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TODAY Friday 9 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Goodbye, Delaware

What you see above is an image of the middle portion of the Eastern Seaboard next to images of the same area after a big asteroid lands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Computer simulations presented at the Las Alamos National Laboratory on Wednesday vividly portray the havoc. As the Lab's press release says, "An asteroid three miles across hitting the mid-Atlantic would produce a tsunami that would swamp the entire upper East Coast of the United States to the Appalachian Mountains. Delaware, Maryland and Virginia would be inundated, including Long Island and all the coastal cities in this region. It would also drown the coasts of France and Portugal." (France as an afterthought!)

We love asteroid stories around here. We followed the announcement of a fresh hypothesis that objects as big as a house enter Earth's atmosphere every day ("Duck!"). We were fascinated by the data that indicate that extinction-inducing asteroid / comet strikes were a recurrent event in planetary history ("Duck! (Again)"). Those stories concentrated on the atmospheric perturbations brought on by a collision. And now... tidal waves!

Jack Hills and Charles Mader, astrophysicists at Los Alamos, reason that because most of the earth is covered with water, a tsunami (aka "tidal wave," but it's not really tidal) would be the most frequent and fastest form of disaster. "A tsunami retains its destructive energy while it travels enormous distances. When the wave strikes a continental shelf, its speed decreases and its height increases. An asteroid impact would induce a series of waves that could scour thousands of miles of coastline with walls of water and roiling debris." (I'm quoting from the Los Alamos press release; for more information contact Gary Kliewer).

Well, just as death gives meaning to life, we tend to believe that natural catastrophes give meaning to environmentalism, but we don't say so very much. It certainly wouldn't be a popular point of view in underwater downtown Wilmington. Dr. Hills reasonably argues that humans should prepare defenses against the small-to-medium-size impacts which occur with fair regularity. The famous Siberian fireball of 1908, which flattened 800 square miles of forest, was of a "small" size likely to recur about every 300 years. A nuclear missile could intercept and deflect such an object. "it's a problem that could be solved for much less than the cost of one hurricane. We could just set it up and be done with it," said Dr. Hills.

Do you agree?

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

We love letters, even when we hate 'em. Here's a recent exchange:

Dan Steinicke wrote:

I found David Tenebaum article on sewage sludge to be extremely baised and full of over simplifications and downright lies. Articles of this type have no place in your magazine if you wish to be taken seriously as an environmental organization.

For a more balanced look at the question of sewage sludge I would suggest a visit to: http://www.life.ca/nl/58/sludge.html

Thank you
Dan Steinicke

 

Dear Dan --

I'm sorry that you didn't like David Tenenbaum's article on sludge. We are not, however, an "organization" and don't want to become one. We're an electronic magazine with 117 different contributors; all we ask is that authors write clearly and write what they believe. This is a big tent. In that vein, you should feel free to write a refutation of David's piece; I will give it every consideration. Calling someone a liar is pretty serious, though, so I hope you're prepared to either document or retract that particular charge.

Yours,
Conn Nugent

 

Dear Conn Nugent,

I am not interested in refuting Mr. Tenenbaum's article. I'm interested in reading electronic magazines that can provide me with reliable information on environmental concerns. If the Liberty Trees sees its mission as giving voice to anyone who can write clearly what they believe without any regard to the accuracy of the information then your magazine is no more useful to me than the National Enquirer and I will no longer continue to read it or recommend it to others. I can see no useful purpose to the spreading of this type of misinformation other than to further confuse people on environmental issues and thus make it easier for vested interests with big bucks and powerful public relations agencies to sway public opinion towards environmental views that are best for them and not in the best interests of the public or the environment.

Former Reader
Dan Steinicke

Well. I e-mailed all of this to Tenenbaum, who urges readers to check out Environmental Health Perspectives, "The Beauty of Biosolids," Vol. 105, number 1, Jan. 97, p. 32-36 last October's issue of Environmental Health Perspectives for his research article on sewage sludge, replete with footnotes.

David Tenenbaum may be wrong about sewage sludge, and nobody's universe around here gets blown up if he is. We like the idea of spreading sewage on fields, because we're knee-jerk recyclers, but if it's demonstrably dangerous, then forget it. The anti-sludge article recommended by Mr. Steinicke is way underdocumented, and chronically confuses industrial and sewage sludge. Maybe Peter Montague at Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly would like to weigh in here and present an informed anti-Tenenbaum point of view that goes beyond the hauteur of Mr. Steinicke.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

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: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997
12/30: Bad Eating and Not Eating
12/29: Owning the Public Health Issue
12/23: Good Year for Vintage Climate
12/22: Save the Reefs
12/19: Mousemobile
12/18: Year of Fire
12/17: Ramblin' Man (Ramblin' Woman)
12/16: Big News on the Margins
12/15: The Hybrid As Savior
12/12: Good Week for the Dragon
12/11: Help Wanted: Unreasonable Extremists
12/10: Oh Boy! A Fight!
12/9: Running Away From It All
12/8: "What I Wouldn't Give for This War to End."
12/5: Feisty Euros at Kyoto
12/4: Beauty in the Bronx
12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.