Nature Podcast 26 July 2007
Introduction
This is a transcript of the 26th July edition of the weekly Nature Podcast. Audio files for the current show and archive episodes can be accessed from the Nature Podcast index page (http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast), which also contains details on how to subscribe to the Nature Podcast for FREE, and has troubleshooting top-tips. Send us your feedback to mailto:podcast@nature.com.
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Chris Smith: In this week's program, how rising ozone levels are damaging plants and affecting their ability to lock away CO2 .
Stephen Sitch: If ozone concentration increase into the future, there would be more carbon than we previously saw and increased warming.
Chris Smith: And that means our greenhouse predictions might be even more bleak than we first thought plus alongside that report we have also got strong new evidence that human activities are having a serious impact on rainfall. It is on the way. But on the lighter side, why science has found a friend in The Simpsons'.Excerpt from the Simpsons':"This perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke. It just keeps going faster and faster. Lisa, get in here. In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics."
Chris Smith: The head writer behind the show will be sharing with us his passion for science and if that is not sweet enough could a chocolate bar hold the secret to how continents break apart.
Daniel Lizarralde: We have things here in the state called PowerBars, they are like sort of a taffy and if you pull on them when they are hot they stretch and stretch before they actually break, but if they are cold they break abruptly. When we look across this ocean basin, some places the crust is stretched and stretched before it broke and in other places it just broke very quickly.
Chris Smith: Clearly, a researcher with a sweet tooth. That is Dan Lizarralde, who will be joining us later. Hello, I am Chris Smith. Welcome to the Nature Podcast. First this week, ozone, friend or foe? Well, we cannot live without it, but in your own place, i.e., at ground level, it can also spell disaster. Now, new research shows that it damages plants and prevents them from picking up CO2 , which means that our greenhouse models might just need to rethink. Here is Stephen Sitch. Nature advance online publication 25 July 2007
Stephen Sitch: Some of the human emissions of CO2 , due to, fossil fuel burning, and land use, which has got into the atmosphere is being taken up by the land ecosystems and the ocean and this thing I am really trying to study is how efficient the land ecosystems will be at taking up some of this extra CO2 into the future and up until now the existing models do not include this negative impact of ozone onto land productivity and hence CO2 uptake from the land.
Chris Smith: Where does the ozone come from?
Stephen Sitch: The ozone is a major secondary air pollutant and so what that really means is it is because of emissions of nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide, some are natural, some are coming now from industrial activities, cars, etc., and when you have this mix together with sunlight you can get situations where ozone rapidly is produced in the lower part of the atmosphere.
Chris Smith: And what are the consequences of this ozone at ground level for plants and other kinds of life?
Stephen Sitch: Ozone may have detrimental effects on human health. I think a lot of the studies originally focused on the human health impacts of elevated ozone. We are looking at effects of ozone damaging plants in terms of reducing their ability to photosynthesize.
Chris Smith: So, we have high ozone, then the plants would not photosynthesize so also they will fix less CO2 ?
Stephen Sitch: Exactly!
Chris Smith: So, how have you arrived to this conclusion and what are the models that you drove in to gather actually say the future holds then, because that sounds pretty, pretty scary?
Stephen Sitch: Well, there is quite a lot of field data showing up some species are very responsive to ozone damage so that their leaves start to brown, etc. So, what we have done is we have taken this ecological field knowledge and implemented that into one of these big global carbon cycle models and what we have really done in this paper is to look at the interaction between elevated CO2 in the atmosphere and elevated ozone concentrations. So, the productivity of the land is projected to increase in the future simply because you have got more CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 effectively fertilizes the plants; however, when you also include elevated ozone, our increase is reduced.
Chris Smith: Have you factored into the equation? The fact that when the CO2 level goes up, the plants do not have to open their stomata, the little pores on the onside of the leaf so big to get same amount of CO2 in, and is not that how ozone gets in. So, will the plants not become bit immune to ozone as the levels of CO2 go up?
Stephen Sitch: Yes, that is actually one of the main aspects of this study, because we mechanistically represent the uptake of both CO2 and ozone through the pores in the leaves or stomata. What we do find is that at elevated CO2 , the stomata would be a bit more closed and therefore, the uptake of ozone would be less. The ozone damage would be reduced. So, we factored that into the exercise.
