Who do you talk to about getting a meme changed?

Over the course of the past four decades (since the first Earth Day in 1970), environmentalists have talked about the importance of “saving the planet.” As passionately as I feel about our environment, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with this message. The planet doesn’t need saving - we do.

Recently watched the incredible documentary series Earth: The Biography on National Geographic. It’s a follow-up to the popular Planet Earth series, but focused on Earth’s systems and how they work together. Jaw-dropping footage, some of the best video infographics I’ve ever seen (if you didn’t understand the importance of the ocean conveyor before, you will after seeing this), and lots of mind-blowing science.

Among other things, the series puts you face-to-face with the insane and cataclysmic changes Earth has gone through in its history, and reminds you of just how tiny is the sliver of Earth’s history that humans have occupied. But it also reminds you of how dramatically we’ve altered the atmosphere and environment in that tiny sliver of time. Never before has an animal species affected the environment like humans have. In fact, our impact on the planet has become so profound that many scientists now refer to a whole new era in Earth’s timeline, starting from around the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution - the Anthropocene.

Cycles of global warming and cooling have of course been a constant in Earth’s history, but the case for anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is now virtually incontrovertible. And the urgency is increasing:

BBC News:

New and cautious calculations by the New Economics Foundation’s (nef) climate change programme suggest that we may have as little as 100 months starting from August 2008 to avert uncontrollable global warming.

But if global warming is part of a natural Earth cycle, and if Earth has been through repeated cycles of warming and cooling, survived massive meteor crashes, periods of surface-melting volcanic activity and more, why should we care about “saving the planet?” Nothing we puny humans could possibly do could “damage” Earth - it’s survived far worse than we can ever hope to dish out.

George Carlin on “saving the planet”:

Hilarious but misguided. Carlin was a genius, and I love him, but arguments like this are a distraction. It’s not about “saving the planet” - it’s about saving US. In the really big picture, Earth may be able to withstand our greatest abuses. Well, duh. We, on the other hand, require a pretty narrow band of temperature to survive. We need breathable air and drinkable water, or we’re not going to be around for much longer, period. We may not be able to change natural fluctuations in the environment, but we might be able to undo, or at least mitigate, changes we’ve made to the environment since the Industrial Revolution. Can we rewind the Anthropocene? Probably not, but we can try. We have to; we have no other choice than to try.

And that’s why we need the “save our planet” meme changed - it gives the anti-environment nutjobs a distraction to point to, and completely misses the point. Humans are really, really cool. As radical as it probably sounds, I happen to think we’re worth saving. It’s the conditions for human survival we need to be concerned about, not the Earth itself.

Excellent summary of (mostly) easy things you can do to reduce your footprint - carbon and otherwise: 50 Ways to Help the Planet. A quick read. Focus is on individual action, and doesn’t ask the impossible. I thought the call to use clotheslines was especially interesting — in the U.S., we obsess about how energy-efficient our dryers are. But when I lived in Australia in 1983, nobody had a dryer - to own one would have appeared wasteful and indulgent. Recently talked with friends just returned from living in Australia, who confirmed that dryers are still uncommon. And talking with others a couple of nights ago, confirmed that this is still the case in many (most?) countries. Dryers v. clotheslines are a great example of the degree to which a culture is willing to be inconvenienced to avoid waste. The U.S. is extremely adverse to inconvenience, and cultural norms are extremely difficult to change (n.b.: We own and use a dryer too).

The counter-argument to this kind of list is that it ignores the big picture (big oil, big industry). But change has to happen at all levels (”Think globally, act locally.”) Every action you take, every decision you make, is a vote for how you want things to be (the Categorical Imperative). If you want a habitable planet, you must act towards it. If you want a habitable planet for your children, you must at least try to set an example, show them that not every action need be wasteful.

