Special to Bayview Hill-Jake Sigg's Nature News

1. Rationale behind the Endangered Species Act/celebrating Endangered Species Day, May 15
2. A way to act on Endangered Species Day: Help restore Sharp Park
3. And endangered landscapes: Hetch Hetchy Valley
4. Dept of Fish & Game Fisheries Restoration Grant Program soliciting proposals
5. Hawk migration counters needed
6. Permaculture transformation, redesigning and getting off the grid, April 29
7. Nominate for San Francisco Beautiful 2009 Beautification Awards
8. West Marin Bike to Work Week May 10-16/Green New Deal for the North Bay--transform Marin and Sonoma Counties into environmental sustainability
9. 1 in 60 Brits go to church/The End of Christian America?
10. Evolution, again
11. Cal-IPC'S Northern California field courses/call for contributed papers and posters
12. Slaughter of birds by communication towers
13. Venus grazes the Moon
14. Feedback: botanical garden entrance fee/lawns in arid climates and Frederick Law Olmsted
15. "Trough Plants Czech Style" in Oakland April 29
16. An alarming view from Worldwatch's Lester Brown
17. Malthus redux
18. Are you biased toward noticing good or bad events? Genetics?
19. Mr Ahmadinejad meets Rush Limbaugh. In my dreams
20. Notes & Queries
21. Too many bipeds in Antarctica

1. Endangered Species Day, May 15

The rationale behind the Endangered Species Act was complex and varied. The idea was to save genetic information, and an item of genetic information having appeal was the compounds produced by plants and animals that may be of use to human beings--in particular, medicines. Many in Congress, when considering writing the legislation of the Act, thought only in terms of large creatures, or warm and cuddly ones. It never occurred to them that it might include a fly, a mite, or a pathogen.

In the Winter 1992 issue of Wings, journal of the Xerces Society, Thomas Eisner of Cornell University wrote an article 'Insects: The Master Chemists'. Here is a small excerpt:

"...Of the millions of insect species that inhabit our planet, only a tiny fraction, far less than 1%, have been studied chemically. Our chemical ignorance of insects, and of invertebrates in general, has practical implications. Invertebrates are largely ignored in searches for chemicals of use, such as medicinals.

In our very limited studies at Cornell University, we have discovered cardiotonic substances in fireflies, sedatives in millipedes, and hormone analogs in carrion beetles. There is no telling what molecules or molecular processes might be uncovered if invertebrates were to be screened as intensely for chemicals as microorganisms and plants are. Truly frightening is the prospect that so many potentially useful chemicals from invertebrates will vanish as a consequence of species extinction before they have been discovered...."

If anyone is in doubt that Homo sapiens is digging its own grave, this should dispel it. Genetic information in the form of species, subspecies, varieties, and races are disappearing daily from that vast treasure trove bequeathed to us by nature. The Endangered Species Act is a treasure in this politically difficult world, but it can't even scratch the surface of the crisis. But it's all we have.


Started in 2006 by the United States Congress, Endangered Species Day is the third Friday of May.

Celebrate Endangered Species Day - May 15, 2009

On Friday, May 15, 2009 our nation will celebrate America’s commitment to protecting and recovering endangered species. As we well know in California, without the Endangered Species Act, our natural heritage would be hopelessly lost.
The goal of Endangered Species Day is simple – to educate people about the importance of protecting endangered species.

Click here to visit the Endangered Species Day website and:

* Find an event near you
* Get help in planning an event
* Request educational materials
* Sign a personal pledge

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2. Don't just celebrate Endangered Species Day--act on it:

ACTION ALERT – Join us to support the effort to Restore Sharp Park:
1. April 30, 2009 – 1 pm at San Francisco’s City Hall: The Board of Supervisors will consider Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi’s planning legislation to protect the endangered San Francisco garter snake and red-legged frog at the City-owned Sharp Park and to ensure that future uses of the Park are compatible with protecting its natural resources. Some golfers will oppose this basic planning document: they don’t want alternative uses to even be considered. And they will show up for the hearing. If we don’t get more people out to this hearing than they do, this basic step towards a better future may never occur. If you only attend one Board of Supervisors meeting this year, make it this one: please make time to join us because a show of public support will be essential to encourage the Board to pass the legislation.

