Rescue workers have ended their search following a plane crash which killed 24 people and left four survivors in Brazil's Amazon basin, authorities said Sunday.
An investigation is underway into the cause of the accident which happened on Saturday, with survivors' accounts and officials' initial assessments pointing to engine failure as a possible cause.
The Embraer, chartered by Manaus Aerotaxis, was carrying two crew members and 26 passengers, including children, when it went down after taking off from the city of Coari en route to the inland Amazon basin's largest city, Manaus.
The plane was forced to make an emergency landing in the River Manacapuru, a tributary of the Amazon, between Santo Antonio and the island of Montecristo, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Manaus.
Seven children were among those killed, Brazil's Legal Medicine Institute said.
Almost 40 firefighters including nine divers (frogmen) and civil defense officials searched through the night for survivors, but confirmed that just four people survived while the death toll rose from six from late Saturday to 24.
Authorities suspect the plane tried to make an emergency landing at the Panamacapuru airport but went down instead in the river.
The director of Manacapuru Regional Hospital, Marcelo Alves, told local media that survivors had relayed how "they heard one of the motors stop and the plane lost altitude. They hit something and then went nose first into the water," he said.
Some survivors said they were able to jump from a door at the rear of the plane shortly before impact.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jehyfwE2-qSXmNfSR7XFEKCtyhNg
rainforestpower Headline Animator
Monday, February 9, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Pure Acai Products to Market New Line of Acai Zone Products
After signing an agreement with Apex-Nutra, Pure Acai Products has unveiled three new Acai Zone brand products that are set to take the health-food industry by storm.
Pure Acai Products, one of the world's leading suppliers of acai berry products, recently signed an agreement with Apex-Nutra to develop a new line of three high-quality, private-label acai juices and supplements under the Acai Zone brand.
Acai Zone products are 100% pure acai and have been developed using cutting edge technology.
The joining of forces with Apex-Nutra was a natural progression for Pure Acai Products. Initially, Acai Zone will be marketed exclusively through Acai Berry Site, but will later be distributed through other online retailers.
These new products combine the wide range of health benefits of the acai berry with functional nutritional supplements developed by Apex-Nutra. Acai Ultra Slim is engineered to provide maximum aid to people looking to lose and keep off excess pounds. Acai Maxx is an energy booster and mood enhancer. Finally, Acai Rejuvenate is for anyone who wants to look and feel younger.
It is obvious that the explosion of interest in the acai berry is largely due to the wide range of benefits it provides. So we decided to combine our experience with producing quality acai products with the homeopathic knowledge of Apex-Nutra to market products that better target the specific needs of our customers. The Acai Zone brand is well known for the standard of the products available.
All of us behind Acai Zone have seen and felt how much of a change acai berry products can have on a person's life. By going into the acai berry business we are championing a product that we have complete faith in because we use it ourselves.
Bryan Nettles, who deals with the business side of the company, said, "It is obvious that the explosion of interest in the acai berry is largely due to the wide range of benefits it provides. So we decided to combine our experience with producing quality acai products with the homeopathic knowledge of Apex-Nutra to market products that better target the specific needs of our customers. The Acai Zone brand is well known for the standard of the products available."
Acai berries are the world's newest superfood. A native of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, the fruit has become recognized the world over thanks to its incredible health values.
There are several key benefits to consuming acai berry products such as Acai Zone. These range from an increased libido, better sleep and enhanced energy to better mental focus, an improved immune system and less aches and pains.
The berries are no wonder cure, but they could be the next best thing. Acai berries have also been linked to weight loss and decreasing the risk of cancer. Most of all, however, users say that a diet that includes the berries makes them feel great.
Pure Acai Products is a company founded by a group of friends who first came across acai berries while on a surfing trip to Rio in 2004. The adventurers ate the berries during their trip and could tell that there was something special about the fruit.
After returning to their homes in the Bay Area in San Francisco, the friends dug up all the information they could about acai berries. What they discovered was fascinating: the berries are full of helpful substances. However, it was near impossible to get acai products in the US.
It took several rounds of phone calls to find manufacturers who were prepared to export acai berries. However, as the berries spoil within a day of harvesting, it is necessary to process the berries before transporting.
The most convenient way of getting the product out of Brazil is in freeze-dried powder form, which is then consumed in capsule form. Acai berry juice is also popular with consumers, but is often diluted with water or other fruit juices and the end product is usually less than 10% acai berry.
The Acai Zone beverages are purees and are pulverized acai berry, with no water or other fruit juices added, so consumers get the maximum effect possible.
Nettles in particular was an immediate convert to acai berries after that trip to Brazil. "All of us behind Acai Zone have seen and felt how much of a change acai berry products can have on a person's life. By going into the acai berry business we are championing a product that we have complete faith in because we use it ourselves."
Apex-Nutra is a direct supplier of raw materials, including goji, camu camu and, of course, acai. Apex-Nutra has strong connections with the growers and manufacturers of these products, ensuring that Acai Zone is a high-quality, affordable acai product.
All of Apex-Nutra's suppliers and manufacturers have been handpicked and are CGMPs and HACCP compliant. Nothing is shipped without being thoroughly examined and tested.
The Acai berry has become the most talked about health food in the world. The fruit is full of antioxidants, which helps keep bodies healthy. Furthermore, antioxidants combat the effects of aging by targeting free radicals.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/02/prweb1974634.htm
Pure Acai Products, one of the world's leading suppliers of acai berry products, recently signed an agreement with Apex-Nutra to develop a new line of three high-quality, private-label acai juices and supplements under the Acai Zone brand.
Acai Zone products are 100% pure acai and have been developed using cutting edge technology.
The joining of forces with Apex-Nutra was a natural progression for Pure Acai Products. Initially, Acai Zone will be marketed exclusively through Acai Berry Site, but will later be distributed through other online retailers.
These new products combine the wide range of health benefits of the acai berry with functional nutritional supplements developed by Apex-Nutra. Acai Ultra Slim is engineered to provide maximum aid to people looking to lose and keep off excess pounds. Acai Maxx is an energy booster and mood enhancer. Finally, Acai Rejuvenate is for anyone who wants to look and feel younger.
