The background to this important judgement is in Switzerland. A 57-year-old Swiss national, Ernst G. Haas, felt that he could no longer live a dignified life after battling a serious bipolar affective disorder for 20 years. He twice attempted suicide, but then hit upon the idea of using sodium pentobarbital, a prescription-only drug. But no psychiatrist would prescribe it for him. He then asked the Swiss government for permission to obtain sodium pentobarbital without a prescription. He argued that Article 8 imposed on the State a “positive obligation” to create the conditions for suicide to be committed without the risk of failure and without pain.

Various Swiss courts refused. Mr Haas then asked 170 different psychiatrists whether they could examine him with a view to getting his hands on some sodium pentobarbital. They all refused.

As a result, Mr Haas invoked Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a right to privacy, and sued the Swiss government in the European Court of Human Rights.

On January 20, the Court handed down its decision. It acknowledged that there does appear to be a right to suicide implied in Article 8. This has been strengthened by the 2002 Pretty case, in which the Court approved the right of a British woman to kill herself if she found life undignified and distressing.

However, Article 2 of the Convention also guarantees the right to life. Most member states give the right to life more weight than the right to suicide.

The Court pointed out that a prescription system is supposed to protect vulnerable people from making hasty decisions and to prevent abuse. That was all the more true in a country such as Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal. It also declared that the risk of abuse inherent in a system which facilitated assisted suicide can not be underestimated. That is why a prescription from a doctor and a psychiatric examination to ensure free will are proper safeguards.

For the original Human Rights Europe article visit:
http://www.humanrightseurope.org/2011/01/court-judgement-on-swiss-assisted-suicide-row/

Genetically modified cows and goats can produce proteins in their milk that can be extracted as a drug component. Cloning animals to create living drug factories could lower the costs of medicines used to save lives.

Examples include cows that pump pharmaceutical proteins and antibodies in their milk and blood; chickens that lay drug-producing eggs; and pigs that grow human-ready organs. Making perfect copies of these animals, through cloning, could speed up the drug-making process, according to scientists.

“Once you create a genetically engineered animal, you want to make copies,” said David Andrews, director of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade association that represents 1,200 companies.

In Dane County, a now-closed biotech firm created cloned pigs that had human-friendly, transplantable organs.

The same firm, Infigen, created a herd of cloned cows with drug-making capabilities.

Infigen wanted to produce proteins for the treatment of hemophilia, an affliction that causes uncontrolled bleeding, and Pompe’s disease, a rare genetic disorder that can lead to muscle degeneration.

The science was proven, but the firm ran out of money and closed in 2004.

“Because we were breaking new ground, where the FDA approval process was not fully developed, investors were hesitant. That became the stumbling block,” said Michael Bishop, Infigen’s former president.

“We knocked the science out and achieved some very amazing things,” he said. “And the interesting thing is I don’t think the technology has advanced very much since then. As a matter of fact, I think Infigen enjoyed better success than anybody else in the business.”

Preventing blood clots

Currently, a Massachusetts biotech firm is using genetically engineered dairy goats to make a human protein that prevents dangerous blood clots from forming. GTC Biotherapeutics extracts the protein from the goats’ milk for a drug that helps prevent strokes, pulmonary embolisms and other life-threatening conditions.

The FDA-approved drug, called ATryn, could be followed by other medicines made from the milk of genetically engineered animals. Cloning would be an efficient way to create them, said Yann Echelard, GTC vice president of corporate and technology development.

There are ways to do this without cloning, but it’s a more predictable process, he said.

Now that the FDA has said it’s safe to consume the milk and meat from cloned animals, it could help pave the way for creating drugs.

“As scientists, we can do this stuff,” said Mark Cook, an animal sciences professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The big issues that came up were more regulatory than science based. Just to get a drug through FDA clearance can take 10 to 15 years and cost a billion dollars.”

A herd of 150 dairy goats could produce enough of a life-saving drug to meet the needs of thousands of people.

The mammary gland in cows and goats was designed by nature to make proteins, Echelard said.

Not everyone agrees

But some people are wary of the use of genetically engineered animals, saying a mating between one escaped animal and a natural one could trigger a chain of events that could contaminate a species.

“What we have learned from the genetic engineering of crops is that nature finds a way” to reproduce, said George Kimbrell, an attorney with the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit group focused on food issues.

“I am dubious, at best, of claims that if we produce these transgenic animals there are not going to be some accidental escapes that will impact the environment and, potentially public health, through the food chain,” Kimbrell said.

Genetic engineering raises animal cruelty questions, said Pete Shanks with the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit group that encourages responsible use of genetic technologies.

Last year in New Zealand, a government-owned company created four genetically engineered calves intended to produce a hormone for treating infertility. Three of the calves developed huge ovaries, the size of tennis balls rather than the usual thumbnail size, and two of them died unexpectedly at the age of 6 months, according to Shanks.

“There are many possible responses to this debacle,” said Shanks, author of “Human Genetic Engineering: A guide for activists.”

