At Random: Tonga and the Gaia Hypothesis

By Paul Clark
(aka motomynd)

Listening to a BBC radio newscast about Tonga this morning, it occurred to me that maybe there is something to the Gaia Hypothesis after all, and its forces might be in play.
    While the rest of the world has been plagued by the pandemic for more than two years, Tonga has so far had only one Covid case. Isolation obviously has its advantages. Tonga’s luck ran out on another front, however. A massive volcanic eruption [“2022 Hunga Tonga eruption and tsunami”], described as a blast larger than an atomic bomb, spawned a tsunami that created great destruction. The extent of the damage is not yet fully known because of a damaged undersea cable, but relief efforts were launched.

Acting Citizen: Science shows...

It could still get worse

By James Knudsen

Let me be the first to admit the obvious: 2020 is not over yet, it could still get worse. And lately, I’ve been learning a lot about the ways it could get worse. My wife, Andra, likes to fall asleep to something soothing, like scientific shows playing softly on the television. A recent favorite is, “How the Universe Works.” A better title would be, “How the Universe Will Eventually Conspire to Incinerate Planet Earth to a Cinder.” That’s usually what the scientists explain will happen should the topic of that evening’s episode happen. Actually, I misspoke, when the topic of that evening’s episode happens. Because given enough millions or billions of years, all of these things are going to happen. Things like...

Recommending Emergence Magazine

Illustration by Jia Sung

To meet a global need

By Moristotle

Thank our colleague Bob Boldt for sending me the text of Emergence Magazine’s op-ed “Finnegas” by Paul Kingsnorth, a writer living in rural Ireland. Mr. Kingsnorth opens with the statement, “I would like to tell you a few things about this virus and the lessons it should teach us, all the things we should be learning. I would like to add my voice to the crowd and be heard above it.” As you can see, the op-ed is timely.
    We have inserted a few links into the excerpt, for your convenience. And, following the excerpt, we provide some information about the Kalliopeia Foundation and Emergence Magazine.

Ask Wednesday: How can we mark this Earth Day?

Some practical suggestions

By Paul Clark, aka motomynd

[Editor's Note: Originally published on April 15, 2013 as "Mark the day," in the motomynd's monthly column, "Third Monday Random."]

Today is the 45th Earth Day. Do you remember the first one—how old does that make you feel? More importantly, do you remember the idealism of that first Earth Day, and all the things you resolved to do to help save the planet? So how have you done—does your resume make you an eco warrior, or just another backslider?

Sunday Review: Earth & Oceans

One thing we know

By Morris Dean

One thing about who we are we know: we evolved from the earliest life forms on Earth. We are, in the deepest sense, children of the Earth, and we are related to Earth's other children. For those interested in a highly readable book about how we know that, I recommend Richard Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Third Monday Random

Mark the day

By motomynd

Next Monday, April 22, is the 43rd Earth Day. Do you remember the first one—how old does that make you feel? More importantly, do you remember the idealism of that first Earth Day, and all the things you resolved to do to help save the planet? So how have you done—does your resume make you an eco warrior, or just another backslider?

Humanitarian inclusion

On my residential community's website the other day, someone asked whether anyone else had heard early-morning gunshots nearby. Someone else wondered whether local people were taking shots at the coyotes, which she had several times seen early in the morning as she headed out to work.
    A gun enthusiast in our community commented approvingly:

There is no closed season for coyotes, so as long as it is daylight, then you can hunt them. This area is also outside the city limits, so there are no limitations on discharging firearms. I am a hunter/shooter and I say more power to these folks if they are hunting coyotes. Coyote packs are a danger to small pets in the neighborhood and perhaps even to calves and small livestock in the pastures down the road.

    While predators of course need to be dealt with for such reasons as he gives (I do not condemn the killing of a home-invader, for example, if that's the only way to protect oneself or one's family), I asked this hunter/shooter to suggest humane ways to reduce the local coyote population. I pointed out that shooting them might not result in a clean kill, but only wound the animals and result in their prolonged suffering. I told him that I was opposed to hunting on philosophical grounds (and I cited my statement on sentients rights).
    This morning, I was thinking about the grounds of my opposition, but in doing so I misremembered characterizing the grounds as humanitarian rather than "philosophical." Humanitarian, of course, seems perfectly congruent with my asking the hunter about humane ways to deal with the coyotes.
    But opposition on humanitarian grounds doesn't seem quite right. Humanitarian is usually used in the context of the mistreatment of humans (human animals), even if humane has a wider berth—the humane treatment of animals is a common phrase, focusing on the idea that compassionate human beings would not treat animals badly.
    It didn't take me long to identify a nearly perfect synonym for humanitarian to include the mistreatment of other animals as well as human ones: sentientarian, derived easily from my statement of sentients rights.

I say nearly perfect. In fact, plants, too, are sentients, as my wife correctly observed (in attempting to demolish the moral foundation of my opposition to eating animals, but not to eating plants). "Plants can react to their environment. That's practically the definition of life."
    Which brings me back to a sentence from Wikipedia's entry on sentience, which I omitted in my statement on sentients rights:

For Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things [emphasis mine] that requires respect and care.

(I myself avoid phrases like "metaphysical quality," however much they impressed me when I was in school.)
    Respect for life should of course take in respect for plants, but also for our environment, for our planet—the laboratory of our natural creation and evolution fueled by solar energy.

Rainer Maria Rilke
(1875-1926)

    And Rainer Maria Rilke (and others of a mystical bent, myself included) would count manufactured things as well. From the eighth of his Duino Elegies:

...Are we here, perhaps, for saying: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window—
at most: column, tower......but for saying, realise,
oh, for a saying such as the things themselves would never
have profoundly said. Is not the secret intent
of this discreet Earth to draw lovers on,
so that each and every thing is delight within their feeling?

I didn't see it coming, that I would end up quoting Rilke this morning. But it is most agreeable to be reminded of the many transfixed hours I have spent reading his Duino Elegies, his Sonnets to Orpheus, and many others of his poems....

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
                [– Archaic Torso of Apollo, Stephen Mitchell's translation]

Feeding animals to the masses

Do you think that the factory-farming of animals mentioned in my post on Friday helps to feed the additional 3.2 billion people on the planet since the first Earth Day?
    Tragically not.

Consider the environment and the food crisis: there is no ethical difference between eating meat and throwing vast quantities of food in the trash, since the animals we eat can only turn a small fraction of the food that is fed to them into meat calories—it takes six to twenty-six calories fed to an animal to produce just one calorie of animal flesh. The vast majority of what we grow in the United States is fed to animals—that is land and food that we could use to feed humans or preserve wilderness—and the same thing is happening all over the world, with devastating consequences. [Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals, pp. 210-211]

    Note that the animals in question were bred, artificially inseminated, heavily injected with antibiotics (dangerous for public health), and speedily fattened only to be slaughtered for people to eat; it's not as though we'd start feeding people plants at the animals' expense.

The UN special envoy on food called it a "crime against humanity" to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? [emphasis mine, Foer, p. 211]

    It's unfortunate that such arguments are used to excuse an ever-growing human population; such use ignores the destructive effects of humans on the environment as their standard of living approaches that of the United States and Western Europe.

If everyone consumed like an American

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest—extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding. [from the January 28 New York Times Book Review, "Thy Neighbor’s Wealth," Catherine Rampell's review of The Haves and the Have-Not: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, by Branko Milanovic]

[April 29. Because that comparison between the rich of India and the poor of American was challenged as "preposterous" by a respected follower, I've consulted Milanovic's book. Rampell was summarizing "Vignette 2.2: How Unequal Is Today's World?," from Chapter 2. P. 116 presents a comparative graph of income data:

    Milanovic explains the graph:

We take the entire population of the United States and divide it into twenty income groups ranked by their household per capita income from the poorest to the the richest. Each group is called a ventile...Each contains 5 percent of the American population. We do the same "slicing" of all countries in the world. Each ventile will therefore "enter" with its own average income expressed in local currency. This income is converted into international (PPP) dollars of equal purchasing power so that in principle, with such a dollar, a person can buy the same amount of goods and services in India as in the United States or anywhere else in the world. This enables us to compare incomes worldwide.
    ...The poorest American ventile, as shown in the figure, is at the 68th percentile of the world income distribution...This means that the poorest Americans are better off than more than two-thirds of the world population....
    India, by contrast, is fairly poor, with its poorest ventile belonging to the 4th-poorest percentile in the world and the richest ventile only to the 68th. This last value shows that the richest people in India(as a group—admittedly a large one since it contains more than 50 million people) have the same per capita income as the poorest people (as a group) in the United States. [emphasis mine]...For sure, if we were to break national distributions into smaller units, not in ventiles of 5 percent each, but in percentiles (1 percent each), we would find some overlap. But the overlap is still tiny. In the case of India and the United States, only about 3 percent of the Indian population have incomes higher than the bottom (the very poorest) U.S. percentile. [pp. 116-118]

    Rampell should perhaps have avoided the phrase "typical person"; Milanovic doesn't use it. His writing on this complex topic seems wonderfully careful and clear.]

