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The Climate Divide: Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.
In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.
Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm — and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face — tend to be the richest.
To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.
“The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. “But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”
The large, industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in midlatitude regions with Goldilocks climates — neither too hot nor too cold.
Many enjoy gifts like the thick, rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand.
But a bigger factor is their wealth — wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life.
The United States, where agriculture represents just 4 percent of the economy, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas and about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture.
As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of greenhouse gases; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide.
But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere’s natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases. China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.
Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
The obligation of the established greenhouse-gas emitters to help those most imperiled by warming derives from the longstanding legal concept that “the polluter pays,” many experts say.
“We have an obligation to help countries prepare for the climate changes that we are largely responsible for,” said Peter H. Gleick, the founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Berkeley, Calif. His institute has been tracking trends like the burst of new desalination plants in wealthy places running short of water.
“If you drive your car into your neighbor’s living room, don’t you owe your neighbor something?” Dr. Gleick said. “On this planet, we’re driving the climate car into our neighbors’ living room, and they don’t have insurance and we do.”
Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks, while poverty, geography and history place some of the world’s most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm’s way.
Here are four views of the climate divide.
Prone to Drought, and All but Unable to Predict the Weather
BLANTYRE, Malawi, March 29 — Twice a day, 25-year-old Harold Nkhoma checks a series of gauges at the government’s weather station here in Malawi’s second-biggest city.
He skips the barometer because its light doesn’t work and he can’t read the figures. He has waited six months for new batteries.
He ignores the evaporation pan designed to show how quickly water is absorbed into the soil. Peeled-off paint and missing wire mesh have left it useless. And he bypasses the glass sphere that measures the duration of sunshine by burning marks on paper strips. It has been out of paper for four years.
His supervisor, Werani Chilenga, is disgusted. Broken equipment, outmoded technology, slipshod data and a sparse scattering of weather stations are all that his national agency can manage on a $160,000 budget.
“We cannot even know the duration of sunshine in our country for four years, so how can we measure climate change?” said Mr. Chilenga, a meteorological engineer. “Oh, oh, it is pathetic!”
The lack of meteorological data is just one challenge as Malawi struggles to cope with global warming. Add to that a lack of irrigation; overdependence on a single crop, maize; shrinking fish stocks; vanishing forests; and land degradation.
Last March, Malawi, which has a population of 14 million people and is one of the world’s poorest countries, identified $23 million worth of urgent measures it should take in the next three years. It delivered them to the United Nations program that helps poor nations deal with climate change.
A year later, the government is still negotiating with donors. “It is sad that up until now we have not gotten the monies that have been talked about,” said Henry Chimunthu Banda, the minister of environmental affairs. That is not to say Malawi is standing still. The government is moving toward bigger grain reserves, changes in agricultural practices and construction of a new dam. Nine out of 10 Malawians are subsistence farmers.
Austin Kampen, 39, is an early adapter. A nonprofit group last year gave him hoses and a huge bucket — a rudimentary but effective crop sprinkler system.
He plants a variety of maize more likely to survive shorter growing seasons and backs it up with cotton, vegetables, potatoes and cassava.
He still lost his entire harvest in January when the river overflowed after a week of nonstop rain, submerging his seven-acre field and leaving 75 of his neighbors homeless. Still, he said, he will manage to plant anew this season.
Another farmer, Jessie Kaunde, also aims for resilience. But her bravest effort failed.
Armed with a $68 loan, she dug two fish ponds in 1999 behind her house north of Blantyre. Since drought struck three years ago, they are nothing but giant grassy pits.
“I am really disappointed,” she said.
One reason is that other farmers have planted by the river that fed her ponds, causing the riverbanks to cave in and disrupt the water flow. Such planting is illegal but enforcement is weak, said Everhart Nangoma, an environmental specialist formerly with CURE, a nonprofit group focusing partly on climate change.
“Malawi is getting ready, but we are not there,” Mr. Nangoma said. “We are not ready at all.” - SHARON LAFRANIERE
Prone to Drought, but Moving Ahead on Desalination
PERTH, Australia, March 27 — Looking out over a sparkling blue bay on Australia’s west coast, Gary Crisp, an alchemist for the new century, saw an ocean of drinking water.
Behind him was an industrial park filled with tanks, pipes, screens, filters and chemicals for converting seawater into drinking water — 17 percent of the water supply for this city of 1.5 million people.
As the world warms and clean water becomes a prized commodity, the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant is using the renewable resources of wind and ocean to produce it, along with a finite resource that is less available in many other countries: money.
The $313 million plant, among the largest in world (behind giant plants in Israel and the United Arab Emirates), opened in November and is already running at capacity, producing up to 38 million gallons of water a day, nearly enough to fill 100 Olympic-size swimming pools.
The seawater is sucked into the plant through a pipeline whose mouth is 200 yards offshore. Once inside, it is filtered through fine membranes in a complex process called reverse osmosis.
About half the water is purified and sent into the city water system to mingle with water from other sources. The salt remains in the other half, which is flushed back out to the ocean.
The plant is one of the newest in a rapid spread of desalination plants in countries that can afford them. Though the plants are expensive to build, water from them costs only $3.50 per 1,000 gallons. They are commonplace in the Middle East, where oil pays for water, and Southern California is home to many smaller plants. What sets the Perth plant apart is not only its size but its engine — wind power.
The plant is driven by power from 48 turbines in the Emu Downs Wind Farm, about 100 miles to the north, that can produce 80 megawatts of electricity a day, more than three times the needs of the plant. That avoids the trade-off at most desalination plants, which are powered by fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.
“We call it alchemy — converting wind to water,” said Mr. Crisp, the Perth plant’s principal desalination engineer.
The treated water offers people here in the world’s most arid continent “security through diversity,” in the local phrase, complementing dams, aquifers and recycling. Water conservation could be a powerful tool, but few politicians dare to suggest any measures more aggressive than limiting the use of lawn sprinklers — a privation Perth’s plant is helping to avoid.
Half the water used domestically in Perth goes to gardens, Mr. Crisp said; of the water used indoors, 30 percent goes into washing machines. Affluent suburbs use twice as much water as the city proper, he said.
Australia is suffering some of the worst droughts in its recorded history. Stream flows into dams in Perth have shrunk by two-thirds in the last 30 years, even as its population swells by more than 20,000 people a year.
Perth is talking about building one or two more plants in the coming years, and similar plants are in the early stages of development in Sydney and the town of Tugun in Queensland.
Having proved itself, the plant will have its official opening next month. Standing by the sparkling blue bay, people will be invited to drink from small plastic bottles bearing labels that read, “Limited edition desalinated water from the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant.” - SETH MYDANS
At Risk From Floods, and Defensless When the Rivers Rise
DHANAUR, India, March 28 —Year after year, the Baghmati river swells with the rains and, rushing down from the Himalayas, submerges this back-of-beyond village into utter ruin.
Year after year, it sweeps away cattle and goats. It sends mud houses collapsing back into the earth. It kills dozens of people in and around Dhanaur, and that’s during a mild monsoon, like last year, when Pavan Devi’s 19-year-old son, Vikas Kumar, went to a communal toilet in the fields and was swept away by a fast-moving stream.
In 2004, the last major flood, the death toll stood at 351 in Bihar state, which is home to this village and many others sitting on some of the most vulnerable floodplains in India.
Their vulnerability is likely to grow. Since 1950, in concert with global warming, monsoon rains over India have increasingly come as heavy downpours rather than gentle showers, Indian scientists reported last year. That pattern is raising the risk of sudden floods.
Cities are prone to peril as well: In 2005, 37 inches of rain in 24 hours crippled the country’s commercial capital, Mumbai, killing 400 people.
The picture here in this destitute, crowded corner shows how ill-equipped India remains in dealing with that looming danger, despite its newfound prosperity. Nationwide, about 20 million acres of land are affected by floods each year, according to the government; they affect 4.2 million Indians each year on average, according to Columbia University.
Here in Dhanaur, for nearly three months of monsoon, everyone lives at the water’s mercy. The well-off save their firewood and food grains for the annual disaster. The poor beg and borrow to eat, and they camp out on higher ground in tents made of cement bags.
They bathe and defecate in the floodwater. They drink from it, too. Who can afford to boil it before drinking, a father of six named Hira Majhi asked. With prices more than doubling during the rainy season, there is never enough money for cooking fuel, and hand pumps are routinely submerged. Last year, after his 4-year-old son contracted black fever, a deadly disease endemic here, Mr. Majhi rowed for an hour, in a homemade canoe made of water hyacinth leaves. No government ambulances ply here.
