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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS Zero traffic deaths or serious injuries is achievable
“The Finnish capital has set a new global benchmark by recording an entire year with zero traffic-related deaths. It’s the culmination of a decades-long, systematic implementation of a road safety philosophy. “Helsinki’s metropolitan population is around 1.5 million people, comparable to Cincinnati or Nashville. But where these American cities have dozens of fatal accidents per year, Helsinki has zero. ‘A lot of factors contributed to this, but speed limits are one of the most important’, said Roni Utriainen, a Helsinki traffic engineer. “More than half of Helsinki’s streets have a speed limit of 30 km/h (approximately 20 mph). The city gradually worked to reduce the speed limit, especially around schools and kindergartens. “This all started with the ‘Vision Zero’ approach. The Vision Zero concept originated in Sweden and states that, ‘it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system’.” More at: Global plastics treaty jeopardized by oil-producing nations
“Delegates from 184 countries met in Geneva [beginning last week] in the last scheduled opportunity to halt the escalating plastic pollution crisis through a legally binding global agreement. Progress has been slow at each of the five preceding sessions, in large part due to a consensus-based decision-making structure that has allowed oil-producing countries to obstruct progress. “Most countries, led by the Global South, want to limit plastic production. But fossil fuel-producing nations and the petrochemical industry favor managing waste instead. A handful of fossil fuel-producing countries including Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia used the consensus-based decision-making process, stalling the negotiations over their opposition to plastic production limits. “Since barely 9% of plastic is recycled, every year about 20 to 25 million tons of plastic waste contaminates lakes, rivers and seas – on the highest mountains, at the bottom of the sea floor, and in the human brain and mother’s milk. “Scientists and health policy experts have urged capping and reducing plastic production, ending the use of toxic chemicals in plastics, and reducing toxic emissions from all stages of plastics’ life cycle. Researchers have identified more than 16,000 chemicals used in plastic products, 4,200 of which are known to have hazardous properties. “The chair’s text, however, currently lists just seven chemicals for phaseout, and only in specific products. It also lists seven types of single-use plastic products like straws and cutlery, and does not mention particular polymers — polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, for instance.” More at: Plastics processing PR claims to be recycling, but it’s not
“Plastic companies are using a convoluted version of an accounting technique known as ‘mass balance’ in order to make it seem that their products have more recycled content than they really do. Mondelez announced last September it would use the ‘mass balance’ system for its North American Triscuit packaging. “The California attorney general’s office recently called mass balance a ‘false and misleading marketing scheme’. ‘This is just a bogus scheme’, said Jan Dell, a chemical engineer and founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, who owns Mondelez stock and filed a shareholder resolution demanding that the company substantiate its recycled content claims. “To understand mass balance, you first have to understand ‘advanced recycling’, also known as chemical recycling, that uses high heat and pressure to convert plastics into their chemical building blocks. “First, plastic is melted into an oil, and the chemical company gets a credit for ‘recycling’. Most of this oil is not turned into new bottles, but instead is burned as fuel. The remaining plastic oil must be heavily diluted with virgin fossil fuels in order to be made into new plastic. “Even though the resulting bottles contain little to no recycled plastic, the credits can be applied to a small portion of the bottles, making them appear far more recycled than they actually are. “This process is so complicated and expensive, said Andrew Rollinson, a chemical engineering consultant, that most pyrolysis oil is turned into fuels that can be burned for energy. ‘Often it’s burned because it’s no good for anything else’, he said.” More at: Neoliberal consumption levels — a chicken in 9 billion pots
“In case you missed it, ‘abundance’ is the word of the moment because two centrist Democrats [Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson] wrote a book with that title. It is the definitive document of the neoliberal ‘abundance’ doctrine — all of our problems will be solved via technology plus a tiny dash of sensible regulation. “The abundance doctrine will unlock an endless flow of treats powered by magic — lab meat, vertical farms, mass desalinization, ‘green’ jet fuel, ‘star pills’ (not a joke) — the list of absurdities goes on and on. The broad concept of ‘abundance’ requires attention. “Generally, non-structural solutions to structural problems flow from a belief that structural change is impractical, so realism demands that we only offer a slightly modified version of the present. From this starting point, ‘abundance’ advocates see the hegemony of mass consumerism, industrial production, and high technology as unchangeable. “Rhetorically, the goal of the ‘abundance’ framing is to turn the ideological terrain of ecological possibilities into a binary — less stuff or more stuff. Either you’re for ‘abundance’ or ‘austerity’. “The other aspect of this is technology. The binary here is supposed to be ‘innovation’ or ‘primitivism’. If you question whether it’s even possible to produce sustainable slop, you get hit with ‘primitivism’. We don’t have to accept this ridiculous framing. “Suffice to say, I find this version of ‘abundance’ unconvincing. Whether a billion new electric cars use Fair Trade lithium or not doesn’t change the outcome of such an approach — ecological collapse and mass exploitation. “The childish belief that biophysical limits aren’t real remains at the crux of this ‘abundance’ project too, and no amount of misplaced faith in induction cooktops will change that.” More at: Pacific Northwest earthquake — Cascadia will be unrecognizable
“Most people in the United States know just one [earthquake] fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California. For the San Andreas, one of the most extensively studied and best understood fault lines in the world, the upper limit to its potency is roughly an 8.2 magnitude — a powerful earthquake, but, because the Richter scale is logarithmic, only 6% as strong as the 2011 event in Japan. “Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The ‘subduction zone’ part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not. “The stuck edge of North America is bulging upward and compressing eastward, at the rate of between three to four millimetres and thirty to forty millimetres a year. It can do so for quite some time. But it cannot do so indefinitely. There is a backstop — the unbudgeable mass at the center of the continent — and, sooner or later, North America will rebound like a spring. “The magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one. The odds of the very big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in ten. “Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast. “By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable.” More at: Cause I’m in need of some restraint
“I’ve been working on this system story that I call the human predicament — others call the meta crisis — now for over 20 years. So my framing is that we have an economic system [by which] we take ideas and we combine energy and materials into products, and we represent those products in the marketplace by putting a value on them like dollars or yen or euros. “So our culture is energy blind. We look at our progress and our productivity and our wealth with a money-and-technology lens, without realizing that we’re all alive during what one day might be referred to as the carbon pulse. It’s this few hundred year period where we’re drawing down incredibly potent ancient carbon millions of times faster than Mother Nature sequestered it — this ancient carbon, when combined with machines, annually does the work of around 500 billion human workers. “The waste product from our current economic system is not included in our prices, or for the most part in our values. And we have fish swimming pole-ward because of reduced oxygen. We have one 50th or so of the weight of our brains is microplastics. We have declines in fish, animal, bird species. “We are functioning at a species-wide level as this energy-hungry, blind, unthinking Superorganism. So that’s what happened since, for 290,000 years, we were in hunter gatherer tribes until we started to store surplus in agriculture. This started this new trajectory for homo sapiens. And we started hierarchy and storage and markets and kings and shamans and accountants and warriors and all that. And we started also to spread around the world. “And then 200 years ago, we had access to the incredibly magical benefits, on human timescales, from the carbon pulse underground. Then we started to create monetary markers that match the amount of money on the other side of the ledger. But when money is created, there’s no relationship to how much copper or oil or gold or seawater or dolphins or forests are left. And so we kept creating with digital, and paper money, this hierarchical system. “And now AI is acting as a turbo boost on the whole thing. So the Superorganism uses all these dynamics to continue to grow. it isn’t evil. it is just maximizing for throughput. it doesn’t realize, it doesn’t care about equality or ecosystems or, anything. It just grows even when growing is becoming the problem.” “So there are four potential scenarios in the future. The top left is green growth. The top right is a scenario I call the Mordor economy. The bottom left is a viable descent in a post growth world (I refer to this as the name of my podcast, The Great Simplification). And the fourth category is Mad Max, which we’ve heard about in the movies.” More at: Socio-spiritual-economic governance by natural relations
“The Kogi are an Indigenous peoples living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. Despite centuries of attempted colonization and assimilation, the Kogi have largely maintained their autonomy and biocultural harmony. The factors underpinning their exceptionally sustainable and resilient lifeway are their overarching nature-based cosmovision, strong cultural identity, and intricately intertwined spiritual-political governance model. “I had seen time and time again how Indigenous peoples had been lured into mainstream modes of so-called ‘development’ — the (often false) notion of progress and civilization. The Kogi are well known precisely for having strongly resisted the Western model development. Moreover, their territory stands out in the wider region as an island of intact, extremely well-preserved forests and waterways. “I came to see the Kogi as a beacon of hope, a changemaking inspiration also to other Indigenous peoples and local communities who find themselves at the sticky interface between ‘traditional’ and ‘Western’ lifeways? What if the Kogi story could help all of us — anywhere in the world — be more discerning in our relative processes of acculturation. So I set off to northern Colombia, to see what I might find.” More at: Localism — power for our communities by our own choice
“Planet Earth is experiencing a five-alarm emergency, yet our political systems are paralyzed and incapable of responding. The list of seemingly insoluble national and global problems is growing. But there is a clear path forward that has received little attention. And that solution is localism: a commitment to place, supported through the decentralization of power, action, and our economies. “Localism is not utopian. It describes the reality of power for most of human history. And it can be seen today. Perhaps the closest living example of localism is Switzerland, where the national government is so minor that almost no one can name its President, and yet the country ranks at the top of global rankings of economic, social, and environmental performance. “Localism is fundamentally about our power in place, and it rests on four principles: The Imperative of Action, Subsidiarity, Partnership, and Tolerance. “Principle #1 – The Imperative of Action. Localism means that if we discover a problem in our backyard, we address it immediately and locally. We don’t wait for permission, assistance, or money from higher levels of government. If we can’t solve the problem on our own, we solve as much of it as we can and recruit other jurisdictions — act, experiment, learn, try again. “Principle #2 – Subsidiarity. Localists insist that power be held primarily at the local level, with states holding less power, countries less still, and global institutions the least amount. By power, we mean the power collectively to tax, regulate, and administer projects. Political scientists call this structure subsidiarity. Absent a good reason to go higher, the presumption is always that power should remain local. “Principle #3 – Partnership. Localism can also mean finding partners to serve local needs. Sometimes that’s higher levels of government. but increasingly, it’s other communities around the world struggling with similar challenges. “Principle #4 – Tolerance. Localism means live and let live. Localists appreciate that every community is different, with different values, ideas, and traditions. When appropriately empowered, every community will make different choices. Instead of striving to grab central power and impose one solution on all communities, we strive to create frameworks that allow communities to make different choices that we all can live with. “Because local leaders have closer and more personal relationships with their constituents, they are more inclined to approach problems pragmatically, build coalitions, and get things done. The level of trust in state and local leaders in the United States, for example, is significantly higher than trust in national leaders.” More at: Wildfire risk interactive map — US homes county by county
“So far this year, there have been 42,854 wildfires, with 3,548,278 acres burned, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center. The 10 years with the largest acreage burned all have occurred since 2004. This period aligns with many of the warmest years on record nationwide. “Nationwide, about one in seven homes are forecast to have at least a 6%-14% chance of being directly damaged by wildfire at least once over the next 30 years, according to climate non-profit, First Street Foundation. Roughly one in 20 have at least a 15% chance of being directly damaged by wildfire at least once over the next 30 years. “From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, federal firefighting expenses generally stayed below $1 billion annually. However, starting in the early 2000s, spending began to rise, with several years exceeding $1 billion. The trend accelerated after 2010, with costs surpassing $2 billion in multiple years and peaking at nearly $4 billion in 2021.” More at: | 
