Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

ree leaves do a pretty good job of achieving temperatures that are just right for photosynthesis, even if it’s too hot or too cold where they live, a new study shows.

From roughly the top to the bottom of North America, across some 50 degrees of latitude, trees all do their photosynthesizing at leaf temperatures around 21.4° Celsius plus or minus 2.2 degrees, says physiological ecologist Brent Helliker of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That conclusion was based on a broad survey of the ratios of two forms of oxygen that vary depending on the temperature and humidity of leaves. Those properties control evaporation and make a signature in the cellulose of the tree rings, Helliker and colleague Suzanna Richter report in an upcoming Nature.

Such temperature control undermines the assumption that the insides of leaves have the same temperature as the air, Helliker says. That’s an assumption underlying studies that check oxygen ratios in old tree tissue to reconstruct past climates, he says.

The tree-ring community is just starting to sort out what the finding means. “I, and I am sure my colleagues in isotope dendroclimatology, will welcome this paper because it improves our understanding of the complex relationship between climate and the stable isotope ratios in wood,” says Danny McCarroll of the University of Wales Swansea. However, he objects to Helliker’s claim that paleoclimatologists’ approaches have relied so heavily on whether leaf temperatures match those of the surrounding air.

Those paleoclimatology methods for using isotopes in tree rings to reconstruct climate have been validated by observations, says Jan Esper of the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf. “From this perspective, the findings by Helliker and Richter are indeed surprising, as I would have expected a closer association between leaf and surrounding air temperature,” he says.

Helliker says he has been bugged for years by the assumption that a tree leaf photosynthesized at whatever the local air temperature might be. Trees release water, and during hot times, that botanical sweat cools them down. And trees that grow in cold places tend to cluster their leaves. These tight formations can affect the rate at which leaves lose heat on cold days, just as fingers pressed together in mittens stay warmer than fingers separated by space in gloves.

Physiologists, of course, could measure the temperature on individual leaves, but measuring enough leaves to give a picture of the canopy has been difficult. Helliker estimates that scientists would need at least 140 leaves to get a valid reading for the temperature of photosynthesis of a single tree.

His colleague Richter, however, had collected tree ring data for another project, and Helliker realized it would be perfect to test his idea. Richter had not only recorded oxygen ratios in the tree rings, but had also collected data from nearby weather stations on relative humidity. Since she knew the humidity, the researchers could calculate what the leaf temperature must have been to produce particular ratios of oxygen isotopes. When the leaf is photosynthesizing, the sugars it produces include oxygen in the temperature-sensitive ratio. The cellulose in tree rings made from these sugars thus indicates the leaf temperature during photosynthesis.

“What I like about this paper is the fact that it highlights the need to account for actual life conditions,” says Christian Körner of the University of Basel in Switzerland. Louis_J_Sheehan

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Earlier this week, I wrote about tropical glacier studies by Lonnie Thompson and his colleagues at Ohio State University. On Tuesday, I got a chance to tour Thompson’s labs. Several were quite cool, as in frigid. But that’s the price these scientists pay to preserve some 7,000 ice cores — archives of regional environments around the world, some depicting conditions that existed more than 10,000 years ago.

One core that particularly captured my attention was collected atop Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro. The glacier there is rapidly evaporating. But Thompson’s crew has extracted one core from the site that contains ice that at its bottom dates back 11,700 years. And at a depth corresponding to 4,200 years ago, this core exhibits a curious 3 millimeter black band. It’s dust, Lonnie explains, and appears to help corroborate some ancient archeological records from Egypt, half a continent away.

Egyptian history archived in ice atop a 15,000-foot glacier in central East Africa? Yep. Not far-fetched at all, he says. Indeed, by marrying physical data from ice cores to anthropological records, Thompson says, “we can start to figure out the role that climate and environment played on the rise and fall of cultures.”
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Kilimanjaro's Black MarkThe black line in this glacial core collected atop Mt. Kilimanjaro corresponds to a prolonged deposition of dust 4,200 years ago that likely represents 300 years of drought.J. Raloff

In fact, lessons from that relationship, he suspects, “can help us adapt to climate change as we go into the 21st century.”

