Special to Bayview Hill-Jake Sigg's Nature News

NOTE TO READERS: As noted in newsletter of March 5, I am revamping my address book (with great trepidation and investment of time; the electronic world terrifies me), and things may drop through the cracks. I screwed up in addressing the March 5 newsletter, and some of you probably didn't receive it. If so, please let me know. Also, I will switch to my "new" system next newsletter. If you don't receive one within a week, let me know, as you probably fell through the cracks. Thanks.

1. Edgar Wayburn dies at 103
2. SF Beautification Award - nominees
3. Promote biodiversity in the city: proposed traffic island planting needs your support Saturday March 13
4. SaveNature.org's annual Bowl the Planet Saturday March 13
5. Ecology Emerges: Evolution of Eco-activism March 18
6. LTE: Encouraging news on selling live animals at market--but your help still needed to implement
7. LTE: light pollution
8. SFPUC offers discounted rain barrels/classes on organic gardening
9. Living New Deal Project in London's Guardian
10. Feedback: Man the adaptable/I'm called racist
11. Neuroscience on racism
12. Robert Reich: Rethinking employment - the shifting labor landscape Apr 29
13. Don't like the weather? It's the president's fault
14. News on vitamin D continues to roll in
15. Center for Biological Diversity gets innovative about population
16. What's not to like about growth? Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet/A nose for the smell of funny money
17. Notes & Queries: Can anyone explain why men act like baboons?

“I stuck my head out the window
this morning and spring kissed me
bang in the face.”
Langston Hughes


1. Edgar Wayburn dies at 103

John Muir laid the foundation for the Sierra Club, and inspired, dedicated individuals such as David Brower and Edgar Wayburn carried out aspects of his vision. Long before I became active in public issues I was reading about Wayburn's campaigns to create a national park in the giant redwoods (an expensive and difficult battle), preserve large tracts of Alaska as wild, create a national park in the North Cascades, preserve the Marin Headlands and many other struggles that I can't remember. We owe much to him.

(These battles occurred in a tumultuous time simultaneous with Brower's fight to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon, and the hair-raising battle to keep freeways from ringing our entire waterfront from south of the Ferry Bldg all the way around to the GG Bridge [!!] as well as along the Park Panhandle, through GG Park, and up Park-Presidio [!!]. [Yes, we almost allowed that to happen, narrowly defeating it twice in 1965 and 1967, both on 6-5 votes.])

To get an inkling of just some of the work of this marvelous man, go to pages 52-56 in New Guardians for the Golden Gate by Wayburn's co-creator of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Amy Meyer. (It's a book you should possess and cherish anyway, because it's an interesting story, but also to remind you that every blessing we have didn't just happen--somebody made it happen, often at great personal cost. Be ever grateful.)

Hi Jake: No doubt others have already notified you that Edgar Wayburn passed away Friday, March 5, 2010.

I, among many others who worked with him during the formative GGNRA and Arctic National Wildlife Preserve years, still marvel at his quiet but passionate persistance to preserve as much open space as he could.

I personally miss hiking in Marin County with him and his wife, Peggy, while they pointed out to me fields, hills, canyons and ranches they were hoping to save from development, to keep as open space. (These areas eventually were included in GGNRA.)

Here is the link to the SFChronicle front page article written about him: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/08/MN5O1CCB1S.DTL

Jeanne Koelling


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2. San Francisco Beautiful Beautification Award Nominees

Nominated entries must be located or active in San Francisco and for physical projects be fully visible or physically accessible to the general public. Nominations are due at Noon on Monday, April 12th. Award winners are selected by San Francisco Beautiful's Award Jury and winners will be notified in early May. Awards will be publicly presented at SFB's Beautification Awards Dinner on October 13th at the Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel. For questions or assistance with your application, contact San Francisco Beautiful at awards@sfbeautiful.org.

