A Kennedy Back in the White House?

[The following is a blog I wrote for NewScientist.com Check out the original here]

President-elect Barack Obama has short listed firebrand environmental lawyer Robert F Kennedy Jr as a potential head of the US Environmental Protection Agency according to the Washington Post and Bloomberg.

As a prosecuting attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and environmental watchdog Riverkeeper, Kennedy - the nephew of former US President John F Kennedy - boasts an impressive track record as protector of the nation's waters, air and open spaces.

One could even argue that he has already served as the de facto EPA head for the last 8 years, as Bush appointees used the Cabinet seat to plunder public lands for oil and gas, gut the Endangered Species Act, and block CO₂ emission regulations.

Kennedy is the highest-profile candidate among a number of individuals being considered for the position, including Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles, former Sierra Club president and environmental activist Lisa Renstrom, and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty.

Yet, surprisingly, Wired.com considers him the worst possible of the potential picks: "His environmental track record is excellent, but he's clung to the vaccines-causing-autism-hypothesis long after large-scale epidemiological studies have discredited it as anything but a statistically insignificant cause."

Wired goes on to argue that heading such a large organisation as the EPA, with its thousands of employees and a $7.2 billion budget, might be too big a jump for the relatively small potatoes environmental defense lawyer. But then again, imagine what an ace environmental prosecutor could do with a $7.2 billion budget and thousands of staffers. We may yet have an Environmental Protection Agency that is worthy of its name.

Copyright Newscientist.com (Image: www.robertfkennedyjr.com)

Beijing Smog Blog, An Update

"Like a giant kid who's been holding a fart in during a three week [now nine week] elevator ride, Beijing has apparently relaxed its many industrial sphincters and let a big one rip." -Imagethief

My brother Gene just returned from his first trip to Beijing. He arrived a few days after emergency measures to clean Beijing's air for the Olympics and Paralympics ended on Sept 21. The following, including three photos taken 1 day, 3 days, and 5 days after a rainstorm, is what he reports.

Beijing - America in a different (and hazier) font.
Beijing is pretty much America at this point. I'm sure smaller cities and especially cities in Western China are very much, not America, but Beijing is. It's a great city. Massive in size. Very much on-the-move. It's an exciting and busy place to be. The food is great and plentiful. The history is rich and long and apparently if you were in charge in Beijing ... you built another palace inside the Forbidden City. I think every castle of Europe could fit inside the Forbidden City. There is some great new architecture that's really impressive: from the bird's nest and the water cube to the CCTV building and more. I met with several people at different high-tech companies and they were all very helpful in aiding our understanding of doing business here, and they were all very excited to be part of this raging economy.

The following are the differences between Beijing and America as I see it.

Air quality: Indoor air quality with all the smoking is disgusting - ok, I'm a spoiled Californian who never has to experience indoor smoke at home. Outdoor air quality - well see the pictures attached. The first was taken the day after it rained. The rain scrubs all the particles out of the air. The second photo was taken two days later. Ouch. I went for a run today and I am wondering how many cigarette-equivalents I have just inhaled. I don't think I could live here because of the air.

Language - ok, that one is obvious.

Red. Ok, people, I know red is the big, important color in China, but seriously - explore the color palette a bit more.

Traffic. They are way more 'green' than Americans in that there are tons of people who bike or ride small mopeds which guys in America could never be seen riding. They drive their cars on the freeways like one would drive a bike - as though crashing into something is not likely to cause any damage. Therefore going backwards on the freeway, dropping off passengers in the middle of the freeway, or getting to a freeway exit and stopping at that mid-point between taking the exit and staying on the freeway are all completely normal.

Food. The waitresses will wait forever for you to give an order. In the US if you aren't ready to state your entire party's order back-to-back, they say "I'll give you a minute and come back". Chinese menus, of course, are gi-normous with about 150 different options. The waitresses are all too willing to hang out, answer questions, watch you rub your chin, turn the page, discuss with each other ... they are very patient. Of course there are a few things I've eaten here that would not be on a menu in America: bull bladder, pig trotter (foot), chicken feet, some kind of frog and marinated pig's ear. They were all good. The food here is awesome. Even 'fast food' in China can include vegetables. When's the last time you got broccoli at a fast food restaurant?

