We Cannot Negotiate With Nature

The physics of climate change are not interested in the opinions of humans. 

This is what Danish Climate and Energy Minister Dan Jørgensen had in mind when he made the statement I use as a title above. In an interview with the BBC, he was explaining the very bold policies his country is employing in order to reduce its greenhouse emissions. Some of these approaches also have economic benefits, but he makes it clear that they will operate some utilities at a financial loss if necessary.

Image: Maersk

The interview included both the political leader of Denmark and the CEO of its largest company, the shipping giant Maersk, which moves one fifth of the world's trade. He described how the company is planning to make all of that transportation carbon-neutral by 2050, and how it has already begun to accelerate those plans. The first carbon-neutral cargo ship will be on the water in 2023, with eight already on order.

The finances are negotiable; the atmosphere is not.

Their sense of responsibility is in sharp contrast to that of investment bankster Roberto de Guardiola, whose $10,000,000 yacht Highlander was berthed for a couple of months recently near my club's much more modest vessels in New Bedford. 

I was reminded of this yacht -- called a super yacht because of its size and cost -- when listening to another person in the same BBC program -- Selina Leem of the Marshall Islands, which is the country where this yacht happens to be registered. 

The yacht called Highlander is registered in Bikini, M.I. Perhaps de Guardiola chose that port in part because he enjoys the excuse to have a name that sounds sexy painted in huge letters on the stern of an otherwise unadorned vessel. If he is aware of the calamities inflicted on the small archipelago by the United States, it does not stop him from claiming the name. Nuclear testing erased some islands and left others with a legacy of poison. None of this matters, of course, since the islands were chosen strictly for the "convenience" of lower fees and looser regulations that the super-rich often prefer. 

Selina Leem is an activist and one of just 60,000 residents of her country, which is found entirely on low-lying islands and atolls. I have written about the vulnerability of similar archipelagos in Climate Attack and other posts, but her first-person account of the multiple perils of rising seas is well worth hearing, as is her conversation with the program host about the reasons she would rather combat climate change than abandon her country. 

This conversation was just a sample of many events that were taking place in and around Glasgow in the days leading up to the most recent global climate negotiations. As I posted in Delaying Justice, the main negotiations offered some progress on some of the unmet goals (read: unkept promises) of the previous round of negotiations in Paris. It is of some use to have heads of state make commitments to future targets, but it is increasingly clear that Greta Thunberg and others are correct in insisting that we need much bolder action than COP26 could provide.

The participants in the BBC interview cited above (which I recommend taking the time to hear in its entirety) were in Glasgow at the invitation of TED as part of an ongoing effort called COUNTDOWN that is putting into action exactly the idea suggested above. Never has the adage of to think globally and act locally been more important. We can press our political leaders to do the right thing at a global scale, but we must also do the right things ourselves countless ways that will never be part of the COP proceedings.

Lagniappe

The world desired by the Guardiolas of the world and the politicians they rent:

Post-Peak Oil

 

Detail of photo by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
for Bloomberg Green

Perhaps the most profane guest lecturer I ever brought to campus was James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. I qualify this with "perhaps" because I also helped to bring Junot Díaz to campus. Kunstler is certainly the more curmudgeonly of the two: a professional pessimist for whom dire predictions are a moral imperative. It is as if we were stepping off a curb in front of a fast-moving bus, and he is trying to push us out of its path with books, lectures, and profanity-laden blog posts.

I was reminded of this by a recent story from Bloomberg. In Toxic Spills in Venezuela Offer a Bleak Vision of the End of Oil, journalists Fabiola Zerpa, Peter Millard, and Andrew Rosati describe the multiple environmental catastrophes that are accompanying the financial collapse of what was once a leading national petroleum industry.

As the article describes in detail, the demise of petroleum in Venezuela is following a path that is not likely to play out in other producing areas. It is, after all, failing to refine oil while it still has plenty. Most other oil fields -- and the global oil field as a whole -- will not run aground financially until reserves are proportionally much scarcer than they are in Venezuela at the moment. 

But the tale is a cautionary one for another reason: it is difficult enough to get polluters to take financial responsibility for the havoc they cause while they are profitable. It is much more difficult when they have run out of money. It is for this reason that regulatory programs such as RCRA in the United States require industries to show strong financial reserves as part of any process of permitting potentially polluting facilities. 

