Video: Hard work is a grift.

Hey, so because of personal reasons I’ve had trouble writing the past couple days. It is very fortuitous that Thought Slime put up this video today. I’m about 2 minutes in, and this feels uncomfortably like a description of me, or at least some aspects of my life. At around 4 minutes, it just starts describing my work process, which feels a little rude to do without consulting me first! Fortunately, this video is about more than how my brain works (and nobody else’s). It’s about the concept and history of “laziness” in general, and how it just destroys people; not in isolation, but in conjunction with everything else in society.

Nature will help clean up plastic pollution, we just need top stop adding to the problem

For most of my life, the conventional wisdom has been that because nothing eats plastic, it will last for thousands of years, so we need to clean it all up. I can’t back this up with numbers, but I feel like this approach is why people have been so taken with things like Ocean Cleanup. Rebecca Watson has pointed out the problems with that particular endeavor, and as with most pollution, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Our energy would be far better spent reducing the amount of plastic waste generated in the first place.

But when it comes to cleanup – which I do think we should do – it’s encouraging, and a little concerning to know that Earth’s bacteria have been evolving to take advantage of this strange, calorically dense food we’ve been leaving all over the place:

A study of 29 European lakes has found that some naturally-occurring lake bacteria grow faster and more efficiently on the remains of plastic bags than on natural matter like leaves and twigs.

The bacteria break down the carbon compounds in plastic to use as food for their growth.

The scientists say that enriching waters with particular species of bacteria could be a natural way to remove plastic pollution from the environment.

The effect is pronounced: the rate of bacterial growth more than doubled when plastic pollution raised the overall carbon level in lake water by just 4%.

The results suggest that the plastic pollution in lakes is ‘priming’ the bacteria for rapid growth –  the bacteria are not only breaking down the plastic but are then more able to break down other natural carbon compounds in the lake.

Lake bacteria were found to favour plastic-derived carbon compounds over natural ones. The researchers think this is because the carbon compounds from plastics are easier for the bacteria to break down and use as food.

The scientists caution that this does not condone ongoing plastic pollution. Some of the compounds within plastics can have toxic effects on the environment, particularly at high concentrations.

The findings are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

“It’s almost like the plastic pollution is getting the bacteria’s appetite going. The bacteria use the plastic as food first, because it’s easy to break down, and then they’re more able to break down some of the more difficult food – the natural organic matter in the lake,” said Dr Andrew Tanentzap in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, senior author of the paper.

He added: “This suggests that plastic pollution is stimulating the whole food web in lakes, because more bacteria means more food for the bigger organisms like ducks and fish.”

The effect varied depending on the diversity of bacterial species present in the lake water – lakes with more different species were better at breaking down plastic pollution.

That mention of compounds within plastics is especially important, I think. I expect more and more bacteria to be eating plastic the world over, and from what I can tell that means a couple things for the those more toxic compounds. Some of them may bio-accumulate – becoming more and more concentrated in the bodies of creatures higher on the food chain (like us). Some may end up just mixing with the sediment, or floating around in the water causing trouble. It’s hard to know.

And as with so many other forms of pollution, the scale at which we’re pumping out this stuff far exceeds the biosphere’s ability to handle it. There’s an important role for active cleanup, especially if we want to remove that plastic from the food web, but it will be useless if we don’t stop dumping new plastic faster than we could ever clean it up.

In the meantime, it seems like plastic could take up an increasingly important role in ecosystems around the world.

The new study also found that bacteria removed more plastic pollution in lakes that had fewer unique natural carbon compounds. This is because the bacteria in the lake water had fewer other food sources.

The results will help to prioritise lakes where pollution control is most urgent. If a lake has a lot of plastic pollution, but low bacterial diversity and a lot of different natural organic compounds, then its ecosystem will be more vulnerable to damage.

“Unfortunately, plastics will pollute our environment for decades. On the positive side, our study helps to identify microbes that could be harnessed to help break down plastic waste and better manage environmental pollution,” said Professor David Aldridge in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who was involved in the study.

The study involved sampling 29 lakes across Scandinavia between August and September 2019. To assess a range of conditions, these lakes differed in latitude, depth, area, average surface temperature and diversity of dissolved carbon-based molecules.

The scientists cut up plastic bags from four major UK shopping chains, and shook these in water until their carbon compounds were released.

