April 2024 on…

Reading The Best American Science and Nature Writing , 2022 (ed. Ayaba Elizabeth Johnson) with CJS.

So far, as of May 2024, this is a very enjoyable read. I particularly appreciate the efforts of the editor to create a nice progression of topics, giving what is essentially an eclectic sampling of articles a higher level narrative.

September 2024: Nearing the end; still an enjoyable read.

Contents

Favorites

After finishing the book, here are my favorites

Top Five Six

C2 – What Slime Knows. Really gave me a new view of slime molds. I hadn’t realized the degree of intelligence a seemingly simple colonial organism can possess. Offers a counter-narrative to the usual ideas about what is necessary for intelligence.
!! C7- Rising Groundwater. This is the biggest eye-opener in the book, at least for me. While sea level rise will have very obvious impacts on costal regions, this makes the point that sea water will also cause a rise in ground water and, with or without infiltrating it, will cause a lot of problems for a lot more people than are effected directly by sea level rise. Think corroding water and gas pipes, malfunctioning sewage systems, and failing electical systems. This is one I’ll tell other people about.
C15: Poisoned—Part I: The Factory. Not a pleasant story. Talks about working conditions in a battery recycling factory, the horrible degree of exposure to lead, and the toll it takes on the workers. Shocking for two reasons: one is that the company behind this is based in Minnesota, and is in theory doing good things (recycling lead from batteries); second, that the industry and factories are regulated, but that in spite of that conditions are horrible.
!! C25 – Why Combining Farms & Solar Panels Could Transform How We Produce Both Food and Energy. A hopeful and plausible tale about how we can do better quite easily. A win-win. Perspective shifting and positive. I’ll mention this to others.
: – ) C28 – Beavers Are Firefighters Who Work for Free (Sierra) A perspective shifting article on role beavers can play in making land more resistant to wildfires, and also points out that the autonomy of tribes can allow them to take the forefront in experimenting with more sustainable approaches to environmental problems.
: – ) C32 – A River Reawakened (Orion). Not a perspective shifter, but just a very pleasant positive piece on what happens when a river is undammed, the problems that need to be addressed, and the rapidity of recovery. This was going to be an honorable mention, but I liked it too much!

Honorable Mentions

C1- The Body’s most embarrassing organ. On the evolution and importance of the anus. Allowed organisms to continually be taking in nutrition, rather than cycling between input and output. Some subtle humor. Interesting.
C8 – How wC8: How we Drained California Dry. Not a surprising story, but an honorable mention for lyrical writing and ground the story in the particular. e Drained California Dry
C26 – A Recipe for Fighting Climate Change and Feeding the World. A nice article on the prospects offered by perennial grains. Includes some mentions of intriguing problems, like the fact that that the Kernza kernels are small enough that it causes difficulties for traditional agricultural equipment.

Front Matter: Forward & Introduction

Series editor:

“The sweep of a spiral galaxy draws our eyes and attention much more than the black of space between the galaxies ever could. But there’s so much beauty to understand in the things we can’t see.”

Book editor:

Science and nature” I interpreted both more expansively and more narrowly than might be anticipated. Another bias of mine is being more enamored with ecology, evolution, and anthropology than with technology, medicine, and engineering. In short, 1 lean toward the “nature” in “science and nature.

I: Nature is Magnificent

* C1: The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ…, Katherine Wu (Atlantic)

Entertaining and interesting. Some interesting bits:

Evolutionarily, the appearance of the anus allowed organisms to move from a ‘one-meal-at-a-time’ ingest/digest/excrete sack, to a mouth-digestive track-anus that enabled (1) multiple meals to be consumed without need to excrete between them, and (2) the development of serial specialized regions for different digestion/absorption processes, with (3) a corresponding increase in both the amount of food that can be consumed, and in the efficiency in extracting nutrition from food. Overall, the appearance of the anus was associated with an increase in size and length of organisms’ bodies.
The two hypotheses for the origin of the anus: (1) a single opening that became elongated and then split into two openings via fusion of the center portion, or (2) a single opening with the subsequent evolution of a rear opening.
Humans are notable not for the anus, but for their buttocks, which, due to the demands of the bipedal posture/locomotion, are the largest in the animal kingdom.
While there is subtle humor via wordplay, the author does not overdo it.