Pre-reported news: I was lucky enough to be here when the Chinese astronauts (Taikonauts) took off and did the space walk. There was much excitement about this at our office and we watched the space walk live through the internet. Prior to the astronauts even leaving the earth, however, the Xinhua news agency reported the mission a success, noting that they 'captured the target' 12 seconds ahead of plan, and even included dialogue that the astronauts said to each other. The Chinese team in my office said it's common to have stories that describe how things will be before they happen. Like America, the engineers I work with here are a bit cynical on the manned space mission. They said "Yeah, China wins bronze in space-walking" and they ridiculed how some Chinese official tried to convince people that there was some scientific reason to do the mission. Sounds similar to the debate in the U.S. whenever manned space programs are announced.

Mao: They say that people over 50 like Mao better than Deng and people under 50 like Deng better than Mao. Let's see, Mao killed more people than anyone else in history combined. Deng changed China to capitalism and brought more people out of poverty than anyone else in history combined. Well, I guess people over 50 in America have their odd bouts of nostalgia too.

I asked my guys here how they thought China would change the world in the next 20-50 years. guy said the world would change China more than the other way around. A few stressed that China loves peace and it would not be changing the world in the way America has been. One expressed that China might bring a lot of help to Africa where they have been investing heavily. I said I wished America would be influenced by Chinese art and culture and particularly that we could learn to be more patient and long-term in our planning, like the Chinese appear to be.

Pan Wenshi and the White-Headed Langurs

Rachel and I returned from the PRC to the People's Republic of Cambridge about a month ago, however, a story I reported over the summer just came out in today's New York Times.

It Takes Just One Village to Save a Species

By PHIL MCKENNA

Published: September 22, 2008

CHONGZUO, China — Long ago, in the poverty-stricken hills of southern China, a village banished its children to the forest to feed on wild fruits and leaves. Years later, when food stores improved, the children’s parents returned to the woods to reclaim their young.

To their surprise, their offspring had adapted to forest life remarkably well; the children’s white headdresses had dissolved into fur, tails grew from their spines and they refused to come home...Click here for full story copyright, New York Times.


Story Behind the Story

Perhaps China's greatest environmental success story to date, this was also a really fun piece to report. The Nongguan Nature Reserve with its mind bending karsts and tropical forests is absolutely amazing, and I got to experience it with Rachel who was able to join me for my visit.



I'd known of Pan's prior work with pandas for some time but hadn't heard what he'd been up to recently, until a good friend visited the reserve and told me I really ought to check it out. Thanks for the tip, Ollie!



Check out the following video I shot in the Chongzuo Eco-park and hear Pan tell how alpha males patch themselves up after bloody battles with other males.



Langur and landscape photos used with permission from Peking University Chongzuo Biodiversity Research Institute


Phil

The Redwoods of Beijing

I was hiking through a valley in a remote corner of the Beijing Botanical Gardens the other morning when I had this strange feeling that I was walking through a redwood grove. Turns out I was! A short walk from the yoga retreat there is a stand of dawn redwoods that were planted here in the 1970s. The trees are a distant cousin of the redwoods found on the West Coast and were thought to be extinct until the 1940s when they were rediscovered in southwestern China. Dawn redwoods are a lot heartier than true sequoias and are thus able to make it here in the northern China climate. All of the trees I saw still looked on the relatively young and scrawny side, but no one really knows just how big they can get. I may have to check back in in another 50 years or so.

While on the topic of trees once thought to be lost only to be rediscovered in China, it turns out ginkgos--the trees now found in city parks the world over--have a similar story. It seems that for much of the last 1000 years the only place these trees could be found was inside the courtyards of Chinese and Japanese temples. The trees were "discovered" by Europeans in the 17th century in Japan and quickly spread around the world thereafter. The temple where Rachel often teaches (see photos on the right side of this blog) has a massive ginkgo that easily predates the Euro discovery.

Phil

World Record In The Bird's Nest

Rache and I took in a night of track and field last night at the Bird's Nest. It was really fun to get inside the Olympic Green after all of the hype we've been exposed to here this summer. Watching an Olympic track and field event is a lot like a 3, or perhaps 5, ring circus. There were often several events--discus, long jump, pole vault, steeple chase--all going on at the same time, often while the awards ceremony from a prior event was under way.
Highlights from the evening included seeing Jamaican sprinter Usain-The-Lightning-Bolt crush the competition, again, this time in the 200 meter quarterfinals, and seeing Lolo Jones do the same in the women's 100 meter hurdles warm up. Yet what made the evening truly unforgettable was seeing women's pole vaulting superstar Elena Isinbaeva clear 5.05 meters to set another world record!
Enclosed are some photos from the evening. Our seats were up near the rafters for the majority of the night, but towards the end of the evening--just before Isinbaeva attempted to set her 24th straight world record--we snuck down to just above track level.

