By: Christine A. Klein
Christine A. Klein is a professor of law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she teaches water law and natural-resources law.

This week the governors of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia will discuss the allocation of the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers (ACF) among the three states.

As the Southeast struggles against an exceptional drought, Georgia has tried all the easy fixes. Last month, Gov. Sonny Perdue even led a prayer service on the steps of the state Capitol.

But before seeking divine intervention, remember this: God helps those who help themselves.

Looking forward, what can the states learn from the current crisis to help themselves in the future?

First, they can adopt detailed water plans.

As any canoeist knows, one carefully planned paddle stroke now will do more than 10 frantic strokes just before the canoe crashes into an obstacle. Planning is just as important for state water officials.

Georgia lacks a comprehensive, modern water code. It currently treats surface water and groundwater separately, an antiquated throwback to the days when groundwater was deemed mysterious and beyond regulation.

Existing Georgia law also contains a gaping loophole for farm use, which consumes the lion’s share of the state’s water. Virtually all farm use dating back to 1988 is exempt from permitting requirements. Even golf course irrigation systems may qualify as “farm use.”

More broadly, Georgia needs to adopt a statewide water plan. Although authorized since 2004, lawmakers have been dragging their feet. The current draft plan will not be fully operative until at least 2011, under the best of conditions. Meanwhile, the state population is projected to increase 32 percent from 2000-2015.

Second, the states must fairly share the waters of the ACF Basin.

For almost 20 years, Alabama, Florida and Georgia have been embroiled in an acrimonious dispute over basin waters.

Georgia has tried to take unfair advantage of its upstream location. It has pressured the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to operate federal reservoirs for the primary benefit of Atlanta’s relentlessly growing population.

In contrast, for almost a century it has been absolutely routine legal practice for neighboring states to negotiate agreements for sharing interstate rivers. Importantly, there has been no special treatment for upstream or quickly-growing states such as Georgia.

Third, the states should avoid short-term fixes that may cause long-term damage to endangered species and aquatic ecosystems.

Contrary to some reports, the current dispute is not one of fish vs. people. True, Florida’s mussels, sturgeon, oysters and shrimp need water to survive. But until very recent emergency orders, Georgia’s people have dumped significant amounts of water onto their suburban lawns and golf courses. And Florida’s oysters have supported the livelihood of numerous fishing families.

The Bush administration appears to be buying the fish vs. people story line. Last month, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne attempted to broker a deal among the three states. Subsequently, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a plan for “Exceptional Drought Operations.” Under that proposal upstream reservoirs would store more water, choking off flows into Florida by as much as 16 percent.

The White House gave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service only two weeks to review the proposal. In its biological opinion, the service concluded that the plan will likely result in the “take” (a euphemism for “killing”) of mussels that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. Offering small comfort, the service did not predict the demise of the entire species.

The Bush administration has bought the fish vs. people story line before, and the results were ugly. But that’s another tale, involving the allocation of water in 2002 to farmers and ranchers rather than fish in the drought-stricken Klamath River Basin of California and Oregon. The result was, in the words of The Washington Post, “the largest fish kill the West had ever seen, with tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.”

Plan. Share. Respect the natural environment that sustains our rivers in the long term.

If the drought-stricken states take these measures to help themselves, then surely the rain gods will take note.

By: Jack E. Davis
Jack E. Davis, an associate professor of history at the University of Florida, is a specialist in American environmental history and author of the forthcoming book, An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the Environmental Century.

When Dade County relocated its public library to a new building in 1985, the last several hundred books were moved by a human chain. The Everglades: River of Grass, the last of them all, was carried by a runner like a torch.

Last week marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ classic. When it appeared in 1947, it convinced the nation that a place historically dismissed as a vulgar unvarying wasteland was actually a life-giving river, one that originally flowed 120 untroubled miles on a three-month pilgrimage to deliver sustenance to rare plants and animals and to charge the all-important Biscayne Aquifer. Four weeks after the book’s publication, President Truman dedicated Everglades National Park. Ever since, America’s greatest wetland has been known as the River of Grass.

The book was similarly destined to stay indefinitely in print, a credit to Douglas’ eloquent and enduring warning against civilization’s headlong sprawl into a sensitive environment. She had not intended to write a call to arms, but in the 1960s, after the Army Corps of Engineers ‘’comprehensive'’ flood-control project emptied out nearly half the region’s water, activists embraced her book as the green bible of Everglades environmentalism. Comparisons with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac followed. The book convinced environmentalists to persuade Douglas, who as early as 1959 knew something was amiss with the Corp’s project, to become a full-fledged activist.

At age 79, she scaled back writing projects, organized Friends of the Everglades and leapt into the national consciousness as the most vivid spokesperson for Everglades ‘’repair.'’ She continued to head her organization until age 100, gave her last news conference at 104 and died at 108. She was the holder of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and namesake of a national wilderness area (a distinction belonging to only 15 individuals).

If Douglas were alive today and asked to issue a report card on America’s stewardship of the Everglades, the grades would be disappointing. She would praise the state for allocating $2 billion over the past seven years for restoration, much of it going toward the purchase of sensitive land and the partial restoration of the Kissimmee River. But she would penalize the Legislature for postponing pollution limits to the benefit of the sugar industry. Various agencies would earn good marks for giving battle against the diaspora of invasive plants, but to aficionados who release exotic reptiles upon the beleaguered wetlands and to growth merchants who inch development’s rim deeper into it, she would react with schoolmarm reproach.

She would place primary fault for a poor overall grade with the executive branch of the federal government. With President Bush’s recent veto of long-delayed restoration funding — which Congress voted to override — and his Interior Department’s removal of the Everglades from the U.N.’s list of endangered World Heritage sites, one can imagine her retrieving words she intoned against President Reagan’s indifference in the 1980s. He “set us back 50 years . . . I don’t think he gives a damn about the environment.'’

But one should be clear: Bush has resisted funding a project she would dislike herself, one with a familiar and ominous boast in its name: ‘’comprehensive.'’ Passed by Congress to bipartisan fanfare 20 months after her death, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan drew a strong rebuke from Friends of the Everglades and the Sierra Club. Both declared it a massive water-management project that awards resource priorities to agriculture and bloated municipalities over the Everglades ecosystem. Restoration thus far has largely centered around the expansion of water-conservation areas, or so-called filtering swamps, and to date they have spurred the growth of native vegetation and the return of animal life.

