A fresh look at Iceland’s fin whale hunts and meat exports to Japan. Originally posted here: Dot Earth Blog: Should Fin Whales Be a Source of Wonder or Meat? ; ; ;
From:
Dot Earth Blog: Should Fin Whales Be a Source of Wonder or Meat?
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
At the 1964 Winter Olympics, Eero Mäntyranta won the 15 kilometer cross-country skiing competition by a whopping 40 seconds—a margin of victory that has never been equaled. That same year, he won the 30 kilometer race by a full minute. So what made this legendary Finnish skier such a success?
According to sports journalist David Epstein, Mäntyranta became the “greatest endurance athlete” of his generation in part because of a single mutation to his erythropoietin receptor (EPOR) gene, which helps regulate the production of red blood cells. Remember Lance Armstrong’s blood doping scandal? It turns out that because of his DNA, Mäntyranta had a similar advantage over his competition—but without ingesting or injecting a single cell. Mäntyranta “produced about 50 percent more oxygen-carrying red blood cells than a normal person,” explains Epstein on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “So he essentially was naturally what…Lance Armstrong was through doping technology.”
Epstein says Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation is the clearest example of a “sports gene”—a single genetic variant that has the ability to turn someone into a superior athlete. But these genes are rare. More often, says Epstein (whose recent book is also called The Sports Gene), “we’re talking about networks of genes and suites of traits that make people better suited to some sports than others.”
Saying that some people are “better suited” than others sounds a lot like the idea that some of us are born more talented. But in recent years, much of the sports community has embraced the notion that achievement in athletics is attributable largely to logging 10,000 hours (or so) of dedicated training. The “10,000 hour” rule also permeates education in other domains, such as music and chess, where complex skills need to be developed. But with athletes like Mäntyranta in the competition, can this status quo idea possibly still hold true? And what, exactly, is the scientific recipe for building an elite athlete?
Here are a few of the key factors that Epstein lays out:
Start with the right genes. Mäntyranta’s EPOR mutation isn’t the only gene variant that can make or break an athletic career. On chromosome two of the human genome, there is a gene that codes for a protein called myostatin. (Myo meaning “muscle,” and statin meaning “to halt.”) For most people, this gene does exactly what its name suggests—it stops the production of muscles. But in rare cases, says Epstein, “someone has a mutant version, and it basically doesn’t tell their muscles to stop growing on time, and they end up being really, really muscle-bound.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, explains Epstein, the first adult determined to have this mutation was a professional sprinter. But it’s been detected in young children, as well. In 1999, for instance, a bouncing baby boy with seemingly superhuman strength was born in Germany. Unlike his roly-poly peers, this baby was ripped. The muscle mass in his lower limbs was off one end of the charts, while his limited body fat was off the other end.
When this “Superbaby” was tested for the presence of myostatin, none was detected in his blood. And other babies with similar mutations have begun to pop up, including Liam Hoekstra, who apparently could do a difficult gymnast move called the iron cross by the time he was 5 months old and could do a pull-up at eight months.
But if one gene can have such a significant effect, what other gene variants might be combined in a person to optimize athletic performance?
In his book, Epstein cites Alun G. Williams and Jonathan P. Folland, scientists in England who are studying 23 gene variants strongly linked to athletic endurance. The chance that any single individual currently on the planet has all 23 variants is incredibly small—less than one in a quadrillion (one thousand million million). The most any one of us can hope for is about 16 of these 23. The chance of having none of these variants, or very few of them, is also extremely small. Most of us have some but not too many. The end result? We need to train to build up endurance.
But genetics can also make a big difference when it comes to that training. “No two people respond to the medicine of training the same way because of differences in their genes,” says Epstein. “And so it’s turning out that the talent of trainability—the ability to get more biological adaptation out of your one hour of training than the next guy or the next girl—is really the most important kind of talent.”
But if we can’t change our genes, what can we do to become better athletes?
Learn to to predict the future. When it comes to professional baseball, says Epstein, “keep your eye on the ball” is useless advice. That’s because Major League pitches take far less than half a second to reach the plate—they’re simply moving faster than the eye can track. What batters are actually keeping track of is a specific pattern of movements that the pitcher is making.
Ted Williams in 1957, on his way to the Major League batting title. AP
The ability to predict where the ball will go based on how the pitcher releases it is the real talent of an all-star hitter. That’s why Mariano Rivera could strike out batter after batter with one pitch: a 90+ mile-per-hour cut fastball whose final destination was very difficult to predict. With just a subtle difference in how much pressure he put on the ball with two of his fingers, he could alter its course dramatically.
That’s also why no amount of trips to the batting cage will turn you into a slugger like Albert Pujols or Ted Williams. “We’ve only just realized that pitching machines are totally worthless for baseball practice,” explains Epstein, “because they don’t teach you to read body movements the way that you need to.”
