Movement within Mars

I feel like I probably had a childhood astronomy phase, but if I did, all I really remember was the feeling of existential dread upon learning that the sun was expanding and would eventually consume the entire Earth. When it comes to Mars, my primary interest was that time Calvin and Hobbes went there in their cardboard box. Later, my father spent a brief time as a consultant biologist on some part of NASA’s search for signs of life, but my understanding of the place, following the science, was that it was not only dead in terms of life, but also in terms of geological activity. The main evidence for that that I knew of was that Mars doesn’t have a magnetosphere. Earth does have one, and our current understanding is that it’s generated by activity in our planet’s molten core. It provides a great deal of protection from solar radiation, which is part of why we’re able to have such low radiation levels and such a nice atmosphere. Mars, or so the thinking goes, lost all of its heat, because it’s such a small planet. It cooled off, lost its core activity, and so lost its magnetosphere along with the capacity to shelter life.

Well, it turns out there’s a bit more going on down there than we thought. Those of you who follow science news will probably have heard about this in recent days, but there’s evidence of new movement deep within the red planet:

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge current views of Martian geodynamic evolution with a report on the discovery of an active mantle plume pushing the surface upward and causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The finding suggests that the planet’s deceptively quiet surface may hide a more tumultuous interior than previously thought.

“Our study presents multiple lines of evidence that reveal the presence of a giant active mantle plume on present-day Mars,” said Adrien Broquet, a postdoctoral research associate in the UArizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and co-author of the study with Jeff Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor of planetary science at the LPL.

Mantle plumes are large blobs of warm and buoyant rock that rise from deep inside a planet and push through its intermediate layer – the mantle – to reach the base of its crust, causing earthquakes, faulting and volcanic eruptions. The island chain of Hawaii, for example, formed as the Pacific plate slowly drifted over a mantle plume.

“We have strong evidence for mantle plumes being active on Earth and Venus, but this isn’t expected on a small and supposedly cold world like Mars,” Andrews-Hanna said. “Mars was most active 3 to 4 billion years ago, and the prevailing view is that the planet is essentially dead today.”

“A tremendous amount of volcanic activity early in the planet’s history built the tallest volcanoes in the solar system and blanketed most of the northern hemisphere in volcanic deposits,” Broquet said. “What little activity has occurred in recent history is typically attributed to passive processes on a cooling planet.”

The researchers were drawn to a surprising amount of activity in an otherwise nondescript region of Mars called Elysium Planitia, a plain within Mars’ northern lowlands close to the equator. Unlike other volcanic regions on Mars, which haven’t seen major activity for billions of years, Elysium Planitia experienced large eruptions over the past 200 million years.

“Previous work by our group found evidence in Elysium Planitia for the youngest volcanic eruption known on Mars,” Andrews-Hanna said. “It created a small explosion of volcanic ash around 53,000 years ago, which in geologic time is essentially yesterday.”

Ok, so I was already off before this plume showed up – that’s much more recent activity than I would have guessed. Still, it seems like my surprise at an active mantle plume is shared by scientists. From what I can tell, this doesn’t affect our lives in any way – it’s not going to re-start the Martian magnetosphere, so Elon Musk’s supposed plans for colonization still have to account for the radiation problem. From the perspective of people studying Mars, however, this is a major discovery.

Mantle plumes, which can be viewed as analogous to hot blobs of wax rising in lava lamps. give away their presence on Earth through a classical sequence of events. Warm plume material pushes against the surface, uplifting and stretching the crust. Molten rock from the plume then erupts as flood basalts that create vast volcanic plains.

When the team studied the features of Elysium Planitia, they found evidence of the same sequence of events on Mars. The surface has been uplifted by more than a mile, making it one of the highest regions in Mars’ vast northern lowlands. Analyses of subtle variations in the gravity field indicated that this uplift is supported from deep within the planet, consistent with the presence of a mantle plume.

Other measurements showed that the floor of impact craters is tilted in the direction of the plume, further supporting the idea that something pushed the surface up after the craters formed. Finally, when researchers applied a tectonic model to the area, they found that the presence of a giant plume, 2,500 miles wide, was the only way to explain the extension responsible for forming the Cerberus Fossae.

“In terms of what you expect to see with an active mantle plume, Elysium Planitia is checking all the right boxes,” Broquet said, adding that the finding poses a challenge for models used by planetary scientists to study the thermal evolution of planets. “This mantle plume has affected an area of Mars roughly equivalent to that of the continental United States. Future studies will have to find a way to account for a very large mantle plume that wasn’t expected to be there.

“We used to think that InSight landed in one of the most geologically boring regions on Mars – a nice flat surface that should be roughly representative of the planet’s lowlands,” Broquet added. “Instead, our study demonstrates that InSight landed right on top of an active plume head.”

The presence of an active plume will affect interpretations of the seismic data recorded by InSight, which must now take into account the fact that this region is far from normal for Mars.

“Having an active mantle plume on Mars today is a paradigm shift for our understanding of the planet’s geologic evolution,” Broquet said, “similar to when analyses of seismic measurements recorded during the Apollo era demonstrated the moon’s core to be molten.”

My first thought, when hearing about these findings, was that this activity also increases the chance of there being active microbial life in Mars’ crust, similar to what we’ve found on Earth. Reading this article, it seems that I’m also not alone in that. I don’t know how long it’ll be before we get clear answers, but it feels like actually finding that life might be closer than I thought. Once scientists have done their recalculations, accounting for these new data, my guess is that they’ll have a better idea of where to look for life, based on current geological activity.

Not Fine with Ultrafine: Airplane pollution comes from engine lube, not just burned fuel

I first dedicated a neuron to “ultrafine particles” (UFPs) around a decade ago, when I was looking into the health problems associated with the air that I, personally, was breathing. At the time I had just moved to an apartment a couple blocks southwest of Interstate 93, one of Boston’s biggest freeways. I knew that air pollution was harmful, but if memory serves, I was only just starting to learn how that harm actually manifests in the people exposed. In digging up information for this post, I came to the conclusion that the simplest way to describe the effects is that your health will just… be a bit worse. All of your health. It basically puts a cap on how healthy you, personally, can actually be. If you do everything right, you’ll still be less healthy, more vulnerable to chronic conditions, and more vulnerable to heart attacks and strokes. Or, to quote a study from Tufts, living near a highway can be bad for your health in a million small ways:

Fine and ultrafine particulates both cause cardiovascular disease in similar ways. Once they hit your lungs, your body immediately recognizes that something is amiss. “It essentially says, ‘Oh, crap, something’s wrong here,’ and releases cytokines, molecules that control immune response,” says David Weiss, M12, who works on the CAFEH study analyzing health surveys generated as part of the community outreach component of the research project. Those cytokines are used to summon help to the site of the infection, but also affect the activity of the immune system throughout the body.

