The Environment

[Goldengirl]

I don't want to be too leading.

 

Broadly speaking, I think it's common consensus that there's something wrong "out there" in the environment, whether one defines the environment as all-inclusive or nonhuman nature. Some say the problems come from "in here" (some say there's no such distinction between society and nature) and certainly at least some of them (e.g. pollution) do come as a result of human actions.

 

Moreover, we have a unique cross section of society, including natural scientists, social scientists, humanities experts, social justice advocates, lay people, etc. This brings a lot of ways of thoughts together from all over, ostensibly because we all like Spiderweb Software games.

 

What do you do about the environmental crises? Do you work on personal practices, such as recycling? Do you get dismayed and do nothing? Do you try to advocate to change minds? Do you do something else entirely?

 

I'm curious. And since we have so many different people here, I'd love to see your reasoning for what you do.

[Callie]

My main mode of transportation is a bicycle (even in the winter). I prefer my exercise, and a bicycle is much cheaper to operate than a car. I don't drink bottled water.* I recycle if a marked bin is conveniently located nearby. I never shower longer than eight minutes. I only keep the light on in the room I currently occupy. I avoid using printing paper, but will use the backsides if I'm allowed to.

 

I suppose I'm more environmentally friendly than most, but admittedly my reasoning is more a matter of personal finance. I do care about the environment, but only to the extent that it aids humanity.

 

*It really bothers me that some people exclusively drink bottled water. Bottled water in the U.S. is scarcely regulated, whereas tap water must be tested multiple times a day. Tap water doesn't fill natural bodies of water with plastic.

[Harehunter]

Goldengirl,

I do not mind discussing these issues , for I do so daily on Linked In.

[Dikiyoba]

*It really bothers me that some people exclusively drink bottled water. Bottled water in the U.S. is scarcely regulated, whereas tap water must be tested multiple times a day. Tap water doesn't fill natural bodies of water with plastic.

Well water is a potential issue, though. So are old pipes made of lead or something. Those are valid reasons to avoid tap water. Still, there are far better ways to get clean water than through bottled water, both in terms of sustainability and cost.

 

I do care about the environment, but only to the extent that it aids humanity.

Dikiyoba would argue that all of nature (except for things that are obviously bad, like an individual tiger that eats people or malaria) aids humanity. You never know where the next scientific/medical breakthrough might come from, or what will bring someone inspiration or peace of mind (plus tourist dollars!). And since you never know what might be useful, it's more cost-efficient to leave it in place rather than finding out years down the line that you need it and have to spend millions of dollars trying to restore it, or is often the case, spend millions of dollars try to restore it now so you don't end totally boned down the line.

[Student of Trinity]

There has been an environmental crisis for fifty years or so now; so if it's really a crisis, it's a slow one. I think that's really important to recognize, because there's almost nothing we can do to change the world quickly, because the world is really big. I think there are things we can do that will help slowly. Since they're slow, we need to get going on them, but an atmosphere of unrealistic urgency may make us waste effort on the pursuit of quick fixes that would better be put into long-term plans.

 

Materials science is making major advances these days. Soon things will all be made of pretty exotic materials. We've been smelting ore and baking ceramics for millennia, but soon the story of how a product was shaped and put together will be far shorter and simpler than the story of how the stuff that composes it was formed. In effect the working parts of our things will be molecules. This will surely offer the opportunity to just make things that cost enormously more energy to produce than ever before, and whose production produces more hazardous waste; but I'm hoping that expanding technology down to microscopic scales will also let us find new tricks and shortcuts for making things much more efficiently, with lower energetic costs and less harmful waste.

 

Everything is going to cost energy, and producing energy is not going to be easy. It's not just because oil companies are evil that the world is hooked on fossil fuels. Nothing else packs anywhere near the enormous energetic punch of combustion; it's just ridiculous how much energy gasoline delivers. If a car didn't have a gas tank, but instead drove along by sucking up a stream of fuel from the road as it rolled, that line of fuel would only have to have the thickness and width of a spaghettini. That's why the industrial revolution changed the world. It wasn't just some kind of social consciousness shift. It was that when humans learned to tap fossil fuel energy, that was like picking up a +100 sword.

