Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Octopus Tool Use
from BBC News
(for more video visit BBC site)
An octopus and its coconut-carrying antics have surprised scientists.
Underwater footage reveals that the creatures scoop up halved coconut shells before scampering away with them so they can later use them as shelters.
Writing in the journal Current Biology, the team says it is the first example of tool use in octopuses.
One of the researchers, Dr Julian Finn from Australia's Museum Victoria, told BBC News: "I almost drowned laughing when I saw this the first time."
He added: "I could tell it was going to do something, but I didn't expect this - I didn't expect it would pick up the shell and run away with it."
Quick getaway
The veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus ) were filmed between 1999 and 2008 off the coasts of Northern Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia. The bizarre behaviour was spotted on four occasions.
Quick getaway
The veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus ) were filmed between 1999 and 2008 off the coasts of Northern Sulawesi and Bali in Indonesia. The bizarre behaviour was spotted on four occasions.
The eight-armed beasts used halved coconuts that had been discarded by humans and had eventually settled in the ocean.
Dr Mark Norman, head of science at Museum Victoria, Melbourne, and one of the authors of the paper, said: "It is amazing watching them excavate one of these shells. They probe their arms down to loosen the mud, then they rotate them out."
After turning the shells so the open side faces upwards, the octopuses blow jets of mud out of the bowl before extending their arms around the shell - or if they have two halves, stacking them first, one inside the other - before stiffening their legs and tip-toeing away.
Dr Norman said: "I think it is amazing that those arms of pure muscle get turned into rigid rods so that they can run along a bit like a high-speed spider.
"It comes down to amazing dexterity and co-ordination of eight arms and several hundred suckers."
Home, sweet home
The octopuses were filmed moving up to 20m with the shells.
And their awkward gait, which the scientists describe as "stilt-walking", is surprisingly speedy, possibly because the creatures are left vulnerable to attack from predators while they scuttle away with their prized coconuts.
Dr Mark Norman, head of science at Museum Victoria, Melbourne, and one of the authors of the paper, said: "It is amazing watching them excavate one of these shells. They probe their arms down to loosen the mud, then they rotate them out."
After turning the shells so the open side faces upwards, the octopuses blow jets of mud out of the bowl before extending their arms around the shell - or if they have two halves, stacking them first, one inside the other - before stiffening their legs and tip-toeing away.
Dr Norman said: "I think it is amazing that those arms of pure muscle get turned into rigid rods so that they can run along a bit like a high-speed spider.
"It comes down to amazing dexterity and co-ordination of eight arms and several hundred suckers."
Home, sweet home
The octopuses were filmed moving up to 20m with the shells.
And their awkward gait, which the scientists describe as "stilt-walking", is surprisingly speedy, possibly because the creatures are left vulnerable to attack from predators while they scuttle away with their prized coconuts.
The octopuses eventually use the shells as a protective shelter. If they just have one half, they simply turn it over and hide underneath. But if they are lucky enough to have retrieved two halves, they assemble them back into the original closed coconut form and sneak inside.
The shells provide important protection for the octopuses in a patch of seabed where there are few places to hide.
Dr Norman explained: "This is an incredibly dangerous habitat for these animals - soft sediment and mud couldn't be worse.
"If they are buried loose in mud without a shell, any predator coming along can just scoop them up. And they are pure rump steak, a terrific meat supply for any predator."
The researchers think that the creatures would initially have used large bivalve shells as their haven, but later swapped to coconuts after our insatiable appetite for them meant their discarded shells became a regular feature on the sea bed.
Surprisingly smart
Tool use was once thought to be an exclusively human skill, but this behaviour has now been observed in a growing list of primates, mammals and birds.
The shells provide important protection for the octopuses in a patch of seabed where there are few places to hide.
Dr Norman explained: "This is an incredibly dangerous habitat for these animals - soft sediment and mud couldn't be worse.
"If they are buried loose in mud without a shell, any predator coming along can just scoop them up. And they are pure rump steak, a terrific meat supply for any predator."
The researchers think that the creatures would initially have used large bivalve shells as their haven, but later swapped to coconuts after our insatiable appetite for them meant their discarded shells became a regular feature on the sea bed.
Surprisingly smart
Tool use was once thought to be an exclusively human skill, but this behaviour has now been observed in a growing list of primates, mammals and birds.
The researchers say their study suggests that these coconut-grabbing octopuses should now be added to these ranks.
Professor Tom Tregenza, an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Exeter, UK, and another author of the paper, said: "A tool is something an animal carries around and then uses on a particular occasion for a particular purpose.
