news20090913gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World news > Kneya]
The last nomads: drought drives Kenya's herders to the brink
In the isolated border lands between Kenya and Somalia, families have always clung to a precarious existence. Now a decade of droughts has tested their endurance
Peter Beaumont in Elwak
The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009 Article history

Hawa Hassan comes leading three donkeys, accompanied by two female relatives and a handful of the family's smallest children. They have walked out of the drought-withered acacia scrub, travelling 15 miles in a day to reach the Kenyan settlement of Makutano, not far from the border with Somalia.

Makutano is a sparse collection of tukuls – dome-shaped dwellings patched with cloth and tarpaulin and sections of woven-grass matting – scattered along the dirt road.

Passing through a fence of piled thorn around the settlement, Hawa and the other women unload branches from the donkeys' backs. Quickly and dextrously they bend and lash the boughs, framing an igloo-shaped structure in a few minutes, one of three that will be erected by the women in a sandy clearing among the low and spiny trees.

The men, says 55-year-old Hawa, are a day behind the women with what remains of their livestock – some camels and 18 goats out of the 40 they once owned. The rest perished through lack of water – or were slaughtered for meat so her family could survive a few more days on their journey.

As Hawa works the rough twine around the sticks, she describes in a few sentences the story that marks not simply the end for her family of generations of nomadic existence in the isolated lands where Kenya meets Somalia and Ethiopia, but the imminent collapse of a whole way of life that has been destroyed by an unprecedented decade of successive droughts.

"We have no water," she explains, "and no food. We have left the pastures because we have lost so many goats. We had to come here to seek assistance. For the past two months we have talked and talked about making this decision. We waited because we thought there might be some rain."

And in these few minutes on arriving at Makutano, Hawa's world is utterly transformed. A nomad when she walked in through its fence, in the moment of settling into its impoverished community she became something else instead: part of the burgeoning class of pastoral dropouts. No longer self-sufficient. Condemned to live at the very margins of Kenyan life. "I'm not sad that I came," she says. "I can get water here. I don't want to leave my life. If I could get some goats then I would return to herding... I can't feel good about being in a settlement. It has been forced on me. I don't wish it for my life."

A day later, I return to Makutano to find Hawa again, and to see how she has settled in. The men of her family have now joined the women. Children crowd outside the tukuls eating porridge made of maize mixed with ground tree bark – a traditional coping technique during times of little food. But Hawa is not there. One group of Hawa's relatives I do notice, however. A mother and young children, they sit eating next to the corpses of two of the family's goats that had collapsed and died a few hours before.

Other family members are gathered quietly around something lying on the ground, the motionless figure of a woman in her late 60s, her face wrapped in a shawl. A grandmother, someone explains, she is sick from hunger and malaria. It does not look as if she will survive the evening.

What is happening in Kenya's ranger lands is the slow death of an existence, with families attempting to cling stubbornly to a land where the acacia scrub has been scorched to a spectral grey; where wind erosion scourges the possibility of life out of the fragile, desiccated soil. It has always been a hard living, herding goats, camels and bony cattle on the migration routes between the dry season and the wet season pastures. These days it looks close to impossible: the herders have begun slaughtering what precious stock has survived in order to feed their families.

Those trying to assist the nomads in the ranger lands around the dusty town of Elwak on the Somalia border understand that there is a catch-22 in their efforts to help them: that external help – for all that it is desperately needed – may also be hastening the end of nomadic pastoralism in this region.

Where water is provided, delivered in a solitary tanker with a broken steering column, the nomads will gather, attracted by what is an occasional and insufficient supply of water. And be encouraged to drop out. New parts for the water truck can take up to three months to come from Nairobi, so its drivers have been forced to make their own uncomfortable decision: to drive it until it breaks completely rather than take it off the road for temporary repairs.

The watering points in the new settlements also attract wild animals. In the villages we hear stories of infants and livestock snatched by predators.

And so far it is a very piecemeal relief effort. While some plastic water tanks are being trucked in by Kenya's government, most settlements are reliant on dirty water pans – often shared by animals and humans.

While Hawa Hassan says she will miss her life among the tracts of thorn bushes, most recent pastoral dropouts interviewed by the Observer conceded that while in the past, perhaps, they had settled for brief periods, this time many are doing it for good.

The last drought – which began in 2005 – saw a dropout rate of close to 80%. This time the numbers are between 55% and 60%. But with no rains likely for weeks at the earliest, and then only the short rains, the situation is worsening by the day.