The most vulnerable to these annual floods are those who sit lowest on the pecking order. Mr. Majhi, for instance, belongs to a low caste group so poor for so long that they are commonly known as musahars, or the rat-eaters. He is landless. He works on other people’s fields, usually only during the sowing and harvesting seasons. Because the land remains under water for so long, there is only one harvest each year. Floods and droughts hit families like his the hardest of all.
The measures taken by the government to adapt to the annual floods are rudimentary at best. Some parts of the road have been built with conduits underneath to let water pass, but the road itself is pocked with gaping craters, and locals say it is usually impassable for weeks at a time during the rains. No embankments have been built; construction upstream was suspended 30 years ago, though it is scheduled to resume later this year. Enterprising villagers have built bamboo bridges.
Last year, for the first time, the government put an early warning system into effect. Local officials went around with a bullhorn, on cycle-pulled rickshaws, warning of imminent floods. But there were no shelters to go to, except the local village school, where there was no drinking water or latrines.
In mid-March, the Baghmati rose up during an unexpectedly early spring flood. In less than a day, it wreaked havoc.
Sunil Kumar, one of the more well-to-do farmers here, lost three acres of wheat, a third of his annual income. He walked across his own soggy field and then across his neighbor’s, examining patches of barley and mustard and peas — all waterlogged and ruined.
“It is our misfortune living here,” he said. “There is no system of water control.” - SOMINI SENGUPTA
At Risk From Floods, but Looking Ahead With Floating Houses
MAASBOMMEL, the Netherlands, March 29 — Anne van der Molen lives on the edge of the River Maas, by definition an insecure spot in a country constantly trying to keep water at bay. But she is ready for the next flood.
Excited, even. “We haven’t floated,” she said of her house, “but we’re looking forward to floating.”
Her two-bedroom, two-story house, which cost about $420,000, is not a houseboat, and not a floating house of the sort common across the world. It is amphibious: resting on land but built to rise with the water level. It sits on a hollow concrete foundation and is attached to six iron posts sunk into the lake bottom. Should the river swell, as it often does in the rain, the house will float up as much as 18 feet, held in place by two horizontal mooring posts that connect it to the neighboring house, and then float back down as the water subsides.
It is part of a new experiment in living. The 46 houses here are meant to address two issues at the heart of the housing debate in this low-lying, densely populated country, said Steven de Boer, a concept developer at Dura Vermeer, the company that developed the project. These are lack of space for new housing to meet a growing demand and the need to anticipate relentlessly rising sea levels and a heightened chance of flooding rains because of climate change.
Worries about water levels are not a hypothetical issue here in this village in Gelderland province, southeast of Amsterdam. In 1995, the Maas and other rivers overflowed their banks and breached the dikes, forcing 250,000 people to evacuate their homes. Now the dikes are higher, but with a possible sea-level rise of several feet within a century or so, much more is needed.
“All the universities are united in one big program with the government; we have a team of some 500 people working on climate-proofing the Netherlands,” said Pier Vellinga, a professor of climate change at the University of Amsterdam. “Whatever happens — Greenland melting or tropical storms surging on the Atlantic — we are here to stay. That is becoming our national slogan.”
That means developing new guidelines for building in flood-prone areas, introducing insurance for those who live in exposed places, building higher dikes and exploring ways for farmers to adapt to a new agricultural landscape.
For private firms, it means experimenting with new housing, as Dura Vermeer is doing here in Maasbommel. The company has also built a floating greenhouse near the Hague and, along with other firms, has received government approval to try other kinds of housing in 15 areas in the country at risk for flooding. Other proposals — for entire floating cities, for instance — are still preliminary, but are being talked about seriously as a possible way forward.
In Maasbommel, Mrs. van de Molen loves the feeling of almost being part of the river.
“Dutch people have always had to fight against the water,” she said. “This is another way of thinking about it. This is a way to enjoy the water, to work with it instead of against it.” - SARAH LYALL
Forastronautical:
Drugs Are in the Water. Does It Matter?
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
Residues of birth control pills, antidepressants, painkillers, shampoos and a host of other compounds are finding their way into the nation’s waterways, and they have public health and environmental officials in a regulatory quandary.
On the one hand, there is no evidence the traces of the chemicals found so far are harmful to human beings. On the other hand, it would seem cavalier to ignore them.
The pharmaceutical and personal care products, or P.P.C.P.’s, are being flushed into the nation’s rivers from sewage treatment plants or leaching into groundwater from septic systems. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, researchers have found these substances, called “emerging contaminants,” almost everywhere they have looked for them.
Most experts say their discovery reflects better sensing technology as much as anything else. Still, as Hal Zenick of the agency’s office of research and development put it in an e-mail message, “there is uncertainty as to the risk to humans.”
In part, that is because the extent and consequences of human exposure to these compounds, especially in combination, are “unknown,” the Food and Drug Administration said in a review issued in 2005. And aging and increasingly medicated Americans are using more of these products than ever.
So officials who deal with these compounds have the complex task of balancing reassurance that they take the situation seriously with reassurance that there is probably nothing to worry about. As a result, scientists in several government and private agencies are devising new ways to measure and analyze the compounds, determine their prevalence in the environment, figure out where they come from, how they move, where they end up and if they have any effects.
In many cases, the compounds enter the water when people excrete them or wash them away in the shower. But some are flushed or washed down the drain when people discard outdated or unused drugs. So a number of states and localities around the country have started discouraging pharmacies, hospitals, nursing homes and residents from disposing of drugs this way. Some are setting up “pharmaceutical take-back locations” in drugstores or even police stations. Others are adding pharmaceuticals to the list of hazardous household waste, like leftover paint or insecticides, periodically collected for safe disposal, often by incineration.
For example, Clark County, Wash., has a program in which residents with unwanted or expired drugs can take so-called controlled substances, like prescription narcotics, to police stations or sheriffs’ offices for disposal. They can drop noncontrolled drugs at participating pharmacies, and 80 percent of the pharmacies in the county participate.
In guidelines issued in February, three federal agencies, including the E.P.A., advised people with leftover medicines to flush them down the drain “only if the accompanying patient information specifically instructs it is safe to do so.” Otherwise, the guidelines say, they should dispose of them in the trash (mixed with “an undesirable substance” like kitty litter to discourage drug-seeking Dumpster divers) or by taking them to designated take-back locations.
Worries about water-borne chemicals flared last summer when researchers at the United States Geological Survey said they had discovered “intersex fish” in the Potomac River and its tributaries. The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, were male but nevertheless carried immature eggs.
Scientists who worked on the project said they did not know what was causing the situation, or even if it was a new phenomenon. But the discovery renewed fears that hormone residues or chemicals that mimic them might be affecting creatures that live in the water.
In a survey begun in 1999, the agency surveyed 139 streams around the country and found that 80 percent of samples contained residues of drugs like painkillers, hormones, blood pressure medicines or antibiotics. The agency said the findings suggested that the compounds were more prevalent and more persistent than had been thought.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration started looking into the effects of residues of antibiotics and antiseptics in water, not just to see if they might affect people but also to assess their potential to encourage the development of drug-resistant bacteria.
Reports of contamination with pharmaceutical residues can be alarming, even when there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed. In 2004, for example, the British government reported that eight commonly used drugs had been detected in rivers receiving effluent from sewage treatment plants. A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it was “extremely unlikely” that the residues threatened people, because they were present in very low concentrations. Nevertheless, news reports portrayed a nation of inadvertent drug users — “a case of hidden mass medication of the unsuspecting public,” as one member of Parliament was quoted as saying.
Christopher Daughton, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency and one of the first scientists to draw attention to the issue, said P.P.C.P. concentrations in municipal water supplies were even lower than they were in water generally because treatments like chlorination and filtration with activated charcoal alter or remove many chemicals. Dr. Daughton, who works at the agency’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas, said he believed that if any living being suffered ill effects from these compounds, it would be fish and other creatures that live in rivers and streams.
Dr. Daughton and Thomas A. Ternes of the ESWE-Institute for Water Research and Water Technology in Germany brought the issue to scientific prominence in 1999, in a paper in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. They noted that pollution research efforts had focused almost exclusively on “conventional” pollutants — substances that were known or suspected to be carcinogenic or immediately toxic. They urged researchers to pay more attention to pharmaceuticals and ingredients in personal care products — not only prescription drugs and biologics, but also diagnostic agents, fragrances, sunscreen compounds and many other substances.