It is obvious that the explosion of interest in the acai berry is largely due to the wide range of benefits it provides. So we decided to combine our experience with producing quality acai products with the homeopathic knowledge of Apex-Nutra to market products that better target the specific needs of our customers. The Acai Zone brand is well known for the standard of the products available.
All of us behind Acai Zone have seen and felt how much of a change acai berry products can have on a person's life. By going into the acai berry business we are championing a product that we have complete faith in because we use it ourselves.
Bryan Nettles, who deals with the business side of the company, said, "It is obvious that the explosion of interest in the acai berry is largely due to the wide range of benefits it provides. So we decided to combine our experience with producing quality acai products with the homeopathic knowledge of Apex-Nutra to market products that better target the specific needs of our customers. The Acai Zone brand is well known for the standard of the products available."
Acai berries are the world's newest superfood. A native of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, the fruit has become recognized the world over thanks to its incredible health values.
There are several key benefits to consuming acai berry products such as Acai Zone. These range from an increased libido, better sleep and enhanced energy to better mental focus, an improved immune system and less aches and pains.
The berries are no wonder cure, but they could be the next best thing. Acai berries have also been linked to weight loss and decreasing the risk of cancer. Most of all, however, users say that a diet that includes the berries makes them feel great.
Pure Acai Products is a company founded by a group of friends who first came across acai berries while on a surfing trip to Rio in 2004. The adventurers ate the berries during their trip and could tell that there was something special about the fruit.
After returning to their homes in the Bay Area in San Francisco, the friends dug up all the information they could about acai berries. What they discovered was fascinating: the berries are full of helpful substances. However, it was near impossible to get acai products in the US.
It took several rounds of phone calls to find manufacturers who were prepared to export acai berries. However, as the berries spoil within a day of harvesting, it is necessary to process the berries before transporting.
The most convenient way of getting the product out of Brazil is in freeze-dried powder form, which is then consumed in capsule form. Acai berry juice is also popular with consumers, but is often diluted with water or other fruit juices and the end product is usually less than 10% acai berry.
The Acai Zone beverages are purees and are pulverized acai berry, with no water or other fruit juices added, so consumers get the maximum effect possible.
Nettles in particular was an immediate convert to acai berries after that trip to Brazil. "All of us behind Acai Zone have seen and felt how much of a change acai berry products can have on a person's life. By going into the acai berry business we are championing a product that we have complete faith in because we use it ourselves."
Apex-Nutra is a direct supplier of raw materials, including goji, camu camu and, of course, acai. Apex-Nutra has strong connections with the growers and manufacturers of these products, ensuring that Acai Zone is a high-quality, affordable acai product.
All of Apex-Nutra's suppliers and manufacturers have been handpicked and are CGMPs and HACCP compliant. Nothing is shipped without being thoroughly examined and tested.
The Acai berry has become the most talked about health food in the world. The fruit is full of antioxidants, which helps keep bodies healthy. Furthermore, antioxidants combat the effects of aging by targeting free radicals.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/02/prweb1974634.htm
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Dear capitalists, admit you got it wrong
Buoyed up by a crisis and with five presidents in attendance, the international left has ideas for fixing the world that a neoliberal might recognise
OFTEN mocked for an endless ability to disagree with itself, the World Social Forum—an annual jamboree for NGOs, anti-capitalists, leftish intellectuals, bohemians and bishops—was unusually united this year. More united, in some ways, than the recent World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos, a gathering of political and corporate bigwigs to which the social forum supposedly responds.
While Davos Man was busy looking for someone to blame for his predicament, no such doubts troubled his opposite number in Belém, a city on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest where mango trees grow so tall that their fruits can shatter car windscreens when they fall. The culprit was the whole current design of the world economy, promoting competition. Free trade and free movement of capital needed to be re-thought, participants insisted. Some even had ideas on what should replace it.
The forum’s main purpose is to bring together social movements (which generally dislike being called NGOs) from around the world to network. In that respect, it is rather like any other business conference, though some participants carry spears and wear the feathers of various unfortunate parrots on their heads. The forum is skewed towards Latin America, especially Brazil. One of the founders of the forum is a Brazilian businessman called Oded Grajew, and its first meeting was held in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil.
Of more than 5,000 accredited organisations, 4,193 were from South America, roughly ten times the number of African outfits present. This partly reflects the number and prominence of NGOs in South America and the semi-official role which some governments give them. This year Brazil’s left-leaning government gave the forum a subsidy of R$120m ($52m)—a piece of generosity that was not universally popular at a time when economic growth may be on the verge of halting.
As a result, many causes dear to the Brazilian left were well represented. T-shirts demanded asylum for Cesare Battisti, a left-wing Italian émigré convicted of murder in Rome, who is currently in Brazil. Banners called for Brazilian troops to be withdrawn from Haiti, where they are doing a good job of containing violence.
A proposed hydroelectric dam on the Madeira river (a tributary of the Amazon) was denounced, and the country’s new oil find claimed for its people. Plenty of people came from further afield, like the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, with a Delphic slogan: “We would rather sweat in peace than bleed in war.” And there were swarms of young, largely white folk who treated the forum like a music festival.
This cacophony sometimes sat awkwardly with the presence of five leftish presidents—Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil—who dropped in to be fêted. The flurry of helicopters and security men seemed out of place. Four leaders (President Lula was elsewhere) appeared together at a meeting that was billed as a dialogue with the social movements. But the talking was mostly one way. Mr Chávez gave a long, rambling speech in which he struggled to animate the crowd. “Another world is possible! No! Another world is necessary,” was as inspiring as it got.
Since its inception, the forum has struggled to get the right balance between a range of attractions: intellectual stars such as Noam Chomsky and Joseph Stiglitz, both of whom have addressed previous meetings; sympathetic politicians; large NGOs and the smaller single-issue organisations which often feel squeezed out.
This tension produced the best exchange in the presidential meeting. “You all talk about doing these things,” said João Pedro Stedile, a founder of the Landless Movement in Brazil, “but when you met in Bahia [in December] you just went to the beach.” “I didn’t go to the beach,” muttered the Venezuelan leader. “Well, perhaps those of you who are a bit overweight didn’t go,” Mr Stedile fired back.
