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johnmauldin · 5 years ago

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Economics Is Like Quantum Physics

I often say a writer is nothing without readers. I am blessed to have some of the world’s greatest. Your feedback never fails to inspire and enlighten me.

My last week’s That Time Keynes Had a Point letter brought many more comments than usual. Apparently Keynes is still provocative 73 years after his death, no matter what you say about him.

But my real point was about the twisted economic thought that is having dangerous effects on us all. And we can’t blame it just on Keynes.

Today I want to share some of the feedback I received, add a few thoughts, and then show you some real-world consequences that are only getting worse. But first, let me wax philosophic for a minute.

Economic Dispute

This economic dispute is, at its core, a very old argument about how we understand reality. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle might agree with some of today’s economists. He taught deductive reasoning with the classic syllogism:

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man

Therefore, Socrates is mortal

In other words, Aristotle said to move from general principles to specific conclusions. That’s what the bulk of modern macroeconomics does, using their (much more elaborate) models to deduce the “best” policy choices.

Centuries later, Sir Francis Bacon turned Aristotle upside down when he advocated inductive reasoning.

Rather than start with broad principles and apply them everywhere, he said to presuppose nothing, observe events and move from specific to general as you gather more observations… what we now call the “scientific method.”

Today’s economists may think that’s what they are doing, but they often aren’t. They begin with models that purport to include all the important variables, then fit facts into the model. When the facts don’t fit, they look for new ones, never considering that the model itself may be flawed.

Furthermore, as I have shown time and time again, they assume away reality in order to construct models that are in “equilibrium” with themselves. This is supposed to give us insight into the reality that has been assumed away.

That process isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s not science. It is the opposite of science. Bacon would be horrified to see this. He tried to show the world a better way and now, centuries later, some of our most learned professors still don’t get it.

This is sadly not just a philosophical argument. It has real consequences for real people, including you and me.

Uncertainty Principle

Speaking of science, I received this note from an actual scientist (i.e., not an economist).

Dear John, having been an avid reader of your articles for many years now I wanted to write to say how much I tend to agree with your commentary, and in particular how much I enjoyed this week's article. I'd like to make a couple of comments about this week's material.

Firstly, reference was made to comparing economics with physics, and how economists suffer from "physics envy" (I should say that I have a PhD in physics from Oxford and subsequently worked as a physicist at the European Center for Nuclear Physics Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, although I left behind my career as a physicist a long time ago.)

Economies and financial markets are much more like the world of quantum mechanics than the world of classical physics. In classical physics there is complete independence between the observer and the system under observation. However, in the realms of quantum mechanics, the systems under observation are so small that the act of observation disturbs the system itself, described by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

This situation is similar to that of financial markets, where the actions of market players is not separate from market outcomes; rather the actions of market players PRODUCE the market outcomes.

Betting on financial markets is different from betting on the outcome of an independent event, such as the outcome of a horse race or a football match. The latter are akin to classical physics where there is independence between observer and observed. Whilst actions in the betting market change the odds on which horse/team is favored to win, they don't impact the outcome of the event, which is rather determined by the best horse/team on the day. —Paul Shotton

Thank you, Paul, for pointing out this important distinction. I can’t pretend to understand quantum mechanics but your point about independent observation is profound.

Economists don’t just build models; they (and all of us) are parts of the model. We are the economy and the economy is us. While discussing it, we also affect it.

George Soros calls this the principle of reflexivity, the idea that a two-way feedback loop exists in which investors' perceptions affect that environment, which in turn changes investor perceptions. (Here’s his essay explaining more.)

That means these macroeconomic models, which with their Greek letters and complex equations look very scientific to a layperson, are often at odds with the scientific method.

You can’t conduct independent observations and experiments on an entire economy. That doesn’t render the models completely useless, but greatly limits them.

Borrowing from Clint Eastwood, this might be fine if those who use these models would respect the limitations. All too often, they don’t. And this is where it gets a little complicated.

I confess that I use models. I build them and work with others who build even better ones. Models can help inform us of potential outcomes and better understand risk and reward.

But there are clearly inherent limitations on using historical or theoretical observations to predict future results.

(Dis) Equilibrium

Here are a couple more letters, taking issue with my comments on equilibrium.

Just to clarify… Even if the economy can be modeled in some sense by a sand pile that will ultimately collapse, that does not mean that the economy is, at any point in time, not in equilibrium. In fact, it must be in equilibrium in order to form the sand pile! You could argue that the equilibrium is “unstable,” perhaps, but it is certainly a (possibly unstable) equilibrium. —John Bruch

***

John, I’ve been a reader for years and love your letter. But your comment today is over the top; “The entire premise of equilibrium economics is false.” Efficient market hypothesis is over the top but the premise of equilibrium is perfectly modeled in your sand pile letter. Cycles have always existed and always will exist.

Natural market forces will always move markets towards equilibrium but government interference slows the process making the sand pile grow in size and magnitude. To say that the principle of equilibrium is false is just ignoring reality.

The economy is like our forests. When a fire starts in the forest you let it burn so that nature’s cycle can run its course. If you keep putting out the fire you build excess fuel and then at some point you have a catastrophic fire that no humans can control. Mother Nature eventually steps in and puts out the fire and puts life back into equilibrium.

I agree that we need to rethink economics. But the principle of equilibrium, however short lived that moment in time is, is a sure reality. —Dennis Carver

John and Dennis raise an interesting question. The mere fact that the “sand pile” exists intact for some period of time means that equilibrium exists for that interval. Fair enough. The grains of sand do, in fact, line up so that they don’t collapse.

But we are constantly adding more sand and each additional grain changes the equilibrium. The previous equilibrium ends at that point, having been so brief as to be meaningless.

Eventually a grain of sand will create an unstable equilibrium, causing the pile to partially or completely collapse (and then be in equilibrium once again). So if no single state of equilibrium can exist for more than an instant, I would argue it’s not really “equilibrium” for any practical purpose. We can’t rely on it to continue. Every moment brings a new, unknown situation.

Let’s look at it another way. The sandpile model assumes there will be moments of instability. In economic terms, we are experiencing transitory equilibrium. The sandpile model is inherently unstable, a perfect example of Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis: Stability leads to instability and the longer the period of stability, the greater the instability will be at the end.

(Nassim Taleb’s Antifragility Principle is important to understand when we think about equilibrium, or rather the lack of it. His book Antifragile is important and you should at least read the first half.)

My old friend and early economics mentor Dr. Gary North sees this idea of “equilibrium” as not just wrong, but downright evil.

In his 1963 textbook for upper division economics students, [Israel] Kirzner wrote about the assumptions of economists regarding the use of equilibrium as an explanatory model. They use it to describe the system of feedback that the price system provides the market place. “The state of equilibrium should be looked upon as an imaginary situation where there is a complete dovetailing of the decisions made by all the participating individuals.”

This means not only perfect knowledge of available economic opportunities, but also men’s universal willingness to cooperate with each other. In short, it conceives of men as angels in heaven, with fallen angels having conveniently departed for hell and its constant disequilibrium, where totalitarian central power is needed to co-ordinate their efforts. “A market that is not in equilibrium should be looked upon as reflecting a discordancy between the various decisions being made.”

The heart of free market economic analysis is the concept of monetary profits and losses as feedback devices that persuade people to cooperate with each other in order to increase their wealth. “But the theorist knows that the very fact of disequilibrium itself sets into motion forces that tend to bring about equilibrium (with respect to current market attitudes)” (Market Theory and the Price System, p. 23). Presumably, even devils cooperate on this basis. They, too, prefer profits to losses.

Biblically speaking, this theory of equilibrium is wrong. It is not just wrong; it is evil. It adopts the idea of man as God as its foremost conceptual tool to explain people’s economic behavior. It explains the market process as man’s move in the direction of divinity. Economists are not content to explain the price system as a useful arrangement that rewards people with accurate knowledge who voluntary cooperate with each other. They explain the economic progress of man and the improvement of man’s knowledge as a pathway to divinity, however hypothetical. The science of economics in its humanist framework rests on the divinization of man as a conceptual ideal.

Setting aside the theology, the point here is that economists assume human beings are perfectly rational and consistent, or at least wish to be. That’s what makes equilibrium possible.

But we know humans aren’t perfect or consistent. So how can we have equilibrium? We can’t, unless we assume markets are in equilibrium because they act in a manner we deem appropriate or ideal.

Insane Ideas

Again, this isn’t an academic argument. People who believe these ideas either hold seats of power or have influence on those who do. They truly think they can twist some knobs on their models and make everything better.

If we just had better monetary or fiscal policy, if the government could tax the right people and distribute the money correctly, everyone would be so much better off. And of course, their highly complex models and theories will conveniently lead to their desired political conclusions.

It is increasingly obvious that conventional monetary policy is useless now that rates have been so low for so long, and everyone believes they will remain low.

Nothing the central banks do incentivizes anyone to make immediate growth-generating decisions. If you need to borrow money, you likely did it long ago.

A new Deutsche Bank analysis says the major world economies now have government debt, on average, exceeding 70% of GDP, the highest peacetime level of the past 150 years.

Source: Financial Times

This is obviously unsustainable but the economics profession (and the bankers) desperately want to sustain it. With monetary tools no longer useful, they are turning to fiscal policy. Serious people are mapping strategies like helicopter money, debt monetization, MMT, and worse.

These all, in various ways, essentially say that government debt doesn’t matter, and in some cases we actually need more of it. Historically, the only way that can be right is if we are on the cusp of another WW2-like crisis.

This horrifying but well-researched Bloomberg article is chock full of links to insane ideas. Some look superficially attractive, especially to those unfamiliar with even basic economics. Many have familiar, heavyweight names attached to them. All have, to me at least, a whiff of desperation. They are frantic attempts to make the world stop spinning.

I don’t think these ideas will work. I think we are beyond the black hole’s event horizon. Bad things are going to happen, culminating in some kind of globally coordinated debt liquidation I have dubbed the Great Reset. I really see no other way out.

Every day brings more signs of the impending crisis. Duke University’s latest quarterly CFO survey found more than half of finance chiefs foresee a US recession before the 2020 election. Possibly worse, they project only a 1% increase in capital spending over the next 12 months.

An economy in which near-zero interest rates can’t spur more investment than that is an economy with serious problems. And I expect them to get worse, not better.

Furthermore, an increasing body of evidence says that increasing sovereign debt is a slow but inexorable drag on GDP. It is like the frog being boiled in water, but so slowly that we as citizens don’t really understand what is happening to us. We do sense something is wrong, though. Hence today’s worldwide populist movements.

The driver for 1930s populism was the Great Depression and unemployment. Now the impetus is rising debt and underemployment, with people unable to improve their lives as past generations did. Millions no longer expect to be better off economically than their parents. That frustration is sparking unproductive political partisanship and has the potential to bring political chaos as governments try to protect their own technology and businesses.

The world in general has clearly benefited from globalization and automation, but that is a hard argument to make as jobs disappear. And more jobs will disappear as technology increasingly lets businesses replace expensive humans with cheap robotics and algorithms. Sigh… I wish I had answers. Well, I do, but I don’t think they’ll going to get a great deal of traction.

This won’t be the end of the world. I really do think there are ways that you can properly position your portfolio and your personal life to not just survive but to thrive. We will get through it and be better on the other side. But it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

The Great Reset: The Collapse of the Biggest Bubble in History

New York Times best seller and renowned financial expert John Mauldin predicts an unprecedented financial crisis that could be triggered in the next five years. Most investors seem completely unaware of the relentless pressure that’s building right now. Learn more here.

