“how plagues really work”

This article from Aeon argues that we shouldn’t worry so much about some random mutation of an animal virus coming out of the jungle and destroying us. Instead, it is the conditions in human society that allow new diseases to evolve and adapt to us that we should be more concerned about.

According to this argument, new germs that erupt into our species will be potential triggers for pandemics, while germs that have a long history in a host species will have evolved to be relatively benign.

Many health experts take the notion further, contending that any coming plague will come from human intrusion into the natural world. One risk, they suggest, comes when hungry people in Africa and elsewhere forge deep into forests and jungles to hunt ‘bushmeat’ – rodents, rabbits, monkeys, apes – with exposure to dangerous pathogens the unhappy result. Those pathogens move silently among wild animals, but can also explode with terrifying ferocity among people when humans venture where they shouldn’t. According to the same line of thought, another proposed risk would result when birds spread a new pandemic strain to chickens in factory farms and, ultimately, to us.

But there’s something in these scenarios that’s not entirely logical. There is nothing new in the intimate contact between animals and people. Our hominid ancestors lived on wildlife before we ever evolved into Homo sapiens: that’s why anthropologists call them hunter-gatherers, a term that still applies to some modern peoples, including bushmeat hunters in West Africa. After domesticating animals, we lived close beside them, keeping cows, pigs and chickens in farmyards and even within households for thousands of years. Pandemics arise out of more than mere contact between human beings and animals: from an evolutionary point of view, there is a missing step between animal pathogen and human pandemic that’s been almost completely overlooked in these terrifying but entirely speculative ideas.

According to the evolutionary epidemiologist Paul W Ewald of the University of Louisville, the most dangerous infectious diseases are almost always not animal diseases freshly broken into the human species, but diseases adapted to humanity over time: smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, typhus, yellow fever, polio. In order to adapt to the human species, a germ needs to cycle among people – from person to person to person. In each iteration, the strains best adapted to transmission will be the ones that spread. So natural selection will push circulating strains towards more and more effective transmission, and therefore towards increasing adaptation to human hosts. This process necessarily takes place among people.

It goes on to talk about some major plagues in history, including the 1918 influenza which is “the rod by which all other pandemics are measured”.

We could take some comfort in all this – the diseases that cause the most suffering are the ones that evolve within and amongst people, suggesting that there should always be sub-groups of people who develop immunity to them. This suggests that despite terrible suffering, they shouldn’t represent an existential threat to the species. There is a plague in history that I find even more horrifying that 1918 or the Black Death, and that is the almost complete ravaging of Native American populations after 1492. That was a case of diseases that evolved in and amongst human populations, that were then unleashed on another isolated population (possibly a very large one) that had no resistance to them. So as much as we worry about international travel spreading germs, maybe it means it would be harder for some germ to completely sneak up on us, since there are virtually no human populations that are truly isolated anymore.

There is still the worst possible scenario though – somebody taking one of the ugly human-adapted diseases mentioned in this article, and purposely modifying it into something that the population has no immunity to.

backyard wildlife projects

This Permaculture Research Institute article has some interesting videos about projects to attract more backyard wildlife. I don’t think I could convince my urban neighbors that these are a good idea (a “hotel” for centipedes and bees?) They need some adaptation and scaling for urban areas. It could be done though. I especially like the idea of girls playing with bugs – it is natural for children to be covered in bugs most of the time and modern society has gotten away from that.

the “greater depression”

This article from Project Syndicate is very pessimistic about prospects for the global economy. It focuses mostly on low inflation:

Draghi began by acknowledging that, in Europe, inflation has declined from around 2.5% in mid-2012 to 0.4% today. He then argued that we can no longer assume that the drivers of this trend – such as a drop in food and energy prices, high unemployment, and the crisis in Ukraine – are temporary in nature.

In fact, inflation has been declining for so long that it is now threatening price stability – and inflation expectations continue to fall. The five-year swap rate – an indicator of medium-term inflation expectations – has fallen by 15 basis points since mid-2012, to less than 2%. Moreover, as Draghi noted, real short- and medium-term rates have increased; long-term rates have not, owing to a decline in long-term nominal rates that extends far beyond the eurozone…

A year and a half ago, those who expected a return by 2017 to the path of potential output – whatever that would be – estimated that the Great Recession would ultimately cost the North Atlantic economy about 80% of one year’s GDP, or $13 trillion, in lost production. If such a five-year recovery began now – a highly optimistic scenario – it would mean losses of about $20 trillion. If, as seems more likely, the economy performs over the next five years as it has for the last two, then takes another five years to recover, a massive $35 trillion worth of wealth would be lost.

When do we admit that it is time to call what is happening by its true name?

This discussion doesn’t really get at potential root causes (a valid criticism of most economic and financial reporting, I think) – is it just a lack of confidence feeding on itself? Is it lack of innovation causing productivity to fall? Is it automation causing productivity to rise but lining too few pockets? Is it climate change or some other manifestation of environmental degradation?

The reference to falling food and energy prices wouldn’t seem to support that last hypothesis. But I don’t quite get it – Brent crude is at $102 a barrel compared to its historic inflation-adjusted level of $20-40 for most of the last century. Meat and grain prices in the U.S. are definitely up due to one of the worst droughts ever in some key farming states. And that’s the U.S., not the tropics where the bulk of humanity now lives and the bulk of food needs to be grown in the future. So if I am right and there are serious pressures on water, energy, and food, we better hope that we are innovating at the same time to do something about it.

12 “sustainable” countries

This post from Alternet says we should admire the following 12 countries for their sustainable policies:

  1. Iceland
  2. Switzerland
  3. Costa Rica
  4. Sweden
  5. Luxembourg
  6. Germany
  7. Cuba
  8. Colombia
  9. Singapore
  10. France
  11. Norway
  12. Finland

Now all these countries definitely have progressive policies that other countries can learn from. But with the possible exceptions of Costa Rica, Cuba, and Colombia, all these countries have a lot of heavy industry and finance. They have large carbon emissions. They have replaced a lot of their original natural habitat with ecologically sterile urban development and factory farming. They house corporate headquarters and investors that exploit natural resources and export urbanization and heavy industry abroad. It simply won’t work to take these best-of-business-as-usual, relatively-low-footprint models and copy them in developing countries on a much larger scale. The resulting footprint will still be much too large, and lead to collapse. So what we need to do is take bits and pieces of what they do well, but come up with a completely new, truly sustainable model.

more on drought in California

From the BBC:

For many years rainfall, reservoirs and irrigation canals have allowed this sunny expanse in California to produce half of America’s fruit, nuts and vegetables.

But after three extremely dry years, the farmers are turning to groundwater to keep their crops and their precious trees alive.

There’s a water-rush as drilling companies are burrowing ever deeper – and there’s no restriction on how many wells can be sunk underground…

In some parts of the Central Valley, the water level has dropped more than 20m in less than a year…

This year, for the first time, farmers in many parts of the Central Valley have received no rainwater or runoff allocation for their crops from the water district…

“If this drought situation is the new normal we are going to have to completely re-think how much food we can grow – and a lot of people depend on California for growing food,” he said.

It can be hard to separate the long-term signal from the short-term noise, but still this seems like it may be climate change finally coming to bite us. That’s what happened in Australia and it took them a decade to accept their “new normal”.

Water, energy, and food supplies (and prices) all fluctuate constantly and affect one another. Here’s NPR talking about a few of these fluctuations but ultimately coming back to, yes, drought.

Across the country, the virus killed several million piglets, adding up to a lot fewer hogs at market. So tighter supply means Lewis gets paid more per pound, per hog.

“It’s been remarkable what the price has done,” says Lewis. “The last couple of years, hog farmers dug a real deep equity hole. And so it’s really nice to have that hole start to get filled up.”

He’s referring partly to the cost of feed — a major expense here on the farm. After record high corn prices in 2012, feed has now gotten cheaper, and Lewis can raise bigger hogs.

It’s a different story with cattle, which take much longer to bring to market. When feed prices skyrocketed two years ago, many ranchers sold off more cattle than they might have otherwise.

That extra beef is long gone, and ongoing drought in the Plains states means herds aren’t growing fast enough to meet demand.

The headline suggests that higher meat prices “aren’t scaring consumers”, but later they say that “Shoppers who can may spend more to eat the same amount of meat. Others will spend just the same, but get less.” That’s how it works in this economic system of ours – those who can pay more, do, and those who can’t, do without.

