Dirty river but clean water
Floods can occur in rivers when the flow rate exceeds the capacity of the
river channel, particularly at bends or meanders in the waterway. Floods often cause damage to homes and
businesses if they are in the natural flood plains of rivers. While riverine flood damage can be
eliminated by moving away from rivers and other bodies of water, people have traditionally lived and
worked by rivers because the land is usually flat and fertile and because rivers provide easy travel and
access to commerce and industry.
A FIRE and flood are two of humanity's worst nightmares. People have,
therefore, always sought to control them. Forest fires are snuffed out quickly. The flow of rivers is
regulated by weirs and dams. At least, that is how it used to be. But foresters have learned that
forests need fires to clear out the brush and even to get seeds to germinate. And a similar revelation
is now dawning on hydrologists. Rivers – and the ecosystems they support – need floods. That is why a
man-made torrent has been surging down the Grand Canyon. By Thursday, March 6th it was running at full
throttle, which was expected to be sustained for 60 hours.
B Floods once raged through the canyon every year. Spring Snow from as far
away as Wyoming would melt and swell the Colorado river to a flow that averaged around 1,500 cubic
metres (50,000 cubic feet) a second. Every eight years or so, that figure rose to almost 3,000 cubic
metres. These floods infused the river with sediment, carved its beaches and built its sandbars.
C However, in the four decades since the building of the Glen Canyon dam,
just upstream of the Grand Canyon, the only sediment that it has collected has come from tiny, undammed
tributaries. Even that has not been much use as those tributaries are not powerful enough to distribute
the sediment in an ecologically valuable way.
D This lack of flooding has harmed local wildlife. The humpback chub, for
example, thrived in the rust-red waters of Colorado. Recently, though, its population has crashed. At
first sight, it looked as if the reason was that the chub were being eaten by trout introduced for sport
fishing in the mid-20th century. But trout and chub co-existed until the Glen Canyon dam was built, so
something else is going on. Steve Gloss, of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), reckons that the
chub's decline is the result of their losing their most valuable natural defense, Colorado's rusty
sediment. The chub were well adapted to the poor visibility created by the chick, red water which gave
the river its name and depended on it to hide from predators. Without the cloudy water, the chub became
vulnerable.
E And the chub are not alone. In the years since the Glen Canyon dam was
built, several species have vanished altogether. These include the Colorado pike-minnow, the razorback
sucker and the roundtail chub. Meanwhile, aliens including fathead minnows, channel catfish and common
carp, which would have been hard, put to survive in the savage waters of the undammed canyon, have moved
in.
F So flooding is the obvious answer. Unfortunately, it is easier said than
done. Floods were sent down the Grand Canyon in 1996 and 2004 and the results were mixed. In 1996 the
flood was allowed to go on too long. To start with, all seemed well. The floodwaters built up sandbanks
and infused the river with sediment. Eventually, however, the continued flow washed most of the sediment
out of the canyon. This problem was avoided in 2004, but unfortunately, on that occasion, the volume of
sand available behind the dam was too low to rebuild the sandbanks. This time, the USGS is convinced
that things will be better. The amount of sediment available is three times greater than it was in 2004.
So if a flood is going to do some good, this is the time to unleash one.
G Even so, it may turn out to be an empty gesture. At less than 1,200 cubic
metres a second, this flood is smaller than even an average spring flood, let alone one of the mightier
deluges of the past. Those glorious inundations moved massive quantities of sediment through the Grand
Canyon, wiping the slate dirty, and making a muddy mess of silt and muck that would make modern river
rafters cringe.
Memory and Age
A Aging, it is now clear, is part of an ongoing maturation process that all
our organs go through. "In a sense, aging is keyed to the level of the vigor of the body and the
continuous interaction between levels of body activity and levels of mental activity," reports Arnold B.
Scheibel, M.D., whose very academic title reflects how once far-flung domains now converge on the mind
and the brain. Scheibel is a professor of anatomy, cell biology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at
the University of California at Los Angeles, and director of university's Brain Research Institute.
Experimental evidence has backed up popular assumptions that the aging mind undergoes decay analogous to
that of the aging body. Younger monkeys, chimps, and lower animals consistently outperform their older
colleagues on memory tests. In humans, psychologists concluded, memory and other mental functions
deteriorate over time because of inevitable organic changes in the brain as neurons die off. The mental
decline after young adulthood appeared inevitable.
B Equipped with imaging techniques that capture the brain in action, Stanley
Rapoport, Ph.D., at the National Institutes of Health, measured the flow of blood in the brains of old
and young people as they went through the task of matching photos of faces. Since blood flow reflects
neuronal activity, Rapoport could compare with networks of neurons were being used by different
subjects. "Even when the reaction times of older and younger subjects were the same, the neural networks
they used were significantly different. The older subjects were using different internal strategies to
accomplish the same result in the same time," Rapoport says. Either the task required greater effort on
the part of the older subjects or the work of neurons originally involved in tasks of that type had been
taken over by other neurons, creating different networks.
