Re-wilding is good, but research into the ecosystem roles of ancient trees shows we must preserve existing wilderness.

There are a lot of different ways to approach climate change as an issue. The primary focus is, rightly, on power generation and on ending fossil fuel use, but there’s plenty of other stuff that we can be doing at the same time. Returning cleared or developed area to some form of ecosystem – managed or otherwise – is a big part of that. For myself, I tend to focus on the more active, progressive, and left-wing angle of environmental justice. This means thinking about how to change the relationship between people and their environment, as well as eliminating the political and economic structures that, for example, prevent indigenous people the world over from managing their land, or simply pushing them off of any land that a (usually white) corporation decides it can use to make money.

A lot of environmentalism over the last century has been heavily informed by the white supremacy of the colonial powers, and has been used to justify preventing development in poor countries, as well as preventing people from living off the land. The misguided notion that humans must exist in conflict with nature let to the equally misguided notion that caring for the natural world means, mostly, keeping humans out of it, which has caused problems for a lot of people, mostly non-white. All of this is why the focus on environmental justice caught on, and the intersection between environmentalism and other subjects like racism, economics, colonialism, and so on.

That said, there are a lot of things that the environmental movement yesteryear got right, and taking care of trees is one of them. Specifically, it turns out that there are measurable benefits to having very, very old trees around:

“Ancient trees are unique habitats for the conservation of threatened species because they can resist and buffer climate warming,” write the authors, including Gianluca Piovesan (@Dendrocene) and Charles H. Cannon (@ruminatus). Some of these trees, such as bristlecone pines in the White Mountains, USA, can live up to 5,000 years and act as massive carbon storage.

Ancient trees are hotspots for mycorrhizal connectivity, the symbiotic relationship with underground fungi that supplies plants with many of the nutrients they need to survive. This symbiosis with fungi also helps reduce drought in dry environments. Ancient trees play a disproportionately large role in conservation planning and yet are being lost globally at an alarming rate.

Of course they are, and in case it wasn’t obvious, that deforestation is being driven by the greed of a small number of humans with way too much power, not by human need, or any vague bullshit about human nature. Fortunately, as with most of our environmental problems, it’s pretty clear what we should be doing, if we can get together the power to do it:

The researchers propose a two-pronged approach to protect ancient trees: first, the conservation of these trees through the propagation and preservation of the germplasm and meristematic tissue from these ancient trees, and second, a planned integration of complete protection and forest rewilding.

“Mapping and monitoring old-growth forests and ancient trees can directly assess the effectiveness and sustainability of protected areas and their ecological integrity,” they write. “To carry out this ambitious project, a global monitoring platform, based on advanced technologies, is required along with public contributions through community science projects.”

Currently, protecting ancient trees in forests, woodlands, historic gardens, and urban and agricultural areas remain limited by national policy levels. “The current review of the Convention of Biological Diversity and Sustainable Development Goal 15 ‘Life on Land’ of Agenda 2030 should include old-growth and ancient tree mapping and monitoring as key indicators of the effectiveness of protected areas in maintaining and restoring forest integrity for a sustainable future,” write the authors.

“We call for international efforts to preserve these hubs of diversity and resilience. A global coalition utilizing advanced technologies and community scientists to discover, protect, and propagate ancient trees is needed before they disappear.”

I will add that for those with the ability, I think there’s a lot to be said for  direct action. That can be anything from the long-standing tactic of camping out in trees to keep them from being cut down, to the ongoing movement to defend the Atlanta forest. This kind of activism is dangerous, both because of the inherent dangers of aerial camping, and because it will bring you into conflict with governments and with capitalists, both groups with a history of violence against environmentalists.   I also want to make very clear that if we are acting to preserve the ecosystem services provided by ancient trees, then that means we also need to make sure that younger trees get a chance to become ancient. There’s merit in defending very young forests, because they won’t always be young, if they have a chance to grow.

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Climate change is bad for your skin, and we should do revolutionary change about it.

Well, the rapid test says that I am now COVID-free, which is nice. My nose and sinuses aren’t back to normal yet – still some congestion and my voice resonates in my head as if I’ve got a cold. I also seem to just have less energy, which is annoying. All in all, it was unpleasant but far from unbearable, and I’m sure the vaccine helped with that.

When it comes to climate change and health, my focus has mostly been on stuff like the ways in which air pollution affects the cardiovascular system, with occasional mentions of how ecosystem collapse will likely lead to more zoonotic disease outbreaks. What I hadn’t really considered was how climate change looks to a dermatologist. Honestly, I don’t think about how the environment affects skin health in general, beyond solar radiation and things like poison ivy. I have encountered it when looking into the health impacts of flooding, but for some reason I haven’t felt a need to write about it, and that ends today. Sort of. It ends today because I came across some research on the ways in which extreme weather affects skin health:

The skin is a large, complex organ, and it serves as the body’s primary interface with the environment, playing key roles in sensory, thermoregulatory, barrier, and immunological functioning. As floods, wildfires, and extreme heat events increase in frequency and severity, they pose a significant threat to global dermatological health, as many skin diseases are climate sensitive. Investigators draw on an extensive review of published research to highlight the key dermatological manifestations initiated or exacerbated by these climatic events and also highlight the disproportionate impacts on marginalized and vulnerable populations. Their findings appear in The Journal of Climate Change and Health, published by Elsevier

“We wanted to provide dermatologists and other practitioners with a comprehensive overview of extreme weather-related skin disease as a foundation for patient education, implementation of early treatment interventions, and improved disease outcomes,” explained lead author Eva Rawlings Parker, MD, Department of Dermatology and the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA. “We were astounded by the shear breadth of impacts that extreme weather events have on skin disease and how profoundly climate change exacerbates inequality.”