August 2014 in Review

At the end of July, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2. Let’s see if things got any better in August. As I did last month, I’ll sort selected posts that talk about positive trends and ideas vs. negative trends, predictions, and risks. Just for fun, I’ll keep a score card and pretend my posts are some kind of indicator of whether things are getting better or worse. I’ll give posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-8):

  • The Ebola outbreak is very sad and scary. Some people are calling this a “dress rehearsal” for the “big one” that could actually threaten humanity more widely. (-1)
  • New research on patents suggests that they have mixed effects, at best, in spurring innovation – they are effective in some industries (like drugs, chemicals, mechanical technology) but actually an impediment to innovation in others (like computers, electronics, medical technology). The former are examples of technologies with very clear “recipes” which can easily be copied, it seems to me, while the latter are complex and knowing how others have made them doesn’t necessarily mean you can make them easily. Another hypothesis would be that the computer industry just moves a lot faster, so knowing how somebody made something yesterday doesn’t help you compete with them, because they have already moved on to the next thing today. But if that is the case, should we be trying to speed up the slow industries rather than giving some players protections that slow or deter their potential competitors? (-0)
  • The drought in the western United States is looking worse and worse. Is it the “new normal”, or is it just a really bad drought, as happens from time to time? Unfortunately we can only answer this question in retrospect, but it seems prudent to take action as though it were the new normal. Even if it turns out just to be a bad drought, it is clear that snow packs we used to rely on are melting and that we have mined groundwater unsustainably in many places. These are things that urgently need new management strategies – lack of rain is just adding insult to injury. On a slightly positive note, agricultural has adapted to change in the past and may be able to adapt again. (-1)
  • In 1986 Ronald Reagan laid out a bold vision for complete elimination of nuclear weapons…which was interpreted by everyone else as a sign of him losing his mind. (-3)
  • A few people are questioning the gospel of shareholder value as the only thing a company, its management and employees have any business caring about. Milton Friedman, if not exactly spinning in his grave, might have rolled over just an inch or two. But most people and companies still take it as…well…gospel. Noam Chomsky can explain pretty well why this is likely to lead our civilization to ruin – because the long-term “externalities” not being considered, which are costs to everyone for the next several generations, are much larger than the short-term financial profits being made by a few shareholders today. (-2)
  • Cars – the more I think about it, the more I am coming to believe they are the root of all evil in our society, and they have to go. But a positive way of saying that is that we could really solve an enormous number of thorny, intertwined problems if we come up with better, cleaner, faster, cheaper, safer ways to get around, which really shouldn’t be hard! (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+11):

  • I discovered NetLogo, which is a programming language supposedly even children can learn and use to do dynamic simulations. Educational tools like this are critical if we want to build a new generation of system thinkers with any chance to solve our problems. (+3)
  • There is new research on corridors and connectivity for wildlife habitat. This is important because we are not going to have many huge, interrupted reserves in the future and we need the connected patches and smaller reserves that remain, interspersed with the human-dominated landscape, to be as ecologically functional as possible. And it turns out that the human-dominated landscape itself does not have to be an ecological dead zone, but can actually be preferred by some wildlife such as some kinds of birds and bees (+1)
  • David Cameron has announced a bold plan to make chemotherapy “a thing of the past” through accelerated genetic research. (+1)
  • Elon Musk is trying to put sustainable colonies on Mars longer term as a hedge against human extinction, build cheap batteries for cheap electric cars and houses, build cheap solar panels to charge the batteries, and protect us against killer artificial intelligence. (+1)
  • Vermont is adopting the Genuine Progress Indicator, a GDP alternative that adjusts for natural capital depletion. The World Economic Forum also has a nifty GDP alternative index. (+1)
  • Grid parity for solar energy appears to be here, seriously for real this time. Economic mayhem for the business-as-usual fossil fueled utilities is likely to follow. (+3)
  • Speaking of economic mayhem, cap and trade is going on in California! And looks like it is going to add to the cost of gas…ten cents or so. Just a reminder that consumers can either pay that, or choose to adjust their lifestyle ever so slightly to include ten cents less driving. (+1)
  • A couple more fabulous science fiction technologies, which can be used for good or evil or none of the above, are here: virtual reality and remote control moths. (+0)

Hope for the Future Index (July 2014): -2

August 2014 change: -8 + 11 = +3

Hope for the Future Index (August 2014): +1

Wow, we’re in positive territory people!

“blue carbon”

This article in Ecological Economics is about carbon sequestration in “mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes”, and policy and market mechanisms that can help make this happen. To me carbon sequestration is not the only or the primary reason to try to conserve these ecosystems, but I will certainly support it if it gets the job done. Plus if we can come up with hard-nosed market-based approaches that actually work, we can apply them to conservation and restoration of a whole range of ecosystems.

Blue carbon – the carbon stored and sequestered in mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes – is considered a cost-effective means to achieve positive climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes. Blue carbon is therefore of considerable interest to the scientific and policy communities, and is frequently discussed in relation to carbon markets and climate finance opportunities. This paper identifies peer-reviewed and ‘gray literature’ documents that discuss blue carbon in the context of finance and market mechanisms. The document set is analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the principal scientific, economic, regulatory, social, and management issues that emerge are discussed. The study reveals that (1) the blue carbon literature is dominated by technical and policy commentary, with a dearth of research into practical social considerations and a stark absence of private sector perspectives; (2) there is confusion over the nature and role of important concepts including private and public sector finance and instruments; and (3) understanding of the important issues of investment priorities and risk considerations is also limited. This paper therefore identifies gaps in the blue carbon literature, clarifies critical concepts and issues, and proposes novel pathways for blue carbon research and project development.

Integrating the planetary boundaries and global catastrophic risk paradigms

I think this article in Ecological Economics gets at a very important idea. There are planetary boundaries we are at risk of exceeding, most obviously the ability of the atmosphere and oceans to absorb and hold greenhouse gas emissions before reaching some catastrophic tipping point. Then there are catastrophic risks that come out of left field every once in a while, like war, plague, accidents, and asteroid strikes. Since our attention span and ability to respond seems to be severely limited, we really need to understand which of these risks are the most likely and the most consequential, so we know where to focus our efforts.

Planetary boundaries (PBs) and global catastrophic risk (GCR) have emerged in recent years as important paradigms for understanding and addressing global threats to humanity and the environment. This article compares the PBs and GCR paradigms and integrates them into a unified PBs-GCR conceptual framework, which we call Boundary Risk for Humanity and Nature (BRIHN). PBs emphasizes global environmental threats, whereas GCR emphasizes threats to human civilization. Both paradigms rate their global threats as top priorities for humanity but lack precision on key aspects of the impacts of the threats. Our integrated BRIHN framework combines elements from both paradigms’ treatments of uncertainty and impacts. The BRIHN framework offers PBs a means of handling human impacts and offers GCR a theoretically precise definition of global catastrophe. The BRIHN framework also offers a concise stage for telling a stylized version of the story of humanity and nature co-evolving from the distant past to the present to multiple possible futures. The BRIHN framework is illustrated using the case of disruptions to the global phosphorus biogeochemical cycle.

cars are evil

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

No, Joel Kotkin, this is not the same thing as saying everybody has to live in tiny apartments, or in a “luxury city” where young childless “hipsters” do nothing but eat and drink and shop and party. Only someone who has never really experienced a walkable community would have this misconception. These are communities where people live, work, innovate, raise families, shop for groceries, garden, and care about each other. There are a lot of ways the actual buildings and infrastructure can be laid out to achieve the basic objective. It might be “dense” in terms of people, but it won’t feel crowded if the space is used well rather than wasted. There can be lots of breathing room for people, and even for plants and wildlife, as long as space is not wasted on oceans of parking lots and rivers of angry people trapped inside glass and steel bubbles separated by one car length for every 10 miles per hour of speed.

urban bee habitat

The BBC has an article on urban habitat for bees:

There is widespread concern that wild bee populations in rural areas are being adversely affected by a number of factors, including pesticides.

“For a bee species to be present in [an urban] habitat, it must be able to find food and nesting substrate,” said co-author Laura Fortel, a researcher from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA).

“Urban and periurban (the transition between rural and urban) sites can provide high quantities of flowers all year long; they show a high diversity of land cover types and are often warmer than surrounding landscapes.”

She added: “Also, such habitats are seldom treated with pesticides, which are involved in the decline of bees elsewhere.”

It seems like a reversal of conventional wisdom that cities could be important reservoirs of biodiversity when rural agricultural areas have become degraded. In a way it is a negative story, but in another way it is reminder that we should not cynically assume that urban landscapes are always biological dead zones. There is a lot we can do to make them much more ecologically functional for important species of pollinators and birds. If it is happening to some extent by accident, then it could work even better if we did it by design. We can think about how the individual small patches are designed, then think about how they can connect better to each other, to larger urban parks, and to the rural landscape.