Author: Marina

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Study Says Fluids From Hydraulic Fracturing Killed Trees

(My emphasis added to the last line of the excerpt.)

A study that argues for more research into the safe disposal of chemical-laced wastewater resulting from natural gas drilling found that a patch of national forest in West Virginia suffered quick and serious loss of vegetation after it was sprayed with hydraulic fracturing fluids.

The study, by researchers from the United States Forest Service, was published this month in the Journal of Environmental Quality. It said that two years after liquids were legally spread on a section of the Fernow Experimental Forest, within the Monongahela National Forest, more than half of the trees in the affected area were dead.

The researchers said that the disposal section was less than half an acre in size “to minimize the area of forest potentially affected by the fluid application.” About 75,000 gallons were applied over two days in June 2008.

The study’s author, Mary Beth Adams, a soil scientist, said that if the same amount had been spread over a larger area, less environmental damage to the forest would probably have been resulted.

She said that there was little information in the scientific literature about such impacts and that the study indicated that “there are potential effects of natural gas development that we didn’t expect.”

Fluids From Hydraulic Fracturing Killed Trees, Study Says – NYTimes.com.

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Can’t Eliminate an Invasive Species? Try Eating It. – NYTimes.com

(My emphases added.)

“Humans are the most ubiquitous predators on earth,” said Philip Kramer, director of the Caribbean program for the Nature Conservancy. “Instead of eating something like shark fin soup, why not eat a species that is causing harm, and with your meal make a positive contribution?”

Invasive species have become a vexing problem in the United States, with population explosions of Asian carp clogging the Mississippi River and European green crabs mobbing the coasts. With few natural predators in North America, such fast-breeding species have thrived in American waters, eating native creatures and out-competing them for food and habitats.

While most invasive species are not commonly regarded as edible food, that is mostly a matter of marketing, experts say. Imagine menus where Asian carp substitutes for the threatened Chilean sea bass, or lionfish replaces grouper, which is overfished.

“We think there could be a real market,” said Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch, whose 2011 Smart Seafood Guide recommends for the first time that diners seek out invasive species as a “safer, more sustainable” alternative to their more dwindling relatives, to encourage fisherman and markets to provide them.

“What these species need now is a better — sexier — profile, and more cooks who know how to use them,” she said. She has enlisted celebrity chefs to promote eating the creatures.Scientists emphasize that human consumption is only part of what is needed to control invasive species and restore native fish populations, and that a comprehensive plan must include restoring fish predators to depleted habitats and erecting physical barriers to prevent further dissemination of the invaders.

via Can’t Eliminate an Invasive Species? Try Eating It. – NYTimes.com.

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Book Review – What’s Gotten Into Us? – By McKay Jenkins – NYTimes.com

We all know by now — don’t we? — that many of the synthetic chemicals in our food, personal-­care and cleaning products, toys and household goods are harming not just the environment but ourselves. Body-burden tests, for measuring exposure to chemicals, reveal flame retardants, plasticizers, pesticides and perfluorinated chemicals in the blood of almost every person studied. We see rising rates of some cancers, autoimmune disorders, reproductive illnesses, autism and learning disabilities. Meanwhile, our consumption of synthetic chemicals, a majority of which haven’t been tested for human health impacts, has skyrocketed. A growing number of books make the case that these phenomena are linked….

Consumers are hardly blameless, Jenkins says. We’ve allowed ourselves to become alienated from the products we use: we don’t know where they come from or how they’re made (let alone where they go when we’re done with them). The more this physical and psychological distance between our stuff and ourselves grows — a breach filled by brands — the more confused we get. “The dumber we feel, the less confident we are in our decisions,” Jenkins riffs. “The less confident we are, the more susceptible we become to the suggestion that everything is as it should be.” When we reach unthinkingly for a familiar brand, “we implicitly grant authority — and trust — to what manufacturers have told us, that a product is ‘safe.’ ” But doesn’t surrendering to corporate marketers cut both ways? Seventh Generation, a brand synonymous with a lighter environmental impact, is just as eager to win our trust as Dow Chemical.

excerpt from   What’s Gotten Into Us? – By McKay Jenkins – NYTimes.com.

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Jasmine Becomes Contraband in China – NYTimes.com

Beginning in February, when anonymous calls for a Chinese “jasmine revolution” began circulating on the Internet, the Chinese characters for jasmine have been intermittently blocked in cellphone text messages while videos of President Hu Jintao singing “Mo Li Hua,” a Qing dynasty paean to the flower, have been plucked from the Web. Local officials, fearful of the flower’s destabilizing potency, canceled this summer’s China International Jasmine Cultural Festival in south China, said Wu Guangyan, manager of the Guangxi Jasmine Development and Investment Company.

Even if Chinese cities have been free from any whiff of revolutionary turmoil, the war on jasmine has not been without casualties, most notably the ever-expanding list of democracy advocates, bloggers and other would-be troublemakers who have been preemptively detained by public security agents, among them the artist provocateur Ai Weiwei, who remains in police custody after being seized at Beijing’s international airport last month.

Less well known are the tribulations endured by the tawny-skinned men and women who grow ornamental jasmine here in Daxing, a district on the rural fringe of the capital. They say prices have collapsed since March, when the police issued an open-ended jasmine ban at a number of retail and wholesale flower markets around Beijing.

via Jasmine Becomes Contraband in China – NYTimes.com.

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OOO for dummies (like me)

I’ve been scampering and doing a troll-like stumble,  following along with Tim Morton‘s logorrheic flights for some time now, and gotten twinks of excitement about things like Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology (OOO).  Of course I have no thorough (or even scanty) background in this stuff or its antecedents, but it gets me tweaked, nonetheless.

So I was happy when I found an all-access kiddie primer on OOO on Ian Bogost‘s web site:

So, I thought I’d try to work on a simple, short, comprehensible explanation of object-oriented ontology so I don’t find myself in this bind in the future. My goal is to assume zero knowledge whatsoever about the history of philosophy or its current trends, even if that means massive oversimplification. I’ve also hoped to offer a characterization of the overall approach of OOO rather than any one position within it. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and Harry Potter, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests at the center of philosophy, and that things can be understood by how they appear to us. In place of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.

This is tentative, and I’m posting it here to seek feedback and discussion, not to declare myself victorious. So, have at it.

Update: Here’s an alternate version, crafted based on some of the excellent discussion below. I’m sure I’ll go through a few of these before finding the right one.

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.