At each lake, glass bottles were filled with lake water. A small amount of the ‘plastic water’ was added to half of these, to represent the amount of carbon leached from plastics into the environment, and the same amount of distilled water was added to the others. After 72 hours in the dark, bacterial activity was measured in each of the bottles.

The study measured bacterial growth – by increase in mass, and the efficiency of bacterial growth – by the amount of carbon-dioxide released in the process of growing.

In the water with plastic-derived carbon compounds, the bacteria had doubled in mass very efficiently. Around 50% of this carbon was incorporated into the bacteria in 72 hours.

“Our study shows that when carrier bags enter lakes and rivers they can have dramatic and unexpected impacts on the entire ecosystem. Hopefully our results will encourage people to be even more careful about how they dispose of plastic waste,” said Eleanor Sheridan in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, first author of the study who undertook the work as part of a final-year undergraduate project.

This appeals a great deal to the cyberpunk dystopia fan in me, but have to say I’d rather we had just dealt with these environmental problems when discovered them decades ago.

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!

We must learn to channel our inner pocket gopher

Biomimicry is a fascinating concept in a lot of ways. The basic idea is pretty straightforward – evolution is a process of trial and error that’s been doing on for billions of years, and there are certain physical or behavioral patterns that show up repeatedly, or hang around for eons, because they work. So, we study those things, figure out how and why they work so well, and then find ways to apply them to technology. It has been pretty popular for while now, and I’ve seen it applied to renewable energy, architecture, military tactics, medicine, and more.

This is not a new process for our species. If I had to guess, I’d say we were learning how to do things by watching other animals long before our ancestors were human. Watching and trying out things done by other organisms seems to be a basic part of the “monkey” operating system in general. Myths, legends, and fables from around the globe are filled with people learning important lessons from nature, and that’s one of those ancient traditions that I think is absolutely worth keeping.

This time, however, it’s a little different. There are lessons for us to consider for our society, but they’re not new lessons for us. In pocket gophers, we find an example of evolution finding a useful approach to agriculture that matches one we’ve discovered for ourselves before:

“It really depends on how ‘farming’ is defined,” says Putz. “If farming requires that crops be planted, then gophers don’t qualify. But this seems like a far too narrow definition for anyone with a more horticultural perspective in which crops are carefully managed — such as fruit trees in forests — but not necessarily planted. With this perspective, the origins of agriculture included Mesopotamian annual cereal and pulse crop cultivation as well as maize cultivation in the Americas, but many cultures around the world developed agriculture based on perennial crops, many of which they didn’t plant but did tend.”

I don’t think that this approach to subsistence is a viable way to generate food for all of humanity, but I do think that it would be a brilliant way for us to both add variety to our diets, and to repair the harm we’ve done to ourselves by trying to separate ourselves from “nature”. Because of the changes we’ve made to Earth’s biosphere, we desperately need to prioritize ecosystem management, if only out of self-preservation. I think that this approach is one we should strongly consider. That said, I think it is time to learn what the gophers have to teach us:

“Southeastern pocket gophers are the first non-human mammalian farmers,” says F. E. “Jack” Putz of the University of Florida, Gainesville. “Farming is known among species of ants, beetles, and termites, but not other mammals.”

Veronica Selden and Putz report that pocket gophers don’t just eat roots that happen to grow in the paths of new tunnels they excavate. Instead, they provide conditions that favor root growth, by spreading their own waste as fertilizer. As a result, the authors argue that — by promoting root growth in their tunnels and then harvesting or cropping those roots — southeastern pocket gophers have stumbled upon a food production system that qualifies as farming.

[…]

Selden and Putz suggest that root cropping may explain why gophers keep and defend such extensive tunnel systems. The tunnels are comparable to rows of crops. If indeed what they’re doing counts as farming, then the gophers are the first non-human mammal known to farm.

“Pocket gophers are great examples of ecosystem engineers that turn over soil thereby aerating it and bringing nutrients back to the surface,” says Putz. “They eat only roots, some of which they grow themselves, and seldom interfere with human activities.”

They note that further study may reveal whether gophers eat fungi and how seasonal variation in the energetic contributions of roots growing into tunnels relates to their activity cycles. It’s not clear yet how their underground activities affect vegetation at the surface.

“Whether or not [pocket gophers] qualify as farmers, root cultivation is worth further investigation,” the researchers write.

I hereby declare that they qualify as farmers. Glad I could clear that up.

