http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3P0HXRmfKg

It can be hard to resist the cute puppies and kittens for sale in pet store windows. But a closer look into how these stores obtain animals reveals a system in which the high price that consumers pay for “that doggie in the window” pales in comparison to the cost paid by animals who are sold in pet stores or forced to produce them.
 
That adorable little scamp in the store probably came from a “puppy mill,” a breeding kennel that raises dogs in cramped, crude, filthy conditions. The majority of these facilities are in the Midwest, but kennels can be found throughout the country, and some dealers even import puppies from other countries.(1) Constant confinement and a lack of adequate veterinary care and socialization often result in animals who are unhealthy and difficult to socialize. As a result, many are abandoned within weeks or months of their adoption by frustrated buyers-further exacerbating the tragic companion animal overpopulation crisis.

Cages, Filth, and Neglect

Puppy mill kennels can consist of anything from small cages made of wood and wire mesh to tractor-trailer cabs or simple tethers attached to trees. One Arkansas facility had “cages hanging from the ceiling of an unheated cinder-block building ….”(2) Female dogs are bred twice a year and are usually destroyed when they are no longer able to produce puppies.(3) Mothers and their litters often suffer from malnutrition, exposure, and a lack of adequate veterinary care.
 
Puppies are taken from their mothers and sold to brokers who pack them into crates for transport and resale to pet stores. Puppies who are shipped from mill to broker to pet store can travel hundreds of miles in pickup trucks, tractor trailers, and/or airplanes, often without adequate food, water, ventilation, or shelter. Two men faced charges after 38 puppies were found to be confined to a feces-filled van without food, water, or space to exercise. The men were transporting the animals from Oklahoma to Florida when a passerby noticed the dogs’ distressed barking and the foul stench emanating from the van, which was parked at a Daytona Beach motel.(4) In Tennessee, 150 overheated puppies, who were traveling from a Missouri puppy mill to pet stores on the East Coast, were found in a cargo truck without air conditioning; four died.(5) Even if a store claims that it doesn’t buy from puppy mills, there is a good chance that it buys from a broker who does.(6) 

Young puppies who survive the unsanitary conditions at puppy mills and endure the grueling transport to pet stores have rarely received the kind of loving human contact that is necessary for them to become suitable companions. Breeders, brokers, and pet stores ensure maximum profits by not spending money for proper food, housing, or veterinary care.

Conditions don’t improve much when the puppies reach pet stores. Dogs who are kept in small cages without exercise, love, or human contact tend to develop undesirable behaviors and may bark excessively or become destructive and unsociable. Unlike many humane societies and shelters, pet stores do not screen buyers or inspect the future homes of the dogs they sell. Poor enforcement of humane laws allows shops to continue selling sick animals, although humane societies and police departments sometimes succeed in closing down stores where severe abuse is uncovered.

Farms and Brokers Do Big Business

When PETA conducted an undercover investigation at Nielsen Farms, a puppy mill in Kansas, PETA’s investigator found that the dogs had no bedding or protection from the cold or heat. Some dogs were suffering from untreated wounds, ear infections, and abscessed feet. Confinement and loneliness had caused some mother dogs to go mad. PETA’s investigator witnessed one USDA inspection, during which the officer glanced at the cages but did not examine the dogs. Our investigation led to the Kansas facility’s closing and a $20,000 fine from the USDA. The Nielsens are also “permanently disqualified from being licensed” by the USDA.(7)

There are thousands of breeders and dealers across the country. In Missouri alone, there are more than 1,400 licensed dog-breeding operations, although so many illegal breeders are in business that a state audit advised that the program designed to regulate commercial breeding was ineffective.(8) The nation’s largest puppy broker is the Hunte Corporation in Missouri, which also exports dogs overseas.(9) The company has been linked to numerous negligent pet stores and breeders and has sponsored American Kennel Club (AKC) meetings.(10) The USDA has loaned the company more than $4 million for expansion and upgrades in recent years-taxpayer money being used to bring more misery to dogs and puppies.(11)

The Plight of Purebreds

Some people impulsively obtain purebred dogs, even though they may not be educated about the breed or ready for the commitment that animal companions require. Movies such as 101 Dalmatians and Beethoven, TV shows like Frasier, and commercials such as those for Taco Bell have caused a jump in the popularity of certain breeds, yet very few potential dog caretakers take the time to investigate the traits and needs of the breed that they are considering. “Every time Hollywood makes a dog movie, the breed goes to hell,” says one caretaker of Bouvier des Flandres dogs. A Dalmatian fancier concludes that “… the unscrupulous breeders will see there’s a profit margin there.”(12) When there is a surge in demand for a particular breed, puppy mills try to meet that demand, but when Jack Russell terriers don’t turn out to be just like Frasier’s “Eddie” or St. Bernards don’t act just like “Beethoven,” rescue groups and animal shelters become flooded with these breeds. 

The AKC, which opposes mandatory spay/neuter programs for purebred dogs, receives millions of dollars from breeders who pay AKC registration fees.(13) The AKC registered more than 421,000 dogs in 2005, some of whom will join the millions of animals who end up in animal shelters every year.(14) Buyers may be swayed by talk of “papers” and “AKC registration,” but these papers cannot ensure good temperament or good health. Says one veterinarian, “The best use of pedigree papers is for housebreaking your dog. They don’t mean a damn thing.”(15) The AKC has minimum care standards for “high-volume breeding” facilities, but with 14 inspectors and an operating budget that is directed toward registration and dog shows, the AKC can only manage to inspect its registered kennels once every two years.(16) By its own admission, some of the more problematic kennels have simply sought registration services (such as Dog Registry of America, Sporting Dog Registry, American Hunting Dog Registry, and All American Dog Registry, to name a few) that don’t perform inspections.(17)

At puppy mills, dogs are bred for quantity, not quality, so unmonitored genetic defects and personality disorders that are passed on from generation to generation are common. This situation results in high veterinary bills for people who buy these dogs and the possibility that unsociable or maladjusted dogs will be disposed of by their unprepared “owners.” “There is virtually no consideration of temperament,” says one dog trainer. “I wish legislators could sit in my office and watch … people sobbing in extreme emotional pain over having to decide whether to euthanize their dog because of some serious behavioral problem.”(18)

Inadequate Inspections

The USDA is supposed to monitor and inspect kennels to ensure that they are not violating the housing standards of the Animal Welfare Act, but kennel inspections are a low priority. In the U.S., there are more than 1,000 research facilities, more than 2,800 exhibitors, and 4,500 dealers that are supposed to be inspected each year.(19)

There are three APHIS sector offices with a total of approximately 70 veterinary inspectors who are supposed to inspect, unannounced, the various types of facilities covered by the AWA.(20)

This means that 70 inspectors have to cover more than 8,300 facilities nationwide.