2. Volunteer: Organizers of the Restore Sharp Park effort need volunteers to help with data entry and phone banking.
Contact Brent Plater (bplater@ggnrabigyear.org ) if you can help.

3. For more information and updates, please visit the Restore Sharp Park website at http://www.restoresharppark.org/, or contact Brent Plater at bplater@ggnrabigyear.org.

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3.
Hetch Hetchy is a grand landscape garden, one of nature’s rarest and most precious temples. As in Yosemite, the sublime rocks of its walls seem to glow with life…while birds, bees, and butterflies help the river and waterfalls to stir all the air into music…These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to hve a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar…Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.

John Muir 1912

Restore the dream of John Muir. Restore Hetch Hetchy! Click Here to Donate

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4. The Department of Fish and Game (DFG) Fisheries Restoration Grant Program is soliciting proposals for fisheries restoration projects in California’s coastal watersheds. Proposal packages are due on May 15, 2009. The primary goal of this program is to ensure the survival and protection of coho salmon, steelhead trout, Chinook salmon and cutthroat trout in the state’s coastal watersheds.


Workshops, map of area where grant applies (all of western half of California is possible):
http://www.dfg.ca.gov/fish/Administration/Grants/FRGP/Solicitation.asp

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5. Hawk migration counters needed!

Each fall, the Bay Area is host to the largest numbers of raptors (birds of prey) in the Pacific States! Tens of thousands (of 20 species) of hawks, kites, eagles, osprey, falcons, vultures, and harriers can be seen migrating over the Golden Gate. We need your help keeping track of them all.

For more than twenty years, the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory (GGRO) has been training people from all over Northern California to identify, track, and monitor birds of prey. Hundreds of GGRO volunteers annually use counting, banding, and radiotracking techniques to keep a pulse on this immense raptor flight, and report our findings to state and federal officials. This spring we are holding our only new-volunteer recruitment classes for 2009 hawkwatchers. Come to a no-obligation informational talk at Ft. Mason in San Francisco to hear what’s required and included. You’ll get lots of time outside in the beautiful Marin Headlands, and you’ll give back to the environment while enjoying the hawks.

Volunteers must be at least 15 years of age and able to commit to one regular day in the Marin Headlands every two weeks, from mid-August through the beginning of December 2009, along with some weekend and evening trainings in July. The training schedule will be available at the meetings. Please join us for one of the three dates below to see if you want to help with this innovative conservation program:

Wednesday, April 29 from 7 to 9:30 pm; or
Thursday, April 30 from 7 to 9:30 pm; or
Saturday, May 2 from 10 am to 12:30 pm

All meetings will be held at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area headquarters, Building 201 at UPPER Fort Mason, in San Francisco. Enter Fort Mason at Franklin and Bay streets. For more information, call the GGRO at (415) 331-0730 or e-mail us at ggro@parksconservancy.org. You can also visit our website at www.ggro.org.

(Incidentally we just watched a spring migrating juvenile Bald Eagle cruise into Kirby Cove from across the Golden Gate, about 1 mile west of the GGBridge, then soar over the Marin Headlands and disappear north bound. A lovely big eagle holding its mouth agape for the heat.)

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6.
Title: Transition City
Date: April 29, 2009 - 7:30 p.m.
Place: CounterPULSE, 1310 Mission Street (@ 9th), San Francisco
Free & open to the public

Description: Permaculture transformation, redesigning and getting off the grid. How can urban dwellers begin immediately to move towards self-sufficiency? What are the impediments, what are the resources? We'll have several permaculture practitioners presenting step-by-step recommendations for the next six months, a 1-year and a 3-5 year transition. Is there a relationship with backyard habitat restoration?


