Psyche, Science, and Society

Carbon offsets: Part of the solution or part of the problem?

The LA Times has an articles discussing the carbon offset scam that is currently serving to offset real action to avert global warming fiasco:

Can you buy a greener conscience?
A budding industry sells ‘offsets’ of carbon emissions, investing in environmental projects. But there are doubts about whether it works.

By Alan Zarembo

The Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” touted itself as the world’s first carbon-neutral documentary.

The producers said that every ounce of carbon emitted during production — from jet travel, electricity for filming and gasoline for cars and trucks — was counterbalanced by reducing emissions somewhere else in the world. It only made sense that a film about the perils of global warming wouldn’t contribute to the problem.

Co-producer Lesley Chilcott used an online calculator to estimate that shooting the film used 41.4 tons of carbon dioxide and paid a middleman, a company called Native Energy, $12 a ton, or $496.80, to broker a deal to cut greenhouse gases elsewhere. The film’s distributors later made a similar payment to neutralize carbon dioxide from the marketing of the movie.

It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions.

Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution.

According to Native Energy, money from “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village.

As it turned out, both projects had already been designed and financed, and the contributions from Native Energy covered only a minor fraction of their costs. “If you really believe you’re carbon neutral, you’re kidding yourself,” said Gregg Marland, a fossil-fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who has been watching the evolution of the new carbon markets. “You can’t get out of it that easily.”

The race to save the planet from global warming has spawned a budding industry of middlemen selling environmental salvation at bargain prices.

The companies take millions of dollars collected from their customers and funnel them into carbon-cutting projects, such as tree farms in Ecuador, windmills in Minnesota and no-till fields in Iowa.

In return, customers get to claim the reductions, known as voluntary carbon offsets, as their own. For less than $100 a year, even a Hummer can be pollution-free — at least on paper.

Driven by guilt, public relations or genuine concern over global warming, tens of thousands of people have purchased offsets to zero out their carbon impact on the planet.

“It made me feel better about driving my car,” said Nicky Tenpas, a 29-year-old occupational therapist from Hermosa Beach, who bought offsets to neutralize emissions from the Jeep she always wanted.

The star of “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore, says he and his family are carbon neutral, as are Dave Matthews Band concerts and Coldplay albums. The travel websites Expedia and Travelocity now offer passengers the option of counteracting their flights, and Rupert Murdoch promises that his entire News Corp. will be carbon neutral by 2010, largely through the purchase of offsets.

Offset companies stress that they are not a cure-all for the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, which are equivalent to 54 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Tom Boucher, chief executive of Native Energy, said people should first reduce their energy consumption and waste, and then buy offsets — “the only way to really get to zero unless you stop driving, stop traveling.”

But the industry is clouded by an approach to carbon accounting that makes it easy to claim reductions that didn’t occur. Many projects that have received money from offset companies would have reduced emissions by the same amount anyway.

The growing popularity of offsets has now prompted the Federal Trade Commission to begin looking into the $55-million-a-year industry.

“Everybody would like to find happy-face, win-win solutions that don’t cost anything,” said Robert Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard University. “Unfortunately, they don’t exist.”

Selling clean airIn the rolling hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, outside the town of Berlin, Dave Van Gilder’s family has been raising cows for four decades. He and his twin sons, Jason and Justin, tend to their 400 Holsteins while his wife, Connie, keeps the books.

The smell of manure has long been the sweet exhaust of a dairy farm running full tilt.

Millions of pounds of cow excrement over the decades were funneled from the barns to a 3.3-million-gallon lagoon, where it decayed, burping invisible clouds of the potent greenhouse gas methane.

In the days of Van Gilder’s father, nobody cared about the greenhouse gases.

But things began to change a few years ago. Van Gilder didn’t know it, but his lagoon had become an economic opportunity.

A local congressman urged him to apply for a state alternative energy grant to build a system that would capture methane from cow manure and burn it to generate electricity.

The whole project, known as a methane digester, would cost about $750,000 — $631,000 of it coming from the state and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Van Gilder had to make up the difference, but he figured he could earn that back — and in several years start making money — by supplying electricity for the farm and selling the excess to the local utility.

A year before construction began, Van Gilder was contacted by Native Energy, which wanted to buy his emissions reduction, along with the reductions of others who had won state energy grants.

Van Gilder had never heard of the company or the idea of selling clean air.

Nothing came of his discussions with the company until construction started on the massive tank for heating manure. He gladly signed a contract to sell Native Energy 29,000 tons in carbon dioxide reductions — the company’s estimate of how much greenhouse gas the digester will keep out of the atmosphere over the next 20 years.

“There wasn’t a lot of negotiation,” said Van Gilder, who was happy to accept whatever the company was offering.

Family members said the contract prohibited them from disclosing the payment, but based on a contract with another dairy farmer, signed with Native Energy, it was about $70,000, or $2.40 a ton.