Lately I’ve been more wrapped up than I probably should be, obsessing about the fact that - by this point in time - we need to be beyond the point of asking whether we need to be taking drastic steps to stabilize the environment before it’s too late, but how. I’m bothered by two groups: On one hand the apathetic - people who hear all the science going down, but do not act to change their lifestyles. On the other we have the actively oppositional - people who continue to dispute that the mountains of evidence that we are facing dire consequences for our neglect is real, or that all this talk about consequences is just a money-making scheme for Al Gore. Yes, people with this view are real, numerous, and influential. And I personally think they’re dangerous.

I recently confessed to friends how chewed up I was feeling about all of this, and one said something to the effect of “But this is all just your opinion, and you want to force your opinion on others.” Well, I do believe that humans don’t want to be inconvenienced, and that we’re not going to get to where we need to be without lots of enforcement. If we allow the apathetics and the conspiracy nuts who either ignore or deny the critical state we’re in, we have no reason to hope that we can save the human race from what is now pretty much certain destruction at our own hand. So, yes, I do feel like we need to “force” environmental care on everyone. If we don’t, we’re doomed. But … what exactly is an opinion? How overwhelming does the evidence have to be before something crosses over from opinion to actionable fact? Is this really just the “opinion” of the vast majority of scientists?

The world runs on bread, and financial incentives help. When it’s financially beneficial to go green, people and corporations do. The question for me is, how can we get to a point where our motivations are more than just financial? For example, that we agree to reduce the speed limit not because it will save us money, but because it reduces carbon emissions, i.e. because it’s the right thing to do, i.e. because it satisfies the Categorical Imperative? I see people on Twitter talking about the move to reduce the national speed limit as an example of a “nanny state.” Well… if people were motivated by their sense of responsibility to the planet that gives them life rather than just to their wallets, we wouldn’t need a nanny state, would we? But that’s never going to happen.

What’s missing? How can we get everyone on board?

Several years ago, when Birdhouse Hosting was young, I was researching the market to find a reliable datacenter that was entirely powered by renewable energy sources. I did find a few, but none working at the scale I was looking for (some didn’t have 24×7 monitoring and support; others did, but didn’t provide cPanel licenses). I ended up going with ServInt, and have been extremely happy with their reliability and support.

Today got some exciting news: ServInt has just announced that their whole VPS operation has gone not just carbon-neutral, but climate positive:

ServInt’s commitment to climate-positive hosting applies to its entire line of Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting services. Each of ServInt’s VPS services is backed by a commitment to offset the total carbon-footprint of the VPS by at least 110 percent. ServInt accomplishes its carbon-offsetting goals through large-scale reforestation campaigns operated by American Forests (www.americanforests.org).

To ensure a truly climate-positive approach, ServInt calculates its reforestation commitment not only on the energy consumption of the host servers, but on its entire VPS infrastructure. That includes compensating for all core routing and switching equipment, for cooling and redundant power operations, and for an extensive back-LAN that provides customers with free backups and centralized update repositories.

Stunning example of “a picture is worth a thousand.” From the United Nations Environment Programme, this amazing graphic (click for larger):

Update: Got a nice link-in on this from Wired Blogs writer Alexis Madrigal, who expands on the graphic with more information.

Salon has an interesting interview with author Elizabeth Royle about her new book Bottlemania, which dissects the bottled water industry from top to bottom. For Royle, it’s not as simple as “Bottled war evil, tap water good.” She recognizes that not all regions can get good drinking water from the tap (but most do), and she recognizes that most bottled water is not in fact “just filtered tap water,” as is commonly claimed (well, it is, but the filters used by Coke and Pepsi are more sophisticated than the home filters that consumers have access to). That said, Royle has seen the bottled water from the inside out, and sees a corporate manipulation of the culture on the road to making bottled water seem almost normal and OK. The idea that water from public fountains is “filthy” or not to be trusted, the idea that you risk ingesting pharmaceuticals or other toxins if you drink tap water, the idea that Fiji water (actually imported from Fiji!) can offset the huge carbon footprint of shipping water across the water by buying carbon credits… she sees through it all. Sounds like a good summer read.

