http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/22ccaa98-b5d9-11dd-ab71-0000779fd18c.html?nclick_check=1
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/38cf416a-c26e-11dd-a350-000077b07658.html
Daewoo Logistics of South Korea has secured a huge tract of farmland in Madagascar to grow food crops to send back to Seoul, in a deal that diplomats and consultants said was the largest of its kind.
The company said it had leased 1.3m hectares of farmland - about half the size of Belgium - from Madagascar for 99 years. It planned to ship the corn and palm oil harvests back to South Korea. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The pursuit of foreign farm investments is a sign of how countries are seeking food security following this year's food crisis, which saw record prices for commodities such as wheat and rice and food riots in countries from Egypt to Haiti.
Agricultural commodities prices have tumbled by about 50 per cent from their record levels this year but countries remain concerned about long-term supplies.
The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation warned this year that the race by agricultural commodity-importing countries to secure farmland overseas risked creating a "neo-colonial" system.
Those fears could be heightened by the fact that Daewoo's farm in Madagascar represents about half the African country's arable land, according to estimates by the US government.
Shin Dong-hyun, a senior manager at Daewoo Logistics in Seoul, said the company would develop the arable land for farming over the next 15 years, using labour from South Africa. It was intended
to replace about half South Korea's corn imports.
South Korea, a resource-poor nation, is the world's fourth-largest importer of corn and among the 10 largest buyers of soyabean.
Carl Atkins, of consultants Bidwells Agribusiness, said Daewoo Logistics' investment in Madagascar was the largest it had seen. "The project does not surprise me, as countries are looking to improve food security but its size it does surprise me."
Concepción Calpe, a senior economist at the FAO in Rome, said the investment came after this year's food crisis. "Countries are looking to buy or lease farmland to improve their food security," she said.
Al-Qudra Holding, an Abu Dhabi-based investment company, said in August it planned to buy 400,000 hectares of arable land in countries in Africa and Asia by the end of the first quarter of next year.
Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia, said this year its government was "very eager" to provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land to Middle Eastern countries for investment.
Daewoo unsure of Madagascar deal
Daewoo Logistics of South Korea has not received approval from Madagascar for a plan to farm maize and palm oil in an area half the size of Belgium, contrary to statements by company officials, it has emerged.
Daewoo managers told the media last month the company would develop 1.3m hectares on the island to secure stable food supplies for South Korea under a 99-year lease, joining a flurry of Asian and Middle Eastern companies seeking to tap Africa's agricultural export potential.
A Daewoo official told the Financial Times that the company understood it would not have to pay to lease the land, given the investment involved and the jobs to be created.
But in a statement attributed to the company and posted on the website of the Malagasy president, Daewoo said: "There is not yet a contract on the land between Daewoo Logistics and [the] Madagascar government."
Echoing that, the Malagasy land reform ministry told the FT: "There has been no contract at regional or central government level. They [Daewoo] have prospected for land and now the central government is waiting for the prospecting reports."
The ministry said an environmental investigation would be required as well. Marius Ratolojanahary, the land reform minister, confirmed to a Malagasy newspaper that Daewoo still had several hurdles to clear.
"Every request must be examined by a commission before being supported by the cabinet," he said. "So Daewoo was free to file an application in line with the procedure but that does not mean it will get the land."
Daewoo declined to confirm or comment on the statement on the government website.
Responding to initial reports of the deal, critics said the welfare of Malagasy people and global food security would be better served by islanders being helped to manage their own farms.
They stressed the trickle-down effect of Daewoo's plan would be marginal and noted the company's focus on exporting food from a country in which about 600,000 people rely on relief from the United Nations World Food Programme.
South Korea is the world's fourth biggest maize importer and wants to wean itself off US shipments.
lunedì 8 dicembre 2008
Paradise almost lost: Maldives seek to buy a new homeland
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/audio/2008/nov/10/randeep-ramesh-maldives-climate-change
The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into buying a new homeland - as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees, the country's first democratically elected president has told the Guardian.
Mohamed Nasheed, who takes power officially tomorrow in the island's capital, Male, said the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels.
The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59cm by 2100, due to global warming. Most parts of the Maldives are just 1.5m above water. The president said even a "small rise" in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago.
"We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome. After all, the Israelis [began by buying] land in Palestine," said Nasheed, also known as Anni.
The president, a human rights activist who swept to power in elections last month after ousting Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the man who once imprisoned him, said he had already broached the idea with a number of countries and found them to be "receptive".
He said Sri Lanka and India were targets because they had similar cultures, cuisines and climates. Australia was also being considered because of the amount of unoccupied land available.Mohamed Nasheed, who takes power officially tomorrow in the island's capital, Male, said the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels.
The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59cm by 2100, due to global warming. Most parts of the Maldives are just 1.5m above water. The president said even a "small rise" in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago.
"We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome. After all, the Israelis [began by buying] land in Palestine," said Nasheed, also known as Anni.
The president, a human rights activist who swept to power in elections last month after ousting Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the man who once imprisoned him, said he had already broached the idea with a number of countries and found them to be "receptive".
"We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades," he said.
Environmentalists say the issue raises the question of what rights citizens have if their homeland no longer exists. "It's an unprecedented wake-up call," said Tom Picken, head of international climate change at Friends of the Earth. "The Maldives is left to fend for itself. It is a victim of climate change caused by rich countries."
Nasheed said he intended to create a "sovereign wealth fund" from the dollars generated by "importing tourists", in the way that Arab states have done by "exporting oil". "Kuwait might invest in companies; we will invest in land."
The 41-year-old is a rising star in Asia, where he has been compared to Nelson Mandela. Before taking office the new president asked Maldivians to move forward without rancour or retribution - an astonishing call, given that Nasheed had gone to jail 23 times, been tortured and spent 18 months in solitary confinement.
"We have the latitude to remove anyone from government and prosecute them. But I have forgiven my jailers, the torturers. They were following orders ... I ask people to follow my example and leave Gayoom to grow old here," he said.
The Maldives is one of the few Muslim nations to make a relatively peaceful transition from autocracy to democracy. The Gayoom "sultanate" was an iron-fisted regime that ran the police, army and courts, and which banned rival parties.
Public flogging, banishment to island gulags and torture were routinely used to suppress dissent and the fledging pro-democracy movement. Gayoom was "elected" president six times in 30 years - but never faced an opponent. However, public pressure grew and last year he conceded that democracy was inevitable.
Upmarket tourism had become a prop for the dictatorial regime. Gayoom's Maldives became the richest country in South Asia, with average incomes reaching $4,600 a year. But the wealth created was skimmed off by cronies - leaving a yawning gap between rich and poor. Speedboats and yachts of local multimillionaires bob in the lagoon of the capital's harbour, while official figures show almost half of Maldivians earn less than a dollar a day.
Male is the world's most densely populated town: 100,000 people cram into two square kilometres. "We have unemployment at 20%. Heroin has become a serious social issue, with crime rising," Nasheed said, adding that the extra social spending he pledged would cost an immediate $243m. He said that without an emergency bailout from the international community, the future of the Maldives as a democracy would be in doubt. To raise cash, his government will sell off state assets, reduce the cabinet and turn the presidential palace into the country's first university.
"It's desperate. We are a 100% Islamic country and democracy came from within. Do you want to lose that because we were denied the money to deal with the poverty created by the dictatorship?" he said.
At a glance
• The highest land point in the Maldives is 2.4 metres above sea level, on Wilingili island in the Addu Atoll
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels could rise by 25-58cm by 2100
• The country comprises 1,192 islands grouped around 26 Indian Ocean atolls. Only 250 islands are inhabited. The population is 380,000
• The main income is from tourism, with 467,154 people visiting in 2006
domenica 7 dicembre 2008
Los costes del transporte naufragan
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/economia/costes/transporte/naufragan/elpepueconeg/20081207elpnegeco_1/Tes Pese a la gravedad de la crisis, el mundo no se ha parado. Cada día, millones de empresas envían de un lugar a otro del planeta sus productos y materias primas, que siguen engrasando -aunque sea lentamente- la máquina de la economía. Sólo que hace apenas seis meses contratar un buque de transporte era una misión casi imposible [¡y millonaria!] y ahora el sector empieza a hablar de un exceso de capacidad que ha hundido sus tarifas.
El indicador más conocido, el índice de contratación de fletes (Baltic Dry Index), ha perdido este año más del 90% de su valor [ver gráfico], desde el máximo histórico alcanzado en mayo pasado cuando rozó los 12.000 puntos. En este momento cotiza en su nivel más bajo desde 1986, a poco más de 600 puntos. Y bajando.
Este índice mide la cantidad de contratos de envío de mercancías que se cierran en las principales rutas marítimas mundiales. En la medida en que la economía mundial está en crisis, los contratos de transporte se reducen y el índice baja. De ahí que haya sido utilizado durante mucho tiempo como un indicador adelantado de las perspectivas del comercio y el crecimiento mundial.
Los expertos ponen ahora en duda esta teoría. "El índice había alcanzado niveles poco creíbles. Detrás de los máximos registrados en mayo pasado había mucha especulación, y ahora todo eso ha estallado", asegura Roberto Ruiz-Schlotes, director de estrategia del banco suizo UBS.
De hecho, el Dow Jones y los principales índices bursátiles mundiales alcanzaron su máximo en octubre de 2007. Para finales de ese año, la economía estadounidense, según han certificado las autoridades esta semana, ya había entrado en recesión. El Baltic Dry Index (BDI) no alcanzó su pico hasta mayo, lo que daría al traste con su capacidad de anticipar un punto de inflexión en la economía. O no tanto. El estallido de la burbuja en las materias primas se produjo unos meses después, en julio. Fue entonces cuando el petróleo alcanzó su máximo de 146 dólares por barril. Pero también la soja, el acero o el cobre registraron los precios más altos de su historia. Ahí sí que se le puede atribuir al BDI su condición de indicador adelantado.
La caída del índice se ha acelerado en las últimas semanas. Ahora cabe saber si esa tendencia apunta a una desaceleración más intensa de la producción y la inflación en todo el mundo, o si esconde otras razones. De todo hay.
Deutsche Bank calcula que, con la economía mundial encaminada a una recesión, el exceso de capacidad del sector oscila entre el 20% y el 10%, "una situación tan funesta como la del mercado de tanques en los años ochenta, cuando las tarifas cayeron por debajo del nivel de equilibrio y se alcanzaron en algunos casos tasas a cero dólares diarios". Caso muy distinto es el del petróleo y el gas, transportes que se mantendrán a flote mientras coticen entre 30 y 40 dólares por barril, dice el banco.
La Agrupación de Industrias Marítimas de Euskadi (Adime) y la propia Asociación de Navieros de Españoles (Anave) coinciden en parte con esta tesis. Aseguran que buena parte de la caída de los fletes se debe al fuerte aumento de la oferta de buques. Lo que parecía el imparable ascenso del precio de las materias primas, sobre todo del petróleo, llevó a muchas empresas a encargar buques de carga que se están entregando ahora. Pero aún quedan muchos pendientes. Adime asegura que los astilleros vascos y del resto del Estado mantienen carga de trabajo para los próximos tres años "con una cartera de buques firmados y con la financiación aprobada". Aunque ya empiezan a ver reducidas sus carteras de pedidos con cancelaciones sobre todo de países asiáticos, como Corea, China o India.
Eso es lo que más preocupa al sector. Y al mundo entero.
El último informe trimestral del Banco Mundial sobre China advierte de un deterioro de su economía mayor del inicialmente previsto y cuyas causas atienden más a razones internas que a la crisis internacional. La construcción de viviendas se ha frenado en seco, al pasar de un crecimiento del 20% a cero. Eso significa que China produce ahora más cemento y acero del que necesita, lo que explica a su vez las cancelaciones de pedidos de este metal que se han producido en los últimos meses.
