Our friend Kai in the Globe

Scientists to gauge worth of nature

Team identifying marine zones to study value of environment

DEBORAH JONES

Special to The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- To some people the sight of a meadow, a stretch of river or a stand of leafy trees swaying in the breeze on a hilltop might signify beauty, spirituality or perhaps an opportunity to make money by "improvement" or "development."

Ecologist Kai Chan looks at such things from the dollars-and-cents standpoint of what he calls "ecosystem services" -- the value of the natural environment to humans.

As head of a research team that includes a fisheries economist, an anthropologist and the British Columbia chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Dr. Chan is identifying marine zones off the B.C. coast for in-depth study.

The coast is rife with conflicts between competing demands on resources -- such as those between fishermen harvesting wild fish and fish farmers, or foresters who have an impact on watersheds and recreational users, Dr. Chan says.

He says his research aims to assist decision makers in their plans for resource use.

The Canadian ecosystems project, still in its infancy, is an offshoot of an ambitious global project Dr. Chan has been involved with to develop a new scientific model to measure the value of defined regions of forests, grassland, waterways -- even the air -- to human communities.

He was a lead researcher of a groundbreaking ecosystem study in California, with Stanford University biologist Gretchen Daily. Their report, published last month in the Public Library of Science Biology journal, focused on the California coast between Santa Barbara and San Francisco, and assessed the value of carbon storage, flood control, forage production for livestock, outdoor recreation, pollination of crops such as strawberries and provision of water.

The B.C. project is related, but focuses on marine environments.

Too often, decision makers make plans with little understanding of hidden or future environmental issues that can cause economic loss or even death, says Dr. Chan, a Toronto native who recently moved from Stanford to take up a post at the University of British Columbia.

Devastation caused by hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 was worsened by the lack of natural buffers on the coastline, which shows a failure to assess the value of nature's "services," he says.

When Katrina smashed into New Orleans, the wetlands that could have buffered its force were diminished because they'd been used for development. More than 1,800 people died and the damage to the U.S. economy was estimated at $150-billion, he says.

In East Asia, mangrove forests were wiped out to build shrimp farms. If the mangroves had been considered valuable to humans, he said, the shore would have had more protection when the tsunami hit, killing about 230,000 people.

If decision makers had been able to place a real value on mangroves and wetlands, the economic appeal of using them for shrimp farms and land development could have been assessed, and the ecosystems would have been protected, he says.

The B.C. ecosystem research is part of a growing trend among scientists and economists to measure the natural world in economic terms.

Other examples are the British report by Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, that estimated global climate change will cost as much as $7-trillion and turn 200 million people into environmental refugees.

Another is New York City's purchase throughout the 1990s of land in the watershed that provides its drinking water.

Protecting the natural watershed let New York protect its water quality and avoid the heavy cost of building a water-treatment plant, says Taylor Ricketts, a landscape ecologist with the Washington office of the World Wildlife Fund, who is involved with Dr. Chan on the Natural Capital Project.

Dr. Ricketts worked on another research project to measure the value of tropical forests in pollination "services" in Costa Rica. Researchers found that where coffee farms were near untouched tropical forests, greater pollination by wild bees produced a 20-per-cent greater yield of coffee. The forest was subsidizing farmers, for free.

"It added up to $60,000 a year in added revenue for one farm," Dr. Ricketts said.

"People are beginning to realize and understand there are real economic benefits we get from healthy ecosystems, worth significant amounts of money," he said.

"That's a great thing, I think, because it makes people aware of the ways in which we depend on ecosystems and makes conservation more mainstream than special-interest."

