Let me snooze on, like a kitty in the sun

We’re all glad that the sun is back, but His Holiness seems particularly pleased that his favorite napping conditions have returned. If contentedness were given mortal flesh, I think this is what it would look like.

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Living near green spaces reduces your risk of stroke by 16%.

One of my hopes for the future involves a more urban humanity, but with cities that have plants growing wherever possible. Instead of towers covered in glass, we can have them covered in ivy, or with tiered gardens. Instead of streets, we can free underground mass transit (or elevated railways), designed for accessibility. Also maybe bicycle taxis and the like. The streets themselves can be repurposed for gardening or leisure, or even just some version of “forest”. I want cities that look like strange forested landscapes from a distance, until it gets dark, and you can see lights twinkling through the leaves. There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which I’ve talked about before, but a big one is its affect on the overall health of the population, primarily by mitigating some of the air pollution associated with traffic and industry. We should be clear; air pollution is also a problem in rural areas. That’s why simply adding more vegetation to our current cities – while that’s a decent start – isn’t enough. We also need to change how and why cities are designed, and what the options are for getting around. Regardless, even in cities as they exist today, more green space seems to mean less risk of having a stroke, even controlling for factors like air pollution, smoking, and so on:

The results indicate a direct relationship between increased levels of NO2 in the atmosphere and the risk of ischaemic stroke. For every increase of 10 micrograms (µg) per cubic metre, this risk increases by 4%. The same happens when PM2.5 levels increase by 5 µg/m3. In the case of soot particles, the risk increases by 5% for every 1 µg/m3 increase in the atmosphere. These figures are the same for the entire population, irrespective of other socio-economic factors, age or smoking habits.

“It should be borne in mind that, unlike other air pollutants, which have various sources, NO2 is mainly caused by road traffic. Therefore, if we really want to reduce the multiple risks that this pollutant poses to people’s health, we need to implement bold measures to reduce car use”, says Cathryn Tonne, a researcher at ISGlobal.

“The study demonstrates the importance of environmental determinants in stroke risk. Given that it is predicted that the incidence, mortality and disability attributed to the disease will increase in the coming years, it is important to understand all the risk factors involved”, explains Dr. Carla Avellaneda, a researcher in the Neurovascular Research Group at IMIM-Hospital del Mar and one of the main authors of the study. Previous studies by the same group had already provided evidence on the relationship between factors such as soot or noise levels and the risk of suffering a stroke and its severity. All these factors act as stroke triggers.

In contrast, having an abundance of green spaces within the same radius from the home directly reduces the risk of suffering a stroke. Specifically, up to 16%. In this sense, “People who are surrounded by greater levels of greenery at their place of residence are protected against the onset of stroke”, says Dr. Avellaneda. Exposure to green spaces is generally considered to have beneficial effects through a variety of mechanisms, such as stress reduction, increased physical activity and social contact, and even exposure to an enriched microbiome.

Societies tend to be guided based on the goals of those governing them. Currently, the goal is ever-increasing wealth and power for those at the top. That’s not how things have always been, and it’s not how things have to be in the future. We can have a society aimed at giving everyone the time and resources to really seek meaning and happiness for themselves, and research like this can go a long way to showing us what that society should look like, at least in general terms. We should want things like a more verdant kind of city for the same reason we should want universal healthcare – it makes people’s lives better, and gives them longer, healthier lives.

Deep below the waves, something is stirring…

I’m afraid I have something of a confession to make. When learning about the dangers posed by thawing permafrost, it never occurred to me that there might be such a thing as underwater permafrost. Turns out there is, and that’s melting too.

Across the Arctic, numerous peer-reviewed studies show that thawing permafrost creates unstable land which negatively impacts important infrastructure and impacts Indigenous communities. Now, a new study from MBARI researchers and their collaborators published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds dramatic changes offshore and is the first to document how the thawing of permafrost submerged underwater at the edge of the Arctic Ocean is affecting the seafloor.

About one quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere is permafrost or frozen ground. At the end of the last ice age (12,000 years ago) melting glaciers and sea level rise submerged large swaths of permafrost. Until just recently, this submerged permafrost had been largely inaccessible to researchers. But now, thanks to technological advancements, including MBARI’s autonomous mapping robots, scientists are able to conduct detailed surveys and assess changes in the seafloor.

High-resolution bathymetric surveys in the Canadian Beaufort Sea have revealed changes in the seabed from 2010 to 2019. Using autonomous mapping robots, scientists documented multiple large sinkhole-like depressions—the largest the size of an entire city block of six-story buildings—had developed in less than a decade.

