Thinking on the anomalous weather across North America this past December, capped by a tragic, drought-fueled, out of season wildfire in CO…
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Nature is sounding the alarm; her civil defense sirens are blaring.
Humanities’ response is to design better hearing protection.
Photo of the Marshall Fire, Boulder County, CO on December 30th, 2021: by J.S.
Copyright ©️ 2022 T. Schneider All Rights Reserved
About the Image: The clean, white snow melts more slowly than dirty (darker) dust-covered snow because it reflects more radiation from the sun rather than absorbing it. This Image was excerpted from NPR, and was courtesy of the Center For Snow and Avalanche Studies.
A day for celebration and reflection on our impact on the planet.
Through humanity’s alteration of the landscape in the Southwest, we’re disrupting Nature and fiddling with the water supply of 40 million people: “The Rocky Mountains Have A Dust Problem“.
Eventorum explained.
Copyright ©️ 2018 T. Schneider All Rights Reserved
About the Image (above): A female monarch butterfly (from Wikimedia Commons).
In the waning days of last summer (2017) I saw a monarch butterfly. It was the first I had seen in a great many years where I live near the Rocky Mountains. In Provocations #7, I ask are monarchs with us for just a relative moment longer? Are they headed the way of the great northern white rhinoceroses?
I seem to recall seeing many more of these remarkable beings twenty years ago when our children were young. Back then, our daughter even found a monarch chrysalis, and she “raised it” in a jar. When the butterfly emerged, she made sure the wings could fully unfold and harden, and then she released it. A profound and moving experience for her, for the whole family actually, and an instructive connection to the cycle of life as well.
Today, I have had so few sitings! Virtually none. So I did a little digging. Scientific studies show a clear and disturbing decline in monarch butterfly numbers (see figure). An 80% decline in the last decade alone. Experts have concluded that there may only be a couple more decades left for these beautiful animals, before they become extinct.
The decline observed “in the eastern migratory monarch butterfly population as surveyed by the World Wildlife Fund-Mexico.” The black dots represent an adjustment to reflect a reanalysis of the data (from
https://www.umesc.usgs.gov/management/dss/monarch.html)
The reasons for this decline point to humankind as the culprit. At the top of the list are modern agricultural practices, which have witnessed the widespread adoption of herbicides that are used with genetically modified corn and soybeans in the United States. These destroy the principle summer habitat of the monarchs. Habitat loss (deforestation) in the wintering grounds in Mexico is another likely cause. One can only imagine how many end as roadkill, adorning the grills of myriad vehicles in the U.S. While verging into speculation, one might reasonably ask what climate change has in store for these animals.
So many challenges for such a delicate and exquisite creature. The world will be a much smaller and sadder place without monarchs in it.
There are things you can do to help. As always, the most effective tool you have is your pocket book and the personal choices you make. Drive less. Consume less. Demand labeling for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and do not buy foods or goods that contain GMOs. You can also grow some milkweed in your yard or garden (find seeds for your region here).
I once again go back to Wendell Berry, the fount of so much wisdom. The closing words in his March 2015 essay Farmland Without Farmers in The Atlantic were:
“We have an ancient and long-enduring cultural imperative of neighborly love and work. This becomes ever more important as hardly imaginable suffering is imposed upon all creatures by industrial tools and industrial weapons. If we are to continue, in our only world, with any hope of thriving in it, we will have to expect neighborly behavior of sciences, of industries, and of governments, just as we expect it of our citizens in their neighborhoods.”
Copyright ©️ 2018 T. Schneider All Rights Reserved
Image: A receding glacier in northern Bolivia (phys.org)
Bye-bye glaciers. Subtitled, rising tides lift all boats without holes: Glacier shrinkage is past the point of no return [scientific journal – Nature Climate Change,
Eventorum explained.
I’m a localist in mind and at heart, but I find this interview fascinating and recently I felt compelled to revisit it: socio-economic history evolving, “Francis Fukuyama On Why Liberal Democracy Is In Trouble” (aired on NPR on April 4, 2017).
Eventorum explained.
Provocations #4 is a wake-up call that should scare the bejesus out of you. Here we take a look at questions of scale, the second of the ‘trinity of the unwise’.
In this context I am referring to the scale of the problems that we are facing. The factual reality is that everything is amplified by the sheer scale of humanity and by how we chose to live. There are two sides to this same coin: the explosive growth of the human population, and the increasing rate at which each person is consuming resources. In the simplest terms, there are more people and each person is having a greater impact on the planet.
As I write this, the world is very quickly approaching 7,500,000,000 people according to the US Census Bureau. That is seven and one half BILLION people (7.5B)!
An overcrowded train leaves Dhaka’s Airport rail station.
This is the scaling factor: take everything that you might do over the course of a day —flushing the toilet, commuting to and from work (consuming and emitting hydrocarbons), throwing away your old plastic toothbrush, whatever— and multiply it by 7.5B. There is of course nuance and variability from person to person, and from region to region, but the general argument holds. The point is, that the scale of humanity is staggering. It is so mind-bogglingly huge, that it is likely beyond our capacity to comprehend.
But … it gets worse. The population is growing exponentially, presently at a rate of 1.1% per year. This looks like this:
Estimated global human population (billions) from 10,000 BCE to 2000 CE. Source: Wikipedia.org
If the growth rate were to remain constant at 1.1%, the human population will double approximately every 63 years. Informed estimates put the global human population at about 9.8 billion by 2050 (e.g. the United Nations). The population scale factor is growing, and our future generations will face much greater challenges than we do today.
Never before has the world seen a single species (Homo sapiens) become so absolutely dominant, so quickly. The Earth, as an ecosystem, is in uncharted territory. It is entirely novel, so much so in fact that scientists are now considering (and debating) that we may have entered a new epoch, the Antropocene. But we know from systems and complexity theories that this does not bode well. These topics will almost certainly be the subjects of future blogs.
While the population is growing explosively, the impact on the planet that each person has is also growing. It’s a scaling factor double whammy. Let’s take the example of a simple and seemingly (to some) harmless plastic bottle of water. Twenty years ago, give or take, most of us were content to drink water from a public source, out of a cup or a drinking fountain. Today bottled water has become commonplace and is now globally ubiquitous. The simple arithmetic is scary. 
You think, “Hey, it’s just one plastic water bottle, what impact can that have?” Now imagine that every person thinks the same thing: one bottle a day for one year: that’s suddenly 2,737,500,000,000, nearly 3 trillion water bottles per year. We’re not there yet, but we’re heading in that direction. Once estimate from 2014 had us using more than 100 million bottles per day.
Let’s think about those water bottles a little bit more (to say nothing of soda, juice, plastic-lined paper cups from the ‘green mermaid coffee company,’ etc.). These bottles are filling our landfills, clogging our waterways, hell they’re even beginning to overwhelm the oceans. Beyond the simple disposal of this bottle, the waste is equally staggering. The oil for that bottle has to be extracted from deep underground, shipped, refined, shipped some more, turned into plastic, shipped again, turned into a bottle, shipped once more to a bottling plant, filled with liquid, shipped yet again, and so on. It is endless!
A vast supply chain is needed and it too is driven by the consumption of raw materials and energy, and the production of waste. It is fractal-like, in that the deeper you dig, the more similarities you see in consumption at every level of the process. Do you see? The global impact of your humble bottle of water is almost infinite. I could go on and on, the ship to transport the oil is made of steal which had to be mined; so too for the oil rig…
In just a few decades there has been an explosion of personal disposable stuff. Everyone didn’t need to have their own smartphone, tablet device and laptop, bluetooth speakers, printers, toys, and what not. And all of these are designed with planned obsolescence and destined for the landfill after a very short period of use. Virtually everything we consume is toxic. Each year we invent more things we didn’t and don’t need. Now, multiply that by 7.5B.
There are two dimensions that amplify mankind’s impact on the planet: exponential human population growth and a similar growth in our per capita consumption and waste. These scaling factors greatly exacerbate all of our problems.
Our civilization is based on an economic fallacy: the need for endless growth and insatiable consumption. This is patently unsustainable, as the planet on which our lives depend is finite, it has limited resources. This is a form of insanity. It cannot continue. We can choose to confront this reality directly and immediately and act accordingly, or we can allow it to confront us. Either way, this confrontation is inevitable.
In the next installment, Provocations #5 will look at Compounding Problems, the third and final of the Trinity of the Unwise.
The final word belongs to Prof. Albert Bartlett (1923 – 2013):
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Copyright ©️ 2018 T. Schneider All Rights Reserved
Provocations 