The current drought, which began when the rains failed once again in April, is not yet as bad as the drought that came in 2005 and left this area littered with the corpses of animals. But the animals are dying now, the weakest stumbling and falling, unable to get up again. And the consequence of a change in the global weather patterns that has seen three serious droughts within a decade, when previously a bad one occurred every nine to 12 years, has been a whittling away at the nomads' capacity to restock with animals, to replenish and survive – normally a period of about three years.

The problems are exacerbated by the political marginalisation of this remote region – nearly 700 miles from Nairobi – whose residents, mainly Muslims, have long been regarded with either suspicion or indifference by those in the capital.

The result has been a mounting desperation. Families who are rich enough have taken their animals hundreds of miles by lorry to Mombasa on the coast to pasture them, or have had fodder brought from Nairobi. Those lacking in resources have been forced over the border to Somalia or into Ethiopia where many have seen their cattle stolen by militias, or have been drawn into sometimes violent conflicts over competition for resources.

One man, recently returned from Ethiopia, shows me a freshly healed wound on his throat that was sustained in a fight before he was driven back across the border. Others speak of losing all their camels to raiders in Somalia. And not all these conflicts are occurring across the border.

One morning I accompany the limping government water truck on its deliveries. First stop is a settlement named Iresuki. A group of women wait by the road with empty 20-litre plastic canisters. As the tanker arrives a fight breaks out between several women desperate to get water.

The problem is explained. The tanker visits on average just once a week. The water it delivers lasts only four days. So those without access to donkeys to fetch water from elsewhere are forced to beg and borrow. Or go thirsty.

In another village, Dowder, I come across a temporary water pan – a tarpaulin laid into a broad trench in the earth – into which the tanker deposits water for livestock. A few muddy puddles are all that remain of the water.

Abdi Kher Hassan and Bishar Dahir are scooping up the puddles, a few spoonfuls at a time. "It's for my family to drink," says Abdi. "For our homes." Unlike Hawa, Abdi has no wish to return to the ranger lands and the nomadic way of life. He dropped out of pastoralism two and a half years ago. His life is not much better.

"When we had livestock we had to move around," he says with sad logic. "Now our livestock is gone, we don't have to move. Before I had 50 goats. Now I have five. Those are ones that I'll stay home with. I don't want to go back to that life. It is too hard. My children are getting an education here. I don't want them to follow their father and grandfathers as the situation gets worse."

Bishar says they have chosen to settle on these remote and dusty roads so that their plight remains visible to the government. "If we went to the big towns, no one would notice us. We have settled here where people will notice us and where we can be helped."

The escalating collapse of the pastoralist way of life is having a profound social impact on the dropouts, those on the verge of dropping out, and the few settled communities in the region.

At a bush madrasa, an irritable teacher with a stick beats children struggling to learn Islamic verses drawn with charcoal on flat sections of tree bark.

Their parents, it transpires, are still in the bush trying to survive but have given their youngest children to relatives – who have already dropped out – to care for in settlement.

CONTINUED ON gdn2

news20090813gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World news > Kneya]
The last nomads: drought drives Kenya's herders to the brink
In the isolated border lands between Kenya and Somalia, families have always clung to a precarious existence. Now a decade of droughts has tested their endurance
Peter Beaumont in Elwak

CONTINUED FROM newsgdn1

Other problems are more obvious. The dropouts congregating in Elwak and by the road have little access to healthcare and sanitation – a particular issue in the town, where the tukuls have sprung up around homes, behind the healthcare centre, and around the water towers. Most of the dropouts are lacking in any employment.

For the children it is a particularly harsh existence. Close to the water towers in Elwak, Khadija Omar is standing over the body of the last of her 50 goats. She arrived in Elwak 10 days before. One of her children has pneumonia, another has malaria. She says she will survive by gathering firewood.

Ahmed Ibrahim, of Northern Aid, a local partner of the British charity Christian Aid, which is about to launch an appeal to counter the effects of the drought in Kenya, describes the situation of the nomads as desperate. "The pastoralists know that to take their livestock into areas like Somalia, where there is a war, is unsafe. It is a mark of their desperation."

"The way the climate is changing – if it continues – it will be very difficult to sustain the nomadic way of living. It is a very hard task. We fear that soon people will begin dying not just from the lack of food but from a lack of water."

He believes that despite the terrible conditions visible already, the nomads are currently only at the beginning of what has become a disaster.

The flight from drought

A third drought in a decade is afflicting the countries in the Horn of Africa. In Kenya, more than three million people are facing food and water shortages. The worst problems have been in the north of the country, where conflicts over resources have broken out between groups of nomadic pastoralists, killing dozens.

In desperation, some nomads have crossed the borders into Ethiopia and war-torn Somalia. Others have sent women and children to lead herds into the Tsavo national park to graze, while those who are wealthy enough have moved livestock by truck as far as Mombasa on the coast in search of grazing land.


[Environment > Deforestation]
RSPB accused of damaging British environment in bid to save birds
Charity accused of damaging the environment as it takes the axe to hundreds of acres of conifer woodland to restore traditional open heaths. Opponents say the scheme threatens UK's fight against global warming
David Adam, environment correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009 Article History

It is an all-too familiar scene of environmental destruction. Deep in a forest, heavy machinery has felled a giant swath of trees to leave bare scrubland and a handful of stumps as forlorn memorials. The timber has long gone and cattle now pick their way across the clearing.

But the scene of this environmental vandalism is not Indonesia or the Amazon; it is affluent Surrey. And those responsible are not illegal loggers, but one of Britain's largest and most influential conservation groups. If it has its way, a forest near you could be next for the chop.

"Scots pine, Corsican pine, Japanese larch. There are clues in the names. These trees are not native to southern England," says Mike Coates, a project manager with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

In a controversial move, the RSPB has set its sights on England's non-native woodlands, which it wants to demolish to find space to restore a different type of English habitat, the open and rugged heathland immortalised in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Dominated by heather and scrubby plants, such heathland is an increasingly rare sight in England, and so is the wildlife that relies upon it.

Coates says: "Woodland is very common compared with heathland. But re-creating heathland is so much better for wildlife than a conifer plantation. Lots of the birds that live in the conifer forests are common and can survive elsewhere. Heathland stuff needs heathland, and much of it is very rare."

Restoring heathland will help birds such as the nightjar and woodlark, he said, as well as rare insects, plants and reptiles, including the elusive adder, Britain's only venomous snake. The RSPB has made a start on its Farnham Heath reserve in Surrey, where it has cleared some 60 hectares (150 acres) of conifer forest to make way for heathland, but it has bigger plans. Ministers are poised to decide whether the Farnham Heath experiment should be repeated nationwide, across tens of thousands of hectares of government land run by the Forestry Commission.

The RSPB is lobbying hard that it should be. It wants the government to double the 55,000 hectares (135,000 acres) of lowland heathland in England by chopping down the non-native conifers that stand in the way.

Nick Phillips, RSPB's biodiversity policy officer, says it is a "once in a generation" opportunity to revive heathland on a large scale. Many of the trees in question were planted after the second world war, on cleared heathland, and are due to be harvested soon. The old heather seeds are still in the ground, he says, but will not survive much longer.

"All you've got to do is get the trees off to expose the buried heather seeds, get some sunlight and water and, bingo, in five years you've got a heathland. If you replant [conifers] after the trees are harvested, you've blown it. You can't restore heathland without it being much more difficult and time consuming."

At a time of increased awareness of climate change and the merits of protecting forests to reduce emissions, it strikes some, including the Green party, as a strange move to chop down trees in the name of protecting the natural world. The government's own figures suggest such a large-scale clearance could increase Britain's carbon emissions by up to 0.1%.

Stuart Goodall, chief executive of the Confederation of Forest Industries, calls the idea "absolutely crazy". He adds: "The government is highlighting the importance of combating climate change and planting trees to lock up carbon, and here we have a proposal to chop trees down, release carbon and lose jobs, all for an environmental benefit that you can get from better management of existing heathland. It just doesn't add up."

British companies have come to rely on the regular supply of softwood from the conifer forests, he says, which is used for construction, furniture and wood products such as fencing and pallets. "The forestry sector is small and we can struggle to get our voice heard. We are an easy target for the RSPB to pick on."

He adds: "It is a fallacy to think that certain types of trees have no biodiversity benefit. It's just that conservation bodies don't like them. But plenty of local people like walking in these woods."

Coates is unrepentant. "It should be the right tree in the right place. A field of barley is a field of grass, but it's not a meadow; it's a crop. In the same way, these are areas of land dominated by trees, but they are not woods, they are crops."

Heathland restoration will help Britain to adapt to global warming, he says, by providing habitats for species such as the Dartford warbler to spread north with rising temperatures.

At the centre of the debate is the Forestry Commission, which is drawing up several policy options for ministers to choose from this autumn on the back of a summer consultation exercise.