Speakers: K. Ruby (sparkybeegirl.com), Chris Shein (Wildheart Gardens), Urban Permaculture Guild.
Contact: steward@natureinthecity.org, 415-564-4107

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7. San Francisco Beautiful 2009 Beautification Awards

Bring recognition to individuals, organizations, businesses and civic entities that have partnered to improve the quality of life in San Francisco. Nominate a project that has enriched the life of your community by enhancing the City's physical environment. Nominated projects must be located in San Francisco and visually or physically accessible to the general public. Due date for nominations is June 1st.

Special consideration will be given to those projects that reflect this year's theme, "Saving Our City: Beauty Has a Place". We are looking for beautification projects that happen due to creative thinking and collective efforts - even in the face of resource shortages (both financial and natural) and some urban planning policies that threaten neighborhood character. These beautification projects take many forms and happen everywhere - schools, parks, stairways, neighborhood historic districts and streetcar lines. These projects often start with a few people who have a vision and then a community force builds around them.

For details, call 415.421.2608x12 or visit www.sfbeautiful.org

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8.

Monday May 10 - Saturday May 16: 2nd Annual West Marin Bike to Work Week

The Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, League of American Bicyclists, and Black Mountain Cycles invite you to join us for West Marin Bike to Work week, running from May 10-16. Each day you bike to work or school that week in West Marin's communities, send an email to bikewestmarin@yahoo.com and we’ll enter a raffle ticket in your name, featuring prizes from local businesses. Visit eacmarin.org for more details.

Join us for “Bike to Work” Day on Thursday May 14. Join over 50,000 Bay Area residents and show your support for alternative transportation. To learn more call 663-9312 or go to http://btwd.bayareabikes.org/

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Green New Deal for the North Bay
How can we create a sustainable future that includes economic equity and social justice? How can agendas for labor rights and environmental protection become more integrated into progressive political work? The Green New Deal for the North Bay is a grassroots initiative aiming to help transform Marin and Sonoma Counties into a more resilient community guided by environmental sustainability, economic equity and social justice.
We see great opportunity for rethinking the way we live while planning a community response to coming changes in climate, energy and jobs. We want to hear from you about innovative, effective, practical ideas for achieving greater economic stability and equity within our region. Your voice is important for influencing decision-makers. Open Community Forums to HEAR from YOU:
May 8, 6:30 p.m. - San Rafael, CA - City Council Chambers
May 12, 7 p.m. - Point Reyes Station - The Dance Palace
May 16, 1 p.m. - Sea Ranch - Del Mar Center
May 19, 6:30 p.m. - Mill Valley - City Council Chambers
May 21, 6:30 p.m. - Sonoma - Community Center
May 30, 6L30 p.m. - Novato - School Board Meeting Room
TBD - Petaluma, CA

During the summer, the commission will assess the community input and schedule public hearings for the fall of 2009 to hear testimony from experts on such issues as food, housing, water, energy, health care and social equity. The Commission will then create a report outlining recommendations for government, businesses, community groups and other institutions with the goal of increasing community participation to reach our goals in the North bay. For more information, call 415-663-9674 or 707-227-0047

Your input is invited at a community forum on May 12 from 7-9 p.m. at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station. Call 415-717-6833 for details. Co-sponsored by the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin and Mainstreet Moms.
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9. Ian Wilson on de-baptism certificates:

"Every time the Pope says something outrageous we get another rush on the certificate"

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1891230,00.html

"Official estimates are that fewer than one million Britons regularly attend Sunday services, but there are currently 26 Church of England bishops sitting in the House of Lords. "With churches, everybody checks in, but nobody checks out," says Evans, who was baptized as an infant. "There's no exit strategy except the funeral.""