I don’t know what it is about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that makes me feel so profoundly sad. Actually, I do. Just a century plus change since the industrial revolution, and the oceans, which have existed in perfect, bounteous balance for billions of years, have become a garbage dump - and not the kind we can build a baseball field on top of.

100 million tons of plastic now swirl in the vortex — so much plastic that samples show plastic particles outnumbering zooplankton by a ratio of six to one.

This plastic ends up in the stomachs of marine birds and animals. In fact, one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals die globally each year due to ingestion of or entanglement in plastics.

I like the way care2 is running this petition. Rather than yet another unanswerable call to law-makers, it’s a pledge to become conscious. To notice the plastic you’re consuming that might be avoidable… and to avoid where you can.

• Using reusable bottles for my water and other drinks. By using just one reusable bottle, I will keep 167 single-use plastic bottles from entering the environment.
• Using cloth bags for groceries and other purchases. For each reusable bag I use, I will save approximately 400 plastics from being used.
• Recycling the plastic bags and bottles I already have. For every thirteen plastic bags I don’t use, I will save enough petroleum to drive a car one mile.

Remember: In the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle hierarchy, Reduce comes first.

Update: Definitely check out this cnet piece on a pair of sailors traveling from CA to Hawaii in a junk made of junk. Also some staggering facts in that piece, which pegs the plastic/plankton ratio at 48/1.

My first thought was “Wow, nice clay snail sculptures.” But nope - nature makes these. Amazing psychedelic nature in all its infinite potentiality will make everything conceivable - on some planet somewhere - if it hasn’t already on this one.

They’re called nudibranchs, and they’re as toxic as they are beautiful (c.f.: poison dart frogs) - the coloration is a “don’t eat me” warning/billboard. No bones, no shell, nothing but tender, unprotected, inedible flesh slithering through the seas, testifying to nature’s infinite scope.

Text and jaw-dropping gallery at National Geographic. The sense of awe I get from these pictures? This is my religion.

Oh, and p.s.: If we stay on the current track of break-neck deforestation and reef destruction, one quarter of all species on earth today will be extinct by 2050.

The new J-School server has arrived! Spent half the day developing a migration strategy to transition sites and services for the school off of OS X Server and onto a Linux/cPanel solution more tuned to the security ravages and configuration needs of pure web hosting (if cPanel ran on OS X Server we’d be sticking with it). The next month will be an interesting challenge as we get that project off the ground.

In the middle of putting the strategy together, the server itself arrived. Along with it, a separate box, very light. Inside that box, two more boxes. And inside those… ye gods! One power cable each. Power cables that don’t require damage protection at all, and that could have been stuffed into a single padded envelope. Better yet, they could have been thrown into the server’s own box - there was plenty of room.

This kind of thing makes my blood boil. Why do so many people/organizations behave as if their actions don’t matter? It’s not just one box. Multiply this kind of apathy by millions and you get… the world as it is. Talked to a Safeway employee last night who was foisting plastic bags on me unrequested. Asked her whether management was talking about banning plastic bags from the store any time soon. Her answer floored me: “No. In fact, we’re not even allowed to ask ‘Paper or plastic.’”

My boss warned me that if I blogged about this, certain perqs would be revoked. This is a test.

Like many people, I have a relative who sends frequent email forwards of various ill-thought-out, thinly-veiled right-wing propaganda pieces. Today’s dose came in the form of a photo screed against the piles of trash left by Mexican immigrants as they cross through the Arizona desert on their way into the U.S. Here’s the webified version of it.

Usually I just let these things go without responding, but today being Earth Day, I couldn’t help myself from hitting Cmd-Shift-R, even though I didn’t know most of the people on the cc: list:

Wow, that is truly sad - breaks my heart. Almost as bad as the mess left by “real americans” after a rock concert or sporting event. “About 400 city workers hauled almost 220 tons of trash left behind by the more than 1 million people who attended the concert…”

Even as bad as the local “gully” in many Appalachian regions where the locals dump their trash. Weird thing is, those rock concert go’ers and hillbillies actually have access to trash cans - they just choose not to use them. Must be really tough to try and escape from abject poverty into a hostile nation that used to welcome the tired, the poor, the weary… without access to a trash can. I wish immigrants were more like hippies and hikers (”Pack it in, pack it out!”) or at least would put all their trash in a pile or something.