Weiss likens the body’s reaction to the terror-alert system that was put into place after 9/11. “You know, the one that was green, yellow, red,” he says. “The higher levels of cytokines will take you from a level green to a level yellow.” In other words, your whole body goes on high alert, causing elevated levels of inflammation.

Of course, not all inflammation is bad, says Doug Brugge. For example, if you cut your finger, within a day, you’ll see some inflammation (redness) around the cut as your immune system mobilizes to kill any invading bacteria. “That is an example of a good inflammatory response, because it’s localized,” says Brugge. “It’s responding to a real problem, and it’s controlled. It has a beginning and an end.”

But constant exposure to fine and ultrafine particulate pollution can cause chronic inflammation. If that happens, white blood cells called macrophages, which are part of the body’s natural defense mechanism, go into overdrive, seeking out bacteria or other foreign objects in the bloodstream. They start attacking whatever’s there with extra gusto—including certain types of cholesterol that accumulate in the bloodstream. As macrophages gorge themselves on this fatty molecule, they (and their cholesterol contents) settle into the inner lining of blood vessels, where they slowly build up and create artery-clogging plaques.

Weiss says that some of these deposits may happen anyway as the body ages, but inflammation caused by particulate pollution speeds the process, leading to premature heart attacks and strokes.

[…]

Essentially, Weiss says, this gives the pollutants that make up ultrafine particles more bang for their buck. They’re more potent than larger particles, so they may lead more quickly to heart disease. And, he adds, they may be small enough to get directly into the bloodstream, where they can do even more damage.

“Larger particles can’t cross the barrier from the lungs to the bloodstream,” says Weiss, “but the ultrafine particles can. So because of that, and partly because of their increased exposed surface area, there’s more of an opportunity for them to have reactions that will cause inflammation.” The only way to avoid this inflammation—short of somehow removing particles from the air around you—is to spend less time near major highways.

“For people who move away from the highway, it’s like they quit smoking,” says Wig Zamore, a longtime resident of Somerville with a master’s degree in urban planning. Over the past decade, Zamore has worked with community groups on public health and clean-air issues, and is a member of the CAFEH steering committee, a group of academics and community members who help guide the study’s research.

“Their risk pretty immediately starts to go down, and for the people who move closer to a highway, their risk immediately starts to go up over a matter of just a couple years,” he says, citing a 2009 study by the University of British Columbia.

The problem is, of course, that many people living near highways don’t have the financial means to move. According to Zamore, of the 35 million Americans who live by a major four-lane highway, roughly 18 percent are renters or live in low-income housing.

We were living there because of the low rent – my flat farther away from I-93 had its rent go up by something like $150/month, so we had to move, and there didn’t seem to be anything of a comparable price that didn’t come with at least as much air pollution. It should not surprise you to learn that that neighborhood, like most high-pollution neighborhoods in the US, was mostly not white. Unfortunately, the dangers of UFPs go beyond this smoking-like effect on those most exposed. Infant exposure has been linked to adult lung disease, implying lifelong problems, and exposure in utero has been linked to childhood asthma.

But wait! There’s more!

See, as previously mentioned, the real problem with UFPs is that they’re so small. They’re smaller than our body is really capable of dealing with in a meaningful way. To my knowledge, we don’t currently know the exact causal chain from UFP exposure in pregnant mothers to asthma in preschool. It could be that the aforementioned inflammation is what’s actually affecting lung development, but it’s also possible that the particles are simply passing through the mother into the fetus, especially since there’s evidence that they also cross the blood/brain barrier. Unsurprisingly, scientists are looking into possible links to neurological problems.

There’s a great deal more such research out there, but I think this is enough to get across why I think that UFPs are something we should take seriously. The fact that a lot of them seem to come from car tires, rather than exhaust, is one reason that I think we should be moving away from cars as a primary mode of transit, even without their greenhouse gas emissions. If I snapped my fingers and made every car in the world electric, Somerville would still be having problems. If we manage to build a system that’s not obsessed with profit and growth, I think there will be a lot less need for people to be moving around so much. A shorter work week, for example, would mean less commuting, and more work could be done from home. That, combined with increased investment in mass transit, and the reclamation of urban landscapes for people, rather than cars, could largely eliminate traffic as we know it today.

Unfortunately, that’s not the only big source of UFPs. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll pretend that coal plants went away with the gas-powered cars, and were replaced with insert favorite power source here. We also need to reduce air traffic, and as with cars, focusing just on the fuel would be a mistake. It turns out that jet engines – specifically the oils that lubricate them – are a major source:

Since several years, the Hessian Agency for Nature Conservation, Environment and Geology (HLNUG) has been measuring the number and size of ultrafine particles at various air monitoring stations in the vicinity of Frankfurt International Airport, for example in the Frankfurt suburb of Schwanheim and in Raunheim. Last year, scientists led by Professor Alexander Vogel at Goethe University Frankfurt analysed the chemical composition of the ultrafine particles and came across a group of organic compounds which, according to their chemical fingerprints, originated from aircraft lubrication oils.

The research team has now corroborated this finding by means of further chemical measurements of the ultrafine particles: the particles originated to a significant degree from synthetic jet oils and were particularly prevalent in the smallest particle classes, i.e. particles 10 to 18 nanometres in size. Such lubrication oils can enter the exhaust plume of an aircraft’s engines, for example through vents where nanometre-sized oil droplets and gaseous oil vapours are not fully retained.

In laboratory experiments, the researchers also succeeded in reproducing the formation of ultrafine particles from lubrication oils. To this end, a common engine lubrication oil was first evaporated at around 300 °C in a hot gas stream, which simulated the exhaust plume of an aircraft engine, and subsequently cooled down. The number-size distribution of the freshly formed particles was then measured.

Alexander Vogel, Professor for Atmospheric Environmental Analytics at the Institute for Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences of Goethe University Frankfurt, explains: “When the oil vapour cools down, the gaseous synthetic esters are supersaturated and form the nuclei for new particles that can then grow fast to around 10 nanometres in size. These particles, as our experiments indicate, constitute a large fraction of the ultrafine particles produced by aircraft engines. The previous assumption that ultrafine particles originate primarily from sulphur and aromatic compounds in kerosene is evidently incomplete. According to our findings, lowering lubrication oil emissions from jet engines holds significant potential for reducing ultrafine particles.”

The experiments show that the formation of ultrafine particles in jet engines is not confined to the combustion of kerosene alone. Potential mitigation measures should take this into consideration. This means that using low-sulphur kerosene or switching to sustainable aviation fuel cannot eliminate all the pollution caused by ultrafine particles.

