Wild Orchids for Trotsky

To Midway and Back: An Email Interview with Barbara DiBernard

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:45:00 +0000

Beach, Midway atoll.

In an earlier post, we took an imagined journey to the islands of the Northwestern Hawaiian atoll, following the life of the Laysan albatross and the troubles this beautiful bird now faces due to plastic pollution in the North Pacific Gyre.

Today we would like to welcome Barbara DiBernard, professor of English and of women's studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Barbara has participated in several study tours to environmentally sensitive areas, volunteering in efforts to protect endangered species, and recording her observations in award-winning photographs. Having recently returned from Midway Atoll in the Hawaiian Archipelago, where she worked to preserve albatross populations, Barbara has kindly consented to share with us her photographs and reflections on her experience, as well as on continued efforts to ensure the albatross's survival.

All photographs by Barbara DiBernard.

RLM: Could you convey to us a few general impressions of Midway Island? What do you see on arriving at the airport? Where on the island did you stay? Are there many remnants of Midway's naval history, e.g. WWII-era military bases? How many people, if any, live permanently on Midway?

BDB: As the plane approaches the runway on Sand Island, Midway Atoll, at 9 p.m., the landing lights illuminate thousands of albatross lined up on each side and as far as we can see. Everyone aboard the 19-seater charter plane gasps. Of course we expected to see albatross; that’s why we came, but the reality of them and sheer numbers are overwhelming. This atoll belongs to the birds, particularly the Laysan albatross, and we are privileged to be able to spend a week with them.

Laysan Albatross adults and chicks in varying degrees of maturation.

Midway Atoll, 1250 miles west-northwest of Honolulu, is part of the leeward chain of the Hawaiian archipelago. The atoll consists of a circular coral reef approximately 5 miles in diameter inside of which is a shallow white sand lagoon and 3 islands. Midway Atoll, the other Northwest Hawaiian Islands and the ocean around them were declared the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in 2006, forming the largest protected marine area in the world. This vast, remote, and largely uninhabited marine region encompasses approximately 139,793 square miles (362,061 square kilometers) of Pacific Ocean in the northwestern extent of the Hawaiian Archipelago.

“The name Papahanaumokuakea comes from an ancient Hawaiian tradition concerning the genealogy and formation of the Hawaiian Islands...Papahanaumoku is a mother figure personified by the earth and Wakea is a father figure personified in the expansive sky...

Endangered Laysan duck.

thus the naming of the monument is to honor and preserve these names, to strengthen Hawaii’s cultural foundation and to ground Hawaiians to an important part of their history” (informational handout). Midway is also a National Wildlife Refuge and is designated as the Battle of Midway National Memorial. Because of these designations, several agencies are charged with the preservation of the historical sites as well as the reef, the islands, and their flora and fauna. For more information, you can go to www.hawaiireef.noaa.gov or www.fws.gov/pacificislands. Currently the Monument Draft Management Plan is on these sites, laying out several options for how the Monument should be maintained over the next few years.

Laysan albatross

Only one of the islands within Midway Atoll is inhabited. About 50 people live on Sand Island at this time, including the Monument director, Fish & Wildlife staff, biologists, people there on special projects (such as invasive plants specialists, who were there during our time on the island), and those who care for the grounds and buildings and do the cooking for visitors and staff. In addition, a few volunteers are on the island at any given time. They come for a few weeks or month at a time to help with research and special projects. The Oceanic Society (www.oceanic-society.org), with whom I traveled, has several 1-week trips a year on which 15 visitors at a time can participate in a Natural History Tour.

Visitors stay in “Charlie Barracks,” refurbished barracks from the time when the atoll was a navy base. The rooms are comfortable, the lobby of the building has a computer with internet capabilities, and everyone eats together at the Clipper House restaurant, right on the beach. There are no cars or trucks on Midway. Staff and visitors travel in golf carts, ride old fat-tire bikes, or walk. Cell phones don’t work on Midway. Everyone leaves their rooms unlocked, and you can drop your backpack or other belongings anywhere and know they will be there when you return. I found the lack of vehicles, the lack of cell phones, the safety, and the sense of community among the most positive aspects of being on Midway.

There are remnants of Midway’s military history on the atoll and the designation Battle of Midway National Memorial mandates that the history be preserved. While it has not been feasible to preserve everything, some sites are being maintained. Among them are the “bombproof” command/communications building into which a Japanese bomb was deflected on December 7, 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Lt. George H. Cannon died after refusing medical attention until he was sure communications were restored, and received the first Medal of Honor given to a U.S. marine in WWII.

Eastern Island.

You can also see shrapnel holes in metal beams of the old seaplane hangar that were made by Japanese shells during the Battle of Midway in June 1942. A pillbox on one of the beaches has been maintained as well. The current operating airplane hangar has a small historical exhibit, and plans call for this to be expanded and moved to a new location in the future. One of the interesting things about Midway is this contrast between the natural and human ecologies. You can be biking through a remote area of the island deeply involved in watching the albatross when you come upon an old artillery bunker, for example.

RLM: Describe for us the variety of wildlife you saw. It appears from your beautiful photos that the birds and other animals are almost completely unafraid of human presence. Is this a correct impression, and if not, how did you manage to get such stunning close-up shots? What did you observe of the life-patterns of animals on the island?

Laysan and black-footed albatross.

BDB: Seventeen seabird species for a total of about 2 million nest on Midway Atoll each year. The most recent population counts include 487,524 nesting pairs of Laysan albatross, 24,085 pairs of black-footed albatross, 32,066 pairs of bonin petrels, 5,000 pairs of red-tailed tropicbirds, 53 pairs of red-footed boobies, 87 pairs of great frigatebird, 6,000 pairs of black noddy, 1,000 pairs of brown noddy, 7500 pairs of fairy terns, 1000 pairs of wedge-tailed shearwaters, 400 pairs of gray-backed terns, and 45,000 pairs of sooty terns. As I mentioned above, the atoll measures approximately 5 miles in diameter. Within it, Sand Island is 1.8 miles long by 1.2 miles wide or about 1200 acres; Eastern Island consists of 334 acres, and Spit Island consists of only 6 acres. Obviously the bird population is very dense.

Sub-adult Laysans dancing.

Certainly on Sand Island, the Laysan albatross are the most overwhelming feature. At the time we were there, albatross chicks were sitting on their nests waiting to be fed about once a week by their parents, who alternate feedings. They were 2-4 weeks from fledging. Everywhere you looked were albatross chicks. In many areas, there was a chick about every 3 feet. At this age, some chicks are beginning to investigate their surroundings a bit, and often roads are impassable without moving several chicks before driving a golf cart through. Chicks are also on the sidewalks in front of buildings, taking shelter from the sun next to bike racks, and on the boardwalk leading to the restaurant. We saw many adults feeding their chicks, regurgitating the oil that they make of the fish and squid they consume while out at sea. There were also hundreds of sub-adult Laysan albatross dancing to find a life-long mate. They perform an intricate series of steps, bows, feather preening, sky-pointing, and bill clapping, accompanied by clicks, calls, and moos. The grouping of dancers was very fluid. At times 1 or 2 albatross would join 2 who were dancing, then one of the original dancers would wander off and start dancing with another bird, etc.

Chick on sidewalk, feet raised for thermal regulation.

Adult Laysan feeding its chick.

Pair of adult Laysan albatross.

Fairy tern.

Fairy terns are beautiful all-white birds. They nest on bare branches, or at times on top of bike racks, roofs, or air conditioners. Their chicks were just starting to hatch (our guide told us they were voted “cutest chicks on the island”), and it was always a delight to find one perched on a tree branch, on the roof of the porch of the barracks, or, in one case, next to a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in an outdoor shrine. Bonin petrels nest underground. Their population had been almost decimated by the rats brought in by ships. However, with the total eradication of the rats a few years ago, their population has rebounded. One reason to stay on the paths was to avoid crashing through a petrel burrow. If you did, you had to instantly drop to your knees and dig until you opened up the burrow in both directions so a chick would not be trapped.

Fairy tern with fish to feed its chick.

Fairy tern chick.

Laysan chick and bonin petrel chick.

Yes, it’s true that many of the birds are unafraid of human presence, as in the Galapagos. That is one of the most amazing aspects of being on Midway. I’m a birdwatcher at home, so I am aware of how difficult it is to get close to birds and how lucky one is to get a good glimpse through binoculars. On Midway, you can sit in a field of albatross only a few feet away from the closest bird and observe for hours at a time with no sign of disturbance. Fairy terns are very curious and would often flutter right above our heads, and red-tailed tropicbirds, even those sitting on nests, would let us approach within 3 feet.

RLM: What was a typical day like for you and other volunteers in your program? How many people were in your group? What were the daily activities and the overall goals of the stay?

Red-tailed tropicbird.

BDB: There were 15 people in our group. The goals of Oceanic’s Natural History tour were to learn about the natural and human history of the Atoll; to learn about the wildlife, especially the albatross, but also other seabirds, spinner dolphins, green sea turtles, and endangered Hawaiian monk seals; to learn about and have a chance to experience the healthy coral reef and the fish and other creatures who live there; and to gain an environmental consciousness about the threats to the wildlife who nest on or use the atoll. I believe that the privilege of visiting Midway also charges each of us to help educate others about the need to preserve the Northwest Hawaiian Islands and the creatures that live there.

Green sea turtle, fairy tern, and Hawaiian monk seal.

We would usually do a natural history excursion in the morning, with some of us traveling by golf cart and others by bike. Our naturalist and a Fish & Wildlife ranger would take us to part of the island to observe a particular species and educate us about it. We always had time for silent observation as well, just “being there.” After lunch we would have another excursion, then some free time to wander, swim, and take pictures. Most of us would gather at the beach to watch the sun set, and then our naturalist gave talks illustrated with slides of his own photographs. We had a talk on Laysan albatross, on the other seabirds, on the Hawaiian monk seal, and on fishes of the reef. We had 2 snorkeling excursions on the outer reef as well.

Red-footed booby.

Great frigatebird.

RLM: Tell us about your consciousness of the presence of plastic pollution. Is there plastic debris on the island itself, or mostly at sea where the albatross feed? What did you observe about the threats faced by albatross, and by other wildlife on the island?

Marine debris, Sand Island.

Fishing nets, Sand Island.

BDB: There is a huge pile of marine debris on Sand Island. One of our most memorable excursions and talks was at this pile. It is shocking to see the things that have washed up on Midway Atoll and/or have been pulled off the reef. Of course there is a great deal of fishing line, netting, rope, etc. Seals, dolphins, and turtles are all at risk of drowning from being caught in these. But we also observed a computer monitor, tires, laundry baskets, buoys, plastic bottles, glass bottles, plastic toy figures, sunglasses, “disposable” cigarette lighters, and many other kinds of debris. Our naturalist emphasized that we should be aware of what happens to our garbage. Many garbage dumps are placed so that in bad storms they are overwhelmed and the debris ends up in the ocean. Other debris comes from fishing boats.

While we were on Midway, we helped remove an estimated 900 lbs. of rope and netting which was caught on the rocks and would almost surely be washed back out into the lagoon in a bad storm. Fortunately, a Coast Guard cutter visited Midway while we were there and was able to take this rope and netting as well as about half of the other debris off the island. Getting debris or even recyclables taken away is a significant logistical problem on Midway. Not many boats visit, and few of the ones that do have the capacity to carry a significant amount of marine debris.

Removing ropes and nets.

Sand Island has much less plastic debris throughout than when I last visited in 2000. I imagine that Midway’s inclusion in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument and the plan to make Midway the educational site for visitors within the Monument led to this change. In 2000, the island was littered with plastic and other debris, the most noticeable being cigarette lighters. I learned then that virtually every lighter of the hundreds of thousands collected there had been brought to the island by an albatross, picked up inadvertently while feeding and often regurgitated into a chick’s body. The lighters on the island were the result of chicks expelling them in boluses or from the carcasses of chicks or adults who died from ingestion of debris. As you pointed out in your blog, the problem is with the “seafaring junkyard of plastic waste” in the North Pacific Gyre.

Plastic fragments from stomach of dead albatross chick.

RLM: You mentioned you have been to Midway on three different occasions. Have you observed changes, positive or negative, over the course of these visits, to the plastic situation or to other aspects of the island's ecology?

BDB: As I mentioned above, Sand Island is cleaner than when I visited in 1999 and 2000. However, the amount of debris getting caught on the surrounding coral reef or washed into the lagoon has not lessened. No matter how much debris humans pick up and dispose of on Midway, albatross will continue to ingest plastic while feeding and turtles, dolphins, and Hawaiian monk seals will continue to get caught in nets and ropes. While everyone is excited because endangered Hawaiian monk seals (population approximately 1100) have started pupping on Midway again, the mortality rate of pups in a recent year was 100%. Some of them must get drowned in marine debris, others may not get adequate nourishment from their mothers, and others may not be able to find adequate food on their own when they are weaned.

Midway is in a state of transition. With its designation as part of a Marine National Monument, in addition to its previous designations as a Wildlife Refuge and the Battle of Midway National Memorial, comes change. I read through the parts of the Monument Draft Management Plan that deal with Midway, and significant positive changes should be coming within the next 10 years, including making the atoll as close to energy independent as possible. In addition, old buildings that are a threat to the wildlife, such as those with lead paint (curious chicks often nibble at it and biologists have documented cases of chick carcasses with lethal levels of lead), will be destroyed and green buildings will be constructed.

RLM: What is your sense of Midway's future, particularly with regard to plastic pollution? Are there feasible ways for us to clean up the plastic already in the North Pacific Gyre or on Midway? If we can't clean up what's already there, how can we control the situation and most effectively safeguard the future of albatross and other animals?

BDB: This is for people more knowledgeable than I! Obviously, we have to reduce the amount of plastics we use, and we have to dispose of garbage more carefully. I’m a teacher, so I do believe in the value of education.

Plastic from albatross carcass.

When I returned from Midway in 2000 I gave a slide show to local groups in which I talked about the mortality of albatross from eating or being fed plastic. As part of my talk, I passed around a basket which contained plastic from one albatross carcass—bottle caps, toy figures, 2 lighters, a toothbrush handle, a belt buckle, unidentified pieces of plastic, some with sharp edges. Someone who heard one of my talks invited me to talk to her college class 2 years later and told me that the basket of plastic had made such an impression on her that she had asked herself of everything she bought since, “Could this hurt an albatross?”

I do believe in the ability of human beings to change. My partner and I were remarking yesterday that when we were growing up and well into our adulthood, the right of people to smoke anywhere was unquestioned. Neither of us could have foreseen the change that has come about in the U.S. in regard to smoking. And as author and transgender activist Leslie Feinberg said in an interview, in the repressive and homophobic 1950s, she could never have imagined that the ‘60s were right around the corner.

