AlterNet Special

AlterNet:
We Can Build A Healthy Global Society

By David Korten, YES! Magazine
Posted on August 7, 2006

By what name will future generations know our time?

Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption exceeded Earth's capacity to sustain and led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet's resources, and a dramatic dieback of the human population? Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the time of the Great Turning, when their forebears embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, and learned to live in creative partnership with one another and Earth?

We face a defining choice between two contrasting models for organizing human affairs. Give them the generic names Empire and Earth Community. Absent an understanding of the history and implications of this choice, we may squander valuable time and resources on efforts to preserve or mend cultures and institutions that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.

Empire organizes by domination at all levels, from relations among nations to relations among family members. Empire brings fortune to the few, condemns the majority to misery and servitude, suppresses the creative potential of all, and appropriates much of the wealth of human societies to maintain the institutions of domination.

Earth Community, by contrast, organizes by partnership, unleashes the human potential for creative co-operation, and shares resources and surpluses for the good of all. Supporting evidence for the possibilities of Earth Community comes from the findings of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and religious mysticism. It was the human way before Empire; we must make a choice to re-learn how to live by its principles.

Developments distinctive to our time are telling us that Empire has reached the limits of the exploitation that people and Earth will sustain. A mounting perfect economic storm born of a convergence of peak oil, climate change, and an imbalanced U.S. economy dependent on debts it can never repay is poised to bring a dramatic restructuring of every aspect of modern life. We have the power to choose, however, whether the consequences play out as a terminal crisis or an epic opportunity. The Great Turning is not a prophecy. It is a possibility.

According to cultural historian Riane Eisler, early humans evolved within a cultural and institutional frame of Earth Community. They organized to meet their needs by cooperating with life rather than by dominating it. Then some 5,000 years ago, beginning in Mesopotamia, our ancestors made a tragic turn from Earth Community to Empire. They turned away from a reverence for the generative power of life - represented by female gods or nature spirits - to a reverence for hierarchy and the power of the sword - represented by distant, usually male, gods. The wisdom of the elder and the priestess gave way to the arbitrary rule of the powerful, often ruthless, king.

The peoples of the dominant human societies lost their sense of attachment to the living earth, and societies became divided between the rulers and the ruled, exploiters and exploited. The brutal competition for power created a relentless play-or-die, rule-or-be-ruled dynamic of violence and oppression and served to elevate the most ruthless to the highest positions of power. Since the fateful turn, the major portion of the resources available to human societies has been diverted from meeting the needs of life to supporting the military forces, prisons, palaces, temples, and patronage for retainers and propagandists on which the system of domination in turn depends. Great civilizations built by ambitious rulers fell to successive waves of corruption and conquest.

The primary institutional form of Empire has morphed from the city-state to the nation-state to the global corporation, but the underlying pattern of domination remains. It is axiomatic: for a few to be on top, many must be on the bottom. The powerful control and institutionalize the processes by which it will be decided who enjoys the privilege and who pays the price, a choice that commonly results in arbitrarily excluding from power whole groups of persons based on race and gender.

Herein lies a crucial insight. If we look for the source of the social pathologies increasingly evident in our culture, we find they have a common origin in the dominator relations of Empire that have survived largely intact in spite of the democratic reforms of the past two centuries. The sexism, racism, economic injustice, violence, and environmental destruction that have plagued human societies for 5,000 years, and have now brought us to the brink of a potential terminal crisis, all flow from this common source. Freeing ourselves from these pathologies depends on a common solution - replacing the underlying dominator cultures and institutions of Empire with the partnership cultures and institutions of Earth Community. Unfortunately, we cannot look to imperial powerholders to lead the way.

History shows that as empires crumble the ruling elites become ever more corrupt and ruthless in their drive to secure their own power - a dynamic now playing out in the United States. We Americans base our identity in large measure on the myth that our nation has always embodied the highest principles of democracy, and is devoted to spreading peace and justice to the world.

But there has always been tension between America's high ideals and its reality as a modern version of Empire. The freedom promised by the Bill of Rights contrasts starkly with the enshrinement of slavery elsewhere in the original articles of the Constitution. The protection of property, an idea central to the American dream, stands in contradiction to the fact that our nation was built on land taken by force from Native Americans. Although we consider the vote to be the hallmark of our democracy, it took nearly 200 years before that right was extended to all citizens.

Americans acculturated to the ideals of America find it difficult to comprehend what our rulers are doing, most of which is at odds with notions of egalitarianism, justice, and democracy. Within the frame of historical reality, it is perfectly clear: they are playing out the endgame of Empire, seeking to consolidate power through increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic policies.

Wise choices necessarily rest on a foundation of truth. The Great Turning depends on awakening to deep truths long denied.

Empire's true believers maintain that the inherent flaws in our human nature lead to a natural propensity to greed, violence, and lust for power. Social order and material progress depend, therefore, on imposing elite rule and market discipline to channel these dark tendencies to positive ends. Psychologists who study the developmental pathways of the individual consciousness observe a more complex reality. Just as we grow up in our physical capacities and potential given proper physical nourishment and exercise, we also grow up in the capacities and potential of our consciousness, given proper social and emotional nourishment and exercise.