"While the octopus carries the coconut around there is no use to it - no more use than an umbrella is to you when you have it folded up and you are carrying it about. The umbrella only becomes useful when you lift it above your head and open it up.
"And just in the same way, the coconut becomes useful to this octopus when it stops and turns it the other way up and climbs inside it."
He added that octopuses already have a reputation for being an intelligent invertebrate.
He explained: "They've been shown to be able to solve simple puzzles, there is the mimic octopus, which has a range of different species that it can mimic, and now there is this tool use.
"They do things which, normally, you'd only expect vertebrates to do."
Thanks to Chrissie E. for the link
Professor Tom Tregenza, an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Exeter, UK, and another author of the paper, said: "A tool is something an animal carries around and then uses on a particular occasion for a particular purpose.
"While the octopus carries the coconut around there is no use to it - no more use than an umbrella is to you when you have it folded up and you are carrying it about. The umbrella only becomes useful when you lift it above your head and open it up.
"And just in the same way, the coconut becomes useful to this octopus when it stops and turns it the other way up and climbs inside it."
He added that octopuses already have a reputation for being an intelligent invertebrate.
He explained: "They've been shown to be able to solve simple puzzles, there is the mimic octopus, which has a range of different species that it can mimic, and now there is this tool use.
"They do things which, normally, you'd only expect vertebrates to do."
Thanks to Chrissie E. for the link
Monday, December 14, 2009
Campbell's monkeys use syntax
Image from PBS.org
Monkey calls give clues to language originsBy Rebecca Morelle
from BBC News
(to hear clips of the monkey calls visit: BBCNews.com)
Scientists may be a step closer to understanding the origins of human language.
Two studies suggest that the ability to combine sounds and words to alter meaning may be rooted in a species of monkey.
A team found the Campbell's monkey can add a simple sound to its alarm calls to create new ones and then combine them to convey even more information.
The research is published in the journals Plos One and PNAS.
'Krak-oo'
Human language is incredibly complex, but one commonly used feature is the process of adding another unit - a prefix or suffix - to a word to change its meaning. For example, adding "hood" to the word "brother" to form "brotherhood".
Human language is incredibly complex, but one commonly used feature is the process of adding another unit - a prefix or suffix - to a word to change its meaning. For example, adding "hood" to the word "brother" to form "brotherhood".
A team looking at Campbell's monkeys ( Cercopithecus campbelli campbelli ) in the Ivory Coast's Tai National Park found that these primates do a similar thing.
The researchers studied alpha males in six wild groups. These monkeys do not play a very social role but are alert to potential threats and disturbances and use their calls to highlight them.
The researchers studied alpha males in six wild groups. These monkeys do not play a very social role but are alert to potential threats and disturbances and use their calls to highlight them.
The researchers discovered that the monkeys made several distinct alarm cries, among them calls described as "boom", "krak" and "hok".
The team found that booms were sounded when a falling branch had been spotted or to initiate group travel.
The team found that booms were sounded when a falling branch had been spotted or to initiate group travel.
Kraks were only given after a leopard had been sighted.
While hoks were almost exclusively sounded when a crowned eagle swooped above the canopy.
But further analysis revealed that while booms were always unaltered, the monkeys sometimes added an "oo" to their kraks and hoks - and this transformed the information they were conveying.
While hoks were almost exclusively sounded when a crowned eagle swooped above the canopy.
But further analysis revealed that while booms were always unaltered, the monkeys sometimes added an "oo" to their kraks and hoks - and this transformed the information they were conveying.
Klaus Zuberbuehler, an author of the paper from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, said: "If you add this subtle additional oo unit to turn krak into krak-oo, then that call can be given to a whole range of other contexts. If you take the suffix away then it is almost exclusively a leopard alarm call."
While krak-oo appeared to be a general alarm call given to almost any disturbance, hok-oo was used for commotion specifically in the canopy, from the presence of neighbouring groups of monkeys to a glimpse of other flying animals.
Professor Zuberbuehler added: "What is interesting is that the same acoustic modifier is being used for these calls and that is really analogous to using a suffix in human language."
'Boom, boom'
A second study focused on how Campbell monkeys combined their alarm calls, as they were more likely to use a longer sequence of calls than voice individual ones.
Professor Zuberbuehler added: "What is interesting is that the same acoustic modifier is being used for these calls and that is really analogous to using a suffix in human language."
