Monday, January 28, 2013
The Ogden Memo: After the Medical Marijuana Mess
DeAngelo, looking at his desktop computer during an interview that summer, threw his hands up and shouted, "Yes!" Hillary Clinton, campaigning for president in New Hampshire, had just told a video-camera-wielding marijuana-policy activist that, if elected, she would end federal raids on pot clubs in California. That meant that all three leading Democratic candidates -- including the ultimate winner -- had vowed as president to leave DeAngelo and his business alone. Within a year of opening, the shop was bringing in $1 million a month in sales.
President Barack Obama made good on his campaign promise shortly after taking office. "What the president said during the campaign, you'll be surprised to know, will be consistent with what we'll be doing in law enforcement," Attorney General Eric Holder said in March 2009. "What he said during the campaign is now American policy."
In October, the Department of Justice followed up with what became known as the "Ogden memo" -- a missive from Deputy Attorney General David Ogden telling federal law enforcers that they should not focus federal resources "on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."
Steph Sherer, the head of Americans for Safe Access, a California-based medical marijuana group, was thrilled when she saw the Ogden memo. The group quickly put out a press release touting it.
"We were so beside ourselves in so many ways that we were finally recognized by a government agency, that our press release was victorious," Sherer said. "What our nuance was, we said, 'Great, we have an administration that will have a dialogue with us, this is a major step forward.'"
Some members of the medical marijuana industry, however, took a less nuanced view. "Instead, the reaction [from cannabis industry people] was, 'OK, we're all in the clear, it's time to expand our businesses and bring in outside investors,'" Sherer said.
Encouraged by the Ogden memo and DeAngelo's public assertions of his million-dollar monthly revenue, medical pot shops flooded Montana, Washington, and other states. Legislatures in 18 states, plus the District of Columbia, have now approved marijuana for medical purposes. Twelve, including DC, have laws allowing dispensaries. Local officials in California's Mendocino County and in towns like Chico moved forward with plans to regulate medical marijuana as well. Before 2009, there were roughly 1,000 pot shops across the country. Today, there are 2,000 to 2,500, according to Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access.
"Nobody can argue that the number of medical marijuana shops in California and Colorado didn't grow at an exponential rate directly because of this" Ogden memo, said a former senior White House official who worked on drug policy and, like other former and current members of the Obama administration, requested anonymity in order to speak about internal debates.
The Ogden memo, however, was not the beginning of the end of the war on pot. Instead, it kicked off a new battle that still rages. Since the memo, the Department of Justice has cracked down hard on medical marijuana, raiding hundreds of dispensaries, while the IRS and other federal law enforcement officials have gone after banks and landlords who do business with them. Fours years after promising not to make medical marijuana a priority, the government continues to target it aggressively.
The war has played out not just between federal authorities and the pot industry, but between competing factions within the federal government, as well as between local and state officials and the more aggressive federal prosecutors and drug warriors. As officials in Washington fought over whether and how to continue the war on pot, U.S. attorneys in the states helped beat back local efforts to regulate the medical marijuana industry, going so far as to threaten elected officials with jail. The willingness of elements within the Department of Justice, including its top prosecutors, to use their power in brazenly political ways is, in many ways, the untold story of Obama's first-term approach to drug policy.
by Ryan Grim and Ryan J. Reilly, Huffington Post | Read more:
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Capitulation Everywhere
- Benjamin Graham
“Human beings desperately want to belong, but, they also desperately want to understand the environment around them. Often, the desire to belong and the desire to know the truth conflict. The idea of the majority view or the ‘mainstream,’ gives people the sense that they are a part of a group, and at the same time, gives them the illusion of being informed.”
- Brandon Smith
The bears are gone, extinct, vanished. Among the ones remaining, many are people whom even I would consider to be either permabears or nut-cases. And yet, the historical evidence for major defensiveness has rarely been stronger.
The newest iteration of the bullish case is the idea of a “great rotation” from bonds and cash to stocks, as if the outstanding quantity of each is not held by someone at every point in time. The head of a “too big to fail” investment firm argued last week that stocks are “underowned” – as if every share of stock presently in existence is not actually owned by someone. To assert that stocks can be “underowned” seems to reflect either a misunderstanding of how markets work, or a desire to distribute overvalued institutional holdings onto the unwashed muppets. Likewise, the idea of a “rotation” out of bonds and into stocks begs the question of who will buy the bonds and sell the stocks, as someone must be on the other side of that trade. Similarly, to “move cash into the market” requires a seller of stock who becomes the new holder of said cash.
Quite simply, the reason that pension funds and other investors hold more bonds relative to stocks than they have historically is that there are more bonds outstanding, relative to stocks, than there have been historically. What is viewed as “underinvestment” in stocks is actually a symptom of a rise in the gross indebtedness of the global economy, enabled and encouraged by quantitative easing of central banks, which have been successful in suppressing all apparent costs of that releveraging.
The "rotation" fallacy has emerged even in the work of analysts that we admire. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater talked on CNBC last week of a move “out of” cash and “into” stocks, seemingly reversing comments he made only weeks ago at the Dealbook conference (h/t PragCap) where he suggested that risk premiums are likely to expand, that the effects of QE are diminishing as we do more rounds, that we’re facing austerity, that growth is flagging, that the economy is facing unprecedented risk, and that we face a slowdown with very little room to maneuver. Meanwhile, Albert Edwards of SocGen suggested that there has been an excessive “move away from equities” in recent years – instead of noting, for example, that the volume of U.S. government debt foisted upon the public (even excluding what has been purchased by the Fed) has doubled since 2007, not to mention other sources of global debt issuance, while the market capitalization of stocks has merely recovered to its previously overvalued highs.
It’s fine to argue that perhaps investors are momentum chasers, and with profit margins now about 70% above historical norms (making stocks seem both "safe" and misleadingly cheap), with stock prices up, and with low returns on cash, investors not holding stocks will be the greater fools that allow investors who do hold stocks to get out. Indeed, that is an argument that I fully embrace as logical – the only issue being the extent to which one wants to assume the perpetual existence of a greater fool, as the supply of greater fools seems increasingly exhausted. But the problem with the “great rotation” argument is that somebody has to hold the debt. Somebody has to hold the cash. It cannot go anywhere, and it is impossible – in aggregate – for the markets to “rotate” out of it.