Away from this set-piece spat, people were sitting in meeting rooms and coming up with proposals. The ones that dealt with reforming finance read a bit like a co-production between militant anti-capitalists and more cautious types, which was no accident. At the far edge was the idea that money and finance are public goods and should be shared out accordingly, through democracy. The familiar call for a special tax on international transactions was repeated. But there was plenty of talk that was more moderate and rather more interesting.
The forum suggested that the United Nations should be charged with preventing large trade surpluses and deficits from building up. Controls on exchange rates and the international movement of capital should be re-established. Credit-rating agencies should be reformed, incentives for excessive risk-taking reduced and bankers’ bonuses paid on the basis of long-term performance. Hedge funds, private-equity firms and other parts of the shadow banking system should go, along with over-the-counter derivatives (OTCs), collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs) and other nefarious structured products.
In general, a “speculator pays” principle should be introduced and applied when things go wrong. Finally, the world’s economy should get a stimulus in the form of a green New Deal.
Bits of this belong to the realm of reality; indeed, they might have come from America’s Democratic Party, or even from the op-ed pages of a respectable business daily. Interestingly, the forum proposed an outright ban on subprime mortgages, even though it might have been expected to look favourably on lending to people who would otherwise struggle to get credit.
If some delegates seemed to have thought hard about the economic crisis, the same could not be said of the visiting presidents. After leading the crowd in a chant of “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!” Mr Chávez joined Messrs Lugo, Morales and Correa in a karaoke rendition of “Hasta siempre commandante”—a dirge about the exploits of Che Guevara—before disappearing. That was far too cruel a fate for the assembled company of Asian bishops, indigenous types in all their finery, would-be financial reformers and anti-capitalist warriors.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13061828
OFTEN mocked for an endless ability to disagree with itself, the World Social Forum—an annual jamboree for NGOs, anti-capitalists, leftish intellectuals, bohemians and bishops—was unusually united this year. More united, in some ways, than the recent World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos, a gathering of political and corporate bigwigs to which the social forum supposedly responds.
While Davos Man was busy looking for someone to blame for his predicament, no such doubts troubled his opposite number in Belém, a city on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest where mango trees grow so tall that their fruits can shatter car windscreens when they fall. The culprit was the whole current design of the world economy, promoting competition. Free trade and free movement of capital needed to be re-thought, participants insisted. Some even had ideas on what should replace it.
The forum’s main purpose is to bring together social movements (which generally dislike being called NGOs) from around the world to network. In that respect, it is rather like any other business conference, though some participants carry spears and wear the feathers of various unfortunate parrots on their heads. The forum is skewed towards Latin America, especially Brazil. One of the founders of the forum is a Brazilian businessman called Oded Grajew, and its first meeting was held in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil.
Of more than 5,000 accredited organisations, 4,193 were from South America, roughly ten times the number of African outfits present. This partly reflects the number and prominence of NGOs in South America and the semi-official role which some governments give them. This year Brazil’s left-leaning government gave the forum a subsidy of R$120m ($52m)—a piece of generosity that was not universally popular at a time when economic growth may be on the verge of halting.
As a result, many causes dear to the Brazilian left were well represented. T-shirts demanded asylum for Cesare Battisti, a left-wing Italian émigré convicted of murder in Rome, who is currently in Brazil. Banners called for Brazilian troops to be withdrawn from Haiti, where they are doing a good job of containing violence.
A proposed hydroelectric dam on the Madeira river (a tributary of the Amazon) was denounced, and the country’s new oil find claimed for its people. Plenty of people came from further afield, like the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, with a Delphic slogan: “We would rather sweat in peace than bleed in war.” And there were swarms of young, largely white folk who treated the forum like a music festival.
This cacophony sometimes sat awkwardly with the presence of five leftish presidents—Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil—who dropped in to be fêted. The flurry of helicopters and security men seemed out of place. Four leaders (President Lula was elsewhere) appeared together at a meeting that was billed as a dialogue with the social movements. But the talking was mostly one way. Mr Chávez gave a long, rambling speech in which he struggled to animate the crowd. “Another world is possible! No! Another world is necessary,” was as inspiring as it got.
Since its inception, the forum has struggled to get the right balance between a range of attractions: intellectual stars such as Noam Chomsky and Joseph Stiglitz, both of whom have addressed previous meetings; sympathetic politicians; large NGOs and the smaller single-issue organisations which often feel squeezed out.
This tension produced the best exchange in the presidential meeting. “You all talk about doing these things,” said João Pedro Stedile, a founder of the Landless Movement in Brazil, “but when you met in Bahia [in December] you just went to the beach.” “I didn’t go to the beach,” muttered the Venezuelan leader. “Well, perhaps those of you who are a bit overweight didn’t go,” Mr Stedile fired back.
Away from this set-piece spat, people were sitting in meeting rooms and coming up with proposals. The ones that dealt with reforming finance read a bit like a co-production between militant anti-capitalists and more cautious types, which was no accident. At the far edge was the idea that money and finance are public goods and should be shared out accordingly, through democracy. The familiar call for a special tax on international transactions was repeated. But there was plenty of talk that was more moderate and rather more interesting.
The forum suggested that the United Nations should be charged with preventing large trade surpluses and deficits from building up. Controls on exchange rates and the international movement of capital should be re-established. Credit-rating agencies should be reformed, incentives for excessive risk-taking reduced and bankers’ bonuses paid on the basis of long-term performance. Hedge funds, private-equity firms and other parts of the shadow banking system should go, along with over-the-counter derivatives (OTCs), collateralised-debt obligations (CDOs) and other nefarious structured products.
In general, a “speculator pays” principle should be introduced and applied when things go wrong. Finally, the world’s economy should get a stimulus in the form of a green New Deal.
Bits of this belong to the realm of reality; indeed, they might have come from America’s Democratic Party, or even from the op-ed pages of a respectable business daily. Interestingly, the forum proposed an outright ban on subprime mortgages, even though it might have been expected to look favourably on lending to people who would otherwise struggle to get credit.
