We post the paper How Much Will Feeding More and Wealthier People Encroach on Forests?, which just appeared in the journal Population and Development Review.
We also post the paper DRAMs as Model Organisms for Study of Technological Evolution, which will appear soon in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
Fred Pearce, BioMedNet News, www.bmn.com
Amsterdam — Planet Earth is on the verge of a “great restoration” of nature – or it will be, provided humanity takes the right tack in the coming decades, claimed a leading environmental scientist today at a major conference here on global change that saw an outpouring of optimism from technologists about their ability to solve the world’s problems.
“Since the middle of the 20th century, humans have begun to reverse the pattern they followed for millennia of extending further into nature to meet needs for food and materials,” said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York. “I am convinced that a great reversal is under way,” he told delegates at the Global Change Open Science Conference, organized by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. The IGBP comes under the auspices of the International Council for Science (ICSU) at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Global farm yields have risen by more than 2% a year for 40 years now, says Ausubel. If farmers continue that progress for another 60 to 70 years, average farm yields will reach those of the US corn farms and Chinese rice farms today. And as world population growth slows, “only half of today’s cropland will be needed,” he noted.
The key will be “environmentally responsible precision agriculture”, using technology to apply fertilizers, pesticides, and water only where they are needed. “High yield is the best friend of habitat,” said Ausubel.
Likewise, he says, forestry will concentrate on much smaller areas of highly productive plantations. By 2050, he calculates, “production forests” could diminish to “just about 12% of all woodlands.” The new plantations would mostly be established on abandoned farmland.
Far from declining, the world forest cover could increase by 300 million hectares, or 10%. The spare land could go back to nature. In the US alone, “an area twice the size of Spain could be newly spared for nature in the coming century,” he noted. “Smart aquaculture in highly productive closed systems” and a few iron-fertilized ocean farms will replace hunting for fish on the high seas. “Adding the right nutrients in the right places might lift fish yields by a factor of hundreds,” he said.
The result will be a resurgence of marine biodiversity and “the preservation of traditional fishing where communities value it.”
Ausubel’s optimistic vision extends to urban landscapes, where he sees cities surrounded by nature and connected by underground maglev
(magnetically levitated) trains. “We already have a Faustian bargain with technology. Having come this far with it, there is no road back,” he insisted. Now, he says, we can have a technological future – and nature, too.
The public reaction against the benefits of technology had to be halted, said many delegates.
“We have become so terrified of the downside of technology that we tend to pay little attention to the risks of not doing things,” warned William Clark, professor of international science, public policy, and human development at Harvard. “Technology can mess things up – you only have to think of Chernobyl – but we have to find ways of using it positively.”
Scientists behind the green revolution in farming joined in claiming credit for saving nature from the plough.
More than 400 million hectares of forests and grasslands have been saved through planting high-yield green revolution crops on existing farmland, according to Louis Verchot of the Nairobi-based International Research Centre for Agro-forestry (ICRAF), based in Nairobi. That is, an area almost half the size of the US.
We post the paper Death and the Human Environment, which appeared this
month in the journal Technology in Society.
We post the article The Evolution of Transport, which
appeared in this months issue of the magazine,
The Industrial Physicist.
The Census of Marine Life Home Page
CoML.org
By REUTERS, February 22, 2001
SYDNEY – Marine scientists from across Australia are meeting at laboratories this week as part of an ambitious $1 billion international attempt to record all life in the world’s oceans, officials said Wednesday.
The International Census of Marine Life, being led by U.S. groups, could settle once and for all whether fabled animals such as Jules Verne’s giant squid populate the uncharted ocean depths.
“We should give them (giant squids) a run for their money if they were (down there),” said Don Michel, communications director of the Marine Research division of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).
Only around five percent of the world’s oceans have been surveyed for marine life — mostly in coastal regions.
The international census, expected to take 10 years, is being promoted by Jesse Ausubel of the U.S.-based Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that fosters scientific programs.
An international steering committee from marine research institutions in the United States, Europe and Japan is due to release a scientific strategy for the data collection of the census later this year.
HIGH TECH SURVEY
So far 63 institutions in 15 countries had begun work around the world on an ocean bio-geographical information system that would support the census, Ausubel said in a CSIRO statement.
The Australian scientists were meeting in Hobart, on the island of Tasmania, to discuss Australia’s possible contribution to the project
The census would be conducted through multi-scanning technologies which can map the acoustic signatures of a wide range of sea life, Michel told Reuters.
Subsequent physical sampling of selected areas would then produce data that would be fed into super computers which would create models to produce fairly accurate estimates of most major forms of marine life.
The census would also use advanced electronic data-storage tags to track and monitor the behavior of large animals at the top of the food chain, such as whales, sea turtles and tuna, offering clues to the distribution and abundance of many other marine species, Ausubel said.
In addition, plans were under way to charter a ship “to go around the world in a Charles Darwin sort of way,” conducting deep water tests for viruses and bacteria, Michel said.
“(There could be) huge pharmaceutical applications,” he said.
The census project is expected to be backed by about $500 million from the United States, with the remaining $500 million expected to be contributed by Japan, Europe and other participants including Australia, Michel said.
An adaptation of Jesse’s keynote address to the fall 2000 Business
Roundtable’s National Summit on Technology and Climate Change appears in
the January-February issue of The Electricity Journal.
Our simulation game of the US university, Virtual U, is one of ten finalists for best game of the year 2000 at the upcoming Independent Games Festival! Can we outsmart competitors such as “Shattered Galaxy”?
We post the paper The Forester’s Lever: Industrial Ecology and Wood Products, which
appeared recently in the Journal of Forestry.
We post the talk The Census of Marine Life and the Role of Aquariums, which Jesse
presented at the Musee Oceanographique, Monaco, 23 November 2000.
We post the paper “Restoring the Forests”, by David G. Victor and Jesse H. Ausubel,
which recently appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs.
The Forester’s Lever: Industrial Ecology and Wood Products, Iddo K.
Wernick, Paul E. Waggoner, and Jesse H. Ausubel, appeared in the Journal of
Forestry 98(10):8-14, 2000
and
Restoring the Forests, David G. Victor and Jesse H. Ausubel, appeared in
Foreign Affairs 79(6): 127-144, 2000