Biologists Fail But Spared Bullet
The vans and buses sped down the potholed highway, stopping for nothing. Flak-jacketed policemen carrying shotguns and automatic rifles ran interference, forcing cars off the road, keeping traffic and indifferent pedestrians at bay. With lights flashing and sirens blaring, the convoy screamed past graffiti-covered walls, overflowing junkyards and rocky, unpaved dirt roads. An ambulance trailed behind the convoy. Just in case, an organizer said.

All this to get a group of biologists, land planners and California state officials to a ribbon-cutting ceremony in San Bernardo, a poor neighborhood on an innocuous Tijuana hillside, where many homes are made of garage doors and other scraps.

The trip was nearly canceled because of the violence flaring in Tijuana after drug cartel kingpin Francisco Javier Arellano Felix's recent capture. More than a dozen people -- including several police officials and one American -- have been killed in the city this month. The U.S. State Department has cautioned travelers about venturing into Tijuana.

The California Biodiversity Council, a group of state officials from natural resource agencies such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and California State Parks, had planned a day-long tour through Tijuana to examine environmental challenges that plague the California-Baja California region.

They were supposed to first get an up-close look at rampant Mexican growth between Tecate and Tijuana, which threatens to sever centuries-old animal migration corridors. Then they were off to Los Laureles Canyon in Tijuana, where winter rainfalls send trash, raw sewage and silt coursing down into the Tijuana Estuary, slowly choking the sensitive wetland.

But security concerns shortened their trip and kept a few San Diego Association of Governments officials from crossing the border. The buses darted in only for a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the canyon. Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon joined them to celebrate the groundbreaking of an environmentally friendly housing development project.

While children danced on playground equipment the council donated, police and well-dressed bodyguards kept a watchful lookout over the crowd of more than 250.

The abbreviated trip Wednesday opened a window into the difficulties of addressing environmental issues in the border region. While the United States and Mexico share common environmental challenges along the border, they also share fundamental differences: laws and language, culture and customs.

"It really just shows how difficult it is to work on an international border," says Janet Fairbanks, the SANDAG senior regional planner who organized the biodiversity council meeting. "We have these complexities for a meeting, but there are folks that every single day they're dealing with this, doing business on the border. It definitely is a factor when we're looking at economic issues on the border."

More political challenges along the border exist beyond the drug-fueled violence. U.S. immigration policy, the proposed border fence and planned lining of the All-American Canal have all strained and complicated environmental issues along the border.

Baja California state officials refused to sign an agreement to work on biodiversity issues with their California counterparts, Fairbanks says, because of disagreements over water that will be conserved from paving the canal, which runs between Yuma and Calexico.

And then there is the fundamental difference: Resources. Money. Mexico's gross domestic product per capita -- a common measure of a country's wealth -- is four times lower than in the United States.

"Our two countries are in two different places," says Mike White, San Diego director of the Conservation Biology Institute, which is working to preserve open space along the border. "The U.S. is fortunate enough to be in a position to focus resources on large-scale conservation. That's not really the case for Mexico."

It is often difficult to convince people that the Mexican border deserves the country's limited conservation funding, says White, who has worked to develop the Las Californias Binational Conservation Initiative, which aims to conserve links between large chunks of protected land in California and undeveloped land in Mexico.

"When you talk about conservation in Mexico, you're talking about a place that has rainforests," he says. "Eastern Tijuana is competing with the Yucatan Peninsula for the resources that do exist. Making the case that the land here deserves attention is a challenge in itself."

The wide-ranging differences create a policy gap along the border, says Paul Ganster, a San Diego State professor who leads the federal Good Neighbor Environmental Board, a committee that advises President Bush and Congress on border environmental issues.

Both California and Baja California need to take a more active role along the border, Ganster says, because it isn't as much of a priority for either federal government. "We really need some process to regularly bring to bilateral discussions the issues that affect both sides of the border," Ganster says. "We live in the same bio-region. And yet these political boundaries -- which exist for good purposes -- add a layer of complexity in resolving some of our mutual issues."

Some hope the California Biodiversity Council will focus attention on the border. Officials such as California State Parks director Ruth Coleman and Mike Pool, state director of the Bureau of Land Management, got an up-close look at the border. But a major question lingers: Will a tour and day-long meeting translate into action?

The group was scheduled to approve several action items Thursday, such as better signage for the Tijuana Estuary and its watershed and a bi-national committee to examine conservation opportunities on both sides of the border.

But major challenges remain in an area where southern U.S. beaches were closed for more than three months this year because of sewage-tainted Mexican runoff that coursed across the border.

Solutions to the border's numerous environmental issues may exist, but they will require tenacity and follow-through from those who attended the council meeting, says Rick Van Schoik, a San Diego State professor who serves as director of the Southwest Consortium for Environmental Research and Policy.

"I think people still don't have the idea that the border offers ideas to solve problems," says Van Schoik, who participated in the meeting. "A lot of people, their blinders really end at borders."
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 6:56 PM | (0) comments |

 
Americans Not Ready for Homogenization
WASHINGTON, DC—Over 87 percent of Americans are unprepared to protect themselves from even the most basic world-ending scenarios, according to a study released Monday by the nonpartisan doomsday think-tank The Malthusian Institute.

