Corals consist of large numbers of polyps, tiny tube-like fleshy cylinders,
which are open at the top and ringed by waving tentacles that sting and
draw in prey. Because corals are related to sea anemones and jellyfish,
biologists assumed they functioned in the same way, with their different
parts acting largely independently. It was thought, for example, that individual
polyps caught and digested their own food in an uncoordinated fashion,
even though nutrients are known to pass between the polyps to the whole
colony.

Now Ian Lawn and Ian McFarlane of the University of Queensland have
identified a through-conduction system that coordinates the feeding of
a fungus-like hard coral known as Heliofungia actiniformis.

Lawn and McFarlane carried out their work at the University of Queensland’s
marine research station on Heron Island, a white coral cay on the southernmost
section of the Great Barrier Reef. The researchers used a special ‘open’
seawater circulation system that pipes water from the deep outer reef through
tanks and aquaria. This enabled them to monitor the way the corals control
their feeding on zooplankton – microscopic marine animals.

Lawn and McFarlane attached recording electrodes to the long, mobile
tentacles. They used tiny syringes which sucked up tissue from the coral’s
surface so that it touched the electrodes. Measurement revealed that the
coral has a single conduction system – which is sluggish in comparison with
ours, but nevertheless responds rapidly to food.

‘The system responds to the presence of dissolved food substances at
a remarkably high frequency, often over 35 pulses per minute,’ says Lawn.

The coral’s ability to eat large prey such as damselfish suggests to
Lawn that the pulses relax the mouth to prepare it for ingesting the prey.
This idea is supported by the distribution of its chemoreceptors, tiny sense
organs that receive chemical stimuli from the surrounding water and transmit
messages to the coral’s nervous system. The chemoreceptors are situated
all over the coral’s tentacles but not on the oral disc, except for a narrow
band around the mouth.

The coordination of such activities with the identification and ingestion
of food by the polyps indicates the existence of a sophisticated through-conduction
system that communicates messages in a way not unlike that of our own nervous
system. Lawn stops short of implying that corals are sentient beings. But
he believes the finding is ‘a major milestone on the road to understanding
the evolution of nervous systems in higher animals, including man’.

Curiosity and the urge to observe are fundamental to the practice of
both science and journalism. Without curiosity there is little motivation
to search for answers. And without the knowledge that observation supplies
it is difficult, if not impossible, to ask the right questions.

The doyen of curiosity and observation was, arguably, the Dutch naturalist
and one of the founding fathers of ethology, Niko Tinbergen who, with Konrad
Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, received the Nobel Prize for Biology and Medicine
in 1973. ‘It seems to me that no man need be ashamed of being curious about
nature,’ he wrote in Curious Naturalists in 1958. ‘It could even be argued
that this is what he got his brains for and that no greater insult to
nature and oneself is possible than to be indifferent to nature.’

Indifference was not one of Tinbergen’s characteristics. His lively
mind and unstinting efforts led to the coming of age of ethology. Following
in the giant footsteps of Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution resulted
from studies of the flora and fauna of the Galapagos Islands, Tinbergen’s
ground-breaking thesis was founded on the premise that behaviours culminate
from a series of evolutionary compromises.

For example, his well-known work on breeding male sticklebacks demonstrated
that their actions performed during a fight depend on the level of two independent
drives, aggression and fear. When both drives are strongly activated, a
behavioural compromise is reached that takes the form of displacement activity,
such as sand digging – equivalent to nest building in birds – which seem
daft performed out of context.

To study these and other phenomena related to what is generally called
instinct, Tinbergen adopted what he and fellow ethologists considered were
‘objective scientific methods’. Not everyone would agree. The more rigorous
of behaviourists, for example, dispute that the ethological method is either
wholly objective or scientific. This, in part, may have explained Tinbergen’s
aversion to behaviourism, with its confinement of experimentation to the
laboratory where variables may be tightly controlled and manipulated.

The main weakness of this book is that it omits the behavourists’ opposition
to the ethologists’ belief that the field may serve as a laboratory for
observations and experiments to unlock the myriad causes and effects of
behaviour. This weakness results from the book being basically a record
of a conference held in 1990 when some 120 of his former Oxbridge colleagues
and students – the ‘maestro’s mob’ – converged at Oxford to pay tribute
to the Tinbergen legacy. As such, it comprises a series of what sometimes
amount to eulogies.