Chris Smith: But even so, you are still going to see a net negative or devastating effect on plants. So, this will of course impact on the CO2 levels because they would not be fixing as much?
Stephen Sitch: The effect of elevated CO2 fertilizing plants is larger than the negative effect of ozone; however, models do not include this negative effect. So, up until now the projections into future assuming that the land is taking up a certain amount of carbon from the atmosphere which may not be the case if ozone concentration increase into the future. So, therefore there would be more carbon than we previously saw remaining in the atmosphere and hence increased warming.
Chris Smith: And this means that we could have effectively underestimated how fast things could change if this continues to be the case?
Stephen Sitch: Yes. Because the elevated ozone concentrations are regional, the mid latitude sort of areas like southern United States, Southeast Asia, Europe, that is where the projections of future high ozone concentration is. They are also the areas we rely most for food production, etc. So, we have the global story looking at reduced efficiency of the land to take up some of this emitted carbon, but also there might be an issue with regard to crop productivity.
Chris Smith: So, more ozone means less CO2 pickup by plants and that means a greater greenhouse effect. That was Stephen Sitch from the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre. Unfortunately, the bad news does not end there, because Francis Zwiers and Xuebin Zhang have uncovered new evidence, which suggests that we are also having a significant effect on rainfall. In just 75 years, in some places it has got much wetter whilst in others it is now a lot drier. Here is Frances Zwiers. Nature 448, 461–465 (26 July 2007)
Francis W. Zwiers: The trend over the century has been about 62 mm compared to the amount that we typically receive between 40 N and 70 N of above 600 mm per year. In the northern subtropics between 0 and 30 N there has been a decrease of the order of 90 mm per year compared to 1400 mm per year that is received every year in that latitude band, and then in the southern tropics between the equator and 30 S there has again been an increase of about 82 mm compared to about 1450 mm per year in that band. So, these are pretty large changes over better part of the century.
Chris Smith: So, how far back in time can you say that the preceding rainfall measurements were accurate for, in other words, is this just a wiggle or is this something which we think is as sustained and real departure from what would be considered normal?
Francis W. Zwiers: Well, we think it is a sustained and real departure and the data that we are using extend from 1925 to the present. We began our analysis in 1925 because we felt that is when there was enough data in each of these latitude bands for us to calculate reliable estimates of how much precipitation was being received over land.
Chris Smith: What do you think has driven this change?
Francis W. Zwiers: Well, we think this is due to human interference in the climate system. People had previously done studies looking at the global mean land precipitation and they had been able to detect external influence and in particularly volcanic forcing on that time series, but by just looking at the global mean they were not able to separate out the effects of natural external forcing from solar and volcanic and anthropogenic forcing from greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols, and so what we have been able to do here is to look at the pattern of change in the spatial distribution of precipitation by latitude band and by doing that we have been able to separate out the effects of the human influence on the distribution of precipitation and natural influences on its distribution.
Chris Smith: And Xuebin, how did you actually arrive at this conclusion, what was the experimental method that has enabled you to tease out this human imprint that you are saying?
Xuebin Zhang: Well, we used over 90 simulations conducted by 14 climate models. First, we need to find out what is the anticipated precipitation response to anthropogenic or human influence added to natural forces, and then we compared this to what we call as fingerprints of anthropogenic climate change and natural climate change, we observed trend patterns using statistical methods.
Chris Smith: And was there a big difference?
Xuebin Zhang: Well, the observed trend of precipitation is very consistent with what model tells us under influence of anthropogenic forces.
Chris Smith: And Francis, what are the implications of this then if it is down to us? Does this mean that this is just the tip of the iceberg, things are going to get a lot worse because the numbers that you have stated for how much things have changed are quite severe are not they?
Francis W. Zwiers: The numbers are substantial between 40 and 70 N. We estimate that two-thirds of the change that has taken place there is due to human influence, in the Northern tropics one-third of the change due to human influence, and in the Southern tropics most of the change due to human influence.
Chris Smith: How much of a difference is this going to make to the average person's life? Is this going to be sufficient say to turn a fertile farming area into a desert?
Francis W. Zwiers: That is of course a difficult question to respond to, but we have been concerned about the Sahel for example and in the Sahel which is quite a dry place having that place become more dry and now we suspect that human influence on the climate system might have been responsible for some of that there that certainly made life there a lot more difficult.
