Most frightening and/or depressing story: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.
Most hopeful story: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.
Let’s see what Project Censored has come up with as their top 25 “censored” stories of 2021. “Censored” has a broad definition here which includes “under-reported”. News stories are under-reported when there is no market for them in our mostly profit-driven media. Anyway, here are a handful that caught my eye:
“Coastal darkening” – I hadn’t heard this term, but it encompasses organic matter in the water (from farms and urban runoff and wastewater), algal blooms, and sediment stirred up by human activity. These are all forms of water pollution scientists and engineers have been familiar with for a long time. Solutions are known, but the scale of the problem and cost of dealing with it is difficult. Our industrialized, urbanized, heavily populated civilization creates these forms of pollution. We should appreciate that a lot of money and hard work go on behind the scenes to make these problems much, much less bad than they would be if nothing was done – wastewater treatment, etc. But still, the scale of the problem is daunting to solve completely and we prefer to pay in environmental damage which affects everybody a little bit rather than divert the money and effort it would require to solve them completely. Under the basic economic principle of scarcity, something else would have to give if we did this, at least in the near- to medium-term. In the long term, there is a virtuous cycle where once we get started, technology tends to improve and we learn by doing. But cynical politicians elected on 2-4 year cycles are not going to pitch these ideas to the public, even if they understand them.
The pollutants mentioned above (organic matter, nutrients, etc.) are yucky but at least biodegradable. Another article is about microplastics and PFAS in the ocean. They are going to be there until the end of time now, but we could start working on trying not to add more of them.
“tens of thousands of satellites” – driven by civilian communications but inevitably useful for military applications. Companies like SpaceX are getting billions of dollars of military-industrial-complex money.
factory farming creates a risk for future pandemics – the article is about “U.S. factory farming”, but even if we invented it, it is being done all over the world, and the scale of what is done in Asia dwarfs anything the U.S. or Europe does at this point
things are not good for Amazon (the rain forest)
You could think of the social cost of past carbon emissions by industrial economies as a kind of debt owed to countries that are less industrialized or have industrialized more recently. That would mean that they have taken up much more than their fair share of the atmosphere’s and ocean’s ability to absorb emissions over time. The US, UK and Europe would probably prefer to focus on their share of current annual emissions rather than their share of cumulative emissions since they got the first lumps of coal in their Christmas stockings and burned them a couple centuries ago.
The sky is up, the Earth is down, and US drug prices are still insane. The article estimates the human toll of this in terms of premature deaths.
(Too)Long(didn’t)reads.com picks a best article every week, and once a year they list all of them from the past year. I probably won’t have time to really dig into many of these, but there are certainly interesting topics here and they provide a look back on the year.
a look back at the January 6 attack on the US Congress by a fascist mob, just a few days after it happened
the story of the Covid vaccine development, and on a much less happy note, the Covid carnage in US prisons, and the crisis in India as it was happening
“Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State” – I think I may have actually read this. What is happening there meets the UN definition of genocide and must stop. A wrinkle is that its genesis came shortly after the 9/11 attacks and U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Almost anything could be justified as part of the Global War on Terror at the time. Xinjiang is next door to Afghanistan, and is home to a Muslim ethnic group, and within that ethnic group a resistance/terrorist group formed which perpetrated attacks on the imperial capital. The parallels are surprising when you think about it. The Chinese approach is not acceptable, but did that make the American approach in Afghanistan any more acceptable?
Anti-Asian-American violence. I continue to be a bit puzzled by this. I am not questioning its reality, it just doesn’t seem to be happening in the places or to the Asian-Americans I cross paths with. I wonder if it is really new or something like shark attacks that happens periodically and the media suddenly picked up on and made a big deal of for awhile. People could also be reporting it more often now that they feel someone is listening and something might be done about it.
Hugo Drax…I mean…Elon Musk is Time’s man…I mean…person of the year for 2021. I guess I’m okay with it, since I am interested in electric cars, self-driving cars, and space travel.
