When Rena Wilson Jones and her husband, Drew, were building a house 10 years ago in a subdivision near the edge of Urbana, Illinois, they knew the property was likely to be windy, bordered as it was by open fields to the north and west. But they did not realize how fierce the winds would be until construction of their house was under way. In the decade that followed, the wind drove Rena Wilson Jones crazy from November through April, she said, whipping across her yard and making it difficult to work in the garden. At times, it was hard to walk outside.
Eventually, the couple decided to capitalize on their affliction. Last summer, they installed a 56-foot wind turbine in their yard to draw electrical power from the wind, which sometimes gets up to 40 miles per hour. They did the work themselves over a weekend, digging a four-foot-deep hole for the foundation and raising the $13,000 turbine with a winch on their Jeep. It was spinning by early September, and their electricity bills dropped sharply, from $90 to $10 for November, one of the windier months.
"Now, the faster the wind goes, the happier I am," said Wilson Jones, a director of nursing at Community Blood Services of Illinois.
Until recently, wind turbines were used primarily by those who lived outside the range of local utility lines, or who wanted to live completely off the grid. Now, reductions in their size and cost, along with improvements in their efficiency, are allowing suburban homeowners in the United States with no dissident leanings to speak of to install them in growing numbers, with concerns over rising energy costs and global warming driving the demand.
Sales of wind turbines have been growing steadily since 1990, when the American Wind Energy Association, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, DC, began tracking them. Last year, about 7,000 small wind turbines — defined as those that have a capacity of up to 100 kilowatts, roughly enough to power a large school — were purchased in the United States, according to the group, which said it expects sales to reach about 10,000 this year.
Residential turbines, which account for half those sales, are typically 33 to 100 feet tall, with outputs of two to 10 kilowatts. They cost between $12,000 and $55,000, but in recent years, 19 states, including California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Ohio, have begun offering incentives and rebates that can cut purchase prices by up to 50 percent. And last week, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that would help states provide grants and low-interest loans for residential turbines (as well as solar panels and geothermal heat pumps), and that would offer a 30 percent federal tax credit on turbine purchases, up to $4,000; the Senate is now considering a similar measure.
A 10-kilowatt turbine in an area with an average wind speed of 12 miles per hour can lead to a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to removing 1.3 cars from the road, according to the wind energy association. But for some, the financial savings made possible by turbines are at least as important. Marc Schambers eliminated his payments to Southern California Edison after he installed a turbine in his backyard in the town of Phelan five years ago. Schambers, the owner of CleanMessage, a spam-filtering service, opted for an unusually tall 120-foot model (taller devices generate more energy) because his electricity bills were as much as $1,000 a month in summer, he said, when he was paying to cool both his home office and his 1,800-square-foot house.
He has since paid off his $25,000 investment — the turbine cost $46,000, but he received a $21,000 rebate from the California Energy Commission — and now produces more power than he can use. Since California is one of 23 states that require power companies to offer "net metering," by which customers receive credit for any extra power they generate, he comes out ahead.
"One of the top 10 pleasures in life is watching your electrical meter go backward," he said.
Schambers's neighbors apparently agree; he said he can see 20 turbines from his backyard.
Other parts of the country, too, offer ideal conditions for turbines: The Great Plains, for example, are the "Saudi Arabia of wind," according to Karl Bergey, the chairman and chief executive of Bergey Windpower, a turbine manufacturer in Norman, Oklahoma.
Some consumers have installed turbines in low-wind areas. In August, Curt and Christine Mann put up a turbine next to their Craftsman-style house in the Grant Park neighborhood of Atlanta, despite an average wind speed of only nine miles per hour, the minimum recommended by the wind energy association. (The group also says that home turbines should be at least 30 feet tall and surrounded by at least an acre of land, free of any large obstructions like dense trees.) So far, their turbine has led to only a modest reduction in electricity costs, from around $95 to roughly $75 a month, and it could take up to 20 years at that rate to recoup their initial investment. But they were more interested in ecological benefits than financial ones, said Mann, a real estate developer whose company is called City Crest Holdings.
Local governments have put up roadblocks to the devices. A few towns, like Blowing Rock, North Carolina, have banned them outright because of their appearance, and others require homeowners to petition the local zoning board for a variance to exceed building height limits. Some cities require letters of support from neighbors, which can be hard to obtain because some people believe turbines may threaten birds, reduce property values and make too much noise.
At Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in California, it is estimated that between 1,700 to 4,700 birds are killed each year. But Michael Daulton, director of conservation policy for the National Audubon Society, said it is not clear what effect individual wind turbines have on birds. The society suggests that homeowners learn whether they live close to a wildlife preserve that attracts a lot of birds, or are situated on a bird migratory route, as the Altamont wind farm is.
Turbines' effects on property values is not clear. Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said the effect of large wind farms on home values has been mixed, and added that there are no studies covering small turbines. When calculating the sale price of a home with a turbine, some brokers value them as they would a swimming pool, adding half of the purchase and installation costs to a home's price.
The noise and shadows turbines make have resulted in some concerns. In July, residents of Beach Haven Terrace, New Jersey, sued a neighbor, saying that the noise from his 35-foot turbine exceeded 50 decibels (the sound level of light traffic or an average home), and that it cast "strobe-like shadows" on their property for several hours a day.
When Kurt Karpavich, a resident of Watertown, Connecticut, an affluent rural town in Litchfield County, sought a variance from the town to put up a 55-foot turbine behind his house last summer, a dozen neighbors signed a petition against it and placed signs reading "No to the Windmill" on their lawns.
Jacqueline and David Daddona, who live next to Karpavich, are concerned that his turbine will cast shadows on their house, attract lightning and mar their view of the Naugatuck Valley. Others objected to the presence of a tower rising above the roofline.
"I'm not against the environment, but I just think there's a place for all this," said Daddona. "You shouldn't try to save a little bit on your electrical bill if it affects your neighbors."
Karpavich was granted the variance in early summer, but the Daddonas appealed the decision and sued the town planning and zoning appeals commission as well as Karpavich. The various parties have a January date to meet in Watertown Superior Court. Karpavich hopes the legal wrangling is done by this winter so he can install the turbine — the town's first — in the spring.
"It's been a tough fight," said Karpavich. "But it's more of a crusade now."
My husband, at 74, is the baby of his bridge group, which includes a woman of 85 and a man of 89. This challenging game demands an excellent memory (for bids, cards played, rules and so on) and an ability to think strategically and read subtle psychological cues. Never having had a head for cards, I continue to be amazed by the mental agility of these septua- and octogenarians.
The brain, like every other part of the body, changes with age, and those changes can impede clear thinking and memory. Yet many older people seem to remain sharp as a tack well into their 80s and beyond. Although their pace may have slowed, they continue to work, travel, attend plays and concerts, play cards and board games, study foreign languages, design buildings, work with computers, write books, do puzzles, knit or perform other mentally challenging tasks that can befuddle people much younger.
But when these sharp old folks die, autopsy studies often reveal extensive brain abnormalities like those in patients with Alzheimer's. Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas and Yaakov Stern at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center recall that in 1988, a study of "cognitively normal elderly women" showed that they had "advanced Alzheimer's disease pathology in their brains at death." Later studies indicated that up to two-thirds of people with autopsy findings of Alzheimer's disease were cognitively intact when they died.
"Something must account for the disjunction between the degree of brain damage and its outcome," the Columbia scientists deduced. And that something, they and others suggest, is "cognitive reserve."
Cognitive reserve, in this theory, refers to the brain's ability to develop and maintain extra neurons and connections between them via axons and dendrites. Later in life, these connections may help compensate for the rise in dementia-related brain pathology that accompanies normal aging.
Exercise: Mental ...
As Cathryn Jakobson Ramin relates in her new book, "Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife" (HarperCollins), the brains of animals exposed to greater physical and mental stimulation appear to have a greater number of healthy nerve cells and connections between them. Scientists theorize that this excess of working neurons and interconnections compensates for damaged ones to ward off dementia.
Observing this, Stern, a neuropsychologist, and others set out to determine how people can develop cognitive reserve. They have learned thus far that there is no "quick fix" for the aging brain, and little evidence that any one supplement or program or piece of equipment can protect or enhance brain function — advertisements for products like ginkgo biloba to the contrary.
Nonetheless, well-designed studies suggest several ways to improve the brain's viability. Though best to start early to build up cognitive reserve, there is evidence that this account can be replenished even late in life.
