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editor
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 Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 12:11 pm Post subject: Garden Gambles |
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WELCOME!
Garden Gambles:
The Ottawa Citizen
Tomato flavor gene restores old-fashioned rose scent
Florida scientists say discovery could be a powerful tool in traditional breeding
By Tom Spears
(Reprinted in the Vancouver Sun)
May 16/06
| Quote: | Tired of big, colorful roses that hardly smell at all, flower researchers at the University of Florida have found the genes to bring back that old-fashioned rose scent that has been accedentally bred out.
Their luck came unexpectedly from the tomato, where they were decoding the genes that give a tomato flavor. A flavor gene in the tomato turns out to be the scent gene in the rose. Now they're hoping tomato genes will make a rose by any name smell as sweet as before. They say they may even learn how to make a petunia smell rosy. (-- p. A11) |
Two PokerPulse favorites on roses:
The English Roses
Hardcover
By UK authority in whom we trust (and invest) David Austin
Old Roses and English Roses
Hardcover
By David Austin
PokerPulse all-time FAVORITE garden:
| Quote: | In Osaka, Japan, the result of moving a small garden for the blind to a larger, more central area, the Sensory Gardens are definitely NOT just for people with disabilities. Now, EVERYONE can enjoy accessible, informational pathways, benches with armrests, and out-of-traffic space for strollers and mobility aids. Raised gardens with retaining wall “perches” are filled with bright flowers in contrasting colors. Up-close, “touchy-feely” sculptures and orientation boards provide necessary sensory cues.
WOW!! At the edge of a pond, the Sensory Gardens have box seats with three sides SURROUNDED BY WATER! The pathway gradually slopes down so people with wheelchairs and scooters can enter the boxes and EXPERIENCE running their hands through the water. Frail older adults can touch and smell the aquatic plants without stooping or kneeling! Fun for EVERYONE! (From Lesson 7, Universal Design Learnsite) |
| Quote: | | Editor's Note: Anyone with photos of this garden is warmly invited to submit them to legal@pokerpulse.com. All slide shows very much appreciated. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2534#2534
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| Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:50 am Post subject: |
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BBC Gardens Illustrated
Magazine Subscription
Roald Dahl's BFG:
Blissful flower garden
Renowned author Roald Dahl lived at Gipsy
House, his home in Great Missenden, for over
40 years. As well as building up a body of
memorable literature, he also created a
garden as part of his lasting legacy.
Words by Rae Spencer-Jones
Photographs by Fiona McLeod
May, 2006
| Quote: | | It started with the delightful kitchen garden. At the top end of the garden, but separated from the ornamental areas by a small car park, 3.5m-high red brick walls were built for shelter, while the slope was terraced to accommodate raised borders of railway sleepers. A glasshouse copied from nearby Tythrop Park houses a vine, nectarines and peaches; the garden walls support fan-trained apples and pears. "I was determined to have old-fashioned fruit with good flavour," Liccy says. "Roald took great care in sourcing plants so our fruit came from the best stock." What Roald loved most of all however, was growing vegetables. Where onions were concerned he was obsessed. He grew two cultivars, 'Robinson's Mammoth' and 'Robinson's Red Mamoth,' and competed every year against local tradesmen in a bid to grow the largest. He always won. "He always cheated," laughs Keith Pounder. "Instead of growing them from seed like everyone else he gave himself a head start by buying in seedlings." (-- pgs. 59-60) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2536#2536
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| Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 10:08 am Post subject: |
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In Cold Blood
Paperback
By Truman Capote
| Quote: | | And that is really all. Unless you include, as one must, the Holcomb School, a good-looking establishment, which reveals a circumstance that the appearance of the community otherwise camouflages: that the parents who send their children to this modern and bly staffed "consolidated" school - the grades go from kindergarten through senior high, and a fleet of buses transport the students, of which there are usually around three hundred and sixty, from as far as sixteen miles away - are, in general, a prosperous people. Farm ranchers, most of them, they are outdoor folk of very varied stock - German, Irish, Norwegian, Mexican, Japanese. They raise cattle and sheep, grow wheat, milo, grass seed, and sugar beets. Farming is always a chancy business, but in western Kansas its practitioners consider themselves "born gamblers," for they must contend with an extremely shallow precipitation (the annual average is eighteen inches) and anguishing irrigation problems. However, the last seven years have been years of droughless beneficence. The farm ranchers in Finney County, of which Holcomb is a part, have done well; money has been made not from farming alone but also from the exploitation of pelentiful natural-gas resources, and its acquisition is reflected in the new school, the comfortable interiors of the farmhouses, the steep and swollen grain elevators. (From The Last to See Them Alive at pgs. 4 and 5) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2572#2572
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| Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2007 5:27 pm Post subject: |
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The Pastures of Heaven
Paperback
By 1962 Nobel laureate John Steinbeck
| Quote: | He had to reassure himself a great deal before he made his first contract for beans in the field. In the first year of business, he made fifty thousand dollars, the second year two hundred thousand. The third year he contracted for thousands of acres of beans before they were even planted. By his contracts, he guaranteed to pay ten cents per pound for the crops. He could sell all the beans he could get for eighteen cents a pound. The war ended in November, and he sold his crop for four cents a pound. He had a little less money than when he started.
