Hi again,
Herewith, some snippets from various sources.
I appeal to you to send me items to distribute to our members for the Cleft Stick, the Game Ranger magazine and to be posted on the web site. These are your magazines and website, so ensure it gets the news that you would like to see in it.
Please let me have any changes to your physical address, phone no. or e-mail address to keep the database up to date. Remember this is the address we will send your Game Ranger Magazine to.
Thanks to all of you who have made the effort. Please will any of you who know of members who do not get this “electric” Cleft~Stick, & have access to e-mail, pass their address along to me.
Don Yunnie
7 Chalet Drive, Hilton, 3245, South Africa Local Tel & Fax (033) 343 1534
Int. Tel & Fax (+2733) 343 1534 cell 082 377 7562, E-mail dyunnie@xsinet.co.za
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Sad News
Prof Steven Piper
Although Steven was not a member, he was known to many in the academic and conservation spheres.
It is with great sadness that I inform you of the sudden passing of Professor Steven Piper, who was enjoying an active retirement in the mountains, conducting birding tours.
The following record of his contribution to academia has been prepared by Professors Mike Perrin and Colleen Downs.
Our sincere condolences go to his wife, Andy, and children.
PROFESSOR P J K ZACHARIAS
Deputy Vide-Chancellor and Head of College
(Agriculture, Engineering & Science)
__________________________________ Steven Piper was unique, talented and joyously eccentric. He always had a smile and an anecdote. Kind, generous and well informed, he always had time for students and colleagues alike. Birds were his passion, especially vultures and wagtails, while numeracy and statistics set him apart from many ornithologists and twitchers. He was a charming gentleman and delighted delegates at conferences with wit, humour and science. Steven wore a beard, and Scottish cap, covered with many badges collected from conferences around the world, and was instantly recognized and never forgotten.
Steven enjoyed a very varied and successful professional career at the University of (KwaZulu-) Natal for 25 years, in several departments and schools which reflect his talents and skills. He held teaching posts at three universities, Natal, Wits and Cape Town, in four faculties, Engineering, Humanities, Science and Social Science, and in seven departments, Applied Mathematics, Botany, Environmental Studies, Mathematical Statistics, Psychology, Surveying and Mapping and Zoology and Entomology. I doubt whether anyone else could match that diversity and scope. He was appointed as an Associate Professor in Zoology in 1997, was promoted to Full Professor and retired in 2006, after an extension of his contract. He enjoyed teaching, communicating and interacting with students and took on a heavy load willingly. He taught population ecology with a strong numerate content in addition to courses in evolution and conservation biology. Steven supervised and co-supervised many postgraduate students in various biological fields.
His first degree was in engineering at Natal, followed by a masters at Wits. At the University of Natal, Steven worked in Survey and Mapping (on GIS), Psychology (as a statistician) and then at Zoology (later Biological and Conservation Sciences) as an ornithologist. He excelled in the field and was excellent with the analysis of complex data sets, both of which made him exceedingly popular.
He collected over 25 years of data on the breeding biology of Long-tailed Wagtails along the Palmiet River in Westville, which illuminated the long-term demography of an African passerine in over 20 publications. His passion for wagtails was matched or exceeded by that for Griffon Vultures, which were the subject for his doctorate at the University of Cape Town, yielding more than 50 publications. He has collaborated with many scientists and has written papers on frogs, baboons, hyrax, duiker and crabs! He also has papers on geographic information systems, remote sensing, meta-populations, political voting patterns and psycho-linguistics.
Steven worked closely with ornithologists around the globe, recently with Barn Swallow researchers in Europe, and locally at the Vulture Study Group, BirdLife South Africa and (KwaZulu-) Natal, the Percy FitzPatrick Institute for African ornithology at UCT and colleagues overseas. Steven retired to run an avi-tourism business based at Underberg and travelled often up Sani Pass.
He will be sadly missed by friends, colleagues and researchers from all quarters of the world. He is survived by his wife Andy, a son and a daughter.
One last chance to save mankind
23 January 2009 by Gaia Vince
James Lovelock thinks humanity has only one remaining option to halt climate change and save ourselves (Image: Eamonn McCabe / Camera Press)
With his 90th birthday in July, a trip into space scheduled for later in the year and a new book out next month, 2009 promises to be an exciting time for James Lovelock. But the originator of the Gaia theory, which describes Earth as a self-regulating planet, has a stark view of the future of humanity. He tells Gaia Vince we have one last chance to save ourselves - and it has nothing to do with nuclear power Your work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?
Not a hope in hell. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that's an awful lot of countryside.
What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?
That is a waste of time. It's a crazy idea - and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.
Do you still advocate nuclear power as a solution to climate change?
It is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems, but it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.
So are we doomed?
There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agriculturalwaste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.
Would it make enough of a difference?
Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it.
Do you think we will survive?
I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.
I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.
I don't think we can react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up It's a depressing outlook.
Not necessarily. I don't think 9 billion is better than 1 billion. I see humans as rather like the first photosynthesisers, which when they first appeared on the planet caused enormous damage by releasing oxygen – a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out in the end to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.