Chris Smith: What about health and disease for other reasons, because where you have water you have other kinds of problems, waterborne illness?
Francis W. Zwiers: You certainly do. Whenever there are changes in water there are concerns for humans and for ecosystems and I suspect that while this signal in temperature is much clearer than the human signal in precipitation at this point. The major impacts that humans and society and ecosystems are going to feel will come via changes in the availability of water.
Chris Smith: Francis Zwiers and Xuebin Zhang from Environment Canada. Their models have removed natural events from the climate equation leaving what looks very much like human fingerprints all over the recent changes we have seen in rainfall.
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Chris Smith: On the way, what a young fault in the Gulf of California is teaching researchers about rifting. We take a look at the lie of the land in the word of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis and Pygmy FM., the radio station dedicated to deforestation or at least trying to stop it. First though, to an unusual ally for science, The Simpsons' as the new movie hits the big screen, Mike Hopkin has caught up with some of the writers, who it turns out are highly sympathetic to the scientific cause. Nature 448, 404–405 (26 July 2007)
Michael Hopkin: If you are looking for science on TV, you probably would not turn to a show about a dysfunctional cartoon family whose main intellectual thinker is an 8-year-old girl, but if you look closely, The Simpsons' is one of the most scientifically literate shows around and that is perhaps unsurprising given the fact that the shows head writer, Al Jean studied mathematics at Harvard. I asked him whether there are any parallels between cartoons and maths.
Al Jean: I look at comedy writing mathematically. You know it started like a proof for you trying to find the ideal punch line for a setup and when you get it, it is a very elegant feeling and it is a little like a feeling of completing a proof when I was doing math in college.
Michael Hopkin: And he is not alone, in fact, most of the established writers on this show have a scientific pedigree and it is a pretty impressive roll call.
Al Jean: Yes, Ken Keeler who wrote for The Simpsons and Futurama has a mathematical Ph.D., Bill Odenkirk who writes for The Simpsons has a Ph.D. in chemistry, George Meyer a long time Simpsons writer, I cannot remember what his major was, but it was definitely in the sciences and Stewart Burns another Simpsons and Futurama writer had maths degree, and you know when we are alone, you know, we sort of talk about math, but again we have learnt that there is a wider world and we do not always like, expose others to it. We do it in a subtle way. Excerpt from The Simpsons':"I know. Well, this perpetual motion machine she made today is a joke. It just keeps going faster and faster. Lisa, get in here. In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics."
Michael Hopkin: There is also a scientific theme running through the new movie alongside typical Simpsons' absurdities such as Homer falling in love with a pig. The plot also features the looming threat of climate change prompting Lisa to present an Al Gore-style lecture entitled 'an irritating truth'. In fact, throughout the shows 400-episode history, it has often fallen to Lisa to speak up for scientific rationalism, perhaps most notably in the episode in which she attacks Springfield's decision to abandon the teaching of evolution. It made me wonder whether the writers have a specifically pro-science agenda.
Al Jean: Our general agenda is to display both sides of an issue and to let the viewer make up his or her own mind. In that particular case, I believe evolution is so scientifically well founded that it is hard to have any sort of intelligent alternative joy.Excerpt from The Simpsons':"Creationism, but that is not science.""It is now. This helpful video will evade on your questions. Eyes screenward.""So, you are calling god a liar an unbiased comparison of evolution and creationism. Let's say hi to two books; one a bible was written by our lord. The other, the origin of species was written by a cowardly drunk named Charles Darwin,""This is slander. Darwin was one of the greatest minds of all time. Then, why is he making up with Satan."
Michael Hopkin: Of course, The Simpsons also has fun with scientists' social image especially in the case of the painfully awkward professor Frink, who one suspects would trade in all of his inventions such as the sarcasm detector, the frog exaggerator, and mood pants for the chance just to get a girlfriend, but more seriously and as someone who has spent time in the scientific community, Al Jean worries about the negative portrayal of science and scientists in much of the mainstream media.