The book’s main strength lies in its anecdotal and personal accounts
of Tinbergen in action combined with academic accounts of his ideas, methods
of researching and questioning, and their application to current research
issues. His methods entailed making detailed observations of animal behaviour
that he analysed by asking four fundamentally different categories of questions
concerning causation, function, development and evolution.

The more controversial question of comparing observations of animals
to humans he left to his more ambitious successors, some of whom got into
hot water by encroaching upon the closely guarded terrain of other disciplines.
The issue of comparative ethology is addressed in one of the book’s most
fascinating chapters by the Cambridge zoologist Robert Hinde who writes:
‘Stated baldly, humans are not fish, and descriptive methods that were outstandingly
successful in studies of sticklebacks in the 1930s-1950s cannot be applied
directly in the human case.’

This is not to say that Tinbergen’s work was irrelevant to later generations
of social scientists, particularly psychologists, some of whom relished
his analyses of group behaviour in the animal kingdom. In Social Behaviour
in Animals, published in 1965, he noted that ‘the result of cooperation
of individuals is continually tested and checked and thus the group determines
ultimately, through its efficiency, the properties of the individual’.
His idea that cooperation develops within a group because of the advantages
this affords its individuals also appeals to radical sociologists and Marxists.

Such multidisciplinary appeal is fitting for a remarkable man whose
wide-ranging interests spanned almost every aspect of nature in the wild
and, unlike many dedicated researchers, did not exclude those of his pupils
and colleagues. His heuristic method, combined with a modesty of manner,
is applauded by Oxford zoologist John Krebs: ‘I never felt, in talking to
him, anything other than a colleague and an equal, one whose views were
to be judged and appreciated in the same way as those of more senior colleagues.’

Equally commendable was his conviction that as important as conducting
research is the need to communicate its findings to the public. ‘Science
is a social effort, and scientists must adjust to the public,’ Tinbergen
said. ‘If people don’t want to read your work, your whole effort, and all
the money that went into it has been lost.’ The same might be said of this
book.

Peter Spinks is a science writer and former research psychologist based
in the Netherlands.

It is their contribution (and mine when I rise early enough) to gallant
government efforts to reduce the incineration and dumping of waste from
20 million to 12 million tonnes a year by 2000. The ecology-conscious government,
concerned that, without recycling, waste production will keep expanding
by 2 per cent annually, plans to introduce deposit-return schemes for consumer
products ranging from plastic bottles to cars and refrigerators. Local authorities
have also been allocated extra funds to supervise schemes, many privately
run, to separate the various constituents of household litter.

Out front in the great Dutch contest to out-green other municipal councils,
the ambitious council of Egmond, the cosy Dutch town in which I live, is
testing the tolerance of its 14 000 citizens with a recycling scheme sine
qua non. Each household has a set of green and grey bins with black plastic
wheels. They are emptied at bin stations, on alternate weeks, by a hulk
of a yellow and red refuse truck with flashing lights and an automated bin
lift.

By the time the truck arrives the refuse has, in theory at least, been
separated into recyclable parts. Putrescibles including vegetable peelings,
uneaten food, plants and garden debris, go in the green bin; plastics, metal,
hardboard and the like go in the grey one. Glass bottles, which are not
deposit-refundable, must be taken to the communal glass dumps; plastic,
and deposit-refundable glass ones are returned to the shop for a 1 guilder
deposit. Newspapers and magazines (except New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, of course) are
collected monthly, with luck, by schools; string, ribbon and old clothes
are collected twice a year by the Salvation Army.

It all sounds admirably green-spirited and, to the uninitiated, quite
simple. It is not.

For a start, paper collection, a dire necessity for newspaper-accumulating
journalists like myself, requires the patience of Job and the logistics
of a Stormin’ Norman-style strategist. The schools, which regard paper collection
as less a profession than a charitable hobby, make their collections the
first Wednesday of the month, unless that is a public holiday, in which
case they collect on the second Wednesday. Neither advance warning nor a
calendar of collections is given to households, who need to keep track of
paper days. For those able and willing to keep track, on paper days, school
children roam the streets with go-karts and other makeshift paraphernalia
to transport the paper. Being primary school children, however, the pint-sized
collectors can only manage restricted bundles of newspapers. So, the householder
must ensure that bundles are liftable; if not, they are left where they
stand, often in the rain. This means the rest of the month is taken up ironing
the piles of paper dry because wet bundles, being too heavy to load, will
not be collected the following month either. Even after ironing, dry papers
require monitoring as failure to keep track of the schools’ ‘flexible’ rosters,
means that the paper mounds soon become mountains.

