Posts Tagged ‘environment’
“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand”*…
(Roughy) Daily has looked before at that most common– and essential– of substances, sand. (See here, here, and here.) Today, via Michaela Büsse, an update…
After water, sand is the second most used material in the world. Each year, approximately 40-50 billion metric tons of sand are consumed worldwide.
This accounts for 79% of all aggregates extracted and traded, making sand the literal foundation for global human infrastructure. Sand plays a vital role in the production of glass, steel, and concrete. Silica, one of the most common minerals found in sand, is the key ingredient in silicon chips and thus for the development of digital technologies. But sand is also fundamental to the creation and maintenance of land itself, rendering it constitutive to processes of urbanization. Artificial islands, port expansions, and beach nourishment projects consume vast quantities of sand. As the bedrock of urban infrastructures, sand is embedded in the very fabric of modern life. Yet, its ubiquity belies its complexity. As a sediment, sand is foundational for the functioning of ecosystems. The relentless expansion and intensification of cities is starving rivers and coasts of sediment, depleting sand at a rate that far exceeds its natural replenishment.
Intensive dredging of rivers and seabeds has fundamentally altered sedimentation patterns, disrupting the delicate equilibrium that governs ecosystems. Rivers, which once carried sand from mountains to coastlines, now struggle to replenish beaches and wetlands. This depletion has far-reaching consequences. Without sufficient sand deposits, coastlines are left vulnerable to erosion, rising sea levels, and the devastating impact of extreme weather events. In ecosystems already on the front lines of climate change—like deltas, wetlands, and estuaries—the effects of sand extraction are compounded. Delta regions, for instance, rely on continuous sediment deposits to counteract the natural sinking of land. When sand is removed faster than it can be replaced, these regions are exposed to subsidence, where land sinks at an accelerated rate, amplifying flood risk and increasing the salinization of freshwater resources. Such impacts are often delayed, manifesting years or even decades after extraction, making them challenging to monitor and mitigate effectively.
As global sand consumption surges to unprecedented heights, the profound and far-reaching consequences of extraction come sharply into focus. Numerous journalistic and scientific accounts warn of the “looming tragedy of the sand commons,” highlighting environmental concerns related to dredging and mining sand, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil disturbance, as well as illegal practices in the sand trade. The reality of the sand trade is both dirty and messy, intertwining national and transnational politics. In regions like Southeast Asia, rapid urbanization and investments in large-scale infrastructure projects have spurred an unprecedented demand for this essential resource. Here, land reclamation has emerged as a flashpoint where extraction practices intersect with issues of sovereignty, livelihoods, and environmental justice, transforming sand into a highly sought-after and contested commodity. Building new land for some means taking old land from others. The exploitation of sand goes hand in hand with exploitative labor and geopolitical maneuvering.
Sand’s impending scarcity has fueled a black market, giving rise to “sand mafias”—criminal organizations that exploit extraction and trade through corruption, violence, and intimidation, often circumventing national mining and export bans. It is not uncommon for sand to become a matter of life and death for those who mine it as well as for those who seek to prevent it from being mined. Across the world, activists and local communities have mobilized against sand extraction and land reclamation, fighting the prevailing narratives of development and progress that often justify environmental exploitation. However, these initiatives are rarely successful, resulting (at best) in compensation payments to the affected communities. A transboundary governance of sand would require international standards, which many researchers and organizations have requested. Even so, it is nearly impossible to control the natural flow of sand.
As sand transitions from a sediment to a precious resource, it has become instrumental in urban ideals of late modernity. Cities like Dubai and Singapore epitomize how architectural ambitions is built on vast quantities of imported sand. Land built from scratch, towering skyscrapers, and sprawling infrastructure are testaments to sand’s transformative potential. Yet, these urban landscapes are haunted by their materiality: each grain is a silent witness to the ecological and social disruptions that enabled its journey. The sand in these structures embodies the persistence of environmental degradation, displaced labor, and the exploitation that made them possible. In this way, sand is both an architect and a specter of modernity’s unrestrained ambitions, leaving us to confront the shadows cast by our own constructions…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand,” from @michaelabussey.bsky.social and @eflux.bsky.social.
