MIT's 2013 Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies - 3: Big Data from Cheap Phones

ORIGINAL: Tech Review
By David Talbot
April 23, 2013

Collecting and analyzing information from simple cell phones can provide surprising insights into how people move about and behave—and even help us understand the spread of diseases.



WHY IT MATTERS
Poor countries lack data-gathering infrastructure; phone data can provide it.

Breakthrough
Creating disease–fighting tools with cell-phone mobility data.

Key Players
• Caroline Buckee, Harvard University
• William Hoffman, World Economic Forum
• Alex Pentland, MIT
• Andy Tatem, University of Southampton

At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.

When she and her colleagues studied the data, she found that people making calls or sending text messages originating at the Kericho tower were making 16 times more trips away from the area than the regional average. What’s more, they were three times more likely to visit a region northeast of Lake Victoria that records from the health ministry identified as a malaria hot spot. The tower’s signal radius thus covered a significant waypoint for transmission of malaria, which can jump from human to human via mosquitoes. Satellite images revealed the likely culprit: a busy tea plantation that was probably full of migrant workers. The implication was clear, Buckee says. “There will be a ton of infected [people] there.”

Caroline Buckee

This work is now feeding into a new set of predictive models she is building. They show, for example, that even though malaria cases were seen at the tea plantation, taking steps to control malaria there would have less effect on the disease’s spread than concentrating those efforts at the source: Lake Victoria. That region has long been understood as a major center of malaria, but what hasn’t been available before is detailed information about the patterns of human travel there: how many people are coming and going, when they’re arriving and departing, which specific places they’re coming to, and which of those destinations attract the most people traveling on to new places.

Caroline Buckee, a Harvard epidemiologist, is using detailed data on population movements—gleaned from mobile phones— to build precise new tools for fighting the spread of malaria.

Existing efforts to gather that kind of travel data are spotty at best; sometimes public-health workers literally count people at transportation hubs, Buckee says, or nurses in far-flung clinics ask newly diagnosed malaria victims where they’ve been recently. “At many border crossings in Africa, they keep little slips of paper—but the slips get lost, and nobody keeps track,” she says. “We have abstractions and general models on travel patterns but haven’t been able to do this properly—ever.”

The data mining will help inform the design of new measures that are likely to include cheap, targeted campaigns of text messages—for example, warning visitors entering the Kericho tower’s signal zone to use bed netting. And it will help officials choose where to focus mosquito control efforts in the malarial areas. “You don’t want to be spraying every puddle for mosquito larvae all the time. But if you know there is a ton of importation from a certain spot, you want to increase your control program at that spot,” Buckee says. “And now I can pinpoint where the importation of a disease is especially important.”

Buckee’s most recent study, published last year in Science and based on records from 15 million Kenyan phones, is a result of a collaboration with her husband, Nathan Eagle, who has been working to make sense of cell-phone data for more than a decade. In the mid-2000s, after getting attention for his work mining data from the phones of volunteers at MIT, Eagle started to get calls from mobile carriers asking for insight into questions like why customers canceled their phone plans. Eagle began working with them. And when the couple spent 18 months in Africa starting in 2006—Buckee was doing work on the genetics of the malaria parasite—he studied call data for various purposes, trying to understand phenomena like ethnic divisions in Nairobi slums and the spread of cholera in Rwanda. Buckee’s results show what might be possible when the technology is turned on public-­health problems. “This demonstrated ‘Yeah, we can really provide not just insight, but actually something that is actionable,’” says Eagle, now CEO of Jana, which runs mobile-phone surveys in the developing world. “This really does work.”

“This is the future of epidemiology. If we are to eradicate malaria, this is how we will do it.”

That demonstration suggests how such data might be harnessed to build tools that health-care workers, governments, and others can use to detect and monitor epidemics, manage disasters, and optimize transportation systems. Already, similar efforts are being directed toward goals as varied as understanding commuting patterns around Paris and managing festival crowds in Belgium. But mining phone records could be particularly useful in poor regions, where there’s often little or no other data-­gathering infrastructure. “We are just at the start of using this data for these purposes,” says ­Vincent Blondel, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Louvain in Belgium and a leading researcher on data gleaned from cell phones. “The exponential adoption of mobile phones in low-income settings—and the new willingness of some carriers to release data—will lead to new technological tools that could change everything.”

