Tentative Optimism

            Hello, readers! To my own shock and surprise, I’m feeling uncharacteristically optimistic about the future. This is probably a fleeting phenomenon, but I figured I should explain why I feel as though we might yet succeed in regional and local wildfire mitigation.

            Just last year, California drafted a Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan that will be executed by a Task Force of the same name. You can read the full plan here: https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/ps4p2vck/californiawildfireandforestresilienceactionplan.pdf. This plan identifies four overarching goals: 1.) increase the pace and scale of forest health projects; 2.) strengthen protection of communities; 3.) manage forests to achieve the state’s economic and environmental goals; and 4.) drive innovation and measure progress. Successfully implementing this plan will require widespread cooperation between state, tribal, federal, regional, and local organizations. We have only just begun flexing the full force of our combined strength!

California spends billions of dollars reacting to wildfires, desperately responding to repeated disasters after the conflagrations have already begun. With this action plan, task force, and a huge influx of funding to the tune of billions more dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, we are aggressively shifting to preventative measures.

I just recently learned from an excellent expert panelist discussion that for every dollar spent on preventative efforts, $3-$8 are saved in damages and losses from wildfire. Watch the full webinar here if you want to “nerd out” as hard as I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqvrxsC1ta0. Mind you, the webinar is two hours long but it is absolutely jam-packed full of information, valuable perspectives, and achievable solutions that can be accomplished with existing technology, indigenous tribal knowledge, and scientific understanding. After watching, I couldn’t help but think, “Hey, we might actually stand a chance! We can do this!”

First and foremost, as identified by the first goal of the Action Plan, California must scale up forest treatments (thinning, prescribed burning, reforestation) to a landscape level. Currently, projects cover only localized areas on the order of magnitude of several thousand (10^3) acres, but what we really need are projects that span tens or hundreds of thousands (10^4 or 10^5) of acres. This is a massive gap in what we’ve been doing versus what we need to do, but with enough people-power in a burgeoning workforce, we can strive toward a prosperous, healthy forest.

Such massive workloads will require conservancy collectives and cooperatives to pool their resources, share their data, streamline their forest treatments and wildfire responses, share funding rather than compete for it, and standardize reporting metrics so that all stakeholders and key players can measure progress in the same way. All of this is possible!

To any and all young people (or older folks looking for a new career path) I implore you to get involved in land and water management. There is no way to sustain any economy of any kind without nourishing a viable ecosystem around and within us. Everything we have, Earth has provided. Without salmon, we have no fisheries, no food. Without forests, we have no lumber or paper products. Without habitat, we have no game to hunt, no beautiful opportunities for recreation. Scaling up treatments to a landscape level requires ALL HANDS on deck. There is no shortage of work and all levels of land management are experiencing a huge influx of capital.

Trinity County is already tackling goal #2 (strengthening protection of communities) with rigor. The Resource Conservation District and Watershed Research and Training Center have been scaling up fuels reduction, chipping, and burning projects in the WUI (wildland urban interface/intermix) all across the county. Some insurance companies are being legislatively pressured to offer discounts to homeowners who take preventative measures against wildfire. CAL FIRE has tons of information on home hardening and creating sufficient defensible space (https://www.fire.ca.gov/dspace/). And if you really want to dig your heels in and rage back against the blazes, VOLUNTEER for your local fire department!

We always need more folks becoming familiar with the tools and techniques to manage the flames. Knowledge is our most powerful tool for dispelling fear. There is a paradigm shift unfolding, and someday we will learn to cohabitate with good, frequent, ecosystem-enriching low-intensity fires. Let’s GO!

Seafloor Mining Will Make Rich Countries Richer

Greetings, all! Thank you as always for continuing to read along, even when I ramble on about moon mining. I thought this would be a great opportunity to dive deeper into the more likely scenario we are facing, one of seafloor mining. So, let’s dive!

            I had never heard of the International Seabed Authority prior to this year. It is an intergovernmental organization, established in 1994, intended to oversee the equitable division of natural resources in international waters. On the surface it’s a worthwhile mission statement that blends environmental responsibility and social justice. But in practice, it appears as though environmental safeguards will be ignored while rich, exploitative countries continue to oppress, marginalize, and disadvantage poor, exploited countries. We’ll get to that shortly.

            First, a quick rundown of the science. There are four known major manganese nodule deposits in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, totaling more than 14.5 million square kilometers (roughly 1.5 times the surface area of Europe) (https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-3/mineral-resources/manganese-nodules/). These nodules range in size from a baseball to a soccer ball and contain manganese, iron, nickel, titanium, copper, and cobalt.

Manganese nodules can form through chemical precipitation and diagenetic growth. Similar to cloud formation where water vapor condenses upon a nucleus (a bit of dust, dirt, smoke, or salt), metals can precipitate out of sea water and condense around a nucleus (such as a bit of shell, tooth, or bone), growing into a metal-rich nodule. Limestone is another example of chemical precipitation, but calcium carbonate, rather than metal, is the resulting precipitate. In contrast, diagenetic growth occurs when metals dissolved in the pore spaces between sediment clasts condense around a nucleus on the ocean floor, rather than precipitating out of the water column.

There are billions of tonnes of ore contained in these deposits. The fact that these nodules lie in international waters complicates mining and production. Power has always been distributed unevenly geographically and throughout time. As we shift away from oil—a source of economic, political, and energetic power that has historically been sought by the U.S., Europe, and other countries wealthy enough to wage war for the fossil fuel—we will now see that future power lies in metals. If the world is going to run on electricity, the countries that mine the most metal and produce the most batteries will continuing dominating the global arena.

Enter the International Seabed Authority. As it turns out, the Metals Company, a private organization out of Australia, has already been granted permission to begin exploratory mining and data collection, without clearly building a pathway for smaller, poorer island countries to economically benefit from the extraction (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-15/deepsea-mining-pacific-ocean-nauru-metals/101438478). It is possible that Nauru, Kiribati, the Cook Islands, and other interested developing nations may come to benefit from a partnership with the Metals Company, but it seems likely that yet again, colonialism will win. The remnants of the British Empire will probably continue to disproportionally rake in the dough as they rake the ocean floor free of nodules and sea life simultaneously.

And we will gladly give them our dollars. Or mine the ocean ourselves! Americans will always choose cars over marine life. I am 100% in support of the electric buses and electric chargers in Weaverville, and I applaud the Office of Education, Chamber of Commerce, and all partners who made it possible. But everything comes at a cost.

In this county, it takes more than a year to get a CEQA license for a 10,000 square foot cannabis garden. The quantity of environmental analyses required to get a truly accurate picture of potential impacts to the ocean and the creatures therein would take upwards of five years, minimum. Seafloor dwelling organisms like worms, clams, and sea cucumbers will get killed in the direct area of extraction. Sediment clouds could bury benthic organisms further away, or worse yet, shade out plankton closer to the surface. Once the base of the food chain is gone, the ocean will die.

But of course, everyone who understands the climate crisis knows the ocean is getting hotter and more acidic. Moon mining or seafloor nodule extraction, all for the luxury of private vehicles.

What a wild ride.

Mine the Moon to Save the Seafloor!

            Welcome back, readers! What a relief it is writing during these cloudy, rainy days. There is magic in the sound of raindrops on rooftops, in the scent of parched earth now quenched. It’s enough to soothe a troubled mind and soften a strained soul.

            I came across an interesting proposition in an article that I wanted to share with you all: to save the deep ocean, we should mine the moon (https://nautil.us/to-save-the-deep-ocean-we-should-mine-the-moon-238541/).

            I know I sound crazy. Moon bats, am I right? “We can’t mine the moon! What a logistical nightmare!” Space is scary. It’s dangerous. It is only just now beginning to be ‘managed’ under complex international law that is still being written. Why mess with space?

            Well, it all comes down to rare earth elements, minerals, and metals necessary for the widespread decarbonization and electrification of our economy. As some readers have noted, cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo are widely exploited, subjected to human rights abuses like lack of food and water. And worse. Our hunger for personal vehicles, first gas-powered, now electric, continues to ravage poorer countries in the southern hemisphere. To some, the answer to these humanitarian violations is to mine a massive swath of Pacific Ocean seafloor between Hawaii and Mexico for minerals and metals (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02242-y). No one lives at the bottom of the ocean, right?

            Well, certainly no humans live at the bottom of the ocean. And certainly, to decarbonize we will need copious amounts of copper, cobalt, manganese, and nickel ore. But mining the ocean floor presents nearly as many logistical problems as moon mining does, and at the detriment of a delicate ecosystem that contains a myriad of sea creatures. These animals possess value simply by existing, but if one were to take an anthropocentric approach also may possess medicinal and therapeutic properties that could be beneficial to humans. The long-term and widespread impacts of mining roughly two miles beneath the ocean’s surface are not well-understood. Indeed, we haven’t even classified everything that lives down there. Just as drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge would result in catastrophic loss of irreplaceable, charismatic Arctic megafauna, drilling the seafloor for metals and minerals will result in catastrophic loss of ocean life, both known and as-yet undiscovered.

