No Time for Niceties: A Contrarian Ruffles Feathers Over the Climate Crisis

“If you’re younger than 60, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on Earth — massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought.”

— Jonathan Franzen

Wake up and smell the forest burning.

Author Jonathan Franzen’s recent scorched-earth essay in the New Yorker, titled “What if we stopped pretending?”, ruffled more than a few feathers for being overly defeatist about the climate emergency, but in a follow-up for Medium.com Medium, the noted conservationist and ecologist Carl Safina asks: What’s the big deal?

From the counter-view, published Sept. 11 in Scientific American by Columbia University climate scientist Dr. Kate Marvel headed, “Shut up, Franzen,” to the nagging feeling that growing alarmism over the climate crisis is unhelpful — Franzen’s argument is that it’s already too late; there’s almost no chance enough will be done to avert massive climate change and its attendant calamities in the months and years ahead —   the experts are divided. Polemics have a way of doing that.

“Thing is,” Safina, author of A Natural Year in the Unnatural World and host of the self-explanatory PBS nature series Saving the Ocean wrote in Medium, “Franzen’s piece was the best thing I’ve ever read about climate change.”

Thing is, Safina may have a point.

Trouble is, people are so emotionally invested in the battle to reverse the effects of climate change that they can’t — or won’t — entertain the possibility of failure. The response to the climate crisis, where there has been any response, has been reactive than proactive. 

Geo-engineering, cloud seeding, flood gates, redesigning homes to be more carbon neutral and building those homes away from the coasts —  so-called “climate adaptation” — is more about retreat than advancement. The fight is lost. Now the only question is how we deal with it from here.

Certainly the rise of climate-denying populists in leadership positions throughout the world suggests that voters in liberal democracies around the world are good at talking about climate change — and watching David Attenborough documentaries —  but are reluctant to actually do anything about it, if it means personal inconvenience. The populists promise that everything can stay the same, on the pretext that planet Earth, evolution and the human brain have been able to handle crises for the past 3 million years, so why not this crisis? In their vision of the world, invasive species are simply a sign of evolutionary adaptation — survival of the fittest in an ever-changing ecological environment.

Drill, baby, drill.

Except that if the dinosaurs died out after 180 million years of living on Earth, during the Mesozoic Era, aka “the Age of the Reptiles,” why should we humans think we can outlive them? After all, look at the mess we find ourselves in — that we’ve made for ourselves — after just 200,000 years.

“A top-down intervention needs to happen not only in every country but throughout every country,” Franzen argues. “Making New York City a green utopia will not avail if Texans keep pumping oil.”

That’s the essential message the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg brings to the UN General Assembly and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change later this week.

Safina, echoing Franzen, says, “I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. Do you?”

What we do in our personal lives won’t stave off climate change by itself, Safina says, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to be part of the possible solution, no matter how seemingly hopeless, rather than adding to the problem.

“We don’t have to like everything in every well-intended mix that comes our way,” Safina wrote in Medium. “That doesn’t mean we send the whole thing back and yell at the chef.”

There may come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, Franzen writes, when the systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and homeless people outnumber people with homes.

“At that point, traditional local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal buzzwords. Kindness to neighbours and respect for the land—nurturing healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators—will be essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it. A project like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that the future, while undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways, be better. Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending

https://medium.com/@carlsafina/jonathan-franzen-generates-heat-with-light-so-whats-the-big-deal-f3f74862812d

©Iván Tamás/Pixabay

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Balls, You Say? Welcome to the Ig Nobels

“The Ig Nobel Awards are arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar.”

— Nature magazine

Balls, you say? Roger Mieusset, a fertility specialist at France’s University of Toulouse, would beg to differ. Mieusset and his accomplice, Bourras Bengoudifa, won the coveted  Ig Nobel Prize for Science this week, for settling an issue that has confounded science for generations: namely, whether a man’s testicles are  the same temperature. They recruited French postmen (don’t ask) as volunteers, and wired them with delicately placed sensors. In case you’re wondering — and who isn’t? — the left one is warmer, though as always with these things, lab conditions can be the deciding factor. Who’s to say that another, similar study, conducted in, say, Siberia, might yield an entirely different result.