As oil reserves dwindle worldwide -- and all of them will -- abandoned fields and infrastructure will require close scrutiny. Unfortunately, many of the costs of our oil addiction are likely to be borne by generations who do not enjoy the benefits.

Ten Shillings, Six Pence: 10/6

My favorite librarian habitually checks the National Day calendar, looking for things that might be fun to celebrate, and this often inspires special meals in our household. It also leads to odd discoveries, such as the Mad Hatter Day.

Chapeleiro Maluco

The "holiday" began in Colorado in 1986, simply as an excuse for "crazy" or whimsical behaviors, especially involving the wearing of hats. When I posted this photo online, a friend in Brazil immediately commented with the Portuguese version of the term, and some virtual chuckles followed.

As detailed in a Mad Hatter Day article in the Panache section of Economic Times, the manic character is associated with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, though he never used that exact name for his character the Hatter. The article explains why today's date is used to celebrate the character. 

It errs, however, in associating the "madness" of haberdashers with their use of lead; mercury was the real culprit, as mentioned in the video above. It is an easy mistake to have made: both are metals known to be neurotoxins, and in reality the toxicity of mercury is gravely serious. In fact, I am justifying the time I am spending on this blog post by the fact that I am sharing it with my Environmental Regulations class later this morning. We will make some comparisons between mercury and dichlordiphenyltrichloroethane, which we have been studying for the past few weeks. 

Mercury and DDT are different in many ways, but both are subject to biomagnification in fatty tissue and were in use for decades before their toxicity was understood. Both exemplify the limitations of free markets when managing environmental risks.

Dam Shame

I did my entire master's thesis on dams, so I feel emboldened to make more than the usual number of dam-related puns whenever the topic of dams comes up. And for the same reasons, I make sure that the topic comes up more than it does around normal people. That said, the title of this post is slightly mismatched to the topic, because the people responsible for the recent dam failure in Edenville, Michigan and for the associated toxic-waste disaster downstream seem to have exactly zero shame.

Shortly before a catastrophic failure. Image: NPR.

I am including a few items that relate to different geographic lessons about this failure. First is from a rather nerdy geomorphology perspective, but it illustrates sometihng everyone should know about dams.


Every dam has a spillway at some level below the top of the dam -- usually at least a few feet lower. This spillway defines what should be the maximum level of water behind the dam. It must be designed with a capacity to allow for ANY possible flow of water around the dam. If water is allowed to flow over the wall of the dam ("topping" the dam) failure is quite likely. This is especially true of earthen dams, but is also a danger with concrete or stone dams. Dave Petley's American Geophysical Union blog post on which I found this video includes more technical details, including some that are in the form of questions, as this system is much more complicated than it appears to non-specialists.

The failure of this dam brings immediately to mind the 1889 Johnstown Flood. In both cases, innocent downstream communities were devastated by a failure of both engineering and conscience. Wealthy owners had been warned that their structures were unlikely to survive expected rain events, but chose to risk not only their investments but also the properties -- and the very lives -- of downstream neighbors. Lee Mueller, the owner of the Edenville Dam, is doubly culpable because he has actively ignored federal and state safety regulators and he must know the history of Johnstown. He is a perfect illustration of the need for environmental regulations, and the need to empower those agencies charged with enforcing them. Sadly, at least 2,500 dams in the United States are considered dangerous, meaning that they are both in a position to cause deaths if they fail and in a state of repair that makes such failures more likely than they ought to be.

When I commented about the good luck that nobody was killed by the Edenville collapse (though thousands were evacuated and millions of dollars of damage was done), a friend and former professor of mine quickly corrected me: nobody died as an immediate result of the collapse, but the flood damage included the inundation of an inadequately prepared chemical plant downstream.

As I explain in my 2016 Houston, Too Close to New Orleans post, tanks storing hazardous chemicals are required to be surrounded by secondary containment, meaning a wall or berm that will contain the chemical in the event of flooding or failure of the tank. I know this because I have done the calculations for such containment in Puerto Rico. The inside dimensions must be adequate to contain the entire contents of the dam, plus a small freeboard capacity. Similarly, the outside dimensions (height above ground) must be high enough to withstand a 100-year flood. Tanks on Dow properties downstream from Edenville were not adequately contained, so my friend is correct that increased casualties are likely. But they will be the result of long-term, low-dose chemical exposure that will be impossible to document on an individual basis.