He sees his mission as solving the globe’s most intractable challenges, along the way disrupting multiple industries across two decades. These include what was once the core American creation, combustion-engine automobiles, and what was once the core American aspiration, spaceflight, as well as a litany of other manifestations of our present and future: infrastructure construction, artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and increasingly money itself through his dalliances with cryptocurrencies.
Wow, a dozen or more famous people asked to weigh in and it is almost 100% doom and gloom. To grossly summarize:
Carbon emissions will just keep getting worse, and not much will be done. About the most positive thing anyone can say is that pressure for change will increase and the “corporate and financial sectors” will get more serious about it. We are the corporate and financial sectors, and we are here to help!
Political dysfunction and polarization in the US and EU. Republicans will retake the US Congress (and both sides will say they knew it all along).
US vs. Russia, China vs. US, Iran vs. the US and/or Israel. Several commentators predict one more attempt to revive the Obama nuclear deal, which will fail, which will be followed by more uranium enrichment, which will be followed by a military strike by the US and/or Israel.
Bees will continue to decline. Does this seem less important than the other things? Bees pollinate around a third of crops, and even if we find other ways to pollinate crops or grow crops that don’t need pollination, we can look forward to:
Given that heatwaves, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events prevent people from engaging in agricultural work, and that bees and other pollinators affect 35% of the world’s agricultural land and support the production of 87 of the leading food crops, we will see an increase of global insecurity, even in developed economies. Unable to sustain the production of the food they need, many of the world’s poor will be pushed into extreme poverty, suffer malnutrition, and migrate.
Several point to mass migration as a big issue for 2022. Not a long term issue, but an issue that will come to a head in the next year.
On the Covid front, most people think it will just become another disease that kills us some times but we will get used to that.
Many commentators think inflation will tone down, and that the bigger risk is governments overreacting to it. Some predict a sharp decline in the US dollar (is this bad for the average Joe? hard to say), and there is already a real estate crash happening in China.
A few are optimistic that social safety nets may improve here and there.
On the technology front? “One hopes for more demonstrations of the power of recent biomedical and genetic research, amply validated by the rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. There also may be new leaps in additive manufacturing and machine learning.” (Diane Coyle) There may be some progress on “green hydrogen and an overhaul of mobility and transportation systems”.
I’m not known for unbridled optimism, but let me think of a few positive things that could happen in 2022. Electric vehicles could finally emerge in the public consciousness in the US. We will all be surprised if that happens, and then one day later we will all have known it all along. The US could make some progress on the childcare crisis that is holding our country back (see this Fresh Air interview if you don’t believe me). Covid will be annoying and disruptive, but I am predicting it will be less annoying and disruptive on December 31, 2022 than on January 1.
In a way, a good year at this point will be one in which nothing really catastrophic happens and we have some breathing room to chip away at the many challenges already on our plates. We have to hope there will not be a major war, nuclear detonation, epic new plague, major food crisis, catastrophic meltdown of the internet or financial system. Hoping is about all us average citizens can do about the latter list, but if you are one of the movers and shakers out there with the power to help manage these risks, WHAT ARE YOU DOING???
I tried to talk myself into being optimistic just now, and failed, oh well.
According to The Onion, you should not attend your office holiday party. But if you choose to ignore that advice, you should under no circumstances give a six-hour lecture on how “Christmas” evolved from pagan winter solstice celebrations. Because “No way you can cover all the relevant material in less than eight. And remember to build in time for questions!”
I say make it a double header and add at least two hours on the pagan origins of Halloween (spoiler: it involves fairies). I can see how this can be annoying, but it is still more interesting than whatever it is that “normal” people jabber on about. Perhaps what we introverts fail to understand is that the jabbering itself is the point, and the content mostly irrelevant.
Here I am writing in late December, and it seems I forgot to do a November in review. In current events, the “Omicron” coronavirus tidal wave is breaking over the Northeast U.S. as we speak. But plenty of people have plenty to say about that, and I do not have much to say, and even if I did it would be outdated by the time I said it. One thing that is slightly amusing is that we just stopped naming hurricanes after Greek letters because most of the public lacks the “benefits of a classical education”. Months later, we are naming mutant viruses after Greek letters. Anyway, here goes the November review:
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them a a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.