#economy theory

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airoasis · 5 years ago

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How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-make-stress-your-friend-kelly-mcgonigal-2/

How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal

I’ve a confession to make. However first, i want you to make a little bit confession to me. Up to now 12 months, i would like you to only raise your hand if you’ve experienced quite little stress. Any individual? How a couple of reasonable quantity of stress? Who has experienced quite a few stress? Yeah. Me too. However that is not my confession. My confession is this: i am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help humans be happier and more fit. However I fear that whatever i’ve been educating for the final 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years i have been telling individuals, stress makes you ill.It increases the threat of the whole thing from the usual bloodless to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I’ve grew to become stress into the enemy. However i have converted my intellect about stress, and in these days, I need to change yours. Let me with the be trained that made me rethink my entire technique to emphasize. This be trained tracked 30,000 adults in the us for eight years, and they started via asking people, "How much stress have you ever skilled within the final year?" additionally they asked, "Do you suppose that stress is detrimental on your health?" and then they used public death records to find out who died.(Laughter) okay. Some dangerous information first. Individuals who experienced various stress within the previous yr had a forty three percentage improved risk of death. However that was once simplest genuine for the persons who additionally believed that stress is detrimental on your wellbeing. (Laughter) folks who skilled numerous stress but didn’t view stress as dangerous had been no more prone to die. In fact, they had the lowest chance of dying of anyone within the learn, together with men and women who had slightly little stress. Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were monitoring deaths, 182,000 americans died upfront, no longer from stress, but from the belief that stress is dangerous for you. (Laughter) that’s over 20,000 deaths a 12 months. Now, if that estimate is right, that might make believing stress is dangerous for you the 15th greatest purpose of dying in the us final yr, killing more humans than dermis melanoma, HIV/AIDS and murder. (Laughter) you will see why this study freaked me out. Right here i have been spending a lot energy telling men and women stress is unhealthy for your wellness.So this gain knowledge of received me wondering: Can altering how you suppose about stress make you more healthy? And right here the science says yes. When you exchange your intellect about stress, that you may alternate your physique’s response to stress. Now to provide an explanation for how this works, i would like you all to pretend that you are contributors in a be trained designed to emphasize you out. It’s known as the social stress experiment. You come into the laboratory, and you are informed you ought to give a five-minute impromptu speech to your private weaknesses to a panel of knowledgeable evaluators sitting correct in front of you, and to be certain you feel the stress, there are bright lights and a digicam to your face, style of like this. (Laughter) And the evaluators had been informed to provide you with discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this. (Exhales) (Laughter) Now that you are sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math experiment. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been educated to harass you in the course of it. Now we’ll all do this together. It will be enjoyable. For me. Ok. (Laughter) i need you all to rely backwards from 996 in increments of seven. You are going to do this out loud, as fast as which you can, starting with 996.Go! (viewers counting) Go rapid. Rapid please. You’re going too gradual. (viewers counting) stop. Discontinue, stop, stop. That man made a mistake. We’re going to have got to begin all over again. (Laughter) you’re no longer superb at this, are you? K, so you get the thought. If you had been definitely on this be taught, you’ll most of the time be a bit of pressured out. Your coronary heart perhaps pounding, you might be breathing turbo, perhaps breaking out into a sweat. And customarily, we interpret these bodily alterations as nervousness or signs that we aren’t coping very good with the stress. However what if you considered them as a substitute as signs that your physique was once energized, was getting ready you to meet this project? Now that’s precisely what contributors were instructed in a be taught carried out at Harvard university. Earlier than they went by way of the social stress scan, they had been taught to rethink their stress response as useful. That pounding coronary heart is preparing you for motion. If you’re respiratory faster, it can be no crisis. It’s getting extra oxygen to your mind. And contributors who discovered to view the stress response as invaluable for their performance, good, they have been less pressured out, less anxious, more constructive, however essentially the most intriguing discovering to me was how their physical stress response changed.Now, in a natural stress response, your coronary heart cost goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the explanations that chronic stress is commonly related to cardiovascular disorder. It is not fairly healthy to be on this state all the time. But in the study, when contributors seen their stress response as beneficial, their blood vessels stayed comfortable like this. Their coronary heart used to be still pounding, however it is a a lot more fit cardiovascular profile. It truly looks quite a bit like what occurs in moments of joy and braveness. Over a lifetime of disturbing experiences, this one organic trade could be the difference between a stress-brought about coronary heart assault at age 50 and residing good into your 90s.And that is quite what the new science of stress exhibits, that the way you consider about stress issues. So my intention as a wellbeing psychologist has modified. I no longer need to eliminate your stress. I wish to make you higher at stress. And we simply did a little intervention. Should you raised your hand and stated you’d had plenty of stress in the last yr, we would have saved your lifestyles, considering that optimistically the following time your coronary heart is pounding from stress, you are going to take into account this speak and you are going to consider to your self, that is my physique helping me rise to this venture. And when you view stress in that way, your physique believes you, and your stress response becomes fitter. Now I stated i have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we’re going to do one other intervention.I want to let you know about some of the under-liked aspects of the stress response, and the concept is this: Stress makes you social. To realise this side of stress, we have got to talk a couple of hormone, oxytocin, and i know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its possess lovely nickname, the cuddle hormone, due to the fact it is released whilst you hug any person. However it is a very small part of what oxytocin is concerned in. Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It first-class-tunes your mind’s social instincts. It primes you to do matters that strengthen shut relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave bodily contact with your acquaintances and loved ones. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more inclined to support and help the persons you care about. Some individuals have even instructed we will have to chortle oxytocin… To emerge as more compassionate and caring. However here is what most persons do not recognize about oxytocin. It is a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It can be as much part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released within the stress response, it’s motivating you to seek aid.Your biological stress response is nudging you to inform anyone how you believe, as an alternative of bottling it up. Your stress response desires to make sure you realize when any individual else for your existence is struggling so to aid every different. When life is problematic, your stress response wants you to be surrounded with the aid of individuals who care about you. K, so how is knowing this part of stress going to make you fitter? Well, oxytocin doesn’t most effective act for your brain. It additionally acts in your body, and one in all its important roles on your physique is to look after your cardiovascular method from the consequences of stress.It can be a common anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay cozy during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is truely on the heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-caused harm. This stress hormone strengthens your coronary heart. And the cool thing is that every one of those bodily advantages of oxytocin are greater by using social contact and social aid. So whilst you reach out to others beneath stress, both to seek support or to help anybody else, you release extra of this hormone, your stress response turns into healthier, and also you genuinely recuperate rapid from stress. I in finding this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection. I need to conclude by using telling you about another learn. And hear up, considering the fact that this be trained would additionally save a existence. This be taught tracked about 1,000 adults in the U.S., and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, they usually started the be trained by asking, "How a lot stress have you skilled in the final 12 months?" additionally they requested, "How so much time have you spent serving to out buddies, neighbors, people in your group?" and then they used public records for the subsequent five years to find out who died.Ok, so the unhealthy news first: for each main worrying lifestyles expertise, like fiscal difficulties or loved ones difficulty, that extended the danger of dying by 30 percent. However — and i am hoping you expect a "however" by means of now — however that wasn’t real for every body. People who hung out caring for others confirmed obviously no stress-associated expand in death. Zero. Caring created resilience. And so we see as soon as once more that the dangerous effects of stress for your wellbeing aren’t inevitable. The way you feel and how you act can grow to be your experience of stress. While you pick to view your stress response as precious, you create the biology of braveness. And whilst you decide upon to connect with others beneath stress, that you would be able to create resilience.Now i would not always ask for more traumatic experiences in my lifestyles, but this science has given me a entire new appreciation for stress. Stress offers us access to our hearts. The compassionate coronary heart that finds joy and that means in connecting with others, and sure, your pounding bodily heart, working so hard to offer you force and power. And whilst you decide on to view stress in this method, you are now not simply getting higher at stress, you’re truly making a beautiful profound assertion. You are announcing which you can believe your self to manage life’s challenges. And you are remembering that you don’t have got to face them on my own. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: that is form of amazing, what you are telling us. It appears potent to me that a notion about stress could make a lot difference to anyone’s life expectancy. How would that extend to recommendation, like, if anybody is making a tradition alternative between, say, a worrying job and a non-traumatic job, does it subject which method they go? It can be equally shrewd to head for the disturbing job as long as you believe that you may control it, in some feel? KM: Yeah, and one thing we all know for certain is that chasing which means is best to your health than looking to avert suffering.And so i might say that is fairly the pleasant strategy to make choices, is go after what it’s that creates meaning on your existence and then believe your self to control the stress that follows. CA: thanks so much, Kelly. It is beautiful cool. (Applause) .

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batterymonster2021 · 5 years ago

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How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-make-stress-your-friend-kelly-mcgonigal-2/

How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal

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infillinfrastructure-blog · 6 years ago

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An Interview with Dr. Anant Maringanti: Director of Hyderabad Urban Lab 1/3

photo from google

I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to Dr. Anant Maringanti, the founder and director of Hyderabad Urban Lab who was kind enough to sit down with me and answer my many, many questions. Have a read of the interview below:

Q: What exactly is Hyderabad Urban Lab and what do you do in the city?

A: Hyderabad Urban Lab is a bit of a hybrid organisation that was set up initially through a sequence of conversations that came together from many different places. One set of conversations came from a series of research projects that I have been involved in since 2000. I began to think about how to understand urban transformations in the post-Fordist accumulation regimes - where large units are breaking down and the state is withdrawing from certain social spaces. What do we make of these changes? A large part of the research until 2001 was looking at how the state was slowly getting hollowed out and how policy was being driven from the top. There was very little understanding about how people were responding to any of this. So one of the things we did at that time was to set up a research project looking at cities and social and political initiatives in cities across north America; that’s US, Canada and Western Europe (Germany, Italy, France, UK) and what we were looking at was to see what kinds of new mobilisations were taking place, what kinds of new collective bargaining mechanisms were coming out. Somewhere towards the end of it, we realized that the transformations that were happening in cities were not driven by one single force but driven by many different forces and those forces changed from place to place, region to region. Then, we started organising a sequence of conferences and one of the ideas that emerged by 2012 was that we need to really have research initiatives that are embedded in particular cities and begin to theorise from the experience of that city. There’s no reason why we must be so overwhelmed by urban theories that comes from research done in a few neighborhoods around the University of Chicago. So what does it mean to do urban theory from Hyderabad? So that’s one set of conversations. But being part of Hyderabad, having grown up here there was another set of conversation that was happening amongst my friends which is that Hyderabad’s modernity is follows a different arc compared to the rest of India. Until 1948, the people in Hyderabad were all subjects to a monarch who was then an ally to the British. So, in the 50’s you begin to learn to become a citizen - what was that sensibility, who were these people, what were they thinking, what kind of institutions, what kind of sensibilities came out of that and how does that reflect in the public space? We wanted to do this because postcolonial theory until then was heavily dominated by the experience of the rest of India particularly from Bengal and we wanted to think about this question of what does it mean to think about modernity and postcoloniality from a place where the British actually never ruled. So that was another set of conversations. Then the third one was what kind of an institution should this be. This was the time when a number of attempts were being made to create new urban research institutions. We decided that it should be a very simple small urban research centre, not inside a University, because we wanted to do work with a certain rigour but we didn't want to get caught up within the time horizons and protocols of an academic institution. So I’m not worried about doing anything with unintended consequences in a place because I’m not going away so I can take risks. I may screw up but I can straighten out.