            Here’s where we circle back around to the moon. The moon is the result of a cataclysmic collision between proto-Earth and a Mars-sized planet called Theia. This caused the two molten planetoids to merge while ejecting a spinning mass of material that would then become our moon (https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/how-did-the-moon-form.html). Although the moon lacks an atmosphere and is geologically dead, devoid of weather, meteoric impact protection, plate tectonics, and volcanoes, it consists of materials we can find on Earth, like iron, titanium, aluminum, and magnesium. The lunar surface consists primarily of anorthosite and basalt, two common, well-studied igneous rocks. It follows that other concentrations of ore may be present in the formerly molten remains of the moon.

            Both seafloor and lunar mining require the use of robotics and communications. It’s not feasible for humans to undertake such environmentally dangerous labor, and it would be better performed by rovers and automated machinery. We already possess the hardware. Even the “software” of artificial intelligence is making strides toward being capable of conducting an autonomous mining operation or similar project. I think colonizing Mars is a waste of time and resources, but mining the lifeless moon, our closest neighbor, might be worth it.

If we can spare the ocean floor, we must. It is critical. We must protect the final bastion of unspoiled habitat. It will be comparably difficult to mine the moon as opposed to the seafloor, and it will be much simpler to mine the moon as compared to an asteroid or meteorite. The moon has a solid, predictable orbit that stabilizes our axial wobble and we’ve already demonstrated that we can put people on the surface and bring them back home safely.

In all honesty, we probably won’t invest in lunar mining just like we won’t invest in the genetics needed to bring back the caribou and wolves when they’ve gone extinct. RIP, Pacific Ocean.

Re-Examining “Wilderness” in the Era of Megafires

            We’re a week out from the autumnal equinox. Fall is nigh! We’re nowhere near finished with wildfire season, but I’m grateful we’ve had fewer unhealthy air quality days this year than last.

            The end of summer always feels bittersweet. Leisure slows to a trickle, the sun dips lower in the sky. And yet now we can look forward to slightly cooler temperatures creeping in.

            The weekend of August 20th-21st I enjoyed a weekend of hiking in Lassen Volcanic National Park. I’d visited twice before, but this was the first time I’d seen the place since the Dixie Fire tore through the entirety of the western side. The carnage was visceral.

            Call me a tree-hugger. I take no offense. Trees offer us shade, water retention and regulation, soil stabilization, carbon sequestration, habitat for many bird and mammal species, roots, shoots, nuts, and seeds to eat, as well as various materials and fibers with which to build and craft. And they’re beautiful! And they’re good for the soul. Forests are complex systems that use a network of roots and underground fungi (a symbiotic mycorrhizal network) to share nutrients and transmit chemical messages regarding stressors like drought, pests, and wildfires between trees (https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2019/exploring-the-underground-network-of-trees-the-nervous-system-of-the-forest/).

Just like humans, trees live longer, healthier lives in interconnected forests than in isolated urban plots. Even the neurons in our human brains are dendritic, shaped like trees. We do not give trees and forests nearly enough credit for all of the benefits they provide for us, just by the very nature of their existence, our co-adapted biological dependence upon them, and the fantastic structural similarities we share in our Creation.

Imagine my horror seeing the most severe burns, charred blackened trunks, spindly like burnt matchsticks still tall, imposing window-makers. A tree immediately off the trail to Upper and Lower Twin Lakes was bleeding bright red sap from the heartwood, scarlet fresh like human blood gushing from an artery, dripping down the charcoal. I grew up in New England, maple syrup country, so I understand the protective pest-fighting properties of sap. But I honestly had no idea sap could be bright red. It was disturbing. I thought perhaps the sap had soaked up some red flame retardant, but I learned through a cursory internet search that sap from the heartwood is naturally stained red with tannins. So many dead trees, burned to a crisp, still bleeding nearly a year after death. My heart was so heavy seeing that my hiking pace slowed by half.

I was a National Park Ranger for five seasons, so a key portion of the Wilderness Act was drilled into my ethos performing land stewardship as I had understood it in my early twenties. “A wilderness […] is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean […] land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions” (https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-laws/wilderness-act/default.php).

Now, I agree that no one should possess private property right on top of the most beautiful landscape features in the entire country (and arguably the world) but I’m starting to question the hard boundary constructed between Wilderness and Humanity. Mechanically thinning and prescribed burning our forests at large is the best course of action to preserve these fire-adapted landscapes for future generations without total devastating loss in high severity wildfires exacerbated by a century of overgrowth and a glaring reality of aridification.

We have several ways to move forward.

We can adopt a culture of fire-hardening and remove as much overgrowth as possible.

We can petition the government to reconsider wilderness management such that fuels reduction becomes a top priority, possibly requiring numerous addendums to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that allow for new management strategies as climate change alters all ecosystems.

And we can choose teamwork and kindness, refusing to resort to violence in a world already ravaged by loss and destruction.

Don’t add to the mass death. Add to the nurturing of all remaining life.

Toxic Cultural Biases Must Challenged. Toxic Norms Must Be Dismantled.

Welcome back, readers!

Please remember to wear person protective equipment when the air quality is unhealthy. I wear an N95 during wildfire season and don’t feel the slightest bit ashamed. I’m keeping my young lungs as unpolluted and free of PM10 and PM2.5 (particulate matter 10 microns across or 2.5 microns across, respectively) as is technologically feasible. Remember: PM2.5 can lodge deep in our blood vessels, creating or exacerbating heart disease and other cardiovascular ailments. Protection from smoke and viruses, in one low-tech mask! Astonishing!

            It’s worth it to use this article as an opportunity to look at resource management through a cultural lens. Don’t get me wrong, science and capitalism have allowed us to exponentially advance while achieving average standards of living better than kings and queens experienced a hundred years ago. There are numerous benefits to learning using the scientific method, specifically that hypotheses can be tested, disproven, and refined as a result of observation and experimentation, and that scientific lines of inquiry can be conducted by anyone. Science and mathematics are not limited by language or nationality.

But here’s the catch: science is limited and narrow. It is an anthropocentric pedagogy that originated in Europe and is still currently dominated by men. Scientific studies can sometimes be biased because the scientists, the flawed human beings collecting, interpreting, and reporting data, are often operating in a larger system or cultural perspective that is itself biased. Similarly, capitalism’s fatal flaw is its extractive perspective toward all available resources, often over-consuming in its “efficiency” and producing massive amounts of waste when the resources cannot glean a profit.

Megafires are a timely example. For tens of thousands of years, indigenous peoples of these mountains (the Wintu, Chimariko, and Hupa, to name a few) viewed themselves as part of the landscape, working with nature to maximize ecological productivity. These peoples intentionally set small, controlled fires to keep the underbrush from growing too dense, increasing open meadow space for grazing ungulates and maintaining large, healthy carbon-sequestering trees with ample space between them. Fires were frequent and well-managed, informed with the knowledge that lightning strikes and resulting fires were commonplace.

The Gold Rush changed everything. Western thought trained European colonizers to look at the forest system as separate from humanity, a commodity, as land upon which to grow more lumber and paper products. When miners stampeded through these hills, they also massacred indigenous peoples. State-sanctioned militias wreaking terror and bloodshed, slaughtering the original inhabitants of this land. It’s estimated that only a few thousand Wintun people survive today, when there had been more than 100,000 living here.

With the native peoples shot nearly to extinction, forest managers and loggers at the turn of the century could abandon the practice of prescribed burning and allow the forest to grow thick, dense, and unruly. More trees to cut! More profit, of course! But now we can see the full effect of USFS mismanagement full-suppression tactics for the last 100-120 years, the result of our insatiable greed for timber, smothering the landscape. Our white ancestors were biased. They were so focused on drawing monetary value from the forests, so centered on inflicting a consumptive society’s desired outcomes in a futile effort to tame nature to serve our narrow needs, that we are now grappling with the massive, overwhelming consequences of ugly, genocidal, abusive history.

Some folks will scream out, “Critical Race Theory!” while reading this article, but I don’t care! Being unable to face the darkest chapters of our past, the crimes committed against disenfranchised groups, the terror and trauma inflicted, and being unable to learn to never repeat those atrocities only signals intellectual immaturity and emotional stunting. Just look at us now! Just look at the ridiculous, violent culture war compelling right-wing MAGA extremists to threaten civil war, threaten the lives of their fellow Americans. Those who ignore the past and refuse to consider systems in all of their complexity are the ones driving the machines and fires of mass death.

Nationalism is believing your country is by default the greatest. Patriotism is believing it could be.

I will never stop writing persuasively in pursuit of a more perfect union.