This time he was sure of the curse. His spirit was so badly broken that he didn't leave his house very often. He worked in the garden, planted a few vegetables and brooded over the enmity of his fate. Slowly, over a period of stagnant years, a nostalgia for the soil grew in him. In farming, he thought, lay the only line of endeavor that did not cross with his fate. He thought perhaps he could find rest and security on a little farm.
...The moment he had bought the farm, Bert felt free. The doom was gone. He knew he was safe from his curse. Within a month his shoulders straightened, and his face lost its haunted look. He became an enthusiastic learner; he read exhaustively on farming methods, hired a helper and worked from morning until night. Every day was a new excitement to him. Every seed sprouting out of the ground seemd to renew a promise of immunity to him. He was happy, and because he was confident again, he began to make friends in the valley and to entrench his position.
...Within three months he had become a part of the valley, a solid man, a neighbor. He borrowed tools and had tools borrowed from him. At the end of six months he was elected a member of the school board. To a large extent Bert's own happiness at being free of his Furies made the people like him. In addition he was a kindly man; he enjoyed doing favors for his friends, and more important, he had no hesitancy in asking for favors.
...Bert had been frowning soberly as a new thought began to work in his mind. "I've had a lot of bad luck," he said. "I've been in a lot of businesses and every one turned out bad. When I came down here, I had a kind of an idea that I was under a curse." Suddenly he laughed delightedly at the thought that had come to him. "And what do I do? First thing out of the box, I buy a place that's supposed to be under a curse. Well, I just happen to think, maybe my curse and the farm's curse got to fighting and killed each other off. I'm dead certain they've gone, anyway." (Chapter 1, pgs. 17-19) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2748#2748
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| Posted: Sun May 27, 2007 1:49 pm Post subject: |
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Country Living
British Edition
Village Life with Sue Gaisford
The Fete Committee
May, 2007
| Quote: | | I was tempted to volunteer as Madame Petulengro with large earrings and a crystal ball, wishing glamorous adventures upon those who crossed my palm with silver, but common sense prevailed and a clairvoyant was decided upon. I'd be the human fruit-machine. This involves inviting people to pay 30p to pull down your right arm (ch-chung!), while three small children snatch a lemon, an orange or a grapefruit out of carrier bags. If all three choose the same fruit, the punter wins 50p. Irresistible, isn't it? (-- pg. 37) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2868#2868
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| Posted: Sat Aug 18, 2007 10:24 am Post subject: |
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Country Living
British Edition
Roll up! Roll up!
Take a range of have-a-go games, add a
few fancy dress costumes and a well-laden tombola,
and you have the makings of that very British
institution, the village fête
By Jon Beer
July, 2007
| Quote: | We have held raft races on the canal at previous fêtes, duck racing on the river beyond and pony rides in the strip of land between - but this year there are punt rides. The bloke on the pole may look a touch piratical for a summer fête in the heart of England but that's the theme for this year's event so you won't be surprised to see a few eye-patches and coat-hangers-up-the-sleeve on the stallholders. The Civil War is another favourite theme: a battle was fought through the streets of the village 360 years ago and it's a good excuse to dress up as Nell Gwynn or a cavalier in big boots, lots of lace and a hat with a feather in it. The year Auntie Dot opened the fête we had a circus theme. The sight of our formidable chair of the fête committee striding through the proceedings in a ringmaster's top hat and long boots and wielding her whip is not something easily forgotten.
A particularly rascally pair of pirates is crouched over a wheelbarrow filled with sand. The surface is studded with eggs pressed into the sand. Most of these eggs are just shells but some are whole and for the trifling sum of 10p you can have three goes at picking a real one. Winners get their egg and rasher of bacon for breakfast: losers get a jelly baby. Children love this game and come back time and again to try their luck - before going on, no doubt, to lead lives addicted to gambling, spiralling into debt, sin and degradation. But it's all in a good cause: the damp patch has appeared again on the ceiling of the village hall and it looks like we need roof repairs. (-- pg. 40) |
More about our favorite gardening magazine, esp the 30-page Garden supplement May, 2007!.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2964#2964
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| Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 4:37 pm Post subject: |
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Canadian Geographic
Vancouver Real Estate Pumper
Hardly Better than a Freebie
Insert for the Recycling Bin
Queen of green
Inspired as a girl to make the world a little more environmentally friendly, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander has taken her cue from nature to become Canada's premier landscape architect and green-roof champion.