Putting this idea to the test, softball pitcher Jennie Finch struck out Pujols and other Major League batters during the 2004 Pepsi All-Star Softball Game—her windup and delivery confounded their ability to predict where the pitch will go, despite the fact that she threw a bigger ball.
To understand how complex skills like hitting a small projectile traveling at speeds of over 90 miles per hour are performed, consider a famous study in which chess players of different levels were given a few seconds to study a chess board. What separated the experts from the amateurs was the fact that grand masters could memorize the location of pieces on the board after looking at it for just three seconds. At first, it seemed as though they had superhuman memory skills. But when the scientists asked them to memorize the placement of pieces on a board that didn’t conform to the rules of the game, they were no better than novices. In other words, what grand masters have actually developed is the ability to organize the board into meaningful units in their mind’s eye—what psychologists call “chunks”—that they can then easily recall.
Major League Baseball players can’t hit Jennie Finch’s pitches. C5813/Wikimedia Commons
We all use chunking to remember complex things: “If I gave you 20 random words right now, you’d have a lot of trouble repeating them back to me,” explains Epstein. “But, if I gave you a 20-word meaningful sentence, you might be able to repeat it back to me or very closely.” Why? Because “you’ve learned a system of grammar and groups of words and phrases that you can break down into meaningful chunks. So, you don’t have to…rely on your working memory.” And, adds Epstein, “it turns out sports works in a very similar way.”
So it’s not that MLB players have superhuman reflexes; instead, over the course of many years of training, they learn to “read” a pitcher’s upper body movements and predict where the ball will end up. “It’s really this kind of cognitive expertise that they’ve learned that allows them to look as if they’re reacting faster than is humanly possible,” says Epstein. “They are judging the field—their version of the chess board—and seeing what’s going to come in the future.”
Sample many sports in childhood—don’t specialize too early. As every parent knows, elite athleticism comes at a high price in the US, with many coaches pressuring talented children to start specialized practice immediately—often to the exclusion of other sports and activities. “AAU basketball has a second graders’ national championships now,” notes Epstein. “This is like kids who are over-hand heaving a ball at a 10-foot rim. They’ve convinced parents it’s like an important part of the scouting pipeline and their kids will get behind if they don’t go.”
Epstein argues that this push towards specialization—which he attributes to the popularization of the 10,000 hours rule—has been a “disaster.”
“There’s now a pretty strong body of evidence that we’ve over-specialized kids too early, and it actually makes them worse athletes,” he says. What Epstein is getting at is that there seems to be a critical “sampling period” before puberty, during which many eventual professional athletes play a variety of sports. Hyper-specialization makes it harder for kids to find the sport that is best suited to their biology. As an example for parents to follow, Epstein points to two-time NBA most valuable player Steve Nash, who didn’t start playing basketball until he was 12 or 13.
Grow up in a small town. The trend towards hyper-specialization might even explain why professional athletes come disproportionately from small towns, far away from elite training programs, instead of from major metropolises. If you’re from a city with a population of more than 5 million people, you’re actually less likely than the average Joe to make it to the NBA. If you come from a town of 50,000 to 99,000 people, your chances are 11 times greater than average of making it to the NFL or the NBA. These towns “are vastly over-represented for producing elite athletes,” says Epstein, “because they’re big enough to have a team, and small enough to avoid all of the hyper-specialization that the 10,000 hours has caused.”
Take a scientist’s approach to your own training. Ultimately, as scientists learn more about the biology of athletic prowess and the skills we need to excel at specific activities, what’s becoming clear is that training needs to be more individualized. Given the highly variable nature of our genes, what can you do to make sure that you’re using those training hours most effectively? Think like a scientist: test and retest your assumptions constantly.
“In studies of kids who go on to become elite, whether it’s in chess, sports or music,” says Epstein, “they tend to more often exhibit that self-regulatory behavior where they’re almost taking a scientist’s view of themselves…and continually evaluating and evaluating. And they better figure out what works for them.”
This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion with skeptical pediatrician Clay Jones.
To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.
See original:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Being president can be a bitch.