In their review, Dr. Parker and her colleagues cite nearly 200 articles documenting the myriad impacts of extreme weather events on skin. Marcalee Alexander, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Climate Change and Health, noted, “This information is especially timely in light of traumatic events such as Hurricane Ian, which has led to increased infections due to flood and standing water exposures.”

Flooding, one of the most common natural disasters, is linked to traumatic wounds and bacterial and fungal infections of the skin. Contact dermatitis is another common consequence of flooding since flood water is often contaminated with pesticides, sewage, fertilizers, and chemicals. Exposure to wildfire smoke can trigger atopic dermatitis (eczema) in adults with no prior diagnosis, and it can trigger or exacerbate acne.

Because the skin plays a critical role in the regulation of body temperature, the effects of extended heat waves can be severe. The inability to properly cool during high heat events can lead to heat stroke and death, for example. Many chronic inflammatory dermatoses are exacerbated by heat as well. Infectious diseases can be seasonal, with heat and humidity increasing the risk of common cutaneous infections caused by bacterial, fungal, and viral pathogens. Less obvious, extreme heat events influence behavior. When temperatures are high, people may spend more time outdoors, increasing exposure to air pollution, UV radiation, and insects.

I think I’ve been ignoring skin problems partly because I’ve been fairly lucky in the kinds of skin ailments I’ve had, and partly because of the ways in which our culture has affected my brain (more on that later). Injuries don’t seem to count, in my head. As a kid I had an unpleasant encounter with a bunch of boiling water, and learned that burning large portions of your skin can be deadly. It’s clearly a vital organ, but it’s one that’s designed to handle treatment that would destroy any other organ in our body, so I think I take it for granted sometimes. I suppose the same can be said of other organs as well, but generally if there’s something detectable wrong with an internal organ, that’s a much worse sign than being able to detect a problem that’s only skin-deep.

But, of course, skin health is damned important. Leaving aside the way the skin itself can give us indications of more internal health problems, it’s also where we’re most exposed to external harm, we rely on our skin to keep the good stuff in, and the bad stuff out.

Skin ailments come with unique forms of misery. It’s difficult to not be aware of something wrong with your skin, and the mental toll of pain, itching, and dysmorphia that tends to come along with skin problems – especially chronic ones – is something that I think we should not underestimate. More than that, skin problems are visible. They’re there for other people to see, and so they can be harder to ignore. You can sometimes cover them up, but if there’s something wrong with your skin, having it in constant contact with cloth can be a problem all by itself.

There’s also a degree to which actively taking care of one’s skin is seen as an act of vanity. Certainly, most products surrounding skin care are aimed at appearance, and while a desire to be seen as attractive is an entirely valid part of the human experience, I think the Puritanical disdain for seeming like you care about your appearance is still running strong in our society, as is the misogynistic denigration of “feminine” activities like skin care.

I’m mentioning the social stuff because beyond the direct impact of any given health problem, I think it’s important to remember that stress – in addition to being an effect of all sorts of illness, also is a cause of ill health.

The news on climate change tends to be bad. The planet is going to keep getting more hostile and dangerous as the temperature rises, and so if we want life to get better for everyone – mere survival is not enough for me – then developing a more caring society is a key public health measure. Climate change is happening, and happening fast, but a lot of the pain and death we’re seeing because of it is still mostly because of social, political, and economic factors that make life unnecessarily hard for a large majority of humanity. I think that systemic cruelty is going to get worse as the temperature rises, unless we make some pretty big changes.

Thankfully, this report does not shy away from the ways in which societal conditions interact with skin health:

Dr. Parker and her colleagues observed that extreme weather events disproportionately affect marginalized and vulnerable populations and widen existing health disparities. Children, pregnant women, the elderly, people with mental health illness, racial/ethnic minorities, low-income individuals, and migrants are especially vulnerable to climate-related effects.

Black and Hispanic populations and lower income populations are more likely to live in areas at higher risk for flooding. These populations also have a greater incidence of skin disease and less access to care. Extreme heat is a frontline occupational hazard for manual laborers and migrant workers. Extreme weather events contribute to large-scale migration. Skin diseases are among the most commonly reported health concerns observed in migrants. Of particular concern is the spread of communicable and infectious diseases and vector-borne viruses. People experiencing homelessness are plagued by higher rates of highly morbid, climate-sensitive skin diseases.