Sólo en octubre, los precios del acero han caído un 12,4% respecto a un año antes y un 6,9% respecto a septiembre. La producción industrial creció en octubre al menor ritmo en siete años y el consumo de electricidad cayó (-4%) por primera vez en una década.
Los analistas también apuntan a una derivada directa de la crisis financiera sobre el comercio en todo el mundo, financiado en un 90% a través del crédito. La industria explica que algunas cargas se han quedado en los muelles porque es difícil encontrar bancos dispuestos a financiar el movimiento de los bienes. Los bancos están mostrando reticencias a proporcionar letras de crédito para operaciones de importación y exportación, hasta tal punto que el propio Banco Mundial ha ampliado sus programas de financiación de estas operaciones (1.500 millones de dólares) para evitar el colapso del comercio mundial. Según sus cálculos, por primera vez en 27 años el comercio mundial puede registrar un descenso el año que viene después de registrar un crecimiento del 6% en 2007 y del 8,5% en 2006.
"Nadie en activo en el sector ha pasado por una situación parecida, no tenemos precedentes y no sabemos qué pasará", admite Manuel Carlier, director general de Anave. "Evidentemente, los tres últimos años han sido excepcionalmente buenos y las empresas cuentan con un pequeño margen, pero las compañías no podrán aguantar mucho así", concluye Carlier.
Este índice mide la cantidad de contratos de envío de mercancías que se cierran en las principales rutas marítimas mundiales. En la medida en que la economía mundial está en crisis, los contratos de transporte se reducen y el índice baja. De ahí que haya sido utilizado durante mucho tiempo como un indicador adelantado de las perspectivas del comercio y el crecimiento mundial.
Los expertos ponen ahora en duda esta teoría. "El índice había alcanzado niveles poco creíbles. Detrás de los máximos registrados en mayo pasado había mucha especulación, y ahora todo eso ha estallado", asegura Roberto Ruiz-Schlotes, director de estrategia del banco suizo UBS.
De hecho, el Dow Jones y los principales índices bursátiles mundiales alcanzaron su máximo en octubre de 2007. Para finales de ese año, la economía estadounidense, según han certificado las autoridades esta semana, ya había entrado en recesión. El Baltic Dry Index (BDI) no alcanzó su pico hasta mayo, lo que daría al traste con su capacidad de anticipar un punto de inflexión en la economía. O no tanto. El estallido de la burbuja en las materias primas se produjo unos meses después, en julio. Fue entonces cuando el petróleo alcanzó su máximo de 146 dólares por barril. Pero también la soja, el acero o el cobre registraron los precios más altos de su historia. Ahí sí que se le puede atribuir al BDI su condición de indicador adelantado.
La caída del índice se ha acelerado en las últimas semanas. Ahora cabe saber si esa tendencia apunta a una desaceleración más intensa de la producción y la inflación en todo el mundo, o si esconde otras razones. De todo hay.
Deutsche Bank calcula que, con la economía mundial encaminada a una recesión, el exceso de capacidad del sector oscila entre el 20% y el 10%, "una situación tan funesta como la del mercado de tanques en los años ochenta, cuando las tarifas cayeron por debajo del nivel de equilibrio y se alcanzaron en algunos casos tasas a cero dólares diarios". Caso muy distinto es el del petróleo y el gas, transportes que se mantendrán a flote mientras coticen entre 30 y 40 dólares por barril, dice el banco.
La Agrupación de Industrias Marítimas de Euskadi (Adime) y la propia Asociación de Navieros de Españoles (Anave) coinciden en parte con esta tesis. Aseguran que buena parte de la caída de los fletes se debe al fuerte aumento de la oferta de buques. Lo que parecía el imparable ascenso del precio de las materias primas, sobre todo del petróleo, llevó a muchas empresas a encargar buques de carga que se están entregando ahora. Pero aún quedan muchos pendientes. Adime asegura que los astilleros vascos y del resto del Estado mantienen carga de trabajo para los próximos tres años "con una cartera de buques firmados y con la financiación aprobada". Aunque ya empiezan a ver reducidas sus carteras de pedidos con cancelaciones sobre todo de países asiáticos, como Corea, China o India.
Eso es lo que más preocupa al sector. Y al mundo entero.
El último informe trimestral del Banco Mundial sobre China advierte de un deterioro de su economía mayor del inicialmente previsto y cuyas causas atienden más a razones internas que a la crisis internacional. La construcción de viviendas se ha frenado en seco, al pasar de un crecimiento del 20% a cero. Eso significa que China produce ahora más cemento y acero del que necesita, lo que explica a su vez las cancelaciones de pedidos de este metal que se han producido en los últimos meses.
Sólo en octubre, los precios del acero han caído un 12,4% respecto a un año antes y un 6,9% respecto a septiembre. La producción industrial creció en octubre al menor ritmo en siete años y el consumo de electricidad cayó (-4%) por primera vez en una década.
Los analistas también apuntan a una derivada directa de la crisis financiera sobre el comercio en todo el mundo, financiado en un 90% a través del crédito. La industria explica que algunas cargas se han quedado en los muelles porque es difícil encontrar bancos dispuestos a financiar el movimiento de los bienes. Los bancos están mostrando reticencias a proporcionar letras de crédito para operaciones de importación y exportación, hasta tal punto que el propio Banco Mundial ha ampliado sus programas de financiación de estas operaciones (1.500 millones de dólares) para evitar el colapso del comercio mundial. Según sus cálculos, por primera vez en 27 años el comercio mundial puede registrar un descenso el año que viene después de registrar un crecimiento del 6% en 2007 y del 8,5% en 2006.
"Nadie en activo en el sector ha pasado por una situación parecida, no tenemos precedentes y no sabemos qué pasará", admite Manuel Carlier, director general de Anave. "Evidentemente, los tres últimos años han sido excepcionalmente buenos y las empresas cuentan con un pequeño margen, pero las compañías no podrán aguantar mucho así", concluye Carlier.
Cambio ladrillo por huerto solar
Millones de paneles solares han germinado en el paisaje español con la voracidad de una plaga. Donde antes había cultivos o terreno baldío han surgido 29.000 instalaciones dotadas de la última tecnología fotovoltaica. Ni siquiera el boom inmobiliario ha registrado un crecimiento parecido (900% en dos años) en sus tiempos dorados. Alguna cifra es elocuente. Se necesitó todo el año 2004 para alcanzar 8 megavatios de potencia de origen solar: en 2008, bastaban cuatro días. El Plan de Energías Renovables confeccionado por el Gobierno socialista para la energía solar preveía la instalación de un total de 371 megavatios en el periodo comprendido entre 2005 y 2010. Pues bien, el objetivo previsto para un quinquenio se alcanzó en cuatro meses durante el año 2008. El fenómeno puede ser contradictorio si se confirma que una energía limpia tiene un origen sucio.
A lomos de esa expansión sin freno ha surgido un potente sector industrial que ha generado 24.000 empleos, con fuertes inversiones en I+D+i y plena capacidad exportadora, pero también la sospecha de un fraude que puede tener grandes proporciones y causar dolores de cabeza en varias comunidades autónomas, tanto socialistas como populares. Detrás del caso hay dos viejos conocidos, la especulación y el tráfico de influencias. La explicación es bien sencilla: algunos hábitos perversos del boom inmobiliario han cambiado de domicilio. El Estado deberá desembolsar durante los próximos 25 años unos 18.500 millones de euros en subvenciones comprometidas.
Un repaso a la prensa regional sirve para describir qué tintes alcanzó la peculiar competición entre comunidades autónomas por el liderazgo en el sector solar. Mes a mes se fueron reproduciendo escenas parecidas en puntos diferentes del mapa.
Septiembre de 2007. La prensa de Castilla y León daba cuenta de la inauguración de "la planta solar fotovoltaica más grande del mundo" entre las localidades salmantinas de Zarapicos y San Pedro del Valle sobre una superficie equivalente a 100 campos de fútbol. El vicepresidente de la Junta, Tomás de Villanueva, declaraba en el acto que "Castilla y León es la región más avanzada en el desarrollo de energías renovables".
Dos meses después. La localidad alicantina de Beneixama celebraba la puesta en marcha de la planta solar "más grande del mundo" sobre una superficie de 418.515 metros cuadrados, equivalente, según la prensa local, a 70 campos de fútbol. Francisco Camps, presidente de la Generalitat valenciana, proclamaba que su comunidad "se convierte en un ejemplo para todo el mundo del aprovechamiento de una fuente energética inagotable".
Enero de 2008. Murcia. Jumilla. Durante el acto inaugural de una planta considerada como la "más eficiente de Europa", Benito Mercader, consejero de Desarrollo Sostenible de Murcia, declaraba que Murcia es un "referente nacional para la producción de energías limpias", al tiempo que sentenciaba que "el Sol es el petróleo de Murcia". La nota de prensa no dejaba escapar la comparación: la planta está ubicada sobre una extensión aproximada a "100 campos de fútbol".
Unos días después, José María Barreda, presidente de la Junta de Castilla la Mancha, visitaba las obras de la planta solar de El Calaverón, calificada como "la mayor planta solar del mundo en su género" por ser de doble eje. "Con una potencia de 20 megavatios, se ubica sobre una extensión equivalente a 90 campos de fútbol" rezaba la nota de prensa. Barreda bautizó a Castilla-La Mancha como la "rosa de los vientos" en materia de energías renovables.
Su colega Guillermo Fernández Vara, presidente de la Junta de Extremadura, no se quedó atrás en mayo de este año durante la presentación de la planta solar de Abertura (Cáceres). Aprovechó el momento para anunciar eufórico que "uno de cada cuatro proyectos en energía solar se desarrollan en Extremadura". Meses después, en octubre, visitó la planta situada entre Mérida y Don Álvaro (Badajoz), de 30 megavatios, bautizada en ese momento como "la planta solar de dos ejes más grande del mundo". Toda la prensa regional se hizo eco del mismo dato: la superficie ocupada equivale a 390 campos de fútbol.
En las mismas fechas, Aragón vivió su inauguración particular en Figueruelas (Zaragoza). No hubo discursos oficiales en este caso, pero sí otro dato para el Guinness autonómico: el estreno de la "planta solar más grande del mundo sobre tejado" con 85.000 módulos instalados sobre 183.000 metros de techo en la fábrica de General Motors.
Manuel Chaves, el presidente andaluz, inauguró en tres días dos plantas solares en un septiembre especialmente fructífero. La de El Coronil (Sevilla) el 23, y la de Lucainena de las Torres (Almería) el 26. Chaves declaró a Andalucía como "la mayor superficie de energía verde de Europa" tras haber multiplicado por ocho en un solo año la potencia solar instalada. En este caso no hubo comparación futbolística.
¿Qué estaba pasando en España para esta alocada competición solar entre comunidades autónomas? ¿A qué venía esta eufórica conversión a la fe renovable, proclamada con tanto entusiasmo por dirigentes políticos sin distinción de ideologías? Las notas de prensa, además de la alusión inevitable a la relación entre hectáreas y campos de fútbol, abundaban en otras consideraciones positivas sobre la obra recién inaugurada, tales como inversión económica, puestos de trabajo creados, toneladas de dióxido de carbono ahorradas al medio ambiente y algunos datos técnicos de difícil digestión. Pero ninguna ponía sobre el papel otros datos significativos: la identidad de los beneficiarios (o propietarios) de esas instalaciones y las entidades bancarias que habían participado en la concesión de créditos que cubrían hasta el 80% de la inversión efectuada por esos particulares, a quienes probablemente no les movió un impulso ecologista sino una mera operación contable: amortización de la inversión en diez años, retornos económicos asegurados durante un mínimo de 25 años, además de exenciones fiscales. Total, rentabilidad asegurada de un 12% como poco. Detrás de cada planta solar había un producto financiero. La otra cara de la sostenibilidad ocultaba algunos hábitos muy conocidos del boom inmobiliario: el tráfico de influencias y la especulación.