I think it’s important to be clear here – I don’t think we should be focused on the total elimination of all ultrafine particle sources. It’s a nice idea in theory, but so long as we want to keep the benefits of modern engines of any sort, there’s a good chance we’ll be producing some form of harmful air pollution. What I do want is to drastically reduce the amount we generate, even as we develop things like plant-based jet fuel. As with cars, I think that changing our economy would drastically reduce air travel (it’s almost like I’m obsessed with systemic change. Funny, that), but I also think that it would open up options for slower forms of air travel, like lighter-than-air craft, that don’t require the same kind of heat and friction involved in getting airplanes off the ground.

I also – since it’s a factor we shouldn’t forget – believe that a post-capitalist society would greatly reduce the amount of pollution generated by military activity.

Pollution will probably always be something we have to manage, rather than entirely eliminate, but as we’re all aware by now, we generate far, far more pollution than is required for humanity to have a good standard of living, complete with the benefits of technology. I wish it was as easy as swapping out our fuel sources, as difficult a task as that is. Unfortunately, it keeps coming back to the need for systemic change. Capitalism and imperialism are not the only source of problems in society, but the problems they’re creating have become so big that it’s often hard to even tell what those other problems might be. It’s like worrying about wet feet when you’ve fallen overboard at sea. In the meantime, while there’s no practical way to entirely protect yourself, there’s some evidence that having plants around can help, so support efforts to increase the amount of greenery in cities, and “green walls” around places like airports and freeways. There are plenty of other benefits to doing that, and I really do believe that any steps we take to strengthen people, including literally caring for their health, will bring that systemic change just a little bit more within our reach.

 

Fear, Discovery, and Animal Crossing

Once upon a time, long, long ago, I was a college student studying biology with plans to go to grad school somewhere to study ecology and possibly animal behavior. I was frustrated with the small scale of research one had to do as an undergrad, and I was looking forward to digging into something better. For example, I’d spent a lot of time tracking fishers and mink in New Hampshire in my teens, and Indiana, where I got my BA in biology, didn’t really have fishers. Since the two species have overlapping territories and prey, it seemed likely that without the larger species to compete with, mink in Indiana would have more opportunities for larger prey, and would thus have some evolutionary pressure to embiggen across the generations.

My plan to study this using the animals tracks. This would have been far cheaper and less invasive than trying to catch, weigh, and measure a representative sample of mink in two different parts of the U.S., and while the more invasive study might be necessary to fully support my hypothesis, tracks would certainly be enough to provide solid justification for such a study. I’d learned how to build a “trap” to collect tracks using aluminum foil, contact paper, and wood, so the material end of things would have been pretty straightforward to put together, and it’s a technique that gives you quite consistent data, by baiting the animals to use consistent behavior in a fairly controlled setting. I was also told that was much too big of a project for undergrad work. I suppose I can see why, but I still wonder whether I would have taken a different path had I been able to go through with it. The research I did end up doing primarily taught me that the shrews living in east-central Indiana had somehow figured out how to avoid drift fences and pit traps. It’s accurate to say I’ve done research on shrews, but over about a month of setting out research-supported live traps, and checking them multiple times per day, my partner and I didn’t catch a single damned shrew.

All of this is to say that I have a long-standing interest in both animal ecology, and animal behavior, as well as the various aspects of conservation, environmentalism, and so on. Writing this now, I’m honestly very tempted to do a little track survey around Dublin’s rivers, just for the fun of it. Maybe if I get enough patrons that I can afford the materials, I’ll start doing research projects and writing about them here.

There are a lot of reasons why this kind of research is good. The first, of course, is the same reason I support most other research – it’s a process of exploration. There might be nothing on the other side of that mountain but more forest, just like this side, but we won’t know that, until someone actually goes and looks. And once we know what’s on the other side of the mountain, well, that opens up a new frontier that also needs to be explored. Sure, you might just discover that your shrew-catching methods need to be updated, but you might also discover that the reason why horseshoe crab blood coagulates in that particular manner, is a chemical reaction that would make that blood a pillar of modern medicine, while also raising a number of ethical and environmental questions that go well beyond the scope of this paragraph.

Part of my discomfort with the horseshoe crab situation comes from my understanding, born of both observation and study, animals are, in some ways, just like us. There are a great many differences of course, some of which matter a lot, but they’re not just meat automatons wandering through the world until we find a use for them. They’re made of the same stuff as us, and their behavior is often guided by the same chemical reactions as the ones going on in your brain as you are reading this.

There’s a recording from a radio show that’s been kicking around the internet for a while, in which a caller complained about the placement of deer crossing signs. Wouldn’t it be better, she asked, to put the signs in lower-traffic areas, to reduce car crashes? She’d somehow gotten it into her head that the sign was there to tell deer where to cross the road, rather than to warn humans that deer often crossed in that area. It’s a kind of mental slip that I think most of us have had at some point in our lives, but we’re generally lucky enough to not have it happen on radio for everyone to hear.

The thing is, while there’s zero chance of literacy in white-tailed deer, she’s not wrong to assume some level of agency. Deer have reasons for the things they do. They have reasons why they cross the roads we build, why their timing seems to be so terrible sometimes, and why they will sometimes just stand and stare at those weird pair of bright lights that seems to be growing. Whether your concern is for deer or for humans, understanding those reasons is key to reducing those crashes. The deer don’t seem to have the capacity to understand us, and work around the weird shit we do, and they certainly don’t have any power over our actions as a species, which means that it’s on us to figure out how to make things better.

Enter the wildlife crossing.

The image shows a highway cutting through a dense, green conifer forest. In the background, behind he road, you can stony mountains looming over the river valley the road is following. Near the center of the photograph, there is a wide bridge over the highway. The bridge, a wildlife crossing, is covered in grass, shrubs and small trees, forming a “natural” pathway for wildlife to cross the highway.

Wildlife crossings, both with and without fences to guide animals toward them, have proven to be beneficial in reducing collisions, and in allowing more natural movement of animals:

The findings of the MSU genetics study, which collected some 10,000 hair samples from  and grizzlies, have been published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and a photograph of one of Banff’s wildlife overpasses is featured on the publication’s cover.

“Showing that the black  and grizzlies using the crossings to traverse the highway are also breeding is a major finding,” said former MSU graduate student and WTI scientist Michael Sawaya, who wrote the paper as the final piece for his doctorate in ecology. “While there have been a lot of studies showing that wildlife are using these crossings, this is the first time anyone has shown that animals using the crossings are breeding often enough to ensure that the populations on either side of the highway are not being genetically isolated.”

MSU professor of ecology Steven Kalinowski, who was Sawaya’s doctoral adviser and co-authored the paper, agreed that the genetic evidence offers the best indication to date of the success of Banff’s system of wildlife crossing structures.

The crossings – there are currently 44 in all – form the most extensive system of wildlife crossing structures on the planet. In addition to reducing collisions, the crossings project was designed to prevent fragmentation of wildlife populations living along Canada’s busiest highway. Grizzly bears, Banff’s marquee predator, are often negatively impacted by roads, Kalinowski added, so any true measure of the project’s success has to account for the impact on that population, which the Alberta government currently lists as threatened.