The newest iteration of the bullish case is the idea of a “great rotation” from bonds and cash to stocks, as if the outstanding quantity of each is not held by someone at every point in time. The head of a “too big to fail” investment firm argued last week that stocks are “underowned” – as if every share of stock presently in existence is not actually owned by someone. To assert that stocks can be “underowned” seems to reflect either a misunderstanding of how markets work, or a desire to distribute overvalued institutional holdings onto the unwashed muppets. Likewise, the idea of a “rotation” out of bonds and into stocks begs the question of who will buy the bonds and sell the stocks, as someone must be on the other side of that trade. Similarly, to “move cash into the market” requires a seller of stock who becomes the new holder of said cash.
Quite simply, the reason that pension funds and other investors hold more bonds relative to stocks than they have historically is that there are more bonds outstanding, relative to stocks, than there have been historically. What is viewed as “underinvestment” in stocks is actually a symptom of a rise in the gross indebtedness of the global economy, enabled and encouraged by quantitative easing of central banks, which have been successful in suppressing all apparent costs of that releveraging.
The "rotation" fallacy has emerged even in the work of analysts that we admire. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater talked on CNBC last week of a move “out of” cash and “into” stocks, seemingly reversing comments he made only weeks ago at the Dealbook conference (h/t PragCap) where he suggested that risk premiums are likely to expand, that the effects of QE are diminishing as we do more rounds, that we’re facing austerity, that growth is flagging, that the economy is facing unprecedented risk, and that we face a slowdown with very little room to maneuver. Meanwhile, Albert Edwards of SocGen suggested that there has been an excessive “move away from equities” in recent years – instead of noting, for example, that the volume of U.S. government debt foisted upon the public (even excluding what has been purchased by the Fed) has doubled since 2007, not to mention other sources of global debt issuance, while the market capitalization of stocks has merely recovered to its previously overvalued highs.
It’s fine to argue that perhaps investors are momentum chasers, and with profit margins now about 70% above historical norms (making stocks seem both "safe" and misleadingly cheap), with stock prices up, and with low returns on cash, investors not holding stocks will be the greater fools that allow investors who do hold stocks to get out. Indeed, that is an argument that I fully embrace as logical – the only issue being the extent to which one wants to assume the perpetual existence of a greater fool, as the supply of greater fools seems increasingly exhausted. But the problem with the “great rotation” argument is that somebody has to hold the debt. Somebody has to hold the cash. It cannot go anywhere, and it is impossible – in aggregate – for the markets to “rotate” out of it.
by John P. Hussman, Hussman Funds | Read more:
Image via:
Patent Troll Soverain Loses on Appeal
It's all a sham. Court records show Soverain hasn't made a sale—ever. The various voice mailboxes were all set up by Katherine Wolanyk, the former Latham & Watkins attorney who is a co-founder and partial owner of Soverain. And the impressive list of big corporate customers on its webpage? Those are deals struck with another company, more than a decade ago. That was OpenMarket, a software company that created these patents before going out of business in 2001. It sold its assets to a venture capital fund called divine interVentures, which in turn sold the OpenMarket patents to Soverain Software in 2003.
"Thank you for calling Soverain technical support," says Wolanyk, if you press option 2. "If you are a current customer and have a tech support question, please call us at 1-888-884-4432 or e-mail us at support@soverain.com." That number, like the "customer support" number on Soverain's contactpage, has been disconnected.
Soverain isn't in the e-commerce business; it's in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it has been quite successful until now. The company's plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling [PDF] that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.
The ruling effectively shuts down dozens of the lawsuits Soverain filed last year against Nordstrom's, Macy's, Home Depot, RadioShack, Kohl's, and many others (see our chart on page 2). All of them did nothing more than provide shoppers with basic online checkout technology. Soverain used two patents, numbers 5,715,314 and 5,909,492, to claim ownership of the "shopping carts" commonly used in online stores. In some cases, it wielded a third patent, No. 7,272,639.
Soverain will lose the $2.5 million it stood to gain from Newegg, as well as two much bigger verdicts it won against Victoria's Secret and Avon. Those two companies were ordered to pay a total of almost $18 million, plus a "running royalty" of about one percent, after a 2011 trial. The ruling in the Newegg case is a total wipeout for a patent troll that had squeezed many millions from online retailers, was backed by big-firm lawyers, and was determined to collect hundreds of millions more.
For Newegg's Chief Legal Officer Lee Cheng, it's a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever.
"We basically took a look at this situation and said, 'This is bullshit,'" said Cheng in an interview with Ars. "We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we'd have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents."
by Joe Mullin, ARS Technica | Read more:
Photo: Aurich Lawson
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Do-It-Yourself After-Death Care
A little over five years ago, Alison and Doug Kirk held their 9-year-old daughter's hand as she lay on a futon in their Nashville living room, told her they loved her, and watched her take her last breath.
The Kirks had known for a long time that their little girl, Caroline, would die. In her last weeks, she was under hospice care, lived off an oxygen machine, was fed through a tube, and spoke only in small murmurs. It was the normal course for a child born with Niemann-Pick, a terminal disease that gradually leads to the breakdown of the nervous system, brain and lungs.
What happened after Caroline's death was anything but typical.
Alison and Doug carried Caroline upstairs to the bathtub, where they washed her skin and hair, dried her limp, 45-pound body with a towel and placed her head on a pillow on the bed in her old room. Alison slipped a white communion dress on Caroline, turned up the air-conditioning and put ice packs by her daughter’s sides. She put pink lipstick on the child's paling lips, and covered up Caroline's toes and fingers, which were turning blue at the nails, with the family quilt.
Caroline stayed in her bedroom for 36 hours for her final goodbyes. There was no traditional funeral home service, and no coroner or medical examiner was on hand. Caroline's death was largely a home affair, with a short cemetery burial that followed.
"We had taken care of Caroline her whole life," recalls Alison, whose other daughter, Kate, has the same disease and will also have a home funeral. "Why would we give her to someone else once she died?"
