As farmers north of the equator get ready to plant their seeds, we’ve started wondering about agriculture before Columbus. Conventional wisdom says Native Americans were mostly hunters and gatherers. When they did farm, their slash-and-burn techniques exhausted the soil, forcing them to clear new fields.

Although Native Americans domesticated corn, tomatoes and potatoes, their farms were generally unproductive, and most of their plant food came from gathering tubers, greens, berries and shoots.

But as we learned at a series of talks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this picture needs editing:

The provision of permaculture

Until the 1960s, the government of Canada enforced assimilation of First Nation children at boarding schools that banned ancestral languages and practices. The goal was to homogenize Canada’s population, but suppressing culture also squelched knowledge of the traditional methods for raising and gathering food.

When the police boats arrived in British Columbia in the 1930s, to take children to boarding schools, Adam Dick (tribal name Kwaxsistalla) escaped, and went to live in secluded locations with his grandparents for about a decade.

Dick, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl) tribe, has become a link to a vanishing past. “His people have learned from him, they all benefit from his teaching,” says Nancy Turner, in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada).

Turner, who has spent a career studying indigenous agriculture, says knowing what to look for is key to understanding native agriculture on the coast of British Columbia. “They used perennial cultivation. ‘Keep it living’ was part of their philosophy, and it shows the way they value other life. A lot of perennial plants were being cultivated, but outsiders saw this as random plucking.”

People in the First Nations of British Columbia ate 35 species of roots, 25 greens, berries, even the inner bark of some trees, Turner says.

Overall, coastal people used 250 species of plants for food, tea, fuel, construction, fiber, canoes, dye and glue, Turner says.

When the natives harvested bark and wood from a living tree, they took what they needed without killing the tree. “They believed trees have sentient life, and called these ‘begged from’ trees,” Turner says. “‘We have come to beg a piece of you today.’”

“Gardens” in the water

The same attitude of “stewardship and caring” also applied to aquatic food, Turner says, especially the all-important salmon. “The salmon streams were carefully tended, and even cleaned. If the stream changed course, Adam and the others were taught by the elders to transplant [salmon] eggs to the new stream channel.”

Similarly, she says, people moved rocks to “create the most productive clam beds on the coast.”

Courtesy Nancy Turner.

Small plots of springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), about to blossom in British Columbia produced “immense quantities” of roots that were “regarded as indispensable to good health,” says Turner. In this permaculture, the harvesters replanted segments of the roots for another crop.

This was more like farming and harvesting than hunting-and-gathering, Turner insists. But the colonists, more interested in survival and profit than the people they were displacing, “were blind to these practices. They had in mind Mr. McGregor’s garden, with a fence and rows you can harvest. They looked at these things, but they did not see them.”

Restoring the foods

Most cultures give a central role to the production, preparation and consumption of food. What happens when the land that grew traditional foods is drowned by dams?

That’s the conundrum facing Linda Different Cloud Jones, an activist and student from the Lakota Sioux Nation. “The loss of biodiversity is the greatest challenge on traditional lands,” she told an audience in March at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and the loss of one culturally important species has significant impact.”

The Lakota people “are stereotyped as the people of the plains,” says Jones, “but we are also people of the river, or were a people of the river, until, in the 1950s and ’60s, when dams built in the Pick-Sloan project changed the way of life for the Lakota forever.”

Standing Rock, the Lakota reservation, is sandwiched between the Dakotas, and borders the Missouri River. “Overnight, hundreds of thousands of acres of native land was underwater,” said Jones. “All the plant and animal species in the riparian cottonwood forest were gone.”

The underground seedpods of the hog peanut (AKA mouse bean), were collected by prairie voles. These small mammals, which the Lakota called “mice,” cached the big seeds underground.

Lakota women found the caches with a stick and removed the seeds, Jones said, but “They always left a gift, dry berries, animal fat or corn. They would sing, ‘You have helped sustain my children during this coming winter, and we will not let your children go hungry.’ Their song echoed from the trees, and it seriously breaks my heart that my young children will never see that.”

A sustainable yield?

The song revealed that “an entire world view and behavior went along with this one plant species,” Jones said, and both suffered when dams flooded the forest. “We haven’t eaten these for 50 or 60 years. With the death of this one plant was the death of a little piece of our culture.”

The hog peanut was part of a larger cycle, Jones says. In spring, “We would tap box elder maples for syrup, then collect biscuit root, wild strawberries, currants, juneberries, cattail shoots, and acorns in December. Nothing was ripe at exactly the same time. When the plants are no longer there, the cycle is broken.”

Jones, a Ph.D. student at Montana State University, is attempting to grow the hog peanut as a form of “ecocultural restoration.” “Research for the sake of research was not what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to change the world for my people, to make their lives better.”

Millions of people made a living for thousands of years in the New World, she says. “Everyone always thought that when European people colonized the Americas, they were coming into a pristine place, but we were managing the landscape for thousands of years.”

Iroquois corn

Corn is an indisputable triumph of Native American agriculture. The plant, domesticated thousands of years ago in Mexico and Central America, was a staple of the American diet and is now the largest crop in the world (global production in 2009 was 819 million metric tons).

Although natives also invented the highly productive “three sisters” companion-cropping technique, their agricultural prowess has been underestimated, says Jane Mt. Pleasant, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

Although the Native Americans had transformed a weed into the phenomenally productive crop maize, “There are claims by scholars, archeologists, geographers and historians that native agriculture was predominantly shifting cultivation… largely marginal, not too productive,” Mt. Pleasant says.

In “shifting cultivation” (a politically correct locution for “slash and burn”), farmers move to new plots as they exhaust their soil. According to this logic, native farmers in North America “sowed the seeds of their own destruction through environmental degradation,” says Mt. Pleasant, who directs the American Indian Program at Cornell.

But Mt. Pleasant says this is bunk. Rather, she contends that:

The soil should be the starting point for understanding agriculture, says Mt. Pleasant. While many soils on the Eastern Seaboard are not great, large parts of upstate New York had good soil that still supports productive farms.

About 300 years ago, the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of five (later six) tribes, lived in the area, and evidence for their farm productivity comes, ironically, from armies that sought to destroy them. “The quantity of corn which we found in store in this place, and destroyed by fire is incredible,” wrote the governor of New France in 1687.²

The French attacked the Iroquois, who were allied with France’s great enemy, Great Britain.

Slash ‘n burn, or sustainable agriculture?

Then in 1779, a soldier sent by General George Washington reported that his unit had destroyed at least 200 acres of Iroquois corn and beans that was “the best I ever saw.”

“This was not backyard gardening, not primitive farming,” Mt. Pleasant says. “They were dynamic, producing farmers on really good soils.”

In modern tests of corn varieties believed to resemble those grown by the Senecas, one of the Iroquois tribes, Mt. Pleasant got yields of 2,500 to 3,000 pounds per acre (45 to 54 bushels per acre or 2,800 to 3,400 kilograms per hectare).

This was far above the 500 kilograms per hectare of wheat grown in Europe.

Turner calculated that the Iroquois could support roughly three times as many people on an acre as contemporaneous Europeans could with their wheat crops.

Part of the advantage, she says, comes from maize’s inherent productivity. But observers have long wondered how this production could have occurred with neither plow nor draft animals, usually deemed the hallmarks of agricultural progress.

Plows, however, are now viewed as mixed blessing by many soil scientists. Although they prepare a good seedbed and bury weeds, they expose soil to the air, which encourages oxidation of humus, the organic content that supports essential microorganisms.

Although, after plowing, the humus briefly releases a burst of nitrogen, the depletion of organic matter and increased erosion continue for decades.