“We know that big changes are happening across the Arctic landscape, but this is the first time we’ve been able to deploy technology to see that changes are happening offshore too,” said Charlie Paull, a geologist at MBARI who led the study with Scott Dallimore from the Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and an international team of researchers. “While the underwater sinkholes we have discovered are the result of longer-term, glacial-interglacial climate cycles, we know the Arctic is warming faster than any region on Earth. As climate change continues to reshape the Arctic, it’s critical that we also understand changes in the submerged permafrost offshore.”

The image is a topographical map of a section of seafloor. The areas of higher elevation are orange, fading to yellow, green, and then blue at greater depths. The image shows a sinkhole that's 220 meters long, 74 meters wide, and 24 meters deep.

Repeated surveys with MBARI’s mapping AUVs revealed dramatic, and rapid, changes to seafloor bathymetry from the Arctic shelf edge in the Canadian Beaufort Sea. This massive sinkhole developed in just nine years. Image: Eve Lundsten © 2022 MBARI

It seems there’s something of a thawing and re-freezing process going on, which could account for the creation of sinkholes without any real methane release, but that doesn’t mean that couldn’t change if frozen organic matter is thawed long enough to start rotting. I’m honestly more worried about the stability of methane clathrates. If it turns out this process is widespread on the seafloor in the Arctic, or if it’s becoming more so, then that could cause a lot of problems. As ever with this stuff, we probably won’t know if we’ve crossed a deadly threshold until it’s far too late to do anything about it. It would be better to be proactive than reactive.

On the plus side, maybe it’s just Kroll waking up.

Tegan Tuesday: Stuart Little and the recovery of lost art

Studying art history is a bittersweet thing for me. Much of art is ephemera, and any preservation is only as good as your failsafe. Fires, floods, random spills of ink, hard drive failure, the memorable cat-based file-deletion, and a myriad of other things mean that a huge amount of has simply been lost to time. I’ve read about composers or performers, the best of their ages, with all of their musical works lost. We only know Sappho’s poetry in fragments. Early film was highly combustible and whole warehouses have gone up in flames, as well as being destroyed or lost for any number of non-accidental reasons – in 2013, the Library of Congress reported that 75% of all silent-era films were lost. For myself, as a kid, my favorite painter was Claude Monet, and when I learned that he would paint over old canvases I cried to think of all the paintings that nobody will ever see!

But just as there have been losses, there have been amazing finds. I worked with a flutist in the Boston area who reconstructed an early 19th century concerto. The most important oboe concerto in the repertoire is Mozart’s — and it was only rediscovered in an attic in 1920 by a Mozart scholar named Bernhard Paumgartner. (And amusing to my modern academia-trained self, the article detailing the find is a scanty four pages long.) The US Library of Congress also hosts a semi-yearly event called “Mostly Lost” with scraps of unidentified film and the public invited to help identify aspects. Mere seconds of a film might show show something distinctive and lead to proper identification. From what I’ve heard it is a fun event and a real life mystery puzzle that could have archival importance for these scraps of celluloid. Despite ongoing efforts like this to find lost art, many of the biggest discoveries were made by accident.

While on Christmas break in 2009, Hugarian art historian Gergely Barki opted to relax with his daughter and watch the 1999 film Stuart Little, when he recognized the art in Stuart’s living room as a previously-missing painting by Hungarian avant-garde artist Róbert Berény (1887 – 1953).

Barki recognized the painting—“Sleeping Lady with Black Vase”—from a black-and-white photograph taken of the work during its last exhibition, in 1928. “It was not just on screen for one second but in several scenes of the film, so I knew I was not dreaming. It was a very happy moment,” said Barki. who had no idea how it ended up as set dressing in a 1999 children’s movie.

Barki, who is writing a biography of Berény, went into full detective mode. “I started to write e-mails to everyone involved in the film,” he told the New York Post. He sent letters to the film’s creators, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, finally receiving a reply from the film’s former set designer two years later.

According to Barki, the film assistant, whose name has not been reported, had picked up the painting in a Pasadena, Ca., antiques shop for just $500. Unaware of its origin or value, she used the work to decorate the apartment of the family—played by the disembodied voices of Michael J. Fox, Jonathan Lipnicki, Geena Davis, and Hugh Laurie—in the film based on E.B. White’s beloved book. When production wrapped, the assistant bought the painting from the studio and hung it in her apartment. “I had a chance to visit her and see the painting and tell her everything about the painter,” said Barki. “She was very surprised.”

