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Si le texte de l’eurocrate me paraît déjà décalé tellement il enfonce une porte ouverte, vos commentaires atteignent des sommets dans le psychédélique. Avez-vous imaginé que la baisse de consommation ne touche que les plus pauvres? Qu’il n’y a pas de crédit qui couvre la consommation de combustibles et carburants? Et que ce sont les plus pauvres qui réduisent leur consommation par nécessité?
Je pense qu’en ce qui concerne le virtuel, vous en rajoutez une couche d’une façon inattendue.
Allons, c’était un bon sujet à aborder, mais il me semble que vous êtes cette fois passé à côté de la question.
Bonne continuation d’un fidèle lecteur.

Votrer commentaire sur l’extrait et la citatiion de Toqueville (DA)ne colle pas très bien. Désolé. D’accord avec le fast-food intellectuel, d’accord avec la dictature stupide des intellectuels actuels (pauvres) mais ne faites pas comme eux, Toqueville mérite mieux que cela.

washingtonpost.com
Critical U.S. Supply Line Is Disrupted

By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 1, 2005; A01

The effects of the monster storm that devastated the Gulf Coast spread through the nation’s economy yesterday, disrupting shipping and rail networks and sending prices for lumber, coffee and other commodities soaring.

Hurricane Katrina is likely to drag down U.S. economic growth in the months ahead, analysts said, threatening what has been a robust expansion.

Katrina’s economic effects may be more lasting than those that usually follow big storms, economists and businesspeople said yesterday, owing to the severity of the damage and the unique geography of the New Orleans region. The storm hit a chokepoint in the U.S. economy—a concentration of ports, rail lines, barge traffic and major highways making up one of the nation’s major trade hubs.

New Orleans is underwater, and its future is uncertain—as is that of the $49 billion in goods, 60 percent of U.S. grain exports, and 26 percent of the nation’s natural gas supply and crude oil that flow through nearby ports each year.

“The Mississippi River is the aorta of the American economy, and New Orleans is the access point to it,” said Al DeLattre, a supply-chain specialist with consulting firm Accenture Ltd.

In an attempt to fend off disruptions to the nation’s fuel supply resulting from the storm, President Bush yesterday moved to release at least 1 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a 700 million-barrel emergency stockpile. Oil prices fell slightly yesterday on the news.

Signs emerged yesterday of the havoc the storm wreaked on the companies and transportation lines that supply the nation, with dozens of firms disclosing the scope of damages at facilities near the Gulf of Mexico or simply stating they could not yet say what that scope might be.

Union Carbide Corp. officials could not even get to their chemicals plant in Hahnville, La., the firm said yesterday, and it will probably take weeks to resume operations there. Chiquita Brands International Inc. reported severe damage at the Gulfport, Miss., facility where it stores one-fourth of the bananas it imports from Central America.

Yellow Roadway Corp., one of the nation’s largest trucking companies, has 20 trucking terminals in the area affected by the storm, some of which may have been destroyed, chief executive William D. Zollars said yesterday. With major bridges near New Orleans damaged, the company is routing trucks hours out of their way.

Rail carriers Norfolk Southern Corp., Union Pacific Corp. and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. have all stopped freight traffic into the afflicted area. And shipping experts said it is hard to predict how long it will take the Port of New Orleans and other nearby ports to reopen, given that they may need to dredge new channels and make major repairs. Efforts to reach officials of the Port of New Orleans were unsuccessful yesterday.

“I don’t think there is any historical precedent for an incident of this scale,” said C. James Kruse, director of the Center for Ports and Waterways at the Texas Transportation Institute.

The damage might even be felt at the breakfast table. New Orleans warehouses hold about a quarter of the nation’s raw coffee, 211 million pounds. Concerns that importers will have difficulty rerouting coffee shipments and that large amounts of inventory have been lost pushed the price of coffee for December delivery up to $1.01 a pound yesterday on the New York Board of Trade, an increase of more than 3 cents, after gains Monday and Tuesday.

The sugar Americans add to their coffee could get more expensive too; Department of Agriculture officials are sufficiently concerned about tight sugar supplies because of Katrina that they raised import quotas on refined sugar on Tuesday.

Exporters of U.S. goods, especially farmers in the Midwest, may have the most to lose if New Orleans area ports are out of service for a prolonged period. The harvest is just beginning—the time when grain and other major commodities for export are carried by barge down the Mississippi River, then deposited in cargo ships to be carried overseas.

Exporters of manufactured goods might simply reroute and ship goods out of Houston or Tampa. Agricultural exporters have fewer options in shipping corn, wheat or soybeans. Moving the crops by train might cost up to five times as much, and even then, other ports often lack the specialized warehouses and equipment needed to handle the crops. If it takes more than a few weeks to fix the ports, a glut of grain and widespread spoilage could yield a disastrous season for farmers.

“If this is a week-long problem, it’s probably not too damaging,” said J.B. Penn, undersecretary of agriculture for farm and foreign agricultural services. “But if it’s much longer, then it’s a real problem.”

In most severe weather events, a perverse bright side to the economic outlook often emerges. After major storms such as Hurricane Andrew, an economic boom often begins within a few weeks as residents with insurance checks begin rebuilding their houses. Already, in anticipation of such a boom, lumber prices have risen. Yesterday, prices for lumber to be delivered in September rose $10, to $297 per thousand board feet.

But that effect may be slower coming this time around, economists and construction executives said, because of the sheer severity of the damage. “If this was a normal hurricane in Florida, you’d have construction people in pickup trucks heading south right now to help clean up and rebuild,” said Steven Cochrane, chief regional economist of Economy.com Inc. “Instead you have the governor saying to stay away.”