And thus on balance, Mt. Pleasant says the lack of the plow was an advantage, because planting with hand tools saves soil organic matter.

“If you are not tilling, and start with good soil, you are not going to lose fertility,” Mt. Pleasant says. “The system is stable as long as the crop yields are moderate and there is no plowing.”

But without plowing, there was no need for slash and burn.

Overall, Mt. Pleasant says, the new data provide a “quite different” perspective on agriculture. “Who were the primitive farmers? This is sustainable agriculture at its highest level.”

Rethinking agriculture

This type of revelation changes our view of the origin of agriculture, says Eve Emshwiller, an assistant professor of botany at UW-Madison who organized the seminar on native agriculture and who studies oca, a root crop grown in the Andes. “We have always talked about hunter-gatherers as if one day they were gathering food and noticed a plant growing from seed and thought, ‘We could gather seeds and start farming,’ as if this brilliant idea happened all of a sudden.”

Aside from historical curiosity, why worry about how native Americans grew their crops? One reason is the growing interest in sustainable agriculture, says Emshwiller. As agriculture faces the challenge of feeding more people without further damaging soil and water, older traditions could contribute.

Looking at other ways to grow and gather food will broaden our perspective, Emshwiller says. “There were a lot of people who were not considered agriculturalists, who were [supposedly] just gathering from the wild. But if you really understand what they were doing, there is not a sharp line between gathering and farming. There is a huge continuum of ways that people manage resources and get more from them.”

As honeybee colonies in the United States and Europe continue to suffer from a mysterious syndrome called colony collapse disorder (CCD), scientists are scrambling for answers. Another answer arrived this week, with a publication¹ that implicates a widely used insecticide.

CCD endangers many crops, but none more than almonds, which are pollinated by bees in more than a million hives trucked to California during the flowering season. Trucking stresses the bees, and stress is one of several likely contributors to the collapse syndrome.

Indeed, CCD could be several conditions lumped under one name, but here’s the trademark: The bees die away from the hive, obscuring the cause or causes of the collapse.

In the new study, scientists in France glued radio frequency identification tags to bees. Half were fed non-lethal doses of thiamethoxam, a common insecticide, then all the bees were released 1 kilometer from the hive. At the hive, the scientists used a radio-frequency gizmo to count how many flew home.

The tags did not affect the results, says Mickaël Henry, a researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, in Avignon. “Previous studies have shown that they do not impair movement or behavior of bees, or their time budgets for foraging activity.”

In any case, the control bees also sported tags.

What’s wrong?

How did the insecticide reduce the return rate so significantly? Most likely by causing difficulties with orientation, or locomotor activity, or both, Henry says.

When the experiment was repeated over a distance of just 70 meters, 92 percent of exposed and 98 percent of control bees returned, so both sets of bees were able to fly. The major impairment of exposed bees on the unfamiliar, longer route suggests that the insecticide was most damaging to the ability to learn a new route.

The neonicotinoid insecticides, the category that includes thiamethoxam, trigger nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which are normally excited by a signal from a neurotransmitter. According to the new study, “Effects of sublethal neonicotinoid exposures in honey bees may include abnormal foraging activity, reduced olfactory memory and learning performance, and possibly impaired orientation.”

These insecticides make bees stupid, in other words.

The experiment was designed to count how many bees failed to return rather than pinpoint the reasons for that failure, Henry stresses. “The next step is to go into deeper detail about the behavior, with time-activity budgets, and looking at their foraging.”

Not the whole story

“This is a nice study, and it does clarify something that a lot of people have pointed to in the disappearance of bees,” says Phil Pellitteri, a faculty associate in entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Insecticides have been known to cause bees to get lost, that’s one symptom of collapse. But colony collapse is a complex thing, and you can’t hang it all on one factor.”

Honeybees have long been attacked by viruses, protozoans and mites, Pellitteri says, and pesticides may decrease immunity, thus increasing susceptibility to pathogens. These, combined with the stress of long-distance travel and the scarcity of natural foraging grounds “are the general direction a lot of CCD research is pointing to. It’s a number of things, and their interactions.”

Henry and colleagues fed their data on return rates into a mathematical model, which predicted a perilous slide in colony populations. “The disappearances we observed may cause the colony to reach a population size low enough to be sensitive to other stressors,” he says. “Most bees are exposed to pesticides, and this confirms that exposure can put the colony at risk of collapse; this is the take-home message.”

As the science of genetics advances, the task of informing patients has grown both more complicated and more essential. Good communication must reflect the science of the genetic situation and the attitudes and beliefs of patients and their families, says Roxanne Parrott, professor of communication arts and sciences, and health policy, at Penn State.

Photo: futurowoman

This child may one day choose to know the genetic risks passed down from her parents.

In starting a new study, Parrott used a survey to elicit attitudes and beliefs from family members and patients with three genetic conditions: Down syndrome, Marfan syndrome and neurofibromatosis. The results, she says, confirm the idea that communication must reflect the audience: “There is not a one-size-fits-all notion of how to communicate about genetic conditions, but there are enough patterns that we don’t have to adapt to each individual or family member.”

Although some genetic mutations always cause disease, more raise the risk without spelling doom — and that’s often a hard concept to get across, she adds. “There is so much media attention to genetic determinism,” so those who would communicate with patients must realize that many people assume that having a gene means getting a disease, when in fact more disease genes raise the odds of getting that disease, but are also affected by environmental and behavioral factors.

Talking genes blues

Communications researchers “have focused on the threat, and on trying to motivate people to take action,” says Parrott, “and this is correct, as long as we package the message in ways that can help them change their behavior and reduce the threat.”

A fearsome genetic test

Huntington’s disease, a hereditary neurological disorder, was one of the first diseases linked to a single gene. Huntington’s progressively attacks motor, mental and emotional abilities.

Photo: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Digital ID: cph 3c30859

American folk singer Woody Guthrie died from Huntington’s disease in 1967. His son Arlo Guthrie chose to be tested for HD and found that he does not carry the mutation.

HD is caused by a dominant mutation in the Huntington gene, so any child of a parent with HD has a 50 percent risk of inheriting the disease. Huntington’s is the archetype of genetic determinism: if you have the mutation, HD is inevitable.

Once the genetic test became available, a child of a parent with HD could be tested for the mutated gene. This is a difficult decision: Would you rather live in uncertainty, or get tested and possibly learn you will develop a fatal, incurable disease?

Messages about the genetic contribution to heart disease, cancer and diabetes should reflect the needs of patients with disparate beliefs, says Parrott. She and co-author Kathryn Peters, a genetic counselor, found that each group was about equally common among family members and diagnosed patients. “When we think about communication, these four frameworks represent quite different things to listen for, ideas to probe for, and a different approach to communication.”

In an online survey of 541 patients and family members, Parrott and Peters found that some beliefs were misconceptions while others were accurate, and that despite the media emphasis on single mutations as causing disease, not everybody thought “that genes alone determine health.”

Genes are relative

One interesting result came from the “integrated relativists,” who talked about how behavior, religious faith and social support “could come together to predict health,” Parrott says. That is a rather sophisticated attitude concerning genomic information, she adds.

Unfortunately, “The integrated folks were the most uncertain about their future, and how things would work out with their diagnoses,” says Parrott. “That’s probably a good indication of having almost too much information, conflicting information. Their integrated perspective puts them in a situation where they … believe that a lot of things contribute to their health, and they don’t know what to do about it.”

Learning what’s inside your genes can have a psychological impact, Parrott adds. “How do you know who to tell? How could this affect your personal relationships? When do you start having these conversations? Does your identity become a package of genes?”