But let’s get back to Egypt, I prod.

Which takes Lonnie back to that black band in the Kilimanjaro ice. A similar signature shows up in glacier cores extracted from atop Andean glaciers, he notes. In the last 13,000 years there’s only one stand-out feature in that South American glacial record. “And it’s from 4,200 years ago — same as in Africa,” he notes.
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Ice ColdThis lab room and one behind it are kept a frigid -30 °F to archive 7,000 precious ice cores, many of which could persist after their parents — millennia-old glaciers — have vanished. J. Raloff

There’s no written records of what settlements in East Africa and the Andes were experiencing at that time. But there is such a record from Egypt, Lonnie says. “And you find that this period corresponds to the fall of the Old Kingdom, which is when the pyramids were built, and the rise of the Middle Kingdom.”

Enscribed onto the tombs of pharaohs are tales describing the history of their realm. “These are usually glowing tales of conquests and expansion,” Lonnie explains — much like you often hear politicians crow about today.MySpace.com - Louis J - 48 - Male - ENOLA, Pennsylvania - www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire

Except there was one period in Egypt — 4,186 years ago — when the news was anything but upbeat. Hieroglyphic accounts reported tales of people migrating north and south in a search for food. The stories describe sand dunes crossing from one side of the mighty Nile to the other. Horror stories recounted episodes of mass starvation. Further north, in the Middle East, archeologists have unearthed evidenced of huge cities that came to an abrupt end 4,200 years ago.

The Kilimanjaro black-dust band: “We believe it comes from the Middle East and Africa,” he says. “It appears to record a 300 year drought that impacted the entire region.” And some of that telltale dust appears to have traveled across and up into the Andes.

The question, Thompson says, is how widespread this drought was. Because he also finds markers of it in ice cores he’s brought back from Tibet.

The number and geographic distribution of cores exhibiting the black band allow scientists to probe such apparently devastating events — and show that they can be wide scale and last centuries.

Keep in mind, Thompson says, these were natural climate anomalies. Currently, humankind is engaged in an unwitting experiment, unleashing humongous quantities climate-warming carbon into Earth’s atmosphere. There’s every reason to suspect they might trigger unnatural climate anomalies. Ones that could last at least as long and prove as widespread, he says. MySpace.com - Louis J - 48 - Male - ENOLA, Pennsylvania - www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire The big difference: Now there are more than 6 billion people who could be forced to bear the brunt of the changing climate’s impacts.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Apple is investigating a complaint that its pre-2008 Mac Pros emit fumes from the chemical benzene. One user told Apple that he noticed a strong smell when he unpacked his Mac last year, and that 10 days later, he developed nose and throat irritation, reports the French newspaper Liberation. (A clunky English translation of the report can be found here.)

“We have not found anything that supports this claim, but continue to investigate it for the customer," Apple spokesman Bill Evans said in an email. Evans did not say whether benzene, a solvent used in plastics, is a component of the computer.

Mac Pro users on an Apple discussion board have also complained of "new car smell" and other odors the first time they fired up their units – and, in some cases, when they ran them later.

The company said last year that all of its new products would be free from brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a chlorinated plastic, by the end of this year.

We asked Philip Landrigan, chair of the department of community and preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, about the potential risks of benzene.

This is an edited transcript of the interview.

What is benzene?

It’s a very widely used chemical, a solvent. It's also used widely as a building block in organic chemistry to create molecules. It's been used for 100 years in an enormous range of plastics. There's some in gasoline — less than there used to be — and it's in jet fuel. It used to be used in dry cleaning.

What does it smell like?

Some would call it sweet, some pungent. It's natural [not an added scent]. It vaporizes easily so if you put it in a dish in a room, you'd smell it instantaneously.

Is benzene dangerous?

Solvent vapors can cause headache and nausea. From a toxic point of view, benzene is a known human carcinogen [according to] the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the World Health Organization and virtually any regulatory body you could name.