Over a lifetime, those who enjoy the requisite emotional support traverse a pathway from the narcissistic, undifferentiated magical consciousness of the newborn to the fully mature, inclusive, and multidimensional spiritual consciousness of the wise elder. The lower, more narcissistic, orders of consciousness are perfectly normal for young children, but become sociopathic in adults and are easily encouraged and manipulated by advertisers and demagogues. The higher orders of consciousness are a necessary foundation of mature democracy. Perhaps Empire's greatest tragedy is that its cultures and institutions systematically suppress our progress to the higher orders of consciousness.

Given that Empire has prevailed for 5,000 years, a turn from Empire to Earth Community might seem a hopeless fantasy if not for the evidence from values surveys that a global awakening to the higher levels of human consciousness is already underway. This awakening is driven in part by a communications revolution that defies elite censorship and is breaking down the geographical barriers to intercultural exchange.

The consequences of the awakening are manifest in the civil rights, women's, environmental, peace, and other social movements. These movements in turn gain energy from the growing leadership of women, communities of color, and indigenous peoples, and from a shift in the demographic balance in favor of older age groups more likely to have achieved the higher-order consciousness of the wise elder.

It is fortuitous that we humans have achieved the means to make a collective choice as a species to free ourselves from Empire's seemingly inexorable compete-or-die logic at the precise moment we face the imperative to do so. The speed at which institutional and technological advances have created possibilities wholly new to the human experience is stunning.

Just over 60 years ago, we created the United Nations, which, for all its imperfections, made it possible for the first time for representatives of all the world's nations and people to meet in a neutral space to resolve differences through dialogue rather than force of arms.

Less than 50 years ago, our species ventured into space to look back and see ourselves as one people sharing a common destiny on a living space ship.

In little more than 10 years our communications technologies have given us the ability, should we choose to use it, to link every human on the planet into a seamless web of nearly costless communication and cooperation.

Already our new technological capability has made possible the interconnection of the millions of people who are learning to work as a dynamic, self-directing social organism that transcends boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality and functions as a shared conscience of the species. We call this social or-ganism global civil society. On February 15, 2003, it brought more than 10 million people to the streets of the world's cities, towns, and villages to call for peace in the face of the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They accomplished this monumental collective action without a central organization, budget, or charismatic leader through social processes never before possible on such a scale. This was but a foretaste of the possibilities for radically new forms of partnership organization now within our reach.

We humans live by stories. The key to making a choice for Earth Community is recognizing that the foundation of Empire's power does not lie in its instruments of physical violence. It lies in Empire's ability to control the stories by which we define ourselves and our possibilities in order to perpetuate the myths on which the legitimacy of the dominator relations of Empire depend. To change the human future, we must change our defining stories.

For 5,000 years, the ruling class has cultivated, rewarded, and amplified the voices of those storytellers whose stories affirm the righteousness of Empire and deny the higher-order potentials of our nature that would allow us to live with one another in peace and cooperation. There have always been those among us who sense the possibilities of Earth Community, but their stories have been marginalized or silenced by Empire's instruments of intimidation. The stories endlessly repeated by the scribes of Empire become the stories most believed. Stories of more hopeful possibilities go unheard or unheeded and those who discern the truth are unable to identify and support one another in the common cause of truth telling. Fortunately, the new communications technologies are breaking this pattern. As truth-tellers reach a wider audience, the myths of Empire become harder to maintain.

The struggle to define the prevailing cultural stories largely defines contemporary cultural politics in the United States. A far-right alliance of elitist corporate plutocrats and religious theocrats has gained control of the political discourse in the United States not by force of their numbers, which are relatively small, but by controlling the stories by which the prevailing culture defines the pathway to prosperity, security, and meaning. In each instance, the far right's favored versions of these stories affirm the dominator relations of Empire.

The imperial prosperity story says that an eternally growing economy benefits everyone. To grow the economy, we need wealthy people who can invest in enterprises that create jobs. Thus, we must support the wealthy by cutting their taxes and eliminating regulations that create barriers to accumulating wealth. We must also eliminate welfare programs in order to teach the poor the value of working hard at whatever wages the market offers.

The imperial security story tells of a dangerous world, filled with criminals, terrorists, and enemies. The only way to insure our safety is through major expenditures on the military and the police to maintain order by physical force.

The imperial meaning story reinforces the other two, featuring a God who rewards righteousness with wealth and power and mandates that they rule over the poor who justly suffer divine punishment for their sins.

These stories all serve to alienate us from the community of life and deny the positive potentials of our nature, while affirming the legitimacy of economic inequality, the use of physical force to maintain imperial order, and the special righteousness of those in power.

It is not enough, as many in the United States are doing, to debate the details of tax and education policies, budgets, war, and trade agreements in search of a positive political agenda. Nor is it enough to craft slogans with broad mass appeal aimed at winning the next election or policy debate. We must infuse the mainstream culture with stories of Earth Community. As the stories of Empire nurture a culture of domination, the stories of Earth Community nurture a culture of partnership. They affirm the positive potentials of our human nature and show that realizing true prosperity, security, and meaning depends on creating vibrant, caring, interlinked communities that support all persons in realizing their full humanity. Sharing the joyful news of our human possibilities through word and action is perhaps the most important aspect of the Great Work of our time.

Changing the prevailing stories in the United States may be easier to accomplish than we might think. The apparent political divisions notwithstanding, U.S. polling data reveal a startling degree of consensus on key issues. Eighty-three percent of Americans believe that as a society the United States is focused on the wrong priorities. Supermajorities want to see greater priority given to children, family, community, and a healthy environment. Americans also want a world that puts people ahead of profits, spiritual values ahead of financial values, and international cooperation ahead of international domination. These Earth Community values are in fact widely shared by both conservatives and liberals.

