Eaarth day and the speedy Anthropocene

Today is the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day! I’ll be celebrating two ways: 1) A coastal clean-up on a small Grenadine Island in the Lesser Antilles, where I live for the moment, and 2) launching Colugos – this blog, about news from an evolutionary perspective.

To start it off, I’m inspired by a new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben. No, its not a typo: This new Earth he calls “Eaarth” because our old familiar planet is gone. The power of naming is important. It focuses attention on the sort of organismal whole of the entire planetary system: it’s the same physical planet, 3rd from the Sun, but all the interactions of soil, atmosphere and oceans are rearranged into something new, and something that cannot “return to normal” or “heal itself” back to what we’ve enjoyed for 2.5 million years. Rather, it achieves its own nightmarish stability, one that may, for example, favour its own ecosystems such as sulfur-belching bacteria rather than a well-oxygenated ocean (See Dr. Peter Ward’s Under A Green Sky for a Scientist’s perspective).
This is all a big “may”, of course (But the uncertainty is no grounds for inaction).

But what are we really saying goodbye too? Taking a longer term perspective, the earth we know and, indeed, love, is actually quite young. Our troublesome civilization sprang into existence only during the last interglacial of 10,000 years. Our species has only been around for 150 – 200 thousand years, all of which has been during the last 2.6 million years of glaciations that started during the Pleistocene. Before that, you might be surprised to learn that a variety of Planetary Systems / Geological Epochs have existed. Only 15 million to 20 million years ago, back in the balmier Miocene, did grasslands and all their associated herbivores, such as the magnificent Buffalo, Wildebeests, Caribou and Antelopes, come into prominence as one of the planet’s great biomes. How to even imagine such a planet without grasslands?

Despite Bill McKibben’s popular writing, the idea of a wholly new “manmade” earth is not new, and the idea was even given a name in 2000, the Anthropocene, by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen., in a newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme No. 41. The idea is that just like our modern scientists who can unearth obvious discontinuities in rock chemistry, ice-cores, tree-rings, fossil records, and ocean levels, that indicate geological regime changes (e.g., Pliocene to Pleistocene), so too will future geologists (homo sp. or otherwise) see a sharp boundary at the beginning of the industrial revolution: goodbye >50% of all species; hello jellyfish, crows, mercury, ash, etc.

The Anthropocene is just getting started. Every generation of living humans has been passing off a radically different Earth to succeeding generations. It is the “shifting baseline” phenomena: I come to think of the highly degraded ecosystem as natural, normal, and beautiful. I wonder what my great-great-great-grandfather would have thought to look up onto our skies, only to find it empty of the sun-darkening, horizon-to-horizon, multi-day flock of billions of passenger pigeons? Writing in the geological records, human “civilization” will look as dramatic as an asteroid impact, so says Dr. Jan Zalasiewicz, interviewed recently on CBC’s Quirks and Quarks.

Listen to the full interview of Dr. Jan Zalasiewicz on CBC’s Quirks and Quarks
See Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben
See Under a Green Sky by Dr. Peter Ward

Climate Change sceptics peddle dangerous analogy

CNN just recently fired its entire science department. Not surprising, and part of a disturbing trend of myopic and distored converage of science issues. This was the topic of a panel discussion on the CBC's beloved Sunday Edition with Michael Enwright, talking about why journalists are failing the public on Climate Change. The discussion stood my hair on end after hearing a dangerous analogy proposed by Globe and Mail columist Margarat Wente. She says that media coverage on Climate Change is becoming more religious, with either side embedded in ideology. Since when did advocating that we act according to evidence become ideological? Isn't policy based on evidence and reality just... well... reasonable?

Her "religion" analogy is dangerous and underscores the failure of journalists' handling of Climate Change: that the best course  of action is some reconsilitation between two extremes. This "middlepath" is a phoney solution that insidiously suggests comfortable images of Catholics happily living beside Protestants. Perhaps greenies can have their electric cars and wind-turbines, while oil men keep their tarsands, right? Wrong, there is no compromise with reality. There is only one atmosphere, one planet, and one climate trajectory that will we eventually follow. The most credible evidence suggests that its a very grim trajectory, and any prudent response means deep GHG cuts. Would someone please tell me what relgion or ideology this view represents?

Perhaps it should be called "climate-realism", and I will keep screaming it from the hilltops. Please excuse me if I have that panic-striken, wild-eyed look of religious furvor while I do so, because so far, no political leader is doing what the evidence says we should be doing. 

Copenhagen Climate Conference

I just returned from Sweden to present my thesis, and stopped by the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties on Climate Change. No-- I wasn't a delegate, rather, I participated in a more productive assemblage of civil society meetings and rallies. Dispite the failure of the official talks, I was pleased at least by the maturity of debates at the street level. In particular, the attention brought upon meat consumption. Placard after placard, a long line of marchers, floats and banners drawing attention to something no one in the mainstream media wants to touch.

The meteoric rise in meat consumption from more afluent Chinese (for example) has two dire consequences for our atmosphere: ONE ) more rainforest and native land is turned into agriculture to grow soya and corn for cows... about 90% of global goes to cows, not to tofu, and along the way more than 10% of the energy is lost; so switching the route that soya travels to enter a Chinese consumer from a "tofu pathway" to a "meat pathway" means that more and more rainforest needs to be converted to make up for that 90% loss in energy. (I hitchhiked in Yellowstone with a german agricultural economist, who balked at the idea that global food shortages and price surges were due to biofuels: its the Chinese, he said, eating more meat). More agricultural and less rainforest releases a horrid amount of stored carbond in the soil and wood into the atmosphere. Globally, deforestation accounts for over 10% of carbon dioxide increase.