The economic arguments are increasingly being made, added Dr. Ricketts, because "we are newly able to do it. We have better understanding of the ecological things that ecosystems do for us and we have a better understanding of how to value them economically. We're newly able because of a bunch of research to place dollar value on ecosystem services, by ecologists and economists. . . . People are beginning to believe the numbers, and you are beginning to hear about it outside of science journals."

winter wonderland

Babel

Coming Undone - Four Stories of Woe in Babel

The Biblical story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) begins by imagining a time when "the whole earth had one language and the same words." After mankind dares to challenge God by building a tower "with its top in the heavens," the Lord punishes them by introducing the confusion of multiple languages, thereby scattering humans around the Earth. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (Paramount) is bleaker even than the Genesis story: It starts with the assumption that the human race is already irreparably scattered, and things only get worse from there.

Babel's Tower of Babel—the human folly that brings down God's wrath—is globalization. This sprawling 142-minute film traces the trajectory of an American weapon—a Winchester rifle—that's given by a Japanese tourist to a Berber hunting guide in Morocco and eventually becomes the catalyst for four separate stories of families torn apart.

After the hunting guide sells the gun in question to a goat herder, the herder's young sons (Boubker Ait El Caid and Said Tarchani) decide to use it for target practice on a passing tourist bus. In doing so, they accidentally hit Susan (Cate Blanchett), an affluent American touring Morocco with her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), in a bid to save their crumbling marriage. (It's obliquely suggested that the two have recently lost a baby to SIDS.) Soon, Susan is half-comatose in a village in the middle of nowhere, while Richard makes frantic calls to the U.S. Embassy. The Moroccan police, suspecting a terrorist act, threaten and intimidate the goat herder's family, provoking what may become an international crisis.

Meanwhile, Susan and Richard's Mexican nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), back home in California with their two children (Nathan Gamble and Elle Fanning), is worried to hear of her employers' troubles abroad, but even more worried that she may have to miss her son's wedding in Tijuana. After exploring every avenue, she decides to take them along on a one-day trip across the border, chauffeured by her hotheaded nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal.) It's a trip that promises to be about as trouble-free as Gilligan's three-hour tour.

And in a fourth story line that takes a long time to converge with the others, Chieko, a deaf-mute Japanese teenager (the astonishing Rinko Kikuchi), rebels against seemingly everyone in Tokyo, from the volleyball ref to the dentist to her sorrowful widowed father (Koji Yakusho). What's eating Chieko? It turns out to be something both simple and unbearable—and then, in a final twist, something else again.

Whew. Just summarizing what happens in Babel takes longer than some entire movies. To be sure, some of the plot's mechanics feel overengineered: Chronologies and convergences are shuffled and reshuffled like songs in an iPod mix. But Babel has the intelligence not to invoke destiny as the force behind its interconnecting stories: Things in this movie's world happen because of physics, economics, and individual bad decisions, not because of fate. And unlike many movies with multiple-thread plotlines, Babel handles all of its story lines equally well. When Iñárritu would cut away from any given locale, I'd experience a moment of disappointment—wait, I want to stay with these guys!—only to get equally caught up in the next story. You watch the last third of Babel with your heart in your throat, terrified that something awful will happen to these characters you've come to love—and that includes the shooters as well as the shot-at.

The Japanese plot is probably my favorite of the four, if only because of Kikuchi's incandescent incarnation of the fierce Chieko. It also features a bravura nightclub sequence in which we alternate between the pulsing music of the strobe-lit dance floor and the silence of Chieko's inner experience. The Morocco scenes are, by their very nature, the least dynamic: How much oomph can you get out of a leading lady who spends the entire movie prone on the floor of a hut? But the casting of Pitt and Blanchett as the Americans abroad is weirdly right. At first you think they're the butt of some satiric jab: har har, look at the rich Americans, worrying about the safety of the drinking water when there's a bullet in their future. But in Iñárritu's humanistic worldview, Richard and Susan's suffering is just as real, their family just as precious, as anybody else's. And seeing their smooth, iconic movie-star faces next to the rougher complexions of the Moroccan villagers (many of them played by nonprofessional actors), you realize that in a Third World country, all Americans are, in essence, movie stars.