Al Jean: Well, it is sad because, you know, in my life I have seen science viewed as sort of the saviour for everything and it has almost come full circle, you know, because nothing can completely solve everybody's problems, the disappointment when that happens is extreme and now people are, you know, casting scientists as villains or, you know, not listening to them, which I think is tragic, you know, 50 years ago, Albert Einstein was the epitome of scientists among the public and regarded as a hero and there is not anybody comparable today and I think it shows how science has, you know, have been made to appear in a, you know, more ambiguous way.
Michael Hopkin: That is not to say that contemporary scientists have not appeared on the show. Over the years, The Simpsons has featured scientific luminary such as Stephen Jay Gould and Stephen Hawking and the writers have not been afraid to give them scripts that delve into the relevant subject matter.
Al Jean: There is nothing, you know, purer than mathematics of all the things I have ever studied. People seem really thrilled that we have had Stephen Hawking on the show and no one could be more thrilled than I.Excerpt from The Simpsons':"Oh! Stephen Hawking!""The world's smartest man.""What are you doing here?""I wanted to see your Utopia, but now I see it is more of a Fruitopia.""I am sure what Dr. Hawking means.""Silence I don't need anyone to talk for me, except this voice box. You have clearly been corrupted by power. For shame""Larry Flynt is right! You guys stink!""I don't know which is the bigger disappointment, my failure to formulate a unified field theory or you."
Michael Hopkin: So, if you worry about science getting a bad reputation on TV, you can take solace in the fact that Springfield at least is on your side. That is assuming of course that you think science is worth caring about.Excerpt from The Simpsons':"Science! What has science ever done for us? TV off"
Chris Smith: And I strongly suspect that there are probably a few people out there struggling with grant applications at the moment and wondering exactly the same thing. It was Mike Hopkin talking with Simpsons' writer and Harvard mathematician, Al Jean, and incidentally, the film is out from the 27th of July if you would like to go and see it. Now, from home of Simpsons' who is always at fault, to the Gulf of California and a fault of a very different kind, which is giving scientists important clues about how tectonic processes work the world over. Here is Dan Lizarralde. Nature 448, 466–469 (26 July 2007)
Daniel Lizarralde: One of the reasons for studying the structure of these torn margins is to learn something about the strength of continents and we had assumed that they were more or less the same strength everywhere and so the differences that we see imply that there are differences in strengths and we are able to associate the differences in strength with the history of geologic activity that it had occurred along the margins.
Chris Smith: So, when you say there are differences as you go along the feature, what sorts of differences you are seeing and where do you think they come from?
Daniel Lizarralde: Well, when you are tearing a continent apart, it is pretty much like pulling anything apart and we have things here in the States called, PowerBars, I do not know if you have them there. They are like sort of a taffy kind of a thing and if you pull on them when they are hot, they stretch and stretch for a long time before they actually break, but if they are cold and more brittle, then you pull on them and they break abruptly. So, when we look across from one side or the other of this ocean basin, in some places the continental crust has stretched and stretched before it broke and in other places it just broke very quickly.
Chris Smith: So, you think that it is down to subsurface heat?
Daniel Lizarralde: Well, normally you would think it is due to subsurface heat, but heat is something that affects a broad region. You cannot have one place really hot and then, some place right next to it really cold, because heat distributes itself and so it had to be something else and so that is why we think it has to do with the actual physical properties of the stuff. So, again back to the PowerBar analogy it would be sort of a PowerBar that has maybe more soft chocolate bits in it and another one that is mostly hard sugar.
Chris Smith: Recent studies have shown though when you look at big sections of faults and mid ocean ridges for example that it is down to the magma plumbing that underlies them and how much magma is available to squirt into these features at different places, which can affect some of these processes. So, is that a feature here?
Daniel Lizarralde: Absolutely! I think one of the key features is that at some point in order for a continent to break you have to have some melt come from deeper in the mantle and cut through the lithosphere and so, the mantle that is underneath the lithosphere has to be able to melt and so, in addition to the inherent strengths of the mantle, which we think was different, we also think that the underlying mantle had a different ability to melt and so places that were weaker and more likely to melt broke very quickly and other places stretched for a long time and the melt just was not there to cut it.
Chris Smith: So, the relative use of this particular feature means that you can study at any evolution and then, I guess you can take this and apply it to other places elsewhere on the planet and give you some important clues as to the dynamics of how they work.
