"Ray" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> spaketh thusly:
> Interestingly enough though, if I recall correctly, in
> activated carbon, the surfaces are very much like
> graphite, but again, it's a surface area per unit volume
> thing.
Not precisely sure of the surface interactions of the different types of carbon
(diamonds, anyone?), but it is certainly true that the deeply fractured and
invaginated structures of charcoal on the microscale afford it a vast surface area per
unit weight. I am to understand the best (or some of the best) material is produced
from coconut shells, although much cheaper material is produced from wood. It is in
this manner that large chunks of forest are consumed- to feed the commercial and
industrial requirement for charcoal.
I suspect- but have no proof- that the commercial water supplies for Phoenix (which
are filtered through activated charcoal as they enter and leave residential,
commercial, and industrial consumers) are consuming large chunks of forest in the
process of making our water taste better (on the demand side) and smell better (on the
waste side). I wouldn't be surprised to find out it's rainforest charcoal.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] spaketh thusly:
> What is the purpose of the following decision (?) :
>
> "America's agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman, ended a
> directive that protects almost 60m acres of national
> forest in western states from road building. The states
> will instead be allowed to submit their own conservation
> and development proposals for the nature spots to the
> federal government."
*deletia*
> Are states more favorable to the environment than the
> federal government ?
No, but there is the tenth amendment to the US Constitution which states (in part):
"[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." (Or,
as we like to say, "those powers not delegated... are reserved for prime time TV").
The strict interpretation is that if it's not in the Constitution, then it's up to the
states to decide. Ergo, the use of the national forests should be left to the states,
not the federal government.
In more practical terms, it changes a strongly protected system of national forests
into a patchwork of land that is primed for consumption by timber, mining, and other
extractive industries that do not necessarily have the long-term interests of the land
at hand.
Removing such constraints on 60 million acres is almost equivalent to lessening the
protection on the combined protected areas of Alaska (22.2 million acres), California
(20.6 million acres) and and Idaho (20.4 million acres), the three states with the
largest national forest areas, and about 1/3 of the total (191 million acres) in the
US.
It is worth pointing out that this is one reason the national forests were created- as
reserves for timber and other "extractables"- and is one reason they're in such bad
shape. For example, while the current wildfire problem in the US stems from ranching
and range problems almost a century old, the "modern" problems started during World
War II during paranoia about Japanese landing in the western US and setting our
forests on fire, depriving us of timber (and, presumably, paper and red tape for the
war effort).
Unfortunately, it simply isn't possible to "manage" forests without fire, so the
situation has reached criticality; we've moved away from periodic, stabilizing fires
to the point where the forests are choked. The one solution is to simply cut the whole
damned thing down; the other is to hire people to trim them, as if it were some giant
hedge that needed pruning. Neither is practical, and (eventually) everything must
burn, and it WILL burn no matter what we do.
But that is a whole other story, one that is long and complex and misrepresented by
republicans as being an "environmentalist" or "tree-hugger" issue, or one that can be
resolved by, say, judicious pruning. It's a whole 'nother soapbox that I can speak to
for hours, and really doesn't fit on this list anyway, so I apologize for the
digression.
Cheers,
-AJHicks
Chandler, AZ
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