 

Wind and sun and water power are all great, but they are horribly, horribly weak compared to combustion. It will probably take a century or so to harness enough renewable energy to let the whole planet's population live modern lives. We may end up covering much of the planet with artificial lakes from power dams, and wind farms, and solar panels. And I expect we'll have to make our peace with nuclear power as well. Fission sources are non-renewable, but fusion can work with some extremely abundant elements. The problem is that the easiest fusion reactions are not at all the wonderful kind of fusion. The beginner-level fusion reactions with tritium and ordinary hydrogen need exotic elements and they produce a lot of radiation, including neutrons that make the surroundings radioactive. Harnessing even these simple fusion reactions has been thirty years in the future for about sixty years now, but even if they finally do come online sometime in the next century, fusion power will still seem a lot like the fission-based nuclear industry we know today, until we can reach very much higher temperatures and pressures still, to attain the first low-neutron fusion reactions, with boron.

 

I think the total human footprint on the planet is going to remain enormous no matter what. We need too much energy. An angel with a fiery sword bars the way back to Eden: his name is entropy. I think we can achieve sustainability, however, over the next century or two. The world will survive that long; it might be a few degrees warmer on average, and have different climate patterns, but it won't be unlivable. And we should be able to preserve a few protected patches, for the reasons Dikiyoba describes.

 

Personally I try not to live extravagantly, but we fly several times a year. We live in Europe while most of our families live in North America, and I have a brother in Africa. I'd like my children to know their grandparents and their cousins. On the positive side, much of my research is about the ultimate limits of efficiency in power technology. It's very theoretical and fundamental, not something that is going to help at all, directly, in the foreseeable future. But it might someday turn out to be a link in a long chain that goes somewhere good.

[Dikiyoba]

There has been an environmental crisis for fifty years or so now; so if it's really a crisis, it's a slow one.

Do you enjoy being incredibly wrong or something?

 

List of environmental disasters

North American Dust Bowl

London Smog Disaster

Pollution-caused diseases in Japan

 

(Anyone have any good links specifically on pre-Industrial environmental disasters? Dikiyoba knows there are lots of them, but Dikiyoba's Googling powers are weak.)

[Goldengirl]

SoT, I think it's interesting that you focused in immediately on climate change and energy issues. Those are certainly parts of the environmental crisis, large parts even, but I was thinking about smaller and more easily identifiable crises. The extinction and endangerment of specific species is just as much an environmental crisis as the larger global ecological trends, the devastation of water sources through pollution, increasing desertification in places like the Sahara, all are pressing issues.

[Dintiradan]

(Anyone have any good links specifically on pre-Industrial environmental disasters? Dikiyoba knows there are lots of them, but Dikiyoba's Googling powers are weak.)

It's just a Wikipedia link, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Pre-industrial_history (the deforestation of Europe in the Middle Ages was what initially came to mind, but as it turns out it's a common phenomenon across cultures).

[Student of Trinity]

SoT, I think it's interesting that you focused in immediately on climate change and energy issues. Those are certainly parts of the environmental crisis, large parts even, but I was thinking about smaller and more easily identifiable crises. The extinction and endangerment of specific species is just as much an environmental crisis as the larger global ecological trends, the devastation of water sources through pollution, increasing desertification in places like the Sahara, all are pressing issues.

"The environment" makes me think of the planet as a whole. Things can certainly also go wrong locally, and smaller scale problems naturally have shorter time scales, both for going bad and for being fixed, and for the window within which they can be fixed. For local things, though, I only know my own immediate environment. In the places I personally know, nothing seems to be going especially wrong, above the background of general problems.