Blank Slate

The world’s six billion mobile phones generate huge amounts of data—including location tracking and information on commercial activity, search history, and links in social networks. Innumerable efforts to mine the data in different ways are under way in research and business organizations around the world. And of those six billion phones, five billion are in developing countries. Many of them are cheap phones that can do little besides make calls and send text messages. But all such activity can be tracked back to cell-phone towers, providing a rough way to trace a person’s movements. Throw in the spread of mobile payment technology for simple commerce and you have the raw material for insights not only into epidemiology but into employment trends, social tensions, poverty, transportation, and economic activity.

This map, a product of cell-phone data analytics, shows the most important sources of malaria infections (darker shades)—taking into account the potential for further transmission caused by human travel—as well as the major destinations of people exposed to the disease (lighter shades). It can be used to determine where best to focus warnings and mosquito control techniques.

Animal Magnetism: How Animals Navigate.

ORIGINAL: SciShow

Hank tells us about new research into the question of how animals navigate from place to place - while the problem is still unresolved, we do have some hypotheses, and they all involve something called "magnetoreception."

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CITATIONS

• How salmon find their way home up river
• Mystery of bird navigation system still unsolved
• Scientists use trout to unlock the secrets of magnetic cells
• Arctic tern crowned king of commuters
• Magnetoreception in animals
• Longest animal migration measured, bird flies 40,000 miles a year
• Structure and function of the vertebrate magnetic sense
• Human cryptochrome exhibits light-dependent magnetosensitivity
• Can humans sense the earth’s magnetism?
• Humans may have ‘magnetic’ sixth sense

Boom in Wind Energy Threatens Migrating Hawks

ORIGINAL: Adventure-Journal

by JOHN BERRY HIGH COUNTRY NEWS

SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

On a Friday evening in the middle of August there isn’t much traffic along Franklin Boulevard, an old agricultural road that now cuts through 20 miles of Sacramento, California, suburbs. We’re looking for birders along its half-mile length but don’t see anybody or even a parked car.

When a farmer drives his pickup out of a field and stops to lock a gate, I walk over and ask whether he’s seen any hawks or bats in the neighborhood. He sure has, he says, because his family has farmed nearly 400 acres of this land for six generations. They’re Mexican free-tailed bats, he says, and there are 30,000 to 40,000 of them roosting under the bridge right now. The hawks gather when it’s time for the bats to emerge, and we’ll hear them, he assures me.

As if on cue, a Swainson’s hawk screams.

By the time we park and get across the road, four or five Swainson’s have begun circling low over the riparian oak woods. We stand at the bridge’s railing and peer at the floodplain below. A few bats shoot out. Soon a stream of the tiny mammals pours down from under the bridge, and the stream becomes a torrent. Bats swirl into a great boil before making a dash for the nearest oaks, where they rise into the canopy and form ribbons that wind westward into the orange sky.

That’s what the hawks were waiting for. I spot a bird positioning itself above the nearest ribbon of bats, and then it plunges through, talons outstretched. A bat, still flapping, gets caught in a talon. The hawk quickly dispatches the bat and veers back for another pass. Now there’s action all around with thousands of bats unspooling into four great ribbons to fly through this gauntlet of Swainson’s hawks. No, it isn’t only hawks. Two peregrine falcons have joined the hunt. Within minutes all the raptors have bulging crops.

Turning my binoculars toward the distant lead bats, now far out over the valley, I wonder how much longer this remarkable hunt can last. Despite the recession and the efforts of local conservation groups, Sacramento continues to sprawl, gobbling up farmland, grassland, and woodland to spit out legions of McMansions, retirement communities, and strip malls. With each advance of the developers’ bulldozers, Swainson’s hawk habitat is destroyed.

But a more immediate threat may come from the wind. Famous for their long-distance migration of more than 10,000 miles, Swainson’s hawks follow the wind as far south as the Argentine pampas. Energy companies also follow the wind. Seven wind farms have been built in the isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, near a stretch of the flyway used by the vast majority of Swainson’s hawks. Thirteen more are in development. Erecting thousands of wind turbines along a major migration corridor would seemingly fail a fundamental requirement for bird-safe wind energy: correct siting. A World Bank document about one of the Tehuantepec wind farms states that “avian impacts are not expected to be significant,” but a case study of another wind farm admits “concern about the potential cumulative impacts of the many additional wind farms planned in the same general area.”

