A singular chain of events

Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality. IV. Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’, Global Environmental Risks, and the Future of Humanity.

Every year, millions of migratory shorebirds fly through the East Asian-Australasian Flyway between their arctic breeding grounds and Australasia. This flyway includes numerous coastal wetlands in Asia and the Pacific that are used as stopover sites where birds rest and feed. Loss of a few important stopover sites through sea-level rise (SLR) could cause sudden population declines. We formulated and solved mathematically the problem of how to identify the most important stopover sites to minimize losses of bird populations across flyways by conserving land that facilitates upshore shifts of tidal flats in response to SLR. To guide conservation investment that minimizes losses of migratory bird populations during migration, we developed a spatially explicit flyway model coupled with a maximum flow algorithm. Migratory routes of 10 shorebird taxa were modeled in a graph theoretic framework by representing clusters of important wetlands as nodes and the number of birds flying between 2 nodes as edges. We also evaluated several resource allocation algorithms that required only partial information on flyway connectivity (node strategy, based on the impacts of SLR at nodes; habitat strategy, based on habitat change at sites; population strategy, based on population change at sites; and random investment). The resource allocation algorithms based on flyway information performed on average 15% better than simpler allocations based on patterns of habitat loss or local bird counts. The Yellow Sea region stood out as the most important priority for effective conservation of migratory shorebirds, but investment in this area alone will not ensure the persistence of species across the flyway. The spatial distribution of conservation investments differed enormously according to the severity of SLR and whether information about flyway connectivity was used to guide the prioritizations. With the rapid ongoing loss of coastal wetlands globally, our method provides insight into efficient conservation planning for migratory species.

Estimates of levels and differentials of pregnancy loss are presented for 40 developing countries participating in the World Fertility Survey (WFS) program. Judged against agreed-upon levels of spontaneous loss in human populations, WFS surveys measured from 50 to 80 percent of recognizable losses. The coverage of induced abortions appears to be much worse. Consistent with data from other sources and settings, the probability of loss is strongly correlated with maternal demographic characteristics: age, pregnancy order, pregnancy spacing, and pregnancy loss history. Despite incomplete coverage, the WFS data on pregnancy loss provide considerable, and largely unexploited, insight on the dynamics of the reproductive career.

Nature, too, has a history, and in the late twentieth century that environmental history seems transnational. The millennium closes with fears about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, the rise in human populations, the depletion of ocean fisheries, and the loss of biological diversity. None of these problems are national; all are, to varying extents, global. Global environmental events are retrospective as well as prospective. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, historians now argue, pandemics depopulated the Western Hemisphere, ecological invasions precipitated by European expansion began their long march across the world, and climatic change rearranged European agriculture.' But there is something incongruous about global perspectives on the environment: they are to a striking degree confined to the present, the future, and the pre-modern past. In considering the early modern and modern periods-the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and most of the twentieth-historians have de-emphasized the global and transnational and treated environmental issues as largely national. Particularly in the United States, where environmental history is strongest, national boundaries have largely determined studies of the depletion of resources, efforts at conservation and preservation, and ecological change. Historians have often framed such studies below the scale of nation-as regional or local-but they have rarely framed them above it. Environmental histories, it seems, parallel the history of the state, even though it is hard to believe that nature itself does. When writing about eras of strong or rising states, environmental historians make their histories state-based. When writing about eras with few or weak states or those when the state seems to be in decline, historians write in other frames than that of the nation. I raise this issue of the relationship between environmental history and national

Global Pollution: How Much Is Too Much?

