Sustainable Sundays: What Can I do?

 Those who wish to change the world for the better should not begin by vilifying the public they seek to persuade, or by confronting it with a task that appears impossible.  Theodore Roszak

Last week we talked about ecological footprint, in other words how much of an impact our individual living styles have on the earth.  Now if you went through the footprint calculator last week you know that there are some real specific things that directly drive your impact on resources.  Things like how far you drive, how many airline trips you take, the size and energy efficiency of your home and even what you eat.  The calculator is a gross tool, it takes a look at the larger picture without analyzing the details, for instance it asks you the size of your house, but not what level of insulation do you have; the type of windows; do you have a radiant barrier or how hot do you keep your house in winter.

I hope the calculator doesn’t make you feel bad, trust me the number you get will always be larger than you think it is.  The purpose of the tool is to make you aware, not make you feel bad and give you an indication of the direction you might want to take and the things you’d like to do.  So this week, let’s start exploring what specific things you can do to reduce your impact on the earth, while at the same time, saving you a little bit of money.  We’ll hit a couple of topics this week and come back to this idea again over the next couple of weeks.

Recycling can be a bit confusing and certainly takes up a bit of time, but if you are throwing out recycled items than you are throwing out money.  Also, if you don’t want to do the work, there are plenty of people who will do it for you.  In my neighborhood there is a homeless gentleman who comes by every Thursday morning and I set out a bag of rinsed recyclables for him and he handles taking them to the center and gets paid.  Now yes, I’m not getting that money but I feel pretty good about helping him out, call it a two-for and there are benefits of giving to others as well.

Tire pressure believe it or not is a sustainable issue, and presents the opportunity for you to exercise my adopted motto fiscal stability through sustainable initiatives.  This is probably the simplest, make sure your tire pressure is set at the right level, it will increase the life of your tires and save you money on gasoline which is heading on its way to being $4 a gallon again.

Have a great day.

Sustainable Sundays: Your Ecological Footprint

This was an exercise I used to do with my students about ten years ago, and it’ s really amazing to see how much the graphics have improved in that time.  You don’t have to register or sign up in anyway for the site and it only takes a couple of minutes to click through the simulation and find out how your personal usage relates to resource usage, or in their terms, if everyone lived like you, how many earths we would need, have fun with it:

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/calculators/

Should we get rid of all environmental regulation?!

So I went to a local Japanese restaurant after work the other day, I’ve been craving sushi after my week in the desert and so I settled in for a little chicken teriyaki and a B52 roll.  I ordered my standard bowl of miso soup as well and while I waited for the waitress to bring the soup, I sat there listening to the discussion at the next table.  At the table sat an older man who had the attention of a younger woman and two young guys, he was pontificating about the environment, liberals and such and I was about to tune it out when something caught my attention.  It was the phrase, “all this environmental stuff is blowing hot air, our environment is better now than it has ever been.”

He then went on to describe how the foothills area of the Sierras has improved vastly over the gold rush times.  He went on to talk about how the area was deforested and polluted with the chemicals of mining and how now we have trees and clean water and everything is wonderful.  Now, he’s not wrong about that but he then went on to talk about how because the environment is getting so much better that we need to get rid of all of this unnecessary regulation of the environment, that things get better as time goes on and that fifty years from now our environment will be cleaner than it has ever been because the earth repairs itself.  I looked over to see these three young people staring up at him with admiration in their eyes and I almost spit up my miso soup.

I quietly sat there wondering if I should insert myself into the conversation and lay down a little bit of reality and in all truth slaughter this half-ignorant wind bag, but in the end, I live and work in a very conservative county and I really just wasn’t up for the annoyance on a Friday afternoon, so I ate my meal and slipped out to enjoy my weekend.  But I don’t want to let this go, it fries my ass when I overhear things like this and friends I frequently overhear people who know just a little bit about science and then use this tiny bit of understanding to inappropriately apply science to support their ideology.  So my friends instead you’ll get to hear it and this is what I would have said.

Hi pal, couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I find your perspective to be interesting and completely idiotic.  You are covering and interesting concept in environmental science, which is what point in time do we use as the baseline for the environment.  Taking your example, if we use the middle of the 1800’s as our baseline then yes, our environment here in the foothills is much better than it was.  However, if you pick 1800, then we have a whole different ballgame because prior to the massive environmental impact of the gold rush, this area was pristine forest habitat.  So apparently things don’t get better as time goes on, maybe you just picked a really convenient point to make your argument conform to your ideology.  I would ask people who lived on the Cuyahoga River in the 1960’s and 70’s if they think all of this environmental nonsense is just a lot of hot air.  In case you don’t know, the Cuyahoga River is most famously known as the river that caught on fire because it was so polluted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River