Ten prizes were awarded overall, including an Ig Nobel Peace Prize — a joint winner — to researchers from Liverpool’s John Moores University who identified which parts of the body are most pleasurable to scratch. The ankles topped the table, followed by the back and then the forearm.

The award ceremony itself, at Harvard University, proved blissfully short. The unofficial emcee of Thursday’s “black-tie” affair, an eight-year-old girl, did not have to cut off too many long-winded acceptance speeches with her by-now practiced refrain, “Please stop, I’m bored.”

Which is just as well. These are the Ig Nobel prizes, the other most sought-after award in science. And what makes the Ig Nobels more elevating than, say, The Onion, is that they celebrate actual science. Real, hard science. Weird science, yes,

but actual, peer-reviewed studies, based on actual, peer-reviewed research published in peer-reviewed journals, judged on hard evidence and verifiable fact — for the most part.

The competition for the top prize was stiff, as is to be expected. The Ig Nobels are now in their 29th year, after all. They weren’t born yesterday.

Contenders for the top prize included a study by Japanese scientists who calculated how much saliva a typical five-year-old produces in a single day. (Half a litre. Now you know.)  That study won the Ig Nobel for chemistry.

Dutch researchers won the Ig Nobel in economics for proving that banknotes spread infectious microbes (the Romanian leu is the worst), while an Iranian inventor who invented a machine that changes nappies won the Ig Nobel for engineering.

For me, though, the coup de grâce belonged to the winner of the Ig Nobel prize in medicine, the Italian scientists who sought to answer the eternal question of whether pizza provides protection from death.

Sadly, the scientists never managed to answer their own question but, as we all know, it’s the idea that counts. The unprovable is not always the unknowable.

The science isn’t in yet, in any event. The scientists were most hopeful. The proof may not be in the pudding exactly, but it’s out there somewhere.

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Planet Plastic

“I hate plastic bottles. Just think about it before you buy one. We pay more for a gallon of water than we do for a gallon of gas. I think people will realize that water quality standards in most municipalities are as good or better for the stuff coming out of the tap than bottled water companies. You’ll save money and save the environment, too.”

— Philippe Cousteau, Jr.

Dustin Hoffman was both right and wrong in The Graduate. Plastics did prove to be the wave of the future, just not in the way he — and industrialists at the time — intended.

Thanks in large part to Blue Planet II, though it came as no surprise to anyone keeping up with environmental news, we now know that plastics are wrecking the world’s oceans. Our insatiable appetite for plastic, the ultimate in convenience in virtually very product we use, is choking the planet, literally and figuratively.

We’re living in the Anthropocene epoch, that period in time when there is recorded evidence of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems, and now science has come up with a new defining term — equally based on empirical, scientific evidence. Humankind evolved through the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age; now, scientists state in a new paper, we’re living in the Plastic Age.

There is more than semantics at play here. Scientists identify and name the world’s epochs based on core samples of minerals found deeply embedded in rocks that have been around for millions of years, in some cases. There’s now evidence, they say, that plastics have become embedded deep in the Earth’s core, where evolutionary scientists — human or otherwise — in the distant future will find them. Plastic pollution has entered the fossil record, researchers say.

Contamination has grown exponentially since 1945, the scientists have found. So the argument — often cited by climate deniers in their campaign against those who blame the climate crisis on human activity — that humans have nothing to do with it is not just disingenuous but dangerous. 

The study, the first of its kind, examined layers in sediments off the coast of California for each year

dating back to 1834. (The first plastics, based on a synthetic polymer made from phenol and formaldehyde, was invented in 1907, by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born American living in New York state.)

The study was authored by Dr. Jennifer Brandon, an oceanographic biologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California (San Diego), and was published this month in the journal Science Advances. Brandon found that the amount of microscopic plastics in ocean sediments is doubling roughly every 15 years.

