On Bighorn Sheep in the Catalinas and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction

The ongoing effort to reintroduce bighorn sheep to the Catalina Mountains near Tucson, like other programs designed to increase populations of endangered animals, has caused its share of controversy. Though only 13 of the 31 bighorns released last November are known for certain to be alive, and three mountain lions have been killed because they preyed on the sheep, state wildlife officials want to transplant more captured bighorns in their quest to create a sizeable herd (see the August 27 Arizona Daily Star). Critics of the program cite loss of animal life and question whether wilderness regulations are being violated. One of these critics, Ben Pachano, spokesman for Friends of Wild Animals, suggests that environmentalists on the advisory committee should ask themselves “why they’re supporting a project backed by notorious anti-conservation groups like Safari Club International.” (Back in March the Star revealed the “dominant role of hunting-related interests in planning and financing the November bighorn reintroduction.”) Critics also question how bighorns can make a comeback in the Catalinas when they proved unable to thrive there in the 1990s. But whether or not Game and Fish officials carry out this second attempt at bighorn transplantation, the issues raised by critics – about the role of hunting, the extent of habitat degradation, and the transportation of wild animals – are part of a much larger story of the dramatic impact our species has had on the natural world.

Having just read Elizabeth Kolbert’s recent book The Sixth Extinction: an Unnatural History, I learned that over the course of the past half billion years, there have been five major mass extinctions of species, with causes that have ranged from the landward progression of plants to the asteroid strike that ended the age of dinosaurs. There was a time when people thought that the natural world was created as it is now and that it remained unchanged throughout history; Kolbert weaves together the discoveries made by historical geologists and evolutionary biologists to tell the sweeping story of mass extinctions and their consequences. She credits the French naturalist Cuvier with introducing the notion of extinction, the understanding that species are born and die just as individual organisms do. And in the case of the Sixth Extinction that is now underway, Kolbert shows us the many ways that human activity leads to loss of diversity on our planet.

Kolbert begins her story in Panama at the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center (EVACC), and she accompanies EVACC staff on expeditions to scoop up increasingly rare frogs that belong to disappearing species. Many of these endangered creatures are being killed off by a type of chytrid fungus, called Bd for short, which has either been spread around the world with shipments of African clawed frogs (once widely used for pregnancy tests) or with North American bullfrogs, which are exported for food. Both types of frogs are unharmed by Bd but are carriers, and in either case, Kolbert says that without human involvement it would have “been impossible for a frog carrying Bd to get from Africa to Australia or from North America to Europe. This sort of intercontinental reshuffling, which nowadays we find totally unremarkable, is probably unprecedented in the three-and-a-half-billion-year history of life.” Kolbert lists numerous other examples of this reshuffling, such as the introduction of cane toads to Australia and the threat they now pose to the endangered northern quoll. Sometimes, as in the case of the Catalina bighorns, individuals are transported to help save their species, but the book shows that the human inclination to “reshuffle” our planet’s flora and fauna has often had disastrous results.

When Kolbert investigates another of the human-caused drivers of species extinction -- climate change and subsequent habitat loss and degradation -- she introduces us to Ken Caldeira, the scientist who is credited with coining the term “ocean acidification.” One of the consequences of global warming and ocean acidification is that many coral reefs will stop growing and will no longer be there to support the huge diversity of ocean species that seek shelter in these reefs. [Here’s an interesting side note: the negative effects of too much carbon dioxide on coral was discovered by another scientist, Chris Langdon, who was studying the failed ocean “system” at Biosphere I here in Tucson.] Caldeira, Kolbert notes, cares a great deal about the effects of climate change and ocean acidification. One of his published scientific papers states that if emissions trends continue, in fifty years time “all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.”  But Caldeira is also a leading proponent of geoengineering, which he first investigated when he was hired by the Department of Energy to look into the feasibility of carbon-capture and deep sea injection as a solution to carbon dioxide emissions. Caldeira is fully aware of the destruction climate change will wreak on the oceans, and he supports the possible use of a technological fix like geoengineering. But if you agree with Clive Hamilton and others who see geoengineering as a form of hubristic technological tampering with natural systems, not a true solution, you will be aware that geoengineering's potential consequences could lead to even greater destruction of habitat and loss of diversity.