Barack Obama is in charge of the world’s most consequential superpower (when you combine economic might and military force) at a time when the world seems to be cracking up more than usual. A Malaysian airliner is shot down—presumably by Russian-armed separatists in Ukraine. The too-extreme-for-Al-Qaeda Islamic State, a Sunni force once allied with Washington-backed Syrian rebels fighting the Russian-supported Assad regime, has taken control of a swath of territory in Syria and Iraq and set up an Islamic fundamentalist state that is waging war against the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq, which is supported by Russia-allied Iran and Washington. Meanwhile, US-backed Israel has sent military forces into Gaza to quash Hamas, a Sunni-dominated outfit that receives support from Shiite Iran (a US foe) and Sunni Saudi Arabia (a US ally). And at the same time, the United States—as part of the P5+1, which includes Russia, China, England, France, and Germany (a key trading partner of Iran and a US ally that is pissed off at Washington for spying on it)—is trying to arrange the extension of nuclear talks with Iran, as the negotiations hit the deadline. Obviously, the United States needs Russia—which Obama just hit with tougher sanctions (before Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was blasted out of the sky)—to lean on Iran for these talks to succeed.
See more here:
A private equity company that is funding the restoration of Louisiana wetlands plans to sell environmental credits to private developers and government agencies. Jump to original: Equity Firm Restores Louisiana Marshland to Earn Credits It Can Sell ; ;Related ArticlesEconomic Scene: Blueprints for Taming the Climate CrisisNatural Gas Pipeline Plan Creates Rift in MassachusettsNew England Confronts Surging Demand for Natural Gas ;
Source:
Equity Firm Restores Louisiana Marshland to Earn Credits It Can Sell
The extent of any damage to North Carolina’s coastline and areas just inland was unclear, and forecasters said the storm could threaten New England. Link to original: Hurricane Arthur Moves Away From U.S. East Coast Related ArticlesHurricane Arthur Nears U.S. Coast on Eve of Holiday WeekendDot Earth Blog: Keeping Track of Hurricane ArthurDot Earth Blog: On World Fish Migration Day, Recalling When America’s Rivers Ran Silver
View this article:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
Over the next few weeks, we will see all that is beautiful and all that is damned in soccer at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Hundreds of millions will swoon at the sight of the gods of the global game—Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Uruguay’s Luis Suarez, Italy’s Andrea Pirlo, England’s Wayne Rooney—plying their exquisite trade across the newly built or expensively refurbished stadiums on which Brazil, according to the Wall Street Journal, has spent $3.6 billion over the last few years.
The 32 national teams arriving in that country will, however, be confronted with another, far more sobering reality. Soccer-crazy Brazil has been in revolt over the World Cup—over, in particular, the staggering sums that have been siphoned from the public purse into a string of gargantuan, desperately-behind-schedule construction projects for the competition. Last year, there were protests, some of which were violently suppressed, in more than 120 Brazilian cities during the somewhat pointless warm-up tournament that the governing body of world soccer, FIFA, runs a year before the World Cup begins.
For lovers of the game, in his celebrated masterpiece Soccer in Sun and Shadow, the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano long ago caught the way the spectacle of soccer and the spectacle of reality intertwined. Of the Brazilian protests, he recently observed: “Brazilians, who are the most soccer-mad of all, have decided not to allow their sport to be used any more as an excuse for humiliating the many and enriching the few. The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it. That is a fire police violence will never put out.”
Huge global sporting contests, their boosters promise, will transform the nature of the host country. The billions South Africa poured into hosting the World Cup were touted by some as a form of development. The result? The month-long euphoria of the contests was followed by the hangover of dealing with an expensive unused or underused stadium infrastructure scattered across that developing country. (Host countries pay FIFA for the privilege of hosting the competition, then foot the bill for most of the tournament, while FIFA takes most of the revenues.) Today, something similar is happening in Brazil where, as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanksi have noted, there has been “a transfer of wealth from Brazil as a whole to various interest groups inside and outside the country. This is not an economic bonanza. Brazil is sacrificing a little bit of its future to host the World Cup.”
This is just one symptom of a corporate takeover of “the beautiful game” that has reached the saturation point. Since the neoliberal 1980s, Brazil, like many other South American countries, has been in the business of exporting its soccer talent to the rest of the world. As Galeano once noted of his own country’s leg drain, “In Uruguay… soccer is an export industry that scorns the domestic market. The continuous outflow of good players means mediocre professional leagues and ever fewer, ever less fervent fans.”
Corporate sponsorship is officially prohibited from team shirts during the World Cup, but elsewhere, from the T-shirts on their chests to the laces on their shoes, even in one controversial case their underpants, the players are advertisements for the multinational apparel companies who make their uniforms. And the elite among them are employed as brand ambassadors by corporations during the tournament; so expect to see Messi and Ronaldo advertising soft drinks and airlines during gamebreaks.
We all need an antidote to soccer as big business; if you can’t take to the streets of Brazil to offer your own comment on the ways in which international sports leave misery in their wake, you must, at least, pick up Eduardo Galeano’s witty and rebellious history of the game, Soccer in Sun and Shadow. It already has a cult readership in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking one it is considered a bible of soccer by ordinary readers and professional players alike. In the run-up to the games, TomDispatch offers you just a taste of that classic: five pieces that capture the marvel and melancholy of the world’s most popular sport.
