Happy July 4 to the Americans reading this. As we eat our cheeseburgers and hot dogs, here’s a robot designed to drill through your blocked arteries, modeled after…the bacteria that causes Lyme disease. The article says it’s about 5 years out, so given my age and health I should be able to start eating all the junk food I want right now, and this technology should be available well before my arteries start to get into serious trouble.
edible forest gardens
Now this truly is uplifting summer reading. It takes the idea of “perennial polycultures”, which are typical in the tropics, and asks whether they can work in eastern North America. I’ve spent some time in the tropics (Thailand in particular). Some people are worried about whether climate change will affect industrial agriculture in the tropics. But in my experience, people in the developing tropics are surrounded by more food than we are here in the developed temperate zone. Peoples’ yards are overflowing with mangoes, payapas, bananas, coconuts, peppers, eggplants and squashes of various sorts (mostly spicy sorts). Throw in some chickens foraging around, farm ponds full of fish, and bamboo for both food and timber, and you could really get by for awhile if the grocery store suddenly disappeared. Gardening there really doesn’t take much effort – once the plants are established. the effort is keeping the plants under control, if you are inclined to 
It turns out we can grow fruit in the temperate zone too. Persimmons and pawpaws are native American trees, for example, but there are also hardy Asian persimmons and Asian pears, which are tougher than our native pears. There are hardy kiwis and yams that can grow here. There are “invasive” native wildflowers like Jerusalem artichoke that grow 10 foot tall stalks with edible, supposedly potato-like tubers. Not to mention some of our favorite perennials like strawberries and asparagus. The books go into a fair amount of detail on soil science, nutrient cycling, attracting pollinators, and other ecological topics, which is fun.
evil empires
Part of my light, uplifting summer reading program. The 80s were my grade school years. I certainly remember the Cold War being a big deal. But knowing that by 1989 it was pretty much over, and knowing about what went down in the 60s, I just always assumed that things were winding down by the 80s. This book has changed that perspective. By the 80s, the arsenals were at an all time high, and communication was at an all-time low. What is really chilling is the picture painted about the Soviet paranoia in the early 80s – the leaders 
Even if there are no clear good or bad guys in this story, the Soviets are certainly not the good guys when it comes to biological weapons. They pursued them secretly, vigorously, and cynically for decades. It is truly chilling to think some of these weapons are still out there. Luckily, genetic engineering technology hadn’t really come into its own yet, so all they had to play around with was garden variety germs like smallpox and plague. Today of course, the technology is here and much more accessible to the average Joe Dictator or madman than back then. Even if there are no “evil empires” out there.
Los Angeles Stormwater Capture Plan
Los Angeles has a new stormwater capture plan out. They seem to focus mostly on the idea of using urban stormwater to recharge aquifers at the watershed to neighborhood scale.
The long term (by 2099) potential average annual capture volume was calculated for a conservative and aggressive scenario. Each was broken down by aquifer and between distributed capture and centralized capture. The fraction of the incoming flow to the City through direct precipitation, applied irrigation and run-on (831,400 acre-feet) that is currently captured in the existing baseline scenario is 11% (92,400 acre-feet). The fraction of the incoming flow to the City that could be captured ranges between 24% (197,300 acre-feet) and 33% (285,900), where the low value represents a conservative scenario and the higher value an aggressive scenario. This represents a captured volume of approximately double and triple the existing volume in the conservative and aggressive scenarios, respectively. As in the existing condition, most of the distributed recharge, and most of the increase in recharge, will take place in the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles Forebay area under all scenarios, reflecting well suited infiltration characteristics and the prioritization of Class 1 and Class 2 aquifers. It is important to note that the potential capture over the long term (to 2099) does not reflect the stated goals of the SCMP which will provide an implementation strategy for capture potential over the next 20 years.
This doesn’t really explore the idea of capturing and reusing more water at the site scale. If we really tried to close loops better at that scale, using a whole suite of water conservation, stormwater capture, and graywater tools, I feel like it could go a long way. You install waterless plumbing fixtures first (waterless urinals, composting toilets, urine-separating toilets), where practical, then the lowest-flow fixtures next (low flow showerheads and clotheswashers, dual-flush toilets). Then you capture stormwater in cisterns and rain barrels. Next is graywater – capturing and reusing water from clothes washers and showers. None of this is rocket science – it’s just plumbing, but the potential for creative and user-friendly designs just hasn’t been fully explored yet. People may think that the current generation of composting toilets and rain barrels is not worth the trouble even if they lower our water bills a little bit, so we need to design products that people want, like any other industry that competes for peoples’ attention and dollars.
Alaska wildfires
Climate Central has an interesting report on a trend of increasing wildfires in the Arctic region of Alaska.
In the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the country, with average temperatures up by nearly 3°F. By 2050, temperatures are projected to climb an additional 2-4 degrees, with the Arctic region seeing the most dramatic increases. These rising temperatures are expected to increase wildfire risks in Alaska, just as they have in the rest of the western U.S. Wildfires have been on the rise across the western U.S. since the 1970s, at the same time that spring and summer temperatures have increased dramatically, and average spring snowpack has declined substantially. Fires in Alaska don’t often make news in the lower 48, but they threaten vast expanses of forest, parkland, and tundra that store immense quantities of carbon. The state’s growing number of large wildfires have the potential to damage these ecosystems, and the people and wildlife that depend on them, while releasing a significant amount of carbon into the atmosphere, further contributing to global warming. Wildfire emissions over these vast areas also threaten air quality in Alaska and beyond.
