Why do Assateague Island horses have only themselves to blame for getting eaten out of house and home? How does iodizing salt ensure the Kazakh people never get to the bottom of their iodine deficiency problem? Doubtless, neither of these burning questions have kept you up nights.
Elsewhere we have documented, extensively, how the Aphenomenal Model upholds and serves to maintain the status-quo in all fields of natural and social sciences and their applications and engineering. The following pair of articles provide two case-examples that are emblematic of why --- and illustrative of how --- modelling of solutions based on the principles of the aphenomenal model makes worse that which was already bad, and --- as a result --- always lead to what we have identified elsewhere as the "Honey ==> Sugar ==> Saccharine(TM) ==> Aspartame (TM)" syndrome.
In general, in both cases, the situation may be modelled abstractly thus:
• Problem: As a result of "Intervention(now-1)", the state of nature incorporates a negative bias that has generated certain unforeseen and unwanted consequences.
• Solution: prepare "Intervention(now)" to overcome the negative consequences of "Intervention(now-1)"
In the first article, the original biasing and state-upsetting intervention on Assateague Island was the fencing off of the horse herd at the Virginia-Maryland state line on the island. This triggered a shift in feeding and mating that saw population trends diverge and adding stress on the food supplies at the dune grasses on the Atlantic Ocean-exposed beaches of the island's Maryland side.
In the second article, which is murkier about even identifying an original biasing intervention much less giving it a name, it must have been was whatever caused salt deficiencies to increase among new (probably first) pregnancies in Kazakhstan.
The body of water at the conjunction of the borders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is the Aral Sea, a completely landlocked saltwater sea. At current rates of evaporation of its surface, it is predicted to disappear by 2020. As it evaporates the salt deposits left behind blow over a vast area that includes parts of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and even Kyrghzstan. The Aral Sea's evaporation was vastly accelerated from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, when its water was tapped for a vast irrigation system aimed at converting the so-called m"virgin lands" of this region into vast coton fields. The chemical fertilisers and pesticidces introduced along with this virgin lands dxevelopment scheme destroyed the environment, and put pregnant mothers at risk. The Soviet planning mechanism, which under NS Khrushchev and LI Brezhnev became indistinguishable from the klind of planning Fors or Chrysler or GM do, was subjugated to serve the aim of making maximum proifits in minimum time, thereby ensuring no care whatever would be taken to protect against high rates of high degrees of salination of the environment and the high rates of retardation among newborns coupled with and linked to that chemical poisoning. The article below, on ther other hand, attempts to suggest the problem was ignorance of some Asians abougt the benefits of iodine being added to salt!
The problem is not just the outlook that human intervention will "fix" Nature's "mistakes", but that mistakes triggered by our own earlier interventions are blamed on Nature. The "solution" then focuses on eliminating/eradicating/reversing the latest problem-symptom manifesting and registering itself in Nature.
What is necessary in formulating any further intervention is, first, to review the state of the system as a whole, including a catalogue of all previous human interventions, so as to differentiate that which is symptomatic / characteristic of Nature, or the system-before-intervention, from that which could have become altered as a consequence of previous interventions.
Such an "historical" approach to the overall bigger picture of the system as a whole, in opposition to "focusing" on some finite/ immediate-short-term element of the system, is exactly what the pragmatic methods of conventional engineering disallow.
This negation of any role for critical rethinking is what makes the aphenomenal model so dangerous.
1.
A Gnawing Problem On Assateague Island
Some Ponies Might Be Removed to Save Maryland Side
By David A. Fahrenthold
The Washington Post, Sat 16 December 2006, Page A01
ASSATEAGUE ISLAND, Md. -- What do you do when one of your natural treasures starts eating all the others?
That's the National Park Service's dilemma on this storied barrier island. Proof of its problem can be found on a spongy stretch of salt marsh, where one section is fenced off by barbed wire.
Inside the fence, the island's native smooth cordgrass is growing thickly, a foot tall. Outside it, the grass is cropped nearly to the roots.
"Inside. Outside. A lot different," said Mark Sturm, a Park Service ecologist, gesturing at the denuded muck. The culprit is obvious: There's only one animal on Assateague that can't get through the fence.
"This is all horses," Sturm said.
Yes. Those horses. About 140 wild ponies live on the Maryland half of the island -- less famous than their cousins in Virginia, who star in the annual Chincoteague pony penning, but still a major part of the Assateague mystique.
Now, Park Service officials say, the horse population is eating away at the plants that underpin rare coastal ecosystems here. They're considering a radical solution: selling or relocating as much as a third of the Maryland herd.
