A Thin Strip of Land, but a Matchstick for Mayhem

State Route 299, where the Carr Fire began outside Redding, is owned and managed by the California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans. For two decades, it has been working to straighten and widen the mountain highway where it slips past 1,000-foot ridges and curves by the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area.

In 2016, Caltrans spent a week on Route 299 pruning trees and clearing vegetation along the narrow state right of way. And as they typically do with highways that cross national forest and parkland, Caltrans vegetation managers let the Whiskeytown leadership know they would like to do the same thing on federal land outside the right of way. The idea was to prevent fires by removing trees that could fall onto the highway, stabilizing hillsides and building new drainage capacity to slow erosion.

“The preferred practices are a clear fire strip from the edge of the pavement to 4 feet,” said Lance Brown, a senior Caltrans engineer in Redding who oversees emergency operations, “and an aggressive brush and tree pruning, cutting and clearing from 4 feet to 30 feet.”

But the transportation agency’s proposal to clear fire fuel from a strip of federal land along the highway ran into some of the numerous environmental hurdles that complicate fire prevention in California and other states.

Whiskeytown’s mission is to protect natural resources and “scenic values,” including the natural corridor along Route 299. Clearing the roadside would have been classified as a “major federal action” subject to a lengthy review under the National Environmental Policy Act. Whiskeytown would have been obligated to conduct a thorough environmental assessment of risks, benefits and alternatives.

Public hearings also are mandated by law, and such a proposal almost certainly would have prompted opposition from residents devoted to protecting trees and natural beauty. And so the basic fire prevention strategy of clearing brush and trees along a state highway never got traction with Whiskeytown’s supervisors.

Brown said the risks of leaving the trees and brush were clear. But he said Caltrans had no way to force the park to do anything.

Whiskeytown officials are “very restrictive,” Brown said. “They don’t want us to cut anything. They like that brush. They like that beauty. Our right of way is basically in their right of way.”

USDA Forest Service officials and land owners discuss sharing stewardship of forests and future forest treatment strategies to recover lands. “Fire” by Pacific Southwest Region 5 is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Tom Garcia, the recreation area’s fire manager, disputed the view that Whiskeytown opposed any kind of brush and tree clearing. “We most likely would not agree with a clear-cut type of fuel treatment,” he said, “but most certainly would have very likely supported a thin-from-below type of treatment activity that reduced the shrub and brush undergrowth and thinned some of trees as opposed to mowing everything down to the ground level.”

The threat posed by issues such as brush along the highway had drawn the worry of a local conservation group, as well.

The Western Shasta Resource Conservation District, devoted since the 1950s to safeguarding the region’s land and water, prepared a report in 2016 that called for more than 150 urgent fire prevention projects around Redding. They included clearing roadsides of trees and flammable grass and brush, constructing wide clearings in the forest, and scrubbing brush from public and private lands.

Just two of the projects were funded, neither of them in the Carr Fire’s path.

Rich in Fire Fuel; Starved for Money

The fire fed greedily on the dry roadside fuel left along Route 299 that day in late July. In minutes, it jumped from the state right of way into the federal park’s thick stands of brush and small trees, and then up the steep ridge of chaparral, pine and oak.

It was the sort of scenario Garcia had been worrying about for years. A 28-year firefighting veteran, Garcia was known in California for being an aggressive member of the school of fire prevention. He advocated brush and tree clearing and lighting deliberate fires to keep small burns from turning into uncontrollable wildfires.

What he lacked was money. Garcia’s budget for clearing, set by senior federal officials, provided just $500,000 a year for clearing brush and small trees, enough for about 600 acres annually. It was far, far less than needed. Garcia estimated that he should be clearing 5,000 acres a year. Given the budget constraints, he decided to focus on what he viewed as the highest risk area: the park’s eastern boundary closest to Redding’s expanding subdivisions and outlying communities. Garcia took a chance; he left Whiskeytown’s northern region, the forest farthest from Redding, largely untouched.

The risk was significant. A decade earlier, a fire had burned 9,000 acres in much the same area. By July 2018, the land had recovered and supported a new fire feast: Manzanita, oak, small conifers and decaying timber, a dry mass of fuel ready to burn.

Garcia was deeply frustrated. Clearing fuels works, he said. The 600 acres of Whiskeytown that Garcia had treated on a rotating schedule easily survived the Carr Fire. Clearly visible lines ran up the ridges, like a photograph divided into black-and-white and full-color panels. On one side stood tree skeletons charred by the blaze. On the other, healthy groves of green trees.

But despite such proven effectiveness, fuels reduction has never attained mainstream acceptance or funding in Sacramento, the state capital, or in Washington, D.C. Half of Garcia’s annual $1 million fire management budget pays for a crew of firefighters and a garage full of equipment to respond to and put out fires. The other half is devoted to clearing brush and small trees.

Garcia said it would cost about $3.5 million to treat 5,000 to 6,000 acres annually. A seven-year rotation would treat the entire park, he said. The risk of fires bounding out of Whiskeytown would be substantially reduced, Garcia said, because they would be much easier to control.

In Garcia’s mind, the price paid for starving his budget was enormous: The Carr Fire incurred $120 million in federal disaster relief, $788 million in property insurance claims, $130 million in cleanup costs, $50 million in timber industry damage, $31 million in highway repair and erosion control costs, $2 million annually in lost property tax revenue and millions more in lost business revenue.

“For $3.5 million a year, you could buy a lot more opportunity to prevent a lot of heartache and a lot of destruction,” Garcia said. “You’d make inroads, that’s for sure. Prevention is absolutely where our program needs to go. It’s where California needs to go.”

Stoked by the land Garcia had been unable to clear, the Carr Fire raged, despite the grueling work of almost 1,400 firefighters, supported by 100 fire engines, 10 helicopters, 22 bulldozers and six air tankers. The firefighters were trying to set a perimeter around the angry fire, which was heading north. In two days it burned over 6,000 acres and incinerated homes in French Gulch, a Gold Rush mining town set between two steep ridges.

Late on July 25, the fire changed course. The hot Central Valley began sucking cold air from the Pacific Coast. By evening, strong gusts were pushing the fire east toward Redding at astonishing speed. By midnight, the Carr Fire, now 60 hours old, had charged across 10 miles and 20,000 acres of largely unsettled ground.

The fire raced across southwest Shasta County. By early evening on July 26, it burned through 20,000 more acres of brush and trees and reached the Sacramento River, which flows through Redding. From a rise at the edge of his Land Park subdivision, Charley Fitch saw flames 30 feet tall. A diabolical rain of red embers was pelting the brush below him, sparking new fires. He jumped into his vehicle, drove back to the house and alerted his wife, Susan, it was time to leave.

“Do You Like the Brush or Do You Want Your Home to Burn?”

On the outskirts of Redding, the Carr Fire encountered even more prodigious quantities of fuel: the homes and plastic furniture, fences, shrub and trees of exurban Shasta County.

Two hours past midnight on July 26, Jeff Coon was startled awake by his dogs. Through the curtain he saw the flashing blue lights of a passing county sheriff cruiser. He heard evacuation orders sternly issued over bullhorns. Coon, a retired investment adviser, smelled smoke. The sky east of his home on Walker Terrace, in the brush and woodlands 5 miles west of Redding, was red with wildfire.

Almost every other wildfire Coon experienced in Redding started far from the city and headed away from town. The Carr Fire was behaving in surprising ways. It was bearing down on Walker Terrace, which is where the ring of thickly settled development in the brush and woods outside Redding begins. Coon’s Spanish tile ranch home at the end of the street would be the first to encounter the flames.

“I jumped into my truck and caught up with the sheriff down the road,” Coon recalled. He said: ‘Evacuate immediately! Like now!’ My wife and I didn’t pack much. She grabbed the dogs and some food. I grabbed some shirts.”

In the terrible and deadly attack over the next 20 hours, the Carr Fire killed six people — four residents and two firefighters — and turned nearly 1,100 houses into smoking rubble, including all but two of the more than 100 homes in Keswick, a 19th-century mining-era town outside Redding. Two more first responders died after the fire burned through Redding.

The horrific consequences were entirely anticipated by city and county authorities. Both local governments prepared comprehensive emergency planning reports that identified wildfire as the highest public safety threat in their jurisdictions. Redding sits at the eastern edge of thousands of acres of brushy woodlands, known as the wildland urban interface, now thick with homes built over the past two decades and classified by the state and county as a “very high fire hazard severity zone.” Nearly 40 percent of the city is a very high hazard severity zone.

To reduce the threat, the county plan calls for a “commitment of resources” to initiate “an aggressive hazardous fuels management program,” and “property standards that provide defensible space.” In effect, keeping residents safe demands that residents and authorities starve fires.

The Redding emergency plan noted that from 1999 to 2015, nine big fires had burned in the forests surrounding Redding and 150 small vegetation fires ignited annually in the city. The city plan called for measures nearly identical to the county’s to reduce fuel loads. And it predicted what would happen if those measures weren’t taken. “The City of Redding recently ran a fire scenario on the west side, which was derived from an actual fire occurrence in the area,” wrote the report’s authors. “As a result of the fire-scenario information, it was discovered that 17 percent of all structures in the city could be affected by this fire.”

The planning reports were mostly greeted by a big civic yawn. City and county building departments are enforcing state regulations that require contractors to “harden” homes in new subdivisions with fireproof roofs, fire-resistant siding, sprinkler systems and fire-resistant windows and eaves. But the other safety recommendations achieved scant attention. The reason is not bureaucratic mismanagement. It’s civic indifference to fire risk. In interview after interview, Redding residents expressed an astonishing tolerance to the threat of wildfires.

Despite numerous fires that regularly ignite outside the city, including one that touched Redding’s boundary in 1999, residents never expected a catastrophe like the Carr Fire. In public opinion polls and election results, county and city residents expressed a clear consensus that other issues — crime, rising housing prices, homelessness and vagrancy — were much higher priorities.

Given such attitudes, fire authorities in and outside the city treated the fire prevention rules for private homeowners as voluntary. State regulations require homeowners in the fire hazard zones to establish “defensible spaces.” The rules call for homeowners to reduce fuels within 100 feet of their houses or face fines of up to $500. Cal Fire managers say they conduct 5,000 defensible space inspections annually in Shasta County and neighboring Trinity County. Craig Wittner, Redding’s fire marshal, said he and his team also conduct regular inspections.

State records show not a single citation for violators was issued in Shasta County in 2017 or this year.

Wittner explained how public indifference works in his city. Each year his budget for brush clearing amounts to about $15,000. Yet even with his small program, residents complain when crews cut small trees and brush. “They like living close to nature,” he said. “They like the privacy. I put it to them this way: Do you like the brush or do you want your home to burn down?”

Redding owns and manages more than 2,000 acres of public open space, about a quarter of the heavily vegetated land within city boundaries. The city’s program to clear brush from public lands averages 50 acres annually. Brush and clearing on private land is virtually nonexistent. Whether or not that changes could hinge on a lawsuit filed in mid-September and a new property tax program being prepared by city officials.

Jaxon Baker, the developer of Land Park and Stanford Hills, two major residential complexes, filed the suit. In it he argued that the city anticipated the deadly consequences of a big fire in west Redding, but did not adequately follow its own directives to clear brush from city-owned open spaces. Redding’s Open Space Master Plan, completed in August, sets out goals for future land and recreational investments. It does not mention fire as a potential threat. Baker’s suit called for rescinding that plan and writing a new one that identifies fire as a higher priority in municipal open space management. “It makes sense,” Baker said. “We have a lot of city-owned land that burns. We just learned that.”

On Nov. 6, the Redding City Council acknowledged that Baker was right and rescinded the Open Space Master Plan, thereby resolving the lawsuit. Preparations for writing a new one have not yet been addressed by the council. Barry Tippin, Redding’s city manager, said that city officials are preparing a proposal to establish a citywide defensible space district and a new property tax to sharply increase public spending for fuels reduction on public and private land. “This is a city that is leery of new taxes,” Tippin said. “But after what happened here in the summer, people may be ready for this kind of program.”

Coon, who had evacuated his neighborhood as fire engulfed it, returned to find his home standing. He wasn’t surprised. Prevention, he said, works, and he invested in it, even without any local requirements that he do so.

Though his home was built in 1973 and remodeled in 1993, it met almost all of the requirements of Shasta County’s latest fire safe building codes. The mansard roof was fire resistant, as were the brick walls. Coon paid attention, too, to the eaves, which he kept protected from blowing leaves. And he didn’t have a wooden fence.

Prompted by his son, a firefighter with Cal Fire, and his own understanding of fire risk, Coon had also established a big perimeter of light vegetation around his house, a safe zone of defensible space. He worked with the Bureau of Land Management to gain a permit to clear a 100-foot zone of thick brush and small trees from the federal land that surrounded his house. He trimmed his shrubs, kept the yard clear of leaves and branches, cleaned out the gutters and discarded plastic items that could serve as fuel. On days designated for burning, he incinerated debris piles.

The project took two summers to complete. When he was finished, his home stood amid a big open space of closely cut grass, rock and small shrubs. In effect, Coon had set his home in a savanna, a fire-safe setting that looked much different from the shaded, grassy, shrub and leafy yards of neighbors who clearly liked mimicking the federal woodlands that surrounded them.

When Coon returned to Walker Terrace days after the fire passed through Redding, his yard was covered in ash and charred tree limbs. But his house remained. So did the garage where he kept his prized 1968 Camaro.

“How Do You Want Your Smoke?”

A warming planet, conflicting government aims, human indifference or indolence — all are serious impediments to controlling the threat of wildfires in California. But they are not the only ones.

Add worries about air pollution and carbon emissions.

The California air quality law, enforced by county districts, requires fire managers interested in conducting controlled burns as a way of managing fire risk to submit their plans for review in order to gain the required permits. County air quality boards also set out specific temperature, moisture, wind, land, barometric, personnel and emergency response conditions for lighting prescribed fires.

The limits are so specific that Tom Garcia in the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area said only about six to 10 days a year are suitable for managed burns in Shasta County.

John Waldrop, the manager of the Shasta County Air Quality District, said he’s sympathetic to Garcia’s frustration but determined to meet his obligations to protect the public’s health. Waldrop said that federal and state agencies and private timber operators lit prescribed burns on an average of 3,600 acres annually in Shasta County over the last decade. Most burns are less than 100 acres, which fits his agency’s goal of keeping the air clean and fine particulate levels below 35 micrograms per cubic meter, the limit that safeguards public health.

Waldrop said it would take 50,000 acres of prescribed fire annually to clear sufficient amounts of brush from the county’s timberlands to reduce the threat of big wildfires. That means approving burns that span thousands of acres and pour thousands of tons of smoke into the air.

“From an air quality standpoint, that is a harder pill for us to swallow,” Waldrop said.

Balancing the threat of wildfires against the risk of more smoke is a choice that Shasta residents may be more prepared to make. During and after the Carr Fire, Redding residents breathed air for almost a month with particulate concentrations over 150 micrograms per cubic meter. That is comparable to the air in Beijing.

“We’re at a point where society has to decide,” Waldrop said, “how do you want your smoke? Do you want it at 150 micrograms per cubic meter from big fires all summer long, or a little bit every now and again from prescribed burning?”

Another air pollution challenge Californians face is the troubling connection between wildfires and carbon emissions. Two years ago, California passed legislation to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 258.6 million metric tons annually by 2030. That is a 40 percent reduction from levels today of about 429 million metric tons a year.

Reaching that goal, a stretch already, will be far more difficult because of runaway wildfires. Last year, wildfires poured 37 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into California’s atmosphere, according to a state report made public this year. Even higher totals are anticipated for 2018.

Efforts to quell the fires with more prescribed burns will add, at least for a number of years, more carbon dioxide. Prescribed fires produce an average of 6 tons of carbon per acre, according to scientific studies. Burning half a million acres annually would produce 3 million more metric tons of greenhouse gases.

A Matter of Priorities and Focus

For now, California can seem locked in a vicious and unwinnable cycle: Surprised anew every year by the number and severity of its wildfires, the state winds up pouring escalating amounts of money into fighting them. It’s all for a good, if exhausting, cause: saving lives and property.

But such effort and expenditure drains the state’s ability to do what almost everyone agrees is required for its long-term survival: investing way more money in prevention policies and tactics.

“It’s the law of diminishing returns,” Garcia said. “The more money we put into suppression is not buying a lot more safety. We are putting our money in the wrong place. There has to be a better investment strategy.”

Just as drying Southwest conditions forced Las Vegas homeowners to switch from green lawns to desert landscaping to conserve water, fire specialists insist that Californians must quickly embrace a different landscaping aesthetic to respond to the state’s fire emergency. Defensible spaces need to become the norm for the millions of residents who live in the 40 percent of California classified as a high fire-threat zone.

Residents need to reacquaint themselves with how wicked a wildfire can be. Counties need to much more vigorously enforce defensive space regulations. Sierra foothill towns need to establish belts of heavily thinned woodland and forest 1,000 feet wide or more, where big fires can be knocked down and extinguished. Property values that now are predicated on proximity to sylvan settings need to be reset by how safe they are from wildfire as they are in San Diego and a select group of other cities.

“We solved this problem in the urban environment,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, a national wildfire research and policy group in Oregon. “Towns were all once made of wood. The Great Chicago Fire. The San Francisco fire. We figured out they can’t make cities out of flammable materials. They hardened them with brick and mortar and building codes and ordinances for maintaining properties.

“This is a really solvable problem with the technology we have today. Making homes and communities that don’t burn up is very solvable. It’s a matter of priorities and focus.”

In a select group of towns in and outside California, residents have gotten that message. Boulder, Colorado, invested in an expansive ring of open space that surrounds the city. It doubles as a popular recreation area and as a fuel break for runaway fires that head to the city.