Cognitive reserve is greater in people who complete higher levels of education. The more intellectual challenges to the brain early in life, the more neurons and connections the brain is likely to develop and perhaps maintain into later years. Several studies of normal aging have found that higher levels of educational attainment were associated with slower cognitive and functional decline.
Dr. Scarmeas and Stern suggest that cognitive reserve probably reflects an interconnection between genetic intelligence and education, since more intelligent people are likely to complete higher levels of education.
But brain stimulation does not have to stop with the diploma. Better-educated people may go on to choose more intellectually demanding occupations and pursue brain-stimulating hobbies, resulting in a form of lifelong learning. In researching her book, Ramin said she found that novelty was crucial to providing stimulation for the aging brain.
"If you're doing the same thing over and over again, without introducing new mental challenges, it won't be beneficial," she said in an interview. Thus, as with muscles, it's "use it or lose it." The brain requires continued stresses to maintain or enhance its strength.
So if you knit, challenge yourself with more than simply stitched scarves. Try a complicated pattern or garment. Listening to opera is lovely, but learning the libretto (available in most libraries) stimulates more neurons. In my 60s I took up knitting and crocheting and am now learning Spanish. My husband is a fanatical puzzle-doer who recently added Sudoku to the crosswords and double-crostics he carries around with him.
In 2001, Scarmeas published a long-term study of cognitively healthy elderly New Yorkers. On average, those who pursued the most leisure activities of an intellectual or social nature had a 38 percent lower risk of developing dementia. The more activities, the lower the risk.
Long-term studies in other countries, including Sweden and China, have also found that continued social interactions helped protect against dementia. The more extensive an older person's social network, the better the brain is likely to work, the research suggests. Especially helpful are productive or mentally stimulating activities pursued with other people, like community gardening, taking classes, volunteering or participating in a play-reading group.
... and Physical
Perhaps the most direct route to a fit mind is through a fit body. As Sandra Aamodt, editor of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, recently stated on The New York Times's Op-Ed page, physical exercise "improves what scientists call 'executive function,' the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that's appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party."
Although executive function typically declines with advancing years, "elderly people who have been athletic all their lives have much better executive function than sedentary people of the same age," Dr. Aamodt and Dr. Wang reported.
And not just because cognitively healthy people tend to be more active. When inactive people in their 70s get more exercise, executive function improves, an analysis of 18 studies showed. Just walking fast for 30 to 60 minutes several times a week can help. And compared with those who are sedentary, people who exercise regularly in midlife are one-third as likely to develop Alzheimer's in their 70s. Even those who start exercising in their 60s cut their risk of dementia in half.
Exercise may help by improving blood flow (and hence oxygen and nutrients) to the brain, reducing the risk of ministrokes and clogged blood vessels, and stimulating growth factors that promote the formation of new neurons and neuronal connections.
The sign on the wall reads "Emergency Response Procedures for a Mosquito Release."
Among them are "Do Not Leave the Room or Open Any Doors!!!" and "Do Not Panic!"
Everything in the room is white, including the lab coats and surgical masks - for sterility, yes, but also the better to see a mosquito. Hanging next to the sign, in vivid orange, is the last line of defense, a brace of fly swatters.
This room, the mosquito dissection lab, in an unassuming biotech park in the Washington suburbs, is at the heart of one of the most controversial ideas in vaccine science.
Sanaria Inc. (meaning "healthy air," a play on the Italian "mal'aria" or "bad air") is making a vaccine the old-fashioned way, more or less as Louis Pasteur did.
Avoiding modern recombinant DNA technology that injects tiny fragments of parasite protein to prime an immune response, Sanaria uses the whole parasite, extracted by hand from the mosquito's salivary glands, and weakened so it cannot multiply.
Pasteur weakened rabies and anthrax bacilli by air-drying them. Sanaria uses gamma rays.
Because the world now fights malaria - ineptly - with nets, insecticides and drugs, a vaccine is desperately needed.
As many as 70 experimental programs exist around the world; eight rival projects are being supported by the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, which was established in 1999 with money from the Gates Foundation.
Sanaria's is the sole vaccine using the whole parasite. Injected into a capillary, it rides the bloodstream to the liver and starts making proteins. But after about three days, it stops, and it never floods the blood with copies of itself.
Radiation-weakened parasites have protected many lab mice and a handful of humans, but making a vaccine that can be mass-produced is a huge challenge.