Of course, the dangers posed by wind energy don’t lie just south of the border. California has its own wind farms, and some are notorious for their raptor mortality. Several wind farms — comprising more than 700 turbines — have already been constructed in the Montezuma Hills of Solano County, an important part of the Swainson’s hawk’s historic breeding range.

Reviewing a draft environmental impact report for the latest proposed wind farm there, Friends of the Swainson’s Hawk, a wildlife advocacy group, warns, “Over time, the project could have a significant impact on the range of the Swainson’s hawk in California through higher than natural mortality rates and loss of foraging habitat used by nesting Swainson’s hawks to feed their young.” The project would be relatively small at just 50 turbines on about 3,000 acres, but it can only ratchet up the pressure on this threatened, distinctive population of Swainson’s hawk. Some unknown number of birds will be killed each year; more habitat will be lost.

After 25 minutes, the bat exodus is coming to an end. We walk down the bridge, following the last bats across the Mokelumne, and almost run into a peregrine flying toward us. Startled, the bird banks and heads upriver into the night. We turn back toward the car. “Wow,” says my mom, “that was incredible.”

Environmental coverage made possible in part by support from Patagonia. For information on Patagonia and its environmental efforts, visit www.patagonia.com. In affiliation with High Country News. Photo by Shutterstock

A Sixth Sense

ORIGINAL: The Scorpion and the Frog

ancient Egyptians used carrier pigeons, the domesticated descendants of wild rock doves, to carry urgent messages to distant lands. They proved to be cheaper, faster and more efficient than human messengers and their use spread throughout the Mediterranean, central and northern Europe, and then throughout the world. Yet it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that scientists began to ask how they do it. To this day, how animals accurately navigate on long migrations is still one of biology’s great mysteries. 

A modern day rock dove.
Photo by Ingrid Taylar at Wikimedia.

That’s not to say science hasn’t made a lot of headway on this investigation. Scientists have found that some animals learn landmarks when they travel in one direction, and use those landmarks to find their way back. Some animals follow odor cues. But one of the more intriguing theories is that animals have an internal map and compass… but not a literal map and compass. The “map” is how the brain knows where things are in relation to each other and the “compass” is how the animal knows what direction it is facing with respect to where it wants to be.

How might such a compass work? One internal compass is a sun compass, in which an animal can use the position of the sun and the time of day to determine what direction it is facing. Some of the most convincing evidence supporting the existence of such a compass is that pigeons that are kept in a room with a time-shifted light cycle will fly in a predictably wrong direction on a sunny day. They will fly this wrong direction for long distances and even when they can see known landmarks. So pigeons clearly rely on the sun to achieve their great navigational feats… But what do they do on cloudy days… or at night? 

A cartoon of the Earth's magnetic field by Zureks at Wikimedia. In reality, the directions of magnetic pull are not this straight and uniform, but you get the idea.

Maybe pigeons have another compass based on the Earth’s magnetic field. Over 30 years ago, researchers found that racing pigeons (the new profession of decedents of carrier pigeons after mailmen in trucks and airplanes took their previous jobs) arrive at their destinations a little bit later when there have been recent magnetic storms due to sunspots. Pigeons also get disoriented in places with magnetic anomalies, such as areas with lots of iron ore. But experiments in which researchers have placed magnets or magnetic coils on the backs, wings, necks, heads or legs of pigeons have not had consistent effects, particularly on sunny days (when the sun compass likely comes into play).

Enter Cordula Mora and Michael Walker from the University of Aukland, New Zealand. Cordula and Michael reasoned that because the magnetic field gets weaker with distance and because we think that magnetoreception (the ability to perceive magnetic fields) occurs in or around the head, maybe these previous studies had inconsistent results because the magnets used were too far away and/or too weak to affect the receptors in a consistent way. So they did their own study with smaller, stronger magnets applied to pigeon beaks. 

Cordula and Michael glued magnets to the cere of pigeons. The diagram on the left shows how they did it and the photo on the right is a pigeon showing off his new nosepiece. (Check out the rock dove image above to see what a naked cere looks like). Diagram and image from Mora and Walker 2012 Animal Behaviour paper.