San Diego is another example. After big and deadly fires burned in San Diego in 2003 and 2007, residents, local authorities and San Diego Electric and Gas sharply raised their fire prevention efforts. Thirty-eight volunteer community fire prevention councils were formed and now educate residents, provide yard-clearing services and hold regular drives to clear brush and trees. SDE&G has spent $1 billion over the last decade to bury 10,000 miles of transmission lines, replace wooden poles with steel poles, clear brush along its transmission corridors and establish a systemwide digital network of 177 weather stations and 15 cameras.

The system pinpoints weather and moisture conditions that lead to fire outbreaks. Firefighting agencies have been considerably quicker to respond to ignitions than a decade ago. SDE&G also operates an Erickson air tanker helicopter to assist fire agencies in quickly extinguishing blazes.

The area’s experience with wildfire improved significantly.

“We haven’t gone through anything like what we had here in 2003 and 2007,” said Sheryl Landrum, the vice president of the Fire Safe Council of San Diego County, a nonprofit fire prevention and public education group. “We’ve had to work hard here to educate people and to convince people to be proactive and clear defensible spaces. People are aware of what they need to do. Our firefighting capabilities are much more coordinated and much stronger.”

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Keith Schneider, a former national correspondent and a contributor to the New York Times, is the senior editor and producer at Circle of Blue, which covers the global freshwater crisis from its newsroom in Traverse City, Michigan. This article was originally published by ProPublica.

California Knew the Carr Wildfire Could Happen. It Failed to Prevent it. by Keith Schneider is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 International License.

Capturing Carbon to Fight Climate Change is Dividing Environmentalists

By Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Holly Jean Buck

#science #environment #climatechange #global #nature #technology

Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality. Not all of the activists agree on what those policies ought to be.

Some 626 environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity and 350, recently laid out their vision in a letter they sent to U.S. lawmakers. They warned that they “vigorously oppose” several strategies, including the use of carbon capture and storage – a process that can trap excess carbon pollution that’s already warming the Earth, and lock it away.

In our view, as a political philosopher who studies global justice and an environmental social scientist, this blanket opposition is an unfortunate mistake. Based on the need to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and the risks in relying on land sinks like forests and soils alone to take up the excess carbon, we believe that carbon capture and storage could be a powerful tool for making the climate safer and even rectifying historical climate injustices.

Natural solutions

Every pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the most recent U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected the use of carbon removal approaches.

Planting more trees, composting and farming in ways that store carbon in soils and protecting wetlands can also reduce atmospheric carbon. We believe the natural solutions many environmentalists might prefer are crucial. But soaking up excess carbon through afforestation on a massive scale could encroach on farmland.

To be sure, not all environmentalists are writing off carbon capture and storage.

The Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council, along with many other big green organizations, did not sign the letter, which objected not just to carbon capture and storage but also to nuclear power, emissions trading and converting trash into energy through incineration.

Rather than leave carbon removal technologies out of the Green New Deal, we suggest that more environmentalists consider their potential for removing carbon that has already been emitted. We believe these approaches could potentially create jobs, foster economic development and reduce inequality on a global scale – as long as they are meaningfully accountable to people in the world’s poorest nations.

____________________

Olúfẹmi Táíwò completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and teaches philosophy at Georgetown University. Holly Jean Buck is a NatureNet Science Fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and author of After Geoengineering, a look at best and worst-case futures under climate engineering.

Capturing Carbon to Fight Climate Change Is Dividing Environmentalists by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Holly Jean Buck is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Cold, Hard Harvest: Making the Case for Frozen Produce

by Nicco Pandolfi

#argument, #proposal, #valuesbased, #descriptive, #systemanalysis, #advice, #pathos, #ethos, #logos, #kairos, #food

I recently acquired a hand-me-down chest freezer from a colleague, and have since been daydreaming about all the ways it is going to enhance my food life. From preserving berries and greens at peak freshness to caching away soups and stocks, the extra freezer space will help me spend my food dollars more strategically. With a little forethought, it provides an alternative to relying on distantly sourced, subpar produce in the bleak winter months. Frozen foods have long been marginalized by foodies as pale, second-rate substitutes for their fresh equivalents, but those sentiments are starting to shift. Here are a few pitches for ushering in a new age of appreciation for these undersung foot soldiers of the local food movement.

The Climate Change Pitch

The lab-coated grand jury has spoken: Homo sapiens is a measurable contributor to climate change (United Nations IPCC, 2018). To most this is not news, but it does prompt us to ask how we can take action to mitigate rather than augment our role in driving carbon emissions. Since food production, consumption and disposal are among the primary ways we interact with the planet, our diet seems like a logical place to begin. Eating food in the 21st century is a wildly intricate process that involves far more steps than we can even comfortably wrap our minds around. As such, any quest to shrink our carbon stomach-print must begin by simplifying our relationship with food.

Like any process, food sourcing can be simplified either by eliminating steps or by reducing them to a more observable scale. By establishing a vibrant regional food economy, we can accomplish both of these aims. Unfortunately the farther from the equator a community is, the fewer days per year it experiences that are suitable for food production without implementing massively energy-intensive workarounds like heated greenhouses. Simply put, it costs energy to work against the seasons. Embracing frozen produce as a piece of the locavore pie allows us to grow while the sun shines and freeze the resulting bounty to get us through the less productive winter months.

The norm, of course, is to import fresh produce from wherever it is most cheaply grown, which involves considerable carbon emissions. Frozen storage has carbon costs of its own but industrial freezers are gaining in efficiency, and unlike freight transit vehicles they can be easily converted to run on renewable energy. Moreover, a recent study in the U.K. discovered that the carbon footprint of a typical family meal was 5% smaller when made with frozen ingredients as opposed to fresh ones. Consider that for plant-based foods on the national market, transportation accounts for over 16% of total emissions and suddenly you are talking about substantial carbon savings when you choose local frozen produce as an alternative.

The Food Waste Pitch

A 2011 study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization examining food waste in several industrialized countries found that 40% of all food is wasted along its journey from producer to consumer. For fruits and vegetables that figure is closer to 52%. What’s more, close to half of that waste occurs before it even reaches the distributor, let alone the end-consumer. These are wild numbers when you consider what is lost: not widgets or knick knacks, but the stuff that sustains human life and health.

The first logical front to attack this waste problem on is pre-season crop planning. When there are established outlets for small-batch (i.e. 1,000 lb rather than 10,000 lb) freezing, producers can look at historical data and estimate a certain percentage of projected yield that – either because of quality or short shelf life – will not sell on the fresh market. Growers can then make arrangements with regional processors for this portion of the crop to be frozen, locking in a fair price ahead of time without the urgent pressure to move perishable inventory mid-season. In this way, farmers can turn potential waste into nutritious and saleable food.

Of course, January’s fireside predictions are not always borne out in the field come July. The occasional bumper crop or crop failure is a given, so it is important to develop ways to both preserve unusually large harvests and ensure a steady supply of frozen products when yields are lower than expected. A collaborative sourcing model that spreads these risks out over several growers can help ensure that no one is hung out to dry, while also capturing literal tons of good food before it becomes waste.

The “Slow Money” Pitch

Our economic system is not set up to make capital readily available to small farms and food businesses, which are often perceived as risky ventures. If we wish to safeguard sources of healthy food and ensure conscientious land stewardship, we need to create a framework for directing resources to the next generation of farmers and food innovators. There is a well-documented multiplier effect that kicks in when dollars are spent at small independent businesses rather than national or transnational chains, with the net result that two to three times more of this “slow money” stays in local circulation.

Enfranchising frozen foods as bona fide culinary players in the regional foodshed expands opportunities for small and mid-size growers, offering them outlets for far more food than they can sell fresh. Tapping into the frozen market can create new revenue streams, allowing producers to re-invest in farm infrastructure that will help them capture more of the existing harvest and even grow their production to meet new demand. Moreover, as chefs give frozen foods a second chance, they rely less on the Just-In-Time inventory model touted by broadline distributors and can begin to redesign their kitchen spaces to accommodate more frozen storage.

If you are willing to work with frozen produce, all it takes is a little planning and collaboration with growers and food hubs to secure year-round local sources of many kitchen staples. As these collaborations mature, they form an increasingly resilient food web that shifts the culture of cooking in both professional and home kitchens. In this model, any fruit or vegetable that can be grown in a given region represents an opportunity to recapture food dollars and watch the multiplier effect ripple through the local economy.

The Regional Food Security Pitch

Most dollars we spend immediately subdivide into pennies that scatter all over the world. Sheer geography blinds us to the real human, environmental and social consequences of our economic choices. Nowhere is this truer than in the food world. Only by sourcing from local producers can we witness the impacts of our food choices and vote with our dollars for best practices that create a foundation for lasting regional food security. By food security I mean not simply access to calories, but community-wide access to healthy, real food from trusted producers who belong to the same community as the eaters they are feeding.

There is an emerging scientific consensus that extreme weather events are on the rise, and such events can impact regional infrastructure for transporting food goods. Major flooding, winter storms and other natural disasters can create serious obstacles for both shipping out and bringing in food. Despite the temporary nature of these phenomena and the damage they cause, a pinch in the food supply has immediate effects on a community. More importantly, access to good food should be a basic right and its absence is linked to other types of disenfranchisement, as the plight of many food deserts shows. Freezing and storing the local harvest is one way to establish reserves of good food in the interest of community resilience and improving food access for all.

In the long run, food security is best preserved by fostering a culture that values food from soil to belly. This hinges on treating cuisine as a cultural asset to be protected and built upon as we pass it from generation to generation. A key piece of this cultural inheritance is the understanding that each food has its time, and is best enjoyed during that brief glorious window. The next option we should look to is preserving it as that window closes, while it is still fresh. Though some will call me a blasphemer for saying it, one can only eat so many pickles. We need to think of frozen produce not as a consolation prize, but a snapshot of summer that we can unearth to warm us on the coldest day of the year.

The Quality Pitch

To be sure, none of these pitches will sway anyone who thinks they are just window dressing designed to make them forget the reason they spurned frozen foods in the first place: a nagging sense that they are weak stand-ins for their fresh counterparts. Fortunately, there is growing evidence to the contrary, as frozen foods are gaining credence and approval in the realms of both flavor and nutrition.

Despite their long-standing stigma, frozen foods are shedding their bad reputation as eaters and chefs make increasingly complex decisions about where they get their food. In a 2014 survey of food industry professionals, 75% of respondents believed there are unnecessary negative connotations attached to frozen food, a staggering 60% increase from an earlier version of the survey conducted just three years prior. Such a precipitous shift in industry opinion indicates that this is more than just a fringe idea.

According to several recent studies frozen fruits and vegetables have equal or greater nutritional value than their fresh cousins. This is in large part because fresh produce has been shown to decline in nutrients the longer it sits between harvesting and eating, whereas frozen produce stops its nutritive shot clock the moment its temperature drops. Hence the popularity of the term “fresh frozen,” which conveys a useful message despite its ubiquitousness as fodder for claim-tastical food marketing campaigns.

Bringing it back home

If any of these pitches resonate with you, we are fortunate to have some great options for frozen local produce in northwest Michigan. One is Goodwill Industries’ Farm to Freezer project, a job training program that teaches kitchen skills by freezing small batches of local produce. They carry a wide range of fruits and vegetables, which are available at many area grocers. Oryana Natural Foods Co-Op recently partnered with Farm to Freezer and Cherry Capital Foods to pack and distribute a line of Fair Harvest berries, starting with organic strawberries grown at Ware Farm in Benzie County. Some area CSAs, such as Providence Farm in Central Lake, even offer frozen Michigan fruit as an optional add-on to members’ shares. As we weather the harsh realities of a Michigan winter, here’s to taking some time to honor the freezer and carve out a more respectable place for it in our foodshed.

Works Cited

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5? (United Nations, 2018), available from https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/.

____________________

Nicco Pandolfi works as a librarian at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, MI. His poetry and prose have appeared in Dunes Review, Pulp, and Edible Grand Traverse. He mostly writes about what he mostly thinks about: music and food.

Cold, Hard Harvest: Making the Case for Frozen Produce by Nicco Pandolfi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. This work was first published in Edible Grand Traverse magazine.

The Defense Department Is Worried about Climate Change – and Also a Huge Carbon Emitter

by Neta C. Crawford

Scientists and security analysts have warned for more than a decade that global warming is a potential national security concern.

They project that the consequences of global warming – rising seas, powerful storms, famine and diminished access to fresh water – may make regions of the world politically unstable and prompt mass migration and refugee crises.

Some worry that wars may follow.

Yet with few exceptions, the U.S. military’s significant contribution to climate change has received little attention. Although the Defense Department has significantly reduced its fossil fuel consumption since the early 2000s, it remains the world’s single largest consumer of oil – and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.

A broad carbon footprint

I have studied war and peace for four decades. But I only focused on the scale of U.S. military greenhouse gas emissions when I began co-teaching a course on climate change and focused on the Pentagon’s response to global warming. Yet, the Department of Defense is the U.S. government’s largest fossil fuel consumer, accounting for between 77% and 80% of all federal government energy consumption since 2001.

In a newly released study published by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I calculated U.S. military greenhouse gas emissions in tons of carbon dioxide equivalent from 1975 through 2017.

Today China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, followed by the United States. In 2017 the Pentagon’s greenhouse gas emissions totaled over 59 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. If it were a country, it would have been the world’s 55th largest greenhouse gas emitter, with emissions larger than Portugal, Sweden or Denmark.

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND

The largest sources of military greenhouse gas emissions are buildings and fuel. The Defense Department maintains over 560,000 buildings at approximately 500 domestic and overseas military installations, which account for about 40% of its greenhouse gas emissions.

The rest comes from operations. In fiscal year 2016, for instance, the Defense Department consumed about 86 million barrels of fuel for operational purposes.

Why do the armed forces use so much fuel?

Military weapons and equipment use so much fuel that the relevant measure for defense planners is frequently gallons per mile.

Aircraft are particularly thirsty. For example, the B-2 stealth bomber, which holds more than 25,600 gallons of jet fuel, burns 4.28 gallons per mile and emits more than 250 metric tons of greenhouse gas over a 6,000 nautical mile range. The KC-135R aerial refueling tanker consumes about 4.9 gallons per mile.

A single mission consumes enormous quantities of fuel. In January 2017, two B-2B bombers and 15 aerial refueling tankers traveled more than 12,000 miles from Whiteman Air Force Base to bomb ISIS targets in Libya, killing about 80 suspected ISIS militants. Not counting the tankers’ emissions, the B-2s emitted about 1,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases.

Quantifying military emissions

Calculating the Defense Department’s greenhouse gas emissions isn’t easy. The Defense Logistics Agency tracks fuel purchases, but the Pentagon does not consistently report DOD fossil fuel consumption to Congress in its annual budget requests.

The Department of Energy publishes data on DOD energy production and fuel consumption, including for vehicles and equipment. Using fuel consumption data, I estimate that from 2001 through 2017, the DOD, including all service branches, emitted 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases. That is the rough equivalent of driving of 255 million passenger vehicles over a year.

Of that total, I estimated that war-related emissions between 2001 and 2017, including “overseas contingency operations” in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria, generated over 400 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent — roughly equivalent to the greenhouse emissions of almost 85 million cars in one year.

Real and present dangers?

The Pentagon’s core mission is to prepare for potential attacks by human adversaries. Analysts argue about the likelihood of war and the level of military preparation necessary to prevent it, but in my view, none of the United States’ adversaries – Russia, Iran, China and North Korea – are certain to attack the United States.

Nor is a large standing military the only way to reduce the threats these adversaries pose. Arms control and diplomacy can often de-escalate tensions and reduce threats. Economic sanctions can diminish the capacity of states and nonstate actors to threaten the security interests of the U.S. and its allies.

In contrast, climate change is not a potential risk. It has begun, with real consequences to the United States. Failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will make the nightmare scenarios strategists warn against – perhaps even “climate wars” – more likely.

A case for decarbonizing the military

Over the past last decade the Defense Department has reduced its fossil fuel consumption through actions that include using renewable energy, weatherizing buildings and reducing aircraft idling time on runways.

The DOD’s total annual emissions declined from a peak of 85 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2004 to 59 million metric tons in 2017. The goal, as then-General James Mattis put it, is to be “unleashed from the tether of fuel” by decreasing military dependence on oil and oil convoys that are vulnerable to attack in war zones.

Since 1979, the United States has placed a high priority on protecting access to the Persian Gulf. About one-fourth of military operational fuel use is for the U.S. Central Command, which covers the Persian Gulf region.

As national security scholars have argued, with dramatic growth in renewable energy and diminishing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, it is possible for Congress and the president to rethink our nation’s military missions and reduce the amount of energy the armed forces use to protect access to Middle East oil.

I agree with the military and national security experts who contend that climate change should be front and center in U.S. national security debates. Cutting Pentagon greenhouse gas emissions will help save lives in the United States, and could diminish the risk of climate conflict.

____________________

Neta C. Crawford is a professor of Political Science at Boston University and the author of Accountability for Killing: Moral Responsibility for Collateral Damage in America’s Post-9/11 Wars (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2002.)

The Defense Department Is Worried about Climate Change – and Also a Huge Carbon Emitter by Neta C. Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Dirt on Soil Loss from the Midwest Floods

by Jim Ippolito and Mahdi Al-Kaisi

#science #environment #climatechange #nature #rural

“Farmland being flooded by Missouri and Red Rivers in North Dakota” by Good Free Photos is in the Public Domain, CC0

As devastating images of the 2019 Midwest floods fade from view, an insidious and longer-term problem is emerging across its vast plains: The loss of topsoil that much of the nation’s food supply relies on.

Today, Midwest farmers are facing millions of bushels of damaged crops such as soybean and corn. This spring’s heavy rains have already caused record flooding, which could continue into May and June, and some government officials have said it could take farmers years to recover.

Long after the rains stop, floodwaters continue to impact soil’s physical, chemical and biological properties that all plants rely on for proper growth. Just as very wet soils would prevent a homeowner from tending his or her garden, large amounts of rainfall prevent farmers from entering a wet field with machinery. Flooding can also drain nutrients out of the soil that are necessary for plant growth as well as reduce oxygen needed for plant roots to breathe, and gather water and nutrients.

As scientists who have a combined 80 years of experience studying soil processes, we see clearly that many long-term problems farmers face from floodwaters are steeped in the soil. This leads us to conclude that farmers may need to take far more active measures to manage soil health in the future as weather changes occur more drastically due to climate change and other factors.

Here are some of the perils with flooded farmland that can affect the nation’s food supply.

 

Suffocating soil

When soil is saturated by excessive flooding, soil pores are completely filled with water and have little to no oxygen present. Much like humans, plants need oxygen to survive, with the gas taken into plants via leaves and roots. Also identical to humans, plants – such as farm crops – can’t breathe underwater.

Essentially, excess and prolonged flooding kills plant roots because they can’t breathe. Dead plant roots in turn lead to death of aboveground plant, or crop, growth.

Another impact of flooding is compacted soil. This often occurs when heavy machinery is run over wet or saturated farmland. When soils become compacted, future root growth and oxygen supply are limited. Thus, severe flooding can delay or even prevent planting for the entire growing season, causing significant financial loss to farmers.

Loss of soil nutrients

When flooding events occur, such as overwatering your garden or as with the 2019 Midwest flooding, excess water can flush nutrients out of the soil. This happens by water running offsite, leaching into and draining through the ground, or even through the conversion of nutrients from a form that plants can utilize to a gaseous form that is lost from the soil to the atmosphere.

Regardless of whether you are a backyard gardener or large-scale farmer, these conditions can lead to delays in crop planting, reduced crop yields, lower nutritive value in crops and increased costs in terms of extra fertilizers used. There is also the increased stress within the farming community – or for you, the backyard gardener who couldn’t plant over the weekend due to excess rainfall. This ultimately increases the risk of not producing ample food over time.

Small microbial changes have big effects

Flooding on grand scales causes soils to become water-saturated for longer than normal periods of time. This, in turn, affects soil microorganisms that are beneficial for nutrient cycling.

Flooded soils may encounter problems caused by the loss of a specific soil microorganism, arbuscular mycorrhizae fungi. These fungi colonize root systems in about 90% to 95% of all plants on Earth in a mutually beneficial relationship.

The fungi receive energy in the form of carbon from the plant. As the fungi extend thread-like tendrils into the soil to scavenge for nutrients, they create a zone where nutrients can be taken up more easily by the plant. This, in turn, benefits nutrient uptake and nutritive value of crops.

When microbial activity is interrupted, nutrients don’t ebb and flow within soils in the way that is needed for proper crop growth. Crops grown in previously flooded fields may be affected due to the absence of a microbial community that is essential for maintaining proper plant growth.

The current Midwest flooding has far-reaching effects on soil health that may last many years. Recovering from these types of extreme events will likely require active management of soil to counteract the negative long-term effects of flooding. This may include the adoption of conservation systems that include the use of cover crops, no-till or reduced-till systems, and the use of perennials grasses, to name few. These types of systems may allow for better soil drainage and thus lessen flooding severity in soils.

Farmers have the ability to perform these management practices, but only if they can afford to convert over to these new systems; not all farmers are that fortunate. Until improvements in management practices are resolved, future flooding will likely continue to leave large numbers of Midwest fields vulnerable to producing lower crop yields or no crop at all.

____________________

Jim Ippolito is Associate Professor of Environmental Soil Quality/Health at Colorado State University. Mahdi Al-Kaisi is Professor of Soil Management and Environment, Iowa State University. This essay originally appeared in The Conversation.

The dirt on soil loss from the Midwest floods by Jim Ippolito & Mahdi Al-Kaisiis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Does Recycling Actually Conserve or Preserve Things?

by Samantha MacBride

#scholarly, #argument, #systemanalysis, #logos, #ethos, #kairos, #cognitivebias, #currentevents, #research, #science

“”217” “ by grotos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (cropped)

There are a series of assumptions behind the familiar assertion that recycling saves resources and energy, and in so doing, protects the environment. These assumptions are in the motto, “recycling saves trees.” With recycling – one assumes – used materials stand in for raw materials. This way, recycled content cuts down on the need to extract (conservation), which in turn prevents some of the environmental damage from extraction that would be taking place without recycling (preservation).

Conservation and preservation are distinct, though linked, ideas. Historians of North American environmentalism distinguish the Conservation Movement, which focused on the responsible management of materials to sustain production and economic growth, from the Preservation Movement, which stressed the protection of wilderness.1 Both movements have been rightly critiqued for failing to consider questions of power and equity in people’s health, dignity, and livelihoods.2 Still, the distinction between conserving resources for use in production, and preserving complex ecosystems (which include people in human settlements), is useful for a question I now pose about recycling. Does recycling, in the way it is practiced today, actually conserve or preserve things that matter?

To answer “yes” requires that a set of assumptions hold true. When we say recycling saves trees, we start by assuming that the paper in the recycling bin goes to a plant to be sorted and baled. Plant managers find buyers for the bales, which are shipped off to a manufacturer. We assume that this manufacturer, individually or as part of a larger industry sector, is weighing the options between using virgin input (wood pulp) or secondary input (recycled paper). When it costs less to use recycled paper as an input, the manufacturer is going to use the secondary material to make things. So far, so good.

But to save trees, much less forests, more has to happen. When the decision is made to use recycled input, the virgin alternative ought to be conserved in a way that preserves ecosystems and people. Preservation isn’t achieved if the virgin stock is directed into a new product that hasn’t existed before; or if it is conserved technically for later use, and then harvested and utilized when economic growth makes for favorable conditions to ramp up production. It’s not enough to simply offer up recycled paper on a commodity market to be grabbed when price signals are favorable. It doesn’t do to merely measure increases in recycled content of various products on the market. Nor is it sufficient to theorize that recycling may have slowed a sectoral growth rate that would have proceeded, all things being equal, faster in an imaginary world in which there was no recycling at all. To save trees in a way that matters ecologically and socially means something more. It means that forests, including forest ecosystems and surrounding livelihoods in all of their complexity, are actually protected in today’s world.

Theoretically, there is no reason why recycling couldn’t deliver on such protection, were it integrated into a system of monitoring that followed through on promises. Such a system would need to identify limits on rates of extraction in accordance with their ecosystemic threat; include long term planning for stabilization of some extractive industries, and phase-out of others; and ensure maximum protection of future lands and ecosystems from development. Under such a system, extractive industries would need to demonstrate to what degree recycled inputs substituted for virgin sources in their sectors annually, and also that their sectors were not encroaching with new development in terrains that matter to people and other living things.

Empirically, there is no question that at certain times, for certain periods, recycling may have conserved virgin resources to some degree; and even that recycling may play a role in localized resource policies, such as boosting timber plantations that spare virgin forests as sources in papermaking. In fact, portions of the assumption of conservation, can be and regularly are dragged out for theoretical and/or empirical testing within the disciplines of resource economics, materials flow analysis, and life cycle analysis. There is much scholarship that asks whether recycling has resulted in, or could theoretically result in, less net extraction or harvest.3 Such inquiries are interesting in their own right, and to the extent that they tell us something about tradeoffs that manufacturers make between virgin and recycled inputs, they inform an understanding of what recycling could, under ideal circumstances, achieve in terms of actual conservation — which would be a precondition for, but not a guarantee of, actual preservation.

We are on shaky ground, however, if we take these assumptions for granted. I trace my concern on this matter to the work of William Stanley Jevons.4 In the 19th century, technological improvements in mining and combustion were greatly improving the efficiency of using coal as fuel. Noting these developments, Jevons argued that, rather than conserve coal, improvements in efficiency, and a subsequent drop in coal price, would paradoxically lead to an increased demand for coal.

The Jevons Paradox. Public Domain.

Now known as Jevons’ Paradox, this perspective observes that when you increase efficiency in production and consumption, you may well see an increase in overall extraction.5 Massive amounts of scholarship have followed the Jevons’ Paradox, most around energy efficiency.6 In the materials realm, recycling can be thought of as a form of efficiency (getting more out of the same input).7 There is a growing body of work tracing the effects of recycling on extraction of virgin materials, in particular in the area of metals.8 Scholars ask questions about conservation of metals in part because the data on their trade is more available than for other materials. It’s more organized. It’s more harmonized among different nations, given the nature of these economies. Both the economy of metals and as well as the material properties of metals make them relatively easy to be recycled over and over again and be reintroduced back into production, especially in comparison the heterogeneous range of synthetic polymers we call plastics. Yet we see growing rates of metals extraction taking place alongside growing recycling rates, worldwide. We can speculate about what those growth rates would have been had recycling not existed, but it would be hard to argue that global production systems are using less virgin raw material as a result of metals recycling, much less that metal recycling is preserving lands from mining.9

“French waste lines” by Charos Pix is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The caveats and careful measurements in the specialized literatures above suggest that recycling can conserve resources temporarily in some cases, almost always absent considerations of preservation. Such nuances fall away, however, as recycling becomes idealized and abstracted as an ethical, “earth-saving” end unto itself. Under-examined assumptions of conservation and preservation run deep through recycling discourse, and are also core to the notion that reuse will cut down on the flow of materials and energy from cradle to grave. Each time reuse and recycling are affirmed in the waste hierarchy, there is a hazy sense that somewhere, by someone, some sort of accounting is going on to ensure that overall, recycling is delivering protection of things that matter. I would wager that many in the media, in environmental education, and even in environmentally focused NGOs hold this position. This is how recycling would, actually and not just in theory, “save the planet.” But is there really any coordinating body who is conducting such accounting? No.10 And is recycling actually preserving ecosystems and livelihoods, or achieving real-world “dematerialization” (the technical term for less use of raw materials overall)? Not in any systematic way.11

Oil, Gas, and Plastics

So far I’ve used the examples of forest products and metals. I have done so because of the historical potency of the motto “recycling saves trees”, and the relatively developed scholarship around steel, aluminum, and other metals. In reality, much more is going on around forestry, or the mining and metals trade, than is taken into account when one simply looks at recycling. But at least we have some data to inform questions. If we examine the plastics industry and the role of plastics recycling, we find that similar assumptions abound, with particular complications, and little information. How can we evaluate the assumption that plastic recycling reduces the need to extract fossil fuels; or the separate but related claim that manufacturing with recycled inputs uses less energy, meaning lower fuel use economy-wide, meaning diminished carbon emissions?

It is well known that only a small percentage of global fossil fuel extraction is used directly in plastics production.12 So even recycling every shred of plastic would not, on its own, diminish the need to drill at current rates by much. Looking specifically at the U.S., the situation is no different. Let’s say we build up domestic plastic recycling capacity in the U.S., as many are calling for in the wake of China’s imports restrictions. What would the effect be of repatriating that tonnage, and feeding it back into domestic production, on domestic fossil fuel extraction – to make plastics, or to generate electricity?

It may surprise you to learn that the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) “is unable to determine the specific amounts or origin of the feedstocks that are actually used to manufacture plastics in the United States.”13

The reason hints at the constantly fluctuating conditions of virgin raw material sourcing that I’ve alluded to above, and data limitations that I’ll elaborate below. The EIA writes:

Because the petrochemical industry has a high degree of flexibility in the feedstock it consumes and because EIA does not collect detailed data on this aspect of industrial consumption, it is not possible for EIA to identify the actual amounts and origin of the materials used as inputs by industry to manufacture plastics. 14

Let’s pivot back to the day-to-day understanding of recycling, in which it is it is axiomatic to assert that plastic recycling saves oil and gas resources.15 On a ton-for-ton basis, in a hypothetical scenario in which recycled materials actually substitute for fossil fuels, and lead to a concomitant net decrease in extraction or fuel combustion, such claims hold. But without data on “actual amounts and origin of materials used as inputs,” it is not possible to evaluate the actual effect of plastics recycling on conserving such inputs. This would be the precondition to assessing what role, if any, plastics recycling has on actual preservation of things that matter in the U.S. (such as coastal communities, Indigenous peoples’ lands, and/or arctic wildlife refuges).

Frequent assumptions are being made among well-intentioned members of the media, environmental organizations, and concerned individuals that actual, current recycling efforts are part of real world protection. In more specialized discussions around Zero Waste and Circular Economy, there is a rolling process of coming to terms with hints that assumptions of conservation and preservation don’t hold. If, for example, we are dismayed to learn that plastics are “downcycled,” our dismay betrays a faith in the assumption of preservation in the background. If only plastic bottles could be produced in a closed-loop fashion, we reason, then we would be able to conserve at least some of the resources that would otherwise be extracted. Presumably, such conservation is needed for ecosystemic preservation, not just to boost the economic fortunes of the plastics industry.

Now let’s turn to the huge, multinational firms in the petrochemical industry that drill for the precursor materials for plastics at the beginning of the production chain. Let’s say more Americans recycled their plastics, and this resulted in an influx of more recycled plastic onto the market. Even with robust closed loops achieved, does anyone really think that the executives at one of these multinationals would get to the point of saying, “well, you know, it’s good that the need for input materials is being met by recycled plastic, and that means that this year we can scale back production a bit. We don’t need to open up a new offshore platform. It isn’t required to meet society’s needs after all!”

Ultimately, this would have to be the scenario in which more and more recycling of plastics actually preserved things that matter ecologically and socially. Yet very little of the empirical work needed to trace materials flows exists in the area of plastics recycling, in part because of a dearth of data.16 And in the area of plastics waste we have perhaps the most egregious misuse of claims that recycling is going to address problems related to pollution and climate change. The industry, and affiliated academic researchers, carry out life-cycle analyses that are impeccable in their methodological approach to quantifying different energy and material requirements associated with primary and secondary flows of plastics.17

None to my knowledge, however, answer the question of what more plastics recycling would do to diminish overall ecosystem withdrawals of fossil fuels. Does tar-sands extraction slow as a result? How about pipeline construction? Perhaps, with improved plastics recycling, we don’t need a Northeast U.S. expansion of storage capacity for hydrofractured natural gas. Not yet? Well, then, what are the plans for the scaleback?

Ideological Implications

These are both empirical and ideological questions. 18 They are ideological because a general optimism about recycling as earth-saving has become internalized in the thought processes of children and adults genuinely concerned about preservation. In everyday speak, assumptions of conservation and preservation swirl in a distant, misty background. In order to preserve optimism, can-doism, and a solutions oriented outlook it is easier not to look into these depths. In fact, critique of recycling’s earth-saving claims falls harshly on concerned ears, leaving bewilderment and a sense of betrayal. Sometimes, it is met with a binary response: either recycling is part of an overall process of saving resources and saving energy and by extension it’s saving the planet, or it’s a waste of time and it’s a sham and a lie.

I would urge all who are interested in this kind of thing to move away from binaries. The alternative is uncertain and less morally satisfying. It requires taking multiple perspectives, and wading through material complexity, power relations, institutional arrangements, and ideological maneuvering around recycling, asking again and again how, or even if, this or that initiative — often proudly and cheerfully announced by a consortium of producers — preserves things that matter. It also means looking at how recycling actually takes place in any particular place and time, not just under modelled conditions. Some of this work involves redirecting outrage. So, for example, if recycling plants are unable to sell recycled plastics because of market slumps, it is less morally shocking than a reflection of market conditions that they will landfill them instead? When people ask me about the crisis in North American plastics and paper recycling, which China’s trade policies has brought about, I’m tempted to respond, “what did you expect?” Recycling firms are tails wagged by massive dogs: neither evil, nor earth-saving, but actually a reflection of the organization of material exchange under the global market system, today.

In part, the potential for recycling to actually conserve and preserve is an empirical question, and the answers will vary from place to place and material to material. But it’s not just a matter of collecting data, or organizing the right technical systems. It also means recognizing that recycling as we know it may start with an ethical impulse, but materially translates into nothing more or less than a set of business practices. As with the 19th and early 20th scrap trades, recycling is part of smart industrial operations (nothing wrong with that). But let us dismantle the faith that recycling, as practiced currently, will save the earth if we do more of it. Affirming this ideal is a potent tool used by powerful networks of big producers, big extractors, and constellations of firms at the global level. Make no mistake, they are undertaking this strategy daily, with increasing sophistication. They understand the nuances of material sourcing, production volumes, input substitution, and property acquisition all too well. They rely on the fact that you don’t — and, in fact, can’t — because much of the data you would need for such an understanding is proprietary to them.

It is no easy feat to press producers to explain how recycling stands to scale back their operations, reduce their net output, or redress the ravages they have left behind. Such questions are typically outside the scope of a particular recycling project; easy to evade. As a group, these are smart folks. They know which NGOs to fund, which scholars to support, and where to make public appearances. They even understand the critiques that come out of discard studies, so they start to speak of “plasticity” instead of plastics; and they use the term“litter” to name the crisis of marine plastics.

But if you are in a position to do so, politely ask corporate spokespeople how the tonnage they take credit for recycling fed back into their operations last year, in a specific country, and how it in turn measurably reduced virgin extraction. Be specific. Ask them where and when it led to a reduced material throughput in their company or industry. Query them on the documented, not speculative, environmental protection afforded by, say, making cheap picture frames made out of spent polystyrene packaging. Reject the notion that cheap picture frames are a social good that would have needed to be manufactured with fracked natural gas, had polystyrene recycling not yielded up secondary inputs.

In the meantime, sit for a while to contemplate the fact that recycling, as it exists today, does not in fact save ecosystems in a way that matters on the whole ecologically or socially. How would recycling need to be practiced to achieve this desired end? In a different context of extraction, production, and growth – with different politics, knowledge structures, and ideologies. I realize this is an unsatisfying conclusion, but I believe in the importance of critique as a precondition to developing collaborative solutions. I have presented this information as part of a process of thinking through short-, medium- and long-term characteristics of this different context. This is an ongoing project to which I invite responses, as well as empirical contributions that would refine or refute what I have presented here.

Footnotes

1. Hays, S. (1999). Conservation and the gospel of efficiency: The progressive conservation movement, 1890–1920. No. 40. University of Pittsburgh Press.
2. See Guha,R. (YEAR). “Radical American environmentalism and wilderness preservation: a third world critique” Environmental Ethics 11, no. 1:71–83; Faber, D., and D. McCarthy. “Neo-liberalism, globalization and the struggle for ecological democracy: linking sustainability and environmental justice.” Just sustainabilities: Development in an unequal world (2003): 38-63.
3. See Geyer, R. et. al. (2016) “Common Misconceptions about Recycling” Journal of Industrial Ecology 20, no. 5: 1010–17
4. Jevons, W. S. (1866) The coal question: an inquiry concerning the progress of the nation, and the probable exhaustion of our coal-mines. London, UK: Macmillan and Company .
5. See Alcott, B. (2005). “Jevons’ paradox” Ecological Economics 54, no. 1: 9–21.
6. See Dimitropoulos, J. (2007). “Energy productivity improvements and the rebound effect: an overview of the state of knowledge.” Energy Policy 35, no. 12: 6354–63.
7. I am grateful to Bruce Lankford for helping me clarify this. See Lankford, B. (2013) Resource efficiency complexity and the commons: the paracommons and paradoxes of natural resource losses, wastes and wastages. London: Routledge.
8. See Modaresi, R. and D.B. Müller. (2012) “The role of automobiles for the future of aluminum recycling.” Environmental Science & Technology 46, no. 16: 8587–8594.
9. OECD (2019), Global material resources outlook to 2060: economic drivers and environmental consequences. Paris: OECD Publishing
10. The closest I have come to identifying such a body is the OECD, which has published interesting research on the this subject for a range of materials, but not plastics. OECD (2019), http://www.oecd.org/environment/global-material-resources-outlook-to-2060-9789264307452-en.htm
11. The OECD writes that, “Recycling is projected to become more competitive compared to the extraction of primary materials,” but that, “The strong increase in demand for materials implies that both primary and secondary materials use increase at roughly the same speed.” OECD (2019), p. 3
12. Most estimates cite to data from the British Petroleum Federation, http://www.bpf.co.uk/press/oil_consumption.aspx
13. Energy Information Administration (EIA).2018. “How much oil is used to make plastic?” accessed 1/29/2019 at www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=34&t=6.
14. EIA 2018.
15. The plastics industry is careful about how it phrases conservation claims in its public relations. It tends to talk about the importance of growing plastics recycling to jobs, litter cleanup, and generally as an end unto itself.
16. Geyer, R. et. al. (2017) “Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made.” Science Advances 3, no. 7
17. The Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council (2018). “Life Cycle Impacts of Plastic Packaging Compared To Substitutes in the United States and Canada” accessed 1/29/2019 at https://plastics.americanchemistry.com/Plastic-Packaging-Life-Cycle-Study/
18. See Lifset, R.(1995). “Foreward”, in Ince, P. What won’t get harvested, where, and when: the effects of increased paper recycling on timber harvest, Yale University School of Forestry and Environment.

____________________

Samantha McBride is an Assistant Professor at the Baruch College School of Public Affairs and works full time as a professional in urban waste governance in New York City. Her essay was originally published in Discard Studies.

Does recycling actually conserve or preserve things? by Samantha McBrideis licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Emotional Lives of Animals

by Marc Bekoff

#pathos #reportinginformation #nature #ethos #research #descriptive #cognitivebias #sharedvalues

Scientific research shows that many animals are very intelligent and have sensory and motor abilities that dwarf ours. Dogs are able to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes and warn humans of impending heart attacks and strokes. Elephants, whales, hippopotamuses, giraffes, and alligators use low-frequency sounds to communicate over long distances, often miles. And bats, dolphins, whales, frogs, and various rodents use high-frequency sounds to find food, communicate with others, and navigate.

Many animals also display wide-ranging emotions, including joy, happiness, empathy, compassion, grief, and even resentment and embarrassment. It’s not surprising that animals—especially, but not only, mammals—share many emotions with us because we also share brain structures, located in the limbic system, that are the seat of our emotions. In many ways, human emotions are the gifts of our animal ancestors.

Grief in magpies and red foxes: saying goodbye to a friend

Many animals display profound grief at the loss or absence of a relative or companion. Sea lion mothers wail when watching their babies being eaten by killer whales. People have reported dolphins struggling to save a dead calf by pushing its body to the surface of the water. Chimpanzees and elephants grieve the loss of family and friends, and gorillas hold wakes for the dead. Donna Fernandes, president of the Buffalo Zoo, witnessed a wake for a female gorilla, Babs, who had died of cancer at Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo. She says the gorilla’s longtime mate howled and banged his chest, picked up a piece of celery, Babs’ favorite food, put it in her hand, and tried to get her to wake up.

I once happened upon what seemed to be a magpie funeral service. A magpie had been hit by a car. Four of his flock mates stood around him silently and pecked gently at his body. One, then another, flew off and brought back pine needles and twigs and laid them by his body. They all stood vigil for a time, nodded their heads, and flew off.

I also watched a red fox bury her mate after a cougar had killed him. She gently laid dirt and twigs over his body, stopped, looked to make sure he was all covered, patted down the dirt and twigs with her forepaws, stood silently for a moment, then trotted off, tail down and ears laid back against her head. After publishing my stories I got emails from people all over the world who had seen similar behavior in various birds and mammals.

Empathy among elephants

A few years ago while I was watching elephants in the Samburu National Reserve in Northern Kenya with elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton, I noticed a teenaged female, Babyl, who walked very slowly and had difficulty taking each step. I learned she’d been crippled for years, but the other members of her herd never left her behind. They’d walk a while, then stop and look around to see where she was. If Babyl lagged, some would wait for her. If she’d been left alone, she would have fallen prey to a lion or other predator. Sometimes the matriarch would even feed Babyl. Babyl’s friends had nothing to gain by helping her, as she could do nothing for them. Nonetheless, they adjusted their behavior to allow Babyl to remain with the group.

Waterfall dances: Do animals have spiritual experiences?

Do animals marvel at their surroundings, have a sense of awe when they see a rainbow, or wonder where lightning comes from? Sometimes a chimpanzee, usually an adult male, will dance at a waterfall with total abandon. Jane Goodall describes a chimpanzee approaching a waterfall with slightly bristled hair, a sign of heightened arousal:

“As he gets closer, and the roar of the falling water gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he may perform a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls. Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up the slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. This ‘waterfall dance’ may last 10 or 15 minutes.” After a waterfall display the performer may sit on a rock, his eyes following the falling water. Chimpanzees also dance at the onset of heavy rains and during violent gusts of wind.

In June 2006, Jane and I visited a chimpanzee sanctuary near Girona, Spain. We were told that Marco, one of the rescued chimpanzees, does a dance during thunderstorms during which he looks like he’s in a trance.

Shirley and Jenny: remembering friends

Elephants have strong feelings. They also have great memory. They live in matriarchal societies in which strong social bonds among individuals endure for decades. Shirley and Jenny, two female elephants, were reunited after living apart for 22 years. They were brought separately to the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tenn., to live out their lives in peace, absent the abuse they had suffered in the entertainment industry. When Shirley was introduced to Jenny, there was an urgency in Jenny’s behavior. She wanted to get into the same stall with Shirley. They roared at each other, the traditional elephant greeting among friends when they reunite. Rather than being cautious and uncertain about one another, they touched through the bars separating them and remained in close contact. Their keepers were intrigued by how outgoing the elephants were. A search of records showed that Shirley and Jenny had lived together in a circus 22 years before, when Jenny was a calf and Shirley was in her 20s. They still remembered one another when they were inadvertently reunited.

A grateful whale

In December 2005, a 50-foot, 50-ton, female humpback whale got tangled in crab lines and was in danger of drowning. After a team of divers freed her, she nuzzled each of her rescuers in turn and flapped around in what one whale expert said was “a rare and remarkable encounter.” James Moskito, one of the rescuers, recalled, “It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing it was free and that we had helped it.” He said the whale “stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun.” Mike Menigoz, another of the divers, was also deeply touched by the encounter: “The whale was doing little dives, and the guys were rubbing shoulders with it … I don’t know for sure what it was thinking, but it’s something I will always remember.”

Busy bees as mathematicians

We now know that bees are able to solve complex mathematical problems more rapidly than computers—specifically, what’s called “the traveling salesman problem”—despite having a brain about the size of a grass seed. They save time and energy by finding the most efficient route between flowers. They do this daily, while it can take a computer days to solve the same problem.

Dogs sniffing out disease

As we know, dogs have a keen sense of smell. They sniff here and there trying to figure who’s been around and also are notorious for sticking their noses in places they shouldn’t. Compared to humans, dogs have about 25 times the area of nasal olfactory epithelium (which carries receptor cells) and many thousands more cells in the olfactory region of their brain. Dogs can differentiate dilutions of 1 part per billion, follow faint odor trails, and are 10,000 times more sensitive than humans to certain odors.

Dogs appear to be able to detect different cancers—ovarian, lung, bladder, prostate, and breast—and diabetes, perhaps by assessing a person’s breath. Consider a collie named Tinker and his human companion, Paul Jackson, who has Type 2 diabetes. Paul’s family noticed that whenever he was about to have an attack, Tinker would get agitated. Paul says, “He would lick my face, or cry gently, or bark even. And then we noticed that this behavior was happening while I was having a hypoglycemic attack so we just put two and two together.” More research is needed, but initial studies by the Pine Street Foundation and others on using dogs for diagnosis are promising.

It’s OK to be a birdbrain

Crows from the remote Pacific island of New Caledonia show incredibly high-level skills when they make and use tools. They get much of their food using tools, and they do this better than chimpanzees. With no prior training they can make hooks from straight pieces of wire to obtain out-of-reach food. They can add features to improve a tool, a skill supposedly unique to humans. For example, they make three different types of tools from the long, barbed leaves of the screw pine tree. They also modify tools for the situation at hand, a type of invention not seen in other animals. These birds can learn to pull a string to retrieve a short stick, use the stick to pull out a longer one, then use the long stick to draw out a piece of meat. One crow, named Sam, spent less than two minutes inspecting the task and solved it without error.

Caledonian crows live in small family groups and youngsters learn to fashion and use tools by watching adults. Researchers from the University of Auckland discovered that parents actually take their young to specific sites called “tool schools” where they can practice these skills.

Love dogs

As we all know, dogs are “man’s best friend.” They can also be best friends to one another. Tika and her longtime mate, Kobuk, had raised eight litters of puppies together and were enjoying their retirement years in the home of my friend, Anne. Even as longtime mates, Kobuk often bossed Tika around, taking her favorite sleeping spot or toy.

Late in life, Tika developed a malignant tumor and had to have her leg amputated. She had trouble getting around and, as she was recovering from the surgery, Kobuk wouldn’t leave Tika’s side. Kobuk stopped shoving her aside or minding if she was allowed to get on the bed without him. About two weeks after Tika’s surgery, Kobuk woke Anne in the middle of the night. He ran over to Tika. Anne got Tika up and took both dogs outside, but they just lay down on the grass. Tika was whining softly, and Anne saw that Tika’s belly was badly swollen. Anne rushed her to the emergency animal clinic in Boulder, where she had life-saving surgery.

If Kobuk hadn’t fetched Anne, Tika almost certainly would have died. Tika recovered, and as her health improved after the amputation and operation, Kobuk became the bossy dog he’d always been, even as Tika walked around on three legs. But Anne had witnessed their true relationship. Kobuk and Tika, like a true old married couple, would always be there for each other, even if their personalities would never change.

Jethro and the bunny

After I picked Jethro from the Boulder Humane Society and brought him to my mountain home, I knew he was a very special dog. He never chased the rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, or deer who regularly visited. He often tried to approach them as if they were friends.

One day Jethro came to my front door, stared into my eyes, belched, and dropped a small, furry, saliva-covered ball out of his mouth. I wondered what in the world he’d brought back and discovered the wet ball of fur was a very young bunny.

Jethro continued to make direct eye contact with me as if he were saying, “Do something.” I picked up the bunny, placed her in a box, gave her water and celery, and figured she wouldn’t survive the night, despite our efforts to keep her alive.

I was wrong. Jethro remained by her side and refused walks and meals until I pulled him away so he could heed nature’s call. When I eventually released the bunny, Jethro followed her trail and continued to do so for months.

Over the years Jethro approached rabbits as if they should be his friends, but they usually fled. He also rescued birds who flew into our windows and, on one occasion, a bird who’d been caught and dropped in front of my office by a local red fox.

Dog and fish: improbable friends

Fish are often difficult to identify with or feel for. They don’t have expressive faces and don’t seem to tell us much behaviorally. Nonetheless, Chino, a golden retriever who lived with Mary and Dan Heath in Medford, Oregon, and Falstaff, a 15-inch koi, had regular meetings for six years at the edge of the pond where Falstaff lived. Each day when Chino arrived, Falstaff swam to the surface, greeted him, and nibbled on Chino’s paws. Falstaff did this repeatedly as Chino stared down with a curious and puzzled look on her face. Their close friendship was extraordinary and charming. When the Heaths moved, they went as far as to build a new fishpond so that Falstaff could join them.

An embarrassed chimpanzee: I didn’t do that!

Embarrassment is difficult to observe. By definition, it’s a feeling that one tries to hide. But world famous primatologist Jane Goodall believes she has observed what could be called embarrassment in chimpanzees.

Fifi was a female chimpanzee whom Jane knew for more than 40 years. When Fifi’s oldest child, Freud, was 5 1/2 years old, his uncle, Fifi’s brother Figan, was the alpha male of their chimpanzee community. Freud always followed Figan as if he worshiped the big male.

Once, as Fifi groomed Figan, Freud climbed up the thin stem of a wild plantain. When he reached the leafy crown, he began swaying wildly back and forth. Had he been a human child, we would have said he was showing off. Suddenly the stem broke and Freud tumbled into the long grass. He was not hurt. He landed close to Jane, and as his head emerged from the grass she saw him look over at Figan. Had he noticed? If he had, he paid no attention but went on being groomed. Freud very quietly climbed another tree and began to feed.

Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser observed what could be called embarrassment in a male rhesus monkey. After mating with a female, the male strutted away and accidentally fell into a ditch. He stood up and quickly looked around. After sensing that no other monkeys saw him tumble, he marched off, back high, head and tail up, as if nothing had happened.

Animal rescues: feeling compassion for those in need

Stories about animals rescuing members of their own and other species, including humans, abound. They show how individuals of different species display compassion and empathy for those in need.

In Torquay, Australia, after a mother kangaroo was struck by a car, a dog discovered a baby joey in her pouch and took it to his owner who cared for the youngster. The 10-year-old dog and 4-month-old joey eventually became best friends.

On a beach in New Zealand, a dolphin came to the rescue of two pygmy sperm whales stranded behind a sand bar. After people tried in vain to get the whales into deeper water, the dolphin appeared and the two whales followed it back into the ocean.

Dogs are also known for helping those in need. A lost pit bull mutt broke up an attempted mugging of a woman leaving a playground with her son in Port Charlotte, Florida. An animal control officer said it was clear the dog was trying to defend the woman, whom he didn’t know. And outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a dog rescued an abandoned baby by placing him safely among her own newborn puppies. Amazingly, the dog carried the baby about 150 feet to where her puppies lay after discovering the baby covered by a rag in a field.

Raven justice?

In his book Mind of the Raven, biologist and raven expert Bernd Heinrich observed that ravens remember an individual who consistently raids their caches if they catch them in the act. Sometimes a raven will join in an attack on an intruder even if he didn’t see the cache being raided.

Is this moral? Heinrich seems to think it is. He says of this behavior, “It was a moral raven seeking the human equivalent of justice, because it defended the group’s interest at a potential cost to itself.”

In subsequent experiments, Heinrich confirmed that group interests could drive what an individual raven decides to do. Ravens and many other animals live by social norms that favor fairness and justice.

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Marc Bekoff is professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is a Fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and a past Guggenheim Fellow. His essay originally appeared in YES! magazine.

“The Emotional Lives of Animals” by Marc Bekoff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

For a Flooded Midwest, Climate Forecasts Offer Little Comfort

by Shuang-Ye Wu

Flooding in the Midwest, triggered by an intense “bomb cyclone,” has devastated parts of the region, which has been plagued by flood events in recent decades.

Floods are triggered by extreme rainfall events, often combined with ground conditions, such as saturated or frozen ground, that make it harder for water to percolate down into soil, which increases runoff.

Global warming has the potential to intensify the Earth’s water cycle, which will alter the quantity, frequency, intensity and duration of rain and snowfall. As my research and work by others has shown, all of these changes raise the risk of floods for Midwest states.

A wetter Midwest

There is strong consensus among scientists that climate change will make many parts of the world wetter. This happens because higher temperatures increase the rate at which moisture evaporates from Earth’s surface, and warmer air holds more moisture than cool air. For every 1 degree Celsius of warming, the moisture-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases by about 7 percent, based on well-established laws of physics.