Ningún otro sector productivo ha registrado un crecimiento del 900% en España durante los dos últimos años. Expertos del propio sector fotovoltaico no han dudado en calificar esta expansión como "irracional". España ha pasado a ser de golpe una potencia mundial en energía solar por el total de la potencia instalada, que equivale a casi tres centrales nucleares de tipo medio. Como consecuencia de ello, el Estado tendrá que abonar una cantidad próxima a los 1.000 millones de euros anuales durante un cuarto de siglo a los propietarios de dichas instalaciones en concepto de subvención. Sin embargo, hay serias dudas de que una parte de esas plantas solares esté funcionando correctamente en la actualidad. Hay evidentes sospechas de fraude y de la existencia de auténticos caza-primas. La sombra de la sospecha afecta a buena parte de las comunidades autónomas que emprendieron con tanto entusiasmo la veloz carrera por el liderazgo solar.
Durante el último Gobierno de Aznar se establecieron una serie de primas a la producción eléctrica de procedencia solar y eólica para estimular ambos sectores. El arranque de la solar fue más tardío. Disposiciones posteriores del Gobierno terminaron por facilitar su despegue hasta cotas insospechadas.
La inclusión de una prima muy generosa de 0,44 euros por kilovatio hora para pequeñas instalaciones no superiores a los 100 kilovatios de potencia con la idea de "democratizar" la fuente de energía fue el detonante. La planta solar dejó sitio al huerto solar, convertido en un producto financiero. El mecanismo era muy simple: divide la planta solar en parcelas (huertos solares) y ponlas en el mercado. Cualquier inversor podía adquirir su huerto solar en unas condiciones ideales: rentabilidad asegurada superior al 10% durante los primeros 25 años. Ni el mejor de los planes de pensiones podía garantizar un beneficio de ese tipo.
Numerosos constructores, los especuladores de rigor, empresarios que buscaban diversificar sus actividades, volvieron la vista hacia la energía solar. Hubo inmobiliarias e incluso agencias de viajes que crearon divisiones solares. No fue una conversión hacia el ecologismo, sino pura ingeniería financiera. Aparecieron ciertos síntomas muy conocidos en el mundo inmobiliario: compra de terrenos rústicos que no necesitaban recalificación, y obtención de permisos para instalación de una planta solar, entre ellos el denominado permiso de conexión.
¿Cómo se obtenían esos permisos? Cada comunidad autónoma era soberana a la hora de establecer los requisitos y conceder dichas autorizaciones. ¿A quiénes se les concedió permisos? Ahí aparece la sombra de la sospecha: no han existido concursos públicos ni decisiones transparentes. Las primeras evidencias de un tráfico de influencias surgieron en Castilla y León, donde media docena de funcionarios han cesado por existir pruebas de que concedieron permisos a familiares. No hay posibilidad de acceder a los listados de permisos concedidos en Castilla y León (de hecho, el Gobierno autónomo rechaza la creación de una comisión de investigación al efecto), pero esa misma opacidad se reproduce en Castilla-La Mancha, Valencia, Murcia, Andalucía y Extremadura, las regiones donde más se ha expandido este sector. Por otro lado, el número de sociedades que aparecen ligadas a una planta solar es tan grande que dificulta la identificación de sus propietarios reales.
Durante el periodo de expansión se divulgaron anuncios de particulares que vendían puntos de conexión (600.000 euros por megavatio), de forma que quien tuviera un permiso en vigor lo vendía obteniendo sustanciosas ganancias con una inversión previa que apenas superaría los 60.000 euros. Y algo parecido sucedió con los permisos de instalación. El terreno estaba sembrado para el pelotazo solar.
Vinieron entonces algunos efectos indeseables: los precios de los componentes adquirieron precios desorbitados por exceso de demanda. Pero no importaba: España consumía buena parte de la producción china de paneles solares. "Se han dado casos de barcos mercantes procedentes de China que pusieron la carga a subasta antes de tocar puerto", reconoce un empresario.
El fenómeno sorprendió a un Gobierno que no acertaba a regular lo que estaba pasando. La sucesión de tres ministros de Industria en poco tiempo (Montilla, Clos y Sebastián) tampoco contribuyó a poner orden. El sector acusa al Gobierno socialista de ir por detrás de los acontecimientos.
La cuestión es que España creció en 2008 tanto como Alemania, la primera potencia mundial, pero el perfil de su crecimiento era bien distinto. Mientras el 45,4% de las instalaciones solares en Alemania se han hecho sobre tejado (el 36% en Francia, Italia y Grecia) esa cifra en España se sitúa en un modesto 8,8%. "Mientras en Alemania se ha democratizado la energía solar beneficiando a los particulares, en España se ha favorecido a los de especuladores de siempre, entre ellos a demasiada gente del sector inmobiliario", dice un experto, responsable de la página web Jumanji.bogspot.com considerada como la más independiente del sector.
La sospecha de fraude está servida. La del tráfico de influencias también. La Comisión Nacional de la Energía (CNE) acaba de terminar una inspección de 30 instalaciones. No tiene muchos medios, apenas 10 inspectores. El resultado final no es concluyente pero si premonitorio: sólo 13 de esas 30 instalaciones cumplen con todos los requisitos y están vertiendo electricidad a la red. Comunidades como Castilla y León, Andalucía y Castilla-La Mancha van a tener que dar algunas explicaciones. Y lo que antes era una competencia totalmente descentralizada ha cambiado de signo: ahora el Gobierno ha creado un registro central. Un Gobierno que puede verse obligado a imponer fuertes sanciones a las Comunidades Autónomas si se confirma el fraude.
Un repaso a la prensa regional sirve para describir qué tintes alcanzó la peculiar competición entre comunidades autónomas por el liderazgo en el sector solar. Mes a mes se fueron reproduciendo escenas parecidas en puntos diferentes del mapa.
Septiembre de 2007. La prensa de Castilla y León daba cuenta de la inauguración de "la planta solar fotovoltaica más grande del mundo" entre las localidades salmantinas de Zarapicos y San Pedro del Valle sobre una superficie equivalente a 100 campos de fútbol. El vicepresidente de la Junta, Tomás de Villanueva, declaraba en el acto que "Castilla y León es la región más avanzada en el desarrollo de energías renovables".
Dos meses después. La localidad alicantina de Beneixama celebraba la puesta en marcha de la planta solar "más grande del mundo" sobre una superficie de 418.515 metros cuadrados, equivalente, según la prensa local, a 70 campos de fútbol. Francisco Camps, presidente de la Generalitat valenciana, proclamaba que su comunidad "se convierte en un ejemplo para todo el mundo del aprovechamiento de una fuente energética inagotable".
Enero de 2008. Murcia. Jumilla. Durante el acto inaugural de una planta considerada como la "más eficiente de Europa", Benito Mercader, consejero de Desarrollo Sostenible de Murcia, declaraba que Murcia es un "referente nacional para la producción de energías limpias", al tiempo que sentenciaba que "el Sol es el petróleo de Murcia". La nota de prensa no dejaba escapar la comparación: la planta está ubicada sobre una extensión aproximada a "100 campos de fútbol".
Unos días después, José María Barreda, presidente de la Junta de Castilla la Mancha, visitaba las obras de la planta solar de El Calaverón, calificada como "la mayor planta solar del mundo en su género" por ser de doble eje. "Con una potencia de 20 megavatios, se ubica sobre una extensión equivalente a 90 campos de fútbol" rezaba la nota de prensa. Barreda bautizó a Castilla-La Mancha como la "rosa de los vientos" en materia de energías renovables.
Su colega Guillermo Fernández Vara, presidente de la Junta de Extremadura, no se quedó atrás en mayo de este año durante la presentación de la planta solar de Abertura (Cáceres). Aprovechó el momento para anunciar eufórico que "uno de cada cuatro proyectos en energía solar se desarrollan en Extremadura". Meses después, en octubre, visitó la planta situada entre Mérida y Don Álvaro (Badajoz), de 30 megavatios, bautizada en ese momento como "la planta solar de dos ejes más grande del mundo". Toda la prensa regional se hizo eco del mismo dato: la superficie ocupada equivale a 390 campos de fútbol.
En las mismas fechas, Aragón vivió su inauguración particular en Figueruelas (Zaragoza). No hubo discursos oficiales en este caso, pero sí otro dato para el Guinness autonómico: el estreno de la "planta solar más grande del mundo sobre tejado" con 85.000 módulos instalados sobre 183.000 metros de techo en la fábrica de General Motors.
Manuel Chaves, el presidente andaluz, inauguró en tres días dos plantas solares en un septiembre especialmente fructífero. La de El Coronil (Sevilla) el 23, y la de Lucainena de las Torres (Almería) el 26. Chaves declaró a Andalucía como "la mayor superficie de energía verde de Europa" tras haber multiplicado por ocho en un solo año la potencia solar instalada. En este caso no hubo comparación futbolística.
¿Qué estaba pasando en España para esta alocada competición solar entre comunidades autónomas? ¿A qué venía esta eufórica conversión a la fe renovable, proclamada con tanto entusiasmo por dirigentes políticos sin distinción de ideologías? Las notas de prensa, además de la alusión inevitable a la relación entre hectáreas y campos de fútbol, abundaban en otras consideraciones positivas sobre la obra recién inaugurada, tales como inversión económica, puestos de trabajo creados, toneladas de dióxido de carbono ahorradas al medio ambiente y algunos datos técnicos de difícil digestión. Pero ninguna ponía sobre el papel otros datos significativos: la identidad de los beneficiarios (o propietarios) de esas instalaciones y las entidades bancarias que habían participado en la concesión de créditos que cubrían hasta el 80% de la inversión efectuada por esos particulares, a quienes probablemente no les movió un impulso ecologista sino una mera operación contable: amortización de la inversión en diez años, retornos económicos asegurados durante un mínimo de 25 años, además de exenciones fiscales. Total, rentabilidad asegurada de un 12% como poco. Detrás de cada planta solar había un producto financiero. La otra cara de la sostenibilidad ocultaba algunos hábitos muy conocidos del boom inmobiliario: el tráfico de influencias y la especulación.
Ningún otro sector productivo ha registrado un crecimiento del 900% en España durante los dos últimos años. Expertos del propio sector fotovoltaico no han dudado en calificar esta expansión como "irracional". España ha pasado a ser de golpe una potencia mundial en energía solar por el total de la potencia instalada, que equivale a casi tres centrales nucleares de tipo medio. Como consecuencia de ello, el Estado tendrá que abonar una cantidad próxima a los 1.000 millones de euros anuales durante un cuarto de siglo a los propietarios de dichas instalaciones en concepto de subvención. Sin embargo, hay serias dudas de que una parte de esas plantas solares esté funcionando correctamente en la actualidad. Hay evidentes sospechas de fraude y de la existencia de auténticos caza-primas. La sombra de la sospecha afecta a buena parte de las comunidades autónomas que emprendieron con tanto entusiasmo la veloz carrera por el liderazgo solar.
Durante el último Gobierno de Aznar se establecieron una serie de primas a la producción eléctrica de procedencia solar y eólica para estimular ambos sectores. El arranque de la solar fue más tardío. Disposiciones posteriores del Gobierno terminaron por facilitar su despegue hasta cotas insospechadas.