* C2: What Slime Knows, Lacy M. Johnson (Orion)

Interesting!

Slime molds are not fungi — they are protozoa.
Slime molds, throughout their lifecycle, are single-celled: even when they fuse with one another in their aethalial form, the cells fuse into a single cell with multiple nuclei. There appear to be no bounds on their size: they have been observed to grow as large as a bath mat.
Slime molds show the ability to learn: they can be trained to anticipate a negative stimulus (like a cold blast of air), and they can learn to solve a maze to obtain a piece of oatmeal.
Individual slime molds that have learned things can retain the things learnt when they fuse into a single entity.
Slime molds can go dormant.
Recent genetic analyses suggest slime molds are 1 to 2 billion years old
This article also included a discussion of the history of taxonomy, sparked by the difficulty of categorizing slime molds; as it recapped very briefly what we read in A Tangled Tree, some time ago, I pretermit this material.

C3: Too Big for the Universe, Arianna S. Long (Scientific American)

Interesting, but a lot I didn’t have the background to understand, and that was not explained in the article. CJS notes that it was in Scientific American, and wonders if it was part of a special issue that would have provided more context.

Galaxies have life cycles: From an accreting cloud of gas, to a galaxy of stars that slowly shift from white and blue stars to cooler red and yellow stars, they end up, if massive enough, as a spheroidal blob that will never birth stars again– this end state is called an elliptical galaxy.
All around us within 200-600 light years, astronomers see dead or dying elliptical galaxies gathered in ensembles known as galaxy clusters consisting of hundreds of thousands of galaxies.
Most galaxy clusters appear to have been established with the universe was only half its present age. That means the clusters grew quickly, more quickly that we can understand [don’t understand this]. The early galaxy clusters — called protoclusters — must have been incredibly violent places, forming forming stars 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more quickly than the milky way currently does.
Galaxies that produce 100’s to 1,000’s of suns per year are known as starburst galaxies.
It is difficult to locate starburst galaxies because they are hotter than our current instruments have been designed to detect, they are spread out over distances 100x greater than our current instruments’ fields of view, and they are swathed in heavy metal dust (produced by the exploding stars) that make them nearly invisible to optical and UV telescopes.
It is only in the last 15 years that we have been able to see them with infrared telescopes, and only much more recently that the Altacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), an array of the nearly 70 radio dishes that work as one telescope, came on line.
ALMA has allowed the detection of protoclusters, including the Distant Red Core (DRC), a cluster of 10 starburst galaxies that are giving birth to 10,000x more galaxies than the milky way. These protocol clusters should burn through their available fuel in a few hundred million years.
The galaxies in the DRC are so messily shaped that they must have recently collided with other galaxies. The DRC appears to be too large for our universe — simulations based on our current understanding of physics predicts that such galaxies should either shred themselves apart or feature explosions that would eject the gas needed for star formation.
All galaxies are thought to be surrounded by halos of dark matter, more massive than the galaxies themselves. The DRC has such a large halo of dark matter that it is at the edge of what is possible — and, that said, it seems likely that the DRC has considerably more mass that we haven’t seen.
One possibility is that galaxies and other structures began forming earlier in the universe that we had previously thought…

. . . reading break . . .

C4: Heads Up: The Cardiovascular Secrets of Giraffes, Bob Holmes (Knowable Magazine)

Giraffes need a blood pressure of about 220/180 to have a normal-for-large-mammals blood pressure at the brain. This level of pressure would could a host of problems for humans.
The left ventricle’s in Giraffe hearts are thickened, so they can pump more strongly, but they have mutations that decrease the stiffening that would accompany such thickening in human hearts. Also, the ventricle-filling phase in the giraffe’s heartbeat is extended, allowing the heart to pump more blood with each stroke.
Giraffe legs have a tight wrapping of connective tissue — think built-in support stockings — to prevent swelling. They also have thick-walled arteries near their knees which may serve as a flow restrictor to reduce pressure.
The giraffe also has mechanisms that appear to regulate pressure when it lowers its head to drink (blood pools in the neck veins), and then raises it when it raises its head.

