Slaying the trash monster

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, quests, trash, garbage, environmentalism, recycling, plastics

In 2017 and 2019 there were controversial proposals in northern Delaware to raise the permitted height of the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington from about 150 feet to 190 and then 225 feet. This all dropped out of the news after a while. A recent search reveals that the present permitted height is 225 feet and the operator is seeking a variance to allow a new permitted height of 325 feet. At the same time, new compaction technology is being studied, that involved dropping weights of between six and thirty tons as much as 75 feet onto existing trash piles to increase their density and reduce the height of current landfills.

With this all sitting in the back of my mind, I ran across a book published last year, Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman's Trashy Journey to Zero Waste, by Eve O. Schaub. In prior years Mrs. Schaub has performed year-long experiments, with her family's often reluctant approval, that resulted in Year of No Sugar and Year of No Clutter. She has promised her family that this is the last such experiment! Having taken on the Trash Monster, and finding it rather harder to slay than the prior ones, she will need to set her sights on less onerous quests in the future.

At the beginning of the experiment, she reports that her family—she and her husband and two girls, teen and post-teen—had been filling a 96-gallon trash container every week. If "filling" is literally true, that comes to 4,992 gallons. At 7.48 gallons per cubic foot, it is 667 cubic feet, which is just over 8x8x10 feet, or one-twelfth of the volume of a 1,000 square-foot ranch house. Her family also has a 96-gallon recycling container, but I didn't get a good handle on how frequently it fills. Suffice it to say that total waste had been well beyond 5,000 gallons yearly, probably in the 1,000-cubic-foot range. How hard is it to reduce the landfilled portion to zero, and also getting recycling "right"? That is, it's good to recycle if the people taking away our "recycling" actually recycle it. (Spoiler: they mostly don't.)

Let me contrast that with my family, which until fifteen years ago included my wife and me and our college-age son. Now it is just the two of us. We have a few waste baskets around the house and a box for recyclables, which mostly holds cardboard, paper, and occasional steel or aluminum cans. If we were to hold our trash container until we filled it, we would be putting it out about every six weeks. We fill a plastic grocery bag or two weekly, which sit forlornly in the bottom of the bin on trash pickup day. The trash collectors typically reach in and snag out the bags rather than roll the whole bin over to upend into their truck. When our son was at home, we sometimes filled a third bag. By the way, we mostly kept all those single-use grocery bags, folded and stuffed into a bag. We reuse them for garbage. Now that we can't obtain them any more, our supply is slowly depleting. It will last another few years. As for the recycling bin, we put it out every second week, typically less than half full.

I suspect that the author's family and my family are close to the opposite ends of a spectrum of trash disposal for middle-class families in America. Back to the Wilmington landfill. It is notable in the area because the operator accepts trash from outside Delaware. Geographically and demographically, Wilmington is a suburb or Philadelphia. I suspect overflowing landfills in Philly provide a significant portion of the total trash.

This is the most recent Google Earth satellite photo of Cherry Island. By noodling around with my mouse, I find that the maximum height of the main dumping area, at lower right, is 150 feet. The similarly-sized area to its left has a height of 40-50 feet, as does the smaller area to the upper right. I don't know the filling strategy.

Wilmington is a smallish city, with about 80,000 residents, and the rest of the northeastern quarter of New Castle County has about twice that population. I don't know if Newark, Delaware, home of University of Delaware, uses the same landfill. If so, that portion of the county has a similar total population, making population of the "upper half" of the county about 400,00, all using that landfill. There is an area "south of the canal" focused on Middletown, that pushes total county population to almost 600,000, or more than half the state total. This historical montage of the Cherry Island area is instructive:

The years are 2010, 2005, and 1992 (it is what is available). Thirty years ago, only the whitish triangle in the middle of the photo was being actively landfilled. The county had planned for the future, and over time, we see how the future has arrived. Today's future includes possible growth of the main landfill to 325 feet, nearly the height of Iron Hill, at 328 feet the second-highest point in Delaware! The highest point in the state is a survey marker near Ebright Road as it passes north into Pennsylvania, 448 ft.

What has the author and her family discovered? It appears that to really not send anything to the landfill, in the face of limited recycling options, one must become a hoarder! So much for the Year of No Clutter!! I think it is the ancillary matters related to recycling that form the findings of greatest value. First and foremost: Plastic just isn't recyclable. Polyethylene (PE) can be "downcycled", that is, turned into products of lower value than their original use, such as making picnic benches out of recycled milk cartons. That takes care of "triangle" numbers #2 and #4, for high-density PE and low-density PE. All the other numbers can't be recycled, no matter what various industry websites say.

Can they be burned? Sort of. At present, waste incineration is sometimes used to generate heat to drive turbines and make electricity. However, burning plastics generates lots of toxic chemicals, and the worst of these come in two groups, the furans and the dioxins. In order:

Until petroleum-based polymers came along, the primary source of furans in the atmosphere was forest fires. They are produced by pyrolysis of cellulose, fortunately in rather low amounts. Typical methods of plastic incineration have a very high yield of furans, and they are trouble! Asthma- and cancer-causing trouble. Where is the research in how to incinerate plastic in a way that reduces furan production?

Dioxins contain chlorine, and are worse than furans. Forest fires also produce dioxins, but in very low amounts, due to the small amounts of chlorine in wood. PVC and PCB and other chlorine-containing plastics produce huge amounts of dioxins when burned. There should probably be a ban on burning them, but then what would we do with the waste? At present these are usually sent to landfills.

Looking back to a motto of Earth Day: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The first word is Reduce. Don't buy so many plastics in the first place, particularly the chlorine-containing ones. When "organic" produce or meat is wrapped in plastic, much of its "benefit" is nullified. Public safety is touted as the reason for wrapping (and over-wrapping and even triple-wrapping) food in plastic. A century ago that wasn't an option. The options were oilcloth for certain products, and cloth or paper for the rest. People learned how to use these to safely transport stuff, or they got food poisoning as a learning experience.

For some waste materials, reusing and recycling are possible. But for plastics in particular, these are hard to impossible. Mrs. Schaub advocates legislation coupled with education to make a difference. Both are hard. But so is encroaching illness and early death.

She is a born optimist. Still, as fascinating and well written as the book is, it's a bit of a downer. I'm glad to already be at the more frugal end of the spectrum. But there are still habits it would be worthwhile for me to change. I hope you'll read this book, and perhaps learn some useful strategies and habits.

---------------------------

I want to correct a single erratum. On the first page we find a list of "Ten Statistics to be Horrified By". Number 6 states:

In its history, eight billion metric tons of plastic have been produced. That's the mass equivalent of 100 Moons.

Gigantic oops! The Moon's mass is 1/81st the mass of the Earth. That means that plastics already outweigh the entire Earth by 23%. Hardly! Eight billion is an 8 followed by nine zeroes. The statement implies that the Moon's mass is 80 million metric tons. The Moon, in short tons, weighs close to 8 followed by 19 zeroes. That's 80 billion billion short tons, or 72 billion billion metric tons. A better comparison would have been that 8 billion metric tons is about equal to 80,000 fully-laden aircraft carriers of the Gerald R. Ford class.

Up to his elbows in alligators

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, mini-biographies, law enforcement, alligators, environmentalism, everglades

Decades ago during the misnamed "sexual revolution", protests against many laws were made and we often heard the slogan, "You can't legislate morality." Though I was pretty young then, still in college, I thought, "Nonsense! We legislate nothing but morality." What is lawmaking? It is the process of defining what moral laws we care enough about to sanction (punish people for). As I watched the process unfold, as certain formerly illegal matters were legalized, and other matters were made illegal (often improperly), I came to this conclusion:

Not all that is ethical is legal.
Not all that is legal is ethical.

Fast-forward a generation or so: It has become illegal in some states or cities to call someone "him" or "her" if they prefer to be called "them" or "zhe" or "go away". It has become legal to destroy a city if your reason is "I am offended/oppressed/outraged". These are just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg. It has become illegal to practice common sense, and what was formerly criminal insanity is the "most legal".

Jeff's career was law enforcement. He was working in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and for a good many years, he primarily caught poachers and brought them to prosecution. As chronicled in Gator County: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades by Rebecca Renner, near the end of his career he was asked to embark on an extended sting operation, going undercover. To provide only a mild spoiler (because of course he succeeded, or there'd be no book): his sting caught a ringleader, and a number of lesser figures were caught in the net. But Jeff had seen what it really means to be a poacher, and he was able to weave the net more loosely so as to avoid catching absolutely everyone who'd been involved. He had more than a minimal conscience, and he cared for being ethical more than strict legality. He also knew the conclusions I stated above.

