As long as I kept the dialog to “buon giorno,” “uno” (when pointing to a particularly remarkable pastry), “grazie” (when buying said pastry) and “sera” (turns out “buona” is optional), the illusion was perfect. I was Roman. So what if I had only the sketchiest of mental maps of the city and came across the Trevi Fountain by chance? Or that my  concrete-coddled American legs were no match for the Eternal City’s infernal paving stones? I was Roman enough to have paid my respects at Julius Caesar’s surprisingly humble tomb at the Forum:

In ricordo della Idi di marzo

But two or three times a day, someone would burst my bubble with a babble of Italian, forcing me to admit that I was but a clueless American, more lost than they. That is until the undaunted Eva, who announced she was Dutch, spoke English and asked one of the few questions for which I actually had an answer: “Do you know the way to the Piazza Navona?” “Si, si! Just heading that way myself…”

Built on the site of a first century stadium, the piazza is a long irregular oval, punctuated by three fabulous fountains and filled with artists of varying talent doing their best to sell paintings. On one side sits a massive 17th century basilica built above the tomb of St. Agnes, not far from the brothel where she was martyred 1,700 years ago (Sant’Agnese in Agone). On the other, a row of so-so restaurants offering better view than food. A rotating cast of “living statues” rounds out the regulars, including the inevitable King Tut (I must have seen 8 of them working various piazzas). The afterlife, it turns out, is funded by tourists.

Another day, another euro: Morning on the Piazza Navona - King Tut suiting up and The Headless Man waiting for tourists...

Into this delicious mix of past, present, saints, sinners, art and artifice, Eva and I strolled as dusk dimmed and the piazza’s evening crowd began to gather. She turned out to be a frustrated international studies grad student who had found a program in Rome that, unlike others closer to home, hadn’t been fussy about her bachelor’s degree in psychology. It was a deficiency they felt she could overcome.

At TrackerNews we celebrate the mix and the match, crossing disciplines every chance we get, firmly believing in the the serendipity of collaboration.

It is just plain easier to think outside the box when at least one person isn’t in it. It also improves the odds for generating new ideas and breakthrough answers. The rest of Eva’s class was full of the usual round of poly-sci, history and econ majors. How could the addition of someone with a little background in psychology be anything but a plus?

TrackerNews was designed with the Eva’s of the world in mind. The typical news aggregator skews to dateline or popularity. TrackerNews skews to contextual relevance, focusing on connections. We seek out what automated RSS feeds routinely miss: research papers, older news stories, author interviews, the brilliant one-off’s. The mission is quality over quantity in the day-to-day and archival depth over time.

THE LESSONS OF LEONARDO

When I bought my Kindle a few months back, in the pre-iPad era, I knew it would turn out to be the “8-track cassette” of e-readers: a good-enough idea until something less idiosyncratic came along. Its klutzy set-up for creating and accessing notes has indeed proved annoying, but still not a bad way to haul around a lot of books.

I traveled through Italy reading Fritjof Capra’s, “The Science of Leonardo” – which, ironically, was made possible by the quirky fate-twist that as a bastard offspring, he skipped university. This lack of formal education was a sore spot at the time, but allowed him the freedom to think in new ways. Eventually, he read all the classic texts on his own, but was spared the tests proving he had interpreted them “correctly.”

Instead, after what sounds like a fairly idyllic childhood spent roaming the Tuscan hills pursuing his interests as a budding naturalist, Leonardo was apprenticed to a sculptor in Florence. The studio was where Art met Science and Engineering. Practical issues such as how to weld, how to cast, how to hoist, how to handle different materials and how to design for durability were simply part of the job. It was a perfect spot for a natural-born “systems thinker” with a talent for spotting patterns that could be applied from one field to another.

…Leonardo da Vinci was the first in an lineage of scientists who focused on the patterns interconnecting the basic structures and processes of living systems. Today, this approach to science is called ‘systemic thinking.’ This, in my eyes, is the essence of what Leonardo meant by farsi universale. Freely translating his statement into modern scientific language, I would rephrase it this way: ‘For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker.’

It wasn’t just static patterns that fascinated Leonardo, but patterns of transformation. Change over time was integral to his thinking, whether analyzing the flow of water or the development of a fetus, or the mathematics that allows one geometric shape to become another. In a world of snapshot thinkers, Leonardo was talking video.

BACK ON THE PIAZZA: CHINA, GENDERCIDE, CONGO, CLIMATE CHANGE  & A THESIS

Eva listened attentively to my soapbox rant on TrackerNews, Leonardo and the endless benefits of omnivorous curiosity and multi-faceted perspective. How, she asked, might that apply to a somewhat pressing personal and very specific problem, namely, coming up with a thesis topic: “Something about China.”