C5: How Far does Wildlife Roam: Ask the Internet of Animals, Sonia Shaw (The New York Times Magazine)

ICARUS — International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. A worldwide collaborative project to tag and track animals, beaming their data to a receiver on the international space station. The tags are powered by solar energy, weight less than 5 grams, and will track position, physiology and microclimate for each organism.
A description of trapping and tagging a cuckoo.
- Q: I wonder where the tag was attached, and how it would provide information on the physiology of the cuckoo.
  - A: According to chatGPT there are different methods depending on the organism and tag type. Collars and harnesses can be used; in some cases, tags can be implanted under the skin. They use ECG, thermistors and accelerometers to collect physiological data.
- Q: I’m also unsure of what happens when the International Space Station is not in line-of-sight of various tags — is there some sort of network of receivers involved?
  - A: According to ChatGPT, the tags have on-board memory and store the data if the ISS is not in line-of-sight. They can also transmit to one of several ground stations around the world, if they are in range.
Traditionally, the article argues, it has been assumed that animals were relatively fixed in place, inhabiting a niche in a stable ecosystem.

“But over the last few decades, evidence has emerged that animals move farther, more readily, and in more complex ways than previously imagined. And those movements, ecologists suspect, could be crucial to unraveling a wide range of ecological processes, including the spread of disease and species’ adaptations to habitat loss. “
– ibid., p 32

The planet may well be criss-crossed with “environmental highways” that provide paths along which various species can travel. This could be an explanation for why many bird migrations are not straight-line, but follow looping paths.
Describes genesis of ICARUS — Wikelski and Kay were talking with George Swenson, a retired radio engineer, who told them they were stupid and should think bigger — think about tracking all creatures on the planet, everywhere, simultaneously. Wikelski became obsessed with the idea and spend a decade or so recruiting allies and grant money to make it happen.
Migrating thrushes spend twice as much energy on stop-overs than while flying.

The revolution in wildlife tracking offered a glimpse into the world that ICARUS seeks to reveal. It’s one in which geographic borders are porous and migrants make their way across the globe almost effortlessly, like hang gliders on a front. It’s one in which movements once deemed episodic are continuous, in which those regarded as rare are common, in which others dismissed as ineffectual are ecologically fundamental. It’s a vision of a planet that vibrates with motion.
ibid. p 41

II: Nature is Roiled

C6: Our Summer from Hell, Jeff Godell (Rolling Stone)

A downbeat article suggesting, on the one hand, that the summer of 2021(?) was a preview of what climate change that ‘woke up’ a lot of people, but that, on the other hand, if this is what it means to wake up “we are well and truly fucked.”

I didn’t particularly care for this article.

. . . reading break . . .

C7: How Rising Groundwater Caused by Climate Change Could Devastate Costal Communities (MIT Technology Review)

An unexpected effect of rising sea level is that the groundwater also rises: in coastal areas, the fresh groundwater floats on deeper, denser salt water. Rising ground water has the potential to effect at least twice the area that rising sea level will.
Rising groundwater can
- corrode metal pipes
- infiltrate sewage and storm sewers, and cesspools and septic tanks, decreasing or eliminating their ability to function
- introduce water vapor into natural gas lines, causing gas appliances to corrode
- release buried pollutants from military and industrial sites (e.g., benzene), including those that have been remediated
- create surface wetlands where we do not want them
- cause roads and foundations to buckle
- (not mentioned, but obvious) inundate fresh water wells with salt water
Approaches to addressing sea level rise, such as building sea walls, may
- (1) fail because a seawall that keeps all seawater out will keep fresh ground water in
- (2) may keep surface seawater out, but if the bedrock is porous, the subsurface seawater level will rise, pushing up the freshwater layer.

* C8: How we Drained California Dry (MIT Technology Review)

A lovely essay on the transformation of California, the seizing and regulating of water to support agriculture, and the not-very-promising future that appears to lie ahead. The first part is a lyrical summary of the process of transformation, the second part is in the present, spent on a raisin farm of a friend, a farm where the raisins are not drying properly because the sun is obscured by wildfire smoke.