'Boom, boom'
A second study focused on how Campbell monkeys combined their alarm calls, as they were more likely to use a longer sequence of calls than voice individual ones.
Professor Zuberbuehler said: "Sometimes the monkey can give 10, 15 or even 20 calls, and typically different types of calls can appear in these sequences... So we tried to understand what particular context would trigger these sequences."
The scientists found that a sequence made up only of booms was used to prompt the group to travel.
If a pair of booms was followed by some krak-oos, it was almost exclusively given when falling trees or branches had been seen.
But if two booms were followed by a mix of krak-oos and hok-oos, then that seemed to signal the presence of a neighbouring group of Campbell's monkeys or another lone male.
Professor Zuberbuehler said: "These are three different events that are nothing to do with each other, but they are basically made of the same call types."
He added: "This is the first time that we can demonstrate that these sequences convey something about the environment or an event the monkey has witnessed."
The researchers say that while the monkey's linguistic talents may be unique amongst primate species, if the findings prove to be more widespread then they could help to reveal more about the origins of language.
Professor Zuberbueler said: "Campbell's monkeys and humans separated from a common ancestor about 30 million years ago.
"This set of papers shows that in terms of the call morphology, there seem to be ancestral traits floating around the primate lineage that haven't been known before."
Citation:
The scientists found that a sequence made up only of booms was used to prompt the group to travel.
If a pair of booms was followed by some krak-oos, it was almost exclusively given when falling trees or branches had been seen.
But if two booms were followed by a mix of krak-oos and hok-oos, then that seemed to signal the presence of a neighbouring group of Campbell's monkeys or another lone male.
Professor Zuberbuehler said: "These are three different events that are nothing to do with each other, but they are basically made of the same call types."
He added: "This is the first time that we can demonstrate that these sequences convey something about the environment or an event the monkey has witnessed."
The researchers say that while the monkey's linguistic talents may be unique amongst primate species, if the findings prove to be more widespread then they could help to reveal more about the origins of language.
Professor Zuberbueler said: "Campbell's monkeys and humans separated from a common ancestor about 30 million years ago.
"This set of papers shows that in terms of the call morphology, there seem to be ancestral traits floating around the primate lineage that haven't been known before."
Citation:
Monday, December 7, 2009
Good News for Cote d'Ivoire's farmers (lets hope for the wildlife as well)
from the Independant
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Nestlé are to convert the cocoa supply for its iconic bar to fairtrade producers
Nestlé, the world's biggest food company, is to pay poor cocoa farmers more for their beans by switching its best-selling Kit Kat chocolate bar to Fairtrade.
Emrbarking on what its UK chocolate boss described as an ethical "long journey", the four-finger Kit Kat will carry the Fairtrade logo from next month. Over the next two years the two-finger and other versions of the £183m-a-year bar will make the switch.
More than 8,000 cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire (formerly Ivory Coast) will benefit from the decision, receiving an extra $150 a tonne, 4 per cent above the $3,384 world price.
They will also be able to sell their cocoa more directly to Nestlé and receive advice from the Swiss giant on raising yields and quality, which will further increase returns.
Nestlé said the extra money would fund education and healthcare in the West African state, which is recovering from the 2002-2007 civil war.
For the coffee-to-cereals multinational, the deal will help boost the supply of cocoa. Prices have spiralled to a 26-year high because of investor speculation and the failure of benighted producers such as those in Côte d'Ivoire to meet rising global demand.
Nestlé's decision will also help it improve its chequered reputation for ethics. In the 1970s and 1980s consumers boycotted the company, which makes Nescafe, Perrier and Cheerios, over its promotion of baby milk formula in Africa. The protests have fallen away in recent years with the adoption of a marketing code of conduct.
Kit Kat is the latest example of Fairtrade being "mainstreamed" following Starbucks' decision to convert its espresso beans, Tate & Lyle its retail sugar, and Cadbury its Dairy Milk, the UK's best-selling chocolate bar.
It came about after Nestlé Confectionery UK's managing director, David Rennie, visited Côte d'Ivoire in October. Asked to describe life for cocoa farmers there, he said: "They're not going hungry and they're not going thirsty but they live in a way in which the crops they produce are very important.
"The nearest school could be 20 or 30 miles away and they have no transport, so getting local village schools where kids can get literacy and numeracy skills without embarking on massive treks is really important.
"And the fact that we can go in and help them build schools and can give help on the ground was enlightening and heartening for me."
Only Kit Kats sold in the UK and Ireland will go Fairtrade, but Mr Rennie would not rule out other Nestlé chocolate brands following.
