Reclaiming The Stuff That Matters

November 5, 2015November 6, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to read the results of a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showing that three-quarters of Americans are not very worried about the effects of climate change. After all, a lot of money and energy has gone into sowing doubt when it comes to climate science.

The inundation of daily data, from gossip to war to financial news to games and local weather that we call the Information Age also makes it easy to miss the links between various developments unless those links are helpfully made in the media, but then, often with round-the-clock media, the links take on an alarmist character. And unless it affects them directly, people can only stay in a state of panic for a short time before they get dulled to the noise.

FlowerHouse, a project in Detroit to try and reclaim a ruined home with fresh flowers. All images: FlowerHouse

FlowerHouse, a project in Detroit to transform a ruined home with fresh flowers.
All images: FlowerHouse

After all, how many people really care that climate change is responsible for the sudden death, in the space of a single month, of half the remaining population of the curiously snouted and endangered saiga antelope? Tens of thousands of wild antelope just dropped dead. But does that really affect anyone’s day-to-day life? Maybe if it were half the dogs in the country. Or half the cattle. The saiga antelope are strange, unique and far away. But we need to talk about these weird animals as if they matter. Because they do.

The lack of climate worry would be a problem if the United States itself didn’t weigh so heavily on the global climate change balance, both in terms of cause and effect.

In 2012, the top 10 GHG emitters accounted for more than two thirds of the global emissions total. Find the newest data on global greenhouse gas emissions on the CAIT Climate Data Explorer, click here for an interactive version of this graph.
Source: World Resources Institute.

It’s not just the production of greenhouse gases, or the consumption of energy and goods, either. Wars – and the U.S. has a lot of influence when it comes to wars, both actively and in weapons manufacture – have a major environmental impact. And wars are already being fought over the effects of climate change, too – water wars, oil wars. We need to be aware of the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict as if it matters to us personally, because it does.

I hear from many people, and I read, that great hope is placed in major technological breakthroughs, big fixes for big problems, solutions that will absolve individuals and industries and countries from having to reconsider what the desire to stick to business as usual really means.

FlowerHouse promotes sustainability and responsibility to American-grown flower farms.

The fact that three-quarters of the population in one of the world’s major contributors to climate change isn’t worried at all about climate change is probably one of the main reasons that real solutions aren’t being implemented on a wider scale. Sure, renewables are making progress, but fossil fuel production and consumption have expanded dramatically in the U.S. over the past few years.

A recent study says that worriers tend to be creative problem solvers. So, by extension, a nation of non-worriers isn’t going to engage overmuch in problem solving because they don’t see the necessity.

I’m not advocating round-the-clock worrying, which doesn’t do anyone much good.

Some people try to ignore climate change as just another turn of the global screw, too big for humans to fix.

Some groups, mainly in the U.S., try to divert attention from imminent climate change impact on crops, lifestyles, water supplies and shorelines. Apparently, 300 million people have something else to think about, and I know that plenty of those people have real, pressing issues that are as important to them as future notions of rising waters and wild temperatures.

Still: Talk about the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Paris as if it matters. Because it does.

Change is coming, it’s coming soon, and sugar-coating that reality will just make adjusting to the changes harder when they are no longer something that can be ignored.

The FlowerHouse is a collective effort to reclaim what’s been abandoned, condemned and neglected.

Adding It Up

June 24, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Not so very long ago, processing large amounts of data was a tedious business, riddled with human error, machine failings and limited reach.

These days, information availability can feel like a tsunami. There’s so much of it, all the time, all around. It’s become easier than ever to share information and images, sometimes involuntarily.

The sheer abundance of facts available all the time can mask what’s missing, namely, synthesis and understanding of the facts at hand.

The constant flow of information can also mask that we don’t really have all the information necessary to assess specific environments or track changes.

Old adding machine.
Photo: Kevin Twomey

The rise of citizen science projects has sought to harness both the ability to share information and the need for more facts on the ground.

A positive example of this is the Capture the Coast project getting underway in the United Kingdom. Financed by lottery funds to the tune of £1.7 million ($2.7 million), several universities and non-governmental organizations are collaborating to train 3000 volunteers to gather data on species up and down the UK coastline.

This data will be collected and analyzed by the various institutions to better track and understand climate change.