Human beings have an incomplete understanding of the natural world, and we understand technology better. So we are inclined to use our tools to solve problems. Whether those tools are as technocratic as geoengineering or as precise as captive breeding programs, they are all designed to end-run around the real solution to the problem, which would involve a change in human behavior. Kolbert takes a look at two captive breeding programs in her book, one for Hawaiian crows and another for the Sumatran rhino. She visits Dr. Terry Roth while Roth is giving a Sumatran rhino an ultrasound as part of a breeding program at the Cincinnati Zoo. Kolbert compares the near extirpation of Sumatran rhinos, which has been caused by habitat destruction and fragmentation, with the prehistoric extinction of other large mammals, megafauna like the mastodon and mammoth, because it seems increasingly likely these megafauna were hunted to extinction by human beings. This in turn leads her to talk about the Anthropocene  (a name that has been suggested for the current geological epoch because of the extensive impact of human activity), which is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution. Kolbert questions whether or not the starting point of the Anthropocene was “the introduction of modern technologies—turbines, railroads, chainsaws…” She says, “the megafauna extinction suggests otherwise… Though it might be nice to imagine there was once a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.”

Though I highly recommend Kolbert’s book, I think that her view of the Anthropocene is not helpful. Often humans are a destructive species, but it is human technology that has had the harshest and most irreversible effect on the natural world. This is largely because technology enables us to destroy not just plants and animals, but the places where they are best adapted to survive. Here in Arizona, we know that habitat is being destroyed to make way for roads and houses, and we see climate change take its toll as drought worsens. Solutions are not simple. Recently, however, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has begun to sterilize members of another threatened species, the desert tortoise, though such treatment seems counterintuitive. As it turns out, backyard breeding has led to the release of unwanted captive tortoises into the wild, and these released tortoises carry diseases that threaten native populations (see "Wildlife officials promote tortoise sterilization"). Mike Senn, assistant field supervisor of the Fish and Wildlife Service in Nevada, said “simply breeding more tortoises won’t save the species if not enough is done to improve and protect natural habitat and address threats in the wild.”  This is something the Arizona Game and Fish officials should consider as they decide on whether to relocate more bighorn sheep to the Catalinas, and it’s something to think about for anyone who recommends quick fixes for the problems we humans have caused.

Snowpiercer and Earthmasters: Complementary Views of Geoengineering

Korean director Bong Joon-ho's film Snowpiercer is an allegorical – and sometimes phantasmagorical – science fiction thriller about a geoengineering climate fix that goes terribly wrong. When the film opens, we see planes releasing something called CW7 into the upper atmosphere to help cool a warming planet. As a result Earth freezes catastrophically, killing everyone except the few hundred people who have bought or forced their way aboard the Snowpiercer train. This powerful, seemingly unstoppable, train circles the globe once a year, racing through the frozen wasteland, while preserving in miniature the oppressive social relations that existed before the Earth froze (in 2014). The first-class passengers in the front of the train – who live luxurious lives complete with spa, conservatory, nightclub, and sushi bar – contrast with the wretched masses at the rear of the train, who eat disgusting food and live in filthy, dark conditions. Wilford, the technocrat who created Snowpiercer, believes that these social divisions are necessary, and his point of view is echoed by his minion Mason when she says, "We must occupy our preordained position. I belong to the front; you belong to the tail. Keep your place." Though the film contains many violent scenes that earned it an R rating, it brings together environmental and social justice themes in surprising and effective ways.

There are lots of good reviews of Snowpiercer, and taken together they offer a more complete picture of this complex film than I have just given. Kate Aranoff at Waging Nonviolence emphasizes the class conflict aspects of the film and identifies Bong’s major point as follows: “Confronting the climate crisis means confronting capitalism and the inequality it produces.” Jason Mark at Earth Island Journal focuses on the film’s relationship to other eco-disaster and dystopic sci-fi fare, including the recent Elysium and The Hunger Games, and he calls Snowpiercer “the smartest bit of cli-fi I’ve come across since reading Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” And Ty Burr at The Boston Globe tells us that Snowpiercer almost wasn’t seen in the U.S. because the distributor didn’t like “…the film’s dark tone, often brutal violence, and general creative weirdness” and believed American audiences wouldn’t understand it. But Bong refused to change the film, and I’m glad he refused, not only because Snowpiercer successfully brings together issues of class and ecology, but also because it makes an effective indictment, however strange and fictional it may be, of geoengineering.

