Let’s war on the enemy within: Feral hogs

For more than a decade, the federal government has been handling out military equipment to local governments while expanding the budget and capabilities of the Department of Homeland Security.   It is time to use this equipment and a capabilities on a dangerous enemy within:  Feral hogs.

You think I’m kidding?

The feral hog population of the United States numbers in the millions.   Nobody knows how many there are.  One source says there are 5 million in the USA, another that there are 2.5 million in Texas alone.  All agree that their numbers are increasing rapidly and that they are spreading to all states of the Union.

Feral hogs destroy an estimated $1.5 billion worth of  livestock and crops every year.  They kill  game animals and destroy the natural habitat—the latter by rooting up trees, shrubs and plants until nothing is left but a wasteland.   They carry diseases and parasites than can spread to people and livestock.

They breed frequently and have large litters.  Game experts say it is necessary to kill 60 to 70 percent of the wild hog population every year just to keep the population stable.

On a visit to San Antonio, I met a man who makes a living hunting feral hogs.  He said they typically weigh hundreds of pounds, and he has seen tracks of a hog that must have weighed 1,000.

The feral hog population originated with the first Spanish settlers of the Southwest, who brought herds of pigs with them to assure a secure meat supply.   U.S. pioneers in the South and Southwest would typically let their hogs roam free, and hunt and kill them when they needed meat to eat.   Natural selection made the surviving wild hog population more intelligent and adaptable.

The turning point came when sportsmen imported wild boars as game animals.   Wild boars are ferocious, intelligent and hard to kill.  They have thick skulls and thick hides, and can be killed only by a well-aimed, high-caliber bullet hitting a vital organ.  A wounded wild boar is one of the most dangerous creatures on earth.   And they have no natural predators, at least not in North America.

Some wild boars escaped into the wild and inter-bred with the existing feral hog population.  The result was a super-hog, like something out of a Michael Crichton novel.   When I read about these creatures and their adaptability and ability to learn, I give thanks that they don’t have opposable thumbs.

Feral hogs can’t be controlled by ordinary hunting methods.   We need to mobilize our war technology—helicopter gunships, infrared sensors, killer drones, signature strikes.  We also could use the help of people who have stockpiled high-caliber, military-type weapons.  They could make a good contribution by organizing into well-ordered militias and fighting an undisputed enemy within.

Feral hogs are gaining a foothold in New York state, but they’re not yet a noticeable problem here in the Rochester area.  We have deer, which have lost their fear of humankind, wandering into the suburbs and sometimes into the city, which is a big nuisance.  A farmer friend of mine is troubled by coyotes, which have migrated from west to east in North America.  But as yet, no feral hogs.

The feral hog situation is much worse in some parts of Europe.  Wild boars wander into urban areas in Germany and have been known to attack people.  Some of them are radioactive, a lingering result of the Chernobyl disaster, although all that really means in practice is that their meat is not safe to eat.

Hydrofracking for me, but not for thee

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My friend Hal Bauer, a long-time and committed environmental activist and organic farmer, e-mailed me this graphic.  As a resident of the city of Rochester, N.Y., I get my drinking water from the pristine Hemlock and Canadice lakes 28 miles to my south—unlike my suburban neighbors, who drink mostly treated water from Lake Ontario supplied by the Monroe County Water Authority.

Hydraulic fracturing for oil and natural gas is a process that involves fracturing deep underground strata of shale with explosives, and forcing out the trapped oil and gas by means of a high-pressure mixture of water and detergent chemicals.   The chemicals as well as some of the toxic underground metals could be dangerous if they got into the water table, and the DEC takes that danger seriously enough to protect the watersheds of the New York City and Syracuse water supplies.  Why, then, do I not deserve the same protection?

The DEC leases public lands to oil and gas drillers.   Historically the DEC has charged significantly less than the drillers pay private land-owners.  I bet this is still true, although I don’t know it for a fact.

Click on Leasing of Natural Gas Drilling Rights on Public and Private Land in New York for a 2003 study by Katherine E. Ziegenfuss and Duane Chapman of Cornell University.  That was before the current boom in hydrofracking, so my guess is that the disparity is even greater now.