As a reminder – there are more vacant houses and apartments than there are unhoused people, and the money most societies spend on “policing” houseless folks (also known as punishing them for being poor) far exceeds what it would cost to just guarantee safe housing for all. The same is true for the cost of privatized vs. universal healthcare. Things are likely to get worse as the temperature rises, but it’s important to remember that they don’t necessarily have to get worse. Climate change is increasing all sorts of health problems, but the degree to which people suffer because of those problems is almost always going to be determined by their place in the economic and political systems in which they live.

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Coal workers can be transitioned to renewable energy jobs throughout the U.S.

When people talk about ending fossil fuel use, there are a wide variety of objections. The one that I think is perhaps the most valid, is concern for those workers whose livelihoods currently rely on the extraction, processing, transportation, and use of oil, coal, and natural gas. I don’t remember when I first heard this objection, but as with so many other “arguments“, no matter how many times it’s addressed, it keeps coming up. If we remove the fossil fuel industry, the obvious answer is to make sure that fossil fuel workers either get new jobs that fit their skills, or be given a dignified retirement if they’re old enough that retraining seems like a waste of their remaining time. Honestly, I’d be fine just making sure they all have their needs met regardless of whether jobs are found for them, since I think that should be the default for everyone.

But I get the concern. Capitalism – and U.S. history in particular – is rife with examples of industries that either died, or moved overseas. Detroit is probably the most famous example of this. Its auto industry was gutted, the money all left, and the city’s working class – having made the auto industry fabulously wealthy – was left to twist in the wind. Under the system we have, if your industry dies, there’s a good chance that you and your family with die too, or at least any hope for a life free from the horrors of poverty. The solution that I prefer doesn’t really matter on a practical level, because I have virtually no power to affect policy. Most people who are worried about their jobs aren’t really looking for “have a revolution” as the solution. Fossil fuel workers may or may not be on board with a new, left-wing re-imagining of society, but until it’s actually happening, it’s not a valid alternative to their very real jobs.

The more short-term solution, from a left-wing, ground-up perspective, might be to pool resources to ensure that people’s needs are met, but that’s gonna feel like charity to a lot of people, and at this stage there’s simply not the organization to demonstrate that we can actually promise to keep people housed and fed. Regardless of our ultimate goals, we need to be able to offer solutions within the system we have, and we need to be able to show that those solutions are actually within reach.

A research team at the University of Michigan has shown that we can absolutely replace every coal job in the United States with a renewable energy job:

As of 2019, coal-fired electricity generation directly employed nearly 80,000 workers at more than 250 plants in 43 U.S. states. The new U-M study quantifies—for the first time—the technical feasibility and costs of replacing those coal jobs with local wind and solar employment across the country.

The study, published online Aug. 10 in the peer-reviewed journal iScience, concludes that local wind and solar jobs can fill the electricity generation and employment gap, even if it’s required that all the new jobs are located within 50 miles of each retiring coal plant.

Keeping employment local would increase the costs of replacing U.S. coal-plant workers by $83 billion, or 24%, nationwide, according to the study.

“These costs are significant in isolation but are small relative to annual U.S. power investments of $70 billion and to the total costs of transitioning the U.S. energy system away from fossil fuels, which have been estimated to be as high as $900 billion by 2030,” said study senior author Michael Craig of U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability.

“Our results indicate that replacing lost jobs in coal-plant communities would modestly increase overall energy-transition costs while significantly furthering a just transition for one category of frontline communities,” said Craig, assistant professor of energy systems and an expert on power system emissions, operations and planning.

Obviously, the cost doesn’t bother me at all. I have my doubts as to whether it actually bothers anyone – most of the objections are probably from people who have an ideological problem with government action, or with ending fossil fuel use. Still, for those who still just see big numbers and general claims, the authors do go into a bit more detail:

The U-M researchers say federal policymakers could introduce a new investment tax credit to help defray the costs of achieving local replacement of coal with renewables. Such a credit would only apply to wind and solar projects that are located near retiring coal plants and that employ retrained coal-plant workers.

Previous studies have concluded that aggressively mitigating climate change will require deep, sustained reductions in emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas.

Since electric power is the cheapest sector to decarbonize, much of the early U.S. emissions reductions have come from that sector, largely due to a shift from coal to natural gas in the electricity-generation mix.

Many decarbonization pathways retire most or all U.S. coal-fired power plants within the next 10 to 20 years. Electricity generation from those retired plants will need to be replaced by new, low-carbon sources of energy. Despite the rapid growth of wind and solar power in the United States, previous research has not quantified the feasibility and costs of replacing coal jobs with local wind and solar jobs across the country.

The new U-M study helps fill those research gaps. It applies a bottom-up optimization model to all coal plants in the contiguous United States and assumes a full phase-out of the U.S. coal-fired fleet by 2030.

As each coal plant retires, the model requires new renewable investments to replace the retiring plant’s electricity generation and employment. The model replaces coal-plant power generation and employment with wind and solar located within specified distances from retiring power plants.