Puppy mills are rarely monitored by state governments, and existing regulations vary from state to state. In Missouri, for instance, each of the 2,100 facilities is supposed to be inspected once a year, but there are only 12 inspectors employed to handle the task.(21) Even with an estimated 1,300 puppy mills in Wisconsin, inspections of breeder facilities that sell at least 50 dogs and cats are voluntary, and there is no funding for enforcement of these regulations.(22,23)

The Puppy Pipelines

Dealers who want to avoid relevant U.S. laws-the few that exist-look elsewhere to continue doing business. Says one Canadian lawyer, “[P]uppy mill operators in the States buy from us. And crossing the border isn’t a problem either. They cross them all the time.”(24) For example, there is a network of breeders and smugglers who bring puppies into the U.S. from Mexico. A Los Angeles woman was arrested during a sting operation on suspicion of selling underaged puppies and for failure to provide proper veterinary care for the animals; one of the officers involved in the capture of the woman said that the smuggler fit the description of a puppy smuggler: The person uses an alias and a throwaway cell phone and sells puppies from the backs of cars or on street corners.(25) A New Hampshire breeder, who was arrested for cruelty to animals when dozens of dogs and cats were found living in filth, was selling puppies from Russia for as much as $1,900 each on the Internet.(26)

While no federal agency tracks the number of puppies that enter the U.S., an investigation by a New York TV station concluded that thousands of puppies arrive every year and that many are sick or dead when they get here. A staff member at a private veterinary clinic at John F. Kennedy Airport told the CBS affiliate that she had seen “a couple of cases where they (puppies) were shrink-wrapped.” The station also found that although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal agencies have been alerted to the problem of underaged, sick puppies who are crammed and shipped into filthy, crowded kennels for hours at a time, none has jurisdiction over the animals’ care. The CDC only checks animals for rabies, and the USDA regulations for dogs’ age and transport conditions do not apply to foreign shipments.(27)                                                                                                                               

Some states have enacted “puppy lemon” laws that give caretakers the right to return sick or dead puppies for replacement or that offer the option of having veterinary expenses paid by the seller. Unfortunately, depending on the state, the law may not clearly say to whom it applies, or it may affect only pet stores or breeders that sell a certain number of animals each year. Check with your state’s attorney’s office to find out about your state’s laws.

What You Can Do

With millions of unwanted dogs and cats (including purebreds) dying every year in animal shelters, there is simply no reason for animals to be bred and sold for the pet-shop trade. Without these stores, the financial incentive for puppy mills would disappear, and the suffering of these dogs would end. The best way to find an animal companion is through an animal shelter or rescue group.

For more information on pet stores and puppy mills, please visit HelpingAnimals.com.

References

1) Josh Shaffer, “Law Meant to Reduce Puppy Farms Raises Alarm From Kennels,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram 17 Apr. 2002.
2) “Humane Society Takes 77 Dogs From Owner. Animals Missing Toes, Chewed Ears,” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 20 Dec. 2002.
3) Natalie Lariccia, “A Warning on Puppy Mills,” The Vindicator 25 Apr. 2000.
4) Charlene Hager-Van Dyke et al., “4 Testify in Animal Neglect,” Orlando Sentinel 16 Apr. 2003.
5) “Puppies Rescued From Cargo Truck,” Associated Press, 11 May 2000.
6) Lariccia.
7) U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Recent USDA Animal Welfare Act Case Actions,” press releases, 14 Sep. 2001.
Miglena Sternadori, “Officials Seek to Collar Illegal Dog Breeders,” Columbia Daily Tribune 20 Jun. 2004.
9) “USDA Approves Loan to McDonald County K-9 Distributor, Blunt Announces,” Blunt news release, 5 Sep. 2001.
10) American Kennel Club, “AKC Statement on Relationships With High Volume Kennels,” 2003.
11) Shaffer.
12) Chuck Haga, “Every Dog Has Its Day,” Minneapolis Star Tribune 7 Sep. 1999.
13) “Boise, ID Faces Breeding Restrictions,” AKC, 8 Nov. 2002.
14) American Kennel Club, Registration Statistics, 2006.
15) Michael D. Lemonick, “A Terrible Beauty,” Time 12 Dec. 1994.
16) High Volume Breeders Committee, “Report to the AKC Board of Directors,” AKC, 12 Nov. 2002: 5.
17) High Volume Breeders Committee, 12.
18) Richard P. Jones, “Panel Weakens Pet Industry Rules,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 19 May 2003.
19) U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, “Animal Care Report” (Riverdale: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2004).
20) U.S. Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, “Compliance Inspections” (Riverdale: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Jun. 2005).
21) “Missouri’s Animal Care Facilities Act Ensures Proper Animal Care,” MVMA Messenger Jul./Aug. 2002.
22) “Curb State’s Puppy Mills,” Wisconsin State Journal 14 Mar. 2003.
23) Franzen, “This One’s All Bark,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 26 May 2003.
24) Peter Mansbridge, “Puppy Mills,” The National Show, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 30 Jul. 2001.
25) Sandy Mazza, “Puppy Pipeline Plugged,” Pasadena Star-News 16 Mar. 2006.
26) Doug Hanchett, “N.H. Dog Dealer Busted; Cop: ‘The Odor Was Indescribable,’” Boston Herald 14 Jun. 2003.
27) “Puppy Pipeline. Many Shipped to America Are Abused,” WCBS TV, 17 Feb. 2006.

Reprinted from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA).

The world is nuking up again, to new and alarming levels. So why are disarmament campaigners so optimistic? Jess Worth spots a window of opportunity.

‘When the bomb dropped on Hiroshima I was one kilometre from the explosion. I was 14. Now I’m 77 - a lucky number in Japan.’

It’s Easter Monday, and I’m listening to Yushio Sato’s story in the Great British drizzle, outside Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment. ‘My mother and sister died in the months following,’ he tells the crowd. ‘My brother and I survived - but we have had many diseases. 26 years after the explosion, I had an operation to remove half my stomach because of cancer. My brother died of liver cancer. Now I am the only survivor of my family.’

Around 5,000 of us have gathered at our country’s nuke factory to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first protest march from London to Aldermaston. The 1958 march was a defining moment in the history of the peace movement. It marked the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the launch of the iconic peace symbol, and the beginning of annual Aldermaston marches which - at their height in the 1960s - attracted hundreds of thousands of people.

But this isn’t just a symbolic event. We are here to protest about what’s happening today. The British Government is spending $11 billion developing Aldermaston in order to research, build and test a new generation of nuclear weapons - including ‘mini-nukes’ intended for actual use in the battlefield.

After we have all spread out to surround the base and declare to the slightly soggy media that ‘the bomb stops here’, I decide to take a stroll around the perimeter fence. It turns out to be an eight kilometre hike. The place is vast, and the scale of new construction work staggering.

I’ve always found it hard to get my head around the idea that my country even possesses weapons of such indiscriminate and cataclysmic destructive power - let alone that we are prepared to use them. Surely the suffering of Yushio Sato and his family, and the hundreds of thousands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims, should have been enough to shock the world into banning the atom bomb before it could be used again?

Apparently not. Political leaders express their commitment to nuclear disarmament on a regular basis. But my trip to Aldermaston has provided a grim dose of reality. As I gaze through the fence at the shiny new dome built to house ‘Orion’ - a super-powerful laser that will simulate the conditions of a nuclear explosion so that the British Government can bypass the pesky Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - it becomes quite obvious that, behind the rhetoric, maintaining our grotesque ‘deterrent’ decades into the future is the real plan.

So it has come as a welcome surprise to find that disarmament campaigners are more optimistic than they have been in years. In fact, circumstances have converged to create a window of opportunity to begin ridding the world of nuclear weapons for good. The question is whether we can seize the moment.

A new kind of madness

Before I started working on this magazine, nukes weren’t very high up my list of things to be worried about. Like acne and exams, fretting over atomic armageddon seemed to belong to a bygone era. The fact that the NI hasn’t done a magazine on nuclear weapons since the 1980s shows I’m not the only one to have deprioritized the nuclear threat.

Back then, the Cold War was at its height. NATO and the Warsaw Pact were deploying 65,000 nukes, sucking up 85 per cent of the world’s military expenditure. One NI focused on how to break the ‘suicide pact’ of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) in which the US and USSR were locked in a state of common vulnerability. Military strategists at the time argued that MAD helped keep the peace, but in fact it was having the opposite effect, fuelling a potentially apocalyptic arms race which was being played out through proxy wars all over the Majority World.

In the 1990s the Cold War melted away, and stockpiles were scaled back substantially. The world stepped back from the brink and breathed a sigh of relief. The NI started laying into globalization instead.

However, in recent years we’ve entered a frightening new phase of nuclear proliferation, and the rules have changed. It’s a new kind of madness. Since Hiroshima, the bomb has been a building-block of empire: every US President has threatened to nuke at least one country, ignoring arms control treaties to continue expanding its arsenal. But now the US is the sole superpower, for the time being. It has attained a state of nuclear supremacy, striving for ‘full spectrum dominance’ whereby it can destroy any country without fear of nuclear retaliation: and thus rule the world.