In the case of the Dow facility, it is not yet clear what the nature of the miscalculation was; it could very well be that the berms met legal requirements and failed anyway. This is because the regulations worst-case conditions on which regulations are based might assume only meteorological flooding, not that caused by independent failures upstream. Moreover, the 100-year flood level is no longer an adequate way to estimate flood risk. It describes a flood that would have a 1/100 probability of being exceeded in any given year in the past. As I explain in my 2018 post Not in the Cards, even in the hands of statisticians, hydrologists, and engineers who do understand precisely what the term does and does not mean (and these people are rare), existing records are not adequate to estimate flood probabilities, because climate change means that today's conditions are statistically not related to those of the past.

Ellicott City Comparison

Image: Scott Weaver

I was reminded of the flood-interval problem in the recent Save Our Town episode (s3e10) of Gordon Ramsay's 24 Hours to Hell and Back. Careful readers of this blog (if there are any) might know that "Our Town" refers to Ellicott City, Maryland, whose 2016 and 2018 floods I have written about in Flood Flash and Burying the Survivors, as well as Not in the Cards. No dam was involved in these catastrophes, but other aspects of the story are relevant.

We are not fans of reality television -- even if it pertains to food -- but of course we watched this show with great attention (and through torrents of tears, to be honest). PLEASE watch it if you can, because ultimately it is a hopeful story. Because it is not a show about hydrology, though, it is understandable that a mistaken comment about the floods was included without correction. Someone in the program said that the town had been struck by two 1,000-year floods. They did not go on to say that the odds of this would be close to one in a million, but it is implied. The reality, unfortunately, is that the floods in Ellicott City were inevitable given. climate change and recklessly inadequate regulation of upstream land use. The three blog posts above describe the details.

Incidentally, Ellicott City is still vulnerable, but engineering remedies -- including those described in Ramsay's show -- have likely reduced the risk in general terms and have removed some of the most vulnerable victims completely.

Lagniappe

Strictly speaking, my master's thesis was not about dams: it was about soil erosion. But the unexpectedly rapid sedimentation of a reservoir behind a medium-scale dam was the motive for our study, and we examined several dozen small-scale reservoirs to study the problem. When we started the project, I could barely discern small reservoirs on aerial photos; after a full year of study, I felt as though I knew some of them personally.

I am not certain to what extent dam safety has been a factor in the decision, but I recently learned that a small dam about a mile from my house in Bridgewater is slated for removal. This will create some environmental benefits and some environmental hazards (principally from the draining of artificial wetlands and the possible liberation of long-dormant toxic sediments). I will be following that with nerdy interest!

Food Resilience, Not

Those who protest (sometimes violently) against common-sense measures to protect public health during the Coronavirus pandemic are attacking the immediate cause of the severe dislocations they are facing: mandates from state or local government. But what really should concern them are much deeper patterns. Short-term measures to protect public health are merely exposing deep fault lines that have run through our society for some decades; it is not difficult to imagine a world in which the same stay-at-home measures would not cause such immediate and widespread dislocation.

In an interview with environmental journalist Steve Curwood, author (and one-time BSU visitor) Michael Pollan explains this with remarkable clarity in a 14-minute radio segment entitled Coronavirus Shocks US Food System. He describes the disconnect between two geographies of food in the United States: that of grocery stores and that of food service (such as restaurants and schools).

Spoiler alert: he mentions a third, much more resilient segment as well. He cites several examples of local food networks that have found ways to adjust distribution patterns -- away from restaurants and toward farm-box subscriptions, for example. This corroborates recent reporting from Australia, where planners have found that suburban sprawl has made Melbourne more vulnerable -- both to food-supply disruption and to wildfire.

All of the above has to do with what is available in the food system; sadly, another dimension of the crisis is the rapidly growing number of people who cannot afford food even if it is for sale at relatively low prices. Since the 1980s, social safety nets have eroded along with wages; a great number of people in what many still call the wealthiest nation on earth (it is not) cannot afford to eat if they miss a paycheck. 

