Do you have a flag?

I saw this in IFLScience: Planet Earth Now Has A Flag | IFLScience. Boy am I relieved.

Yes, this is a beautiful flag, and my little utopian heart dreams that things like this can help unite us in love for planet Earth, etc.

The cynical bastard side of me, though, is also quite pleased. See, once we use up this planet, we’re gonna need a new one. This means we must make some serious investments in space research.

For instance, we’ll need to keep advancing our ability to detect new, potentially habitable planets. We’ll need new propulsion techniques — or, better, as-yet-unrealized advances in physics that enable us to get there quickish while still remaining alive. We’ll need better ways to recycle air and everything else aboard a spacecraft and withstand all the weird effects of space on the human body. And of course we’ll have to find somewhere we won’t be instantly broiled or frozen sandblasted to death.

But luckily for us, the most crucial part of the enterprise has already been taken care of. We don’t want to work our way into space over maybe hundreds of years, put up with burning and freezing and weird gravity and mind-bending physics and the intensity of the void and all that, and finally come to Earth Phase II and stride out onto its surface and look around us with hope and pride only to be greeted by some other species that already lives there just looking at us skeptically with its 85,000 calcium carbonate eyes and being like, “Yeah, bro, but do you have a flag?”

We have a flag.

“We stole [planets], through the strategic use of flags.”
Image credit: Oskar Pernefeldt, via IFLScience

Commence with the space-conquering.

Watch your ass(umptions)

How many differences can you spot? (Answer: I can’t remember the picture on the left, so I’m’a say none?)

Studies such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have given us a rough picture of how much human activity impacts the rest of the biosphere. Answer: approximately as much as a live-in gang on PCP would impact your house. Many industrial groups and others trying to reduce their environmental impact have done studies on a finer scale. Known as life cycle assessments, these studies try to determine, say, exactly how much water is needed to produce one Australian pig, or how much pesticide is used to produce a kilogram of cacao beans. This is a serious step toward making improvements, marginal though they often are in the grand scheme of things.

Now it turns out that even companies trying to measure their environmental impact (at least in terms of land use–forests lost, carbon not sequestered, water not recharging the aquifers) are probably underestimating, according to a study in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. This is because, when people conduct life cycle assessments, they often consider the land from the perspective of its current use. If you’re going to knock down a forest to build a new factory, that impact is counted. However, if you have already built a factory, an LCA (at least, an attributional LCA, the form commonly used for quantifying the impacts of current practices) doesn’t normally consider the fact that your factory could still *be* a forest, or could return to being a forest if given the chance. This is akin to having a home inspector come in while your house is occupied by the PCP-gang and make note of the conditions, then go away. If he returns and finds the gang still there, his response is to nod amiably, since there has been no change. He never saw the hydrangea bushes *before* they were on fire. Maybe he even thinks things are better now, since someone put a tarp over the hole in the roof.

The paper, by Sampo Soimakallio of the Finnish Environmental Institute and several colleagues, argues that an LCA should use a baseline that takes into account natural succession. The impact of your cacao farm on the surrounding ecosystem should be considered on the basis of what would happen if the cacao farm stopped operating. Instead of what is there, you try to take into account what could be there. Obviously a cacao farm isn’t going to turn back into a rainforest overnight, but nature could do something with your farm if you weren’t farming it. Land permanently occupied, then, is land that cannot be (re)occupied by natural ecosystems, and an LCA that fails to recognize this is underestimating our ongoing impact on the land.

OMG, GMOs! What the labeling controversy is actually about

Voters in Oregon will decide on Tuesday whether their state will require labeling of products that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs), when they vote on the Oregon Mandatory Labeling of GMOs Initiative, aka Measure 92. As usual with initiatives on controversial topics, there’s been a ton of hype about this, and both sides have spent so much money (especially on advertising) that this has become the most expensive ballot measure in the state’s history. Unsurprisingly, given the potential repercussions, the top five contributors both to the Yes on 92 and to the NO on 92 coalition are ALL based outside the state of Oregon. According to Ballotpedia, the top five contributors to the pro-labeling group are Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, Mercola.com Health Resources LLC, the Organic Consumer’s Fund, and Tom Hormel (grandson of the meat-packing tycoon, whose namesake company has taken the exact opposite position on Measure 92), and the group has spent about $9 million all together. The NO coalition has spent more than twice as much ($20 million+ last time I checked); in fact, they’ve spent (by themselves) far more than was spent in total on the previous record-holding ballot measure in 2007. Again unsurprisingly, the biggest contributors to the don’t-label-GMOs campaign are DuPont Pioneer, Monsanto, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Kraft. I get why, yet I still find it kind of hilarious that they’re putting so much money in there, since the resulting coverage is similar to pasting a big sign on all your merchandise saying “WE USE GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS.” Of course, once the public knows how much of their food is genetically modified, they might well get used to the idea, so this could be a good move in the end.

I’ve refrained from watching any of the ads either of these groups are putting out, because I don’t enjoy feeling nauseous. I really should do that if I want to write an informed blog post, but I know that if I do, I’ll be too dispirited to write anything. So I’m just going to assume, given the summary blurbs on Ballotpedia and the considerable spam in my inbox, that the positions of the two groups are something like this:

Pro-labeling viewpoint

• People have a Right to Know whether they’re eating “Frankenfood”.
• GMO food could damage your health.
• GM organisms are TAKING OVER THE WORLD.
• GMO organisms are damaging/competing with existing species and organic farms.
• GMO labeling is good for the economy/nature/jobs.
• Anti-labeling groups are spreading misinformation and lies to promote their own profits and political agendas.

