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Biology Comics

2011-03-04T12:54:00.000-08:00

Why Ethanol Is Brown

In 2010, 119 million metric tonnes of the U.S. corn crop (out of 400 million metric tonnes; between one third and one fourth of the total) went to make ethanol. This sent corn prices near record highs.

U.S. corn production has been rising at 2% a year for 30 years, mostly from plant breeding. (The limits of using more and more fertilizer were reached earlier). The crop went from 4 billion bushels in 1970 to 10 billion bushels in 2000.

In 2008 the U.S. corn crop was 12.8 billion bushels. About 40% went to feed animals, 30% for ethanol, 8% was processed for starch, corn oil and sweeteners, 15% was exported (mostly for animal feed). The sweeteners include high fructose corn syrup, a mixture of glucose and fructose which is used to sweeten sodas and processed foods. Fructose is the sugar found in honey and fruits. Unlike glucose (our main source of sugar) it doesn’t promote the release of insulin from pancreatic cells (the cells lack receptors for fructose) and thus doesn’t lead to the biochemical cascade that results in the secretion of leptin, the hormone that tells us we are full (stop eating!). Ingesting lots of fructose (as in soft drinks) leads to weight gain and the associated insulin resistance (which may be a direct result of too much fructose) and Type II diabetes. High fructose corn syrup is cheap and so products sweetened with it are cheap, but full of calories: a disaster—cheap unhealthy foods. We live in a world where buying a candy bar makes more sense than buying an apple.

Michael Pollan describes the miasmic smell of a cattle feedlot hanging over the Kansas plains. The cattle, fattened on a food (corn) to which they are not adapted, are maintained on low dose antibiotics, and develop life threatening strains of e coli in their intestines (life threatening to us, not to the cattle): the bugs disappear when the cattle are fed hay.

The corn is grown as a monoculture (nothing but corn in sight), fed with manufactured nitrogen fertilizer synthesized from natural gas, protected from competition with weeds by herbicides and from insects by pesticides. Resistance to the most popular herbicide, along with some insect killing toxins, are built into the genetically altered corn plants, whose seed is obtained from the manufacturer of the herbicide (a nifty deal for the seed-producing manufacturer).

Because of the petrochemicals (fertilizer, diesel fuel, pesticide) used to grow corn, and because of the energy required to distill it, ethanol is energy neutral or energy negative: that is, more energy goes into making ethanol than it contains. (Not very green.)

On a regenerative farm, rotating row crops with hays improves the tilth of soils, stores carbon, provides most of the nutrients for the following crops. The hay is sold or used to feed cattle.

Industrial corn is not rotated with hays. It is often rotated with soybeans (another animal feed). Both corn and soybeans are row crops whose fields shed topsoil into streams. Soybeans fix nitrogen from nitrogen gas in the atmosphere (making it usable to plants) but only enough for their own use. The manure the feedlot cattle produce is not used to fertilize the corn that feeds them (the corn is grown 100-1000 miles away). Some manure is processed into animal feed, some is spread (far too heavily) on nearby fields.

The extra nutrients from the feedlots and from the fields of corn and soybeans, along with topsoil (a bushel of topsoil for a bushel of corn), herbicides and pesticides, are carried by rain into rivers and streams; some seep down into groundwater, or volatilize into the air. (Herbicides from middle western farms are detectable in spring rains in the northeastern United States.)

Excess nutrients in streams cause algae to grow and reproduce. The algae are always there (they are a basis of the streams’ food chain) but their growth is limited by nutrients and by predation from small animals (zooplankton), which are eaten (as are the algae) by fish.

The flood of nutrients from corn and soybean fields, along with their topsoil, overwhelms the natural systems of streams. Water clouded with algae and silt shades out rooted underwater plants that hold and oxygenate bottom sediments and serve as nurseries for fish. The fish populations change from sight feeders (game fish like bass and pike) to bottom feeders like European carp that locate prey by touch and smell; or to fish that filter algae from the water column (two species of Asian carp that escaped from catfish farms in the Mississippi drainage). Overfertilized lakes and rivers stink, as the algae dies and sinks to the bottom. Most rivers in American farm country (reported by early travellers as clear) are murky with algae and silt. The silt settles out behind dams, shortening their lives.

The nutrients, pesticides and herbicides are carried by rivers to the sea. “Dead zones” off the coasts of developed countries are common. Decaying algae deprive the water of oxygen; few fish or invertebrates can survive. Herbicides injure water plants and riverside trees. As estuaries like Chesapeake Bay are overwhelmed by nitrogen and their sea grass meadows die, they lose their value as nurseries for marine fish; oysters disappear; they become dominated by algae and jellyfish (a predator of algae).

Much of this can be traced to poor farming practices: soybeans, corn, ethanol.

Ethanol production (like corn production) is subsidized. Its use in motor fuels is mandated. That it takes more energy to produce than it contains is ignored (a technical problem). This is a wonderful story for corn farmers (who have seen the price of corn near record levels), for the agribusinesses that distill ethanol, for the government whose support payments are no longer necessary. Perhaps less wonderful for drivers, who see their mileage fall while the price of motor fuel remains the same, and may have damage to their vehicles through improperly mixed fuels.

The agricultural support system that began under Franklin Roosevelt (the ever-normal granary; a very old concept of ensuring a food supply) limited the acreage of crops that could be grown on a farm. In return, the government would buy up the surplus at a reasonable price and resell it on the market when demand allowed. Thus the supply of grain would be maintained at a price that profited farmers; and enough grain would be available to feed the population.

Rising food prices under President Nixon forced a change in this policy: farmers were encouraged to grow as much as they could. The government would support the price at the cost of production. So farmers expanded their plantings. (Some conservation limits have been imposed recently.) Ethanol offered a way out of low corn prices caused by the continually expanding corn crop.

Suppose, instead of ethanol, or corn, biologically appropriate farming were subsidized. Farmers would be encouraged to grow an amount of grain their landscape could absorb; that would keep topsoil and nutrients on their fields and out of streams. Their fields would be part of a biologically working landscape, with herbivores (rabbits and deer), predators (foxes and coyotes), songbirds, hawks, amphibians, insects.

From 15% to 40% of such farms would be natural landscape—forest, desert, prairie. These landscapes store carbon (worth, say, $25-$50 an acre) and harbor insects, bats and birds and small predators that help the farmer. (When the farmers of Kern County, California, managed to exterminate their coyotes, the resulting overpopulation of mice chewed their way through their crops.) This natural land might be beside streams. If not, a band of hayfield or lightly grazed pasture 100-300 feet wide should border streams.

Where possible (providing water is a problem), cattle are grazed several months of the year on rotational pastures—small plots grazed for three days or a week, then rested for a month or six weeks. (The pastures are sometimes grazed after the cattle by chickens, which eat the hatching fly larvae out of the manure, spreading the manure in the process.) Grassland birds, the most endangered in the United States today, and ducks, breed in rotational pastures (the cattle graze around their nests). Modern hayfields are cut too often for successful nesting. Game birds and animals are part of farms with natural habitat and spilled grain. Canada Geese are attracted to the Chesapeake region by the spilled corn (about 10% of the crop) left in the fields. Prairie chickens probably increased in numbers as the prairie was settled, and more food was available in farmers’ fields, then disappeared as the larger landscape was reduced to grain fields and they lost their breeding grounds. Quail nest in damp thickets in Carolina corn and soybean fields. So hunting rights can be leased; and farms become attractive places to visit.

Row crops on the regenerative farm are rotated with hays. A third of the cultivated ground is in hays at any one time. (The corn crop is now down by a half to a third and the price of corn is as high as now.) Cattle are brought back to the farm to eat the hays, their manure used to grow the farm’s crops.

Cattle are grazed on small rotating pastures in summer and fall, fed baled hay in winter. Pigs are raised in large hoop houses bedded with hay, free to root, socialize, build great communal nests in the hay. After they are slaughtered, the hay and manure is scraped up and spread on the fields; or the house moved and the ground used to grow vegetables.

The corn stalks and cobs from fields harvested for grain are chopped and partially burned in a kiln to provide heat for the farmer’s house (hot tub, greenhouse) and biochar, a fine charcoal. Biochar increases the productivity of soils (some claim by several times) by storing and releasing nutrients (thus reducing losses through leaching). It locks up the carbon in the corn stalks for tens of thousands of years.

With the right management regenerative farms can grow food, improve soils, provide habitat for wild animals and store carbon.

The streams that run through the farm are clear and swimmable; the ocean estuaries and marine fisheries (with limits on fishing and fishing gear and large protected areas) recovering.

Green dreams! What corporation will profit? And population continues to grow, the demand for meat and grain with it…

Biology Comics

2011-02-19T13:40:00.000-08:00

The Roman Empire

The first conquests of the Roman Empire were in the East and immensely profitable. These old Mediterranean civilizations were rich and could afford much tribute. The profits funded new conquests.

Most of Italy was forested in BC 300. The newly cleared lands yielded large crops. The richness of the Italian soil was another basis of the Empire.

The western lands (Gaul, Spain, England, the Rhineland), which were conquered last, did not pay the costs of conquest. These lands were lightly settled and poor. While their soils were good, the cost of transporting crops like wheat overland was too great.

The Roman economy was overwhelmingly agricultural. Trade and industry were perhaps 10% of the economy. Once the conquests were over (about AD 1) agriculture had to pay the costs of administration.

A smallholder of the early Republic cultivated a hectare by hand with a hoe, growing olives, vines, fruit trees, grains, vegetables, forage crops and animals. The multistory canopy saved labor, reduced erosion, and was twice as productive in foodstuffs as plowing with an ox to grow grain. Some farmers applied manure, human manure, crushed limestone and ashes to their fields and grew cover crops on the grain fields left fallow every other year.

For large landowners plowing with oxen to grow grain was more profitable than hoe agriculture. While good farming practices were known, most large farmers didn’t follow them. In the two field system of the Greeks that was taken over by the Romans, land was plowed three times a year, whether cultivated or fallow, to control weeds. Erosion from plowland near Rome has been estimated at three quarters to four inches per century.

Iron had come into common use in Italy by BC 500 (for shovels, plow points and other tools) and forests were cut to smelt it, to fire pottery and burn brick. Trees were also cut for building material. Eroded soils from forests slid down the hillsides to the valley bottoms. Forests were often grazed after being cut.

As the more wealthy began to dominate Roman society after BC 200, large estates began to replace smallholdings, especially in the countryside around Rome. This landscape, the Campagna, fed the city until about BC 200.

Wheat, oil and wine could be profitably shipped by sea. The conquest of Egypt, with its soils renewed by the Nile, and the new lands of North Africa, let Rome feed itself after AD 1. The Imperial Middle East was completely deforested by AD 100 however and most of its upland soils were degraded by AD 200. Grazing replaced the cultivated grainland, which had replaced the forests. By the end of the Empire the silt carried by the Nile fed Rome. (The same African silt and the new lands of Sicily had also fed the declining Greek states 1000 years before.)

Land itself was taxed. No provision was made for varying yields. The government financed itself on a cash basis. Its single tax was inelastic and made it difficult to raise additional funds in time of need (as in war). Emperors in need of money debased the currency, an indirect tax.

Tenant farmers were taxed too highly to accumulate capital. When crops failed they abandoned their lands and left for Rome, where Egyptian wheat was distributed free to the citizens (the dole).

As more land fell into the hands of the large landowners, erosion increased. As yields fell, taxes became more difficult to pay and more and more land was abandoned. Abandoned land reached a third to a half of some provinces. Tax receipts collapsed. In AD 300 abandoned lands in the Campagna were estimated at 75,000 smallholdings. Taxes were doubled AD 324-364.

Eroded soil turned river valleys into marshlands. Malaria became a problem after AD 200. Malaria increases child mortality and reduces people’s capacity to work. In time, both slopes and valley bottoms were used for pasture rather than cultivated.

With the end of the conquests and the money they brought in, and the declining agricultural yields, and thus declining tax revenues, Rome no longer worked. The population of the Empire never recovered from the plague of the AD 160s. With the barbarian invasions of the AD 200s (crops destroyed, people killed and enslaved, animals killed or stolen), Rome began to go bankrupt. The literacy rate fell, but the size of the army and bureaucracy increased. The army was more and more staffed by barbarians.

As large estates further consolidated (city magistrates, whose position had become hereditary, had to pay the cost of city services), and plowed lands increased, yields fell further, and the countryside grew emptier. It now took ten times the land to feed a Roman than in the days of the early Republic. (Five hundred years of erosion would have reduced topsoil in the Campagna by 4 to 20 inches, and more on sloping lands.) Laws tied tenants to the land to prevent them from abandoning it. What the land needed to become productive was known; perhaps the larger structural problems of the Empire were also known. The western provinces were let go AD 260-274. By the late 300s, the Romans waited—as the poet Cavafy said—for the barbarians to deliver them from the Empire.

(In this essay I am indebted to The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter and Dirt by David Montgomery.)

Biology Comics

2011-02-10T07:53:00.000-08:00

Barges

Recent figures indicate one gallon of diesel will move a ton of cargo 59 miles by truck, 202 miles by train, 514 miles by canal barge (a single barge can carry 3000 tons or 100 truck loads).

Barges use rivers as highways. They motor through the still waters behind the dams, passing each dam in locks. On the Rhine, narrow canal boats carrying bulk cargoes push their way upstream through the currents.

By converting rivers into highways dams interrupt the flow of water, sediment and detritus along the stream. Flooding riverside wetlands eliminates their capacity to remove nutrients from water flowing into the river. Dams prevent fish migrations (and thus migrations of mussels, their glochidia transported by swimming fish). The water above dams is warmer, that below dams (released from the bottom of the reservoir) colder, thus changing the temperature cues the eggs and larvae of riverine invertebrates and fish use for hatching and development. (So they grow too early or too late—both want to develop when abundant food of the right size is available). The levees with which dams are associated prevent floods and limit the spawning of fish, many species of which prefer to spawn on flooded habitats. Dams alter the timing and abundance of flows to ocean estuaries, upon which marine fish (many of which spawn in nearshore waters) depend. Silt and silicon stored behind dams change the relative abundance of algal species in estuaries; less sand downstream causes erosion of beaches.

Dams also let people harvest river water to drink, bathe, fill swimming pools; to use in industry; to cool power plants; to irrigate crops. Together with levees, dams let people farm riverside land (much of which was farmable before dams, with free fertility provided by the river); build houses and cities near the river; and use the river to move freight.

The Romans thought the air, the waters, the ocean, the shores of the sea could not be owned. Under the Public Trust Doctrine (which the United States received through English common law from Roman Law), public assets, such as shore and river banks, are held by government for the common good. Similarly, the authority of the state to regulate wildlife derives from its authority to protect common resources. It would be much simpler to see where these matters lead us if we depended more directly on an abundance of wildlife and fish. But we have extinguished both for the ‘common good’ of economic development.

While fossil fuels let us lead lives separate from nature, our dependence on nature is clear, if poorly understood. For instance, trees and photosynthetic bacteria maintain the oxygen levels in the atmosphere, microbes, fungi, and invertebrates recycle the carbon (the lignins and carbohydrates) the plants produce annually, and many interconnected systems maintain the climate. Our dependence on nature is a dependence on ecological process.

The ‘common welfare’ includes the taking of water from rivers for human use, the right of fish to water (so they remain a resource for fishers), the right of beaches to sand (so beach goers, and the owners of houses that back the beach, may enjoy them). In an ideal world, the beach deserves sand and the fish water (and water a place in rivers; and even oil a place in its underground reservoirs), whether or not any human advantage flows from them. (But the advantage is that a given system works in a more or less predictable way—which is not to say it cannot be disturbed—by volcanic eruptions cooling or warming the earth; by landslides damming rivers.)

Some rivers no longer reach the sea (the Colorado, the Yangtze). All their water is used by people. So marine fish are deprived of deltas and estuaries to spawn and mature in, offshore waters of nutrients. Many rivers no longer flood so native fish have trouble surviving (the Mississippi-Misssouri, the Colorado, the Rhine). Or are so polluted with silt and nutrients their fish (mussel, invertebrate, waterbird, turtle) populations crash and other organisms take over. The Illinois, a booming native fishery a century ago is now dominated by two filter feeding Chinese carp, escapees from fish farms, that thrive in the turbid water, and terrify boaters and water skiers by leaping up as they pass—part of the fishes’ strategy for escaping predators.

A rule of thumb for functioning rivers is that no more than 20-25% of longterm average flow should be withdrawn; and less during droughts.

Such numbers cannot be applied to rivers like the Colorado, all of whose water is subscribed to human use. (In fact, more Colorado water is allocated than exists, since the early 20th century years used as a benchmark to determine its flow were unusually wet ones).

Like the Mississippi-Missouri, the Columbia, or the Rhine (each remade in its own way), the Colorado is a totally remade river. Once silty and unpredictable, it now has long reaches of clear cold water and a more even flow. It is twice as salty as before. (The yearly flow of the river before dams varied from 4 million acre-feet to 24 million acre-feet, an enormous range; an acre-foot is the water necessary to cover an acre a foot deep.)

Large dams transformed the Colorado. Irrigation of rancher’s hayfields along its upstream tributaries began to change it. The concrete plug of Hoover Dam stopped any movement of fish upstream from the lower river. That part of the river, below the canyons, where the Yuma once planted their corn in the wet mud left by the receding floods (the corn matured in 60 days) flowed through an wide riparian valley of marshes and backwaters, fed on silt, rearranged by floods. The backwaters were places young pike-minnow and other native fish (razorback sucker, humpbacked sucker, bonytailed chub) matured. Pike-minnow were the top predatory fish in the Colorado, reaching 6 feet in length and 80 pounds. Pike-minnow spawned in the clean gravel and cobble left by the spring floods, matured in backwaters, migrated 300 miles up and down the river to seek optimal places for spawning and survival. Like the other fish of the Colorado and its tributaries they were adapted to the warm low silty flows of summer and the turbulent spring floods, when water volumes might increase by 100 times.

The marshes and backwaters along the lower river have been consolidated into a 150 yard wide stream held back by Parker dam at the Mexican border. The water irrigates fields on either side. Protected by dam operations and levees, houses have crept up to the edge of the river, which is no longer allowed to flood.

The Delta of the Colorado in the Gulf of California once consisted of 2 million acres of fresh and tidal wetlands. (Aldo Leopold wrote a memoir of a bow hunting trip there with his brother.) A desert delta, it was an important habitat for west coast waterbirds. Shrimp and other invertebrates of the delta supported the marine fish and birds of the Gulf of California. Now starved of silt and water (wet years in the 1980s restored about 150,0000 acres of the marshes), its place in the avian world has been taken over by the Salton Sea, a desert sink that was filled by the Colorado early in the 20th century when the river abandoned its normal course to take over an irrigation canal into California’s Imperial Valley. The water filled the sea during the several years it took to return the river to its bed. (That this had happened before is the subject of Native American tales.) The Salton Sea is now maintained by runoff from irrigated farms in the Imperial Valley (irrigated with Colorado water). Its increasing content of salts, fertilizers, metals and pesticides make it something of a disaster as a sanctuary for birds, which suffer (like the fish introduced from the gulf) from periodic epidemic diseases and dieoffs.

Allotting 5% of the Colorado water to the delta would restore a third of it (about 750,000 acres). Then plans to desalinate the Salton Sea (to maintain it as a bird habitat) could be abandoned and the money put into buying out water rights from farmers. Irrigation runoff would matter less, and farmers could shift to less water using, more valuable crops (say, to winter greens from alfalfa and cotton). All this would leave more water in the river, some of which would reach the delta.

Irrigation lets you ignore climate. Colorado water supports the alfalfa, cotton and lettuce fields of the Imperial Valley; the citrus plantations and spinach and cotton fields of Arizona. Many commodity crops (cotton, corn) grown under irrigation could be grown in sufficient quantity further east, with irrigation (if necessary) from streamside reservoirs dug beside the rivers. Small farmsize irrigation ponds store irrigation water, recharge underground aquifers, provide spawning places for fish and habitat for waterbirds and amphibians, especially if the water is pumped from shallow wells and not from the reservoirs themselves, with all their plant and animal life. Such reservoirs, storing no more than say 10% of the spring runoff, might improve the habitat of degraded eastern rivers. (Somewhat similarly, floodwaters from the Colorado could be stored in underground aquifers rather then in reservoirs behind dams, from which the water, exposed to the desert sun, evaporates.)

Drylands are often rich in nutrients which have been banked by plants and soil cyanobacteria, but not much used or leached by rain (nitrogen in dryland subsoils can reach toxic levels). Some dryland soils take to irrigation well. Many drylands however were once ocean bottom and are underlain by salts, which irrigation tends to draw upwards, and which must be constantly drained and flushed away. In the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation District of Arizona, the Bureau of Reclamation sunk wells into the briny groundwater and piped it to the Colorado. Not allowed to raise the salt content of the river, they reduced its salt input in other ways—by lining canals, using more efficient irrigation systems, taking some lands with very salty subsoils out of production. I suppose if agriculture wouldn’t pay to desalinate the briny drainage water, marketing the salts and metals, and reusing the water for irrigation or returning it to the river, the agriculture wasn’t economic. But agriculture never pays the cost of large scale irrigation systems, which enrich private landowners with public monies, and degrade rivers.

Suppose for rivers like the Colorado we reverse the usual figure and say 25% of its water should be kept in the river to support its normal flood cycle and its wildlife. It is estimated that pressurized irrigation systems (drip tubing, sprinklers) that use less water (and more power but once you install the equipment solar power is free in the desert), shifting to crops of higher value that use less water (such as winter greens) and urban water conservation could save a third to a half of the water taken from the river. (The potential for household savings is huge but irrigation uses most of the water.) Then even more water could be left in the river and through a new treaty with Mexico, to whom the U.S. is currently obligated to release 1.5 million acre feet of Colorado water a year of a certain salinity (the last standard usually not met), the delta could be partially restored.

Rivers like the Colorado need to flood. Floods distribute sediment and nutrients to the floodplain, dig new channels and backwaters, renew the vegetation of cottonwood and willow. Floods maintain habitat for fish. The vegetation that sprouts on the newly bare ground feeds small mammals and water and game birds. While levels of heavy metals, pesticides and herbicides in the lower Colorado are high enough to cause reproductive problems in fish, the lack of floods and the changes in patterns of seasonal flow may be greater problems for the fish.

Glen Canyon Dam, the last major dam on the Colorado, was constructed to provide additional water storage for Lake Mead (the reservoir behind Hoover Dam). Evaporation from Lake Powell (the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam) is about a million acre-feet a year. Because of this, removing it would not cause much change in Lake Mead’s capacity to provide water. It’s removal would restore a more natural flow to a long reach of the river and let more water reach the delta. It would end the dam’s power generation (Glen Canyon Dam provides 3-4% of the electricity used in the four corners states); the power is useful because it can be switched on immediately when needed. It would also end the cold water fishery for rainbow trout below the dam (the trout feed on diatoms that thrive in the clear water) and the growing population of bald eagles that eat them. The silt behind Glen Canyon Dam is contaminated with mercury and selenium (as is the silt in Lake Mead), much of it leached from the basin’s sedimentary rocks. The dam also captures phosphorus (bound to the silt). The building of Glen Canyon Dam dramatically reduced the abundant artificial fishery in Lake Mead, which is based on phosphorus eating algae, algae eating gizzard shad and striped bass.

Letting the river flood below Hoover Dam would restore the lower river. Thanks to dam operations, levees and dredging, people now build up to the edge of the dredged river. About 123,000 acres of riparian vegetation remain along the lower Colorado (one fourth of the original), 23,000 of them in a natural state (5% of the original vegetation, then, the rest in introduced salt cedar which outcompetes cottonwoods and willows on salty, dry soils). Removing levees along contiguous parts of this (connecting the floodplain to the river) and letting the land flood would restore parts of the floodplain (then salt cedar is likely to become a part of the ecosystem, not a dominant). Some people would have to be bought out, which puts the government in the position of paying people to surrender what it paid to provide them.

A river disconnected from its flood plain no longer works. Without a floodplain, a river cannot store floodwaters, provide spawning habitat for fish, turn silt and nutrients into herbs and trees, adjust its bed to its flow and silt load, shelter abundant amphibians, song and water birds, and game animals, and provide water of an amount, timing, and with the nutrients, the fish and invertebrates in its delta expect.

By damming rivers and turning them into highways, we interfere with fundamental ecological process. Rivers can handle some interference but control beyond a point turns them into drains, barge highways, water delivery canals. Ecological process is what provides the fish and mussels in the river, the fish of the estuaries and the sea. Do people own the ecological processes that maintain our green world; or have a right to extinguish them?

We live more and more in a world separate from the rest of creation. The separate world always existed—all plants and animals create their own worlds, some more than others. The separate world became more so with cities and writing. It got a push forward with the printing press, the secularization of thought, the use of fossil fuels. Now most of us live in one separate world (that supported by fossil fuels), while scanning (through the internet) another. In these worlds what does nature matter? Who knows about it?

Moving freight by river barge takes less fuel but is biologically very expensive. If all the costs of maintaining the river as a highway were charged to the barges, it would be economically expansive too.

Human use and ownership of the landscape move along a continuum. One way to approach biological economics is to assign values to things (fish, forests, underground waters) that are extremely hard to value; and which receive very low values under modern economic theory (once used up, a resource will be replaced by something else); but whose loss is likely to have far-reaching effects (what will we drink?). I think an enlightened state should set biological limits through its interest in the common good; and let the cornucopian human economic society deal (as it will) with a much more limited landscape and resources.

(In this essay I am indebted to Restoring Colorado River Ecosystems by Robert Adler.)

Biology Comics

2011-01-14T08:27:00.000-08:00

Cornucopians and Malthusians

In 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a biologist (author of The Population Bomb), along with his colleagues the physicists John Harte and John Holdren, bet the economist Julian Simon on the future price of metals. Ehrlich bet the prices would increase as the better ores (those more accessible, with a higher metal content) were used up. Simon bet that metals would become cheaper and cheaper.

Simon won. In 1990 the prices of all five metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, tungsten) were lower.

While ores were poorer, processing methods became more efficient and the energy needed for processing got cheaper. The rise in metals prices (up to 1975) stimulated substitution of cheaper materials (as the use of plastic pipe instead of copper), which reduced demand for metals and kept their prices down (they had to compete).

Economics focuses on the human world. It teaches that the best use for resources is to exploit them as quickly as possible to economic extinction, then invest the profit in something else. As the resource becomes more scarce (and expensive) people will find alternatives and the human world will not suffer.

Malthusians point out that there is only so much of any resource (fresh water, ocean fish, fertile farmland, unpolluted air) and when they are gone what will we do. Some will be hard to substitute for.

Don’t worry, say the Malthusians—harvest the ocean for a tasty algal soup; adjust the climate to where we like it. If all else fails, we’re off to other worlds!

In the early nineteenth century Malthus’ concern was that population (which has the potential to grow geometrically) would always outgrow the supply of food (which grows slowly if at all). (The idea that animals produce far more young than can survive is one of the bases of evolution.) But at the time Malthus wrote the exploitation of fossil fuels was beginning. Fossil fuels let people build railroads to open up new farmland, ship food in steam powered steel ships all over the world, manufacture fertilizers, trawl distant seas. Over the next century and a half population grew by several times while world output (food and stuff) grew by several tens of times. Many more people became a lot more prosperous (even if some of them remain as poor as before). We could feed all those people a healthy diet even now, if food were fairly distributed.

So who’s right? Ehrlich? Simon? Both?

Simon refused to take a later bet Ehrlich proposed (his partner this time was the climatologist Stephen Schneider) in which Ehrlich focused on the resources themselves—the amount of fertile farmland per person, the extent of moist tropical forests, the global temperature, the number of species of plants and animals. Simon wouldn’t take the bet because he said that the degradation of the planet didn’t matter. Less farmland would be made up through fertilizer, or by producing food in other ways. The human habitat (the virtual world maintained by fossil fuels) would continue to improve. He used the analogy of the Olympics. While Ehrlich was betting the track would be worse, Simon was betting the times of the athletes would be better.

John Tierney, a journalist who writes a contrarian column in the Science Times of The New York Times recently described a bet with an oil expert, Matthew Simmons. In 2005 Simmons bet Tierney and his partner Rita Simon, Julian Simon’s widow, $5000 that the price of oil would average $200 or more in 2005 dollars in 2010. The price of oil rose to $145 by the summer of 2008 but fell with the global recession in the fall of 2008 to $50. The average price in 2010 was about $80. So again the cornucopians won (this time by chance).

Human affairs, like changes in climate, are unpredictable. I would bet Tierney that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in October 2015 measured from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii will be 398 ppmv or greater; that is, that carbon dioxide will continue to rise at 2 ppmv per year. Tierney, like Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist, thinks the effect of manmade carbon dioxide on climate will be minimal. (I could bet that one year between 2011 and 2015 will be either warmer or wetter, or both, than any since reliable measurements started in the 1880s.) Simon wouldn’t have taken my bet, because he wouldn’t have thought climatic conditions a matter of his concern. Human welfare was his concern, something that modern economies let prosper apart from nature.

I find it difficult to understand that the cornucopians feel no regret for the changes I see taking place all around me (collapsing songbird populations; strange fish in the rivers; butterflies, birds and fish moving north; lakes that don’t freeze; suburbs marching over the hills); or consider matters like terrible agricultural and forestry practices, acidifying seas, tropical forests going up in smoke or melting glaciers nothing to worry about.

I think all these (and related) things will affect the human world. I think the cornucopians are out of their minds. But they are likely to be correct up about our ability to take care of the human world, right up to the very end.

Up to the edge of the cliff.

Last year (2010) was the wettest in the historical record and tied 2005 as the hottest. I think we are seeing the future now.

Wildflower Portraits

2010-10-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

A childhood book, Two Little Savages, pointed out the blue hepatica as the first woodland wild flower of spring. Hepaticas hide their heads among their three lobed leaves and only open their starry blue or pink blooms when they’re ready. The more eager bloodroots seem to open all at once, ten days of joyful white blossoms at the edge of the garden and scattered throughout the meadow. Their fat reddish roots (that bleed when cut) choke out other plants, but not all: dutchman’s breeches send up their lacy leaves and stems of nodding pantaloons from tiny bulbs that sit below the roots of the larger plant a few weeks later. Bloodroot grows along the river and some lowland streams in our area. Like false hellbore (which outcompetes it), it favors pockets of rich soil. I moved a single clump from the riverbank to my garden forty years ago and now it grows throughout my garden and much of my meadow, especially where the grass is thinner. So it does well enough in our uplands away from water though I have never seen it in the wild there. Perhaps it hasn’t reached more distant areas in its post glacial travels or perhaps clearing and cattle grazing on the uplands in the nineteenth century led to its retreat to the center of its distribution.

Bloodroot sets lots of seed in plump scimitar shaped pods that poke up under its leaves in June. The seeds must germinate well: ants or birds have spread the plant all over my garden and meadow. I usually however reproduce bloodroot by root division, which is simpler than from seed. The naked reddish rhizomes lie just under the ground. A clump is easily lifted to pot or put elsewhere in the garden. You must do this if the bloodroots are encroaching on your yellow lady’s slippers or trilliums. (Even some hostas are vulnerable.) Bloodroots do well in sun or shade in any garden soil. Their leaves start to look messy in July, when you may cut them off.

Biology Comics

2010-08-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

Aliens

My immigrant friend gets defensive when I brake and start pulling up purple loosestrife from the roadside. Another dastardly invasive, I say! What’s wrong with it, he says? It’s pretty!

We’re the invasives of course. Even the Indians only came here 10,000-30,000 years ago, some walking across the Bering Strait with their wary companions the moose and buffalo, others following the fish and manatees of the kelp beds around the coasts of Siberia and Alaska in skin boats. For them it was a new world too, with tame mammoths on the steppe, giant sloths lumbering across the Great Plains, a fruit eating rhinocerous in the forests of Central America.