Reconstruction in the worst-hit parts of New Orleans and neighboring areas will have to wait until levees can be rebuilt and floodwaters pumped out, and there are no reliable predictions on when that will occur. Cochrane guesses that rebuilding—and its eventual impact in generating jobs and growth—will not come until next year.

Russell L. Burns, an executive vice president of Turner Construction Co., one of the largest nationwide general contractors, said the firm is not yet pursuing business rebuilding the Gulf Coast; it is too busy trying to figure out how its crews might help get hospitals running and bring in equipment to clear streets in the affected area. “We are not even really thinking about the reconstruction process right now,” Burns said.

Some economists said gross domestic product, a broad measure of U.S. output, will grow more slowly in the third and fourth quarters of 2005 than they had expected. For example, John Silvia, chief economist of Wachovia Corp., lowered his GDP growth forecast by 0.5 percentage points to 3.1 percent for the quarter ending Sept. 30.

“There’s a lot of lost output here,” he said. “The railroads are not working, shipping up and down the Mississippi isn’t working, there’s a huge loss of personal income in the Louisiana-Mississippi-Alabama region. People just don’t have jobs. There’s no jobs, no profits in that region for the next few months.”

Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, acknowledged that the hurricane will cause economic distress but predicted in an interview on CNBC yesterday that those effects will not be long-lasting. “My guess is though that as long as we find that the energy impact is only temporary, and there is no permanent damage to the infrastructure . . . the effects in the overall economy will be fairly modest,” Bernanke said.

While economists pondered the storm’s impact on supply chains and aggregate demand, the businesspeople at the center of the storm have more narrow concerns.

Cindy Goodwin, 47, abandoned the Kenner, La., hair salon she has worked in for 25 years and owned for the past seven, on Saturday afternoon. She has no flood insurance and no idea if the 1,100-square-foot shop still stands.

“I’m not sure if it’s a few broken windows and water we can mop up, or worse,” Goodwin said yesterday in Shreveport, La., where she is staying with relatives. Her 20-year-old daughter, Angele Goodwin, fears business will be tough in the months ahead regardless of the salon’s condition. Customers “will want to pay $5 to get just a trim, rather than $50 for a perm or $60 for highlights,” she said.

Cindy Goodwin added, “We’ve got little old ladies. We’re not a froufrou kind of shop. Maybe we should consider going down a bit in our pricing until everybody gets back on their feet.”

Dana Hedgpeth, Amy Joyce, Nell Henderson, Caroline Mayer and Ellen McCarthy contributed to this article. Hedgpeth reported from Shreveport, La.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/31/AR2005083102755.html?referrer=email

Analyse de Barthélémy Courmont (IRIS)
IRIS (Paris) – Les révélations concernant le dopage à l’EPO du champion cycliste américain Lance Armstrong, septuple vainqueur du Tour de France, agitent depuis maintenant plusieurs jours non seulement le monde du sport, comme on s’en serait douté en pareil cas, mais également, et cela étonne beaucoup plus, celui de la politique.

En mettant en cause les laboratoires et les médias français, Lance Armstrong a soudainement ravivé les rancunes en marge du déclenchement des opérations militaires en Irak au printemps 2003, entre la France et les Etats-Unis.

Les médias américains, CNN et Fox News en tête, se sont emparés de l’affaire pour rappeler l’animosité presque « clinique » des Français envers les Etats-Unis et ses champions les plus illustres. Dans un talk show sur la chaîne télévisée américaine la plus célèbre au monde, celui de Larry King, diffusé dans le monde entier, Armstrong a pointé du doigt la jalousie des Européens, les Français en particulier, à l’égard de l’Amérique et de ses Boys.

Cette affaire est aussi l’occasion pour les amateurs de «french-bashing» (taper sur les Français) de reprendre leurs attaques. Le site internet de discussions «fuckfrance.com» se délecte ainsi de l’affaire, en proposant de nouveaux messages d’insultes aussi stupides qu’intolérables. Le champion américain serait ainsi victime d’un complot fomenté par les autorités françaises… Des «freedom fries» à l’affaire « Lance contre la France », le niveau ne semble pas avoir franchement été élevé.

L’« alibi français », si utile dans les moments difficiles (la guerre contre l’Irak, les accusations lors de la campagne électorale 2004, ou le scandale Newsweek), fait son grand retour, et rappelle ainsi, si cela était nécessaire, que l’animosité à l’ égard de la France reste très profonde dans les milieux conservateurs américains, prêts a profiter de la moindre occasion pour faire taire toutes les critiques sur leurs actions, et mobiliser l’attention sur leur ennemi préféré. Les médias américains sont la preuve la plus éclatante de ce malaise qui n’est pas à leur avantage.

Sur un plan plus sportif (mais s’agit-il de sport ?), les accusations de Lance Armstrong à l’égard de ceux qui mettent en doute son honnêteté sont, sinon fondées, au moins compréhensibles de la part d’un sportif sur la défensive. En revanche, le fait de vouloir s’en prendre à la France de façon si générale semble aussi ridicule que mal approprié. Faut-il rappeler ici que l’autre coureur américain vainqueur du Tour de France, Greg Lemond, qui s’était de surcroît illustré en battant en 1989 de seulement huit secondes le français Laurent Fignon, est adoré du public français, qui ne lui en a jamais tenu rigueur. Mais, à la différence du champion des années 80, Lance Armstrong a récemment affirmé avoir quelques ambitions politiques. Cette affaire est ainsi non seulement l’occasion pour lui d’afficher ses couleurs (on l’a notamment vu en compagnie de George W. Bush à Crawford), et de couper les liens sportifs qui semblaient l’unir à la France pour entrer dans cette catégorie d’agitateurs politiques qui, d’un coté ou de l’autre de l’Atlantique, déçoivent bien plus qu’ils ne rassemblent, et empoisonnent les relations entre Paris et Washington. On aurait sans doute espéré mieux de la part d’un ancien sportif.