Cars in Minneapolis queuing for food pantry (trailer in upper-right)
Photo: Mother Jones

As of this writing, the Federal government has authorized $9,000,000,000,000 that is called "stimulus" or "relief" but which is not targeted at those who most urgently need it. The result is a shockingly rapid surge in those seeking relieve at through local food banks, as documented by Mother Jones in mid-April.

Tom and the Volcano

Just a few weeks ago, a hiker on Mauna Loa found this bomb. More precisely, they re-found it, leading to a retelling of its remarkable story.

Rocks that fall from the ejecta of a volcano are called bombs, but this was a bomb dropped deliberately into the volcano 85 years earlier.

The photo was not taken by the hiker; it was taken as part of a 1977 study of the bombing, which had taken place in late 1935. It was one of 40 bombs dropped in the volcano to protect the water supply of Hilo.

The rediscovery of the bomb led to the retelling of the story by the staff of the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory, the agency whose founder had organized the bombing. Their account -- in blog posts dated March 5 and March 12 -- provides insight into volcanology as a descriptive and occasionally prescriptive discipline.



The red icon on this map of the Island of Hawai'i marks the Wailuku River, which reaches the sea at nearby Hilo. In late 1935, lava flowing from Mauna Loa was approaching the city. If the flow reached the Wailuku River just upstream of the city, its water supply could be interrupted.

Volcanologist Thomas Jaggar asked the Army Air Corps to bomb the flow, and this succeeded in stopping it. Better put: forty bombs were dropped, the flow slowed, and the river was spared. The volcanologist claimed victory, but even the pilots were skeptical -- presumably because they could see the scale of the flow relative to the magnitude of the munitions they used.

The story reminds me of one of the first environmental geography books I read: The Control of Nature by John McPhee, a Princeton professor of English, now emeritus, who is one of the best geography writers I know. Among the three stories he tells is one of an effort to divert a lava flow in Iceland. Rather than dropping bombs, the citizenry confronted the volcano in that story with water hoses. Read McPhee's engaging account to learn why that was not as crazy as it sounds.

Lagniappe: The Gap Band

This MTV classic has been running in my mind since I first read the story. Welcome to my earworm.

Heat Down Under

Source: Courier Mail

When reading the Courier Mail story about expected record heat in Australia, it is useful for non-scientist readers in the United States remember that 1°C = 1.8°F, so the differences cited are almost double what they would seem on quick reading.

... and that 40°C = 104°F, while 50°C = 122°F

Official temperature readings are taken 1.5 meters (5 feet) above the surface. From my experience in Tucson (and from the literature), I know that in dry, still air this means that the surface temperature can be MUCH hotter.

It is also useful when reading the story, of course, to remember that Australia is about to pass from late spring into summer. Records being broken now are very likely to be exceeded in January or February. As has been widely reported, smoke and fire are already serious problems.

Bogs and Biodiversity

From Estonia comes new research on the importance of biodiversity related to an ecosystem type that is found throughout southeastern Massachusetts -- the bog. As common as they are in the glacial outwash plains from Middleborough to Carver to Cape Cod, on a global scale these are quite rare.

Not only is the geomorphology needed to create them highly unusual, they must also have a hydrologic balance that allows organic soils to be maintained over millennia. Extended dry periods cause bog soils (highly organic types known as histosols) literally disappear.

As the article explains, adjoining fens (think Fenway) are even rarer and ecologically more important.

Baby on the Shelf

Writing for NPR's Planet Money, journalist Greg Rosalsky brings to mind -- perhaps inadvertently -- the annoying Elf on the Shelf craze in his discussion of recent research in demographic economics. He begins his explanation of the current Baby-Less Recovery in the United States, by citing the tendency of some economists to put babies in the "durable goods" category, alongside cars and refrigerators.

This reporting draws on research that shows significant correlations between declines in birth rates and subsequent economic recessions. In other words, people anticipating economic put off baby-making early in economic slowdowns. They put, as it were, the baby on the shelf.

The research further finds that the sensitivity of potential parents to economic stress is far from uniform across demographic groups. For the first time, in fact, married women aged 30-34 are now the most likely to have children because they are less susceptible to economic woes than their younger sisters. For the first time, student loans are cited as a significant demographic factor. The pernicious ramifications of Grover Norquist's politics of austerity, in other words, are showing up in population figures.