“These wildlife crossing structures cost millions of dollars and this is one of the first studies that has shown that they are doing what they are intended to do,” Kalinowski said. “If the bears aren’t crossing the road and breeding, you’re going to have fragmented and inbred populations on each side of the road.”

This is a good solution, and the kind of thinking I’ve always liked. My vision for a better world involves a lot of interweaving – in this case literal – of human and “natural” systems. Another version of these crossings that I would say is equally important, and far cheaper to build, is tunnels under roads, primarily for reptiles and amphibians, who tend to move seasonally in large numbers, and often get run over.

The thing is, as the radio caller from earlier eventually realized, we can’t just put up signs telling animals where to cross. We have to figure out where the heaviest animal traffic is, and build crossings there. Many such installations also use fences to guide animals to the crossing, similar to how I tried to use them to guide shrews to my bucket traps, but the ideal is to arrange things so that animals need as little direction as possible. This means, of course, that the research is ongoing. These animal crossings have worked quite well, but there’s still room for improvement. It turns out that some deer and elk, entirely reasonably, are suspicious of these bridges that we’ve built for them. We climbed the mountain, so to speak, and part of what’s on the other side is a bunch of frightened even-toed ungulates.

For the study, Abelson and Blumstein worked with UCLA undergraduate student Mehdi Nojoumi to review a set of nearly 600 animal-activated videos collected by Montana State University road ecologist Anthony Clevenger that showed elk and white-tailed deer in the vicinity of a Trans-Canada Highway wildlife undercrossing near Banff National Park in Alberta. Nojoumi observed the behavior of the animals before and after vehicles passed and counted the vehicles.

The videos showed that elk and deer on the roadside near the tunnel often shifted from foraging for food to fleeing or becoming vigilant after vehicles passed; those animals that showed fear or vigilance were much less likely to use the crossing. If they continued grazing when vehicles passed, as some did, they were more likely to use the crossing.

Surprisingly, the animals reacted more strongly when vehicles passed infrequently than when the traffic flowed steadily.

“We are not certain why animals are more responsive to fewer vehicles,” said Abelson, who is now a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “It is possible that when there are many cars barreling down the road, they can be heard from farther away and don’t surprise the animals as much.”

The study reinforces that animals respond dynamically to human activities in ways that can influence if and how they use wildlife crossings. Abelson pointed out that some animals, like racoons, may be so accustomed to human activities that they don’t respond negatively at all, while others may be much more cautious. Behaviors differ from species to species, he stressed, and further research can help reveal these species-specific patterns.

“If we can figure out ways to leverage wildlife behaviors, we may be able to make wildlife crossings more effective,” Abelson said. “For example, walls to dampen sound or to reduce the visual effects of passing headlights may encourage use of crossing structures. We hope that this this study is just one of many that will examine different wildlife species and levels of traffic to better develop tools that increase the use of crossing structures by wildlife and, ultimately, protect the lives of humans and wildlife.”

To me, it seems like more steady traffic is less frightening because of its constancy. There’s a clear pattern of the loud things zipping by without regard for any of the animals around. If there’s nothing at all, and then suddenly there’s a car, that’s a break in the pattern – a new creature on the scene. When I lived in the country, I was much more aware of cars going by than I am in the city, and as I’ve said, I don’t think animals are all that different from us. Regardless, some of the differences that do  exist are pretty big, and we never know when we’ll find something unexpected, so as the scientists say, we should keep studying this stuff.

Personally, it’s my goal to see the need for car traffic decrease a great deal, as part of a global end to capitalist overproduction and a shift in priorities. I’d like to see most land-based transit happening by rail, thus eliminating much of this problem, but we will always have a need to understand how our actions as the force of nature we’ve become affect the ecosystems around us. I feel as though we still have a tendency to view the world in terms of problems and solutions, rather than as something more fluid and dynamic. “Solution” feels like the wrong word, most of the time, because our efforts to improve society are rarely so definitive, and in my way of thinking, it’s always worth trying to do better.

And we’ll never find away around the hypothetical problems with our solutions, until we actually get there. It’s said that a brave person dies but once, while a coward dies a thousand times before their death. As I understand it, that means that the so-called “brave” person accepts that death will come, and tries to live a good life anyway, while the “coward” spends all their imagining how they might die, as part of an obsession with avoiding the inevitable. It feels as though, as a society, we’ve become so obsessed with the ways that life could be worse, that we can barely remember that things could actually get better. I suppose the question is – will we be the ones building forest bridges to save lives, or will we be the deer, so startled by loud noises that we can’t bring ourselves to cross those bridges?

 

Snoozy Cat to you all, and a happy New Year!

“The old year now away is fled, the New Year it is entered”.

In many ways, the turning of one year to the next doesn’t matter much. It’s a way to track time, but while that’s the axle on which the wheels of history turn, it’s not what determines where we go. The New Year is a social construct. The thing is, social constructs are real, material forces in the world, and like gods, flags, and philosophies, the New Year has meaning, at its root, because enough people want it to. At the end of the day, that kind of meaning may be the only kind we really have.

This has been an interesting year for me. Some combination of a supportive family, total control over my time, and a legal situation that convinced me writing was actually the most “productive” use of my time meant that I’ve been writing daily for a year, in a way I’m not sure I ever have. More than that, having this control over what I write, how I write it, and why I write it has made the work immeasurably more fulfilling. I don’t know why it took so long for all of this to click, but in some ways it’s been exhilarating, after so many years of trying to get my brain to cooperate. I still have problems, of course, and there’s the nagging dread that something small will change and I’ll sink back into the brain fog and dysfunction, but for now? Life feels strangely good, despite everything that’s going on in the world.

I think that’s a testament to the importance of ensuring that everyone has this freedom, and of staying connected to humanity as a whole, so as to avoid that trap of assuming one’s own experience is universal. I’m also somewhat grounded by the fact that my current situation has a time limit on it. It is, speaking of social constructs, a result of Tegan’s visa as a graduate student. It’s my hope that between this blog and the novel I’m working on, I can bring in enough money to make writing continue to be viable when our situation changes. It feels like the odds are against me on that, but in this moment, there’s nothing for it but to keep working.

This has also been an “interesting” year, for a certain definition of interesting, because I lost Raksha. She had been a huge part of my life starting the summer after I graduated from college in 2007, all the way until this past spring, and I don’t think I could have asked for a better dog. She was gentle, sociable, smart, and eager to please. She also rarely barked, which made her a surprisingly good apartment dog, for a Shepherd mix that weighed 50lbs. She was probably happiest during the couple years we were living at my parent’s place in the woods, where she’d hang out, chase squirrels, and bask in the sun.