Babel has great expectations for itself: It wants to be a movie about big ideas and big emotions at the same time. Aided by gorgeous locations and classy trappings (cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, theme music by Gustavo Santaolalla), it succeeds for the most part, and in the process makes Crash, another recent film with converging stories and a multicultural cast, look like an undergraduate term paper on race relations.

Basso signs with Discovery

Yesterday in a press conference, Johann Bruyneel confirmed the signing of Italian Ivan Basso to his Discovery Channel team. The winner of the 2006 Giro d'Italia signed a contact for two years to ride with Discovery Channel, the same team that took American Lance Armstrong to seven Tour de France victories. After closing out nearly three years with Danish Team CSC, Ivan Basso will aim for grand tour glory under the guidance of Bruyneel.

"It is an ideal squad. I am happy," said Basso late last night to La Gazzetta dello Sport from his home in Cassano Magnago. "It not an exaggeration for me to say that this is the start of a new life, because I feel reborn."

Ivan Basso, 28 years-old, confirmed earlier speculation as to whether or not he would be going for wins in the two major tours. "The group [at Discovery] is ready to give total support to the Giro d'Italia-Tour de France double," reassured Basso. "It is a project that gives me lots of enthusiasm. The team and I have the same ambitions."

According Bruyneel's announcement yesterday, Ivan Basso will be heading to Lance Armstrong's home town, Austin, Texas, on December 3. "Now I am taking a week's vacation at the beach and [will be going] where it is warm. Then I will think of 2007," the Italian concluded.

Basso had toyed with the idea of moving to non-ProTour teams, like Barloworld and Tinkoff. He confirmed he had contact with Tinkoff to La Gazzetta dello Sport but an offer of two million USD a year and a structure built for Tour success was too irresistible.

But what about the International Association of Professional Cycling teams (AIGCP) pact made on 25 October in Paris? The members of the AIGCP claimed that they would not sign riders implicated in doping investigations and request riders authorize the UCI to collect their DNA samples before the end of 2007. Bjarne Riis, Basso's former team manager at CSC, was left confused with his fellow ProTour team.

"In his events I have lost too. I am left without the best in the world, but I also risked my team disappearing," said the Dane to La Gazzetta dello Sport Wednesday afternoon. "Only a few days ago, the ProTour teams had expressed their intentions to no longer engage the riders entangled with Operación Puerto in addition to requiring a DNA test. In reality, in the end, the interests of individuals prevail while the initiatives go disregarded."

German teams, T-Mobile Team and Team Gerolsteiner, were relatively tight-lipped in light of Discovery Channel's signing of Ivan Basso. "[Team manager Hans-Michael Holczer] will not comment on this event for the time being," Gerolsteiner spokesman Mathias Wieland told Cyclingnews. His counterpart at T-Mobile, Stefan Wagner, told Cyclingnews, that "We have our clear line and there is a commitment among all ProTour teams."

T-Mobile Sports Director Rolf Director explained to www.express.de, "I find it inconceivable that Basso will sign with Discovery Channel," and added, "Basso and Jan Ullrich, too, should prove their innocence, only then will they be interesting again."

He Came, He Cramped, He Conquered

Cycling champion Lance Armstrong calls the ING New York City Marathon “the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done”

Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong did what he wanted to do on November 5 – run the ING New York City Marathon in under three hours.

Armstrong, 35, stepped over the finish line in Central Park just under his goal in 2:59:36. His dark green shirt soaked in sweat, the superstar cyclist admitted that the last few miles of the race were a struggle.
“Even after experiencing one of the hardest days of the Tour nothing has ever left me feeling this bad,” he said at a post-race news conference. “[My shins] started to hurt in the second half, but the bigger problem the last 7 or 8 miles was the tightness in my calves and thighs. My calves really knotted up. I can barely walk right now.”

Armstrong called the race “the hardest physical thing I have ever done.” While he competed in triathlons as a teenager, Armstrong had never attempted a marathon.

