Want to Use My Suit? Then Throw Me Something

Just after dusk on Friday night, Tyrone Yancy was strutting through one of the more uncertain parts of town in a $6,000 custom-made suit.

He was concerned about being robbed, but not by the neighborhood teenagers who trotted out in the street to join him. The real potential for theft, as Mr. Yancy sees it, came from the strangers darting around him and his well-appointed colleagues in a hectic orbit: photographers.

Mr. Yancy, 44, is a nursing assistant by profession. His calling, however, is as one of the Mardi Gras Indians — a member of the Yellow Pocahontas tribe, to be exact — the largely working-class black New Orleanians who create and wear ornate, enormous feathered costumes and come out three times a year to show them off.

He is also one of a number of Indians who have become fed up with seeing their photographs on calendars, posters and expensive prints, without getting anything in return.

Knowing that there are few legal protections for a person who is photographed in public — particularly one who stops and poses every few feet — some Mardi Gras Indians have begun filing for copyright protection for their suits, which account for thousands of dollars in glass beads, rhinestones, feathers and velvet, and hundreds of hours of late-night sewing.

Anyone could still take their pictures, but the Indians, many of whom live at the economic margins, would have some recourse if they saw the pictures being sold, or used in advertising. (News photographs, like the ones illustrating this article, are not at issue.)

“It’s not the old way of doing things, but the old way of doing things was conducive to exploitation,” said Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who represents Indians in her private practice and also works with them through two pro bono legal programs, Sweet Home New Orleans legal services, and the Entertainment Law Legal Assistance Project.

The legal grounding of the strategy is debatable, the ability to enforce it even more so. But what may be most tricky of all is pushing the Indians themselves to start thinking about the legal and financial dimensions of something they have always done out of tradition.

Mardi Gras Indians have been around for more than a century — more than two, some say — and are generally thought to have originated as a way to pay homage to the American Indians who harbored runaway slaves and started families with them.

The Indians come out and parade in full dress on Mardi Gras; on St. Joseph’s Night, March 19; and on a Sunday close to St. Joseph’s — a tradition that arose out of the affinity between blacks and Sicilians in the city’s working-class precincts.

The 30 or so Indian tribes are representatives of their neighborhoods, and starting from home turf they venture out in their shimmering suits to meet other tribes on procession in the streets. Time was, these run-ins would often end with somebody in the hospital, or worse.

But over the past few decades, encouraged by the legendary Chief of Chiefs, Tootie Montana, the showdowns became primarily about the suits, and whose suit could out-prettify all the others.

Indian suits, which in the old days were occasionally burned at the end of a season, have become stunningly elaborate and stunningly expensive, costing upwards of $10,000. For many Indians, it is a matter of principle that they make a new suit from scratch each year.

The copyright idea has been floating around for a while — several of Mr. Montana’s suits were registered years ago — but Ms. Keaton began pursuing it more vigorously in 2006, when she was approached by John Ellison, a 52-year-old detailer in an auto body shop and a member of the Wild Tchoupitoulas.

Any photograph that focused on a suit protected by a copyright could arguably be considered a derivative work. The sale of such a picture (or its use in tourism ads, for example) would be on the merits of the suit rather than the photograph itself, and if the person selling it did not have permission, he could be sued.

But the idea is not so easy to put into practice. In American copyright law, clothing designs generally cannot be protected because they are more functional than aesthetic. Ms. Keaton argues that the suits, which can weigh well over 100 pounds, should be considered works of sculpture, not outfits.

The Sweet Home organization held a workshop for Indians on the topic last fall, and is pressing them to fill out copyright forms for this year’s suits. But there has not yet been a test case for the legal theory and it is unclear how one would fare.

“The Mardi Gras Indian costumes are pretty wild and not functional in the ordinary sense of the word, so that suggests that they might be copyrightable,” Kal Raustiala, a professor at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail message.

“That said,” he added, “lots of runway fashion is also way out there and not likely to fit anyone’s ordinary idea of usefulness, yet it doesn’t receive copyright protection.”

Mr. Ellison filled out his copyright registration form on the spot, but later lost it, a testament to the difficulties of changing a culture.

Christopher Porché West, who has been photographing Mardi Gras Indians since 1979, said he had heard these kinds of complaints for years. They are counterproductive, he said, given the relatively small amount of money he and other photographers earn from Indian portraits.

“What they really need to do is self-exploit,” he said. If they want to make money from their culture, he said, “they should find a way to commodify it and bring that to the market.”