They theorized that chronic exposure to low levels of these compounds could produce effects in water-dwelling creatures that would accumulate so slowly that they would be “undetectable or unnoticed” until it was too late to reverse them. The effects might be so insidious, they wrote, that they would be attributed to some slow-moving force like evolution or ecological change.
Initial efforts concentrate on measuring what is getting into the nation’s surface and groundwater. The discharge of pharmaceutical residues from manufacturing plants is well documented and controlled, according to the E.P.A., but the contribution from individuals in sewage or septic systems “has been largely overlooked.”
And unlike pesticides, which are intentionally released in measured applications, or industrial discharges in air and water, whose effects have also been studied in relative detail, the environmental agency says, pharmaceutical residues pass unmeasured through wastewater treatment facilities that have not been designed to deal with them.
Many of the compounds in question break down quickly in the environment. In theory, that would lessen their potential to make trouble, were it not for the fact that many are in such wide use that they are constantly replenished in the water.
And researchers suspect that the volume of P.P.C.P.’s excreted into the nation’s surface water and groundwater is increasing. For one thing, per capita drug use is on the rise, not only with the introduction of new drugs but also with the use of existing drugs for new purposes and among new or expanding groups of patients, like children and aging baby boomers.
Also, more localities are introducing treated sewage into drinking water supplies. Researchers who have studied the issue say there is no sign that pharmaceutical residues accumulate as water is recycled. On the other hand, the F.D.A. said in its review, many contaminants “survive wastewater treatment and biodegradation, and can be detected at low levels in the environment.”
Some say the spread of these substances in the environment is an example of how the products of science and technology can have unintended and unpredictable effects. In their view, when the knowledge about these effects is sketchy, it is best to act to reduce risk, even if the extent of the risk is unknown, an approach known as the precautionary principle.
Joel A. Tickner, an environmental scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, says that it is a mistake to consider all of these compounds safe “by default,” and that more must be done to assess their cumulative effects, individually or in combination, even at low doses.
In his view, the nation’s experience with lead additives, asbestos and other substances shows it can be costly — in lives, health and dollars — to defer action until evidence of harm is overwhelming.
Others say the benefits of action — banning some compounds, say, or requiring widespread testing or treatment for others — should at least equal and if possible outweigh their costs.
“You have to somehow estimate as well as possible what the likely harms are and the likely benefits,” said James K. Hammitt, a professor of economics and decision sciences at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.
And while it is possible that some of the tens of thousands of chemicals that might find their way into water supplies are more dangerous in combination than they are separately, Dr. Hammitt said in an interview, “it’s perfectly possible that they counteract each other.”
Anyway, he said, assessing their risk in combination is a mathematical problem of impossible complexity. “The combinatorics of this are truly hopeless.”
Given all this uncertainty, policy makers find it difficult to know what to do, other than continuing their research. Studies of “the fate and transport and persistence” of the P.P.C.P.’s will allow scientists to make better estimates of people’s exposure to them, Dr. Zenick said, and “to assess the potential for human health effects.”
But even that normally anodyne approach comes under question because of something scientists call “the nocebo effect” — real, adverse physiological reactions people sometimes develop when they learn they have been exposed to something — even if there is no evidence it may be harmful.
“The nocebo effect could play a key role in the development of adverse health consequences from exposure even to trace elements of contaminants simply by the power of suggestion,” Dr. Daughton wrote recently in a paper in a special issue of Ground Water Monitoring and Remediation, a publication of the National Ground Water Association, an organization of scientists, engineers and businesses related to the use of groundwater.
In fact, the idea that there are unwanted chemicals in the water supply has many characteristics that researchers who study risk perception say particularly provoke dread, regardless of their real power to harm. The phenomenon is new (or newly known), and the compounds are invisible and artificial rather than naturally occurring.
But scientists at agencies like the Geological Survey say it is important to understand the prevalence and actions of these compounds, even at low levels. If more is known about them, agency scientists say, researchers will be better able to predict their behavior, especially if they should start turning up at higher concentrations. Also, the Geological Survey says, tracking them at low levels is crucial to determining whether they have additive effects when they occur together in the environment.
Comprehensive chemical analysis of water supplies “is costly, extraordinarily time-consuming, and viewed by risk managers as prompting yet additional onerous and largely unanswerable questions,” Dr. Daughton wrote in his paper last year.
But it should be done anyway, he said, because it is a useful way of maintaining public confidence in the water supply.
“My work is really categorized as anticipatory research,” he added. “You are trying to flesh out a new topic, develop it further and see where it leads you. You don’t really know where it leads.”
DNA Boosts Herodotus’ Account of Etruscans as Migrants to Italy
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
Geneticists have added an edge to a 2,500-year-old debate over the origin of the Etruscans, a people whose brilliant and mysterious civilization dominated northwestern Italy for centuries until the rise of the Roman republic in 510 B.C. Several new findings support a view held by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus — but unpopular among archaeologists — that the Etruscans originally migrated to Italy from the Near East.
Though Roman historians played down their debt to the Etruscans, Etruscan culture permeated Roman art, architecture and religion. The Etruscans were master metallurgists and skillful seafarers who for a time dominated much of the Mediterranean. They enjoyed unusually free social relations, much remarked on by ancient historians of other cultures.
“Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom,” wrote the Greek historian Theopompos of Chios in the fourth century B.C. “Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise often. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. Further, they dine not with their own husbands, but with any men who happen to be present.”
He added that Etruscan women “are also expert drinkers and are very good looking.”
Etruscan culture was very advanced and very different from other Italian cultures of the time. But most archaeologists have seen a thorough continuity between a local Italian culture known as the Villanovan that emerged around 900 B.C. and the Etruscan culture, which began in 800 B.C.
“The overwhelming proportion of archaeologists would regard the evidence for eastern origins of the Etruscans as negligible,” said Anthony Tuck, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts Center for Etruscan Studies.
Because Italians take pride in the Roman empire and the Etruscan state that preceded it, asserting a foreign origin for the Etruscans has long been politically controversial in Italy. Massimo Pallottino, the dean of modern Etruscan studies in Italy who died in 1995, held that because no one questioned that the French, say, developed in France, the same assumption should be made about the Etruscans. “Someone who had a different position didn’t get a job in archaeology,” said Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia.
Even so, a nagging question has remained. Could the Etruscans have arrived from somewhere else in the Mediterranean world, bringing their sophisticated culture with them?
One hint of such an origin is that the Etruscan language, which survives in thousands of inscriptions, appears not to be Indo-European, the language family that started to sweep across Europe sometime after 8,500 years ago, developing into Latin, English and many other tongues. Another hint is the occurrence of inscriptions in a language apparently related to Etruscan on Lemnos, a Greek island just off the coast of Turkey. But whether Lemnian is the parent language of Etruscan, or the other way around, is not yet clear, said Rex Wallace, an expert on Etruscan linguistics at the University of Massachusetts.
An even more specific link to the Near East is a short statement by Herodotus that the Etruscans emigrated from Lydia, a region on the eastern coast of ancient Turkey. After an 18-year famine in Lydia, Herodotus reports, the king dispatched half the population to look for a better life elsewhere. Under the leadership of his son Tyrrhenus, the emigrating Lydians built ships, loaded all the stores they needed, and sailed from Smyrna (now the Turkish port of Izmir) until reaching Umbria in Italy.
Despite the specificity of Herodotus’ account, archaeologists have long been skeptical of it. There are also fanciful elements in Herodotus’ story, like the Lydians’ being the inventors of games like dice because they needed distractions to take their minds off the famine. And Lydian, unlike Etruscan, is definitely an Indo-European language. Other ancient historians entered the debate. Thucydides favored a Near Eastern provenance, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus declared the Etruscans native to Italy.
What has brought Italian geneticists into the discussion are new abilities to sequence DNA and trace people’s origins. In 2004, a team led by Guido Barbujani at the University of Ferrara extracted mitochondrial DNA from 30 individuals buried in Etruscan sites throughout Italy. Their goal was to see whether Etruscans’ DNA was more like that of modern Italians or of people from the Near East.
But this study quickly came under attack. Working with ancient DNA is extremely difficult, because most bones from archaeological sites have been carelessly handled. Extensively contamination with modern human DNA can swamp the signal of what little ancient DNA may still survive.Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, a geneticist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, wrote that the DNA recovered from the Etruscan bones showed clear signs of such problems.
With the geneticists in disarray, archaeologists had been able to dismiss their results. But a new set of genetic studies being reported seems likely to lend greater credence to Herodotus’ long-disputed account.