So my friend why don’t we look at the reality of the environment globally and seriously if you think the global environment is better now than in 1850, I’d have to say you’re a moron.  In 1850 passenger pigeons on migration flew overhead in flocks that were a mile wide and sometimes 300 miles long, taking hours to pass; you could regularly catch blue fin tuna bigger than the biggest tuna caught today;  and there were even grizzly bears in California actually roaming around, not just on the flag.  I could go on and I don’t want to take away the successes we have had in recovering and saving species, species like the Bald Eagle, the Gray Wolf and the California Condor.  However our environment is in trouble:

* There are dead zones in our oceans depleted of oxygen

http://azstarnet.com/news/science/environment/article_69547a06-1391-5939-b3ca-451cc65b5017.html

* We now the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific

http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/

* Niger is so polluted due to oil extraction that they should close the country

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/the-bp-gulf-oil-spill-is-nothing-compared-to-this%e2%80%a6/

* Air quality is so bad in Beijing that athletes at the Olympics wore dust masks

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/vancouver/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/U-S-athletes-wear-face-masks-upon-arrival-in-Be?urn=oly-98641

* Haliburton and friends are destroying water quality through hydrologic fracking

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/natural-gas-fracking-in-the-news/

 And yes my conservative friends, I made that entire argument without once mentioning global climate change.  How do we get people to understand the simplest of scientific principles and the difference between causation and correlation?  Honestly I don’t know but trust me we are trying in Biology and Environmental Studies classes all over the world we are trying.  In the meantime let’s remember all of the good things the Clean Air and Water Acts as well as the Endangered Species Act have done.  Should our environmental laws and policies be reviewed, of course no law or policy should be above review, but let’s not be stupid enough to think that they should all be abolished, if you’re not convinced you can borrow my copy of Silent Spring.

Does this mean Global Warming has accelerated?

Does this mean Global Warming has accelerated?

The short answer is no, but take a little walk with me.

So how do crazy tin-foil hat rumors get started and fly across the internet scaring the heck out of innocent folks?  Typically they start with a grain of truth, some piece of scientific research or information and then it gets out of control.  A couple of recent examples surrounding the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill include that the sea floor was cracked in multiple areas and that Russian Oceanographer Anatoly Sagalevitch had taken his Mir1 and Mir2 submersibles to the gulf and reported this in Russia which would lead to us needing to nuke the seafloor in the Gulf.

I busted that rumor by contacting Dr. Sagalevitch and you can read about that here:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/anatoly-sagalevitch-comments-on-bp-oil-crisis-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/

The next one that got a serious foothold was that a giant methane bubble was going to erupt from under the Gulf of Mexico and extinguish almost all life on earth.  This rumor followed the standard path, first there is some real science, a theory by Dr. Gregory Riskin that puts forward that an event like the one describe above may have been responsible for past mass extinctions.  Then you have the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill and high levels of methane related to the spill and boom, someone jumps to the conclusion that the drilling has set off a mass extinction event.  Dr. Riskin himself debunked this one and I detailed many of the points of incongruity in another post on this blog:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/has-bp-triggered-an-explosive-methane-event-that-will-bring-on-dystopian-times/

Well let’s see if we can head one off before it gets started, as the title suggests, a study shows plants are reducing their uptake of carbon.  So the part that is the real science is that a 10 year study has shown that carbon uptake rates have decreased over the last decade.  Now the alarming thing is that if this trend continued it would actually accelerate the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and any impacts that result from the increase.  Hence the effects of global climate change would be greatly accelerated.   Now the not so alarming part the study, like any good scientific study, also indicates that this may have a very explainable cause.  First, the decrease is very small compared to the overall rate of carbon uptake and secondly, during the period of the study there were massive droughts in both hemispheres.  The droughts could easily account for the decrease.  You can read the article for yourself at:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0820/As-plant-productivity-dips-a-search-for-answers?sms_ss=email

As I mentioned in the methane bubble debunk piece I worry about the level of science education in the American population and the ability for the general public to discern science from conjecture, essentially the ability to tell Carl Sagan and Glenn Beck apart.

BP and the oil industry are only part of the danger and Haliburton is involved!

I had heard about the documentary Gasland for a while and didn’t pay much attention, I first heard about the film on NPR and then I saw Josh Fox, who made the film, on The Daily Show with John Stewart.  Mr. Fox showed a video clip of someone’s tap water catching on fire, you can see a clip at the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U01EK76Sy4A

That little clip was enough to get me to check out the film which I caught On Demand, through cable on HBO and yes Comcast that was a shameless plug, how about a little free cable.  I watched the documentary and was really impressed with Josh Fox and his story.  Fox was obviously not a filmmaker and that shows particularly early on in the story.  However, the deeper he digs into what’s going on, the better his film work and story-telling become.  Essentially Mr. Fox was offered a decent sum of money to give up the gas rights to his property and unlike most of us he became suspicious of easy money and promises of no adverse environmental effects.  The film is basically about his initial quest to learn more about the offer and proceeds into an in-depth investigation of a process called hydraulic fracturing or fracking.  On a side note fracking serves as the alternate universe substitute for the word fucking on Battlestar Gallactica and the irony of being fracked by big gas companies didn’t escape me as I watched the film.