Justin Van Gilder said the money had nothing to do with the family’s decision to build its methane plant. “It was a free bonus,” he said.

“We still don’t understand it all,” Connie Van Gilder said. “It’s hard for us to fathom, to see what it is doing.”

The situation was similar for the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative, a power utility for dozens of remote communities.

In early 2006, account manager Brent Petrie was at an Anchorage environmental conference talking about a windmill project that the cooperative was building in the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Kasigluk, a soggy patch of tundra on the remote Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in western Alaska.

Rising 100 feet over the landscape, the three 100-kilowatt turbines were intended to reduce the area’s dependence on diesel generators, whose fuel must be shipped in on barges. Federal grants were covering $2.8 million of the project’s $3.1-million cost.

Petrie had barely finished his presentation when he was cornered by representatives from two brokers — Native Energy and the Bonneville Environmental Foundation — eager to buy the project’s offsets.

The cooperative sold 25 years of carbon dioxide reductions to Native Energy for $36,000 — roughly $4 a ton.

Native Energy had contributed just over 1% of the total cost of the project yet claimed 100% of its carbon reductions.

“If you look at the costs of these projects, it’s a tiny, tiny fraction,” said cooperative president Meera Kohler. The payment did “not determine whether those blades turn or not.”

At best, Kohler said, the money could cover some maintenance costs.

An untapped marketDespite its relatively small role in the project, Native Energy counts the windmills as a success, demonstrating the power of carbon offsets to encourage clean energy.

“Every kilowatt-hour they produce means one fewer kilowatt-hour is generated by the diesel generators that otherwise provide power for this village,” the company’s website says.

Wind power has long been a fascination for Boucher, Native Energy’s co-founder. As an electrical engineering major in the 1970s at the University of Vermont, he built a 25-foot-high wind turbine in his parents’ backyard, carving the blades from a piece of redwood.

He later worked at a Vermont utility and helped develop one of the first wind farms in the northeast. Boucher started his own company in the 1990s to sell alternative energy but soon came upon a simpler and possibly more lucrative product: voluntary carbon offsets.

It was a new twist on an old idea.

About 30 years ago, the U.S. government began fostering emissions markets that allowed industrial polluters to buy offsets for such gases as nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides. One of their successes has been in reducing acid rain in the Northeast.

The Europeans have recently adopted a similar model to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, allowing the continent’s dirtiest industries to buy and sell rights to spew greenhouse gases.

The key to these regulated markets is a gradually falling cap on total emissions, forcing factories to either reduce their own emissions or buy someone else’s reductions at increasing prices.

Boucher and other environmental entrepreneurs, however, believed there was an untapped market for carbon reductions: people and companies who would buy them voluntarily.

“What was coming was a way for folks to take actions against global warming,” said Boucher, a bearded 52-year-old, who has long believed that alternative energy can be competitive with cheaper power from fossil fuels.

Native Energy, based in Charlotte, Vt., was one of the first offset companies in the United States and has become one of the most respected in environmental circles.

It has sold offsets to thousands of individuals and companies, including Levi Strauss & Co. and Ben & Jerry’s. It has been big with political campaigns, providing offsets to Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards. The producers of the 2005 film “Syriana,” which claims to be the first carbon-neutral major motion picture, bought 2,040 tons of carbon dioxide reductions from the company.

After Native Energy’s name was mentioned in the final credits for “An Inconvenient Truth,” visits to the company’s website jumped 1,100%, marketing director Billy Connelly said.

As a private company, it doesn’t report its revenue, but Connelly said he expects it will double its sales this year, reaching a total of about 1 million tons of carbon dioxide neutralized since its founding.

“Things have really taken off in the last year or two,” said Boucher. The company has about 20 employees.

Native Energy now finds itself facing competition from nearly three dozen other offset firms worldwide. Some are nonprofit, but most of the biggest are in business to make money.

In 2006, offset companies sold greenhouse gas reductions equivalent to at least 14.8 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than double the previous year, said Katherine Hamilton, carbon project manager for Ecosystem Marketplace, which tracks the industry.

Sales are expected to double again this year.

Requirements are vagueFor all the money spent, nobody can say if the offsets have done much to alleviate global warming.

The problem is whether the voluntary reductions really exist. The buzzword in the industry is “additionality” — the idea that offset purchases actually lead to additional greenhouse gas reductions.

The concept should be simple: Pay for a project, monitor its actual reductions, then claim your share.

Instead, offset companies often have vague requirements to determine if their potential investments would actually lead to additional reductions.

Native Energy says it looks for projects that need offset revenue to survive — a difficult standard, since the projects are expensive and the offset payments are relatively small. But even if a project can stand on its own, it can still qualify for the money if it is novel or simply “not business as usual,” according to the company’s website.

