The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Hong Kong’s hunt for homes threatens green spaces Posted: 13 Sep 2013 10:56 PM PDT A government minister's suggestion this week that developing the city's green spaces should no longer be off limits drew scorn from environmentalists, adding to concerns that Hong Kong's natural habitats are slowly being eroded by developers. But the comments from development chief Paul Chan also illustrate the problem faced by a city whose 7.1 million inhabitants are squeezed into only 30% of the territory. The remaining 70% is made up of woodland, wetland, barren land, and protected country parks. These parks alone make up 40% of the territory. "Development of country parks has been unmentionable, if not a taboo. But should it be completely untouchable?" Chan wrote on his blog on Sunday. Hong Kong's unpopular Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has made adequate affordable homes the central plank of government policy as he attempts to cool a soaring market driven by low interest rates and thin supply in the face of an influx of mainland Chinese immigrants. Prices have roughly doubled since 2009, putting property ownership out of reach for many. The average price of a small 400-square-foot apartment is HK$4.92 million ($635,000). The government has also sought to address a yawning gap between rich and poor in the city, and estimates that nearly 170,000 people are living in subdivided flats – tiny units partitioned off within already cramped residential units. An official advisory body last week suggested that 470,000 residential units needed to be built in the next 10 years to meet demand, with 60% to be earmarked for public housing. In an editorial this week the South China Morning Post cited lawmakers who suggested this was a conservative figure. But despite the city's space constraints, the idea of using designated green areas for potential sites for flats has triggered a backlash against what is perceived as an onslaught of development and a disregard for heritage. "If you are giving away one inch, you will give away one foot later. There will be serious intrusion (to green areas). It should not be even thought of," Lam Chiu-ying, a former senior government official, said on a radio programme Tuesday. Observers also pointed to recent controversies that have sparked debate over how to balance development with nature and heritage protection. A law limiting the scope of reclamation was enacted in the 1990s following years of protests by conservationists against the shrinking of the world-renowned Victoria Harbour, with some voicing concern that the harbour would eventually resemble "a river" given the pace of development. Yet the law has not prevented the demolition of heritage sites along the coastline to make way for redevelopment projects, such as the Queen's Pier in 2008. Victoria Park is the city's largest urban park, but it has steadily shrunk and been concreted over. The latest portion to be sacrificed will make way for a slip road. A plan to convert Hong Kong's northern Fanling golf course into public housing estates has also drawn ire and concerns that removing such a world-class facility would compromise the financial hub's global appeal. Hong Kong's 24 country parks cover 40% of the 1,100-square-kilometre territory, and were set up in the colonial era with laws tracing back to the 1970s. Under the laws, country parks should be reserved for the purposes of education, recreation, and nature protection. A green group said the authorities were "out of control" in their search for fresh land. Roy Tam, chairman of non-profit group Green Sense, told AFP that the government would quickly lose control if it started to allow incremental development on country parks. "Country parks are one of the few places people can go on their weekends besides shopping malls. It is not rational to take them away," Tam said. Some critics say Hong Kong's land supply issues are a myth and that the shortage is a result of years of mismanagement. They say the city has abundant shrubland, woodland, and open rural areas that could become readily available sites for development – much of which are instead being used as storage or illegal dumping sites. Large portions of land in the city's New Territories are locked up by a colonial-era law that stipulates all indigenous male villagers receive a village house for free. Local media have estimated nearly 1,000 hectares of land is reserved for this purpose. Sonny Lo, a social scientist at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, said the government is set to run into more problems as the community becomes increasingly environmentally conscious. "From the sustainable development perspective, the government should not encroach upon green spaces now highly cherished by a community that is increasingly aware of the importance of sustainable development," he said. - AFP, September 14, 2013. |
| From Elvis to E.T.? The Voyagers’ extraordinary tale Posted: 13 Sep 2013 10:14 PM PDT Today, 36 years on, Voyager 1 has become the first spacecraft to leave our neighbourhood and venture into the loneliness of interstellar space, according to data published on Thursday. It is 19 billion kilometres from home. Like its sister Voyager 2, also heading to the boundaries of the Solar System on a different trajectory, the 722-kilo scout bears a time capsule - a gold-plated disk providing images and sounds of life on Earth in 1977 for any intelligent alien it may encounter. Rosine Lallement of the Paris Observatory told AFP that Voyager 1 was now literally pushing back the frontier of knowledge. "For the first time, a probe is an environment that has never been experienced before by a man-made object." "It will be intriguing to see what happens next," she said. The Voyagers were originally designed to conduct close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn, Saturn's rings, and the larger moons of the two planets. They were then ordered to carry out additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune. After this feat, the spacecraft were sent on the ultimate trip: to the edge of the Solar System and beyond. Voyagers 1 and 2 are identical craft, fitted with television cameras (since switched off to save power and computer memory), infrared and ultraviolet sensors, magnetometers, plasma detectors and cosmic-ray and charged-particle sensors. They use a small radioactive source for electricity at this huge distance from the Sun. Signals back home are sent with a power of about 20 watts, equivalent to a refrigerator light bulb, making them so faint they can only be picked up by NASA's huge "ears," the Deep Space Network. A key moment came in 2004, when Voyager 1, then about 14 billion kilometres (8.7 billion miles) away, crossed the "termination shock," or when the particles spewed out from the Sun, called the solar wind, start to interact with cosmic rays from interstellar space. In 2010, it reached a kind of doldrums where the solar wind peters out. A further two years later, a surge in high-energy particles detected by its cosmic-ray sensor indicated the tough little explorer had reached the heliopause, which divides the Sun's zone of influence from interstellar space. Transition of this wide boundary has taken a long time to figure out but now, says Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, it is confirmed. Data sent back by the two probes has already confounded textbook depictions of the Solar System as being spherical. Instead, the Sun's neighbourhood, the heliosphere, is egg-shaped. The "bottom" of the egg is flattened by a permanent clash between the solar wind and the blast of particles from other stars. Lallement said astrophysicists were now eager to know if Voyager 1 will confirm their theories about the space between the stars. "If one day we send out probes to neighbouring stars, what kind of environment can we expect for them?" she asked. "Until now, all of our theories are based on computer models, not on observed data." Voyager's instruments will have to shut down permanently in 2025, the US journal Science reported on Thursday. However, experts say the spacecraft may keep traveling indefinitely, advancing outward at more than 17 kilometres per second, or 38,000 miles per hour. That may seem fast, but space is big. In the year 40272 - yes, more than 38,000 years from now - Voyager 1 will come close to the nearest star on its present course. It will be within 1.7 light years of a minor member of the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear or Little Dipper) called AC+79 3888, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says on its website. - AFP, September 14, 2013. |
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