Each year, 2.5 million Americans die. For the majority, about 70 percent, deaths happen in a hospital, nursing home or long-term care facility. What happens afterwards is nearly always the same, with few exceptions for religious traditions: A doctor or nurse will sign a death certificate and the body will be whisked to the funeral home, where it's washed, embalmed, dressed, and prepared for a viewing and burial. A family usually sees the dead only a few times: when they die, if there's an open-casket viewing and in the rare case when a casket is opened during burial.
But a small and growing group of Americans are returning to a more hands-on, no-frills experience of death. In the world of "do it yourself" funerals, freezer packs are used in lieu of embalming, unvarnished wooden boxes replace ornate caskets, viewings are in living rooms and, in some cases, burials happen in backyards.
Nobody keeps track of the number of home funerals and advocacy groups, but home funeral organizations have won battles in recent years in states such as Minnesota and Utah that have attempted to ban the practice. Most states have nearly eliminated any requirements that professionals play a role in funerals. It's now legal in all but eight states to care for one's own after death. And the growth of community-based, nonprofit home funeral groups and burial grounds that are friendly to the cause point to an increasing demand.
The reasons vary from the economic to the psychological and cultural. The average funeral costs $6,560, while a home funeral can cost close to nothing. In a society where seeing death and speaking of it is often taboo, home funeral advocates are challenging the notion that traditional funerals are anything but a natural end to life. Instead, they assert, death and mourning should be seen, smelled, touched and experienced.
"There are people who get it and think it's a great idea. And there are people who have been so indoctrinated to think a different way, a less hands-on way, that they can't imagine anything else," says Elizabeth Knox, the founder of Crossings, a Maryland-based home funeral resource organization, and the president of the National Home Funeral Alliance. Knox travels across the nation to run trainings on do-it-yourself funerals and her book on her daughter's home funeral is what inspired the Kirks to do their own. Her group is one of several that have seen interest grow in recent years. They include Final Passages (California), Natural Transitions (Colorado) and Undertaken with Love (Texas). There are 61 organizations that are members of the NHFA, many of which are run by just one person.
"A lot of people don't want to do anything with touching dead bodies," says Knox. "They consider it creepy. But it can actually be the first step to healing and acceptance of death. Slowing down the process allows all involved to absorb the loss at their own pace. It's an organic emotional and spiritual healing not available from limited calling hours at a remote location."
The Kirks had known for a long time that their little girl, Caroline, would die. In her last weeks, she was under hospice care, lived off an oxygen machine, was fed through a tube, and spoke only in small murmurs. It was the normal course for a child born with Niemann-Pick, a terminal disease that gradually leads to the breakdown of the nervous system, brain and lungs.What happened after Caroline's death was anything but typical.
Alison and Doug carried Caroline upstairs to the bathtub, where they washed her skin and hair, dried her limp, 45-pound body with a towel and placed her head on a pillow on the bed in her old room. Alison slipped a white communion dress on Caroline, turned up the air-conditioning and put ice packs by her daughter’s sides. She put pink lipstick on the child's paling lips, and covered up Caroline's toes and fingers, which were turning blue at the nails, with the family quilt.
Caroline stayed in her bedroom for 36 hours for her final goodbyes. There was no traditional funeral home service, and no coroner or medical examiner was on hand. Caroline's death was largely a home affair, with a short cemetery burial that followed.
"We had taken care of Caroline her whole life," recalls Alison, whose other daughter, Kate, has the same disease and will also have a home funeral. "Why would we give her to someone else once she died?"
Each year, 2.5 million Americans die. For the majority, about 70 percent, deaths happen in a hospital, nursing home or long-term care facility. What happens afterwards is nearly always the same, with few exceptions for religious traditions: A doctor or nurse will sign a death certificate and the body will be whisked to the funeral home, where it's washed, embalmed, dressed, and prepared for a viewing and burial. A family usually sees the dead only a few times: when they die, if there's an open-casket viewing and in the rare case when a casket is opened during burial.
But a small and growing group of Americans are returning to a more hands-on, no-frills experience of death. In the world of "do it yourself" funerals, freezer packs are used in lieu of embalming, unvarnished wooden boxes replace ornate caskets, viewings are in living rooms and, in some cases, burials happen in backyards.
Nobody keeps track of the number of home funerals and advocacy groups, but home funeral organizations have won battles in recent years in states such as Minnesota and Utah that have attempted to ban the practice. Most states have nearly eliminated any requirements that professionals play a role in funerals. It's now legal in all but eight states to care for one's own after death. And the growth of community-based, nonprofit home funeral groups and burial grounds that are friendly to the cause point to an increasing demand.
The reasons vary from the economic to the psychological and cultural. The average funeral costs $6,560, while a home funeral can cost close to nothing. In a society where seeing death and speaking of it is often taboo, home funeral advocates are challenging the notion that traditional funerals are anything but a natural end to life. Instead, they assert, death and mourning should be seen, smelled, touched and experienced.
"There are people who get it and think it's a great idea. And there are people who have been so indoctrinated to think a different way, a less hands-on way, that they can't imagine anything else," says Elizabeth Knox, the founder of Crossings, a Maryland-based home funeral resource organization, and the president of the National Home Funeral Alliance. Knox travels across the nation to run trainings on do-it-yourself funerals and her book on her daughter's home funeral is what inspired the Kirks to do their own. Her group is one of several that have seen interest grow in recent years. They include Final Passages (California), Natural Transitions (Colorado) and Undertaken with Love (Texas). There are 61 organizations that are members of the NHFA, many of which are run by just one person.
"A lot of people don't want to do anything with touching dead bodies," says Knox. "They consider it creepy. But it can actually be the first step to healing and acceptance of death. Slowing down the process allows all involved to absorb the loss at their own pace. It's an organic emotional and spiritual healing not available from limited calling hours at a remote location."
Bones of Contention
Along one wall, behind ropes, loomed the skeleton of a Tarbosaurus bataar. T. bataar, as it is known, was a Tyrannosaurus rex cousin that lived some seventy million years ago, in what is now the Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia. Eight feet tall and twenty-four feet long, the specimen had been mounted in a predatory running position, with its arms out and its jaws open, as if determined to eat Lot No. 49220—a cast Komodo dragon, crouching ten yards away, on blue velvet. (...)