 

The general impression that the planet is going rapidly downhill has been a media staple for my entire life, which is now nearly fifty years. The end has always been nigh, but in fact it hasn't come. I've heard jawboning about how pressing the problems are for decades. My impression is that this energetic consciousness-raising has mainly been a way for people who don't have any more useful ideas than anyone else to let themselves feel as though they've done their bit, by spreading the word. In fact that's the easy part, and isn't worth much.

 

Serious efforts are something else. They do exist; for instance, the enormously expensive Energiewende underway for a decade in Germany. These interest me a lot. This season's episode of earnest public handwringing, not so much.

[keira]

The problem is that the vast majority of environmental damage is not caused by the average person, it's caused by industrial processes. I mean, it's nice and all that jimbo wants to use paper bags at the grocers, but that's nothing compared to the damage caused by industry.

 

Unfortunately, since profits are usually a bottom line both for a company and for individuals, industrial uses are going to continue to cause great harm for the forseeable future. jimbo is quite the environmental warrior until he finds out his Whatsitcalled is going to be an extra ten cents.

 

A great example of this is in copper mining. Back in the day you could just leave your slag wherever and it was okay. Then at some point the US government decided that that wasn't the best idea and said you had to actually clean up after your smelting processes (those hippie bastards!). This, coupled with other EPA regulations, has made it so that the standard now is to just ship the raw ore across the Pacific to China and smelt it there. even if you end up shipping copper ingots back to the US for production, it's still cheaper.

 

Unfortunately China apparently doesn't care much about pollution, so this process will continue for the forseeable future. Until the US and other countries enact legislation to forbid shipping raw ore across to China to smelt (which, on the off chance it somehow got past mining lobbyists, would probably just result in all domestic mining being shut down), this will continue. jimbo's wont support it because it'll raise the costs of things a negligible amount for him and god forbid we uh dont destroy the only place remotly hospitable for us to live.

Edited May 7, 2014 by sylae
just one of many examples

[Randomizer]

China would just import the raw ore from other countries that don't have the regulations. China has been pouring money into Africa in order to secure raw materials and gain allies.

 

Conditions are starting to improve because Chinese citizens are no longer tolerating the pollution and government corruption. Plus customers here and in Europe are complaining about health problems from cheaper Chinese imports. For instance Chinese drywall health hazards.

[Sudanna]

(Anyone have any good links specifically on pre-Industrial environmental disasters? Dikiyoba knows there are lots of them, but Dikiyoba's Googling powers are weak.)

 

I have a fantastic description of ancient Roman mining practices I find terribly compelling:

 

As her grip tightened' date=' so the very appearance of her provinces began to alter, as though giant fingers were gouging deep into the landscape. In the east great cities were ransacked for treasure - but in the west it was the earth. The result was mining on a scale not to be witnessed again until the Industrial Revolution. Nowhere was the devastation more spectacular than in Spain. Observer after observer bore stunned witness to what they saw. Even in far off Judaea, people 'had heard what the Romans had done in the country of Spain, for the winning of the silver and the gold which is there.'

 

The mines that Rome had annexed from Carthage more than a century previously had been handed over to the publicani, who had proceeded to exploit them with their customary gusto. A single network of tunnels might spread for more than a hundred square miles and provide upwards of forty thousand slaves with a living death. Over the pockmarked landscape there would invariably hang a pall of smog, belched out from the smelting furnaces through giant chimneys, and so heavy with chemicals that it burned the naked skin and turned it white. Birds would die if they flew through the fumes. As Roman power spread the gas clouds were never far behind.[/quote']

[Dikiyoba]

The general impression that the planet is going rapidly downhill has been a media staple for my entire life, which is now nearly fifty years. The end has always been nigh, but in fact it hasn't come. I've heard jawboning about how pressing the problems are for decades. My impression is that this energetic consciousness-raising has mainly been a way for people who don't have any more useful ideas than anyone else to let themselves feel as though they've done their bit, by spreading the word. In fact that's the easy part, and isn't worth much.