But words like “commodify” are foreign and even a little distasteful for many in this city, rather like finding tofu sausage in a gumbo. Indians do make a few hundred dollars here and there showing up at parties and concerts, and a few have tried, with disappointing results, to sell last year’s suits on eBay.

“Indian culture was never, ever meant to make any money,” said Howard Miller, Big Chief of the Creole Wild West, the city’s oldest tribe, and president of the Mardi Gras Indian Council. But neither should the culture be exploited by others.

“We have a beef,” he said, “with anybody who takes us for granted.”

from the NY Times

Gardeners grow dinner with aquaponics

Unless you are Alice Waters or Barbara Kingsolver, planting and maintaining an edible garden can seem a tad arduous. In her book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Kingsolver extolled the pleasures of home-grown food, but all the soil amending, weeding and watering - not to mention controlling greedy pests - takes time, effort and, of course, space.

Enter aquaponics, a system of food gardening that has a small but growing fan base, not least because its advantages seem almost too good to be true. An aquaponics installation requires no soil, scant water (2 to 10 percent of what is used in the average vegetable garden), a modest financial outlay and minimal maintenance. There's no dealing with pesticides, and the system is sustainable and easy to set up. For gardeners conscious of the need to slash their water use during California's drought, or those with little or no land, this method has a lot to offer.

The cherry on top is that you get to enjoy nurturing a school of pretty fish. Fish can be fed with regular fish food or, eventually, with the fruits of your crop, creating a virtuous circle in which you know precisely what is going into the food you eat. Whether you consider your fish a decorative feature or dinner is up to you.

"My wife and I were blown away when we saw aquaponics for the first time," says Bob Rudorf, who has a system installed under a grow light in the living room of his Sonoma home and is harvesting baby lettuces and culinary herbs.

Aquaponics combines hydroponics, or water-based planting, with aquaculture, or fish cultivation. The idea is simple: In a closed-loop system, water from a tank full of fish, rich with fish waste, irrigates and feeds plants that grow in a bed of gravel. The plants filter the water, which is then channeled back into the fish tank. The boxed plant bed is typically set at table height to distance it from soil-borne diseases such as the fungi that grow on tomatoes, but there's another benefit: no need to bend or kneel to tend your plants. Aquatic life can range from goldfish, trout and tilapia to crustacea, frogs and turtles; a simple pump is required to circulate the water. Plants can be grown from seed or as transplants that have been cleaned of soil.

more from the SF Chronicle

Bees face 'unprecedented' pesticide exposures at home and afield

For years the news has been the same: Honey bees are being hammered by some mysterious environmental plaque that has a name -- colony collapse disorder – but no established cause. A two-year study now provides evidence indicting one likely group of suspects: pesticides. It found “unprecedented levels” of mite-killing chemicals and crop pesticides in hives across the United States and parts of Canada.

Scientists here at the American Chemical Society spring annual meeting, which kicked off today, will report on the findings of this study later in the week. But if you want an early peak at their results, or can’t make it to the meeting, check out a 19-page synopsis of the data that has just been published online in the March PLoS ONE.

In it, Christopher Mullin of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his colleagues describe widespread pesticide tainting in 749 samples of bee-dom, some of those chemicals at levels that would be toxic if they occurred alone. Except that most bees aren’t exposed to just a single pesticide.

In beeswax, they report, “87 pesticides and metabolites were found with up to 39 different detections in a single sample.” The average number of pesticides identified per wax sample (and they analyzed 259 samples): eight. Among 350 pollen samples retrieved from hives, each harbored an average of seven such chemicals – but at times up to 31 pesticide contaminants (or their breakdown products, some of which are far more toxic to bees than the parent chemical would have been).

more from Science News

Poll: Worries about environment hit low

Americans' worries about environmental issues have hit a 20-year low, largely because of economic concerns, according to a Gallup Poll released Tuesday.

Fewer adults worry "a great deal" about each of eight issues surveyed, including global warming, than a year ago, according to the poll of 1,014 Americans taken March 4-7. Their concerns about six of the issues hit record lows.

At the same time, in findings Gallup will release later this week, a record number — 53% — say economic growth takes precedence, even if it hurts the environment, says Frank Newport, Gallup's editor in chief.

"The economy is swamping everything," Newport says. Also, questions about the science of global warming are affecting other issues, he says. "The whole environmental realm has been politicized."