La inclusión de una prima muy generosa de 0,44 euros por kilovatio hora para pequeñas instalaciones no superiores a los 100 kilovatios de potencia con la idea de "democratizar" la fuente de energía fue el detonante. La planta solar dejó sitio al huerto solar, convertido en un producto financiero. El mecanismo era muy simple: divide la planta solar en parcelas (huertos solares) y ponlas en el mercado. Cualquier inversor podía adquirir su huerto solar en unas condiciones ideales: rentabilidad asegurada superior al 10% durante los primeros 25 años. Ni el mejor de los planes de pensiones podía garantizar un beneficio de ese tipo.
Numerosos constructores, los especuladores de rigor, empresarios que buscaban diversificar sus actividades, volvieron la vista hacia la energía solar. Hubo inmobiliarias e incluso agencias de viajes que crearon divisiones solares. No fue una conversión hacia el ecologismo, sino pura ingeniería financiera. Aparecieron ciertos síntomas muy conocidos en el mundo inmobiliario: compra de terrenos rústicos que no necesitaban recalificación, y obtención de permisos para instalación de una planta solar, entre ellos el denominado permiso de conexión.
¿Cómo se obtenían esos permisos? Cada comunidad autónoma era soberana a la hora de establecer los requisitos y conceder dichas autorizaciones. ¿A quiénes se les concedió permisos? Ahí aparece la sombra de la sospecha: no han existido concursos públicos ni decisiones transparentes. Las primeras evidencias de un tráfico de influencias surgieron en Castilla y León, donde media docena de funcionarios han cesado por existir pruebas de que concedieron permisos a familiares. No hay posibilidad de acceder a los listados de permisos concedidos en Castilla y León (de hecho, el Gobierno autónomo rechaza la creación de una comisión de investigación al efecto), pero esa misma opacidad se reproduce en Castilla-La Mancha, Valencia, Murcia, Andalucía y Extremadura, las regiones donde más se ha expandido este sector. Por otro lado, el número de sociedades que aparecen ligadas a una planta solar es tan grande que dificulta la identificación de sus propietarios reales.
Durante el periodo de expansión se divulgaron anuncios de particulares que vendían puntos de conexión (600.000 euros por megavatio), de forma que quien tuviera un permiso en vigor lo vendía obteniendo sustanciosas ganancias con una inversión previa que apenas superaría los 60.000 euros. Y algo parecido sucedió con los permisos de instalación. El terreno estaba sembrado para el pelotazo solar.
Vinieron entonces algunos efectos indeseables: los precios de los componentes adquirieron precios desorbitados por exceso de demanda. Pero no importaba: España consumía buena parte de la producción china de paneles solares. "Se han dado casos de barcos mercantes procedentes de China que pusieron la carga a subasta antes de tocar puerto", reconoce un empresario.
El fenómeno sorprendió a un Gobierno que no acertaba a regular lo que estaba pasando. La sucesión de tres ministros de Industria en poco tiempo (Montilla, Clos y Sebastián) tampoco contribuyó a poner orden. El sector acusa al Gobierno socialista de ir por detrás de los acontecimientos.
La cuestión es que España creció en 2008 tanto como Alemania, la primera potencia mundial, pero el perfil de su crecimiento era bien distinto. Mientras el 45,4% de las instalaciones solares en Alemania se han hecho sobre tejado (el 36% en Francia, Italia y Grecia) esa cifra en España se sitúa en un modesto 8,8%. "Mientras en Alemania se ha democratizado la energía solar beneficiando a los particulares, en España se ha favorecido a los de especuladores de siempre, entre ellos a demasiada gente del sector inmobiliario", dice un experto, responsable de la página web Jumanji.bogspot.com considerada como la más independiente del sector.
La sospecha de fraude está servida. La del tráfico de influencias también. La Comisión Nacional de la Energía (CNE) acaba de terminar una inspección de 30 instalaciones. No tiene muchos medios, apenas 10 inspectores. El resultado final no es concluyente pero si premonitorio: sólo 13 de esas 30 instalaciones cumplen con todos los requisitos y están vertiendo electricidad a la red. Comunidades como Castilla y León, Andalucía y Castilla-La Mancha van a tener que dar algunas explicaciones. Y lo que antes era una competencia totalmente descentralizada ha cambiado de signo: ahora el Gobierno ha creado un registro central. Un Gobierno que puede verse obligado a imponer fuertes sanciones a las Comunidades Autónomas si se confirma el fraude.
giovedì 4 dicembre 2008
Desolacion en los caladerosdel planeta
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/weekinreview/16bittman.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1According to many scientists, it may be the way of the future: most of the fish we’ll be eating will be farmed, and by midcentury, it might be easier to catch our favorite wild fish ourselves rather than buy it in the market.
It’s all changed in just a few decades. I’m old enough to remember fishermen unloading boxes of flounder at the funky Fulton Fish Market in New York, charging wholesalers a nickel a pound. I remember when local mussels and oysters were practically free, when fresh tuna was an oxymoron, and when monkfish, squid and now-trendy skate were considered “trash.”
But we overfished these species to the point that it now takes more work, more energy, more equipment, more money to catch the same amount of fish — roughly 85 million tons a year, a yield that has remained mostly stagnant for the last decade after rapid growth and despite increasing demand.
Still, plenty of scientists say a turnaround is possible. Studies have found that even declining species can quickly recover if fisheries are managed well. It would help if the world’s wealthiest fish-eaters (they include us, folks) would broaden their appetites. Mackerel, anyone?
It will be a considerable undertaking nonetheless. Global consumption of fish, both wild and farm raised, has doubled since 1973, and 90 percent of this increase has come in developing countries. (You’ll sometimes hear that Americans are now eating more seafood, but that reflects population growth; per capita consumption has remained stable here for 20 years.)
The result of this demand for wild fish, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, is that “the maximum wild-capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.”
One study, in 2006, concluded that if current fishing practices continue, the world’s major commercial stocks will collapse by 2048.
Already, for instance, the Mediterranean’s bluefin tuna population has been severely depleted, and commercial fishing quotas for the bluefin in the Mediterranean may be sharply curtailed this month. The cod fishery, arguably one of the foundations of North Atlantic civilization, is in serious decline. Most species of shark, Chilean sea bass, and the cod-like orange roughy are threatened.
Scientists have recently become concerned that smaller species of fish, the so-called forage fish like herring, mackerel, anchovies and sardines that are a crucial part of the ocean’s food chain, are also under siege.
These smaller fish are eaten not only by the endangered fish we love best, but also by many poor and not-so-poor people throughout the world. (And even by many American travelers who enjoy grilled sardines in England, fried anchovies in Spain, marinated mackerel in France and pickled or raw herring in Holland — though they mostly avoid them at home.)
But the biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back — dead — as “bycatch.”)
“We’ve totally depleted the upper predator ranks; we have fished down the food web,” said Christopher Mann, a senior officer with the Pew Environmental Group.
Using fish meal to feed farm-raised fish is also astonishingly inefficient. Approximately three kilograms of forage fish go to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon; the ratio for cod is five to one; and for tuna — the most beef-like of all — the so-called feed-to-flesh ratio is 20 to 1, said John Volpe, an assistant professor of marine systems conservation at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
It’s all changed in just a few decades. I’m old enough to remember fishermen unloading boxes of flounder at the funky Fulton Fish Market in New York, charging wholesalers a nickel a pound. I remember when local mussels and oysters were practically free, when fresh tuna was an oxymoron, and when monkfish, squid and now-trendy skate were considered “trash.”
But we overfished these species to the point that it now takes more work, more energy, more equipment, more money to catch the same amount of fish — roughly 85 million tons a year, a yield that has remained mostly stagnant for the last decade after rapid growth and despite increasing demand.
Still, plenty of scientists say a turnaround is possible. Studies have found that even declining species can quickly recover if fisheries are managed well. It would help if the world’s wealthiest fish-eaters (they include us, folks) would broaden their appetites. Mackerel, anyone?
It will be a considerable undertaking nonetheless. Global consumption of fish, both wild and farm raised, has doubled since 1973, and 90 percent of this increase has come in developing countries. (You’ll sometimes hear that Americans are now eating more seafood, but that reflects population growth; per capita consumption has remained stable here for 20 years.)
The result of this demand for wild fish, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, is that “the maximum wild-capture fisheries potential from the world’s oceans has probably been reached.”
One study, in 2006, concluded that if current fishing practices continue, the world’s major commercial stocks will collapse by 2048.
Already, for instance, the Mediterranean’s bluefin tuna population has been severely depleted, and commercial fishing quotas for the bluefin in the Mediterranean may be sharply curtailed this month. The cod fishery, arguably one of the foundations of North Atlantic civilization, is in serious decline. Most species of shark, Chilean sea bass, and the cod-like orange roughy are threatened.
Scientists have recently become concerned that smaller species of fish, the so-called forage fish like herring, mackerel, anchovies and sardines that are a crucial part of the ocean’s food chain, are also under siege.
These smaller fish are eaten not only by the endangered fish we love best, but also by many poor and not-so-poor people throughout the world. (And even by many American travelers who enjoy grilled sardines in England, fried anchovies in Spain, marinated mackerel in France and pickled or raw herring in Holland — though they mostly avoid them at home.)
But the biggest consumers of these smaller fish are the agriculture and aquaculture industries. Nearly one-third of the world’s wild-caught fish are reduced to fish meal and fed to farmed fish and cattle and pigs. Aquaculture alone consumes an estimated 53 percent of the world’s fish meal and 87 percent of its fish oil. (To make matters worse, as much as a quarter of the total wild catch is thrown back — dead — as “bycatch.”)
“We’ve totally depleted the upper predator ranks; we have fished down the food web,” said Christopher Mann, a senior officer with the Pew Environmental Group.
Using fish meal to feed farm-raised fish is also astonishingly inefficient. Approximately three kilograms of forage fish go to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon; the ratio for cod is five to one; and for tuna — the most beef-like of all — the so-called feed-to-flesh ratio is 20 to 1, said John Volpe, an assistant professor of marine systems conservation at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.
Industrial aquaculture — sometimes called the blue revolution — is following the same pattern as land-based agriculture. Edible food is being used to grow animals rather than nourish people.
This is not to say that all aquaculture is bad. China alone accounts for an estimated 70 percent of the world’s aquaculture — where it is small in scale, focuses on herbivorous fish and is not only sustainable but environmentally sound. “Throughout Asia, there are hundreds of thousands of small farmers making a living by farming fish,” said Barry Costa-Pierce, professor of fisheries at University of Rhode Island. But industrial fish farming is a different story. The industry spends an estimated $1 billion a year on veterinary products; degrades the land (shrimp farming destroys mangroves, for example, a key protector from typhoons); pollutes local waters (according to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute, a salmon farm with 200,000 fish releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to as many as 60,000 people); and imperils wild populations that come in contact with farmed salmon.
Not to mention that its products generally don’t taste so good, at least compared to the wild stuff. Farm-raised tilapia, with the best feed-to-flesh conversion ratio of any animal, is less desirable to many consumers, myself included, than that nearly perfectly blank canvas called tofu. It seems unlikely that farm-raised striped bass will ever taste remotely like its fierce, graceful progenitor, or that anyone who’s had fresh Alaskan sockeye can take farmed salmon seriously.
If industrial aquaculture continues to grow, said Carl Safina, the president of Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group, “this wondrously varied component of our diet will go the way of land animals — get simplified, all look the same and generally become quite boring.”
Why bother with farm-raised salmon and its relatives? If the world’s wealthier fish-eaters began to appreciate wild sardines, anchovies, herring and the like, we would be less inclined to feed them to salmon raised in fish farms. And we’d be helping restock the seas with larger species.