Barthélémy Courmont est chercheur à l’IRIS. Il a écrit récemment L’empire blessé : Washington à l’épreuve de l’asymétrie, Montréal, PUQ, 2005 et L’Amérique de Bush: les enjeux d’une réélection, Paris, CVMag, 2005.

http://fr.news.yahoo.com/050901/295/4k9w2.html

Gore vidal, un des rares Etats-Uniens encore digne d’être lu,  répond à une question sur la religion aux U.S. :
” “Que pensez-vous de la religion, aujourd’hui, outre-Atlantique ?

C’est l’œuvre du diable. Il n’y a peut-être pas de bon Dieu, mais il y a sûrement un diable et sa passion dominante, c’est la religion des fondamentalistes protestants. Je crois que mon pays commence, à de nombreux égards, à ressembler à une théocratie. Par le biais de la télévision, les évangélistes lèvent des fonds considérables qu’ils investissent ensuite pour faire élire des obscurantistes attardés. Comme il n’y a pas de système d’éducation publique, la grande majorité de mes concitoyens est d’une ignorance à faire peur. Ils ne savent pas où est l’Irak. Ils prennent tout ce que le gouvernement leur dit pour parole d’Evangile. Bon sang, n’importe quel pays normal se serait révolté contre cette guerre ! Mais nous sommes un pays anormal, gouverné par des experts en publicité mensongère.”“

Saluons la clairvoyance et le franc-parler de Vidal. Bien rares sont ceux, outre-Atlantique qui osent tenir des propos aussi fermes contre la soupe judo-chrétienne réformée à la sauce baptiste ou évangéliste (dont la variante romaine actuellement assaisonnée d’un zeste d’opus dei n’est pas moins nauséabonde, d’ailleurs).

Gore Vidal ne se fait évidemment aucune illusion sur ce que l’oppositon démocrate pourrait changer :

“Et le Parti démocrate ?

Si vous arrivez à le trouver, j’y jetterai un œil… Mais il n’existe pas.”“

L’ensemble de l’interview dont ces lignes sont extraites se trouve dns Le Monde du 31/08/05 en ligne (provisoirement) à http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-684157@51-676746,0.html
Reconnaissons au passage qu’il arrive encore une fois de temps en temps que Le Monde (l’une ou l’autre de ses pages, en tous cas) présente de l’intérêt.

L’anti-américanisme primaire est tel qu’il va se loger jusque dans les points ou technologiquement, ils sont quand même à quelques lieues devant nous ces arriérés qui n’ont pas d’Histoire (pensez 230 ans) appelés les Américains (Tiens, et les sud-Africains : 17ème siècle - les Australiens : 1770, voire 1901 si en s’en tient à l’union des 6 provinces - ou les Canadiens : 1867…).  En voici l’exemple type ! Nous aussi, on a nos gaffeurs patentés. Lors du “marché du siècle”, en 1976, pour le remplacement du F-104, La direction de Dassault, n’avait’elle pas déclaré que le F-16 n’était qu’un démonstrateur qui n’avait pas fait ses preuves face au Mirage F1. Qu’en tant que démonstrateur technologique, il faudrait tellement de modifs pour le passer à la série que les Américains n’étaient vraiment pas bien inspirés. Même les commandes de vol électriques, le siège inclinable de 14 à 30°, le mini-manche latéral pour ne citer qu’eux étaient qualifiés de gadgets sans utilité opérationnelle et sans avenir. Sa vitesse maxi de mach 2.05 avait été, force schémas et grands spécialistes à l’appui, remise en question à cause de sa veine d’air fixe, dont personne ne connaissait d’ailleurs la géométrie. Faut dire qu’à l’époque la CAO, on croyait que c’était une dance africaine… Les mêmes avaient également prédit un beau flop financier… On sait ce que l’avenir nous à montré... Mais ces pauvres Américains, quels abrutis !!! Les technologies furtives ? Nous les Français, on a le radar miracle, vous allez voir ce que vous allez voir ! Tiens on en parle plus… Ah, au fait, le Rafale doit une partie de son retard de mise en service à l’intégration non-pévue au départ de technologies furtives, vous le savez je présume… Peut être pour vérifier si notre fameux radar fonctionne vraiment… Et je ne parle pas du F-117 qu’on a dit involable, ni du B2, ni du SR-71 dont on ne croyait pas aux performances, mais dont on avalisait celles du “FOXBAT”. Curieux. Le JSF. Les contre-vérités que vous énoncez m’incitent à réagir. Non pas sur la forme (pauvre), ni l’esprit (étroit) donc Français. Mais sur certaines choses. Ainsi, 4 pays européens -au moins- sont intéressés à la survie du JSF, parmi lesquels, Angleterre, Pays-Bas, Turquie… mais demandent à être plus impliqués dans son développement à la source. A la bourse, le programme dope les valeurs et de Lockheed, de Rolls Royce et de General Electric entre autres. Le JSF N’existe pas encore… bé wé, il est en cours de fabrication. Avant qu’une chose ne soit fabriquée, je me suis laissé dire qu’elle n’existait pas encore… Je me coucherai dorénavant plus heureux de tant de connaissance ! Maintenant, voudriez-vous me dire quel grand programme d’avion n’est pas remis en question, voire menacé d’abandon, voire qualifié d’obsolète, (en leur temps : F-111, F-4, F-14, F-15, F-18, etc… Des “gros” bides selon vous?). Surtout aux USA, ou quand le moment est venu, on sait ne pas s’embarasser de pudeurs et de faux-semblants ; le RAH-66 en est une bonne preuve, ainsi que le B1-A, le Tomcat-21, le XB-70, le Boeing SST… Pardon de ne citer que les programmes américains mais il est vrai que le Rafale est né d’une siscion du Programme commun d’avion de combat européen. Tout ça parce que Serge Dassault s’estimait de fait être le seul habilité à être le maître d’oeuvre d’un tel programme! Et que nos chers gouvernants n’ont rien sû lui refuser. C’est marrant, à l’export, ce canard laid et gauche -dixit ledit Serge D- qu’est le Typhoon, se vend bien mieux que cette perle de technologie -pourtant elle aussi qualifiée de couteau suisse, d’avion miracle et en en plus “a pas (trop) cher- qu’est le sublime dernier-né de Dassault. Faut dire que la coopération, la vraie, ça aide… Il est vrai qu’actuellemnt la question se pose de savoir si la version “A” du F-35 sera préservée ou non -question de budget principalement- Eéééééh oui des choix sont à faire, notamment comptables (le GAO est certes consultatif mais actif…). La guerre en Irak coûte cher, mais là aussi, il est des domaines ou on ferait mieux de faire profil bas… Le dénigrement étant une de nos spécialités. Vous savez le fameux “camp de la paix” constitués de Chinois et de Russes entre autres… Bon allez, j’arrête là parce qu’en parcourant vos autres articles, je suis partagé entre la franche bidonade et la chose qui me désole le plus chez mes compatriotes : l’esprit petit français… que votre rédaction belge à su parfaitement adopter et appliquer…