Still, the problems are massive. As Charles Moore wrote in his article “Trashed,” “Entanglement and indigestion, however, are not the worst problems caused by the ubiquitous plastic pollution...Plastic polymers, it turns out, are sponges for DDT, PCBs, and other oily pollutants...Plastic resin pellets concentrate such poisons to levels as high as a million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances...After [jellies and salps] ingest the toxins, they are eaten in turn by fish, and so the poisons pass into the food web that leads, in some cases, to human beings.”

RLM: Could you tell us a bit about what first inspired you to join volunteer efforts helping to preserve endangered species? What are some of the rewards and challenges of taking such a journey?

Red-footed booby and chick.

BDB: I’ve always had a deep connection with the earth and its non-human creatures. Growing up, I spent most of my time in the woods around our house. When I need sustenance, I still lie on the ground and feel strength and spirit flow into me. I never questioned that everything is connected, that I am part of a web that includes all animals, plants, people, and the earth and oceans. When I first learned about service trips, that I could contribute in a small way to ongoing research that would help preserve threatened and endangered animals, it seemed an ideal way to put my beliefs into practice.

I have been fortunate enough to participate in research on spinner dolphins and Laysan albatross on Midway; bottlenose dolphins, coral reefs, and American crocodiles in Belize, and leatherback sea turtles in Trinidad.

Sooty terns.

Through these expeditions, I have experienced moments of “grounded transcendence,” when I felt part of a web of life and beyond my ego. For me, these moments have their own value; they don’t need to lead to anything else.

However, I also believe in the value of citizen participation in science. For me to add a small bit to the data about leatherback turtle nesting, to the lives of crocodiles in Belize, or to the mortality of Laysan albatross on Midway is rewarding. Working with scientists has also enriched my life generally as well as my profession as a literature teacher.

RLM: What would be your advice for someone interested in taking action on the problem of plastic pollution in the North Pacific Gyre and the Northwestern Hawaiian atoll? Can anyone participate in the type of program you did? If we can't actually make a trip to one of the Northwest Hawaiian islands, can we still take actions to protect the wildlife vulnerable to plastic pollution? And if we do go on a volunteer trip, how can we best extend our positive effects even after returning home?

BDB: Education, education, education! Your blog is a good example. Being aware of the huge area of plastic in the North Pacific Gyre, as well as its implications for albatross, sea creatures, and humans has to be the first step. Noticing what plastics we use, whether we can reduce them, and making sure they are disposed of responsibly, is important too. Just within the last month, a column from a free-lance writer about the plastic in the North Pacific Gyre was printed in the Lincoln, NE newspaper. This tells me that word is getting out, that this is a problem that bears on all of our lives.

Great frigatebird and chick.

Anyone with the physical capabilities can participate in Oceanic’s natural history tours of Midway or other places. There are also other organizations, such as Earth Watch, the Sierra Club, Elder Hostel, and others that sponsor study tours and service trips on environmental/ecological topics. I encourage everyone who is interested to join one of these. I know that my knowledge of sea birds, dolphins, sea turtles, crocodiles, and coral reefs is more alive for me because I have been able to take these trips. As I said above, I also consider it my responsibility to talk to whoever will listen when I return!

Thanks for asking me to do this interview!

Laysan albatross in flight.

Trash Talk: Lager Radios and Pepsi Guitars

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:00:00 +0000

Photo: Michael Daecher. From About.com.

Anouk Zijlma, Guide to Africa Travel at About.com, has posted a beautiful photo gallery of recycled toys made in Capetown, South Africa by local artists using scraps such as might be found in the average city trashcan. Bottle caps and barbed wire, spray cans and potato chip wrappers find new life as toy cars, miniature guitars, and, most impressively, a working radio whose faceplate still displays the name "Castle Lager," a local beer.

Visit photo gallery at About.com

Asparagus on Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:02:00 +0000

Photo: Frank Vincentz

"Sailors
Fighting in the dance hall.
Oh man!
Look at those cavemen go.
It's the freakiest show.
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy.
Oh man!
Wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show.
Is there life on Mars?

As an escape for the fantasy through science fiction or as a literal terraformed escape from an overpopulated Earth, Mars has been our favorite alternate world since long before the wistful and surreal David Bowie song.

Last week, two news stories appeared in quick succession: on Wednesday, the Environmental News Network reported on climatologist James Hansen's speech to the National Press Club, warning of fast-approaching climatic tipping points beyond which global warming will become uncontrollable. Two days later, on Friday, BBC aired a NASA news brief marveling at the unexpected fertility of Martian soil analyzed by the Phoenix lander. Quoted in the article was a NASA chemist, opining that "You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well."

The juxtaposition of events suggested an unstated but irresistible conclusion: at least we have a getaway planet. But soil with some asparagus-friendly nutrients does not guarantee easy living on Mars. As William McDonough and Michael Braungart write in their book Cradle to Cradle, the idea of terraforming of Mars "provides rationalization for destruction, an expression of our hope that we'll find a way to save ourselves if we trash our planet. To this we would respond: If you want the Mars experience, go to Chile and live in a typical copper mine. There are no animals, the landscape is hostile to humans, and it would be a tremendous challenge."

James Hansen's Wednesday warning to the government and public about Earth's climate is dire:

"Animal and plant species are already stressed by climate change. Polar and alpine species will be pushed off the planet, if warming continues. Other species attempt to migrate, but as some are extinguished their interdependencies can cause ecosystem collapse. Mass extinctions, of more than half the species on the planet, have occurred several times when the Earth warmed as much as expected if greenhouse gases continue to increase. Biodiversity recovered, but it required hundreds of thousands of years.

"The disturbing conclusion, documented in a paper I have written with several of the world’s leading climate experts, is that the safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is no more than 350 ppm (parts per million) and it may be less. Carbon dioxide amount is already 385 ppm and rising about 2 ppm per year. Stunning corollary: the oft-stated goal to keep global warming less than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is a recipe for global disaster, not salvation."

Beyond simply sounding an alarm, Hansen offers policy proposals and a call to action, specifically in the form of a carbon tax:

"A price on emissions that cause harm is essential. Yes, a carbon tax. Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is needed to wean us off fossil fuel addiction. Tax and dividend allows the marketplace, not politicians, to make investment decisions.

"Carbon tax on coal, oil and gas is simple, applied at the first point of sale or port of entry. The entire tax must be returned to the public, an equal amount to each adult, a half-share for children. This dividend can be deposited monthly in an individual’s bank account.

"Carbon tax with 100 percent dividend is non-regressive. On the contrary, you can bet that low and middle income people will find ways to limit their carbon tax and come out ahead. Profligate energy users will have to pay for their excesses."

Difficult as a carbon tax might initially be to draft into law, compare that effort with the Herculean labor of wrestling Mars into some semblance of habitability. In the words again of McDonough and Braungart,

"Let's not make a big mess here and go somewhere less hospitable even if we figure out how. Let's use our ingenuity to stay here; to become, once again, native to this planet."

Reimagining the American Dream

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:38:00 +0000

Photo: New York Times

One of today's three top most-read articles in the New York Times is titled "The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological." Highlighting the growing popularity and social cache of green building, the article centers around a luxurious $2.8 million dwelling recently constructed in Venice, CA, earning the highest Platinum level of the LEED ratings' energy certification.

Actors and luminaries of Hollywood visited the Venice home, considering purchase or seeking inspiration for their own LEED-certified home building projects. The Times article compares LEED certification to "a Prada label," observing

"Custom-built homes dominate the first batch of certified dwellings. Today, dinner-party bragging rights are likely to include: 'Let me tell you about my tankless hot water heater.' Or 'what’s the R value of your insulation?'"

Certainly it is inspiring that not only are the rich and famous opting to live in zero-energy houses, but that the news story describing these homes reached the most-read list. More inspiring still, however, are the reader comments following this piece. Some samples:

"No. I never had a giant overblown tract house MacMansion, so I won't miss it. Price? Green should be cheaper once you get rid of the size and useless gizmos. I have an old house, well designed originally and updated with insulation and a lighter colored roof. The cistern is still out back for gray water from rain. We need a national program for rooftop solar, and I have more to do - but my costs over time versus a tiny utility bill and a very comfortable house, I have a bargain! And a big kitchen garden - I eat for almost free in the summer. Old small well designed houses can be green gems. I've got one - who needs a plaque?"
- Missbike, New Orleans.

"To make a building truly green you also have to make it last a long time. To do that it better be beautiful. If it's beautiful it will be cared for. If it's cared for it will endure. Enduring architecture requires artful design, none of which was mentioned in the description; and I am guessing it's not one of the LEED requirements. Beauty can be more enduring than technical proficiency. It's an important distinction."
- Michel Pariseau, Deep River, CT

"The LEED approach to more responsible construction is well intentioned. Yet, design organized by checklists and point systems promotes fragmented thinking that disconnects us and what we build from genuine ecological processes. Wrapping the architecture of the box in a 'green' lexicon does not bring us closer to living in harmony with nature's renewing rhythms. 'Green' materials and building systems do little to promote ecological dwelling if our structures are not shaped by the geometries of sunlight, the cycles of wind and water, the colors of local plants and the spatial dynamics of the land. To design homes and communities that are actually ecological, lay down the checklists and let go of your ego's grab for gathering green points. Walk outside, observe the patterns of Earth and climate and imagine forms of dwelling that harmonize and delight in what you see."
- lawlor358, larkspur, california

"Oh dear, can someone please inform the 'environmentalists' that their landscape is covered with a non-native invasive grass (Pennisetum setaceum)?"
- elg29, Brasilia

Platinum LEED-certified home in Venice, CA - $2.8 million

A news story about that home in the New York Times - $1.25, newstand price

A reading populace smarter than the breaking news - priceless.

Good Watermelons Make Good Neighbors

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:55:00 +0000

Watermelon leaves. Photo: Derek Ramsey.

"Several hundred kilometres from the simmering conflicts between pastoralists and farmers [over natural resources] in Sudan's Darfur region, the two communities in the village of Gereigikh in North Kordofan State have learnt to cool the tension with watermelons."

So opens a recent report from the Global Policy Forum, an international watchdog organization following UN policy decisions.

Drought has scorched North Kordofan for nearly half a century, and precious land and water must be shared between crop farmers and herders, setting the stage for strife. However, the Global Policy Forum report continues, quoting a village leader,

"'Our farmers discovered that whenever the Kawahla tribe [traditionally pastoral] brought their livestock into the fields, the animal droppings helped improve production, so the members of the Gawamha [traditionally farmers] started planting watermelons to attract the livestock to the field,' recalled Ad-Dukhri Al-Sayed, a community leader in Gereigikh, about 100km northeast of the state capital, El Obeid. 'The situation has improved so much. Now everyone lives in peace, we never have problems.'"

As the report notes, clashes in the neighboring Darfur region of Sudan are more complex, spurred not only by climatic hardship and resource shortage but by ethnic and political forces.

However, the truce between North Kordofan herders and crop farmers is a vital and timely step toward addressing the strains climate change continues to place upon the area. The Global Policy Forum report refers to a 2007 UN document highlighting the effects of increasing desertification:

"[The] scale of historical climate change, as recorded in Northern Darfur, is almost unprecedented: the reduction in rainfall has turned millions of hectares of already marginal semi-desert grazing land into desert. The impact of climate change is considered to be directly related to the conflict in the region, as desertification has added significantly to the stress on the livelihoods of pastoralist societies, forcing them to move south to find pasture."

A member of development NGO SOS Sahel UK sums up,

"The two communities in North Kordofan have developed a symbiotic relationship - they have relationships in the market place over the supply of manure, labour, they buy livestock from each other. These relationships have cemented over the years."

Mangroves and the Hungry Tide

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:17:00 +0000

Their roots provide habitat for young shrimp and crabs; their leaves are food for the manatee. In the branches of Florida Everglades mangroves, roseate spoonbills find a nesting spot, while the mangroves of the Sundarbans forest in West Bengal and Bangladesh support the masked finfoot.

Roseate spoonbill with young. Photo from the National Park Service.

Mangroves in Sri Lanka helped to buffer coastal villages from the ravages of 2004's tsunami. In Myanmar's Irawaddy Delta, the mangroves have fallen to loggers, and over eroded shores where they once grew, the storm surges of Cyclone Nargis raged unchecked.

Recent studies have underscored the importance of mangroves in maintaining the vitality of estuarine ecosystems and protecting humans from extreme weather patterns. At Mongabay.com, a recent article describes the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis:

"Four days after the disaster Surin Pitsuwan, secretary general of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), spoke about the mangrove-effect in Irrawaddy. As reported by the AFP news, Pitsuwan said that increased population in the delta led to 'encroachment into the mangrove forests which used to serve as buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and the residential areas... All those lands have been destroyed. Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces.'"

Dr Deborah Brosnan, president and founder of the Sustainable Ecosystems Institute, warns that all river deltas and their human populations are especially vulnerable to intensified weather patterns due to climate change.

Sundarbans mangrove swamp. Satellite photo from NASA Earth Observatory.

In the Sundarbans region, impenetrable mangrove swamp and invincible Royal Bengal tiger have managed so far to protect one another from human destruction. Writes Caroline Alexander in The New Yorker magazine,

"Washed by powerful, twice-daily tides flowing from the Bay of Bengal, and regularly buffeted by cyclones, the Sundarbans has always been unstable, its low landmasses constantly being eroded, silted, and reconfigured. Upstream pollution, from Calcutta; increasing salinity, caused by naturally occurring displacement of freshwater sources; and depredation of the forest by villagers cutting wood are long-standing threats. Still, the Sundarbans remains 'intact,' thanks partly to stringent conservation measures and to its inaccessibility, and partly to the Sundarbans tiger, whose presence insures that the forest is too dangerous to enter casually. 'Without the tiger, we would have no forest,' I was told by villagers, fishermen, wood collectors, honey gatherers—by all who cautiously skirt the forest." (Read more at New Yorker online)

Royal Bengal tiger. Photo from Bergoiata.org.

However, threats to the Sundarbans and other world mangrove forests are multiplying to include new issues, from overharvesting of shrimp to accelerated climate change. Mangrove forests enjoying fewer environmental regulations, such those in as Indonesia or Mexico, stand a still greater risk, as reported in an Environmental News Service article quoting a UN report.

Here is an interview at Grist.org with Alfredo Quarto, director of the Mangrove Action Project, on initiatives to preserve and restore these intricate, beautiful ecosystems.

