Gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon: global prices, deforestation, and mercury imports.

Many factors such as poverty, ineffective institutions and environmental regulations may prevent developing countries from managing how natural resources are extracted to meet a strong market demand. Extraction for some resources has reached such proportions that evidence is measurable from space. We present recent evidence of the global demand for a single commodity and the ecosystem destruction resulting from commodity extraction, recorded by satellites for one of the most biodiverse areas of the world. We find that since 2003, recent mining deforestation in Madre de Dios, Peru is increasing nonlinearly alongside a constant annual rate of increase in international gold price (∼18%/yr). We detect that the new pattern of mining deforestation (1915 ha/year, 2006-2009) is outpacing that of nearby settlement deforestation. We show that gold price is linked with exponential increases in Peruvian national mercury imports over time (R(2) = 0.93, p = 0.04, 2003-2009). Given the past rates of increase we predict that mercury imports may more than double for 2011 (∼500 t/year). Virtually all of Peru's mercury imports are used in artisanal gold mining. Much of the mining increase is unregulated/artisanal in nature, lacking environmental impact analysis or miner education. As a result, large quantities of mercury are being released into the atmosphere, sediments and waterways. Other developing countries endowed with gold deposits are likely experiencing similar environmental destruction in response to recent record high gold prices. The increasing availability of satellite imagery ought to evoke further studies linking economic variables with land use and cover changes on the ground.

Illicit cigarette consumption and government revenue loss in Indonesia.

BACKGROUND: Illicit cigarettes comprise more than 11% of tobacco consumption and 17% of consumption in low- and middle-income countries. Illicit cigarettes, defined as those that evade taxes, lower consumer prices, threaten national tobacco control efforts, and reduce excise tax collection. METHODS: This paper measures the magnitude of illicit cigarette consumption within Indonesia using two methods: the discrepancies between legal cigarette sales and domestic consumption estimated from surveys, and discrepancies between imports recorded by Indonesia and exports recorded by trade partners. Smuggling plays a minor role in the availability of illicit cigarettes because Indonesians predominantly consume kreteks, which are primarily manufactured in Indonesia. RESULTS: Looking at the period from 1995 to 2013, illicit cigarettes first emerged in 2004. When no respondent under-reporting is assumed, illicit consumption makes up 17% of the domestic market in 2004, 9% in 2007, 11% in 2011, and 8% in 2013. Discrepancies in the trade data indicate that Indonesia was a recipient of smuggled cigarettes for each year between 1995 and 2012. The value of this illicit trade ranges from less than $1 million to nearly $50 million annually. Singapore, China, and Vietnam together accounted for nearly two-thirds of trade discrepancies over the period. Tax losses due to illicit consumption amount to between Rp 4.1 and 9.3 trillion rupiah, 4% to 13% of tobacco excise revenue, in 2011 and 2013. CONCLUSIONS: Due to the predominance of kretek consumption in Indonesia and Indonesia's status as the predominant producer of kreteks, illicit domestic production is likely the most important source for illicit cigarettes, and initiatives targeted to combat this illicit production carry the promise of the greatest potential impact.

Empirical measurement of illicit tobacco trade in the Philippines.

Cigarette smuggling reduces the price of cigarettes, thwarts youth access restrictions, reduces government revenue, and undercuts the ability of taxes to reduce consumption. The tobacco industry often opposes increases to tobacco taxes on the claim that greater taxes induce more smuggling. To date, little is known about the magnitude of smuggling in the Philippines. his information is necessary to effectively address illicit trade and to measure the impacts of tax changes and the introduction of secure tax markings on illicit trade. This study employs two gap discrepancy methods to estimate the magnitude of illicit trade in cigarettes for the Philippines between 1994 and 2009. First, domestic consumption is compared with tax-paid sales to measure the consumption of illicit cigarettes. Second, imports recorded by the Philippines are compared with exports to the Philippines by trade partners to measure smuggling. Domestic consumption fell short of tax-paid sales for all survey years. The magnitude of these differences and a comparison with a prevalence survey for 2009 suggest a high level of survey under-reporting of smoking. In the late 1990s and the mid 2000s, the Philippines experienced two sharp declines in trade discrepancies, from a high of $750 million in 1995 to a low of $133.7 million in 2008. Discrepancies composed more than one-third of the domestic market in 1995, but only 10 percent in 2009. Hong Kong, Singapore, and China together account for more than 80 percent of the cumulative discrepancies over the period and 74 percent of the discrepancy in 2009. The presence of large discrepancies supports the need to implement an effective tax marking and tobacco track and trace system to reduce illicit trade and support tax collection. The absence of a relation between tax changes and smuggling suggests that potential increases in the excise tax should not be discouraged by illicit trade. Finally, the identification of specific trade partners as primary sources for illicit trade may facilitate targeted efforts in cooperation with these governments to reduce illicit trade.

