Posts Tagged ‘environment’
“Nature is the source of all true knowledge”*…
Jonathan Keats on why– and how– clocks that use nature to measure time can reintegrate people into the environment and counteract the calamities of the Anthropocene…
In his studio on the east coast of Vancouver Island, the master clockmaker Phil Abernethy is crafting a timepiece that will be calibrated in a manner that no horologist has ever attempted. It won’t show the minutes and hours of an ordinary human day. Instead, his clock will display time as experienced by some of the oldest trees on the planet.
Using techniques he’s honed over a lifetime, Abernethy will machine the gears by hand in traditional materials such as steel and brass. But the pendulum will respond to the forest: When trees grow quickly, the hours will advance more rapidly; more lethargic growth will result in a slower tempo. Over centuries, the long-term fate of the canopy will be registered on a calendar that may deviate from the Gregorian date by decades or more.
Abernethy has been commissioned to fabricate the arboreal clock by the Nevada Museum of Art. Standing 12 feet tall, the clock will be the first physical manifestation of an environmental timekeeping project I have been developing over the past decade. Some of the clocks in the project respond to rivers; Abernethy’s enlists a stand of bristlecone pine trees in Nevada’s Great Basin as living timekeepers.
Fluctuations in the bristlecones’ growth rate, affected by environmental conditions ranging from local rainfall to planetary climate change, will be measured by analyzing the thickness of tree rings in microcores retrieved from the mountain each year. These data will be used to determine the center of gravity for the pendulum, which will swing slower or faster depending on the tree ring thickness. Though the clock face will display time in the usual way, it won’t serve as a mechanism for human planning — a technology to impose order on the environment for our convenience — but rather to pace our lives to match the lived reality of other organisms.
Abernethy’s arboreal clock, in other words, upsets more than just the standards of horology. The environmental calamity known as the Anthropocene is a consequence of a worldview in which all that is not human is construed as a resource — even time itself. Other life forms are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, laid waste at a pace set by the world economy. Factory farming and logging, fossil fuel and plastics production, mining, human construction and infrastructure — all disregard the timing with which nonhuman systems emerge, ebb and flow. The globalized logic of industry, with its planetary supply chain, must keep up with human demand, turning civilization itself into a manifestation of logistics.
Our mastery of the world is a mastery of time. And as every industrialist knows, mastery of time requires the precision of a master clock to provide a temporal standard against which everything can be measured and controlled. Whether regulated by the swing of a pendulum or the oscillations of a strontium atom — as the most advanced atomic clocks are today — the master clock operates without an external feedback mechanism. The clock has become the ultimate authority. To question it would be tantamount to questioning modernity.
The design of Abernethy’s arboreal clock may be novel, but the underlying ideas are ancient. They predate pendulums and gearwork, originating in an era when people observed time in relation to other beings in order for all to flourish together. Ancient but mostly forgotten, these ideas are urgently needed today. Whatever practical use it might have, the arboreal clock is intended primarily to serve as a philosophical instrument…
…
… Humankind appears to be the only species to have contrived clocks that count without reference to something outside of themselves. We also appear to be the only species to have use for these contraptions, to use time in this peculiar way. (Mumford astutely described clocks as “power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.”)
All life depends on timekeeping. But nonhuman life treats time as a mixed medium: entangled with the environment, dependent on other organisms…
…
… Near the peak of Mt. Washington in Nevada’s Great Basin, which rises more than 11,600 feet above sea level, the bristlecone pines are as scraggly as the tree in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Until very recently, bristlecones didn’t grow at this elevation. To walk down the slope is to stroll through time, eventually reaching trees that are several thousand years old and as solid as sculpted stone.
Over the past decade, I have gotten to know these trees, visiting with members of the Long Now Foundation, the organization that stewards part of the mountaintop and has partnered with me on the clock at the Nevada Museum of Art. By observing the trees and their embodied experience of time, I have been able to see the inadequacy of my wristwatch.
