Yesterday there was a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about researchers involved in some gee-whiz "de-extinction" experiments to clone long- (or not-so-long)-lost species. It mentioned, in breathless terms, that "the possibility of billions of passenger pigeons once again clouding city skies or the sound of thunder from the hooves of woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic's tundra may be speculation no more."
Gosh — I can hardly wait for the spectacle of "woolly mammoths trampling the Arctic tundra" — only to see it melt away beneath their feet! Or perhaps they might share the fate of the gray wolf and other recently "de-listed" species, shot at will as soon as their numbers barely rise above the threshold for endangered status.
Stewart Brand (referred to as "'environmental visionary' Stewart Brand") appears to be pushing this idea through his Long Now Foundation. In the article, he is quoted crowing that "re-wilding is storming ahead everywhere." This idea is not "re-wilding" — according to The Rewilding Institute, rewilding involves "restoring big wilderness based on the regulatory roles of large predators.” The features needed for true rewilding are large, strictly protected core reserves; connections between reserves so that animals are able to travel; and, most importantly, the reintroduction and recovery of keystone carnivorous species. None of this is fulfilled in any way by cloning a few extinct animals — to quote cinematographer Lois Crisler, who spent years filming wolves in the Arctic, "animals without wilderness are a closed book.”
This is rather the ultimate vanity project, designed to assuage our consciences for wiping so many species from the face of the earth (It's okay! Look — we can bring them back!) It is the same sort of thinking that justifies keeping endangered species captive in zoos, to "preserve" the species as their habitats disappear — it certainly does those individual animals no good to be held behind bars, but we don't like to think we've destroyed another species so we keep the last few "specimens" breeding in cages for eternity. The article mentioned one recently extinct species, the bucardo or Pyrenian ibex, as being "very close to 'de-extinction' even now" as "many implantations" resulted in the birth of a "living bucardo clone" — which died ten minutes after birth! Again, cloning animals so feeble as to survive just for a short time does no good for those individual animals, and serves only to make us feel a little less monstrous.
Meanwhile, we are busily driving more species into extinction at the rate of one every five minutes, as we slaughter them for bling, exterminate them to keep them away from our endless herds of livestock, or pave over their habitats in our insatiable need for more space for our ever-increasing billions. Before we in our arrogance start to clone sickly versions of species we have exterminated, I think we would do better to figure out how to stop annihilating those that still manage to survive.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Monday, April 1, 2013
the urgency of the problem — either / or vs. both / and
In some of the online forums I peruse from time to time, there is often a lot of "either/or" talk — endless arguments about which of two problems (or solutions) is most pressing, important, necessary, possible…
Population versus consumption is a frequent theme; also renewables versus consumption — that is, whether renewables can supply all of our energy "needs" or whether we need to reduce consumption; a third common dichotomy is systemic change versus personal consumption — "the problem is capitalism… industrial civilization… big oil… big coal… the corporations… the military-industrial complex…"
What all of these "either/or" arguments miss, of course, is that this is a multiplication problem — debating whether population or consumption is more destructive, or whether developing renewables or reducing consumption is more effective, really makes just as much sense as debating whether height or width is more important in finding the area of a rectangle!
But beyond that, these dualities betray a misunderstanding of the scale and urgency of the problem. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson has determined that we need to cut our emissions 10% per year — and drop emissions to ZERO within ten years — just to have an outside chance of holding warming to the longstanding target of 2°C (and we know what effects we are already seeing from just 0.8°C, with more in the pipeline from what we've already emitted — the 4-6° we are heading for is nearly unimaginable). So our emissions have to essentially drop off the proverbial cliff — and that is not going to happen by reducing either consumption or population, or by either effecting systemic change or changing our own lifestyles (as if one could happen without the other); and certainly not by developing renewables without radically reducing consumption as well. This is an all-hands-on-deck, do everything we possibly can as fast as we can situation, and it feels as if very few people I run into really, truly get that.