A somewhat less positive example of data sharing can be found in Wyoming, which recently passed a law that makes it illegal to gather and transmit data from open land (including photos or sample results) to the state or federal government.

The first page of Wyoming bill WY SF0012, passed in March 2015.

In effect, this means that you can be arrested if you are a concerned citizen or scientist who is documenting a particular issue. And the issue at hand here is mainly the documentation of high levels of E. coli bacteria in streams due to poor ranching habits and bad herd management.

But once a law like this has been passed, it can be applied to anyone who is collecting data that could make someone else uncomfortable.

According to this Slate article, while other states have similar laws that protect the powerful agricultural industries from a concerned citizenry, Wyoming’s law is the first to actually criminalize taking a photo on public land.

Old adding machine.
Photo: Kevin Twomey

Rather than embrace collaboration that connects and supports a better understanding of the environment, these moves seem to be an attempt to turn back time, to go back to an era when information could be stashed in a filing cabinet somewhere in the basement, or simply shredded.

But these days, it’s like trying to hold back the tide. Will this kind of obstructionism slow understanding that points the way to better solutions? Probably. There might be gaps here and there, but the data will still flow.

It’s a shame that some people would rather service the gears and methods of outdated structures and habits.

It doesn’t add up now, and it never will.

Old adding machine.
Photo: Kevin Twomey

Unexpected Communication

April 30, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Raven’s Breath
Photo: Doug Dance

Before I started this post on talking turtles this morning, I moseyed over to Wikipedia to see what words we use to describe acoustic communications between turtles. Dogs bark, geese hiss, tapirs whistle, giraffes bleat and most rodents squeak – at least, that’s what they do when we’re talking about them in English.

But turtles? Apparently, turtles have always been considered voiceless.

As of last year, we’ve known that some turtles use chirps, clicks, meows and clucks to communicate with one another. Just not at levels we were ever able to hear before the advent of modern sound equipment.

Yellow-Spotted Amazon River Turtle
Artist: Brin Edwards

But even among the animals that produce vocalizations we can hear, conversations take place that remain out of our range.

Giraffes don’t really bleat much, but they do communicate via low-frequency moans and grunts. Sumatran rhinos, for example, have been found to emit low frequency whistles that might travel up to 9.8 km (6.1 mi).

In terms of all we’re not hearing, it’s not a one-way street. Animals of all kinds can hear the infrasonic melody being sung by the earth’s surface and waters – migratory birds use it to navigate, homing pigeons use it to find their way back to their lofts.

Sources of infrasound signals that can be detected by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s listening stations.
Note that this graphic doesn’t include any of the sounds discussed here, mainly because the signals being listened for by these infrasound stations are either disaster-related or human-generated.
Graphic: Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization

Pulling on this thread of unheard sounds brought me to the story of some tamarin monkeys in the Central Park Zoo who were found to be whispering about a particular zoo supervisor, a person associated with unpleasant medical examinations.

The tamarins had, for a time, responded to the threat of his presence with screeches and loud vocalizations. After a while, however, researchers found that the monkeys switched to low frequency communication when the supervisor approached, as if to better discuss the real threat level and necessary response.

Golden lion tamarins
Artist: Sally Landry

I started with turtles, but all these whispering monkeys comforting one another and a soft-spoken earth put me in mind of one of my favorite films, Wim Wender’s 1987 Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin). Two angels spend immortality listening to all the unspoken thoughts of humanity, the inward whispers no one else can hear. They offer succor where they can.

But one of the angels becomes so entranced by a lonely woman that he decides to become human just so he can experience the world as humans do, from the taste of food to the emotion of love. All of which had been abstract to him, because he could only hear one kind of communication.

Listening closely, in the end, made the angels want to experience the lives of humans more closely, to protect those assigned to their care beyond offering simple words of reassurance.

Maybe listening closely will have the same effect on us?

Yoke of Gold

February 13, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

The history of gold – that is, the history of gold extracted from the planet surface – is inextricably linked with human history.

Gold has always been as much a shining harness as a coveted bauble.

Gustav Klimt’s Judith 1

It has so many qualities we would like to think we ourselves possess: It’s rare but not lonely and scarce, it’s easy to handle and mold but keeps its shape once formed, it doesn’t corrode, and it doesn’t react explosively with other elements.