* Jorge Luis Borges
###
As we get grainy, we might send insightful birthday greetings to James Hansen; he was born on this date in 1941. An atmospheric physicist, he was Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (from 1981-2013). He is best known for his (June, 1988) testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that there was 99% certainty the cause of climate change was known with 99% certainty to be the buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere– helping raise broad awareness of global warming– and for his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. (Hansen has since proposed a revised explanation of global warming, where the 0.7°C global mean temperature increase of the last 100 years can be to some extent explained by the effect of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide (such as methane).
Currently the Director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, he remains a climate activist.
“One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns”*…
Confronting ancient redwoods can be a transformative experience, helping us appreciate both our place in a larger scheme and the transitory nature of our lives.
The earliest redwoods showed up on Earth shortly after the dinosaurs – before flowers, birds, spiders… and, of course, humans. Redwoods have been around for about 240 million years, and in California for at least 20 million years, compared to about 200,000 years for “modern” humans. – source
But redwoods also play a key role in our ecosystem…
The coast redwood and giant sequoia forests are home to the tallest and largest trees on the planet. They represent the original face of nature, embodying a beauty millions of years in the making. These forests store more carbon from the atmosphere than any other forest ecosystem, and they support communities of life found nowhere else on Earth.
The redwood forests are the greatest forests on Earth.
But the redwood parks and private lands we have protected over the last century still need help. The primeval forests today resemble islands of disconnected old-growth stands — pinched at the edges by clear-cuts, development and agriculture. They depend on streams choked by sediment, and they are cared for by parks organizations that are under-funded and under-resourced… – source
* John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
###
As we prioritize preservation, we might spare a thought for Charlemagne; he died on this date in 814. A ruler who united the majority of western and central Europe (first as King of the Franks, then also King of the Lombards, finally adding Emperor of the Romans), he was the first recognized emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier; the expanded Frankish state that he founded is called the Carolingian Empire, the predecessor to the Holy Roman Empire.
Committed to educational reform and extension, he began (in 789) the establishment of schools teaching the elements of mathematics, grammar, music, and ecclesiastic subjects; every monastery and abbey in his realm was expected to have a school for the education of the boys of the surrounding villages. The tradition of learning he initiated helped fuel the expansion of medieval scholarship in the 12th-century Renaissance.
Charlemagne is considered the father of modern Europe, the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, and thus the forerunner of the Holy Roman Empire. At the same time, in accepting Pope Leo’s investiture, he set up ages of conflict: Charlemagne’s coronation as Emperor, though intended to represent the continuation of the unbroken line of Emperors from Augustus, had the effect of creating up two separate (and often opposing) Empires– the Roman and the Byzantine– with two separate claims to imperial authority. It led to war in 802, and for centuries to come, the Emperors of both West and East would make competing claims of sovereignty over the whole.
We might note that as Charlemagne’s life unfolded, the oldest (officially-recognized) living Redwood was already 400 years old (though some foresters believe some coast redwoods may be as much as 1,000-1,500 years older).
“I’d rather fight 100 structure fires than a wildfire. With a structure fire you know where your flames are, but in the woods it can move anywhere; it can come right up behind you.”*…
The devastation in the Los Angeles area is just the latest reminder that wildfires are a massive problem that continues to grow. Caleb X. Cunningham, Grant J. Williamson, and David M. J. S. Bowman put the threat into alarming perspective…
Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (≥99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our study highlights that fire behaviour is worsening in several regions—particularly the boreal and temperate conifer biomes—with substantial implications for carbon storage and human exposure to wildfire disasters…
An unlocked article from Nature Ecology & Evolution: “Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on earth.”