The bins, too, require constant attention. In winter, to loosen garbage
frozen to the sides, householders are advised to place bins in the sun,
if and when it shines. Come summer, the decomposing contents of the green
bins should be emptied, with noses pegged, into the grey bins, thus rubbishing
the whole idea of separating refuse.

Not that the separation process itself is exactly straightforward. Take
the supposedly simple teabag, for example. To be religious about it, as
the largely Calvinist Dutch are about most things, the wet tea leaves should
be removed from their filter-paper bag and deposited in the green bin. The
bag, once ironed dry, should be put aside for the infamous paper collection,
along with the tea label (after removing the metal staple, which goes in
the grey bin) and the piece of string, which is rolled up for the Salvation
Army.

Fortunately, not all refuse is as tortuous to untease as the teabag.
But a good deal demands dismantling if waste separation is to be even remotely
efficient. To keep separators on their toes, compliance is monitored by
a petty-minded bank of bin inspectors, who police the streets armed with
indelible red pens. Their brief is unenviable but clear: to ferret around,
elbow-deep, in bins whose owners can be identified by prominently displayed
numerals indicating house numbers. The bins of first-time offenders are
marked with warning crosses; those of second offenders, horror of horrors,
are not emptied.

Transgressions are easier to detect in green bins. Therefore the rule
of thumb is: when in doubt, go grey rather than green. This is what many
Egmonders now do, even when not in doubt. The practice explains why fewer
and fewer bins appear on ‘green weeks’ and why grey bins invariably overflow,
leaving a smelly mixture of rubbish strewn across the once-spotless streets.

Unless strong winds prevail, the rubbish remains where it fell because
GP Groot, a private firm of refuse collectors which has replaced the former,
fairly efficient municipal service, refuses point-blank to touch anything
falling from bins during emptying. Groot, meaning ‘big’ in Dutch, recently
compounded the problem by issuing a directive threatening that all overflowing
bins posed certain ‘risks’ and therefore they would not be emptied.

It is a sad state of affairs for a service which, before privatisation,
made weekly collections of all refuse, including fallen rubbish. What is
more, it did it at much less cost to householders than the present recycling
scheme, which itself seems in need of some recycling. That, alas, will not
be easy. Not being biodegradable, the bins fall short of the latest EC environmental
standards and would be difficult to recycle and almost impossible to dispose
of.

Peter Spinks, a science writer and former research psychologist, is
the Netherlands correspondent of New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

The row has split the ruling centre-left cabinet, a Christian Democrat
and Labour coalition, and could bring the government down. The previous
centre-right coalition collapsed in May 1989 over a national environmental
plan.

Energy-intensive companies, such as petrochemicals giant Shell, steel
producer Hoogovens and Dow Chemicals, claim that the ‘profit-crunching’
levies will severely damage their ability to compete internationally.
In addition, they say it will not be worth investing in new plant in the
Netherlands.

Shell has already postponed plans for a £1.6 billion modernisation
of a refinery at Rotterdam-Pernis. And Hoescht Holland, a division of the
German chemicals producer, told Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers that it may
consider closing down its Dutch plant and moving to ‘Kazakhstan . . .
where pollution really is a problem’.

The Netherlands’ carbon tax would be identical in form to the Commission’s
proposed tax – which was put on hold in December largely because of opposition
from industry. To encourage energy efficiency, half the levy is based on
the amount of energy produced by a fuel. The rest is calculated according
to how much carbon dioxide the fuel generates. This is designed to deter
firms from using fossil fuels and so reduce emissions, of CO sub 2 , the
most important greenhouse gas. The Commission’s proposed tax was set at
$3 on a barrel of oil or its equivalent for coal or gas.

Dutch environment minister Hans Alders, supported by his Labour colleagues,
is promoting the new tax. But the Christian Democrat economics minister
Koos Andriessen, has sided with industry.