Our nation is on the wrong course not because Americans have the wrong values. It is on the wrong course because of remnant imperial institutions that give unaccountable power to a small alliance of right-wing extremists who call themselves conservative and claim to support family and community values, but whose preferred economic and social policies constitute a ruthless war against children, families, communities, and the environment.

The distinctive human capacity for reflection and intentional choice carries a corresponding moral responsibility to care for one another and the planet. Indeed, our deepest desire is to live in loving relationships with one another. The hunger for loving families and communities is a powerful, but latent, unifying force and the potential foundation of a winning political coalition dedicated to creating societies that support every person in actualizing his or her highest potential.

In these turbulent and often frightening times, it is important to remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment in the whole of the human experience. We have the opportunity to turn away from Empire and to embrace Earth Community as a conscious collective choice. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

David Korten is co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network. This article draws from his newly released book, "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/39789/

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Extinction: Bye Bye, Birdie ...

By Sarah DeWeerdt, World Watch
Posted on August 7, 2006

In April 2004, a computer and electronics professor named David Luneau paddled a canoe through a swamp forest in eastern Arkansas and captured a blurry video ofa crow-sized bird perching on the trunk of a tupelo tree and then flying off into the woods. The bird had large white patches on the trailing edges of its wings and a vee of white stripes on its back - characteristic features of the ivory-billed woodpecker, last seen in the United States 60 years before and widely believed to be extinct.

Since then, numerous search parties have been launched to comb that patch of forest for more evidence of the bird's existence, and scientists have been examining the video frame by frame and debating whether it really depicts an ivory-billed woodpecker or just a more common, similar-looking pileated woodpecker. Has this lost creature revealed itself to human eyes again after six decades - or is the bird a figment of our wishful thinking? One thing is certain, says Duke University conservation biologist Stuart Pimm: "If it survives, it's a lonely bird."

Lonely, except that in one sense it has lots of company: species that are lost, or nearly so, are increasingly common because human activities are driving them to extinction 1,000 times faster than the normal rate, according to the just-released report, Global Biodiversity Outlook 2. The report echoes the United Nations' Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, published last year, and proclaims that a "sixth mass extinction" is under way, the worst loss of species since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.

Such dire claims have attracted some skeptics, however. Mostly journalists and economists, they start with the argument that nobody even knows how many other species share the planet, so how can anyone claim to know what the extinction rate is? Taxonomists have named and described around 1.5 million species, but estimates of the actual total range from 5 million to over 15 million. A frequently cited mid-range estimate is 7 million species, but that's by no means an exact or universally accepted figure.

Because ofthis uncertainty, says Pimm, the aim should be simply to calculate a relative extinction rate rather than the absolute number of disappearing species. Pimm and a group of colleagues first laid out these ideas in a 1995 paper in Science that has become probably the most widely accepted approach to quantifying species loss.

Only a few of those 1.5 million described species are known well enough to assess how they're doing; what's known about many species derives from single specimens hiding in dusty museum cabinets somewhere. So in order to say something meaningful about extinction rates, it's necessary to pick a well-known group of organisms and treat them as a sample of the larger total. Fortunately for Pimm, an ornithologist, birds make a good sample group. Although there are still occasional surprises, it's generally well known how many kinds of birds there are, which ones have disappeared, and when. And, he says, the fact that there are just about 10,000 species of birds in the world greatly simplifies the arithmetic involved.

About 130 kinds of birds have vanished around the world over the past century and a half. That's a pretty firm number: "We have a body count and we have names," Pimm says. There's the great auk, for example, driven to extinction in the 19th century by hunters who sought its feathers, meat, and oil. There's the Lana'i hookbill, lost in the early 1900s when its habitat was destroyed for pineapple plantations, and the New Zealand bush wren, a ground nester that proved easy prey for introduced rats and was last sighted in 1972. The bird extinction rate is about one per 10,000 species per year, or 100 extinctions per million species per year, since the middle of the 19th century. Of course, extinction is a natural process; no species lives forever. So the real question is how the current extinction rate compares to the usual rate at which species come and go (the back-ground rate).

To determine the background extinction rate, scientists look to the fossil record and to genetic material, or DNA, which accumulates small changes in its sequence as it is copied and passed down from generation to generation. Because these minor copying mistakes occur at a known rate, they can act as "molecular clocks" to help establish how long ago closely related species diverged and to track other aspects of species history. This evidence suggests that under normal circumstances species survive for one million to 10 million years. If species typically lived for only one million years, then we ought to see one extinction per million species-years, or one per million species per year." And so what that tells us is that the rate of bird extinctions is a hundred times greater than it should be," says Pimm.

In their 1995 paper, Pimm and his colleagues also performed similar analyses of mammals, reptiles, frogs and toads, and freshwater clams (dividing the number of extinctions witnessed over the past century by the total number of known species in each of these groups) and came up with similar results: current extinction rates are two orders of magnitude above normal. But the real body count is likely to be even higher, because species usually don't go extinct immediately when their habitats are destroyed, exotic predators arrive, or they otherwise come to ecological harm. Instead, they often hang on for decades or even longer before disappearing forever.

