Part 1: Down the River
- Reversal of the Chicago River by building canal at the turn of 20th c exemplifies concept of “the control of nature,” had immense ecological consequences across the US
- More recently, installed electrification barriers to try to contain invasive species traveling between the Great Lakes, Mississippi, etc.
- Especially meant to limit Asian carp: actually four species, raised together in China in extremely effective polyculture; brought to US on suggestion of Rachel Carson in The Silent Spring to deal with nutrient runoff and feed off excess plant growth → escaped and took off
- Canal was first link between Great Lakes and Mississippi drainage basins → lots of concern that carp would/will cross over to Great Lakes
- Now attempts to harness people (the best overfishers!) for population control— make carp popular to eat?
- People have directly transformed > 1/2 of all land on Earth, indirectly impacted much more
- Humans → major drivers of extinction and speciation on Earth…
- Solution at this point is going to be more control— not the control of nature, but “the control of the control of nature”
- Loss of land in Louisiana — sediment being washed out due to floodgates and levies, bc no spillover from rivers
- Now, trying to engineer more mechanisms to save the land…
- To-scale model of the delta to run simulations…
- Efforts to recreate land-building with pumps and pipes → extremely expensive and only a temporary solution
- Now planning to create ten huge “diversions” from the river to divert flow when flooding (akin to “natural” crevasses that occur during floods), carrying lots of sediment— will be in use year after year, but also each one costs $800 million+
- Land loss only accelerated by drainage of groundwater → sinking
- Louisiana peninsula now known as combined human/natural structure
Part 2: Into the Wild
- Devils Hole → pupfish in pool not connected to anything else, lost their pelvic fins; have smallest range of any vertebrate
- Might be rarest fish on Earth (only a few hundred, totaling around 100 grams in mass!) but threatened by radioactive waste from Nevada test site; preservation efforts aided by complete replica site of Devil’s Hole (except shallower)
- Actual Devils Hole → over 500 ft deep in some parts, very warm—aquifer heated by geothermal; very low oxygen content
- Pupfish adapted to these extreme conditions → maybe because making the extra fins wasn’t worth the energy
- Conditions in simulacra have to be monitored v closely— much easier to ruin an ecosystem than to run one
- Nature has always been entwined with culture— only exists in contrast to technology, art, consciousness… gives rise to many divisions
- Synanthropes: species that were not domesticated, but that thrive due to humans (crows, carp, mice)
- Anthropophytes: plants that thrive where humans move around them— further divided into those that spread before & after Europeans crossed to the New World
- Conservation-reliant (Stockholm species): dependent on their persecutors, like the Devils Hole pupfish
- Disparate ponds/pools in the desert → radial evolution of fish similar to that of plants/animals on islands
- Coral reefs
- Ruth Gates’s efforts to design “super corals” more resilient to warming, acidifying oceans → breeding corals under calibrated stress → assisted evolution of species to build reefs of the future— accepting that nature might not always be so natural
What do you call natural selection after the end of nature?
- Madeleine van Oppen worked with Gates (Australia + Hawaii)
- Ideas include coral probiotic, manipulating algae symbionts…
- Sea Simulator in Aus → many different conditions, selectively cross-breed corals by capturing and separating sperm and eggs during spawning
- Darwin’s paradox → tropical waters are not very conducive to life, so how do coral reefs harbor such staggering biodiversity? Perhaps because extremely efficient “recycling” of nutrients btw species
- At this point, just trying to by enough time for the reefs and hope the world gets its shit together in time so that at least some of the reefs will survive into the future
- Genetic engineering
- In some sense, can see introduction of invasive species as the first occurrences of this— introducing completely new genomes to an ecosystem
- Cane toads: introduced purposefully to Australia to help control pests in sugar cane plantations (which they didn’t do) → spread rapidly across the country at accelerating pace
- Poisonous— sort of opposite to carp in that they are dangerous not because nothing eats them, but because everything does… and then dies
- One of cutest victims = Northern quoll— sure little marsupial
- Conventional methods at “toad-busting” failed… but since toxins produced by enzymes, one group → edit genes controlling this pathway. Detox toads wouldn’t survive long in the wild, but could be used to “educate” other species to not eat them (would make them sick but not kill them)
- Some genes don’t get passed down governed by simple laws of probability— “drive” their chances by affecting meiosis, replicating
- Can engineer gene drives to manipulate or eliminate species, but very risky— could easily go out of control
- Rodents = one of the biggest biological “footprints” of humans— spread rats and mice to virtually the whole world
- Cause extinction of native species
- Most common method of control = poisoning whole islands with anticoagulants, which you can really only do in uninhabited places; causes painful death, poison spreads up and down food chain, even one surviving rodent can repopulate island
- Ideally could use gene drives to control rodent populations, but concern over risk… but what’s the alternative?