Douglas, however, never liked conservation areas because they represent a commercial resource for agriculture and developers and they allow bureaucrats to shift water about the Everglades at will. When flooded to keep farms dry and to store water for later use, the conservation areas potentially destroy habitat, alter the breeding capacity of fickle wading birds and drown animals. The plan also allows the perpetuation of the Everglades Agricultural Area, a colossal obstruction in the ecosystem’s natural water flow. The Everglades could not be the River of Grass, she would argue (and did), as long as the hindrance of farming remained. Finally, leaving the Corps — destroyers not restorers — to implement the plan would provoke from her apocalyptic comparisons to the fox’s charge of the hen house.

Sustenance for aquifer

For Douglas, repair — fixing the Kissimmee River, removing the levees, moving out agriculture and the Corps — meant not only the renewed vigor of the River of Grass but plentiful sustenance for the Biscayne Aquifer, the principal drinking-water source for the region’s people.

Douglas was an environmentalist because she was a humanitarian. She valued plants and animals no more nor less than humans. Protecting one over the other was at odds with the great web of life itself. Protecting the whole was the right thing to do. Douglas did a lot of right things in her life, but none so abiding as to write a book 60 years ago that bears lessons for today.

By: Win Phillips
Win Phillips is vice president for Research at the University of Florida.

Buried in a recent National Science Foundation report is an eye-opening piece of news: The University of Florida has jumped 10 spots among top academic research institutions in research and development spending.

Continue to 2nd paragraph UF, which spent $565 million on R&D last fiscal year, currently ranks 17th among the nation’s major universities - up from 27th just two years ago. UF now outranks the University of California at Berkeley, which spent $546 million, and has edged closer to such well-known institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which spent $601 million, and Duke University, with $657 million, according to the report by the NSF’s Division of Science Resources Statistics.

UF’s success is hardly a surprise: Our research enterprise has grown consistently for many years. But our rise comes at a time when federal support for research, the nation’s largest single source of research dollars, is hitting the brakes. Federal spending on academic research rose just 2.9 percent last year, yet federal dollars flowing to UF increased 11 percent.

We are bucking the trend, and not just for federal support. According to NSF, state and local research and development expenditures didn’t even outpace inflation. Yet UF’s state funding soared from $48.6 million two years ago to $93.4 million last year, an amazing 92 percent increase.

The good news is tied to three major developments.

One, our excellent faculty increasingly win not only large grants from government and private research institutions, but also prestigious ones.

Last year, UF faculty members for the first time scored two grants from one of the nation’s best known medical research institutions’ the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. And we became the only university in Florida to land two new state Centers of Excellence; the Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Center for Bio-Nano Sensors.

Second, our research infrastructure - our labs, clean rooms and technological equipment - is reaching a new level of competitiveness with our peers. Although scientists began moving in as long as 18 months ago, we officially opened the largest research building on this campus, the 280,000-square-foot Cancer and Genetics Research Complex, about a year ago. Its opening comes on the heels of other recently completed state-of-the-art research facilities, including the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity.

Indeed, UF is undergoing something of a building renaissance. President Machen has emphasized an interdisciplinary building program, and we now have more than $750 million in facilities planned and funded. Major current research building projects include the Biomedical Sciences Building and the Nanoscale Research Facility. When these and other projects are complete, we will have added more than a half million square feet of research space to our campus.

Third, our technology transfer and commercialization efforts have scored. In the increasingly synergistic world of public-private research and development, being good at moving research from the lab to the marketplace is important.

In May, Business Week compared UF to MIT and the California Institute of Technology, noting that Florida’s license income jumped from $11 million 10 years ago to $40.3 million today. The Milken Institute has ranked UF fifth nationwide on its University Technology Transfer and Commercialization Index. And our biotechnology incubator was named second this year in the technology category by the National Business Incubation Association.

Much has been made of Florida’s current budget woes. But support for our research endeavors continues to grow, and UF’s technology commercialization business is flourishing, even in this challenging budgetary environment.

By: Win Phillips
Win Phillips is vice president for Research at the University of Florida.

Absent from last week’s headlines about Gov. Charlie Crist’s veto of a 5 percent tuition hike for universities was an important piece of good news: The governor let stand $20 million for a new biofuel pilot plant to be built by the University of Florida.

The fact that Gov. Crist chose to exclude the plant from his record $459 million in line-item vetoes says a lot about the plant’s promise for Florida and the nation. And the plant itself - a near-industrial-scale realization of a concept pioneered by a UF scientist - provides a strong example of the breadth and depth of UF’s research in energy, surely one of the most important issues of our time.

The pilot plant is designed to fine tune the process of making ethanol not from corn, but rather from what today are often regarded as waste biological materials, including sugar cane waste, orange pulp and seeds and yard trimmings. It will bring one step closer to fruition technology developed by UF’s Lonnie Ingram, a distinguished professor of microbiology who earlier this year shared a table with President Bush at a Washington D.C. meeting on alternative energy.

Ingram’s basic innovation was to genetically engineer two common bacteria to create a new organism that converts cellulose into energy.

Unlike corn, that cellulose is available in numerous agricultural byproducts as well as from natural sources. In theory, what’s now often thrown away could instead power Floridians’ cars and buses.

Of course, it’s not that easy. Since he received the landmark 5 millionth patent designation for the technology in 1991, Ingram has been chipping away at refining the process to make it inexpensive and quick enough to be commercially viable. That’s where the new plant, to be located in the sugar-growing region near Lake Okeechobee, comes in. Its goal is test new processes and techniques to accelerate commercialization.

For Florida, the potential is huge. Because of its year-round growing season, the Sunshine State is the nation’s leading producer of the biomass Ingram’s process would tap. Ingram estimates that the state’s lawns, orange groves, sugar cane farmers and forests produce as much as 124 million tons of it per year.

That’s enough, in theory, to make 10 billion gallons of ethanol - more than double the 4.8 billion gallons now made mostly from corn nationwide. And that ethanol would be made without the significant expenditures on fertilizer, herbicides and diesel fuel devoted to growing corn.

Florida’s electricity consumption is expected to grow 30 percent in the next 10 years alone. So Gov. Crist’s approval of the plant could make a huge difference down the road for Floridians. But that’s only half the story.

The other half is this: This revolutionary ethanol process, while certainly the most prominent, is just one of several developments being pioneered by UF energy researchers that could help address the energy crunch. These include research on:

Fuel cells: UF researchers have made significant progress toward low temperature solid oxide fuel cells. These cells can convert available fuels into hydrogen, which would make it easier to transition to hydrogen-based transportation system.

Solar cells: UF engineers and chemists are developing a new generation of cheaper, lighter and more versatile solar cells based on a new breed of exceptionally thin and cheap organic solar cells.

Nuclear energy: UF engineers are working on several new technologies related to the next generation of nuclear plants. Unlike coal plants, nuclear plants do not release greenhouse gases, making nuclear technology an increasingly attractive alternative when it comes to producing large amounts of power.