It’s so pretty, and so desirable.

Source: Amazing Paper Grace

A nice symbol for the ages, which is probably why we’ve used it in so many different capacities since before recorded history, and why we still like it so much today.

Anything rare and precious to us always comes at a price. And it’s not just the one we pay upon purchase.

The Grasberg mine in Papua, Indonesia, is just one in a long line of gold mines around the world and through the ages, but it has the distinction of being the largest. The mine embodies so much of humanity’s relationship with gold.

There’s much for some and very little for others: The mine has brought vast wealth to its owners, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., and the Indonesian government.

Those almost nothing for those who extract the gold in the thin air of Puncak Jaya, the highest island mountain in the world (16,024 ft/4884 metres). And whatever else isn’t considered precious – the mine is also the world’s third-largest copper source – is simply discarded.

Satellite view of the Grasberg mine.
Source: GoGeometry

According to Earthworksaction, a single gold ring generates more than 20 tons of mine waste on average. And the Grasberg mine produces and dumps over 200,000 tonnes of tailings (mine waste) per day (over 80 million tonnes per year).

Mining waste is toxic – the ‘rest’ of the earth from Grasberg mine, the parts considered not precious enough for harvest, have buried over 230 sq. km (88 sq. miles) of forest and wetlands, the surrounding rivers are considered unsuitable for aquatic life.

View of the Grasberg mine. Source: Mine.com

View of the Grasberg mine.
Source: Mining.com

The high price also includes human rights violations and displacement of indigenous peoples. Half of the gold extracted around the world is mined on the territories of traditional indigenous peoples.

So the next time you find yourself reaching for the gold ring, you might consider its real price.

You can also consider reaching for a gold ring mined and made by supporters of the FairGold initiative.

Gold ripples
Source: Pixabay

A Little Perspective

January 12, 2015 / PK Read / 4 Comments

It’s been a rough start to 2015, so I thought I’d step back and look at a bigger picture.

NASA released an image of a section of one of our nearest neighbors, galactically-speaking: the Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31.

The image itself contains 1.5 billion pixels and represents the largest image ever released by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The section of the galaxy shown contains over 100 million stars and would take 40,000 years to traverse at the speed of light.

A section of the Andromeda galaxy.
Click here to explore the image using the NASA zoom tool.
Source: NASA

Something to remind me on the one hand, that we are part of something far more vast than the human squabbles that take place on the surface of our planet, and on the other hand, that among all these countless celestial bodies, this little planet is the only one we’ve got.

If you’ve got the time, set your screen to full-view and spend a few short minutes on this lovely fly-through video, put together by YouTube user daveachuck.

Subterranean Lines

January 8, 2015January 8, 2015 / PK Read / Leave a comment

$A fracking well at the surface. Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic$

A fracking well at the surface.
Photo: Eugene Richards/National Geographic

The bulk of the fracking boom currently underway in the United States is not only in one of the least populated and remote states, North Dakota (population 724,000 – and it’s only that large because of the fracking boom and all the new workers there), but it also takes place mostly underground. Sure, there are the ominous towers of gas flames and the torn up ground at the extraction points, but the real action takes place so far beneath the topsoil layer as to render it abstract.

The gap between what fracking looks like from above, and what it looks like from below, reminds me of Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s drawings in The Little Prince. What everyone initially takes to be a sketch of hat is actually a rendering of something completely different, namely, an elephant inside a snake.

From The Little Prince
By: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We humans are creatures of visual dependence. Or rather, what we can see tends to make the most conscious impression upon us, ahead of the more subtle senses of sound, taste, smell and touch.

And often, what is out of sight is truly out of mind. If we can’t see it, we have a hard time even thinking about it.

Well locations around New Town, N.D.
Source: Fractracker

These various maps and renderings of fracking in North Dakota attempt to make the underground activity more tangible, to show us the elephant inside the hat.

$Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota. Source: Mason Inman/Wired$

Underground fracking lines, drawn from the well, with horizontal underground lines marking the extent of each well. New Town, North Dakota, from Mapping a Fracking Boom in North Dakota.
Source: Mason Inman/Wired

According to Mason Inman over at Map Labs, who created the map above, “Each well travels down about two miles, then turns horizontally and snakes through the rock formation for another two miles. There were 8,406 of these Bakken wells, as of North Dakota’s latest count. If you lined them all up—including their vertical and horizontal parts—they’d loop all the way around the Earth.”

