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?