The article also mentions that these roots make up anywhere from 20% to 60% of the gophers’ daily calories. That’s a pretty broad range, at least to my eyes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if studying creatures like this is pretty difficult, especially if you don’t want to harm them and their farms in the process. Regardless, I think this is really cool!

I also think it’s worth underlining the fact that they are not necessarily incompatible with human agriculture – just the way we do it right now. Youtube is full of videos about how to kill pocket gophers, but I could see them actually being extremely useful for the “edible ecosystem” approach.

I also, as a science fiction writer, am fascinated by the possibilities that could be uncovered by modeling ourselves more after the humble gopher. Specifically, I think we should live underground, and farm in tunnels.

Sort of.

Underground cities have been discussed as a way to adapt to climate change for a while now. I’ve dabbled in the concept a bit – I’ve got a stalled novel about a solar-powered steampunk society living under the vast, lethally hot desert of the American Midwest, a few centuries in the future. Maybe if I hit a future patreon goal I’ll patch some of it up and publish it here for fun (sign up at patreon.com/oceanoxia, featuring new content and rewards starting in August!). I think there are a lot of problems with underground living – especially at the scale of a modern city – of which we can see only those on the surface. Even so, as I keep saying, we’re facing the end of the world as we know it, and that means that we need to be open to modes of living that would not have been worth the effort in the past.

I also don’t think that we need to resort to living in tunnels and farming indoors or underground to take advantage of this. Farming from tunnels could also be a way of doing it safely in extreme heat, as well as irrigating crops without the evaporative water loss from spraying. Subsurface irrigation is a thing that’s been used for a while now (though less than it should be in these days of shrinking water supplies), but I think it’d be interesting to see it combined with things like hydroponics or aeroponics as a way to continue taking advantage of direct sunlight, without putting farmers at risk.

Also we should store things in our cheeks.

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!

Morbid Monday: Heatwave edition

It is far too hot. Over the last three years, the cool climate of these islands has spoiled me a little, but at 31.1°C/88°F, I’d be suffering even if I was more accustomed to the heat. It’s at times like this that I find it hardest not to think about what the rest of my life might look like. A fair amount of attention has been paid to the fact that this heat wave is almost identical to a hypothetical 2050 forecast run two years ago to raise awareness about climate change.

One of the most consistent themes in climate science over the past couple decades has been the ways in which the temperature is rising faster than expected, and the ways in which that’s causing problems faster than expected. The current heat wave has already killed over one thousand people on the Iberian Peninsula, and it is an absolute certainty that it has killed a great many people in the other affected countries. And, in case you need reminding, there are other heat waves happening around the world at the same time, and we are only halfway through July.

This is at 1.2°C over pre-industrial temperatures.

The rate of warming has been increasing, and it’s pretty much certain that that acceleration will itself accelerate in the coming decades. We are currently on track for a whole host of worst-case scenarios, and what do our political leaders do? Toady up to the same vicious monsters they’ve always aligned with, and push for more fossil fuel extraction.

Either these people actively want to bring about the extinction of humanity, or they are so senile, pampered, ignorant and arrogant that they truly cannot comprehend what is happening. Whether through malice or incompetence is irrelevant – these people are on track to getting us all killed.

In case it wasn’t clear, that’s not hyperbole. The path we’ve all been forced to take will lead to our extinction if we don’t make extremely big changes extremely soon. That extinction could happen a lot faster than a lot of people seem willing to consider.

And it’s going to be a miserable death. I’m writing this at 2am because I decided to just sleep through the hottest part of the day. The sun set a few hours ago, and it has cooled down a little, though there’s still depressingly little breeze. I’m irritable in the heat, and physically uncomfortable. It feels like it’s tiring just to exist, let alone work. Year after year, decade after decade, it’s going to just keep getting hotter. Heat waves are going to keep getting longer, and more intense, which means more and more people are going to suffer and die, and all of this was preventable.

Never forget that.

Never forget the future that these fuckers have stolen from us, and never forgive them for their crimes.

In spite of it all, I still think a better world is possible. I think we can reforge our civilization into one that can actually last, and can uplift everyone. What we can’t do is build that world in the image of the one we’ve got today. Obviously that means a more just and equal society, but it also means radically different infrastructure.

Take this heat wave, for example. Even without melting pavement, the way we live will not work in the climate we’re creating. If we want to avoid massive death from heat, we’re going to need to make air conditioning available to everyone. We also have to end fossil fuel use as soon as possible. Part of the reason scientists have been pushing for a proactive approach to climate change is that the energy transition will itself require a huge amount of energy. That means more emissions. The longer we delay it, the more we’re adding momentum to an avalanche that’s already set to destroy us.