Berény was one of leaders of the Hungarian avant-garde movement in the early 20th century and was heavily influenced by artists like Cézanne and van Gogh, thanks to his training and work in Paris. “Berény’s work was exhibited throughout his lifetime, including at the Ernst Museum in Budapest, at the National Salon in 1929 and 1932, and he represented Hungary at the Venice Biennales of 1928, 1934 and 1936. Works by Berény are in the collections of the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs, and the Deák Collection in Székesfehérvár and have been exhibited as far afield as the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California.” Unfortunately, his studio was destroyed during WWII and many of his works are presumed lost. But the importance of Berény to Hungarian art history combined with the rarity of his extant work made Barki’s discovery all the more important. The five-year journey from discovery to repatriation ended with a record-breaking sale for 70 million forints (226,500 Euros) at a pre-Christmas auction hosted by the Budapest Congress Centre. Barki suspects that the reason the painting survived the century is that it left Hungary when it was sold in 1928 “because that was when it was last exhibited and, as most of the buyers were Jewish, it probably left the country as a result of the war”. What a journey this little painting took, and how wonderful that it made it home.

When I initially thought to write up this article, I thought it was extremely charming and a welcome bit of good news. I had foolishly not looked at the dates, and I thought it was a recent article -the hazards of encountering interesting articles through social media! But even good news from 2014 is still good news to read in 2022, especially considering the general tenor of the news today, and I hope the story of “The Sleeping Lady with Black Vase” enchants you too!

What does “green infrastructure” actually mean?

Greenwashing is a serious problem. It’s not just that the rhetoric and advertising mask inadequate or even nonexistent “action”, but also that it misleads people into believing that their individual shopping choices are enough to solve the world’s environmental problems. When it comes to something like infrastructure, it can lull people into thinking that their votes are enough. That’s especially concerning, because there’s an incentive for politicians and construction firms to put a “green” spin on as much of their normal practice as possible. It helps the companies make money, and even if the politicians don’t get kickbacks, they get something to bring up any time they’re asked about dealing with climate change.

So how do we tell when they’re lying? What does “green infrastructure” mean? Turns out, it means a number of different things:

A new nationwide analysis of 122 plans from 20 US cities, published today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, found that many plans fail to explicitly define green infrastructure. When they do, they tend to focus on stormwater management, favoring engineered facilities over parks and larger urban green spaces. The study is the first systematic review of the use and definition of the green infrastructure concept in US city plans.

Lead author Zbigniew Grabowski, who completed the work as a postdoctoral associate at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, explains, “Green infrastructure is broadly understood to be a good thing, but many city plans lack a clear definition of what it actually is. Hydrological definitions dominate. This narrow view can limit project funding and cause cities to miss out on vital social and ecological services that more integrative green infrastructure can provide.”

Green infrastructure has its roots in 19th century landscape design. Its original conceptualization was broad, taking in parks, trail systems, gardens, and other natural landscape features that provide benefits for people and the environment. This shifted in 2007, when the US Environmental Protection Agency defined green infrastructure as a set of best practices for managing stormwater, to meet Clean Water Act regulations.

Coauthor and Cary Institute scientist Steward T.A. Pickett notes, “While the landscape concept of green infrastructure includes stormwater management benefits, stormwater concepts rarely consider the broader landscape. This can mean lost opportunities for more expansive benefits, among them high-quality green spaces, management of diverse environmental risks, and improved urban public health.”

The team’s nationwide analysis explored: the types of city plans that define green infrastructure, how it is defined, and the functions and benefits assigned to green infrastructure projects. Twenty medium to large US cities, representing the major biomes, were included. City plans (303) were collected and screened for references to green infrastructure, with 122 meeting criteria for analysis. These included comprehensive/strategic, sustainability, watershed restoration, and climate plans.

Cities that were part of the assessment: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Louisville, Miami, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Juan, Seattle, St. Louis, Syracuse, and Washington DC.

Among the team’s findings: 39% of plans that refer to green infrastructure do not define what it is. Of those that do, stormwater concepts predominate (59%), followed by landscape concepts (17%), ‘integrative’ — which combine stormwater and landscape concepts (15%), and other (9%). Across plans containing definitions, 57% had several different definitions, with a total of 153 unique definitions identified, indicating that green infrastructure means different things to city planners across the US.

What qualifies as green infrastructure also varied widely. Across GI definitions, 693 different types of green infrastructure were identified. The features most commonly included in plans were trees (90%), rain gardens (75%), ‘other stormwater facilities’ (55%), blue-green corridors (60%), and green roofs (65%). Some cities went so far as to include green energy and alternative transportation technologies within their definitions of GI.