"There is no doubt in my mind," Sturm said, "that in the absence of action, things are only going to get worse."
Assateague Island stretches 37 miles along the Atlantic Coast of the Eastern Shore, from Chincoteague, Va., almost to Ocean City, Md. In between, officials say, is the kind of wilderness that has become rare on the East Coast: nearly pristine sand dunes, salt marshes and coastal forests.
But much as scientists treasure the island's rare birds and flora, it is neither the piping plover nor the sea beach amaranth plant that has imbedded Assateague in childhood memories and young-adult fiction.
It's the ponies.
Horses have lived on the island since the 1600s, possibly descended from livestock that farmers stashed here to avoid taxes. They became famous in 1947 with the publication of "Misty of Chincoteague." The book celebrates an annual ritual in which horses on the Virginia side of the island are rounded up and made to swim across a channel to Chincoteague. There, some are auctioned off to benefit the town's volunteer fire department.
Now, there are two herds on the island, separated by a fence at the state line. The Virginia horses are owned by the fire department. The ones in Maryland, which roam across a national seashore and a state park, belong to the Park Service.
The Maryland herd included 28 horses in 1968. But without predators or firefighters to bother them, the ponies multiplied: By 1994, there were 166, and managers were already worried the animals would eat the island bare.
First, birth control was tried. Starting in 1994, biologists with special rifles and a good deal of patience have tracked down female horses and shot them with contraceptive-filled darts. Each female horse is allowed to give birth to only one foal in her lifetime.
The program worked, but not as fast as managers hoped. Without the stress of repeated motherhood, female horses started living years longer than they previously had, which kept the numbers up.
"The population is still more than the island ecosystem can sustain," said Carl Zimmerman, chief of resource management with the national seashore.
These days, the horses' prodigious appetite -- about 21,000 calories a day for an adult -- has altered all corners of the island. It leaves marsh birds called rails without tall grasses to hide in. It makes meals out of sea-beach amaranth, a federally threatened species.
And it leaves sand dunes without American beach grass, whose tufts and runners hold the sand in place. That's no minor problem, because Assateague is basically one enormous dune.
"If the dunes go away, the island goes away," said Ronald Pilling, past president of the Assateague Coastal Trust, an environmental group.
But no similar problem has been noticed on the Virginia side of the island, which has about the same land area and the same number of horses as Maryland's half. That might be because some sensitive areas, such as beaches and dunes, are fenced off there.
Or it could be, officials say, that the Park Service has done more research on the Maryland side.
On the Maryland side, Park Service officials say they want to reduce the horse herd by 40 to 60 animals. They stress that killing the horses is not an option and that they're unlikely to fence them in permanently. But the horses could be sent away: either sold or taken to privately owned sanctuaries on the mainland. The potential solutions were first reported by the Daily Times of Salisbury, Md.
Animal-rights groups have pushed for another option -- to wait for the contraceptive program to reduce the population on its own. That might take six years or more, but they say it's worth it.
"These are wild animals, and there's nothing they're going to want to do less than be rounded up," said John Grandy, senior vice president for wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States. "There's no reason to put those magnificent animals through that."
Park managers say they expect to make a final decision next year.
2.
On the Brink
In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr
The New York Times, Sat 16 December 2006, Page A1
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=all
ASTANA, Kazakhstan — Valentina Sivryukova knew her public service messages were hitting the mark when she heard how one Kazakh schoolboy called another stupid. “What are you,” he sneered, “iodine-deficient or something?”
Ms. Sivryukova, president of the national confederation of Kazakh charities, was delighted. It meant that the years spent trying to raise public awareness that iodized salt prevents brain damage in infants were working. If the campaign bore fruit, Kazakhstan’s national I.Q. would be safeguarded.
In fact, Kazakhstan has become an example of how even a vast and still-developing nation like this Central Asian country can achieve a remarkable public health success. In 1999, only 29 percent of its households were using iodized salt. Now, 94 percent are. Next year, the United Nations is expected to certify it officially free of iodine deficiency disorders.
That turnabout was not easy. The Kazakh campaign had to overcome widespread suspicion of iodization, common in many places, even though putting iodine in salt, public health experts say, may be the simplest and most cost-effective health measure in the world. Each ton of salt needs about two ounces of potassium iodate, which costs about $1.15.
Worldwide, about two billion people — a third of the globe — get too little iodine, including hundreds of millions in India and China. Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.
The most visible and severe effects — disabling goiters, cretinism and dwarfism — affect a tiny minority, usually in mountain villages. But 16 percent of the world’s people have at least mild goiter, a swollen thyroid gland in the neck.