September/October, 2007
By Sarah Scott
| Quote: | ... The three-block-long park is planted on top of an office building that stretches between Robson Street and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Designed to look like a concrete sky-scraper lying on its side, the building houses the Provincial Law Courts, a UBC satellite campus and government offices. The roof has hanging gardens, pine trees and rhododendrons, three waterwalls to block out sounds of the city, plus a rink that was once iced over for skaters but is now used by skateboarders and salsa dancers. Robson Square, as it is known, has been celebrated for the interplay between the soft contours of Oberlander's roof garden and the sharp geometric lines of architect *Arthur Erickson's construction. It is a place where lawyers and provincial bureaucrats do their daily business, but it has also become an oasis for anyone seeking an escape from the city's concrete core.
Yet today, as she drives past lines of pink dogwoods loaded with blossoms, Oberlander knows her award-winning roof garden is not altogether intact. The trees, bushes and vines were uprooted from the building in early 2006. The roof had been leaking. It leaked so badly that the entire garden had to be replaced. Oberlander and Erickson insisted that at least 40 of the 101 mature trees - mostly pines, maples and dogwoods - be rescued, while the rest were composted. When the repairs are completed in 2008, the architects will have installed a $21 million green-roof system that should not leak.
... Some people in this coastal rainforest suspect green roofs are bound to leak... (emphasis added) (-- pgs. 88-89) |
Link to this entry
http://www.bccondos.ca/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1863#1863
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| Posted: Sun Sep 09, 2007 2:16 pm Post subject: |
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Summer Lightning
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | 'He (pink Ronnie Fish) bounced tennis-balls on my pig!'
'Do you mean to tell me,' he said sternly, 'that all this fuss, ruining my morning's work, was simply about that blasted pig of yours?'
'I refuse to allow you to call the Empress a blasted pig! Good heavens!' cried Lord Emsworth passionately. 'Can none of my family appreciate the fact that she is the most remarkable animal in Great Britain? No pig in the whole annals of the Shropshire Agricultural Show has ever won the silver medal two years in succession. And that, if only people will leave her alone and refrain from incessantly pelting her with tennis balls, is what the Empress is quite certain to do. It is an unheard of feat.'
The Hon. Gallahad frwoned. He shook his head reprovingly. It was all very well, he felt, a stable being optimistic about its nominee, but he was a man who could face facts. In a long and chequered life he had seen so many good things unstuck. Besides, he had his superstitions, and one of them was that counting your chickens in advance brought bad luck.
'Don't you be too cocksure, my boy,' he said gravely. 'I looked in at the Emsworth Arms the other day for a glass of beer, and there was a fellow in there offering three to one on an animal called Pride of Machingham. Offering it freely. Tall, red-haired fellow with a squint. Slightly bottled.'
'Pride of Maqtchingham belongs to Sir Gregory Parsloe,' he said, 'and I have no doubt that the man offering such ridiculous odds was his pig-man, Wellbeloved. As you know, the fellow used to be in my employment, but Parsloe lured him away from me by the promise of higher wages.' Lord Emsworth's expression had now become positively ferocious. 'The thought of George Cyril Wellbeloved, that perjured pig-man, always made the iron enter into his soul. 'It was a most abominable thing to do.'
The Hon. Galahad whistled.
'So that's it, is it? Parsloe's pig man going about offering three to one- against the form-book, I take it?'
'Most decidedly. Pride of Matchingham was awarded second prize last year, but it is quite an inferior animal to the Empress.'
'Then you look after that pig of yours, Clarence.' The Hon. Galahad spoke earnestly. 'I see what this means. Parsloe's up to his old games, and intends to queer the Empress somehow.'
'Queer her?'
'Nobble her. Or, if he can't do that, steal her.'
'You don't mean it.'
'I do mean it. The man's as slippery as a greased eel. He would nobble his grandmother if it suited his book. Let me tell you I've known young Parsloe for thirty years and I solemnly state that if his grandmother was entered in a competition for fat pigs and his commitments made it desirable for him to get her out of the way, he would dope her branmash and acorns without a moment's hesitation.'
'God bless my soul!' said Lord Emsworth, deeply impressed.
'Let me tell you a little story about young Parsloe. One or two of us used to meet at the Black Footman in Gossiter Street in the old days - they've pulled it down now - and match our dogs against rats in the room behind the bar. Well, I put my Towser, and admirable beast, up against young Parsloe's Banjo on one occasion for a hundred pounds a side. And when the night came and he was shown the rats, I'm dashed if he didn't just give a long yawn and roll over and go to sleep. I whistled him...called him...Towser, Towser...No good...Fast asleep. And my firm belief has always been that young Parsloe took him aside just before the contest was to start and gave him about six pounds of steak and onions. Couldn't prove anything, of course, but I sniffed the dog's breath and it was like opening the kitchen door of a Soho chophouse on a summer night. That's the sort of man young Parsloe is.'
'Galahad!'
'Fact. You'll find the story in my book.' (From Chapter 3, The Sensational Theft of a Pig, at pgs. 65-67) |
More about Gally and his book at The Will to Win.
| Quote: | Summer Lightning
Complete and Unabridged
Audio Cassette ONLY!