On parle régulièrement (et à juste titre) de la disparition progressive de la forêt amazonienne. On parle beaucoup moins de la disparition de la forêt nord-américaine. Or celle-ci prend une ampleur tout à fait considérable en raison d’une combinaison de facteurs au nombre desquels, bien sûr, le réchauffement climatique global et la diminution de l’épaisseur de la couche d’ozone, résultats de l’activité industrielle débridée et du mode de vie totalement déraisonnable promus par le modèle occidentalo-américaniste de développement. Parmi les conséquences, notamment une multiplication d’incendies de forêts catastrophiques et la transformation de nombreuses régions en prairies ou en déserts. Ces conséquences contribuent à leur tour au réchauffement global, créant ainsi une boucle de rétroaction aggravante supplémentaire.

Ce n’est évidemment pas l’idéologie judéo-christano-capitalo-néolibérale de Georges Bush et de ses fans qui va arranger les choses. On peut donc s’attendre à ce que cela ne fasse qu’empirer de plus en plus… Alleluiah, mes frères !...

Référence : http://dieoff.org/page47.htm

“AMERICA’S TREES ARE DYING
by Charles E. Little (1995)

After 30 years as an environmental-policy analyst, journalist and author Charles Little spent three years traveling across the US, visiting forests and woodlands in 13 states. In the process, he interviewed the country’s top forest scientists, met with government and university researchers, and reviewed hundreds of scientific papers and reports. His discoveries are profoundly disturbing. The following excerpts have been adapted for the Journal from Little’s new book, The Dying of the Trees: The Pandemic in America’s Forests.

The trees are dying. Not only in the rainforests of Brazil and Southeast Asia, where they are felled by the chainsaws of international greed, local poverty and ecological ignorance, but also in Europe and right here in the US.

From the cedars of Alaska to the palms of Florida, from the maples of Canada and New England to the pines and incense cedars of the Sierra Nevada, the incidents of death and decline are increasing at an alarming rate.

Some argue that the progression of tree death and forest decline in this century, and especially since World War II, is either coincidence or simply a matter of selective reporting. Everything is all right; it is just the natural ebb and flow of nature. But that is not what I have learned from the scores of scientific scholars I have interviewed, and the mountain of papers I have studied. They say something else. What these distinguished sources are describing is a pandemic—an epidemic that is everywhere.

In the US, the trees are dying on the ridges of the Appalachian mountain chain and in the sugar bush of Vermont. They are dying in the mid-South border states, in the thick forests of central Michigan, on the mountainsides of Colorado and California, along the Gulf of Mexico, in the deserts of the Southwest and they are dying in the Northwest—even before they are cut.

IN THE BEGINNING

When we destroy forests, we destroy not only the trees that had occupied the landscape, but possibly future trees as well. Replacement forests of second-growth trees are less able to resist drought and cold, adventitious pests, and diseases, because they grow only in simplified stands, not in the vigorous, complex forest ecosystems that evolved naturally over eons.

The primitive forests encountered by the early British, Dutch and French colonists were filled with trees of mythic proportions and biblical age. White pines reached 200 feet in height. Great stands of hemlocks, more permanent than Gothic cathedrals, were common. Black walnut trunks measured five and six feet through the middle. Chestnuts spread 200 feet from branch tip to branch tip. Graceful arching trunks of elms sheltered the nurslings with dappled shade. Magnolias, crabapples, loblolly bays and basswoods perfumed Southern woodlands.

America’s primordial forests stretched from the barrier islands on which the first British colonists landed 400 years ago to the prairies of the Middle West. It was said that a tree squirrel could travel from the Atlantic shore to the Mississippi River without once dropping to the ground.

In the northern latitudes, between Maine and Minnesota, an unbroken coniferous woodland prevailed, giving way to hardwoods in the lower latitudes in a largely unblemished blanket of green from the Great Lakes to Louisiana.

THE DEATH OF THE DOGWOODS

One such remnant is the Catoctin Woods in Maryland, a profuse Eastern deciduous forest, with impressively tall oak, hickories, maples and tulip poplars. Even the most ordinary specimens reach over 100 feet and intermingle their topmost branches at such a great distance from the ground that the canopy seems almost a kind of intermediate sky. When one walks in such woods, the scale and sheer numbers of the big trees are such that their presence merges into a kind of forest atmosphere.