The researchers analyzed three “siting limits,” the maximum distance that replacement solar and wind facilities can be located relative to a retiring coal plant: 50 miles, 500 miles and 1,000 miles. The 50-mile limit approximates local solar and wind facilities and jobs that would not require relocation of coal plant workers, while the 1,000-mile limit includes jobs that would require relocation.

The researchers found that across most U.S. regions and siting limits, annual renewable energy employment fully replaces coal employment. In all regions and for all siting limits, retiring coal plants are replaced with a mix of wind and solar power.

Operations and maintenance jobs account for 57% to 92% of the replacement employment at wind and solar facilities while construction jobs play a lesser role, according to the study. O&M jobs include field technicians and administrative and management staff.

I think it’s fair to say that this sort of research will not persuade coal barons like Joe Manchin, but I think it could well persuade some of his current supporters that he doesn’t have their interests at heart, when he refuses to support better alternatives and a brighter future for the people of his state. I hate to mention that asshole, but it keeps coming back to the same thing, doesn’t it? We have the “solutions”, we just lack the political power to enact them (which is why organizing and building collective power is key). Without that, knowing that we can do this doesn’t do much beyond raising our blood pressure when we keep not doing it. Even though I don’t think our system is capable of a real response to climate change that addresses environmental injustice, it’s important to recognize that even progress that’s not far enough can still be a big step in the right direction.

And for every step, we can celebrate, and point to the clear evidence that more steps are both needed, and entirely possible.

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Soup, Sabotage, and Spectacle Activism

I’ve been around liberal activism for most of my life. Specifically, I’m very familiar with what you might call “Liberal Protest Activism”(LPA for short). This is the kind of protest where you gather to demonstrate the numbers and determination of your movement, and to call for the government to make a change in response to popular pressure. In a lot of ways, it’s the main form of activism that’s viewed as “acceptable” within our society. In some sectors it’s the only form of activism that’s considered at all effective, which is something I used to believe.

You know the story – Ghandi’s movement was able to win freedom for India and Pakistan, M.L.K.’s movement was able to end Segregation and bring about racial equality. Anything that hints at violence, or that damages property or interferes with business is out of line and counterproductive.

In reality, both of those movements had militant elements, and took place within broader geopolitical contexts that had as much influence as any peaceful protest – probably more.

But within the framework of LPA, spectacle is extremely important, and there are a lot of different opinions about how to do it “right”. Some people think that the more “respectable” the conduct of the protesters, the better the optics, and the more likely that others will join in. Others think that doing silly, loud, or dramatic things will draw more media attention, and stir more conversation about the issue. There are also some who believe that a sincere demonstration of their sincerity, love, or faith will move other people on a spiritual level, and protests can become a sort of ritual.

In a lot of ways, this is the same as the arguments atheists have had about how we should defend or promote our unbelief. Should we mock religious beliefs and practices that seem silly to us? Should we be respectful and patient, and avoid ruffling any feathers? What tone is the most likely to get people to overcome their prejudices and listen?

My view on both of these arguments is the same. Different approaches will work on different people, at different points in their lives. There is room for a wide variety of approaches, and that’s what we should expect for such a strange and diverse species as humanity. More than that, I defy anyone to make a compelling case that it’s even possible to get everyone to agree on messaging and tactics. That’s not what humans are. Some will definitely go for uniforms, planned messages, and so on, but trying to get everyone to do the same thing feels a bit like saying that if everyone just agreed with me, then the world would be doing fine.

That may or may not be the case, but it’s largely irrelevant, because that’s not how people work.

This is not me saying there’s no point in trying to convince people of things. I hope this doesn’t need saying, but if I believed that, this blog would not exist. I just don’t think that I can persuade everyone. I don’t even think that I can persuade anyone by myself, I’m just trying to be part of the process that moves some people in the right direction.

In that same spirit, while I don’t think that LPA is sufficient to change the world in the ways we need to change it, I do think it’s a valid part of a larger movement. For myself, I’m fairly uncomfortable with theatrics, and I have a hard time persuading myself that dressing up and dancing around or something like that is worth the effort. My preference has been to find conversations about theatrical protests, and try to direct them towards the issue the protest is about. They did their job by making people talk, and now it’s my turn to make something useful of that conversation. If people are going to be doing silly and dramatic things, then the media is going to focus on that. It just makes sense to try to make use of that attention while it’s there, and it’s not like I can stop people from doing that stuff anyway.

Which brings us to the recent decision of a couple activists to throw tomato soup on a glass-protected Van Gogh painting and glue themselves to a wall.

Was this useful? Not particularly, but within the framework of LPA, it fits. No real damage was done, and it certainly generated a lot of buzz. The thing is – while I believe some people are genuinely upset at the disrespect shown to a great work of art, I don’t actually believe that anyone’s seriously changing their mind about climate change because of it. If someone’s opinion on whether or not climate action is necessary is swayed by two kids throwing soup at a painting, then I don’t know that it’s worth trying to discipline a global movement specifically for that person’s benefit. I also don’t see a lot of point in saying “they don’t represent all of us”, because I don’t think anyone believes they really do. Some may pretend to believe it because they already opposed the movement, but those folks will also believe that people are going to give their kids free drugs. Trying to appease them doesn’t seem worth the effort to me.