—Carl Bromley
Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators.
At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghost of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.
The English Invasions
Outside a madhouse, in an empty lot in Buenos Aires, several blond boys were kicking a ball around.
“Who are they?” asked a child.
“Crazy people,” answered his father. “Crazy English.”
Journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly remembers this from his childhood. At first, soccer seemed like a crazy man’s game in the River Plate. But as the empire expanded, soccer became an export as typically British as Manchester cloth, railroads, loans from Barings, or the doctrine of free trade. It arrived on the feet of sailors who played by the dikes of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, while Her Majesty’s ships unloaded blankets, boots, and flour, and took on wool, hides, and wheat to make more blankets, boots, and flour on the other side of the world. English citizens—diplomats, and managers of railroad and gas companies—formed the first local teams. The English of Montevideo and Buenos Aires staged Uruguay’s first international competition in 1889, under a gigantic portrait of Queen Victoria, her eyes lowered in a mask of disdain. Another portrait of the queen of the seas watched over the first Brazilian soccer match in 1895, played between the British subjects of the Gas Company and the São Paulo Railway.
Old photographs show these pioneers in sepia tones. They were warriors trained for battle. Cotton and wool armor covered their entire bodies so as not to offend the ladies in attendance, who unfurled silk parasols and waved lace handkerchiefs. The only flesh the players exposed were their serious faces peering out from behind wax-twirled mustaches below caps or hats. Their feet were shod with heavy Mansfield shoes.
It did not take long for the contagion to spread. Sooner rather than later, the native-born gentlemen of local society started playing that crazy English game. From London they imported the shirts, shoes, thick ankle socks, and pants that reached from the chest to below the knee. Balls no longer confounded customs officers, who at first had not known how to classify the species. Ships also brought rulebooks to these far-off coasts of southern America, and with them came words that remained for many years to come: field, score, goal, goalkeeper, back, half, forward, out ball, penalty, offside. A “foul” merited punishment by the “referee,” but the aggrieved player could accept an apology from the guilty party “as long as his apology was sincere and was expressed in proper English,” according to the first soccer rulebook that circulated in the River Plate.
Meanwhile, other English words were being incorporated into the speech of Latin American countries in the Caribbean: pitcher, catcher, innings. Having fallen under US influence, these countries learned to hit a ball with a round wooden bat. The Marines shouldered bats next to their rifles when they imposed imperial order on the region by blood and by fire. Baseball became for the people of the Caribbean what soccer is for us.
Choreographed War
In soccer, ritual sublimation of war, 11 men in shorts are the sword of the neighborhood, the city, or the nation. These warriors without weapons or armor exorcize the demons of the crowd and reaffirm its faith: in each confrontation between two sides, old hatreds and old loves passed from father to son enter into combat.
The stadium has towers and banners like a castle, as well as a deep and wide moat around the field. In the middle, a white line separates the territories in dispute. At each end stand the goals to be bombed with flying balls. The area directly in front of the goals is called the “danger zone.”
In the center circle, the captains exchange pennants and shake hands as the ritual demands. The referee blows his whistle and the ball, another whistling wind, is set in motion. The ball travels back and forth, a player traps her and takes her for a ride until he gets pummeled in a tackle and falls spread-eagled. The victim does not rise. In the immensity of the green expanse, the player lies prostrate. From the immensity of the stands, voices thunder. The enemy crowd emits a friendly roar:
“¡Que se muera!”
“Devi morire!”
“Tuez-le!”
“Mach ihn nieder!”
“Let him die!”
“Kill, kill, kill!”
Tears Do Not Flow from a Handkerchief
Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war. Then “sudden death” is no longer just a name for a dramatic way of deciding a tied match. These days, soccer fanaticism has come to occupy the place formerly reserved for religious fervor, patriotic ardor, and political passion. As often occurs with religion, patriotism, and politics, soccer can bring tensions to a boil, and many horrors are committed in its name.
Some believe men possessed by the demon of the ball foam at the mouth, and frankly that image presents a fairly accurate picture of the frenzied fan. But even the most indignant of critics would concede that in most cases violence does not originate in soccer, any more than tears flow from a handkerchief.
In 1969 war broke out between Honduras and El Salvador, two small and very poor Central American countries that for more than a century had been accumulating reasons to distrust one another. Each had always served as the magical explanation for the other’s problems. Hondurans have no work? Because Salvadorans come and take their jobs. Salvadorans are hungry? Because Hondurans mistreat them. Both countries believed their neighbor was the enemy, and the relentless military dictatorships of each did all they could to perpetuate the error.