The 21st century has so far been marked by jaw-dropping hypocrisy, with Bush and his war poodle Blair outraged at the very idea of other countries developing their own nuclear capability; and in the case of Iraq, even using non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as an excuse to invade and occupy.

The US and Britain are not alone in flouting their disarmament commitments. All the other major nuclear weapons states are busy ‘modernizing’ their nukes, although both Russia and China have been more than a little provoked by Bush’s aggressive push for a ‘Son of Star Wars’ ballistic missile defence system that looks suspiciously like it’s aimed at them.

Since the end of the Cold War, despite - or rather, because of - the refusal of states to disarm, we have seen a new phenomenon: the rise of the ‘nuclear poor’. A Russian entrepreneur making megabucks out of the nuke trade describes how ‘at some point this change occurred. The great powers were stuck with arsenals they could not use, and nuclear weapons became the weapons of the poor.’¹ India and Pakistan built themselves the bomb in the late 1990s, and North Korea enraged its southern neighbour with a test in 2006. At least 13 nations have the ability to ‘go nuclear’ in the next decade, including Algeria, Indonesia, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria. Many more could soon join them as nuclear energy spreads across the world, providing access to bomb-making technology.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, expressed exasperation last February over the actions of the ‘big boys’ which are encouraging poorer countries to want their own weapons. ‘Any country with an average infrastructure can develop a nuclear warhead. Iran is just one example of the new phenomenon of becoming “nuclear weapon capable”: you don’t really need to have an actual weapon. It’s enough to buy yourself an insurance policy by developing the capability and then sitting on it. But let us not kid ourselves. Ninety per cent of it is insurance, because the big boys continue to say “we need nuclear weapons but it is bad for you to have them”. Nuclear weapon states have to lead by example.’

As if the prospect of a multi-polar nuclear world weren’t disquieting enough, it’s conceivable that terrorist groups might get their hands on the technology to build and detonate some kind of nuclear device. ElBaradei can confirm 150 cases a year of illicit trafficking in nuclear materials: ‘But a lot of material stolen has never been recovered and a lot of the material recovered has never been reported stolen. This system leaves a lot to be desired.’²

Seismic shifts

So what possible reason can anti-nuclear activists have to be so upbeat? Well, quite aside from the moral issues, nuclear deterrence is a laughable dogma these days. A journalist who recently went on a tour round a Trident nuclear submarine asked who the missiles are pointed at. ‘Nobody,’ came the answer. So who is the enemy? ‘We don’t have an enemy. It’s a deterrent.’³

But the real security threats for countries like Britain cannot be deterred by the promise of a nuclear attack. Terrorism, climate change, global economic meltdown - however many ballistic missiles you’ve got, they won’t help. Instead, as Commander Robert Green, now retired from the Royal Navy, summarizes: ‘Weapons stimulate hostility, create instability, promote proliferation and generate an arms race. They are dirty and poisonous and the ultimate virility symbol. They represent terrorist logic on the grandest scale imaginable.’⁴ And they’re incredibly expensive to maintain.

Many countries agree with this analysis, perhaps even some nuclear states, who are realizing that having nuclear weapons makes them more, not less vulnerable. There is growing support in the international community for a Nuclear Weapons Convention that would provide a framework and timetable for disarmament - a ‘palpable buzz about reaching a tipping point, where disarmament becomes respectable and achievable’, reports expert and activist Rebecca Johnson.⁵ It’s a matter of bringing the big boys on board - and this is just starting to look possible.

In the US, a seismic shift in attitude is taking place. While the Bush administration has continued to love the bomb, many mainstream military strategists have had a startling change of heart, epitomized by an open letter to the Wall Street Journal in January. Entitled ‘Toward a nuclear-free world’, it is signed by four notorious Cold Warriors: two former Secretaries of State (George Shultz and Henry Kissinger); a former Secretary of Defense (William J Perry) and a retired Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (Sam Nunn). They argue that nuclear weapons are fuelling insecurity, which is in no-one’s interest, and that the US and Russia must take the lead in disarming.

Congress has vetoed many of Bush’s bids for new spending on nukes, and US warmongering in the Middle East has never been so unpopular. In the Presidential primaries, Barack Obama broke with the tradition of always keeping the ultimate threat up your sleeve by stating: ‘it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance’ in Afghanistan or Pakistan - to snorts of derision from Hillary ‘I’d-obliterate-Iran’ Clinton. Using such weapons in situations involving civilians is ‘not on the table,’ he continued, and has since pledged to work towards elimination.⁶ If he wins the Democratic nomination, and then the election, he could turn out to be the most pro-disarmament President of all time.

Of course, the motives of Kissinger et al are by no means pure. They partly spring from a hawkish calculation that a world bristling with other countries’ nukes is dangerous for the US, and prevents it from the total military domination it could otherwise be enjoying. Nevertheless, it’s an extraordinary volte-face and opens up a political space for campaigners that there has never been before.

In Britain, campaigning against Trident has reached a pivotal moment. The fleet of nuclear submarines is based in Scotland, which now has its own Parliament. In 2007, against a backdrop of year-long anti-nuke direct action, the Scottish National Party came to power. They don’t want their country to host Britain’s bombs anymore, and 70 per cent of the Scottish public agree. A parliamentary coalition has been set up to explore legal options, such as using health, safety and environmental legislation to whack Westminster with a massive fine every time a convoy carrying warheads up from Aldermaston crosses the border.

Finding a new home for Trident would be a headache of ballistic proportions for the British Government, as their attempts to upgrade their WMDs may also prove to be. Blair won a preliminary vote last year to replace Trident, but it caused the biggest MP rebellion since the Iraq war, and another vote will be needed for the final go-ahead. In the meantime, campaigners say a colossal defence spending crunch is looming, and the rhetoric on disarmament coming out of Gordon Brown’s Government is the most positive they’ve ever heard. Britain’s submarines are now the weakest link in the nuclear chain.

Profits of doom

The ball is clearly in the court of the US and Britain to start serious negotiations to eradicate nukes completely. We have perhaps a handful of years before nuclear weapons spread to more countries and are used in anger once again. But let’s not be naïve: the barriers in our way are enormous.

Perhaps the most formidable is the so-called military-industrial complex: a term coined in 1961 by a disparaging President Eisenhower to describe the unholy matrimony of war-making and money-making. Its influence helps explain why the US now spends a third more on nuclear weapons, in real terms, than the Cold War average.

The current US plan for massive investment in new facilities and warheads is known as ‘Complex Transformation’. William D Hartung, a specialist in the politics and economics of military spending, argues that it has ‘more to do with bailing out the nuclear weapons industry’ than anything else.⁷ We’re talking seriously big money: well over $200 billion over the next two decades. The main beneficiaries will be eight companies - including Bechtel and Lockheed Martin - who between them received $11 billion in US Government nuclear contracts in 2005. It’s surely no coincidence that these same eight spent $15.3 million on lobbying in 2006 alone.⁸

The nuclear industry’s talent for persuading politicians to keep on spending is not confined to the US. The reason the Trident replacement vote was rushed through the British Parliament was that the main beneficiary - arms company BAE Systems - went into lobbying overdrive. Most of it was behind the scenes, but Murray Easton, BAE’s Submarines Managing Director, is on record as warning the Parliamentary Defence Select Committee that any delay in replacing Trident would have ‘a significant impact’ on BAE’s ability to develop and build nuclear subs for Britain in the future. Design and drafting staff would have nothing to do all day, he complained, and so would no doubt leave the sector, taking their skills with them forever.⁹

While this may sound, to some, like a perfect opportunity to diversify British industry away from arms, to my Government it sounded like an order. And when BAE tells them to do something, they do it - as evidenced by Blair’s illegal suspension of a bribery investigation into a BAE arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

While the case against nuclear weapons may seem watertight, countering the influence of the ‘defence’ industry will require massive popular pressure. This is where a second problem kicks in: public apathy. The anti-nuke movement is nowhere near the size it reached in its heyday, despite including some of the most dedicated and heroic activists I have ever encountered. People have been lulled into a false sense of security, believing that nukes are no longer a threat. CND were pleased with a turnout of 5,000 at Aldermaston, but much larger mobilizations are going to be necessary to burst the tyres of this military juggernaught.

