The Future
Page 62
376 Aral Sea, almost completely disappeared
NASA, “A Shrinking Sea, Aral Sea,” July 23, 2012, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/landsat/news/40th-top10-aralsea.html.
377 eroded land to grassland and a nationwide effort to fight soil erosion
Andrew Glass, “FDR Signs Soil Conservation Act, April 27, 1935,” Politico, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36362.html.
378 “Drylands are on the front line”
Alister Doyle, “World Urged to Stop Net Desertification by 2030,” Reuters, June 14, 2011.
379 way of life for an estimated one billion people in 100 countries
Ibid.
380 “dust storm moved through a large swatch of Arizona”
“Historic Dust Storm Sweeps Across Arizona, Turns Day into Night,” July 6, 2011, Reuters.
381 unusually large number of them in recent years
“7 Haboobs Have Hit Arizona Since July,” KVOA, September 28, 2011, http://www.kvoa.com/news/7-haboobs-have-hit-arizona-since-july/.
382 describing what is in store for many regions of desertifying drylands
Joe Romm, “Desertification: The Next Dust Bowl,” Nature, October 2011.
383 “China, western Mongolia, and central Asia; the other in central Africa”
Lester Brown, “The Great Food Crisis of 2011,” Foreign Policy, January 10, 2011.
384 have increased tenfold during the last fifty years
Gaia Vince, “Dust Storms on the Rise Globally,” New Scientist, August 2004.
385 “activity and 40 percent of the continent’s population”
“Desertification Affects 70 Percent of Economic Activity in Africa,” Pana Press, October 24, 2011.
386 United States’ Midwest just prior to the Dust Bowl
Rattan Lal, interview with author, July 2, 2009; Rattan Lal, “Global Potential of Soil Carbon Sequestration to Mitigate the Greenhouse Effect,” Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences 22, no. 2 (2003): 151–84.
387 the number of livestock exploded
Brown, Plan B 4.0.
388 Muslims moving from the north into non-Muslim areas
Ibid.
389 surrounding China’s Gobi Desert
Damien Currington, “Desertification Is the Greatest Threat to the Planet, Experts Warn,” Guardian, December 15, 2010.
390 goats compared to less than 10 million in the United States
Ibid.
391 China is now losing almost 1,400 square miles of arable land
Ibid.
392 Inner Mongolia and Gansu Province are merging and expanding
Ibid.
393 Taklamakan and Kumtag deserts are also merging and expanding
Ibid.
394 abandoned in northern and western regions of China
Ibid.
395 have already abandoned many villages to the encroaching desert
Ibid.
396 “a savannah-like region bordering the basin on its south side”
Ibid.
397 Amazon rainforest, adding even more risk to the integrity
David Lapola et al., “Indirect Land-Use Changes Can Overcome Carbon Savings from Biofuels in Brazil,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 2010.
398 suffered from two “hundred-year” droughts in the last seven years
Simon Lewis et al., “The 2010 Amazon Drought,” Science, February 2011.
399 greatest tropical rainforest on Earth into a massive dryland region
Brown, Plan B 4.0.
400 90 percent of the people affected live in developing countries
Currington, “Desertification Is the Greatest Threat to the Planet, Experts Warn.”
401 “The top 20 centimeters of soil”
Ibid.
402 to accommodate additional shelter for Egypt’s fast-growing population
Metwali Salem, “UN Report: Egypt Sustains Severe Land Loss to Desertification and Development,” Egypt Independent, June 17, 2011.
403 resulting in the loss of cropland to salinization
“Seawater Intrusion Is the First Cause of Contamination of Coastal Aquifers,” ScienceDaily, July 31, 2007, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070727091903.htm.
404 Ganges Delta, the Mekong Delta, and in other so-called mega-deltas
K. Wium Olesen et al., “Mega Deltas and the Climate Change Challenges,” Eleventh International Symposium on River Sedimentation, September 6–9, 2010, http://www.irtces.org/zt/11isrs/paper/Kim_Wium_Olesen.pdf.