The lucrative market is made up of tourists and the world's military forces. The larger goal is to protect the 3,000 children who die of malaria each day.
"We've got a lot of work to do, and we're extremely mindful of the fact that the road to success is filled with potholes," said the founder of Sanaria, Dr. Stephen Hoffman, a former chief of malaria research for the U.S. Navy.
Before he died two years ago, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, who invented 40 human and animal vaccines, called the Sanaria plan "the best show in town."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which gave Sanaria some of its early research money, said he was enthusiastic. "I have as much confidence in this as I do in any candidate," he said, acknowledging that major problems remained to be solved.
Peering through microscopes and wielding tweezers and a fine needle in surgeon-steady hands, six workers snick the heads off anopheles mosquitoes, tease out the transparent salivary glands and pop them into little vials. After the glands and saliva proteins are dissolved, the parasites will be frozen at extremely low temperatures. When enough batches are ready, clinical trials overseen by the navy will begin.
One recent morning, a reporter and photographers were allowed to view the last "engineering run" in the dissection room.
Nearby, in a room protected by five doors air-pressurized to prevent escapes, mosquitoes are being raised from sterilized eggs and fed infected blood.
On harvesting day, they are wheeled to the gamma-ray kiln in red picnic coolers, each batch in a small plastic pipe.
Just before dissection, they are popped into a freezer for a few minutes to stop their flying. The little pile of chilled mosquitoes is shaken into a dish of ethanol and divided into six portions.
The ethanol kills them without killing the parasites, explained B. Kim Lee Sim, the head of manufacturing. The dissectors work rapidly and with little talk, dismembering 80 female mosquitoes an hour.
"We need to get some music in here," Sim said. The males, which do not drink blood, "are just leftovers on the plate, waiting to get incinerated in the biohazard waste," said Richard Stafford, chief of quality control. Anyone with good eyesight and steady hands can be trained. "It's not as difficult as it would seem to a person who doesn't do it," said Sumana Chakravarty, head of the team.
The idea that parasites weakened by radiation could be a vaccine has been around since 1967, when Dr. Ruth Nussenzweig of the New York University Medical School showed that it worked in mice.
In the 1970s, she and others showed that it could work in humans.
Fourteen volunteers were vaccinated with weakened parasites and later exposed to malarial mosquitoes. Thirteen were protected, one so well that he then worked for three years in rural Ghana without taking any anti-malaria drugs.
But the research never proceeded, for the same reason that the number of tests was so small: It was impractical.
The parasites could not survive outside mosquitoes. So the "vaccination" had to be delivered by mosquito bite, not needle. And because just one parasite at a time fits down a proboscis, each bite delivers just a few.
To be sure of receiving enough material, volunteers endured 1,000 bites from irradiated mosquitoes, which took weeks. In the 1980s, said Dr. John McNeil, the scientific director of the vaccine initiative, the decoding of the mosquito genome opened new routes to make vaccines from bits of parasite surface protein that could be brewed quickly.
Early ventures did not work out. In 1987, Hoffman was one of six volunteers to be injected with an experimental vaccine, FSV-1, and then "challenged" by infected mosquitoes. He was so confident that he flew to San Diego for a medical conference.
"In the middle of giving a presentation," he recalled. "I had a rigor, uncontrolled shaking and chills. It took 36 hours to find the parasites, but I had malaria."
That vaccine, however, helped lead to the candidate now farthest along in African trials, RTS,S/AS02A, tentatively named Mosquirix, which has partly protected young children.
But nothing other than the whole parasite yet offers anything like 90 percent protection.
So in 2002 Hoffman founded Sanaria and obtained $15 million in backing from the infectious disease institute, the U.S. Army and the Institute for One World Health. But $29 million from the Gates Foundation last year finally allowed the building of a real assembly line.
There were many hurdles. Sanaria had to work out how to raise sterile mosquitoes, to supercharge them with far more parasites than nature does, to dissolve saliva proteins to avoid allergic reactions and to freeze and thaw parasites without exploding them.
"This is the evolution of the efforts of five years of very dedicated scientists working together," Sim said. "It's a robust, repeatable, reliable process."
Some scientists say the challenges remain insurmountable. At a recent meeting of the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Dr. Zarifah Reed, a parasite specialist in the World Health Organization's vaccine research initiative, said she was troubled that the mosquitoes had to be raised on human blood, which cannot be sterilized.