Which, surprisingly, is possible. As Mr. Safina noted, “The ocean has an incredible amount of productive capacity, and we could quite easily and simply stay within it by limiting fishing to what it can produce.”
This sounds almost too good to be true, but with monitoring systems that reduce bycatch by as much as 60 percent and regulations providing fishermen with a stake in protecting the wild resource, it is happening. One regulatory scheme, known as “catch shares,” allows fishermen to own shares in a fishery — that is, the right to catch a certain percentage of a scientifically determined sustainable harvest. Fishermen can buy or sell shares, but the number of fish caught in a given year is fixed.
This method has been a success in a number of places including Alaska, the source of more than half of the nation’s seafood. A study published in the journal Science recently estimated that if catch shares had been in place globally in 1970, only about 9 percent of the world’s fisheries would have collapsed by 2003, rather than 27 percent.
“The message is optimism,” said David Festa, who directs the oceans program at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The latest data shows that well-managed fisheries are doing incredibly well. When we get the rules right the fisheries can recover, and if they’re not recovering, it means we have the rules wrong.”
(The world’s fishing countries would need to participate; right now, the best management is in the United States, Australia and New Zealand; even in these countries, there’s a long way to go.)
An optimistic but not unrealistic assessment of the future is that we’ll have a limited (and expensive) but sustainable fishery of large wild fish; a growing but sustainable demand for what will no longer be called “lower-value” smaller wild fish; and a variety of traditional aquaculture where it is allowed. This may not sound ideal, but it’s certainly preferable to sucking all the fish out of the oceans while raising crops of tasteless fish available only to the wealthiest consumers.
Not to mention that its products generally don’t taste so good, at least compared to the wild stuff. Farm-raised tilapia, with the best feed-to-flesh conversion ratio of any animal, is less desirable to many consumers, myself included, than that nearly perfectly blank canvas called tofu. It seems unlikely that farm-raised striped bass will ever taste remotely like its fierce, graceful progenitor, or that anyone who’s had fresh Alaskan sockeye can take farmed salmon seriously.
If industrial aquaculture continues to grow, said Carl Safina, the president of Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group, “this wondrously varied component of our diet will go the way of land animals — get simplified, all look the same and generally become quite boring.”
Why bother with farm-raised salmon and its relatives? If the world’s wealthier fish-eaters began to appreciate wild sardines, anchovies, herring and the like, we would be less inclined to feed them to salmon raised in fish farms. And we’d be helping restock the seas with larger species.
Which, surprisingly, is possible. As Mr. Safina noted, “The ocean has an incredible amount of productive capacity, and we could quite easily and simply stay within it by limiting fishing to what it can produce.”
This sounds almost too good to be true, but with monitoring systems that reduce bycatch by as much as 60 percent and regulations providing fishermen with a stake in protecting the wild resource, it is happening. One regulatory scheme, known as “catch shares,” allows fishermen to own shares in a fishery — that is, the right to catch a certain percentage of a scientifically determined sustainable harvest. Fishermen can buy or sell shares, but the number of fish caught in a given year is fixed.
This method has been a success in a number of places including Alaska, the source of more than half of the nation’s seafood. A study published in the journal Science recently estimated that if catch shares had been in place globally in 1970, only about 9 percent of the world’s fisheries would have collapsed by 2003, rather than 27 percent.
“The message is optimism,” said David Festa, who directs the oceans program at the Environmental Defense Fund. “The latest data shows that well-managed fisheries are doing incredibly well. When we get the rules right the fisheries can recover, and if they’re not recovering, it means we have the rules wrong.”
(The world’s fishing countries would need to participate; right now, the best management is in the United States, Australia and New Zealand; even in these countries, there’s a long way to go.)
An optimistic but not unrealistic assessment of the future is that we’ll have a limited (and expensive) but sustainable fishery of large wild fish; a growing but sustainable demand for what will no longer be called “lower-value” smaller wild fish; and a variety of traditional aquaculture where it is allowed. This may not sound ideal, but it’s certainly preferable to sucking all the fish out of the oceans while raising crops of tasteless fish available only to the wealthiest consumers.
domenica 23 novembre 2008
made in Tokyo / made in Palermo
Scoperto un bunker a Palermo nel quartier Zen
PALERMO - Aria condizionata, lettore dvd, un comodo divano: era arredato di tutto punto il bunker, rigorosamente abusivo, ricavato da Antonino Grimaldi, pregiudicato di 29 anni arrestato dalla polizia a Palermo, in uno dei padiglioni del quartiere Zen 2, feudo dei capimafia Salvatore e Sandro Lo Piccolo, ora detenuti. All'interno del bunker sotterraneo era stato realizzato un poligono di tiro. Nella stanza, ampia circa 20 metri quadrati, sono state trovate, oltre alle munizioni, 100 dosi di cocaina confezionata per la vendita per un valore di 10mila euro e 7000 euro in contanti. Secondo gli inquirenti, il locale avrebbe ospitato latitanti di mafia che potrebbero essere riusciti a sfuggire alla cattura. Il poligono di tiro, ricavato a 10 metri di profondità, lungo una decina di metri, veniva utilizzato secondo gli investigatori per testare le armi. Sulle pareti c'erano buchi di proiettili e a terra bossoli esplosi da pistole di diverso calibro, dalla 22 alla 9x21. Il locale, a cui si accedeva attraverso una rete di cunicoli collegati al bunker, era completamente insonorizzato. Al rifugio gli agenti del commissariato San Lorenzo sono giunti seguendo le tracce di Grimaldi, pregiudicato con precedenti per detenzione e spaccio di sostanze stupefacenti e per reati contro il patrimonio. Gli agenti hanno atteso il weekend, momento in cui gli spacciatori si riforniscono di stupefacenti, e hanno organizzato un blitz nella sua abitazione. Durante la perquisizione è stato scoperto il passaggio segreto che portava al locale, cui si accedeva attraverso gli scantinati di uno dei tanti palazzoni del rione popolare palermitano. Nell'appartamento è stata trovata anche la chiave: l'ingresso al rifugio era impossibile per gli estranei che dovevano superare prima un cancello azionabile solo attraverso un telecomando e poi una porta blindata.
made in Tokyo
stazione dei taxi, uffici della compagnia dei taxi, centro allenamento golf,
Made in Palermo
bunker, rifugio, poligono di tiro, laboratorio stupefacenti, cantina,...
sabato 22 novembre 2008
mercoledì 19 novembre 2008
Economics of Industrial Ecology: Materials, Structural Change, and Spatial Scales
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Industrial-Ecology-Materials-Structural/dp/0262220717/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227130817&sr=8-2+
Product Details
Hardcover: 396 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (January 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262220717
ISBN-13: 978-0262220712
Hardcover: 396 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press (January 1, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0262220717
ISBN-13: 978-0262220712
Editorial Reviews
Review"As the first text focused on this subject, Economics of Industrial Ecology fills a big hole in the literature of the field. It moves the interdisciplinary claim of industrial ecology a long way forward."—John R. Ehrenfeld, Executive Director, International Society for Industrial Ecology"
Review"As the first text focused on this subject, Economics of Industrial Ecology fills a big hole in the literature of the field. It moves the interdisciplinary claim of industrial ecology a long way forward."—John R. Ehrenfeld, Executive Director, International Society for Industrial Ecology"
There have long been calls for the integration of economics and industrial ecology. This book assembles a number of important works—especially on integrated modeling of physical and economic systems—that form an important contribution to the industrial ecology literature."—Reid Lifset, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, editor, Journal of Industrial Ecology"
This is one of the first books that focuses primarily on the economics of industrial ecology, without ignoring the scientific and analytical treatment of its problems."—Arpad Horvath, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley
The use of economic modeling techniques in industrial ecology research provides distinct advantages over the customary approach, which focuses on the physical description of material flows. The thirteen chapters of Economics of Industrial Ecology integrate the natural science and technological dimensions of industrial ecology with a rigorous economic approach and by doing so contribute to the advancement of this emerging field. Using a variety of modeling techniques (including econometric, partial and general equilibrium, and input-output models) and applying them to a wide range of materials, economic sectors, and countries, these studies analyze the driving forces behind material flows and structural changes in order to offer guidance for economically and socially feasible policy solutions.After a survey of concepts and relevant research that provides a useful background for the chapters that follow, the book presents historical analyses of structural change from statistical and decomposition approaches; a range of models that predict structural change on the national and regional scale under different policy scenarios; two models that can be used to analyze waste management and recycling operations; and, adopting the perspective of local scale, an analysis of the dynamics of eco-industrial parks in Denmark and the Netherlands. The book concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of an economic approach to industrial ecology.
Europeana porta online tutto il sapere del Vecchio Continente
http://www.corriere.it/cultura/08_novembre_19/europeana_di_pasqua_0714ed20-b63c-11dd-909d-00144f02aabc.shtml+
MILANO – «Facciamo questo per non abbandonare del tutto l'Europa nelle mani dei motori di ricerca americani»: nelle parole di Jean Noel Jeanneney, presidente della Bibliothèque nationale de France, c'è lo spirito di Europeana, troppo facile da paragonare a Google Books eppure diversa e, forse, persino migliore. L'Europa risponde dunque con un minimo scarto temporale alla provocazione di Google che, con la sua nuova icona Google Preview, permette di accedere a tutti i volumi indicizzati dal suo servizio di ricerca libri all'interno di pagine web esterne. E se Mountain View, con il suo instancabile fermento, regala una versione embedded dei volumi (con possibilità di consultazione online nel caso di diritti d'autore scaduti), il Vecchio Continente sfida il colosso americano con un progetto altrettanto ambizioso, anche considerata la tradizione culturale europea.
EUROPEANA – Opere letterarie, foto, film, libri, dipinti, mappe, giornali: in Europeana (o meglio nel suo prototipo) in sostanza sarà accessibile un patrimonio culturale finora conservato gelosamente (e già digitalizzato) dalle biblioteche e dai musei europei, tra cui la Divina Commedia di Dante, i manoscritti e le registrazioni di Beethoven, Mozart e Chopin, i quadri di Vermeer, la Magna Carta britannica e le immagini della caduta del muro di Berlino. E per il 2010, quando il sito sarà molto di più di un prototipo, la mole di materiali dovrebbe sfiorare i sei milioni di documenti e minacciare seriamente il rischio di una privatizzazione della conoscenza.
TUTTO HA AVUTO INIZIO QUANDO.... – Del resto l'Europa aveva deciso di mettere online il suo sapere già da tempo e il primo passo dell'iniziativa è stato scandito dalla decisione del Parlamento Europeo di dare sostegno al progetto, accordando i finanziamenti necessari all'interno dell'eContentplus Programme (finalizzato a migliorare l'accessibilità e l'uso dei documenti digitali europei). La precedenza alla messa online verrà data mano a mano ai documenti di ciascuna cultura considerati più espressivi e prioritari. E intanto a battezzare la neonata Europeana sarà l'inossidabile Viviane Reding, commissario Ue alla Società dell'informazione, che ha spiegato l'iniziativa con un esempio semplice e illuminante: «Uno studente d'arte irlandese potrà ammirare la Gioconda senza andare a Parigi».
EUROPEANA – Opere letterarie, foto, film, libri, dipinti, mappe, giornali: in Europeana (o meglio nel suo prototipo) in sostanza sarà accessibile un patrimonio culturale finora conservato gelosamente (e già digitalizzato) dalle biblioteche e dai musei europei, tra cui la Divina Commedia di Dante, i manoscritti e le registrazioni di Beethoven, Mozart e Chopin, i quadri di Vermeer, la Magna Carta britannica e le immagini della caduta del muro di Berlino. E per il 2010, quando il sito sarà molto di più di un prototipo, la mole di materiali dovrebbe sfiorare i sei milioni di documenti e minacciare seriamente il rischio di una privatizzazione della conoscenza.