Dominic Driver, of the commission, says that between 6,000 and 30,000 hectares (15,000 and 75,000 acres) of conifer forest are likely to be removed over the next 10 to 15 years. Privately-owned forests could also be converted, with the help of government grants. Driver says lost trees will be replaced somehow. "We can't have deforestation in the UK."

news20090913gdn3

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[Business > Manufacturing sector]
CBI chief's sustainable vision blows away hot air
Richard Lambert meets manufacturers in the north-east to gain an insight into how the region can reinvent itself
David Teather
The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009 Article history

In a hangar once used for shipbuilding on the coast at Blyth in the north-east, a large wind turbine blade, looking like the rib of a giant whale, lies flat on a trestle. Another sticking out of a machine at the back of the hangar is being shaken up and down repeatedly. By the end of three weeks, it will have undergone two and a half million cycles in each direction to make sure it doesn't break.

Richard Lambert, the director general of the Confederation of British Industry, in hard hat and sheltering from the rain under a large umbrella, is taking in the scene. "Forgive me for sounding romantic," he says. "But we do have the capacity for a manufacturing renaissance over the next few years, and if we don't grasp it, future generations will curse us one way or another."

The research and testing facility for the wind and marine industries, called Narec, was one visit on a whistle-stop tour of firms in the low carbon industry undertaken by Lambert last week. His aim was to get a better sense of the attempts to reinvent a region scarred by thousands of job losses in its former smokestack industries. The visit also took in Smith Electric Vehicles, which has been manufacturing since the 1920s, and Banks, a coal miner now trying to re-shape itself as an onshore wind firm.

The trip was partly a fact-finding mission. When Nissan in Sunderland secured a £200m investment in July to build batteries for electric-powered cars, it was hailed by Gordon Brown and Business Secretary Peter Mandelson as a key moment. To mark the investment by the company's Japanese parent, they grandly declared the north-east a low carbon economic zone. But was there any substance behind the rhetoric?

Lambert makes trips like these "most weeks". It is on them, he says, that he gets a real idea of business concerns. "It was very marked last year that, through until March or April, the further away from London you got, and from banking and real estate, the more prosperous people felt. I suspect it is now the other way around".

Narec is backed by the regional development agency One North East, although it now makes around half its budget from commercial contracts, stress-testing blades and marine equipment in three docks, and the impact of lightning on blades in a high-voltage facility. The centre also took over a specialist solar-research division from BP. It currently works with US wind farm company, Clipper, and others from Japan and Europe, and aims to be self sufficient by 2011, hopefully attracting manufacturing and jobs to the region.

"No one else is doing this," Narec chairman Alan Rutherford told Lambert. "The development of new technology is a very expensive process and there are not many organisations that can fund the sort of assets we have off balance sheet. We are correcting market failure.

"We are talking to some heavy hitters around the world about moving to Blyth to develop operations in the North Sea, to develop prototypes and then hopefully full-scale manufacturing on the Tyne. But it is highly competitive. We lost out on onshore wind – the Danes, the Germans and the Dutch got all the business. As far as we are concerned, we are a neck ahead in offshore and want to stay that way."

At a round table where the CBI chief faced leading figures in the wind industry, both the potential and the challenges were laid out. David Still, managing director of Clipper, estimated that around £70bn would be invested in offshore wind between now and 2020. He said that his company was looking to make blades on the Tyne if the infrastructure and support were in place, benefiting the supply chain as well. "The key issue is how much we capture in the UK," he said. "If we make 100 turbines here, someone is going to have to build the foundations, and the steel plate that goes into that is about 10% of [nearby] Corus's annual output."

But significant investment is needed to upgrade the National Grid and the ports in particular, to ensure they can cope with the massive equipment and turbines. "Look at Sunderland," said Martin Lawlor from the Port of Blyth. "[It was] once one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world, where all you can see now on the river is flats." Land also needs to be made available for the manufacturing and storage of the huge turbines.

Planning remains a key concern, and this emerged at Banks, which has a target of 250 megawatts of wind power by 2012. "The government has abdicated delivery of energy supply and generation to the private sector and is not helping it," said Mark Dowdall, at Banks. "The country needs to look at speeding up the whole process if it is to hit its renewables target. It is often up to local authorities to consider big contentious projects and elected members get a lot of earache from constituents."

The urgency for investment has not passed Lambert by. "I was in a meeting with a government minister a couple of weeks ago discussing the impending energy gap and he said, 'well the recession is a big help'," Lambert said, banging his head on the table in mock exasperation. The CBI's official stance is to support the need for a mix of energy, including nuclear and clean coal. "We support the government's targets for greenhouse gas mitigation for 2020, but we are anxious about the renewable targets, because frankly we think they are incredible."