The trees sensitized me to the time reckoning of other life forms, both plants and animals. They attuned me to the time kept collectively in living systems such as rivers, where the flow rate is affected by the melting of glaciers and the eagerness of beavers, not to mention the unquenchable thirst of industrial agriculture. By gearing the flow of time to match the flow of the Susitna or Matanuska — as I have done in partnership with the Anchorage Museum — fluvial clocks can integrate people into local watersheds.
An arboreal clock can likewise integrate people into the forest. Or to be more accurate, it can reintegrate people into their ecosystems, counteracting the human denaturing of the Anthropocene…
Eminently worth reading in full: “A Clock In The Forest,” from @jonathonkeats in @NoemaMag @longnow.
* Leonardo da Vinci
###
As we think about time, we might also contemplate natural space, and spare a thought for Abraham Ortelius; he died on this date in 1598. A cartographer, geographer, and cosmographer, he created the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World)– “the book that invented the world.”
Ortelius is generally considered one of the founders (with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator) of the Netherlandish school of cartography and geography. He was an important geographer of Spain during the age of discovery– and the first person proposing that the continents were joined before drifting to their present positions.
“It always seems impossible until it is done”*…
Adam Tooze unpacks a recent report from the clean energy think tank Ember— one that heralded a profoundly important historical turning point…
Electrification is key to the new energy system that is being built around the world. Electricity generation is one process we do know how to decarbonize. With concerted action, net neutrality is within reach in electric power generation for OECD countries by the 2030s and for the whole world by 2045. Furthermore, as Ember points out, electrification will replace “fossil fuel burning that currently takes place in car and bus engines, boilers, furnaces and other applications.”
Green electrification is the key to the future. And in 2023, according to Ember’s report, almost the entirety of new power demand was covered by growth in renewables, above all solar. Though there was growth in demand for electricity around the world, fossil fuel generation barely increased. Growth in solar and wind alone were sufficient to cover 82 percent of new electricity demand.
This is not new in rich countries. In the OECD demand growth for electricity is not strong or is even negative and renewable investment has been ongoing for two decades. The sensation is that this is now happening at the global level where the growth in demand for electric power is relentless.
In 2024 Ember expects the trend to be even more pronounced. This year, for the first time there will be substantial growth in global demand for electricity, whilst fossil fuel generation will likely fall…
… There is an obfuscation involved in talking about “the global” when, in fact, there is one country that dominates the entire dynamic of the energy transition: China.
As Ember’s data show: “China remained the main engine of global electricity demand growth. China’s rapid growth (+606 TWh, +6.9%) was just 21 TWh lower than the net global increase. India’s growth (+99 TWh, +5.4%) was the next largest contributor.”
Until the 2010s China fed its voracious demand for new power with coal-fired power stations. The energy transition in the advanced economies was never going to be sufficient to offset this. Of course, the renewable energy transition in the West was also painfully slow. But even if the USA and the EU had taken more drastic action, China’s growth was simply too large and too dirty. The fact that we are now reaching a turning point in the balance between fossil and clean power generation is due to a turning point in China: a huge surge in renewable energy investment.
In 2023 China alone accounted for more than half of the new global additions in wind and solar…
Measured in terms of power consumed China’s electrification of road transport is 3.5 times larger than that of the entire rest of the world. That is the EV revolution that the West is so worried about….
It is also the largest heat pump market in the world with more installations per year than any other country. Electrolysers, used mostly in demonstration plants by chemical and petrochemical companies, have also grown faster in China than the rest of the world. As a result, China accounted for 50% of global electrolyser capacity in 2023…
But as Ember notes, this process of applying electricity to new uses, is only at the beginning.
“Even in China, electrification is still in its infancy. Only a fifth of China’s electricity demand growth in 2023 (124 TWh of 606 TWh) was from the three electrification technologies, but this share will rise in time. These technologies added 1.4% to China’s electricity demand in 2023, up from 1.1% in 2022. Meanwhile in the rest of the world, electrification added 0.25% to electricity demand in 2022 and 0.28% in 2023. As China further accelerates the deployment of key electrification technologies and the world continues to catch up, the contribution of electrification will expand even further.“
At COP28 in 2023 many countries around the world committed to tripling global renewable electricity capacity by 2030. This has the potential to almost halve power sector emissions by 2030, as coal-fired power generation will be replaced first. Furthermore, it will provide enough new electricity to replace drive forward the electrification of transport, home and industrial heating with a 32 percent increase in electricity demand.