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3. From Greg Gaar:
Planting native plants on a traffic island contested

The HANC Native Plant Nursery and Nature in the City presumed it would be a "no brainer" to use the Street Parks Program to remove concrete from a traffic island at Frederick and Arguello and plant a garden of San Francisco native plants.

We submitted our plans and the concrete is scheduled to be removed in April. After distributing flyers about a meeting to inform the neighbors, some neighbors expressed a preference for trees. We have proposed planting ceonothus, pink currant and coffeeberry. These shrubs can grow high but they aren't trees. Big trees would be a maintenance headache and DPW is concerned about visual obstruction. Smaller plants, shrubs and grasses, would be easy to maintain and offer great wildlife habitat.

The Department of Public Works and the San Francisco Parks Trust will hear from all interested parties on Saturday March 13 at Noon. Meet at the "Triangle" traffic island at Frederick and Arguello next to the Yoga Center. We need support from habitat activists. Greg Gaar - 584-8985

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4. SaveNature.Org's Bowl the Planet & Silent Auction is this Saturday! March 13th 3pm-6pm, Serra Bowl. Cosmic bowling under black light, rock & roll music, food and a great cause. Call 415.648.3392 to reserve your lane or go to http://www.savenature.org/content/news_events/events to register online or make a contribution. Funds raised support scholarship for the Insect Discovery Lab and our conservation efforts for saving nature.

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5.
Thursday, March 18 at 7:30 pm
Ecology Emerges: Evolution of Eco-Activism
Presented by Shaping San Francisco
Humanist Hall, 390 - 27th Street, Oakland
http://www.shapingsf.org/ecology_emerges.html

On Thursday, March 18th, Shaping San Francisco kicks off Ecology Emerges, a four-part public forum, at the Humanist Hall. Legendary and inspiring examples of Bay Area ecological activism over the past 50 years unfold from a collection of 23 oral histories gathered by local historian Chris Carlsson.
Evolution of Eco-Activism, the first of the four talks, will trace the birth of the modern ecology movement, from conservation and environmentalism, through to today’s recognition of the need for environmental and social justice. Jon Christensen, Executive Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, will host our speakers, conversing with them and the audience. The event will highlight a short video synthesizing the gathered oral histories and imagery from the Bay Area.
Throughout Ecology Emerges, 12 speakers will investigate and speak of their own personal involvement in the evolution of ecological activism, the role of the Bay Area in shaping national and international ecological movements, nature in cities, and the problem of sustainability within a growth-based economy.
This project is made possible, in part, by a grant from The California Council for the Humanities, California Story Fund. www.calhum.org
This is a FREE event, and donations will be welcome. Space provided for on-site bicycle parking.

About Shaping San Francisco:
Shaping San Francisco, a project of CounterPULSE, is a 15 year, ongoing multimedia project in bottom-up, participatory history, recovering lost history and sharing the story of daily life in the City by the Bay. Most recently, together with the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, we launched FoundSF.org a living online history archive. We offer a regular Wednesday night Public Talk Series and various Bicycle History Tours around the City of San Francisco.

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6. LTE, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 March 2010

"FOOD FOR THOUGHT"

After 15 years of heated debate, on March 3 the State Fish & Game Commission voted 5:0 to direct the Dept. of Fish & Game to stop the importation of live turtles and frogs for human consumption. A good first step, but much more is needed.

California annually imports some two million American bullfrogs and 300,000 freshwater turtles for the live markets. The frogs are commercially raised in Taiwan, the turtles taken from the wild in other states, depleting local populations there.

None of these animals are native to California. All are diseased and parasitized, though it's illegal to sell such products. When released into local waters (also illegal), the exotics prey upon and displace our native wildlife, including endangered species. Worse, the bullfrogs carry the dreaded chytrid fungus, a cause of the extinctions of dozens of amphibian species worldwide.

The Department should now revoke all current import permits and impose an immediate ban on the sale of these animals. The non-natives pose a major
threat to the environment and the public health. The cruelty in the markets is horrendous, and many of the animals are butchered and dismembered while fully conscious. Not acceptable!