Three new and independent sources of genetic data all point to the conclusion that Etruscan culture was imported to Italy from somewhere in the Near East.
One study is based on the mitochondrial DNA of residents of Murlo, a small former Etruscan town in an out-of-the-way place whose population may not have changed all that much since Etruscan times.
Mitchondrial DNA holds clues to geographical origins, because local mutations produced traceable lineages as people spread from the ancestral homeland of modern humans in northeastern Africa. Some lineages are found only in Africa, some in Europe and others in Asia.
The Murlo residents’ lineages are quite different from those of people in other Italian towns. When placed on a chart of mitochondrial lineages from Europe and the Near East, the people of Murlo map closest to Palestinians and Syrians, a team led by Dr. Torroni and Alessandro Achilli reports in the April issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.
In Tuscany as a whole, part of the ancient Etruscan region of Etruria, the Torroni team found 11 minor mitochondrial DNA lineages that occur nowhere else in Europe and are shared only with Near Eastern people. These findings, the teams says, “support a direct and rather recent genetic input from the Near East, a scenario in agreement with the Lydian origin of the Etruscans.”
Dr. Torroni said he had data awaiting publication that are based on Y chromosomes and point to the same conclusion.
A third source of genetic data on Etruscan origins has been developed by Marco Pellecchia and Paolo Ajmone-Marsan at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza. Tuscany has four ancient unusual breeds of cattle, including the giant Chianina. Analyzing the mitochondrial DNA of these and seven other breeds of Italian cattle, Dr. Ajmone-Marsan found that the Tuscan breeds genetically resembled cattle of the Near East, whereas the other Italian breeds grouped with cattle of northern Europe.
One explanation could be that people in Etruria had imported cattle from the Near East at some time. But given Dr. Torroni’s finding that the people, too, have a Near Eastern signature in their genes, the best explanation is that “both humans and cattle reached Etruria from the Eastern Mediterranean by sea,” Dr. Ajmone-Marsan and his colleagues said in a report published online in February in The Proceedings of the Royal Society. This explanation fits with Herodotus’ remark that the Etruscans brought with them everything they needed.
The data from the cattle DNA has also let the researchers calculate that the time at which the Tuscan and the Near Eastern cattle were part of the same population was 6,400 to 1,600 years ago, implying that the Etruscans set sail in this period.
The new findings may prompt specialists to look for an arrival date compatible with the archaeological and linguistic data, which essentially means before the proto-Villanovan culture of 1100 to 900 B.C.
“I’m willing to believe that people speaking a prehistoric form of Etruscan came from the Near East — who knows where? — and settled in Italy at some point in the early Bronze Age,” said Dr. Wallace.
The Bronze Age in Europe began around 1800 B.C. Dr. Tuck, the archaeologist, said he supposed that “three clear genetic threads linking a Tuscan population, human or bovine, to groups in the Near East is pretty compelling evidence.”
If the proto-Villanovan culture signifies the Etruscans’ arrival, it is surprising that no similar culture is known from ancient Turkey, he said.
Maria Bonghi Jovino, an Etruscan expert at the University of Milan, said the cultural discontinuity seen at the beginning of the proto-Villanovan culture probably represented the arrival of small groups of traders or prospectors, not a mass immigration.
As for Herodotus, Ms. Jovino said she believed, liked most modern historians, “that he does not always report real historical facts.” often referring to oral tradition.
But at least on the matter of Etruscan origins, it seems that Herodotus may yet enjoy the last laugh.
A Conversation With Philip G. Zimbardo: Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO — At Philip G. Zimbardo’s town house here, the walls are covered with masks from Indonesia, Africa and the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Zimbardo, a social psychologist and the past president of the American Psychological Association, has made his reputation studying how people disguise the good and bad in themselves and under what conditions either is expressed.
His Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, known as the S.P.E. in social science textbooks, showed how anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The road that took him from Stanford to Abu Ghraib is described in his new book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” (Random House).
“I’ve always been curious about the psychology of the person behind the mask,” Dr. Zimbardo said as he displayed his collection. “When someone is anonymous, it opens the door to all kinds of antisocial behavior, as seen by the Ku Klux Klan.”
Q. For those who never studied it in their freshman psychology class, can you describe the Stanford Prison Experiment?
A. In the summer of 1971, we set up a mock prison on the Stanford University campus. We took 23 volunteers and randomly divided them into two groups. These were normal young men, students. We asked them to act as “prisoners” and “guards” might in a prison environment. The experiment was to run for two weeks.
By the end of the first day, nothing much was happening. But on the second day, there was a prisoner rebellion. The guards came to me: “What do we do?”
“It’s your prison,” I said, warning them against physical violence. The guards then quickly moved to psychological punishment, though there was physical abuse, too.
In the ensuing days, the guards became ever more sadistic, denying the prisoners food, water and sleep, shooting them with fire-extinguisher spray, throwing their blankets into dirt, stripping them naked and dragging rebels across the yard.
How bad did it get? The guards ordered the prisoners to simulate sodomy. Why? Because the guards were bored. Boredom is a powerful motive for evil. I have no idea how much worse things might have gotten.
Q. Why did you pull the plug on the experiment?
A. On the fifth night, my former graduate student Christina Maslach came by. She witnessed the guards putting bags over the prisoners’ heads, chain their legs and march them around. Chris ran out in tears. “I’m not sure I want to have anything more to do with you, if this is the sort of person you are,” she said. “It’s terrible what you’re doing to those boys.” I thought, “Oh my God, she’s right.”
Q. What’s the difference between your study and the ones performed at Yale in 1961? There, social psychologist Stanley Milgram ordered his subjects to give what they thought were painful and possibly lethal shocks to complete strangers. Most complied.
A. In a lot of ways, the studies are bookends in our understanding of evil. Milgram quantified the small steps that people take when they do evil. He showed that an authority can command people to do things they believe they’d never do. I wanted to take that further. Milgram’s study only looked at one aspect of behavior, obedience to authority, in short 50-minute takes. The S.P.E., because it was slated to go for two weeks, was almost like a forerunner of reality television. You could see behavior unfolding hour by hour, day by day.
Here’s something that’s sort of funny. The first time I spoke publicly about the S.P.E., Stanley Milgram told me: “Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine.”
Q. From your book, I sense you feel some lingering guilt about organizing “the most unethical study” ever. Do you?
A. When I look back on it, I think, “Why didn’t you stop the cruelty earlier?” To stand back was contrary to my upbringing and nature.
When I stood back as a noninterfering experimental scientist, I was, in a sense, as drawn into the power of the situation as any prisoners and guards.
Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib?
A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.
That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Frederick said, up front, “What I did was wrong, and I don’t understand why I did it.”
Q. Do you understand?
A. Yeah. The situation totally corrupted him. When his reserve unit was first assigned to guard Abu Ghraib, Frederick was exactly like one of our nice young men in the S.P.E. Three months later, he was exactly like one of our worst guards.
Q. Aren’t you absolving Sergeant Frederick of personal responsibility for his actions?
A. You had the C.I.A., civilian interrogators, military intelligence saying to the Army reservists, “Soften these detainees up for interrogation.”
Those kinds of vague orders were the equivalent of my saying to the S.P.E. guards, “It’s your prison.” At Abu Ghraib, you didn’t have higher-ups saying, “You must do these terrible things.” The authorities, I believe, created an environment that gave guards permission to become abusive — plus one that gave them plausible deniability.
Chip worked 40 days without a single break, 12-hour shifts. The place was overcrowded, filthy, dangerous, under constant bombardment. All of that will distort judgment, moral reasoning. The bottom line: If you’re going to have a secret interrogation center in the middle of a war zone, this is going to happen.
Q. You keep using this phrase “the situation” to describe the underlying cause of wrongdoing. What do you mean?
A. That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The “situation” is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Q. So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart?”
A. That’s not true. Some people can be made into monsters. And the people who abused, and killed her, were.
stringy:The Climate Divide: Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
Over the last few decades, as scientists have intensified their study of the human effects on climate and of the effects of climate change on humans, a common theme has emerged: in both respects, the world is a very unequal place.
In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed the least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.
Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm — and that are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face — tend to be the richest.
To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.
“The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell,” said Robert O. Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale. “But the research is not supporting that. We’re not in it together.”
The large, industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in midlatitude regions with Goldilocks climates — neither too hot nor too cold.
Many enjoy gifts like the thick, rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand.
But a bigger factor is their wealth — wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life.
