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TODAY Friday 30 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
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TODAY Friday 30 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Trees and Hormones
Two items on topics of obsessive interest wiggled through our spam defenses last night.
The good-news item is that the search for answers about endocrine disrupting chemicals is broadening. Yesterday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- the club for rich economies -- announced that its members would adopt uniform protocols for detecting and assessing endocrine disrupters. As a first step, OECD is impaneling the obligatory unwieldy working group -- government, science, industry, labor, enviros -- which will begin to meet in March.
Those of you who follow this issue -- through our In The Trenches section, say, or through the Website maintained by the authors of Our Stolen Future -- know that the Environmental Protection Agency is already developing such protocols for the United States (we have our own unwieldy working group). The good bureaucrats in Paris and Washington are said to be "working closely" with each other, so there is reasonable hope that in the not-distant future the industrialized countries of the world will agree on a standard set of tests and measures. With a bigger international pool of research funds now available, there's reason for guarded optimism about an issue that two years ago barely appeared on our cultural radar screens.
The bad-news item comes from a tip sheet sent out by the esteemed Society for Conservation Biology. Actually, there are a number of bad-news items -- overfishing, plummeting populations of pollinators -- but the one that caught our eye was the report of a new study by scientists in Capetown that limns the problem of non-native trees. There has been an unprecedentedly vast migration of tree species over the last century. Farmers plant trees to combat soil erosion, homeowners to beautify the lawn, and timber cutters to make a profit; often the trees best suited to meet those ends quickly are alien species, typically pines and eucalyptus. These non-natives inevitably invade nearby wild places and frequently drive out the plant aborigines. Biodiversity goes down, and watersheds are disturbed. Pine plantations are the biggest offenders: tough on local ecosystems, profitable to maintain.
What makes this alien tree problem particularly worrisome is that many green futurists, like Freeman Dyson, pin their hopes on biotech advances that will allow for the cultivation of tree-like woody plants that will create biomass much more quickly than God's current variety; these new kind-of-trees could be converted to benign hydrogen fuels, all to the benefit of rural villages and local economies. But when they escape the farm...?
TODAY ON THE SITE
You know already about Carolyn Strange's updating of the Endocrine Disrupter portion of our In The Trenches section. Today we're happy to tell you that Brad Auer of Forests has also come up with something new and interesting: a fresh packet of information for already-crazed forest activists. Where to volunteer, how to find arguments, and 17 or so other ways to get involved.
Recent "Today" columns:
1/29: Things To Come (2)
1/28: Things To Come
1/27: 'Bye, 'Bye Brazil
1/26: Jaywalking and Jaydriving
1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish
1/20: Electromagnetic Sleuthing
1/16: Good News Way Down Under
1/15: Twenty-Four Forty or Fight!
1/14: Your Tax Dollars at Work
1/13: Johnny Mobil Appleseed
1/12: Superbowl, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Future of Al Gore
1/9: Goodbye, Delaware
1/8: Leaf Blowers, Old Cars, Class Conflict
1/7: The Great Improvement That Didn't
1/6: Proactive, Shmoactive
1/5: Mediocre Landscapes and Hope for the Planet
1/2: The Greatest Environmental Cause of the Year
12/31/97: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997
To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.