As the air becomes moister, we can expect more precipitation – but the increase is not uniform. Assuming that wind patterns don’t change significantly, more moisture will be transported into some regions under the influence of storm tracks. This means that storm-affected areas are likely to experience larger-than-average increases in precipitation and flood risks, while areas located away from storm tracks are likely to have less precipitation and greater risk of drought.

The U.S. Midwest is located in a convergence zone where prevailing winds blowing from the east and west meet. The polar jet stream blows from west to east along the boundary between warm and cold air and regularly brings in storms, particularly in cold seasons.

Using data from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network, I have shown that from 1951 to 2013, mean precipitation for the United States increased by 1.6 percent per decade. In the Midwest, however, it rose by about 2.1 percent per decade, and winter precipitation increased by 3.7 percent per decade. About half of this growth was caused by more frequent storms, and the other half can be attributed to an increase in storms’ intensity.

I have also used high-resolution regional climate models to simulate future climate change in the Midwest for the period 2040-2070 compared to 1970-2000. In this study I found that mean precipitation across the region is likely to increase by 8 percent by mid-century, and winter precipitation is likely to increase by as much as 12 percent. The northern part of the region could see an even larger increase, likely due to greater evaporation from the Great Lakes resulting from higher temperatures and less ice cover in winter as the region warms.

Stormier weather

With more moisture in the atmosphere, storm systems are likely to produce heavier rainfall events. Enhanced moisture in the atmosphere also increases latent heat – warmth released by water vapor as it condenses into liquid drops in the air. This heat provides more energy to increase the intensity of storms.

These factors mean that climate change is likely to cause a disproportionate increase in heavy precipitation events in the Midwest, a trend that is already apparent when looking at historic climate data. From 1951 through 2013, my study found that light and moderate precipitation across the Midwest increased by about 1 percent per decade, while heavy precipitation increased by 4.4 percent per decade.

Average precipitation for the region is projected to increase by about 8 percent by mid-century, but heavy storms – those of a scale only likely to occur once in 25 years – are projected to increase by 20 percent.

More frequent flooding

All of these changes will significantly alter flood hydrology. A 2015 study that examined discharge data from 774 U.S. Geological Survey stream gauge stations across the Midwest from 1962 through 2011 found that 34 percent of the stations showed significant increases in the frequency of flood events. The most pronounced increase occurred in springtime for floods associated with snowmelt, rain falling on frozen ground and rain-on-snow events. In addition to increasing precipitation, this analysis showed that earlier snow melting and changes in the rain-to-snow ratio caused by higher temperatures are also driving the strong increase in Midwest spring flooding.

Another study projected shifts in flooding due to climate change and calculated how frequently an average 20th-century 100-year flood – that is, large enough to have just a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year, or once in a century – is likely to recur in the 21st century. For most of the Midwest, the authors estimated that the probability of such floods was likely to double in the 21st century, so that what was once a 100-year flood can be expected to occur on average every 50 years.

A third study, published in 2016, examined how climate change could alter streamflow in the Northeast and Midwest. The magnitude and timing of streamflow can affect water supplies and quality, infrastructure systems and aquatic life. This study found that over this century, average 100-year three-day peak flow levels were likely to increase by 10 to 20 percent for the Midwest region.

Meanwhile, people in Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota affected by the most recent storm are assessing the damage. NOAA earlier this month forecast that the historic floods will be followed by more rain and flooding this spring. Current flood waters are expected to remain for months.

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Shuang-Ye Wu is an Associate Professor of Geology at University of Dayton. Her article originally appeared in The Conversation.

For a Flooded Midwest, Climate Forecasts Offer Little Comfort by Shuang-Ye Wu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Hope and Mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding Ecological Grief

by Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo

“Midwest drought” by jackoscage is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss. Not only are human actions destabilising the very conditions that sustain life, but it is also increasingly clear that we are pushing the Earth into an entirely new geological era, often described as the Anthropocene.

Research shows that people increasingly feel the effects of these planetary changes and associated ecological losses in their daily lives, and that these changes present significant direct and indirect threats to mental health and well-being. Climate change, and the associated impacts to land and environment, for example, have recently been linked to a range of negative mental health impacts, including depression, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress, as well as feelings of anger, hopelessness, distress, and despair.

Not well represented in the literature, however, is an emotional response we term ‘ecological grief,’ which we have defined in a recent Nature Climate Change article: “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.”

We believe ecological grief is a natural, though overlooked, response to ecological loss, and one that is likely to affect more of us into the future.

Understanding ecological grief

Grief takes many forms and differs greatly between individuals and cultures. Although grief is well understood in relation to human losses, ‘to grieve’ is rarely considered something that we do in relation to losses in the natural world.

The eminent American naturalist Aldo Leopold was among the first to describe the emotional toll of ecological loss in his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” he wrote, “is to live alone in a world of wounds.”

More recently, many respected ecologists and climate scientists have expressed their feelings of grief and distress in response to climate change and the environmental destruction it entails in places like: “Climate scientists feel weight of the world on their shoulders” and “Is this how you feel?”

Ecological grief is also a significant theme in our own work. In different research projects working with Inuit in Inuit Nunangat in Arctic Canada and farmers in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, both of us have spent a combined total of almost 20 years working with people living in areas experiencing significant climatic changes and environmental shifts.

Despite very different geographical and cultural contexts, our research revealed a surprising degree of commonality between Inuit and family farming communities as they struggled to cope, both emotionally and psychologically, with mounting ecological losses and the prospect of an uncertain future.

Voices of ecological grief

Our research shows that climate-related ecological losses can trigger grief experiences in several ways. Foremost, people grieve for lost landscapes, ecosystems, species, or places that carry personal or collective meaning.

For Inuit communities in the Inuit Land Claim Settlement Area of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada, the land is foundational to mental health. In recent years, melting sea ice prevented travel to significant cultural sites and engagement in traditional cultural activities, such as hunting and fishing. These disruptions to an Inuit sense of place was accompanied by strong emotional reactions, including grief, anger, sadness, frustration and despair.

One male who grew up hunting and trapping on the land in the community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut explained:

“People are not who they are. They’re not comfortable and can’t do the same things. If something is taken away from you, you don’t have it. If a way of life is taken away because of circumstances you have no control over, you lose control over your life.”

Chronic drought conditions in the Western Australian Wheatbelt elicited similar emotional reactions for some family farmers. As one long-time farmer described:

“There’s probably nothing worse than seeing your farm go in a dust storm. I reckon it’s probably one of the worst feelings […] I find that one of the most depressing things of the lot, seeing the farm blow away in a dust storm. That really gets up my nose, and a long way up too. If its blowing dust I come inside – I just come inside here. I can’t stand to watch it.”

In both cases, such experiences resonate strongly with the concept of “solastagia,” described both as a form of homesickness while still in place, and as a type of grief over the loss of a healthy place or a thriving ecosystem.

People also grieve for lost environmental knowledge and associated identities. In these cases, people mourn the part of self-identity that is lost when the land upon which it is based changes or disappears.

For Australian family farmers, the inability to maintain a healthy landscape in the context of worsening seasonal variability and chronic dryness often elicited feelings of self-blame and shame:

“Farmers just hate seeing their farm lift; it somehow says to them ‘I’m a bad farmer’. And I think all farmers are good farmers. They all try their hardest to be. They all love their land.”

For older Inuit in Nunatsiavut, changes to weather and landscape are invalidating long-standing and multi-generational ecological knowledge, and with it, a coherent sense of culture and self. As one well-respected hunter shared:

“It’s hurting in a way. It’s hurting in a lot of ways. Because I kinda thinks I’m not going to show my grandkids the way we used to do it. It’s hurting me. It’s hurting me big time. And I just keep that to myself.”

Many Inuit and family farmers also worry about their futures, and express grief in anticipation of worsening ecological losses. As one woman explained from Rigolet, Nunatsiavut:

“I think that [the changes] will have an impact maybe on mental health, because it’s a depressing feeling when you’re stuck. I mean for us to go off [on the land] is just a part of life. If you don’t have it, then that part of your life is gone, and I think that’s very depressing.”

Similarly, a farmer in Australia worried about the future shared their thoughts on the possibility of losing their family farm:

“[It] would be like a death. Yeah, there would be a grieving process because the farm embodies everything that the family farm is … And I think if we were to lose it, it would be like losing a person … but it would be sadder than losing a person … I don’t know, it would be hard definitely.”

Ecological grief in a climate-changed future

Ecological grief reminds us that climate change is not just some abstract scientific concept or a distant environmental problem. Rather, it draws our attention to the personally experienced emotional and psychological losses suffered when there are changes or deaths in the natural world. In doing so, ecological grief also illuminates the ways in which more-than-humans are integral to our mental wellness, our communities, our cultures, and for our ability to thrive in a human-dominated world.

From what we have seen in our own research, although this type of grief is already being experienced, it often lacks an appropriate avenue for expression or for healing. Indeed, not only do we lack the rituals and practices to help address feelings of ecological grief, until recently we did not even have the language to give such feelings voice. And it is for these reasons that grief over losses in the natural world can feel, as American ecologist Phyllis Windle put it, ‘irrational, inappropriate, anthropomorphic.’

We argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts, and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. How to grieve ecological losses well — particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing — is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.

We do not see ecological grief as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives, collective experiences of ecological grief may coalesce into a strengthened sense of love and commitment to the places, ecosystems and species that inspire, nurture and sustain us. There is much grief work to be done, and much of it will be hard. However, being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place.

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Dr. Neville Ellis is a Research Fellow at the UWA School of Agriculture and Environment at the University of Western Australia.

Dr. Ashlee Cunsolo is the Director of the Labrador Institute of Memorial University, working together with the Inuit and Innu of Labrador to re-envision research, education, and outreach by and for the North.

Hope and Mourning in the Anthropocene: Understanding Ecological Grief by Neville Ellis & Ashlee Cunsolo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How a Green New Deal Could Exploit Developing Countries

by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

#science #environment #climatechange #politics #global

The Green New Deal has changed the conversation among progressive Democrats about how to deal with climate change, from simply managing a disaster to how to take advantage of an existential threat to build a more just society.

However, should this legislative concept be transformed from the hypothetical framework it is today into actual policies, some of the solutions it engenders could make global inequality worse. As a scholar of colonialism, I am concerned that the Green New Deal could exacerbate what scholars like sociologist Doreen Martinez call climate colonialism – the domination of less powerful countries and peoples through initiatives meant to slow the pace of global warming.

Colonialism, explained

The clearest cases of colonialism involve the unmistakable signifiers of foreign control: planted flags, and the formal and institutionally recognized assertion of authority over foreign lands. Only five countries in the world were not colonized by European empires in one way or other after the 15th century.

The history of colonialism has many clear milestones, including the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain, Portugal and the Vatican that divided the world outside Europe between the two Iberian empires. At the Berlin Conference of 1884, European powers divvied the African continent among themselves.

U.S. colonialism has often been less stark. But the United States does occupy land that belonged to people who lived in North America before European settlers arrived. Following the realization of its “Manifest Destiny,” it also went beyond its coastal borders by taking over many islands, including those in Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam.

Likewise, overt foreign influence and control has become the exception rather than the rule, even for the original colonial powers. Throughout much of Africa and Asia, global empires like the British preferred a strategy of “indirect rule,” with chieftaincies, monarchies and other power structures that let them delegate their domination to local elites.

Neocolonialism and climate colonialism

In 1946, there were only 35 member-states of the United Nations. Once most former colonies had become independent countries by 1970, that number had swelled to 127. Amid this wave of independence, rich countries continued to exert control over former colonies through a system Ghana’s first prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, first called “neocolonialism.”

Rather than directly running other countries, neocolonial domination is accomplished through levers of political and economic leverage.

Green New Deal policies could empower communities on both sides of U.S. borders, and could expand the powers of poor nations to determine their own destinies. Or they could promote climate colonialism, a term that can mean different things to different people.

To me, it’s the deepening or expansion of foreign domination through climate initiatives that exploit poorer nations’ resources or otherwise compromises their sovereignty. Others focus more on how formerly colonized countries are paying the price for a crisis caused disproportionately by the emissions from more industrialized nations – their current and past colonizers.

Land-grabbing and exporting solar power

But the Green New Deal will not meet any definition of climate justice if it becomes the next chapter in a long history of U.S. industrial policies that have oppressed people.

During the 19th century, when the transcontinental railway system arose, the U.S. gave land to rail companies it had taken it from Native Americans in a series of coerced treaties and wars. Similarly, responding to global warming may require vast tracts of land to grow food and carry out new policies as the climate changes. A global land rush is already underway around the globe.

Take, for example, carbon offsets: a form of investment in greenhouse gas emissions reduction that lets the buyer “offset” the effects of their emissions-producing activity.

But much of the available land is in poor countries, and inhabited by people who are those countries’ least politically powerful. This can put them in competition for the land that provides their basic needs with powerful private interests from the world’s most powerful countries.

For instance, a research institute reported in 2014 that Norwegian companies’ quest to buy and conserve forest land in East Africa to use as carbon offsets came at the cost of forced evictions and food scarcity for thousands of Ugandans, Mozambicans and Tanzanians. The Green New Deal could encourage exactly this kind of political trade-off.

Efforts to boost energy security can also drive climate colonialism. The African continent is, paradoxically, both home to the world’s largest solar power plant – the Noor Ouarzazate complex in Morocco – and people who are the least connected to grid.

Solar power may end up giving more Africans access to electricity but at the same time, many large renewable energy projects in North Africa could soon boost the European electric grid, bolstering European energy security with a climate-friendly source of power while millions of sub-Saharan Africans have none of their own.

Daniel A.M. Egbe, the coordinator of the African Network for Solar Energy, calls this linkage of large-scale solar farms with foreign power grids “a new form of resource exploitation.”

The Green New Deal’s stated goal of meeting all of America’s considerable and potentially increasing energy demand with renewable or zero-emission sources could create an incentive to go this route too, with Mexico. California already imports electricity from Baja California state and business interests stand ready to expand cross-border grid links throughout Central America if that proves feasible.

I see a serious risk that connecting the U.S. grid to Mexico and Central America could drain power out of the isthmus into the U.S. at the expense of Central Americans.

Justice without borders

To be clear, I do not believe the Green New Deal will necessarily lead to climate colonialism and I see its emphasis on climate justice as a good start. Technologies and policies are tools, and how they function depends on how they are designed and how they are used.

The U.S. could, for instance, do more to subsidize renewable-energy technologies, because American innovation can expedite their adoption everywhere.

The U.S. could also follow the lead of the federal government’s National Academy of Sciences and fund a “substantial research initiative” on negative emissions, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identifies as necessary to prevent the worst climate change scenarios.

The Green New Deal, in its current draft form, is just as compatible with this path as it is with climate colonialism. But I do believe that achieving a version of climate justice that doesn’t end at U.S. borders will require the right vision, values and strategies.

____________________

Olúfẹmi Táíwò completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and teaches philosophy at Georgetown University.

How a Green New Deal could exploit developing countries by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How Rural Areas Like Florida’s Panhandle Can Become More Hurricane-Ready

by Eren Erman Ozguven

#science #environment #climatechange #nature #naturaldisasters #systemanalysis #argument #logos #rural

When Hurricane Michael roared onto northwest Florida’s Gulf Coast in October 2018, its 160 mile-per-hour winds made it the strongest storm ever to hit the region. It was only the fourth Category 5 storm on record to make landfall in the United States.

Thousands of residents, from the coast to 100 miles inland, were left without housing, power, food or water. Schools, stores, businesses and many government buildings shut down for weeks. Hospitals had to temporarily stop services.

Months later, many locals were still trying to survive in battered, tarp-covered homes or living in tents, relying on local food banks for survival. Lacking customers, some business owners shuttered their doors and left town.

In Michael’s aftermath, it gradually became apparent that Florida’s Panhandle experienced more severe damage than many urban areas around the state that are relatively better prepared for behemoth storms. I have seen firsthand how this was due to lack of preparedness and infrastructure that was aging, limited and substandard.

I have studied hurricane resilience for the past 13 years and know that better preparation can help make communities more resilient in the face of major disasters. As the high-risk months approach, I and other Florida State University scholars from many different fields are working with local communities to help them get ready and improve their response plans.

Lost homes and livelihoods

After Hurricane Michael passed through, I drove to Panama City – one of the hardest-hit areas – with fellow FAMU-FSU College of Engineeringprofessors Juyeong Choi and Tarek Abichou. We made the trip to observe infrastructure and community damage and meet with local emergency management officials as part of a project supported by the federally funded Natural Hazards Center, which works to reduce harm from natural disasters.

To get there from Tallahassee, we drove west on State Road 20, an inland route that took us through ravaged rural areas. We returned along U.S. Highway 98, a scenic road that hugs the Gulf of Mexico, stopping at Mexico Beach – a small coastal tourist town that was nearly wiped awayby Hurricane Michael’s winds and storm surge.

The damage we saw was beyond anything we had imagined. There were hundreds of thousands of downed trees and hundreds of blocked roadways. Numerous houses and farms were completely destroyed, along with extensive timber plantations – the region’s big money-producing crop.

FSU planner-in-residence Dennis Smith, who has worked for decades in emergency management in the public and private sectors, was just as stunned. “The damage, both the magnitude and the geographic extent and intensity, was some of the worst I had ever seen,” he told me. “There are extensive housing losses (far inland) and the damage to woodlands is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

The social impacts were equally daunting. “We were especially not prepared for the numbers of homeless,” said Ellen Piekalkiewicz, who directs a center focusing on the needs of communities, families and children at FSU’s College of Social Work. In the schools, she said, “there have been a number of kids having psychological problems.”

Planning for the next big storm

It is extremely challenging to prepare for very fast Category 5 hurricanes like Hurricane Michael. Storms of this size generate extreme winds and storm surge that knock out communications – including cellphone towers – and transportation routes. But proactive planning and community-level decision making can ensure that no one is left without assistance.

One essential step is identifying critical escape and emergency response routes, which are at high risk of disruption during these disasters. Pinpointing these routes in advance provides time to improve roadway infrastructure and develop alternative public evacuation plans in case primary routes are blocked.

It also is important to assess which demographic and socioeconomic groups will be most affected by damage to power lines and roadways – for example, aging populations. Studying power outages and roadway closures during hurricanes, together with a region’s physical features, reveals vulnerable locations that will be at high risk in future events.

My engineering colleagues and I also are studying how uncertainty about storm tracks affects evacuation planning and how wind damage to buildings varies with different types of terrain. These are crucial questions for storm preparedness.

#HurricaneMichael just hours away from a catastrophic, unprecedented #Florida Panhandle, Big Bend Cat. 4 landfall. *Last chance* to get to a safe place, if told to evacuate. No long-time resident of the area has ever experienced a #hurricane this intense.

Another high priority is identifying and supporting at-risk populations. Especially in rural areas like Florida’s Panhandle, planners need good information on population size, location and composition. The most effective way to collect it is by working with nonprofit agencies, volunteer groups, faith-based organizations, community-based centers, neighborhood-level groups, hospitals and governmental organizations.

“Involving these entities in hurricane training exercises is also important to build trust,” FSU public administration professor Richard Feiock told me. “That makes communities stronger and more durable when a hurricane hits.”

One promising strategy we have identified through focusing on the needs of vulnerable groups is repurposing existing hurricane shelters to serve evacuees with pets or other special needs. Experience has shown that some people will remain in harm’s way instead of evacuating if they think leaving means abandoning their pets.

National Guard members distribute food and water in Miller County, Georgia, Oct. 12, 2018, during Hurricane Michael relief efforts. “Photo” by Sgt. Amber Williams, Georgia National Guard is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Getting the word out

Communities also need to develop systems for alerting residents about hurricane risks and getting accurate information to them as quickly as possible when a storm threatens. Such networks can include radio, TV, phone and even door-to-door notification. In rural areas it is especially important to design strong community training programs, and to foster strong social networks that draw on neighbor-to-neighbor ties and other personal connections.

Hurricane warning information should include locations and types of shelters, along with dates, times and locations for pickups if transportation is available, and should explain what people can bring with them. Our research indicates that with these improvements, Panhandle communities and others like them can develop better emergency plans that reduce the stress of evacuations, provide safe shelter and ultimately save lives.

____________________

Eren Erman Ozguven is Assistant Professor of FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, affiliate of the Institute for Successful Longevity, Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy and the Center for Advanced Power Systems, Florida State University. His essay was originally published in The Conversation.

“How Rural Areas Like Florida’s Panhandle Can Become More Hurricane-Ready” by Eren Erman Ozguven is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Hydropower Dams Can Harm Coastal Areas Far Downstream

by Paula Ezcurra and Octavio Aburto

Thousands of hydroelectric dams are under construction around the world, mainly in developing countries. These enormous structures are one of the world’s largest sources of renewable energy, but they also cause environmental problems.

Hydropower dams degrade water quality along rivers. Water that flows downstream from the dams is depleted of oxygen, which harms many aquatic animals. The reservoirs above dams are susceptible to harmful algal blooms, and can leach toxic metals such as mercury from submerged soil.

We wanted to know whether dams also impact river systems farther away, at the coastlines where rivers flow into the sea. So we performed a natural experiment comparing four rivers along Mexico’s Pacific coast – two that are dammed and two that remain free-flowing. We found that damming rivers has measurable negative ecologic and economic effects on coastal regions more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) downstream.

 

Feeding or starving coastlines

We studied four river outflows along the Pacific Coast of Mexico in the states of Sinaloa and Nayarit. Two of these were from the San Pedro and Acaponeta rivers, which are relatively unrestricted, with over 75% of their flow unobstructed.

The other two outflows came from the nearby Santiago and Fuerte rivers, which have over 95% of their flow retained in reservoirs. In addition to restricting water flow, these reservoirs trap sediments – over 1 million tons per year along the two rivers combined.

In unobstructed rivers, sediment flows downstream and is eventually deposited along the coast, helping to stabilize the shoreline and sometimes even to build it up. We found that this was happening along the free-flowing Acaponeta and San Pedro rivers.

However, because the sediment from the dammed Santiago and Fuerte rivers is no longer carried downstream, wave action takes over at the coast. At the mouths of these two rivers, we found that waves were eroding up to 33 hectares of combined land – equivalent to about 62 football fields – each year, with widespread ecologic and economic effects on the surrounding regions.

 

The ecology of healthy coasts

Our field research clearly showed that coastal instability resulting from sediment loss at the mouths of the dammed rivers was harming ecosystems along the shore. For example, we found that coastal regions downstream of free-flowing rivers had significantly more plant diversity. Many of these plants were found only in coastal areas, and therefore had high conservation value.

Coastal erosion due to lack of sediment input from the rivers also reduces critical nursery habitat, such as mangrove forest, where many commercially important fish species spend their juvenile stage. We found that fishing activity at the mouth of the free-flowing San Pedro River was much higher than around the mouth of the dammed Fuerte River. This loss of fishing potential comes at a cost of around US$1.3 million every year.

Reduced sediment flow also deprives coastal estuaries of nutrients. Lucrative shrimp and oyster fisheries in the region we studied rely heavily on nutrient inputs from rivers. In the San Pedro River region, these fisheries generate around $5.8 million yearly; near the dammed rivers, they have been all but abandoned.

Coastal mangrove wetlands also protect shorelines from hurricanes and tropical storms, and serve as recreational areas and conservation habitat for wildlife. Knowing this, we calculated that the loss of these ecosystem services around the dammed rivers totals $3.9 million annually.

Still another valuable function that mangrove wetlands perform is storing “blue carbon” in plant tissue and soils, reducing the effects of climate change. But when coastlines recede and mangroves are destroyed, this carbon is released. We calculated that mangrove loss in our study region represented a loss of around $130,000 in annual carbon trading potential for this region.

Adding up all of the ecological services that coastal ecosystems provide, we estimate that the economic consequences of shoreline loss around the Santiago and Fuerte rivers related to hydroelectric damming totaled well over $10 million yearly.

Letting more sediment flow

Because sediments are so essential to areas around river mouths, reducing sediment trapping behind dams could mitigate some harmful impacts on coastal areas. There are several ways to do this – notably, sediment bypassing, or diverting a portion of the sediments flowing from upriver around dams and allowing it to rejoin the river downstream.

This strategy can be included in new construction or incorporated into existing dams. In addition to reducing dams’ environmental impacts, it also increases dams’ service lives by reducing the rate at which their reservoirs fill up with silt.

To date, environmental impact assessments of large inland dams have often failed to properly analyze the impacts that these dams will have downriver on coastlines, estuaries, deltas and lagoons. Our study shows how important it is to fully account for dams’ environmental and economic impacts along coasts and basins.

Critics are challenging a proposed dam on the San Pedro River at Las Cruces.

Mexico may be at a juncture in its approach to hydropower. The Mexican government recently contracted with Hydro-Quebec, the world’s largest hydroelectric power producer, to revamp existing dams across the country. And a recent study by a Mexican nongovernment organization, SuMar-Voces por la Naturaleza, reported that a long-disputed proposal to build a new hydroelectric dam at Las Cruces is neither financially feasible nor needed to meet energy demand for the region, prompting national groups to call for the final cancellation of the project.

We believe that Mexico and all nations working to develop efficient, low-impact energy sources should take a holistic approach to future dam-related projects, so they can weigh their potentially harmful consequences. The coastal effects that we documented should be part of those reviews.

____________________

Paula Ezcurra is a Digital Communications Specialist, Gulf of California Marine Program, University of California San Diego. Octavio Aburto is an Assistant Professor of Marine Biology, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.

Hydropower Dams Can Harm Coastal Areas Far Downstream by Paula Ezcurra & Octavio Aburto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Is Burning Trash a Good Way to Handle It? Waste Incineration in 5 Charts

by Ana Baptista

#science #environment #health #civilrights #politics #systemanalysis #nature #argument #logos #ethos #kairos #cognitivebias #advice #global

Burning trash has a long history in the United States, and municipal solid waste incinerators have sparked resistance in many places. As an environmental justice scholar who works directly with low-income and communities of color, I see incineration as a poor waste management option.

Although these plants generate electricity from the heat created by burning trash, their primary purpose is waste disposal. Emissions from burning waste worsen environmental inequalities, create financial risks for host communities and reduce incentives to adopt more sustainable waste practices.

I recently co-authored a report that describes signs of decline in the U.S. waste incineration industry due to many factors. They include a volatile revenue model, aging plants, high operation and maintenance costs, and growing public interest in reducing waste, promoting environmental justice and combating climate change.

Nonetheless, 72 incinerators are still operating today in the U.S. Most of them – 58, or 80% – are sited in environmental justice communities, which we defined as areas where more than 25% of residents are low-income, people of color or both. Incinerators worsen cumulative impacts from multiple pollution sources on these overburdened neighborhoods.

Environmental justice flashpoints

Waste incinerators are heavily concentrated in northeast states and Florida – areas with high population densities and limited landfill space. Some of these states also provide favorable economic incentives, such as allowing incinerators to earn renewable energy credits for generating electricity.

In the past year environmental justice advocates have successfully shut down incinerators in Detroit, Michigan, and Commerce, California. The Detroit incinerator was built in the 1980s and received more than US$1 billion in public investment borne by local taxpayers. Groups such as Breathe Free Detroit and Zero Waste Detroit rallied residents to oppose the public financing and health burdens that the facility imposed on surrounding environmental justice communities. The plant closed in March 2019.

The California plant closed in June 2018 after a yearlong campaign by two community-based organizations, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice and Valley Improvement Projects, to prevent incineration from qualifying for state renewable energy subsidies. The facility ultimately closed when a 30-year power purchase agreement with the local utility expired, leaving it without a sufficient revenue stream.

Aging facilities

Incineration plants’ average life expectancy is 30 years. Three-quarters of operating waste incinerators in the United States are at least 25 years old.

These facilities’ revenues come primarily from tipping fees that waste haulers pay to dump trash, and secondarily from generating electricity. These revenue streams are volatile and can undermine the industry’s financial stability. At least 31 incinerators have closed since 2000 due to issues such as insufficient revenue or inability to afford required upgrades.

Operations and maintenance costs typically increase as plants age and their performance decreases. Upgrades, such as installing new pollution control equipment, can cost tens of millions of dollars, and sometimes more than US$100 million.

These large capital expenditures represent risks for host communities, which often provide public financing through bonds or tax increases. Such measures are risky because the waste service and energy contracts that generate revenue are increasingly shorter term and vulnerable to fluctuating market and regulatory conditions. As plants age, their environmental performance may also degrade over time, posing increasing risks to the environment and public health.

What incinerators burn

The composition of municipal solid waste has changed over the past 50 years. Synthetic materials such as plastics have increased, while biogenic, compostable materials such as paper and yard trimmings have decreased.

Plastics are particularly problematic for waste handling because they are petroleum-based, nonbiogenic materials. They are difficult to decompose and release harmful pollutants such as dioxins and heavy metals when they are incinerated.

Waste management trends

Today, thanks to the evolution of waste handling options, a majority of the materials in municipal solid waste can be composted or recycled. This reduces impacts on the environment, including air, soil and water contamination and greenhouse gas emissions. As cities like New York and San Francisco adopt zero-waste policies that create incentives for diverting waste from landfills or incinerators, burning trash will increasingly become obsolete.

Many U.S. cities and states are adopting aggressive climate change and sustainability goals. Waste reduction and diversion will play a critical part in meeting these targets. The public is increasingly demanding more upstream solutions in the form of extended producer responsibility bills, plastic bans and less-toxic product redesign. There is also a growing movement for less-consumptive lifestyles that favors zero-waste goals.

Heavy polluters

Incinerators release many air pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides, particulate matter, lead, mercury, dioxins and furans. These substances are known to have serious public health effects, from increased cancer risk to respiratory illness, cardiac disease and reproductive, developmental and neurological problems. According to recent figures from the waste industry, incinerator plants emit more sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generated than power plants burning natural gas.

Research on direct health impacts of waste incineration in the United States is limited, but a handful of studies from Asia and Europe, where waste incinerators are prevalent, offer some insights. For example, a 2013 study in Italy analyzed the occurrence of miscarriages in women aged 15-49 years residing near seven incinerators in northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, and found that increased particulate emissions from the incinerators was associated with an increased risk of miscarriage.

A single incinerator may burn anywhere from a few hundred tons to several thousand tons of waste per day. Smaller incinerators typically have lower absolute emissions but can emit more hazardous pollutants for each ton of waste they burn. Plant emissions also can vary widely based on the heterogeneous composition of municipal waste, the age and type of emissions control equipment, and how well the plant is operated and maintained over time.

____________________

Ana Baptista is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management at The New School. Her essay was originally published in The Conversation.

Is burning trash a good way to handle it by Ana Baptista is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Jamaica Leads in Richard Branson-Backed Plan for a Caribbean Climate Revolution

by Masaō Ashtine and Tom Rogers

#science #environment #nature #politics #business #global #descriptive #currentevents #sharedvalues #reportinginformation #ethos #kairos #

After hurricanes Irma and Maria tore through the Caribbean in 2017, devastating dozens of islands – including billionaire Richard Branson’s private isle, Necker Island – Branson called for a “Caribbean Marshall Plan.”

He wanted world powers and global financial institutions to unite to protect the Caribbean against the effects of climate change.

That hasn’t happened. So Branson and his government partners from 27 Caribbean countries hope that his celebrity, connections and billions will prod local politicians and the financial community to act.

In August 2018, at a star-studded event at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, Branson helped to launch the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator, a US$1 billion effort to kickstart a green energy revolution in the region.

Its aims include convincing global financial institutions to fund ambitious climate mitigation efforts in the Caribbean, upgrading critical infrastructure across this vulnerable region.

Well before Branson’s arrival, however, some Caribbean countries were already working to break their dependence on fossil fuels.

 

Jamaica’s modern energy grid

Even prior to the debilitating 2017 hurricane season, polling showed that a strong majority of people in the Caribbean see climate change as a very serious threat.

The region – where we study renewable energy and climate change – is home to 16 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries.

That’s because the stronger and more frequent storms, extreme droughts and coastal flooding that result from rising global temperatures hit rural island nations hard.

Before Branson took up the cause, several Caribbean nations were upgrading their electric grids to improve energy independence and better prepare islands for the impacts of storms that knock out power.

Jamaica opened the largest wind farm in the English-speaking Caribbean in 2004. The Wigton Wind Farm now helps power over 55,000 surrounding homes, households that would formerly have used some 60,000 barrels of oil annually.

As part of its national goal to generate 50 percent of all its power using renewable sources, Jamaica now hopes to build offshore wind farms.

It has also enhanced the stability of its grid with a hybrid energy storage system that uses a flywheel and a battery to store solar and wind energy for use as needed, including after storms.

From 0 to 100

Dominica is another Caribbean pioneer in climate mitigation.

This tiny island already generates 28 percent of its electricity from wind, hydropower and other renewable sources. In contrast, 0.3 percent of electricity in Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean’s main oil exporter, is renewable.

In an effort to diversify its energy sources away from diesel, Dominica’s government has secured $30 million from the international Climate Investment Fund and $90 million from the United Kingdom to invest in geothermal energy.

The country is on track to reach 100 percent renewable energy by the end of this year. If it succeeds, it will join Iceland in entirely forgoing dirty oil, coal and gas energy.

Dominica may soon have some more local competition.

Barbados, in the eastern Caribbean, hopes to use 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2030 using a mix of wind, solar and biofuels derived from food waste and grass, which could benefit the island’s ailing agricultural sector.

 

Caribbean academics take the lead

Such policies are what Branson and others call “climate-smart.” While preparing countries for extreme weather, they create jobs and boost key industries. The result is an economy custom-built for the future.

This is already happening, albeit slowly, in many countries worldwide.

In the U.S., wind and solar are already financially competitive with traditional coal power in many places, particularly for new power generators. So, over time, as older facilities age out across the globe, these technologies are being replaced with modern energy systems.

As in other places, the process of moving more Caribbean countries off fossil fuels requires mustering the political will and financial means needed to transform a nation’s entire grid.

For over a century, governments have created regulatory systems and policies designed around imported fossil fuels. Replacing the archaic tax incentives and regulations that discourage renewable energy development takes time, effort and money.

Doing so requires a detailed analysis of a country’s relationship with energy. How are homes, businesses, tourism, farms and transportation networks powered? Which energy alternative is best suited for each use? What resources are available?

In our observation, local academics played a strong role in getting policymakers in Jamaica, Barbados and Dominica to undertake these kinds of assessments.

University of the West Indies professor Michael Taylor founded the Climate Studies Group to help the region adapt to life with climate change.

Failure to prepare for future storms would mean “the destruction of ‘island life’ as we know it,” Taylor said.

It was an academic, too, who in 2014 first pushed Barbados to commit to shifting entirely over to clean energy.

Professor Olav Hohmeyer of Germany’s Flensburg University – who was then teaching at the University of the West Indies – told the recently formed Barbados Renewable Energy Association that the island had the natural resources necessary to become 100 percent renewable within 10 years.

The university and the energy association worked to convince Barbados’ electric utility, central bank, farmers and local policymakers that an island-wide energy transition was feasible – and strategic.

They also engaged the International Development Bank, which in 2016 published a detailed and generally positive assessment on renewable energy development in Barbados.