Habitat destruction is a major cause of species loss and has accelerated rapidly in recent years, especially in the world's most species-rich environments - about half the original extent of tropical moist forest has been lost, for example, most of it in the last 50 years - so it's likely that many extinctions have not yet had time to occur. That means the number of threatened and endangered species (those that are likely to go extinct in the next few decades without human intervention to save them) might be a better assessment ofthe probable toll than simply the number of recent extinctions.

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) currently lists 1,213 birds as threatened,about 12 percent of all avian species. "Which means that by the end ofthe century we could expect that probably a thousand species of birds might disappear," Pimm says. That would be 10 extinctions per 10,000 species per year, or 1,000 times the background extinction rate. The numbers for other well-known groups are similar, if not worse: 20 percent of the world's mammal species appear on the IUCN Red List of threatened species.

Not all scientists agree that hundred-to thousand-fold increased extinction rates among birds and a few other well-known groups mean that all kinds of species are disappearing at the same rates. "There are just so many differences among, even within, taxa, how species respond to the kinds of forces that are causing extinction," says Daniel Simberloff, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Do the patterns we see in birds, which make up just 0.6 percent of known species, necessarily apply to insects, which account for 54 percent?

Pimm and Simberloff were once colleagues at the University of Tennessee and know each other's work well. (Pimm even likes to joke that one of Simberloff's primary research interests is "pointing out Stuart Pimm's mistakes.") "There are certainly lots of credible scientists who don't like the extrapolation methods and would argue with aspects of them," Simberloff says.

Yet within the scientific community, the debate over extinction rates is about details, like just how much extrapolation is appropriate, rather than the big picture." I don't know of any credible environmental scientist that doesn't think that extinctions are happening at greatly increased rates," Simberloff says. To him, high extinction rates among birds and other well-known groups are evidence enough ofa biodiversity crisis - regardless of what the exact patterns might prove to be among other kinds of species.

Moreover, as researchers have begun to look more closely at those other groups of species, all evidence suggests that things are just as bad, if not worse, than studies of birds and mammals indicate. According to a Nature Conservancy study, dragonflies and beetles are more highly threatened than birds in North America. In the sea, where many scientists had long believed that species would be relatively shielded from extinction risk, more than 40 percent of a subfamily of groupers meet IUCN criteria for imperilment, says Callum Roberts, a marine conservation biologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Most marine species have not yet been assessed.

In a study comparing population trends among butterflies, birds, and plants in Britain, a group of ecologists led by Jeremy Thomas of the National Environment Research Council in Dorchester found that butterflies fared the worst in recent decades. Seventy-one percent of butterfly species declined over the course of the study, compared to 54 percent of birds and 28 percent of plants.The group's analyses of other types of insects, while less detailed, suggested similar patterns. Their study involved over 20,000 volunteers who submitted more than 15 million records of species sightings - an enormous amount of effort to analyze just a few groups of organisms on a relatively small, species-poor island with a well-characterized biota, and a good illustration of why sampling is necessary, and probably always will be.

It's just about inconceivable that the precise status of every species on Earth can be known, and there has to be some point at which reasonable people decide that what is known is enough. Admittedly, what we know are still only scattered details woven into a much grander, and still largely mysterious, tapestry. Many of the largest groups of organisms, and the most unexplored. Tropical moist forests, for example, are thought to contain half the Earth's species, and if that's true only about one in 20 of the species living there have been catalogued.

However, two important pieces of information about these environments are available. First, it's often possible to determine how much of a habitat has been destroyed, by means of forest surveys or satellite photos.

Second, it's known that larger areas ofhabitat can support more species, and by contrast smaller areas contain not only fewer numbers of creatures but fewer species - a principle called the species-area relation. Specifically, an area of habitat half the size of another area doesn't host half the number of species as the larger area, but about 85 percent. Thus, say Pimm and many other ecologists, the 50 percent of tropical moist forest that's been lost so far is expected to lead to the extinction of 15 percent of tropical moist forest species.

Scientists also use the species-area relation to predict future extinctions as habitat destruction continues. Peter Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, estimates that tropical moist forests will be reduced to about five percent of their original extent by mid-century. According to the species-area relation, that would commit more than half of the species they hold to extinction." If you put that together with habitat destruction in temperate regions," Raven says," you come up with something like half to two-thirds of all the species in the world becoming extinct during the course of this century" - or at least set on an inexorable path to that fate. Callum Roberts, who has been working on similar calculations for coral reefs, reports that "the species-area relationships suggest that marine species will be lost as a consequence of habitat destruction almost as fast as terrestrial species will."

Not all species are equally vulnerable to ecological threats. "It's easier to destroy a species with a small range than a big one," Pimm says, simply because it's easier to wipe out the entire area where it lives. In fact, a large proportion of species have small ranges, and they're not evenly distributed over the planet. For reasons scientists are still debating, they are clumped together in particular spots, most of which are in the tropics. Habitat destruction in those areas could be particularly devastating, as British ecologist Norman Myers has pointed out. Myers pioneered the concept of "biodiversity hotspots," and in 2000, with input from scientists from Conservation International, he defined 25 hotspots covering just 1.4 percent of the planet's land area. The hotspots include 15 tropical forests but also places like the Mediterranean basin and the Cape Floristic Region at the southern tip of Africa. Destroying these habitats could wipe out 44 percent of all plant species, as well as 35 percent of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. In a similar analysis of coral reef environments, which are among the most diverse parts of the sea, Roberts and a group of colleagues identified 10 marine biodiversity hotspots, representing just 0.012 percent of the ocean but containing a large proportion of small-range species. Moreover, since that analysis was published in 2002, researchers have been gathering evidence of unexpectedly rich concentrations of biodiversity in other parts of the ocean, such as deep-ocean seamounts and cold-water coral reefs, which are being destroyed at a rapid clip by factory trawlers. "The habitats on them are literally being clear-cut as effectively as any forest cutting in the Amazon," Roberts says.