Click on Hydrofracking and carbon caps for a post of mine with good links explaining the hydrofracking process and the hydrofracking controversy in New York state.

Tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline

While the United States looks to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas for energy independence, our northern neighbor Canada looks to an even more problematic and dirtier energy source—tar sands.

Tar sands are a mixture of clay, sand, water and a tarry substance called bitumen, which can be processed into crude oil.   Bitumen can’t be pumped.  It has to be mined.   Then it has to be cooked in order to separate it from the sands and mixed with chemicals to make it liquid enough to be piped to a refinery.

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Canada is the only country with an important tar sands industry.  The Canadian province of Alberta has one of the world’s two largest known deposits of tar sands (the other is in Venezuela).  They underlie an area as large as the state of Florida or the nation of England.  If all the tar sands were usable as oil, Canada could in theory be an oil producer equal to Saudi Arabia.

Tar sands are pumped into the United States partly through Keystone pipeline, which became operational in June, 2010.  The pipeline extends from Hardisty, Alberta, to Cushing, Oklahoma, and Patoka, Illinois.  Now the TransCanada, the pipeline owner, wants to make extensions of the Keystone pipeline—the Keystone XL pipelines—which would take the tar sands crude from Cushing to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas, and create a more direct route from Hardisty across the Great Plains.

Canada is the largest source of U.S. oil imports, and a large fraction of that is tar sands oil.   Enbridge, another Canadian tar sands company, also operates pipelines in the United States and also looks to expand.

Environmentalists have valid objections to tar sands generally and to the Keystone XL plan in particular.  Alberta’s tar sands are extracted through surface mining, one of the most destructive extraction practices in existence.  Tar sands mining contributes to global warming by releasing underground carbon, increasing carbon emissions, and destruction of forest land.  Environmentalists say tar sands mining and processing uses four times as much energy as it makes available.

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Processing of tar sands bitumen requires corrosive chemicals to make it liquid enough to pump.  The chemicals can corrode pipes and create the danger of spills.   Whistleblowers say that TransCanada doesn’t properly inspect its pipelines.  There were 12 spills during the first year of the Keystone pipeline’s operation, admittedly all relatively minor, and a more serious spill in Michigan by Enbridge.

TransCanada says it already has the necessary approvals for the southern Keystone XL through Texas, but President Obama has authority to disapprove the northern Keystone XL because it would cross the U.S. border at a new point.   That extension would take the tar sands pipeline through the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground water reservoir which supplies irrigation water for 20 percent of U.S. farm production and drinking water for many communities.  A spill or leak could contaminate this water.   If President Obama can’t bring himself to disapprove the pipeline altogether, he should insist that it be rerouted around the aquifer.

No matter what he decides, tar sands will reamin as a presence in the United States and as an issue.

I have to admire the oil industry’s enterprise and ingenuity.   It is amazing to me that techniques such as deep water ocean drilling, horizontal hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, and conversion of tar sands to usable petroleum are even possible.  I think the environmentalists’ objections to tar sands are all valid.  But I want gasoline for my car and that gasoline has to come from some source, dirty or clean.

I wish the intelligence, hard work and capital investment that is going into developing dirty energy can be redirected into developing clean energy.   The oil industry probably would say the latter isn’t economically feasible.   I can’t prove this is wrong, but if it is, industrial civilization doesn’t have a future.

Two possible arguments for hydrofracking

Here in New York state, Governor Andrew Cuomo is considering regulations for hydraulic fracturing to obtain natural gas from deep strata of shale.  Like many people, I think hydrofracking is a bad idea [1].  Here is what it would take to change my mind.

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Opponents of hydrofracking are worried about the environmental impact, especially on the ground water and our water supply.  Supporters say that, with proper regulation, environmental effects would be minimal.

Hydrofracking is a large and widespread global industry.   My challenge to supporters would be to point out the area of the world where the hydrofracking industry uses its best practices.   If the environmental impact there is acceptable, then it would be acceptable in New York state under the same conditions. [2]

The other situation in which I would change my mind is that if there was a big shortage of natural gas, and hydrofracking was the only way to get the gas.  I heat my house with gas, and I don’t want to be without gas in an upstate New York winter.  But that situation is the opposite of the situation today.