Hunters and gatherers tend to live in the natural world, though they change it. Agricultural people have been taking apart ecosystems for the last 10,000 years. Industrial people have been creating entirely new worlds for 200.

Vertebrates (except herbivores) access much of the energy in sunlight through insects, which have more protein then beef. Herbivores eat plants (transformed sunlight) directly.

Frogs eat mosquitoes, songbirds caterpillars, falcons dragonflies, many birds beetles, the Everglade Kite snails (an invertebrate, not an insect). Mice eat insects, invertebrates and plants and are eaten by foxes, coyotes, hawks, owls, weasels and men. (Mouse skeletons have been found in fossilized human dung.)

Green plants, the terrestrial transformers of sunlight (let’s ignore the bacteria and archaea), engage in chemical warfare with each other and with the insects that graze on them. (Maybe 20% of the leaf mass of a forest tree is lost to leaf eating insects in a summer.)

The trees and other plants defend themselves by producing so called secondary metabolites (those chemicals not involved in their primary metabolism, that of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide to carbohydrate). These glycosides, phenols, terpenes and alkaloids affect the taste, digestibility and toxicity of plant leaves (and other parts). A caterpillar biting into an aspen leaf begins the production of tannins that will in hours make the leaf indigestible to it. The release of secondary metabolites into the air warns nearby trees of an insect infestation; they also begin producing defensive chemicals.

The insects evolve methods of detoxifying what the trees produce. Some make use of the toxins: thus monarch caterpillars store the glycosides produced by milkweed; the bitter taste of the butterfly keeps the birds from eating it: chemical warfare carried to the next generation.

Insects and plants thus coevolve, for tens of thousands or tens of millions of years. Perhaps 90% of herbivorous insects are thought to be specialists on a few species of plants, which they have evolved the capacity to eat (detoxifying their secondary metabolites). The rest are generalists, that take their chances.

New plants (say, asian rhododendrons in eastern North America) have chemical defenses to which the local insects are not adapted. The new plant thus has an advantage over the natives. New insects, diseases (meeting organisms without immunity), fungi, predators (meeting defenseless populations) and parasites may have similar advantages. The European genotype of Phragmites (giant reed) is eaten by 5 species of insects in the northeastern U.S. and by 170 in Europe, with the result that it is replacing the native strain of Phragmites (eaten by numerous native insects) here. The plants are the same species (they can interbreed) but have different chemical defenses (and their inedible offspring will be selected for).

Over 400 arthropods (insects and spiders) eat the Melaleuca tree in Australia, where it is rare, but 8 eat it in Florida, where it is far too common. (Over time, native insects will learn to eat Melaleuca and also the European Phragmites; but the time may be long.)

Europeans had a similar effect on their own species in the New World, as they brought with them the crowd diseases of the Eurasian agriculturalists to which the native peoples of the Americas had no immunity. So, in seventeenth century opinion, “the good hand of God” cleared the New World of its native peoples. (Europeans suffered a similar fate in Africa, where people and disease had been evolving together longest; approximately half the Europeans emigrating to West Africa died of disease in a year.)

Anyway, the point is that native plants are more edible to native insects and so produce up to 4 times the insect biomass of nonnative plants, and 35 times more caterpillars (a primary food of songbirds). They support a far greater biomass of insect eaters above them.

So I pull the (inedible) purple loosestrife out of the swamp.

Not all native species are equal. A hundred years ago the chestnut was the primary nut producer in the eastern forest (its production dwarfing that of the oaks and hickories). Its mast supported turkeys, deer, mice, squirrels, bears, decomposers, buffalo and people, and the caterpillars that fed on its tasty leaves supported huge populations of songbirds. The chestnut was killed by an imported fungus and its place (partly) taken by the tulip tree (a native), which supports little wildlife.

How to construct an ecosystem?

The problem is breaking ecosystems apart. In intact ecosystems aliens may establish a niche but are less likely become invasive. Their flowers and fruit may be used by the natives, even if their leaves are inedible. (In 10,000 years the leaves will become edible.)

Against some introductions— some predators, fungi, bacteria, insects, parasites, amphibians—there is no defense. For some time, as ships and planes spread plants and animals around, the world will become poorer (until, say, elms develop resistance to Dutch elm disease, American toads to chytrid fungus, chestnuts to chestnut blight).

As the abundant world fades, few will remember it.

Eventually a new world will blossom.

Biology Comics

2010-08-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

Biochar and Silicate Rocks

Heavy rains are increasing, Arctic ice is melting, Russian peat bogs are burning, methane is bubbling out of the East Siberian Sea, the summer’s heat and humidity grows and grows. Alone each means nothing, together they add up to a changing climate, which only demagogs and idiots ignore.

Of course it may all turn around and (especially here in the U.S. northeast) turn cold for the next 1000 years. We are poking the climate beast, with unpredictable results, as Wallace Broecker remarks.

The problem is too much carbon dioxide (and other heat trapping gases, such as methane, nitrous oxide and the chlorofluorocarbons) in the atmosphere. And too much soot and black carbon in the air and falling out on Arctic ice.

We’re putting the gases (and the soot and dust) there. Since modern life runs on fossil fuels, we aren’t likely to stop; or stop fast enough. Is anyone going to make China stop? Or India? Or the U.S. for that matter?

Saving energy is boring, nuclear power risky, wind and solar are expensive and require storage schemes (pumped water reservoirs, chemical batteries) that are expensive, destructive or dangerous. Forget about sequestering carbon from smokestacks, it’s too complicated, it takes too much energy, it’s a pipe dream. What free lunch?

So what about continuing to dig up coal and geoengineer the planet? Launch tiny mirrors into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back to space. (Of course the ocean and atmosphere would continue to acidify.) Spray sulfur dioxide from planes into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, or hey!—just remove the controls on sulfur from fossil fuels. Or spray seawater into the atmosphere to increase the reflectivity of clouds. Or pump seawater onto Arctic ice to thicken it. (Why not, to the last two.)

Lime the planet to counter acid rain!

The main downside of schemes to reduce incoming sunlight is that the planet will continue to acidify. As for spraying sulfur dioxide, the sulfur dioxide will eventually fall out on the land and ocean. There are probably other downsides—changes in rainfall or airflow, changes in stratospheric chemistry or the growth rate of plants. To think all such effects are predictable is nonsense.

So what about taking carbon dioxide directly from the air. One idea is to fertilize the oceans with urea (a nitrogen fertilizer), or finely ground iron (a limiting nutrient in the sea), or by installing huge pipes to increase the transfer of nutrients from deep water (where they are common) to the sunlit surface (where they fuel algal growth). The fertilized algae on the surface divide and grow, are eaten by fish (or die), and sink as tiny corpses or fish poop to the bottom of the ocean where the carbon (taken by the algae from the air) is locked up for thousands of years. Unfortunately, fertilization schemes don’t seem to work (the carbon stored is negligible compared to the effort put into fertilization). Their other effects on the sea are also unknown.

On the other hand, our overfishing of the oceans (a natural result of unregulated capitalistic effort) is reducing them to ecosystems of algae and jellyfish, while our heavy fertilization of large continental watersheds, with the resulting dead zones of maximized algal growth at the mouths of major rivers, may be storing more carbon than we realize. (The oil in farm fertilizer producing more oil in sediments.) Of course destroying the oceans to save the planet is nuts.

What to do? Well all that boring stuff (fast breeder reactors, reducing population, cars that get 200 miles to the gallon, insulating houses, reducing poverty, empowering poor women—both the last tend to reduce population growth) helps. Reforesting or revegetating degraded lands stores carbon in soils, plants and trees. Reducing numbers of cattle and sheep on overgrazed lands (say in the U.S. Great Basin and High Plains) lets shrubs and perennial grasses store carbon in soils. So does rotational grazing of dairy cattle on eastern or midwestern pastures. Proper management of croplands lets them store some carbon (or lose less). Some writers claim the soils’ carbon stores are full after 15-30 years, but soil storage capacity undoubtedly varies with the site.

Reforesting degraded lands lets trees store carbon in their tissues and in the soil. Billions of acres of degraded lands are candidates for reforestation: much of the Mediterranean basin, including the mountainous islands; much of China; the Tibetan plateau; the Andean altiplano (both were deforested by people thousands of years ago for their crops and animals); the Himalayan foothills; much of the U.S. Southeast and Midwest; some deserts.

In the Sahel in the 1970s, millet farmers let acacia trees grow in their fields. This was a folk technique that had been mocked by modern agronomists. The trees provided forage for the animals, which meant more manure for the crops. More trees grew, sprouting in the dung of the (more numerous) grazing animals. This let the farmers raise more animals, which meant more dung and more cropland. Eventually several million acres of the Sahel were reclaimed for agriculture. The trees store carbon in the soil and have slightly increased rainfall over the northern Sahel.

The huarango tree of the Atacama Desert in Peru (one of the driest places in the world) captures water from ocean mists. Its roots draw up water from 150 feet down. It breaks the wind over the desert and, by condensing mists, moistens (slightly) the upper layers of the soil. It lives a millennium and (a mesquite) produces a sweet edible pod, which can be used for fodder, ground into flour, or made into a syrup or beer. Its fragrant blossoms support bees. The Nazca of 1500 years ago cut down huarangos to plant irrigated cotton and corn in the river valleys, exposing the desert to floods and wind erosion. Modern residents of the Atacama cut the trees for firewood. The tree is thorny, not particularly attractive, and invasive where successful and could support a life based on carbon storage, goats, honey and beer.

Agricultural revegetation of degraded lands (acacia trees, camels and millet; salicornia, a forage crop irrigable with seawater; huarango trees; jojoba, a shrub with oil bearing seeds; grapevines; mangoes; pomegranates; other fruit and nut trees) lets carbon accumulate in soils. If the prunings from the trees and the crop wastes are converted to charcoal (biochar) and spread on farmland (where the char promotes plant growth) their carbon will be stored for tens of thousands of years. (Perhaps 50,000 years: this will work in industrial agriculture; with poor peasant farmers, the charcoal will be used for cooking.)

Turning the crop residues of industrial agriculture into biochar would store billions of tons of carbon a year. Estimates range from 1-2 billion tons a year. (We release 8-9 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere.) The equipment to turn corn stalks or wheat straw into charcoal is cheap, the process simple. Since biochar makes an excellent fertilizer, and reduces fertilizer runoff, the equipment would pay for itself in a year or two.

Revegetated forestlands store carbon in the trees and in the soil. The carbon in the trees is released to the atmosphere when the trees are cut (most processed trees return as carbon to the atmosphere in ten years); or when they die and decay. While growing, the forests continue to store carbon (say, for 300-2000 years). When storage slows, the best way to cut the trees is selectively, so as to expose the soil as little as possible to sunlight, which speeds up its losses of carbon. The best bottom log could be used as sawn lumber (a carbon loss, factored into any payments for carbon storage; but the trunk represents only a fraction of the tree’s mass) and the rest converted to biochar and spread back on the forest; or sold to spread on farmland. If landowners are to be paid for storing carbon, the way to maximize a forest’s carbon storage would have to be worked out; and calculated by the year or decade. We have 300 years to do that. Any payments for carbon storage should be based on real numbers, not guesses. Payments from, say, a tax on fossil fuels.

Changing agricultural practices to capture carbon; revegetating degraded lands; producing biochar involve no downsides of which I am aware. Such practices would produce a return on investment and improve the nutrient storage capacity of watersheds, and thus improve the health of riverine and ocean fisheries. We might store a quarter of the carbon dioxide we currently produce by such methods, perhaps more.

One other technique offers carbon storage, but with a limited downside. This involves capturing carbon dioxide through its natural (exothermic) reaction with magnesium oxide or calcium oxide rocks. The reaction forms stable carbonates (limestones). One can foster this reaction by mining and grinding the rocks and spreading them on land or on the sea. The energy involved in the mining and pulverizing is inconsequential in comparison with the carbon stored. Spreading the powder on the ocean (especially over the productive continental shelves) lets one reduce the acidification of the sea as well as capture carbon dioxide from the air. (A free lunch?) One picks cliffs of the appropriate rocks on a seacoast (volcanic rocks are good), sets up a mine and sends the powder down to slow moving ships that spread it over the sea. (Schemes like this have been suggested for the Scottish coast to produce builders gravel.)

In biologically appropriate situations, the mine could be made into a pit for pumped storage of seawater (another munch at lunch). This isn’t appropriate where marine life would be harmed, thus not, say, on the Palisade escarpment north of New York City, above the Hudson estuary, where the rock is appropriate and the pumped storage capacity could use the photovoltaic output of the city, but the damage to the estuary would likely be great.

The variability of solar power means it has to be backed up. The power supply for a modern grid cannot be interrupted or the system will crash. Since the output from the sun and wind is unpredictable, one must either invest in double the capacity—the fossil or nuclear fuelled grid as well as the unreliable photovoltaic or wind capacity— or have some storage that can be switched on when the solar supply falters. Flywheels; chemical batteries; compressed air in abandoned mines; pumped storage all work. Pumped water from the sea is a natural (say, on Oahu in Hawaii; in the Canaries; in California or Maine; in Scotland). A pumped storage scheme was suggested for Storm King Mountain on the Hudson in the late sixties but was abandoned after an outcry from environmentalists (me included). The high dams on the ruined rivers of the U.S. west (the Colorado, the Yellowstone, the Columbia) offer obvious sites for pumped storage: all they lack are the pumps and a safe way (for the riverine biota) to pump sufficient volumes of water back up behind the dams. (A nonbiologically invasive way to extract water from rivers would make many things better.)

Of course, the ultimate solution to climate change is fewer people, saving energy, fast breeder reactors, the electrification of transport and the energy supply (so all energy can be provided by the sun). Alleviating poverty and empowering women, the projects of the “skeptical environmentalist,” a foolish and publicity hungry Dane, will also reduce population.

Let’s do it all! Make biochar, mine silicate rocks, have one child, and plant trees.

Biology Comics

2010-07-22T06:53:00.000-07:00

Suburbs are for the Birds!

In an earlier Comic I mentioned the local cowbirds terrorized by sharpshinned hawks and merlins. The cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and let them raise their young; the growing cowbirds push the competing young out of the nest. Over the last century cowbirds have spread from the plains and prairies east into the artificial human prairie that has replaced the eastern forest in North America and (along with midsized predators like raccoons, opossums, house cats and skunks) have helped reduce songbirds populations by 50% or more (habitat change and industrial pollution also helped). When I moved to the Adirondacks in 1972 the spring sighting of a male cowbird gurgling from the top of our bare apple tree, the glossy black singer perched above his two dove gray companions, made me smile. The cowbird was a common bird in central New York, where I grew up, but (like the raven or the turkey vulture) uncommon in the Adirondacks in the 1950s.

While doing his laundry in a nearby village a friend watched a merlin (a fierce little falcon the size of a robin) harassing the starlings that nested in the eves of the laundromat. Merlins were extremely uncommon 40-50 years ago but over the last decade have been on a roll.

Until fairly recently it was legal to shoot hawks (many of them ate domestic chickens and ducks) and in the early twentieth century thousands were shot each fall as they slid south on air currents above Appalachian ridges, or cruised along Atlantic beaches. Walkers in the woods shot them. Pennsylvania had a $5 bounty on goshawks in the 1930s (not a small sum at the time) when Hawk Mountain Sanctuary was established. Bird books from the early twentieth century debated which raptors should be eliminated: usually the verdict fell on the bird killers, the three short winged hunters of the forest, the sharpshin, the Cooper’s hawk, the goshawk, birds of similar form and abilities in different sizes. The merlin’s rarity made it unimportant. The writers of the books were ornithologists (they favored more songbirds). The story is the same as for mountain lions and wolves (to which many hawks were compared): shot to save the deer.

These books have tales from when hawks were more abundant. Goshawks, the largest of the accepters (and thus the least common, but commonly seen) would strike a rabbit or a hen with such force that the animal’s side would be torn off. When shot at while striking a hen, a goshawk would attack the man with the gun. In thick cover they would bound under trees after rabbits they had missed. Anything that flew or ran was fair game. One battle between a goshawk and a barred owl ended with both birds dead, the owl bleeding to death, the goshawk beheaded.

Large hunters are used to getting their way. They don’t like to be told what to do. Their fierceness helps them survive.

Hawks also suffered from eggshell thinning during the age of DDT (1945-1972 in the United States; approximately the economic life of the manufacturing facility). DDT interfered with calcium metabolism in birds; the result was eggshells that broke under the weight of a brooding bird. Not only hawks suffered, smaller birds did also, but being at the top of long food chains that accumulated the chemical, hawks suffered the most. Peregrine falcons more or less disappeared from Great Britain and the eastern United States. Goshawks, which eat gamebirds and small mammals, which eat leaves, berries and grass (thus situated at the end of shorter foodchains), suffered less.

Lately other chemicals, including other industrial chlorinated hydrocarbons that act as hormone mimics, like DDT, and heavy metals like mercury, a neurotoxin released by burning coal, have become problems for some birds (gulls, cormorants, thrushes); but some raptors seem to be increasing.

Not only hawks were more abundant. Flocks of black billed cuckoos followed infestations of tent caterpillars and would clear small orchards of their nests in a day. One of the common names for the rose breasted grosbeak was potato bug bird; but I have never seen grosbeaks eating potato bugs (or in numbers that could eat enough to help). Cuckoos are now rather uncommon and the silken nests of tent caterpillars on roadside trees (most birds won’t eat the hairy adults) go unmolested.

Such stories make one suspect that populations of North American breeding birds are really down 90-95% from the time of European settlement.

Conservationists who want to restore large animals speak of the three Cs: cores, corridors, carnivores. Cores are ecosystems restored as much as possible to their wild state (thus without people in the developed world). Corridors connect cores, turning separate populations of plants and animals into metapopulations. Carnivores influence the growth of plants and the abundance and types of animals and so are necessary for the health of cores.

This influence of carnivores happens on all size levels, from microbes to moose. Large carnivores influence forest succession by eating large herbivores like deer and moose, which through their feeding habits influence forest succession and the plants of the forest floor. Large carnivores also eat midsized carnivores (their competition; or a tasty snack) and so influence songbird numbers. (Many so called mid size predators are nest predators of songbirds.)

The same is true in birds. Large raptors like goshawks eat crows (a nest robber, also on the increase since shooting of crows has been regulated) as well as rabbits and squirrels. Some great horned owls specialize in crows, which roost communally. Thus one sees flocks of crows roosting at night in the bright lights near malls or superhighways. Smaller raptors eat jays (another nest predator) as well birds the size of starlings and waxwings and also smaller ones like indigo buntings, house wrens and English sparrows.

North Americans are unlikely to live with mountain lions or wolves, despite the fact that deer, which are involved in 1.5 million car accidents yearly in North America, kill many more people than either. (Mountain lions will stalk and kill people but wolves, at least in North America, avoid them.) From a purely utilitarian point of view, we would be better off if mountain lions were abundant enough to control deer numbers and so reduce the number of people killed in collisions with deer (about 225 annually), even if the lions killed 10-20 people a year.

But the emotional difference between dying from a collision with a long legged herbivore that dashes into the road and from being stalked by a large cat that pounces on you from behind, breaks your neck, opens your chest and eats your heart and lungs, is of course considerable.

North Americans may manage to live with coyotes (many millions of Los Angelenos already do), which kill feral (and pet) cats, a major predator of songbirds (and keep many house cats, terrified, indoors). Coyotes have a major influence on songbird populations in Californian canyons: where there are coyotes there are songbirds, where not, not. Coyotes probably have some influence on deer populations through capturing fawns. (They may have more as, in the absence of the wolf, some populations evolve into a larger animal, better able to deal with larger prey.) Coyotes also eat chipmunks and white footed mice, a carrier of Lyme disease.

All this brings us to the suburbs, the modern barnyard, where dogs, cats and cars replace cattle, pigs and chickens: the home of modern people.

In dry climate suburbs are oases of damp. Screech owls are more abundant in Texas suburbs with their sprinkled lawns, and abundant insect life (a major part of the owl’s diet), than out in the dry countryside. (How long the sprinkling will last is another matter.) Many people feed songbirds, attracting at the same time raccoons, Norway rats, skunks, coyotes, crows, bears, red squirrels, chipmunks, white footed mice and other animals, whose presence they often come to regard as a problem. So suburban homes are equipped with pellet guns.

There are two problems. The first is deciding which animals we want to live with; the second is managing the habitat so as to provide a more complete compliment of species and so help control animals like crows, jays, opossums, English sparrows, feral cats and perhaps infections like Lyme disease. (The more species for the Ixodes ticks to bite, the less their level of infection—most animals are not competent carriers of the disease.)

Large undeveloped areas help. Not building the suburb but rebuilding the city to be more livable with trees, parks and public transportation, and still holding more people, helps the most. Deer may retreat to the wooded parts of cemeteries or golf courses during the day. Foxes, skunks and raccoons will make do with little cover, living under porches and becoming mostly nocturnal. More bears in Nevada live in Las Vegas than in the countryside. The city bears grow larger and have more young (on abundant dumpster food); but die more frequently in automobile accidents.

Keeping bears out of Las Vegas thus means bear proof dumpsters, and probably hunting; while keeping mountain lions out of western suburbs means keeping out deer, and probably shooting lions.

But we can deal with coyotes, as we do with (much more dangerous) pet dogs. Thus the undeveloped areas in the suburbs, ideally near watercourses. Coyotes need a retreat, as do great horned owls, barred owls and goshawks. Goshawks prefer a substantial tree (though not as substantial as those favored by the long winged ospreys and eagles), owls like dense cover for resting and nesting (a clump of hemlocks in a larger wood). Some owls will use nest boxes and, like bluebirds or wood ducks, their number can probably be increased this way, with salutary effects on populations of small rodents (like white footed mice).

Resident Canada geese can be controlled partly by manipulating their landscape: letting the grass grow. Geese will avoid tall grass or other cover in which coyotes can hide, while large areas of freshly mowed grass are ideal for them: long vistas; and a new meal, every day. Actually the cycle of grass, goose poop, grass is a virtuous circle which intelligent landscape managers could use (and thus save their fertilizer expenses) by devising a machine to pick up the poop to pile and compost (or pulverize and scatter). Clever construction of golf courses or playing fields would help keep geese away from people and their sandals. Some tolerance is necessary in any situation with animals, as is some predation on the geese, young or old, by humans, egg eating foxes, neck snapping coyotes, owls, goshawks and eagles.

So I imagine suburbs as fingers of settlement in larger swaths of desert, prairie or forest; the people generally on higher ground, away from water, near the breezes. Trees shade suburban roads, deciduous trees shade the south side of houses, clumps of evergreens block northwest winds. Banks of solar collectors shade roofs, laundry decorates the yards. Water drains in open ditches with cattails, frogs, nesting wrens, and probably a few mosquitoes. Such drains also absorb runoff from streets and parking lots (some also covered with solar collectors). The open land near the houses has playing fields and places for dogs to run, while the land further away (or near damper habitat) is left alone, with a few trails for birdwatchers or budding naturalists. Dead trees in the woods are left standing. Fallen trees are left on the ground. Larger streams run through the suburbs as corridors of native habitat, thus further filtering (along with the open vegetated drains) the runoff water that reaches them. Ideally, the sewage effluent from the town, purged of toxins (or free of them, since none go down the drain) only add sufficient nutrients to the water to improve the fishery (as that notable one for brown trout in the Bow River that runs through Calgary, Alberta; the brown trout is not native to the Bow and is out competing the native cutthroat trout—the same story as with browns and brook trout in the East—but nothing’s perfect). This is a matter of the volume of nutrients and of the stream.

Of course most of the nutrients in the sewage belong back on nearby farmland, with which, like the urban center, the suburb is allied.

Biology Comics

2010-06-26T07:39:00.001-07:00

A cheerful Biology Comic?!

Dooryard Views

Watching from my dooryard I think the local raptor population is increasing. I see more and more small birdeating hawks: sharpshins (a small short winged forest hawk), cooper’s hawks (a larger edition of the same), merlins (a tiny forest falcon, the size of a robin).

Three or four autumns ago I watched an immature Cooper’s hawk perched in the top of a dead aspen in my meadow for an hour. If it hadn’t perched there so long (preening and ruffling its feathers) I wouldn’t have been able to identify it: separating sharpshins and Cooper’s hawks is difficult.

Several times a summer a sharpshin arcs over the yard. If one stands and looks up on a sunny September day with a north wind, one sees them soaring south, flicking their wings like butterflies, among the stately redtails.

The call of our common summer hawk, the broadwing, still drops from the sky on sunny days.

A friend found a Cooper’s hawk nest a few weeks ago in a red pine beside a busy mountain trail. Going to look for the nest, I happened upon the hawk perched in a dead elm next to an abandoned beaver pond. A bronzed grackle was perched in the same tree. Upright and gray, larger than the grackle, the hawk stared straight ahead. Neither bird was moving. Perhaps the hawk wasn’t hungry. The safest thing for the grackle (who glanced at the hawk from time to time) was not to fly.

And so what?

Well such hawks, like the fisheating American mergansers that have become common on the river, occupy the top of the food chain. They eat migratory birds and migrate themselves. Thus they concentrate pollutants (absorbed by the birds with their insect prey) from all over. That, plus shooting during migrations (when they are most vulnerable), is thought to be reason for their enormous decline in the middle part of the last century.

So their increase is a good thing: shooting has stopped; the chemicals that worst affected them are declining in the environment (though many bad boys, including mercury, are rising). Of course their prey species (songbirds) have also been declining.

A good thing in more than one way: raptors (day flying hawks) sculpt their surroundings. Cowbirds are a nest parasite from the prairies. Cowbirds spread east during the last century (clearing the eastern forests for farmland created an eastern prairie habitat for them) and increased in number tremendously. The female cowbird lays its egg in the nests of small songbirds (such as warblers and thrushes). The egg isn’t recognized as foreign by the parents. The young cowbird hatches out quickly, grows quickly and pushes the other hatchlings out of the nest. A warbler raises a cowbird chick several times its size.

A female cowbird will parasitize several nests – nice work if you can get it. So some warblers, wood thrushes and other neotropical migrants have been declining. (There are additional causes for this but abundant cowbirds are a factor.)

Since the 1970s, at least one male cowbird has perched in my apple tree gurgling its liquid notes all spring. Often two females accompany him. This year I saw one once, briefly. Their habit of sitting in a treetop displaying makes them vulnerable to our bright eyed hawks.

Perhaps as a result I have heard wood thrushes singing near the house the last two summers for the first time in 30 years. (But mercury accumulating in the insects of the forest floor also affects wood thrushes, as well as habitat change in the tropical forests where they winter.)

So fewer cowbirds (or scared cowbirds) are a good thing. I see also fewer blue jays. The beautiful blue jay (illuminations in blue and violet) is a nest predator. I once watched a blue jay go from nest to nest in the carved stonework above the doorway of a church, plucking out baby sparrows, one from each nest, while the parents chirped and squawked nearby. What could they do?

Sharpshins enjoy tasty blue jays, though the jays are slightly larger than they. One winter afternoon I watched a sharpie out my window eat the breast meat off a jay too large for it to carry away. Jays eat at feeders and the hawks (not stupid) cruise from feeder to feeder. As the hawk fed, the movements of the jay’s spread wings became feebler and feebler. Finally the little hawk flew off with the still remains through the woods.

So this is good. Though the merlins and the sharpshins will undoubtedly also strike at the indigo bunting that now sings in the dead aspen, the scarlet tanager singing in the pines, the crested flycatcher that whoops from the woods.

That’s how it is! In a better world than ours all these birds would be much more numerous, eat the insects that eat the trees and produce many many young.

Biology Comics

2010-06-08T06:11:00.000-07:00

Oily Dreams: the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

The well drilled by the drilling ship Deepwater Horizon in a mile of water continues to pour oil and gas into the deep sea. Some of the oil floats to the surface, where the lighter fractions evaporate (up to half the oil), the rest floats in rafts on the sea, until driven by winds and currents onto the beaches and marshlands of the gulf coast. Turtles or whales that swim through the oil become disoriented; some die. Birds that land in it die. The film of oil kills the larvae of fish and crustaceans that float in the spring waters of the gulf; including the larvae of such long distance swimmers as the western Atlantic population of the bluefin tuna.

Much of the oil and gas disperses underwater to form deep plumes of tiny droplets under the sea surface, that oxidize, or are oxidized by bacteria, and use up the oxygen in the water. The water in the plumes may become too depleted of oxygen for animals to survive. Such plumes are also toxic to the larvae of gulf animals and to the animals (deepwater corals, fish, crustaceans) themselves.

Some summer anoxia in coastal bays and estuaries (like those of the gulf) is normal. The upper layer of the ocean is ventilated by storms mixing surface water, rich in oxygen, with the waters below. Oxygen also diffuses downward into the water column, but slowly. Currents bring deeper waters to the surface, renewing their nutrients and being renewed with oxygen.

In summer storms are fewer. The sun heats the surface waters, which tend to form a lid over the colder waters below. The water column stratifies. Fresh water from rivers pouring into the sea, less dense than salty ocean water, also sits on the sea’s surface, helping keep the lid in place. So the oxygen content of the deeper waters falls.

If the water’s oxygen content falls too low, fish and benthic organisms (corals, anemones, worms, sponges) suffocate. One July evening in 1987, lobsters started crawling out of Long Island Sound onto shore: insufficient oxygen was left in the water. Bluefish gasped in the shallows. Modern summer anoxias are made more extreme by the nutrients (from sewage effluent, pet poop, burning fuel, fertilizer) we put in the ocean. These materials cause algae to grow. The algae grow and die, sink to the bottom of the sea and decay, using up the available oxygen. (This process also sequesters carbon.)

Fertilizer from farms and lawns running off into the Mississippi River has created a so-called dead zone of anoxic water in the Gulf of Mexico for several decades. The size of the zone increased dramatically after the 1993 floods, which increased the runoff of nitrogen and pesticides into the gulf. It continues to grow.

I would guess its growth is related to the size of the American corn crop. The nitrogen runoff is caused by poor agricultural practice in the Mississippi basin: not rotating corn and sod crops; applying too much fertilizer; putting too much land in crops, period. Fertilizing the tens of millions of acres of suburban lawn grasses in the Mississippi basin also adds nitrogen. Rotating cornland into hays would reduce the size of the corn crop by a third and help heal the river and the gulf. With the price of corn so low, people burn it instead of wood and transform it into a motor fuel; but corn is a food. Even agricultural economists say we have too much corn.

The nutrients and soil running off poorly managed farms also degrade rivers, and their fisheries.

So the anoxia caused by the oil adds to the anoxia caused by foolish agricultural policies in the fertile center of the continent.

The rafts of evaporating oil also drift into the marshes at the mouth of the Mississippi and onto coastal beaches.

On the beaches it is removed. (Some sinks below the surface.) Removing it from marshes is more difficult.

Thousands of people have been organized to remove the oil. They drive vehicles through colonies of nesting birds and over low coastal dunes, flattening them. They walk through pelican nests (whose adults will die anyway).

Some biologists say it would be better to leave the oil alone. Over time most of it (perhaps 70%) will evaporate or biodegrade. In Prince William Sound in Alaska, high pressure washing with warm water of rocks along the shore after the Exxon Valdez spill drove the oil underground, where it remains, mobilized from time to time by digging animals or rock shifting storms. (Once out of reach of oxygen oil breaks down extremely slowly. Adding nutrients like nitrogen may help.) The herring fishery in the sound never recovered and other fisheries remain much reduced many years after the spill. Fish living near a 40 year old spill on Cape Cod show elevated levels of liver enzymes many years later. (Fuel oil there also remains under the surface of the beaches, driven down by gravity and storms.) No one knows the continuing effects on fish eggs and larvae and thus on fish abundance; but our use of oil is a sort of tax on the wild world. Oil on the surface of the ocean or land will eventually be broken down by bacteria and archaea (natural asphalt lakes are full of life) but in the case of heavy tarry oils eventually is a long time.