The United States, where agriculture represents just 4 percent of the economy, can endure a climatic setback far more easily than a country like Malawi, where 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas and about 40 percent of the economy is driven by rain-fed agriculture.
As big developing countries like China and India climb out of poverty, they emit their own volumes of greenhouse gases; China is about to surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide.
But they remain a small fraction of the total human contribution to the atmosphere’s natural heat-holding greenhouse effect, which is cumulative because of the long-lived nature of carbon dioxide and some other heat-trapping gases. China may be a powerhouse now, but it has contributed less than 8 percent of the total emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use since 1850, while the United States is responsible for 29 percent and Western Europe 27 percent.
Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
The obligation of the established greenhouse-gas emitters to help those most imperiled by warming derives from the longstanding legal concept that “the polluter pays,” many experts say.
“We have an obligation to help countries prepare for the climate changes that we are largely responsible for,” said Peter H. Gleick, the founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Berkeley, Calif. His institute has been tracking trends like the burst of new desalination plants in wealthy places running short of water.
“If you drive your car into your neighbor’s living room, don’t you owe your neighbor something?” Dr. Gleick said. “On this planet, we’re driving the climate car into our neighbors’ living room, and they don’t have insurance and we do.”
Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks, while poverty, geography and history place some of the world’s most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm’s way.
Here are four views of the climate divide.
Prone to Drought, and All but Unable to Predict the Weather
BLANTYRE, Malawi, March 29 — Twice a day, 25-year-old Harold Nkhoma checks a series of gauges at the government’s weather station here in Malawi’s second-biggest city.
He skips the barometer because its light doesn’t work and he can’t read the figures. He has waited six months for new batteries.
He ignores the evaporation pan designed to show how quickly water is absorbed into the soil. Peeled-off paint and missing wire mesh have left it useless. And he bypasses the glass sphere that measures the duration of sunshine by burning marks on paper strips. It has been out of paper for four years.
His supervisor, Werani Chilenga, is disgusted. Broken equipment, outmoded technology, slipshod data and a sparse scattering of weather stations are all that his national agency can manage on a $160,000 budget.
“We cannot even know the duration of sunshine in our country for four years, so how can we measure climate change?” said Mr. Chilenga, a meteorological engineer. “Oh, oh, it is pathetic!”
The lack of meteorological data is just one challenge as Malawi struggles to cope with global warming. Add to that a lack of irrigation; overdependence on a single crop, maize; shrinking fish stocks; vanishing forests; and land degradation.
Last March, Malawi, which has a population of 14 million people and is one of the world’s poorest countries, identified $23 million worth of urgent measures it should take in the next three years. It delivered them to the United Nations program that helps poor nations deal with climate change.
A year later, the government is still negotiating with donors. “It is sad that up until now we have not gotten the monies that have been talked about,” said Henry Chimunthu Banda, the minister of environmental affairs. That is not to say Malawi is standing still. The government is moving toward bigger grain reserves, changes in agricultural practices and construction of a new dam. Nine out of 10 Malawians are subsistence farmers.
Austin Kampen, 39, is an early adapter. A nonprofit group last year gave him hoses and a huge bucket — a rudimentary but effective crop sprinkler system.
He plants a variety of maize more likely to survive shorter growing seasons and backs it up with cotton, vegetables, potatoes and cassava.
He still lost his entire harvest in January when the river overflowed after a week of nonstop rain, submerging his seven-acre field and leaving 75 of his neighbors homeless. Still, he said, he will manage to plant anew this season.
Another farmer, Jessie Kaunde, also aims for resilience. But her bravest effort failed.
Armed with a $68 loan, she dug two fish ponds in 1999 behind her house north of Blantyre. Since drought struck three years ago, they are nothing but giant grassy pits.
“I am really disappointed,” she said.
One reason is that other farmers have planted by the river that fed her ponds, causing the riverbanks to cave in and disrupt the water flow. Such planting is illegal but enforcement is weak, said Everhart Nangoma, an environmental specialist formerly with CURE, a nonprofit group focusing partly on climate change.
“Malawi is getting ready, but we are not there,” Mr. Nangoma said. “We are not ready at all.” - SHARON LAFRANIERE
Prone to Drought, but Moving Ahead on Desalination
PERTH, Australia, March 27 — Looking out over a sparkling blue bay on Australia’s west coast, Gary Crisp, an alchemist for the new century, saw an ocean of drinking water.
Behind him was an industrial park filled with tanks, pipes, screens, filters and chemicals for converting seawater into drinking water — 17 percent of the water supply for this city of 1.5 million people.
As the world warms and clean water becomes a prized commodity, the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant is using the renewable resources of wind and ocean to produce it, along with a finite resource that is less available in many other countries: money.
The $313 million plant, among the largest in world (behind giant plants in Israel and the United Arab Emirates), opened in November and is already running at capacity, producing up to 38 million gallons of water a day, nearly enough to fill 100 Olympic-size swimming pools.
The seawater is sucked into the plant through a pipeline whose mouth is 200 yards offshore. Once inside, it is filtered through fine membranes in a complex process called reverse osmosis.
About half the water is purified and sent into the city water system to mingle with water from other sources. The salt remains in the other half, which is flushed back out to the ocean.
The plant is one of the newest in a rapid spread of desalination plants in countries that can afford them. Though the plants are expensive to build, water from them costs only $3.50 per 1,000 gallons. They are commonplace in the Middle East, where oil pays for water, and Southern California is home to many smaller plants. What sets the Perth plant apart is not only its size but its engine — wind power.
The plant is driven by power from 48 turbines in the Emu Downs Wind Farm, about 100 miles to the north, that can produce 80 megawatts of electricity a day, more than three times the needs of the plant. That avoids the trade-off at most desalination plants, which are powered by fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.
“We call it alchemy — converting wind to water,” said Mr. Crisp, the Perth plant’s principal desalination engineer.
The treated water offers people here in the world’s most arid continent “security through diversity,” in the local phrase, complementing dams, aquifers and recycling. Water conservation could be a powerful tool, but few politicians dare to suggest any measures more aggressive than limiting the use of lawn sprinklers — a privation Perth’s plant is helping to avoid.
Half the water used domestically in Perth goes to gardens, Mr. Crisp said; of the water used indoors, 30 percent goes into washing machines. Affluent suburbs use twice as much water as the city proper, he said.
Australia is suffering some of the worst droughts in its recorded history. Stream flows into dams in Perth have shrunk by two-thirds in the last 30 years, even as its population swells by more than 20,000 people a year.
Perth is talking about building one or two more plants in the coming years, and similar plants are in the early stages of development in Sydney and the town of Tugun in Queensland.
Having proved itself, the plant will have its official opening next month. Standing by the sparkling blue bay, people will be invited to drink from small plastic bottles bearing labels that read, “Limited edition desalinated water from the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant.” - SETH MYDANS
At Risk From Floods, and Defensless When the Rivers Rise
DHANAUR, India, March 28 —Year after year, the Baghmati river swells with the rains and, rushing down from the Himalayas, submerges this back-of-beyond village into utter ruin.
Year after year, it sweeps away cattle and goats. It sends mud houses collapsing back into the earth. It kills dozens of people in and around Dhanaur, and that’s during a mild monsoon, like last year, when Pavan Devi’s 19-year-old son, Vikas Kumar, went to a communal toilet in the fields and was swept away by a fast-moving stream.
In 2004, the last major flood, the death toll stood at 351 in Bihar state, which is home to this village and many others sitting on some of the most vulnerable floodplains in India.
Their vulnerability is likely to grow. Since 1950, in concert with global warming, monsoon rains over India have increasingly come as heavy downpours rather than gentle showers, Indian scientists reported last year. That pattern is raising the risk of sudden floods.
Cities are prone to peril as well: In 2005, 37 inches of rain in 24 hours crippled the country’s commercial capital, Mumbai, killing 400 people.
The picture here in this destitute, crowded corner shows how ill-equipped India remains in dealing with that looming danger, despite its newfound prosperity. Nationwide, about 20 million acres of land are affected by floods each year, according to the government; they affect 4.2 million Indians each year on average, according to Columbia University.
Here in Dhanaur, for nearly three months of monsoon, everyone lives at the water’s mercy. The well-off save their firewood and food grains for the annual disaster. The poor beg and borrow to eat, and they camp out on higher ground in tents made of cement bags.