Green infrastructure benefits identified by city plans include water quality, recreation, health, city livability, and property value. Across cities, social benefits were most commonly cited in plans, followed by environmental, economic, ‘built environment’ (to enhance or support existing built structures, like a sewer or transportation system), and ecological benefits. Some cities also identified more specific benefits such as recovery from extreme weather events (e.g. Washington DC), new business opportunities (e.g. Miami), and social revitalization (e.g. Atlanta).

Taking in the breadth of concepts outlined in the 122 plans, the authors developed a synthetic definition of green infrastructure to guide future research and planning, and help cities and researchers adopt a more comprehensive view of what green infrastructure entails and the benefits it confers.

Green infrastructure (GI) refers to a system of interconnected ecosystems, ecological-technological hybrids, and built infrastructures providing contextual social, environmental, and technological functions and benefits. As a planning concept, GI brings attention to how diverse types of urban ecosystems and built infrastructures function in relation to one another to meet socially negotiated goals.

Coauthor Timon McPhearson, a research fellow at Cary Institute and Director of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School, concludes, “The US is poised to make large scale, needed, investments in urban infrastructure. To ensure these investments build environmental resilience in a way that benefits the lives of all urban residents, we’ve put forth a more comprehensive definition of green infrastructure, to guide planning, policy, and practice — with the goal of facilitating more equitable urban greening.”

Across the country, advocacy organizations, communities, planners, researchers, and practitioners are working to transform urban planning to better address equity and justice issues. To support these efforts, the research team created a website to share deeper project findings, resources, and recommendations for the 20 cities examined.

I don’t know if I’ll have a more detailed response to this in the future, but fortunately the folks behind the study put together a website to help people explore their findings. I appreciate the effort put in to make this material accessible to the general public.

True Facts about carnivorous plants

Carnivorous plants have always fascinated me, from the “pet” Venus Fly Trap that I’d feed ground beef, to the pitcher plants I found growing around a woodland pond in New Hampshire. Things like this always make me regret my own mortality, because I’d love to see what kind of weird life evolves ten thousand years from now.

Video: How not to talk about climate change

There are a lot of wrong ways to approach climate change, both in terms of the policies proposed, and in terms of the rhetoric used. The people in our society with the most power and the biggest platforms are pretty much universally people who have no trouble making ends meet. I think that’s part of why they’re so willing to embrace the notion that climate change is about individual choices, rather than systems, because paying a little more for something doesn’t really affect their quality of life much. Left Reckoning has a perspective on this that I think is worth lyour time:

Not Just CO2 – plants can clean up other pollution too!

When it comes to the question of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, I’ve long been of the opinion that our best option is also the one that requires the least amount of new research and development – plants. Harvest fast-growing crops, subject them to a little processing, and store them. It won’t solve the problem alone, and it won’t solve anything overnight, but neither will any other options. Plants are also a good way to both lower city temperatures, and reduce industrial and commercial air pollution. They’re useful all around, really.

In fact, for all re-wilding is often framed as being either a way to soak up CO₂ or a way to strengthen ecosystems, there’s also some evidence that it can be a way for use to work on cleaning up the various types of toxic waste we’ve left all over the planet. For all some folks get excited about impressive engineering solutions and pollution-eating nanobots or whatever, as with the carbon capture question, there’s a vast amount we could do to clean up the planet by applying our understanding of evolution, and doing a little ecosystem engineering.

Some more general things have been pretty well-known for a while, like the way beaver-made wetlands and mangrove swamps can help filter pollution out of water, as well as providing other benefits associated with a healthy ecosystem. There is also evidence to support the use of specific plants for specific pollutants. White lupin, for example, can be used to pull arsenic out of contaminated soil, and it seems that there’s growing evidence that bacterial life is evolving to take advantage of a newly abundant food source – our oil and plastic pollution:

Although reducing the manufacture of unnecessary single-use plastics and improving waste management systems will help ease the pollution crisis, our reliance on the convenience of plastic products is unlikely to be abated any time soon. Researchers are therefore looking at alternative approaches to “clean up” the more persistent plastics from our environment and it appears that microbes may offer some promising solutions.

“Certain bacteria harbor the necessary enzymes to degrade PET, the most problematic plastic environmentally,” explains senior author Shosuke Yoshida. “Our research has shown that the bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis converts PET into poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB), a type of poly(hydroxyalkanoate) (PHA) plastic that is biodegradable,” he continues.

This finding is particularly promising because it addresses two current problems for the sustainability of plastics: degrading the most persistent form of petroleum-based plastic while sustainably producing biodegradable plastics.

