Blog for a Better World

The environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world’s richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion, according to the first systematic global analysis of the ecological damage imposed by rich countries. There are huge disparities in the ecological footprint inflicted by rich and poor countries on the rest of the world because of differences in consumption.  The researchers examined so-called “environmental externalities” or costs that are not included in the prices paid for goods but which cover ecological damage linked to their consumption. They focused on six areas: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing and converting mangrove swamps into shrimp farms. The team confined its calculations to areas in which the costs of environmental damage are well understood.

The next time you make some microwave popcorn or cook a frozen pizza, consider this:  The packaging of many of these products contains a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency considers potentially carcinogenic and wants businesses to voluntarily stop using by 2015.  Studies show that this chemical – perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA –is present in 98% of Americans’ blood and 100% of newborns.  It doesn’t break down and thus accumulates in the system over time. PFOA is used to make Teflon pans, Gore-Tex clothing and to prevent food from sticking to paper packaging. The industry says that while the EPA’s carcinogen concerns are based on animal tests, there’s no evidence that PFOA is harmful to humans. Public-health advocates counter that the industry is being disingenuous and that there’s never been a chemical found that affects animals but has no effect on humans.

An effort to bring endangered Mallorcan toads back from the brink of extinction has blighted them with an infectious fungus that is wiping them out.  A recent paper in Current Biology details how the captive breeding and subsequent reintroduction of the Mallorcan Midwife Toad – on the red-list of endangered species – has infected populations in the wild with Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a fungus that has been threatening amphibians worldwide for the past ten years.  The fungus hasn’t been as devastating to the midwife toad as to other amphibian species.  A valuable lesson is that breeding programs must be monitored to make sure they don’t become hot beds of infections for the very species they are intended to save.

The Navy’s sea mammal program started in the late 1950s.  Now, about 75 dolphins and 25 sea lions are housed at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego Harbor as part of a Navy program to teach them to detect terrorists and mines underwater. The base briefly opened its doors to the media for the first time since the start of the war in Iraq. The display came a few weeks after the Navy announced plans to send up to 30 dolphins and sea lions to patrol the waters of Washington state’s Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, which is home to nuclear submarines, ships and laboratories. Both species can find mines and spot swimmers in murky waters. Working in unison, the dolphins can drop a flashing light near a mine or a swimmer. The sea lions carry in their mouths a cable and a handcuff-like device that clamps onto a terrorist’s leg and then sailors can then use the cable to reel in the terrorist.

The Navy is refusing to detail its sonar use for a federal court in a case involving potential harm to whales, saying the information could jeopardize national security. The Natural Resources Defense Council is suing the Navy to ensure sailors use sonar in a way that doesn’t harm whales and other marine mammals. Critics say active sonar, which sailors use by pumping sound through water and listening for objects the sound bounces off of, can strand and even kill marine mammals. A U.S. Congressional Research Service report last year found Navy sonar exercises had been responsible for at least six mass deaths and unusual behavior among whales.  Many of the beached or dead animals had damaged hearing organs.

The American Human Development Index has issued a report measuring well-being in America.  A 30-year gap now exists in the average life expectancy between Mississippi, in the Deep South, and Connecticut, in prosperous New England. Huge disparities have also opened up in income, health and education depending on where people live in the US, according to a report published yesterday. The US finds itself ranked 42^nd in global life expectancy and 34^th in survival of infants to age.  Suicide and murder are among the top15 causes of death and although the US is home to just 5% of the global population, it accounts for 24% of the world’s prisoners.  The report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities.

In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation’s adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years.  The figures are from the IRS’s income-statistics division and were posted on the agency’s web site last July. The 2006 data are the most recent available. According to the figures, the richest 1 percent reported 22 percent of the nation’s total adjusted gross income in 2006. That is up from 21.2 percent a year earlier, and is the highest in the 19 years that the IRS has kept figures. The 1988 level was 15.2 percent.

It was reported that in New Zealand, a dolphin swam up to two distressed whales that appeared headed for death in a beach stranding and guided them to safety. The actions of the bottlenose dolphin, named Moko by residents who said it spends much of its time swimming playfully with humans at the beach, amazed would-be rescuers and an expert. The two pygmy sperm whales, a mother and her calf, were found stranded on Mahia Beach, about 300 miles northeast of the capital of Wellington.  Rescuers worked for more than one hour to get the whales back into the water, only to see them strand themselves four times on a sandbar slightly out to sea. They obviously couldn’t find their way back past the sandbar to the sea until Moko came along, approached the whales and led them 200 yards along the beach and through a channel out to the open sea.