By P.G. Wodehouse
Narrated by British satirist John Wells
Again, a perfectly wonderful piece of fiction probably brilliantly narrated but available only on cassette. Fire the bloody publisher! Unfortunately, we were unable to locate any samples of the narrator's work online but we'll search our local libraries. His resume certainly recommends him. Please check back soon for a fuller review. |
Our indignant e-mail to the fools at Chivers:
| Quote: | Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2007 13:52:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: legal@pokerpulse.com
Subject: Hatred and bitterness! P.G. Wodehouse out of PRINT?!
To: nick.forster@bbc.co.uk
Nick -
Are you MAD?! What is the meaning of this outrage?
How can Summer Lightning be out of print?
And why, why, WHY are so many of the audio books available only in useless, breakable, outrageously expensive audio cassette? I am trying to run an ESL guide and you are not cooperating! Harumph! And furthermore, faugh!
Never mind rubbery rationales - please just fix it.
I'd like to hear a sample of narrator Wells but I must say Jonathan Cecil is the best I've heard so far. If Chivers was going to do the thing again - hint, hint! - I'd vote for him.
Please include me in Chivers e-mail alerts, catalogue - all of that stuff:
legal@pokerpulse.com.
Thanks very much.
Please let me know if/WHEN! Summer Lightning is again available. |
... and the not unexpectedly charming reply:
| Quote: | Subject: RE: Hatred and bitterness! P.G. Wodehouse out of PRINT?!
Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 10:12:14 +0100
From: "Nick Forster" <nick>
To: legal@pokerpulse.com
Quite mad, as it happens.
Alas I cannot say whether it's a prerequisite for the job, or simply a consequence of it.
Many of our Wodehouse titles are out of print, but this is merely a hiatus while shiny new CD editions are prepared for release; we have some 1,500 titles in the catalogue that need to be reissued in CD form and it's taking a little while to work through them.
Meantime let me stress that there are no,
as in none at all,
not any,
no, not even that many
plans to drop any of the Wodehouse books: all of them will reappear on CD in due course.
As for those cassettes, which stay stopped where they are when you switch off and which are so readily portable from the player in the drawing room to the one in the potting shed and from that to the one in the car without the need to fiddle about skipping tracks to find your place? They, astonishingly enough, remain the format of choice for many of our listeners, although this is slowly changing, hence the programme to reissue on CD as quickly as we can.
Summer Lightning is the only book John Wells ever read for us, so regrettably I cannot help with a sample of his narration - he was, however, an accomplished actor - and writer - http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/69101?_fromAuth=1 and would, no doubt, have done much more with us were it not for his untimely demise in 1998.
Sacking the publisher? That's just not my bag, I'm afraid.
I remain yours, etc.
Nick Forster
Nick Forster, Sales and Marketing Manager
BBC Audiobooks, St James House, The Square, Lower Bristol Road, Bath BA2 3BH
T: +44 (0)1225 878065 F: +44 (0)1225 448005 M: 07890 996980
mailto: nick.forster@bbc.co.uk |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2007 11:31 am Post subject: |
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Love Among the Chickens
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | We had been travelling down hill all this time, but at this point we crossed a road and the ground began to rise. I was in that painful condition which occurs when one has lost one's first wind and has not yet got one's second. I was hotter than I had ever been in my life.
Whether *Aunt Elizabeth, too, was beginning to feel the effects of her run, or whether she did it out of the pure effrontery of her warped and unpleasant nature, I do not know; but she now slowed down to walk, and even began to peck in a tentative manner at the grass. Her behaviour infuriated me. I felt that I was being treated as a cipher. I vowed that this bird should realise yet, even if, as seemed probable, I burst in the process, that it was no light matter to be pursued by J. Garnet, author of "The Manoeuvres of Arthur", etc., a man of whose work so capable a judge as the Peebles Advertiser had said "Shows promise."
A judicious increase of pace brought me within a yard or two of my quarry. But Aunt Elizabeth, apparently distrait, had the situation well in hand. She darted from me with an amused chuckle, and moved off rapidly again up the hill.
I followed, but there was that within me that told me I had shot my bolt. The sun blazed down, concentrating its rays on my back to the exclusion of the surrounding scenery. It seemed to follow me about like a limelight.