This war was called the Soccer War because the sparks that set off the conflagration were struck in the stadiums of Tegucigalpa and San Salvador. The trouble began during the qualifying rounds for the 1970 World Cup. There were tussles, a few injuries, several deaths. A week later, the two countries broke off relations. Honduras expelled a hundred thousand Salvadoran peasants who had always worked in that country’s plantings and harvests; Salvadoran tanks crossed the border.
The war lasted a week and killed four thousand people. The two governments, dictatorships forged at a US factory called the School of the Americas, fanned the fires of mutual hatred. In Tegucigalpa the slogan was “Honduran, don’t sit still, grab a stick and a Salvadoran kill.” In San Salvador: “Teach those barbarians a lesson.” The lords of land and war did not lose a drop of blood, while two barefoot peoples avenged their identical misfortunes by killing each other with abandon.
The End of the Match
The ball turns, the world turns. People suspect the sun is a burning ball that works all day and spends the night bouncing around the heavens while the moon does its shift, though science is somewhat doubtful. There is absolutely no question, however, that the world turns around a spinning ball: the final of the ’94 World Cup was watched by more than two billion people, the largest crowd ever of the many that have assembled in this planet’s history. It is the passion most widely shared: many admirers of the ball play with her on fields and pastures, and many more have box seats in front of the TV and bite their nails as 22 men in shorts chase a ball and kick her to prove their love.
At the end of the ’94 Cup every child born in Brazil was named Romário, and the turf of the stadium in Los Angeles was sold off like pizza, at twenty dollars a slice. A bit of insanity worthy of a better cause? A primitive and vulgar business? A bag of tricks manipulated by the owners? I’m one of those who believe that soccer might be all that, but it is also much more: a feast for the eyes that watch it and a joy for the body that plays it. A reporter once asked German theologian Dorothee Sölle, “How would you explain happiness to a child?”
“I wouldn’t explain it,” she answered. “I’d toss him a ball and let him play.”
Professional soccer does everything to castrate that energy of happiness, but it survives in spite of all the spites. And maybe that’s why soccer never stops being astonishing. As my friend Ángel Ruocco says, that’s the best thing about it—its stubborn capacity for surprise. The more the technocrats program it down to the smallest detail, the more the powerful manipulate it, soccer continues to be the art of the unforeseeable. When you least expect it, the impossible occurs, the dwarf teaches the giant a lesson, and a runty, bowlegged black man makes an athlete sculpted in Greece look ridiculous.
An astonishing void: official history ignores soccer. Contemporary history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different. Tell me how you play and I’ll tell you who you are. For many years soccer has been played in different styles, unique expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity seems to me more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes. In this end-of-century world, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom.
For years I have felt challenged by the memory and reality of soccer, and I have tried to write something worthy of this great pagan mass able to speak such different languages and unleash such universal passion. By writing, I was going to do with my hands what I never could accomplish with my feet: irredeemable klutz, disgrace of the playing fields, I had no choice but to ask of words what the ball I so desired denied me.
From that challenge, and from that need for expiation, this book was born. Homage to soccer, celebration of its lights, denunciation of its shadows. I don’t know if it has turned out the way soccer would have liked, but I know it grew within me and has reached the final page, and now that it is born it is yours. And I feel that irreparable melancholy we all feel after making love and at the end of the match.
Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers. He is the author of a three-volume history of the Americas, Memory of Fire, and most recently, a history of humanity, Mirrors, as well as Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History. He is the recipient of many international prizes, including the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and the First Distinguished Citizen of the region by the countries of Mercosur. These excerpts are taken from Soccer in Sun and Shadow, his 1997 book, translated by Mark Fried, and updated to include World Soccer Cup matches through 2010. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Continue at source:
Just in Time for the World Cup, an Excerpt From Eduardo Galeano’s "Soccer in Sun and Shadow"
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Maya Angelou, acclaimed poet, author, and civil rights activist, died Wednesday at the age of 86. Mother Jones had the opportunity to interview Angelou almost 20 years ago. Our reporter, Ken Kelley, wrote that she “speaks in the lilting cadence of the dancer she was trained to be. She moves with the sure grace of the poet she was born to be.” Her words of wisdom are as true now as they were in 1995. Here are seven excerpts from the interview:
1. Not everyone can pull themselves up by the bootstraps:
The powerful say, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” But they don’t really believe that those living on denuded reservations, or on strip-mined hills, or in ghettos that are destinations for drugs from Colombia and Iraq, can somehow pull themselves up. What they’re really saying is, “If you can, do, but if you can’t, forget it.” It’s the most pernicious of all acts of segregation, because it is so subtle.
2. Life isn’t about material things:
Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things. We become what writer Beah Richards calls “exiled to things”: If we have three cars rather than two, we’ll live a little longer. If we have four more titles, we’ll live longer still. And, especially, if we have more money than the next guy, we’ll live longer than he. It’s so sad. There is something more—the spirit, or the soul.
