Category Archives: Ecology

If Not Vaccines, What Triggers Autism?

Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, 1943

Humphrey Bogart as Rick and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa in Casablanca, 1942

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” – “Casablanca.

Once rare, the incidence of Autism has increased exponentially from less than 0.02% of boys to 2.38%.

Before the MMR Vaccine: 400 to 500 died each year as Millions contracted the disease. Due to widespread administration of the vaccine, the incidence of Measles dropped to 37 reported cases in 2004.  But because people believe (falsely) that the MMR vaccine triggers Autism, they stopped immunizing their children. There were 644 cases of Measles in 2014.

If the MMR Vaccine does not trigger Autism, what does?  Glyphosate? Possibly. And what’s Glyphosate? The active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup.

This is a story of unintended consequences.

Continue reading →

Gonorrhea Evolving; Almost Untreatable

Treatment history. Courtesy of CDC and the AthlanticJames Hamblin, MD, at The Atlantic, here,  writes,

The list of effective antibiotics has been dwindling as the bacteria became resistant, and now it’s down to one. Five years ago, the CDC said fluoroquinolones were no longer effective, but oral cephalosporins were still a common/easy treatment. Now injected ceftriaxone is the only recommended effective drug we have left. And it has to be given along with either azithromycin or doxycycline.

Dr. Hamblin and The Atlantic also reproduced the graphic, above, tracing the treatments in use from 1988 to 2010.  Penicillins stopped being effective in the early 1990’s. While this news is disturbing, it also illustrates how evolution works. A small percentage survive because of natural resistance. They reproduce. Their offspring have the resistant genes.  Whether it’s grey moths that are obvious on trees in pristine environments and difficult to see on trees where the smog coloured the bark, pests in a farm field, or infectious bacteria, the principle is the same.

Looking from a whole systems perspective, maybe we need to develop medications that stimulate the human immune response, rather than medications that try to kill the bacteria. Continue reading →

Earth Day, 2011, Where Are We?

Earth, from space, courtesy of the American taxpayer

Earth from Space, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC

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Earth Day, 2010, I looked to the future on Popular Logistics. In 2009, I wrote about water pollution and agricultural waste in the Chesapeake. Today I am looking at the present and recent past. While a comprehensive look at where we are can be found on the web pages of the World Watch Institute, the New York Times, and the World Factbook of the Central Intelligence Agency, I want to make a few points.

Our energy policy is “when you flip a switch, the juice gotta flow.” It ain’t magic. It’s engineering and classical physics, with an understanding of radioactive fission and decay and a profound lack of long term thinking. It ain’t magic, but it might as well be. But we really need to base our energy policy on an understanding of ecological economics and sustainability.

We’ve had a few problems with nuclear power and fossil fuel in the last few years. Yet, there’s some light on the horizon.

Continue reading →

For the Future

Arklow Bank Wind Turbines

Arklow Bank Wind Farm, offshore of Ireland. Copyright, C, GE Energy. Used with permission.

Conferences –

Academics – An MBA for Changing the Climate of Business (click here). Continue reading →

The Deepwater Horizon – The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

Oil Eating Bacteria

Oil Eating Bacteria

The good news is that newly discovered bacteria biodegrade oil in the oceans, and have been chowing down on the oil spilled from the Deepwater Horizon  (Earth and Sky, NPR, PBS, SFGATE) and from oil seeps for millions of years.

While it’s unexpected and wonderful that bacteria are biodegrading the oil, is begs the question:

Do we want to fill the seas with oil and oil-eating bacteria or oceans of clean water, coral, oysters, fish, turtles, and dolphins?

And how quickly can they consume the 5.1 million barrels that gushed into the Gulf at a rate of 60,000 barrels per day for 85 days begining April 20, continuing thru May and June, and ending July 15, 2011?

I suspect it will take more than a few weeks, months, or years.

And do those bacteria break down dispersants?

John Ehrenfeld defines “Sustainability” as “Flourishing.” Because they are small and short-lived, shrimp can handle a higher level of toxics than say dolphins, turtles, etc. We will know the Gulf is clean when there are flourishing populations of dolphins, turtles, and larger and longer-lived fauna, and when they have lower concentrations of heavy metals and petrochemicals in their tissues. Continue reading →

Crisis (Mis) Management and the Gulf Oil Spill

 

What BP and the Government Could Have Done and Should Be Doing (updated 10/7/10)

The handling of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe is a textbook study of how not to manage a crisis. The government and the Obama Administration seems to have understated the problem and ceded responsibility to BP, which seems to have acted to protect the Macondo oil field rather than the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf Coast.

