New word for today: satimages

I want to be like this teacher when I grow up: to teach your students so well that they can do something amazing, like say, send a balloon up to the edge of space and take pictures. People talk about how the space program is so expensive and doesn't do us any good at all; satellite imagery has revolutionized everything, from Google Maps to agricultural and weather forecasts to disaster relief. We send astronauts to orbit the earth and look down, but in today's world of satimages, we are all astronauts.

New Science Discovery #1

Evidently, cows can really be milked for distance! Milk is a really strange substance, when you get down to thinking about it; most other fluids in a cow's body--stomach juice, urine, saliva, blood--just aren't all that appetizing. Of course, most of them aren't good for you--with the exception of blood. Kenya's Maasai people drink cow blood, mixed with milk. Could cow's blood, like milk, just be an acquired taste?

Projecting the future

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What shape will the future take? I am at heart an optimist, but that is more a preference of viewpoint than an expectation. I mean, if you are going to think about the future of the natural world, it obviously is going to be grim. We will lose so much, destroy so much, and degrade so much. The heart of the Pacific Ocean is a rotating island of plastic garbage from the last five decades. The world is slowly heating up, an enormous ball of warming rolling downhill. Soil erosion and degradation is impoverishing many countries in Africa, the number of ocean dead zones is multiplying, and the absolute number of desperately poor people is growing. Pandemics are becoming inevitable; there are so many interconnected people that one day a flu, or a plague, or some other virus, is going to come along and kill off a few hundred million people. Technological change is just not helping the world fast enough (or much at all, if you live in rural villages all over the world). Humans currently control roughly 40% of the land's surface, and that figure already includes almost all of the fertile land. Fish stocks are collapsing just as our population is really taking off. The future of humanity's 9 billion souls is linked to the fate of our environment, and it does not look pretty.

In fact, it is all too easy to be down-hearted about it all. For example, being pessimistic about the future is stock-in-trade of the fellow, J.H. Kuntsler, who wrote "World Made by Hand." He is not alone: many environmentalists fear that we are in an overshoot, like Wylie E. Coyote on thin air, just waiting for a crash.

Our problems do make for sobering stuff. But any projection of the future depends on assumptions about human behavior, and it is worth examining the assumptions of the most dismal "environmental doom" projections to see if they make common sense.

1) Humans will continue the same destructive path they have been on, because that is human nature.

2) The future will see a collapse of human society as we fight over ever-decreasing resources and reel from horrible plagues.

3) The natural world is doomed by an ever-growing human population that uses ever more resources per person for technological toys.

NUMBER ONE: In the short term, sheer inertia will continue to carry humanity on a destructive path: rainforest burning, overfishing, and overgrazing won't stop overnight. But the longer-term response of humanity to its most pressing problems depends more on human nature--whether we can change our habits and our thoughts.

It is a truism that humanity's nature is two-sided: loving and destructive, greedy and kind, self-centered and other-centered. It will probably always continue that way. But to assume that humanity cannot and will not change is wrong-headed. For two brief examples, take the change in thought about slavery and African-Americans in the last century and a half, and the change in behavior about capitalism that have swept China in the last couple decades. Human societies can do many new things (e.g., recycling, talking on cell phones, creating national parks, saving the ozone layer) and give up many old things (e.g., hanging bad slaves, sleeping with little children, killing off annoying native peoples, painting radium on watches, using lead paint, dumping trash directly into the ocean).

Humans are primates that think and change: that is our real nature. Where does that leave the future? An unknown country.

NUMBER TWO: By any metric, human civilization is tough. It survived a black plague and has had very few resource-driven wars up until now. While it is logical that more resource wars should be the offing in the near future, the vast majority of conflicts over water are resolved peacefully (not necessarily equitably--just peacefully). When it comes to resources, there is very little evidence that a lack of resources causes conflict (believe me, I have did the reading for a graduate class--hundreds of pages of papers). Instead, we find that sudden changes in resources cause conflicts (droughts, etc.); slower changes do not. Societies seem to be able to adapt peacefully to every type of resource condition under the sun. Farmers become ranchers, or migrate to other areas, as the climate dries. Sworn enemies negotiate water treaties so they can drink, and live to fight again.

