Tipping Points

Feedback mechanisms have thresholds -- tipping points beyond which regulatory mechanisms fail. For example, perspiration is a feedback mechanism that keeps temperature from rising in some mammals. But the system has limits beyond which it will not protect the body from excessive heating.

Similarly, the Earth as a whole has a lot of mechanisms that tend to limit the damage we do to it. This study published in Nature and reported on MSNBC is the first comprehensive analysis of these thresholds on a global scale. The results are not encouraging. With respect to climate, nutrient loading, species extinction, and too many other systems, human activity is pushing the Earth past its thresholds.

Author Jonathon Foley says that the most important lesson is "that 'wait and see' is a bad environmental policy." Because this news is unpleasant, I anticipate most responses to range from apathy to a "shoot the messenger" effort to discredit the work. We can hope, however, that people will start to think about the fundamental problem of unlimited growth on finite planet.

US-Brazil Programs

I am pleased to be in the fourth year of a US-Brazil consortium program funded by the US Department of Education and its Brazilian counterpart. Our four-school consortium has enabled a couple dozen students to change their lives completely through semester-long exchanges. The binational program currently serves hundreds of students directly and thousands indirectly. The staff in DC and Brasilia have developed this map to show the scope of the program. See if you can find our partners.


View U.S.-Brazil Higher Education Consortia Program Grants FY 2006 - FY 2009 in a larger map

Play Fair

Dean has struck again! Coffee is not the only industry that treats its producers unfairly. Dean Cycon is supporting fair trade in manufacturing -- something that the world could use much more of. By supporting a fair-trade factory in Pakistan, Dean is also doing a critical bit of public diplomacy. The more good will that is spread in this critical part of the world, the better.

More Trouble from Dunkin'

Under Mitt Romney's leadership (through Bain Capital), Dunkin' Donuts is pursuing a strategy that uses its legal department as a profit center. Having squeezed the farmers, the land, and customers, the franchise owners themselves are now the target of DD greed.

Brazilian Embassy in Honduras

This article from the BBC provides both more recent information than my previous post and some cogent analysis. I concur with the BBC that Brazil is taking this opportunity to exhibit leadership as a regional power, second only to the United States in the Western Hemisphere.

Embassies are treated as small zones of sovereign territory; this recognition allows President Zelaya to be in Tegucigalpa unharmed, as long as he is the guest of the Brazilian government. The de facto government may have limited respect for the rule of law, but it is not willing to transgress this diplomatic barrier.

It is clearly, ready, to test limits, and has cut off electricity and other connections to the Embassy. And although it is proud not to have killed any civilians, it has not refrained from beatings and tear gas as a means of discouraging any kind of rallying around the president.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy have offered to help their diplomatic colleagues from Brazil, though it is not clear what they can offer.

Zelaya's daring return: A patch of Brazil in Tegucigalpa

As NPR and others have reported, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has returned to the capital, though in a diplomatically protected place: the Brazilian embassy. Also see coverage from the Miami Herald. This is Zelaya's first visit since he stepped over the Nicaragua-Honduras border for a few minutes during the summer. Ironically, he did so in an area from which CIA-backed Contras launched their illegal offensives against the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s.

For analysis from a variety of perspectives since the June 28 coup, see the Honduras page at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. A lot of the online chatter has focused on the relative merits of Zelaya and de facto President Roberto Micheletti, but the manner of President Zelaya's removal is of deep concern to elected leaders throughout the hemisphere.

A New Transamazon

In the 1950s President Kubichek who called the Brazilian Amazon "terra sem homen para homens sem terra" -- a land without men for men without land. This was both sexist and ethnocentric, as thousands of indigenous people already lived in the region. Because of the pressure on land in the dry Northeast of Brazil -- and the unwillingness of large landowners there to provide any relief to starving smallholders -- the Brazilian Amazon was opened with major and notorious road projects. The BR-364, for example, was paved with the good intention of providing land in Rondonia for 10,000 families to join 70,000 people then living there. When I arrived in 1996, a million and a half people lived in the state, and its deforestation was a rallying cry for environmentalists the world over.

Although the entire length of the Amazon River proper is found within the borders of Brazil, fully half of the watershed and the rain forest it contains is found in neighboring countries, such as Peru. Brazil and Peru are now working together on a road project that -- as with the Transcontinental Railroad a century ago -- will join South America from "sea to shining sea."

National Public Radio focuses on the Peruvian part of the project in an excellent series by , by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, The Amazon Road: Paving for Progress? The story includes a thorough explanation of how road development for one purpose leads to the exploitation of resources for other purposes. As with oil booms and gold rushes in the United States, brief explosions of populations in the pursuit of minerals lead to permanent settlements, even in places that are ecologically ill-suited to large-scale agriculture.

The series includes maps of the part of Peru involved in the project -- which skirts alongside forest reserves that are likely doomed by this opening. The maps suggest, erroneously, that the road does not yet continue past the Brazilian border. See the map below to explore the area and to see that the highway connects to BR-317, which crosses the western Brazilian state of Acre very close to the Bolivian border. BR-317, in turn, connects to BR-364, which so thoroughly changed the landscape of Rondonia two generations ago. (Chapter Two of my dissertation describes this process of change, and provides citations for more detailed descriptions.)


View Larger Map

Equal Time for Tea

This posting is for friends who ask me why I do not care about tea. Actually, I do care ... I just do not know as much about tea as I do coffee. This report from the Mombasa Tea Center beautifully describes the rich traditions of trade in tea.

Find out more about the tea from Equal Exchange. Some fine coffee shops also offer tea, including Jaho Coffee & Tea in Salem and Rockin' K Cafe in Bridgewater.

Why Capitalism Fails

Hyman Minsky was a peer of many of the leading economists of the second half of the twentieth century. He differed from most of them in one imporant way, which many of those peers and their successors are only now beginning to appreciate. He was a capitalist, but he saw in capitalism the seeds of its own destruction. His theoretical work can explain what free-market fundamentalism cannot: why does unfettered growth lead to collapse? Boston Globe correspondent Steven Mihm describes the Minsky revival and its importance for navigating the current global crisis.

What does this have to do with geography? Everything. The world-space economy has been dramatically reordered at the insistance of neoclassical economists whose self-confidence belies the fact that they did not really know what they were doing. The aid and credit policies of the leading Western economies and institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund not only assume that these models are correct; they insist that developing countries gamble their own futures on the models.

New Water

During the annual water communion at my church in Bridgewater, our minister shared this lovely poem by Minnesota poet Sharon Chmielarz. It begins

All those years—almost a hundred—
the farm had hard water.

Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (2004-2006) included this poem as Column Number 99 in his American Life i Poetry project. Visit the posting there to read the rest. It brings me back to the groundwater geology class I took in graduate school in Ohio late last century. After reading the poem to us, Rev. Ed went on to relate a very similar experience he had with a well of his own on Cape Cod.