There seems to be an idea out there that if we begin to reduce our emissions somewhat, then things will start to get better... and little awareness of the cumulative nature of the problem — that what matters to the climate system is the total amount of carbon we add to the atmosphere, not how fast we put it up there. David Roberts, writing in Grist, attributes this in part to thinking about global warming the same way we think of other environmental problems like air or water pollution: if we quit putting particulates into the air, the smog dissipates within a few days (witness the dramatic improvement in air quality in LA when city officials instituted traffic controls during the 1984 Olympics); and if a factory stops dumping its wastes into a river, the water will run cleaner pretty quickly as well. But the CO2 we emit stays up there in the atmosphere for up to a century, and carbon emissions accumulate (sort of like lead posioning in your body) — and that is the piece of this that people seem to have trouble getting their heads around. Our habits of thinking are too ingrained, ironically from past successes.
So a lot of concerned, well-meaning folks (including many of my friends and relations) don't really feel the urgency, and continue to go about their lives thinking that something will come along to fix this — after all, we sent a man to the moon, didn't we?...Or debate which of various dual options is the most realistic, with little recognition that the only way to do what really needs to be done — that is, bring emissions down to ZERO, as soon as possible — is to radically reduce both population and consumption, to both develop renewables and reduce consumption; and to (yes) change our capitalist-industrial-corporate system and look to our own wasteful lifestyles that support that system.
More about all three of these in future posts, soon I hope (sorry I am not as prolific as I would like to be, I'm a bit painstaking in my writing)…
Population versus consumption is a frequent theme; also renewables versus consumption — that is, whether renewables can supply all of our energy "needs" or whether we need to reduce consumption; a third common dichotomy is systemic change versus personal consumption — "the problem is capitalism… industrial civilization… big oil… big coal… the corporations… the military-industrial complex…"
What all of these "either/or" arguments miss, of course, is that this is a multiplication problem — debating whether population or consumption is more destructive, or whether developing renewables or reducing consumption is more effective, really makes just as much sense as debating whether height or width is more important in finding the area of a rectangle!
But beyond that, these dualities betray a misunderstanding of the scale and urgency of the problem. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson has determined that we need to cut our emissions 10% per year — and drop emissions to ZERO within ten years — just to have an outside chance of holding warming to the longstanding target of 2°C (and we know what effects we are already seeing from just 0.8°C, with more in the pipeline from what we've already emitted — the 4-6° we are heading for is nearly unimaginable). So our emissions have to essentially drop off the proverbial cliff — and that is not going to happen by reducing either consumption or population, or by either effecting systemic change or changing our own lifestyles (as if one could happen without the other); and certainly not by developing renewables without radically reducing consumption as well. This is an all-hands-on-deck, do everything we possibly can as fast as we can situation, and it feels as if very few people I run into really, truly get that.
There seems to be an idea out there that if we begin to reduce our emissions somewhat, then things will start to get better... and little awareness of the cumulative nature of the problem — that what matters to the climate system is the total amount of carbon we add to the atmosphere, not how fast we put it up there. David Roberts, writing in Grist, attributes this in part to thinking about global warming the same way we think of other environmental problems like air or water pollution: if we quit putting particulates into the air, the smog dissipates within a few days (witness the dramatic improvement in air quality in LA when city officials instituted traffic controls during the 1984 Olympics); and if a factory stops dumping its wastes into a river, the water will run cleaner pretty quickly as well. But the CO2 we emit stays up there in the atmosphere for up to a century, and carbon emissions accumulate (sort of like lead posioning in your body) — and that is the piece of this that people seem to have trouble getting their heads around. Our habits of thinking are too ingrained, ironically from past successes.
So a lot of concerned, well-meaning folks (including many of my friends and relations) don't really feel the urgency, and continue to go about their lives thinking that something will come along to fix this — after all, we sent a man to the moon, didn't we?...Or debate which of various dual options is the most realistic, with little recognition that the only way to do what really needs to be done — that is, bring emissions down to ZERO, as soon as possible — is to radically reduce both population and consumption, to both develop renewables and reduce consumption; and to (yes) change our capitalist-industrial-corporate system and look to our own wasteful lifestyles that support that system.
More about all three of these in future posts, soon I hope (sorry I am not as prolific as I would like to be, I'm a bit painstaking in my writing)…
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