Swap debt for forest
I read with dismay the statistics and description of the accelerating deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest (15 October, p 34). When will people wake up and realise that we have only one Earth, one environment and a limited amount of rainforest?
This issue is one of international responsibility. The US and the other countries Brazil is financially beholden to should offer a debt break in exchange for safeguarding the Amazon forest. It’s a shame when today’s economy is more important than tomorrow’s environment.
From Robert Ewers, University of Cambridge
Your article rightly points out that rising rates of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon region are a mounting conservation problem. There was just one point missing from this balanced and authoritative overview 鈥� the extraordinary growth of protected areas in the Amazon.
Since 1990, over 25 million hectares have been added to reserves controlled by the federal government and another 20 million to state-controlled reserves. But the biggest increases by far have been in indigenous areas. The last 15 years have seen control of over 80 million hectares of land handed over to indigenous peoples, who jealously guard their land against invading colonists and farmers. That equals 3 hectares of reserves created for every 1 hectare of forest that has been cleared or degraded.
As of 2005, more than one-third of the Brazilian Amazon has some form of legal protection. No one is arguing that this is perfect, but recent satellite images indicate that deforestation rates inside the reserves are vastly reduced relative to the rates outside. The rate at which this impressive reserve network has grown, and the role it now plays in holding back deforestation, is a credit to the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment.
Cambridge, UK
For the record
鈥� In our “In brief” about unhelpful chimpanzees (29 October, p 18), Craig Stamford of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, was wrongly named Chris Stanford.
鈥� In “Razing Amazonia” (15 October, p 34), Brazil was incorrectly named as the largest debtor nation in the world. In fact, the US is the world’s biggest debtor nation, though Brazil topped the developing nations list until just recently, when it was overtaken by China.
Ancient noodles
So an archaeologist lifts a 4000-year-old pot in China and finds noodles preserved underneath (15 October, p 19). It seems, then, that we must honour the Chinese for the discovery of pasta and simultaneously blame them for the invention of the pot noodle.
Enlightenment crisis
The first article in your report on fundamentalism was entitled “End of the Enlightenment” (8 October, p 39). However, the Enlightenment paradigm itself is on the verge of being overturned, much as the European medieval paradigm crumbled when thinkers such as Galileo and Bacon developed methodologies whose success displaced the hegemony of theology.
The consequence then was a new world view. But this powerful and overwhelmingly successful “modern” world view began to show its limits some time during the 20th century.
Its materialist basis, in which nature appears as little more than a resource for humans to appropriate, is implicated in widespread environmental destruction and has promoted a separation between science and ethics. In many ways, the rise of fundamentalism is a response to the inadequacy of the Enlightenment’s techno-scientific world view to encompass questions of value.
Western history shows that epoch-making shifts occur when a dominant epistemological model is dislodged. The displacement of the Enlightenment paradigm by the fundamentalist one is bad news, as it would be a move backwards to theology.
More optimistically, the Enlightenment approach takes physics as the paradigm for knowledge 鈥� but biology is becoming a likely candidate for providing the innovative ontology and epistemology that might underwrite a move forward in our understanding of the world.
However, the fundamentalist colonisation of biology through promotion of intelligent design in the classroom is hampering such progress. Though this has met widespread criticism from the scientific community, its threat to the future, if I am right about biology’s potential to instigate an intellectual revolution, has been vastly underestimated.
Before gravity won
Thank you for your excellent article on the connection between time and entropy, in which Amanda Gefter indicates, among other things, how the initial, low-entropy starting point for the universe is a puzzle that has not yet been solved (15 October, p 30). Ironically, though, she provides such a clear and concise summary of the subject that the solution jumps out, implicitly, from the rest of her article.
At the time the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation came into being, the universe was extremely uniform. As Gefter indicates, this represents a low-entropy state because the dominant force (gravity) works towards a clumping of matter.
In a quote, she indicates that “the hard part is getting the initial entropy to be low”, but surely she has provided the answer to this, when she observes most conventional systems work towards a uniform state 鈥� the one with the highest entropy. This seems to indicate that, in the period before the CMB, gravity was not yet the dominant force, and that some other force (one that discouraged the clumping of matter) was dominant instead.
As with all responses to questions in science, of course, this merely moves the problem somewhere else. In this case, the question then becomes why gravity might suddenly have switched to being the dominant force in the evolution of the universe at this point.