“I think I bit off more than I could chew,” he said. “I never felt a point where I hit the wall; it was really a gradual progression of fatigue and soreness.”
Armstrong was relaxed at the beginning of the race, pointing to the crowd and smiling as spectators yelled, “Go Lance.” Armstrong fans along the course buzzed with excitement at the news that he was due in their area.

The millions of fans didn’t go unnoticed by the cycling champion. “It really was one of the more special events I have ever been involved with,” Armstrong said. “Certainly without the support of New York City I would have been three and a half hours. It’s rare that you see that kind of support from fans. Everyone who was cheering out there was cheering for everyone in this race, not just for me.”

The Armstrong entourage was hard to miss. It included a press vehicle, NBCSports.com on MediaZone.com’s dedicated “LanceCam,” Lance Armstrong Foundation athletes, and a contingent of world-class runners who paced him, including Alberto Salazar, Joan Benoit Samuelson, and Hicham El Guerrouj, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in track and field.

Armstrong ran with Salazar in the first half of the race. Salazar certainly knew the course: he won three consecutive New York City Marathons in 1980, ‘81, and ‘82.

“I had to hold him back,” Salazar, 49, said of Armstrong. “Cardiovascularly he was fine. He could speak sometimes better than I could while we were running. I knew that the challenge for him would be the pounding on his legs. So, I tried to keep us at a decent pace but knew he wanted to make it under three hours.”

Samuelson, who won gold at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, paced Armstrong for the last 16 miles of his marathon. Acting like a cycling domestique, Samuelson muscled runners to the side giving Armstrong a clear path.

“I had to use my elbows more than I ever have in a marathon, just keeping a clear path for him,” Samueslon said. “In the last few miles, I had keep the reins on him and just remind him to loosen up his arms and stretch them every once in a while.”

Armstrong needed Samuelson’s advice to loosen up.
“Toward the end of First Avenue in Harlem, I thought ‘uh-oh, I am in pain,’” Armstrong said, but he did not stop. “That LanceCam is humbling,” he said. “At one point I wanted to stop and stretch but with the LanceCam on me, I thought that would be embarrassing.”

Armstrong is not the first Tour de France cyclist to tackle the five boroughs. Laurent Jalabert ran last year’s ING New York City Marathon in 2:55.39. Armstrong said he was aware of Jalabert’s result and it was one of his goals to beat that time.

“Before the race that was my goal, I wanted to break three hours. But if you asked me that with three miles to go, I wouldn’t have cared,” he said. “Honestly, at the end I was so tired, I couldn’t care. I don't know how these guys do it.”

Armstrong wore a hat bearing the date of his diagnosis of cancer: 10/2 (in 1996). His struggle to overcome cancer and go on to win seven Tours de France has been an inspiration for others. The Lance Armstrong Foundation, which funds cancer research, raised about $600,000 at this year’s ING New York City Marathon.

“What Lance does is bring more people into the sport of running,” Salazar said. “He is good for the sport and he creates excitement.”

Will Armstrong return next year?

“The answer to that right now is ‘no,’” Armstrong said ruefully. “But I reserve the right to change my mind.”