If some delegates seemed to have thought hard about the economic crisis, the same could not be said of the visiting presidents. After leading the crowd in a chant of “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!” Mr Chávez joined Messrs Lugo, Morales and Correa in a karaoke rendition of “Hasta siempre commandante”—a dirge about the exploits of Che Guevara—before disappearing. That was far too cruel a fate for the assembled company of Asian bishops, indigenous types in all their finery, would-be financial reformers and anti-capitalist warriors.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13061828
Friday, February 6, 2009
Predicting diversity within hotspots to enhance conservation
New strategy can identify hotspots within hotspots, focusing effort and money
With limited funding and an inadequate number of scientists, governments in countries containing "hotspots" of threatened biodiversity are wrestling with how to protect plants and animals in disappearing habitats.
But a new strategy developed by University of California, Berkeley, biologists could help scientists, governments and private organizations worldwide to identify the areas within hotspots where they should focus their time, effort and money - areas likely to have a wealth of unique diversity.
The research, led by UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Ana Carolina Carnaval and evolutionary biologist Craig Moritz, professor of integrative biology and director of UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, appears this week in the journal Science. Their colleagues are Michael J. Hickerson of Queens College, New York, Célio F. B. Haddad of Universidade Estadual Paulista, and Miguel T. Rodrigues of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
The UC Berkeley researchers' strategy involves looking at multiple species in an area and, based on current range and models of past climate, estimating the species' past distributions. This gives an indication of which regions have been climatically stable, and thus likely to harbor a diversity of species, and which areas have been unstable and likely to be less biodiverse.
"With this method, we can identify areas that have been working as refugia for biodiversity," Carnaval said. "These are areas that have remained climatically stable through time, where local communities have been able to persist. Despite the fact that we haven't sampled them exhaustively yet, we think there is a lot of undocumented, hidden diversity there, the potential for a lot of species still unknown to science, and, especially, a lot of endemism."
Applying their strategy to the Atlantic forest hotspot, which extends from Brazil's southern border, stretching inland to Argentina and Paraguay, to the country's northeast coast, they pinpointed the central part of the Atlantic forest, much of it in Bahia state, as more diverse than previously thought. This is all the more remarkable because the central forest is among the least studied yet most threatened components of the Atlantic forest, Carnaval said.
"The study demonstrates that the southern portion of the Atlantic forest was more climatically unstable during the Late Pleistocene, relative to the central corridor, which served as a large climatic refuge for neotropical species," she said. "Yet, the central region is poorly known and under extreme anthropogenic pressure. This unveils new priorities for conservation that must reach policymakers, the public and NGOs (non-governmental organizations)."
Two decades ago, scientists proposed identifying "biodiversity hotspots" where "exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat" so that conservation planners could focus on these hotspots "in proportion to their share of the world's species at risk," in the words of Oxford University's Norman Myers and colleagues, who published the first hotspot map in 2000 in the journal Nature. Endemic species are native species found nowhere else.
Carnaval and her colleagues have taken the next step, which is to narrow the focus even more, using the Atlantic forest of Brazil - which, unlike the much larger Amazon, is considered a threatened hotspot - as a test case.
The central Atlantic rainforests, home to tamarins and marmosets, include mangrove swamps along the coast, moist evergreen tropical forests nearby, semi-deciduous inland forests, where many trees drop their leaves in the dry season, and dry forests of deciduous trees even farther from the coast. Much of this rainforest has been cleared for farming, primarily for sugar cane, and only an estimated 8 percent of the original area remains. More than 60 percent of Brazil's population - approximately 100 million people - lives in cleared forest areas in the region.
Focusing on three species of tree frogs found throughout the forest, the UC Berkeley researchers modeled the species' distributions 6,000 years ago, when local conditions were generally cooler and wetter, as well as 21,000 years ago, a cool-dry period. Based on their model, they predicted that southern areas of the forest appear to have been comparatively less stable from a climatic standpoint, and thus recently colonized by the study species and likely to hold far less genetic diversity than the central region.
The team tested this prediction by looking at genetic variation among the frog species today. Frogs in stable areas should have more genetic variation because they have lived and evolved for a longer period of time, while in unstable areas, frogs that may have moved in recently should have less variation. Presumably, frog diversity will reflect diversity throughout the ecosystem.
That is exactly the pattern the researchers found. Taking DNA samples from 184 frogs of three treefrog species - Hypsiboas albomarginatus, H. semilineatus and H. faber - at dozens of sites within the Brazilian coastal rainforest, they sequenced mitochondrial DNA from each and compared the sequences of the same gene from all individuals. Southern frogs had much less genetic diversity than those in the central and northern regions.
"We find a lot of diversity in areas shown as climatically stable by the paleomodels and much less diversity in the south, where models suggest climatic instability," said Carnaval. "Also, we find evidence of population expansion from the central region to the south."
Reanalyzing previously published genetic data by others, Carnaval and Moritz also found supporting evidence from mammals and reptiles. Similar patterns have also been published for birds.
"The study has shown us that the central Atlantic forest, which hasn't had the investment of resources and effort as the southern, has been stable from a climatic standpoint and therefore is likely more diverse than currently believed. But because this area is under great human impact, it deserves conservation and research priority," Moritz said.
"We are not saying the south is not important; today, we find lots of endemics in the south and lots of diversity in the south," she added. "But the data point to another area that should receive more attention from both the conservation and research standpoint."
The method tested on Brazil's Atlantic forest should work in other understudied, highly threatened tropical regions worldwide, Moritz and Carnaval emphasized.
"The broader story is that we think this technique could be applied in other countries and other hotspot areas to identify regions that haven't been well sampled yet, regions that could possibly harbor as yet undiscovered unique diversity," Carnaval said. "This is a general method for identifying and prioritizing hotspots within hotspots, for finding highly diverse areas that have not been fully explored."
"Ana and her colleagues have discovered, using a very simple approach of combining genetics and environmental modeling, how we can make pretty strong predictions that can guide conservation efforts," Moritz said.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uoc--pdw020209.php
With limited funding and an inadequate number of scientists, governments in countries containing "hotspots" of threatened biodiversity are wrestling with how to protect plants and animals in disappearing habitats.
But a new strategy developed by University of California, Berkeley, biologists could help scientists, governments and private organizations worldwide to identify the areas within hotspots where they should focus their time, effort and money - areas likely to have a wealth of unique diversity.