Anti-submarine sonar may have killed a group of whales found dead in the Hebrides in one of Britain’s most unusual strandings, scientists believe. Five Cuvier’s beaked whales, a species rarely seen in British waters, were discovered on beaches in the Western Isles on succeeding days in February. Another animal from a related species was discovered at the same time. Experts consider such a multiple stranding to be highly abnormal.  The main suspect in the case is sonar, as it is known that beaked whales are highly sensitive to the powerful sound waves used by all he world’s Navies to locate underwater objects such as submarines.  Groups of beaked whales have been killed, with sonar suspected as the direct cause, several times in recent years.

White House officials for more than a year have blocked a rule aimed at protecting endangered North Atlantic right whales by challenging the findings of government scientists, according to documents obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The documents, which were mailed to the environmental group by an unidentified National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, illuminate a struggle that has raged between the White House and NOAA for more than a year. In February 2007, NOAA issued a final rule aimed at slowing ships traversing some East Coast waters to 10 knots or less during parts of the year to protect the right whales, but the White House has blocked the rule from taking effect. North Atlantic right whales, whose surviving population numbers fewer than 400, are one of the most endangered species on Earth, and scientists have warned that the loss of just one more pregnant female could doom the species.

Economic inequality is growing in the world’s richest countries, particularly in the United States. The gap between rich and poor has widened over the last 20 years in nearly all the countries studied.  The United States has the highest inequality and poverty rates in the organization after Mexico and Turkey, and the gap has increased rapidly since 2000.  France, meanwhile, has seen inequalities fall in the past 20 years as poorer workers are better paid.  Wealthy households are not only widening the gap with the poor, but in countries such as the United States, Canada and Germany, they are also leaving middle-income earners further behind.

Despite the Wall Street meltdown, the nation’s biggest banks are preparing to pay their workers as much as last year or more, including bonuses tied to personal and company performance. So far this year, nine of the largest U.S. banks, including some that have cut thousands of jobs, have seen total costs for salaries, benefits and bonuses grow by an average of 3 percent from a year ago, according to an Associated Press review.  That there is a rise in pay, or at least not a pronounced drop-off, from 2007 is surprising because many of the same companies were doing some of their best business ever, at least in the first half of last year.  At Citigroup, which has cut 23,000 jobs this year amid the crisis, pay expenses for the first nine months of this year came to $25.9 billion, 4 percent more than the same period last year.

The Kipunji monkeys were originally discovered in 2003/2004 based on a rumor of a shy and unusual monkey from villages in the southern highlands of Tanzania. Now, after 2,800 hours of fieldwork, there are only 1,117 of these monkeys, and they live in two isolated forests with a total area of just 6.82 square miles.  Several years after it was first discovered, researchers managed to get enough evidence to announce it as a new species, a year later it was further hailed as a whole new genus, the first new monkey genus in over 80 years.  Although the Kipunji has already been listed among the World’s 25 Most Endangered Primates, it hasn’t yet made it onto the World Conservation Union’s (ICUN) Red List as “critically endangered”, which is where WCS think it should be because of the threats to its habitat.

Researchers have worked out how rib-extensions helped a 225 million year old reptile glide through the air, with a little help from a wind tunnel.  Although the weird rib-growths of Kuehneosuchus and Kuehneosaurus were long thought to be related to flight it was not clear how they worked, says Koen Stein, who did the work when a palaeobiology student at the University of Bristol in the UK.  To help understand the flight of the two Kuehns, Stein and colleagues built models of the two very similar reptiles and stuck them in a wind tunnel.  To their surprise, they found that Kuehneosuchus was aerodynamically very stable. Jumping from a five-meter tree, it could easily have crossed nine meters distance before landing on the ground. The other form, Kuehneosaurus, was more of a parachutist than a glider.

In March last year, the London’s Natural History Museum discovered a tiny red and black bug in its grounds. By August it was the most common insect found in the museum’s Wildlife Garden.  Checking the bug against the museum’s insect collection produced no match. Although there was a resemblance to a rare species called Arocatus roeselii, this insect is found in alder trees, not the plane trees where the new bug was discovered.  This frustrated the museum personnel that in the garden of the biggest museum in the world there was an insect that they couldn’t identify. In a further twist the National Museum in Prague discovered an exact match for the bug, an insect from Nice classified as Arocatus roeselii.  There could be two possible explanations.  That the bug is roeselii and by switching to feed on the plane trees it could suddenly become more abundant, successful and invasive. The other possibility is that the insect in the museum’s grounds may not be roeselii at all.