The New York Times took the added step of inverting the wells as if they were above ground, the long vertical drills standing like slender trunks one or two miles high, with only one or two branches of equal length suspended in the air, a high forest of activity.

The area around New Town, North Dakota, from What North Dakota Would Look Like if Its Oil Drilling Lines Were Aboveground
Source: Gregor Aisch/NYT

Science and Peace: CERN at 60

September 22, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Last week I had the privilege of attending a series of lectures, 60 Years of Science for Peace, held in the CERN Globe as a part of the celebration to mark CERN’s 60th anniversary. Considering we live just down the road from the Globe, I didn’t have far to travel, but it’s a nice journey to take nonetheless.

The CERN Globe, an exhibition and lecture hall.
Photo: Jean-Claude Rifflard/CERN

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, was founded in the 1950s as a research institution, but it also had a key secondary function: that of fostering cooperation and collaboration between countries that had only just emerged from World War II. It provided a place where scientists could work together across political, linguistic, cultural and national lines by sharing research goals, methodology, resources and outcomes.

People from countries that had been at war worked side-by-side. Throughout the Cold War, CERN was one of the places where lines of communication remained open across the Iron Curtain.

There have been countless side benefits and developments over the decades that are the direct or indirect result of research done through CERN, from medical advances to computer technology, but seems particularly fitting that one of CERN’s major collateral contributions was the creation of the World Wide Web as a means of facilitating communication.

Sitting around me at the lectures were rows of CERN scientists, most of whom communicate with one another in English or French – but who come from dozens of different countries around the world.

CERN at 60
Source: CERN

One aspect of life at CERN that I’ve always found interesting is that while the scale of science that goes on there might be grand, the atmosphere is relaxed and collegial. The main cafeteria at lunch time is packed, abuzz, and the long tables and close seating encourage conversation.

Having lunch at the CERN cafeteria might mean sitting amongst a few Nobel laureates, or it might not – but what is striking is how much of the casual conversation in shared languages revolves around the free exchange of ideas. And it’s all open to the public.

This is the opposite of academics toiling away in an ivory tower.

So today I’d just like to tip my hat to the work of an organization that does more than just research the fundamentals of physical world: Truly open discussion and communication between people of vastly different backgrounds and beliefs is one of the best means of immunizing against misunderstanding and prejudice, whether intellectual or otherwise.

What We Talk About When We Talk About War (VII)

September 16, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

According to the website Wars in the World, as of 11 September 2014, there are currently ongoing conflicts classified as ‘wars’ in 64 countries; there are conflicts involving of 567 militias, guerrilla and separatist groups.

The conflicts are based on everything from ideological and religious issues to narcotics to territorial disputes. There are a few very high profile confrontations, hundreds of others that, like dangerous embers, continue to burn and flare into flame.

Armed aggression is immediate, it’s acute, it demands an answer and it threatens force regardless of the answer given. We usually have a good idea of who threw the first stone, or at least, who is throwing stones at one another.

The Consequences of War (1637-38)
Peter Paul Rubens

Of course we pay attention when conflict requires. Conflict demands all our energy, our resources, our media focus, our politics.

This month marks the world’s highest number of refugees displaced by conflict – over 51 million – since WWII. There are entire groups of displaced persons who have not been able to return to their homelands for years, sometimes decades, after the initial conflict has ended.

If we measure the level of conflict by the number of people affected and displaced, we are at a sad high-water mark.

When it comes to people displaced by environmental deterioration, including land loss and degradation, as well as natural disaster, the estimated number of refugees varies wildly. The very definition of environmental refugees is disputed and complicated, because the fundamentals of environmental change are complicated in themselves.

How many people have been displaced due to loss of habitat? It’s estimated that the Dust Bowl drought (1930-1940) in the United States initiated a migration of 3.5 million people. Current estimates around the world place numbers in the tens of millions.