Globalizing the Sculptural Landscapes of the Sarapis and Isis Cults in Hellenistic and Roman Greece

“Globalizing the Sculptural Landscape of Isis and Sarapis Cults in Roman Greece,” asks questions of cross-cultural exchange and viewership of sculptural assemblages set up in sanctuaries to the Egyptian gods. Focusing on cognitive dissonance, cultural imagining, and manipulations of time and space, I theorize ancient globalization as a set of loosely related processes that shifted a community's connections with place. My case studies range from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, including sanctuaries at Rhodes, Thessaloniki, Dion, Marathon, Gortyna, and Delos. At these sites, devotees combined mainstream Greco-Roman sculptures, Egyptian imports, and locally produced imitations of Egyptian artifacts. In the last case, local sculptors represented Egyptian subjects with Greco-Roman naturalistic styles, creating an exoticized visual ideal that had both local and global resonance. My dissertation argues that the sculptural assemblages set up in Egyptian sanctuaries allowed each community to construct complex narratives about the nature of the Egyptian gods. Further, these images participated in a form of globalization that motivated local communities to adopt foreign gods and reinterpret them to suit local needs.

I begin my dissertation by examining how Isis and Sarapis were represented in Greece. My first chapter focuses on single statues of Egyptian gods, describing their iconographies and stylistic tendencies through examples from Corinth and Gortyna. By comparing Greek examples with images of Sarapis, Isis, and Harpokrates from around the Mediterranean, I demonstrate that Greek communities relied on globally available visual tropes rather than creating site or region-specific interpretations. In the next section, I examine what other sources viewers drew upon to inform their experiences of Egyptian sculpture. In Chapter 3, I survey the textual evidence for Isiac cult practice in Greece as a way to reconstruct devotees’ expectations of sculptures in sanctuary contexts. At the core of this analysis are Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, which offer a Greek perspective on the cult’s theology. These literary works rely on a tradition of aretalogical inscriptions—long hymns produced from roughly the late 4th century B.C.E. into the 4th century C.E. that describe the expansive syncretistic powers of Isis, Sarapis, and Harpokrates. This chapter argues that the textual evidence suggests that devotees may have expected their images to be especially miraculous and likely to intervene on their behalf, particularly when involved in ritual activity inside the sanctuary.

In the final two chapters, I consider sculptural programs and ritual activity in concert with sanctuary architecture. My fourth chapter focuses on sanctuaries where large amounts of sculpture were found in underground water crypts: Thessaloniki and Rhodes. These groups of statues can be connected to a particular sanctuary space, but their precise display contexts are not known. By reading these images together, I argue that local communities used these globally available images to construct new interpretations of these gods, ones that explored the complex intersections of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman identities in a globalized Mediterranean. My final chapter explores the Egyptian sanctuary at Marathon, a site where exceptional preservation allows us to study how viewers would have experienced images in architectural space. Using the Isiac visuality established in Chapter 3, I reconstruct the viewer's experience, arguing that the patron, Herodes Atticus, intended his viewer to inform his experience with the complex theology of Middle Platonism and prevailing elite attitudes about Roman imperialism.

Throughout my dissertation, I diverge from traditional approaches to culture change that center on the concepts of Romanization and identity. In order to access local experiences of globalization, I examine viewership on a micro-scale. I argue that viewers brought their concerns about culture change into dialogue with elements of cult, social status, art, and text to create new interpretations of Roman sculpture sensitive to the challenges of a highly connected Mediterranean world. In turn, these transcultural perspectives motivated Isiac devotees to create assemblages that combined elements from multiple cultures. These expansive attitudes also inspired Isiac devotees to commission exoticized images that brought together disparate cultures and styles in an eclectic manner that mirrored the haphazard way that travel brought change to the Mediterranean world. My dissertation thus offers a more theoretically rigorous way of modeling culture change in antiquity that recognizes local communities’ agency in producing their cultural landscapes, reconciling some of the problems of scale that have plagued earlier approaches to provincial Roman art.