The Hungry Tide is a compelling novel by Amitav Ghosh about the Sundarbans, its people and environment, and the turbulence which characterizes both its political history and its continuing ecological balance.

Introducing Webcasts

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 21:55:00 +0000

As of the previous post on Symbiotic Planet, we are introducing audio webcasts for our features, indicated by clickable links

Listen to webcast.

Please let us know if this tool is useful to you, and feel free to contact us any with thoughts or suggestions in the comments or at trostomaten @ gmail.com.

Book Review: Symbiotic Planet

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution, by Lynn Margulis. Basic Books, 1998.

Listen to webcast of "Book Review: Symbiotic Planet"

"Animal, vegetable, or mineral?" So opens every round of Twenty Questions, with a query intended as the base classification for anything on earth.

But is it really so simple? Lynn Margulis begins her book Symbiotic Planet with a challenge to our received notions about the forms of life on earth. Introducing us to "a strange sort of 'seaweed' that is not seaweed at all," she describes a green organism found in tidepools along the coast of Brittany in northwest France. Superficially similar to green stringy seaweed, these verdant threads are in fact thin transparent worms, inside whose bodies photosynthetic algae grow. The worms luxuriate on the surface of warm shallow tidepools, allowing their internal algae to soak up the sun, synthesize sugars, and deliver the worm hosts a nourishing meal intravenously, as it were. In turn, the algae benefit from the worms' motility, which takes them to the sunniest spots to photosynthesize, or buries them in the sand to hide from predators. Waste products from the worms' digestion become nutrients for the algaes' growth.

Animal, or vegetable? In a symbiotic relationship such as this, the answer is not clear-cut. Frederick William Keeble, the discoverer of the seaweed-worms, compromised in his 1920's treatise by dubbing them "plant-animals." Furthermore, the case of Convoluta roscoffensis, as the seaweed-worms are scientifically known, is anything but anomolous. In Symbiotic Planet, Margulis gives us example after example of symbiotic partnerships between jellyfish and algae, between cows and protists, all defying the rigid boundaries we normally take for granted to divide kingdoms of life.

A simple hand-lens suffices to detect the symbiotic green algae inside their transparent worm hosts. Turn to a scanning electron microscope to probe the internal workings of an animal cell as it digests sugar. Inside the cell are mitochondria, oxidizing the sugar to release energy stored in its chemical bonds. These mitochondria, though so integrally incorporated in an animal's cells, so deeply implicated in its very sustenance, have an independent ancestry as free-living, oxygen-breathing bacteria. Over generations their symbiosis with host cells became so routinized that neither symbiont could survive without the other, and the oxygen-breathing bacteria renounced their individuality to become mitochondria, organelles inside cells. Mitochondria still carry their own bacterial DNA, resembling that of modern-day independent oxygen-breathing bacteria.

Symbiotic Planet is, first and foremost, a book about innovation. Describing the incorporation of free-living bacteria as mitochondria and other cell organelles, 'serial endosymbiosis theory' is Margulis's prime scientific innovation, and the story of this theory's development forms a major thread in the narrative. Part scientific memoir, Symbiotic Planet chronicles Margulis's brilliant and unorthadox career, as well as her ideological influences ranging from such luminaries as Gregor Mendel to the obscure but prescient Konstantin Merezhkovsky (1855-1921). A Russian botanist specializing in the study of lichens, Merezhkovsky rejected Darwinism as failing to provide a complete explanation for the development of new species through natural selection.

Konstantin Merezhkovsky

According to Merezhkovsky and Margulis, it is not natural selection but symbiosis which truly advances evolutionary innovation. Natural selection can hone the adaptation of a species to its niche, but Darwin's Origin of Species fails to live up to its title in that it does not describe the origin of any new species at all, but merely the development of existing species under selection pressures. The overlooked importance of symbiosis in combining disparate life-forms to create a new whole would have been clear to Merezhkovsky through his study of lichens, which are in fact a symbiotic pairing of algae and fungi.

Haeckel, Lichenes. 1904.

Symbiotic Planet paints for us a new picture of nature. While the eat-or-be-eaten, survival-of-the-fittest model familiar from introductory accounts of Darwinism appropriately describes inter- and intra-species competition driving natural selection, there is more to the story. The symbiotic incorporation of bacteria as mitochondria took place over the course of a "violent, competitive, and truce-forming past," writes Margulis. Having tried and failed to eat another bacterium, some primal cell must have made the decision to keep its undigested and still-living dinner as a functioning member of its own expanded body. This creative merger represented an evolutionary jump unachievable by simple random genetic variation.

Our neglect of symbiosis is not confined to an academic debate on the nature of evolution. Not only do we reconstruct from the fossil record an imagined history in which symbiosis plays but a minor role, we envisage our own future on the planet as an extension of the simplistic survival-of-the-fittest paradigm. Margulis whimsically describes her bemusement on watching an episode of Star Trek for the first time:

"I was struck by its silliness. The lack of plants, the machinate landscape, and in the starship, the absence of all nonhuman life-forms seemed bizarre. Humans, if someday they trek in giant spaceships to other planets, will not be alone. In space as on Earth, the elements of life, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus and a few others, must recycle. This recycling is no suburban luxury; it is a principle of life from which no technology can deliver us. Human voyages into deep space require ecosystems composed of many nonhuman organisms to recycle waste into food. Only very short stints in constant contact with mother Earth are possible in the absence of 'ecosystem services.'"

Although hypothetical future intergalactic adventure may seem like a frivolous example, the human-centric character of these imagined odysseys is telling. Such narrowness of focus has brought on the crisis of dwindling nonrenewable resources, such as peak oil. Bent only on the immediate extension and expedition of our existing technologies, we have used the resources which are readily at hand, however temporarily, and without thought for collateral consequence.

Margulis writes at the end of Symbiotic Planet's opening chapter,

"The tendency of 'independent' life is to bind together and reemerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization. I suspect that the near future of Homo sapiens as a species requires our reorientation toward the fusions and mergers of the planetmates that have preceded us in the microcosm."

Rather than using oil to power lawn mowers on municipal grounds, why not move to a symbiotic solution, as Silicon Valley has recently done in employing goats to graze down brush-covered areas? For that oil we have already converted to plastic now littering drains and clogging sewers, perhaps newly-discovered plastic-eating microbes can break it down. Both these solutions are merely preliminary moves toward a more symbiotic mode of innovation.

Symbiotic Planet closes with a chapter on Gaia theory, the study originating from James Lovelock's observation that the Earth's surface behaves like a living system in homeostasis. Although Margulis advances as motivation for Symbiotic Planet the quip "Gaia is just symbiosis as seen from space," the final chapter on Gaia theory is the book's weakest section.

While the rest of the book is bold and original, the chapter on Gaia theory is mainly reactionary, and herein lies its disappointment. Margulis spends a large proportion of the chapter in disclaimers and debunkings of romantic notions nonscientific people might draw from a misunderstanding of Gaia theory's premises. To the mythologically and anti-scientifically inclined, Gaia and the concept of a living Earth may appear to represent a antropomorphized Earth-mother goddess who personally manages the planet's cycles.

Certainly such a picture is a misapprehension of Gaia theory, which though fancifully named is a serious branch of science. Every scientist rankles at undeserved censure from anti-science detractors, but worse is to be mistakenly applauded as a champion of their cause, as Gaia theory sometimes has been. More intriguing to read, however, would be a development of the fascinating ideas Margulis presents in the preceding chapter of Symbiotic Planet, detailing the manner in which symbiosis allowed life to extend its range to dry shores, beyond the nutrient-filled sea where it originated. By gradual collaborations and fusions, life became more and more adapted for carrying its necessary elements to new frontiers. Ever more creative instances of symbiosis went hand in hand with the expansion of ecosystems to cover the whole Earth, resulting in the Gaia phenomenon of a self-regulating, living globe. A symbiotic planet is a homeostatic planet.

Margulis's objections to the popular Earth-goddess myth extend beyond the defense of Gaia theory as legitimate science. Promoting conservation as our responsibility to "heal our sick planet" is, to Margulis, simply another instance of human hubris and inflated self-importance. She writes,

"...[T]he planet is not human, nor does it belong to humans. No human culture, despite its inventiveness, can kill life on this planet, were it even to try. More an enormous collection of interacting ecosystems, the Earth as Gaian regulatory physiology transcends all individual organisms. Humans are not the center of life, nor is any other single species."

A few paragraphs later, discussing the early evolution of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), Margulis continues,

"Oxygen was expelled as a metabolic waste product. This waste, at first disastrous, eventually powered life's continued growth. New wastes test life's tolerance and stimulate life's creativity. The oxygen we need to breathe began as a toxin; it still is. The oxygen release from millions of cyanobacteria resulted in a holocaust far more profound than any human environmental activity. Pollution is natural."

These passages sound, at first blush, shockingly anti-conservationist. If pollution is natural, should we stop worrying about the emissions from our cars, in the expectation that some carbon monoxide-loving organism will evolve to lap up our exhaust? Should we throw our plastic bottles in the ocean to provide dinner for some future phthalate-lover?

Certainly we could, Margulis opines, destroying not life in the long run but merely ourselves. To quote from Symbiotic Planet's concluding chapters,

"The planet will not permit our populations to continue to expand. Runaway populations of bacteria, locusts, roaches, mice, and grass always collapse. Their own wastes disgust as crowding and severe shortage ensue."

As to the continuation of life after our demise, Margulis writes,

"The notion that we can destroy all life, including bacteria thriving in the water tanks of nuclear power plants or boiling hot vents, is ludicrous. I hear our nonhuman brethren snickering, 'Got along without you before I met you, gonna get along without you now,' they sing about us in harmony."

Reading such passages generates at first an uncomfortable feeling that the environmental movement is being cut down to size as a rather mean and self-serving endeavor. No longer our hope to revitalize our engagement in Earth's ecosystems, it seems, in an existential turn of plot, to be merely our last bet at saving our own miserable skins.

The foregoing chapters of Symbiotic Planet, however, hold in themselves the bright alternative to this dour prospect. "We" are not in fact an isolated or isolable phenomenon. As Margulis beautifully puts it, we are "a kind of baroque edifice," having "guts and eyelashes festooned with bacterial and animal symbionts." We are a product of our "coevolving, pointillist bacterial ancestry." Saving ourselves cannot be a mean or narrow enterprise, because it will require a practical realization of the fact that we are not independent individuals, but emergent phenomena resulting from the cooperation of myriad disparate participants. If we can become conscious symbionts in the future, just as we are unconscious products of past and present symbioses, then all that "we" are and all we touch stands a chance at survival and continued thriving.

Remembering Richard Rorty: An Email Interview with Emrys Westacott

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:12:00 +0000

Richard Rorty (October 4, 1931 - June 8, 2007).

On this day one year ago, the eminent American philosopher Richard Rorty died of pancreatic cancer. His philosophical career had been long and rich, leaving us, among many other writings, the autobiographical essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" from which this blog takes its name.

Please join me in welcoming today Emrys Westacott, professor of philosophy at Alfred University. Emrys is the author of articles "The Ethics of Gossiping" and "The Rights and Wrongs of Rudeness," discussed in the New York Times and on National Public Radio. He has also written the short story "The Placebo Effect," and is co-author of the book Thinking Through Philosophy: An Introduction. Emrys has graciously agreed to discuss with us some of Rorty's ideas, their origins and their influence both within philosophy and in the wider context of modern culture.

RLM: One of the strengths of the essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” is the window it provides into the evolution of Rorty's thought. Starting from an early view akin to Platonism, supporting a model of truth whereby our statements mirror an absolute and objective outside world, Rorty narrates his maturation to a pragmatist position which measures the value of ideas not by a priori principles, but by their usefulness to the flourishing of human life. Could you tell us a bit about some of the turning points in this development? I think you mentioned you had recently bought Rorty's two last books. What were some of the notable ideas from those writings?

EGW: In a recent autobiographical essay and in some of the articles published in Volume IV of his Philosophical Papers (Philosophy as Cultural Politics), Rorty suggests, perhaps a little tongue in cheek, that the main forces keeping objectivism alive are professional as much as philosophical. That is, in a culture where natural science enjoys huge prestige, other academics and intellectuals want to be thought of as similar to scientists. So they form themselves into groups of "experts" who claim to have undergone a special training that gives them unique knowledge and skills. In analytic philosophy, this means an understanding of argumentation and conceptual analysis. Applying these skills to the perennial problems of philosophy—mind-body, free will, the definition of knowledge, etc. - they see themselves as making progress in the same sense that they believe the natural sciences make progress: viz. by getting closer to the truth.

But in Rorty's view this self-conception is a form of self-serving self-deception. Graduate students in philosophy buy into it because they have to "play the game", and this game gives them neat, well-defined projects to undertake and showcase their abilities. But it's misguided because it rests on a mistaken view of natural science. Rorty accepts the view of science laid out in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Groups of specialized, professionalized scientists make progress not by getting closer to the truth but by solving particular puzzles that they have inherited from their predecessors. The solutions they work out throw up new puzzles, and so on ad infinitum.

Rorty made his early reputation by publishing articles on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language that reflected his analytic training. He worked for a long time at Princeton, one of the hot-houses of analytic philosophy, alongside people like Saul Kripke. But in 1978 he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which marked a turning point in his career.

Essentially, this book argued that the philosophical problems addressed by the great modern thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant were no longer interesting or relevant. Since most analytic philosophy was devoted to the same problems, this also went for much twentieth century philosophy. In its place, Rorty argued for what he called a "hermeneutic" conception of philosophy. In later writings, including his most recent, he clarified his view of what philosophy is all about. Basically, he holds, like Hegel, that philosophy is one of the ways in which a culture tries to achieve self-awareness, one of the ways in which a culture reflects on how it has come about, where it seems to be heading, where it would like to be heading, and what might be done to help it in that direction.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature argues against the idea that the mind is a place where nature, the world, reality, or whatever you want to call it, is mirrored or represented. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Descartes, Locke and other theorists of the scientific revolution talked about "ideas" and worried about how we could be sure that our ideas corresponded to an objective reality outside the mind. In the twentieth century, following the lead of Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein, people focused on language rather than on the mind. This was considered a great advance since whereas mind is ghostly and not publicly observable, language is in the public domain, so to speak.

But Rorty argues that the "linguistic turn" isn't much of an advance at all. Linguistic philosophy is still held captive by the idea that knowledge or truth consists of an accurate representation of a reality that exists independently of us. The underlying point of view is still representationalist. Descartes had taken the mind to be the vehicle of representation with ideas as the units of reference. Analytic philosophy assumes that language is the vehicle of representation with words or concepts as the referential units. The basic error is the same in both cases.