“Find me a mother who wouldn’t pawn her last blouse to get iodine if she understood how it would affect her fetus,” said Jack C. S. Ling, chairman of the International Council for Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders, a committee of about 350 scientists formed in 1985 to champion iodization.
The 1990 World Summit for Children called for the elimination of iodine deficiency by 2000, and the subsequent effort was led by Professor Ling’s organization along with Unicef, the World Health Organization, Kiwanis International, the World Bank and the foreign aid agencies of Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, the United States and others.
Largely out of the public eye, they made terrific progress: 25 percent of the world’s households consumed iodized salt in 1990. Now, about 66 percent do.
But the effort has been faltering lately. When victory was not achieved by 2005, donor interest began to flag as AIDS, avian flu and other threats got more attention.
And, like all such drives, it cost more than expected. In 1990, the estimated price tag was $75 million — a bargain compared with, for example, the fight against polio, which has consumed about $4 billion.
Since then, according to David P. Haxton, the iodine council’s executive director, about $160 million has been spent, including $80 million from Kiwanis and $15 million from the Gates Foundation, along with unknown amounts spent on new equipment by salt companies.
“Very often, I’ll talk to a salt producer at a meeting, and he’ll have no idea he had this power in his product,” Mr. Haxton said. “He’ll say ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Sure, I’ll do it. I would have done it sooner.’ ”
In many places, like Japan, people get iodine from seafood, seaweed, vegetables grown in iodine-rich soil or animals that eat grass grown in that soil. But even wealthy nations, including the United States and in Europe, still need to supplement that by iodizing salt.
The cheap part, experts say, is spraying on the iodine. The expense is always for the inevitable public relations battle.
In some nations, iodization becomes tarred as a government plot to poison an essential of life — salt experts compare it to the furious opposition by 1950s conservatives to fluoridation of American water.
In others, civil libertarians demand a right to choose plain salt, with the result that the iodized kind rarely reaches the poor. Small salt makers who fear extra expense often lobby against it. So do makers of iodine pills who fear losing their market.
Rumors inevitably swirl: iodine has been blamed for AIDS, diabetes, seizures, impotence and peevishness. Iodized salt, according to different national rumor mills, will make pickled vegetables explode, ruin caviar or soften hard cheese.
Breaking down that resistance takes both money and leadership.
“For 5 cents per person per year, you can make the whole population smarter than before,” said Dr. Gerald N. Burrow, a former dean of Yale’s medical school and vice chairman of the iodine council.
“That has to be good for a country. But you need a government with the political will to do it.”
‘Scandal’ of Stunted Children
In the 1990s, when the campaign for iodization began, the world’s greatest concentration of iodine-deficient countries was in the landlocked former Soviet republics of Central Asia.
All of them — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghzstan — saw their economies break down with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Across the region, only 28 percent of all households used iodized salt.
“With the collapse of the system, certain babies went out with the bathwater, and iodization was one of them,” said Alexandre Zouev, chief Unicef representative in Kazakhstan.
Dr. Toregeldy Sharmanov, who was the Kazakh Republic’s health minister from 1971 to 1982, when it was in the Soviet Union, said the problem was serious even then. But he had been unable to fix it because policy was set in Moscow.
“Kazakh children were stunted compared to the same-age Russian children,” he said. “But they paid no attention. It was a scandal.”
In 1996, Unicef, which focuses on the health of children, opened its first office in Kazakhstan and arranged for a survey of 5,000 households. It found that 10 percent of the children were stunted, opening the way for international aid. (Stunting can have many causes, but iodine deficiency is a prime culprit.)
In neighboring Turkmenistan, President Saparmurat Niyazov — a despot who requires all clocks to bear his likeness and renamed the days of the week after his family — solved the problem by simply declaring plain salt illegal in 1996 and ordering shops to give each citizen 11 pounds of iodized salt a year at state expense.
In Kazakhstan, the democratic credentials of President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, who has ruled since 1991, have come under criticism, but he does not rule by decree. “Those days are over,” said Ms. Sivryukova of the confederation of Kazakh charities. “Businesses are private now. They don’t follow the president’s orders.”
Importantly, however, the president was supportive. But even so, as soon as Parliament began debating mandatory iodization in 2002, strong lobbies formed against the measure.
The country’s biggest salt company was initially reluctant to cooperate, fearing higher costs, a Unicef report said. Cardiologists argued against iodization, fearing it would encourage people to use more salt, which can raise blood pressure. More insidious, Dr. Sharmanov said, were private companies that sold iodine pills.
“They promoted their products in the mass media, saying iodized salt was dangerous,” he said, shaking his head.