405 from whence 40 percent of Egypt’s food production comes
United Nations Development Programme, “Adaption to Climate Change in the Nile Delta Through Integrated Coastal Zone Management,” 2009, p. 9, http://nile-delta-adapt.org/index.php?view=DownLoadAct&id=6.
406 increase its population 85 percent during the same period
Brown, Plan B 4.0.
407 complaints by Iraq and Syria that they are being treated unjustly
Brown, “This Will Be the Arab World’s Next Battle.”
408 will only get worse as populations in all the affected countries increase
“Thirsty South Asia’s River Rifts Threaten ‘Water Wars,’ ” Alertnet, July 23, 2012, http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/thirsty-south-asias-river-rifts-threaten-water-wars/; “Southeast Asia Drought Triggers Debate Over Region’s Water Resources,” VOA News, March 24, 2010, http://www.voanews.com/content/southeast-asia-drought-triggers-debate-over-regions-water-resources—89114447/114686.html.
409 Colorado River system are being waged in court
Felicia Fonseca, “Arizona High Court Settles Water Rights Query,” Associated Press, September 12, 2012; “Colorado Court Ruling Limits Water Transfer Rights,” American Water Intelligence, July 2011, http://www.americanwaterintel.com/archive/2/7/opinion/colorado-court-ruling-limits-water-tranfers-rights.html; “Pivotal Water Rights Case on Wastewater Rights,” American Water Intelligence, June 2011, http://www.americanwaterintel.com/archive/2/6/analysis/pivotal-water-rights-case-wastewater-rights.html; “Navajo Lawmakers Approve Water Rights Settlement,” Associated Press, November 5, 2010; Jim Carlton, “Wet Winter Can’t Slake West’s Thirst,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 2011.
410 an official with a Kenyan NGO, Friends of Lake Turkana
Kremena Krumova, “Land Grabs in Africa Threaten Greater Poverty,” Epoch Times, September 21, 2011.
411 “There is no doubt”
Anil Ananthaswamy, “African Land Grabs Could Lead to Future Water Conflicts,” New Scientist, May 26, 2011.
412 “Rich countries are eyeing Africa”
John Vidal, “How Food and Water Are Driving a 21st-Century African Land Grab,” Guardian, March 6, 2010.
413 an agricultural real estate boom in Africa
Lorenzo Cotula, “Analysis: Land Grab or Development Opportunity?,” BBC News, February 21, 2012.
414 Liberia’s land, for example, has been sold to private investors
Anjala Nayar, “African Land Grabs Hinder Sustainable Development,” Nature, February 1, 2012.
415 signed deals with foreign growers for 21.1 percent of its land
Cotula, “Analysis: Land Grab or Development Opportunity?”
416 was sold to investors after the country won its independence
Nayar, “African Land Grabs Hinder Sustainable Development.”
417 grow palm oil for biofuel on 2.8 million hectares of land
Vidal, “How Food and Water Are Driving a 21st-Century African Land Grab.”
418 calculated that 44 percent was dedicated to biofuels
Krumova, “Land Grabs in Africa Threaten Greater Poverty.”
419 United Arab Emirates purchased slightly more
Vidal, “How Food and Water Are Driving a 21st-Century African Land Grab.”
Ibid.
421 area of the nation of Pakistan—and that two thirds
W. Anseeuw et al., “Transnational Land Deals for Agriculture in the Global South. Analytical Report Based on the Land Matrix Database,” CDE/CIRAD/GIGA, 2012.
422 people have claimed they were unjustly evicted
Ibid.
423 concerning difficulties in financing the projects
International Land Coalition, “Land Rights and the Rush for Land Report,” 2011.
424 will rely entirely on wheat imports by 2016
“Saudi Arabia Launches Tender to Buy 550,000 Tons of Wheat,” Saudi Gazette, August 30, 2012.
425 water from a deep nonrenewable aquifer
Brown, “This Will Be the Arab World’s Next Battle.”
426 80 to 85 percent of that water comes from underground aquifers
Reem Shamseddine and Barbara Lewis, “Saudi Arabia’s Water Needs Eating into Oil Wealth,” Reuters, September 9, 2011; Brown, Plan B 4.0.