I will say this though - it’s wonderful to see right-wingers starting to care about the environment! But when you think about it, a pile of trash like that is nothing compared to the Texas-sized gyre of plastic swirling around in the Pacific ocean that all of us have created. Or any of the other seven garbage wonders of the world.

Nothing compared to the environmental impact of a nation full of SUVs and corporations that won’t stop polluting unless there’s either a profit in it or the EPA forces them to. Would be interesting to see side-by-side pictures of patches of earth fouled by, say, a Dow Chemical factory and all Mexican immigrants to have passed into the U.S. in the past decade. Seems like Americans pointing a righteous finger at immigrants for polluting is a bit hypocritical, no?

Hey, I know - let’s all fuggetaboutit and go on a shopping spree - we’ve got three trillion bucks to spend! What’s that? It’s already been spent? Ooops.

./s

Happy Earth Day everyone!

Santa Clara Valley Water District’s fact page on bottled water:

In addition to the misconception about health benefits, there are other, more serious, problems associated with the production and consumption of bottled water. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans bought a total of 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006. The Pacific Institute estimates that producing the bottles for American consumption required more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation. Bottling the water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. It took 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water.

More at the site.

See also: Bottled Water: The Hoax

I love this. c|net: Carbon Sciences says it has come up with a relatively efficient way to turn carbon dioxide from smokestacks into chalk, which can then be used to make drywall or other products. The process still requires a fair bit of energy, but then so does sequestering. And re-purposing carbon is better than hiding it.

Every responsible state budget means someone gets to swallow some bitter pills when their pet project gets slashed. You can’t reign in government waste and keep everyone happy. I get that.

But Governor Schwarzenegger’s plan to shutter 48 of California’s magnificent state parks is not just a blow to people who like to spend their weekends in them — it doesn’t make fiscal sense. Total savings from closing 48 parks? $9 million annually — less than 0.1 percent of the state budget. What can a state buy for $9 mil these days? Meanwhile, the cost to the spiritual and physical health of the state would be incalculable.

The state’s obligation to maintain a few slivers of natural land for public use seems crystal clear. The question, I suppose, is how much land, and at what expense? Fortunately state parks are cheap to run, and we’re talking about tiny specs of real estate in the big picture.

Check the map of proposed closures on the governor’s own site (also as PDF).

Then, let the governor know that Californians won’t make this particular sacrifice, especially not at this miniscule benefit/cost ratio.

The idea behind the Discovery show Invention Nation is good: Send three hipster dudes around the country in a bio-diesel bus, looking for interesting technological environmental solutions. Unfortunately, the show is poorly produced and executed, but the ideas in it are interesting enough that it’s kept me watching.

Cool to see a piece recently on Integrated Manure Utilization Systems (IMUS). There’s a butt-load (sorry) of usable methane gas locked in the manure that gets discarded by the ton at dairies and stock yards around the world. An IMUS system involves strategically placed floor grates in cattle yards, into which manure can be pushed. From there, it’s chopped, mixed with water, and placed in large holding tanks. Bacteria go to work on the sludge and methane rises to the top, where it’s burned (cleanly) to create electricity.

How effective is the process? The dairy farm visited by the Invention Nation guys had 250 cattle, and was able to generate enough electricity not only to power itself, but 150 average-sized households as well. And the equipment investment pays off in 5-7 years.

The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association says the range of benefits from IMUS include:

• Reduced manure handling costs
• Protection of water resources
• Odour reduction
• Recycling of waste water
• Reduced energy costs
• Value-added revenue from the sale of energy and bio-based fertilizer
• Strengthening agriculture’s reputation of environmentally sustainable resource management

Imagine if every dairy and cattle yard installed their own IMUS - the enviro benefits would be immense.