Millions of tons of plastic are discarded into the environment every year. They’re broken down into small particles that don’t break down as other biodegradable substances do. Microplastics have been found everywhere from the deepest ocean trenches to mountains in the high Arctic. Humans are believed to consume some 50,000 microplastic particles a year, just through the food we eat and water we drink. The long-term health effects are largely unknown, but microplastics are known to release toxic substances and penetrate human tissue. As David Attenborough showed the world  in Blue Planet, consuming plastic is known to  harm marine creatures.

“Our love of plastic is being left behind in our fossil record,” Brandon said. “It is bad for the animals that live at the bottom of the ocean: coral reefs, mussels, oysters and so on.

“But the fact that it is getting into our fossil record is more of an existential question. We all learn in school about the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Is this going to be known as the Plastic Age? It is scary to think that this is what our generation will be remembered for.”

©Pasja/Pixabay

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Piu Caprim

“You have to change the way you live because you are lost, you have lost your way. Where you are going is only the way of destruction and of death. To live you must respect the world, the trees, the plants, the animals, the rivers and even the very earth itself. Because all of these things have spirits, all of these things are spirits, and without the spirits the Earth will die, the rain will stop and the food plants will wither and die too.”

— Raoni Metuktire, chief elder of the Kayapó people (Brazil)

This crisis, Xiuhtezcatl Martinez told the Global Landscapes Forum this past June — not having to name which crisis he was talking about — “is one of the most unifying moments of human history.”

Or divisive, depending on which side of the Amazon fires you happen to stand.

Young people the world over rose in solidarity with elders of indigenous communities from some 83 countries this past June in Bonn, Germany, as they stood up for their rights as sole stewards of their lands, all the while embracing the challenge of confronting the global climate crisis and stemming the tide of devastation left in its wake.

Martinez, with his indigenous Aztec heritage, is the youth director of Earth Guardians, and is one of 21 young people suing the US federal government for its inaction on climate change. Martinez will speak at the Global Landscapes Forum in New York on Sept. 28, around the time teen climate activist Greta Thunberg will address the UN General Assembly.

Indigenous voices are being heard more often of late, if not exactly listened to.

Perhaps they should be listened to, if the words of Raoni Metuktire, chief of Brazil’s Kayapó people, are to have any meaning. In a searing op-ed essay for The Guardian earlier this week headed “We, the peoples of the Amazon, are full of fear. Soon you will be too,” Metuktire was both sombre and reflective as he chose his words carefully, and reached for some deeper meaning behind the fiery headlines.

“You destroy our lands, poison the planet and sow death, because you are lost,” he wrote. “And soon it will be too late to change.”

The warnings have been there since the ancestors, for “you, our brothers who have brought so much damage to our forests.

 What you are doing will change the whole world and will destroy our home — and it will destroy your home, too.”

The young people, the climate activists — Thunberg, Martinez, Alexandria Villasenõr and countless others — are the future. Their vision quest has allowed them to see.

“We call on you to stop what you are doing, to stop the destruction, to stop your attack on the spirits of the Earth,” Metuktire wrote. “When you cut down the trees you assault the spirits of our ancestors. When you dig for minerals you impale the heart of the Earth. And when you pour poisons on the land and into the rivers – chemicals from agriculture and mercury from gold mines – you weaken the spirits, the plants, the animals and the land itself.

“So why do you do this?

”We can see that it is so that some of you can get a great deal of money. In the Kayapó language we call your money piu caprim, “sad leaves,” because it is a dead and useless thing, and it brings only harm and sadness.

When your money comes into our communities, it often causes big problems, driving our people apart. And we can see that it does the same thing in your cities, where what you call rich people live isolated from everyone else, afraid that other people will come to take their piu caprim away from them. Meanwhile other people starve or live in misery because they donʼt have enough money to get food for themselves and their children.

“But those rich people will die, as we all will die. And when their spirits are separated from their bodies their spirits will be sad and they will suffer, because while they are alive they have made so many other people suffer instead of helping them, instead of making sure that everyone else has enough to eat before they feed themselves, which is our way, the way of the Kayapó, the way of indigenous people. 