The Likelihood of Extreme Events is Increasing. Time for a Carbon Tax!

Whew, what a scorcher! I saw reports of 113 degrees in Weaverville, but I estimate a bit of that comes from the hot asphalt absorbing the sun. Our own minuscule urban heat island effect. Overall air temperatures were probably around 111, but that’s still a significant increase from Heat Dome 2021. I can’t help but wonder what bleak record we’ll break next year, or perhaps even this year yet. I hope it’s not drought-related. I hope we get abundant cold precipitation this winter. It’s a fool’s hope, but perhaps we’ll be pleasantly surprised.

            Exponential change and probability. Non-linear relationships. Time seems to speed up as we age, yes? A smaller fraction of our overall lives, whipping by with accelerating haste. Carbon emissions and heating have quickened in an exponential manner, increasing orders of magnitude in geologic leaps and bounds. When we consider the likelihood of climate records being broken year after year, we must envision a normal curve (aka bell curve) with a “fat tail” on the right. The impact of events not yet witnessed and utterly unimaginable in our stable Holocene climate is greater than our previously used statistical models had assumed. Extreme outlier events will become the new “normal”. If you’d like to read a super cerebral article on the topic of climate risks and the social cost of carbon, here’s a link to a paper written by Martin Weitzman of Harvard, Department of Economics: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/weitzman/files/fattaileduncertaintyeconomics.pdf. If you would like a simpler explanation, here’s an article explaining Weitzman’s findings in plain speak: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-fat-tail-of-climate-change-risk_b_8116264.

            There’s an elegant solution at our fingertips: a carbon tax. I understand everyone hates taxes, but hear me out! It feels ridiculous for us to be discussing plastic straws when celebrities and politicians take trips in personal jets less than an hour’s drive, emitting literal tons of CO2. Call it a carbon tax, a tax on over-consumption, on greed, on excessive wealth, but this tax could be used to invest in a decarbonized electrical grid and in local transportation services. Electric shuttles! Mopeds! Bike share programs! Solutions vary in cost, but these are achievable goals. Ideally the costs would be targeted only toward the people who consume the most, who spend the most money and emit the most carbon, sparing middle class and low-income Americans from having to foot the bill. The benefits would be distributed toward the majority of Americans, combatting the widening wealth gap. If not a tax, call it an insurance policy for Earth: We invest today to prevent continuous catastrophes from unfolding right now into the foreseeable future.

            We still have time to act. The window is closing but there’s still time. We have financial tools to use. We have technologies to scale up and adopt extensively, including carbon capture and sequestration and desalinization. There are cultural practices we can adopt, like working together at every organizational level to mechanically thin and control burn our forests to maximize carbon retention in the era of mega-fires. We have options!

            I often wonder what it will take, what facts I could present, what heartfelt plea I could make that would be powerful enough to tip the scales toward mitigation on a large scale. What emotional connection could I ever make that struck a chord so deep we all decided, simultaneously, to steward this miraculous planet with the shared goal of maximizing life, human and non-human alike, and improving individual and collective well-being?

            I certainly will never know the answer, but it’s helpful to remind myself I’m less than a blink of a blip in deep time and space.

This is the nature of democracy: it moves painfully slowly because everyone gets to speak their piece. It takes years or tens of years to implement policy changes because they must be debated and clarified a thousand times over. All the same, despite the downward trends into ecological collapse, fascist tyranny, and looming civil war, I firmly believe democracy is the best model to maximize freedom and opportunity, and that free speech is the best possible mechanism to drive change.

We will survive this wildfire season, and we will live to thrive another day!

Accelerating Damages

            Congratulations, readers! You have successfully survived several weeks of 100+F degree days. Keep up the good work, stay hydrated, and don’t die.

            I’ve been grappling with the enormity of the climate catastrophe for more than a decade. It is abundantly clear that warming is accelerating even more quickly than previous climate models predicted: western Europe is (at the time of this article’s writing) enduring a sweltering 40 degree Celsius heat wave, something that wasn’t predicted to occur until 2050 (https://www.axios.com/2022/07/19/europe-heat-wave-climate-change-uk-france), and winter storms in the southern hemisphere are now reaching intensities not anticipated until 2080 (https://phys.org/news/2022-05-reveals-climate-rapid.html).

The exponential increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide combined with the forcings of positive feedback loops in the climate system are ramping up changes that Earth won’t be able to self-correct for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s troubling realizing we have even less time than we thought, less time than we need to actually implement solutions. We should be slamming on the brakes and yet we haven’t even taken our foot off the accelerator. Carbon emissions are as high as they’ve ever been, with little sign of true progress toward deep cuts.

            On June 10th, a British tourist just happened to capture on video the collapse of a glacier in the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan, a place that has been consistently glaciated for MILLIONS of years. The ice-like slush roars across the vast boulder-strewn field between the man and glacier in under a minute, and he ducks behind a rock to shelter from the river washing over him at the very last second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP82dujKfWA. Eleven people were killed in Italy July 6th as the direct result of Marmolada glacier collapsing above a popular hiking trail (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/all-11-victims-italian-glacier-collapse-identified-authorities-say-2022-07-09/). These folks are sad symbols of a planetary problem that will claim life slowly through famine, drought, and disease, as well as quickly during intense, punctuated natural disasters.

            It’s exhausting contemplating the full extent of our grim fate, made worse witnessing the abject refusal of Republican leaders and Joe “Coal-Sucker” Manchin to support and enact desperately needed mitigations.

            This never-ending stream of climate crises has noticeably soured the tone of my writing. For many years I maintained staunch optimism that technology would save us, preserve life, and help us adapt to the heat. Indeed, I feel hope spark in my heart every time I see folks walking, riding scooters, mopeds, and bicycles. But what happens when the air temperature is so hot that we cannot safely operate our machines? Our cars and air conditions, water pumps and medical devices? Have you ever seen the temperature warning pop up on an iPhone? It reads: “Temperature. iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it.” I saw that message for the first time last June during the heat dome.

Just as humans have their heat limit, so do the pieces of technology upon which we depend to cool, transport, and care for ourselves. We will perhaps need to build cool retreats underground, to take refuge during the scorching days. As much as I don’t want to go back to the “Dark Ages” where we subsist on grains and work at night by candlelight, we are fast approaching the limitations of technological adaptation. Icarus falling from the sky, wings literally melted. By refusing to make sacrifices now, we are ensuring a drastically lower standard of living for everyone to come in perpetuity. I vacillate between deep sadness during the dark winter and flaming rage during the searing summer.

            I’ve taken to adopting a zoomed-out 100-million year view to cope with the sorrow and anger. The word “Anthropocene” has been bantered around, suggesting this moment in history is worthy of its own named epoch. However, Peter Brannen argues quite eloquently that this current warming is more akin to an event, a brief carbon-induced fever that will result in a mass extinction event indistinguishable from all other such extinctions: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arrogance-anthropocene/595795/. Cheery, huh?

            Obla-dee, obla-dah life goes on, I suppose. Earth will cool off long after human civilization has collapsed and any evidence we were ever here has been thoroughly erased. At least I lived in the same time frame as two of the surviving Beatles.

SCOTUS Deals Multiple Death Blows to Birth-Givers and Life on Earth

            I’ve struggled tremendously to write this article. The very first words I submitted to the Trinity Journal were many and technical, but in that letter, I stated I was neither a politician nor a journalist, but a young woman with dreams of having children with my husband someday. After the dual rulings of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade and West Virginia v. EPA utterly eliminating policy tools for the EPA to regulate carbon emissions before they were even written into law, I find I am not functioning as a particularly gifted science communicator this week.

            Every draft I’ve failed to write words completely devoid of political context, and even more so, I’ve been at a loss trying to craft any type of unifying message of hope. I still have dreams of raising a family with my loving life partner, but to speak as a scientist: all the trend lines are bleak. I continue to fear for the health of our planet as well as the omnipresent specter of gun violence, personal threats for writing this article, and now, possibly dying of pregnancy complications or medical emergencies because I wasn’t able to access safe, legal reproductive healthcare when I’m most vulnerable.

I suppose, darkly, there’s something we can unite on regardless of our political leanings or reproductive organs: things are bad, everyone blames someone else, and we can all agree that they appear as though they’re going to get worse.

            Take inflation. We’re all feeling it. With few exceptions, we’re all stressed, squeezed, barely hanging on financially and otherwise. Inflation will inevitably worsen as the productive ecosystems upon which we depend for our survival collapse around us. Food supply will plummet, demand will increase with population, prices will sky-rocket.

How expensive will the final hamburger from the last cow be? The Kansas Department of Health and Environment said it assisted with the disposal of 2,000 cattle carcasses resulting from the heat wave that ruthlessly baked over the center of the nation June 11th-14th, from Texas up to Minnesota (https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105482394/cattle-kansas-heat-wave). Private ranchers are not required to report losses and the deaths could be much higher. We’ve seen losses like this in previous heat waves, and climate change will make extreme heat waves more frequent and longer-lasting. Just like droughts and wildfires.