The error in question is the assumption that we can assess how well we are representing reality. We can't. To do so would be to take a sideways on view of the relation between language and reality, identifying the "hitching posts" where words connect directly to things.

Rorty develops this critique in his subsequent writings. In doing so he claims to be working squarely in the tradition of American pragmatism., unpacking the insights of William James and John Dewey. Of course, given his uncompromising relativism, this infuriates many of those who see themselves as the true guardians of the pragmatist flame.

After Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty published several volumes of essays: most notably, Consequences of Pragmatism, Contingency, irony and solidarity, and four volumes of philosophical papers. There is a tremendous amount of overlap in all of these, although personally I find him to be such an engaging writer that the repetition is rarely tiresome. The critique of objectivism or representationalism remains central to his thinking throughout. But other blossoms appeared, most notably his increasing interest in literature and his defense of gradualist progressive politics.

RLM: To the mind of a scientist, Rorty's variety of relativism is quite appealing because he appears to invoke a Darwinian notion of adaptiveness. Ideas are good and useful if they help us cope with our environment; thinking is the specialized skill humans have evolved just as spiders have evolved the skill of spinning silk. Rorty describes this as a naturalization of Hegel, because it obviates the need for a teleological view of history progressing towards increased rationality. Such self-organized adaptive evolution is exactly the kind of model scientists use to explain situations which would otherwise appear teleological (for example James Lovelock's Daisyworld model in explaining why Gaia theory is not teleological). Is this Darwinian bent unique to Rorty among relativists? Do you think that Rorty's love of nature (orchid searching, bird watching) influenced this aspect of his philosophy?

EGW: The Darwinian bent of Rorty's relativism isn't unique. Earlier pragmatists like James and Dewey had also tried to incorporate the theory of evolution. So, too, did Nietzsche, even though he tends to misrepresent Darwin's own thinking. You can also see the ever-increasing influence of Darwin's "dangerous idea" in other areas of philosophy, most notably ethics. But Rorty certainly presses the implications of Darwinism more consistently and forcefully than most.

He is especially good, I think, at explaining how a Darwinian perspective renders obsolete certain sorts of philosophical debate. Ever since Plato, mind, reason, and language have been viewed as somehow non-natural, as being the part of us that is divine. But as you say, Rorty continually stresses the fact that mind, rationality, and language are natural phenomena, thrown up by evolution. They should be viewed in the same way that we view something like our prehensile thumb.

The ability to persuade other humans to do what we wanted by using speech turned out to be useful. So did thinking in certain ways that we came to call "logical". But there is nothing non-natural about logos. Language doesn't have the intrinsic function of representing the world; logic doesn't have the inherent purpose of leading us to Truth. It's just that using words in certain ways tends to promote our well-being. So, too, does demanding that people abide by certain conventions (e.g. avoiding incest, sneezing into a handkerchief, or agreeing that if p is true then not p is false).

Norms are expectations that a community has regarding a person's behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. They can be enforced in many ways. A hundred thousand years ago, a member of the group who killed another member might be chased out of the cave; today they are tried and imprisoned. A hundred thousand years ago, someone who refused to assert q even though they accepted if p then q and p, might have been hit over the head with a bone; today they receive a poor grade on their logic exam. But the rule they are violating has no supra-human authority.

Many non-relativists are shocked by this attitude. They insist that the rules of valid inference, for instance, have a status that is very different from some norm of etiquette. But Rorty cheerfully denies this. In his view, the only justification for any norm is its utility. So all norms can be ranged on a continuum. The laws of logic are just abstract norms that are deeply entrenched due to the fact that their utility has been well established.

Rorty sees any departure from this way of thinking as a failure to be thoroughly and consistently naturalistic. Someone who holds that there is something inherently rational or correct about the laws of logic is implying that what we call "rational" or "logical" accords with Reason itself. But this phrase "Reason itself" indicates a return to some sort of Platonism. Bits of nature—such as our conventions governing the way we use symbols—are assessed according to their relation to something that is not part of nature. Rorty often describes thinking of this sort - with deliberate abusiveness - as believing in "spooks".

I really couldn't say if Rorty's love of nature influenced this aspect of his thought. I suppose it's possible that spending a lot of time immersed in nature might reinforce his sense that nature is all there is and all there needs to be.

RLM: I have another question about Rorty's relation to science. One of the most common labels to be associated with Rorty is that of relativism, and one of the most familiar and popularly accepted versions of relativism is moral relativism. Most of us would agree that one can't morally judge the actions of another person without taking into consideration that person's cultural norms and individual circumstances. However, the spirit of the scientific method contrasts strongly with that of moral relativism, at least superficially: experimental results or proofs of theorems are supposed to be reproducible by anyone, and hence independent of circumstantial factors in a scientist's environment. One possible response to this contrast would be to say that relativism doesn't apply in science, at least in any form similar to moral relativism. But what about a field like environmentalism, which stands at the intersection of science and ethics? If Al Gore and a climate-change skeptic are in a debate, they will make scientific claims as well as ethical judgments. Can ideas like Rorty's Darwinian adaptiveness help us formulate a version of relativism appropriate to this field? What about a situation where immediate human interests are opposed to the larger interests of preserving the environment?

EGW: A general idea that permeates much of Rorty's thinking is this: sharp distinctions should often be replaced by the idea of points on a spectrum. A paradigmatic example of this shift was provided by one of Rorty's analytic heroes, Willard Van Orman Quine in his famous article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."

Quine argued against the view that there is a sharp line to be drawn between analytic and synthetic statements, the former true by definition, the latter just contingently true. Instead, he argued, our belief system is like a spider's web. Those at the periphery can be revised with little effect on the rest of the system. These are beliefs like, "the tree outside my window is a Norway spruce." Beliefs at the centre of the web, on the other hand - e.g. 2+2=4 - can only be revised at great cost to the system. These are the ones we are inclined to think of as a priori truths. Change these and we have to change everything. So we come to view them as necessary truths. But in principle, no belief is immune from revision. Indeed, this critical attitude is the hallmark of what we call the scientific approach.

Rorty - like any good pragmatist - views the distinction between factual and evaluative statements in an analogous way. Ever since Hume philosophers have worried about the fact-value gap and the problem of deriving an 'ought' from an 'is'. But Rorty's view is that our judgments exist on a spectrum of reasonableness. Those that have proved their worth for a long time are well-established and we think anyone who denies them is being unreasonable. That's all a "fact" is: it's a belief that has become uncontroversial in the relevant community.

But value judgments can be well-established too. Someone who thinks it would be good to bring back slavery would be viewed as utterly unreasonable. We'd say they were "wrong" just as we'd say they were wrong if they claimed that the South won the civil war. There is no essential difference between the ways factual judgments are right and wrong and the way value judgments are right and wrong. In both cases, correctness is determined by what people in the relevant community think it is reasonable to believe. And the norms of reasonableness, as noted earlier, have no special status; they too can vary between cultures and be revised over time.

So the way I read Rorty, he'd resist your suggestion that science and morality are fundamentally different. He certainly denies many times that there is any distinctive procedure that constitutes "the scientific method". He also denies that there is anything special about "the logic of moral argumentation." He argues that we use pretty much the same means of persuasion - appeal to evidence, pointing out inconsistencies, demonstrations of predictive power, etc. - across the board, in all spheres where we engage in conversation.

(This is one place, incidentally, where I think he may overstate his case. I think that in some areas specific forms of justification/refutation are permitted that are not allowed in other areas. E.g. theologians interpreting the Torah, the New Testament, or the Koran, might allow certain moves not permitted in a scientific community. Scientists can say, "Newton got it wrong on that point" in a way that theologians can't say, "Yeah, well, St. Paul messed up in his letter to the Corinthians.")

So I would say that Rorty does offer a form of relativism - he doesn't like this label, of course - that is essentially the same in all areas of culture: science, morality, politics, the arts. Everywhere, we try to make judgments that are reasonable according to accepted but revisable standards of justification.

Where what is in dispute is some "fact" the underlying pragmatic criteria by which we evaluate our claims is not very obvious. It takes a pragmatist philosopher to highlight them. Where we are debating political proposals, measures to deal with environmental crises, and so on, our pragmatism is obvious. We want to embrace ideas that will bring about a world in which more people live healthier, happier, richer lives than is the case now.

You'd expect anyone with Rorty's generally progressive, left-leaning political views to be sympathetic to environmentalism. However, he is a humanist through and through. From his point of view, the value of the natural world lies primarily in the opportunities it offers for human flourishing and in the delight it affords us. Perhaps he'd grant some value to the pleasures enjoyed by other sentient species. But it would go against his general approach to think of the non-human world as having its own intrinsic value.

So if we impose an obligation on ourselves to preserve the natural environment, this is done for the sake of ourselves and our descendants.

RLM: I'd like to pose one final question about Rorty and poetry. In "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Rorty describes Proust's novels as "optional, orchidaceous extras." From this assessment, we might expect Rorty to dismiss poetry as unlikely to effect much good in human life. However, in his posthumously published essay “The Fire of Life” in Poetry Magazine, Rorty concludes with the beautiful passage

"I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts--just as I would have if I had made more close friends."

Where does this place poetry in the Trotsky-vs.-wild-orchids division? Or does it stand outside this dichotomy?
EGW: In the last twenty years of his life, Rorty seems to have been increasingly drawn towards literature. This is very noticeable in Contingency, solidarity and irony, where he writes about Orwell, Dickens, Nabakov and Proust among others. (Incidentally, this was his favourite among his own works, and is most definitely my favourite: I especially like the second chapter which is an extended meditation on some lines by Phillip Larkin.)

This shift in is orientation interests me partly because I find myself following the same path. I think it is prompted (in both his case and mine) by a deepening skepticism toward the idea that philosophy is, can be, or should be, like science. Scientists solve well-defined problems on the basis of agreed upon assumptions and following an agreed-upon methodology. But philosophy, to say it again, is a culture's attempt "to hold its time in thought." So it's a much messier business - more like literature than science.

(This, incidentally, is one way of conceiving of the analytic-continental split in philosophy. Analytics think philosophy should be like science; continentals see it as closer to literature - perhaps as a genre of literature.)

When Rorty talks about "poetry" he's using the term in a very broad way, the way that people like Kierkegaard and Shelley use it. "Poetry" in this sense, refers to the fruits of the imagination, especially (but not only) the literary fruits, as opposed to the fruits of reason. (Obviously, the imagination-reason distinction doesn't have to sharp or rigid.)

According to a long-standing tradition, the sharp and shiny tool that we use to criticize our current ways of thinking and doing things is reason. People like Socrates and Descartes are held up as supreme practitioners of the art of rational criticism. But progress doesn't just require critique. We also have to start thinking of alternatives to our current arrangements. We have to think of how things might be if we tried this, or this, or this. And to stretch our thinking in this way requires imagination.

Although I can't recall any place where he refers to Uncle Tom's Cabin, I suspect the example it offers of how imagination may be more important than reason as a force for progress may have influenced Rorty. Stowe's novel had a great impact because people who read it had their imaginations stretched; they came to feel imaginative sympathy with slaves. This sort of sympathy arguably played a greater role in bringing about the abolition of slavery than any a clinical deduction of rights from the constitution.

In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Rorty describes progress using the metaphor of an expanding circle. By enlarging our capacities, our sympathies, our understanding, we make our lives richer and we establish more satisfying relationships with our fellow human beings and perhaps also with other species and the rest of nature. This idea, like so much of his thought, bears traces of Hegel - something you pointed out earlier. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes how through the course of human history, Spirit comes to feel more at home in the world, overcoming various forms of alienation. This overcoming is less a matter of logical refutation; more a matter of recognizing a way of thinking to be outmoded - to have moved from being liberating to being a fetter on further progress. By means of this process, Spirit enriches itself and becomes more self-conscious.

This seems to be pretty much Rorty's way of thinking about progress, both intellectual and political. And he thinks of Hegel's Phenomenology as a great imaginative achievement - a sort of philosophical novel or epic poem.

If Rorty's ideas prevail, then perhaps the ancient tension between philosophy and poetry - first described by Plato - will gradually be reduced, as will oppression, injustice, inequality, violence and environmental degradation. Even analytic and continental philosophers will come together and embrace and laugh and cry over their past misunderstandings of each other. Let's hope so!

Even in Arcadia: Energy, Entropy, and Efficiency or How Physics Tells Us to Go Green

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:10:00 +0000

Carousel. Photo: Dipankar Maitra.

On the emptying fairgrounds the carousel drifts slowly, slowly, an echo of motion, creaking to a gradual halt. The fields beyond are darkening to indistinctness, punctuated only by the occasional flare sent up by a firefly. Though the carnival has defied the close of day for hour after giddy hour, late spring twilight finally and definitively creeps in to collect its due.

In the vats of lemonade, the ice-cubes have melted and left no trace of themselves but an absence, a thinning of flavor. It is the inevitable way of things, that all heat differences tend to smooth out, that everything dense must rarefy, that the motion of a spinning carousel will be muffled and stilled into friction.

Time's arrow strains unbendingly forward. In the hiss of the bowstring echo the distant pounding shores of chaos, and destruction. Left to itself, everything orderly must move toward disorder. Though W.H. Auden's lover may sing on that summer evening under the archway,

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain,
And the salmon sing in the street,"

still comes the reply even from our petty everyday tragedies:

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead."^[1]

All the sorrowing for lost loves and empires, for ballads forgotten and palaces crumbled, is due to the laws of thermodynamics. Undergirding all of physics, there are four thermodynamical laws, but two are most important:

I. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed;
II. Over the course of any natural process in an isolated system, entropy must increase, barring external interference.

Entropy is a name for the disorderliness of a system, and hence the extent to which its energy cannot be mustered to do work. This increase of entropy described by the second law of thermodynamics sums up all our earthly trials. Even the beloved children's book character, Arnold Lobel's eponymous Owl At Home, makes his tear-water tea by thinking of "mashed potatoes left on a plate because no one wanted to eat them, and pencils that are too short to use."^[2] Everything hot grows cold; everything useful outlives its productivity.

Not surprisingly, the laws of thermodynamics and their implications for efficiency were discovered in the decades following the invention of the steam engine, in the mid-nineteenth century. A steam engine converts heat into work: burning coal heats and vaporizes water into steam, whose expansion forces the piston outwards and begins the engine's cycle, turning the crankshaft.

However, the piston will not retreat and complete the cycle unless it is cooled by a water source. In this process, along with the work of turning the crankshaft, heat is transferred from the burning coal to the cool water supply. At the end of one cycle, the engine has returned to its initial state and the piston is ready to advance and retreat again. However, the heat source and water supply which power the engine have not returned to their initial state; they have degraded. The steam engine's conversion of heat into work is incomplete, because some of the heat necessarily dissipates into the water rather than powering the turning crankshaft.