So Dr. Sharmanov, the national Health Ministry, Ms. Sivryukova and others devised a marketing campaign — much of it paid for by American taxpayers, through money given to Unicef by the United States Agency for International Development.
Comic strips starring a hooded crusader, Iodine Man, rescuing a slow-witted student from an enraged teacher were handed out across the country.
A logo was designed for food packages certified to contain iodized salt: a red dot and a curved line in a circle, meant to represent a face with a smile so big that the eyes are squeezed shut.
Also, Ms. Sivryukova’s network of local charity women stepped in. As in all ex-Soviet states, government advice is regarded with suspicion, while civic organizations have credibility.
Her volunteers approached schools, asking teachers to create dictation exercises about iodized salt and to have students bring salt from home to test it for iodine in science class.
Ms. Sivryukova described one child’s tears when he realized he was the only one in his class with noniodized salt.
The teacher, she said, reassured him that it was not his fault. “Children very quickly start telling their parents to buy the right salt,” she said.
One female volunteer went to a bus company and rerecorded its “next-stop” announcements interspersed with short plugs for iodized salt. “She had a very sexy voice, and men would tell the drivers to play it again,” Ms. Sivryukova said.
Even the former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov, who is a hero throughout the former Soviet Union for his years as champion, joined the fight. “Eat iodized salt,” he advised schoolchildren in a television appearance, “and you will grow up to be grandmasters like me.”
Mr. Karpov, in particular, handled hostile journalists adeptly, Mr. Zouev said, deflecting inquiries as to why he did not advocate letting people choose iodized or plain salt by comparing it to the right to have two taps in every home, one for clean water and one for dirty.
By late 2003, the Parliament finally made iodization mandatory.
In Aral, Mountains Made of Salt
Today in central Kazakhstan, a miniature mountain range rises over Aral, a decaying factory town on what was once the shore of the Aral Sea, a salt lake that has steadily shrunk as irrigation projects begun under Stalin drained the rivers that feed it.
Drive closer and the sharp white peaks turn out to be a small Alps of salt — the Aral Tuz Company stockpile. Salt has been dug here for centuries. Nowadays, a great rail-mounted combine chews away at a 10-foot-thick layer of salt in the old seabed, before it is towed 11 miles back to the plant, and washed and ground. Before it reaches the packaging room, as the salt falls through a chute from one conveyor belt to another, a small pump sprays iodine into the grainy white cascade. The step is so simple that, if it were not for the women in white lab coats scooping up samples, it would be missed.
The $15,000 tank and sprayer were donated by Unicef, which also used to supply the potassium iodate. Today Aral Tuz and its smaller rival, Pavlodar Salt, buy their own.
Asked about the Unicef report saying that Aral Tuz initially resisted iodization on the grounds that it would eat up 7 percent of profits, the company’s president, Ontalap Akhmetov, seemed puzzled. “I’ve only been president three years,” he said. “But that makes no sense.” The expense, he said, was minimal. “Only a few cents a ton.”
Kazakhstan was lucky. It had just the right mix of political and economic conditions for success: political support, 98 percent literacy, an economy helped along by rising prices for its oil and gas. Most important, perhaps, one company, Aral Tuz, makes 80 percent of the edible salt.
That combination is missing in many nations where iodine deficiency remains a health crisis. In nearby Pakistan, for instance, where 70 percent of households have no iodized salt, there are more than 600 small salt producers.
“If a country has a reasonably well-organized salt system and only a couple of big producers who get on the bandwagon, iodization works,” said Venkatesh Mannar, a former salt producer in India who now heads the Micronutrient Initiative in Ottawa, which seeks to fortify the foods of the world’s poor with iodine, iron and other minerals. “If there are a lot of small producers, it doesn’t.”
Now that Kazakhstan has its law, Ms. Sivryukova’s volunteers have not let up their vigilance. They help enforce it by going to markets, buying salt and testing it on the spot. The government has trained customs agents to test salt imports and fenced some areas where people dug their own salt. Children still receive booklets and instruction.
Experts agree the country is unlikely to slip back into neglect. Surveys find consumers very aware of iodine, and the red-and-white logo is such a hit that food producers have asked for permission to use it on foods with added iron or folic acid, said Dr. Sharmanov, the former Kazakh Republic health minister. And the salt is working. In the 1999 survey that found stunted children, a smaller sampling of urine from women of child-bearing age found that 60 percent had suboptimal levels of iodine.
“We just did a new study, which is not released yet,” said Dr. Feruza Ospanova, head of the nutrition academy’s laboratory. “The number was zero percent.”
