What makes it the Anthropocene?

 As I’ve collected materials cut from magazines or printed from internet documents having to do with environmental issues, I’ve wanted to believe that lessons learned from mistakes will be taken to heart, that humans will find ways to avoid despoiling the natural world. But experience has left me philosophically hard-bitten, for want of a better expression. 

Our evolutionary development has endowed humans with curiosity, ambition, imagination, and competitive predilections, with the capacity to dream of and build the modern world in all its complexity. But though we possess brains with amazing powers, it has become frighteningly clear that we’re chronically unwilling to focus on all the consequences of each and every upward turn of the “progress” ratchet. Those nasty vices such as avarice and lust for power have too often had the upper hand.  It’s becoming commonplace now to speak of the Anthropocene, an unofficial recognition that human-kind is creating a new epoch by causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, pollution of land and waters, and significantly increasing the planet’s surface temperature, among other lasting impacts.

 Whether it's neoliberalism, unregulated capitalism, Chinese authoritarianism, benevolent socialism, or whatever else might be ginned up in the way of a governance system, nearly all of us now live in a globally competitive world in which production and consumption of goods and services is the driving force. Nations make resolutions to reform their practices with respect to environmental pollution, sometimes own up to past failures, and vow to fix things.  Simultaneously, the global economy continues to invent new ways to make money and raise standards of living while continuing and even enlarging upon destructive practices of the past.

Missteps taken in pursuit of short-term goals can have long-lasting consequences. Here are two examples of human invention, initiated in good faith and with optimism about the benefits to humanity that would accrue from their use.  

PFAS.  These letters stand for per- and polyflouroalkyl substances. Invented over the past several decades, for the most part in corporate research laboratories, they collectively possess several desirable properties. They are quite stable, meaning that they don’t break down easily if heated or subjected to radiation.  This makes them useful in such diverse applications as coated cookware and fire-extinguishing foams.  As they’ve increased in numbers and the varieties of use to which they’ve been put, PFAS’s have become ubiquitous. They’ve seemed to be real winners in making the world better. They of course would never have become universally dispersed if they had failed to pass tests for toxicity before being put to widespread use.  This brings us face to face with a moral issue, encapsulated in the precautionary principle, which has four central components:

1. taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty; 

2. shifting the burden of proof to the proponents of an activity; 

3. exploring a wide range of alternatives to possibly harmful actions; and 

4. increasing public participation in decision-making.

Not everyone is in favor of applying these principles. For one thing, it’s not possible to quantitatively delineate boundaries. How would these principles be applied to the PFAS family of substances?  Some substances are acutely poisonous, others act more slowly or accumulate over time before manifesting toxicity. In the case of the PFAS, it took some time for their toxicity to show up. It became a big issue when the DuPont Chemical Company was careless about disposing of waste materials.  The movie “Dark Waters'' tells the story of a suit brought against DuPont Chemical by residents of Parkersburg, WVA. The company was accused of dumping toxic wastes containing PFAS, with deadly consequences for those living in the area. Many people sickened and died, children's’ development was stunted. The suit went on for years.   In the end, DuPont, while denying any wrongdoing, agreed to pay $335 million to settle the dispute. 

An internet search reveals multiple suits against 3M, Dupont, and other actors, including the U.S. Government, for poisoning water systems with PFAS, causing many health problems in adults and developmental problems in children. The EPA has not set enforceable drinking water standards for perfluorinated chemicals, although they have a 70-parts-per-trillion advisory. It is difficult to find water anywhere (including bottled water, by the way) that doesn’t contain traces of PFAS. The US government continues to use these substances in firefighting foams, and they find their way into water sources on which people depend.  Meanwhile, new PFASs are being invented in research labs. Recent studies have shown that PFAS pollution easily rides the wind; they have been found in soil and groundwater at locations up to 30 miles downwind of a factory in West Virginia in which they were used. 

PFAS technology is employed in COVID-19 testing equipment, and in medical garments, hospital gowns, drapes, and divider curtains. We can be pretty sure that eventually, all of the materials containing PFAS will end up as trash or consigned to an incinerator.  A team of professors from Bennington College recently collected soil and surface water samples from near an incinerator in New York state that had a contract to burn firefighting foam containing PFAS. The study revealed that the incineration conditions didn’t effectively destroy the PFAS.  Instead, it merely spread them into the surroundings.  The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has directed that incineration of PFAS cease until conditions can be established that actually destroy these very stable substances.  They’re termed “forever compounds'' for good reason.