The research, led by UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Ana Carolina Carnaval and evolutionary biologist Craig Moritz, professor of integrative biology and director of UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, appears this week in the journal Science. Their colleagues are Michael J. Hickerson of Queens College, New York, Célio F. B. Haddad of Universidade Estadual Paulista, and Miguel T. Rodrigues of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.
The UC Berkeley researchers' strategy involves looking at multiple species in an area and, based on current range and models of past climate, estimating the species' past distributions. This gives an indication of which regions have been climatically stable, and thus likely to harbor a diversity of species, and which areas have been unstable and likely to be less biodiverse.
"With this method, we can identify areas that have been working as refugia for biodiversity," Carnaval said. "These are areas that have remained climatically stable through time, where local communities have been able to persist. Despite the fact that we haven't sampled them exhaustively yet, we think there is a lot of undocumented, hidden diversity there, the potential for a lot of species still unknown to science, and, especially, a lot of endemism."
Applying their strategy to the Atlantic forest hotspot, which extends from Brazil's southern border, stretching inland to Argentina and Paraguay, to the country's northeast coast, they pinpointed the central part of the Atlantic forest, much of it in Bahia state, as more diverse than previously thought. This is all the more remarkable because the central forest is among the least studied yet most threatened components of the Atlantic forest, Carnaval said.
"The study demonstrates that the southern portion of the Atlantic forest was more climatically unstable during the Late Pleistocene, relative to the central corridor, which served as a large climatic refuge for neotropical species," she said. "Yet, the central region is poorly known and under extreme anthropogenic pressure. This unveils new priorities for conservation that must reach policymakers, the public and NGOs (non-governmental organizations)."
Two decades ago, scientists proposed identifying "biodiversity hotspots" where "exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat" so that conservation planners could focus on these hotspots "in proportion to their share of the world's species at risk," in the words of Oxford University's Norman Myers and colleagues, who published the first hotspot map in 2000 in the journal Nature. Endemic species are native species found nowhere else.
Carnaval and her colleagues have taken the next step, which is to narrow the focus even more, using the Atlantic forest of Brazil - which, unlike the much larger Amazon, is considered a threatened hotspot - as a test case.
The central Atlantic rainforests, home to tamarins and marmosets, include mangrove swamps along the coast, moist evergreen tropical forests nearby, semi-deciduous inland forests, where many trees drop their leaves in the dry season, and dry forests of deciduous trees even farther from the coast. Much of this rainforest has been cleared for farming, primarily for sugar cane, and only an estimated 8 percent of the original area remains. More than 60 percent of Brazil's population - approximately 100 million people - lives in cleared forest areas in the region.
Focusing on three species of tree frogs found throughout the forest, the UC Berkeley researchers modeled the species' distributions 6,000 years ago, when local conditions were generally cooler and wetter, as well as 21,000 years ago, a cool-dry period. Based on their model, they predicted that southern areas of the forest appear to have been comparatively less stable from a climatic standpoint, and thus recently colonized by the study species and likely to hold far less genetic diversity than the central region.
The team tested this prediction by looking at genetic variation among the frog species today. Frogs in stable areas should have more genetic variation because they have lived and evolved for a longer period of time, while in unstable areas, frogs that may have moved in recently should have less variation. Presumably, frog diversity will reflect diversity throughout the ecosystem.
That is exactly the pattern the researchers found. Taking DNA samples from 184 frogs of three treefrog species - Hypsiboas albomarginatus, H. semilineatus and H. faber - at dozens of sites within the Brazilian coastal rainforest, they sequenced mitochondrial DNA from each and compared the sequences of the same gene from all individuals. Southern frogs had much less genetic diversity than those in the central and northern regions.
"We find a lot of diversity in areas shown as climatically stable by the paleomodels and much less diversity in the south, where models suggest climatic instability," said Carnaval. "Also, we find evidence of population expansion from the central region to the south."
Reanalyzing previously published genetic data by others, Carnaval and Moritz also found supporting evidence from mammals and reptiles. Similar patterns have also been published for birds.
"The study has shown us that the central Atlantic forest, which hasn't had the investment of resources and effort as the southern, has been stable from a climatic standpoint and therefore is likely more diverse than currently believed. But because this area is under great human impact, it deserves conservation and research priority," Moritz said.
"We are not saying the south is not important; today, we find lots of endemics in the south and lots of diversity in the south," she added. "But the data point to another area that should receive more attention from both the conservation and research standpoint."
The method tested on Brazil's Atlantic forest should work in other understudied, highly threatened tropical regions worldwide, Moritz and Carnaval emphasized.
"The broader story is that we think this technique could be applied in other countries and other hotspot areas to identify regions that haven't been well sampled yet, regions that could possibly harbor as yet undiscovered unique diversity," Carnaval said. "This is a general method for identifying and prioritizing hotspots within hotspots, for finding highly diverse areas that have not been fully explored."
"Ana and her colleagues have discovered, using a very simple approach of combining genetics and environmental modeling, how we can make pretty strong predictions that can guide conservation efforts," Moritz said.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uoc--pdw020209.php
Monday, January 26, 2009
Conserving a habitat by exploiting it
SAN ANTONIO DE PINTUYACU, Peru: Women in this remote Amazon village can weave fibers from the chambira palm tree branch into almost anything they need - fishing nets, hammocks, purses, skirts, dental floss.
But for the past year they have put their hopes in baskets, weaving thousands to build inventory for export to the United States. Their first international buyers are the San Diego Natural History Museum and San Diego Zoo, and they plan to sell to other museums and home décor purveyors like the Field Museum in Chicago and Cost Plus.
The circuitous route these baskets have taken from the jungle to American store shelves started with a bird watcher's passion for natural habitats, passed through a regional government whose policies have become increasingly more environmental, and, supporters say, should end with better lives for the weavers and their communities.
The enterprise is one of many ventures here in the Amazon aimed at "productive conservation," a principle that advocates saving the rainforest by transforming it into a renewable economic resource for locals - just as some eco-tourism lodges and other ventures in places like Africa and Southeast Asia have tried to do.
The greatest challenge has been persuading residents of the communities along the river, who until now largely supported themselves by chopping down palm branches and fishing, that conservation is in their best interest.
The government of Loreto, Peru's densely forested and least populous state, organized the basket project, which is financed by grants from two nonprofit organizations, Nature and Culture International and the Moore Foundation.