"In the UK we have started with as much of the Fairtrade cocoa from our co-operatives as we can get. And every single year we hope to get more of that and get it moving across all of Kit Kat," he said.
"We're putting no end point on this. As the cocoa supply develops, we want to continue our work on the Ivory Coast to support those farmers." Harriet Lamb, director of the UK-based Fairtrade Foundation, said the higher prices would "give a break" to the farmers of Côte d'Ivoire. "If any farmers need this kind of break, it's the farmers in Côte d'Ivoire," she added.
Nestlé sells one billion KitKat bars in the British Isles each year, which makes up 23 per cent of its UK confectionery sales. It and other leading chocolate bars will still contain palm oil, which is linked to human-rights abuses, deforestation and the loss of wildlife in South-east Asia. In October, Nestlé committed itself to buying only supplies certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil by 2015. "The commitment is the company moves by 2015 and I think for the whole company to get there by 2015, markets and product categories will get there quicker.
"So that's the end point, it's not the beginning point," said Mr Rennie, who described the Fairtrade commitment as part of a "long journey".
Thanks to Chrissie E. for the link
Protecting wild elephants with their trained counterparts in indonesia
A handler washes an elephant, whose calf is beside them, at Tesso Nilo National Park. At least once a month, wild herds from the park attack one of the nearby settlements.
(Photo: Luis Sinco, LA Times)
On Flying Squad Patrol With Elephants in Indonesia's Sumatra
from the Jakarta Globe
by John M. Glionna
The wild bull elephant stood menacingly in the clearing, trumpeting in annoyance and anger, its brain racing with a chemical that unleashes a throbbing headache. It was mating season, and the bull was desperate for a partner. Was this a good moment to be sitting atop another elephant just a few hundred feet away?
Syamsuardi, a native of the Sumatran forest, had his strategy: He would pit his own elephant against the amorous intruder. The compact 37-year-old manages the Flying Squad, a herd of tame elephants that patrols the more-than-80,000-hectare Tesso Nilo National Park.
In many nations, dwindling forests have brought deadly conflicts between man and animal. In Sumatra, rampaging elephants have been shot or poisoned by officials or vengeful property owners. Syamsuardi’s team is the brainchild of the World Wildlife Fund, which borrowed the idea from India. The goal: persuade the errant elephants to return to their sanctuary, where lethal run-ins with humans are less likely. For the Flying Squad, brute force isn’t the only option. The team sometimes dispatches a female to mate with a male aggressor, a tactic that has defused tension and produced two offspring: Tesso and Nella.
Confronting the latest angry bull, Syamsuardi sensed this showdown wouldn’t end easily. Perched atop Rachman, the Flying Squad leader, he and the other mahouts, or handlers, positioned two males and two females side by side. They moved slowly forward, with each handler atop an elephant, awaiting the wild bull’s charge.
Syamsuardi recalled the terror of knowing he’d be exposed to piercing tusks and collisions of gigantic bodies. Caught in the middle, he might be crushed like an insect. “It’s tense, but you must be calm and stay quiet,” he said. “I have to be ready to think quickly, because when the time comes, my elephants are waiting for my command.”
The forests that once covered Sumatra’s Riau province — home to the largest elephant population in Indonesia — are disappearing.
In the past 20 years, the paper and palm oil industries have cut down 60 percent of the pachyderm habitat. Just 10 percent of the remaining forest land is suitable for elephants. Since 1985, the province’s elephant population has plummeted to 350 from 1,600. About 80 elephants live within Tesso Nilo National Park.
At least once a month, wild herds from the park attack one of the nearby settlements, activists say. Since 2007, 13 elephants and several residents have been killed in Riau. “If given a choice, elephants would prefer never to see humans,” Syamsuardi said. “But the problem is that humans continue to invade their territory. There’s not enough jungle left.”
In 2004, after a rash of rampages, Syamsuardi began his monumental task: shape a team of animals into an obedient police force. A World Wildlife Fund outreach worker at the time, he knew little about elephants. So he began reading up on the animals and working with them in the field. Now he and his staff of eight handlers foster a bond with their elephant wards. For mahouts such as Adrianto, 26, it means a soothing voice interspersed with strict commands.