How much biodiversity will be left after this climatic apocalypse?
We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO2 was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction. It's already moving: if you live in the countryside as I do you can see the changes, even in the UK.
If you were younger, would you be fearful?
No, I have been through this kind of emotional thing before. It reminds me of when I was 19 and the second world war broke out. We were very frightened but almost everyone was so much happier. We're much better equipped to deal with that kind of thing than long periods of peace. It's not all bad when things get rough. I'll be 90 in July, I'm a lot closer to death than you, but I'm not worried. I'm looking forward to being 100.
Are you looking forward to your trip into space this year?
Very much. I've got my camera ready!
Do you have to do any special training?
I have to go in the centrifuge to see if I can stand the g-forces. I don't anticipate a problem because I spent a lot of my scientific life on ships out on rough oceans and I have never been even slightly seasick so I don't think I'm likely to be space sick. They gave me an expensive thorium-201 heart test and then put me on a bicycle. My heart was performing like an average 20 year old, they said.
I bet your wife is nervous.
No, she's cheering me on. And it's not because I'm heavily insured, because I'm not.
Profile
James Lovelock is a British chemist, inventor and environmentalist. He is best known for formulating the controversial Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, which states that organisms interact with and regulate Earth's surface and atmosphere. Later this year he will travel to space as Richard Branson's guest aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. His latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, is published by Basic Books in February.
a.. From issue 2692 of New Scientist magazine, page 30-31. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
b.. Browse past issues of New Scientist magazine
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Can any one help Fabio Gorian,
Has anyone got any interesting things going on in their parks during his time he is here? Game capture, anti-poaching operation, game count or perhaps a fisheries patrol in the cape. Come on guys this is what the association is about!
Hi Don,
I'm Fabio and I'm very pleased to keep in touch with someone from RSA. As you well know I'm going to visit your country in April. I will be accompanied by my family (my wife also is a "ranger") and my brother in law with his wife. We will be 6 people and we have booked a minibus since the beginning of our staying there. We will land on April, 5th in the afternoon and we have rooms reserved at the Urban Chic Hotel in Cape Town. We have Monday and Tuesday free. Our travel agency suggested something to visit there, but substantially we don't have nothing organized.
On Wednesday we are going to Mpumalanga by plane and we have reserved two rooms at the Hotel Casa do Sol.
There we will have booked for us another microbus. The following day we stay in the neighborough to visit Pilgrim's rest and Blyde River canyon. On Friday we will move by microbus to Kruger Park where it seems we have booked four "safari". Our accommodation wll be in some lodges (Kapama). On Sunday late in the morning our last travel: to Johannesburg, to come back Italy.
I hope you will meet us in RSA!
If you need more information, please contact me.
Best wishes,
Fabio, fabio.gorian@libero.
Do Bioplastics Deserve a Seat at Your Table?
March 2009
Read this issue of Greentips online
Unlike typical plastics made from crude oil, “bioplastics” are often made from plant matter such as corn starch, potato starch, cane sugar, and soy protein. A potentially renewable alternative to petroleum-based plastics would have the long-term benefits of reducing global warming pollution and our dependence on fossil fuels, but do bioplastics fit the bill? As they become more ubiquitous—in the form of grocery bags and disposable plates, food containers, and cutlery—numerous concerns have been raised about their true value:
Related Resources
BioCycle Magazine—Find a composter
Biodegradable Products Institute—Compostable logo program
Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative—Fact sheets
World Centric—Bioplastic categories and composting times
Boreholes?
Needing to find water to drill new boreholes? We have been using one of the top water diviners in Africa. He gives a very accurate depth of the faults, direction of underground water flow and a very accurate estimate of the quantity you will be able to pump, all before they even start drilling. We have used him in Mozambique and South Africa with great success.
Contact Barend van der Westhuizen in Zimb, cell 00263 9122 31039, landline 00263 4776 470 or 00263 474 6811. He works anywhere in Southern Africa.
Thanks
Carlos Tavares ctavares@mweb.co.za
Tailpiece
It's Hell Getting Old
Old people have problems that you haven't even considered yet!
An 85-year old man was requested by his doctor for a sperm count as part of his physical exam.
The doctor gave the man a jar and said, 'Take this jar home and bring back a semen sample tomorrow.'
The next day the 85-year old man reappeared at the doctor's office and gave him the jar, which was as clean and empty as on the previous day.
The doctor asked what happened and the man explained, 'Well, doc, it's like this "first I tried with my right hand, but nothing. Then I tried with my left hand, but still nothing.
Then I asked my wife for help. She tried with her right hand, then her left, still nothing. She tried with her mouth, first with teeth in, then with her teeth out, still nothing.
'We even called up Arleen, the lady next door and she tried too, first with both hands, then an armpit, and she even tried squeezin' it between her knees, but still nothing.'
The doctor was shocked! 'You asked your neighbor?' the old man replied, 'Yep none of us could get the jar open.