But let’s say we end all fossil fuel use by 2030. The temperature is still going to keep rising. Even if greenhouse gas levels stayed the same, it would be at least 20 years before we reached thermal equilibrium. Ending fossil fuel use will also cause a drop in aerosol pollution, which will cause a spike in temperature, as that pollution will no longer be reflecting sunlight. And greenhouse gas levels are going to keep rising, because amplifying feedback loops, from permafrost to forest fires, are already active.

You know how futurism in the mid-20th century had everyone expecting flying cars and futuristic cities by this point in history? Well, the cars don’t seem practical, but I think we’re going to increasingly going to need cities that allow people to navigate without having to go outside.

I’ve been called alarmist a number of times by a number of people over the last decade, but I think most people have caught up to the idea that this really is an emergency. We really are facing ever-worsening heat waves and storms. We really are facing massive crop failures leading to planet-wide famine. This is happening, and it’s killing us.

And as it does, we have to keep paying rent.

Keep paying taxes to a government that funnels all that money into death and profit, while scolding us for “not doing enough”.

So we have to keep going. We have to keep surviving so we can change things. Personally, I highly recommend shaving your head. When I realized my immigration status didn’t allow me to get normal work, I decided to try out a mohawk, and I honestly like how it looks. I also am a huge fan of how much it helps  me stay cool. I sharpened my razor and shaved yesterday, and I can feel every breeze leeching a little heat off of my scalp. I honestly don’t think I can ever go back to having a full head of hair. It’s just too hot.

That’s the one upside, if you can call it that. The meme going around is that we live in a cyberpunk dystopia, but without any of the cool fashion or gadgets, and medical technology. Well, we’ve got some of the gadgets, and I know a number of wonderful people who’ve been able to make incredible changes to their bodies, to improve their lives. Mainly it feels like what we’re missing is the aesthetic and the organized resistance movement.

Fortunately, both of those are under our control.

Support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia for more uplifting content like this! It’s a little sparse there right now, but I’m working on a couple things to make it a  more useful resource in its own right, as a sort of supplement to this blog.

Video: Slavery is still legal (for cops)

I want to (belatedly) thank Abbey over at Impossible Me for making me aware of That Dang Dad. He’s an ex-cop who’s now a police and prison abolitionist, and someone that I think everyone should check out. You are all probably aware of the fact that the 13th amendment was written to protect convict slavery, shortly before the country was filled with laws designed to convict newly freed black people of crimes. That has been the state of things ever since, even as the laws stopped explicitly targeting black people. This video is a good look at both the history of convict slavery in the U.S., and the current state of things. Here’s a teaser – it’s not good, and it’s a “bipartisan” problem.

How heat waves weaken plants (and thoughts on parallels in Humanity)

If one makes the questionable decision to look into the rhetoric and arguments of genocide deniers, one common refrain sounds a bit like, “It’s not a genocide, because a lot of them just died from starvation, disease, or exposure to the elements. The reality is that poor conditions are deliberately inflicted because we know that those conditions make people more vulnerable to disease, and less likely to fight back. I’m starting with this rather grim opening, because we’re entering an era in which the natural world is getting more dangerous not just for us, but for most other species on the planet. Basically, poor conditions are increasingly becoming the default, and that’s making everybody suffer.

Today’s example is plants. Plants are being made more vulnerable to disease by the changing climate. This is not new, and it’s not limited to plants. What is new, is this research into why that is:

Scientists have known for decades that above-normal temperatures suppress a plant’s ability to make a defense hormone called salicylic acid, which fires up the plant’s immune system and stops invaders before they cause too much damage. But the molecular basis of this immunity meltdown wasn’t well understood.

In the mid 2010s, He and his then-graduate student Bethany Huot found that even brief heat waves can have a dramatic effect on hormone defenses in Arabidopsis plants, leaving them more prone to infection by a bacterium called Pseudomonas syringae.

Normally when this pathogen attacks, the levels of salicylic acid in a plant’s leaves go up 7-fold to keep bacteria from spreading. But when temperatures rise above 86 degrees for just two days — not even triple digits — plants can no longer make enough defense hormone to keep infection from taking hold.
Further experiments revealed that the cellular machinery needed to start reading out the genetic instructions in the CBP60g gene doesn’t assemble properly when it gets too hot, and that’s why the plant’s immune system can’t do its job anymore.