"Having the government take such a role in a market-based approach is quite novel," said Amy Rosenthal, deputy director for projects with Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit that works in southern Peru and northern Bolivia, when told of the program. She said the state of Amazonas in Brazil had attempted a similar conservation-exploitation program. "It sounds like a well-thought-out program and something that could be wildly successful," she said.
But not without challengers.
Ivan Vasquez, the president of Loreto state, said he had made some enemies by supporting conservation in a region where fishing and logging have been the primary engines of revenue for decades and where oil and natural gas are seen as the next frontiers. He called himself "the Quixote of the Amazon."
"We are part of nature. When we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves," Vasquez said. He said big logging operations, not small farmers, continued to pose the greatest deforestation threat.
The changes in Loreto may correspond to a broader shift in Peru's attitude toward conservation. Last spring, the country set up an environment ministry, which has already started focusing on deforestation.
The basket project is the brainchild of Noam Shany, an Israeli agronomist and entrepreneur. A bird-watching trip in 2005 led him to a remote village on the Tahuayo River, an Amazon tributary. There, he said, he noticed striking local baskets for sale in a tourist lodge and thought, "That's some interesting weaving."
Shany, who had previously sold fake plants to Wal-Mart and cacti to nurseries in California and Australia, decided to put his retailing experience to an environmental use. He had come to Peru in 2002 to study exotic birds. Now, he wanted to protect their habitats, and the baskets were the perfect anchor for a productive conservation program.
In 2006, he helped found Procrel, a biodiversity program that has worked with the regional government to establish three vast protected reserves. The basket program is one of several conservation initiatives meant to help indigenous peoples benefit from the conservation efforts.
On the sales side, pitching Peruvian handicrafts to retailers in the United States was easy. "These baskets represent so much more than simply a basket," said Nancy Stevens, manager of retail and wholesale operations for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. "When I began to hear their story - from a local project into a story of sustainability, where they're being developed as a responsible use of the natural resources of this Amazon region - it just clicked so beautifully with the mission of this museum."
Pitching an international enterprise to the villagers was almost as easy. Shany turned a somewhat haphazard local craft - women making a few baskets, selling them in a local shop, then making a few more - into something more like mass production, with higher returns to the producers.
Artisans get between $10 and $12 for each basket, which sells for $40 in the United States. About a third of that goes into shipping and distribution, and the rest is retailer profit, meaning the company that sells the baskets gets a little more per unit than each maker. Procrel and Shany get nothing.
The artisan's cut may not seem substantial, Shany said, but it more than doubles previous monthly earnings. Two years ago, households in this region earned as little as $30 a month selling fish and palm frond roofing, he said. Today, experienced weavers can earn $100 a month.
Over time, urban Peruvian employees of the program have brought a whole new vocabulary to the river communities. Visiting every few weeks, they encourage the weavers to respect deadlines, quality control and inventory requests. On one such recent trip, Shany delivered a pep talk to his newest recruits, preparing them for the orders that could start coming in.
"These stores don't buy one hundred baskets," he said. "One hundred is nothing. Two hundred is nothing. They buy a thousand, ten thousand. You're all going to need to work together."
Since starting the program, he said the weavers have not been able to meet demand. "We can't keep up with the orders," Shany wrote in a recent e-mail message. "We are training more ladies to increase production and also to involve more people."
Rosenthal noted that there were considerable difficulties with any start-up operation like this, not the least of which was falling demand for all kinds of discretionary spending on the part of U.S. consumers as the recession in the country deepened.
Other than that, "quality assurance is probably their biggest challenge for selling something retail in the U.S.," she said. The arrangement, if successful, "can bring them much better profits and a much better source of income than in local terms."
Still, Trevor Stevenson, executive co-director of the Amazon Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on indigenous populations, said it was vital for communities to diversify their income and not to count exclusively on crafts, which could be volatile, particularly in times like these.
The challenge has been teaching the river communities to shift mentalities from consumption to conservation, on a large scale.
"Here, today is today," Shany said. "Tomorrow is another day. It's an immediate mentality, so replanting, and not cutting the tree in the first place, is really revolutionary."
Eblis Chavez, from San Antonio de Pintuyacu, a village of Iquito Indians that is two days by motorboat from the nearest city, said residents had been slowly won over.
"We hesitated a bit originally," Chavez said, "but it makes much more sense to preserve the trees."
A year ago, villagers walked for hours to find irapay palms, whose fronds are used for the ubiquitous thatched roofs sold at markets, because they had chopped all the closer trees. "We were slaves of the irapay," Chavez said.
Since January of last year, villagers have planted chambira groves 10 minutes away, where young fibers used for basketweaving are ready for harvesting every six months.
The baskets are bringing staples, and stability, to the area. "Already, there's more money changing hands. Already we're buying more from the bodegas. Rice, sugar, soap," said Erika Catashunga, of Esperanza, another village, speaking by communal telephone.
Catashunga, 25, is now at the forefront of another venture. She has just received the first business license granted to a basket weaver with Procrel, establishing her as the manager of a nine-village "empresa comunal," or communal enterprise. Its name is Mi Esperanza, or My Hope.
Growing up, she never imagined she would manage a global business one day. "Not even in my dreams," she said.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=19225765
But for the past year they have put their hopes in baskets, weaving thousands to build inventory for export to the United States. Their first international buyers are the San Diego Natural History Museum and San Diego Zoo, and they plan to sell to other museums and home décor purveyors like the Field Museum in Chicago and Cost Plus.
The circuitous route these baskets have taken from the jungle to American store shelves started with a bird watcher's passion for natural habitats, passed through a regional government whose policies have become increasingly more environmental, and, supporters say, should end with better lives for the weavers and their communities.
The enterprise is one of many ventures here in the Amazon aimed at "productive conservation," a principle that advocates saving the rainforest by transforming it into a renewable economic resource for locals - just as some eco-tourism lodges and other ventures in places like Africa and Southeast Asia have tried to do.
The greatest challenge has been persuading residents of the communities along the river, who until now largely supported themselves by chopping down palm branches and fishing, that conservation is in their best interest.