There's some disagreement about how much is needed to cause cancer or what kinds of cancer it causes, but there's no debate about whether it's a carcinogen and it's most closely associated with leukemia and lymphoma. The best scientific opinion says any amount of exposure is dangerous and more exposure is more dangerous. Industry thinks you can expose people to a fair bit safely and environmental scientists are worried about even low levels of exposure.

How would one find out if a computer or other product was emitting benzene?

[An industrial hygienist] would set up an air sampling pump, which pulls air through a filter and measures how much of a contaminant like benzene is in the air. I'd find a room, sample the air for a couple hours and establish a baseline. Then I'd plug in the computer and see if there was an increase in the level of benzene in the air. Then we'd know.

Why might benzene be in a computer, and would it be dangerous?

They probably use it in the manufacturing of the computer as a solvent to clean up components, but you'd think it would vaporize off in the factory. If there were benzene in a computer or the plastic of a computer, as soon as the computer warmed up, it would start to vaporize. Louis_J_Sheehan If there's any in there, it ought to gas off pretty quickly.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Louis8j8sheehan8esquire’s Weblog

Although acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) didn't hit mainstream collective consciousness until the early 1980s, new research out of the University of Arizona in Tucson indicates that the most pervasive global strain of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) began spreading among humans between 1884 and 1924, a finding that suggests growing urbanization in colonial Africa set the stage for the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Michael Worobey, an assistant ecology and evolutionary biology professor at Arizona, led the research, which studied a number of HIV-1 (the strain found in most cases outside of Africa) genetic sequences to determine the time periods when the virus genetically diverged from its predecessors. These findings, published in the current issue of Nature, were mapped out in the form of a family tree whose roots date back to the beginning of the 20th century.

The research, co-sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, included a team of scientists from four continents who screened multiple tissue samples and uncovered the world's second-oldest genetic sequence of HIV-1 group M, which dates from 1960. The scientists used that, along with dozens of other previously known HIV-1 sequences, to construct a range of plausible family trees for this viral strain.

The scientists recovered the 48-year-old HIV gene fragments from a wax-embedded lymph node tissue biopsy from a woman in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The oldest known HIV-1 group M genetic sequence comes from a 1959 blood sample given by a Kinshasa man. A comparison between the same genetic regions of the 1959 and 1960 viruses provided additional evidence that their common ancestor existed around 1900.

Earlier estimates indicated that HIV first appeared in 1930, still well before most people had heard of either the virus or AIDS.

Bloomberg.com today reported that the AIDS virus is infecting more women, heterosexual couples and gay men in China as the epidemic spreads from intravenous drug users to the general population, according to a study to be published Thursday in Nature.

Elsewhere, The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., Tuesday announced it has received a $30-million grant from the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a large philanthropy in New York City, to create the world's only center dedicated to the "neutralizing antibody" approach, a promising way to develop an AIDS vaccine, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune's Web site. IAVI created the Neutralizing Antibody Consortium six years ago to address a neglected area of AIDS vaccine research and development. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The news this week is all about financial trouble, and even science can’t escape.

Often when a species is in trouble, their plight tugs only at the heartstrings of people who want to save them; polar bears are of little practical use to us. But colony collapse disorder, which has been wrecking bee populations around the world, goes right to our wallets. In a new study, French and German scientists calculated that pollinators are worth about $217 billion to the world economy, which would be lost if bees and other pollinators keep disappearing.

Since not all plants are pollinated by insects, the disappearance of pollinators wouldn’t mean the sudden disappearance of all agriculture (thankfully). The scientists say that their estimate for pollinators’ value amounts to 9.5 percent of the world’s total agricultural production. But, they say, insect-pollinated plants tend to have higher prices than other plants, meaning their loss would hit economies especially hard. In sum, about three-quarters of flowering plants rely on pollination, whether by bees, birds, or other animals, according to the National Academy of Sciences (pdf).

So add that to your economic checklist: Bring some sanity to Wall Street, stabilize housing prices, and save the bees. http://louis-j-sheehan.net
Louis J. Sheehan

Everyone loves licorice. OK, that’s not true. But even if you loathe the smell of black jelly beans, sambuca, and root beer, put aside your distaste for a minute: Licorice is in trouble, and science might have the answer.