In the final analysis, most non-renewable resources are recyclable, renewable, or replaceable. It will just take special political cooperation to properly manage renewable resources like forests, fish, and water. But it is difficult to name a problematic non-renewable resource. The world is running out of oil, but coal, solar, and wind could replace oil and power the world for another two hundred years (then fusion can take over). For minerals such as silver and nickel, they are simply moving from the earth to products and back to the earth (landfills). Mining landfills and recycling trash will be the waves of the future, as prices rise. For plastic, bioplastics are one answer, silicon products another, and plastic recycling another still.

NUMBER THREE: In the short-term, human population and demand for products will seriously hurt the natural world. Roughly 20-50% of species will likely have gone extinct by 2100. But can we save the remainder? First, human population growth must stop. Human population growth has been slowing for years, so that is a real possibility. Second, human demand for natural resources must decrease. That one is a tough one, but it is possible. Technologically, we can choose to build ever-cooler toys with less and less energy and resources--the average car in 1970 and today is a great example. Rising price signals as habitats get rare might help to change consumption habits--tree plantations grow most of the wood in the U.S. on very little land, for example. Global efforts to conserve forests and protect the oceans are gaining traction: the most recent version of Kyoto will fund tropical forest protection on an unforeseen scale.

This is where I choose to hope. To assume that the future will be horrible is to assume that the future is fixed. Some things--global warming, human population growth--are really likely for the near-term. But if you never know what is going happen in your own life, why assume that the world's life is going to be predictable? Hoping keeps you open for solutions to the problems that we have. Being a pessimist is akin to closing your eyes to possibility. Since the world we are driving is speeding toward some pretty big obstacles, it doesn't make much sense to close our eyes just yet.

A World Made by Hand: Finding the path between a rock and a hard place

"World Made by Hand" is a sad, life-affirming story about a small, American town America after an apocalypse that has led to the breakdown, but not outright destruction, of American society. Call it a soft-landing, a Miracle-on-the-Hudson "end" of the world, as opposed to the to hard-landings of Mad Max and Waterworld. Offstage in the story, there has been a big American war in the Mideast, two nuclear jihad attacks on American cities, the breakdown of the oil trade, and a killer flu. After all of that, the people of Union Grove, NY, are pushing onward.

I loved this book. Life goes on in Union Grove after their great loss; life is worth living even without electricity. For some (the Amish, for example) that is a banal statement, but modern American life is built on electricity, and it is good to be reminded that one can walk away from all the twinkly lights and still be fully human and happy. Movies, TV, health care, safety--many sadnesses and inconveniences, great and small, followed mechanized society's demise, but human joy lived on.

As an environmentalist, this book made me realize something fundamental: I really don't want industrialized society to fail.

Most environmentalists are mad at modern society about something. My love for nature began when I was young, but my need to defend it began shortly after the hills around my home were paved over to make dozens of identical suburban developments. I hated suburbs then. And although my hatred has dulled to hearty dislike as I have grown older, more empathetic, and more pragmatic, I spent most of my teens and early 20s hoping suburbs would fail. Rising gas prices would make them ghettos to be washed away by wildfire, or something. I felt powerless, and sad, as I watched every hill become a development. Every valley I grew up watching mist rise from in the morning has been bulldozed, renamed "Green Creek" or "Robin View", and planted with endless rows of white houses and green lawns. This is why I ask people not to move to Austin: the Austin I knew is now half-dead, buried under waves of immigrating suburbanites.

