Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

Who’s Afraid of Genetically Modified Bread?

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CANADIAN, US and Australian wheat organisations recently released a joint statement asking for the development and commercialization of higher yielding varieties through biotechnology – through genetic modification.  

Clearly wheat farmers are feeling left behind with the statement including the comment:  Lack of private and public investment in wheat research has left wheat development behind the advances in competing commodity crops, and has also led to a shortage of scientific expertise in wheat research generally.

I’ve been aware for some time of important research being conducted in South Australia, at the Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG), focused on developing new drought and frost tolerant varieties of wheat and barley.

Frost tolerance has become an issue because plant breeders have been selecting for early maturing varieties in order to escape potential summer drought. But, this has now exposed crops to frost during flowering.  There is apparently variation for traits for frost and salt tolerance in the “crossable” gene pool for wheat and barley, but there are far better genes in other plants and these would need to be transferred through genetic modification. 

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Business That Sees Only Profit In Environmentalism: A Note from Bjorn Lomborg

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“SOME business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

“The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the ‘military-industrial complex’, cautioning that ‘the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’ He worried that ‘there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.’

“This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a ‘climate-industrial complex’ is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

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Ravens, Right Relationships and Ice Trucks

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IN Canada’s remote freezing Northwest Territories, near the diamond mine of Ekati, a black raven follows ice road trucks.  A youtube video has been made of the bird’s antics which include surfing the turbulence created by the big rigs.  

Yesterday at the Sydney Writers Festival, I heard Eva Hornung, author of ‘Dogboy’, the story of a child who grows up with wolfs in Moscow, talking about animals and our relationship with them.   She suggested that the divide between humans and animals is much closer than popular culture suggests and that we humans have a “vested interest” in suggesting otherwise.  

I was also interested in a comment she made that we cannot have a completely “right relationship” with animals – it was in the context of domesticated dogs being necessarily submissive in character in order to coexist with humans.    It is probably also impossible for humans to have a completely “right relationship” with nature?

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Defining the Greens (Part 11)

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ASK a forest worker from Tasmania, a commercial fisherman from South Australia, a sugarcane grower from Queensland or a cattle producer from New South Wales what they think of Greens and a common complaint will be that “Greens tell lies”.  

Each of these groups have been the target of clever campaigns by Green groups including The Wilderness Society and WWF Australia.

Tasmanian forest workers have put up committed and organised resistance and many of their truck and utilities sport bumper stickers with the comment “Greens tell lies”.  

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An Opportunity for Ordinary Australians to Oppose the ETS

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IT would be difficult to justify an emissions trading scheme (ETS) that imposed large costs for purely symbolic benefit during a period of prosperity – it is absurd to consider as much during a financial crisis.

Given the outcry the Rudd government in Australia has decided to postpone introduction of its proposed ETS by one year. That’s good news.

But the enabling legislation is still going to parliament this June and every vote will count in the Senate.

Send the Senators in your state an eCard to let them know how you feel.

You can choose from one of three different cards at http://www.ListenToUs.org.au .

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This campaign is an initiative of the Australian Environment Foundation.

Flow of Deep Water South from Greenland More ‘Diffuse’ than Previously Thought

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WE live on one planet and all its oceans are connected with meridional overturning circulation (MOC) facilitating the mixing of waters across the globe.    

In the apocalyptic movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ the melting of the polar icecaps disrupts a component of this system, the North Atlantic current, and so North America freezes over with US citizens pouring into Mexico to escape the freezing conditions.

New findings, published late last week in the journal Nature don’t dispute MOC, but suggest that the southern flow of deep water from Greenland may not follow as neat a path as assumed – including by the scientist in the Hollywood blockbuster.   In particular rather than the deep water moving as a conveyor belt – yes that is the term that had been used to describe the flow of water southwards – it may be more diffuse. 

One of the authors of the new paper in Nature, Amy Bower, has described it as “A swath in the wide-open, turbulent interior of the North Atlantic” rather than a conveyor belt.

In the media release accompanying the publication of the findings, another author Susan Lozier, suggests this means it is going to be more difficult to measure climate signals in the deep ocean.

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