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Stewart Brand on 'Environmental Heresies'
FleaPlus writes "The MIT Technology Review has an article predicting where the mainstream of the environmental movement may likely reverse its collective stance in the next ten years. The four areas discussed are population growth, urbanization, genetically-engineered organisms, and nuclear power. The article is written by Stewart Brand, known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL online community, and the Long Now Foundation. Brand also has some interesting comments regarding the sometimes-conflicting interaction between romantics and scientists in the environmental movement. There's an online debate between Brand and former DOE official Joseph Romm on TR Blogs." Frankly, unless humanity decides to undergo a massive collective personality change of not being consumption-focused, I don't see much other way around these particular issues. What we all need is an Arthur to keep us depressed and sleeping in darkened rooms to lower energy consumption.
And also it assumes that we do no reprocessing, and we make no use of thorium. There's enough thorium on Earth to keep the breeder reactors running for... well, as near forever as you need it to be.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Increasing demand for power and other resources isn't going away. Time to suck it up and deal with imperfect solutions.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
The whole concept behind the environmental movement is that humans are unable to live symbiotically with Nature. No matter where we go, we act more as parasites that strip our host of life than as beneficial citizens of Nature.
1) Population growth: Humans are the problem. Despite the shrinking birth rate, this does not bode badly for Nature which will theoretically revive itself once we are not sucking nutrients out of the ground and burning it into the sky and water.
2) Urbanization: Cities are the largest contributors to localized pollution. Air quality, sewage overflows, and general griminess ooze from cities. I don't see how environmentalists could come around to see how cities are beneficial to the environment.
3) Genetically-engineered organisms: Knee jerk reactions defines the environmental movement. If they haven't listened to real science thus far, what will convince them otherwise?
4) Nuclear power: Ethical scientists have already converged on this as a plausible renewable energy source. Too bad the environmentalists haven't.
These are issues that are bugs so far up the asses of environmentalists that it is hard to believe that they could change their minds about them. I find it more likely that this one guy came to his senses and sees conservation as a constant management of the environment rather than as political capital. The problem is that the anomie of distancing himself from his old friends is too powerful and he finds himself trying to continue associating himself and his ideas with theirs.
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities.
as part of his observation that urbanization is slowing population growth (which he contends is slowing growth).
Actually, my observation is exactly the opposite. I seem to hear more sympathy for packing everyone together than for spreading them out in the modern environmentalist rhetoric. That's why "sprawl" has become a cuss-word among this bunch.
For another example, look at the current opinion of Walmart. Just today I heard an NPR story about Walmart that criticized them for their environmental impact (pollution and rainwater runoff from their parking lots, plus the extra air pollution from people driving there, I guess).
I guess my point is that the "environmental movement" is a little conflicted; they apparently either like or dislike centralization and efficiencies of scale, depending on the context.
Have you read my blog lately?
The problem I have is that there aren't any good replacements, nothing renewable comes close to the energy return of fossil fuels or nuclear (at current production).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Animal life came out of the oceans some 500 million years ago. For over half that time the land was dominated by dinosaurs. For perhaps 100,000 years the land has been dominated by humanity.
Yeah, we've done well.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Start your own news portal and steal all of slashdots readership. Good luck.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
one can make similar arguments about oil deposits. in fact, for years, people have been claiming that we'll run out of oil in 20 years, and every 20 years, we still have oil to burn. why? because technology advances. oil reserves that were not economical or feasible to pump from 20 years ago are now very viable. we've got these nifty steam injection techniques that can extract from oil sands which have oil concentrations that are far below what previously would have been considered justification for even installing a well.
I'm sure the same could apply to uranium. What isn't viable today to process, could well be quite viable in 20 years if we approached the problem head on.
This is one issue that's always bugged the hell out of me about the wackier spectrum of environmentalists.
GM crops have the potential, hell, they're *necessary* for a great number of third world countries to be able to grow enough food to feed their people. And these guys are trying to stop that for the sake of nonsensical political motivations.
Then they go about using scare tactics, calling it "frankenfoods" and whatnot, as if there's something horrific about it. Excuse me, but we've been genetically modifying our crops for millenia. We've just gotten more sophisticated about it.
If it's not the illogical people that are against nuclear power, and don't understand things like "real life", it's the rich people with more money than sense.
There have been numerous stories about wind-power stations, or water-power stations being denied permission to be built, because rich people don't want to ruin their view of the ocean from their homes on the ocean. Damnit.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Well, (from TFA) he has a degree in biology, and was involved in a Pentagon study on climate change. Oh, and he just got an article published in the Technology Review. You might have heard of it.
Also, eating muesli and selling organically grown tat (what's that?) doesn't disqualify someone from being an expert on these things, so quit the ad hominems.
What are YOUR qualifications by the way? Good Slashdot karma?
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I know who Stewart Brand is. I want to know what among his experience means we should believe a single word he has to say on the Environment?
Or maybe Mr Brand believes a science degree and a few moderately succesful books immediately qualifies him as an expert in anything he cares to to turn his mind to (I believe affliction is usually known as EricRaymondism.)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
My problem with a lot of environmental thought is its all tied up in a package of garbage ideas. Efficiency good, but technology bad. Walmart is EVIL! SUVs are EVIL! Globalism is evil! What's wrong with the Nature Conservancy approach? Buy up the land while trying to respect property rights. Look for approaches that make economic sense to the locals so they are sustainable. Be more efficient without hating SUVs or even nuclear power. Why does it all have to be tied to some lefty anti-capitalist, anti-globalist worldview?
Too bad that people don't realise that coal based energy production is much more hazardous to inveroment...furthermore, it's not only about what people typically understand as pollution, but also also radioactive "waste"! (typical nuclear plant doesn't release them to biosphere; typical coal plant releases some amount of it - radioactive elements that were in its fuel) And meanwhile almost 100% of electricity here comes from coal, and worst of all, 2/3 of it is brown coal :/
And probably public will block construction of nuclear power plant, that is planned in the next ~10/15 years...
One that hath name thou can not otter
That's the entire intent of this article.
But it is becoming more and more obvious that the global warming emperor has no clothes.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Certainly, some environmentalists have financial motives but the majority do not. When scientists are concerned about global climate change, they are publishing these warnings in the hope of drawing attention to what they genuinely perceive as a serious problem. Ditto for polution concerns, supplies of natural resources, biological diversity and ecosystem damage. These are FACTS.
