Agricultural Chemicals Linked To Infections In Declining Amphibian Species
An adult leopard frog
Because Amphibians breath through their skin and live in water much of their life they are particularly vulnerable to environmental toxins. Amphibians around the world are on the decline from disease. In an article in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, Jason Rohr of the University of South Florida (USF) and colleagues revealed that chemical pollution can increase often deadly trematode (parasitic flatworm) infections in the northern leopard frog, a declining amphibian species.
“The combination of atrazine, a widely used herbicide, and phosphate, a primary ingredient in fertilizers, accounted for 74 percent of the variation in larval trematode abundance in the frogs,” said Rohr. “These agrochemicals increase trematode infections by augmenting snail intermediate hosts–the source of trematodes that infect amphibians–and suppressing amphibian immune responses.” The research was funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Agriculture grants.
According to Rohr, identifying the main risk factors and predictors for disease in amphibians is important. This study showed that atrazine and phosphate concentrations in the Minnesota wetlands they investigated were the best of over 240 plausible predictors of trematode abundance in frogs. In a manipulative experiment conducted in outdoor, 300 gallon tanks, Rohr and colleagues verified that atrazine increased snail abundance, caused amphibian immuno-suppression, and elevated amphibian trematode loads.
“At concentrations commonly occurring in freshwater ecosystems, atrazine and phosphate can be drivers of amphibian trematode infections, raising concerns about the role of these chemicals in amphibian declines,” concluded Rohr. “Reducing atrazine and phosphate inputs to wetlands might remediate these often debilitating amphibian trematode infections.”
Like canaries used to gauge the safety of air in coal mines, amphibians are thought to be the “canaries” in our freshwater environments; reductions in their health can warn of subsequent species declines and degradation of ecosystem services.
“Atrazine and fertilizers might not be the only chemicals affecting disease risk,” says Rohr. “Many chemicals can be immuno-suppressive, and standard toxicity tests used to register chemicals in the United States and Europe are conducted on isolated individuals, ignoring interactions with other species, such as their parasites. Thus, our findings are likely the tip of the iceberg for pollution-induced disease emergence in both humans and wildlife.”
“The spread of infectious disease and loss of biodiversity are each a serious challenge to scientists seeking a fundamental understanding of ecological systems, and to policy makers charged with protecting the environment,” said Alan Tessier, an NSF program director. “Rohr and his colleagues demonstrate how both of these phenomena are linked to the widespread use of a common agrochemical in the case of a declining amphibians species. This work illustrates how predicting anthropogenic impacts requires a fundamental understanding of the complexity of species interactions embedded within food webs.”
Screw Banks: Bail Out The Environment, Create Jobs
As capital markets around the world are being rescued by national governments, global unemployment is reaching record levels and the labor market is expanding by tens of millions of workers each year. In the face of the twin challenges of stagnating economies and climate change, stimulating green industry is more important than ever, according to a new assessment released by the Worldwatch Institute.
“It’s time for a bailout for the environment: one that creates jobs, is global in scope, and can help rebuild communities amidst the ashes of the current economic crisis,” says Michael Renner, co-author of the report, Green Jobs: Working for People and the Environment, written in collaboration with Sean Sweeney and Jill Kubit of Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute.*
Green jobs are not only about renewable energy employment. Reengineering buildings, transportation systems, agriculture, and basic industry all have the potential to create jobs that help reduce humanity’s carbon footprint and protect the environment. The report provides an overview of green jobs by sector:
- In China, renewable energy technologies employ an estimated 1 million people in the wind, solar PV, solar thermal, and biomass industries.
- The building and construction sector employs more than 111 million people worldwide. Retrofitting the European Union’s residential building sector to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 75 percent would lead to some 2.6 million new jobs by 2030
- Jobs in manufacturing fuel-efficient cars remain limited in number. Public transit offers a greener alternative. In the United States, transit agencies employed some 367,000 people in 2005. An estimated 900,000 people are employed in urban public transport in the European Union.
- The steel, aluminum, cement, and paper industries are highly energy-intensive and polluting. Worldwide, more than 40 percent of steel output and one-quarter of aluminum production is based on recycled scrap, rendering the estimated quarter million jobs in these two sectors at least a “shade of green.”
- Recycling programs create as many as 15 million jobs worldwide, but can entail dirty, undesirable, poorly paid, and even dangerous work, particularly in developing countries. In Brazil, over 90 percent of recyclable material is collected by scrap collectors who have organized themselves into a national movement with 500 cooperatives and 60,000 collectors.
- A study of 1,144 organic farms in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland showed that organic farms employed on average one-third more employees per farm than conventional counterparts. In the Dominican Republic, organic farms are reducing the movement from rural to metropolitan areas with local employment opportunities.