The government of Loreto, Peru's densely forested and least populous state, organized the basket project, which is financed by grants from two nonprofit organizations, Nature and Culture International and the Moore Foundation.
"Having the government take such a role in a market-based approach is quite novel," said Amy Rosenthal, deputy director for projects with Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit that works in southern Peru and northern Bolivia, when told of the program. She said the state of Amazonas in Brazil had attempted a similar conservation-exploitation program. "It sounds like a well-thought-out program and something that could be wildly successful," she said.
But not without challengers.
Ivan Vasquez, the president of Loreto state, said he had made some enemies by supporting conservation in a region where fishing and logging have been the primary engines of revenue for decades and where oil and natural gas are seen as the next frontiers. He called himself "the Quixote of the Amazon."
"We are part of nature. When we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves," Vasquez said. He said big logging operations, not small farmers, continued to pose the greatest deforestation threat.
The changes in Loreto may correspond to a broader shift in Peru's attitude toward conservation. Last spring, the country set up an environment ministry, which has already started focusing on deforestation.
The basket project is the brainchild of Noam Shany, an Israeli agronomist and entrepreneur. A bird-watching trip in 2005 led him to a remote village on the Tahuayo River, an Amazon tributary. There, he said, he noticed striking local baskets for sale in a tourist lodge and thought, "That's some interesting weaving."
Shany, who had previously sold fake plants to Wal-Mart and cacti to nurseries in California and Australia, decided to put his retailing experience to an environmental use. He had come to Peru in 2002 to study exotic birds. Now, he wanted to protect their habitats, and the baskets were the perfect anchor for a productive conservation program.
In 2006, he helped found Procrel, a biodiversity program that has worked with the regional government to establish three vast protected reserves. The basket program is one of several conservation initiatives meant to help indigenous peoples benefit from the conservation efforts.
On the sales side, pitching Peruvian handicrafts to retailers in the United States was easy. "These baskets represent so much more than simply a basket," said Nancy Stevens, manager of retail and wholesale operations for the San Diego Museum of Natural History. "When I began to hear their story - from a local project into a story of sustainability, where they're being developed as a responsible use of the natural resources of this Amazon region - it just clicked so beautifully with the mission of this museum."
Pitching an international enterprise to the villagers was almost as easy. Shany turned a somewhat haphazard local craft - women making a few baskets, selling them in a local shop, then making a few more - into something more like mass production, with higher returns to the producers.
Artisans get between $10 and $12 for each basket, which sells for $40 in the United States. About a third of that goes into shipping and distribution, and the rest is retailer profit, meaning the company that sells the baskets gets a little more per unit than each maker. Procrel and Shany get nothing.
The artisan's cut may not seem substantial, Shany said, but it more than doubles previous monthly earnings. Two years ago, households in this region earned as little as $30 a month selling fish and palm frond roofing, he said. Today, experienced weavers can earn $100 a month.
Over time, urban Peruvian employees of the program have brought a whole new vocabulary to the river communities. Visiting every few weeks, they encourage the weavers to respect deadlines, quality control and inventory requests. On one such recent trip, Shany delivered a pep talk to his newest recruits, preparing them for the orders that could start coming in.
"These stores don't buy one hundred baskets," he said. "One hundred is nothing. Two hundred is nothing. They buy a thousand, ten thousand. You're all going to need to work together."
Since starting the program, he said the weavers have not been able to meet demand. "We can't keep up with the orders," Shany wrote in a recent e-mail message. "We are training more ladies to increase production and also to involve more people."
Rosenthal noted that there were considerable difficulties with any start-up operation like this, not the least of which was falling demand for all kinds of discretionary spending on the part of U.S. consumers as the recession in the country deepened.
Other than that, "quality assurance is probably their biggest challenge for selling something retail in the U.S.," she said. The arrangement, if successful, "can bring them much better profits and a much better source of income than in local terms."
Still, Trevor Stevenson, executive co-director of the Amazon Alliance, a nonprofit organization that focuses on indigenous populations, said it was vital for communities to diversify their income and not to count exclusively on crafts, which could be volatile, particularly in times like these.
The challenge has been teaching the river communities to shift mentalities from consumption to conservation, on a large scale.
"Here, today is today," Shany said. "Tomorrow is another day. It's an immediate mentality, so replanting, and not cutting the tree in the first place, is really revolutionary."
Eblis Chavez, from San Antonio de Pintuyacu, a village of Iquito Indians that is two days by motorboat from the nearest city, said residents had been slowly won over.
"We hesitated a bit originally," Chavez said, "but it makes much more sense to preserve the trees."
A year ago, villagers walked for hours to find irapay palms, whose fronds are used for the ubiquitous thatched roofs sold at markets, because they had chopped all the closer trees. "We were slaves of the irapay," Chavez said.
Since January of last year, villagers have planted chambira groves 10 minutes away, where young fibers used for basketweaving are ready for harvesting every six months.
The baskets are bringing staples, and stability, to the area. "Already, there's more money changing hands. Already we're buying more from the bodegas. Rice, sugar, soap," said Erika Catashunga, of Esperanza, another village, speaking by communal telephone.
Catashunga, 25, is now at the forefront of another venture. She has just received the first business license granted to a basket weaver with Procrel, establishing her as the manager of a nine-village "empresa comunal," or communal enterprise. Its name is Mi Esperanza, or My Hope.
Growing up, she never imagined she would manage a global business one day. "Not even in my dreams," she said.
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=19225765
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Rainforest report
Logging, clearing decline for now
Here is one positive result of a slow global economy: Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest slowed in the latter part of 2008.
Satellite images show that 245 square miles of forest disappeared in the last five months of 2008. That does not seem like such a good thing until it is compared with 2007, when 1,325 square miles vanished during the same period. That's a decrease of 82 percent.
Brazil Environment Minister Carlos Minc said that government policies slowed deforestation. Brazil has become more vigilant in protecting the rainforest and punitive in its policies. Farmers, ranchers and loggers who clear land illegally no longer are eligible for government loans, for instance.
But environmentalists point to another reason: the global financial crisis has reduced demand for wood, soy and cattle. Thus, there is less call to clear land.
Amazon trees cut by loggers or burned release 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
Such impact on the global climate should concern all of us. Whether Brazil's government is actually slowing the assault on the rainforest should be apparent once business picks up.