The article is a good illustration of details that sometimes arise in discussions of the later phases of the demographic transition model. Broad patterns in population change result from fundamental shifts in the economy, from rural to urban, agricultural to manufacturing. Smaller but still significant shifts then occur as a result of important but less profound economic cycles or social changes.

I found this article via another story I had heard on air -- Less Sex, Fewer Babies: Blame The Internet And Career Priorities. In this lighthearted but very important segment, journalist Sam Sanders explores several reasons that the United States -- along with other economically prosperous countries -- faces a growing need for immigration. That's right: while politicians exploit xenophobic fears of migration in the short run, our current reliance on millions of immigrant workers (regardless of legal status) will only increase in coming decades.

Hothouse Earth

Hearing this interview on my local NPR station today reminded me of The One Who Got Away ... the academic version.

When I was at University of Arizona during the early days of climate-change, Dr. Diana Liverman was a guest speaker a few times. I also met her -- and more importantly her graduate students -- at conferences. I almost transferred to Penn State, where she was on the faculty, even though PhD students do not really do that.

It did not work out, and she ended up coming to Arizona, too late for me to have a decent advisor, though I eventually wiggled my way through.

Hearing her cogent discussion on the radio took me way back, but I have no regrets -- I love what I do now and work with her would have kept me in the R-1 orbit.

Like many geographers, she is deeply worried but not yet resigned -- we could not continue to teach if we did not retain at least some hope. And like many geographers, her work is deeply interdisciplinary. The interview draws on a recent report -- Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene -- that she published with a global team of scientists from many disciplines.
I will be sharing this with many of my students, including those in my Environmental Regulations class this fall. In addition to her insights on the physical science, she mentions something that I will be stressing all semester: the U.S. Federal government is an important environmental actor, but it is not the only one. While it is abdicating its environmental responsibilities, other nations and our own state and local governments -- as well as individuals and private corporations -- must and will fill the void.

Humans Should Act Our Age

Our geologic age, that is.

Geologists who define ages and epochs according to the rise and fall of organisms have come to realize that one particular species has dramatically altered the earth in ways that will be detectable well into the future. That species is us: Homo sapiens sapiens. As the name implies, higher-order thinking distinguishes us from the rest of our genus, and indeed from the rest of all life. It may be both our doing and our undoing.

A lot of that thinking has been directed at the extraction of resources that could be used both for energy and for useful products. Those resources, especially coal, petroleum, and natural gas, provided both concentrated energy and material -- plastic -- that could be used to manufacture almost literally anything.

The Anthropocene (human age) is so called because that process of extraction has fundamentally changed the Earth in ways that some humans have difficulty believing. The earth is indeed so vast -- comprising billions of cubic miles of material -- that it seems unlikely that a "mere" humans could affect it in any significant way.

The first step in understanding how this is possible is to think about the spatial scale of Earth's environments. I help to run an educational project called EarthView, in which we take a giant, inflatable globe to school gyms. We point out that on a 20-foot globe, almost everything that counts in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere -- indeed, the entire biosphere -- is within 1/5 of an inch of the surface. At the scale of an ordinary classroom, all of our resources are within the thickness of the paper covering it.

The second step in understanding how humans can significantly alter the planet is to think about the temporal (time) scale of human activity. Over a few millennia of civilization, humans have changed land-use patterns through hunting, fire, and agriculture. And in just a couple of centuries, we have extracted fossil fuels that have formed over a period of about 300,000,000 years. We use energy for our homes, factories, planes, trains and automobiles that was derived by photosynthesis when India was still attached to Antarctica.

About half of the oil, coal, and natural gas are formed from decayed layers of plants and animals that were growing during the carboniferous period and developed under heat and pressure ever since have been released into the atmosphere and oceans in just two centuries. In half a century, much of that has been turned into plastics that -- whether dutifully recycled or not -- have accumulated into Texas-sized sludge islands in the oceans.

Anthropocene imagined. Image: Shutterstock by way of NPR.
Note vertical exaggeration of the near-surface features.
The Earth has a diameter of 8,000 miles; almost all of our experience is
within a layer that is far less that 1 percent of that thickness.

Thus have geologists recognized our new age. The ability of our children and their children's children to thrive -- or even to survive -- the changes will depend upon our taking much greater interest in what we have wrought, and much greater responsibility for ameliorating the damage.