“Easy,” I replied. “Find a couple of major trends that look likely to intersect and analyze the implications. Take a multi-disciplinary approach, look for patterns and try to figure out how all the moving parts will interact and change over time. Think like Leonardo!”

So… China. No shortage of material there. I suggested two trends we’ve covered on TrackerNews: demographic skew and natural resource depletion.

• One of the most important sit-up-and-take-notice stories of the decade, if not the century, is  The Economist’s “The Worldwide War on Girls,”which takes a hard look at the consequences of a China’s one-child policy and boy-centric tradition. Beyond the disturbing ethical issues of sex-selective abortion and infanticide – “gendercide” – it is estimated there will soon be 40 million more Chinese men of marriageable age than Chinese women for them to marry. That’s enough extra men to fill 5 New York Cities. What will become of them?

• An equally disturbing story is Richard Behar’s 2008 6-part tour de force for Fast Company, “China Storms Africa.” The Chinese, flush with of cash but running low on natural resources,  are on a raw materials buying spree, with serious global power-shift and environmental ramifications. Although the specter of oil palm plantations is only a tiny part of a much larger story, it has the potential to affect the entire planet. Consider: The island of Borneo has slashed and burned its way to the #3 spot of global CO2 emitters, right behind the U.S. and China, by clearning rain forests to make way for these biodiversity-annihilating plantations. In the summer of 2009, a Chinese company announced plans for 1 million hectare – 3,800 square mile – operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Will China’s man-surplus be funneled into an ever-expanding military machine? Will they be deployed around the world to defend the nation’s growing foreign interests? What does this mean for Africa over the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years? For global climate change? For the global economy? What happens to China? Will the extra men marry foreign women? Will Chinese women find themselves in a position of power, sought after and valued? Or shut out of a giant boys’ club? What kind of political force will these extra men present?

******

Poor Eva was taking notes as fast as she could, as I realized how deeply curating TrackerNews for the last year has affected my thinking. Tangents eventually connect, stray thoughts find kindred thoughts, ideas collide and spark epiphanies.

We stood in the piazza riffing for almost a half hour. These big picture issues don’t come up nearly enough in the conversations of humanitarian aid workers, social entrepreneurs, environmentalists or policy-makers. What a kick it would be if this accidental conversation actually led to Eva’s thesis.

Why it would be just the kind of thing we would post on TrackerNews…

ADDITIONAL READING / LISTENING / VIEWING:

• “Willie Smits restores a rainforest” (TED talk – video)

• Fritjof Capra interview / “The Science of Leonardo” (NPR – audio)

• Leonardo da Vinci bio (Wikipedia)

]]> http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/04/18/lessonsofleonardo/feed/ 0 J.A. Ginsburg caesarstomb livingstatues scienceofleonardo leonardos http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/02/10/treesandcharcoal/ http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/02/10/treesandcharcoal/#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:10:01 +0000 J.A. Ginsburg http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/?p=1201 ]]>

Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP)

On link between environmental health & public health; Rebuilding Haiti from the soil microbes up; A humanitarian aid petri dish; Jared Diamond’s checklist for collapse & Haiti as vision what could be in store for the rest of us; Charcoal cartels, Amy Smith’s better answer & Nicholas Kristof’s compost toilet tour

Small farm plots on hilly terrain had been stripped bare of soil-stabilizing cover (2/3 of the the country is on land that slopes 20% or more). No soil means no food means malnutrition means disease, illness, death.

“Practically every medical problem in Haiti is poverty-related,” notes Dr. Vehnita Suresh, the hospital’s CEO. “The never-ending cycle of deforestation lead(s) to more ecological damage, more compromised farming, more poverty and more hunger. It goes on and on and on.”

Public health and environmental health are so tied together, you simply can’t have the former without the latter. “We can go on giving health-care forever,” says Dr. Suresh, “It would never really touch even the brim of the problem here.”

So they plant trees. The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project (HTRIP) has begun to reverse centuries of devastation that literally skinned the country alive, leaving hillsides such as the ones surrounding the Artibonite Valley where the hospital is located barren and bleak.

Documentary on The Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Project, the Hopital Albert Schweitzer's reforestation effort

In the aftermath of the earthquake, reforestation has taken a back seat to the urgency of treating the injured (you can donate directly to support the hospital’s work). But over the long term, any real “Hope for Haiti” means planting trees – literally rebuilding the country from its soil microbes up.