Smith Electric Vehicles began life building trolley buses, trams and milk floats, and now re-engineers commercial vehicles for the likes of Sainsbury's and TNT, and collaborates with Ford. But chairman Roy Stanley said Mandelson's designation for the area appears to have been empty words. "There is nothing tangible," he told the CBI chief. "I don't want to come across as jaundiced. But if you are to very graciously declare this a low carbon economic zone, what does it mean? Define it, tell us what it is, don't just give us a label."

The pain is evident at Smith. Its parent company, the Tanfield Group, which also makes access platforms for the construction industry, has slashed staff numbers and executives have taken a 20% pay cut, as orders for electric vehicles faltered and the market for access platforms collapsed. The production facility is eerily empty. There is capacity for 1,500 vehicles a year, but it is currently producing 10% of that. The company is having to keep many of its suppliers afloat with upfront payments, though Stanley said the market has started to improve.

"So, if I am on an aeroplane with Lord Mandelson, just as he is dropping off to sleep, what is the punchline?" asked Lambert. One idea, Stanley said, would be to kick start orders by giving buyers of commercial electric vehicles a capital allowance, as with ordinary cars.

"There is a certain feeling that people want to cluster round and share the pain and find out how everyone else is doing," said Lambert as he headed off to the regional CBI black tie dinner in Gateshead. "It does feel much lighter now than February or March, but then it was really dark. What people worry about is that there are a lot of temporary stimuluses going through – the car scrappage, the end of stock liquidation, huge monetary stimulus, fiscal stimulus – but what will happen when that starts to run out? Where will the engine of demand come from? I think the recovery is going to be pretty protracted."

The next day at Nissan, though, the mood is upbeat. In January the company was forced to let 1,200 people go, taking the factory down from three to two shifts. But the shifts are again running with overtime and 350 temporary workers have been taken back on since March, partly thanks to the cash-for-clunkers scheme.

But the investment in electric batteries, is the real cause for optimism. Trevor Mann, senior vice-president for manufacturing, purchasing and supply chain for Nissan Europe, looks out of the boardroom window at the site for the battery plant. "This is the biggest single investment that this plant has had since 1992," he says. He says he is "optimistic" that electric car production will be heading to Sunderland.

Mann says Sunderland secured the contract as a result of a long period of lowering costs and improving efficiency, as the plant sought to avoid the fate of others that closed in Britain in the 1990s, such as Peugeot in Coventry. "Nothing is owed to us, everything is earned. And everybody recognises that."

news20090913gdn4

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World news > Nuclear weapons]
MoD sacks advisers in row over disposing of old nuclear subs
Decommissioning project in turmoil as others threaten to resign in protest
Rob Edwards
The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009 Article history

An 11-year investigation into how to safely dismantle 15 decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines has been thrown into turmoil after two of the environmental experts brought in as advisers were sacked. Deep disagreements have split the 25-member advisory group, with eight consultants now considering resignation, the Observer understands.

Since 1998, the Ministry of Defence has been looking for ways of dismantling the submarines and storing their radioactive waste on land. Ministers set up the Interim Storage of Laid Up Submarines (Isolus) programme to look into what plans would be acceptable to the public.

Jane Hunt and Bill Thompson, of Lancaster University's Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, ran two consultations for Isolus in 2001 and in 2003.

But, according to Hunt, the MoD did not understand the need for close public scrutiny of radioactive waste management. She also claimed officials dismissed worries about the health effects of low-level radiation from dismantling reactors.

Public concerns about the risks of privatisation and about the lack of public involvement in selecting dismantling and storage sites had been similarly rejected by the MoD, as had anxieties about recycled metals contaminated with low-level radioactivity being sold on the open market, she said.

"The MoD won't inspire public confidence if they carry on like this," Hunt told the Observer. "They seem intent on doing what the industry wants, despite earlier consultations objecting to this."

Ministers rejected several of the consultation's recommendations and Hunt and Thompson were later sacked from Isolus after a PR company hired earlier this year carried out a study that concluded they were no longer needed. Green Issues Communications, based in Reading, then rebranded Isolus as the Submarine Dismantling Project.

The advisory group heard in July that Hunt and Thompson had been dismissed. It unanimously called for them both to be reinstated, according to members present.