We had reached level ground. Aunt Elizabeth had again slowed to a walk, and I was capable of no better pace. Very gradually I closed in. There was a high boxwood hedge in front of us; and, just as I came close enough once more to stake my all on a single grab, Aunt Elizabeth, with another of her sardonic chuckles, dived in head-foremost and struggled through in the mysterious way in which birds do get through hedges. The sound of her faint spinster-like snigger came to me as I stood panting, and roused me like a bugle. The next moment I too had plunged into the hedge. (From Mr. Garnet's Narrative, pgs. 42-43) |
| Quote: | *Note: A word about Aunt Elizabeth:
I had wandered into the paddock at the moment. I looked up. Coming towards me at her best pace was a small hen. I recognised her immediately. It was the disagreeable, sardonic-looking bird which Ukridge, on the strength of an alleged similarity of profile to his wife's nearest relative, had christened Aunt Elizabeth. A Bolshevist hen, always at the bottom of any disturbance in the fowl-run, a bird which ate its head off daily at our expense and bit the hands which fed it by resolutely declining to lay a single egg. (-- p. 41) |
Love Among the Chickens
Audio CD
Narrated just so by Jonathan Cecil
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3021#3021
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| Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 12:27 pm Post subject: |
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The Long Valley
Paperback
By John Steinbeck
| Quote: | The word ran through the farms, "It's sweet peas. The whole God-damn' forty-five acres is in sweet peas!" Men called on Clark De Witt then, to get his opinion.
His opinion was this: "People think because you can get twenty to sixty cents a pound for sweet peas you can get rich on them. But it's the most ticklish crop in the world. If the bugs don't get it, it might do good. And then come a hot day and bust the pods and lose your crop on the ground. Or it might come up a little rain and spoil the whole kaboodle. It's all right to put in a few acres and take a chance, but not the whole place. Peter's touched in the head since Emma died."
This opinion was widely distributed. Every man used it as his own. Two neighbors often said it to each other, each one repeating half of it. When too many people said it to Peter Randall he became angry. One day he cried, "Say, whose land is this? If I want to go broke, I've got a damn good right to, haven't I?" And that changed the whole feeling. Men remembered that Peter was a good farmer. Perhaps he had special knowledge. Why, that's who those two men in boots were - soil chemists! A good many of the farmers wished they'd put in a few acres of sweet peas.
They wished it particularly when the vines spread out, when they met each other across the ros and hid the dark earth from sight, when the buds began to form and it was seen the crop was rich. And then the blooms came; forty-five acres of color, forty-five acres of perfume. It was said that you could smell them in Salinas, four miles away. Buses rbought the school children out to look at them. A group of men from a seed company spent all day looking at the vines and feeling the earth.
Peter Randall sat on his porch in a rocking-chair every afternoon. He looked down on the great squares of pink and blue, and on the made square of mixed colors. When the afternoon breeze came up, he inhaled deeply. His blue shirt was open at the throat, as though he wanted to get the perfume down next to his skin.
... Ed brought out the bottle and glasses. "What you doing, Peter, celebrating the crop? You must've made a pile of money."
Peter put out his palm and tappied it impressively with a forefinger. "Sure I made money - but it wasn't a bit better than gambling. It was just like straight gambling."
"But you got the money."
Peter scowled thoughtfully. "I might have lost my pants," he said. "The whole time, all the year, I been worrying. It was just like gambling." (From the short story, The Harness, at pgs. 88-92) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3260#3260
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 1:14 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
Beyond the Outer Shores
The Untold Story of Ed Ricketts, the pioneering ecologist who inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell
Hardcover
By non-'Billy Frostback Eric Enno Tamm
| Quote: | Having depleted the ocean, we are now trying to domesticate it by "farming" fish. The U.S. government is even proposing new legislation to privatize the ocean within the two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zone by promoting fish farnming in much the same way that pioneers settled the West. In the words of one newspaper reporter, who obtained a draft of the proposed legislation, "Look out at the boundless ocean, and envision a new Iowa - homesteaded by fish farm colonies... with row upon row of undersea cages roiling with swimming livestock."
Today, the outer shores of the North Pacific represent a tragic microcosm of the world at large. In British Columbia, pristine inlets are being turned into the aquatic equivalent of industrial feedlots with thousands of fish crammed into tiny floating pens. The fish are particularly susceptible to disease and sea lice infestation, are fed pellets and dyes to color their flesh, and contain a level of toxic PCBs seven times higher than in wild salmon. Production from this type of industrial salmon farming soared from 15,500 tonnes in 1990 to 89,000 tonnes in 2002, while wild salmon catches plummeted.
What remains of the wild fisheries, including groundfish, black cod and halibut, among others, are being privatized. The fish in the ocean are being divvied up into individual quotas owned by corporations and so-called "arm chair" fishermen who trade and lease their quotas for profit. Tenant fishermen, not unlike the tenant farmers depicted in The Grapes of Wrath, often pay usurious "rents" equivalent to 70 percent of the revenue from their catches to the quota owners. Poorer rural and aboriginal fishermen have been pushed off the sea, as quota holdings are consolidated in the hands of a rich few. Of the 1,006 quota licences in B.C., for example, only thirteen are owned by people living on the outer shores of Vancouver Island.
A billionaire businessman, Jimmy Pattison, now owns more fishing licences than all these communities combined .