AVOIDING COLLAPSE: LAB HAITI

Haiti has been teetering at brink of breakdown for as long as anyone can remember, but it took the quake to focus  global attention, sparking an unprecedented outpouring of support and a largely spontaneous explosion of technical can-do innovation. From CrisisMappers and Crisis Commons hackers to the collaborative Haiti Rewired network, Twitter hashtag-enabled mash-ups and teams of volunteer architects, engineers, doctors,  veterinarians and other professionals, this has been an all-hands-on-deck emergency.

In a sense, Haiti has become a sort of petri dish for humanitarian action. The stakes couldn’t be higher. If, somehow, this “Exhibit A” for all that Jared Diamond says spells doom for a culture/country’s prospects is rescued from the abyss of complete collapse, the implications go far beyond Haiti.

Haiti, in all its deforested, polluted, cartel-corrupted, disease-riddled impoverishment, is a vision of our planet’s future if we continue to devour natural resources beyond replenishment, downplay the seriousness of climate change, spike efforts at family planning and ignore the integral importance of environmental health. As goes Haiti, so go we all.

“The most important thing we need to do about the world’s environmental problems,” says Diamond, “is trying to forget about there being any most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are dozen things and we’ve got to get them all right.”

EDEN WRECKED

The Haiti/Dominican Republic border; Completely deforested on the Haitian side; "Charcoal cartel" beginning to make inroads on the Dominican side

Where did all the forests go? The stats are as numbing as the satellite photos are stark:

• 1492: Columbus stops by. 75% of what would become Haiti covered in trees

• 1664: The French West India Company formed. Millions of trees chopped & harvested to create massive plantations. African slaves by the tens of thousands are imported to provide labor.

• 1825: French agree to recognize Haiti’s freedom, won in 1804, in exchange for 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million). This puts the country in deep debt from which it never recovers. Much of the country’s timber wealth (mahogony) ships out for a song.

• 1940: An estimated 30% of country still forested

• 1970: Only 10% forested. People depend on charcoal made from wood for cooking. By contrast, government subsidizes gas stoves in the Dominican Republic

• 2010: Less than 1% forested. “Charcoal cartels” start chopping down trees across the Dominican border. Eroded land silts up lake, floods key road to Port-au-Prince. $40 million need to build alternate road.

LOW TECH / LOW COST: SOLUTIONS IN PROBLEMS

In a twist of dust-to-dust poetry, some of the answers to Haiti’s most intractable problems can be found in the one thing that Haiti has in abundance: waste.

About 10 years ago, MIT D-Lab founder Amy Smith, took a group of students to Haiti, where they were inspired by a local entrepreneur who had developed a way to make charcoal briquettes from scrap paper.  Smith’s team improved the process, using agricultural waste as feedstock. In 2006, she presented the results at the TED conference.

The upsides are stunning: No trees cut. A better product. Makes money for the producers. And since charcoal generates less smoke than wood, fewer cases of cooking fire smoke-induced acute respiratory illness, the leading cause of death for those under 5 years old in developing countries.

The process continues to be improved. Here is a step-by-step DIY field demo by Smith:

SHIT HAPPENS – THAT’S GOOD NEWS

SOIL, a small American non-profit operating in Haiti, has a plan for turning one of the country’s foulest, most intractable public health issues into a plus: transforming smelly poop into fragrant fertile compost. “Instead of potting soil, potty soil.”

Composting toilets themselves are nothing new, but developing a sustainable community-supported model for their use is – and  key to the group’s over-arching mission to reduce poverty via “liberation ecology.” With the likes of Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer and The Land Institute’s Wes Jackson on their all-star advisory board, they have a better shot than most at getting the plan to work.

In March, 2009, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof took a tour with SOIL staffers Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell:

SOIL’s approach parallels MacArthur genius Will Allen‘s vermiculture-based urban farms. The flagship 3-acre Growing Power farm, located just a few blocks from Milwaukee’s largest public housing project, is a stunning example of ecosystem-thinking applied to intensive agriculture. And it all begins with worms chowing down on municipal waste, turning garbage into fertile black gold. Allen also weaves in aquaponics – a freshwater closed loop fish-operation (perch, tilapia). Plants are nourished by fish-poo water, which filters down back to the fish. Could such a system work in Haiti? It certainly seems worth investigating.

HIGH TECH HELP

Tree-planting, briquettes, compost toilets and urban farming don’t require a lot of complicated moving parts or all that much money. Their simplicity is an essential part of why they might make a real difference. But high tech tools can help make these good ideas even more effective.

• Mapping: Tools to track and predict deforestation, including illegal logging, and to help identify good sites for reforestation projects.

• Communications: Connecting charcoal briquette producers with ag waste sources and with customers; Web-based how-to guides on how to make charcoal briquettes, tree-care tips, etc.

• Fundraising: M-giving and other philanthropy tools, e.g., develop a game where players grow a cyber-forest – download proceeds to support a real forest.