Heritage brokered the T. bataar on behalf of a thirty-seven-year-old bone hunter named Eric Prokopi, who lives in Florida, a great state for fossils. For roughly the first half of the past fifty million years, the region lay beneath a warm, shallow sea. As land repeatedly surfaced and receded, the remains of marine creatures got mixed up with those of terrestrials, forming one big Ice Age graveyard: sea cows, prehistoric sharks, spike-tailed armadillos the size of refrigerators.
Shark teeth attract kids to fossil hunting because they’re so easy to find. Sharks shed thousands of teeth per year, and have been doing so for eons. The teeth, exposed by erosion and tides, can be as big as a human hand. The largest look like the arrowheads of giants, and can sell for thousands of dollars.
Prokopi, who grew up outside Tampa, is the son of a music teacher and a homemaker. He found his first shark tooth as a small boy, in the late seventies, at nearby Venice Beach. By age ten, he had a diving license. His mother, a competitive swimmer, accompanied him on river expeditions. As he explored underwater, holding a rope, she rode in a canoe, tugging the line if she saw an alligator.
Through fossil clubs and field trips to quarries, Prokopi got to know older hunters who spent their lives beachcombing or standing chest deep in muck, searching for bone. Paleontology books explained what he’d found and taught him what to look for next. When he was in high school, fossils began to take over the family’s house, and around 1990 he started selling them, making eight hundred dollars at his first trade show, in Lakeland. At such events, he bartered with other hunters, who often brought entire trailers filled with specimens. Some fossils were still sheathed in “field jackets”—the lumpy white plaster encasements that excavators apply at dig sites, for safe transport, making the artifacts look like misshapen mummies.
Although some countries had fossil-trade restrictions, or were enacting them, certain dealers proceeded as though there were no rules; they justified their trade, in part, with the idea that exposed fossils, if not collected, disintegrate. Prokopi quickly learned that, when he found something good, someone would buy it. If the business sometimes resembled a black market, it was a small one: nobody seriously imagined getting rich digging up prehistoric bones.
Then, the day before Prokopi turned sixteen, a magnificent T. rex was found weathering out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. An amber hunter named Sue Hendrickson, working with the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, a company that collects and prepares fossils, had wandered off to explore a bluff as her crew changed a flat tire, and came back with a handful of dinosaur. The team named the T. rex Sue.
A legal fight followed, centering on the Sioux rancher who, for five thousand dollars, had sold Black Hills the right to dig out the dinosaur but whose land, part of an Indian reservation, was being held in federal trust. As the case unfolded in the courts, the movie “Jurassic Park” came out, rebooting dinosaurs in the popular imagination. The rancher eventually won the right to sell Tyrannosaurus Sue. On October 4, 1997, Sotheby’s, in New York, auctioned the fossil; Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History bought it, with sponsorship from Disney and McDonald’s, for an unprecedented $8.4 million.
Hendrickson had found her T. rex the way hunters have always found fossils: by walking around and looking down. In America, the most spectacular dinosaur discoveries have been made in the West, in a swath of exposures from the Canadian border to New Mexico. During the infamous nineteenth-century “bone wars,” between the East Coast paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and O. C. Marsh, scientists encountered dinosaur skeletons “exposed like corpses on a deserted battlefield,” Michael Novacek writes in “Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs.”
Today in the United States, only approved researchers may collect vertebrates on public land, but a hunter who finds a fossil on his property, or on private land where he has permission to dig, can sell it, exhibit it, export it—whatever. After the sale of Tyrannosaurus Sue, a modern gold rush began, and it has not let up. In the summers, the Western snows have barely receded before prospectors arrive, often with private clients who pay to hunt with guides.
Ranchers who had once allowed scientists to explore their land for free began leasing it to the highest bidder. Paleontologists lost out to amateurs with more money, and they lost specimens to vandals and thieves, some of whom went after fossils with sledgehammers. Federal agents have tracked stolen American dinosaurs as far away as Japan. The paleontologist Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, says, “The day Sue got auctioned is the day fossils became money.”
Toastmaster
Hypocrisy, Explosive Listening and Fear of Death at the World Championship of Public Speaking.
I learned the applause technique from Toastmasters International, the largest speaking club in the world (with more than two hundred thousand members in ninety countries). The dean who hired me suggested I join the club so I could adopt some of their teaching methods. Several of her former speaking instructors had sat in on meetings, and she’d never heard of a place where everyone was so friendly, she said. I had a feeling she hoped Toastmasters would improve my own speaking skills as well—during the first interview, she gently noted that I was more soft-spoken than most instructors—but we pretended I was going as teacher, not student.
I attended several sessions of a club in Brooklyn Heights with a reputation for particularly active members. The treasurer, Bruce Schaffer, clapped so loudly that he sat in the last row of chairs in the room so he wouldn’t hurt people’s ears. He told me (after politely inquiring whether he should speak in “short, Hemingway sentences or long, flowery, Kerouac ones” for the interview) that being a Toastmaster for the past eleven years had changed his personality and improved his law practice. “I start my day feeling stronger and more powerful,” he said. In the morning when he wakes up, he sometimes yells as loudly as he can into a towel.
Toastmasters meetings usually begin with a pledge of allegiance to the American flag. Then the Jokemaster tells a joke, and the Wordmaster gives the word of the day—easy ones like joy andcollaboration. The first portion of the meeting is devoted to impromptu speaking, and the results are pleasantly idiotic. Members have one minute to respond to random questions like, “Do you feel it is necessary to drink eight glasses of water a day?” or “You are what you eat—agree or disagree?” They struggle for words, clench the lectern, fidget, reveal sweat spots under their arms, and return to their seats suddenly. A designated Grammarian tallies how many times people say “uh,” “um,” “like,” “er,” “you know,” “well.”
At one of my first meetings, I was asked to answer the question “What’s your favorite summer holiday?” I immediately knew my answer (July 4), but all I could do was say, in a tiny, child’s voice, “Do I have to? Can I wait for later?” The Toastmaster officer said yes, but seemed uncomfortable with my request. I soon learned that everyone tries, even if all they can do is go up and whisper a sentence. I felt like I’d ruined the mood. As I left the meeting, a middle-aged man caught up to me and shook my hand. “We’re all in the same boat,” he said. “Don’t believe anyone who says they’re not nervous.” When he asked how I learned about Toastmasters, I was too ashamed to tell him I taught public speaking.
