Girl Scouts take a stand: Just say no to Thin Mints

LEISA THOMPSON / NNS

Rhiannon Tomtishen, left, and Madison Vorva found the habitat of orangutans is being threatened by conversion of the land to the production of palm oil, which is in Girl Scout Cookies.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Two middle-school students who started a project to earn a Girl Scout award have ended up rejecting what may be the best known of their organization's symbols: Girl Scout Cookies.

Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen, both 12, started doing research last fall on endangered orangutans in Indonesia as part of their Bronze Award project. They discovered the habitat of orangutans is being threatened by conversion of the land to the production of palm oil, an ingredient in Girl Scout Cookies.

Although the two have sold many boxes of cookies over the years, this year they sold magazines instead.

"Just doing the Bronze Award wouldn't be enough," Madison said.

Rhiannon agreed. "We have stopped selling [the cookies]," she said.

The girls also started an education drive, giving presentations at area schools and establishing a Web site.

At a recent conference in Chicago, they met anthropologist Jane Goodall, renowned for her studies of primates and efforts to protect them. Goodall signed their petition against palm oil.

Palm-oil production leads to conflict between orangutans and people, the girls said.

"You really just want to reach out and do all that you can to help save them," Madison said.

Palm oil, which is produced from a fernlike plant, is grown after the rain forest is logged and burned, the agricultural technique practiced for centuries in tropical areas. The deforestation is increasing rapidly, partly because of the rising demand for palm oil, which is trans-fat-free, the girls said.

Lisa Raycraft, director of funds development for Girl Scouts of the Huron Valley Council, to which Rhiannon and Madison belong, said cookie sales are a vital part of the organization's funding. She said maintaining two camps that involve girls in nature and outdoor skills would not be possible without the cookie sales.

She also said that ABC Bakers, which produces cookies sold by the council, has committed to using palm oil grown on rehabilitated or previously cleared land rather than on land that is deforested specifically for palm-oil production. Raycraft also provided a letter from the company saying it is researching how to use as little palm oil as possible.

The girls said the explanation does not satisfy them and they plan to continue their boycott.

Raycraft said the council will work with the girls and has invited them to make their presentation about the dangers of palm oil to Girl Scout leaders before next year's cookie sale. The educational effort is to be part of Rhiannon and Madison's work toward the Girl Scout Silver Award, Raycraft said.

The two girls said they plan to continue as Girl Scouts despite the conflict.

"Overall, it's a pretty good organization," Madison said.

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

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Worldwide 'Love' Vibe Detected

A subtle and mysterious global hum has been detected by seismologists studying records from Earth's most boring seismic stations.

The newfound vibration is made of two-minute to five-minute, side-to-side surface seismic waves, also called Love waves. They are named for the British mathematician Augustus Edward Hough Love, who created the mathematical model of such waves in 1911.

The discovery comes 10 years after seismologists first identified louder global oscillations that resemble the ringing of a gigantic bell.

All of the planet's natural oscillations have signatures, or "modes" of vibration, depending on where and how they are created by earthquakes, ocean waves or other forces. Among the suspects for making the Love wave hum are winds, ocean waves or even the sun.

The Love wave is a mode that essentially torques the Earth's north and south hemispheres against each other. It's as if the planet is dancing the Twist, explained Rudolf Widmer-Schnidrig of the Black Forest Observatory in Wolfach, Germany, and the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Stuttgart. This gentle, faint twisting is called the "toroidal" mode.

"Standing on the surface of the Earth, you would only experience a horizontal motion left-right-left," if you were sensitive enough to feel it, Widmer-Schnidrig told Discovery News. "To picture this you imagine holding a metal or maybe rubber rod in your hands. Now twist the two ends of the rod in opposite sense and let go.

The two halves of the rod will perform small oscillatory twisting motions in opposite directions. That's what the two hemispheres of the Earth would also do."

Widmer-Schnidrig and Dieter Kurrle report their discovery in the April issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

Raucous Earth

This newfound mode is entirely different from the rowdy "spheroidal" mode, which is a far more powerful oscillation that actually warps the shape of the planet like waves on a water surface.

"At the surface you would experience an up-down motion together with a forward-backward motion," said Widmer-Schnidrig of the spheroidal mode. "Something to get seasick about."

"You can simply picture a pumpkin and an American football," said Widmer-Schnidrig. "Let a sphere (the Earth at rest) deform itself into a pumpkin, then a sphere, then an American football, then a sphere, then a pumpkin...and you have the fundamental spheroidal mode of the Earth."

The most dramatic spheroidal mode vibration detected by science to date was near the Galapagos Islands soon after the Great Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of December 26, 2004.

The Galapagos are almost exactly on the opposite side of the Earth from the site of the 9.3 magnitude rupture, and the Earth pulsed there with such power that the surface moved up and down with the vibration about an inch every few seconds, said seismologist Rick Aster of New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Interestingly, that same mega-quake produced some horizontal waves as well, says seismologist Jeffrey Park of Yale University.

"We were pretty interested in those modes because they were not what we expected," Park told Discovery News. Even the subsequent tsunamis were heard making landfall by seismometers in islands around the Indian Ocean, he said. The waves actually tilted the islands a tiny bit, which was detected. "It's pretty neat."

All this is what happens when you have a large, loud rupture setting things off -- like striking a bell with a 20-pound sledge hammer. It's noisy and messy when the seismic waves are sped up and played as audio, said Aster.

"It kind of sounds like hitting a trash can," said Aster.

10-Light-Bulbs Mystery

Far, far away from that global cacophony, at the extreme other end of the power scale, is the newfound toroidal Love wave hum, Widmer-Schnidrig explained. This mode moves the Earth's surface a mere millionth of a meter every five minutes and dissipates less than 500 watts of energy.

"In other words, with the power needed by 10 light bulbs you could keep up the hum worldwide," said Widmer-Schnidrig. "This is unbelievable, I know. But maybe it lets you appreciate the minuscule amplitude of this oscillation."

It also explains why it has taken 10 years after the detection of Earth's roaring spheroidal ring to capture Earth's whispering twist, Widmer-Schnidrig said.

The trick to the discovery was locating four extremely quiet seismic stations and then merging the data from their most quiet periods to tease out the tiny signal. The stations are the German Black Forest Observatory (BFO), Baijiatuan in China, and the Japanese Matsushiro and Takato stations.

"It was only by finding the horizontal hum in the data of stations far from our own which enabled us to conclusively demonstrate that the observed signal is a global phenomenon and not just a local artifact," said Widmer-Schnidrig.

Making Love Waves

As for what creates the 500-watt undulations, that's a bit of a mystery.

"Perhaps winds exert shearing forces on the solid Earth...when an air mass hits a mountain range, for instance -- or perhaps long-period ocean waves hitting the undersea walls at continental shelves are generating horizontal forces," speculated geophysicist Toshiro Tanimoto of the University of California at Santa Barbara in an April 3 commentary on the discovery in Nature.

It could even be caused by the sun, said Park. Oscillations in the sun may be picked up by Earth's geomagnetic field and cause Earth to hum a solar tune.

Finding the source will take work, Widmer-Schnidrig said. The first step is to find the Love wave signals at other stations. This might help point researchers in the direction of the source. New theories are also needed to explain precisely how winds, water or the sun can produce the Love wave hum.

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Prince Charles’ Environmental Education Treehouse Center

Prince Charles has been invited to open the New Forest Study Centre’s new educational treehouse, a sustainable building that places city kids right in the middle of nature. The Countryside Education Trust (CET) has commissioned two classrooms-on-stilts to be built, enabling 10,000 children a year to learn about rural life and build a connection to nature - an experience that some one million children in the UK have never had. With an eco-minded design and purpose, the treehouse project will be a catalyst for environmental awareness.

The treehouse was designed by 22-year-old Samantha Sherwood of Oxford Brookes University, who won a student design competition open to five South Eastern architecture schools. She’s been working closely with Novoe Ltd and treehouse specialists Blue Forest Ltd to develop her plans into a workable solution, with additional advice from sustainable environmental consultancy XCO2.

Samantha’s design features a biomass boiler, solar panels, rainwater collection and a glass roof. Construction materials will be sourced within the region, where possible. A walkway suspended 16 feet from the ground will enable students to move from one classroom to the other. Only the toilet block and facilities office will be located on the ground.

The new center replaces two dilapidated classrooms that the centre acquired second-hand. It will be “a model of sustainable and environmental design, technology and energy conservation” serving the environmental education center and local community groups. Construction is underway and, if the Prince accepts, the center will open when the treehouse is completed in Fall 2008.

+ Countryside Education Trust (CET)
+ New Forest Tree House
+ Samantha’s design in detail
+ View the project’s Flickr page

Via Southern Daily Echo

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