Not sure what to make of this Der Spiegel piece on how statistics of death and deformity are consistently overrated after nuclear accidents. Upshot: real rates of destruction are generally far lower than popularly reported.

To answer these questions, the Japanese and the Americans launched a giant epidemiological study after the war. The study included all residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had survived the atomic explosion within a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) radius. Investigators questioned the residents to obtain their precise locations when the bomb exploded, and used this information to calculate a personal radiation dose for each resident. Data was collected for 86,572 people. Today, 60 years later, the study’s results are clear. More than 700 people eventually died as a result of radiation received from the atomic attack:

• 87 died of leukemia;
• 440 died of tumors;
• and 250 died of radiation-induced heart attacks.
• In addition, 30 fetuses developed mental disabilities after they were born.

Even sites like Nature News say Chernobyl’s ecosystems are “remarkably healthy” and that “biodiversity is actually higher than before the disaster.”

My initial reaction is that this is an incredibly skewed, twisted perspective - some flavor of (possibly unintentional) historical revisionism. Or that data simply conflict, and different reporters pick and choose their angles. Yet the piece is very even-handed, doesn’t seem to be written with any kind of pro-nuke agenda, more a commentary on how exaggeration commonly follows on the heels of tragedy. But I’d like to see a rebuttal or response to this article written by other science journalists.

And then… stop. Just. Stop. It’s madness to talk this way.

Watch Paul Fusco’s photo essay on victims of Chernobyl, and their children. And remember that everything beyond these messed up human lives is just statistics. And that death rates are very different from suffering rates. And that statistics are just damn lies anyway. And that people are real. Suffering is real, and cannot be reduced like this.

Thanks Jim Strickland

Over the past year, we’ve mostly filled a large rolling plastic trash bin with earthquake supplies. First-aid kit, blankets, lots of water, hand-crank radio, emergency rations, etc. The wheels on the bin are so we can drag it along with us if our area is evacuated (we live pretty close to a major fault, on soil subject to liquefaction). We’ve got a few more things to add, but are mostly ready.

Recently a friend of ours asked whether we had a gun in our kit. A gun? A friend of his who lived through post-Katrina said that after a couple of weeks of no public services, people who had supplies but no guns were sorry they didn’t.

As you can guess, guns aren’t my bag. What happens when someone with a gun approaches and asks for our water? Am I supposed to have a gunfight with them? I’m more inclined to give them the damn water and drink from the reservoir left over in our home’s water heater. But it’s hard to imagine what actually living through that kind of Mad Max world would actually be like, and how my thinking might change in that kind of situation.

What about you? Is your disaster kit ready? And does it include firearms?

Excellent infographic from Good Magazine: The total floorspace of Wal-Mart (18,810 acres) is now larger than the square footage of Manhattan (15,000 acres).

When baald and I stepped into a Wal-Mart store last weekend, we both had the same realization: It was the first time either of us had ever set foot in one. Funny how something that has occupied so much of the popular imagination (what other store has as many movies, books, and blog posts written about it?) can be so far off the daily radar of millions of Americans.

via Kottke

Think you’ve seen all the fascinating pictures of trippy creatures living at the bottom of the ocean there are to see? The current issue of Smithsonian Magazine has an amazing photo spread full of truly mind-blowing photos of the gelatinous dwellers of the deep. The article is actually a review of a coffee-table book titled The Deep, comprised of more than 160 photos taken by bathyscaphe researchers from around the world. Most are proof of just how “head-shakingly bizarre life can be. The scientists who discovered the creatures were apparently as amused as we are, giving them names such as gulper eel, droopy sea pen, squarenose helmetfish, ping-pong tree sponge, Gorgon’s head and googly-eyed glass squid.”

I love this shot of Grimpoteuthis, a type of Dumbo octopus that grows up to 5 feet in length and looks for all the world like a Robert Crumb drawing of an alien jelly wearing a pair of hiking boots suitable for trekking the Marianis Trench.