3. It doesn’t matter what a woman is wearing:
I married a man once because of something he said. We were in England, and somebody said that women should always expect to be raped if they wore very short pants and low decolletage and acted “fast.” So this man, whom I knew slightly, said, “If a woman has no panties on and sits with her legs wide open, no man has the right to assault her. When a guy tells me, ‘I couldn’t resist because she did sit in such a provocative way,’ all I want to know is if four of her brothers were standing there with baseball bats, would they have resisted?”
4. America is making progress in the fight against racial discrimination, but there’s more to do:
We’ve made a lot of progress—it’s dangerous not to say so. Because if we say so, we tell young people, implicitly or explicitly, that there can be no change. Then they compute: “You mean the life and death and work of Malcolm X and Martin King, the Kennedys, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, the life and struggle of Rosa Parks—they did all that and nothing has changed? Well then, what the hell am I doing? There’s no point for me to do anything.” The truth is, a lot has changed—for the good. And it’s gonna keep getting better, according to how we put our courage forward, and thrust our hearts forth.
5. Black children are the representatives of us all:
Those black children are the bravest, without knowing it, representatives of us all. The black kids, the poor white kids, Spanish-speaking kids, and Asian kids in the US—in the face of everything to the contrary, they still bop and bump snaps fingers, shout and go to school somehow. And dare not only to love somebody else, and even to accept love in return, but dare to love themselves—that’s what is most amazing. Their optimism gives me hope.
6. Artists and writers must fight to be heard:
What we ought to be doing is singing in the parks, talking to children, going to gatherings of parents, doing whatever it is we do—dancing, reading poetry, performing—all the time, so that people know, “These artists are my people—you can’t kill them, you can’t stop them.” We then reestablish our footing with the people. All artists must do that, or we will be defanged.
7. Progressives must confront themselves:
We will have to confront. I don’t only mean external confrontations. We have to confront ourselves. Do we like what we see in the mirror? And, according to our light, according to our understanding, according to our courage, we will have to say yea or nay—and rise!
Read the full interview here.
View original post here:
Mother Jones
Project Puffin‘s live cam.
The new poster child for climate change had his coming-out party in June 2012, when Petey the puffin chick first went live into thousands of homes and schools all over the world. The “Puffin Cam” capturing baby Petey’s every chirp had been set up on Maine’s Seal Island by Stephen Kress, “The Puffin Man,” who founded the Audubon Society’s Project Puffin in 1973. Puffins, whose orange bills and furrowed eyes make them look like penguins dressed as sad clowns, used to nest on many islands off the Maine coast, but 300 years of hunting for their meat, eggs, and feathers nearly wiped them out. Project Puffin transplanted young puffins from Newfoundland to several islands in Maine, and after years of effort the colonies were reestablished and the project became one of Audubon’s great success stories. By 2013, about 1,000 puffin pairs were nesting in Maine.
Now, thanks to a grant from the Annenberg Foundation, the Puffin Cam offered new opportunities for research and outreach. Puffin parents dote on their single chick, sheltering it in a two-foot burrow beneath rocky ledges and bringing it piles of small fish each day. Researchers would get to watch live puffin feeding behavior for the first time, and schoolkids around the world would be falling for Petey.
But Kress soon noticed that something was wrong. Puffins dine primarily on hake and herring, two teardrop-shaped fish that have always been abundant in the Gulf of Maine. But Petey’s parents brought him mostly butterfish, which are shaped more like saucers. Kress watched Petey repeatedly pick up butterfish and try to swallow them. The video is absurd and tragic, because the butterfish is wider than the little gray fluff ball, who keeps tossing his head back, trying to choke down the fish, only to drop it, shaking with the effort. Petey tries again and again, but he never manages it. For weeks, his parents kept bringing him butterfish, and he kept struggling. Eventually, he began moving less and less. On July 20, Petey expired in front of a live audience. Puffin snuff.
“When he died, there was a huge outcry from viewers,” Kress tells me. “But we thought, ‘Well, that’s nature.’ They don’t all live. It’s normal to have some chicks die.” Puffins successfully raise chicks 77 percent of the time, and Petey’s parents had a good track record; Kress assumed they were just unlucky. Then he checked the other 64 burrows he was tracking: Only 31 percent had successfully fledged. He saw dead chicks and piles of rotting butterfish everywhere. “That,” he says, “was the epiphany.”
Why would the veteran puffin parents of Maine start bringing their chicks food they couldn’t swallow? Only because they had no choice. Herring and hake had dramatically declined in the waters surrounding Seal Island, and by August, Kress had a pretty good idea why: The water was much too hot.