One day, Adrianto took 26-year-old Ria and her 2-year-old calf, Tesso, for a bath in a watering hole. Ria trudged though the jungle, grabbing leaves with her trunk, her feet leaving large craters in the soft dirt. At the murky pond, she waded into the water like a four-legged sumo wrestler, with Adrianto on her back. As the animals luxuriated in the cool water, their trunks shooting quick bursts of water, Adrianto scrubbed their backs, talking softly in Indonesian. “Don’t be naughty,” he told Tesso, who nudged him with a forehead sprouting unruly black hairs. Then he pushed the baby’s head underwater and scrubbed behind the ears. “Ria is an actress,” he said later, perched comfortably on her neck as if riding a big, movable easy chair. “She pouts unless she gets what she wants.”
The mahouts treat obedient animals to brownies. But there are sticks that come with such carrots. When Ria resists, Adrianto whacks her on the head with a small metal-tipped stick for discipline. Tesso gets a stick shoved in his ear when he gets too frisky. Before a routine patrol, Syamsuardi showered affection on Ria, rubbing her cheek and neck. He has grown to love the animals, and he fears for their future.
“They’re incredibly loyal,” he said. “When a mahout falls during a fight with a wild bull, the herd will surround him in protection.” They are also immensely powerful. An elephant can topple a pickup truck with one nudge of its forehead. In villages, the animals are referred to as datu , or mister, a term of respect given no other jungle creature.
Syamsuardi has seen the results of the animals’ fury. Every few weeks, they rampage through settlements looking for food or venting anger or frustration. “The male pierces victims with its tusks and then throws them with its trunk. If they are still moving, he’ll stomp them,” he said. “Females mostly kick. Either way, it’s a tragic way to die.”
Syamsuardi uses elephant face-offs as a last resort. His methods have worked: So far, none of the mahouts has been hurt. The team first tries to scare away aggressive herds by setting off carbide cannons. At night, rangers use car lights and blasts of the car horn. If the mating option is used, the team finds a secure spot for the ritual, which can last a week. If the team decides it’s better to make war, not love, fights between the Flying Squad and aggressors can last hours.
As the bull stomped in warning, the Flying Squad approached. The lineup, designed to confuse the invader so it can’t tell which elephant is pack leader, came within a few feet. Finally, the bull lunged at Rachman. Tusks flashing, the two animals collided. Syamsuardi hung on as the other elephants closed in around the intruder, like a gang tackle on the football field. The fight lasted a tense and sweaty 35 minutes, during which the big animals swung their heads, wielding their tusks like swords, their bodies like battering rams. Finally, the bull moved off into the brush.
For now, Syamsuardi knew, the big animal was safe.
“I was so satisfied. We didn’t have to kill that bull,” he said.
“We just gave him a message: Go back to the forest with your own kind. You’ll live longer that way.”
Thanks to Chrissie E. for the link
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Will Big Business Save the Earth?
Really really great op-ed column by eminent ecologist Jared Diamond on the positive interplay between business and the environment.-MA
From the nytimes.com
By JARED DIAMOND
THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.
But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.
As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.
Let’s start with Wal-Mart. Obviously, a business can save money by finding ways to spend less while maintaining sales. This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.
Wal-Mart is also working to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet by 2015, thereby saving more than $200 million a year at the pump. Among the efficient prototypes now being tested are trucks that burn biofuels generated from waste grease at Wal-Mart’s delis. Similarly, as the country’s biggest private user of electricity, Wal-Mart is saving money by decreasing store energy use.
Another Wal-Mart example involves lowering costs associated with packaging materials. Wal-Mart now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents in North America, which has reduced the size of packaging by up to 50 percent. Wal-Mart stores also have machines called bailers that recycle plastics that once would have been discarded. Wal-Mart’s eventual goal is to end up with no packaging waste.
One last Wal-Mart example shows how a company can save money in the long run by buying from sustainably managed sources. Because most wild fisheries are managed unsustainably, prices for Chilean sea bass and Atlantic tuna have been soaring. To my pleasant astonishment, in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to switch, within five years, all its purchases of wild-caught seafood to fisheries certified as sustainable.
Coca-Cola’s problems are different from Wal-Mart’s in that they are largely long-term. The key ingredient in Coke products is water. The company produces its beverages in about 200 countries through local franchises, all of which require a reliable local supply of clean fresh water.
But water supplies are under severe pressure around the world, with most already allocated for human use. The little remaining unallocated fresh water is in remote areas unsuitable for beverage factories, like Arctic Russia and northwestern Australia.
Coca-Cola can’t meet its water needs just by desalinizing seawater, because that requires energy, which is also increasingly expensive. Global climate change is making water scarcer, especially in the densely populated temperate-zone countries, like the United States, that are Coca-Cola’s main customers. Most competing water use around the world is for agriculture, which presents sustainability problems of its own.