Q: So, is your aim to come up with a new theory (for this situation)?

A: Not one theory, there are a number of different kinds of theoretical work that needs to be done. There is also a need to rethink the strict modern boundaries between knowledge and theory and practice.

Q: Do you collaborate with people in architectural or urban practices?

A: We do sometimes - Partly because we need skills of a certain kind. But those collaborations can be in the form of institutional collaborations. Sometimes not. All kinds of collaborations that are concentrated in this sphere. So we engage with architects, we engage with planners quite extensively.

Q: How important do you think it is to physically test something out for your own work?

A: We don’t do that kind of design actually and a lot of things we do are small performative things. We had an intern and we were doing something on busking laws and this guy said he knew how to do busking. He just put together a band in 3 days and went out to the street and perform and document the whole experience. We do a lot of visual work, we produce short films and do an annual event in December which is basically bringing together all kinds of people ( from scrap merchants to architects to planners). Sometimes things work. Sometimes they don’t. We had an architect lead a workshop once and it was a disaster. Architects can be pretty tyrannical.

Q: What do you think of the state investing money into a metro system versus other infrastructures like the buses and the MMTS?

A: I think the horse has already bolted. We have the metro. We learn how to live with it. In 2005, before the metro was even seriously on the cards and contracts were quite some distance away, BRTS was proposed and MMTS was denied investments. I met with the officials at that time which was part of my research along the Musi River and I realized that it was all being put together very carefully, the ground was being cleared. The alternate projects were being discredited. And it was done very systematically. So at that time, I alerted a number of people but it didn’t strike anyone as a political issue at that point. A few years later when contracts were being given, DPR’s (Detailed Project Reports) were drawn, investments were planned - that was when people started objecting. By that time it was over. The logic of a lot of things in India is that: we have done this now you know we can’t roll back. So you give a contract and you can’t roll back. So the question is no longer about is this a good thing - there are a number of risks in it, there are consequences but we are already on the way to getting used to them and forgetting the point at which there was an option to say no. it's quite simple in some parts.

Q: Do you think local electoral politics played into the metro coming about at all?

A: Yes and no. What happens in these things is that most of the urban infrastructure projects are about the needs of the contractors - it’s the needs of the capital right? There is money. There is European standard gauge rail which has to be dumped somewhere. There is money to be made and so you are looking for some place or the other which just happened to be Hyderabad at one time. They thought this would go on for a while as the entire country is available for a metro, but that didn’t happen because at some point of time they realised this just does not making any sense so they rolled back now. No new metro projects are being considered in the country. So what do you do? You still have contractors who have to get contracts, who still have steel that has to be sold, and still have cement that has to be sold. So you build flyovers, you build elevated BRTs . So that’s how the structure works. Now given that kind of logic which is driven by capital, what happens is that people negotiate with it to try and figure out what they can get out of it. There is no way a particular neighborhood can stand up and say we don’t want you coming here because even cities themselves do not have that kind of power in India. We are creatures of the state government. The state/government can completely withhold elections to municipal corporations for a long time, they’re not supposed to in the constitution, but they can come up with all kinds of political reasons. The urban development secretary can veto what a municipal corporation thinks. Cities in india do not have any agency. So if cities don’t have any agency then there is no way a neighbourhood can have an agency and say that they want this or don’t want that. Therefore what happens is that you put up some resistance you go to the court or do something else and find another way of engaging and then you negotiate. You know I can delay your investment by 5 days which means that you are going to lose so much money. I can’t stop you but I can do this to you so you better negotiate. That is one part of the dynamics and that happens with all the politicians. The other thing that is important to keep in mind is that municipal corporators actually don’t have any agency. Within the hierarchy, it is the MP’s, below them the MLA’s and then below them the corporators. That’s how it works because municipal corporators are all members of different political parties and in the hierarchy they are the smallest of the fish. So institutionally the municipal corporation has no agency. It’s a creature of the state government. and politically corporators are those lowest in the hierarchy within any given party so they really don’t have any ability to do anything except create some obstacles, hurdles, delays.

Q: Is there any will to do that though - in Hyderabad? Did the city or the municipal corporation try to resist it?

A: The current MD of the metro rail, NVS Reddy, was additional commissioner of transportation in the municipal corporation at the time when BRT was being considered - at the time when MMTS was asking for new investments. Reddy was the man who was instrumental in saying no.

Q: This is a PPP model. L&T is going to be running the project and they are getting land from the government for it. What profit does the government or the state government gain from the metro project?

A: I don't think anyone makes any profit on this. L&T is not going to make any profit from the corporation of the metro.

Q: But they are building shopping malls - commercial space on the land they are given?

A: Extra change. They’re just lining their pockets a little bit. The amount of money that has gone into the building of the metro - the delays, and therefore the financial burdens, are humongous. That’s all being paid by us through secondary channels. The government pays the bills. The government is not going to get anything out of it and the people are not going to get anything out of it.

Q: So then what’s the incentive to build the metro in the first place?

A: The incentive to build this is of two kinds. One is that metro for a lot of cities is an image builder. So if you have a metro, you’re a world class city. The second incentive is that infrastructures of this kind involve a lot of contracts - involve a lot of other kinds of favours that have nothing to do with the actual technology and actual project itself. So there's a lot of trading that happens in that. You do this - I’ll do that for you. Quid pro quo. There's quite a lot of that. But the bigger thing is that you have one mall...next to that there will be another mall and next to that there will be another mall. And there are people who want those things. The time for saying that the metro is going to be a burden for the city it's bringing in a lot of risk - that time is gone. What's going to happen now, once the other lines are also completed is that quite a few people will actually like the metro. The first people to like the metro will be people who like it just for the novelty - who like it because it has air conditioned coaches. Who like it for the fact that it gives you amazing views of the city because it is elevated. There will be some people who will be getting into it because it cuts travel time and other options have been marginalised. If you look at the map that you have, the metro has actually come up on the roads that the Road Transport Corporation is making the maximum money. Now how are you going to get people to board the metro. You’re not going to get them off of cars and into the metro. You’re going to move them out of buses into the metro. This is not a new public transit system. It’s a public transit system that’s going to feed on the entrails of an existing public transit system which is functional. So that's one of the things that is going to happen. So who benefits from this? This is a bit of a smoke and mirrors operation and this is a bit of a mystery. You don't take something like 10 years to build a railway line in the middle of a city and still be able to make profits. You’ve already lost it. Why are you going on? Where are the books? What kind of auditing is going on? That's all a mystery. So we don’t know. My own guess is that there are a lot of contracts that the government pays for. Its being paid for from the exchequer. Its public money. We will count some of it as part of the government's investment in it. You’ll count some of it in some other way. But basically we’re paying for it. So it's not an independent money making operation. It cannot be. Metros have never done that anywhere in the world. How can you have an exception in Hyderabad? There was a promise of an exception at one point which was the first contractor for the metro - Maytas. But Maytas story was different. They were going to do this like the city boosters did in the US which is that I have a street car and my street car can go up to some area where i am sitting on a lot of land there. And I’m going to build a new town there. No agency is going to make my money from that. And those people are going to travel to the city using this. I'm not going to make money from this - I’m going to make money from the new townships i'm going to build. Whether or not that would have worked, we don't know. What we do know is that they had the land. They had the land and so they said we don’t even want the government to give us any money. We’ll do this by ourselves. Their problem was that they didn’t have liquid cash. They had land. They didn’t have money. Satyam had money. And they were trying to build the two together. And it collapsed.

Q: Now that it’s getting built, how is daily life affected and what is the public’s attitude towards the project as it stands now?

A: It’s hard to tell. I don’t think that public life has been affected a whole lot in terms of ridership. I know Harsha (a previous member of the HUL team) was always excited about anything new happening in the city. He’s constantly climbing up hills, elevated views, looking for all kinds of views… He’s never disappointed by anything in the city. He’s very excited by the metro. He said I’ve never seen the city from that particular vantage point. Zooming through buildings on both sides from that high means that i get a very different view. And then there are people who take picnics in the metro. It's nice, cool. It’s like street kids go and sit in cinema theatres. Not because they are necessarily enjoying the cinema but its cool. In the summer, the air conditioning is nice. There's a lot of people who go and sit in ATM’s because they are air conditioned. It’s nice. So there’s that kind of thing. A lot of novelty riding. There is definitely some population that is using the metro to get to work. It’s not that it is not there. But i don't think it is anything significant at this point in time to make any claims. The construction of the metro has created a lot of obstructions. Construction of the metro has resulted in land and existing infrastructure in several locations being completely dislocated. The construction of the metro and the metro stations has created traffic hazards. Some of it because of the design of the landings. Some of it because of its just an obstruction.

Q: There have been times where I’ve seen a pillar right in the middle of the road.

A: Actually there’s been a terrible car accident in which one guy died.

Q: From what you were saying earlier, you weren't aware of where the people who were displaced by the metro might have been relocated?

A: So there should be a study in CESS on metro related relocations. It was done by Arun Patnaik who is now a professor in the University of Hyderabad. He actually did interviews with people who were going to be relocated. The only study I know of that was looking at relocations because of the metro. I think it was an IDS funded study. I’m not sure. But there were a number of studies on different sectors within a short period of time largely done by political science people. So Arun Patnaik is the man you should ask. You might be able to get some data from that.

Q: Great. More generally and more in line with my own work, do you know of any examples of the metro being resisted in different forms or adapted locally?

A: The only resistance was in Sultan Bazar and then Ameerpet. Both of them basically because of Ramachandraiah. He was the man that was going around bringing people together and they sailed with him for as long as they thought it would be useful. And Ramachandraiah’s other form of resistance was buried into the court.

Q: At a policy level how has it been possible to create this kind of infrastructure? What urban policy exists for this to be allowed?

A: There’s not a single policy. It’s a number of different policies made at different times which changed the culture of regulation. And its that culture of regulation that is crafted in the last 20 years which makes this possible. So one of the things that began to happen in the mid 90’s was an enormous concentration of power in the hands of the chief minister. That’s true for most metro cities now. Except that in Bombay, they MMRDA chief is of the same rank as the chief secretary which is pretty high level rank. And MMRDA has its own money. And it holds on to it very tightly. They can give loans to municipalities. Powerful organisation. But even they have been tempted to do signature infrastructure projects. So during my time I want to see the ceiling road to be built… during my time i want that BKC to be built. That kind of thing. In Hyderabad, HUDA and HMDA were never very powerful. They never had money. HUDA made money between 95 and 2004 through land sales. And then they lost everything after 2005 for two reasons. One is the shifting of the HUDA office from its main office which is where the US Consulate now is. When the US Consulate moved in, they said they want a place and the government said ok and kicked out the urban planning authority. And that was a bad time. But people downplayed that. They committed to the construction of the outer ring road which basically ate up all their money. They shouldn't have agreed to it. But the chief minister said you do this and they said ok. So the chief ministers office is where all the decisions are taken on all matters including big infrastructure decisions in the city. And the only form of resistance that is possible is to go to the court and create delays. Then they sometimes back off because it’s getting delayed, there’s too many distractions... we’ll deal with this later. But they come back in some form.

