Update to Lucy’s Story

Lucy was examined by a third party veterinarian.

Dr. James Oosterhuis, a lead researcher with the Colyer Institute in San Diego, examined Lucy on Thursday along with zoo veterinarian Milton Ness.

“Her [Lucy’s] current respiratory problems preclude any thought of moving her, and, in fact, it would [be] life threatening for her to be placed under that kind of stress,” Oosterhuis said in a letter to the zoo.

An endoscope was used during the examination to look at the elephant’s trunk. It showed Lucy had severe swelling around the trunk and nose, making it hard for her to breathe through her trunk. While she can take in air through the mouth, stressful situations make it harder for her to breathe, according to a news release issued by the city.

On Monday, Zoocheck’s Julie Woodyer said Oosterhuis’ assessment does not settle the issue for them. She points to the case of Maggie, the elephant from the Alaska Zoo, who was moved from Anchorage to a sanctuary in California in 2007.

The zoo consulted 11 experts in making its decision to move Maggie. Oosterhuis was the only expert who said she shouldn’t be moved, Woodyer said.

I think this re-examination stresses the importance of dealing with Lucy’s medical conditions before moving her. The fact that Dr.Oesterhuis did not think that Maggie should have been moved does not negate the seriousness of Lucy sinus infection.

Lucy:Freeing an Edmonton Elephant

Title: Lucy:Freeing an Edmonton Elephant

There has been a lot of recent controversy regarding Lucy, the elephant at the Edmonton valley zoo. Lucy, was brought to the zoo as a one year old orphan in 1976. She had been kept with Samantha, an african elephant from 1989 till 2007. Samatha was then sent to a breeding program leaving Lucy alone.
Elephants are extremely social animals

Green Almonds

I found something new at our local grocery store – green almonds. They were fuzzy, green-grey oval shaped nuts. Nuts came in fuzzy coats ? Apparently a lot of nuts “Nut (fruit) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) do come with an outer shell. Technically these fruits are called drupes.

In botany, a drupe is a fruit in which an outer fleshy part (exocarp, or skin; and mesocarp, or flesh) surrounds a shell (the pit or stone) of hardened endocarp with a seed inside.

Drupes, with their sweet, fleshy outer layer, attract the attention of animals as a food, and the plant population benefits from the resulting dispersal of its seeds. The endocarp (pit or stone) is often swallowed, passing through the digestive tract, and returned to the soil in feces with the seed inside unharmed; sometimes it is dropped after the fleshy part is eaten.

I opened the surprisingly thick shell to find a moist, tender unripe almond inside. The nut was quite soft and fluid filled. It had a subtle, slightly grassy flavour, very unlike the strongly flavoured ripe almonds.

I have been eating almonds for years, but I had no idea what they actually looked like on the tree. If I had been stranded in a grove of almonds I would have starved or at least gone hungry for a long time.

I simply do not have a great idea of what my food really looks like, where it comes from and how it is grown. I consider myself fairly well educated and informed, but the thing about ignorance, is that you are unaware of the depth of it. This is the great illusion of the modern food economy and modern life. As food is made a commodity for our convenience, we lose a visceral connection to the land, and believe in the god-like powers of human ingenuity, forgetting that it all depends on sun, rain and soil.

This is why talk of global warming does not seem to capture the imagination of most people. We are simply ignorant of the consequences of creating desserts of our farmlands. Food comes from the grocery store not farmland. The modern, city dwelling human living in the industrialzied world is so far removed from food production, that the concept of not getting enough food, seems as ureal as entertainment television.

Upgradeitis

“If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it”. This is an interesting article from Macworld. Artist Bob Staake has been using Photoshop 3 since 1994.

The idea of using such outdated software is foreign to many technophiles who, in this era of instant gratification when songs, movies, and software updates are never more than a click away, rarely seem to use programs that are older than a couple of months. So when Staake posted a video of his process for creating the cover of The New Yorker’s recent politics issue, the news that he was using software over a decade old spread faster than celebrity gossip.

Of course, Staake has upgraded some of his equipment over the years, despite his use of Photoshop 3.0 and older versions of Adobe PageMill and FileMaker Pro. “Believe me, I am anything but a technophobe,” he said. “I rarely ever upgrade because I’m usually inundated with work and simply don’t have the time to learn new versions. For me, it is simply a matter of pragmatism.” The 7100 has now been replaced as his workhorse by a PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4.11, necessitating that he run his beloved Photoshop 3.0 in Mac OS 9.2.1 via the Classic emulation environment (and not, as several blog posts about his New Yorker cover erroneously stated, in System 7).