These case studies demonstrate that cultural anxieties played a key role in how viewers experienced artistic imagery in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. This dissertation thus offers a new component in our understanding of ancient visuality, and, in turn, a better way to analyze how local communities dealt with the rise of connectivity and globalization.

Metabolism Regulates the Fate and Function of T Lymphocytes

Proper balancing of the activities of metabolic pathways to meet the challenge of providing necessary products for biosynthetic and energy demands of the cell is a key requirement for maintaining cell viability and allowing for cell proliferation. Cell metabolism has been found to play a crucial role in numerous cell settings, including in the cells of the immune system, where a successful immune response requires rapid proliferation and successful clearance of dangerous pathogens followed by resolution of the immune response. Additionally, it is now well known that cell metabolism is markedly altered from normal cells in the setting of cancer, where tumor cells rapidly and persistently proliferate. In both settings, alterations to the metabolic profile of the cells play important roles in promoting cell proliferation and survival.

It has long been known that many types of tumor cells and actively proliferating immune cells adopt a metabolic phenotype of aerobic glycolysis, whereby the cell, even under normoxic conditions, imports large amounts of glucose and fluxes it through the glycolytic pathway and produces lactate. However, the metabolic programs utilized by various immune cell subsets have only recently begun to be explored in detail, and the metabolic features and pathways influencing cell metabolism in tumor cells in vivo have not been studied in detail. The work presented here examines the role of metabolism in regulating the function of an important subset of the immune system, the regulatory T cell (Treg) and the role and regulation of metabolism in the context of malignant T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL). We show that Treg cells, in order to properly function to suppress auto-inflammatory disease, adopt a metabolic program that is characterized by oxidative metabolism and active suppression of anabolic signaling and metabolic pathways. We found that the transcription factor FoxP3, which is highly expressed in Treg cells, drives this phenotype. Perturbing the metabolic phenotype of Treg cells by enforcing increased glycolysis or driving proliferation and anabolic signaling through inflammatory signaling pathways results in a reduction in suppressive function of Tregs.

In our studies focused on the metabolism of T-ALL, we observed that while T-ALL cells use and require aerobic glycolysis, the glycolytic metabolism of T-ALL is restrained compared to that of an antigen activated T cell. The metabolism of T-ALL is instead balanced, with mitochondrial metabolism also being increased. We observed that the pro-anabolic growth mTORC1 signaling pathway was limited in primary T-ALL cells as a result of AMPK pathway activity. AMPK pathway signaling was elevated as a result of oncogene induced metabolic stress. AMPK played a key role in the regulation of T-ALL cell metabolism, as genetic deletion of AMPK in an in vivo murine model of T-ALL resulted in increased glycolysis and anabolic metabolism, yet paradoxically increased cell death and increased mouse survival time. AMPK acts to promote mitochondrial oxidative metabolism in T-ALL through the regulation of Complex I activity, and loss of AMPK reduced mitochondrial oxidative metabolism and resulted in increased metabolic stress. Confirming a role for mitochondrial metabolism in T-ALL, we observed that the direct pharmacological inhibition of Complex I also resulted in a rapid loss of T-ALL cell viability in vitro and in vivo. Taken together, this work establishes an important role for AMPK to both balance the metabolic pathways utilized by T-ALL to allow for cell proliferation and to also promote tumor cell viability by controlling metabolic stress.

Overall, this work demonstrates the importance of the proper coupling of metabolic pathway activity with the function needs of particular types of immune cells. We show that Treg cells, which mainly act to keep immune responses well regulated, adopt a metabolic program where glycolytic metabolism is actively repressed, while oxidative metabolism is promoted. In the setting of malignant T-ALL cells, metabolic activity is surprisingly balanced, with both glycolysis and mitochondrial oxidative metabolism being utilized. In both cases, altering the metabolic balance towards glycolytic metabolism results in negative outcomes for the cell, with decreased Treg functionality and increased metabolic stress in T-ALL. In both cases, this work has generated a new understanding of how metabolism couples to immune cell function, and may allow for selective targeting of immune cell subsets by the specific targeting of metabolic pathways.