Cordula and Michael glued either a magnet or a brass weight (as a control) to the cere (the fleshy upper-part of the beak that contains the nostrils) of experienced racing pigeons right before a flight. In one experiment, researchers released the pigeons 11 consecutive times from the same place (called Gernsheim), and alternated whether they had a magnet or a brass weight glued to their cere. In a second experiment, the researchers released every bird once from each of 25 different places, each time with either a magnet or a brass weight glued to their cere. The birds were always flying to the same place (their loft), but the direction and distance they needed to fly was different for each of the release sites. Thus, the first experiment provides the birds with an opportunity to learn and compensate for any effect of the magnet, while the second experiment does not. All of the flights were done on sunny days. 

The places the researchers released the pigeons from were all different directions and distances from their home loft (at the center). Diagram from Mora and Walker 2012 Animal Behaviour paper.

For each flight, the researchers watched the bird through binoculars until it vanished from view, at which point they recorded the vanishing bearing (the direction the pigeon was flying before it vanished from view). They also timed how long it took the bird to return to the loft and recorded any instances in which the bird did not return to the loft.

The pigeons with magnets consistently flew just a little to the right of pigeons with brass weights. The effect was very small (ranging from 11° to 22°), but it almost always happened, regardless of the bird or the release site. The effect was also consistent over consecutive years, even in birds tested repeatedly from the same release site. However, although the vanishing bearing of birds with magnets was regularly to the right of the birds with brass weights, the magnets did not prevent the pigeons from finding their loft and did not even cause them to take longer to get home. This shows that some time after the vanishing distance, the pigeons with magnets compensated for their originally slightly-off bearing.

The fact that the pigeons with magnets almost always started off flying too-far right suggests that they do have and use a magnetic compass, or perhaps even a magnetic map. But the fact that they always got back to the loft just as fast as their brass weight carrying counterparts shows that they also rely on other mechanisms, like a sun compass and landmarks. Perhaps magnetoreception is only important to determine take-off direction. Or alternatively, maybe the birds learn to ignore the confusing signals of the magnets after awhile.

We still have a lot to learn about how animals use magnetic fields. And how does magnetoreception even work? How animals navigate over long distances is still a great mystery, but scientists are on the case.

Want to know more? Check these out:

1. Mora, C.V., & Walker, M.M. (2012). Consistent effect of an attached magnet on the initial orientation of homing pigeons, Columbia livia. Animal Behaviour, 84, 377-383 DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.05.005

2. Wiltschko, R., & Wiltschko, W. (2003). Avian navigation: from historical to modern concepts. Animal Behaviour, 65, 257-272 DOI: 10.1006/anbe.2003.2054

3. Bingman, V. P., & Cheng, K. (2005). Mechanisms of animal global navigation: comparative perspectives and enduring challenges. Ethology Ecology & Evolution, 17, 295-318 DOI: 10.1080/08927014.2005.9522584

4. Winged Migration, a fantastic movie by Jacques Perrin

Desplazados ambientales crecen al ritmo del deterioro del planeta

ORIGINAL: El Colombiano

Por Daniel Rojas Arboleda

15 de julio de 2012

Un problema del desplazamiento ambiental es que la mayor parte de las poblaciones afectadas carecen de leyes que las protejan. FOTO SHUTTERSTOCK.

Hoy existen 25 millones de refugiados por fenómenos naturales. En 2050 serán 200 millones.

Hay un tipo de desplazamiento global que suele ser opacado por aquellos que surgen a causa de la violencia y de la falta de oportunidades económicas, pero que resulta tan preocupante que hasta Naciones Unidas, por no citar a otros cientos de organizaciones independientes, lanzó un grito de alerta.

Se trata de la migración por causas medioambientales, un fenómeno que, según ese organismo, hoy deja 25 millones de refugiados en el mundo.

En su informe de 2011, Olivier De Schutter, relator especial de la ONU para el derecho a la alimentación, enumeró como principales causas las sequías, las inundaciones y otros problemas meteorológicos ocasionados por el calentamiento global.