Oil and gas seeps in the gulf may release a million barrels a year (not a small amount). This oil is used by bacteria, which are eaten by large worms and other creatures in so-called dark ecosystems on the seafloor. (‘Dark’ because they are out of the reach of sunlight.) So oil is not new to the gulf.

Booms are used to keep the oil from reaching the beach and people scoop up and bag the oil that does. Hair (human and otherwise) makes an excellent absorbent and afterwards the oil soaked material can be burned. Behind the booms, skimmers remove the oil from the surface of the sea.

Booms and sleeves stuffed with hair are cheap but oil companies don’t want to pay for buying and storing the material against emergencies. (Renting the drilling ship Deepwater Horizon cost about $500,000 a day.) Absorbent booms are probably better than plastic ones but are more expensive.

Any cleanup is a big mess. Nothing really works. Storms and waves cause problems. Marsh vegetation will come back after one oiling but several oilings will kill it, leaving the marshland open to erosion by the sea.

But gulf marshlands have been receding for decades, a matter that is well known. Modern levees keep the muddy waters of the Mississippi from flowing over the marshlands and rebuilding them. Rather, the river water is sent straight out into the gulf, where its muds and fertilizers add to the dead zone, rather than fertilize and maintain the protective marshlands of the delta.

Canals dug by oil companies through the marshes (10,000 miles of them) let the sea in to erode the marshes.

Salt water penetrates inland and as the marshes become more saline, their vegetation changes. They become less desirable to migratory waterfowl. Cypresses and other trees die.

The receding marshlands expose the coast to storms.

The Caribbean, of which the Gulf of Mexico is part, once had tens of millions of sea turtles grazing its seagrass meadows and coral reefs, manatees nibbling seagrasses along its coasts, seals eating its forage fish and many whales. Its spawning fish came from nearby and far away. Like the water birds most of these animals are reduced by 90-95% from their original abundance. Some losses were deliberate (turtles and manatees were hunted for food and oil), some a consequence of human settlement.

The Ixtoc spill of 1979-80 in the Mexican section of the gulf, released 10,000-30,000 barrels a day for ten months until contained. Much of the oil ended up on Texas beaches. The Deepwater Horizon spill is putting out 25,000-60,000 barrels a day. If the relief wells work and end the spill by August, it will only have lasted half as long. (The Ixtoc relief wells did not work at first.)

As of June 5th a temporary containment system seems to be capturing half the oil.

Such oil spills are only a part of our mismanagement of the ecosystems of the gulf. The Louisiana sport and commercial fisheries are worth about 8 billion dollars a year. In general, we have no idea of our place amidst the natural systems of the planet.

And as long as we place no value on nature, we will treat it like shit.

Biology Comics

2010-05-28T17:48:00.000-07:00

Still no illustrators! Well here’s a hard one…

Climate Story

People say weather is what happens day to day while climate is what happens over thousands of days. But climate times also vary in length.

The sun warms the planet. Its radiance has increased by 25% over the last 4 billion years. Despite everything, the average temperature of the planet hovers above the freezing point of water.

Over a timescale of tens of millions to billions of years, volcanoes emit carbon dioxide and silicate rocks absorb it. If volcanism slows down and the earth cools, the chemical reaction governing the absorption of the carbon dioxide by the rocks also slows down (chemical reactions are dependent on temperature). Then carbon dioxide slowly accumulates in the atmosphere and the planet warms.

New carbon absorbing rocks are also created by volcanism, which is influenced by continental drift. Continental drift also uplifts new rocks from the mantle. It operates on a timescale of tens to hundreds of millions of years.

As plants evolved, they also took a hand in storing carbon dioxide. First they oxygenated the atmosphere, driving most organisms, for whom oxygen was a poison, underground. The plants were single cells floating on the surface of the sea. They took carbon into their bodies through photosynthesis, expelling oxygen as a waste. The carbon from the plants fell as dead plant bodies or animal poop to the bottom of the sea (the “poop pump”), where it remained.

Later, rooted land plants evolved. They pumped carbon dioxide into the soil as part of their strategy to obtain nutrients. This increased the rate of weathering in soil. Soils stored more and more carbon dioxide.

The ocean naturally takes up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a simple chemical reaction with water. The deep ocean circulation (the ocean conveyor) stores this carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. One round of the circulation takes 1000-10,000 years.

The placement of continents determines whether the oceans can circulate heat and so even out the temperature of the earth, cooling the tropics (which receive more direct solar radiation) and warming the poles. The narrow basin of the North Atlantic, bounded by continents on each side, lets warm surface water brought by currents from the Pacific and Indian oceans move north, and lets the return flow (at depth) move south toward Antarctica.

There’s more. Over the long term the earth’s temperature is determined by the sunlight falling on it, the position of its land masses, the heat capacity of its oceans and the characteristics of its atmosphere.

The atmosphere lets through the sun’s rays, which strike the earth, while various of its gases absorb the solar energy that is reradiated as heat to space. The gases act like a blanket.

Water vapor is the greatest greenhouse gas. Thus desert days and nights have wide temperature swings (less of a blanket there).

The other (known) gases that absorb heat are carbon dioxide (from combustion, logging, land clearance, animal respiration, plant decay), methane (from coal mining, landfills, rice paddies, cattle, termite mounds, bacterial action, swamps), nitrous oxide (from fertilizer, combustion, denitrifying bacteria), low level ozone (from air pollution and sunlight) and the halocarbons (from fires, bacterial action, chemical manufacture: these are the gases that ate the high altitude ozone shield).

These gases have different molecular weights and absorb infrared radiation at different frequencies. Thus their effect is greater than if they absorbed radiation at the same frequency: a symphony in infrared.

The warming gases are all produced naturally but human activity has become their largest source. The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has been measured continuously since the late 1950s from a mountaintop in Hawaii and is now 100 parts per million over the preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. It seems to me that if you know this and accept that carbon dioxide absorbs heat, you must believe in global warming. A hundred parts per million is a large part of 280 parts per million. (In fact, it is the difference between an ice age and an interglacial period.)

The warming gases are not common in the atmosphere and thus human activity can influence their abundance. Their effects are amplified by water vapor, the greatest greenhouse gas. A small warming from carbon dioxide leads to more evaporation from the oceans and more water vapor in the air, therefore a warmer atmosphere, which leads to more evaporation, and a still warmer atmosphere, in an ineluctable positive feedback.

From the steamy Cretaceous Period of 100 million years ago the earth has slowly cooled to our age of continental glaciations. The cooling has several causes: the storage of 8000 billion tons of carbon (10 times that in the modern atmosphere) during the damp, temperate Carboniferous of 300 million years ago; the current position of the continents, which lets massive ice sheets build up on land near both poles; the ongoing storage of methane by bacteria in sea bottom sediments; a moderate degree of volcanism (a volcano is erupting somewhere on earth every day); and an increased biological storage of carbon by higher animals, both in the poop pump of the oceans and on land.

A cooler earth is a dryer one and a drier one lets grasses outcompete trees. Over the last 70 million years grasslands have come to dominate much of the planet. Grassland and grazers accumulate much more carbon in their soils than forests. Grazers help by stimulating new growth and by recycling nutrients: the Great Plains were maintained by buffalo piss. Many of the most productive agricultural soils are former grasslands.

Man with his plow, his axe, his farm animals and his industries releases carbon to the atmosphere.

But back to the story: why the glacial cycles of our relatively low carbon world?

Imposed on the increasing radiance of the sun, the position of the continents, the state of the atmosphere and the biosphere, are the angle of the earth’s axis to incoming solar radiation and the earth’s distance from the sun: the Milankovitch cycles. While these cycles don’t affect the total amount of radiation the earth receives, they affect its seasonality. Glaciers grow when summers are short and cool (so snow doesn’t melt) and winters long and moderate (warmer winters mean more snow, which accumulates to become ice); that is, when there is less summer sun and more winter sun in the northern hemisphere (where there is more land at high latitudes for ice to form).

The timing of the Milankovitch cycles seems to correspond with the changes of climate expressed in cores from the Greenland ice sheet, in cores from the deep sea, from other glaciers and ice sheets, and from tree rings.

During a modern glaciation the surface of the planet goes from 10% to 30% ice. The ice forms mostly in the northern hemisphere, but also in Patagonia and New Zealand and wherever there are high mountains. Antarctica remains always covered with ice.

Glaciers take tens of thousands of years to grow and less than ten thousand to die. They seem to be self-limiting, perhaps because they depress the earth’s surface so much (up to half a mile) so any surface melting rapidly brings them down into warmer regions; and perhaps because they cover so much of the earth, whose plants no longer take up carbon dioxide, which then accumulates in the atmosphere, warming the planet.

As the planet warms it begins sucking up more carbon dioxide in its soils and oceans, both from increased biological activity on that newly uncovered 20% of the earth’s surface and because warmer temperatures speed up chemical reactions. This slowly lowers the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and sets the stage for the next cooling. These changes are reinforced (or not) by the planet’s position in the Milankovitch cycles.

The small changes in solar radiation during a Milankovitch cycle, and the not-so-small changes in carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere from glacial to interglacial period (about 50%) are amplified by the planet’s water cycle.

Our next glaciation is overdue. Glaciers should have begun forming about 8000 years ago, as the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere began to fall. There are some signs of this on the rocky surface of northeast Labrador (the center of the last continental glaciation in North America).

But the ice melted. One theory is that deforestation to clear fields by humans in Eurasia 8000 years ago released enough carbon dioxide to stop the fall in atmospheric carbon dioxide and in fact raised it several parts per million.

The cultivation of paddy rice (which releases methane) and the keeping of cattle, as well as human population increases by 5000 years ago, raised it more.

(I should point out that the last long interglacial period, 30,000 years long rather than the more normal 10,000, was 400,000 years ago, when the orbit of the earth around the sun was nearly round, as now.)

Who knows? The numbers work. What is incontrovertible is that burning coal from the beginning of the industrial revolution in the 1700s began to raise the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from its preindustrial level of 280 parts per million. The rise has accelerated lately, from 1.1% a year in the 1990s to 3% a year in 2000-2004. The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 389 ppm.

Carbon dioxide shows a peak in the northern hemisphere fall and a trough in the spring. The seasonal variation is explained by the greater amount of land in the North Hemisphere. Plants use up carbon dioxide during the summer, while animals (and many plants) continue to produce it by respiration during the winter.

A warming climate causes many problems. Sea level rises, partly from melting of ice caps and glaciers, partly from thermal expansion of the water. Many continental glaciers, like the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, are grounded on the bottom of the sea. As the sea rises, ever so slightly, the glaciers lose their grip on the sea bottom and surge forward, speeding their collapse (and raising sea levels, in this case, 16-18 feet).

A warmer ocean also melts the glaciers faster where they meet the sea.

A likely estimate for sea level rise is 3-10 feet by 2100. Two feet will drown the Everglades. New Orleans is already a goner. (Because of subsidence, the relative sea level rise at the mouth of the Mississippi is now 4 feet per century.)

A rising sea also raises the heights of inland rivers, which overflow.

Salt water intrudes into coastal aquifers, such as the Magothy under Long Island, making them undrinkable.

Coastal communities build seawalls, move inland or are abandoned.

A warmer climate reduces grain crops in hot climates. Temperatures for growing maize are already marginal in much of the southeastern United States. Farmland moves north, where soils are rocky and poor.

Some regions become drier, some wetter. Reservoirs run out of water or dams must be reinforced. Heavy downpours are increasing in the eastern and middle western United States. A month’s rain comes in a few hours rather than being spread out. This is hard on crops and forests.

Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and the Andes store winter snowfall and release it into summer springs and rivers. As they melt, summer flow falls and there is little water for people or crops. Similarly, as the winter snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada melts earlier, summer water becomes more scarce.

Will this happen? Expressing all the known greenhouse gases as carbon dioxide, the current level of carbon dioxide is 430 ppm, a level not reached for a million years. (But carbon dioxide was about 800 ppm in the temperate Carboniferous 300 million years ago.) The last, recent time carbon dioxide was 350 ppm sea level was 80 feet higher.

Feedback processes are in play. Eastern forests are accumulating carbon much more quickly than 20 years ago; that is, their growth has speeded up. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes it easier for the trees to photosynthesize (they lose less water obtaining carbon). A hopeful sign: but the trees will soon run out of nitrogen, an essential nutrient.

Forests throughout the western United States and Alaska are collapsing from a century of poor management, drought and an infestation of bark beetles. Drought and crowding stresses the trees. Winter temperatures no longer fall low enough to kill the beetles’ larvae and warm long summers let the beetles breed continuously for several months. Crowded stressed trees are not able to mobilize their defenses against the beetles. As these forest collapse and burn they release billions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Similar problems may affect the boreal forests (which may in any case be cleared for agriculture).

Moving societies north will require a lot of energy, which will put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Warming is most pronounced in polar regions. As the sea ice melts, the ocean absorbs heat from the sun, melting more ice, and the glaciers that touch the sea (as in Alaska and Greenland).

As the tundra warms, and the permafrost below it thaws, the soil releases carbon dioxide and methane. Methane now bubbles up through Siberian lakes all winter keeping them from freezing. As the permafrost around them melts, the lakes expand, then drain away as the land beneath them thaws, leaving the bare ground to warm in the sun, and release methane (perhaps 400 billion tons are stored in the tundra).

Off the northeastern coast of Siberia, methane is bubbling up from the sea from underwater clathrates, lattices of water and ice in which the methane is held by cold and pressure. The amount of methane held in underwater clathrates is enormous. Those under shallow seas will be released by a small increase in temperature of the water (of the order of 1° Centigrade).

A warming climate may shut down the Gulf Stream, part of the deep ocean circulation. Warm tropical water from the Indian and Pacific oceans is pulled north around Africa by the sinking of cold salty water around Iceland and Greenland. The warm water loses evaporated moisture to the Eurasian plains as it moves north, to the Pacific as easterly trades blow it across the Isthmus of Panama. It becomes salty and more dense. When it reaches a sufficient density of coldness and saltiness around the latitude of Iceland, it sinks into the oceanic abyss, helping drive the deep ocean circulation.

As the water moves north out of the tropics it also freshens from fresh water from rivers and melting ice. This lessens its density. If the density of the water is sufficiently reduced, it won’t sink. About every 1500 years over the last 100,000, the sinking has slowed and the earth’s climate has become colder, windier and more dry. A complete halt to the sinking and a disruption of the deep ocean circulation (which keeps the sea oxygenated) would be a disaster.

If we do nothing about the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere we may be in for a wild ride.

Who knows? It may be interesting.

Biology Comics

2010-05-12T06:12:00.001-07:00

Lyme Disease

Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium of the genus Borrelia that lives in some small mammals ((white-footed mice, chipmunks, meadow voles) and some birds (robins, grackles, house wrens) without causing them distress. Such animals are reservoir species for the disease. White tailed deer are not a reservoir species.

However the tick of the genus Ixodes that spreads the spirochete has deer for one of its hosts. So the ticks are called deer ticks.

Eggs laid by mature female ticks hatch into larvae (tiny ticks) in early spring. The larvae feed on a small animal, preferably a white footed mouse, but a chipmunk, a bird, a frog or a human will do. The larvae need a blood meal to mature into the next insect stage, a nymph. Feeding lasts a few days. After its meal, the larvae drops off its host, winters over in the leaf litter and the next spring sheds its cuticle to become a nymph.

Nymphs also need a blood meal to mature and also feed preferentially on white footed mice, but again will feed on any animal with blood. Nymphs, as a result of their first blood meal, are more likely to be infected with the spirochete that causes Lyme disease than larvae. Many climb high enough in the vegetation to bite people. Their activity in southern New England and New York State peaks in early summer.

By fall the nymph sheds its skin to become an adult. Adults are able to climb still higher in the vegetation, from where they attach themselves to any animal that brushes against them. Their preferred (or most common) host is deer. The blood meal from the deer or a human lets them develop sexually and survive until spring, when the female lays her eggs and dies.

Lyme disease was here when the Native Americans inhabited the continent (some Puritans seem to have contracted it) but was uncommon. It also exists (with similar ticks carrying it) in Eurasia. Peter Kalm, a Swedish botanist, remarked on the abundance of ticks in the eighteenth century New Jersey forest. Of course Peter Kalm didn’t wear shorts in the woods.

Deer ticks in the Northeast today prefer young forest and forest edges. They probably became much less common around human habitations as the landscape was cleared and settled. The virtual elimination of white tailed deer in the Northeast by 1900 may also have helped break the transmission of the disease to humans.

As northeastern farms were abandoned in favor of better farmland in California or Ohio and as northeastern industries used up their natural resources or failed during the first half of the twentieth century, the land emptied of people and grew back to young woodland, ideal habitat for ticks and deer. Much of the woods was oakwoods, also ideal, once the trees were large enough to bear acorns, for white-footed mice and chipmunks. As the animals returned, so did the disease causing ticks and spirocetes.

Beginning in the 1960s the second growth woodland started to be subdivided into housing lots. Life under the trees had its charms.

In 1975 Lyme disease was recognized as a disease from a cluster of cases in Lyme, Connecticut, a center of upscale suburbia.

A few years later the spirochete was isolated from the gut of a tick. If the disease is recognized, it is easily treated with antibiotics. A bullseye rash is often diagnostic.

Not everyone gets the rash. Other symptoms of the disease include headache, fever, fatigue and depression. If the disease is not recognized early, it becomes, like syphilis, another disease caused by a spirochete, difficult to treat and can result in joint pain and arthritis (especially in the knees), heart trouble and neurological symptoms such as difficulty concentrating and short term memory loss.

What to do? Reducing the number of deer (to fewer than 8-20 per square mile) helps.

Letting in light and air helps. Dehydration is the enemy of insects. Ticks and small mammals like damp leafy woodland edges, unmortared stone walls, brushy areas. Letting forests mature and cutting brush along forest edges probably helps. A few old trees in a sunny mowed lawn is ideal. Such treatments will also make the landscape much less desirable for many birds, small mammals and butterflies.

Cardboard tubes filled with cotton impregnated with pyrethrum helps reduce the number of ticks on mice, if the mice use the cotton to build their nests.

Baited station where mice are treated with insecticide also work; such stations have also been used for deer. Squirrels also enjoy bait stations for mice. A laborious solution is to capture and vaccinate the mice against the spirochete, every year.

Bait stations probably spread chronic wasting disease in deer. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a disease related to mad cow disease that was once endemic but uncommon among elk in the Rockies but is rapidly spreading eastward, probably through the use of feeding stations for deer. At the feeding stations deer come in contact with each other’s saliva, thus spreading the disease.

Lyme disease is a problem of landscape design. The best defense against it is a more diverse ecosystem, in which ticks feed on more animals that are not reservoirs of the disease. Then the incidence of disease in the ticks will be lower. (The chance of getting Lyme disease from a tick bite is currently 1-15%.)

In California, habitats with good fence lizard habitat have fewer infected ticks (ticks feed on lizards and lizards are resistant to the disease).

In the Northeast, small areas of woodland (less than five acres, a huge area in the suburbs) have many more white footed mice, as well as many more ticks, and many many more infected ticks, per square meter. This is probably because most of the woodland is edge, with invasive shrub layers and thick invasive groundcovers, ideal habitat for mice, chipmunks, ticks and deer.

One needs a connected landscape so populations of foxes, coyotes, weasels, owls and hawks can catch mice, and populations of raccoons, opossums, skunks, amphibians, different small birds and foxes can be bitten by ticks. The more young ticks bite animals that don’t carry the spirochete, the less likely humans will get the disease.

The ideal suburban landscape has vegetated bridges over roads connecting small woodlands and amphibian friendly culverts under roads to accommodate migrating frogs and toads (also tick bait).

It has habitat for short tailed weasels and snakes. Mice flee an area at the smell of a snake. Cats that eat snakes are kept indoors.

It has coyotes to help control deer. Coyotes will also control feral or adventurous bird and snake eating cats.

And humans with bows hunting deer. A useful addition to the tool kit would be a curare tipped arrow. Then (as long as the poison enters its bloodstream) the slightest scratch will kill a deer. There are many ways to deliver the poison. Perhaps a groove along the point of a hard plastic disposable arrowhead contains curare, covered with wax (so the hunter doesn’t accidentally kill himself). Or a springloaded pellet propels itself upon impact into the animal’s flesh.

Curare kills by paralyzing the muscles. Respiration stops and the animal dies of asphyxiation. But the curare molecules are too large to pass through the gut wall (curare is harmless if taken orally) so the animal’s meat remains edible.

Since the point is population control as well as sport, does as well as bucks are hunted. Young does taste better anyway.

Tales of the North Pacific

2010-05-02T18:26:00.001-07:00

No one wants to illustrate Biology Comics!

Imagine the drawings…

Tales of the North Pacific

The other name for orcas is ‘killer whale.’ Orcas are the most fearsome predator in the sea.

When attacked by orcas, a pod of great whales formed a daisy pattern, head toward the center, tails out. Great whales are several times the size of orcas. The idea was probably to whack the attacking killer whales with their tails; or to limit their access to whale bodies.

Orcas are intelligent, powerful and not easily discouraged. Their dentition resembles that of Tyrannosaurus rex. Wounded great whales would be nudged back into formation by their companions, trailing their intestines or missing great flaps of skin. The whole pod might be killed.

Dead whales sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they become the base of a novel ecosystem including polychaete worms that live on the fat in whalebone. Before industrial whaling, 850,000 whale carcasses may have littered the seafloor at any one time. Besides supporting their own ecosystem, the carcasses contributed nutrients to the deep sea.

Orcas are opportunistic hunters and also eat seals, sea lions and fish, including herring and salmon. They have a high metabolic demand and need a lot of food. Stellar sea lions, which weigh up to a ton, provide a good meal.

During World War II, fishing in the ocean almost stopped. After the war, life returned to normal. The whale hunt in the North Pacific resumed. About 500,000 great whales were killed there.

During the 20 years of the hunt, orcas learned to respond to the sound of exploding harpoons and whale distress calls. Like gulls, they followed cruising ships. Many harpooned whales escape. These were fat years for the killer whales.

When the hunt ended, whales were few. The biomass of fin and sperm whales in the North Pacific had been reduced by 90% or more.

As the hunt wound down in the 1970s, harbor seals began to decline, followed by Stellar sea lions and fur seals. The declines were rapid and surprising. Stellar sea lions are now considered endangered.

Fur seals had been hunted almost to extinction by American and Russian sealers toward the opening of the twentieth century. Their populations had recovered under a treaty that let the Aleut natives of the Pribolov Islands, their breeding grounds, manage them.

The reason for the decline of these marine mammals was unknown. It was first blamed on overfishing, specifically for pollock, which had begun to replace herring (a more oily fish) in the warming Bering Sea. The white flesh of the pollock is used by chains like McDonald’s in its fish sandwiches.

The decline was also thought to be related to the replacement of the (oily) herring by the (less oily) pollock. Oily fish provide more calories, which sea mammals living in cold water need to maintain their layer of insulating fat; and maintain their metabolisms.

Declaring the Stellar’s sea lion endangered brought boatloads of federal funding. When scientists investigated the pollock fishery, it seemed, for the time being, sustainable. There were enough fish for everybody.

Animals known to have been taken by orcas include blue whales (the largest whale), dogs, great white sharks, sea turtles, moose and sea otters. Orcas capture seal pups resting at the edge of the beach, sliding in on a wave to grab them. Great white sharks flee at the sound of orcas.

In the 1990s sea otters started to disappear. By 1998, 90% of the sea otters were gone from a 1000 kilometer stretch of the central Aleutians. Several tens of thousands of otters were gone.

Sea otters are another predatory animal whose munching on herbivores is thought to keep the world green. They live, or once lived, in the kelp forest of the Pacific coast from northern Japan to Baja California.

Sea otters eat animals that live in the kelp. They are fond of abalone and will hunt them until only those hiding in clefts in the rock are left. They pound the abalone off the bottom with stones. This behavior irritates human fishers (sea otters do the same with beds of mussels) but makes room in the ocean for other invertebrates.

Another favorite food is sea urchins. Sea urchins are covered with spines. Sea otters bite into the soft bottom of the large ones and lick out the insides. The fold up the spines of small ones and pop them in their mouths. The favorite food of sea urchins is kelp.

Sea otters have no layer of fat to keep them warm. Their thick coats do that. To maintain their body temperatures in the cold water in which they live they must eat a quarter to a third of their body weight of 30-100 pounds daily. A lot of sea urchins.

When the shipwrecked German naturalist Stellar wintered on Bering Island in 1741 sea otters were abundant and tame. Like the arctic foxes, whose constant scavenging drove the men crazy, they could be killed with clubs.

Since the otters lack blubber, their insulating fur is the densest of any animal and extremely valuable. The men with Stellar sailed away with 1000 skins, abandoning some of his laboriously prepared specimens on the island. The small boat they cobbled together had only so much room.

Undeterred by the remoteness of the Pacific Northwest, Russian hunters were soon slaughtering sea otters for their skins. They enslaved the native Aleuts to help them. In no time, the Russians were joined by the Americans, who hunted further south.

By 1900 otters were gone from most of their former haunts. The Alaskan otters were hunted out by 1800, but recovered by the 1860s, when they were hunted down again. Sea otters were finally protected by the same treaty that protected the fur seals.

Some otters survived and in the 1970s their influence on the health of kelp forests began to be recognized. Alaska is the center of the sea otter population. Where there were sea otters in the Aleutians in the 1970s, there were dense kelp forests and small sea urchins, where there were no otters, the kelp was grazed down to the bottom by herds of enormous urchins.

In the waving strands of kelp live many fish and invertebrates. Following the abundant fish come harbor seals, sea birds and bald eagles, in numbers greater than where the kelp is missing.

Some sea otter reintroduction programs were successful in reestablishing colonies along the Pacific coast south of Alaska. A colony in Big Sur that had escaped the hunters expanded.

Otters didn’t do as well as formerly. Their habitat was degraded by fishing and runoff. They are susceptible to a disease carried by house cats, whose agents are washed with cat feces down storm drains into the sea.

When in the 1990s, the otters along the Aleutians began to disappear, orcas were not one of the usual suspects. Lacking blubber, otters are not a desirable food for orcas. Three or four hungry orcas could have eaten the tens of thousands of vanished otters over 10 years but more likely several pods of orcas were indulging in otters as a side dish to fur seals, Stellar sea lions, fish and the occasional great whale.

The sea otter tale is one of a predator controlling a grazer, even in the simplified invertebrate fauna of the modern kelp forest (simplified by human fishers).

The orcas demonstrate what happens when a main prey animal is removed: the predatory cascade goes awry. The remaining animals in the ocean can’t satisfy the great hunters’ appetites. They will eat everything available and then starve.

Predatory control of grazers is not always perfect. Sea otters reduce populations of some shellfish to where they are not commercially exploitable (but far from extinct). Wolves will reduce failing populations of moose to zero. Insect populations escape from the control of their bird and rodent predators and eat themselves out of house and home, until controlled by the collapse of the vegetation or by microbes (the ultimate predators). The fear of mountain lions keeps remnant populations of bighorn sheep on their Sierra cliffs during the winter (where they fall on icy rocks) rather than face the hungry lions in the lowlands.

But in most of these cases, the ecosystem has been originally messed up by us.

Biology Comicks

2010-04-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

Wolf Cascade

The last wolf in Yellowstone National Park was killed in 1926. Two young wolves stepped simultaneously into nearby traps. Wolves were killed to protect elk.

The elk enjoyed the wolves being gone. They soon increased in number.

Coyotes also increased and ate lots of mice, voles and rabbits. They also killed many foxes and skunks and learned to kill newborn antelope. Fewer foxes and skunks meant more ground nesting birds.

Elk eat grass but they also browse twigs of aspen and willow, especially in winter. With wolves gone they spent more time browsing near streams. Soon no tender young trees were left.

Beaver had dams along the streams. Fat trout ate tadpoles in their ponds. Green-winged teal dabbled for insect larvae and small plants. Birds sang from the trees.

As fewer and fewer young trees grew and only big old trees were left, beaver had less and less to eat. Slowly, they starved to death or left. Their dams washed out.

The elk missed the young trees too and looked for them. They found every one. Elk numbers had increased until they were eating all the available food. In hard winters, many elk died.

The females were in poor condition in spring when they bore their fawns. During a hard winter the females absorbed the embryonic fawns into their bodies. But when the weather relented elk numbers would increase once again.

Without beaver ponds and young trees to hold their banks, the streams straightened out and cut deeper into their beds. Water tables near the streams fell.

Fewer birds returned to the old aspens on the streamside. Trout were smaller and fewer mink and otters came to hunt them.

In 1960, after 34 years of no wolves, some scientists had the bright idea that fierce predatory animals, by keeping animals like elk from eating up all the grass and trees, kept the world green. This may have not been a new idea but as a general principle it was revolutionary. Ecosystem control was from the top down, through predators, rather than from the bottom up, through photosynthesizers. (Actually both processes are key.)

By the 1990s the idea had taken hold and the National Park Service decided to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone. Wolves were trapped in northern Alberta in the winter of 1994-95 and kept in cages in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley for a few months to acclimatize them to their surroundings.

When the wolves were released it didn’t take them long to figure out what to do with the elk. (These wolves were used to eating moose.) The elk had forgotten about wolves over the last 70 years (many many elk generations).

Soon things were back to normal. When pursued, healthy elk, generally slightly faster than wolves, would tell the wolves to get lost.

Unhealthy or old slow elk did less well. Wolves ate unhealthy, sick and old elk.

Wolves also ate young elk. By eating elk calves, wolves kept numbers of elk somewhat below the carrying capacity of their range, though overall, weather still had the greatest influence on the elk population. Fewer elk starved to death in bad winters and the animals were in better condition.

Wolves also made elk cautious. Elk realized certain places were dangerous because of ambush by wolves. Many of these places were near streams.

As elk spent less time near streams, the streamside forest started to recover. As it got thicker, it provided more cover for the wolves and became more dangerous.

Soon willows and aspen, shrubs and wildflowers were again growing along the streams.

As the trees recovered, beaver started to move back in. Wolves patrolled the valleys too, hoping to surprise a beaver on land. Beaver is a common food of wolves. Soon only very hungry elk would venture near the tasty willows and aspen of the streambanks.

As the beaver dams grew in number, water tables near the streams rose, benefiting the trees and the grasses that grew under them. Downcutting ceased and stream bottoms filled in. Trout grew more plentiful and plump. Mink hunted the trout and the frogs that lived in the ponds.

The wolves killed half the coyotes in the Lamar valley, their competition (as foxes and skunks were for the coyotes), which meant more foxes and skunks, and a recovering population of pronghorn antelope, whose numbers had been decimated by the coyotes. Ground nesting birds probably didn’t enjoy greater numbers of foxes and skunks but neither did they enjoy coyotes.

The wolves left behind a windfall of carrion for foxes, crows, grizzly bears, magpies, golden eagles and early returning mountain bluebirds, who ate the flies hatching out of the carcasses.

Along the streams, the birds returned and sang from the trees.

Biology Comix

2010-04-13T07:37:00.000-07:00

Anyone want to illustrate "Biology Comix"? Line drawings or watercolors give one more scope but photoshopped photos would do.

Cloud Story

The sea surface is full of micro-organisms—single celled bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, viruses. One dives through them into the sea. The photosynthesizing plankton, the algae and cyanobacteria, are the grasses of the sea.

The turning earth generates winds.

The winds blow up waves and generate currents.

The photosynthesizing micro-organisms of the planckton, the basis of the ocean’s food chain, are fed by nutrients coming from below, pushed up by storms, transported by currents.

Bubbles slide up the surface of the waves, concentrating the plankton and a chemical they secrete, dimethyl sulfide (DMS).

As the waves break, the bubbles burst and the plankton and DMS escape the water’s grip and are swept up into the atmosphere.

The wind carries them further and further aloft.

High in the atmosphere, water starts to condense about the molecules of DMS.

Clouds form.

The airborne plankton live in the clouds, on organic acids and alcohols and on sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Some of this material comes from the smokestacks of power plants and the tailpipes of cars, and some from passing ships, but much of it is natural.