And if you think Snowpiercer is just a science fiction allegory, and there aren’t any threats to our planetary well-being like CW7, maybe you should take a look at Clive Hamilton’s 2013 book, Earthmasters:the Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering. Hamilton says, “For sheer audacity, no plan by humans exceeds the one now being hatched to take control of the Earth’s climate.” He defines geoengineering, which will supposedly allow humans to end-run around the daunting collective task of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, as “deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system designed to counter global warming or offset some of its effects.” One such form of intervention, solar radiation management, could include the possibility of spraying sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to mimic the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions. The fact that this action could hinder the repair of the hole in the ozone layer or might even have a negative impact on the Indian monsoons hasn’t stopped investors from backing the research. These investors include Bill Gates, whom Hamilton says is now “the world’s leading financial supporter of geoengineering research.” For example, Gates has invested in Intellectual Ventures, the company that did a feasibility study of the StratoShield, a hose designed to be held in the sky by balloons as it “delivers” sulfate aerosols. Though Hamilton is not opposed to appropriate uses of technology, he says  “…climate engineering is intuitively appealing to a powerful strand of Western technological thinking and conservative politicking that sees no ethical or other obstacle to total domination of the planet.”  

I first started reading Hamilton’s Earthmasters while I was taking Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics MOOC in which Geoengineering was a topic. Hamilton and Singer are fellow Australians and both are ethicists. In February of 2013, they debated the topic “Playing God with the Planet: the Ethics and Politics ofGeo-Engineering” at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne. Among other things, they disagreed on whether or not Bill Gates is really helping humanity with his geoengineering investments.

Singer said that we shouldn’t see Gates’ bankrolling of geoengineering research as sinister because he has already put a “vast amount of money into trying to reduce global disease, trying to help the poorest people in the world,” and the Gates Foundation has probably saved 5.8 million children's lives. We can therefore “assume [he] has some altruistic, benevolent impulses,” and wants to help prevent climate catastrophe. Hamilton didn’t deny that Bill Gates is a philanthropist but said he represents a “…technological world view, a Promethean world view” that doesn’t recognize that we have already made errors in our uses of technology and could easily make more. People with a technocratic, hubristic mindset think that “what we need is more technology, what we need is grander technological solutions, what we have to do is counter our previous technological mistakes with much more godlike technological contributions -- seizing control of the planetary system in total.” In Earthmasters Hamilton dubs those who are in favor of technological solutions like climate engineering Prometheans, after the god of technological mastery. But in their quest for mastery Prometheans can set into motion unstoppable and unfixable consequences. Hamilton calls those who err on the side of caution and oppose technological fixes Soterians, after the goddess of safety and deliverance from harm.

So is there really a discernible connection between the actions of technocrats as portrayed in Snowpiercer and those described in Earthmasters? After all, technocratic Wilford in Snowpiercer doesn’t cause the climate to go haywire, and he isn’t responsible for the film’s geoengineering catastrophe, though he is cruel and heartless in his attitude toward his fellow humans.  Gates, by contrast, has a philanthropic worldview, and he wants to invest in engineering the climate to help humanity. Is it a stretch to talk about the two men in the same breath? To me the Snowpiercer mogul and Microsoft billionaire are similar because, as each strives to protect human beings from themselves, he enters the realm of Promethean hubris. And in this realm where a few rich technocrats make all the decisions about how and when technology is used, when things go wrong – as is almost inevitable – it will be the poor and marginal who suffer the worst consequences.

On Neil deGrass Tyson and Sharknados

As I said earlier, I'm taking a MOOC called Climate Change in Four Dimensions, and this week one of the topics is Extreme Weather, Climate Change, and Communication. We've been talking about the importance of communicating information about climate change to everyone, and how scientists in particular need to be able to communicate their findings in a way that people find intelligible.

Recently National Review felt compelled to say bad things about Neil deGrass Tyson, the Cosmos star who has been a real science popularizer. For more about why they might have done this, see an article at the L.A. Times and this Fashion Sense by Alice comic.

Assessing Tucson's Modern Streetcar

Today I rode the new Tucson streetcar for the first time. I boarded downtown on Congress, rode up to University, and got off and on a couple of times before taking the bus back home. There were some problems with my fare -- I had a SunGo card with $4 on it, and I couldn’t really get a clear answer about whether or not the system would recognize that as a day pass or give me two transfers per fare or what -- but all in all, it was a pleasant smooth ride. The streetcar is an addition that makes Tucson seem more like a 21^st century city, but it’s important to remember the reasons why building it was controversial.

