Citizen Science for the Birds

I have been an NPR nerd long enough to have fond memories of listening to Talk of the Nation whenever I had free afternoons, and especially on my way to carpool duty. It was a five-day program similar to Fresh Air,  and probably adjacent on our local schedule. 

I was sad when TotN ended, but glad that it only ended by 80 percent. That is to say, it retained  one day a week of programming. Fridays had been dedicated to fun and informative conversations about science, and Ira Flatow has continued that part under the name Science Friday. A decade or so on, he continues to bring great energy and enthusiasm to conversations with scientists, science educators, and science journalists of many kinds, working at all scales from the subatomic to the galactic. 

I particularly enjoyed his recent conversation about citizen science with Dr. Brooke Bateman and Dr. Janet Ng, who have been involved in the longest-running such project: the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. I believe I first learned about the count around the time I moved to Massachusetts, when I noticed local results in a newspaper a couple of days after Christmas. 

Photo: Shutterstock by way of Science Friday

I knew that it was much bigger than that, but it was only from the recent 17-minute segment What Scientists Have Learned From 125 Years Of Bird Counts that I learned how much bigger. The Doctors Ng and Bateman discuss their very different roles in science and policy, along with their very similar roles as two of the 80,000 people who did the actual counting this year. 

They also share the charming story of how this all began and the culture of cooperation and mentoring that has grown with this tradition. Some people have just done this for the first time, while others have been leaders in their local communities for more than 50 years in a row. Everybody is welcome, including people with limited mobility and limited (even zero) expertise. 

I invite readers to listen to the entire discussion for some examples of just what is being gained from the gathering, mapping, and analysis of these avian observations. Some of it is worrisome and some of it encouraging; all of it is fascinating. I will be using it both in my Environmental Geography survey course and in my advanced Land Protection course. The former emphasizes global climate change and the latter local landscape change; each course could use this healthy dose of both. And I am pleased that my good friend Geography Jeff will be using it in his Environmental Planning course at another school.

Lagniappe

Fresh Air with Terry Gross & Tanya Moseley continues to thrive five days a week. I have been listening pretty regularly since before it moved up from WHYY to NPR, and
I am glad that Terry Gross has worked so hard to cultivate a co-host who is allowing her gradually to transition toward a well deserved but as-yet unannounced retirement. 

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:

Climate Action and the Executive See-Saw

The U.S. Constitution neither defines nor precludes presidential executive orders, but every president since George Washington has issued at least one. The sole exception was William Henry Harrison, who died in office after only 31 days. In more recent presidencies, this would be ample time to issue orders, some of which are ready for a new president's signature before the Mayflower moving van has left the White House grounds on inauguration day.

Political observers now expect a sheaf of executive orders to be ready with each new administration because -- to some degree -- executive orders are sometimes made to be broken. This will certainly be the case with regard to executive action related to the environment in general and climate change in particular when the Biden Administration takes office on January 20, 2021.

Sadly, public policy is sometimes a game.
Image: Card Cow

A pair of recent segments from the public-radio program Living On Earth provide an overview of recent executive actions related to climate change and informed speculation about orders that may be issued just before and just after the moving vans arrive.

In March 2020, program host and environmental journalist extraordinaire Steve Curwood spoke with law professor Jody Freeman about the EPA's rush to rollback regulations before the election. The discussion draws on her experience as Counselor for Energy and Climate Change in the Obama administration, to quickly describe the most important environmental protections that are at stake. 

This is good preparation for a segment that aired today, in which Curwood returns to the topic of executive orders with economist Joe Aldy, who served on President Obama's 2008-2009 transition team. They explore President-elect Biden's environmental priorities. Aldy's experience 12 years ago gives him keen insight into what the outgoing president is likely to do and what tools the incoming president has available -- including the degree to which control of the Senate will matter.

Lagniappe

Just as I was posting this, I found a more detailed description of President-elect Biden's climate-related transition plans by journalists and Adam Aton and Jean Chemnick. The intention to address climate in nearly every department of government suggests the need for interdisciplinary approaches to the deepening climate crisis.