As the engine completes cycle after cycle, the cool water grows still more heated and hence less effective. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the steam engine left to itself becomes disorderly and less capable of doing work.

The second law of thermodynamics can be stated entirely in terms of the conversion of heat into work, with no mention of entropy. As worded by P.W. Atkins in his excellent book The Second Law,

No process is possible in which the sole result is the absorption of heat from a reservoir and its complete conversion into work.^[3]

This is the form of the second law discovered by the scientist and engineer William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824-1907). Although famous for many achievements ranging from work in electricity and telegraphy to the proposal of an early model analogizing the atom as an English plum pudding, Kelvin's greatest contributions laid the cornerstone for the field of thermodynamics.

By Kelvin's statement of the second law, some degree of wastage is inevitable in principle, no matter to what heights of refinement our engine technology soars. This being the case, the search for an economical source of energy to heat and power the engines took on still greater importance, and from coal the industrial world moved on to oil. In 1859 oil was discovered and drilled for in Titusville, Pennsylvania, beginning an industry boom which rapidly spread to other oil-rich areas of the world.^[4]

Oil fields, California, 1938

In 1930, 100 barrels of oil could be extracted using the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil.^[5] Oil is a highly concentrated source of energy: one barrel (42 US gallons) yields 1,700 kWh of energy,^[6] enough to run a 100 Watt light bulb for nearly two years, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Considering how the earth's oil was formed, its energy-richness is hardly surprising. Petroleum, or crude oil, is the result of an extremely special confluence of geologic circumstances whereby fossilized marine microorganisms are heated and compacted deep in the earth, smelted from rock into oil. Formation of an oil field also requires the bedrock to mold a cavity protecting petroleum from leaking to the surface and decaying due to the action of modern-day microorganisms. Stores of oil represent the intense geothermal compression of solar energy assimilated by the original prehistoric zooplankton.^[7]

Clearly, the total global oil supply is finite, and if not static, then subject only to infinitesimally slow increase by petroleum formation. Using geological sampling estimates of total drillable oil in the 48 contiguous US states and in the world as a whole, geophysicist M.K. Hubbert wrote two papers (1949 and 1956) constructing a mathematical model of projected future oil production. Hubbert's production curves accurately predicted that oil production in the US would reach a peak around 1970, thereafter entering a period of decline more or less sharp according to the height of peak production.

Hubbert's model predicted global peak oil production around the year 2000, an estimate which proved to be slightly early in part due to the conversion of many heating systems from oil to natural gas. However analyses by the international think tank Energy Watch Group of data from the US Energy Information Administration point toward a 2006 peak having occurred in conventional oil production. This view has been corroborated by Sadad Al Husseini of Saudi Arabia's national oil company Saudi Aramco, and by the Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens.^[8]

Because the most easily accessible oil has already been harvested, it is no longer remotely possible to recover 100 barrels at the mere expenditure of one barrel's worth of energy. The energy return on investment of US domestic oil production has fallen from 100:1 in 1930 to 30:1 in 1970 and to 11-18:1 in 2000.^[9] The same principles apply to global oil production.

While the value of energy sources is commonly assessed using standard economic analyses, the alternate measure of energy return on investment (EROI) can in some cases offer information which is not captured in, or is distorted by, monetary values. For example high prices during the 1973 oil crisis were caused not by shortages but by oil embargoes the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) imposed as political leverage against Western countries for their support of Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ensuing economic recession in the affected countries in turn caused the oil glut and lowered prices of the 1980's. Quoting not a currency price per barrel but the price in energy to extract one barrel yields a cost immune to the influence of political forces. The global buying power of energy for energy, of one barrel of oil to win us more barrels of oil, has been falling more or less steadily, independent of economic vicissitudes.

Just as coal once fueled the steam engines of locomotives, oil fuels most of industrialized society, from the electricity that plays Mozart on the stereo, to the ships bringing mangoes to our groceries. As oil supplies dwindle, must the world as we know it run out, like a neglected engine whose fires die down, like a carousel grinding to a halt at the end of a day?

Oil fuels the cycling pistons of a cargo ship's engines, and by extension the cycling routes the vessels themselves shuttle. But the Earth supports many engines besides these: the cycling of wind currents around the globe, and of water evaporated from oceans and rained onto mountains to fuel the rivers.

Jet streams and river deltas do not run down because their wasted and dissipated energy is continually replaced by the Sun's radiation bathing the Earth. The Earth is not a closed system, drearily marching toward heat death in isolation. For as long as the Sun lives, the Earth enjoys a reprieve from the one-way arrow of entropy.

However, this renewal of cycles granted by the Sun's largesse does not extend to fossil fuels, because the timescale of their formation is too slow and the circumstances required too special. From the standpoint of oil, the Earth is a closed system, and no external source replenishes the bounty.

M.K. Hubbert's 1949 paper "Energy from Fossil Fuels" goes on to construct a production curve not only for oil but for water power. As Hubbert notes, "water power represents a fraction of current solar energy which changes but slowly with time, and is being continuously degraded into waste heat irrespective of whether it is utilized or not."^[10] Using 1947 figures for the water power utilization and potential of major sources in each continent, Hubbert extrapolates a global production curve which, like that for oil, will reach a maximum, but rather than falling due to finitude of resources, levels out at a maximum plateau. As technology improves, the energy return on investment for water power should asymptotically approach the maximal value representing an ideal state of affairs. This maximal return, Hubbert asserts, could theoretically supply us with as much energy as we currently enjoy from fossil fuels.

Energy return on investment has been researched for a large range of alternative energy sources by energy researcher Charles Hall at SUNY Syracuse's College of Environmental Science & Forestry. Hall depicts his findings in what he calls "the balloon graph." The vertical axis of this graph represents energy return on investment, while the horizontal axis shows the amount of energy being consumed from each source (or having been consumed, for past sources). Every energy source appears as a balloon, color coded for year of consumption (red is present-day). The size of a balloon indicates the uncertainty in the data used to plot that energy source's position on the graph.

Balloon graph. From TheOilDrum.com. (Click to enlarge)

To illustrate the graph's meaning, arrows connecting the balloons for US domestic oil use in 1930, 1970, and the present day trace a rough version of Hubbert's oil peak curve. The fact that energy return on investment was all the while decreasing for domestic oil can be seen in the lowering heights of the three balloons for 1930, 1970, and today.

Also visible from the graph is the fact that energy return on investment is higher for both hydroelectric and wind power than for imported oil today. In an excellent series of five articles at TheOilDrum.com, Charles Hall examines the potential of all alternative energy sources shown on the balloon graph, as well as the drawbacks of each. None is problem-free: hydroelectric power, for instance, implies serious environmental and social threats due to the land use demands of water engineering, and almost every source poses difficulty related to energy storage and transportation.

Despite the various problems still present with each energy source, however, renewable sources such as water or wind give us effectively infinite time to improve and perfect our technology, approaching a maximum return on expenditure. The carnival of easy oil is finally running down, and an increasing trend shows that former Texas oil moguls, including T. Boone Pickens, are moving their operations to capitalize instead on Texas wind.

We may not be able to control the motions of wind and water as we could once control the flow of oil from the rigs, but we can learn to adapt our technology to capture and store this bounty which flows from the sun. Or, as the W.H. Auden poem concludes,

"Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless."

Note: The title of this post comes from the Latin quotation "Et in Arcadia ego" ("Even in Arcadia, there am I"), a memento mori spoken by personified Death. Even in the most ideal of engines, there is entropy. The title is a reference to Tom Stoppard's imaginative play "Arcadia," also titled from the Latin memento mori, and centering around the invention of the steam engine and the discovery of entropy. The fictional plot of this play vividly brings to life the era of the development of thermodynamics.

How will life change after peak oil? Which alternative energy source do you see as most promising? What is the most important action we as ordinary people can take to conserve energy? What did you think of Arcadia? Please share your comments!

References

[1] ^ W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening, http://www.poets.org, retrieved 5.4.2008.

[2] ^ Arnold Lobel, Owl at Home.

[3] ^ P.W. Atkins, The Second Law.

[4] ^ Titusville, Pennsylvania, Encyclopedia of Earth, retrieved 5.4.2008.

[5] ^ Charles A.S. Hall and the EROI Study Team, EROI on the Web part 2 of 5, (Provisional Results Summary, Imported Oil, Natural Gas), www.TheOilDrum.com, retrieved 5.4.2008.

[6] ^ http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html, retrieved 5.4.2008.

[7] ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum, and references therein, retrieved 5.4.2008.

[8] ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_oil, and references therein, retrieved 5.4.2008.

[9] ^ Charles A.S. Hall and the EROI Study Team, EROI on the Web part 2 of 5, (Provisional Results Summary, Imported Oil, Natural Gas), www.TheOilDrum.com, retrieved 5.4.2008.

[10] ^ M. King Hubbert, Energy from Fossil Fuels, retrieved 5.4.2008.

Update: The Greenest Building on the Planet

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:14:00 +0000

Aldo Leopold Legacy Center

Triple Pundit reports that the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center near Baraboo, Wisconsin has earned 61 out of 69 LEED points from the US Green Building Council, a higher score than any other building.

Read more at Triple Pundit

Main Post: Green Mansions

Earth Day

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:59:00 +0000

To the Universe: Song of Love

The winds assail Jupiter in the trees
star-buffet, in the leafy night
in the throaty dark --
And it is you i love, o world
o world
alone, shining
in a darkened universe
keening tree-toads
The night is heavy
and moist
with unwritten poems
o world
and old images reborn
the jangle of dreams
tangle
with your roots
imaginary and real
become complex.
Against the moon lamp
eye-roots, frozen
frightened by gaps in time
veining, pulsing,
imposed like forms
on the void between stars this heart
thimble vessel
a thousand times filled but not depleting
or even telling
world
I am endlessly small
finite unbounded
in your overpouring infinities, world
world
shining, alone.

~ Rachel Maitra

First printed in Poiesis: Alfred Review

Green Mansions

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000

This post celebrates the 2008 Green Log Home and Lifestyle Awards, hosted by Green Log Awards, Inc. You can vote on the best sustainable solutions from among a huge number of inspiring nominees!

Pitch-dark was the forest as they ran. Jagged slivers of moonlight seldom knifed through dense boughs to illuminate their steps, and the only sound in their ears was their own ragged breathing, punctuated by the thud of their frantic footfalls on pine needles and fern.

As they tore through the clinging branches, Hansel and Gretel dropped neither pebbles nor crumbs, for they never again wanted to find this place. But as they put the Gingerbread Hut farther and farther behind them, they grew less and less sure of their path ahead.

There was no sign of any thinning, any lightening of this deep forest. The pendulous firs, the muscular oaks were unrelieved by clearing or copse, and the canopy overhead showed no snag in its tight weft.

The first flush of flight expended, their steps grew staggering and then halting, until at last weariness sank to exhaustion and they sought shelter under a spreading hemlock. Its pungent whispering boughs enveloped them in a green dark, and they slept.

Perhaps a whole day passed - perhaps an era, they hardly knew. For when they awoke, day was fading from a twilight sky. The cloak of night and their fear must have conspired to make the forest more impenetrable than it was: now they stood on the fringe of a fern-ringed copse, its slender aspens swaying and bowing with the evening breeze. Through the branches blinked lights of a town, just appearing against the purple hillside beyond.

An involuntary cry of surprise and relief rose in their throats only to be checked by a sound of rustling footsteps. Withdrawing again to the shadows of the hemlock, they watched as a man approached, wearing knee-breeches and a waistcoat.

"Surely he is returning to the town," whispered Hansel. "If we follow him, we will find our way to human habitation!"

But the man's footsteps turned resolutely away from the winking lights. His pace was leisurely, and as he walked he spoke, quietly but with passion:

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"

"What can it mean?" whispered Gretel, but Hansel only shook his head. "He's mad."

As though confirming this opinion, the man suddenly burst out,

"Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn!"

After this explosion, he fell silent, and began to pace slowly around the dell, glancing now and then at his pocketwatch. Afraid to risk being seen, Hansel and Gretel remained under the hemlock, waiting for the strange man to move on. Presently footsteps again rustled the leaves carpeting the copse, and the poet looked up sharply from his reverie.

"Mr Thoreau, I presume?" He extended his hand as a sturdy bearded man wearing a straw hat approached from the opposite side of the copse.

"Ah, Mr Wordsworth!" said the newcomer. "I fear you have waited a long time. Come, come, we have a few miles' walk yet to the cabin at Walden Pond."

The two men fell into step as they strolled from the glen into the forest and out of sight.

Rushing from their hiding place, Hansel and Gretel ran pell-mell toward the windows of the distant town, heedlessly tripping over knotted roots. But fast they plummeted in the vale of night, and again the vines of the forest stole the lights from their horizon.

Day followed night, and the vines grew so thickly as to obscure all passage of time. On they ran, and again the forest drew dense and they lost their way.

Still they did not stop until the boughs parted on a small hut, solitary and overgrown. Its candied gables sagged, and tufts of soft green moss sprouted from its gingerbread roof.

Lorenzo Mattotti "Six Scenes from Hansel and Gretel."

"Hansel, stop!" hissed Gretel. "We've come to the witch's hut again! Hide, hide!"

From behind their blind of blackberry bushes, Hansel and Gretel spied movement near the door of the hut. A small girl stood there, experimentally licking the frosted doorjambs.

"Haste! We must warn her!" cried Hansel, but Gretel clutched his arm, whispering, "Watch! Things have changed, we know not how!"

As they waited, voices became audible, and from the side of the house appeared a young couple. Strangely, they were almost identically dressed, in plain blue trousers and simple short-sleeved cotton shirts with pictures and letters worked into their fronts. "What do you think of the design?" the man was saying.

"A bit old-fashioned, yes, and it needs a lot of work," replied his wife. "But it's amazing! The building materials are all completely sustainable and recyclable! And here we are in the middle of this lush forest - what more could we ask for?"

We have made a complete revolution since the days when the forest was a place of dread, inhabited by witches, wolves, and Baba Yagas. Today's complaint is more likely living too close to the next-door neighbors than eking out a rural subsistence in impoverished isolation. For more and more, the fantasy of an ideal home is not a mansion reigning supreme over manicured garden and landscape, but a dwelling in harmony with its natural surroundings.

With increasing awareness of the deep footprint our lives and homes leave on the Earth, architectural design and building techniques are enjoying a green renaissance. Like all renaissances, it has begun organically and spontaneously, with individual efforts and inspirations.