The team was able to show that mutant Arabidopsis plants that had their CBP60g gene constantly “switched on” were able to keep their defense hormone levels up and bacteria at bay, even under heat stress.

Next the researchers found a way to engineer heat-resilient plants that turned on the CBP60g master switch only when under attack, and without stunting their growth — which is critical if the findings are going to help protect plant defenses without negatively impacting crop yields.

The findings could be good news for food supplies made insecure by climate change, He said.
Global warming is making heat waves worse, weakening plants’ natural defenses. But already, up to 40% of food crops worldwide are lost to pests and diseases each year, costing the global economy some $300 billion.
At the same time, population growth is driving up the world’s demand for food. To feed the estimated 10 billion people expected on Earth by 2050, forecasts suggest that food production will need to increase by 60%.
When it comes to future food security, He says the real test will be whether their strategy to  protect immunity in Arabidopsis plants works in crops as well.

The team found that elevated temperatures didn’t just impair salicylic acid defenses in Arabidopsis plants — it had a similar effect on crop plants such as tomato, rapeseed and rice.

This is not the only way in which climate change is affecting agriculture, but it’s definitely a big one. What’s neat about this is that the researchers have also made progress on figuring out how to combat this effect, at least partially:

Follow-up experiments to restore CBP60g gene activity in rapeseed thus far are showing the same promising results. In fact, genes with similar DNA sequences are found across plants, He says.

In Arabidopsis, keeping the CPB60g master switch from feeling the heat not only restored genes involved in making salicylic acid, but also protected other defense-related genes against warmer temperatures too.

“We were able to make the whole plant immune system more robust at warm temperatures,” He said. “If this is true for crop plants as well, that’s a really big deal because then we have a very powerful weapon.”

This is good. I still think we need to move food production indoors, but that’s going to be at least as big of a task as ending fossil fuel use, and anything we can do in the meantime to increase crops’ resistance to heat will save lives. If you’ve been paying attention to farmers recently, you probably already know that food prices are likely to spike in the next few months. That’s due to a mix of factors, but global warming is definitely part of it, and it’s going to become an increasingly big part as the years drag on. That’s also going to be compounded by the ways in which the heat will affect us, both physiologically, and through deprivation of necessary resources and conditions. There’s been a lot of talk about how we’re likely to have more pandemics soon, but I haven’t heard much said about how that will be exacerbated by humanity simply being less resilient due to the constant pressure of climate chaos.

As always, we have the solutions, we just also have a political and economic system designed to prevent change, no matter the harm that does. We desperately need to build a different system.

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!

Swans are debate lords confirmed

Anybody who knows anything about swans knows that they are, as a whole, cantankerous assholes who will murder you if they get the chance. Science has now confirmed that they like squabbling so much, they’ll even sacrifice sleep for it.

Scientists studied the behaviour of mute and whooper swans, to see how they used their time and energy.

Watching four key behaviours – aggression, foraging, maintenance (preening, cleaning and oiling feathers) and resting – they found a “trade-off” between aggression and rest, meaning that “increased aggression is achieved at the expense of resting”.

The study, by the University of Exeter and the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT), could help managers of nature reserves design habitats that reduce the need for aggression.

“These swans use aggression if there’s competition over foraging areas,” said Dr Paul Rose, from the University of Exeter and WWT.

“Our findings show this this requires a trade-off, and that both species reduce resting time to allow for this aggression.

“This was the strongest trade-off we found, but there was also a trade-off for both species between foraging and resting.

“However, there was no apparent trade-off between some behaviours, such as aggression and foraging, and aggression and maintenance.”

I find this unreasonably interesting. While some humans do skimp on activities in the “maintenance” category (I’m terrible about remembering to oil my feathers), I know I’m not alone in having sacrificed rest for the sake of a squabble. Internet fights aren’t going to help me make ends meet, even as a professional blogger, but they often feel important at the moment. I think they trigger instinctive emotional responses. Amusingly, I think that there’s more for us here than just a feeling of kinship with ornery dinosaurs. The researchers didn’t just quantify what swans will give up for a good fight, they also gave some thoughts on how to reduce swanflict in the future:

“By providing enough foraging spots for the birds, we can reduce the need for aggression around desirable feeding spots, giving them more time to rest,” Dr Rose said.