How valuable will the berries from the final fruiting shrub be? Our bird and mammalian pollinator populations have seen massive declines and are projected to continue declining toward extinction (https://www.iucn.org/content/pollinating-birds-and-mammals-declining-reveals-first-global-assessment-trends-status-pollinators). Likewise, our insect populations are plummeting in the same fashion (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023989118).

Our soils continue to erode. Aquifers are running dry. Please understand that from here on out, no matter who holds the reins of power, we’re in for lean, desperate times. Compassion over violence is what’s needed moving forward to maximize life and well-being.

            I’d like to applaud all people who have been good stewards of the land, implementing best management practices on their farms for many years. Growing local food is a great way to foster nutritional resilience and security. Jeffry England, Director of the Trinity Food Bank and Grand Marshal of the Fourth of July Parade deserves praise for his work in feeding hungry families. It is also fitting and fair to offer accolades to all Trinity County residents who hunt and fish, subsisting off the bounty their own backyards provide. Everyone has special skills, talents, and expertise to offer the community, but we’ll only make the most of what we have here if we work together.

            I was inspired and emboldened to see a reproductive freedom, equality, and choice float in the parade, and I was relieved that violence did not ensue. The trend lines for birth-givers and for life on Earth are indeed bleak, but we have an opportunity to appeal to each other’s better angels. We have a chance to value the best in each other. We can find some common ground, somewhere. Solutions exist, we just have to envision, enact, and implement them.

            You get more flies with honey than vinegar, as the saying goes.

That is, until all the bees are extinct, the honey is gone, and the flies are dead.

Addressing Our Mutual Dangers

            Hello, dear readers!

            The repeated weekend rains have inspired in me a more cheerful mood than during the Heat Dome of 2021. I’m so thankful for La Niña’s shading clouds, life-giving rain, and cool, comfortable temperatures. Any summer day under 90 degrees is to be cherished and savored.

            Although some of us seek to minimize this fact, so much of our experience as human beings is emotional. I’ve written articles about the chemistry of combustion, energy budgeting, the slow geologic cycling of carbon through the various spheres of the Earth system, of feedback loops and nonlinear relationships. I’ve briefly touched upon the environmental econometrics at play as we chart a path forward for decarbonization. But all of that doesn’t really touch the heart of the issue at hand here, the emotional weight of this crossroads, the grand scale of all that we stand to lose: life itself.

            It is an inescapable fact that we are mortal creatures who will inevitably meet death at an unknown and unknowable time. Tomorrow is never guaranteed, and this simple notion is enough to explain why we place so much value on today, even at the expense of tomorrow. Economists call this “time preference”: humans tend to want to consume goods sooner rather than later, and often would rather consume goods now rather than consume greater goods tomorrow. Economists also call this “discounting” because the future, forever out of reach with the caveat that it may never arrive, is discounted. We almost instinctually care less about the future, place a lower value on it. If you are so inclined, here is a dense, cerebral article discussing the origins of the discounted-utility economic model: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/TimeDiscounting.pdf.

            All of this is to say, there are numerous psychological, social, and cultural reasons we have not taken appropriately swift action to nationally decarbonize our electrical grid, source more of our food locally, reduce vehicle miles traveled, and remediate natural habitats. I understand the reasons why we’ve been dragging our feet, but this does not excuse us. "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." – Maya Angelou.

            This moment in Earth’s history—and I don’t mean to be so dramatic but I’m speaking beyond human history and specifically talking about Earth’s geologic history—is so crucial. Do we knowingly plunge ourselves into Earth’s sixth mass extinction? Or do we pull off the Herculean feat of tearing ourselves away from the event horizon of the black hole that is unmitigated global heating pushing us past 2 degrees Celsius of warming? We humans aren’t gone yet. We’re still here, and we’re still fighting to survive. The window for action is open.

            What we have here on this miraculous spinning sphere, protected from solar winds by our magnetic force fields emanating from our iron core, protected from UV radiation by ozone high in the atmosphere, kept at a suitable, oftentimes pleasant temperature by a Goldilocks blanket of greenhouse gases, is a cosmic cradle carrying the most precious thing of all: life.

I implore anyone reading this who doubted or denied the science to please hear me pleading with my whole heart: it’s never too late to change your mind. It’s never too late to choose to nurture and protect our home planet. If facts won’t convince you, surely love will.

The last sentence of George Washington’s farewell address reads, “I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking in the midst of my fellow-citizens the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward as I trust of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.”

As I write, 226 years later, climate change is our mutual danger. Our forefathers had the best intentions during the Industrial Revolution, seeking to improve the quality of our lives. But now we better understand the costs of our kingly (historically speaking) lifestyles. Let us not tear each other apart, but care for and build each other up. Let us mutually labor against our mutual dangers.

This is our only home.

Econometrics Allow Us to Value What is Truly Priceless

            Greetings, readers! We continue our discussion of valuation in Environmental Economics.

            Economists have developed several methods to value nonmarket goods, like clean air and water. These include “direct use value—the value derived from the direct use and exploitation of the environmental good, the ecological value—defined by the benefits that environmental goods provide to support forms of life and biodiversity, and the option value—related to future use opportunities of the good. Non-use values are composed of the existence value—the value that individuals give to environmental goods for their mere existence—and the bequest value—the value estimated by individuals when considering the use of goods in the future by their heirs” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7178272/).

Taking clean water as the example, we calculate the value of water by totaling all of its many forms of value, including the value of all agricultural, manufacturing, construction, and utilities output as these industries require the direct use of water to function. In 2021, California’s manufacturing sector generated $397.26 billion, its agricultural sector generated $41.96 billion, its construction sector $90.57 billion, and its utilities sector $35.28 billion (https://www.statista.com/statistics/304869/california-real-gdp-by-industry/).

But truly, when we consider that fact that ALL economic output is generated by humans, all of which are water-based life-forms, it becomes clear that water is the most valuable resource on Earth, sustaining life itself primarily and our complex economic system secondarily. The true value of water is astronomical, incalculable. Even recognizing that salty ocean water is not suitable for human consumption, we can still value the habitat, or perhaps value the $253 billion global sea food market (https://www.statista.com/statistics/821023/global-seafood-market-value/). Everything the planet provides for us is valuable and although the dollar is a crude metric, it is one we all understand.

Similarly, we might calculate the benefit of clean air by comparing it to the saved heath care costs associated with reduced instances of asthma, heart disease, premature mortality, and other cardiovascular health complications. A 30-year analysis drafted in 2011 indicates that the benefits of the Clean Air Act (i.e. the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, the Utility Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, the Industrial Boiler Rule, and the Cement Kiln Rule) will result in $612 billion in direct benefits as saved health care costs as well as indirect benefits such as increased worker productivity and environmental benefits like improved visibility and increased agricultural output (https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/saving-lives-and-reducing-health-care-nov2011.pdf).

A brief health-related aside: particulate matter from fossil fuel combustion and wildfires can lodge itself deep into our lungs and arteries, even reaching our bloodstreams (https://www.health.ny.gov/environmental/indoors/air/pmq_a.htm). Heck, apparently, we even have microplastics polluting our veins (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/microplastics-detected-in-human-blood-180979826/). As a reminder, plastic is a petroleum product, another symptom of our addiction to fossil fuels. We consume fossil fuels faster than nature can regenerate them, and we produce plastic waste faster than nature can break it down and recycle it.

When we poison the environment, we poison ourselves. For our immediate health and for our long-term climatic viability, we simply must harness forms of energy that are not dependent upon combustion. Our planet is far too valuable for us to keep spoiling and igniting it.

“Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.” – Carl Sagan.

Anyone at any point can choose to protect and cherish our beautiful blue marble, our speck of dust in space. Our existence is in and of itself a miracle more precious than currency can consider.

Environmental Economics Part 1: The Tragedy of the Commons?

            Welcome back! Summer is sweet in California.

            The flowers are blooming—a fragrant perfume of red bud, poppy, lupine, orchid, paintbrush. The rich aroma of petrichor followed the rain. These priceless scents are precious to me like water. There are infinite fantastic natural wonders freely available to us.

            Environmental Economics is a relatively new branch of study, originating with our growing awareness of depleting natural resources and environmental services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_economics). Basically, it seeks to give an estimated price to goods (like clean air and water) or bads (like pollution and contamination) that do not have a market value as they are not sold. Functioning within a capitalist framework requires that everything be translated to currency, quantified in dollar amounts. This allows decision-makers and stakeholders to weigh costs and benefits, compare options, and plan strategies and contingencies.