Other Olympic Odds and Ends

Earlier in the eve. we watched through binoculars as Brazilian pole vaulter Fabiana Murer was throwing a fit about something.--At one point she stood in front of Chinese pole vaulter Gao Shuying physically barring her from her next vault. It turns out that someone misplaced one of Murer's poles and it was nowhere to be found. In the end, she had to use a longer pole than she wanted to and wasn't able to clear the bar in all subsequent attempts.

I missed this one watching CCTV, but my cousin Rob points out that the first US finisher in the woman's marathon on Monday was Blake Russell. I interviewed Blake, a resident of Marina, CA, a few years back for the Monterey County Weekly. As part of the interview she let me run with her for a 1/2 mile or so until she finished her warm up and left me in the dust. She seems to have overcome some nasty foot injuries from last year and hopefully we'll be hearing more from her again soon.

Phil

Usain Bolt, Julian Marley, and Rachel

Rache and I were at a party hosted by the Jamaican Embassy the other night to watch Usain Bolt set another world record in the 100 meters. We watched on a giant projection screen as Bolt not only dusted the competition and set a new world record, but did so with one shoe untied and jogging the last 30 meters.
After the race we were all hanging out waiting for the second half of the evening's entertainment--Bob Marley's son, Julian, and his band--to show up .
There was a group of dreadlocked Rastas hanging out near the stage and, as this is a rather unusual sight in the PRC, I had Rache and a friend pose for a photo with them.
When the band started up we realized the guys they'd just had their picture taken with were Julian and his right hand man! (see photos). It was a pretty amazing concert, a Bob Marley cover band led by one of his [many] sons for a crowd of less than 100.

Phil

Phelps, Deng Linlin, Georgian Brazilians and other musings

[The following post comes from guest blogger MeanGene; my brother]

Michael Phelps, who tied Paavo Nurmi (among others) in 9 gold medals, has this in common with the Finnish runner - the ability to bounce back quickly and do it again. Paavo Nurmi, in 1920's, won gold and set world records in the 1500m and 3000m races in one day. But "one day" is misleading. He had only 26 minutes to rest between these races. He won 3 other golds in the same Olympics with 1500m as his shortest run.
Another athlete with this remarkable ability to bounce back is Lance Armstrong. We don't know about Paavo Nurmi, because he died in the 70's, but Lance and Michael Phelps have an ability to remove lactic acid from their bodies at a rate seen in almost no other athletes. In fact, a scientist studying lactic acid in swimmers has tested 5000 other swimmers and always found a lactic acid level, post-competition, from 10-15 millimoles/liter, whereas Phelps level is about 5. Last night they showed Phelp's schedule for a day in which he got 2 more golds and 2 more world records and it included total swimming (including competition, warm up, training) of 5 miles. --Check this story for more freak of nature Olympians.

The best display of team camaraderie - the Croatian water polo team (men's) have all grown moustaches. (I can't find a picture, wish I could).

Synchronized Diving (the Chinese are like mirrors) has made me think of synchronized swimming, which reminded me of this Saturday Night Live skit.

Even the Chinese guys in my office think their gymnasts are underage. There is much discussion on the web about Deng Linlin who some think is missing a tooth, meaning one of her adult teeth has not grown in yet. The story is that a Korean gymnast a few years ago got busted for that when she gave a big smile on the podium. It later came out that she was listed as being 15 years old three years in a row. At the very least, the Olympic committee should call the event "Girls Gymnastics" instead of womens. The more I hear about all the hell they go through at a young age, (from a neighbor who is a former gymnast), the more I don't want to watch.

While there have always been athletes on the US team who were born elsewhere, historically it has been immigration. Increasingly it looks like people try out for their own team, and if they don't make it, hustle to another country where they can. In a very timely match, the Georgian women's beach volleyball played the Russian women's beach volleyball today. The Georgians won, of course, the two woman team were both from Brazil.

Froggfurter's Adventures

I am proud to announce that my wife Rachel--aka The Froggfurter--has been keeping her own blog of our adventures here in the PRC. Check it out! She has lots of great photos--from bathroom stalls to Buddhist temples--and fascinating insights into life as the exotic yogini at a Beijing yoga retreat. (my apologies for not pointing you to her site sooner!)

Phil

Mask on, mask off?

[The Following is a blog I wrote for New Scientist. Check out the original here]

Is Beijing's air safe to breathe?

Members of the US Olympic team came under fire earlier this week for embarrassing their Chinese hosts... by parading through Beijing airport with anti-smog masks covering their faces from ear to ear.