Licorice comes from the root of a plant called Glycyrrhiza glabra, and it’s about 50 times sweeter than ordinary sugar. So its sweetener is often used as an additive, and it amounts to a $40 million-per-year business. But because of that, the wild plant is being over-harvested in some places, and that land is giving way to desertification. This is happening especially in China, one of the first places where licorice was identified and used. Louis8j8sheehan8esquire’s Weblog

But in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Japanese researcher Toshiya Muranaka says that he identified the key enzyme in the plant that catalyzes the making of the sweetener. With that knowledge, he says, it might be possible to genetically engineer other plants to create the sweetener, but right now Muranaka and his team are only part of the way there. Louis8j8sheehan8esquire’s Weblog

So hold tight, licorice-lovers. And if you’re worried about the environmental impacts of harvesting too much wild licorice, why not grow your own?

Louis J. Sheehan

A rose by any other name smells as sweet, even when you only conjure up its fragrance in your mind. That's because people use their noses to sniff imaginary as well as real aromas, and the mere act of sniffing scentless air kick-starts odor perception, a new study finds.

Behaviors, such as sniffing, that are used to acquire sensations do themselves activate brain representations of those sensations, concludes a research team led by Moustafa Bensafi of the University of California, Berkeley.

"Sniffing is not just a way to pick up smells, it's a part of olfactory perception," says Berkeley psychologist Noam Sobel, a coauthor of the new study.

Sobel suspects that all the senses inform perception in this way. For instance, other researchers have found that people move their eyes in much the same way whether they're visualizing an object in its absence or actually seeing it. Moreover, tests have shown that it's difficult to generate a mental image if one's eyes are prevented from moving.

Bensafi's team hooked up 30 college students to a machine that measured nasal airflow as they imagined pleasant and unpleasant sights, sounds, and smells. Visual images included a sunset and a scar. Imagined sounds ranged from rainfall to a person crying. Imagined smells encompassed roses and rotten eggs.

Volunteers spontaneously sniffed only when imagining smells, the researchers report in the November Nature Neuroscience. Imaginary pleasant odors evoked larger sniffs than imaginary unpleasant odors did. Louis8j8sheehan8esquire’s Weblog

In a second set of trials, the scientists measured nasal airflow in 10 additional participants, who completed four tasks in random order�smelling odors, imagining odors, looking at objects, and visualizing objects that weren't present.

Sniffing occurred only as individuals smelled or imagined odors. Volunteers drew in larger volumes of air for real smells than for imagined ones. As observed for imagined smells, pleasant real smells evoked larger sniffs than unpleasant ones did.

A final workout for the mind's nose involved 20 more volunteers. In these tests, each volunteer reported imagining smells more vividly after having been encouraged to sniff air than while wearing a nose clip that prevented sniffing.

These results underscore the influential view in neuroscience that the brain creates and saves information, such as smells, in the form of neural activity patterns, comments psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn of Harvard University in an editorial published with the new research.

Acts such as sniffing trigger odor-specific activity patterns in the brain, Kosslyn contends. Louis8j8sheehan8esquire’s Weblog

Walter J. Freeman of the University of California, Berkeley, who investigates odor perception (SN: 10/19/02, p. 252: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/20021019/bob10.asp), interprets the data differently. Sniffing triggers action-oriented brain activity related to specific smells and the contexts in which they occur, Freeman holds. These flexible neural responses, unique to each individual, reflect the shifting significance of particular smells rather than stored information about smells, he theorizes.

Bensafi is now directing a brain-imaging study to see whether odor imagery provokes responses in the neural gateway for smell perception or only in so-called higher olfactory tissue. Louis J. Sheehan

Louis J. Sheehan. Far from the last knock of civilization in the Borneo jungle, I trudge along the Malaysian border with Indonesia. Here, together with two Iban tribesmen and a guide—all of us caked in mud and sweat—I come to a place where the familiar clamor of birds, monkeys, and bugs is being drowned out by the sound of a chain saw. We enter a clearing in which a teenager is hacking a felled tree, sawing it into pieces. Nearby, a backhoe levels a huge swath of land. Soon palms will be planted here, I’m told, and when harvested their oil will be sold on the world market. What I’ve come upon is just one scene in the massive global picture of deforestation. There are thousands and thousands of small operators hacking away at forests to profit from their bounty.

