During his 24 years in Congress, Sherwood Boehlert has always been a strong advocate for science and the environment. When he retired in December 2006, as chairman of the House Science Committee, he left an impressive legacy of laws which he helped shepherd through the legislative process: among them, the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 including his acid-rain regulation, the Nanotechnology Act of 2003, and the NASA Authorization Act of 2005.
The moderate Republican from Utica (in upstate New York) has served for 12 terms in Congress. He has kept the reputation of being not just one of the biggest proponents of governmental investment in scientific R&D but also one of the few remaining centrist politicians who will cooperate across party lines to get the work done in the people's - and the environment's - best interest: supporting stronger fuel-economy standards, mandatory greenhouse gas restrictions, and endangered species protections.
But to Boehlert, retirement doesn't mean "buying a rocking chair and sitting on the back porch rocking away my more mature years." In addition to the numerous non-compensated boards he is on, he taught a public policy course for honor students for Boston University's Semester-in-Washington program and is writing a book while spending about two days a week in his Washington, DC office at The Accord Group, a public affairs/lobbying firm where he is of counsel. What other people would call a crazy schedule, Boehlert described as "semi-retirement" when he met with bridges at his Washington office to discuss his experiences in science policy-making and his plans for the future.
bridges: Your daily schedule doesn't seem to quite fit into the stereotype of a recent retiree. What have you been up to since you left Congress in December 2006?
Boehlert: I am a counsel to "The Accord Group," a highly respected, tight-knit public affairs lobbying firm with which I had a long association over the years. I do that for about two days a week. In addition, I am on several boards of directors, including the Natural Resources Council Action Fund, The Alliance for Climate Protection (the Al Gore group), The League of Conservative Voters, the Republican Main Street Partnership, and the Heinz Center, to name a few of them. And I am co-chairing, with former Governor Mark Warner of Virginia and former Senator Slade Gordon of Washington State, the Bipartisan Policy Center's "Transportation Policy for the 21st Century Project," something I believe very important and meaningful.
I also taught a college course this spring for the first time in my life, called "American Institutions" at Boston University's Washington Journalism Center. You know, I initially thought it would be a cakewalk, but once I started developing the syllabus and selecting the reading material, boy, I realized how much work this is going to be! The kids in my class were honor students, both juniors and seniors who qualified for their class and internships at Congress here in Washington, DC. They were very bright and asked tough questions, but I loved it. I never thought, though, that I'd appreciate a spring break as much as I did this year's - since it gave not just the students a week off, but me too!
And I am in the process of writing a book on my political past and experiences, which is a labor of love. Unfortunately, this is one of my projects that I am putting off due to so many other things I am working on at the moment. I got it all ready in my head, but only single chapters are written down, and those are scattered in folders... I hope to finish it by the middle of next year, and hopefully published - it would be a good time to publish the book, in the middle of a presidential campaign.
Fuels derived from biomass are increasingly seen as a suitable option for reducing society's dependence on imported, exhaustible energy sources such as fossil fuels and for mitigating global warming. Biomass - both plant and animal biomass - is ultimately derived from the organic materials synthesized by green plants from inorganic components in the process of photosynthesis. Biomass contains energy-rich substances that may be seen as "stored solar energy." Humans vitally depend on biomass to feed themselves and their domesticated animals, as raw material for many products and, increasingly, as a source of energy.
Biomass harvest puts pressures on ecosystems – HANPP is an aggregate indicator to measure the magnitude of these pressures
However, biomass is not only important for humans. The energy supply of ecosystems also derives from the energy fixed by green plants in photosynthesis. All the intricate food webs that underlie the complex patterns and processes in ecosystems originate in the process of net primary production (NPP), i.e., the production of biomass by green plants through photosynthesis. As humans expand their utilization of that vital resource, they inevitably reduce the amount left over for all other species - a process summarized by the phrase "human appropriation of net primary production" or HANPP.
This article discusses some implications of a study recently conducted by my colleagues and myself on the impacts of our species on the earth's ecosystems. Some of these results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0704243104v1 , Haberl et al., 2007).
The question of how significantly any strategy – including carbon offsets – can contribute to climate mitigation can be understood only with a full understanding of the scale of climate mitigation the nation and the world must pursue. Global concentrations of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, are rising at an accelerating rate in recent years, and are already higher than at any time in the past 3 million years. As recently as six years ago, most scientists thought that neither the Greenland nor the Antarctic ice sheets would contribute significantly to sea level rise by 2100, yet both ice sheets are already losing mass. This led Penn State climate scientist Richard Alley to note in May 2006, “The ice sheets seem to be shrinking 100 years ahead of schedule.”
Worse still, the oceans will continue reradiating heat into the earth's atmosphere even after we eliminate the heat imbalance, meaning the planet will keep warming and the glaciers keep melting for decades after we cut greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, we must act in an “anticipatory” fashion and reduce emissions long before climate change has finally become painfully obvious to everyone.
The planet has warmed about 0.8°C since the mid-19th century, primarily because of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Unless we sharply reverse the increase in global greenhouse gas emissions within the next decade, we will be committing the world to an additional 2° to 3°C warming by century's end, temperatures not seen for millions of years when Greenland and much of Antarctica were ice-free and sea levels were 80 feet higher.
bridges vol. 15, Sept 2007 / Feature Article by Edward H. Rau * In the mid-1990s the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began a voluntary initiative to eliminate the use of mercury in medical applications at its research hospital, the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center. The intentions of the initiative were to prevent human exposures and spills, reduce facility decontamination costs, and contribute to state, regional, and national pollution prevention goals for persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals.
The initiative was expanded in 2001 into a more organized, agency-wide campaign covering the approximately 5,000 laboratories and other non-clinical areas of NIH installations across the US. The campaign used the "Mad Hatter" character from Lewis Carroll's 1865 classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in designing publicity materials to stimulate employee interest, improve awareness of mercury hazards, and encourage participation in campaign activities.
The high level of public interest in the campaign and the high use of its Web site, brochures, and information materials by other government agencies, schools, and individuals came as quite a surprise. The evolution of an internal, laboratory-focused chemical health and safety initiative into a program with broad public health impact was probably unprecedented, and the methods used by the campaign could represent a best-practice model for similar national and international public health efforts.
"Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
"Twinkle, twinkle, little bat..." - the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland"
Confused speech - as demonstrated by the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland - is just one serious
symptom of exposure to mercury. Mercury is probably the most ubiquitous and potentially problematic contaminant in biomedical research facilities and waste streams generated by laboratories. It is used in a wide variety of items - thermometers, thermostats, switches, fluorescent lighting, vaccines, and other biologicals, and occurs in environmentally significant concentrations as a contaminant in many chemicals ranging from janitorial products to analytical reagents. Mercury presents serious potential indoor health hazards to employees, patients, and laboratory animals. Its persistent, toxic, and highly bioaccumultative properties have adverse affects both on wildlife and human health.
