This New Yorker piece entitled "A Valuable Reputation" by Rachel Aviv is insightful at many levels.
"In 2001, seven years after joining the biology
faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped
talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed
the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to
hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party
might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events
differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to
meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked
to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”
Three
years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the
world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine,
which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes
was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the
endocrinology of amphibians....." Read on.
My thanks to David W-T for alerting me to this article. It seems classic multinational behaviour - seeking to hide the systemic failure of products and processes. The systemic failings reported are all avoidable; above all else so is
the thinking that creates and sustains these circumstances. I cannot
help but feel we are collectively suffering a self-induced myopia, given
that this atrazine story is only one of many that creates a pattern
that afflicts us. Consider also these recent examples:
1. Epic California Drought and Groundwater: Where Do We Go From Here?
"The bad news is that we are running out of groundwater. In particular, this is happening in the places that we need it most —
the dry parts of the planet where we love to live, precisely because it
does not rain. Out of necessity, our reliance on groundwater in these
parts of the world is much greater than elsewhere."
"One of the key numbers to emerge from the report is that the combined
Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins have already lost 10 cubic
kilometers of freshwater each year in 2012 and 2013.
To put that number in perspective, it is roughly the amount of water
used by the entire population of California, for household, municipal,
and industrial use (that is, for nearly everything else besides
agriculture and environment). It is also the steepest decline in total
water availability that our team has witnessed in the 12 years that we
have been monitoring California water resources with the GRACE mission."
2. The UK floods - see this article by George Monbiot to begin to appreciate some of the systemic issues. Talk about a crisis of governance!
3. Nutrient cycle distortions with massive systemic effects
"A new report commissioned by the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) highlights how humans have massively altered the
natural flows of nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrients. While this
has had huge benefits for world food and energy production, it has
caused a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health,
causing toxic algal blooms, killing fish, threatening sensitive
ecosystems and contributing to climate change.
Our Nutrient World is launched at this week's UNEP
Governing Council / Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Nairobi,
Kenya, which runs until 22 February 2013. The study was carried out by
almost 50 experts from 14 countries."
On the positive side...but way to late really, a significant member of the Obama administration in the person of John Kerry has had the courage to call climate change
[a] 'weapon of mass destruction' ....."... that
climate change could threaten [our] "entire way of life" as he called
for all nations to do more to stop global warming."
It is time for climate change denier regimes such as those of David Cameron and Tony Abbot, and to be fair, Barack Obama, to take responsibility for the futures of the citizens they seek to govern.
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