MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009 Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

Supplemento al numeroodierno de la Repubblica

Sped. abb. postale art. 1legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

LENS

Some of the most iconic images of the GreatDepression come from the parched states ofthe American prairie, where arid land forcedfarm families to flee in search of jobs and sus-tenance. Their plight gave rise to Woody Guth-

rie’s Dust Bowl ballads and John Steinbeck’s “Grapesof Wrath.”

The Dust Bowl was brought on by destruc-tive farming practicescompounded by years ofdrought. But its devastat-ing effects worsened the damage of the broader

economic collapse.Something similar is happening around the

world now. Persistent droughts from Australiato Afghanistan to Spain to Argentina are com-bining with the global recession to squeezefarmers and ranchers.

In Northern China, as Michael Wines re-ported in The Times, the worst drought inhalf a century is crippling a region that growsthree-fifths of the country’s crops. ZhengSongxian, a wheat farmer in the village ofQiaobei, told Mr. Wines he expected to lose atleast a third of his crop this year.

“If we don’t get rain before May, I won’t beable to harvest anything,” he added. (Chineseofficials have said the drought will not have anoticeable impact on overall grain production.)

The Western United States, from Texas toCalifornia, is also contending with a seriouswater shortage. In California’s heavily agri-cultural Central Valley, cities like Mendotahave seen unemployment rates as high as 35percent. “My community is dying on the vine,”Robert Silva, the mayor of Mendota, told JesseMcKinley of The Times.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the worstdrought in generations is wreaking havoc inArgentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and parts ofsouthern Brazil. Argentine ranchers havelost an estimated 1.5 million head of cattle,Ernesto Ambrosetti, the chief economist at theInstitute of Economic Studies at the ArgentineRural Society, told Alexei Barrionuevo of TheTimes.

There is no clear evidence linking the condi-tions to climate change. Nevertheless, manyscientists are warning that more frequentdroughts will be a likely consequence of awarming planet.

To contend with that possibility, researchers are trying to develop crops that can flourishwith little water, Andrew Pollack said in TheTimes. Monsanto, the crop biotechnologyproducer, said last fall that its first strains ofdrought-tolerant corn would be on the marketwithin four years. Because it relies on geneticmodification, Monsanto’s work is encounter-ing controversy.

Some Monsanto critics, like the Alliancefor a Green Revolution in Africa, say droughtresistance can be strengthened through con-ventional seed breeding.

But in some places, the favored approachto an old-fashioned problem like drought isan old-fashioned solution. As Mr. McKinleyreported in The Times, some Californiansstill rely on dowsers — specialists also knownas “water witches,” who use a Y-shaped treebranch and what they say is an intuitive abilityto detect water underground.

Frank Assali, an almond farmer in Water-ford, California, hired a dowser named PhilStine. “Phil finds the water,” Mr. Assali toldMr. McKinley. “No doubt about it.”

For those with the knack, work should beplentiful.

A Thirsty World

VIBUSINESS OF GREEN

In Britain, cooking oil

helps fight warming.

INTELLIGENCE: For Israel, steps out of the wilderness. Page II.

For comments, write tonytweekly@nytimes.com.

By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON

AFTER REPEATED PLEDG-

ES by world leaders to avoid

erecting trade barriers, pro-

tectionism is growing, provoking nas-

ty trade disputes and undermining

efforts to plot a coordinated response

to the deepest global economic down-

turn since World War II.

From a looming battle with China

over tariffs on carbon-intensive

goods to a spat over Mexican trucks

using American roads, barriers are

going up around the world. As the reces-

sion’s grip tightens, these pressures are

likely to intensify, several experts said.

The surge in protectionism is casting a

shadow over an economic summit meet-

ing of world leaders scheduled for London

on April 2. At the last such gathering, in

Washington in November, former Presi-

dent George W. Bush persuaded the Group

of 20 members to commit to protecting free

trade — whatever the pressures caused by

faltering economies and lost jobs. The mem-

bers include industrialized and developing

nations, and the European Union.

“No sooner was the G-20 statement is-

sued than it was breached,” said Daniel M.

Price, an official in the Bush administra-

tion who helped negotiate the agreement.

“Instead of just talking about trade liberal-

ization, countries need to take immediate

steps to show they mean it.”

Far from heeding their pledge not to erect

new barriers for 12 months, many countries

have raised import duties or passed stimu-

lus measures with trade-distorting subsi-

dies. The World Bank, in a recent report,

said that since the Washington meeting, 17

members of the Group of 20 had adopted 47

measures aimed at restricting trade.

Russia has raised tariffs on used cars.

China has tightened import standards

on food, banning Irish pork, among other

things. India has banned Chinese toys. Ar-

gentina has tightened licensing require-

ments on auto parts, textiles and leather

goods. And a dozen countries, from the

United States to Australia, are

subsidizing embattled automak-

ers or car dealers.

The most vivid example of

that policy is the “Buy America”

provision in the stimulus pack-

age, intended to ensure that only

American manufacturers benefited from

public-spending projects. The Obama

administration persuaded Congress to

soften it, and Mr. Obama has taken up

Mr. Bush’s warnings about the dangers of

protectionism.

But pressures are building on other

fronts. The energy secretary, Steven Chu,

said he favored tariffs on Chinese goods

if China did not sign on to mandatory re-

ductions in greenhouse gas emissions —

underscoring how the “green economy”

could be the next trade battleground.

Mr. Obama signed a $40 billion spend-

ing bill that scrapped a program enabling

Mexican trucks to haul cargo over long

DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES

DIPTENDU DUTTA /AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Con tin ued on Page IV

Protectionism on the MarchAn increase in tariffs has complicated the movementof goods across the borders of Mexico and the UnitedStates, above, and India and China, left.

VIISCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Some good news

about right whales. VIIIARTS & STYLES

All ‘world music’

may soon be local.

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009

NEW YORK

Ethan Bronner of The New York Times has been filing some veryimportant dispatches from Israel in recent weeks, chronicling Is-rael’s sense of isolation, its quest to “rebrand” itself, and its soul-searching over reports from soldiers and officers that they wit-nessed or participated in reckless killing of civilians in Gaza.

Here is the paradox of Israel: a hegemonic power in its region, nuclear-armed and protected by a high-tech wall, prosperous and creative, yet inhabited by a gnawing self-doubt that seems only to grow at the same pace as its military dominance.

Israel was supposed, as Shlomo Avineri, an Israeli political scien-tist, has written, not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but also ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” After the millennia of marginalization and Auschwitz, it was intendedto create what David Ben-Gurion called “a self-sufficient people”rather than one “hung up in midair.” The mood Bronner has chron-icled amounts to ample evidence that, 61 years after the creation of the modern state of Israel, that “midair” feeling persists.

Protests against Israel are multiplying around the world. Withinthe country, fissures grow between Jews and the Arab minoritywhile religious nationalists and secular liberals battle for control of the army.

The Defense Ministry was obliged to reprimand the military’schief rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Rontzki, a West Bank set-tler, after a booklet handed to soldiers was found to contain a rab-binical edict against showing the enemy mercy.

Certainly, little mercy was shown in Gaza, where several hun-dred civilians were among the 1,300 dead. In all the operation made scant strategic sense: Hamas endures, as do its rockets, and the damage to Israel’s image around the world has been devastating. As Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations and former sol-dier in the Israeli Army, has observed, the Gaza offensive followed“the logic of an eye for an eyelash.”

I sensed this debacle coming early in the Gaza operation when, in another Bronner dispatch, I read a quote from an Israeli govern-ment spokesman, Mark Regev: “In the cabinet room today, there was an energy, a feeling that after so long of showing restraint wehad finally acted.”

Energy? But to what purpose. Action? But to what end? As the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 demonstrated, such use of overwhelming force by Israel does nothing to resolve the coun-try’s existential quandary. Rather, it ends up redoubling nationalanxiety.

The only way forward will involve a different calculation of secu-rity by Israel, one that places the achievement of peace as the high-est priority — not at any price, of course, but at some price. Fourbasic compromises are needed, as recommended in a new reportby the influential New-York based U.S./Middle East project.

¶ First, abandon almost all settlements to achieve a two-state so-lution based on the lines of June 4, 1967, with minor, reciprocal land swaps where necessary.

¶ Second, establish Jerusalem as home to the Israeli and Pales-tinian capitals, with Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli sover-eignty and Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty,and special arrangements for the Old City providing unimpeded access to holy sites for all communities.

¶ Third, provide for broad financial compensation for Palestin-ian refugees, resettlement assistance in the new Palestinian state,and other measures to address their sense of injustice.

¶ Fourth, agree to a multinational force, probably American-led, for a transitional security period.

Alas, I don’t see the Israeli prime minister designate, BenjaminNetanyahu, moving in this direction, unless the Obama admin-istration can work miracles. The result will only be still greaterIsraeli unease and isolation. Rebranding cannot be a matter of cos-metic change alone.

INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

National Anxiety Clouds

The Zionist Dream

A charming visit with a talk show host won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bank-ers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Ba-rack Obama addresses the full depth ofAmericans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his pres-idency and, worse, our economy will beparalyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Cali-fornia, in a letter to the editor published byThe Times recently: “President Obamamay not realize it yet, but his Katrina mo-ment has arrived.”

On February 8, I wrote that the coun-try’s surge of populist rage could devourthe president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if hedidn’t get in front of it. The occasion thenwas the controversy over Tom Daschle’s tax issues that derailed his nomination assecretary of health and human services.The White House seemed utterly blindsid-ed by the public’s revulsion at the moneyedinsiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’slucrative post-Senate career. Yet recentevents suggest that the administrationlearned nothing from that brush with di-saster.

Otherwise it never would have usedLawrence Summers, the chief economicadviser, as a messenger just as the rageover American International Group’s bo-nus fiasco was reaching a full boil. Sum-mers has proven to be oblivious to theanger of average Americans.

Bob Schieffer of CBS News asked Sum-mers the simple question that has hauntedthe American public since the bailouts be-gan last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers,what the banks have done with all of thismoney that has been funneled to themthrough these bailouts?” What followedwas a monologue of evasion that, translat-ed into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.

Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not.It has, in essence, been laundering its$170 billion in taxpayers’ money by pay-ing off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citi-group on Wall Street to Société Généraleand Deutsche Bank abroad.

Summers was even more highhandedin addressing the “retention bonuses”handed to the very employees who bro-kered all those bad bets. After recitingthe requisite outrage talking point, he de-livered a patronizing lecture to viewers of ABC’s “This Week” on how our “tradition of upholding law” made it impossible toabrogate the bonus agreements. It never occurred to Summers that Americansmight know that contracts are renegoti-ated all the time — most conspicuously of late by the United Automobile Workers,which consented to givebacks as its con-tribution to the Detroit bailout plan. Nor did he note, for all his supposed reverence for the law, that the A.I.G. unit being re-warded with these bonuses is now under legal investigation by British and Ameri-can authorities.

Within 24 hours, Summers’s stand was discarded by Obama, who tardily (and im-potently) vowed to “pursue every singlelegal avenue” to block the bonuses. Thequestion is not just why the White House was the last to learn about bonuses thatDemocratic congressmen had soughthearings about back in December, butwhy it was so slow to realize the depthof the public’s anger. By the time Obama acted, even the Republican leader Mitch McConnell was ahead of him in full (ifhypocritical) fulmination.

David Axelrod, Obama’s closest ad-viser, tried to rationalize the lagging re-sponse when he told The Washington Postthat “people are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about A.I.G.,” but are instead “thinking about their ownjobs.” While that’s technically true, itmisses the point. Of course most Ameri-cans don’t know how A.I.G. brought theworld’s financial system to near-ruinor what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. standsfor. But Americans do make the connec-tion between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

They know that the corporate bosseswho may yet lay them off have sometimes

been as obscenely overcompensated for failure as Wall Street’s bonus babies. AsThe Wall Street Journal reported recently,chief executives at businesses as diverseas Texas Instruments and the home build-er Hovnanian Enterprises have receivedmillions in bonuses even as their compa-nies’ shares have lost more than half theirvalue.

Since Americans get the big picture of this inequitable system, that grotesquereality dwarfs any fine print. That’s why itdoesn’t matter that the disputed bonusesat A.I.G. amount to less than one-tenth ofone percent of its bailout. Or that Edward Liddy, the current chief executive, hadnothing to do with A.I.G.’s collapse, or thatJohn Thain, who spent a small fortune re-decorating his office at Merrill Lynch, ar-rived after, not before, others wrecked thecompany.

These players are just the handiesttargets for the larger rage. Passions are now so hot that even Bernie Madoff’sswindling began to pale as we turnedour attention to A.I.G.’s misdeeds, just asA.I.G. will fade when the next malefactorsurfaces.

In his town-hall meeting in Costa Mesa, California, on March 18, Obama describedthe A.I.G. bonuses as merely a symptom of“a culture where people made enormous

sums of money taking irresponsible risks that have now put the entire economy at risk.” But speeches won’t tamp down the anger out there, and neither will calcu-lated displays of presidential “outrage.”We must have governance to match themessage.

To get ahead of the anger, Obama must do what he has repeatedly promised but not always done: make everything about his economic policies transparent andhold every player accountable.

Inquiring Americans have the right to know why it took six months for us to learn(some of) what A.I.G. did with our money.We need to understand why some of thatmoney was used to bail out foreign banks.And why Goldman, which declared thatits potential losses with A.I.G. were “im-material,” nonetheless got the largestknown A.I.G. handout of taxpayers’ cash ($12.9 billion) while also receiving a TARPbailout. We need to be told why retentionbonuses went to some 50 bankers whonot only were in the toxic A.I.G. unit but who left despite the “retention” jackpots. We must be told why taxpayers have solittle control of the bailed-out financial in-stitutions that we now own some or mostof. And where are the results from those “stress tests” the Treasury Departmentis giving those banks?

That’s just a short list. In general, it’shard to imagine taxpayers paying billionsfor a second bank bailout unless there’s afull accounting of every dime of the first.

Another compelling question connectsall of the above: why has there been solittle transparency and so much evasive-ness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.

The “dirty little secret,” Obama saidduring a recent television appearance,is that “most of the stuff that got us intotrouble was perfectly legal.” An even dirt-ier secret is that a prime mover in keep-ing that stuff legal was Summers, whohelped prevent the regulation of deriva-tives while in the Clinton administration. His mentor Robert Rubin, no less, wrote in his 2003 memoir that Summers had un-derestimated how the risk of derivatives might multiply “under extraordinary cir-cumstances.”

As for Geithner, people might take him more seriously if he gave a credible ac-count of why, while at the New York Fed,he and the Goldman alumnus Hank Paul-son let Lehman Brothers fail but savedthe Goldman-trading ally A.I.G.

As the nation’s anger rose, the presidenttook responsibility for what’s happening on his watch — more than he needed to,given the disaster he inherited. But in the credit mess, action must match words.

To fall short would be to deliver us into the catastrophic hands of a Republicanopposition whose only known economicprogram is to reject job-creating stimu-lus spending and root for Obama and, byextension, the country to fail. This would be the biggest outrage of them all.

FRANK RICH

Has Obama’s ‘Katrina Moment’ Arrived?

The president needs toact on the public anger,not just talk about it.

BARRY BLITT

Send comments to intelligence@nytimes.com.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009 III

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia — Vasily Reutov hadnever set foot in Russia until a few months ago,but the moment he did, he knew he had finallymade it home.

His ancestors, members of an ascetic offshootof Russian Orthodoxy known as Old Believers,fled this region in the 1920s after the Communist Party violently suppressed religion. They set-tled in cloistered villages in South America thatthey turned into Little Russias, as if by preserv-ing the ways of the past, they would somehow,someday, be able to return.

Now, with Russia itself beckoning and stur-dier than before, that time has come.

The government is trying to head off thecountry’s severe population decline by luringback Russians who live abroad as well as their descendants. Mr. Reutov and several dozenother members of his religious community fromUruguay have become among the most strikingexamples of this policy.

Yet their return also points to Russia’s dis-quieting population drop. The United Nationspredicts that the country will fall to 116 millionpeople by 2050, from 141 million now, an 18 per-cent decline, largely because of a low birthrateand poor health habits.

Moscow has spent $300 million in the past twoyears to get the repatriation program started,

and officials estimated that more than 25 mil-lion people were eligible, many of them ethnicRussians who found themselves living in for-mer Soviet republics after the Soviet collapsein 1991.

But the government is not limiting itself toRussia’s neighbors, sending emissaries around the world to sell the program. One even went toBrazil recently to meet with residents of severalcountries who, like Mr. Reutov, are Old Believ-ers, whose followers have some similarities inlifestyle to the Amish. Diaspora Old Believercommunities exist worldwide, including inAlaska and Oregon.

Mr. Reutov, 36, was not at the meeting in Bra-zil because he was already here, having decidedto enroll in the program and move with his wifeand five children from Uruguay. Others fromtwo villages there are planning to follow soon,he said.

“We have always felt like we belonged to Rus-sia,’’ Mr. Reutov said. “We are Russian, and weneed to be here.’’

So far, only 10,300 people have moved backunder the government repatriation program,which has faced criticism that it is overly bu-reaucratic and unpersuasive. Vladimir G. Poz-dorovkin, a Foreign Ministry official who over-sees the program, has visited several countriesin the past year to promote it, including Germa-ny and Egypt. At the meeting in Brazil recently,he said, he was asked many questions by Old Be-lievers about the quality of life and the businessclimate in Russia.

“Their desire to return to the historic home-land is there,’’ Mr. Pozdorovkin said. “Their fa-thers and grandfathers always told them thatthey had to return to Russia. But to what Russia,what conditions are there — they want to findthat out beforehand.’’

Mr. Reutov said he was pleased with the helpthat he had received from regional officials, whoseem equally pleased that he is returning. Rus-sia’s vast and sparsely inhabited Far East hasfallen in population to six million, from eightmillion in 1991. Tens of millions of Chinese arejust over the border, but Russia does not want toallow them in.