Lance will have help from some pacemakers on Sunday

NEW YORK — Lance Armstrong will get a little help from an all-star cast of distance runners past and present when he makes his marathon debut Sunday. Armstrong, who relied on the support of teammates to win a record seven straight Tour de France titles, will be paced by former marathon champions Alberto Salazar and Joan Benoit Samuelson, as well as reigning Olympic 1,500- and 5,000-metre gold medallist Hicham El Guerrouj, in the New York race. "I wouldn't do it for anybody else," said Salazar, the last American winner of the New York City Marathon, way back in 1982. "I just wanted to spend some time with him." The 48-year-old Salazar will run the first 16 kilometres of the race with Armstrong. The 49-year-old Samuelson, who won the first Olympic women's marathon at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, will run the next 16. El Guerrouj then will do 10 kilometres with Armstrong, who will be on his own for the final stretch of the 42.195-kilometre race. The three will try to keep Armstrong, who ran triathlons as a teenager but never has attempted a marathon, to a four-minute-per-kilometre pace. Salazar, who works in the running department at Nike, resumed training when given the chance to run with Armstrong. He has been running eight kilometres a day, six times a week, and is confident he can get through the first 16 kilometres. But that'll be it for the three-time New York winner. "I'm kind of the slow link in this group, I'm an old man now," Salazar joked in a telephone interview Thursday from his Portland, Ore., office. "To try to go the full distance would be tough." Armstrong has said he hopes to finish the race in under three hours. He will be running in large part to raise awareness and money for his foundation and for cancer research.

An evening of art

We started the evening with a trip to Science World to see Body Worlds 3 - very cool! I think my favourite pieces were the configurations of the capillaries, the Skin Man and the dude doing the splits who had his organs all piled on his head (don't have a picture of that one!)



After Body Worlds we went to Shane's gallery - he had an opening last night. The artist was Kevin Tolman - I think he is from Albuquerque, NM. This was one of my favourite pieces.

Saw "The Queen" last night

Helen Mirren speaks with flawless, imperious diction throughout The Queen, but it's worth noting how much acting she does between lines. As Queen Elizabeth II, she reaches several turning points during the course of the film, most of them taking place when she's alone and silent, or as another character natters on about protocol, propriety, and what tradition states obviously must be done. Meanwhile, Mirren has already accepted that changing times have sent "what must be done" out the window.

An account of life inside the royal family during the week following Princess Diana's 1997 death in Paris, the film is bookended by official meetings between Mirren's Elizabeth and then-newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen). In the first meeting, Sheen undergoes the formality of being asked to form a government in Mirren's name. In the second, they mend their relationship after the muted power-struggle that forms the heart of the film. Between the two, director Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan capture an era fading, if not quite disappearing, into the past.

Their tone is alternately affectionate and toothsome. Combining facts from the public record with dramatic speculation, Frears and Morgan portray the royals as simultaneously an ordinary family and anything but. The scenes of Mirren driving an SUV—with considerable brio—across the Scottish countryside, or gathering with her family around the television to catch the news, don't quite jibe with the queen's implacable public image. But then the subject turns to the proper number of days to wait after the death to begin hunting, or most tellingly, Mirren's bafflement that the country could be so upset over someone who wasn't even a royal any more.

The warts-and-all approach ultimately makes its subject seem more human, and lets the film focus on the much larger subject of how times change. The Queen slowly shifts into a low-key tug-of-war between Mirren and Sheen's Blair, then riding a wave of Cool Britannia optimism. Taking the public temperature, he draws Mirren, however reluctantly, into a media-driven end of the century in which the royal family might have more currency than the average celebrity, but it would be best not to overestimate by how much. Frears plays out their struggle with dry wit, dark humor, and surprising compassion, in the end turning it into a moving state-of-the-nation report. Mirren begins the film having her portrait painted, looking every inch the monarch and proud to play the part. By the end, she's let the pressure of one week, and maybe a lifetime, show in her eyes.

New Technology Turns Food Leftovers into Electricity, Vehicle Fuels

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 27, 2006 - Tons of table scraps from the San Francisco Bay Area's finest restaurants are being turned into renewable energy at a new University of California Davis research and technology demonstration facility.The Biogas Energy Project will process eight tons of leftovers weekly (and later as much as eight tons daily) from premier restaurants such as San Francisco's Slanted Door, Jardiniere, Scoma's, Boulevard, and Zuni Cafe, and Oakland's Oliveto and Scott's Seafood. If all goes well, each ton of broccoli spears, cantaloupe rinds and fish bones will produce enough energy to provide electricity to power 10 average California homes for one day.