So my initial reaction was to point out that more conventional protest has not resulted in adequate climate action thus far.

I still think that’s the case.

We’ve certainly made progress. Renewable energy is booming around the world, and that is slowing the rate at which annual emissions are increasing. At the same time, emissions are still increasing, and people are dying because of climate change now.

If you think the action that’s been taken to date is adequate, then I have to question to what degree you value human life.

That said, my initial response was wrong, at least in one way. I think it was a holdover from my fairly recent days of believing in the efficacy of this kind of protest, combined with a lack of new reflexes for a different approach. See, from what I can tell, a majority of the world – even in Western countries – believes there’s a need for more action on climate change. If I have a role in redirecting the attention from activism like this, it probably should be to try to get people talking more about organizing and direct action. What we’re lacking isn’t a desire for change, but the tools for change. If conventional protest doesn’t work, what does work? Doing stranger more offensive forms of protest amounts to trying to do more of the thing that’s not working, in the hopes that “more” is what’s needed.

What I probably should have done in response to this was work on updating my direct action post, since it’s overdue for a tune-up, and trying to have a conversation about more effective forms of activism.

There’s been some discussion around whether or not Just Stop Oil is actually trying to undermine the climate action movement, but while I think that’s worth investigating, it shouldn’t be the basis for how we react to any given action by them. The reality is that there are people trying to sabotage that movement, and there will be for any movement that’s trying to get large-scale change. There will be corporate infiltrators. There will be government infiltrators. We should be on guard against that, but I don’t think that means trying to find and expose every single one. That seems like a futile effort, and a great way to create division and enmity within any movement.

The focus, rather, should be on what goals we want, what tactics we want to use, and making sure everyone understands why a group wants to do things a certain way for a certain action. What material effect will a given action have? If there’s a media buzz around something like this soup-throwing protest, is that something we should try to use, or should we just ignore it and focus on what we were already doing?

As I’m fond of saying, I don’t have all the answers, I’m just trying to figure out some of them. I don’t think this protest was helpful, but neither do I think there’s much point in getting worked up about it. Personally, I shouldn’t have given in to my reflex to defend this one in the way that I did. I think the best conversation for me to try having next time something like this happens, is about what kinds of activism would actually work.

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“Agricultural rewilding” should be a part of our response to climate change.

In general, I believe that we should be investing heavily in various modes of indoor food production. There are a lot of different forms this could and should take – I’ve talked before about diversity as the foundation of resilience – but central to the case for all of them is the same. The vast majority of food production depends on predictable seasonal weather patterns; weather patterns that become less predictable by the year. Another part of the reason for that is that it would free up current farmland to be used either for carbon capture, or rewilded.

Here at Oceanoxia, we view humanity as being a part of the various ecosystems in which we exist. That means that when those ecosystems are threatened, it puts us in danger too. We’re accustomed to thinking of ourselves as apart from the so-called “natural world”, but that was always a fantasy rooted in supremacist ideologies. Rewilding land, if done right helps increase the resilience of those ecosystems, which benefits us in turn.

So what does it mean to “do it right” when it comes to rewilding? Well, there are a lot of answers to that, and maybe I’ll dig into it more in the future (let me know in the comments, I guess?), but for those article there are two things I want to focus on. The first is that it’s going to be different in different places. With invasive species, pollution, climate change, and a hundred other factors, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution to this.

The second is that we should not necessarily be trying to recreate some ideal of an “unspoiled wilderness”. I’ve talked before about how Native Americans, and many other groups around the world, practiced agriculture as ecosystem management. This means cultivating the wildlife to create an ecosystem where edible and medicinal plants are abundant and easy to find. It also means cultivating your society so that everyone knows to care for this common resource. I think it’s also important to note that with the rising temperature, trying to recreate past ecosystems may be a literally fruitless endeavor.

Regardless, I think that we should be cultivating “edible ecosystems” as one part of the work we’re doing, and the science says I’m right!

‘Agricultural rewilding’ can also help to overcome concerns about the impact of rewilding on livelihoods and produce “win-win” environmental and human benefits, according to the researchers.

Agricultural rewilding involves restoring ecosystems via the introduction, management, and production of livestock with domestic species (typically hardy, native breeds) acting as analogues for their wild counterparts.

Researchers say combining rewilding and agriculture in this way helps to address some of the key concerns related to rewilding – the exclusion of people and agricultural work from the land, and reduction in food self-sufficiency.

It can also support the production of high-quality, high-welfare, high-value meat that is environmentally, ethically, and financially sustainable.

Conventionally, rewilding seeks to remove or reduce human intervention in a landscape in order to restore damaged ecosystems. Researchers argue that agricultural rewilding can achieve ecological benefits such as habitat restoration, tree planting, and natural flood management while still allowing for human management of land.