            A brief overview of a key economic concept: The Tragedy of the Commons partly explains our current climate catastrophe. Every individual shepherd is free to graze their flock in the grassy commons. No one is excluded. But as every individual’s flock consumes more grass, no grass remains. The individual gain comes at great cost to all others. The same concept holds true for overfishing.

            In climate collapse, the atmosphere is “the commons” because anyone is free to pollute it but we all reap the damage sewn. I am very much in support of the Polluter Pays Principle: the companies polluting must pay the cost of remediation, clean-up, abatement, prevention, etc. Regarding CO2 emissions, fossil fuel companies are largely responsible for selling a damaging product and lying about it, but we do nothing to hold them accountable. In my opinion, all fossil fuel companies should be financing our transition to renewable energy, whether through taxes or fines.

I believe unfettered, unmitigated, unbridled greed is the only reason why U.S. oil companies, knowing full well 40 years ago that climate change was worsening over time (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago/), didn’t just reform themselves as solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal companies, phasing steadily over the last four decades. Fearing future loss of profit, they launched massive misinformation campaigns, well-funded by deep pockets, hiring the same consultants as the tobacco industry. If we burn, ExxonMobil won’t help us. We must demand they shoulder the financial burden of the problems they created and exacerbated with their deception.

This short article had an optimistic take, suggesting we actually aren’t doomed to tragedy: https://ccs.sciences.ncsu.edu/climate-change-and-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/. Essentially, the author notes that in a true commons, one individual’s choice to not graze their flock allows another shepherd to seize the opportunity, and the grass still continues to degrade. But in climate change, reducing one’s CO2 emissions at any level (personally, locally, regionally, nationally) does not incentivize others to emit more. Reductions always accrue universal benefits. If we go renewable, we won’t incentivize China and India to pollute more. They are seeking to improve air quality as we did. Likely the reduction in U.S. emissions combined with our advancements in technology will inspire (or in certain instances, put geopolitical pressure on) other nations to reduce emissions as well. I’ll gently remind leaders that China generates 3 times more renewable energy than we do.

Sometimes, as I enjoy the bright red brick buildings of historic Main Street, I daydream of the Weaverville of tomorrow. I picture an electric streetcar going up and down the main drag, from Trinity Brew Co. to TAPAC, which will have a multi-level parking garage in the space between the theater and the Redding Rancheria Trinity Health Campus. I envision the multi-use path from TAPAC to Lee Fong Park, lots of bicycles riding safely, with only a few individual vehicles on the road traveling from the coast inland or vice versa. We have electrical vehicle chargers already! Let’s keep it up and pray we don’t reach dead pool.

I don’t mean to end so grimly. It’s just my realism.

Instead, I offer deep gratitude to the many wonderful friends and acquaintances I have met and the opportunities they have graciously provided, to those who have written kind words of encouragement in the paper, and as always, to the Trinity Journal for helping me share these ideas and dreams.

Defining Sustainability

            Greetings, readers! Let’s talk about the term “sustainability”. I’ve touched upon it before as the phrase is ubiquitous in the field, but today, we deep-dive!

            The U.N. defines sustainability as, “Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” https://www.un.org/en/academic-impact/sustainability. These needs refer to our ability to feed, water, clothe, and shelter ourselves, all of which are contingent upon the resources and ecosystem services that are provided by our natural habitats.

            Now, what precisely do I mean by “ecosystem services”? Well, think back to the Salmon and Grizzly Glaciers. Those flowing rivers of ice gave us FREE water storage and allowed water to slowly melt throughout the summertime, feeding our creeks and rivers. Now we have no glaciers remaining in the Alps, and will likely not receive enough snow in the future to rebuild them in our lifetimes. Another example is wetlands, whose hydrophytic plants are able to filter and clean our water. Thanks, Nature! We couldn’t live here without you!

            Simply put, we are consuming materials (i.e. clean water and fertile soil) faster than they can be regenerated by nature, and we are polluting and defiling our water, air, and soil with noxious chemicals (fossil fuels, pesticides, cleaners, microfibers, etc.) faster than nature can filter and dilute them. A new phrase has popped up with respect to this overconsumption and pollution: Earth Overshoot Day, which refers to when humanity has exhausted Earth’s budget of resources and services (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-day/). In 2021, Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 29th, meaning that in just 7 months, we consumed all the water, soil, nutrients, and energy Earth was able to generate and then moved into the red, racking up a huge ecological deficit while pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

            It is worth mentioning, yet again, that nearly all of the lifeforms presently living on Earth are adapted to live within a very narrow range of temperatures, humans included. Hyperthermia (overheating, heat exhaustion, heat stroke) is a very real threat today and will become an increasingly common problem in the future. Remember the heat dome in June last year? A billion sea creatures died off the coast of Vancouver (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pacific-northwest-heat-wave-killed-more-than-1-billion-sea-creatures/). In my personal opinion, 106 degrees Fahrenheit is too hot for comfortable human habitation. South Asia has already had temperatures soar past 120 degrees Fahrenheit this year! (https://www.carbonbrief.org/media-reaction-south-asias-2022-heatwave-and-the-role-of-climate-change). It breaks my heart that we are roasting our planet and ourselves. Children and the elderly are especially vulnerable to heat.

            I’ve not written this column for even a year yet, but the backlash has been persistent, dogged, devoid of facts and figures, instead replaced with personal insults, targeted public threats of violence, and attempts to get me fired at my job. Yep, three separate men tried to cancel me this past year! They were unsuccessful, but I was still shaken.

Sometimes I fear for my safety. Writing this column honestly might not be sustainable. Human civilization is tumultuous and chaotic. People have been shot for far less than challenging those who maintain the status quo, who hold power and choose to enable dangerous actions and actors. Verbally striking back at those who threaten and commit violence can get one killed.

I’ve been accused of hating America and nothing could be further from the truth. I believe we have many problems to solve, but generally my days are peaceful. I love America so much that I want us to heal, thrive and flourish forever. I want future generations to have enough clean water, air, and nourishing food to meet their needs. More than anything, I love the First Amendment freedom of speech, knowing that we will destroy ourselves if lies, threats, and abuse remain unchallenged.

If you’re reading this and you’re angrier at ME than at our collective lack of care for all we presently have, I implore you to readjust your moral compass and priorities.

Protect our children and grandchildren, our planet, and our future.

Please.

We should all be on the same team: Team Life on Earth.

Community Gardens and Farmers Markets to the Rescue!

            Happy Spring, readers!

            And Hallelujah for this multi-day rain and snow storm! It won’t be enough to refill the lakes, but it certainly brings sweet relief from the dry dustiness that crept into February and March. I’m hopeful it will delay wildfire season to mid-summer. At the very least, we have beautiful snowy peaks to admire once again.

            I’ve been thinking about food security quite a bit lately. The largescale agricultural system in this country is intensive and productive, but at great ecological cost. Whether through soil erosion and nutrient depletion from over-tilling, lack of crop rotation, altered hydrological cycles and deepening droughts, or plummeting pollinator populations from pesticide use, we are dancing precipitously close to a cliff edge.

We know that planting cover crops, reducing tillage, and utilizing contour cultivation can conserve our soils and prevent them from washing away into watercourses. We also know that glyphosate (an herbicide/pesticide that has been in use in the U.S. since 1974) can be detrimental to human health just as it is damaging to pollinating insects, meaning that we can prevent chemical pollution by moving toward organic farming practices, even if it means a reduced harvest. Lower yields can be offset by eliminating food waste, which is an ongoing effort across cities, counties, and states. Maybe someday we will compost all of our food scraps and utilize the methane generated as yet another energy source.

Many grim forecasts have been made about our food production: 100 harvests left, 60, 30. But I take solace in the fact that these numbers are exaggerated and these outcomes may not come to pass, particularly if we get intervene right here, right now (https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans). We don’t have enough hard, scientific data to determine exactly how long this agricultural house of cards will stay standing, but it’s safe to say that we cannot keep going about business as usual. Not about our carbon emissions, and most certainly not about our food production.

            We can worry (I, personally, am extraordinarily good at worrying) or we can act. There is such a great need for all of us to learn how to grow our own food, or how to get better at it. Many people in Trinity have their own personal gardens, and from the few I’ve visited, they are quite literally fruitful.

It’s an encouraging sight, witnessing food grow from the ground. The community garden movement has taken root in Trinity County, with a longstanding garden in Weaverville and a newly established garden in Hayfork: the Riverview Community Gardens and Orchards near Riverview Road. Yes, Hayfork, the garden that used to grow so much food it exported it to other communities, is back up and growing! Many citizens came out to clear the land of junk, plant trees, construct garden space, and organize folks to maintain it. The Trinity Journal published a picture of the activities just a few weeks ago.

This community garden thing is growing, and I encourage everyone with even an inkling interest in gardening to get involved! We could hold regular gardening lessons and strive to organize a harvest dinner (or several harvest dinners) in autumn. Homegrown produce served up by the many hands needed to tend to our vines and plants. Could anything be tastier or more delicious?