Roadway products  A few years ago, when a research team from the San Francisco Estuary Institute measured the contents of stormwater collecting from a parking lot near the Oakland Coliseum after a rain event, they found an extraordinary amount of rubbery black fragments in the samples.  These results triggered a three-year-long study of water collected at many sites around the bay.  The team was able to estimate that more than 7 trillion synthetic particles are washing into San Francisco Bay annually. About half of them were the rubbery fragments associated with tires. Tire rubber is a complex mixture of natural rubber, 20 to 60 percent synthetic rubber formed from plastic polymers, and a great many other ingredients such as carbon black, sulfur, oils, steel wires, and fabrics. Other additives, mostly proprietary, are added to extend lifetime, improve flexibility, and serve as antioxidants. Contact with the road in driving causes wear on the exterior surface of the tire, producing particles of complex composition. It’s been estimated that a car in the US could lose up to ten pounds annually in tire wear. Much more will be lost from a huge semi-trailer truck continually on the road. 

For several decades it's been observed that coho salmon in US Pacific Northwest streams have been subject to sudden massive die-offs. Despite strenuous efforts to improve the habitat for salmon in the 1990s, large fractions of adults migrating up certain streams were suddenly dying. Researchers suspected that something was washing off nearby roadways to cause these deaths, which correlated with rainfalls. Just recently environmental scientists at the University of Washington discovered that the primary culprit comes from a chemical widely used to protect tires from ozone. After working their way through several thousand potential candidates the researchers found the culprit. The compound in question is proprietary, so the researchers had to go out of their way to synthesize their own supply. They were able to establish that the compound, labeled 6PPD, is quite poisonous for Coho salmon. 6PPD is of course washing off roadways around San Francisco Bay and all over the world.  The waterways that collect the runoff from the roads may or may not contain life-forms that are poisoned by it. Southwest Florida where I live is very heavily trafficked. The runoff from roadways almost entirely runs into creeks and rivers that empty into the Gulf of Mexico. What is the long term damage to the multiple ecosystems that live in those waters? We don’t know. 

Were precautionary principles applied before 6PPD and its cousins were approved for use? It’s hard to imagine how that could even be done. Thousands of novel chemical substances are discovered in research laboratories every year, and many of them find commercial applications.  Whether it be water plants, bumblebees, coho salmon or human beings, nature suffers at the hands of human creativity. Organisms or ecosystems have mechanisms for coping with novel substances or with environmental changes. In the course of evolution, complex biological systems evolved resiliency, capacities to eliminate or reduce the effectiveness of toxins. When our early ancestors learned to use fire, they huddled around campfires, in hutches or lodges, breathing in smoke rich with carcinogens and other toxins. It wasn’t good for them, but they survived. Similarly, we survive the toxic effects of synthetic materials that find their way through industry into our lives. But is surviving our vision for the future?  Sometimes, as with some industrial dumps, toxic waste materials move into the larger environment at concentrations that override the limited capacity of living systems to cope with them. We read about and see movies about a few notorious examples. But a great many substances pass regulatory requirements set at a certain level, and are distributed globally. Only later does it turn out that, like campfire smoke, they’re not good for us. 

I do not see a way to significantly change the script of our present scenario.  Human society is becoming increasingly global through the agency of shared technologies, which exercise powerful influences on people’s values and aspirations.  Much has been written on the consequences of our having been enthralled by our successes as a species.  Paul Hawken writes, 

It is an understandable vanity for humans to believe that their cells are privileged or unique, but the distinction between human cells and those of a sunflower is shockingly narrow, while between primates and humans the difference is slender as a thread….We live in community, not alone, and any sense of separateness that we harbor is illusion. Humans are animals, albeit extraordinary ones, and have no special immunity conferred upon them. Given the present rate of planetary pollution and destruction, we need to negotiate a dѐtente with nature and ourselves.