A final, escalating problem is the rapid spread of nuclear energy, which is being erroneously touted as a ‘clean’ alternative to fossil fuels. Ban-the-bomb campaigners are split on this issue so tend to keep out of the debate, with damaging consequences for the movement.

Seizing the moment

If the moral case were enough, nuclear weapons would have been banned long ago. It’s time for a more strategic approach that makes the triple obstacles of military-industrial power, public apathy and the spread of atomic energy work to the advantage of the anti-nuke movement.

We should be linking the abolition of nuclear weapons to the fight against climate change. Nuclear energy is a dangerous diversion, and nuclear weapons are worse than useless against the multiple insecurities that global warming will unleash. By uniting the two causes, a case could be made for channelling the piles of public money currently being blown on building bombs into financing large-scale changes to cut greenhouse gases and build a safer future.

Let’s take Britain as an example. Trident replacement will cost around $154 billion over the next three decades. Why not use that money to finance a wholesale shift to renewable energy? Britain could supply 50 per cent of its energy from offshore wave and wind power by 2030 by diverting funds and skills directly from nuclear submarine manufacturing.¹⁰ A mere 1.3 billion Trident bucks a year would fund the transition from car-dependent gridlock to an affordable nationwide public transport system.¹¹ Junking nukes would go a long way towards meeting the estimated $25.4 billion a year cost of helping every British household become low carbon, cutting overall emissions by 80 per cent.¹²

This ‘two birds with one stone’ approach could help revitalize an ageing peace movement. It could bring the genuine threats posed by nuclear weapons to the attention of a new audience of activists, and push it up the agenda of an environmental movement growing in strength. It makes a case for diverting funding from the bomb that even the most trigger-happy politician may find compelling - especially when the challenge of publicly financing major carbon-reduction infrastructure projects during an economic recession begins to bite…

It’s time to seize the moment. There are fewer and fewer survivors like Yushio Sato left to remind us of the horror humans can now unleash upon each other. We’ve never been good at learning from history and the signs point towards a whole new generation experiencing a nuclear attack first hand in the not too distant future. This struggle is too important to leave to the committed few. It’s up to all of us to grab the window of opportunity we’ve been given and ban the bomb, before the shutters slam back down, for good.

• 1. William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar: the rise of the nuclear poor, Penguin, 2007
• 2. Mohamed ElBaradei, speech at the 44th Munich Conference on Security Policy, 9 February 2008, reported by Press TV
• 3. Sam Alexandroni, ‘The 365 ways to say no’, New Statesman, 26 February 2007
• 4. Spoken at CND’s ‘Global summit for a nuclear weapon-free world’, London, 16 February 2008
• 5. Rebecca Johnson, ‘Time to outlaw the use of nuclear weapons’, Disarmament Diplomacy, Issue No. 87, Spring 2008
• 6. Anne E. Kornblut, ‘Clinton demurs on Obama’s nuclear stance’, Washington Post, 3 August 2007
• 7. William D Hartung, ‘Nuclear bailout: a critique of the Department of Energy’s plans for a new nuclear weapons complex’, New America Foundation, 25 March 2008
• 8. William D Hartung and Frida Berrigan, ‘Complex 2030: the costs and consequences of the plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons’, World Policy Institute, April 2007
• 9. BAE Systems, ‘Investor brief - November 2006′, http://tinyurl.com/6jce2r/
• 10. Steven Schofield, ‘Oceans of work: arms conversion revisited’, British American Security Information Council (BASIC), 27 January 2007
• 11. Simon Bullock, Tony Bosworth and Vicky Cann, ‘Way to go - paying for better transport’, May 2004, http://tinyurl.com/yu8em5
• 12. Brenda Boardman, ‘Home Truths: a low carbon strategy to reduce UK housing emissions by 80% by 2050′, University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute, November 2007.

Reprinted from New Internationalist (NI)

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.

(NaturalNews) Victory gardens are popping up all over. Last seen during World War II, these gardens now represent our fight to regain control of our lives and our health. They are the first battlefields against the increasing corporate tyranny, a battle that may end with us throwing off the philosophy of every man for himself and a realization that we are all together in this thing called life.

World War II united people and allowed them to reach into the depths of themselves and pull up a resourcefulness they didn’t know they had. During this time of horror and hope people realized that they were living out a great saga in their lives, and in this saga they all had a part to play. The world was a violent and dramatic place, yet also an awakening happened, a vision of unity and understanding. The victory garden has come to symbolize this unity and vision.

What’s a victory garden?

It was emphasized to urban and suburban dwellers that the produce from their gardens would help provide the nutritious food needed by the soldiers to keep them fighting strong. It would also help keep the price of that food low, so the War Department would have more money to spend on other military needs. The victory garden would also help solve the shortages of labor and transportation that made it difficult to harvest and transport produce to market. One poster from the mid 1940’s reading, “Our food is fighting” portrayed the high sense of patriotism so characteristic of the time.

The Department of Agriculture along with agribusiness corporations distributed booklets providing information about basic gardening techniques. In 1943, 20 million gardens were producing 8 million tons of food. Victory gardens were planted in backyards, apartment building roofs, vacant lots, backyards, and pretty much every available patch of dirt and container throughout the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Neighbors pooled their resources, planted different kinds of foods and formed cooperatives, doing whatever had to be done.

Magazines printed stories about victory gardens, and women’s magazines provided instructions on how to grow and preserve garden produce. Sales of pressure cookers to use in canning skyrocketed as families were encouraged to can their own vegetables. Home canners used non-toxic glass mason jars. The government as well as businesses urged families to make gardening a group effort. At the peak of the effort, 9-10 million tons of produce was produced, an amount equal to all commercial production. Even children and teenagers willingly took part in the work of the garden.

The victory garden was clearly a victory on many levels.

Why victory gardens are back in style

Today we are again involved in fighting a battle, but this time the battle involves how to stay healthy and live genuine lives in a world where everything is increasing stacked against us.

Today’s commercially grown produce comes from soils depleted of the minerals and nutrients so necessary to keep us healthy in our polluted and stressful environment. Plants grown in depleted soils are less healthy and able to resist attack by pests, so the use of pesticides is more prevalent than ever. Much of our big agribusiness produce is now being grown in foreign countries not subject to highly controlled use of pesticide. Today’s big food corporations choose the cheapest, most effective pesticides, not the ones that are least toxic to humans and other life forms. Along with pesticide residues, our produce contains residual amounts of soil depleting synthetic chemical fertilizers which are toxic to our livers.

Parabolic gas prices are estimated to increase wholesale food prices by 30 percent in the coming months. We wonder how we will be able to continue buying quality foods to keep us healthy. Fruits and vegetables are on the road for 1500 miles on average, before they reach the supermarkets. Produce is picked without having a chance to ripen so it can withstand the long trip to market. During this process, even more of the nutrients are lost. When it finally reaches the supermarket, produce can sit in cold storage for a week before being put out for sale.

We want to have access to health promoting fruits and vegetables during the winter months without them having to be flown in from other parts of the world. Asparagus from Argentina in January is a luxury few can afford. Yet we are told that our commercially canned produce contains carcinogenic and toxic bisphenol-A.

We’re short on money to put gas into the SUV to drive our children around to their programmed activities. At the same time, we are realizing that our children are not really learning what is important in life. We yearn for projects and activities that will bring our families together.