Hence Coca-Cola’s survival compels it to be deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture. One company goal is to make its plants water-neutral, returning to the environment water in quantities equal to the amount used in beverages and their production. Another goal is to work on the conservation of seven of the world’s river basins, including the Rio Grande, Yangtze, Mekong and Danube — all of them sites of major environmental concerns besides supplying water for Coca-Cola.
These long-term goals are in addition to Coca-Cola’s short-term cost-saving environmental practices, like recycling plastic bottles, replacing petroleum-based plastic in bottles with organic material, reducing energy consumption and increasing sales volume while decreasing water use.
The third company is Chevron. Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) When I asked how a publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment, Chevron employees and executives gave me at least five reasons.
First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later.
Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company.
In view of all those advantages that businesses gain from environmentally sustainable policies, why do such policies face resistance from some businesses and many politicians? The objections often take the form of one-liners.
• We have to balance the environment against the economy. The assumption underlying this statement is that measures promoting environmental sustainability inevitably yield a net economic cost rather than a profit. This line of thinking turns the truth upside down. Economic reasons furnish the strongest motives for sustainability, because in the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.
Americans learned that lesson from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, when, as a result of government agencies balking for a decade at spending several hundred million dollars to fix New Orleans’s defenses, we suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage — not to mention thousands of dead Americans. Likewise, John Holdren, the top White House science adviser, estimates that solving problems of climate change would cost the United States 2 percent of our gross domestic product by the year 2050, but that not solving those problems would damage the economy by 20 percent to 30 percent of G.D.P.
• Technology will solve our problems. Yes, technology can contribute to solving problems. But major technological advances require years to develop and put in place, and regularly turn out to have unanticipated side effects — consider the destruction of the atmosphere’s ozone layer by the nontoxic, nonflammable chlorofluorocarbons initially hailed for replacing poisonous refrigerant gases.
• World population growth is leveling off and won’t be the problem that we used to fear. It’s true that the rate of world population growth has been decreasing. However, the real problem isn’t people themselves, but the resources that people consume and the waste that they produce. Per-person average consumption rates and waste production rates, now 32 times higher in rich countries than in poor ones, are rising steeply around the world, as developing countries emulate industrialized nations’ lifestyles.
• It’s futile to preach to us Americans about lowering our standard of living: we will never sacrifice just so other people can raise their standard of living. This conflates consumption rates with standards of living: they are only loosely correlated, because so much of our consumption is wasteful and doesn’t contribute to our quality of life. Once basic needs are met, increasing consumption often doesn’t increase happiness.
Replacing a car that gets 15 miles per gallon with a more efficient model wouldn’t lower one’s standard of living, but would help improve all of our lives by reducing the political and military consequences of our dependence on imported oil. Western Europeans have lower per-capita consumption rates than Americans, but enjoy a higher standard of living as measured by access to medical care, financial security after retirement, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy and public transport.
NOT surprisingly, the problem of climate change has attracted its own particular crop of objections.
• Even experts disagree about the reality of climate change. That was true 30 years ago, and some experts still disagreed a decade ago. Today, virtually every climatologist agrees that average global temperatures, warming rates and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any time in the earth’s recent past, and that the main cause is greenhouse gas emissions by humans. Instead, the questions still being debated concern whether average global temperatures will increase by 13 degrees or “only” by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, and whether humans account for 90 percent or “only” 85 percent of the global warming trend.
• The magnitude and cause of global climate change are uncertain. We shouldn’t adopt expensive countermeasures until we have certainty. In other spheres of life — picking a spouse, educating our children, buying life insurance and stocks, avoiding cancer and so on — we admit that certainty is unattainable, and that we must decide as best we can on the basis of available evidence. Why should the impossible quest for certainty paralyze us solely about acting on climate change? As Mr. Holdren, the White House adviser, expressed it, not acting on climate change would be like being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”
• Global warming will be good for us, by letting us grow crops in places formerly too cold for agriculture. The term “global warming” is a misnomer; we should instead talk about global climate change, which isn’t uniform. The global average temperature is indeed rising, but many areas are becoming drier, and frequencies of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events are increasing. Some areas will be winners, while others will be losers. Most of us will be losers, because the temperate zones where most people live are becoming drier.
•It’s useless for the United States to act on climate change, when we don’t know what China will do. Actually, China will arrive at this week’s Copenhagen climate change negotiations with a whole package of measures to reduce its “carbon intensity.”
