"Burning oil on the Gulf of Mexico," from the TEDxOilSpill expedition, June, 2010, photo credit: James Duncan Davidson; For more information on June 28 event: http://www.TEDxOilSpill.com

Despite my general rule that once a day is designated for a cause, the cause is likely lost (or at least in serious trouble), I found myself rooting mightily last Saturday for Solarday. Missed it? It is only in its second year, but with global aspirations and the power of the sun on its side.

The power of new sun that is, not the fossil kind captured by plants millions of years ago and transformed into oil, coal and gas. Old sun is best left underground, underwater, under salt seals, in mountains and far, far away from tail pipes and smokestacks. Old sun warms the Earth in all the wrong ways. New sun offers a way out of Dodge.

The “teachable moment” in the Gulf, now stretching into its third month and threatening to stretch for years, frames the debate in the starkest of terms: oils spills versus sun spills. Which one would you prefer to soak up?

We have loads of clean / cleaner energy options beyond solar (photovoltaic, water heating):

• wind power (macro and micro)

• wave power

• fuel cells (e.g., the Bloom box)

• efficiency (less is more, more for less, instant savings and sure-fire competitive edge)

• biofuels (check out Willie Smits’  on tapping sugar palms sap for ethanol - no tree-cutting required)

• Bill Gates’ scheme for what he promises is  better, safer version of nuclear

• distribution (distributed power generation and smarter grids)

Every week journals burst burst with news on ever-niftier applications for existing technologies (the solar light bulb) and breakthrough improvements, such as MIT professor Daniel Nocera’s efforts to biomimick photosynthesis for “personalized energy,” all the while improving water use and quality:

Energy start-up Sun Catalytix aims to scale up Nocera’s work in the lab for real-world application.

DEMAND: THE OTHER PART OF THE EQUATION

As Nocera points out, unless we get a hold of demand, energy supply is always going to be a game of catch-up – as it is for resources of every kind. Casting the issue in terms of per capita usage actually provides a perverse incentive for over-population.

Rather, the question isn’t how to most equitably divvy up a finite fossil fuel pie, but how much energy is needed for people to live happy, healthy, productive, environmentally-compatible lives.

The education of women in developing countries, which has been shown to correlate to family-planning, along with easier access to contraceptives, are key for a successful global energy strategy.

Business-as-usual means that “every three years, a new Saudi Arabia needs to be discovered and exploited just to maintain the level of output,” according to Antony Froggatt, a senior research fellow at British think tank, Chatham House and co-author on a new report co-produced with insurance giant Lloyd’s of London on business-smart energy strategies: Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business.

Global energy use is expected to climb a staggering 40% over the next two decades. Even if there were no risks or downsides to deep water drilling and tar sand mining, this would be a tall order to fill. “In an energy insecure world, resilience is an absolutely key function,” says Froggatt.

So how do we put more “bounce” back in the system?  Clearly not by continuing to pour money into vulnerable pipelines, pirate-friendly tanker ships, inefficient central power generation plants, “dumb” grids and top-down one-size-fits-all answers driving an ever-depressing downward spiral, greased by oil spills.

How do we transition to the dazzling variety of better technologies that are either already on the shelf or on the near-term horizon? This is a business and logistics question, not a technical question (which is not to say that substantial and steady R&D funding isn’t required – it most definitely is).

If the Chatham House report is right, things will start to get really dicey by 2013, when China’s domestic oil production is expected to peak and competition for global supplies becomes even more fierce.

REINVENTING FIRE

Few people have been as tenaciously focused on saving the world from its fossil fuel addiction as Amory Lovins, chief scientist and cofounder of the Colorado-based “think and do tank,” Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). For over 30 years, Lovins, a geek’s geek, has relentlessly and with trademark statistic-laced cheer, shown how saving energy is almost always cheaper than generating it (“negawatts” and “negabarrels”) and how thoughtful design can translate, often immediately, to the bottom line.

When Detroit declared that cars were as efficient as they were ever going to be, Lovins set about reinventing the auto as a “Hypercar,” experimenting with carbon-composite plastics (light-weighting and saves on “paint shop” costs), LED lights, hydrogen fuel cells, better insulation to cut A/C needs and low drag design.  While the team was at it, they did away with the steering wheel in favor of joystick, too. Voila! 100 mpg.  Many of the technologies (though, so far, not the joystick) have been adopted by major manufacturers (video).

Green building design has always been a central part of the RMI’s work, starting with Lovins’ own home, The Banana Farm, nestled in the Rockies of Snowmass, CO. The most ambitious project so far: a $13.2 million retrofit of the Empire State Building, designed to save just under $4 million in energy costs per year.

As impressive as these projects are, they are the warm up for what may very well be Lovins’ masterwork: Reinventing Fire. RF, a new research initiative just getting underway,  builds on work from an earlier project, “Winning the Oil Endgame,” a business-driven road map for weaning the U.S. off oil by 2050. Lovins explains in this TED talk from 2005:

For Reinventing Fire, once again Business is targeted as the engine of change, with competitive edge as the carrot motivating Business. CO2 and pollution reduction are almost incidental benefits. Rather, RF aims to make virtuous circles possible: Do the right thing and all kinds of good things follow.

With the clear-headed cunning that comes from decades at the front lines, the RMI team has carefully chosen its battles:

In the web of interconnections spanning how energy is produced, transported, distributed and used, all the points along the way are fair game for intervention. But decades of research into how energy moves from fossil-fuel sources to uses have revealed key leverage points in four sectors: transportation, buildings, industry and electricity.

Although RF’s focus is on the U.S., the lessons can be applied anywhere and everywhere. The good news only gets better.

SMALL PEOPLE POWER

There is no need for the rest of us to wait on the sidelines while Business gets its profit-priorities in gear. Plenty of revolutions – maybe most – start with “the small people,” as English-as-a-second-language-challenged BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg dubbed us.

In addition to seeking out energy-smart products, insulating our homes and lobbying for more and better public transportation options, we can begin to think more about what we eat and where it comes from.