Some scientists have objected to this use of the species-area relation, arguing that it's a tool for predicting the total number of species you'll find in an area if you sample a smaller portion of it - not for predicting the number of species you'll lose by destroying a portion of habitat. In other words, you can use the equation to make predictions about going from a smaller area to a bigger one, but not from a bigger area to a smaller one.

Yet in several different environments around the world, researchers have found that predictions of species loss based on the species-area relation align pretty well with reality. In the eastern U.S. forests, which were reduced by about 50 percent at their smallest extent (around 1870), the species-area relation predicts a loss of 15 percent of species. In fact, of 28 bird species restricted to the forest, four (or 14.3 percent) had gone extinct and a fifth was critically endangered as of 1995, according to Stuart Pimm and Robert Askins. (One of the extinct species was the ivory-billed woodpecker, so the best-case scenario now stands at three extinct and two critically endangered.) Likewise, in tropical forests such as the Atlantic Forest of Brazil and the island chains of Indonesia and the Philippines, where deforestation is more recent, the species-area relation accurately predicts or underestimates the number of threatened bird species - an expected result, says Pimm, because in many areas other threats such as invasive species and over-hunting also contribute to species endangerment.

Still, Simberloff says that these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, because the species-area relation is "a very blunt tool." A great deal of habitat loss will surely lead to substantial species loss, but there are many other factors besides area that influence how many species live in a certain place, and the species-area relation doesn't say how fast species will go extinct. "All [the analyses] can say is at some point in the future there are going to be fewer species," he emphasizes.

"It's a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full situation," Pimm responds. Even if these analyses don't yield a precise number of species destined for extinction, they do give us a good sense ofthe magnitude ofthe problem. A loss of half to two-thirds of all species, as Peter Raven predicts is possible, puts the present era on par with the five previous mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth. The most recent one, 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs along with about two-thirds of all forms of life on land.

While habitat destruction was the focus of most work on global extinction rates throughout the 1990s, recently scientists have begun to consider the biodiversity impacts of climate change. A group of researchers presented perhaps the most comprehensive effort to date to quantify these possible effects in a 2004 paper in Nature.

Led by biologist Chris Thomas (then at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom), the group assessed the present distributions of 1,103 animal and plant species and projected how the habitat available to them would change under conditions predicted by the most commonly used computer model ofclimate change. As the Earth warms, boreal forest is expected to shrink toward the poles, for example, and alpine habitat will retreat up the sides of mountains.

Reasoning that habitat loss is habitat loss whether it's caused by chainsaws or the greenhouse effect, Thomas's team calculated the proportion of habitat that species are likely to lose as the climate warms, then used the species-area relation to predict the number of extinctions likely to result. They found that, depending on the assumptions ofthe model, 15-37 percent ofthe species would be on their way to extinction by 2050. The paper generated an uproar almost immediately. Daniel Botkin, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, says the analysis makes inappropriate use of the species-area relation and is based on weak underlying data.

"I've shown that we don't even know the area that is boreal forest very well," he says, pointing out that calculating the future loss of a certain habitat is pretty meaningless when we don't know its present extent.

Yet the gloomy predictions don't depend on the species-area relation, Thomas and his coauthors explained in an online follow-up to their article. The computer model predicted that eight percent of species would have no suitable habitat left at all by 2050. Moreover, warming isn't likely to stop in 2050 - in fact, the maximum temperature increase predicted for 2050 is pretty close to the minimum increase predicted for 2100. So for species that lose most of their habitat by 2050, "it doesn't take much extrapolation in the mind to realize it's not going to be more than a few decades before they've lost the rest," Thomas says. Although he views the 2004 analysis as only "a first step" to understanding the effects of global warming on biodiversity, Thomas still sees it as a pretty good indicator of the magnitude of extinctions that are likely to result from climate change: "It looks like it's going to be in the tens of percents of species."

How do older predictions ofspecies loss from habitat destruction line up with newer ones about extinction from climate change?

No one has done a formal analysis, and Thomas says no one knows yet how much the two groups of species at risk will overlap. But Pimm reluctantly ventures the conclusion that the losses may prove to be additive, because habitats likely to shrink most as the planet warms, like those on mountaintops and in the polar regions, also tend to be remote and thus relatively unaffected by habitat destruction. "Global warming is going to start knocking of fthe species that we thought might survive," Pimm says.

Of course, nature is full of surprises, and could turn out to be more resilient than we think. Maybe species will be able to adapt to a warmer climate, disperse to newly suitable areas, or hang on in human-altered habitats. The Brazilian maroon-bellied parakeet survives in Rio de Janeiro's city parks and gardens, despite the fact that over 90 percent of its native coastal-forest habitat has been wiped out.

But most ecologists agree that while a few species here and there will be able to make a go of it in a changed world, such species will be part of a small minority. Chris Thomas points out that species trying to adapt to a warmer climate will have to compete with heat-loving species that will arrive from warmer climes. And Stuart Pimm has found that those tropical forest species able to survive in human-altered habitats like cow pastures are relatively widely distributed generalist species that are not at high risk of extinction anyway. In other words, the maroon-bellied parakeet is also a lonely bird, having once been part of a teeming avian community in the Atlantic Forest; 200 species of birds with which the parakeet shared its lost habitat are on the brink of extinction.