While glancing at the SunLink supplement in the Arizona Daily Star that appeared the weekend before the streetcar opened, I noticed more emphasis  on businesses and how they will be affected than on on transit users per se. The tone was very self-congratulatory, and under “We Did This… Together” it says, “As you ride our Modern Streetcar today, and admire the more than $1 billion in new development and thousands of new jobs within three blocks of the four-mile route, imagine where we can go next if we do it together.” Such descriptions of this $197 million project focus more on the community development/ business partnership aspects of the streetcar than on the larger transit system it is a part of. (One ad, as an example, encourages you to “show your Wildcat spirit all along the streetcar route with an exclusive UA debit card.”)

I was at the opening ceremony on the 25^th, and there were about 15 Bus Riders Union members there. Two of them held a banner that said, “No Bus Money for the Streetcar,” which is one of the BRU’s five main demands. The Daily Star quoted BRU member Jim Thomas: “We just want to make sure that the bus money stays with buses and they do the trolley on their own budget,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of public transportation in this town is done on buses.”

Another transit advocacy group, Transit Talks, passed out flyers that said, “If you like the streetcar, you’ll love the bus," and I hope riding the streetcar encourages people to start using the bus system. At the Transit Talks site, you can see a video of Jarrett Walker’s talk in Tucson, and you can also answer a poll that says, “We think bus riders = eco heroes. What do you think?” I think yes.

Jarrett Walker Comes to Tucson

Though the origins of the phrase “Think globally, act locally” are disputed,  and it has been used in so many different contexts it sometimes seems like a cliché, in regard to an issue like climate change, it’s very apropos. Climate change affects our whole world, but anything I can do about it has to start where I live right now.

So in the past two weeks, on the “think globally” side of things, I signed up for a MOOC called “Climate Change in Four Dimensions,” which is an eight-week course from UC San Diego.  The course views climate change from the point of view of natural sciences, technology, social sciences, and humanities -- the four dimensions cited in the title -- and so far lectures have addressed the history of climate change science and the scientific consensus on climate change.

On the “act locally” side of things, there’s actually a lot going on in Tucson right now, especially in relation to public transit. On Wednesday evening I attended the Bus Riders Union monthly meeting where I spent time with 25 dedicated and energetic supporters of the bus system here in Tucson. We talked about the fact that our so-called modern streetcar will begin running on July 25, and though Bus Riders Union members do plan to use the streetcar, they also want people to remember that the group has as one of its five goals: Keep bus dollars on the buses -- do not use bus funds for streetcar expenses. The streetcar, which has as its end points the University of Arizona campus and downtown Tucson, is an important adjunct to public transit in our city, but buses are the main people movers in the SunTran system.

Then on Friday evening I attended a presentation by Jarrett Walker, whose appearance in Tucson was sponsored by a range of groups from Bus Riders Union to the City of Tucson Department of Transportation. Walker  is a consultant on transit network design and policy and is also a blogger whose take on the event can be found at http://www.humantransit.org/2014/07/tucson-a-frequent-network-map.html. Walker rarely mentioned green aspects of using transit but focused on the factors that encourage people to ride buses and trains. At the beginning of the talk, he said that everything is changing and there is no status quo any more. He went on to talk about the VMT inflection point and the changing role of cars here in the U.S. (VMT is jargon for vehicular miles traveled, a number which rose steadily between the end of World War II and the mid-2000s and then leveled off -- see “The Case forModerate Growth in Vehicle Miles of Travel: a Critical Juncture in U.S. TravelBehavior Trends.”) 

Walker also said that “the market wants transit-friendly places.” Many people, especially young people, want to live in places where they don’t need cars. They are concerned about the environment, and they want diverse and affordable urban neighborhoods, the type of neighborhoods transit facilitates. Walker also cautioned against binary thinking – for example, it’s wrong to think that some people are “choice riders” and some people  are “captive riders” or that some people want only to ride trains and others buses. He showed us a map of the small but functional high-speed grid here in Tucson where people can travel without having to wait for more than fifteen minutes. He reminded us that some people will choose to live in areas well-served by transit, including low-income people. But low-income people's choices are important. In fact people in the Bus Riders Union who chose a transit-centered lifestyle are pioneers. Hopefully, more people will soon follow their lead.