There is no way to make this drive out of Fresno at harvests end … without thinking about water: the idea of it, the feel of it; the form as it falls from the sky as rain and snow, that man captures with his invention and implementation, his magic and plunder, the dam, the ditch, the canal, the aqueduct, the pump, the drip line; the water that gives rise to every animate and inanimate thing that now stretches before my eyes, the vineyard, orchard, cotton field, and housing tract; the water whose too much can destroy us, whose too little can destroy us, whose perfect measure of our needs becomes our superstition and story.

This is my favorite essay to this point.

C9: The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 into the Atmosphere (Ars Publica / MIT Technology Review)

California’s Carbon offset program — where owners of forested land receive Carbon credits for preserving forests that sequester more Carbon than average — appears to be too permissive in its estimate of Carbon sequestration, the result being through the sale of Carbon credits that over estimate the amount of Carbon sequestered, is enabling CO2 emitters to emit far more CO2 than is really being sequestered by those selling their credits.

C10: In the Oceans the Volume is Rising as Never Before (NYT)

Noise pollution in the ocean. Opens with an anecdote about Clown Fish larva and their use of sound to find their way back to (a/their) reef.

C11: The Nature of Plastics (Orion)

About plastic pollution. It’s not just the west Pacific gyre. Plastic in the ocean is more like a soup or a smog. And it breaks down into micro- and nano-scale particles that can pass through digestive tracks and be absorbed into circulatory systems. Plastic can also act as a ‘sponge’ for various organic chemicals, which then are released into organisms that ingest them. After reading this, it feels like we’re all doomed.

. . . reading break until 9/9/2024 . . .

III: Humans are Part of Nature

C12: Black Bears, Black Liberation (The Cleanest Line (Patagonia), by Raye Wynn-Grant

The essay begins by talking about stories about animals, and in particular stories with bears as characters. It reprises tales like Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Winnie the Pooh, but then notes that there are lesser known ‘bear stories’ in the African American community in which bears are less benign. Wynn-Grant suggests that bears represent the power and terror that slave owners held for enslaved people, and that the African-American bear stories — which featured people outwitting bears — celebrated resistance. It’s an interesting notion.

As the author early on identified herself as a black bear biologist, I expected the story to turn to actual black bears and their behavior, but instead it turned to the experience — some historical and some based in speculation — that enslaved people might have had with bears. Hunting them (under duress from their owners), using their honey (or meat) to supplement their diet, and encountering them while in the forest, either working or trying to flee.

The essay ends with the claim that the bravery and pioneering outdoors work the author’s enslaved ancestors carried out directly led to the brave and pioneering work she does today. An uplifting claim, but it seems to come out of nowhere, with little development or support in the essay.

The essay was interesting, but the end seemed a bit wanting.

C13: Finding Freedom in the Natural World (NYT)

An essay that describes and discusses Black foragers. It provides a counterpoint to the idea that Black people do not “do” the outdoors, at the same time as discussing the historical roots that might have influenced some to turn away from outdoors-based activities (as well as the fact that in the present, Black people are more likely to be harassed when observed in settings where it is not clear (to others) what they are doing).

The essay offers foraging, and the preparation of foraged foods, as a way of reconnecting with earlier Black experience.

Overall, it is a very complex mix of contradicting impulses…

Carolyn mentioned a movie called The Society of Magical Negros.

C14: Humanity is Flushing Away one of Life’s Essential Elements (The Atlantic)

This essay is about phosphorous, the dependence of living organisms on phosphorous, and the fact and danger of our failure to manage and recycle phosphorous.

Interesting, but not notable for the writing. An OK article.

. . . reading break until 9/16/2024 . . .

* C15: Poisoned—Part I: The Factory (Tampa Times)

An exposé of Gopher Resource, a Minnesota company that operates factories that recycle lead from automobile batteries. The work is dirty and dangerous, the facilities are substandard, and the conditions are horrible. It is difficult to believe that the conditions described can exist in a supposedly regulated industry. Corruption reigns.