“This can help to ensure that migratory species don’t ‘push out’ non-migratory species when they mix in the same wintering locations.

Same.

But seriously – this feels very similar to the way our society deliberately makes life harder for us, so that we’ll sacrifice sleep, and compete with each other to survive. The answer is the same for us as it is for the swans – we have the resources to make sure that competition isn’t necessary for survival. That would peaceful co-existence far easier, but it would also mean that in those situations where there we do want to use competition, it’d be much more about excelling for the sake of excellence, rather than desperately fighting to win some sense of security and accomplishment.

We’re swans, is what I’m saying, and we need to redistribute foraging spots. Be sure to check back here for more deep insights into the similarities between humans and birds. This counts as evolutionary psychology, right?

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!

Video: The fishing cat

Took today off, so you get a video about one of my all-time favorite cat species! I’m also trying a slightly new thing with these, where I’m throwing in some of what Wikipedia has to say about the organism in question:

The fishing cat has a deep yellowish-grey fur with black lines and spots. Two stripes are on the cheeks, and two above the eyes running to the neck with broken lines on the forehead. It has two rows of spots around the throat. The spots on the shoulder are longitudinal, and those on the sides, limbs and tail are roundish.[4] The background colour of its fur varies between individuals from yellowish tawny to ashy grey, and the size of the stripes from narrow to broad. The fur on the belly is lighter than on the back and sides. The short and rounded ears are set low on the head, and the back of the ears bear a white spot. The tail is short, less than half the length of head and body, and with a few black rings at the end.[10] As an aquatic adaptation, the fur is layered. A short, dense layer provides a water barrier and thermal insulation, while another layer of protruding long guard hairs provides its pattern and glossy sheen.[11]

[…]

The fishing cat is broadly but discontinuously distributed in South and Southeast Asia.[1] It is strongly associated with wetlands, inhabiting swamps and marshy areas around oxbow lakes, reed beds, tidal creeks and mangrove forests; it seems less abundant around smaller, fast-moving watercourses. Most records are from lowland areas.[2]

New research shows how mines harm salmon populations

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far, fast.

I’ve been encountering that sentiment, on climate change, for about as long as I’ve been paying attention to the issue. Looking back, I’m surprised it wasn’t a phrase that frustrated me more. It perfectly conveys the need for reckless urgency in the face of this growing crisis, and yet the same communities that adored phrases like that also tended to think I was being alarmist for suggesting that people get in the habit of storing food. For my entire life, people have been talking about what a big crisis this is, but so many of them seem to think that going far, fast means everybody acting as if they’re alone. I hope by now it’s clear to all of you that we can’t change the world through individual people choosing to buy better products or to live sustainably on the periphery of an unsustainable society. There’s simply too much to do.

This is probably going to end up being one of those topics that I talk about more as time goes on. It’s encouraging to know that there are bacteria that can eat plastic and things like that, but the sheer volume of toxic material that we’ve pumped into this world is reaching a crisis point even without the rising temperature. All the conservation and renewable energy in the world won’t save us if we cause a mass extinction anyway by poisoning the world.

We need to go far, fast, and in this case that includes a massive, global cleanup of mining sites, and a revolution in how we go about the process of resources extraction.

A new paper published in Science Advances synthesizes the impact of metal and coal mines on salmon and trout in northwestern North America, and highlights the need for more complete and transparent science to inform mining policy.

It is the first comprehensive effort by an interdisciplinary group of experts that explicitly links mining policy to current understanding of watershed ecology and salmonid biology.

“Our paper is not for or against mining, but it does describe current environmental challenges and gaps in the application of science to mining governance. We believe it will provide critically needed scientific clarity for this controversial topic,” said lead author Chris Sergeant, a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and a research scientist at the University of Montana.

For the study, experts integrated and reviewed information on hydrology, river ecology, aquatic toxicology, biology and mining policy. Their robust assessment maps more than 3,600 mines throughout Montana, Washington, British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska. The size of the mines ranges from family-run placer sites to massive open-pit projects.

The study shows that, despite impact assessments intended to evaluate risk and inform mitigation, mines continue to harm salmonid-bearing watersheds through contaminants, stream channel burial and streamflow alteration. Silt suffocates eggs, and embryos may not survive contaminated groundwater. Heavy metals compromise a salmon’s sense of smell, which affects their ability to react to predators and find their way back from the ocean to spawn.