An MoD spokeswoman said: "We reviewed membership of this MoD-funded group in order to ensure value for money. In the area of communications, work was being duplicated and the appropriate action was taken to reduce staff numbers."


[Comment is free> Cif America]
Sustainable cities are the solution
Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves
David Lepeska
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 September 2009 13.00 BST Article

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $25m, energy-efficient office building on the Brooklyn waterfront a few months back. The Perry Avenue Building features solar panels, rainwater-fed toilets and six rooftop windmills, which will produce 10% of its energy supply. "Wind power in this city," said the mayor, "is one of the solutions to our problem."

That problem – devising more sustainable cities – has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention of late. In February, Barack Obama created the White House office of urban affairs and quickly set about staffing it with experienced urban planners, to complement what many have called his "green dream team" on environmental policy.

Earlier this year in Strasburg, Obama acknowledged that the US bears the brunt of the responsibility for climate change. Combined with nearly $50bn in infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, the new administration's emphasis on building better cities is clear.

As for New York, the new Brooklyn building is part of a $250m programme to make Brooklyn's Navy Yard a hub for green industry, just one aspect of the mayor's broader plan to make the city more eco-friendly. When he launched PlanNYC two years ago, Bloomberg pointed out that the world's cities were responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Former US president Bill Clinton and UN officials have quoted the same figure.

This bit of data would mean city dwellers emit nearly four times as much as their rural counterparts. (The UN estimates that humanity became more urban than rural in 2008. Right now, the global populations of urban and rural folk are roughly the same.) Put another way, living in a city is almost four times as polluting as living outside of one.

Thankfully, the figure turns out to be wildly inaccurate.

The carbon footprint of urban dwellers is relatively light, says a report by David Dodman in the April issue of Environment and Urbanisation. Dodman, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, examined emissions reports from cities in the Americas, Asia and Europe.

He found that New Yorkers emit a third less greenhouse gases than the average American and that Barcelonans and Londoners emit about half of their national averages. And urban Brazilians are truly green: the residents of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are responsible for only one-third the national emissions average. Dodman's paper complements an earlier study by IIED senior fellow David Satterthwaite, who argued that cities emit about 40% of all greenhouse gases, as opposed to the oft-cited 80%.

On average, then, people who live in small towns and rural areas emit 50% more greenhouse gases than city folk. That cities may be part of the solution, however, does not mean that efforts like Bloomberg's PlanNYC are misplaced. Precisely the opposite is true.

By 2050, some 70% of us will live in urban settings, and it will ultimately be well-managed urban environments, with smart, energy-efficient buildings, power systems, transport and planning, that will save us from ourselves. Seeking better ways to do precisely that, a constellation of designers, architects and academics gathered at a conference on "ecological urbanism" at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design earlier this year.

Mitchell Joachim, who teaches architecture and design at Columbia University and was selected by Wired magazine as one of 15 people Obama should listen to, presented his vision for a collapsible and stackable electric city car, which would hang at public recharging stations, available for shared use.

He also explained "meat tectonics". Aiming to use meat proteins developed in a lab as building material, Joachim presented a digital rendering of an armadillo-shaped, kidney-coloured home. "It's very ugly, we know that," he said. "We're not sure what a meat house is supposed to look like."

Dorothee Imbert, associate professor in landscape architecture at Harvard, pointed to urban farming, a trend that has taken root in Detroit, New York, Milwaukee and a handful of international cities. Imbert mentioned her own student-assisted organic farms in Boston, yet acknowledged that adequate food supplies for future cities "would require rethinking of landscape in the building process".

Pritzker-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is thinking regionally. The Harvard professor and designer of the MC Escher-esque CCTV building in Beijing talked about his Zeekracht ("sea power" in Dutch), a plan for oceanic wind farms across the North Sea that would provide energy to much of northern Europe. With its constant high winds, shallow waters and advanced renewable industries, Koolhaas believes the North Sea offers energy potential approaching that of Persian Gulf oil.

His plan, which includes production belts in a half-dozen urban centres on or near the sea, energy cooperation and clean-tech research centres, is the type of project that, ideally, will both preserve green spaces and increase urban sustainability.

Another is a recently approved high-speed rail project in California, which will link that state's southern and northern hubs. Obama's stimulus package contains $8bn for high-speed and urban rail projects. That amount is nowhere near enough to install networks on a European scale, but, like windmills on the Brooklyn waterfront, it's a step in the right direction.

Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond "to live deliberately", as he put it. But shortly thereafter the American naturalist and philosopher accidentally burned over a hundred acres of pristine Massachusetts woodlands. We can no longer afford to be like Thoreau. If we want to continue to romanticise our natural world, we, as a civilisation, must also avoid it.

news20090913bbc1

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 07:34 GMT, Sunday, 13 September 2009 08:34 UK
Dozens dead in Kazakhstan blaze
A fire at a hospital facility for drug addicts in the city of Taldykorgan in south-eastern Kazakhstan has killed 38 people, according to officials.

The country's emergency ministry said 40 staff and patients were rescued. The fire was large, it said, covering 650 sq m (7,000 sq ft).

Prime Minister Karim Masimov is reported to have ordered an inquiry.

Safety regulations are often violated in Kazakhstan, with frequent workplace accidents and fires as a result.

There were almost 10,000 fires in Kazakhstan in the first eight months of 2009, AP news agency quoted the emergency ministry as saying.
Commission

According to one report, firefighters were still tackling the blaze hours after it started.

There are as yet no details on the cause of the fire, which broke out early on Sunday, or why it was so deadly.

Prime Minister Masimov immediately ordered a commission to be set up to investigate the cause of the fire, a government spokeswoman said, according to Russian news agency Ria-Novosti.

"Today the head of the government signed such a decree; the commission will be led by Deputy Prime Minister Serik Akhmetov who, in the nearest future, will be flying from Astana to Taldykorgan," a spokeswoman was quoted as saying


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 03:28 GMT, Sunday, 13 September 2009 04:28 UK
Oil threat to Australia wildlife
Environmentalists have warned that an oil slick caused by an accident on a rig in the Timor Sea is threatening wildlife in Australian waters.
By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Sydney

{Environmentalists fear oil is heading towards an area where whales breed}

Oil has been flowing from the West Atlas platform for three weeks.

Safety authorities have been using chemicals to try to break up the spill but warn it could be at least two more weeks before the leak is plugged.

Up to 400 barrels of oil per day have been pouring into the Timor Sea to Australia's north.

An emergency rig has arrived from Singapore to repair the damage and aircraft and boats have been dousing the slick with dispersants.

Fragile environment

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority has said that this has helped to contain the spread of oil, the bulk of which remains around the drilling platform thanks, in part, to benign weather conditions.

Officials have stated that the slick is about 170km (100 miles) from the Australian coast.

Environmental groups believe the contamination poses a significant threat to wildlife and is heading towards land.

Piers Verstegen, from the Conservation Council of Western Australia, says the spill - off the north coast of the Kimberley region where whales congregate - is an ecological disaster.

"Humpback whales, an endangered species, go to that area and that region to calf and give birth and this oil spill is happening just off the Kimberley coast," Mr Verstegen said.

"The oil, as far as we are aware, is travelling towards the Kimberley coastline but it is definitely affecting areas that are used by these whales and dolphins."

Fishermen have reported seeing endangered flatback turtles covered in oil.

There have also been claims that fish and sea-snakes have been poisoned.

Conservationists believe that, in its rush to exploit abundant natural resources, Australia risks inflicting irreparable damage on its fragile environment.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 06:37 GMT, Sunday, 13 September 2009 07:37 UK
Agriculture pioneer Borlaug dies
Norman Borlaug, the man known as the father of the Green Revolution in agriculture, has died in the US state of Texas aged 95.

{Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize and US Congressional Gold Medal}

Prof Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for agricultural innovation and the development of high-yield crops.

The Green Revolution helped world food production more than double between 1960 and 1990 with Asia, Africa and Latin America in particular benefiting.

The Nobel Institute said he had helped save hundreds of millions of lives.

Prof Borlaug died late on Saturday evening at his home in Dallas from complications with cancer, said a spokesperson for Texas A&M University, where he had worked.

'A better place'

In the early 1960s Prof Borlaug realised that creating short-stemmed varieties would leave food plants more energy for growing larger heads of grain.

His high-yield, disease-resistant dwarf wheat quickly boosted harvests in Latin America, and his techniques were particularly successful in South Asia, where famine was widespread.

Analysts believe the Green Revolution helped avert a worldwide famine in the late 20th century.

A close friend of Prof Borlaug at Texas A&M, Dr Ed Runge, told Associated Press news agency: "He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much... He made the world a better place."

The Nobel prize presentation said Prof Borlaug "more than any other single person of his age... has helped to provide bread for a hungry world".

Prof Borlaug continued his work into his 90s.

At a conference in the Philippines in 2006 he said: "We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability.

"Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that."