Ah, but how do we enter into that negotiation, when most of the human race is unaware that it’s needed, and is disinclined to deal with what promises to be a demanding, even painful, experience?  The illustrious scientist Edward O. Wilson has written extensively on the urgency of acting now to preserve the biodiversity of the planet. In his book, Half-Earth, he’s quite clear: We have entered into a new epoch.  The biosphere is disappearing, species-by-species, at a sickening pace. Many have termed this epoch the Anthropocene, because it's clear that humans are the major causative agents.  Only an enormous commitment to preservation could save most of what is left.  In a final chapter, Wilson suggests ways in which we might employ our intelligence and imaginative capacities to put aside half of planet Earth for the preservation of biodiversity and to reclaim some of what has been lost. He argues that we can still do this by reshaping society. Check out the Half-Earth Project website. 

I’m heartened by Wilson’s readiness to embrace new technologies.  Futurists have been talking of the inevitability of massive shifts in how and where people will live, of producing food from cellular bases, thus freeing land for a return to a biodiverse natural state, of dramatic reductions in per capita energy consumptions, and more.  But even if society can learn to think differently about planet Earth, reforms won’t go as they should unless our species adopts an ethic that overrides all other claims on our fealty: we are nature ourselves and must live in it.  Darwin argued that, in keeping with other species, humans evolved to have a moral sense.  How can we evince it with respect to nature? Among other things, we think ahead, envisioning a holistic, soil-supporting agricultural system, weaning ourselves away from animal-focused diets, supporting community-based education and practice. When we’re able, we get our hands in the dirt. We become devoted stewards of the planet’s freshwater. We constantly urge elected officials and those in government to pay attention to the ecology of the bioregion they represent. Just maybe, we’ll succeed in preserving a good bit of Gaia for our progeny. 

There is no going back to nature as it was. People think of the Anthropocene in terms of warming oceans, rising sea levels, and other climate-related changes.  But if we could somehow forestall or reverse many of those changes, there will still be PFAS, 6PPD, countless other man-made chemical substances, and mind-boggling quantities of plastic and other waste.  These may prove to be the greatest drivers of change in the Anthropocene Epoch.

When will climate change start to matter?

Let me ask you something: Can you name an experience you’ve had, something that affected you or your family in the past year or so, that you would attribute to global warming? Maybe you recall that you couldn’t fly somewhere because of torrential rains, or that last summer was especially hot, or maybe you have a vacation home in Florida that was damaged by a hurricane. But you can’t be sure that those events were related to global warming. Such things have been going on for a long time. Chances are that if you’re concerned about global warming, it’s not a result of personal experience with it, but rather because you’ve read reports written by scientists that point to the existence of greenhouse gases and the manner in which they contribute to warming of the Earth’s surface. If you accept their reports, and the conclusions they draw from their data, that the Earth is warming as a result of human activity, you could be concerned—even a climate change activist. Or not, depending on your political and social history and present situation.

Paul Hawken

Ten years ago Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger authored an article in YaleEnvironment360, entitled Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change. They attempted to explain survey results pointing to a significant decline in the public’s belief that global warming is occurring, or that human activities contribute to climate change. For the most part their proffered explanations for the tepid responses to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth revolve around notions of political psychology: “many people have a psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order, whatever it may be. This need manifests itself, not surprisingly, in the strong tendency to perceive existing social relations as fair, legitimate, and desirable, even in contexts in which those relations substantively disadvantage the person involved.” In other words, unless the driving forces are staring us in the face, we’re inclined to stick with the status quo, if departing from it requires sacrifices and uncomfortable changes that we’re forced to acknowledge.

As we greet the New Year we might ask whether things are different from a decade ago. The reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have definitely grown more urgent. The special report recently published is decidedly sharper in tone than those preceding it. It carries a sense of urgency and specificity that reflects the most recent results from the field: we will be experiencing the effects of global warming much earlier than previously assumed. If we don’t take substantial actions soon, things will get very bad a few decades down the line. And people still yawn and say, “more doom and gloom!”. That’s too bad, because the scientists are right.