If there is any real cause for optimism, it lies in the time lag before extinction. If species can hang on for 50 or 100 years, we humans may be able to organize a system of protected areas and alter our own activities to ensure their long-term survival in the wild. The ivory-billed woodpecker was decimated when the mature bottomland forests it depends on were razed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but these forests are now coming back. If the bird has managed to survive for this long, its chances will only be better in the future as the big trees continue to grow. Similarly, Thomas says that if global temperatures peak at a relatively low level sometime late this century and then decline towards pre-industrial levels 150 or 200 years from now, about half of the extinctions predicted by his group's analysis could be avoided.

Perhaps we humans are not yet fated to be lonely.

This article appears in the June/July issue of World Watch.

Sarah DeWeerdt is a Seattle-based science writer specializing in biology and the environment.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/39790/

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White House Wants A Wider Mid-East War

By Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on August 7, 2006

George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah as an opportunity to expand the conflict into Syria and possibly achieve a long-sought "regime change" in Damascus, but Israel's leadership balked at the scheme, according to Israeli sources.

One Israeli source said Bush's interest in spreading the war to Syria was considered "nuts" by some senior Israeli officials, although Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has generally shared Bush's hard-line strategy against Islamic militants.

After rebuffing Bush's suggestion about attacking Syria, the Israeli government settled on a strategy of mounting a major assault in southern Lebanon aimed at rooting out Hezbollah guerrillas who have been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post hinted at the Israeli rejection of Bush's suggestion of a wider war in Syria. "Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.

On July 18, Consortiumnews.com reported that the Israel-Lebanon conflict had revived the Bush administration's neoconservative hopes that a new path had opened "to achieve a prized goal that otherwise appeared to be blocked for them - military assaults on Syria and Iran aimed at crippling those governments."

The article went on to say:

After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003 - after only three weeks of fighting - the question posed by some Bush administration officials was whether the U.S. military should go "left or right," to Syria or Iran. Some joked that "real men go to Tehran."

According to the neocon strategy, "regime change" in Syria and Iran, in turn, would undermine Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that controls much of southern Lebanon, and would strengthen Israel's hand in dictating peace terms to the Palestinians.

But the emergence of a powerful insurgency in Iraq - and a worsening situation for U.S. forces in Afghanistan - stilled the neoconservative dream of making George W. Bush a modern-day Alexander conquering the major cities of the Middle East, one after another.

Bush's invasion of Iraq also unwittingly enhanced the power of Iran's Shiite government by eliminating its chief counterweight, the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein. With Iran's Shiite allies in control of the Iraqi government and a Shiite-led government also in Syria, the region's balance between the two rival Islamic sects was thrown out of whack.

The neocon dream of "regime change" in Syria and Iran never died, however. It stirred when Bush accused Syria of assisting Iraqi insurgents and when he insisted that Iran submit its nuclear research to strict international controls. The border conflict between Israel and Lebanon now has let Bush toughen his rhetoric again against Syria and Iran.

In an unguarded moment during the G-8 summit in Russia on July 17, Bush - speaking with his mouth full of food and annoyed by suggestions about United Nations peacekeepers - told British Prime Minister Tony Blair "what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit."

Not realizing that a nearby microphone was turned on, Bush also complained about suggestions for a cease-fire and an international peacekeeping force. "We're not blaming Israel and we're not blaming the Lebanese government," Bush said, suggesting that the blame should fall on others, presumably Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

Meanwhile, John Bolton, Bush's ambassador to the United Nations, suggested that the United States would only accept a multilateral U.N. force if it had the capacity to take on Hezbollah's backers in Syria and Iran.

"The real problem is Hezbollah," Bolton said. "Would it [a U.N. force] be empowered to deal with countries like Syria and Iran that support Hezbollah?" [NYT, July 18, 2006]

Strategy Meetings

Though the immediate conflict between Israel and Hezbollah was touched off by a Hezbollah cross-border raid on July 12 that captured two Israeli soldiers, the longer-term U.S.-Israeli strategy can be traced back to the May 23, 2006, meetings between Olmert and Bush in Washington.

At those meetings, Olmert discussed with Bush Israel's plans for revising its timetable for setting final border arrangements with the Palestinians, putting those plans on the back burner while moving the Iranian nuclear program to the front burner.

In effect, Olmert informed Bush that 2006 would be the year for stopping Iran's progress toward a nuclear bomb and 2007 would be the year for redrawing Israel's final borders. That schedule fit well with Bush's priorities, which may require some dramatic foreign policy success before the November congressional elections.

At a joint press conference with Bush on May 23, Olmert said "this is a moment of truth" for addressing Iran's alleged ambitions to build a nuclear bomb.

"The Iranian threat is not only a threat to Israel, it is a threat to the stability of the Middle East and the entire world," Olmert said. "The international community cannot tolerate a situation where a regime with a radical ideology and a long tradition of irresponsible conduct becomes a nuclear weapons state."

Olmert also said he was prepared to give the Palestinians some time to accept Israel's conditions for renewed negotiations on West Bank borders, but - if Palestinian officials didn't comply - Israel was prepared to act unilaterally.