This is not something that you hear a great deal about in our consumer culture, where new is always better and if you want to remain competitive, beautiful, accepted you’ve got to get with the latest and greatest. This is the great lie of the consumer culture – the constant need to upgrade. Mr.Staake did not fall for the fallacy of needing the constant upgrade to keep producing successfully.

Learning new versions of photoshop might make his work easier or faster. But for this artist, it did not really matter. He tried newer versions and simply found them lacking. He knows his tools inside and out and they do what he wants from them. Knowing the quirks of your tools and the things you need to do to work around them is the productive side of not upgrading. Any perceived adavantage of a novel system is negated by the fiddle time – that is the time it takes to get productive again. I have lost years to fiddle time.

There is nothing wrong with the upgrade or learning something new. But, I think it becomes counter productive when you assume that an upgrade is needed to keep producing or to keep competitive. To fully evaluate an upgrade or product, you need to divorce it from the glamour of “newness”. I am always thinking that the newest version will have that much “needed” feature or just be that much whiz bang better. But, what does the new software or hardware deliver that can not be done now ? Is this ability worth the time and monetary cost ? I find that if I do ask this question I am much less likely to decide to upgrade (unless it is free-then what the heck).

I like learning new systems and I like playing with new toys. I think one can get more creative learning novel systems. But, if the goal is to create and one just keeps learning new tools, is that any different than procrastinating by any other method ? Mr. Staake solved the problem by sticking with his original goal – just making his art.

The Price of Oil:Solutions for Children

Yesterday I saw a news clip about G8 Asian powers urging an oil production hike

AOMORI, Japan (AFP) — Eleven nations that guzzle nearly two-thirds of the world’s energy called Sunday for an urgent hike in global oil production as host Japan warned the world could plunge into recession….
In a joint statement, they called for boosts to their own production and asked major oil producers “to increase investment to keep markets well supplied in response to rising world demand”.
The European Union’s energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs warned that high oil prices were a fact to be reckoned with and that major economies needed to come up with alternative energy.

“The era of cheap energy seems to be over and no economy should gamble on a potential return to low prices,” Piebalgs said.

What incredible wisdom-if there is not enough – ask mom and dad for more. The “end of oil” has been a long time in coming. Peak oil production had been predicted, ridiculed and discovered again. But,none of this wisdom reached politicians or car manufacturers. Standards for emissions were relaxed as the new gas guzzlers (SUVs) came into being.

Dead Ducks:The Envirornment and Making Clean Oil

Title: Dead Ducks: The Environment and Making “Clean” Oil

500 hundred ducks landed in a Syncrude toxic tailings pond 75 km north of Fort McMurry. Only 5 were strong enough to even try saving, of those, 3 have survived. The tailings pond contains water that is used to wash the oil from the tar sands. The contaminated water contains a mixture of heavy metals, sands and residual oil. Birds that land on the pond are quickly coated, loose their waterproofing and drown.

Update on Bisphenol A and Plastic Toxicity

It seems that our exposure to Bisphenol A, may be much greater than was previously assumed. Bisphenol A is an endocrine disrupter and can have a drastic effect on the endocrine system, especially in infants and children.

David Biello writes an excellent article in “Scientific American”:Plastic (Not) Fantastic: Food Containers Leach a Potentially Harmful Chemical

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found traces of BPA in nearly all of the urine samples it collected in 2004 as part of an effort to gauge the prevalence of various chemicals in the human body. It appeared at levels ranging from 33 to 80 nanograms (a nanogram is one billionth of a gram) per kilogram of body weight in any given day, levels 1,000 times lower than the 50 micrograms (one millionth of a gram) per kilogram of bodyweight per day considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the European Union’s (E.U.) European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

This seems all well and good, the levels in human urine are less than the arbitrarily defined level deemed harmful by the EPA. I say arbitrarily defined as the more subtle, affects of Bisphenol A (sperm counts, developmenal anomalies, cancer rates i.e. non-lethal effects.) were examined. However, almost ALL urine samples had Bisphenol A. Further, it seems that humans can degrade Bisphenol A quickly.

Harper Goverment Shows Leadership by Doing Nothing

Steven Harper managed to dilute the agreement at the Commomwealth talks from a proactive statement to a statement of hope that one day things would be better, just not now.

Commonwealth leaders agreed to a much watered-down agreement on climate change after Prime Minister Stephen Harper resisted any reference to binding targets on greenhouse gas emissions.

The agreement, announced at a news conference Saturday afternoon was a setback for other Commonwealth members, led by Britain, who had called for binding commitments for greenhouse gas reductions in the statement.
Instead, the statement speaks of “a long term aspirational global goal for emissions reduction to which all countries contribute.”

How Not to Eat oil

I did not comprehend our utter dependance on oil in food production. I have been listening to “The Ominvore’s Dilemma”, by Micheal Pollan. The beginning of the book discusses the utter dependance of animal feed and processed food on the abundance of corn. This is probably slightly different in Alberta, as there is more wheat than corn, but the ideas are the same. The diagram below illustrates the entire convoluted relationship. The book is worth a read or listen for a deeper understanding how we are essentially eating petroleum. Plastic pollution makes this statement more literal.

How the Harper Government Knows Everything About Climate Change

In a move that is classic for the Harper government, funding for climate research has been slashed.

Last year

Forty per cent of this year’s budget for climate change programs has been slashed from the departments of Natural Resources and Environment, CBC News has learned.
The cuts include the much-advertised One Tonne Challenge, 40 public information offices across the country and several scientific and research programs on climate change.

In fact, the Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network has been shut down.

The Canadian Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network (C-CIARN) was established by Natural Resources Canada in 2001 with the mandate of promoting and encouraging research on climate change impacts and adaptation, as well as promoting interaction between researchers and stakeholders.
C-CIARN successfully met the mandate that it was given when it was created in 2001, and on June 30, 2007, the network closed.
The Harper government has claimed that the C-CIARN had met its mandate. But, there was also a question of funding.

The foundation has received $110 million in federal grants since 2000 and will continue to finance research projects until 2010, while seeking additional government money.
But a spokesman for Environment Minister John Baird last week questioned whether they were managing their funding properly.
“The question one has to ask is, if CFCAS has spent the $110 million it received from the government already, why have they run out of money three years before the end of their allocation?” wrote Garry Keller, Baird’s director of communications, in an e-mail to CanWest News Service.

…Gordon McBean, a climate scientist who is the volunteer chairman of the foundation, said the organization still has money, but that it could shut down in a few years if it doesn’t get more funding for new projects.
>”I’m quite concerned because they never ask us,” said McBean. “They have never allowed us to give them a briefing on what we do … They don’t acknowledge our requests.”

Scientist are surprised at the rate of climate change. It is occurring (faster than predicted)[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5303574.stm}. Given that the scientists are surprised, I am not sure how the Harper government can claim that the C-CIARN has fulfilled its mandate of climate research. The C-CIARN had research that was used for the IPPC(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Cange) report. This was the same report that for which the IPCC was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore.

This is the real reason for clamping down on climate research. It has gotten public attention. Public attention means that the Harper government will have to undergo public scrutiny on its lack of any concrete plan to address climate change. The funding cuts come at a time that the Harper government has made election winning, $60 billion dollars worth in corporate and personal tax cuts. Harper has once again taken his direction from George Bush. This is an echo of the Conservatives’ Afghanistan policy, where muzzling the press is the best response

Without adequate research, we are unable to determine what is actually happening with the climate. As the news gets ever more dire and the evidence more conclusive, government will have to set policies to meet the crisis. But, the Harper government would rather take the route of not knowing. Not knowing means not doing – business and pollution as usual. It is not as if resource are tight, after a $60 billion dollar tax break, how tight could they be ?

I thought that any reasonable government would have to acknowledge the problems and challenges we have to face. It is not as if the research is tenuous, although even at this late stage, debate is rife by a minority of oil company scientists. What I did not count on was the incredible power of cognitive dissonance. In spite of increasing evidence that the climate is in serious trouble, the Harper government takes the route of ignorance. Not knowing is better that actually making the hard decisions to change.

Our “leaders” are unable to change the direction of our society. Leadership has to come from the people. Without this internal leadership we will end up like Easter Island. Decimated on a deserted Island with no trees and a lot of large stone statues that stare back with the folly of its creators.