Oil and gas companies have spent millions of dollars on ads to oppose a bill in the Senate that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says Bob Deans of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"That does have an impact" on public opinion, Deans says. He's not surprised by the findings, given unemployment and foreclosures. "People have a lot on their worry plate."

Still, he says, other surveys show that people want Congress to tackle global warming, so he doesn't expect Gallup's poll to make the bill a harder sell.

The poll numbers are disappointing, but they "don't capture what motivates environmental legislation," which is "intensity," says Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, which promotes clean air and water policies.

The Gallup Poll finds that of eight environmental issues, Americans worry least about global warming and most about drinking-water pollution.

Even so, it cites record lows of 50% in the share of those who worry "a great deal" about drinking-water pollution, 33% on the loss of tropical rain forests, 31% on the extinction of plant and animal species. The poll finds lower concerns on three other issues:

•Waterways pollution, 46% are concerned today, down from 72% in 1989.

•Toxic waste contamination of air and water, 44% now, 69% in 1989.

•Air pollution, 38% today, 63% in 1989.

Global warming concerns have fallen dramatically since 2007, when 41% worried "a great deal" about the issue; 28% worry today.

Gallup's findings, based on land-line and cellphone interviews, have a margin of error of +/–4 percentage points.

from USA Today

Can Smiley Faces (and a 14-Step Program to Stop Overconsumption) Save the Global Climate?

Energy efficiency seems to make rational economic sense—the less energy used, the more money saved. Yet, in the real world it's actually competition with neighbors rather than cost savings that can drive people to turn down their thermostats, install insulation or simply switch off the lights when they leave a room. Such is the lesson of a host of efforts, ranging from a group called OPOWER's comparative use utility billing to switching from miles per gallon to rate vehicle efficiency to gallons per mile.

Now a new collaborative study from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Garrison Institute's Climate, Mind and Behavior Project reveals that such simple actions—from taking one fewer flight per year to wasting less food—can add up. The environmental group estimates that if all Americans adopted 14 such steps over the next decade the country would avoid one billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020—or the equivalent of the entire annual greenhouse gas emissions of Germany.

"Much of this is eliminating waste—and most waste costs you money," says NRDC's executive director Peter Lehner. "If all Americans did take a fairly modest range of actions, most of which actually save you money, we can make a big difference."

The recommendations, in addition to flying less and wasting 25 percent less food, include: carpooling or telecommuting once a week (75 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) saved by 2020, if adopted by all Americans); maintaining your car or truck, such as keeping tires properly inflated (45 million metric tons of CO2e); cutting the time spent idling in a vehicle in half (40 million metric tons of CO2e); better insulation at home (85 million metric tons of CO2e); programmable thermostats set higher (80 million metric tons of CO2e); reducing electricity demand from appliances that are "off," so-called phantom demand (70 million metric tons CO2e); using hot water more efficiently, such as washing clothes in colder water (65 million metric tons of CO2e); buying EnergyStar appliances when old ones wear out (55 million metric tons CO2e); replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescents (30 million metric tons CO2e); eating chicken instead of beef two days a week (105 million metric tons of CO2e); increased recycling of paper, plastics and metals (105 million metric tons of CO2e); "responsible" consumption, such as buying less bottled water (60 million metric tons CO2e).

more from Scientific American

When Goods Get Traded, Who Pays for the CO2?

Popularly, China is a villain in climate change. Many people who attended last year's chaotic U.N. climate-change talks in Copenhagen — especially those who belonged to the U.S. delegation — singled out China as the main reason the summit nearly collapsed. Chinese diplomats fought hard against any form of emissions regulation, even though their country is now the world's No. 1 national carbon emitter, and will emit far more carbon in the future than any other. In Washington, opponents of carbon cap-and-trade also point to China, which is unlikely to take on a carbon cap of its own, and wonder why the U.S. should have to restrain its emissions.

But a new study published in the March 8 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that the carbon equation isn't as straightforward as we might think. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford University synthesized carbon emissions and trade patterns and found that more than one-third of CO2 emissions related to the consumption of goods and services in developed countries are actually emitted outside their national borders. Rich nations are essentially outsourcing some of their carbon emissions to developing nations through global trade — by importing goods and services from abroad — thereby shrinking their carbon footprints while inflating those of major exporting nations like China. "It's surprising just how much this effect is driven by the U.S. and China," says Steven Davis, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution and the lead author of the PNAS paper. "It is significant."


more from Time

Regional Rainfall in a Warming World

Slowly but surely, a picture of climate change at the regional scale -- where it really matters -- is beginning to take shape.

