11/21: IRAQ / WP / Eugene Robinson: Leave Now

If even Henry Kissinger now says that military victory in Iraq is impossible, pretty soon George W. Bush really will be left with just Laura and Barney on his side.

The Only Real Option: Leave Iraq Now

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, November 21, 2006; A27

Good lord, if even Henry Kissinger now says that military victory in Iraq is impossible, pretty soon George W. Bush really will be left with just Laura and Barney on his side.

The Decider Agonistes must be feeling betrayed and abused these days. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's admission that the war has been "pretty much of a disaster" was just a slip of the tongue, but the president must have felt it as a cut most unkind.

And Kissinger? The oracle who has been dropping by the White House regularly to whisper sweet nothings into the presidential ear, urging him to hang tough? The sage who wrote in August 2005 that "victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy" is now listing Bush's conditions for withdrawal -- a stable government, ruling all of Iraq, with the ability to control the violence -- and pronouncing them unattainable. Will anyone be surprised if Henry the K soon reveals that he knew the whole thing was folly all along?

Meanwhile, the neocon architects of the war are making a spectacle of themselves in their undignified flight from the sinking ship. Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Rubin -- they all take pretty much the same line, which is that the invasion was a great and noble idea but that the White House and the Pentagon bungled it horribly.

Defections, recrimination and finger-pointing among the people who got us into this mess provide an amusing sideshow. But the main event is the mandate that midterm voters imposed this month, in no uncertain terms: Find a way out.

Sen. John McCain has planted his flag at one extreme of the debate, making the counterintuitive argument that the way to get out of Iraq is to send in a lot more U.S. troops who would stabilize the country as a necessary prelude to withdrawal. By "counterintuitive," I mean "divorced from reality as we know it." For one thing, the troops McCain wants to send do not exist -- the military is stretched paper-thin as it is, and I don't think Rep. Charles Rangel's proposal to reinstate the draft is going to get very far. For another, McCain doesn't specify how all those magically conjured reinforcements are supposed to accomplish such a mission.

In a sectarian civil war, the last place you want to stand is in the middle. Is the United States really going to choose sides and then lend a hand as Shiite or Sunni death squads go about their awful business?

At the other end of the debate is Rep. John Murtha, who says we should cut our losses and start pulling out. At least Murtha doesn't pretend we'd be leaving behind a secure, viable Iraq, because we wouldn't.

The new, post-midterm mainstream position in Washington is to support "phased withdrawals," with or without telling anyone in advance when a new phase will begin, and to involve "the neighbors," meaning Iran and Syria, in forcing Iraqi politicians to reach "a political solution." James Baker and his Iraq Study Group will probably come up with some variation of this scenario. But we should be honest and acknowledge that phased withdrawals, with or without a stated timetable, really mean just telling the Iraqis good luck and adios, drawing the whole process out in a belated attempt to save face.

The president clearly doesn't want to hear any of this. The bizarre analogy he made in Hanoi -- comparing Iraq to Vietnam and saying, "We'll succeed unless we quit" -- doesn't even make sense in his own parallel universe. He should ask his friend Kissinger to tell him about that Ho Chi Minh guy whose picture is plastered all over Vietnam.

But while the Decider covers his ears and rewrites history, the center of gravity of the debate has shifted from whether we should get out of Iraq to how and when.

If we are ready to acknowledge, as Kissinger does, that the president's goals in Iraq will never be accomplished, then how do we justify the American lives that will be lost next year, next month or next week, while the phases of a face-saving withdrawal run their course?

If American troops begin pulling out tomorrow, Iraq surely will suffer a terrible spasm of bloody violence. But if we wait a year and then pull out, there is no reason to expect any different outcome. Quite the contrary: The longer we stay, the more lawless and chaotic the country becomes. And the more young Americans die in a war that no longer has an attainable goal.

11/21: Algerie: Guerre Sauvage Pour la Paix / Horne / Ricks NYRB / WP

Gurre Sauvage -- Pour la Paix: Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace, has been an underground bestseller among U.S. military officers over the last three years, with used copies selling on Amazon.com for $150.
Aftershocks: A classic on France's losing fight against Arab rebels contains troubling echoes of Iraq today. Reviewed by Thomas E. Ricks Sunday, November 19, 2006; BW05;NYRB:

A SAVAGE WAR OF PEACE

Algeria 1954-1962

By Alistair Horne

New York Review Books. 608 pp. Paperback, $19.95

When Americans talk about the raging insurgency in Iraq, they often draw parallels with the Vietnam War, but a better analogy is probably the French war against nationalist rebels in Algeria from 1954 to 1962. That's one reason why the landmark history of that conflict, Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace, has been an underground bestseller among U.S. military officers over the last three years, with used copies selling on Amazon.com for $150. Indeed, "Algeria" has become almost a codeword among U.S. counterinsurgency specialists -- a shorthand for the depth and complexity of the mess we face in Iraq. Earlier this year, I referred to Horne's book while conversing with one such expert in Taji, Iraq, and got a grim nod of agreement.

Now a new paperback edition of Horne's 1977 classic has been issued, cutting the price of wisdom to a more reasonable $19.95.

In a new preface, Horne makes the connection to Iraq explicit. (Digits added by Steganograph)

1. First, he notes, the Algerian insurgents fighting to end France's colonial control over the country avoided taking on the French army directly; instead, they attacked the police and other more vulnerable targets, thereby demoralizing local supporters of the French presence.

2. Second, Algeria's porous borders greatly aided the insurgents, who could receive reinforcements, arms and sanctuary from neighboring countries such as Tunisia and Morocco.

3. Third, and most emphatically, he writes that "torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society."

Those three parallels are provocative enough, as far as they go. But many other, perhaps less obvious points in Horne's lucid, well-organized history may do even more to deepen our understanding of the Iraq War.

Again and again, Horne wrote passages about the French in Algeria that could describe the U.S. military in Iraq. As I wrote about the U.S. Army's big "cordon-and-sweep" operations that detained tens of thousands of civilian Iraqi males in the Sunni Triangle in the fall of 2003, I remembered Horne: "This is the way an administration caught with its pants down reacts under such circumstances. . . .

4. a: First comes the mass indiscriminate round-up of suspects, most of them innocent but converted into ardent militants by the fact of their imprisonment."

Like the Americans in Iraq, the French in Algeria consistently

4.b: misunderstood the nature of the opposition, focusing too much on supposed foreign support and too little on the local roots of the insurgency. Horne also detected a distinctly familiar

4. c: pattern of official optimism among French officials, who were quick to declare their war "virtually over" four years before it ended in their defeat.

4. d: Moreover, A Savage War of Peace draws an important distinction between torture by the police and torture by the military. The former damages mainly individuals and need not be hugely damaging to the war effort;

4. e: the latter, Horne quotes a former French officer as saying, involves the honor of the nation -- as it did at Abu Ghraib and other facilities where Iraqis were abused by American soldiers in 2003-04.

5. Along the way, Horne offers three other comments that are not particularly encouraging.

First, when considering the Bush administration's policy of having U.S. forces stand down as newly trained Iraqi forces stand up, it is worth noting that throughout the eight years of the Algerian war, more Algerians were fighting on the French side than on the rebel side -- and the French still lost.

Second, when trying to understand Iraq's current violence, it is good to recall Horne's comment that "such a simultaneous internal 'civil war' " often rages alongside a "revolutionary struggle against an external enemy."

Finally, when we hear U.S. military officers arguing that they achieved their mission in Iraq but that the rest of the U.S. government failed or the will of the American people faltered, remember Horne's quotation from a French general, Jacques de Bollardière, who was critical of his army's performance: "Instead of coldly analysing with courageous lucidity its tactical and strategic errors, it gave itself up to a too human inclination and tried -- not without reason, however -- to excuse its mistakes by the faults of civil authority and public opinion."

6. To be sure, there are huge differences between the two wars. Most notably, the United States isn't a colonial power in Iraq, seeking to maintain a presence of troops and settlers as long as possible. Rather, in Iraq, victory would consist of getting U.S. personnel out while leaving behind a relatively friendly, open, stable and independent government. And while elements of the French military tried to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle for pulling out from what he termed "a bottomless quagmire," there is little fear that U.S. officers will go down that rebellious road.

7. But there are numerous suggestive parallels -- mainly relating to conventional Western militaries fighting primarily urban insurgencies in Arab cultures while support for their wars dwindles back home and while the insurgents hope to outlast their better-armed opponents. As such, anyone interested in Iraq should read this book immediately.-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas E. Ricks, a Washington Post military correspondent who has reported frequently from Iraq, is the author of "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq."

11/21: DIA from WP Maples / Ricks 11/19

Tom Ricks's Inbox: After years of Bush administration officials bashing the media for supposedly not reporting all the good news in Iraq, this extraordinarily pessimistic assessment of the situation came last Wednesday from Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
Tom Ricks's Inbox
Sunday, November 19, 2006; B02 (W. Post)
Today, DIA assesses the conditions for the further deterioration of security and instability exists within this ongoing, violent struggle for power. Although a significant breakdown of central authority has not occurred, Iraq has moved closer to this possibility primarily because of weak governance, increasing security challenges, and no agreement on a national compact. .
The perception of unchecked violence is creating an atmosphere of fear and hardening sectarianism which is empowering militias and vigilante groups, hastening middle-class exodus, and shaking confidence in government and security forces. Sectarian violence, a weak central government, problems in basic services, and high unemployment are causing more Iraqis to turn to sectarian groups, militias, and insurgents for basic needs, imperiling Iraqi unity.