The $20 million for the biofuel plant is only the latest indicator of Florida’s support for these and other energy related projects at UF. Last year, for example, Florida lawmakers approved $4.5 million for the Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy Energy Technology Incubator. The incubator is intended to help UF scientists and engineers “scale up” energy-related technologies, such as fuel cells and solar cells, to prove their capabilities in the marketplace.

That’s important, because technology commercialization is something we have proven we know how to do. Business Week readers learned as much earlier this month, when that magazine’s May 21 issue featured a story about UF’s success in this area.

The story, headlined “MIT, Cal Tech - And The Gators? How the University of Florida moved to the major league of technology startups,” noted that Florida’s license income jumped from $11 million 10 years ago to $40.3 million today. And it pointed out that the Sid Martin Biotechnology Incubator is fully occupied with a dozen clients.

Those clients include two energy companies currently. That number is likely to grow as our energy research expands. Through such startups and other avenues of commercialization, we think we can contribute a lot to solving Florida’s energy challenges.

By: Francis E. “Jack” Putz
Francis E. “Jack” Putz is a professor of botany at the University of Florida.

Environmentalists whine a lot. I whine mostly about biodiversity loss, global warming and mismanagement of ecosystems. As an environmental scientist, I whine with copious data, stultifying statistics and assumed authority. Even friends get tired of my harping and ask for solutions, not more details about the problems.

Admitting that no environmental solutions are perfect and few are truly novel, I can offer one that seems both good and new. Adoption of this cost-effective solution would reduce the risk and severity of wildfires while enhancing biodiversity protection and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

In a recent study published in Restoration Ecology, Brian Condon and I showed that these goals can be approached by restoring the natural structure of pine savannas and woodlands of the Southeast. Given that only 2 percent of these once extensive and hyper-diverse ecosystems still exist, anything we can do to save what remains is worth considering.

The linkage between biodiversity, climate change and wildfire control emerges from the fact that most of our region historically supported open-canopied pine savannas, not forests. Most of the extraordinary biodiversity in these savannas is lost when broadleaved trees are allowed to invade and close the canopy.

Hardwoods invade when fires are suppressed. Shade from these fire-sensitive invaders kills the hundreds of species of understory herbs that historically fueled the low intensity fires that burned through every year or two. Hardwood domination also leads to the demise of gopher tortoises, fox squirrels, red cockaded woodpeckers, and many more species of concern.

After dense forests are allowed to replace open savannas and woodlands, the fires that are inevitably ignited burn hot - very hot. Decades of fire suppression results in dangerous accumulations of fuel, fires that are too intense to stop, and lots of losses, financial and otherwise.

What Brian and I found was that, by selling the invasive hardwoods to the highest bidders, the costs of pine savanna restoration are greatly reduced or even made profitable. Unfortunately, the hardwood market isn’t so good, so most of the invasive hardwood biomass in the 13 restoration projects we studied was sold for fuel chips. The fuel chips are burned in place of fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Generating electricity by burning wood instead of coal or petroleum products still puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but tree carbon is new carbon, not the stuff that accumulated for hundreds of millions of years. Also, chipping of invasive trees requires no mountains to be leveled or wars to be fought. Better to reduce our energy use, but if we want power, better biomass than fossil carbon, negawatts instead of megawatts.

The amount of biomass available for electricity generation varies with the extent of hardwood invasion. In our study sites, the average acre supplied about 20 tons of fuel. Diesel fuel is burned in harvesting and transporting hardwood fuel chips, but the carbon benefit-to-cost ratio is about 100-to-1.

Compare this with the 2-to-1 or even 1-to-1 ratio for corn ethanol, and it’s clear why we are so excited about the prospects of restoring our way to carbon neutrality.

Clearing out invasive hardwoods does not immediately result in savanna restoration, but it is the first big step in the right direction. Given that we’ve already lost 98 percent of the natural pine savannas of the Southeast, taking this step is really important for all the biodiversity we have lost, from fox squirrels and gopher tortoises to squirrel bananas and gopher apples.

Thinning stands will not stop wildfires, but it will certainly make the fires that occur easier to stop. And using invasive hardwoods for fuel won’t stop global warming and the attendant sea level rise, but it will help.

By: Bron Taylor
Bron Taylor is a professor at the University of Florida and president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. He is author of “Ecological Resistance Movements; the Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism.”

For nearly 20 years, I’ve studied radical environmental movements. Fifteen years ago, I met with a small group of them in a forest in Tennessee. One among that group now faces sentencing before a federal court in Oregon for crimes attributed to the Earth and Animal Liberation fronts.

In the forest that day, the assembled activists shared their deep feelings of grief about the rapid decline of the Earth’s ecosystems and some of the reasons that triggered their activism. The man now facing sentencing described how, as a boy, he had killed a bird with a slingshot and subsequently had became overwhelmed with remorse. That day in Tennessee, surrounded by others who understood, his grief returned, and he wept.

Today prosecutors are attempting to brand this man and nine co-defendants as terrorists, which could dramatically lengthen and worsen the conditions of their pending incarceration. U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled Monday that federal sentencing guidelines allow her to impose a “terrorism enhancement” on the confessed eco-saboteurs. Soon she will decide whether the facts in each case merit such an enhancement.

Given the way the terrorism-enhancement statute was crafted, a key fact the judge must decide is whether the defendants sought to influence or retaliate against the government. But this focus leaves out critically important ethical issues, also related to intent, which should be taken into account during sentencing, including when considering whether to label these defendants “terrorists.” One such issue is whether they intended to kill or maim anyone — their actions clearly show that they did not. Equally important are the deeper motivations of the activists.

In general, radical environmental activists are motivated by an ethical commitment to life in all its forms. They believe that, as human societies expand, suffering among human and other creatures has followed, some of which even face extinction. They believe that most people are indifferent to this intensifying ecological cataclysm. They conclude that politics as usual is insufficient and the only remaining ethical course is to resist, even illegally. Some, like that young man in the Tennessee forest, also have more personal reasons to atone for their own environmental sins.

A just sentencing ought to recognize that these defendants have good reason for their frustration and alarm. Scientists have amply demonstrated the imminent danger posed by the ongoing and escalating deterioration of the Earth’s living systems. One need not approve of the crimes to recognize that a rational and compassionate urgency was a part of the motivation for them.

These are cases that cry for a judicious temperament that recognizes the moral complexity of the current cases in ways that the letter of the law might not. If terrorism is to be a meaningful term, able to represent society’s harshest condemnation, it should be reserved for those who intend to maim or kill in the pursuit of their causes.

To the best of my knowlege, it is not a label that fits these defendants.