The deep sea is the largest ecosystem on earth, plunging to more than 37,000 feet below sea level at the Marianas Trench in the Pacific. It accounts for 85 percent of the space where life can exist and holds an estimated ten million or more species. “But we’re still trying to figure out what’s out there,” says marine scientist Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Unfortunately, the web version of the piece has different - and less amazing - examples than the print version, and it’s tricky to find the slideshow (click the small round dots after clicking the main image). Pick up the dead tree version next time you’re waiting at the dentist’s office.

In the United States, 220 million adults own 247 million vehicles. Do we really need all those cars? Many of us do. And many, I suspect, only think they do.

According to Jane Holtz Kay’s book “Asphalt Nation,” by the time you finish this sentence, [all those cars] will have traveled another “60,000 miles, used up 3,000 gallons of petroleum (products) and added 60,000 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.”

The Orange County Register has an inspirational story about an average family (not a family of athletes or outdoor enthusiasts) that got sick of dumping money into their car, bought a couple of bikes and a bike trailer, and dove in feet-first.

Within two months they paid off two credit cards. No car meant no car bills. It also meant no quick trips to Taco Bell. No morning jolt of Starbucks. No impulse buys of jeans or toys at Target.

“It’s as if your boss came in,” he says, “and asked if you wanted a 35 percent raise.”

Sometimes I wonder what aliens arriving on Earth would think of the way we’ve let cars completely take over our landscape. I wonder if it’s even possible to measure what percentage of vehicle usage is avoidable. How much of it is necessary, how much is merely convenient but negotiable, and how much is just plain habit? For example, a lot of people seem to think they need to use a car to go on quick grocery trips, even when buying less than two bags of groceries, even when they live less than half a mile from a grocery store. A trip like that is easily done by bicycle w/backpack. But many grocery stores don’t even have bike racks outside. How did we get to this point? What will it take to get Americans to re-examine their habits? Why is the Cave family an anomaly, not the rule?

Via Neat-o-Rama

China’s one-child-per-family law, enacted in the 70s, has prevented (avoided?) around 300 million births since that time - roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States. Now China is making the connection between the reduced birth rates it’s enforced and the environment.

“… avoiding 300 million births means we averted 1.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005″

Hard to argue with the math - the question is whether China is using the numbers as proof that it’s doing its part in the fight against global warming. Oops, guess they are:

“This is only an illustration of the actions we have taken,” said Su Wei, a senior Foreign Ministry official…

The environmental benefit of the reduced population is real. Spinning that reality as though it were China’s intended contribution to the environment is dishonest - especially in a country where air pollution causes up to 750,000 premature deaths each year.

Once upon a time, the “Paper or plastic?” question seemed like it could go either way. Choose plastic and you’re choosing something that may be stuck in landfills for hundreds of years. Choose paper and you’re sacrificing trees (”it takes 14 million trees to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used every year by Americans”). But it’s way more complicated than that. From an excellent article at Salon:

Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil. … Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide.

The bags look like jellyfish to a lot of marine life. The bags that don’t get “eaten” become part of the flotsam that now clogs every square inch of the world’s now fully plastinated oceans (some sections of ocean now carry 6x more plastic than biomass).

more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

Despite the hopeful-looking recycling symbol on the side of most plastic bags, recycling centers can’t handle them - they bring most recycling equipment to a screeching halt. You’re better off bringing them back to the store where you got them.

“The only salient answer to paper or plastic is neither. Bring a reusable canvas bag, says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.”

Sadly, environmental incentives to get people to bring their own canvas bags shopping have never worked. But economic incentives might. IKEA now charges customers five cents per plastic bag, and donates the proceeds to an environmental working group. Fashion might work too:

Bringing your own bag — or BYOB as Whole Foods dubs it — is the latest eco-chic statement. When designer Anya Hindmarch’s “I am not a plastic bag” bag hit stores in Taiwan, there was so much demand for the limited-edition bag that the riot police had to be called in to control a stampede, which sent 30 people to the hospital.

Earthresource.org is running the Campaign Against The Plastic Plague.