Our biosphere encompasses the shared existence of all living organisms, including the human and animal populations on Earth. As such, it is something that must be kept healthy to maintain stable relations between humans and Earth. That common ground we tread and the social fabric we form should not be used for a global experiment, especially when the driving forces are human greed, stupidity, and the allure of profits. Should a select group of people be allowed to make money while destroying the biosphere and abusing other people? The human population presently increases by about 75 million annually, and our growing numbers have been assaulting renewable and non-renewable resources with selfish ferocity. That trend of consumption has been occurring for centuries, but as the human population skyrockets, the amassed hunger for resources is turning into an unstoppable craze—with profit as the primary goal. Child laborers are stripped of their rights. Several billion humans lack the basic resources to satisfy daily nutritional needs. Such people survive on a day-to-day basis, driven to scavenging, while affluent people drive inefficient vehicles to restaurants. A biosphere dominated by such greed resembles a careless, global experiment to see how far it can be taken. To what extent can people profit at the expense of contemporary suffering and the threat of widespread future suffering? This experiment is founded on all the wrong values. There is little justification for excessive consumption for the privileged while the poor have no access to resources. These resources are not to be snatched away by the wealthy; they belong to the Earth and all its people—not just the power-hungry classes. Greed for wealth in a growing population leads to exhaustion of those resources and irrevocable damage to the biosphere. The preservation and improvement of our biosphere is beyond the realm of politics and national agendas. It is about survival and improvement of the human situation, and protection and survival of other species. It is about evolution towards global peace and stabilization of universal human rights. It is about a sustainable human population that does not consume every resource on the planet. The big biosphere experiment has destroyed the fish stocks, laid bare the once vast reaches of forest, Water Air Soil Pollut (2010) 205 (Suppl 1):S53–S54 DOI 10.1007/s11270-007-9589-4

The ABO locus in humans is characterized by elevated heterozygosity and very similar allele frequencies among populations scattered across the globe. Using knowledge of ABO protein function, we generated a simple model of asymmetric negative frequency dependent selection and genetic drift to explain the maintenance of ABO polymorphism and its loss in human populations. In our models, regardless of the strength of selection, models with large effective population sizes result in ABO allele frequencies that closely match those observed in most continental populations. Populations must be moderately small to fall out of equilibrium and lose either the A or B allele (Ne ≤ 50) and much smaller (N e ≤ 25) for the complete loss of diversity, which nearly always involved the fixation of the O allele. A pattern of low heterozygosity at the ABO locus where loss of polymorphism occurs in our model is consistent with small populations, such as Native American populations. This study provides a general evolutionary model to explain the observed global patterns of polymorphism at the ABO locus and the pattern of allele loss in small populations. Moreover, these results inform the range of population sizes associated with the recent human colonization of the Americas.

Climate change may affect the behavior of various systems on earth, one of which is human population. In the current literature, it is hypothesized that anthropogenic impacts on earth may yield persistent and adverse climatic conditions which may become the norm rather than an exception. Given these climatic conditions, the world population may lose its stability and these climate conditions may trigger population shifts that may be characterized by regional migration patterns or loss of population. In this commentary the purpose is to review historical views on this subject and apply a mathematical model developed to provide computational insight to human population behavior given climatic conditions that are hypothesized to occur during the next millennium. The scenarios used for this purpose is hypothetical, but they may reveal critical population dynamics which may need to be taken into consideration in addressing future climate change impacts.

Important variables that influence base-line micronucleus frequency in cytokinesis-blocked lymphocytes—a biomarker for DNA damage in human populations

The purpose of this article is to review and analyze the foreign and domestic scientific papers to assess the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) occurrence in the human population. 
 A search of Russian and foreign publications in the PubMed and E-library databases was conducted. The high ecological and medical significance 
 of EBV-infection is due to its global spread in the human population, lifelong persistence of EBV in the human body. Evidence has been collected EBV to be involved in the development of various somatic pathologies, such as rheumatic diseases and vasculitis, chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular pathologies, pathologies of the gastrointestinal tract, T- and B-cell lymphomas in children and adults, nasopharyngeal carcinoma. These diseases are the main causes of population disability and premature death not only in Russia, but also in the World. The deterioration of the ecological and epidemic situation for 
 EBV-infection is associated with the other infectants spread that change the population immunological status. These include the human immunodeficiency virus, hepatitis B and C viruses, SARS-CoV-2, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. With the simultaneous persistence of these infectants, their synergistic or antagonistic effect on the human body occurs. In the modern World, the COVID-19 and the EBV-infection are simultaneously developing. It is difficult to say which infection is more significant in terms of medical, social. and economic losses of the human population. The EBV has been undeservedly given little attention. 
 It is necessary to optimize preventive measures and epidemic surveillance for EBV-infection.