With its graceful branches and luminous leaves, the Eastern flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, is perfectly suited to a life under this overarching canopy. But the showy bracts—the creamy white leaflike coverings for the blossoms themselves—no longer gleam in the deep woods. Now the dogwoods are mostly dead in the Catoctin mountains, victims of a virulent form of fungal infection called “anthracnose” that has been killing off C. florida from southern New England to Alabama. Anthracnose, a combination of the Greek words for coal (anthra) and disease (nosos), describes the dark brown blotches found on infected leaves. In 1988, a study by forest scientists Manfred Mielke and Keith Langdon revealed that 79 percent of the Catoctin’s dogwoods were dead and the rest were dying.

Before the scourge of anthracnose, the dogwoods, with more than 400 medium-to-large trees per acre, gave the woods a human scale. But now a whole layer of life had been extinguished. Questions arise: What of the plants and creatures that live below the understory—the mosses and grasses and lovely ground covers; the mayapple, ferns and violets? What of the birds, such as the cedar waxwing and robin, who love the bright fall berries of dogwood—would they absent themselves from these woods? What of the big trees themselves—will some subtle change in the chemistry of the forest soils make their own survival more difficult?

A PLAGUE ON BOTH COASTS

The first notice taken that something might be amiss with the dogwood occurred some 3000 miles to the west, when in 1976 Ralph Byther and Roy Davidson, plant pathologists with the Western Washington Research and Extension Center in Puyallup, Washington, received a diseased Pacific dogwood branch (similar to the Eastern flowering dogwood) from a correspondent living near Vancouver, Washington, across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. Anthracnose is the ordinary term plant pathologists use to describe a set of disease symptoms in a wide variety of trees—oaks, sycamores, even citrus—that are attacked by fungus. But the coal-dark blotches on the dogwood leaves Byther and Davidson were investigating was not caused by any ordinary fungus. This fungus, belonging to the genus Discula, was a species that could not be identified because it had never been seen before.

A new virulent form of fungus had suddenly and unaccountably appeared on both coasts at the same time and was wiping out dogwoods by the thousands, spreading outward in widening circles like a silvicultural version of the bubonic plague.

Is the lovely dogwood sending us a sign, a warning, as its last gift before it disappears altogether?

FOREST DEATH IN NEW ENGLAND

Amid the tinkling glasses of tourists in the lounge of the Woodstock Inn, former-Vermont Forest Commissioner Mollie Beattie (now chief of the US Fish and Wildlife Service) spoke candidly and earnestly. “If you ask me if there’s a connection between pollution and the maple dieback,” she began, “I would say yes. If you want proof, that’s another matter. In the chronology of a forest, a decline taking 25 years is a sudden eruption, but human consciousness does not take it in that way. To us the change is so slow as to be unobservable. Nobody knows what the natural level of mortality is. It’s not that there’s no science. It’s that science is asking the wrong questions.”

Beattie also discussed the fate of other forest trees in New England; how the ozone-sensitive white pine seemed to be disappearing; how beech trees had been dying at the rate of ten percent a year in the Adirondacks of New York State. The largest US fabricator of stairway parts—the Visador Corporation—now finds it can no longer count on beech wood for lumber and must substitute tulip poplar, a somewhat weaker hardwood. Beattie fears the butternut might actually become extinct.

CHANGING CLIMATE: DYING TREES

In Alaska, a warming trend has been taking place during most of this century that coincides with the decline of the Alaska cedar as well as an increase in atmospheric CO2. In recent years, the protective snow cover has all but disappeared along the coasts due to the warming trend, causing the cedars to die.

At the opposite corner of the US, sabal palms (Sabal texana) are dying. Francis E. Putz, a botanist with the University of Florida, has found that the sabal palms—50-foot cousins of the palmetto—were dying along a 200-mile stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Putz suspects that rising sea levels have exposed the palms’ roots to toxic levels of salt water. As he told a New York Times reporter, “Areas that today support salt marsh vegetation were forested in the 1940s. Twenty million years ago Florida was a series of islands. Maybe it is going to be that again.” If the global warming scenario suggested by the National Academy of Sciences is correct, sea levels may rise as much as two feet by the end of the 21st century, which would submerge not only the palms, but most of the state of Florida.

Beginning in the late 1940s, even before most of the freeways were built in the land of the three-car garage, commuters came home from a workday in Los Angeles with red eyes, scratchy throats, chest pains and headaches. Particulate matter collected in their lungs, women’s nylons melted on their legs and trees were dying.

Today, auto-generated ozone, far from being confined to Los Angeles, is devastating trees in the distant Sierra Nevada, too. Ozone from the Central Valley travels up the steep canyons of the western flank of the Sierra on a daily basis.

In the Sierra Nevada, I visited Trent Proctor, an air resources specialist for the Sierra National Forest. “In the summer,” Proctor said, when the inversion layer of cold air covering the valley lifts, “in the southern Sierra we see ozone-injury in trees up to about 7000 feet and in the northern Sierra about 5000.” Others have found ozone-caused tree injury as high as 9000 feet.

Once the ozone is inside the cellular structure of the tree, it bleaches the chlorophyll from the needles—just like Clorox, also an oxidant—so that they lose their ability to photosynthesize and then drop prematurely.

At the headquarters of the Stanislaus National Forest, entomologist John Wenz and plant pathologist John Pronos reported that years of drought have brought widespread trouble to the mountains. “Years ago, we did a very large-scale mortality survey in the Sierra Nevada mixed conifer forest,” said Pronos, “and we came up with a normal mortality of between 0.1 and 0.3 dead trees per acre. Now we are well beyond 1.0 dead trees per acre—up to a tenfold increase.”

Wenz and Pronos also claim that the shade-loving and relatively ozone-resistant incense cedars are inexplicably dying throughout the Sierra.

LEARNING TO LOOK

We read of tree death in Europe and in the tropics, and I am telling you it is happening here in North America. Yet we look out our windows, what do we see? Trees.