Toastmasters invents the circumstances for ordinary people to speak forcefully and authoritatively to a silent, adoring crowd. To become a “Competent Toastmaster,” members must give ten prepared speeches, each with a specified length and style. Each member then receives an oral evaluation. Those who show talent (and have bigger goals than getting over stage fright) move on to compete against other clubs, divisions, districts, regions, and finally, every August, the best ten speakers gather for the World Championship of Public Speaking. “It’s like American Idol, except no one cares,” says Rory Vaden, one of the 2006 contestants, who, at twenty-three, made the unusual decision that Toastmasters could bring him fame. “I woke up in the middle of the night, and it was like, boom: You are supposed to pursue the World Championship of Public Speaking. You are supposed to become the youngest champion ever.” (...)
Toastmasters clubs work on cultivating a pleasant, homey atmosphere where all speeches are considered innately special. Many chapters are set up in boardrooms, churches, or classrooms, and, for those scarred by the shame of having once given a horrible presentation, it becomes possible to rewrite the experience. Seasoned Toastmasters look delighted no matter who is speaking: they nod, sigh, and smile at the appropriate moments.
Lee Glickstein, founder of Speaking Circles International—a younger, smaller, more informal version of Toastmasters—calls this type of feedback “explosive listening.” “We were wounded when we stopped trusting ourselves,” he writes in his 1999 bookBe Heard Now! To promote sincerity, he moves away from the Carnegian idea that the best speakers are actors. He encourages students to stare in the mirror for a few minutes every day and get to know themselves—be “vibrantly vulnerable,” “turn nervousness—into nirvana!” “OLD MYTH: public speaking is about mastering PERFORMANCE,” he writes. “NEW REALITY: public speaking is about EXPRESSION OF OUR AUTHENTIC SELVES.” (...)
I, too, began thinking of the gift of public speaking as inexplicably awarded to some and not others. At Toastmasters meetings, I’d take careful notes on voice technique and hand gestures, but never thought of absorbing them myself. I just passed the suggestions on to my students. I quickly became uninterested in becoming a good speaker; it was like becoming a good astronaut. It wasn’t going to happen. I began to feel more comfortable in class, but as soon as I got into a new situation, the anxiety returned. When I was called on at Toastmasters the second time—“What are your hobbies?”—my chest was visibly moving. I couldn’t get enough air. I said, “I like to play tennis?” I stared at an old woman with frizzy gray hair who nodded. My voice was high and airy. “I don’t get to play tennis a lot so I really hope to play more tennis soon.” Everyone clapped.
Most Toastmasters have a story about someone who sobbed through their first speech and then couldn’t be dragged from the stage. When the transformation wasn’t happening for me, I found comfort in the idea that the anxiety could simply be a matter of genetics. “About 20 percent of the population have severe communication apprehension and there’s not a whole hell of a lot they can do about it,” James McCroskey, a professor at the University of Alabama who’s studied this problem for the past thirty years, told me. He began his career believing the fear was taught, and then shifted tracks. Now he believes biology is more important than learning processes. “We thought our parents scared us when we were little kids. We had wonderful theories, but the problem is they weren’t true.”
My therapist’s theory was that speaking anxiety is an accident of evolution: we still interpret being separated from the crowd as a danger. I called her six months after our last appointment (I stopped going after the third session) and told her I was writing an article about public speaking but hadn’t conquered the fear. She was disappointed. “We’re really much more primitive than we think we are,” she said, as consolation. “These feelings are no longer helpful to us, the way that the appendix or tailbone is no longer helpful to us. But these things once had a purpose. It’s not that we’re nuts.”
by Rachel Aviv, The Believer | Read more:
Photo via:
Saturday, January 26, 2013
The Untouchables
PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering. What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable.
What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.
Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).
As I documented at length in my 2011 book on America's two-tiered justice system, With Liberty and Justice for Some, the evidence that felonies were committed by Wall Street is overwhelming. That evidence directly negates the primary excuse by Breuer (previously offered by Obama himself) that the bad acts of Wall Street were not criminal.
Numerous documents prove that executives at leading banks, credit agencies, and mortgage brokers were falsely touting assets as sound that knew were junk: the very definition of fraud. As former Wall Street analyst Yves Smith wrote in her book ECONned: "What went on at Lehman and AIG, as well as the chicanery in the CDO [collateralized debt obligation] business, by any sensible standard is criminal." Even lifelong Wall Street defender Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair, said in Congressional testimony that "a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud."
A New York Times editorial in August explained that the DOJ's excuse for failing to prosecute Wall Street executives - that it was too hard to obtain convictions - "has always defied common sense - and all the more so now that a fuller picture is emerging of the range of banks' reckless and lawless activities, including interest-rate rigging, money laundering, securities fraud and excessive speculation." The Frontline program interviewed former prosecutors, Senate staffers and regulators who unequivocally said the same: it is inconceivable that the DOJ could not have successfully prosecuted at least some high-level Wall Street executives - had they tried.
What's most remarkable about all of this is not even Wall Street had the audacity to expect the generosity of largesse they ended up receiving. "The Untouchables" begins by recounting the massive financial devastation the 2008 crisis wrought - "the economy was in ruins and bankers were being blamed" - and recounts:
"In 2009, Wall Street bankers were on the defensive, worried they could be held criminally liable for fraud. With a new administration, bankers and their attorneys expected investigations and at least some prosecutions."
Indeed, the show recalls that both in Washington and the country generally, "there was broad support for prosecuting Wall Street." Nonetheless: "four years later, there have been no arrests of any senior Wall Street executives."