“But we should start by noting the callous response of the scientists involved, who did not see the deaths as a big deal and called it part of the learning process.”

[Economist] MORE than a week after the earth convulsed beneath it, Haiti has still to plumb the depths of suffering and want. The numbers are still only more-or-less informed guesses, but their magnitude is grim: perhaps 200,000 killed, 250,000 more injured and some 3m in desperate need of help. The generosity of the world’s response has also been profound. Barack Obama led the way, dispatching 16,000 American troops and marines, but others, from Europe to Brazil, Cuba, China and Israel, responded too. Immediate promises of aid added up to around nearly $1 billion.

The urgent task is to connect this supply of help with the demand. That is proving extraordinarily hard (see article). Seven days after the earthquake, the United Nations had got food to only 200,000 people. Lessons from other disasters are not always relevant to Haiti. The Asian tsunami, for example, struck a ribbon of remote, mainly rural, areas. The governments of the affected nations could lead the relief effort. But Haiti’s institutions were weak even before the disaster. Because the quake devastated the capital, both the government and the UN, which has been trying to build a state in Haiti since 2004, were decapitated, losing buildings and essential staff. So did many NGOs. The president, René Préval, and his cabinet have been reduced to meeting in a police station.

Into that vacuum stepped the United States. Inevitably the dispatch of marines, Black Hawks and an aircraft-carrier looked to some like an invasion (after all, they have been there before). A brief caricature of great-power prickliness ensued as the Americans took charge of the airport and seemed to some others to give priority to their own flights. But by mid-week the airport was receiving three times as many flights as it did before the earthquake. The American forces are well-equipped for the vital task of setting up a supply chain for aid. That is what they are doing under a sensible division of labour eventually hammered out (the Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping force remains in charge of security, and the UN will co-ordinate the aid effort). Certainly most ordinary Haitians seemed pleased to see the Americans.

They are just desperate for water, food, fuel, medicines and shelter. Contrary to some reports, there were only isolated cases of looting and fighting. But delay and disarray has cost many lives. The longer it lasts, the more likely that desperation turns to violence. The UN called for more peacekeepers. Brazil offered 800; it may take weeks to muster the rest. If ever a situation cried out for the UN to have a standing army at its disposal, as The Economist has urged, this is it.

From relief to building a better country

Amid such chaos, it might seem premature to think about a long-term strategy for rebuilding Haiti. Actually, it is vital. Already Haitians’ resilient response to disaster is creating new facts on unstable ground: the spontaneous refugee camps around the capital will be hard to shift. Even before the earthquake Haiti was poor, environmentally degraded and aid-dependent and had few basic services. This means that “building back better” must be more than just a slogan. It also means that time is short before the world’s generosity turns to cynicism.

Fortunately there is a blueprint, drawn up by Haiti’s government and presented to donors last year. It calls for investment to be targeted on infrastructure, basic services and combating soil erosion to make farmers more productive and the country less vulnerable to hurricanes. The pressing question is who should do it and how. Haiti’s government is in no position to take charge, yet the country needs a strong government to put it to rights. Paul Collier, a development economist who worked on the plan, reckons that the answer is to set up a temporary development authority with wide powers to act.

Given the local vacuum of power, this is the best idea around. The authority should be set up under the auspices of the UN or of an ad hoc group (the United States, Canada, the European Union and Brazil, for example). It should be led by a suitable outsider (Bill Clinton, who is the UN’s special envoy for Haiti, would be ideal, perhaps to be followed by Brazil’s Lula after he steps down as president in a year’s time) and a prominent Haitian, such as the prime minister. To provide services, it should work with aid groups.

Some will object that this would undermine a democratically elected government. But there is not much left to undermine. Done well, it could create a state in Haiti able to do more than preside over chaos and corruption. Otherwise the suffering of the past ten days risks being repeated.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida [Reuters] – A Canadian astronaut aboard the International Space Station said on Sunday it looks like Earth’s ice caps have melted a bit since he was last in orbit 12 years ago.

Bob Thirsk, who is two months into a planned six-month stay aboard the station, said he is mostly in awe when he looks out the window, particularly at the sliver of atmosphere wrapped around the planet.

“It’s a very thin veil of atmosphere around the Earth that keeps us alive,” Thirsk said during an in-flight news conference. “Most of the time when I look out the window I’m in awe. But there are some effects of the human destruction of the Earth as well.”

“This is probably just a perception, but I just have the feeling that the glaciers are melting, the snow capping the mountains is less than it was 12 years ago when I saw it last time,” Thrisk said. “That saddens me a little bit.”

If Thrisk needs a sympathetic ear, he has 12 crewmates with him, at least until Tuesday, when visiting shuttle Endeavour astronauts are scheduled to depart.

The astronauts delivered a Japanese-built experiment platform, installed new batteries for the station’s solar power system and stashed spare parts to keep the station operational after shuttles are retired next year after seven more flights.