By: Francis E. ‘Jack’ Putz
Francis E. “Jack” Putz is a professor of botany at the University of Florida.

The fire season has barely started, but the costs of wildfires in Florida are already soaring. Few homes have been destroyed so far, but with more dry weather likely, more will probably go up in flames before the summer rains start. Given that the disastrous fires of 1998 didn’t get cranking until June, 2007 is likely to go down as the costliest fire season on record.

But what did the 1998 fires cost? Who paid? And what should we have learned from that experience?

According to a study by USDA Forest Service economists that appeared in the Journal of Forestry in 2001, the Florida wildfires of June-July 1998 burned about 500,000 acres and cost at least $600 million. This estimated price tag on six weeks of catastrophic wildfires in northeast Florida includes the cost of canceling the Daytona 500 and the otherwise steep decline in tourism. But it does not include the lingering effects of smoke on the tourist trade or the indirect costs of road closures.

The authors’ admittedly conservative estimate also includes the costs of 100 percent increases in emergency-room visits for asthma and bronchitis, but does not include lost worker productivity and wages. The $600 million includes $12 million in destroyed houses, businesses, cars and boats, but only insured properties were considered.

Who paid the costs of the 1998 fires, and who is paying today? From the Forest Service study, it appears that commercial forest owners are the big losers from big fires — lost profits to the tune of $400 million in 1998. Wildfire suppression and disaster relief in 1998 ended up costing about $100 million, which came out of local, state and federal government coffers. All those firefighters, bulldozers, fire engines and helicopters certainly cost us taxpayers a pretty penny. I’m not sure that we should all be paying these costs, but we are.

The financial damages from big fires compare to Category 2 hurricanes, but, with hurricanes, we at least have increasingly strict building codes. There has been no such progress when it comes to fires. With more and more people building homes at the forests’ edge, the price of this season’s fires is likely to be astronomical.

When a wet El Niño winter is followed by an extremely dry La Niña spring, wildfires are unavoidable in Florida, lightning capital of North America. Our soils are sandy, nutrient-poor and severely drained. Droughts are common and becoming more so due to climate change. Our natural savannas and woodlands tolerate drought, make due with scarce nutrients, and thrive only where fires sweep across the land every two to three years. Without fire, most of our native species disappear. To avoid this fate, many species promote the frequent fires with their flammable foliage. Pine needles, wiregrass leaves and palmetto fronds seem designed to burn.

What made the fires of 1998 so devastating, and what is causing the 2007 fires to be so hard to stop, is that despite lots of warnings, we have allowed huge quantities of fuel to accumulate. To some extent, plummeting pulpwood prices have spurred industrial forest owners to plant lower densities and thin their stands, but many plantations and forests are still too dense.

Consequently, instead of the creeping surface fires that have burned across Florida for millennia, we now face unstoppable crown fires. Instead of investing in fuel management through controlled burning and fire-preventing treatments such as thinning, we let pine-needle brush collect in tinderboxes of epic proportions.

Some of us remember back in 1998, when the fire bearing down on the town of Waldo was transformed from a raging crown fire to a moderate intensity understory fire when it reached landowner Clark Smith’s well-managed pinelands. His efforts at ecosystem management through frequent controlled burns saved the town.

We need more Clark Smiths, more savannas and open-canopied woodlands, and more preventive action so as to lessen the extent and the power of the wildfires inevitable in Florida. Instead, we have burdensome regulations on controlled burns, native savannas choked by invasive hardwoods, residents who don’t recognize the benefits of frequent low-intensity fires, pines planted as thick as the hair on a dog’s back, massive amounts of fuel, firefighters risking their lives, homeowners losing their homes and smoke in the air.

By: Mike Seigel
Mike Seigel is a professor of law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Durham police report that the lacrosse players presented neither a special nor unique case.

While Americans join the three former Duke University lacrosse players in celebrating their exoneration last week on sexual-assault and kidnapping charges, they should be less sanguine about what the case revealed concerning the behavior of our nation’s college students.

Indeed, a careful look at the activity on the Duke campus should send chills down the spine of every parent with a child away at school.

Only 83 years old, Duke has risen to the top of the academic ladder through decades of concerted effort. For example, a Duke program identifies “gifted” fourth- through seventh-graders and offers them educational opportunities all associated with the Duke name. As a result, parents connect Duke with academic excellence years before their child decides which college to attend.

The school’s determination to compete with the likes of Princeton and Harvard has been remarkably successful: In the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings, it was rated the eighth-best university in the country.

Accordingly, Duke attracts some of the nation’s best and brightest. This makes it even more alarming to learn that alcohol abuse on campus is rampant. The school reports that, in 2003, 43 percent of fraternity members, 29 percent of sorority members, 14 percent of non-fraternity men and 8 percent of sorority women engaged in binge drinking. During the 2005-06 academic year, 37 students were transported to Duke’s emergency room for alcohol poisoning. Each year, dozens of students show up at Duke’s counseling services suffering from the symptoms of alcoholism.

One Duke custom reveals much about alcohol abuse on campus — and the administration’s ambivalence toward it. Before football games, Duke students participate in tailgating. That means partying, eating and, of course, drinking outdoors. But because the Duke football team is notoriously bad, most students who participate in tailgates never bother to watch the game.

One year, after drunken behavior during tailgating was particularly outrageous, the Duke administration took action — sort of.

It did not flood tailgates with officials to crack down on excessive (and mostly illegal) drinking. Instead, it requested help from certain student groups, including the lacrosse team, to moderate tailgate conduct. The lacrosse coach’s solution was to require his team to set an example by attending the football games. His theory, apparently, was that kickoff would be a logical time for drinking to stop. Needless to say, this laughable effort failed.

By itself, excessive and underage drinking is bad enough — but it is much worse because of its consequences. According to Duke, drunkenness is a factor in incidents involving assault, property damage, injury and unwanted sex. The behavior of the Duke lacrosse team provides ample evidence to support this claim. Keeping in mind that the team was composed of about 45 players, 22 team members were disciplined in 2003-04 for misconduct involving underage possession of alcohol, public urination, providing false identification, and violation of the school’s noise policy. In 2005-06, 18 players were cited, with the offenses this time including open containers of alcohol in a car, destruction of property and holding a drinking party in a dorm room.

Like their counterparts at other schools, Duke students who really want to party move off campus, simply transferring the problem to another jurisdiction. Indeed, the lacrosse players residing off campus were well known to the Durham police. During the several years prior to the rape allegation, players were cited for 14 incidents of alcohol-related misconduct, often involving property damage.

But the bigger picture is even more alarming. Durham police report that the lacrosse players presented neither a special nor unique case — their house was not even in the top 10 with respect to neighbors’ complaints of loud parties and disorderly conduct. True to form, the most egregious behavior took place in the school’s fraternity houses.

What is a school to do?

It could, of course, get serious about policing underage and excessive drinking — for instance, by instituting real punishments at least for second offenses and notifying parents of their child’s infraction. (The full extent of the Duke lacrosse players’ alcohol-related behavior was never brought to their parents’ attention.) But serious action would be unpopular — and no school wants to risk getting a reputation for not letting students have their fun. That might, after all, hurt recruiting and cause a fall in the almighty rankings.

At the University of Florida, it took five alcohol-related student deaths in 2003-05, and a dedicated university president, for the problem to gain serious attention. The jury is still out on the success of these efforts — no doubt a lot of underage and excessive drinking still takes place in Gainesville.

But many colleges still do essentially the same as Duke has done until now — they pretend the problem doesn’t exist, and when they are forced to face it, they address it with Band-Aid solutions. This hypocrisy is not lost on our young adults — who will bear the ill effects of it for a long time to come.

By: Michael Seigel
Michael Seigel is a professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law in Gainesville.

The recent firing of eight U.S. attorneys illustrates the fine line between politics and policy in our democracy. Whether the Bush administration did anything wrong depends on which side of the line its conduct fell. Because the evidence indicates the possibility of political manipulation of the prosecutorial function, Congress must persist in ferreting out the truth.

Although U.S. attorneys are political appointees, once in office they morph into the chief federal prosecutor in their district. The role of the prosecutor is to administer justice in an impartial, nonpolitical manner. When a case with political overtones comes in the door, the U.S. attorney must ensure that it is handled by the book. It would be a gross abuse of power, for instance, for a U.S. attorney to pursue a case — or decline to do so — to help members of his party win election.

The role of the Department of Justice should be to ensure that U.S. attorneys abide by their ethical obligations and to protect them from outside political forces. The department certainly should not be the source of political pressure itself.

That’s where the behavior of Justice under this administration is suspect. If even one U.S. attorney was fired because he or she failed to yield to political pressure in an ongoing case, the administration was sending the message department-wide that it was willing — perhaps even anxious — to pervert justice for political gain. That, of course, is beyond presidential prerogative. President Richard Nixon learned as much when he fired Attorney General Archibald Cox to prevent him from pursuing the Watergate investigation during the “Saturday Night Massacre” some 35 years ago.

But some have taken this principle too far. The president and the attorney general clearly have the power to set the agenda for the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys. Usually, the prosecutive priorities for any given district are set through negotiation between the U.S. attorney and Justice Department officials. But the bottom line is that the power resides in Washington.

If the president and the attorney general believe that immigration is the most important crime problem facing border states, they have the right to direct all U.S. attorneys in those states to make the prosecution of illegal aliens the top priority. This is not politics, it’s policy. If a U.S. attorney flouts this directive, she risks getting fired, even if she firmly believes that she knows what’s best for her district. Certainly, this is the minimum meant by the phrase, “serving at the pleasure of the president.”

Which was going on here? Kyle Sampson, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ former chief of staff, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday that the U.S. attorneys were fired because they failed either to execute the department’s priorities or to “work constructively with other governmental constituencies.” The latter sounds like doublespeak for purely political concerns. Moreover, Gonzales’ counsel and White House liaison Monica Goodling’s decision to invoke her Fifth Amendment right not to testify indicates that criminal activity might be lurking at the heart of the matter. If administration members were endeavoring to impede the due administration of justice in one or more cases, their conduct would, in fact, be criminal. It is therefore vital that Congress press for the testimony of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers — and for all other important evidence — to determine if justice was undermined by top White House and Justice Department aides.

The president’s invocation of executive privilege should not stand in the way of the congressional inquiry. In U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court recognized the existence of executive privilege, noting it is needed to guarantee that presidents receive full and frank advice from their advisers. However, the court further held that the privilege is not absolute; it must be weighed against the reasons why disclosure is sought. In that case, it ruled against the president.

Although the present case is not yet as dramatic as Nixon’s, President Bush’s reliance on privilege should be no more successful than his predecessor’s. Congress has the constitutional authority to investigate executive wrongdoing, and the possibility of criminal wrongdoing in the U.S. attorney firings is real. Therefore, if the matter were to end up in the courts, Congress should prevail. Its investigation is vital to determine if the White House was exercising its rightful authority when it comes to executive branch policy, or was abusing its power in an attempt to thwart justice.

By: Sarah Hamersma
Sarah Hamersma is an assistant professor of economics at the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida.

BOTH the House of Representatives and the Senate have recently passed bills raising the minimum wage. The Senate bill includes tax breaks for businesses, based on the following logic: While a minimum wage increase is popular, the resulting higher labor costs will translate into fewer jobs, more expensive products or both. The solution, the senators concluded, was to subsidize companies that hire disadvantaged workers, in order to reimburse them for these higher wage costs.

Does this reasoning hold up? A look at one of the key pieces of this business tax package — the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which has been in place since 1996 and would be extended for five years under the proposal — suggests otherwise.

First, most eligible companies don’t take the credit, which averages about $1,000 for each employee who belongs to one of the specified categories of workers (for instance, recent recipients of welfare or food stamps). Even though national surveys show many such workers being hired, employers claim the credit for less than a third of them.

Second, there is no evidence that employers have hired more eligible workers as a result of the program. Indeed, according to a number of studies — including one by the Department of Labor, another surveying 101 temporary help agencies, and a statistical analysis of welfare recipients in Wisconsin — the credit seldom influences hiring decisions of participating firms. Many companies wish to avoid preferential hiring, even though the policy is explicitly intended to give disadvantaged job seekers an advantage in the labor market.

Is it a good idea to extend this program, even though it hasn’t meaningfully improved the employment picture for disadvantaged workers? But suppose such a program had even a small effect. Would it undo the negative consequences of a minimum wage increase? The answer is no, for two reasons.

First, data from Wisconsin show that fewer than 25 percent of workers claimed under the credit are earning the minimum wage. Second, large corporations are the most active participants in the program. In 1999, the average participating corporation received more than $100,000 in credits. The Senate bill, however, is supposed to support small businesses, which have never taken advantage of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit in large numbers, but are the most likely to suffer under the proposed minimum wage increase.

There’s a more direct path to improving incomes for the working poor. Instead of requiring employers to pay more, and then allowing them to apply for reimbursement through tax subsidies, why not skip the middleman and subsidize the worker directly?

Such a program already exists. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a federal tax refund for workers, who qualify based on family income rather than individual income or wages. This means that an upper-class teenager working at McDonald’s will not get a benefit, but someone trying to support a family will. Over the last 15 years, the credit’s subsidy rates have increased and the definition of eligibility has broadened. These expansions have greatly improved labor force participation among single mothers.

If we don’t think that people with low incomes are getting what they need, let’s not look to ineffective employer tax credits to try to create jobs. And let’s not burden employers with the costs of a higher minimum wage, most of which won’t even go to low-income families. If additional investments are to be effective — and directed toward the intended recipients — they should focus instead on making sure our Earned Income Tax Credit program provides an adequate income supplement for the working poor.

By: Michael Seigel
Michael Seigel is a professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. He serves on the Attorney-Client Privilege Task Force, which is examining whether the Florida Bar should take a position on this matter. The views expressed here are his own.

Last time the public was tuned in, the Justice Department was vigorously prosecuting corporate giants such as Enron for massive frauds committed during the waning days of the stock bubble. Assisted by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, government lawyers were racking up victories in the battle against white-collar crime. One recent highlight was the October sentencing of former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling to 24 years in prison.

Now that the public’s attention has shifted to matters such as Iraq, however, corporate America has launched a counterattack. Its goal is to derail the Justice Department’s efforts to maintain a heightened level of white-collar criminal enforcement. Its success thus far starkly illustrates how power and money influence our criminal justice system.

Big business, represented primarily by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, could not attack white-collar criminal enforcement head-on. Instead, it enlisted the aid of its lawyers, including the American Bar Association and the Association of Corporate Counsel, in a more oblique assault. Their strategy was to mount an all-out offensive against a seemingly obscure trend: the Justice Department’s increasing insistence that corporations waive their attorney-client privilege as part of their cooperation with government investigators.

Through experience, government lawyers have learned that the efficiency of white-collar criminal prosecution can be significantly improved when companies facing indictment cooperate and provide relevant information. This way, prosecutors can get to the bottom of complex criminality and promptly indict those responsible. However, unlike an ordinary criminal who cooperates by telling what he knows, a corporation only “knows” what its employees tell it. Often, information relevant to a prosecution has been gathered by the corporation’s counsel. Therefore, to cooperate, the corporation must waive its attorney-client privilege.

In a January 2003 document known as the “Thompson Memorandum,” Justice told its prosecutors to consider a corporation’s willingness to waive its attorney-client privilege in determining whether it ought to be indicted. This is where big business and its lawyers aimed their attack. Treating attorney-client privilege as if it were a sacrosanct American institution, akin to freedom of speech, they claimed that Justice was unfairly using its tremendous power to coerce corporations into privilege waivers. The resultant erosion of the privilege would be catastrophic, they contended. This tactic even garnered the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, and together the various lobbying groups formed the Coalition to Preserve the Attorney-Client Privilege.

The coalition’s claims are hugely overstated. The government does not “coerce” corporations to waive their attorney-client privilege any more than it “coerces” drug dealers to waive their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when they agree to testify. Moreover, the attorney-client privilege is not an end unto itself but a means to an end. Its main purpose is to encourage individuals to be candid with their lawyers.

The coalition says that the prospect of a privilege waiver will cause corporate employees and officers to clam up, eviscerating internal investigations and compliance programs and resulting in more corporate crime. But employees of corporations have known since the Supreme Court’s 1981 decision in Upjohn Co. v. U.S. that when they speak to corporate counsel, the decision of whether to keep the conversation confidential resides with the corporation, not with them. The necessity and complexity of legal compliance leads most employees to talk to counsel nonetheless. Little indicates that the recent increase in privilege waivers has upset this balance.

So the Justice Department simply carried on. But it underestimated the power of the forces allied against it. Through intense lobbying efforts, the coalition persuaded Congress to conduct hearings. The same politicians who expressed outrage at corporate fraud a few years back now expressed outrage at the government’s vigorous pursuit of it. Eventually, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) introduced a bill that would prohibit federal prosecutors from seeking privilege waivers or considering a corporation’s willingness to waive privilege voluntarily when evaluating its cooperation. Realizing that it was in danger of losing, Justice issued the “McNulty Memorandum” on Dec. 12. It reins in prosecutors’ ability to request privilege waivers by requiring high-level supervisory approval.

But big business smells blood. Its reaction to the McNulty memo has been negative, and its goal continues to be the outright prohibition of waiver requests. Through reintroduction of the Specter bill, it is pressing its legislative “fix” in the new Congress, and the newly empowered Democrats — eager for lobbyists’ money — are likely to be as responsive as their Republican predecessors. The result of a waiver prohibition, of course, would be a significant slowdown of white-collar criminal prosecutions — exactly what the business lobby wants. And the losers, once again, would be the victims of white-collar crime: the American people.

By: Stephen Mulkey
Stephen Mulkey is science adviser to the Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida and Director of Research and Outreach/Extension for the University of Florida’s School of Natural Resource and Environment.

Evidence for human-caused climate change is now so compelling that policy makers are unlikely to ignore it.

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

The IPCC’s report, the fourth in a series since 1990, was the work of 150 lead and 450 contributing authors, representing 113 nations. These researchers, most of whom were unpaid and newly recruited to this effort, concluded that the warming of the climate is “unequivocal,” and that human activities are behind the unprecedented speed of change.

The temperature record is perhaps the most straightforward part of the report. The authors stated that future warming is “very unlikely” to be inconsequential. This echoes the consensus of 11 of the world’s leading national academies of science, which stated in 2005 that we should mitigate the causes of climate change and prepare to adapt to the consequences.

As John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, put it last week, “We have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.” What we do in the near term will determine the mix of these.

Scientific consensus
What is most remarkable about the scientific consensus is that there is one.

Scientists build their careers by challenging paradigms and reframing conventional wisdom in the light of new data. As a practicing scientist for over 20 years, I am certain that if my research program were to rigorously discount the role of humans in climate change, it would be well funded and lead to career success.

But the fact is, the science behind this work is impeccable. The new report and the joint academies statement represent the views of the world’s best experts. The IPCC’s latest report is especially interesting because of what is left out.

The scientists concluded they could not quantify the rate of increased ice flow from glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, and limited their assessment of sea level rise to quantifiable factors affecting ocean expansion caused by heat. Similarly, they left out the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, which most scientists agree is accelerating, resulting in significant emissions of carbon dioxide and methane.

Accordingly, the estimate of sea level rise is conservative. Several scientists have argued that it could be much higher than the predicted 7 to 23 inches by 2100. Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues recently reported in Science that the observed rises in temperature and sea level over the last 6 years have been at the upper limit of the IPCC’s previous predictions.

Florida in cross hairs
Florida is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change through sea level rise, hurricanes and associate storm surge. The new report states that increased hurricane intensity will be a “likely” consequence (greater than 66 percent probability) of rising sea surface temperatures in the early part of this century.

Topping our list of concerns should be the storm surge associated with more powerful hurricanes, which could seriously impact the almost 80 percent of our population that live in Florida’s 35 coastal counties. At a recent executive forum for business leaders in Orlando, a senior representative of the insurance industry made it clear that Florida’s risk exposure from global warming is considered extreme.

Given its vulnerability, it is striking that Florida is not a leader of states responding to climate change. Florida is not among the 26 states that have climate action plans, nor is it one of the more than 20 states that require power companies to produce a portion of their electricity from renewable resources.

A new report by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy notes that Florida is among the least efficient of the states, and about 45 percent of Florida’s electricity needs in 2023 could be met through improvements in efficiency and the development of renewable energy. Residential photovoltaic electricity generation is mostly undeveloped in Florida, largely because of market and regulatory disincentives.

Opportunity and hope
The long emergency of climate change is far from hopeless. There is immense economic growth available to Florida through development of renewable energy, energy conservation, and efficient transportation.

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy reports that savings in electricity bills could total $84 billion over 15 years. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the formation of the US Climate Action Partnership, an alliance of major businesses, including Alcoa, BP America, Caterpillar Inc., Duke Energy, DuPont, General Electric, and PG&E Corporation. With combined assets of more than $1 trillion, this group has issued a call to implement a mandatory, flexible climate program based on a cap-and-trade approach that would allow emissions to be traded.

Florida industries could reap significant profits by being players in the cap-and-trade market. Similarly, Florida could employ a program of limits and market incentives to regulate emissions from the production and consumption of biofuels.

Because of the business opportunities emanating from climate change, I am more hopeful than I have been in 15 years that we can significantly reduce carbon emissions. Just as in the Great Depression, those who capitalize on the opportunities inherent in this challenge can create wealth. In a recent survey of 31 major companies for a Pew report on climate strategies, 90 percent said they believe that government regulation of emissions is imminent. Major profits await those companies who can meet the growth needs of Florida, while reducing greenhouse emissions.

Programs at UF, such as its Program in Resource Efficient Communities and the new Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy, can help industry meet this challenge.

As the science adviser to the Century Commission for a Sustainable Florida, my job is to make science accessible to the commissioners so that they can advise the governor and Legislature on guiding Florida to a prosperous and sustainable future. This task is made easier by the outstanding talent and energy of the commissioners, and I am heartened by their proactive response to the compelling opportunities posed by this science. I encourage all of us to join with them in developing the tools for a sustainable future.

By: Douglas J. Barrett, M.D.
Doug Barrett, M.D., is senior vice president for health affairs at the University of Florida.

Floridians don’t always agree on things. Remember the presidential election of 2000? That’s why a recent survey showing Florida citizens’ overwhelming support for medical and health research is so striking.

Conducted by Research!America, a respected national nonprofit research-advocacy group, the November survey of 800 Floridians revealed that 96 percent agree it is important for Florida to be a leader in medical and health research, with about nine of 10 describing this goal as “very important.” Proving their support is more than just talk, an impressive 59 percent said they would be willing to pay $1 more per week in taxes to finance expanded medical and health research in Florida.

Our public officials and members of Florida’s biomedical research community need to respond to such a show of unanimity and commitment. Gov. Jeb Bush made building Florida into a biotechnology research powerhouse a cornerstone of his administration. With Bush’s departure from office, Gov. Charlie Crist and other state leaders have the opportunity to build on this recent momentum and respond to citizens’ aspirations.

When it comes to health and medical research, Florida has some serious catching up to do. Despite our state being the fourth-largest, we do not have a national “brand name” medical research center that ranks with the likes of Johns Hopkins, Michigan, Duke or Stanford. Evidence for this opinion was presented in Research! America’s survey, in which more than half of respondents couldn’t come up with the name of a single Florida institution where health and medical research are conducted.

Fortunately, that’s beginning to change. State officials have recently begun to invest in the life-sciences research infrastructure. At the University of Florida, we are two years deep into a five-year plan that will add more than 600,000 square feet of state-of-the-art laboratory space. Combined with growth in the biomedical research programs at Florida’s other academic medical centers, the development of new state medical schools in Orlando and Miami and, above all, the recruitment of private biotech players Scripps, Burnham and Torrey Pines, Florida is developing a constellation of life-sciences research clusters that could have multibillion-dollar effects on the state’s economy. In fact, the recruitment of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research to Orange County perfectly illustrates what can be accomplished when local and state governments, the university system and the private sector work together. UF researchers are excited at the prospect of working with Burnham scientists on their Lake Nona campus.

Attracting established out-of-state biotech enterprises to set up shop here is one way to grow the research base. And yet this “acquisition” approach to growth is relatively expensive. It should always be a supplement to a grow-your-own philosophy — both public and private — that should represent the vast majority of the state’s investment in health and medical-research capacity. Why? Because with time, grow-your-own presents a much stronger return on investment for the state.

Here’s an example from UF’s Health Science Center:

A few years ago, on the suggestion of a sharp-eyed faculty member, the university spent $175,000 in institutional funds to develop a database of genetic samples to serve as the foundation for future research projects. Amazingly, over the next four years, that database has been crucial to our ability to attract more than $16 million in project support from the National Institutes of Health and private industry.

To be sure, not every investment yields such large returns so quickly. But this example demonstrates how, over time, relatively modest but thoughtful investments in the productive capacity of our universities and biomedical-research institutions can yield big returns. Indeed, these expenditures have a power akin to compound interest in a retirement account, producing the real economic wealth that will foster the development of new therapies, improved health status and high-paying jobs.

If we want to continue the upward trajectory of health and medical research in Florida, it will be important for our state’s leaders to continue to carefully nurture and invest in our existing research universities while remaining poised to seize attractive new opportunities.

Clearly, we cannot afford to sit idle. A number of other states are already ahead of us or laying plans to either get in the game or maintain their competitive advantage. States such as California, Wisconsin, Missouri and New Jersey have made long-term investments of hundreds of millions of dollars to the benefit of their university-based research and their state’s economic development. They’re creating an atmosphere in which scientists can vigorously pursue their work in the only place that matters: at the cutting edge.

If we hope to stay in that game, I believe our state will have to answer. And about as unanimously as possible, Floridians agree.

By: Robert H. Jerry II, James M. Loy and Steven E. Roberts.
Robert H. Jerry II is dean of the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida, James M. Loy is former commandant of the Coast Guard and Steven E. Roberts is an attorney at Alston & Bird.

