Bringing Nature Home

I’m reading Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants by Douglas Tallamy. It’s a pretty interesting book because he is an entomologist and writes from that perspective. His message is pretty straightforward: most plants have compounds that help them defend against insects, and native plants have evolved for millions of years with insects that specialize in eating them. These insects are overwhelmingly the base of the food chain that supports everything else up to birds and larger animals. Replace the natives with ornamentals from elsewhere, often specifically bred to be unattractive to insects, and there are a lot fewer insects. The ecosystem doesn’t function any more, even if the plants kind of look similar to the way the functioning ecosystem used to look. Add to this the long list of devastating pests and diseases that have been imported along with alien ornamental plants, and ornamental plants that have escaped into the wild to further devastate ecosystem function, and the case is pretty strong.

Joseph Stiglitz’s Economic Platform

Joseph Stiglitz has a new book on what he thinks an evidence-based progressive economic platform should look like. I admit, I haven’t read the book, but I have read this Axios summary of the book. And here is my summary of that summary:

  • “the government should spend as much money as it takes to bring the economy to full employment.” Nicely put.
  • strong antitrust action, including against social media companies
  • a federal job guarantee, but no universal basic income or explicitly race-based reparations
  • the ability to opt in the Medicare
  • (optional) mortgages provided by the government (well, don’t we have something close to this already? I guess it’s just that private banks get their cut before they hand it over to an “implicitly” government-backed lender. I guess you could cut out the middleman.
  • Higher education funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings: “Graduates earning more than $30,000 might pay 1% of their income toward repaying their student loans; those on seven-figure salaries might pay 4%. After 25 years, the loans are forgiven.” He doesn’t specify this has to be public schools only, although it seems to me this would blur the distinction. And if this federal program existed, is it possible states would reduce or end their funding for state schools and blur the distinction even more?

This all sounds good to me. Add some serious research spending and it just might work. The jobs guarantee might work, but would have to be coupled with a stronger disability, mental health and substance addiction safety net than we have now.

April 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The most frightening and/or depressing story often involves nuclear weapons and/or climate change, because these are the near-term existential threats we face. Oliver Stone has added a new chapter to his 2012 book The Untold History of the United States making a case that we have lost serious ground on both these issues since then. In a somewhat related depressing story, the massive New Orleans levy redesign in response to Hurricane Katrina does not appear to have made use of the latest climate science.
Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Genetic engineering of humans might have to play a big role in eventual colonization of other planets, because the human body as it now exists may just not be cut out for long space journeys. In farther future space colonization news, I linked to a video about the concept of a “Dyson swarm“.

New Orleans levees are upgraded, but did not take climate change into account

A $14 billion upgrade to New Orleans’s flood protection system has been completed, as recommended following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. For the U.S., this is a pretty massive and fast public works project. I haven’t delved into any technical details and am only going on this Scientific American article, but it sounds like it will not provide the level of protection originally envisioned.

The agency’s projection that the system will “no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023” illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana….

Sea-level rise raises questions about whether the protective system—known officially as the Greater New Orleans Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System—should be built to a higher standard.
When Congress approved funding after Katrina, it required the system to protect against a so-called 100-year flood, which has a 1% likelihood of occurring in any year.

That’s a laudable attempt to communicate probability to the public. But if the Army Corps is really using the “100-year flood” as its design standard, and if it’s doing that because Congress prescribed it, and if they did not consider coastal erosion or adequately consider sea level rise, this may be yet another sign the U.S. is slipping behind its peer group of advanced nations. The Dutch are not doing this, they are providing a much higher level of protection to coastal population centers based on the economic value of doing so. I want to believe Congress will do the right thing and protect our coastal population centers when push comes to shove, but I am not encouraged.

Of course, if it protects from a 1-chance-in-50 event rather than a 1-chance-in-100 event, this is not nothing. Each year, and over the course of several decades or a century, your city and personal property either floods or it doesn’t. When it does, you either have practical and financial plans in place to help you bounce back, or you don’t. So good planning, good public works design, good building codes and land use controls, insurance and disaster resilience planning all matter. Some academics, professionals and bureaucrats within the U.S. might be talking about these things, but our political system is certainly not on the cutting edge when it comes to putting them into practice.

when do people travel

Here’s an interesting article in Wired (sadly, my last free one of the month – Wired is one of the few magazines I might actually consider subscribing to) about an analysis of transportation data in L.A. What’s different about it is that they used cell phone data to understand not just longer commutes and trips to and from school, but also all the short trips people take near home for errands, chores and quick shopping. A conclusion is that public transportation, at least in L.A., is much slower and less convenient for these. It makes sense. In my neighborhood, in Philadelphia, these are going to be 95% walking trips, because there is only street parking on both ends, and giving up your spot on the street would not be worth it, not to mention making your trip slow and inconvenient. So free parking on both ends is a big contributor to this, and free parking obviously requires a lot of land, and once you devote all that land to free parking, your neighborhood is no longer walkable and you can’t go back.

the latest on male birth control

Wired’s Gadget Lab, strangely enough, has an episode on male birth control. This is not a gadget, but a hormonal pill men could take. This has been a goal for many decades with little or no progress, and now it sounds like it may be within reach in the near future. Opinions will vary, but I think anything that gives us more control over our reproductive options is good for individual freedom and for society as a whole.

Isaac Asimov’s guide to the Bible

In 1968, Isaac Asimov released a guide to the Bible. According to Open Culture,

“I am trying,” Asimov writes in his introduction, “to bring in the outside world, illuminate it in terms of the Biblical story and, in return, illuminate the events of the Bible by adding to it the non-Biblical aspects of history, biography, and geography.” This describes the general methodology of critical Biblical scholars. Yet Asimov’s book has a distinct advantage over most of those written by, and for, academics. Its tone, as one reader comments, is “quick and fun, chatty, non-academic.” It’s approachable and highly readable, that is, yet still serious and erudite.

Asimov’s approach in his guide is not hostile or “anti-religious,” as another reader observes, but he was not himself friendly to religious beliefs, or superstitions, or irrational what-have-yous. In the interview above from 1988, he explains that while humans are inherently irrational creatures, he nonetheless felt a duty “to be a skeptic, to insist on evidence, to want things to make sense.” It is, he says, akin to the calling believers feel to “spread God’s word.” Part of that duty, for Asimov, included making the Bible make sense for those who appreciate how deeply embedded it is in world culture and history, but who may not be interested in just taking it on faith.

Game of Thrones and human extinction

Slate makes a pretty good point about Game of Thrones – the humans probably shouldn’t win, but they will. This happens in a lot of movies, of course. The bad guys are so bad that the good guys have no plausible chance, and then there is some deus ex machina that makes it all work out. Like all you have to do is throw a bucket of water on the previously invulnerable witch, and she melts. The Death Star has some ridiculous vulnerable point that can be taken out with one shot. The alien ship’s force field can be deactivated because it just happens to use Windows 95 as its operating system (Independence Day). It can be a little annoying if you feel like the authors/screenwriters were just lazy. But in the end, you can either suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story, or go watch a documentary or read a non-fiction book if you are such as deadly serious person you can’t do that.


Viewers have known from the beginning that humanity is facing an existential threat from the army of undead known as the White Walkers, but the show’s characters have discovered the looming crisis only gradually, and they’ve been slow to reckon with the little they do know. Now, with the Night King’s masses marching south from the sundered Wall, there’s no doubt that the threat is real. And yet, with only five episodes of Game of Thrones remaining, the human race is resolutely failing to rise to the occasion. Jon Snow’s attempt to form an alliance with Daenerys Targaryen has created dissension instead of unity, with some northern houses deserting the cause and others, like poor little Lord Umber’s, left unprepared and undersupplied. Despite having pledged her troops, Cersei is merely lying in wait, hoping that the rival armies weaken each other enough for her to conquer whatever remains.

So there you have it. I don’t really think Game of Thrones is primarily a climate change allegory. It mashes together a lot of different things as good authors (especially fantasy and science fiction authors) tend to do. Early on, I thought it was a realistic depiction of social conditions in a medieval, feudal society, examining what it was like for various groups to live there, with just enough fantasy and soft porn thrown in to keep people hooked. Mythologically, there are definitely some King Arthur ties. Zoroastrians have a seven-fold god and fire temples, and the Celts have tree spirits. Most religions have some sort of apocalypse scenario, and in many it is part of a cycle that repeats.

What do I think is going to happen? We may never find out what George R.R. Martin originally had in mind, any more than Disney’s Star Wars ending is likely to match whatever George Lucas had in mind. This is not a particularly bold prediction, but I predict the Deus Ex Machina is going to involve dragons and fire in some way. The humans will have all but lost, and then the fire god will step in and cleanse the land in some way so the cycle can begin again.

bike lanes need to be protected

I’ve always felt that drivers are more reckless on streets with bike lanes. A new study confirms this. So bike lanes need to be separated and protected to be safe. This is especially acute where I live in Philadelphia, where we have faded, poorly marked bike lanes and vehicles constantly blocking the bike lanes causing bikers to merge in and out of sometimes fast moving, often angry traffic including trucks. Still, if I have to get hit by a car on a relatively slow residential street, I think I would rather be side-swiped rather than run over from behind. Riding with the flow of traffic scares me because if an inattentive driver hits you from behind while you are making a legal stop at a stop light or stop sign, you could very well die, whereas if you are sideswiped, you have a reasonable change to crash land on the curb or run into a parked car, pedestrian, or something else to absorb some energy and slow you down hopefully without killing you. None of these things should ever happen of course, it is just cowardly and ignorant politicians and bureaucrats who are putting their citizens and children at risk when solutions are available.