TUTTO HA AVUTO INIZIO QUANDO.... – Del resto l'Europa aveva deciso di mettere online il suo sapere già da tempo e il primo passo dell'iniziativa è stato scandito dalla decisione del Parlamento Europeo di dare sostegno al progetto, accordando i finanziamenti necessari all'interno dell'eContentplus Programme (finalizzato a migliorare l'accessibilità e l'uso dei documenti digitali europei). La precedenza alla messa online verrà data mano a mano ai documenti di ciascuna cultura considerati più espressivi e prioritari. E intanto a battezzare la neonata Europeana sarà l'inossidabile Viviane Reding, commissario Ue alla Società dell'informazione, che ha spiegato l'iniziativa con un esempio semplice e illuminante: «Uno studente d'arte irlandese potrà ammirare la Gioconda senza andare a Parigi».
Emanuela Di Pasqua19 novembre 2008
domenica 16 novembre 2008
Prishtina European Grand Prix 2009
workshop Ecologies of Identities [UBT Prishtina, Politecnico di Milano]- Novembre 2008
prima presentazione video
in collaborazione con Alberto Clerici
ringraziamo Autosalloni Prishtina, Lanti, Virusi, Rrebeli, Plusi, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, 50 cent, Euronews, Sokolekrajes, Skillz, Mergim e Selim
domenica 2 novembre 2008
POST - Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking
http://www.postcoml.org/Dr. David Welch reviews the technical operation of the Pacific Ocean Tracking Project (POST) and reviews its performance in addressing key policy questions.
Abstract
Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) array, currently operates as the world’s largest telemetry system for studying the movements and survival of marine fish. It will provide the exemplar for the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), the subject of the May 18th talk by Ron O’Dor. OTN shall form “an array of POST arrays," sitting on the continental shelves of all the continents on the planet. As such, it provides a prime example of what the evolving Ocean Observation System (OOS) system might look like.One of the Census of Marine Life’s (CoML's) original field projects, POST made a natural fit given the CoML’s focus on distribution, diversity, and abundance of marine life. However, POST has begun to prove itself in addressing key US policy questions for fisheries, and thereby demonstrating the fundamental linkage between these biological questions and vexing high-level policy issues. POST thus forms an interesting example of how the development of a highly quantitative tool looking at basic biological processes can inform and reinvigorate the science of fisheries management—and ocean research.The operational considerations involved in developing POST include the need for:
Developing large-scale and high volume methods for conducting surgery on thousands of test animals while ensuring the highest ethical standards of fish handling and surgical procedures are met.
Developing technical methods for deploying and maintaining a very large scale permanent tracking array on the seabed.
Ensuring that the data are recovered in very high yield to validate the array concept and provide meaningful scientific results to justify the support for building (and expanding) the array.
Dr. Welch reviews the technical operation of POST from the twin perspectives of ethical animal use and technical operation of a large-scale engineering system. In the final section of the talk, he reviews the performance of the array in addressing key policy questions concerning the management of Columbia & Fraser R salmon populations.
Biography
David Welch received a B.Sc. in Biology and Economics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia) in 1985.
He started and led the Canadian government’s High Seas Salmon Program at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in 1990, after a quarter century of governmental hiatus in ocean research on salmon. During the next decade he studied the ocean biology of Pacific salmon, and provided some of the first compelling evidence for a potentially profound impact of global warming on Pacific salmon in the ocean.
Dr. Welch serves as the chief architect of the Census of Marine Life’s project POST and President of Kintama Research. Welch started Kintama in 1990 to develop the pioneering technology platform necessary for delivering data from a permanent ocean array capable of directly measuring survival of migrating fish in the ocean.
We can measure the success of POST from three perspectives:
It is the largest and most complex marine tracking array under single management anywhere in the globe, with a current geographic span of almost 2,500 km;
The Canadian Government committed $45M Cdn starting in 2007 to champion the globalization of the POST array as the Ocean Tracking Network;
The array is now capable of measuring the movements and survival of fish as small as 12.5 cm year-round, and may be capable of tracking fish as small as 10 cm by 2008.
As a result, the marine science community stands on the brink of having the ability to conduct direct quantitative experimental studies in the ocean on fish of the kind that transformed chemistry and physics one and two centuries ago.
Dr Welch has previously acted as scientific spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund on the issue of global warming, and received an invitation to testify on the results of his research on the ocean biology of Pacific salmon in the U.S. Senate. Dr Welch speaks fluent Japanese and lives on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
Abstract
Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) array, currently operates as the world’s largest telemetry system for studying the movements and survival of marine fish. It will provide the exemplar for the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN), the subject of the May 18th talk by Ron O’Dor. OTN shall form “an array of POST arrays," sitting on the continental shelves of all the continents on the planet. As such, it provides a prime example of what the evolving Ocean Observation System (OOS) system might look like.One of the Census of Marine Life’s (CoML's) original field projects, POST made a natural fit given the CoML’s focus on distribution, diversity, and abundance of marine life. However, POST has begun to prove itself in addressing key US policy questions for fisheries, and thereby demonstrating the fundamental linkage between these biological questions and vexing high-level policy issues. POST thus forms an interesting example of how the development of a highly quantitative tool looking at basic biological processes can inform and reinvigorate the science of fisheries management—and ocean research.The operational considerations involved in developing POST include the need for:
Developing large-scale and high volume methods for conducting surgery on thousands of test animals while ensuring the highest ethical standards of fish handling and surgical procedures are met.
Developing technical methods for deploying and maintaining a very large scale permanent tracking array on the seabed.
Ensuring that the data are recovered in very high yield to validate the array concept and provide meaningful scientific results to justify the support for building (and expanding) the array.
Dr. Welch reviews the technical operation of POST from the twin perspectives of ethical animal use and technical operation of a large-scale engineering system. In the final section of the talk, he reviews the performance of the array in addressing key policy questions concerning the management of Columbia & Fraser R salmon populations.
Biography
David Welch received a B.Sc. in Biology and Economics from the University of Toronto and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia) in 1985.
He started and led the Canadian government’s High Seas Salmon Program at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in 1990, after a quarter century of governmental hiatus in ocean research on salmon. During the next decade he studied the ocean biology of Pacific salmon, and provided some of the first compelling evidence for a potentially profound impact of global warming on Pacific salmon in the ocean.
Dr. Welch serves as the chief architect of the Census of Marine Life’s project POST and President of Kintama Research. Welch started Kintama in 1990 to develop the pioneering technology platform necessary for delivering data from a permanent ocean array capable of directly measuring survival of migrating fish in the ocean.
We can measure the success of POST from three perspectives:
It is the largest and most complex marine tracking array under single management anywhere in the globe, with a current geographic span of almost 2,500 km;
The Canadian Government committed $45M Cdn starting in 2007 to champion the globalization of the POST array as the Ocean Tracking Network;
The array is now capable of measuring the movements and survival of fish as small as 12.5 cm year-round, and may be capable of tracking fish as small as 10 cm by 2008.
As a result, the marine science community stands on the brink of having the ability to conduct direct quantitative experimental studies in the ocean on fish of the kind that transformed chemistry and physics one and two centuries ago.
Dr Welch has previously acted as scientific spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund on the issue of global warming, and received an invitation to testify on the results of his research on the ocean biology of Pacific salmon in the U.S. Senate. Dr Welch speaks fluent Japanese and lives on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
sabato 1 novembre 2008
In Texas, Weighing Life With a Border Fence
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/us/13border.html
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: January 13, 2008
GRANJENO, Tex. — Rafael Garza, a former mayor of this small border city, stood steps from the back door of his simple brick house and chopped the air with a hand. “This is where the actual fence would be,” he said.And the federal property line, he said, would be at his shower.
Mr. Garza, 36, a Hidalgo County sheriff’s sergeant who traces his family here to 1767, was imagining what life would be like in the shadow of the Proposed Tactical Infrastructure — the wall, to many outraged South Texans — that the Department of Homeland Security has committed to build by the end of the year.
Although federal officials say its location and design are still in flux, official maps of the Texas third of the 370-mile intermittent pedestrian barrier from Brownsville to California have provoked widespread alarm among property owners fearful of being cut off from parts of their own land or access to the Rio Grande for livestock and crops.
In the Rio Grande Valley last week, yards were plastered with signs demanding “No border wall,” raising the prospect of a protracted legal, if not physical, standoff, although Congress has recently taken steps to review the original plan. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is under fire from some fellow Republicans for amendments to a financing bill last month that they say scale back the fence.
At the same time, local concern was heightened by letters in December from the United States Army Corps of Engineers to property owners in the Southwest — 71 of them in Texas — who had refused access to their land for up to a year of survey work and were given 30 days to comply or face a federal lawsuit.
One was Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez, a nursing director at the University of Texas, Brownsville, at Texas Southmost College, who owns three acres in El Calaboz, the remnant of a 12,000-acre land grant to her ancestors in 1747 by the King of Spain. The barrier would rise within feet of her backyard, as well.
“It’s all I have,” said Dr. Tamez, 72, a widow who served for years as a chief nurse in medical centers of the Department of Veterans Affairs. “Who do they think we are down here? Somebody sitting under a cactus with a sombrero taking a nap?”
Her deadline expired last Monday with no legal action.
But Laura Keehner, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Friday, “We will begin that process as early as next week.”
Ms. Keehner said that of 135 letters sent seeking access for surveys, 30 local landowners had so far agreed. “They recognize that a fence will help fight drug trafficking and human trafficking,” she said.
The government would have to pay for any private land acquired or condemned for the fence, at a price set by federal evaluators. But landowners would not be compensated for allowing surveys, except for cases of damage.
Not all residents vowed resistance. Juan Hernandez, 43, a poultry farmer in Los Indios, sounded resigned. “I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but they’re going to do it,” said Mr. Hernandez, who complained about rampant drug trafficking.
He said, “if it helps my kids” he could go along with a fence. “I’m probably having to move,” he said, “but if they pay for it, O.K. ”
Valley officials and residents who denounced the fence said they were not soft on illegal immigration or blind to the dangers of drug smuggling and terrorism. “Who doesn’t want security?” said Mayor Richard Cortez of McAllen. “Our fight with the government is not over their goals, it’s how they go about them.”
“You can go over, under and around a fence,” he said, “and it can’t make an apprehension.”
Instead, he said, the government should deepen the river, clear the land for better surveillance and create a legal Mexican worker program.
Up and down the border, his fellow mayors agree, banding together in the Texas Border Coalition with rare unanimity to oppose the fence, calling instead for increased electronic measures like sensors and more Border Patrol agents.
Stirring particular concern was the plan to run the fence north of the levees built decades ago to hold back the Rio Grande, now flowing in many places a mile or more to the south. So the fence would in effect cut off swaths of American soil — including range and farmlands — between the barrier and the international boundary of the river.
To build the fence as originally conceived, in two parallel rows with a road for the Border Patrol between them, some local officials were told, the government would need to acquire a strip of land at least 150 feet from the levee. That would take it into the backyards of Mr. Garza in Granjeno, Dr. Tamez in El Calaboz and other property owners.
But Ms. Keehner of the Homeland Security Department said the agency was reviewing its options. “That’s why we need the surveys,” she said.
Local officials have been told that there would be some kind of gates through the fence, but what kind and where have yet to be specified.