Thanks to hydrofracking, the world’s supply of natural gas is increasing and the price of natural gas is falling.   Purely from the standpoint of economic gain [3], New York state would be wise to sit on its supply of natural gas until the world supply is diminishing (relative to demand) and the price is rising.  The underground natural gas isn’t going to go way.  It is like money in the bank.  We should save it for a rainy day, when we can impose a hefty severance tax (as Alaska does for oil) without diminishing the demand.

Matt Damon stars in anti-fracking movie

Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is supposed to take care of the United States energy problems for the next generation.  Many struggling farm owners in New York and Pennsylvania see it as their economic salvation.  But there is a price to be paid that goes beyond the direct economic cost, in destruction of the land, in danger to the ground water and in greenhouse gas emissions.

Matt Damon stars in a new movie, “Promised Land,” which he also helped write, which makes a case against hydrofracking.  It is due out in December, and should be interesting to see.

Hydraulic fracturing requires drilling a deep vertical well, then drilling a horizontal well out from the side of the vertical well, then setting of an explosive charge to fracture (frack) the underground shale.  Then a mixture of water (hydro) and chemicals is pumped into the crevices in order to force out the gas.  If the seal on the sides of the well is imperfect, gas and chemicals can leak into the ground water.

Even if the seals are always perfect and execution is always perfect, lots of fresh water is used, and it is not in infinite supply.  Natural gas is a clean-burning fuel, but in unburned form it is a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.  Drilling is hard on the land, and oil rigs are hard on local roads.  Hydraulic fracturing has been associated with minor earthquakes.  There are a lot of things that can go wrong with the process.

For now we in the United States need natural gas, and all the cheap easy-to-get gas has been used up.  We may have to turn to hydrofracking eventually, unless better energy sources are developed in the meantime.  Drilling companies may be in a hurry to get control of the land ahead of other drilling companies.  We the poeple don’t have to be in a hurry to use up our reserves shale gas. The shale gas is not going to go away, and it’s not going to lose its value if we hold off on drilling.  In fact, natural gas prices at present are extremely low and likely to go up in the future..

Click on Shakeshock Media videos for background about hydrofracking and the anti-fracking campaign.

Click on Blog | No Fracking Way for Shaleshock Media’s web log.

Hat tip to Hal Bauer.

What is killing the bees of America?

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I bought a big jug of honey this morning from a beekeeper at the Rochester Public Market.  I told him I am glad he is still in business in the light of Colony Collapse Disorder, a disease which for the past five years has ravaged the nation’s beehives.

The beekeeper is inclined to blame pesticides.  Other possibilities, he said, are diseases brought in with bee colonies imported from foreign countries.  His hives are recovering, and he thinks it is because he has relocated away from cornfields which are subject to high-altitude pesticide spraying, and away from other beehives.

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A recent study by Harvard scientists supports the pesticide hypothesis.  A team of researchers led by biologist Chensheng Lu blame a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, which disrupt the nervous systems of insects.  Seeds are treated with these systemic pesticides, and the toxins are taken up into the plants, where they remain through the growing season.  Elizabeth Kolbert reported in the New Yorker that studies by British and French scientists also blame neonicotinoids.

Germany, France and Italy have banned neonicotinoids.  If the United States did the same, it would be a big disruption to the U.S. corn industry, which is the largest part of U.S. agriculture.  Brandon Keim reported in Wired that cornfields sprayed with neonicotinoids cover an area nearly as large as Montana.

Pesticide companies say researchers’ conclusions are uncertain.  I don’t deny the possibility that Colony Collapse Disorder has other causes or additional causes..  But who should get the benefit of the doubt in such cases? Chemicals do not have human rights.  They are not innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The burden of proof should be on the pesticide companies to show their chemicals are safe.

Click on Colony Collapse Disorder and Pesticides for the full New Yorker article.

Click on Controversy Deepens Over Pesicides and Bee Collapse for the full Wired article.