Apart from the obvious warming at the high polar latitudes, which already is affecting Arctic sea ice, the rate of Greenland ice cap melting, and Antarctic ice shelves, new details are beginning to emerge about the impact of global warming in the Tropics -- the boiler-room of Earth's climate and weather.

This is the home of El Niño, and the generator of Asian monsoons, the towering cumulonimbus storms that deliver water vapor to the atmosphere and drive patterns of rainfall over much of the world.

In the March issue of the Journal of Climate, a team of University of Hawaii researchers led by meteorologist Shang-Ping Xie offers a preliminary look at what a relatively uniform warming does to a climate system that is chock o'block with regional patches of hot and cold and wet and dry.

From a series of simulations of computer models of different design, here is a robust pattern of enhanced rainfall across the equatorial Pacific during the first half of the 21st Century under a "business and usual" scenario of carbon dioxide emissions. (Click on it for a more detailed look at the patchwork the rainfall pattern and the contours of warmer and cooler temperatures.)

The basin-wide bands of heightened rainfall and warm temperatures looks somewhat like El Nino, although the timing and scale and potential impacts could be different. In an email, Xie draws the analogy, but makes a distinction:

Tropical anomalies during El Niño have strong impacts on US climate, inducing dry conditions in the Pacific Northwest and floods in California, among other things. Exact effects of SST warming patterns on US rainfall are under investigation.

more from Discovery

Rolling out the changes

JOHN DUNLOP had a son who complained that his bicycle was bumpy to ride. So he invented the pneumatic tyre in 1888. Various improvements have been made since then. In particular, Pirelli, an Italian tyremaker, introduced steel-belted radial tyres in 1973, which reduced the fuel consumption of cars fitted with them. Now manufacturers are trying to develop tyres that reduce it still further.

Tyres account for about a fifth of the energy required to power a car. They provide friction, so the vehicle can grip the road, but some of the power supplied to the tyres is lost as heat. Indeed, Michelin, a French tyremaker, estimates that this “rolling resistance” accounts for 4% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. Tyre designers have therefore sought to improve fuel economy by reducing rolling resistance. However, this not only reduces a tyre’s ability to grip, making drivers take corners sideways, it also wears out the tyres more rapidly.

Such disadvantages may now be overcome using chemical engineering and the clever design of new materials made from tiny structures just a millionth of a metre across—dubbed “nanocomposites”—along with “metamaterials” that let engineers build microstructures into tyres. Such innovations could, for example, enable the inner lining of a tyre to have a special coating that helps retain air longer, while the tread would contain a compound that lets it provide the right amount of traction where the rubber meets the road.

Tyre manufacturing is big business—about a billion tyres a year are produced across the world. Over the past few years, some tyremakers have routinely added polyester, fibreglass and silica particles to the mix used to make tyres, in order to increase the durability of the finished item. A modern tyre contains up to 30 different materials, including synthetic polymers such as styrene-butadiene rubber, according to Forrest Patterson, Michelin’s technical director in America.

A “durable security compound” incorporated into the treads of the company’s new Energy Saver tyre helps maintain the tyre’s rigidity, allowing it to grip the road. The performance of tread rubber depends strongly on the quality of the molecular bonds formed by the 14 individual ingredients that go into making the rubber, and Michelin claims to have perfect control of these molecular interactions. Mr Patterson says that the tyres increase fuel efficiency by 8% compared to standard tyres, and will reduce a vehicle’s carbon-dioxide emissions by almost a tonne over the tyre’s lifetime.

Goodyear, an American tyre manufacturer, recently announced that the 2010 model of Toyota’s popular Prius hybrid car will be fitted with its Assurance Fuel Max fuel-efficient tyres, which also contain a special compound in their treads to help reduce fuel consumption. The company estimates that, over the life of a typical tyre, it will save its owner enough petrol to drive more than 4,000 extra kilometres (2,500 miles). The 2010 Ford Fusion and the 2011 Chevrolet Volt models will also be fitted with this tyre.

Chemical suppliers are also getting involved. Lanxess, a German chemicals firm, is selling a nanoparticle rubber additive called nanoprene for tyre treads. It says this will extend the tyre’s lifetime without affecting its rolling resistance or sacrificing its grip. The tiny particles are made from polymerised styrene and butadiene—normal tyre ingredients—but bind better to the silica also found in normal tyres than larger lumps of the same stuff. Toyo Tires, a Japanese tyremaker, has announced that it will use nanoprene in its winter tyres.