That definition has allowed Native Energy and other offset companies to claim the carbon reductions from projects in which they have played minor roles. Still, Native Energy’s contract requires projects to certify that whatever offset money they receive “is a necessary component of the project’s economic viability.”

The company has struggled with whether its funding matters. Boucher said the windmills in Alaska were debated for weeks inside Native Energy since the project already had been funded by the government. “This is a case of one of the more difficult determinations,” he said.

Native Energy, he said, eventually concluded that its contribution, if used as a reserve fund for emergency repairs, was meaningful. It helps “to make sure these turbines will run as well as they can, and to further the chances that other wind farms will be built,” he said.

In the case of the methane digester, Boucher said the reductions were additional since the offset payments helped cover a significant portion of Van Gilder’s out-of-pocket expenses.

The best way to ensure additionality, according to Native Energy, is to pay a project for a decade or more of offsets while the developers are still arranging the financing.

The downside is that the carbon reductions might not occur for a decade or more.

One of Native Energy’s expected future projects is a windmill development being planned for a South Dakota Sioux reservation. Part of the offset money from “An Inconvenient Truth” has been earmarked for the $45-million project, known as the Owl Feather War Bonnet Wind Farm.

Native Energy and the developers are still negotiating, but the payment for the next 25 years of carbon reductions could be a few million dollars.

Even in this ideal case, the developer is hesitant to say that the money he will get from Native Energy is essential.

“Could we do it without it?” said Dale Osborn, head of Distributed Generation Systems Inc. in Lakewood, Colo. “Maybe. But that would require charging more for the energy or the investors accepting a lower rate of return.”

Several environmental and clean energy groups have also raised concerns about verifying projects, monitoring their actual carbon reductions and ensuring that each carbon offset is not sold more than once.

“People are trying to do the right thing,” said Peter Knight, a partner with Al Gore in Generation Investment Management, which invests in environmentally responsible companies. “It’s a new field . . . and it’s going through some growing pains.”

Price of feeling goodWithout government regulation and mandatory caps on emissions, all that is left to drive offset sales is guilt and marketing. Offset companies charge what the market will bear.

“How much are you willing to spend to feel good or to impress your neighbors?” asked Marland, of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

For Katy Hansen, a 29-year-old law school student, the answer was $429.99.

She wanted to offset the travel of the guests to her May wedding in Madison, Wis., and paid San Francisco-based offset company TerraPass Inc. to neutralize 40 tons of carbon dioxide.

“The wedding felt out of character in a way,” she said. “It was more overdone than anything in our lives.”

It was a well-intended gesture, but one that some scientists say does carry a price. Offsets are so convenient that they may foster a false sense that global warming can be easily solved when the hard and expensive work remains undone.

A United Nations panel recently concluded that actually reducing emissions to avoid the worst perils of global warming would cost trillions of dollars a year over the next several decades.

“These offsets are not addressing the problem that must be addressed now,” said James Hansen, NASA’s top climate researcher. “If we just fool around with marginal things, we will be up a creek without a paddle in the rather near future.”

Despite the imperfections of the offset market, some customers say, it still helps people think about their own responsibility for global warming.

“It’s a powerful first step,” said Davis Guggenheim, director of “An Inconvenient Truth.” “The choice of doing this rather than nothing is not a choice.”

He acknowledged the skepticism about voluntary offsets, but he added, “All of us knew when you’re doing offsets that the theoretical and symbolic quality to doing this is as important as the practical quality.”

Ethan Prochnik, a 43-year-old freelance television producer in Los Angeles, said the enormous threat of global warming means that everyone has to help in reducing emissions.

He foresees a time when a carbon tax will be factored into the price of every tomato, every pair of jeans, every computer.

Until then, offset payments are a sort of self-imposed pollution tax.

For months, Prochnik and his fiancee saved to offset a year of their lives. He finally went to the website for an Oregon company called the Climate Trust. He entered their state of residence, the size of their Montecito Heights house, their cars, their annual mileage and the number of flights they took in a year.

“It’s like a poor man’s Prius,” he said, explaining that he couldn’t afford to trade his Isuzu Rodeo SUV for a hybrid.

“It does make you feel a little better,” said his fiancee, Amber Vovola, 29.

Prochnik entered his credit card number and pressed the “enter” key. The total came to 21.22 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or $200.28.

Figuring that the website calculator didn’t cover all their pollution, he decided to buy an additional $300 in offsets, just to be safe.

Add comment September 2nd, 2007

Senator Craig scandal in the light of social research

The New York Times opinion Section has an article by Laura MacDonald that shed new light on the Sen. Larry Craig bathroom sex case. She draws upon the 1970 research of Laud Humphreys on sexual behavior in men’s bathrooms. Humphreys showed that men’s sexual advances in bathrooms are elaborately ritualized, so that, the author argues, the policeman had to have responded to Craig and he must have been entrapped.

The Humphreys study is described in the social research methods text I use for my undergraduate class, put only in terms of the ethical issues raised. Its nice to see it entering popular consciousness for its findings. The article also illustrates that research ca provide illumination for important social questions.