Fracking, not in the Battlestar Gallactica sense – that’s a talk for your parents to handle, is a process by which natural gas companies drill down through the ground into pockets of natural gas not previously accessible.  Then high pressure water and chemicals are pumped down into the ground to fracture the rock and release the gas helping it flow up through the well to be captured.  According to the companies that do this, the chemicals they use are safe, and there is no contamination of nearby drinking water wells.  However Josh Fox shows us this just isn’t so and visits folks who have some of the nastiest water you’ve ever seen including some that is actually flammable when it comes out of the taps.  Other people show how their cats, dogs and horses are getting ill and losing their hair and talk about the very real fear that their families will get ill or their house will blow up from the gas in the water lines.

Our old friend Dick Cheney and Haliburton are involved, and to quote the promotional site for the film we find out the following:   ”In 2005, the Bush/ Cheney Energy Bill exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act. It exempts companies from disclosing the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing. Essentially, the provision took the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) off the job. It is now commonly referred to as the Halliburton Loophole.”

The worst part of the loophole is that it means that there is no regulatory agency even looking at this issue and it allows the companies involved, Haliburton included, to poison people’s drinking supply and the people impacted have nowhere to go, enter Josh Fox and his film.  A lot of the folks involved truly looked scared and some have very definite proof of what these companies are doing in their heartless pursuit of profits as some of the companies have paid for alternate water sources of water indefinitely.  These sources include bringing in tankers of water to fill giant cisterns or full industrial level filtration systems.

The scariest part of this issue is the sheer area of the United States that has the type of rock that possess the natural gas.  The areas include some of the largest watersheds in the Northeast including the drinking water supply for New York City.  Take a look at the trailer below and then the link for the movie’s promotional website below that:

The trailer:

http://www.wikio.com/video/gasland-trailer-2010-3378350

The promotional site:

http://gaslandthemovie.com/whats-fracking

And finally take the time and see Gasland

Save the Earth, NO! Save your ass!

The late and immortal George Carlin once postulated using a unique Gaian perspective, that the earth allowed human evolution because it had no other way to make plastic.  God help us if that’s the truth because I think the earth may have all the plastic it needs and then, it will have no need for us.  Remember, everything on earth gets recycled, even us.  Mountains get blown down by wind, earth gets ground under in tectonic motion, rain goes to land, to river, to ocean and back to the sky.  Human beings need to develope the realization that we, not the earth are the temporary thing here.

It strikes me as funny that given the self-centered nature of the human race that when it comes to environmental impacts that we have adopted the tag line save the earth.  I mean come on folks, it should be save the humans!  Or much more bluntly save our ass.  Of course those of us who dabble in the sciences, particularly ecology have a deep understanding that all things are connected.  Saving the whales was not really about saving the whales folks it was about saving a keystone species in oceanic ecosystems that we depend on for a major part of our food supply.

This brings me to today’s point friends, the end is near, or is it?  There is a fundamental concept in ecology, it is called carrying capacity.  Simply, this is the assessment of how many of any given organism can live healthily in a system.  So maybe a thought just hit you, what is the carrying capacity of the earth?  That question is just a tad incomplete, carrying capacity is specific for each species, so the real question is what is the carrying capacity for humans on the earth.  The frightening thing is that the estimates range from 1 billion to 20 billion with the majority of scientists falling into the 10 – 15 billion range.    However, something unique to humans is that we can have a varying human footprint, or environmental impact.  That footprint can be very small, like that of a lightly populated nonindustrialized culture to the heavy footprint we have here in the USA.  So, as the third world becomes increasingly developed their footprint increases and the overall carrying capacity of the earth for humans decreases.

Two solutions loom, both seemingly wholly unpalatable to people in general and Americans in particular.  Solution one reduce the population and that means either stop having babies or get rid of the some of the current population, did I sayslaughter politely enough?  Solution two is reduce our footprint here in the US and globally and that folks is not something Americans are game for doing.  We seem to feel entitled to a standard of living that is completely unsustainable as if it has been granted by God.  I guess that’s what we mean on our money when we say in God we trust.  However, in time, this trust in God may lead to us being crushed by Gaia, so let’s drop the save the earth bit folks, SAVE OUR ASS!