The seas’ most sought-after fish are swimming between a rock and a hard place: the fisherman’s net and an encroaching mass of suffocating water.

A recent study has uncovered a new dose of bad news for ocean fish and the fishing industry. Areas of the deep ocean with little dissolved oxygen, called dead zones, are expanding and, thus, shrinking many fishes’ watery homes.

One driving force behind the predicament is none other than that pesky climate problem.

“Climate change is actually working in tandem with overexploitation of the animals to push these populations into a real dangerous place in terms of population collapse,” said Eric Prince, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center and co-author of the study.

For example, Prince and his colleagues calculated that the Atlantic blue marlin, an economically valuable fish that was a focus of their study, has lost about 15 percent of its habitat from expanding dead zones since 1960. Dwindling habitat threatens not only the lives of fishes, but also the sustainability of the already ailing fishing industry.

Breathing room

Like their above-water brethren, fish need oxygen, which is dissolved in the water. Big, predatory fish, such as the blue marlin, need more dissolved oxygen than most, because they require lots of energy to grow and survive. Without sufficient oxygen, they’ll suffocate.

The level of oxygen in the water thus partly delineates fish habitat boundaries. Dead zones often draw these borders.

As climate change causes open ocean dead zones to balloon, fish habitat deflates.

Diagram modified from one originally published in Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers, Vol 57, Issue 4, Lothar Stramma, Sunke Schmidtko, Lisa A. Levin, & Gregory C. Johnson. Ocean oxygen minima expansions and their biological impacts, 587-595, Copyright Elsevier (2010).

Technically known as oxygen minimum zones, dead zones are actually a natural occurrence. Found at depths of between 200 and 1000 meters, they are caused partly by seawater circulation and partly by the decomposition of organic matter, namely deceased sea critters that sink from surface waters.

As aerobic bacteria nosh on the organic matter, they use up the oxygen in the water. Eventually, hypoxia happens—the water becomes so depleted of oxygen that many creatures can’t survive.

Since deep-sea dead zones are insulated from the ocean’s surface, where the water borrows oxygen from the atmosphere, they can only reload with oxygen if currents make a long-distance delivery, according to Sunke Schmidtko, an oceanographer at the University of East Anglia, the other co-author of the study.

Deep-sea dead zones are different from their coastal cousins like the one in the Gulf of Mexico. Coastal dead zones form due to a buildup of agricultural fertilizer that rivers, such as the Mississippi, collect and then flush out to sea, causing abnormal blooms of plant life.

De-fizzing the ocean

But climate change is turning what Mother Nature does normally into a big problem. As the air is getting hotter, so is the water, and warmer water can hold less oxygen than colder water.

This is similar to what happens to a soft drink on a hot day. After sitting in the heat and sun, the fizz fizzles, and you are left with a flat, carbon dioxide-depleted beverage.

Also, warmer surface waters are less likely to sink to the ocean’s lower layers, because warm water is lighter than the colder water below, Schmidtko explained. In other words, as the oxygen-rich surface layers heat up, they could have a harder time delivering oxygen to the deeper ocean.

Schmidtko clarified that oceanographers are still trying to determine how exactly climate change is affecting the ocean, but with their knowledge of how water works, these represent their current speculations.

The rock below

With less oxygen to go around, oxygen minimum zones are swelling and intruding on many fishes’ living zones.

For example, marlins often dive deep to feed, sometimes as far down as 800 meters. However, in the eastern Atlantic’s growing dead zone, which is already one of the largest in the world, Prince found that marlins can’t dive as deep as their west-side counterparts.

“They need to go where the food is and where they can breathe,” he said.

With less breathing room below, the floor of their habitat rises, and they are pinned to the surface layers. With nowhere to go but up, marlins become squished into tighter, testier quarters with other predatory fish and their prey. They also find it harder to dodge a waiting fishing hook or net.

“Concentrating them makes it much easier for overexploitation by [humans],” said Prince.

The increasing concentration of animals at the top could also lead to a boost in the amount of sinking organic matter, which would further worsen the oxygen shortage below.

Softening the hard place above

As a prized catch, Atlantic blue marlins are already victims of overharvesting. In fact, their populations have dropped 60-64 percent over the past three fish generations (14-18 years).

But the growing dead zones can actually fool scientists and fishermen into thinking fish populations are doing just fine, since more fish are squeezed into a smaller area. Thus, to ensure the dead zone-fishing vise does not become their demise, Prince said scientists must more carefully monitor fish populations, as well as the expansion of the dead zones.

While fish stock assessments are starting to incorporate this information, Prince warned the pace needs to quicken.

And if the Earth is to continue warming, as most scientists predict, Schmidtko added that humans should chill out on fishing.

After all, we will never be capable of “ventilating the ocean,” he said.

You have read it in black and white: the economy is improving: Factories are hiring. Adding 200,000 jobs in December cut the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Consumer confidence is rising, and cars are selling again.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit a record $2-trillion a year, and since the cataclysm in 2008, real gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services, has grown for more than two years.

These economic measures are broad, ubiquitous and reliable, but there are other ways to measure the economy. If you poke around, you’ll find economists — on Wall Street and Elm Street alike — with their own idiosyncratic economic indicators.

Like the GDP and unemployment rate, many are less forecasting tools than measures of the current economy. That may diminish their prognostic value, but not their human-humorous-interest value.

To stay or to vacate?

Vacations, however necessary, can be expensive, and so when the economy tanked in 2008, we began to hear about the cost-cutting “staycation.” By taking time off from work (assuming we had a job…) without leaving home, we could enjoy friends, family and local attractions: parks, museums, lakes and beaches.

We could, in other words, enjoy many of the benefits of a vacation while ducking the hefty price tag. Staycations can have pizazz: would you rather be taking off your shoes in a frenetic airport or building a tree house with the kids?

We failed to find anybody who studies staycations, so the best we can say about their merit as economic indicators is that past performance is no guarantee of future success; read the full prospectus before investing!

Vacant at home

It doesn’t take a Rhodes scholar to deduce from foreclosure stats or photos of abandoned houses that housing remains a black hole in the American economy. But like the staycation, a foreclosure boom follows a sour economy, and is more informative about the immediate past than about the immediate future.

We were, however, intrigued to learn that foreclosure could be a disease vector. Clouds of mosquitoes are breeding in abandoned ponds and swimming pools at foreclosed homes in Arizona.

That gives us another reason to hate skeeters, even if their whine is the sound of love.

Sports: No rush to the finish line

Pro-sport tickets are not cheap, so a full stadium must signify a healthy economy. But it ain’t necessarily so, says Andrew Billings, who studies broadcasting and sports at the University of Alabama. “People often get a flawed picture from simply going by attendance figures. It depends on the sport.”

In the National Football League, he notes, “the majority of stadiums sell out, and demand far exceeds supply.” Before a sick economy leads to empty seats, he says, it deflates ticket prices on resale markets, “but you will still see a full stadium, and may think the economy must not be too bad, even if the demand is cut in half.”

And don’t bother counting duffers at a private golf course, either, Billings says. A full golf course “is not always a straight-off indicator of prosperity,” because the major expense is the cost of membership. “For many people, once they have bought the membership, the costs are sunk, and golf becomes the cheap option for entertainment.”

When money is tight, he says, “They may be playing twice as frequently because it’s already paid for.”

Big screen, big sales, bogus economic indicator?

You might think sales of pricy electronic goods, including those “mine-is-bigger-than-yours” TVs, would closely track prosperity, but Billings says they “may be another misleading measure.”