Micro-organisms are abundant in clouds. They divide and reproduce and live happily there.

The clouds float over the earth, reflecting the sun during the day (and cooling the earth), keeping the warmth in at night (making the earth warmer). No one knows the overall effect of clouds but it is thought they cool the earth. Without clouds, temperatures would be more extreme.

When the micro-organisms are tired of living in the clouds, they secrete proteins that make ice form around them.

Then they fall from the clouds as pellets of ice, perhaps melting as they pass through a warmer layer of air, and falling to earth as rain; or refreezing to fall as snow, on the sea, a lake, or the land below.

Then they begin life in their new environment. Thus these micro-organisms constantly recolonize the earth.

3/13/10: Leaving Berkeley

2010-03-18T08:30:00.001-07:00

3/13/10: Leaving Berkeley

Forty years ago Seymour Melman pointed out again and again in The New York Times that the cost of the Vietnam War was approaching the value of the built American landscape. From the 1960s through 2000 the United States lost the opportunity to create a new world: a more egalitarian society, living comfortably within its natural limits. But this was a time without limits, when the United States dominated the world, much of which was developing at an unprecedented pace. In 1960, carbon dioxide levels were rising but not unreasonable; human populations low enough that much natural landscape, with its fierce large animals, was left (fierce wild animals, through their predatory behavior, are thought through a trophic cascade of effects on herbivores and smaller predators to keep the world green; in 1960 in developed countries like the United States the land was now largely empty of such animals, which were replaced by human hunters); songbird populations collapsing but still relatively high; chemical use low (DDT new and popular), if growing; medical care largely affordable; the country relatively rich. Berkeley was creeping out into San Francisco Bay; the Mississippi being hemmed in by dikes, the Everglades drained off to the sea. The sea still had fish, the sky hawks. During full moon at nighttime high tide, millions of silvery grunion spawned on the beaches of southern California.

From its founding amidst the unfolding of capitalist economies in the West, the United States has been ruled by its economic interests; most often, the economic interests of wealthy individuals and corporations (which largely replaced wealthy individuals; the 1930s were an apparent exception). So from the sixties on, corporations like ExxonMobil, General Motors and United States Sugar, with their financial connections to politicians (who needed money for reelection, to put their children through college, to entertain their mistresses, impress their colleagues, or for a comfortable retirement) determined the country’s priorities. The result is that our prosperity, in a much less egalitarian society than in 1960, depends on our producing chemicals that cause developmental anomalies in children (ambiguous sexuality, autism, low IQ) and cancer in adults (perhaps partly as a result of depressed immune systems, with similar effects in fish, marine mammals, birds and the other creatures with which we share the planet); on our eating cheap industrial foods that produce life-shortening diseases (obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis); on world trade that haphazardly introduces strange plants and animals to new places; on processes that produce carbon dioxide, methane and other gases that are changing the climate. While all this is known, little changes: a recent plan by the State of Florida to buy land to add to the Everglades turns out to be a plan to prop up United States Sugar, a company which survives through the use of cheap Haitian labor, through import duties on sugar (which raises its price to us and harms poor farmers worldwide), which is a major polluter of the Everglades with its releases of phosphorus, and which was only able to farm at all because of public works projects that drained its land. The Everglades will not survive anyway: a two foot rise in sea level will turn the fresh water marsh with its alligators and shorebirds (already reduced 90% from the 1930s) into a salt water one with crocodiles and manatees. Sea level is predicted to rise three feet by 2100 (though ten feet is more likely). A changing climate will make all plans to save habitats, plants and animals moot, as the creatures move and their habitats change and disappear. The forests of the western cordilleras of North America from Arizona to Alaska are collapsing from insects and fire, partly as a result of drought, partly from 100 years of human mismanagement. Boreal forests across the northern hemisphere may soon join them. Tropical forests continue to be logged and cleared for agriculture. Methane bubbles up from the warming Arctic Sea (or perhaps it always has). Blister rust, a fungus disease of pines (it inspired a program of hand eradication of native gooseberries, an alternate host in the eastern United States in the 1920s-1930s) has reached the white bark pines of high altitudes in the Rocky Mountains, whose seeds, robbed from rodent nests, are a major autumn food of grizzly bears. The bears survive because they live high up in the backcountry. If they descend to lower altitudes to feed they will be shot. Eastern forests change as the climate warms, heavy cutting continues, cloud ceilings (the boundary between deciduous and evergreen forests) rise, and as several of its species (green and white ash, eastern hemlock, beech) join chestnut, red spruce and the elms in decline from imported insects, air pollution and diseases. Coyotes however, have moved into habitats abandoned a century ago by gray wolves and, growing ever larger as they adopt white tailed deer, along with rabbits and mice, as a prey animal, are doing well. What a changing climate will do to people (a species as opportunistic as coyotes) is uncertain. Rich populations may survive without too much difficulty. But if I were to buy land, I would do it at least 200 feet above sea level, out of river flood plains, and north, perhaps in walking distance of water with fish. Much may depend on how much the chemical soup in which we live, and the industrial food we eat, costs us (and of course in the case of the United States, the costs of our pointless foreign wars): modern life may not be cost-effective or survivable.

What all this implies for conserving the landscape is uncertain. Habitat for individual animals (grizzly bears, tigers, shorebirds) may not be worth saving: habitats are changing too fast. Land in large quantities is worth saving, especially lands near large rivers and coasts (and inland of coasts) and any extensive, connected pieces of open land. Lands in continental interiors are probably going to get drier (deserts will expand, land for photo-voltaic panels become a dime a dozen) and northern lands warmer. Northern lands may remain well watered and so desirable for agriculture, despite their relatively poor soils. Coastal regions (the lands east of the Appalachians, the coast of California) may become too stormy to be easily habitable by people. An orderly retreat from the effects of a changing climate, demolishing or moving buildings as we go, leaving much open land for nature, would be the best strategy; but we won’t do it. The cities of older civilizations slid under the sea and were adopted by sponges and fish but our more toxic buildings may be less friendly to wildlife and us. In 10,000 years bacteria will have broken down or sequestered the toxins, the sea diluted the radioactivity in the storage ponds of nuclear power plants, buried the asbestos insulation, oxidized the iron, the action of the waves turned the concrete to sand.

* * *

The day we left Berkeley dawned clear and cool, the air washed clean by the previous day’s rain. There was an invisible skim of frost on the car’s windshield, momentarily confusing the locals. The sun was going to be hot, the air cool, with a slightly sour smell of damp and redwoods. The plane banked over the bay, revealing pale green hills, with darker oaks and firs in the hollows, the blue sky, a pale blue or muddy green sea. Large areas of the southern parts of the bay are still used for the evaporation of salt, diked rippled flats red with salt tolerant micro organisms, and more areas of natural wetland are left, if with no natural flow from the San Joaquin River, all of whose water is allocated to people and agriculture. I missed California already. Who would want to leave on such a day, such a beautiful and ruined landscape?

We were returning to our black and white late winter world. When we landed in Albany, parked on the side of the airport tarmac were several huge planes, diverted from New York City airports because of tremendous winds earlier that day. Global warming gives us a more energetic atmosphere, of which this may or may not be an example. But perhaps more difficult and unreliable air travel will be another part of our warming world.

3/1/10 Berkeley

2010-03-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

We went down this morning to visit Daui's grandnephew at Santa Clara University. Santa Clara is at the foot of the Bay, near San Jose. The Santa Clara River once flowed freely and contributed major amounts of sand to the beaches of southern California. The land around the lower Bay is flat and completely developed, perhaps once sea bottom, or high marsh: strip malls, warehouses, several story apartment buildings and hotels, single family houses. I suppose the flats were originally wooded with Douglas fir and redwood, with some pine, cypress and coastal scrub near the water, some oak and bay along the brooks, serpentine meadows. The campus consisted of tall yellow stucco buildings, on wide lawns decorated with dying redwoods. Against the mission church was a walled rose garden. A black phoebe flitted from shrub to shrub in an alley. We took the kid to lunch at a "pedestrian mall" set down with its own parking garage off a major road, a totally fake urban scene: America as Disneyland.

We drove there from Berkeley, also totally built up, with its tiny yards, scattered redwoods amd palms, unkempt old gardens, a totally mixed and wild vegetation, redwoods growing up against house walls, wild orange bushes, palms two feet thick and sixty feet tall growing out of three square feet of soil, with stone steps laid around the fibrous trunk to a front door; Berkeley with its parks, organic amaranth, sustainably fished salmon, fresh greens, mushrooms smelling of the woods, round topped trees pruned by the wind, happy eggs, bottles of fresh squeezed blood orange juice, affordable apartments set among million dollar houses, round soft green hills fading away to the east from Inspiration Point, the swirl of plastic bottles amidst swimming ducks where Strawberry Creek enters the Bay. A few days later, in early morning we drove Daui's niece and her husband to the airport, through flat gray light, eight lanes of traffic, rain washed buildings visible above the elevated highway, water from the streets running into the Bay. Real life in our capitalist world was along the walled interstates leading down to San Jose.

1/30/10

2010-01-30T18:16:00.001-08:00

1/30/10

For the past month I’ve been cutting up a load of logs for firewood. They came from Schroon Lake, maybe thirty miles away. Most of them are sugar maple, tall slim trees, each yielding three or four sixteen foot logs, knotty, with a small core of rot. The bark on some of them flows like a river around the lopped off branches, covered with frilly pale green lichens and bright clumps of moss. Logs from the deep woods. For good measure the logger threw in a couple of hemlock logs – maybe he thought I wouldn’t know the difference. Hemlock and sugar maple often grow together. Crushed against one log was a long strand of princes pine, a club moss of the forest floor, kept bright by the cold. If it isn’t too cold, I can smell the sweetness of the blocks as I split them. The wood inside the logs is slightly pink. I feel slightly guilty at using these offerings from the forest – at least I should pay attention to them. One tree is a species I don’t recognize – perhaps red elm.

* * *

Now everyone is moaning about the deficit. Okay! How about paying for our current wars? (Bush and the Republicans never thought this necessary.) I think a universal draft is the best way to keep American foreign policy honest, and the U.S. a republic rather than an empire, but if we must have wars, we should pay for them. Everyone’s wars – everyone should pay. Perhaps a 1% surcharge on income taxes to start, the percent rising as incomes rise, to a maximum of - what? 100% on incomes over $2 million? 200%? Those poor bankers will need even larger bonuses….

1/27/10

2010-01-27T16:56:00.000-08:00

1/27/10

The Democrats are losing their nerve again. Goodbye health care! Goodbye cap-and-trade! Hello Afghanistan!

It’s too bad no one can figure out that a carbon tax can also be a jobs program. Half the money collected goes back to those who can least afford the increased cost of goods and fuel (say those families earning less than $80,000 a year), half goes to reducing our dependence on carbon – wind and solar power, new transmission lines, electric cars, better electric motors, more home insulation.

If we don’t steer capitalism in a new direction, it will continue with its frontier mentality, swallowing up resources, as though the whole world were still out there, unspoiled.

1/19/10

2010-01-19T10:40:00.001-08:00

10/19/10

We don’t do anything about carbon emissions because we have no real motivation to do so. What’s wrong with Jim Hansen’s plan of a carbon tax whose money goes back to the people? We could also put it toward universal medical care. (It amounts to the same thing.)

Say, $100 a ton, from oil and coal companies directly into our pockets.

Climate change isn’t going to be an apocalyptic event out of a film but a slow moving catastrophe.

But we may regret every wrong move we make from now on.

1/4/10

2010-01-06T08:01:00.000-08:00

1/4/10

The NY Times a few days ago had a photo of a river of electro-shocked carp leaping into the air. These asian carp (bighead and silver carp) were introduced by southern catfish farmers to control algae in their fishponds. They escaped during floods to the Mississippi, an entirely predictable event. These carp also leap into the air when boats pass—the pressure wave must indicate a predator to them—so boaters going by at 5-10 mph may get whacked in the face with a 20-50 pound fish. The carp breed prolifically and have been moving up the Mississippi drainage for years. They are now poised to enter Lake Michigan, via a canal from the Illinois River. The other Great Lakes’ states are in an uproar since the carp are likely to dominate the ecosystems of the lakes. (And while carp have a good reputation in Europe and Asia, they don’t have one here.) The other states insist the canal be closed. Building the canal, partly for transportation, partly to send Chicago’s sewage and stockyard waste away from Lake Michigan, was never a good idea. But why wait til now to do something? I think fish from the Mississippi are edible. Couldn’t McDonalds sell carp fillets in a bun instead of Alaskan pollock? Eco-fish? Can’t we make use of these “invasive species?” Florida panthers prefer to dine on invasive European feral hogs.

During the Reagan years I watched the progression of a pandemic of raccoon rabies up the East Coast. It had started with the release of Florida raccoons by coon hunters in West Virginia. One animal was rabid. I guess there aren’t enough raccoons in West Virginia. Wild animals in general die horrifying deaths but hunting coons with dogs seems an unnecessary addition to the scene. At any rate, no one did anything and the epidemic, now also affecting foxes and skunks, eventually reached us in upper New York State. There were stories of foxes walking up to people or being shot in barns. People were bitten and had to be vaccinated. One died. Rabies is a public health problem but the Reaganites seemed to think people should take care of themselves. Now New York State and Vermont try to prevent the spread of new outbreaks by spreading bait spiked with a vaccine around the area with the disease.

This fall we were visited nightly by three raccoons. They pulled down the bird feeder if I left it up. They also visited my neighbor who doesn’t put up with this sort of thing. He trapped one for a friend who was training his hounds. Let’s not think about what happened to that animal. The others, one as big as a small bear (50-60 pounds), disappeared in a few days. I suppose he shot them. The big one was too big to trap, he was too big to climb up the side of the house to reach the bird feeder. I would have preferred the coyotes to get them. Coyotes are one positive sign in our natural environment—our evolving small wolf, tolerant of humanity and smart enough to live among us. And perhaps also the moose, who, during much debate by state game departments on their reintroduction, began reintroducing themselves.

* * *

As for that article in the Sunday NY Times for January 3rd, What’s a Failed Bailed out Banker Worth? — what a red herring! It’s hard to put morality into capitalism. The banker’s worth what he can get. Any income over $1 million? $2 million? $2.5 million? should be taxed at 90%.

1/3/10

2010-01-03T13:49:00.001-08:00

1/3/10

How awful to read of the University of California cutting its budget by hundreds of millions of dollars! The American Empire is such a bore! What happened to the American Republic of which we were all part? Would we have such useless, dehumanizing wars if we had a universal draft? Instead of public education, a decarbonizing economy and affordable medical care we have gated communities, a “volunteer” army, the merrily partying super-rich, floating above a sea of poverty, drugs, abused prisoners and abused illegal immigrants. Every man for himself! So we have community restrictions on rooftop solar collectors and hanging laundry out to dry. Those drafted kids could be working in hospitals and planting trees. Instead we throw our money away on wars and the “war on drugs.”
Then it occurs to me, what is the carbon footprint of a dollar? If we divide the U.S. GDP of about $14.2 trillion into the carbon dioxide emissions of about 5.8 billion metric tons, we get about .8 pound. (Thanks, Jimmy Wales!) This is a measure of the carbon intensity of the economy. But there are only about $400 billion (bills and coins) in circulation. So the dollar in your pocket weighs about 35 times that, or 28 pounds, about 8 pounds in pure carbon. Or if you take account 200 years of fossil fuel combustion, many tens of times that.
I hope I got the zeros right. It’s hard carrying around 230 pounds in my wallet.

The Public Good

2010-01-01T07:24:00.000-08:00

The Public Good

Capitalism works because people strive to become rich. Who knows why they do this? Perhaps people are naturally greedy and competitive, perhaps they learn to be so. But a state whose sole motivation was to enable its citizens to become wealthy would be sorry and short lived. Maintaining a citizen’s liberties (against the state), taking some concern for a citizen’s economic well being, and maintaining the health of the ecosystems without which the state and society would collapse, must be part of any successful state. As Keynes pointed out, the state should not do what individuals can do but it must do what they cannot do. Such things include running public education systems, public transportation systems, prisons, the postal service and probably hospitals and clinics (none of which can be run affordably at a profit), regulating the electrical grid, regulating the use of waterways, regulating land use. Well run public transportation systems, public education systems and systems of medical care provide social goods worth much more (morally speaking, and often economically speaking) than their cost. Most elements of a social safety net (education, unemployment insurance, pensions, medical care) lead to a more prosperous society, and its various monetary benefits (unemployment payments, pensions), as well as its support of parts of the economy through the funding of education, transportation infrastructure and medical care help the economy survive downturns by providing a continuing flow of income from the state.

From this point of view, complaints about the bonuses being handed out by banks that were recently rescued with government loans, and later overpaid, also by the government, for bad debt they had amassed, seem to me disingenuous. The spread in incomes in the United States now (the difference between the richest and the poorest) is similar to that in China or Brazil. High incomes should be taxed and the money redistributed (one way or another) to those who need it (their incomes don’t pay for food, shelter and gas). Similarly, why complain that many of the people who profited by granting and reselling subprime (bound-to-fail) mortgages, are now making money by buying up those same distressed mortgages from banks at substantial discounts, refinancing the mortgages, and selling the new (solvent?) mortgages to entities guaranteed by the government. While it is repugnant that the same people who helped create, and who profited hugely from, the debt crisis, should profit from its resolution, its resolution is a good thing. (Of course, people guilty of fraud should be prosecuted.) For much the same reasons, I find the uproar over very short term trading (trades measured in seconds), being done by those same trading banks the government rescued, also disingenuous. Very short term trades take advantage of technical anomalies in the market and have nothing to do with “value investing” or choosing companies likely to succeed. They are a way of squeezing more money out of the system. Most capital gains (50% 75% ? 90%?) from trades that last less than a second? A minute? A day? should be taken by the government. Or, less punitively, one could tax each short term transaction, as one should tax any transaction of dubious financial value, such as currency hedges, mortgage resales and credit default swaps. A small tax on each transaction, a very small percent of the transaction’s value, payable no matter what happens, makes traders think twice.

Judicious taxing, like regulation, is a way of promoting the public good. We live under a social contract. Do we want a wise government or do we only want to become rich? Redistributing income through taxation is a way of compensating for the social effects of capitalism, a system which tends to create a wide separation between rich and poor, is inherently unjust (the playing field is never level), and if allowed to go on unchecked, tends to destroy democratic government, its own environment and the rule of law. A rule of thumb in Scandinavian countries is that the rich should make no more than ten times the poor. That would never work here, where the rich now make hundreds or thousands of times the poor, but we could aim at 50-100 times. So if a poor family made $25,000, a rich one would find it hard to make more than $1-$2 million.

The point is to use the tax system to support moral values without restraining the activity of the economic society. People will constantly and successfully find ways around any system. Thus clear and simple ways of taxing are better than complex ones.

* * *

Capitalism’s profit motive, properly directed, can be used to solve environmental problems. The cutting and draining of its tropical peat swamp forests for plantations of palm oil and paper pulp trees make Indonesia the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. (The swamps are cut, burned and drained before planting and emit enormous amounts of carbon as they continue to sink and dry out.) The agricultural system is successful. Yields from palm oil plantations compare well with yields from grain fields. The oil from the palms is used for food and for biodiesel, a one-time environmentally correct fuel. One result is that per capita emissions of carbon dioxide in Indonesia, a relatively poor country, are close to those in the developed world. An Indonesian pulp company, one of the developers of natural forests, recently offered to protect a large area of untouched swamp forest that adjoins its drained lands. The company knows how to do this; it has the manpower and expertise; it wants to be paid enough to make the effort profitable. To charge for carbon that is emitted by the practice of forestry or agriculture (a carbon tax) is one thing. To pay for carbon that is not emitted, by not cutting a forest or plowing a field, is another. But some method must be worked out for this if carbon put into the atmosphere by people is to be reduced; and if any natural forests are to be left uncut. Perhaps the carbon saved from the atmosphere by not draining this piece could be subtracted from the carbon lost from the drained lands, for which the company should be charged, so much a ton per year. Of course, there are other, better reasons, for saving tropical forests: their habitat is invaluable, and through their transpiration of moisture and their solar reflectivity they have large effects on local and global climate; but their storage of carbon (and thus their effect on climate) is a more commonly accepted value, perhaps more easily expressible in dollars.

In the United States, new extraction techniques have made the methane in the Marcellus Shale available. The Marcellus Shale underlies parts of the Appalachian range in the eastern United States from south central New York State through much of Pennsylvania to eastern Ohio and West Virginia. This hilly landscape consists of cities, small woodlots and farms, and is cut by many roads. It has been logged, farmed, burned; there are extensive areas of lightly settled logged forest, managed as forest; in parts of the anthracite region of Pennsylvania fires and logging have reduced the vegetation to heath and scrub, an industrial recreation of the heath hen habitat that was turned into forest and farm in New England (this resulted in that bird’s extinction): perhaps prairie chickens transplanted from the Middle West would thrive in the new industrial scrublands. Drilling rigs and gas wells here are not interrupting a virgin landscape, though (each the size of a football field) they will be disturbing a bucolic one. Much of the rural landscape is relatively poor. Drilling for gas represents a windfall of thousands of dollars a year, comparable to the payments dairy farmers in flat windy Saint Lawrence valley of northern New York receive for windmills, which have helped revive the region, and which, despite their effects on birds and bats, are a somewhat less objectionable source of energy. Extracting the gas involves fracturing the rock by pumping in huge volumes of water together with chemicals (a cocktail of 100 or more) like benzene. So extracting methane from the Marcellus shale has the capacity to pollute the groundwaters under the whole region essentially forever, with fracturing fluids and also methane. That the companies have agreed not to drill in the New York City watersheds should tell us something. Taxes might work here. For instance, industrial water use should be taxed. There are many complaints about bottled water plants depleting local ground waters; and the huge volumes of water needed to cool power plants destroy rivers. Toxic chemicals like benzene should be taxed, for whatever use (all questionable bioaccumulating chemicals should be taxed). Such taxes force alternatives: cooling towers that use less water (90% less in some cases, for a small increase in the cost of the plant); nontoxic chemicals to extract gas. For the time being, if the gas can’t be extracted safely, it shouldn’t be. The product of bacteria working on ancient ocean sediments, it isn’t going away. There are alternative energy supplies, such as conservation (insulating houses, more efficient lights, pipelines motors), windmills or photo-voltaic panels. The public good represented by the long term habitability of the landscape is greater than that represented by the income from the gas. Of course this is precisely what capitalist fundamentalists, with their focus on the good produced by each person acting in his immediate self interest, would deny. They say that acting in one’s self interest makes the economy stronger and a stronger economy lets us deal with that polluted groundwater, if it turns out to be a problem. Does evil wear a smiling salesman’s face?

* * *

Forty years ago the Danish geochemist Willi Dansgaard found evidence of long climate cycles and rapid climate change in the Greenland ice. By the early 1970s anyone who knew carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and was aware of the Keeling curve of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere suspected we were in trouble. It took another thirty years and several more ice cores to confirm Dansgaard’s results. Along the way, a rather good idea of the climate over the last 100,000 years was drawn out of ice cores, ocean sediments, tree rings, changing isotopes of oxygen in sea shells. With the present configuration of ocean currents and ice sheets, what happens to the Greenland ice sheet seems to be closely linked to global climate. Rapid warmings or coolings in climate terms are those that occur in three years or a decade rather than centuries and involve changes in temperature of several degrees (up to 15º Fahrenheit or 8.5º Centigrade during the Younger Dryas of 12,800 to 11,500 years ago). The more extreme of those that occurred during the last 90,000 years (the last ice age) seem to have been related to the periodic breakdown of the ice lobes from the ice sheet over Labrador that filled Hudson’s Bay. The earth is very slightly heated from below by the decay of radioactive elements at its core. Hudson’s Bay is shallow. As the ice ground into the bay from the northeast it froze to the rocks and mud of its bottom. But ice is an insulator, thicker ice a better insulator. As the ice thickened over the bay it kept in more and more of the earth’s heat, the heat eventually melted the bottom of the ice, which lost its hold on the mud and rocks of the bay. The whole ice sheet then began to thin and slide. Its seaward sides at the entrance of the bay broke up and sailed as armadas of icebergs across the North Atlantic. After the ice sheet had thinned sufficiently, it froze once again to the bay’s bottom and (since the climate was still, overall, cooling) began to build up once again. The immense release of ice and the thinning of the ice sheet itself, let the climate warm. The melting icebergs chilled the sea and eventually their fresh water, diluting the salty water of the north Atlantic, began to shut down the currents bringing warm tropical water north. The shutdown caused an abrupt cooling (among them, the Oldest, Older and Younger Dryas, though these occurred during a period of general warming, as the ice sheets of the last continental glaciation were breaking up). As the fresh water on the surface of the sea froze and tropical water no longer moved north, warm westerlies stopped blowing across the British Isles and northern Europe. The climate worldwide turned cold, windy and dry. Then as the flow of icebergs stopped and the ice sheet over Labrador rebuilt (its accumulating snows taking water from the north Atlantic) the cold ocean turned saltier, the sea ice was less extensive and the ocean circulation that draws tropical water north started once again. The climate warmed. Such fluctuations are recorded every 1500 years over the last 100,000 years in ice sheets and further back in ocean cores. The basic cause of the 1500 year oscillations are unknown but probably has to do with changing patterns of sea surface temperatures in the tropics. The behavior of ice sheets, such as the flow of icebergs from the sheet over Labrador (Heinrich Events) magnify them. In the last 10,000 years, with no glacial meltwaters to amplify them, the oscillations have been much muted. (The Little Ice Age was one.) Such abrupt fluctuations in temperature and rainfall would have made agriculture a bad (perhaps impossible) adaptation compared with (more mobile) hunting and gathering. Today a large meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet is poised to cool the (warming) climate on the same massive scale.

A tax on carbon would help. Of course a sufficiently powerful economy could organize itself to reverse the warming of the globe. Some proposals are not entirely nuts. (For instance, machines that filter carbon dioxide from the air and convert it, in a more or less energetically neutral way, to inert minerals: several million of them.) This job might be easier than filtering trillions of gallons of groundwater; or removing DDT from the bottom of Lake Michigan.

* * *

How would people live in a new world? Eugene Odum said 40% of any ecosystem should be left alone. Is this enough? Large predators (wolves, jaguars, mountain lions, great horned owls, peregrine falcons, walrus, whales, cod, tuna) have large effects on their ecosystems. Wolves reduce the number of mid-level predators (coyotes, raccoons). Their removal reduces the predation pressure on many songbirds, especially the neotropical migrants, which come north to feed on the abundant insect life of the northern summer. These birds help control the insects that defoliate shrubs and trees, they also eat seeds and the invertebrates of the forest floor. The effects of their predation radiate down through the invertebrate and vegetative world. Similarly great horned owls and goshawks kill crows, another nest predator. (One reason crows pick well lighted roadsides and city parks, and starlings downtown buildings, for roosts, is to escape night hunting owls.) The smaller bird-eating accipiters and falcons eat jays, another devourer of songbird eggs and nestlings. Wolves and mountain lions eat deer. Deer, and other herbivores, influence forest succession by their browsing habits (favoring some species, ignoring others). Seed and seedling eating mice also influence forest succession and are eaten by weasels, foxes, coyotes, hawks and owls. Abundant deer and mice increase the incidence of Lyme disease. Changes in the abundance of large predators cascade through the ecosystem.

Large predators also eat people, though very rarely if they are hunted (and therefore probably not abundant enough to influence the ecosystem, though there is a continuum of influence here). Moose, white tailed deer and dogs also kill people. Mountain lions kill people occasionally, black bears and grizzlies now and then, wolves almost never. Many more people are killed by people, cars and lightning than mountain lions but I think it unlikely large predators will be let inhabit their former ranges in the United States. But who knows? Black bears moved into Las Vegas during a drought in Nevada a few decades ago and a large population now inhabits the city, growing larger (like urban raccoons) on abundant dumpster edibles than country bears and bearing more young. The population is held down by heavy predation by cars. Eurasian wolves, more used to people than North American ones, who move out when people number more than a few per square mile, live among the vineyards and olive groves of Tuscany. Eastern coyotes, a new species, part western coyote, part eastern timber wolf, have colonized the suburban northeast (one was seen in New York’s Central Park). They are doing well among the suburbs and farms, living on rabbits, mice, grasshoppers, cats and deer (mostly fawns). A focus on deer may turn them into a larger animal.

Of course people could perform the part of a large predator by hunting deer (where this isn’t done deer become a problem) and trapping (humanely) mid level predators for their fur (at a profit to themselves)

In formerly forested landscapes (much of humid temperate and tropical earth), large areas of the new forest would be edge. The better soils that once produced tall trees and great numbers of wild animals would be occupied by farms, while forestland would occupy the swamps, steeper hills, poorer soils. Edge environments are favored by hunters. Their berries and browse make them haunts of game (rabbits, grouse, deer) but because they are also haunts of coyotes, foxes, opossum, skunks, crows, jays and raccoons many nesting songbirds reproduce poorly. Edge environments tend to be sinks rather than sources of birdlife. Wide edges are created by frequently logging (or occasionally brush hogging) the border of a forest in a band 100-300 feet wide. The effects of the edge in terms of bird nest predation and a drier microclimate go 100 yards or more into the forest (some claim ten times that) so in a fragmented landscape, even if 40% of it is forest, much of it will be effectively edge. Thus fat clumps of forest are better than skinny ones. In the new world, skinny lines of forest following watercourses connect fat ones, with farms and towns among the woods. But skinny forests can be allowed to mature. Clumps of old evergreens make nesting habitat for predatory birds (cooper’s hawks, sharpshins, merlins, great horned owls) that control the nest predators. Tall deciduous trees hold nests of goshawks. Large coyotes will hunt some of the smaller predatory mammals. The forest will be different from the natural primary forest but modern forests have been manipulated by humans for thousands of years, north temperate forests since people and trees followed the ice north several thousand years ago. The point is to maintain the processes and wildlife essential for the forest’s health; and regard timber as one result of those processes.

A new landscape would also focus on streams. Wide borders of forest (100-300 feet wide), or grassland in the prairie and savannah, would follow streams, taking up some farmland, shading and cooling the water in summer, providing fallen trees to help the current dig pools, letting fertilizing spring and winter floods spread further, absorbing the nutrients running off farmland. Mature forests would cover the steep valleys of tributary brooks. Small streams in farmland would have a buffer of unmowed grassland to catch the soil and nutrients coming off the fields. Green swales would follow the drainage centers of large sloping fields. Aquifer recharge areas would be permanently vegetated. (They could be mowed or lightly grazed.) After 1000 years of dams and streamside cultivation many European streams may be unrestorable (at least culturally) but the memory of the wilderness might let many eastern and middle western American ones can regain their populations of migratory and cold water fish (shad, river herring, alewives, sturgeon, trout). This requires the restoration of river habitat, the removal of some dams, the provision of fish ladders around others, letting rivers flood and allowing patterns of river flow that favor fish.

In regions of good farmland in the American Middle West, 40% of the land will never be left to nature. (Over 90% of Illinois is farmed.) But 15-20% of the landscape in permanent natural vegetation, some of that in lightly grazed pasture, much of it too sloping to plow without the soil eroding anyway, would protect streams, catch the soil drifting off farmland, absorb farmland nutrients and turn them into trees, birds and grass, let runoff water become groundwater and slowly seep downhill into streams. One doesn’t have to restore all the original wetlands along rivers to restore fisheries but can choose the obvious ones: those useful in reducing flooding in populated areas downstream, those needing constant pumping to remain dry enough to farm. Replacing river transport with rail corridors, and thus eliminating locks, dams and much of the levee system on large rivers, would restore native fisheries, reduce nutrients flowing downstream into estuaries, where excess nitrogen is destroying these breeding habitats for marine fish, and eliminate most of the cost of maintaining the river. Given space, rivers maintain themselves.