C At the Georgia Institute of Technology, psychologist Timothy Salthouse,
Ph.D., compared a group of very fast and accurate typists of college-age with another group in their
60s. since reaction time is faster in younger people and most people's fingers grow less nimble with
age, younger typists might be expected to tap right along while the older one's fumble. But both typed
60 words a minute. The older typists, it turned out, achieved their speed with cunning little strategies
that made them far more efficient than their younger counterparts: They made fewer finger movements,
saving a fraction of a second here and there. They also read ahead in the text. The neural networks
involved in typing appear to have been reshaped to compensate for losses in motor skills or other age
changes.
D "When a rat is kept in isolation without playmates or objects to interact
with, the animal's brain shrinks, but if we put that rat with 11 other rats in a large cage and give
them an assortment of wheels, ladders, and other toys, we can show—after four days—significant
differences in its brain," says Diamond, professor of integrative biology. Proliferating dendrites first
appear in the visual association areas. After a month in the enriched environment, the whole cerebral
cortex has expanded, a has its blood supply. Even in the enriched environment, rats get bored unless the
toys are varied. "Animals are just like we are. They need stimulation," says Diamond. One of the most
profoundly important mental functions is memory-notorious for its failure with age. So important is a
memory that the Charles A. Dana foundation recently spent $8.4 million to set up a consortium of leading
medical centers to measure memory loss and aging through brain-imaging technology, neurochemical
experiment, and cognitive and psychological tests. One thing, however, is already fairly clear—many
aspects of memory are not a function of age at all but of education. Memory exists in more than one
form. What we call knowledge—facts—is what psychologists such as Harry P. Bahrick, Ph.D., of Ohio
Wesleyan University call semantic memory. Events, conversations, and occurrences in time and space, on
the other hand, make up episodic or event memory, which is triggered by cues from the context. If you
were around in 1963 you don't need to be reminded of the circumstances surrounding the moment you heard
that JFK had been assassinated. That event is etched into your episodic memory.
E When you forget a less vivid item, like buying a roll of paper towels at
the supermarket, you may blame it on your aging memory. It's true that episodic memory begins to decline
when most people are in their 50s, but it's never perfect at any age. "Every memory begins as an event,"
says Bahrick. "Through repetition, certain events leave behind a residue of knowledge or semantic
memory. On a specific day in the past, somebody taught you that two and two are four, but you've been
over that information so often you don't remember where you learned it. What started as an episodic
memory has become a permanent part of your knowledge base." You remember the content, not the context.
Our language knowledge, our knowledge of the world and of people, is largely that permanent or
semi-permanent residue.
F Probing the longevity of knowledge, Bahrick tested 1,000 high school
graduates to see how well they recalled their algebra. Some had completed the course as recently as a
month before, others as long as 50 years earlier. He also determined how long each person had studied
algebra, the grade received, and how much the skill was used over the course of adulthood. Surprisingly,
a person's grasp of algebra at the time of testing did not depend on how long ago he'd taken the
course—the determining factor was the duration of instruction. Those who had spent only a few months
learning algebra forgot most of it within two or three years.
G In another study, Bahrick discovered that people who had taken several
courses in Spanish, spread out over a couple of years, could recall, decades later, 60 per cent or more
of the vocabulary they learned. Those who took just one course retained only a trace after three years.
"This long-term residue of knowledge remains stable over the decades, independent of the age of the
person and the age of the memory. No serious deficit appears until people get to their 50s and 60s,
probably due to the degenerative processes of aging rather than a cognitive loss."
H "You could say metamemory is a byproduct of going to school," says
psychologist Robert Kail, Ph.D., of Purdue University, who studies children from birth to 20 years, the
time of life when mental development is most rapid. "The question-and-answer process, especially
exam-taking, helps children learn—and also teaches them how their memory works. This may be one reason
why, according to a broad range of studies in people over 60, the better educated a person is, the more
likely they are to perform better in life and on psychological tests. A group of adult novice chess
players were compared with a group of child experts at the game. In tests of their ability to remember a
random series of numbers, the adults, as expected, outscored the children. But when asked to remember
the patterns of chess pieces arranged on a board, the children won. "Because they'd played a lot of
chess, their knowledge of chess was better organized than that of the adults, and their existing
knowledge of chess served as a framework for new memory," explains Kail.
I Specialized knowledge is a mental resource that only improve with time.
Crystallized intelligence about one's occupation apparently does not decline at all until at least age
75, and if there is no disease or dementia, may remain even longer. Special knowledge is often organized
by a process called "chunking." If procedure A and procedure B are always done together, for example,
the mind may merge them into a single command. When you apply yourself to a specific interest—say,
cooking—you build increasingly elaborate knowledge structures that let you do more and do it better.
This ability, which is tied to experience, is the essence of expertise. Vocabulary is one such
specialized form of accrued knowledge. Research clearly shows that vocabulary improves with time.
Retired professionals, especially teachers and journalists, consistently score higher on tests of
vocabulary and general information than college students, who are supposed to be in their mental prime.
Save Endangered Language
"Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest
linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearance of 90
percent of the very field to which it is dedicated." – Michael Krauss, "The World's Languages in
Crisis".
Ten years ago Michael Krauss sent a shudder through the discipline of linguistics with his prediction
that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be uttered within a century.