C16: Future Moves (Atmos)

A short piece on the ways in which climate change is and will increase migration, including migration within countries. Factoid: by 2050, it is estimated that 2050, 215 million people within the global south will have migrated within their countries due to “slow-onset climate change impacts.” These events include things like water scarcity, sea level rise and decreasing crop productivity.

The silver lining to this — potentially — is that slow-onset events potentially allow time for countries to respond in various ways.

C17: There’s a Clear Fix to Helping Black Communities Fight Pollution

This is about policy, particularly with respect to environmental justice.

It emphasizes the importance of, and the need to strengthen NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act).
It notes that people of color and their communities bear the brunt of pollution, and deal with far more than they are responsible for causing.
There is a comment about the Sierra Club issuing a statement taking responsibility for promoting white supremacy — I’d like to understand more about that.
NEPA requires the preparation of an Environmental Impact Report. A shortcoming, however, is that it is entirely up to the state whether or how to act on the report. This is disturbing. The saving grace — a small one IMO — is that preparation of an EIR takes time, and allows time for activism to rally local opposition.
Argues for integrating social justice policies into NEPA.
CJS points out that the tribes are becoming much more sophisticated about using the law, and going to court to require adherence to Federal Laws that give them control over their land, and environmental impacts on it.

* C18: To be a Field of Poppies

This article is about an environmentally positive alternative to cremating or burying (with embalming) bodies: it advocates for human composting, and describes a new company called “Recompose” that provides a system/service” for such composting.

Recompose was founded by an architect, Katrina Spade.
The process is referred to as NOR (Natural Organic Reduction). It involves composting bodies in steel cylinders along with wood chips, alfalfa and straw for about 30 days, after.
Pharmaceuticals remediated to less than EPA standards–CJS finds this a little dubious… with respect to the amount of pharmaceuticals one would find in a human body.
I enjoyed imagining some alternative forms of ‘burial’ — a casket sunk into a subduction zone, cremation in an active volcano, or even having one’s ashes get permanently lost in the mail.

. . . reading break until 9/23/2024 . . .

IV Ways of Knowing

C19: To Hell with Drowning (The Atlantic)

Activism that spans a number of nations based on Coral Atolls: there attempts to garner resources to fund mitigation and relocation.

Opens with anecdote about author talking with a traditional micronesian navigator. We have insights both from living in close harmony with earth, and also from having survived the ravages of extractive industries and the damage caused by nuclear and other military testing.
Climate justice movement needs to listen more to people like author, and stories — and not just facts — are needed to persuade people.
The facts are frightening: most of the Coral Atoll nations may become uninhabitable by as soon as 2030.
Kiribati has already purchased 5,000 acres of land in Fiji to relocate farms. And Fiji has a list of 42 villages most subsceptible to climate-caused flooding, etc. One village already located in 2014 — a traumatic action due to cultural ties to the land, and to graveyards that cannot be moved.
Tropical cyclones are intensifying because of rising temperature, and that, along with rising sea levels, is increasingly causing more damage.
Climate Vulnerability Forum: A group of 42 countries most affected by climate change, that advocates for those countries.
Final anecdote about navigation from one island to another using traditional means, and a sail made in a traditional way, the knowledge for which existed in the mind of one dying woman.

C20: To Speak of the Sea in Irish (Hakai Magazine)

An essay on phrases in Irish that are being lost — or perhaps, now, are being preserved — that embody the relationship of the Irish to the sea.

hounds of the storm (a particular cloud on the horizon that suggests an impending storm)
white flowers on the fisherman’s garden (a particular type of choppy sea)
stanch (the rush of water from the shore)

Phrases like this can remind us of what we’ve lost, and help connect us to what we might preserve.

C21: A Tight-Knit Island Nation Hopes to Rebuild while Preserving “the Barbauan Way,”(National Geographic)

Barbuda is a small, 64 square mile island in the eastern Caribbean populated by the descendants of British Blacks and later West Africans. The author’s, as with many of his compatriots, has lived there for seven generations.

The article talks about the history of the island, and recent attempts by some to create hotels and high end developments for outsiders, and local attempts to combat this. The article is clearly on the side of preserving it for locals, but at the same time does not see ways in which damage from climate-induced storms can by mitigated without outside funds.