An Inconvenient Truth (for Some): Vegetarianism Cuts Your Carbon Footprint

Today a friend forwarded me a link from the Huffington Post: "Vegetarianism Cuts Your Dietary Carbon Footprint A Ridiculous Amount, Study Finds." According to a new report published in the journal Climatic Change, meat-eaters' dietary greenhouse gas emissions are twice as high as vegans'. "Reducing the intake of meat and other animal-based products can make a valuable contribution to climate change mitigation," the report concluded.

We vegans and vegetarians have actually known this for a long time. In 1990 I took a course called "Changing Global Climates." Though at that time there wasn't such a consensus among climate scientists that human activity was causing global warming (some said it was an artifact of taking temperatures in "urban heat islands"), I wrote a paper about how a vegetarian or vegan diet will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and found ample evidence to prove that point. What was true then is still true today. So why aren't more people vegans?

I don't think you have to look any further than the comments section that follows the Huffington Post article for the answer to that question. On commenter says, "The day I go vegan is the day the sun explodes."  Another says, "Guess that means I'll find some other way to balance out my personal carbon footprint cos there is no way I would ever, ever give up great big slabs of lovely grilled beef." Still another nastier commentator says, "Should just eat vegetarians..." There are also the people I call "vegetarian/vegan deniers," who tell us how long they were vegetarians/vegans and how awful it was and how much better they feel now that they eat meat -- "I am mentally sharper," says one.

I have been a vegetarian/vegan since 1986 for environmental and animal rights reasons. Just FYI, I feel fine. And though I have occasionally used milk products over that time, mostly I've been vegan, which is the way I eat now. You can find the recipe for this Beans and Greens dish here. You're welcome.

Waiting for the 2014 Monsoon Rains

In a few days the summer solstice will be here, and Tucson will be at its hottest and driest. Though we had a few drops of rain the other day, the monsoon rains are nowhere in sight. The birds and animals around me all seem, like me, to be waiting for the rains. And these times of long dry heat may be getting worse in the Desert Southwest (as I noted in my previous blog post) due to climate change.

Desert cottontails, desert spiny lizard, and antelope squirrel
 (click on image to see a larger version)

And as if the dry heat isn't bad enough right now, we in the Southwest are increasingly vulnerable because of our limited water resources. Last Sunday the front page of the Arizona Daily Star featured the story “Tucson is warned of water shortage.” According to Star reporter Tony Davis, the state agency that operates the Central Arizona Project has, for the first time, warned that water shortages could affect Tucson and Phoenix in as little as five years. Though shortages will probably not come that soon, we are still dealing with a combination of drought, growing demand for water, and declining water levels in Lake Mead. Between now and 2026 the likelihood of CAP shortages is 17-29% in a given year. The outcome depends on weather, especially the “impacts of climate change.”

Though Tucsonans have been cutting back on water use (total use sank to 1989 levels last year even though the city has continued to grow), these shortages have been brought about partly by the so-called mega-drought, which is now in its 15th year. Drought been a major factor in reducing Lake Mead from 91% full in 2000 to 45% full today, though there is also a “structural deficit” that existed before the drought started. In other words, in a typical year more water is taken out of Lake Mead than is returned to it. Brad Udall, whose father Arizona Rep. Morris Udall helped extend CAP to Tucson, calls the river’s situation “a ticking time bomb.” He said that, because of continued overuse of water in the West and drought worsened by climate change “there is a cancer on our water-management systems now. It might be slow-growing or fast-growing, but we can’t ignore it and we need to deal with it.” Doug Kennedy, director of the University of Colorado’s Western water policy program says, “Demand on the river caught up with supply around 2000. No one noticed, but the drought also started right there, and (Lake Mead) started dropping like a rock.”

Also on June 15 the Palm Springs, California, paper The Desert Sun featured the third article in its series Scorched Earth: How Climate Change is Altering the Deserts of the Southwest. In this piece called “Vanishing water: An already strained water supply, threatened by climate change," reporter Ian James notes that Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in the U.S. is dropping one foot each week. Though droughts and even mega-droughts have long been part of the cycle of the Colorado, those fluctuations are now occurring alongside global warming, which puts new pressures on our inadequate water supply. James says scientists aren't sure to what degree climate change is influencing the natural cycle of droughts in the West, but they do know that "hotter temperatures across the West have led to less mountain snowpack and earlier melting of snow in the spring. More of the snow and rain that does fall is evaporating due to warmer temperatures, and that diminishes the flows of water into the Colorado River..." The article includes a chart called "Water supply and water use in the Colorado River Basin," which shows that water use began to exceed water supply during the past decade. There is also a video by Richard Lui and Marilyn Chung ("As Lake Mead declines, climate change poses risks") in which you can see Lake Mead’s earlier water level marked by a white mineral ring and can easily see how much lower the lake's level is compared to 14 years ago. John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority says about Lake Mead "That's the bank account for 25 million people," and he says it can hold two full years of the Colorado's flow and now holds only one year's worth.

What will happen to our water supply depends in part on what will happen to our climate, and as is the case with the starting date of the monsoon rains, it's very hard to predict...

Climate Change Denial vs. Climate Change Reality

Yesterday I had a chance to talk with writer Christina Birchfield, who is a fellow National Writers Union member and a blogger at the Green Builder magazine website. Christina has written a number of posts about global warming, the most recent of which is "Changing Climate Deniers' Minds?”  In that post, she reviews Pew Research data and notes that Republicans and those Independents who "lean Republican" are much more likely to be global warming skeptics – this seems to be related to the fact that there has been a real downturn in the number of Republicans (and Republican-leaning Independents) who place a high priority on the environment compared to 20 years ago. Christina also referred to an article in Bloomberg View, which asserts, based on Gallup Poll data, that “Americans' views on climate change increasingly have more to do with politics than science.” “When I studied at the University of Chicago, one of the political science truths was that once people had formed an opinion it was unlikely to change,” Christina notes in the post. “They would distrust or disbelief the messenger who delivers facts that refuted their opinions.”  

Despite the existence of climate change deniers, Christina remains optimistic. Both in her blog and in our conversation, Christina focused on the importance of renewable sources of energy, particularly solar energy. She mentioned the Idaho-based Solar Roadways start-up (which she blogged about in an earlier post http://www.greenbuildermedia.com/news/solar-roadways-smart/intelligent-infrastructure) as having potential to make a difference. The Solar Roadways people want to pave driveways, roads and parking lots with hexagonal solar-cell paving. Christina  noted that the indiegogo campaign for Solar Roadways met and exceeded its fundraising goal and said that as of June 4 more than 44,000 people contributed nearly $2 million, which she found heartening.

But in spite of occasional good news, it's hard not to feel real concern about climate change. On the front page of today’s Daily Star there was an Associated Press story called “Global warming hits SW states hardest, as summer temps soar.” The AP analyzed federal temperature records and found that the average Arizona summer is now 2.4 degrees warmer than it was in 1984. This is the fourth fastest summertime increase in the contiguous 48 states, and the article goes on to say that Tucson’s average annual temperature rose 1.1 degrees in the past thirty years. Apparently, climate scientists used 1984 as a starting point for this analysis because it had an average temperature, and it was not “a cherry-picked year to skew a trend either way.” Tucson is a hot place, it’s getting hotter, and though climate change doesn’t always manifest itself in terms of warming trends, it’s certainly doing so here. This afternoon I went out and walked around the nearby desert for a few minutes and saw that even cacti are having a hard time of it.

Heat-stressed prickly pear cactus

What's Wrong with the Keystone XL Pipeline?

Today President Obama made a significant move toward fighting climate change by unveiling a plan aimed at cutting 30% of power plant emissions of CO2 by 2030 (though some states that rely most heavily on coal will not have to cut their emissions by a full 30%). This is heartening progress, and I fervently hope Obama’s next step will  be to say no to the Keystone XL pipeline, a project with the potential to contribute massively to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions.

Last Friday evening, I attended a potluck fundraiser for Occupy Tucson, and Vince Pawlowski from Tucson Climate Action Network was the guest speaker. His topic was the Keystone XL Pipeline. Vince started out by talking about why the “oil” that is being violently wrenched from the Alberta Tar Sands is so problematic. (For some visual proof of just how violent that process is, see “Photographer Captures Tar Sands 'Destruction' from Above.") Vince said that in the first half of the 20th century, when oil literally gushed from the ground here in the U.S., it cost about one barrel of oil to take 100 barrels of oil out of the ground. But in the Tar Sands, one barrel of oil gets you roughly 3-5 barrels. That’s poor rate of return, by anyone’s standards, but the Tar Sands project is viable because of cheap frack gas from Alberta, which is used to heat the bitumen, the crude product that comes out of the earth.