In contrast, the news releases from industry which make their way across television and newspaper spread absolute lies. Examples:
- there is no global climate change (flies in the face of 90%+ of scientific opinion)
- business can continue as usual without worrying about environmental factors (a hope, for short term business as usual)
- the economy can survive $100 oil
- nuclear is the solution to our energy needs
Here's the important point: a lot of scientists work for industry. So they have a distinct bias. In many cases they are providing reports for their employer. So next time you run into a scientific report, check the source... not all scientists are funded equally.Uranium deposits are shrinking at an alarming rate. In a few decades time, the cheap U ores would have run out, and the remaining deposits would absorb more energy to extract a gram of U than that gram can ever hope give back.
Alright, since I don't know the current figures on Uranium deposits/Uranium consumption
I'll accept that that might be true. However even if all Nuclear power gave us was another
two decades woundn't that buy us time to transition from an oil infrastucture to an
infrastucture based on some kind of alternative energy?
"The moment "pride" is lost, "freedom" is also lost." - Ramza.
By 'well', do you mean using up the earth's resources to the point of our own extinction?
Dinos: "we died off after 300 Million years"
Joe Bob: "ha! We can beet that!"
This article describes a GMO rice that is herbicide resistant. Scientists spliced in a human enzyme that is very effective at crunching toxins to create rice that can withstand a wider variety of weed-killers. This lets farmers rotate their weedkillers to reduce the chance that the weeds evolve resistance.
The GMO rice provides two other important environmental benefits. First, the new enzyme is so efficient at detoxifying the herbicide that the resulting rice is relatively herbicide free (non-modified rice contains 20X more residual herbicide). Second, the GMO rice extracts herbicide from the soil, meaning less herbicide in run-off.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Unless the odd grammar above somehow changes the meaning of the sentence, I think Marvin was who you were going for there...
As long as I'm nitpicking, when I think of "an Arthur" I think of http://www.thetick.ws/car8.html
In a few decades time, the cheap U ores would have run out, and the remaining deposits would absorb more energy to extract a gram of U than that gram can ever hope give back.
Over reliance on Nuclear energy can easily turn us away from looking at real alternatives. That's my gripe with Newkiller. Not some quasi-religious aversion.
And what are those real alternatives pray tell? Not solar power, wind power, conservation - that rickety tripod of enviromentalist dogma. Your statement that Uranium availability is in decline is absurd. The same Chicken Little arguments were used by environmentalists in the '70's about oil, and came to nothing. Uranium is still in plentiful supply on the Earth's surface and, for the very long term, in asteroids.
It is good to see environmental pseudo-science challenged in articles like this.
an ill wind that blows no good
"radical conservation in energy transmission and use"
He says this like it's an insignificant thing. It's not. We literally throw away approximately 60% of the energy used to produce electricity as "waste heat". And this is at the power station itself (including nuclear)!
We then go on to use most of the 40% of the energy we have actually transmitted to produce more heat. It's not what could be classed as clever.
Changing this single inefficiency in our energy generation sector would do the job. It's not even particularly radical, the solution is a couple of hundred years old, it's just that until very recently it's been cheaper to just pump in more oil, gas or coal.
Deleted
On population, he points out that global population is close to leveling off and is declining precipitously in many countries. Why? Mostly it is the unprecedented worldwide migration from rural villages to cities, where having lots of children is less of an advantage. If those concerned with sustainability get out ahead of this trend and help guide it, it could be an environmental blessing. Cities put people close together, reducing their collective energy use. They free up rural areas for wildlife and wilderness (if protections are put in place).
Regarding biotech: There's truth to this, though it's slightly facile. It does, after all, matter that GM has been developed by giant corporations and has been used primarily for their benefit. But the idea that the technology itself is intrinsically bad ... that doesn't make much sense to me. As Brand says, the proper reaction for greens ought to be to appropriate the technology and use it for their ends, particularly since, embrace or no embrace, it's gonna spread. Open-source biotech seems like a promising way for GM to do some environmental good. Brand offers some scenarios.
Ultimately, I suspect that urbanization, GM crops, and nuclear power are inevitable. If all we do is stand on the sidelines shouting "no, no, no!" the process will proceed without us, guided by the worst actors. The smartest thing that those of us concerned about the health of humanity and the planet can do is get involved and try to steer toward an outcome that is equitable and sustainable.
You must be new here :)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
GM crops make a negligible difference to third world countries. The yields on GM crops are only marginally better than for regular crops, the difference is only significant for those huge agribusinesses who have tens of thousands of acres of the stuff.
It's war, corruption, disease and import tariffs which decimate the farming populations of third world countries. What they need is good stable government and fair trade with the developed world, not GM crops.
Deleted
will be the first thing reversed.
It's high time the top brass of the environmental movement admit that stopping Nuclear power was a mistake that has lead to greater devastation of the environment by coal plants.
Even the nuclear waste issue pales in comparison to the the ecological damage coal plants have caused and will keep causing until we replace them (finally) with much cleaner nuclear technologies like Pebble Bed. Coal of course has it's own waste issues.
The anti-nuclear power movement has been one of the best examples of the law of unintended consequences in our times.
"Their answer is "Not much," because they know from their own work how robust wild ecologies are in defending against new genes, no matter how exotic"
"The second greatest cause of extinctions is coming from invasive species, where no solution is in sight. Kudzu takes over the American South, brown tree snakes take over Guam . . ."
So why is kudzu a problem if wild ecologies are so good at defending against new genes?
The correct response would have been, "You must new here! :)"
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated.
When I read this I thought of Hillary Clinton's memorable tome, "It Takes a Village". In retrospect it was about a prescient as Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead". Did she get anything right?
an ill wind that blows no good
1) Population growth: Humans are the problem. Despite the shrinking birth rate, this does not bode badly for Nature which will theoretically revive itself once we are not sucking nutrients out of the ground and burning it into the sky and water.
So... the solution to overpopulation is the end to the human race? We will always be "sucking nutrients out of the ground" as long as we continue to eat and/or live on Earth, which is basically as long as there are people. I'm not going to get into the actual feasibility of colonizing the rest of the solar system.
2) Urbanization: Cities are the largest contributors to localized pollution. Air quality, sewage overflows, and general griminess ooze from cities. I don't see how environmentalists could come around to see how cities are beneficial to the environment.
Not all environmentalists are civilization-hating Luddites who want to return to our hunter-gatherer roots. There are many who believe that it is possible to develop in a environmentally sustainable way. There are environmentalists who don't mind admitting that they value human life more than field mice.
