Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 10/27/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“LEASING THE RAIN
by WILLIAM FINNEGAN”
Our quotes are from the print edition of THE NEW YORKER of 04/08/02:
“…The world is running out of fresh water. There’s water everywhere, of course, but less than three per cent of it is fresh, and most of that is locked up in polar ice caps and glaciers, unrecoverable for practical purposes. Lakes, rivers, marshes, aquifers, and atmospheric vapor make up less than one per cent of the earth’s total water, and people are already using more than half of the accessible runoff. Water demand, on the other hand, has been growing rapidly – it tripled worldwide between 1950 and 1990 – and water use in many areas already exceeds nature’s ability to recharge supplies. By 2025, the demand for water around the world is expected to exceed supply by fifty-six per cent.
“Some of the resource depletion is visible from outer space. The Aral Sea, in central Asia, was until recently the world’s fourth-largest lake. Then Soviet planners dammed and diverted its source waters for cotton irrigation. The Aral has since lost half its area and three-fourths of its volume. Its once great fisheries have vanished; all twenty-four species native to the lake are believed to be extinct. The local climate has changed, and dust storms now plague the region.
“Aquifer depletion, though less visible, is an even more serious problem. There is sixty times as much fresh water stored underground as in lakes and rivers aboveground. And yet parts of northern China, to take one example, are approaching groundwater bankruptcy. Beijing’s water table has dropped more than a hundred feet in the past forty years. In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer, which reaches from Texas to South Dakota and is indispensable to farming on the Great Plains, is being drained eight times faster than it can naturally recharge…
“Annual rainfall is not always a measure of water wealth. Poland, for instance, gets plenty of rain, but its lakes, rivers, and groundwater are so polluted that it has as little usable water as Bahrain. Arid regions with the means to pay (Southern California, the Persian Gulf States) already pipe water in from wetter areas. New technologies are being hurriedly developed: huge fabric bags holding millions of gallons of fresh water are being hauled by barges across the Mediterranean, and there are businessmen in Alaska who believe that the state’s earnings from fresh water will eventually dwarf its earnings from oil…”
To read this entire article, click on http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bolivia/leasing.html
“SAFE AS HOUSES?
By James Surowiecki
Our quotes are from the 2006/10/30 print edition of THE NEW YORKER:
“…But if you’re trying to figure out what kind of investment housing is – what rewards you can expect and what risks you’ll run – median prices become a lot less useful. In the first place, the data don’t adjust for improvements in quality. People have been building bigger homes – the typical new home is about twenty-five per cent bigger than it was twenty years ago – and putting money into improvements like central air-conditioning, home theatres, and pools. And the impact of quality adjustments isn’t trivial; a study of home prices between 1977 and 2003 found that adjusting for quality reduced the return to homeowners by forty per cent.
“As for the much vaunted statistic about housing prices never falling for a full year since the Depression? That’s true only if you forget about inflation. When you adjust for it, you find long stretches when housing prices tumbled and then stayed low for years; nationally, real home prices were actually eight per cent lower in 1991 than they were in 1979. What makes the problem worse is that sellers have recently been offering buyers huge incentives, ranging from granite counters to free cars and, in some cases, large rebates. These are, in fact, price cuts, but they never make it into the data.
“Then, there’s the problem of sample bias. When you hear that housing prices in a city have gone up, you assume that all the homes in the city have become more valuable. But the numbers reflect only the homes that were actually sold in a given month, and, if more of those homes happen to be expensive, it’ll make the market as a whole look strong even if it’s really quite weak. This is what leads to the curious phenomenon of median prices rising even as the number of sales is plummeting and the backlog of houses on the market is soaring.
“…The economist Robert Shiller, meanwhile, has created an index that controls for quality by tracking repeated sales of the same houses over more than a century. Together, these numbers give us a better picture of what happens to housing prices over time. And though they show that housing prices have risen sharply in the past decade, they also show that, over the longer haul, investing in a home is far from a sure thing; if you control for inflation and quality, Shiller found, real home prices barely budged between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-nineties. The idea that housing prices have nowhere to go but up is, in other words, a statistical illusion…”
To read the complete article, click on http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/061030ta_talk_surowiecki
“SATELLITE-PHOTO ATLAS USES DIGITAL GLOBE TO SHOW ECO DAMAGE”
Our quotes are from the 10/13/06 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NEWS:
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, digital satellite imagery could inspire tomes’ worth of new environmental policies. At least that’s the hope of the designers behind the Atlas of Our Changing Environment, a unique new Web site that uses a digital map framework to catalog damage inflicted on the Earth over the last few decades…
“The new site is based on Google Earth, a popular desktop program that displays a virtual globe comprising high-resolution satellite images from government and private sources. The U.S. branch of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) partnered with Google to create a ‘layer’ of data that users can navigate using Google Earth or view in a Web browser…
“One entry shows images of Iguazu National Park – which stretches over Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina – taken in 1973 and in 2003. The dramatic differences between the images illustrate how much rain forest has been lost to farmland and other human uses in a span of 20 years.
“Another pairing shows the shrinking of Africa’s Lake Chad between 1972 and 2001 due to lack of rainfall and upstream diversion of water by humans.
“Once the sixth-largest lake in the world, Lake Chad has shrunk from 8,843 square miles in 1963… to less than 117 square miles today…
To read the complete article, click on
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/061023-environment-map.html
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