Category Archives: Environment

California agriculture

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Excellent article by Natasha Geiling, “California’s Drought Could Upend America’s Entire Food System“:

In 2014, some 500,000 acres of farmland lay fallow in California, costing the state’s agriculture industry $1.5 billion in revenue and 17,000 seasonal and part time jobs. Experts believe the total acreage of fallowed farmland could double in 2015 — and that news has people across the country thinking about food security.

“When you look at the California drought maps, it’s a scary thing,” Craig Chase, who leads the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative at Iowa State University, told ThinkProgress. “We’re all wondering where the food that we want to eat is going to come from. Is it going to come from another state inside the U.S.? Is it going to come from abroad? Or are we going to grow it ourselves? That’s the question that we need to start asking ourselves.”…

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Uncivilisation – I

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From The Dark Mountain Project’s Manifesto:

 

I

 

WALKING ON LAVA

 

The end of the human race will be that it will
eventually die of civilisation.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.

Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.

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Uncivilisation

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The Dark Mountain Project recently published a paperback edition of their 2009 Manifesto.  You can order a copy here or read it on-line.  (I bought the paperback.)  In case you’re not inclined to follow the link, I’ll post sections over the coming days and weeks.   It starts with a poem:

Rearmament

 

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935

 

Misguided criticism of Franzen’s New Yorker article

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In this week’s Weekly Digest I linked to a recent article by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker, “Carbon Capture:  Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?”  He made a few statements that I’d challenge but, overall, it’s a very thoughtful and nuanced piece.  He speaks to the challenge that many of us feel in trying to make progress towards solving chronic problems while also dealing with acute ones.   He tells a good “think globally, act locally” story.   It’s a good read.  Unfortunately, over the past few days I’ve read some really out-to-lunch criticisms of the piece by people whose opinions I generally respect.  (Names omitted here to protect the guilty.)  I don’t know what to say about that beyond, “Read it for yourself.”

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LearnEO!

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LearnEO! is a creation of the European Space Agency.  From the LearnEO! website:

LearnEO! is an Earth observation education project funded by the European Space Agency. Its aim is to increase the understanding of satellite data from ESA missions and show how these can be used to tackle environmental problems in the real world.

The project will develop hands-on training resources for use primarily (but not exclusively) by teachers and students at upper high school to university level.

 

The nine planetary boundaries

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From the Stockholm Resilience Center:

Today, 60 per cent of the free ecosystem services that we use are exploited in an unsustainable manner.

Crucial ecosystem services such as air- and water purification, the pollination of crops and the seas’ capacity to produce fish are in serious decline. The changes are occurring so rapidly today that society is unable to adapt to the new environmental circumstances and thus cannot effectively develop strategies and frameworks for sustainable use of the ecosystems.

“Our societies are an integrated part of the biosphere and dependent upon functioning ecosystems. That is why we need to manage ecosystems so that we can handle the future’s challenges and maintain our capacity to evolve in a positive way,” says Carl Folke.

With that in mind:

The [Planetary Boundaries] framework was first introduced in 2009, when a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists identified and quantified the first set of nine planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. Crossing these boundaries could generate abrupt or irreversible environmental changes. Respecting the boundaries reduces the risks to human society of crossing these thresholds.

The nine are:

  1. Stratospheric Ozone Depletion
  2. Loss of biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and extinctions)
  3. Chemical pollution and the release of novel entities
  4. Climate Change
  5. Ocean acidification
  6. Freshwater consumption and the global hydrological cycle
  7. Land system change
  8. Nitrogen and phosphorus flows to the biosphere and oceans
  9. Atmospheric aerosol loading

Here’s where the Center rates humanity with respect to each:

PB_FIG33_media_11jan2015_web2