“We all breathe this one air, we all drink the same water. We live on this one planet. We need to protect the Earth. If we donʼt, the big winds will come and destroy the forest.”

Just so.

©Chanwit Whanset-Pixabay

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They Do It With Holograms: Le Carnaval des Animaux

“You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated, Gandhi once said.

That’s instructive today because a small, little-known travelling family circus based outside Cologne, Germany has done away with poking tigers with cattle-prods, shackling elephants together in leg irons and using whips to subdue lions, and instead has opted to go with holograms, in a dazzling display of light and emotion that is starting to gain traction in the global, worldwide community at large.

Circus Roncalli has been entertaining small crowds since 1976, but those crowds are apt to grow much larger now that the circus’ technological innovation — making the unimaginable real — is making waves on YouTube and a growing number of North American television news magazines.

Elephants still trumpet and shake their tusks and wild horses still parade before acrobats in fiery circles, but it’s all illusion — Cirque du Soleil in the age of CGI and holographic imagery. (The hard numbers are just that, cold numbers, but here they are anyway: 3D hologram projectors — ZU850 Optoma laser projectors, 11 of them in all, calibrated to a contrast resolution of 2 million-to-one — create a visual parade of images that fills an arena 30 metres wide (105 feet) and five metres (16 feet) deep, with a view of 360°. No unsighted seating here.)

The arena may not be of Barnum & Bailey dimensions, but that isn’t the point: The point is that Roncalli founder-director Bernhard Paul has created an entertainment in which cruelty to animals, real or imagined, is no longer a factor.

What’s more, crowds are not just entertained but dazzled. Very young children don’t know the difference between reality and illusion, and their parents can’t help but marvel at the technology — even if they;re predisposed against the idea of circuses with performing animals. If nothing else, Roncalli has dispelled the argument that “It can’t be done,” along with the old canard that audiences won’t pay to see something that isn’t real.

“Times change, also opinions change,” Paul told the public advocacy group Educate Inspire Change (EIC) in an interview this past summer. “In the beginning of 2016, I had the wish to show animals in the circus in a poetic and modern way.”

Roncalli’s initial focus was on the tireds-and-true in circus entertainment: clowns, acrobats, “and poets acts [sic].”

The more Paul thought about it, the more sense

advanced  technology seemed to make.

“We just visit cities where we have special places, like Vienna where we play at the town hall square [City Hall Square, home of Vienna’s annual Music Film Festival],” he explained. “There is no space anymore for animals and not really green fields. In the past, we played at Moscow, Amsterdam and Sevilla. So new cities in Europe are of course possible in the future. It is important, though, that we get a special and central place. Many cities want to invite us. This year we are touring in Germany, for example Hamburg and Munich.”

Paul is a dreamer, but also a realist. He’s found a way to make fantasy real, while keeping the audience in mind.

“As a circus you have to be open-minded for everything, especially the feelings of the audience,” he told EIC. “‘Cause the audience is our boss. When you feel that the audience does not approve of something, then you have to change it.”

Over the years, he had noticed growing public sentiment against the idea of animals performing in captivity, be it a zoo, circus or aquarium.

“After the announcement not to use any animals at our shows, we received more than 20,000 emails and letters from all over the world, 95% positive feedback.”

Other circuses — especially those that rely on performing animals — were not so happy.

Paul shrugged.

“Since last year I did call my circus not anymore just a circus. I call it now Circus-Theatre Roncalli. Because we were and are now also more close with theatres.”

Circus-Roncalli is still working to push the envelope, so to speak — for example, finding a way to make it appear as if the holographic animals are jumping into the audience.

“We continue to work on the holography,” Paul said. “So far, we are pioneers. The modern technology is quite intense. Again, there may be technical problems. But so far everything works very well.”

Circus-Roncalli has other ideas, as well.

“We have also changed a lot outside the ring. We are the first circus that is going to be free of plastic. For example, our popcorn is only sold in paper bags instead of plastic bags. In addition, we now also offer vegan and vegetarian food.”

Imagine that.

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