If the Dutch were to ‘go it alone’ with such levies, the consequences
for the economy would be ‘so disastrous that I don’t even want to talk about
them’, Andriessen told parliament in The Hague last week.

Andriessen calculates that recently – agreed increases in Dutch environmental
levies already amount to the equivalent of the Brussels $3 tax. And his
sums exclude the national carbon tax. ‘The Netherlands could argue to be
excluded from a Commission carbon tax, when and if it is approved,’ he says.

Additional enviromental levies, planned for next year, include heavy
taxes on the use of ground water, pesticides and artificial fertilisers,
on cattle fields containing phosphorous and nitrogen, and on waste incineration
or dumping.

Distinctly Anglophile Amster-dammers, therefore, make prodigious use
of their very own branch of W. H. Smith, situated prominently at Kalverstraat
152, the Dutch capital’s main shopping street. For some time now, the best-seller
on the shop’s popular science shelves has been the ubiquitous A Brief History
of Time by Stephen Hawking. Though originally published in 1988, the book,
with worldwide hardback sales of more than one million, is still selling
by the hundreds here every year. ‘We keep having to order more copies of
this extraordinarily successful book’, says Rene Prins, the science book
buyer at W. H. Smith. ‘It seems to be as popular with university students
as general readers.’

This perhaps explains why the next most popular general science books
both deal with the highly graphic world of fractal geometry. Chaos: Making
a New Science by James Gleick (Cardinal, 1991), introducing the fundamentals
of chaos theory, brims with colourful Mandelbrot sets and strange attractors.

The modern move by many young Dutch academics toward a more organic,
holistic approach, converging the once divergent worlds of science and art,
is reflected in Disappearing Through the Skylight by O. B. Hardison (Penguin,
1990). Hardison was not Dutch but American. But his groundbreaking analysis
of culture and technology in this century, spanning the seemingly disparate
realms of science, history, art, architecture, music and language, grips
the Dutch with a vice-like hold on their imaginations. Though still highly
specialised and compartmentalised in almost every aspect of their education
system, they are now re-evaluating traditional approaches that have separated,
for example, mathematicians and painters.

Weird as it may seem to some foreigners, neither of the Netherlands’
foremost publishers produce science books in Dutch. ‘The demand is for publishing
science in English, which is obviously the language we use for our market,’
explains the company secretary of Elsevier Science Publishers, Maarten Goudsmit.
Most of their books are sold in the US, western Europe and Japan. ‘But we
cannot give any sales figures – it’s not company policy.’

After much prompting, however, he produced a list of the company’s three
top international sellers. Far and away the favourite is the Handbook of
Clinical Neurology, edited by P. J. Vinken, GW Bruyn and H. L. Klawana (1991,
pp 864, G550). This handbook’s popularity probably stems from the speed
with which it updates matters in this rapidly developing field.

Still on the neurology beat, Principles of Neural Science, edited by
Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz and Thomas M. Jessell (1991, pp 1200,
G185) is a textbook and reference book. The third edition comprehensively
summarises the state of the science and discusses relevant historical issues.

The third most popular tome is Dynamic Optimization by M. I. Kamlen
and N. I. Schwartz (1991, pp 352, G155). The second revised edition is subtitled
‘The Calculus of Variations and Optimal Control in Economics and Management’.
Through explanations of the use of mathematical methods in economics, and
a maze of worked examples, managers are presumably equipped with the tools
of optimisation needed to get them through the recession.

Kluwer Academic Publishers, further south in Dordrecht, also does not
reveal or, according to the book review manager, Robert Kennedy, ‘does not
know’, the extent of its science book sales in the Netherlands. ‘Our books
are so expensive and so academic that they are not widely read in this country,’
admits Kennedy.

The company has three international best-sellers which are highly specialised.
The most popular is Replacement of Renal Function by Dialysis, edited by
John F. Maher (pp 1252, G395). The third edition, updated and enlarged,
begins with a description of uremia toxicity and includes chapters on the
history of dialysis. New chapters deal with technical aspects of renal replacement
therapy and the prevention of renal failure.

Space Mission Analysis and Design, edited by James R. Wertz and Wiley
J. Larson (1991, pp 832, G95) claims to be ‘the first book to address the
art and science of preliminary space mission design’. Starting with a blank
sheet of paper and creating a space mission to meet a set of broad objectives,
the book draws on the experiences of some 40 authorities on aerospace and
aeronautics.