Much of what appears an America’s dinner plates took thousands of miles to get there. Calves born in Florida might be “finished” in a feedlot in Nebraska and shipped as hamburger to a grocery story in Illinois. Fresh fruits and vegetables are no longer about the bounty of season, but flight logistics. The loss of shrimping in the Gulf from the oil spill doesn’t only mean lost jobs, it means more imports from overseas.

From running farm machinery, to inputs for pesticides and herbicides and, of course, shipping, an enormous amount of fossil fuel goes into food. It is time we put a fork in it: “Small people for locally or regionally-produced food!” If we can up the percentage to just 25% of our collective plate, not only would it force a change in production logistics, but we would be healthier for our efforts. A lot of vitamins get lost in transit…

The urban agriculture movement, which puts farms in the middle of cities, shortens the loop about as much as it can be shortened. As pioneered by MacArthur fellow Will Allen at Milwaukee- based Growing Power’s flagship farm, fish can be added to the harvest through a closed loop aquaponics set up where plants filter water while fish fertilize plants (see TrackerBlog post: “The Farm Next Door”).

BP: BEYOND PROPOGANDA

In a recent interview with the New York Times, the wife of a Gulf coast oil worker spoke about her conflicting feelings between the need for  jobs right now and the high environmental costs of drilling.

“I mean, eventually we might figure out a way to switch over to something else for us to use for energy,” she said. “But is it going to be affordable for everybody?

If we remain loyal to oil, it is a sure thing that it will not be affordable for all. There is simply too much global competition, too much geopolitical risk and no deadline for “eventually.”

Jon Stewart / "The Daily Show": Presidents promising energy independence...

Imagine what the present would have looked like if Nixon (!) had delivered on his promise for energy independence by 1980. Or his successors been a bit more successful pushing green alternatives. What wars might have been averted? What industries would be creating jobs? What would Nigeria look like? And what hole in the ocean floor wouldn’t be gushing?

There is no time left for “eventually.” You want that better future back? Let’s go get it.

RELATED READING/VIEWING:

• TEDxOilSpill: June 28, 2010 – livestreaming from Washington D.C.

• “The Spill, the Scandal and the President” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

• “Obama’s Sherriff” by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

• “Far From Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old” by Adam Nossiter, New York Times

• “Energy (R)evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook” - Greenpeace website / pdf report

]]> http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/06/20/the-future-fossil-fuels-are-so-yesterday/feed/ 0 J.A. Ginsburg Bookmark and Share oiltedxoilspill oilpresdailyshow http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2009/09/26/the-farm-next-door/ http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2009/09/26/the-farm-next-door/#comments Sat, 26 Sep 2009 17:38:29 +0000 J.A. Ginsburg http://trackerblog.instedd.org/?p=858 ]]>

Growing Power, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Healthier food, better access for poor, landfill relief, reduced carbon footprint, off-the-shelf set up, replicable, scalable, jobs bonanza, includes fish; Can a “small food” paradigm succeed where Big Food has failed?

The next agricultural revolution will not be patented. It will not depend on genetically modified seeds or petrochemical fertilizers. It will not poison or deplete aquifers. It will not erode topsoil that took millennia to form. Nor will distance between “farm and fork” be measured in thousands of gas-guzzling miles.

The next agricultural revolution won’t even take place on the farm – at least as we know it.

It will be potted and stacked, set up in hoop houses and warehouses, sprout from rooftops, vacant lots and lawns. Worms will be celebrated, bacteria will flourish and grubs nurtured. It will be drought and flood resistant and productive all year long.

The next agricultural revolution will be street-smart and urban, yet mimic nature far more closely than agro-giant operations sprawled over hundreds or even thousands of monotonous monoculture acres.

Best of all, the next agricultural revolution is well underway, just 5 blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, off a busy street, behind an unassuming farm-stand surrounded by sunflowers basking in the brilliant light of a mid-September afternoon. Welcome to Growing Power.

BIG FOOD GONE BAD

“The Big Food system hasn’t fed the world,” says Will Allen, urban farmer, MacArthur genius, share-cropper’s son, former basketball star, former corporate marketer, vermicompost evangelist and CEO of Growing Power. He is speaking to a group of environmental lawyers who have spent an hour digging a ditch after 2 hours touring Growing Power’s flagship 3-acre farm. They are flushed and sweaty and hang on every word. Here at last is a genuine answer that could just turn things around, no legal briefs required.

According to UN statistics, over a billion people do not have enough to eat, with tens of millions more added to the tally each year. Even in the  U.S., an estimated 1 in 6 children – more than 12 million – are “food insecure.” A global recession, a series of increasingly severe droughts and floods (at least some likely driven or amplified by climate change), and competition for land between food and fuel crops have sent those living near the edge straight over it. Every 6 seconds, a child somewhere in the world dies from hunger or related causes.

Micronutrient malnutrition affects an estimated 2 billion people. One third of children in the developing world are vitamin A deficient, putting them at risk for blindness. Anemia from iron deficiency during pregnancy is linked to over 100,000 maternal deaths.

In the developed world, malnutrition is often masked by obesity. A diet of high-calorie, high-fat, fast food laced with high fructose corn syrup  is not only a nutritional catastrophe, but also ups the odds for developing diabetes, heart disease and other assorted ills. Cheap food comes at a high cost that the poor, more than anyone else, have had to pay.

Fast food joints and liquor stores dot the neighborhood around Growing Power, but  the nearest full-service grocery is several miles away. For all practical purposes, the neighborhood is a healthy food desert. American cities are rife with them.

Allen’s mission is to fill the gap: to bring fresh, healthy, affordable food to the urban poor, to green food deserts with greens…and eggs, honey, chickens, turkeys, ducks and fish. Lots of fish.

SMALL FOOD, BIG DIFFERENCE

The Growing Power greenhouse - intensive all-season farming generates between $5 and $30 per square foot (photo: Growing Power)

Walk through the door of  the small shabby-neat one-room  store – where a video of Allen extolling the wonders of worms plays on an old television perched on some equally vintage coolers stocked with a few cartons of eggs and miscellaneous produce – into the Growing Power greenhouses and you enter a world that makes such sense, the relief is palpable. It fairly hums with purpose.