... Are we slaves to a great industrial machine, or "monster" as Steinbeck called it, or are we a species living in mutual dependence with our natural environment? It seems we have failed to heed the one biological truth so evident in the various writings of Ricketts, Steinbeck and Campbell: humans, like other animals, live in communities. Our traditional knowledge, connection to place, dependence on clean air and water, and intergenerational bonds are part of a lifecycle that has allowed us to thrive in nature and persevere despite history's travails. Destroy this organic entity or try to replace it with the harsh mathematics of a corporate ledger or sever a community's connection to the land and sea, and you'll ultimately destroy what makes us human. We will become the brutal machines we have created. (From Epilogue, pgs-. 313-314)) |
Stain Upon the Sea
West Coast Salmon Farming
Paperback
By S. Hume
Foreward by David Suzuki
EurekAlert!
Press Release
Fish farms drive wild salmon populations toward extinction
Experts raise serious concerns about the expansion of industrial fish farming
Contact: Matt Wright
Dec. 13/07
| Quote: | A study appearing in the Dec. 14th issue of the journal Science shows, for the first time, that parasitic sea lice infestations caused by salmon farms are driving nearby populations of wild salmon toward extinction. The results show that the affected pink salmon populations have been rapidly declining for four years.The scientists expect a 99% collapse in another four years, or two salmon generations, if the infestations continue. (see summary and links below)
“The impact is so severe that the viability of the wild salmon populations is threatened,” says lead author Martin Krkosek, a fisheries ecologist from the University of Alberta. Krkosek and his co-authors calculate that sea lice have killed more than 80% of the annual pink salmon returns to British Columbia’s Broughton Archipelago. “If nothing changes, we are going to lose these fish.”
Previous peer-reviewed papers by Krkosek and others showed that sea lice from fish farms can infect and kill juvenile wild salmon. This, however, is the first study to examine the population-level effects on the wild salmon stocks.
“It shows there is a real danger to wild populations from the impact of farms,” says Ray Hilborn, a fisheries biologist from the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “The data for individual populations are highly variable. But there is so much of it, it is pretty persuasive that salmon populations affected by farms are rapidly declining.” According to experts, the study also raises serious concerns about large-scale proposals for net pen aquaculture of other species and the potential for pathogen transfer to wild populations.
“This paper is really about a lot more than salmon,” says Hilborn. “It is about the impacts of net pen aquaculture on wild fish. This is the first study where we can evaluate these interactions and it certainly raises serious concerns about proposed aquaculture for other species such as cod, halibut and sablefish.”
The data are from the Broughton Archipelago, a group of islands and channels about 260 miles northwest of Vancouver that is environmentally, culturally, and economically dependent on wild salmon. To pinpoint the effect of salmon farms, the study used a large dataset collected by the Canadian federal government’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Fisheries and Ocean Canada) that estimates how many adult salmon return from the ocean to British Columbia’s rivers each year. Extending back to 1970, the data covers 14 populations of pink salmon (Onchorhynchus gorbuscha) that have been exposed to salmon farms, and 128 populations that have not.
Sea lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis) are naturally occurring parasites of wild salmon that latch onto the fishes’ skin in the open ocean. The lice are transmitted by a tiny free-swimming larval stage. Open-net salmon farms are a haven for these parasites, which feed on the fishes’ skin and muscle tissue. Adult salmon can survive a small number of lice, but juveniles headed from the river to the sea are very small, thin-skinned, and vulnerable. In the Broughton Archipelago, the juvenile salmon must run an 80-kilometer gauntlet of fish farms before they reach the open ocean.
“Salmon farming breaks a natural law,” says co-author Alexandra Morton, director of the Salmon Coast Field Station, located in the Broughton. “In the natural system, the youngest salmon are not exposed to sea lice because the adult salmon that carry the parasite are offshore. But fish farms cause a deadly collision between the vulnerable young salmon and sea lice. They are not equipped to survive this, and they don’t.”
Salmon bring nutrients from the open ocean back to the coastal ecosystem. Killer whales, bears, wolves, birds, and even trees depend on pink salmon. “If you lose wild salmon there’s a lot you are going to lose with them – including other industries such as fishing and tourism,” says Krkosek.
“An important finding of this paper is that the impact of the sea lice is so large that it exceeds that of the commercial fishery that used to exist here,” says Jennifer Ford, a co-author and fisheries scientist. “Since the infestations began, the fishery has been closed and the salmon stocks have continued declining.” (emphasis added)
“In the Broughton there are just too many farmed fish in the water. If there were only one salmon farm this problem probably wouldn’t exist,” Krkosek says.
“Over the years the number of farmed fish has increased,” says Morton. “There used to be only a few farms, each holding about 125,000 fish. But now we have over 20 farms, some holding 1.3 million fish. The farmed fish are providing a habitat for lice that wasn’t there before.”
The researchers observed that when farms on a primary migration route were temporarily shut down, or fallowed, sea lice numbers dropped and salmon populations increased. “Even though they have complicated migration patterns they all have one thing in common – overall, the populations that are declining are the ones that are going past the farms,” says Mark Lewis, a mathematical ecologist at the University of Alberta.
