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@chrislewisdc
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Should We Fertilize Oceans To Fight Global Warming?
The short answer is: No. Definitely not. But it could theoretically be possible.
Ecologists understand that iron is a limiting resource for big swaths of the worldâs oceans. Availability of iron controls primary productivityâthat is, how much plankton grow in oceans, and therefore, how much carbon they take in from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
In a 2004 study published in Science, researchers dumped about a ton of iron into the Antarctic Ocean. They estimated that their efforts created a 1000-square-kilometer plankton bloom which, in the end, transferred about 900 tons of carbon to deep ocean, where it will stay for hundreds of years. Thatâs enough to offset the effects of about 700 Americansâ yearly emissions from driving, and we could perhaps do way better. Another study found that when sections of ocean are fertilized by naturally occurring iron deposits, the sequestration rate is at least ten times higher.
We are far from even beginning to know what the side effects would be of dumping massive amounts of iron into the ocean. It is sure to be highly disruptive to existing ecosystems. We also donât know how much it would cost, and whether the impact would scale in the way we expect.
We have climate solutions that we already know to be feasible and effective (solar panels! fewer cars! less meat!), so it probably doesnât make sense to start recklessly altering major earth systems. But since those reasonable solutions seem to be off the table politically, it is possible to picture a world in which we have to start trying some of these unreasonable ones.
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Plants Are People Too
Really enjoyed getting to know Anishinaabe plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmererâs way of thinking the other day. She spoke on campus about what we can learn from plants. Not some sort of metaphorâKimmerer draws from indigenous teachings to argue that we should see plants as sovereign, sentient beings. Thereâs some Western precedent for this, too; apparently Plato argued that plants have souls.
Such a view leads to some interesting perspectives. Kimmerer talked about how âhumans and plants worked together to create corn,â a cool way of thinking about the breeding process that turned a Mexican wild grass into the most important food source in the world.
Thereâs more here than semantics, philosophy, or spirituality. Kimmerer argued that Western cultural dominance has imposed the idea that plants are objectsâreferred to as âitâârather than the pronoun weâd use for a living being, and the pronouns that her Potawatomi language still uses. In her view, this objectification is a key precursor to the abuse and exploitation of nature.
For the bulk of human history and until very recently, Kimmererâs view was the dominant one. She argued that our lives since the Industrial Revolution have been humanityâs first experiment in treating the world as if it isnât alive. âThe results are in, and they donât look good,â she said. If the grim projections of our environmental future are to be believed, sheâs certainly right.
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Is Civilization Just A Fluke?
Okay, perhaps the title is a bit provocative. This from Seed Magazine captured my attention though:
To begin, we need to put our role on this planet in perspective by placing humanity and the Earthâs systems in a geological context. If you graph the range of global temperature variations over the past 100,000 years, most of it forms a wild, erratic sawtooth pattern as climatic variations have at turns scorched or frozen the world. But, about 10,000 years ago, temperature variation stabilized, and we entered what geologists call the Holocene epoch. This is the stable period during which agriculture and complex societies, including our own, developed and flourished.
Considering the fact that our modern globalized society has developed within these unusually stable conditions, it might come as no surprise that todayâs hospitable environment is often taken for granted in investment decisions, political actions, and international agreements.
It doesnât seem like a coincidence that civilization just happened to develop during a uniquely stable climate. What does it mean that human life as we know it has existed only in one fleeting stable window of geological time? Is a semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle inherently more resilient than what we call civilization?
Probably not, but the passage above suggests that we might as well start thinking about our unstable climateââsuddenly and violently out of balance,â in Bill McKibbenâs termsâas the norm, not the exception. If not from greenhouse gases, that stability was bound to end at some point, so we better start planning for our long-term future on this âtough new planet,â as McKibben says.
Iâm taking a class on climate resilience this semester, so more on this to come.
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Horse Power
I posted awhile back about horses in Detroit. My friend and former coworker Pasha Ellis organizes monthly equestrian events for kids in his central Detroit neighborhood with the group Motor City Horsemen. He envisions a future Detroit where horses become a prominent form of transportation.
It may seem like a bit of an esoteric goal. In an interview we did this summer, he explained his thinking. He said horses are about:
Bringing people closer to who they are. Helping people find definition without things, objects, man-made products. Yo, riding a horse is an exhilarating experience man, especially for people whoâve never rode a horse before. Itâll definitely cut down on pollution, and it will spark an interest, I feel, in nature and being closer to nature.
As the leader of the Fenkell and Dexter Community Coalition, Pasha organizes a wide range of projects in the neighborhoodâtending gardens, cleaning streets, building community spaces in vacant lots. He argues that American consumer culture perpetuates an internalized mentality of white supremacy in distressed black Detroit neighborhoods. Improving the cityâs quality of life therefore requires confronting that culture. Beyond the free fertilizer and saved fossil fuel, horses have a role to play in that work:
I think all aspects of nature have a healing aesthetic, whether itâs planting gardens, riding a horse, raising livestock, since itâs our natural element as people. It just puts us in a better place health-wise, overall. And like I say for these kids, these city kids, definitely just bringing them closer to nature and their humanity, opposed to, you know, âooh I like that new car, that new car!â You know, fuck that pollution, get up on this horse and stop next to that car. See how majestic you really feel!