What happens when the enforcer comes to identify with his "prey"? This is the conundrum Jeff faced as he morphed himself into a seedy-looking trying-to-do-better ne'er-do-well, someone who could pass as a newly minted alligator farmer in a countryside filled with a mix of mostly honest alligator farmers and alligator hunters, and some less than honest, and a few downright scoundrels.

A similar process transformed the author as she dug deeper and deeper into Jeff's story, and the stories of others such as Peg Brown, the most legendary of the poachers of the prior generation (she befriended his son). The book's chapters bounce around between her life growing up in Florida, being a Floridian among Floridians who had been on the land for generations. She could internalize their struggles to cope with seeing their day-to-day survival methods becoming illegalized, until in many cases their choices were to poach for a living, to move somewhere else, or to starve. She asks, several times, "How does a family live when they were barely making it and their breadwinner is now incarcerated?"

The allied question that bedeviled Jeff as his operation drew to a close was, "What becomes of children if both parents are imprisoned?" Because many of the men who worked for the ringleader would bring their wives into some of the work, such as gathering alligator eggs in "illegal" quantities. The wives knew what was going on, so they were technically complicit.

Parts of some chapters outline the stages the Everglades went through as Florida became a popular destination. The Army Corps of Engineers, in their efforts to "tame" the 'glades, actually set in motion dramatic environmental changes that led to a reduction by 95% or more of the alligator population, not only in Florida but throughout gator country. But who got blamed? People like Peg Brown. Even after the alligator population rebounded—due more to their adaptability than to the efforts of environmentalists—the poaching laws were kept or even strengthened.

The poaching, at least of alligators, doesn't seem to be wiping them out. Their numbers in every state of the deep south continue to increase. There are millions, dozens to hundreds of times as many as there were 60 years ago.

This book isn't about "the corruption of Goody Two-shoes". When the operation ended, including the deliberate overlooking of some, including the wives, Jeff appeared in court when the chief perpetrators, the ones who weren't just flouting the law but smashing it to bits, were tried. It is about how we relate to others, and the struggle it can be to understand someone with whom we fundamentally disagree. I am reminded of the most remembered line of Cool Hand Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

Studying trees from top down

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, forestry, canopy research, eighth continent, environmentalism, ecotourism

Behold Canopy Meg, Dr. Meg Lowman, called "Your Highness" by friends, a pioneer in forest canopy research, doing what she loves best.

In The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us, Dr. Lowman describes her life, beginning as a shy, nature-loving girl, to become a pioneer in forest canopy research. She describes the twists and turns of beginning a scientific career when women were actively discouraged from doing so. A big turn was when she decided she needed to get into the treetops to study how the leaves differ between those near ground level, and farther up. They differ a lot!

In Australia, with the help of friends who are cavers, who use ropes and ascending equipment, using a slingshot she welded from some metal rods (It is illegal to buy power slingshots in Australia), she shot a line over a branch 75 feet up a coachwood tree, and learned to climb.

It didn't take long to learn that leaves in the upper part of a tree are different from those lower down. At ground level, where all earlier research had been done, it is darker and more humid, and the air is still. At the crown, the sun is relentless, the air is dryer or even arid, and the wind is almost constant and sometimes quite strong. Thus, the leaves lower down are larger, greener, and softer; the higher you go, the smaller, yellower, and tougher they are.

There are so many aspects to Canopy Meg's life and career that it is hard to remember more than a few. In spite of the bias against women in science and the roadblocks and the "glass canopy" even in tree research, she persisted—quietly and shyly, as is her wont—and is finally recognized as the pioneer she really is. But not without numerous scars from the "glass" she had to break through. She left a few prestigious positions, after having built viable educational and scientific organizations, when a board of directors changed course and hired a supervising manager, who made it his (always, his) first order of business to "put her in her place."

Earlier in her career she focused as much on the technology as on the science, developing or co-developing the techniques of bringing people to the treetops safely and with some measure of comfort. While she has rope-climbed Eucalypts upwards of 200 feet, a sweaty task you may be sure, some of her students who study Redwoods have been faced with climbing nearly 400 feet. That's a lot of rope work, and a heck of a daily commute! Enter the tree crane, for those scientific programs with sufficient funding (a million dollars or so for equipment, and thousands per day to pay the crew), and the canopy balloon (maybe less costly, a little). The crane shown is in use in Papua New Guinea, and the balloon in French Guinea.

The balloon is used in conjunction with several kinds of "tree raft" such as this one, light structures that can be left in the treetop for a few days at a time. Why, it looks quite comfortable! But the author writes that she makes sure not to drink much before ascending. It's a long way down to a lavatory, and she declines to carry a jug the way many men do.

There is much more to treetops than leaves and leaf research. Bromeliads and other epiphytes, including orchids, inhabit the branches, and sometimes seem to coat them. In this complex ecosystem there could be as many species of animal, from nematodes to insects to bats to rodents to the ubiquitous primates, as are found as ground level. Everywhere she and her associates and students have looked, they have found new species. Not just a few here and there, but hundreds. She writes of one collecting "bioblitz" that collected so many new beetle species that her systematist friends will be 10-20 years getting them all described and properly published. This is partly why she calls the forest canopy "the Eighth Continent".

And guess what all those insects are doing? Eating leaves (and each other, and trying to avoid being eaten by birds, and each other). Early estimates placed the amount of defoliation trees experience at 5-10% yearly. Not so; it is typically 30% or more. In some climates, where the trees are always adding leaves, it is 300% per year! When climatic stress or other ills weaken a tree, that level of herbivory soon kills them, hence the author's concern with a warming climate, which is a definite stressor.

Her work has always included education. That is becoming a primary focus. Firstly, education of students of all ages. Canopy walkways such as this one allow easy access for children, and other designs are wheelchair-friendly. Take a group of youngsters a hundred feet or so into the treetops, and you'll change a few lives. That goes for their parents and grandparents also.

She is equally involved in creating and maintaining opportunities for women in biology and the sciences in general. I suspect she would be heartened by an article I recently read about the number of women astronomers, which are becoming a majority at many institutions. But it is not just numbers. It is promoting pay equity and raising the prestige of productive female scientists, removing barriers to their growth as scientists.

Just as a side note: In a career of 40+ years writing scientific software, I have had both male and female supervisors and managers. While I have had a few bad bosses of both sexes, I have had a larger number of good female bosses than male. My two lifetime favorites are a man and a woman, so I don't consider sex either a benefit or detriment to being a good supervisor or manager.

One more branch (he-he) of Dr. Lowman's career has been promoting ecotourism, such as by using canopy walkways, as an alternative to "extractive forestry" (logging!). A thriving forest is really like the goose that will lay golden eggs one after another, while a logged forest may yield gold once, but then that's done. In many places, plantations that replace forests are less lucrative than ecotourism.

Canopy Meg is more than a great scientist, she is a great communicator. Her book is a joy to read. She has instantly become one of my favorite people of all time.

The buck stops in the blubber

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, whales, ecology, environmentalism, pollution

A few years ago a half-grown humpback whale died in Delaware Bay and washed ashore near one of the little towns that are scattered along the shoreline. The Fish & Wildlife service soon found a more out-of-the-way place to take it, and towed the body there, using a tractor and nylon straps to pull it fully onto the shore. The body was 37 feet long and weighed about 16 tons, which is rather emaciated; a healthy humpback this length weighs closer to 20 tons. The curators from the Delaware Museum of Natural History "visited" the remains over the winter, when the smell was less, although the flesh had not yet all rotted away. A year later they organized a field trip for some of us to see the skeleton, now nearly flesh-free.

This is one of my colleagues from the museum next to the remains. About half of the skeleton is shown in this photo; the skull is to the right. You can see that, even in this rather small whale, the vertebrae are 2-3 feet (a little under a meter) across. A few ribs show.

Almost another year later the museum received permission to collect the skull, some vertebrae, and the bones of a flipper. A shed was built to house the remains, which were brought into it late in 2018. I took this photo from the door to the shed. One of the long jaw bones is on the left; its opposite number was carried off by someone before our visit the prior year. If the museum decides to put the skull on display, the remaining jawbone can be scanned and a mirror-image duplicate can be 3D printed.

There was still quite an oily smell about it in 2018. It takes years for all the oily material in the bones to either rot away or leak out and evaporate.

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs, begins with the story of her visit to a dying humpback whale near her home in Australia. I am not sure what I was expecting when I checked out the book; I should have been wise enough to expect a very environmentalist tone, particularly from someone who is probably a younger member of the X generation.

The book's chapters each have a subject, but the subjects are secondary to the overall theme, which is introduced on page 47, where a word that is new to me, and to most of us I reckon, is defined: defaunation. If you know that "fauna" refers to animal life, the word defines itself as the removal of animal life. The whales are harbinger species, and their downfall portends the general downfall of everything. It is happening all around us, but most people don't notice.