“We believe that this discovery could be significant in tackling plastic pollution,” Yoshida states, “as we show that the PET-degradation and PHB-synthesis pathways are functionally linked in I. sakaiensis . This might provide a novel pathway where a single bacterial species breaks down difficult-to-recycle PET plastics and uses the products to make biodegradable PHA plastics.”

Given the overwhelming challenge of dealing with worldwide plastic pollution, this novel bacterial approach may be a significant part of the solution.

Things like this won’t matter if we don’t stop creating pollution. Even if we could find an organism to consume every poison we’ve unleashed on the world, their ability to do so will never come close to the rate at which we’re generating pollution. Just as our production of greenhouse gases has outpaced the planet’s ability to absorb them, so is our production of chemical pollution outpacing the biosphere’s ability to adapt. If we’re going to survive, the first step is always to stop actively doing harm, to the greatest degree possible.

The hope that things like this gives me is not one that lessens the amount of work we have to do; it’s the hope that once we do that work, even if it takes multiple generations, it will be possible to heal, and to move forward into something better.

Simmering seas: “extreme” heat is now normal for a majority of the ocean’s surface.

As the planet warms around us, a lot of predicted changes are being confirmed by science. The drought forecast I wrote about a little while back is just one indicator of how the world around us is seething. Those of us who’ve paid even a little attention have been able to see and feel the changes around us, and anyone keeping up with ecological research knows that every other life form on the planet can see and feel the change as well, even if they lack the capacity to understand what’s going on. To the complete surprise of nobody, oceans continue getting hotter. Research from the Monterey Bay Aquarium now indicates that “extreme heat” is starting to become part of normal conditions:

Researchers conducted the study by mapping 150 years of sea surface temperatures to determine a fixed historical benchmark for marine heat extremes. The scientists then looked at how often and how much of the ocean surpassed this point. The first year in which more than half of the ocean experienced heat extremes was 2014. The trend continued in subsequent years, reaching 57 percent of the ocean in 2019, the last year measured in the study. Using this benchmark, just two percent of the ocean surface was experiencing extremely warm temperatures at the end of the 19th century.

“Climate change is not a future event,” said Dr. Kyle Van Houtan, who headed the research team during his tenure as chief scientist for the aquarium. “The reality is that it’s been affecting us for a while. Our research shows that for the last seven years more than half of the ocean has experienced extreme heat.”

“These dramatic changes we’ve recorded in the ocean are yet another piece of evidence that should be a wake-up call to act on climate change,” he added.” We are experiencing it now, and it is speeding up.”

The study grew from separate research into the history of kelp forest changes throughout California. Van Houtan and team discovered that sea surface heat extremes, which are key stressors for canopy kelps, needed to be quantified and mapped along the California coast throughout the last century. The researchers then decided to expand the investigation beyond California to better understand the long-term frequency and location of extreme marine heat across the global ocean surface.

Using historic records, aquarium scientists first determined the average temperatures for the ocean’s surface over the period spanning 1870 to 1919. Then they identified the most dramatic ocean warming that occurred during that period — the top two percent of temperature increases — and defined that as “extreme heat.” The team then mapped the extremes over time, examining whether they occur regularly or are becoming more frequent.

“Today, the majority of the ocean’s surface has warmed to temperatures that only a century ago occurred as rare, once-in-50-year extreme warming events,” Van Houtan said.

The fact that I’m able to maintain this blog means that we still have time and resources to make changes that would both slow down the warming, and improve everyone’s ability to survive and thrive. That said, it’s hard not to think of the proverbial frog in its slowly warming pot of water.

Gravel Institute: The Famine America is Creating

Yesterday’s post discussed the effects of war on food prices and productions. Today, we’re looking at starvation inflicted by “economic” policies like economic sanctions. As I’ve mentioned, I’m working on a larger piece about sanctions that focuses on Iraq, but the US is currently in the process of setting up a brutal sanctions regime in Afghanistan. Further, there’s no good reason for these sanctions. There’s no reason to think they’ll influence Taliban policy, or to think that they’ll somehow result in regime change. Many of the people at the top of the US government are the same ones who push the previous sanctions against Iraq, and it seems very clear that no amount of death and misery will ever make them change their minds.

Oceanoxia

Exploring an increasingly strange new world

Trump and the Kennedy Center fiasco

Quick follow up on Jey McCreight

Flowers

Road Raging

Origami: Sferica

The Greater Gardening of 2026 - Part 19 - O-ko-pa-ni-ny

The Measurement of Suffering

The Probability Broach: Heads in the sand