Despite ongoing Iraqi government and Coalition operations against terrorists, Sunni Arab insurgent groups, and Shia militias, violence in Iraq continues to increase in scope, complexity, and lethality. . .
Recent Coalition and ISF [Iraqi Security Force] operations in Baghdad have achieved limited success. In August, levels of violence temporarily decreased, primarily in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. However, as armed groups adapted to the Coalition presence, and the ISF was unable to exert authority once Coalition forces moved on, attacks returned to and even surpassed preoperational levels. .
Shia militias are a growing impediment to stability. The Ministry of Interior and the police are heavily infiltrated by members of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq or SCIRI's [Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq] Badr Corps and Muqtada al-Sadr's Jaysh al-Mahdi. The Jaysh al-Mahdi often operates under the protection or approval of Iraqi police to detain, torture, and kill suspected Sunni insurgents and innocent Sunni civilians.
=====================================
Tom Ricks is The Post's military correspondent. This feature aims to give readers a snapshot of the conversations about Iraq, Afghanistan and other matters that play out in Ricks's e-mail inbox. Have an interesting document? Send it to TheInbox@washpost.com

11/19: Another Way: (WP) Energy-Sustainable Village in NC Joel Achenbach

Another Way
A band of idealists in the mountains of North Carolina is trying to build a low-energy lifestyle. But must we all live like hippies in the woods to make a difference?

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page W10

THE SOLUTION TO THE ENERGY CRISIS turns out to be, in part, mood lighting. You go with one gentle bulb, a 10-watt number that shoos away enough of the darkness to keep everyone at the table identifiable. We're having a delicious, if arguably dim, meal on a pleasant summer evening at a place called Earthaven. It's an "ecovillage." It's in western North Carolina, east of Asheville, in a notch in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We're off the grid, and deep inside one version of the human future.

Susan Lathrop and Kim Rylander, known in the village as Suchi and Kimchi, are hosting me and my guide, Earthaven resident Greg Geis, as I try to figure out how a bunch of suburbanites who've fled mainstream America are able to live in the boondocks half an hour by car from the nearest small town, without electrical lines or water mains or flush toilets or streetlights or microwave ovens or washing machines or home entertainment systems or electric garage door openers or fake-log fireplaces operated by remote control or any of the other things that most people consider essential to survival.

Earthaven is not a "commune," a term now in disfavor (too stale, too '70s); the members prefer to call it an "intentional community." It's the kind of counterculture social experiment more typically found in places such as Oregon and Northern California. I visited because, while the rest of us worry about gas prices and global warming and terrorists taking over oil fields, the residents of Earthaven have a special approach to energy. They make their own.

Suchi and Kimchi have solar panels that give them enough juice to run a laptop and a coffee grinder and a few low-wattage light bulbs. They follow the weather reports, dialing a local phone number for the latest forecast.

"If I know it's going to be sunny tomorrow, I know I can be a little more extravagant -- put on the Christmas lights for dinner, check my e-mail at night," Suchi says.

They're not absolutists, to be sure. They use propane. Even an ecovillage finds it hard to wean itself completely from fossil fuel. With help from a little stove, Suchi and Kimchi have made a fine meal of stir-fried beef with vegetables, basmati rice, garden salad with greens from the community garden, and a blueberry cobbler with berries from the bushes not far from their front door.

There won't be any leftovers, because it's all good, and they don't have a refrigerator. They use coolers. They had a freezer for a while, but it sucked too much energy. When the leaves came out in spring, their solar panels didn't get enough sunlight. Maybe Suchi and Kimchi needed to add more panels or cut some trees. In the meantime, they simply unplugged the freezer. That's another solution to the energy crisis. Unplug what you don't need. They decided they could make do temporarily by hauling ice in milk jugs from an old freezer that's a few hundred yards away, powered by a small hydroelectric contraption parked on a tumbling stream.

Suchi doesn't mince words as we talk over dinner about life in the village: "It's torment living here sometimes -- just torment." But she loves it still, and says, "I have the sanity of living my principles."

After dinner, I help with the dishes and do what I can to stretch a little pot of hot water heated on the stove. Most of us mainstream people keep a huge tank of the stuff in our homes, say, 30 gallons, maintained at scalding temperatures, at least 160 degrees, even when we're out of town on a long vacation -- in case we need to fly home suddenly and take a bath.

Washing dishes the Earthaven way works acceptably well (though in the gloaming, it's kind of hard to see what's happening down there on the plates as you scrub). It's energy-efficient. It does not require gratuitous amounts of fossil fuel or result in the prodigious emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

When you live like this, you think differently. You think about energy. You think about where it comes from and where it goes. The people of Earthaven have developed a way of life that's sophisticated, that's technologically aware, even as it resembles, at first glance, camping. It's all rather enlightened. Or so you may conclude, after your eyes adjust.

THE KEY TO MODERN LIFE IS STRATEGIC IGNORANCE. There are so many things we don't know about our lives and that, frankly, we don't want to know. We don't know much about the basic things that sustain us. We are clueless "end users" in elaborate industrial supply lines. Energy comes from distant power plants and oil refineries and pipelines and electrical grids, but we don't think about them when we flick on a light or turn the key in the ignition. We live in a world we didn't make, by rules and customs and laws we didn't invent, using tools and technologies we don't understand.

Even as science teaches us, constantly, that we are part of the fabric of life, that we have a common genetic heritage with all other living things, we continue to hold nature at arm's length. Predation and cultivation and gathering and even preparation of food have all been outsourced.

Meat in the store has been carefully butchered and wrapped to obscure any association with an actual animal (hence the counterculture movement toward "food with a face"). Novelist Arthur C. Clarke said that when a technology becomes sufficiently advanced it becomes indistinguishable from magic, but he didn't go far enough: The final advancement comes when the technology ceases to register at all. Electricity, accessed through an outlet, becomes an intrinsic property of residential walls, as are the drywall and the studs. Power comes from a switch. We have the consciousness of small children. We can conjure power at will. It's a dream world, but one that might not be sustainable.

I'm guessing that for most of us, the only time we really concentrate on energy is at the gas station, because we can feel the fuel surging through the hose and can see the numbers spinning on the pump. The United States uses about 141 billion gallons of gasoline a year. A barrel of oil yields about 19.6 gallons of gasoline, not far off from the capacity of a typical automobile gas tank. If you were really conscious of your gasoline use, you'd say to yourself: There goes another barrel of oil.

Americans make up 5 percent of the global population, and use about 25 percent of the energy. You wake to an electric alarm clock. You grab your cellphone, which has been charging overnight. Your computer monitor is dark, but it's not really "off," because it's one of those vampire appliances that operate in standby mode all the time (the average house has 20 of them, a Cornell study says). Your hot water heater and air conditioning/heating system have been going strong all night, as has your refrigerator, which is a vintage appliance using 7,000 watts a day (and has been keeping the same half-empty jar of exotic mustard chilled since 2002).

You put coffee beans in an electric grinder that sits next to your electric coffee maker that is adjacent to your electric toaster that is struggling to make a frozen waffle edible. National electricity use has doubled in the past three decades. In 1978, 23 percent of American homes had central air; by 2001, 55 percent had it (the booming Sun Belt is also the AC Belt -- gone are the days when people cooled themselves by sitting six inches from the fan or by lounging on the porch with a glass of iced tea held to the forehead). Appliances are far more energy-efficient these days, but we make up for that by having more appliances. Only 14 percent of homes had a microwave oven in 1980, but two decades later, 86 percent had one. Your energy statistics are right there on your monthly bill, not that you pay attention. In 2004, the typical household in Washington used 757 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month; Maryland and Virginia, with a greater percentage of stand-alone houses, averaged 1,117 and 1,188 kWh, respectively. Where is your meter? Hidden.

So, too, is the meter that monitors the fuel you use for the hot water heater. It's easier to sing in the shower when you're not thinking about the Btus that went into it. The energy the United States used in 2005 came out to about 337 million Btus per person. One British thermal unit is roughly the amount of energy in the head of a match. Collectively, we all struck a lot of matches.

Most of the electricity we use comes from the burning of coal or natural gas, which heats water to create steam and turn turbines. Thus, when you flick on a light, you're responsible for a certain amount of carbon that goes into the air. You can go online and calculate your "carbon footprint." Compared with that of most people in the world, mine is Sasquatch-size. I like to drive in the countryside ("motoring," we call it), fly on business a lot, and although my home seems pretty modest, it's crammed with human beings, including teenagers who leave so many lights on the house can probably be seen from the moon. One Web site calculates that the combustion of a gallon of gas emits 19.55 pounds of atmospheric carbon, and using that standard, driving my six-cylinder Honda Accord for 450 miles from Washington to Earthaven puts about 338 pounds of carbon into the air. Every time my house burns through a kilowatt of electricity, add another 1.32 pounds of CO2. I ran the numbers (guesstimating my household energy use), and the calculator declared that we emitted 47,350 pounds of carbon annually. On a per-capita basis, that's less than the American average but a long way from being "carbon neutral."

"If everyone lived at the lifestyle of Americans," says Jim McMillan, who works on alternative energy for the Department of Energy, "we'd need five planets."

So how do we change? What's practical? Sure, we can lower the thermostat in winter, but do we have to wear a parka and a ski mask around the house? Is the right duration for a hot shower two songs, one song or a couple of stanzas? How much energy is "embedded" in each of our consumer decisions? How much fossil fuel did it take to truck that organic salad from California across the country? Does it make environmental sense to wash a glass instead of tossing a cheap Dixie cup in the trash? Desktop computer or laptop? Paper or plastic?

How should we live?

There are those who argue that using energy is, in fact, good. That the solution to the energy crisis will emerge naturally from a full-throttle economy filled with ingenious people, just one of whom has to invent the new thingamajig that yanks energy from the vacuum of space, or whatever. Believers in the genius of the free market will say we should not fret. It'll work out. Markets solve problems almost magically.