Some of us have lived long enough to remember very noisy Spring and Summer mornings, with dozens of species of birds singing their territorial songs. Our family lived in Sandusky, Ohio in the early 1960's. The southern shore of Lake Erie, from Cleveland westward to Toledo, and around the tip of the lake, is a concentrating flyway for songbird migration, so the morning chorus was very intense. These days, although I live under one of the East Coast flyways, the morning chorus is pretty, but quite "thin" by comparison; I seldom hear more than four species. Ms Giggs also points out that, in her lifetime (perhaps half of mine), the level of splatter on car windshields has dropped almost to nothing. I do remember that on road trips my Dad allowed for a stop every hour to clean the windshield and the grille. We didn't even try taking road trips during the heavy grasshopper and locust season of midsummer! Now when my wife and I drive from near Philadelphia to the town near Cleveland where some relatives live, we don't need to clean until the end, when we wipe off the remains of half a dozen insects at most.

Some species of whale are verified to live 200 years or longer. That means that some "pod elders" may remember the decades of intense whaling that they managed to survive. I suspect they also find the ocean as comparatively voiceless as I find a modern Spring morning. Whales communicate over hundreds to thousands of miles, and the enchanting (to us) "songs" of the humpbacks are just one version of their globe-spanning conversations. But voiceless doesn't mean silent. The thrum of a 50,000 horsepower engine driving a supertanker or container ship fills an entire ocean—yes, even the mighty Pacific—with noise that causes the whales to lower the pitch of their voices. Lower pitch travels farther, and engine noise has a higher pitch. Even when they do that, thousand-mile "gossip" just isn't happening any more. In most of the seas, the whales can hear each other "only" 100-200 miles away. You might say, as we humans have globalized electronic dating, "swiping" Tinder profiles from anywhere on Earth, we have crippled the water-borne Tinder that whales were using to find mates, at a time when there are fewer mates to find.

Just by the way, there are 770 supertankers and more than 5,200 container ships in operation, nearly all of them on the move nearly all the time. Their combined engine power is about 300 million horsepower. The fuel they burn is many times as polluting as gasoline. A container ship is how the rubber ducky made it from China to your bathtub.

Speaking of pollution, whales are also great concentrators of waterborne pollution. Their prey are polluted, no matter where on earth they may be. Many common pollutants are oil-soluble so they wind up in the blubber. While that means the whale is somewhat protected from adverse effects from those pollutants, when a whale dies, not from whaling but in the ocean, its blubber is the first thing to be eaten by an enormous number of scavenging organisms, all of which concentrate the stuff even further. People are also affected, some directly. The author tells of Inuit women, who eat a lot of whale blubber in the winter, when you need a fatty diet just to keep from freezing: their breast milk is so contaminated that, if they pump it into a jar, it would be illegal to carry across a state line. For that matter, most beached whales now must be treated like toxic waste!

The "Save the Whale" efforts that began in the 1970's have ironically saved them but not their environment. On the first Earth Day in 1970 (51 years ago this coming Thursday) nobody dreamed that the oceans would be filled with ships powered by 50,000 hp engines, ships that would outnumber some of the species of remaining whale! There are less than 400 northern right whales alive today, though most other species number in the tens of thousands to a quarter million or more. But most species of large whale were hunted down to populations of less than 1,000 by the 1920's to the 1960's. That cluster of population bottlenecks is in itself a great risk to the existing whales. Less genetic diversity results in greater susceptibility to diseases, for example.

This is not a happy book. The outlook for whales may be better than it was half a century ago, but the picture is still not rosy. I can't predict what the future holds, but a book like this is sobering, and may motivate some, at least, to drive even more toward a planet that is safer for both whales and people.

Mao, recycled

kw: book reviews, science fiction, environmentalism, political fiction

Many, many years ago I read Dune by Frank Herbert. I think I read part of another one, perhaps Children of Dune. I ignored all the rest of the series, whether by the original author or by his son Brian and a couple of co-authors. I liked the sweeping saga of Dune but I didn't care for the sequels.

Brian Herbert is at least as accomplished as his father, and has in recent years branched beyond the Dune realm, first with the Hellhole trilogy, written with Kevin J. Anderson, and now on his own with The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma. Where Hellhole can be thought of as a sideways extension of the Dune milieu, Little Green Book breaks new ground. Set about 50 years in the future, it posits an Earth quite different from what we know, but based on certain trends.

Of course, Chairman Rahma is a conscious mirror of Chairman Mao, as the two little books are mirror images. Where most consider Mao Zedong to be unequivocally evil, Herbert goes to some length to present Rahma as a man with a conscience, striving to "save the planet", and in a position with the power to do it. As I have written many times, the Devil doesn't know he is evil, and neither did Mao. Little Green Book lays bare the soul of an unknowingly evil man trying his mightiest to do good. Another similarity is the incessant womanizing that characterized Mao, and drives certain plot lines of this book.

Herbert writes of compellingly complex characters. Even the "good guy", Joss Stuart, is a rounded person, not a flat smiley face who cannot fail. The ending gets rather saccharine, but I can tell where the author is trying to go.

An anti-corporate revolution in the 2040s brought Rahma Popol to power in North and South America, where he as instituted a Green Revolution. Now, two decades down the road, most Americans of both continents have been gathered in Human Reservations and land not needed for agriculture to support a primarily vegan populace is being restored to some semblance of its natural condition. A substantial reduction in population because of civil war has "helped" in this regard, as have further reductions from "recycling" of millions of dissidents, or even tens of millions.

Here is where it gets interesting. The technology of recycling now-unused cities and industrial sites is based on "dark energy". Let's be clear, this bears no resemblance to the dark energy of cosmology, which theorists claim is causing acceleration of cosmic expansion. Herbert's dark energy powers cannon-like machines called Splitters, that break most or all chemical bonds in materials, yielding a blackish goo. Then a different kind of machine can re-form this into a basic soil in which seeds are sown to quickly regenerate a landscape. In later parts of the book, dark energy looks like a ropy or thready substance that emits darkness the way a glowing or fluorescent substance emits light.

Mention is also made of "gravity generators", with no particular technology stated, but dark energy is implied. It reminds me of a novel I read decades ago in which gravity was harnessed much as magnetism and electricity, yielding electro-gravitic and magneto-gravitic tools, with seemingly magical powers. Other technologies and some kind of super-battery are hinted at but not explained. That's OK, Herbert's aim is to follow the emotional progress of Joss Stuart and Rahma Popol (We are told his name is a pseudonym at one point, but never told who he was before), particularly after Joss is transformed by an accident with dark energy into some kind of triple hybrid. Thereafter he can use dark energy directly.

One very interesting application of splitter and re-former technology is machines called voleers that create "vanishing tunnels". They can travel through solid rock at speeds in the 400 mph (700 kph) range, and have obvious military applications. But a great many possible story lines are cut short by a technological disaster that leads to the unusual ending I mentioned. It seems Joss-type hybrids are to be the new humans. I won't spoil things further. I had to suspend disbelief a little more strenuously than usual, and greatly enjoyed the story as a result.

Developing a voice others will hear

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, spirituality, women, environmentalism

A peek behind the scenes: I don't buy every book I review. Some, but not most. I haunt the new book sections of a few libraries. I look first at the Science Fiction section (inexplicably mingled with Fantasy in most libraries!), then at Science, then at everything else, but usually not biographies or "mainstream fiction". If I haven't found 3-5 books on a particular visit by that point, I peruse the new LP (large print) section.

I picked up When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations of Voice by Terry Tempest Williams because of the title, and because it was the first book I saw in the 500's (Science in DD system; it is classified 508: Natural History). While I would probably still have gotten it if it were in either 298 (Mormon Religion) or 305 (Women's Studies) where it belongs, perhaps that is less likely. At any rate, it was a very good read.

The author's mother died young, of cancer, as did many of her relatives, possibly because they lived downwind of the A-bomb test site in Nevada (I lived in the same area in the 1950s, and I have also had cancer, but I am a fortunate survivor). Her mother's legacy was a bookshelf of journals; Mormon women are instructed to keep a journal of family history. There was a journal for each year. Every page of every volume was blank.

The book is Ms Williams's autobiographical meditation on what her mother might have written. The 54 chapters are only loosely related to the 54 years of her mother's life; perhaps a bit more to the 54 years of her own age when she wrote. Not in time, but in substance. Assuming the subtitle was her choice alone (editors often arrogate that to themselves), we find a development of her own voice as influenced by the strong women in her family, her mother, both grandmothers, and a couple of aunts. In a key chapter toward the end, she learned to recruit other voices when she found her own voice being brushed aside.

