Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt? Dark Energy Independently Confirmed
The gravitationally repulsive presence, thought to make up most of the universe, shows its effect on the development of galaxy clusters
By John Matson
GLOW IN THE DARK (ENERGY): Researchers used x-ray images of galaxy clusters such as this one, known as Abell 85, to track the effects of dark energy on the evolution of large-scale structures in the universe. NASA/CXC/SAO/A. Vikhlinin et al.
In 1998 two teams of researchers made a milestone cosmological announcement: The universe, long known to be expanding, was not slowing down in its expansion as expected but was in fact accelerating. Both groups had been studying exploding stars, or supernovae, and used the objects' movement to show that the universe is speeding up. The culprit was labeled dark energy—a hypothesized presence that pervades space and pushes the pieces of the universe apart.
A new study that examines the growth of galaxy clusters rather than the movement of stars independently confirms the presence of dark energy. Researchers, led by Alexey Vikhlinin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), found that dark energy seems to restrain the growth of clusters over time, hindering the gravitational clumping of matter that would allow them to grow even more massive.
Vikhlinin called the findings, which are set to be published in The Astrophysical Journal, "an unambiguous signature of dark energy." Such an effect is not entirely surprising: Astrophysicist Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham in England raised this as a likely role for dark energy in a 2007 Scientific American article.
The researchers said in a teleconference this week that the new look at dark energy is akin to sports referees making calls based on multiple vantage points. Whereas the existence of dark energy has been well supported for a decade, this new study helps to confirm its presence and to place constraints on just how strong its effects can be. Mario Livio, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, says that it does not overturn dogma, but "it is nevertheless an observation that had to be made." Because so many of the early results came from the supernova approach, Livio says, it is important to verify the phenomenon with "a completely independent method."
By studying far-flung galaxy clusters, astronomers are able to look back in time at the state of those objects millions or even billions of years ago, when the light just now reaching us was emitted. By comparing relatively close clusters with those more distant, the physical evolution of these gargantuan structures can be traced over time. Their observed development is "exactly what's expected for a universe with a low density of matter and a high density of dark energy," Vikhlinin said. (By current estimates, dark energy makes up nearly three quarters of the universe, dark matter comprises another 20 to 25 percent, and ordinary matter—all that we can see and touch—constitutes a mere 4 percent.)
What Vikhlinin and his co-authors observed is also what was expected for a universe described by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, the reigning theory of gravity. At the news conference, Princeton University astrophysicist David Spergel, who did not contribute to the research, called this further confirmation of dark energy "a triumph of general relativity."
Study co-author William Forman, a CfA astrophysicist, noted that although general relativity fit well with his team's observations, Einstein's vision may still require future adjustments. Livio agrees, but believes that the galaxy-cluster result nonetheless provides an important test for relativity. "There was the potential here, with this method," he says, "to tell us whether we had to modify our theory of gravity."
THIS week, I bought a shiny new BlackBerry. This made me very happy. Then I went home and found that my new BlackBerry was inundating my in-box with copies of my sent e-mail messages. This made me very frustrated.
Christophe Vorlet
I headed back to the store, where a well-intentioned “specialist” took my phone, tweaked a few settings and said that my e-mail messages would be duplicate-free. They weren’t.
If you’re like me, odds are that you’ve also found yourself with a tech problem that was made worse by the lack of ready, available — and perhaps most important — useful help. But with the Internet, there’s no need to have to wait on hold.
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of other users out there, sharing their experience and wisdom, often free. So instead of getting on the phone, get online and start crowdsourcing your tech support needs.
Here’s how.
General Tips
First, a few general rules. Many of the below sites require you to register a user name and password before you can post a question. Also, it’s a good idea to check how active a site is. Answerbag.com, for example, has more than 750,000 members. The bigger the site, the more likely you are to get an answer.
Sites with moderators are a plus because they will help weed out irrelevant or duplicate answers and keep the discussion on topic. There are also good fee-based sites like Experts Exchange (secure.experts-exchange.com/), but I’ve limited the below list to free help.
PCs
One of my favorite tech support sites is FixYa.com (www.fixya.com/). It has a clean design, which makes searching easy. When posing a question, use keywords, hit the search button, and a list of solutions will pop up.
FixYa lets its users rate one another so you can see who has a good solution rating and who doesn’t.
Users can choose among the “post a new problem,” “I can solve this!” and “I have the same problem” tabs. The site also has an alphabetical list of brands so you can search by name.
The site’s PC hardware and tech general discussion board (www.techimo.com/forum/general-tech-discussion/) had nearly 240,000 posts when I checked it. Fair warning: the site is geared more toward the tech-savvy than the tech-phobic.
Pretty as they may be, Macs have their own special brand of problems. Apple’s own site (www.apple.com/support/) has effective forums (discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=731), but sometimes they can turn into complaint centers where everybody acknowledges having the problem, but no one seems to have a solution.
CNet’s MacFixIt.com (www.macfixit.com/) gets around this by taking select Apple.com forum questions and answering them on its site. In one post, a Mac user wrote on Apple.com’s forums that he was experiencing problems with Time Machine backups. Most of the thread’s other users chimed in only to say that they had the same problem. MacFixIt then stepped in and offered its solution.
In addition to an active forum, MacFixIt also offers useful tutorials (tinyurl.com/4xw9a) with digestible instructions, and explanations, on everything from sleep problems to reinstalling your system.
I solved my BlackBerry problem on Crackberry.com’s forums (forums.crackberry.com/). Not only does the site break down problems by model, including Apple’s iPhone 3G, but it also has a section for older BlackBerrys (forums.crackberry.com/f29/), which is helpful because not everyone has the money or desire to switch models every year. You can also search by carrier.
Users of the iPhone can turn to the iPhone Blog (www.theiphoneblog.com/iphone-help-and-how-to-guides/), which is helpful because it uses screen images and other visual aids instead of dizzying amounts of text. Even better are video tutorials. Instead of wasting time trying to locate your SIM card tray, just mimic the video’s step-by step instructions and pause and replay as needed.
If you’re short on patience, CNet’s video tutorials (cnettv.cnet.com/2001-1_53-28619.html) are better organized and are presented by the site’s editors who, generally speaking, should be qualified to solve your problems. The site’s Quick Tips section is good to browse if you’re looking to better navigate your gadget. In one video, CNet’s editor at large, Brian Cooley, gives some BlackBerry navigation tips, which is infinitely more colorful than reading your phone’s instruction manual.
And if you still insist on speaking to a human being, go to gethuman.com (www.gethuman.com/) first — it will tell you the fastest, most direct number to use to reach a living, breathing technician on the line.
See, even when you don’t want its help, the Internet is there for you.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Embracing Koolhaas’s Friendly Skyscraper
OMA
A computer image showing the China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing. The building is scheduled to be completed in 2008.
Set on a site that’s about as large as 37 football fields, Rem Koolhaas’s television authority headquarters in Beijing may initially seem intimidating. This 54-story tower leans and looms like some kind of science-fiction creature poised to stomp all over the surrounding central business district.
OMA
A rendering of the Central Chinese Television building.
But if the five-million-square-foot building is one of the largest ever constructed, its architect sees it as a people-friendly reinvention of the skyscraper.
“Awe is not usually a condition our buildings inspire,” Mr. Koolhaas said in an interview at the Museum of Modern Art, where a show devoted to the Central Chinese Television building — known as CCTV — opened yesterday. “Amidst all the skyscrapers there, it’s relatively low. It will feel accessible.”
Tina di Carlo, an assistant curator in MoMA’s architecture and design department, said the goal of the exhibition was not so much to bring the CCTV design to people’s attention; the building is already something of a phenomenon in architectural circles. She said she and Mr. Koolhaas’s firm set out to address the preconceptions that people bring to an enormous tower. “It’s a radical rethinking of the tall building typography,” she said.
The television building is essentially an upside down U with right angles, an office tower bent out of shape. Ole Scheeren, the partner in charge of the CCTV project at Mr. Koolhaas’ firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, said the structure might be frightening “if it was a pure gesture.”
“But since it’s actually a circuit of life inside, it’s a huge social catalyst,” he said.
Since the Chinese government chose Mr. Koolhaas’s design in a competition in 2002, rumors have circulated that the building was too ambitious to ever get built. But construction photos on view at the show, taken as recently as last month, suggest that it may well be completed on schedule in 2008. “It confirms it’s actually going forward,” Ms. di Carlo said. “There were so many rumors that it wasn’t.”
Through models, drawings and extensive wall text, the exhibition — “OMA in Beijing” — explains the various activities that will unfold inside the tower, detailing circulation patterns that encourage staff members and visitors to intersect; amenities like restaurants and health clubs; even a small hospital. “It’s a fiendishly complex building in terms of program and structure,” Mr. Koolhaas said.
The show juxtaposes the Beijing project with images from MoMA’s collection, from Mies van der Rohe’s first glass skyscraper to the mechanical structures of Peter Cook to the organic growth of Kisho Kurokawa.
The exhibition represents a new effort by the Modern to explore architectural projects that have yet to be completed; the first was last year’s show about the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway that is being converted into a landscaped park. The goal is to present architecture in new ways, “to get away from plan, section, elevation,” Ms. di Carlo said.
The architects insist that practical concerns drive their design but note that it is also upending tradition. “Hardly any building really engages space,” Mr. Scheeren said. “Most skyscrapers exhaust space. This building leaves open the space it encapsulates. It activates the ground. It draws activities into the building.”
The architects could have created a campus with each of the company’s various functions in a building of its own. Instead they decided to unite them in a single structure, with everyone connected through the spaces they jointly inhabit. In addition to 10,000 workers, several thousand visitors are expected each day. “It attains the critical mass of a small city,” Mr. Scheeren said. “It becomes a collective in its own right.”
Glass peepholes about 15 feet in diameter, in the floor of the large viewing deck at the underside of the building’s cantilever, will afford vertical views to the ground some 500 feet below. “Staff and visitors move in parallel, can observe each other, can meet and congregate,” Mr. Scheeren said.
The CCTV project also includes a second, more modest building that will house a five-star hotel with 300 rooms, restaurants and spas, recording studios and a 1,500-seat theater. Mr. Koolhaas’s design provides untrammeled circulation from the outdoor plaza to the inside foyer to the backstage area, clearing space so that television cameras can move freely. The floors are equipped with hydraulic platforms.
There are also digital screening rooms, a multi-use ballroom, 20 audiovisual rooms, an exhibition hall and a press room in the second building. The architects describe that structure, the Television Cultural Center or TVCC, as the public component of the project, a kind of “fun palace.” It is to open ahead of the larger headquarters, at the end of 2007.
China’s television network — with more than one billion viewers — will be capable of broadcasting 250 channels when the headquarters is completed. CCTV currently produces and broadcasts just 16 channels.
Mr. Koolhaas won the competition at an important moment for China: recently admitted to the World Trade Organization and selected as the site for the 2008 Olympic games, the country was exploding with soaring new architecture projects. While CCTV is technically not being built for the Olympics, it will be the main broadcaster for the games, Mr. Scheeren said.
The scope of the project forced Mr. Koolhaas’s firm to open a separate office in Rotterdam, where it was already based; it has also established a permanent office in Beijing. By the end nearly 400 architects, engineers and consultants in Europe, Asia and the United States will have worked on the CCTV Tower, producing some 6,000 drawings. “We never did a building of this scale,” Mr. Koolhaas said.
From left to right: Proposal by the firm Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects of New Haven; Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners; Manhattan architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox. (Renderings: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) Enlarge this image.
The on-again, off-again plans to build an office tower over the Port Authority Bus Terminal took at least a conceptual step forward on Thursday afternoon with the unveiling of three possible designs by three leading architectural firms.
Easily the most striking of the three is a constructivist assemblage by the London firm Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, which is also designing Tower 3 at the World Trade Center site. It takes the form of four discrete boxes stacked atop one another and bound together by open diagonal trusswork that echoes the bold X-shaped steel braces girdling the main terminal below.
In complete contrast, for its suavity and lucidity, is a proposal by the Manhattan firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects. The central element of this plan is a sheer, glass-clad tower whose surface has an almost icy gleam. In this plan, the X braces would recede in importance behind a screen.
Somewhere between these two is the proposal by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects of New Haven, whose overall form is monolithic but accentuated with a curtain wall on the north and south sides in a kind of monumental basketweave pattern.
The 40-story, 1.3-million-square-foot office tower is to be developed by a joint venture of Vornado Realty Trust and the Lawrence Ruben Company, which is leasing the air rights over the terminal for 99 years.
Read an updated version of this article prepared for later editions. ************************************************************************************** November 17, 2008, 5:02 pm
For a Tower Atop the Buses, the British Are Coming
This design by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners Rendering has won a private competition to design a new office tower atop the Port Authority Bus Terminal. (Rendering: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)
Not that such a project would — or even could — happen in the ravaged economy of the foreseeable future, but the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced on Monday that it had chosen an architectural design for an office tower atop the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
The 1.3-million-square-foot office tower is to be developed by a joint venture of Vornado Realty Trust and affiliates of the Lawrence Ruben Company, which would lease the air rights over the north part of the terminal from the Port Authority for 99 years. The next-to-last round of the architectural competition came in July, when the three competitors were announced.
In July, the Rogers Stirk Harbour design was far less conventional and much more expressive. (Photo: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)
At the time, the plan by Lord Rogers’s firm was considerably more expressive visually than the version that was chosen. But the explanation for the modification is more structural than aesthetic. The earlier version depended on eight massive columns that would have extended through the terminal building. (In the model, the first two of these columns can be seen as the lower legs of the vaguely H-shaped structure at the base of the tower.)
As the rendering above shows, the revised version is very likely to have more columns, perhaps as many as 12, but they will be smaller and less intrusive.
The Architects Journal carried the news on Nov. 5 that Lord Rogers’s firm had won the competition, but illustrated the post with the earlier, discarded design.
Because lease negotiations between the authority and the developers are still in progress, the announcement contained no word as to when construction would start or be finished.
Perhaps that’s just as well. It leaves one less thing that will have to be revised.
Each of the floors of the Dynamic Tower rotates independently, giving the building different shapes throughout the day. (Dynamic Architecture/ David Fisher)
Would you like to see a building twisting itself into different shapes night and day on the New York skyline? Would you like to live in an apartment with a view that rotates 360 degrees? It may be a little hard at the moment to arrange financing for such tower — or any other new skyscraper in Manhattan — but the architect David Fisher is looking for a place to build it here someday.
He’s already designed such an edifice in Dubai called the Dynamic Tower, billed as the “world’s first building in motion.” Dr. Fisher, an architect based in Florence, he told me that he hopes groundbreaking for the Dubai tower will occur “within a matter of weeks,” and said that the problems in the credit market haven’t affected the project.
The tower is supposed to generate enough electricity to supply the power needs for itself as well as buildings nearby. The electricity will come from horizontal wind turbines tucked away between each of its 80 floors, and from solar photovoltaic cells on the roof each story. As the individual floors move, about 20 percent of each roof is expected to be exposed to the sun at any time of the day.
Dr. Fisher, who’s working on another of these towers for Moscow, was in town this week to discuss plans for New York. Where might it go? “We are currently looking at a few sites,” he told me. “It should be a place from where the view is attractive and also where people can stand and watch the building changing its shape.”
Any suggestions for him? Any predictions on how well those turbines and photovoltaic cells will work? And would you pay a premium to live in a room with a moving view?
************************************************************************************* China Builds Its Dreams, and Some Fear a Bubble
SHANGHAI, Oct. 16 - Move over, New York. This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City.
That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
The changing Shanghai skyline includes Skyline Mansion, the white building at center, which will be one of the most expensive apartment buildings in the city.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
An apartment complex going up in Shanghai. With mortgage rates around 5 percent, energetic foreign investment, rising income and official approval, the nation is making up for years of inattention to construction.
China's real estate market is so hot that miniature cities are being created with artificial lakes, and the country's nouveau riche suddenly seem eager to put down as much as $5.3 million for a luxury apartment in skyscrapers with names like the Skyline Mansion.
For decades after the Communists took over in 1949, there was relatively little housing construction or office building under central planning. But since the early 1990's, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. And this year the building boom is at a frenzy, with the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.
"There's no doubt what is happening in parts of China is on a scale we've never seen before," said Richard Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics. "But more importantly, it's the fastest pace of development in the past 50 or 100 years."
In Beijing, the remains of an old Taoist temple now stand in the middle of the parking lot of a new mall more than twice the size of the Mall of America. Big developers are acquiring huge swaths of prime land in the largest cities to build huge residential campuses with kitschy names like Cloudland Water Manor, Eastern Venice, Palais de Fortune and Skyway Oasis Garden.
Such developments dwarf anything being built today in the West. "I'm working on a master plan for a 46-kilometer riverfront area," said Robert Egan, who runs a landscape architecture firm in Beijing called PlaceMakers. "Scale like that doesn't happen in the U.S."
It is not uncommon to see a residential development with 10, 20 or even 30 identical high-rise apartment buildings clustered around sculpted green spaces and artificial waterways.
For increasingly wealthy Chinese, the American dream of a home and a yard has become more like a French villa with a community lake, a town square, a post office, a hospital, a cinema, a church, a hotel, a shopping mall and, of course, a power plant.
A top-of-the-line unit at one development project has a 25-acre palm-shaped artificial lake, which brochures say will feature docks with berths for private yachts.
Prices are soaring. Luxury apartments in Shanghai and Beijing with names like Home of the Tycoons now sell for prices comparable to some high-end properties in New York.
Rising prices have created a circus-like atmosphere in parts of China. Real estate fairs are mobbed, land speculation is rampant and some poor farmers dream about converting their wheat fields into the next Beverly Hills.
Indeed, prices have risen so fast over the last few years and the pace of building has been so furious here and in other large cities that the government and some leading economists have been warning about a huge property bubble in China.
The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw material to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage .
China's heavy reliance on coal to power its overcharged economy has already made it the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. And the World Health Organization says China has 7 of the world's 10 most-polluted cities.
The construction boom is also beginning to wipe out what little is left of the old China, alarming historic preservationists. Indeed, as the world's most-populous country, at 1.3 billion, rapidly modernizes and urbanizes, producing millions of new homeowners, its social and economic fabric is being fundamentally altered.
China's housing rush is being fueled by mortgage rates around 5 percent and huge inflows of foreign capital. But the boom is also driven by landmark government housing reforms from the 1990's that for the first time since the Communist revolution of the late 1940's allowed Chinese to acquire their own homes rather than live in government housing.
As a result of this privatization, thousands of new residential projects are rising in the bustling coastal provinces. And sprawling satellite towns and luxury villa developments are sprouting in what was once farmland.
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
The changing Shanghai skyline includes a Marriott hotel, center, and small houses in the Puxi area, right.
This may just a suggestion of what is ahead. China expects 75 million more farmers to move to cities over the next five years, amounting to one of the biggest mass migrations in history, according to CLSA, a brokerage house specializing in the Asia-Pacific region.
"China's demand for housing is just getting going," says Andy Rothman, a CLSA analyst in Shanghai.
The boom is most evident in the largest cities like Beijing, which will be host for the 2008 Olympics and is now draped in construction projects that are straining water and power supplies. Every big city seems to have plans for a central business district. And every big housing project seems to have a Phase 1, 2 and 3.
"Everyone wants to build a Manhattan," said Jun Xia, a principal in the Shanghai office of Gensler, a global architecture and design firm. "In China, I say 'smaller, smaller' and the clients say 'wider, wider.' "
Some of the greatest financial rewards have been going to the country's new real estate tycoons - people like Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin in Beijing, and Wang Shi in Shenzhen. A property tycoon in Tianjin, Sun Hongbin, once served a two-year prison term for embezzlement but now graces the cover of magazines like China Entrepreneur.
It is not surprising that in a country where 170 metropolitan areas have more than a million people, according to government figures, everyone seems to want to be a developer. State-owned oil and steel giants, automobile companies, shipbuilders and even Communist Party newspapers are creating real estate subsidiaries.
The developer of the Fortune Residence in Shanghai, a high-end property, is a subsidiary of People's Daily, the leading newspaper of the Communist Party. And China Central Place in Beijing is being developed by Guohua Electric, a power company that for 50 years has occupied land in an area the city recently designated as its new central business district.
Guohua's real estate arm is now building a $1.2 billion complex that consists of three high-rise office buildings, a 1.8-million-square-foot shopping mall, 1,300 luxury apartments, two five-star hotels and a man-made lake and river walk.
Foreigners are also scrambling to enter the Chinese real estate market. Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch have invested in property. And Morgan Stanley has acquired about $700 million worth of commercial real estate this year in Shanghai. The city says it now has more than 4,000 skyscrapers - buildings 18 stories or higher - far more than New York, according to Emporis, a global real estate research group based in Germany.
Also considering investments here are Simon Property, one of the world's biggest retail developers; Triple Five Group, developer of the Mall of America; and a Japanese real estate tycoon, Minoru Mori, who is spending nearly $1 billion to build one of the world's tallest buildings - the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center in the Pudong district.
There is, of course, a dark side to this real estate boom. In the scramble to reallocate land and create boomtowns, China has spent much of the last decade demolishing millions of old homes and buildings and relocating tens of millions of people, many against their will.
And there are broader risks. The Chinese government is concerned that soaring prices might overheat the nation's economy and even threaten social stability. It moved this year to impose new taxes and other tough administrative measures aimed at cooling off the property sector.
Housing sales have slowed since June. But in recent months, real estate construction has picked up steam again, according to UBS. And that growth is bolstering new demand for energy and raw material. China is already the world's largest producer and consumer of steel, cement and coal.
In his report, "China Eats the World," Mr. Rothman of CLSA predicted that in coming years, "the Chinese dragon will stay very, very hungry."
Many Chinese are acting as if the housing boom will not fizzle any time soon. The economy is soaring, income is rising, Ikeas and Wal-Marts are popping up in second-tier cities and tens of millions of people are giddy about the prospects of owning their own homes, driving their own cars and adopting a more modern lifestyle.
"You know for a half-century, nothing was built in China," Mr. Jun of Gensler said. "Now there's a lot of excitement and demand for new houses, and excitement about a new way to live."
Correction: Oct. 19, 2005, Wednesday:
A front-page picture caption yesterday with an article about the real estate boom in China misidentified the skyscraper at the center of the photograph. It was the Citic tower, in downtown Shanghai; the Marriott Hotel was at the left, with a triangular roof.
*******************************************
Beijing Air Terminal Goes All Out for the Games
China Photos/Getty Images
The recently opened Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport was designed and completed in record time for the Summer Olympics. It can handle 50 million passengers a year.
BEIJING — Beijing airport’s new Terminal 3 — twice the size of the Pentagon — is the largest building in the world.
Adorned with the colors of imperial China and a roof that evokes the scales of a dragon, the massive glass- and steel-sheathed structure, designed by the renowned British architect Norman Foster, cost $3.8 billion and can handle more than 50 million passengers a year. The developers call it the “most advanced airport building in the world,” and say it was completed in less than four years, a timetable some believed impossible.
It opened in late February with little fanfare, but also without the kind of glitches that plagued the new $8.7 billion terminal at Heathrow in London, a project that took six years to complete.
This is the image China would like to project as it hosts the Olympic Games this summer — a confident rising power constructing dazzling monuments exemplifying its rapid progress and its audacious ambition.
While much of the world has focused on protests trailing the Olympic torch, China’s poor human rights record, its pollution, product safety and child labor scandals, workers here have been putting the finishing touches on one of the biggest building programs the world has ever seen.
Beijing hopes to overcome these negatives, and the dark sides of its roaring economy, by emphasizing its ability to upgrade and modernize, at least when it comes to buildings and infrastructure projects. The main Olympic stadium, nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, is already widely admired for its striking appearance and its use of an unusual steel mesh exterior. The nearby National Aquatics Center, known as the Water Cube, is a translucent blue bubble that glows in the dark.
And east of the main Olympic arenas, construction is winding down on the new headquarters of the country’s main state television network, China Central Television, or CCTV.
That $700 million building, designed by Rem Koolhaas, consists of two interlocking Z-shaped towers that rise 767 feet and may be the world’s largest and most expensive media headquarters.
New York has the Chrysler Building, Grand Central and the Guggenheim Museum; Paris has the Louvre and the Pompidou Center; now Beijing is determined to build its own architectural icons.
“Beijing is a huge experimental site right now,” says Zhu Wenyi, dean of the school of architecture at Tsinghua University. “This modern architecture is the identity of modern China.”
But sometimes the sheer scale of the buildings overwhelms everything else. Thirty years after economic reforms began, this country has built a series of super structures that almost seem intended more for the Guinness Book of World Records than cityscapes.
China is home, for instance, to the world’s largest shopping mall (the seven-million-square-foot South China Mall); the longest sea-crossing bridge (it stretches 36 kilometers, or about 22 miles, over part of the East China Sea); the largest hydroelectric dam (the Three Gorges project); and the highest railway (an engineering marvel that crosses the Tibetan permafrost 16,000 feet above sea level, the so-called roof of the world).
Late last year, Beijing opened what may be the world’s largest performance hall, the National Center for the Performing Arts, a $400 million concert hall, opera house and theater center even bigger than the Kennedy Center in Washington. Nicknamed The Egg, the Chinese center’s titanium dome rises above a wide reflecting pool.
For decades, the ruling Communist Party used huge building programs to lure foreign investment and to create millions of jobs. But this new wave is different.
“This is just the start,” said Ma Yansong, a 32-year-old architect who studied in the United States and runs a practice here. “The last 10 years we’ve had landmark buildings in Beijing and Shanghai. But now, the private developers are coming in, and second-tier cities want to develop.”
In recent weeks, many Chinese have complained about what they say is Western media distortions about China and its role in Tibet, where riots broke out last month.
Indeed, behind the increasingly nationalistic counterprotests is a fear that China’s Olympic moment is being overshadowed by critics and that the country’s remarkable achievements are being ignored.
Many Chinese say that will change on Aug. 8, 2008 — an auspicious date by traditional reckoning because 8 is a lucky number — as the world focuses on the Olympics and China’s undeniable accomplishments.
In Beijing, officials have used the Olympics to justify razing old neighborhoods and relocating tens of thousands of poor residents, with hopes of remaking the city into a modern capital of new highways, subway lines and gleaming skyscrapers.
Similarly, city officials in Shanghai have relocated huge factories and thousands of residents along the Huangpu River to prepare a two-square-mile site for the 2010 World Expo, Shanghai’s own coming-out.
With China rapidly urbanizing, there are now dozens of other big cities developing master plans and commissioning new skyscrapers, expressways and whole shopping districts.
In Macao, one of China’s special administrative zones, the Las Vegas-based Sands Corporation built a 10.5-million-square-foot casino, hotel and convention center, which opened last summer to huge crowds.
Not everyone, however, is pleased with the development transforming China’s cities. Old neighborhoods and important historical buildings are being demolished. Expressways and skyscrapers have erased cultural signposts. Even some leading Chinese architects and urban planners are crying foul. And all this growth depends largely on energy derived from coal, which fouls the air, distracting from China’s gleaming new palaces.
Others complain that too many foreign architects are being showcased, at the expense of China’s home-grown talent, that Chinese elements are being lost — like Beijing’s old courtyard-style homes — and that overaggressive development is littering the landscape with modern monstrosities.
“I’m completely against this big architecture; it’s a total waste,” says Yin Zhi, president of the urban planning and design institute at Tsinghua University. “The government wants to grab the Olympic opportunity to remake Beijing, spending so much money on these stupid projects. Why not use the budget to improve Beijing’s traffic system? Why not improve the quality of people’s lives?”
Professor Yin went on: “China, as a developing country, is not supposed to spend so much on these eye-catching projects. It shows in some ways that China lacks confidence.”
But Beijing seems eager to show the world it can attract world-class architects to China, and it has lured big names, including Zaha Hadid, a distinguished architect from London.
Local developers are rushing to capitalize on this moment of extreme transformation. A rising middle class and the emergence of a car culture in China are creating opportunities to build new cities and suburbs, and many cities want to prove they are fast-developing, hoping to lure even more investment.
With the economy booming, air travel has also skyrocketed, creating demand for new airports. Indeed, even after a building boom over the past decade, the government says it plans to build another 97 new airports by 2020.
Here in Beijing, the construction of Terminal 3 was accelerated to meet the surge in air travel into the capital, and to create a dazzling new gateway to the city in time for the Olympics.
Foster & Partners, the British architectural firm, won the design competition less than five years ago, in late 2003. The firm quickly set up an office here and in March 2004 began work on a 14-million-square-foot project that would eventually dwarf all five of Heathrow’s terminals combined.
The developers wanted to incorporate Chinese characteristics, so they sought the advice of a feng shui master. They selected red and gold as the dominant colors, to match those of old palaces and the Forbidden City.
Then they raced the clock.
“In November 2003, we were awarded the contract,” says Mouzhan Majidi, the lead architect on the project for Foster & Partners. “Within a week, we had to have a Foster office in Beijing.”
Siemens, the German company, built a sophisticated baggage handling system that can sort and transport 19,200 pieces of luggage an hour through the nearly two-mile-long building. Workers lifted and placed a giant roof designed to look like the scales of a dragon.
The building opened ahead of schedule, largely because Beijing had turned the site into a 24-hour-a-day operation, with tens of thousands of workers living on the airport grounds. It is the kind of operation that can be found only in China.
Beijing supplied an army of workers. “When I think back to our site visits with Norman, it was an incredible scene to see 50,000 people working on a building,” says Mr. Majidi, who works closely with Norman Foster, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect. “It evoked what it might have been like to build the pyramids.”
Still, it may not be big enough.
In January, Beijing’s civil aviation authority announced that yet another international airport was needed in the city. Construction is expected to begin soon.
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A Russian Skyscraper Plan Divides a Horizontal City
RMJM London
A plan for a 1,299-foot-tall building in St. Petersburg has drawn criticism in the city, where the tallest building is now just over 400 feet.
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Dec. 1 — Russia’s largest company, Gazprom, announced on Friday that it had chosen the architecture firm RMJM London to design this city’s tallest building, brushing aside arguments from preservationists and residents that the project — whoever the architect — would destroy the city’s architectural harmony.
Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
A protest of the St. Petersburg skyscraper project, Gazprom City, derided it on this banner as “Lunatics City.”
RMJM’s winning proposal includes a twisting glass tower that would anchor a business and residential center planned for a site on the Neva River opposite the Smolny Cathedral, one of the city’s most famous landmarks.
As now designed, it would rise 1,299 feet — higher even the Peter and Paul Cathedral, built 300 years ago by Peter the Great, which is just over 400 feet tall.
Gazprom’s chief executive, Aleksei B. Miller, hailed the project as a “new symbol of St. Petersburg” akin to city landmarks including the Admiralty, St. Isaac’s Church and the Peter and Paul Cathedral.
“This new, modern project will give birth to a new mentality for St. Petersburg, which lives in a new, modern civilization,” said Mr. Miller, appearing with the city’s governor, Valentina I. Matviyenko. “And its citizens will feel the pulse of the new economy, the pulse of the contemporary world.”
Gazprom selected the RMJM proposal over five other designs by the noted architects Jean Nouvel of Paris; Massimiliano Fuksas of Rome; the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron; Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam; and Daniel Libeskind of Berlin.
The competition stirred weeks of ferocious debate. Even as Gazprom’s executives met with city officials and experts on the selection commission at the company’s headquarters on the English Embankment, a small group of protesters passed back and forth aboard a small trawler in the Neva, dressed as clowns and mental patients and holding a sign deriding the project. “Lunatics City,” the sign said. (The project is referred to as Gazprom City.)
There was also dissension within the selection panel. The Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, who was invited to serve as a member of the jury, read a two-page statement on Friday describing his vision for St. Petersburg, which would preserve its cityscape on a lower scale, and opposing any of the projects under consideration. He then resigned from the jury and left. In a telephone interview later, he said the city’s current limit on building heights was “the most sensitive issue to keeping the existing cultural value of the old city center.”
Before the architect was chosen, the project came under attack on several fronts, and potential challenges remain.
The St. Petersburg Union of Architects, the director of the State Hermitage Museum and other preservation groups have threatened to challenge it in court. This week three members of the city’s parliament appealed to the country’s prosecutor general, saying the project would violate budget rules and a city zoning ordinance that restricts buildings in that part of the city to 157 feet.
One of the lawmakers, Mikhail I. Amosov, said on Friday that the construction of a skyscraper, as Gazprom specified when it solicited proposals, would intrude into St. Petersburg’s horizontal cityscape, which has remained largely unaltered for two centuries.
“Eventually we are going to lose the shape of St. Petersburg that we inherited from previous generations,” Mr. Amosov said after Gazprom announced the decision.
With offices throughout Britain and in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok, RMJM ranks among the world’s top 15 architecture firms in size. The St. Petersburg commission will significantly expand the firm’s presence in Russia, where it is already building a 46-story office tower in Moscow called the City Palace.
RMJM’s managing director in Britain, Tony Kettle, said in a telephone interview that the firm designed the tower with St. Petersburg’s cityscape in mind, evoking the city’s Baroque architecture, especially its punctuating spires.
“We’ve created a new spire that elegantly breaks into the sky,” he said.
Mr. Miller and Ms. Matviyenko said the decision to select RMJM had been unanimous and made no mention of Mr. Kurokawa’s resignation. Planners said that RMJM’s design had also drawn the most votes from visitors to the project’s Web site, www.gazprom-city.info.
They emphasized that while they had chosen a design, the exact details remain undecided. Philip Nikandrov, RMJM’s Moscow director, said the project’s most controversial feature — its height — could still be reconsidered.
Ms. Matviyenko, the St. Petersburg governor and a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, the city’s most prominent native, strongly defended the project against its critics. She said the project’s site was outside the historic center, which is recognized by Unesco as a cultural landmark. She added that Gazprom’s willingness to build a business center for its newly acquired oil company would inject sorely needed revenue into the city, which has not enjoyed the energy-fueled boom that has transformed Moscow.
“Without big companies coming, without turning the city into a financial and economic center, we shall never have these resources,” she said, “and the unique architectural heritage in the center of the city will be quietly falling apart before our eyes.”
INCHEON, South Korea — On a stretch of reclaimed land, near where Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces came ashore during the Korean War, this city will build a towering monument to its rising ambitions: twin skyscrapers reaching 2,013 feet into the sky, higher than the tallest building in the world today.
Seokyong Lee for The New York Times
A rendering of the Songdo Incheon Towers, part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone.
Developers in neighboring Seoul responded by increasing the height of a skyscraper they were planning by 66 feet. In December, the chief of a Seoul ward announced an even more grandiose plan to erect a 220-story building that, at almost 3,200 feet, would be twice as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Incheon and Seoul are part of one of the biggest booms in tall-building construction since the skyscraper appeared more than a century ago, a rush spreading from established tower magnets like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai and Hong Kong to lesser-known cities across fast-rising East Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Awash with cash from South Korea’s economic takeoff, Incheon and Seoul are being joined in the building rush by Busan, which also plans two skyscrapers of more than 100 stories. In the Middle East, Mecca and Doha are building soaring new towers. So are a half dozen lesser-known cities in China, including Tianjin, Guangzhou and Wenzhou. Experts say the next wave of skyscraper proposals could come from economically booming India.
“We have entered an unprecedented era of skyscraper construction,” said Daniel Kieckhefer, a senior editor at Emporis, a German research firm that tracks building projects worldwide. “Chinese cities that I’ve never heard of are building skylines that rival New York’s.”
According to Emporis, 42 skyscrapers are in the planning stages or under construction around the world that are more than 1,000 feet, a height widely regarded as “super-tall.” At least 33 super-tall buildings have been completed in the past 80 or so years, including the world’s current tallest, the 1,667-foot Taipei 101 in Taiwan, built in 2004.
Of those planned new buildings, only five will be in the United States. Three are in New York: the Freedom Tower, the 1,776-foot building planned for the site where the World Trade Center stood; the Bank of America Tower; and The New York Times Tower. The other two are in Chicago: the Trump International Hotel & Tower and the Waterview Tower.
Many of the world’s new super-tall buildings are rising in overcrowded cities where land is scarce, and a newly emerging middle class is clamoring for modern office and living space. But experts say the drive to go tall also reflects the aspiration of Asian and Persian Gulf nations to join the ranks of the developed world, and to assert that their long-awaited moment in history has finally come.
“Developing countries want the tallest building to put themselves on the map,” said Antony Wood, executive director of the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. “They want to say to the developed world that they’ve arrived, that they now have the financial and technological ability to make these projects happen.”
In South Korea, one reason for the sudden proliferation of ambitious skyscraper plans has been a desire to keep up with its booming neighbors: China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“South Koreans were a little hurt by the fact that Taiwan has the world’s tallest building, and we don’t,” said Lee Bok-nam, a researcher at the Construction & Economy Research Institute of Korea. “If they have one, we have to have one, too.”
For now, the busiest builder remains Dubai, as the bustling port in the United Arab Emirates grows into the Persian Gulf’s financial center. The city has poured billions of its oil and banking dollars into dozens of gleaming high-rises that have sprung out of what was until recently empty desert, though the boom has been marred by labor abuses.
According to Emporis, 15 of the super-talls planned or under way are located there, including the Burj Dubai, a $1 billion, 161-story tower scheduled for completion next year that will be — at least for a while — the world’s tallest man-made structure, besting the 2,063-foot KVLY-TV mast in North Dakota.
The Burj’s Dubai-based owners hope that by not revealing the building’s height until the final spire is fitted, they will frustrate rivals’ plans to immediately outdo them. Most speculation puts the Burj’s height at about a half-mile, or 2,650 feet.
Such heights are possible because of new high-performance concretes and composite materials and advances in engineering. One of the Burj’s chief structural engineers, Ahmad K. Abdelrazaq, said that computer simulations allowed for increasingly innovative designs.
“Tall buildings are all about the technologies available,” said Mr. Abdelrazaq, an executive director at Samsung Engineering & Construction, one of the main contractors building the Burj. “Humans have always aspired to go to the highest point they can reach, and the technologies determine how high that is.”
Mr. Abdelrazaq said wind is one of the biggest challenges for super-tall buildings. The Burj has a series of platforms along its height that form a spiraling helix shape, forcing air currents harmlessly upward and preventing the formation of deadly whirlwind-like vortexes, he said.
The Taipei 101 overcomes the forces of wind and earthquakes by using a different technology, called a tuned mass damper — essentially, a 600-ton ball suspended by cables inside the building’s top. The damper acts as a huge pendulum, steadying the building when it starts to sway.
Just as the invention of the elevator made early skyscrapers feasible, faster, better elevators are crucial now. The Taipei 101’s aerodynamic, bullet-shaped elevators rise to the building’s 89th-floor observation deck in 37 seconds. Experts say in the future, tall buildings could use elevators that move on magnets instead of cables, allowing them to move sideways and diagonally.
In South Korea, the burst of economic and nationalist passion has borne proposals for a dozen super-tall buildings. Some, experts say, may never break ground, but others seem certain.
The $3 billion twin Songdo Incheon Towers will be the centerpiece of a 13,000-acre urban development, called the Songdo International City. Estimated to cost tens of billions of dollars, the project is the product of this gritty port city’s ambition to transform itself into a transportation and high-technology research hub. Incheon officials hope the towers will replace General MacArthur’s epic landing as a symbol for the city.
“All international cities have landmark towers,” said Lee Seung-joo, a senior project manager of the 151-story Incheon towers, scheduled for completion by 2013. “A landmark tower is like a brand. These towers will be Incheon’s brand to the world.”
Strong public interest here attests to South Korea’s desire for global recognition.
“A tall building means pride,” said Kim Sang-dae, a professor of architectural engineering at Korea University in Seoul. “It is a message to the world, that we are now equal to you and that we are not a poor country anymore.”
There has been little popular opposition here, even from the sorts of neighborhood preservation groups that commonly battle such projects in the United States. So far, the biggest opponent has been the Korean Air Force, which worries that the structures will block its flight paths.
Instead, attention seems to be on who gets the grandest new monument. In Seoul, the planned 151-story Yongsan Landmark Building, at 2,046 feet, will tower over all the city’s existing structures, and even some nearby mountain peaks.
“Seoul is the capital, so it must have the tallest building,” said Han Bong-seok, an executive at Korea Railroad, the national railway company, who heads the project to build the tower on the site of an old train yard. “This is for the pride of Seoul.”
In the field of conservation, success stories about saving individual species abound. Bald eagles have recovered from their bout with the pesticide DDT; from fewer than 500 breeding pairs in 1963, the population in the lower 48 states has grown to nearly 10,000 breeding pairs, such that they are no longer listed even as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Gray wolves have returned to Yellowstone National Park, as well as to the Italian and French Alps. The California condor has been brought back from the absolute brink of extinction, after the last surviving birds were rounded up and bred in the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos. And so on.
When human ingenuity and resources are trained on a particular species, usually a charismatic one, it makes a difference—but it does not change the global pattern, which is a steady drumbeat of extinction and of the permanent loss of biodiversity that goes with it. In a recent global assessment, Stuart Butchart and his colleagues at BirdLife International in England concluded that between 1994 and 2004 conservation efforts had saved 16 species of bird from extinction, at least temporarily. During that same decade, however, another 164 bird species listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had slipped a notch closer to extinction.
Conservationists have many priorities and many strategies. But for the past two decades, a leading priority has been to preserve as much biodiversity as possible, and the most prominent strategy has been to focus on "hotspots"—regions of the world, such as tropical rain forests, that are rich in species and yet losing them fast. The strategy has been arguably successful, yet it has also been controversial.
"The most difficult challenge we face as conservationists today is to answer the question, Why does biodiversity matter?" says Mike Hoffmann, an ecologist based at Conservation International (CI), an organization that has made hotspots the centerpiece of its efforts. All conservationists oppose extinction, it seems, in the same way that they favor apple pie. But not all agree that saving the maximum number of species worldwide should be the number-one priority—or that preserving hotspots on our increasingly crowded planet leads to the best of all possible worlds.
Defining Diversity
The word "biodiversity" first appeared in print in 1988, as the title of a National Research Council report edited by Harvard University entomologist E. O. Wilson. In the opening chapter Wilson guessed that the earth held between five million and 30 million species, more than half of them living in tropical rain forests. "From a single leguminous tree in the Tambopata Reserve of Peru," he wrote, "I recently recovered 43 species of ants belonging to 26 genera, about equal to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles." He went on to make an equally rough estimate of how many species the earth was losing to extinction: about one every half an hour. Most were undescribed tropical insects vanishing without witness.
Wilson's calculation was based on his theory of "island biogeography," which predicts how many species can survive in a given area of isolated or fragmented habitat, and on estimates of how much rain forest was being cut down. An area the size of West Virginia, Wilson said, was being lost every year—confirming predictions made a decade earlier by a British researcher named Norman Myers. Those predictions had been dismissed by some of his peers as alarmist, but it became clear they were not: human beings were causing a mass extinction unparalleled since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Over in species-poor Britain, Myers was also coining a new term in 1988—new at least to conservation biology—and it would soon become a buzzword, too: "hotspots." Myers is an independent environmental consultant, an adjunct academic, notably at the University of Oxford, and a self-described "lone wolf." After previous lives as a schoolteacher in colonial Kenya and then as a photographer of African wildlife, he had earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1970s and moved into conservation work. By the late 1980s he was frustrated. "It struck me that because of sheer shortage of funds, scientific expertise and government attention, we were not helping many species all that much," Myers recalls. "We were spreading ourselves far too thinly."
Hotspots were his solution: If you had limited resources and wanted to preserve the maximum number of species, Myers reasoned, you should concentrate on regions that had the most "endemic" species—species that were not found elsewhere—and that were losing them fastest. In his 1988 paper Myers identified 10 such hotspots, all of them centered on tropical forests. Two years later he added eight more to the list, including four regions with Mediterranean climates—subtropical grasslands that were under intense pressure from humans.
The hotspot concept caught on almost immediately. From 1990 on the MacArthur Foundation supported hotspot preservation to the tune of $15 million a year. Later the idea was adopted by CI, which had initially been formed by defectors from the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund. Those older organizations had also been concerned with preventing extinctions, but CI made the preservation of global biodiversity—that is, the total number of species—its main focus. Working with Myers, it refined his concept, defining a hotspot as a region that had at least 1,500 species of endemic plants (0.5 percent of the world's total) and that had lost at least 70 percent of its original vegetation. Hotspots brought a welcome rigor to conservation biology, says Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. "There was a sense before that conservation was ad hoc—that it was about this pretty place or that charismatic animal. The good thing about hotspots is that they were the beginning of being analytical."
Above all, hotspots made sense to the World Bank and to the foundations that have become increasingly important supporters of conservation work. Even people in the business of healing the world's pain do not like feeling they are pouring money down a bottomless hole. Hotspots divided a vast and intractable problem into more manageable parts, with definable targets, and that made foundation managers want to sign checks. Ask Myers today, 20 years after he hatched his simple little idea, which of its impacts he is proudest of, and he says this: "The mobilizing of $850 million." It is indeed an astonishing sum. CI, which has received much of it into its Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, had fewer than 100 employees in 1990; it now has about 900 in locations all over the world. Recently it increased the number of hotspots to 34. "If our number-one priority is to save as many species as possible, I don't see how you can do much better than hotspots," Myers says.
Focusing Aid and Attention Hotspots, as Myers and CI define them, are large regions—Central America is one, for instance, as is Madagascar. Within those regions, various conservation strategies are possible, including captive breeding programs for particular species. But because habitat loss is generally the gravest threat, the most obvious strategy is to designate smaller, even hotter spots within those regions as "protected areas." Beside its "Red List" of threatened species, the IUCN also maintains, along with the United Nations, a list of protected areas. They number over 100,000 and cover 11.5 percent of the earth's land surface.
But many, especially in the poorer tropical countries, are what conservationists call "paper parks"—parks in name only. A few years ago Ana Rodrigues of CI and her colleagues compared the ranges of 11,633 species of terrestrial vertebrates with the geographic coverage of the protected areas. They found that a minimum of more than 12 percent of vertebrates—1,483 species, including 833 listed as threatened by the IUCN—fell into gaps between the parks and thus had no protection at all. Mammals fared the best, amphibians the worst, presumably because people care more about mammals and because amphibians tend to have smaller ranges that are less likely to overlap with a park.
Thus, a large gap exists between conservation need and conservation resources: compared with what it would take to prevent the mass extinction that is now under way, $850 million spread over many years is actually a tiny sum. People such as John Watkin, an ecologist who is also a grant director for the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, feel that gap acutely. "I'm a huge advocate of the hotspots approach," he said recently. He was speaking on his cell phone, stuck in what he said was "the longest traffic jam in my life," on a bus that was taking him from Arusha, Tanzania, to Nairobi, Kenya. Hotspots, such as the Eastern Arc Mountains of those two countries, are not wilderness areas; on the contrary they are areas that are being crushed by a needy humanity. "When I first joined [Conservation International], I was very skeptical of hotspots," Watkin went on. "I've been turned around by looking at the financial resources. Everybody has to draw a line in the sand somewhere."
Biodiversity hotspots channel resources to places that need it most, Watkin observed—not only away from the temperate-latitude industrial countries, which are richer in cash than in creatures, but away from "the Serengeti and the other established reserves that have been popularized by research and tourism." At the northern end of the Eastern Arc Mountains, for instance, CI is working to protect the cloud forests of the Taita Hills. Ninety-eight percent of the forest has been cut down, mostly in the past 40 years, to make way for agriculture; a little more than 1,000 acres are left, a dozen small islands in a sea of farmland and exotic tree plantations. No lions, elephants or giraffes live in the Taita Hills; there are not even gorillas, but there are three species of bird that live only in those beleaguered islands. Saving those birds means saving what is left of the forests.
Saving the Picassos In that sense, the forest islands are irreplaceable—which is the essential feature of hotspots. The concrete criteria for choosing hotspots are just convenient ways of measuring irreplaceability and threat, Hoffmann says, and they work. Threatened vertebrate species may be falling freely through the gaps in the protected-area network, but three quarters of such species are found in hotspots and nowhere else on the earth—indicating that hotspots are good places to protect more land and in general to focus efforts at saving vertebrates as well as plants. "We believe everything can be saved," Hoffmann says. "It's about where you go first. If we fail in the hotspots, half of biodiversity is gone. Finished."
The fear of that finality is something that drives most conservation biologists, including some who are critical of the hotspot approach. "There is nothing as bad as losing species," says Walter Jetz, an ecologist at the University of California, San Diego. "They are unique biological entities, with unique evolutionary histories and a set of functions we have only partly understood." People will rush back into burning houses to retrieve family photographs and heirlooms; something like that emotion stirs in the hearts of conservation biologists when they contemplate the irreversible loss that is extinction—although Jetz compares species to Picassos, not snapshots. Jetz grew up in Bavaria, saw how much money was spent there conserving relatively little biodiversity, then plunged as a young scientist into the teeming tropics of central Africa. He wholeheartedly endorses the transfer of conservation resources from North to South.
But Central Africa is a case in point: it is not on the hotspot list, because it is still in relatively good shape. In revising its list, CI also created a parallel list of five "wilderness areas," including the Congo Basin, but it devotes far fewer resources to them. Conservation efforts in general tend to focus on areas that have suffered heavy human impact in the past—but those areas, Jetz and his graduate student Tien Ming Lee concluded in a study published this year, often are not the areas projected to suffer the heaviest impacts in the future. Central Africa, for instance, still retains most of its original forest, but in recent decades industrial logging concessions have been granted to more than 30 percent of it, and only 12 percent is protected. "That's potentially a hotspot for conservation," Jetz says. "Future challenges to conservation may not have much to do with the past."
Especially when global warming enters the equation: no one really knows what to do about it. In mapping out the future high-impact areas, Jetz and Lee considered the effects of climate change on vegetation but not its effects on the ranges of animals, because too little is known about that. A study published in Nature in 2004, however, predicted that by 2050 between 15 and 37 percent of the species on the earth might be "committed to extinction" as a result of climate change alone. Those alarming numbers were contested—but not the basic reality that no area on the earth can be completely protected anymore. Carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels warms the planet everywhere, and it will change habitats everywhere, including ones we are not destroying in a more direct way.
That doesn't mean stopping the destruction isn't a good idea, of course—it is, not only because it protects habitats but because it curbs the deforestation that is itself a huge source of CO2. Expanding the focus of conservation beyond hotspots, however, does mean that the entire rationale behind parks and other protected areas is going to need to be rethought for a warming world. "Unless you worry some about the area between the reserves, species won't be able to move," Kareiva says. The Nature Conservancy has been focusing much of its efforts lately on creating migration corridors. "Thinking only about parks leads people to pay not enough attention to the rest of the world," he adds.
"Protected areas are just a tool, not a goal," says Luigi Boitani, a biologist at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" who has spent decades studying the wolves and bears of Italy. He participated with Rodrigues in the analysis of gaps in the existing protected area network, and he thinks the explicit purpose of such reserves should be to preserve biodiversity. But reserves are not the final answer, he says: "By setting aside 10 percent of the world, we are far from saving the world. Protected areas are useless if we don't find a broad agreement between humans and nature.
"We have wolves 20 minutes from the Coliseum," he goes on. "Bears an hour from downtown Rome. I must believe in coexistence." If the carnivores are spreading once again in Italy, he says, it's not because they are being protected in parks—it's because the government compensates farmers for lost livestock, subsidizes guard dogs and electric fences, and in general encourages Italians to live alongside the beasts, not shoot them.
Warming Up to Coldspots Coexistence between humans and nature can be encouraged in biodiversity hotspots, too. In the Taita Hills, Watkin and Conservation International are trying not so much to create forest reserves as to get people to respect reserves that already exist. To that end, they are involving the local population in the conservation strategy, and they are funding projects designed, as Watkin puts it, "to provide very realistic alternatives to chopping down the forest and making charcoal." Farming butterflies or indigenous silkworms, for instance: both can be done without encroaching further on the cloud forest, and both have become significant moneymakers for the Taita Hills.
Much good conservation work has been done and continues to be done as a result of the hotspot approach; that $850 million has been put to good use. Yet the same critique Kareiva and Boitani direct at parks applies, on a larger scale, to hotspots: that they lead people to not pay enough attention to the rest of the world—to the "coldspots," as Kareiva calls them. Hotspots are hot because they are rich in endemic species and because Myers and CI define the top priority as preserving the maximum number of species on the whole planet.
The main argument for this view, aside from the moral one that it is wrong for us to extinguish any species, is that species diversity keeps ecosystems functioning. Functioning ecosystems in turn provide economically valuable services; for instance, healthy forests around cities keep local water supplies clean. Hard scientific data back up both those claims—but only at the level of individual ecosystems, not the whole planet. "There is not a single scientific paper that shows a loss of ecosystem services when you change the total global number of species," Kareiva says.
The hotspot concept, he goes on, "doesn't have a scientific basis at all. When we say we care about biodiversity, we mean wherever you live, Montana or Tanzania, you don't want to lose so many species that your ecosystem just won't function. The goal might be, nowhere in the world do we lose half our species. If we lose that much, that place is gone." Boitani's long-term priority is similar. It is "to find a stable relationship between humans and other species," he says. "Stop the negative trend. Find a relation of coexistence and tolerance, even if it means we have to lose 50 percent of the species. I'm ready to sign off on that if it means what is left will last."
That view is anathema to hotspot proponents. "The notion that biodiversity loss of any kind is acceptable is just not acceptable," Hoffmann says. "We don't believe that extinction is inevitable—human-mediated, fast-tracked extinction should not be inevitable." From that standpoint, accepting the reality that we are causing extinctions every day and, as global warming accelerates, are soon going to be causing many more is unforgivably unambitious. The counterargument is that trying to preserve the whole planet in some kind of ecologically intact form is in fact far more ambitious than just focusing on the 2 percent of land surface that happens to be in hotspots.
Biodiversity hotspots were a useful conceptual shortcut—a quick way of figuring out where to begin with the daunting task of saving the world. By focusing efforts on the total number of species, they allow conservationists to avoid the hard science required to decide which species matter most to ecosystems and the hard choices required to decide which species matter most to us. But we'll come closer to making real conservation progress, say Kareiva and other scientists, when we face up to those choices. "We're the stewards of the planet," Kareiva declares. "We get to choose its future. Let's admit that."
Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Are Hot Spots Key to Conservation?"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S) Robert Kunzig is a science writer and co-author (with Wallace S. Broecker) of Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threat and How to Counter It.