To this end, the most recent edition of the Ted Radio Hour is dedicated to understanding the Anthropocene and considering our responsibilities. The discussion begins with a paleontologist's perspective on the evidence we are leaving future geologists, and then turns to several discussions of our impact on biodiversity, including the potential of landscape ecology to reduce further harm.


Lagniappe

For more on the basics that drive the climate part of our epochal impact, see my earlier posts Frosty Denial and Early Warning. For beautifully written, nuanced discussion of the localized impacts of climate change throughout the world, please see my various blog posts referencing the works of Carl Safina and read his book The View from Lazy Point.

Bears Ears Reversal

Photo: Tim Peterson, Grand Canyon Trust

A week after insulting Navajo veterans of World War II -- the code talkers who helped to win the war in the Pacific -- under a portrait of the odious Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States announced the unprecedented removal of National Monument status from over 1,000,000 acres of land in Utah whose protection had been sought by Navajo and other tribes. Fortunately, the United States does still have three branches of government, and it is possible that a Federal court will agree that that the Antiquities Act does not give a president this authority.

Still, as widely reported yesterday, the president is asserting just such authority in Utah, and if successful he may try to do the same in many other states, though not in Montana.

In the NPR report above, Matt Anderson argues that President Obama's naming of the Bears Ears National Monument had itself been overreach, and that reverting to BLM status would keep "the areas open and accessible to locals who depend on this land for their daily lives." The image he hopes to convey is of family farmers grazing animals on highly-regulated rangelands, but it cannot be denied that coal, oil, and natural gas leases would also be made possible if yesterday's decision is upheld.

Without sensing the irony of their own claims, some opponents argue that indigenous opponents of the rollback are located far away, and that local, non-indigenous voices should have priority. The displacement of native people from their land is thus used as an argument against their standing to discuss it.

Later on Monday, All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly spoke with Ute Indian Shaun Chapoose about Native American responses to the announcement.

The reversal of federal protection is unprecedented -- with the 1,300,000-acre Monument reduced to just 228,000.

Map: State of Utah, by way of Grand Canyon Trust

Lagniappe: It Gets Worse

Immediately after seeing to the removal of 2,000,000 acres (an area bigger than Delaware) from these the National Monuments, Secretary Zinke urged the president to reduce the size of four more protected areas: Nevada's Gold Butte, the Cascade-Siskiyou of Oregon and California, the Pacific Remote Islands, and the Rose Atoll. The last of these is an area of protected marine resources covering an area larger than Massachusetts.

Next on the secretary's agenda: Cascade-Siskiyou.

In addition to unspecified reductions in the size of each of these monuments, the secretary recommends changing the way restrictions are enforced on all national monuments. Even if this attempt to rewrite of the Antiquities Act does not survive court challenges, it will waste countless hours of time -- and millions of dollars -- that environmental organizations and federal employees could be spending on actually protecting the environment.

Without any shame, the secretary declared that his recommendations reflect the will of the people, dismissing 2.8 million public comments that he admitted were mostly counter to his recommendation. By "the people" he meant those people he prefers to listen to, some of which are not actually people at all. He further continues to associate himself with the signer of the 1906 Act, Teddy Roosevelt. Again, without shame.

The same announcement includes expanded protection in Montana itself, where his political ambitions outweigh his general preference for environmental destruction.

UPDATE: Even Worse

It is with some hesitation I add even more bad news to this post, but new information about this decision is unsettling and needs to be shared. If the courts allow the executive order to stand, Bears Ears will be open not only to grazing, but also to the mining of uranium. This has nothing whatsoever to do with public use of the land; it has to do with pleasing political donors. A map of the uranium potential accompanies the story behind the president's decision.

Map: Washington Post

July 2018 further update

It is now clear that the documents used to justify the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument were selectively censored to hide known benefits of the protection the area had been receiving. Someone should be going to jail for this, but will more likely be going to the bank.

Secretary NIMBY

The most important qualification for most Cabinet-level appointments in the current administration has been hostility toward the mission of the department or agency to be led, and to the implementation of policies that the Congress has assigned.

In most respects, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has fit this mold. As the most anti-stewardship steward of public lands since James Watt, he has been good company for secretaries of State, Education, Environmental Protection who have a similar antipathy toward the programs with which they have been intrusted by an administration that values only chaos and a Senate that does not value its advisory duties.