The rice plant was basically a tropical semiaquatic grass. Before the advent of agriculture, it served as a food supplement to people who depended on hunting, fishing, and gathering of other food plants for subsistence living. Even today in many areas of the humid tropics where the environment is harsh, rice farming provides a subsistence level of livelihood. However, in areas outside its home habitat where water control, soil fertilization, tillage and weeding, and plant selection were well managed or practiced, rice yields steadily rose and food surpluses from farms served as the main source in supporting rapid increases in human population. Expansion in rice acreage, rises in rice yield, and multiple cropping have fueled flourishing civilizations of several Asian countries. This paper summarizes the fascinating pathway along which a lowly swamp plant has provided the impetus for accelerated progress in national economy, cultural improvements, and population increases in many Asian countries du...

The rice plant was basically a tropical semiaquatic grass. Before the advent of agriculture, it served as a food supplement to people who depended on hunting, fishing, and gathering of other food plants for subsistence living. Even today in many areas of the humid tropics where the environment is harsh, rice farming provides a subsistence level of livelihood. However, in areas outside its home habitat where water control, soil fertilization, tillage and weeding, and plant selection were well managed or practiced, rice yields steadily rose and food surpluses from farms served as the main source in supporting rapid increases in human population. Expansion in rice acreage, rises in rice yield, and multiple cropping have fueled flourishing civilizations of several Asian countries. This paper summarizes the fascinating pathway along which a lowly swamp plant has provided the impetus for accelerated progress in national economy, cultural improvements, and population increases in many Asian countries during the past two millennia.

Statistical samples from urban and rural non-traditional populations at Piracicaba, SP, Brazil, are studiedin terms of human ecological fitness to his own environment. Ecological fitness was measured by Body Mass Index(BMI) with a demographic approach. Niche amplitude was estimated by Levins index. An economic classification wasalso elaborated. The highest level income families include rare food items and relative narrowing of food niche. Bothpopulations use the same five food items more frequently: rice, beans, meat, bread, and coffee. According to BMI,these foods are not adequate: overweight and obesity mean that both populations are not ecologically fitted to theirenvironment. The three joint approaches (ecological, economical and population nutritional status) have shown tobe adequate for human ecological studies on modern ways of life. They also made it clear that economical factors areinconclusive for food choices. INTRODUCTION In 2007, about half of world human populationwas already living in urban environments (RNU2007). Most of them and an expressive part ofrural population were living non-traditional waysof life. The current way of life of humans causesmore impact over the environment and, also,allows the proliferation of specific diseases,affecting human life, interfering in fitness, suchas overweight and obesity, which nowadayscharacterize a global epidemic event (WHO 2000,2009). Human ecology, both as science and asstudy program (Begossi 1993), cannot avoidfacing this context. It is necessary to proposeand to test multi-disciplinary scientific approaches,in order to study these complexes aspects incurrent Human Ecology.Food choices and food intake are the mostimportant interactions between population andits environment. The success of these interactionsis very important for ecological fitness ofa particular population. For non-traditionalpopulation, perhaps, economical factors can bethe strongest ecological influences on foodchoices (Begossi et al. 2002). In this paper,ecological human fitness and ecological foodniche were employed associated to an economicclassification, in order to perform a human-ecological study of urban and of rural populations,both presenting modern ways of life.The ecological concept, as proposedby Hutchinson (1957), expresses the relationshipof an individual or a population to all aspects ofits environment. Among several aspects, foodselectivity analyses shows itself as a nichedimension measure. This concept was appliedfirst to human population by Hardesty (1972).Studies on the relationship between humanpopulation and environmental resources haveemployed concept (Adams 2002; Hanazakiand Begossi 2004; Cavallini and Nordi 2005;Silva and Begossi 2009). However, studiesapproaching concept applied to humanurban populations are not found. Laland et al.(2007), employ niche construction concept,similar dimensions to Hardesty's concept, whichwas applied to urban environments. Accordingto these authors, the niche construction is aresult from relationships between the organismand its environment, which comprehends itsmetabolism, activities, and choices. They includelearning and culture in studying ecological nicheon human populations. Shenegyan and Zhiheng

Exploring the impact of climate variability during the Last Glacial Maximum on the pattern of human occupation of Iberia

Environment and evolution through the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum