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In the UK, the EA regulates discharges from sewage works and intensive animal units but not always in terms of nutrient levels (although recent legislation is in place which is likely to improve this). Reducing diffuse farmland fertiliser and animal manure run-off is more difficult. It has to rely on improved farm management, for instance via Environmentally Sensitive Areas administered by the UK’s Agriculture Departments or the CCW’s successful Tir Cymen scheme. Reducing fertiliser usage and animal numbers, in exchange for an annual payment to the farmer, can be a component of such schemes.Florida has no similar schemes for farmers. “Instead,” says Larry Belli, deputy superintendent of the Everglades National Park, “our Everglades Forever Act requires the agricultural areas to reduce fertiliser run-off. The government agencies monitor the levels and it’s up to the farmers how they achieve the reductions necessary.”It may be small compensation but at least the source of the nitrates and phosphates contaminating parts of the Everglades is identifiable Unfortunately, the source of mercury pollution isn’t.

Absorbed by fish when they eat contaminated small plants and animals, the toxic metal concentrates at the tops of food chains. Anywhere where angling is allowed in the Everglades now has a notice advising against eating more than one fish per week. Largemouth bass have mercury levels of up to 1.8 parts per million; levels above 1ppm are considered unsafe for human consumption. Higher quantities have been found in racoons and the endangered Florida panther. Some of this mercury may be leaching out of soils disturbed by crop growing – peaty soils often contain such metals which, if left wet and undisturbed, retain them.

Some farmers are now keeping soils wetter by including rice in their rotations and growing other crops needing higher water tables. Some of the mercury may be from airborne pollution or from unknown dumps where old batteries or paints could be sources.Drawing a boundary around a self-contained habitat of biological interest – a woodland for instance – in order to conserve what lies inside it is not usually problematic, but for wetlands it’s completely different. When the Everglades was designated a national park few people gave much thought to what enormous changes were and would continue to be happening outside its boundary across the huge land and water areas draining into it. Putting a stop to the decimation of egret populations for the plumes sought by the millinery trade, or to alligator hunting for their skin, today seems such an easy achievement compared with the complex water quantity and quality issues faced by wetlands the world over.In Florida, the issue of curtailing further urbanisation and water consumption will have to be tackled. Agriculture is becoming more environmentally sensitive, albeit slowly. Combined with an increasing awareness of the need to preserve – even expand – wilderness areas by politicians and policy makers, and by more of the public, there is hope yet that the Everglades really are for ever !The Park’s hydrologist Freddie James says:. Death is currently one of the most fashionable fields in cell biology.

It had long been known that programmed cell death played a very important role in the development of the embryo. For example, the fact that our digits are separated from one another is due to cell death in the regions between them during the development of the limb This process is now called apoptosis. An enormous number of nerve cells die by apoptosis during the development of the nervous system; about one half of all the neurons that migrate into our limbs from the spinal cord to connect to our muscles die. Over the last few years it has become clear, to everyone’s astonishment, that all our cells carry an apoptotic suicide package within them and it will lead to self-destruction unless they receive the right signals not to.

I find it rather attractive that it might thus be possible to initiate, by some simple action, this suicide programme when we no longer wish to continue to live. Indeed while we are making very good progress in understanding and dealing with death at the cellular level we are much less good at dealing with death at the human level. Very often doctors do not know, for example, why a particular tumour of the liver has caused death, while a much larger one has had much less effect Also doctors have real difficulty dealing with death Dying is something patients are not allowed to do. It is an affront to so go against the doctors’ efforts and advice.
I obtained quite new insights on these issues when I met Bert Keizer from Holland, who was in London to promote his book Dancing with Doctor D. What is so special about Dr Keizer is how much attention he has given to the needs of the dying, and his experience of euthanasia. He has chosen to work in a nursing home where many of the patients are chronically ill from a variety of causes. His aim with his dying patients is not to try and cure them, but to turn the death bed into something palatable.