Computer Presentation of Data in Science by Doig Simmonds and Linda
Reynolds (pp 192, G95), is subtitled ‘A do-it-yourself guide based on the
Apple Macintosh for authors and illustrators in the sciences’. Essentially
a manual explaining ways to present data using a personal computer.

‘Over the last 18 months we have sold several thousand copies of these
best-sellers’, says Kennedy. This is unlikely to have been the case if they
had been produced in Dutch.

Peter Spinks, a science writer, is based in the the Netherlands.

Under the law, doctors can end a patient’s life under strictly controlled
conditions. The patient must make a ‘well-considered’ request for euthanasia.
Doctors must provide a detailed account of the patient’s circumstances by
means of a 28-point check list and must notify the coroner that they have
administered euthanasia.

Although officially illegal in the Netherlands, euthanasia accounts
for an estimated 2 per cent of deaths in the Netherlands each year. The
government’s proposals set the practice on a firmer footing. Although doctors
who carry out euthanasia face a maximum 12-year sentence, in practice they
have avoided prosecution by following similar informal guidelines. Under
the draft legislation, doctors who fail, in the view of a court, to comply
with the stipulated conditions, would also be liable to a 12-year sentence.

The Dutch justice minister, Ernst Hirsch-Ballin, said the proposals
struck a delicate balance between the government’s duty to protect life
and the individual’s right to die with dignity. But the initiative received
a lukewarm response from the medical profession and a Dutch right-to-die
group.

The Royal Dutch Medical Association said that the publication of the
guidelines was a step forward. But the association’s vice-president, Raymond
van de Velde, said he was disappointed that doctors would still be at risk
of prosecution. ‘A doctor who feels compelled to terminate a patient’s life
still risks being considered a criminal,’ he said.

Pit Bakker, chairwoman of the Netherlands Association for Voluntary
Euthanasia, said the government proposals were ‘extremely confusing’. She
also regretted that the government had not chosen the more ‘straightforward’
approach of legalising euthanasia without attaching such stringent conditions.

Hirsch-Ballin and the health minister, Hans Simons, said in a letter
to parliament that the government had a responsibility to protect human
life ‘even in its vulnerable final phase. But the government should also
take into account a patient’s wish to die with dignity and to curtail unbearable
²õ³Ü´Ú´Ú±ð°ù¾±²Ô²µ.’

In opinion polls more than 80 per cent of the Dutch public support an
individual’s right to die.

Catalytic converters are compulsory on all new cars in the US and Japan,
and will be in Europe from the beginning of 1993. But the precious metals
currently used in converters are expensive and can be difficult to obtain.
This has persuaded many car makers to seek cheaper alternatives.

Catalytic converters promote oxidation reactions on the surfaces of
the metals which convert the main harmful gases in car exhaust into less
harmful forms. Conventional converters contain platinum and rhodium, which
are most effective when smelted in a ratio of 5:1. An expensive and complicated
process of rhodium enrichment is required.

Converters made from a compound of copper oxide and chromite – a form
of chromium ore – where first considered inthe 1970s, but they were found
to be less effective than precious metals at cleaning exhaust emissions.
However, Sander Stegenga of the chemical engineering department of the University
of Amsterdam found that by using more catalyst, a copper-chromium converter
could compete with precious metal converters. His research was cosponsored
by the French car maker Peugeot and the Dutch government, which offers generous
tax incentives to motorists who use catalytic converters.

‘Admittedly platinum-rhodium, per square millimetre, is more active
in removing noxious gases, and retains its activity for a long time. But
the low cost of copper and chromium means that larger quantities may be
applied while still remaining cost-effective,’ Stegenga says. ‘Operationally
speaking, copper and chromium converters are far superior to precious metal
devices.’ He estimates that the new converters may be two-thirds of the
cost of conventional precious metal devices, which can add £300 to
the price of a car.

Platinum-rhodium devices successfully convert 80 per cent of unburned
hydrocarbons and less than 70 per cent of nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide,
Stegenga says. At the same time, however, the converters produce ozone-depleting
nitrous oxide and foul-smelling hydrogen sulphide.

Stegenga claims his copper-chromium converters produce no hydrogen sulphide
and up to 90 per cent less nitrous oxide. This offsets the main drawback
of copper-chromium converters, Stegenga says, that they become less efficient
as the sulphur content of fuel increases.