3) Genetically-engineered organisms: Knee jerk reactions defines the environmental movement. If they haven't listened to real science thus far, what will convince them otherwise?
Show me the "real science" that proves all GMOs are safe. Yes, there may be no cause for alarm. Still, I think the burden of proof should be creators of these products and the governments that support them to prove that they are safe before they are widely used.
4) Nuclear power: Ethical scientists have already converged on this as a plausible renewable energy source. Too bad the environmentalists haven't.
Nuclear power may be a good addition to our range of power options. From what I have read, it is not ready to be a total replacement for other sources of energy. Also, it has been billed as safe before, before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Things rarely work out as well in practice as they do in theory.
It sounds like you believe that there is a single, unified environmental movement, and that it has only one set of beliefs. Furthermore, you seem to believe that the most extreme views represent the views of everyone. Sounds like you should try looking into what environmentalists are actually saying - not just reading news reports and jumping to conclusions.
These are not isolated, ignorant farmers who just plant corn. These farmers are doing their hardest to follow best practices and be competitve in the agri-industry, and honestly, they're still killing their land. Unless we make a big change in how soil quality is treated, our ability to produce food is going to take nose dive. It's simple.
And don't start on the vegetarianism rant. In North America, plant production with the overuse of petroleum based chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides is what is killing soil - not grazing.
Unfortunately I fear you've shot your whole argument with the stuff inside the parenthesis. I also fear that I need to alter it, for the worse:
The "real world" purpose for GM is to increase the profitability of those companies in that market.
That's the marketplace in action, and unfortunately reducing resources has little to do with it, unless the resources reduced are procured from a competitor. I suspect similar reasoning is why medical cannabis is has been an issue between the DEA and alternative medicine anecdotes. IMHO, it should be in FDA studies, but there's just *no profit* in it compared to synthetic drugs.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I concider myself a soft enviromentalist, Population growth, well it's a problem in some countries in most of europe the population is in decline only kept up by economic migrants. I don't have much of a problem with urbanisation, but it'd be nice if we could have clean cities instead of dirty ones (comming from congested brittan I don't much like the car, and have no problem with keeping them out of city centers), Neuclear power, it won't last forever but for now it's looking like one of the best options.
But GM foods and other orgaisms, they do worry me a little bit, I'm just waiting till we see the roundup ready dandylion.
1) Population growth will settle just as starvation, disease and other 3rd world issues will settle as those countries liberalize and develop their economies so they can distribute goods and services.
2)Cities are far more efficient places for people to live than suburbia. If there were no cities, land use and pollution would skyrocket as each person took his 40 acres and a SUV. Look at LA. That's what the entire east coast would be like w/o cities.
3)Genetically engineered food is better than no food...
4) Nuclear power is a no brainer to anyone except NIMBY types.
"Environmentalists" are politicians. Most of their organizations are basically just law firms. I equate them with oil execs. We really need more publically funded independent research in vertical solutions to improving the environment.
bp
Well, one reason is to consider our quality of life before we are wiped off the face of the planet (if that even happens). This kind of attitude is like saying "I'm going to die eventually anyway, so why bother keeping myself healthy and enjoying life?"
It is also unecessarily alarmist. Environmentalists are often accused of being hysterical - but most of them don't believe in this "apocalypse" scenario, like you do. Yes, we are upset about environmental degradation. Yes, people are suffering because of it. But only the most lunatic fringe believes in a sudden impending doom, or stocking up on shotguns for when the revolution comes, or the energy runs out. It's because environmentalists are interested in survival that they don't just give up in the face of overwhelming odds.
(OT: I always find it amazing how the political extremes on both right and left, adopt this "sudden extiction" rhetoric from opposite angles - religious and environmental)
Basically, we are perfectly capable of humans of adapting to changes in our lifestyles, and we are capable of slowing, and even reversing the damage we have done. We can survive and change if we want to. Sure, people don't like change, but I think most people would prefer survival to wallowing in our own filth, when they are faced with the inevitable.
Throughout history, there have been people who have predicted total doom, and those who predicted total utopia. I don't believe any of them have ever been correct. Meanwhile, most of us live in a difficult, complicated world that has many shades of gray - and do our best to cope with what we have. The visions of some future paradise or hell, are used to manipulate the dreams and fears of people, to draw them away from the difficult contradictions of reality.
... and then they built the supercollider.
It doesn't sound like the Africans are too concerned about starvation, either, huh? Maybe they should, like, do something about it, like every other civilization has had to at one point or another in its history.
Just to add to this post... as someone who has worked in a nuclear reactor, I'd like to comment on the safety of nuclear vs. coal/petroleum industries. In addition to nuclear releasing far less pollution into the environment (and all its waste being very localized and contained), there is the issue of worker safety.
The nuclear industry is very well regulated. Worker safety (and radiation exposure) is meticulously monitored and recorded. Because the entire system is so paranoid and regulated, it is very safe. The most dangerous thing about working in a nuclear plant is conventional industrial accidents (like a crane falling on you). The risk increase due to the presence of nuclear power is minimal.
It is very strange that the public would be shocked and horrified if 10 people were killed in a nuclear power plant accident. However, many more than that are injured or killed every year in the coal/petroleum industry (think of fires on oil rigs, etc.) because this industry is far less safety-oriented. (It's also worth reminding that nuclear power is "more expensive" than other power sources mostly due to this level of regulation.)
The number of injuries/deaths in the nuclear power industry, per year, is small compared to other power industries (and indeed compared to most industries in general). So from the point of view of worker safety, nuclear (in its current, regulated form) is the best.
we've got these nifty steam injection techniques that can extract from oil sands which have oil concentrations that are far below what previously would have been considered justification for even installing a well.
Which is why Shell *lied* about their proven reserves back in 2000, because they thought they could use this nifty new technique, which ended up collapsing the reservoirs, causing it to be MORE difficult to get the oil out.
Get your head out of the clouds. Oil is NOT a sustainable resource.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You may have heard about the embargo? Long gas lines? Why, would the embargo hurt, if the US oil production didn't decline after the '70's? Answer: US domestic oil production has been in decline since the 1970's. Wake up, there will be plenty of oil, but no more cheap oil as global production is peaking. Can Saudi still provide swing capacity? Why is solar, wind and conservation a "rickety tripod" ? Does hydroelectric count as solar? (think hard here, what drives the water back to the resevoir?) Asteroids for uranium source? Can I get what you are smoking? I can't speak to U ore supplies, but oil has peaked in the US. This is a fact. What makes you think it won't peak in the other oil producing counties?