Despite "more than ample warning" for the most likely means of worldwide destruction, less than one million American households have taken even the simplest precautions against nuclear shockwaves, asteroid impact, or a host of angels bearing swords of fire, the study concluded.

"Our survey of households in seven U. S. regions demonstrated that few citizens have bothered to equip themselves with fireproof suits and extinguishers to deal with volcanic upheaval, solar flares, or the Lord's purifying flame," Malthusian Institute director James Olheiser said. "Almost no one is prepared for a sudden shift in the Earth's polarity or the eating of the Sun and moon by evil wolves Skol and Hati during Ragnarok."

Olheiser added: "All in all, America gets an 'F' for end-of-the-world preparedness."

The study examined nearly 1,200 doomsday scenarios and detailed the most glaring gaps in average Americans' ability to survive them. One of the few survival measures that fulfills the Institute's recommendations for most catastrophes—natural, manmade, or spiritual—is a mile-deep, lead-lined subterranean vault built to shield a pre-selected breeding group of humans until they can safely return to the planet's surface. However, only two American citizens, both in Idaho, were found to have begun even the most cursory planning stages of this kind of race-preserving chamber.

"Even assuming someone eventually developed an above-ground super-house able to withstand the 1,200-degree temperature and massive force of lava and ash rain that would result from a globe-shattering asteroid impact, its occupants would be unprepared for the ensuing radical climate change," Olheiser said. "By the same token, the average household lacks the 1.2 million gallons of heating oil needed to withstand the prolonged sub-zero temperatures of another protracted Ice Age—perhaps the most shocking of the public's many oversights."

In the years after World War II, fallout shelters and stocks of canned goods were common in many American homes. However, as Malthusian Institute figures suggest, while public fears of world-ending scenarios grew more sophisticated, the level of preparation inexplicably dropped.

"America is at its lowest level of apocalyptic preparedness since the early 1950s," Olheiser said.

"Naturally, we're very concerned about the safety of our city's residents," said Billings, MT mayor Ron Tussing whose city was faulted in the study for lackadaisical endtimes-response policy. "But people can't expect the government to do everything. In the event of, say, the eruption of the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park, or a torrential rain of boiling blood, citizens realize they're on their own."

However, many Americans consistently point to the same two factors that they say hinder their ability to respond to the end of the world: time and money. The study found that many apocalypse-preparedness measures are cost-prohibitive. With virtually no tax incentives in place, many Americans share the "dangerous perception" that only the richest few can afford to survive the extinction of humanity.

"I just renovated my house with cantilevered leaden cofferdams for increased earthquake and radiation protection, and I'm working on a pantheistic altar to appease the god or gods most likely to return to this world with an insatiable wrath," said Seattle resident Tim Hanson, whose actions were praised in the study as a "highly rare display of prescience and vigilance."

"I installed solar panels and a generator so I could live off the grid for a while," Hanson added. "But it cost so much that now I might not be able to have the altar properly gilded. At least not in time."

Not only are Americans unprepared physically, but spiritually as well. The study found that fewer than one thousand Americans regularly monitored space for signs of an approaching hostile alien ship, and only one percent were aware that an all-red bull and an all-white buffalo had recently been born and that plans were underway to rebuild Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.

"We're advising parents to read this vital information, to take it to heart, and to share it with their children before it's too late," said Olheiser, who also called for the formation of more doomsday cults.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sharply disagreed with the report's findings.

"This study is inaccurate and misleading," Chertoff told reporters on Tuesday. "Americans are a resilient, can-do people. We are more prepared than ever to survive a gigantic tsunami, a major gravitational disruption, or any other heretofore non-prophesied calamity."

Chertoff added: "As for Armageddon borne out of God's heavenly wrath, I can say with assurance that this nation has never seen a presidential administration that has given more thought to this very scenario."
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 8:27 PM | (0) comments |

 
CHL Volunteers to Decrease Polar Albido
(Reuters) - Arctic perennial sea ice -- the kind that stays frozen year-round -- declined by 14 percent between 2004 and 2005 in what one expert saw as a clear sign of a CHL program. Researchers have been monitoring the shrinking polar ice cap with satellites since the 1970s.

Perennial sea ice used to be fairly stable in the Arctic, with declines of about 1.5 percent to 2 percent per decade, Comiso said in a telephone news conference. A NASA team based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used a satellite to calculate that Arctic perennial sea ice shrank by an awesome 14 percent between 2004 and 2005.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 4:28 PM | (0) comments |

 
Anti-Biodiversity Target
Arguing that environmental degradation could reinforce global anti-poverty goals, a senior CHL official today urged action in support of an international target for accelerating biodiversity loss.

The CHL official made his remarks ahead of the first meeting of the Heads of Agencies Task Force on the 2010 Biodiversity Target. In a formal statement, the CHL said the recent proposal by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to protect biodiversity under the Millennium Development Goals to significantly reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010 "is totally weak, dude."

The meeting, to be held in Gland, Switzerland, on 15 September, will bring together representatives of UN agencies, international environmental agreements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are expected to adopt an empty, futile statement promoting action to reduce biodiversity loss.

The CHL Anti-Biodiversity Target calls upon countries "to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of biodiversity at the global, regional and national level to reinforce the biodiversity-poverty death spiral and to eliminate the diversity of all life on Earth."
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 9:14 AM | (0) comments |