Low-impact woodland home. Photo: Simon Dale (http://www.simondale.net/house)

In west Wales, photographer Simon Dale and his family live in a low-impact woodland home they built themselves, from "imagination, optimism and rubbish." Dug into a hillside, their earth-sheltered dwelling is insulated by the turf which shapes its softly domed roof and overhangs its wide arched windows. Straw bales provide additional insulation and structure. Over the living area, sloping rafters incline toward a round skylight illuminating the house with natural light.

Photo: Simon Dale (http://www.simondale.net/house)

The unfolding of this home, as described by Simon Dale and his wife Jasmine Saville on their webpage, is a story of serendipity and individuality. The floor is made from discarded pine pallets; the windows are misfits donated by a factory which would have landfilled them. Turning to advantage the house's earth-sheltered situation, cool air from belowground chills the refrigerator via the foundation.

A reward for the thought devoted to material and situation was ease of actual construction, which required no tools other than "chainsaw, hammer and 1 inch chisel." The original low-impact dwelling project has now expanded to include plans of an eco-village site in Pembrokeshire.

Eco-village site. http://www.lammas.org.uk/lowimpact/gallery.htm

Although now living primarily in Mexico, Kelly and Rosana Hart built their own sustainable home in Colorado using earthbags, misprinted rice bags refilled with insulating volcanic soil. The earthbags serve as bricks, which are then stuccoed over with papercrete. A local dump offering a special section for reclaimable materials furnished the Harts with fixtures such as their kitchen sink.

Photo: Hartworks. http://www.which-hobbit.com/sustainable_architecture.htm

Enjoying a sunny climate, the Harts' house uses passive solar heating and solar electricity from panels. Solar power even fuels their modified Rhoades car, also self-built and dubbed "the Sunmobile." A planned upgrade from the Sunmobile to "the SunVee" would triple the Sunmobile's 1 horsepower motor and add a full chassis and suspension.

Sunmobile. Photo: Hartworks. http://www.sunvee.com

The concept of passive solar heating has made its way into mainstream architecture, notably with the Passivhaus ("passive house") building code. First constructed in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1990, Passivhaus buildings must conform to much stricter energy specifications than those outlined in standard building codes. For example, the maximum annual energy consumption allowed for heating is 15 kWh/m², while for total annual energy consumption (including heat, hot water, and electricity), an upper limit of 120 kWh/m² is imposed. This represents a 75-95% reduction compared with energy usage in new structures complying with current US building codes.

In addition to using passive solar heating, Passivhaus buildings are so well insulated and employ such efficient heat recovery ventilators that no central heating is necessary. A supplement to the solar heat can come from recovered waste heat, generated by lighting and electrical appliances.

Particularly in Germany where the movement started, Passivhaus building has advanced to the point of cost-competitiveness with ordinary construction. A still more efficient cousin, zero-energy building, is now up and coming. Though multiple different standards are in currency for its definition (e.g. net-zero energy costs versus net-zero consumption), several successful buildings have achieved various forms of the zero-energy requirement. Using technologies such as solar panels integrated in siding or roof-shingles, zero-energy buildings can sell energy back to the grid, or function completely independently. In Denver, Colorado, a house built by Habitat for Humanity has demonstrated net zero energy consumption for more than a year. Several businesses, including Integrated Design Associates in San Jose, California, and the China National Tobacco Corporation in Guangzhou, China, are moving to zero-energy office buildings.

Ideas which started as experiments by outsiders to the establishment are slowly gaining wider acceptance and broader support. An especially beautiful story of such acceptance is that of the recycled rock garden in Chandigarh, India. It began in 1957 as a secret garden, when roads inspector Nek Chand bicycled after work to an overgrown empty lot at the outskirts of the city. Bringing with him rocks and discarded broken pots and dishes, he began to build concrete figures and tile them with mosaics made from the rubbish. Working at night and in fear of discovery, he filled courtyard after courtyard with sculptures of people, horses, and birds.

Nek Chand Recycled Art Bangle Mosaic Bird Rock Garden India - Carol Mitchell

Years passed, and the garden grew to cover twelve acres with hundreds of statues crafted from junk: old tires, broken glass bangles. In 1969, Chand revealed his project to M.N. Sharma, the city's chief architect. Although the secret garden was illegally constructed on public land, Sharma was so impressed with what he saw that instead of disciplining Chand, he arranged a salary for him to work full-time on the garden, along with fifty assistants. The garden, which Chand continues to embellish and expand, now comprises forty acres open to the public.

Nek Chand Garden Mosaic Sculpture fountain chdigarh, india - savagecorp

"Art is the setting-into-work of truth," said the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and indeed Nek Chand's dream garden is a vivid reminder to look again at objects we might have deemed useless trash, to think again about how something new and beautiful can be created. From the Harts' kitchen sink or Simon Dale's windows, this truth is making its way into the minds of designers fashioning carpet from old soda bottles, or countertops from recycled paper. Inspiration and innovation are pointing the way forward to invention; the renaissance has begun.

For a beautiful series of photo-essays on the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, see this post on Mosaic Art Source Blog, and the three immediately preceding posts. For a discussion on cost-effectiveness of solar panels, read this post from Chemistry for a Sustainable World.

Note: The title of this post is from the 1904 novel "Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest," by W.H. Hudson, an English-Argentinian author and naturalist.

Please share your comments! I welcome thoughts, questions, further information, and civil debate.

Update: Diary from the Middle of Nowhere

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:35:00 +0000

BBC Environment correspondent David Shukman is reporting from the Northwestern Hawaiian island of Midway, on the growing problem of plastic waste. Read his diary here.

NOAA Map of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Main Post: The Isle of the Dead

Please share your comments! I welcome thoughts, questions, further information, and civil debate.

The Isle of the Dead: Another Tale of Transformation

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:54:00 +0000

Laysan Albatross, Bering Sea. Photo: Ian Jones (http://www.mun.ca/serg/)

On wide cambered wings they glide, almost effortless, seldom flapping. Where the ocean stretches boundless to the eye and leagues deep they wheel and soar. Or they sleep, floating lightly on the water's frothy surface, rocked in the bosom of the swells.

Old seafaring legend has it that they are the souls of departed sailors. In "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Coleridge writes of his albatross

"And some in dreams assuréd were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow."^[1]

But far from tracing some occult spirals of the supernatural, the albatross's route over the North Pacific follows circling currents of wind and water, the slow permanent vortex known as the North Pacific Gyre. A westward-flowing ocean current girdles Earth's equator, powered by the daily rotation of the planet. Facing continental coastlines, the North equatorial current is forced upwards, while its South equatorial counterpart plunges farther below the equator. It is this motion which starts the gyres, the steady swirling of water in every ocean basin.^[2]

To a Laysan albatross, the sea is not the transient backdrop of a voyage, supplanted in the mind by regrets for the point of departure or expectancy toward destination. This voyage is itself the destination, and the home. An albatross's wings are equipped with a tendon for locking into flight position, stretched taut as the spars of a kite. Gliding windward, the albatross's heartbeat scarcely rises above resting pulse. After fledging from the nest a young albatross will spend the first years of her youth entirely at sea, never landing until the day she revisits her native island to start a new nest, at an average of 22 meters' distance from her ancestral home.^[3]

One ancestral home to many Laysan and black-footed albatrosses is Tern Island, in the French Frigate Shoals. Harboring 14 million birds of 19 species,^[4] Tern and other Northwestern Hawaiian islands are real-life versions of the Quangle Wangle's beaver hat, where

"Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl;
The Snail, and the Bumble-Bee,
The Frog, and the Fimble Fowl;
(The Fimble Fowl, with a Corkscrew leg;)
And all of them said, -- 'We humbly beg,
'We may build our homes on your lovely Hat,--
'Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!
'Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!'"^[5]

Having carried out their elaborate courtship dances and rituals and built their home, a pair of albatrosses will embark on the arduous journey of raising a chick. While one parent guards the island nest, the other scans the sea for weeks at a time foraging squid, fish, and fish eggs, sometimes traveling as far as Alaska.^[6] In their peregrinations, currents of ocean and wind are highway and thoroughfare.

But the circling waters of the North Pacific Gyre carry more than albatrosses in their wake. In 1997 Charles Moore, a Californian businessman turned oceanographer, took an unusual return route from a Hawaiian yacht race. Breaking with standard nautical practice, he steered his vessel the Alguita into the North Pacific Gyre, otherwise known to sailors as the doldrums because of its lack of sustained forward winds.

In this remote expanse of trackless deep, Moore encountered not the untouched waters he had expected, but a diffuse floating ghost island - a seafaring junkyard of plastic waste. In a piece in Natural History magazine, Moore describes his later return to the area with a trawling net, conducting a survey which recovered everything from volleyballs to truck tires to Gordian knots of polypropylene fishing line. Some of the debris is refuse or accidental spills from ships; the rest originates from garbage on land, via beaches or rivers. All is eventually engulfed in the gyre currents, where it circulates endlessly.^[7]

So great was the preponderance of plastic fragments that Moore's net regularly surfaced bearing 6 times more weight in plastic than in biomass. No living microbe is able to decompose plastic, so rather than biodegrading it can only photodegrade, becoming brittle under the rays on the sun and disintegrating into ever smaller plastic shards. Masquerading as zooplankton, these shards are unwittingly consumed by filter feeders like salps and jellies, which in turn provide food for sunfish and other larger predators.^[8]

As Moore writes, the irony of these phony plastic zooplankton lies in the origin of petroleums from which plastic is fashioned. Petroleum is itself derived from fossilized carcasses of prehistoric ocean zooplankton. The simulacra haunting the gyre are ghosts of ghosts, eternally orbiting the rings of purgatory.

Floating plastic detritus is also mistaken for food by the Laysan albatross, and scavenged to regurgitate for its chicks. A study of dead Laysan albatross chicks found plastic lodged in the stomachs of 90%.^[9] Filling the birds' stomachs while providing no nourishment, plastic drives the albatross chicks to starvation.

Albatrosses are not the wandering souls of shipwrecked sailors, and the floating plastic, with its artificial zooplankton, is the North Pacific's true ghost island. But if concentrations of plastic in the gyre increase, Tern Island too could become another Isle of the Dead.

Tern Island, Laysan albatross chick with adult skeleton containing plastic fragments. Photo: Ian Jones

Besides this monstrous shapeshifting trickery, there are other possible tales of transformation for plastic products which have outlived their useful lives. Rajiv Badlani, an innovator and entrepreneur from Ahmedabad, India, has plans to extend his current cotton tote bag business to include a line of reusable totes woven from discarded plastic bags. The plastics are cut and spun into string, which becomes the warp and weft plied by skilled handloom weavers to create fabric for the bags.^[10]

However, even in this best possible outcome for plastic trash, it remains an essentially deathless substance which can never be thoroughly disposed of on the timescales of any living creature. As polymer chemist and oceanographer Anthony Andrady writes, "[E]very little bit of plastic manufactured in the world for the last 50 years or so, still remains in the environment somewhere."^[11]

Recycling of plastics is notoriously problematic, especially for less rigid varieties such as plastic bags.^[12] The weight of plastics recovered through recycling is only 7% that of plastics generated.^[13] Slowly, research is progressing in the areas of biodegradable and compostable plastic substitutes, but industry standards are as yet few, and not widely publicized or understood.^[14]

We can only hope that the world's love affair with plastic will be remembered in the future as a brief, destructive infatuation. In museums, samples of plastic can be displayed to viewers - they will require no very great care to prevent their degradation. We must act to prevent a second wing of that museum from containing a skeleton of the Laysan albatross, beside that of the dodo and the great auk.

We must innovate and rethink, weaning ourselves from our dangerous addiction to plastic in everyday life, to keep the Laysan albatross where it belongs, flying free in its home winds over the North Pacific.

Laysan Albatross, Pacific Ocean. Photo: Alexander Lees http://www.freewebs.com/alexlees/photography.htm

Please share your comments! I welcome thoughts, questions, further information, and civil debate.

References

[1] ^ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto, retrieved 3.20.2008.

[2] ^ Surface Currents of the Subtropical Gyres, Encyclopedia of Earth, retrieved 3.20.2008.

[3] ^ Albatross, Wikipedia, and references therein, retrieved 3.20.2008.

[4] ^ Carl Safina, Albatross Wanderings, Audubon Magazine 2001.

[5] ^ Edward Lear, The Quangle Wangle's Hat, Edward Lear Home Page, retrieved 3.20.2008.

[6] ^ Laysan Albatross: Natural History, National Audubon Society, Waterbird Conservation, retrieved 3.20.2008.

[7] ^ Charles Moore, Trashed, Natural History Magazine, November 2003.

[8] ^ Moore et al, A Comparison of Plastic and Plankton in the North Pacific Central Gyre, Marine Pollution Bulletin Volume 42, Issue 12, pp 1297-1300, 2001.

[9] ^ J. Derraik, The Pollution of the Marine Environment by Plastic Debris, Marine Pollution Bulletin Volume 44, Issue 9, pp 842-852, 2002, and references therein.

[10] ^ www.badlani.com/recycle, retrieved 3.20.2008.

[11] ^ A.L. Andrady, Plastics and Their Impacts in the Marine Environment, Proceedings of the International Marine Debris Conference on Derelict Fishing Gear and the Ocean Environment, August 2000.

[12] ^ Seven Misconceptions About Plastic and Plastic Recycling, Ecology Center Plastics Task Force, retrieved 3.20.2008.

[13] ^ Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006.

[14] ^ www.worldcentric.org/store/bioplastics.htm.

Tales of Transformation: Soil

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:26:00 +0000

This is a tale of transformation. It is a story of death and rebirth, of rot giving way to redemption, and of miracles hiding in plain sight.

Like all such stories, it begins humbly, in lowly refuse: coffee grounds and apple cores, things we throw away without a second thought. Most of us live in urban settings, and the words refuse, dirt, and soil conjure up overflowing trash cans, foul with half-eaten hamburgers, soiled napkins, things only a rat could love.

But besides being “soiled,” there is another sense of the word, as in “the soil of the homeland.” Here the soil is something to be proud of, something hard-won and precious. This is the soil of the farmer's field, rich and dark and moist as a chocolate torte. This is the soil which thaws after winter to release the heady fragrance of spring, at once honeyed and earthy: the smell of growing grass and returning warmth.

Anyone who has planted a seed, infinitesimal as a grain of salt, and months later pulled from the ground a full-blown carrot or beet knows that soil is capable of strange and wonderful magic. Soil must be a sort of powdered life-force, pregnant with undifferentiated potential.