Bounty beyond imagining bursts from a substrate of plywood, 2 x 4s, waterproof liners, pumps (some solar powered), pvc pipe, fluorescent grow lights and tens of thousands of plastic pots and seed trays. There is an order to the chaos, a rhythm and logic to the intertwining series of elegantly balanced ecosystems that together support over 150 varieties of vegetables, edible plants, poultry, a few goats and tens of thousands of fish.

So intensively is space used, each square foot generates between $5 and $30. That translates per acre between roughly $218,000 and a little more than $1.3 million, which is astonishing. By contrast, corn currently sells for about $3 per bushel. If you figure 200 bushels per acre – a bumper crop – that ‘s only $600. Comparing commodity grain crops to vegetables isn’t entirely fair: corn and wheat aren’t greenhouse-friendly. Still, this gives you some idea just how distorted and subsidy-addled the Big Food system has become. Factor in the cost of seed, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, machinery, land and labor and what’s really being raised is a bumper crop of debt.

Allen’s harvest is also healthier because it is fresher, with fewer nutrients literally lost in transit. Tomatoes, produced year-round at Growing Power, sell when naturally ripe. Supermarket tomatoes, however, are often picked green, then exposed to ethylene gas to make them ripen in time for delivery, which usually involves a long-haul truck or an international flight.

In a rather poetic twist, fewer greenhouse gases are emitted from Allen’s greenhouse food because delivery is local.

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Will Allen atop compost bounty: waste + worms + coir + time = fertile soil = everything (photo: Growing Power)

Fertile soil is key to the whole operation, so Growing Power makes its own. As much as 100 thousand pounds of food waste is collected weekly for composting – millions of pounds diverted from landfills annually.

Coir, eco-friendly coconut husk alternative to peat moss, is added to the compost mix to improve texture. An army of ravenous red wriggler worms do the rest. Seven or eight species chow down for a few months, releasing nutrients and leaving little gift trails of mucous that help soil retain water. As a measure of Growing Power’s growth over the last 15 years, the “starter” 30 pounds of worms has ballooned to 5,000 pounds. Their “castings” – staggering to imagine – are another crop, fertilizer gold bagged and sold for $4 per pound. The worms themselves, though, are priceless. To get a bucketful, you have to sign up for a workshop on their care and feeding, or otherwise prove yourself a fit parent: “…(W)e won’t give them to just anybody.”

Alchemy: From garbage to $4 per pound via worms

Compost bins are everywhere. Outside, a massive compost windrow has been piled against a greenhouse wall to provide a bonus geothermal harvest: insulation and heat. Even in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, when zero degrees looks like a warming trend, it is equator hot inside the mound and the party never stops. Feasting on 20,000 to 30,000 pounds of brewery waste each week (this is Milwaukee after all), these worms are so delighted (drunk?) with their lot in life, no thought of escaping into the wild ever seems to enter their tiny happy heads.

Good times.

FISH TALES

Systems thinking is, perhaps, Growing Power’s defining feature. This is biomimicry on a sweeping scale, with careful attention paid to the smallest details and profound delight taken from learning how to work within Nature’s symbiotic set-up.

If you shut your eyes, it is easy to imagine that the pervasive background burble is a stream in the woods and not water being pumped via pvc pipe from a 6-foot-deep, fish-filled trench called a raceway up onto shelves packed with plants several feet overhead. The plants – tomatoes,watercress, basil, among others – thrive on a diet of fish poop-enriched water, which they filter and drip back to the pond/raceway, fresh and clean.

Checking the fish crop at Growing Power

Aquaponics, a closed loop system for raising fish, herbs and vegetables, is so exquisitely balanced, water to top-off the tank only need be added occasionally.

Cold water lake perch and warm water tilapia swim among the greens at Growing Power. In the spirit of endless recycling, heat from the 85 degree tilapia water helps warm the greenhouses, while the fish nibble on plant waste. A moveable feast of floating papyrus – shades of the Fertile Delta – provide tilapia with a treat of tender roots in one of the above-ground set-ups.

Could soldier fly grubs help solve the global food crisis? Protein-rich feed for fish & poultry

Perch are omnivores, so also munch on home grown worms and commercial fish feed. One the dirtiest secrets of commercial aquaculture is the need to trawl wild waters for massive amounts of smaller fish to process into food for farmed fish, so Allen is experimenting with a more eco-friendly solution: raising protein-rich soldier fly grub. Cheap, prolific, and virtually without carbon footprint (no shipping), chickens like them, too.

The perch -  10,000 to a 10,000 gallon tank – not only grow 3 times as fast as their wild cousins in Lake Michigan a few miles east, but are also mercury-free.

TAKING ROOT & SCALING UP

Allen holds a shovel for the ceremonial photo-op, tosses some dirt into a wheelbarrow and darts off to get his own camera to document the lawyers as they set about their appointed volunteer task: Digging a trench 6 feet deep and 3 feet wide for a rain catchment system designed to harvest enough water to handle all the greenhouses’ needs.

The lawyers go at it with gusto, quickly discovering just how heavy dirt can be, gamely whittling their way down a foot or two. It’s not easy. But the real lesson they have learned this day is that it’s not that hard.

Will Allen’s agro-urban miracle, breathtaking in it depth and detail, can be easily replicated and scaled. The steps are straightforward and simple: Start with waste. Honor worms. Think in terms of systems. Study Nature. Then, as Candide eventually figured out, watch your garden grow.

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Imagine: You live in a third world slum, refugee camp or in an isolated village with marginal soil and an unpredictable water supply. A hoop house is set up, which takes about a day, perhaps with the help of an enterprising NGO. Vermicompost bins are built for food waste and a garbage collection program launched. An aquaponics system is set up, with fish below and plants above, powered by a solar pump using a car battery for electricity storage.

More waste, more soil. More soil, more plants. More plants, more fish. Water recycles, replenishes. Now repeat.