It’s strange to have a creature be a constant presence for a decade and a half, and then just… be gone. It’s something you always know is coming, but there’s a limit to how much easier that makes it, when it’s clear that nobody really wants things to end. I’ll probably never stop missing her, but writing these two paragraphs is more than I was able to do a few months ago. One benefit of aging is that experience can remind us that while time may not remove the pain entirely, things do get easier.

The picture shows Raksha, lying under my desk. It’s an oak roll-top desk I got at a thrift store, so the space under it is pretty small. The dog’s head and shoulders are visible in the bottom center of the picture, with her white undercoat showing through the black fur of her shoulders. Her cheeks are white, fading to tan on the muzzle, with a black stripe down the center of her snout. She has brown eyes with a little dark fur around them, and off-white, expressive eyebrows. This was her safe spot, where she’d hide (if I was at the desk) when the fireworks started.

Thankfully, she wasn’t my only companion. I still have Tegan and His Holiness Saint Ray the Cat. Tegan shared my grief, of course, having lived with Raksha for almost nine of her fifteen years. His Holiness apparently didn’t care at all. He was there on the grass when the vet put her down, but he was far more interested in whether we were going to feed him. I think his main problem was that the landscape changed. Thankfully, as long as we keep feeding him and providing warmth and shelter, he will continue to be a loving stuffed animal of a housemate.

Honestly, I think the dog was more like a roommate that he had to put up with than someone he actually cared about. When Tegan’s gone for a long period of time, he gets fussy, and when she spends the day out of the house, he makes it his mission to prevent her from leaving again by sitting on her lap the second it becomes possible to do so. He’ll spend lots of time there when she’s home all day, too, but there’s less urgency to it. Tegan, you will be surprised to learn, is largely OK with this.

The other day, he took up residence while she watched a movie (I think it was The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – I was working and didn’t feel like watching it), and he discovered that, when she wasn’t actively using it for work, her laptop made an excellent pillow!

His Holiness, a chunky British shorthair cat, is sleeping on Tegan’s lap, on top of a plaid comforter, using her laptop as a pillow. His fur looks golden-brown with black stripes, except for the plush, white fur on his muzzle, cheeks, neck, and paws. That particular spot on the laptop generates its own heat, and is therefor the cat’s One True Love.

Tegan sent me a couple pictures that seemed worth sharing with you all. He used to have a problem with comforters – the squishiness bothered him for some reason – but he has made his peace, and seems to appreciate them now, especially when they have the added benefit of being over a lap.

It’s true what you’ve heard – you really can have too much of a good thing! He got overheated, so he had to curl away from the laptop and plant his face in the comforter.

A few days before this, Tegan had been using her old sleeping bag to keep warm while she worked out in the living room, and His Holiness had apparently decided that that sleeping bag was the best thing ever created, and spent several entire days and nights mostly sleeping on it, regardless of where we were. He goes through phases like that with random spots in the house sometimes, like the box he was obsessed with a little while back.

Apparently he had reached the end of that phase, however, because when I came to bed, he decided to stick around, and found a little space above my pillow.

In this picture, you can see me using one side of the pillow, and His Holiness using the other. Neither of us appreciated the flash, but it does show how glossy the soft black fur on his head is.

I have never encountered a cat that was so fond of pillows – not as a thing to lie on but as, well, a social construct. It’s not always, but often he likes having his head propped up on something other than his sleeping surface. This means that he will often share a pillow with one of us, by curling up next to it, and putting his head on it. Maybe this is something they all do and I’m just noticing it with my cat, but it’s such a marked preference with him, it seems to stand out in a way that I feel I would have noticed.

Either way, it’s extremely cute, and I’m grateful to have him in my life.

2023 looks to be an interesting year, not just in the sense of the curse of “interesting times”, but also because it feels sort of like a next stage for my attempt to hold on to a lifestyle that I actually find fulfilling. As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m not going to be posing anything for the first week in January. It’s not exactly a week “off”, but my biggest upcoming goal is to get a solid draft of my current novel finished by the end of Spring. I’m aiming for April, but I’m unsure of my ability to get there. Fiction’s harder for me than nonfiction in many ways. I didn’t get as far as I wanted to in November, but I did make real progress, and I’ve made more over the past month. I think it’ll be a fun book, and a good, if somewhat sneaky beginning to what I hope will be a unique and captivating fantasy epic.

I’m still working on how I want to go about publishing it, but I’m leaning towards self-publication or something close to it. At some point this year, I’ll also start releasing bits and pieces as teasers, and probably a little more than that for my patrons (who have the option to name characters). It’s a sword-and-sorcery story that follows a young mage named Tad, who signs up to serve the empire in which he was born. In that regard, the setup is familiar, and in many ways this will be just another fantasy novel in a quasi-medieval setting. That said, I find I cannot be satisfied with a society that has rulers in fiction any more than in reality, and the ghosts of “past” injustice continue to haunt us in any world, until we do what is needed to appease them and mend the damage.

What potions require mushrooms, harvested from a swamp in the dark of the New Moon? What secrets are held within the red-streaked black marble of the Imperial palace? How much of the world around us is a lie? What waits at the bottom of a bottomless pit? How much can a friendship withstand?

In 2023, I mean to answer these questions and more. In time, of course, the answers will be available to all who buy my books, but readers of this blog may get early or inside information, and my patrons will play a role in shaping this world, should they want it.

And, of course, Oceanoxia will continue. Once my break is over, I plan on posting daily as I have been. Going forward, I’ll do my best do provide better written summaries and discussions of Youtube videos I post. I think it was The Great American Satan that pointed out that people likely to read a blog like this might be less interested in watching videos than in, well, reading. It’s a good point and one I’ll be trying to keep in mind. I had started using Youtube as a way to post content when I didn’t have anything better, and I’m sure I’ll still do that from time to time, but like I said – I’m trying to make a living out of this, and beyond periodically haranguing people for money, Oceanoxia needs to be something that people feel is worth supporting.

I’ve found it hard, recently, to feel hopeful about the start of a new year. There’s a lot of bad in the world right now, and a lot of power behind the effort to keep things that way. In terms of the world at large, well, it doesn’t feel like things are getting better soon. In terms of my own life? It’s hard to tell, but I have real hopes for my current projects, and for another year in which it feels like I’m actually making progress as a craftsman. In a lot of ways, that’s most of what I want out of my personal life, and I’m grateful for this opportunity, however long it lasts.

I hope you all have a good night, whatever your plans tonight, and I hope that 2023 is filled with pleasant surprises for all of us.

In terms of human cost, Paris climate goals are likely insufficient.