The prime minister said Israel would "remove most of the [West Bank] settlements which are not part of the major Israeli population centers in Judea and Samaria. The settlements within the population centers would remain under Israeli control and become part of the state of Israel, as part of the final status agreement."

In other words, Israel would annex some of the most desirable parts of the West Bank regardless of Palestinian objections. That meant the Israelis would need to soften up Hamas, the Islamic militants who won the last Palestinian elections, and their supporters in the Islamic world - especially Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

In a speech to a joint session of Congress, Olmert added that the possibility of Iran building a nuclear weapon was "an existential threat" to Israel, meaning that Israel believed its very existence was in danger.

Nuclear Face-Off

Even before the May 23 meetings, Bush was eyeing a confrontation with Iran as part of his revised strategy for remaking the Middle East. Bush was staring down Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over demands Iran back off its nuclear research.

By spring 2006, Bush was reportedly weighing military options for bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. But the President encountered resistance from senior levels of the U.S. military, which feared the consequences, including the harm that might come to more than 130,000 U.S. troops bogged down in neighboring Iraq.

There was also alarm among U.S. generals over the White House resistance to removing tactical nuclear weapons as an option against Iran.

As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New Yorker, a number of senior U.S. officers were troubled by administration war planners who believed "bunker-busting" tactical nuclear weapons, known as B61-11s, were the only way to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities buried deep underground.

"Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap," a former senior intelligence official told Hersh. "'Decisive' is the key word of the Air Force's planning. It's a tough decision. But we made it in Japan."

This former official said the White House refused to remove the nuclear option from the plans despite objections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Whenever anybody tries to get it out, they're shouted down," the ex-official said. [New Yorker, April 17, 2006]

By late April, however, the Joint Chiefs finally got the White House to agree that using nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, less than 200 miles south of Tehran, was politically unacceptable, Hersh reported.

"Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning," one former senior intelligence official said.

But - even without the nuclear option - senior military officials still worried about a massive bombing campaign against Iran. Hersh wrote:

"Inside the Pentagon, senior commanders have increasingly challenged the President's plans, according to active-duty and retired officers and officials. The generals and admirals have told the Administration that the bombing campaign will probably not succeed in destroying Iran's nuclear program. They have also warned that an attack could lead to serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States."

Hersh quoted a retired four-star general as saying, "The system is starting to sense the end of the road, and they don't want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say, 'We stood up.' " [New Yorker, July 10, 2006]

The most immediate concern of U.S. military leaders was that air strikes against Iran could prompt retaliation against American troops in Iraq. U.S. military trainers would be especially vulnerable since they work within Iraqi military and police units dominated by Shiites who are sympathetic to Iran.

Iran also could respond to a bombing campaign by cutting off oil supplies, sending world oil prices soaring and throwing the world economy into chaos.

Israel's Arsenal

While the Joint Chiefs may have had success in getting the White House to remove the use of nuclear weapons from its list of options on Iran, the rising tensions between Israel and Iran may have put the nuclear option back on the table - since Israel has the largest and most sophisticated nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.

As Hersh reported, "The Israelis have insisted for years that Iran has a clandestine program to build a bomb, and will do so as soon as it can. Israeli officials have emphasized that their 'redline' is the moment Iran masters the nuclear fuel cycle, acquiring the technical ability to produce weapons-grade uranium."

In spring 2006, Iran announced that it had enriched uranium to the 3.6 percent level sufficient for nuclear energy but well below the 90-percent level for making atomic bombs. The U.S. intelligence community believes that Iran is still years and possibly a decade away from the capability of building a nuclear bomb.

Still, Iran's technological advance convinced some Israeli strategists that it was imperative to destroy Iran's program now. Yet to do so, Israel faces the same need for devastating explosive power, thus raising the specter again of using a nuclear bomb.

One interpretation of the Lebanese-Israeli conflict is that Bush and Olmert seized on the Hezbollah raid as a pretext for a pre-planned escalation that will lead to bombing campaigns against Syria and Iran, justified by their backing of Hezbollah.

In that view, Bush found himself stymied by U.S. military objections to targeting Iran's nuclear facilities outside any larger conflict. However, if the bombing of Iran develops as an outgrowth of a tit-for-tat expansion of a war in which Israel's existence is at stake, strikes against Iranian targets would be more palatable to the American public.

The end game would be U.S.-Israeli aerial strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities with the goal of crippling its nuclear program and humiliating Ahmadinejad.

Strangling an Axis

While U.S. officials have been careful not to link the Lebanon conflict to any possible military action against Iran's nuclear facilities, they have spoken privately about using the current conflict to counter growing Iranian influence.

Washington Post foreign policy analyst Robin Wright wrote that U.S. officials told her that "for the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East. ...

"Whatever the outrage on the Arab streets, Washington believes it has strong behind-the-scenes support among key Arab leaders also nervous about the populist militants - with a tacit agreement that the timing is right to strike.

"'What is out there is concern among conservative Arab allies that there is a hegemonic Persian threat [running] through Damascus, through the southern suburbs of Beirut and to the Palestinians in Hamas,' said a senior U.S. official."

Another school of thought holds that Iran may have encouraged the Hezbollah raid that sparked the Lebanese-Israeli conflict as a way to demonstrate the "asymmetrical warfare" that could be set in motion if the Bush administration attacks Iran.

But Hezbollah's firing of rockets as far as the port city of Haifa, deep inside Israel, has touched off new fears among Israelis and their allies about the danger of more powerful missiles carrying unconventional warheads, possibly hitting heavily populated areas, such as Tel Aviv.