But with the Games' Opening Ceremonies less than a day away, the question remains whether such precautions are a good idea, or worthy of the apology the team members later made to Chinese officials.

One thing that is clear, however, is that the emergency anti-pollution measures enacted on 20 July - pulling half the cars off Beijing's streets, halting construction, shutting down factories - are having little to no effect on the city's pollution levels.

A frequently-updated chart of the city's Air Pollution Index (API), compiled by researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the University of Rhode Island in the US, has found no correlation between the emergency measures and the air quality. In fact, pollution levels nearly doubled in the first week following the 20th, before subsiding.

The reason, says Kenneth Rahn of the University of Rhode Island, has everything to do with wind, and little to do with local pollution prevention measures.

So long as the winds continue to blow out of the south - where the forest of coal-fired plants that powers Beijing is located - air quality in Beijing will continue to worsen, until northern winds out of Mongolia clear the skies. It's a pattern that repeats itself about every two weeks during the summer, and as the Games are about to begin, Beijing is one week into foul air buildup.

But just how bad are pollution levels in the city right now? It depends on who you ask. Most days the API has remained below 100, the magic safe number, as determined by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection.

Yet each country's measurement of API is a little different, making it hard to say just how foul things really are. BeijingAirblog does a good job of converting Beijing's figures to US and Hong Kong API measurements. It finds that the city's current air pollution would register as moderate in the US and, surprisingly, high in Hong Kong.

Walking through central Beijing on Monday afternoon - early in the current week-long pollution buildup - I found pea-soup skies and a sun that disappeared behind a thick haze at 5:30, nearly two hours before actual sunset.

If I were an athlete, I think I'd make whatever apologies were necessary, but give them through the best mask I could find on any days I didn't see blue skies overhead. Still, I wouldn't be pointing any fingers; I doubt the API of Los Angeles in 1984 was much better than today's Beijing.

Phil

Eclipse over the Great Wall

Check out the full story here. Videos © New Scientist. Eclipse image courtesy of Alphonse Sterling, NASA.

STORY BEHIND THE STORY

Getting to the eclipse site was totally nuts. I flew into Dunhuang, a couple hundred kilometers further west of Jiayuguan on a flight full of eclipse chasers from Germany and the US.
In the days leading up to the 1st, thousands of eclipsers were pouring into the region from all over the world and local officials started to freak! We were told that entrance into the special Eclipse Cities they set up in the desert would now be road blocked and only those with prearranged permits would be allowed in. One group I was hoping to join for the event had to find a new viewing site after the place they'd been planning to use for a year was suddenly barred to foreigners a week before the event.
I couldn't really figure out what the big deal was until someone pointed out that the eclipse path cut through a lot of closed off military land including Jiuquan, the launch site of China's two recent manned space flights. Getting worked up over countless foreigners pouring across the desert with giant telescoping cameras suddenly started to make a lot more sense.

Phil

Take Cover!

Rachel and I were taking a cab home from a day in the big city Monday night when all of the sudden what seemed to be anti aircraft missiles started going off all around us. It was dark and pouring rain but the flames from the rockets were less than 50 yards away and the noise was deafening. We quickly realized that these were cloud seeding rockets.

My first thought was they were practicing inducing heavy rainfall here in the hills west of town to reduce the amount of rain from falling on Beijing. Olympic planners have launched a full scale assault on the weather to try to prevent rain from ruining the opening ceremonies and other outdoor events.

Talking with our hosts the next morning, however, they informed us that the rockets in our neighborhood are for hail prevention. They say the anti-rain rockets are further west into the hills and the rockets launched here are to prevent hail stones from forming and taking out the fruit trees in the many nearby orchards.

So the Chinese use cloud seeding rockets to induce rain, to prevent rain in other places, and, it seems, to prevent hail stones from forming.

Pretty savvy weather commanders here in the Middle Kingdom, eh? Perhaps not.

William Langewiesche has a great article in Vanity Fair profiling the country's top rainmakers and tracing the long history of cloud seeding back to its roots in the States. His final conclusion is it likely has little to no affect but sure packs a powerful sense of control.

[Photo by Calum MacLeod, lifted from USA TODAY].

Big Sur Blaze

In a brief departure from our time in China, I just wanted to point out a link on the fires that are burning in Big Sur, CA. I just saw a slide show from the Monterey Herald that shows my former employers, Joe and Kelly of the Ventana Wilderness Society. In the slideshow they return to Big Sur after a mandatory evacuation to find their condor release facilities burned to the ground. It looks like lots of rebuilding is in store, but, fortunately, they were able to get themselves and all of the birds out in time.

Phil