Human settlements would be more compact, moved back from the riverbank and the shore. This allows rivers to flood, beaches to migrate, seas to rise. A third to a half of the continental shelves would be off limits to fishing, along with much of the open ocean, places where fish congregate to breed, the currents along which sea turtles migrate. Most bottom trawling, which destroys the life of the sea floor, and long drift nets, which catch everything, and which, when lost, continue to fish for decades, filling with fish bones, would be banned. So, probably, would be long lines, which also catch everything (fish, birds, turtles). The top marine predators (seals, whales, porpoises, bluefin tuna, rays, sharks) would be let recover. So would the forage fish on the bottom of the food chain, now fished industrially for meal and oil. More fishermen, in smaller boats, using traps, small nets, hook and line, would catch fewer, more valuable fish.

On land, factories would imitate ecosystems: the waste of one becoming the resources of another in an endless loop. Process water would be recycled, which lets paper mills locate in cities, with their tremendous resources of waste paper, greater than that of tropical forests. (Each sheet of paper reusable 9 times.) Dangerous industrial chemistries such as the chemistry of chlorine and its allies and the industrial use of poisonous metals like cadmium, arsenic, lead and mercury would disappear (or be much more controlled) and with them the accumulation of chlorinated hydrocarbons and metals in human fat (and with that, the growing incidences of mental instability and cancer). Populations would slowly fall, to a quarter of those today—this would take a century or two—and in 50 years those people would use 10% of the energy per capita we do today be comfortable. (So in 200 years total energy use would be 2.5% of today.)Farmers would farm so as to keep soil and nutrients on their fields, which then remain farmable indefinitely, and would think of their farms as part of the larger biological landscape.

The development of rational western society, of which modern capitalism, modern medicine and modern war, are part, has let human populations increase tremendously in the last 200 years (especially the last 50) and made us much more prosperous. For the last century we westerners have been cradled in the strong arms of endless electricity and oil. I have enjoyed it as much as anyone. But the result is that the real biological world is disappearing. We are also poking the climate beast with a sharp stick. Modern capitalism believes in endless growth, it discounts the future for the present, and uses up natural resources as fast as the market (encouraged by advertising) can absorb them. It is totally nuts. We need a capitalism that can deal with economic contraction, a shrinking population, and a natural world that is restorable to provide a constant and limited source of material and an unlimited sense of joy. A capitalism of contraction gets more from less. It would probably require a policy of national savings (to get through the period of a declining work force), taxes on materials rather than wages, long term investments that reduce yearly maintenance costs (efficient houses, cars, machinery; rivers that maintain themselves), a more compact and efficient organization of society (New Yorkers use a fraction of the energy of suburbanites), seeing the past, present and future as connected. Are such ideas antiwestern? They constitute the public good.

Our New World

2009-11-16T07:50:00.000-08:00

Our New World

Much of “The Natural History of the Present” looks back toward the America the Europeans found, the fragrant narcotic ‘natural world,’ even then much modified by its earlier human inhabitants, soon emptied of them by European diseases. Parts look forward to a new world where people once again let nature regain control. To look back to an ideal past is a very Western behavior: the Roman poet Hesiod looked back to a ‘golden age’ from his of iron, so did the Greeks, and the Christians (the Garden of Eden). A golden age formed one of the Hindu cycles of time. Are these memories of the hunter-gatherer life, when at certain seasons fish were there for the taking and at others fruit hung from the trees? We moderns look back to the golden days of childhood, a modern development, when in our memories, we spent long afternoons picking blackberries in the long grass. Audubon clearly saw the end of the golden age of the American wilderness coming. He regretted the loss of the great trees (he complained he never saw a ‘great tree’ in England). He built a sawmill on the banks of the Ohio to saw their trunks, then lost it in the cash squeeze of 1837. He took with his paints to the woods in the hope of other successes. He wrote admiringly of those men who were ‘civilizing’ their landscape by logging and clearing it. What other choice was there? The past is gone and the future may be less susceptible to change than we think. Like John Muir, Audubon had little connection to Native Americans, the true native ‘men of the woods.’

* * *

Plants and animals have always been long distance travelers. Now we move them from place to place by ship and plane. New plants whose chemistries the native insects and microorganisms find unpalatable or poisonous, and so don’t eat, may (as they lack predators, competition or parasites) take over ecosystems. Then, foodless, populations of native plants, animals and invertebrates decline. Native or alien plants and animals may become invasive in ecosystems degraded by logging, settlement, altered water tables or nutrient pollution. Such changes expand habitats for some organisms and shrink them for others. Thus high water tables have let monocultures of silver maple (a native tree) replace the mixed deciduous oakwoods along the regulated middle Mississippi, with the loss of many game animals and birds. White footed mice and white tailed deer have few predators in the fragmented woodlands of the suburban northeast, greatly increase in number, eat ornamental plants and bird food, infect each other (and the local human population) with Lyme disease and prevent regeneration of the forest. Alien plants and animals may take over if they find the habitat to their liking. If they lack competitors are not eaten by insects, microbes or vertebrates (thus lack parasites and predators), their populations are not controlled, and they do become part of the local food web (for instance, by being eaten by an insect which is eaten by a bird). Such organisms include purple loosestrife, Eurasian milfoil, Japanese knotweed, European wild boar. Some of them can probably be controlled by introducing insects specific to them; by encouraging their picking for profit (say, with loosestrife); or with hunting (open season on boar). Introducing insects is risky, since the insects themselves lack local microbial and insect predators, may find other plants to their liking and their populations grow out of control. If the attempt at control works, the introduced insects become food for local birds and insects and introduce the new plants into the local food web. Introduced diseases in trees, many of them fungi (blister rust in pines, phytophora in oaks, chestnut blight, Dutch elm disease, beech decline), are essentially uncontrollable. So may be some introduced insects (perhaps wooly adelgid in Hemlocks and emerald ash borer). These introduced organisms will change the landscape, modifying forests and meadows as much as we, our grazing animals and our nutrients falling from the air. The chestnut blight of the early twentieth century perhaps changed northeastern forests the most by eliminating a common tree and a large and dependable supply of autumn carbohydrates, food for people, bears, deer, buffalo, squirrels, turkeys. Dutch elm disease changed the street profile of American cities from the tall, vase shaped American elms (100 feet high) to the fat stubby profile of Norway maples. After some hundreds of generations the insect and plants will find their populations coming under control as local insects and microbes adapt to them and they become part of the food chain. Some of the plants under attack (such as the American elm, which sets seed before being killed by the Dutch elm fungus) will develop resistance to their diseases. Elms in Europe suffered a catastrophic decline several thousand years ago but recovered. The problem is that plants, whose time between generations is years to decades, take much longer to adapt than most insects and microbes, with a generation time of weeks to minutes. The woods and meadows will adjust to the newcomers but will be different.

How to evaluate such change? In the near term, most such changes (climate shifts, new organisms, more nutrients) makes things worse. More nitrogen from the combustion of fossil fuels falling from the air tends to convert the perennial grasses of Middle Western prairies, whose roots transfer huge amounts of carbon to the soil, to annual grasses, whose carbon storage capacity is negligible. The long term is more difficult to evaluate. In the northeastern United States, Eurasian honeysuckle, distributed with autumn olive and rosa rugosa 50 years ago by state conservation departments to provide food and shelter for game birds, are now considered invasive. They are so in old fields (this was more or less the intention). Honeysuckle forms impenetrable clumps, used by as nesting and foraging sites by warblers and sparrows; their berries are eaten by migrating thrushes. Meadows are unnatural habitat in much of the northeast and the return of the forest would shade much of the honeysuckle out, though, its seeds spread by birds, honeysuckle would colonize openings in the forest left by falling trees or by logging, and so maintain itself in the ecosystem. Some insects feed on honeysuckle and butterflies nectar on it. By growing in openings, honeysuckle would compete with the native trees and herbs (early succession or sun loving species like white and yellow birch, pin cherry, oaks, the spring emphemerals of the forest floor, and the insects and other animals associated with them), that also colonize such openings and maintain the forest. Whether this is good or bad depends on how much the honeysuckle takes over and how it affects the regeneration of the forest. One could argue, for instance, that the silver maple monoculture along the Mississippi is undesirable from the point of view of a more complex ecosystem but there is little to do about it except plant oaks on higher ground as long as water tables remain artificially high. In the case of honeysuckle in the northeastern forest, some honeysuckle (not honeysuckle in every clearing) may simply add to its diversity and its variety of moths, birds and butterflies.

We have to face the question of how much we accept our new world. The survival of Pacific salmon along the northwest coast of North America is an example. Salmon numbers there have been dropping, partly from climate change, partly from dams, partly from degradation of spawning habitat in the rivers and tributary streams, partly from competition with introduced fish. On the Columbia River, introduced shad (introduced from the North American east coast) now are thought to make up most of the missing biomass of salmon, which are in serious decline. Shad were introduced in the early twentieth century and fished mainly for their roe, which was a favorite of eastern gourmands (the fish itself is also a spring delicacy in the northeast). Since the 1980s shad populations in the Columbia River have boomed. There is only so much food and space in the river and the ocean, for species that occupy similar niches: only so much fish of both can survive. Salmon populations are also affected by rising temperatures in the river and the ocean. These are likely to continue to rise, depressing salmon populations further. (Salmon will move north, into the rivers of the Arctic Ocean.) Dams don’t seem to bother shad, a more fragile fish (but one perhaps capable of more rapid reproduction than salmon, though salmon is a weedy fish, capable of rapid reproduction under favorable conditions). Dams can be modified to be more friendly to salmon and river flows adjusted, without sacrificing much of their power. Many other things can also be done for salmon. Ocean fishing, which catches salmon before they reach the river, and so prevents them from spawning, should be stopped (ocean fishing catches about 70% of some declining runs). All the hundreds of small spawning streams whose gravels have been silted in by logging and road construction should be restored by adding gravels, controlling erosion, planting trees, stream by stream. (A good work for a conservation corp of draftees.) Irrigation diversions should be screened so juvenile salmon don’t end up in cornfields, so many to the acre. The restoration of degraded river habitat may do more for restoring Columbia salmon than removing dams. (This varies from dam to dam: unnecessary dams or dams that produce little power or interfere too much with the life of salmon should undoubtedly go.) Thus we can probably have salmon and dams, within climatic limits. We will need some dams in the new solar powered world, to provide base line power and even out the variations in solar supply (the latter the worst use of dams, since the flows have little relation to natural ones, from the point of view of the fish). The Columbia is full of fish, just not those fish that were historically there. This state of affairs can be adjusted but probably not largely changed, especially considering the climatic changes we have put in motion. But improvement in the fish habitat in the river would make life better for everyone living in the river basin.

More Grim Matters

2009-11-13T18:04:00.000-08:00

More Grim Matters

We won’t know when we have passed the point of no return for a changing climate. Current changes are only apparent to butterflies, migratory birds, sea fish and gardeners. At some point, linear changes become catastrophic ones, as temperatures soar, winds howl and natural feedback processes take over. Perhaps one day we will be able to say it was when the earth passed 435 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide plus the carbon dioxide equivalent of other warming gases such as methane and nitrous oxide), perhaps 450 ppm. When feedback processes take over and climate change starts to accelerate, it’s out of our hands. (There are always dangerous, desperate measures.) The atmosphere now has a concentration of carbon dioxide plus carbon dioxide equivalents of 430 ppm (390 ppm Carbon dioxide, 50 ppm other warming gases). This is about 150 ppm above the ‘natural’ background of 280 ppm and 20 ppm below the predicted ‘tipping point’ of 450 ppm (an educated guess), at which point climate change becomes nonlinear. Essentially we are at the point where feedback processes (methane bubbling out of tundra pools, melting Arctic ice, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets) take hold.

Our economic lives have tremendous momentum. To decarbonize industrial infrastructure (turn carbon producing industry into photo-voltaics or nuclear power; create energy reductions on the scale needed) takes fifty years, if one replaces 2% of the carbon producing infrastructure every year. Fifty years is the time such energy shifts (from wood to coal, or coal and oil to electricity made from coal and oil) have taken in the past, under purely economic incentives. To insulate all buildings, replace inefficient motors, appliances, light bulbs, pipeline designs, inefficient industrial processes with efficient ones also takes time. Because doing all that involves using carbon based infrastructure (trucks, trains, mining machinery), and because the economy and population will continue to grow, the carbon content of the atmosphere is virtually certain to rise another 100-150 ppm before the changeover (whenever we start it) is complete. The climate system also has tremendous momentum and much warming is stored up in it but not yet expressed. With the best will in the world (turning the system around in, say 20 years), we’re in for a wild ride. But we haven’t yet started.

A grim outlook, perhaps: even if we save energy with more efficient houses, cars, light bulbs, electrify the economy with photo-voltaic panels or nuclear power (this saves the 60-70% of carbon wasted in converting fossil fuels to electricity, the 90% of it wasted in powering automobiles), stop overfishing the oceans, stop destructive farming practices, stop engaging in polluting industrial chemistries, give poor third world women more control over their lives so they limit the number of their children), the earth is still going to warm (4ºC? 9ºC?), sea level rise (3'? 7’? 80'?), rains beat down or fail, glaciers melt, reservoirs dry up, the oceans acidify, ocean currents slow. On the other hand, if we listen to the economic optimists and burn up all the available fossil fuels in the next 100-400 years (the speed of depletion depends on the rate of use), we will certainly see catastrophes: a temperature rise of 9-20ºC, collapsing forests, Arctic farms, a sea level rise of 80-400 feet (putting modern coastal settlements below the cleansing waves). The richest or best organized among us will be able to deal with the changes for a while. When fossil fuels are gone, so is easily obtainable energy, and unless a technological society capable of making solar voltaic panels, or solar thermal devices, and probably nuclear power plants, survives, the people at the tropical poles will live in a permanent stone age, growing some food, hunting animals, taking their hot baths in mineral springs at the edge of the sea.

* * *

Culture provides life with meaning. Science, part of culture, tells stories that explain the world. Without culture, we are reduced to eating, breathing, defecating, perhaps reproducing (but how to raise the children? Why bother?): the fate of stranded men like Robinson Crusoe. I write because I want to be part of the ongoing dialogue between people and their culture, people shop to define themselves in their culture (what they can afford, the objects they choose to buy), children are brought up in ways that conform or don’t conform to cultural norms. Culture defines our view of the future and the past. As a plains Indian remarked, when the buffalo were gone, life was over. His people defined themselves by their relationship to the buffalo; without buffalo, life became meaningless. Modern lives are defined by their place in the so-called meritocracy of rationalist western society and culture. Western material lives (hot running water, clean clothes, abundant food, nuclear weapons) are the product of that rationalist culture. We westerners live apart from nature in a man-made world of sidewalks, houses, cars. In a hunting and gathering culture people are seen as separate from nature (which they explain with different stories and which may be terrifying) but also as part of it. Such people are far better observers of their natural surroundings than we, and far better integrated with them. With the energy from fossil fuels, we have constructed a heated, well washed world apart from the messy chaotic natural world. So the scientist sits in his laboratory, the banker in his office, and paved roads penetrate the countryside. Our rationalist approach (together with fossil fuels) has let us understand the natural world in a way the hunter never would, though he understood his place in that world better than we. Our world is a mechanical one, of cars, roads, furnaces, fans (for instance, to move the mephitic air from cavernous chicken houses). In this world, nature for the most part is incidental, and put to use.

* * *

Empires collapse when they run out of resources, or when, through no fault of their own, those resources are compromised by nature herself. (A drying climate, erupting volcanoes, tsunamis are examples.) Many, perhaps most, empires expand their populations, their use of resources and their conquests of other lands with no thought of the future. To an extent, hunting and gathering bands may have done this too and so slowly forced each other into new habitats. Growth equaled success and human fertility let populations cope with great losses. Rome began to falter after it conquered the poorer agricultural peoples of northern Europe (Gaul, Britain, Germany). These new provinces, unlike the richer older civilizations of the eastern and southern Mediterranean littoral, did not return a profit—the cost of keeping them was more than the territories brought in. And soils near home wore out under a more and more capitalist exploitation. The Sumerian empire failed as its soils salted up from heavy summertime irrigation and as new lands to bring under irrigation ran out. (But the Sumerians lasted longer than the modern West has.) The Hohokum empire of southern Arizona faced the same problem and survived by rotating its fields on a ten year growing cycle. The Anasazi civilization of Chaco Canyon probably collapsed because of a long drought (the flowering of the civilization corresponded with a period of above average rainfall in the Southwest). The drought came after soils had been depleted by decades or centuries of continuous corn; and after the intensive cutting of pinion pine for firewood (for cooking and to fire pottery) and ponderosa pine for building timbers (for monumental shrines and dwellings) had changed the local ecosystems (removing some of their food resources) and accelerated sheet erosion on the uplands, preventing regeneration of the trees and increasing the likelihood of flooding and downcutting of streams.

The modern West has taken the whole world as its resource base. It is changing the atmosphere by its emissions; its rivers and coasts by dams, erosion and nutrient pollution; its soils by the relentless growing of cereal crops; the planet’s other organisms (frogs, dolphins, songbirds, tigers) by its pollutants and expansive settlement patterns. Driven by the search for profit, it does this essentially without a thought, shedding few tears of regret (growth is necessary, a platted suburb looks better than a messy meadow, you can see wonderful nature shows on TV). The human population continues to grow. While the current biomass of ants is greater, humans have the greatest biomass of any animal in their size class to occupy the earth. Perhaps more people are alive now than ever lived. This is a measure of our evolutionary success. Every successful plant or animal changes the planet. But few have changed it so greatly, or will take as much of it with them, as we.

Growth

2009-11-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

Growth

Environmentalists and economists view the natural landscape differently. One sees it as something to be turned into saleable goods (grain, timber, furs, building lots), one sees it as something good in itself, connected to other ecosystems, and maintaining a growing, cyclical or simply varying state of biological production. Their differences are for the most part irreconcilable, despite recent attempts, over the last two or three decades, to place a dollar value on the work of nature. Farmland, a necessary use for most civilizations, provides a good example. In a growing agricultural society farmland, partly because of its extent, changes the natural environment considerably, reducing some species, increasing others, changing the state of water courses, changing farmed soils. Such changes in the natural landscape can be minimized, farmed soils conserved or improved, nutrients kept on the farm (and out of rivers and lakes), and some of the natural biota maintained, by using regenerative agricultural practices and giving nature room to work (that is, leaving large parts of the landscape unfarmed). The natural productivity of the ecosystem, and the work it does, will be reduced, some parts of it eliminated. For instance, large predatory animals (wolves, mountain lions) rarely survive in agricultural regions, partly because they compete with humans by eating domestic animals, partly because their prey animals (deer, moose, beaver) are too few for them to maintain viable populations. The connections among patches of suitable habitat are too few. But if agricultural practice is enlightened and takes into account the needs of the natural world (rarely the case now because regenerative practices are seen as limiting profits) and limits itself to a proportion of the landscape (say, 60-70% of any ecosystem, which is seen as limiting real estate profits), both the natural world and the agricultural/industrial society can survive.

In a capitalist world, land tries to maximize its value. So farmland is over fertilized to grow more crops, polluting ground water and waterways, and takes over as much of the landscape as it can. River floodplains, with their connected swampland—land eminently useful as natural habitat but of no value in a capitalist economy—tries to become dry, saleable land. Controlling a river with dams and levees creates new dry land in the river’s floodplain; and also hydroelectricity; water for drinking, irrigation and industry; a mode of transportation. The amount spent on controlling the river, which continues for as long as the riverworks are maintained, raises the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of all these uses, hydroelectricity is the only one that comes close to paying the costs of river development, which is—in terms of costs and benefits—a loss funded by the state, whose benefits such as transportation and water supply could have been provided otherwise, if one ignores the value of the newly created dry land (its value growing daily as farmland becomes factory or subdivision). River development is a windfall to riverside landowners and land speculators, whose profits also add to the GDP. What are lost are the fisheries the river provided, the timber and collectable mushrooms, the habitat for migratory birds, for fur bearing and game animals, for spawning fish, the work of the floodplain in storing and cleaning water, in controlling flooding downstream, in removing nutrients (and using them to grow fish, animals and trees), in regulating the pulse of fresh water to the marine estuary to which the river flows, and to which the spawning fish of the estuary (many of them commercial species) are adapted: the whole seasonal background of human life. These values require no human input and the most valuable of them (nutrient removal, flood control) are not counted as part of the GDP. Income—from harvested fish, recreational hunting and fishing, harvested timber—count in the GDP. Adding things up, the additional cost of purifying water by communities all along the river, of flood control, of lost fisheries and timber, of collectable mushrooms, of recreational use, of lost marine fisheries often exceeds the value of the hydroelectricity, the production of floodplain farmlands, the navigational use. In some streams the loss becomes clear and dams are removed. In rivers with great hydroelectric potential like the Columbia, development is probably profitable on a cost-benefit analysis, though even there, a healthy salmon fishery would, at current prices for fish (and the increased value of recreational fishing), rival the value of the power. Without the dams the whole pattern of settlement along the river and its industrial evolution would have been different. (No aluminum industry, for instance, and thus no manufacturer of aircraft like Boeing.) Nowadays the power could be generated by solar thermal collectors in the deserts west of the Cascades, or by photo-voltaic panels on roofs of houses, parking lots and warehouses anywhere in the Columbia valley. With solar systems, the power from water stored behind dams provides a useful backup for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind blow; but less water is required and the dams have more flexibility of operation—they can make more concessions to the needs of fish. On the other hand, power from dams in flatland streams (the Mississippi valley, the lower Amazon basin) doesn’t pay the costs of construction and maintenance. Such dams require more land per watt than photo-voltaic collectors (often criticized for the land they take up). Half the power reservoirs in the Amazon emit more carbon to the atmosphere in the form of methane from decaying vegetation left in the reservoir during construction, or growing and dying in it, and washed into it from above, than a coal-burning power plant producing the same amount of electricity.

* * *

The push for development comes partly from population growth: more people need more farms, more land to be turned into saleable real estate. The idea of living within nature has not applied to human settlement in any serious way since the adoptions of agriculture 7-10,000 years ago. (All this time I am sure some people mourned the end of fish runs, of migrations of gazelles, of great trees—for instance, of the cedars of Lebanon, their wood prized by the Egyptians for its durability and sweet smell.) Agricultural peoples carved out their niche from nature: fields from forests, irrigated fields from deserts, floodplain fields from diked rivers. Forests provided wood for brickyards, iron foundries, buildings, ships, cookfires; rivers provided water and power and took away waste. The corn that could be grown on a floodplain field in the Middle West was marketable and edible, more desirable than a hatful of wild mushrooms or a dozen muskrat pelts.

Much of the problem with modern human settlement patterns is their extent. Temperate forest recovers rapidly from logging (full recovery can take 300-2000 years, depending on the forest—redwoods take the longest) and the berries and shrubs that colonize the bare ground make habitat for the animals of the edge. So a watershed’s forests could be logged on a long rotation (300-500 years in the eastern United States, 150 in some environments), with some areas (steep slopes, stream edges out 100 feet) left uncut, or cut more lightly (light, infrequent selective cuts). Such cutting would preserve the different ages of forest habitat in the watershed (old growth, edge, young forest) and the mix of tolerant and intolerant, deciduous and coniferous, trees; minimize loss of nutrients and water; protect fisheries and streams (and thus the land downstream). Such forests would be managed for their place in the water cycle and as habitat for their plants and animals as well as for their marketable timber. How can this be done? The timber after 50 or 80 years is too valuable, the time too long, the need to make a mark on the land too great.

Capitalism has successfully harnessed human greed, which is unstoppable. People build up to the banks of rivers or the shores of the sea and are driven out in floods, and expect the government to correct the problem. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries milldams were built every few hundred yards on northeastern rivers (low dams, often passable by fish), turning them into a series of ponds. The edges of the ponds silted in from erosion from agriculture in the watershed and the dams were finally abandoned for steam or electrical power. The freed rivers downcut through the silt to form single channel streams, unconnected with their former floodplains and wetlands: a loss no one foresaw. Homemade levees at the mouths of small salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest destroy the nursery habitat for the fish but carve out a few flat acres for a homestead. The millions of acres of the Mississippi valley that were drained and developed under the nineteenth century Swampland Act would be immensely valuable today in maintaining the flow and fisheries of the river, and in reducing the nutrients that reach the Gulf. The need to grow—the existence of land that could potentially be used—made preserving them impossible. The Progressive Movement of the early twentieth century rationalized such use as turning the environment to maximum human benefit (to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, a Benthamian proposition). Farmers living near rail lines who sued railroads for the fires that resulted from the sparks flying from locomotive smokestacks that burned down their haystacks and barns found a similar rationale less benevolent. They invariably lost their suits—progress, in the form of railroads, was regarded as the greater good. Perhaps this argument started to weaken with the regulation of contaminants in food and drugs under Teddy Roosevelt.

* * *

Our current effect on the environment (especially the changing climate) forces us to look at nature as a good in itself, not as something to be manipulated for human use. But how can we live in nature? We haven’t done it since people lived among the great herds of animals in the Pleistocene. That way of life lasted tens of thousands of years; and hunting peoples regularly burned forests and grasslands, hunted some animals to extinction, ditched swamps to favor certain trees or fish, affected the evolution of herbivores. The effect of people on the natural world runs along a continuum. Geographers use ways to measure it, such as energy use per capita (the more, the more the environmental impact), the size of the American corn crop (the greater the crop, the greater the effect on farmland, rivers, estuaries), the rate of growth of population, or of economic output; the land required to support each person (the ‘ecological footprint’). Technological development is not necessary for the destruction of an environment or the collapse of the population that depends on it. A rise in population of microbes, sheep or people beyond the carrying capacity of their environments will do that, though the long term damage to the environment is likely (but not necessarily) less than that of a technologically advanced civilization with its mines, waste dumps, ubiquitous chemical contamination. (The banned industrial chemicals released by melting glaciers are once again accumulating in Swiss alpine lakes.) An agricultural population that puts too much pressure on its soils can collapse as easily as a technologically advanced one that overwhelms many natural systems at once.

A focus on nature is totally new for us; it means giving nature room to work. Modern people can consolidate their lives into linear cities, and recycle their biological and manufactured wastes into resources, but the natural world needs room to work: 40% of any ecosystem left to itself was Eugene Odum’s estimate, not a bad one. Letting nature work means the end of expansive growth. It means halving the size of the American corn crop, as a quarter of cornland goes into hayfields and another quarter into annual grasses like rye and wheat. Crop rotation reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticides, greatly reduces soil erosion and helps control runoff of nutrients and pesticides into streams. A focus on nature means putting enough land, farmland or suburbs, into unused (or lightly used) habitat to reduce the runoff of soil, water and nutrients into streams to something near aboriginal levels (that 40% of the landscape in natural habitat, some of which can be in one’s back yard). It means recreating riverside wetlands and connecting separated natural habitats so plants and animals can move around us. It means reducing energy use in the US by 75-90% and keeping carbon emissions per person to a fraction of what they are now. It means opening up streamside wetlands (buying farmland, moving houses) so rivers can flood and fish can spawn. It means moving permanent structures back from the river or the beach (at least 20-30 feet above flood level or mean high tide; beyond the surges of storms or hurricanes) and being ready to move riverbank and coastal settlements back further as the sea rises (7 feet by 2100 is a reasonable planning figure). It means banning hormone-mimicking chemicals that accumulate in animals, plants and people; controlling the use of heavy metals like lead and mercury; and phasing out the industrial chemistry of chlorine. It means falling human populations, at least until their footprints match their environments. It means a more egalitarian world, less third world poverty, more women with control over their lives

Little of this seems likely, some, such as drinkable rivers, is probably impossible. Wars over resources, over Australian iron ore or North American water, are much more likely our future.

* * *

For the last few hundred years westerners have lived with the idea of progress. In the west, progress in understanding the world (a scientific outlook) became part of controlling and exploiting it (a capitalist impulse? this was less so, say, in China) and coincided with the west’s beginning to dominate the rest of the planet. As agricultural practices improved and industrialization revolutionized the production of soil nutrients and the transportation of crops, people ate more, and as public health measures (such as vaccination and better sewage disposal) improved human health, progress in ‘scientific’ understanding coincided with a tremendous growth in human population. Growth and progress were intertwined. Progress meant growth, in population, land area, military power, personal income. The idea of progress replaced the notion that human societies are cyclical: that societies rise and fall, like the prosperity of the individual, while the human heart remains the same. We think of moderns as rising above racism, sexism and homophobia and while there is a progressive strain in modern western thought, other strains, usually associated with fundamentalist interpretations of the traditional near-eastern religions of the west, are quite reactionary; and despite the tremendous sentimental streak in western culture (a product of our wealth, that insulates us from biological realities), we seem as capable of cruelty to each other as any Assyrian or Roman. But progress in understanding the earth, or in human relations, and growth are not the same; and a society can advance in understanding of the world and not (or not necessarily) grow in overall income; for instance, it might use new knowledge to modify its environmental impact. The idea of the usefulness of science is very old—think of Ariadne showing Theseus how to escape from the Minotaur’s cave—and I am not arguing against it. ‘Progress’ in the future may mean a different, perhaps ’better,’ more comfortable life with less use of natural space or of materials; some say for more people, some for fewer. (But aren’t we comfortable enough, when we must schedule exercise at the gym?) ‘Better’ is a normative word and depends on point of view. I fail to see the advantage, except militarily, of more people—one or one-and-a-half billion are enough. I would prefer some jungle with tigers to remain and some old deciduous forest with elk and wolves, out beyond the suburban edge. While the human heart remains mysterious, the end of growth is not the end of rational thought. Still, it raises some practical problems.

These are being faced by declining industrial cities in the American Middle West. The Middle West has been losing jobs for decades as industrial production becomes more efficient or moves to lower cost labor markets. As people leave and housing deteriorates, neighborhoods fall apart. Some cities attempt to consolidate neighborhoods, some of which remain viable, in order to maintain services (water, roads, police, sewers) which otherwise become unaffordable. Ideally, many abandoned neighborhoods would become parkland, their houses dis-assembled, the lumber and metals in them sold, their roof shingles and wallboard recycled, their foundations crushed and filled in. The parks would be planted with native, or more or less native species (perhaps, with an eye on the future, those from 300-500 miles to the south), and so be more or less self-maintaining—not Mr. Olmstead’s charming vistas of green slopes and groves, whose meadows require constant input. Neighborhood associations could maintain playing fields fertilized with urban composts provided by the city. Double or triple size lots would have vegetable gardens and orchards. Geese or sheep would mow the Olmsteadian meadows, the availability of the grass the shepherd’s payment. Such parks, if well designed, let nature back into the city, reclaim natural habitat, let people inhabit the more geographically desirable areas (such as breezy ridgelines), and protect aquifer recharge areas and streams. Decline is turned into something positive, letting cities adapt themselves to the landscape in a way the pressures of development (that is, shortsighted profit taking and greed) prevented when they were growing. The hopefulness of this sort of consolidation may be difficult to grasp amidst an ideology that growth is good. It requires accepting the place demanded by nature and some unpleasant realities. Such matters were not grasped after the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Much (probably most) of New Orleans is indefensible in the modern world. Relative sea level has risen three feet in southern Louisiana in the last century, a product of rising seas and the subsidence of delta muds. The muds subside from their own weight, from being starved of annual replenishment in floods by dams and levees, and from slow collapse caused by the pumping out of underground oil and water. That is, the subsidence is largely manmade and could be slowed, but at a cost in lost real estate and in oil company profits. Low-lying areas in New Orleans that flooded once will flood again. Such areas should be turned into parks and their inhabitants (largely poor and black) offered a stake on higher ground, financed by a tax on those who benefit from the subsidence. But doing something like this requires accepting that some things can’t be fixed—that a rising sea on a sinking coast can’t be held back—with a disastrous racial twist in the United States. The whole management of the Mississippi Delta and of low-lying coasts everywhere is a disaster. The mangroves, marshes and coral reefs of sea coasts are important for coastal protection and marine fisheries. Coastal areas should not have permanent structures within the reach of high tides or storm surges but—rich or poor—everywhere in the world they do. In general, planning for a rise in sea level of seven feet by 2100 is a reasonable goal for coastal development, but much more in southern Louisiana because of accelerated subsidence caused by the erosive power (eroding the delta marshes) of the rising seas.