RELATED READING / VIEWING:

“After the earthquake: Haiti’s deforestation needs attention” by Moises Velasquez-Manoff (Christian Science Monitor)

“Agroforestry and sustainable resource conservation in Haiti: A Case Study” by Nathan McClintock

U.S. Senate Bill 1183: Haiti Reforestation Act of 2009 introduced by Senator Dick Durbin

“Haiti and the Dominican Republic: One Island, Two Worlds” by Jared Diamond (excerpt from “Collapse”)

“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” by Jared Diamond (book)

“Jared Diamond on why societies collapse” (TED talk – video)

The Charcoal Project (website)

Growing Power (website)

“The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” by J.A. Ginsburg (Trackerblog)

“Google Earth boosts deforestation monitoring capabilities” by Rhett A. Butler (Mongabay.com)

On biomimicry and the answers right in front of us; Photosynthesis & personal power; Urban farming, tropical agroforestry and (eco)system modeling; A carbon negative idea with fertile perks; Population balance

Waiting for diplomats to resolve the global climate crisis may take so long, it won’t matter. So what do we do in the meantime?

At TrackerNews, we have highlighted all kinds of promising green energy ideas, from micro-wind and solar textiles to vast arrays of concentrated solar collectors and giant “sea snakes” harvesting wave energy.

We love them all and their heartening range of ingenuity and resourcefulness. But none of them – or even all of them taken together – can do much to move the global thermostat in the near term, especially without the political will and the investment that results to grow them to scale.

We began to wonder whether there were any ideas that could make a difference, that could actually help stabilize our feverish planet within a matter of years instead of decades. We found five – an encouraging start. Notably, all take their design cues from nature and offer multi-faceted benefits. Nature, notes Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Institute, relies on technologies that have been field tested for millions of years, the ultimate in iterative design. It works. Every time.

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1) TAKING A LEAF FROM NATURE

MIT chemistry professor Daniel Nocera says he can solve the world’s energy needs with a little bit water – and while he’s at it, make a dent in the water crisis. Although the most theoretical of the four ideas, Nocera’s breakthrough could lead to a quick and decisive global conversion to a hydrogen-based economy.

He began by calculating global energy needs past and future (best case and business-as-usual scenarios), comparing them with the most optimistic projections for energy generated from non-carbon sources (wind, solar, nuclear) and noting the physical limitations that prevent significant improvement in battery storage.  Disturbingly, even if we all did everything possible to minimize per capita energy consumption and the number of “capitas” was kept in check by educating poor women – the fastest way, according to Nocera, to reduce the birth rate, the future looks pretty gloomy.

In the hopes of rosying things up, he studied how plants make energy by splitting water molecules. For years researchers had focused on finding catalysts that could survive the process. Nocera noticed that nature didn’t bother, instead using catalysts that simply reassembled themselves. The system was “self-healing.” Then he came up with a way to do the same thing.

Within  “8.1254 years, ” Nocera envisions homes outfitted with solar panels tied into  inexpensive water-splitting systems (no pricey precious metals such as platinum required – common pvc pipe will do). The resulting hydrogen will be stored on site to take care of the home’s energy needs and recharge electric cars.  Each building will become its own power station, with no grid  – and no coal-powered central power stations – required. As a bonus, the catalyst is hardy enough to handle dirty water, so the system  can be set up almost anywhere. And if you reverse the process, reuniting hydrogen with oxygen, presto, clean water.

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2) AN (ECO)SYSTEMS APPROACH TO URBAN AGRICULTURE

Growing Power, agriculturist and MacArthur fellow Will Allen’s flagship farm in Milwaukee, has become the “go to” lab for urban agriculture. Even in sub-zero, snow-packed dead of winter Wisconsin, the suite of greenhouses spread over 3 acres a few blocks from the city’s largest public housing project produces harvest after bountiful harvest. It is literally a green oasis in the middle of a food desert.

As in nature, there is no waste, only recycling. And the more complex the system, the more robust and stable it becomes. Worms – millions of red wrigglers – convert mountains of municipal waste into castings of remarkable fertility. Fish poo feeds plants that filter water for the fish in closed loop aquaponics set-ups. Rainwater is captured and stored. Compost berms insulate and heat greenhouses. Over 150 crops – vegetables, fruit, poultry and fish – dovetail in dense exuberance, collectively generating from $5 to $30 per square foot, which is super-star status by traditional farm metrics.

Among the climate benefits:

• No petrochemical fertilizers required

• Much shorter “farm to fork” distribution chains, so a significantly reduced carbon footprint

• Growing plants that sequester carbon

Additionally, water is recycled wherever possible, so less is required overall. In regions facing climate change-related droughts (retreating glaciers, shifting rain patterns), this is a significant advantage.