Unless scientists and community leaders directed a worldwide effort to stabilize the decline of local
languages, he warned, nine-tenths of the linguistic diversity of humankind would probably be doomed to
extinction. Krauss's prediction was little more than an educated guess, but other respected linguists
had been clanging out similar alarms. Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted
in the same journal issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had since passed into
extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90 surviving Aboriginal languages were no
longer used regularly by all age groups. The same was true for all but 20 of the 175 Native American
languages spoken or remembered in the US., Krauss told a congressional panel in 1992.
Many experts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. To start, there is
scientific self-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguistics have to do with the limits of
human speech, which are far from fully explored. Many researchers would like to know which structural
elements of grammar and vocabulary – if any – are truly universal and probably, therefore, hardwired
into the human brain. Other scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing
borrowed words that appear in otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these cases, the wider the
portfolio of languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right answers.
Despite the near-constant buzz in linguistics about endangered languages over the past 10 years, the
field has accomplished depressingly little. "You would think that there would be some organized response
to this dire situation," some attempt to determine which language can be saved and which should be
documented before they disappear, says Sarah G. Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan at
Ann Arbor. "But there isn't any such effort organized in the profession. It is only recently that it has
become fashionable enough to work on endangered languages." Six years ago, recalls Douglas H. Whalen of
Yale University, "when I asked linguists who were raising money to deal with these problems, I mostly
got blank stares." So Whalen and a few other linguists founded the Endangered Languages Fund. In the
five years to 2001, they were able to collect only $80,000 for research grants. A similar foundation in
England, directed by Nicholas Ostler, has raised just $8,000 since 1995.
But there are encouraging signs that the field has turned a corner. The Volkswagen Foundation, a German
charity, just issued its second round of grants totaling more than $2 million. It has created a
multimedia archive at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house
recordings, grammars, dictionaries and other data on endangered languages. To fill the archive, the
foundation has dispatched field linguists to document Aweti (100 or so speakers in Brazil), Ega (about
300 speakers in Ivory Coast), Waima'a (a few hundred speakers in East Timor), and a dozen or so other
languages unlikely to survive the century. The Ford Foundation has also edged into the arena. Its
contributions helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice program created in 1992 by Leanne Hinton of
Berkeley and Native Americans worried about the imminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in
California. Fluent speakers receive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their native
tongue through 360 hours of shared activities, spread over six months. So far about 5 teams have
completed the program, Hinton says, transmitting a least some knowledge of 25 languages. "It's too early
to call this language revitalization," Hinton admits. "In California, the death rate of elderly speakers
will always be greater than the recruitment rate of young speakers. But at least we prolong the survival
of the language." That will give linguists more time to record these tongues before they vanish.
But the master-apprentice approach hasn't caught on outside the U.S., and Hinton's effort is a drop in
the sea. At least 440 languages have been reduced to a mere handful of elders, according to the
Ethnologue, a catalogue of languages produced by the Dallas-based group SIL International that comes
closest to global coverage. For the vast majority of these languages, there is little or no record of
their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or use in daily life. Even if a language has been fully
documented, all that remains once it vanishes from active use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of
features that the scientist was lucky and astute enough to capture. Linguists may be able to sketch an
outline of the forgotten language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree, but little more. "How did
people start conversations and talk to babies? How dis husbands and wives converse?" Hinton asks. "Those
are the first things you want to learn when you want to revitalize the language."
But there is as yet no discipline of "conservation linguistics," as there is for biology. Almost every
strategy tried so far has succeeded in some places but failed in others, and there seems to be no way to
predict with certainty what will work where. Twenty years ago in New Zealand, Maori speakers set up
"language nests," in which preschoolers were immersed in the native language. Additional Maori-only
classes were added as the children progressed through elementary and secondary school. A similar
approach was tried in Hawaii, with some success – the number of native speakers has stabilized at 1,000
or so, reports Joseph E. Grimes of SIL International, who is working on Oahu. Students can now get
instruction in Hawaiian all the way through university.
One factor that always seems to occur in the demise of a language is that the speakers begin to have
collective doubts about the usefulness of language loyalty. Once they start regarding their own language
as inferior to the majority language, people stop using it in all situations. Kids pick up on the
attitude and prefer the dominant language. In many cases, people don't notice until they suddenly
realize that their kids never speak the language, even at home. This is how Cornish and some dialects of
Scottish Gaelic is still only rarely used for daily home life in Ireland, 80 years after the republic
was founded with Irish as its first official language.
Linguists agree that ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is multilingualism.
Even uneducated people can learn several languages, as long as they start as children. Indeed, most
people in the world speak more than one tongue, and in places such as Cameroon (279 languages), Papua
New Guinea (823) and India (387) it is common to speak three of four distinct languages and a dialect or
two as well. Most Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec, have a gut reaction that anyone
speaking another language in front of them is committing an immoral act. You get the same reaction in
Australia and Russia. It is no coincidence that these are the areas where languages are disappearing the
fastest. The first step in saving dying languages is to persuade the world's majorities to allow the
minorities among them to speak with their own voices.