The $100 billion station, a project of 16 nations, is nearing completion after more than a decade of work.

Endeavour astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn are scheduled for a fifth spacewalk Monday to rewire a station gyroscope, fix insulation on its Canadian-built robot and install television cameras needed to guide a Japanese cargo vessel into its docking port. The HTV cargo hauler is slated for its debut flight in September.

“All in all I think it’s an extremely successful mission in spite of a lot of really interesting curveballs that have been thrown our way,” Endeavour commander Mark Polansky told reporters.

The latest glitch occurred Saturday when the station’s U.S. air-scrubber shut down, prompting NASA to call in extra flight controllers to oversee the device manually. The machine strips deadly carbon dioxide, a by-product of respiration, from the station’s air.

“It’s not something that we want to do long term, because (of) the number of commands we have to send from the ground. But in the short term, we’ve got the carbon dioxide removal system back up and running and operating at close to its normal capacity,” Smith said.

A backup air-scrubber is due to be launched aboard NASA’s next shuttle mission, targeted for launch in August.

Endeavour is due back at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday.

[NPR] Climate change is a potential environmental disaster — but it’s also potentially an economic opportunity. President Obama spoke of it in economic terms Tuesday when he urged the House of Representatives to pass legislation that would address global warming.

“The nation that leads in the creation of a clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy,” he said. “That is what this legislation seeks to achieve. It is a bill that will open the door to a better future for this nation. And that is why I urge members of Congress to come together and pass it.”

Promoting responses to global warming as an economic opportunity — rather than as a pollution problem that needs to be solved through regulation — has long been championed by a tiny think tank in Oakland, Calif.

The Breakthrough Institute

The Breakthrough Institute doesn’t look like much — just a few offices in a shared suite in downtown Oakland.

There are only five people on staff. On a recent day, they were outnumbered by an incoming crop of seven freshly minted college graduates, who showed up for their summer internships.

Michael Shellenberger, 37, and Ted Nordhaus, 43, founded the Breakthrough Institute in 2002.

Shellenberger tells the interns that environmental groups — like the ones he used to work for — are going about it all wrong. By urging Congress to cast carbon dioxide as a pollutant that needs to be controlled, he says, they will constantly swim against the tide of public opinion.

“We’re stuck in this kind of poor paradigm for dealing with climate change, this pollution paradigm,” he says, “not because environmentalists are failures, but actually because they were so successful. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the cap and trade on acid rain — these things worked really well.”

Pushing Innovation, Not Regulation

But reducing carbon dioxide is a different story. It’s not just a nuisance byproduct, like the sulfur in coal that contributes to acid rain. Carbon dioxide is unavoidable when we burn coal, oil and natural gas. So getting rid of it means either capturing it at great expense, or regulating fossil fuels into oblivion.

In theory, regulation will force companies to develop cleaner alternatives as the price of carbon pollution grows. But Shellenberger says that’ll never work.

“When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?” he asks the interns. “And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never.”

Personal computers didn’t take off because there was a tax on typewriters, he says. And the Internet didn’t sprout up because the government made telegraphs more expensive.

“So is there a better way to do this? Well, we think that there is. It’s very simple: It’s that we need to make clean energy cheap worldwide.”

China will never stop burning its massive reserves of coal unless there’s something cheap to replace them, he argues. And the United States isn’t likely to stop burning coal, either, he says.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that the best way to develop those clean technologies is to increase federal energy research tenfold, and to create a project akin to the Apollo mission to the moon. But a massive increase in federal energy research spending is not a popular idea at the moment.

“There’s this idea that the government shouldn’t be involved in technology, the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers,” Shellenberger says. “Which is sort of a funny thing to say. It’s kind of like, well, why not? And when hasn’t the United States government been involved in picking technology winners and losers?”

He points to the computer industry as just one example of something that came into being because of deliberate federal investments.

Tapping Into Americans’ Love Of Invention

Nordhaus and Shellenberger weren’t always technology advocates. They met as young adults, trying to save redwood trees on the California coast. Working as pollsters and strategists, they spent a lot of time figuring out what motivates people. That led them to rethink how to frame global warming as an issue.

“The things that will drive or not drive action have nothing to do with how well you understand how fast the polar ice caps are melting,” Nordhaus says.

A sense of doom or shame only motivates a small segment of the public — and puts off the rest, he says. Instead, their research shows that people are motivated when the issue is presented as an opportunity to revolutionize energy technology.

“In fact, not only is it popular, but voters get excited about it,” Shellenberger says. “If you go and talk to folks in the Rust Belt, in Ohio, or you talk to people in Silicon Valley, you talk to people in New York, Americans love that. And they love that, I think, for reasons that are really specific to the national character, which is: That’s what Americans do; we invent stuff. That is so much part of who we are. It just seems crazy that we wouldn’t put that at the center of our policy agenda.”