Please write: John Carlson, Exec. Director, State Fish & Game Commission, 1416 Ninth Street, Sacramento, CA 95814; email - fgc@fgc.ca.gov. The
animals, the environment and the public deserve better.

Eric Mills, coordinator
ACTION FOR ANIMALS

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"An age is called dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." James Michener

7. LTE, San Francisco Examiner

Light pollution is not just an astronomy and bird problem, but also an economic one. We spend billions of dollars each year carelessly lighting the undersides of airplanes. There’s a long list of health and safety issues stemming from excessive outdoor lighting. A growing alliance of astronomers, lighting engineers, environmentalists, and politicians work to combat light pollution.

One has only to survey a few people to see how abysmally ignorant they are about the stars in the night sky--which they have usually never seen--to understand the pernicious effects of light pollution on our very nature as intelligent beings. There is a famous photograph of the sky over Toronto during 2003’s widespread power outage which reveals the Milky Way in all its splendor, something that many young people have never seen. Following simple instructions on the website www.globe.gov/GaN/index.html, everyone from schoolchildren to professional astronomers report how many stars they can see in the constellation Orion without optical aid.

Luminous billboards and prodigal streetlights anesthetize our feeling for the night. As the Milky Way dissolves, cosmic grandeur and mystery evaporate. With the stars lost from sight, our reach is reduced.

Jake Sigg, San Francisco
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(Addendum: While lobbying the California Legislature yesterday--our annual Weed Day at the Capitol--I got into a warm conversation with a Republican Assemblyman from southern California, Paul Cook. As mayor of Yucca Valley he caused enactment of a native plant landscaping ordinance. But, on an unrelated note, he also managed to have Yucca Valley become a dark sky city, meaning the lighting is directed downward, where it is needed, not upward and washing out the night sky, which is important to him. Love that man.)

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8. SFPUC discounted rain barrels: http://www.digital-currents.com/currentsnewsletter/20100304#pg4

Also classes in organic gardening--and much, much more: http://www.gardenfortheenvironment.org/

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9. Living New Deal Project in London's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/10/1#history-link-box - or Article history

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10. Feedback

On Mar 5, 2010, at 11:56 PM, Peter Rauch wrote:

Jake, Join the club. Man is quite able to adapt to the realities --that's his downfall. Look at the world's most desperate populations, in the innards of big Indian cities for example, where it becomes bluntly evident just how adaptable Man is. As we seek "equality" for all, that is the direction the realities of overpopulation and over-exploitation of resources is taking us all --we _will_ adapt. No doubt about it. Peter

(I've become so cynical that I think that we'll have to be actually starving first before there is the beginning of a will to adapt to the realities.)


(Name Withheld):

Interesting Jake,

And can you explain in clear terms why someone's race has any bearing or importance whatsoever on their political position on undocumented immigration.

Please explain in detail how 'Hispanic, Asian-American, and African-American' voters are different from 'white' voters.

Or are they instead 'separate but equal' to 'white' voters in the importance of their views on immigration?

Are you implying that race is the key issue in immigration?

Please elaborate. I recommend carefully...

I don't understand your puzzlement, ____. It seems clear to me. It's stated in the first paragraph.

Politicians, media, government, policy-makers, think-tanks, and so forth need to have such information to help guide policy and actions. Can you listen to news for a whole week--or even a day--without hearing a breakdown of groups by demography, income, ethnicity, occupation, &c on public attitudes on some subject or another? Our technical world lives on data. If advocacy groups and politicians, eg, have incorrect or biased information or purposely promote incorrect information in order to promote what they want to do, then the public should know about it.

