Sent: Wednesday, September 15, 2004 8:30 AM
Subject: RE: book club meeting: Thu 9/2

Present: Jim, Peter and newcomer Mary, who has returned after
several years of conservation work in Ecuador.  We discussed
"The Future of Life" by Edward O. Wilson. Wilson paints a
grim picture of the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity,
mainly due to the loss of habitat. The average American,
for example, has an ecological footprint of about 24 acres,
while people in developing countries require 2.5 acres.
If everyone in the world were to reach American standards
of living, we would need 4 more planet Earths. Wilson also
points out how our natural resources provide free services
to humans, to the tune of $33 trillion per year. But since
nobody pays for this service, there is no incentive to
preserve species diversity. Many plants may contain
chemicals of great economic importance, but we may lose
them forever before scientists can even begin to study them. 
An example is Calophyllum lanigerum, which contains a
chemical that stops the replication of the AIDS virus.
Wilson also offers many ways to solve this problem; humans
are unique not only in being able to make such drastic
changes to its environment, but also in recognizing
problems and having hope for the future.

Our next meeting will be Thu 11/18, 7pm, the book will be another
one by Edward O. Wilson, "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge".

Peter
http://www.wideopenwest.com/~peterwchen/book.html

Below is a followup to a question from our previous meeting:

 From: Plannedscapes@aol.com [mailto:Plannedscapes@aol.com]
 Sent: Saturday, July 17, 2004 10:06 PM
 
 The layers of rock were formed in a sea so were in the shape
 of a basin - imagine a stack of cereal bowls - so as the
 basin shape was pushed upward, the edges of the bowls eroded
 and soome of the bottoms even, but the result was that the
 youngest bowl bottom was left surrounded by circles of
 progressivley older bowls - the sides of the bowls of older
 layers. Of course, not a perfect circle and layers not
 perfectly horizontal or even in perfect layers, but in general.
 
 -----Original Message-----
 "Ancient Life of the Great Lakes Basin" by J. Alan Holman. 
 
 	At the end of the Pennsylvanian period, ... there was
 	an upwarping of the Great Lakes region that resulted in
 	an erosional interval for the next 250 million years.
 	As the gently downward-curving layers of sedimentary
 	rocks in the Michigan Basin were slowly pushed upward,
 	they were eroded away to form a pattern in which the
 	youngest Paleozoic rocks were closest to the surface
 	at the center of the basin, with successively older
 	closest to the surface away from the center of the basin.
 
 As far as we could tell, eroding the center of the rising
 dome would wear away the youngest rocks in the center, so
 the center should have the oldest rocks?