Daniel Lizarralde: Those are two very good points. This region was chosen as a focus site for a program that we have here planned through the National Science Foundation, which is called 'Margins' and their whole philosophy is to go to places that are currently active. You cannot just cross a margin for instance some place near New York to take an example and assume that the structure you see there is the same structure that you are going to see all along the lengths of the continent. You are going to have to think more about the possibility that there could be a lot of variability and think about what the geologic history of the continent was prior to rifting.
Chris Smith: So, you do not think this is a special case specific to the Gulf of California?
Daniel Lizarralde: No, I do not. I mean, one of other things that are interesting about continents that break apart, is that often times they break apart soon after there has been a collisional event. So, for instance, most of the Atlantic started rifting some time in the Triassic 200 million years ago, but that was not very long after the whole Atlantic had closed up to form the super continent of Pangaea, which finished something like 250 million years ago, and so all of the plates came together and really almost kind of bounced off of each other in geologic time and all of the processes that were associated with that collisional event would in part affect to the way that continents then rifted apart to open the Atlantic.
Chris Smith: So, what is the big picture here? What do you think is the major take-home message from what you have found?
Daniel Lizarralde: We really need to think more about the effect of the underlying mantle on the evolution of the crust during tectonic events. One, way of examining what the properties of the mantle are, are to look at rocks that have come from the mantle through melting and so we can look at those rocks. The second thing is the importance of water. The differences in strength and ability to melt that we are inferring here from the differences in structure are probably all due to having more or less water in the mantle. Tiny amount of water makes something very strong or very weak. So, understanding the water cycle on a global scale and the effect of water on tectonic processes I think is another thing that comes out of this.
Chris Smith: Well, I have not actually tried a Powerbar, but it sounds very much like they could make the Earth move for me. That was Dan Lizarralde from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He has found that rifts can exhibit substantial variations in their structure even if they are very short distances.
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Chris Smith: And now to a topic, which is a subject of review in this week's Nature by Daniel K. Podolsky and Ramnik J. Xavier. They have taken a look at inflammatory bowel disease, IBD, which includes Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. In particular, they focused on the roles played by genetics gut bacteria in the immune system. Here is Dan. Podolsky. Nature 448, 427–434 (26 July 2007)
Daniel K. Podolsky: This review attempts to really bring into focus some exciting recent progress that is giving us better insights into a group of diseases that clinically are designated Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis.
Chris Smith: How do the two diseases compare, because they are not identical?
Daniel K. Podolsky: They are not identical and one of the longest running controversies in the many decades since these were first appreciated clinically is to know whether in fact these are one disorder with variable expression or two, in fact, completely distinct clinical entities because they do have distinctive features. I think what we are learning now is that both in a sense may be true. We know that there are some genes which are common in terms of conferring susceptibility and then there are others which are unique to each condition and it may ultimately explain the differences in the clinical characteristics.
Chris Smith: And Ramnik, what do we know so far about the genetic side of things because that has shown quite a lot of promise in recent years isn't it?
Ramnik J. Xavier: Yeah, there has been sort of an explosive growth in the field of understanding the genetics of IBD and what is interesting is that lot of the genes that have been identified as related to Crohn's disease are consistent with the pathobiology or the presentation of the disease in patients. So, for example, some of the genes clearly highlight that there is an interaction between a genetic component and the bacteria that is usually present in this colon.
Chris Smith: Just taking the general picture and the general clues those genes give you, do they lead research in any particular direction saying this is the hot area we should look at? This could be the underlying cause here?
Ramnik J. Xavier: For sure, I mean, I think that has been the major benefit of identifying the genes. The two points are that even though the genetic risk of Crohn's disease is somewhere in the 5-10% range depending on the population, the genetic variants that have been identified to date give us clues as to what might be going on in the remaining 90% or 95% of patients with Crohn's disease, and the second major finding is that the epithelium and the innate immune system have been highlighted as being important for disease onset.
Chris Smith: And Dan, those bacteria which Ramnik is saying have to be recognized, there is common evidence emerging that in fact they may play a role in triggering the disease. Tell us on that.
Daniel K. Podolsky: From earliest days, there had been a suspicion that these diseases might be attributed to a specific infectious agent and yet despite decades of effort no particular pathogen could be identified. What is now emerging is that it is the mixture of bacteria which are thought otherwise to be just part of the normal content of the GI tract and if a person has a certain predisposition in response to those bacteria or their products he will develop the inflammatory diseases that we call IBD.
