Saturday, December 21, 2013 THE NEW MEXICAN
LIFE&SCIENCE &SCIENCE
E/The Environmental Magazine
Question: How can it be that carbon dioxide emissions are the lowest they have been in the United States in 20 years despite the fact that we have no binding federal legislation limiting them? Jason Johnson, Port Chester, N.Y. Answer: Carbon dioxide emissions are indeed lower than at any time since 1994, according to data recently released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But if you think that the rise of the hybrid car, our embrace of public transit, walking, biking and those new windows on the house are behind the trend, think again. According to the EIA, increased energy efficiency has played a role, as have recent warmer winters and the recession, but the key driver has been the swapping out of coal at power plants and industrial facilities across the country for cleaner-burning and now more abundant natural gas. The reason so much natural gas is around is the rise of hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking,” a technique in which drillers inject water and chemicals into underground shale rock deposits to free up otherwise trapped natural gas. Fracking has allowed U.S. oil companies to access huge natural gas deposits from the Marcellus Shale in the Northeast and elsewhere. The increased supply has brought natural gas prices down so that it has been cheaper than coal during the last few years. Our carbon footprint benefits because burning natural gas to generate electricity generates about half the carbon emissions of coal for every megawatthour of power generated. But Americans might not want to pat themselves on the back for too long, as the positive trend won’t continue indefinitely. “Replacing coal with natural gas reduces smokestack emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury, but natural gas production and distribution comes with a host of problems, including methane leaks, contaminated water supplies, destroyed streams and devastated landscapes,” says Dan Lashof of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group. “And while gas-fired power plants have lower carbon dioxide emissions than coal-fired ones, their emissions are still far too high to be considered a global warming solution.” Furthermore, EIA says our energyrelated carbon emissions are already rising again as recent increases in natural gas prices have steered some utilities back to coal. The EIA anticipates U.S. energy-related carbon emissions rising 1.7 percent in 2013 and another 0.9 percent in 2014. The most important remaining question, Lashof says, is whether or not the U.S. will continue to reduce its CO2 emissions to achieve the president’s 2020 goal of a 17 percent reduction from 2005 levels — and eventually the 80 percent or more reductions needed to prevent the most dangerous risks of climate disruption. The target is within reach, he says, but power plant carbon pollution standards, among other changes, will be needed. Lashof adds that the only way to keep the ball rolling is via a coordinated effort including stricter federal carbon and energy efficiency standards, new state renewable energy and energy efficiency incentives and reworked zoning and transportation policies that discourage the use of private automobiles. “We can build the clean energy future we need, but we aren’t there yet and it’s not going to happen by itself.” Also, even if Americans can mobilize to get their emissions in check, will it matter? During 2012, energyrelated carbon emissions fell by some 3.7 percent in the U.S., but they rose 1.4 percent overall around the world. Indeed, global carbon emissions are on an unrelenting upward march as developing nations acquire the taste for the extravagant fossil-fuel-driven lifestyle perfected in the U.S.
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COURTESY C T JOHANSSON VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
New rules, incentives could extend emissions progress
Alan Honick Documentary filmmaker thinks fairness, as a conscientious, cooperative behavior, is an inherent feature of human nature, and he wants to start a much deeper discussion on what fairness means.