Many of those giant video screens, more suited to aircraft hangers than living rooms, are bought to watch sports, and looking at the full economic picture reveals the folly of the sales = prosperity equation, he says.

Consider the cost of season tickets for big-league sports — up to $20,000 for a seat behind home plate at the New York Yankees. When times get bad, Billings says, “The buyer may think, ‘Why don’t I get a $2,000 TV and the major-league baseball package? Once you add in parking and food, sports can be very expensive, and that makes the flat screen look pretty cheap.”

Although another flat-screen sale may contribute to the image of prosperity, Billings says, this fan “has really cut their budget to avoid going to the stadium.”

Pretty Byzantine?

How do we get a measure of economic activity in the long, dark epoch before the invention of the GDP or the flat-screen television? In the 14th century, during the death throes of the Byzantine empire, the church was an economic engine and a wealth center. If you bought a marriage license, you paid the church, which also owned buildings, even entire communities.

Because churches hold some of the best documents from the period, some scholars have proposed using records of church wealth as a proxy for economic development — or decline — during this benighted epoch before the spreadsheet was envisioned.

Garbage everywhere

With the possible exception of unwrapped broccoli from a local farm, everything you buy creates garbage, and the garbage disposal system is always affected by economic slowdowns.

Duh.

But we were surprised to hear that garbage can offer almost a real-time economic readout. According to Edward Humes, author of the forthcoming book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, “Until the housing bubble burst, the largest landfill in the country, by intake, was Puente Hills in Los Angeles County, which was taking up to the legal limit, 13,000 tons per day. This was cut in half after the housing bubble burst. Home construction and demolition debris fell as construction stopped, and people started buying less stuff.”

Construction fell so quickly, Humes says, that “Landfill operators probably saw [bad economic] things coming ahead of a lot of the rest of us.”

Even “durable goods” can quickly start bulking up the garbage stream, he says. “So much of what we buy is pretty ephemeral, even the stuff defined as durable goods must last just one year. A lot of it is designed to be thrown away; not fixed. The age of the TV repairman is long behind us.”

Garbage tells us about more than just economics, Humes adds. “It’s a little scary, one of our greatest exports is trash. We used to make things, and now we make trash.”

Although high garbage flows correlate to prosperity, Humes says the linkage cannot last forever. “Every culture figures out” that wasting resources is not a long-term solution, he says. “Suddenly, when resources are scarce, humans get more conscious of how much they have wasted, but by then it’s too late.”

Night lights, big city

Can lights at night, as seen from space, measure a region’s economy? After all, lighting requires bulbs, generators, energy and wires, so the argument has face validity. But a 2011 study returned mixed results. Night lights were a useful gauge in 25 percent to 33 percent of counties in the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii). In India, night lights gave a useful picture of local GDP in a “very small number” of districts.

And in China, fewer than 10 percent of districts showed a significant correlation between night lights and GDP. One reason: light from the intense coastal urbanization overwhelmed the satellite’s sensors and could not be measured accurately.

Underwater underwear

Alan Greenspan, who ran the Federal Reserve for oh-so-many years, was said to favor sales of men’s underwear as an economic indicator. His theory: When times get tight, men decide to forgo the pleasure of a new pair of briefs or boxers.

We were unable to unearth evidence for this notion, but wish to ask two follow-up questions: Do sales of women’s underwear convey an economic message? And how do you know?

Stick with lipstick?

If men can withstand the urge to buy boxers and briefs, women apparently can’t cut back on “small indulgences” like lipstick. In 2001, the chair of Estee Lauder coined “lipstick index” to explain why lipstick sales rise during a bad economy.

Going to war

For some, the military is a job of last resort, and so the number and quality of new recruits offers a proxy for economic conditions.

But military recruiting ads may be just as telling as the numbers. In 2009, the New York Times described a new Marines ad showing “men crawling through mud and under barbed wire, being smacked in the head with padded fighting sticks, vomiting after inhaling tear gas and diving, boots and all, into a swimming pool.”

With so many potential recruits in the job market, the ad didn’t bother soft-selling the rigors of Marine life.

Recouping the coupons

When pressed for coins, why not cash in on those coupons that clutter mailboxes and newspapers? In hard times, coupon redemptions do rise, according to a company that processes them.

Skirting the economic reality?

If we can believe QI, a quiz show from the United Kingdom, long hair and short skirts are both signs of prosperity. Hey, we tried, but failed, to track this revelation back to a legit study, but still give thanks to reader “St Ga” for the suggestion, and for an elegant mix-mastering of cause and effect: “If the government makes short skirts & long hair compulsory for EVERYONE will the economy improve? :)”

We wish.

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”

In New York and Pennsylvania, a technique that splits rock so natural gas can flow is pitting environmentalists against industry and neighbor against neighbor.

In areas distant from the surge of natural gas drilling that has swept western states over the past 20 years or so, high-pressure fracturing, or “fracking,” has raised a fundamental question: Can a huge supply of deep natural gas be developed without harming rural landscapes and poisoning the groundwater that most people drink?

Nationwide, fracking is now used not only to liberate gas from shale, but also to boost production in the majority of oil and gas wells. In an era of energy shortages, it’s difficult to dismiss a massive new supply of natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, and the gas industry is quick to position fracking as a key to jobs, prosperity and energy security.

But critics charge that fracking pollutes water and causes excess noise, truck traffic and health hazards. They reject the conversion of rural landscapes into what they call “industrial landscapes.”

Update Dec. 9, 2011: On Dec. 8, the Associated Press reported on an Environmental Protection Agency finding “that compounds likely associated with fracking chemicals had been detected in the groundwater beneath Pavillion, a small community in central Wyoming where residents say their well water reeks of chemicals.” Despite the differences in geology and fracking technology between Wyoming and the eastern gas deposits, the finding adds fuel to the contention that fracking can harm groundwater. End update.

The middle ground on the fracking debate seems as lonely as the far side of moon. But could both sides have some valid arguments? And if so, where do we go from here?

Context for the contest

Natural gas was once flared off as junk at oil wells, but it began to enter the energy markets in the 1920s. By now, it’s one of the big three sources of energy in the United States, alongside coal and oil.

Ten or 15 years ago, rising prices heralded a shortage of natural gas, a clean fossil fuel containing mostly methane that has become a major energy source for electricity and home heating over the past 50 years or so.

Those prices helped spark a two-legged technological revolution composed of fracking and horizontal drilling. Fracturing rock allows gas to flow. Horizontal drilling allows one well to tap a profitable volume of a thin, gas-rich wafer of deep shale.

The power of this combination is evident in the frenzy to lock up land above the Marcellus shale, a rock body that underlies parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia, and in the rising estimates for future gas production.

At the same time, “fracking” has become the “brand name” for more generalized opposition to gas drilling, and the debate is confused by the fact that many people use “fracking” as shorthand for new gas development rather than the process that breaks rock so gas can flow. This matters: Although fracking fluids can pose a hazard to groundwater, many gas wells contain other fluids that may carry radiation or other nasties that must be removed before the gas is shipped to its destination.

This “produced water” can be hazardous in its own right.

Down Pennsylvania way

Today, the biggest shale-gas development is in the Barnett Shale, around Fort Worth, Texas, site of more than 10,000 wells. But the hottest political debate concerns the Marcellus shale. The Marcellus was consolidated from mud about 390 million years ago into a fine-grained sedimentary rock that trapped methane produced during the decay of organic matter. The low-oxygen conditions protected the methane from oxidation.