Yesterday I wrote about the danger of assuming, as the CEO of Shell apparently does, that we’ll be able to cool down the planet in the second half of the century, even if we overshoot the targets set in the Paris agreement by 2050. For those who don’t want to read the post, it’s pretty straightforward: The warmer it gets, the better the odds of passing a “tipping point”, beyond which the planet would continue warming without our help, and possibly even in spite of our efforts to cool it. That’s a danger to all of us, obviously, but even within that risky bet that’s apparently being made with our lives, there are people whose lives have already been written off altogether.

Keep in mind, going forward, that “serious” people consider it reasonable to allow us to pass 1.5-2°C, because we’ll just bring the temperature down after. Their best-case scenario still involves a huge amount of ice melt, as the temperature continues to rise. That, in turn, means significantly more sea level rise, and devastation for those most at risk. The problem is that Antarctica, being an entire continent of ice, is a literally massive heat sink. Keep in mind that all of the greenhouse gasses we’ve added to the atmosphere are trapping an amount of heat equivalent the heat of four Hiroshima-sized atomic explosions per second. That’s as of 2013, so it’s probably at least a bit higher now, but the other thing they note is that most of that energy is going straight into the oceans and ice. That doesn’t just get absorbed, it causes changes. In the oceans, it causes thermal expansion, and in the ice, of course, it causes melting. Both of those increase sea level, but that doesn’t affect everyone the same.

This video from Minute Physics is a good primer, but basically gravity affects sea level, so big chunks of mass, like mountains, draw the oceans toward them, raising local sea level above what it would have been without mountains. The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are big chunks of mass, similar in scale to mountains, and as they melt, the gravitational force they exert on the oceans eases. This means that the ocean retreats from the melting ice, and “settles” towards a new center of gravity. The effect of this is that ice melting in Greenland is accelerating sea level rise in my old stomping grounds of New England (among other places), not just because it’s adding water to the oceans, but also because it’s effectively “tilting” the oceans by changing how gravity pulls at them.

That means that, as huge amounts of heat continue to be absorbed by ocean and by ice, sea level rise will continue accelerating, which will hit those areas in the gravitational “danger zones” the hardest. It’s something that, in theory, a nation like the U.S. can cope with easily, but when we move from Greenland south to Antarctica, the countries being put in danger have neither the land nor the wealth to survives casual attitudes about so-called “safe” amounts of warming:

While rising temperatures are having many deleterious effects on global ecosystems, economies and human wellbeing, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts emphasize that temperature alone is not a sufficient basis for climate policy. The team focused on the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds the world’s largest store of freshwater—enough to raise the oceans by 58 meters, and which is melting at an accelerating pace. But the physics of the ice sheet itself also contribute to its liquification, which will continue for millennia, even if global carbon emissions are reigned in. And because melting ice can slow rising temperatures in the atmosphere, it is conceivable that the melting ice sheet could help maintain what is commonly considered a “safe” level of warming, 1.5 degrees, say, while actually allowing for devastating sea-level rise. Furthermore, all that Antarctic meltwater won’t cause the same amount of sea-level rise everywhere in the world. Some areas in the Caribbean Sea as well as the Indian and Pacific Oceans will experience a disproportionate share of the sea-level rise from Antarctic ice—up to 33% greater than the global average.

This gap between temperature and sea level has immediate repercussions for many places throughout the world, and especially for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), an organization of 39 island and coastal nations across the globe. Indeed, the paper’s authors show that, though AOSIS countries have emitted a negligible portion of the planet’s anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, they are bearing the brunt of the world’s rising waters.

“Temperature is not the only way to track global climate change,” says Shaina Sadai, the paper’s lead author, who completed this research as part of her doctoral studies in geosciences at UMass Amherst, “but it became the iconic metric in the Paris Agreement. Knowing that Antarctic melt can delay temperature rise while increasing sea levels, I wondered what it meant for climate justice. But climate science alone can’t answer that question of justice.”

I think that last point is worth dwelling on. It’s easy to forget that temperature isn’t the only metric to watch. Sea level rise is an important one as well, of course, but a huge portion of climate data, past and present, isn’t just from temperature measurements and a few physics equations. We know what’s likely to happen to the surface of our planet because we’ve been able to track what it’s already doing, and we can look at fossils from past warming events. Fossil pollen, for example, can give us an idea of past climates and climate change, by telling us about the plants that lived in a given area at the time. Likewise, things like the “insect apocalypse”, mass crab-death, reef bleaching, and a dozen other things can be a metric. Temperature tells us about energy buildup, but other data can tell us how that actually affects the complex systems of a planet’s biosphere.

One other such metric, arguably the most important to humans, is the degree to which climate change is affecting humanity. In that regard, I would say that we are actively failing, it’s guaranteed to get worse with the current crowd of crooks in charge. It really does seem as though they’ve just written off large portions of humanity (almost none of whom are white), and are betting that they can bullshit their way through hundreds of millions of deaths, and keep their power the whole time.

We have made progress in the right direction, but unless you have faith in The Invisible Hand of the Free Market, there’s no way it’s more than a baby step in the right direction, with a desperate hope that “nudging” the market will solve everything. We need to be doing more, and not as individuals – as a species. As I so often say, those to whom we’ve given most of the world’s wealth and power have already demonstrated that they value human life far, far less than maintaining the system that put them where they are. That does mean that it comes back to us doing more, but the “more” that we should be doing is less about power consumption, and more about our political power, as people who value both life, and freedom.

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!

Ancient shipwreck points to sophisticated material supply chain 2,000 years ago

I’ve been having a little trouble figuring out what the scale of our overproduction problem is. I know it’s big, between food waste and planned obsolescence, but how big? Or, put another way, how much could we scale back on resource extraction and general production, if we were running things based on the needs of a post-capitalist, degrowth/steady-state society? To my knowledge, most of the metals and other such resources that were easy to access were consumed long ago, but if we account for the amount of stuff in dumps and landfills around the world, would there even be a need for supply chains anywhere near the current scale? My goal, ideally, is to have a state of material abundance for everyone, in the sense of “rather luxurious caves, with high-efficiency facilities“, but I’m not sure what that would actually require.

The reason I’m wondering, is that last month, some research was published about an ancient Mediterranean shipwreck that’s been a subject of study since the 1980s:

More than 2,000 years before the Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic Ocean, another famous ship wrecked in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern shores of Uluburun — in present-day Turkey — carrying tons of rare metal. Since its discovery in 1982, scientists have been studying the contents of the Uluburun shipwreck to gain a better understanding of the people and political organizations that dominated the time period known as the Late

Now, a team of scientists, including Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, have uncovered a surprising finding: small communities of highland pastoralists living in present-day Uzbekistan in Central Asia produced and supplied roughly one-third of the tin found aboard the ship — tin that was en route to markets around the Mediterranean to be made into coveted bronze metal.