Looking forward: “Five Climate Realism Insights on California’s Wildfires.”
Apposite: “Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner’s Insurance,” from the Congressional Budget Office.
And very practically: “Wildfire Prep.”
* Tom Watson
###
As we contemplate conflagration, we might recall that on this date in 1949, after two days in which a few flakes fell, Los Angeles “enjoyed” a real snow fall (the first that anyone can recall).
“The last act is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason”*…
Climate change is wreaking an increasing amount of havoc in the U.S. and around the world. Many are worried that the political turn to right in so much of the world will aggravate the situation. But Nathan Gardels suggests that, while the current political temper is out of sync with the planetary imperative, it may still present a path forward.
He begins by recounting his Berggruen Institute colleague Nils Gilman‘s call for a planetary response, then …
… [In sum] What is needed, says Gilman, “is a radical rethink of the very architecture of planetary governance in light of this condition of planetarity.” Or, as I put it… what is now called for is not the old “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nation-states against each other but a “Gaiapolitik” that aims at securing a livable biosphere for all.As logically compelling as this case may be, the paradigm shift underway is going in the opposite direction. Instead of the global interconnectivity forged in recent decades maturing into a planetary perspective, it is breaking up into a renewed nationalism more emphatic than before the advent of globalization.
In short… the present political temper across the world is out of sync with the planetary imperative.
All of this makes the politics of what can be called “planetary realism” a vexing endeavor. It entails both a recognition of the interdependence of the planetary condition as well as a realistic grasp of what it will take to navigate through what remains a world of nation-states.
This is where such alternative notions as decision-division allocated among appropriate scales of governance, sub-national as well as non-state networks of the willing, and a “partnership of rivals” come in.
For example, when President-elect Donald Trump formally pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord during his last administration, then-California Governor Jerry Brown intensified the state’s cooperation with China’s provinces on de-carbonization strategies, including efforts, among others, to align the metrics of their carbon-trading markets so they could one day be integrated with each other. The present governor, Gavin Newsom, also visited China last year to meet President Xi Jinping to enhance and deepen that collaboration even as U.S.-China relations worsened at the national level.
Acting as a new breed of subnational statesmen, both Brown and Newsom have understood that while the U.S. and China may well survive the decoupling of their economies from each other, the world will not survive the decoupling of climate cooperation between the two largest carbon emitters on the planet. “Divorce is not an option,” Newsom declared in Beijing last year.
Despite all other tensions between these two incommensurate political systems, what Newsom calls the “fundamental and foundational” climate summons must bind the two together in partnership despite rivalry in other realms. This climate cooperation embodies the idea of “a partnership of rivals.”
California is just one case among many where trans-localism can circumnavigate geopolitics. We don’t have to wait for the nation-state as the cumulative causation of local, regional and non-state actors can move the needle. One saving grace of the climate challenge is that, as a distributed reality, it can be addressed in a distributed way.
While climate action does not have to wait for the nation-state, the capacity of nation-states to mobilize domestic populations and resources to shape outcomes remains decisive for crossing the threshold of effective mitigation.
Here, something new is emerging — “green nationalism” — that, in essence, does the right thing for other reasons. Or, to put it another way, it paradoxically advances the planetary agenda on nationalist grounds.
Industrial policies designed to make the green energy transition across America, Europe and China are all competing to protect and promote national self-interest vis-a-vis each other rather than collaborating as a species facing a common threat. Subsidies here are put in place to counter subsidies there. Tariffs or outright bans are blocking the spread of electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels and critical supply-chain minerals across borders. All these policies are aimed at building homegrown industries of the future.
Recently, Italy’s right-leaning prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, put a new twist on the issue. She argues that her country must implement serious climate policies as a key way to keep migrants from the Global South trekking north as climate refugees.