The farmers’ markets are also such gems in this community, and I think we could expand upon the magic of growing our own sustenance and sharing it with each other. Both Hayfork and Weaverville have markets, which can and do feature locally grown produce every week. We have many organizational tools available to us to benefit from local and regional food production, and this gives me tremendous hope.

We have hard times ahead of us, but we will weather the storm better if we weather it together. The planet is a miraculous gift and good blooms in the hearts of all humans, who—like sturdy, healthy roots, shoots, and stalks—thrive when they are well-tended.

Special thanks to Colleen O’Sullivan, editor of the S.A.F.E. newsletter for her extremely helpful contributions on this article.

Be safe and well, dear readers. Until next time.

Saying a Sad Farewell to the Grizzly and Salmon Glaciers of the Trinity Alps

            On Wednesday, March 23, 2022, I attended the Science on Tap event at the Trinity County Brewing Company. There were three forest service biologists, Justin Garwood, Ken Lindke, and Mike Van Hattem, sharing their personal experiences with and self-described “amateur” scientific study of the Grizzly and Salmon Glaciers in the Trinity Alps. These were the last two remaining glaciers in the range, clinging precipitously to the northeast corners of Thompson Peak (Grizzly) and Caesar Cap (Salmon). You can read their published paper here: https://bioone.org/journals/Northwest-Science/volume-94/issue-1/046.094.0104/20th-Century-Retreat-and-Recent-Drought-Accelerated-Extinction-of-Mountain/10.3955/046.094.0104.short or an excerpt here: https://www.michaelkauffmann.net/2020/04/the-last-glacier-in-the-klamath-mountains/.

The day before, when it was eighty degrees Fahrenheit in town, my young neighbor remarked, “It’s hot.” She’s seven, and she’s right: it’s April and we launched into late spring/early summer. This change  isn’t happening in the future, it’s happening now.

            I’m realizing the chronic, lingering feeling in my heart is grief. It’s sad to say goodbye to things, even if they are unliving, like the ice of the now extinct Salmon Glacier and the presumed extinct Grizzly Glacier. There goes our last summer-long melt source. Free water storage, gone. Water provided for at least 72 alpine plant species, transformed to bare, dry rock. Plants have been blossoming earlier this year. I hope the pollinators have been keeping up. It’s such a delicate dance, with precise timing. We live in a beautiful, fragile world.

            The three presenters were very knowledgeable, well-spoken, and honest, directly tying the stark increase in temperatures to anthropogenic activities. Their paper was published in 2020, but the last two winters were an intense addendum to their written conclusions. It was a factual, and unfortunately brutally bleak look at the trends in increasing temperature and decreasing precipitation for our mountains.

I hold out hope we might get respite storms or slightly more precipitous years to reprieve us for a season. We are still close to the ocean, after all. But the entire ecosystem around us will change dramatically in response to the new conditions. We will not see glaciers in the Alps again for a very long time, thousands—perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands—of years from now. That requires us to say goodbye to what was and prepare for what will be, which is a very daunting task.

            The presentation did a great job of driving home the local effects of this global change. The Glenzer and Conger ice shelves in Antarctica collapsed on March 21st (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/149640/ice-shelf-collapse-in-east-antarctica). If you remember from my Milkankovitch Cycle article, we should be moving toward glaciation, with the poles receiving less direct sunlight, allowing continental ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice to grow. Now we’ve set in motion a largescale meltdown, with feedback loops hastening and amplifying heating.

If Antarctica melts entirely, sea level will rise by five meters (15 feet) (https://scitechdaily.com/melting-of-the-antarctic-ice-sheet-could-cause-5-meter-rise-in-sea-levels-by-the-end-of-the-millennium/). We can deny the problem, or we can start to plan. Coastal relocations, desalinization plants, widespread rain catchment, sustainable, hazard-proof homes, buildings, roads, and infrastructure. If we deny the problem and make no plans, we make yet more problems and open ourselves up to desperation, hostility, and chaos. In many ways, we have already done this. If we look ahead to the anticipated changes, we can problem-solve and work our way through to solutions that minimize harm to humans and prevent or remedy damage to the environment. We still have time to do all of this.

At the end of the glacier presentation, I approached all three men and said, with tears in my eyes and on my cheeks, “Thank you. Folks here need to hear it from you. What you say is important. Thank you.” I would have said more, but was embarrassed to be crying in public. All the same, grief is heavy and painful, and it’s always okay to cry.

Trinity County is so scenically gorgeous and full of interesting, strong people with big personalities. I have been very fortunate to meet many great humans, expanding my community ties. We will all make it further if we work together. All hands on deck! The more people we have working to solve problems, the better our quality of life will be, for everyone.

There is No Shortage of Solutions to the Problems We All Face

            When contemplating climate change, it helps to remember that we have a vast suite of technologies, adaptable land management techniques (reforestation, soil conservation, fuels reduction), and sustainable alternatives (bamboo, hemp, biofuels) for many plastic or petroleum consumer products available to us. We have the money to revamp our infrastructure and prepare for the future, we simply have to shift resources away from fossil fuel companies and invest them in sustainable and renewable solutions.

Fire preparedness is the most immediate, time-sensitive solution we can all implement, right this very moment, by clearing defensible space around our homes, using rain catchment systems for emergency fire suppression, thinning fuels through selective timber harvests and prescribed burns, and replanting burn scars to stabilize soils and promote forest regeneration. We must also protect old growth forest to maintain and preserve ecologically critical carbon sinks and sensitive wildlife habitat. All of these strategies must be executed simultaneously. They are not mutually exclusive. There are numerous resources available through the Hayfork Watershed Research and Training Center: https://www.thewatershedcenter.com as well as the Trinity County Fire Safe Council: www.firesafetrinity.org and the Trinity RCD: www.tcrcd.net.

Transportation accounts for 29% of our national carbon emissions (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions). Did you know that every gallon of gasoline puts twenty pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? That’s breathable, free oxygen being bound up in CO2. Personal solutions include carpooling, ride sharing, riding the Trinity Shuttle, walking, or biking. Commuting with a car that gets 45 mpg is monumentally preferable to a vehicle that gets 15 mpg. Societal solutions include building high-speed electric rail to reduce air traffic, and increasing shuttle and bus services. No one person can reduce their footprint 100% because we haven’t yet built a decarbonized world. Perfection for each individual is not the goal. Small changes in our choices magnified over hundreds of millions of people adds up to a big difference nationally and globally!

All of the United States is catered to the private automobile: our laws, pop culture, infrastructure, roads, the arrangement of our commercial centers and neighborhoods. People are only truly “free” and mobile if they have an expensive personal vehicle, one that is extremely costly to repair and maintain, all while shoveling hard-earned income into the greedy, hungry, profit-devouring mouths of oil companies. Chevron, Shell, Exxon, and BP make tens of billions of dollars of profit, on average, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of publicly-funded tax subsidies each year. Our fossil fuel dependency puts our fate into the hands of authoritarian dictators and corrupt oligarchs. Transportation will never be completely carbon-free, but we can reduce overall vehicle miles traveled. Electricity generation currently accounts for 25% of U.S. emissions (ibid.), but if we chose to harness electrical energy from the sun, earth, wind, waves, and water, we would further avoid stuffing the pockets of dangerous geopolitical actors.

Agriculture accounts for 10% of U.S. carbon emissions (ibid.). At-home solutions include: growing personal and community food gardens, composting food waste to amend and bolster soil, and buying local meat and produce. Eating locally and lower on the food chain are the two best choices you can make to reduce your carbon footprint. On a national scale, we could incentivize American farmers to rotate their crops, reduce tillage, remediate soil, plant cover crops, use integrated pest management practices, disuse chemical pesticides, and avoid growing disease- and drought-susceptible monocrops. Complex environments supporting complicated food webs are more resilient than sterile landscapes with few species present. Protecting biodiversity serves the well-being of all lifeforms.

This is a heavy topic, with planet-sized stakes. But we have a myriad of solutions available. We have many alternative choices we can make, new infrastructure we can build, new modes of transportation and consumption we can adopt. The answers are right in front of us. We must examine the problem in its entirety and then peer beyond the problem through to the other side, to a brighter, healthier future, with clean air and water, robust soils, thriving resilient forests, and public transportation that can take us anywhere, regardless of our vehicle ownership status.

Let’s work! Let’s build. Let’s act while we still have the time and resources to do so.

It is NOT China’s NOR India’s Responsibility to Cut Emissions!

            Welcome back for another climate myth debunking!

            One of the most vicious ‘retorts’ I hear from climate change deniers is, “China and India are at fault—they should cut first!” So, let’s analyze this bad-faith, factually incorrect argument.