La Boqueria, Barcelona, Spain. Photo: Dipankar Maitra

In Barcelona, Spain, is a beautiful open market known as La Boqueria, dating from 1217 C.E. and offering a dizzying variety of fruits and vegetables every day: eggplant, artichoke, and arugula; pithaya, pomegranate, mangosteen. La Boqueria is a carnival of Earth's fecund whimsy, of the multifarious forms the soil brings forth. With W.B. Yeats, pondering on the sources of his own inspiration, we might wonder about the origin of those fruits:

“Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can.”^[1]

We know that our garbage is buried in the earth, and that from the earth grow orchards and crops, but what happens in between?

Take a handful of soil, and look more closely. Like a cake made of non-cake elements – flour, eggs, sugar – the soil comprises a bit of everything else on Earth: mineral particles, water, air, organic matter. But the list “flour, eggs, sugar” fails even to approximate a recipe for cake, let alone convey the vast assortment of Black Forest, Lady Baltimore, and Pineapple Upside-Down cakes which might result from combining the basic elements.

Soil ranges from peat, a dense airless pudding of decayed bog plants, to desert sand, light and dry as sifted flour. Tiny grains of rock weathered from the Earth's crust form its mineral base, varying in chemistry and in particle size. Put that handful of soil in a glass of water, and over a few days it will separate into layers like a parfait, the organic matter floating near the top while minerals settle into layers of decreasing particle size: sand at the bottom, topped by silt and clay. The widths of these bands yield composition by percentage, classifying soil texture on a triangle nuanced as a painter's color wheel.

USDA Soil Texture, http://soils.usda.gov

If soil texture is a complex affair, the inclusion of organic matter – castoffs from the plant and animal kingdom, in various states of decay – explodes the classification to more than 17,000 distinct recognized soil types in the U.S. alone.^[2] Chemistry, climate, and formation broadly divide these soils into twelve orders, their occurrence mapped symbolically in color over the surface of the globe.

USDA Soil Orders

Soil is no more static over time than it is constant across space. Ascending another level in complexity above the organic matter, we find our handful of soil inhabited by a teeming bureaucracy. Bacteria and fungi form the proletariat, a billion tireless first responders breaking down leaves as they fall. Dependent on them for nourishment are the middle management: mites by the hundred, along with thousands of protozoans and those simple microscopic tubes known as nematode worms. Centipedes, beetles, and spiders people the food web's upper echelons. Though equivalent in size to these larger predators, the earthworms, sowbugs, and millipedes are gentle giants feeding on dead plant matter and leaving behind shredded scraps which the microbes easily digest.^[3]

As an commonplace byproduct of its everyday existence, this vast hierarchy unlocks stores of nitrogen hoarded in the bodies of deceased plants and animals, releasing the nutrient as soil nitrates which when assimilated will fiber new plants and flesh new animals in turn. Symbiotic bacteria in the roots of certain plants also harvest Earth's plentiful atmospheric nitrogen, rendering it usable for their hosts. Completing a final lobe in the web, denitrifying bacteria replenish atmospheric nitrogen with some of the soil nitrates originally produced by the decay of plant and animal life.^[4]

Though we began by examining a handful of soil through the lens of a microscope, we cannot fully comprehend without widening our focus to include the air which touches the soil, the plants it roots, and the animals whose footsteps it supports. Mammalian blood cannot be understood by counting red blood cells on a microscope slide, but by considering the bloodstream and its central role in metabolism. Similarly, soil is not merely the inventory of its chemical resources or the census-count of its citizens, but part of the nitrogen cycle, as well as the carbon cycle and other biogeochemical loops.

Looking at the Earth though not a microscope but a far-away “imaginary telescope” first brought the nitrogen cycle to the attention of James Lovelock, a British scientist who once spent his spare time searching for wild orchids on the Wiltshire downs.^[5] Lovelock and his collaborators were hired by NASA in 1961 to devise instruments the Viking lander would use for detecting the presence or absence of life on Mars's surface. In considering this problem, Lovelock first conducted a thought experiment, asking himself whether the known presence of life on Earth could be deduced solely from hypothetical astronomical observations by a telescope in space.

Lovelock's answer was in the affirmative. The Mariner spacecraft had already analyzed Venus and Mars's atmospheric compositions from space, and even earth-based telescopes were able to glean information on these planets' atmospheres through infrared observations. Analogous experiments would reveal the make-up of Earth's atmosphere to a telescope in space or on Mars, and the imaginary astronomer manning this observatory could construct a table comparing the atmospheres of Earth, Mars, and Venus.

Such a table shows Venus and Mars to have remarkably similar atmospheres, almost solely made of carbon dioxide and in a state near chemical equilibrium with their planetary soils. If Mars or Venus were heated and then cooled again, allowing chemicals to recombine according to their equilibrium preferences, they would resume more or less their current configurations. Earth, however, is in a state far from chemical equilibrium, with nitrogen dominating its atmosphere, followed by oxygen and a tiny amount of carbon dioxide. Something or someone must be hard at work twenty-four hours a day to preserve this anomalous state.

Though effectively convincing Lovelock that the Viking lander's search for Martian life was misguided, this thought experiment led him to the Gaia hypothesis: the proposal that the entire Earth is a living organism which maintains itself in homeostasis, a stable condition favorable for life and different from the equilibrium which inanimate chemicals would choose if left to themselves. Human body temperature is an example of homeostasis: whether the air is 0 or 100 degrees Fahrenheit, a healthy human has a constant body temperature of 98.6, maintained through regulatory feedback mechanisms such as shivering to keep warm or sweating to cool off.

Viewed from the Gaian perspective, the nitrogen cycle is indeed part of a living being's metabolism. Every nitrifying or denitrifying soil microorganism is part of the feedback loop maintaining a favorable distribution of Earth's nitrogen for the flourishing of life. We have laid our hands on the soil and felt the warm pulse of a sleeping giant.

Unsurprisingly for an idea so bold, the Gaia hypothesis has its share of passionate critics, in large part because it challenges the definition of what it means to be alive. If one includes in this definition, as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins does, the possession of a "selfish gene" and the ability to reproduce, the Earth taken as a whole clearly does not meet the criteria. There is, however, no completely successful standard definition of life. As Lovelock whimsically suggests, our innate ability to recognize living beings, paired with our lack of success at advancing a definitive characterization, suggests that the question "What is life?" has an answer classified as top secret and filed inaccessibly in the black box of our unconscious minds.^[6]

An alternative to Dawkins's view characterizes living systems not in terms of reproduction but self-production (autopoiesis). First described by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, autopoiesis is the process of constant self-motivated update and regeneration through which a cell, for example, renews itself and maintains the conditions necessary for its continued survival. According to this definition, the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, sulfur, and water qualify Earth as a living system.

The autopoietic self-motivated quality of the nitrogen cycle is the seat of its greatest power. It sustains the miracle Walt Whitman celebrates in his poem "This Compost," a reflection on the fact that all living bodies must eventually return to the soil:

"It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings
from them at last."^[7]

What of the "infused fetor" which we leave weekly in trash bags on the curb for the garbage trucks to collect? What is its eventual fate? Will it, too, be redeemed by the agency of nitrogen and carbon cycles?

A typical bag of nonrecyclable trash in the U.S. might be more than 50% composed of biodegradable materials such as kitchen scraps and yard waste, from the EPA's trash composition estimate. In a year, the average household generates 200 pounds of kitchen waste alone.^[8] If left to the ministration of earthworms and microbes, this trash could, like leaves fallen to the forest floor, be regenerated and recovered as valuable humus.

Most trash, however, ends in an airtight landfill, insulated from contact with soil by a layer of clay.^[9] Slowly and surely its organic content will decompose, but lacking contact with the atmosphere, anaerobic bacteria must effect its demise. Their byproduct is not nitrogen but methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. Increased methane levels set up a feedback loop of their own, but not a regulatory negative feedback loop such as that keeping human body temperature constant. Instead, methane initiates a runaway positive feedback loop, leading to increased temperature which in turn triggers the release of more methane from normally sequestered ocean deposits.^[10]

Knowing the power of biogeochemical cycles, it seems sheer lunacy to refuse the soil's promised redemption of any cast-off from the biosphere. There are, fortunately, alternatives to landfills: many cities are beginning to introduce industrial composting programs, in which residents sort the organic matter from their trash for separate collection. Given the cost of running and maintaining landfills, not to mention constructing new ones when old landfills reach capacity, a composting program could benefit every city, in economic returns as well as free soil fertilizer.^[11]

In regions where no municipal composting program exists, anyone with a little outdoor space, even a small patio having a garden plot or planting containers, can compost independently. The only requirement for success is a good ratio of green materials (wet, nitrogen-containing) to brown (dry, carbon-containing). With proper ventilation and hence aerobic decomposition, there will be no smell except that sweet earthy fragrance lent to healthy soil by the presence of actinobacteria.

Humans too live on Earth, and affect the operation of biogeochemical cycles. Since these cycles are feedback loops regulating the condition of the planet, our actions change the natural homeostasis. By sequestering our trash in landfills, we effectively break the nitrogen cycle, making a sink into which resources fall and cannot be recovered. Ironically, the artificial fertilizers added to farm fields to compensate this loss have produced a surfeit of nitrates in groundwater.^[12]

On the other hand, with a bit of thought and minimal effort, we can still reconnect the links we have broken in the web of life. By acknowledging and using the waste management programs inherent in the very soil, we can rejoin the cycling of resources which are the sinew and bloodstream of our planet Earth. | Printer-friendly version | Email this post |

Please share your comments! I welcome thoughts, questions, further information, and civil debate.

References

[1] ^ W.B. Yeats, The Circus Animals' Desertion, http://weblamp.princeton.edu/~milberg, retrieved 3.3.2008.

[2] ^ R.C. Lindholm, "Information derived from soil maps: Areal distribution of bedrock landslide distribution and slope steepness," Environmental Geology, Volume 23, Number 4, June 1994, and references therein

[3] ^ USDA Soil Biology Primer, http://soils.usda.gov, retrieved 3.3.2008.

[4] ^ Nitrogen Cycle, Environmental Literacy Council, retrieved 3.3.2008.

[5] ^ James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. Oxford Univ. Press, 1988.

[6] ^ Ibid.

[7] ^ Walt Whitman, This Compost, http://classiclit.about.com, retrieved 3.3.2008.

[8] ^ http://www.compostguide.com, retrieved 3.3.2008.

[9] ^ Fungal Decomposition, http://www.herbarium.usu.edu, retrieved 3.3.2008.

[10] ^ Elizabeth Svoboda, Global Warming Feedback Loop Caused by Methane, Scientists Say, August 29, 2006, National Geographic News.

[11] ^ Maunsell Australia Pty Ltd, Consultancy Report: Alternatives to Landfill - Cost Structures and Related Issues, September 2003.

[12] ^ Ecological Society of America, Human Alteration of the Global Nitrogen Cycle: Causes and Consequences, Issues in Ecology, Number 1, Spring 1997.

Earthen Vessels in the City of Joy

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:35:00 +0000

Through wrought-iron grillwork and light curtain come currents of air, hot and wet, a tropical winter. Moisture brings the air close to your skin, like a silky membrane, its movements too those of a curtain.

This air has a flavor, smoky bittersweet, overlaid with smells of potato and cauliflower frying with kalojeera seeds for breakfast, and luchis rolled thin from dough, fried into puffy golden balloons deflating slowly in a sizzling stack.

Close, too, are the noises rising on moist air from the street below: a lusty cacophony of honks, from assertively nasal Ambassador taxis to bicycle rickshaw horns, high-pitched and insistent as rubber squeak-toys. There are shouts of the street vendors: paan-wallahs and chaat-wallahs, and men in lungis pulling carts of sugar-cane. Outside the window, through hazy sun-filled mango leaves, Dhakuria, South Kolkata is awake.

Join the thronging streets of people walking, talking, eating, shopping. The sidewalk is lined with narrow shops open to the street, their entrances overhung with a benediction of limes and green chilies threaded like beads on a string. In the shelter of a banyan tree’s many-armed embrace is a painted and brocaded shrine, its deity surrounded with tiny bells and curls of fragrant incense smoke.

On the sidewalks vendors hawk their wares, squatting amid stainless steel bowls and pans on gas burners, or sitting under pitched tarpaulins. The chaat-wallah mans his pyramid of hollow deep-fried spheres, puncturing and filling them with potato masala and tamarind water to make puchkas. Flower garlands, guavas, washing and ironing service – all are for sale. But most frequent of all are the stalls selling tea, brewed in a huge tin kettle and poured into small conical earthen cups on a tray. These earthen cups, or bhands, are the disposable cups of choice, made of low-fired, unglazed terracotta, and smashed on the sidewalk by the consumer once the tea is finished. Over time the soft, porous shards disintegrate into dust. Bhands are also the vessel in which yogurt is made and sold in Kolkata, the terracotta walls absorbing excess water content to leave a rich, creamy curd.

In the evening, there is a tent at the end of Station Road in Dhakuria, a simple portico of tarpaulins stretched on poles, where you can order dinner to go: spicy tarka of lentil and egg, with rumali rotis – literally “handkerchief” rotis. A cook punches and twirls the roti dough high above his head to make a diaphanous sheet which cooks in seconds on an upturned iron hemispherical pan. With practiced hands, the tarka chef tosses into the kadhai pan sliced onions, then tomatoes, sizzling and steaming. Next go the lentils, a few handfuls of masala powders, and last the egg, fried and stirred. Before the long and crowded commuter train has rumbled by on the tracks behind the tent, you are holding a bhand filled with tarka, and a bundle of rumali rotis wrapped in a paper bag handmade from newspaper.

For a visitor from the West, habituated to take-out dinners mummified in Styrofoam and accompanied by an army of plastic cutlery, there is a thrill in this simple packaging, a thrill intensified by its lack of fanfare. Could there really be such an easy solution to the problems of litter and non-recyclable trash, of Styrofoam boxes doomed to deathless eternity in a landfill?^[1]

The bhand’s ubiquity belies its recent debate and scrutiny across India. In 2004, a notoriously colorful and controversial politician named Lalu Prasad Yadav took charge of the Indian railways ministry, promising widespread reforms and innovations – even announcing that under his supervision, the tracks would be made as smooth as the cheeks of Bollywood beauty Hema Malini. Among the first of Lalu’s reforms was to ban plastic cups on trains, mandating that vendors instead sell tea in earthen cups (known as kulhars in Hindi, bhands in Bengali).

"Storm in a Kulhar," proclaimed a headline in Outlook India,^[2] detailing the controversy generated by Lalu's move, its political motivations and practical ramifications. Was it economically feasible, critics questioned, to use kulhars made at a rate of 80 paisa each, rather than plastic cups available for only 25 paisa? This objection loses force, however, in light of Lalu's achievement of a budget surplus in a railway operation which had been on the verge of bankruptcy before the beginning of his term. A government subsidy of Rs. 2.5 billion (~$63 million) is budgeted yearly for buying kulhars to be used by railway vendors.