Moving two families during a ceremony -- even a long ceremony -- is daunting, but it is done every 4 to 8 years in the People's House. I once read that Mayflower (which seriously botched the 1997 Hayes-Boh family move) was always hired, but a quick image search suggests that competent companies also get the job sometimes, as in the January 2001 move shown above.

Burying the Survivors

Photo: Geoffrey Scott Baker, resident of nearby Oella who calls Ellicott City his muse

I remember this riddle from middle school days -- "If a plane crashes on the U.S.-Canada border, where would they bury the survivors?" The punchline, of course, is that you don't bury survivors.

I was reminded of this when reading Ambitious Ellicott City flood prevention plan would tear down 19 buildings in historic downtown, by Baltimore Sun journalists Sarah Meehan and Jess Nocera. The headline is an accurate summary of what Howard County officials have proposed in response to the devastating floods of July 2016 (see my Flood Flash and and Flood Peak articles) and May 2018 (Flooding: It's Not in the Cards).

The headline hints at some of the problems with the response of county officials. The plan is indeed ambitious, in the way that Al Capone was ambitious at banks: it contemplates obliterating the victims. The financial cost to be paid by the county would be high, but the businesses that have rebuilt in the "flood zone" would not survive in new locations. They thrive because of the "sense of place" to which they have contributed for years or decades.

The plan announcement seeks to downplay the impact of the demolition by pointing out that 5 percent of the historic district would be affected, and this map with much less than 1 percent in red reinforces (and exaggerates) that message. Everyone who cares about the place, however, knows that this is the most important road segment on the map, or indeed in the entire county.



Moreover, the removal of buildings in the path of the flood waters will not "prevent" flooding. As detailed in the Preservation Maryland Statement on Ellicott City Demolition Proposal, the county's plan merely moves victims out of the way but does not even include study of the radically altered upstream hydrology that has driven the floods.

Main Street Ellicott City -- A walkable downtown with arts, history, architecture, cuisine, and coffee

The story is a reminder that climate change is leaving less room for error in many of our decisions about the environment. In this case, decisions about land use that would normally have made flooding quantitatively worse are now making it qualitatively worse -- a threshold has been crossed into an entirely new type of flood risk.

Lagniappe

I have to admit that -- like many people from this part of Maryland -- I take the woes of Ellicott City personally. I have been a customer in most of the buildings slated for demolition, and my favorite librarian and I bought wedding gifts for each other in Discoveries.

Discoveries, around the anniversary of the 2016 flood. We tried to go again in May 2018, but downtown was thriving and we could not find a parking space. We were actually glad to see that. The next day, it was destroyed by a disaster resulting from climate change and poor land-use planning upstream.

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.

Environmental Geography Gamut

One of my goals in general-education classes is to ensure that students will emerge better able to interpret course-related news they encounter in the future. For this reason, my final exams often ask them to find a news item, describe it, and relate it to something they learned in the course. This is a pedagogic approach I learned from the work of geographer L. Dee Fink; it is also a way to ensure that I continue to learn from my students.

At the moment I am taking a break from grading summer courses to share some of the articles that came my way as the result of such an assignment, because all of them fit nicely into the theme of this blog -- and the title of the course in question -- Environmental Geography. (See my "What is environmental geography, anyway?" web page if you've been wondering about that title. Most of what is on this blog fits somehow into that category, though some of it is more appropriately called political, economic, or cultural geography.)

Here -- without elaboration, in the interest of time -- are the articles and radio pieces that students shared. Each one made a connection between the article and Carl Safina's book The View from Lazy Point. (See more Safina references throughout this blog.) In some cases, several students commented on the same stories, making different connections.

Supreme Court Blocks Obama Administration Plan on Power Plant Emissions. NPR June 29th, 2015.

Note From A Civilized City: Boston Parks To Offer Dispensers Of Free Sunscreen. WBUR June 26, 2015.

New Panda Count Brings Cheers And Debate. WBUR March 2, 2015.

Shameless and gratuitous use of cute charismatic megafauna.

Survival Of The Greenest Beer? Breweries Adapt To A Changing Climate. NPR June 24, 2015.