Ehrlich may have underestimated the ability of technology to increase food production on the short term but I think he was right in principle. It is my understanding that the large fish population in the Atlantic is a minor fraction of what it was only 30 years ago. That is an epic planetary die-off that has already occurred in an extraordinarily short time. World-wide human starvation hasn't been seen (yet) because we are still in the transition process of stripping the planet bare. Why do we need _any_ population increase to finish the job?
Haven't people heard the story about passenger pigeons:
"It was Alvin Jones who told us about the Pigeon Roost Prairie which was near the Jones homestead. He said so many pigeons stopped to roost in the pines in this are that they broke the limbs off the trees and the trees died, so there was a prairie there. There wasn't a living tree for 150 acres, and it was called Pigeon Roost Prairie. That was virgin pine timber they killed. The pigeons were almost as big as a chicken, not the homing pigeon; they were two or three times larger, about the size of a pheasant. Not thousands of pigeons but millions of pigeons! I tried to learn all I could about this pigeon migration. I was interested in it. It was something to think about. There would be so, many they would darken the sun for three days, all going north."
http://www.ulala.org/P_Pigeon/Texas.html
Aren't people curious about how primitive cultures were able to feed themselves with sharpened sticks? I suspect it was because going down to the brook to spear a carp was only somewhat more inconvenient than going down to the freezer to find something to thaw.
Like boiling frogs, the human lifespan is only 70+ years. Perhaps it is too short for people to actually experience ecological change and ingrain any feeling for the issue. As long as there is soylent green, some people will call it a balanced ecology. Others think more diversity is valuable.
The point is that the planet was already damaged by population and industry before anyone on Slashdot was born. We should be discussing whether we are at the planetary coup de grace stage, not congratulating ourselves on how population isn't a problem.
(AND, if we didn't have so many people, there would be one less argument for both GMO and nuclear.)
The geographic requirements for nuclear power plants and long term nuclear waste storage are just about opposite.
"And that is the problem with the environmental movement. I don't see the millions of environmentalists giving up electricity or their homes in the suburbs or the country."
That is a very trite response. It is a common tactic in a debate to immediately jump to an extreme position. People aren't being told to give up electricity, just use less and be more efficient. This should be a laudible goal by anyone's standards. To say "but you use it!" is an asinine response. We have to function in the society we are born in, that includes having to use a car and electricity. It doesn't mean we can't push for change.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
His reliance on nuclear energy as the solution to the greenhouse emission problem betrays exactly the sort of lack of creativity just described. Natural ecosystems need not suffer substantial presence of intensive agriculture and global warming CO2 can be sequestered from the atmosphere in the process.
Agriculture need not be land intensive. In fact, it can be removed from the vast majority of existing ecosystems with a relatively minor amount of innovation in food processing and packaging.
On about 108 acres, Earthrise Farms in the Imperial Valley desert, California is producing 67kg of protein per square meter per year using relatively little water. This is better than 20 times the yield of soybeans and includes one of the broadest spectrums of amino acids of any known source of protein. The crop is spirulina, a blue green algae that is a source of nutrition at the base of the aquatic food chain. They have been doubling their production every 5 years but have limited themselves to a niche market in health food or "nutriceuticals". The primary technology they need developed to make this protein directly consumable by humans as a staple of the diet is removal of nucleic acids -- something that may be feasible as an extension of their centrifugal drying process. In any case, it is an excellent feed stock for animals and can displace many times its own acreage in conventional agricultural uses.
The late John Martin at Moss Landing hypothesized in 1987 that large sections of the tropical Pacific were ready to support ecosystems nearly as abundant as the oceans off the coast of Peru except for the lack of one key nutrient: Iron. In 1995, subsequent to his death, his team tested "the Iron hypothesis" by spreading a half ton of iron sulfate (available in huge cheap quantities as a byproduct of iron smelting) over a wide area of ocean. The south Pacific ocean turned from "crystal clear electric blue", virtually devoid of life, to duck pond green. They produced 25,000 tons of biomass for a factor of 50,000 gain from fertilizer to biomass. Once the ocean desert bloomed with phytoplankton, zooplankton, the next link up the food chain, began grazing. Had they kept going, zooplankton grazing fish could have been introduced, such as anchovies, but they terminated the ferti
Seastead this.
Didn't read the article, did you? Go find the paragraph about flouridation.
Let me lay this out in short sentences. Herbicide resistant crops need less herbicide. That's not good for the chemical companies, but bad. Simultaneously, it has a net positive impact on farmers, food, and the environment.
Let me explain by analogy. I'm not a farmer -- but I do raise roses as a hobby. As you no doubt know, rose bushes are fundamentally unhealthy organisms which only thrive with massive doses of fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide, so those of us who raise them know all about this.
Except for one thing: what you think you know isn't true. Older roses do require lots of support to thrive. More modern roses, with their huge flowers and bizarre growth patterns...don't. They've been selectively modified to resist the blights and infestations that killed older plants. They use the calcium in the soil more efficiently, and so don't need as much. They're stunningly healthy plants, designed to be raised in low maintenance gardens by amateurs.
As a result, if I'd grew the modern frankenplants, I'd spend more on the plants to start with, but far less on chemicals.
The same kind of thing applies in frankenfood. If I raise glycophosphate-resistant wheat, then I can apply a glycophosphate-based herbicide to the fields in quantities sufficient to kill the weeds without affecting the wheat. Guess what? That's less than ten percent of the amount I used to apply to the fields. Traditional preemergence applications had to persist in the soil long enough to affect the broad-leaf weeds, which meant applying enough to resist washing away. Applying postemergence means applying only enough to kill the weeds that are there right now. Monsanto will sell me less herbicide than they used to...not more.
Should the environmental movement favor nuclear power?
Who cares!
The four subjects he raises are fringe distractions from the major policy questions which have the largest impact on our environment, which are merely a symptom of wider deficits in our nation's democratic culture.
Population growth is becoming a non-issue.
I favor nuclear power as long as the details are right - if the public is going to take all the risks, we shouldn't allow some private entity to reap the profits off of it.
I favor genetically modified organisms which are designed in a way that benefits farmers and/or the environment, rather than maximizing the profits of entrenched power.