The research, published on November 30 in Science Advances, was made possible by advances in geochemical analyses that enabled researchers to determine with high-level certainty that some of the tin originated from a prehistoric mine in Uzbekistan, more than 2,000 miles from Haifa, where the ill-fated ship loaded its cargo.

But how could that be? During this period, the mining regions of Central Asia were occupied by small communities of highlander pastoralists — far from a major industrial center or empire. And the terrain between the two locations — which passes through Iran and Mesopotamia — was rugged, which would have made it extremely difficult to pass tons of heavy metal.

Frachetti and other archaeologists and historians were enlisted to help put the puzzle pieces together. Their findings unveiled a shockingly complex supply chain that involved multiple steps to get the tin from the small mining community to the Mediterranean marketplace.

“It appears these local miners had access to vast international networks and — through overland trade and other forms of connectivity — were able to pass this all-important commodity all the way to the Mediterranean,” Frachetti said.

“It’s quite amazing to learn that a culturally diverse, multiregional and multivector system of trade underpinned Eurasian tin exchange during the Late Bronze Age.”

Adding to the mystique is the fact that the mining industry appears to have been run by small-scale local communities or free laborers who negotiated this marketplace outside of the control of kings, emperors or other political organizations, Frachetti said.

“To put it into perspective, this would be the trade equivalent of the entire United States sourcing its energy needs from small backyard oil rigs in central Kansas,” he said.

Interesting…

Very interesting. I’m assuming that the backyard oil rig metaphor is a bit of an exaggeration, but the reality is that I don’t know by how much. Even the scaled-back system I think we should be aiming for would still require a much more complex system, by the sheer diversity of resources required, right? At the same time, we’ve got tools available that they didn’t have 2,000 years ago, and honestly, we’ve had tools that could get the job done for decades. I can’t say anything for certain, but I feel like maybe the Kansas backyard oil rigs aren’t as hyperbolic as it first appeared.

I’m in the business of imagining what the world could look like, and this glimpse of what it did look like makes me wonder to what degree a supply chain like that could work in a more high-tech society.

For one example, if we continue on the current trend of finding ways to make all sorts of interesting carbon-based stuff out of processed plant material, would it be possible for a region to “make a living” with a few thousand small-scale operations that practice coppicing, or that grow and harvest hemp. It seems plausible that that would be more viable in a less growth-obsessed society. Maybe the biggest difference would be that instead of all those concentrated resources being used to power imperial expansion and the like, they’d be re-distributed back through the supply web.

The biggest commonality in all these great feats of the past, and the massive achievements of the present, is people working together. That’s how pretty much everything cool we’ve ever done has happened. Continent-spanning trade doesn’t require either the economic systems of the present, or the impressive technology we’ve developed. Having billions more people is a valid consideration, but that’s also billions more workers able to cooperate on creating and transporting stuff. Maybe it’s just me, but I find that this story from the deep past sparks just a little hope for the future.

Caturday come on Wednesday this week.

I find Irish winters to be an interesting and novel experience. I’m further north here than pretty much the entire United States, but thanks to oceanic currents, it never gets as cold as the winters of my homeland. That said, the cold is still very much a problem. To begin with, the housing is designed for the average climate. That means that there’s basically no insulation. Worse, because these apartments were built with gas boilers, there are vents to the outside in every room. Add in the apparently lazy installation of the windows, and the result is a very drafty apartment that does not hold heat for long. Its natural resting temperature seems to be around 50°F/10°C, when the outdoor temperature is around freezing, and it gets there quite quickly. More than that, it’s always very humid here, and that really makes a difference. Recently, we got about half an inch of snow, and it’s been just cold enough to keep most of it around. At the same time, the humidity has been hovering around 100%. That means that it’s been feeling about ten degrees colder than it actually is.

I took the cat out into the snow when it was falling, to see his reaction. Initially, he just hid in the bushes, but when I actually carried him to a salad station, he was willing to eat some grass. He was, however, not happy about the snowflakes falling on his delicate fur.

His holiness was not thrilled about the cold, wet stuff on his toebeans. He also did not appreciate things falling on his back. The salad was good, though. The image, for those who can’t see, is of a chubby British shorthair cat, partially hidden by a tree trunk. His fur is mostly dark, but he’s got white on his face, neck, and paws that’s as pure as the falling snow. He’s sitting on snowy grass, watching flakes fall.

After that, he actually was willing to play a little. I tried, and failed to get a video of him chasing snowballs, but it was extremely cute. Then, he chased one into a more brightly lit area, and his tiny brain was short-circuited by the combination of big flakes falling, and big shadows falling with them. He started randomly chasing everything at once until he reached a car, and retreated into the blessed darkness underneath it.

In this somewhat blurry photo, you can see His Holiness huddled under my neighbor’s car. His dark fur blends in with the background, but you can see the white on his muzzle, forehead, cheeks, and neck, and you can see his stubby white paws poking out. He’s looking to the side, and his eye is glowing a little from the camera flash. A couple cat pawprints are visible in the snowy foreground.

Eventually, I managed to coax him out from under the car, and we went back inside.

I’ve been maintaining a livable temperature by running a space heater in my little workroom, where I already spend most of my time. It’s cheaper than running the boiler to heat the whole flat, and thankfully the Irish government has been handing out electricity credits to help people get through the winter.

A couple days later, we awoke to find ourselves shrouded in fog, so I decided to see if I could get some evocative pictures during the cat’s salad run. I still need to get a new charger for my camera, and I find it hard capture the feel of a foggy day anyway, but I tried my best. It felt cold enough that the mist should have been freezing out of the air, but instead it hung around to make everything feel colder.

His Holiness made his usual first stop, giving me a chance to grab this picture. Fog seems to hold on to smells, so the air was full of slightly stale wood smoke, that seemed to be diffusing through the water droplets more than blowing from any definable source The bare branches of the maple trees stand out against the white fog that seems to have consumed the world outside our little oasis of reality.

This weather was much more acceptable to His sensibilities, but he still wasn’t thrilled about the cold, wet, white stuff on the ground, so when it came time to move on from the first grass patch, he was careful to walk where it was safe.

 

His Holiness has dark fur – brown-gray on the sides, with black stripes that thicken into the black that runs along his spine. His tail is similarly striped with a black tip. He’s a chunky cat, with thick fur that makes him look chunkier. His white legs seem stubbier than they are poking out from other the imposing bulk of his torso. In the picture, you can see that he’s walking along a curb where the snow has melted, forming a clear path through the treacherous white landscape. There was too much snow by that stump for him to graze there.

 

He followed that trail around to an area that had gotten a little more solar radiation, and stopped for a blessedly snow-free bit of roughage.

His Holiness is sitting on the corner of the paved walkway, looking back towards the mist-shrouded house. You can see the green grass fading smoothly into white snow behind him, contrasted with the tree trunk that fills the center of the picture.

Shortly after taking this picture, I decided it was time for both of us to go back inside to where it was warm.