Karen Minot
On a map, the Gulf of Maine looks like an unremarkable bulge of the North Atlantic, but it is unique. A submerged ridge between Cape Cod and the tip of Nova Scotia turns it into a nearly self-contained bowl. Warm water surging up the East Coast glances off those banks and heads for Europe, bypassing the Gulf of Maine and leaving it shockingly cold. (I’m looking at you, Old Orchard Beach!) Meanwhile, frigid, nutrient-rich water from off the coasts of Labrador and Nova Scotia feeds into the Gulf through a deep channel and gets sucked into the powerful counterclockwise currents. Whipped by that vortex, and churned by the largest tides in the world (52 feet in one bay), the Gulf of Maine acts like a giant blender, constantly whisking nutrients up off the bottom, where they generally settle. At the surface, microscopic plants called phytoplankton combine those nutrients with the sunlight of the lengthening spring days to reproduce like mad. That’s how the thick, green soup that feeds the Gulf’s food web gets made. The soup is so cold that its diversity is low, but the cold-water specialists that are adapted to it do incredibly well.
At least, they used to.
Like much of the country, the Northeast experienced the warmest March on record in 2012, and the year just stayed hot after that. Records weren’t merely shattered; they were ground into dust. Temperatures in the Gulf of Maine, which has been warming faster than almost any other marine environment on Earth, shot far higher than anyone had ever recorded, and the place’s personality changed. The spring bloom of phytoplankton occurred exceptionally early, before most animals were ready to take advantage of it. Lobsters shifted toward shore a month ahead of schedule, leading to record landings and the lowest prices in 18 years.
Hake and herring, meanwhile, got the hell out of Dodge, heading for cooler waters. In all, at least 14 Gulf of Maine fish species have been shifting northward or deeper in search of relief. That left the puffins little to feed their chicks except butterfish, a more southerly species that has recently proliferated in the Gulf. Butterfish have also been growing larger during the past few years of intense warmth, and that, thinks Stephen Kress, might be a key. “Fish start growing in response to changes in water temperature and food,” he says. “The earlier that cycle starts, the bigger they’re gonna be. What seems to have happened in 2012 is that the butterfish got a head start on the puffins. If it was a little smaller, the butterfish might actually be a fine meal for a puffin chick. But if it’s too big, then it’s just the opposite. That’s one of the interesting things about climate change. It’s the slight nuances that can have huge effects on species.”
Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
Life would go on without puffins. Unfortunately, these clowns of the sea seem to be the canaries in the western Atlantic coal mine. Their decline is an ominous sign in a system that supports everything from the last 400 North Atlantic right whales to the $2 billion lobster industry.
The next sign of deep weirdness arrived in December 2012, when Florida beachcombers began spotting hundreds of what appeared to be penguins soaring above the Miami surf. They turned out to be razorbills, close relatives of puffins that also call the Gulf of Maine home.
Razorbills should be high on your reincarnation wish list. Superb fliers, they can also plunge into the sea and pursue fish underwater by flapping their wings—while dressed in black tie. James Bond, eat your heart out.
But normally, they do all this in the North Atlantic. Suddenly thousands of them had decided to move to Florida. The consensus was that they had simply kept going in a desperate attempt to find food—and that it couldn’t end well for them. It didn’t. By early 2013, hundreds of dead razorbills had washed up along East Coast beaches, most emaciated. So did 40 puffins. “That’s very rare,” Kress says. In fact, finding even a single dead puffin on the beach is unusual. “They’re tough little guys! They’ll live 30 years or more.”
The weirdness continued. In the spring of 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made its semiannual trawl survey of the Gulf of Maine, dragging a net at dozens of points throughout the Gulf and counting, weighing, and measuring everything caught. There were plenty of butterfish and mountains of spiny dogfish, a small shark that used to be relatively rare in the Gulf of Maine but now owns the place. There were very few cod, the fish that made New England, that lured thousands of fishing boats from Europe, that fed millions of people over the centuries. NOAA slashed the 2013 quota for cod to a pittance, putting hundreds of enraged fishermen out of work.
In recent history, the average ocean surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine has hovered around 44 degrees Fahrenheit. 2013 was the second-warmest year in the Gulf in three decades, with an average surface temperature of 46.6 degrees. But it was nowhere near the freakish spike to 47.5 degrees in 2012, and the phytoplankton did not repeat its crazy early bloom. Instead, it didn’t bloom at all. “So poorly developed, its extent was below detection limits” was how NOAA put it in its Ecosystem Advisory, sounding surprisingly calm, considering it was saying the marine equivalent of “No grass sprouted in New England this year.” Phytoplankton feeds some tiny fish and shrimp directly, but more often it feeds zooplankton, the bugs of the sea, and these in turn feed everything from herring to whales. The undetectable phytoplankton bloom did not bode well for zooplankton, and sure enough, that spring NOAA broke the grim news: “The biomass of zooplankton was the lowest on record.” Even this dirge doesn’t do justice to the dramatic deviation from the organisms’ historical norm: Their numbers bounced along in a comfortable range for 35 years before taking a gut-wrenching nosedive in 2013.