An economy that does not grow supporting a population that does is not a good thing, though the current American economy could probably support a billion people with a comfortable standard of living: an adequate diet, education, warmed or cooled houses, running water, transportation, communication, medical care, a room of one’s own. Income would be radically redistributed. What environmentalists want is not necessarily an economy that doesn’t grow in income but one that doesn’t grow in materials use or in the use of space—so one in which the wastes of one process become the resources of another; the natural world is not assaulted with bioaccumulating chemicals; and nature is left room to work. The process of getting more from less is probably self-limiting, and always requires energy, but who can tell—that is a matter of human ingenuity.

While nature, and the growing of fresh food, require space, industrial production and human housing don’t require much of it. Unfortunately, both settlement and industry are usually located in the wrong places, along coasts, on river banks, on major estuaries. Photo-voltaic panels and ground source heat pumps set certain lower limits (both require more space than oil fired burners or fossil fuelled power plants). A world that produces its food without harmful chemicals, without eroding its soils, or degrading its streams or rivers (a so-called regenerative agriculture) and leaves half the landscape alone for nature to work, is probably already at its limits of population. In much of South Asia, Europe and coastal North America, the print of human settlement is too large for the natural world to function properly.

A population that is falling should be able to manage a falling economy. The initial period is difficult because of the increased proportion of old people. This can be partly managed by letting people work longer, partly by better preparing young people (abandoning fewer of them to poverty and prison), partly by a universal military draft with an option to do other work. Many growing economies depend on growth to raise the income of the poorer parts of the population. A shrinking or steady state economy would have to redistribute income to maintain some sense of fairness, and popular support. Egalitarianism has its advantages. The less the gap between rich and poor in a society, the better the quality of life for the average person. To an extent, quality of life is determined less by income itself than by income equality. Thus children from the highest social group, the richest 20%, in (richer) England and Wales are more likely to die than those in the lowest social group (the poorest 20%) in poorer, more egalitarian Sweden. Similarly, wealthy English schoolchildren have poorer test scores than wealthy Finnish children—though better than poor Finnish children. At any rate, an economy that shrinks in accordance with its population should be able (more or less) to maintain its level of personal income.

Whatever that means. Beyond an (easily reachable) point, human happiness and wellbeing have little to do with income. Human needs are few, wants infinite. Most of what we buy and expect is culturally determined. American houses in 2008 are more than twice the size of those 50 years ago, while families are smaller. Western societies in the 1960s used a fraction of the energy of today (one-seventh of today in France and Japan) and were ‘modern.’ We buy to meet our cultural expectations, to soothe our anxieties or to impress or neighbors, less than to satisfy our material needs or provide for our comfort. (‘Comfort’ in terms of modern levels of heat, living space, running hot water and personal hygiene arrived for the mass of people in the 1950s.) Our public priorities suffer from the same lack of perspective. Much of the money the US spends on its armed forces could be spent elsewhere, and the soldiers, many of whom sign up because of lack of economic opportunity in their towns, employed in doing something socially useful. (The two trillion dollars spent in Iraq and Afghanistan could have solarized our energy supply and changed our health care system but we wouldn’t have spent the money for that.) Our hired military forces don’t keep us safe, they bring us prestige and let us engage in expensive and unwise military adventures, that would never be undertaken with a people’s army of draftees, trained by a small core of professionals, the proper army for a democracy, since it brings the implications of foreign policy home. I see nothing to fear and much to hope for in a shrinking population and a shrinking economy—better food, a working natural environment, more open space in cities, cleaner rivers, fish runs, birds moving through the trees and migrating over our heads.

Sustainability?

2009-08-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Sustainability ?

The idea of the balance of nature and of people’s sustainable use of nature are human notions that come from looking at nature from relatively short periods of time. They likely have limited application in the natural world.

After the last glaciation, the temperate world reassembled itself from seeds that arrived on foot, in poop, in beaks, in the stomachs of fish, or on the wind. Plants moved north, their seeds carried by birds, squirrels, ants, high winds, floods, accompanied by animals that ate them. People were part of these assembling landscapes. In Europe the closest relatives of Homo sapiens , the Neanderthal people, went extinct about 30,000 years ago, leaving modern people, with their spears and firesticks, along with mammoths, as the major influence on the biotic environment. The continental glaciers began to retreat about 20,000 years ago, and sea level rose (eventually by 360 feet), forcing people and animals inland, off the continental shelves. The climate moderated (and dried further south), forests moved north, and the hairy elephants found their habitat growing smaller, their predators more aggressive, life more difficult.

The primeval forests of temperate Europe and North America are about six thousand years old. Probably from the beginning, people burned them. Perhaps people were used to savannah and steppe. Australians burned to ‘clean’ the land and make travel easier, thus converting brushlands to grass and eliminating the food of many native animals. Burning northeastern American forests thinned the trees and pruned and invigorated the understory, which regrew, and whose new leaves, stems and berries fed many birds and animals, increasing by several times the abundance of game animals (grouse, rabbits, deer). Burning created forests of large old nut-bearing trees. Some North American landscapes—the grassy meadows with elk and buffalo in the forests of Kentucky, the scrub oak and berry barrens of New England, home of the heath hen, which disappeared as its landscape was converted to closed forest or farm—may have been burned continuously for several thousand years: people had inhabited these places before the forest was there. Oysters became abundant in northeastern estuaries about 4000 years ago, as the rise in the sea level slowed, and soon after became a major part of the native diet. Abundant fish and shellfish made coastal lands desirable and Native Americans ate a lot of both: the largest oyster shells and fish skeletons are found at the bottom of Indian middens. Fire could make some environments less ‘sustainable.’ The extensive longleaf pine forests of the coastal Southeast were maintained by human burning and without fire succeed to mixed oak and hickory forest—an environment more productive of game animals. Similarly the slash pine forests of Florida were produced by Indians using fire to drive deer, which became less abundant in those forests than in the mixed scrub that preceded them. (All the same, deer were phenomenally abundant in the aboriginal Southeast.) Red spruce, the signature tree of the uplands of New York State and New England for the nineteenth century loggers, became abundant in that northern hardwood forest relatively recently, just in time for their slow-growing trunks to produce the 2-3 foot thick logs whose sawn joists now hold up the floors of New York City apartments. Abundance in the forests and oceans was produced by chance, competition and time—that is, by the long history of these environments—and by the restriction of human tools for the most part to stone axes, digging sticks, bows and arrows, bone needles, fire. As more extensive agriculture began to replace foraging and horticulture, as animals were domesticated, and the use of iron and burned brick replaced renewable materials, people got shorter, less healthy and more abundant, and the balance between the civilized world and the natural worlds shifted.

* * *

The idea of ‘the balance of nature’ comes from the typical J-shaped curve of population growth: populations of animals tend to level off after a period of exponential growth. Animal populations are limited by weather (in itself or through its effects on food plants), competition, parasites and predators. The effects of food supply, parasites, and microbial predators are often density dependent. The parasite that limits red grouse populations in Scotland is weather dependent and so the grouse population fluctuates irregularly. Red grouse would have more large predators (peregrine falcons, owls, foxes), which might or might not affect their populations, if they weren’t eliminated by gamekeepers. Icelandic ptarmigan are hunted by gyrfalcons and snowshoe hares in the Canadian arctic by lynx. Both prey animals follow regular 7-10 year cycles of increase and decline, that of the hare followed, at a remove, by the lynx. The large predators don’t cause the cycles, which are thought to be density dependent. Density dependent cycles are often controlled by the abundance of food plants (that is, by competition: thought to be the case in the hare) or by parasites, microbial or multicellular, probably the case with the ptarmigan.

Wolves in Yellowstone Park seem to keep elk populations about 30% below what plants and the weather would allow, with benefits to the landscape (the recovery of aspen groves along streams, the return of beaver and many songbirds, aggradation of stream beds, healthier populations of trout). Declining elk populations can however be eliminated by wolves, as mountain lions are eliminating remnant populations of bighorn sheep in the California Sierra (keeping the terrified sheep above snowline in winter), or wolves reduce small populations of moose in Alaska. Insect populations often go through rapid increases, controlled only by a disease (as in gypsy moth caterpillars), a change in the weather, or the elimination of the food supply (as in spruce budworm outbreaks in mature balsam fir forests in Atlantic Canada, which end with the burning of the forest). Outbreaks are probably the result of weather conditions, along with abundant food. (The explosion of pine bark beetles that is killing million of acres of tree in the western United States, Canada and Alaska is probably caused by the significantly warmer winters and longer summers that allow populations of the insects to build up, as well as by a century of poor forest management that has left a population of vulnerable trees.) Insect populations may increase more than a million times over ‘normal’ and overwhelm their predators (wood warblers foraging on spruce budworm in Canada, for instance). With gypsy moth caterpillars, a virus eventually infects the expanding population and kills most of the insects. In between outbreaks, predation by white footed mice on gypsy moth egg cases is thought to control the population. Red tides in the ocean (populations of single celled dinoflagellates toxic to vertebrates that color the water red) occur where weather and nutrient supply are favorable (warm, nitrogen-rich seas: for instance, off the west coast of Florida). Red tides disappear when the nutrients are gone (though they produce more in tons of rotting fish), or when weather or currents disrupt them (a matter of ‘chance’).

The ‘balance of nature’ is an ideal formulation of a messy, chaotic natural world. ‘Control’ in nature is not the same as ‘control’ on a factory assembly line. The natural world changes, partly because of weather, partly because of its own internal dynamics and the trajectory its history has put it on, partly from the influence of solar irradiance and plate tectonics, and human influence on this world is only partly predictable.

* * *

‘Sustainability’ competes with capitalist economics. The abundance of animals and trees in North America bewitched the Europeans but they lost no time into converting the landscape into something more marketable (logs, fish oil, salted meat, farms). No timber company or landowner is going to wait 300 years to harvest a mature red spruce or white pine, 150-300 to harvest mature red oak or sugar maple, 500 years for an eastern hemlock, 700 years for a coastal Douglas fir or redwood. No capitalist society is going to let enough of the natural landscape remain in forest, grassland or swamp (a reasonable number is 40-60%) to let that landscape function in a real way, with herbivores, predators, insects, amphibians, change, chance, fish, though over the long term such management may be more profitable. (Over that long a term we are all dead.) Sustainability in a coppiced medieval woodland meant the trees that sprouted from stumps could be cut every ten or fifteen years for fuel (the ‘sustained yield’) with some trees allowed to mature further for building timbers. Such forests are very different from native ones (for one thing, they produce very little timber and mast) but provide some habitat for birds, for deer and boar, mice, voles, frogs, mushrooms. The tree roots hold the soil and minimize erosion and (perhaps) loss of nutrients after a cutting cycle.

Formerly sustainable agricultural landscapes often depended on the health of the surrounding forest. Paddy rice in the Philippines and Indonesia depended on manure from water buffalo, which were fed on forage harvested from the forest. Tropical soils are in general poor. The fertility of the rice paddy came partly from the forest (through water and manure), partly from nitrogen fixing Azolla plants growing in the paddy’s water, partly from insects and plankton recycled through the fish that colonized the paddy. The mineral content and seasonal availability of the water that fed the paddy depended on the health of the whole forested watershed, which also produced fuel, nuts and fruits, medicines and building material. Logging the forest destroyed the water source and removed the forest’s other fruits. So the paddy was sustainable within limits. Too many people, or too much demand put on the forest for other income, destroyed the system.

* * *

Like large old trees, Atlantic salmon were once abundant in northeastern rivers. (Shad and river herring were more so and their ranges extended south, into the Middle Atlantic states.) When the Europeans arrived in the 1600s Atlantic salmon had been fished for several thousand years by settled populations of Native Americans, though ones in which salmon outnumbered people by 1000 to 1. For the last several hundred of those years many of the natives were farming peoples (horticulturalists). The European settlers of the 1600s and 1700s were also farmers, but they grew crops for market as well as for subsistence, and changes in the rivers caused by their more extensive and intensive use of the landscape reduced the landscape’s suitability for fish. Fishing for subsistence and to sell reduced the numbers of fish. Dams cut off rivers to fish migration, siltation shallowed them and covered spawning gravels with mud, cutting trees along their banks let the water warm in summer. Without the forest, summer water levels were lower and without trees to fall into them, rivers lost their deep pools. High rates of fall and winter runoff from cleared ground scoured out fish nests. The logs in spring log drives killed fish directly. The economic outlook of the Europeans, the pattern of European settlement, the density of settlers, made their settlement (as far as the rivers were concerned) ‘unsustainable.’

Much the same thing has happened in the oceans. Postwar fishery biologists mistook the ability of fish populations to recover from fishing. It was thought that catching a large percent of the population yearly would, by reducing competition, let the young fish grow faster and produce a larger number of fish indefinitely. But taking most of the large fish has an evolutionary effect on a population of fish. The fish that breed at earlier ages, when they are smaller, produce more young, and begin to dominate the population. But smaller female fish produce fewer and less viable eggs, so the population becomes less able to reproduce itself. Weather also strongly affects the survival of juvenile fish. A population of poor breeders reduced by bad weather finds it harder to recover. Predation on fish eggs and larvae by other fish and invertebrates have a larger effect. Trawling for fish also destroyed the bottom habitat, turning the coral and invertebrate forests of the seafloor into muddy plains. Development and nutrient runoff reduced the quality of breeding and nursery habitat in the estuaries where most marine species breed and grow to maturity. The forage fish on which large predatory fish feed were fished for food for farmed fish and for chicken and pigs. So over time, settlement and fishing pressure also made the marine fishery ‘unsustainable’. The continuing development of fish farming and the exploitation of new stocks of wild fish means fish will be available until (like oil) one day they aren’t.

* * *

Energy flows through living things, letting them grow and maintain themselves, and ends up lost to space as heat. Without a continuous source of energy the unlikely combination of matter that is life on earth would not be possible.

The sun powers life on the surface of the earth, though a not inconsiderable biosphere deep below the surface (warmed by the radioactive decay of the earth’s interior) is powered by the energy in chemical compounds. Biological life is ‘sustainable’ in that the sun will keep shining for another 500 million years. Life also depends on large, chemically unstable, biogeochemical pools of minerals like carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. These biogeochemical pools are maintained (more or less) by living things. For instance, carbon enters the atmosphere from chemical reactions deep in the earth through the vents of volcanoes. It is incorporated into living tissue of plants through photosynthesis, into animals and fungi when they ‘eat’ (break down) plants, and into predatory animals when they ‘eat’ the plant eaters. Carbon from plants that was stored as coal, oil and natural gas also enters the atmosphere through fires, from warming bottom muds of oceans or thawing tundra, from the subduction of continental plates (and then once again through deep ocean vents or volcanoes). Nitrogen is a major constituent of the atmosphere and is put in a usable form by lightning and nitrogen fixing bacteria, some of which are allied with the roots of higher plants. That caught in the biological pool is recycled many times before escaping back to the inert form of the atmospheric gas. Phosphorus is cycled between land and sea. Sulfur, iron and potassium have their own cycles. The minerals necessary for life are ‘sustainable’ in that the pools are large. But there are limits. The growth of land plants is often limited by the supply of nitrogen, of riverine plankton by phosphorus. Iron is a limiting nutrient in the oceans and in tropical forests. Sulfur can be a limiting nutrient in tropical soils. All nutrients become limited at the sea surface and are renewed by upwelling from below, which explains why some areas of the sea, where nutrient rich cold currents meet warmer waters, are so productive. Before human intervention in the nutrient pools, nutrient-limited habitats (coral reefs, most forests) had developed recycling techniques that (where climate permitted) allowed for a great abundance of living things (many species of plants and animals) and a large standing biomass (of trees, prairie grasses, buffalo). But this abundance of wildlife or trees was often easily eliminated by over exploitation and might then take a great time to re-establish itself (if it would do so, the ecosystem having been put on a new trajectory by human intervention). At present, thanks to the combustion of fossil fuels and the use of fertilizers, people have doubled the amount of available nitrogen and greatly increased that of phosphorus. The more available nutrients tend to simplify former habitats, turning, for instance, perennial grasslands into annual ones, and favoring early seral species over trees of the primary forest.

With the help of limitless energy from fossil fuels over the last century and a half, we have also introduced many new minerals into the pools of biologically active compounds. Chlorine is usefully reactive. The modern chemical industry is largely based on the chemistry of chlorine and so many of the new compounds are chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as DDT. DDT slowly breaks down (sunlight, bacterial action) into more toxic daughters. Along with other chlorinated hydrocarbons, it is raised by storms from the bottoms of lakes and seas, into which it has been washed or dumped, or onto which it has settled from the air. Once in the water column, chlorinated hydrocarbons are adsorbed on the fatty surfaces of living material and taken up by plankton, cycled through zooplankton, small fish, larger fish, sea birds, sea mammals, all the time becoming more concentrated in fat, and also drifting down towards the sea bottom, in fish poop or the fat in dead seals and whales, from which storms will raise them once again. Many chlorinated hydrocarbons are hormone mimics and disrupt embryonic development in vertebrates (especially those that spend much time exposed to them in water), lower the functioning of immune systems and (probably partly through those two mechanisms) are implicated in many types of cancer, in many animals and humans. The brominated hydrocarbons are similar. Such compounds, new to the microbial world, are only slowly broken down (that is, torn apart for the energy in their chemical bonds) by microorganisms.

We have also greatly increased the biogeochemical pools of heavy metals, such as lead, cadmium and mercury, some of which have known and deleterious effects on living things. Lead concentrations in the modern atmosphere are several thousand times that of the Paleolithic background. Lead and mercury are neurotoxins. The atmospheric concentration of mercury continues to rise, like carbon dioxide, by about 2% per year.

* * *

Against this background, a sustainable society is one in which we stay out of the way. Sustainability implies sufficient ‘natural landscapes’ (Eugene Odum said 40% of any landscape) to let the natural world work and adapt to longterm changes. In many landscapes (the urban and suburban landscapes around large lowland cities) this is no longer possible but might be more so one day as rising seas and higher rivers make abandoning many settled lands necessary. Such ‘wild’ landscapes should be connected and (ideally) would blend into suburban lands with sufficient native plant cover to support some wildlife (especially insect and amphibian life). Wild landscapes should include all ecosystems and subecosystems but be concentrated where they do the most good: along streams and rivers to allow floods to spread out (floodplains provide essential habitat for many species of fish), and to soak up silt, pollutants and nutrients running off developed land; on aquifer recharge areas (ditto); along migratory pathways and in nesting and wintering areas of birds, mammals and invertebrates; along coasts, to allow for storm surges and the alongshore movement of sand. If the massive movement of human populations climate change will cause turns out to be orderly, much of our pattern of settlement could be revised: cities and roads could be located above (rather than on) river floodplains, coastal cities live surrounded by their natural wetlands. Old growth would climb up the banks of salmon streams.

Sustainable agriculture would focus on the agricultural landscape as well as on crop production. Meadows and woods amidst cropland would catch nutrients and silt running off the fields (already reduced by crop rotation, strip cropping and less use of manufactured fertiliser). Such lands would also recharge water tables and streams; provide habitat for populations of native pollinators and bats; for predatory and parasitic insects that help control crop eating insects; for insects that feed on weeds (such as the larvae of the American painted lady butterfly on Canada thistle). Wild lands would also provide habitat for mammals and birds (foxes, owls, falcons) that prey on mammals and insects that damage crops. Some of the herbivores of these wild lands (say, the corn and alfalfa eating white tailed deer in Wisconsin dairy country) would have to be controlled by people, since it is doubtful that people will willingly coexist with mountain lions and wolves (as Italians—for the most part unknowingly—do with Eurasian wolves in Tuscany). Forestlands would be managed for their animals, nuts, mushrooms and fish as well as their timber. Some landscapes, like the short grass plains, might be managed communally as semi-natural pasture for their native grazers (the idea of the ‘buffalo commons’). In this case a corporation of landowners replaces the organization of the medieval village or the tribe; and mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep, coyotes, wolves, prairie dogs, and grizzlies share the grasslands with the buffalo.

Riverine fisheries and marine estuaries would be major beneficiaries of such a resettlement of the landscape.

The industrial world would abandon the chemistry of chlorine for less toxic alternatives. (Carpets made by the Steelcase Corporation are compostable and recyclable. No toxic materials are used in the manufacturing process.) Chip factories would degrease with ethyl lactate, carbon dioxide or steam. Demolished buildings would be taken apart so their materials could be reused. Dumps would be mined. The wastes of one industry would become the raw materials of another. Water use by power plants and paper mills would be cut by 90% or more (doable now) making it possible to locate paper mills in cities, where waste paper is a major resource (and cleaned sewer water another), and reducing the effects of both on rivers (power plants are the greatest industrial users of water). Energy use will fall as buildings are better insulated, cooled and lighted. More electricity will come from the sun or geothermal heat, house heat or coolness from the ground. Our impact on the global cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus will lessen. The human population will slowly fall as women become better educated and able to control their destinies.

A Short History of the End of Our World (II)

2009-06-22T07:20:00.000-07:00

A Short History of the End of our World

When the current recession ends (if it ends), economic growth will return and carbon dioxide will continue to accumulate in the atmosphere. (The current rate of accumulation is about 2% a year, or a doubling from the current 385 parts per million to over 700 ppm in less than 50 years.) No one is talking about limiting growth and adjusting developed economies to a new reality. Few people are talking about limiting population. No one is talking about cutting carbon dioxide emissions to a level that would stabilize and then reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and slowly let it return to a “normal” level (probably 280 parts per million). Such cuts would amount to 70-90% of carbon emissions in the developed world. That is a monumental project that can only be accomplished by reducing energy use—insulating houses, building very efficient cars, motors, pumps, redesigning cities for public transportation. There are also two safe, relatively inexpensive methods of taking carbon out of the atmosphere in large enough amounts to make a difference: converting crop waste to charcoal (biochar) and spreading it on farmland, where it raises soil fertility, and the carbon remains bound up for approximately 50,000 years; and revegetating degraded lands to forests or grassland (5 billion acres, land equivalent to current cropland, is available). No one is doing either of these on any scale. Most schemes for engineering a lower temperature (seeding the oceans with iron, pumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, launching fleets of tiny reflective sunshades) have serious disadvantages. That is, they are either risky or nuts.

As the atmosphere warms, the sea warms (but more slowly) and sea level rises, partly from more water in the ocean from melting glaciers, partly from the thermal expansion of water already there. A disastrous rise in temperature and sea level will supposedly occur after a global warming of 4˚ Centigrade (within the generally accepted range of temperature predicted for 2100 if we don’t control carbon emissions). However, the most recent time carbon dioxide levels were at 350 ppm, sea level was 80 feet higher, so we may already be there, so to speak, the sea just hasn’t responded yet. What is certain is that the carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere implies much additional warming. The earth responds slowly to the temperature of its atmosphere. Both land and sea have great thermal inertia. The ocean has bulges and hollows and because of changing currents and jet stream winds and shifting gravitational pulls from collapsing ice sheets, sea level rise will vary considerably from place to place.

Ecosystems and climates flip. That is, a slow change turns into a new regime. Feedback processes kick in. The forests in the western United States and across the boreal regions of Canada and Russia are collapsing from drought, insect damage and warmer temperatures. Drought stresses the trees, thawing permafrost uproots them, and insects are many times more abundant in the shorter winters and warmer summers. These dying forests will decay, or more likely, burn, putting hundreds of millions, or billions, of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As the permafrost below them thaws, it emits methane and carbon dioxide. So do warming boreal peat bogs. The tundra lakes, filled with water from the last ice age, expand as the ice beneath them melts, then drain away, exposing more bare ground to the sun. This soil also emits methane and carbon dioxide. As the sea ice melts in the Arctic, the ocean warms from the sun. Along the east Siberian coast, methane, produced by bacteria and locked in a water/ice lattice by cold and the weight of the sea water, bubbles up from the seabed. Such lattices store perhaps 400 billion tons of carbon as methane. As they warm and dry further, the tropical peat-swamp forests of Indonesia burn. (Burning tropical peat swamps to plant palm oil plantations has been a major contributor over the last 20 years to global warming.) The Amazon rain forest burns more frequently and as transpiration from the trees falls, and then rainfall fails, begins to collapse. These are all positive feedback processes put in place by a small amount of warming (and some additional human interference).

Melting large glaciers like the Greenland ice sheet or the Antarctic glaciers takes time (millennia or centuries, one century for the Greenland ice sheet under the most calamitous and respectable of recent scenarios), so sealevel rise beyond 6-10 feet by 2100 is unlikely but 80 feet is possible. A sea level rise of 10 feet would displace tens of millions of people (in Long Island, Florida, the Gulf Coast, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia, the Rhine Delta). Higher seas push river floods back upstream, into areas that didn’t flood before, and makes the rice fields in the deltas of the great south Asian rivers (the Ganges, the Mekong, the Irrawaddy, the Red, the Pearl) unusable. The fields will become brackish estuaries and produce shrimp and fish. Barrier islands will move to the coast and coastal aquifers (such as the Magothy under Long Island) will become too salty to drink. Mountain glaciers, smaller and fed by yearly snows, melt more quickly than continental ones. Those in the Andes that water the high terraces of Peru (most cultivable land in Peru is over 9000 feet) are almost gone. When they are gone and ground water levels fall, many crops will no longer be grown. The Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of India, Pakistan, China and Southeast Asia, are also melting. Without them, spring floods will be greater and summer flows lower. Much land now irrigated by these rivers will no longer be cultivable. Two billion people depend on its crops. Since groundwaters in India and China are already overpumped, the only way to maintain agricultural production will be with older water harvesting techniques, such as the bunds and valley tanks that once caught the rains in monsoon India. But rising temperatures and a failing or flooding monsoon may make that effort difficult, or fruitless.

Except for island nations, and a few tens of millions of coastal dwellers, sea level rise will likely be a problem for the future, but other things will happen in the ocean. Its rising acidity will cause its fisheries to collapse, as the shell-forming algae at the center of food webs die. (All commercial fish stocks are already predicted to collapse from overfishing by 2048, so we may have caught the last fish just in time.) Coral reefs will melt away and animals with calcium carbonate shells (clams, oysters, mussels) will go extinct. Whales and other sea mammals will go extinct. The Gulf Stream will slow greatly or shut down, ending the circulation of oxygenated water to the deep sea and suffocating the animals of the depths. As the sea stagnates, it will become perfused with toxic hydrogen sulfide. The change in ocean currents and surface temperatures will change weather patterns and make many parts of the earth (the east coast of North America, much of Mexico and Central America, South America south of the Amazon, parts of southeast Africa, much of Southeast Asia) uninhabitable from constant storms, floods and drought.

The land warms more quickly than the sea. Much of the land on earth is between 30˚ north and 30˚ south (that is, about the equator). Some of this is now desert, some tropical forest and savannah. As the climate warms these forests and grasslands will be replaced by desert (though some pockets of vegetation in favored locations may remain). Desert conditions will spread south and north, encompassing most of the United States, southern Europe up to the latitude of Paris, northern South America, most of Africa, India, Southeast Asia and all of China: most of the inhabited world. The boreal forests and tundra of North America and Eurasia be replaced by mixed deciduous woodland and grassland. (Not long ago, the Arctic islands were covered by redwood forests.) Most flowering plants and large animals, unable to migrate quickly enough, or their way blocked by human settlements, will go extinct. The habitable parts of the world, where large animals can live and crops grow, will consist of the boreal regions (an immense landscape, its Siberian section unfortunately contaminated by radioactivity from the Soviet nuclear program), the west coast of Greenland, Iceland, New Zealand, Tasmania, southern Patagonia, western Antarctica. Some writers imagine high rise cites amidst intensively cultivated stony Arctic soils.

What will happen to people? Most, in both undeveloped and developed parts of the world, will die, probably not catastrophically, but slowly, from starvation and despair, as death rates climb by 15-20%. This happened in Russia recently (with a lesser rise in the death rate) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is still happening there today. (The collapse of the Soviet system explains why Russian troops stationed far from their home bases must return in spring to plant, and in fall to harvest, their potatoes.) It probably happened with the collapse of the Maya and the Aztec civilizations in Mexico and Central America, or the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Industrial civilization can maintain itself in a desert, desalinating seawater, growing crops in greenhouses cooled by seawater and watered by its sweet condensation, mining copper, pumping oil out of the sand, fueling itself largely with solar panels, living underground where daytime temperatures average 150˚ Fahrenheit. Would it? As the economic blows worsen, and food, water and electricity become scarce, I doubt whether the retreat from the present will be orderly. Farmers will not plant with perennial cover crops the fields they abandon. For one thing, they will have no money to do so. People imagine an orderly retreat to the Arctic coasts (forget about national boundaries) but this ignores the difficulties of feeding large populations, purifying polluted surface water, maintaining the infrastructure necessary to build roads, power stations, vehicles, cement plants in the north. As the seas rise, the water will flood the containment ponds of abandoned nuclear power stations, where the spent fuel rods are stored, oil refineries with their stored oil and chemicals, private houses with their toxic cleaners and pesticides. This material will spread to river deltas and inshore waters. Public zoos and private animal shelters will release their animals rather than let them starve: lions, tigers, elephants, camels, yaks may once again populate North America. Tropical plants will escape from botanical gardens into the new tropical habitat. Over a long time (20,000-100,000 years?), the ocean, finally cleansed of man-made and natural toxins, its circulation restored, will return to something like normal, and after another million years or more, new adaptive radiations will fill it with new creatures.

Perhaps people will watch some of this, as they wander the corners of the deserts with palms and springs, carrying their bows and arrows, and digging tools scavenged from former habitations (much of it now under water), and the great savannahs and woods of the Arctic and Antarctic coasts.

The Natural History of the Present: Chapter 19

2009-06-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

Part III: Energy, Population, Hope

Chapter 19: Thoughts on Energy and the End of our World

If cars got 90 miles per gallon, the straw burned in the fields of Denmark and France, converted to hydrocarbons, would fuel the car fleets of those countries: this is one of the more startling claims of Natural Capitalism. Today’s cars can probably reach 100 miles per gallon, 200 if the steel in them were replaced by carbon fiber resin and their engines by an electric generator. A more traditional calculation comes from Sunshine Farm, an imaginary Iowa spread, where 25% of the cropland is put aside to raise food for draft animals, or for material to be converted into fuel for tractors. One could not fuel the current American transportation fleet on crops grown on 25% of the country’s land but a writer claims that algae grown on 20 million acres of ponds, a small percentage of U.S cultivable land, would do the job. If the Danish straw were converted to fuels, its fertilising elements would be lost to the fields, unless the residue of the conversion process were spread on them. (Burning, whether in an internal combustion engine or in place, simply speeds up the conversion of the plant-based carbon into carbon dioxide, which goes up in flames, rather than being transformed in a slower, bacterial combustion.) Some mashes left from fuel conversion (such as that of corn converted to ethanol) can be used as animal feeds, and the manure spread.

The transportation sector of a modern economy produces about 14% of its carbon emissions (nearly the same as agriculture), almost all of it from fossil fuels. Increasing a car’s mileage lowers its production of carbon dioxide, and thus lowers its effect on global warming; so efficient cars would warm the world, but less. Increasing the mileage sufficiently, but still well within current technological limits, lets a nation’s car fleet run on waste biological materials; that is on wheat straw, peach pits, apple pomace, walnut shells, cotton waste, tree trimmings, sawdust, waste cooking oils, spoiled grain: materials that are transformable by bacterial action into fuels. (Waste cooking oils can be burned directly.) So the car fleet can be powered by renewable fuels. Since the carbon in these fuels comes from modern (not fossil) plants, which grow again the next year, taking up the released carbon, no net carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere. Some may be lost from the soil by the agricultural and forestry practices that produce the feedstock. But increasing car mileage sufficiently means that vehicles need so little fuel that its source becomes almost irrelevant.