The Marcellus shale lies an average of two kilometers deep, far below the groundwater that feeds home and municipal water wells. With an average thickness of about 30 meters, the Marcellus contains an estimated 295 to 2,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

If 10 percent of that gas can be recovered, this amounts to one to 10 years of supply for the United States, which used 21 trillion cubic feet in 2006. ¹

Fracking has been dividing communities in the East, which has seen little of the vast energy development of the West. While some landowners and businesses profit from leases and economic activity related to gas development, others fear for the safety of their well water, streams and air.

Today, much of the concern about fracking focuses on drinking water. According to Food & Water Watch, toxic chemicals in fracking fluid can contaminate water via spills, accidents, improper disposal or poor well construction. Natural gas has entered drinking water, the group notes, during “more than 1,000 documented cases of water contamination near drilling sites around the country.”

Photo: Helen Slottje

This drill worked in Dimock, Penna.

In areas with many gas wells, groundwater pollution cannot easily be traced to a particular well, and it takes some effort to trace the pollution to gas drilling itself. But widespread groundwater pollution can also be virtually impossible to reverse.

One of the more notorious cases occurred in Dimock, a Marcellus-shale town in northeastern Pennsylvania. After drilling started in 2008, 18 private water wells became polluted with methane and other chemicals, turning dishes brown and, according to a press report, residents reported getting sick from drinking the water, or even showering under it.

On Dec. 15, 2010, Cabot Oil and Gas Corp. signed a consent agreement with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection regarding 18 polluted water wells in Dimock. Cabot agreed to suspend drilling, plug and abandon three gas wells, supply drinking water to 18 houses, test home well water, and “comply with all applicable environmental laws and regulations” when it resumed drilling and fracking in the area.

The Department concluded, but Cabot disputed, that the company had engaged in “unlawful conduct.”

Let a thousand wells bloom!

New York City continues to oppose fracking in its prized watershed in the Catskill Mountains. And fracking opponents scored a victory on Nov. 18, when the Delaware River Basin Commission declined to move forward on a decision to allow fracking in the Basin. Opponents had warned that up to 20,000 gas wells in the area would threaten water supplies for millions.

Many billions are at stake in the debate over shale gas, which ConocoPhillips expects to account for almost half of U.S. natural gas production by 2035. The petroleum giant credits shale gas for a 110 percent rise in U.S. natural gas reserves and resources between 2000 and 2009.

What is fracking?

Hydrofracturing, or fracking, is a stage of “well completion” that follows drilling. Briefly, drillers bore through the surface, insert steel casing and concrete to seal the hole against groundwater, and drill deeper into the rock, repeatedly adding pipe and cement if needed to seal the well from the surrounding rock.

As the drill approaches the gas-bearing shale, it is “steered” into a horizontal direction, then forced through the source rock for hundreds of meters or more. Once the drilling is completed, holes are punched in the lower casing and millions of gallons of frack fluid are pumped into the well at roughly 1,000 times atmospheric pressure.

After some of that frack fluid is withdrawn, production can begin, as gas rises under the influence of the immense pressure belowground. At the surface, produced water and frack fluid are removed before the gas is piped to market.

Fracking in the history books?

The gas industry often meets questions about the environmental aspects of fracking by asking, essentially, “What’s new?” “The history of fracturing technology’s safe use in America extends all the way back to the Truman administration, with more than 1.2 million wells completed via the process since 1947,” says the industry group Energy in Depth.

But fracking “was a rare process” at first, says Geoffrey Thyne of the Enhanced Oil Recovery Institute at the University of Wyoming. For 20 years it usually used water measured in the tens of thousands of gallons (not millions like today) and sometimes sand, says Thyne. But in the 1990s, drillers in Wyoming “did a giant frack. Suddenly the amount of [frack] fluid jumped 10 or 20 times, and suddenly a whole class of resources that was labeled unconventional became accessible.”

Let’s do the definitions:

Thyne notes that in contrast to conventional gas, shale gas requires “a lot more development, more wells and infrastructure, to get the same bang for the buck, and that creates a lot of friction with landowners.”

Jonah, an unconventional gas field in Wyoming “has a well on every 10 acres,” says Thyne, who teaches petroleum geology and hydrogeology. “If you flew over it, it looks like a moonscape, there’s an incredible amount of development. If you bring that into areas that have not had development, people are going to be put back on their heels: ‘What the heck?’”

As the economic benefits of fracking were proven, it became the rule for oil and gas. Over the last 20 years, Thyne says, “we went from a period where one well in 100 would be fracked, maybe one time each, to now, where 90 percent of all gas and oil wells are fracked, and the number of frackings per well has gone from one to as many as 25, done over a period of several months.”

But that growth is both normal and desirable, says Felmy. “Absolutely, it’s been a wonderful development of technology, and like all technology, it takes time to ramp up. Fortunately, [as a result] a bright spot for consumers is the low price of natural gas today.”

Let the debate begin

The impact of fracturing and horizontal drilling is evident in a new estimate from the U.S. Department of Energy, which places the national gas resource at 110 years of current consumption (although by definition not all of a fossil-fuel “resource” can be recovered).

Projections about future production are inherently debatable because the economical amount of any energy resources depends on future prices. Internal emails from the U.S. Energy Information Administration have suggested that estimates of production and profit in the shale-gas boom exhibit signs of “irrational exuberance.”

In 1996, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, used that to describe the “dot-com market bubble.

Natural gas has environmental benefits over coal and oil, including a reduced greenhouse-warming impact. To release the same amount of heat, oil and especially coal release more carbon dioxide than methane.

We have seen an April, 2011 study claiming heavy releases of heat-trapping methane from fracking and drilling make natural gas worse than coal for the climate. Although critics have questioned the study on the ground that the massive releases are both dangerous and uneconomical, methane is clearly entering the atmosphere at some gas operations.

Ozone, which damages the lungs and triggers asthma attacks, forms when sunlight strikes hydrocarbons released from a gas or oil well. The Environmental Protection Agency is studying ozone and smog at a gas field in Wyoming.

In a tight economy, jobs and taxes are big allures of gas drilling. Some landowners have profited mightily by leasing land to gas firms. In 2009, an industry-financed study reported that 622,000 people are directly involved in the discovery, extraction and distribution of natural gas in the United States, and the industry had an estimated, direct economic impact of $170 billion.

Concerns and open questions

There are plenty of concerns about the intensified gas extraction enabled by hydro-fracturing. Beyond the worries about noise, traffic, and the “industrial landscape,” there are other concerns.

Seven hours after fracturing began, more than 50 shallow earthquakes occurred within 3.5 kilometers of a gas-drilling operation in Oklahoma, in January, 2011. According to the Oklahoma Geological Survey, “The strong correlation in time and space as well as a reasonable fit to a physical model suggest that there is a possibility these earthquakes were induced by hydraulic-fracturing,” but added that this is “impossible to say with a high degree of certainty… “

Fluid chemistry

Frack fluid, the liquid used to pressurize and crack underground rocks, is a major concern about fracking. Water, an incompressible liquid, and sand, used to hold open the fractures created by the immense pressure, are said to comprise more than 99 percent of fracking fluid. But the fluid can also contain hundreds of other chemicals to fight bacteria or rust, or to change how the water flows.

Some of the additives are common and low-toxicity, but others, like diesel fuel, are poisonous.

And many are unknown, held as trade secrets. According to an April, 2011 report from Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, “Between 2005 and 2009, the 14 oil and gas service companies used more than 2,500 hydraulic fracturing products containing 750 chemicals and other components. Overall, these companies used 780 million gallons of hydraulic fracturing products – not including water added at the well site – between 2005 and 2009.”