These are the real “Biosphere 2′s,” creating resilient little self-sufficient Edens exactly where they are needed most: right here on Biosphere 1.

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In the year since becoming a MacArthur fellow, Will Allen and Growing Power have been featured in everything from Oprah’s O magazine to the New York Times. His rousing call to arms for food justice was featured in the Sofia Joanes’ documentary, Fresh. He has become a popular speaker (appearing this October at both Bioneers by the Bay and  PopTech ’09 ).

What began as project for local teens on the last tiny bit of farmland in Milwaukee in the mid-1990s has blossomed  into a network of small farms and a suite of regional training centers. A steady stream of Ph.D.’s and would-be Ph.D’s, mostly  from the University of Wisconsin, bring a scientific rigor to the operation, measuring, documenting and providing technical assistance for a seemingly endless series of projects.

Big Food may have failed the world. Small, smart, savvy food may just save it. The urban agriculture revolution is alive and well and coming to a city near you.

Let’s eat!

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sidebar: FARM CITY

Although Growing Power now has an enthusiastic national as well as an international following, nowhere has its example been more joyously embraced than in its home city, Milwaukee. Located halfway between Madison, a college town with a hippy past and an obsession for farmers’ markets, and Chicago, all skyline and swagger, Milwaukee mixes a do-able human scale with a some big city flash (read: easier and cheaper to park, a knock-out lakefront and did you see that stunning Calatrava-designed museum?!) In short, it is a very good place for ideas to grow quietly out of the limelight, but with plenty of help and expertise nearby.

As Growing Power ramped up its food business – it now provides thousands of low-income families access to affordable, healthy, fresh food and has built up a robust restaurant / school / grocery store clientele – it also grew as an educational resource. Long before the term “open source” became popular, sharing information was an integral part of the urban agriculture ideal. If Big Food is defined by patents and monopolies, small food counters with choice, education and collaboration. Know-how is a yet another “crop” at Growing Power, packaged in videos and workshops (see schedule / more).

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Erik Lindberg, a carpenter by trade (Community Building and Restoration), signed up for a workshop a couple of years ago. If it didn’t change his life, it certainly changed his roof. His modest one-story building, next to an auto garage and across the street from a Goodwill and a Popeye’s Chicken, now has a double life as a farm. To be precise, a rooftop CSA (community supported agriculture), that provides 7 families with a serial supply of cabbages and carrots, potatoes and pickles, tomatoes, squashes, basil and beans 40 weeks a year. That’s no mean feat in a place where winter feels like it lasts 6 months, even though it’s only 5. But that’s the magic of a hoop house and raised beds.

Gretchen Mead's entire front yard is filled with flowers & vegetables

Gretchen Mead, whose Victory Garden Initiative promotes planting veggies early, often and wherever possible, including front lawns (hers had a particularly tasty crop of ground cherries this year), is a big fan of Lindberg’s. Last spring she rounded used kiddie pools for him to recycle as giant planters – perfect for patty pan squash. If you plant them, they will grow..

The first commercial scale up of Will Allen's aquaponics system

But  the most improbable of Milwaukee’s new farms, Sweet Water Organics, is located in a 6-acre industrial complex, next door to a steel rolling plant, three miles from downtown. Earlier this year, when a Dutch flower-bulb importer tenant was forced to downsize due to the recession, landlord Steve Lindner, another Growing Power graduate, found himself with a spare 11,000 sf. In the time it takes to say, “from tulips to tilapia,” raceway trenches were being excavated for the first commercial scale up of Allen’s aquaponics system (aquaponics has been around for some time, but Allen, with help from University of Wisconsin – Sea Grant Institute, tweaked the design).

Soon worms were munching through small mountains of compost out back, while hundreds of pots filled with basil, watercress and sprouts were put in place under grow lights and tens of thousands of perch and tilapia fingerlings began swimming laps in their respective pools. Within 2 years, plans call for annual production of 100,000 fish, with revenue also coming in from herb sales, compost and worm casings.

Success is still a question mark and Lindner, along with his partners Josh Fraundorf and James Godsil – a Growing Power board member – are working closely with an array of University of Wisconsin aquaculture experts. Over $100,000 has been invested so far, but with perch going for as much as $7 per pound, tilapia for $4 and basil for $18, they’re hopeful.

A lot of people, including Will Allen, are watching closely. If Sweet Water works, it would be easy to replicate in other cities, redefining “industrial agriculture” while greening up the rust belt.

Over the last 50 years, a million farm jobs have been lost from consolidation and mechanization, Allen estimates, noting that the next generation of farmers likely won’t come from farms. Only 2% of the U.S. population still lives on farms and 40% of farmers are now in their mid-50s, staring at retirement. “I believe we can grow thousands of jobs creating this new food system,” he says.

So:

• Healthier food
• Accessible to everyone, poor and rich alike
• Reduced carbon footprint and reliance on petrochemicals
• Smarter waste recycling and water use
• Flexible and adaptable enough to work anywhere
• Better able to survive, recover and rebuild after a catastrophic weather event
• Comparatively inexpensive to set up; no patented seeds required
• Job creation

In a world stressed to its resource limits in so many ways, where merely managing to maintain status quo can feel like progress, Allen and the other urban farmers are pioneering a new promising path. By following Nature’s lead maybe, just maybe, we can get ourselves back to the garden.

First, though, we have to plant it.