The population of the UK is about 60 million, so this means that only 1/60 Brits regularly attend Sunday services. Presumably this means that Hell will be full of my fellow-Brits, all complaining about the heat, lack of running water, how rude the staff are, etc. -- a fitting punishment I suppose. Ian

AND...(busy guy, this Ian):

Ian Wilson 6 April 09:
This Newsweek article is entitled "The End of Christian America". Hyperbole to be sure, still it's interesting (dare I say encouraging?):
http://www.newsweek.com/id/192583/output/print

Bill Maher used the Pew Forum Poll finding that "the percentage of people [in the US] who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent" in his recent movie Religulous.

On a related theme, religious types often say that Darwin believed in God because he mentioned a "Creator" in the final paragraph of the Origin of Species. Indeed he did:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

However:
http://www.csuchico.edu/~curbanowicz/DarwinDayCollectionOneChapter.html
The phrase 'by the creator,' in the final sentence of the selection chosen here, did not appear in the first edition of Origin of Species. It was added to the second edition to conciliate angry clerics. Darwin later wrote in a letter [to Joseph Hooker], "I have long since regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process."

This "truckling to public opinion" is the reason there probably won't be an atheist president of the United States during my lifetime. (In fact are there any US senators or congressmen who will openly admit to being atheists or at least agnostics?)

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10. LTEs, Scientific American, 5/09

Sir: "The Latest Face of Creationism," by Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott, details the tactics of those agitating against the teaching of evolution in public schools. Scientists have, to some extent, contributed to creationists' arguments by using the term "theory" when referring to evolution. It is not a theory but an established law. Robin A. Cox, Scarborough, Ontario
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Sir: Simply suppressing the teaching of intelligent design (ID) sends the wrong message to students. They ought to learn that science is about understanding the world and that it proceeds in stages. The questions they should ask are, Does ID make predictions? And can those predictions be tested? If the answers to both are negative, they themselves can conclude that ID is "only a nonscientific theory." Oscar Estevez, University of Amsterdam Medical Center

Q :Why did the chicken cross the road?
Evolutionist: Pure chance.
Evolutionist: Only the fittest chickens survive crossing the road.
Creationist: God created the chicken on the other side of the road. There is no proof it ever was on this side.

Q: Why did the dinosaur cross the road? A: Chickens hadn't evolved yet.

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11. Cal-IPC's 2009 Northern California Field Courses!

Santa Rosa - Mountain Home Ranch - http://www.cal-ipc.org/fieldcourses/index.php#SR
May 13 - Biology & Identification
May 14 - Control Methods
Sign up before the end of April to receive the Early Bird Discount!

Santa Cruz Mountains - San Lorenzo Water District's Olympia Well Field - http://www.cal-ipc.org/fieldcourses/index.php#SCM
July 21 - Advanced Mechanical Control Methods NEW!

Click here to register now.

Cal-IPC's field courses train natural resource managers and restoration volunteers on all aspects of invasive weed management.

HUGE Discount for restoration volunteers! You qualify as a restoration volunteer if weed management is not part of your professional work and you volunteer for an organized restoration effort. Please tell your volunteers!

Registration and details at www.cal-ipc.org/fieldcourses/index.php
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And:

The California Invasive Plant Council invites abstracts for contributed papers and posters for our 17th Annual Symposium in Visalia! This year's theme is "The Leading Edge of Wildland Weed Management". Main Symposium webpage: http://www.cal-ipc.org/symposia/index.php
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12. Alice Polesky:
Also, I'm forwarding you another alert that I thought might be of interest, about the tragic numbers of bird deaths from towers.
As to the tower story, perhaps I'll post. I've already posted about birds crashing into night-lit downtown highrise buildings, and the windmill hazard is not new. However, this renewable energy craze is making me nervous. We don't ever think things through, we just lurch from one crisis to another without thinking first what might be the consequences of the new course we embark on. I used to think that we were beginning to learn that actions have consequences and that we should look before we leap. I don't think that anymore. I don't think we're capable of learning. (Do I sound depressed?)