Published: January 13, 2008
GRANJENO, Tex. — Rafael Garza, a former mayor of this small border city, stood steps from the back door of his simple brick house and chopped the air with a hand. “This is where the actual fence would be,” he said.And the federal property line, he said, would be at his shower.
Mr. Garza, 36, a Hidalgo County sheriff’s sergeant who traces his family here to 1767, was imagining what life would be like in the shadow of the Proposed Tactical Infrastructure — the wall, to many outraged South Texans — that the Department of Homeland Security has committed to build by the end of the year.
Although federal officials say its location and design are still in flux, official maps of the Texas third of the 370-mile intermittent pedestrian barrier from Brownsville to California have provoked widespread alarm among property owners fearful of being cut off from parts of their own land or access to the Rio Grande for livestock and crops.
In the Rio Grande Valley last week, yards were plastered with signs demanding “No border wall,” raising the prospect of a protracted legal, if not physical, standoff, although Congress has recently taken steps to review the original plan. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas is under fire from some fellow Republicans for amendments to a financing bill last month that they say scale back the fence.
At the same time, local concern was heightened by letters in December from the United States Army Corps of Engineers to property owners in the Southwest — 71 of them in Texas — who had refused access to their land for up to a year of survey work and were given 30 days to comply or face a federal lawsuit.
One was Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez, a nursing director at the University of Texas, Brownsville, at Texas Southmost College, who owns three acres in El Calaboz, the remnant of a 12,000-acre land grant to her ancestors in 1747 by the King of Spain. The barrier would rise within feet of her backyard, as well.
“It’s all I have,” said Dr. Tamez, 72, a widow who served for years as a chief nurse in medical centers of the Department of Veterans Affairs. “Who do they think we are down here? Somebody sitting under a cactus with a sombrero taking a nap?”
Her deadline expired last Monday with no legal action.
But Laura Keehner, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Friday, “We will begin that process as early as next week.”
Ms. Keehner said that of 135 letters sent seeking access for surveys, 30 local landowners had so far agreed. “They recognize that a fence will help fight drug trafficking and human trafficking,” she said.
The government would have to pay for any private land acquired or condemned for the fence, at a price set by federal evaluators. But landowners would not be compensated for allowing surveys, except for cases of damage.
Not all residents vowed resistance. Juan Hernandez, 43, a poultry farmer in Los Indios, sounded resigned. “I don’t know how they’re going to do it, but they’re going to do it,” said Mr. Hernandez, who complained about rampant drug trafficking.
He said, “if it helps my kids” he could go along with a fence. “I’m probably having to move,” he said, “but if they pay for it, O.K. ”
Valley officials and residents who denounced the fence said they were not soft on illegal immigration or blind to the dangers of drug smuggling and terrorism. “Who doesn’t want security?” said Mayor Richard Cortez of McAllen. “Our fight with the government is not over their goals, it’s how they go about them.”
“You can go over, under and around a fence,” he said, “and it can’t make an apprehension.”
Instead, he said, the government should deepen the river, clear the land for better surveillance and create a legal Mexican worker program.
Up and down the border, his fellow mayors agree, banding together in the Texas Border Coalition with rare unanimity to oppose the fence, calling instead for increased electronic measures like sensors and more Border Patrol agents.
Stirring particular concern was the plan to run the fence north of the levees built decades ago to hold back the Rio Grande, now flowing in many places a mile or more to the south. So the fence would in effect cut off swaths of American soil — including range and farmlands — between the barrier and the international boundary of the river.
To build the fence as originally conceived, in two parallel rows with a road for the Border Patrol between them, some local officials were told, the government would need to acquire a strip of land at least 150 feet from the levee. That would take it into the backyards of Mr. Garza in Granjeno, Dr. Tamez in El Calaboz and other property owners.
But Ms. Keehner of the Homeland Security Department said the agency was reviewing its options. “That’s why we need the surveys,” she said.
Local officials have been told that there would be some kind of gates through the fence, but what kind and where have yet to be specified.
The last maps also show wide gaps between segments of fence, setting the barrier in more developed areas where the risk was greater that illegal immigrants could more easily melt into the population, and leaving open desolate tracts that could be more easily monitored.
But that raised other concerns for residents like Aida Leach of River Bend Resort, a golf community outside Brownsville that the maps show getting partly fenced.
“The wall stops at part of the houses and starts again,” leaving her house exposed, Ms. Leach told a meeting of concerned property owners that was convened Wednesday night at the San Ignacio de Loyola Roman Catholic Church in El Ranchito by lawyers from Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid. “So I guess they’ll be coming to our house.”
“Good question,” said Corinne Spenser-Scheurich, one of the lawyers. Ms. Spenser-Scheurich said landowners should not feel intimidated by the government’s requests to survey. “To sign or not is a personal choice,” she said.
Another landowner, H. R. Jaime, attending with his 90-year-old mother, Frances Wagner Quiñones, whose forebears settled nearby Landrum, asked, “What happens to water rights, if we can’t get to the water and pump it out?”
Emily Rickers, another of the lawyers, said the government might have to compensate him for that as well.
At the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge to Reynosa, Mexico, George Ramon, the bridge director for McAllen, questioned the value of a border fence considering how brazenly the fences at the heavily patrolled crossing were regularly breached, aided by “spotters” who hang around the bridge communicating with cellphones and hand signals like baseball coaches.
“They form a human pyramid and leap the fence,” Mr. Ramon said. “I’ve seen them pay a guy who helps them over.” Others, known as “port runners” just make a dash for it past the toll takers and agents and melt into the crowd. “It’s a constant, daily occurrence” he said.
He kept five police cars lined alongside the fence as a deterrent, but they proved worthless, he said, “as soon as they figured out no one was in them.”
He stopped at a hole in a chain-link fence, where cars were lining up to enter the United States. “Well,” he said, “it’s cut again.”
“The wall stops at part of the houses and starts again,” leaving her house exposed, Ms. Leach told a meeting of concerned property owners that was convened Wednesday night at the San Ignacio de Loyola Roman Catholic Church in El Ranchito by lawyers from Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid. “So I guess they’ll be coming to our house.”
“Good question,” said Corinne Spenser-Scheurich, one of the lawyers. Ms. Spenser-Scheurich said landowners should not feel intimidated by the government’s requests to survey. “To sign or not is a personal choice,” she said.
Another landowner, H. R. Jaime, attending with his 90-year-old mother, Frances Wagner Quiñones, whose forebears settled nearby Landrum, asked, “What happens to water rights, if we can’t get to the water and pump it out?”
Emily Rickers, another of the lawyers, said the government might have to compensate him for that as well.
At the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge to Reynosa, Mexico, George Ramon, the bridge director for McAllen, questioned the value of a border fence considering how brazenly the fences at the heavily patrolled crossing were regularly breached, aided by “spotters” who hang around the bridge communicating with cellphones and hand signals like baseball coaches.
“They form a human pyramid and leap the fence,” Mr. Ramon said. “I’ve seen them pay a guy who helps them over.” Others, known as “port runners” just make a dash for it past the toll takers and agents and melt into the crowd. “It’s a constant, daily occurrence” he said.
He kept five police cars lined alongside the fence as a deterrent, but they proved worthless, he said, “as soon as they figured out no one was in them.”
He stopped at a hole in a chain-link fence, where cars were lining up to enter the United States. “Well,” he said, “it’s cut again.”
venerdì 31 ottobre 2008
Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/20/world/americas/20burro.htmlLA GLORIA, Colombia — In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.
Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.
In doing so, Mr. Soriano has emerged as the best-known resident of La Gloria, a town that feels even farther removed from the rhythms of the wider world than is Aracataca, the inspiration for the setting of the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, another of the region’s native sons.
Unlike Mr. García Márquez, who lives in Mexico City, Mr. Soriano has never traveled outside Colombia — but he remains dedicated to bringing its people a touch of the outside world. His project has won acclaim from the nation’s literacy specialists and is the subject of a new documentary by a Colombian filmmaker, Carlos Rendón Zipaguata.
The idea came to him, he said, after he witnessed as a young teacher the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child.
The violence by bandit groups was so bad when he was young that his parents sent him to live with his grandmother in the nearby city of Valledupar, near the Venezuelan border. He returned at age 16 with a high school degree and got a job teaching reading to schoolchildren.
By the time he was in his 20s, Colombia’s long internal war had drawn paramilitary bands to the lawless marshlands and hills surrounding La Gloria, leading to clashes with guerrillas and intimidation of the local population by both groups.
Into that violence, which has since ebbed, Mr. Soriano ventured with his donkeys, taking with him a few reading textbooks, encyclopedia volumes and novels from his small personal library. At stops along the way, children still await the teacher in groups, to hear him read from the books he brings before they can borrow them.
A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, “The Ballad of Maria Abdala,” by Juan Gossaín, a Colombian journalist and writer. Mr. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro.
After Mr. Gossaín broadcast details of Mr. Soriano’s project on his radio program, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.
There is little money left over for such luxuries on his teacher’s salary of $350 a month. Already the family’s budget is so tight that he and his wife, Diana, opened a small restaurant, La Cosa Política, two years ago to help make ends meet.
Even among the restaurant’s clientele, mainly ranch hands and truck drivers with little formal education, the bespectacled Mr. Soriano sees potential bibliophiles. On the wall above tables laid out with grilled meat and fried plantains, he posts pages from Hoy Diario, the region’s daily newspaper, and prods diners into discussions about current events.
His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia.
In doing so, Mr. Soriano has emerged as the best-known resident of La Gloria, a town that feels even farther removed from the rhythms of the wider world than is Aracataca, the inspiration for the setting of the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, another of the region’s native sons.
Unlike Mr. García Márquez, who lives in Mexico City, Mr. Soriano has never traveled outside Colombia — but he remains dedicated to bringing its people a touch of the outside world. His project has won acclaim from the nation’s literacy specialists and is the subject of a new documentary by a Colombian filmmaker, Carlos Rendón Zipaguata.
The idea came to him, he said, after he witnessed as a young teacher the transformative power of reading among his pupils, who were born into conflict even more intense than when he was a child.
The violence by bandit groups was so bad when he was young that his parents sent him to live with his grandmother in the nearby city of Valledupar, near the Venezuelan border. He returned at age 16 with a high school degree and got a job teaching reading to schoolchildren.
By the time he was in his 20s, Colombia’s long internal war had drawn paramilitary bands to the lawless marshlands and hills surrounding La Gloria, leading to clashes with guerrillas and intimidation of the local population by both groups.
Into that violence, which has since ebbed, Mr. Soriano ventured with his donkeys, taking with him a few reading textbooks, encyclopedia volumes and novels from his small personal library. At stops along the way, children still await the teacher in groups, to hear him read from the books he brings before they can borrow them.
A breakthrough came several years ago when he heard excerpts over the radio of a novel, “The Ballad of Maria Abdala,” by Juan Gossaín, a Colombian journalist and writer. Mr. Soriano wrote a letter to the author, asking him to lend a copy of the book to the Biblioburro.
After Mr. Gossaín broadcast details of Mr. Soriano’s project on his radio program, book donations poured in from throughout Colombia. A local financial institution, Cajamag, provided some financing for the construction of a small library next to his home, but the project remains only half-finished for lack of funds.
There is little money left over for such luxuries on his teacher’s salary of $350 a month. Already the family’s budget is so tight that he and his wife, Diana, opened a small restaurant, La Cosa Política, two years ago to help make ends meet.
Even among the restaurant’s clientele, mainly ranch hands and truck drivers with little formal education, the bespectacled Mr. Soriano sees potential bibliophiles. On the wall above tables laid out with grilled meat and fried plantains, he posts pages from Hoy Diario, the region’s daily newspaper, and prods diners into discussions about current events.