“There are two solutions that may work – closed containment, and moving farms away from rivers,” says Lewis. Closed containment means moving the salmon to pens that are completely sealed off from the surrounding environment in contrast to the open-net pens currently in use. In a May 16, 2007 provincial government report, the B.C. Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture recommended a move towards closed containment within 5 years.
“If industry says it’s too expensive to move the fish farms or contain them, they are actually saying the natural system must continue to pay the price,” says Daniel Pauly, Director of the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre, who was not involved with the study. “They are, as economists would say, externalizing the costs of fish farming on the wild salmon and the public.”
Morton, who has been studying the impacts of aquaculture for 20 years, says that, “Wild salmon are enormously important to the ecosystem, economies, and culture. Now it is clear they are disappearing in place of an industry. People need to know this and make a decision what they want: industry-produced salmon or wild salmon.” |
| Quote: | Science:
14 December 2007
Vol. 318. no. 5857, p. 1711
DOI: 10.1126/science.318.5857.1711
| Quote: | Rather than benefiting wild fish, industrial aquaculture may contribute to declines in ocean fisheries and ecosystems. Farm salmon are commonly infected with salmon lice (Lepeophtheirus salmonis), which are native ectoparasitic copepods. We show that recurrent louse infestations of wild juvenile pink salmon (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha), all associated with salmon farms, have depressed wild pink salmon populations and placed them on a trajectory toward rapid local extinction. The louse-induced mortality of pink salmon is commonly over 80% and exceeds previous fishing mortality. If outbreaks continue, then local extinction is certain, and a 99% collapse in pink salmon population abundance is expected in four salmon generations. These results suggest that salmon farms can cause parasite outbreaks that erode the capacity of a coastal ecosystem to support wild salmon populations.
1 Centre for Mathematical Biology, Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
2 Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
3 Biology Department, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
4 Salmon Coast Field Station, Simoom Sound, BC, Canada.
* Deceased.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mkrkosek@ualberta.ca |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2008 11:11 am Post subject: |
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The Labours of Hercules
Hardcover
By Agatha Christie
| Quote: | ... 'The Classics aren't a ladder leading to quick success like a modern correspondence course! It's not a man's working hours that are important - it's his leisure hours. That's the mistake we all make. Take yourself now, you're getting on, you'll be wanting to get out of things, to take things easy - what are you going to do then with your leisure hours?'
Poirot was ready with his reply.
'I am going to attend - seriously - to the cultivation of vegetable marrows.'
Dr. Burton was taken aback.
'Vegetable marrows? What d'yer mean? Those great swollen green things that taste of water?'
'Ah," Poirot spoke enthusiastically. 'But that is the whole point of it. They need not taste of water.'
'Oh! I know - sprinkle 'em with cheese, or minced onion or white sauce.'
'No, no - you are in error. It is my idea that the actual flavour of the marrow itself can be improved. It can be given,' he screwed up his eyes, 'a bouquet -'
'Good God, man, it's not a claret.' The word bouquet reminded Dr. Burton of the glass at his elbow. He sipped and savoured. 'Very good wine, this. Very sound. Yes.' His head nodded in approbation. 'But this vegetable marrow business - you're not serious? You don't mean' - he spoke in lively horror - 'that you're actually going to stoop' his hands descended in sympathetic horror on his own plump stomach - 'stoop, and fork dung on the things, and feed 'em with strands of wool dpped in water and all the rest of it?'
... 'Yours aren't the Labours of Hercules,' he said. 'Yours are labours of love. You'll see if I'm not right. Bet you that in twelve months' time you'll still be here, and vegetable marrows will still be' - he shuddered - 'merely marrows.'
Taking leave of his host, Dr Burton left the severe rectangular room.
He passes out of these pages not to return to them. We are concerned only with what he left behind him, which was an Idea. (From the Foreward, pgs. 10-12) |
Two PokerPulse marrow favorites:
| Quote: | The Labours of Hercules
Audio CD
Narrated by British actor Hugh Fraser,
who played Captain Arthur Hastings opposite
Poirot in the successful TV series.
Fraser, who possesses a remarkable vocal range of characters, is among the top three PokerPulse picks for readers of recorded books. The other two are, of course, Jonathan Cecil reading P.G. Wodehouse and the unaparallelled Hamlet, young John Gielgud recently re-mixed on Audio CD. |
| Quote: | Agatha Christie's Poirot
The Complete Collection
DVD
First-rate series and unlike so many excellent but unwatchable British dramas very well recorded. Unfortunately, The Labours of Hercules is not yet among the popular dramatizations. |
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2008 9:52 am Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Harrowsmith Country Life
Canadian Edition
Magazine Subscription
The Canola Capers
Manitoba farmers try to nab crop rustlers
By Jason Santerre
October, 2005
| Quote: | WINNIPEG - Farmers in southern Manitoba have a mystery on their hands - and they're keeping a close eye on their fields until they find the answer, name, who's been stealing their canola? Indeed, entire crops have vanished.