Still, not all Old Believer communities are asenthusiastic. The Reverend Nikolai Yakunin, apriest who leads one in Nikolaevsk, Alaska, saidhe was often asked whether he yearned to livein Russia.

“We are not moving back,” he said. “They arestill Communists there, even if they call them-selves democrats.’’

JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Vasily Reutov, left, and Aleksei Kilin,his brother-in-law, were enticed to leave Uruguay and resettle in Russia.

Russia Scours Globe for Expatriates

A HarvestBrings StrifeIn Andalusia

By VICTORIA BURNETT

LEPE, Spain — José María Gómez Jimenez thought his days of toilingin the Andalusian countryside wereover. For much of the past eight years,Mr. Gómez, 29, earned about $1,900 a month plastering walls and workingweekend shifts as a chef in this pros-perous, strawberry-farming town.He bought an apartment, often wentto parties after work and splurged on trendy sneakers.

A year ago, Mr. Gómez lost his con-struction job. Now he is harvestingstrawberries for $1,100 a month on afarm outside Lepe, in the Andalusianprovince of Huelva.

“Picking strawberries is the lastresort, but it’s all there is,” Mr. Gómez said. “The fat cows have gone, and nowthe lean cows are here.”

As jobs disappear across Andalusia,workers like Mr. Gómez are return-ing to the fields they abandoned forconstruction sites, hotels and shopsduring Spain’s decade-long economic boom.

They are competing with the mi-grants who replaced them, fueling re-sentment that immigrant representa-tives and farmers worry could becomeexplosive.

Huelva, one of the world’s largestproducers of strawberries, becamea magnet for foreign labor in recentyears as Spanish farmers who couldnot find enough local workers flew in

thousands of fruit pickers from coun-tries like Morocco and Romania.

But with unemployment soaringnow, a region that successfully ab-sorbed temporary workers when jobs were plentiful has become an example of emerging friction between nationaland foreign workers, unions and farm-ers.

The jobless rate in Andalusia hit 22percent at the end of last year, wellabove the national rate of 14 percentand three times the average in the Eu-ropean Union.

“We have fields full of immigrants

and people in the village sitting aroundwith no work,” said Malu Escobar Co-bos, 23, who lost her job as a supermar-ket cashier in Lepe five months agoand was looking for a job at the farmwhere Mr. Gómez was working. Mr.Gómez’s boss, José Muriel Madrigal, said about 30 job-seekers, both localsand immigrants, stopped by each day.

“It’s partly our fault, because weSpaniards didn’t want to work in thefields anymore,” Ms. Escobar said.“But now that there’s no work in thetown, they have to find a balance.”

Farmers said that when they did

their main round of recruitment inSeptember, few local workers applied for jobs. The farmers hired about halfthe harvest’s 50,000 fruit pickers from overseas, only a few thousand below last year’s total. The other half are amix of Spaniards and migrants resid-ing in Spain.

But by the time the harvest began inlate February, many local people had been out of work for months and were desperate. Villagers staged protestsaround the strawberry belt, threaten-ing to occupy farms if producers didnot hire more local people.

Scattered in the woods aroundHuelva was another set of losers in the dire contest for farm jobs: hundreds of migrant day laborers living in impro-vised shelters. Among them was Bou-ba Gul, 27, a Senegalese who shares a shelter made of plastic sheeting andold blankets with eight men. Each

morning, Mr. Gul and his friends walkabout five kilometers to nearby farms to ask for work, so far unsuccessfully.

“If I had known Europe would belike this, I would never have come,”Mr. Gul said.

“This is no life: we can’t wash, wecan’t eat, we can’t even sleep prop-erly,” Mr. Gul said. “If I can’t work,if I can’t eat, how can I send moneyback?” After a dangerous crossing to Spain via the Canary Islands in a fish-ing boat, followed by two years trying to find a job, Mr. Gul said he was ready to quit.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m so, sotired. I just want to go home.” For Mr. Gómez, the boom already seems likea mirage.

“It was a dream,” he said wistfully.“You earned good money; you couldbuy whatever you wanted. We allthought it would last forever.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURA LEON FOR THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

Many strawberry pickers in Lepe, Spain, come from other countries.Bouba Gul, praying in the middle above, wants to return to Senegal.

N09031F31NQAN02

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IV MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009

THE NEW YORK TIMES

0

+ 5

+ 10

+ 15%

Source: Federal Reserve, via Haver Analytics

Annualized change in net worth of U.S. households over four-year periods, before inflation.

’60 ’70 ’80 ’90 ’00 ’08

Losing Ground

The losses from the worldwide fi-nancial implosion are only now being tallied up. Adjusting to the reality isproving hard.

That difficulty is the unifying fact inmuch of the news thesedays — as well as in themass public outrageover Bernard Madoff, aman who stole primar-ily from the well-off.Much of the anger is

coming from people who did not lose adime from his Ponzi scheme but whohave lost plenty in the stock and realestate markets and would dearly loveto find someone to blame.

All those who lost a lot — and a lot is defined differently for each person — now face similar decisions. Do theyadmit they are permanently poorer,and adjust both their spending and their sense of how successful theyhave been? Or do they seek to denyreality and hope that somehow the good old days will return?

That problem can be illustratedby the bonuses paid to executives at companies like the American Inter-national Group. They still think theydeserve to be treated as highly suc-cessful people running a large finan-cial company. The fact that it wouldhave collapsed if not for the govern-ment’s repeated bailouts is viewed asan insignificant detail.

And it could also be seen recently in a legislative proposal being pushedby art museum directors in New Yorkthat would bar museums in financial difficulty from selling artwork to raise money to pay other bills. Even without such a law, one museum that sold artwork is to be punished by notbeing allowed to borrow art from other museums.

There was outrage earlier this yearwhen Brandeis University in Mas-sachusetts announced plans to close its art museum and sell the paintings. The university’s endowment was devastated by bad investments.

What do people opposed to the sale of paintings think suddenly poor in-stitutions should do? Close? Seek gov-ernment bailouts? Should Brandeisclose down a few academic depart-ments, or cut back on scholarships, to keep its art?

Brandeis is hardly the only collegewhose endowment has contractedsharply. I suspect that when the final numbers are in it will turn out that colleges as a group did far worse thanthe stock market while the market was doing horribly.

That is because colleges followedthe herd. They poured money into so-called alternative investments, which had appeared to be so successful forHarvard and Yale. Alumni clamoredto know why their college could not show similar returns, and some col-leges that could ill afford big losses

put most of their endowment into hedge funds. It turns out such funds could be extremely risky.

Those colleges, like many othersuddenly less well-off investors, nowface decisions. Should they shift to lessrisky investments with the money thatis left, thus giving up the profits thatwill come if the market does bounceback, as some hope it has alreadybegun to do? Or should they hang inthere and risk even bigger losses?

In the meantime, a host of college construction projects have been sus-pended because the money that was to pay for them is gone. Those deci-sions, rational as they may be, are putting further downward pressure on the economy just as the college building binge fueled by previous stock market profits helped to stimu-

late the economy.State and local governments with

pension plans are facing similar is-sues. Rather than raise taxes or holdback promised benefits, it was easier to assume generous stock market re-turns would continue forever.

Faced with underfunded state pension plans, New Jersey even soldtaxable bonds to raise cash to put into the funds. That would save the state money if profits from the funds’ in-vestments exceeded the interest paidon the bonds. It would cost a lot if the market plunged.

Now New Jersey wants to find villains to blame. It recently suedformer officials of Lehman Brothers, saying they lied about the firm’s fi-nancial position before it collapsed.

As a society, we are not as rich as wethought we were. The Federal Reservenow estimates that American house-holds as a group are poorer than theywere four years ago, even before ad-justing for inflation. That had not hap-pened in any four-year period sincethe Fed began making those estimatesmore than half a century ago.

It is not an easy reality to adjust to.But simply assuming that we deserveto live as if it had not happened willonly make things worse.

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ

Since it was founded by his great-grandfather in 1880, Carl MartinWelcker’s company in Cologne, Ger-many, has mirrored the fortunes ofmanufacturing, not just in Europebut around the world.

That is still true today. In a patternfamiliar to industrial businesses inEurope, Asia and the United States, Mr. Welcker says his company, Schüt-te, which makes the machines thatchurn out 80 percent of the world’sspark plugs, is facing “a tragedy.”

Orders are down 50 percent from ayear ago, and Mr. Welcker is cutting costs and contemplating layoffs to pre-vent Schütte from falling into debt.

That manufacturing is in decline ishardly surprising, but the depth and speed of the plunge are striking and,most worrisome for economists, aself-reinforcing trend not unlike the cascading bust that led to the Great Depression.

In Europe, for example, wheremanufacturing accounts for nearlya fifth of gross domestic product, in-dustrial production is down 12 per-cent from a year ago. In Brazil, it hasfallen 15 percent; in Taiwan, a stag-gering 43 percent.

Even in China, which has become the workshop of the world, productiongrowth has slowed, with exports fall-ing more than 25 percent and millionsof factory workers being laid off.