But the business world also tells us to use as much energy as possible. Oil companies are among the planet's largest and most politically influential corporations. The advertising industry pumps billions of dollars a year into what amounts to an organized campaign to make us into frenetic consumers. The implicit message is: Live it up. Keep buying. More is better.

Earthaven is a low-budget, backwoods advertisement for the alternative view. Its members are attempting to craft a new society, built not around economic growth but around the idea of sustainability and what they call "permaculture," the goal of creating modes of living that will never damage the planet. And even if they don't succeed in saving the world, they hope to survive whatever calamity might be coming down the pike.

FROM INTERSTATE 40, YOU DRIVE UP BAT CAVE ROAD FOR ABOUT EIGHT MILES, and if you know where you're going, you'll eventually come to a low sign saying "Earthaven Ecovillage." A gravel road leads down through the trees. A street sign gives the road a name: "Another Way."

The property has 320 acres fingering the mountain hollows along several converging creeks. You might catch a glimpse of a ridgeline overhead, but there are no grand vistas. Somewhere out there the Blue Ridge Mountains fall away toward the flatland, and in the other direction are the Smokies, but it's all a bit disorienting. You're in the woods.

The main street passes by a few structures and over a creek before reaching the humble center of the village. There's a visitor's kiosk where you sign in. The White Owl Cafe and the trading post are directly ahead. Off to the left, down a trail and over a footbridge that crosses a stream, is the Hut Hamlet, the first neighborhood on the site. To your right is the Village Green, a pasture where you might see a small cow, named Bridget.

Landscaping is minimal. Woody debris is piled along the creeks. There's even a junkyard. The place is an aesthetic mishmash, a bit shabbier than an ecovillage ideally would be. As co-founder Chuck Marsh, 55, puts it, "If we're going to make a place that's going to inspire others, we've got to make it beautiful."

At the moment, you'd call it interesting. Permaculture emphasizes such "natural" building techniques as using plastered-over straw bales as wall insulation. Windows are tall, for natural lighting, and floors are often concrete, built thick to hold heat in winter and remain cool in summer. One house, in a style known as an "Earthship," is set into a hillside, with walls made of dirt-filled, salvaged automobile tires.

Rain is precious here. Rooftops channel it into cisterns. Some people draw water from small springs on higher ground. There's a communal shower with a water-saver button on the shower head (to shut off the flow while you lather up). It is acceptable to pee on the ground, because it nourishes soil that can later be cultivated. "Pee Here Now" a sign will say in a spot that someday will be a garden. There are several communal composting toilets, which are basically outhouses. Sawdust cuts down on odor. Everything eventually is repatriated to the soil. Permaculture is pretty uncompromising.

There are a couple of satellite dishes on the property, but it's not really a television-watching culture. There's no cell coverage whatsoever. Residents rely on voice mail, e-mail and -- radically in this modern age -- face-to-face communication. At one point, my guide Greg Geis said he had to call someone, stepped outside and whistled. It didn't seem to work, but I got the point. Birds do it; people can do it.

Founded in 1994, Earthaven is less radical than some intentional communities. Members don't share income. Some older members are affluent and comfortably retired; others find work inside Earthaven, like construction, or hold jobs in nearby towns. The property is communally owned (and fully paid for), but everyone must lease his or her plot of land. Joining costs $4,000, not counting the lease and the additional cost of housing and energy. So you can't just walk up and pitch a tent. Applicants go through a six-month-minimum trial period and must win approval from everyone else -- Earthaven isn't a democracy but, rather, is governed by consensus.

There are a lot of philosophies swirling through the air here. Feminism runs strong. A men's movement searches for "the sacred masculine." There's a lot of yoga and meditation and holistic healing. You hear references to "radical honesty" and "neo-tribalism." "The white cultures no longer remember the tribal knowledge their ancestors had," says a member named Ivy Bolick.

They talk about Peak Oil. That's the hypothesis that global oil production will soon decrease, triggering a global economic collapse. (Peak Oil is, in a sense, the cure for global warming.)

One day, one of the founders of Earthaven, Arjuna daSilva, invited Greg and me for lunch, which turned out to be a veritable feast of pasta with red sauce, fish with squash and onions, and a leafy salad. We were all feeling fat and happy, even as the conversation turned toward the end of civilization as we know it.

"It's a little too late to do major salvation of the planet," Arjuna, who is 60, said. "We're screwed."

Will we face a worldwide economic depression?

"That may be the best-case scenario," Greg said.

"Worldwide depression is what many of us have been hoping for for the last 30 or 40 years," Arjuna said.

Wipe the slate clean. Start over. It's an appealing concept when you're already in the community-invention business.

One night in the Hut Hamlet, a 37-year-old Earthaven member named Robert Carran talked about the coming collapse.

"Something will come to a head in the next five years. Definitely in 10 years. It could happen tomorrow. There's a term bandied about called Roving Cannibal Hordes."

He didn't explain it fully, but the gist seemed to be that, someday, when the mainstream collapses, people will roam the countryside in search of food and energy supplies and, who knows, any source of meat. If the food supply collapses, Robert said, "I'm ready to eat some bugs. Run up in the hills and eat some bugs."

I questioned that. He backed off.

"I'm not ready to eat bugs," he admitted.

It's all a work in progress. There's no script. They're making up a lot of it as they go, and there are basic questions they're still trying to answer. How many people can be supported by 320 acres of land? What is the right number of people for a village? What does it actually mean, to be "sustaining"?

And finally, how do you create -- out here in the sticks, with only a tiny labor pool and very little energy -- a functioning economy?

THE SUN WAS OUT, AND GREG GEIS WAS MAKING ENERGY. A little meter on the wall told him how much: 12.4 amps of net gain as our friendly star blasted his solar panels. Greg tapped a button on his meter and learned that his batteries were at 85 percent capacity.

The meter is right there in the living room, next to his bulletin board. That's typical for Earthaven: The meters are centrally located, crucial to life management. If the sun hasn't been out for days and your batteries are low, you probably shouldn't watch that movie on the VCR.

Greg has more creature comforts than many of his neighbors. When you enter his residence, you might well hear Pat Matheny coming from the sound system and see Greg typing away on a desktop computer in the corner. He's not roughing it.

As we talked, the number on his meter began to go down, below 10 amps, below 5 . . . below zero.

A cloud.

"We're negative. We're using more power than we're getting."

The sun came out again, and the numbers improved. Greg said his batteries would probably soon be back up to 90 percent.

But when I went back the next day, they were still at 85 percent. Had Greg been profligate with electricity? He had fixed dinner for me and his friend Arjuna the night before, and by his calculation we'd used only about 30 watts of illumination over the course of 90 minutes. Something didn't quite add up.

Greg was my Earthaven guide, graciously taking me all over the place and setting up interviews. He's 56, soft-spoken, rail thin. He'd like to put on some weight, but he's a busy man who lives alone and sometimes forgets to eat. Greg came to Earthaven from the corporate world. He had saved a couple of hundred grand as an energy consultant. He wanted to live in the mountains, in the woods, among tumbling waters. "The question for me was whether I wanted to be a monk, a hermit, or wanted to do something with a broader meaning." When he first showed up at Earthaven, he had an overly ambitious plan to build a spa. That didn't fly -- too corporate. He put his money into his home, and now he's a village techie, setting up solar power systems and running the micro-hydro electrical generating station (it can put out about 1,000 watts continuously by funneling stream water into smaller and smaller pipes, creating a jet of water that turns a turbine). He can take a hot bath pretty much whenever he wants, thanks to a solar panel that heats water for a bathtub parked (rather conspicuously, the visitor might think) in his front yard, just off the main road.

He has an electric hot water heater under his sink that only holds 2.5 gallons and is usually turned off. I never saw him turn on more than a single, small halogen light bulb. His propane-powered refrigerator is not much bigger than what a college dorm room would use for beer.

"We all tend to be minimalists. We find that people tend to be happier when it's simple," he says.

He is not a big believer in ice, because of the energy penalty when the water goes through the phase change.

"That takes 144 Btu, just to cause the water to become a solid," he says.

Greg's batteries continued to hover at 85 percent -- oddly low, given the sunny days.

At about 1 the next morning, Greg looked at his meter. It should have been completely quiescent. Off. Blank. No numbers. But it was still on, showing a negative number.

He surveyed his electrical possessions and tried to figure out what could possibly be sucking energy. Finally, it occurred to him: His tenant, away several days, must have left something on.

The next morning at the crack of dawn he walked to the little rental unit a few strides from his own home, and went inside and saw the culprit: The tenant had left her computer on. He yanked the cord out of the wall. He later did a calculation: 1,800 watts down the drain.

"For no reason! There's nobody there!"

MAYBE SOMEDAY OUR ENERGY PROBLEMS WILL GO AWAY, vanquished by human ingenuity. Right now, we have an energy crisis, even though politicians and the media don't upper-case the term the way they did in the 1970s. Back then, we worried about Arab oil embargoes and long gas lines. We worried about smog. We worried that we were running out of oil. President Carter famously described his efforts to solve the Energy Crisis as "the moral equivalent of war." Turn down your thermostat in winter, he said, and put on a sweater. He even wore sweaters himself to show how it could be done.

Americans did, in fact, conserve. They made do with less electricity. They bought energy-efficient appliances. Auto companies, forced to abide by new fuel-efficiency laws, stopped making so many eight-cylinder gas guzzlers. But somewhere along the way we took a detour. The political and cultural climate changed. The word "conservation" gave way to the less loaded term "energy efficiency."

Marilyn Brown, a Georgia Tech professor of energy policy, says the government decided after the 1970s that it shouldn't tell people how to live.