It sounds unbelievable but for canola farmer Raymond Martel, the heists are no joke. He is the latest victim in a series of thefts that involve harvesting the crop while the legitimate owner is out of town. The brazen bandits made off with $50,000 worth of Martel's crop on his farm near Somerset. "They used my own trucks, broke the lock to my machine shed and got away with over 5,000 bushels," he says. Martel had just returned home from holidays to find his empty field. (From The Gazette at p. 98) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2008 1:23 pm Post subject: |
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Time's River
The Voyage of Life in Art and Poetry
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Hardcover
Selected by Kate Farrell
| Quote: | Answers
If I envy anyone it must be
My grandmother in a long ago
Green summer, who hurried
Between kitchen and orchard on small
uneducated feet, and took easily
All shining fruits into her eager hands.
That summer I hurried too, wakened
To books and music and circling philosophies.
I sat in the kitchen sorting through volumes of answers
that could not solve the mystery of trees.
My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles,
Smiling, in faulty grammar,
She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.
so to please her I studied-- but I will remember always
How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled
All the wild sauces of the brimming year.
Mary Oliver, American, b. 1935
(-- p. 97, adjacent to Camille Pisarro, The Artist's Garden at Eragny, 1898) |
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editor
Site Admin
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Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2008 10:08 am Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
COUNTRY LIFE
Weekly Magazine Subscription
Country Crusader
Foot-and-mouth: the death knell for Defra?
Aug. 9/07
| Quote: | Agriculture is a vulnerable business. In the space of a few years, we have seen swine fever decimate the pig herd, foot-and-mouth take eight billion pounds out of the econonomy, bird flu destroy the livelihoods of hundreds of workers and small farmers, and floods leave fields and farm buildings under water. Now comes a return of the dreaded foot-and-mouth, an immediate and correct imposition of an EU export ban, and the destruction of yet more animals as Mr Borwn seeks to show, this time, the Government has it under control.
Yet it seems that this time, it's the Government itself that may have been to blame, not for failing to stop the spread of the disease, but for starting it in the first place. The finger of suspicion points to the Ministry research site at Pirbright. This is a centre that has suffered much from recent cuts, including those imposed to pay for Defra's own failure in the useless Rural Payments Agency (RPA).
... If this outbreak turns out to originate at Pirbright, Defra will have to take 100% of the blame. It allowed the production of vaccine so near to the animals it was supposed to protect. It cut the already inadequate funding to make up for the huge sums squandered by the RPA. It failed to demad adequate resources from Mr. Brown. It must carry the can. (-- p. 32) |
The Canadian perspective on BSE - blame the U.S.
Harrowsmith
Country Life
Magazine Subscription
Where the buffalo roam
Wather buffalo cheese isn't the only attraction at
Vancouver Island's newest and most talked about
culinary retreat. But it's an unusual start.
By Tom Cruickshank
August, 2007
| Quote: | All they wanted to do was raise a small herd of exotic livestock. Instead, Darrel and Anthea Archer found themselves in a legal quagmire that cost them their savings, sapped their energy and catapulted them head-first into the BSE scare. It's been a rough ride since it all started in 2000, but at last, the dust seems to have settled.
"At first, things went according to plan," says Anthea, recalling that after years working with Brown Swiss and other dairy cattle, she and Darrel thought it would be novel to try their hand with abreed of fiver buffalo called Murrah. "There were none in Canada, but our research showed that they had many factors in their favour," continues Anthea. Gentle and easy to handle despite their forbidding size, river buffalo thrive on pasture and don't need commercial feed. They are exceptionally hady, free of foot rot, pink eye and other diseases which cattle are routinely medicated with antibiotics. Best of all, their milk is six to nine per cent fat, about double that of cow's milk. "It's ideal for making cheese," says Anthea. When the couple found some animals for sale in Denmark, they went through documented channels and shipped them to Vancouver. Local cheesemakers were already excited at the prospect of making buffalo cheese.
Then all hell broke loose. While the Archers' animals were still in quarantine at their farm, a single case of mad cow disease (BSE) was diagnosed back in Denmark. "At first, we weren't alarmed," says Darrel. "After all, our animals had a clean bill of health, and besides, BSE strikes cattle, not buffalo." But the American government decreed that all ruminants - be they cows, sheep, goats, pigs or, yes, buffalo - with a Danish pedigree had to be destroyed and their brains tested after death (the only way to determine the presence of mad cow disease). And in an effort not to jeopardize the major market for Canadian meat, our authorities were determined to comply. The Archers were thunderstruck.
Thus began three years of legal battles....
... today, the herd numbers 45, of which 24 are being milked. Now at an age when most people are thinking of retiring, the Archers are just getting started, selling their buffalo milk to a local artisan cheese factory. (From Battle for the Buffalo, p. 46) |
Link to this entry
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