This post, however, is not about Secretary Zinke's failures to protect Bears Ears, or whether he shares the libertarian fringe's fear of "massive federal land grabs." Rather, it is this counter-intuitive story about Sec. Zinke's support of a new National Monument that would provide added protection to federal lands in his home state of Montana.

Reporter Nate Hegyi sought further information on the various ways in which Zinke supports land protection in his home state, but could get a comment from the secretary or his spokesman. In the current administration, it seems, a cabinet secretary must be very careful to avoid seeming to support the work he or she was hired to undermine. If only we could get him interested in taking a similar position on the 96 percent of the United States that is not in Montana!

The story is an example of the well-known NIMBY phenomenon -- support for noxious facilities or damaging practices in the abstract evaporates when a proposal is close to home: "Not In My BackYard" is the hypocrite's refrain.

Despite the dubious personal ethics revealed by this story, it does provide a glimmer of hope for those who care about environmental protection. Although he will not yet say so, Secretary Zinke seems to understand that scorched-earth environmental policies -- if applied on Native American or other public lands inside Montana -- would reduce his chances of being elected governor of the Big Sky state in the future. Profiles in Courage this is not, but it does suggest that at some level, people in the West do still want land and water and sky protected.

Update: June 4

Daniel Wenk: Pushed aside

According to a June 1 Washington Post report, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park -- considered by many to be the crown jewel of the system -- is retiring early. Daniel Wenk is highly respected by those across the political spectrum for his professionalism and his commitment to wildlife and public lands.

He has served the National Park Service for 43 years, so his retirement at age 66 is not necessarily surprising, but according to journalist Darryl Fears, the timing of his retirement has to do with a punitive reassignment to Washington, D.C.

As an individual, of course, Superintendent Wenk will be alright. He is presumably retiring with full benefits. But he is just one of 37 senior officials in the Department of Interior that the new secretary has rushed to reassign or remove. This of course belies the "drain the swamp" rhetoric that brought the current administration into Washington.

A Decreasing Increase

This graph shows the rate of human population year-by-year since 1951.  Notice that it has been in decline throughout most of that time.  How is it, then, that the human population has grown by billions during my lifetime and  we expect to gain about  2 billion more people by the middle of the century.

Graph source: worldometers
Note: a 2-percent growth rate results in doubling every 35 years
A 1.2-percent growth rate, every 58 year
During this period, world population nearly tripled, from 2.7 to 7.3 billion

A Dark and Stormy Night

To understand how this is possible I need to start with the story about the misconceptions surrounding population change. This story goes way back, decades ago, to an evening in Cambridge Massachusetts. It was a dark and stormy night on the campus of Harvard University. A young divinity student who would eventually become a professor of mine decided to go to a lecture over at the Harvard business school. The speaker was a famous businessperson, perhaps one of the most famous in the world, though few know his name today.

Because it was a dark and stormy night very few people were in attendance, so Young Tom the divinity student had the opportunity to venture a question after the lecture. His question was this:  “Mr. Kroc, Why are there no salad at McDonald’s?” As I mentioned, this young man was to become an old professor of this old professor, so this was many years ago, before the days of salads at McDonald’s. And the speaker was Ray Kroc, the chief executive of McDonald’s.

“Because it’s a hamburger place!” was his first answer, but Tom  pressed him about the the importance of having other other options.

“Well,” Mr. Kroc continued, “we have done extensive studies of Seventh-Day Adventists and we have learned that there are not enough of them to sustain a salad menu at McDonald’s.” It was from the story that I learned – and I think even young Tom the divinity student had learned – that about half of Seventh-day Adventists in the United States are vegetarian.

“That is not the only reason to be a vegetarian,” Tom replied, now entering a bit of a debate with one of the wealthiest people on the planet.  “What other possible reason could they have?” Mr. Kroc stammered,  for it was truly beyond his comprehension that someone would avoid meat unless they thought God was telling them to.

“Well,” Tom replied,  some people are concerned for animal welfare -- Mr. Kroc grunted but Tom continued -- “and people are trying to eat lower on the food chain because of their concern for starvation around the world.”

“Starvation? There’s no such thing as starvation,” he groused. “Don’t you watch the news?” asked Tom, straining in disbelief. “What about this Sahel? What about the Biafra children?”