(photo: Growing Power)

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MORE READING / VIEWING

Will Allen, MacArthur Fellow:

Growing Power blog & Will Allen’s post, “A Good Food Manifesto”

Video Tour of Growing Power: Vermicomposting:

Video Tour of Growing Power: Greenhouse Growing

Video Tour of Growing Power: Aquaponics

Aquaponics video, University of Wisconsin – Sea Grant Institute:

“Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear,” Vanity Fair article by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele

Seed Savers Exchange: non-profit organization of gardeners dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds

“Access to Affordable and Nutritious Food—Measuring and Understanding Food Deserts and Their Consequences: Report to Congress,” USDA – Economic Research Service

“Investing in the Future: A United Call to Action on Vitamin and Mineral Deficiencies,” UNICEF report

The Biomimicry Institute, founded by Janine Benyus

“AskNature: The Biomimicry Design Portal,” Brain Pickings article by Kirstin Butler

“Fresh”: clips from Sofia Jones’ documentary – Russ Kremer, Will Allen, Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan

“Fresh” trailer:

“Food, Inc” movie website

“Food, Inc” trailer (Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser)

Colbert Report interview with Eric Schlosser, co-producer of “Food, Inc” and author of “Fast Food Nation”

Author Michael Pollan’s website: (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food”)

Urban Agriculture magazine (produced by the RUAF Foundation – Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security)

Urban Farm magazine

Oxfam report summary: "Even the Himalayas Have Stopped Smiling"

If no other statistic about climate change gives you pause, this one should: 1/4 of the world’s population – an estimated 1.4 billion people – rely on water from rivers that source in the Himalayas. As glaciers retreat, snow packs shrink and spring thaws occur earlier and earlier, the precious gift of a well-timed water supply is disappearing before our eyes. Instead, flooding torrents race down mountain streams too early in the spring for crops to use, followed by months of drought when the flows of once reliably mighty rivers slow to a trickle. If that weren’t misery enough, alpine lakes swollen from glacial melt threaten to break their banks, unleashing “Nepali tsunamis” officially called “GLOFs” (Glacial Lake Outburst Floods) that threaten to drown villages and fields and scour away topsoil.

Women, who do most of the water-fetching and firewood-gathering, are forced to walk further and further for essentials each day. Crop failures mean hunger and malnutrition.

Temperatures, like a seasoned sherpa hiking up Mount Everest, climb fast at higher elevations – as much as 8 times faster in the Himalayas than elsewhere on the planet over the last three decades. With warmer weather comes a raft of vector-borne diseases for which these cold-adapted communities have no defense.

Weak, sick, hungry, thirsty. So much for Shangri-La.

WHERE THE RIVERS NO LONGER RUN THROUGH IT

Downstream, as Newsweek’s Sharon Begley notes, “A special place in climate hell is being reserved for India and China.” Already, 20% of China has turned to desert. And the water table beneath India’s irrigation-dependent “breadbasket” has been so depleted, NASA satellites have been able to detect a change in earth’s gravitational field over the region.

It isn’t just the breadth of the water disaster that is so confounding, but the fact that it is accelerating. As worthy as the efforts by organizations and projects such as charity: water and Ripple Effect may be, it is hard to believe they can possibly make a dent when need is growing both exponentially and quickly. There is a great big climate change hole-in-the-bucket.

So fast is the change, “glacial pace” has had to be redefined. The Extreme Ice Survey, headed by photojournalist James Balog, set up dozens of time-lapse cameras to document glacial retreat in the northern hemisphere (95% of the glaciers outside of Antarctic are shrinking, with flow speeds doubling over the last 20 years). But even they were gobsmacked when a 1.8 cubic mile chunk – the size of 3,000 U.S. Capital buildings – calved off a glacier in Greenland in 75 minutes.

from TED Global:

PROSPERITY SHIPS OUT

Indeed, only the Russians seem to see a silver lining in the global meltdown: For the first time in at least 5,000 years, a Northeast passage has opened up, making it possible for ships traveling from Asia to Europe to bypass the Suez Canal – at least during the summer months. The Beluga Group, which sent two ships as a test this summer, boasts that not only does the route knock 10 days off the journey at a cost savings of nearly $300,000, but that using less fuel means lower CO2 emissions. The lucrative “Arctic Rush” is on and, golly, it’s green, too!

Trade and development are routinely cited by politicians as reasons not to take a more aggressive stance on curbing emissions. Fear of being perceived as standing in the way of progress and its twin, prosperity, has blinded them to stark and utterly inconvenient truth: If the world continues to heat up, there won’t be as much to trade (failing crops, chronically depressed economies) or as many people who can afford to buy. That may begin to change as big institutional investors, feeling increasingly insecure about climate-driven threats to their investments, start to make their financial clout felt. The medical establishment has also come on board, framing the climate change as the biggest public health threat ever.

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Climate change is a braid of the subtle and the profound. Warming air feeds winds that shift sea temperature cycles that change weather patterns. A monsoon misses its cue, or fails altogether. Landscapes parch, becoming fire fodder.

These tragic consequences are often “tipped” and amplified by land use changes that directly affect local climates. Expanding cities are expanding “heat islands,” while deforestation is a multi-category disaster. Lose the trees and you pretty much lose the game. It’s not just their talent for sequestering carbon. Their roots help funnel water to aquifers, while the transpiration – the evaporation of water from leaves – cools the air and provides moisture for rain clouds. Sea breezes blowing over a coastal forest can inland can push moisture inland, so clear-cut the forest and you could trigger a drought hundreds of miles away.

In both Mexico and Kenya, logging, legal and otherwise, have increased vulnerability to droughts, which are becoming more frequent and devastating. Hippos now bask in roadside puddles in Kenya, while water trucks are routinely hijacked in Mexico City. Dead livestock spells the end of a way of life for African nomads, while stunted crops bring debt to Mexican farmers and higher food prices to everyone else.

We know better. Or, more accurately, we have the collective knowledge to do better. The question is whether we have the collective will.