Norman Borlaug was born in Iowa in 1914.

He studied at the University of Minnesota and later worked for DuPont and the Rockefeller Foundation.

He set up his wheat and maize centre in 1963 to train scientists.

Prof Borlaug was awarded the highest US civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal, in 2007.


[Americas]
Page last updated at 22:22 GMT, Saturday, 12 September 2009 23:22 UK
Protests over Obama health reform
Tens of thousands of people have marched from the White House to Capitol Hill in Washington to protest against Barack Obama's healthcare reforms.

The demonstrations came as the US president sought to boost support for his plans during a Minneapolis rally.

Addressing a crowd of 15,000, Mr Obama said he refused to accept no change on his top domestic priority.

He said he would not allow special interests to "use the same old tactics to keep things the way they are".

"I will not accept the status quo. Not this time. Not now," Mr Obama said in the democratic-leaning state, which has one of the country's smallest numbers of uninsured residents.

'Taxed to death'

But in Washington protesters attacked Mr Obama's administration for what it called out-of-control spending - on healthcare, the stimulus packages and the bailout of the banking and car industries.

{Protesters are angry at what they say is reckless public spending}

Healthcare in the US costs $2.2tn a year, or 16% of the country's GDP - nearly double the OECD average.

The protestors insist that spending tax dollars on a government-run health insurance option will increase inflation and lead the country to economic ruin.

"Born free, taxed to death," one protester's sign read while another, held up by an immigrant from Ukraine, said: "I had enough of socialism in the USSR."

The march - co-ordinated by the conservative grouping Freedomworks, a grassroots movement calling for lower taxes and smaller government - brought together protesters from across different states.

'Door open'

Days after urging Democrats and Republicans in Congress to work together, Mr Obama said his plan was open to ideas from across the political spectrum.

{ HEALTHCARE IN THE US
> 46 million uninsured, 25 million under-insured
> Healthcare costs represent 16% of GDP, almost twice OECD average
> Reform plans would require all Americans to get insurance
> Some propose public insurance option to compete with private insurers}

"If you come to me with a serious set of proposals, I will be there to listen. My door is always open," he said.

He warned, though, that he would not waste time with those who believe: "it's better politics to kill this plan than improve it".

It is estimated that some 46 million Americans do not have health insurance, and a further 25 million are thought to have inadequate insurance.

The healthcare plans currently being considered in Congress are all attempting to expand coverage, while also reforming the system to prevent spiralling costs.

The bill would expand coverage to 97% of Americans, at a cost of some $900bn (£540bn).

news20090913bbc2

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Health]
Page last updated at 00:35 GMT, Sunday, 13 September 2009 01:35 UK
Antibiotic resistance clue found
US scientists have uncovered a defence mechanism in bacteria that allows them to fend off the threat of antibiotics.

{MRSA highlights the problem of antibiotic resistance}

It is hoped the findings could help researchers boost the effectiveness of existing treatments.

The study published in Science found that nitric oxide produced by the bacteria eliminates some key effects of a wide range of antibiotics.

One UK expert said inhibiting nitric oxide synthesis could be an important advance for tackling tricky infections.

Antibiotic resistance, for example with MRSA, is a growing problem and experts have long warned of the need to develop new treatments.
{Here, we have a short cut, where we don't have to invent new antibiotics
Dr Evgeny Nudler, study leader}

The latest research, done by a team at New York University, showed that in bacteria the production of nitric oxide - a small molecule made up of one nitrogen and one oxygen atom - increased their resistance to antibiotics.

They found the enzymes responsible for producing nitric oxide were activated specifically in response to the presence of the antibiotics.

They also showed that nitric oxide alleviates damage caused by the drugs as well as helping to neutralise many of the toxic compounds within the antibiotic.

The researchers then showed that eliminating nitric oxide production in the bacteria allowed the antibiotics to work at lower, less toxic doses.

More effective

Study leader, Dr Evgeny Nudler, said developing new medicines to fight antibiotic resistance, such as that seen with MRSA is a "huge hurdle".

"Here, we have a short cut, where we don't have to invent new antibiotics.

"Instead we can enhance the activity of well-established ones, making them more effective at lower doses.

Dr Matthew Dryden, consultant in microbiology and communicable disease at Royal Hampshire County Hospital and general secretary of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, said if the enzyme which creates nitric oxide could be inhibited, it could suppress the ability of the bacteria to counteract antibiotics.

"This would be a useful therapeutic advance, especially as we are running out of new classes of antibiotics and there is less antibiotic development in general."