In response to the DOJ's excuse-making that these criminal cases are too hard to win, numerous experts - Senators, top Hill staffers, former DOJ prosecutors - emphasized the key point: Obama officials never even tried. One of the heroes of "The Untouchables", former Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman, worked tirelessly to provide the DOJ with all the funds it needed to ensure probing criminal investigations and even to pressure and compel them to do so. Yet when he and his staff would meet with Breuer and other top DOJ officials, they would proudly tout the small mortgage brokers they were pursuing, in response to which Kafuman and his staff said: "No. Don't show me small-time mortgage guys in California. This is totally about what went on in Wall Street. . . . We are talking about investigating senior level Wall Street executives, even at the Board level". (The same Lanny Breuer was recently seen announcing that the banking giant HSBC would face no criminal prosecution for its money laundering of funds for designated terrorist groups and drug networks on the ground that the bank was too big to risk prosecuting).
by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
What Obama justice officials did instead is exactly what they did in the face of high-level Bush era crimes of torture and warrantless eavesdropping: namely, acted to protect the most powerful factions in the society in the face of overwhelming evidence of serious criminality. Indeed, financial elites were not only vested with immunity for their fraud, but thrived as a result of it, even as ordinary Americans continue to suffer the effects of that crisis.Worst of all, Obama justice officials both shielded and feted these Wall Street oligarchs (who, just by the way, overwhelmingly supported Obama's 2008 presidential campaign) as they simultaneously prosecuted and imprisoned powerless Americans for far more trivial transgressions. As Harvard law professor Larry Lessig put it two weeks ago when expressing anger over the DOJ's persecution of Aaron Swartz: "we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House." (Indeed, as "The Untouchables" put it: while no senior Wall Street executives have been prosecuted, "many small mortgage brokers, loan appraisers and even home buyers" have been).
As I documented at length in my 2011 book on America's two-tiered justice system, With Liberty and Justice for Some, the evidence that felonies were committed by Wall Street is overwhelming. That evidence directly negates the primary excuse by Breuer (previously offered by Obama himself) that the bad acts of Wall Street were not criminal.
Numerous documents prove that executives at leading banks, credit agencies, and mortgage brokers were falsely touting assets as sound that knew were junk: the very definition of fraud. As former Wall Street analyst Yves Smith wrote in her book ECONned: "What went on at Lehman and AIG, as well as the chicanery in the CDO [collateralized debt obligation] business, by any sensible standard is criminal." Even lifelong Wall Street defender Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair, said in Congressional testimony that "a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud."
A New York Times editorial in August explained that the DOJ's excuse for failing to prosecute Wall Street executives - that it was too hard to obtain convictions - "has always defied common sense - and all the more so now that a fuller picture is emerging of the range of banks' reckless and lawless activities, including interest-rate rigging, money laundering, securities fraud and excessive speculation." The Frontline program interviewed former prosecutors, Senate staffers and regulators who unequivocally said the same: it is inconceivable that the DOJ could not have successfully prosecuted at least some high-level Wall Street executives - had they tried.
What's most remarkable about all of this is not even Wall Street had the audacity to expect the generosity of largesse they ended up receiving. "The Untouchables" begins by recounting the massive financial devastation the 2008 crisis wrought - "the economy was in ruins and bankers were being blamed" - and recounts:
"In 2009, Wall Street bankers were on the defensive, worried they could be held criminally liable for fraud. With a new administration, bankers and their attorneys expected investigations and at least some prosecutions."
Indeed, the show recalls that both in Washington and the country generally, "there was broad support for prosecuting Wall Street." Nonetheless: "four years later, there have been no arrests of any senior Wall Street executives."
In response to the DOJ's excuse-making that these criminal cases are too hard to win, numerous experts - Senators, top Hill staffers, former DOJ prosecutors - emphasized the key point: Obama officials never even tried. One of the heroes of "The Untouchables", former Democratic Sen. Ted Kaufman, worked tirelessly to provide the DOJ with all the funds it needed to ensure probing criminal investigations and even to pressure and compel them to do so. Yet when he and his staff would meet with Breuer and other top DOJ officials, they would proudly tout the small mortgage brokers they were pursuing, in response to which Kafuman and his staff said: "No. Don't show me small-time mortgage guys in California. This is totally about what went on in Wall Street. . . . We are talking about investigating senior level Wall Street executives, even at the Board level". (The same Lanny Breuer was recently seen announcing that the banking giant HSBC would face no criminal prosecution for its money laundering of funds for designated terrorist groups and drug networks on the ground that the bank was too big to risk prosecuting).
by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters
Why Does Stephen Hate Bob (More Than His Wife)?
“If a wife left her husband with three kids and no job/ to run off to fuck in Hawaii with some doctor named Bob/ you could skin them and drain them of blood so they die…especially Bob. Then you would be justice guy”. – Stephen Lynch, “Superhero”
For those of you not in the know, Stephen Lynch is a popular comedic musician. In the song, “Superhero”, Stephen gives the above description of what he would do were he “Justice Guy”. As one can gather, in this story, Stephen’s wife has run off with another man, resulting in Mr. Lynch temporarily experiencing a Predator-like urge for revenge. The interesting thing about this particular song is the emphasis that Stephen puts on his urge to kill Bob. It’s interesting in that it doesn’t make much sense, morally speaking: it’s not as if Bob, a third party who was not involved in any kind of relationship with Stephen, had any formal obligation to respect the boundaries of Stephen’s relationship with his wife. Looking out for the relationship, it seems, ought to have been his wife’s job. She was the person who had the social obligation to Stephen that was violated, so it seems the one who Stephen ought to mad at (or, at least madder at) would be his wife. So why does Stephen wish to especially punish Bob?
There are two candidate explanations I’d like to consider today to help explain the urge for this kind of Bob-specific punishment: one is slightly more specific to the situation at hand and the other applies to punishment interactions more generally, so let’s start off with the more specific case. Stephen wants his wife to behave cooperatively in terms of their relationship, and she seems less than willing to do so herself; presumably, some mating mechanisms in her brain is suggesting that the payoffs would be better for her to ditch her jobless husband to run off with a wealthy, high-status doctor. In order to alter the cost/benefit ratio to certain actions, then, Stephen entertains the idea of enacting punishment. If Stephen’s punishment makes his wife’s infidelity costlier than remaining faithful, her behavior will likely adjust accordingly. While punishing his wife can potentially be an effective strategy for enforcing her cooperation, it’s also a risky venture for Stephen on two fronts: (1) too much punishing of his wife – in this case, murder, though it need not be that extreme – can be counterproductive to his goals, as it would render her less able to deliver the benefits she previously provided to the relationship; the punishment might also be counterproductive because (2) the punishment makes the relationship less valuable still to his wife as new costs mount, resulting in her urge to abandon the relationship altogether for a better deal elsewhere growing even stronger.