If not…

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MORE READING/VIEWING

“Copenhagen Climate Summit Heat: from business to condoms” by Peter Casier – The Road to the Horizon round-up of issues & article links

“Study of 16 developing countries shows climate change could deepen poverty”: (press release overview / abstract & author links)

“Managing the health effects of climate change”: Lancet / University College London report on public health implications of climate change (free registration required)

The Not Stupid Campaign : from the creators of film, “The Age of Stupid”

“China’s Growing Sands” by Sean Gallagher: slide show produced for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (HT Peter Casier)

The Central Park Conservancy faces months of clean-up and hundreds of thousands of dollars in clean-up costs to repair the damage caused by an unusually fierce storm on August 18. Donations welcome. (photo: Tony Yang)

Making a right from two wrongs; For the love of a park; Inspiration from Aldo Leopold, MLB-branded grass & Neopets; Cyber-seedlings & fundraising; “You had me at orangutan”

By all accounts the storm that hit New York’s Central Park last week didn’t last very long, but the devastation was breathtaking. In a matter of minutes, winds approaching hurricane-strength flattened hundreds of old beloved trees and damaged hundreds more. With roots in the air and limbs askew, and the dead and wounded strewn everywhere, the soft green heart of this hard gray city had taken a direct hit. The days that followed were filled with the cracking of ripped timber, the whine of power saws and the relentless buzz of wood-chippers. Grass will grow where giants once stood. Sunlight will filter down to the urban forest floor for the first time in years. New trees will be planted. And in a few decades, incredibly, no one will be the wiser.

Central Park, after all, was never the forest primeval. Still, there is something sacred about old trees – even if their age is measured in decades rather than centuries, and their arrangement determined by a landscape architect. They grew up with us, or we with them. In a place of constant change they are, simply, constant. If trees can be so easily uprooted, what chance have we? It is unnerving to see how shallow and vulnerable a tall tree’s roots really are.

Although I live in Chicago, I visit New York several times a year and have come to know the Park well enough to have my favorite places. I know Spring has finally arrived when flocks of birders at the Ramble start comparing notes on who’s returned and set up nests, while flocks of Japanese brides/grooms/photographers start flitting to scenic spots to set up Wedding Pictures. In  summer, it’s bicycles, drumming circles, reading on a shady rock, serenaded by an old man playing un-hummable but delicious melodies on a one-stringed Chinese instrument. Fall is filled with the smell and crunch of leaves, walking down the promenade near the statue of Christopher Columbus. And Winter – if I am lucky enough to be marooned by a LaGuardia-closing blizzard – is a trip to the Museum of Natural History for some fossils and stars, followed by a few quick snow angels in the Park.

Always, there are the trees. Budding, shady, raining seeds, etched with a white filigree sparkle.

According to the Central Park Conservancy, the tab for clean up and replanting will easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (donations welcome). The true cost –  lost views, lost homes (nests & burrows) and lost familiarity — is incalculable.

THE TREES WE KNOW & THE TREES WE ONLY KNOW OF

We will do whatever it takes to save the trees we know and love. But in the time it took the storm to turn the Park into a leafy war zone, several thousand trees were intentionally shredded in rain forests around the world.

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  "Borneo's Moment of Truth" / National Geographic

  In Brazil,  nearly 3 million acres destroyed by illegal logging, soy farming, cattle ranching, road-building and mining between 2007 and 2008, according to Greenpeace. Although the rate of destruction appears to be slowing, it is a tenuous triumph at best.

• In Congo, plans are in the works to turn a  staggering one million hectares (2.47 million acres)  into a palm oil plantation, which environmentalists term nothing short of a “biodiversity disaster.”

• In Borneo and Sumatra, the destruction of rain forest, mostly for palm oil plantations, has not only been devastating to wildlife (most famously, orangutans), but has made the land more vulnerable to fire.

The loss of even 1,000 trees in the middle of Manhattan is unlikely to have much of an impact on the city’s “urban heat island,” but the loss of massive swaths of CO2-absorbing, biodiversity-critical, moisture-recycling rain forest will help heat up the whole planet. It can even be argued that without the rain forests, the outlook for New York’s urban forest is fraught. A warmed world could mean more intense storms, droughts and the faster spread of tree disease-carrying insects (warmer winters mean fewer bugs die off).

As I read about the clean-up in New York, I began to wonder whether there might be a way to weave these two tales of arboreal tragedy into an opportunity.

WHAT WOULD ALDO DO? / FINDING “LEGACY” IN RECYCLING

If your path has not crossed Aldo Leopold’s yet, the time has come. Leopold is best known as the author a “A Sand County Almanac an Sketches Here and There,” in which he argues for a “land ethic” that acknowledges and values what Nature provides. Along with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” Leopold’s book, published in 1949, shortly after his death, helped lay the philosophical foundations for ecology.

The “Sand County” in title refers to a piece of worn out Dust Bowl-era farmland he bought an hour’s drive north of Madison, Wisconsin, where he was a professor of forestry at the university. With in the help of his wife, five children and a nearly endless supply of pine seedlings (Leopold also founded one of the country’s first arboretums at UW), he set about testing his ideas for healing and restoring land. Year after year, the Family Leopold planted thousands of trees. Many were lost to drought, but they kept trying.

Today, hiking through the 200+ acres of what is now The Aldo Leopold Foundation, giant pines tower overhead. Ironically, too many trees survived, weakening the forest in the competition for limited resources.  In 2003, a selective harvest was organized to help the forest become more resilient to drought, disease and insects.

Logs were dried, stripped, cut into lumber and used to build a LEED Platinum “Legacy Center,” for educational programs, retreats and small conferences (the building was awarded 61 out of a possible 69 points, for those who keep score).

TREES FOR TREES

Unfortunately, Central Park trees cannot be turned to into lumber for fear of spreading insect pests (Asian long-horned beetles & emerald ash borers). Even cords of firewood are out the question. The only option: chipping logs for in situ mulch.

But there is still a way to create a legacy of hope a la the Leopold Foundation. 

If Major League Baseball can license and sell ballpark grass seed and turf, surely Central Park can sell branded tree seedlings at a premium. Now take the legacy global: For every dollar that goes to Central Park, ring up two dollars for rain forest projects. Call it “Trees for Trees.”  The Central Park Zoo could mount a biodiversity exhibit, connecting the dots between animals on display and the dire straits their wild kin face from habitat loss. Perhaps a “Tree Story” show at the Museum of Natural History. Or a website with virtual seedlings that can be “watered” and tended to,  just like Neopets. Buy a cyber-seedling and be part of a Facebook Forest or Twitter Trees…

No doubt there are many other, better ideas out there, but you get the drift. Sometimes two wrongs actually can make a right. Actually a lot of rights: Mend the Park. Repair the rain forest. Help the planet. And while we’re at it: Clean the watershed. Stabilize hillside erosion. Scrub the air. Reduce farm fertilizer run-off. Provide wildlife habitat. Give migrating birds a home to go home to…

So, consider this a call to arms for green-minded marketers: How can we actually make this happen?