Some companies are looking at making more environmentally friendly tyres, using sustainable and renewable biopolymers instead of natural rubber or petroleum-derived synthetic polymers. Among the candidates are Russian dandelion and guayule, a desert shrub found in the south-western American states and in Mexico, says Joe Walter, a tyre expert at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Food byproducts are also being considered as ingredients for new tyres. Yokohama, a Japanese tyremaker, is promoting a tyre made with oil from orange peel, a waste product from the production of orange juice. The company says its tyres are among the greenest produced, with 80% of their ingredients derived from sources other than petroleum. They are only slightly more expensive than normal tyres, costing about $20 extra for a set of four. Yokohama is aiming its tyres at hybrid cars and efficient city cars like the Mini Cooper. To prove that orange-oil based tyres can compete with traditional racing tyres, it has also fitted Porsche racing cars with them.
from The Economist

For Pennies, a Disposable Toilet That Could Help Grow Crops

A Swedish entrepreneur is trying to market and sell a biodegradable plastic bag that acts as a single-use toilet for urban slums in the developing world.

Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces.

The bag, called the Peepoo, is the brainchild of Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm.

“Not only is it sanitary,” said Mr. Wilhelmson, who has patented the bag, “they can reuse this to grow crops.”

In his research, he found that urban slums in Kenya, despite being densely populated, had open spaces where waste could be buried.

He also found that slum dwellers there collected their excrement in a plastic bag and disposed of it by flinging it, calling it a “flyaway toilet” or a “helicopter toilet.”

This inspired Mr. Wilhelmson to design the Peepoo, an environmentally friendly alternative that he is confident will turn a profit.

“People will say, ‘It’s valuable to me, but well priced,’ ” he said.

He plans to sell it for about 2 or 3 cents — comparable to the cost of an ordinary plastic bag.

In the developing world, an estimated 2.6 billion people, or about 40 percent of the earth’s population, do not have access to a toilet, according to United Nations figures.

It is a public health crisis: open defecation can contaminate drinking water, and an estimated 1.5 million children worldwide die yearly from diarrhea, largely because of poor sanitation and hygiene.

To mitigate this, the United Nations has a goal to reduce by half the number of people without access to toilets by 2015.

The market for low-cost toilets in the developing world is about a trillion dollars, according to Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, a sanitation advocacy group.

As far as toilets go, “the people in the middle class have reached saturation in consumption,” said Mr. Sim, who calls himself a fan of the Peepoo. “This has created a new need, urgently, of looking for a new customer.”

Since 2001, his organization has held an annual World Toilet Summit, and Mr. Sims said he was excited that in recent years there had been an emergence of entrepreneurs devising low-cost solutions.

At the 2009 meeting, Rigel Technology of Singapore unveiled a $30 toilet that separates solid and liquid waste, turning solid waste into compost. Sulabh International, an Indian nonprofit and the host of the World Toilet Summit in 2007, is promoting several low-cost toilets, including one that produces biogas from excrement. The gas can then be used in cooking.

But Therese Dooley, senior adviser on sanitation and hygiene for Unicef, said that inculcating sanitation habits was no easy task.

“It will take a large amount of behavior change,” Ms. Dooley said.

She added that while “the private sector can play a major role, it will never get to the bottom of the pyramid.”

A sizable population, poor and uneducated, will still be left without toilets, Ms. Dooley said, and nonprofits and governments will have to play a large role in distribution and education.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wilhelmson is pushing ahead with the Peepoo.

After successfully testing it for a year in Kenya and India, he said he planned to mass produce the bag this summer.

from the NY Times

Weak sea walls blamed for France storm disaster

Many died after the sea wall off the coastal town of L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer was breached, allowing 8m-high (26ft) waves to crash through the streets.

A local governor said the walls dated back to the time of Napoleon and needed to be replaced with taller barriers.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged 3m euros (£2.6m) in emergency aid.

He was touring the worst-affected western coastal regions of Vendee and Charente-Maritime after declaring a national disaster, and promised to channel recovery funds quickly.

"It is a national disaster, a human drama with a terrible death toll," he said. "The urgent thing is to support the families who have members missing or dead."

The Atlantic storm, named Xynthia, smashed into the western coasts of France, Portugal and Spain on Sunday, with torrential rain driven by winds of up to 140km/h (87mph).

The storm has since swept north-eastwards into Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. and deaths have been reported in Portugal, Spain, Belgium and Germany.

more from the BBC