The well-dressed man, probably in his thirties and clutching his bible, stood on the street corner outside of an Irish pub quite literally screaming about Jesus, sin, and impending doom. I'd just come out of the movie theater. Across the street two college boys yelled at him to "go fuck" himself. Not a good thing to say to an aspiring martyr. It began to drizzle.
The Kansas State Board of Education recently mandated that "Intelligent Design" be incorporated into the state science curriculum. A well-known medical establishment in Kansas City has decided to take its multi-million dollar stem-cell research program to Massachusetts, a friendlier science environment. Bob Dylan once sang of the reincarnation of Paul Revere's horse.
After more than 40 years of protection and preservation, the U.S. Senate voted to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. Stupidity and corruption are a potent combination. Yet--a week later--the House of Representatives took the oil drilling provision out of the budget bill. A temporary reprieve?
I read recently that with only 5 percent of the world's population the United States generates 30 percent of the world's trash. Who said America's manufacturing base is deteriorating? We've set a high bar for China and India to emulate.
Hurricane Katrina has worsened starvation in Malawi, a country in Africa few people have heard of. When Katrina shut down New Orleans' shipping, the Japanese had to buy their corn in South Africa. The price of South African corn shot up and Malawi couldn't afford it. A picture in a local newspaper a couple of days ago showed 2.7 million bushels of corn piled up outside of a co-op grain silo in Iowa. The silo is full and presumably the excess corn will rot. Could someone actually use this "extra" corn?
There seems to be a shortage of water in the Brazilian Amazon, as hard as that is to believe. In the southwest Brazilian Amazon many lakes are going dry, tons of dead fish are strewn along empty riverbeds, and villages dependent on water travel have become isolated.
No one can say for certain, but rising surface temperatures in the northern Atlantic might have something to do with the drought according to some. But others suggest that the massive deforestation in the Amazon has eliminated forest cover, which has reduced moisture and rainfall. "Negative synergies" as the researchers might say but regardless; the daisy chain is unraveling.
What's to be done? Diane Ackerman said in her book, An Alchemy of Mind, that evolution must have a sense of humor: We have brains that can conceive of states of perfection they can't achieve.
This is the "mysterious" of the moment. Of course a a sixth mass extinction is possible; we've had five over the past 400 million years. Scientists estimate that at least 99.9% of all species of plants and animals that ever lived are now extinct. Yet, new technologies and new ideas are springing up everywhere, everyday, in different places.
Environmental scientists speak of fragmentation, where large units of habitat are broken into smaller units. Thus, a loss of habitat as well as the isolation of the remaining territory occurs. A problem can develop when the interaction between some organisms situated in these different fragmentary locations causes them to be, for all practical purposes, separate populations. How fast can we alter human fragmentation? What are we willing to do--to do it?
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