Health Science Environment
EARTHTALK
Professor seeks to extract all he can from research on orchids
A-9
Filmmaker examines survival of the fairest W
So much more than
vaNilla
By Meg Jones
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
MILWAUKEE o Ken Cameron, vanilla is a lot sexier than its name implies. The world’s leading expert on the biology of vanilla orchids sees the popular spice not as plain or ordinary, but as a beautifully complex and valuable commodity produced from the world’s largest family of plants. While vanilla extract flies off store shelves this time of year as holiday bakers mix it into cakes, pies and cookies, vanilla is much more than a pastry chef’s favorite spice. Deodorants, household cleaners, popular brands of vodka, pill coatings, the finest perfumes, even Coke and Pepsi count vanilla as an ingredient. And, of course, it’s the No. 1 selling ice cream. “I often tell people, ‘I’ll challenge you that within 10 minutes of waking, you will encounter vanilla,’ ” Cameron said in his office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he’s a botany professor and director of the Wisconsin Herbarium. “We tend to think of it as a flavor, but it’s also a fragrance. There aren’t many spices in that category.” Cameron travels around the world to speak about vanilla and conduct research on the valuable crop. This month, he will spend three weeks in vanilla capitals Madagascar and nearby Reunion Island. He’s written a well-received book, Vanilla Orchids: Natural History and Cultivation. Much of his research has been done in sequencing the DNA of vanilla orchid species around the world, determining, for example, that plants found in Mexico are the same species found in Madagascar. He was the first to figure out that the vanilla orchid found in Tahiti, which has different colored flowers than those in Mexico, is a hybrid. “It was kind of a like a paternity test,” Cameron said of his work on the Tahitian orchids. “There had always been a mystery as to how it got there. We don’t have a time machine to see who crossed it and when.” Because vanilla vines pretty much look the same and rarely flower, he is building a DNA bar code database for the 100 species of vanilla orchids, to identify them like a criminal fingerprint book. That way anyone can cut a piece of vanilla orchid vine and determine the species. Working with the University of Wisconsin, Madison botany graduate students, he so far has created bar codes for
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45 vanilla orchid species by sequencing small snippets of DNA. Gourmet cooks and foodies already know this — the flavor and fragrance of vanilla varies widely depending on the species. With more than 400 separate flavor components, selecting vanilla beans can be as difficult as judging fine wines. “In the same way tobacco and wine have different varietals, or terroir, all those things apply to vanilla, too,” said Cameron, opening tubes containing vanilla pods harvested from different countries. Holding a long, brown seed pod from Madagascar, Cameron explained the rumlike smell is the most common to vanilla consumers. A vanilla pod from Mexico smells spicier while the species grown in Tahiti has a more flowery, fruity aroma. Cultivation, harvesting and drying affect flavor and odor. The first vanilla orchids were cultivated for food centuries ago in Mexico. Called vainilla, or little pods, by Spanish explorers, vanilla beans and orchids were taken back to Europe, where the French were much more enthusiastic about the new spice than Spaniards, Cameron said. French explorers then carried the orchids to the colonies of Tahiti, Indonesia and Madagascar. That’s why it’s commonly known as French vanilla. The Spanish explorers, however, didn’t take along the orchid bees that pollinated the vines, so for many years the transplanted orchids didn’t flower and produce beans. Eventually, someone figured out how to hand pollinate vanilla orchids, which is still done today on vast vanilla plantations. Scientists believe the vanilla orchid bee is now extinct. They also suspect vanilla orchids in the wild are close to becoming extinct, a prospect that worries Cameron. Since most orchids are propagated by cutting pieces of the vine, there are many genetically identical copies in the world, “so if a disease comes through, it could wipe out everything like the Irish potato famine,” said Cameron, who wants to explore directive breeding because vanilla is still being grown the same way as a century ago. Which is to say, very painstakingly. On plantations in Madagascar, vanilla orchid flowers open once only for a few hours and must be hand pollinated. It can take up to nine months for the fruit to develop. When the green fruit is picked, it has no odor but during a monthlong drying process the aroma develops as the pods are laid in the sun during the day and rolled up in blankets at night while the beans ferment.
Food-service inspections For the period ending Dec. 19. To file a complaint, call the state Environment Department at 827-1820. REALBURGER, 2641½ Cerrillos Road. Cited for high-risk violations for hand sink not working, problem with beef refrigeration, blocked hand sink (corrected), undated beans, raw ground turkey stored above prepared foods (corrected). Cited for moderate-risk violations for particle accumulation along wall, food buildup on potato slicer. Cited for low-risk violations for unshielded light bulb, sealing problem in walk-in cooler, prep- and wash-area walls not light in color, chipping paint on wall. EL PASEO BAR & GRILL, 208 Galisteo St. Cited for high-risk violations for lack
of sanitizer test kit, problem with sanitizer mixture (corrected). Cited for low-risk violation for missing base coving in some areas. DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY TRAINING ACADEMY, 4491 Cerrillos Road. Cited for moderate-risk violation for problem with back door. Cited for low-risk violations for hand lotion at hand sink, lack of proper seals on wall, ceiling penetrations, nonworking light bulb. ALARM CLOCK CAFE, 2100 Yucca St. Cited for highrisk violations for air leak on dishwasher, unshielded drain line. Cited for moderate-risk violation for rust on food processor stand. STATE PENITENTIARY, 4311 N.M. 14. No violations.
REGAL SANTA FE STADIUM 14, 3474 Zafarano Drive. Cited for high-risk violation for problem with sanitizer dispenser. Cited for moderaterisk violation for buildup in sink, hard-water deposit on sink. LE PETITE ACADEMY, 1361 Rufina Circle. Cited for moderate-risk violation for improper storage of spoons. Cited for low-risk violation for inadequate ventilation in prep area. HORSEMAN’S HAVEN, 4354 Cerrillos Road. Cited for high-risk violation for undated foods in walk-in cooler (corrected). Cited for moderaterisk violations for vent hood light bulbs out and missing shields, missing base coving, peeling paint and plaster, dust accumulation on vent.
Section editor: Bruce Krasnow, 986-3034, brucek@sfnewmexican.com Design and headlines: Kristina Dunham, kdunham@sfnewmexican.com
hat the world needs now is a sixth sense, according to Alan Honick, a documentary filmmaker who has focused on environmental issues such as sustainability, climate change and resource depletion. Honick noticed that many of the conflicts he covered in his films revolved around the simple question of fairness. People often talk about “a sense of fairness,” hinting at special mode of perception, but Honick thinks fairness, as a conscientious, cooperative behavior, is an inherent feature of human nature, and he wants to start a much deeper discussion on what fairness really means. “We all have a definition, Roger depending on our own perspecSnodgrass tives on life,” said Honick, who Science Matters recently relocated to Santa Fe from Washington state. “I started to wonder if there is a more objective way to understand fairness — some way to approach fairness from a scientific perspective — and I found out there were all sorts of different angles on it, whether it’s game theory, archaeology, evolutionary psychology or behavioral ecology. Subject after subject looks at different aspects of fairness, how it originated, how it evolved and how it functions in human relationships at all levels, from human interpersonal relationships to international relations.” The problem of fairness has become a hot topic in the social and life sciences, where it competes with the highly structured domains of justice and the arcane distinctions of moral philosophy. “We invest in medical science to preserve the health of our bodies, and in environmental science to maintain the health of ecosystems,” writes David Sloan Wilson, president of the Evolution Institute, the institutional partner for Honick’s fairness project. “Yet our understanding of what makes societies healthy is in the pre-scientific stage,” Wilson pointed out a few years ago in an article in Nature. The Evolution Institute’s stated mission is “to use evolutionary science to solve real-world problems,” an ideal that was expressed in much of the work of economist Elinor Ostrom, who shared the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 2009, for her research analyzing economic governance as a collective action. “The issue of how best to govern natural resources used by many individuals in common is no more settled by academia than in the world of politics,” she wrote in Governing the Commons, first published in 1990. The battle between state and private control of resources has settled on a winner. Instead, Ostrom identified a set of design principals in the real world that successfully enabled individuals to sustain community resources. “We are neither trapped in inexorable tragedies nor free of moral responsibility for creating and sustaining incentives that facilitate our own achievement of mutually productive outcomes,” Ostrom wrote. Almost any news story about resource conflict can become a test case in a fairness discussion, from inequities in student-teacher ratios to endangered species to the rise in polygamy in Kazakhstan as an escape from poverty. We can trace our human ancestry back more than 2 million years, but modern humans who looked and thought more or less like we do only came along about 15,000 years ago during the Ice Age. Most of our social and genetic makeup was well-established by then. “Our Ice Age ancestors typically lived in small foraging societies whose members are believed to have valued generosity, sharing and altruism,” Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus write in The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery and Empire. As anthropologist Christopher Boehm adds in his book, Moral Origins, the Evolution of Virtue, Altruism and Shame, the pervasive equality of early hunter-gatherer society, unlike the hierarchical structure of our ancestor apes, probably kept predatory cheaters and bullies under control by group pressure and punishments that could include banishment. He concludes that “45,000 years ago almost all the humans living on this planet were practicing this egalitarianism.” So far, Honick has published several multimedia stories in Pacific Standard and online at Slate.com about facets of fairness as an evolutionary trait that is visible in the anthropological and archaeological record. Adding to these stories, he plans to continue to talk to leading thinkers in the field, attract an audience and stimulate a larger discussion on his way to producing what he currently conceives as a trilogy of full-length documentary films that will lay out the entire life story of fairness, “beginning with the earliest expression of cooperation and competition” in a single-cell amoeba and its role in human evolution to its vastly diminished role and potential utility amid the growing dysfunction of Industrial Age. “Evolution is a ruthless cost-benefit analyzer,” Honick says. “Things don’t evolve unless the benefits of that particular trait are greater than the costs.” Contact Roger Snodgrass at roger.sno@gmail.com.
Honick plans to produce what he conceives as a trilogy of full-length films that will lay out the life story of fairness. BREAKING NEWS AT www.sAntAfenewmexicAn.com