And continuing the “best books” theme, this year’s New York Times list is out. The only one that really catches my eye is When we Cease to Understand the World. This appears to be historical fiction somehow knitting together the 20th century’s great scientists and their ideas.
Other books mostly cover a variety of racial and multicultural topics that are interesting and good to know about, but I do not have time to learn about them in book form. There’s a new autobiography of Sylvia Plath, and I like and am saddened by Sylvia Plath, but I think I would rather spend time reading her original work rather than an autobiography about her. Just a random note since I was briefly talking about Margaret Attwood yesterday – when I think of The Handmaid’s Tale I often think of Sylvia Plath, and also Anne Frank, and also Frederick Douglas and other first-person slave narratives. All depressing, and all things everyone should read. The Handmaid’s Tale is at least a work of fiction although it seems quite real when you are in the middle of it, at least for me, and especially the audiobook version.
Planetizen has its list of top ten urban planning books out. Here are a couple that caught my eye. I don’t know that I’ll actually read these – It’s not like I know everything there is to know about these topics, but I may know enough and be just bored enough to want to spend my dwindling budget of mortal reading time on other things.
Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. The case against car-dependence and for walkability. I’m 100% on board. It’s a long and exhausting fight. Also, the title is a bit insulting to engineers, who do not consider our profession an illness to be cured. I guess the point is to draw attention to the book. Well, engineers may not be the intended audience if you are going to insult us before we even open the cover.
Metropolis: A History of the City, Mankind’s Greatest Invention. I’m 100% on board with the idea that modern cities can be great places for human beings to live. It’s a long and exhausting fight (see above). This one looks interesting because it appears to be a comparative history of a number of famous cities in history.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. This is fiction, and definitely on my list. The reviewer feels that Mr. Robinson (he is neither female nor Korean, Kim being a fairly common British dude name at least in the past) “lacks the superlative writing chops of Margaret Attwood” and “some sentences are begging for an editor”. This surprises me, because this is certainly not Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel! Now I am even more curious to read it. I have always found Robinson a little challenging to read, but he has an astonishing imagination and is worth reading for this alone.
Here are a few random thoughts on this year’s growing season. We had our first below-freezing temperatures here in my Philadelphia neighborhood around November 20, which is 3 or so weeks later than “average” (although I’m not sure if what is reported is really the average, or something like a 30% probability to improve the odds a bit for farmers.)
I got my son a Venus fly trap for his birthday in May. They are native to the Carolinas, which is cool, although I bought this one from California Carnivores. We looked at it for awhile, then left it in our buggy backyard for the summer where it seemed to be very, very happy. It even flowered – now a Venus fly trap flower is not a particularly breathtaking flower, but I was excited nonetheless. Most of the time, there was plenty of rain to keep it wet, but I invested in a gallon of distilled water to top it up occasionally. As I write this in early December, I’ve brought it inside for the winter. I’ll continue to give it distilled water, and no matter how sad or even dead it starts to look, I’ll keep watering it and put it back out in the spring. I threw one away a few years ago thinking it was dead, and was horrified to read later that they naturally go dormant in the winter. They can also supposedly handle some light freezes (again, think Carolinas) but not an extended deep freeze, so it seemed safest to just bring it in. My research said to put it in an “unheated garage or entryway” for the winter, but my urban home has neither of these things.
a fuzzy photo of a Venus Fly Trap flower
The “dwarf” (advertised as 15-feet but 20+ feet tall and maybe still growing) Asian pear tree grew lots of pears this years, which the squirrels really enjoyed. I picked and ate one unripe one just to get something, but there were no ripe ones left when the squirrels were done with them. The annoying thing is that they don’t actually eat all that fruit, they take a bite or two out of each one and drop the rest on the ground to rot. Luckily, I find squirrel antics fairly amusing and my family is not starving as a result of the fruit they are depriving us of.