Slaughter of birds by communications towers

It's hard to beat the power of pictures to bring words to life. Here is a URL that will help:
http://audubonaction.org/campaign/fcc_commtowers?rk=P13v%5fVS1Wi9NE

Last week, Audubon, Defenders of Wildlife, and the American Bird Conservancy petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to address the killing of millions of migratory birds from collisions with the more than 100,000 communications towers throughout the United States.

Now, we need your letters to support our petition. Please e-mail the FCC today.

The Problem
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that millions of birds are killed each year because of communications towers. Scientists have shown that—especially during bad weather conditions—migrating birds become disoriented and trapped by the halo of light surrounding towers using steady-burning illumination, circling endlessly until they either collide with the structure, collide with each other, or fall dead from exhaustion.

In one instance, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 dead birds were documented at just three nearby towers in a single night!

The Solution
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has issued science-based guidelines on the siting and operation of these towers to minimize bird deaths. Unfortunately, the FCC—the government agency that licenses towers--has been dragging its feet implementing them for nearly a decade, despite repeated appeals by Audubon and other conservation groups; as well as independent scientists, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and even a federal court order.
With the annual spring bird migration underway, there is no better time to e-mail the FCC and urge them to take immediate action to prevent future migratory bird deaths at towers.

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13. Contributions from readers

Doug Allshouse:

Jake, I saw something this morning (Apr 22) that I have never seen in my life. About 6:15 I was beginning my morning walk, the sun was about to rise and I looked at the sliver of the crescent-Moon. Since the sky was half-bright (dull blue), Venus was visible, but it was positioned as though it was just peeking out from the dark side of the Moon, almost like it was eclipsed. What are the odds of that? I'm thinking that tomorrow morning the Moon and Venus will be farther apart. Doug*

Ooh, that hurts. I read Astronomy magazine every month, which always arrives a month early, in order to give amateur astronomers time to fill out their monthly calendar and prepare for observing events. (The June issue is due this week.) So events that won't happen for a month or more I usually jot down in notes or enter on my wall calendar. On receiving your note I got out the April issue, and sure enough there it was: a picture of the crescent moon with Venus immediately to the left of the unilluminated portion of the Moon--it was barely grazing the Moon! And the caption: "The Moon occults Venus the morning of April 22 for observers in the western two-thirds of North America." Damn!!

What a sight! And I missed it! Darn you. I'm raw with envy.

I need a secretary. And yes, Venus and the Moon will be substantially apart tomorrow morning.

**BTW, if you're wondering how Astronomy could show in February a photograph of the event that won't happen until April, it published a photo of the same phenomenon that took place in Europe last December--with a bonus: Besides Venus grazing the crescent Moon, Jupiter was thrown in on upper right--at no additional charge. So yes, it does happen. It's not rare, but it's not common either, and always exciting and dramatic when you see it. I'm now getting used to the world passing me by. With envy, Jake

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14. Feedback

Barbara Pitschel (regarding entrance fee to the SF Botanical Garden):

First of all, this was the first I had heard about the "cafe," which is a red herring to divert rational discussion from an issue that deserves serious discussion and consideration. I'm glad I waited, because Allan Ridley's discussion with Michael McKechnie and Michael's response in today's Nature News email clarify this discussion very well. There is no cafe planned at this time, and everything in the entire master plan would be inside existing buildings, as there are no changes planned to the footprint or envelope of buildings in Golden Gate Park. And these are not in any way part of this discussion.


What is my personal opinion? I am 100% in favor of this modest admission charge at this time. As Allan noted, the Library, the Bookstore, and the entire Entry Garden will be accessible outside the admission gate, with professional staff providing information to visitors about the resources they may choose to visit. And also, your point that a annual reasonable membership fee would provide unlimited admission and additional benefits is pivotal.


As Jake and Allan have noted, the Garden collections contain rare plants, plants that are being preserved from extinction in their native habitats, and plants of considerable interest and value. Yes, many people respect this living museum, but many others consider it a jogging trail, a pest-animal feeding place, a sporting ground, and even a place for illegal barbeques; apparently it appears somehow different from the other museums because it isn't indoors. Other people break in at night to steal plants and equipment, and I don't even want to talk about the flashers and the overnight campers who consider it a refuge. In this time of economic cutback, it is even more difficult to protect our unique resources. (And by ALL, I mean all of us--San Franciscans and people everywhere with environmental respect and concerns!)