Likewise, urbanization is fine if it leads to prosperity, but as a result of people being driven off of the land by thugs (e.g. Columbia) it is a bad thing.
The devil is in the details, as has always been the case. In ten years time the details may have changed enough that the present situation becomes unrecognizable; so I think trying to predict what we will be trying to do ten years from now is futile and silly.
This isn't to bash futurism generally - we can't know what to work towards now if we don't have some concept of what the future will be like. But trying to predict the future of activism? Waste of time.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Well, genes do appear through mutation, so if you have a few million or billion years, you could probably get fish oil in corn. There's also "jumping genes" and viruses which can move genetic material from one species to another. Bacteria do it all the time. If I remember right, there was some tentative examples of this happening in a few cases with larger species (shark cancer resistance maybe?)
Selective breeding isn't simply shuffling genes around. Instead it's taking the "most desirable" of the current crop and propagating it. Historically there was little understanding as to where those traits came from. Creating corn, for example, was looking for the right mutation and exploiting it.
In recent years selective breeding has undergone a revolution. Now that people can look for specific genes, it's possible to better understand the genetic mechanics behind what was previously trial-and-error.
So yes, I agree there's a difference. I also agree that you have to be careful with new tools. Still, all the techniques involve changing the genetic makeup of populations. Some are more effective than others.
Population is the most important issue in politics for me, so I read the section on this topic (but skipped the rest). I'm so tired of the descriptions of "doom and gloom" that will happen with low fertility rates and a shrinking population - these authors are a mirror image of the mistakes they claim that past environmental authors have made in predicting the future.
o rder/2127rank.html, you will see there are still quite a few countries that have fertility rates above 2.1. (By the way, saying 2.1 is steady state assumes an average infant mortality rate that is pretty high. If you want the human race to all move into a the modern industrialized world, something under 2.05 is required). Granted, I don't have the plots of all countries fertility rates over time and some of these countries near the top may be declining, but I see absolutely no way we can declare success now. I expected better out of Technology Review, the magazine where I first learned about fuel cells for automotive use.
There are some scientific facts on population that are rarely disputed:
1] The earth has a finite carrying capacity
Actual numbers will vary anywhere from 1 to 10 billion people, but it's obvious that constraints on food, water, energy, pollution sinks do constrain the number of us. My opinion is that the number is less than we are now, but we are getting by (some of us anyway) because of unsustainable oil and water use. Perhaps we could get by on renewable energy with around 2 billion people.
2] Large numbers of humans cannot leave the earth
There is no way we could move even 1/1000th the world population off the earth even if there was someplace to go. The resources/pollution needed to do this make it a non-starter for addressing population growth.
3] Adjustments need to be made to run an economy with a declining population growth
Not impossible, but obviously it is harder to operate a system that is shrinking instead of growing. Tricks like using lots of workers to support fewer retirees won't work. Any pyramid scheme seems great when you are on the growth side, but I'd prefer not to have the human race crash like a big pyramid scheme.
4] Fertility rates can be adjusted by government action
Coercive measures while espoused by some as necessary have been avoided in very successful transitions to lower fertility (e.g. Iran). We have less experience with going the other way, but some countries (e.g. Singapore) are trying incentives to raise the fertility rate. I see no reason that these rates can't be successfully adjusted if for some reason, 50 years from now, the world wide fertility rate dips down well below 2 and stays there so long that our population goes below 2 billion.
Now, back to the article:
In each country listed: Japan, Germany, Spain, Russia (I think) and Italy, they could stand to lose 30% of their population anyway. I think the U.S. is too crowded and Europe has much higher densities (and Japan is worse) in terms of population per arable land unit.
"It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason."
What does this mean? If you measure the increase or decrease of an exponential function (what he's talking abut here) as a percentage, then of course they have the same fierceness, but there is no concept of acceleration (percentage growth is constant). If you measure the amount in absolute numbers, then exponential increase is accelerating, but exponential decrease is always decelerating.
As far as fertility going down everywhere, we in the U.S. are now at 2.08 and this is going up (albeit slowly). We were closer to 2 about 5 years ago I think. If you look at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank
Dara
Look up dwarf wheat sometime, and the difference it has made in the Indian subcontinent.
GM is little more than deliberately engineered advantageous mutation.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Changing it at the genetic level through fancy techniques is not incredibly different than isolating a strain for its characteristics and cross pollinating it.
Corn isn't anywhere near what its original form is, being modified for years and years to be the tall vegetable we're accustomed to.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
If I was Monsanto's competitor, could I legally produce and release roundup-resistant weeds to nullify the benefits of roundup-ready soybeans?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
When I moved to an urban area, I recognized instantly that I was lowering my environmental impact. I do not drive, I take up less land, and I take advantage of economies of scale for shipping and distribution of goods. I also have more options for recycling and co-op purchasing. Environmentalists are opposed largely to suburban sprawl that destroys habitats, wastes water for lawns, and makes mass transit impractical.
Brand writes off environmentalists' opposition to GM crops and nuclear power as romantic, but an environmentalist would just as easily paint his glowing portrait of these technologies as naive scientific idealism. It's unfortunate that Brand is unwilling to see the highly rational thinking behind environmentalists' opposition to GM and nuclear power.
Food and power "shortages" are in large part economic, which is to say they're a distribution problem, or ultimately a political problem. As an environmentalist, I do not see an inherent or immediate need for GM crops or additional nuclear power. I'm aware that we could already feed everybody on Earth with existing agricultural technologies, but we lack the political and economic will. Further, I do not trust corporations sponsoring genetic research. They are motivated by profit, not by environmental conservation, and will gladly wipe out everything that can't sue them on their way to profitability.
Environmentalists have already seen corporations do massive damage to the environment, and there is no reason to believe that corporations have changed in any way. 50 years ago, scientists were using the same food shortage arguments to back the introduction of pesticides, hormones, and chemical fertilizers into the food chain. I would rather not see a repeat of DDT with GM crops, and as corporations gain legal impunity, I see no reason to trust them or the scientists in their employ. Rather, I would like to see an emphasis on organic, sustainable farming, with a slow, balanced introduction of GM species after careful scientific peer review and heavy governmental oversight. Unfortunately, we do not currently have the political structure to provide trustworthy governmental oversight of GM foods, and until we do, it would be better in my opinion to hold off.