We are stressed out and overworked trying to get the money to buy all the stuff that corporations have decided we must have. Our closets and homes are filled, but our bank accounts are empty. We are so busy that we seldom see our family as a whole or do activities in which the whole family participates. It’s time to say ‘no’ to the big corporate food sellers and big oil. It’s time to reach inside ourselves again and rediscover that kernel of resourcefulness. It is still there.

Victory gardens and the new age

A victory garden is a manifestation of new thinking, new vision and an explosion of new understanding. We not only live in this world but we help create it. We can choose to participate in unity and renewal, and to become part of the higher forms of consciousness. We are at the point now where evolution can become conscious of itself.

We can choose to participate in a new age of creative intelligence and love. This new age is like a rising tide which may wash away those who seek to go on working in accordance with that old law of every man for himself. It is a movement just beginning like the emergence of a tiny shoot in spring. You can tear out that shoot or stomp on it, but there is no way that you can hold back the coming of spring.

We have had enough of the old ways of thinking, and we are here to take back control of our lives, our health, our resources, and our futures. We are resisting the control of destructive governmental and corporate forces. We are developing an energy and enthusiasm that characterizes new values, new ways of living, new survival techniques, and new experiences.

A garden that symbolizes our part in this evolution is a challenge and a source of immense hope. If a family or group is able to achieve this, others will follow and the movement will grow. In a time of famine for many and threatened famine for many others, the victory garden is an indication of a new way the earth can be made more fruitful. We must have a vision.

We realize with horror what the human race in its greed and arrogance is doing to the earth, and the life forms on it. Our ignorance of the realities of nature has led us to follow all sorts of practices which hurt and alienate. We are at the juncture where we may either come to be parasites upon the planet, or we may come to a new enlightenment. The choice is ours.

A victory garden can be our symbol of the victory of the decision to be part of the new enlightenment. It can provide us with a way to re-establish a positive relationship with nature as we are called on to love life-giving plants, to cherish and nurture them, to talk to them, and thank them for all their work for us. When we have reached out to do this, we are breaking down barriers within our minds, and our resistance to this new age will dissolve. We are readying ourselves to go forth openly toward nature with a loving attitude.

Remember, this is not somebody’s thought out plan. It is a phenomenon and an expression of the living energies for renewal that are sweeping through our society. This is a creative energy to renew in many facets, the garden being just one of them. The garden is an expression of a community filled with energy, enthusiasm and love for all life.

A garden teaches us the secrets of creation in various ways. Once we make the decision to pull back from the getting and spending lifestyle, we learn the power within us to create our world by the choices we make. We realize that we no longer have to be controlled by the power of events, but that by our power of thought, we control events. We can bring about what is in our thoughts.

When this is our direction we will have the confidence to succeed in the garden. Gardening is about the relationship we have with the plants. When we love and cherish them, they will return the favor. Plants are like our children. A child who is loved thrives no matter what the conditions are, but a child who has no love dies. Gardening is never about technique or the color of your thumb. It is about what is in your heart and spirit.

About the author

Barbara is a school psychologist, a published author in the area of personal finance, a breast cancer survivor using “alternative” treatments, a born existentialist, and a student of nature and all things natural.

Reprinted from NaturalNews.

UC researchers have found that more than 30 percent of American public schools are within 400 meters, or a quarter mile, of major highways that consistently serve as main truck and traffic routes.

Research has shown that proximity to major highways-and thus environmental pollutants, such as aerosolizing diesel exhaust particles-can leave school-age children more susceptible to respiratory diseases later in life.

“This is a major public health concern that should be given serious consideration in future urban development, transportation planning and environmental policies,” says Sergey Grinshpun, PhD, principal investigator of the study and professor of environmental health at UC.

To protect the health of young children with developing lungs, he says new schools should be built further from major highways.

“Health risk can be mitigated through proper urban planning, but that doesn’t erase the immediate risk to school-age children attending schools that are too close to highways right now,” he adds. “Existing schools should be retrofitted with air filtration systems that will reduce students’ exposure to traffic pollutants.”

The UC-led team reports its findings in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, an international scientific journal. This is believed to be the first national study of school proximity and health risks associated with major roadways.

For this study, Grinshpun’s team conducted a survey of major metropolitan areas representative of all geographical regions of the United States: Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis and San Antonio.

More than 8,800 schools representing 6 million students were included in the survey. Primary data was collected through the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

Schools within this data set were then geocoded to accurately calculate distance to the nearest interstate, U.S. highway or state highway.

Past research on highway-related air pollution exposure has focused on residences located close to major roads. Grinshpun points out, however, that school-age children spend more than 30 percent of their day on school grounds-in classrooms, after-school care or extracurricular activities. 

“For many years, our focus has been on homes when it comes to air pollution. School attendance may result in a large dose of inhaled traffic pollutants that-until now-have been completely overlooked,” he adds.

These past studies suggest this proximity to highway traffic puts school-age children at an increased risk for asthma and respiratory problems later in life from air pollutants and aeroallergens.

This includes research from the UC Cincinnati Childhood Allergy and Air Pollution Study (CCAAPS) which has reported that exposure to traffic pollutants in close proximity to main roads has been associated with increased risk for asthma and other chronic respiratory problems during childhood.

Grinshpun’s team found that public school students were more likely to attend schools near major highways compared to the general population. Researchers say the rapid expansion of metropolitan areas in recent years-deemed “urban sprawl”-seems to be associated with the consistent building of schools near highways.

“Major roads play an important role in the economy, but we need to strike a balance between economic and health considerations as we break ground on new areas,” says Alexandra Appatova, the study’s first author. “Policymakers need to develop new effective strategies that would encourage urban planners to reconsider our current infrastructure, particularly when it comes to building new schools and maintaining existing ones.”

The state of California, for example, has passed a law prohibiting the building of new schools within 500 feet (168 meters) of a busy road. New Jersey is moving a bill through the legislature to require highway entrance and exit ramps to be at least 1,000 feet from schools.

This study was funded in part by grants from UC’s Center for Sustainable Urban Engineering and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. UC’s Patrick Ryan, PhD, and Grace LeMasters, PhD, also participated in this study. Appatova was an intern in UC’s department of environmental health when the study was being conducted.

Reprinted from University of Cincinnati

A global study led by Professor Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, shows that the number of “dead zones”-areas of seafloor with too little oxygen for most marine life-has increased by a third between 1995 and 2007.

Diaz and collaborator Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden say that dead zones are now “the key stressor on marine ecosystems” and “rank with over-fishing, habitat loss, and harmful algal blooms as global environmental problems.”

The study, which appears in the August 15 issue of the journal Science, tallies 405 dead zones in coastal waters worldwide, affecting an area of 95,000 square miles, about the size of New Zealand. The largest dead zone in the U.S., at the mouth of the Mississippi, covers more than 8,500 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey.

Diaz began studying dead zones in the mid-1980s after seeing their effect on bottom life in a tributary of Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore. His first review of dead zones in 1995 counted 305 worldwide. That was up from his count of 162 in the 1980s, 87 in the 1970s, and 49 in the 1960s. He first found scientific reports of dead zones in the 1910s, when there were 4. Worldwide, the number of dead zones has approximately doubled each decade since the 1960s.

Diaz and Rosenberg write “There is no other variable of such ecological importance to coastal marine ecosystems that has changed so drastically over such a short time as dissolved oxygen.”

Dead zones occur when excess nutrients, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, enter coastal waters and help fertilize blooms of algae. When these microscopic plants die and sink to the bottom, they provide a rich food source for bacteria, which in the act of decomposition consume dissolved oxygen from surrounding waters. Major nutrient sources include fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels.

Geologic evidence shows that dead zones were not “a naturally recurring event” in Chesapeake Bay or most other estuarine ecosystems, says Diaz. “Dead zones were once rare. Now they’re commonplace. There are more of them in more places.” The first dead zone in Chesapeake Bay was reported in the 1930s.