The article:

America’s Toe-Tapping Menace

by Laura MacDonald

WHAT is shocking about Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom arrest is not what he may have been doing tapping his shoe in that stall, but that Minnesotans are still paying policemen to tap back. For almost 40 years most police departments have been aware of something that still escapes the general public: men who troll for sex in public places, gay or “not gay,” are, for the most part, upstanding citizens. Arresting them costs a lot and accomplishes little.

In 1970, Laud Humphreys published the groundbreaking dissertation he wrote as a doctoral candidate at Washington University called “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” Because of his unorthodox methods — he did not get his subjects’ consent, he tracked down names and addresses through license plate numbers, he interviewed the men in their homes in disguise and under false pretenses — “Tearoom Trade” is now taught as a primary example of unethical social research.

That said, what results! In minute, choreographic detail, Mr. Humphreys (who died in 1988) illustrated that various signals — the foot tapping, the hand waving and the body positioning — are all parts of a delicate ritual of call and answer, an elaborate series of codes that require the proper response for the initiator to continue. Put simply, a straight man would be left alone after that first tap or cough or look went unanswered.

Why? The initiator does not want to be beaten up or arrested or chased by teenagers, so he engages in safeguards to ensure that any physical advance will be reciprocated. As Mr. Humphreys put it, “because of cautions built into the strategies of these encounters, no man need fear being molested in such facilities.”

Mr. Humphreys’s aim was not just academic: he was trying to illustrate to the public and the police that straight men would not be harassed in these bathrooms. His findings would seem to suggest the implausibility not only of Senator Craig’s denial — that it was all a misunderstanding — but also of the policeman’s assertion that he was a passive participant. If the code was being followed, it is likely that both men would have to have been acting consciously for the signals to continue.

Mr. Humphreys broke down these transactions into phases, which are remarkably similar to the description of Senator Craig’s behavior given by the police. First is the approach: Mr. Craig allegedly peeks into the stall. Then comes positioning: he takes the stall next to the policeman. Signaling: Senator Craig allegedly taps his foot and touches it to the officer’s shoe, which was positioned close to the divider, then slides his hand along the bottom of the stall. There are more phases in Mr. Humphreys’s full lexicon — maneuvering, contracting, foreplay and payoff — but Mr. Craig was arrested after the officer presumed he had “signaled.”

Clearly, whatever Mr. Craig’s intentions, the police entrapped him. If the police officer hadn’t met his stare, answered that tap or done something overt, there would be no news story. On this point, Mr. Humphreys was adamant and explicit: “On the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been ‘molested’ in such a setting without first having ‘given his consent.’ ”

As for those who feel that a family man and a conservative senator would be unlikely to engage in such acts, Mr. Humphreys’s research says otherwise. As a former Episcopal priest and closeted gay man himself, he was surprised when he interviewed his subjects to learn that most of them were married; their houses were just a little bit nicer than most, their yards better kept. They were well educated, worked longer hours, tended to be active in the church and the community but, unexpectedly, were usually politically and socially conservative, and quite vocal about it.

In other words, not only did these men have nice families, they had nice families who seemed to believe what the fathers loudly preached about the sanctity of marriage. Mr. Humphreys called this paradox “the breastplate of righteousness.” The more a man had to lose by having a secret life, the more he acquired the trappings of respectability: “His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of his practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous — an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking.”

Mr. Humphreys even anticipated the vehement denials of men who are outed: “The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man, hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited.”

This last sentence brings to mind the hollow refutations of figures at the center of many recent public sex scandals, heterosexual and homosexual, notably Representative Mark Foley, the Rev. Ted Haggard, Senator David Vitter and now Senator Craig. The difference is that Larry Craig was arrested.

Public sex is certainly a public nuisance, but criminalizing consensual acts does not help. “The only harmful effects of these encounters, either direct or indirect, result from police activity,” Mr. Humphreys wrote. “Blackmail, payoffs, the destruction of reputations and families, all result from police intervention in the tearoom scene.” What community can afford to lose good citizens?

And for our part, let’s stop being so surprised when we discover that our public figures have their own complex sex lives, and start being more suspicious when they self-righteously denounce the sex lives of others.

Laura M. Mac Donald is the author of “The Curse of the Narrows: The Story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion.”

Add comment September 2nd, 2007

Robert Fisk on the Armenian genocide

The Independent’s Robert Fisk has discovered new photographs that, as he describes, give new insights into the Armenian genocide, the template for systematic bureaucratized mass murder. He points out the uncanny similarities to the later Jewish holocaust, including in the number of victims that were stuffed into rail transport cares taking them to their deaths. It is the obligation of each of us to remember and to counter the nearly century long Turkish campaign of denial:

Robert Fisk: The forgotten holocaust

The killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious episodes of the 20th century. Robert Fisk visits Yerevan, and unearths hitherto unpublished images of the first modern genocide

The photographs, never before published, capture the horrors of the first Holocaust of the 20th century. They show a frightened people on the move – men, women and children, some with animals, others on foot, walking over open ground outside the city of Erzerum in 1915, at the beginning of their death march. We know that none of the Armenians sent from Erzerum – in what is today north-eastern Turkey – survived. Most of the men were shot, the children – including, no doubt, the young boy or girl with a headscarf in the close-up photograph – died of starvation or disease. The young women were almost all raped, the older women beaten to death, the sick and babies left by the road to die.

The unique photographs are a stunning witness to one of the most terrible events of our times. Their poor quality – the failure of the camera to cope with the swirl and movement of the Armenian deportees in the close-up picture, the fingerprint on the top of the second – lend them an undeniable authenticity. They come from the archives of the German Deutsche Bank, which was in 1915 providing finance for the maintenance and extension of the Turkish railway system. One incredible photograph – so far published in only two specialist magazines, in Germany and in modern-day Armenia – actually shows dozens of doomed Armenians, including children, crammed into cattle trucks for their deportation. The Turks stuffed 90 Armenians into each of these wagons – the same average the Nazis achieved in their transports to the death camps of Eastern Europe during the Jewish Holocaust.

Hayk Demoyan, director of the grey-stone Museum of the Armenian Genocide in the foothills just outside Yerevan, the capital of present-day Armenia, stares at the photographs on his computer screen in bleak silence. A university lecturer in modern Turkish history, he is one of the most dynamic Armenian genocide researchers inside the remains of Armenia, which is all that was left after the Turkish slaughter; it suffered a further 70 years of terror as part of the Soviet Union. “Yes, you can have these pictures, he says. “We are still discovering more. The Germans took photographs and these pictures even survived the Second World War. Today, we want our museum to be a place of collective memory, a memorisation of trauma. Our museum is for Turks as well as Armenians. This is also [the Turks'] history.”

The story of the last century’s first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey’s reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to “resettle” their Armenian population – as the Germans were to speak later of the Jews of Europe – the true intentions of Enver Pasha’s Committee of Union and Progress in Constantinople were quite

clear. On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists) Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of Armenians in his city. “You have already been informed that the government… has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons living in Turkey… Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to any scruples of conscience.” These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers in 1941.

Taner Akcam, a prominent – and extremely brave – Turkish scholar who has visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual Turkish officers often wrote “doubles” of their mass death-sentence orders, telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during their “resettlement”. This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva that they were being well cared for and well fed.

Ottoman Turkey’s attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the Middle East – the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu, became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from paganism in AD301 – is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen.

In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey’s Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians – including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at Gallipoli – have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called “merciless fury”. Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people’s persecution and deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and on to Sivas province. The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people – their teeth were perfect. I even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there and identified the hillside for me.

Hayk Demoyan sits in his air-conditioned museum office, his computer purring softly on the desk, and talks of the need to memorialise this huge suffering. “You can see it in the writing of each survivor,” he says. “When visitors come here from the diaspora – from America and Europe, Lebanon and Syria, people whose parents or grandparents died in our genocide – our staff feel with these people. They see these people become very upset, there are tears and some get a bit crazy after seeing the exhibition. This can be very difficult for us, psychologically. The stance of the current Turkish government [in denying the genocide] is proving they are proud of what their ancestors did. They are saying they are pleased with what the Ottomans did. Yet today, we are hearing that a lot of places in the world are like goldmines of archive materials to continue our work – even here in Yerevan. Every day, we are coming across new photographs or documents.”

The pictures Demoyan gives to The Independent were taken by employees of Deutsche Bank in 1915 to send to their head office in Berlin as proof of their claims that the Turks were massacring their Armenian population. They can be found in the Deutsche Bank Historical Institute – Oriental Section (the photograph of the Armenian deportees across the desert published in The Independent today, for example, is registered photo number 1704 and the 1915 caption reads: “Deportation Camp near Erzerum.”)

A German engineer in Kharput sent back a now-famous photogaph of Armenian men being led to their execution by armed Turkish police officers. The banking officials were appalled that the Ottoman Turks were using – in effect – German money to send Armenians to their death by rail. The new transportation system was supposed to be used for military purposes, not for genocide.

German soldiers sent to Turkey to reorganise the Ottoman army also witnessed these atrocities. Armin Wegner, an especially courageous German second lieutenant in the retinue of Field Marshal von der Goltz, took a series of photographs of dead and dying Armenian women and children. Other German officers regarded the genocide with more sinister interest. Some of these men, as Armenian scholar Vahakn Dadrian discovered, turn up 26 years later as more senior officers conducting the mass killing of Jews in German-occupied Russia.

Computers have transformed the research of institutions like the Yerevan museum. Poorly funded scholarship has been replaced by a treasure-house of information that Demoyan is going to publish in scholarly magazines. “We have information that some Germans who were in Armenia in 1915 started selling genocide pictures for personal collections when they returned home… In Russia, a man from St Petersburg also informed us that he had seen handwritten memoirs from 1940 in which the writer spoke of Russian photographs of Armenian bodies in Van and Marash in 1915 and 1916.” Russian Tsarist troops marched into the eastern Turkish city of Van and briefly liberated its doomed Armenian inhabitants. Then the Russians retreated after apparently taking these pictures of dead Armenians in outlying villages.

Stalin also did his bit to erase the memory of the massacres. The Armenian Tashnag party, so prominent in Armenian politics in the Ottoman empire, was banned by the Soviets. “In the 1930s,” Demoyan says, “everyone destroyed handwritten memoirs of the genocide, photographs, land deeds – otherwise they could have been associated by the Soviet secret police with Tashnag material.” He shakes his head at this immeasurable loss. “But now we are finding new material in France and new pictures taken by humanitarian workers of the time. We know there were two or three documentary films from 1915, one shot approvingly by a Kurdish leader to show how the Turks “dealt” with Armenians. There is huge new material in Norway of the deportations in Mush from a Norwegian missionary who was there in 1915.”

There is, too, a need to archive memoirs and books that were published in the aftermath of the genocide but discarded or forgotten in the decades that followed. In 1929, for example, a small-circulation book was published in Boston entitled From Dardanelles to Palestine by Captain Sarkis Torossian. The author was a highly decorated officer in the Turkish army who fought with distinction and was wounded at Gallipoli. He went on to fight the Allies in Palestine but was appalled to find thousands of dying Armenian refugees in the deserts of northern Syria. In passages of great pain, he discovers his sister living in rags and tells how his fiancée Jemileh died in his arms. “I raised Jemileh in my arms, the pain and terror in her eyes melted until they were bright as stars again, stars in an oriental night… and so she died, as a dream passing.” Torossian changed sides, fought with the Arabs, and even briefly met Lawrence of Arabia – who did not impress him.

“The day following my entry into Damascus, the remainder of the Arab army entered along with their loads and behind them on a camel came one they called… the paymaster. This camel rider I learned was Captain Lawrence… Captain Lawrence to my knowledge did nothing to foment the Arab revolution, nor did he play any part in the Arab military tactics. When first I heard of him he was a paymaster, nothing more. And so he was to Prince Emir Abdulah (sic), brother of King Feisal, whom I knew. I do not write in disparagement. I write as a fighting man. Some must fight and others pay.” Bitterness, it seems, runs deep. Torossian eventually re-entered Ottoman Turkey as an Armenian officer with the French army of occupation in the Cilicia region. But Kemalist guerrillas attacked the French, who then, Torossian suspects, gave weapons and ammunition to the Turks to allow the French army safe passage out of Cilicia. Betrayed, Torossian fled to relatives in America.

There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appea r to care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia. Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me that “days, weeks, even months go by” when he does not think of the genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70 years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the historical memory in eastern Armenia – the present-day state of Armenia. Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia – in what is now Turkey – lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their lands. Demoyan disputes all this.

“The fundamental problem, I think, is that in the diaspora many don’t want to recognise our statehood,” he says. “We are surrounded by two countries – Turkey and Azerbaijan – and we have to take our security into account; but not to the extent of damaging memory. Here we must be accurate. I have changed things in this museum. There were inappropriate things, comments about ‘hot-bloodied’people, all the old clichés about Turks – they have now gone. The diaspora want to be the holders of our memories – but 60 per cent of the citizens of the Armenian state are “repatriates” – Armenians originally from the diaspora, people whose grandparents originally came from western Armenia. And remember that Turkish forces swept though part of Armenia after the 1915 genocide – right through Yerevan on their way to Baku. According to Soviet documentation in 1920, 200,000 Armenians died in this part of Armenia, 180,000 of them between 1918 and 1920.” Indeed, there were further mass executions by the Turks in what is now the Armenian state. At Ghumri – near the centre of the devastating earthquake that preceded final liberation from the Soviet Union – there is a place known as the “Gorge of Slaughter”, where in 1918 a whole village was massacred.

But I sensed some political problems up at the Yerevan museum – international as well as internal. While many Armenians acknowledge that their countrymen did commit individual revenge atrocities – around Van, for example – at the time of the genocide, a heavy burden of more modern responsibility lies with those who fought for Armenia against the Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. This mountainous region east of the Armenian state saw fierce and sometimes cruel fighting in which Armenians massacred Turkish Azeri villagers. The Independent was one of the newspapers that exposed this.

Yet when I arrive at the massive genocide memorial next to the museum, I find the graves of five “heroes” of the Karabakh war. Here lies, for instance, Musher “Vosht” Mikhoyan, who was killed in 1991, and the remains of Samuel “Samo” Kevorkian, who died in action in 1992. However upright these warriors may have been, should those involved in the ghastly war in Kharabakh be associated with the integrity and truth of 1915? Do they not demean the history of Armenia’s greatest suffering? Or were they – as I suspect – intended to suggest that the Karabakh war, which Armenia won, was revenge for the 1915 genocide? It’s as if the Israelis placed the graves of the 1948 Irgun fighters – responsible for the massacres of Palestinians at Deir Yassin and other Arab villages – outside the Jewish Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem near Jerusalem.

Officials later explain to me that these Kharabakh grave-sites were established at a moment of great emotion after the war and that today – while they might be inappropriate – it is difficult to ask the families of “Vosht” and “Samo” and the others to remove them to a more suitable location. Once buried, it is difficult to dig up the dead. Similarly, among the memorials left in a small park by visiting statesmen and politicians, there is a distinct difference in tone. Arab leaders have placed plaques in memory of the “genocide”. Less courageous American congressman – who do not want to offend their Turkish allies – have placed plaques stating merely that they “planted this tree”. The pro-American Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri left his own memorial less than a year before he was assassinated in 2005. “Tree of Peace,” it says. Which rather misses the point.

And yet it is the work of archivists that will continue to establish the truth. In Yerevan you can now buy excellent witness testimonies of the genocide by Westerners who were present during the Armenian Holocaust. One of them is by Tacy Atkinson, an American missionary who witnessed the deportation of her Armenian friends from the town of Kharput. On 16 July 1915, she recorded in her secret diary how “a boy has arrived in Mezreh in a bad state nervously. As I understand it he was with a crowd of women and children from some village… who joined our prisoners who went out June 23… The boy says that in the gorge this side of Bakir Maden the men and women were all shot and the leading men had their heads cut off afterwards… He escaped… and came here. His own mother was stripped and robbed and then shot… He says the valley smells so awful that one can hardly pass by now.”

For fear the Turkish authorities might discover her diaries, Atkinson sometimes omitted events. In 1924 – when her diary, enclosed in a sealed trunk, at last returned to the United States, she wrote about a trip made to Kharput by her fellow missionaries. “The story of this trip I did not dare write,” she scribbled in the margin. “They saw about 10,000 bodies.”

Anatomy of a massacre: How the genocide unfolded

By Simon Usborne

An estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1917, either at the hands of Turkish forces or of starvation. Exact figures are unknown, but each larger blob – at the site of a concentration camp or massacre – potentially represents the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The trail of extermination, and dispute about exactly what happened, stretches back more than 90 years to the opening months of the First World War, when some of the Armenian minority in the east of the beleaguered Ottoman Empire enraged the ruling Young Turks coalition by siding with Russia.

On 24 April 1915, Turkish troops rounded up and killed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. Weeks later, three million Armenians were marched from their homes – the majority towards Syria and modern-day Iraq – via an estimated 25 concentration camps.

In 1915, The New York Times reported that “the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles… It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people.” Winston Churchill would later call the forced exodus an “administrative holocaust”.

Yet Turkey, while acknowledging that many Armenians died, disputes the 1.5 million toll and insists that the acts of 1915-17 did not constitute what is now termed genocide – defined by the UN as a state-sponsored attempt to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. Instead, Ankara claims the deaths were part of the wider war, and that massacres were committed by both sides.

Several countries have formally recognised genocide against the Armenians (and, in the case of France, outlawed its denial), but it remains illegal in Turkey to call for recognition. As recently as last year, the Turkish foreign ministry dismissed genocide allegations as “unfounded”.

One authority on extermination who did recognise the Armenian genocide was Adolf Hitler. In a 1939 speech, in which he ordered the killing, “mercilessly and without compassion”, of Polish men, women and children, he concluded: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Add comment September 2nd, 2007

Video games expanding to war and medicine

Video game technology, like most new technology in our society, is expanding into the dual domains of life-saving (medicine) and life-taking (military). These two domains seem inextricably intertwined:

Video games starting to get serious

Producers target military, medical, education clients

by Steve Berberich

‘This is you,” says the voice in ‘‘Gator Six,” an interactive video filmed with live actors that’s used as a training tool for U.S. troops in Iraq.

‘You” — an Army artillery captain in the fictional nation of Ariana — ‘‘have just completed what turned out to be the last combat operation of the war,” the voice continues.

But before the troops can relax, ‘‘your” superior officer arrives by jeep and says he is ‘‘giving you a town”: Samara, population 13,000. He orders you to ‘‘pacify it, maintain order and prepare it for transition to democracy.” You have only 95 soldiers, who now must become town administrators.

The screen darkens. The voice asks you to make a pivotal decision: Do you set up outside of Samara and find out who’s in charge of the town? Or do you ‘‘roll in heavy,” to show you are in charge?

‘‘Gator Six” is a leadership game that teaches adaptability and cross-culture cooperation, one of many ‘‘serious” games produced by Will Interactive Inc. of Potomac. The company produces such games for military, law enforcement, health care and corporate clients.

The company also has just received a grant from CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield to develop a program to reduce violence in various Washington, D.C., charter schools.

The video game industry, which topped $7 billion in sales in 2006, is known for products that take players into fantasy worlds, such as outer space, auto racing or dragon fighting. Serious video games, which teach real-life lessons, are a fast-growing slice of the industry.

The term grew out of a desire of some video designers to apply their skills to more serious applications, said Marc Olano, assistant professor of computer sciences at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Tracy Fullerton agrees. She left a career as a commercial video game designer to ‘‘get serious” as an assistant professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California.

‘‘There is a lot of research now on how we learn and how we can enhance learning in young people, people spending more time with video games than TV or film,” Fullerton said.

USC’s Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab is working with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on a game that teaches constitutional issues to middle and high school classes, she said. ‘‘We are seeing topics in social training moving into video space. Everyone plays a role.”

Real actors,true stories

Most video games use animation.

But Sharon Sloane started Will Interactive in 1994 to make ‘‘slice-of-life” interactive movies, using real actors with scenes shot on location and based on true stories.

‘‘Cartoons don’t teach well except for jumping over buildings or coming back to life,” said Sloane, who holds a master’s in counseling. ‘‘We teach people how to think instead of what to think.”

In ‘‘Gator Six,” the action stops each time the Army captain faces a pivotal decision. The game player decides on one of two choices. As action resumes, the player experiences the consequences of that choice, but can return later to also live the consequences of the alternative.

The company produced another serious game, ‘‘Generation Rx,” with Kentucky River Community Care. Players take the roles of high school students and learn the perils of prescription drug abuse.

Another game, ‘‘Hate Comes Home,” made with the Anti-Defamation League, asks the player to ‘‘live” different roles in another high school to learn how to overcome prejudice and racism.

‘‘Anatomy of Care,” produced for Washington Hospital Center and MedStar Health, helps medical personnel, from physicians to technicians, understand how to cooperate to benefit patients.

Sloane and COO Lyn McCall, a retired Marine colonel who specialized in modeling and simulation, began their work for the military in 1998. The Pentagon needed a program to deal with sexual harassment charges following the Navy‘s Tailhook scandal, Sloane said.

Will Interactive produced ‘‘Saving Sergeant Pabletti” to teach proper conduct in different military situations. After U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were charged with prisoner torture and abuse and were dismissed, the military required replacement soldiers to play ‘‘Saving Sergeant Pabletti” on their plane to Iraq, Sloane said.

Will Interactive has produced 11 serious games for the military. ‘‘It was a majority of our work this year. They were massive efforts,” Sloane said.

She declined to disclose revenues or earnings for the privately held company.

Serious gamesreach ‘the mainstream’

Another Maryland maker of serious games is Breakaway Ltd., one of a half-dozen video game producers in Hunt Valley. Until lately, the company, founded by Douglas Whatley in 1998, produced only entertainment games.

In one of its serious games, a tactical simulation of Baghdad puts the player in the role of an Army commander with the choice to plan military actions from above or at street level. The game is part of a video development platform called Modeling and Simulation Building for Everyone, which Breakaway is marketing to both the military and medical communities, said marketing director Lindsay Riehl.

‘‘It is at the point where it [serious games] has reached the mainstream,” Riehl said.

‘‘Breakaway believes that gaming has the power to transform the world,” according to its Web site.

The company’s clients include the Air Force, Northrop Grumman, Rockwell Collins, the Department of Justice, Texas A&M University and the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict.

‘The potentialmarket is huge’

The serious game trend also circles back into entertainment video games, said Kelley Gilmore, marketing director for Firaxis Games, also in Hunt Valley. She has received more than 300 telephone calls from teachers who use the company’s ‘‘Sid Meier’s Civilization,” a history game for entertainment, to instruct students in history, economics and communication.

‘‘Usually, if there is a question between historical accuracy and fun, we choose fun. But, it’s pretty cool that ‘Civ’ goes into classrooms now,” Gilmore said. ‘‘This happened organically in the education community and we’re thrilled.

‘‘People are recognizing that the game industry is on to something in terms of engaging people, and the potential market is huge. People in training are starting to take notice.”

Firaxis was acquired in 2005 by Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. of New York, which reported revenues of $ 1.04 billion and net loss of $185 million for the year ended last Oct. 31.

‘‘If you look at the technology in traditional flight or military simulators, serious games have been around,” said UMBC’s Olano. But while that technology remained static, entertainment video games passed it by, he said. Now industries are ‘‘looking at advances in the entertainment field and pulling them into the serious side.”

Starting this semester, UMBC is offering two degrees in video game development: one in art, the other in computer science.

Add comment September 2nd, 2007