I remember what West Virginia landowner and self-taught naturalist Joe Aliff told me when we were tramping through the “falling forest” in the Appalachian hollows. To see what is happening, he said, “All you got to do is look.” By that he meant something more than having one’s eyelids in the open position. And when you look, you see that the trees are dying.

I have since learned to see a world of dying trees—dying because the trunks have been bored into and the leaves have been stripped by pests; dying because fungi are girdling their bases and branches and turning their leaves to black corpses; dying because their shrunken roots can no longer absorb enough nutrients and water to keep them alive; dying from the direct effects of too much ozone in the troposphere and not enough in the stratosphere; dying because neighboring trees have been clearcut, allowing cold, heat and drying winds into their precincts; dying because of being bathed too often in the sour gases of industry; dying because the weather patterns have changed and they cannot adapt quickly enough.

The more trees that die, the more trees that will die. In the forlorn formulation of ecologist George Woodwell, climate warming from an increasing greenhouse effect could, in temperate forests especially, increase the respiration rate of trees to the degree that it may surpass the rate of photosynthesis . The tree would then no longer be a net producer of oxygen, but a net producer of carbon dioxide.

“The amount of carbon dioxide that could be injected into the atmosphere,” wrote Woodwell and longtime associate Richard Houghton in Scientific American, could theoretically approach “approximately 750 billion metric tons, or about the same amount of carbon as there is in the atmosphere currently.” Implied by this analysis is a devastating feedback loop in which trees in the vast northern hemisphere forests, instead of absorbing carbon, add to the global build-up of CO2 in a nightmarish cycle, whose finale could be a worldwide policy decision to cut down trees in order to protect the Earth’s oxygen supply!

OUR FORESTS ARE GROWING SILENT

The widespread deaths of forest-dwelling species also strongly suggest an extreme ecosystem imbalance. Increasing levels of ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation are leaking through the thinning stratospheric ozone shield and harming not only trees. Researchers at Oregon State University have found that the frogs living in the forest pools and streamsides of the Cascade Mountains are failing to regenerate because increased UV-B radiation scrambles the cells of frog eggs, which lay uncovered in shallow water. The decline of amphibians of all types has been noted since the 1970s. Bufo boreas, the common Western toad, is now absent in more than 80 percent of its original range. The toad is the victim of a malfunctioning immune system. Bufo periglenes, the golden toad of Costa Rica, has not been seen since 1988. In Australia, the so-called gastric-brooding frog disappeared in 1980 and is presumed extinct. In Canada, the population of the northern leopard frog, Rana pipiens, has crashed, as have the Yosemite toad and the red-legged frog in California. According to Emily Yoffe, writing in The New York Times Magazine, nearly one-third of North America’s 86 species of frogs and toads are in trouble and, worldwide, “Researchers estimate that one-quarter to one-half of the Earth’s species could be extinct in the next 30 years.”

In Europe’s forests (and to a lesser degree in the US) a mass extinction of mushrooms may be taking place. In Holland, Eef Arnolds has found that the number of viable mushroom species in test plots declined from 37 to 12 over a 20-year period. In England, mycologists report that 20 species are in decline. In general, European researchers believe that the mushroom decline is bound up with the decline of forests from pollution and related causes.

In the Midwest forests, earthworms are dying. According to ecologist Orie Loucks, studies of soil invertebrates in parts of Ohio and Indiana subject to air pollution deposition “show a 50 percent decline in the density of invertebrates and a 97 percent decline in the density of earthworms.” These extraordinary data have led Loucks and others to describe the mixed mesophytic forest as resembling an ecosystem with AIDS—a metaphor that concerns not only trees, but all the myriad species that make up a forest ecosystem and keep it operating and functioning by producing oxygen and sequestering carbon.

STRATEGIES FOR THE ENDGAME

Have we crossed the threshold? Are we now dealing with nature in another zone—the endgame? The question is: what should be done?

Should we plant trees? Yes, of course, plant billions. But can we reforest the Earth in such a way that it will stay reforested?

Reduce the pollution caused by gluttonous fossil-fuel energy use? Yes, of course. But not to the level of 1990, as the policymakers suggest and have legislated. Trees were dying long before that. The mid-50s would be closer to the mark.

Stop cutting forests? Of course. Zero cut on our national forests would be a tiny beginning. Stopping the pillage of the rainforest is a given. But have too many atoms of carbon—and too many species of virus—already been released?

End the production of CFCs? Without question. But have the chlorine atoms that have already risen to the stratosphere entrained an unstoppable feedback reaction that will cause an increasing ultraviolet bombardment of trees and forests and frogs and humans no matter what we do?

Control population and consumption? Absolutely. But would even the most extraordinary efforts in this regard come soon enough?

Environmentalism practices the language of crisis: to insist that something be done before it is too late. But what we need now is a language (and the intellectual constructs that go with it) to deal with a post-crisis environmental condition. And our response to the dying of the trees is at the heart of the matter.

In the course of my research, I have learned things I wish I had not learned. I have learned that the trees are dying. And that the more trees die, the more will die. I have learned that we have crossed the threshold. And I simply do not know how we can get back safely to the other side.

Such a conclusion can lead to despair. I think the only antidote to despair is to stay firm in the belief that, as William Wordsworth put it in Tintern Abbey, “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”

We must begin to love her as we have never been asked to love before. Even then, it will take a century or more for environmental repair; for letting nature heal herself.

Thus have we come to the crux of the matter: the trees could save us, if we would save the trees.

******* From The Dying of the Trees: The Pandemic in America’s Forests, by Charles E. Little. Copyright Charles E. Little, 1995. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. To order the book, please call 1-800-253-6476.