-->

“Well,  if they are starving ... it’s their own fault.”  Blaming the poor for their misery has long been a habit of the wealthy.  And then the punchline: “They’re breeding like rabbits."

Breeding like rabbits.

These three words stopped Tom in his tracks, and caused him to repeat the story countless times, as I have done in the years since I took his class. The rich give birth; the poor breed. And if population growth is making food scarce -- as it was at the time -- it must be because of more breeding.

Demographic Transition Model (DTM)

Demographers and geographers know that this is a misconception, commonly held though it is. Birth rates do fluctuate, but populations grow only modestly when birth rates increase. They grow dramatically when death rates decrease, and during the middle of the twentieth century, they were doing exactly that. Because of improvements in the availability of medicine -- particularly vaccines -- and high-yield crops, death rates fells quickly in many parts of the world -- falling much more quickly than birth rates tend to rise. 

Following World War II, for the first time in human history, death rates decreased in places that were not undergoing enough economic growth to sustain significantly more people. Population growth was therefore both unprecedented and problematic. The 1968 publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich was the first widely-known description of the growth itself and of its potential to outstrip resources on a global scale. 

Ehrlich was scorned by some for his pessimism -- though his most dire predictions did actually come to pass -- as many believed that the planet was simply too vast to be impacted seriously by humans. We are indeed on a giant sphere, 8,000 miles in diameter. But all of our resource comes from very near the surface of that sphere, and all of our pollution remains in that same thin layer of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. 

Geographers also know that not all parts of the sphere are created equal. Seven tenths of the surface is covered by deep salt water, most of which sustains only a minimal amount of biological activity. The vast majority of food from the oceans is found on continental-shelf areas that comprise just 2 percent of the total. Similarly, most land areas are too cold, too high, too wet, or too dry to sustain settled agriculture without significant artificial inputs. Just 13 percent of the land surface is considered arable (farmable), and ALL of the good farmland is already in use either for farming or for more remunerative urban uses. Humans already use all of the good land and a good bit of the marginal land.

Image: Geography Fieldwork

Just after Ehrlich's book -- and perhaps to some degree because of it -- the rate of population growth began gradually to decline, as indicated in the graph above. This was the result of many factors, some related to intentional policies and others relating to feedbacks in the system. Known as the demographic transition, the conditions that accelerate population growth often lead to reduced birth rates in subsequent generations, and these changes actually continue to this day. Without them, population would already have passed 10 billion. Have a good look at the worldometers population page for a second-by-second estimate of the population (nearing 7,500,000,000 at the moment) and a lot of other ways of visualizing and understanding of demographic change.

Among many other cool visuals, the worldometer population page includes a 2000-year graph of human population that allows users to zoom in specific time frames. I use it here to approximate period shown on the natural-increase graph at the top of this post.

My Good News from Gorongosa post discusses the ecological implications of the century of rapid population growth from 1950 to 2050, and points to the original article "The Bottleneck," E.O. Wilson's excellent description of how this has happened and what it means. We can be concerned about the inexorable momentum of population growth, while being somewhat relieved that there is an end in sight... at least for those young enough to live to the middle of this century. Natural resources, ecosystems, and species that survive until 2050 will still face challenges from human activity, but a growing human population will not be one of them.

Lagniappe: Salad

Careful readers will note that McDonald's does of course have salads now, and might be wondering whether our young seminarian and his bold questions played a role. Sadly, no. Salad at McDonald's was literally an "over my dead body" thing, not appearing until 1985, when Mr. Kroc (1902-1984) was safely in the ground and for sure not coming back. His wife Joan lived until 2003. I do not know whether she played a role, but I have noticed that she is a generous funder of public radio, a cause I do not imagine Ray would have supported.

May 2020 Kroc-family update: When I posted this in March 2017, I did not realize that my guesswork about Joan and Ray Kroc was a well-known story (to others). In 2016, it was the subject of a book by Lisa Napoli and a film starring Michael Keaton. Author Napoli discussed their fascinating marriage with one of my favorite journalists, Scott Simon:

And another lagniappe: Science

Humans are innovative of course, and we have placed a lot of faith in science and technology to avert disaster as a population grows rapidly on a finite earth. But we also live in an era -- in the United States, at least -- in which the denial of science is widespread, greatly limiting our ability to employ it for adaptation.

*misconception: no pun intended, but my favorite librarian noticed