In the United States, industrial out-put fell 11 percent in February from a year ago, according to statisticsreleased March 16 by the Federal Re-serve.

“Manufacturing has fallen off thecliff, and it’s certainly the biggestdecline since the Second World War,” said Dirk Schumacher, senior Euro-

pean economist with Goldman Sachsin Frankfurt.

The pattern of manufacturing and trade ominously recalls how the finan-cial crisis of 1929 grew into the GreatDepression: tightening credit andconsumer fear reduced demand formanufactured goods in one countryafter another, creating a downward spiral that reduced global trade.

“Plunging manufacturing sug-gests that as bad as things were inthe fourth quarter, they are at leastas bad now,” said Robert J. Barbera,chief economist at ITG, a New Yorkresearch and trading business. “This is a classic adverse feedback loop. It

won’t quickly correct itself.”That means more workers can

expect to lose their jobs around theworld in coming months as manufac-turers continue to cut production, es-pecially as global trade contracts.

In fact, trade is shrinking evenfaster than production. Germany’sexports are down 20 percent from a year ago, Japan’s have plunged 46percent, and in the United States, ex-ports fell at an annualized rate of 23.6percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Mr. Welcker says he has never seenanything like it. For parallels, he has to hark back to the Great Depressionand World War II, when Schütte’s fac-tory was destroyed. After focusingonGermany and Europe in the decadesafter the war, Schütte thrived recentlyas globalization opened new markets

in Eastern Europe and Asia. In the last five years, Schütte’s sales soaredto about 100 million euros ($131 mil-lion) from 58 million.

While manufacturing equals about 14 percent of gross domestic productin the United States, it totals 18 per-cent worldwide, and accounts for 33percent of G.D.P. in China, accord-ing to the World Bank. That means that China, Brazil, India and otherfast-growing emerging market coun-tries that have escaped the worst of the fallout from the credit crisis willincreasingly suffer, dragging downdemand in more advanced Western economies .

Although the problems of manu-facturers supplying the auto industryand other so-called big iron manufac-turers of products like locomotives,jet engines and power turbines havegotten the most attention, makers of a variety of other products, includinghandicrafts, clothes and jewelry, aresuffering too.

India’s manufacturing sector,which accounts for about 16 percent of G.D.P., recently recorded its first quarterly production decline in morethan a decade.

Since last April, handicraft exportshave fallen by 55 percent to $1.35 bil-lion, and textile makers estimate theyhave slashed half a million jobs. Banksare restructuring loans for diamond makers and polishers.

And despite tax cuts and a $64 mil-lion stimulus package announced inFebruary, Indian textile makers are pushing for more government help.

“We’re competing with countrieslike Bangladesh, where wages arelower,” said Rakesh Vaid, the chair-man of Usha Fabs, a Delhi textilemanufacturer. “We’re competingwith China where the currency is wellmanaged, and Vietnam where the in-dustry is getting strong support fromthe government.”

CHINA PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

BORYANA KATSAROVA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

FLOYD

NORRIS

ESSAY

The Money Is Gone.Will Spending Adjust?

Factories Around the World Feel the Pain

Protectionist Sentiment Rises As Economic Slump Spreads

From Page I

Tight credit and fearare ominous signs for manufacturers.

distances on American roads. Mexicoretaliated by imposing duties on $2.4billion worth of American goods. The trucking dispute has its roots in the North American Free Trade Agree-ment, or Nafta, which guaranteedMexico, Canada and the United Statesaccess to one another’s highways for cargo transport by 2000.

While resistance in Congress to Mex-ican trucks is long-running, based inpart on safety and environmental con-cerns, American officials worry it willcause broader frictions with Mexico.

“It’s very worrisome to the Mexi-cans because it’s seen as protection-ism,” said Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the

assistant secretary of state for West-ern Hemisphere affairs, who is work-ing with other officials to devise a new pilot program for trucks that will sat-isfy critics in Congress.

Mexico’s tariffs affect 90 productsfrom 40 states, accounting for lessthan 2 percent of American exports.Mr. Shannon said it underscored thebreadth of the trading relationship.

Even without protectionism, thesynchronized global downturn islikely to result in the largest annualdecline in world trade in 80 years, ac-cording to the World Bank. While the bank said it was difficult to quantifythe effects of the new barriers, theycould aggravate that decline.

The World Bank president, Robert

B. Zoellick, warned recently that 2009could be a “very dangerous” year, asleaders faced rising calls for protec-tion from economically insecurepopulations. He called on the WorldTrade Organization to monitor pro-tectionist actions and publicize them.But not all the measures violate thebody’s laws.

The stimulus plans that the UnitedStates is pushing Europe to adoptcan also distort trade, depending on how much they rely on subsidies. InNovember, the Group of 20 agreed to “refrain from raising new barriers to investment or to trade in goods and ser-vices,” regardless of whether the mea-sures complied with trade laws. Mr.

Price, the former Bush administrationofficial who is now a trade lawyer withthe firm Sidley Austin, said the leadersshould go further in London.

Given Mr. Obama’s ambiguous po-sitions on trade during the campaign— he favored renegotiating Nafta —economists praise him for taking a de-fensive stand against protectionism sofar. But as stimulus programs begin totake hold, they could encourage con-sumers to buy more imported goods .

“The U.S. is in such great danger ofbacking away from free trade,” saidKenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of eco-nomics at Harvard University. “Thenext two years could be a disaster for free trade.”

Bulgaria asked for helpin reopening its bordercrossings with Greece, which angry farmers had shut toprotest low food prices.

Heather Timmons contributed reporting from New Delhi and Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo.

Migrants leftGuangzhou,

China, after the factory where

they workedclosed because

demand for goods fell.

Repubblica NewYork

A M E R I C A N A

MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009 V

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By ERIK ECKHOLM

COSTA MESA, California — There is a new face of homelessness in Or-ange County in Southern California:formerly middle income, living weekto week in a cramped motel room.

As the recessionhas deepened,longtime work-ers who lost their jobs are facing theterror and stigma of homelessnessfor the first time,

including those who have owned orrented for years. Some show up inshelters and on the streets, but oth-ers are the hidden homeless — living doubled up in apartments, in garages or in motels, uncounted in federalhomeless data and often receivinglittle public aid.

“The motels have become the defacto low-income housing of OrangeCounty,” said Wally Gonzales, direc-tor of Project Dignity, one of dozens of small charities and church groups that have emerged to assist families,relying on donations of food, clothing and toys.

The Garza family moved to theCosta Mesa Motor Inn in August, af-ter the husband, Johnny, lost his job atTarget, his wife, Tamara, lost her job at Petco, a pet supply store, and theywere evicted from their two-bedroomrental. Their 9-year-old daughter nowshares a bed with two younger broth-ers, their toys and schoolbooks piled on the floor. The couple’s baby boy,born in April, sleeps in a small crib.

Rental aid from federal and countyprograms reaches only a small frac-tion of needy families, said Bob Cer-ince, coordinator for homeless andmotel residents services in Anaheim,who estimated the families at more than 1,000.

Motel families exist by the hun-dreds in Denver, along Route 1 which connects the major cities on the East-ern Seaboard, and in other cities fromChattanooga, Tennessee, to Portland,Oregon. But they are especially prev-alent in Orange County, which hashigh rents, a shortage of public hous-ing and a surplus of older motels that once housed Disneyland visitors.

In the past, motel families herewere mainly drawn from the chroni-cally struggling. In 1998, an exposé ofneglected motel children by The Or-ange County Register prompted cre-ation of city task forces and promisesof help. But in recent months, schools,churches and charities report a differ-ent sort of family showing up.

“People asking for help are from a wider demographic range than we’veseen in the past, middle-income fami-

lies,” said Terry Lowe, director ofcommunity services in Anaheim,California.

The motels range from those withtattered rugs and residents who abusealcohol and drugs to newer placeswith playgrounds and kitchenettes. With names like the Covered Wagon Motel and the El Dorado Inn, theylook like any other modestly pricedstopover inland from the upscalebeach towns. But walk inside and the perception immediately changes.

In the evening, the smell of pasta sauce cooked on hot plates driftsthrough half-open doors; in the morn-ing, children leave to catch schoolbuses. Families of three, six or more are squeezed into a room, one child doing homework on a bed, jostled byanother watching television. Chil-dren rotate at bedtime, taking theirturns on the floor. Some families use a closet for baby cribs.

President Obama’s stimulus pack-age may give hope to more peopleand blunt the projected rise of fami-lies who could end up in motels and shelters, said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Home-lessness in Washington. The packageallows $1.5 billion for homeless pre-vention, including help with rent andsecurity deposits.

Many motel residents have at leastone working parent and pay $800 to $1,200 a month for a room. Yet even those with jobs can become mired

in motel life for years because of bad credit ratings and the difficulty ofsaving the extra months’ rent andsecurity deposits to secure an apart-ment.

Paris Andre Navarro, 47, knowshow hard it can be to climb back. She and her husband used to have goodjobs and an apartment in GardenGrove, 48 kilometers from Los Ange-les. But they have spent the last three years with their 11-year-old daughter in the El Dorado Inn.