Critics Say There Isn’t Time

The downside of this is that global warming is a looming crisis, and critics say their solution offers no timetable for action and no assurances that technologies will be ready before the world tips into a dangerous new state. So they often hear that their approach is a distraction.

“Well, I say, look in the mirror here,” Nordhaus says. He says the pollution paradigm isn’t succeeding either. Most countries aren’t keeping the lofty promises they made in international climate talks. And the 1,200 page climate legislation now before Congress is so full of escape clauses and giveaways, it’s not clear what exactly it will achieve. One thing it won’t do is substantially increase federal research dollars.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger rail against the bill in the blogosphere. And they’re trying to get attention on Capitol Hill.

Taking Their Agenda To The Capitol

A few days after our interview, we meet up again in front of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

They came to town with a simple plea: The government needs to spend more money — not less — to develop radical new energy technologies, and to help bring those to market.

On this day, they’re accompanied by Peter Teague from the left-leaning Nathan Cummings Foundation — the Breakthrough Institute’s main funder. Teague is pleased with what Shellenberger and Nordhaus have achieved to date.

“The president has adopted their language, their message, the story they helped to develop,” Teague says. “The next stage in the development of all of this is for the actual reality of the policy to reflect the glowing, wonderful, positive, visionary rhetoric.”

Turning Obama’s rhetoric on energy opportunity into a fundamentally new approach to climate change will require a massive political shift. And that’s the breakthrough that the Breakthrough Institute is hoping to achieve.

- Richard Harris

Ms. Miller’s panel entitled, “Climate Justice Adaptation: Public Health and Emergency Preparedness,” is schedule for this Thursday January 29th at 1:15pm.  We look forward to seeing you Thursday. 

• Panel Time: Thursday January 29, 2009 1:15pm – 2:30pm
• Location: Fordham University Lincoln Center Campus, 113 W. 60th St., New York City
• Panelists’ Bios
• Conference Agenda
• Panel Description: Emergency preparedness for climate disasters is an increasingly essential and immediate element of climate change adaptation. Panelists will examine how municipalities are preparing for imminent climate disasters and the need to protect communities from displacement, disinvestments and disempowerment in the immediate aftermath of climate disasters.

• “I think Americans and the press and most of our political leaders have now made the connection we’ve long been urging that the environment is intertwined with all the other critical issues that concern us, starting with national security, our prosperity, jobs protection, and health care.”
• The national advertising budget of the entire environmental movement is probably well under $ 10 million. The advertising budget for the automobile industry is $15.5 billion-that’s just one industry, one group of polluters. If you add all the polluters together-from the oil and coal and nuclear and chemical industries-you’re talking about well over $100 billion a year that’s spent on propaganda. And that doesn’t include their lobbying budgets, which are astronomical, or their campaign contributions.

[full article] Discover why this year’s NRPA Congress & Exposition keynoter believes it’s high time to remove environmental issues from the back burner-and what he plans to do about it. If there’s anyone who is able to take the lead in resolving the environmental mess we find ourselves in now-lax regulations on drilling and pollution, a warming planet, and rapidly disappearing open space, just to cite a few examples-it’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After all, he’s got some pretty good street cred: president of the international Waterkeeper Alliance, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and chief prosecuting attorney for the New-York based Riverkeeper organization, directing the charge to protect the city’s water supply.

A vocal critic of the Bush administration (Kennedy claims that the president is the number-one threat to the global environment), Kennedy has dedicated his adult life to the role of environmental protection. Along the way, his singleminded determination has earned him some flack from detractors, many of whom suggest that he could attract more flies with honey than vinegar.

But Kennedy remains resolute in his approach, arguing that the American public cares profoundly about conservation and sustainability; they’re just looking for a champion to enforce an environmental code of ethics that will guarantee clean air and water, hold corporate polluters accountable, and protect our public lands.

For the past 20 years, Kennedy, who will deliver the keynote address at next month’s NRPA Congress & Exposition in Baltimore, has advocated the adoption of a sound environmental policy, one that is good for business and for the natural world.

Parks & Recreation caught up with Kennedy to discuss the potential impact of a new administration, the role that NRPA can play in advancing environmental stewardship, and the struggle to reconnect our children with nature.

Parks & Recreation: With this being a presidential-election year, will environmental issues finally receive the attention they deserve?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: I think Americans and the press and most of our political leaders have now made the connection we’ve long been urging that the environment is intertwined with all the other critical issues that concern us, starting with national security, our prosperity, jobs protection, and health care.

Our deadly addiction to oil is not just causing global warming, but it is the cause of the collapse of the American dollar, the erosion of our economy, and the entanglements that we now have with Middle Eastern dictators who hate democracy, who are despised by their own people, and who have embroiled us in a $3 trillion war that has cost America its international prestige and its moral authority.

It’s also draining us of $1 billion a day, which we’re borrowing from countries that don’t share our values to buy petroleum from countries that don’t share our values.

P&R: What can be done to intensify the public’s interest in environmental issues, both at the local and national level?