This bitumen is corrosive, toxic, and contains compounds that are known carcinogens and mutagens. Two scientists from Environment Canada – Jane Kirk and Derek Muir – have confirmed that there's a “bull’s-eye” of mercury around the Tar Sands project that covers 19,000 square kilometers. And as if that's not already a toxic nightmare, there are a variety of toxic compounds like benzene, toluene, and  xylenes  in the diluted bitumen. These toxic substances pollute the air, water, and soil of nearby Canadians – most of whom are from the Alberta First Nation (the people who just hosted Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu at a weekend conference on treaty rights and the environment, at which he called the production of bitumen “filth.”)

This huge expenditure of fossil fuels – not to mention the number of toxics involved – is supposedly justified because of the jobs that will be created and the American industry the project will support. Yet, as Cornell University predicted, little American steel has gone into production of the pipeline infrastructure, and only a few thousand part-time, temporary, and short-term jobs have been created. So who will really benefit from the pipeline? Vince said that Koch Industries holds a lease on 1.1 million acres in the tar sands area, the single largest foreign holding. According to the Washington Post their lease holdings could be closer to 2 million acres, and they have a huge stake in this largest civil engineering project in the world. It’s not hard to see that the Kochs benefit, but the rest of us – the whole biosphere – will suffer the consequences of human addiction to fossil fuels as this project helps heat our climate.

Vince has an engineering background, so I asked him what he thought of some of the geoengineering projects that have been proposed as a solution to global warming; what’s notable about them is that they will not require the Koch Brothers – or us – to change our ways. He said he was skeptical about geoengineering because of the fact that tampering with complex natural systems can have unpredictable results, as the people who propose the space mirrors and atmospheric aerosols should well know. But he said there’s one geoengineering solution that he does favor – planting more trees. In addition to what I plan to do to reduce the size of my carbon footprint, I support planting more trees is a sustainable form of carbon-offsetting.  Over the weekend I looked at some of the mesquite trees in my neighborhood, which are still flowering and also starting to make bean pods.

Edible bean pods of the mesquite tree

I know the solutions aren't so simple as planting trees and opposing Keystone, but for now those are two things I can do!

Climate Fiction and Climate Change

I just read a very erudite essay by Gregers Andersen called "Cli-fi: a Short Essay on its Worlds and its Importance." Andersen, who just received his Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen with a dissertation called "Climate Changed Existence and its Worlds. Global Warming in Fiction and Philosophy" says (though I'm simplifying his argument) that fiction about climate change prepares us for a world changed by global warming. He notes that, though the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes has given us a great deal of information in the reports it has been publishing for the past 25 years, nowhere in them "does one find characters forced to live in the future living conditions sketched." This is because reports are full of data, but "fiction typically depicts human beings in action..."

Not every piece of fiction that shows human beings in extreme climates is climate fiction, Andersen says, and he goes on to define cli-fi as fiction that "depicts or in some other way employs the motif of climate change generated by humanity's emissions of greenhouse gasses in their plot." These fictions have, he goes on to say, five basic and recurring themes: Social Breakdown in which individuals are shown battling over limited resources; Judgment in which Nature revolts and punishes humanity; Conspiracy in which climate change is part of a cover-up to promote private interests; Loss of Wilderness in which climate change is the end of nature; and Sphere in which the biosphere is destroyed but humans create their own artificial atmospheres. Interestingly, he describes fiction that applies Social Breakdown and Judgment themes to show a climate-modified human way of being in the world as "unheimlich" or uncanny. This usually refers to the experience of something familiar becoming something strange.

Recently I made my own small contribution to cli-fi, a short story called "The Relocation Specialist," which is in the current issue (#74) of DoorKnobs & BodyPaint. I suppose it best fits the Social Breakdown theme, as set out by Andersen. It's only a small (450-word) story, but having written it, I am especially interested in what Andersen says about cli-fi – fiction takes the data about what our future can and will hold and converts it into the actions and reactions of human beings. In this way, it helps prepare us for what our future will be like if we don't act now.