            First, a historical perspective. The U.S. has been emitting CO2 since roughly 1800. Coal was the culprit, then oil and natural gas. More than two hundred years’ worth of emissions. Over that time, the U.S. emitted 404.77 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, resulting directly from the growth and expansion of the U.S. economy (https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577). In contrast, China only began emitting CO2 in earnest in the 1980s, resulting in a cumulative 210.20 billion tonnes of carbon (Ibid.). For India, the timeframe is the last fifty or so years, and the emissions are significantly less than China’s.

            Mind you, in 2016, China’s population was 1.414 billion, India’s population was 1.324 billion, and the U.S. population was 323 million. That means per capita (per person) emissions were 7.38 tons per person in China, India’s was a paltry 1.91 tons/person, and the U.S. was a whopping 15.52 tons/person (https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-per-capita/). The average American drives more, eats more red meat, and buys more consumer goods than the average Chinese or Indian person. These are choices we can alter.

            Second, an economic, social, and cultural justice perspective. China and India are just as deserving of economic development as we are. It is morally wrong and shameful to suggest they deserve to suffer harsh living conditions because we refuse to cut emissions. China and India have every right to build public transportation infrastructure, as well as plumbing, electrical, sewer, and wastewater infrastructure. This necessitates carbon emissions, just as the U.S emitted for centuries. And more than that, China produced 895 gigawatts of electricity from renewables in 2020, India 134 gigawatts, and the U.S. only produced a modest 292 gigawatts (https://www.statista.com/statistics/267233/renewable-energy-capacity-worldwide-by-country/).

It is hypocritical and embarrassingly immature to point fingers at those who are much worse off, force them to cut emissions, and limit their economic prospects and upward mobility. Especially when China and India are decarbonizing faster than us!

            Now, there are things I dislike about China. I found the One Child Only policy to be brutally dystopian, the air pollution from coal plants is extremely unhealthy and bad for the population, the lack of free and fair elections angers and horrifies me, and the governmental censorship is a nightmare. 

But this is a climate corner. So, we’re just talking about carbon emissions. And economics.

            One more point to make: We cannot change China. We cannot vote there; we cannot influence events there. We can only change ourselves. We can only build a better America. That is our new calling. We must amplify indigenous voices, elect them to higher positions of power, and we must cut our emissions and our consumption—fast.

            The United States already has public infrastructure built. Unfortunately, we’re also letting it crumble before us. Bridges are collapsing in Pennsylvania. Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have access to safe drinking water. Everyone in Trinity County knows how rough our roads are. We have stopped investing in our public, common goods and interests. This serves no one and hurts everyone.

            I am so deeply tired, and I am still not yet thirty. We all used to agree that actions have consequences. Now, not even that universal truth resonates with everyone anymore.

I wonder what I could do with my energy, with my life, if I didn’t have to battle liars who can’t accept the physical and chemical consequences of our actions. I wonder what I could do with more hope.

Look yourself in the mirror. Can you honestly say you’re doing anything to help future generations survive the rapid shift to a blisteringly hot future? I still don’t have children . . .

We capitalist, over-consumptive humans are the harbingers of Hell on Earth. We are awake, self-conscious, knowingly roasting our one and only planet. Even if we pray for rain, I don’t think God would show mercy to an abusive species killing His good, green Earth.

Reimagine our future. It’s time to repair and build. Time to do better. No excuses.

Change starts here.

The Sun’s the Limit!

Welcome back!

Today we’ll scratch the surface of energy econometrics as it applies to solar energy production. When discussing the energy transition from fossil fuels to carbon-free renewables, we must analyze the theoretical potential, as well as technical and economic feasibility of developing and “scaling up” these technologies to make them suitable for the world’s largest, energy-consuming economies.

I highly recommend reading this comprehensive module on the renewable energy transition from Boston University: https://www.bu.edu/eci/files/2019/06/RenewableEnergyEcon.pdf.

            Theoretical potential refers to how much energy is available hypothetically. For example, the sun generates a whopping 3.9x10^26 watts of power, which dwarfs the world’s 16x10^12 watts (aka 16 terawatts) of power consumption (https://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/the-sun). Put another way, those watts, if converted to mass, equate to 4,000,000 tons of energy every second, and the world currently only captures and converts 44 pounds of sun energy into usable energy per day (https://www.gocamsolar.com/blog/how-much-energy-does-sun-generate). Theoretically, the sun provides the world with enough energy for a year every single day.

Unfortunately, only a small amount of this energy can actually be captured and converted. Up to 50% of the sun’s energy is scattered by dust and clouds in the atmosphere, and doesn’t reach Earth’s surface. Accounting for absorption and scattering, 1.08x10^8 GW (1.08x10^17 watts) of power reach Earth’s surface, which is still 7,000-8,000 times the amount of annual global energy consumption (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/solar-energy).

Solar potential is further hindered due to variable weather conditions, the limited number of solar panels we can actually build, and the limited ways in which we can store solar energy (batteries, ponds) for use at night. The southwestern United States, northern Africa, and the Middle East are especially good locations for solar plants because they are arid and cloud-free for most of the year, but this limited geographic extent isn’t large enough to power the planet. We are also materially limited and don’t have enough rare earth elements, minerals, and metals to build enough panels to rely 100% on solar power. The technical feasibility is therefore greatly reduced by our geography and material needs.

Now, we luckily don't have to reach 100% of our solar potential. We can have a mixed-source electrical grid using wind, tidal, and geothermal energy. We can also maximize our hydropower by adding generators at existing dams without building new dams. There also remains the solution of recycling our electronic waste and recovering more minerals and metals from our thrown-out phones, computers, and machines. Recycling our e-waste would help make our economy more of a closed-loop system, where we no longer need to mine fresh materials for solar panels, but can strip them from pre-existing consumer goods. This would reduce pollution and leaching from e-waste as well as reduce energy consumption.

Then there’s the economic feasibility of solar power. Frankly, we have more than enough money to make renewable energy cheaper and more profitable. Gas is literally publicly funded. Global fossil fuel subsidies were $4.7 trillion in 2015 and $5.3 trillion in 2017 (https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies). I cannot overemphasize how MASSIVE a trillion is. “A stack of one billion dollar bills would be 67.9 miles high. A trillion dollar bills would reach 67,866 miles into space,” (https://exhibitcitynews.com/how-big-is-one-trillion-dollars/). If we took some of those trillions of dollars away from fossil fuel companies and gave them to renewable companies, we could easily make renewables the cheaper, more attractive consumer option.

As a closing thought, a long-time commenter mentioned that solar panels are currently being manufactured in the Uyghur Muslim concentration camps in the Xinjiang province of China. I do not condone these human rights violations and have, for the entirety of my professional life, insisted that America responsibly source our energy technologies and consumer goods while recycling our waste. Manufacturing our own panels would bring many jobs back to our shores. If you’d like to read about how America, the country that first developed solar technology, lost the solar advantage and allowed development and manufacturing to move overseas, I recommend reading this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/why-the-us-doesnt-really-make-solar-panels-anymore-industrial-policy/619213/.

We have the technology to rebuild our grid.

We have the money.

Now, we need action. We need vision and bravery.

Energy: A Crash Course. Generation and Consumption.

Welcome back, readers! It’s time for a crash course in energy.

For review: 1 kilowatt (kW) = 1,000 watts. 1 megawatt = 1,000,000 (1 million) watts. 1 gigawatt = 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) watts.

Energy is the ability to do work. Humans can perform work, and we do so by metabolizing food for kinetic energy. But we are quite limited in our output, producing only 100 watts at rest, 300-400 watts over sustained periods of time, and up to 2 kW in short bursts, like sprinting (http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph240/labonta1/). For most of our existence on this planet, we were hunter gatherers, chasing game and foraging. When we adopted an agrarian lifestyle roughly 10,000 years ago, we domesticated animals to assist us in performing labor for the purposes of planting and harvesting crops. Draught animals like horses and oxen can sustain 600-1,000 watts of power on average, also with bursts up to 2 kW (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/draught-animal). An improvement upon the limits of human labor, to be sure, but a small improvement.

Then we invented windmills about 3,700 years ago, mostly for crushing and milling grain and pumping water (www.historyofwindmills.com). Capturing wind is ancient technology. Humans have literally sailed the world for millennia, and traditional windmills generated about 14kW of usable power, which allowed for more food production and spurred population growth (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-does-the-power-output-of-a-traditional-windmill-compare-to-a-modern-wind-turbine/amp/).

The invention of the (coal-powered) steam engine marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and completely altered the way humans lived and worked. Steam had been used for various purposes in previous centuries, but became a commercially successful technology capable of performing mechanical work in 1712 due to developments made by Thomas Newcomen, and later, improvements made by James Watt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine). Suddenly we had engines cranking out up to 1800 kW of power! Steamships appeared, then steam locomotives crisscrossed industrialized nations, and steam-powered machinery became commonplace in factories. Our consumption of coal fueled our growth, and our growth fueled our consumption.

Most electricity in the U.S. (and the world) is produced by turbine generators which use a fluid (air, steam, water, combustion gases) to move a series of blades mounted on a motor shaft (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/how-electricity-is-generated.php). The generator then converts the kinetic energy of the moving blades into electrical energy. Power plants burn coal or natural gas to generate steam to turn the turbine. Nuclear power plants generate heat and steam through the process of fission (atoms splitting apart), which then turns the turbine. Hydroelectric dams turn the turbine with the power of flowing water. Modern day wind turbines use the energy from air currents. It’s the same design recycled again and again, powered by different fluids and fuels.

Now let’s talk numbers. There are multiple units for energy (watts, joules) but we tend to standardize to “watt-hours”. A kilowatt hour (kWh) is 1 hour of electricity usage at a rate of 1 kW, but this can be scaled up to be megawatt hours or gigawatt hours (https://ourworldindata.org/scale-for-electricity).

A standard coal power plant is about 500 mW in size and can crank out 3.5 billion kWh per year, which is utterly massive in scale and demonstrates just how dependent we are upon fossil fuels for our electricity (https://www.mcginley.co.uk/news/how-much-of-each-energy-source-does-it-take-to-power-your-home/bp254/). In 2020, about 4,007 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or about 4.01 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3) and more than half of this total resulted from the combustion of fossil fuels. When one examines the staggering amount of energy we consume, it should be no surprise that atmospheric CO2 has risen, and will continue to rise, exponentially unless we choose to decarbonize our electrical grid.

I won’t bore you with more mind-boggling numbers, but I will leave you with this parting thought: we CANNOT continue to exploit, pollute, pillage and plunder this planet. We will perish if we do. And I don’t mean individuals will perish. I mean the human species and upwards of 90% of life on Earth will go extinct.

We always have a choice. We live in the most technologically advanced age of our existence. We must reduce consumption and we must harvest our energy from renewable sources. We can always choose to be part of the solution.

Welcome to Callie’s Climate Corner! The Civilian Climate Corps May Offer Us Hope for the Future.

Happy New Year, dear readers! And welcome to Callie's Climate Corner!

I just love alliteration. But my favorite "CCC" will forever be the Civilian Conservation Corps for constructing beautiful, time-tested infrastructure across the nation. During its nine-year existence (1933-1941), the CCC employed about 3 million young men. They built roads, bridges, campgrounds, dams, and strung thousands of miles of telephone lines. We still use the infrastructure they built to this very day! These men also fought wildfires, reseeded grazelands to stabilize topsoil, constructed trails and shelters, and planted upwards of three billion trees (https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/civilian-conservation-corps). A quick reminder: trees are a major carbon sink, drawing CO2 down from the atmosphere and storing it in their biomass. Forests are dubbed the “lungs of the world” and we can’t have a healthy planet without healthy forests.

Looking to the past provides us with potential answers to the most pressing issues we collectively face today. FDR’s CCC existed during two separate crises: the Great Depression and World War II. Today we face the dual challenge of COVID and climate change. It’s an ideal time to establish a modern-day Civilian Climate Corps and put our young people to work. The Climate Corps would be managed by the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and its project initiatives would resemble those of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Corps Network. Climate Corps members would continue building and maintaining trails and structures, as well as combat invasive species, remediate wetlands, replant trees (where appropriate), and reduce the fuel loads in overgrown forests prone to wildfire.

Now, ideally, this conservation work would be completed in tandem with a complete overhaul of our expired, failing, fossil fuel- and nuclear-powered electrical grid. And rebuilding our grid would require the work of millions of contractors and manufacturers. Although we will always need to consume some fossil fuels for our transportation and manufacturing sectors, it is quite possible for America to invest in a nationwide electrical grid powered by wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal power.

It’s safe to say that we as a nation have maxed out our hydroelectrical potential , considering we’ve built an estimated 84,000 dams, impounding approximately 17% of the nation’s rivers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_the_United_States). There are many good reasons to remove some of these dams: many are in disrepair and pose safety hazards, while others have choked out fish populations. But realistically, hydro power will need to remain a sizable piece of the puzzle if we are to succeed in our decarbonization efforts. We must maintain and repair the roughly 2,400 dams that produce hydroelectricity, and the fate of other dams will need to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Now, to this day our potential renewable energy sources remain largely untapped. Wind and solar power have grown cheaper over time, and there is plenty more energy to be harvested from the sun, wind, and the very earth itself than we are currently using. The American southwest is an ideal location for solar fields. The Midwest is well suited for wind farms. Geothermal energy exists everywhere. All that would remain is building a large enough distribution system to transport electricity generated in remote areas of the country to the more populous areas. And more than anything, we must encourage and fund the building of renewably-powered localized micro grids that are more resilient, reliable, and less prone to catastrophic failure than our current system.

I believe it is infeasible to completely disuse fossil fuels, but I also believe it is crucial and well within our technological capacity to increase renewable energy use while simultaneously developing carbon sequestration technology (capturing atmospheric CO2 and burying it deep underground in geologic reserves). Executing such great feats would be a veritable job boom for all workers who build things, and establishing a Civilian Climate Corps would carry on the legacy laid down by the original CCC, a legacy that established, defended, and nurtured our public lands. The United States rebuilt itself after the Great Depression. It is my most fervent hope that we rebuild our great nation once more. Our future is always worth the investment.

Fact: CO2 is Rising Exponentially. And, New Beginnings for the Climate Corner.

            Welcome back, readers!

            Atmospheric CO2 has increased exponentially. This is a provable fact.

            The reason for this exponential growth is multi-faceted. First and foremost, we are emitting more CO2 today than we were one hundred twenty years ago. In 1900 global emissions were only 5 x 10^8 (five hundred million) metric tons. In 2015, global emissions were 1 x 10^10 (ten billion) metric tons (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data). The global output of CO2 has increased by two orders of magnitude, a 100-fold increase! This is exponential growth. If you need a refresher on scientific notation and orders of magnitude, watch this helpful study video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXTuYjPDjqQ.

As our economies have grown, so has our global consumption of fossil fuels. Humans cannot produce goods and services without energy, and we have chosen to use energy that takes tens of MILLIONS of YEARS to form through geologic processes, but only a matter of DAYS for us to extract it from the ground and burn it.

Second, I mentioned the importance of lag times and feedback loops in my Systems Thinking article. Carbon dioxide stays present in the atmosphere for a whopping 100 years! As far as the atmosphere is concerned, it’s only 1921 and we are feeling the residual warming from CO2 emmitted by our ancestors with the advent of the Model T. This also means that our great grand babies will be feeling the effects of warming caused by OUR emissions today all the way in 2121! If you build upon something in an increasing fashion, the rate of change accelerates. This lag time in CO2breakdown has allowed it to accumulate to extraordinary levels, levels this planet has not seen for the last 3 million years. And again, to reiterate, bipedal hominids (our evolutionary ancestors) have only existed for 2 million years.

            Regarding feedback loops, we’ve already begun tipping key Earth systems into new equilibriums. For example, permafrost in the arctic tundra is melting at an increasing rate which releases methane, a GHG 30 times more powerful than CO2. This accelerates warming even more! Mass coral bleaching events are another example of a system reaching its breaking point. Corals are habitat for many species, and according to the geologic record, the oceans die first in extinction events.

Compare the Vostok ice core graph of atmospheric CO2 (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Graph-from-the-Vostok-Ice-Core-for-the-past-800-000-Years_fig5_339130657) to the graph of human population throughout history(https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/population-environment). There is a sharp increase in one variable over very little time. If we continue on “business as usual” meaning “growing and emitting at the same increasing rate” we will warm six degrees Celsius. This will sterilize ninety percent of life on Earth. We cannot in good conscience keep emitting as we have been. This is why climate scientists urge us to cut emissions so that we warm fewer than two degrees Celsius: our species (and others) will have a better chance of surviving. We are pressed for time because there is already warming “baked into” the atmosphere from our past and current emissions. This is why I stick my neck out and write. Catastrophic climate change is an issue much bigger than my personal safety or the hurt feelings of letter writers who viciously and repeatedly lie about this topic. Carbon dioxide has increased exponentially and this is not up for debate. One can either accept the reality of atmospheric chemistry and its consequences, or one cannot.

Alas, dear readers, this is the final edition of Megan's Climate Corner. Thank you to the Trinity Journal for the opportunity to share information about Earth with all of Trinity County. They took a gamble on me and gave my first column a home. I am very grateful. Thank you, Mr. Wagner, and thank you to the entire Trinity Journal team.

The next edition will appear the second Wednesday of January 2022 with a new name and email address for the New Year (for copyright purposes), but the same complex, quality climate content presented in an approachable manner. We will continue to explore environmental topics in depth while marveling at the majesty of our unique, one-in-a-million home planet and its place in the universe. See you next year!