Those involved in the effort to arouse the public to a heightened awareness of climate change find themselves struggling with how to do it. What will it take to get things moving toward mitigation? The tenor of many articles that deal with this question is surprisingly similar to Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s. For example, Laurence Tubiana, a former French ambassador to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and CEO of the European Climate Foundation, echoes their sentiments in an article in Project Syndicate. However, she goes on to emphasize the vital role that expectations play in human behavior. She writes of a convergence of expectations as an enforcement mechanism in changing human behavior. As an example, enormous progress is being made in implementing solar energy. In the state of Florida, where I live, Florida Power and Light is in the midst of one of the largest solar expansions ever in the southeastern U.S., with more than 3.5 million new solar panels added in the last two years alone and millions more on the way. Next year, solar will outpace coal and oil combined as a percentage of FPL’s energy mix. I doubt that most of the people in Florida would have predicted that shift, or that Google is close to supplying all its energy needs from renewable sources. That’s a pretty big deal; Google consumes more electricity in all its operations than San Francisco. To borrow a phrase from Tubiana, society is moving from a mindset of Impossible to Inevitable. Without question, large-scale implementations of existing technologies such as wind, solar, electric cars and vast improvements in energy storage capacity are moving from impossible to inevitable.

Social forces are very important. The idea of global warming is becoming a meme, an element of culture that spreads throughout society like something infectious. Nongovernmental agencies are peppering the developing world with devices and tools to confront climate change. People don’t always get it right, about what global warming will entail, but when they associate the occurrences of more powerful hurricanes, or forest fires in California, or flooding in Wilmington, North Carolina with global warming, they’ve moved a step closer to accepting the immediacy of climate change. That’s good, but it’s not good enough. If the developed world is to effectively counter the long-term consequences of global warming, we’ve got to stop thinking only in terms of what it might do to the resale value of a condo in Florida, or whether New York City will be a good place to live in twenty years. What happens in Bangladesh doesn’t stay there. We’ve got to think wide.

The present political climate across the globe does not look promising for fostering cooperation between nations. But we must have it if human society is to rescue the planet from global despoiling of its resources. If we’re fortunate, we’ll come to realize in time that justice and fairness, coupled with respect for nature, give us what we need. Which brings me to note that on January 7, one of my heroes, Paul Hawken, Executive Director of Project Drawdown, will receive a lifetime achievement award of the National Council for Science and the Environment, one more in a long list of recognitions for all that he’s accomplished. Let’s help celebrate by reading the book he's been instrumental in creating.

Our anti-environment administration; renewing hydropower with pumped storage

The figure at left summarizes the various sources of greenhouse gases for the US.  Notice that electricity is a substantial contributor.  The reason, of course, is that about 63 percent of electricity generation is produced from plants employing fossil fuels, which upon combustion, convert to carbon dioxide.  Most of us have every reason to wish this dependence on carbon were much smaller.  Solar and wind power have come increasingly into the mix, and we can expect those contributions to increase rapidly in the years ahead.  But so much potential progress is being blocked by appointees in the Trump administration. Rick Perry’s time as the head of the Department of Energy is severely hamstringing the country’s economic development and energy security.  The detestable Scott Pruitt has finally been kicked out at EPA, but Trump has replaced him with Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who worked for Murray Energy, the nation's largest coal producer.  Its CEO, Robert  E. Murray,  has been  an avid backer of Donald Trump.   Then there’s the appointment of  Daniel Simmons, a conservative scholar and renewable energy critic to be the head of the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).  EERE’s mission is to create and sustain American leadership in the transition to a global clean energy economy.  It’s difficult to imagine a less appropriate person to pursue this important mission. Simmons recently served as vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research, a notoriously conservative think tank, supported primarily by fossil fuel money.  It advocates greater fossil fuel use and opposes the international climate agreement signed in Paris. If Simmons’s views on renewable energy, and his mindless favoring of fossil fuel over renewable energy enterprises in the US budget and environmental policies, find their way into practice, it would be a shameful betrayal of the public trust.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in this blog about hydropower. In retrospect, I think I may have been more skeptical of its promise than I need have been.  Since that blog appeared, the New York Times published a beautiful interactive article on a $3 billion plan to combine the virtues of renewable but variable solar energy with the stored energy capacity of hydroelectric power. This is long-range, and years from completion, but the story is instructive and a pleasure to read and watch. In brief, the idea is that during the daylight hours a pumping station downstream from Hoover Dam would pump water that has already run through the hydroelectric station back upstream to Lake Mead.  The pumping station would be powered by a gigantic solar farm. The solar energy would in effect be stored by raising the water back up to the lake level so that it can be utilized again for electric power generation. While the solar farm is inactive, during nighttime, the energy it collected from the sun would be recovered in the dam.