The safer components of frack fluid included salt and citric acid, the Democrats wrote, but some components “were extremely toxic, such as benzene and lead.” Methanol, a hazardous air pollutant and human poison, was “the most widely used chemical … used in 342 hydraulic fracturing products.”

To counter suspicion about these chemicals, the industry recently established Frac Focus, a public database on chemicals used in particular wells. Participation is voluntary.

Wastewater disposal

Used fracking fluid needs safe disposal. “We are talking a substantial volume, millions of gallons per well,” Thyne says, “and one-half to one-third of the fracking fluid comes back, and has to be disposed of.”

Gas from many wells contains a second liquid, called “produced water,” that also needs disposal.

“In classic, conventional petroleum, they can reinject everything back into the reservoir,” says Thyne, “but they can’t do that with unconventional gas [because the rock formation is not porous], so we have a sudden surge in material that has to be treated and disposed of; that’s been a real challenge.”

Some of the liquids have been trucked to municipal wastewater plants, which are designed to remove biological waste, not the components of frack fluid.

One of those components, naturally occurring radioactivity, has sparked a flurry of interest among Pennsylvania and federal environmental regulators. The source is radium in the deep rocks; the hazard occurs if this water is released into surface water or groundwater.

Yet as so often in the fracking fracas, much remains in dispute, including whether radioactivity is elevated in rivers that receive fracking wastewater.

Contaminated water emerging from gas wells is often stored in a wastewater pit near the well site, and these pits have been linked to groundwater pollution, as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in June, 2011. “It gets put in these ginormous huge pools and sits there, and that is a source of contamination all by itself, and so we need to determine how to stop that from happening.”

Wasted by the water

In some states, this wastewater can be spread on land, but a 2011 study² demonstrated that the practice can kill plants.

When 303,000 liters of fracking fluid were spread on 0.2 hectares of experimental forest, tree leaves started to brown and curl within 10 days, and 56 percent of the trees were dead within two years. Every surviving tree was harmed.

The research suggested that high levels of salts – calcium and sodium chlorides – was causing the damage. Several states, including Colorado and West Virginia, permit land application, and the test application was below West Virginia’s limits.

Industry is starting to recycle fracking fluid to reduce environmental contamination, but that’s no panacea, Thyne says. “You can recycle to a certain extent, once or twice. By that time, you’ve got to treat the water to get it back to where it was before you put in new additive. Recycling buys you a little time, but it’s not an end game.”

Mad about methane

Although industry argues that not a single case of water contamination has been conclusively attributed to fracking, methane and other contaminants are appearing in drinking water and near-surface geology after the drill-and-frack sequence.

State investigators traced a house explosion in 2007 in Geauga County, Ohio, to a faulty cementing job on a nearby gas well. After the well was fractured, gas pressure built up inside it and nearby rock formations before being released into basements. One house was seriously damaged and 19 were evacuated, but there were no injuries.

In a 2011 study ³ of 68 residential wells in Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania and New York, Robert Jackson of the Center on Global Change at Duke University found, on average, more than 17 times as much methane in wells that were located within one kilometer of a natural-gas well.

As many as 1 million Pennsylvania households rely on private wells for water, the study noted, and in general, the wells are unregulated and untested.

Jackson says the study found no evidence that fracking fluid had contaminated the water wells. “But we see the gas as a warning sign. If methane is leaking, chances are that other things are leaking too.”

The Jackson study was flawed by “a lack of baseline data,” according to Reid Porter, a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute. “Most critical: The authors don’t have hard data to show how much methane surfaces on its own in northeastern Pennsylvania. They cite ‘historical sources’ but don’t say how far back those sources go or exactly what the sources are. … Without more data it’s impossible to distinguish between methane emitted naturally and/or from coal mining and methane released by fracturing.”

A baseline would be nice, but the Jackson study did succeed in finding a significant elevation in methane levels closer to gas wells, and isotopic analysis traced that methane to the Marcellus shale, rather than decay of biomass at shallow levels.

Finding a way

So how is methane reaching water wells from deep shale? It could be rising thousands of feet through existing or newly stimulated cracks in the rock, Jackson says, “but the most likely explanation is poor well construction, cementing or casing.”

Petroleum expert Thyne agrees with that explanation, which “means it’s a mechanical issue that can be dealt with.”

Here, at least, API is in agreement. “The energy industry recognizes that well construction is key to community safety,” Porter wrote us. “That’s why API members have developed five documents that specifically and proactively address well construction and environmental protection practices during hydraulic fracturing.”

When API maintains that fracking groundwater has never been polluted by fracturing fluid, it cites two studies:

Industry is fond of quoting EPA administrator Jackson telling Congress that there has never been a documented case where fracking polluted drinking water, but she implied in June, 2011 that such certainty had not been possible: “There are chemicals in the frack water, and until recently, even today, companies don’t have to disclose them, and we at EPA are exempt from regulating them, except for diesel.”

Because gas wells are much deeper than shallow aquifers, Jackson said groundwater pollution can be prevented by attention to the details of drilling, casing, cementing and closing. “If you get a bad operator, someone who is not responsible, who is not seeing how important it is to get this right, they can contaminate an aquifer … so there need to be some standards.”

Is the enemy fracking, gas drilling — or neither?

The gas industry fears legislation that would ban fracking, says Felmy, and it also believes that some of the opposition comes from “anti-fossil-fuel folks who have discovered that a tenet of their opposition, that we are running out of fossil fuels, is suddenly not true. With the technology developments we have, we can produce a vast amount.”

Yet behind all the protest and controversy, there is some constructive movement. Pennsylvania passed an improved well casing standard in February, 2011, so “it’s quite possible that that will go a long way to fixing problems in newer wells,” says Jackson of Duke. New York has not decided whether or how to allow hydraulic fracturing.

In November, the U.S. EPA announced plans for a study of any relationship between hydraulic fracturing and drinking water, with initial results due in 2012. That’s in addition to ozone studies related to gas extraction.

Some changes are likely in the shale-gas industry, Thyne says. “It’s got a lot of newcomers, it’s very much a gold-rush mentality where the profit margins are low. As the industry matures, it will shake out and the big boys will tend to self-regulate both production and environmental standards.”

Oil and gas are secretive industries, and the voluntary website listing chemicals in fracking fluid is a step toward openness. “The public said, ‘If this is not a problem, why won’t you tell us?’” says Thyne. “I sometimes feel the [energy] companies treat the public a bit like children: ‘You don’t want all these details, you just want to put gas into your car.’ But when the well is in your backyard, you want that information. Half the problem will be going away if they are transparent.”

Porter, of the American Petroleum Institute, says, “Disclosure is something we are very much in favor of.”

In deep water?

Just 19 months ago, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11, releasing 4.9 million barrels of crude oil, and reminding us that fossil-fuel development can go horribly wrong. Stories from the gas fields remind us that polluted groundwater is difficult or impossible to clean up, even when money is available. Houses atop polluted aquifers are difficult or impossible to sell.

And so the choice is simple: ban fracking, and accept a rising price for energy, or do gas production right, even if that takes more time.

It’s trite but true: Time is money when you are running a gas drilling rig, but haste makes waste. “The Deepwater accident happened because people were in a hurry,” says Jackson of Duke. “I think there is tremendous pressure to move drilling rigs along in the Marcellus. There aren’t enough drill rigs … . The cause of problems here is likely the same as it was with BP: haste.”

Best management practices and standards are important, says Jackson, “but people have to follow them day after day in the field, when they are in a hurry and when nobody is watching, and that does not always happen.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

What causes your brain to switch from the quiet focus needed to read (or write) these words to the frantic, goggle-eyed arousal needed to confront a frothing dog or rabid boss?