"Voice" has several meanings. Perhaps someone reading this encountered it because to them the title meant gaining singing skills. To the author, "voice" is a political power. Persuasive voice. Voice of influence. The voice that gets things done. If possible, a voice with the power of the one that spoke "Let there be light." Because…then there was light. Thus a major theme of the book is to develop a voice of light in the midst of the voices of darkness and destruction. That is the environmental voice, in her case.

I find it interesting to read this right after Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. Williams's writing is not as lyrical as Leopold's, but it is seen to be at least as effective. She did not persuade legislators directly, but by forming a coalition of voices more likely to be heard, at least one major piece of environmental legislation did get enacted, and another has been pending for a decade and may yet be passed.

Finally, I realized how she chose her title. She writes of songbirds scolding a raven that has seized a nestling. Ignoring them, it gulps down its prey. More and more small birds gather and scold. Then there is a sudden silence. And the small birds begin to sing, ignoring the raven. They rise above the incident, rise above the raven. They sing because they have voices to sing with. One nestling may have been lost, but others will survive, and life goes on. Regardless what voices there may be in the world, women who know who they are have voices of life.

Spending the principal

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, environmentalism

Scenario 1: Everything seems normal in the forest. Squirrels scurry about seeking nuts or mushrooms or fruits; birds fly hither and yon; deer forage in the shadows; a puma is stalking the deer, but as yet undetected; and a fox sniffs for a field mouse track in the undergrowth. All seems well in upstate New York. Unseen to them all, something is floating a mile above, nearly invisible. Then a shape separates from the dirigible, slowly lowered on cables, and unfolds to exceed it in size. Down it comes, until it thuds to the forest floor in a clearing. It looks like an enormous wind sock with a flat, heavily armored and weighted bottom. A few animals scatter, but at first the interloper is still, and quiet returns, as the cables begin to pull taut. They jerk taut, and the "wind sock" shudders through the forest, dragging down trees that its clever shape pushes aside, but it is moving faster than even puma can run, and drags together a multitude of animals and smaller plants. Several acres of forest are leveled to bare dirt. Then the cables tighten and pull harder, and the filled "sock" rises into the sky, to the waiting dirigible above. After an hour or so, things begin raining from the sky: Plants of all sizes and branches from trees, then dead squirrels and mice and foxes and skunks and badgers and even some birds. The puma and the deer do not return, dead or alive. They and they alone were the targets of the ship above.

This is how ocean dredging for halibut or other near-bottom-dwelling fish or shellfish would be, were the technique used on land.

Scenario 2: A different forest, perhaps a tropical rain forest, perhaps the Siberian taiga, perhaps the savannah, and it all begins the same, with a nearly invisible shape floating above. What descends is not a dredge, but a pair of thinner cables bearing baited hooks. They are miles long, with gas-filled floats keeping the full weight off the ground. They are dragged along, much more slowly. Predators smell the bait and trot alongside, perhaps wolves, perhaps lions or tigers or jackals or hyenas. Some take the bait and are hooked. Their cries scare others from the vicinity, but further up or down the line, others are not deterred and are similarly hooked. So are smaller predators, even perhaps a meat-hungry primate or bear. Eventually, the lines are hoisted back into the sky, dangling a dismal variety of dying creatures. After a time, many dead, everything but the wolves or lions or tigers, rain down again, all dead.

This is how long-line fishing would seem, were it carried out on land.

Now that your imagination has been primed, imagine how a purse seine trap might work on land, or drift nets. Nearly every method of large-scale fish or shellfish "harvesting" wastes more tonnage than is kept. Suppose our taste for meat paralleled our taste for fish. People prefer the big predators of the sea, and disdain most of the herbivores. There is a huge market for tuna, cod, ling and other large predators. The market for herbivores, which are often denigrated as "bottom feeders", is smaller. This is just the opposite of our land meat appetite, which is almost exclusively for herbivores such as beef and sheep. Imagine the meat market piled with the carcases of lions, wolves, foxes, hyenas, and tigers. That is the analogue of a typical fish market!

This is just one issue raised in The Ocean of Life by naturalist Callum Roberts. It is not the largest. As you might expect, the book raises an alarm about the condition of the oceans. By far the greatest threat to the oceans is a nearly universal attitude. The oceans are so big, and contain so much life of so many kinds, that they are considered beyond our grasp, untouchable, eternally replenishing. For the first half million years of human existence on Earth, the oceans were truly oceanic, hardly touched by the level of fishing and shell-gathering practiced by our ancestors. Then came the industrial revolution. Since about 1830, first using sailing craft, then ships powered by steam and then petroleum, fishing became an industrial enterprise that has reduced the total mass of fish and sea mammals to less than a tenth of what it was 200 years ago.

But our more distant ancestors were not entirely feckless in their depredations. Careful study of the middens of shore dwellings, in America in particular, demonstrates that over a period of a few centuries, the variety of shellfish used decreased, along with their average size. Some shell beds were cleaned out completely and abandoned, long before Europeans arrived. We are hungry critters, we humans, and as omnivores, we pretty much eat the land down to the dirt, we or our domestic animals. That is why the "fertile crescent", swinging in a gentle arc from near Baghdad northwest, is no longer fertile.

It reminds me of a story told me by a fellow geologist. He was prospecting in Canada, for a mining company. He met an old Indian who told him, "When the first Europeans came to Canada, they shot all the large game and hauled away the meat. Later they came again, trapping all the small game and hauling away the furs. Then some came that cut down all the big trees and hauled away the lumber. Others cut the small trees and hauled them away to make paper. Now here you are again, to take the rocks!"

The book is in two parts. The first part, with 15 chapters, outlines the changes wrought upon the oceans over time. Chapter 1 covers the first 4 billion years or so. Then the human race arrives, and the author shows how we've impacted nearly everything about the sea, and nearly always in a negative way. I used to think, for example, that global warming is nothing new, and that there have been past episodes of high carbon dioxide, but sea life survived and we still have shellfish. I didn't know about the fossil evidence that these carbonic episodes were periods of very low shellfish abundance. The extra carbon dioxide made the seas acidic, which made it harder for a snail to produce its shell. Only a few particularly robust species were able to produce shells, for millions of years at a time. We are making it happen again.

Here is an interesting fact, brought up several times in several chapters. If an area, say several tens of square miles, is protected, not only do the large fish return (it can take a few years), but once they do, they do not stay put, and fishing in a large area of surrounding waters gets better and better. Late in the book, the author compiles work that indicates a total of around 30% of the seas need to be "no fishing no taking anything" zones, and that this will lead to a gradual increase in abundance of many, many species. Fishing will get better, and it may just be possible to support the 9 or 11 billion people that are expected to be on this planet in another 50 years or so. The problem is, we have to start now, and nobody with any power wants to.

Side note: What if scientists had genuine authority and power? Could they run things any  better than "politicians", the most despised class of humans (yet the most fawned over by way too many of us!)? Suppose the President and Congress were REQUIRED to take the consensus advice of scientific advisers in any areas in which they did not have personal competence? My father is of the opinion that nearly all members of the Legislature are lawyers who were too incompetent to make a living in the "real world" so they went into politics. You don't have to be competent at anything but giving rousing speeches, to be a legislator.

To spin another analogy: A man inherited $2 million in 1960, and began living like a king. At the time, you could get 5% if you just kept the money in a bank, and 7% from Money Market accounts or CD's. In 1960 an income of $100,000 or so was like a million today. But our greedy fellow found himself spending more like $120,000 a year (and didn't have the wisdom to build a CD ladder). After 20 years, he finds a third of his money is gone, and he is earning about $69,000. He has grown up a little, so he cuts back, and manages to keep his expenses to $75,000 yearly. You could live very well on that kind of money in 1980. Another 20 years pass, and not only has his fortune shrunk more, but the rates have dropped. He still has a million left, but the income is barely $10,000. He reasons, "I am getting old. I'll probably die before I run out." He keeps spending $75,000 which buys a lot less in 2000 than in 1980. He never had income, so gets no Social Security. Today he is still alive, to his surprise, and he has only $100,000 left. Now what?

Suppose instead he had kept his expenses in the $80,000 range in 1960, and allowed them to grow only 1% yearly. By 1995, when interest rates began to fall precipitously, he has nearly $3 million, and if he didn't cut back, he'd still have more than $1 million today, in spite of interest income in the $10,000 range. Now suppose that the 5% rate had continued to the present. He'd be able to enjoy $130,000 yearly and he'd have $3.5 million in the bank. This last represents managing your stock so you don't deplete your principal. It also represents what fish stocks can do if appropriately managed. Interest rates don't fall if the capital is sufficient.