From Mark Bruce
If we were ever to witness effect preceding cause, as Amanda Gefter describes, we would conclude that time was flowing in reverse due to an apparent decrease in entropy. With the laws of physics being essentially time-independent, and our bodies and brains governed by such laws, it is interesting to note that ultimately we would never, indeed could never, notice whether time (whatever it is) was flowing forwards or backwards or not.
In our conscious state of any particular moment, we would be blissfully unaware of whether time was moving forwards as we grow older and accumulate experiences and memories, or moving backwards with our memories “evaporating” as we “un-experienced” our experiences. It would appear that such a distinction is meaningless and of no consequence to our lives and the universe in general.
Adelaide, South Australia
Shifting towns
I see from the map in your article on the Wollemi pine that I shall have to get a new street directory for New South Wales (22 October, p 45). Someone has shifted Sydney north to the Hawkesbury river and put Wollongong in its place.
It’s hard enough finding my way around with the new road closures without finding a new city on my doorstep.
Stutchbury's cockle
The article about the rediscovery of gorillas in the 1840s mentioned Samuel Stutchbury and Richard Owen (1 October, p 46). But Samuel Stutchbury’s surname was misspelled three times in the article as “Stutchbery”.
Samuel Stutchbury was a remarkable naturalist whose many achievements included collecting (in 1827) specimens of the New Zealand cockle. As a result, it bears the taxonomic name Chione stutchburyi.
Costly iron age
The only merit in car engines fuelled by nanoparticles of iron or any other metal seems to be that the metal fuel may be safer than hydrogen (22 October, p 34). But hydrogen or carbon monoxide is needed to recycle the fuel and reduce it to its original metal element after it has been oxidised. If hydrogen were used for the recycling, we would be every bit as dependent on it as if the car were running on hydrogen.
Environmentally, the main problem with hydrogen is that you need another source of energy to produce it from water. And the only practical sources of that energy we have so far are coal plants, other hydrocarbon-burning plants, nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams.
To produce CO requires the burning of hydrocarbons or coal. And the end-product of using toxic CO to reduce the oxidised fuel to pure metal would be CO2.
Skipping the recycling stage is not feasible either. The total process of mining ores, extracting their metals and making nanoparticles from the metals requires more energy than can be extracted from the end product. And I doubt that the problem could be alleviated by scavenging junkyards and dump sites.
From Gerry Wolff
The use of powdered metal suggests a possible solution to another problem: how to tap into the enormous quantities of energy falling as sunlight on the world’s hot deserts.
Sunlight can be concentrated with mirrors to raise steam and generate electricity () but centres of population, where the energy is needed, are typically a long way from where there is most sunlight. Conduction losses mean that it is not economical to transmit electricity directly over long distances and, while hydrogen may be generated by the electrolysis of water and used as an energy vector, it is awkward to handle and expensive to transport by tanker or pipeline.
If powdered metal or boron can be produced by treating the relevant oxide with hydrogen (or if these things can be made directly from the oxide using the energy of concentrated sunlight), then they may serve as a very convenient medium for transporting solar energy to the places where it is needed. The oxide produced when the metal or boron powder is burned may be collected and returned to the solar power plants for recycling.
Menai Bridge, Anglesey, UK
From Guy Cox, University of Sydney
If we are going to use powder to propel cars, why not use flour? As any silo worker knows, this provides a very explosive mix when suspended in air, eminently capable of powering an internal combustion engine. This would be greenhouse-neutral and much more efficient than fermenting the grain into ethanol for fuel. The technology required would surely be simpler than the metal-fuelled engine.
Sydney, Australia
Who pays the piper?
Timothy Ferris seems to be embarrassingly unaware of several important facts of life, such as money and morality (22 October, p 50).
If one follows the money track, his concept of free research is meaningless. Does he really believe that scientists are free to go wherever their altruistic curiosity might take them? Hasn’t he heard about funding, which, be it governmental or corporate, or even “NGOtic”, mercilessly directs all those brilliant minds out there into very narrowly defined paths that have nothing to do with freedom?
The morality issue he himself dismisses wholesale, together with normal logic, when he states that no research that has been done should not have been done.
From Mark MacDiarmid
Ferris asks us to name a past programme of scientific research that ought to have been prohibited. The answer is on page 6 of the same edition in the form of Hans Reiter’s typhoid inoculation experiments on Nazi concentration camp victims.
Ferris pursues the naive line that it is possible for science to proceed on the value-free basis of rationality and empiricism. But as anyone who has ever put in a funding application knows, the dance of science is always choreographed by someone. The questions we all need to keep asking are: who is paying the piper, and what tune do they want scientists to dance to?
Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia