Views from Elsewhere 2017 lists my monthly picks from other sites since we launched in March 2017: around 100 short reads, with links to the original articles, blog posts, broadcasts or podcasts from more than 35 sources:
Aeon, Aesthetica Magazine, Anthropocene, BBC Radio, Cambria Publishing, Climate Outreach, The Committee on Climate Change, The Conversation, Creative Carbon Scotland, The Creativity Post, Cultural Anthropology, Daily Kos, Dark Mountain Project, Ecosophia, Edge Effects, Entitle, Environmental Research Web, Farnam Street, Future Earth, The Guardian, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, Integration and Implementation Insights, Language Making Nature, Minding Nature, The New York Times, The Observer, Politico, Public Books, Real Climate, Resilience, Running in the Anthropocene, Skeptical Science, The Story of Stuff, The Stratford Observer, Wild Culture, xkcd
Views from Elsewhere 2018, with the latest selections of good reads, can be found here.
NB: These posts appear in the order I discovered and read them (most recent at the top), rather than the original publication date.
December 2017
Writing at Entitle (18/12/17) Ed Thornton asks "Do mental states have their own ecology? ... Psychoanalysis can help us to make sense of the strange mix of emotional states that the looming presence of ecological catastrophe can elicit. Whether it be anxiety, denial, paranoia, guilt, hope, or despair, discussions of climate change are never without their psychological dimension. The problem of apathy is especially acute. Psychoanalysis offers us a set of theories designed to explore the origins of these strange neuroses. It also offers a toolbox of techniques devised to work through whatever we find ... [B]y concentrating on the fact that we are not directly conscious of our own desires, psychoanalysts pay close attention to the gap between what we seem to want and what really drives us. By exploring the contents of this gap, psychoanalytic techniques can show how behaviors that seem irrational on the surface might have their own, hidden logic. In short, psychoanalysis can help us to explore the madness of our situation ... The global circulation of desire, the circulation of capital, and the circulation of carbon-dioxide are intimately linked. As long as this is the case, the question of how our mental lives interact with our environment must be confronted." As many of us gather in Reading for the closing ceremony to the city's year-long innovative Festival of the Dark, BBC Radio 4's The Echo Chamber (17/12/17) broadcasts this 'total darkness' encounter between poet Paul Farley and visual artist Sam Winston. "Sam spent a week living in total darkness, recording the experience in a series of 'blind' drawings. He later invited three poets to undertake 'darkness residencies', asking them to write new work in response to the experience." You can listen to this programme on the BBC website and BBC iPlayer Radio, with Paul Farley visiting Sam's installation at the Southbank Centre to spend time in the dark himself, and to hear the resulting poems by Kayo Chingonyi, Emily Berry and George Szirtes. The Darkness Visible exhibition runs at the Southbank Centre in London until 25th March and there is an event at Whitechapel Gallery in London on 11th January - see our Events page. Writing at the Journal of Wild Culture (17/12/17), Judith Mueller - a college professor who "struggles to keep her students from falling prey to a despairing pessimism ... about current ecological crises" - discovers temporal complexity in an account of "time shelters", which might provide a livable alternative. "Dire times call for radical temporal recalibration. That is, how might we reframe the conversation about Time? The Anthropocene demands — or perhaps enables — this dwelling at once on at least two (multi-layered) temporal scales: 1) the temporality of a human lifetime, made up of various sub-temporalities (a childhood, a campaign, a bus ride, an undergraduate career, a pregnancy, a beloved dog, a summer, a clematis vine, a friendship) with the opportunities for action and meaning-making these human time-scales afford; and, 2) the deep timescale that can conceive a planetary history stretching long before and well beyond homo sapiens and the other creatures whose world we share in this moment, a vast temporality with lived sub-temporalities visible in rocky traces ... David Wood’s notion of “time shelters” might be useful here. In his book, Time After Time (2007), Wood engages with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, and accepts, without pessimism, the broad postmodern idea of the end of time. In doing so he exposes the rich, stratified, and non-linear textures of temporal complexity that characterize our world. A time shelter, as he conceives it, is an “economy” of temporal organization. In an entropic universe, living beings “are essentially negentropic”: resisting disorder and creating order “whether at the molecular level or that of information”, or that of a tidy room. Each organization comprises a time shelter." Writing for the British Medical Journal (7/12/17), Zosia Kmietowicz reports that doctors "are backing legal action against UK government ministers on the grounds they have not fulfilled their commitments to cutting carbon emissions in line with the Climate Change Act of 2008 and the Paris Agreement objective of limiting warming to 1.5°C or “well below” 2°C. In an open letter published in The BMJ, 18 health professionals, including The BMJ’s editor in chief Fiona Godlee, are supporting campaign group Plan B’s legal challenge to force the government to revise its 2050 carbon target, saying it is inconsistent with the Paris Agreement temperature objective."
Another interesting piece from the Conversation (29/11/17). Rachel Witherst set out to explore the environmental artworks in Norway’s Artscape Nordland collection – 36 permanent public sculptures installed in 35 of Nordland’s municipalities. "Objections to public artworks and 'environmental' art ... can be as diverse as the genre itself. But some themes recur. Most obviously, there are objections of taste, often based on the prejudice that contemporary art per se is a load of ludicrous charlatanry. These taste-based beefs often lurk behind 'economic' objections ('the money would be better spent on hospitals/schools/housing/roads' etcetera ...). There are ecological issues: will installations lead to increased foot and road traffic, trampled habitats, disturbed livestock, dumped litter, other kinds of damage? ... An infrequently mentioned but inevitable function of permanent public artworks, however interesting in themselves, is that they never simply enhance a site. They shut down possible ways of seeing, reading and inhabiting an environment, as well as adding new ones. The issue is whether what’s gained outweighs what is lost. I fretted that I’d find myself niggling at this effect of the sculptures – wishing I could swig the landscape neat, as it were, minus the contemporary art tonic." Join Rachel on her tour of these impressive works of art: a collection which quashes her doubts. An anthropologist, a geologist, a literary scholar, a palaeoecologist, and a radiocarbon dating expert walked into a bar... "Take a glass of whisky," the authors of this piece in the Conversation (8/12/17) advise, and who needs to be asked twice? Carina Fearnley, Lourdes López-Merino, Niamh Downing and Richard Irvine - members of an interdisciplinary research team investigating Deep Time in the everyday, remind us that the term “deep time” was coined in 1981 as a way of "highlighting the apparent insignificance of the span of human existence in the face of geological processes. Yet such scale is inherently difficult to conceive of. And so as societies face changing environments, with challenges of energy and food security, the short-term perspective is often politically and economically dominant. But this way of thinking is high risk. If we are to adequately respond and adapt to landscape change, we need think about time differently, take a more holistic view. As such, over the last year we have been exploring different ways in which we might understand how humans think about deep time, and how it shapes our behaviours ... Deep time, for all its vastness, becomes intimate when we trace it in things that are familiar to us ... Deep time is therefore visible in our daily lives, and if we look closely enough we can understand time through the material presence of objects. Take a glass of whisky." Then take another one and start reading. Quoting the poet William Blake - "May God us keep / From single vision and Newton’s sleep!" - John Michael Greer completes his two-part post at Ecosophia (6/12/17) with his understanding of 'nature spirits' via a 'four-fold' vision that Blake subscribed to. "Single vision - the shrill and dogmatic insistence that real knowledge can only come through the material senses, and must never be understood as anything but the random acts of dead matter and mindless energy in a dead and mindless cosmos - pervades contemporary industrial civilization. It’s because we’re so used to thinking in these terms that we’ve gotten so good at manipulating matter and energy, but it’s also because we’re so used to thinking in these terms that we’ve done such a dismal job of maintaining the balance of the living planet on which our own lives depend ... You and I, dear reader, are members of the animal kingdom. That means, among many other things, that our material bodies are more completely differentiated from their environment than the bodies of living things that belong to other kingdoms. That doesn’t mean that we’re entirely separate from our environments, not by a long shot; we constantly absorb things from our environments and release other things into our environments, and about ten per cent of our body weight is made up of microbes of various kinds, without which we can’t survive - but unless you use a microscope, it’s fairly easy to figure out where our bodies stop and the environment starts. That’s less true of other living things." Writing at his site Ecosophia (29/11/17), John Michael Greer often asks his readers what they'd like him to write on, and the most recent topic has been 'nature spirits.' "The mere act of mentioning the words 'nature spirits,' or any of their synonyms, calls up shrill prejudices in most people in today’s industrial societies. It’s indicative that when members of the current crop of evangelical atheists want to be just as nasty about other people’s religious beliefs as they possibly can, they refer to gods as 'sky fairies.' Against belief in gods, these same atheists deploy any number of arguments, and some of them - by no means all, or even most, but some - are serious philosophical challenges. Against belief in faeries and other nature spirits, they don’t even bother. Far beyond the bounds of devout evangelical atheism, the notion that there might be disembodied (or rather, as we’ll see, differently bodied) intelligent beings in the natural world, corresponding more or less to what’s described in traditional lore concerning faeries and nature spirits, is dismissed as too absurd to consider." And with that, he's off - on a two part article which is well worth a read whether you think you're firmly on the material plane, find yourself enquiring into the astral from time to time, or are happily - well, away with the faeries. Either way, it's an interesting enqiry into how we see the place of human beings - and being human - in the Anthropocene; and as Greer says, "the terror of finding out that we don’t own the planet is one of the things that has to be faced"... Inhabiting the Anthropocene (29/11/17) features a discussion by Peter Soppelsa of recent special papers in The Anthropocene Review focusing on the 'technosphere.' (See also 'Technosphere' in September's Views from Elsewhere). "The technosphere is defined as the totality of human artifice, the earth’s 'archaeological strata,' including landscapes, technologies, and material culture. For example, as Gabrielle Hecht and Pamila Gupta recently wrote, 'there’s now enough concrete on the planet to produce a 2mm thick, full-scale replica of Earth, and enough plastic to completely wrap that replica in cling film.' ... [T]his human-made sphere displays three important characteristics—autonomy from human action, global integration, and a systematic character. Thus, the term raises the question of whether the things that humans produce can take on a 'meta-ecological' role analogous to other spheres (biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, etc.) that are self-organizing, -preserving, and -replicating, while exerting a structuring or limiting effect on human activity ... And just as water is an important medium of interaction between the bio-, hydro-, and atmospheres, so material produced in the technosphere can have effects that feed back into the other spheres." Writing for Edge Effects (30/11/17), artist Nina Elder introduces images and notes on her encounters with erratics: rocks carved and carried by glaciers moving from one geological environment to another and dropped as the glacier melts. "An erratic signifies the time and place where the glacier originated - often hundreds of miles and hundreds of years distant. Erratics hold traces of the parent bedrock, the path that the glacier traveled, and the process of deposition. They are time travelers, treasure troves, reliquaries, and rubble. Encountering an erratic is akin to encountering a piece of sculpture, perched in a surprising location with an unstable or alien appearance. The material presence of an erratic is strange, an anomaly mismatched to its surroundings. It is often not clear how this solitary rock arrived. Erratics have a newness, a vulnerability, and a childlike awkwardness. They have an aura of meaning, promise and poetry that, for those of us who are not geologists, remains a mystery." One of her images is captioned, "Land feels like a verb out here," another contains a prose poem: "The poet writes about wildfire ash crossing oceans and coating glaciers. On the other side of the planet, the glaciologist discovers 8-million-year-old soot and silt. The cryospherologist toggles satellites in scientific orbit and sees a future with more fires and less ice. His poem settles into the pores and crevasses and gets caught in a cosmic wind. One scientist looks down from her satellite, the other looks up from her cold brittle instruments. There is a bridge of comprehension that has a poem in the middle."
November 2017
In an update on - and correction to - their recent reporting on the UK Parliament vote on the EU Withdrawal Bill, Andrew Griffin at the Independent (24/11/17) looks in more detail at how UK does (or does not) acknowledge the sentience of (non-human) animals, and what failing to carry over the relevant EU Lisbon Treaty protocol into UK law after Brexit might mean. "Animal rights campaigners, politicians and journalists are involved in an argument about whether the Government believes animals are sentient. But what’s the truth? The issue arose after a vote last week as part of the process of bringing EU legislation into UK law. Part of that process included a vote that, if passed, would have officially said that the UK recognises animals can be sentient.That amendment didn’t pass. And it’s from that event that the confusion and disputation of this week emerged." The article also mentions a written statement from Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, in which he explains the government's position. You can read that in full here. Rachael Ravesz, writing in the Independent (20/11/17), reports on British MPs decision in the first vote on the EU Withdrawal Bill "to reject the inclusion of animal sentience – the admission that animals feel emotion and pain – into the EU Withdrawal Bill. The move has been criticised by animal rights activists, who say the vote undermines environment secretary Michael Gove’s pledge to prioritise animal rights during Brexit. The majority of animal welfare legislation comes from the EU. The UK Government is tasked with adopting EU laws directly after March 2019 but has dismissed animal sentience." Animal sentience was incorporated into EU law in 2009 via the Lisbon Treaty, following years of campaigning by animal rights activists. The article quotes Richard Bowler, a wildlife photographer: "Science is showing more and more animal intelligence and emotions and yet our government has yet again ignored it. There can only be one reason to deny animal sentient status, and that is to exploit them." Anyone who agrees that the decision should be reversed can sign peritions from 38 Degrees or Change.org or others and/or email their MP; you can find your MP and their email address by entering your postcode at the Parliament website. Writing for Edge Effects (21/11/17), Stepha Velednitsky and Jared Wood give a highly readable precis of the origins of psychogeography and the Situationists in Paris in the late 1950s, who rejected the way that urban life has increasingly been reduced to 'a series of work and consumption routines'. This is a starting point for Atlas, a new "card game in which players explore urban places and map their experiences. Created by Jared Wood (a co-author of this essay) and Richie Rhombus in the spirit of psychogeographic games, Atlas takes players to places they would have never found on their own - and gets them lost in places they thought they knew ... Atlas is not easy. Instead, it intentionally complicates the players’ journeys through urban space in an effort to open up new ways of moving through and relating to cities ... Though the increasingly commodified cities in which we live look very different from mid-century Paris, the practice of psychogeography is more relevant now than ever before. Atlas encourages players to enter their own psychogeographic studies by making maps of their game, documenting not only the places they wander to, but the physical and psychological journeys of doing so. While these maps don’t help anyone get from point A to B, they do recall visceral memories of what it felt like to be somewhere—and why." Writing in the Conversation (15/11/17), Deirde McKay surveys some of the creative uses that artists around the world are finding in waste plastics. "Waste plastics contaminate our food, water and air. Many are calling for a global ban on single-use plastics because throwing them “away” often means into our river systems and then into the world’s oceans ... It’s suspected that much of the “recycling” shipped to Asia may be joining local waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This soupy collection of plastic debris is trapped in place by ocean currents, slowly breaking into ever-smaller pieces, but never breaking down. Covered by bacterial plaques, they are mistaken for food by fish. Ingested, they contaminate the food chain and, potentially, may even be disrupting the biophysical systems that keep our oceans stable, thus contributing to climate change. So we need to use far less plastic, re-use what we can, and dispose of what we must far more wisely. In facing this challenge, developed countries can learn from innovations in the less-developed world. People, globally, are innovating, creating new processes to use waste plastics and making new objects and art forms." In the concluding part of her post for Inhabiting the Anthropocene (25/10/17), Kyle Harper develops her theme that "To speak of an 'Anthropocene for pathogens' is to imagine the ways that human transformation of the environment has shaped the ecology and evolution of infectious microbes. In other words, it is to imagine the interrelated history of humans and our germs." Surveying how human habitats define germ habitats, how we transform the ecologies of hosts and vectors, and human health is a war on pathogenic microbes, she says that "In short, the old model of disease history is crumbling and nothing has yet replaced it, in part because the rise of genomic evidence is moving more quickly than the field can keep up. But, ultimately, the story of human pathogens will be one that requires us to imagine how humans have shaped their ecology and evolution. It will be a story that is temporally deep, global in scale, and sensitive to the importance of geography. Already we might try to catalogue some of the ways that human civilization has changed the rules of the game for infectious microbes." I'm grateful to ClimateCultures member Mark Nash-Williams for sharing this very interesting piece from Chris Winters at Resilience (3/11/17). It's an interview with Raj Patel, co-author, The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. The book describes how the 'cheapness' of our hidden social, ecological and economic infrastructure - nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives - drives our global economy and mindset, andventually forces the things we neglect (the 'externalities', in economists' jargon) to strike back in ways we are becoming very familiar with... It's a short interview and sounds like an excellent book. It calls for cultural re-imagination, a psychological shift to overcome "the bumper sticker problem that a number of people notice ... that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. When you ask folks to imagine what they want instead of this world? Blank stares all around. Yet, not far from here, you have Coast Salish communities that have profoundly interesting relationships with nature, relationships that can point the way to what a different world might be like. So let’s look at the salmon festival. It begins with the celebration of the first salmon caught swimming upstream. The festival runs for 10 days, during which no fishing is allowed. While the first salmon is prepared and eaten, all the other salmon go upstream and they spawn. And then you start fishing for salmon. But for 10 days, you don’t, and instead you celebrate the treaty that your people have with the salmon people ... To enter into a treaty with extra-human life rather than simply possess it involves a deep psychological reorientation. It’s an individual transformation of a relationship in the world and with nature, but also it’s a social one. If an individual asserted, “I’ve signed a treaty with salmon,” that’d be bonkers. … These transformations have to be collective and social."
October 2017
In a fascinating interview piece for Edge Effects ( 17/10/17), Elizabeth Hennessy speaks with Gregory Cushman, a professor of International Environmental History at the University of Kansas, about his history of the Anthropocene focused on humanity’s changing relationship to the Earth’s crust, the Lithosphere. "An old parable promises security to the man who builds his house on solid rock, but as Gregory Cushman observes, building a civilization based on the consumption of irreplaceable “rocks” is an unsustainable endeavor. Cushman, whose first book, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History, explored the rise of the industrial production of guano, nitrates, and phosphates in agricultural fertilizers, is now taking a broader look at ... humanist approaches to studying the lithosphere. Our conversation explores extractivism, the globalization of fossil fuel consumption, and what the changing human history with rocks can tell us about when the Anthropocene epoch began, who is implicated in it, and what needs to be done about it." You can listen to the interview or read the transcript. In this short post for Anthropocene magazine (20/10/17), Emma Bryce summarises recent research findings showing how "better global land stewardship - conserving and restoring wild habitats and practicing more sustainable farming - could get us more than one-third of the way to the Paris climate mitigation targets. Nature may not be the most sexy tool in the shed, but it has tremendous power to move the climate change needle ... For instance, carbon-sequestering peatlands, if undisturbed, can keep vast amounts of this greenhouse gas on lockdown. More sustainable fertilizer use on farms could reduce the amount of nitrous oxide leaching into the atmosphere, while improved animal feed can cut down on the huge quantities of methane that cows spew. To put a figure on this potential, the researchers modeled 20 options for improvement at the global-scale, which they labeled ‘Natural Climate Solutions’ (NCS). These included reforesting deforested land–as well as land that has been converted to livestock pasture–restoring peatland and wetland areas, improving livestock feed, and boosting conservation agriculture practices, like planting trees amid crops. They added constraints to the model that ensured the solutions aligned with necessary land requirements for food production. Based on that, they found that NCS could save a maximum 23.8 billion tons of CO2 equivalent annually. Then the researchers applied a financial constraint to the model, to ensure that land-use options would also be cost-effective. Under this scenario, the annual emissions savings were still over 11 billion tons, which could provide 37% of the mitigation needed to limit a temperature increase to 2° C." Some listening, rather than reading, for a change - an intriguing episode of BBC Radio Four's series Four Thought (19/10/17). Jay Owens argues that dust is a lot more interesting than we think, and we ought to pay more attention to it. From 100 tons of cosmic dust raining down on Earth every day, to Saharan sands fertilising the Amazon rainforests and Chinese soils blown to the Greenland ice sheet, what the dust in ice cores from there tell us about ancient climates and what can be discovered in house dust - 60% of which comes from outside, and creates an archive of pesticides and radionuclides in our carpets... "Jay has spent years researching dust, and produces a popular newsletter on the subject ... She shares some stories from the field of dust research that up until now have only been known to other 'dust people', as she calls her fellow dust researchers." Kyle Harper, writing for Inhabiting the Anthropocene (18/10/17), introduces the suggestion that human transformation of the global environment has long extended to the microorganisms that have flourished with our species' success - and cause widespread human suffering and mortality: viruses, bacteria and other disease-causing microbes. "In AD 166, the city of Rome was invaded by an unfamiliar enemy. Invisible to the naked eye, this enemy was more destructive than any the Romans had ever encountered in their long history. We cannot yet say with certainty what this microorganism was, although most historians strongly suspect that it was the debut of the smallpox virus, Variola major ... a disease characterized by a ghastly pustular rash wrapping the entire body, a drawn out course of infection, hemorrhagic cases, and high mortality. There are simply few pathogens that are capable of accomplishing what this germ did. Within a few years, the disease rampaged from Egypt to Britain, from the Danube to the Sahara ... How are we to understand a biological event of this magnitude, which might deserve to be considered history’s first true “pandemic”? The answer, I would suggest, takes us to the heart of what Michael Gillings and Ian Paulsen have called “the microbiology of the Anthropocene.” The Antonine Plague occurred at the intersection of human and natural factors. If the disease was indeed smallpox, the agent of the pestilence evolved, relatively recently, in Africa, from an ancestral rodent Orthopoxvirus, and entered the Roman Empire as an evolutionary newborn. It was carried into the empire on the trading networks that had grown up in the first centuries, connecting the lands lying around the Indian Ocean. The Red Sea was a major theater of Roman trade, bringing spices, silks, ivories, slaves, etc. into the empire, in massive quantities. This trading network, the scene of incipient globalization, also brought germs. The Antonine Plague, then, was the conjuncture of human transformation of the planet with random, evolutionary events far beyond human influence." In this short but useful reminder of the value of participatory research at the Integration and Impemantation Insights blog (19/10/17), Hilary Bradbury addresses how "Action researchers, often working in inter-disciplinary settings, hold in mind that technical, practical and emancipatory goals of action research require us to develop facility in communicating with two audiences: the ‘local’ practitioners and the ‘cosmopolitan’ community of scholars ... Generally speaking, action researchers ought to find ways to communicate with the local community first, using this as an opportunity for validating and disseminating local learning." Bradbury goes on to highlight that quality in research "develops from action research praxis of participation with practitioners; is guided by locals’ concerns for practical results; is inclusive of stakeholders’ ways of knowing, which means letting go the conventional over-emphasis of rational frameworks; helps to build capacity for ongoing change efforts; and, results from choosing to engage with those issues people might consider significant; from asking “how do we accomplish more good together?" Writing for the Conversation (27/9/17), Jack Ashby of the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL says of their new exhibition, "which we have called The Museum of Ordinary Animals, we want to highlight the boring beasts that have changed the world, including dogs, rats, cats, cows, chickens and mice. Ordinary animals are everywhere, and the ways they interact with our lives are endless and varied. We have invited them into our homes as pets; their role in our diets has changed us biologically; they are critical to modern medicine and they hold huge symbolic value in many cultures. These animals have had profound impacts on humanity and the natural world, and we have learned extraordinary things from them." He contrasts this to the "noticeable bias in what kinds of animals museums choose to display: on the whole, the huge, exotic, rare and extraordinary get more than their fair share of shelf-space. As a result, natural history museum galleries are not accurate reflections of the nature they might be thought to represent. Around 80% of described species are arthropods – the group that contains insects, crustaceans and arachnids; and around 80% of living individual animals are nematode worms." At Edge Effects (10/10/17), Amy Free offers a very interesting review of Ursual Heise's new book, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Heise "quickly identifies themes familiar to such [extinction] narratives: “decline,” “crisis,” “loss is inevitable,” and “one last stab at survival.” The stories are urgent and foreshadow tragedy, leaving all of us koala lovers, bee observers, and gardeners in a state of melancholy. “Melancholy,” Heise says, “can be considered an integral part of the environmentalist worldview.” How true! ... It can feel impossible to muster that bit of optimistic belief that humans could do right by other species. Heise asks readers to wonder along with her: …stories and images of decline go only so far. Is it possible to acknowledge the realities of large-scale species extinction and yet to move beyond the mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia to a more affirmative vision of our biological future? And she provides the answer. It is." Writing on the Committee on Climate Change blog (4/10/17) Kathyrn Brown highlights the new advice from Natural Capital Committee on what long-term goals are needed in the Government's forthcoming plan for the UK’s natural environment over the coming 25 years. "Climate change will exacerbate existing pressures on wildlife, water, soil health and habitats – so working out how this affects long-term goals (and how to measure success) is a huge challenge ... I love my garden. It’s a tiny plot on the edge of a 1960s new town, which my husband and I manage in our own small way for the benefit of our local wildlife. As a result of our efforts, we see over 20 different species of birds, plus frogs, bats, lizards and (my favourite) hedgehogs on a regular basis. We make specific choices with our garden to do our bit for local biodiversity and because the benefit we get – pure joy – far outweighs the effort we put in. The whole of the English landscape is similarly managed ... a result of centuries of individual choices, which is why it’s referred to as ‘semi-natural’. Given that we have no ‘purely natural state’ in England to aim for, what should our goals be for the natural environment, and how does climate change affect our ability to achieve them?" Martin Solan and others share results from new research in this post at Environmental Research Web (4/10/17): "A group of UK scientists, co-ordinated by the University of Southampton, has published extensive research into how industry and environmental change are affecting our seafloors ... Researchers from eight institutions and organisations have worked together to examine areas of sea or ocean located on the UK continental shelf to understand the sensitivity of these systems to human activities. The societal importance of these ecosystems extends beyond food production to include biodiversity, carbon cycling and storage, waste disposal, nutrient cycling, recreation and renewable energy. Martin Solan, lead principal investigator and Professor in Marine Ecology at the University of Southampton, comments: “... Human intervention, such as fishing, pollution and activities causing climate change are all affecting these finely balanced ecosystems. Collectively, our research provides us with a new perspective on how the seafloor is being modified, for better or for worse – but more research is now needed to understand the longer-term consequences of such change for the wider environment and for society at large.” This post by George Marshall at Climate Outreach (14/9/17) revisits the question of how (and when) to make the links between extreme weather events and underlying climate change. "Hurricanes Irma and Harvey were unprecedented in many ways. But of greatest interest to us, as people who have been fascinated by climate change communication, was that for the first time we heard climate scientists in the media making a confident (albeit hedged) connection between an extreme weather event and climate change. Recent breakthroughs in modelling have enabled scientists to attribute the role of climate change in an extreme weather event quickly and accurately. But this raises an important question: are people in Florida, Texas, the wider US and the Caribbean going to make that connection, or accept it when made by others? In short, will storms like Harvey and Irma increase public concern about climate change and generate increased demands for collective action?"