As for nuclear power, there are better options that have been ignored or underfunded in favor of GE's and MIT's pet projects. Whether it's tidal generators, solar, wind power, or bioenergy, I think it's worth focusing first on technologies that don't produce toxic wastes that will be around for thousands of years and can be used to make weapons, no matter how "safe" they are. It's not that nuclear energy is heresy, it's that it looks like a poor stopgap measure when we're on the way to genuinely sustainable power. Rather than invest in a nuclear power problem, it would be better to promote sustainable power and conservation in the meantime.
Brand's piece is long on rhetoric and short on information. It presents a breathless technological romanticism which ignores the difficulties in all of the "hopeful" proposals that he makes, e.g. the use of GM bacteria to attack invasive species. The problem of specifically targetting a host with a live organism and limiting it to that host is not likely to be solved any time soon. Not even if Brand waves the magic wonder wand of "GM" over it. The history of environmental remediation is littered with the introduction of live parasites which would supposedly prey upon the unwanted pests, cause a population crash and then die out with the pest. Environmental remediationists are now trying to figure out how to get rid of the live parasites which are doing just fine and have _adapted_ and _evolved_. GM is a solution looking for a problem: the favorite supposed problem is the worldwide food shortage. This supposed shortage is a distribution problem. It is caused by deliberate economic manipulation by the developed nations. I don't have the time to go into the problems with his lauding of the automobile as now being some sort of wonder vehicle because the yuppie-next-door is able to get 30mpg in her Prius. Overall a fairly unimpressive article that would fit in well with the anti-scientific, irrational technological fetishism of middle-class liberals that don't want to admit that there are hard societal problems to solve.
Wow, that's the first time I've seen the "you must be new here" post modded as Insightful. Someone get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? :)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Roundup was already one of the most popular herbicide when roundup-ready corn hit the market. Prior to GM corn being available farmers were applying the herbicide 4-5 time in good years and upto 8 times in really bad years. By using roundup-ready corn and roundup together farmers apply the herbicide at most 3 times befor the corn is tall enough to kill off weeds on its own by preventing the weeds from receiving enough light. The net result for monsanto is $ from both the pesticide and the seeds. Now most farmers, even prior to the advent of GM crops didn't save seeds because they would miss out on the genetic improvements from year to year. Seed companies practiced intensive selection for production traits prior to using GM to improve plant quality. Genes native to the plants confering resistance to mold, insect infestation, and improved growth were combined via controlled polination for decades prior to the GM revolution. The net gain for producers is time. 1 application of roundup as opposed to 4 applications in good years and even better in bad years. As we all know time is money, and as someone who has worked on family run dairy farms, (tip: most large "Factory Farms" are family owned and operated) there are never enough hours in the day to manage animals, crops, employee's, maintenance and the ever increasing paper work needed to run a farm. saving that much time is worth the premium paid for the seeds. Land is finite. Most farms cannot get larger with out buy land off of competitors aready using it to grow the same crops, and often the land is more valuable for urban sprawl than agriculture. The best way to make more money is to improve the efficiency of production via less input costs, or increased production from the same land. Most of the posts i've seen on this page are from the "non scientist" members of the environmentalist movements. Being a tech person is not the same as devoting your life to understanding the problems facing agriculture and attempting to solve them. As a Scientist associated with this problem (i'm a phd student in animals science) I'm constantly frustrated by the ignorance western peopls have concerning their own food supply and the arrogance seen from people despite there admited ignorance. the article may or may not be correct on the other points. I'm not associated with those fields but I am qualified to comment on the validity of the GM topic and they are right on the money
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Well, if you don't conserve on verbs, pretty soon we'll run out. Then what will we do? The only solution will be to continue verbing nouns at an ever greater pace.
The deal that is proposed lets wind mills be built and their is no fee or tax, just a blank check for a well-connected company to build hundred of windmills in a very public waterway.
There is a give-away to a well-connected few and just because it is wind power doesn't make it a good idea.
Why can't I build a windmill in Nantucket sound, or anyone? No, the powers that want the Nantucket sound windmill plan want it to go to private interests who will be given a very sweet deal.
It is a bad deal for Massachusetts.
I have always felt that environmentalist should embrace urbanization. However, I feel that it is more important for industry to exist in urban settings then people. This is because when industries cluster in a single location it becomes immediately clear what the environmental effects of these industries will be. The combined results of these industries waste products can be seen much easier than those of decentralized and well insolated (by natural or artificial blinds) industries. The addition of people into the mix makes for incredible political force for change in industrial policies and practices. If you look at some the most tragic environmental disasters (such as Woburn, MA and Three Mile Island) they happened in places where the there was not as much political pressure for change because there were not as many people.
All Roundup Ready items must be Roundup Ready or you cannot plant there (roundup stays in the soil).
Please don't spread misinformation.
Roundup is basically a chemical called glycophosphate. While Monsanto-sponsored studies found it to be pretty much non-toxic in animals, as a reflex, I take corporate-sponsored studies with a grain of salt. (Anyone who does not, is foolish).
But while toxic effects are arguable, one thing is not: glycophosphate is water soluable. As such, roundup does *not* stay in the soil. Not past the first rain.
The IP restrictions on GM crops, however, are a legitimate reason for serious, serious, concern.
Should we ban slave-collars for those who willingly, cheerfully, don them?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Actually, this usually has more to do with harvesting things prematurely for long-haul shipment, and then force-ripening (with gas exposure, etc) just prior to sale. The fruit, or vegetable in question doesn't have as long to properly ripen and generate the compounds that we enjoy as the familiar mature tastes.
This is driven mostly by the demand from less well educated (in culinary terms) shoppers wanting to see/feel crisp-looking produce of every variety on the shelf through every season, or with their unwillingness to pay what it costs for the more immediate transportation of those same items if they were left to ripen on the vine/tree, etc. Spend a little more on the same varieties at a higher-end store, and you'll get your flavor back. But you'll also be burning more fuel, because the produce was probably flown to you (unless it's grown locally).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I don't know who modded you up, but you don't deserve it, as your logic is fundamentally flawed.
They're not going to dump herbicides with "wreckless abandon" because doing so takes time and money. Farmers, like most people, don't want to spend either unproductively.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
This problem has been solved. The waste is processed into what amount to vitrified glass blocks which have stable storage lifetimes in the thousands of years. There is no way short of intentional refinement for waste stored in this manner to re-enter the environment in the relatively short term, unlike liquid or cannister based storage mechanisms. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that in a thousand years or so, we'll have a lot better idea of what to do with the blocks themselves, if indeed anything need be done. We've only had nuclear power for half a century or so, after all.
