|
TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
______________________________________________________________________
CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Pure hubris that humans can manage planetary systems
“It is a myth that humans, if they are wise and clever enough, can learn to ‘manage’ the biosphere. Successful efforts to reduce air pollution have resulted in fewer particles in the atmosphere, particles that reflect sunlight back into space. This reduction has actually accelerated global warming even as it has improved air quality and reduced illness and death.
“By spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere that dim the sun, temperatures at ground level stabilise, and life goes on as normal despite escalating carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. But then something goes wrong.
“The spray guns break down, the money runs out. . . Whatever the case, the planet starts to heat up, fast, as years of pent-up emissions kick into effect. The phenomenon is called ‘termination shock’. The piece explains that we’ve been experiencing something like a termination shock because efforts in the last two decades to reduce air pollution have been so successful.
“Having recently re-read James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth I was reminded of some key points he makes about attempts to manage the biosphere. His Gaia Theory goes something like this: The Earth can be seen as a single organism using its natural processes that involve both living and nonliving materials to maintain conditions favorable to life.
“The idea that humans could manage such a complex system is almost laughable to Lovelock who notes: There can be no prescription, no set of values, for living within Gaia. For each of our different actions there are only consequences.
“Each time we significantly alter part of some natural process of regulation or introduce some new source of energy or information, we are increasing the probability that one of these changes will weaken the stability of the entire system, by cutting down the variety of response.” More at:
“Why We Need To Be Wild” book review (2nd in a series)
“This post covers six books I read (and/or listened to) over the summer. Loosely speaking, the theme revolved around gaining a better anthropological sense of who we really are as a species. Some paved the way to others in a memorable story of its own.
“The author of Why We Need to Be Wild, Jessica Carew Kraft, was stuck in a bay-area tech company, and describes her craving for a more authentic way of life. She began attending primitive skills workshops, building proficiency in fire starting, animal processing, hide tanning, basket crafting, and many related arts. She also embarked on a path of anthropological study.
“I was struck by the unexpected normalcy of the ‘rewilding’ community she described. The ancestral skills community that I met is full of really great folks. They didn’t set off my alarm bells as fatalistic bunker-building fanatics. No political conversations arose: like me, these folks are in a sense beyond the petty politics of the day — not strongly identifying with either ‘side’.
“A number of Indigenous folks were at the gathering to pass along traditions. These folks deem it worthwhile to teach anyone who’s serious, independent of genetic heritage. When colonialism comes to an end and modernity exhausts its means, it’ll be time for some subset of folks to re-indigenize — wherever they happen to be when the music stops (limited seating available).” More at:
Rewilding in harmony with farming
“The term, rewilding, often elicits strong emotions. Thus, anger is provoked that farmers will be forced to waste precious cropland, or that dangerous animals will be released into towns and cities (e.g. ‘beaver bombing’).
“However, while rewilding, as a subject, is now widely discussed, its linkage with ecological overshoot and planetary boundaries is far less addressed. Although rewilding is often thought of as keeping humans ‘away’, in fact, people must be integrated into much of the rewilding process, living alongside and allowing space for ‘wildness’.
“Rewilding is not necessarily bringing back what was there before, but ‘making wild again’, so that new, thriving and regenerative, ecosystems can arise and flourish. It is a looser, systems-based, approach aiming to give nature the space and freedom to recover.
“E.O.Wilson regarded mass extinction as the greatest threat to Earth’s future. Wilson was one of the first ecologists to estimate that we need to rewild roughly half of the Earth. Wilson argued that, ‘the process of setting aside half the Earth doesn’t mean moving people out, but being creative with park designations, restoration, and encouraging private-public partnerships’.
“It is posited that rewilding advocates have often not engaged appropriately with farmers, and do not really comprehend rural communities. Rather than it being a simplistic binary choice between farming and rewilding, the latter should be thought of as part of a broad spectrum that incorporates different kinds of ‘nature-friendly’ farming, along with more ‘traditional’ conservation techniques.
“The [British] National Food Strategy concludes that, ‘If we were to… increase productivity by 30% and reduce meat eating by 35%, we could produce the same amount of food from 40% less land’ to free up enough land to make space for nature, both in wilder areas and on our farms.” More at:
Farmland held in perpetuity through community land trust
“In the United States today, nearly 30% of farmland, over 280 million acres, is owned by people who do not farm it. Some live a county away, others a continent away. The living soil owned within their deeds has become an asset class, a line in an investment portfolio to be flipped, leased, or held until its value increases.
“Decisions for use of the land are being made by people who do not know it, and this growing disconnect has dire consequences for agriculture, the natural world, and our own communities. Studies have linked higher absentee ownership rates with significantly lower adoption of regenerative practices like cover cropping, especially with short-term leases.
“Entities like Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), private equity firms, and high-net-worth individuals see farmland as a stable, appreciating asset. The recurring headlines about Bill Gates’s farmland holdings have crystallized this broader trend. In stark contrast, there are many private citizens who are inheriting and investing in land and are dedicated to securing its protection and stewardship.
“To explore this prospect further, I reached out to Julian Lauzzana, founder of the Earthen Heart Initiative in Michigan. Julian is the owner and steward of several regenerative properties in southwestern Michigan: a 20-acre perennial crop farm in Bangor, a 70-acre orchard in South Haven, and a one-acre permaculture oasis homestead in Kalamazoo.
“Julian is currently working with The Farmers Land Trust to create and incubate the Earthen Heart Farmland Commons. The Farmers Land Trust creates a community-held resource while preserving active farmland in perpetuity.” More at:
We should be so healthy — just emulate RFK,jr
“In 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump promised to let his pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ‘go wild’ on both health and food issues. Everything that has been said so far about the forthcoming Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) indicates a version that will be rife with food industry influence, false and unscientific claims, and promotion of Kennedy’s pet issues.
“For example, Kennedy’s relentless push for greater saturated fat intake via increased meat and dairy consumption is the exact opposite of prevailing nutrition advice. The MAHA movement has a bizarre obsession with cow-based products, for instance. The DGA has consistently recommended limiting saturated fat and fatty meat since its first publication in 1980.
“Prepared by the Department of Agriculture and by Health and Human Services every five years, the DGA is supposed to be based on ‘the preponderance of the scientific and medical knowledge which is current at the time the report is prepared’. Traditionally the agencies have appointed a scientific advisory committee, referred to as the DGAC. Members of the 2025 DGAC stated that they were ‘completely ghosted’ by Health and Human Services.
“The latest DGA released in December is supposed to guide the forthcoming 2025–2030 DGA. It strongly recommended prioritizing plant-based sources of protein like beans, peas, and lentils over animal-based sources and reducing red and processed meat consumption. But Kennedy has claimed without evidence that it is too heavily influenced by the ‘food processing industry’.” More at:
An arm and a leg for terawatts and mega-grid
“Proponents of the much-hyped ‘energy transition’ frequently claim that rapid decarbonization of the electricity sector can only be achieved with huge expansions of America’s high-voltage transmission grid. We are told those expansions, totaling tens of thousands of miles of new capacity, must be completed in the next decade or two.
“This new grid will deliver us to the Valhalla of ‘a net-zero economy with high electrification of transport, industry, and buildings by midcentury’, in which, presumably, everyone is using ‘clean’ energy that’s too cheap to meter.
“But there’s a terawatt-size disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. America isn’t building anything close to the amount of high-voltage transmission capacity that the promoters claim is needed. Indeed, the amount of new high-voltage transmission (230kV and above) built annually is flat or declining. Furthermore, the cost is skyrocketing.
“The hard truth is that almost no one — including the DOE, reporters at big media outlets, pundits, and others — has bothered to do the math. Last November, Jesse Jenkins, who heads the Zero Lab at Princeton University, told Utility Dive that ‘By 2035 alone we’re going to need to add about 75,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines, enough to run from New York City to Los Angeles and back 15 times…This shouldn’t be viewed as impossible.
“But the odds of the U.S. building 75,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission over the next 10 years are, as my father used to say, ‘slim and none, and Slim left town’. There’s no precedent — none — for adding that much capacity, which would require a four-fold increase in the average number of line miles built annually since 2008. Furthermore, that pace of new capacity would have to be sustained for a decade.” More at:
The what and wherefore of living off-grid
“So, is living off the grid worth it? I like telling this story to help others realize that unplugging from society’s standard systems and instead creating your own self-sufficient homestead isn’t always the fantasy you imagined. But if you plan ahead and set yourself up for success, you’ll have more good days than bad.
“I now live on 11 acres of land, in a house that I designed and that I power with solar; I get my water from a well, have a composting toilet and septic system, eat from my garden, raise baby quail, and run my own business. My expenses are a fraction of what they were when I paid rent and utilities.
“I will say that it’s essential to be intentional about your choices: where you live, how you spend your time and money, how you interact with the broader world. For me, simply deciding what I wanted for myself was the most impactful thing I’ve ever done.
“Your own interest in disconnecting may be different from mine. Having flipped the script on life, I saw many advantages you can enjoy, too. Here are some of the main benefits of going off the grid — simplifying your life, going green, developing self-reliance, escaping debt, eating healthfully, living on your own terms, and building community.
“The spirit of building for the future is summed up nicely in the adage: ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit’.” More at:
Lawsuit to protect lesser prairie chicken
“Conservation groups want a Texas court to overturn the recent gutting of federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken, a near-flightless bird living in the grasslands of Eastern New Mexico and four other states.
“In 2022, the Biden Administration offered the bird protection under the Endangered Species Act. Two distinct population segments were defined and given different protections: the northern population in Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and northern Texas was classified as ”threatened’, whereas the southern population in New Mexico and western Texas was classified as ‘endangered’.
“In August, a Texas judge stripped federal protections for the chicken. The Arizona-based nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity filed the appeal in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Monday, asking a panel of judges to overturn the decision and allow conservation groups to enter the proceedings.
“Said Jason Rylander of the Center for Biological Diversity, ‘The lesser prairie chicken listing was carefully considered and checked all the legal and scientific boxes. This is a pure Trump power play to put oil and gas industry profits ahead of these birds’.
“The lesser prairie chickens’ decline to a fraction of their historic numbers is the result of the degradation and fragmentation of the southern Great Plains. Conversion to crops, cattle grazing, the raising of powerlines and telephone poles, oil and gas drilling, and the incursion of woodlands, as well as drought and high temperatures linked to global warming, all harm the birds.” More at:
As urban car use drops, streets can be repurposed
“Seattle’s human population is growing fast, but its car population has stalled out. Between 2017 and 2023, Seattle added 35,000 households (80,000 residents), but just 3,300 cars — in news that is music to urbanist ears.
“The rate of car ownership appears to be down about 10% in just six years time, and the share of households that are carless grew 25%, reaching 20% of all Seattle households. Around 9 out of 10 carless homes were rental units in 2023.
“This break from car dependency is not factored into infrastructure decisions. Traffic engineers continue to project that traffic will trend upwards endlessly, leading to suboptimal plans that continue to focus on adding car capacity.
“Seattle has managed to cut car ownership rates and grow carless households even with most streets remaining car-centric. Imagine what would be possible with a more balanced approach with more focus on alternatives.” More at:
|