Barbados’ clean revolution

Politicians in Barbados were slower to come around, weighing the cost of green energy against other national development priorities.

Then came the 2017 hurricane season.

In May 2018, Mia Mottley of the leftist Labour Party was elected prime minister of Barbados with a bold sustainability pledge.

At the United Nations General Assembly later that year, Mottley declared that her country would be 100 percent renewable by 2030. And she insisted that the world must help Barbados and other island nations in their climate change fight.

Her Labour Party even envisages electrifying Barbados’ busy Bridgetown port, allowing the 500 cruise ships that dock each year to plug into battery-run power sources rather than operating on-board generators.

Three Caribbean countries are well on their way to becoming “climate smart.” With international support, the other 23 may get there, too.

____________________

Masaō Ashtine is a Lecturer in Alternative Energy, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. Tom Rogers is a Senior Lecturer in Renewable Energy & Energy Management, Coventry University. Their article was originally published in The Conversation.

Jamaica leads in Richard Branson-backedplan for a Caribbean climate revolution by Masaō Ashtine & Tom Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Mapping the US Counties where Traffic Air Pollution Hurts Children the Most

by Haneen Khreis

#health #science #climatechange #systemanalysis #research

In the U.S., over 6 million children had ongoing asthma in 2016. Globally, asthma kills around 1,000 people every day – and its prevalence is rising.

This condition has a high economic cost. Each year in the U.S., more than US$80 billion is lost because of asthma. This is mainly due to premature deaths, medical payments and missed work and school days. The burden is higher for families with asthmatic children, who, on average, spend $1,700 more on health care than families with healthy children.

One major environmental factor that might contribute to the development of asthma is air pollution from traffic. In our study, published on April 3, our team mapped where in the U.S. children are most at risk for developing asthma from this type of pollution.

Traffic and asthma

Asthma is likely the most common chronic disease in childhood, according to the World Health Organization.

Asthma presents as episodes of wheezing, coughing and shortness of breath due to the reversible, or partially reversible, obstruction of airflow. Six in 10 of children with asthma worldwide had a form of persistent asthma, meaning that either they were on long-term medication or their condition could not be controlled even with medication.

Traffic pollution contains a mixture of harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, benzene and sulfur. These pollutants are known to harm health in many ways, causing a number of cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological diseases.

One 2013 review suggested that long-term exposure to common traffic-related air pollutants is linked to the development of asthma in children and adults.

A much larger meta-analysis in 2017, which focused on children and included more recently published studies, found consistent connections between this type of pollution and childhood asthma development. The researchers concluded that there is now sufficient evidence showing a relationship between this type of pollution and the onset of childhood asthma.

Studies from the nonprofit research group Health Effects Institute and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have concluded along these lines.

Mapping the problem

Despite this emerging evidence, the burden of childhood asthma due to traffic-related air pollution is poorly documented. Very few studies explore the geographic and spatial variations.

My research team wanted to quantify the connection between exposure to traffic pollution and the onset of childhood asthma across 48 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. We also wanted to make these data open to the public.

In our analysis, we looked at 70 million kids and conducted all calculations at the census block level, the smallest available geographical unit for census data. We collaborated with researchers from the University of Washington, who modeled the concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, a strong sign of traffic-related air pollution, using satellite imagery combined with environmental ground monitoring data.

We then took data extracted from surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimating childhood asthma incidence in the U.S. Alongside data from our air pollution models, we used these data to estimate the number of childhood asthma cases caused by exposure to traffic pollution.

We then created a first-of-its-kind, county-by-county interactive heat map and city-by-city table detailing the distribution of childhood asthma due to nitrogen dioxide across the U.S. in both 2000 and 2010. Each county is represented, and users can explore the data to see the findings for a particular county.

Screenshot from interactive map. CC BY

 

A win for public health

Our analysis found that childhood asthma cases attributable to traffic pollution across the U.S. decreased, on average, by 33% between 2000 and 2010. In 2000, we estimated that 209,100 childhood asthma cases could be attributed to traffic pollution, while this number dropped to 141,900 cases in 2010. That’s a major win for public health.

What caused the decline in traffic-related asthma cases? There may be multiple causes, including more fuel-efficient vehicles, more stringent regulation on nitrogen oxide emissions and, potentially, reductions in total vehicle miles traveled due to the recession.

Despite this encouraging decrease in air pollution and its associated health burden, there were 141,900 childhood asthma cases due to traffic-related air pollution in the U.S. That’s 18% of all childhood asthma cases.

Moreover, we found that children living in urban areas had twice the percentage of asthma cases attributable to nitrogen dioxide exposures as compared to children living in rural areas.

Our estimates underline an urgent need to reduce children’s exposure to air pollution. We hope that our analyses and heat maps will better inform policymakers, transportation agencies, medical associations and anyone else interested in learning more about the burden of childhood asthma due to air pollution.

_____________________

Haneen Khreis is an Assistant Research Professor at Texas A&M University with an interest in the health impacts of transport planning and policy. Her article is reprinted from The Conversation.

Mapping the US counties where traffic air pollution hurts children the most by Haneen Khreis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Mushrooms: “Nature’s Greatest Decomposers”

by Deonna Anderson

At the Española Healing Foods Oasis in Española, New Mexico, Pueblo dryland farming techniques are on display in a downtown public park. The garden, designed and planted by the Indigenous-led organization Tewa Women United, demonstrates how food and medicine can be grown in an environment that receives just 11 inches of rain per year. And at a nearby community garden, which the organization helped operate in the past, Pueblo members and locals grow fruit and vegetables.

The garden projects are part of the organization’s efforts to grow foods and herbs for people in the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos, as well as locals in the wider Española Valley, using traditional methods. But there’s a problem: The soils at these gardens are being exposed to contaminants. Tewa Women United hopes oyster mushrooms will clean them up.

At the community garden, a 2015 study found levels of contaminants high enough to threaten human health. Similarly toxic levels of these or other contaminants were not found at the Foods Oasis, though petroleum from a nearby parking lot percolates into the soil there when it rains. So far, tests of petroleum at that site have shown levels within state standards, but Beata Tsosie-Peña of the Santa Clara Pueblo and program coordinator at Tewa Women United said that the organization’s standards are stricter than the state’s. People from local Pueblos consume food and herbs from the Oasis, she said.

Tsosie-Peña added that community elders experience disease, illness, and miscarriage as a result of pollution in the area.

“We’re not disconnected from our lifeways and rootedness in our land base, tradition, and culture,” she said, adding that “living off the land and having that intimate relationship … does put us at risk for more exposure to contaminants.”

The problem is bigger than soil toxins at these gardens. At nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, hexavalent chromium, a heavy metal and known carcinogen, is seeping into the water supply.

Hexavalent chromium is a byproduct of the lab’s work to design nuclear weapons. The Department of Energy lab at Los Alamos was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project. This location was selected for its isolation. Yet Pueblo people lived there at the time and still inhabit the land.

The risk of toxic exposure in their community has led Tewa Women United to explore methods to clean up the soils. They’ve begun by experimenting with mushrooms at the Healing Foods Oasis and the nearby community garden site.

Mycologist Peter McCoy explains that in a process called mycoremediation, mushrooms have the ability to remove chemicals from soil—and heavy metals from water—through their mycelium.

“They’re sort of nature’s greatest decomposers, disassemblers, by far better than and more powerful than bacteria, animals, and plants,” McCoy said. “They break all kinds of stuff down.”

Mushrooms have helped remove petroleum from soil everywhere from Orleans, California, where they cleaned up a small motor-oil-and-diesel-fuel spill at a community center, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where they’re being used to clean up the largest land-based oil spill in history.

In April 2018, Tewa Women United buried bricks inoculated with oyster mushroom mycelium at the Foods Oasis and community garden.

While the organization doesn’t have funding for formal scientific testing, it is seeking out money to run pilot studies on its own. They plan to check the soil later this spring to see whether the mycelium has been spreading underneath the surface.

“It has been proven already what the mycelium can do,” Tsosie-Peña says, referring to other examples around the world. “So we are moving forward with inoculating all our garden sites as a proactive measure … but recognize the need to also have scientific backing [provided by] before and after sampling to gain support for widespread implementation.”

The organization has also asked Los Alamos to explore mycroremediation as a method to clean up the hexavalent chromium on its property. Communities for Clean Water, a coalition of environmental and indigenous advocacy organizations including Tewa Women United, advocated in public testimony at a hearing in November that the laboratory use mycoremediation to clean up the heavy metals. The hearing was for a groundwater cleanup permit originally issued in 2015. That permit was issued to Los Alamos by the New Mexico Environment Department without a public hearing, but after the coalition pushed back, it granted the one in November. But in March, the hearing officer’s report determined the permit would continue as originally issued in 2015, as “current water treatment methods are sufficient to meet and exceed the applicable groundwater and drinking water standards.”

Tsosie-Peña said the decision was disappointing because most of the recommendations—including the use of mycoremediation—that came from more than six hours of public comments were not reflected in the report.

The New Mexico Environment Department Ground Water Quality Bureau says it can’t consider mycoremediation in the proceedings related to this particular discharge permit. According to Bureau Chief Michelle Hunter, the activity that Los Alamos completes with this permit is just an intermediate cleanup action in which the lab is authorized to treat and release groundwater on its property.

Hunter explained that the remediation process will start after “all these interim measures have been implemented” and that a different bureau—the Hazardous Waste Bureau—will handle that process.

At that point, Los Alamos and the Hazardous Waste Bureau will choose the remediation technology.

Los Alamos has piloted a couple of remediation strategies, she said, including one that injected molasses into the water and another that used sodium dithionite. If the coalition wants mycoremediation to be considered, they’ll have to advocate for it to get evaluated in the remediation process that the Hazardous Waste Bureau will lead.

For now, Tewa Women United is doing what it can to clean up soils at the community gardens and Foods Oasis and plans to bury more mushroom-inoculated bricks in the community garden sites soon.

Tsosie-Peña said her organization is also working with the Communities for Clean Water Coalition to secure resources and collaborators to implement two pilot projects. One is on Los Alamos property, and another is in local communities downwind from the lab.

She said that while the coalition didn’t get their preferred outcome with the groundwater permit, she hopes they can advocate for mycoremediation in other, separate, work they are doing with Los Alamos on stormwater permitting.

“I think the mainstream view is that these places have been lost to us because they’re contaminated,” Tsosie-Peña said. “But to me, it’s like you wouldn’t just abandon your sick grandmother in the hospital to suffer alone.

“That’s how we feel about these places. They’re sick. They need healing. They need our love and attention more than ever.”

____________________

Deonna Anderson is a Bay Area-based reporter and serves as the Surdna Reporting Fellow for YES! Magazine, where she reports on social issues and solutions having to do with housing, food, race, and equity. Her essay originally appeared in YES!

Mushrooms: “Nature’s Greatest Decomposers” by Deonna Anderson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Seed Libraries Fight for the Right to Share

by Christopher D. Cook

#reportinginformation, #sharedvalues, #kairos, #ethos, #logos, #pathos, #descriptive, #currentevents, #seeds #intellectualproperty

It’s easy to take seeds for granted. Tiny dry pods hidden in packets and sacks, they make a brief appearance as gardeners and farmers collect them for future planting then later drop them into soil. They are not “what’s for dinner,” yet without them there would be no dinner. Seeds are the forgotten heroes of food—and of life itself.

Sharing these wellsprings of sustenance may sound innocuous enough, yet this increasingly popular exchange—and wider seed access—is up against a host of legal and economic obstacles. The players in this surreal saga, wherein the mere sharing of seeds is under attack, range from agriculture officials interpreting seed laws, to powerful corporations expanding their proprietary and market control.

Seed libraries—a type of agricultural commons where gardeners and farmers can borrow and share seed varieties, enriching their biodiversity and nutrition—have sprouted up across the U.S. in recent years, as more Americans seek connection to food and the land. This new variety of seed sharing has blossomed from just a dozen libraries in 2010 to more than 300 today. The sharing of seeds “represents embedded knowledge that we’ve collected over 10,000 years,” says Jamie Harvie, executive director of the Institute for a Sustainable Future, based in Duluth, Minnesota. “Healthy resilient communities are characterized not by how we control other people, and more about valuing relationships.”

As Harvie suggests, seed libraries offer a profound alternative to the corporate takeover of seeds, which has reached frightful proportions: according to the non-profit ETC Group, just three firms control more than half of the worldwide seed business (more than doubling their 22% share in 1996), while the top ten corporations now occupy 76 percent of the global market. Monsanto alone has 26 percent of the world’s seed market, with Du Pont and Syngenta not far behind.

A 2013 report by ETC Group shows the startling scope of the industry’s market power, across the panorama of seeds, agrochemicals, and genetics: Four firms control 58.2% of seeds; 61.9% of agrochemicals; 24.3% of fertilizers; 53.4% of animal pharmaceuticals; and, in livestock genetics, 97% of poultry and two-thirds of swine and cattle research.

Kristina Hubbard, communications director for the Organic Seed Alliance, sees a direct connection between corporate control and the seed-sharing movement. “I think community-based projects like seed libraries are at least in part a direct response to concerns people have about who controls our seed,” explains Hubbard. “It’s a necessary response, as seed industry consolidation continues and is increasing the vulnerability of our seed and food systems. We need more decision makers in the form of seed stewards, and more resiliency in our seed and food systems.”

 

Seed Libraries Rising

“Love the earth around you,” urges Betsy Goodman, a 27-year-old farmer in Western Iowa, where “most of the landscape is covered in uniform rows of corn and soybeans.” Working on an 11-acre organic farm that sprouts 140 varieties of tomatoes and 60 varieties of peppers, among other crops, Goodman has become something of a seed evangelist. In 2012, she launched the Common Soil Seed Library, just across the Missouri River in nearby Omaha, Nebraska—enabling area gardeners and farmers to borrow some 5,000 seed packets (112 different varieties) to date.

“It didn’t make sense to me that no one was perpetuating the cycle of seed and life,” says Goodman. “People have this idea that you put a seed in the ground, harvest your food, and let it die.” Goodman says she is working to perpetuate life. “The basis of our whole food system comes from the seed,” she says. “I think people are not generally conscious of how grateful we should be for our food diversity and wealth.”

Goodman sees the seed library as an essential reclaiming of farming traditions and local food security. “I want farmers to go back to saving seeds. It’s our responsibility to uphold our food system. It takes everybody.” But, she says, many farmers remain isolated and unaware of the seed-sharing movement. “The consciousness around this is not there yet. I haven’t really heard from farmers yet…The farmers buy their seed each year from Monsanto and Syngenta, this huge industrial system that’s very much in control of this state and surrounding states.” Farmers, she adds, “rely on these companies to buy their corn, they are very tied into these companies, and can’t even feed themselves off of the food they’re growing.”

Motivated by similar concerns, the Wisconsin Seed Savers Alliance has helped germinate six seed libraries (with three more on the way this spring) across five counties in the state’s economically isolated northeast, along the shores of Lake Superior.

“A lot of food grown here is shipped away,” says Alliance director Tessah Wickus. She explains that seed libraries are about “sharing the burden of growing food and making sure we all have something nutritious…We don’t have a whole lot of income sources, our schools are in the system for hot lunch programs, and we have a high poverty rate. One of the concerns here is food security and expanding local foods.”

While small in scale, Wisconsin’s seed library alliance has tapped a well of interest among new farmers and old, says Wickus, who is 25. “Sharing seeds is part of helping the next generation of farmers…[T]his is an integral part of how to survive and sustain yourself, how to pass along knowledge from one generation to another. People have a hunger to know where their food comes from, something we’ve lost.”

About 200 miles westward, on the White Earth Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, a new seed library offers varieties of sunflower, bean, corn and other seeds to residents—many of whom are poor and seeking a reconnection to indigenous food and farming. Most of the money here “goes off the reservation,” says Zachary Paige, farm manager at the White Earth Land Recovery Project. “This is one way to get the economy back on the reservation, and save money for food, instead of buying seeds from catalogs,” he says, while also “closing that loop in producing food.”

Paige (who is not Native American) helped start the White Earth Seed Library two years ago, and is working with local college and school garden projects to cultivate traditional seed varieties. He points to an indigenous tradition of growing and sharing food, and a revival of highly nutritious pre-Columbus crops, such as Bear Island Corn. Sharing seeds fits into a larger goal on the reservation of “trying to eat healthier and relieve diabetes.”

Seed-Sharing Crackdown

But all this seed-sharing love is butting up against some prodigious economic and regulatory challenges. As the libraries spread across the US, they are catching scrutiny from agriculture officials in states such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Iowa, who express concerns about unlabeled seed packets, and the spreading of contaminated seeds and noxious or invasive species.

One flashpoint in this battle is a small seed library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, which ran into a regulatory dispute with the state’s department of agriculture. Last June, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture informed an employee of the Joseph T. Simpson Public Library that its seed library ran afoul of state seed laws and would have to shut down or follow exorbitant testing and labeling rules intended for commercial seed enterprises. County Commissioner Barbara Cross raised the specter of terrorism, telling local media, “Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario,” she said. “Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an overwhelming challenge…so you’ve got agri-tourism on one side and agri-terrorism on the other.”

The library was forced to limit its sharing, holding a special seed swapping event instead. As Mechanicsburg seed librarian Rebecca Swanger explained to media at the time, “We can only have current-year seeds, which means 2014, and they have to be store-purchased because those seeds have gone through purity and germination rate testing. People can’t donate their own seeds because we can’t test them as required by the Seed Act.”

While the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) insists that laws regulating large commercial seed companies do not apply to seed libraries, “other states are now considering adopting Pennsylvania’s seed protocol,” Shareable reported—potentially stopping the seed library movement in its tracks.