From the photo series ‘A Tale of Paradise Lost—Climate Refugees in Bangladesh’
Photo: Munem Wasif

There is no obvious aggressor when rivers overflow and flood – was it a rainy year? Was the water infrastructure poorly conceived? Was land for housing and industry located too close to flooding areas? When water runs out, is it due to drought, or land mismanagement, poor farming techniques, or livestock overgrazing, or all of the above?

And the fix is just as complicated as the problem, maybe more so, because it requires a complete rethinking of how we do things.

But we know how to do aggression, violence, war and we know how to react.

Which is why what we talk about when we talk about war is just one thing: War.

While we focus all our resources on the immediate threat, the bright spotlight of world attention leaves everything else in the shadows.

Web Music

June 5, 2014June 5, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

I’ve got my windows open today to let in some of the fine late spring air, which is filled with the sound of birdsong and a light rustling of the trees in our garden. Because I leave my old wooden shutters latched shut so the sun doesn’t glare off my computer screen, I can’t see outside.

If I listen, I can make out the ambient hum of traffic on the road at the other end of our village, the occasional distant plane on approach at the Geneva airport, all punctuated by the bells on the grazing sheep on one side, and on the other side, the next-door dog giving out a brief yap, which he only does if someone walks by on our road.

And then another neighbor rumbles past on his tractor, the walls shake slightly, and now I can hear him in the farm courtyard, tinkering on the thing with tools that chime like bells.

It’s my personal web of sound impressions.

The Westfield dome in San Francisco, during a sound and light performance.
Photo: SF Examiner

Knowing our surroundings by virtue of sound and vibration is part of what we can do without much thought, and I suppose that’s true of many animals (and plants).

The extent of some creatures’ ability to interpret surroundings via vibration is an ongoing focus of research, and new study due to be published in Advanced Materials looks at just how finely-tuned an instrument a spider’s web can be.

The Oxford Silk Group fired lasers and bullets at spider silk to see how it vibrates and found that the silk – always known to be remarkably strong – can also be tuned to a variety of harmonics.

Spiral orb webs
Photo: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

In The speed of sound in silk: Linking material performance to biological function, the study examines just how much information a spider can learn from the plucking of its silken strands, and further, that spiders can fine-tune their webs to optimize transmission of prey information as well as the approach of a prospective mate. The web vibrations can be played to indicate the web’s own intactness, echoing back to the spider in a song of building and necessary repair.

I had a recording of ancient Greek music on vinyl back in the 1980s, a weirdly soothing collection of short sound fragments that echoed through my college apartment.

I mention it only because there are no recordings, yet, of the spider silk music – but if there were, I imagine they’d sound a bit like those remembered scraps. I found this recording, which isn’t as haunting as what I remember, but will serve for the moment in my imagination of a spider sounding out its world with all eight limbs in nanometer vibrations.

Seabed Data

March 5, 2014 / PK Read / Leave a comment

Image: Net Valley

The first trans-Atlantic communications cable was laid in 1858, carried across the ocean by two ships and connected to create instantaneous communication across an ocean.

Unfortunately, it only worked for few days, and it was almost ten years before a replacement was successfully laid. That cable, however, remained in service for a century.

I only mention that because I came across this global map of submarine communications cables. A cartography of big data streams at the bottom of the sea.

Submarine Cable Map (2014)
Source: TeleGeography
Click on the map for the interactive version

It all looks so tidy and reassuringly mechanical on a map like this.

Still, each and every festively colored line represents something like this:

That was laid like this:

Some of the cables, like those that cross the Izu-Ogasawara Trench off Japan, rest at 8000 meters (26,000 ft), a depth that almost equals the height of Mt. Everest. At some point, most of them must end up looking like some version of this:

The nuts and bolts of the modern world are subject to breakage, mostly due to either environmental forces (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms) or human activity (mostly fishing lines, mining operations or dropped anchors).

Given the lack of knowledge of the Atlantic sea bed in the 19th century, it’s all the more impressive that the first successful cable last 100 years.

Seabed profiles.
Source: Telegeography

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#communication

Reclaiming The Stuff That Matters

Adding It Up

Unexpected Communication

Yoke of Gold

A Little Perspective

Subterranean Lines

Science and Peace: CERN at 60

What We Talk About When We Talk About War (VII)

Web Music

Seabed Data