Even though mosquitoes do not inject one person's blood into another, there is the theoretical risk of passing on a virus, a prion or some other pathogen, she said.
Dr. Pierre Druilhe, a malaria expert at the Pasteur Institute in France and the inventor of a rival vaccine that he said was rejected for a Gates grant, was even more scathing.
"Even calling it a vaccine is a compliment," he said. "It has no chance of offering protection. It is like Captain Ahab in the movie trying to kill Moby Dick with his knife."
Besides the sterilization problem, he said, there was the risk that under-radiated parasites would cause malaria or that weakened parasites would not reach the liver. Cryogenically frozen vaccines, he added, will never be practical at sites with poor refrigeration.Sanaria's defenders said these were legitimate questions, but ones that had answers. Fauci, of the infectious disease institute, said the company had consulted the Food and Drug Administration about every aspect of sterility, "so quite frankly, I'm not impressed by that objection." Dr. Myron Levine, director of the center for vaccine development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said that any successful vaccine "would be used in places where kids' chances of dying of malaria are much greater than any theoretical risk of dying from a rare blood problem." How big a dose is needed and where it is injected are questions for the trials, the doctors said. And although cryogenic storage may be impractical in Africa now, such problems can be solved with money, Levine said, adding, "Those are the easiest ones."
Druilhe, in his critique, has said Hoffman was raising millions of dollars with unreal promises to sell Sanaria to private investors and cash out.
Hoffman responded: "Pierre and I are friends and colleagues, but we don't think alike about how to get to the end of the game.
"But let me ask a rhetorical question. If, as he says, this is never going to be a vaccine, who am I going to sell it to?"
Until then, he said, "I do what I do, and if it works, it works."
An undated artist's rendering shows Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis, a newly discovered extinct armadillo relative that lived about 18 million years ago in South America. Scientists searching for fossils high in the Andes mountains in Chile unearthed the remains of this tank-like mammal that grazed on grasses 18 million years ago in South America. It was about 200 pounds (90 kg) and 2-1/2 feet long (76 cm). It was a primitive member of a line of heavily armored mammals that culminated in the massive, impregnable Glyptodon, a two-tonne, 10-foot (3 meters) long beast covered in armored plates and a spiky tail that lived until 10,000 years ago.
"It looks different than almost anything out on the landscape today. There really isn't anything that's comparable today in terms of its body form," John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the scientists, said in a telephone interview.
The creature, Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis, was a primitive relative of a line of heavily armored mammals that culminated in the massive, impregnable Glyptodon, a two-metric ton, 10-foot(3-meter)-long beast covered in armored plates and a spiky tail.
Glyptodon, the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, died out 10,000 years ago. Parapropalaehoplophorus had similar traits, but was much smaller, at 200 pounds (90 kg) and 2-1/2 feet.
The findings were published on Wednesday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The creature is a member of a family called glyptodonts that originated in South America and later entered North America after the two continents joined 3 million years ago.
OPEN SAVANNAH
The scientists discovered the remains in 2004 working at 14,000 feet in the Andes.
The conditions -- thin air, scarce water and bitter cold -- presented challenges to the scientists. But they were not the conditions in which Parapropalaehoplophorus lived.
The scientists think the area has been thrust upward since this mammalian mini-tank lived there 18 million years ago. It was, they think, an open savannah about 3,000 feet above sea level, dotted with trees and home to grazing mammals.
"It was probably grazing on grasses. They occupied the role that on other continents sheep might have been occupying ecologically," Flynn said.
Remains of other animals living alongside it have been found, including a variety of extinct hoofed mammals, rodents and opossum relatives. No predators have been found nearby, but the scientists think that marsupial dog-like animals and gigantic flightless birds may have been on the prowl.
But any predator would have had a hard time making a meal of Parapropalaehoplophorus or any of the glyptodonts. They were the most heavily armored mammals ever to live on Earth -- similar in their armor to the spiky, formidable dinosaur Ankylosaurus that lived 50 million years earlier.
Parapropalaehoplophorus was covered by a shell of immovable armored plates, different from the hinged rows of plates on today's armadillos.
The scientists found remains of the shell, jaws, legs and backbone. It was one of the oldest members of the glyptodont family, and the discovery prompted the scientists to craft a new evolutionary tree for glyptodonts and their closest kin.