Deforestation is occurring at a rapid pace as the demand for housing and goods increases with world population growth, which is expected to climb 50 percent between 1999 and 2040, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Moreover, as appetites for food and biofuels—made with palm, corn, and other plants—rise, more land is needed to accommodate agriculture. About 32 million acres of forest are destroyed per year. That’s equivalent to about 50 football fields a minute. And the rate is expected to increase as demand grows.

Without forests, the world as we know it would cease to exist. Climate change has added new impetus to forest conservation efforts as we increasingly appreciate how efficiently forests sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. In fact, deforestation is calculated to be the second-biggest man-made contributor to global carbon emissions after the burning of fossil fuels for energy use, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. This is because when forests are cleared, the carbon stored inside the trees is released, either immediately or over time; in addition, what had been a natural resource for capturing carbon—the trees themselves—disappears. Moreover, many people clear land by fire, which releases still more noxious gases. But there is an innovative and growing worldwide movement to get people to stop chopping down trees. The answer: Simply pay them not to do it.

Governments can try to conserve with stricter policies, activists can petition developers and farmers, and benefactors can buy land out of the goodness of their hearts (much like the investment firm Goldman Sachs, which recently purchased some 700,000 acres in Patagonia for conservation purposes). But to really put a dent in deforestation, people must have an incentive not to partake in it. (For-profit businesses such as large timber operators already have profit incentives.)

“Forests are like giant utilities providing ecosystem services to the world that we all benefit from but we don’t pay for.” That’s the way the U.K.-based nonprofit Global Canopy Programme puts it.

Global Canopy advocates a “cap and trade” program that hinges on ecosystem valuation. Simply put, a forest’s importance to the ecosystem would be valued in the form of credits. These credits could then be traded on markets. Forest owners would be given credits for the amount of carbon that they sequester, and those credits could be sold to those who are producing carbon in excess of a specified cap. The economic pressure of having to buy credits could effectively mitigate that “footprint” we hear so much about and arguably balance things out.

The United Nations has initiated a similar offset program called REDD (which stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). REDD will work in one of two ways: either with forest owners’ earning credits that they can sell, as with Global Canopy, or by developed countries’ contributing to a fund that would in turn pay developing countries to keep their forests intact. The fund would act as a de facto arbiter of the developed world’s carbon emissions, allowing offending countries to offset their pollution through such payments.

The idea was introduced for inclusion in the Kyoto Protocol but was eliminated from the final provisions because of political concerns. Brazil, for example, formally opposed it, saying that accepting funds from industrial nations to reduce deforestation could limit the country’s future development options. Its sovereignty would be jeopardized, the argument went, because it would be controlled by the prices set by large carbon emitters—such as the United States, China, and the United Kingdom—who might contribute to the fund, in effect paying Brazil not to develop its forests.

If every hectare of preserved forest saves 200 tons of carbon and each ton of carbon is worth $10, then Indonesia could gain around $2 billion each year.

Since Kyoto, however, Brazil and other countries with large forest reserves, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, are warming to the idea of REDD. “Rather than seeing it as inhibiting their economic development, they are seeing the potential for big credits in their forests,” says William Laurance, a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. He tells me that REDD would bring much bigger resources to the table than have ever been contemplated in global conservation, and that is opening the eyes of government ministers who had previously opposed such ideas. “What have been efforts valued in the millions, [REDD] would bring into the billions,” he says.