They bathe and defecate in the floodwater. They drink from it, too. Who can afford to boil it before drinking, a father of six named Hira Majhi asked. With prices more than doubling during the rainy season, there is never enough money for cooking fuel, and hand pumps are routinely submerged. Last year, after his 4-year-old son contracted black fever, a deadly disease endemic here, Mr. Majhi rowed for an hour, in a homemade canoe made of water hyacinth leaves. No government ambulances ply here.
The most vulnerable to these annual floods are those who sit lowest on the pecking order. Mr. Majhi, for instance, belongs to a low caste group so poor for so long that they are commonly known as musahars, or the rat-eaters. He is landless. He works on other people’s fields, usually only during the sowing and harvesting seasons. Because the land remains under water for so long, there is only one harvest each year. Floods and droughts hit families like his the hardest of all.
The measures taken by the government to adapt to the annual floods are rudimentary at best. Some parts of the road have been built with conduits underneath to let water pass, but the road itself is pocked with gaping craters, and locals say it is usually impassable for weeks at a time during the rains. No embankments have been built; construction upstream was suspended 30 years ago, though it is scheduled to resume later this year. Enterprising villagers have built bamboo bridges.
Last year, for the first time, the government put an early warning system into effect. Local officials went around with a bullhorn, on cycle-pulled rickshaws, warning of imminent floods. But there were no shelters to go to, except the local village school, where there was no drinking water or latrines.
In mid-March, the Baghmati rose up during an unexpectedly early spring flood. In less than a day, it wreaked havoc.
Sunil Kumar, one of the more well-to-do farmers here, lost three acres of wheat, a third of his annual income. He walked across his own soggy field and then across his neighbor’s, examining patches of barley and mustard and peas — all waterlogged and ruined.
“It is our misfortune living here,” he said. “There is no system of water control.” - SOMINI SENGUPTA
At Risk From Floods, but Looking Ahead With Floating Houses
MAASBOMMEL, the Netherlands, March 29 — Anne van der Molen lives on the edge of the River Maas, by definition an insecure spot in a country constantly trying to keep water at bay. But she is ready for the next flood.
Excited, even. “We haven’t floated,” she said of her house, “but we’re looking forward to floating.”
Her two-bedroom, two-story house, which cost about $420,000, is not a houseboat, and not a floating house of the sort common across the world. It is amphibious: resting on land but built to rise with the water level. It sits on a hollow concrete foundation and is attached to six iron posts sunk into the lake bottom. Should the river swell, as it often does in the rain, the house will float up as much as 18 feet, held in place by two horizontal mooring posts that connect it to the neighboring house, and then float back down as the water subsides.
It is part of a new experiment in living. The 46 houses here are meant to address two issues at the heart of the housing debate in this low-lying, densely populated country, said Steven de Boer, a concept developer at Dura Vermeer, the company that developed the project. These are lack of space for new housing to meet a growing demand and the need to anticipate relentlessly rising sea levels and a heightened chance of flooding rains because of climate change.
Worries about water levels are not a hypothetical issue here in this village in Gelderland province, southeast of Amsterdam. In 1995, the Maas and other rivers overflowed their banks and breached the dikes, forcing 250,000 people to evacuate their homes. Now the dikes are higher, but with a possible sea-level rise of several feet within a century or so, much more is needed.
“All the universities are united in one big program with the government; we have a team of some 500 people working on climate-proofing the Netherlands,” said Pier Vellinga, a professor of climate change at the University of Amsterdam. “Whatever happens — Greenland melting or tropical storms surging on the Atlantic — we are here to stay. That is becoming our national slogan.”
That means developing new guidelines for building in flood-prone areas, introducing insurance for those who live in exposed places, building higher dikes and exploring ways for farmers to adapt to a new agricultural landscape.
For private firms, it means experimenting with new housing, as Dura Vermeer is doing here in Maasbommel. The company has also built a floating greenhouse near the Hague and, along with other firms, has received government approval to try other kinds of housing in 15 areas in the country at risk for flooding. Other proposals — for entire floating cities, for instance — are still preliminary, but are being talked about seriously as a possible way forward.
In Maasbommel, Mrs. van de Molen loves the feeling of almost being part of the river.
“Dutch people have always had to fight against the water,” she said. “This is another way of thinking about it. This is a way to enjoy the water, to work with it instead of against it.” - SARAH LYALL
For
astronautical:Drugs Are in the Water. Does It Matter?
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
Residues of birth control pills, antidepressants, painkillers, shampoos and a host of other compounds are finding their way into the nation’s waterways, and they have public health and environmental officials in a regulatory quandary.
On the one hand, there is no evidence the traces of the chemicals found so far are harmful to human beings. On the other hand, it would seem cavalier to ignore them.
The pharmaceutical and personal care products, or P.P.C.P.’s, are being flushed into the nation’s rivers from sewage treatment plants or leaching into groundwater from septic systems. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, researchers have found these substances, called “emerging contaminants,” almost everywhere they have looked for them.
Most experts say their discovery reflects better sensing technology as much as anything else. Still, as Hal Zenick of the agency’s office of research and development put it in an e-mail message, “there is uncertainty as to the risk to humans.”
In part, that is because the extent and consequences of human exposure to these compounds, especially in combination, are “unknown,” the Food and Drug Administration said in a review issued in 2005. And aging and increasingly medicated Americans are using more of these products than ever.
So officials who deal with these compounds have the complex task of balancing reassurance that they take the situation seriously with reassurance that there is probably nothing to worry about. As a result, scientists in several government and private agencies are devising new ways to measure and analyze the compounds, determine their prevalence in the environment, figure out where they come from, how they move, where they end up and if they have any effects.
In many cases, the compounds enter the water when people excrete them or wash them away in the shower. But some are flushed or washed down the drain when people discard outdated or unused drugs. So a number of states and localities around the country have started discouraging pharmacies, hospitals, nursing homes and residents from disposing of drugs this way. Some are setting up “pharmaceutical take-back locations” in drugstores or even police stations. Others are adding pharmaceuticals to the list of hazardous household waste, like leftover paint or insecticides, periodically collected for safe disposal, often by incineration.
For example, Clark County, Wash., has a program in which residents with unwanted or expired drugs can take so-called controlled substances, like prescription narcotics, to police stations or sheriffs’ offices for disposal. They can drop noncontrolled drugs at participating pharmacies, and 80 percent of the pharmacies in the county participate.
In guidelines issued in February, three federal agencies, including the E.P.A., advised people with leftover medicines to flush them down the drain “only if the accompanying patient information specifically instructs it is safe to do so.” Otherwise, the guidelines say, they should dispose of them in the trash (mixed with “an undesirable substance” like kitty litter to discourage drug-seeking Dumpster divers) or by taking them to designated take-back locations.
Worries about water-borne chemicals flared last summer when researchers at the United States Geological Survey said they had discovered “intersex fish” in the Potomac River and its tributaries. The fish, smallmouth and largemouth bass, were male but nevertheless carried immature eggs.
Scientists who worked on the project said they did not know what was causing the situation, or even if it was a new phenomenon. But the discovery renewed fears that hormone residues or chemicals that mimic them might be affecting creatures that live in the water.
In a survey begun in 1999, the agency surveyed 139 streams around the country and found that 80 percent of samples contained residues of drugs like painkillers, hormones, blood pressure medicines or antibiotics. The agency said the findings suggested that the compounds were more prevalent and more persistent than had been thought.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration started looking into the effects of residues of antibiotics and antiseptics in water, not just to see if they might affect people but also to assess their potential to encourage the development of drug-resistant bacteria.
Reports of contamination with pharmaceutical residues can be alarming, even when there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed. In 2004, for example, the British government reported that eight commonly used drugs had been detected in rivers receiving effluent from sewage treatment plants. A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said it was “extremely unlikely” that the residues threatened people, because they were present in very low concentrations. Nevertheless, news reports portrayed a nation of inadvertent drug users — “a case of hidden mass medication of the unsuspecting public,” as one member of Parliament was quoted as saying.
Christopher Daughton, a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency and one of the first scientists to draw attention to the issue, said P.P.C.P. concentrations in municipal water supplies were even lower than they were in water generally because treatments like chlorination and filtration with activated charcoal alter or remove many chemicals. Dr. Daughton, who works at the agency’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas, said he believed that if any living being suffered ill effects from these compounds, it would be fish and other creatures that live in rivers and streams.
Dr. Daughton and Thomas A. Ternes of the ESWE-Institute for Water Research and Water Technology in Germany brought the issue to scientific prominence in 1999, in a paper in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. They noted that pollution research efforts had focused almost exclusively on “conventional” pollutants — substances that were known or suspected to be carcinogenic or immediately toxic. They urged researchers to pay more attention to pharmaceuticals and ingredients in personal care products — not only prescription drugs and biologics, but also diagnostic agents, fragrances, sunscreen compounds and many other substances.