“Not all mines pose the same level of risk, but our review revealed that harm from mining can be severe and long-lasting. The extent of mining pressures on these watersheds underscores the importance of accurately assessing risk to water, fish and communities,” said Sergeant.

The paper also describes how some mining policies do not account for the breadth and length of mining impacts on the environment, or the increasing effects of climate change.

“The crux of the issue is that salmon use so much of the watershed during their life cycle. They move throughout watersheds, whereas the impact assessments of mining projects tend to be very locally focused, and they don’t sufficiently consider all of the compounding and downstream effects of mining,” said salmon biologist and CFOS faculty member Megan McPhee.

She explained that some impact assessments don’t fully assess the infrastructure required to operate a mine, such as roads, electricity generation and water removal.

“Another thing is that most mines, after closure, have to be mitigated in perpetuity. That’s a problem because most corporations aren’t structured that way. Also, most mitigation strategies don’t take into account environmental change, including permafrost melting, and climate change-induced flooding,” said McPhee.

If you haven’t studied the ecological role played by salmon and other anadromous fish, you might not appreciate how much they matter. Entire forest ecosystems are shaped around this near-miraculous delivery of an abundance of high-quality food from the ocean. These fish spend their lives eating and growing at sea, and then they carry all those nutrients back up the river, where they lay a mind-boggling amount of eggs, and in the case of salmon, die. It is not an exaggeration to say that without these fish, a number of ecosystems around the world would look radically different.

And in case it needs saying, the problem of mine waste is not limited to this study’s geographic region.

Going far, fast is reckless. There’s no way around that. Honestly, the crises we’re facing today are in part because we ignored that rule for so long. We have to be reckless now, too. We have to be willing to try modes of life that we’re not sure will work. We have to be willing to do things that have never been done. We have to be willing to take the risk of failure, because if we continue to be paralyzed by fear of the new, we will be consumed by the devil we know.

I think we can have a future with a better standard of living that most people have today, while also leaving this planet a better place to live. While a lot of that will come from re-using materials, and building things to last, it seems likely that there will still be a need for mining. The upside of needing to do this cleanup work is that it will almost certainly teach us how to make mining something that’s more or less environmentally friendly.

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Housekeeping

Back in the beginning of June, I had gotten a thousand words or so written on a post about the recent spike in transphobia in the United States. I promised that post because I felt fairly confident that I’d have it done in a week or so. So far I’m at around a little under 6,000 words, and it’s no so much an essay as it is a literary amoeba that keeps extending new psuedopodia as new, terrible things happen to feed it. I’m not even clear on what my point is, beyond wanting people to be safe, which feels like it ought to be the bare minimum. At this point the fact that I still haven’t finished it is becoming a problem in my brain, so as odd as it may sound, I have to remove the deadline if I want to get it done any time soon.

I feel like I’ve been talking about ADHD a fair amount on this blog recently. It’s a predictable result of maintaining a commitment to daily posting, if I want this blog to be more than just recycled content. I only really came to believe I have the disorder in the last couple years, and since medical treatment remains out of reach, I’ve been in the process of trying to figure out how to manage a brain the often refuses to cooperate. One lesson I should have learned a while ago is that I need to stop promising the results of work that isn’t already done.

That post will be up when it’s finished, and unfortunately I see no indication that it will be less relevant in July or August than it was in June. The tragic reality is that without some very uncharacteristic behavior from the leadership of the Democratic Party, it looks like we’re in for a long period of conservative, theocratic, minoritarian rule in the United States. If the implications of that don’t chill you to the bone, then you either haven’t been paying attention, or you’re one of the bad guys. Neither of those are good things.

I’m generally inclined to believe that people are products of our experiences. To me that means that saying someone is “good” or “bad” tends to obscure a more complicated reality. That said, bigotry is similar to violent crime – we can discuss the philosophical implications after the harm has been stopped, and the people inflicting the harm no longer have the power to do so. The important thing right now is defending those who are under attack, and as with oppressive regimes of the past, that may will involve doing things that could make you a target, either of the government, or of the fascist movement that is currently being emboldened.

That’s not an easy call to make. I would never pretend it is, especially seeing as how I up and left the country.

But I think it’s important to understand what seems to be happening, and to think about what that means for us, and for the other people in our lives. A lot of people are justifiably frightened, angry, and grieving right now, all while continuing the never-ending struggle to make ends meet.

To quote my new favorite movie, “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind. Especially when we don’t know what’s going on.”