The correct choice at this time seems to be a combination of pebble bed reactors, which are highly resistant to serious problems such as meltdown or explosive failure, and vitrified glass waste storage insofar as waste storage turns out to be required. Pebble bed reactors are somewhat different from the reactors we're used to thinking about, particularly in that they repeatedly re-process their own fuel, continually converting "waste" from the previous stage into still more energy.
The primary problem is political and environmentalist fearmongering (to the extent that it is not just ignorance, which I am perfectly will to credit both politicians and environmentalists with.) People will believe anything, especially if it comes with a nice, high energy dose of hysteria.
The secondary problem is that building nuclear power plants -- any kind -- is a long, drawn out proceedure. If we started today, money no object, the public all about supporting it, it'd still be quite a few years before the putative new plants began to benefit the infrastructure. Compound this with the fact that we're not going to start today, or at any time in the foreseeable future, and the fact that money is a severe problem, the public is in no way supportive, and the future for reasonable nuclear energy generation appears mighty bleak.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"nothing renewable comes close to the energy return of fossil fuels or nuclear (at current production)."
Am I the only person to have noticed the success of wind power these days?
Current state-of-the-art wind turbines (1.5+ MW) are able to compete with other power sources on equal terms (and before you rant about PTCs, Production tax credits, remember that other power sources also receive massive direct and indirect subsidies). I don't know how you calculate your "energy return", but I hope you include e.g. for nuclear, the astronomical cost of decomissioning, which can be greater than the cost of running the plant for the whole of it's lifetime.
Wind power has the potential to fulfill a great deal of our energy needs. Denmark, for example, already gets 20% of it's energy from wind power.
It's unfortunate that older wind projects like Altamont Pass have given so much bad press. Newer projects, and especially offshore wind farms are much easier on the eye and on the environment. e.g. A Vestas V90 3MW turbine pays for itself energetically within the first 7 months of its 20 year rated liftime.
And anyone who says that reducing energy consumption is not part of the solution has lost touch with reality. This is the same sort of person who has maxed out all their credit cards, has massive debts and doesn't intend to reduce their spending. (Did someone say National debt, Mr. Bush?)
However much energy we produce, we will always be able to consume it all if we waste it. And the expense is no barrier - if there is oversupply in our market economy, the price falls. So energy saving schemes must always be part of the solution.
I want to apologize for the harshness of my response. Most of that was intended for some others who had responded to your comment.
As for the possibility of resistance jumping, it is a legitimate concern. However, the gene used for roundup ready crops was discovered in the wild. Genetic researchers very rarely synthesize genes from scratch. More often they find a useful gene in one place and put it somewhere else, and since roundup had been used for a long time before roundup ready corn was introduced and the gene hadn't jumped species before there is not a strong argument for believing that it will happen now.
The reason that gene transfer is such an issue with antibiotics is due to the brevity of the generational period. some bugs can experience several generations in a single day, and microbiota transfer genetic material far more easily than plants. Each cell of bacteria is capable of becoming the progenitor of a new population. While the potential is there for plants, the likely hood of this happening isn't. The plants involved here reproduce sexually, and the only way a new gene can become the progenitor of a new population is if it is a seed. otherwise any modification to that cells genome die with that cell.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Yes, and I live in Alabama. In can be over 90 and 99% humidity for over 100 days. I have summered here many years without A/C. But I'm young. I think that climate control as implemented in the US is very wasteful. Central heating and air, while nice, heats and cools a lot of empty rooms in the peoples' McMansions. And large office buildings are empty half the time (or more) yet are heated and cooled as if someone were there all the time. We need to think of better ways to live and work. I just don't think it was a fair comment that some of the alternate energy sources are "rickety". There are numerous examples of self sufficient homes. It costs alot, as much as some of the SUV's and cars that people drive, but unlike them, it would pay for itself. Large cities, are a whole different problem. Granted, I heat with natural gas, and sometimes I've been known to use a window unit A/C. But I have to wear a sweater at work (in a very cool office) in the summer. I think people have grown soft, but I guess it is only a sign that we are a prosperious nation. That gets cheap oil overseas. Things are the way they are because it has been the path of least resistance, I suppose. To do otherwise takes foresight and thought. I ride my bike as transportation as much as possible. We need (and in my opinion, should want) mass transit and more bike lanes. Fewer automobiles. We could simultaneously tackle obesity as well. But I'll have trouble getting the rednecks to give up their big ass trucks (the ones that need them are good ole boys BTW).
Simple economics. Farmers are in business to make money. When you are talking about 2000 acres, the cost of everything adds up. When you can turn the sprayer down to half the volume and get the same results as before because you can use a different, stronger poison, that appears on the bottom line.
The typical suburban lawn gets at much chemicals as a 20 acre field. Homeowners care about their green lawn more than the environment, and the cost is so cheap they don't care. Farmers are using much more expensive fertilizer (something that doesn't target their crops), applied more carefully.
Coming from a large US farm background (2000+ acres of corn and soybeans) I can say the GM crops reduce fuel and chemical consumption in many ways.
For instance in the 70's, we used to run mechanical cultivators through the corn at least once and the beans 2-4 times to root out the weeds. (think big tractors). Now, my brothers don't even own a cultivator. They use spot treatments of Roundup and other chemicals to kill the weeds. And believe me, at the cost of Roundup, they experiment all the time with reduced concentrations, spot treatments, etc. Fewer trips, fewer chemicals, less cost to the farmer.
Jim Wildman jim@rossberry.com
What about coal? From what I have read without breeder reactors we have about 50 yrs worth of uranium left. Coal on the other hand gives us 500. I know we have all been indoctrinated since grade school that coal is dirty, but scrubbers can be used to get out most of the stuff other than CO2. Nuclear power is also not the only option for generating hydrogen. Using the water-gas shift reaction you can get H2 from coal. 500 yrs gives use alot more time to come up with something better.
Did you miss the part of the article that said that this rice actually removes herbicide from the ground? Once your weeds are killed the rice sops up the excess and processes it into harmless chemicals. The rice had 20x less herbicide in it than conventional rice, plus the growing medium had nearly zero of the applied herbicide in it, while with conventional rice, the growing medium still contained 25% of the orginial herbicide. One of the main problems of irrigating otherwise fallow croplands is that evaporation leads to concentration of the residual herbicides and fertilizers that are applied to the ground. These run off into lakes and streams, further polluting the environment. If we can eliminate herbicide runoff from this, then we should be behind this wholehartedly, regardless of if it sells more herbicide or not.
a containment structure is primarily a one-time cost
So is a wind turbine. You still have to amortize it.