They theorized that chronic exposure to low levels of these compounds could produce effects in water-dwelling creatures that would accumulate so slowly that they would be “undetectable or unnoticed” until it was too late to reverse them. The effects might be so insidious, they wrote, that they would be attributed to some slow-moving force like evolution or ecological change.
Initial efforts concentrate on measuring what is getting into the nation’s surface and groundwater. The discharge of pharmaceutical residues from manufacturing plants is well documented and controlled, according to the E.P.A., but the contribution from individuals in sewage or septic systems “has been largely overlooked.”
And unlike pesticides, which are intentionally released in measured applications, or industrial discharges in air and water, whose effects have also been studied in relative detail, the environmental agency says, pharmaceutical residues pass unmeasured through wastewater treatment facilities that have not been designed to deal with them.
Many of the compounds in question break down quickly in the environment. In theory, that would lessen their potential to make trouble, were it not for the fact that many are in such wide use that they are constantly replenished in the water.
And researchers suspect that the volume of P.P.C.P.’s excreted into the nation’s surface water and groundwater is increasing. For one thing, per capita drug use is on the rise, not only with the introduction of new drugs but also with the use of existing drugs for new purposes and among new or expanding groups of patients, like children and aging baby boomers.
Also, more localities are introducing treated sewage into drinking water supplies. Researchers who have studied the issue say there is no sign that pharmaceutical residues accumulate as water is recycled. On the other hand, the F.D.A. said in its review, many contaminants “survive wastewater treatment and biodegradation, and can be detected at low levels in the environment.”
Some say the spread of these substances in the environment is an example of how the products of science and technology can have unintended and unpredictable effects. In their view, when the knowledge about these effects is sketchy, it is best to act to reduce risk, even if the extent of the risk is unknown, an approach known as the precautionary principle.
Joel A. Tickner, an environmental scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, says that it is a mistake to consider all of these compounds safe “by default,” and that more must be done to assess their cumulative effects, individually or in combination, even at low doses.
In his view, the nation’s experience with lead additives, asbestos and other substances shows it can be costly — in lives, health and dollars — to defer action until evidence of harm is overwhelming.
Others say the benefits of action — banning some compounds, say, or requiring widespread testing or treatment for others — should at least equal and if possible outweigh their costs.
“You have to somehow estimate as well as possible what the likely harms are and the likely benefits,” said James K. Hammitt, a professor of economics and decision sciences at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.
And while it is possible that some of the tens of thousands of chemicals that might find their way into water supplies are more dangerous in combination than they are separately, Dr. Hammitt said in an interview, “it’s perfectly possible that they counteract each other.”
Anyway, he said, assessing their risk in combination is a mathematical problem of impossible complexity. “The combinatorics of this are truly hopeless.”
Given all this uncertainty, policy makers find it difficult to know what to do, other than continuing their research. Studies of “the fate and transport and persistence” of the P.P.C.P.’s will allow scientists to make better estimates of people’s exposure to them, Dr. Zenick said, and “to assess the potential for human health effects.”
But even that normally anodyne approach comes under question because of something scientists call “the nocebo effect” — real, adverse physiological reactions people sometimes develop when they learn they have been exposed to something — even if there is no evidence it may be harmful.
“The nocebo effect could play a key role in the development of adverse health consequences from exposure even to trace elements of contaminants simply by the power of suggestion,” Dr. Daughton wrote recently in a paper in a special issue of Ground Water Monitoring and Remediation, a publication of the National Ground Water Association, an organization of scientists, engineers and businesses related to the use of groundwater.
In fact, the idea that there are unwanted chemicals in the water supply has many characteristics that researchers who study risk perception say particularly provoke dread, regardless of their real power to harm. The phenomenon is new (or newly known), and the compounds are invisible and artificial rather than naturally occurring.
But scientists at agencies like the Geological Survey say it is important to understand the prevalence and actions of these compounds, even at low levels. If more is known about them, agency scientists say, researchers will be better able to predict their behavior, especially if they should start turning up at higher concentrations. Also, the Geological Survey says, tracking them at low levels is crucial to determining whether they have additive effects when they occur together in the environment.
Comprehensive chemical analysis of water supplies “is costly, extraordinarily time-consuming, and viewed by risk managers as prompting yet additional onerous and largely unanswerable questions,” Dr. Daughton wrote in his paper last year.
But it should be done anyway, he said, because it is a useful way of maintaining public confidence in the water supply.
“My work is really categorized as anticipatory research,” he added. “You are trying to flesh out a new topic, develop it further and see where it leads you. You don’t really know where it leads.”
DNA Boosts Herodotus’ Account of Etruscans as Migrants to Italy
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
Geneticists have added an edge to a 2,500-year-old debate over the origin of the Etruscans, a people whose brilliant and mysterious civilization dominated northwestern Italy for centuries until the rise of the Roman republic in 510 B.C. Several new findings support a view held by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus — but unpopular among archaeologists — that the Etruscans originally migrated to Italy from the Near East.
Though Roman historians played down their debt to the Etruscans, Etruscan culture permeated Roman art, architecture and religion. The Etruscans were master metallurgists and skillful seafarers who for a time dominated much of the Mediterranean. They enjoyed unusually free social relations, much remarked on by ancient historians of other cultures.
“Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom,” wrote the Greek historian Theopompos of Chios in the fourth century B.C. “Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise often. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. Further, they dine not with their own husbands, but with any men who happen to be present.”
He added that Etruscan women “are also expert drinkers and are very good looking.”
Etruscan culture was very advanced and very different from other Italian cultures of the time. But most archaeologists have seen a thorough continuity between a local Italian culture known as the Villanovan that emerged around 900 B.C. and the Etruscan culture, which began in 800 B.C.
“The overwhelming proportion of archaeologists would regard the evidence for eastern origins of the Etruscans as negligible,” said Anthony Tuck, an archaeologist at the University of Massachusetts Center for Etruscan Studies.
Because Italians take pride in the Roman empire and the Etruscan state that preceded it, asserting a foreign origin for the Etruscans has long been politically controversial in Italy. Massimo Pallottino, the dean of modern Etruscan studies in Italy who died in 1995, held that because no one questioned that the French, say, developed in France, the same assumption should be made about the Etruscans. “Someone who had a different position didn’t get a job in archaeology,” said Antonio Torroni, a geneticist at the University of Pavia.
Even so, a nagging question has remained. Could the Etruscans have arrived from somewhere else in the Mediterranean world, bringing their sophisticated culture with them?
One hint of such an origin is that the Etruscan language, which survives in thousands of inscriptions, appears not to be Indo-European, the language family that started to sweep across Europe sometime after 8,500 years ago, developing into Latin, English and many other tongues. Another hint is the occurrence of inscriptions in a language apparently related to Etruscan on Lemnos, a Greek island just off the coast of Turkey. But whether Lemnian is the parent language of Etruscan, or the other way around, is not yet clear, said Rex Wallace, an expert on Etruscan linguistics at the University of Massachusetts.
An even more specific link to the Near East is a short statement by Herodotus that the Etruscans emigrated from Lydia, a region on the eastern coast of ancient Turkey. After an 18-year famine in Lydia, Herodotus reports, the king dispatched half the population to look for a better life elsewhere. Under the leadership of his son Tyrrhenus, the emigrating Lydians built ships, loaded all the stores they needed, and sailed from Smyrna (now the Turkish port of Izmir) until reaching Umbria in Italy.
Despite the specificity of Herodotus’ account, archaeologists have long been skeptical of it. There are also fanciful elements in Herodotus’ story, like the Lydians’ being the inventors of games like dice because they needed distractions to take their minds off the famine. And Lydian, unlike Etruscan, is definitely an Indo-European language. Other ancient historians entered the debate. Thucydides favored a Near Eastern provenance, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus declared the Etruscans native to Italy.
What has brought Italian geneticists into the discussion are new abilities to sequence DNA and trace people’s origins. In 2004, a team led by Guido Barbujani at the University of Ferrara extracted mitochondrial DNA from 30 individuals buried in Etruscan sites throughout Italy. Their goal was to see whether Etruscans’ DNA was more like that of modern Italians or of people from the Near East.
But this study quickly came under attack. Working with ancient DNA is extremely difficult, because most bones from archaeological sites have been carelessly handled. Extensively contamination with modern human DNA can swamp the signal of what little ancient DNA may still survive.Hans-Jürgen Bandelt, a geneticist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, wrote that the DNA recovered from the Etruscan bones showed clear signs of such problems.