- “Sometimes doing something is better than doing nothing. Sometimes, it is the other way around.”
- No longer a question between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be (or something like that)— the status quo is not stable, but a state of decline
Part 3: Up in the Air
- Footnote: quantities of carbon sometimes measured in tons of CO2, sometimes in tons of carbon; the former is around 4x the latter
- Climeworks — Icelandic company working on carbon drawdown
- CO2 from geothermal plants (along with steam, other gases released) and some scrubbed from the air → injected back into ground to turn to rock (calcium carbonate)
- Speeding up process of chemical weathering
- Put capture devices next to power plants → higher CO2, can use residual heat to power the capture devices without making more emissions
- Also sell CO2 to greenhouses to grow crops— but this only temporarily captures carbon, because released when food is eaten
- Challenges = storage (places with right geology aren’t rare, but not super common); very expensive
- Klaus Lachner (sp?) → “inventor” of negative emissions
- First explored extreme idea of a fleet of self-replicating, solar-powered robots that could capture CO2– obviously not realistic, but can learn a lot from these edge cases
- Rather than looking at carbon emissions as an ethical issue, which makes everyone a sinner, should treat it like we do sewage: we don’t reward people for going to the bathroom less, but people don’t go around shitting on sidewalks
- Cumulative nature of carbon emissions make it tricky….
- Brings up inequity in making countries that didn’t create the problem sacrifice to help solve it
- At this point, no way to reach any of the goals without some sort of negative emissions
- Other negative emissions technologies (NETs)…
- Enhanced weathering — kind of opposite of injecting CO2 to ground: scatter basalt and other minerals on fields, in the ocean, to react with CO2 in the air/water
- Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) — growing plants, burning them and harnessing power, capturing the emissions and burying (electricity and negative emissions!)
- Reforestation, then not allowing new plants/trees to rot in other ways (bury them, dump into ocean?)
- Problem with all these ideas is scale, and potential for injustice (less food production, etc.) with all
- Solar geoengineering
- Volcanic eruptions → ultimately lead to sulfur dioxide particles that stay suspended for several years, reflecting back sunlight; eruption in early 1800s → basically prevented summers worldwide and lead to famines
- From Cold War times, many proposals for climate modification by US, USSR (seeding clouds with silver iodide = one of few actually tried), but fell out of favor
- David Keith at Harvard: founder of Carbon Engineering
- Believes that we can cut emissions drastically, and carbon capture can eventually be scaled to take care of the rest— but period of overshoot between these will lead to mass suffering (some irreversible), so still a sense of urgency
- Implementation would be relatively cheap and rapid, but also only treats symptoms — once it’s started, cannot be stopped (and must be continually ramped up) without “termination shock,” rebound warming
- Increasing amount of particles → more and more unexpected, weird, potentially dangerous effects: white skies, geopolitical conflict
- Could try to selectively refreeze the poles by spraying salt crystals into the clouds there to increase reflectivity
- Ice cores from Camp Century (US attemptED to build a base under Greenland ice during Cold War)
- Research side did accomplish something, even if the base was a failure — ice cores → history of world climate
- Realized there were much more drastic swings in climate than expected— 25 or so; last one around 10,000 years ago
- All of human civilization has taken place during this period of stability, perhaps because of it— conducive to agriculture, people don’t have to move around all the time to go to places with better weather
- Can look at current climate change as a human-induced swing like historic ones (which would be disastrous)
- Leads to need for extreme ideas like building barriers to physically hold up glaciers
- This book = about people trying to solve problems caused by people trying to solve problems
- Solutions not so much techno-optimism as techno-fatalism; not an improvement but the best we can do
- Akin to chemo— no one would do things like “dimming the fucking sun” if you had any other option
- Scientists have proposed these ideas, but now up to politicians to implement them (and to try to do so as equitably as possible… not a great track record for this)