They attribute the trend to higher temperatures in May, June, and July, while at the same time there has been no clear trend in rainfall during these months. So it is getting hotter and, if not dryer, at least not any wetter. It makes sense that higher temperatures would dry out wood, dead vegetation, and organic soils, increasing the amount fuel available for fires. I don’t know what exactly starts the fires, maybe lightning. The scariest thing in this report is the idea of a self-reinforcing feedback loop between thawing permafrost, burning forests and organic soils, greenhouse gas emissions, and higher temperatures. I suspect if this is going on in Alaska, it is also going on in other parts of the Arctic – Canada, northern Europe, and Russia.
18-year-old sperm
A scientist says all men should freeze their sperm at age 18. The argument is that because the risk of autism and certain diseases is slightly higher later in life, doing this would provide some benefits if done consistently across an entire population. The risk to any individual is still small, and the technology is still pretty expensive and imperfect.
vegetable rain gardens
Growing food in rain gardens – it seems almost too obvious. But it isn’t done much, and somebody has gone to the trouble of studying it scientifically here. They planted “beetroot, onion, spinach, tomato and broad bean”. This sounds good, but it might be fun to experiment with trees and other perennial species. There are some tough plants out there that will tolerate wet and dry conditions better than your typical annual garden crops. Jerusalem artichoke comes to mind, which is a sort of invasive American prairie flower that produces enormous amounts of delicious potato-like tubers.
recycling
The Washington Post has an interesting article on recycling in the U.S. The prices of most recyclables are down, and although people are putting more recycling on the curb than ever before, there is more non-recyclable material in it than ever before. The technology has improved, but packaging design has also changed a lot towards extremely lightweight, plastic packaging that is cheap to make and ship.
This reminds me of the classic book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, which talks about truly sustainable product design. Clearly, the companies that design this packaging have no incentive to consider how it is disposed of. They don’t pay any of that cost and it is not their problem. Their incentive is to produce cheap, lightweight materials. If on the other hand, they considered the recycling process alongside the manufacturing and transportation process, and designed products with all three in mind, they could produce truly reusable and recyclable materials.
my pope post
Everybody seems to have a post about the pope, so here is mine.
The Pope and Climate Change, Biodiversity, Inequality, Technocracy, Anthropocentrism: He has a lot to say on all of these topics. Here is just a short quote:
We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door.
The Pope, Philadelphia, and The Sharing Economy. He’s coming here in September. Philadelphia is a city of 1.5 million people, and nobody knows exactly how many additional people we need to plan for. Here are some facts and figures:
- In 1979 , John Paul II attracted 1.2 to 2 million people. However, he made stops in half a dozen U.S. cities, whereas Philadelphia is the only stop this time.
- John Paul II drew 1 million in Rio and 4-5 million in Manila. Francis has drawn 3 million in Rio and 6 million in Manila.
- The 2008 Phillies World Series victory parade drew 420,000 to 750,000.
- Obama’s inauguration drew 1.8 million to D.C., which they pulled off without major incident.
- The U.S. Secret Service will protect the Pope while he is here.
- The Philadelphia government, after refusing to either legalize or enforce against Airbnb for several years, has realized they can legalize it and tax it for this event, and make a fortune.
- Rick Santorum, prominent science-denying Catholic presidential candidate from Pennsylvania, says the pope should “leave science to the scientists” and focus on things like morals. The pope has not responded to Rick, but he appears to see a connection between morals and not destroying our home planet.
gators and tigers and extinction, oh my!
The extinction rate is now 1000 times normal, says Duke University.
Not to worry, say Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and the University of Florida (and what would they know, those ‘gators with their beady dinosaur eyes), it’s only 114 times normal using “conservative assumptions”.
And according to a surprisingly edgy book review in my favorite special interest publication Civil Engineering (because what could be more special than my own interest), there is a new book out:
You probably don’t subscribe to Civil Engineering, so here is the Amazon description:
A growing number of scientists agree we are headed toward a mass extinction, perhaps in as little as 300 years. Already there have been five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years, including the Cretaceous Extinction, during which an asteroid knocked out the dinosaurs. Though these events were initially destructive, they were also prime movers of evolutionary change in nature. And we can see some of the warning signs of another extinction event coming, as our oceans lose both fish and oxygen. In The Next Species, Michael Tennesen questions what life might be like after it happens.
Tennesen discusses the future of nature and whether humans will make it through the bottleneck of extinction. Without man, could the seas regenerate to what they were before fishing vessels? Could life suddenly get very big as it did before the arrival of humans? And what if man survives the coming catastrophes, but in reduced populations? Would those groups be isolated enough to become distinct species? Could the conquest of Mars lead to another form of human? Could we upload our minds into a computer and live in a virtual reality? Or could genetic engineering create a more intelligent and long-lived creature that might shun the rest of us? And how would we recognize the next humans? Are they with us now?