September 2017
In this thoughtful - and beautifully illustrated piece for the Guardian (30/9/17), Robert Macfarlane muses on findings that children aged eight and over are '“substantially better” at identifying Pokémon “species” than “organisms such as oak trees or badgers”: around 80% accuracy for Pokémon, but less than 50% for real species. For weasel read Weedle, for badger read Bulbasaur – and this was before the launch of Pokémon Go. The researchers published their paper in Science. Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. “Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),” they wrote, but they are presently “more inspired by synthetic subjects” than by “living creatures”. They pointed to evidence linking “loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it”. We need, the paper concluded, “to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation”, for “we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren”?' In a thought-provoking piece (13/9/17) for Politico, Helena Bottemiller Evich reports on how the work of Irakli Loladze, a mathematician with a passion for biology, has revealed a worrying trend in the nutritional value of crops as a direct result of increasing atmospheric CO2 levels. "It was already well documented that CO2 levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. 'Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,' Loladze said. 'We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.'" In this post (15/9/17) for the Guardian, poet Joanna Guthrie writes that "The Florida Keys are still closed until further notice. On the far side of the blockade that inhabitants of the lower Keys negotiate to return to their homes, the US One highway, a tarmac spine over the limestone vertebrae of the islands, makes its way 127 miles down to Key West, battered and torn. Key West, final south-easterly outpost of mainland North America and the self-styled “last resort”, is, still, four days after Hurricane Irma hit, almost completely out of contact with the outside world ... I know and love these islands well. I’m wondering what they did with the dolphins in the sea aquarium; how the evacuation of the mental health facilities went; whether the drive-through bank where I used to cash my pay cheque got wrecked; what it’s like in the Winn-Dixie supermarket right now, and in the Kmart, in the dark." In a short but fascinating summary of recent research, Sarah DeWeerdt writes (12/9/17) for Anthropocene that "Roughly one-quarter of global warming can be traced to carbon emissions from less than two-dozen companies, according to research published last week in Climatic Change. The analysis reflects an emerging idea that responsibility for climate change lies not just with the countries where past carbon emissions occurred but also the companies that profited from those emissions. It builds on a 2014 study that traced nearly two-thirds of all industrial carbon dioxide emissions between 1880 and 2010 to just 90 companies, including 83 fossil fuel producers and 7 cement manufacturers ... The researchers also calculated the effect of emissions since 1980, a period of robust public and scientific awareness of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change – in other words, a period during which the companies knew their products were harmful and might have taken action to reduce that harm. Instead, emissions (and companies’ efforts to obscure and deny their effects) have only accelerated. 'Strikingly, more than half of all emissions traced to carbon producers over the 1880-2010 period were produced since 1986,' the researchers write." In a thought-provoking piece (10/9/17) for Wild Culture, Craig Comstock looks at the 70+ years of nuclear standoff to consider how massive risks are normalised in a "world [that] is a set of rational games until it isn’t, until there’s an accident, a miscalculation, a system that gets out of hand ... We humans react to immediate threats, but are not very good at dealing with threats thought to be improbable (such as nuclear war) or far-off (climate change). Even if the event would be devastating, we hesitate to react if the probability seems extremely low. The age of nuclear weapons began in 1945 and thus has gone on for more than seventy years without a nuclear weapon being used against an enemy, at least after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The system of mutual threats seems to work, or has worked so far. These two dangers (nuclear war and climate change) share some characteristics. In each instance a powerful economic interest is involved: in the case of climate, the fossil fuel purveyors (and users), and in the case of the nuclear system, what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. Second, the danger is also largely hidden in each case: greenhouse gases are invisible, and the missiles are underground or under the sea. Third, the danger is so extreme as to be unimaginable to many: in the case of climate change, some scientists worry that it could even cause “near term human extinction,” and in the case of the nuclear system, the sudden killing of hundreds of millions (and the corresponding destruction of things). Fourth, our governing systems seem insufficient to the task. For example, the Paris Accord on climate change is insufficient (in terms of promises made), non-binding (if promises are not kept), and has been denounced as unnecessary by the current U.S. regime." In this piece (11/9/17) for the Guardian, Patrick Barkham reports on the current spate of urban tree felling,. He cites examples where campaigners have highlighted the value of the condemned trees (as far as this can be captured in financial calcluations of 'ecosystem services' *): "Chestnut Avenue [Wandswoth] is currently worth £2.6m, according to this method. The young trees that will replace it are estimated at £50,000-£100,000. Spending £45,000 to destroy a multimillion-pound community asset doesn’t stack up. In Sheffield’s long-running tree saga, independent professionals calculated that trees worth £66m have been cut down in the past five years. The ruination of this community asset is being orchestrated by a cash-strapped Labour council that sought salvation in a PFI contract with the infrastructure company Amey to rebuild its roads. Big trees are replaced by saplings, which are cheaper to maintain over 25 years of the contract but possess few of large trees’ beneficial effects – for example on flood alleviation and pollution. The devil is in the mostly hidden detail of the PFI contract. Campaigners have discovered that this contract permits a very limited range of engineering solutions for unruly trees. Pollarding a tree, for instance – the simplest way to rejuvenate an old tree or make it safe – is not a “free” option under the contract." *As Patrick himself notes, "Some environmentalists view such “ecosystem service” arguments as the great hope for saving a planet ruled by accountants. Others fear that such calculations are reductive, and underestimate “natural assets” – i-Tree valuations do not include less easily calculable tree benefits, such as the improved mental health of local people, or ecological diversity. Ultimately, nature will always be the loser in any cost-benefit crunch." Damien Carrington for the Guardian (6/9/17) brings a disturbing new link in the chain that is the Age of Unintended Consequences (aka the Age of Stupid): "Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries around the world, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the implications for health. Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analysed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian. Overall, 83% of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibres ... How microplastics end up in drinking water is for now a mystery, but the atmosphere is one obvious source, with fibres shed by the everyday wear and tear of clothes and carpets. Tumble dryers are another potential source, with almost 80% of US households having dryers that usually vent to the open air." Meanwhile, in more evidence of 'disturbia'... For the Conversation (5/9/17), Stephen Tuffnell writes about the reopening of a vast gold mine in Romania and the global pollution legacy of extracting gold and other metals by cyanidisation: "In nearly all metal mines, and some coal mines, acid drainage occurs because of the oxidation of iron ore found alongside precious mineral deposits. Uncovered by the mining process, the iron reacts with the air and releases sulphuric acid into the water. This process can last centuries. Spills from cyanidation waste are more short-lived, but more highly toxic than acid mine drainage occurring through iron oxidation. The ratio of waste to metal recovered in gold mining is vastly disproportionate: the Fimiston Super Pit, near the West Australian town of Kalgoorlie, and until recently the largest open cut mine in the world, has returned approximately 1,640 tonnes of gold since operations began there in 1989. But that’s only a small portion of the 15m tonnes of rock extracted per year. On a more personal scale, a single gold wedding ring generates 20 tonnes of waste." In this episode (31/8/17) of BBC Radio 4's Inside Science, Adam Rutherford introduces a five minute feature (starting 8:15 minutes into the programme) on how our technologies will endure - after a fashion - as fossils in the human Technosphere of the Anthropocene: "We know about extinct species from fossils in rocks. But in the future there will be techno-fossils too, evidence of our civilisation. Katie Kropshofer has been finding out from Professors Jan Zalasiewicz and Sarah Gabbot of the University of Leicester what we’re leaving for the hypothetical geologists of the future."
August 2017
"A disaster involving a hurricane cannot happen unless people, infrastructure and communities are vulnerable to it," Ilan Kelman writes in the Conversation (29/8/17). This neglects the impacts of such events on wildlife and the more-than-human world in general - and his opening claim that "Weather and climate don’t cause disasters – vulnerability does" maybe ignores the blurring of 'cultural' and 'natural' that human-compounded climate change heralds - but his point is a very good one. "People become vulnerable if they end up lacking knowledge, wisdom, capabilities, social connections, support or finances to deal with a standard environmental event such as a hurricane. This can happen if lobbyists block tougher building codes, planning regulations, or enforcement procedures. Or if families can’t afford insurance or the cost of alternative accommodation if they evacuate. Or if limited hurricane experience induces a sense of apathy." Compare and contrast this post with George Monbiot's article on the same day, in the Guardian - see below. George Monbiot writes in the Guardian (29/8/17) that "It is not only Donald Trump’s government that censors the discussion of climate change; it is the entire body of polite opinion. This is why, though the links are clear and obvious, most reports on Hurricane Harvey have made no mention of the human contribution to it ... This is not an accident. But nor (with the exception of Fox News) is it likely to be a matter of policy. It reflects a deeply ingrained and scarcely conscious self-censorship. Reporters and editors ignore the subject because they have an instinct for avoiding trouble. To talk about climate breakdown (which in my view is a better term than the curiously bland labels we attach to this crisis) is to question not only Trump, not only current environmental policy, not only current economic policy – but the entire political and economic system ... I believe it is the silence that’s political. To report the storm as if it were an entirely natural phenomenon, like last week’s eclipse of the sun, is to take a position. By failing to make the obvious link and talk about climate breakdown, media organisations ensure our greatest challenge goes unanswered. They help push the world towards catastrophe." This short post (25/8/17) from Brett Chamberlin at the The Story of Stuff is an opportunity for you to answer that question and explore how change is made by a combination of all these builders, nurturers, networkers, communicators, resisters and investigators. "Ever wondered how to start making change? Take the quiz and learn your changemaker type! Then keep reading meet some of the changemaker types who exemplify the Story of Stuff Community!" Brandon Keim writes at Anthropocene (23/8/17) that "Even as native populations of large-bodied herbivores fall at alarming rates, others of their kind are thriving in new locales — yet they’re often regarded as unwelcome aliens, a source of environmental catastrophe. It’s a strange dichotomy, say some ecologists, and one that’s blinded people to the potential importance of these so-called invaders." This post (14/8/17) at Farnam Street sets out what the famous 'butterfly effect' is, and is not, and how it helps us understand the world. "The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon. Of course, a single act like the butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon. Small events can, however, serve as catalysts that act on starting conditions ... The butterfly effect is somewhat humbling - a model that exposes the flaws in other models. It shows science to be less accurate than we assume, as we have no means of making accurate predictions due to the exponential growth of errors." Max Holleran at Public Books (16/8/17) reviews a new book, Environmentalism of the Rich by Peter Dauvergne, which "traces the shifting tactics of mainstream environmentalism from the radicalism of the 1970s to the corporate partnerships of the 1990s", up to the present and the different approaches in the 'Global North' and 'Global South'. The article reviews a broad spectrum of 'environmentalisms' and how these have shifted in recent years; and argues that this diversity is important. "On one hand, a diversity of tactics is needed to restore some semblance of environmental balance to a cooking planet. At the same time, without a radical environmentalism that addresses the economic system as a whole, these tactics are