427 will eventually involve desalination of seawater
Shamseddine and Lewis, “Saudi Arabia’s Water Needs Eating into Oil Wealth.”
428 locked up in the ice and snow of Antarctica and Greenland
Howard Perlman, U.S. Geological Survey, “Where Is Earth’s Water Located?,” September 7, 2012, http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html.
429 even energy-rich Saudi Arabia cannot afford it
Caline Malek, “Solar Desalination ‘the Only Way’ for Gulf to Sustainably Produce Water,” National, April 24, 2012, http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/solar-desalination-the-only-way-for-gulf-to-sustainably-produce-water.
430 purchase the use of water-rich land in Africa
John Vidal, “What Does the Arab World Do When Its Water Runs Out?,” Guardian, February 19, 2011.
431 many desalination plants in the world—including in Saudi Arabia
“Saudi Arabia and Desalinisation,” Harvard International Review, December 23, 2010, http://hir.harvard.edu/pressing-change/saudi-arabia-and-desalination-0.
432 towing them to areas experiencing severe droughts
Bob Yirka, “Simulation Shows It’s Possible to Tow an Iceberg to Drought Areas,” PhysOrg, August 9, 2011, http://phys.org/news/2011-08-simulation-iceberg-drought-areas.html.
433 could supply 500,000 people with freshwater for a year
Ibid.
434 supplied with ample amounts of water, nutrients, and sunlight
“Does It Really Stack Up?,” Economist, December 9, 2010, http://www.economist.com/node/17647627.
435 rely on fish for approximately 15 percent
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, “The State of Fisheries and Aquaculture,” 2012, p. 5, http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/i2727e/i2727e00.htm.
436 from twenty-two pounds per person per year to almost thirty-eight pounds
Bryan Walsh, “The End of the Line,” Time, July 7, 2011.
437 one third of fish stocks in the oceans
Ibid.
438 reduced by 90 percent since the 1960s
Ransom Myers and Boris Worm, “Rapid Worldwide Depletion of Predatory Fish Communities,” Nature, May 15, 2003.
439 The world reached “peak fish” twenty-five years ago
Brad Plumer, “The End of Fish, in One Chart,” Washington Post, May 20, 2012.
440 “with 14% of assessed stocks collapsed in 2007”
Convention on Biological Diversity, “Global Biodiversity Outlook 3: Biodiversity in 2010,” 2010, http://www.cbd.int/gbo3/?pub=6667§ion=6709.
441 large marine area in the Pacific Ocean
Suzanne Goldberg, “Bush Designates Ocean Conservation Areas in Final Week as President,” Guardian, January 5, 2009.
442 61 percent of which will occur in China
OECD-FAO, “Agricultural Outlook 2011–2020.”
443 can be tainted by pollution, antibiotics, and antifungals
Laurel Adams, Center for Public Integrity, “FDA Screening of Fish Imports Not Catching Antibiotics and Drug Residue,” May 18, 2011, http://www.publicintegrity.org/environment/natural-resources?page=3; George Mateljan, “Is There Any Nutritional Difference Between Wild-Caught and Farm-Raised Fish? Is One Type Better for Me Than the Other?,” World’s Healthiest Foods, http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=george&dbid=96.
444 five pounds of wild fish for each pound of farmed salmon produced
U.S. Department of Agriculture, “Trout-Grain Project,” 2012.
445 Over half of the fish food in agriculture
NOAA Fisheries Service–National Marine Fisheries Service, “Feeds for Aquaculture,” 2012.
446 Although more than 10 percent of all cropland
Elizabeth Weise, “More of World’s Crops Are Genetically Engineered,” USA Today, February 22, 2011.
CHAPTER 5: THE REINVENTION OF LIFE AND DEATH
1 introduce human genes into other animals
Richard Gray, “Genetically Modified Cows Produce ‘Human’ Milk,” Telegraph, April 2, 2011.
2 mixing the genes of spiders and goats
Adam Rutherford, “Synthetic Biology and the Rise of the ‘Spider-Goats,’ ” Guardian, January 14, 2012.
3 computer chips into the gray matter of human brains
Daniel H. Wilson, “Bionic Brains and Beyond,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2012.