Transforming wastes into fuels involves costs in energy and materials. Trucks and trains must be used to move the wastes, which are bulky (of course, trucks, ships and pipelines also move gas and oil), one must build the manufacturing sites to do the fermenting, the distilling, and so on. Processing wastes locally eliminates some of these costs and lets the material left from fermentation be returned to the soil (rather than, say, landfilling it). Energy gains in converting plant wastes to hydrocarbon fuels are often neutral or negative. With oil in its heyday, fuel oil contained 60 to 80 times the energy that went into mining and manufacturing it, but with corn-based ethanol the ratio is 1 to 1. In other words, it takes 10 gallons of ethanol-equivalent fuel to make 10 gallons of ethanol. If the fuel one uses is ethanol, the process isn’t worth it economically. (That one can use the left-over mash as animal feed helps.) If one uses fossil fuels to make the ethanol, the process is pointless from the point of view of carbon emissions: one might as well burn gasoline in one’s very efficient car, and subsidize the planting of a tree each year to soak up one’s carbon emissions. The whole chain of conversion must use renewable energy for the process to be worthwhile in terms of reducing carbon emissions. The greatest fuel use in ethanol conversion comes from the distilling process; and this might be cut considerably by the development of appropriate semi-permeable membranes, such as are now available for making maple syrup or desalinating water. Making fuel from grain (a food and a row crop) does not seem like a very good idea. However some food crops perform better than corn: making ethanol from sugar cane yields an energy surplus and sugar cane ethanol fuels most of the motor vehicles of Brazil. Making fuel from agricultural or forestry wastes, or from a sod crop like switchgrass (so called cellulosic ethanol), perhaps from a native plant like cattails (harvested in winter, from the ice) is a better one, but only makes biological sense if the manufacturing sites are decentralized (Georgia cars running on peach pits and peanut shells, Oregon ones on fruit waste) and if cars are much more efficient. In all industrial processes, reducing energy use, which also reduces the energy embodied in manufactured materials, is the key to a low-carbon economy. The energy costs of transportation make one wonder whether subsidizing those railroad cars of New York City sewage sludge heading to Texas cotton fields is worth it; or those trucks of recyclables one sees lumbering along the highways. The alternatives are even less desireable— ocean disposal of sewage sludges, or landfilling of sludges, bottles and cans. The production and transport of fossil fuels also involves energy costs, as does the manufacture of virgin metals and plastics, which are from 2 to 10 times more energy consumptive than recycled materials.

It was a dream of the Sixties to run the world on natural products: wood, sand, sunlight, straw, organic food. Trees cut on short-term rotations would produce fuel for electric power plants. Some plants were built but the landscape that resulted in the tree-shed was neither esthetically pleasing nor biologically or hydrologically functional. This was true even where chips were produced as part of a logging operation that also produced sawlogs; that is when just “junk” trees and tops went into chips. Landowners appreciated the fact that less mess was left behind in the woods, but the woods are naturally chaotic, as are grasslands on a smaller scale. The mess had included the nutrients in the tops and limbs (structures where above-ground nutrients are concentrated); the shade the cut branches provided, that kept the soil of the logged forest cooler, reduced nutrient losses, helped in the survival of invertebrates, fungi and amphibians and in the regeneration of the plants of the forest floor. The mess also included wolf trees, whose shape makes them unmarketable as sawlogs, and other large old trees, partly rotten and unmarketable as sawlogs, but which produce crops of mast, are habitat for birds, bats, fungi and insects, and are essential parts of the structure of the forest. With so much of the forest removed, its place in the local hydrology was substantially altered. Erosion increased because of the loss of forest cover and the destruction of the soil surface by heavy equipment. Soil and nutrients flowed into forest streams. Besides all this, agriculture or forestry that produces hydrocarbons for fuel is subject to at least as much economic pressure as one that produces sawlogs and food. Such landscapes are ruled by economics, not biology. Only so much land in a watershed should be put into producing food and fiber. If such landscapes can produce bio-fuels, without compromising the ecosystems of which they are a part, that would be wonderful. But the main advantage for the larger landscape comes from reducing fuel use, not from using bio-fuels. In a sense, we are already growing our fuel, in that our enormous corn exports help pay for our imported petroleum (6 barrels per acre with 150-bushel per acre corn at $4 a bushel and oil at $100 a barrel): that is, our eroding landscape pays for our oil.

During the 1970s I followed a debate in the margins of the scientific literature about the relative energetics of styrofoam and paper coffee cups (lab workers get their coffee from machines). I think the fundamental basis of the debate was between the old and the new; between good old, semi-natural paper and new, forward-looking, petroleum-based styrofoam. (A better insulator, styrofoam kept the liquid warmer longer; the downside was burning your tongue on the first sip or burning your fingers when you picked up the cup.) At the time, thanks partly to DDT, petrochemicals were in poor repute (this hasn’t improved), but paper-making, because of its use of mercury as a biocide in the pulp mix and of chlorine as a bleach has been a major polluter of waterways and of their food chains; and thus of waterbirds, fish and people. The fish in large parts of major Canadian river systems have been made inedible through paper-making. After many calculations of the energy involved in the manufacturing chain, styrofoam came out with a slight advantage in energy and water expenditure. However, it turned out that pottery cups (the old old thing) were the best, if wash water use were kept low and if they lasted long enough. Rinsed-out cups that lasted several years involved by far the least expenditure of energy and materials. On a similar theme, glass bottles, if re-used 8 times or more, are superior in terms of energy consumption to plastic or aluminum, even if these materials are recycled. Glass bottles are however (like pottery) heavy; and for the numbers to work refills cannot be transported more than 150 miles. So optimists like me picture local bottling plants (a current feature of the American landscape) refilling local bottles. Ideally these are standard bottles, in several sizes, with glued-on labels (non-toxic inks, water-soluble glues), usable for any fluids (soda, fruit juice, spaghetti sauce). At the end of their useful lives the bottles are ground up and remelted into new bottles, at a considerable energy savings over manufacturing new glass. The wash water for the bottling plant is cleaned by a man-made marsh next door (with a greenhouse for winter use in cold climates, that grows flowers, bedding plants, fish and edible greens). The greenhouse and marsh also handle the run-off from the roof and parking lot. The cleaned water sinks into the ground or flows through a vegetated ditch into a local waterway. Power comes from photo-voltaic panels on the flat roof of the super-insulated building.

The main way to make cars more efficient is to make them lighter. Better aerodynamics also help. Currently, with fleet mileage in the United States a little over 21 miles per gallon, about 1% of the gasoline burned in the engine goes into moving the passengers. Very efficient cars (90-200 miles per gallon) can’t be made of steel; it’s too heavy. Heavy cars require a large engine for acceleration. Composites are stronger than steel and can absorb 5 times more energy per pound, and thus are as safe in crashes. Composite cars weigh 2-3 times less than metal cars, perhaps 1500 pounds, 10 times more than a person. Powering cars with electricity produced by a gasoline-powered generator saves weight by eliminating the engine (the generator and electric motor are much lighter), the drivetrain, clutch, driveshaft and transmission. If car bodies are manufactured of carbon fiber and resin, something like 90% of the steel and 30% of the aluminum in a car can be eliminated. U.S. resin production would rise by 3%. All that metal that doesn’t have to be made involves tremendous savings in fossil fuels (less carbon dioxide, metals and hydrocarbons in the atmosphere), in mining (less atmospheric pollution and earth-moving), and in transportation (ditto). Thus making cars lighter also (in general) helps with the carbon footprint involved in building them, which for a midsize car in 2007 was equivalent to burning 900 gallons of gasoline. According to the authors of Natural Capitalism, the savings for car manufacturers in going to composite bodies are also tremendous: the capital costs of manufacture (tooling costs, fabricating plants, the time needed to bring a new model out) are reduced by 50-90%. Our need for oil would drop precipitously. We could save the $50 billion a year we now spend, on average, to keep the Persian Gulf safe for oil production. (Lowering the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, or requiring the car fleet to average 40 miles to the gallon, would also save the oil we now import from the Persian Gulf: around a billion barrels a year.) We would also save the steel that goes into the military ships and oil tankers, the coal and oil needed to make that steel, the diesel or uranium that powers them, the economic costs and biological problems involved with petroleum production and weapons manufacture, and so on. We could put that $50 billion a year into infrastructure projects that saved energy (home insulation, energy-efficient lighting, more efficient heating and cooling equipment) and into supporting renewable energy (solar thermal power plants, solar cells on roofs); and thus further reduce our need for oil. Money that went for oil would now be invested at home. Our balance of payments situation would improve by $80-$100 billion (now, in 2008, $125-$135 billion) per billion barrels of oil. The materials used in car bodies have changed once before; from 85% wood in 1920, car bodies shifted to 70% steel by 1927.

The point of making cars that get 100 miles a gallon is to reduce fuel use and carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere, as well as to reduce air pollution generally (nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, ground level ozone); that is to reduce the environmental impact of cars. In the United States it also reduces our international indebtedness and our dependence on foreign oil. But the effect is to make room for more cars. Since many of the environmental effects of cars are worldwide, in a more just world this room would be in under-developed countries, but in fact it will be in the developed world as well. In our current capitalist world, cars will expand to fill the available space; or to use up the available fuel. Oil prices rose in the 1970s and the average energy intensity of the United States’ economy (the energy required per dollar of economic output) fell by 34% from 1980 to 2000. (Energy costs are typically 1-2% of industrial costs and so aren’t worth worrying about, but high enough costs make them so, and so energy efficiency doubled from 1975 to 1985.) At the same time the population increased by 22%, mostly from immigration. The economy also grew. If the average percapita Gross Domestic Product had remained constant, the United State’s energy use in 2000 would have been 20% below the 1980 level, but the percapita GDP rose 55% and so total energy use was up 26% in 2000. The point is that growth in the economy or in population will eventually swallow up any energy gains. This is the Malthusian dilemma, which human ingenuity sometimes lets us evade.

In a typical herbivore irruption (meadow voles introduced to a temperate island, sheep in the late 1500s to the highlands about Mexico City) the animals, now without predators, parasites or diseases, and with an unlimited food supply, increase in population exponentially until they overshoot the landscape’s carrying capacity. This phenomenon has been documented mostly in hooved animals, the ungulates, but English sparrows, when introduced the the United States in the 1800s, had up to 5 broods a year, the young of one brood warming the eggs of the next, as the birds spread from barnyard to barnyard across the continent. The population crashes as the animals run out of food, then reaches an accommodation with the (now degraded) food supply. The plant population stabilizes under grazing pressure at a lower density, height and species diversity. The population of animals (sheep, voles) is also much reduced and begins to oscillate about the food supply. In some cases the landscape is so degraded it will no longer support any grazers; or hold much water, which runs off the bare ground. The human situation is something like this. When people were hunters and gatherers, they slowly filled the world. Some niches were difficult and took a long time to exploit, such as the Arctic lands of the Inuit. Some landscapes, such as Antarctica, or altitudes above 16,000 feet, were unexploitable. The constant expansion shows population pressure remained a factor in human life. Polynesians living on small islands kept their populations low, partly by exposing infants, partly by forced emigration of young people (which is how the far-flung islands of Polynesia were settled). Probably through active control, many hunter-gatherer populations stabilized about 30% below the maximum carrying capacity of their landscapes to provide food. (But some must not have, for the human population continued to grow.) This is near where wolves and weather keep populations of elk and may reflect a long term lower limit of capacity.

Of course what a landscape will provide in food depends partly on human abilities and tools. Agriculture let people fill the world more completely. (It supported up to 100 times more people per unit of land.) But agricultural productivity fell as the post-glacial world warmed and dried and as poorer soils were exploited and better soils were depleted. Hierarchical agricultural societies and more limited diets meant shorter, poorer lives for much of the population. Agricultural populations tend to oscillate around the maximum food supply, so starvation was common. New lands, new crops, new crop rotations, plant and animal breeding, new irrigation schemes kept agricultural productivity and the world population slowly rising, but at least in Europe, periodic starvation only ended with the Industrial Revolution and the exploitation of fossil fuels, the cheap transport of grain from new lands, new fertilisers derived from inorganic minerals. (All the same, under solar powered agriculture, world population grew from 4 million people 12,000 years ago, at the end of the time of the hunter-gatherers, to 750 million in 1750, the beginning of industrialization.) The continuing industrial and economic revolution is still filling the world with people. One might speculate that population growth (like economic growth) is an evolutionary imperative, but in fact women will control their fertility if it seems advantageous to them and if they are allowed to do so. If not for immigration, populations throughout the the industrial world would be falling—children are seen as too expensive. The economic emancipation of women from the control of men, universal education, better medical care (thus better childhood survival), and some sort of social safety net slows population growth to near zero even in relatively poor countries. Control of economic growth is another matter: growth in the economy is driven not just by growth in the population but, as the French textbook made clear, by our ideas of what life should be—that is, without the possibility of becoming rich, man loses hope and France declines. (Modern Americans, when asked about the purpose of the American government, reply that it is to let them get rich.) Early in the Industrial Revolution growth that was faster than that of population allowed Europeans to outrun the Malthusian dilemma. Now one might say, as we approach the dilemma from another direction, that sustainable growth is growth that does not cause the implosion of the society from which it springs. No cycle of growth, including that of population, continues forever and no economist knows how to run a capitalist economy that doesn’t grow. People have ideas: for instance, taxing raw materials rather than capital and labor, by favoring the use of labor over the use of materials, should let a considerably lower level of material growth—perhaps a negative one—be possible and profitable. Declining populations remove the need for growth. But in the coming world, new sources of energy will have to be developed, houses made more energy efficient, degraded lands, fisheries and rivers renovated, coastal and riverine settlements moved inland and uphill. The development of capitalist economics turned human greed into a developmental force. The rational pursuit of profit has transformed our world more than technology, which is only a tool.

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“We’re cooked,” remarked Vaclav Smil, a Canadian expert on agriculture, energy and the environment at a conference on global warming with 10,000 participants in Montreal in 2006. He’s right. The earth responds slowly to changes in its atmospheric gases and to the surface warming of its oceans. The extra carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will take a century or more to exert its full warming potential. But feedback processes are already in play. The missing sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic exposes more of the polar oceans to the sun’s heat, which the ice reflected; the warming waters will melt more ice, and those exposed waters absorb more heat, in an ineluctable downward spiral. The peat bogs of the boreal tundra contain something like 400 billion tons of carbon in the form of methane. (We emit the equivalent of about 7 billion tons of carbon a year to the atmosphere, mostly as carbon dioxide.) Methane is beginning to bubble out of the thawing ground and out of tundra lakes, some of which no longer freeze because of this. Those tundra lakes, filled with fossil water from the glacial age, and covering up to half the tundra’s surface, expand as the permafrost thaws, then drain away as it thaws more deeply (the water, a good conductor, absorbing the underground ice’s latent heat). Boreal forests across the subarctic have turned into carbon emitters as the ground under them thaws and shifts and the trees lose their grip on it and lean over and as bark beetles, no longer kept in check by the length of winter, kill them. The forests burn, or the trees decay, in either case releasing their carbon to the atmosphere. Bark beetles and fire also take a toll on the forests of the mountain ranges of western North America, a toll worsened by a century or more of spectacularly bad forest management. Increasing temperatures may turn all forests and grasslands into net emitters of carbon dioxide and methane. Increasing heat and drought will make forests in warmer, drier regions (such as the American Southwest) collapse. Collapsing forests emit carbon. Burning peat bogs in Indonesia, burned as part of the illegal clearance of forest lands for palm oil plantations (like corn, another biofuel), put from 10-20% of current anthropogenic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. The oxidising peat will continue to emit carbon for years and makes the production of those biofuels pointless. Biologically produced methane is also held in hydrates along the outer continental shelves, kept in stable form by low temperatures and high pressures. As the sea warms (not much: 1º-2º C.), these hydrates become unstable. A sudden release of methane from seafloor hydrates is thought to have been behind a dramatic warming of the earth 55 million years ago.

Climate change is a problem mostly for charismatic animals like us. Rapid climate change, like too much ultraviolet light, may make much of the green and blue world uninhabitable for many of its larger plants and animals, whose generation times are relatively long and whose ability to move is limited. Trees, for instance, will have trouble moving fast enough to accomodate the changing climate. For many species of amphibians, the current state of the world, awash in man made chemicals that compromise their immune systems and in man made ultraviolet light that scrambles the DNA in their eggs, in warm air from cleared lowlands swallowing up the clouds on mountaintops—which become sunny and dry, too dry for breeding frogs—and in diseases spread by amphibians from other continents, is already too much and many populations have collapsed. Fewer amphibians means fewer hawks, minks, raccoons, fisher, fewer nutrients brought from the margins of beaver ponds (where the frogs live) to the uplands, as urine, bones and dung. Higher seas, more powerful rains and windstorms, more severe droughts, rising or falling average temperatures will make much human infrastructure obsolete. Such infrastructure includes roofs, bridges, tunnels, seawalls, roads, farmland, water reservoirs, river works, riverbank housing, seaside lots, buildings in fire-prone woodlands or in regions with hurricanes or tornados. Places are occupied and houses built according to long-term climatic averages. Human settlements are manifestations of climate. At the same time, chemical and nutrient pollution may make much of the landscape unstable or uninhabitable. Ecological collapse came for the Maya and the Tiahuanaco people in small changes of climate, for which their cultures, already stressed by overpopulation and habitat destruction, could not cope; for Native Americans in the 1500s and 1600s in microbes to which they were not adapted. When cultures and their support structures collapse, many people die. What keeps us from acting to alleviate the growing risk is fear: fear of change, fear of economic collapse.

At the least, since governments seem incapable of acting except in the face of calamity, we are in for a warming of 2º-3º C. (and then probably 4º-5º C.) and a sealevel rise of 1-4 meters (up to 25 meters). This is catastrophic for low-lying countries (those on river deltas or on islands) and for any settlements near the coast. Perhaps 10-20% of people worldwide will be displaced (about a billion people, perhaps 50 million in the United States). If warming can be kept to this level however, it may be less of a worry than the contamination of the biosphere with bio-accumulating chemicals. Changes on this scale don’t mean the end of people, but because of the financial losses involved, may mean the end of our civilization. Of course, people can plan for the coming changes and thus reduce their economic consequences and try (like our ancestral hunter-horticulturalists) to live within the green world. In 2040, when the Arctic is mostly ice-free in summer, there will be refugia for some arctic mammals (ringed seals, polar bears) about the northern tip of Greenland. (The several species of Arctic seals depend on different ice conditions and depths to the seabed and it is unlikely all species will survive. Polar bears evolved from grizzlies, with which they still can mate, and can evolve again.) Other refugia for cold-adapted animals will exist about Antarctica; new animals will colonize that continent, perhaps from the other end of the globe, and evolve there into new animals. The connected wild and semi-wild landscapes I have tried to describe, into which the man-made landscape of cities, roads, farms, and fiber-farm forests fits, should let plants and animals move around in response to a changing climate. (Plants also move through landscape connections and connected landscapes have more species of plants.) Prudent homeowners may order seeds from forests 500 miles south, so as the trees around them die from winters that are too short or summers that are too hot, others can take their place. Connected, functioning landscapes let small populations of organisms survive, which expand as conditions change. Audubon saw a chestnut-sided warbler once. A bird of the woodland edge, it is now one of the more abundant warblers in the settled parts of the northeastern forest.

The gift of fossil fuels was cheap, abundant energy. Our civilisation runs on energy. Without electricity and motor fuels our cities would start to collapse in 3 days (the length of their food supply), perhaps a week (far too long to be without water). There are three reasons for hope. One of them is that the development of a low-carbon, energy efficient economy would be immensely profitable. Carbon emissions become worth avoiding at $50-$100 per ton. The United States produces about 2 billion tons of anthropogenic carbon a year, or $100-$200 billion worth. This amounts to a rounding error in the current budget, but a potent economic incentive. Paying farmers $50-$100 a ton ($25 to $100 an acre) for storing carbon would transform farming practices. Paying electricity producers $50-$100 per ton for avoided carbon (and guaranteeing the payments for 20 years, as the Germans do with their solar power premiums) would make photo-voltaic power profitable. Under such conditions, photo-voltaic power generation, or generation from solar thermal power plants (which are more cost effective than photo-voltaic panels but only work in sunny climates and on a large scale), makes much more sense than coal. Machines turn over every 20 to 50 years, appliances and cars every 3 to 10, commercial buildings every 30, so it wouldn’t take long to transform our energy use. From 1800 to 1950 industrial energy in the United States changed from wood to coal and then to oil and natural gas, largely under economic incentives, but influenced by government policy. A reasonable estimate for shifting to a solar powered energy supply (worldwide) is 50 years, too long to prevent much of the coming climate change but better than doing nothing. A changeover in 20 years is probably possible. (A small Danish island did it in 10.) Buildings use one-third the total energy in the United States, two-thirds of the electricity. Efficient new (or retrofitted) buildings save 70-90% of this energy, and with solar collectors on their walls or roofs produce more daytime electricity than they use. Dispersed electric generation is much cheaper than the current centralized system. Efficient retrofitting means replacing windows with more energy efficient ones, super insulating, using daylight for lighting office spaces, and using more efficient lights, office equipment, heating and cooling equipment, perhaps in some climates replacing air handling equipment with building designs that exploit the natural bouyancy of air. Replacing all the electric motors and lights in the United States with efficient ones would save half the United States’ electricity production. If investment focused on reducing energy use (say, if utilities were allowed to profit from some of the energy saved), the United States after 20 years (the time between renovations) would use 10-25% of the energy it now uses to produce the same value of national income. Reducing energy use by 75% is not technically difficult, but would require public policies that more or less guaranteed the new investments. Reducing energy use also speeds up the time it takes to replace fossil fuelled with solar energy, since so much less energy is required.

Using that much less energy makes renewable resources look good. Back-of-the-envelope calculations from the 1980s indicate that covering suitable roofs and walls of houses in Britain with solar collectors would supply most of Britain’s daytime electricity needs. (That is, Britain’s needs at that time: not needs that were 75-90% less.) More generally, it is thought that surfaces of buildings in industrial countries could generate 15-50% of the countries’ electricity needs; or all of them, with energy use reduced 90%. Putting collectors on the roofs of buildings in the United States, much of which is quite sunny, would supply more than the United States’ daily electricity needs. If energy use fell by 75%, such collectors would provide 3 times the power we need. Some fossil-fueled or nuclear power would be necessary to provide so-called base-line power, but only about 5% of what we have now (which would provide 25-50% of total electricity needs). Reducing energy use so much makes many thing possible. About 9% of California’s current electricity supply comes from the wind; that is somewhat more than 35% of what would be needed if electricity use fell by 75%. Reducing home heating and cooling by better insulation and design shifts part of the energy costs of heating and cooling to insulation manufacturers. But the energy embodied in an efficient house equals 50 years of heating, rather than 3 to 5 years, as now. (This is better than the past: in 1850 a farmhouse in the colder parts of the United States burned the equivalent of the wood that went into it every year.)

Another reason for hope is that a similar approach would also make a non-toxic economy profitable. The European Union’s classifying of carpet remnants as toxic waste (thus increasing disposal fees) made the Steelcase Company invent a non-toxic, recyclable carpet (no waste, period). Increasing dumping fees increased the recycling of materials from house demolitions in Denmark from 12% to 82% of the total (4% is the average in industrial countries). Developing non-toxic materials would mean transforming another aspect of the industrial system, and another immensely profitable enterprise, if government policy guaranteed the regulations for the lifetime of the investment. With forward looking policies (tweaking the market), the goal of capitalist effort would be zero net carbon emissions and a chemical industry based on nonaccumulating, recyclable and biodegradable materials. Taxes on labor, income and investment (high tax rates on investment require high rates of return) would slowly be replaced by taxes on climate change gases, non-renewable fuels, air traffic, pesticides, toxic chemicals (dioxins, benzene, bromine, chlorine), nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, irrigation water, loss of topsoil, newly cut timber, aquifer depletion, landfill waste. As the cost of labor fell, businesses could hire more workers to remanufacture products, close the loops in material flows (so one company’s waste becomes another’s raw material), save energy, change raw materials and manufacturing processes.

The last reason for hope is a line on a graph. The problem of growth in capitalist societies may be insoluble. Reducing the energy and materials needed for a modern lifestyle, making them nontoxic, and leaving room for the natural world to operate, helps. For the rest, since capitalist societies to become more and more skewed in income over time, redistributing income may be necessary for democratic institutions to survive. Perhaps growth in wealth will become self-limiting. Growth in population is another matter. Growth in wealth may help: no country in the world with a per capita income over $5000 has a fertility rate much above the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. Some writers think the current global fertility rate of 2.7 children per woman is an all time low. In our agricultural-industrial world, family size depends on infant mortality (that is, on health care and diet); the status of women (whether they have status as individuals or as childbearers, whether they can control their incomes, their fertility and their destinies); education; and (perhaps) on industrialization, which makes children a financial liability rather than an economic asset. If every woman had one child, world population would fall from 6.3 billion people now to 1.6 billion by 2100. If she had two children, or slightly fewer than two, population would also fall, but more slowly. That slow transition to a world population of 1-2 billion would be more manageable. That line on the graph is another reason for hope.

Who Are We? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

In the years about the turn of the nineteenth century came three great paintings dealing with our relations to the natural world. By then fossil-fueled civilisation had consolidated its hold on daily life and life had become much more comfortable. The paintings are Georges Seurat’s Un Dimarche a la Grande Jatte, Paul Gaugin’s D’ou Venons Nous? Que Sommes Nous? Ou Allons Nous?, and Henri Matisse’s Calme, Luxe and Volupte. These paintings show people at ease in an idealized nature. The idea of the protected space of the garden is ancient. Here, the world has become a garden. Any idea of a human relationship with nature is of course a human construction. “Nature” is a human idea. But it pleases us to think of the world as benign (why else live?) and to construct human landscapes that fit a benign world. It would be hard to survive in a world that was always inimical. (So even the Inuit live, and regard their world as hospitable.) I argue that for the garden to work, it must shade into wilderness. (So there are mountain lions in the garden and the ideal landscape is perhaps more that of Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.) Contrary to popular opinion, the end of growth is the beginning of hope.

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I end with notes for a web site:

There are 5 billion chickens in the United States at any one time. Feathers are a major waste product of the chicken industry. Circuit boards made from chicken-feather keratin (a waxy substance in the feathers), coated with soybean resin, have a lower die-electric constant than standard boards, which are made from virgin plastics and coated with petroleum-based hydrocarbons. Chicken-feather boards can switch signals faster and support faster processing speeds.

Chickens turn calcium carbonate into eggshells at body temperature. Shellfish make calcium carbonate materials harder than cement at 40º Fahrenheit. Spiders spin silk stronger than kevlar at ambient temperatures. People manufacture portland cement by heating limestone to 2700º Fahrenheit and make Kevlar from petroleum-based molecules boiled at several hundred degrees Centigrade in pressurized sulfuric acid. Chicken eggshells, shellfish shells and spider webs are all biodegradable, and their manufacture, as far as is known, does not use hazardous chemicals. Can new manufacturing techniques mimic these processes?

Twenty-two million tons of food waste are landfilled in the United States each year. Bacteria have been used to turn it into a biodegradable plastic polymer. The yield of polymer is about 20% of the weight, so the process would produce about 4.5 million tons of polymer a year. To this feedstock could be added the many millions of tons of slaughterhouse waste currently reprocessed into animal feed. (Thirty percent of commercial cattle feed consists of reprocessed animal fats. Cows are no longer supposed to be fed cows, but they are fed pigs and chickens, which are fed cows, and mistakes are made. Such high-tech cannibalism gave us mad cow disease. Some European cattle feed in the 1980s may have contained human bodies, which are often only partly burned when put into the Ganges River, where their flesh is eaten by turtles.)

Food waste and slaughterhouse waste could also be composted, or processed into fuels. Steaming organic matter (food waste, landfill waste) under low pressure with a citric acid catalyst produces a fuel, heat, which can be recycled into the process, and biochar, a charcoal that greatly increases the productivity of agricultural soils.

Ethyl lactate made from fermented corn starch can replace many dangerous and polluting volatile organic compounds. It is cost-competitive with existing paints, paint thinners, glues, inks, dyes and circuit-board cleaners (such as di-chloroethylene and tri-chloroethylene, major pollutants of much U.S. ground water). Ethlyl lactate breaks down into carbon dioxide and water. It is a much better use for corn than distilling it into fuel.

Agricultural oils may find similar uses. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons produced by tire wear (40,000 tons per year in the United States) that form a haze over Los Angeles freeways derive from the petroleum-based oils used to make the tires. Tires made from plant-based oils (jojoba, soybean, cottonseed, hazelnut) might eliminate these hazardous chemicals, though this has not yet been shown. Jojoba is an oilseed shrub that grows in the desert without irrigation. (If irrigated, it can be irrigated with salty water.) Using less material lets us return to a carbohydrate-based chemical industry, from a petrochemical-based one.

Do we need the chemistry of chlorine? No, but changing the stream of chemical manufacturing processes of which it is a part would be a major headache. Approximately 1% of chlorine is used to disinfect water. Adding chlorine to water for the purpose of disinfection creates a whole family of chlorinated hydrocarbons, from the reaction of chlorine with organic molecules in the water. Many of these chemicals are cancer promoting or mutagenic; some mimic human hormones. Treating water with ultra-sound, ozone, and untraviolet light disinfects it without creating hazardous compounds. Polyoxymetalate can be used to bleach paper. It works as well as chlorine. The chemical is easily regenerated from the waste stream for reuse. Using a polyoxymetalate bleaching process lets paper mills increase the recycling of their process water and saves half their use of electricity. Modern paper mills produce essentally no effluent and use very little new water (some evaporates in the paper-making process). Nontoxic, soybean based inks that float off waste paper in a warm water bath are collected and reused. Limiting their water use lets paper mills locate in cities near their suppliers and markets, use a feedstock of urban waste paper, and save many dollars and millions of gallons of fuel in delivery costs. (The annual production of cellulose from waste paper in New York City amounts to 50-100% of that harvested from the forests of Brazil.)

Citus-based solvents, made from orange peels, and materials like ethyl lactate can adequately replace chlorine-based solvents. Cleaning with mild soap and water has been successfully used to replace dry-cleaning fluids. Dry-cleaning fluids like tetra-chloroethylene, a neurotoxin and carcinogen, are ubiquitous in North American water and food supplies.

Placing 6 foot tall concrete bat boxes in clearings formerly occupied by tropical forest in Costa Rica attracts bats. The roosting bats drop seeds of forest plants in their manure (5-20 times as many seeds as in clearings without bat boxes). The plants that grow, especially the fast growing pioneer plants, provide cover for mammals, birds and insects that disperse more seeds. Replanting a forest this way is much cheaper and more efficient than replanting one using human labor.

Tuberculosis hospitals in Lima, Peru, with large windows and high ceilings had better air circulation than hospitals with mechanical ventilation systems. Especially in warm climates, passive airflow systems (which depend on the building’s design), with roofed outdoor walkways and waiting rooms, may be preferable to mechanically ventilated closed systems.

The Steelcase Company recently invented a compostable upholstery fabric. Their reason for inventing it was the designation by the European Union of textile mill trimmings as hazardous waste. Disposal of the trimmings was going to cost the company considerably more than previously. The new fabric contains no mutagens, carcinogens or heavy metals. Its manufacture generates no toxic waste. Manufacturing costs for the material are less than for fabrics that use standard, hazardous materials. (An added benefit is that users of the fabric do not accumulate toxic chemicals through their skins.) The carpet is completely recyclable and can be remanufactured with little energy input indefinitely. The company leases its floor coverings. The manufacturing process allows it to renew the leased material at little cost to itself.

A tax on pollutants sends a clear, long-term signal.