meaningless." Gavin Schmidt's short post (17/8/17) at RealClimate lists many of the historic climate datasets that are being worked on to improve our understanding of different aspects of climate change - projects which 'citizen scientists' can often get involved in. "It's often been said that while we can only gather new data about the planet at the rate of one year per year, rescuing old data can add far more data more quickly. Data rescue is however extremely labor intensive. Nonetheless there are multiple data rescue projects and citizen science efforts ongoing, some of which we have highlighted here before." And there is a link to an introductory article on this topic. Edge Effects looked forward to the 'Great American Eclipse' with a collection of mini-essays from its editorial team (15/8/17): "You have no shortage of places to turn for rundowns of the eclipse’s chronology and geography, for primers on eyewear and camera tips, for descriptors of what to expect from birds and squirrels and spiders. But what can you expect from people?" Here are short extracts from five of them ... "Solar eclipses like the ones on Earth must be rare across the universe. How many planets have their star blocked by a moon that just happens to appear to be the same size as that star? And of those, how many have intelligent life that can appreciate it? With such long odds, one might be inclined to think himself special should the maximum point of eclipse fall over his hometown—especially if he’s 12." "We gathered on the rooftop garden of our house and from there, as the sky started to darken, we could watch birds hurry back to their shelter and listen to dogs howl. We heard conch shells, blown by our neighbors to protect their homes from bad omens—a practice rooted in the Hindu tradition that holds the demon Rahu swallows the sun to cause eclipses. The sounding of these shell trumpets scored anxious minutes for domestic life: some forbid cooking until the sunshine returns; some believe pregnant women must not pee. Though the sun and moon begged attention to the cosmos, what I remember most is what happened within our homes." "So, on Monday, the children of the Enlightenment will step out to take in the visceral pleasures of what is, thanks to uncontested science, widely considered a predictable, unthreatening display. And yet, the event is not merely one of orbital mechanics, but of human actions, too, and thus stubbornly unpredictable. So forests may burn, snakes may attack, people may go blind. Stay safe out there." "As alternate forms of meaning-making, astronomy and meteorology offer a different vision of the solar eclipse. Here, the occlusion of the sun is a surprisingly banal matter—indeed, it is one of Earth’s few natural phenomena which remain unthreatened by global climate change. In the era of record-breaking heat waves and collapsing ice shelves, perhaps it is time to rethink the cosmological significance of this cosmic event. What kind of meaning-making—across political, social, and physical distances—do we need in order to recognize the real signs of a climactic apocalypse? And how can we galvanize our fellow eclipse-lovers to participate in the kind of dramatic, impactful action necessary on a rapidly heating planet?" "The title of our post today riffs on a Wallace Stevens’s poem 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,' in which the speaker can never really see the bird in question. One looks at a blackbird through a fragmented filter of experience and sensation, hears its whistle, senses the shadow of its wings, perhaps reads it as an omen. But like an eclipse, one cannot see it directly. Although the poem is often read as an anthropocentric meditation on human experience, I’ve always read Stevens’ deep respect for how entwined we humans and our meaning making are with the more-than-human worlds. The blackbird, the speaker tells us, “is involved / In what I know.” In this piece for the Conversation (13/8/17), Mark Maslin speaks to Al Gore about his new film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. "It is more than ten years since Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth brought climate change to the masses. At its heart, it showed the former US vice-president giving a comprehensive global warming slide show – warning of the dire consequences if we do nothing about the climate crisis." Maslin asks: "I was struck in the middle of your film by a profound statement: “To fix the climate crisis we need to fix democracy”. And then the film moved on to another topic. How do you think we can fix our democracies now in the 21st century?" "For a year, the American writer Barry Lopez pulled over whenever he passed a dead creature on the road. Animal or bird or reptile, he picked them up – sometimes he had to scrape them up – and took them away to be buried and honoured. When asked why he bothered, he said: ‘You never know. The ones you give some semblance of a burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness.’" So begins Dougie Strang's piece (7/8/17) for the Dark Mountain blog, drawing on his perforemance of Badger Dissonace at art.earth's In Other Tongues event in June. With musical and sung accompaniment, the performance included the creation of a shrine to each of the animals he encountered as roadkill. "My first was a roe deer on the A75. I’d passed it already but this time it spooked me, its dead eye hooked me. I kept driving, got home, put a spade in the boot, went back. Its belly was swollen, crows had started in on the mouth. Cars were slowing, suspicious as they passed: ‘What’s he doing, bothering the roadkill?’" Two short quotes from Lucy Siegle's short column in the Guardian (13/8/17) contrast the good news and the bad: "Let’s begin with the bad news. First, Earth Overshoot Day – the point at which the world consumes more natural resources than the planet can renew throughout the year – shifted forward this year to 2 August, putting humanity in the red for longer ... As an antidote, visit mission2020.global, convened by Christiana Figueres (star of the Paris talks), and acknowledge the eco “wins”. These include the fact that last year global emissions plateaued while growth has continued. Previously emissions have only plateaued during recessions." Alistair Jump writes for the Conversation (2/8/17) that "When it comes to deciding which plants and animals to protect and which to remove, our approach might make even the most forthright nationalist blush if it were ever applied to people. The central question in the UK and many other countries is whether a particular species is native or non-native. Rarer natives are more likely to have government money spent on their protection ... On the face of it, native is good and non-native is bad. Not only do we make this distinction at UK level, we do it for species in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It may seem simple, but the very definition is less clear cut than it first appears."
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
Views from Elsewhere 2018, with the latest selections of good reads, can be found here.