I regard population (and the out-of-control variety of capitalism that we have) as our #1 problem, even greater than climate change--and it is the chief driver of climate change. It is threatening our very existence. I don't know your view of this problem, but if you're not concerned about it you should be. There are many subsets contributing to the population problem, and immigration (both legal and illegal) is one. I don't isolate this topic from the larger population problem. For example, what is called the fertility-industrial complex (ie, the business of producing babies--and it IS a business) is another, and I will be posting an article on it soon. It concerns strictly very rich people, and the very rich doctors who are ripping them off (and they are probably 100% white) and it is a story that is almost never reported. That is what I am after. I suspect you may have misunderstood the item.

On 3/5/2010 6:10 PM, Jake Sigg wrote:
9. Most minorities think immigration is too high.

Many of our politicians are afraid to support enforcement of our immigration laws. They fear a voter backlash because ethnic advocacy groups call for increased immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens.

Yet a Zogby survey on immigration done for the Center for Immigration Studies found that Hispanic, Asian-American, and African-American voters support enforcement of our laws and want illegal immigrants to return home. In fact, 56 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of Asian-Americans, and 68 percent of African-Americans think immigration is too high. You can see the poll here.

(There was a further exchange of emails with this correspondent, but he became abusive. I was accused of being a closet racist, without adducing any reason for labeling me so. That's the tactic: label the opponent of racism or some other hidden motive, and don't be bothered by lack of evidence. The 'racist' epithet has been effective in silencing people, but in the harsh economic times to be expected from here on it may become less effective, as people look for ways of alleviating problems they previously have been glad to ignore.

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11. Scientific Observations (Science News 30 Jan 2010)
“All that’s separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person’s touch in your mind. You’ve dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. And this of course is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, and that is, there’s no real independent self aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world and inspecting other people. You’re in fact connected. Not just via Facebook and the Internet. You’re actually quite literally connected by your neurons…There’s no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else’s consciousness. And this is not mumbo jumbo philosophy, it emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience.”
University of California, San Diego, Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran in a talk on Mirror Neurons and “Empathy Neurons”
posted on www.ted.com


“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

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12. The University of California at Berkeley invites you to save Thursday, April 29th for
"An Evening with Robert Reich" - Rethinking Employment - The Shifting Labor Landscape

Landmark Building - One Market Street, Suite 200 San Francisco
Thursday, April 29, 2010 - 6:00pm - 8:30pm
Seasoned Bears and Cal Friends - $50
New Alumni (2005-2009) - $25

Register

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13. From the archives (during Dubya's term):

One radio commentator I heard recently said that people sometimes blame the weather on whoever is in office at the time. In 1916 there were several shark attacks off New Jersey. Woodrow Wilson lost a large number of votes then; they expected him to control sharks. Will Bush be blamed for the Florida hurricanes?

(A friend sent me a jpg file map showing that the hurricanes were hitting hardest the Florida counties which voted for Bush, as well as adjacent states, and sparing those which voted for Gore. She interpreted this as God punishing the Republicans. However, I pointed out that God is a Republican, and this was just doubtless a foul-up, as s/he is getting on in years and increasingly prone to screwing up. I know how that is.)

"The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless." Nicholas Chamfort (1741-1794)

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14. Scientific American
OBSERVATIONS: Another reason vitamin D is important: It gets T cells going
Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to all kinds of ailments, but a new discovery demonstrates how it plays a major role in keeping the body healthy in the first place
http://cl.exct.net/?qs=f397e559ae7668afc8e4c89c403065fb2b439a87758da8fcb64371ad708b20d9

(I have carried many items about the virtues of vitamin D over the years, and have a large file of electronic and printed material, mostly scientifically documented, detailing D's importance. [I will send the electronic files on request.] My interest was stimulated by a personal dramatic discovery.

About five years ago I became concerned about losing my teeth when biting into hard rolls or tough meat. Fortuitously, I read an item in Science News about D's importance to bones. The article said that covering up skin with clothing and slathering on sunblock was creating D deficiencies in many people, and it created problems with bones. So I started exposing my arms more often and taking D supplements. Within a week I noticed a great difference, and soon my worries about teeth disappeared.