THE DESERT’S DYING CACTI

According to Kate Kajtha, a biologist at Boston University, the 63,000-acre Saguaro National Monument near Tucson has lost more than 50 percent of its giant cactuses in the last 50 years due to a mysterious affliction that turns the cactus brown prematurely and causes the trunk and branches to lose their spines. “They’re dying,” Kajtha lamented. “Their arms are falling off. They’re keeling over.”

Some scientists suspect that air pollution from local mining smelters may be involved, but the affliction is not confined to the Tucson area; it can be found even in remote parts of the Sonoran Desert in northern Mexico. This has led researchers to consider the possibility that the rapid spread of the disease may be linked to increased ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation streaming through the thinning stratospheric ozone shield, the result of the destruction of ozone molecules by chlorofluorocarbons released from air conditioners and refrigerators. Cactus disease symptoms appear on the south side of the plant, the side getting the most sun and therefore the most UV-B rays. Tellingly, in shaded saguaros, the disease is not found at all.—CEL

FOREST DEATH IN COAL RIVER VALLEY
by John Flynn

MONTCOAL, WV—Sprawling across parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, the mixed mesophytic forest is the greatest hardwood forest in the world and the oldest in North America. Nearly as big as New England, the mixed mesophytic (meso, midrange and physic, plant) forest is the largest relatively unbroken stretch of deciduous woodland in the US.

In The Dying of the Trees, Charles Little calls the mixed mesophytic “the ‘mother forest’ of eastern North America—the forest that has provided the germplasm resources from which all other forests have subsequently arisen.” This summer, the Mother Forest turned sickly as the verdant greenery of southern West Virginia was abruptly transformed into an eerie backdrop of browns and yellows.

In the last ten days of July, anthracnose-like browning began to curl the foliage of yellow poplar, sycamore, red maple and redbud along a 50-mile east-to-west belt in the Coal River Valley, 40 miles west of Charleston. Blister-like lesions on petioles (leaf stems) were visible on all species. The damage—and the suddenness with which it occurred—was most easily detected in poplar trees, which are relatively free of insect and disease damage.

Between July 20-25, poplar leaves began rapidly browning and curling. The damage began on leaf blades and spread rapidly. Within a few days, yards were littered with fallen leaves. Shedding occurred in leaves of all ages. Foliage on the outer twigs of larger trees in open settings was the most severely affected. Poplars growing in moister, less-exposed settings were significantly less affected.

During the first week of August, the foliage on shagbark hickory and three species of oak—white, chestnut and chinkapin—began curling and browning. By August 20, damage was evident at all elevations.

The shedding was not drought-related, since the combined rainfall for May and June was more than three inches above the norm. Normal sunlight, while possibly a contributing factor, does not cause dark, burn-like discoloration on leaves.

With the help of Ozone Action, the Appalachia Forest Action Project (AFAP) obtained satellite readings prepared by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration physicist Art Neuendorffer. The readings revealed that the ozone layer was at record or near-record lows in southern West Virginia throughout July. Neuendorffer concluded that: “It’s very likely the trees were getting record amounts of UV-B.” In fact, the damage to broad-leafed species was accompanied by severe needle damage on white pines—symptoms associated with UV-B damage.

Upper-level ozone is measured by Dobson units. As Dobson units go down, UV-B exposure goes up at a rate of approximately two-to-one. During the past 16 years, southern West Virginia had a July noontime average of approximately 330 Dobson. The average for July, 1995, however, was 292 for the month and 282 for the last 20 days, with a low of 278 on July 17. This value is 16 percent below normal, suggesting that UV-B intensity could have been 30-35 percent higher than normal.

On August, 14, 1995, AFAP volunteers observed severe drooping and bending on white pine needles at several locations in Raleigh and Boone counties. The damage resembled UV-B-damage symptoms that ecologist Orie Loucks of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, discovered in white pine in Ohio and Toronto, Canada in 1993 during the worst ozone-loss readings on record. Loucks observed similar damage in Ohio this summer when stratospheric ozone levels were again severely depressed.

Specimens of the damaged leaves were collected by the AFAP and turned over to the US Forest Service (USFS) laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia. USFS plant pathologist Martin MacKenzie tentatively ruled out insects, fungi or chemical pollution as a cause of the damage. “The damage I observed was sun-directed,” MacKenzie concluded.

If UV-B damage is ultimately confirmed, it would mark the first evidence that the loss of stratospheric ozone has begun to damage broadleaf trees. Because of the critical need to be able to “fingerprint UV-B damage,” Loucks is calling for immediate action at the federal level. “As national policy, we simply must have the answer to this question” before next spring, he maintained.

******* John Flynn is communications director for: AFAP, 168 Middleton Avenue, Montcoal, WV 21540 304-854-2215

from fall 1995 “Earth Island Journal” Earth Island Journal is published quarterly by Earth Island Institute, 300 Broadway # 28, San Francisco, CA 94133 Phone: (415) 788-3666; fax (415) 788-7324

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Le site dekba.com - tres proche des service israeliens- rapporte des evenements tres inquietants au Liban. Est-ce de la desinformation? du ‘wishful thinking’? ou la verite?
Personnnelement je trouve l’implication francaise des plus interessantes - en particulier elle pourrait expliquer partiellement le rapprochement avec Israel..
bonne lecture
DEBKAfile Reports: Syrian president Assad cancels UN trip for fear of arrest. Panicked Lebanese leaders flee as Syrian agents and Hizballah distribute weapons to Muslims.

August 31, 2005, 11:27 AM (GMT+02:00)
Bashir Assad stays home for fear of arrest

A second wave of arrests of Lebanese security officials was made overnight Tuesday Aug. 30 on the orders of the UN team investigating the Hariri assassination headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis. French sources report these officials had access to the weapons the former Lebanese prime minister’s assassins used after they blew up his motorcade last February.