With the geneticists in disarray, archaeologists had been able to dismiss their results. But a new set of genetic studies being reported seems likely to lend greater credence to Herodotus’ long-disputed account.
Three new and independent sources of genetic data all point to the conclusion that Etruscan culture was imported to Italy from somewhere in the Near East.
One study is based on the mitochondrial DNA of residents of Murlo, a small former Etruscan town in an out-of-the-way place whose population may not have changed all that much since Etruscan times.
Mitchondrial DNA holds clues to geographical origins, because local mutations produced traceable lineages as people spread from the ancestral homeland of modern humans in northeastern Africa. Some lineages are found only in Africa, some in Europe and others in Asia.
The Murlo residents’ lineages are quite different from those of people in other Italian towns. When placed on a chart of mitochondrial lineages from Europe and the Near East, the people of Murlo map closest to Palestinians and Syrians, a team led by Dr. Torroni and Alessandro Achilli reports in the April issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.
In Tuscany as a whole, part of the ancient Etruscan region of Etruria, the Torroni team found 11 minor mitochondrial DNA lineages that occur nowhere else in Europe and are shared only with Near Eastern people. These findings, the teams says, “support a direct and rather recent genetic input from the Near East, a scenario in agreement with the Lydian origin of the Etruscans.”
Dr. Torroni said he had data awaiting publication that are based on Y chromosomes and point to the same conclusion.
A third source of genetic data on Etruscan origins has been developed by Marco Pellecchia and Paolo Ajmone-Marsan at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Piacenza. Tuscany has four ancient unusual breeds of cattle, including the giant Chianina. Analyzing the mitochondrial DNA of these and seven other breeds of Italian cattle, Dr. Ajmone-Marsan found that the Tuscan breeds genetically resembled cattle of the Near East, whereas the other Italian breeds grouped with cattle of northern Europe.
One explanation could be that people in Etruria had imported cattle from the Near East at some time. But given Dr. Torroni’s finding that the people, too, have a Near Eastern signature in their genes, the best explanation is that “both humans and cattle reached Etruria from the Eastern Mediterranean by sea,” Dr. Ajmone-Marsan and his colleagues said in a report published online in February in The Proceedings of the Royal Society. This explanation fits with Herodotus’ remark that the Etruscans brought with them everything they needed.
The data from the cattle DNA has also let the researchers calculate that the time at which the Tuscan and the Near Eastern cattle were part of the same population was 6,400 to 1,600 years ago, implying that the Etruscans set sail in this period.
The new findings may prompt specialists to look for an arrival date compatible with the archaeological and linguistic data, which essentially means before the proto-Villanovan culture of 1100 to 900 B.C.
“I’m willing to believe that people speaking a prehistoric form of Etruscan came from the Near East — who knows where? — and settled in Italy at some point in the early Bronze Age,” said Dr. Wallace.
The Bronze Age in Europe began around 1800 B.C. Dr. Tuck, the archaeologist, said he supposed that “three clear genetic threads linking a Tuscan population, human or bovine, to groups in the Near East is pretty compelling evidence.”
If the proto-Villanovan culture signifies the Etruscans’ arrival, it is surprising that no similar culture is known from ancient Turkey, he said.
Maria Bonghi Jovino, an Etruscan expert at the University of Milan, said the cultural discontinuity seen at the beginning of the proto-Villanovan culture probably represented the arrival of small groups of traders or prospectors, not a mass immigration.
As for Herodotus, Ms. Jovino said she believed, liked most modern historians, “that he does not always report real historical facts.” often referring to oral tradition.
But at least on the matter of Etruscan origins, it seems that Herodotus may yet enjoy the last laugh.
A Conversation With Philip G. Zimbardo: Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS, The New York Times, April 3, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO — At Philip G. Zimbardo’s town house here, the walls are covered with masks from Indonesia, Africa and the Pacific Northwest.
Dr. Zimbardo, a social psychologist and the past president of the American Psychological Association, has made his reputation studying how people disguise the good and bad in themselves and under what conditions either is expressed.
His Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, known as the S.P.E. in social science textbooks, showed how anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The road that took him from Stanford to Abu Ghraib is described in his new book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” (Random House).
“I’ve always been curious about the psychology of the person behind the mask,” Dr. Zimbardo said as he displayed his collection. “When someone is anonymous, it opens the door to all kinds of antisocial behavior, as seen by the Ku Klux Klan.”
Q. For those who never studied it in their freshman psychology class, can you describe the Stanford Prison Experiment?
A. In the summer of 1971, we set up a mock prison on the Stanford University campus. We took 23 volunteers and randomly divided them into two groups. These were normal young men, students. We asked them to act as “prisoners” and “guards” might in a prison environment. The experiment was to run for two weeks.
By the end of the first day, nothing much was happening. But on the second day, there was a prisoner rebellion. The guards came to me: “What do we do?”
“It’s your prison,” I said, warning them against physical violence. The guards then quickly moved to psychological punishment, though there was physical abuse, too.
In the ensuing days, the guards became ever more sadistic, denying the prisoners food, water and sleep, shooting them with fire-extinguisher spray, throwing their blankets into dirt, stripping them naked and dragging rebels across the yard.
How bad did it get? The guards ordered the prisoners to simulate sodomy. Why? Because the guards were bored. Boredom is a powerful motive for evil. I have no idea how much worse things might have gotten.
Q. Why did you pull the plug on the experiment?
A. On the fifth night, my former graduate student Christina Maslach came by. She witnessed the guards putting bags over the prisoners’ heads, chain their legs and march them around. Chris ran out in tears. “I’m not sure I want to have anything more to do with you, if this is the sort of person you are,” she said. “It’s terrible what you’re doing to those boys.” I thought, “Oh my God, she’s right.”
Q. What’s the difference between your study and the ones performed at Yale in 1961? There, social psychologist Stanley Milgram ordered his subjects to give what they thought were painful and possibly lethal shocks to complete strangers. Most complied.
A. In a lot of ways, the studies are bookends in our understanding of evil. Milgram quantified the small steps that people take when they do evil. He showed that an authority can command people to do things they believe they’d never do. I wanted to take that further. Milgram’s study only looked at one aspect of behavior, obedience to authority, in short 50-minute takes. The S.P.E., because it was slated to go for two weeks, was almost like a forerunner of reality television. You could see behavior unfolding hour by hour, day by day.
Here’s something that’s sort of funny. The first time I spoke publicly about the S.P.E., Stanley Milgram told me: “Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine.”
Q. From your book, I sense you feel some lingering guilt about organizing “the most unethical study” ever. Do you?
A. When I look back on it, I think, “Why didn’t you stop the cruelty earlier?” To stand back was contrary to my upbringing and nature.
When I stood back as a noninterfering experimental scientist, I was, in a sense, as drawn into the power of the situation as any prisoners and guards.
Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib?
A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.
That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Frederick said, up front, “What I did was wrong, and I don’t understand why I did it.”
Q. Do you understand?
A. Yeah. The situation totally corrupted him. When his reserve unit was first assigned to guard Abu Ghraib, Frederick was exactly like one of our nice young men in the S.P.E. Three months later, he was exactly like one of our worst guards.
Q. Aren’t you absolving Sergeant Frederick of personal responsibility for his actions?
A. You had the C.I.A., civilian interrogators, military intelligence saying to the Army reservists, “Soften these detainees up for interrogation.”
Those kinds of vague orders were the equivalent of my saying to the S.P.E. guards, “It’s your prison.” At Abu Ghraib, you didn’t have higher-ups saying, “You must do these terrible things.” The authorities, I believe, created an environment that gave guards permission to become abusive — plus one that gave them plausible deniability.
Chip worked 40 days without a single break, 12-hour shifts. The place was overcrowded, filthy, dangerous, under constant bombardment. All of that will distort judgment, moral reasoning. The bottom line: If you’re going to have a secret interrogation center in the middle of a war zone, this is going to happen.
Q. You keep using this phrase “the situation” to describe the underlying cause of wrongdoing. What do you mean?
A. That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The “situation” is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Q. So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart?”
A. That’s not true. Some people can be made into monsters. And the people who abused, and killed her, were.
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 12:48 pm (UTC)The water article, on the other hand, is really frightening. I wonder how well the Living Machine is able to take up those compounds?
"The Lucifer Effect"
Date: 2007-04-03 05:56 pm (UTC)