. . . reading break until 9/30/2024 . . .

C22: Thriving Together: Salmon, Berries, People (Hakai Magazine)

An essay on indigenous knowledge systems and what they have to offer science. In particular, discusses the ecology of salmon and salmon berries and the way in which the native people tried to support the ecosystem. The essay recounts stories from the author’s childhood about gathering salmonberries, and notes that a good salmonberry harvest forecast a good salmon run. It also describes a study showing that the nutrients that spawning salmon bring to the local ecosystems increase the salmonberry production. …The latter makes sense to me; the former is clear to me.

It also describes the ways the native people manage the salmon-salmonberry system, including fertilizing berry patches with the remains of captured salmon.

“...along the lush banks of streams and rivers that pulse like deep green arteries…“

C23: Your Face is Not Your Own (The NYT Magazine)

A long piece on the various uses of face recognition, in particular those pioneered by Clearview AI.

Face recognition used to investigate a child predator. The person was identified when the face recognition program identified someone in the background of another image, which allowed them to be ID’d.
Clearview AI scraping Google and Facebook sites without permission.
Origins of Clearview AI — conflicting stories.
“…a world without strangers would be a friendlier, nicer world…”
Uses of FR technology to find criminals, enforce covid lockdowns in Russia
~-When we interact with people on the street, there’s a certain level of respect accorded to strangers because we don’t know if they are powerful’~ — Not clear at all.

C24: Quantum Enlightenment (Atmos)

An indigenous person writes about quantum mechanics and the world view it suggests and brings it into connection/dialog with Oceti Sakewan (sp) belief systems.

It seems to me that it has a lot of misapprehensions about science and academia, and feels more like a belief system in search of a scientific rationalization.

. . . reading break until 10/7/2024 . . .

V Futures We Could Have

* C25 – Why Combining Farms and Solar Panels Could Transform How We Produce Both Food and Energy (The Counter)

A great article! Interesting content and well-written: had a great phrase: “shadow-thatched.”

The theme is combining solar panels with farming. If panels are mounted up high — 9 feet above ground level in the cases described, crops, some at least, can be grown below them.

The article notes that converting 1% of cropland globally to agrivoltaics could “supply “offset global energy demand.” (Does that mean it would meet the world’s energy needs??? What does ‘offset’ mean here.)

Advantages of agrivoltaics

Crops create a cooler microclimate below the panels, which increases the panels energy efficiency.
Conversely, the panel-created microclimate can increase crop productivity, though this obvious depends on the particular geographic region and crops. In particular, the micro-climate is cooler, which in turn reduces evaporation and heat-stress on crops. For example, in Arizona, tomato production doubled with 67% increase in water efficiency.
The microclimate can also be beneficial for livestock — in Minnesota cows grazing beneath solar panels undergo less heat stress, and conversely keep plants from growing up and interfering with the solar panels.
And of course, being able to sell electricity in addition to crops is often a win-win, even when the solar panels reduce productivity.

Drawbacks of agrivoltaics

Solar panels can interfere with aerial spraying, and also with the movement and operation of farm equipment.
Vehicle operation below solar panels can raise dust that can coat solar panels and decrease their efficiency.
Runoff from solar panels might cause problems with erosion in the fields.
Lightning can strike solar panels — but this seems to occur rarely and can be addressed with lightning rods.

For agrivoltaics to be successful, policies will need to be designed to ameliorate or assist with the large up-front costs…

* C26 – A Recipe for Fighting Climate Change and Feeding the World (The Washington Post)

Another good article. This describes the development of Kernza, a perennial form of wheat. Starting with a perennial wild wheat, selective breeding, gene editing, and AI was used to produce a commercially viable version over 2-decades.

Associated with Kernza, at least in this article, is the idea of moving away from monoculture, so that it would be mixed in with other crops.

Benefit: Kernza is a perennial. It doesn’t need to be replanted, and thus avoids annual tilling of the soil, with all its drawbacks. Because it is a perennial, it can also provide habitat for wildlife.
Benefit: Kernza has an extensive root system that stores carbon and stabilizes the soil.
Drawback: Kernza has smaller seeds, and agricultural equipment is not designed to handle that well.
Question: The article mentions cattle grazing on the same land — is the idea that after harvesting, Kernza stalks can serve as livestock forage, and it will grow back from roots each year.