The goal of the leaders of the Botanical Garden and the Botanical Garden Society is not to exclude people. They are trying to find the best possible ways to make these resources accessible to everyone who is interested in them, regardless of age or financial situation, and they are really hoping to work with people to address genuine concerns, rather than deal with the above-mentioned red herrings!


There are very few botanical gardens or arboreta anymore that are free of charge. As I have often said to groups for whom I have presented library orientations, without the work the SF Botanical Garden Society has contributed over the past nearly-sixty years SFBG would look more like Big Rec across the street. It does cost money to build, maintain, and preserve plant collections.


So thanks for requesting the opinion of a dedicated public-serving professional librarian, who has served the public free of charge for the past 28 years!!!


Gray Brechin:

Jake, Regarding your reader's (and your own) remarks on lawns in an arid climate, you probably know that Frederick Law Olmsted was — as usual — about a century ahead of his time when at the time of the Civil War he told the promoters who wanted him to lay out an English landscape like that of Central Park on the western SF dunes. He wrote to his wife "The sojourning habit of the people [here]... is shown in their want of interest in the fixed qualities of the place. Nobody knows what the trees and plants are." He proposed instead a linear park along what is now Van Ness Avenue planted largely with drought-adapted natives "acquired from the canons of the coast range," with a compact and more English-style park in the Duboce Triangle area in the lee of Buena Vista Hill and where there were springs. This is not what the promoters wanted, of course, and so he returned to the East to found the profession of landscape architecture and create parks across the country.

Twenty years later, Leland Stanford hired him to lay out his new university. He and Olmsted disagreed since Stanford wanted that old English landscape again and Olmsted insisted on one more suited to a Mediterranean climate so that precious water would not be squandered. They split the difference so that the central quadrangle is like a Spanish plaza but the Oval is a vast water-wasteful lawn. Of course, ever since Hetch Hetchy water came in, Stanford has thrived on the popular illusion that anything can and should grow in California — as long as you can use remote control technology to steal the water from somewhere and somethings else.

I didn't know that this is when he created the profession.

Sigh. If only our City fathers had listened to Olmsted. Vain regret. I spend a lot of my life regretting what might have been. I could never be a businessman or a politician, one who has to deal with realities. I much prefer a fact-based world, not one catering to narrow interests or distorted beliefs. It was not just San Francisco leaders, it was the whole American psychology of the time. Read Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. That pretty well lays out the fantasy that motivated this country, and still dominates it.

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15. Speaker Josef Halda is a noted botanist and seed collector from the Czech Republic, who has travelled the world to many obscure and botanically significant places to bring back unique collections of seed for sale. He is an expert and has written monographs on Primula, Daphne, Gentiana and Paeonia. His lectures are filled with exquisite, artistic and rare photos of plants in their native habitat.

"Trough Plants Czech Style" at the Lakeside Garden Center (in Oakland near Lake Merritt) on Wednesday, April 29, at 7:30 PM.

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16. Glum picture painted by Lester Brown

Anxiety-producing events in this over-anxious world are not items I like to post in this newsletter. However, in the case of an article in the May 2009 Scientific American titled 'Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?', there seems no point in trying to ignore the situation portrayed. Lester Brown, in the words of the Washington Post, is "one of the world's most influential thinkers", and similar accolades have been bestowed on him throughout the world.

However, the accolades are not why I am taking him seriously. I take him seriously because I have "written" (ie, composed in my head) the same article, and the facts Brown cites are well-known to anyone paying attention in recent decades: water shortages, soil losses, and rising temperatures are placing severe limits on food production. Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three environmental factors, a series of government collapses could threaten the world order. (Save Haiti, the 20 countries closest to collapse are in Africa and Asia. There is no way to isolate disorder; it spreads like the plague--or, more apt, like a tsunami.)