In terms of overall urban discourse, 1996 was the time when the first India Infrastructure Report was published and that India Infrastructure Report focuses a lot on urban infrastructure for ensuring high growth rates and that was also the time it began to break away from the earlier structure within which all these things had to get planning commission allocations, that broke off so it was possible for people to go to the market for money. That was then again reinforced in the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. Municipal corporations were constantly pushed to raise their own revenues and aso look to the market for capital funds, they never succeeded getting any money from the market sometimes they attempted to get bank loans but that also didn’t work very well, in hyderabad 2014 municipal corporation tried to mortgage lands to get about 600 crores and no bank was willing to take the lands and the old heritage buildings, they tried to mortgage Moazzam Jahi Market.

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swipestream · 7 years ago

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Sensor Sweep: Dungeon Fantasy, Infinity War, Saber & Blood, Halo for Hire

RPG (Walker’s Retreat): “Geek Gab Game Night is irregular these days, but worth it when it happens. It happened today, and Dorrinal hosts both Douglas Cole and Sean Punch (“Dr. Kromm”) to talk about their new hotness:

Sean Punch, also known as Dr. Kromm, works for Steve Jackson Games. He joins us along with our old friend Douglas Cole to talk about Dungeon Fantasy RPG and Cole’s new adventure for the setting, Hall of Judgment!

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Well hit the button below and settle in for an episode of tabletop gaming fun.”

Writing (Erindor Press): “The most important thing you’ll do for your story is to get the details right. Spending time on research is every bit as important as writing the prose. Why? Because research is writing. If you’re an independent author who creates your own deadlines, you may want to rethink some things…

Your daily word-count goal is killing you (AKA “An odd place to begin this article, but trust me…”)

I hear the collective gasp! coming from the peanut gallery, believe me. But, I’ve also seen you all on social media, constantly bemoaning that you’re not making your daily word-count quotas, as if something mystical happens when you reach 2000 words.”

Cinema (RMWC Reviews): “Since Infinity War hits very, very soon, the thing to do seems to be to make a survey of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. So yeah, time to rank the movies according to my own arcane standards. Do note that even if I drop a movie somewhere down at the bottom, that doesn’t mean its not entertaining or competently made. I’d rather watch The Incredible Hulk again instead of Electra or X-Men Origins: Wolverineever again.”

Writing (Rawle Nyanzi): “A few days ago, I wrote a post detailing the far-left bias in traditional publishing; this bias is so pervasive that anyone even slightly non-extreme leftist must go indie to have a career at all. Now, from the UK, we have a report (archive) that stories about traditional masculinity will be avoided.

The reasoning given is that such men are dangerous to women, and thus the publishers must motivate boys to be safe and non-sexual; #MeToo and #TimesUp are cited as inspirations for this new direction.”

RPG (RPG Pundit): “In this week’s session, the PCs faced a trio of challenges in the town of Tombstone. Also, Doc Holliday finally got to town, just in time to stop a scumbag called Johnny Tyler from taking a shot at Wyatt Earp (and Jackson, who was chatting with him outside the oriental) with a shotgun!”

Gaming (Table Top Gaming News): “Central Europe. 1600s. The different states within the Holy Roman Empire are regularly fighting against one-another. There’s plenty of opportunity for those that want to make war their business to ply their trade. That’s where you find yourself in Saber & Blood, a new card-driven board game that’s up on Kickstarter now.

From the campaign:

It’s the grim 17th century Middle Europe! A time full of war, lust, blood and glory! Become an ataman of a Zaporozhian Cossack’s band, or lead a group of cunning Polish Nobles in a brawl of vicious fencing combat! Saber & Blood is a card driven board game with unique fencing dice mechanics for 2-4* players (* with unlocked expansions).”

Manga (Pulp Rev): “The age of the warring states is over, and all of Japan is unified under the Tokugawa Shogunate. But the shadow of the Sengoku jidai still casts a pallor over the nation. Disgraced samurai and poor peasants turn to banditry and crime, and ninja stalk the shadows and untamed hills. Sword schools across the country battle to demonstrate their supremacy. The age of peace may have come, but it is still the age of the sword. It is still the age of samurai.”

Magazines (Altus Press): “Black Mask (Spring 2018)$4.99 – $14.95

by Robb T. White, Jonathan Sheppard, Richard Billingsley, J.D. Graves, Brian Townsley, J. Allan Dunn, Paul Ernst, Dan Cushman, Frederick Nebel, and H. Bedford-Jones

Black Mask, the greatest American detective magazine of all time, is back with another issue featuring five all-new stories, plus vintage har

d-boiled classics from the pulp era of the 1930s-40s. And it includes a never-before published cover by James Lunnon, painted for Black Mask in 1940.”

Fiction (P. J. Thorndyke): “Firmly in the Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition of sword and sorcery adventures on Mars, Leigh Brackett flips the John Carter story on its head by making her

hero, Matthew Carse, an interplanetary archaeologist in the distant future who, through some mystical force, is transported millions of years into the past. The Mars he winds up in is vastly different from the dusty world of dry sea beds and ruined cities he knows. Here, the seas of Mars are brimming and roamed by slave galleys while the empire of Sark and the realm of the Sea-Kings are locked in an uneasy stalemate.”

Magazines (Broadswords and Blasters): “Issue 5 of Broadswords and Blasters Available Now!

That’s right, year two of the indie magazine officially started last week with the release of issue 5. And, while we love all of our little mutant babies, we feel especially proud of this issue. So what will you find inside Issue 5? ‘After War’: A retelling of the African tale of Yennenga of Burkina Faso by Alison McBain. Irini’: A princess is caught in the middle of a palace coup, and discovers more about her family than she ever realized. An excellent slipstream fantasy by Aaron Emmel.”

Pulp Fiction Reprints (Haffner Press): “Of all of Raymond Chandler’s followers, the most Chandlerish of them all might have been Howard Browne. His private eye hero, PAUL PINE, is simply one of the great eyes, no matter how inspired by (or derivative of ) Chandler’s Philip Marlowe he might have been. All the Pine books are well worth reading, and A Taste of Ashes (1957) in particular is just a flat-out, stone-cold private eye classic. Pine is a former investigator for the Illinois State attorney’s office in Chicago who works as a P.I. in Chicago. He’s got the obligatory cynicism, snappy similes and metaphors down pat, though he tends to be a bit more down to earth than Marlowe, and often mocks his own tendencies to moroseness and world-weariness.”

Sensor Sweep: Dungeon Fantasy, Infinity War, Saber & Blood, Halo for Hire published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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southeastblog · 7 years ago

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How I built a multimillion naira business in a wheelchair –Nnoruga, entrepreneur

Stanley Nnoruga is the Chief Executive Officer of Stanzo Collections, a fashion importation company based in Lagos. Confined to the wheelchair as a teenager, he told Eric Dumo how he has managed to fulfill his childhood dreams despite his disability

You were not born with disability, how did you end up in a wheelchair?

I was born and raised like every other normal child in the society. At the time of my birth and several years after then, I had no disability. But it was around 2003 while in secondary school that I began experiencing difficulty in moving my legs.

What was the cause of this difficulty and how did this affect your development, especially education?

I was later told that I had Muscular Dystrophy, a disease that results in increasing weakening and breakdown of skeletal muscles, leaving sufferers without the ability to walk. The news came to me like a bomb.

The condition indeed affected my growing up in many ways as a young boy, especially in the aspect that I could no longer play well with friends the way I used to. I loved playing football, attending parties, participating in church activities and also dancing, I couldn’t do any of those anymore. It was a painful transition for me because my life completely changed.

But because the situation wasn’t as bad then as it is now, I had no problem going on with my education. I graduated from the university in 2012 and proceeded for my National Youth Service Corps Programme the following year.

Apart from that, I have certificate in Java and C# programming languages which I acquired during my industrial training. This has gone a long way to help me in life today.

Even though you are into importation business today, what dreams did you nurse as a child?

I wanted to be a mechanical engineer but after I lost my ability to walk, I had to have a rethink and decide on going for a computer-related course. This choice was based on the fact that I needed a career path where I wouldn’t encounter too much difficulty as a result of my disability. I wanted something I could sit at home and do, that was the reason why I decided on this. I thank God today that decision had paid off.

Did you experience any sort of deprivation as a child?

The only form of deprivation I can say I experienced while growing up was the fact that my condition denied me the privilege of going on school excursions with fellow students. But aside this, I would say there was no deprivation.

I was raised in the Ogba area of Lagos and childhood was fun for me. Until I lost my ability to walk and became isolated from many of my friends, it was really interesting growing up. But after that incident, I was forced to spend most of my time indoors.

Even though my parents were strict, they treated me with love and never discriminated against me. Also, they made us fight for our own success in life despite their relative wealth. We were never pampered, so we appreciated everything that came our way through hard work. It was this training that has helped me to become the man I am today.

But then on a personal level, I have had to deal with a lot of stigma from the public. As a matter of fact, I have been turned down on several occasions while trying to look for work as a result of my condition. I have been able to handle all of these through the grace of God. I am no longer ashamed to go out because I know and believe that God has a purpose for me.

Have there been times when people tried to take advantage of you as a result of your physical condition?

I experience this a lot. In fact on several occasions while driving on the road, people who hit my car drive off after realising that I cannot walk. They know that I cannot come down from my car to confront them, so they simply drive off without even apologising to me. There are several instances apart from this.

You run a thriving importation business today, how did you get into it?

I have always wanted a business I could do right from my room and make good cash as a result of my disability. I came into the business in 2012 after graduating from the Anambra State University. I realised that with my condition, working for someone else would throw a lot of challenges on my path and make my life more difficult. There are hardly facilities in our society for people living with disabilities, this and other factors I considered before arriving at my decision.

So, I decided to start a small business from home and be my own little boss. I spent several nights doing research on what to do with my NYSC allowance. One day, I stumbled on an idea on the Internet on how to import certain items with small capital. So, with my small allowance, I followed the idea step by step and successfully imported 15 pairs of female wristwatches which were new in Nigeria at the time. This was in February 2014. I sold all the wristwatches almost immediately and made more than 100 per cent profit. I thereafter used both the profit and capital and imported more of the items, the result was amazing.

After several months of importing wristwatches, I added female handbags, before I knew what was happening, money was all over me. This was how my company and brand was founded.

So, what have been some of the biggest challenges running a business of this magnitude in a wheelchair?

It has not been an easy experience, I must confess. Without the help of my brothers and some friends that always assist me in going to the airport to clear my goods and also helping to arrange them at my warehouse, I wouldn’t have come this far. A lot of times they are the ones who help me attend to clients.

There are several other challenges but through the grace of God and my knowledge of online marketing, it has not been difficult selling my ware on and offline.

You recently got married, how did you meet your wife and how were you able to convince her to marry you?

I met my wife in December 2015 when she saw off her brother to a party in my compound. Later that day, she came to our flat to charge her phone and so from there, we got talking. I was seated then, so she didn’t know that I had issues with walking. One day in February 2016, she decided to come and pay me a visit; that was when she realised I couldn’t walk. She wept but summoned the courage to stick with me after I explained that I wasn’t born that way.

However, when I told her I wanted to marry her, it became a bit tough. But despite reservations from her family members, she later accepted to marry me. I look back today and I am grateful to God for bringing her into my life. She has not only brought sunshine into my life, she has also given me a million reasons to approach each day with renewed hope and vigour in life.

There are many people living with disabilities in Nigeria today who think that is the end of life, how can such persons make the best out of their situations?

For such persons, I would say they should look no further if they require any proof that God can make anything possible in life. As an individual, I have never allowed my disability to limit my aspirations in life; instead I have allowed it to be my driving force.

I know there are so many odds against people living with disabilities in Nigeria, they must not be intimidated by these challenges but instead use that to push towards success in every aspect of life.