Children and their right to roam

We older folks know that children have much less freedom to roam than we did when we were young.  That’s true in Britain as well as here in the USA.  The above map shows four generations of Thomas children, who live in Sheffield in the north of England, and how each has a smaller free range than the one before.

• In 1919, George, the great-grandfather of the family, was allowed to walk six miles by himself to go fishing at Rother Valley.
• In 1950, Jack, the grandfather, was allowed to walk one mile by himself to go play in the woods nearby.  Like his father, he walked to school.
• In 1979, Vicky, the mother, could walk by herself to the swimming pool, half a mile away.
• In 2007, Ed, the son, was only able to walk to the end of the street on his own – a mere 300 yards.  He was driven to school, and even to a place where he could ride his bike safely.

via Strange Maps.

One reason is that parents are more fearful nowadays of traffic accidents and kidnapers.  Maybe another is that they don’t know their neighbors as well as earlier generations did.   Ed has a lot more interesting things he can do right in his living room than George did.  But Natural England says children need exposure to the natural living world, not just monitors and screens.

I think it is too bad that children today have so little freedom and so little opportunity to learn self-reliance.  But I don’t know what I would do if I were a parent.  The world really does seem more threatening than it did when I was a child.

Click on The Great Indoors, or Childhood’s End? for background by Frank Jacobs on his Strange Maps web log.

Click on How children lost the right to roam in four generations for more background from The Daily Mail of Britain.

How to use just one paper towel

Make insecticide from cigarettes and coffee

I’m not a gardener, but I like this recipe for homemade insecticide, which I found on Matt Johnsen’s The Thinking Viking web log.

Years ago when I was in a neurobiology lab studying the effects of drugs on nerves, it dawned on me – why use synthetic pesticides when you can cook up some of the most bug-toxic stuff in your own kitchen?  Nicotine and caffeine, two of the world’s most popular drugs, are LETHAL to insects.  Here’s how to put this to good use in the coming “aphids are eating my garden” season.

First, take some tobacco – equivalent to about two cigarettes should do it, and two table spoons of ground coffee – DON’T USE DECAF -the caffeine is what you are looking for.  Go ahead and use more of both if you like I cooked up the first batch of this simply by cleaning up the cigarettes butts my smoking roommates left on the back patio.  Soak this in rubbing alcohol – maybe a half cup or so or high-proof vodka, if that’s more convenient, it will also help make this more fun -soak longer with vodka as it isn’t as strong alcohol-wise for a week or so.  With a funnel and a coffee filter, drain off the resulting dark brown stinky fluid into a 1 liter spray bottle.  This alone with some water will be pretty bad, but there’s something you need to do to make it better.

Bugs breathe through pores in their skin, and this stuff will kill much quicker if you can get it in there better. Also, its good to have some repellent qualities to this stuff, so lets juice it up.

Add several dashes of the hottest hot pepper sauce you can get—Capsaicin is what you want— pepper spray would do the trick too, but be careful if you try that – spraying into the bottle could get you covered in nastiness trust me on this one.  Next fill the bottle with water. Finally, add good squirt of liquid dish soap.  Why the soap, you ask?  It’s because of the bug breathing pores spiracles for the geeks out there – the soap helps break the surface tension of the liquid and allows it to enter these pores much more easily.  Don’t use very much soap – too much and the spray bottle will fail as the liquid foams in the mechanism.

Give it a little shake to mix it up. Let it settle.

This stuff is almost instantly fatal to aphids, and will kill most any other insect eventually if sprayed directly on them.  And your plants won’t care one bit about it. And to us mammals, it’s effectively non toxic – DON’T DRINK IT THOUGH – the nicotine from two cigarettes CAN KILL YOU if you drink it.  Shouldn’t be hard to avoid drinking it though, it STINKS.

Also, DO NOT SPRAY UPWIND – trust me, you don’t want to get a face-full of this spray.

So, yeah, it’s smelly, but would you rather be spraying some synthetic chemicals made by a mega corp?

Think about it.

MJ

PS – for aphid control, spray the UNDERSIDE of plant leaves – that’s where aphids feed.

via The Thinking Viking.