That hyper condition, popularly called the fight-or-flight response, is a hormonally inflicted surge of stress that puts all systems on alert, raises the heart rate and blood pressure, and shifts blood from the gut to the muscles.

This is not when you want to be translating Latin or solving equations, but fight-or-flight certainly fulfills its evolutionary role of allowing the body and brain to survive threatening circumstances.

After the transition, the brain regulates attention differently: A person studying Japanese woodcuts is unlikely to notice someone prowling on the other side of the art library. A person cranked up on stress hormones is unlikely to miss the lurker.

Neuroscientists long ago fingered two “stress” hormones — cortisol and noradrenaline — as playing key roles in fight-or-flight and today, a study in Science helps confirm that noradrenaline, not cortisol, triggers the transition to a different level of attention. “Many people thought cortisol would have an effect on the attention process in the early phase, but our study shows cortisol probably is not as important” as noradrenaline, says first author Erno Hermans, of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in Holland.

Putting the stress on stress

Image: Irréversible

According to some film critics, Irréversible was one of the most disturbing films of 2002. No wonder it stressed-out the study subjects!

To study the mental effects of stress, Hermans and colleagues put 80 subjects in a magnetic resonance imager and tracked the usage of oxygen in the brain to show which structures were active at any moment. Then the subjects watched parts of a French movie containing what Hermans calls “particularly horrific” scenes of violence.

The scans revealed changes in what’s called the salience network, which “is active in a general state of hyper-arousal, vigilance,” Hermans says. “It scans the environment for things that might be important, and allows you to redirect your attention.” The result is not just a change of focus, “but a switch to a state where a change of your focus becomes more likely.”

To confirm that the violent movie clip was triggering the stress response, the researchers measured heart rate and chemicals in the saliva.

Counting on cortisol

Long-term stress can lead to many problems, including the disabling post-traumatic stress disorder, and cortisol, which makes memories more vivid and plays a major role in the constant arousal and intrusive memories of PTSD, has long been considered a major player in stress in general.

“Stress research in humans has been very focused on cortisol for very good reason,” says Hermans, “as it’s linked to a number of very important features of stress in the body and also in the brain.”

In a second phase of the experiment, Hermans and his colleagues used drugs to block either cortisol or noradrenaline. Blocking cortisol did not prevent the changes in brain networks, but blocking noradrenaline did. “Because blocking noradrenaline results in a reduction in the salience network, this shows that noradrenaline is important for this reorganization of the brain,” Hermans says.

Stress or distress?

The new study helps explain our world, says Christopher Coe, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in cortisol and stress. “As we all have subjectively experienced, a fearful stimulus can exert a galvanizing influence on us. It can reorient our attention and, when sufficiently provocative, make us feel more alert, energized and focused. This change in state is facilitated by the type of coordinated brain reaction described in this Science paper. We and our brains are mobilized in order to better analyze the situation, to quickly interpret and utilize incoming information … and to respond adaptively.”

Coe adds that although “it is reasonable to conclude” that cortisol is not initiating the change in salience, “nevertheless, because of cortisol’s widespread effects and potency, if its release into the blood stream is sustained, it may ultimately exert a more protracted effect on both the brain and other physiological functions.”

Changes in the mode of attention are a fact of life, Hermans says. “We are really selective about accepting information while doing a focused task,” but a threat “requires a switch so your brain can respond to significant things in the surroundings. The brain becomes more responsive to stimuli, the eyes are wide open, the pupils become larger, everything is focused on having more sensory intake.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Among all animals, amphibians are in the worst shape; fully 30 percent are classified as threatened or endangered. Amphibians – including frogs, toads and salamanders — are under attack by a deadly fungus. They are losing habitat to farms and cities, and collected as food or pets. Amphibians are suffering from chemical pollution and the warming climate.

The present is harsh enough, but the future seems worse.

This week, Nature publishes the first global attempt to forecast the impact of three big threats to amphibians by 2080 – a year chosen to be one century after the study’s baseline data.

By comparing areas with plenty of amphibian species with projections of climate change, land use change and the chytridiomycosis fungus, the researchers forecast a grim future for these cold-blooded, four-legged vertebrates. “The bad news is that more than two-thirds of all high-richness regions will probably be affected, to a high intensity, by one of these three threats,” said lead author Christian Hof, who did the work as a Ph.D. student and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

The geographic study of data on 5,527 amphibian species found little overlap between the cool, moist areas afflicted by fungal serial killer chytridiomycosis, and the places likely to suffer the worst effects of changes in climate and land use.

And the losers win!

In forecasting the future of amphibians, the study coined two technical terms: “losers” — species that are expected to suffer due to disease or changes in climate or land use, and the less numerous “winners,” which are expected to prosper by 2080.

The projection hinged on whether an expected change would make a habitat more or less suitable to the species, says Hof, who’s now at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Germany. “We ran a number of climate-change models and based on them, calculated a change in climate suitability for each region across the globe.”

Based on these changes in suitability due to climate, land use and disease, Hof adds, “We calculated the number of species that would probably decline due to a decline in habitat suitability. We classify the species as a loser in a particular region, but that does not mean it will decline across its whole range.”

Overall, the researchers found an increasingly dire future for amphibians. For example, 54 percent of frogs are likely to be “climate losers” in the average grid cell of their model. And heavy impacts are projected for about two-thirds of the regions with the highest species richness in frogs and salamanders.

In fact, the future could be even worse, since the study ignored a number of potentially damaging factors, including chemical pollution from cities, factories and agriculture.

Photo: Robert Fletcher, Ohlone Preserve Conservation Bank

Tougher times might await this prowling California tiger salamander, an endangered California native.

Going down!

It’s frustrating but understandable that the study could not predict rates of decline among amphibians. “For many species, we are not sure about the actual distribution, many have tiny ranges and we don’t know where they occur, so we can’t relate historic changes to, say, climate change. We were very careful not to predict extinctions, based on these uncertainties.”

Data are scarce in the study of amphibians, agrees Anna Pidgeon, an assistant professor of forest and wildlife ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s frustrating, amphibians are out at night, often in remote areas, they are small and many are cryptic, so it’s a huge challenge” to understand their populations and ecologies. “We work with the best data we have all the time … and try to make inferences from what we know about close relatives.”

Pidgeon, an expert on habitat needs of vertebrates, says predicting 70 years into the future is always dicey, but that the study’s analysis of multiple threats and global scope are major accomplishments. “They did a lot of things to make sure they were using consensus data, and that makes it a pretty solid approach.”

Although the study looked at overlapping threats, it did not actually look at interactions between those threats, Hof says. “What needs to be done, and we could not do that with our model, is to look at, for example, how climate change would affect susceptibility to the fungus. How would habitat fragmentation affect susceptibility to climate change?”

Although the study does not suggest practical changes that could sustain amphibians in the short run, “The general conclusion is that it’s very important, when thinking about the future for amphibians, to consider different threats together,” says Hof. “Just looking at one threat will not give us the whole picture.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Twelve years on, and another billion people are sharing the planet.

Starting half a century ago, the Green Revolution doubled or tripled production of the major grains, using modern seeds, heavy use of fertilizer and irrigation. The revolution helped India and China to feed themselves and averted widespread starvation.

Today, an estimated billion people go to bed hungry. Hundreds of millions are stunted by poor nutrition. And by 2025 another billion people will want to know what’s for dinner…

What to do?

After World War II, agronomist Norman Borlaug played a role in founding international farm research stations that invented and distributed seeds and technologies to Latin America and Asia, with a focus on the big three crops: rice, wheat and corn (maize).