Life many of my fellow environmentalists, I wondered what would happen if industrialized society failed as well. I worked it out in my head: mass plagues, wars, starvation, and the destruction of nature as a desperate world tried to scratch a living from the soil. But I couldn't conceive living in that world, and so it never seemed real. The possibility of everything working out in some nice fashion lingered like a bucolic dream: suburbanites forced to garden together, forming their own communities, living along the rivers...."World Made by Hand" counts the tally of loss, and realistically notes the logistical nightmares that would arise if everything breaks down. My bucolic dream evaporated.

We are definitely better off in this modern world, for so many reasons, and this book, by making me feel the loss of the modern world, changed my environmentalism forever. It is somewhat ironic. Against a backdrop of evil and sadness, this book depicts a realistically joyful life without TV, without electricity, without plastic, and without contact with friends that live far away. But far from being an environmentalist's dream, this book showed me that I am not ready to give up on the modern world. There is too much good in it to be lost to some catastrophe.

Environmentalism is all too often a negative belief system: make fewer people, consume less, recycle, minimize your carbon footprint. Stand on one toe, and make your desires small. When taken only that way, it is a belief system for ascetics, hypocrites, despairing idealists, and well-meaning, dangerously unrealistic people who have a bucolic vision of a planet run by muscle power.

Right now I don't buy a new computer until my old one is inadequate, simply because computers are made of plastic and heavy metals that are ripped from the ground, shipped to some factory, and then shipped to me. A decade of wars was fought in the Congo over the minerals in computers. A computer is a nasty thing, environmentally, and much of it cannot be recycled because so many materials are intertwined. The day they use solar energy to make a whole computer out of materials that are 100% separable and recyclable (aluminum, or bioplastic, or silicon), I will start swapping computers like crazy. Why not? The cherry trees make lots of flowers this time of year, but I don't see the Earth complaining.

Many environmentalists want a better industrial society, one that doesn't hurt the environment by design. We want walkable cities, less packaging in everything we buy, completely recyclable computers, compostable jeans, carbon-free power. But we want these things not because we want less: we want everything to be better. Everyone should have an American lifestyle, without guilt or danger of harming the planet. If everything on this planet was designed to run on solar electricity, designed to decompose or be recycled at the end of its life, and designed to respect and imitate nature...well, that would be a good start at a cleaner, healthier world. Give me not a world made by hand, but a real world, made to last.

The next industrial revolution

In the depths of an economic crisis that seems to have no end, I am pondering what the shape of our next economic boom will look like. Many people have predicted that the alternative energy revolution will provide new jobs and cause developed economies to grow once again. Even though credit is tight now for alternative energy projects--most require large investments (and therefore loans) at the beginning--I agree with these experts. At some point in the next two decades, the developed world will direct the truly staggering amounts of money we spend on foreign oil and natural gas back at its own economies to build alternative energy systems. As carbon legislation and gas taxes do their work, trillions of otherwise wasted dollars will rush back into our economies, and the boom will be on.

Some people think the next industrial revolution will be energy, or nanotechnology, or some broader digital rollout. For the developed world, it may be. But I predict that the real industrial revolution, the one that people will remember, will be in the developing world. As alternative energy and digital technology becomes more and more distributed, they will spur economic growth for the other 5/6ths of humanity. Solar panels and cell-phone sized computers will tie every village in the world to the grid. The next green revolution will bring Cargill to Africa and Thailand; it is already in South America. In the next few decades, the developing world will be the new market for alternative energy, for computers, for infrastructure, for agriculture, for communications, and for cars, clothes, and everything else developed countries have now.

If all of this comes to pass, the world's demand for products will far exceed its natural resources to produce those products. Cars made out of steel will be things of the past. Let's hope that forests made out of wood won't be things of the past either. It is wrong to suggest that the rest of the world doesn't deserve to live like the developed world now: health care, education, and material comfort are human rights. Our challenge is to figure out how to create material wealth in a sustainable way: plastics that biodegrade, computers that are 100% recyclable, crops that don't poison the soil, and policies that favor keeping forests and coral reefs around. It is a generational challenge, and I think we could do it. I wonder who will have the leadership to try.