Pero el documento va más allá. Reveló otros fenómenos menos visibles como el aumento de enfermedades tropicales y la pérdida de biodiversidad, y proyectó también cifras impactantes, según las cuales habrá, para el año 2050, 600 millones de personas afectadas por el hambre ocasionada por los daños que causa el cambio climático a la agricultura, un fenómeno que explica José Franklin Ruiz Murcia, meteorólogo del Ideam.

"Estamos atravesando por un fenómeno de variabilidad climática, de frío en el norte y calor en el sur, que obedece a las estaciones pero que está afectando los valores históricos de precipitación", dijo el experto a EL COLOMBIANO.

En total, según los cálculos, en 2050 habrá 200 millones de desplazados climáticos un estimado bastante conservador si se tienen en cuenta el avance de los desiertos y la pérdida acelerada de suelo fértil que afecta sobre todo al sur de Asia y al centro y sur de África.

Tom Kucharz, especialista de Ecologistas en Acción, "el nivel de población afectada es mucho mayor al estimado. Uno de los procesos más graves es el de la desertificación, es decir, la pérdida de suelo fértil que se produce por falta de agua, o largas épocas de sequía seguidas por fuertes precipitaciones, que se llevan todo el terreno fértil".

Kucharz señaló la agricultura industrial como otro fenómeno que genera grandes corrientes migratorias.

"La agricultura de monocultivos de soya ha arrasado grandísimos ecosistemas. Los de palma aceitera han afectado grandes zonas de Indonesia o Malasia, donde están desplazando a comunidades indígenas campesinas para librar los bosques en los que trabajan", dijo el experto a Efe.

La amenaza es global y serán los países insulares de Oceanía los primeros en sentir el golpe del aumento en el nivel del mar producido por el calentamiento global, las lluvias y el derretimiento de los polos, otra tragedia inminente.

"Al haber más calor encerrado se intensificará la evaporación, por lo que tendremos sequías severas en algunas regiones e inundaciones en otras. Por su posición los polos son más sensibles", explicó a este diario José Musse, fundador de la revista y sitio web Desastres.org

La situación es tal, que varios Gobiernos de entre las cerca de 30.000 islas de Micronesia, Polinesia e Indonesia, han solicitado a Nueva Zelanda y Australia acoger sus poblaciones, previendo que en el corto plazo ya no puedan vivir en sus tierras.

Otros factores como la minería a cielo abierto, que según Kucharz afecta al sudeste asiático, África, Sudamérica y Canadá se suma a los megaproyectos promovidos por diferentes Gobiernos en todos los continentes, como la construcción de carreteras, gaseoductos y represas.

"La construcción de represas causa uno de los más amplios grupos de desplazamientos ambientales. En Brasil o India, como también otros muchos países africanos, hay decenas de miles de desplazados de comunidades campesinas indígenas que tienen que dejar sus tierras porque, simplemente, están siendo inundadas", indicó el ecologista.

Un problema social

Al aumento en el número de refugiados se suma a los cerca de 1.000 millones de personas que sufren diferentes situaciones de desnutrición y los más de 27 millones de desplazados en el mundo por la violencia y la falta de oportunidades, según cifras de la ONU.

Tales desplazamientos, de acuerdo con el informe de esa organización, siguen patrones en los que el flujo va primero del campo a la ciudad y, luego, de las ciudades a otros países o continentes.

El aumento en la población en comunidades que no tienen ni la infraestructura ni la capacidad económica para recibir a la nueva población genera choques sociales y aumenta los factores de riesgo de criminalidad y violencia.

El internacionalista mexicano, Jesús Velasco Grajales, puso como ejemplo de este caso el de los mexicanos que cruzan hacia Estados Unidos y, cada vez con más frecuencia, se quedan viviendo allí, a pesar de las duras leyes contra su presencia.

"Antes, los inmigrantes mexicanos eran temporales: llegaban a E.U., trabajaban un rato y se pasaban de nuevo a México para poder estar con su familia una temporada. Hoy, la gente que cruza ya no intenta salir tan fácilmente del país", concluyó.

¿Qué sigue?

MOVIMIENTOS MIGRATORIOS

Los movimientos migratorios por fenómenos naturales siguen unas pautas de orientación en cada continente. Mientras que en las zonas andinas se desplazan hacia las ciudades, desde la zona de Centroamérica se dirigen hacia el norte de América. Los flujos migratorios en los países subsaharianos se dirigen hacia el sur, por ejemplo hacia Sudáfrica, o hacia el norte, a los países del sur del Mediterráneo. Las migraciones del sudeste asiático, se orientan hacia Nueva Zelanda o Australia. A esto se suma el fenómeno de especulación con la tierra que generó la crisis inmobiliario de 2007.