How do you think the society can make life better for people with special needs?

The truth is that people with disabilities are largely on their own in this part of the world. Government over the years has hardly done anything tangible to make life easier for persons in this category.

However, one of the ways I think this can improve is if government can mandate all public and private firms especially banks and other government offices to create access ramps for those of us in wheelchair. Also, firms must be mandated to employ one or two persons with disability. This way, we’ll be able to provide equal opportunities for all and make the society a better place.

What would you say are some of the biggest lessons disability has taught you?

Disability has taught me how to buy goods from China and to my warehouse right from my bed. It has taught me how to build something from nothing.

Also, I have been able to broaden my knowledge of e-Commerce and importation as a result of my disability. Maybe if I hadn’t been in a wheelchair, I could have been working for someone else and never find fulfilment in life. But because God destined it this way, I am finding fulfilment in everything I do and adding value to the society. I am grateful to God for where He is still taking me to.

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lightningmount-blog · 7 years ago

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IMPACT 17

It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books.

The majestic history of the name of the trees(Robert Laffont, 2017) is a book in the times learned and entertaining, work coupled with a renowned linguist, Henriette Walter, and of a passionate of the natural sciences and of etymology, Pierre Avenas. This is not the first time that they work together: they have written on the name of the fish and other names of birds. You learn a lot and often in a playful way, with riddles. Did you know that many of our family names come from a name of tree? That in Latin or Greek, the names of the trees are almost all female, and that only the French have fully masculinisés? Because there is a labor and labor. No need to return the land to 40 centimeters in depth. A tool called “étrille harrow” allows for example to uproot the weeds, even in the middle of the crops already in place, only 2 centimeters in depth. Another technique is the “direct seeding under cover”, which is to implement a culture directly in a vegetative cover (which stifles the unwanted herbs, relaxs the earth and can be destroyed just before the seedlings by freezing or by a roll crusher, which avoids the use of herbicides). It enables the use of tractors less powerful, to reduce the number of passages in the fields, which reduces fuel consumption, and use less fertilizer, explain the agronomists Lydia and Claude Bourguignon in their manifesto for a sustainable agriculture (Southern Acts, 2017). And to add: “Cultivate then becomes complex but fascinating: complex because it is necessary to forget everything that is taught in agricultural high schools, but exciting because it must rethink and create another approach to agriculture.” The idea is to observe the nature and work with it rather than against it. Rather than consider the soil as an inert carrier to flood the envi of fertilizer and herbicides petrochemicals, it must use its “agronomic value”, its insects, its bacteria, its toward Earth. Avoid monoculture, promote the rotations. Carbon balance sheet Then, out of glyphosate, point of salvation? Will it really choose between this molecule and another, equally harmful? Choose between her or tillage? No, respond more and more farmers and agronomists. Of the solutions already exist, which come out of these diagrams binaries. Simply, they assume to rethink the agricultural model. Many NGOS, such as Greenpeace, have tried to alert the authorities. In vain. Studies are conducted with the rural populations of Argentina the victims of the “sojisation” and doctors accumulate the evidence. Has the force of perseverance, mothers of Ituzaingó, in the province of Córdoba, have succeeded in 2008 to prohibit the pesticide applications to less than 500 meters from the village and less than 1 500 by air. Four years after, if y is held a trial where, for the first time, the spreading of pesticide has been considered as a criminal offense. “There is no provincial legislation, this Are municipal ordinances which govern the limits of application of pesticides. It is therefore up to each municipality to regulate,” says Christine Seghezzi. On 2 August, the Ministers of the Environment and of the Agro-industry have made part of a draft resolution which determines the minimum distances recommended: 200 meters by air, 100 meters by land. The safety distances, ridiculous. In Buenos Aires, the application of pesticides in the parks and gardens is prohibited. In the province of San Luis, in the center of the country, a law of 2016 prohibits to spread the glyphosate and other herbicides to less than 1 500 m of urban centers and less than 300 m from any home. But the application decree has never been published. “There is no alternative”, proclaimed Margaret Thatcher to defend its neoliberal policy. Thirty years later, the pro-glyphosate play the same partition. “There is no alternative”, repeated-they in a loop, then that the experts of the Member States of the European Union must vote on Wednesday, after several postponements, for or against the renewal for a period of “five to seven years” of the authorization of the pesticide most used in the world (it enters in the composition of several hundreds of products, including the herbicide Roundup of Monsanto). The industry within the European Working Group on glyphosate (Glyphosate Task Force or GTF, a consortium whose aim is to “combine their resources and their efforts” in order to obtain this renewal), continue to argue that “The Glyphosate does not pose a risk to human health”. While it has been classified “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. But the argument holds less and less. The NGO Global 2000 has revealed in September that a large part of the report of the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BFR), on which are based the two European agencies for the assessment of pesticides (the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency) to declare the glyphosate not carcinogenic was in fact a copied and pasted from a study published by Monsanto in 2012 Use prohibited in Sri Lanka In 2015, the Sri Lanka, a great producer of tea and rice, became the first country to prohibit the glyphosate, on directive of the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. “He explained that “the herbicide was responsible for a growing number of patients suffering from a chronic disease Renal impairment affecting 15 per cent of the population of working age in the regions of the North”, and which has already “killed 20,000 people,” writes Marie-Monique Robin. The first case was identified in 1994. And then from the years 2000, this was a real epidemic.” In an interview broadcast in 2016 by Reporterre, Channa Jayasumana, researcher in environmental health at the University of Rajarata in Sri Lanka, explains: “The Epidemiological study, clinical biochemical and confirms that there is a very strong link between the glyphosate and the disease.” Combined with a water rich in calcium and containing metals such as arsenic present in the soil, glyphosate is transformed into a stripper, and becomes very toxic to the kidneys. That is what is happening when the peasants drink the water from their wells. That is why “the government has decided to ban the import, distribution, sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicide in Sri Lanka,” continues Jayasumana. Despite the pressures of Monsanto, the decision is maintained. And elsewhere? In the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, where “the authorities have registered an epidemic of chronic disease Renal rice farmers”, but also “in the coastal regions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, where glyphosate is sprayed in the fields of sugar cane,” says Robin. Furthermore, “El Salvador has voted the prohibition of 53 chemical pesticides and fertilizers containing heavy metals such as glyphosate “. “Green fertilizers”. With its 90 hectares of land (30 hectares of permanent grassland natural, 40 hectares of temporary prairies in which he sows different cultures alternately and 20 hectares of permanent crops), Vivien Grandin, 39 years, account among the seven farm operators in Montravers, village of 400 inhabitants of the Deux-Sèvres. After a BTS “animal productions” and then a master in ecology and finally a DEA “Soil Science”, the breeder-polyculteur, as it defines itself, has chosen to work only after eight years in agricultural grouping of exploitation in common (GAEC). By stopping to buy the expensive inputs, Vivien Grandin fact of economies. “But working a little more of the soil, particularly in the plowing, yet the least often and the less deeply possible, I enhances a little my loads of mechanization” in material and fuel, said the farmer. Consequence of this orientation: “It has led me to break my More the head. Fortunately, I exchange with members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and the network conservation agriculture.” It is as well that it has adopted the rotation of cultures: “Between the wheat and sunflower successively in a same plot, I uses green fertilizers.” is a set of live plants that he has chosen and that nourish the earth, the structure and contain the weeds. In so doing, the more need to use of glyphosate.It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books. The majestic history of the name of the trees(Robert Laffont, 2017) is a book in the times learned and entertaining, work coupled with a renowned linguist, Henriette Walter, and of a passionate of the natural sciences and of etymology, Pierre Avenas. This is not the first time that they work together: they have written on the name of the fish and other names of birds. You learn a lot and often in a playful way, with riddles. Did you know that many of our family names come from a name of tree? That in Latin or Greek, the names of the trees are almost all female, and that only the French have fully masculinisés? Because there is a labor and labor. No need to return the land to 40 centimeters in depth. A tool called “étrille harrow” allows for example to uproot the weeds, even in the middle of the crops already in place, only 2 centimeters in depth. Another technique is the “direct seeding under cover”, which is to implement a culture directly in a vegetative cover (which stifles the unwanted herbs, relaxs the earth and can be destroyed just before the seedlings by freezing or by a roll crusher, which avoids the use of herbicides). It enables the use of tractors less powerful, to reduce the number of passages in the fields, which reduces fuel consumption, and use less fertilizer, explain the agronomists Lydia and Claude Bourguignon in their manifesto for a sustainable agriculture (Southern Acts, 2017). And to add: “Cultivate then becomes complex but fascinating: complex because it is necessary to forget everything that is taught in agricultural high schools, but exciting because it must rethink and create another approach to agriculture.” The idea is to observe the nature and work with it rather than against it. Rather than consider the soil as an inert carrier to flood the envi of fertilizer and herbicides petrochemicals, it must use its “agronomic value”, its insects, its bacteria, its toward Earth. Avoid monoculture, promote the rotations. Carbon balance sheet Then, out of glyphosate, point of salvation? Will it really choose between this molecule and another, equally harmful? Choose between her or tillage? No, respond more and more farmers and agronomists. Of the solutions already exist, which come out of these diagrams binaries. Simply, they assume to rethink the agricultural model. Many NGOS, such as Greenpeace, have tried to alert the authorities. In vain. Studies are conducted with the rural populations of Argentina the victims of the “sojisation” and doctors accumulate the evidence. Has the force of perseverance, mothers of Ituzaingó, in the province of Córdoba, have succeeded in 2008 to prohibit the pesticide applications to less than 500 meters from the village and less than 1 500 by air. Four years after, if y is held a trial where, for the first time, the spreading of pesticide has been considered as a criminal offense. “There is no provincial legislation, this Are municipal ordinances which govern the limits of application of pesticides. It is therefore up to each municipality to regulate,” says Christine Seghezzi. On 2 August, the Ministers of the Environment and of the Agro-industry have made part of a draft resolution which determines the minimum distances recommended: 200 meters by air, 100 meters by land. The safety distances, ridiculous. In Buenos Aires, the application of pesticides in the parks and gardens is prohibited. In the province of San Luis, in the center of the country, a law of 2016 prohibits to spread the glyphosate and other herbicides to less than 1 500 m of urban centers and less than 300 m from any home. But the application decree has never been published. “There is no alternative”, proclaimed Margaret Thatcher to defend its neoliberal policy. Thirty years later, the pro-glyphosate play the same partition. “There is no alternative”, repeated-they in a loop, then that the experts of the Member States of the European Union must vote on Wednesday, after several postponements, for or against the renewal for a period of “five to seven years” of the authorization of the pesticide most used in the world (it enters in the composition of several hundreds of products, including the herbicide Roundup of Monsanto). The industry within the European Working Group on glyphosate (Glyphosate Task Force or GTF, a consortium whose aim is to “combine their resources and their efforts” in order to obtain this renewal), continue to argue that “The Glyphosate does not pose a risk to human health”. While it has been classified “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. But the argument holds less and less. The NGO Global 2000 has revealed in September that a large part of the report of the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BFR), on which are based the two European agencies for the assessment of pesticides (the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency) to declare the glyphosate not carcinogenic was in fact a copied and pasted from a study published by Monsanto in 2012 Use prohibited in Sri Lanka In 2015, the Sri Lanka, a great producer of tea and rice, became the first country to prohibit