Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 03/31/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
TRANSPLANTING 120-YEAR-OLD OAK TREE
The April 2006 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC contains a spectacular photo of a 120-year-old oak tree being transplanted. The explanation attached to it follows:
“When a big chain store wanted to build on a certain lot in Auburndale, Florida, a 120-year-old oak stood in the way. Rather than cutting it down, the retailer paid more than $100,000 to have the tree transplanted – a practice that’s become more common as municipalities require developers to preserve tree canopy, says Dan Joy of the Davey Tree Expert Company, the firm that moved the oak. Saving trees creates positive publicity and attracts crowds who come to watch the process. ‘It’s like the circus coming to town,’ says Joy. The Auburndale oak’s move took six weeks of preparation. After uncovering and trimming its 42-foot-wide root ball, the movers slid steel rods underneath (above), and the 353-ton tree was lifted onto a trailer for transport to its new home – just 500 yards away, in a wetland preservation area. So far the old tree is doing just fine.”
“CLIMATE MODEL PREDICTS GREATER MELTING, SUBMERGED CITIES”
Our title and quotes are from an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN:
“Over the past 30 years, temperatures in the Arctic have been creeping up, rising half a degree Celsius with attendant increases in glacial melting and decreases in sea ice. Experts predict that at current levels of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide alone is at 375 parts per million – the earth may warm by as much as five degrees Celsius, matching conditions roughly 130,000 years ago. Now a refined climate model is predicting, among other things, sea level rises of as much as 20 feet…
“Modeler Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona matched results from the Community Climate System Model and climate records preserved in ice cores, exposed coral reefs, fossilized pollen and the chemical makeup of shells to determine the accuracy of the computer simulation. Roughly 130,000 years ago the Arctic enjoyed higher levels of solar radiation, leading to increased warming in the summer and the retreat of glaciers worldwide. The model correctly predicted the extent of the resulting Arctic ice melt, enough to raise sea levels by roughly nine feet…
“…Overpeck speculates that may have been the result of additional melting in Antarctica. After all, the ice there is not all landlocked; some rests in the ocean and a little warming in sea temperatures could melt it or pry it loose. And this time around, the warming is global, rather than concentrated in the Arctic. ‘In the Antarctic, all you have to do is break up the ice sheet and float it away and that would raise sea level,’ he says.
“Such a sea level would permanently inundate low-lying lands like New Orleans, southern Florida, Bangladesh and the Netherlands. Already sea level rise has increased to an inch per decade, thanks to melting ice and warm water expansion, according to Overpeck. And evidence that the Arctic is exponentially warming continues to accumulate…
“‘We need to start serious measures to reduce greenhouse gases within the next decade,’ Overpeck says. ‘If we don’t do something soon, we’re committed to [13 to 20 feet] of sea level rise in the future.’”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.sciam.com/ and then on our title under “Latest Science News.”
“TALES FROM THE BACK OFFICE
It is becoming easier for employees to reveal their bosses’ wrongdoings”
Our title and quotes are from the 3/23/06 THE ECONOMIST print edition:
“Sherron Watkins, a star witness in the current trial of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, respectively Enron’s former chairman and chief executive, is billed as a whistleblower. ‘Probably the closest thing to a hero to emerge from the Enron saga,’ said the WALL STREET JOURNAL. Ms Watkins fits the public’s image of what a whistleblower should be – female, feisty and ultimately vindicated, a stereotype laid down by actresses such as Julia Roberts (in ‘Erin Brockovich’) and Meryl Streep (in ‘Silkwood’) and reinforced when Ms Watkins was one of three female whistleblowers named as TIME magazine’s ‘Persons of the Year’ in 2002.