Risk of Extreme Weather From Climate Change to Rise Over Next Century, Report Says. New York Times, June 22, 2015.

Chinese Couples Urged to Have More Children. The Guardian June 29, 2015.

The Dutch Ruling On Climate Change That Could Have A Global Impact. NPR June 25, 2015.

The Evolution of Birdsong. Living on Earth, June 26, 2015.

Genetically Modified Salmon: Coming To A River Near You? NPR June 24, 2015.

How A Historical Blunder Helped Create The Water Crisis In The West. NPR June 25, 2015.

Image: NPR

To Tackle Food Waste, Big Grocery Chain Will Sell Produce Rejects. NPR June 17, 2015. (In searching for this, I also found Landfill of Lettuce by the same reporter.)

Decisions On Climate Change Will Affect Economic Future Of U.S. NPR June 22, 2015.

Save Wildlife, Save Yourself? NPR June 26, 2015.

Scientists Build Case for 'Sixth Extinction' ... and Say It Could Kill Us. NBC News. June 19, 2015.

OK, so I will elaborate on this one. This story was cited by a couple of students. I had seen the headline but had not yet worked up the nerve to read the article. Not only will I now be assigning it in some of my classes -- such as Land Protection -- but I will also be assigning the original article on which it is based:

Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction.  Science Advances 1(5): June 19, 2015. Gerardo Cebellos, Paul Ehrlich, et al.

Coffee Catch-up

I sometimes start my coffee courses with this song, though this video rendition is new to me. It is included for sheer fun, and also because of a pun that works between the lyrics and the title of this post.

As a compulsive blogger, I sometimes have waaaay too many tabs open on my computer, and right now several of them have to do with coffee. Taking the time to blog about each one would be a great way to procrastinate on other tasks, but I am choosing to employ the original meaning of blog a "web log" or simple listing of interesting sites encountered while browsing.

So with minimal commentary, here are a few disparate articles that have caught my attention recently.

Writing for Bloomberg, Marvin Perez explains how the climate-stoked roya fungus threatens organic coffee. This article is an excellent introduction to an issue that concerns many of my friends in Central America and should concern anybody interested in coffee and climate justice.

The blog PHYS.ORG summarizes a new report on the mapping of the coffee genome, which has interesting implications for understanding the role of caffeine as both an attractor of pollinators and a repellant for insect pests. I understood about 3/4 of this article, so I have shared it with colleagues in chemistry and biology with whom I have been in increasingly specific discussions of interdisciplinary undergraduate research on coffee and caffeine.

Writing for Serious Eats, coffee pundit Nick Cho describes how to make the best French-press coffee at home. I was going to write a whole piece explaining a couple of ways to improve on his advice, but this tab has been open forever, so I'll just share and move on. Except to mention that if your kitchen is cold, you should wrap a towel around the carafe as it brews, and that you can experiment a bit with brew times and grinds until you find what makes the coffee perfect for you. Starting with excellent coffee and grinding it for each preparation are given, of course.

Also open on my computer for a long time has been NY Times blogger Jon Grinspan's fascinating explanation of how coffee fueled the Civil War.

Finally -- and I did write that this is a disparate assortment -- Boston University graduates have created Coffee, a social-networking app for users of Apple mobile devices who are seeking employment. I do not have such a device and am not seeking employment, but among my students and alumni who might use this app, some are true coffee experts. My estimation of the app will be how well it helps them find coffee-related employment!

Climate Foxholes

This morning I was reminded of the adage that there are no atheists in foxholes. Leaving the theological implications of Pascal's Wager aside for the moment, I found a connection between two island stories this morning.

Damage in Taclovan is undeniable. Photo: Aaron Favila/AP, via The Guardian.

The first is widely known, of course, as the most powerful storm ever observed arrives in Vietnam, having pushed past numerous low-lying Pacific islands before devastating many islands of the Philippines.

The visitation of such a calamity on an island country presents special challenges, as people on some islands will have few places of  refuge. A resident of Kiribati has already sought "environmental refugee" status, and entire countries such as his are considering ways to migrate as countries to higher ground. As researcher Susan Martin points out, people who migrate always do so for multiple reasons and usually do so domestically -- the internally-displaced Dust Bowl refugees known as Oakies are a perfect example -- but anybody who is concerned with international migration must include climate-driven migration in their calculations.