- Nearly 1.2 billion people depend on agroforestry for subsistence and income, particularly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Planting trees on agricultural land provides multiple environmental benefits and can raise farm incomes
.
.
Addressing the climate challenge in particular requires a multipronged approach that can create jobs, according to the report. This approach prioritizes the development of more environmentally benign technologies; greater efficiency of energy, water, and raw material use; altered lifestyle and consumption choices; economic restructuring; and environmental restoration efforts. It also requires adaptation to those changes that now seem inevitable and perhaps irreversible.
While there is significant untapped potential in the green jobs sector, not all news is good, according to the report. Global unemployment stands at roughly 6 percent, affecting some 190 million people. Some 487 million workers do not earn enough yet to rise above the $1-a-day level of extreme poverty. Furthermore, green investments are found primarily in a relatively small number of countries. Green jobs development is still an exception in most developing countries, which account for some 80 percent of the world’s workforce.
Other issues include the rising level of informality in the global economy, a lack of rules and standards to help ensure decent jobs, and the fact that environmental costs are too often externalized, making it harder for green enterprises to compete.
Integrating social and environmental aspects into the cost of doing business and undertaking large-scale public and private sector investments will be key to realizing the massive potential that green jobs hold. Government targets, mandates, business incentives, and reformed tax and subsidy policies must promote sustainable development in order for the green labor market to take off.
“Given all of the uncertainties in today’s world, it’s time for a bold commitment and international cooperation to promote green economies that support conservation, low carbon technologies, recycling, and local communities,” says Renner. “I can’t see how we’ll escape our twin economic and environmental crises if we don’t.”
* The report is derived from a longer, in-depth study, Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World, commissioned for a joint initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme, the International Labour Organization, the International Trade Union Confederation, and the International Organisation of Employers. It is available for download at www.unep.org/labour_environment/features/greenjobs-report.asp.
Crossing The Finish Line At Full Speed
Just because the polls say we are winning doesn’t mean we can give up. VOTE FOR OBAMA!
Vote Flipping
If you can’t win an election, just get the faulty machines to switch the votes for you. The first video is extra bad, the man starts turning very red, and sweating when it becomes clear that even after “calibration” the machine is still malfunctioning badly.
Be afraid America, be very afraid. If something like this happens to you on voting day MAKE A HUGE FUSS. Call the media, call your rep, call the police, call everyone. Don’t let our elections be stolen by a couple computer geeks and some shady politicians.
Sabotage Is Not An Option, It Is A Necessity
When the signal fails during the advertisement break, who will be screaming: the children in the middle of getting their fix of consumer messages; the shoppers finding out what they can buy on their next mall run; the drivers being tempted by vehicles with more power, more safety and more sexiness; the television sales executives placing advertisers’ messages where they will be absorbed by the maximum number of people; the advertisers creating the adverts that sell product and dreams for their clients; the companies that produce the goods and services that make them money; the system that needs the children, the shoppers, the drivers, the sales executives, the advertisers and the companies to all play their part so that the economic machine can keep on turning?
You can make the system scream, if you want to.
In the latest Earth Blog article I have come as close to breaking the law as I have ever done so, using words alone. In some countries, the article may already be illegal because it explicitly states that the system that controls us must be stopped and that there are ways to do this. In some readings you might also think that the article provides ideas on how to do this…
Adam sits in his apartment in front of 5 kilowatts of broadcasting equipment, watching the channels, flicking and flicking until…”We’ll be right back after this break”…474 MHz on scramble: and the aerial sends out a wave of television liberty, just until the adverts are finished.
It only takes a few hours until the “off” switches are used. The hypnotic dance of the lights across the glass teat that once sold dreams to the masses is now an unintelligible squall of white noise, cascading arcs of interference, static dissonance of interest to no one: least of all the children, the shoppers and the drivers. They look to each other, they talk, they connect: where once there was a room of atomised individuals hooked into their own electronic realities, there are families and friends once more.
Whether this article actually breaks the law is, in fact, a moot point; the laws of a nation exist in order to protect the status quo, so in order to undermine the power of a nation, and the power of the corporations which are unequivocally protected by the same laws, the only option is to carry out illegal acts.
The only way to ensure as many people as possible can live their lives in a sustainable, non-industrial, non-approved way is to take away the things that stop them thinking there is another way. To give the people a chance, we have to sabotage the Tools Of Disconnection.
The choice to do this is entirely yours; but it is worth asking yourself the question: “What do you want to preserve – the sanctity of the law and the continuation of the toxic, terminally destructive system it protects; or our own liberty, and that of the the natural life-support system on which all humans depend for their existence?”
There is no middle ground.
You can read the full article at http://earth-blog.bravejournal.com/entry/27638/
RSS XML Feed
