Irony isn't the word when we find our scientific policy democratically directed by people for whom cutting down the trees in their backyard is an impossibility so that they can grow vegetables, based on what? Idealogy about clearcutting...good grief. So that's why we prefer these carbon cap trading schemes from alpha males we trust even though their previous ideas such as GPRA and their selection of Presidential running-mates were total disasters..but somehow the carbon trading is gonna work, but no word about trying to internationally set up effective agricultural carbon sequestering which has so many advantages...no, we have to shut down the US and Western European coal plants and buy new and energy intensively manufactured new cars..but no word on mass transit like rail roads...and US and western European coal plants only. China's coal plants plus the hundreds more they're going to build are OK? I become less and less able to keep my food down as blathering increases to drown-out the calls for reason. I just heard on CNN that this earth day we're not supposed to worry about the mercury in our compact flourescent light bulbs.

Regarding the polar bears feeding habitat: You know why that's their feeding habitat? Because they eat seals, not because they love ice for any particular reason. Where will the seals go when the ice is gone? Well they'll go onto shores and shoals. Why don't they go there now? Because then it's too easy for the polar bears eat them. Without the ice cover there will be a huge increas of solar energy onto the surface of the cold nutrient rich arctic sea water which will create an explosion of phytoplankton which will fuel a population burst of plankton-eating fish which will translate as a profusion of seals which will now be hauling out onto rocky shoals and shorelines and islands which will be where the polar bears will find them in greater numbers than ever before and why there will be even more polar bears. It is this kind of feedback loop that has been ignored by those who fail to see the kind of robustness that is built into complex systems as exemplified by our terrestrial climate. Happy Earth Day...it is a very robust earth, though I don't have all than much hope for us stupid humans unless we recognize the weakest link...our un-opened minds which gives such little credit to nature's ability to absorb an assault such as it's experiencing right now within our little bubble of earth's history.

for all the modern knowledge so many of us have stuck into our heads, and our rather smug self-satisfied feelings that we're so much better informed than our predecessors, we're still monkeys and stuck on being lazy when it comes to challenging our understanding once we're secure in it. So experts from every corner will tell you the new is impossible. For instance I've been reading this column for quite a while and we read the same old re-hash of problems...and why not? I, and lots of others keep reading it don't we? And does the writer not recieve recompense for creating it?

So, I guess that's why there's not much effort to examine genuinely new and emergent technology as proposed by the few among us who are genuinely "out of the box" thinkers, as was Robert Bussard who's research in to Inertial Electrodynamic Fusion has been so long overlooked and/or disregarded so many of us monkeys. His google video from Nov '06 generated some interest but when the peer-reviewed paper from a grad student based on 20 year old understanding was applied, we just sort of presumed that it was yet another false alarm...again, monkey reasoning...but a few have continued to be interested and now there has been a small but steady increase in awareness. Some of todays readers might be familiar with the Daily Kos. They are running a series of reports on the state of energy technology and if you wish to find out what's gotten a growing number of energy researchers who are disenchanted with the tokomak approach, interested at the prospects of a real world workable approach to hydrogen fusion you might want to go over there and take a look. Or one can stick with the typical response, "oh, that's too much effort. We all know fusion is 20 years in the future...blah blah blah"...and continue to wring our hands while we squeeze the fear factor for the last bit of interest and revenue we can, as usual.

On any given day there's reason for optimism and pessimism...I prefer the former but who can ignore the latter as the cause of much of our human inertia?

It will be great when the common knowledge catches up with the actual history of the Amazon and we once again integrate the kinds of permaculture and multicropping that prior to the arrival of Europeans supported millions of Amazonians in productive agriculture. The remote primitive tribes we see inhabiting the seemingly pristine forests represent the vestiges of a culture that lasted for thousands of years in productive balance. The west still denies it's existence by insisting on its being kept as wilderness as we first perceived it in the modern sense a few decades ago.

These pollutants are the same that will continue to be emmitted from the coal fired power plants of China and India that will be permitted by Kyoto, thereby delaying the evolution of clean power at the expense of the very environment we claim to be so concerned over. There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of Kyoto and the claims of anthropogenic global warming...and not all of them are shortsighted and greedy. I reject Kyoto and the IPCC's perspective and think Al Gore is in error but believe that he is capable of turning it around once he sees how the model which he supports is actually hurting the environment and the people who depend on its health.