When Mary Robinson addressed the Association of American Geographers in 2012 she admonished us to work diligently for climate justice, because those most vulnerable and those most responsible are not the same people, and do not live in the same places. I must admit that I thought of her remarks as referring mostly to some future condition, though the fact that daffodils were blooming in Manhattan on that February day should have been a clue. It turns out that the migration, crop loss, and impoverishment are the least of the injustices of climate change. The dying has started.

A young boy from Mr. Sano's city.
Image: Erik De Castro/Reuters via The Guardian

So it that Yeb Sano has traveled from the ruined city of Tacloban to the pointless climate talks in Poland, leaving his family behind to bring his story to the banquets halls and negotiating tables of Warsaw, hoping someone will listen to his anguish. 

The complexity of our climate means that we can each deny responsibility; climate change did not invent drought, flood, typhoon, or blizzard. But the increasing frequency of "wild weather" is now far outside the bounds set by prior experience. We predicted a new normal, and statistically, we are there. Typhoon Haiyan has been compared to a Category 5 on the hurricane scale, but this is only because Category 6 had not been contemplated when looking at the storms of previous generations. A storm sustaining winds of near-tornado strength across hundreds of miles had not been imagined before this most unusual century.

Students, parents, and educators: It is sometimes difficult to find appropriate educational materials for such an event; I recommend the Philippines storm post on Listen Edition as a possible starting point for discussion with upper-elementary and middle-school learners.

Key Considerations

Closer to home is a less dramatic story about insurance and planning in the city of Key West, Florida -- a lovely place I have not yet managed to visit. Those who manage public affairs in Key West -- and especially those who set insurance rates -- cannot afford "ivory tower" arguments about whether or not the climate is changing. In the case of those with actual responsibilities, to ignore rising seas is now unthinkable. Just as governors have shown more leadership than the national government, so too have municipal authorities and private-sector planners in Key West left debates to those who still have the luxury of entertaining denial for political purposes.

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Incidentally, the "comments" section of the Key West story illustrates the severity of geographic ignorance. Comments on all sides of the climate "debate" reveal profound gaps in understanding of physical systems, human settlement patterns, and math.

Lagniappe
(Posted April 15, 2014)

Image source: Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Looking for the link to my own post here, I found several other blogs that have made the same observation. Peter Sinclair, for example, focuses on reinsurers. These are pretty conservative folks as a rule, and they are not in a position to make their decisions on the basis of ideology.

Natural Gas: Plank to the Future

I usually try to find a source for images I use on my blog, but I keep finding images similar to this on web sites about online piracy -- without attribution! I would love at least to know the name of the artist.

On my way to "whaling" on Sunday morning, I heard two important stories about climate change, the second with direct relevance to my new hobby.

BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

The phrase "Bridge to Nowhere" refers to the proposed Gravina Island Bridge in Alaska that would replace ferry service to the airport currently serving Ketchikan, Alaska. Even as it remains unbuilt, it estimated cost has continued to grow, reaching about $40,000 for each and every resident of the city. That would buy a lot of ferry rides, and the foolishness of the proposal has embarrassed even members of Congress in the proponents' own party. (See an overview and commentary to learn more about the most famous non-bridge in history.)

Politicians of both major parties -- and even some environmentalists -- regularly promote an even more costly boondoggle when they characterize natural gas as a bridge energy source. President Obama's "all of the above energy policy" is simply a refusal to acknowledge that natural gas is a fossil fuel. It burns more cleanly than coal or oil, but its recovery does more climate disruption than either of these. I have written extensively in this space about the pernicious nature of fracking as a recovery method. As civil engineer Tony Ingraffea explains in Climate Risks from Leaky Natural Gas Wells, however, even conventional wells are a huge source of climate disruption, long after the gas has driven our bus or heated our soup.

On a recent drive through Pennsylvania, we did not see these wells, but we saw a few of the thousand of trucks needed to carry water and equipment to them. We also saw plenty of evidence of the giddy economic bubble surrounding thi rush to extraction, from young guys in $50,000 pickups to real estate billboards and strip clubs.

Back to the metaphor that the industry and politicians and even some environmentalists like to use: natural gas is not a bridge. If it were, it would be connecting us in a reasonable amount of time to some other energy future. As currently operating, though, it simply serves as another way of ensuring that virtually all of the carbon stored several hundred million years before the arrival of human is put into the atmosphere in the blink of a geologist's eye. It is not a "bridge" in any meaningful sense, and actually generates profits while delaying real changes in the use of energy.

WHALES & OTTERS

Otter warrior
 Inbar TrueFlight

After hearing this very discouraging story, I continued my drive to the historic whaling center of New Bedford Harbor, where I was to meet my crew for an hour or so of rowing our replica whaleboat around the harbor, where we would indulge in a close-up view of the historic whaleship Ernestina before heading very briefly out to sea. (2022 correction: the Ernestina was never a whaleship; it was built for fishing cod before becoming a legendary ship of exploration and transportation).

So it was fitting that I heard a somewhat more encouraging story with a whaling connection. In Otters as Climate Defenders, environmental studies professor Chris Willmer explains a complicated sequence of event by which whaling in the Pacific a century ago contributes to climate change today, by limiting the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Enter the otter, whose restoration in the northern Pacific could be funded by the many millions of dollars of carbon credits that could be offset.

MORE TO LEARN

For introductory resources on climate change, please see my Inconvenient Geography page and be sure to click on the link back to this blog. For ongoing information about climate activism worldwide, join Bill McKibben's 350.org. To find out how the vulnerability and responsibility vary at a global scale, please see the Mary Robinson Foundation; for a focus on variable impacts in the United States, please see the NAACP Climate Justice Initiative page.

Finally, the best possible introduction to the topic is Carl Safina's beautiful and terrifying The View from Lazy Point, which is now required reading for all of my introductory Environmental Geography students. I first heard about the book from Safina himself on the program that is the source of both stories above -- Living on Earth.

Fracking Hell

Today's On Point discussion of Better Fracking is informative and thorough. It is important, though, to listen to the entire program. The headline is about reductions in the amount of good water turned into poison. But like "clean coal," this is a distinction without a difference.

As the scientists on the program stress repeatedly, reducing the amount of water used in fracking partially addresses only one of several fundamental problems with this approach to energy development. At the end of a long, careful discussion, it remains clear that fracking is not part of a viable energy policy. If allowed to continue, it will merely delay the need for a comprehensive conversion to sustainable energy.

Learn more about fracking from a Nation Action blog post that includes an 18-minute video.

December 7 update: Several instances of scientific fraud and conflicts of interest related to pro-fracking research have led to disciplinary action against professors at the University of Texas and elsewhere.

Cochabamba Continued

In this slide show, Jennifer Saltz of Water Today describes the deadly conflict over water privatization in Cochabamba and the ultimate reversal of Bechtel's onerous contracts in the region.



Writing for yes! a year after this video, Jim Shultz describes the decade following the Cochabamba conflict in more detail, including its relationship to the election of President Evo Morales and the encouragement of many other social movements. He points out that although Bechtel was defeated, the people of the region have not yet won access to water. In a separate article from the same source, Jessica Camille Aguirre explains that melting glaciers remain a severe threat to water supplies in the region -- yet another effect of climate change that is disproportionate in the Global South.

Emilia Laime demonstrates the use of a slingshot commonly found at Bolivian protests.
Of course, their effectiveness is determined by the extent to which this expression of bravery
is respected by police and army officials. And of course, this slingshot is now mine!

 I have been hearing the Cochabamba story for several years, but just last autumn I finally had the opportunity to meet somebody from the region -- a textile fabricator whose community is directly affected. Emilia Laime sells sweaters, bags, and other textiles on behalf of a cooperative in her comminty of Arani, about 30 kilometers to the east of the city. As is clear from the map below, this altiplano (high plateau) community is close to the edge of Andes mountains, on which it is dependent for runoff from glaciers and snowpacks.