 

That's because there have been environmental crises throughout all of human history, but the Industrial Revolution made environmental crises bigger and closer together. The 1960s and 1970s are just the most recent change in attitudes toward it. We've been hearing about environmental crises for the past fifty years because there have been environmental crises for the past fifty years. Either we resolve them (the ozone hole is slowly shrinking, non-CO2 air pollution throughout North America and Europe is way down, USA rivers no longer catch fire) or we don't and they either drag on and on (endangered Pacific salmon stocks due to dams and other river mismanagement problems) or reoccur (loss of fertility of farmland, energy crises). Progress is being made, but there are always new problems cropping up. And for each new crisis, the quality of life for humans goes downhill. Maybe it's direct, like when chemicals get into our groundwater and make us sick, or it's indirect, like when American settlers extirpated the wolf only to discover that there are suddenly a ton of disease-spreading deer eating all the vegetation in sight. It'll take a massive change in cultural attitudes and norms to prevent the crises from happening in the first place, but working to stop them and repair the damage they've done is better than nothing.

 

---

 

Also, SoT, if you want me to stop being mean to you, don't send me a PM full of backhanded compliments. Actually respond to the polite and reasonable requests and objections people make. Because right now being mean is the only way to get any sort of response from you.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Kelandon]

Also, SoT, if you want me to stop being mean to you, don't send me a PM full of backhanded compliments. Actually respond to the polite and reasonable requests and objections people make. Because right now being mean is the only way to get any sort of response from you.

Needless to say, I'd like to remind you (and everyone) that being mean to anyone for any reason is discouraged here. As the CoC says, be friendly!

[Edgwyn]

Sylae, industry is caused by consumers (the average person).

 

To me, too much of the environmental debate has been fueled by politics and poor science. Unfortunately there would not have been much environmental progress without popular outcries. Too often, the enacted "solution" to a particular problem is ill thought out. That gave us "green" lamps containing relatively high concentrations of Hg far outweighing the drop in CO2 generation. It gives us wind farms that kill endangered species and solar farms thats useful life is shorter than their payback period. Where fission power generation could buy us some time, the political process in the US (driven by the supposedly greener of our two political parties) has prevented the design and construction of safer nuclear power plants and the completion of a high-level radioactive waste storage site that is orders of magnitude safer and less likely to cause environmental damage than our current practices.

 

As near as I can tell, nobody on either side of the climate change debate actually understands the earth's climate. I do think that we are closer than we were when I was a kid and the predictions were of the next ice age, but I don't think we are there yet. The earth's climate changes due to a bunch of natural processes that we do not fully understand and do not cause (like the 17,000 year global warming trend). Do I believe that it is likely that our production of CO2 is causing an increase in global temperatures over and above what occurs naturally, yes. I will be more convinced that we can quantify that difference once that is a model that actually fits observed facts for the past hundred years of our 17,000 year warming cycle. Should we reduce the amount of CO2 pollution we generate? Of course. Will completely eliminating all production of CO2 stop global warming? Probably not. Do we need to figure out how to survive on an earth that is going to be warmer and has higher sea levels in the next hundred years? Yes.

 

Going back a bit to the original post: I use a thermostat with a clock, reusable grocery bags, LED and CFL (I try and find less nasty ones) lamps, have upgraded the windows in my house and recycle paper, aluminum, glass and plastic (which is very debatable).

[Dikiyoba]

It gives us wind farms that kill endangered species

The first few generations of wind turbines do, but the modern ones don't, provided they are set up properly.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Swimmin' Salmon]

Plants have been polluting the atmosphere with corrosive gas for millennia now, but you don't see many people crying about it.

[Slawbug]

Sylae, industry is caused by consumers (the average person).

On some level this is true, but in practice, individual consumers cannot directly affect industry.

 

As near as I can tell, nobody on either side of the climate change debate actually understands the earth's climate... The earth's climate changes due to a bunch of natural processes that we do not fully understand and do not cause (like the 17,000 year global warming trend).

