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Hunger for Concrete Destroys Mountains in Cyprus

A front-end loader moves material inside the open pit at Molycorp's Mountain Pass Rare Earth facility in Mountain Pass, California, on June 29, 2015. (Reuters)
A front-end loader moves material inside the open pit at Molycorp's Mountain Pass Rare Earth facility in Mountain Pass, California, on June 29, 2015. (Reuters)
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Hunger for Concrete Destroys Mountains in Cyprus

A front-end loader moves material inside the open pit at Molycorp's Mountain Pass Rare Earth facility in Mountain Pass, California, on June 29, 2015. (Reuters)
A front-end loader moves material inside the open pit at Molycorp's Mountain Pass Rare Earth facility in Mountain Pass, California, on June 29, 2015. (Reuters)

From Cyprus to New Zealand, Lebanon and beyond, environmentalists worry about the proliferation of quarries in a world ever greedier for concrete. Concrete consumption has tripled over the past 20 year.

Over 40 billion tons a year of sand and gravel are extracted around the world from mountains, rivers, coastlines and marine environments, the majority for construction. With the global population expected to grow by two billion by 2050, demand can only go up, according to the UN environment agency. The extraction process often comes with deforestation, air pollution and disruption of traditional human activities.

This is the case in Cyprus, near the hut where Jamal makes traditional "hellim" cheese, trucks come to collect rock, kicking up clouds of dust and frightening the animals.

On the quarried area of the mountain slope, vegetation has disappeared. A policeman asks the goat herder to stay back as an explosion triggers a huge cloud of smoke and part of the rock face collapses. On another mountain, Jamal was injured and lost animals to quarrying work.

Rocks "rained down on us," he recalled.

While he understands the "need for rock to build", he hopes the company running the site will help him find quieter pastures in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus established in 1974, and on which live 355,000 people. This region walks the line between development and conservation.

Cenk Sarper, head of the Stone Quarries Union, said: "Today, the island is fed by tourism so we need hotels, guest houses, roads and airports. We don't have any other choice than to exploit the quarries."

He said the quarries operate in areas far from residential zones and respect all the adopted environmental standards. More than 12,000 tons of rock is extracted every day, or around 33 kilograms per capita. The world average is 18 kilograms, according to the UN.

Asking to remain anonymous, a contractor said that key actors "did not do everything possible to limit visual pollution." Some accuse companies from Turkey of being less vigilant than Turkish Cypriot ones.

The secretary general of the biologists' association in northern Cyprus, Hasan Sarpten, regrets that a large quarry was authorized far from a reserved area, in the west.

"They are not applying the best methods" environmentally, he said, criticizing the lack of regulation by Turkish Cypriot authorities.

These authorities declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

Environmentalists are equally worried in the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus.

Environment expert Klitos Papastylianou said: "The growing extraction of raw materials for the construction industry is one of the main threats for protected areas."

Green Party MP Charalampos Theopemptou noted that "marinas and coast protection works require huge amounts of rocks."

An audit recommended increasing fines to discourage illegal quarrying. Calls for stricter controls resound around the world. In Lebanon, where illegal quarries have cleared entire mountains and hundreds of thousands of trees, activists are pushing back, despite death threats.

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Scientists Explore Where Consciousness Arises in the Brain

People are silhouetted against the setting sun on top of the Drachenberg in Berlin, Germany, Germany, August 19, 2019. (Reuters)
People are silhouetted against the setting sun on top of the Drachenberg in Berlin, Germany, Germany, August 19, 2019. (Reuters)
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Scientists Explore Where Consciousness Arises in the Brain

People are silhouetted against the setting sun on top of the Drachenberg in Berlin, Germany, Germany, August 19, 2019. (Reuters)
People are silhouetted against the setting sun on top of the Drachenberg in Berlin, Germany, Germany, August 19, 2019. (Reuters)

Consciousness is at the center of human existence, the ability to see, hear, dream, imagine, feel pain or pleasure, dread, love and more. But where precisely does this reside in the brain? That is a question that has long confounded scientists and clinicians. A new study is offering fresh insight.

In a quest to identify the parts of the brain underpinning consciousness, neuroscientists measured electrical and magnetic activity as well as blood flow in the brains of 256 people in 12 laboratories across the United States, Europe and China, while the participants viewed various images. The measurements tracked activation in various parts of the brain.

The researchers found that consciousness may not arise in the "smart" part of the brain - the frontal areas where thinking is housed, which progressively grew in the process of human evolution - but rather in the sensory zones at the back of the brain that process sight and sound.

"Why is any of this important?" asked neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute in Seattle, one of the leaders of the study published this week in the journal Nature.

"If we want to understand the substrate of consciousness, who has it - adults, pre-linguistic children, a second trimester fetus, a dog, a mouse, a squid, a raven, a fly - we need to identify the underlying mechanisms in the brain, both for conceptual reasons as well as for clinical ones," Koch said.

The subjects in the study were shown images of people's faces and various objects.

"Consciousness is the way it feels like to see a drawing of a toaster or Jill's face. Consciousness is not the same as the behavior associated with this feeling, for example pushing a button or saying, 'I see Jill,'" Koch said.

The researchers tested two leading scientific theories about consciousness.

Under the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, consciousness materializes in the front of the brain, with important pieces of information then broadcast widely throughout the brain. Under the Integrated Information Theory, consciousness emanates from the interaction and cooperation of various parts of the brain as they work collectively to integrate information that is consciously experienced.

The findings did not square with either theory.

"Where are the neuronal footprints of consciousness in the brain? Very crudely put, are they in the front of the cortex - the outermost layer of the brain - such as the prefrontal cortex, as predicted by the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory?" Koch asked.

It is this prefrontal cortex that makes our species uniquely human, driving higher-order cognitive processes such as planning, decision-making, reasoning, personality expression, and moderating social behavior.

"Or are the footprints in the back regions of the cortex, the posterior cortex?" Koch asked. The posterior cortex houses the regions where hearing and vision processing occurs.

"Here, the evidence is decidedly in favor of the posterior cortex. Either information pertaining to the conscious experience couldn't be found in the front or it was far weaker than in the back. This supports the idea that while the frontal lobes are critical to intelligence, judgment, reasoning, etc., they are not critically involved in seeing, in conscious visual perception," Koch said.

However, the study did not identify enough connections that last for as long as the conscious experience in the back of the brain to uphold the Integrated Information Theory.

There are practical applications in gaining a deeper understanding of the mechanics of consciousness in the brain.

Koch said it would be important for how doctors deal with patients in a coma or patients in a vegetative state or with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, when they are awake but present no signs of awareness due to traumatic brain injury, stroke, cardiac arrest, a drug overdose or other causes.

"If the patient remains in this unresponsive state for longer than a few days without signs of recovery, the clinical team initiates discussion with the family around, 'Is this what they would have wanted?'" Koch said.

Of such patients, 70% to 90% die because a decision has been made to withdraw life-sustaining treatment.

"However, we now know that around a quarter of patients in either coma or vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome are conscious - covert consciousness - yet are unable to signal this at the bedside," Koch said, referring to research published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Knowing about the footprints of consciousness in the brain will let us better detect this covert form of 'being there' without being able to signal."