Our fisheries have been taking the principal for 150 years or more. The year 1860 is not in living memory; nobody living can remember the abundance of fish at that time. We think today's situation is "normal" because it hasn't changed much in the past 10-20 years. But we are not "harvesting" the sea, we are mining it. We are taking fish so fast we truly will take them all within the lifetime of people now in college. A comparatively small investment now can raise the "interest rate" on our fishy "savings account", so in the near future, taking a smaller percent of the fish in the sea will actually yield a larger total harvest.

The matters I have discussed here are just a few of the many the author presents. We are taking the oceans from our children. The second section of the book, in 7 chapters, discusses measures some people are already taking to improve the situation, and what needs still to be done to ensure a living ocean in the future. It is by no means clear that we will do enough soon enough. Today, a percent or two of the oceans have been set aside for protection. An appropriate level for long-term health is 30-35%. If we do not do so, the earth simply won't have a population of 10 billion in 2050 or even 2100, because so many will die of starvation. No matter what "green revolution" still may be in the works, the planet is finite, probably a lot more finite than we think. The author estimates that we are now using 150% of the earth's "earnings".

Take that last statement to bed with you, and do try to sleep well.

Toxic is as toxic does

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, environmentalism, polemics

For lunch today, I had one of those microwave meals, something I very rarely do. I am not even sure why my wife bought it, because while she will often buy almost anything that is on special, she is very leery of anything that will result in using plastic inside the microwave oven (we microwave in ceramic or glass only). Regardless, there it was, and I agreed to dispose of it by ingesting the contents. Once I had done so (about an hour ago), I turned over the bowl to see what I could find. It is recycle group 5, helpfully designated "PP", meaning polypropylene. That is good: there are no plasticizers, and polypropylene, like the polyethylene found in milk cartons, has very, very little potential for leaching into food.

Just a few years ago, PVC's were common in "microwave safe" plastic materials. The fact is, they are only safe in that they won't melt when steam hits them. They have a much greater potential to release chlorinated chemicals into the food, and they are made with plasticizers, including phthalates, that are rather scary, with a long rap sheet of damaging effects.

For a long list of things that won't do such damage, consult the Appendix to What's Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World by McKay Jenkins. But do also take time to read the book. It begins with the author's own wakeup call, a bout with cancer at a young age, quite a bit younger than my own cancer episode at age 53 (he isn't 53 yet). It led him to study the matter, and he arranges the book by concentric rings of concern: the body (what is in it already), home, retail outlets and stores, and the yard.

For an answer to the title question, you'll have to consult one of the online "body burden" studies listed in his Appendix. Some of their conclusions are in the "Body" chapter. Brace yourself for a shock. People in seemingly pristine places were found to have significant amounts of numerous pesticides, of heavy metals but primarily mercury, and of contaminants from plastics manufacture and plasticizers. Most of us are probably even more "burdened".

I found the chapter on "Home" helpful, particularly because I am planning to paint a few rooms in the near future. His suggestions about the most benign paints are worth considering. At least modern latex paints are less damaging than what my grandfather, a house painter, had to work with. I wonder if all that painting has something to do with his death at 75, when his father had lived 82 years, and his mother, 87 years. I also paint in the spring or fall, when I can open the windows and fill them with fans.

A book like this requires a lot of research, and all research needs to be checked, at least for plausibility. While I am very appreciative of all the research the author has done, there are two claims I need to challenge. On page 171 it is stated the "mowing your lawn for an hour produces as much pollution as driving your car about 650 miles." On the following page we read, "Using a gas-powered leaf blower for a half hour releases as much carbon as driving a car 7,700 miles at 30 miles per hour." The first claim is implausible, the second is incredible.

Firstly, my 12-year-old Camry gets 28 mpg on the highway. Driving 650 miles consumes just over 23 gallons of gasoline. A fresh catalytic converter is 90% efficient, and I replaced mine less than a year ago. A lawn mower, of course has none, but it does have the benefit of running at a constant engine speed, which reduces emissions compared to more variable speed. Anyway, the cat converter means my car emits the amount of pollutants my lawn mower would by burning 2.3 gallons of gasoline. I can run my mower for an hour on less than a quart of gas, so my estimate is one mower-hour is equivalent to at most 2.5 gallons run through my car, or a 70-mile drive, which also takes about an hour.

Secondly, 7,700 miles of driving takes 275 gallons of gasoline. Half an hour of leaf blower use needs at most a pint, and probably less; my neighbor's leaf blower has a much less powerful engine than my lawn mower. The 7,700 mile claim is ridiculously wrong. Burning a pint of gasoline, no matter the engine, releases about three pounds of carbon dioxide. Burning 275 gallons releases about three Tons. I looked in the author's notes, and he has no indication what his source was for either claim. The sources are grossly wrong, stupidly wrong!

There is one other minor misstatement, and not a surprising one. The author notes that there are several thousand halogen-containing chemicals being produced, presumably products on the market. It is worse than that. A friend who works at a major chemical company told me that there are more than 30,000 products containing fluorine, chlorine, bromine or iodine in his company's database of chemical products. In my estimation, things are at least ten times worse than what the author states. Given the secrecy of these companies to most outsiders, this is not surprising.

OK, with those items put to bed, let's not forget that in general, the author's research is very good. In particular, a final chapter on regulations and the difference between Europe's REACH laws and America's TSCA is well outlined. Some US states, including Washington and Maine, have taken steps to implement some provisions of REACH within their borders. That is a useful early step.

I had an early impulse, reading the book, to scoff. No longer. My generation is the first "plastics generation". I have a 24-year-old son. What kind of world is he facing? Is there a chance that it will become more benign? There is hope. I cook mainly with cast iron cookware, and have taught him to do so. I do use Teflon coated cookware for a few things. I am watching research that one company is doing to replace PFOA with safer chemicals for Teflon manufacture. And PFOA is already pretty safe, which is a good thing, because everyone who has been tested has some in their body. Perhaps my grandchildren will grow up free of at least some of the chemicals that make up my own body burden.

Green fading to black

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, environmentalism

You buy E-15 Regular at the gasoline station, and wonder if you ought to get a flex-fuel vehicle that'll take E-85, assuming you can find any. You've put CFL's in most of the fixtures of your home, and wonder if it would still be worthwhile to purchase carbon offset credits. You go to the farmer's market for certified Organic groceries, whenever you can afford it, and wonder if buying "Beyond Organic" produce would be worth it.

In an ideal world, the answer to all three questions would be an unqualified "Yes!" In today's world, don't waste any more time; the answer is nearly always "No!!" That is, unless Heather Rogers is wrong on all counts. In her book Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy is Undermining the Environmental Revolution, she went around the world to record and report just how three huge areas of popular environmental activism have worked out: Food, Shelter, and Transportation. The six chapters of the book are organized into these three areas.

Beginning in a farmer's market in New York City, and visiting a few of the farmers that sell there, she finds that none of the producers can afford to farm sustainably; all either have outside jobs to support their farm, or inherited the land so they have no mortgage to pay, yet they are still barely eking out a living. There is huge pressure to either "go conventional" or to get out of farming. And their customer base is small because their products cost so much more than factory-farmed, "conventional" produce. Many cannot be certified as Organic, because the paperwork and filing fees would swallow up all their available time and money.

In South America she finds that "Organic" is largely an illusion. Monocrops prevail, and the certifying bodies won't blow the whistle because they'll just be ignored anyway. Many fields are fertilized with chicken dung and waste from chicken farmers that fatten up their birds using definitely non-organic means, but this slips through a loophole in the Federal definition of Organic. And let's not even begin to discuss what happens to the indigenous people who inhabited the (former) forests—and managed them sustainably for centuries.

Amid multiple nations full of failed "green housing" projects, the author found a bright spot or two. One was in Freiburg, Germany, where the Vauban housing units demonstrate that green apartments can be very pleasant, comfortable, and economical. Startup costs are high, but the energy savings makes up for this in relatively few years. Rogers makes clear that it took a concerted effort by quite a number of social organizations, government and NGO groups, and citizen activism to create a social climate that was amenable. Freiburg is one of a few places where a Vauban could work.

Side note: Twenty-five years ago I had the opportunity to purchase a new SIPS home (Super Insulated Passive Solar), which included an air-to-air heat exchanger to allow good ventilation without losing heated or cooled air. Had the development been located convenient to anything, I'd have done it, but we decided location meant more. I wish I'd done it now, so I'd know more about living in such a home, because I want to have such a home built for us the next time we move.

Fully half the book is taken up with the three chapters regarding transportation. This is a big bugaboo of mine: E-15 or E-whatever is made from food, and in a world with one billion hungry people, we ought not be burning food to get around!!! Then we read of the author's visit to an oil palm plantation. The company's web site promises all kinds of good things, but the reality is a brutal rape of the Borneo rain forest to monocrop oil palms and the subjugation of the Dayak people. She could have titled this chapter "Every Promise Broken". It gets worse.