That's... not really true? At all? There aren't even two sides to this debate, as far as the scientific consensus goes.

[Lilith]

whoops, turns out we read that paper wrong and we're actually headed for a new lice age, when all the Earth's surface is covered in lice for thousands of years

 

the living will envy the dead

 

no but seriously considering how much energy consumption goes to transportation alone, whether of people or of goods, there's a lot more that can be done at the level of production or city planning than on the individual level

[Edgwyn]

On some level this is true, but in practice, individual consumers cannot directly affect industry.

 

 

That's... not really true? At all? There aren't even two sides to this debate, as far as the scientific consensus goes.

 

Scientific consensus does not equal understanding. There are many things where there is scientific consensus based on observed reality, not understanding of the mechanism that causes that reality. While in this debate I said it for climate science, I would also make the same statement if we were discussing quantum physics, evolutionary biology, astrophysics, etc.

 

A more concrete example is Dark Matter/Dark Energy which have been theorized without observation to explain the discrepancies in observations. Most scientists agree that it exists, but they have not observed it, nor do they currently understand it (at least from my biases sense as an engineer not a scientist).

 

There is scientific consensus (90 - 98% agreement) that global warming exists and that humans effect their environment. If you understand a process, you can build an accurate model of the process. Currently we do not have an accurate short term model of a long term process, much less an accurate model of the entire process.

[Slawbug]

It's true that the long-term climate of a planet depends on enormously complex factors. But that doesn't mean we can't isolate individual factors and come to a strong understanding of how those work within a narrowly defined environment.

 

It's also true the scientific consensus could be wrong. But that's a reason to say "there's strong evidence for this view, but there isn't proof." That's not a reason to say "nobody on either side of the debate actually understands the earth's climate" -- a phrase that implies we barely have any reason to favor one theory over another.

[Goldengirl]

The general impression that the planet is going rapidly downhill has been a media staple for my entire life, which is now nearly fifty years. The end has always been nigh, but in fact it hasn't come. I've heard jawboning about how pressing the problems are for decades. My impression is that this energetic consciousness-raising has mainly been a way for people who don't have any more useful ideas than anyone else to let themselves feel as though they've done their bit, by spreading the word. In fact that's the easy part, and isn't worth much.

 

This is an idea I really want to delve into. So much environmental eschatology states that the world, the environment, the ecology, the species on the endangered species list, the human race, etc. is doomed if we allow the status quo to continue unchallenged, but we can fix it by turning off our lights. I mentioned in the OP responses that included not just practices but also spreading ideas. My working thesis is that these efforts ultimately are meant to alleviate a profound modern societal guilt in terms of our relationship with the larger environment in which we live. However, while these micro-actions help wash our hands of complicity in environmental crises, but they can't wash away our ecological footprints.

 

Sylae, industry is caused by consumers (the average person).

 

I literally do not know how you can support this statement, especially since you haven't. Industry is caused by industrialists, the producers and not the consumers. They are responding to the consumers, sure, trying to undercut the other producers and thereby offer a quality product for cheaper, but ultimately they are the ones responsible for their actions. It's an incentive structure, but opportunities for collusion, tacit or explicit, may have prevented such industrialization. The Luddites seem the classic example here to show that the modern industrial society was not inevitable.

[Randomizer]

There are two ecological scales. On the macro side the world and it's inhabitants will survive. On the micro side, which is what modern environmentalists worry about, not every species that is currently here will be around in the future. Society guilt is trying to keep the current environment from changing so species don't have to move due to climate warming and/or cooling into different areas and endangered species don't get wiped out. This would occur eventually without man being present and changing things albeit on a different time scale.

 

I just mailed the book, Stupid Science, to a friend, but it quoted a study saying dinosaur extinction occurred because their flatulence was higher than current levels and the produced methane altered the atmosphere. But whatever the cause, that was a larger extinction event that any we are currently producing and we weren't around to cause it.