Scientists refer to water with too little oxygen for fish and other active organisms as “hypoxic.” Diaz says that many ecosystems experience a progression in which periodic hypoxic events become seasonal and then, if nutrient inputs continue to increase, persistent. Earth’s largest dead zone, in the Baltic Sea, experiences hypoxia year-round. Chesapeake Bay experiences seasonal, summertime hypoxia through much of its main channel, occupying about 40% of its area and up to 5% of its volume.

Diaz and Rosenberg note that hypoxia tends to be overlooked until it starts to affect organisms that people eat. A possible indicator of hypoxia’s adverse effects on an economically important finfish species in Chesapeake Bay is the purported link between oxygen-poor bottom waters and a chronic outbreak of a bacterial disease among striped bass.

Several Bay researchers, including VIMS fish pathologist Wolfgang Vogelbein, hypothesize that the prevalence of mycobacteriosis among Bay stripers (>75%) is due to the stress they encounter when development of the Bay’s summertime dead zone forces them from the cooler bottom waters they prefer into warmer waters near the Bay surface.

Diaz and Rosenberg’s also point out a more fundamental effect of hypoxia: the loss of energy from the Bay’s food chain. By precluding or stunting the growth of bottom-dwellers such as clams and worms, hypoxia robs their predators of an important source of nutrition.

Diaz and VIMS colleague Linda Schaffner estimate that Chesapeake Bay now loses about 10,000 metric tons of carbon to hypoxia each year, 5% of the Bay’s total production of food energy. The Baltic Sea has lost 30% of its food energy-a condition that has contributed to a significant decline in its fisheries yields.

Diaz and Rosenberg say the key to reducing dead zones is “to keep fertilizers on the land and out of the sea.” Diaz says that goal is shared by farmers concerned with the high cost of buying and applying nitrogen to their crops. “They certainly don’t want to see their dollars flowing off their fields into the Bay,” says Diaz. “Scientists and farmers need to continue working together to develop farming methods that minimize the transfer of nutrients from land to sea.”

Reprinted from Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Meanwhile, a related discussion has ensued among international-security experts who believe climate-change-related damage to global ecosystems and the resulting competition for natural resources may increasingly serve as triggers for wars and other conflicts in the future.

Jürgen Scheffran, a research scientist in the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security and the Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research at the University of Illinois, is among those raising concerns. In a survey of recent research published earlier this summer in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Scheffran concluded that “the impact of climate change on human and global security could extend far beyond the limited scope the world has seen thus far.”

Scheffran’s review included a critical analysis of four trends identified in a report by the German Advisory Council on Global Change as among those most possibly destabilizing populations and governments: degradation of freshwater resources, food insecurity, natural disasters and environmental migration.

He also cited last year’s report by a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicating that climate change would affect species and ecosystems worldwide, from rainforests to coral reefs.

In his analysis, Scheffran noted that the number of world regions vulnerable to drought was expected to rise.

Water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover in major mountain ranges such as the Andes and Himalayas also are expected to decrease, he said.

“Most critical for human survival are water and food, which are sensitive to changing climatic conditions,” Scheffran said.

The degradation of these critical resources, combined with threats to populations caused by natural disasters, disease and crumbling economic and ecosystems, he said, could ultimately have “cascading effects.”

“Environmental changes caused by global warming will not only affect human living conditions but may also generate larger societal effects, by threatening the infrastructures of society or by inducing social responses that aggravate the problem,” he wrote. “The associated socio-economic and political stress can undermine the functioning of communities, the effectiveness of institutions, and the stability of societal structures. These degraded conditions could contribute to civil strife, and, worse, armed conflict.”

In fact, Scheffran said, there’s evidence that such dramas are already playing out on the world stage - whether already affected by climate change or not.

“Large areas of Africa are suffering from scarcity of food and fresh water resources, making them more vulnerable to conflict. An example is Sudan’s Darfur province where an ongoing conflict was aggravated since droughts forced Arab herders to move into areas of African farmers.”

Other regions of the world - including the Middle East, Central Asia and South America - also are being affected, he said.

With so much at stake, Scheffran recommends multiple strategies for forestalling otherwise insurmountable consequences. Among the most critical, he said, is for governments to incorporate measures for addressing climate change within national policy. Beyond that, he advocates a cooperative, international approach to addressing concerns.

“Although climate change bears a significant conflict potential, it can also transform the international system toward more cooperation if it is seen as a common threat that requires joint action,” he said.

One of the more hopeful, recent signs on that front, he said, was the 2007 Bali climate summit that brought together more than 10,000 representatives from throughout the world to draft a climate plan.

“The Bali Roadmap has many good ideas, but was criticized as being too vague to induce a major policy shift,” Scheffran said. “Nevertheless, the seeming conflict between environment and the economy will be best overcome with the recognition that protecting the climate in the best interest of the economy.”

In addition to global cooperation, Scheffran believes that those occupying Earth now can learn a lot about the future by studying the past.

“History has shown how dependent our culture is on a narrow window of climatic conditions for average temperature and precipitation,” he said. “The great human civilizations began to flourish after the last ice age, and some disappeared due to droughts and other adverse shifts in the climate. The so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ in the northern hemisphere a few hundred years ago was caused by an average drop in temperature of less than a degree Celsius.

“The consequences were quite severe in parts of Europe, associated with loss of harvest and population decline,” Scheffran said.  “Riots and military conflicts became more likely, as a recent empirical study has suggested.”

However, as history has demonstrated, humans are quite capable of adapting to changing climate conditions as long as those changes are moderate.

“The challenge is to slow down the dynamics and stabilize the climate system at levels which are not dangerous,” Scheffran said.

He remains optimistic that this is still possible - in large part, because public awareness and educational efforts taking place today are making concerns about climate change a priority.

“Global warming receives now more public and political attention than a few years ago,” Scheffran said.

“Grass-roots movements are emerging in the United States for protecting the climate and developing energy alternatives, involving not only many local communities and companies but also influential states such as California, led by Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger.”

Further evidence that the issue is being taken seriously at last, Scheffran said, is coming from the campaign trail.

“Congressional and presidential candidates now acknowledge that something has to be done to play a leading role on energy and climate change to not fall behind the rest of the world,” he said.

Reprinted from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Washington, D.C. (August 21, 2008) - The FDA announced today that it will allow food producers to start irradiating fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce in an attempt to kill E. coli O157:H7 and other bacteria that cause food-borne illnesses, despite scientific and consumer concerns about the use of irradiation.  The move comes in response to a petition filed by The National Food Processors Association, a trade group representing major food companies.

“Irradiation is not the solution to food-borne illness,” said Bill Freese, Science Policy Analyst at the Center for Food Safety.  “In fact, it serves to distract attention from the unsanitary conditions of industrial agriculture that create the problem in the first place.”

In 2006, California spinach contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 sickened over 200 people, and killed three.  A field investigation by FDA and the State of California identified the same strain of E. coli O157:H7 in cattle feces from a ranch close to where the spinach was grown. 

Besides being the source of 3/4ths of the nations spinach, California is home to nearly 5 million cows which produce 15 million tons of manure every year - manure that often ends up in nearby waterways, including the ditches and channels of irrigation water for crops like spinach.  Dried manure can even blow onto neighboring fields in clouds of dust.

“Irradiation kills some bacteria in our foods, but it is no substitute for measures to clean up the huge animal operations that pollute our waterways and irrigation water with the raw manure that often carries pathogenic bacteria,” said Freese.

Contamination of leafy greens is not a new problem.  According to the California Department of Health Services, in the last 11 years, 20 E. coli outbreaks have been linked to “leafy products” grown in California, including two related to spinach. 

“Food companies are also seeking FDA permission to label irradiated foods as ‘pasteurized’ - an obvious attempt to conceal from consumers the fact that foods are being irradiated,” added Freese.