Tropical Forests done a disservice by the NYT

A recent article in the NYT stirred my ire, but it looks like my letter to the editor didn't make the cut since I didn't include a prestigious-sounding organization along with my attack on the NYT's journalistic fact-checking. I feel very sad that no one has pointed out a fundamental factual error in the article that completely changes its interpretation.

Lies have been put forward as truth by the NY Times, of all places. For shame!

The article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/science/earth/30forest.html?ref=science

To the Editor:

RE: “New Jungles Prompt a Debate on Rain Forests” (Article: Jan. 30). The regrowth of tropical rainforests in some countries is a hopeful sign. Sadly, the statistics and conclusions on forest regrowth reported in your article are erroneous, and I urge the Times to issue a retraction of the article.

It was reported that “38 million acres of original rain forest are being cut down every year”, an area the size of Michigan. This reasonable estimate of forest loss was contrasted against the “2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing in the tropics— an area almost as large as the United States.” This figure is a thousand times too high. Although satellite estimates are less optimistic, the FAO currently estimates that forest regrowth covers about 14 million acres annually in the tropics (Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, page xii). To have 2.1 billion acres of tropical forest regrowth, all of humanity would have to abandon agriculture in the tropics.

This article fundamentally misrepresents the deforestation crisis. In reality, the amount of tropical deforestation dwarfs the amount of regrowing tropical forest (38 vs. 14 million acres), and tropical deforestation shows no signs of slowing down.

Articles that delve into scientific controversy must pay careful attention to the facts. It is irresponsible to advance a sense of complacency about the rapid and tragic loss of rainforests around the world. It is even more irresponsible to do so with incorrect statistics.

Matthew

The sky is falling!

The New Depression is starting! The sky is falling! Banks are going to collapse and take your money! Hedge funds are going to go up in flames tomorrow! A lack of short-term liquidity is going to cause a severe recession!

Okay, no one is yelling that last one, but I think that is the most likely result of the credit and mortgage mess. Some banks and hedge funds will fail. Many people will lose their jobs, and it will be tough to get a loan to buy anything. This one may last for years--other countries have gone through similarly long recessions due to bank credit problems (take Japan and Finland, for instance).

What is the proper role of government in stopping this crisis? A $700 billion bailout failed today in Congress, and the stock market took a long jump with a short rope. Was the bailout the right idea?

A smart politician would say that the bailout was not a perfect solution, but it was good enough for now. It would have stabilized the markets (on the positive). Although it might not have been enough to keep them stable long-term, and it would have been horrifically expensive (about $2800 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S.), it was worth the risk to keep the economy running.

But even if it will cause regular people to lose their jobs and not get car loans, regular people dislike saving Wall Street types from the trouble their reckless greed has brought them. The bailout seems like a desperate, rushed gamble from a president who has cried "Wolf!" once too often. But now, a real wolf is at the door, and the nation is divided at the wrong time.

Are there viable alternatives? Yes. The government could raise the limit on FDIC bank insurance (protecting us little people), provide temporary credit to keep the markets liquid, and send government accountants into every major credit house and bank to open the books and determine which companies are financially sound, and which are not. Making the company books public would greatly help to mend the crisis of confidence in short-term credit that is causing our economy to seize up like a old Chevrolet running a few quarts low.

But do we have time for Washington to come up with another plan? Those old biddies will be arguing while Rome burns, and none of them are currently favoring the ideas above. It's good not to rush, except when it is called for--delay can be a risky proposition when it's your neighbor's house on fire. Waiting for a new, cheaper plan might save you or I a few hundred dollars, even a thousand dollars. But in the end, isn't all that matters is whether I get to keep my job, and you get to keep yours? I'd pay up for that. I bet most people would, too.

When you think about it, I bet the government won't gesture and POOF, $700 billion will disappear overnight. No, they will take time to spend it, and better plans can be made as the markets calm back down. After all, there will be a new president come January, and a new Congress as well. I think they might fix things. At the very least, people will believe it when they tell us that the sky is falling. Really.