On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…a squirrel in an Asian pear tree
The Asian persimmon tree grew exactly one persimmon this year. This tree is a bit younger (4 years?) so hopefully there is more to come. The squirrels didn’t eat it – maybe they just don’t know what it is – and it was delicious. I thought I had a photo but can’t seem to find one. I believe persimmons are the most delicious fruit that most Americans have never tried. And I don’t know why – the trees are compact, prolific, pest and disease free (the flip side of this is they probably don’t have much ecological value locally), cold tolerant (there are several Japanese varieties), and the fruit is absolutely mouth watering and yet very tough on the outside which seems like it would make for easy shipping. There are native American varieties, but be warned these grow into very big trees which is why I chose the Asian variety. By the way, I am generally partial to native species, but I have not found the right native tree species that works in my small urban garden. I want trees that provide a little bit of shade for the front of the house but leave sunny areas to grow other things, and that I can easily get under or around. My basic principle is that a plant should have at least one other function, whether an ecological function or a food function, other than just looking good. Of course, plants that have all these things are awesome! But like I said, I haven’t identified the perfect tree yet that fits that bill.
Around July, my garden was clear cut (other than the trees) by a gardener hired by a neighbor. And not just mowed, but scraped absolutely to the ground. I was upset, but it was actually kind of interesting to watch how it responded. It’s a perennial garden, so it mostly grew back quickly. More aggressive and resilient plants outcompeted the less aggressive ones for the most part. Interestingly, some plants that are normally aggressive, like Black Eyed Susan, were probably about to flower when they were whacked and apparently decided they were done for the year. I assume their roots are fine and they will be back. Wild strawberries by contrast loved being mowed and took over an entire corner of the garden. There is way too much lemon balm now, even though I like lemon balm. A neighbor actually bought me some native plant seedlings after it happened, which I found really touching. So now I have an aromatic Aster and a Hubricht’s Blue Star in my garden.
After the garden was clear cut, I talked to the neighbor that (inadvertently) did it, and we agreed that I would just take over part of her garden from now on. To get things going quickly, I’ve picked a prairie seed mix (most “prairie” plants are native to the entire U.S. east of the Rockies). I’ve put down some cardboard to suppress weeds from growing back, put a mix of homemade and store-bought compost on top of that, and plan to sprinkle the seeds over the winter and see what happens in the spring. The only issue is that at least one cat has decided this bare soil makes a nice litter box. I intended to plant a fall cover crop but work, family, and life intervened to prevent that project.
Each year, I like to pick a “try again” species and a “new species”. The try again species is usually something I have tried to start from seed in a previous year without success, and still have seeds left over in my basement. This year, I finally got a sea kale seedling going. Squirrels dug it up multiple times for some reason, and it seemed to wilt during a fall heat wave, but now as we enter December it looks incredibly happy and has even flowered. We’ll see what happens. My “new species” was goldenrod variety “Golden Fleece”. I got it from a nursery out west somewhere, but the variety was originally bred at the Mount Cuba center in Delaware, which is nearby where I live and on my list of places to eventually go. It is advertised as a ground cover less than 18″ high. It is flowering and looks happy out there.
In pots, I did cherry tomatoes, Thai basil (both the “holy” variety as Indian people tend to refer to it, which Thai people insist is just “normal” Thai basil, and the “sweet” variety as Thai people refer to it, which seed companies in the U.S. consider normal Thai basil.) Both taste and smell awesome, and are much more heat and drought tolerant than Italian basil, which tends to wilt and die on me if I go away on a summer weekend. I also tried a mini-version of a polyculture mentioned in the book “Gaia’s garden”, which was fun although it didn’t really go as planned.
this year’s pots
We had a groundhog. Not exactly a rare species, but a rare siting around our urban neighborhood so fairly exciting.
a furry friend
And finally, I loved this enormous sunchoke. It was not in my garden, but was likely spread by an enterprising squirrel from my garden to a neighbor’s garden, and then forgotten. I read The Dark Tower this summer, in which God is at least sometimes embodied as a rose bush. But I am not a big rose fan. If I were any sort of deity, I might choose to be a sunchoke.