The punishing of potential third parties – in this case, Bob – does not hold these same costs, though. Provided Bob was a stranger, Stephen doesn’t suffer any loss of benefits, as benefits were never being provided by Bob in the first place. If Stephen and Bob were previously cooperating in some form the matter gets a bit more involved, but we won’t concern ourselves with that for now; we’ll just assume the benefits his wife could provide are more valuable than the ones Bob could. With regard to the second cost – the relationship becoming costlier for the person punishment is directed at – this is, in fact, not a cost when that punishment is directed at Bob, but rather the entire point. If the relationship is costlier for a third party to engage in, due to the prospect of a potentially-homicidal partner, that third party may well think twice before deciding whether to pursue the affair any further. Punishing Bob would seem to look like the better option, then. There’s just one major hitch: specifically, punishing is costly for Stephen, both in terms of time, energy, and risk, and he may well need to direct punishment towards far more targets if he’s attempting to prevent his wife from having sex with other people.
Punishing third parties versus punishing one’s partner can be thought of, by way of analogy, to treating the symptoms or the cause of a disease, respectively. Treating the symptoms (deterring other interested men), in this case, might be cheaper than treating the underlying cause on an individual basis, but you may also need to continuously treat the symptoms (if his wife is rather interested with the idea of having affairs more generally). Depending on the situation, then, it might be ultimately cheaper and more effective to treat either the cause or the symptoms of the problem. It’s probably safe to assume that the relative cost/benefit calculations being worked out cognitively might ultimately be represented to some degree in our desires: if some part of Stephen’s mind eventually comes to the conclusion, for whatever reasons, that punishing one or more third parties would be the cheaper of the two options, he might end up feeling especially interested in punishing Bob.
For those of you not in the know, Stephen Lynch is a popular comedic musician. In the song, “Superhero”, Stephen gives the above description of what he would do were he “Justice Guy”. As one can gather, in this story, Stephen’s wife has run off with another man, resulting in Mr. Lynch temporarily experiencing a Predator-like urge for revenge. The interesting thing about this particular song is the emphasis that Stephen puts on his urge to kill Bob. It’s interesting in that it doesn’t make much sense, morally speaking: it’s not as if Bob, a third party who was not involved in any kind of relationship with Stephen, had any formal obligation to respect the boundaries of Stephen’s relationship with his wife. Looking out for the relationship, it seems, ought to have been his wife’s job. She was the person who had the social obligation to Stephen that was violated, so it seems the one who Stephen ought to mad at (or, at least madder at) would be his wife. So why does Stephen wish to especially punish Bob?There are two candidate explanations I’d like to consider today to help explain the urge for this kind of Bob-specific punishment: one is slightly more specific to the situation at hand and the other applies to punishment interactions more generally, so let’s start off with the more specific case. Stephen wants his wife to behave cooperatively in terms of their relationship, and she seems less than willing to do so herself; presumably, some mating mechanisms in her brain is suggesting that the payoffs would be better for her to ditch her jobless husband to run off with a wealthy, high-status doctor. In order to alter the cost/benefit ratio to certain actions, then, Stephen entertains the idea of enacting punishment. If Stephen’s punishment makes his wife’s infidelity costlier than remaining faithful, her behavior will likely adjust accordingly. While punishing his wife can potentially be an effective strategy for enforcing her cooperation, it’s also a risky venture for Stephen on two fronts: (1) too much punishing of his wife – in this case, murder, though it need not be that extreme – can be counterproductive to his goals, as it would render her less able to deliver the benefits she previously provided to the relationship; the punishment might also be counterproductive because (2) the punishment makes the relationship less valuable still to his wife as new costs mount, resulting in her urge to abandon the relationship altogether for a better deal elsewhere growing even stronger.
The punishing of potential third parties – in this case, Bob – does not hold these same costs, though. Provided Bob was a stranger, Stephen doesn’t suffer any loss of benefits, as benefits were never being provided by Bob in the first place. If Stephen and Bob were previously cooperating in some form the matter gets a bit more involved, but we won’t concern ourselves with that for now; we’ll just assume the benefits his wife could provide are more valuable than the ones Bob could. With regard to the second cost – the relationship becoming costlier for the person punishment is directed at – this is, in fact, not a cost when that punishment is directed at Bob, but rather the entire point. If the relationship is costlier for a third party to engage in, due to the prospect of a potentially-homicidal partner, that third party may well think twice before deciding whether to pursue the affair any further. Punishing Bob would seem to look like the better option, then. There’s just one major hitch: specifically, punishing is costly for Stephen, both in terms of time, energy, and risk, and he may well need to direct punishment towards far more targets if he’s attempting to prevent his wife from having sex with other people.
Punishing third parties versus punishing one’s partner can be thought of, by way of analogy, to treating the symptoms or the cause of a disease, respectively. Treating the symptoms (deterring other interested men), in this case, might be cheaper than treating the underlying cause on an individual basis, but you may also need to continuously treat the symptoms (if his wife is rather interested with the idea of having affairs more generally). Depending on the situation, then, it might be ultimately cheaper and more effective to treat either the cause or the symptoms of the problem. It’s probably safe to assume that the relative cost/benefit calculations being worked out cognitively might ultimately be represented to some degree in our desires: if some part of Stephen’s mind eventually comes to the conclusion, for whatever reasons, that punishing one or more third parties would be the cheaper of the two options, he might end up feeling especially interested in punishing Bob.
by Jesse Marczyk, Pop Psychology | Read more:
Photo: uncredited
The Lynx Effect
The Lynx became the top predator in Doñana after the last wolf was shot in 1951. That is how it goes with predators and large animals. The bigger they are, the sooner they tend to vanish. Among mammals, the risk of extinction rises sharply for species that weigh more than three kilograms—about as much as a small pet cat. Big creatures need more food and more space to find it in than small ones; they are slower to reproduce, and are apt to get on the wrong side of humans. "The species that tend to go extinct first tend to be the big-bodied things, and the tasty things," says Rob Ewers of Imperial College London. He is talking about the Amazon forests, but it’s a general truth.