"We were wanting not to characterize saving energy as having to live in the cold and the dark," she says. The emphasis was on using energy wisely, "as opposed to suffering. The whole Jimmy-Carter-wearing-a-sweater."

The Carter approach seemed to some people to be weak, timid, lacking in confidence. Americans are supposedly a muscular, energetic, independent bunch of folks, living large, always fighting with the urge to light out for the territory like Huck Finn, only not on a raft but in a sport utility vehicle. Meanwhile, in suburbia and exurbia, the newly affluent have had no compunction about expanding their homes to 4,000 square feet or 6,000 or even 8,000, with seldom-used formal living and dining rooms, overwrought guest bedrooms, auxiliary kitchens and even, perhaps, a conservatory on the off chance that someone will drop by to play the violin.

And so we wound up back where we started: worried about energy. Worried about the supply, worried about the demand. Worried about the political consequences of needing it and the environmental hazards of using it. Worried that it's killing us coming and going.

The big problem of energy supply isn't that we're in danger of suddenly running out. We've got a couple of hundred years' worth of coal in the ground, just for starters. And the Peak Oil theory collides with a long history of human ingenuity. The Pennsylvania geologist J.P. Lesley warned that the amazing production of oil in recent decades was a "temporary and vanishing phenomenon." That was in 1886. (I noticed that some older folks at Earthaven didn't buy into Peak Oil. "I think it's fear-based," Chuck Marsh says.)

The real energy dilemma is geopolitical and atmospheric. The United States imports 60 percent of its oil, much of it from places where even our friends seem to hate us.

Energy security has become a hot-button political issue. And then there's the whole issue of global warming. By burning coal, oil and gas, we are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and throwing the global climate out of whack. There aren't a lot of people, outside of the coal industry and Exxon Mobil, who think business as usual will be healthy for the planet. We need to keep that carbon in the ground and out of the air. Our long-term challenge may not be a lack of fossil fuel, but an abundance.

What if we could do with less?

Part of the problem is that we never run out of new ways to use energy. Free-market advocates point to a confounding fact about energy efficiency: It often leads to more

energy use, not less. The reason is that a technology that makes something more energy-efficient can also be used more broadly, in novel ways. Think about the amazing

advances in computer chips, which didn't simply make those bulky old mainframe computers smaller; the new microchips made possible the desktop computer, then the laptop, then the BlackBerry and all the other gadgetry that marks our lives. Someday your eyeglasses will always be online.

Energy use is calculated every year by the federal government, and from certain angles the numbers look encouraging. As we've shifted from an industrial to a service economy, we've gotten a lot more economic bang per Btu -- about 9,000 Btus per dollar of gross domestic product, compared with nearly 17,000 Btus per dollar three decades ago. But the economy has also tripled in that time, overwhelming the sizable gains in energy efficiency. Our total energy use (and carbon output) keeps going up and up and up. In 2004, we hit a national milestone: 100 quadrillion Btus.

The Department of Energy estimates that global energy use will triple by the end of this century. China wants to build 500 coal-fired electrical plants. The global population of 6.5 billion is expected to rise to at least 9 billion. At the moment, 1.6 billion people don't have electricity. They're all going to want it. In half a century, the planet is probably going to have 2 billion cars.

Finding a way to give people the energy, food, water, shelter, clothes, toys and entertainment they demand is going to be hard enough; doing it without roasting the planet is yet more daunting.

We hear all the time about alternative energy sources -- biomass, butanol, cellulosic ethanol, fuel cells, photovoltaics, wind farms, geothermal, hydroelectric, "the hydrogen economy." But even in aggregate, new energy technologies have to overcome the fact that fossil fuels, for all their faults, are rather marvelous. They're buried in the ground beneath our feet as though waiting for us to find them and use them. They pack a lot of energy into a small amount of matter. They can be easily stored and transported at normal temperatures (unlike, for example, hydrogen). New technologies have to outcompete the old ones.

There are technological optimists who say we have the know-how to solve the climate problem. They say it's a matter of political will. Many argue that the government has to find a way to factor in the long-term cost of climate change. Right now, carbon emissions are what economists call an "externality," a cost not included in the price of energy (just as health-care costs aren't factored into the price of cigarettes). One possibility would be some kind of carbon tax, or a "cap and trade" system that gives companies a financial incentive to cut emissions. The convoluted details of such schemes tend to be a bureaucrat's dream.

Al Gore has endorsed the "wedge" approach of two scientists, Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala. They argue that we need to remove 7 billion tons of carbon -- seven wedges -- from what we're currently projected to emit into the air in mid-century. They believe there are at least 15 potential wedges in their pie-shaped model. We could increase solar power 700-fold. We could stop deforestation. We could double nuclear power. We could increase wind power 80-fold to make hydrogen fuel cells for cars. Some of these ideas may be more difficult to achieve than others, but none of them requires a breakthrough in physics. These technologies exist and are already being used. And three "wedges" can come from energy efficiency and conservation: cutting electricity in homes and businesses; doubling fuel economy from 30 to 60 miles per gallon; driving 5,000 miles a year on average instead of 10,000.

One idea (and potential wedge), already in use by Norway, is burying CO2 underground. The crust of Earth is porous. "Carbon sequestration" captures CO2 at its origin in a power plant and pipes it deep into the ground, into depleted oil and natural gas reservoirs. But the scale of such an enterprise is daunting: "Just to give you an idea on a volume basis, you could be looking at Great Lakes' worth of carbon dioxide," says Scott Klara, who works on coal research for the Department of Energy.

Ethanol, already in mass production, offers a modest improvement over the carbon emissions of gasoline. But there may be better results from the next generation of ethanol, which will come not from corn kernels, but from cornstalks and other inedible forms of biomass. Still, transportation costs skyrocket as ethanol factories get larger and require biomass to be hauled from ever-greater distances. Jim McMillan, who works on biomass for DOE, asks: "Do we truck it? Do we barge it? Do we rail it? Do we do some preprocessing of it at the farm? Do we slurry pipeline it?" Cornstalks won't walk to the factory.

Wind power is booming. James A. Johnson, senior mechanical engineer with the National Wind Technology Center, says the design of wind turbines has greatly improved, and more turbines will come online in the next year than in the past 25 years combined. The problem with wind is not technological, but political, as wind farms run into the NIMBY problem: Not In My Back Yard. People living on Cape Cod or Martha's Vineyard, for example, have made it clear they want to gaze upon sailboats, not big metallic contraptions.

The photovoltaic industry is thriving, nearly doubling in size every couple of years with a boost from tax rebates. But going solar is still, at the moment, much more expensive than buying electricity from your local utility. You might pay 46 cents for a kilowatt-hour of solar energy, but only 8 or 9 cents a kilowatt-hour from the power company. "The technology needs to improve. Efficiencies need to improve. And then the production scale has to increase in order to bring costs down," says Tom Surek, manager of the photovoltaic program at DOE's Natural Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The nuclear power industry boasts that it produces no greenhouse gases. But nuclear has its own set of issues, including disposal of nuclear waste, terrorism fears and the sheer cost of building nuclear plants.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently came up with a comprehensive blueprint for future action. Five years in the making, the "Climate Change Technology Program Strategic Plan" is what you'd expect from the title: a technophile's handbook. The word "conservation" pops up in passing on Page 2 of the introduction, but this is not the place you'll find advice to turn down the thermostat in winter. We can finesse the global warming problem with "the power of markets and technological innovation," the report states. Human beings are essentially nowhere to be found in the document. In the calculations of energy use, Americans are not a variable but a constant. There's an assumption, stated explicitly at the outset of the report, that there will be "a continuation of existing patterns and trends in energy use."

We won't change. That's the official word.

FOR A PLACE DEDICATED TO BEING SUSTAINABLE, Earthaven has a fundamental problem: It's not. Not even close. No one pretends otherwise. There's not enough money, not enough labor.

"There's just not enough people here," longtime member Sue Stone says.

You can't buy a sandwich at Earthaven. You can't even buy a loaf of bread. You can buy a dozen organic eggs from a little farm in the center of the village, but no orange juice. There's a trading post that doubles as an Internet cafe, but it doesn't have enough of a customer base to carry much merchandise. For a quarter you can buy a cigarette, but you have to roll it yourself.

A dentist would be nice. Greg Geis has a cracked tooth. "I haven't had my eyes checked for nine years," he told me.

Washing clothes is a dilemma. There's no working laundromat yet, and most people take their laundry down the mountain into town. They'd rather not jump in a car, but being a purist isn't an option at the moment. Tracy Kunkler, for example, briefly carpooled into Asheville on Monday mornings with another of the single moms. They would dash from one errand to another -- laundromat, grocery store, bank, hardware store, etc. -- with three boys, ages 3 to 7, crammed into the back seat of Kunkler's Honda Civic. It was chaotic and exhausting. The carpooling plan was what turned out to be non-sustainable. They now drive separately.

"I'm not going to make myself crazy on a Monday with three kids in the back seat. That's the line I draw," says Kunkler, 37. "We're not martyring ourselves."

For Earthaven to make the next leap forward, it has to solve the basic problem of feeding itself. A community garden helps, but it's not enough. That's where Gateway Farm comes in. Anywhere else, the plowed field near the entrance to Earthaven would hardly be worth a second glance. Here, it represents a tremendous change. A gamble, really.

Chris Farmer -- everyone just calls him "Farmer" -- is the appropriately named driving force behind Gateway Farm. He's 35, sunburned, muscles taut from hard labor. He grew up mostly in Bethesda and spent a couple of years at Whitman High before his family moved away. While in college, he "had a realization one day that I hadn't eaten a single thing in my life that I knew where it came from." Nine years ago, he came to Earthaven, living in an old-fashioned canvas tent for two years, sleeping on a futon, reading by candle-light. On the coldest winter nights he'd boil water, seal it in a Mason jar, wrap the jar in a towel and put it under his blanket. He'd wake up and try to take a sip from his canteen and get nothing. Solid ice.