REDD would pay market prices for carbon storage. At the current market value for carbon, a hectare of rain forest, if left intact, could be worth anywhere from $400 to $8,000 or more. Since we are talking about millions of hectares of conservation, the sum adds up to quite a lot for the developing world. Laurance explains: “Suppose, for example, that the baseline deforestation rate for Indonesia is 2 million hectares per year, and the government manages to reduce this to 1 million hectares per year. If one assumes that every hectare of preserved forest saves 200 tons of carbon emissions and that each ton of carbon is worth $10 on the international market, then Indonesia could gain around $2 billion each year.”

Moreover, leases are now being contemplated so landowners retain land titles and receive “rent” payments (rather than selling their land to the fund). Not a bad way for a poor farmer to profit from his land. Louis_J_Sheehan

REDD so far has commitments of hundreds of millions of dollars from a dozen developed countries. Not a large amount, to be sure, but a beginning. The program is scheduled to be formally voted on for all-nation adoption at next year’s U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen. Then the hope is that the billions will pour in.

REDD isn’t the only game in town. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.comMany forest conservationists believe it will take a combination of efforts to save the world’s trees and, along with them, all the carbon they store.

Mark Plotkin, who heads the Amazon Conservation Team, says he is skeptical of progress being made on the national and international policy levels. “It needs to be addressed by grassroots efforts as well,” he says, explaining that by the time policy trickles down to the people to whom it applies, “it may be too late.” In addition, Plotkin believes that resources should be put toward creating attention and awareness and toward policies that make sense and are applicable to indigenous people.

When you see the squalor in which they live—under a mere tarp covering a small raised platform—and you hear that they receive less than one dollar per felled tree, you really have to think there must be a way to preserve the forests and at the same time aid the people who live off them. Louis_J_Sheehan Indeed, as the sun begins to set and I turn away from the teenage loggers to begin my long hike out of the Borneo jungle and away from their desperate conditions, I realize this is not an option for them. But another type of dollar incentive might just give them a different way out.

REDD is one way to do it and may hopefully spark more widespread attention, laws, and policies that will further promulgate forest conservation. Louis_J_Sheehan It gives credit where credit is due and pays out the ultimate dividend to us all. Louis J. Sheehan.

Louis J. Sheehan. For decades, the panda has been an icon of the conservation movement, along with other majestic animals like the Siberian tiger, the mountain gorilla, the blue whale, and, most recently, the polar bear. http://louis-j-sheehan.com These conservation superstars have a few things in common: They're big, they're mammals, and they're pretty—earning them the label "charismatic megafauna." But they're obviously not the only animals in danger of extinction.

About 22 percent of all mammals are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), but the percentage is significantly higher for creepy, crawly, backbone-less invertebrates, which enrich the soil, filter water, recycle nutrients, pollinate plants, decompose animal carcasses and waste products, play a vital role in the food chain, and inspire biomimetic creations. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

What are pandas good for? Why are invertebrates (a group that includes the three most endangered groups of animals in the United States) seemingly absent from conservation planning strategies, while the panda receives a great proportion of our efforts and our concern, not to mention tens of millions of dollars for captive breeding programs?

The panda has been called "possibly one of the grossest wastes of conservation money in the last half century" by conservationist Chris Packham, president of Britain's Bat Conservation Trust. http://louis-j-sheehan.com In fact, he insists that he "would eat the last panda" if the resources devoted to them could be transferred to "more sensible things."

Save the Charismatic Megafauna!
At first glance, it may seem that the conservationists have let emotion win out over reason, ignoring the suffering of the masses (and the vitality of the earth) to save the cuddliest animals. But a closer look reveals a different picture: The charismatic megafauna may get all the glory, but they also bring in the bucks.

The conservation movement has been exploiting the panda's earning power since the World Wildlife Fund—the most widely supported conservation organization in the world—made it their symbol in 1961. "Kids love them, parents love them, the Chinese government loves them, and yes, conservationists love them," says Matt Durnin of The Nature Conservancy in China. “From a marketing perspective, they’re a no-brainer." The panda's ability to resonate so widely has earned it the role of "flagship species" for its natural habitat, the fertile Yangtze River Basin. Flagship species act as representatives of a defined environmental cause; they are selected for their ability to raise awareness and, more practically, money. The idea is that support for the flagship species will also benefit the many other species that share the flagship animal’s habitat but lack that sympathy-inspiring je ne sais quoi.
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It may seem like bringing people's attention to as many endangered species as possible would only help the cause. But as psychology experiments have demonstrated over and over again, we've evolved to act on our emotions, not logic. A recent study showed that the general public was willing to give significantly more to save the charming Eurasian otter than to save the homely, but similarly threatened, water vole—and more for the otter alone than for the otter and the vole combined.