For those of you who’re wondering about the title, it’s a reference to a very old newspaper comic called Pogo, about the lives of various anthropomorphic swamp critters somewhere in Georgia. I don’t need to go into too much detail, but Churchill “Churchy” LaFemme is a turtle with an interesting perspective on the transitive property of days:

The image is a four panel comic strip. In panel one, Pogo Possum is scooping a bucket of water, while angrily saying,

If you want to help me feed His Holiness, that we might be spared his divine wrath, or you just want me to be able to do things like eat and have shelter, consider tossing me a little money at patreon.com/oceanoxia. It can be as little as a few cents a day, and for immigration reasons it’s my only form of income right now. See this as me passing around the hat at the end of a bit.

Irish study confirms: A four-day work week is better for everyone.

I don’t often take days off. Some days I’ll do the bare minimum, but I’m still doing at least a little work. Part of that is because I’m afraid that if I take time off, I won’t be able to start back up with daily posting. A lot of it is that if I hope to ever get to the point where I’m making even minimum wage, I need to post often, and have content that people might consider paying for (patreon.com/oceanoxia). Basically, I’m an internet busker, and if I’m not putting in the time, I can’t expect to make a living. Honestly, I don’t expect that even if I do put in the time, which is part of why I’m working on the novel I’ve mentioned before. All of this is to say that I basically have a 7 day work week, which pulls in very little money (though you could help change that!), which makes it just a little amusing to write about a resoundingly successful trial of a four-day work week that took place right here in Ireland!

The project, backed by Fórsa and carried out in partnership by Four-Day Week Ireland, University College Dublin (UCD), and Boston College, examined the financial, social, and environmental impact that a four-day working week would have on businesses and employees in Ireland.

Following the trial, 100 per cent of employees indicated they would like to continue a reduced work schedule. Nine of the 12 companies involved are committed to continuing with the four-day week, while the remaining three are planning to continue but have not made a long-term commitment.

Lead researcher Dr Orla Kelly said: “All participating organisations plan to continue the reduced work schedule. Productivity levels are up. We found significant improvements across a wide range of well-being metrics, including positive affect, work-family and work-life balance, and several domains of life satisfaction.

“Conversely, stress, burnout, fatigue, and work-family conflict significantly declined. Levels of sleep deprivation have also fallen dramatically. We observed an increase across three forms of pro-environmental behaviour.

“The trial was particularly successful for women. They reported a significantly greater improvement in life satisfaction, had larger gains in sleep time and reported feeling more secure in their employment. Our findings hold important lessons for the future of work in this country.”

I’m not surprised. I’m a huge advocate of people having as much control over their own time as possible, and every time I see research on it, the result seems to be the same – moving to fewer days on the job is better for everyone, even the bosses. The one way it’s not better, which the articles I read don’t mention, is that it means that bosses have less control over their workers’ lives. Personally, I don’t think that’s a “downside” worth considering, but I think it’s something that does need to be considered when thinking about the motivations of business owners. A disproportionate number of them seem to be some form of petty tyrant.

It’s somewhat irritating to me that “improves productivity for employers” always has to be a part of it, though:

“In today’s working world there’s a mismatch between the amount of time we spend working and the time we spend with our families and friends. The four-day week can be at the forefront of a new age of work, providing transformative social benefits without losing pay or productivity.”

In a just world, the fact that the companies can afford it, and that it makes the workers’ lives better, would be enough. Still, in this case it seems that the drive for “more productivity” lines up with the goal of more freedom for workers, since happy, healthy workers tend to be more competent as well.

Despite this research, I suspect that it will be a long, hard struggle to make a shorter work week the norm. Powerful people seem to have a deep horror of any movement away from the arrangement that gave them their power, so we have to make the world better despite them.

But the case can be made, and studies like this show how important it is to fight for this stuff. Another day off is a huge boon in a world where so much of our time is dictated by work, getting to and from work, and trying to find moments to live in between it all. Further, with overproduction driving this climate crisis, a lot of the work that’s being done now needs to stop being done, and it would be good, in my view, if that didn’t result in anyone losing their home or going hungry. Some of that work can be replaced with environmental cleanup and restoration work – there’s a lot to do – but this is a golden opportunity to start to undo some of the social damage that has been done over the last couple centuries, and start moving towards a world where the point of life isn’t working, but living.

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!

Advances in avian culinary technology open new front in The Toad Wars

One of my favorite “tropes” in modern environmentalism is the idea of solving human problems by improving, amplifying, or adjusting ecosystem services. This covers all sorts of things, but I think the first example I ever heard of was using predatory insects – ladybugs – to control agricultural pests. That was my first example, but not my favorite. My favorite, as I mentioned recently, is the story of cane toads in Australia. It’s an example of an almost-clever idea that has had horrible, and sometimes hilarious results. If nothing else, it has given us this gem of a nature documentary, which you can watch with your family while you eat Thanksgiving dinner!

That’s high art, if ever there was such a thing. Truly a masterpiece of cinema.

Now, why do I bring this up, other than the fact that it lets me write about something easy while my mind is elsewhere? Well, a new front has been opened in the Cane Toad Wars, and it comes to us thanks to the very latest in avian innovation. May I present to you, the Ibis-devised “stress-and-wash” technique for cane toad cuisine?

Ibis are often seen feeding on food dumped by humans, but citizen scientists are increasingly reporting the native species is dining out on toxic cane toads.

Gold Coast coordinator of Watergum’s Cane Toads program Emily Vincent said the “stress and wash” method had been viewed numerous times by citizen scientists.

“It’s quite amusing to watch and it’s quite different from other native species and their methods of eating them,” she said.

“The ibis will pick up cane toads and they will flick them about and stress out the toads.

“What this does is it makes the cane toads release toxins from the parotoid gland at the back of their neck, which is their defence mechanism when they’re faced with predators.

“Then they’ll take them down to the creek and wash them.”
Ms Vincent said it was encouraging to see the ibis capitalising on the food source, which was first introduced into Australia in 1935 to control cane beetles in Queensland’s sugarcane crops.

The cane toad has since spread into New South Wales, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

“We have lots and lots of ibis in Australia,” she said.

“This is a learned behaviour and it’s been observed in multiple different regions.

“I think it will have an impact, especially as more species tag along and copy the behaviour.”

The article has some other useful information, including the fact that while the toad’s poison is apparently unpleasant for birds, it doesn’t actually do a whole lot to them. They mainly avoid it because of the flavor. I do feel bad for the toads (as I feel bad for some shown in the video above), but Australia’s ecosystem could really use a break, so it’s nice to see this.

Maybe this will finally bring peace between the Australians and the Ibis. I certainly hope so, given that country’s record when it comes to fighting birds, but it’s hard to say. In the meantime, here’s the current state of things as I understand it: