Morning Ecology 4 August 2008: Signs of Salvation v. Apocalypse Edition

• Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization (The New York Times)
• Pump Uses Less Energy to Desalinate Seawater (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Advance of Jellyfish -- "Cockroaches of the Open Waters" -- Hints at Ocean's Decline (The New York Times)
• Five States Sue EPA to Restrict Ship, Aircraft, Off-road Vehicle Emissions (Associated Press)
• EPA Approves Air Permit for Coal-fired Power Plant on the Navajo Nation (Associated Press)
• Hydrogen Power on the Cheap--Or at Least, Cheaper (Scientific American - sciam.com)
• Melting Permafrost Poses Threats to Alaska Infrastructure, Economy (Fairbanks Daily News Miner)
• In the Hills of Nebraska, Change Is on the Horizon -- In the Form of Wind Turbines (The New York Times)

Image: A sketch of "war," by an Inuit child, in the notebook of polar researcher Gianluca Frinchillucci, who writes:

Some years ago I was in eastern Greenland on an research. I was visiting a very particular village, Isertoq, probably housing the last branch of Inuit migratory movements, remained isolated for ages...[I]t was the time of Iraq war, when televisions from all over the world talked about the flight and the torment of thousands of men, women and children. An inuit child took my notepad and started drawing a sketch of how war was in his mind.

It was the perfect portrait of war, fitted for the land of the great ice, conceived by an inuit child's imagination: the upheaval in a world inhabited by bears, seals, narwhals, reindeers and people peacefully living their lives. And there I started thinking... Why don't we promote an exchange network, where children from all over the world can, thanks to the immediate way of the drawing, tell each other their stories, hopes, flights of fancy, and, why not, their ways of living and cultures?

And it was there that the Project "Friends from the World", now involving children from Greenland, Siberia, Italy and Ethiopia and followed by the Italian non profit association Perigeo Onlus, was born.

Source: Blog of the International Polar Year 2007-2008