The Secret Life of Trees
Think of carbon dioxide, the main gas that causes global warming, and you'll likely picture a polluting factory in China; neon lights in Tokyo, an SUV sitting in traffic on the freeways of Santa Monica. But while industry, electricity and transportation all add to the greenhouse effect, there's another villain less well known: our forests. Or, rather, the lack of them. Forests, especially in the lush tropics, suck and store carbon, which is released when trees are cut down or burnt. At the current rate of destruction, deforestation is estimated to account for up to 20% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The amount of carbon stored in tropical forests is staggering — Brazil alone has nearly 50 billion tons — and its loss would ensure dramatic climate change. Scientists estimate that without a change in business as usual, more than half of the Amazon forest would be logged by 2030, releasing 20.5 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
While there are already international carbon trading schemes that help rich countries pay for reductions in carbon emissions from power or industry in poorer nations, no such mechanism exists for avoided deforestation. That nations are not compensated for protecting their forests has been a huge gap in anti-climate change efforts, and one that has to be resolved if the world is ever to achieve the kind of large-scale reductions in carbon emissions needed to avert catastrophic climate change. "Forests are the elephant in the living room," says Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Project and a forestry advocate. "Powerful — but unseen and unrecognized."
At the UN climate change summit in Bali — hosted by Indonesia, home to some of the world's most extensive tropical forests — that's begun to change. Though negotiators still need to work out the details, nations here agreed to put deforestation and forest degradation — the damage of woodlands, which can also release carbon — as a main element of the climate change deal that will eventually succeed the Kyoto Protocol. That will eventually open up a new market that could be worth billions, as industrialized nations that need to reduce carbon emissions could choose to pay tropical nations like Brazil and Indonesia to preserve their own forests. The private market — which has been the engine of forest destruction in the form of logging — could end up saving the trees. "We have to solve this market failure by turning to market measures," says Mitchell.
That works by putting a market value on standing forests. A tropical forest stores carbon, recycles moisture, provides a haven for biodiversity — but its only monetary value lies in being cut down. "The main trigger behind deforestation is that there's little or no value for standing forests," says Paulo Moutinho, who studies Brazilian forests for the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC). Put a value on forests in the carbon market, and suddenly it makes sense to leave a tree be, rather than clear it for cheap pastureland. The value doesn't even have to be that high — a new report by WHRC found that it might cost as little as $10 per sq km in some areas to make conservation pay better than destruction. "That's cheap by today's standards," says Daniel Nepsted, a senior scientist with WHRC.
Of course, a market works only if buyers knows they're getting what they're paying for, which requires accurate monitoring of the rate of deforestation. But attempting to track disappearing trees in jungles as vast as the Amazon — where 17 square miles are cut down each day — has long been considered all but impossible. There are also concerns about "leakage," the possibility that if one paid for a project to save trees in one area, logging would simply move to another, unprotected forest — and the saved CO2 would leak. But new space imaging, much of it done by the Japanese Land Observing Satellite (ALOS), can collect precise data on the rate and type of deforestation, even through clouds — pretty important, given that the Amazon alone recycles trillions of tons of moisture every year. And leakage can be avoided by assigning countrywide baselines for deforestation — a kind of emissions cap for forestry — so that projects can be judged on a national level; ensuring one patch of logging can't be replaced with another. Though the details still need to be worked, it looks like that's the sort of scheme that seems likely to emerge out of the Bali discussions.
As valuable as tropical forests may be to the world as a carbon sink, however, they matter even more to the people whose lives and livelihoods depend on them. Some environmentalists fear that a rush to cash in on forest conservation could end up hurting the indigenous people — whether the rubber tappers of Brazil or the forest dwellers of Aceh — that it should benefit most. After all, history as not been good to native people in the developing world who dwell on suddenly valuable land. The key will be to manage avoided deforestation projects properly, to make sure they are truly win-win. "The value of a forest is not only carbon sequestration, but biodiversity, and the lives of those in the forests themselves," says Manuel Silva de Cunha, president of the National Council of Rubber Tappers in Brazil. (Listen to Silva de Cunha talk about avoided deforestation on Greencast.) "We can't just forget those principles." If the Bali process works, the world may follow a new — and better — set of principles.
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