It’s been a long time since I’ve been as inspired by a TV show as I am by Animal Planet’s Whale Wars. Of the n billion people on earth, only a few dozen are prepared to actually put their lives on the line to help prevent extinction of whales.

While international law is clear on the illegality of modern whaling, “research” loopholes allow for a certain number of whales to be taken annually for research purposes. Japanese fishermen exploit the loophole to carry on with commercial whaling under the guise of research. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society exists to prevent specious whaling by interfering with whaling directly. The society was created in 1977 by Paul Watson, who co-founded Greenpeace. But Greenpeace didn’t go far enough for Watson – he accuses the organization of refusing to directly engage whalers, going instead for high-profile photo ops.

Every winter, a group of volunteer sailors head for Antarctica with a ship, a helicopter, and a couple of high-speed delta boats. When they find Japanese fishing boats and evidence of whaling, they engage by throwing stink bombs on board, buzzing the deck, taking close-up photographs of the action, and generally making whaling impossible.

It’s a classic David/Goliath story. Sea Shepherd feels that the work they do should be government work. But governments won’t step up to enforce existing laws, so they take matters into their own hands. The crews are poorly trained, and it’s sometimes funny to see environmentalists organized in a semi-military structure, but they do have some effect, and it’s a fantastic watch. This is reality TV.

Got into an interesting debate tonight on Twitter on the question of whether efforts to save a single species are worthwhile. That’s a slippery slope – we might well survive after a species or two disappears. But how long can we continue to say that? How many extinctions can our species endure before we are affected? And is it really all about us? Even if we’re not affected, are whales worth saving just because they’re awesome? I believe they are.

Amid the din of conversations about how South Dakota alone gets enough wind to power a quarter of the country, or the huge efficiency gains of nuclear power, or how harnessing the movement of the tides could provide 20% of Britain’s energy needs, one important fact gets lost: The power grid in the U.S. has barely been upgraded in 20 years, and is nowhere near ready to move vast amounts of power across long distances. As energy demand rises and we start to look at large centralized installations (wind, hydro, nuclear, other), we overlook a politically inconvenient truth – without vast investments in the power grid itself, all that new energy isn’t going anywhere. The grid is already full-to-bursting, and moving lots of energy across long distances is a giant headache.

When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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