Chris Smith: When you put patients who have one of these diseases on astronaut food, the elemental diet, their symptoms invariably get better, do not they? Is that because it was having some kind of probiotic effect, is it manipulating what bacteria are growing in their intestines?
Daniel K. Podolsky: First, I should say that that may often improve, but not invariably and the mechanism of that improvement is uncertain, but a very reasonable speculation is that that change in diet has a impact on the flour of the mixture of bacteria and that in turn is why you can see the benefit that does occlude in many patients.
Chris Smith: And Ramnik, do you think that this is down to some kind of immune phenomenon then, the bugs are driving and immune responds and this is responsible then for causing the symptoms that you see in the tissue?
Ramnik J. Xavier: Yes, clearly. The immune function is important, but what has become clear is that the initial barrier function is also equally important for the immune system to recognize these bacteria there should be abnormalities also in the epithelial barrier.
Chris Smith: Well, so the epithelium will allow bugs to transit and this will bring them into closer proximity and they then trigger some kind of aberrant immune response?
Ramnik J. Xavier: Possibly and the immune system is broadly divided into an innate and adaptive immune system, and the epithelial cells have recently been shown to play an important role in triggering that initial innate response.
Chris Smith: It is rather strange though isn't it that these diseases do not peak until the second or third decade in life. So, you would have thought that if this is purely a genetic phenomenon and the bug spectrum in your intestines is fairly mature by the time you are in your teenage years, why does it peak then, why later in life, why not earlier in life?
Ramnik J. Xavier: Well, the symptoms present in the second or third decade, but it is possible that some of these patients have asymptomatic disease and it is not uncommon for inflammatory bowel disease to be seen in children as well.
Chris Smith: Dan any thoughts on that?
Daniel K. Podolsky: There are still some real puzzles and in fact the clinical manifestations can occur as early as infancy and as late as the 70s or 80s and knowing the genes and knowing that the bacteria may be important just begs the question of what are the other important factors, which eventuate in the disease. Other mysteries are that certain sections of the digestive tract will be affected and the area immediately adjacent to it will be normal or relatively normal and how can you explain that paradox when the genetic background is of course the same throughout the GI tract.
Chris Smith: And so, just to finish off, what would you say Dan is going to be the key area which is probably going to show the biggest progress in the next five years or so?
Daniel K. Podolsky: Well, I would point at two things. One is realizing the benefit of the identification of the genetic susceptibility so that we can actually use that for more precise diagnosis, stratification of patients for treatment and prediction, and the second will be to really go from an inferred understanding of the functional importance to find and demonstrate it, in particular in characterizing the nature of the bacterial-mucosal interaction.
Chris Smith: And Ramnik?
Ramnik J. Xavier: Well, I mean, the genetics as well as the environmental components have offered clues to what might be the therapeutic targets for these two diseases and for example, the IL-23 receptor variant is associated with protection against Crohn's disease and it is likely that building on this and prior knowledge that this cytokine and receptor might be novel targets to help patients with the disease.
Chris Smith: Ram Xavier and Dan Podolsky. They are both based on Harvard. Now, big businesses are notorious for being difficult to get through to, especially if you cannot read and write and the company happens to be cutting down the forest in which you live. Well, now technology has come to the rescue with what has been nicknamed Pygmy FM. Here is Mike Hopkin. Nature 448, 402–403 (26 July 2007)
Michael Hopkin: For thousands of years, there have been Benjelle Pygmies who have lived a hunter gatherer lifestyle in heart of the northern Congo. Unfortunately for them, their home is slapped bang in the middle of one of the world's richest sources of prime hardwood and these semi-nomadic people are forced to share the forest with international logging companies. For years, the Benjelle have accepted logging as a fact of life without much means to air their grievances with CIB, the company that holds extensive logging rights in the Republic of Congo, the pygmies have been unable to tell the loggers which trees they would like to see left alone, but now with consumers demanding more sustainably harvested timber, CIB has realized that its profits are at stake. So, it has enlisted the help of development groups to set up a community radio station that aims to allow the Benjelle to speak up. I asked Scott Poynton of the Tropical Forest Trust, charity that promotes responsible forest management about the need to put the Benjelle on the air waves.