An Arctic future that’s already here

The future is already here, the science fiction writer William Gibson once wrote; it just isn’t widely distributed.  Charles Emmerson in his 2010 book, The Future History of the Arctic, said the future of the Arctic is already here, shaped by the melting of the polar caps, the opening of the Arctic Ocean to navigation and the world’s appetite for the Arctic’s natural resources, especially its oil and gas.   I learned a lot from the book about the present and future importance of the Northern world.

Russia is the nation with the largest presence in the Arctic and strongest commitment to developing the Arctic, Emmerson said; the Russians are more oriented toward their Far North than any other people except Greenlanders.  This goes back to the old Soviet Union.  The first Heroes of the Soviet Union were Arctic aviators and explorers, and many Gulag forced laborers died building the White Sea canal and other Arctic infrastructure.

In present-day Russia, exports of oil and gas are the basis of the economy, and as production in the older oil fields peaks out, the new Arctic fields become critically important.

Gazprom, a company in which the Russian government holds a majority interest, is the world’s largest producer of natural gas and owns the world’s largest natural gas reserves.  It has an ambitious plan to develop Arctic gas fields and  ship liquified natural gas (LNG) from Arctic ports.   Like the old USSR, Russia is determined to press forward regardless of cost, efficiency or the ups and downs of oil and gas prices.

The Russian dilemma is that its energy industry needs the technological expertise of Western companies, but the government is unwilling to accept foreign control of its resources.  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oil magnate, was reportedly on the verge of selling a large part of his company, Yukos, to ExxonMobil and Chevron when he was arrested in 2003.

The United States and Canada became Arctic powers partly as a result of historical accident.  The purchase of Alaska from Russia by U.S. Secretary of State William Seward in 1867 was unpopular.  Also in 1867, the British North American Act created the Dominion of Canada, consisting of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the southern parts of present-day Quebec and Ontario.  British Columbia was a separate entity and most of the land area of present-day Canada was controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was devoted to trading for furs with the native peoples.  Canada’s Prime Minister John A. MacDonald, alarmed by Seward’s ambition to acquire British Columbia and Greenland, negotiated the purchase of the Hudson Bay territories, and persuaded British Columbia to join Canada by promising to build a Canadian Pacific Railroad.  Without Seward and MacDonald, history may have taken a different course.

Oil companies in Canada and Alaska are pressing forward, but they are constrained by economic and environmental considerations more than the government-controlled Russian companies.

Leaders of the native peoples of Alaska and northern Canada are caught in the middle.  They want economic development, but also want to continue traditional activities such as whale and seal hunting.  They distrust the oil companies, but think they can deal with them, and they have no use at all for environmentalists, who, as the native leaders see it, want to deprive them of the benefits of the modern world.  Arctic warming threatens this way of life regardless of what the oil, gas and minerals do.  Any actions to mitigate global warming will not change the current situation, but may prevent things from getting even worse 20 or 30 years from now.

Emmerson thinks Norway has the most enlightened and balanced approach to development of its Arctic resources.  Iceland is attractive to outside companies because of its abundant geothermal and hydroelectric power, and Greenland even more so because of the potential resources under the melting Greenland ice cap.   Iceland’s population is slightly over 300,000, less than Monroe County, N.Y., where I live, and Greenland’s is about 56,000, yet many Greenlanders want independence from Denmark.  They are in much the same position as the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, tiny communities sitting on enormous resources which they lack the power to defend.

The book is worth reading, and contains a lot more interesting material.  One sidelight, and sign of the times:  The world’s largest manufacturer of icebreakers is Aker Arctic, a Finnish company, but the only work still done in Finland is design and testing of prototypes.  Manufacture has been outsourced to Korea.

Click on The Guardian, Financial Times and Eye on the Arctic for reviews of Emmerson’s book.

Click on The potential wealth of a warming Arctic and Navigating a warming Arctic Ocean for maps showing national territorial claims, Arctic oil and gas fields and potential Arctic sea routes.

[Added 6/5/12]  A number of people, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last Saturday, have called on the Arctic nations to make the region a zone of peace and international cooperation.  It certainly would be a good place to begin.  Without enlightened action, the Arctic seems destined to become a zone of economic rivalry, political conflict and military confrontation.