YOU HAD ME AT “ORANGUTAN”

There is, of course, no shortage of worthy reforestation projects around the world in desperate need of support. But as long as I have the floor, I nominate Willie Smits’ work in Borneo to start. The projects are comprehensive and practical, a deft mix of tech, cutting edge biology, social entrepreneurship and environmental stewardship (TED talk):

In July, Smits gave another, longer talk at the ESRI Users’ Conference, detailing the use of GIS mapping to monitor deforestation to track down illegal logging operations and for selecting the best sites for reforestation:

Willie Smits' keynote address at the 2009 ESRI User's Conference

Smits’ ideas have been proven in the field and offer genuine hope that there may yet be a way to turn things around.

Imagine that.

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MORE READING

How to Plant & Mulch a Tree – from City Trees: The City of Chicago’s Guide to Urban Tree Care

Orangutan Outreach: website for the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, the largest primate rescue project in the world – also information on deforestation, palm oil plantations, habitat loss and what you can do to help.

Map of swine flu outbreak - with time animation bar (BBC)

• In the U.K., experts predict there could be as many as a 100,000 cases per day by August – which would also dash hopes for an economic recovery any time soon, according to a new study.

• In Argentina, flat-footed bureaucrats are in the cross-hairs for taking too long to implement protective measures. Now Argentine pigs are sick, too.

• In Saudi Arabia, where nary a pig dares wander, officials are bracing for millions of devout Muslims planning hajj trips this November, advising the old, young, pregnant and those with chronic conditions to reschedule.

• In the U.S., a new survey suggests that obesity doubles the risk for serious flu complications. Exactly why this is so is a bit of mystery, but a mouse study may provide a clue. Fat mice produce elevated amounts of leptin, a hormone involved in immune response. Researchers theorize that the mice became desensitized to leptin, so their immune systems don’t kick into gear fast enough. When their immune systems finally do kick in, they go into overdrive with a “cytokine storm” – a defense so strong, it kills the host.

At the other end of the spectrum in the developing word are the nearly one billion chronically hungry weakened by malnutrition. Now factor in air pollution, which has long been known to exacerbate respiratory illnesses in general, and it is really not too much of stretch to say that almost everyone suffers from some kind of complicating underlying condition. To put it in medical terms, co-morbidities are probably the rule, not the exception.

Still, there is something particularly unfair and frightening about the risk to pregnant women. Though case numbers are small, a disturbing trend has begun to emerge of otherwise healthy women fighting for their lives and the lives of their unborn babies only days after coming down with swine flu.

ABC "Nightline" segment opens with the story of Audrey Opdyke, 26 weeks pregnant, who came down with swine flu. She was put in an induced coma to try to save the baby. Shortly after this piece aired, an emergency C-section was performed. The baby did not surive.

The CDC’s page on “Pregnant Women and Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus: Considerations for Clinicians” does not discuss etiology, but it might be similar to the obesity story — although instead of leptin desensitizing the immune system, pregnancy itself might act as a dampener (to prevent rejection of the fetus). By the time the mother’s body mounts a defense, it is too much, too late.

Influenza presents another, more subtle, threat to the unborn: Exposure to the virus in the first trimester appears to increase the (still small) risk the child will develop schizophrenia later in life. Again, the “how” remains murky, but if it is due to the mother’s immune response rather than direct exposure to the virus, then a vaccine, which also triggers an immune response, could be dangerous.

As swine flu begins to spread into the developing where maternal health care is already spotty, the effects of this pandemic could prove especially heartbreaking.

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PIGS, PATHOGENS & OPPORTUNITY

Now a second strain of a combo pig/human/avian influenza virus has been identified in Saskatchewan, Canada. So far it causes only mild illness and spreads pig-to-pig and  pig-to-person. Whether it can spread person-to-person is still unknown; the illness may be so mild that patients aren’t tested. But it shows that such viral mixing is likely much more common than previously thought, and that large hog factory farms with their high density populations provide a perfect setting.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in the Philippines, pigs have been identified as a host of Reston ebolavirus, the only strain that isn’t fatal to humans. The discovery, via metagenomics, came as a surprise. (listen to Science magazine podcast with APHIS-USDA researcher Michael McIntosh). The pigs were also suffering from  porcine reproductive and respiratory disease syndrome, the severity of which may have been the result of co-infection. USDA researchers are concerned, of course, about food production and safety implications. The WHO is worried about the ease of pig to human transmission. In January, several hog farm workers, along with a butcher, tested positive for REV antibodies. Should the strain mutate into a more virulent or even lethal version, all bets are off on stopping the carnage.

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Eventually, the fog of the current battle against swine flu (a.k.a. “Pandemic H1N1 2009 “) will lift. One can only hope that then policy-makers will  – finally – begin to shift focus to the biggest “underlying condition” of all: a modern farming system rife with significant public health dangers. Otherwise, almost inevitably, they will find themselves in a few years once again calling for emergency conferences, fretting over limited budgets, drawing up distribution plans for vaccines and resistance-prone anti-virals and fighting a variation of the very same war.

Perhaps Peter Cooke put it best in the cult classic “Frog & Peach” routine he performed with Dudley Moore about a catastrophic failure of a restaurant located in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors. When asked whether he had learned from his mistakes, Cook’s proud proprietor replies, “Yes! I have learned from my mistakes! And I am sure I could repeat them exactly!”

Well, exactly…

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FURTHER READING

When Pigs Flu: Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms (Tom Philpott/Grist)

Follow the Pigs! – Swine Flu, Factory Farms, Mapping and Public Health (TrackerBlog)

A Virus by Any Other Name: Lessons from an Outbreak (so far…) (TrackerBlog)

Fresh (movie trailers – pay particular attention to segment on pig farmer Russ Kremer’s life-changing bout with farm-incubated MRSA)

Food, Inc (movie website / trailer)

Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin interview (Venture / Bloomberg TV)

Or at least try to make the best of it.