Para saber más

AMENAZAS POR CADA REGIÓN

Asia Pacífico:

• ciclones
• aumento en el nivel del mar
• construcción de represas
• desertificación
• erosión
• inundaciones y mala disposición de desechos
• aguas residuales

Asia Central:

• estrés hídrico
• desertificación
• pruebas nucleares
• contaminación del suelo
• mala disposición de basuras
• terremotos
• derrumbes

Europa y Rusia:

• desertificación
• escasez de agua
• destrucción de fuentes de agua
• construcción de represas

Latinoamérica y el Caribe:

• inundaciones
• aumento en las precipitaciones de agua
• sequías
• derretimiento de glaciares
• deforestación
• escasez de agua
• degradación de suelos
• tormentas tropicales
• derrumbes
• inundaciones

Este Medio y Norte de África:

• escasez de agua
• desertificación

África subsahariana:

• suelos poco fértiles
• inundaciones
• sequías
• deforestación
• pastoreo excesivo
• degradación de la tierra

Claves

UN PROBLEMA CON MUCHAS FACETAS

1- Los ciclones son una amenaza grande en

• Centroamérica
• India
• Vietnam
• Somalia y Tanzania.

2- En África es grave la especulación con los precios de producción de alimentos básicos. 

3- En Canadá y E.U. viven comunidades esquimales que deben reubicarse por causa del deshielo.

Elephant Underpass Reuniting Kenya Herds

ORIGINAL: NatGeo

Photograph courtesy Lewa Wildlife Conservancy

Road to Recovery?

An African elephant approaches an underpass beneath the busy Nanyuki-Meru road in northern Kenya in a recent picture.

The first of its kind for elephants, the underpass will ideally provide a safe corridor for the large mammals to move throughout the Mount Kenya region (map), where highways, fences, and farmlands have split elephant populations, according to Geoffrey Chege, chief conservation officer of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, a Kenya-based nonprofit.

Without the underpass, animals that try to move between isolated areas often destroy fences and crops—leading to conflicts with people. (Related pictures: "'Ghost Chili' Scares Off Elephants.")

Since its completion in late 2010, the underpass has been a "tremendous success"—hundreds of elephants have been spotted walking through the corridor, according to the conservancy.

First seeing pictures of the elephants using the underpass "was an awesome moment," Chege said by email.

—Christine Dell'Amore

The Mount Kenya-Lewa Wildlife Conservancy Corridor Project is a joint effort of the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, the Kenya Wildlife Service, Kisima Farm, Marania Farm, the Bill Woodley Mount Kenya Trust, and Ngare Ndare Forest Trust.

“La economía ha roto definitivamente con la naturaleza”

ORIGINAL: Rebelion.org

05-04-2012

La ecologista y antropóloga Yayo Herrero imparte el sexto taller de la Academia de Pensamiento Crítico de Socialismo 21 y El Viejo Topo

El marco del debate económico, entre neoliberales y keynesianos, deja poco espacio para otras propuestas más a la izquierda. Por ejemplo, las que proceden del ecologismo radical, hoy más necesarias que nunca ya que, como afirma la antropóloga, profesora de la UNED y especialista en Ecología y Feminismo, Yayo Herrero, “la economía actual, vinculada a las finanzas y a las bolsas, se ha desligado totalmente del mundo físico, de la naturaleza”.

Yayo Herrero ha impartido el sexto taller de la Academia de Pensamiento Crítico organizada por Socialismo 21 y El Viejo Topo, en la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. “Hombres y mujeres frente a la crisis” es el título de la conferencia desarrollada por la ecofeminista.

