Ocean

Climate & Instinctuality

/ bigdiff / 1 Comment

I write this on the Sea of Cortez, where sparrows chirp in the palms, brown pelicans splash down to catch their lunch, a whale takes a quick breath before diving down again, and a sign on the beach warns me not to step on stingrays. Most of the time, we live and work in air conditioned buildings, watch fiction on screen, and eat processed foods produced by big agricultural conglomerates. Nature often seems distant, filtered and controlled, which suppresses our natural affinity with other living creatures. Here, I am surrounded by many different forms of life, filling my senses, each living free. Looking out over the ocean is calming, and the smell of salt in the air reminds me that our roots are in the ocean; it’s in our blood. When we are in nature, we feel more connected with all living things that eat, breathe and cheat death, like we do.

But our selfish thoughtlessness now risks mass extinctions, as we unbalance the living world oblivious to the damage done by our pollution. Anger is what I feel most when contemplating the climate crisis, but also despair. People refusing to change, repeating lies, smugly imagining themselves smarter than scientists. Despair about the coming diseases, droughts, mass extinctions, famines, floods, heatwaves, refugees, storms and wildfires. Do we not fear death, like those trapped in their attics during Katrina or engulfed in Lahaina on Maui? Have we lost our survival instinct?

I’ve already seen huge wilderness forests, in areas largely untouched by man, burned over 95% in wildfires 100 or 1000 times larger than normal. I’ve stumbled on the moraine where glaciers once clung to mountaintops. I’ve swum along dead coral reefs that were brimming with fish when I was a teenager. In Mexico last year I heard about the decline in monarch butterflies in their winter refuge after migrating from all across North America. This year I heard about the decline in gray whales, breeding less due to less food, as our carbon pollution is rapidly changing the ocean’s temperature, acidity and salinity, poisoning the lifeblood of the smallest and simplest organisms upon which larger ones rely to survive.

We are betraying our evolution. I feel shock, despair and anger that my fellow humans knew and mostly refused to act. Pain of loss is what I feel when I know that future generations will never again experience the bounty of life we once had, to learn from or appreciate the living natural beauty we could have enjoyed, but recklessly gave up, unwilling to change our behavior.

Next week, I’ll wrap up this trip to Baja, and then we need to work on thinking rationally.

Biosphere 2

/ bigdiff / Leave a comment

From 1991 to 1993, eight people lived in this huge sealed greenhouse or giant terrarium in Arizona, growing their own food and attempting to live without outside intervention. Built at a cost of some $250 million, the complex includes the artificial ocean above, multiple tropical growing zones, industrial HVAC, and even a unique, massive ‘lung’ to equalize air pressure at different temperatures. Results were mixed, but there are important lessons to be learned.

Humans like to believe we can control our environment and that we have conquered nature. The truth is that we don’t completely understand nature, and when we try to control it, there are unintended consequences.

The most serious problem was a gradual reduction in oxygen, which threatened to kill the participants by around day 500 and required emergency intervention. Despite all the plants, overall, the system produced too much carbon dioxide. Also, the participants complained of constant hunger, unable to eat enough calories per day, which made it difficult to complete their extensive daily chores. Many plants and pollinators did not survive, but stowaways like cockroaches thrived. Still, they survived for two full years. Others later managed shorter stints, but bickering and mismanagement soon ended fully sealed living experiments.

From 1995 to 2003, Columbia University managed the site and completed groundbreaking research here scientifically proving up to 90% declines in oceanic coral due to artificially high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, the coral later died when the site went back on the market, although there are plans to try to reintroduce it. Today the site is run by Arizona State University, which offers both a general self-guided tour and specialized guided tours, in addition to hosting students and researchers. When fully funded, the semi-tropical desert forests are very well controlled and measured, enabling many scientific experiments on micro ecosystems to be carried out under laboratory conditions. Tracers can be added to water and carbon dioxide, so researchers can figure out exactly what plants are doing in different conditions. Unfortunately, the whole complex is extremely energy intensive, and it is run on diesel and natural gas, which both contribute carbon pollution to exacerbate the climate crisis.

Some believe that technology will allow us to adapt to the worst effects of climate change. The truth is that we need to spend our time, energy and money trying to protect Biosphere 1 (Earth) from carbon pollution. This massive, extremely expensive, carefully engineered and scientifically researched project could barely take care of eight people for two years. That’s neither an efficient nor effective use of resources, but it quickly illustrates how difficult it is to scale environmental technologies to the point that they are practical. How big of a terrarium would we need to feed eight billion people? Far better to take care of the Earth, while we still have hope.