Food irradiation uses high-energy Gamma rays, electron beams, or X-rays (all of which are millions of times more powerful than standard medical X-rays) to break apart the bacteria and insects that can hide in meat, grains, and other foods. Radiation is one of the more destructive forces in nature, and scientific studies have documented that irradiation can dramatically lower the nutritional content of foods, particularly vitamin A and folate, an essential B vitamin.  The FDA’s proposal concedes that irradiation will make spinach less nutritious.

“Fresh spinach is extremely nutritious, as every mother knows.  Irradiation will rob it of some of those essential nutrients, all to avoid tackling the problem at its source,” said Freese.

The Center for Food Safety is national, non-profit, membership organization founded in 1997 to protect human health and the environment by curbing the use of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture.

On the web at: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/

(Dallas, August 20, 2008) - More than 200,000 US public school students were punished by beatings during the 2006-2007 school year, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union said in a joint report released today. In the 13 states that corporally punished more than 1,000 students per year, African-American girls were twice as likely to be beaten as their white counterparts.

In the 125-page report, “A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools,” the ACLU and Human Rights Watch found that in Texas and Mississippi children ranging in age from 3 to 19 years old are routinely physically punished for minor infractions such as chewing gum, talking back to a teacher, or violating the dress code, as well as for more serious transgressions such as fighting. Corporal punishment, legal in 21 states, typically takes the form of “paddling,” during which an administrator or teacher hits a child repeatedly on the buttocks with a long wooden board. The report shows that, as a result of paddling, many children are left injured, degraded, and disengaged from school.  
 
“Every public school needs effective methods of discipline, but beating kids teaches violence and it doesn’t stop bad behavior,” said Alice Farmer, Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU, and author of the report. “Corporal punishment discourages learning, fails to deter future misbehavior and at times even provokes it.”  
 
The report found that in the 13 southern states where corporal punishment is most prevalent, African-American students are punished at 1.4 times the rate that would be expected given their numbers in the student population, and African-American girls are 2.1 times more likely to be paddled than might be expected. There is no evidence that these students commit disciplinary infractions at disproportionate rates.  
 
“Minority students in public schools already face barriers to success,” said Farmer. “By exposing these children to disproportionate rates of corporal punishment, schools create a hostile environment in which these students may struggle even more.”  
 

Students with mental and physical disabilities are also punished at disproportionate rates, with potentially serious consequences for their development. In Texas, for instance, 18.4 percent of the total number of students who were physically punished were special education students, even though they make up only 10.7 percent of the student population.  
 
“A Violent Education” is based on four weeks of on-the-ground research in Mississippi and Texas in late 2007 and early 2008, including more than 175 interviews with children, teachers, parents, administrators, superintendents, and school board members.  
 
The report documents several cases in which children were beaten to the point of serious injury. Since educators who beat children have immunity under law from assault proceedings, parents who try to pursue justice for injured children encounter resistance from police, district attorneys, and courts. Parents also face enormous, sometimes insurmountable, obstacles in trying to prevent physical punishment of their children. While some school districts permit parents to sign forms opting out of corporal punishment for their children, the forms are often ignored.  
 
In the report, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU cite experts on best practices in school discipline, who emphasize traditional approaches such as detention, and modern approaches such as positive behavior support systems. Positive behavior support systems, which are school-wide discipline systems that stress a clear structure of rewards and consequences for student behavior, have been effectively implemented in major US school systems. States and school boards that fail to implement best practices allow the status quo, or school beatings, to remain in place.  
 
Human Rights Watch and the ACLU call upon the US government to prohibit corporal punishment in all public schools and urge state governments, school boards, superintendents, and administrators to eliminate physical punishment in their schools.  
 
Selected Witness Accounts:  
 
“He took me into the office and gave me three licks. … He made me hold onto the wall and he paddled me. … It hurt for about two hours, it felt like fire under my butt.”  
- Matthew S., who was paddled in second grade for throwing food in a school cafeteria in the Mississippi Delta.  
 
“The other kids were watching and laughing. It made me want to fight them… When you get a paddling and you see everyone laugh at you, it make you mad and you want to do something about it.”  
- Peter S., a middle school student in the Mississippi Delta.  
 
“What made me so angry: he’s three years old, he was petrified. He didn’t want to go back to school, and he didn’t want to start his new school. I was so worried that this was going to constantly be with him, equating going to school with being paddled.”  
- Rose T., mother of a 3-year-old boy in Texas who was bruised from physical punishment after he refused to stop playing with his shoes in class.  
 
“I went into the principal’s office. … He gave me a chair and said hold onto the chair. The paddle had holes in it. Then he just did three swats. … I was hit on my buttocks. … There were holes in the paddle to make it go faster. … It hurt very much. There were definitely red marks and then swelling… almost welt-like markings. It didn’t last for more than a couple days. … It left me feeling very humiliated. I think there were several levels of emotion. Physical pain, mental humiliation. … And being a female at that age, it was like there was this older man hitting me on the butt. That’s weird… even at that age I knew it was inappropriate.”  
- Allison G., a recent graduate punished as a teenager in Texas for being late to class multiple times.  
 
“I’ve heard this said at my school and at other schools: ‘This child should get less whips, it’ll leave marks.’ Students that are dark-skinned, it takes more to let their skin be bruised. Even with all black students, there is an imbalance: darker-skinned students get worse punishment.”  
- Account of Abrea T., former teacher in rural Mississippi.  
 
“I see corporal punishment as a form of slavery. Beating on the slaves was how the headman got them to do something… we’re focused so much on making kids do what we want. Think about the mental capacity that this kind of treatment leaves our children with. We are telling them we don’t respect them. They leave that principal’s office and they think, ‘they don’t consider me a human being.’ That young person loses self-respect.”  
- Account from Doreen W., school board member in a Mississippi Delta town.

A Violent Education: Corporal Punishment of Children in US Public Schools
Report, August 20, 2008

Audio Link

“There’s no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now,” said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn’t. The fact that they’re cutting out now should be a lesson for us.”

The study, co-authored by Wake and Vance Vredenburg, research associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley and assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University, will appear in a special supplement to the journal featuring papers based on presentations from the December 2007 Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “In the Light of Evolution II: Biodiversity and Extinction.”

New species arise and old species die off all the time, but sometimes the extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species. Extreme cases of this are called mass extinction events, and there have been only five in our planet’s history, until now.

The sixth mass extinction event, which Wake and others argue is happening currently, is different from the past events. “My feeling is that behind all this lies the heavy hand of Homo sapiens,” Wake said.

There is no consensus among the scientific community about when the current mass extinction started, Wake said. It may have been 10,000 years ago, when humans first came from Asia to the Americas and hunted many of the large mammals to extinction. It may have started after the Industrial Revolution, when the human population exploded. Or, we might be seeing the start of it right now, Wake said.

But no matter what the start date, empirical data clearly show that extinction rates have dramatically increased over the last few decades, Wake said.

The global amphibian extinction is a particularly bleak example of this drastic decline. In 2004, researchers found that nearly one-third of amphibian species are threatened, and many of the non-threatened species are on the wane.

Our own backyard provides a striking example, Wake said. He and his colleagues study amphibians in the Sierra Nevada, and the picture is grim there, as well.

“We have these great national parks here that are about as close as you can get to absolute preserves, and there have been really startling drops in amphibian populations there, too,” Wake said.

Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, five are threatened. Wake and his colleagues observed that, for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as Yosemite National Park. This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size. Originally, frogs living atop the highest, most remote peaks seemed to thrive, but recently, they also succumbed.

There are several frog killers in the Sierra Nevada, Wake said. The first hint of frog decline in this area came in the 1990s, and researchers originally thought that rainbow trout introduced to this area were the culprits - they like to snack on tadpoles and frog eggs. The UC Berkeley team did experiments in which it physically removed trout from some areas, and the result was that frog populations started to recover.

“But then they disappeared again, and this time there were carcasses,” Wake said.