Ni siquiera, como explica Jorge Riechmann, los indicadores de los modelos económicos vigentes pueden distinguir “lo que nos acaricia de lo que nos aplasta”. ¿Cómo decrece el suelo fértil? ¿Hay que producir bombas u hortalizas? ¿Es el crecimiento económico lo que determina la vida? Yayo Herrero considera que el Producto Interior Bruto (PIB) no contabiliza cuestiones vitales, como el ciclo del agua o las tareas relacionadas con la crianza”. Al contrario, “contabiliza la destrucción –las guerras o las enfermedades como un factor generador de riqueza”. “Y es con estos indicadores con los que nos pretenden sacar de la crisis”. La crítica ecofeminista del capitalismo considera éste como un iceberg. En la punta afloran las bolsas, los mercados y el suflé financiero. Por debajo, el expolio de recursos naturales, la extracción de plusvalías y la incautación de un volumen ingente de trabajo que, en las sociedades patriarcales, realizan las mujeres. De hecho, estos trabajos que realizan las mujeres son los que garantizan la reproducción social y la existencia de una vida digna.

En la actual coyuntura de crisis hay un argumento inapelable y que, según Yayo Herrero, es como “mentar la bicha”: los límites físicos de la naturaleza y los de nuestros cuerpos, que por definición son vulnerables. Por debajo de la actual crisis financiera hay otra ecológica, “de la que no se habla”. Por ejemplo, vivimos en un mundo que “come petróleo”, afirma la antropóloga, sin tener en cuenta que se ha llegado a la extracción del 50% de las reservas mundiales, singularmente, del petróleo más fácil de extraer y con mayor capacidad energética. La cantidad de tecnología y las inversiones requeridas para obtener el combustible fósil hace que cada vez sea menos rentable.

Las mismas limitaciones físicas del planeta afectan a la energía nuclear, a la que el gobierno del PP pretende dar un impulso. Además de los habituales argumentos contrarios, centrados en la generación de residuos y los peligros en sí de esta energía, cabe agregar los límites de las reservas de uranio. Otro tanto sucede con el calentamiento global: “Funcionamos con la mentalidad de que el planeta es un mecano sobre el que rigen leyes científicas, cuando no es así; cuenta con sus propias pautas y ritmos, que ahora estamos cambiando”, afirma Yayo Herrero.

La crisis ecológica también profundiza la brecha social entre el centro y la periferia del mundo. Según la antropóloga ecofeminista, “mientras el norte se ha convertido en un gran centro consumidor de productos y generador de residuos, el sur pasa a ser una gran área de extracción de materias primas y el gran vertedero del planeta”. Y este modelo, en ningún caso resulta exportable. No hay más que considerar los datos de la “huella ecológica”: Si todos los habitantes del mundo consumieran

• lo que un español medio, serían necesarios tres planetas como el actual; 
• entre cinco y siete si se toma como patrón un norteamericano medio, y 
• cuatro veces un ciudadano noruego.

El Calentamiento Global cambia el Comportamiento de las Aves

ORIGINAL: RT

26 feb 2012

Imagen: CORBIS

El calentamiento global cambia el comportamiento de las aves. Científicos de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte (EE. UU.) revelaron que el aumento de la temperatura en un grado hace a las aves volver a sus ‘tierras natales’ entre un día y seis días más temprano. Además cambian la ruta de su viaje.

Durante 10 años los ornitólogos investigaron cómo migran las aves que habitan en el este de Norteamérica, con la ayuda del proyecto voluntario ´eBird`. El programa cuenta con 48 millones de observaciones realizadas por 35.000 voluntarios, que fijaron el paso de 18 especies de aves.

Los investigadores concluyeron que en primavera las aves vuelven a Norteamérica en promedio más temprano, a medida que el clima es más cálido.

Según los biólogos, durante la migración las aves tienen unas condiciones de vida más difíciles, en muchas ocasiones sufren la falta de comida. Éste hecho a su vez, puede llevar a la extinción de algunas especies y a la evolución de otras.

“El momento cuando las aves empiezan y terminan su migración influye mucho en su vida, porque aunque sean pequeñas correcciones en su ´horario de vida`, significa que comienzan a criar en otro tiempo, sin tener todo lo necesario para hacerlo. Tales fallas puedan poner en peligro la vida de futuras generaciones y llevar cuando menos la disminución de la especie,” comenta Allen H. Hurlbert, el jefe del proyecto.

Actualmente el calentamiento global es uno de los problemas más discutidos. Según la prognosis de los científicos, en los próximos 50 años la temperatura promedio del aire podría aumentar entre 2 y 3 grados centígrados.