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090124/OPINION01/301249964
Here is one positive result of a slow global economy: Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest slowed in the latter part of 2008.
Satellite images show that 245 square miles of forest disappeared in the last five months of 2008. That does not seem like such a good thing until it is compared with 2007, when 1,325 square miles vanished during the same period. That's a decrease of 82 percent.
Brazil Environment Minister Carlos Minc said that government policies slowed deforestation. Brazil has become more vigilant in protecting the rainforest and punitive in its policies. Farmers, ranchers and loggers who clear land illegally no longer are eligible for government loans, for instance.
But environmentalists point to another reason: the global financial crisis has reduced demand for wood, soy and cattle. Thus, there is less call to clear land.
Amazon trees cut by loggers or burned release 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
Such impact on the global climate should concern all of us. Whether Brazil's government is actually slowing the assault on the rainforest should be apparent once business picks up.
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090124/OPINION01/301249964
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Fashion Rio – Eco Survivor Chic Rules
Anyone who suggests that Brazil has little to add in the global world of style should have spent Monday in Rio de Janeiro, where two cleverly crafted and artfully staged shows spoke loudly about our generation’s obsession with ecology and the threat our own species represents to the planet on which we live.
There were two contrasting collections, one by Redley, chock full of prints and staged in a tropical rainforest and the other print-free and austere by Mara Mac presented in the tented city of Marina Gloria, where all but four of the shows in this season of Fashion Rio are staged. But both spoke about our greatest modern fear – even greater surely than the specter of unemployment in the current downturn – and that is what life will be like if or when the polar ice caps melt.
Neither of these labels could be described as “designer brands,” i.e. an international label embodying one individual’s taste, which made the performances by these high-street brands all the more impressive.
Redley’s creative director Jurgen Oeltjenbrun's vision is surprisingly upbeat. Judging from this Fall 2009 collection, he expects people to party hearty after the ecological apocalypse and, more importantly for fashionistas to look good while doing so.
Staged before noon under the dappled light of the Tijuca rainforest, located, remarkably, as close to Ipanema Beach as the George Washington Bridge is to the West Village, the collection was a wonderfully counter cultural happening inspired by the novel “The Alternative” by William Hedgepeth, a cerebral commentary on Sixties optimism and communal living. Yet the looks that strutted along the leafy catwalk were all about survivor chic: people finding the residue and rags of a civilization and yet still managing to make them into cool clothes.
Made of macramé cuts and rustic fabrics mixed with eco graffiti prints, this show was an optimistic interpretation of the future in a country whose Amazon Forest is the lungs of our globe.
“It’s all about sustainability,” commented Oeltjenbruns, a German whose Portuguese language skills may be limited, but whose sense of what’s relevant and commercial are very much spot on.
Seven hours later before the local fashion top-hitting nomenclature - rival TV style hosts Lilian Pacce and Gloria Maria - Mara Mac presented more survivor's chic but for folks who expect to be able to attend classy dinner parties after global warming has turned the Alps into a muddy hill.
In the half light as the show was starting, one correspondent wondered out loud, “Is this Max Mara or Marky Mark?” But, what hit the red Formica catwalk was neither, but a darkly subtle view of how elegant women can throw together looks from simple fabrics like jersey, cotton felt and wispy wool. Shown in various shades of gray and off-white, the clothes had an international ethnic feel – with lots of drop crotch yet slinky dhoti pants and cunningly well-cut coat dresses, decorated with Japanese texts and symbols.
Arran sweaters so small they looked like scarves and elongated ballet slippers on models that weaved between mini mountains of wood pulp added to the quirky panache of a show that seemed both contemporary and, above all, relevant.
http://www.fashionwiredaily.com/first_word/fashion/article.weml?id=2343
There were two contrasting collections, one by Redley, chock full of prints and staged in a tropical rainforest and the other print-free and austere by Mara Mac presented in the tented city of Marina Gloria, where all but four of the shows in this season of Fashion Rio are staged. But both spoke about our greatest modern fear – even greater surely than the specter of unemployment in the current downturn – and that is what life will be like if or when the polar ice caps melt.
Neither of these labels could be described as “designer brands,” i.e. an international label embodying one individual’s taste, which made the performances by these high-street brands all the more impressive.
Redley’s creative director Jurgen Oeltjenbrun's vision is surprisingly upbeat. Judging from this Fall 2009 collection, he expects people to party hearty after the ecological apocalypse and, more importantly for fashionistas to look good while doing so.
Staged before noon under the dappled light of the Tijuca rainforest, located, remarkably, as close to Ipanema Beach as the George Washington Bridge is to the West Village, the collection was a wonderfully counter cultural happening inspired by the novel “The Alternative” by William Hedgepeth, a cerebral commentary on Sixties optimism and communal living. Yet the looks that strutted along the leafy catwalk were all about survivor chic: people finding the residue and rags of a civilization and yet still managing to make them into cool clothes.
Made of macramé cuts and rustic fabrics mixed with eco graffiti prints, this show was an optimistic interpretation of the future in a country whose Amazon Forest is the lungs of our globe.
“It’s all about sustainability,” commented Oeltjenbruns, a German whose Portuguese language skills may be limited, but whose sense of what’s relevant and commercial are very much spot on.
Seven hours later before the local fashion top-hitting nomenclature - rival TV style hosts Lilian Pacce and Gloria Maria - Mara Mac presented more survivor's chic but for folks who expect to be able to attend classy dinner parties after global warming has turned the Alps into a muddy hill.
In the half light as the show was starting, one correspondent wondered out loud, “Is this Max Mara or Marky Mark?” But, what hit the red Formica catwalk was neither, but a darkly subtle view of how elegant women can throw together looks from simple fabrics like jersey, cotton felt and wispy wool. Shown in various shades of gray and off-white, the clothes had an international ethnic feel – with lots of drop crotch yet slinky dhoti pants and cunningly well-cut coat dresses, decorated with Japanese texts and symbols.
Arran sweaters so small they looked like scarves and elongated ballet slippers on models that weaved between mini mountains of wood pulp added to the quirky panache of a show that seemed both contemporary and, above all, relevant.
http://www.fashionwiredaily.com/first_word/fashion/article.weml?id=2343
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