But Pennsylvania and some other states “have misapplied the law entirely,” says Neil Thapar, staff attorney at SELC, which is spearheading a national seed library campaign called Save Seed Sharing. Pennsylvania’s Seed Act, he says, “does not actually authorize the state agriculture department to regulate noncommercial seed sharing through seed libraries.”

Thapar argues that applying state seed laws to the libraries is “inappropriate because it violates the original spirit and intent of these laws. Seed laws were created solely as consumer protection laws to protect farmers from unscrupulous seed companies in the marketplace.” In contrast, seed sharing takes place outside of markets, as a “noncommercial activity in community.”

Minnesota’s budding seed library movement has encountered similar resistance. Last September, the state’s department of agriculture (MDA) informed the Duluth Seed Library that it was in violation of state seed laws that prohibit transferring ownership of seeds without comprehensive testing. Harvie, who helped organize the library effort in Duluth, recalls the crackdown “really shocked people…it seemed like an egregious overreach.”

Harvie says the Department of Agriculture enforcements nationally are galvanizing people to support seed libraries. “What people are asking is, who’s being hurt,” he says. “Nobody is being hurt. The only one anyone can imagine being hurt is the seed industry.”

Was the seed industry behind the MDA’s actions? Harvie does not suspect a conspiracy, but he notes, “There had to be some pressure, the [MDA] has plenty of other things to do. Perhaps the MDA knew that by purposefully enforcing the law, it would draw out support for saving.”

Minnesota’s Seed Program Advisory Group, which advises the MDA on state seed laws, meets three times a year and publishes no records of its meetings. Its members include major state commodity groups such as the Minnesota Corn Growers Association, Soybean Growers Association, and the Minnesota Crop Improvement Association.

When the advisory group met last December, Harvie recalls, “I think the Department of Agriculture was excited for us to be at the meeting. It provided them with some community voice,” he says, “when too often it is only industry that can afford the time and expense of attending meetings. The lesson is, the community has to stand up and be present.”

With nationwide challenges to seed libraries, activists worry about a chilling effect on this nascent and increasingly popular form of seed-sharing. In Omaha, Nebraska, the community “has responded really well and been very supportive” of Common Soil’s initiative, says Goodman. “We’re not being attacked, we are being supported,” she says, by gardeners and lawmakers interested in putting the libraries on more solid legal ground. But, she adds, “I was approached by others across Nebraska who wanted to open seed libraries, but they were afraid they would put all this work in and get shut down.”

It remains unclear whether the seed industry has played any role in promoting the enforcement push, but this powerful agribusiness sector is vigilant about expanding its control over seeds. As first reported by MintPress News this January, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is peddling its “Pre-Emption of Local Agricultural Laws Act”—a law providing “exclusive regulatory power over agricultural seed, flower seed and vegetable seed and products of agriculture seed, flower seed and vegetable seed to the state.” Despite the conservative mantra of “local control,” ALEC’s measure would prohibit local governments from enacting or enforcing measures to “inhibit or prevent the production or use of agricultural seed, flower seed or vegetable seed or products.”

Meanwhile, the American Seed Trade Association advocates for “Strong intellectual property protection,” to keep investment dollars flowing, and to “add value to agriculture and society through new products. Any state legislation that could undermine this simple principle is vigorously opposed.”

Asked for its stance on seed libraries, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) stated, “We have not received any formal complaints of mislabeled seed being distributed in interstate commerce through these programs (seed libraries).” The Federal Seed Act (FSA) governs “truthful labeling of agricultural and vegetable seed shipped in interstate commerce,” the agency said, adding, “It remains to be seen if any of the seed being obtained from these libraries will make it into interstate commerce.” Unless the seeds are shipped across state lines, or “determined to be a variety protected” under the federal Seed Act, the FSA “has no jurisdiction over this seed. Individual States will need to establish internal methods of dealing with labeling and possible mislabeling of the seed packets.”

Saving the Libraries

As state agriculture agencies consider whether to curtail seed libraries, legislative efforts are underway in Nebraska, Minnesota, and other states, to protect them. The Community Gardens Act [pdf] currently moving through the Nebraska legislature would exempt seed libraries from state laws governing seed labeling and testing. In December 2014, the city council of Duluth, Minnesota passed a resolution supporting seed sharing “without legal barriers of labeling fees and germination testing.”

Perhaps more significantly, the Duluth resolution advocated reforming the Minnesota Seed Law to “support the sharing of seeds by individuals and through seed libraries,” by exempting these forms of sharing from the law’s labeling, testing, and permitting requirements. After one reform measure was withdrawn from the Minnesota legislature, activists are gearing up for another legislative push soon.

In coming months, seed-sharing advocates can expect legislative battles across the US—some seeking to expand libraries’ sharing rights, and others limiting the exchange. Meanwhile, agribusiness continues to widen its economic and legal control over the world’s seed supply. “Seed sharing is an interactive and vibrant contrast to the extractive marketplace,” says Harvie. The battle over seed libraries and sharing represents “a clash of worldviews that just don’t reconcile.”

Despite the challenges, Goodman remains buoyant about the seed library movement. “It’s natural for companies to try to get power over this, but it’s our responsibility to push back and establish our freedom,” she says. “We are losing huge chunks of our food system, and it’s our responsibility to reclaim it. We have to be the ones to do it.”

____________________

Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning journalist and author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis. This essay originally appeared in Shareable.

“Seed Libraries Fight for the Right to Share” by Christopher D. Cook is reprinted from On the Commons and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Wastewater Is an Asset – It Contains Nutrients, Energy and Precious Metals, and Scientists Are Learning How to Recover Them

by Yalin Li

#science #environment #research

Aeration tanks at the Oaks wastewater treatment plant in New Providence, Penn. Montgomery

County Planning Commission, CC BY-SA

Most people think as little as possible about the wastewater that is produced daily from their showers, bathtubs, sinks, dishwashers and toilets. But with the right techniques, it can become a valuable resource.

On average, every Americans uses about 60 gallons of water per day for purposes that include flushing toilets, showering and doing laundry. This figure can easily double if outdoor uses, such as watering lawns and filling swimming pools, are also included.

Most of the used water will eventually become wastewater that must be treated before it can be discharged into nature. And that treatment uses a lot of energy. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, water and wastewater facilities account for more than a third of municipal energy budgets.

My research focuses on recovering resources from wastewater. This process is difficult because wastewater contains many different types of contaminants. But researchers in our fields are exploring many creative ways to make valuable products from them.

 

Energy from organic materials

Diehard wastewater engineers understand the value of wastewater, which they view as an asset rather than a waste. That’s why some of them call it “used water” instead, and refer to what most people call wastewater treatment plants as water resource recovery facilities.

In fact, wastewater can contain more than three times the amount of energy needed to treat it. One simple and mature technique for recovering part of this energy is anaerobic digestion, a natural process in which microorganisms feed on grease and other organic materials in wastewater and produce biogas, just as yeast can eat up barley and spit out beer. Biogas contains roughly 50 percent methane, which can be used as a renewable fuel for boilers, furnaces and heating systems or to turn turbines and generate electricity.

Inside these anaerobic ‘egg’ digesters at the Deer Island Treatment Plant on Boston Harbor, microbes break down sewage sludge and scum into methane gas, carbon dioxide, water and organic solids that are processed into fertilizer. Frank Hebbert/Wikimedia, CC BY

More advanced techniques, such as hydrothermal processes, take sewage sludge – the solids removed from wastewater during treatment – and convert it into biobased fuels that can be used to replace gasoline and diesel fuel. This process is currently at the demonstration stage.

In additional to sewage sludge, many researchers – including me – are very interested in microalgae. Microalgae are promising feedstocks for biofuels, and some of them can grow in wastewater. My colleagues and I have designed hydrothermal systems to turn wastewater-grown microalgae into biofuels. They are still being tested in the lab, but we hope to scale them up in the near future.

 

Mining nutrients from wastewater

Wastewater also contains nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which are essential elements that plants need to grow. In current wastewater treatment processes, we use energy to convert ammonia in the wastewater, which comes mostly from urine, into nitrogen gas. However, industries then use large quantities of natural gas to convert nitrogen gas back into ammonia, predominantly for producing fertilizer, through the Haber-Bosch process.

Clearly, it would be much more efficient to directly extract the ammonia from wastewater without converting it. One way is to use urine-diverting toilets, which already are commercially available, to separate urine from other sources of wastewater. Then the collected urine could be used as fertilizer after sanitizing it to remove pathogens.

Sanitized urine also contains other nutrients like phosphorus and potassium. The Rich Earth Institute, a Vermont-based nonprofit supported by federal agencies and foundations, is researching ways to turn human urine into fertilizer. The institute is testing harvested urine on real crops, and has found that it works effectively.

Using pasteurized urine as fertilizer reduces waste and resource extraction. Photo still from “Project Recycles Human Urine as Fertilizer” by VOA News, Public Domain.

Alternatively, we can recover these nutrients as struvite, or magnesium ammonium phosphate, a mineral that contains magnesium, nitrogen and phosphorus. Struvite can naturally form during wastewater treatment processes, but tends to deposit in tanks and pipes and will damage the equipment if left unattended. By controlling the formation of struvite, it can be recovered in separate reactors.

Researchers have tested recovered struvite on crops in laboratories and achieved yields comparable to commercial fertilizers. The technique is still maturing, but companies are developing commercial versions for wastewater treatment plants.

 

More possibilities

Want more valuable stuff? Wastewater is literally a gold mine. It contains metals valued up to millions of U.S. dollars per year. These metals are often toxic to aquatic life, so they need to be removed. But conventional removal technologies require a lot of energy and produce toxic sludge.

Researchers are developing new ways to remove and reuse these metals, including membrane systems that can selectively remove precious metals from water and biosystems that use microorganisms to recover them. These techniques are at a very early stage and it is not clear yet whether they will make economic sense, but they have the potential to make wastewater more valuable.

In addition, wastewater is generally warmer than natural water supplies, especially in the winter, so it can serve as a heat source. This technique is well-established and is not limited to commercial scale. You can install drain-water heat recovery systems at home to lower your energy bill.

To me, this is just a beginning. With proper techniques, “wastewater” can offer us much more – and I very much look forward to the day when there is no “wastewater,” just “used water.”

____________________

Yalin Li is a Ph.D. Candidate/Research Assistant, Colorado School of Mines and also a student researcher in ReNUWIt She received her master’s degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and bachelor’s degree from Tongji University (China), both in environmental engineering. Her research focuses on resource recovery from wastewater. This essay was originally published in On the Commons.

Wastewater is an asset – it contains nutrients, energy and precious metals, and scientists are learning how to recover them by Yalin Li is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Why Women From Asia Are Confronting U.S. Fracking: Oil Extraction Equals Plastic Production

by Isabelle Morrison

#environment #global #health #policy #nature #systemanalysis #science

Heaps of plastic waste cover the shores of Manila Bay in the Philippines. Myrna Dominguez remembers when an abundance of fish inhabited its waters—locals would catch enough to feed their families and sell at the market. Today, she says, they are catching more plastic than fish.

“We’re very afraid that if this is not addressed, the bay, which 100,000 small fishers rely on, will no longer be viable for them,” Dominguez says.

In May, Dominguez and Indian labor organizer Lakshmi Narayan visited communities in the U.S. that are affected by pollution from oil extraction and plastic production, to show the effects that these processes have on communities overseas. The “Stopping Plastic Where It Starts Tour,” organized by #Breakfreefromplastic and Earthworks, is part of a project that aims to reduce plastic consumption and production by raising awareness about the impacts of plastic production on the communities at either end of its supply chain.

Dominguez and Narayan, representing communities in Asia experiencing the effects of plastic pollution, visited places in the U.S. experiencing the impacts of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) oil and gas production—an industry that is producing the raw materials to build plastic.

Dominguez is the policy and advocacy adviser of the Asia Pacific Network on Food Sovereignty, which campaigns to protect the rights of small food producers such as fishers and farmers, and to preserve fishing grounds and cultural lands of indigenous communities.

Narayan is the co-founder of Solid Waste and Collection Handling, a cooperative of waste-pickers in Pune, India, who collect waste throughout the city and separate it into categories for proper disposal.

Both women represent groups from Asian countries that are dealing with the effects of plastic pollution—particularly plastic that is produced and distributed by U.S. companies.

“I’m hoping this tour will change American people’s views of how they live every day, and how it impacts poor countries like us,” Dominguez says. “If America gets a cold, the Philippines gets the flu. We’re very dependent on the U.S., so whatever happens here affects us too.”

The Philippines is the third largest ocean plastic polluter in the world—it also has the most persistent poverty rate in Southeast Asia. In 2017, the U.S. was the third largest plastic exporter in the world, exporting $6.8 billion worth of plastic items.

Single-use plastic products, such as straws and other utensils—and products packaged in plastic, including toiletries and food—are produced by transnational companies and marketed to people in places like the Philippines at low costs. The plastic waste from these products ends up in landfills or marine areas like Manila Bay.

Plastic manufacturers are not responsible for the disposal of their products, so the burden is placed on people in the Philippines, who do not have the resources to properly dispose of all the waste, Dominguez says.

“People have realized there’s no easy technological solution to the problem of ocean plastic waste, and the only way to stop ocean plastic is to stop plastic,” says Jennifer Krill. Krill is the executive director of Earthworks, an environmental and social justice organization dedicated to protecting communities and the environment from the impacts of mining and energy extraction.

#breakfreefromplastic activists in front of a petrochem facility in Pittsburgh. Photo courtesy of #breakfreefromplastic.

“If we were to somehow recover all that waste from the ocean, we would still have to put it in a landfill or in an incinerator, and there would be significant environmental impacts from those solutions. The better solution would be to not make so much of it to begin with.”

That’s why Dominguez and Narayan traveled to the U.S., where the women visited communities affected by fracking. In the U.S., a fracking boom is helping fuel plastic production worldwide by providing a necessary building block of plastic: ethane. Dominguez and Narayan visited communities experiencing the impacts of fracking in Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They also visited Washington D.C.

In 2017, the U.S. consumed around 1.2 million barrels of ethane per day.

In Texas, for example, a major fracking boom is underway. A new report by IHS Markit shows the Permian Basin in West Texas is expecting a surge in oil production—more than double by 2023—in large part because of fracking, which has made trapped oil and gas accessible.

Fracking involves pumping water, sand, and chemicals underground to release gas and oil from rock. The shale formations used for extracting oil and gas in the U.S. are high in ethane, which is wasted in the extraction process unless the industry has a way to bring it to market.

“Currently what we’re seeing is a major build-out of new petrochemical manufacturing in order for the industry to recover that waste ethane and convert it into plastic, most of which is also going to become waste, but along the way they’ll make a lot of money manufacturing it into plastic,” Krill says.

In 2017, the U.S. consumed around 1.2 million barrels of ethane per day, and exported around 180,000 barrels per day to countries overseas.

Earthworks—one of the organizations that organized the tour—has recently introduced a Community Empowerment Project to provide communities near oil and gas facilities with data on methane and ethane pollution from nearby oil and gas extraction sites by using an optical gas imaging camera that makes invisible ethane—and methane—pollution from these sites visible.

Not only does methane and ethane pollution contribute to climate change, but it also causes health issues for people who live near oil and gas facilities—in the U.S., that’s more than 17 million people.

Residents who live near these facilities have reported experiencing respiratory problems such as asthma and coughing, eye, nose, and throat irritation, headaches, nausea, dizziness, trouble sleeping, and fatigue.

“If we are going to stop plastic we need to stop plastic where it starts.”

The organization has been taking the camera to oil and gas wells, pipelines, and compressor stations to show government regulators and companies that the methane and ethane pollution problem is real. Gas imaging videos are available on Earthworks’ YouTube channel for citizens to use as evidence when urging regulators in their states to require operators clean up the gas waste.

“It hasn’t stopped pollution—it hasn’t been as effective as we’d like it to be yet,” Krill says about the project. But she hopes it will be. “The industry likes to say ‘There’s no pollution, we’re very clean,’ and with this video evidence it’s hard to deny that there’s a serious problem with oil and gas extraction.”

On a global scale, the #Breakfreefromplastic movement, made up of 1,000 organizations worldwide, has been focused on creating “zero-waste cities” in Malaysia, India, and the Philippines—teaching communities about separating organic from inorganic waste, composting, and recycling.

Narayan, who represents the waste-pickers who collect and separate waste in Pune, India, says the process of recycling plastics into reusable materials is so expensive that the waste is often not recyclable at all.

#Breakfreefromplastic also focuses on making the public aware of their consumption habits in hopes of reducing the use of one-use plastic products, and pushing for “corporate accountability,” says Jed Alegado, the Asia Pacific communications officer for #Breakfreefromplastic.

“Corporations that have the money to come up with these products should invest in more sustainable and ecological distribution systems for their products,” Alegado says. “They shouldn’t pass the burden to consumers and governments for the plastic waste they are creating.”

Growing up in the Philippines, Dominguez recalls using coconut shells as plates, and eating food with her bare hands—before large companies had convinced the world that plastic products are a necessity, she says.

Dominguez is optimistic that change can occur by educating and inspiring people to reduce their use of plastic products and become vocal about how the government handles waste.

“If we are going to stop plastic we need to stop plastic where it starts,” Krill says. “We can’t let greed get in the way of common sense and sustainability.”

____________________

Isabelle Morrison is a solutions reporting intern for YES! where this article was originally published.

Why Women From Asia Are Confronting U.S. Fracking: Oil Extraction Equals Plastic Production by Isabelle Morrison is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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88 Open Essays – A Reader for Students of Composition & Rhetoric, edited and compiled by Sarah Wangler & Tina Ulrich is licensed under CC BY 4.0