Providing the road tests confirm the laboratory results, Stegenga is
optimistic that copper-chromium converters may become commercially available
by the European Community’s 1993 deadline.

Not so long ago green-mindedness was considered the preserve of long-haired
hippy dropouts or, at best, of eccen-tric muesli-munching puritans. Nowadays
you are something of a dropout or an eccentric if you are not at least rudimentarily
green. The speed with which the idea that ‘green is good’ caught on in different
countries has differed markedly between the relatively affluent north and
the cash-strapped south.

The Making of the New Environmental Consciousness tackles not the obvious
question of how the north-south divide accounts for such marked differences,
but looks instead at the more subtle ways in which countries of a broadly
similar political structure have jumped aboard the environmental bandwagon.
The three countries chosen for comparison – Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands
– have each ingested green values with varying degrees of gusto, and have
regurgitated such unpleasant issues as unacceptable costs with almost uniform
distaste.

In Sweden, the bastion of the Scandinavian ‘clean’ ethic, greener-than-thou
values became popular after antinuclear sentiment entered parliament and
the country’s Centre Party started pushing for renewable energies as greener
alternatives than traditional fuels. Indeed, opposing existing government
policies on essentially ecological grounds became fashionable in parliament
for winning debates and on the street for winning votes.

Pressure groups, such as the Friends of the Earth, emphasised the need
for changes in lifestyle. This helped to integrate the somewhat narrower
concerns of green politics into the wider realm of parliamentary politics
by broadening the focus of the environmental movement and the debate on
energy.

Field biologists also joined the fray. Their contribution, writes Andrew
Jamison of the University of Lund, was to rearticulate a ‘conservationist
attitude to nature’ that had the effect of popularising the ‘mainly technical
discourse of the antinuclear movement’. This conservationist approach also
tended to depoliticise environmental issues, which in turn made them less
threatening.

Later, inevitably, the full political thrust of environmentalism became
all too evident to the broad left movement, which was quick to realise that
this was no isolated issue. Socialist environmentalism aimed to involve
the working class as closely as possible. Per Kageson, the Swedish environmentalist,
noted that: ‘Workers are affected more than other groups by environmental
destruction. What environmentalists do not understand is the necessity of
showing solidarity with the worker – make contact and cooperate with him.’

In Denmark, the NOAH environmental movement got off to a rowdy start
in 1969 when the annual seminar of a respectable natural history society
at Copenhagen University was disrupted by a group of some 20 students who
stormed the meeting hall.

After bolting the doors and cutting off the hall’s ventilation, the
students proceeded to pollute the air by burning garbage and tobacco while
spraying the aghast society members with water from a polluted lake and,
if that weren’t enough, blasting them with a traffic alarm played over a
loudspeaker. To further colour the occasion, they covered a wild duck in
oil, cut off its head and walked along the first row of chairs, spilling
blood on those seated. After, the students invited the bewildered society
members to attend the first meeting of the new environmental movement, NOAH.

Unsurprisingly, NOAH’s unusual start proved a hard act to follow and
its subsequent verbal assaults on established values and political ideology
certainly paled by comparison. They succeded, nevertheless, in building
on the foundation laid by Denmark’s 19th-century cooperative movement whose
self-organised alternative culture lent itself to the promotion of environmental
concerns.

The chapter on the new environmentalism in the Netherlands is particularly
illuminating. By first painting a vivid picture of the ‘pillarisation’ of
Dutch society – based on the precepts of different political and religious
groups – Jacqueline Cramer, of the Amsterdam-based Research Centre for Technology
and Policy Studies, explains the development of disparate environmental
groups with often vastly different aspirations.

The groups continue to work happily alongside one another rather than
together. This tends to provoke competition between different environmental
groups which, in contrast to Denmark, sometimes appears to be counterproductive.

Because the different societal ‘pillars’ represent minority groups,
the Dutch learnt that the best way to muster a majority was to form a consensus
by compromise rather than opposition by conflict. Their penchant for compromise
is manifest today in the broadly held belief that something, indeed everything,
ought to be done to tackle environmental pollution. For the guilder-conscious
Dutch, the question is what to do and, more importantly, at what cost.

