BS: Doing Something About It...

Subject: RE: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: Chief Chaos
Date: 27 Apr 04 - 02:40 PM

Dianavan - Sounds like you won't have to worry about burning the salmon when you grill it!

You've got to look for that silver lining.
Of course you know dozens of people get struck by lightning each year looking for that silver lining.

Subject: RE: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: dianavan
Date: 27 Apr 04 - 12:35 AM

Meanwhile, they just found out that the salmon has been polluted by fire retardents that were used in last year's forest fires (B.C.)

I often feel like, whats the use... but then I look at my optimistic children and know that at least they are aware and doing all they can do to make this a better world. Ah, youth!

Subject: RE: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: Amos
Date: 27 Apr 04 - 12:15 AM

  
2004-04-22


And http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040421232304.htm reports:


'Green' Chiller Technology Rolled Out For Earth Day


Penn State acousticians put their new prototype for a compact chiller, based on "green" technology that substitutes sound waves for environment-damaging chemical refrigerants, on first public display in conjunction with Earth Day in New York City.

The roll-out took place at a Ben & Jerry's scoop shop in New York City where the chiller was hooked up to a standard ice cream sales freezer cabinet and successfully kept the creamy merchandise in delicious condition. Ben & Jerry's partnered with Penn State, with financial and scientific support from its parent company, Unilever, to develop a more environmentally friendly prototype freezer cabinet.

Subject: RE: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: CarolC
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 06:56 PM

Here's something interesting for you, Amos:

Association For Temperate Agroforestry

Agroforestry: An Integrated Land-Use Management System for Production and Farmland Conservation

AGROFORESTRY DEFINED

"Agroforestry is an intensive land-management system that optimizes the benefits from the biological interactions created when trees and/or shrubs are deliberately combined with crops sad/or livestock."

Excerpts:

"Never in history has global concern for the consequences of human land use been more widely shared. Many regions of the world cannot meet their growing populations most basic needs for food, water and energy. Soil erosion adds to food, energy and transportation costs and threatens future food production capacity. Nonpoint source pollution from forest and agricultural lands restricts access to safe water. Loss of vegetation from land development and site degradation affects our aesthetic environment, global climate patterns and the quality of the air we breathe.

Such problems are often the legacy of our success in maximizing production of o­ne or more agricultural products in a financially optimal fashion without sufficient knowledge of, or regard for, impacts o­n future productivity and the environment. This was a rational economic choice when long-term consequences were unknown, when resources appeared to be relatively unlimited, and when technology promised means for further intensifying production. Now that we are discovering undesirable longer term consequences of current land-use systems, alternatives must be sought.

O­ne alternative is to model managed ecosystems after the structure and functions of naturally-occurring o­nes by reestablishing complexity in time, space and biodiversity. This would lead to a shift away from separating land uses o­n discrete parcels to integrating them o­n a landscape level. Agroforestry, which exploits the interactions between trees and crops (including livestock) when they are grown together, bridges the gap between production agriculture and natural resource management. This provides opportunities to integrate land uses o­n a landscape level. Furthermore, properly designed agroforestry systems provide environmentally and economically sound alternatives to unsustainable production systems.

In the past, progressive land management in North America meant increasingly intensive use of a site for production of a single product -- corn, rice, wood, or others, -- in which other values such as watershed and wildlife habitat were competitive, or at best, secondary. In contrast, agroforestry seeks to optimize production of multiple products and benefits by manipulating the interactions between components.

For example, sheep grazing a forest plantation provide short-term revenue and reduce competition. Trees planted o­n a floodplain yield wood products, trap sediments during peak flows, reduce bank cutting and protect adjacent croplands and downstream water quality. Resource conservation and production goals are integrated rather than assumed to be tradeoffs.

Several decades of development of agroforestry systems and their application in temperate nations such as New Zealand and China demonstrate the range of conditions under which this approach has been successful. Agroforestry requires shifting our thinking in both spatial and temporal domains, and demands skills in managing, rather than reducing complexity. Traditional disciplinary approaches to problem-solving such as the forester dealing with the trees, the soil scientist with the soil, and the hydrologist with the water, are no longer sufficient.

This may be o­ne reason why less developed nations that have never strictly segregated land uses are today's world leaders in development and application of agroforestry technologies. Agroforestry challenges land managers to transcend disciplinary boundaries and explore the potential synergism between production agriculture and natural resource management. Essential to this is an understanding of hierarchical scalar relationships within ecosystems and recognition that defined ecosystem "boundaries" exist primarily for managerial convenience."

Subject: RE: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 06:53 PM

You have to nurture these threads Amos, and give them time...

That first one, with its "frequent wetting and drying cycles" sounds like they're moving towards reversing what we've being doing all these years, and are starting to find ways for us to undo the damage, by producing what will eventually become peat, or in time, coal. That's the way to do it.

An interesting site - thanks Amos. Here's a bit for the Trekkies among us - a step towards holodeck technology.

Subject: RE: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: Amos
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 06:30 PM

Hmm...not a popular topic., I guess...

Subject: RE: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: Amos
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 03:43 PM

From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040420011541.htm

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A Mayo Clinic discovery about a protein known as Dynamin-2 has thrown conventional wisdom for a loop. Finding the protein on the centrosome, a minute structure near a cell's nucleus, may lead to new strategies for stopping cancer growth.

The Mayo team, already known for discovering several families of dynamins, this time discovered them -- not on a membrane, as expected -- but on the unlikely centrosome which has no membrane. It was the last place they expected to find them, but the surprise finding offers a new lead in the fight against cancer.

"These findings provide us with a basic understanding of how normal and cancer cells are organized; how they divide and how they might grow and die -- which is an important part of cancer," says Mark McNiven, Ph.D., the cell biologist who led the Mayo Clinic research team's investigation. "A lot of cancers, you could argue, don't grow faster; they just don't die. So this discovery will improve our understanding of this very relevant cellular process. It promotes understanding the cell at its most basic level, giving us a new layer of detail."

The research is featured in the April issue of Nature Cell Biology (http://www.nature.com/ncb/).

Subject: BS: Doing Something About It...
From: Amos
Date: 26 Apr 04 - 03:14 PM

This thread is dedicated to those who are finding answers to issues, including environmental, energy, water, economic, social or political issues. I am looking for insights as to how things couold be resolved and improved, whether high or low.

For starters, here's a refreshing angle on a partial solution to the global warming rate due to CO2 in the atmosphere. Enjoy.

A