Kennedy: It’s important that people understand we’re not protecting the environment so much for the sake of the fish and the birds, but because nature is the infrastructure of our communities.

If we want to meet our obligation as a generation, as a civilization, as a nation-which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity, enrichment, prosperity, and good health as the communities that our parents gave us-we need to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the public lands, the landscapes that connect us to our history, that provide context to our communities, and that are the ultimate source of our values and virtues and our character as a people.

P&R: The Bush administration has been widely criticized for its lack of commitment to improving the environment. Is a new administration the answer, or is that false hope?

Kennedy: I think it depends a lot on who we elect as president. I’m encouraged that both candidates are seriously making the connection between our carbon dependence and the erosion of American values, prosperity, democracy, and national security.

P&R: “Green” is widely regarded as a Democratic issue, but that hasn’t always been the case. Can the environment become a party- neutral issue?

Kennedy: It ought to be. It was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who was our greatest conservationist. Unfortunately, since that time, the modern Republican Party has torn the “conserve” out of conservatism. And that’s largely because the party is in the thralls of the largest polluters in America, who are also among the largest contributors to the Republican Party.

That’s not to say that Democrats don’t also take polluter money, but I always say that the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt and that Republicans are 90 percent corrupt, based upon the ratios of polluter money they take.

But generally speaking, it’s the Republicans whose entire agenda is being dictated by the worst corporate polluters.

P&R: In your opinion, what are environmental and conservation groups doing right today, and where are they falling short?

Kennedy: When you talk about environmental conservation groups, you’re really talking about a movement that has many parts. It’s like the Civil Rights movement or the Labor movement or any other successful progressive movement in American history. You need many different groups that take different approaches in order to bring in a diverse range of constituencies.

The Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have achieved its many accomplishments if it was just Martin Luther King. You needed Malcolm X and [the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] and John Lewis and Eldridge Cleaver and all these different approaches to appeal to a variety of constituencies.

Similarly, the environmental movement has many parts that do different things. You have more conservative groups, like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature Conservancy, which are happy to work with corporations and take corporate money. You have more middle-of-the-road groups, like [the Natural Resources Defense Council], which use the legal system to do enforcement.

Then you have groups like Greenpeace that are more likely to use civil disobedience and the other tools of more-radical activism. [You have] places like Waterkeeper and the Sierra Club, which focus on grassroots.

Through a collection of approaches and very talented people, [the outcome] has been generally very successful. I would not attribute the failures of the environmental movement to a failure of strategy or imagination or energy or organizational genius, but rather it’s a function of the power of the forces that we are battling.

The national advertising budget of the entire environmental movement is probably well under $ 10 million. The advertising budget for the automobile industry is $15.5 billion-that’s just one industry, one group of polluters.

If you add all the polluters together-from the oil and coal and nuclear and chemical industries-you’re talking about well over $100 billion a year that’s spent on propaganda. And that doesn’t include their lobbying budgets, which are astronomical, or their campaign contributions. In those realms, most of the environmental groups don’t even participate, because it’s illegal for charitable groups to participate in those ways in the political process.

So we’re outgunned in every theater of conflict. I would say that against those odds, the environmental [movement] has been able to get its message out with extraordinary success.

P&R: There’s little question that kids are losing touch with the outdoors today. Beyond expanding waistlines, what do we stand to lose from this disconnect?

Kennedy: There’s a terrific book that recently came out called Last Child in the Woods (Richard Louv, 2005) that documents the strong correlation between the decline in mental and physical health among American children and the divorce of this generation from hands-on contact with nature.

We have a plugged-in generation now that is experiencing unprecedented levels of obesity, depression, and anxiety disorders, and there’s a series of convincing research studies that link those ailments to the diminishing contact with the natural world.

Also, nature is the source of our spiritual values, ultimately, and it’s the source of our national values. If you look at every religious tradition, the essential epiphany always occurs in the wilderness. When we cut those roots, we risk losing a vital part of our humanity.

Traditionally, the strongest constituencies for protecting wilderness have been the people who utilize those resources.

P&R: Pro-business doesn’t normally translate to pro-environment and healthier communities. Talk a little bit about how-and why-we redefine this.

Kennedy: In 100 percent of the cases, good environmental policy is always identical to good economic policy. We should be measuring the economy based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets in our communities.

If, on the other hand, we want to do what the current White House is urging us to do, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, and have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy-but our children are going to pay for our joyride with denuded landscapes, poor health, and huge clean- up costs that are going to amplify over time. Environmental injury is deficit spending; it’s a way of loading the costs of our generation’s prosperity onto the backs of our children.

P&R: When does our culture of mass-consumption reach a boiling- over point? Or are we already there?

Kennedy: I consider it a hopeless task to change human nature and to stop people from the desire to consume. I think the increasing materialism of our society is extraordinarily destructive, but I don’t think it’s a feasible or pragmatic solution to try to persuade people to stop consuming.