A surprise extra dividend was noticed when I climbed my 20-foot pine tree for its annual Japanese-style pruning. I had become fearful that I would no longer be able to do this, and that would have created a problem for me. Climbing upward was a strain on my muscles, and I felt insecure. After my D-regime change the problem disappeared, and I have continued doing the annual pruning just as always, without discomfort.

People's needs change as they get older; apparently the body is not as efficient at garnering certain nutrients from food. I also discovered that taking B-complex supplements has had a positive effect on my energy and outlook.)

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15. Center for Biological Diversity:

Overpopulation is at the root of all environmental problems, but you wouldn't know it from listening to most environmental groups. The topic is rarely discussed, even though unsustainable human population growth is eating up wildlife habitat, polluting water, overfishing the oceans, and driving species extinct.

Overpopulation is the most important -- and most ignored -- environmental problem on the planet. Help us change that by donating to our Earth Day Overpopulation Fund.

Building on the spectacular success of our Valentine's Day launch of the Endangered Species Condom project, we will distribute a quarter of a million funny, edgy, conversation-provoking Endangered Species Condoms in all 50 states this Earth Day, April 22. With your help, it will be one of the biggest overpopulation campaigns in U.S. history.

Our six condom packages have beautiful drawings of endangered species and funny sayings like "Wear with care, save the polar bear" on the outside. Inside, they explain how species are being crowded off the planet by an ever-growing human population, and what people can do about it.

The packages are designed to get people talking about overpopulation. And boy, do they work. We tested them on Valentine's Day, expecting 100 volunteer distributors to come forward. An astounding 5,000 people volunteered taking all 100,000 condoms in just a couple of days!

As planned, the media ate it up. We generated funny but deadly serious conversations about overpopulation and the extinction crisis in hundreds of newspapers including The New York Times, L.A. Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe. More than 300,000 blogs and Web sites covered the issue.
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16. What's not to like about growth?

We must forget traditional economics if we want to save the planet, says Jeremy Leggett
Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, by Tim Jackson

Prosperity is understood as a successful, thriving condition: a state in which things are going well for us. Every day the system in which we live tries to persuade us - via news, politicians' speeches, corporate pronouncements, inducements to consume and so on - that our prosperity is intimately linked to whether or not gross national product is growing and whether stock markets are riding high. These are the main measuring sticks for the version of capitalism on which most countries base their economies today.

Other ways of measuring prosperity, such as employment and savings, follow these two. If GNP - the total national output of goods and services - is in recession, then unemployment will rise, and that means growing numbers of unprosperous people without salaries. If stock markets are falling, that means falling pension values, and rising numbers of unprosperous people in retirement. So what's not to like about growth?

Tim Jackson states the challenge starkly: "Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must." And that is the core mission of this perfectly timed book. In the wake of the financial crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Nobel-prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz and elements of the Financial Times's commentariat are among those now arguing that prosperity is possible without GNP growth, and indeed that prosperity will soon become impossible because of GNP growth. A new movement seems to be emerging, and this superbly written book should be the first stop for anyone wanting a manifesto.

Jackson...is not slow to simplify where that is warranted: "The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist."

...this could well be the most important book you will read. Who to believe if you don't have time? Well, I invite you not to believe the profession that so thoroughly disgraced itself with its systemic acceptance of the case for complex derivatives as a prime example of increasing economic efficiency in the financial services industry.

The last chapter of the book looks at opportunities for achieving "a lasting prosperity". They are many and varied, and most of them - unsurprisingly - start from the grassroots. High on the list is the need for us all to consume less "stuff" and to seek a type of prosperity outside the conventional trappings of affluence: within relationships, family, community and the meaning of our lives and vocations in a functional society that places value on the future.