The paper was first presented at the conference of the European Society for Agricultural and Food Ethics and is now published in Transforming food systems: ethics, innovation and responsibility. The work was a collaboration between Virginia Thomas from the University of Exeter, England, and Aymeric Mondière, Michael Corson, and Hayo van der Werf from the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment.

Dr Thomas said: “Agricultural rewilding offers the potential for win-win scenarios in which biodiversity is increased and ecosystems are restored along with active human intervention in landscapes and the provision of livelihoods which are financially and environmentally sustainable.”

“Agricultural rewilding can potentially have biodiversity benefits over those of conventional rewilding since it can create and maintain habitats which may be lost in “hands-off” rewilding practices and whose loss would pose a threat to habitat-specialist species.”

“Furthermore, extensive farming as part of agricultural rewilding offers an advantage over more intensive agriculture in that animals can be kept in naturalistic conditions and in accordance with high welfare standards.”

“Domestic livestock can be present in the landscape, restoring biodiversity and regenerating ecosystem function, while still contributing to agricultural production where their lives are lived to high welfare and environmental standards and their deaths provide high-quality meat, thus contributing to food self-sufficiency and reducing the outsourcing of food production to systems with higher environmental impacts. Meanwhile, management of livestock allows for continued active human intervention in the landscape, thereby supporting rural livelihoods and communities.”

Yes, please. I want that.

For all I think that we should be planning for a world where people can’t go outside without serious heat protection during growing parts of the year, I also think that we should be reshaping our cultures to make our connection to the rest of the biosphere harder to ignore. Some of that means bringing the outside in, and having more plant and animal life within places like cities (which may need to be enclosed at some times? I feel like people don’t think enough about how hot things are likely to get), but it also means having a different relationship with the outdoors. Yes to recreation, yes to having the time to be outside, but also as a part of maintaining and governing our communities.

As much as capitalists and their supporters may hate to hear it, the biosphere is a common resource. All of our fates are tied to it, and efforts to privatize it have proven disastrous. We can have a better world, than this one, but we should expect it to be radically different from what we’re used to.

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Puerto Rico is demonstrating yet again that capitalism cannot solve climate change.

I wrote a few days ago about the total failure of Puerto Rico’s privatized power grid under Hurricane Fiona. As of seven hours before writing, half the island is still without power. In case it’s unclear to anyone, this – both the failure of privatization and the arrival of another hurricane – was entirely predictable. That’s what makes it all the worse that it seems as though most or all of the rebuilding from that disaster was done without any attempt to guard against the next hurricane. Many of you may have seen this already, but the most dramatic example from Hurricane Fiona is this bridge that was build shortly after Maria:

A temporary metal bridge in Puerto Rico, built in the wake of Hurricane Maria, was swept away in the rushing floodwaters of Hurricane Fiona.

The bridge, over the Guaonica River in Utuado, was destroyed Sunday, the same day Fiona made landfall on the island, officials said at a news conference.

It’s been five years, and they still just had a temporary bridge. Why didn’t they build something sturdier, or something that could be lifted out of the way of entirely predictable floodwaters? How much damage did that bridge do on its way downstream?

To me, this is emblematic of the Age of Endless Recovery. Puerto Rico had not rebuilt from Maria before Fiona hit, and what rebuilding they did do seems to have been dragged down by the same kind of greed and corruption that plagues all the rest of the United States. We know that storms are going to be getting stronger. We know that Puerto Rico is in dire need of resilient infrastructure, as is most of the rest of the world. If we valued human life and wellbeing above profit, then we would prioritize infrastructure that won’t be destroyed by entirely predictable weather events.

This is one of the many reasons why I think capitalism is incompatible with real climate action, or with the long-term survival of humanity. From the perspective of a construction corporation, there’s more profit to be made in building the same bridge every few years, than in building one bridge that can actually meet the demands of its location, and last for decades with maintenance. Obviously, this is not a problem limited to Puerto Rico, but remember the fundamental rule of climate catastrophe in our society – it hits those at the bottom first and hardest. While there are a myriad of communities in the United States and its colo- sorry, territories – Puerto Rico is both a laboratory for disaster capitalism, and for the shambling, undead horror that is Reaganomics. You know how conservatives of both parties always talk about lowering taxes to attract rich people “because of all the prosperity that brings”?

Puerto Rico has done wonderfully at attracting rich people, and I hope it’s clear to all of you that doing so has not helped the people of that island. The defining trait of a rich person is their selfishness, and there is no reason whatsoever to assume that they will spend a cent on something that doesn’t benefit them personally. They moved there for tax purposes, because they don’t care about things like infrastructure. It’s far better for them to just leave the island until the peasantry has managed to pull it back together, and then they’ll move back.

Capitalists do not care about climate change, or about the billions of lives that are at risk. Capitalism means that the capitalist class has total freedom, paid for by the rest of us. They have open borders. They can go anywhere they want whenever they want.

Our entire society has been designed to reward greed and ruthlessness, and this is the result. Obviously it’s good to provide material help to those in need if you’re able, but if we want the world to get better, we need to change how people interact with politics, and build the collective power we need to actually topple the hierarchy that’s currently driving us towards extinction.