The Biogas Energy Project is the first large-scale demonstration in the United States of a new technology developed in the past eight years by Ruihong Zhang, a UC Davis professor of biological and agricultural engineering. The technology, called an "anaerobic phased solids digester," has been licensed from the university and adapted for commercial use by Onsite Power Systems Inc. The goal of this innovative public-private alliance is to divert organic matter -- stuff made from plants and animals, such as food waste and yard clippings -- away from landfills and into the energy grid. That reduces greenhouse gas emissions from landfills and turns trash into a substantial source of clean energy.

"The new Biogas Energy facility at UC Davis allows us to conduct innovative research on renewable energy sources. By utilizing agricultural and food waste as alternatives to fossil fuels, UC Davis continues the tradition of protecting California's environment," said Neal Van Alfen, dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

"The College of Engineering is leading a campus-wide initiative that emphasizes renewable energy, energy efficiency and transportation," added Engineering Dean Enrique Lavernia. "The opening of the Biogas Energy Project marks a significant step, and we're delighted that we were able to partner with industry in addressing this important problem for the state and for the nation."

Zhang's system differs from other anaerobic digesters, most of which are in use on municipal wastewater treatment plants and livestock farms, in three key ways:

* It processes a wider variety of wastes -- both solid and liquid -- including food scraps, yard trimmings, animal manure and rice straw. More than 5 million tons of food scraps go into California landfills each year. * It works faster, turning waste into energy in half the time of other digesters. * It produces two clean energy gases -- hydrogen and methane. Other digesters produce only methane. The gases can be burned to produce electricity and heat, or to propel cars, trucks and buses.

Zhang has proved in the laboratory on a small scale that in anaerobic, or oxygen-free, conditions, naturally occurring bacteria can quickly convert food and green wastes into hydrogen and methane gases.Now the challenge is to make the gases in consistently high quality and large volumes over the long term. Zhang believes it can be done. "My UC Davis students and I have determined the efficient bacterial species and their favorite environmental conditions for turning various wastes into gases," Zhang said.

"We know what happens with bacteria in 10 to 5,000 gallons of water and waste. Now we expect to see those bacteria perform as well, if not better, when they are in 50,000 to 300,000 gallons."

If they do, Onsite Power Systems CEO Dave Konwinski will be closer to his goal of selling similar power-production facilities to waste-generating businesses, such as food processors, farms and dairies, and municipal green-waste collection programs.

"Onsite will actually scale the digester to fit the customer's operations, then build it on their property. We will take the customer's waste stream in and send the energy it produces right back out to their plant," Konwinski said. "This technology will make a substantial dent in both our landfill needs and our use of petroleum and coal for fuels and electricity. It also will reduce our greenhouse gas emissions."

Onsite Power Systems has invested almost $2 million in helping Zhang refine the technology and prepare it for transfer to the commercial market. The other major funding source for Zhang's ongoing research has been the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program, which has awarded the university grants of nearly $1 million. The PIER program supports innovative energy research, development and demonstration projects that improve the quality of life in California by bringing environmentally safe, affordable and reliable energy services and products to the marketplace. Other supporters include California Integrated Waste Management Board, GraybarPropane Education & Research Council, California Air Resources Board, and Norcal Waste Systems.

Norcal Waste Systems of San Francisco is supplying the waste for the project because it already collects restaurant leftovers for its composting operation near Vacaville. Every day, Norcal collects 300 tons of food scraps from 2,000 restaurants in San Francisco and 150 more restaurants in Oakland, said Chris Choate, the firm's vice president of sustainability.

"Of the waste-collection companies in the U.S., Norcal is the most aggressive recycler," Choate said. "We pioneered collecting restaurant food scraps separately from other garbage and turning food scraps into nutrient-rich compost that is applied to vineyards and farms as an alternative to chemical fertilizers.

"New technology like UC Davis' offers California opportunities to harvest energy out of approximately 50 percent of the waste material that the state currently sends to landfills and to significantly reduce landfill disposal."