To this, and other intriguing questions, Cramer dispenses no ready answers.
But she does helpfully signpost one through the historical highlights that
make the Netherlands the environmental melting pot it now is.

The book’s strength lies in its concluding chapter which emphasises
the similarities, as well as the differences, in approach to environmentalism
in the three countries. Though too many and varied to list here, suffice
it to say that there is anything but a common approach to tackling such
common problems as the use of synthetic chemicals and nuclear power. Yet
somehow the various environmental lobbies in the three countries achieve
similar goals by continuing to influence social and political processes
in one way or another.

The book’s main weakness is that the arguments are not always cogently
expressed and sometimes obfuscate rather than clarify the issues – a common
weakness of works written by academics for academics. Having said that,
academics involved in any aspect of environmentalism would be well advised
not to skip this only occasionally tortuous tome.

Peter Spinks is a science writer based in the Netherlands.

The Dutch government, which is struggling to find ways to reduce air
pollution, has welcomed the scheme. The government pledged two years ago
to make public transport cleaner and cheaper to entice motorists away from
their cars, but it has done nothing to keep fares down. Without an increase
in the number of passengers, bus operators have no incentive to invest in
less polluting fuels or reduce their exhaust emissions. If bus companies
do not switch voluntarily from diesel to cleaner fuels such as ethanol,
however, they may soon be forced to comply with stricter emission standards.

‘It is now really up to the bus operators to clean up our own act, and
what better way to do that than by using a renewable fuel that is less polluting
than conventional fossil fuels,’ a spokesman for Gado said. The project,
he added, will also help farmers seeking alternative markets for their crops.

The technique is of crucial importance in the Netherlands, where manure
from the enormous pig and cattle population is seriously polluting the environment.
Left untreated, part of the ammonia in manure evaporates into the atmosphere,
where it contributes to the formation of acid rain. Most of the remainder
is oxidised into harmful nitrates which seep through the soil into the ground
water. The Dutch government is considering legislation to curb the output
of manure.

In 1986, the biotechnology company Gist-Brocades, based in Delft, began
looking for a bacterium which could convert almost all of the ammonia in
pig manure into an amino acid, lysine, a protein used in animal feed. The
company used a traditional technique in biotechnology in which microorganisms
are cultured and then irradiated with ultraviolet light to generate random
mutations in the bacteria. Bacteria are then selected according to specific
criteria for further reproduction.

After irradiating hundreds of different strains of microorganisms from
three genera of bacteria – Brevibacterium, Corynebacterium and Arthrobacter
– the scientists isolated the best mutant strains. ‘The breakthrough has
been in engineering a selection of mutants which are unparalleled in their
ability to produce lysine from manure,’ says Sanders. ‘All that’s now left
for us to do is select the very best bacterium which functions under optimum
³¦´Ç²Ô»å¾±³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô²õ.’

Tests are currently being carried out in a small-scale experimental
fermentation vessel. The researchers are juggling the controls to find the
ideal conditions of heat, movement and aeration under which the bacteria
produce lysine. The conditions will then be replicated in an industrial-scale
fermenter with a capacity of more than 100 000 litres.

The final step will be to separate out the lysine from the remaining
manure. This will be achieved, Sanders says, by concentrating the lysine
as much as possible and then filtering away the solids left in the manure.
Other soluble compounds in the manure will be drained away and the amino
acid solution will be evaporated to leave a pure powder of lysine.

‘The addition of an amino acid like lysine to the feed of pigs and poultry
will further reduce the amount of ammonia-producing nitrogen needed in the
feed as well as the amounts of phosphate and potassium,’ Sanders says. ‘So
in one fell swoop we rid ourselves of the scourge of manure and of the fundamental
problem of polluting ammonia, phosphate and potassium in feedstocks.’

Ground water can also be contaminated by phosphate from manure. Pigs
need phosphate in their diet, so it is added to their feed. This can be
avoided by adding an enzyme called phytase instead. Phytase breaks down
a substance which plants use to store phosphorus, releasing it in a form
that the pigs can absorb. Using phytase in pig feed instead of phosphate
cuts the amount of phosphate in manure by over a quarter.

The fully integrated process is expected to be in commercial operation
by 1994. It will treat up to 500 000 cubic metres of manure, about 15 per
cent of the Netherlands’ manure-processing capacity.