Melting mixed plastics produces a weak, unstable material. Pulvering mixed plastics in a ball mill under pressure in the presence of carbon dioxide breaks the plastics up sufficiently at a molecular level to let the molecules recombine. The hybid polymer yields a homogeneous melt that can be formed into durable new plastics. Is this is a temporary solution for mixed plastics in the landfill, another side-trip on plastics’ long journey into oblivion; or a way to reconstitute plastics indefinitely?

Concrete production produces 5-8% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide globally. (Twenty percent of China’s production: China is now the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases). Geopolymer concrete (E-crete) produces 10-20% of the greenhouse gases associated with the production of portland concrete. Adding alkali to silicates and aluminates derived from fly ash and slag (waste products of coal burning and steel production), plus gravel and sand, makes E-concrete. Unlike portland concrete, no carbon dioxide is produced during polymerization. No heating is required to produce the raw materials, which are waste products—though heat went into producing them originally. Geopolymer concrete is more porous than regular concrete, hardens faster, is more resistant to acid, fire and microbial attack.

Beer bran, a byproduct of brewing beer from barley, adsorbs hazardous organic molecules, such as benzene and tri-chloroethylene. Beer bran is a waste product. The activated charcoal usually used as a filter requires heating coal to 900º Centigrade.

Tomato sauce can be extracted from crushed tomatoes using a semipermeable membrane (so-called reverse osmosis technology). The process uses 30 times less energy than heat reduction. The sauce tastes better and has more nutritional value. (In general concentrating foods using direct osmosis rather than heat uses 95% less energy and produces foods of better nutritional value.)

Direct osmosis can also be used to desalinate water. Windmills could mechanically drive reverse osmosis desalination plants and pump the fresh water ashore. This would not require converting the wind power to electricity. The stream of salty waste water can be processed using rapid spray evaporation. Salt water is sprayed as a fine mist into a heating vessel. The salt falls to the floor, the vapor is condensed to pure water. The cost is of rapid spray evaporation is one-third that of regular desalination and virtually all the brine stream can be converted into fresh water and salt. (The brine stream, a polluting byproduct of desalination plants, is usually released into the sea, where it damages the flora and fauna of the seafloor.)

Titanium dioxide solar cells are currently 33% efficient, approximately double that of solid-state silicon (the current standard). They are transparent. Their cost is not that much more than glass.

Methane digesters can be used to compost food waste. The extracted methane can be burned to generate electricity and the compost sold as fertiliser. This process does not decrease the global warming effect of the methane but burning it to produce electricity replaces the burning of other fuels. (The carbon dioxide and methane in landfills are recyclable: they come from renewable sources.) Food waste normally goes into landfills, which are currently the largest single source of methane in the United States. The contents of old landfills can also be put through methane digesters. In time, the one trillion aluminum cans old landfills contain (a year’s supply of aluminum ingot, worth $21 billion) will make them worth mining.

Shallow landfills can be used as digesters in place. The landfill is capped with two impervious (low permeability) layers of clay, with a permeable layer of sand between. The methane trapped beneath the lower level of clay is extracted and used to generate electricity. The carbon dioxide extracted from the landfill gas is pumped back into the permeable layer at slightly above atmospheric pressure to keep oxygen from being drawn into the landfill as methane is drawn out. This keeps the production of methane up. (The methane production process is anaerobic.)

Processing the 200 million tons of manure confined animals produce annually in the United States in a methane digester makes electricity, a non-smelly liquid fertiliser, and processed solids for sale as a soil amendment. The anaerobic digestion process is sensitive to the properties of the feedstock (its temperature, liquidity, alkinality, pH, carbon-to-nitrogen ratio) and so must be properly overseen. Keeping animals in confinement is not something anyone except the owners of the facility should favor, but this a is a good way to dispose of their manure.

Texas Instruments built a green chip factory in Dallas, Texas, for 30% less per square foot than a conventional one. Water usage is 35% percent less, electricity usage 20% less. The lower costs make it competitive with plants in China or Singapore. (Do they clean their circuit boards with steam, ethyl lactate, or trichloroethylene?)

It would cost $23 billion a year to turn 10% of every region on earth into a national park. This figure includes land purchase and staffing costs. (It may be too low.)

A petrochemical plant covering 300 acres, with some additional acreage in natural gas production facilities and pipelines, can produce the fiber grown on 600,000 acres of cotton. A tempting idea, since cotton grown conventionally is destructive of both soils and landscape. But the petrochemical industry has left us an overwhelming legacy of pollution. Hemp, bamboo and sweet gum are much less demanding fiber crops than cotton. Perhaps there are non-polluting ways to manufacture synthetic fibers.

With a 17-year cutting rotation, tree plantations for railway fuel in India would occupy 20 acres per mile of track. This constitutes a band about 200 feet deep along 80% of the track on one side. Approximately 5-10% of that acreage in photo-voltaic panels would also work.

Organic vegetable soups have 6 times the salicyclates of conventional vegetable soups. Pests feeding on the organically-grown plants stimulates them to secrete salicyclates. (In general, crop plants like potatoes can lose a third of their leaf area without reducing yields.) Salicyclates (aspirin is one) are anti-inflammatories and anti-oxidents. They help prevent heart attacks, strokes, several cancers and may delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Similarly, organic tomato ketshup contains 2 to 3 times the cancer-fighting lycopenes of non-organic ketchup. Temporary shortages of nutrients (as occur in organic agriculture) may also stimulate the production of anti-oxidants in plants.

A fleet average of 40 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks would save over a billion barrels of oil in the U.S. annually, more than we now import from the Persian Gulf. Cutting the speed limit to 55 miles per hour would let the present fleet save the same amount of oil.

Cars running on compressed air can go 200 miles at 30 miles per hour and refuel in three minutes at a cost of $2.50 . Of course, faster speeds reduce the car’s range.

Human urine makes up about 1% of the volume of waste water flow, but contains 80% of its nitrogen and 45% of its phosphorus. Urine could replace a quarter of the commercial fertiliser currently used for crop production. Removing 50-60% of the urine in waste water would turn sewage treatment plants into net producers of energy. With fewer nutrients in the water, microbes in the aeration tanks turn the remaining nitrogen and phosphorus into biomass much more quickly and efficiently. The biomass formed is richer and generates more methane (the source of the plant’s energy) in the anaerobic digesters. The transit time of the waste water through the plant is much reduced.

Urine separation toilets separate out urine and store it in tanks until it is collected and taken away to be converted to fertiliser. Such toilets require replumbing existing waste-water systems. Separating the urine from the waste water flow itself would be simpler. Low-flush toilets reduce the volume of waste water and toilets with separate flushes for urine and for solids reduce it further. This helps concentrate the urine. Once solids have been settled out, reverse osmosis membranes might further concentrate the urine. Then the urine-water mix is cooled until it is half frozen. Water freezes preferentially out of the mixed fluid. Water freezes as a pure substance, expelling other molecules from its crystal lattice, so most of the fertilising elements remain in the liquid fraction, which is then decanted and reacted with magnesium oxide to produce struvite, an ammonium phosphate fertiliser.

One of the best uses for partially treated wastewater is for irrigation. One-tenth of the world’s irrigated crops are grown with partially treated wastewater. The crops use the nutrients in the urine and the water is cleaned during its passage through the soil. Excess water moves as groundwater flow into streams or percolates into the soil, where it maintains groundwater levels. Such waters should not contain industrial waste (as they usually do). Unless further cleaned, such waters should not be used on vegetable crops.

Nanoparticles of iron seem to catalyze the breakdown of chlorinated solvents like trichloroethylene. If so, they could be used to decontaminate soil or ground water. (Bacteria recently isolated from sewage also break down the chloroethylenes. Chloroethylenes are neurotoxins and carcinagens now common in soils and drinking water.)

A cheap molecular sieve of zeolites will filter carbin dioxide from the exhause gases of power plants. The gas can be pumped into depleted oil wells, or reacted with magnesium oxide to create building blocks and the filter reused. But even at present prices, photovoltaic electricity is probably cheaper than that produced by coal burning plants that have to sequester their carbon dioxide. Solar panels may also be more efficient, as much of the energy in the coal is used up in its mining, transportation and burning (about half in modern plants). The recapture of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and carbon dioxide and the proper disposal of fly ash (perhaps in E-crete) would add to this.

Raising cattle sustainably in Montana raised the profits of the ranchers over 20%. The cattle were raised on grass and given antibiotics only when they were sick.

There are 5 billion acres of currently degraded soils on the planet (more than 5 times the current cropland of the United States: degraded by human use). Revegetating them (perhaps farming them with perennial crops) could absorb most of the carbon dioxide now emitted by human activity. In the dry Sahel, for instance, acacia trees encouraged by local farmers form a virtuous circle. The trees add carbon and nitrogen to the soil. They provide shade and forage for cattle. More cattle mean more manure for the fields and better crop yields. More land can then be used for the trees (which in this case remove carbon that would otherwise contribute to global warming). In California pasturelands, grass grows better under native blue oaks and cattle prefer to graze there. Cattle also eat the oak seedlings, which must be protected if the trees are to regenerate. Modern farmers do not allow trees in their fields or pastures.

Injecting an appropriate mix of bacteria into sewers reduces odor and digests 50% of the solids before they reach the treatment plant. This clever idea uses the sewers as an extension of the plant.

Approximately 1.4 million pounds of human hair contained in mesh pillows (so the hair could be easily retrieved) would have soaked up the oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez in a week. (Barbershops in the City of London produce several times that in a year.) Exxon spent $2 billion on a high-tech cleanup which further damaged the environment and recovered 12% of the oil.

Selling 10% of the straw from wheatfields in Oregon as a feedstock for non-toxic paper pulp raised the earnings of the farmers by 25-50%. The rest of the straw is left as a stubble mulch. The effuent from the paper mill that processes the straw can be used as a fertiliser.

Land contaminated with cadmium and zinc can be cleaned up by cultivating a flowering brassica, a subspecies of Thlassi caerulescens, which accumulates the metal in its tissues (stems, leaves, flowers). After harvest, the plants are dried and burned and the metals recovered from the ash.

Radiation will kill food-borne pathogens like salmonella in chicken and ground beef; so will the anti-oxidants found in dried plums.

Miners removed 700 tons of gold from the California hills during the 1850s and 1860s, using 7000 tons of mercury to do this. (Mercury attracts finely divided gold. Woolen mats soaked with mercury were used to pick up particles of gold in crushed ore.) Much of the mercury ended up in San Francisco Bay, where 150 years later it makes the fish unsafe to eat. The level in the fish is falling and will probably reach a safe level in another 50 years. So contamination is not forever. (Size, sedimentation, bacterial action, dilution have helped heal the bay.) New Haven harbor on Long Island Sound however is still however too toxic for benthic organisms. This probably is related to the concentration of metal-working industries in Connecticut in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to the continuing transport of metals from the rivers to the harbor. The larvae of polychaete worms settle, but as soon as they bore into the mud and ingest the sediment they die.

Environmental damage may occur abruptly and be irreversible: thresholds are crossed, buffering capacities exceeded, ecosystem resilience lost. Without warning, moose populations flip to a lower level, water plants disappear from estuaries, jellyfish and algal blooms replace striped bass and oysters. Since the new states are stable, such changes can be hard to reverse. Basic ecosystem services such as purifying the air, cleaning the water, maintaining the carbon dioxide balance of the atmosphere, decomposing wastes, filtering untraviolet light out of the solar spectrum, providing sources of new medicines or new knowledge, permitting recovery from natural disturbances, are not tradeable for economic gain, at least not by any economy grounded in reality. There are few trade-offs in most human interference with the natural environment: only losses. Mines leach heavy metals and other toxic compounds essentially forever, unless their drainage waters are filtered (forever) by men. The economic users of an environment need economic signals of the harm they are doing. Thus—one way or another—farmers and homeowners should pay if they deplete rivers or groundwaters, trawlers pay for the damage they cause to the seabed, and chemical companies pay for the damage their products cause. Putting a realistic cost on environmental damage would make much of it cease immediately. Taxes on pollutants like mercury provide a clear long-term signal of social intent. So the recovery of San Francisco Bay from massive mercury contamination, even after 200 years, is a hopeful sign. (A variety of E. coli has been engineered to take up mercury. It could be used to clean up waste water streams or polluted waterways.)

In the United States and Canada 10-15 million tons of salt are spread on roads annually. According to a 1987 study, each ton does $1400 of damage to roads and bridges. It also increases the saltiness of surface waters. This becomes a problem if the water is a source of drinking water. It is also a problem for aquatic organisms. Digesting whey (a diary waste) with bacteria to produce acetate, and combining the acetate with limestone makes calcium magnesium acetate, a nontoxic, noncorrosive salt substitute that can be sprayed on roads in advance of storms. A new process makes calcium magnesium acetate more competitive in cost with salt, but it still costs considerably more. Looking at the whole costs of road maintenance would make the new material affordable. (It was probably affordable in 1987, at $1200 a ton, but states and localities paid for the salt, the federal government for road and bridge repairs.)

Electricity can be extracted from hot rocks 5 kilometers down at a rate of about 25 megawatts per cubic kilometer of granite for about 20 years. (Then the rocks must be let reheat.) Pumping water through the rocks uses about 20% of the power produced. There is sufficient geothermal heat within 10 kilometers (4 miles) of the earth’s surface in the United States to provide all the 27 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity the United States used in 2005 for the next 2000 years. Such drilling distances are well within modern limits. Of course the energy is renewable.

Yam beans from the American tropics yield 35 to 70 tons of plant per acre. A crop fixes about 50 tons of nitrogen per acre per year. After rotenone (a natural pesticide) is extracted from the seeds, they can be pressed for oil, and the oil cake, similar to soybean meal, fed to pigs. All parts of the plant are edible. Its roots keep without refrigeration. It will grow in poor, dry soil. It is traditionally grown in Mexico along with corn and beans.

In the late 1990s the Danish island of Samsoe won a contest for Denmark’s “renewable energy island.” Winning was the result of a plan put together by an engineer who didn’t live on the island but thought that its small size and steady winds would make it a good candidate. No prize monies or economic incentives came with the prize but one island resident became interested in the idea and found the money to fund a position for himself to develop the project. Also at the same time, the Danish government passed a law requiring electric utilites to offer producers of wind power 10 year contracts at a fixed rate. Under such contracts the cost of the turbines was usually paid off in 8 years.

The changeover to renewable energy on Samsoe was created by this one man, who talked his neighbors into thinking renewable energy was a good idea. After the start, thinking about how to use renewable energy (and make money at it) became a game. The island now produces more renewable energy than it uses, mostly from large wind turbines owned by the islanders or other investors, also from small backyard turbines, photo-voltaic panels, and rooftop hot water heaters. Heat and hot water in several of the small villages (Samsoe has 4300 inhabitants) is provided by furnaces that burn straw and (in one case) wood chips). The residents of Samsoe still use fossil fuels in their cars, tractors and trucks but the island as a whole produces more renewable energy than it uses in renewable and fossil fuelled energy combined. (A few farmers press diesel—or salad oil—from canola seeds, a major oilseed crop in Europe.) Samsoe did not make any attempt to save energy during the conversion and energy use is now the same, or perhaps slightly greater, than before.

Like the American Middle West, Samsoe is a radically simplified human habitat, lacking much of its original mammalian, avian, amphibian, insect and fishy life. Leaching of nutrients into groundwater, streams and estuaries is a major problem, as is overfishing in the surrounding seas. However nothing stops the island from going further and trying to become a sustainable landscape. The flat sandy fields of Holland and Denmark were long maintained with leaf mold, crop rotation, rock powders and manure. Land to protect streams and estuaries and for wildlife can be set aside, as can undersea habitat.

Like Samsoe, the United States could remake its energy environment. It would take guaranteed contracts for renewable electricity production for periods somewhat longer than the time needed to pay off the investment, new long distance power lines, much solar thermal investment in the West and Southwest, solar electric panels and water heaters on private walls and roofs. Besides that, buildings that use 50-75% less energy, electric motors and appliances that use 25-50% less energy, and cars that get 150-200 miles per gallon (all of this built of nontoxic materials) are not a bad idea. Whether we can stop global warming or construct a sustainable landscape isn’t clear but we can quickly reduce our carbon footprint.

On the dry eastern slopes of the Casacade Mountains in Oregon the United States Forest Service is trying to restore forests that have been altered by logging, replanting and fire suppression into dense forests that are susceptible to drought, root diseases, insects and catastrophic fire. In this area, prior to 1900, frequent low-intensity fires had created open forests of sun-loving trees; ponderosa pine dominated the high desert forests, along with some sugar pine, western white pine, western larch and coastal Douglas fir. (The last is intermediate in shade tolerance; it will grow in some shade.) Early logging removed most of the big trees, low intensity fires were suppressed, and the open woodlands were invaded by the shade tolerant white fir, which formed thick stands. Some parts of the forest were replanted to plantation conifers, also thickly. The dense mid-level fir canopy, with some remaining large pines above it, provided ideal habitat for spotted owls, which colonized the area. But the new forest was overcrowded and unstable. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, drought, an epidemic of budworm, root diseases (which spread easily in a crowded stand) and bark beetles killed most of the firs. Bark beetles also killed many of the ponderosa pines, which lose the vigor necessary to ward of insect attack in crowded stands. With so much fuel, a series of catastrophic wildfires burned large areas of the Sister’s Ranger District (91,000 acres of 324, 000 in the district burned in 1991). The Sister’s Ranger District then came up with a plan to restore the original, fire-resistant old growth forests. Most of the dead trees were removed (4 to 13 were left per acre for wildlife); all large, healthy pines and larches (the sun-loving trees) were left; and as much fir as possible was removed. The amount of fir that could be removed was constrained by the need to provide habitat for the spotted owls, a protected species. Large firs were left along with the large pines and larches, whose numbers were too few to make a sufficiently dense stand. Some mid-level fir stands were left amidst the taller sun-loving trees for the owls. The thicker stands were surrounded by the more open historical forest of old growth pines, which is now maintained by cutting and low-intensity fires. High-intensity fires that invade the fir stands die down when they reach the surrounding open forest. The mid-level fir canopy regenerates quickly and will be rotated through the whole area. This likely mimics the natural situation, since ideal owl habitat consists of regenerating old growth woodland. This new woodland, neither completely historical, nor what the forest developed into with cutting and without fire, will produce sawtimber, poles, pulpwoods and fuelwood. Some of the clearing does not produce a profit and has been contracted out to prison labor; volunteer organizations also take part. A major purpose of the management is to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire and make the surrounding area safer for human settlement.

Further north, also on the dry side of the Cascades, in southern British Columbia, open pondersosa pine forests with an undergrowth of bunch grasses and forbs slowly filled in with Douglas fir during the twentieth century, as the low intensity fires that maintained the stands were suppressed. The fires had been set by the Lilloet First Nations people, a Salish tribe that had historically burned the woods to regenerate collected foods (huckleberry, raspberry, glacier lily, wild onion, spring beauty, buffalo berry, service berry) and to increase forage for mule deer. This dry, warm woodland (July temperatures average 75º F.) had 5-40 ponderosa pines per acre. The low intensity fires also allowed trees growing on moist sites (red cedar and paper birch, along with many shrubs and herbs important to wildlife) to survive. (High intensity fires would have killed these trees.) So the fires also maintained variety in the woodland. When the fires were suppressed, the woods filled in with young conifers (up to 500 trees per acre) and in the late twentieth century large areas began burning catastrophically, destroying houses and threatening nearby towns. Now an attempt is being made to restore the historical old growth forest. Most fires in western North America are started by lightening but lightening is uncommon in this part of British Columbia. Studies of fire scars on trees showed that fires burned at 5-10 year intervals for the last 400 years. These fires were almost certainly set by the Lilloets or their predecessors. No one knows when the process started. The forest may have been continuously manipulated by people from the time of its establishment after the retreat of the glaciers. (One suspects this is how the scrub oak barrens, habitat of heath hens in New England, arose.) Burning of the herbaceous cover to renew it would have let only the fire-resistant pines survive. The goal of restoration is not the forest of a golden age, but a healthy, vigorous woodland adapted to today’s world. (In north temperate landscapes, the golden age from the beginning included people, with their spears and firesticks.)

I want to avoid proposing one of those totalitarian utopias in which people walk, take public transportation, drink tap water instead of soda, and borrow a communal car now and then for a trip to the country— those utopias so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so terrible when put into operation. Of course I do end up proposing one. The engineering ideas of the hypercar, if applied to the vehicles of public transportation, would multiply their beneficial effects several-fold (in some calculations, by 10 times). In other words, energy efficient public transportation, in cities where public transportation worked—that is, where zoning encouraged mixed development and dense human settlement along transportation corridors, and where bus lines, light rail lines, and subsidized taxi services put everyone within reach of public transportation—would save even more energy and materials than a fleet of very efficient cars, one for every 1.5 persons. In terms of public monies, sudsidizing public transportation is much cheaper than subsidizing private cars. Depending on how you calculate it, the current public subsidy for cars in the United States is several hundred billion dollars annually (including things like road resurfacing, drilling subsidies for oil companies, military operations to protect oilfields). And in general what consumers pay directly for public transporation (their personal outlay: this is a political decision) is less than the cost of purchasing and maintaining a car. It is probably close to the cost of maintaining a car (gas, insurance, tires, oil changes, brake jobs). Of course those freeways and car repair shops represent jobs; many, many jobs if one traces the chain back to the manufacturers of steel, aluminum, plastics and concrete, and forward to the car dealers, insurance agencies, motor vehicle bureaus and banks. Public transportation is also a source of jobs, with its own construction, financing and maintenance streams.

People like me are run over by events. While writers like me speculate about what should be done, things take their course. It now seems most probable that world oil production will peak early in the third millennium (2010? 2020?). If demand is sufficient, production will be maintained, but at steadily rising cost. When the cost becomes too great, production of oil will fall. If the oil geologist Hubbert is right, the great bulk of oil production will have occupied the century between 1950 and 2050. A rise in the real price of oil will reverse the trend of the previous 50 years. (That steady fall in the price of energy is what made Paul Ehrlich lose his bet to Julian Simon. Ehrlich bet that as the better deposits of metal ores were used up and poorer and poorer ones exploited, the price of the refined metal would rise. But thanks to lower and lower energy costs and advances in the refining process, that didn’t happen. In many ways, their bet—one betting on human ingenuity, one on the limits of the world—encompass the arguments in this book. Ehrlich was too prescient and he shouldn’t have bet on prices. But on what? The state of native fish stocks ? — not the price of fish in markets. The presence of working ecosystems?) As the real price of fuel rises, we may not need a tax to make cars more efficient, or public transportation more desireable. We may still need government fuel standards; Europeans now pay double or triple what Americans do for gasoline, have for the most part excellent public transportation systems, and still fill their roads with not-very-efficient cars. (But cars that are twice as efficient as ours.)

The end of oil doesn’t necessarily mean the end of our dependence on fossil fuels, since at present rates of consumption considerable natural gas and several hundred years of coal are left, but it gives one pause for thought. Perhaps, as some have argued, it would be better to use oil as a more or less recyclable lubricant, and coal and natural gas as feedstocks for a non-polluting, also recyclable chemical industry. This won’t happen soon. Perhaps some coal and oil should be left in place—a spiritual perspective, or a resource for future generations. Renewable energies are the only permanent sources of supply on earth, which is to say they will last us for the next 500 million years (one-eighth of the earth’s 4 billion years of evolutionary time), the span set for life on earth by the growing radiance of the sun. People not fond of the possibilities of renewable energy consider nuclear fusion, which, though not yet worked out technically, is currently the most long-term solution to the problem of obtaining large amounts of high-density energy. (Renewable sources like solar cells are so-called low density sources because they occupy a lot a space.) While supplies of uranium on earth are limited, nuclear fission could also carry us for some time, especially if we gave up our squeamishness over plutonium and used fast breeder reactors to process new fuel from old (and help solve the problem of radioactive waste). In the case of fusion power, estimates vary, but the deuterium in the oceans should last several thousand years at present rates of energy consumption. After deuterium, there is helium-3 from the moon. Our civilization’s dependence on energy is greatly underestimated. (People compare the Internet Revolution to the Industrial Revolution: but the Internet Revolution sits squarely amidst the warm houses and cheap energy supplies of the Industrial Revolution: one is a subset of the other.) Our world may simply collapse whencheap supplies of coal and oil collapse, as the Tiahuanaco people collapsed when their water supply failed.

Bringing the underdeveloped world to the living standards of the developed one means maintaining our present global rate of using energy and materials (with much higher rates in Asia and Africa, falling ones in Europe and the United States) but reducing the polluting effects of both. To maintain a livable world (about a third of the air pollution in Los Angeles now comes from China) energy use in the West has to fall by over 90%, and continue (like population) on a downward trend. The climate will still warm, but less. Continuing growth in energy use or population will obliterate any advantages of energy efficiency. (Using the internet now takes 10% of the U.S. electricity supply.) One of the advantages of photo-voltaic power is that energy supply can be integrated with human habitation—that is, put on the roofs of houses, in back yards, over parking lots. Separate structures and more land development aren’t needed. But if we want this new solar powered world, we have to grasp it, and not wait for the invisible hand of the market to give it to us, as energy prices (perhaps) rise, or as the costs of a changing climate and a polluted biosphere become clearer. Energy prices are unlikely to rise soon enough to avoid large and irreversable changes in both ecosystems and climate. Too much ultraviolet light will make much of the green and blue world uninhabitable by its present plants and animals, some populations of which have already collapsed, though in general climate change is less a problem for the biosphere than for us. Higher seas, more powerful rains and windstorms, longer and more severe droughts, rising or falling average temperatures will make much of the human infrastructure of the world obsolete. Chemical and nutrient pollution will make much of the landscape uninhabitable. If we continue to do nothing, we will lack the means or the will to deal with the unfolding catastrophe. Historically, societies like ours collapse at the height of their powers. Growth in population and wealth for us is over. This is not a bad thing. What we must do is provide a soft landing.

* * *

Against the backdrop of planetary evolution, our concerns for growth and riches seem petty. Mammalian extinctions peak every 2.5 million years, when the earth’s orbital geometries combine to produce a more strongly seasonal climate (harsh winters, hot dry summers), which makes survival difficult. Every 100,000-2,000,000 years a stony asteroid 1-2 kilometers in diameter strikes the earth. Dust from the collision and soot from widespread fires dim the sun, slowing or halting photosynthesis and cooling the climate worldwide. About once every 50 million years a nearby supernova explosion bathes the eath in sufficient X-ray radiation to kill most vertebrates (the microbial world remains undisturbed). But in 500 million years the increasing brightness of the sun will make the earth too hot to inhabit. As the increasing radiance of the sun evaporates the oceans, hot fierce winds will sweep their water into the stratosphere, from where it will be lost to space. One billion years from now increasing temperature will have made the earth lifeless.

Bibliography

This book depends almost entirely on secondary sources. It is not a work of original scholarship or a reasoned argument so much as a pastiche of examples and data that support the central place of nature in the human world. The stories that scientists tell change (some have changed while I have written this book); even data change. I have tried to be accurate and up-to-date. But in a decade someone may write a book that reaches similar conclusions with entirely different stories.

While I think footnotes are superfluous in a work of this sort, some parts of it are more dependent on others’ work than other parts. The description of rivers and salmon derive a good deal from David Montgomery’s King of Fish and Alice Outwater’s Water (both excellent books), the descriptions of western forests from Arno and Fiedler’s Mimicking Nature’s Fire, the logging rules for western forests from the work of Jerry Franklin. Other sections derive from many works: that on buffalo from the Buffalo Book, Buffalo Management and Marketing, Lives of Game Animals, Mammals of the Northern Great Plains, Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains, Prehistoric Hunters of the High Plains, Water, The World’s Water 2000-2001, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Bring Back the Buffalo, The Destruction of the Bison, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land; that on forests from The Work of Nature, Defining Sustainable Forestry, The Hidden Forest, Toward Forest Sustainability, Natural Capitalism, California Forests and Woodlands, Land Use and Watersheds, Deforesting the Earth, Americans and their Forests, Mimicking Nature’s Fire. Certain works I admired for their perfection as works of art (The Work of Nature by Yvonne Baskin) as well as for the information they contained. Many examples, facts, and factoids came from New Scientist, 1995-2008, others from Ecology and Ecological Applications (especially 1995-1997), some from Natural History (for instance, the story about the difficulties faced by the gray jay in the southern parts of its range), a few from The New York Review of Books and The New York Times (most of whose relevant articles were better reported in New Scientist). Fernand Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800 opened a door in my mind and I.G.Simmons Changing the Face of the Earth: Culture, Environment, History pushed me through it. Some of the books listed contributed a single word to my essay, some a sentence, but all of them improved my understanding of the place of man in nature.

Journals
Ecology
Ecological Applications
Natural History
New Scientist
The New York Review of Books
The New York Times

Books

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Askins, R. 2000y. Restoring North American Birds: lessons from landscape ecology. Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn.
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----. 2002. A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines: the growing threat of species invasions. Island Press/Shearwater Books: Washington, D.C.
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Bradley, J. 1987. Evolution of the Onondaga Iroquois: accomodating change, 1500-1665. Syracuse University Press: Syracuse, NY.
Braudel, F. 1967. Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800. Harper and Row: New York/ Evanston/ San Francisco/ London.
----. 1982. The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century. Harper and Row: New York/ Cambridge/ Philadelphia/ San Francisco/ London/ Mexico City/ Sao Paulo/ Sydney.
----. 1982. The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century. Harper and Row: New York/ Cambridge/ Philadelphia/ San Francisco/ London/ Mexico City/ Sao Paulo/ Sydney.
Brown, Nancy Marie. 2007. The Far Traveller: Voyages of a Viking Woman. Harcourt, Inc.: Orlando/Austin/New York/San Diego/London.
Bush, M. 1999. Ecology of a Changing Planet, 2nd Ed. Prentice Hall: New York.
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Calow, P. and G. Petts. 1992-1994. The Rivers Handbook: hydrological and ecological principles: in two volumes. Blackwell Scientific Publications: Oxford and Boston.
Carling, P. and G. Petts, ed. 1992. Lowland Floodplain Rivers: geomorphological perspectives. Wiley and Sons: Chichester and New York.
Carrol, C. 1973. The Timber Economy of Puritain New England. Brown University Press: Providence.
Castetter, E. and W. Bell. 1942. Pima and Papago Indian Agriculture. University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Cayton, A. 1999. Frontier Indiana. Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianopolis.
Changnon, S., ed. 1996. The Great Flood of 1993. Westview Press/Harper Collins: Boulder, CO and Oxford, England.
Cioc, M. 2002. The Rhine: an eco-biography, 1815-2000. University of Washington Press: Seattle, Wa.
Clark, J. 1996. Coastal Zone Management Handbook. Lewis Publishers: Boca Raton/ New York/ London/ Tokyo.
Clover, Charles. 2006. The End of the Line: how overfishing is changing the world and what we eat. The New Press: New York and London.
Collman, James. 2001. Naturally Dangerous: surprising facts about food, health and the environment. University Science Books: Sausalito, Ca.
Cooke, G. Dennis (et al.). 1993. Restoration and Management of Lakes and Reservoirs, 2nd ed. Lewis Publishers: Boca Raton, FL.
Coon, C. 1971. The Hunting Peoples. Little Brown: Boston.
Cronk, J. and M. Fennessy. 2001. Wetland Plants: biology and ecology. Lewis Publishers: Boca Raton, FL.
Cronin, W. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England. Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.
Crosby, A. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York.
Curtin, P., G. Brush, G. Fisher, ed. 2001. Discovering the Chesapeake: the history of an ecosystem. Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London.
Daily, G., and K. Ellison. 2002. The New Economy of Nature: the quest to make conservation profitable. Island Press/Shearwater Books: Washington/Covelo/London.
Dean, C . 1999. Against the Tide: the battle for America’s beaches. Columbia University Press: New York.
Deffeyes, K. 2001. Hubbert’s Peak: the impending world oil shortage. Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey.
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