4 parents who wish to design their own children
Keith Kleiner, “Designer Babies—Like It or Not, Here They Come,” Singularity Hub, February 25, 2009, http://singularityhub.com/2009/02/25/designer-babies-like-it-or-not-here-they-come/.
5 sometimes noted, “There Be Monsters”
H. P. Newquist, Here There Be Monsters: The Legendary Kraken and the Giant Squid (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2010).
6 they seized knowledge that had been forbidden them
Genesis 3:16–19.
7 so he could endure the same fate the next morning
Thomas Chen and Peter Chen, “The Myth of Prometheus and the Liver,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 87 (December 1994): 754.
8 replacement livers in their laboratory bioreactors
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, 10-30-10, “Researchers Engineer Miniature Human Livers in the Lab,” October 30, 2010, http://www.wakehealth.edu/News-Releases/2010/Researchers_Engineer_Miniature_Human_Livers_in_the_Lab.htm.
9 almost certainly become the model for medical care
“Personalized Medicine,” USA Today, January 20, 2011.
10 volume of fine-grained information about every individual
“Do Not Ask or Do Not Answer?,” Economist, August 23, 2007.
11 reduce medical errors and enhance the skills of physicians
Farhad Manjoo, “Why the Highest-Paid Doctors Are the Most Vulnerable to Automation,” Slate, September 27, 2011, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/will_robots_steal_your_job_3.html.
12 “all are subject to radical transformation”
Topol, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, p. 243.
13 unhealthy behaviors in order to manage chronic diseases
David H. Freeman, “The Perfected Self,” Atlantic, June 2012; Mark Bowden, “The Measured Man,” Atlantic, July/August 2012.
14 digital monitors that are on—and inside—the patient’s body
Topol, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, pp. 59–76.
15 leads to an improvement in the amount of progress made
Janelle Nanos, “Are Smartphones Changing What It Means to Be Human?,” Boston, February 28, 2012.
16 will see their progress or lack thereof
Freeman, “The Perfected Self.”
17 global access to large-scale
digital programs
John Havens, “How Big Data Can Make Us Happier and Healthier,” Mashable, October 8, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/10/08/the-power-of-quantified-self/.
18 living systems are also being applied to the human brain
Matthew Hougan and Bruce Altevogt, From Molecules to Minds: Challenges for the 21st Century, Board on Health Sciences Policy, Institute of Medicine, 2008.
19 prosthetic arms and legs with their brains
Associated Press, “Man with Bionic Leg Climbs Chicago Skyscraper,” November 5, 2012.
20 curing some brain diseases
Meghan Rosen, “Beginnings of Bionic,” Science News 182, no. 10 (November 17, 2012): 18.
21 mapping of what brain scientists call the “connectome”
Olaf Sporns, a professor of computational cognitive neuroscience at Indiana University, was the first to coin the word “connectome.” The National Institutes of Health now have a “Human Connectome Project.” Ian Sample, “Quest for the Connectome: Scientists Investigate Ways of Mapping the Brain,” Guardian, May 7, 2012.
22 greater than that required for mapping the genome
Hougan and Altevogt, From Molecules to Minds.
23 technologies necessary to complete the map are still in development
“Brain Researchers Start Mapping the Human ‘Connectome,’ ” ScienceDaily, July 2, 2012, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120702152652.htm.
24 complete the first “larger-scale maps of neural wiring”
Sample, “Quest for the Connectome.”
25 “artificially perfect the thinking instrument itself”
Eric Steinhart, “Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 20, no. 1 (December 2008): 1–22.
26 for the brains of people who have Parkinson’s disease
Wilson, “Bionic Brains and Beyond.”
27 provide deep brain stimulation to alleviate their symptoms
Ibid.
28 activated in stages to give the brain a chance to adjust to them
Johns Hopkins Medicine, Cochlear Implant Information, http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/specialty_areas/listencenter/cochlear_info.html#activation.
29 “designer babies” may be highly appealing to some parents
Kleiner, “Designer Babies”; Mark Henderson, “Demand for ‘Designer Babies’ to Grow Dramatically,” Times (London), January 7, 2010.