the glyphosate, on directive of the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. “He explained that “the herbicide was responsible for a growing number of patients suffering from a chronic disease Renal impairment affecting 15 per cent of the population of working age in the regions of the North”, and which has already “killed 20,000 people,” writes Marie-Monique Robin. The first case was identified in 1994. And then from the years 2000, this was a real epidemic.” In an interview broadcast in 2016 by Reporterre, Channa Jayasumana, researcher in environmental health at the University of Rajarata in Sri Lanka, explains: “The Epidemiological study, clinical biochemical and confirms that there is a very strong link between the glyphosate and the disease.” Combined with a water rich in calcium and containing metals such as arsenic present in the soil, glyphosate is transformed into a stripper, and becomes very toxic to the kidneys. That is what is happening when the peasants drink the water from their wells. That is why “the government has decided to ban the import, distribution, sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicide in Sri Lanka,” continues Jayasumana. Despite the pressures of Monsanto, the decision is maintained. And elsewhere? In the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, where “the authorities have registered an epidemic of chronic disease Renal rice farmers”, but also “in the coastal regions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, where glyphosate is sprayed in the fields of sugar cane,” says Robin. Furthermore, “El Salvador has voted the prohibition of 53 chemical pesticides and fertilizers containing heavy metals such as glyphosate “. “Green fertilizers”. With its 90 hectares of land (30 hectares of permanent grassland natural, 40 hectares of temporary prairies in which he sows different cultures alternately and 20 hectares of permanent crops), Vivien Grandin, 39 years, account among the seven farm operators in Montravers, village of 400 inhabitants of the Deux-Sèvres. After a BTS “animal productions” and then a master in ecology and finally a DEA “Soil Science”, the breeder-polyculteur, as it defines itself, has chosen to work only after eight years in agricultural grouping of exploitation in common (GAEC). By stopping to buy the expensive inputs, Vivien Grandin fact of economies. “But working a little more of the soil, particularly in the plowing, yet the least often and the less deeply possible, I enhances a little my loads of mechanization” in material and fuel, said the farmer. Consequence of this orientation: “It has led me to break my More the head. Fortunately, I exchange with members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and the network conservation agriculture.” It is as well that it has adopted the rotation of cultures: “Between the wheat and sunflower successively in a same plot, I uses green fertilizers.” is a set of live plants that he has chosen and that nourish the earth, the structure and contain the weeds. In so doing, the more need to use of glyphosate.It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books. The majestic history of the name of the trees(Robert Laffont, 2017) is a book in the times learned and entertaining, work coupled with a renowned linguist, Henriette Walter, and of a passionate of the natural sciences and of etymology, Pierre Avenas. This is not the first time that they work together: they have written on the name of the fish and other names of birds. You learn a lot and often in a playful way, with riddles. Did you know that many of our family names come from a name of tree? That in Latin or Greek, the names of the trees are almost all female, and that only the French have fully masculinisés? Because there is a labor and labor. No need to return the land to 40 centimeters in depth. A tool called “étrille harrow” allows for example to uproot the weeds, even in the middle of the crops already in place, only 2 centimeters in depth. Another technique is the “direct seeding under cover”, which is to implement a culture directly in a vegetative cover (which stifles the unwanted herbs, relaxs the earth and can be destroyed just before the seedlings by freezing or by a roll crusher, which avoids the use of herbicides). It enables the use of tractors less powerful, to reduce the number of passages in the fields, which reduces fuel consumption, and use less fertilizer, explain the agronomists Lydia and Claude Bourguignon in their manifesto for a sustainable agriculture (Southern Acts, 2017). And to add: “Cultivate then becomes complex but fascinating: complex because it is necessary to forget everything that is taught in agricultural high schools, but exciting because it must rethink and create another approach to agriculture.” The idea is to observe the nature and work with it rather than against it. Rather than consider the soil as an inert carrier to flood the envi of fertilizer and herbicides petrochemicals, it must use its “agronomic value”, its insects, its bacteria, its toward Earth. Avoid monoculture, promote the rotations. Carbon balance sheet Then, out of glyphosate, point of salvation? Will it really choose between this molecule and another, equally harmful? Choose between her or tillage? No, respond more and more farmers and agronomists. Of the solutions already exist, which come out of these diagrams binaries. Simply, they assume to rethink the agricultural model. Many NGOS, such as Greenpeace, have tried to alert the authorities. In vain. Studies are conducted with the rural populations of Argentina the victims of the “sojisation” and doctors accumulate the evidence. Has the force of perseverance, mothers of Ituzaingó, in the province of Córdoba, have succeeded in 2008 to prohibit the pesticide applications to less than 500 meters from the village and less than 1 500 by air. Four years after, if y is held a trial where, for the first time, the spreading of pesticide has been considered as a criminal offense. “There is no provincial legislation, this Are municipal ordinances which govern the limits of application of pesticides. It is therefore up to each municipality to regulate,” says Christine Seghezzi. On 2 August, the Ministers of the Environment and of the Agro-industry have made part of a draft resolution which determines the minimum distances recommended: 200 meters by air, 100 meters by land. The safety distances, ridiculous. In Buenos Aires, the application of pesticides in the parks and gardens is prohibited. In the province of San Luis, in the center of the country, a law of 2016 prohibits to spread the glyphosate and other herbicides to less than 1 500 m of urban centers and less than 300 m from any home. But the application decree has never been published. “There is no alternative”, proclaimed Margaret Thatcher to defend its neoliberal policy. Thirty years later, the pro-glyphosate play the same partition. “There is no alternative”, repeated-they in a loop, then that the experts of the Member States of the European Union must vote on Wednesday, after several postponements, for or against the renewal for a period of “five to seven years” of the authorization of the pesticide most used in the world (it enters in the composition of several hundreds of products, including the herbicide Roundup of Monsanto). The industry within the European Working Group on glyphosate (Glyphosate Task Force or GTF, a consortium whose aim is to “combine their resources and their efforts” in order to obtain this renewal), continue to argue that “The Glyphosate does not pose a risk to human health”. While it has been classified “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. But the argument holds less and less. The NGO Global 2000 has revealed in September that a large part of the report of the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BFR), on which are based the two European agencies for the assessment of pesticides (the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency) to declare the glyphosate not carcinogenic was in fact a copied and pasted from a study published by Monsanto in 2012 Use prohibited in Sri Lanka In 2015, the Sri Lanka, a great producer of tea and rice, became the first country to prohibit the glyphosate, on directive of the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. “He explained that “the herbicide was responsible for a growing number of patients suffering from a chronic disease Renal impairment affecting 15 per cent of the population of working age in the regions of the North”, and which has already “killed 20,000 people,” writes Marie-Monique Robin. The first case was identified in 1994. And then from the years 2000, this was a real epidemic.” In an interview broadcast in 2016 by Reporterre, Channa Jayasumana, researcher in environmental health at the University of Rajarata in Sri Lanka, explains: “The Epidemiological study, clinical biochemical and confirms that there is a very strong link between the glyphosate and the disease.” Combined with a water rich in calcium and containing metals such as arsenic present in the soil, glyphosate is transformed into a stripper, and becomes very toxic to the kidneys. That is what is happening when the peasants drink the water from their wells. That is why “the government has decided to ban the import, distribution, sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicide in Sri Lanka,” continues Jayasumana. Despite the pressures of Monsanto, the decision is maintained. And elsewhere? In the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, where “the authorities have registered an epidemic of chronic disease Renal rice farmers”, but also “in the coastal regions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, where glyphosate is sprayed in the fields of sugar cane,” says Robin. Furthermore, “El Salvador has voted the prohibition of 53 chemical pesticides and fertilizers containing heavy metals such as glyphosate “. “Green fertilizers”. With its 90 hectares of land (30 hectares of permanent grassland natural, 40 hectares of temporary prairies in which he sows different cultures alternately and 20 hectares of permanent crops), Vivien Grandin, 39 years, account among the seven farm operators in Montravers, village of 400 inhabitants of the Deux-Sèvres. After a BTS “animal productions” and then a master in ecology and finally a DEA “Soil Science”, the breeder-polyculteur, as it defines itself, has chosen to work only after eight years in agricultural grouping of exploitation in common (GAEC). By stopping to buy the expensive inputs, Vivien Grandin fact of economies. “But working a little more of the soil, particularly in the plowing, yet the least often and the less deeply possible, I enhances a little my loads of mechanization” in material and fuel, said the farmer. Consequence of this orientation: “It has led me to break my More the head. Fortunately, I exchange with members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and the network conservation agriculture.” It is as well that it has adopted the rotation of cultures: “Between the wheat and sunflower successively in a same plot, I uses green fertilizers.” is a set of live plants that he has chosen and that nourish the earth, the structure and contain the weeds. In so doing, the more need to use of glyphosate.It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books. The majestic history of the name of the trees(Robert Laffont, 2017) is a book in the times learned and entertaining, work coupled with a renowned linguist, Henriette Walter, and of a passionate of the natural sciences and of etymology, Pierre Avenas. This is not the first time that they work together: they have written on the name of the fish and other names of birds. You learn a lot and often in a playful way, with riddles. Did you know that many of our family names come from a name of tree? That in Latin or Greek, the names of the trees are almost all female, and that only the French have fully masculinisés? Because there is a labor and labor. No need to return the land to 40 centimeters in depth. A tool called “étrille harrow” allows for example to uproot the weeds, even in the middle of the crops already in place, only 2 centimeters in depth. Another technique is the “direct seeding under cover”, which is to implement a culture directly in a vegetative cover (which stifles the unwanted herbs, relaxs the earth and can be destroyed just before the seedlings by freezing or by a roll crusher, which avoids the use of herbicides). It enables the use of tractors less powerful, to reduce the number of passages in the fields, which reduces fuel consumption, and use less fertilizer, explain the agronomists Lydia and Claude Bourguignon in their manifesto for a sustainable agriculture (Southern Acts, 2017). And to add: “Cultivate then becomes complex but fascinating: complex because it is necessary to forget everything that is taught in agricultural high schools, but exciting because it must rethink and create another approach to agriculture.” The idea is to observe the nature and work with it rather than against it. Rather than consider the soil as an inert carrier to flood the envi of fertilizer and herbicides petrochemicals, it must use its “agronomic value”, its insects, its bacteria, its toward Earth. Avoid monoculture, promote the rotations. Carbon balance sheet Then, out of glyphosate, point of salvation? Will it really choose between this molecule and another, equally harmful? Choose between her or tillage? No, respond more and more farmers and agronomists. Of the solutions already exist, which come out of these diagrams binaries. Simply, they assume to rethink the agricultural model. Many NGOS, such as Greenpeace, have tried to alert the authorities. In vain. Studies are conducted with the rural populations of Argentina the victims of the “sojisation” and doctors accumulate the evidence. Has the force of perseverance, mothers of Ituzaingó, in the province of Córdoba, have succeeded in 2008 to prohibit the pesticide applications to less than 500 meters from the village and less than 1 500 by air. Four years after, if y is held a trial where, for the first time, the spreading of pesticide has been considered as a criminal offense. “There is no provincial legislation, this Are municipal ordinances which govern the limits of application of pesticides. It is therefore up to each municipality to regulate,” says Christine Seghezzi. On 2 August, the Ministers of the Environment and of the Agro-industry have made part of a draft resolution which determines the minimum distances recommended: 200 meters by air, 100 meters by land. The safety distances, ridiculous. In Buenos Aires, the application of pesticides in the parks and gardens is prohibited. In the province of San Luis, in the center of the country, a law of 2016 prohibits