Yet more on the conquest of nature: destruction of Amazon rainforest intensifies

Perhaps only on the BBC -- not Fox, CNN, much less Tweedledum and Tweedledummer --
does one find headline news that "New satellite information from Brazil has
revealed a sharp increase in the rate of destruction of the Amazonian rainforest."

"The information shows the speed of deforestation increased by 40% between
2001 and 2002 to reach its highest rate since 1995. Figures from the National
Institute for Space Research (INPE) show more than 25,000 square kilometres
of forest were cleared in a year - mainly for farming.

Environmentalists have expressed alarm at the development which represents
a sharp reversal of a trend in which destruction had been slowing.

'The rate of deforestation should be falling, instead the opposite is happening,'
said Mario Monzoni, a project co-ordinator for Friends of the Earth in Brazil."

The conquest of nature (again): Superweeds foil GM crop plans

One widely heralded feature of genetically modified crops is that they
can be designed to be herbicide resistant. Farmers can spray poisons
with impunity, killing the "weeds," while the desired crops survive.
Thus, Monsanto's "Roundup ready" GM plants survive a good spraying of
Roundup, the company's pungent weed killer. Alas, recent research
indicates that the weeds are still on job, evolving in ways that make them
"Roundup ready" too!

A story from The Independent reports the findings of a researcher in the U.S.

"The paper, by Professor Bob Hartzler of the Department of Agronomy at
Iowa State University, reveals that in the past seven years, up to five weed
species have been found with resistance to the herbicide glyphosate, best
known by the Monsanto trade name Roundup. The resistance has come
about not through gene transfer from GM herbicide-tolerant crops, as some
have feared, but through natural evolution.

Glyphosate is a "broad spectrum" herbicide, meaning that, originally, it killed
everything, including crops. GM crops were developed to be tolerant of the
herbicide, so it could be applied throughout the growing season.

Two GM crops proposed for commercial growth in Britain, fodder beet and sugar
beet, are glyphosate-tolerant. But weeds have been found in Australia, Chile,
Malaysia and California and other areas of the US, that glyphosate cannot kill.

.... Pete Riley, Friends of the Earth's GM campaigner, said: "Companies like Monsanto
have spun GM crops and their weedkillers as having less impact on the
environment, but the fact of resistant weeds undoubtedly means more weedkillers,
and means the impact on the environment will be greater.

'These discoveries remove a central plank from the whole argument for GM crops.'"

Orwellian Newspeak on climate change

A report on the state of the environment that the Environmental Protection Agency
will release soon shows evidence of the Orwellian Newspeak that characterizes so
many Bush administration pronouncements. According to the New York Times, the
original E.P.A. draft of the report's section on global climate began with the words,
"Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment
change."

That seems admirably clear and sensible.

After Bush's people did their linguistic massage, however, the section now reads,
"The complexity of the Earth system and the interconnections among its components
make it a scientific challenge to document change, diagnose its causes, and develop
useful projections of how natural variability and human actions may affect the global
environment in the future."

If one of my students gave me a paper with such babble, I'd recommend an emergency
visit to the campus Writing Center.

Evidently, the EPA report deletes any mention of the likelihood that pollution from
automobiles and industrial production contributes to climate change. Perhaps its
time to demand an immediate ceasefire in the Bushies undeclared war
on the English language.