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report the Assad regime is in a panic as the UN team’s findings on the murder case come closer to Damascus. In Beirut, the specter of civil war hovers as Syrian agents and Hizballah officers are seen handing out weapons to Muslims – the first sign that Assad has decided to react to the threat closing in on him by igniting fresh civil bloodshed.

Warnings from French intelligence to were conveyed to Lebanese leaders in the last 24 hours to get out of Beirut and take temporary refuge in Paris. “Big events are in the making,” they said. Most Lebanese cabinet ministers, bankers, public figures and newspaper editors accepted the offer. They and Saad Hariri, leader of the ruling party with his family, fled to the French capital.

The sense in Washington and Paris is that both governments are resolved to bring the Assad regime to an end.

Our sources add that the Mehlis probe achieved its second breakthrough when a number of defectors from Syrian and Lebanese security and intelligence services from the time Damascus dominated the country also reached Paris this week. They handed French intelligence incriminating materials and testimony on the part played by the Syrian president and Lebanese president Emil Lahoud in the Hariri murder. A high-ranking French intelligence official told DEBKAfile Wednesday that this evidence and the defectors’ willingness to testify against both presidents provides grounds for international arrest warrants against them.

Also Wednesday, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice interrupted her vacation for a conference with Terje Larsen, the UN secretary’s Middle East envoy who updated her on the latest turn in the Hariri inquiry. The European Union’s external affairs executive Javier Solana, currently visiting Israel was on the point of traveling to Beirut but changed his mind.

On peut aimer une langue etrangere tout en detestant leur politique ‘etrangere’.

Vu des USA les Ricains sautent de joie que les Europeens ne s’entendent plus entre eux. Peut-etre serait-il temps d’inventer une langue europeenne en tant que deuxieme langage qui reunit tous les langages?

Oui, l’UE-3 est paralysé semble paralyser entre la soi-disante volonté américaine de ne rien céder et l’agressivité nationaliste du pouvoir en place à Téhéran. Mais puisque l’Iran cherche à élargir le cercle des négociateurs, pourquoi ne pas lui dire “chiche”. D’autant qu’il y a une instance adéquate pour ça : le Conseil de Sécurité des Nations unies. L’Iran n’a pas respecté ses engagements au titre du TNP et de ses accords avec l’AIEA. Par ailleurs pourquoi vouloir à tout prix fabriquer du combustible à l’uranium enrichi alors qu’elle n’a pas encore de centrale nucléaire et que la Russie lui en propose pour celle future de Buscher. D’ailleurs que prévoit l’Iran pour améliorer son réseau d’énergie électrique ?
Une piste à étudier : L’ONU, en coopération avec l’Agence de l’énergie, devrait entrependre une étude sur les besoins à long terme des pays en énergie, et de faire des recommandations sur les sources d’énergie à développer en rapport bien entendu avec les richesses naturelles de chaque pays étudier (pétrole, gaz, charbon, hydraulique, nucléaire, énergies de substitution).

On s’apercevrait peut-être d’uen évidence : la Corée du Nord a certainement besoin du nucléaire (civil, bien entendu) mais pas l’Iran. Il faudrait ensuite l’expliquer au peuple iranien….

Pourtant il y a au moins un cas (la disparition après de multiples attaques du précieux site Solidarité-Palestine) qui montre que lorsque un site est efficace dans la contre-désinformation il est aisé et parfaitement possible que les forces adverses le liquident.

j’ai été très content de voir que le site alternatif “l’Autre portail” qui, je pense, est très fréquenté, vous avait désormais pris comme une de ses sources.

Je ne sais pas qui ou quoi vous a fait découvrir par ces gens mais c’est une bonne chose.

La question que je me pose, car j’ai cru comprendre que vous aviez eu une augmentation significative du nombre de visiteurs, c’est de savoir si une part signficative de cette augmentation provenait de ce site ?

Après tout vous valez largement un Réseau Voltaire comme source d’information et de réflexion (bien que sans doute “légèrement” plus à droite qu’eux - mais ce n’est pas un reproche) et l’on ne peut que se régouir du fait que vous preniez enfin la place centrale que vous méritez d’occuper dans le l’internet dissident français..

Et puis au moins avez-vous la politesse d’indiquer clairement les sources (anglo-saxonnes) auxquelles vous vous abbreuvez (avec raison, là n’est pas non plus la question).

Je remercie le très haut fonctionnaire international qui tient les propos sur Enron . Il fallait aller sur le site de
BBC news pour voir la galerie des personnages liés à la Maison Blanche et liés à Enron
il est clair que cela porte un nom .

Le lecteur qui parle d’une multitude de sites qui inonderaient Internet veut peut-être faire référence à Maurice Joly ( Voir http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Joly)  et

Dans le Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (1865), à propos de la presse, Joly fait dire au tyran moderne : ” Comme le dieu Wishnou, ma presse aura cent bras, et ces bras donneront la main à toutes les nuances d’opinion (…) On sera de mon parti sans le savoir. Ceux qui croient parler leur langue parleront la mienne, ceux qui croiront agiter leur parti agiteront le mien, ceux qui croiront marcher sous leur drapeau marcheront sous le mien.

Certains passages sont curieusement d’actualite , voir
Wikipedia Dialogue Aux enfers de Montesquieu et MachiaveL ...

Amateur a moitié de votre site , car je n’en lis que la partie écrite en Français .
Vous pourriez quand même avoir la courtoisie , envers vos lecteurs , de traduire grossièrement les parties en anglais . Curieusement on ne voit rien dans d’autre langues , serait-ce du partis pris? , ou un simple “hazard”.
Systran , ou un autre le ferait très bien : http://w4.systranlinks.com/trans?systran_lp=en_fr&systran_url=http://www.systranbox.com/
Donc regardez un peu plus loins que les Anglophones par éclectisme , et traduisez sommairement par respect de vos lecteurs .
D’avance merci .
Salutations