At the COP29 meeting in Azerbaijan, Viktor Orbán, declared Hungary was positioning itself to become “a significant player in electric vehicle development and electricity storage” as a basis for bolstering and sustaining national strength in the fiercely competitive times ahead. Unlike other Western nations, the pugnacious autocrat intends to do so through collaboration with his Chinese friends to leverage their prowess in green-tech development.
It is entirely conceivable that Elon Musk can sell the climate-denier-in-chief on the need for a robust EV industry and infrastructure in the U.S. as the best way to stay ahead of China and, for the same reason, Big Tech can sell him on a revival of non-fossil fuel nuclear energy to power its data centers as part and parcel of national security.
On the face of it, all this may seem a fatal fragmentation. But there may be another way we are compelled to look at it. We have the legitimacy framework we have — the nation-state — not the one we wish we had.
The hard truth seems to be that competitive green nationalism in the realpolitik mold possesses the kind of political legitimacy required for effective action that would take Gaiapolitik generations to achieve at the planetary level.
As the climate clock is ticking, green nationalism is beginning to appear as the most politically organic way to move forward as fast as possible at this historic juncture. In tandem with subnational and non-state networks, it in some ways manifests the very kind of distributed action that decision-division according to scale envisions. Though each may be going it alone, all are going in the same direction.
That is not an endorsement, but simply a recognition of the best we can probably hope for in the intermediate term.
Making lemonade from the lemons we have: “Green Nationalism,” from @noemamag.com @nilsgilman.bsky.social.
* T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
###
As we search for silver linings, we might recall that it was on this date in 2021 that a rare and record-breaking derecho and tornado outbreak caused widespread damage that was focused across Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. There were many reports of hurricane-force thunderstorm wind gusts and more than 50 tornadoes causing widespread damage to homes, vehicles, businesses and infrastructure (totaling roughly $2 Billion). This was the first December derecho on record to occur within the United States. This event also produced the first December tornado on record in Minnesota since 1950, with 17 tornadoes reported across southeast Minnesota.
(Your correspondent will note that yesterday, December 14, San Francisco experienced its first tornado warning in recorded history.)
“Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power”*…
Coleman McCormick on a framework that can help us understand change in systems– and build resiliance…
A forest is a complex ecosystem made up of thousands of organisms living, evolving, interacting with each other, and changing over time.
At the top of the hierarchy are the leaves, changing annually, growing, dying, and shedding in a year-long seasonal cycle. Next there are branches, fewer in number and slower in growth. Then the whole tree itself, changing over decades. The tree sits in a stand of dozens, and the stand in a forest of thousands of individual trees. The forest within a biome, the biome in a region with a particular climate.
You get the idea.
All natural ecosystems evolve in layers like this that connect to each other, but move at different speeds. You can imagine other systems with similar structures: your body is made up of proteins, DNA strands, organelles, cells, membranes, organs, a skeleton, and eventually, your whole body. Cells are being generated but also dying off at almost the same rate. Slower layers like the nervous system take a long time to heal (if ever) when subjected to injury.
Seeing complex systems this way — as layered collections of variable-speed elements — is a useful framework for understanding why we have a hard time changing them.
Stewart Brand [and here and here] noticed this recurring pattern in the anatomy of systems, which he called pace layering.
The concept builds on an observation made by architect Frank Duffy, who noticed a hierarchy in the components of buildings. In his book How Buildings Learn, Brand expanded this observation into a model he termed “shearing layers,” which describes how different parts of a structure change at varying speeds. Site → Structure → Skin → Services → Space plan → Stuff. Each must survive or adapt on different timelines. When architecture fails to account for the different rates at which users need to modify these layers, it results in rigid, non-functional design. Buildings where Services or the Space Plan are overly inflexible are difficult to adapt to users’ changing needs.