Is that still capitalism? "Does it really matter?" Jackson asks. For what it's worth, as a creature of capitalism - a venture-capital-backed energy industry boss, a private equity investor and an Institute of Directors director of the month - I am convinced that capitalism as we know it is torpedoing our prosperity, killing our economies and threatening our children with an unlivable world. Tim Jackson has written the best book yet making this case, and showing the generalities of the escape route. The specifics are down to us.

Slightly abbreviated review in Guardian Weekly 05.03.10
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Willie Sutton: I rob banks, because that’s where they keep the money.


A nose for the smell of funny money
Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, by John Lanchester

John Lanchester's Whoops! is a book that made my head spin. That's partly because of the author's speed of thought - here is an explanation of how the global economy works, in 240 blistering pages. And it's also because of the sheer, dizzying maths of it all - the hundreds and thousands, the billions and trillions. But it mostly made my head spin out of admiration. I must have read 30 books on the global economic crisis (I'm writing one myself) and this is the best. No question.

Lanchester is not a banker, but he has a gift for explaining complex things in a simple way. He says that if money were alive, it would always be looking for ways to get bigger. Reading this made me see that as mere human beings, we are its servants, here, it seems, to facilitate the process.

Why did the crisis happen? Lanchester says that it was because of a climate, a problem, a mistake and a failure. When he was a kid, he says, he lived in a climate of pretty much unfettered capitalism. But Britain and America were different - the capitalism in western countries was softer and gentler. Why? Because the west was always aware of the communist world. The guys on the other side of the Iron Curtain kept us on our best behaviour.

But then communism died. So capitalism, without a Marxist invigilator, started to cheat. Capitalism went wild. Money, which always wants to grow, found new ways of growing. Here's where the problem comes in. The problem, as Lanchester sees it, was sub-prime mortgages. Or, to be more precise, the problem was the financial instruments that enabled - and, in some ways, forced - financiers to lend money to people who couldn't pay it back, thus causing the crash.

It is here that Lanchester is at his best. I've never seen a more concise description of "credit default swaps" - deals allowing banks to lend the same money over and over by insuring it with a third party. For a while, everybody is happy. The loans flood the economy with money, which increases the price of assets. Soon, if you're a banker and you're not doing this, you're toast. But then the honeymoon ends. People default on their loans. Asset prices fall. The insurance company crashes. Banks seize up. We are screwed.

Then there was the mistake. Put concisely, bankers did not understand the nature of risk. That's partly because they were working from mathematical models. But human beings are not like mathematical models. When your model says that something is so unlikely it's practically impossible, it's not. Where humans are concerned, all sorts of things are possible. What is "the most common mistake of very smart people"? It's "the assumption that other people's minds work in the same way that theirs do".

The failure was one of regulation. As Lanchester puts it, for a while the economy had a funny smell. But the people who should have pointed this out, and done something about it, didn't. But who wants to burst a bubble? Not investors, not politicians and especially not bankers. So the bubble keeps growing. Until it bursts.

"Now what?" asks Lanchester. Well, we have to pick up the bill. And how much do we owe? That's one of the problems - nobody knows for sure.

Reviewed by William Leith in Observer

(Good, as far as it goes, but the reviewer is still limited in his vision of the problem. It's true that after communism died capitalism went into a virulent stage. But that only hastened the end; it didn't cause it. You needn't be a Marxist to see the inner contradictions of our economic system, based as it is on eternal growth. The end would have come one day anyway, only a little later. The problem is deeper. JS)

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17. Notes & Queries, Guardian Weekly

Can anyone explain why men act like baboons?
Why is it that so many human males are committed to violence?

It's a gene on the Y-chromosome that we've inherited from the lower mammals. Packs with males who protected their members, practised rape and stole from and killed members of rival packs were more likely to survive, and males practising such behaviour were more likely to reproduce than those who eschewed it. We share the trait with baboons.

Perhaps these characteristics attract human females, another possible genetic heritage.
Art Hilgart, Kalamazoo, Michigan, US