I find it difficult to envision the collapse of civilization. That is a problem. Nobody can; it is an abstract concept. We mouth it often, but it lacks reality. The collapse of civilization is beyond anything we can imagine; there has never been anything like it in history. My head is totally convinced that we are heading toward an unmanageable condition, yet I am unable to believe it. If I have a problem envisioning it, what about the several billion who are too busy surviving to another day to take notice--and who do not even have the facts to be noticed? The leaders of those people must respond to their people's immediate needs. Even in the U.S., where we have data pouring into our brains at an unassimilable rate, we still can't entertain this catastrophic event seriously.

President Obama plans to allow "12 million" (actually probably 20 million) illegal immigrants to obtain citizenship. Possibly he knows better but is forced into it by the politics. We have been declaring amnesty and granting citizenship to illegal immigrants many times, and apparently will continue until the situation becomes untenable and results in violence.

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17. The Malthusian question

…Yet human numbers continue to swell, at more than 9,000 an hour, 80 million a year, a rate that threatens a doubling in less than 50 years. To make matters worse, human numbers threaten the survival of other species.

Malthus's arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when they are not. Is Homo sapiens an exception? Perhaps. Humans can consider each other's needs, and cooperate; there is also plenty of evidence that they choose not to. The Optimum Population Trust does not have the answers, but the questions remain, quite literally, vital.

Guardian Weekly editorial excerpt 27.03.09
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18. Half empty or half full

People are typically biased toward noticing either good or bad events, and a common genetic variation may underlie such tendencies for optimism or pessimism...The findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, help to explain why people may be less prone to anxiety and depression and could lead to therapies that help some look on the bright side.

Caption (to a picture of a spider and a stack of chocolates): What do you prefer to look at? Optimists tend to pay attention to images of chocolate and avoid pictures of spiders; pessimists do the opposite.

From Scientific American, 5/09

(JS: I looked at the spider. Is that because I'm interested in natural history, or because I'm a pessimist? Or both?)

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19. Quote of the week
President Ahmadinejad of Iran said after a highly controversial speech at a UN racism conference his purpose had been to promote "international love and tolerance".

Mr. Ahmadinejad, I'd like to introduce you to Mr Rush Limbaugh. Mr Limbaugh, Mr Ahmadinejad.
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20. Notes & Queries, Guardian Weekly
(JS: Notes & Queries is placed in a section of the weekly called Diversions.)

How much chaos and mayhem can one stand?
Why do Notes & Queries respondents display such a dismal sense of humour? What about some serious answers to interesting questions?

This is an interesting question, so I will respond with a serious answer: most of the questions in Notes & Queries are nonsensical, and therefore easy prey for "silly answers". Moreover, since this column is titled Diversions, it is obviously intended as a pleasurable distraction, and not meant to be pondered over by pundits or dissected by an elite of intellectuals.

Of course, there are serious question-and-answer columns in most world-class publications, but they are generally simplistic, boring, and, unfortunately, invite the opining of egomaniacs and mental cases. Frankly, I welcome Notes & Queries for interjecting a note of humour in an otherwise intolerable world of economic recession, war, crime, disease, illiteracy, religious and political strife, and perhaps one of the most pitiful of all human failings - those who lack of a sense of humour. Les Dreyer, New York City, US

Any answers?
Why is black black, brown brown but yellow blond?
Jonathan Seyghal, Berlin, Germany

When can air travel to a conference about sustainability be justified?
Chris Watson, Wellington, New Zealand

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21. Antarctica

Cruise ships visiting Antarctica carrying more than 500 passengers will be prohibited from landing anyone. Only 100 visitors are to be allowed on shore at any given time. the limits, agreed by 28 countries that have signed the Antarctic treaty, were decided after figures showed that visitor numbers had risen from 6,700 in 1992 to more than 45,000. Guardian Weekly