“In reality, the lives of most whistleblowers are far from glamorous. In ‘Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power’, Fred Alford, a professor at the University of Maryland, writes, ‘the average whistleblower of my experience is a 55-year-old nuclear engineer working behind the counter at Radio Shack. Divorced and in debt to his lawyers, he lives in a two-room rented apartment…
“Finally, company structures are changing, becoming more open and, via the large number of alliances and joint ventures that corporations have with each other, more open-ended. Mr. Alford says gloomily that ‘organisations are the enemy of individual morality’. But the organisation of the future may have fewer dark corners in which to hide the wrongdoings that whistleblowers attempt to bring to light. With luck, that could result in fewer broken lives.”
To read the complete article, click on
http://www.economist.com/business/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=5662830
“THE GOD PROJECT
by H. Allen Orr
What the science of religion can’t prove”
Our title and quotes are from the 06/04/03 issue of THE NEW YORKER:
“…Science has its proper domain of activity, religion has its domain, and each must refrain from interfering with the other.
“The religious opinions of scientists are, of course, a separate matter from a science of religion. And yet, whatever else religion may be, it’s something that happens in the real world in real time. So why not approach it as a natural process? Why not study it scientifically? This is the task that Daniel Dennett sets for himself in his ambitious new book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking; $25.95). Dennett, a philosopher, is steeped in science, especially evolutionary biology, and he has written several books and article with a Darwinian focus…Given his enthusiasm for all things evolutionary, and given that he called he calls himself a ‘godless philosopher,’ you might expect Breaking the Spell to be an extended exercise in debunking belief. It is not – at least, not ostensibly. Dennett’s approach to religion is reasonably respectful, though a certain bombast breaks through now and then. Writing for a general audience, Dennett insists that he wants to engage religious readers in a rational discussion, not turn them away…
“‘There was a time,’ he writes, ‘when there was no religion on this planet, and now there is lots of it. Why?’ Why did religion appear in the first place? And why did certain religions spread while others sank into obscurity?
“To answer these questions, Dennett says, we must confront two spells. The first is the taboo against asking uncomfortable questions about religion. In his view, religion is simply too important to be spared hard questions. Indeed, he argues, religion is among the most powerful forces on earth and, as religiously inspired warfare and acts of terrorism remind us, it is not always benign. The second spell, in Dennett’s account, is one cast by religion itself. Do we risk dimming religion’s numinous glow by the very act of scientific analysis?…
“Explaining the emergence of real religion requires a different kind of approach, and here things get complicated. A mind-boggling number of explanations, some biological and some economic, have been introduced over the past decade or so. One was championed by the evolutionary theorist David Sloan Wilson in his 2002 book, Darwin’s Cathedral…
“Wilson argued that religion is an adaptation of human groups in the same way that the heart is an adaptation of human individuals. Religion is, in his account, a collection of beliefs and behaviors that brings people together, coordinates their activities, and, in the end, allows groups to accomplish tasks that would otherwise be impossible. If my group’s religion is better at this than yours, my group and its religion will spread and yours will recede. Wilson suggested, for instance, that the early Christian Church succeeded against all odds because its creed of selflessness provided its adherents with a sort of welfare state. Christians banded together, aiding each other through illness, famine, and war. The resulting biological edge, he thinks, played a part in the unexpected success of this once obscure mystery cult…
“Finally, Dennett describes a recent theory according to which the spread of religions reflects the action not of Charles Darwin’s natural selection but of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. As the rational-choice theorists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke argued in their book Acts of Faith (2000), human beings, when confronted with imperfect information, behave in a way that is generally rational. So if you believe (rightly or wrongly) that there is a God, it can be perfectly rational for you to engage in exchange with this well-heeled partner (even if the commodity you most desire can be delivered only post mortem). Stark and Finke are not, then, so much concerned with why people believe in God as with how believers act and why religious institutions spread. Their key claim is that churches mediate the complex exchanges between mortals and their gods. People go to church, in other words, for much the same reason they hire a real-estate agent: when something important is at stake in a complex transition, it pays to get professional help…
To read the entire four-page article, click on http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/060403crbo_books
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