Their troubles began when her hus-band’s medical problems forced him to leave his job as a computer techni-cian and her home-care job ended.They were evicted and moved intothe motel, and she started working at a Target department store. Last year,when her husband started a telemar-keting job, they thought they mightescape. That hope evaporated when her hours at Target were cut in half. What with the $241 weekly rent, thecost of essentials and a $380 car pay-ment, they cannot save.

“Now we’re just living paycheck topaycheck,” Ms. Navarro said.

Their daughter, Crystal, tries tosound stoical. “What I miss most ishaving a pet,” she said. The moteldoes not allow pets, so she gave awayher cat and kittens.

Greg Hayworth, whose familyhas spent six dispiriting months inthe Costa Mesa Inn, tried workingin sales but has had trouble findinga lasting job. His teenage daughterhas had the roughest time becauseof the lack of privacy. She is too em-barrassed to take friends home, and is uncomfortable dressing in front ofher brothers, who are 10 and 11.

“I’d promised my daughter thatwe’d be out of here by her birthday,”Mr. Hayworth said. “But that camelast week, and we’re still here.”

By RUTH LA FERLA

MIAMI BEACH — In recentmonths, the sinking economy has,inevitably, altered the landscape andgo-go spirit of Miami Beach. Many ofthe glittery hotels lining Ocean Drive

are barely two-thirds full, and es-calating rents andslowing sales haveforced a number ofboutiques and res-taurants to moveoff the Lincoln

Road Mall, the eight-block-long pe-destrian street that is South Beach’stown center.

Clearly, the recession has cast ashadow here. But it is not a long enoughshadow to have darkened the spirits ofmany heat-seeking visitors, who stilldescend on South Beach in search ofescape. Lulled by the languid air and the pastel-tinted backdrop of Art Decohotels, many are still intent on indulg-ing a hedonistic streak.

Tourists — 12.1 million last yearfor Miami and Miami Beach, accord-ing to the most recent figures fromthe Greater Miami Convention andVisitors Bureau — are still arrivingfrom New York and Atlanta, BuenosAires and São Paulo, Brazil, swarm-ing clubs, restaurants, pool decks and boutiques.

“People are drinking vodka instead of Champagne, but the crowds are stillhere,” said Roman Jones, owner of the Opium Group, the force behind flashyclubs like Set, Mansion, Privé and the trendy Louis Bar, which is inside theeight-month-old Gansevoort South ho-tel. Despite the recession, about 15,000people continue to pass through Mr.Jones’s clubs each night, he said.

“They come to blow off steam, and ifspending $5,000 over a couple of nightswill make them forget they lost more than $5 million, then in their minds it’sworth it,” he said. “They’re markingan era that has passed, but they wantto hold on to it.”

At Louis Bar, Adriana Leone, a den-tist with a practice on Wall Street, said,“I came because the place is new, but mostly because I needed to get awayfrom the depressing economy that isNew York City right now.”

She is one of many visitors embrac-ing Miami Beach as the ultimateescape, a place to shrug off the inhi-bitions — fiscal or otherwise — thatrestrain them at home.

This time, the usual streams ofvisitors from New York, Latin Amer-ica and Europe have been joined by wealthy Russians .

“In the first week of January, we did as much business as we did last yearfor that entire month, and it was allRussians,” said Roma Cohen, a part-ner in Alchemist, a year-old LincolnRoad boutique selling high-end fash-ion by Azzedine Alaïa and Rick Ow-ens. “They’re the only ones who buy without asking for discounts.”

Mr. Cohen, hard-pressed to keep hotlabels in stock, may be doing well, but

other retailers are suffering, reportinga drop in sales of as much as 20 percent.On weekdays and some weekends,Lincoln Road traffic can dwindle to a trickle. Mead Dunevant, an assistant manager at Fly Boutique, a vintageshop, complained: “It’s dead here, likesummer. People aren’t spending what they were, and that leaves less for the locals.”

Still, the economy has not deterreda handful of outsiders from establish-ing beachheads on the mall. J. Crew isexpected to arrive in November, and Diesel, the Milan-based purveyor ofhip casual wear, opened its doors inJanuary.

“There are certain markets wherewe have unbelievable success,” SteveBirkhold, the chief executive of Diesel U.S.A., told Women’s Wear Daily, “andMiami is one of them.”

Some of these mainstream ven-tures are predicted to fare well. Butbroad economic indicators depict aboomtown that has cooled. Declining prices and rising numbers of homesand apartments for sale place Miami and Miami Beach at the leading edgeof the nation’s real estate crisis. Homeprices are 15 to 25 percent lower thanat their peak in 2004, according to Mi-chael Y. Cannon, a real estate analyst in Miami.

In the last half-dozen years, a more ambitious wave of development has given rise to hotels like the Setai and the Fontainebleau, which underwenta $500 million renovation last year. “At

this point, I think we’re set in stone,” said Michael Capponi, a local promot-er and builder. “There is too much in-vestment for it all to collapse.”

On a recent Friday night, the fever-ish activity at restaurants and nightspots suggested there may be moreto Mr. Capponi’s claim than wishfulthinking.

At Prime 112 on Ocean Drive, one of five South Beach restaurants ownedby Myles Chefetz, a line of patrons indouble-breasted suits and short cock-tail dresses snaked from the bar to the sidewalk outside, waiting for tables.Inside, others enjoyed a double-por-tion $79 Porterhouse steak or sampled the restaurant’s exotic rendition ofcomfort food: a steaming truffle-laced platter of macaroni and cheese.

Business at Prime 112 was up 5 per-cent in 2008 over the year before, saidMr. Chefetz, attributing the rise to peo-ple who “like to act rich for a night.”

“This isn’t New York,” he said. “It’s not considered bad taste to spendmoney here.”

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MONICA ALMEIDA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Johnny Garza was forced to move his family into a motel after he and his wife, Tamara, lost their jobs. Below, Paris Andre Navarro and her daughter, Crystal, have lived in a motel for three years.

BARBARA P. FERNANDEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The pool lounges and nightclubs of Miami Beach are still filled withtourists from Latin America and Russia.

In Recession’s Shadow, Escaping to South Beach

As Jobs Vanish, Motels Become Home

Warm days and hot nightclubs haven’t losttheir decadent allure.

With little public aid,growing numbers ofhidden homeless.

Repubblica NewYork

B U S I N E S S O F G R E E N

VI MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009

By DAN LEVIN

BEIJING — Each morning TianWengui emerges from the homehe makes under a bridge here, twolarge sacks slung over his shoulder. Through the day and well into thenight, he scours garbage cans for so-da bottles, soy sauce containers and cooking oil jugs. Selling the refuse toone of Beijing’s ubiquitous recycling depots, he can earn $3 on a good day.

But good days are getting harder tocome by.

Since Mr. Tian migrated from Sich-uan Province, the multibillion-dollarrecycling industry has gone into anosedive because of the global eco-nomic crisis and a concomitant fall incommodity prices. Bottles now sell forhalf of what they did in the summer.

“Even trash has become worth-less,” Mr. Tian said.

The collapse of the recycling busi-ness has affected people like Mr.Tian, the middlemen who buy thewaste products and the factoriesthat refashion the recyclable wasteinto products bound for stores andconstruction sites around the world.American and European waste deal-ers who sell to China are finding thattheir shipments are being refused byclients when they arrive in Asia.

The ultimate victim may be theenvironment, now further burdenedwith refuse that until recently wouldhave been recycled.

The effect is being felt acutely inChina, the world’s largest garbageimporter. The United States, for ex-ample, exported 10.5 million metrictons of recovered paper and card-board last year to China, up from 1.9million metric tons in 2000, according to the American Forest and Paper As-sociation.

Because Chinese consumption isfar less developed than the West’s,more than 70 percent of the materi-als that feed the country’s recycling industry must come from abroad, saidWang Yonggang, a spokesman for theChina National Resources RecyclingAssociation. “Chinese tradition is allabout saving and being thrifty,” he said. “People here would rather havethings repaired several times beforeabandoning them.”

The drop in prices was so rapid thatin a matter of weeks last fall, containerships carrying used railroad wheelsand empty dog food cans arrived inChinese ports worth far less than theyhad been when they departed New-ark, Rotterdam or Los Angeles.

“Everything was moving along justfine until October and then we fell offa cliff,” said Bruce Savage, a spokes-man for the Institute of Scrap Recy-cling Industries, a trade organizationthat mostly represents Americanwaste processing companies.

The United States exported $22 bil-lion worth of recycled materials to 152countries in 2007. Now the organiza-

tion estimates the valueof American recyclables has decreased by 50 to 70percent.

Western dealers saythey are grappling withmounting stockpileswhose value in many cas-es continues to sink.

To make matters worse, Chineseimporters are demanding to renego-tiate contracts drastically downward.In some cases, they are refusing to ac-cept shipments they already have a contractual obligation to take.