While the United States is dithering about long-distance energy transmission from our rural areas with the highest potential for wind energy generation to our urban areas with the highest need for energy, China is far ahead of us. It is developing ultra-high-voltage transmission lines from wind and solar generation sites in rural western China to cities in eastern China. If America doesn’t act to develop innovative energy technology, we will lose the green jobs competition not only to Finland and Germany (as we are now) but also to China.
On each of these issues, American businesses are going to play as much or more of a role in our progress as the government. And this isn’t a bad thing, as corporations know they have a lot to gain by establishing environmentally friendly business practices.
My friends in the business world keep telling me that Washington can help on two fronts: by investing in green research, offering tax incentives and passing cap-and-trade legislation; and by setting and enforcing tough standards to ensure that companies with cheap, dirty standards don’t have a competitive advantage over those businesses protecting the environment. As for the rest of us, we should get over the misimpression that American business cares only about immediate profits, and we should reward companies that work to keep the planet healthy.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.”
thanks to Josh L for the link
From the nytimes.com
By JARED DIAMOND
THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.
But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.
As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.
Let’s start with Wal-Mart. Obviously, a business can save money by finding ways to spend less while maintaining sales. This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.
Wal-Mart is also working to double the fuel efficiency of its truck fleet by 2015, thereby saving more than $200 million a year at the pump. Among the efficient prototypes now being tested are trucks that burn biofuels generated from waste grease at Wal-Mart’s delis. Similarly, as the country’s biggest private user of electricity, Wal-Mart is saving money by decreasing store energy use.
Another Wal-Mart example involves lowering costs associated with packaging materials. Wal-Mart now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergents in North America, which has reduced the size of packaging by up to 50 percent. Wal-Mart stores also have machines called bailers that recycle plastics that once would have been discarded. Wal-Mart’s eventual goal is to end up with no packaging waste.
One last Wal-Mart example shows how a company can save money in the long run by buying from sustainably managed sources. Because most wild fisheries are managed unsustainably, prices for Chilean sea bass and Atlantic tuna have been soaring. To my pleasant astonishment, in 2006 Wal-Mart decided to switch, within five years, all its purchases of wild-caught seafood to fisheries certified as sustainable.
Coca-Cola’s problems are different from Wal-Mart’s in that they are largely long-term. The key ingredient in Coke products is water. The company produces its beverages in about 200 countries through local franchises, all of which require a reliable local supply of clean fresh water.
But water supplies are under severe pressure around the world, with most already allocated for human use. The little remaining unallocated fresh water is in remote areas unsuitable for beverage factories, like Arctic Russia and northwestern Australia.
Coca-Cola can’t meet its water needs just by desalinizing seawater, because that requires energy, which is also increasingly expensive. Global climate change is making water scarcer, especially in the densely populated temperate-zone countries, like the United States, that are Coca-Cola’s main customers. Most competing water use around the world is for agriculture, which presents sustainability problems of its own.
Hence Coca-Cola’s survival compels it to be deeply concerned with problems of water scarcity, energy, climate change and agriculture. One company goal is to make its plants water-neutral, returning to the environment water in quantities equal to the amount used in beverages and their production. Another goal is to work on the conservation of seven of the world’s river basins, including the Rio Grande, Yangtze, Mekong and Danube — all of them sites of major environmental concerns besides supplying water for Coca-Cola.
These long-term goals are in addition to Coca-Cola’s short-term cost-saving environmental practices, like recycling plastic bottles, replacing petroleum-based plastic in bottles with organic material, reducing energy consumption and increasing sales volume while decreasing water use.
The third company is Chevron. Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) When I asked how a publicly traded company could justify to its shareholders its expenditures on the environment, Chevron employees and executives gave me at least five reasons.
First, oil spills can be horribly expensive: it is far cheaper to prevent them than to clean them up. Second, clean practices reduce the risk that New Guinean landowners become angry, sue for damages and close the fields. (The company has been sued for problems in Ecuador that Chevron inherited when it merged with Texaco in 2001.) Next, environmental standards are becoming stricter around the world, so building clean facilities now minimizes having to do expensive retrofitting later.
Also, clean operations in one country give a company an advantage in bidding on leases in other countries. Finally, environmental practices of which employees are proud improve morale, help with recruitment and increase the length of time employees are likely to remain at the company.
In view of all those advantages that businesses gain from environmentally sustainable policies, why do such policies face resistance from some businesses and many politicians? The objections often take the form of one-liners.