Prior to meeting Emilia, I believed that the water crisis in highland Bolivia had been solved. When she told us that water for crops, livestock, and domestic use was being rationed at the local well, I asked how this could be, with Bechtel long gone. She replied that climate change had simply reduced the availability of water. The water crises therefore continues, albeit with a new set of villains -- all of us who use fossil fuels excessively. This is quite a clear example of the growing mismatch between climate winners and losers, and the need for work on climate justice.


View Larger Map

Alaspen

As my I wrap up my first summer session and our reading of Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point, (about which see several Safina-related posts on this blog), I had the good fortune of hearing Neal Conan's discussion of many of Safina's themes on yesterday's Talk of the Nation. I was confused for a moment, because although TotN is a very eclectic show, in-depth environmental discussions are usually reserved for its Science Friday section, and this was -- I was pretty certain -- only Monday. Once I confirmed that it was a Monday and that I would therefore be seeing my students on Tuesday, I decided that listening to Conan's visit to the Aspen Institute would be a good way to reprise many of Safina's themes.

During the program, Conan interviews participants in the annual forum that brings together some of the leading thinkers about the relationships between humans and the environment on which we depend. They focus on first-hand observations of climate change, with much of the conversation centered on the same Arctic regions visited by Safina.

Conan also invites listeners to share their direct observations about how the environment is changing. As with most NPR call-in programs, this one attracts a better-informed caller than most AM radio.

The conversation illustrates both the unprecedented speed of climate change and its geographic variability. This reminds me of a talk I heard earlier this year (and about which I posted at the time) in which Dr. Mary Robinson of Climate Justice discussed the many ways in which climate "winners" and "losers" parallel already-familiar disparities in wealth and opportunity.

Discussions of this kind risk turning into gloomy "we're going to Hell in a hand-basket" hand-wringing, which is not my intent, nor is it that of Safina, McKibben, Robinson, or the many others who are sounding climate alarms. The bleakness of the big picture makes our attention to our own daily experience all the more important. Those who are motivated to act may find Bill McKibben's 350.org the most useful way to connect to others who are concerned.

By way of a very small example, while listening to this program, I am sharing some EcoLogic Agua de Vida coffee with my students. In addition to being grown and marketed under organic and fair-trade certifications, sale of this coffee supports clean-water projects in the Honduran communties in which the coffee is produced.

Those who missed the opportunity to participate in the Aspen Institute directly should consider attending one of the Bioneers conferences in October. I have attended -- and presented -- a couple of times at the Massachusetts satellite conference, and found it richly rewarding.

Coffee & Climate change

As most people who know me already know, I use coffee to teach geography, and geography to teach coffee. Murray Carpenter's report from the World Coffee Conference in Guatemala (sadly, I was not there), does exactly what I strive for: it uses coffee as a lesson on climate change.

When I visit coffee farms in Nicaragua, I am sometimes asked, "What are you doing about climate change?" As Carpenter's story points out, the mountains are pointy, so going up is not necessarily an option. And coffee requires a great deal of specialized knowledge, hard work, and patience. So even if a changing climate results in suitable microclimates in new locations, good coffee will not automatically follow.

Hopenhagen

As people from throughout the world gather to talk about climate change, it is good to explore some of the questions that will determine whether Copenhagen will be about hopes realized or hopes dashed by business as usual. Many stories are circulating in the media, globally and even here in the United States. Here are a few that I believe cut to some of the more important aspects of possible futures.

The December 4, 2009 installment of Living on Earth is an in-depth discussion of several ways in which the Amazon region of the world is involved -- and implicated -- in climate change. I followed this with particular interest, since I did my dissertation research in Rondonia and am currently working on the second edition of a book about the region and how it is perceived. The entire program is valuable; I find the Cattle Climate Connection segment particularly interesting, as it connects food and land use to a problem we normally associate only with transportation and electricity generation.

On the day prior to the Copenhagen conference, National Public Radio described recent surveys that indicate waning interest -- and even belief -- in climate change. The physical processes that drive climate change are not like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus; "choosing" whether or not to believe does not change the process -- only choosing to act can do that. This story links attitudes to some of their causes, including -- oddly enough -- a sense of futility. As Al Gore has pointed out, one reaction is to move quickly from disbelief in the whole process to a sense that the process is unstoppable -- these positions are exactly opposite, but yield the same result.