“There are still many containersfull of waste sitting at the port in HongKong,” Mr. Wang of the recycling as-sociation said. “It’s hard to say whenthey’ll be picked up.”

The tough times are hitting Chineserecyclers at every level.

On a recent day on the outskirts ofBeijing, Chen Xiaorong, 36, squattedon a vast island of stockpiled note-pads, magazines and schoolbooksnear her tiny brick shack.

“I know people who lost everythingbetting on recycling,” she said.

Many of her neighbors have re-turned to the countryside, while the $735 her extended family would earna month has shrunk to $360.

Sorting through discarded sheetsof Chairman Mao’s poems, she added,“China now has more garbage than itcan digest. Do we really need Ameri-ca’s junk, too?”

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

NUNEATON, England — AndyRoost drove his blue Peugeot 205 ontoa farm, where signs pointed one way for “eggs” and another for “oil.” He un-screwed the gas cap and chatted non-chalantly as Colin Friedlos, the propri-etor, poured three jugs of used cookingoil — tinted green to indicate environ-mental benefit — into the gas tank.

Mr. Friedlos operates one of hun-dreds of small plants in Britain that areprocessing, and often selling to privatemotorists, used cooking oil, which canbe poured directly into unmodified die-sel cars, from Fords to Mercedes.

Last year, when the price of crude oiltopped $147 a barrel, a number of largecompanies in Europe and the UnitedStates set up plants to collect and re-

fine used cooking oil into biodiesel. Theglobal recession and the steep dropin oil prices have killed many of thoselarge ventures. But smaller ones likeMr. Friedlos’s are filling the void, hav-ing been deluged by offers of free oilfrom restaurants.

Some dealers here offer fill-ups insuburban yards and barns. Others —like John Nicholson, founder of a smallcompany in Wales — deliver jugs ofgreen fuel to hundreds of customers,much like a vehicular milkman.

Used cooking oil has attractedgrowing attention as a cleaner, lessexpensive alternative to fossil fuels forvehicles. In many countries, the oil iscollected by companies and refined in-to a form of diesel. Some cities use it inspecially modified municipal buses or

vans. And the occasional environmen-talist has experimented with individu-ally filtering the oil and using it as fuel.

Here, however, the direct-to-the-tank approach is gainingpopularity, at-tracting people like Mr. Roost. The oil,he said, is “good for the environment and it’s cheaper than diesel, even nowthat prices have dropped.” It costs $1.29per liter, about 10 percent less than die-sel costs now and about one-third lessthan it cost at its peak last year.

Used cooking oil will never erase theneed for filling stations, nor will it, byitself, reverse climate change.

“You can’t eat enough French fries”to serve all the cars in the West, saidPeder Jensen, a transport specialist atthe European Environment Agency.But he said it was one of many small ad-

justments that, added together, could help reduce emissions of greenhousegases. The main barriers to the wide-spread use of cooking oil, Dr. Jensensaid, are “structural,” like the lack of standards for processing the fuel and adapting vehicles to run on it.

Others disagree. Stuart Johnson,manager of engineering and environ-ment at Volkswagen of America, calledputting raw vegetable oil in cars “abad idea.” The inconsistent quality of cooking oil fuel, he said, means “it maycontain impurities and it may be too viscous,” especially for newer diesel

engines with fuel-injection systems.None of that seems to concern Mr.

Nicholson, the Welsh entrepreneur.“People say, ‘I’ve got no choice but theregular filling station, and they sellonly fossil fuel,’ ” he said. “You’ve got to think differently.”

By PENELOPE GREEN

BARCELONA, Spain — Petz Schol-tus’s renovation of an apartment in theBarri Gòtic, or old city, was a carbon-neutral success.

Eco-renovation is the phrase Ms.Scholtus, a 28-year-old product de-signer from Luxembourg, has beenusing to describe the ongoing restora-tion and decoration of a one-bedroom apartment in the 18th-century build-ing where she lives and works. InBarcelona, a city that has long prizedthe new and the glossy, Ms. Scholtus’sproject amounts to a countercultural effort.

“Here people have an idea that sus-tainable is for the rich or that it’s some-thing horrible and low-quality hippy,” Ms. Scholtus said. “I wanted to see ifit was possible to make it inexpensivebut also, you know, cool.”

Ms. Scholtus’s experiences (which

she recounts on her blog, r3project.blogspot.com) are lessons in how one can realize green ideals on a budget inan existing home in any city.

Ms. Scholtus bought the apartmentfor 235,000 euros in 2006 (just under$300,000): it had no plumbing, no elec-tricity; no glass in its windows; thetoilet was in a closet on the terrace;and what would become the bedroomwas closed off by a load-bearing wall(the only entrance was from the ter-race).

Because Ms. Scholtus had chal-lenged herself to be environmentally responsible during every stage ofhome ownership, she began by re-

searching green financing. To buy the place, she obtained a mortgage fromTriodos, a Dutch ethical bank. Ethi-cal banks (which are more commonin Europe and Canada) invest only insocially or ecologically responsiblebusinesses and projects.

In making her new home livable,Ms. Scholtus’s challenge was to hewas closely as possible to the three R’s of environmentalism: reduce, reuse,recycle. Could she find products thatwere made close to home, were pro-duced without a huge environmental impact, could be dismantled after her tenancy and did not use too much en-ergy? Oh, and all for under 30,000 eu-ros (about $38,000)?

There were successes and disap-pointments, but the budget didn’twaver. One disappointment: Thesmashed-television-screen floor tiles she found for the kitchen and bath-

room in off-white turned out to be a sickly beige. She quicklyfound ceramic tiles made by alocal company that had its own water-treatment plant — thatwas the good part. But because they were ceramic, they couldonly be installed with grout — the old-fashioned permanentway, not ideal for someone who prefers disposable products.

An electrician from Colombiabecame her assistant and then her full-time contractor, thoughhe initially mocked her instruc-tions to find things like PVC-free pipes for the new plumbing (PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, is a ubiquitous building material;environmentalists are con-cerned about toxic emissionsduring its manufacture and dis-posal).

“In the end, he got into it,”she said, “and asked me, ‘Is thissustainable?’ or ‘Why is this notgood?’ ”

To heat the apartment and thewater, Ms. Scholtus purchased an efficient condensing gasboiler .

She also dreamed of radiantfloor heating, but its cost pushedher toward radiators. She chose Low-H

2O radiators (which use

two liters of water, rather than20, a big energy saver), made by thestylish radiator company Jaga.

Ms. Scholtus’s dining room tableis a glass slab she found in the rubbleof her apartment. “The workers kept complaining that it was too big toremove,” she said. So she found tres-tles on the street, painted them andplaced them under the slab to makea table.

Dismantled wine boxes await de-ployment as the doors to her Ikeakitchen cabinets and ancient drawers rescued from the street smell of in-cense — “I think they must have come from a church,” Ms. Scholtus said,wrinkling her nose.

STEFANO BUONAMICI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Petz Scholtus renovated her apartment in an eco-friendly manner. She covered an armchair with newspapers; the cork floor tiles click into place.

Apartment RenovationIs Green, and Affordable

Enlisting Fish and Chips to Combat Climate Change

PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOUG KANTER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

HAZEL THOMPSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Zhan Yingying and Tang Xuemeicontributed research.

Colin Friedlos sells refined cookingoil, which costs about 10 percent

less than diesel fuel, from jugs.

Prices for recyclables have fallen as the economic crisis has reduced demand. Used paper at a recycling center in Beijing. A calligraphy collection, left.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009 VII

By CORNELIA DEAN

ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Georgia —The biologists had been in the plane forhours, flying back and forth over the ocean. They had seen dolphins, leath-erback turtles, a flock of water birds called gannets and even a baskingshark — but not what they were look-ing for.

Then Millie Brower, who was peer-ing with intense concentration througha bubblelike window fitted into theplane’s fuselage, announced “nineo’clock, about a mile off.” The planebanked left and began to circle. And there, below, were a right whale motherand her new calf, barely breaking the surface, lolling in the swells.

The researchers, from the NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administra-tion and the Georgia Wildlife Trust,are part of an intense effort to monitorNorth Atlantic right whales, one of themost endangered, and closely watched,species on earth. As a database checkeventually disclosed, the whale wasDiablo, who was born in these waters eight years ago. Her calf was the 38thborn this year, a record that would besurpassed just weeks later, with a re-port from NOAA on the birth of a 39thcalf. The previous record was 31, set in2001.

“It’s a bumper year for calves,” Rich-ard Merrick, an oceanographer forNOAA’s fisheries service, said in aninterview. “That’s a good sign.”

Actually, it’s one of so many goodsigns that researchers are beginning to hope that for the first time in centu-ries things are looking up for the rightwhale.

In December, researchers from the National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration spotted an unusually

large aggregation of right whales inthe Gulf of Maine. A month later, a rightwhale turned up in the Azores, a first since the early 20th century. And last year, probably for the first time since the 1600s, not one North Atlantic rightwhale died at human hands.

North Atlantic right whales, which can grow up to 17 meters long and weighup to 65 metric tons, were the “right” whales for 18th- and 19th-century whal-ers because they are rich in oil and ba-leen, move slowly, keep close to shore and float when they die.

They were hunted to extinction inEuropean waters, and by 1900 per-haps only 100 or so remained in theirNorth American range, fromMaritimeCanada to winter calving grounds offthe southeastern coast of the UnitedStates. Since then, the species’ num-bers have crept up, but very slowly. NO-AA estimates that there are about 325.But “over the last four or five months there’s been a tremendous amount

of good news,” said Tony LaCasse,a spokesman for the New EnglandAquarium in Boston, a center of right whale research.

Recent changes in shipping lanesseem to be reducing collisions betweenwhales and vessels. The Bush adminis-tration agreed last year to lower speed limits for large vessels in coastal wa-ters where right whales congregate.

Fishing authorities in the UnitedStates are beginning to impose gear re-strictions designed to reduce the chanc-es whales and other marine mammalswill be entangled in fishing lines. “Weare seeing signs of recovery,” Dr. Mer-rick said. He and others warn that it isfar too soon to say the whales are out of danger.

In weighing the value of a species,“each individual has to sort that out for themselves,” said Barb Zoodsma,a NOAA biologist. But if right whales vanished, she said, “it would be a tre-mendous loss for future generations.”

Like many people, I can never re-member a joke. I hear or read somethinghilarious, I laugh loudly, and then I in-stantly forget everything about it.

For researchers who study memory,the ease with whichpeople forget jokes is oneof those quirks that endup revealing a surpris-ing amount about theunderlying architectureof memory.

And there are plenty of other illumi-nating examples of memory’s whimsyand bad taste — like why you may forgetyour spouse’s birthday but will go toyour deathbed remembering everyword of a bad television show’s themesong. And why you must chop a string ofdata like a phone number into manage-able and predictable chunksto remember it.

Welcome to the humanbrain.

In understanding human memory and its oddities,Scott A. Small, a neurologist and memory researcher atColumbia University in NewYork, suggests the analogywith computer memory.

We have our version of abuffer, he said, a short-termworking memory of limitedscope and fast turnover rate. We haveour equivalent of a save button: thehippocampus, deep in the forebrain, is essential for translating short-termmemories into a more permanent form.

Our frontal lobes perform the findfunction, retrieving saved files to embel-lish as needed. And though scientists used to believe that short- and long-termmemories were stored in different partsof the brain, they have discovered thatwhat really distinguishes the lastingfrom the transient is how strongly thememory is engraved in the brain, andthe thickness and complexity of the con-nections linking large populations ofbrain cells. The deeper the memory, themore readily and robustly an ensemble

of like-minded neurons will fire.This process helps explain why some

of life’s offerings are deeply embed-ded in our minds. Music, for example.“The brain has a strong propensity toorganize information and perception inpatterns, and music plays into that incli-nation,” said Michael Thaut, a professorof music and neuroscience at ColoradoState University. “From an acousticalperspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented andwhich the brain loves to hear.”

Really great jokes, on the other hand,work not by conforming to patternrecognition routines but by subvertingthem. “Jokes work because they dealwith the unexpected, starting in onedirection and then veering off into an-other,” said Robert Provine, a professor

of psychology at the Univer-sity of Maryland, BaltimoreCounty, and the author of“Laughter: A Scientific In-vestigation.” “What makes ajoke successful are the sameproperties that can make itdifficult to remember.”

Memory researchers sug-gest additional reasons thatgreat jokes may elude com-mon capture.

Daniel L. Schacter, a pro-fessor of psychology at Harvard

University, ays there is a big differ-ence between verbatim recall of all thedetails of an event and gist recall of itsgeneral meaning.

“We humans are pretty good at gistrecall but have difficulty with being ex-act,” he said. Though anecdotes can betold in broad outline, jokes live or die bynuance, precision and timing.

Memories can be strengthened withtime and practice, but if there’s one partof the system that resists improvement,it’s our buffers, the size of our workingmemory on which a few items can betemporarily cached. Much researchsuggests that we can hold in short-termmemory only five to nine data chunks ata time.

A Very Good Year for a Whale Species in the North Atlantic

FLORIDA FISH AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION COMMISSION/NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION

NATALIE

ANGIER

ESSAY

The Elusive MechanicsOf Memory

Exploring the Hidden Corners of the Web

ROSALIND ROLLAND/NEW ENGLAND AQUARIUM

A record number of right whale calves have been spotted this spring. Whale-sniffing dogs help scientists collect waste.

By ALEX WRIGHT

One day last summer, Google’ssearch engine trundled quietlypast a milestone. It added the onetrillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impos-sibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of theentire Web.

Beyond those trillion pages liesan even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shoppingcatalogs, flight schedules, medi-cal research and all kinds of othermaterial stored in databases thatremain largely invisible to searchengines.

The challenges that the majorsearch engines face in penetrating this so-called Deep Web go a longway toward explaining why theystill can’t provide satisfying an-swers to questions like “What’s the best fare from New York to Londonnext Thursday?” The answers areavailable — if only the search en-gines knew how to find them.

Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend thereach of search engines into theWeb’s hidden corners. When that

happens, it will do more than justimprove the quality of search re-sults — it may ultimately reshapethe way many companies do busi-ness online.

Search engines rely on programsknown as crawlers that gather infor-mation by following the trails of hy-perlinks that tie the Web together.While that approach works well for the pages that make up the surface

Web, these programs have a harder time penetrating databases that areset up to respond to typed queries.

“The crawlable Web is the tip ofthe iceberg,” says Anand Rajara-man, co-founder of Kosmix, a Deep Web search start-up. Kosmix hasdeveloped software that matches

searches with the databases mostlikely to yield relevant information,then returns an overview of the top-ic drawn from multiple sources.

“Most search engines try to helpyou find a needle in a haystack,” Mr. Rajaraman said, “but what we’retrying to do is help you explore the haystack.”

To extract meaningful data fromthe Deep Web, search engines haveto analyze users’ search terms and figure out how to broker those que-ries to particular databases.

Professor Juliana Freire at theUniversity of Utah is working on anambitious project called DeepPeep that eventually aims to crawl andindex every database on the publicWeb. Extracting the contents of somany far-flung data sets requires asophisticated kind of computational guessing game.

“The naïve way would be to que-ry all the words in the dictionary,”Ms. Freire said. Instead, DeepPeep starts by posing a small number of sample queries, “so we can then usethat to build up our understanding of the databases and choose which words to search.”

SERGE BLOCH

JEFFREY D. ALLRED FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A new breedof technologiesis taking shape that will extendthe reach ofsearch engines.Professor Juliana Freire is working onDeepPeep, aneffort to index every publicdatabase online.

Beyond Google, new ways to sortinformation.

Repubblica NewYork

By BROOKS BARNES

GLENDALE, California — WhenRob Letterman and Conrad Vernonsigned up as directors of “Monsters vs.Aliens,” the latest computer-generatedspectacle from DreamWorks Anima-tion, they were worried about all the usual things: telling a good story, hir-ing the celebrity vocal talent, survivinga four-year production process withoutsuffering a nervous breakdown.

Then Jeffrey Katzenberg threw achallenge at them. After work on themovie was well under way, Mr. Katzen-berg, DreamWorks Animation’s chief executive, informed the pair that theywould also need to deliver the moviein 3-D.

“We were totally taken aback,” Mr. Vernon said, sitting in a conferenceroom at DreamWorks headquartershere. “I didn’t sign up to do somethinggarish.”

Lisa Stewart, a producer of thefilm, was equally surprised, recall-ing how 3-D effects of the past couldmake people feel ill. “I just rememberthinking, ‘Oh, great, I’m going to havea headache for the next two and a halfyears,’ ” she said.

The DreamWorks team associated3-D with “Captain EO,” the 1980s-eraDisneyland attraction,long since closed, thatstarred Michael Jack-son as a space explorer.Stuffed with 3-D tricks thatextended from the screen into the audience — lasers,smoke, flying aliens — thatfilm, directed by FrancisFord Coppola with GeorgeLucas as executive pro-ducer, defined lowbrow fora generation of Hollywood creative people.

But Mr. Katzenberg hadan artistic justificationfor using 3-D in “Mon-sters vs. Aliens,” whichopened March 27 in the United States. (It opens worldwide in April.) The sto-ry, about monsters who unite to saveEarth from alien destruction, was de-signed as a homage to the “creaturefeatures” of the 1950s and ’60s.

Mr. Katzenberg has staked thecompany’s future on the format;starting with “Monsters vs. Aliens”every movie it makes will be done in3-D. Because of advances in digitaltechnology, he told the directors that 3-D was no longer just a gimmick forreaching out and tickling (or scaring)the audience from time to time. Rath-er, building a film from the ground upin 3-D — as opposed to making a two-dimensional version and adding ef-fects later, the way most old releases did it — could result in a dazzling new visual language.

The nauseated feeling is a thing ofthe past: new projection equipmentand improved glasses have eliminatedthe headaches and dizziness.

So the “Monsters vs. Aliens” squad headed out to learn about 3-D. The

story they were attempting to adoptfocuses on Susan (voiced by ReeseWitherspoon), a small-town girl whogets hit by a meteor at her weddingand grows to be 15 meters tall. A tough monster wrangler, General W.R. Mon-ger (Kiefer Sutherland), hauls thenewly named Ginormica away to a se-cret monster prison, where she meets the gang, which includes Dr. Cock-roach, a brilliant scientist with a roach head (Hugh Laurie); the fish-ape hy-brid Missing Link (Will Arnett); and Bicarbonate Ostylezene Benzoate, or B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a shapeless tur-quoise blob.

Although Mr. Katzenberg had pro-posed 3-D as a grown-up creativeform, the artists, directors and pro-ducers working on the project discov-ered that they were very unsteady.“It was like they were doing their job in English before and we suddenlywanted them to work in Russian,” Mr.Katzenberg said.

Mr. Letterman and Mr. Vernonasked for a tutorial from John Bruno, the Oscar-winning visual effects de-signer (“The Abyss”).

“That calmed us down a lot,” saidMr. Vernon, whose other directingcredits include “Shrek 2.” “John told us

that we already knew how to think in3-D by trying to show depth and move-ment in a two-dimensional medium.”

Mr. Katzenberg had wanted to re-lease the movie on at least 5,000 3-Dscreens. But because fewer movie the-aters than expected have completedthe expensive projector upgradesthe format requires, “Monsters vs.Aliens” will be shown on about 2,0003-D screens in North America (out of a total of 7,000).

The finished movie feels very much like a DreamWorks product, with the studio’s juvenile sense of humor — anunderwear pull here, a breast jokethere — especially pronounced.

The 3-D is somewhat startling atfirst, which Ms. Stewart said was in-tentional. The movie quickly movesfrom a scene in outer space — despite the title, there is really only one alien,Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson) — to thedestruction of the Golden Gate Bridge.“We wanted to blow people’s mindsinto deep space right from the start,” she said.

By WILL HERMES

Musical acts from different pointson the globe are helping to dispel the notion that world music is a folk cat-egory geared toward older listeners.

Congolese artists, includingKonono N°1 and Kasai Allstars,working with European producersand artists (like Bjork, who recordedand toured with Konono N°1), havemade their hypnotic, urbanized tra-ditional music available to Westernfans of techno and psychedelic rock. And various types of contemporaryAfrican club music, especially theAngolan and Portuguese groupBuraka Som Sistema, have beguntraveling abroad.

Amadou Bagayoko and MariamDoumbia, known as the Blind Cou-ple of Mali, are among the most re-nowned African musical acts. Thesuccess of the duo, who perform asAmadou & Mariam, may be aboutuniversal pop attributes as much ascultural exoticism.

“They’re extremely accessible,”said Bill Bragin, the director of pub-lic programming at Lincoln Centerin New York City. “They write great hooks and melodies. She has a terrif-ic voice. He’s a really interesting gui-tarist. Plus they have a great show.They’re one of the few world-musicacts where you don’t feel you need to be schooled in the particular kind ofmusic to appreciate it.”

“Welcome to Mali,” their latest CD,is a pop-rock record with Africanroots, and it arrives as the continent’smusical exports are gaining new lis-teners. Like their international peers,African artists are usingdigital technology to cre-ate musical hybrids anddistribute them globally.And Western fans of rock, rap and electronic musicare using digital access to discover novel sounds.

The most high-profileexample of this trendcomes not from Africa,however, but via India:the Grammy-winning hitsoundtrack to the film “Slumdog Mil-lionaire.” Composed by A. R. Rah-man, the music is modern Bollywood pop, full of digitally sequenced drumsand processed vocals, raps, housemusic and schmaltzy balladry — and yes, some sitar. A remix of its signa-ture song, “Jai Ho,” was just releasedwith English vocals by the Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger.

Amadou & Mariam consider using electronic music styles, like singing ina range of languages, as routes to newaudiences. When they began making music at the Institute for Young Blind People in Bamako, the capital of Mali(they were married at the school in

1980), their ambition was solely to tour Mali, which has many cultures.

“When we started, wesang only in Bambara,”Mr. Bagayoko said. “Butwe wanted to reach othertribes. So we started tosing in Dogon, Tuareg,Tamasheq, Senufo, Song-hai, Soninke, Malinke,Khassonke. Then it was

French. And now English. Peopleare touched when you sing in theirlanguage.”

Ms. Doumbia, 50, and Mr. Bagay-oko, 54, released cassettes and CDsthrough the 1990s and early ’00s,mixing gentle Malian pop with bluesand other international flavors. Theirbreakthrough came in 2005 with“Dimanche à Bamako,” a Grammy-nominated collaboration with thefusion-minded European producerand artist Manu Chao.

“I Follow You,” a sort of Malianwaltz, is the duo’s first all-Englishsong.

In addition to the electro-pop of

“Sabali,” and “Africa,” a collabo-ration with Somali émigré rapperK’naan, there is “Djara,” which fea-tures the kora harp of the group’scountryman Toumani Diabaté, and“Bozos,” a song that features thewindswept desert sounds of the Ma-lian violin.

All these styles, from kora tradi-tionalism to hip-hop, constitute mod-ern African music, a notion that’s of-ten lost on Western audiences.

“People have watched too manyNational Geographic documentariesabout sick kids with big bellies, andelephants,” said Joao “Lil John” Bar-bosa of Buraka Som Sistema.

“People forget Africa is a big con-tinent with different countries, andwhen you travel to these places yousee it’s not all prehistorical; there arebig cities with economies and traffic and Internet and cellphones.”

Asked how their African fans liketheir music’s more international di-rection, Mr. Bagayoko is emphatic.“For African people it’s progress. Itbrings the music forward. They’reexcited.”

Monsters and AliensLeap Off the Big Screen

A Young Milliner, a Superstar,A Sudden Rush on Fancy Hats

DREAMWORKS ANIMATION

From left, Missing Link, Dr. Cockroach and B.O.B. in ‘‘Monsters vs. Aliens,’’ a 3-D film.

Global Quest To UncoverNew SoundsAnd Fans

By MICHELINE MAYNARD

DETROIT — The vacant lots andhollow buildings abound across De-troit. But walk into Mr. Song Millinery on Woodward Avenue, north of down-town, and you are hit by two impres-sions: a riot of color and a constantly ringing telephone.

The color comes from rows of cus-tom-designed ladies’ hats. The sound ofthe phone is thanks to Aretha Franklin,who stepped to a microphone at Presi-dent Obama’s inauguration in Januarywearing a gray fur felt hat trimmed with a huge sloping, rhinestone bow.

Now, the hat’s creator, Luke Song,

has more than 5,000 orders for thespring version of the Aretha Hat (hedeclines to make a replica of the actualmodel), selling for $179 apiece.

More orders are bound to pour in be-cause Mr. Song recently learned thatMs. Franklin has decided to lend her hat to the Smithsonian, where it will beon display until it moves to Mr. Obama’spresidential library.

Mr. Song knew the hat Ms. Franklinwore would be one of three models she had picked out. He learned which one only while watching her sing at the in-auguration on television. “I’m so gladshe chose that one,” he said. “It was

the one I was pushing her to wear.”Interest in Mr. Song’s work has ex-

ploded so much that he expects hisbusiness, Moza Incorporated, which recorded $1 million in sales during2008, to do six to seven times more thanthat this year. Mr. Song would like to

double his workforce, current-ly at 11 people.

The problem, he said, is that millinery “is a dead art.” And indeed, Mr. Song, who esti-mates that he is one of about a dozen custom milliners in the United States, is, in a sense, anaccidental milliner.

As a young man, Mr. Song, 36,had no intention of taking overthe business his parents, Han

and Jin Song, started after emigratingfrom South Korea in 1982. After study-ing biochemistry in college, he left onesemester short of a degree to pursue art studies at Parsons the New Schoolfor Design in New York. He needed topay his student loans. The answer, he

found, lay in hats.An early success came in a hat he de-

signed from a chicken-wire base andcovered with silk, chiffon and trim-mings. Word of the creation, whichcost $200 and up, quickly spread.

Ms. Franklin is the best known ofMr. Song’s buyers, who wear theirhats to churches, synagogues and tea parties, and display them in transpar-ent boxes in their homes. Mr. Song’shats are priced from $200 to $900, but he does accommodate modest bud-gets, too.

The Aretha Hat apparently caughtthe eye of Queen Elizabeth, he con-fided, although Buckingham Palacehas yet to place an order. Mr. Song saidhe would love to sell a hat to MichelleObama, although she does not seem tohave embraced hats — at least, not yet.

“That would be the best day of mylife,” he said. “The best.”

TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES

RAHAV SEGEV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

MICHAEL NAGLE/REUTERS

An evolution for international music: Amadou & Mariam, from Mali, above; BurakaSom Sistema,an Angolan and Portuguese act,left; and the Somali rapper K’naan.

Hats are hand-sewn at Mr. Song Millinery.

FABRIZIO COSTANTINI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, MARCH 30, 2009

Repubblica NewYork