Back in Detroit, we find that our Big Three automakers can successfully market autos in Europe that get as much as 80 mpg, but claim that the U.S. market won't support them. Knowing how little such a car costs "over there", I can only answer, "Try me, dammit!" I once figured out that the fuel savings from a Prius (at 50mpg) didn't balance out the extra cost over a Corolla (at 32mpg), so we got the Corolla. It was a close thing. We're about to trade in a Camry, and the newer Prius is a very tempting alternative, as relative costs have come down. One of GM's Eurocar alternatives would be an even more tempting alternative, if importing one didn't almost double the cost of the car…and I might still do just that. My dad has railed for years about the engineered "failure" of GM's EV-1 electric. And if the author has it right, the automakers conspired over decades to dismantle the public transportation systems in all major U.S. cities to increase the market for autos. Once the trolleys are gone and the tracks paved over, it is hard to bring them back.

Finally, consider the "economics" of buying a carbon offset, where the organization promises to plant so many trees per ton of carbon you pay for. Will they really plant the trees? Maybe, if you're really lucky. Where? Oh, in the middle of somewhere that gets no rainfall, like central India. And, that promise to water and tend the saplings? Don't make me laugh! The author had a dangerously creepy moment in India, trying to get truthful answers about these things. I reckon she's lucky to have gotten away with her skin. Then think of this. Trees take twenty years to hit their stride and start absorbing lots of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But the carbon we've "offset" is going to be released right now, or it has been already. Then in fifty years the trees will die and their carbon will go back to the atmosphere. Will the atmosphere be ready for that in 2061?

In two closing chapters the author sums up the situation (bad and getting worse) and offers some slightly hopeful comments titled "Notes on the Possible". It is going to take a massive citizen effort, sustained over a couple-to-several decades, to straighten out these things. It is going to take a disaster to get people's attention, but will it be by then too late?

This book made my blood boil. Not at the author, I really appreciate what she has done. But at the venality of banal people who can find a way to subvert anything to their own benefit. A family proverb of mine, and perhaps one you've known: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The primary reason that is so true is that you are not in total charge of what happens to any of your well-intended efforts. Do not trust others, particularly when they are a world away, to ease your conscience. Do things where you control the outcome. As Mark Twain wrote, "Go ahead. Put all your eggs in one basket. Then watch that basket!"

Coal burning cars

kw: opinion, technology, environmentalism

In the July 2010 issue of Scientific American, Michael Moyer has written an article that speaks directly to a concern I have long had about electric cars: Where does the electricity come from? The article, on pages 55-56, is titled "The Dirty Truth about Plug-in Hybrids".

To cut to the chase, the amount of benefit, or lack thereof, simply depends on where you live. A plug-in hybrid vehicle is expected to use about half the gasoline used by a first-generation hybrid such as the Toyota Prius or a Honda Civic Hybrid. An all-electric car, of course, burns no gasoline at all. Thus, in most parts of the U.S., an all-electric uses no gasoline, but not all. In New York state, in particular, where 2/3 of the electricity is generated by burning petroleum products similar to gasoline, you may as well be driving a gasoline-burning car.

In most of the rest of the highly-populated, industrial Northeast and in the deep South and upper Midwest, while little or no electricity is generated using petroleum, from half to 75% is generated using coal, making an electric vehicle that plugs in a worse producer of carbon dioxide than a pure hybrid vehicle.

The areas where an electric, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid, will have a benefit in both reducing carbon dioxide and greatly reducing petroleum consumption are those areas that use no petroleum or coal to generate electricity: the Pacific Northwest, California, Texas, and Florida. In the lower Midwest and desert Southwest and New England, though a little coal is used, little enough is burned that an electric car is also a benefit there.

Now consider population. The coal-burning areas are mostly high-population areas, and the natural gas-burning (and nuclear-powered) areas are mostly areas of lower population density. The only highly-populated area in which an electric car is a distinct benefit is California.

If you are considering getting a greener car, find out where your electricity comes from. If you are in a coal-burning area, a pure hybrid is probably the best. Otherwise, a "more electric" vehicle just may be the right thing to get.

Earth Day #41

kw: national events, environmentalism

I was 22 on the first Earth Day. Now I am 62. My wife and I have done something from time to time to improve our energy efficiency: plant trees, install more efficient windows, replace most bulbs with CFL's, be more diligent about shutting things off, recycling… I thought of one thing I've done with my computers at home and at work that many people don't think of. While I tend to either turn off a laptop or hibernate it when I am about to step away from it, when I am using a desktop I leave it on all day. Here is how to reduce power use by taking advantage of the computer's power management features:

First, open the Display Properties dialog box. There are two ways to do this:

1. Open the Control Panel from the Start menu, then double-click the Display icon.
2. Right click out in the middle of the display, and select Properties.
   

Then open the Screen Saver tab as shown, and click the Power… button near the bottom of the dialog box. The Power Options dialog box will open:


A desktop computer will not have the "Running on batteries" column. Note that by default this computer will darken the monitor after 25 minutes. Set this to 15 minutes or less. On most laptops the monitor consumes 20-25 watts. Some stand-alone monitors consume 50-75 watts, though the best ones are 40w or less. But that is like having a small light bulb running all the time. Although shutting off the hard disk(s) doesn't save much power, it helps the disk drives last longer.

So tune your computer's power settings to save a little power, and perhaps also make the computer last longer.

The dream to escape oneself

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, environmentalism, synergistics

Just over three years ago I reviewed Jane Poynter's memoir of her two years inside Biosphere 2. At that time, I called the experiment a disaster. Having just read a book with a wider view, Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities by Rebecca Reider, it is easier to see why the experience was so disastrous, though I am more sympathetic than before to the Biospherians.

Take a large patch of Arizona desert land, add about a hundred idealists who have been undertaking environmentally activist projects for a decade or so, mix in a billionaire's largess ($200+ million) and a short list of extremely Alpha primates, and this is one possible result: A three acre greenhouse enclosing seven "biomes" that costs $1 million just for its yearly electric bill.

Three acres. Three football fields. That's quite a bit larger than many sailing ships with crews much larger than eight, which have spent months and years on voyages and managed to stay afloat. I am not that interested in the fact that Biosphere 2 was "materially isolated, energetically open". It was a different openness that drove its human dynamics: Mission Control.

I stated before, and will repeat it here: a ship needs a captain. Be he/she benevolent or bastard, there must be a captain. I'll add this proviso: "...aboard ship." That single lack more than any other doomed the Biospherians to their division into two warring factions. The focus of their war was John Allen, head of Mission Control, and his closest aides, particularly Firefly (Margrit Augustine). Simply put, within the first year, four of the Biospherians came to hate John and Margrit, and the other four to worship him. All other woes stemmed from that. For the human experiment to work, John Allen needed to be locked inside with the others. It is a poor experiment that proves something that ship captains have known for centuries.

John was the spearhead of the efforts that led to Biosphere 2's creation and its first few years. He was well known to be a bullying megalomaniac, but he has a psychopath's charm and could always attract new adherents. People who should have known better were tolerant of his bad behavior. But he was only the first of the big Alpha primates. After Ed Bass, the bucks behind the Biosphere, engineered a takeover that included armed sheriffs "buttoning down" the facility, later work soon came to be driven by Columbia University's Wally Broecker, just as bullying, who hired and fired almost with abandon. But Columbia backed out after a decade. Although current B2 programs are being proctored by the University of Arizona, and it is called "Where Science Lives", it is largely a tourist destination. It just isn't big enough to need a big Alpha any more.

Almost lost in the mix are the second group of seven "Mission 2" Biospherians, who stayed inside during the takeover, and remained half a year. Largely due to much less outside interference from Mission Control, they had more of a lifeboat mentality, ran much of their own affairs, sorted out their own social pyramid, and avoided the divisive experience of Mission 1.

Ms Reider initially had some difficulties getting people to talk to her. Over time, she was able to interview the Biospherians and many other members of the original Theater of All Possibilities of Synergia Ranch and other facilities worldwide. But many "official" types, particularly of Columbia U, wanted the pre-Columbia memories expunged, buried. It seems to have taken the author quite a number of years to gather the material for Dreaming.

And what a dream it was! Some thought of Biosphere 2 as a prototype spaceship (one that would have needed ten acres of solar cells to run its physical plant). Some thought of it as a chance to repeat Earth's biotic processes in miniature. Some dreamed of learning things to save Earth systems from further degradation. And to some it was a huge toy, a scientific apparatus on the scale of a supercollider, but intended to elucidate ecological units rather than subatomic particles. Nobody thought of it as a human experiment until it was too late. A contemporary song sums up wisdom that the dreamers forgot: "Wherever you go, there you are."