Almost every week he thought of leaving, but stuck it out. He built himself a microhut, 10.5 feet by 10.5 feet on the inside. He looks around today and wonders: "How do you take a bunch of overeducated suburban refugees and help them train themselves to build a village in the woods?"

The key, he believes, is entrepreneurship. Building an economy. He's among those who talk of markets, economies of scale, of expanding the definition of "sustainability" to include a larger bioregion defined by the watershed of Cedar Creek.

Last year Farmer, in partnership with a young Earthaven member named Brian Love, persuaded the village council to let them clear four acres of land. It was an agonizing decision. These were people committed to protecting the environment, not ravaging it.

Farmer and Brian and a team of co-workers first built a sweat lodge, a little structure in which they sat naked among stones heated in a fire, and contemplated what they were about to do. An old Indian ritual.

Then they brought in a huge, diesel-guzzling, smoke-belching industrial tractor and ripped out trees and dug out the stumps and piled the brush along the creek. It was, as Farmer put it, "ecological brutality." He felt a scar on his soul. But he also felt honest.

Humans require food. Earthaven would never be sustainable, never be a real ecovillage, until it could feed itself. Farmer had a guiding principle: It is essential, he says, to "bring the effects of our actions within the horizon of lived experience." Translation: Someone who can't stand the idea of cleared land should give up eating vegetables. "They're not growing under tulip poplar trees."

If they can get the farm going, they might be able to create biofuel from their crops rather than buy gas and propane from mainstream sources. They could grow vegetables. Raise livestock. They've dug a pond for aquaculture (fishing, etc.).

It all takes money, labor, imagination and energy. It's ambitious. There are times when Farmer sounds as though he's been reading the Wall Street Journal.

"We're undercapitalized, and we're under-entrepreneurized," he says. "Unless we're just a bunch of hippies living in the woods."

JUST A BUNCH OF HIPPIES . . .

Yeah, you could probably make a case for that if you wanted. There's a lot going on at Earthaven that's not exactly . . . linear. Being off the grid is just one element of being an "alternative community." "It's a social experiment that's packaged up as environmental awareness-slash-conservation," Kimchi says. Traditional families are rare. Earthaven has little kids scampering around, and they go to a school on the property, but there's only a single teenager. Because teenagers find the place boring. "Teenagers just don't do well here," Marjorie Vestal says. "They want their peers, they want technology, they want sports, they want to be invisible."

Privacy is rare, romantic life transparent. One person's problems become everyone's problems. "We almost read each other's minds," Greg said at one point. If you don't work hard enough or create a bad vibe, you might be called to face the community in what is known as a Heartshare. Operating by consensus is not exactly fast and efficient. One person can block an initiative. "We can spend years discussing whether one particular word should be included in the bylaws," Greg said.

Could the rest of us live this way?

Um, no. Not unless held at gunpoint. Most of us aren't moving to Earthaven or anything like it. On the official Earthaven tour, a banker with a small farm who was taking the tour just to get tips on animal husbandry, shook his head at the thought of living by consensus with lots of other people. "That'd kill me," he said.

What the visitor realizes at Earthaven is how much energy is expended in mainstream culture just keeping other people out of our hair. There's a reason everyone on the block drives separately to the grocery store. It's a waste of energy but, arguably, a rational purchase of independence. For the most part, we don't use energy to be powerful; we use it to be alone.

And yet for all its imperfections and eccentricities, there's a lot that's right about Earthaven. There's an honesty and directness, not only in the approach to energy but in every aspect of daily life. The people here are self-aware, awake, perceptive. They work hard. They don't do things the easy way. And I never heard anyone try to hype the place. No one pretends that Another Way is an easy road to travel. They don't even argue that they represent the future of the planet.

"I don't think the future is going to be in isolated rural communities like this," Sue Stone says.

Mall culture, Chuck Marsh says, isn't going to be changed by "this little experiment that we're doing in the woods."

But in the same way that Earthaven is gradually adopting ideas from the mainstream -- pushing entrepreneurship, building an economy -- the mainstream may have no choice one day but to adopt some ideas from Earthaven. Starting with being conscious about energy.

Cities, where most of us live, are where the battle for energy efficiency has to be won. Fleeing to the woods isn't an option to begin with. There are not enough resources in the world to allow all 6.5 billion (or 8 or 9 or 10 billion) people to live in their own little Earthaven, says John Anderson, an engineer with Rocky Mountain Institute in Boulder, Colo. And because of their density and higher use of public transportation, cities can actually have a low carbon footprint per capita. "One of the least carbon-intensive places on Earth is Manhattan," Anderson says.

Individuals -- the "end users" in this whole energy drama -- can create one of those billion-ton carbon wedges. And being green doesn't necessarily mean suffering. Many of the things that save energy also improve lives. City planners are trying to design communities with less distance between where people live and work; less time stuck in traffic jams saves energy and sanity simultaneously. Green architecture places an emphasis on natural light -- a nice thing in and of itself. Greg's house at Earthaven is pleasant without any artificial lighting during the day. There's a big light out there in space, 93 million miles away, doing all the hard work.

Switching to an energy-efficient refrigerator saves money in the long run, and lots of energy. Eating local foods rather than something shipped from California or Brazil or New Zealand may be pleasant on the palate -- local often means fresher.

The federal government estimates that if you switch five high-energy light bulbs with Energy Star bulbs, you'll save $60 a year. If everyone in America did that, we'd delete from our greenhouse emissions the equivalent of what's emitted annually by 21 power plants.

Mainstream culture can be cynical about those who are self-consciously green. To be ecologically centered is to be eccentric. To tread softly on the planet is to be "crunchy." What Earthaven seeks to be, an "ecovillage," at first blush may sound a bit silly, a bit theme-parkish. But the mainstream is its own vast theme park, built around the themes of consumption, convenience and more of everything. We talk a good game about nature, even as we become more and more removed from it. We're all environmentalists these days but cannot imagine life without paper towels and a microwave.

Change is hard. We have to start somewhere.

"You pick your battles," Farmer says. "Often the perfect is the enemy of the good."

When I got home from Earthaven, the first thing I did was turn off some lights.

Joel Achenbach is a staff writer for the Magazine and can be reached at achenbachj@washpost.com

Another Way
A band of idealists in the mountains of North Carolina is trying to build a low-energy lifestyle. But must we all live like hippies in the woods to make a difference?

By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page W10

11/13: Livestock Emergencies: Carcass Disposal Symposium Planned

NATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON CARCASS DISPOSAL, December 4-7
The National Symposium on Carcass Disposal, cosponsored by USDA, the EPA, and several state universities will be held December 4-7 in Beltsville, Maryland. The symposium brings together agricultural officials, researchers, policy makers, and emergency first-responders to discuss emergency and large volume livestock carcass disposal. To register, visit www.composting.org or contact Jeanne Pipicello, University of Maine, (207) 832-0343.

11/13: Our Most Prosperous State: NJ

NYTimes: 11/10/06 Where Officialdom Lunched, the Vermin Grazed, Too
November 10, 2006 By JONATHAN MILLER, New York Times
TRENTON, Nov. 9 — It is certainly not Pete Lorenzo’s Cafe, the restaurant of choice here where legislators and lobbyists conduct serious business while having a thick steak Pittsburgh style.

Still, when someone from the attorney general’s office or the Supreme Court staff wanted a sandwich or a cup of soup at lunchtime, the cafeteria at the Richard J. Hughes Justice Complex served the purpose. But that was not all that was served, and that was the problem.

On Wednesday, after a second inspection by the state’s Department of Health, the cafeteria was shut for the foreseeable future and the vendor’s contract terminated. Inspectors found 34 violations on their first visit, on Oct. 31, including three live roaches found in the salad line, dozens of live and dead roaches around the grill and kitchen, dead rodents, rodent droppings and “dead white-winged, fly-like insects” on the garbage room floor.

All this came as little surprise to Deputy Attorney General Dan Reynolds, a frequent diner at the cafeteria, who said he usually ordered a grilled cheese sandwich — “adequate,” he deemed it — because it was one meal “you could see them making in front of you.”

Mr. Reynolds said his trips to the salad bar ended abruptly even before the cafeteria was inspected, when an e-mail message began circulating that said vermin had been found there.

“The soup wasn’t bad,” he said, but then rethought his response. “Given what the reports are, I’m not sure it’s sanitary.”

The decision to close the cafeteria, which serves about 3,000 employees in the attorney general’s office and the Department of Law and Public Safety, the New Jersey Supreme Court and other state agencies, was made by Attorney General Stuart Rabner and Dr. Fred Jacobs, the commissioner of health and senior services.

David Wald, a spokesman for Mr. Rabner, said of the cafeteria, “There were some pretty disturbing things in there.”

A spokesman for the Health Department said the cafeteria was allowed to continue operating after the Oct. 31 inspection on the condition that it remedy several problems, including food debris under meat slicers, faulty food preparation equipment and rodents.

When the cafeteria was inspected again on Wednesday, state officials found some of the violations corrected, but they said the improvements were not enough to allow it to remain open.

For Allen Smith, who works for the human resources office in the Judiciary Division, the final straw came two weeks ago, when he saw what he described as an impossibly big cockroach resting on top of a potato chip left on a counter beside a soda machine.

“Disgusting,” was his one-word assessment of the dining hall.

Mr. Wald said the state ended the contract with the vendor, Unique Food Management Inc., of Cresskill, N.J. The contract with the company, which manages no other state dining halls, was set to expire in April 2007.