For the Yangtze Basin, the panda has proved an effective ambassador. Because of panda-centered conservation, China—a country with an abysmal environmental record—is taking dramatic steps to protect their environment. A logging ban has been in place for 10 years, former poachers now earn a living as trackers for panda tourists, and the local people are recognizing the value of the natural environment beyond its role as a source of meat and timber. By preserving the panda's forest home, conservationists hope to protect thousands of other species—including 100 mammals, 250 birds, thousands of insects—as well as the water supply for nearly 40 percent of China’s people.

The Other 99.9% of Life on Earth
But there is considerable debate concerning whether the use of flagship species as cash cows is the best way to reach broader conservation goals. According to Durnin, flagship species work, but they’re not perfect. "Hypothetically, the strategy protects all inhabitants of the forest, but if the entire management plan is devoted to the panda, no one really pays attention to what happens to the other species. The Siberian weasel might start disappearing, but it would be a while before anyone noticed."

An alternative strategy for managing the environment—one favored by many academic conservation biologists—is to focus on preserving biodiversity and whole ecosystems, thereby protecting a substantially wider range of species. Niles Eldredge, a curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, claims says that the current extinction rate—approximately three species every hour—reveals that we are, which puts us in the middle of our planet's sixth mass extinction. (The fifth mass extinction, 65 million years ago, claimed the last dinosaurs as its most famous—and most charismatic—victims).

While the panda and its fellow charismatic megafauna are magnificent beasts, our preoccupation with them leaves little energy and concern for the greater biodiversity crisis. But the general public's participation and financial support are vital to the conservation movement, and it’s difficult for the average member person to emotionally connect with the nebulous concept of biodiversity.

So the flagship species strategy may be our best option—for now. But with the loss of species accelerated by a warming planet and a burgeoning human population, it's unclear whether the panda's earning power will be able to keep up. Instead of using the panda to tug at heartstrings, perhaps conservationists should start a long-term project to tackle the greater problem—lack of funding, political and commercial indifference, and ignorance of the magnitude of the biodiversity crisis.
Louis J. Sheehan

Once again it appears that sometimes, trying to suppress large forest fires might be creating unintended negative consequences.

Last month we wrote that fighting fires in the pine forests of the American West could actually decrease the amount of carbon the forest could sequester by allowing smaller trees to survive, and thus compete with the larger trees that absorb most of the CO2. Now, a new study says that huge, raging fires can be the best weapon to get rid of pesky and damaging invasive species in California’s chaparral.

John Keeley and colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey studied about 250 fires in the California chaparral, a particularly fire-prone shrubland. When blazes ignited in areas that possessed plenty of fuel because they had not burned in many years, Keeley says, the enormous fire that resulted would kill off invasive grasses, while native grasses recovered afterward. The researchers say this happens mostly because invasive plants aren’t adapted to survive the fires, while native California grasses are not only accustomed to the heat, but many also use fires as a cue to germinate.

Keeley’s idea that chaparral fires should be allowed to burn unless they pose high risk to human life isn’t a universally popular one, especially as more and more property development occurs near these forests. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire I But in 2001 Keeley argued that the kind of controlled burns forest managers currently use couldn’t prevent huge fires, and in the new study he concludes that suppression strategies could be sparing invasive species.

Still, the effects of fire—and the effectiveness of trying to combat them—can vary greatly from forest to forest. For example, fierce fires in the Pacific Northwest could have the opposite effect, actually helping invasive species by giving them more open space in which to thrive. So while firefighters have to step in if a blaze threatens someone’s house, whether or not they should try to extinguish forest fires likely depends a lot on the forest. Louis J. Sheehan.