Strategies for a shrinking planet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, environmentalism, memoirs

When I was born, world population was about 2.5 billion. It has since grown by a factor of about 2.6 to 6.6 billion. During those early years of "the good life", people in the West began to live as though planetary resources were unlimited, even though their parents, who'd lived through the Depressions of 1920-23 and 1929-39 tried to raise them to live frugally.

Conspicuous consumption became the rule, and along with it, planned obsolescence. Henry Ford is said to have sponsored a study in the 1920s, to discern how long each part of a Model T lasted. It was found that the "key" that held the front wheel to the axle never broke. "Make 'em smaller," Ford demanded. That kind of thinking eventually led to the Super 8 movie camera of the 1960s and '70s. They were designed to last twenty minutes of continuous use, and given a one-year guarantee. Kodak sales figures showed that more than 90% of movie camera owners purchase three or fewer rolls of movie film per year, and each roll takes five minutes of action. By making cameras that lasted four rolls before breaking, they nearly never had to make good on that guarantee.

Now, however, we are faced with a dilemma. Our stuff doesn't make us happy, so we work harder to get even more stuff, hoping maybe that will do the trick. But does it, ever? Once Colin Beavan thought this through, he decided, "No, probably not." And those mountains of worn-out movie cameras and other doodads we thought would make us happy? Just making them, using them, and discarding them used up mountains of natural resources, including water. Every industrial process consumes lots of water.

This four-year-old map (from a BBC article called State of the Planet) shows then-current water shortages. Water use is one issue Colin Beavan tackled in a one-year experiment in No Impact living, as he records in No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process. I love the way the title takes up the whole front cover of the book, which was produced entirely from recycled paper and cardboard at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a Macmillan imprint.

Let's be clear on one count. The one-year experiment that the author and his wife and toddler undertook was not a full year of full-blown deprivation, but a step-by-step process through making No Impact in one area after another. They started with trash.

What do you need to do to produce no trash? Carry a jar and ask the Starbucks clerk to put your coffee in it; carry cloth bags to the produce market…and use only a market that lets you pick your stuff out of trays and bins, not just pick up pre-packaged goods (this is hard to find, even at the local Farmers' Market in Boothwyn). I guess he re-used egg cartons until they fell apart. And he mentions scrounging for plastic bags for picking up his dog's droppings.

The second stage was no-carbon travel. Bicycles and pedal-powered scooter, in New York City? Surprisingly, it worked. But what do you do when your Mom trumps your stance with a demand to see you for Christmas? She did have a point in saying, "The train will run whether you are on it or not." So Colin's family made fewer "fueled" trips, but could not eliminate them.

Step by step, the author found more and more understanding from his wife, who began all unwilling, almost a prisoner of the process. Amazingly, her first bargaining chip was the TV. Not to keep it, but to get rid of it! She didn't like how much time it consumed. With that gone, they could live almost without electricity (but you do need heat in a New York winter).

Couple the no-trash dictum with a local-food one (you can't know where the Deli's cuts come from), and Colin had to learn to cook. Theirs had been a no-cook lifestyle previously. This one thing is the biggest habit changer of all. The focus of the home shifts from the TV room to the kitchen/dining nook. The Beavans found that friends tended to visit more often and stay longer. Not because he was a good cook, but because the talk and the atmosphere were so congenial. They were learning that happiness comes not from stuff but from Community.

Then there's water. There is only so much you can do. All bathed in the same tubful. Launder less frequently (and learn that baking soda is a superior deodorant). Fill one cup before brushing teeth, and rinse with that; leave the tap off. And so forth. So in this area he began to volunteer with cleanup organizations, in an effort to offset his water use with positive actions such as removing garbage from the banks of the Hudson River. Just as learning to cook, this brought them more Community.

The author wrote a blog during the year, and continues to do so. He got enough attention that by late 2007, when the No Impact year ended, a NY Times reporter was following him around.

The key thing he learned? Individual actions are the only kind there are. The question of whether one person can make a difference is the wrong question. The right question is, "Are you the kind of person who wants to try?" No matter what your viewpoint, we can learn by paraphrasing something Ronald Reagan said in his 1980 campaign: If your car has gone into a ditch off one side of the road, the tow truck has to be on the other side of the road to pull it to the middle. Doing something worthwhile to the extreme is no sin, and it is instructive, primarily to the doer.

The people of air and sky

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, birds, natural history, environmentalism

Crows are the most visible of the species that remain wild while clustering with humans. They thrive, not just on the edges of our neighborhoods (as coyotes do), but throughout. In congested city centers, they are outnumbered only by pigeons, which are morons by comparison. Crows are smart, smart enough to recognize death as a transition to be honored: stories abound of "crow funerals" and of small clusters of crows "being with" a dying crow, as though easing its passing like the family clustered around the bedside of a dying patriarch.

Many people consider crows and ravens pretty much the same. This image and the next show two of the clues one may use to distinguish them. First, the tail: In flight, a crow's tail ends in a smooth fan curve or nearly straight edge. A raven's tale is wedge-shaped or somewhat pointed (see below). Second, the head and beak: A raven's head is larger compared to its body, and the beak is correspondingly thick with a somewhat Roman-nose look.

A raven is also much larger than a crow, but this can be hard to detect in a bird at an unknown distance. Where a crow weighs scarcely a pound (0.45kg) and is half again as long as a robin, a raven is half again as long as a crow and weight 2.5-3 times as much. They also sound different, but a raven's croak is hard to describe, and as they are less vocal than crows, you might not get much of a clue anyway.

Because crows not only tolerate the human landscape but thrive in it, people in a newly-constructed neighborhood—that started out as a meadow or forest—sometimes note the shift as many songbirds vanish over time and crows move in to replace them. I feel fortunate to live in an area where there is a goodly patch of forest bordering most neighborhoods, so that, while we see plenty of crows, we also see robins, blackbirds, jays, goldfinches, cardinals, mockingbirds, magpies, a few kinds of hawk, vultures, and—in addition to the ubiquitous squirrels—raccoons, foxes, mice, voles and shrews…and an occasional deer. I have heard owls, but not seen them.

In Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, author Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes with two things in mind. Firstly, that the crow is a harbinger of our self-made doom, as we continue to produce a human landscape in which fewer and fewer nonhuman species can subsist. Secondly, that humans are, like crows, smart and adaptable, which sheds a glimmer of hope that we will restore balance by taking our place in nature, realizing that we are as much "natural" as any thrush or woodchuck, leaving "elbow room" for the rest of nature in our midst.

It is not just a matter of switching out our light bulbs for CFLs and turning down the thermostat a degree or two. It is fighting the tendency to jam new neighborhoods cheek-by-jowl; it is persuading planning boards to leave untouched some reasonable percentage of the land so that the animals are not totally displaced. We need to remember, also, that while the built-over landscape ranges around two percent of a nation like the United States, in city-states like Singapore that proportion is well over half and growing. In the U.S. we can well afford to set aside forested enclaves throughout our cities and suburbs, but not everywhere do they have that luxury.

The author tells stories of Louis Agassiz, who would give a prospective student something to "look at", such as a preserved fish or other animal. He would gently prod his victim to look and look again over a few days, hours daily, and finally learn to see deeply. I understood, better than every before, why naturalists draw so much. Agassiz called the pencil "the best set of eyes"; by observing closely enough to make a good sketch or drawing, one will see what went unseen before. Based upon this, Ms Haupt spent three days, seven hours daily, studying a preserved crow (she closed her study's drapes so the neighborhood crows would not be disturbed by the sight). It helped her see crows better in each daily encounter.

Thus, it happens that crows are a gift to us, a portion of non-human nature that won't hide, that makes the in-your-face statement that we share this world, and we'd do well to get used to that. It may be easy in the abstract to rejoice that wolves and cougars are returning to the wilderness. It is quite a bit harder when the new neighborhood fox eats your cat.

It may be unsettling to see a crow stripping down a roadkill squirrel, but it is better than if it stays there until it rots. No scavengers would mean the squirrel becomes a maggot pile in short order. Y'got any stomach for that? Me, if I get there before the crow does, I shovel up the body and toss it on my compost heap. The birds and the ants can share it, and any crow that visits won't become roadkill in turn.

Crows thus become a metaphor, a symbol of us, fellow omnivores, just making a living on this planet. When times get hard, crows drive out other species; so do we. Can we learn to prosper graciously, as crows will? Creeping climate change may melt the arctic. Other environmental insults we barely understand might make living quite a bit harder, even in the prosperous nations. The author closes with such musings, and I'd rephrase her ultimate question thus: will we ever learn to live as a part of nature rather than in opposition to an imagined "Nature"? and if we do, will we do so in time?

Being green is easier than you think

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, ecology, environmentalism, advertisements

To be totally up front here, the book under review is mainly an extended advertisement for Shaklee products. Also, I happen to be a favorable witness, having used certain Shaklee products for forty years. I was a distributor at one time, but soon found it more lucrative to program computers—I am too introverted to be a good sales person.

I also found I didn't need to read right through. Green Goes With Everything: Simple Steps to a Healthier Life and a Cleaner Planet, by Sloan Barnett, is something of a reference book. Ms Barnett is a journalist, and the wife of a Shaklee executive, so she has gathered a ton of research into its chapters.

Her opening chapters are autobiographical. She was a casual Shaklee customer (in spite of the executive connection) until a child's asthma attack got her attention. When she found that much asthma is caused by, or triggered by chemicals in common household cleaning products, she basically went on a rampage. Wherever she could, she replaced products with Shaklee products, and found other alternatives for almost everything needed to run a modern home.

Most of the chapters are topical: houshold cleansers, body and baby products, food, water, air, energy…she covers it all. She closes with an appendix that is a 33-page resource guide, to just about everything Shaklee doesn't produce but is chemically and ecologically acceptable. This guide is kept updated at the GreenGoesWithEverything web site.

Forty years ago, Shaklee really had only one or two products that were worth the extra cost. The company has revamped the product line and streamlined manufacturing, so that many of the products are now either competitive or less costly on a per-use basis, and work as well or better than "the usual". I am re-evaluating my own choices of home products, a process I began early in the year, before I ran across this book. The hurdle now is not economical or practical, but a matter of being willing to change certain habits. Using a super-concentrated cleaning product requires being willing to mix it up rather than using it as it comes in the bottle. And, as the author states several times, being willing to forego "fragrances", which are often toxic or problematic: "Clean doesn't smell like lemons, it smells like nothing."

A useful reference book, if you don't mind its advertising nature.

If the bees go, we're all going

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, honey bees, environmentalism, ecology

This image will make many people edgy, not because the bee is dying, but because it's too close. I am deathly afraid of bees, I guess because I have a low tolerance for pain, plus a single sting when I was in grade school caused allergy symptoms. I could never be a beekeeper.

I used to live next door to one, though. His "honey house", where they spun the honey from the hive supers, was on the next piece of land. I went in there with him once, and felt a bit creepy the whole time. Bees were crawling all over the walls. He assured me, they are pretty calm when there is a lot of honey nearby and they are, as they were, away from the hive.

That place had a regular clientele of older people who came regularly to get stings on their arthritic hands. They claim it helps a lot. One came in while I was there, and got several stings on each hand, one per sore knuckle, at about $2 per sting. The keeper just grabbed a bee from the wall and held it so it stung where the old fellow pointed, one bee after another after another. I found it fascinating and almost forgot my creepiness.

He is out of business now. This was in South Dakota, and northern plains bees get trucked all over the country to pollinate crops, more so than most. They also suffer the greatest losses from bee diseases (they live stressful little lives) and have been particularly hard hit by CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. My friend and his son lost so many hives over the winter of 2006 that they simply folded the operation. He still has some 12,000 acres of grassland that he ranches, or rather his son does, now that he has retired (he's a few years older than I am). So far there isn't a cow collapse disorder epidemic.

CCD is the subject of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, by Rowan Jacobsen. In conscious imitation of Silent Spring, which the author cites a time or two, the book digs into the history and possible causes of CCD, and urges action so that its title not become an "I told you so" prophecy.

Honey bees and humans have coevolved over thousands of years. This article from Villanova U reports on beekeeping in Israel 3,000 years ago. It is likely that bees have been kept since thousands of years before that. They were probably the first livestock animal species. But traditional practices have been all-but-forgotten since the Industrial Revolution applied advanced machinery powered by fossil fuels to every facet of production, including agriculture…especially agriculture.

The monocrop is now the norm, whether we're talking about a monocultural suburb (most still are), a field of wheat or maize the size of Manhattan Island, or an almond orchard in California that reaches to both horizons. Wild bees can't fly more than a couple of miles without starving to death, and they prefer to fly a half mile or less from a hive to the farthest blossom. Those huge grain fields don't need pollinators, but the almonds do. So do the fields and orchards that grow every fruit, nut, legume or vegetable. Nearly every one is pollinated by honey bees.

These days, many of those bees are trucked into the fields and orchards, becaue the local bees just can't keep up. We're in several vicious circles at one time. One of them is: just before blooming, spray for insect pests (This kills wild pollinators also); truck in bees during flowering time; get the bees outta there before you have to start spraying for the pests that attack the fruit (not that it matters, half of them have died already, and most will die in a few weeks); pay a ton of money to the beekeeper (who may or may not be able to then afford new bees). Why are so many bees dying?

Most of Fruitless Fall is detective work into the proposed causes of CCD. The symptoms are stark. Just about when the hives ought to be the busiest, the bees disappear, over a few weeks' time. They don't die near the hives, like mite-infested bees do. They seem to get out there and get lost, and never make it back. The possible culprits include mites (of a different kind perhaps), new bacterial or virus infections, new systemic pesticides (a chief cause of confused behavior), and the stress of spending a quarter of their time on long-distance trucks. It seems clear to me that the culprit behind CCD is "all of the above."

Things come even more clearly into focus when the author recounts the experiences of a few beekeepers who have been willing to "learn from the bees." One allowed evolution to do its work, by refraining from using miticides, and by breeding into his Vermont bees strains from Russia that cope better with mites and some diseases. He considers the mites his friends; they kill the weaker bees and flag trouble spots. He lost a lot of bees, but the stronger ones built back up, and now he has a valley full of bees with excellent resistance to mites and quite a number of other pests, plus they are hardy, being raised in the New England climate.

Another investigated the effect of hive cell size on colony health. Bee strains known to be mite resistant are a little smaller. Commercial honey frames have pre-manufactured wax cell bases with the cell size set, to which the bees conform. This investigator produced some frames with a smaller base width, causing the bees to make smaller cells, and lo-n-behold, they began doing a better job of getting rid of mites. There were side effects, however, such as poorer mid-season performance.

Wild bee colonies make honeycomb with different cell sizes, smaller near the bottom and larger near the top. So another couple of beekeepers tried making a top-bar frame (just some wax along the top). The bees could make "wild" style combs. These hives thrived like none other. It turns out that bees produce different sized workers for different parts of the growing season, and a particular size for overwintering. Commercial one-size-fits-all frames have been forcing the bees to produce the wrong sizes most of the time. Chalk up one more stressor.

Of course, wild-style comb can't be trucked around the country. It is too fragile. So what are beekeepers going to do? We just might be saved by the recent trend toward localism. It may be a bit harder to take care of a field that is frequently crossed by a non-crop swatch. But wildflowers that bloom successively over the whole growing season will feed the bees in off-seasons. Crop blooming typically only lasts a couple of weeks, or less. Beekeepers have been feeding corn syrup to bees to keep them alive between different crop flowering times!

Bee yards used to be pretty unkempt places. Let's return to that. Those "weeds" are helpers! Today, in the California almond growing areas, you'll find acres of alternating rows of two kinds of almonds, because they have to cross-pollinate. But they have to have bees to pollinate at all. So beehives are trucked in and distributed between rows, in huge numbers. It doesn't sound economical, but this would help: remove a third of the trees in strips and let weeds grow, like in shelter belts. Even plant flowering weeds that bloom when your crops don't Take a clue from areas where small farms abound with plenty of shelter belts: they don't need much in the way of trucked-in pollinators, if any.

When I first heard about CCD nearly two years ago, I began watching the flowers in my yard, and particularly my apple tree. There aren't many honey bees in the area. My apple tree was pollinated by at least thirty species of bee and a few kinds of wasps, plus some flies, mostly about half the length of "houseflies". I have lots of apples every year, and the past two were no exception. In my suburb, with its frequent patches of forest, there are plenty of alternative pollinators. I also saw many different kinds of bees on all the flowers, even dandelions.

The author laments that studies are only produced where there is money to be made (or lost). When will those who fund "studies" realize that there is a crying (and expensive) need to understand the genuine value of "unfarmed" patches of land. They are probably the key to the productivity of many farms! And for honey bees, here is the bottom line: they do better when they can stay put, they do better when they aren't dosed with poisons, and they do better when they live on weedy patches between fields. Sure, beekeepers may be earning more for pollination services than for the honey, but that could change again if farmers get smart and let some wilder places grow to boost the numbers of natural pollinators. These are a few of the ideas we'll need to turn the situation around before the honey bee goes extinct.