The owner of Unique Food Management, Harry Murphy, told The Associated Press that the company had worked hard to correct the problems at the cafeteria, adding that the state was responsible for some of them. He said that there were already pest problems in the building when the company was hired in 2003, and that it inherited faulty equipment that the state was slow to fix.

There was no shortage of cafeteria horror stories on Thursday, as state employees roamed the neighborhood looking for a place to grab a quick and inexpensive lunch. Many described swarming ants near the soda fountain, roaches roaming the salad bar, undercooked pork, objects floating in drinks — and managers who seemed indifferent to complaints.

“I went up to the manager and said, ‘You have roaches crawling over the lids,’ ” said Mr. Smith, who added that his complaint was met with a shrug. Later, when he told the same manager about the roach on the potato chip, he said, she simply squashed the insect.

Marlaine Meskunas, who works in the Criminal Division, said she ate at the cafeteria “every day,” mostly ordering turkey sandwiches or a wrap, although most of her colleagues had stopped going there.

As for Thursday, “I didn’t eat,” Ms. Meskunas said, as she lounged outdoors in the springlike weather during her lunch break. “I’m smoking cigarettes instead.”

Mr. Smith said he was already taking a more cautious approach. “I think I’ll start bringing a lunch,” he said. “That’s a little safer. At least I know what’s going on inside my house.”

11/13: Meat Recalled: Maple Leaf Kitchener Ont

Syringe casings in meats held saline and blood thinner

Canada.Com

OTTAWA - Syringe casings that prompted a national recall of some Maple Leaf Foods products contained a mixture of saline solution and a blood thinning nutrient not normally used on animals, the company confirmed yesterday. The solution, commonly used to flush out wounds, is not used at the company's plant in Kitchener, Ont., and the casings found are different than those used by Maple Leaf, which adds fuel to fears some meat products were purposefully tampered with. "It would not normally be used in this facility or in animal care, to our knowledge," said Maple Leaf spokeswoman Linda Smith. Syringe casings were found in the plant on Oct. 24 and last Thursday and Friday, although a product recall was not announced until Tuesday. More casings were discovered last week, including one last Friday that was stuck inside a ham, which prompted the company to contact the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Although the company has received more than 900 phone calls since the recall was announced on Tuesday, no illnesses or tampered products have been reported.
Meat Recalled, Police Called After Syringe Casings Found At Maple Leaf Plant (http://www.canada.com/ Canada)
KITCHENER, ON - A syringe casing found jutting out of a ham at a Maple Leaf Foods processing plant in southwestern Ontario prompted a precautionary recall and a police investigation Tuesday for fear some of the company's meat had been tampered with. Products pulled from store shelves and examined have so far tested negative for any traces of contamination, and no illnesses related to the products have been reported, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said. An employee found the syringe casing, which contained trace amounts of a saline or salt-based solution, during his Friday night shift, said Maple Leaf spokeswoman Linda Smith. The agency was called Saturday and arrived at the facility Sunday night; the meat packer issued a recall of several products early Tuesday at the urging of the agency, Smith said. It was the third time a syringe casing had been found in the plant in just two weeks, but the first to prompt a recall because it was touching food, she added. No needles were found with the casings. "The company has acted appropriately, bringing the CFIA in when they did," Smith said.
The first casing was found Oct. 24 in the vicinity of raw meat products, but not touching any food. An incident report was written up by the company, with the theory that "perhaps it had come in with outside supply and was part of veterinary supplies," Smith said. The second syringe casing was found last Thursday on a table top. Police described the syringes as plastic, similar to those used to administer medication or cleanse a wound. Waterloo Regional Police Insp. Bryan Larkin said forensic investigators spent all day Monday going through the entire processing and manufacturing process at the plant. Police haven't yet determined whether the syringe casing found in the ham was put there on purpose. "That's the essence of our investigation - to actually determine how and why this did occur. It's a wide-open investigation," Larkin said. "We're currently concentrating our efforts internally right now, but it's a very complex investigation based on the magnitude and size of the company that we're currently looking into."
During a shift change at the Kitchener plant Tuesday, employees were tight-lipped about the incidents and politely declined to comment. Investigations and recalls rarely begin immediately after an incident is reported, said CFIA food safety and recall officer Garfield Balsom. "We have to determine if there's any product is affected, what's out on the marketplace, if there's any on the marketplace," Balsom said. "We have to be assured of all the products that are affected." Smith said all of the company's retail customers have been contacted, shipments of the product in distribution centers have been stopped, and the company's aim is for all product to be removed from shelves by the end of the day Wednesday. Most of the product has already been pulled from shelves, she said. Maple Leaf Foods Inc. recently reported a third-quarter loss of $22.3 million, the result of major restructuring costs. As part of that plan, the company recently canceled plans to build a new $110-million pork processing plant in Saskatoon and said it will wind down operations at one of two existing plants in the city over the next three years.

World Briefing | Americas

NY TIMES 8 NOV: Canada: Syringe Found in Ham

By IAN AUSTEN, NEW YORK TIMES
Published: November 8, 2006

The police are investigating possible food tampering that led one of Canada’s largest meat packers to initiate a nationwide recall of hams and lunchmeats. Schneiders, a unit of Maple Leaf Foods, said a plastic syringe was found inside a ham, and two others were discovered on equipment at a plant in Kitchener, Ontario. The syringes did not have needles and were described as the type normally used to give liquid medicines to small children. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said none of the meat involved in the recall was exported outside Canada.

11/11: Agro Terror Overview (Homeland Security Daily Wire)

Agroterror overview(Homeland Security Daily Wire)

As the attacks of 9/11 showed, terrorism is in large part theatre, so it is natural that attention of security planners should focus most immediately on threats that would satisfy terrorists' desire for spectacle. Yet not all terrorists are like al-Qaeda, and even that group, it is fair to assume, can change its tactics and goals. At the same time, most of the technology developed in the post-9/11 world has focused on these larger threats -- airplane hijacking and radiological bombs first and foremost. The result is an overemphasis on these threats to the near exclusion of others. Of these under-considered vulnerabilities, food safety tops the list.

Unlike a dirty bomb attack, which is much easier to prevent than to mitigate, agroterrorism is best approached as a problem to be stopped after the attack itself has been completed. Due to long supply and manufacturing chains, there are just too many areas of vulnerability to ensure security on the front end. Consider the milk sold in the supermarket. After being extracted from the cow -- who we hope has not been in some way poisoned -- a delivery truck, after making all of its rounds for the day, carries it to the production plant where it is treated and homogenized. Then it is bottled and distributed, often across state lines. Should a terrorist desire to infect the milk supply with ricin, he could do so at various points in the process. Most worrisome of all, if he poisoned the delivery truck, it would be impossible to trace the original source.

A chilling story this week from Canada provides another example. After syringe casings were repeatedly found touching meat at a plant operated by Toronto-based Maple Leaf Foods, the processing giant was forced to recall large shipments of ham and turkey products. Although no illnesses have been reported, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said it suspects some meat products may have been tampered with an exposed to an ''unknown contaminant.'' In the case of Maple Leaf, the contamination was easily located because the culprit left behind evidence. Yet had the casings gone unnoticed, and had illness resulted, it might have been impossible to tell whether the processing company or the original meat supplier had been at fault. Defending food lines is critical, but it is not anywhere near as easy as defending an airport.

The problems are further compounded by the vastness of the American food industry. In the Mid-Atlantic region alone there are 100,000 farms and nearly 150,000 post-farm businesses. Nationwide, ninety-seven percent of farms are family farms, small and undercapitalized businesses that can ill-afford expensive security, monitoring, and tracking systems. On the other hand, large factory farms are only 3 percent of the total but contribute 40 percent of the output, making them better able to manage security but also prime targets for a massive agroterror attack.

Not that the agriculture industry does not try to play defense. The problem is that it has enemies other than terrorists -- natural enemies such as imported pests and pathogens, as well as a lawsuits stemming from unhygienic practices. These threats are well-known and not at all uncommon, and so the agro-defense industry -- much older than the homeland security industry -- has built up around securing fields from rusts and rots rather than from ricin. Nevertheless, the threat continues to grow in proportion to imports from abroad. In 2005 the United States imported nearly twenty-seven million metric tons of agricultural products, of which significantly less than 5 percent was subjected to thorough inspection. Customs and Border Protection in 2005 seized a daily average of over 1,100 prohibited agricultural products at ports of entry, including 147 agricultural pests. All told, pests and disease cost the industry approximately $3 billion per year, with Asian soybean rust (introduced in 2004) to cost $2 billion alone.

In consideration of these obstacles, the federal government has initiated a number of programs to help get new technologies on the market. The Support Anti-terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act limits civil liability for developers of qualified technologies that protect the nation's food supply. DHS is also starting work on a new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) to support bioforensics, the science of identifying and tracking outbreaks, and in 2004 DHS announced the Regional Technology Integration (RTI) initiative. The latter focuses on regional collaboration and private sector solutions for a range of infrastructure threats, including agriculture.

To our minds, the best thing that could come out of these efforts is a national geographical information system (GIS)-based food tracking system that incorporated data about production and retail distribution for post-attack analysis. Such an approach would take advantage of the RFID sensors now attached to livestock for inventory purposes by attaching new biosensors that will alert food processors to possible contaminates. By layering this data over geographic information related to soils, geology, water resources, and transportation networks, security officials would have the tools to identify likely dispersion patterns and work backwards toward likely contamination sites. One such system is already at work in Kansas, where public health officials have managed to identify prime locations to bury diseased animals in a way that respects state and federal laws and protect water sources and agricultural land from contaminated drainage.

11/10: Bio Terrorism & GIS

Responding to the Threat of Agricultural Bioterrorism
By Shawn Hutchinson

Directions Magazine
In October 2004, Kevin Coleman discussed the susceptibility of the U.S. food supply chain to bioterrorist attack. Given events surrounding the recent E. coli outbreak in spinach grown in the U.S., now is an ideal time to revisit the subject of food safety by expanding upon the place of agriculture in the United States and some of the ways in which geospatial technology, and its practitioners, can address this area of homeland security.

The vital roles played by agriculture (and those employed in that sector of our economy) are largely underappreciated by many people. These roles include the provision of food, maintenance of healthy ecosystem function, and enhancement of aesthetic qualities. However, the "selling point" most often used to convey the importance of agriculture, and to capture the attention of decision makers, is simple economics. Various reports published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) show that agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry, with the total value of agricultural products exceeding $117 billion dollars, and that of agriculture and related industries topping $563 billion.

While many of the plant and animal products grown or raised in the U.S. are used domestically, a significant portion is also exported to other nations. In 2004, total U.S. agricultural exports were estimated at $61.4 billion - with agriculture being one of the few trade sectors in which the U.S. often exports a higher value commodity than we import. While these national figures are certainly impressive, the economics of agriculture is perhaps even more important at the state and county scales. Consider, for instance, that farm income accounts for over 30% of the total income in many rural U.S. counties.

So, the "grand challenge" for domestic food safety and security programs is then twofold: To ensure access to a safe, reliable and inexpensive food supply and, at the same time, to maintain the profitability of plant and animal production systems. However, our collective ability to meet this challenge is under constant threat.

We face, for example, the nearly impossible task of stopping invasive pests and introduced pathogens from entering the country. Unfortunately, the number of such introductions will not only continue, but likely increase, if for no other reason than sheer logistics. In fiscal year (FY) 2005, the U.S. imported nearly 27 million metric tons of agricultural products (excluding wine and malt beverages). Of this amount, significantly less than 5% was subjected to thorough inspection. Despite this low inspection rate, the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection agency seized a daily average of over 1,100 prohibited agricultural products at ports of entry in FY 2005, including 147 agricultural pests.

The financial impact of disease and pest management is significant, costing the agricultural industry in the neighborhood of $3 billion per year. The projected economic impact of one disease alone, Asian soybean rust (first introduced into the U.S. in 2004), is upwards of $2 billion. This, and future introductions may result in restrictions on domestic and foreign trade, disruptions in food production, changes in consumer perceptions and confidence, and employment declines within all aspects of agriculture and food markets.

Given the monetary importance of the agricultural sector, it is not an overstatement to say that the economic well-being of the nation, and that of many rural communities, is susceptible to significant disruption. Several additional factors further expose U.S. agriculture to the harm posed by natural and intentional introductions of pests and pathogens. These "multiplying" factors include a genetic simplification of planted landscapes and food animal lines that makes crops and livestock more susceptible to disease, the difficulty of monitoring plant and animal conditions (i.e., situational awareness) over large geographic areas, and the concentrations of crops and livestock production at local and regional scales.

One framework which can be used to plan for and execute our response to agricultural biosecurity events is the emergency response cycle outlined by hazards researchers. Here the term "hazard" is considered broadly, and can be applied equally to natural events, technological failures and biological agents. The cycle of emergency response begins with "preparedness" - how people and places plan to deal with a hazard event. Eventually, a disaster happens (such as a tornado) and it tests how well we have prepared for that hazard. We respond to the emergency by rescuing people and addressing other immediate threats to life, limb and property. Following response is the recovery stage, which includes "cleaning up" after the disaster and other efforts geared toward getting back to "normal" conditions. Next, and often concurrent with the later recovery activities, is the mitigation phase. Here, the disaster and our reaction to it are assessed, and ways to improve preparedness, response and recovery are identified. Finally we transition back to the preparedness stage, await the next hazard and begin the whole process again.

This same emergency response cycle can be used to guide our actions in the event of a biological hazard and, I believe, contribute to an operational definition of food safety and agricultural biosecurity:

"The ability to develop, maintain, and execute a rapid and effective emergency response to disease outbreaks and invasive species in order to ensure a safe, constant, and profitable supply of food, feed, and fiber." (Author's unpublished quote)

Geospatial technologies have played, and will continue to play, a key role in the development, maintenance and execution of emergency response cycles related to food security and agricultural biosecurity events. One example that illustrates this role is a spatial model for locating large-scale livestock carcass disposal sites.

Consider for a moment a scenario where Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is detected in beef cattle within a commercial feedlot. After confirming the diagnosis, the relevant state department of agriculture working in conjunction with the USDA will implement some form of an animal carcass disposal plan. That plan will involve destroying cattle from the affected feedlot, as well as those from neighboring operations within an established quarantine zone, to prevent the spread of the disease. For some states, such as Kansas, the preferred disposal mechanism is burial. The next logical question to ask, then, is where to bury as many as several hundred thousand head of cattle found within the quarantine zone?

To help solve this problem, we can view and simultaneously analyze a series of thematic data layers in a GIS-based landscape suitability model to prepare our emergency response. Geographical datasets including environmental and cultural information related to soils, geology, water resources, transportation networks, threatened and endangered species, and population can be combined into automated digital workflows using functionality built into commercial GIS software packages. The model created for the State of Kansas currently uses twelve data layers that represent "exclusion criteria" developed by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). These data are then subjected to various geoprocessing procedures to produce maps that identify the cumulative geographic area falling within the spatial extent of one or more of the predefined exclusion criteria - in other words, the least preferred sites for carcass burial.

Running this model yields results such as that shown here for Finney County, Kansas. Green areas on the map represent locations that do not violate any exclusion criteria and, therefore, would be preferred burial sites. Based upon the KDHE exclusion criteria, nearly 40% of the county would be unsuitable for animal burial. It is important to note that licensed animal feeding operations are required by the state to develop a plan for onsite livestock burial. However, a visual comparison between actual feedyard locations (not shown on map for security reasons) and preferred mass burial locations indicates a potential flaw in this strategy - and that onsite burial may not actually be in the long term interests of regional populations.

Figure 2. Results from GIS-based animal carcass disposal site evaluation model for Finney County, Kansas (unpublished data, Geographic Information Systems Spatial Analysis Laboratory, Department of Geography, Kansas State University). (Click for larger image)

Given the automated nature of this method, emergency managers now have a sound procedure, based upon good science, for rapidly identifying suitable burial sites before and during an event. The ability to "pre-emptively" target preferred sites for burial is especially helpful when negotations are required to obtain burial rights on private lands.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, several post-event analyses have highlighted the importance of both GIS and geographic data in providing rapid and effective emergency response. Summarized from Galloway (2003), some of those key findings include:

* Having geographic datasets for critical infrastructure already developed and on-hand prior to an emergency
* Having the human and information technology infrastructure in place to facilitate sharing geographic information
* The importance of graphical forms of communication, such as maps, in conveying information to both decision makers and the public
* Having made a "pre-response" investment in developing relevant decision support tools

We must take these hard lessons learned in the aftermath of intentional attacks on urban centers and apply them equally, and urgently, to the area of agricultural biosecurity. As noted by Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kansas) in 2001, our nation’s crops and livestock are at very high risk. It is time for the U.S. to make an appropriate investment in food safety and security.

References:

Cutter, S.L. 2003. GI Science, disasters, and emergency management. Transactions in GIS 7(4):439-445.

Galloway, G.E. 2003. Emergency preparedness and response: Lessons learned from 9/11. In Cutter, S.L., Richardson, D.B., and Wilbanks, T.J. (eds) Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism. New York, Routledge: 27-34.

Thomas, D.S.K., S.L. Cutter, M. Hodgson, M. Gutekunst, and S. Jones. 2002. Use of Spatial Data and Geographic Technologies in Response to the September 11 Terrorist Attack. Boulder, CO, University of Colorado, Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, Quick Response Bulletin No. 153 (available at ).

J.M. Shawn Hutchinson is Assistant Professor of Geography and Director of the Geographic Information Systems Spatial Analysis Laboratory (GISSAL) at Kansas State University. His research is centered on the integration of geospatial technologies with environmental models, especially as it applies to the thematic areas of environmental assessment, biogeography, and biosecurity.


Bioterrorism and the Food Supply
By Kevin Coleman
(Oct 01, 2004)

Directions Magazine

The goal of terrorists is to strike fear in the hearts of their targets.This can take many forms. They may wish to cause death, shock, economic disruption, loss of faith in authorities, psychological trauma, dread, or just uncertainty.Perhaps the act that would most readily accomplish this would be an attack on the United States' food supply.Protecting the food supply has been a priority for public health officials for decades.Traditionally, industry and regulators have depended on spot-checks of manufacturing conditions and random sampling of final products to ensure safe food.This system is seen as more reactive than preventive because it finds problems after they have occurred rather than as the food is being prepared.

So what is at stake? Here are some interesting statistics about the food supply-chain in the United States.These are just from just the Mid-Atlantic region.

Mid-Atlantic Food Supply

* Number of farms = over 100,000
* Number of post-farm businesses = nearly 150,000
* Private Sector Food Business = over 12% of private sector businesses involve food
* Collective Sales = over $300 billion
* Employment = nearly 12% of the workforce

The introduction by terrorists of noxious or lethal materials into foods or beverages could result in undetected, rapid and widespread distribution within the food supply-chain that relies on distributed food production, processing and transportation firms.There are really three types of terrorist threats to the food supply.

1) The use of food or water as a delivery mechanism for pathogens, chemicals, and/or other harmful substances for the purpose of causing human illness or death.

2) The introduction of anti-crop or anti-livestock agents into agricultural systems.

3) The physical disruption of the flow of food/water as a result of the destruction of transportation or other vital infrastructure.

So how vulnerable is our food supply? That is a question that has been asked by scientists and government officials.The answer lies in an analysis of the "food" supply-chain.The supply chain begins with a vast number of producers (farms) and the numerous transportation, processing and distribution facilities that are all part of bringing the food to the point of consumption.It is estimated that 98 percent of all U.S.farms are family farms.This small, highly distributed food production network creates security, monitoring and tracking challenges. Very large factory farms make up only 3 percent of the total farms but contribute more than 40 percent of the output.In addition to being vulnerable to terrorist attacks, this system makes it exceedingly difficult to trace back and identify the source of the contaminated food.

Figure 1 examines the likelihood of a bioterrorism attack against the U.S.food supply and the impact of such an attack.Four recent GAO reports found gaps in federal controls for protecting agriculture and the food supply.Local, state and federal officials must do even more to protect our food supply from tampering. A new comprehensive approach is needed if we are to safeguard our food supply.

* Document the "food" supply-chain
* Analyze risks and vulnerabilities
* Identify critical control points
* Establish monitoring procedures
* Develop response plan
* Develop reporting and tracking system
* Develop system reliability checks

The Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 (the Bioterrorism Act) directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to take steps to protect the public from a threatened or actual terrorist attack on the U.S.food supply.

Exempt from these regulations are the transportation vehicles that hold food only in the usual course of business.As you could imagine the ability to attack our food supply while in transit from the production site is a critical area and possibly the area that has the least amount of protection currently.It is important to recognize that this is only one of many exceptions granted under the act.

Protecting U.S.agriculture and ensuring safe and wholesome meat and poultry is one of the primary challenges facing USDA.The office of the Inspector General of the United States Department of Agriculture's chief missions is to ensure the safety of the food supply, both by auditing food safety programs to detect deficiencies and recommend improvements and by investigating criminal activity involving the intentional contamination of food products.They also monitor the processing and sale of adulterated meat, poultry, and egg products; and the substitution, adulteration or other misrepresentation of food products regulated or inspected by USDA.

Technology
The Department of Homeland Security in June 2004 announced the first Designations and Certifications under the Support Anti-terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act.The SAFETY Act provides liability limitations for makers and sellers of qualified anti-terrorism technologies, including those that may be used to protect the nation's food supply.DHS is also developing a new National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) to support the law enforcement and intelligence communities in their biodefense responsibilities. The Center will apply the newest advances in science to the challenges both of biological threat characterization and of bioforensics, strengthening the nation's ability to determine the source of a biological agent used in an attack and strengthening deterrence.In June 2004, DHS announced its new Regional Technology Integration (RTI) initiative.RTI provides a mechanism for working directly with urban areas on infrastructure protection (including protection of the food supply) to develop and deliver new technologies as part of a regional security response.The program focuses on regional collaboration, private sector solutions, measurable objectives and continuous evaluation, and communicating best practices and lessons learned to other communities, states, Congress, the Administration, and other federal agencies.

The support is there.Now all that is needed is a workable platform that can provide an economically feasible solution to safeguarding our food supply.A critical component of this platform will, without question, be a GIS system that supports tracking and traceability.Incorporated into the platform will also be RFID capabilities to trace the product throughout the food supply-chain. These hybrid tags will also serve to detect tampering and integrated with new biosensors will alert food processors to possible contaminates.But this platform will not be cheap.The question is can the platform be developed and implemented in time to protect the population from a bioterrorist attack against our food supply? Only time will answer that question.

Conclusion
The food supply is by far the most vulnerable to a bioterrorism attack.This year we learned from news reports that terrorists have developed materials to manufacture salmonella and botulinum, and they may have intended to poison the food supply.Even more alarming was a Washington Post article on biological weapons developed by the South African government under the apartheid regime, including a biological agent created by splicing a common strain of E.coli with a toxin-producing gene from Clostridium perfringens.These are only a handful of examples of food bioterrorism that demonstrate the health and economic damage that could be inflicted through an attack on the food supply.

We need to continue to strengthen our food supply surveillance systems and improve communication and coordination among local, state and federal agencies to heighten the ability to recognize and quickly respond to food-borne outbreaks.This will not be cheap or able to be accomplished in a short period of time.

Coleman is the former Chief Strategist at Netscape.

11/10: WTO Deal Confirmed by US & Russia; US ELECTIONS

Russia, U.S. confirm WTO deal
Fri Nov 10, 2006 11:15 AM ET

By Elif Kaban and Doug Palmer

REUTERS

FT.COM

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia and the United States agreed in principle on Friday on Moscow's bid to join the World Trade Organization, marking a major breakthrough after 13 years of tortuous negotiations.

The deal paves the way for presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush to sign a bilateral accord when they meet at an economic summit in Vietnam next week.

That would enable Russia to advance to the final stage of entry talks with the WTO's 149 members on a comprehensive deal to bring its $1 trillion economy -- the largest outside the trade club -- on board.

FT EDITORIAL: RUSSIA / WTO
Editorial comment: Trade rules for Russia
Published: November 6 2006 02:00 | Last updated: November 6 2006 02:00

It may come as some small comfort to the World Trade Organisation, struggling without much success to put the Doha round back on its feet, that WTO membership is still regarded as a badge of international respectability. But that credibility could be undermined if Russia, the largest economy outside the WTO, is allowed to enter without making a serious effort to enforce its rules. The US, the only remaining obstacle to Russia's accession, is right to press for pledges that laws will be not just enacted but enforced.

Russia's entrance into the WTO is not before time. It has become ever more embarrassing that the Group of Eight nations, supposedly a club of rich democracies, includes a country that has yet to achieve what more than 30 of the world's 50 least-developed countries have already done.

How much real difference WTO membership will make to Russia's international trade, at least in the short run, is doubtful. No producer of oil and gas is exactly finding it difficult to hunt out international buyers for its exports, and the Kremlin, whose status as an energy exporter has given it a powerful negotiating weapon, seems to have got at least some of its way in restraining trade in financial services.

The issue that has held up membership the most is one that many trade economists say should not be in a WTO agreement at all: the protection of intellectual property rights. Russian optical disc plants continue to produce millions of DVDs that infringe thecopyright of US film studios.

The problem the US faces, even more so than with China, is not so much the law - on paper Russian copyright law is just about adequate - as its enforcement. With the high-handedness it typically shows towards inconvenient regulations, Russia's leadership has shown almost no enthusiasm for clamping down on piracy; while the number of criminal and civil counterfeiting actions has increased, the numbers convicted and fined or jailed has not. Neither the history of Soviet communism nor its subsequent status as an oligarchical oil and gas producer has made the Russian establishment particularly respectful of property rights.

These are intrinsically difficult areas in which to set quantifiable performance criteria, which is merely one of the reasons that IPR is an awkward addition to trade deals. The US cannot very well demand Russia lock up a minimum number of counterfeiters every year, though American officials have occasionally been known to gaze wistfully at the horizon about the idea.

While the presence of IPR in WTO law is a matter for controversy, now it is there it ought to be enforced, if only to preserve the credibility of the entire system. WTO membership should not be an automatic right, nor a privilege that can be extorted by energy blackmail. If Russia wants the respectability of belonging to the WTO it needs to demonstrate it can play by its rules.
END 11/6 EDITORIAL

RESUME 11/10 REPORTING
Russia, U.S. confirm WTO deal
Fri Nov 10, 2006 11:15 AM ET

By Elif Kaban and Doug Palmer

REUTERS
"Delegations from both sides have reached agreement on all the principles of this agreement," Russia's Economy Ministry said in a statement on its Web site.

"Both sides aim to complete the process of bringing Russia into the WTO and are ready to take more active measures to reach that goal."

The news was well flagged after officials and business leaders in Moscow told Reuters earlier there had been a breakthrough.

News overnight that Bush plans a stopover in Moscow on his way to Hanoi for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, which starts on November 18, also increased expectations that a WTO deal had been clinched.

"We have an agreement in principle and are finalizing the details. We are also holding consultations with the Congress and our cleared advisers," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said in a statement issued in Washington.

"This agreement will mark an important step in Russia attaining membership in the WTO."

HOME STRETCH

Russia had hoped to announce a WTO deal with the United States at the summit of the G8 group of leading industrialized nations in St Petersburg in July but was unable to overcome the negotiating hurdles in time.

Talks between the U.S. and Russia hit trouble on the home stretch over Moscow's unwillingness to grant access to U.S. meat imports and Washington's concerns about Internet and video piracy in Russia.

Keith Rockwell, a spokesman for the WTO in Geneva, welcomed news of the breakthrough but cautioned that Russia may not make it into the club as quickly as many expect. China, he said, took 20 months to get in after completing its bilaterals.

"Don't forget that accession is a two stage process," Rockwell told Reuters.

"Even after Russia completes all its bilaterals, it must still gain consensus from the multilateral Working Party, where much work remains to be done and where some complications have arisen."

Arkady Dvorkovich, head of the Kremlin's economic staff, was more optimistic and forecast that Russia could wrap up a final entry deal within months.

"It's mutually beneficial -- it's in the interests of Russia because we receive the opportunity to operate in foreign markets, and introduce foreign countries to the Russian market on the basis of established rules," he told Reuters.

"Our foreign partners ... will be able to work in the Russian market on the basis of better known, more defined rules. We are already used to tough competition, so our companies have nothing to fear."

Accession would stimulate Russian service industries such as telecoms, banking and insurance, and "lead to a step-up in reforms by Russian companies to keep pace with the competition," said Peter Westin, chief economist at MDM-Bank in Moscow.

But the impact on trade may be more muted than was the case when China joined the WTO in 2001. Chinese manufacturers are enjoying an unprecedented export boom, while Russia is already reaping a big windfall from its oil and gas exports.

(Reporting by Douglas Busvine in Moscow and Richard Waddington in Geneva)