Big animals, particularly those at the top of food chains, "are really fundamentally important to holding ecosystems together," says Jim Estes, a biologist based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. When they go, ecosystems unravel and reorganise, removing more species in the process. "Apex consumers" can take whole habitats with them. Wolves may protect forests by preying on the deer that browse saplings. If the wolves are wiped out, the deer multiply at the expense of the trees, preventing the forest from renewing itself: the end-point, as on the once-forested Scottish island of Rùm, is a treeless landscape. Globally, the result is the "downgrading of Planet Earth", as Estes put it in an article for the journal Science in 2011.
The exits began long before roads or rifles were devised. Nearly three-quarters of North American and a third of Eurasian megafauna disappeared between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, giant sloths and sabre-toothed cats were among the species that vanished from the face of the Earth. While climate change was one part of the story, human expansion was another. The selective disappearance of large animals marks this period out from other extinction episodes, and was the start of what Estes and his fellow authors suggested "is arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world". For Estes, it was the beginning of the sixth mass extinction.
If that was the opening phase, the second distinctive spike was the wave of extinctions in historic times that took place on islands colonised by humans and the animals that came with them on their voyages. Species after species ended up as dead as the dodo, which succumbed a few decades after people began to settle the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in the 17th century.
Today Mauritius is the humanised world in a nutshell. Smaller than many English counties, it has been cleared for cane fields, strung with towns, dotted with resorts, factories and call centres. A mountainous outcrop endures as a national park, and the fragility of island nature is given poignant expression on the Ile aux Aigrettes, an offshore microdot the size of a large town park from which the rats and non-native plants have been cleared. Its 26 hectares are now covered in a low net of native vegetation that offers shelter to threatened native creatures. A pink pigeon huddles beneath a bush: it’s one of fewer than a hundred on the Ile, and of fewer than 500 in the world. A little bird called a Mauritius olive white-eye darts among the leaves: there are a couple of dozen here, and a couple of hundred in all.
The pink pigeon demonstrates even more dramatically than the Iberian lynx how emergency intervention can throw a species a lifeline—in 1990, there were just ten left in the wild. Turnarounds like these affirm the value of conservation efforts. But they may also induce complacency about the broader sweep of extinction. As a child I was distressed by the thought of species disappearing for ever, thanks largely to a small album entitled "Wildlife in Danger", filled with cards given away in cartons of Brooke Bond tea. Written by the ornithologist Peter Scott, it was published in 1963 and reissued ten years later. None of the 50 animals featured on the cards is yet officially classed as extinct—though one of them, the North American ivory-billed woodpecker, very probably is—and three or four are now out of danger. In the case of the Javan rhino, it is almost as though extinction has been put on pause. The album gives the population figure as just 40. Today’s estimates are pretty much the same—and the album has been superseded by a website showing 35 of them in individual video clips. The last of the species have become something like reality-TV stars. And my generation, the first to grow up with a background sense of ecological crisis, has reached middle age without having to read many obituaries of species.
That isn’t just because special efforts have been made for charismatic creatures, or because naturalists prefer to regard a species as missing until they are quite sure that it must be dead. About 800 extinctions have been recorded since 1500, a low figure even allowing for the likelihood that there are several unknown species for each one that has been given a Latin name, and most of them were on islands. Now that the island phase has largely run its course, the big question is what will happen on the land masses, where species are more vulnerable than in the oceans.
Estimates of future extinction levels are usually based on the relationship between the area of a habitat and the number of species in it. A rough rule of thumb is that if the area shrinks by 90%, 50% of its species will be lost. They may not go straight away, though. The difference between the number of species remaining and the number predicted is regarded as an "extinction debt" that will be paid in the long run. Rob Ewers took part in a study that found 80% of local extinctions in Amazon forests were still to come.
The accuracy of such predictions was challenged in 2011 by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell, who argued in a theoretical paper for the journal Nature that they always over-estimate extinction rates. Nevertheless, the researchers agreed that "the sixth mass extinction might already be upon us or imminent." And reports from remaining fragments of Brazil’s Atlantic-coast forests show that the situation on the ground may be much worse than it would appear from the graphs. "These habitat patches are essentially sitting ducks," says Carlos Peres of the University of East Anglia.
He and his colleagues surveyed 200 forest fragments across an area the size of Britain, wrecking four 4x4 vehicles in the process. They found what they called a "staggering" rate of extinctions among medium-sized and large mammals. Four-fifths of the populations had gone, although species-area calculations predicted that up to four-fifths would still be there. Fragmentation had left patches exposed to hunters and fire; their effects interacted "in a very perverse way", as Peres puts it, with those of area loss and isolation. Similar perverse synergies can be expected elsewhere. "I think that the processes we describe are actually quite ubiquitous," he says.
Peres regards the death of the last member of a species as "relatively trivial". What matters is the decline in population that leads to it. "People only care about those very terminal patients once the very last of a species dies out," he observes. "They hardly ever care about the long march towards global-scale extinction."
That view of nature, as an assembly of examples, does have a powerful hold on the imagination. We seem prone to a kind of Noah delusion: as long as we save a pair of each kind, we have fulfilled our responsibilities. But although a species that is down to its last few members is not extinct, it is not fully alive either, because it is no longer part of society. It is no longer contributing, competing, or helping to shape a larger living system. "Nature is not like a museum collection of the world’s species," says Georgina Mace of University College London. "It’s not just a matter of naming and keeping every one of those things. We should care about keeping the parts of the system. Can they still interact with each other? Can they still migrate, disperse, adapt, evolve?"
Mass extinction is thus more than the loss of kinds. It is the loss of abundance, of range, of populations. It is local extinction, the attrition of diversity as ranges shrink to enclaves, as well as global extinction. And, as the ecologist Daniel Janzen recognised in the 1970s, it is "what escapes the eye…a much more insidious kind of extinction: the extinction of ecological interactions."
Extinctions of this kind are surely happening all around us. Will they develop into a sixth mass extinction on the scale of the "Big Five", in which three-quarters of living kinds vanish? Extinctions among mammals, birds and amphibians are already running at higher rates than those which led to mass extinctions in the past, according to a study led by Anthony Barnosky, of the University of California, Berkeley. His team calculated that if all currently threatened species were to disappear within a century—the likelihood of which "would be quite high if we continue doing business as usual," Barnosky says—and extinctions carried on at the same rate, they could reach "Big Five" levels around 300 years from now.
by Marek Kohn, Intelligent Life | Read more:
Picture Nature Picture Library
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)