Continue reading →

Earth Day For the Future

Earth from Space, Courtesy NASA

In 100 years our descendants will not be burning coal, oil, natural gas or using nuclear fission.  They might be using terrestrial nuclear fusion.  They will be using solar, wind, geothermal, marine current hydro, tidal energy systems – clean, renewable, sustainable energy systems. No fuel: No Waste. No mines, mills, wells, spills. No arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium, thorium – no fly ash to be contained or to leak.

We have started.  California and New Jersey lead the U. S. Germany and Spain lead Europe. Boeing and Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic want to build aircraft that run on biodiesel.  We need to move forward in a big way – to 100% clean energy in 10 years, to retrain coal miners and oil rig operators to build and run solar arrays and wind turbines, and dig deep geothermal systems.

25 Dead in W. Virginia Coal Mine Accident

Police, Emergency, and Concerned Citizens

Police, Emergency, and Concerned Citizens

Monday, April 4, 2010, in West Virginia, at least 25 coal miners were killed and another four remain unaccounted for in a methane gas explosion in a coal mine owned by Massey Energy. As reported in the NY Times, “In the past two months, miners had been evacuated three times from the Upper Big Branch due to dangerously high methane levels, according to two miners who asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. … the disaster has raised new questions about Massey’s attention to safety under the leadership of its pugnacious chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, and also why stricter federal laws, put into effect after a mining disaster in 2006, failed to prevent another tragedy.”

Is this a pattern of behavior? Does it establish a callous attitude or criminal intent?

In January, Charleston, W. Virginia, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. debated Massey CEO Don Blankenship.

Kennedy argued again and again that the coal industry is indirectly subsidized by society. “Every single waterway in our country is contaminated with mercury,” and 70 percent of it is from coal-burning power plants, he said. (click here).  Kennedy concluded by pointing out Massey’s own reports of 12,900 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a single year, and asked, “Is it possible to do mountaintop removal mining without violating the Clean Water Act?” (here). Blankenship shrugged and responded that complying with regulations is too expensive.

We need to do is transform the coal industry into a wind and solar industry.

Barack Obama, a Systems Thinker in the White House

President Barack Obama.

President Barack Obama.

In his State of the Union Address <video, transcript Englsh, en español>, President Obama said “The best anti-poverty program is a world classeducation

.” He described a positive, or reinforcing, feedback loop. Education enables people to accomplish more, earn more, and better educate their children, who also accomplish more and earn more. It is one of the most important differences between the populations of New Jersey and West Virginia. This is described in detail in Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows<link>, (C) 2008, published by Chelsea Green<link>, ISBN 978-1-60358-055-7.

The President also asked for a better health care plan. I can answer that in five words: “Single Payer; Medicare For All” <link>  just approved by the California Senate. Medicare works for my octogenarian father. Health Insurance Care doesn’t work for a 20-something friend of mine. He just graduated from college. He has no job and therefore no medical insurance. If he was a full-time student he’d be covered on his parents’ insurance. A simple reform would cover recent graduates until they find a job that pays a living wage and provides health insurance benefits. Another would be by expanding Medicare to cover all citizens. This is much easier said than done. Our medical care system cannot adequately care for approximately 50 million people – one out of six. This can’t be changed overnight – we need to train more doctors and nurses, and build more hospitals, but it must be changed.

Image showing mountain strip mined for coal.

Mountain strip mined for coal. Chris Dorst, Charleston, WV Gazette.

Energy is another set of systems problems. No one who has seen a once pristine valley after strip mining or “mountain-top removal”  uses the term “Clean Coal.” Countries like Denmark, Ireland, Israel, Japan, and Sweden built their economies with education not extraction of natural resources. As the President alluded to, conservation and clean, renewable energy technologies – solar, wind, geothermal, hydro – can be implemented faster, at a lower cost, and with fewer negative economic externalities than traditional fuel intensive resource based technologies like fossil fuel and nuclear power. This suggests another of the differences between New Jersey and West Virginia – the “Blessings of Education” versus the “Resource Curse” <link> from which economies built on extraction of natural resources suffer.