Work is going on to ‘perennialize’ other crops: soybeans, sorghum, sunflowers (for oil), rice.

C27 – Power Shift (The Verge)

This article is on environmental justice (specifically the ways in which inhabitants of East New Orleans have been subjected to development for waste dumps, power plants, etc.), the impact of hurricanes on long distance energy distribution (due to downing transmission lines), and a bit on how smart microgrids can be part of a solution.

Smart microgrids can make local energy production and distribution viable, so that locally produced energy can be distributed during times of surplus. They can also function on their own if power goes out elsewhere.

Solar panels and batteries, spread out across a neighborhood, can function as a virtual power plant.

. . . reading break until 10/21/2024 . . .

* C28 – Beavers Are Firefighters Who Work for Free (Sierra)

Discusses the benefits of re-introducing beavers to native habitat. These include:

Retaining more water (amount of surface water increased 2.5x in one case)
and thus making the land more drought and wildfire resistant (sections of creek lacking beaver were more than 3x effected by fire)
Improving the ecosystem for salmon
The thus-created wetlands can also work as livestock and wildlife refuges
Lowering the temperatures and improving the water quality of streams

This work was initiated by tribes in California and Oregon.

Interestingly, there are fairly strict federal regulations about relocating beaver — due to the way they alter habitat — that need to be adjusted to permit these beneficial uses.

C29 – New Wind Projects Power Local Budgets in Wyoming (High Country News)

Discusses wind-power projects in Wyoming, and that despite resistance based on traditional ‘alleigance’ to fossil fuel power, people are coming around because of various economic benefits to the tax base and to local labor (though not all wind power jobs, especially construction, are going to the locals.

C30 – Work from Home, Save the Planet? Ehhh (Heated)

Discusses the advantages of working from home in terms of saving energy, but then dismisses them if work-from-home is not construed as part of a climate mitigation strategy.

I agree with the advantages, but, while thinking in terms of climate mitigation would be nice, do not agree that failing to do so eliminates most of the advantages. Sort of a strange article.

. . . reading break until 10/28/2024 . . .

* C31 – In Amsterdam, a Community of Floating Homes Shows the World How to Live Alongside Nature (The Washington Post)

Discusses a neighborhood of floating houses in Amsterdam. An interesting article, but it seems to me that the majority of the attractive features stem from it being an intentional community where most inhabitants arrived at the same time, and where there was collective agreement to pursue sustainable living.

The actual advantages of living on water seem sparser: they can float and are thus less vulnerable to sea level change, and it is easy to have heat pumps that take advantage of the water beneath them.

It is not at all clear from the article how utilities are handled. Yes, there are solar panels, but how does the electric grid work given that you have a group of floating, potentially moving houses. Same question for water and sewage. And how do people get in and out of the community — is there the potential for businesses that draw traffic from the larger urban area, or is this really a floating bedroom community (and tourist attraction)?

* C32 – A River Reawakened (Orion)

Describes what happened in the wake of the un-damming of the Elwha river in 2011.

The un-damming led to some short term problems: large sediment plumes making the river turbid and carrying sediment out to sea; and large areas of sediment laden bare land, open to ‘invasion’ by pioneer plants. The first problem solved itself within a few years; the second problem was addressed, in part, by re-vegetation specialists who collected and spread seeds native to the ecosystem prior to the damming.

Wild salmon weave freshwater and saltwater ecosystems together, and rivers are the threads between those worlds.

— Jessica Plume, A River Reawakened, p. 283

The proximal effect of the un-damming was the return of the salmon (five types). The salmon carry nutrients from the ocean inland, as the migrate to spawn and then die. The return of the salmon facilitate the return and increase of other wildlife, from otter to bear, and birds such as American Dippers.

C33 – There’s a Global Plan to Conserve Nature. Indigenous People Could Lead the Way (The New York Times)

Seems reasonable, and ethically appropriate. The actual scientific evidence for this being advantageous seems scant. But nothing wrong with the idea.

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