Welcome to NBN’s Waste-Not-Want-Not issue. In Opinion News this week we have a piece on all the wonderful, wasteful things in this country. Right below we’ve got a new name for Sin City and below that we offer insight into ice cream cones, self indulgence, and the U.N. conspiracy to reduce oil consumption in this country.

Welcome To Las Vegas. Pictured here is the parking lot of the Rio All Suites Resorts and Casino on Jan. 30, 2012. While much of Rio's business is convention driven and arrives by the bus-load, this parking lot is empty and there is more to this ocean of asphalt on the left that couldn't fit into the frame. The cavernous casino floor of the almost brand new Wynn Encore on the strip was at 5 percent of capacity at 1 pm the next day. Hundreds of tables were empty. Is it possible Sin City is feeling the pinch from the recession? How can it not? This is a city that sells waste as a virtue on a planet placing an ever higher premium on all its resources. And everything gets wasted here: the billions of gallons of fresh water evaporating into the air of the second driest city in the country, the thousands of half-eaten plates of food discarded hourly at the hundreds of buffet restaurants, the millions of incandescent lightbulbs radiating increasingly expensive energy into nothing. Let’s not leave out the money wasted in the casinos. Anyone want to guess at the carbon footprint of The Strip when you take the hard-earned cash tossed around like confetti into consideration? What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas because no one wants the rest of the world to know how irresponsible we can be when immersed in a culture that says waste is fun. It lets you think, if just for a brief period, that life’s essentials are non-essential. The bloom is off the rose folks. Fun or not, the planet can no longer afford to subsidize this bizarre notion that it’s somehow OK to rampantly waste the natural resources we all share because the people encouraging us to do so say we have a constitutional right to. Toward that end we offer you an 800 word rant in Opinion News this week on other forms of waste, one even more obscene than Vegas, and a few constitutional amendments we’d like to see that might reduce that waste and still guarantee our right to the pursuit of happiness. Have a great week folks and thank you for reading News by Nature. We can only hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy writing it.        

_In News by Nature this week: Weird Science News looks at evolution through the eyes of an octopus-imitating fish. In our RSS Feeds below we have: the genetic grass is greener on the other side of the river, survival of the un-fittest in salmon farming, and the Galapagos tortoise Lonesome George finds a friend and possible relative.

_In matters of evolution NBN has timidly tread where no sane scientist would dare, suggesting Darwin’s theory does not explain all that we see in biodiversity. This week, no more timidity. Darwin’s theory of evolution—that random mutation in DNA helps some offspring more than others—just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore. We’re not talking Rick Perry-esque skepticism. Rather, we’re thinking learning, and other environmental influences, also drive genetic diversity, possibly a lot faster than could occur by random mutation alone. There are all kinds of ways to affect an individual’s fitness for survival. Take this Christmas cactus for example. Last year NBN cross-fertilized blossoms from this plant with another slightly different strain of the Christmas cactus sharing the same folding table in the window of the offices at NBN. This experiment in evolution produced two bright red buds and a few insights, among them that evolution does not favor species subject to experiments by amateur scientists. If you're looking for more scientific insight, in Weird Science News this week we look at a species of fish that is fairing a little better than our cactus in its own evolutionary experiment. Just below we have snippets on: the genetic grass being greener on the other side of the river, survival of the un-fittest in salmon farming and Lonesome George, the last known living Pinta Island tortoise finds a friend and possible relative. Have a great week folks and thank you for reading NBN.

_ News by Nature this week: In Opinion News we attempt to help some truck drivers see the need for higher gas tax and just below we have our thoughts on the upside of military spending, alternative energy in Iran, the “Great Restaurant Grease Caper” and other tasty tidbits.

_There are waterfront homes, and then there is the "Clam Shack" which became a cause celeb when its owner fought with the city of Newburyport, MA, for the right to renovate what a century ago was a wholesale clam auction house. What you can’t see here is that the Clam Shack sits about six feet--yes, six feet--off one of the busiest streets in the city: Plum Island Turnpike, which connects downtown with the increasingly popular ocean beaches. Who in their right mind sandwiches their living room between a daily avalanche of autos and occasional assaults by the ocean? That’s what the Newburyport zoning board was pondering when it took the owner to task a few years back over the renovation plans. Around the same time the Tea Party started defending the cause of personal responsibility against Big Brother/Big Government nationwide. The city relented and that owner now has  expansive views and the unique ability to fish from bed. How could a national movement challenging government regulation sway a local zoning board's ruling in such a case? How could it not? At least in some small way, the growing national sentiment against government interference has got to weigh on the minds of law enforcers everywhere. But what happens when a bigger storms pushes this tide 18 inches higher, as it easily could come spring. This charming waterfront home gets flushed into the middle of Newburyport Harbor and this fellow’s exercising his right to personal property becomes an ugly hazard to navigation saddling the entire community. Would the Tea Party think it an excess of Big Government to force the owner to clean up the mess he made? The Tea Party's embrace of personal liberty is commendable, their ignorance of personal liability is the reason this country is politically and ideologically paralyzed. Toward that end we have a piece in Opinion News this week on NBN’s failed attempt to break that paralysis by helping some skeptical furniture movers believe in global warming. In our RSS feeds below we have our thoughts on the upside of military spending, the down side of alternative energy in Iran, compelling school kids to question global warming and the “Great Restaurant Grease Caper.” Enjoy folks, and thank you for reading NBN.

_ Here we have Plum Island, MA, on a balmy January afternoon. That’s right. This is a salt marsh duck pond in January in northeast Massachusetts. This pond should be frozen solid. Instead these mallards are bulking up when ice and snow covered the island this time last year. Most would be tempted to call this a January thaw, the only problem is there was no December freeze. When placed in the context of historical weather data, the mild winter of 2011-2012 just joins others New Englanders have enjoyed over the years. What makes such weather exceptional in NBN’s eyes is the political and economic climate, and the role climate change is playing in both these days. This winter is as extreme in its mildness as last year’s was for its severity. That snowy season was just a warm-up act for the spring that delivered the country’s deadliest string of tornadoes in the mid-Atlantic states, a super-saturated northeast and a drought stricken southwest. Let’s not forget the second warmest summer on record and the warmest fall in much of New England history. Yet we still have legions of Americans completely convinced all this abnormal weather is nothing out of the norm. It’s tempting to blame our political leaders for this Emperor's-New-Clothes populist mis-perception of climate change, but as we point out in Global Warming News this week, the blame lies elsewhere as well. Also this week we share our thoughts on the articles linked below which include a dramatic rethinking of thawing permafrost, California truckers fighting for the right to drive dirty rigs and the U.S. Forest Service’s tilting toward windmills with federal help in Vermont. Have a great week folks and thank you for reading NBN.

_Imagine you’re at a dinner party and you ask to use the host’s bathroom only to find a composting toilet like this one here waiting to embrace your underparts. Would you be more reluctant to attend another party at the same host’s house? Despite what the host may believe, NBN thinks that depends more heavily on the host and the party than the potty. It’s not just personal hygiene keeping composting toilets out of every U.S. restroom save those out of reach of running water. Vanity plays a big part: nobody wants to be seen using a product that can so vividly imply indifference toward personal hygiene. Never mind that widespread distribution of these things could mean a quantum leap forward in correcting a growing coastal water pollution calamity called deadzones. “What will the neighbors think” comes much more quickly to mind in this self conscious country then why there are no lobsters in Long Island Sound, crabs in the Chesapeake or fish at the mouth of the Mississippi. Now, as our consumer culture catches on, it looks like the rest of the world wants to be just like us. In NBN this week we try to put the price paid for our vanity and self indulgence into a little planetary perspective. In Watershed News we dwell on what suburban life without flush toilets might be like. Then in Popular Wisdom we question a California consumer asserting his right to buy inefficient light bulbs. Imagine a law forcing that guy to buy a composting toilet? Give him dead zones or give him death. Have a great week, a greater New Year and thank you for reading NBN.

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_ With many of earth’s ecosystems crippled versions of their former selves, resuscitation has moved far past simply fooling with Mother Nature to something akin to experimental surgery. To illustrate, above we have the latest efforts to control a tall grass called phragmites, in the upper left corner, that experts fear is taking over New England’s largest salt marsh. The huge machines are mowing down phragmites (lower left) in some parts of the salt marsh while native cattails can be found slugging it out with the tall grass for dominance of other parts of the same marsh. The fear is the aggressive invasive will overrun the cattail, and other native grasses, because it is a relative new-comer to the marsh, it has no natural means of keeping it in check. Should that happen, it would turn the entire salt marsh ecosystem on its ear. But the war on invasives in some ways resembles the War on Terror or the War on Drugs: where’s the end game? How do you win these battles? Is mowing down these plants undertaking a battle of attrition better left to the cattails? Might the monster mower money be better spent cleaning up the six aging sewage treatment plants discharging into the river feeding this salt marsh? Is this war on invasive species in general better left to Mother Nature? Perhaps it's time to rethink all these "Wars." In other challenges to conventional environmental wisdom this week we ask in Endangered News why comparatively few salt water species have gone extinct, while in Opinion News we weigh the pros and cons of raising cash for environmental causes by allowing advertizing in our national parks.