to spread the glyphosate and other herbicides to less than 1 500 m of urban centers and less than 300 m from any home. But the application decree has never been published. “There is no alternative”, proclaimed Margaret Thatcher to defend its neoliberal policy. Thirty years later, the pro-glyphosate play the same partition. “There is no alternative”, repeated-they in a loop, then that the experts of the Member States of the European Union must vote on Wednesday, after several postponements, for or against the renewal for a period of “five to seven years” of the authorization of the pesticide most used in the world (it enters in the composition of several hundreds of products, including the herbicide Roundup of Monsanto). The industry within the European Working Group on glyphosate (Glyphosate Task Force or GTF, a consortium whose aim is to “combine their resources and their efforts” in order to obtain this renewal), continue to argue that “The Glyphosate does not pose a risk to human health”. While it has been classified “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. But the argument holds less and less. The NGO Global 2000 has revealed in September that a large part of the report of the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BFR), on which are based the two European agencies for the assessment of pesticides (the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency) to declare the glyphosate not carcinogenic was in fact a copied and pasted from a study published by Monsanto in 2012 Use prohibited in Sri Lanka In 2015, the Sri Lanka, a great producer of tea and rice, became the first country to prohibit the glyphosate, on directive of the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. “He explained that “the herbicide was responsible for a growing number of patients suffering from a chronic disease Renal impairment affecting 15 per cent of the population of working age in the regions of the North”, and which has already “killed 20,000 people,” writes Marie-Monique Robin. The first case was identified in 1994. And then from the years 2000, this was a real epidemic.” In an interview broadcast in 2016 by Reporterre, Channa Jayasumana, researcher in environmental health at the University of Rajarata in Sri Lanka, explains: “The Epidemiological study, clinical biochemical and confirms that there is a very strong link between the glyphosate and the disease.” Combined with a water rich in calcium and containing metals such as arsenic present in the soil, glyphosate is transformed into a stripper, and becomes very toxic to the kidneys. That is what is happening when the peasants drink the water from their wells. That is why “the government has decided to ban the import, distribution, sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicide in Sri Lanka,” continues Jayasumana. Despite the pressures of Monsanto, the decision is maintained. And elsewhere? In the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, where “the authorities have registered an epidemic of chronic disease Renal rice farmers”, but also “in the coastal regions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, where glyphosate is sprayed in the fields of sugar cane,” says Robin. Furthermore, “El Salvador has voted the prohibition of 53 chemical pesticides and fertilizers containing heavy metals such as glyphosate “. “Green fertilizers”. With its 90 hectares of land (30 hectares of permanent grassland natural, 40 hectares of temporary prairies in which he sows different cultures alternately and 20 hectares of permanent crops), Vivien Grandin, 39 years, account among the seven farm operators in Montravers, village of 400 inhabitants of the Deux-Sèvres. After a BTS “animal productions” and then a master in ecology and finally a DEA “Soil Science”, the breeder-polyculteur, as it defines itself, has chosen to work only after eight years in agricultural grouping of exploitation in common (GAEC). By stopping to buy the expensive inputs, Vivien Grandin fact of economies. “But working a little more of the soil, particularly in the plowing, yet the least often and the less deeply possible, I enhances a little my loads of mechanization” in material and fuel, said the farmer. Consequence of this orientation: “It has led me to break my More the head. Fortunately, I exchange with members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and the network conservation agriculture.” It is as well that it has adopted the rotation of cultures: “Between the wheat and sunflower successively in a same plot, I uses green fertilizers.” is a set of live plants that he has chosen and that nourish the earth, the structure and contain the weeds. In so doing, the more need to use of glyphosate.It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books. The majestic history of the name of the trees(Robert Laffont, 2017) is a book in the times learned and entertaining, work coupled with a renowned linguist, Henriette Walter, and of a passionate of the natural sciences and of etymology, Pierre Avenas. This is not the first time that they work together: they have written on the name of the fish and other names of birds. You learn a lot and often in a playful way, with riddles. Did you know that many of our family names come from a name of tree? That in Latin or Greek, the names of the trees are almost all female, and that only the French have fully masculinisés? Because there is a labor and labor. No need to return the land to 40 centimeters in depth. A tool called “étrille harrow” allows for example to uproot the weeds, even in the middle of the crops already in place, only 2 centimeters in depth. Another technique is the “direct seeding under cover”, which is to implement a culture directly in a vegetative cover (which stifles the unwanted herbs, relaxs the earth and can be destroyed just before the seedlings by freezing or by a roll crusher, which avoids the use of herbicides). It enables the use of tractors less powerful, to reduce the number of passages in the fields, which reduces fuel consumption, and use less fertilizer, explain the agronomists Lydia and Claude Bourguignon in their manifesto for a sustainable agriculture (Southern Acts, 2017). And to add: “Cultivate then becomes complex but fascinating: complex because it is necessary to forget everything that is taught in agricultural high schools, but exciting because it must rethink and create another approach to agriculture.” The idea is to observe the nature and work with it rather than against it. Rather than consider the soil as an inert carrier to flood the envi of fertilizer and herbicides petrochemicals, it must use its “agronomic value”, its insects, its bacteria, its toward Earth. Avoid monoculture, promote the rotations. Carbon balance sheet Then, out of glyphosate, point of salvation? Will it really choose between this molecule and another, equally harmful? Choose between her or tillage? No, respond more and more farmers and agronomists. Of the solutions already exist, which come out of these diagrams binaries. Simply, they assume to rethink the agricultural model. Many NGOS, such as Greenpeace, have tried to alert the authorities. In vain. Studies are conducted with the rural populations of Argentina the victims of the “sojisation” and doctors accumulate the evidence. Has the force of perseverance, mothers of Ituzaingó, in the province of Córdoba, have succeeded in 2008 to prohibit the pesticide applications to less than 500 meters from the village and less than 1 500 by air. Four years after, if y is held a trial where, for the first time, the spreading of pesticide has been considered as a criminal offense. “There is no provincial legislation, this Are municipal ordinances which govern the limits of application of pesticides. It is therefore up to each municipality to regulate,” says Christine Seghezzi. On 2 August, the Ministers of the Environment and of the Agro-industry have made part of a draft resolution which determines the minimum distances recommended: 200 meters by air, 100 meters by land. The safety distances, ridiculous. In Buenos Aires, the application of pesticides in the parks and gardens is prohibited. In the province of San Luis, in the center of the country, a law of 2016 prohibits to spread the glyphosate and other herbicides to less than 1 500 m of urban centers and less than 300 m from any home. But the application decree has never been published. “There is no alternative”, proclaimed Margaret Thatcher to defend its neoliberal policy. Thirty years later, the pro-glyphosate play the same partition. “There is no alternative”, repeated-they in a loop, then that the experts of the Member States of the European Union must vote on Wednesday, after several postponements, for or against the renewal for a period of “five to seven years” of the authorization of the pesticide most used in the world (it enters in the composition of several hundreds of products, including the herbicide Roundup of Monsanto). The industry within the European Working Group on glyphosate (Glyphosate Task Force or GTF, a consortium whose aim is to “combine their resources and their efforts” in order to obtain this renewal), continue to argue that “The Glyphosate does not pose a risk to human health”. While it has been classified “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. But the argument holds less and less. The NGO Global 2000 has revealed in September that a large part of the report of the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BFR), on which are based the two European agencies for the assessment of pesticides (the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency) to declare the glyphosate not carcinogenic was in fact a copied and pasted from a study published by Monsanto in 2012 Use prohibited in Sri Lanka In 2015, the Sri Lanka, a great producer of tea and rice, became the first country to prohibit the glyphosate, on directive of the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. “He explained that “the herbicide was responsible for a growing number of patients suffering from a chronic disease Renal impairment affecting 15 per cent of the population of working age in the regions of the North”, and which has already “killed 20,000 people,” writes Marie-Monique Robin. The first case was identified in 1994. And then from the years 2000, this was a real epidemic.” In an interview broadcast in 2016 by Reporterre, Channa Jayasumana, researcher in environmental health at the University of Rajarata in Sri Lanka, explains: “The Epidemiological study, clinical biochemical and confirms that there is a very strong link between the glyphosate and the disease.” Combined with a water rich in calcium and containing metals such as arsenic present in the soil, glyphosate is transformed into a stripper, and becomes very toxic to the kidneys. That is what is happening when the peasants drink the water from their wells. That is why “the government has decided to ban the import, distribution, sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicide in Sri Lanka,” continues Jayasumana. Despite the pressures of Monsanto, the decision is maintained. And elsewhere? In the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, where “the authorities have registered an epidemic of chronic disease Renal rice farmers”, but also “in the coastal regions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, where glyphosate is sprayed in the fields of sugar cane,” says Robin. Furthermore, “El Salvador has voted the prohibition of 53 chemical pesticides and fertilizers containing heavy metals such as glyphosate “. “Green fertilizers”. With its 90 hectares of land (30 hectares of permanent grassland natural, 40 hectares of temporary prairies in which he sows different cultures alternately and 20 hectares of permanent crops), Vivien Grandin, 39 years, account among the seven farm operators in Montravers, village of 400 inhabitants of the Deux-Sèvres. After a BTS “animal productions” and then a master in ecology and finally a DEA “Soil Science”, the breeder-polyculteur, as it defines itself, has chosen to work only after eight years in agricultural grouping of exploitation in common (GAEC). By stopping to buy the expensive inputs, Vivien Grandin fact of economies. “But working a little more of the soil, particularly in the plowing, yet the least often and the less deeply possible, I enhances a little my loads of mechanization” in material and fuel, said the farmer. Consequence of this orientation: “It has led me to break my More the head. Fortunately, I exchange with members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and the network conservation agriculture.” It is as well that it has adopted the rotation of cultures: “Between the wheat and sunflower successively in a same plot, I uses green fertilizers.” is a set of live plants that he has chosen and that nourish the earth, the structure and contain the weeds. In so doing, the more need to use of glyphosate.It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books. The majestic history of the name of the trees(Robert Laffont, 2017) is a book in the times learned and entertaining, work coupled with a renowned linguist, Henriette Walter, and of a passionate of the natural sciences and of etymology, Pierre Avenas. This is not the first time that they work together: they have written on the name of the fish and other names of birds. You learn a lot and often in a playful way, with riddles. Did you know that many of our family names come from a name of tree? That in Latin or Greek, the names of the trees are almost all female, and that only the French have fully masculinisés? Because there is a labor and labor. No need to return the land to 40 centimeters in depth. A tool called “étrille harrow” allows for example to uproot the weeds, even in the middle of the crops already in place, only 2 centimeters in depth. Another technique is the “direct seeding under cover”, which is to implement a culture directly in a vegetative cover (which stifles the unwanted herbs, relaxs the earth and can be destroyed just before the seedlings by freezing or by a roll crusher, which avoids the use of herbicides). It enables the use of tractors less powerful, to reduce the number of passages in the fields, which reduces fuel consumption, and use less fertilizer, explain the agronomists Lydia and Claude Bourguignon in their manifesto for a sustainable agriculture (Southern Acts, 2017). And to add: “Cultivate then becomes complex but fascinating: complex because it is necessary to forget everything that is taught in agricultural high schools, but exciting because it must rethink and create another approach to agriculture.” The idea is to observe the nature and work with it rather than against it. Rather than consider the soil as an inert carrier to flood the envi of fertilizer and