By the time of that announcement, Project Puffin was starting its 2013 season. With spring temperatures closer to normal, Kress had hoped that his Seal Island puffins would return to their fruitful ways, but only two-thirds of the colony showed up. Still, a new chick was chosen for the Puffin Cam feed, and viewers named her Hope. For a while, all went well. Kress saw fewer butterfish being delivered, and Hope flourished. But soon Kress noticed that fewer birds than usual were hanging out at the Loafing Ledge, a rocky ridge where the parents socialize between feedings. Then he realized that the time between chick feedings was considerably longer than normal. The puffins were having to range much farther to find fish.
Too far, as it turned out. Although Hope successfully fledged on August 21, she was one of the few lucky ones. Only 10 percent of the puffin chicks survived in 2013—the worst year on record. “We’ve never seen two down years like this,” Kress told me. “The puffins really tanked.”
And how could they not? The Gulf of Maine, the great food processor of the western Atlantic, was almost out of food.
Usually, a system as large and complex as the Gulf of Maine, sloshing with natural noise and randomness, will disappoint any human desire to fit it into a tidy narrative. It can take years to tease a clear trend out of the data. But by late 2013, things were so skewed that you could see the canaries dropping everywhere you looked.
November 30: Researchers announced that instead of the dozens of endangered right whales they normally spot in the Gulf of Maine during their fall aerial survey, they had spotted…one. They were quick to note that the whales couldn’t all be dead, just missing—probably off in search of food. Sure enough, in January 2014, 12 of the same species of whale were spotted in Cape Cod Bay, where food is more plentiful.
By now, you’ll have no trouble filling in this sentence from the December 4 Portland Press Herald: “This summer, a survey indicated that the northern shrimp stock was at its ____ ____ since the annual trawl survey began in 1984.” That’s right: lowest level. In fact, the sweet Gulf of Maine shrimp—a closely guarded secret in New England—had collapsed so completely that regulators closed the 2014 season and warned of “little prospect of recovery in the near future.” It takes shrimp four to five years to reach harvest size, and few of the shrimp born in the Gulf of Maine since 2009 have survived. If shrimp miraculously produce a bumper crop this year, there might be a few to eat in 2018. In the meantime, throw some butterfish on the barbie.
Or maybe sailfish or cobia, two Florida species hooked by bewildered New England anglers in 2013. The Gulf of Maine Research Institute scrambled to find a bright side, publishing a paper (PDF) on the commercial potential of former Virginia standbys like black sea bass, longfin squid, and scup, which are new regulars in the Gulf. Admirable adaptability, and undoubtedly a few quick-moving fishermen will profit from the regime change. But I don’t relish life in a world where only the hyperadapters survive.
See original article here:
Something Is Seriously Wrong on the East Coast—and It’s Killing All the Baby Puffins
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
It’s a hard-knock life, scouring the landscape for pollen to sustain a beehive. Alight upon the wrong field, and you might encounter fungicides, increasingly used on corn and soybean crops, and shown to harm honeybees at tiny levels. Get hauled in to pollinate California’s vast almond groves, as 60 percent of US honeybees do, and you’ll likely make contact with a group of chemicals called adjuvants—allegedly “inert” pesticide additives that have emerged as a prime suspect for a large bee die-off during this year’s almond bloom.
The hardest-to-avoid menace of all might be the neonicotinoid class of pesticides, widely used not only on big Midwestern crops like corn and soybeans but also on cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, apples, cherries, peaches, oranges, berries, leafy greens, tomatoes, and potatoes. They’re even common in yard and landscaping products. I’ve written before about the growing weight of science linking these lucrative pesticides, marketed by European agrichemical giants Bayer and Syngenta, to declining bee health, including the annual die-offs known as colony collapse disorder, which began in the winter of 2005-’06.
More:
When stuff sticks to ships, it slows them down and uses more fuel. Now a new biocide-free paint may help ship owners slash fuel use and claim carbon credits too. Visit site – Blistering barnacles! Ship’s paint can save 9% of fuel use, and even earn carbon credits ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: Values and Data Meet at a Vatican Workshop on Sustaining Humanity on a Flourishing PlanetIs Oil Money Turning the NRA Against Hunters?Sherpa’s Family on Avalanche ;
Read the article:
Blistering barnacles! Ship’s paint can save 9% of fuel use, and even earn carbon credits
Libros