Video: How the Rich REALLY Cause Climate Change

I talk about systemic change a fair amount on this blog. The effort to solve climate change through “individual action” has failed. More than that, it has become increasingly clear that that approach was backed by fossil fuel corporations because they knew it would never work. Folks have been focusing more on the rich, recently, but there’s still a lot of attention paid to the individual habits of those people – their short jet rides, their wasteful houses, their massive yachts. This video is a good overview of how the rich really cause climate change, through their systemic control of society:

Lives are traded for profit yet again, as Puerto Rico’s newly privatized grid fails.

It’s been said many times that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster these days. With all of our technology, we’re capable of building resilient infrastructure, moving people out of harm’s way, and engaging in herculean rescue efforts. As a rule, big disasters are made worse but inaction, incompetence, and corruption. At the end of the day, there’s more money to be made in the aftermath of a disaster than there is in preventing one. That means that when there was a push (eventually successful) to privatize Puerto Rico’s grid after the disaster of Hurricane Maria, it wasn’t hard to predict that the end result not be good for the people.

Now, under the advance of Hurricane Fiona, the entire island has apparently lost power.

A “total blackout” was reported on the island of Puerto Rico on Sunday as heavy rainfall and powerful winds pounded the island before Hurricane Fiona made landfall just before 4:00 pm local time.

Weather forecasters said the rainfall is likely to produce devastating landslides and severe flooding, with up to 25 inches (64 cm) expected in some areas. A Category 1 storm, with sustained winds of 85 mph, Fiona is nowhere near as powerful as Hurricane Maria which slammed the island in 2017, nearly five years to the day, as a Category 4 monster.

It wasn’t lost on many that the nation’s sole power utility company, LUMA—granted control of the territory’s electricity system in a 2020 privatization deal in the wake of Maria’s devastation—is the institution now in charge as the entire island has lost power in the face of Fiona.

In July, major protests were organized by Puerto Ricans opposed to LUMA—a joint venture by Canada-based ATCO and Houston-based Quanta Services. Citing increased outages, unreliable service, and higher bills, opponents demanded the 15-year contract with the company be canceled.

As Reuters reported in July, “Power rates have gone up five times since LUMA began operating Puerto Rico’s transmission and distribution system on June 1, 2020. The last rate hike, which took effect at the start of July, pushed rates up by 17.1%.”

Earlier this month, protests again were again on display in San Juan and elsewhere condemning LUMA.

In a statement on its website Sunday, LUMA said “full power restoration could take several days” and asked for “support and patience” from its customers.

Carmen Yulín Cruz, who was the progressive mayor of San Juan when Maria hit the island in 2017, offered a sobering comment in response to news of the blackout:

“Puerto Rico is 100% without electrical power,” she tweeted. “The cycle of death begins.”

“The cycle of death” is a good alternate name for disaster capitalism. I’m at a point where I am no longer willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone in power. We know how this plays out. It’s been done over and over and over again all over the world. The people running our government – the leadership of both the Democrats and the Republicans, and the capitalist class they serve – know what they are doing. They know that things like privatizing Puerto Rico’s grid will result in high costs for unreliable results. They knew this would happen and they wanted it anyway. If someone wants to insist that they didn’t know, then they are so incompetent and out of touch that their ignorance is literally getting people killed.

Either way, things need to change.

Breadfruit to the rescue!

When it comes to adapting to/preparing for global warming, resilience is key. It’s absolutely worth finding ways to increase our resistance to climate disasters, but being able to recover quickly will matter much more.  There’s no roadmap for how the next few decades are going to go – we’ve got good general guesses, but those don’t allow us to predict what’s going to happen where. We can prepare for some things – ensure access to air conditioning and reliable potable water during heatwaves, for one example – but the ability to take an unexpected hit without collapsing is key.

Resilience, in my view, is best achieved through diversity. Diversity of strengths, diversity of thought, diversity of experience, diversity of species – I make no secret of my interest in ecology, or of my belief that we should see ourselves as part of the ecosystems around us. In ecosystems, biodiversity is key to resilience. The more species you have living in a given area, the less damage will be done by removing any one of those species. There are a lot of ways in which I think this concept applies fractally. At the level of a local community, a diversity of people makes it more likely that whatever problem arises, someone will have some idea of what to do about it. A diversity in diet – in types and sources of food – means that if one kind of crop fails, there are other kinds of food available. Zoom out to the national or global scale, and the same remains true.

That’s why it’s such a problem that so much of our population depends on so few species. Even leaving aside the disease and pest risks of monoculture farming, relying on a small number of crops means depending on a narrow range of growing conditions. At risk of stating the obvious, growing conditions are changing worldwide. I maintain that our first priority should be investing heavily in indoor food production, but in the interest of diversity and resilience, I think there’s real value in exploring other options.

Enter the breadfruit.

While researchers predict that climate change will have an adverse effect on most staple crops, including rice, corn and soybeans, a new Northwestern University study finds that breadfruit — a starchy tree fruit native to the Pacific islands — will be relatively unaffected.