In his later book The Clock of the Long Now, Brand expanded the concept of shearing layers to a civilizational scale:
At the bottom, nature moves along on its own eons-level time scale. In the middle, governance and culture shift with generations. Infrastructure and commerce in the range of years. And on the surface, fashionable trends flare up and die out with sometimes daily regularity, like the turbulent wave tops in a stormy ocean. Each layer serves a function:
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power...
… Seeing the world through this lens — not only of scale, but also of time — has distant reach to so many other domains. It’s a fundamental characteristic of how systems work and adapt to change.
The fast flurry of activity at the top of a pace layered system creates a testbed for new ideas. In the forest, each individual tree can try out different evolutionary adaptations. New survival strategies are tested in numbers not possible if entire ecosystems had to move together. If one tree tests a new trait that turns out not to work, only a single organism is at risk, not the whole forest.
Because upper layers move faster they can also rebound faster. A forest fire or a passing herd of elk causes some damage, but only at the surface level upper crust of our strata. The bark and branches and leaves may get eaten or burn off, but in a few weeks they bounce back.
Pace layering builds resiliency into complex systems. The fast layers shield the slower ones from shocks, while selectively transmitting changes down through the layers, allowing slower ones to incorporate those adaptations. But some changes propagate too fast.
Some of the worst cases of system shock happen when change shakes to lower levels too rapidly. Look at the collapse of the Soviet Union. A rapid change in the governance layer caused wreaked havoc in the layers above: massive instability on a national scale, rippling through the whole system for decades. In this case, a totalitarian government imposed rigidity on commerce, infrastructure, and even fashion, and didn’t allow for the necessary shifting and experimentation required for the system to maintain resilience.
Drawing sharp lines between layers actually draws an inaccurate picture of how a thriving system works. A more accurate diagram would show smoother gradients across the transitions between layers.
Resilience comes from allowing this gradient — this slippage — at the junctions between layers. Each layer, above and below, must allow for give and take from its neighbors. Slow layers must permit some influence at the edges, and fast layers must slow down to maintain a workable interface with the slower. The layers need to be able to negotiate with one another. If the fast ignores the constraints of the slow, you get discontinuous instability. If the slow never bends to the fast, you get stifling stagnation…
[McCormick explores the applicability of this framework to governance and to corporate activity…]
… With age, my mind seems to sink to lower levels in the hierarchy. “Current things” are more likely to hit me and bounce off. We come around to new ideas more slowly. Above us are the teenagers, trying new technologies, listening to new music, pushing new memes, on a weekly or daily basis. We parents underneath can’t keep up.
But “keeping up” isn’t our role! Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast tries things, slow preserves what works. Resilient, sustainable systems balance this learning and remembering.
Not every meme or new song or fashion trend has staying power, but some do. The ones with notable resonance absorb and influence the culture below. Youth play the role of experimenters, continuously throwing new ideas at the wall — some good, many terrible. The elders carry the torch of tradition, and provide the stable platform of time-tested solutions on top of which the innovators can explore.
Pace layering is one of those ideas with such broad reach that once you learn about it, you see it everywhere…
The hidden architecture of resilient systems: “Pace Layers,” from @colemanm.
For Stewart’s own essay on Pace Layers, see here; and for more, here.
* Stewart Brand
###
As we take the long view, we might send connective birthday greetings to Alexander MacMillan; he was born on this date in 1818. MacMillan was cofounder (in 1843) with his brother Daniel, of Macmillan Publishers, one of the “Big Five” English language publishers.
Though not himself a professional scientist, MacMillan did much to promote science in the Victorian times– especially when he established the journal Nature (in 1869), enabling communication between men of science. The journal had the support of many influential contributors, including Thomas Huxley. Yet, it remained a financial challenge for Macmillan. Other scientific quarterlies had short lives, but Macmillan tolerated losses for three decades, committed to the journal’s mission “to place before the general public the grand results of scientific work and scientific discovery; and to urge the claims of science to move to a more general recognition in education and in daily life.” That mission continues to the present day.
You must be logged in to post a comment.