herbicides petrochemicals, it must use its “agronomic value”, its insects, its bacteria, its toward Earth. Avoid monoculture, promote the rotations. Carbon balance sheet Then, out of glyphosate, point of salvation? Will it really choose between this molecule and another, equally harmful? Choose between her or tillage? No, respond more and more farmers and agronomists. Of the solutions already exist, which come out of these diagrams binaries. Simply, they assume to rethink the agricultural model. Many NGOS, such as Greenpeace, have tried to alert the authorities. In vain. Studies are conducted with the rural populations of Argentina the victims of the “sojisation” and doctors accumulate the evidence. Has the force of perseverance, mothers of Ituzaingó, in the province of Córdoba, have succeeded in 2008 to prohibit the pesticide applications to less than 500 meters from the village and less than 1 500 by air. Four years after, if y is held a trial where, for the first time, the spreading of pesticide has been considered as a criminal offense. “There is no provincial legislation, this Are municipal ordinances which govern the limits of application of pesticides. It is therefore up to each municipality to regulate,” says Christine Seghezzi. On 2 August, the Ministers of the Environment and of the Agro-industry have made part of a draft resolution which determines the minimum distances recommended: 200 meters by air, 100 meters by land. The safety distances, ridiculous. In Buenos Aires, the application of pesticides in the parks and gardens is prohibited. In the province of San Luis, in the center of the country, a law of 2016 prohibits to spread the glyphosate and other herbicides to less than 1 500 m of urban centers and less than 300 m from any home. But the application decree has never been published. “There is no alternative”, proclaimed Margaret Thatcher to defend its neoliberal policy. Thirty years later, the pro-glyphosate play the same partition. “There is no alternative”, repeated-they in a loop, then that the experts of the Member States of the European Union must vote on Wednesday, after several postponements, for or against the renewal for a period of “five to seven years” of the authorization of the pesticide most used in the world (it enters in the composition of several hundreds of products, including the herbicide Roundup of Monsanto). The industry within the European Working Group on glyphosate (Glyphosate Task Force or GTF, a consortium whose aim is to “combine their resources and their efforts” in order to obtain this renewal), continue to argue that “The Glyphosate does not pose a risk to human health”. While it has been classified “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. But the argument holds less and less. The NGO Global 2000 has revealed in September that a large part of the report of the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BFR), on which are based the two European agencies for the assessment of pesticides (the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency) to declare the glyphosate not carcinogenic was in fact a copied and pasted from a study published by Monsanto in 2012 Use prohibited in Sri Lanka In 2015, the Sri Lanka, a great producer of tea and rice, became the first country to prohibit the glyphosate, on directive of the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. “He explained that “the herbicide was responsible for a growing number of patients suffering from a chronic disease Renal impairment affecting 15 per cent of the population of working age in the regions of the North”, and which has already “killed 20,000 people,” writes Marie-Monique Robin. The first case was identified in 1994. And then from the years 2000, this was a real epidemic.” In an interview broadcast in 2016 by Reporterre, Channa Jayasumana, researcher in environmental health at the University of Rajarata in Sri Lanka, explains: “The Epidemiological study, clinical biochemical and confirms that there is a very strong link between the glyphosate and the disease.” Combined with a water rich in calcium and containing metals such as arsenic present in the soil, glyphosate is transformed into a stripper, and becomes very toxic to the kidneys. That is what is happening when the peasants drink the water from their wells. That is why “the government has decided to ban the import, distribution, sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicide in Sri Lanka,” continues Jayasumana. Despite the pressures of Monsanto, the decision is maintained. And elsewhere? In the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, where “the authorities have registered an epidemic of chronic disease Renal rice farmers”, but also “in the coastal regions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, where glyphosate is sprayed in the fields of sugar cane,” says Robin. Furthermore, “El Salvador has voted the prohibition of 53 chemical pesticides and fertilizers containing heavy metals such as glyphosate “. “Green fertilizers”. With its 90 hectares of land (30 hectares of permanent grassland natural, 40 hectares of temporary prairies in which he sows different cultures alternately and 20 hectares of permanent crops), Vivien Grandin, 39 years, account among the seven farm operators in Montravers, village of 400 inhabitants of the Deux-Sèvres. After a BTS “animal productions” and then a master in ecology and finally a DEA “Soil Science”, the breeder-polyculteur, as it defines itself, has chosen to work only after eight years in agricultural grouping of exploitation in common (GAEC). By stopping to buy the expensive inputs, Vivien Grandin fact of economies. “But working a little more of the soil, particularly in the plowing, yet the least often and the less deeply possible, I enhances a little my loads of mechanization” in material and fuel, said the farmer. Consequence of this orientation: “It has led me to break my More the head. Fortunately, I exchange with members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and the network conservation agriculture.” It is as well that it has adopted the rotation of cultures: “Between the wheat and sunflower successively in a same plot, I uses green fertilizers.” is a set of live plants that he has chosen and that nourish the earth, the structure and contain the weeds. In so doing, the more need to use of glyphosate.It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books. The majestic history of the name of the trees(Robert Laffont, 2017) is a book in the times learned and entertaining, work coupled with a renowned linguist, Henriette Walter, and of a passionate of the natural sciences and of etymology, Pierre Avenas. This is not the first time that they work together: they have written on the name of the fish and other names of birds. You learn a lot and often in a playful way, with riddles. Did you know that many of our family names come from a name of tree? That in Latin or Greek, the names of the trees are almost all female, and that only the French have fully masculinisés? Because there is a labor and labor. No need to return the land to 40 centimeters in depth. A tool called “étrille harrow” allows for example to uproot the weeds, even in the middle of the crops already in place, only 2 centimeters in depth. Another technique is the “direct seeding under cover”, which is to implement a culture directly in a vegetative cover (which stifles the unwanted herbs, relaxs the earth and can be destroyed just before the seedlings by freezing or by a roll crusher, which avoids the use of herbicides). It enables the use of tractors less powerful, to reduce the number of passages in the fields, which reduces fuel consumption, and use less fertilizer, explain the agronomists Lydia and Claude Bourguignon in their manifesto for a sustainable agriculture (Southern Acts, 2017). And to add: “Cultivate then becomes complex but fascinating: complex because it is necessary to forget everything that is taught in agricultural high schools, but exciting because it must rethink and create another approach to agriculture.” The idea is to observe the nature and work with it rather than against it. Rather than consider the soil as an inert carrier to flood the envi of fertilizer and herbicides petrochemicals, it must use its “agronomic value”, its insects, its bacteria, its toward Earth. Avoid monoculture, promote the rotations. Carbon balance sheet Then, out of glyphosate, point of salvation? Will it really choose between this molecule and another, equally harmful? Choose between her or tillage? No, respond more and more farmers and agronomists. Of the solutions already exist, which come out of these diagrams binaries. Simply, they assume to rethink the agricultural model. Many NGOS, such as Greenpeace, have tried to alert the authorities. In vain. Studies are conducted with the rural populations of Argentina the victims of the “sojisation” and doctors accumulate the evidence. Has the force of perseverance, mothers of Ituzaingó, in the province of Córdoba, have succeeded in 2008 to prohibit the pesticide applications to less than 500 meters from the village and less than 1 500 by air. Four years after, if y is held a trial where, for the first time, the spreading of pesticide has been considered as a criminal offense. “There is no provincial legislation, this Are municipal ordinances which govern the limits of application of pesticides. It is therefore up to each municipality to regulate,” says Christine Seghezzi. On 2 August, the Ministers of the Environment and of the Agro-industry have made part of a draft resolution which determines the minimum distances recommended: 200 meters by air, 100 meters by land. The safety distances, ridiculous. In Buenos Aires, the application of pesticides in the parks and gardens is prohibited. In the province of San Luis, in the center of the country, a law of 2016 prohibits to spread the glyphosate and other herbicides to less than 1 500 m of urban centers and less than 300 m from any home. But the application decree has never been published. “There is no alternative”, proclaimed Margaret Thatcher to defend its neoliberal policy. Thirty years later, the pro-glyphosate play the same partition. “There is no alternative”, repeated-they in a loop, then that the experts of the Member States of the European Union must vote on Wednesday, after several postponements, for or against the renewal for a period of “five to seven years” of the authorization of the pesticide most used in the world (it enters in the composition of several hundreds of products, including the herbicide Roundup of Monsanto). The industry within the European Working Group on glyphosate (Glyphosate Task Force or GTF, a consortium whose aim is to “combine their resources and their efforts” in order to obtain this renewal), continue to argue that “The Glyphosate does not pose a risk to human health”. While it has been classified “probable carcinogen” by the World Health Organization. But the argument holds less and less. The NGO Global 2000 has revealed in September that a large part of the report of the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment (BFR), on which are based the two European agencies for the assessment of pesticides (the European Food Safety Authority and the European Chemicals Agency) to declare the glyphosate not carcinogenic was in fact a copied and pasted from a study published by Monsanto in 2012 Use prohibited in Sri Lanka In 2015, the Sri Lanka, a great producer of tea and rice, became the first country to prohibit the glyphosate, on directive of the President Mahinda Rajapaksa. “He explained that “the herbicide was responsible for a growing number of patients suffering from a chronic disease Renal impairment affecting 15 per cent of the population of working age in the regions of the North”, and which has already “killed 20,000 people,” writes Marie-Monique Robin. The first case was identified in 1994. And then from the years 2000, this was a real epidemic.” In an interview broadcast in 2016 by Reporterre, Channa Jayasumana, researcher in environmental health at the University of Rajarata in Sri Lanka, explains: “The Epidemiological study, clinical biochemical and confirms that there is a very strong link between the glyphosate and the disease.” Combined with a water rich in calcium and containing metals such as arsenic present in the soil, glyphosate is transformed into a stripper, and becomes very toxic to the kidneys. That is what is happening when the peasants drink the water from their wells. That is why “the government has decided to ban the import, distribution, sale and use of glyphosate-based herbicide in Sri Lanka,” continues Jayasumana. Despite the pressures of Monsanto, the decision is maintained. And elsewhere? In the State of Andhra Pradesh in India, where “the authorities have registered an epidemic of chronic disease Renal rice farmers”, but also “in the coastal regions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Costa Rica, where glyphosate is sprayed in the fields of sugar cane,” says Robin. Furthermore, “El Salvador has voted the prohibition of 53 chemical pesticides and fertilizers containing heavy metals such as glyphosate “. “Green fertilizers”. With its 90 hectares of land (30 hectares of permanent grassland natural, 40 hectares of temporary prairies in which he sows different cultures alternately and 20 hectares of permanent crops), Vivien Grandin, 39 years, account among the seven farm operators in Montravers, village of 400 inhabitants of the Deux-Sèvres. After a BTS “animal productions” and then a master in ecology and finally a DEA “Soil Science”, the breeder-polyculteur, as it defines itself, has chosen to work only after eight years in agricultural grouping of exploitation in common (GAEC). By stopping to buy the expensive inputs, Vivien Grandin fact of economies. “But working a little more of the soil, particularly in the plowing, yet the least often and the less deeply possible, I enhances a little my loads of mechanization” in material and fuel, said the farmer. Consequence of this orientation: “It has led me to break my More the head. Fortunately, I exchange with members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network and the network conservation agriculture.” It is as well that it has adopted the rotation of cultures: “Between the wheat and sunflower successively in a same plot, I uses green fertilizers.” is a set of live plants that he has chosen and that nourish the earth, the structure and contain the weeds. In so doing, the more need to use of glyphosate.

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xcellsofgalaxyx-blog · 7 years ago

Text

IMPACT 17

It should not be that the success editorial of The Secret Life of trees of Peter Wohlleben, worthy of a Harry Potter, cache the forest of other books.

0 notes