This is not a new idea.  Pumped storage, as it is called, is already practiced at about 40 locations.  But this would be larger than any currently in operation.  It needs to be said that pumped storage is not going to be a huge factor in the nation’s energy budget, but, every bit helps. That philosophy is inherent in Project Drawdown, an imaginative approach to mitigating the increase in greenhouse gas levels via many different actions, some potentially very large, such as reforestation, regenerative agriculture, reduced reliance on animal protein and education of women and girls in developing nations.  

I must say that writing about pumped storage and Project Drawdown makes me feel refreshed after having to write about the visionless, narrow-minded and ultimately selfish machinations of our current executive leadership in Washington.  I only hope they don’t succeed in doing irreparable damage before the American people wake up.

         I urge you to have a look at the Drawdown site.  Watch Paul Hawken's interviews--he's inspiring.

A new Start

This blog has gone quiet for a long time.  Life put too many things on my plate, and I just had to let some things go adrift for a time.   In the meantime, environmental politics have turned worse at the national level, and there’s no sign of slowdown in the rate at which CO₂ is being added to the atmosphere. I believe it’s time for me to restart the blog.  I have no illusions about the importance of any pushback I might generate, but there are new things to say, new dragons to go after, perhaps new readers to attract.  We’re told that there are many hopeful signs for the world’s environment if we just look for them and lean into the future.  Renewable energy technologies have been making substantial progress.  And of late there’s new interest in taking assertive actions to actively draw down the levels of atmospheric CO_2, and address social factors that bear upon the rates of CO₂ emissions.  

Realistically, even with the best efforts of all those on the right side of conserving this planet in a livable state, our progeny are in for difficult times.  But we can get going on doing remedial important work.  I’m enthused about Drawdown, a comprehensive plan to actually reverse global warming through an array of initiatives extending over energy, food, the status of women and girls, land use, transport and materials.  The book, Drawdown, edited by Paul Hawken is exciting in its ambition and comprehensiveness. The Drawdown team proposes 80 “solutions”, steps that are cost-effective and doable, each of which can reverse or mitigate the rate of increase in atmospheric CO₂.

Presently we’re faced with the likes of Scott Pruitt and his fellow cabinet member, Ryan Zinke, to name the two most villainous critters in the Trump cabinet cage. They seem bent on reversing as much as possible of the progress made since the inception of the E.P.A. and other legislation protecting the nation’s treasured wild places.  We can and should keep pressure on our congressional representatives to do what they can to block these political hacks’ attacks on the budgets and scientific frameworks of the agencies they control. But Margaret Talbot’s excellent piece in The New Yorker tells us how tough it will be.  It’s easy to get discouraged.

 My spirits were recently boosted by re-watching Kens Burns’s wonderful series on The Roosevelts. From Teddy Roosevelt through FDR’s New Deal programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps the legitimacy of government’s role in maintaining the commonweal was established.  We have history on our side, in terms of admiration for past accomplishments and determination to continue the fight.  Those of us who treasure a sustainable and beautiful world must not give up—we’ve got to keep pushing back, keep working for change.

Consider trees, just one aspect of the environment. Deforestation has led to loss of a significant fraction of the planet’s forests.  In the early stages of human culture, wood was used as a fuel, to provide warmth, and for cooking.  Then forests were stripped to provide land for agriculture, a process that continues to this day.  But this must not continue, not only because we need trees to contribute to the carbon dioxide balance.  Their destruction leads to loss of habitat for many of the earth’s species, and destabilization of the land, with resultant erosion and flooding. 

And who would want to be without trees?  Richard Powers, one of finest novelists writing today, has just published a new novel, The Overstory, that explores the essential conflict between humans and all the nonhuman living rest, while at the same time revealing the deeply complex webs woven in the natural world.  A lyrical, inventive and heartfelt tale worth reading.   

So now I’m motivated to write regularly, mostly about energy, the environment, food and the politics surrounding energy and the environment.  By way of introducing the topic of my next blog, let me ask a question:  What eventually happens to all the machinery, all the technological wizardry, that makes renewable energy possible?  Everything we make use of eventually wears out, right?  Cell phones, Solar panels, electric car batteries, those monumental wind towers.  If you think recycling now is difficult and complex (it is), just wait.