The green revolution that resulted gave a dramatic boost to farm production. But population continues to rise, and funding for food projects tapered off after the initial gains were realized.

The green revolution averted massive starvation “in some situations, but in others, especially Africa, it failed terribly,” says James Lassoie, a professor of natural resources at Cornell University, and leader of Agriculture Bridge, which attempts to harmonize agriculture with conservation.

Small could be beautiful

As the green-revolution research organizations continue working on high-yield crops, a newer approach to raising food production is emerging that concentrates on methods and technologies that can be built and maintained locally.

For reasons related to economics, environment, and efficient technology transfer, the new projects have steered away from large-scale provision of food, equipment, seeds and fertilizer, and toward social and environmental goals. Many projects work in Africa, where food and population problems are most acute, and with women, who do most of the farming.

Although few would discount the role of high-yield seeds in feeding seven billion, “Economic development needs to support both environmental protection and livelihoods,” Lassoie says. “Technologies are not going to help if they don’t also deal with the social and political dynamics.”

Our look at a few of these projects only offer an educated scanning of the horizon. We neither visited these projects nor possess a crystal ball, and so can neither vouch for their results nor predict the end game. But farmers are smart people who gravitate to things that work — if they fit the local culture, economy and environment.

Enough introductory blather. Let’s take a look!

Progress on one acre in Kenya and Rwanda

Africa’s agriculture is dominated by “small-holders,” people who work an acre or two, mainly with family labor, and are an increasing focus of attention in the effort to feed ourselves.

Services are loans, not gifts, and as is common with micro-lenders, borrowers join small groups that guarantee each loan. One Acre says 99 percent of its loans are repaid.

The fund’s advisors offer farming advice during weekly visits that emphasize profitability as much as productivity. For example, because prices are usually lowest during the harvest, the advisors suggest that farmers hold on to their crops for a few months.

One Acre says its growing and marketing strategies double the average farmer’s income, allowing small-holders to pay school fees and buy land to improve family income and food security. One Acre is reaching 55,000 families in Kenya and Rwanda, and aims to enroll 150,000 families by 2013.

Fish, water and wetland in Uganda

The realization that healthy ecosystems improve water quality and store carbon from the atmosphere has spawned a system called “payment for ecosystem services.” After all, if people downstream are getting clean water or hydroelectric power from a well-forested watershed, that should be worth paying for…

It’s a simple concept that conceals any number of complexities, but these payments do bring in outside money that can support environmental improvements.

In densely populated southwestern Uganda, the organization Nature Harness Initiatives is combining payment for ecosystem services with collaborative management to protect the environment of a wetland in the Kanyabaha-Rushebeya region.

The wetland provides fish for food, bees for honey, and fiber for thatch, mats and baskets, but farming and deforestation by people trying to make a living are causing serious soil erosion, harming the wetland and its many human and non-human residents.

Although baseline data on water quality is short, Nature Harness is convinced that it’s program works, and can be expanded to regions with similar problems.

Growing new farmers in Uganda

In Uganda – and elsewhere — farming is often seen as an occupation best suited to school dropouts and people who cannot afford college. Could interesting the younger generation of Ugandans in growing vegetables reverse this trend?

Through the Project for Developing Innovations in School Cultivation, more than 1,100 children in at least 31 schools have transformed schoolyards into gardens as they learn to grow local crops with traditional and environmentally-minded methods.

Project DISC was inaugurated in 2006 to combat rising food shortages and preserve Uganda’s culinary traditions. By allowing children to experience growing, tasting and cooking fruits and vegetables, it is cultivating a generation that values agriculture and quality, local food.

(The whole setup reminds us of the U.S. urban farming movement.)

The farming lessons includes methods for sustainably growing crops in Uganda’s increasingly hostile climate, as the children learn about raised gardens, drip irrigation and drought-tolerant crops.

Project DISC does face obstacles, such as Uganda’s staggering population growth and declining soil fertility. All the more reason to encourage young Ugandans to see agriculture as a respectable livelihood, rather than a last-resort job.

Community grazing rights in Mongolia

In land-locked Mongolia, 2.7 million people coexist with about 10 times as many horses, cattle, sheep, goats and camels. The people of Mongolia have followed their animals for centuries, living a nomadic life in portable shelters called gers.

This windy, dry and cold land exists at the mercy of the weather; the harsh winter of 2010 killed 20 percent of the country’s livestock. Meanwhile, overgrazing is promoting erosion and making the pastures less productive, while the Gobi Desert encroaches from the South.

It’s a classic case of the “Tragedy of the commons,” the idea that resources owned by all are protected by none.

To avert tragedy, Mongolia is experimenting with “co-management,” a system for making joint decisions about the grasslands to maximize benefits and prevent long-term degradation. In co-management, groups of herders contract with the government to assume the regulation and protection of tracts of land. Contracts are adapted as needed during annual renegotiations.

The result has been a reduction in herd size and an attempt to breed better animals to maximize profits from a resources that is now managed with an eye to community prosperity. Evaluations say the process is raising family incomes by 5 to 10 percent annually, and the idea is catching on elsewhere in Mongolia and Central Asia.

Banking on the harvest in Niger

In many lands with poor people and marginal agriculture, the months before harvest are called the “hunger season.” In Niger, in the dry Sahel region just south of the Sahara Desert, the hunger season has been exacerbated by droughts and locusts.

Niger is second to last in the United Nations Human Development Index.

Micro-lending is catching on as a way to fight poverty, but there’s a twist in Niger: Instead of lending money, the Project for the Promotion of Local Initiative for Development in Aguie lends grain through “soudure” (pre-harvest) banks.

The cooperative buys grain from local farmers, and lends it when needed at 25 percent interest, a fraction of what moneylenders charge.

By the middle of 2010, about 168 soudure banks, managed by over 50,000 women, were storing enough millet – a local staple grain — to feed 350,000 people for at least a month. That storehouse helped villagers survive the hunger season (see #38) during the spike in global food prices in 2008.

Beating hillside erosion in Yunnan, China

After a devastating flood in 1998 in Southwest China (blamed largely on deforestation of steep slopes), a new reforestation project focused on planting trees that generate income. (Reforestation projects can drive farmers and herders from their land by planting trees that may offer long-term environmental advantages but do not provide income to local people.)

The World Agroforestry Center has sponsored a different approach to reforestation on a 42-square-kilometer watershed in Yunnan Province. The project began with a collaborative design process that focused on using trees for food, forage or other purposes.

Walnut trees provide edible nuts. Beneath the trees, medicinal herbs are planted as a cash crop. Women may spend four hours a day collecting firewood, but new fermentation devices transform pig dung into biogas for cooking.

Although the project is said to be working on the small scale, and is producing enough income so parents can send kinds to school, these techniques will only provide a meaningful benefit once they are applied more broadly.

WFARM-TV in Benin

Rice, a staple crop and food through much of southern Asia and tropical Africa, is usually grown on small farms. To stimulate and propagate farmer creativity, Africa Rice develops short videos with significant input from local farmers, and distributes them across the rice-growing region.

Farmers are inherently interested in the ideas of other farmers, and seeing their innovations legitimizes farmer experiments and leads to further improvements.

The 10- to 20-minute videos cover such topics as preparing land, transplanting seedlings, managing weeds and harvesting the rice. AfricaRice distributes the videos through farmer associations; the farmers line up the video equipment and stage the screenings, which are often held outdoors.

By 2009, 11 videos were available to communities in Africa; some have been translated into more than 30 African languages and/or been transcribed for radio broadcast.

– David J. Tenenbaum