Having shattered all previous experience of renewable power rollout, China’s huge surge in solar now actually puts us within striking distance of achieving a net zero path, driven by green electric power…
What we are witnessing is the most rapid take-up of a significant energy technology in history.
The response of Western politicians? Protectionism. Of course there are complex motives. They need to build coalitions to sustain the energy transition. They are worried about the CCP regime in China. They want to escape extreme dependence on imported sources of energy (though of course in the renewable space it is capital equipment not energy they are importing). But the more basic question is simply this. Are Western government and societies willing to prioritize the energy transition if it is not their drama, not their success story? Or, if the PV panels and the electric vehicles are from China, do other interests take priority?
In the European case one can see a compromise based on a balance between domestic and Chinese-sourced energy transition solutions. As Martin Sandbu has remarked there is at least the possibility of a grand bargain. In the case of the United States it seems increasingly clear that the energy transition as such is a second order concern, and geopolitical confrontation and the struggle to form domestic coalitions take precedence. That is depressing. And it matters. But, as Ember’s data make clear, it is far from being a decisive obstacle. The global energy transition will go on anyway…
“The beginning of a new era: How the ‘global’ energy transition is happening in China,” from @adam_tooze and @EmberClimate. Eminently worth reading in full (both Tooze’s summary and the Ember report).
Apposite (and divergent, though not opposite, from Tooze): “The climate case for Biden’s new China tariffs,” from @timmcdonnell in @semafor.
And this: “We might be closer to changing course on climate change than we realized,” from @voxdotcom.
* Nelson Mandela
###
As we find solace where we can, we might spare a thought for Joseph Wood Krutch; he died on this date in 1970. An author, critic, and naturalist, he began his career in New York City, where he was a professor at Columbia and theater critic for The Nation, and where he wrote The Modern Temper (challenging the then-fashionable notions of scientific progress and optimism), biographies of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, and (inspired by Thoreau) The Twelve Seasons, Krutch’s first nature book.
In 1952, on doctor’s orders, Krutch left the East for Tucson and the Sonoran Desert, where he began writing about ecology, the southwestern desert environment, and the natural history of the Grand Canyon. He won renown as a naturalist, nature writer, and an early conservationist for works like The Voice of the Desert and The Desert Year, arguing that human beings must move beyond purely human centered conceptions of “conservation” and learn to value nature for its own sake.
“Biodiversity is our most valuable but least appreciated resource”*…
As Chris Armstrong reminds us, the environment is about so much more than climate…
Later this month [May 22] it will be World Biodiversity Day, and we will again celebrate the remarkable contributions that biodiversity makes to the resilience and productivity of the earth’s ecosystems. But it will also be a fitting time to face the continued failure of our institutions to grasp the scale of biodiversity loss. Or, if not to grasp it, to respond in any way adequately.
The figures speak for themselves. Since 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity has been charged with agreeing global targets for biodiversity conservation. The Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2011-2020, for instance, aimed to halve the rate of habitat loss, protect 17% of terrestrial ecosystems, and much else besides.
None of those targets were met. In response, the Kunming-Montreal Agreement recently agreed to protect 30% of ecosystems by 2030, to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems, and so on and so on and so on. On current projections, these targets are going to be missed too, by some distance. Like Canute ordering the tides to stop, it turns out that setting targets, by itself, achieves nothing.
So why has the biodiversity governance regime failed so spectacularly?…
Read on learn: “Why has global biodiversity governance failed so badly?” from @crookedtimber.
(Image above: source)
###
As we value variety, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that President Theodore Roosevelt convened a three-day Conference of Governors. Largely driven by U.S. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, the gathering was focused on the problems of conservation. The Conference was a seminal event in the history of “conservationism,” most fundamentally in drawing public attention to the issue in a highly visible way. More concretely, there were two outgrowths of the Conference: the National Conservation Commission, (which Roosevelt and Pinchot set up with representatives from the states and Federal agencies, and which prepared the first inventory of the natural resources of the United States), and the first National Conservation Congress, which Pinchot led as an assembly of private conservation interests. Not long after, annual governors’ conferences became a regular event, and 38 state conservation commissions were created.