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Need Cash Fast? Ask Reddit
My friend Gustav and I laid out the hottest new place to get a payday-style loan, sometimes in just minutes: Reddit. In The Atlantic, we explain how an ad-hoc community of online lenders Paypal money to strangers based on their forum posts, and most of them get repaid.
When asked if theyâd be able to cover a $400 emergency expense, Neal Gablerâs recent Atlantic cover story noted, nearly half of all respondents to a 2014 Federal Reserve study said that they wouldnât have enough cash on hand.
So how would they scrape the money together? Most told the Fed they would try for a bank loan, use a credit card, or make a potentially embarrassing request to family and friends. Two percent of respondents said they would take out a payday loan.
To avoid this suite of unattractive choices, some borrowers are asking strangers for money on Reddit instead. Since 2011, a section of the site, r/borrow (and its predecessor, r/loans), has matched users looking for quick credit with lenders willing to put up cash. Most loans on r/borrow charge very high interest ratesâusually between 10 and 25 percent, to be paid back over weeks or months. Per data collected by one r/borrow user, the subreddit facilitated 3,473 loans totaling over $780,000 in 2015. According to a moderator of the subreddit, r/borrow users, like Redditors at large, skew young, white, and male. Loans tend to range from $100 to a few thousand dollars, and cover the gamut of emergency financial needs, including car repairs, debt consolidation, medical bills, or unexpected travel costs.
Relatively speaking, these arenât huge numbersâthe consumer-credit market handles trillions of dollars each yearâbut they do highlight the ways in which traditional lending options can fail to give some people what they need. âItâs not surprising that borrowers are looking for alternative ways of getting access to credit,â says Paul Leonard, the former director of the California office of the Center for Responsible Lending.
When Americans need money, they often turn first to banks for a loan, but their options there are only as good as their credit. If their credit scoreâa figure that can be calculated incorrectly and yet is often taken as the sole indicator of a prospective borrowerâs reliabilityâis low, they often turn to loans with much higher interest rates. Take Justin OâDell, a cable technician living in Dexter, Michigan. He says his mother took out several credit cards in his name while he was in college and racked up about $40,000 in debt. âMy choices were to press charges for credit fraud or eat the debt,â he said. âI ate the debt.â No longer able to get student loans, OâDell was forced to drop out of college.
When OâDell later needed some cash to pay his cellphone bill after his wife lost her job, he briefly considered a payday loanâan extremely high-interest alternative that is known to catch consumers in cycles of debt and is mostly unregulated in 32 states. (Payday loans are not equal-opportunity debt traps, either: âThere is some evidence that lenders have concentrated themselves in communities of color,â said Joe Valenti, the director of consumer finance for the Center for American Progress.) But after deciding against that option, and against the embarrassment of asking his father, OâDell ultimately opted for the comfortable distance of a Reddit loan. âYou donât have to walk back to dad with your tail between your legs and ask for help,â he said. Now, he turns to Reddit when surprise expenses arise.
The full story here.
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Motor City Horsemen // Detroit, MI // 6/4/2016
A friend of mine, the Fenkell and Dexter Community Coalition, and the Motor City Horsemen organize monthly horse rides and gardening workshops on this corner in Central Detroit. The goal is to build community and put vacant landâof which Detroit has 20 plus square milesâto good use.
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Word
Iâve long struggled to adequately explain the racial tinge of the animus toward Detroit prevalent in so much of Michigan. Mark Binelli taps into it pretty impressively. He reflects after realizing how a group of suburban companions seemed to relish littering in a Detroit parking lot before a football game:
A wave of exhaustion came over me, even though Iâd only been awake for a couple of hours. The gulf between city and suburbs felt gaping and hopeless. Still, when one of the tailgaters asked about my reporting, I mentioned that things in Detroit felt different, better, knowing I risked scorn for being hopelessly naĂŻve, a dupe. Predictably, the guy shook his head and said heâd been hearing that for the past thirty years. The main problem, he claimed, was leadership, that the city really screwed up by electing the worst people ever, that nothing would change unless you changed things at the topâa not uncommon assessment from white suburbanites, âleadershipâ often signifying âthieving blacks who demanded the keys to the shop, and now look what fucking happened.â If there was national schadenfreude about the failure of Detroit, regional schadenfreude was even stronger, and it hinged in large part on race.
In that moment, I thought of certain aspects of United States foreign policyâthe practice of isolating enemy states financially and then watching the leader whom weâve labeled a tyrant act more and more like one when his regime begins to crumble under the pressure of the embargo. The leader and his state must fail in order to confirm the triumph of our own ideology. And if his people do not rise up against him, their suffering is, at least in part, their own fault. Here, Detroit was the rogue state, defying the bullying hegemony of a superpower that (in the eyes of many Detroiters) wanted to install its own hand-picked leader, making the transfer of any remaining natural resources that much smoother.
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