Despite ominous predictions that this hurricane season would rival last year’s onslaught of killer storms, the season ended quietly on Nov. 30. The lessons of Hurricane Katrina, however, require us to plan for what lies ahead. Unfortunately, Congress has failed to enact comprehensive catastrophe legislation to prepare for and respond to the worst Mother Nature has to offer.

When disaster strikes, those affected turn to insurance to provide the financial resources to pick up the pieces. If all goes according to plan, the insurance company compensates the victims according to the terms of the insurance policy.

Theory vs. reality

Because the magnitude of loss does not exceed the premiums collected, the company individually — and the insurance industry collectively — can afford to pay claims and make a profit. To do this, insurance companies limit their financial exposure through risk diversification that correctly assumes that not all customers will experience the same loss at the same time. Reinsurance — which is essentially insurance for insurance companies — further enhances financial solvency by distributing some of the risk even more widely.

But what happens in theory and what has happened in reality could not be more different: Residential and commercial development, rising population densities and escalating land values have created a recipe for disaster. Estimates suggest that a repeat of the 1900 Galveston hurricane and 1906 San Francisco earthquake would cause losses in excess of $36 billion and $400 billion respectively. If a Category 5 hurricane were to hit Miami, losses would top $50 billion. Because claims would greatly surpass premiums and retained dollars, some insurance companies will default.

Floridians are all too familiar with this scenario. Following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, 10 insurance companies went bankrupt. This summer, driven to financial insolvency by the explosion of claims caused by 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons, another Florida insurer, which was once the state’s third largest, declared bankruptcy.

Mortgage defaults

And Floridians are not alone. Homeowners from Texas to the Carolinas either cannot obtain insurance coverage or must pay astronomical premiums for coverage that is much more limited than before. For homeowners who simply cannot afford it, a major hurricane spells financial disaster and virtually guarantees unprecedented mortgage defaults. The effect on the national economy would be pronounced and long-lasting.

A national catastrophe fund would offer a level of protection from catastrophic hurricanes and other mega-disasters. Under proposals considered, but not passed by Congress in 2005 and 2006, the federal government would offer catastrophe reinsurance to qualifying state governments. This, in turn, would help ensure the availability and affordability of property insurance in high-risk areas while establishing a reserve fund to cover the losses when all else fails.

Yet insurance is only one component of a forward-looking national-catastrophe policy. Mitigation measures — such as stronger building codes and land-use regulations — soften the impact of natural disasters. A study by Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center estimated that if four specific mitigation measures had been in place before Hurricane Katrina — including the installation of hurricane shutters and hurricane straps — 75 percent of the estimated losses could have been avoided. Similar arguments have been made for earthquake prone areas. For existing homes and businesses, tax credits to retrofit construction with stronger materials and safety measures are needed.

Timing unkown

When lawmakers return to Capitol Hill in January to tackle complex issues ranging from Iraq to healthcare, the opportunity to create a comprehensive natural-catastrophe policy must not be wasted. The 2006 hurricane season passed with a whimper, but the 2007 season is only six months away. The timing of future natural disasters is unknown, but that they will occur is absolutely certain. Now is the time to prepare a comprehensive, cohesive and coordinated national policy to deal with them.

By: Terry L. McCoy
Terry L. McCoy is director of the Latin American Business Environment Program at the University of Florida.

For 47 years Fidel Castro has ruled Cuba. For 44 years through 10 U.S. administrations, Washington has pursued a diplomatic and economic embargo of Cuba designed to force Castro from office. For at least 40 years, critics have argued that U.S. policy is a failure. While the 80-year-old Cuban dictator may return to power, his end is in sight — and it is time to rethink our Cuba policy. What should U.S. policy be toward a post-Castro Cuba?

The operating assumption of U.S. policymakers and the Cuba-American community has been that when Castro dies the communist regime will fall to be replaced by democratic politics and a free-market economy, such as occurred in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. This may happen — although it is not likely to be a straightforward transition. But events surrounding Castro’s recent surgery and temporary transfer of power to his brother Raúl suggest that the regime may make a peaceful transition to new leadership. This is clearly what they are planning for. Then what should U.S. policy be?

• If Cuba were any other country (think China, Vietnam, North Korea), the first consideration would be security. Does a Cuba governed by Raúl Castro or one of the younger senior Communist Party officials constitute a threat to U.S. security? Does it have weapons of mass destruction or support terrorists operating abroad?

If the answer is No, then the diplomatic and economic sanctions of the kind imposed against Cuba over the past four-plus decades would be difficult to justify. While it is the responsibility of U.S. officials to constantly monitor and reassess security threats, especially with unfriendly states — and Cuba is no friend of the United States — there is no credible case that Cuba is a threat to our national security.

• A second consideration is whether there are common interests. Given close geographic proximity, the United States and Cuba share a fragile marine environment with major shipping lanes and recently discovered deep-sea petroleum deposits. Both countries also must cope with the same natural disasters. Then there is human traffic across the Straits of Florida. These are all challenges that could be better managed through closer government-to-government contact and coordination.

• Economic gains are a third consideration. Cuba could be an important market for U.S. exports and destination for U.S. private investment. The embargo has put Cuba beyond the reach of U.S. companies (and U.S. tourists) while European, Canadian, Latin American and Asian businesses trade and invest in the island’s slowly recovering economy.

• This suggests a fourth criterion: Does our policy have the support of other countries, especially of our allies? The answer is a resounding No. Every year the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly passes a motion condemning the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and Washington typically can count on fewer than a handful of votes supporting the embargo. Designed to isolate Castro, U.S. policy has isolated Washington and opened the door for the rest of the world to conduct economic relations with Cuba.

• A final consideration is the nature of the regime. Is it freely and popularly elected? Does it respect human rights? Building democracy is a legitimate foreign policy goal, but one, as we are painfully learning in the Middle East, not easy for a foreign power to accomplish.

Cuba is a dictatorship and, if the communist regime survives Castro’s death, it will remain a dictatorship. But Washington conducts normal diplomatic and trade relations with countries throughout the world (China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia) that do not have democratically elected governments that protect the human rights of their citizens. We justify these bilateral relationships in terms of providing the economic foundation for the gradual emergence of democracy. With Cuba we deny the possibility of a Chinese-like path to market socialism (reportedly favored by Raúl Castro) that would trigger the forces of political liberalization.

Fidel Castro’s death may provoke the fall of communism in Cuba. That is our desired outcome, although it will create its own policy challenges. However, if the regime survives — which appears more likely now than it did 10 years ago before the embargo was tightened — Washington is going to have some choices.

Should the United States continue to pursue the failed policies of the last 44 years, or should it take advantage of Castro’s passing from the scene to deal with Cuba the way we deal with other countries, through a more nuanced policy that serves a broader array of legitimate national interests?