“As you sow, so shall you reap”*…
The circle of life, via Nothing Here (@nothinghere_but).
* Galatians 6:7
###
As we watch what goes around come around, we might send very carefully-crafted birthday greetings to Jacques de Vaucanson; he was born on this date in 1709. A mechanical genius, de Vaucanson invented a number of machine tools still in use (e.g., the slide rest lathe) and created the first automated loom (the inspiration for Jacquard). But he is better remembered as the creator of extraordinary automata. Among his most famous creations: The Flute Player (with hands gloved in skin) and The Tambourine Player, life-sized mechanical figures that played their instruments impressively. But his masterpiece was The Digesting Duck; remarkably complex (it had 400 moving parts in each wing alone), it could flap its wings, drink water, eat grain– and defecate.
Sans…le canard de Vaucanson vous n’auriez rien qui fit ressouvenir de la gloire de la France. (Without…the duck of Vaucanson, you will have nothing to remind you of the glory of France)
– Voltaire
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken”*…
The estimable Jonathan Watts on the (painfully) pivotal year just ended…
As historically high temperatures continued to be registered in many parts of the world in late December, the former Nasa scientist James Hansen told the Guardian that 2023 would be remembered as the moment when failures became apparent.
“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said.
“Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”…
The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.
…
His comments are a reflection of the dismay among experts at the enormous gulf between scientific warnings and political action. It has taken almost 30 years for world leaders to acknowledge that fossil fuels are to blame for the climate crisis, yet this year’s United Nations Cop28 summit in Dubai ended with a limp and vague call for a “transition away” from them, even as evidence grows that the world is already heating to dangerous levels…
Veteran climate watchers have been horrified at the pace of change. “The climate year 2023 is nothing but shocking, in terms of the strength of climate occurrences, from heatwaves, droughts, floods and fires, to rate of ice melt and temperature anomalies particularly in the ocean,” Prof Johan Rockström, the joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said.
…
Aquino [Francisco Eliseu Aquino, a professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the deputy director of Brazil’s polar and climatic centre] said human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics. Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned with similarly devastating force in mid-November.
Aquino said this “record record” was a taste of what was to come as the world entered dangerous levels of warming. “From this year onwards, we will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5C [of heating] in the global average temperature and new records for disasters,” he said.
This is already happening. This year’s deadliest climate disaster was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna. In a single day, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. Human-induced climate change made this up to 50 times more likely.
Forest fires burned a record area in Canada and Europe, and killed about 100 people in Lahaina on Maui island, the deadliest wildfire in recent US history, which happened in August. For those who prefer to calculate catastrophe in economic terms, the US broke its annual record of billion-dollar disasters by August, by which time there had already been 23.
…
…as science has proved beyond any doubt, global temperatures would continue to rise as long as humanity continues to burn fossil fuels and forests.
In the years ahead, the heat “anomaly” and catastrophes of 2023 would first become the new norm, and then be looked back on as one of the cooler, more stable years in people’s lives. As Hansen warned, unless there is radical and rapid change, failure will be built into the climate system…
Bracing, but critically important– eminently worth reading in full: “World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say,” from @jonathanwatts in @guardian.
* Leo Tolstoy
###
As we face facts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1870 that Congress authorized the formation of the U.S. weather service (later named the Weather Bureau; later still, the National Weather Service), and placed it under the direction of the Army Signal Corps. Cleveland Abbe, who had started the first private weather reporting and warning service (in Cincinnati) and had been issuing weather reports or bulletins since 1869, was the only person in the country at the time who was experienced in drawing weather maps from telegraphic reports and forecasting from them. He became the weather service’s inaugural chief scientist– effectively its founding head– in January, 1871. The first U.S. meteorologist, he is known as the “father of the U.S. Weather Bureau,” where he systemized observation, trained personnel, and established scientific methods. He went on to become one of the 33 founders of the National Geographic Society.
You must be logged in to post a comment.