“We can take political talk only so far, of course,” he said, referring to the looming threat of retaliation from the paramilitary groups, which have effectively defeated the guerrillas in this part of northern Colombia. “I learned that if I interest just one person in reading a mundane news item — say, about the rising price of rice — then that’s a step forward.”
Such victories keep Mr. Soriano going, despite the challenges that come with running the Biblioburro.
He fractured his left leg in a fall from one of his burros in July, leaving him with a limp. And some of his readers like the books they borrow so much that they fail to return them.
Two books that vanished not long ago: an illustrated sex education manual, and a copy of “Like Water for Chocolate,” the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s novel about food and love in a traditional Mexican family.
And there are dangers inherent to venturing into the backlands around La Gloria. Two years ago, Mr. Soriano said, bandits surprised him at a river crossing, found that he carried almost no money, and tied him to a tree. They stole one item from his book pouch: “Brida,” the story of an Irish girl and her search for knowledge, by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho.
“For some reason, Paulo Coelho is at the top of everyone’s list of favorites,” said Mr. Soriano, hiding a grin under the shade of his sombrero vueltiao, the elaborately woven cowboy hat popular in Colombia’s interior.
On a trip this month into the rutted hills, where about 300 people regularly borrow books from him, he reminisced about a visit to the National Library in the capital, Bogotá, where he was stunned by the building’s immense collection and its Art Deco design.
“I felt so ordinary in Bogotá,” Mr. Soriano said. “My place is here.”
At times, on the remote landscape dotted with guayacán trees, it was hard to tell whether beast or man was in control. Once, Mr. Soriano lost his patience, trying to coax his stubborn donkeys to cross a stream.
Still, it was clear why Mr. Soriano does what he does.
In the village of El Brasil, Ingrid Ospina, 18, leafed through a copy of “Margarita,” the classic book of poetry by Rubén Darío of Nicaragua, and began to read aloud.
She went beyond where the heavens are
and to the moon said, au revoir.
How naughty to have flown so far
without the permission of Papa.
“That is so beautiful, Maestro,” Ms. Ospina said to the teacher. “When are you coming back?”
He fractured his left leg in a fall from one of his burros in July, leaving him with a limp. And some of his readers like the books they borrow so much that they fail to return them.
Two books that vanished not long ago: an illustrated sex education manual, and a copy of “Like Water for Chocolate,” the Mexican writer Laura Esquivel’s novel about food and love in a traditional Mexican family.
And there are dangers inherent to venturing into the backlands around La Gloria. Two years ago, Mr. Soriano said, bandits surprised him at a river crossing, found that he carried almost no money, and tied him to a tree. They stole one item from his book pouch: “Brida,” the story of an Irish girl and her search for knowledge, by the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho.
“For some reason, Paulo Coelho is at the top of everyone’s list of favorites,” said Mr. Soriano, hiding a grin under the shade of his sombrero vueltiao, the elaborately woven cowboy hat popular in Colombia’s interior.
On a trip this month into the rutted hills, where about 300 people regularly borrow books from him, he reminisced about a visit to the National Library in the capital, Bogotá, where he was stunned by the building’s immense collection and its Art Deco design.
“I felt so ordinary in Bogotá,” Mr. Soriano said. “My place is here.”
At times, on the remote landscape dotted with guayacán trees, it was hard to tell whether beast or man was in control. Once, Mr. Soriano lost his patience, trying to coax his stubborn donkeys to cross a stream.
Still, it was clear why Mr. Soriano does what he does.
In the village of El Brasil, Ingrid Ospina, 18, leafed through a copy of “Margarita,” the classic book of poetry by Rubén Darío of Nicaragua, and began to read aloud.
She went beyond where the heavens are
and to the moon said, au revoir.
How naughty to have flown so far
without the permission of Papa.
“That is so beautiful, Maestro,” Ms. Ospina said to the teacher. “When are you coming back?”
mercoledì 8 ottobre 2008
An Eye on the Swarm
http://www.princeton.edu/~icouzin/
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=RbxDLjcosss
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=RVvcX8HWghA
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=RbxDLjcosss
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=RVvcX8HWghA
martedì 7 ottobre 2008
From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm 1-2
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/science/13traff.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.
Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.
Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.
“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”
The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.
By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
“No matter how much you look at an individual army ant,” Dr. Couzin said, “you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.”
To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Couzin builds computer models of virtual swarms. Each model contains thousands of individual agents, which he can program to follow a few simple rules. To decide what those rules ought to be, he and his colleagues head out to jungles, deserts or oceans to observe animals in action.
Daniel Grunbaum, a mathematical biologist at the University of Washington, said his field was suddenly making leaps forward, as math and observation of nature were joined in the work of Dr. Couzin and others. “In the next 10 years there’s going to be a lot of progress.”
He said Dr. Couzin has been important in fusing the different kinds of science required to understand animal group behavior. “He’s been a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together,” Dr. Grunbaum said. “He has a larger vision. If it works, that’ll be a big advance.”
In the case of army ants, Dr. Couzin was intrigued by their highways. Army ants returning to their nest with food travel in a dense column. This incoming lane is flanked by two lanes of outgoing traffic. A three-lane highway of army ants can stretch for as far as 150 yards from the ant nest, comprising hundreds of thousands of insects.
What Dr. Couzin wanted to know was why army ants do not move to and from their colony in a mad, disorganized scramble. To find out, he built a computer model based on some basic ant biology. Each simulated ant laid down a chemical marker that attracted other ants while the marker was still fresh. Each ant could also sweep the air with its antennas; if it made contact with another ant, it turned away and slowed down to avoid a collision.
Dr. Couzin analyzed how the ants behaved when he tweaked their behavior. If the ants turned away too quickly from oncoming insects, they lost the scent of their trail. If they did not turn fast enough, they ground to a halt and forced ants behind them to slow down. Dr. Couzin found that a narrow range of behavior allowed ants to move as a group as quickly as possible.
It turned out that these optimal ants also spontaneously formed highways. If the ants going in one direction happened to become dense, their chemical trails attracted more ants headed the same way. This feedback caused the ants to form a single packed column. The ants going the other direction turned away from the oncoming traffic and formed flanking lanes.
To test this model, Dr. Couzin and Nigel Franks, an ant expert at the University of Bristol in England, filmed a trail of army ants in Panama. Back in England, they went through the film frame by frame, analyzing the movements of 226 ants. “Everything in the ant world is happening at such a high tempo it was very difficult to see,” Dr. Couzin said.
Eventually they found that the real ants were moving in the way that Dr. Couzin had predicted would allow the entire swarm to go as fast as possible. They also found that the ants behaved differently if they were leaving the nest or heading back. When two ants encountered each other, the outgoing ant turned away further than the incoming one. As a result, the ants headed to the nest end up clustered in a central lane, while the outgoing ants form two outer lanes. Dr. Couzin has been extending his model for ants to other animals that move in giant crowds, like fish and birds. And instead of tracking individual animals himself, he has developed programs to let computers do the work.
The more Dr. Couzin studies swarm behavior, the more patterns he finds common to many different species. He is reminded of the laws of physics that govern liquids. “You look at liquid metal and at water, and you can see they’re both liquids,” he said. “They have fundamental characteristics in common. That’s what I was finding with the animal groups — there were fundamental states they could exist in.”
Just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, animal swarms can also change abruptly thanks to some simple rules.
Dr. Couzin has discovered some of those rules in the ways that locusts begin to form their devastating swarms. The insects typically crawl around on their own, but sometimes young locusts come together in huge bands that march across the land, devouring everything in their path. After developing wings, they rise into the air as giant clouds made of millions of insects.
“Locusts are known to be around all the time,” Dr. Couzin said. “Why does the situation suddenly get out of control, and these locusts swarm together and devastate crops?”
Dr. Couzin traveled to remote areas of Mauritania in Africa to study the behavior of locust swarms. Back at Oxford, he and his colleagues built a circular track on which locusts could walk. “We could track the motion of all these individuals five times a second for eight hours a day,” he said.
The scientists found that when the density of locusts rose beyond a threshold, the insects suddenly began to move together. Each locust always tried to align its own movements with any neighbor. When the locusts were widely spaced, however, this rule did not have much effect on them. Only when they had enough neighbors did they spontaneously form huge bands.
“We showed that you don’t need to know lots of information about individuals to predict how the group will behave,” Dr. Couzin said of the locust findings, which were published June 2006 in Science.
Understanding how animals swarm and why they do are two separate questions, however.
In some species, animals may swarm so that the entire group enjoys an evolutionary benefit. All the army ants in a colony, for example, belong to the same family. So if individuals cooperate, their shared genes associated with swarming will become more common.
But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals.
Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals.
“Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition,” Dr. Couzin said. “So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don’t move, you’re likely to be eaten.”
This collective movement causes the crickets to form vast swarms. “All these crickets are on a forced march,” Dr. Couzin said. “They’re trying to attack the crickets who are ahead, and they’re trying to avoid being eaten from behind.”
Swarms, regardless of the forces that bring them together, have a remarkable ability to act like a collective mind. A swarm navigates as a unit, making decisions about where to go and how to escape predators together.
“There’s a swarm intelligence,” Dr. Couzin said. “You can see how people thought there was some sort of telekinesis involved.”
What makes this collective decision-making all the more puzzling is that each individual can behave only based on its own experience. If a shark lunges into a school of fish, only some of them will see it coming. If a flock of birds is migrating, only a few experienced individuals may know the route.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have built a model of the flow of information through swarms. Each individual has to balance two instincts: to stay with the group and to move in a desired direction. The scientists found that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively. They do not even need to send any special signals to the animals around them. They create a bias in the swarm’s movement that steers it in a particular direction.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right information, though,” Dr. Couzin pointed out.
Two leaders may try to pull a swarm in opposite directions, and yet the swarm holds together. In Dr. Couzin’s model, the swarm was able to decide which leaders to follow.
“As we increased the difference of opinion between the informed individuals, the group would spontaneously come to a consensus and move in the direction chosen by the majority,” Dr. Couzin said. “They can make these decisions without mathematics, without even recognizing each other or knowing that a decision has been made.”
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have been finding support for this model in real groups of animals. They have even found support in studies on mediocre swarmers — humans.
To study humans, Dr. Couzin teamed up with researchers at the University of Leeds. They recruited eight people at a time to play a game. Players stood in the middle of a circle, and along the edge of the circle were 16 cards, each labeled with a number. The scientists handed each person a slip of paper and instructed the players to follow the instructions printed on it while not saying anything to the others. Those rules correspond to the ones in Dr. Couzin’s models. And just as in his models, each person had no idea what the others had been instructed to do.
In one version of the experiment, each person was instructed simply to stay with the group. As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, they tended to circle around in a doughnut-shaped flock. In another version, one person was instructed to head for a particular card at the edge of the circle without leaving the group. The players quickly formed little swarms with their leader at the head, moving together to the target.
The scientists then sowed discord by telling two or more people to move to opposite sides of the circle. The other people had to try to stay with the group even as leaders tried to pull it apart.
As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, the human swarm made a quick, unconscious decision about which way to go. People tended to follow the largest group of leaders, even if it contained only one additional person.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues describe the results of these experiments in a paper to be published in the journal Animal Behavior.
Dr. Couzin is carrying the lessons he has learned from animals to other kinds of swarms. He is helping Dr. Naomi Leonard, a Princeton engineer, to program swarming into robots.
“These things are beginning to move around and interact in ways we see in nature,” he said. Ultimately, flocks of robots might do a better job of collecting information in dangerous places. “If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally.” The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies. Dr. Couzin is working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish.
“One of the really fun things that we’re doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions,” Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. “How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you’re seeing?” Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm.
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