A PBMR is more economical no matter how you build it
No. PBMRs are small reactors - in fact, a PBMR will cost you a little over a hundred million instead of the several billion that you'd pay for, say, a CANDU. The lack of a containment structure is *how* they make it economical. They instead use a "confinement structure", which is not positive-pressure.
serious heat
PBMRs operate about 4 times as hot as PWRs
serious pressure
Pressures are roughly equivalent to PWRs
radiation
It is just as radioactive, mass for mass.
shock issues
Shock is bad in any reactor.
Of course, containment structures aren't related to any of the above. They're related to *containment* in the event of an accident; which is what must be discussed here.
There are many PBMR designs
They all use graphite as a moderator and call for air to be used as an emergency coolant, as I said above. I'm not cherry-picking - that's part of what a PBMR is. The other parts of what a PBMR is include helium as primary coolant, a mix of microspheres of fuel and graphite, a pellet recycling method that monitors decay, and a few other basic features. The technical details vary - many designs even include a secondary water cooling loop, which is just asking for problems.
Decent PBMRs don't present these issues
They sure as heck present a number of accident risks. The very testbed for PBMRs in Germany led to a minor leak of radioactive material and a huge economic setback when the pellet feeder jammed, and it took weeks to restore it. This is one of the most minor accident scenarios, however. The most major accident scenarios are on plants that use water secondary cooling and use water for hydrogen generation; water reacts explosively with hot graphite via hydrogen generation, so any water/steam penetration of the core is an immediate, serious accident situation. As for oxygen in the core loop, while fresh nuclear grade graphite is considered incombustable (this is debated), even proponents admit 1-2% erosion at the temperatures PBMRs operate before it cools, and since the graphite will not be fresh (but will have been bombarded for long periods by high intensity radiation and eroded by decay products), the risk is much higher of flammability/erosion. Worse, however, is that unlike the graphite that spread radioactive waste from Chernobyl, this graphite will be in direct contact with the fuel. The contamination of the eroding graphite will be quite severe as a consequence.
While radical environmentalists will try and convince you that every nuclear power plant is a Chernobyl waiting to happen, the converse can be said about nuclear proponents. It's not a ticking time bomb, but it's not some benign power source. Containment structures have prevented about at least a dozen nuclear accidents in the US alone which had the potential to be significant region contaminators. There's no reason to trust a graphite-moderated reactor with such a risk just because it has a negative void coefficient and inert primary coolant.
"It felt almost as good as stealing cars from grandma." -- Margaret Thatcher, probably.
Don't make me laugh.
First and foremost requirement for membership in a UN panel is agreement with the UN agenda.
In this particular case and in the case of Kyoto, the agenda is to redistribute the wealth of "first world" countries to "third world" countries.
Science has nothing to do with it.
The only "evidence" of global warming is your precious "computer models" comprised, conveniently enough, of proprietary code so that nobody can know what the true calculations are, just the magic result.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
It gives me just a bit of fear about how soon we'll have roundup-resistant weeds
They are already here, Roundup Ready resistant weeds have been found in the "wild":
Weed with Roundup immunity galloping across state
John Woodmansee4 0526/localnews/503241.html
Chronicle-Tribune, May 26 http://www.chronicle-tribune.com/news/stories/200
A herbicide-resistant weed that arrived in Indiana two years ago isn't standing still.
Marestail populations that are immune to glyphosate were first identified in 2002 in the southeast Indiana counties of Jackson, Bartholomew, Clark, Jefferson and Jennings.
LRecent field inspections by Purdue University researchers found the weeds in another 15 counties to the north and west, said Bill Johnson, Purdue Extension weed specialist.
Glyphosate is the active ingredient in many herbicides, including Roundup.
Indiana farmers annually plant millions of acres in crops genetically modified to withstand Roundup applications. This year alone, 88 percent of the state's projected 5.45 million acres of soybeans are expected to be Roundup Ready varieties.
"We had a few isolated fields in southeast Indiana that were showing poor control of marestail with glyphosate in 2001 and 2002," Johnson said. "By late 2002 we'd confirmed glyphosate resistance in four counties, and we highly suspected it in six additional counties.
"We did some extensive field surveying in the fall of 2003 and now believe we've found glyphosate-resistant marestail in about 19 counties, mostly in southeastern Indiana," Johnson said. "We've found it as far north as Wells County, as far west as Montgomery County and as far south as Perry County."
Marestail -- also known as horseweed -- is a thin-leafed annual weed that can grow to more than 6 feet tall if undisturbed. The weed produces seed in July and August but can emerge at almost any time during the year.
"This weed is problematic for a number of reasons," Johnson said. "First and foremost, the weed's biology allows it to behave not only as a winter annual but also as a summer annual. I'm convinced that this weed can germinate and grow any time the soil is not frozen."
He said the second reason marestail is troublesome is that it already has developed resistance to ALS inhibitors and triazines.
"So we're running out of effective tools to manage the weed," Johnson said.
Aceto-lactase synthase (ALS) inhibitors kill weeds by preventing them from producing essential amino acids necessary for growth. Triazine herbicides work by interrupting a weed's photosynthesis.
Marestail's ability to reproduce poses a third challenge, Johnson said.
"The seed of this weed spreads rapidly. Because it's so adaptable, the weed easily could become a predominant weed on our landscape, much as giant ragweed, giant foxtail and velvetleaf have done," he said.
Farmers are relying too much on glyphosate-based herbicides, according to Johnson. If farmers begin noticing glyphosate-resistant marestail in their fields, one option is to utilize 2,4-D in their burndown applications next year.
"We know that 2,4-D is very effective on these weeds, so farmers need to use it in their burndown if they have marestail in their field, regardless of whether they think it is glyphosate-resistant," Johnson said.
John Woodmansee is the agriculture and natural resources educator and director of the Purdue Cooperative Extension Office in Grant County.
Originally published Wednesday, May 26, 2004
FalconWeed with Roundup immunity galloping across state
Should there be a Law?
And the real problem isn't that we can't live after the peak oil but what it does to the economy. Recession isn't out of the question.
BTW, The Guardian recently had a nice article about the issues: The end of oil is closer than you think.