Scott Poynton: Part of the problem was the pygmy communities living in that area, well throughout central Africa really is that they are semi-nomadic. Today, they can be in one place and tomorrow they will be somewhere else. They are also non literate. You know, you cannot send them a letter. They do not have a letterbox that you can contact them through and also they are an egalitarian society so they do not have a village head. So, you cannot just go and talk to one person. So, it was actually Jerome Lewis's idea and Jerome and I been working with these pygmy communities for many years. Jerome had the idea of establishing a radio station, by which using, you know, robust wind up radio technology that we could have some broadcasts made by the communities themselves whereby they can communicate with the company and the company can create its own broadcast and thereby establishing a dialogue, not a direct dialogue, anyhow sort of two-way dialogue, but a dialogue nonetheless where ideas can be exchanged and the thoughts of the communities can be put on air and that can reach the company.
Michael Hopkin: The radio station at first perhaps inevitably nicknamed Pigmy FM has now been formally named "Bisso na Bisso," which means "between us" in the local Lingala language. A few pilot shows have already been made and in the traditional community radio style, feature mix of debate and music, but the pygmies still need a way to tell CIB exactly which trees they particularly value and this is where the project gets really clever. With the help of anthropologist Jerome Lewis of the London School of Economics, who has lived on and off with Benjelle for years, the project's organizers have created special handheld computer consoles for the pygmies to carry while roaming through the forest. The devices use GPS to log automatically the locations of important trees and sites. That way CIB, which has always practiced selective logging can avoid these precious specific resources.
Jerome Lewis: They put together a series of icons and have a decision tree whereby the pygmy communities can go into the forest and that is a very easy technology. It takes about five minutes to explain what it is all about and the pygmies are pretty smart people. They know what is going on. They have never seen a computer before, but they can work out what this technology is aiming to do and I have advised it because they can guide into the forest and say, 'look here is a sacred area so they can click on the icon that shows the sacred area and then they can click on the reason why it needs to be protected. It is a sacred area for the women or is it sacred area for traditional festivals, and in some cases they do not actually go down to that far because some of that knowledge is in fact confidential and sacred and they do not share, but in other cases they say 'look, here is an area we just need to protect it because we need to protect it' or 'here is an area where we gather food' or 'here is our watering hole' and so through that process they have been able to map large areas of forest that they use. These maps are then produced. They go to the company. They say, 'hey, look these are the areas we would really appreciate you to keep your bulldozers out of them, please do not fell these trees for example because in the dry season we harvest the caterpillars from those trees'. It is an important food product. And so what has happened is there is a dialogue being started through this handheld.
Michael Hopkin: The radio station will also benefit the pygmies in other ways. It will give them better access to information about doctor visits, vaccinations, and AIDS awareness.
Jerome Lewis: Everyone can make their own programs and put out their stories, their concerns and their music. We can make sure that information about the visits of the doctor are kind of getting out, because in the past for example the doctor would go out to make a vaccination program for the children, but half the children would be in the forest, you know, for one reason or another and so, there are issues like that but if we can sound radio, hey look, you know, at the second moon or whatever the doctor will be at this place, then the chances of helping these communities and the kids out there to get their vaccinations is going to be much stronger.
Michael Hopkin: The project's organizers have already started using the mapping technology in other neighbouring countries in the Congo basin, particularly the vast Democratic Republic of Congo to the East. It looks like the pygmies of the Congo are finally finding their voice. (Voice in Lingala language)
Chris Smith: It sounds like they are certainly on the right wavelength with that particular approach. A wonderful story. Thank you Mike. Well, that is it for this week. Next time, electrifying brains and sorting out mouse genomes. If you would like to send us some feedback, then the address to write to is mailto:podcast@nature.com. For more science in the meantime do join me for this week's Naked Scientist Podcast, which explores survival under extreme conditions. We will be looking at how deep free divers can go without air, how organisms can survive the freezing environment of Antarctica, how fighter pilots combat G-forces to avoid blackouts and Extreme Everest, a project to workout how the human body can cope with the conditions at the top of the world's tallest mountain. That is all on the Naked Scientist Podcast and it is free from the http://www.nakedscientists.com. Production this week was by Azi Khatiri and I am Chris Smith. See you next time.
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