[Jerakeen]

... that was a larger extinction event that any we are currently producing...

Patience.

[Alorael at Large]

The Earth is currently undergoing a mass extinction event, judging by comparing current extinction rates with fossil records. How big? We can't know when we're in the middle of it. How bad is it? Oh, the Earth's ecology always bounces back from mass extinction. The question is how uncomfortable it will be for us.

 

—Alorael, whose actually not convinced that even large losses of megafauna will make much difference. Losing insects is bad news, though. And climate change is really uncomfortable whether or not species vanish.

[Dikiyoba]

—Alorael, whose actually not convinced that even large losses of megafauna will make much difference. Losing insects is bad news, though. And climate change is really uncomfortable whether or not species vanish.

I think the ecological importance of a species matters more than its size. While tragic, the loss of the giant panda or a gall aphid wouldn't change much. Lose the African savannah elephant or a bumblebee, and the ecological disturbance will be much greater.

 

Dikiyoba has been stressing the utilitarian value of the environment for humans, but really, ecosystems, species, and natural processes are worth preserving for their own sake. Nature is full of beauty, awe, drama, spectacle, subtle patterns, and unexpected encounters. The massive spread of a condor's wings, wolf packs warring over territory, clear air that allows you to see far and wide, earwig mothers tending their eggs, songbirds defending their territory through song, clear water in meandering streams, plants creating chemicals to defend themselves against herbivorous insects, colorful bacterial mats in geothermal pools, a hawk swooping down on a snake, barn swallows playing with an airborne feather, a lion's roar, the acceleration of a cheetah, the oddness of the aardvark, the strangeness of sloths. All these things will pass eventually, because all things on Earth do, but why would you want to end them prematurely?

[Slawbug]

[Questionably Legal]

Nature is full of beauty, awe, drama, spectacle, subtle patterns, and unexpected encounters. The massive spread of a condor's wings, wolf packs warring over territory, . . . the strangeness of sloths. All these things will pass eventually, because all things on Earth do, but why would you want to end them prematurely?

How about the musical whine of a mosquito's wings, the soft coo of defecating pigeons, or the lustrous gleam of a cockroach's exoskeleton? Don't discriminate against the apalling sort of animal.

[Lilith]

pigeons are pretty cool tbh. also tasty

[Dikiyoba]

How about the musical whine of a mosquito's wings, the soft coo of defecating pigeons, or the lustrous gleam of a cockroach's exoskeleton? Don't discriminate against the apalling sort of animal.

Do pigeons really coo when they poop? Anyway, yeah, all those animals are cool too. Male and female mosquitoes have different wing beat frequencies. This means that males can hear a nearby female despite being in a huge mating swarm of other male mosquitoes. The species we think of when we say "mosquito" or "cockroach" don't need appeals for protection, though, because they've benefited from humans and are quite difficult for humans to control. Though cockroaches and pigeons have non-pest species that either need protection or may need protection in the near future.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Lilith]

from a certain perspective bringing about the extinction of the passenger pigeon was one of our more impressive achievements as a species

[Dikiyoba]

Eh, the passenger pigeon's numbers made it more vulnerable, not less. Traveling and roosting in huge flocks made it easy to hunt and meant it needed huge areas of habitat to feed in. Plus apparently reproduction could only occur successfully in huge colonies, so once the numbers began to drop enough, the birds stopped nesting successfully and its fate was sealed despite thousands of individuals remaining. Many other species survive just fine with a few thousand individuals. The closely-related mourning dove is doing just fine despite 20 million of them being shot by humans every year.

 

Now the eradication of smallpox, that's an achievement. (Oh hey, rinderpest was eradicated too, apparently, and quite recently. You'd think there would have been more in the news about that. Is that disease that evolved in cattle and so had no role in any natural ecosystem, or was there some "wild" rinderpest that later came into contact with domestic bovines? The Wikipedia article makes it sound like the former.)

 

Dikiyoba.