What we need to do is create market rules that do what a free market is supposed to do, which is to reward good behavior, which is efficiency, and to punish bad behavior, which is inefficiency and waste.

Right now, we have a market that is rigged to reward the least- efficient and filthiest producers, which is oil and coal and the carbon cronies and nuclear energy.

In a true free market, there’s no way that those fuel sources could prevail against their much more efficient and cheaper competitors: solar, geothermal, tidal, bio-mass, and conservation. The only way that they prevail is through giant subsidies that protect the carbon and nuclear incumbents and impede competition by more-efficient sources of energy.

I believe that a true free market would encourage us to properly value our natural resources. It’s the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. In a true free market, you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.

What polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor, raising standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else. They do that by escaping the discipline of the free market.

You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs.

Corporations are externalizing machines; they’re constantly devising ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. If you’re in the polluting industry, the simplest way to do that is to shift your clean-up costs to the public, and make yourself a billionaire by poisoning the rest of us. And that’s what all pollution is.

As long as someone is cheating the free market, it distorts the whole marketplace, and none of us gets the advantages of the efficiency and the prosperity and the democracy that the free market otherwise promises our country.

P&R: What can participants at this year’s NRPA Congress & Exposition in Baltimore expect to take away from your keynote address?

Kennedy: I think the idea that the fight for wilderness is not an isolated fight for unspoiled places, that it is tied in with all of the battles to preserve America’s prosperity and democracy and everything that makes us proud of our country.

P&R: What role can NRPA play in advancing an environmental stewardship agenda?

Kennedy: It’s definitely something that [your members] ought to be involved in. Unfortunately, outdoor users have not been aggressive enough in protecting the public interest in wild places, and all of us need to get more organized in doing that.

Hunters, fishermen, hikers, recreationists, kayakers-if we came together, we would make the most powerful lobby in the country. Unfortunately, we have not yet done that. I hope your organization will take a role in making that happen.

Against tremendous odds, says Kennedy, the environmental movement has been able to get its message out with great success.

By Vaira, Douglas

Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, and the trend is likely to continue according to a report released on Friday by the World Wide Fund for Nature. The report, said global temperatures would increase, sea levels would rise, and few places in the world would be spared an increase in violent rainstorms, droughts, tropical cyclones and other climatic disruptions.

Dr. Ute Collier, head of the WWF’s Climate Change Program, said the evidence to show extreme weather was the result of global warming was overwhelming.

“We got leading scientists to investigate (the evidence) — we wanted scientists because they’re often reluctant to link events such as more floods and the disappearance of Arctic ice to climate change — and they’ve said that climate change is clearly having an impact on the frequency and intensity of natural disasters,” Collier told BBC radio on Friday. The report was compiled for the WWF by Pier Vellings and Willem van Verseveld of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the Vrije University in Amsterdam, using observations and documents on climate patterns produced by various organizations over recent decades.

Stark choice for world

The authors said the increase in extreme weather would affect different parts of the world differently, and that the southern hemisphere would suffer most.

Southern Europe was expected to become drier while northern Europe would become wetter. In Britain, summer droughts in the southeast would become more frequent and there would be more winter rainfall across the country, with more frequent flooding.

The authors are cautious over the causes of climate change, but said “at least part of the damage caused by weather extremes is due to human-induced climate change.”

“The world faces a stark choice — reduce emissions or face the fury of nature,” Collier said.

However, Richard North of the Institute of Economic Affairs said the consensus view of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a panel of leading world scientists — was that little could be done to reverse the trend of global warming, and that humans needed to adjust to it.

“The IPCC says we’ve put our foot on the accelerator and taking it off a bit won’t make much difference,” he told BBC radio. “The Greens are defending very high petrol prices. They’re ignoring evidence that fuel prices have doubled in the last decade, but it’s had hardly any impact on carbon dioxide emissions.”

Copyright 2000 Reuters.http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/09/29/warming.disasters.reut/

Writing in the British Medical Journal, John Guillebaud (emeritus professor of of family planning at UCL) and Pip Hayes (a GP) raise the spectre of global population explosion, and suggest that the children of the developed world are a particularly severe carbon burden.

The Optimum Population Trust calculates that “each new UK birth will be responsible for 160 times more greenhouse gas emissions . . . than a new birth in Ethiopia.” Should UK doctors break a deafening silence here? “Population” and “family planning” seem taboo words … isn’t contraception the medical profession’s prime contribution for all countries?Unplanned pregnancy, especially in teenagers, is a problem for the planet, as well as the individual concerned. But what about planned pregnancies? Should we now explain to UK couples who plan a family that stopping at two children, or at least having one less child than first intended, is the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren? We must not put pressure on people, but by providing information on the population and the environment, and appropriate contraception for everyone (and by their own example), doctors should help to bring family size into the arena of environmental ethics, analogous to avoiding patio heaters and high carbon cars.

