Another perspective on global consumption and damage to the environment

From “Easy Chair: The War of the World”, by Rebecca Solnit, in Harper’s, 2015 Feb, pp. 6f.

[S]o much of the environmental damage we are facing has been done in recent decades. This is especially worth remembering when those who don’t want us to do anything about the catastrophes around us suggest that the costs of action are prohibitively high. Though it is shaming and alarming to look back on just how destructive the so-called Greatest Generation and its successors have been, it’s encouraging to note that when it comes to living standards we don’t need to return to the Stone Age or the preindustrial era but maybe only as far as 1940: to more modest scales of consumption, to agriculture that uses fewer chemicals and fossil fuels, to more locally sourced goods, and to less corporatized globalization. Instead of thinking in terms of “going back,” it may make more sense to say that it is finally time to end the war.

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We are, in other words, still in a wartime economy, only now the war is against nature.

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This is not the old false binary of culture versus nature; it’s the great majority of us against a small minority who have chosen short-term individual benefit over long-term global survival.

Trumpism defines the first ecological government

From “The New Climate” by Brian Latour, in Harper’s 2017 May, pp 13-16.  Translated from the French by Andrew Brown.

The United States had two options after the election. It could recognize the extent of the change in global circumstances, and the enormousness of its responsibility, and finally become realistic, leading the free world out of the abyss; or it could sink into denial. Trump seems to have decided to let America dream on for a few more years, and to drag other countries into the abyss along the way.

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We are going to have to live together with people who have not hitherto shared our traditions, our way of life, or our ideals, who are close to us and foreign to us — terribly close and terribly foreign.

The thing we share with these migrating peoples is that we are all deprived of land. We, the old Europeans, are deprived because there is no planet for globalization and we must now change the entire way we live; they, the future Europeans, are deprived because they have had to leave their old, devastated lands and will need to learn to change the entire way they live.

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But there is another aspect of this same change, which they haven’t properly realized: for a long time, the new climate has been sweeping away all borders, exposing us to every storm. Against such an invasion, we can build no walls. Migration and climate are one and the same threat.

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The complete indifference to facts that marked the campaign is simply a consequence of claiming you can live without being grounded in reality. When you’ve promised those who think they’re heading back to a country they once knew that they will indeed rediscover their past there (and are actually dragging them toward a place that has no real existence), then you can’t be too picky about empirical evidence.

It’s pointless to get angry that Trump’s electors don’t believe the facts: they’re not stupid. The situation is quite the opposite: it’s because the overall geopolitical situation has to be denied that an indifference to facts becomes so essential. If they had to realize the huge contradiction, they’d have to start coming down to earth. In this sense, Trumpism defines (albeit negatively, by taking up the opposite position) the first ecological government.

 

Nature’s distribution networks

From The Economist, 2010.02.13, p. 82:

The study of living things may shed light on urban planning.  And vice versa.

CITIES are often described as being alive. A nice metaphor, but does it mean anything? And, if it does, can town planners and biologists learn from one another? Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell University, wrote last year that Manhattan and a mouse might just be variations on a single structural theme. His point was that both are, in part, composed of networks for transporting stuff from one place to another. Roads, railways, water and gas mains, sewage pipes and electricity cables all move things around. So do the blood vessels of animals and the sap-carrying xylem and phloem of plants. How far can the analogy be pushed?

Peter Dodds of the University of Vermont draws a particular analogy between the blood system and a suburban railway network. The commuter-rail system of a city ramifies from the centre. The farther out you go, the sparser it is. By analogy, Dr Dodds predicted, the network of capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that permeate tissues) would not be as dense in large animals (where many of them are far from the centre) as it is in small ones. They, too, branch ultimately from a central source—the heart. Surprisingly, no one had looked for this before, but in a paper published recently in Physical Review Letters Dr Dodds shows that this does indeed turn out to be the case.

Dr Dodds’s calculations overthrow a 70-year-old rule of thumb which is known as the ¾ law of metabolism. This suggests energy expenditure is proportional to body mass raised to the power of three-quarters. That a mouse expends more energy per gram than an elephant does is well known. But Dr Dodds’s calculations show that metabolic rates must fall off faster than had previously been believed as animals get bigger because less glucose than thought is being transported by the smaller than predicted capillary network. The law needs to be adjusted to something more like two-thirds.

Two other studies published in the same volume similarly overthrow conventional wisdom about plants. Traditionally, biologists have celebrated the trunk, branch and twig system of a tree as no accident. Many mathematical formulas have suggested it is the best, least wasteful way to design a distribution network. But the very end of such a network, the leaf, has a different architecture. Unlike the xylem and phloem, the veins in a leaf cross-link and loop. Francis Corson of Rockefeller University in New York used computer models to examine why these loops exist.

From an evolutionary point of view, loops seem inefficient because of the redundancy inherent in a looped network. Dr Corson’s models show, however, that this inefficiency is true only if demand for water and the nutrients it contains is constant. By studying fluctuations in demand he discovered one purpose of the loops: they allow for a more nuanced delivery system. Flows can be rerouted through the network in response to local pressures in the environment, such as different evaporation rates in different parts of a leaf.

Another group of researchers at Rockefeller, led by Marcelo Magnasco, also examined vein-loops in leaves. They found that as well as improving efficiency, they also help to ameliorate damage. They discovered this by injecting fluorescent dye into leaves to see if the vein network could distribute the dye to all parts of a leaf that had been damaged. They found the loops are structured in such a way that no matter which piece of a leaf’s supply mechanism is disrupted, there is usually enough capacity in the rest to distribute water and nutrients. “It was very surprising,” Dr Magnasco observes. “The famous theorems that tell us that the optimal structure is a tree failed in a spectacular fashion.”

The leaf, then, is a resilient distribution network—one whose principles could be applied to, say, electricity grids. Next time your power is cut off because a tree has fallen on the cable, remember that.

http://www.economist.com/node/15495944