Clean Energy Springfield

Again, not a direct energy issue, but a couple of nice appreciations of the biggies in the plant and animal worlds. First, the ten most magnificent trees in the world, with an honorable mention of an old favorite of mine, the Tree That Owns Itself, an Athens, GA, landmark. (My dad is a Bulldog.) Second, an overview of the role that whales play in the oceans, along with what lowered whale populations entails.

This is going to be a somewhat rambling post about the nature of environmental concern and how it relates to economic growth. (See Lee's ponderings here for a recent example.) A lot of the debate over environmentalism is: to what extent does improving our environment hurt our economy. I don't think that has to be the question, though. I think the question can be something more like: can we move to an economy that is a healthy part of the environment and that meets everyone's needs, broadly construed (so: material needs--do you have enough to eat? clothing? leisure time and materials?--but also our needs for useful work and meaningful relationships).

I'm going to start, though, with something that just plain tickles me. The Journal of Industrial Ecology (here is a rough and not-great explanation of what industrial ecology is) recently gave free access to a proof of an upcoming article, The Changing Metabolism of Cities, about how our cities have changed their use of materials, energy, and water over time. It's an interesting article and not too technical, though it's also not intended for a lay audience. However, I'm going to skip all of that, and just post a funny picture:

That's the urban metabolism of Brussels, Belgium, in the 1970s. If you look closely, you can see that it has flows (arrows) for solar energy, for precipitation and evaporation, for materials coming into the city, and solid waste going out. (I'm a goof for this stuff; here's a slightly more legible flow chart, showing how all energy in the US (in 2002) began and ended.)

The serious point lurking here is that these kinds of flow tools are stolen wholesale from the science of ecology (heck, industrial ecology even stole the word). And that gives a useful way in to understanding the relationship between our environment and our economy.

People often say that nature is incredibly efficient. And it is. But it's useful to understand that it's Nature As a Whole that's efficient; any one part of it is likely to be incredibly inefficient--for example, the tree in my front yard produces thousands of seeds every year; even if it weren't surrounded by the road, sidewalk and my pristine, glistening lawn, this is an amazing amount of effort with very little possibility of return. But it's because nature has so many layers of uptake--that is, that any waste becomes food for someone else--that the system overall becomes efficient. If it weren't for decomposition--which is a living process, composed of innumerable kinds of decomposers--my tree would soon be up to its elbows in seeds.

And this is where I think we go wrong in talking about the environment. We want to lessen our impact. Some of the highest praise we have for a sustainable home, for instance, is that it's zero energy or zero impact. But my tree doesn't have zero impact: it has a beneficial impact. It's part of a healthy system. We should make our economy like that. What prevents us from doing so is that we harvest too fast and our waste products are toxic, or they evolve too quickly.

Biomimicry is one route into the change that we need. Another is the focusing on lessening negative impacts (which, yes, I just got finished criticizing). We don't know all the tools for this yet, but I think it's something we can grow into.

SOME OTHER STUFF: Lee follows up his post about growth and environmental quality with this one, about those two, plus happiness, plus the role of local economies. I agree with him that re-localizing is important. And I think that re-asserting traditional sources of identity, religious and community, is important, because these bring a sense of how to find happiness that we've been missing for awhile, as we've been left looking to just our material possessions. However, if you're not quite ready to make the culture shift yet, Matthew Yglesias has good news for you: When you hear people talk about how much fighting global warming is going to lessen how fast our economy grows, bear in mind that doesn't mean that we'll have less stuff, it means that we'll get more stuff slower in the future.

Salmon return to the Thames. Who knew?

Justakim at Ecocene points to an interesting story from National Geographic, about an Australian species of tree, the Wollemi Pine, once thought to be extinct, but found in a remote location in 1994. National Geographic is selling cuttings of the few trees that exist as a way to spread the gene pool around. Justakim frames it as a property rights success (and it is, don't get me wrong).

But I also think it's an example of a more a general meshing of natural and social worlds (the latter being a subset of the former). Often, we look at these worlds as in conflict--Nature's Metropolis, for example, is a book about the intertwined development of Chicago and it's hinterland, the plains region, and how a variety of transportation technologies and market innovations remade the American West, and one thing that comes through quite clearly is the differences in how money works and how nature works. (Think of the difference in day-night cycles in all sorts of living creatures, versus shift work that's needed to get the maximum amount of productivity out of your machinery (where "you" = "General Motors").)

One of the major problems of climate change is how species will cope. In past climate changes, which have been slower, species are often able to migrate together. The speed of "our" change is casting many species' ability to do so this time into doubt. And that's exacerbated by human settlement patterns (sprawl and agricultural) that cleaves natural habitats into isolated patches, with no routes to more habitable climes.

National Geographic, then, is one way to overcome that kind of patchiness: by creating paths through human institutions. Something worth exploring, and keeping an eye on.

I can be magnanimous--really. So I don't begrudge the coal industry this nifty little story: a 15 square mile section of prehistoric rainforest has been found fossilized in a Illinois coal mine.

One of the points that we try to make over and over is that there's nothing we'd recommend to fight global warming that doesn't have other benefits. Here's a nice, and near-ish, example: the Wetlands Initiative, along with other environmental groups, is doing a wetlands restoration project in Hennepin, IL, with the goal of showing that converting farmland back to wetlands can be an effective tool for improving water quality, improving wildlife habitat, providing recreational opportunities, and trapping carbon dioxide.

I think that we're about to enter a revolution in how we understand the potential of ecosystems to provide valuable services. On a large scale, wetlands like this are going to cease to be an impediment to development, and instead will be seen as a crucial component--a cost-effective way of responsible growth. And, as in the past, the cost-effective route will lead to a cultural shift in how we perceive the relationship between people and our environment. Of course, to do this, we need good rules, that require heightened environmental performance.