• We have to balance the environment against the economy. The assumption underlying this statement is that measures promoting environmental sustainability inevitably yield a net economic cost rather than a profit. This line of thinking turns the truth upside down. Economic reasons furnish the strongest motives for sustainability, because in the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.
Americans learned that lesson from Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, when, as a result of government agencies balking for a decade at spending several hundred million dollars to fix New Orleans’s defenses, we suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage — not to mention thousands of dead Americans. Likewise, John Holdren, the top White House science adviser, estimates that solving problems of climate change would cost the United States 2 percent of our gross domestic product by the year 2050, but that not solving those problems would damage the economy by 20 percent to 30 percent of G.D.P.
• Technology will solve our problems. Yes, technology can contribute to solving problems. But major technological advances require years to develop and put in place, and regularly turn out to have unanticipated side effects — consider the destruction of the atmosphere’s ozone layer by the nontoxic, nonflammable chlorofluorocarbons initially hailed for replacing poisonous refrigerant gases.
• World population growth is leveling off and won’t be the problem that we used to fear. It’s true that the rate of world population growth has been decreasing. However, the real problem isn’t people themselves, but the resources that people consume and the waste that they produce. Per-person average consumption rates and waste production rates, now 32 times higher in rich countries than in poor ones, are rising steeply around the world, as developing countries emulate industrialized nations’ lifestyles.
• It’s futile to preach to us Americans about lowering our standard of living: we will never sacrifice just so other people can raise their standard of living. This conflates consumption rates with standards of living: they are only loosely correlated, because so much of our consumption is wasteful and doesn’t contribute to our quality of life. Once basic needs are met, increasing consumption often doesn’t increase happiness.
Replacing a car that gets 15 miles per gallon with a more efficient model wouldn’t lower one’s standard of living, but would help improve all of our lives by reducing the political and military consequences of our dependence on imported oil. Western Europeans have lower per-capita consumption rates than Americans, but enjoy a higher standard of living as measured by access to medical care, financial security after retirement, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy and public transport.
NOT surprisingly, the problem of climate change has attracted its own particular crop of objections.
• Even experts disagree about the reality of climate change. That was true 30 years ago, and some experts still disagreed a decade ago. Today, virtually every climatologist agrees that average global temperatures, warming rates and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any time in the earth’s recent past, and that the main cause is greenhouse gas emissions by humans. Instead, the questions still being debated concern whether average global temperatures will increase by 13 degrees or “only” by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, and whether humans account for 90 percent or “only” 85 percent of the global warming trend.
• The magnitude and cause of global climate change are uncertain. We shouldn’t adopt expensive countermeasures until we have certainty. In other spheres of life — picking a spouse, educating our children, buying life insurance and stocks, avoiding cancer and so on — we admit that certainty is unattainable, and that we must decide as best we can on the basis of available evidence. Why should the impossible quest for certainty paralyze us solely about acting on climate change? As Mr. Holdren, the White House adviser, expressed it, not acting on climate change would be like being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”
• Global warming will be good for us, by letting us grow crops in places formerly too cold for agriculture. The term “global warming” is a misnomer; we should instead talk about global climate change, which isn’t uniform. The global average temperature is indeed rising, but many areas are becoming drier, and frequencies of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events are increasing. Some areas will be winners, while others will be losers. Most of us will be losers, because the temperate zones where most people live are becoming drier.
•It’s useless for the United States to act on climate change, when we don’t know what China will do. Actually, China will arrive at this week’s Copenhagen climate change negotiations with a whole package of measures to reduce its “carbon intensity.”
While the United States is dithering about long-distance energy transmission from our rural areas with the highest potential for wind energy generation to our urban areas with the highest need for energy, China is far ahead of us. It is developing ultra-high-voltage transmission lines from wind and solar generation sites in rural western China to cities in eastern China. If America doesn’t act to develop innovative energy technology, we will lose the green jobs competition not only to Finland and Germany (as we are now) but also to China.
On each of these issues, American businesses are going to play as much or more of a role in our progress as the government. And this isn’t a bad thing, as corporations know they have a lot to gain by establishing environmentally friendly business practices.
My friends in the business world keep telling me that Washington can help on two fronts: by investing in green research, offering tax incentives and passing cap-and-trade legislation; and by setting and enforcing tough standards to ensure that companies with cheap, dirty standards don’t have a competitive advantage over those businesses protecting the environment. As for the rest of us, we should get over the misimpression that American business cares only about immediate profits, and we should reward companies that work to keep the planet healthy.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse.”
thanks to Josh L for the link
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