Jakarta, from "The world’s 20 cities with the worst traffic jams"

• In Jakarta, where “total traffic” (all rush hour, all the time) is expected by 2011, some have found a bit of gold in the gridlock. Passengers-for-higher called “jockeys” hustle for pick ups from drivers needing to fill seats to qualify for slightly speedier high occupancy lanes.

• In Sao Paulo, where traffic jams can stretch well over 100 miles and commute times average between two and three hours a day, the tale is told of a lovesick soul who threw a cell phone through the open window of a neighboring car to ask a girl for a date. Alas, the car-crossed lovers probably spent most of their courtship simply trying to rendevous.

• In Cairo, the Egyptian Horatia Alger is Nasser Sedky, a budding valet parking tycoon who had some business cards printed up for $10 and now runs a mini-empire of 50 professional parkers.

• In Chicago, parking pays the bills: The city recently leased its meters to meet a budget shortfall: $1.16 billion for 75 years.

• In San Francisco, cars have become data points for a team at UC-Berkeley testing a system to crowdsource traffic reports via GPS-enabled driver cell phones.

WHEN COPING ISN’T ENOUGH: TRAFFIC AS A MALARIA-LEVEL KILLER

Making the most of a bad situation still leaves a bad situation. According to the United Nations Road Safety Collaboration, more people die each year from traffic accidents (~1.2 million) than from malaria (~1 million). Millions more are injured and maimed, which is several orders of magnitude more than are killed and wounded by land mines. Not surprisingly, most the carnage is in the developing world where vehicles tend to be older, roads worse and health care systems beyond overburdened. 85% of the deaths are in low and middle-income countries, leaving a trail of wrecked lives and nicked GNPs (estimate: 1% to 1.5% of gross national product). Young people are particularly at risk, with traffic injuries listed as one of the leading causes of death for between the ages 5 to 25 years-old.

In short, traffic isn’t just inconvenient, but a full-out, top-tier global public health disaster. If nothing is done, the numbers are expected to double by 2030. Does the World Health Organization have a scale for that?

George Robertson, chair of the U.K.-based Commission for Global Road Safety (CGRS), points out the irony of spending millions in development aid while ignoring things as basic, if mundane, as building better roads and investing in traffic signs:

Our overseas aid is devoted to improving life chances for education, for health. Dangerous roads damage this effort, killing the young and productive, disrupting commerce and trade. They impose a high burden on under-funded health services. They make the daily journey to school a high-speed life or death lottery for millions of children. Worse, many of these dangerous roads are being built with our taxes. Roads are being funded by our governments’ international development agencies, the World Bank and EU with one objective; to speed traffic and increase trade flows, but without sufficient attention to road safety safeguards or the needs and views of local communities.

“The killer we know too well: roads” / The Guardian

A new report by CGRS, “Making Roads Safe,” proposes a UN-sponsored “Decade of Action for Road Safety” to start in 2010, with the goal cutting the death rate by half. The cost – $300 million to save 5 million lives – is positioned as a bargain. By comparison, the annual cost of traffic deaths and injuries is tallied at $100 billion, “equivalent to all overseas aid from OECD countries.”

THE ROAD TO CLIMATE CHANGE…IS PAVED

But roads are only part of the problem. To the extent they contribute to the urban heat island effect, they are a problem all by themselves. Dark hard surfaces soak up heat, making cities several degrees warmer than surrounding areas. This local warming, seasoned with CO2 from the city’s million-plus tail pipes, has given scientists a way to see into the future.

In 2002, Lewis Ziska, a scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, planted three plots of weeds: one on a farm, one in the suburbs and one near Baltimore’s inner harbor. Not only was the temperature at the Baltimore plot 3 to 4 degrees warmer, but CO2 levels averaged 450 parts-per-million – roughly the middle-case scenario projected for the planet as a whole in 30 to 50 years. The city weeds dwarfed their suburban and country cousins, producing more allergy-inducing pollen in the process.

As much as the weeds may have reveled in the smoggy muck, it hasn’t been all that good for us. Air pollution from cars and trucks has been linked to childhood asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

OPTIONS?

Two words: Drive less. Even an electric car requires urban-warming roads, so it is not just a question of trading up to a cleaner power source, but of rethinking the entire transportation equation. A billion cars and trucks, and the massive infrastructure that supports them, are not (short of an asteroid) going to disappear overnight. We have built our world and designed our cities based on their existence.

But what if we didn’t have to drive so much? Could we begin to chip away at some of the 12,000 pounds of CO2 each car adds to the atmosphere each year? (U.S. figures) Are there ways to better mix and match transportation options?

• In Vauban, Germany, an upscale suburb of Freiberg, most residents don’t even own a car. This modern throwback to simpler village life was laid out for walking and bicycles. Rental cars and car-sharing clubs are used for longer trips.

• More and bigger garages near commuter train stations can make it easier for drivers to split commutes, dramatically reducing the number miles spent in stalled traffic. For extra green points, build garages using  CO2-negative cement and landscape with green roofs that help keep cities cooler.

• Duel mode transportation schemes envision cars that can be hooked up to tramways where strings of cars form trains.

No matter how we wriggle out of global gridlock, benefits will be dramatic and immediate. Fewer traffic deaths. Healthier air. Improved prospects on the climate change front. Insti-savings from reduced fuel bills. Quieter, cleaner, cooler cities. Not being stuck in “total traffic.” Blue skies (an unexpected bonus for Mexico City during the recent swine flu shut-down). Now wouldn’t that be something?

MORE READING

“Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us” by Tom Vanderbilt (book website)

NPR Science Friday and Fresh Air interviews with Tom Vanderbilt (audio)

“Transportation Futuristics” (web exhibition)

“The Lincoln Park Pirates” by Steve Goodman (for all the Chicagoans / ex-pat Chicagoans out there….)

"Invisible Car" by Artist Sara Watson