Arklow at Sunset

Arklow Bank Wind Park, off Arklow Bay, Ireland. Image courtesy Oneworld.net, UK.

The President needs economic advisors who start think in terms of ecological economics <link1 / link2>, of metrics like the Genuine Progress Indicator, GPI <link>, rather than Gross Domestic Product, GDP <link>. Simply put, ecological economics is neoclassical economics with a better understanding of the long term and of costs. Spending one dollar – or one trillion dollars – to clean up a mess is not as good as allocating those resources to build factories, houses, libraries, museums – the infrastructure, culture, and community of a nation.

Copenhagen, Climate Change, China, and Dessert

Sea IceEarlier today one of my friends handed me a copy of some satire published in the New York Post, a tabloid in the tradition of the London rags, on the subject of “Climate-Gate.”  At about the same time, Roger Saillant, co-author of Vapor Trails, who heads the Fowler Center for Sustainable Value at Case Western Reserve University pointed me to Elizabeth May’s post on the hacked computers and stolen e-mails at East Anglia University. Ms. May leads Canada’s Green Party.

Patrick Michaels, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is really a public relations arm of Exxon Mobil, was once a scientist at the University of Virginia.  He is famous for giving testimony attacking Dr. James Hansen to the U.S. Senate. However, when interviewed by Elizabeth May on Canada’s CBC Sunday Morning’s “Kyoto on Trial” in 2002, Michaels admitted to redrawing Hansen’s graph to make it wrong. Michaels, who has traded the scientific method for Stanislavsky’s acting method, admitted to perjury in his testimony before the United States Senate.

The graph shows the amount of sea ice from July thru November from 1979 to 2000, then in 2005, 7, 8, and July thru Sept., 2009. It is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder Colorado (here) published Oct. 6, 2009. The dark gray line shows Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2000. The gray band shows 2 standard deviations from the mean. The colorful lines show that Arctic sea ice is at or well below two standard deviations from the mean levels of 1979 to 2000.  Clearly there is less ice in the Arctic then there used to be. Continue reading →

Earth Day 2009

Shows Oxygen and Fish Catch in the Chesapeake

The Chesapeake: Oxygen & Fish Catch

“Poisoned Waters,” a documentary on PBS Frontline examines the state of our nation’s waterways. It focuses on the Chesapeake and the Puget Sound. As the title suggests, the nation’s waterways are far from pristine. Click here for Tim Wheeler’s review in the Baltimore Sun and here for Frontline. The documentary suggests that the Clean Water Act, in response to Earth Day, 1970, started off well. But gutting regulation, castrating the EPA, allowing open dumping and externalizing cleanup costs do not solve pollution problems. Perdue, in his denial that chicken manure contributes to algae blooms in the Chesapeake, sounds like a shill for the tobacco industry saying “Well we know the plaintiff smoked 4 packs a day for 25 years. How do we know the cigarettes caused lung cancer? How do we know lung cancer killed him? He died when his heart stopped. The cancer was in his lungs.”

This image, from Science Daily, shows a dead zone in the northern stem of the Chesapeake. The area in red shows oxygen depletion. The area in blue shows oxygen. The green circles in the blue zone show fish catch.

On Earth Day, 2009, we have much to do.  It is not as if we have accomplished nothing in the last 39 years. However, we see two glaring omissions in the clean water act. It doesn’t regulate farm waste or coal ash. We also need to understand that regulation and enforcement are effective and deregulation and voluntary compliance does not work.  After all,  we have police and prosecutors to chase and bring to trial criminals in order to protect the citizens. Speed limits and parking regulations are not “goals” or “guidelines” for voluntary compliance. They are hard and fast laws. Break the law; get a ticket. This paradigm must be applied to protecting the nation’s waterways.

But here’s an idea: Take this algae-manure system and transform it from one that is destroying an estuary into one that is creating the biofuels for the next generation of cars and power plants!

Plastics in Paradise

Bird Foraging on The Beach

This shows a bird foraging on the beach in Zihuatenejo, Mexico. Note the pretty blue bottle cap at 1:00, the yellow ball at 8:45, and the white foam tray at 11:30. This is good stuff – it will last 1000 years.  No matter how many birds, dolphins, turtles,  eat it, and consequently die, it will still be a blue bottle cap, a yellow ball, and white foam.