TWO ) Cows fart, a lot! Its a products of the long long disgestive tract tackling the recalcitrant cellulose material. Methane is much much worse a greenhouse gas than carbon released from industry and deforestation.

If this sounds like an affront to "Cowboys", its not. On the contrary, I would absolutely LOVE it, if supposed Cowboys were actually out in the plains and hearding grass-fed cattle. If you like cowboys and cowboy culture, eat grass-fed pastural cows, thereby supporting cattle-hearding cowboys (and girls), not the factory "farms" that import corn and soya.

4th of July outta USA!

Its the fourth of July and I'm getting out of the States! Not that I can't enjoy the ultra-nationalism, parades and flag waving (in an ironic way), but two months doing point counts in Oregon was enough. It was no easy job, crawling through the "japanese prison" of wine maple and rhododendrons, stumpling down slopes of slippery debris, and bearing the brunt of a ultra-stressed Ph.D student. A steady diet of demoralization, getting banged up, bruised, waking at 3:30 am to count the old growth passerines in the HJ Andrews Experimental forest. It just goes to show you that not all field biologist jobs are a dream job. It had to happen sooner or later I suppose, as I've been lucky with amazing employers and amazing co-workers before. Some hot springs, treks to the coast weren't so bad though.

But wow, two months to really examine what it is to be an American vs. a Canadian. I had sort of idealized Americans, having lived in Sweden, where they were a delightfully chatty and interesting bunch, in comparison to the more humble Swedes. I had forgotton the otherside of the coin, that with the fanciful ambitions and mental plasticity comes those with mad individualism, unchecked and inconsiderate of others. Not everyone, of course, not by far, but there are definitely a high proportion to steer clear off and not work for (ask for references). In a slight but noticeable contrast, I'd say Canadians at least have politeness and humility as values, even aspects of "national character". You just can't get away with somethings.

On the other hand, I've been seeing a wonderful Californian girl. California, I'm been lectured, is another story unto itself, and why not, given its the population nearly of Canada and certainly more wealthy, productive and creative. Buts thats for another blog; now, its back up to the Arctic!

A brief stop through California…

California is one of those places you can’t help but have prejudices and expectations, especially for a self styled Green, and especially for the Bay Area: from the Berkeley bicycle-friendly avenues adorned with “organic” shops, to the sight of a wild sea otter anchored in the mats of giant kelp, acres of artichokes interspersed with fresh Tomales stands, and the immense scale of vaporous waterfalls drifting down the many faces of Yosemite. so far so good!

There’s a lot happening here, good and bad. Good in the sense of a coastal culture proudly engaged in their wildlands and progressive legislation, bad in that it’s entirely unsustainable. I’ve just passed through, hanging out with a friend in a vegetarian coop, mostly doing ridiculous certification and work permits stuff, and otherwise weekend tripping. At Ana Nuevo State park, I was privileged to get within metres of Elephant Seals! All the magnificent males (upto 6 m long) had left, having fought and fornicated and leaving the females to tend to the pups. Some of the subadult 5 year old males started to have that characteristic floppy snout and head-banding fighting disposition. We even spotted one with a time-depth recorder. At the park, the officials had measured dives down to 2 km, a depth which beats the record of any air-breathing animal, from whales to penguins.

Now, I’m off to Vancouver and back down to Oregon. It’s a border run to get a firearms license and a TN1 Status work permit. It’s ridiculous what I have to do to work in the USA. Considering how easy it is people like Poles and a Swedes, whose differences rank among the most extreme on the planet, can work in each other’s country without any formalities, and yet I’m terrified by what harassment I’ll get at our border….

 

Carry on 2009

Its been a while since I added to this blog...having been a tumultuous month, another new year. We had a wonderful time celebrating new years in Paris. Countdown at the Eiffel tower. Never have I seen so many people converged to one place at one time. My previous record was 80000 people in a Toronto peace demonstration leading up to the Iraq war.

Paris was paris. Wine, cheese, art galleries, c'est la vie! We did a mad tourist dash, not wanting to sit still and think about the future. The highlight was our fortune to couch surf with a wonderful gabonese women who gave us her entire apartment to our selves, and showed us around the city a bit, came out in the evenings. I even got to see my brother en route to Morocco, a delightful coincidence, once in four years. Sadly, it was also the last time I got to see a really good friend from Lund, heading back to the States. Strange thinking she is resuming her "normal" life back in California, that Lund is a bit of a fantasy-land to exchange students. Such is the scourge of international students, so many friends come and go so quickly. Throughout January, it was one after another, a piece of my heart stolen away every which destination they return to, and me carrying on in Lund.

I remember a moment like this, last year, reflecting on 2007. I wrote "I can die a happy man because of 2007", and I think 2008 (minus the broken jaw incident) was even better! The year stretches impossibly back into the stuff of legend, but I recall, as if it were last month, sitting just down the hall, marvelling about the dawn of 2008 and what it would bring. My californian friend reminds me of something I wrote last year: "A heart stretched too thin across the globe, memories too grandiose to believe, mistakes too plentiful to be sad, a future too beautiful to name." And go it goes...

So far 2009 is serious: emotions and missings sublimated into analyzes and script writing. I buy an extra fan for my computer, defragment, optimize and send it humming into hours of computations of theoretical birds in the Swedish alpine. Hopefully, I'll be able to write my masters this semester. It won't be fun, but I've had my kicks in Sweden. I'm already applying for jobs for the summer....

Eurotripping

In scotland on a Marine Biology trip, visiting especially Aberdeen and Oban