In quoting the Optimum Population Trust – a population-reduction pressure group – the two docs are quoting themselves: both are involved in the running of the Trust. The Trust’s position on UK population is clear:

In the UK, that population should be allowed to stabilise and decrease by not less than 0.25% a year to an environmentally sustainable level, by bringing immigration into numerical balance with emigration, by making greater efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies, and by encouraging couples voluntarily to “Stop at Two” children.

Rosamund McDougall, policy director at the Trust, told us an environmentally sustainable population for the UK is in the 17-27 million range – on an “equal shares basis” applied to world resources. The only way any more people would be OK would be in the event of a “major breakthrough in renewable energy or food production”.

Asked if, say, fusion power would permit a relaxation, McDougall was highly sceptical. “They’ve been talking about that for 20 years,” she said, suggesting that a big increase in the efficiency of solar power was more plausible. But until that happens, the UK (and the rest of the world) should seek to seriously reduce its population.

Dr Hayes is certainly more than willing to advise her patients on matters that many would say are outside the remit of a GP. Her practice exhorts its patients not to fly on holiday, “but if you are flying this year, please consider offsetting your carbon emissions”. Dr Hayes also requests that her patients “will walk or cycle whenever possible”, so as not to damage the environment as well as for their own health. She herself is off on sabbatical to Madagascar and Australia – no doubt having offset the carbon from her flights.

The Register

The consensus view is that we’ll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today – including climate change and terror threats. And we’ll hit upon so many medical and technological wonders that today’s 50-year-olds will have a fair chance of finding out firsthand how the world will look in 2058.

The problem with having so many predictions of the future is that they can look like a collection of to-do lists: The most popular item on the checklist would be getting your complete genetic code analyzed, so that the doctors can give you custom-made medications for what ails you (or what might have ailed you without the drugs). And don’t forget the cyber-implants: Several essayists, including inventor-futurist Ray Kurzweil, heralded the day when nanomachines would merge with our own bodies.

In addition to those well-traveled themes, “50 Years From Today” is jam-packed with nuggets of less conventional wisdom from experts in fields ranging from bioethics to counterterrorism. Here are a few examples:

• Diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be shown to be caused by infectious agents that take advantage of genetic predisposition, says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Researchers will be surprised to find that many of those infectious agents are being transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, it will be uncommon to keep cats, birds or hamsters as pets – but we’ll still have dogs around, because they’ve been “man’s best friend” for so long that we’ve already adjusted to their infectious agents.
• International terrorism will be brought under control because governments will realize counterterrorism is primarily a police function rather than a job for the military, says Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol. Passports and IDs will be linked to a global monitoring system, much as credit cards are today. “People will no longer be able to travel and engage in transactions with anonymity,” thanks to surveillance and biometrics, he says. All this will pose “thorny issues” for a post-privacy era.
• Several essayists said water will become as big a resource issue as petroleum is today. “We cannot go green without thinking blue,” former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and former Energy Secretary James Watkins say. Norman Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” in agriculture, says there will have to be a “Blue Revolution” to provide enough water for the planet’s burgeoning population. Thus, cleaning up the oceans and providing fresh water should rank right up there with controlling greenhouse gases.
• The outlook for longer life spans is a mixed bag: Kurzweil says the pace of life extension will outrun the passage of years, offering at least the possibility of an indeterminate life span 50 years from now. But trends also point to a decline in average life expectancy, due to the increased incidence of obesity among today’s young people, says Wanda Jones, director of the Office on Women’s Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Pros and cons for longer life

Arthur Caplan, a columnist for msnbc.com and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, takes something of a middle road: In his essay, written from the point of view of his grandchild, he foresees a world where people can look forward to 140 years of high-quality life. (In a comic twist, the essay also bemoans Caplan’s death, “frail and decrepit,” at the young age of 80.) 

Caplan, who is 58, told me he bases his prediction on the promise of regenerative medicine, as well as a better understanding of how lifestyle and genetics affect health. All these new technologies will raise new ethical issues, he acknowledged – for example, whether future generations will be genetically modified to fix defects and even introduce enhancements.

“People will have to think harder about whether they want to have kids the old-fashioned way,” he said. “Why would you choose to take a random chance, knowing that your child would have a chance of having a defect but going ahead anyway? You start to get into blame and guilt about disability in a way that we don’t really do now.”

Greater longevity will also have social implications, he said. “You’re not going to just have people living till 140 without changing your ideas about retirement, career, education, leisure, marriage, childrearing – also, even eligibility for social benefits. My hunch is that you’re going to have to tack on a few more years before you get that senior discount card.”

The bad, the good and the ugly
In his essay, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss sorts through the “bad, the good and the ugly.” For Krauss, the “bad” issues that have to be dealt with focus on climate change, energy shortages and nuclear weapons – and the “good” technologies ahead include medical breakthroughs, computer intelligence and virtual reality.