If everyone consumed like an American, continued

Emerging economies like those of China and India aspire to the living standards of the Western world as does the non-industrialized world in general. It is the combination of population increase in the developing world and unsustainable consumption levels in the developed world that poses a stark challenge to sustainability. [Wikipedia article on sustainability, section titled "Consumption—population, technology, resources"]

    China and India's combined population today is more than eight times that of the United States (2,554 million versus 311 million).

Today, animal products still account for only 16 percent of the Chinese diet, but farmed animals account for more than 50 percent of China's water consumption—and at a time when Chinese water shortages are already cause for global concern. [Foer, p. 262]

    The point is: the Chinese have only begun to eat animals. And...

Studies by the United Nations and the Pew Commission show conclusively that globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than transport. According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector—cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships—combined. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO₂, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO₂. The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do. [Foer, p. 58]

Five planet Earths
    In the starkest general terms:

Consumption overpopulation, also known as overconsumption, is the name for the concept of unsustainability and imbalance in per capita energy consumption between different countries...The classic example of consumption overpopulation is the United States, which consumes more resources than practically any other country in the world. It emits 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide every 5.4 seconds, by far the highest in the world. For perspective, China [with over four times the population of the United States] emits the same amount of carbon dioxide every 9.2 seconds, Britain every 58 seconds, Canada every minute, Nigeria every 10.1 minutes and the Central African Republic every 31.6 hours. If every single person in the world consumed as much energy as an American, we would need five planets to be able to support all of them. India and China alone would take up one of these. [emphasis mine, Wikispaces article on consumption overpopulation]

Before someone points it out for me, I detect a problem with the final statement. China and India combined account for 37 percent of the world's current population. Wouldn't they take up 1.85 of the five planets? The author appears to have rounded the number down.

Earth Day comes 364/365ths too infrequently

Environmentalists felt so triumphant in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. I had been with IBM for three years, and I was thrilled that the IBM Chairman had been featured in the press as lauding the designation of April 22 as Earth Day. I wrote a letter of gratitude to the Chairman, whom I remember as Frank Cary, but it couldn't have been before 1973. Must have been Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
    I may remember him as Frank Cary because I want to believe that whoever it was had already ingratiated himself to my wife by personally approving her taking a center piece floral arrangement from our table at an employee dinner in San Francisco. The ingratiation had been heightened by the fact that she had first asked a lower-level IBM manager if it would be okay to take the flowers, and he had been unwilling to say one way or the other. Mr. Cary didn't hesitate a millisecond. It was clear to my wife why he became the Chairman eventually.
    And my wife had impressed the hell out of me, marching right up to Frank Cary's table like that.
    I sort of think that we even got that first Earth Day off, but I can't remember for sure.

In 1970, the human population of the earth was "only" 3.7 billion.
    Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, still seemed to hope that mankind could achieve zero population growth.
    In 2009, however, when the human population was very near its current 6.9 billion, he said that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future."
    Yes.
    He could had factory farming in mind, among the range of devastations that made him more pessimistic.

In Jonathan Franzen's April 18 reflections in The New Yorker, "Farther Away: 'Robinson Crusoe,' David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude," Franzen describes an annual Chilean cattle-branding festival:

Of the hundred-plus cattle, at least ninety were malnourished, the majority of them so skeletal it seemed remarkable that they could even stand up. The herd had historically been a reserve source of protein, and the villagers still enjoyed the ritual of roping and branding, but couldn't they see what a sad travesty their ritual had become? [emphasis mine, p. 94]

(Note that the locals seemed to be enjoying it. The human tendency to perpetuate received sentiment, however irrational, will be the subject of a future post.)

My thought for today, as hopeless as it is, is that, if every day had been Earth Day since 1970, the human population of the earth might still be less than four billion and humans might no longer be eating the creatures with whom they share the planet and experience their brief, bittersweet life on it.
    Alas, Earth Day is just another empty gesture that people observe out of thoughtless habit, an empty sentiment.

Early image of Earth newly restored

On Monday, The New York Times editorial, "The Moon View," published a newly restored image of our planet photographed from the first lunar orbiter, in 1966. More attractive images (in color) have of course since been made, but, as the editorial concludes:

What is most evocative is the awareness that this is our planet in 1966, which feels like a very long time ago. A train of thought immediately presents itself. If scientists can recover extensive new information from old electronic data, shouldn’t there be some way to peer beneath those clouds, back in time, and see how this planet looked when it had only half its current population? [emphasis mine]
    It is probably not possible to say that one Earth is ever more innocent than another. And yet there is a feeling of innocence hanging over that beclouded planet, which was just about to get the first glimpse of itself from the Moon.