The culprit is a nasty pathogenic fungus that causes the disease chytridiomycosis. Researchers discovered the fungus in Sierra Nevada frogs in 2001. Scientists have documented over the last five years mass die-offs and population collapses due to the fungus in the mountain range.

But the fungus is not unique to California. It has been wiping out amphibians around the world, including in the tropics, where amphibian biodiversity is particularly high.

“It’s been called the most devastating wildlife disease ever recorded,” Wake said.

Global warming and habitat constriction are two other major killers of frogs around the world, Wake said. And the Sierra Nevada amphibians are also susceptible to poisonous winds carrying pesticides from Central Valley croplands. “The frogs have really been hit by a one-two punch,” Wake said, “although it’s more like a one-two-three-four punch.”

The frogs are not the only victims in this mass extinction, Wake emphasized. Scientists studying other organisms have seen similarly dramatic effects.

“Our work needs to be seen in the context of all this other work, and the news is very, very grim,” Wake said.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health helped support this study.

Audio files and slides of presentations from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on biodiversity and extinction are available online.

Washington, D.C. - Exactly 20 years have passed since Dr. James E. Hansen of NASA first testified to Congress on June 23, 1988 that global temperatures had risen beyond the range of natural variability. Waiting another 20 years before taking decisive action is not an option.

Since 1988, mainstream scientific thinking has caught up with Dr. Hansen’s declaration that our climate is being adversely affected by human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels-and the forecasts of climate change in the coming decades are increasingly dire.

But political action has fallen well behind the pace of scientific progress, and despite growing public support to limit greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. Senate failed early this month to approve landmark legislation that would have begun to do so.

Dr. Hansen’s latest research indicates that greenhouse gas concentrations have already reached damaging levels and the climate is nearing a dangerous tipping point that will unleash far-reaching changes in the atmosphere and oceans that could take millennia to reverse. In his latest paper, Dr. Hansen calls for deep reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, beginning almost immediately, with a focus on phasing out the uncontrolled combustion of coal by 2030.¹  

As the world moves toward a new climate agreement in 2009, decision makers must understand the tremendous risks we face and the urgency of action in the year ahead.

Although many still argue that such a transition to a low-carbon energy system will be enormously expensive and difficult, our research has shown that it would open up vast economic opportunities, spur innovation and job creation, assist efforts to reduce poverty, and increase energy security.

The transition to a low-carbon economy should be based on sustainable use of renewable sources of energy, including wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass, together with major advances in energy efficiency. The world can achieve a tipping point at which renewables are less expensive than fossil energy-allowing economic momentum to accelerate the transition.

The United States and other industrial nations must work collaboratively with developing countries to increase their capacity to respond to the challenges presented by climate change and to pursue a more viable energy development path. Brazil, China, Europe, India, and the United States together account for 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Following Dr. Hansen’s recommendations, policymakers should adopt a policy that puts a price on carbon dioxide emissions, halts the construction of uncontrolled coal-fired power plants, and promotes agriculture and forestry practices that will sequester large amounts of carbon.

Achieving the needed energy transformation will require profound changes in government policies, strengthened global governance in the form of a new international climate agreement, and the mobilization of the private sector to develop and deploy a host of new technologies.

“We applaud Jim Hansen for his leadership on this critical issue,” said Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin. “His warnings show how essential it is that 2008 become a turning point for climate policy as well as climate science-launching the post-fossil fuel economy the world so desperately needs.”

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1. J. Hansen et al., “Target Atmospheric CO₂: Where Should Humanity Aim?” revised 18 June 2008. See http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126and http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1135.

Reprinted from Worldwatch Institute

In an experiment carried out at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London), volunteers were shown a selection of images, which they had already been familiarised with. Each card had a unique probability of reward attached to it and over the course of the experiment, the volunteers would be able to work out which selection would provide the highest rewards. However, when unfamiliar images were introduced, the researchers found that volunteers were more likely to take a chance and select one of these options than continue with their familiar - and arguably safer - option.

Using fMRI scanners, which measure blood flow in the brain to highlight which areas are most active, Dr Bianca Wittmann and colleagues showed that when the subjects selected an unfamiliar option, an area of the brain known as the ventral striatum lit up, indicating that it was more active. The ventral striatum is in one of the evolutionarily primitive regions of the brain, suggesting that the process can be advantageous and will be shared by many animals.

“Seeking new and unfamiliar experiences is a fundamental behavioural tendency in humans and animals,” says Dr Wittmann. “It makes sense to try new options as they may prove advantageous in the long run. For example, a monkey who chooses to deviate from its diet of bananas, even if this involves moving to an unfamiliar part of the forest and eating a new type of food, may find its diet enriched and more nutritious.”

When we make a particular choice or carry out a particular action which turns out to be beneficial, it is rewarded by a release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. These rewards help us learn which behaviours are preferable and advantageous and worth repeating. The ventral striatum is one of the key areas involved in processing rewards in the brain. Although the researchers cannot say definitively from the fMRI scans how novelty seeking is being rewarded, Dr Wittmann believes it is likely to be through dopamine release.

However, whilst rewarding the brain for making novel choices may prove advantageous in encouraging us to make potentially beneficial choices, it may also make us more susceptible to exploitation.

“I might have my own favourite choice of chocolate bar, but if I see a different bar repackaged, advertising its ‘new, improved flavour’, my search for novel experiences may encourage me to move away from my usual choice,” says Dr Wittmann. “This introduces the danger of being sold ‘old wine in a new skin’ and is something that marketing departments take advantage of.”

Rewarding the brain for novel choices could have a more serious side effect, argues Professor Nathaniel Daw, now at New York University, who also worked on the study.

“The novelty bonus may be useful in helping us make complex, uncertain decisions, but it clearly has a downside,” says Professor Daw. “In humans, increased novelty-seeking may play a role in gambling and drug addiction, both of which are mediated by malfunctions in dopamine release.”

Reprinted from Wellcome Trust.

The research, conducted by political scientists James H. Fowler, Christopher T. Dawes (of UC San Diego) and psychologist Laura A. Baker (of University of Southern California), appears in the May issue of the American Political Science Review, a journal of the American Political Science Association (APSA).  The article is available online at: www.apsanet.org/imgtest/APSRMay08Fowler_etal.pdf.

“Although we are not the first to suggest a link between genes and political participation,” note the authors, “this study is the first attempt to test the idea empirically.”  They do so by conducting three tests of the claim that part of the variation in political participation can be attributed to genetic factors.  The results suggest that individual genetic differences make up a large and significant portion of the variation in political participation, even after taking socialization and other environmental factors into account. They also suggest that, contrary to decades of conventional wisdom, family upbringing may have little or no effect on children’s future participatory behavior.

In conducting their study, the authors examine the turnout patterns of identical and non-identical twins-including 396 twins in Los Angeles County and 806 twins in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.  Their findings suggest that 53% of the variation in turnout can be accounted for by genetic effects in the former, with similar outcomes in the latter.

Moreover, genetic-based differences extend to a broad class of acts of political participation, including donating to a campaign, contacting an official, running for office, and attending a rally.  According to Fowler, “we expected to find that genes played some role in political behavior, but we were quite surprised by the size of the effect and how widely it applies to all kinds of participation.”

“The fact that we have found genetic variation in voting, and political participation in general, should not be surprising given the large numbers of behaviors that have already been found to be heritable,” observe the authors.  They conclude by noting that “the next step in this line of research must move beyond estimates…and attempt to identify why genes matter so much.”  Some potential avenues include examining the interaction of genes and the environment on political participation, tracing the connections between participation in small groups and large-scale participation, and identifying the genes or groups of genes implicated in political behavior.  

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 The American Political Science Association (est. 1903) is the leading professional organization for the study of politics and has over 14,000 members in 80 countries. For more news and information about political science research visit the APSA media website, http://www.politicalsciencenews.org/.