With over half the world’s population now living in cities, urban farming has become a world-wide phenomenon. From small rooftop plots that also help curb the “urban heat island effect” (localized warming caused by the mix of heat absorbing asphalt and auto-exhaust-fueled particulate pollution), to sophisticated integrated greenhouse operations, urban farms offer the benefits of a distributed system: local, modular, adaptable, scalable. Since food is fresher when it reaches the consumer, it is also more nutritious.

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3) TROPICAL AGROFORESTRY

Willie Smits, a Dutch-born forestry scientist working in Indonesia, is, to a certain extent, doing the same thing as Will Allen, only on a rainforest scale.

For the last 30 years, he has focused much of his work in Borneo, which now has the dubious distinction of being the world’s 3rd highest emitter of greenhouse gases, right behind China and the United States. This is due almost entirely to the wholesale destruction of  its rainforests to make way for palm oil plantations. Deforestation has also dealt at crushing blow to the island’s biodiversity, turning great swaths of land into superficially green monoculture bio-deserts. The loss of coastal forests has also led to inland droughts. Trees that transpired massive amounts of water vapor into the air are gone, so oceans winds blow dry and hot.

The scourge of palm oil plantations is now spreading to Africa, where there are plans for a one million hectare (~ 3,800 square mile) operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Smits’ solution? Trade in the oil palm for the polyculture-loving, biodiversity-friendly, marginal land-suited, local economy-boosting, altogether superior sugar palm. He has developed a method to process the notoriously fast-fermenting sap (a.k.a. “juice”) before it begins go alcoholic. The juice, which can be turned either into sugar or ethanol, is only one of series of forest-based products, ranging from food to furniture. The scheme, however, can only succeed with local support to assure a vested interest in protecting the land. It is as much about preserving the stability of human cultures and local economies as it is restoring forests to thriving productivity.

So far, Smith has tested his ideas at two sites, one in Borneo and the other in nearby North Sulawesi. Over the last decade, millions of trees have been planted, thousands of jobs created, local micro-climates stabilized, hillsides stabilized, river health improved, wildlife populations restored and tons upon tons of carbon sequestered. The system is scalable, replicable and could just save the “lungs of the planet.”

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4) GOING (CARBON) NEGATIVE: MAYA-MIMICKING SOIL

If someone were to tell you that there was a way to sequester carbon while improving soil fertility, would you bite?

Biochar, charcoal produced in a low oxygen burn, was first used by Amazonians at least 1,500 years ago as a soil amendment (called terra preta or black earth). Its porous structure attracts microbial colonization, which  attracts other soil life forms, which improves the recycling of nutrients. Little did the Amazonians realize, but biochar is also very good at sequestering atmospheric carbon and nitrous oxide (which molecule for molecule, packs roughly 300 times the greenhouse gas punch).

Tim Flannery (“The Weathermakers“) thinks biochar may be “the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future,” while James Lovelock (“The Revenge of Gaia“) suspects it may be our only chance.

It is not, however, without controversy, with some wondering how burning biomass could possibly help the environment. Proponents point out that it also improves soil moisture retention, so crops don’t require as much water – a big plus from regions hit with climate-driven drought – while reducing the need for petrochemical fertilizers.

If entrepreneurs such as Jason Aramburu are right, not only could biochar dramatically improve crop yields in developing world, its production could generate enough energy to power a village. Scaled up globally, it could bring us back from the brink of climate catastrophe. “If we can get two billion tons of CO2, two gigatons out, in year,” says Araburu, “we could roll back emissions to pre-1982 levels in just 10 years.”

Araburu uses plant waste to make biochar – the same material MIT’s Amy Smith and her D-Lab students use to create a clean burning charcoal alternative to cheap cooking oil (ironically, palm oil). Did they reach essentially the same answer for two completely different problems? Very possibly. In which case this virtuous circle just gets better and better.

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5) POPULATION BALANCE

When a population of anything – bacteria, bugs or bunnies – grows beyond its supplies of food, water or shelter, or pollutes its environment to the point it becomes poisonous, there will be die-offs. The species may survive. Or not. This is Nature’s ultimate feedback loop and there is no negotiation.

In 1900, the global human population was 1.65 billion. In 2000, it was just over 6 billion. In another 40 years, the U.N. estimates it will be over 9 billion. And if something isn’t done fast to slow or reverse climate change, at least 250 million of them are expected to be “climate refugees.”  These will be people whose island homes or coastal cities have been submerged by rising seas. Fresh water supplies will have been fatally fouled. Others will have fled drought-scarred lands left dry and desolate by the retreat of glaciers. Still others will find their homelands flooded by ever more frequent and fierce typhoons, hurricanes and tornadoes.