Dealing with the bad and taking advantage of the good will depend on whether society can bring an end to today’s “ugly” struggle between science and religion, Krauss said. That observation is particularly apt for a week in which this year’s presidential candidates passed up an opportunity to attend Science Debate 2008 - and in which a new movie titled “Expelled” renews the creationism-vs.-evolution argument.

“If we allow nonsense to be purveyed with impunity, then I think it feeds down – it’s a slippery slope,” Krauss told me. “We can’t honestly address the serious problems we’re going to face in the next 50 years until we’re willing to accept the world the way it really is, without fear.”

The next-to-the-last word
In “50 Years From Now,” the first essayist to have his say is Vint Cerf, who was one of the founding fathers of the Internet almost 40 years ago. Today, he’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and one of the world’s most widely consulted technological seers. He’ll get the next-to-the-last word here.

Cerf foresees a world in which the infrastructure used today for transporting oil has been replaced by water tankers and water pipelines. The energy for a global electrical grid is provided by solar, wind and nuclear plants. Outposts are taking root on Mars and Titan, knit together by an Interplanetary Internet. And discoveries about the Higgs field and the nature of mass, pioneered by the Large Hadron Collider, are raising the possibility of inertialess travel at the speed of light.

Here’s the e-mail exchange I had with Cerf this week, while he was traveling in Spain:

Q: A lot of the essays in the book, yours included, refer to the global warming / energy issue but imply that the problems have been overcome without putting a crimp in technological development. Why is your projection of life 50 years from now so optimistic on the rising technological trend line?

Vinton Cerf: I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.

I just spent a half-day at the Bletchley Park museum near London. As you will recall, it was at Bletchley Park that a remarkable and diverse group of Britons produced some of the most critical intelligence of World War II through the use of the Bombe and Colossus special-purpose computers. They created alternatives where there were none before, as did the Americans with the Manhattan Project. I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.

That there will be many negative side effects is not in dispute. Ways of life will change and in some cases degrade, but I believe that we will find ways to adapt. We may find that we have to move into underwater habitats. We will need to invest massively in more environmentally responsible energy production. And the world’s ecological and economic systems will almost certainly change, too. But we will survive.

Q: I’m interested in your reference to the Higgs field and potential implications for new technologies, obviously because of the imminent startup of the Large Hadron Collider. You mention the E.E. Smith inertialess drive, which is really quite intriguing – that’s something I hadn’t heard before in reference to the LHC. Could you expand a bit on how understanding the theoretical underpinnings of inertial mass might lead to propulsion technologies (even in hand-waving terms)?

A: I am only a layman in this area, but it is my understanding that the Higgs field is what imbues other atomic particles with mass and that the Higgs boson is the particle that delivers the force of the field. If we had a way to manipulate the Higgs field, we might be able to establish inertialess conditions that could overcome Einstein’s fundamental speed limitations.

Q: Could you provide a brief update on the Interplanetary Internet project?

A: The project is in its 10th year and it is now planned to carry out tests of the Interplanetary Protocols using the Deep Impact spacecraft that launched a probe into Comet Tempel 1 in October 2006. The spacecraft is still operational, and the plan is to upload the Delay Tolerant Networking protocols onto the onboard computer. NASA has given the project permission to test these protocols from Earth. A successful test will qualify the protocol for future deployments on production space missions. We also hope to carry out demonstrations and tests on board the international space station.

Q: Any thoughts on Ray Kurzweil’s singularity? I’m not sure if you’ve seen his essay in the book, but it makes clear he thinks that the machines we build 50 years from now will be … us. In your estimation, will artificial implants and enhancements have a significant impact on how we think of ourselves in 2058, or will it not be that big of a deal?

A: I continue to worry about the potential to upload ourselves into a silicon analog. I think Kurzweil could be right about the relative intelligence of the computers of the distant future, but a machine intelligence may not be commensurate with instantiation of a biological intelligence within the silicon version. However, I do agree that artificial implants will provide us with supranormal capabilities that are presently inaccessible to most humans today.

Q: I like the idea that trying to explain the new jobs of the future would be as difficult as trying to explain what a Webmaster does to the man in the 1950s gray flannel suit. Nevertheless, do you have any thoughts on what any of those jobs might be, even in very general terms? (E.g., virtual-worldmaster…)

A: I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today. With billions of Internet-enabled devices or at least programmable devices on the network, there seems to be ample room for new services that manage these devices to be developed. “Hi, I’m your virtual entertainment manager! What movies would you like to watch next week?”

Q: Do you think imagining the future, as you and your colleagues have done in this book, will help shape that future – or do you see this exercise as merely a fun, readable exercise of the imagination?

A: I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future – what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build. I hope that reading these essays, there will be a few young people who will realize some of the speculative ideas or discover more interesting ones of their own.

I said that Cerf would have the next-to-the-last word – and that’s because, as always, it’s you who have the last word. Feel free to pass along your predictions about the world in 2058 as comments below. If we can carry these electronic bits from one generation of the Internet to the next, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to find out who came closest to the truth. http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/18/915263.aspx