Opponents of the kulhar scheme also pointed to its ecological imperfections,^[3] raising concerns about clay being mined from agricultural land, hardwood trees burned as fuel in kilns, and soot polluting nearby areas. Under such suboptimal conditions, could the plan be sustainable, ecologically or economically? Would the land support the industry? Could the making of kulhars be expected to benefit potters themselves in the long run, or merely line the pockets of middle-men?

Another point under debate in the media was the timescale over which a scrap of broken kulhar would in fact degrade, returning to soil. After all, skeptics warned, shards of pottery recovered from Indus Valley archaeological sites date from thousands of years ago.

The ravages of time and tide which break solid inorganic material into soil comprise two categories of weathering: physical and chemical. Sun and rain beat down physically on a rock, grinding and chipping it away, while contact with air and biological agents weakens its chemical bonds.

Weathering for a porous material like low-fired terracotta is much simpler and faster than for hard rocks, because water and salts can permeate and degrade it internally. Kulhars have no glaze, allowing breakdown to begin as soon as the shards smash on the train tracks. However, the most important factors determining the timescale for weathering - chemical or physical - are climate and environment.

Perhaps one of the reasons why bhands, so hotly debated in the national railways scheme, remain commonplace in Kolkata is their perfect adaptation to the environment of Bengal. A humid tropical climate is optimal for chemical weathering, and heavy monsoon rains add physical weathering. How long until a piece of bhand returns to its elements? Exact information is difficult to find; however ceramic engineers at the Central Glass and Ceramic Research Institute in Kolkata estimate an 8 or 10 year decay time,^[4] not much longer than that required for wax-coated food paper to biodegrade.

More still than an example for recycling and use of renewable resources, the bhand seems to be a model of such a process suited to a place. The alluvial soil of Bengal has long supported traditional clay and pottery craft.^[5] Whether this tradition can be transplanted to grow successfully in an arid desert soil, is a question which can only be answered by watching the fate of Lalu's nationwide kulhar policy. What is clear, however, is that naturally successful and sustainable ideas should be supported wherever they arise. Moreover, innovation to design and adapt schemes for sustainability in specific environments is at least as important as the development of new technology to compensate the shortfalls of less than sustainable standardized programs.

What other environments might support the use of hand-crafted bhands? It is hard to imagine that quality yogurt made and sold in terracotta pots would not be enthusiastically welcomed by U.S. or European markets in clay-rich areas. Like a species evolving spontaneously to fill a niche, the bhand occurs naturally in Kolkata. Perhaps, however, a hospitable climate could permit its introduction and success on new soil.
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References

[1] ^ Biodegradable, www.worldwise.com, retrieved 2.15.2008.

[2] ^ Paromita Shastri, "Storm in a Kulhar," Outlook India, Aug 2 2004.

[3] ^ Maneka Gandhi, "Clay-Pot Dictator," Outlook India, Jun 28 2004.

[4] ^ "Why Laloo's kulhad isn't as green as he makes it out to be," The Indian Express, Jul 6 2004.

[5] ^ Pottery of Bengal, www.catchcal.com, retrieved 2.15.2008.

Modern Mathematics Tells Us to Go Green

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:28:00 +0000

In the old days, we lived at the center of the Universe. We had dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and every other living thing that moved on Earth.

These living, moving things, however, were not docile or subservient subjects. As likely as not they were dragons or vicious three-headed dogs, to be valiantly slain. The seas were infested with monsters and booby-trapped with whirlpools, and if we did not fight, they would rend our ships to splinters. Paradoxically, we were at once lords and victims of the universe.

Over the ensuing centuries, Earth was shaken loose from its secure spot at the cosmos’s heart. First the usurper was the Sun, once a planet revolving around us, now grown in stature to a star marshalling the planets. Then even the Sun was forced to bow to the Milky Way Galaxy, where far bigger and brighter stars shone by the score. And still the dizzying descent did not stop: the Milky Way was only one very average spiral galaxy, clustered with countless others.

Domestically, however, matters seemed to improve. Despite the ballooning foreign policy disaster and concomitant loss of stature, we managed to drive the giants and minotaurs to extinction. Our cosmological demotion went hand in hand with increased understanding and mastery of the elements, and over time the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution became inevitabilities.

Now, living on an obscure outpost of rock circling a mediocre star, we are finally the masters of creation. Scylla and Charybdis are gone, choked or buried by the oil from our ships, which sail the seas unmolested. Perhaps emboldened by the consciousness of our triviality, we lay waste with abandon.

Have we not drawn the correct conclusion from the knowledge of our smallness? In the greater scheme of things, we surely cannot have any real or lasting effect. The temperatures may rise a little here, or the storms worsen there, but these effects are temporary. It has all happened before, and what we do cannot seriously change or damage the Earth.

This is fallacious reasoning. From the state of the art in the 19^th century, one might have concluded such a thing, but among the most important discoveries of 20^th century mathematics has been the sometimes crucial effect even of tiny variations. Popularly known as “the butterfly effect,” this phenomenon is studied in the branch of mathematics called “chaos theory.”

Consider that every process mathematics can describe – physical, biological, or economic – is encoded in an equation involving rates of change over time. Like a riddle, this equation tells us something about how the quantity we are interested in changes. The value of that quantity itself at any given time must be teased out by solving the riddle. Such an equation describing rates of change is known as a “differential equation.”

However, a differential equation alone is not sufficient for complete knowledge of the quantity in question. The world’s most famous differential equation describes the motion of an object in free-fall, and is so simple it can be stated in words: the acceleration of an object in free-fall is 32 feet per second, per second. This means that with each passing second, the object’s downward velocity will increase by another 32 feet per second.

But as it stands, this riddle has no solution. How fast was the object moving to begin with? Was it a baseball thrown high in the air? A champagne cork spurting from a bottle? To know the current velocity, we need to know not only how velocity changed, but also where it started. We need an “initial condition.”

How crucially does the trajectory of an object depend on initial condition? This is the question which leads to chaos theory. For many systems, the dependence is not crucial. If you slightly change the angle of your billiard cue, you will only cause a correspondingly slight change in the ball’s trajectory.

This, at least, is how ordinary billiards works. In 1898, however, the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard invented his own version of billiards, and with it chaos theory.

Picture a billiard table shaped like the inside of a perfectly hemispherical bowl. The billiard table is made of a metal so highly polished that we can assume it has no friction. Since gravity would spoil the game by clumping all the balls at the bottom of the bowl, Hadamard billiards should be played by astronauts in outer space, using magnetic balls which cling to the surface of the billiard table.

Imagine the frustration of the astronauts when they discover just how difficult Hadamard billiards is to play! Every possible trajectory of a Hadamard billiard ball differs exponentially from every other. Adjusting the cue or the position of the ball by even a hair’s breadth results in the ball’s taking a radically different path.

With the invention of this bizarre game, Hadamard opened the sluice-gates for study of systems highly sensitive to initial conditions. As it turns out, these are not limited to annoying astronaut pastimes.

In 1961, American meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz ran a computer simulation using differential equations for the behavior of weather systems. Compared with the complexity of real-world weather, Lorenz’s model was quite basic, using only three quantities to characterize the convection of air-currents. Roughly, these quantities were the strength of the convection currents, the temperature difference between rising and falling air, and a measure of temperature variation. The rate of change for each quantity over time obeyed a differential equation, relating it to a simple combination of all three quantities. Having constructed a solution, the computer printed its results in a chart: for each time-step was a list of the three values of interest.

Noticing an intriguing effect in one solution, Lorenz wished to run the simulation again from the same initial condition. However, only the latter half of the solution was of importance, and to save time he did not start the simulation from its beginning but from a later time, using his printed chart to enter the three values at that time-step as initial conditions.

To the astonishment of Lorenz, the computer printed a solution radically diverging from the one he had wished to reproduce. What could be the difference of starting in the middle rather than at the beginning? Given an initial condition, there is only one solution to a differential equation. Lorenz had copied a number from the previous solution, so the simulation should simply have resumed from that point as before.

The answer lay in round-off error. Though the computer performed its calculations using six decimal places, the print-out was rounded to three decimals. When Lorenz had entered the figures from the print-out as initial conditions, they were in fact not the numbers the computer had used in the first calculation, but very slightly altered values: decimals of .506 rather than .506127, to be precise. Lorenz wrote, “One flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever.”

Chaos had moved much closer to home. The artificial and idealized game of billiards envisioned by Hadamard was replaced by a pragmatic and basic model of convection currents, exhibiting similar complex behavior. At once the dream of long-term accurate weather forecasting was shattered, while the study of chaos theory burgeoned in magnitude and importance. Today, everything is chaotic, from brainwave frequency to exchange rates in the East European black market.

If a seagull can flap its wings once and change the course of weather forever, surely the 80,987 airline flights taking off worldwide each day can do as much, too? ‘Perhaps,’ the skeptic might reply, ‘but if this system is so fantastically sensitive to initial conditions, how can we predict what effect we will have? How then can we frame any reasonable ground rules? How could we be sure they would work?’

The answer lies in the difference between weather and climate. While weather refers to the immediate conditions of temperature, humidity, etc, climate is determined by averages of these quantities over some appropriate window of time, and region of space. For this reason, small random disturbances to the weather are averaged out when one passes to the level of climate. Butterflies and seagulls can be considered random in their motions; therefore while capable of changing the weather, they have little effect on climate, which appears to be non-chaotic in nature.

Our motions, however, are not random. Unlike the turbulence of butterflies, our effects do not average out in the calculation of climate, because we have uniformly raised weather temperatures by our carbon emissions.

It seems that our position is reversed from that of the Middle Ages: rather than important but impotent, we are now trivial but powerful. Or, in more familiar (and more flattering) words – small but mighty.

The Earth is no longer a hostile barbarian to be ruled with an iron fist. The dragons have left their caves, and the serpents their briny deep. It is time for a new narrative of our position in the world. Perhaps it could begin with the words of the 20^th century mathematician and physicist Paul Dirac, “Pick a flower here on Earth, and you move the farthest star.”

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Low-cost ways to green your lifestyle, from The Good Human

Trotsky and the Wild Orchids

noreply@blogger.com (Wild Orchids for Trotsky) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:22:00 +0000

"To hold reality and justice in a single vision..."

These are the words of the poet W.B. Yeats which inspired philosopher Richard Rorty to seek a reconciliation of his two passions: that for social justice (symbolized for him by Leon Trotsky), and that for the wild orchids growing in the woods of his New Jersey home.

In an autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Rorty describes his personal journey into philosophy as the hoped-for means of uniting reality and justice. He recalls his hunger for overarching truths and first principles, even for a set of axioms which could rigorously distinguish the rightness of democracy from the evil of Nazism. In the vision encompassed by these first principles, there must surely be a place for pure and rare beauty, such as Rorty saw in the orchids.

Rorty traces the evolution of his thinking through the story of this question, and his various attempts to answer it. Rejecting religion and absolutist philosophy as candidates for an overarching vision, he arrives at the position that it is simply not the job of philosophy to endorse or justify ideologies at all. In his words,

"[P]hilosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together. We can offer some advice about what will happen when you try to combine or to separate certain ideas, on the basis of our knowledge of the results of past experiments...But we are not the people to come to if you want confirmation that the things you love with all your heart are central to the structure of the universe..."

As for holding reality and justice in a single vision, Rorty eventually decides that it is a mistake - even a folly - to try.

In reading the essay, it is hard not to feel at first a sense of disappointment in this answer to a query so compellingly phrased and so familiar, in one form or another, to everyone. What hope does Rorty leave us? Must any enjoyment of orchids be relegated to a private, guilty pleasure? Must the furtherance of justice be a Puritanically bleak pursuit?

Maybe searching for overarching absolutes which induce a one-to-one correspondence between abstract ideologies and political philosophies really is a mistake. But maybe it is also unnecessary, because there is no shortage of beautiful ideas with the power to change the world. As Rorty acknowledges,

"Had there been no Kant, the nineteenth century would have had a harder time reconciling Christian ethics with Darwin's story about the descent of man. Had there been no Darwin, it would have been harder for Whitman and Dewey to detach the Americans from their belief that they were God's chosen people...Ideas do, indeed, have consequences."

Moments of epiphany are often more like the discovery of an orchid on a walk through the forest, rather than like a helicopter ride affording a broad vision of that same woodland. In the paths and byways of the forest of thought, we can still trace the trails linking luminous ideas to world-changing plans. From "The Art of Travel," here is Alain de Botton's map of the terrain, charting

"...chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask, 'Why is there good and evil?' 'How does nature work?' 'Why am I me?'...The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of peat in the Thirty Years' War."

This blog is here to follow some of the paths in this network, to celebrate concepts both beautiful and revolutionary. Not only do ideas have consequences, but practical movements have ideas: there are stories behind the science of greenhouse gases, and numinous ideas tied to development economics. This blog is here to tell these stories, to elaborate the ideas, and to admire the many orchids already growing in Trotsky's own backyard.

Trostomaten

'Trostomaten' is the Dutch word for a special cultivar of clustered tomatoes available in The Netherlands. Trostomaten are bred for flavor rather than size. They are intensely fire-engine red, and have a smell and taste which is the epitome of tomato-ness. At this blog, we love poems in something of the same way we love trostomaten: because they are both delicious and nourishing.

As a disclaimer, this blog has no party political affiliations, and in particular is not Trotskyite. The name is for Rorty's essay, and for my dear friend Rebecca, who introduced me to it.

Wild Orchids for Trotsky

To Midway and Back: An Email Interview with Barbara DiBernard

Trash Talk: Lager Radios and Pepsi Guitars

Visit photo gallery at About.com

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Asparagus on Mars

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Reimagining the American Dream

Good Watermelons Make Good Neighbors

Mangroves and the Hungry Tide

Introducing Webcasts

Book Review: Symbiotic Planet

Remembering Richard Rorty: An Email Interview with Emrys Westacott

Even in Arcadia: Energy, Entropy, and Efficiency or How Physics Tells Us to Go Green

References

Update: The Greenest Building on the Planet

Main Post: Green Mansions

Earth Day

Green Mansions

Update: Diary from the Middle of Nowhere

Main Post: The Isle of the Dead

The Isle of the Dead: Another Tale of Transformation

References

Tales of Transformation: Soil

References

Earthen Vessels in the City of Joy

References

Modern Mathematics Tells Us to Go Green

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Trotsky and the Wild Orchids

Trostomaten