As a species, we are running out of everything: food, water, shelter, clean air and especially time. But we can buy at least a little time if population growth can slowed.

Daniel Nocera is right: Investing in the education of poor women (along with providing ready access to contraceptives) is a critical part of addressing the energy crisis and, by extension, climate change. Women who attend school have fewer children because they are in a better position to make decisions about their families and their futures. According to WHO, there are 51 million unplanned children born in the developing world each year. That’s 1/6 of the population of the United States. Each year.

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NATURE BATS LAST

Each one of five ideas offers the extra bonus of multiple bottom lines: Save the climate and provide energy / clean water / food / jobs / habitat restoration / education. We can either learn from nature and biomimic our way to a more promising future, or defy it and suffer.

The really good news: We don’t have to wait for politicians. We can start to make a difference right now.

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RELATED READING / LISTENING / VIEWING

• “Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action” (TED talk – video)

• Biomimicry: Nature as Model, Measure and Mentor (Benyus’ website)

• “Chemistry and Personalized Solar Power” (NPR “Science Friday” interview with Daniel Nocera- audio)

• “The Farm Next Door: Urban Agriculture, Biomimicry, Aquaponics, Why Worms are Priceless & How Will Allen Aims to Fix the World” (TrackerBlog post)

• Tapergy: Willie Smits’ business to commercialize the sugar palm and related rainforest products (website)

• “Google Earth Hero: BOS, Borneo rain forest – Willie Smits” (video)

• “The Carbon NEGATIVE Option: Why Tim Flannery & James Lovelock Love Biochar” (TrackerBlog post)

• re:char – Jason Aramburu’s biochar business (website)

• “The Way Forward: Researching the Environment and Migration Nexus” (report by the Institute for Environment and Human Security, United Nations University – pdf)

It was a wonderful little bubble while it lasted. Getting up before dawn. Dressing in easy-to-peel layers for whatever the day might bring. Walking over to Boynton-McKay, a diner of rare perfection, where the wi-fi was as reliably good as the pancakes (a boon in connectivity-challenged Camden…) Ascending the stairs and more stairs of the town’s famous 19th century Opera House. A few minutes to mingle-navigate among tables of nibble-food before settling down for a morning of things worth thinking about.

But first, a little music. Logan Richardson’s soulful, playful, questioning sax riffs on “America the Beautiful” one day. Zoe Keating’s clear, deeply layered, architecturally precise, transcending cello pieces another. How lovely to start each day by not thinking. Just being. In the moment. Together. Brilliant.

And then it was off and running, from economics to education, urban decay to urban agriculture, environmental catastrophe to conservation hope, design theory to food design, cardboard robots to paper diagnostics, communications to comics, art to dance to music. To, to, to…

But as the last note of the Mark O’Connor-anchored jam session finale faded into festive applause and we trundled off in buses through the rainy dark to a cavernous transportation museum for one last party, the bubble had begun to weaken and thin. Faces, now familiar, circled by against an improbable backdrop of vintage automobiles, sci-fi bicycles and disconcertingly disembodied airplane parts.  A few final conversations and business cards. Some hugs and toasts. Promises to keep in touch, follow up, finish that thought. We stayed up until we couldn’t. By morning, the bubble was lost in the dazzling clarity of a New England fall day. One by one we left the the small town – Maine’s answer to Brigadoon – journeying back to the chaotic urgency of our daily lives. With each mile down the highway to Boston, and each minute in the sky back to Chicago, I could feel experiences recasting into memories, ready for sorting and analysis.

TAKE-AWAYS

Throughout the conference, Michelle Riggen-Ransom, Rachel Barenblat, and Ethan Zuckerman were absolutely brilliant live-blogging the talks and I recommend reading their posts, along with Kristen Taylor’s, on the PopTech blog to get a more detailed view of goings on.

Among the overarching themes: the serendipity of the amateur and the common sense of a cross-disciplinary approach. In short, the easiest way to see outside the box is to be outside the box.

Take, for example, the tale of the $12 computer (can be haggled down to $10). PopTech 2009 fellow Derek Lomas, who was working in India on”ethnographic design research on uses of mobile phones in urban and rural contexts,” found just such a miracle browsing a crowded electronics marketplace. It’s bare bones – hooks up to a television for a screen and runs on the 8-bit chip that powered 1980s-era Apple II computers and Nintendo game systems. So “vintage” is the tech, patents have run out, making it, for all intents and purpose, open source. Funded by a $180,000 MacArthur grant, Lomas and his collaborators the Playpower Foundation are developing software that combines educational aims with game-playing appeal. “It occurred to me that if this platform had just a few decent games, and one good typing game, it could be economically transformative,” notes Lomas, “because touch-typing can make a difference between earning a dollar a day or a dollar an hour.” Why invent an answer from scratch when you can assemble one cheaper? Innovation through shopping…

______________________________

Another theme: The most effective way to to trigger change is to provide a better alternative to the status quo.