That fear of missile attacks by Islamic extremists dedicated to Israel's destruction has caused Israel to start "dusting off it nukes," one source told me.

Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/39981/

---

Female Vets Put Military Mettle in House Races

By Allison Stevens, Women's eNews
Posted on August 7, 2006

When Maryland Democrat Mishonda Baldwin is on the campaign trail, parents often ask if they can introduce her to their daughters.

That's partly because she is such an anomaly, says Baldwin, a decorated veteran of the first war in Iraq who has also served as an intelligence officer and as a U.S. delegate to Egypt and Jordan for the American Council of Young Political Leaders, a nonprofit organization that sponsors international exchange programs.

"When you lay out my background and my experience and my young age, most people are absolutely flabbergasted," she told Women's eNews. "Women in particular are just absolutely thrilled; they're like, 'This is the best thing since sliced bread!'"

Baldwin is one of only four women with military experience known to be running for Congress in this year's midterm elections.

That small number also happens to be a record, says Gilda Morales, a researcher at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And it is one that she says will go a long way toward changing the popular perception that women are less capable than men on foreign policy and national security.

"These women have more face credibility," says Marie Wilson, president of the White House Project, a group in New York dedicated to electing a female president. "Whether men have been in war or not, people project that on to male candidates because people have seen men primarily on the front lines in movies or in history. Women are still having to prove their toughness." Sea Change in Attitudes

But Wilson takes heart from a recent "sea change" in voter attitudes. She cites a 2005 poll commissioned by the White House Project that showed "a growing belief" that men and women are equally suited to handle the complex issues of foreign policy and national security. Fifty-four percent of those polled said a female leader would be no different from a male leader in handling issues of foreign policy and 55 percent said there would be no difference between a male and female leader on issues of homeland security.

That is a "stunning" shift in voter attitudes, Wilson says. "Traditionally that's been a real sticking point for women."

But Baldwin and her fellow female veteran congressional candidates - Democrats Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Republicans Heather Wilson of New Mexico and Martha Rainville of Vermont - are shielded from any lingering stereotypes.

"I can talk about health care and I can talk about the FISA courts," Baldwin told me, referring to the controversial federal court that handles requests from the FBI for warrants to monitor suspected foreign agents within the United States. "We're like this new untried commodity in the political sphere. What people are finding is that we're tough, we're credible, but by the same token we haven't lost sight of our progressiveness."

While there are only four known female veterans in the House races - compared to well over 100 male veterans running for election or reelection to the House - their impact is often expanded by media attention. Duckworth, for instance, was little known when she threw her hat in the ring last year. But since then she has become a central figure in the Democrats' bid to retake the House of Representatives. That's due in great part to her compelling story about co-piloting a Black Hawk helicopter that was struck down in November 2004 when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the cockpit and exploded.

Campaigns Affect Public Views

"We finally do have this core group of women who are running this year," says Barb Palmer, a professor of political science at American University in Washington, D.C., and co-author of "Breaking the Political Glass Ceiling," a book about women in politics published earlier this year. "Regardless of whether they succeed, they are contributing to the downfall of those perceptions."

The stereotype about women and war is one of two main hurdles still blocking a woman's road to the White House, says Dianne Bystrom, professor of political science at Iowa State University in Ames, who has a specialty in women and politics. The other is the view that women with young children cannot handle political office. Women, she says, face tougher scrutiny about the state of their marriages and the number and age of their children than do men.

Bystrom sees the stereotype of women and war easing in 2006 and beyond, thanks not only to female veteran candidates but also to female soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the appointment of women to positions of authority on international issues.

The most prominent of these are secretaries of state Madeline Albright, a Democrat who served under President Clinton, and Condoleezza Rice, a Republican serving under President Bush. Women in lower offices are also combating stereotypes by serving in positions that identify them with foreign policy. As women increase their numbers in the House and Senate, more are gaining recognition for their service on committees that deal with veterans' issues, military affairs and intelligence.

"As more women come into these offices, the likelihood is that people will not think of them as anything less than men," said Morales.

Baldwin Trails in Fundraising

Baldwin is one of eight Democrats running in a crowded field in Maryland's Sept. 12 primary for the seat vacated by Rep. Ben Cardin, a Democrat running for the Senate. Baldwin has raised $26,000, far less than many of her competitors. John Sarbanes, another Democrat in the race who is the son of retiring Sen. Paul Sarbanes, has raised nearly $790,000, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Political oddsmakers give the three other female veterans better chances for victory. GOP Rep. Heather Wilson, a former Air Force officer and currently the only female veteran serving in Congress, has a slight edge in her race against Democrat Patricia Madrid. Before winning her Albuquerque, N.M., House seat in 1998, she served on the National Security Council staff at the White House.

Two other women - Duckworth, who lost both her legs in Iraq in 2004, and Rainville, who in 1997 became the first woman to serve in the influential position of state adjutant general of the National Guard - are considered formidable challengers in their open seat races.

Duckworth locked up her party's nomination in March and will face Republican Pete Roskam in what is expected to be one of the most closely fought races this fall. Rainville is favored to win her party's Sept. 12 primary; if she does, she will be a formidable candidate in this Democratic-leaning district representing the entire state of Vermont.

Another female veteran - Democrat Karen Otter of California - lost a primary contest for a House seat in June. She served in Army units in Oklahoma and Germany.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/39873/