As if to signal a new administration's willingness to accept -- and act on -- scientific consensus, the Environmental Protection Agency chose the opening of the Copenhagen conference to release its finding that greenhouse gases are pollutants that threaten public health. NPR's All Things Considered describes the legal basis for this finding and its implications.

Finally, All Things Considered desribes the opening of the conference itself and reasons for skepticism about action that might be taken.

Tipping Points

Feedback mechanisms have thresholds -- tipping points beyond which regulatory mechanisms fail. For example, perspiration is a feedback mechanism that keeps temperature from rising in some mammals. But the system has limits beyond which it will not protect the body from excessive heating.

Similarly, the Earth as a whole has a lot of mechanisms that tend to limit the damage we do to it. This study published in Nature and reported on MSNBC is the first comprehensive analysis of these thresholds on a global scale. The results are not encouraging. With respect to climate, nutrient loading, species extinction, and too many other systems, human activity is pushing the Earth past its thresholds.

Author Jonathon Foley says that the most important lesson is "that 'wait and see' is a bad environmental policy." Because this news is unpleasant, I anticipate most responses to range from apathy to a "shoot the messenger" effort to discredit the work. We can hope, however, that people will start to think about the fundamental problem of unlimited growth on finite planet.

British Columbia Climate Action Plan

My friend Brendan is an expert on state and provincial government in the U.S. and Canada, respectively. For a few years now, he has been researching the ways that state and provincial leaders address climate change.

Some of his findings are encouraging and a bit surprising. One reason that so many environmental problems are regulated at the Federal level in the United States is that individual states were once very reluctant to restrict activities that other states did not. Federal regulations on waste disposal, for example, ensure that a U.S. company cannot save money by shopping around for a state with a lighter regulatory burden. This has been one factor, by the way, in the flight of many U.S. firms abroad.

With current efforts to address climate change, though, things are different. State governments -- and even many municipal governments -- are concluding that climate change poses a serious enough threat locally that local measures should be taken instead of waiting on national governments. As the U.S. video below indicates, state- and provincial-level leaders from across the political spectrum are no longer willing to wait on national governments.



As an environmental geographer, I must admit to being rather surpised by the bold moves states and provinces, cities and towns are making. It takes quite a bit of courage to enact local regulations on climate change, since the regulations will only have a climate benefit if many other localities join the effort.

The British Columbia Climate Action Plan comes highly recommended, not only because it is a bold step in the right direction, but also because the plan's documents very clearly describe the expected threats to the local environment, should the status quo be allowed to prevail.

My climate change page provides more on the subject, including the basic science of climate change.

Drought Withers Iraqi Farms

We live on a water planet, but lack of water is an increasingly dire concern, contributing to poverty and perhaps even to war.

Most of the world's water is in the form of salt water, which is unsuitable for drinking or agriculture. The majority of what is left is frozen (at least for now). Just one percent of the world's water is fresh, liquid water. Significant portions of this are far from human populations For example, 20 percent in the Amazon Basin, where about 0.1 percent of the world's people live. Where water is near humans, it is often contaminated.

This radio story by Deborah Amos describes a more complicated problem -- in some places the interaction of physical and political geography contributes to water scarcity as upstream and downstream users do not cooperate. Professor Erwin Klaas provides other examples and some maps on his Potential for Water Wars page at Iowa State University. Closer to home, the U.S. is the problematic upstream neighbor along the Colorado River, which does not even reach the Gulf of California most of the time.

With climate change, we can expect such problems to worsen.

An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up

NY Times environmental writer Elisabeth Rosenthal provides an important example of how climate change is already interacting with other environmental programs to put both ecosystems and people at risk. The article focuses on indigenous people in the Xingu National Park in Brazil whose livelihood is threatened by a combination of global climate change and regional climate change induced by excessive forest clearing. Citing additional examples of indigenous people for whom climate change is already a matter of life and death; the article makes very clear that the consequences of climate change vary a great deal according to geography.