For preventive medicine pioneer Dean Ornish, the shift from the “fear of dying to the joy of living is the key to the healthier future. For materials scientist Neri Oxman, it is moving from a Miesian reality where each building material has a specific function (steel for support, glass for light) to one inspired by Nature, where a single material yields a range of benefits (e.g., the structure of an egg shell evolved to provide strength as well as gas permeability). For clinical psychologist, Naif  Al-Mutawa, it is tackling Muslim stereotypes through the compelling comic book stories of Muslim superhero kids (“The 99″). Better is better.

MIT architect Sheila Kennedy, who has helped spearhead PopTech’s portable lighting project, points out the importance of opening up a space to new ways of thinking.  FLAP – Flexible Light & Power – is a Timbuk2 messenger bag outfitted with small solar array, battery and LED. A removable panel lined with reflective material amplifies the light from a tiny bulb cleverly tucked into a strap. AfriGadget’s Erik Hersman recently took some prototypes to Africa for field testing. But no matter whether a bag design turns out to be a viable answer or not, the thinking has shifted: Solar is not just for roofs and calculators any more. Now you can literally wear power on your sleeve.

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photo: Growing Power

Which segues into a third theme: Just add sunshine. Three ideas presented at the conference that are either dependent upon or inspired by photosynthesis have the potential to help significantly move the dial on climate change.

• Will Allen is a teacher and an inspiration for the potential of urban agriculture. His suite of Growing Power farms in Milwaukee and Chicago are designed as a series of nested ecosystems. Vermicomposting – turning garbage into wildly fertile worm castings – is the lynchpin. You start by creating soil so rich, it doesn’t require petro-based chemical additives.  From aquaponics set ups to raise fish by the thousands to a biodigester for converting food waste into energy, everything that can be harvested or recycled is. It is cleaner, healthier, oil-independent food system, with local “farm to fork” distribution networks designed to turn urban “food deserts” green.

• Willie Smits has plans for a similar polyculture fix, only rainforest-size. Trained in forestry, Smits career took a turn when he came across a sick orangutan in a Borneo market. Saving orangutans meant saving habitat, an increasingly difficult task when easy profits for palm oil led to wholesale conversion of ancient forests into modern superficially-efficient monocultures. Beyond the staggering loss of biodiversity, forest clearing fires, especially in peat-land forests, have led to “CO2 volcanoes,” spewing vast amounts of sequestered greenhouse gases skyward. Smits’ fix centers around the sugar palm, a short tree common in second-growth forest, which thrives only when grown as part of a polyculture and has a talent both for sequestering carbon (deep roots) and gushing a liquid that can be turned into sugar or ethanol. Smits has come up with a way to process the quick-to-ferment “juice” efficiently off-site. With the “juice” as the economic anchor, a suite of other forest products can also be sustainably harvested. Recently Smits set up a company, Tapergy, to implement his ideas. Notably, both Smits and Allen focus on jobs. Commodity monocultures destroy jobs and communities. Urban agriculture and tropical agroforestry create them.

• Chemist Daniel Nocera, by contrast, doesn’t want to raise plants but mimic them to generate vast amounts of energy. His epiphany: Plants routinely rebuild the mechanisms for splitting water in their leafy “fuel cells.” Scientists’ decades-long quest to find stable catalysts was not only futile but utterly misguided. Instead, his lab developed a resilient catalyst that could rebuild itself, making it possible to create both a better, cheaper fuel cell and process dirty water into drinkable water.

NEXT…

Perhaps the most exciting announcement at the conference was about a new fellows program for scientists, which takes us back to cross-disciplinary common sense. As the speaker list already demonstrates, science is an essential part of creating change for the greater good.

The further promote and support collaborations, some suggestions:

1) Develop a session or a workshop focused on tech transfer, focusing on both the legal and marketing angles.

2) Add data visualizations to the program and on the website showing connections between speakers. With such a multi-disciplinary list, connections transcend program groupings.  For example, Smits could just as logically been grouped with Michael Pollan and Will Allen.

3) Open the PopTech Creative Reuse Workshop at 8 a.m., one hour before the conference. Put out coffee as bait for early risers. I completely missed the workshop. The daily speaker sessions tended to go long, so there wasn’t much time to scoot over afterward. During breaks, the tendency was to mingle, network and nosh on site. Restaurants chosen for lunches were all located in the opposite direction.

4) Develop an online book store search-able by title, author and subject.

Now to wait for the videos to post, just in time for the long winter cozy season…

Blame it on the birds. And the elephants, lions, biochar, Indonesian agroforestry, dirt batteries, mechanical caterpillar waves, global maps, messenger bag-cum-lighting systems, a cyber-dance experience and one very lovely essay about migration. But not too far into the first day of PopTech, the conference’s “Reimagining America” theme disappeared. Which was fine. It seemed too limited for a confab about Big Thoughts, even here in a small, charming  American town (that could use a little reimagining itself – connectivity way, way too spotty). In any case, you can’t really reimagine, or even imagine, America without including the rest the world in the equation.

And nobody brought that point home with more heart-wrenching eloquence than Chris Jordan with his slide show of photographs of dead albatross on Midway Island, killed by a diet of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Photograph after photographs of birds, heads twisted by pain, guts split by a bounty of all too familiar bottle caps – perky shades of reds and blues favored by marketers – had the audience in shock and *this* audience in tears. This wasn’t an isolated occasional bird tragedy, but the picture of a extinction-in-progress. And because it took so darn long for anyone to discover the Garbage Patch, a ghostly-insidious man-made chemically-enhanced primordial soup the size of at least a couple of Texas’s (Texi?), it is far too late to do much about it – at least for the albatross (“Midway Journey” project blog – notes & videos).

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Save the microbes! Save the plankton! Save the food chain!  Who knows? We might just save ourselves, too.

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The day was filled with jolts of Overwhelming Problems paired with Glimmers of Hope.

John Fetterman, the myth-come-to-life mayor of Braddock, PA, a bankrupt rust-belt town that had been all but written off. A strikingly tall bald figure, with dates tattooed on his massive arms to remember the victims of violent crimes (thankfully, no new tattoos in over a year), Fetterman’s unvarnished recitation of all that had gone wrong coupled with some very basic ideas of what can be done had the crowd on a can-do upswing. Renovate those $5,000 homes (average price – since the recession, they’ve lost value). Add artists. LOTS of artists. Plant urban gardens. Hold lots of family-friendly it-takes-a-village-to-make-a-village. Clear debris and make a park. Then came news of a major hospital closing, which will not only take jobs from the area, but leave the population – mostly poor and minority – in a health-care desert. It is hard to make money taking care of poor people. So much for the greater public good or, for that matter, public health.

I began to wonder whether some of the health solutions being tested in the developing world -  many driven by cell phone tech – wouldn’t be appropriate here, too? (e.g., PopTech Fellow Josh Nesbit’s FrontlineSMS: Medic & Hope Phones).

Indeed, one of the conference’s most intriguing themes to emerge so far is this concept of two-way innovation: developed to developing world and vice-versa. (Note to makers of One Laptop Per Child: I really really REALLY want one of those computer screens designed for use in full sun…)

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On the Glimmers of Hope front, the PopTech Fellows were batting it out of the park. From Jason Aramburu‘s efforts to commercialize biochar, a carbon negative solution that also improves soil fertility, to Eben Bayer’s nifty mushroom-mediated compostable alternative to landfill-choaking styrofoam, Aviva Presser Aiden and Hugo van Vurveen’s “dirt batteries” and Emily Pilloton’s no-nonsense determination to enlist an army of young designers to come up with Better Answers, there was a sense that it’s still not too late. We can, just maybe, turn this thing around and not go down the climate change tubes.

FLAP – Flexible Light and Power – a prototype of a portable lighting system stitched into a Timbuktu messenger bag – also caught the crowd’s imagination. Designed by MIT’s Sheila Kennedy, it’s a simple idea that could radically change the way we think about solar deployment, opening up the space to all kinds of new ideas. No longer would solar be consigned to rooftop panels or a strip on a pocket calculator. It can almost literally be woven into the fabric of our lives, turning us into portable “plants,” photosynthesizing as we go about our daily business. (More from Erik Hersman on field-testing the design in Africa.)

Indonesia-based Willie Smits also has big plans for photosynthesis, with a scheme that would not only reforest the world’s rain forests, but generate jobs and an array of crops, supply power to poor villages, restore biodiversity and wildlife habitat and dramatically reduce demand for foreign oil. Smits “Tapergy” plans is an integrated system that works with Nature to increase the productivity of land while capping CO2 “volcanos” that result when millions of acres of land, particularly peat-lands, are cleared from monoculture oil palm plantations. (read more about Smits work in “Trees for Trees” post – page down to section on “You Had Me at Organgutan” – includes videos)

There was much more to Day 1. But Day 2 is about to begin. So, connectivity willing, follow on twitter: #poptech / @trackernews.

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.

• 

  "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.