Because breadfruit is resilient to predicted climate change and particularly well-suited to growing in areas that experience high levels of food insecurity, the Northwestern team believes breadfruit could be part of the solution to the worsening global hunger crisis.

The study was published today (Aug. 17) in the journal PLOS Climate.

“Breadfruit is a neglected and underutilized species that happens to be relatively resilient in our climate change projections,” said Northwestern’s Daniel Horton, a senior author on the study. “This is good news because several other staples that we rely on are not so resilient. In really hot conditions, some of those staple crops struggle and yields decrease. As we implement strategies to adapt to climate change, breadfruit should be considered in food security adaptation strategies.”

[…]

Despite having “fruit” in its name, breadfruit is starchy and seedless, playing a culinary role more like a potato. Closely related to jackfruit, the nutrient-rich food is high in fiber, vitamins and minerals. In tropical parts of the world, people have been eating breadfruit for thousands of years — whether steamed, roasted, fried or fermented. Breadfruit also can be turned into flour, in order to lengthen its shelf life and be exported.

“Breadfruit trees can live for decades and provide a large amount of fruits each year,” said Zerega, a conservation scientist with the Negaunee Institute for Plant Conservation Science and Action at the Chicago Botanic Garden. “In some cultures, there is a tradition to plant a breadfruit tree when a child is born to ensure the child will have food for the rest of their life.”

This sounds like something worth looking into, doesn’t it? As ever, this needs to come with systemic economic and political change – there’s no point to  increasing consumption of breadfruit if it’s just rich countries buying it from the people who currently rely on it, and forcing those people to then buy food on the international market. Fortunately, it seems likely that the number of places capable of growing breadfruit will go up as the temperature rises, particularly compared to current staples like wheat.

To conduct the study, the researchers first determined the climate conditions required to cultivate breadfruit. Then, they looked at how these conditions are predicted to change in the future (between the years 2060 and 2080). For future climate projections, they looked at two scenarios: an unlikely scenario that reflects high greenhouse-gas emissions and a more likely scenario in which emissions stabilize.

I love the optimism of their likely/unlikely labeling. I hope history proves them right about that.

In both scenarios, areas suitable for breadfruit cultivation remained mostly unaffected. In the tropics and subtropics, the suitable area for growing breadfruit decreased by a modest 4.4 to 4.5%. The researchers also found suitable territory where growing breadfruit trees could expand — particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where breadfruit trees are not traditionally grown but could provide an important and stable source of food.

“Despite the fact that climate will drastically change in the tropics, climate is not projected to move outside the window where breadfruit is comfortable,” Yang said. “From a climate perspective, we can already grow breadfruit in sub-Saharan Africa. There is a huge swath of Africa, where breadfruit can grow to various degrees. It just has not been broadly introduced there yet. And, luckily enough, most varieties of breadfruit are seedless and have little-to-no likelihood of becoming invasive.”

According to Zerega, once established, a breadfruit tree can withstand heat and drought much longer than other staple crops. But the benefits don’t end there. Because it’s a perennial crop, it also requires less energy input (including water and fertilizer) than crops that need to be replanted every year, and, like other trees, it sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the tree’s lifetime.

“A lot of places where breadfruit can grow have high levels of food insecurity,” Yang said. “Oftentimes, they combat food insecurity by importing staple crops like wheat or rice, and that comes with a high environmental cost and carbon footprint. With breadfruit, however, these communities can produce food more locally.”

This brings us back to the need for systemic change. There’s a long history of rich nations using their wealth and power to undermine efforts at self-sufficiency in poor nations. Forcing a country to remain dependent on imports means that they have to put all their resources into generating cash crops to sell on the international market. That benefits capitalists, but it’s terrible for the kind of resilience we need. This is yet another example where we have what looks to be a good solution to part of the climate problem, but it’s unlikely to be implemented in any useful capacity without revolutionary political change.

It’s also worth underlining that there’s very little chance of the plant becoming invasive if grown in new locations. I’ve talked before about the damage that invasive species can do, and now is not the time to be adding more burdens to already-crumbling ecosystems.

The scale of change that we need is daunting, to say the least. I don’t think humanity has ever undertaken a task of this size and complexity. The upside is that “humanity” is also big and complex, and we’ve learned how break down big problems into more manageable parts. For climate change, one of those parts is changing our food system. Some of that change will just be differences in proportion – maybe we’ll have less wheat and corn, and more rice breadfruit, for example. I find it helps to remember that there are thousands of teams like the one behind this breadfruit research. More than that, there are millions of people not just doing research, but also taking direct action, and working out how to do more.

I no longer think climate change is just the result of all of us being collectively irresponsible – that would ignore how power works, and how our system is designed. That said, we are collectively living through it. You are not alone, and even if it’s not your day, your week, your month, or even your year, there are countless others out there working.

To grow breadfruit.

The image shows two breadfruits close to the camera. They’re green, oblong, and seem to be covered in small scales. The leaves behind them are very big, and toothed. Other breadfruits can be seen out of focus in the background.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!