Anti-labeling viewpoint

• “Frankenfood” is perfectly safe and normal and well-tested and harmless and therefore it doesn’t matter if you know whether you’re eating it or not, sheesh!
• GMO food will NOT damage your health.
• GM organisms are NOT taking over the world.
• Shut up.
• GMO labeling is bad for the economy/jobs and GMO organisms don’t harm the environment. GM crops are helping us feed the world.
• Pro-labeling groups are spreading misinformation and lies to promote their own profits and political agendas.

Thoughtful and valid points (LOL), but as far as I can tell, most of these arguments, on both sides, are — to a greater or lesser extent — bullshit. That’s not to say none of it is accurate, but it’s mostly just playing Street Fighter with strawmen, i.e., politics as usual.

The pro-labeling movement has been portrayed by many outlets — typified by this article in The Atlantic — as one of those green vegan hippie self-righteous ideas that is kind of quaint and deluded and anti-science and has gotten out of control. This is because, in part, it is. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science stated in its recent policy brief on the topic:

These [GMO labeling] efforts are not driven by evidence that GM foods are actually dangerous. Indeed, the science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe. Rather, these initiatives are driven by a variety of factors, ranging from the persistent perception that such foods are somehow “unnatural” and potentially dangerous to the desire to gain competitive advantage by legislating attachment of a label meant to alarm. Another misconception used as a rationale for labeling is that GM crops are untested.

Now, the AAAS cannot afford NOT to oppose GMO labeling, lest it give traction to “anti-science”-type people. Of course, they also don’t admit that there might be anything wrong with genetically modified crops, because they have to be in favor of “science.” Insofar as it goes, their argument is correct. Most of the messages used by pro-labeling groups are based on populist hype. Some of them have a grain of semi-truth, but most of are based either on misinformation or on the fact that we don’t have information, so the accusations of fearmongering are totally accurate. I disagree with the AAAS’s idea that we can “know” something is safe, since not proving that something is bad for you isn’t the same as proving that something is not bad for you — but there’s nothing unusual about this approach to consumer products. If your argument is that we shouldn’t do anything until we’re 1,000 percent positive nothing bad will happen, good luck getting anything done. Like, ever. We can’t “know” things are safe, beyond a reasonable doubt, and we have to deal with that to an extent. We do the best we can.

The argument that genetic engineering is the same as the rest of the agricultural things we’ve been doing for the past 10,000 years is both true and not-true. It’s a whole level above, in the sense that the ability of most organisms to, say, exchange genes with members of completely different families was kinda limited before. Gene flow does occur between species sometimes, especially in plants and all the time in prokaryotes, but there didn’t used to be a way to just grab a gene out of a jellyfish and use it to make mice glow green, or select a particular bacterial gene and stick it in a potato so the potato can kill beetles. What we can do now is much more targeted, and can occur much faster, than what we used to do. I.e., it is much more efficient and much more commercial — as evidenced by the fact that since 2001, you have been able to patent seeds. We also don’t really know all the epigenetics involved yet, but the companies are trying to weed out (har) any defects that may cause problems, and are quite vigorous about doing so.

Anyway, the big issue here is that people are arguing about the wrong things. This, I believe, is largely because environmentalists don’t think people will support them as much if they talk about the main problem with many genetically modified crops. Maybe they’re right, but I’m not in favor of using scare tactics to mislead the public. It’s dumb to claim that you’re labeling GMOs for health reasons, because (a) see above and (b) knowing that something is genetically modified tells you nothing whatsoever about any potential health risks.

Here, finally, is my point: The problem with GMOs is not really what they are. It’s what they are used for.

Specifically, the issue is one of the main agricultural-industrial uses of genetically modified crops. To blatantly oversimplify (see below), some very prevalent GM crops are created by chemical companies to encourage monoculture farming, a form of agriculture in which basically nobody wins except the chemical companies. Industrial-scale farming relies on planting dense stands of the same species (a monoculture) to maximize efficiency and profit. This way of farming tends to make vast tracts of land uninhabitable for most species, and to harm the soil by (a) never giving it any rest or variety, (b) letting all the nutrients run off into rivers and (c) dumping huge amounts of pesticides on it. Soil is fertile because it contains bugs and bacteria and fungi and all kinds of weird things that work as a community, recycling waste and providing plants with the nutrients they need to grow. There are also animals that eat plants, animals that eat animals that eat plants, animals that eat those animals, etc. In a healthy ecosystem, all these organisms keep each other from getting out of hand, and a plant supported by a healthy soil community is usually less likely to be wiped out by disease or pests. In conventional farming, you kill everything that doesn’t belong to this one species you’re growing, because it’s more efficient that way, but then you find yourself needing to spend more and more on fertilizer to make up for declining soil fertility, and on pesticides to protect your ever-more-vulnerable crops.

Conventional farming is more efficient but also far, far more fragile compared with a more classical organic farm. Because of this, the few farmers who haven’t already been driven out of business by the farm-industrial complex are dependent on the chemical companies to provide them with temporary fix after temporary fix, trying to stay ahead of crop failure and the resulting mountain of debt. Your cornfields are being taken over by pigweed? No problem! Big Chemical Company will engineer the corn to be able to resist pesticides, so you can nuke the shit out of your fields and the corn will still come up while everything else is dead (you’ll want to buy some fertilizers and stuff from us as well, in that case). The pigweed has become resistant now, too? No problem! Here’s another pesticide we’ve just made, and a new corn variety that’s resistant to it! Of course, the pesticide-resistant pigweed is now spreading all over the world, forcing everyone *else* to use Big Chemical Co.’s newer, special-er pesticide or watch their fields be swallowed up by pigweed. And the pesticides and fertilizers are poisoning the water supply and food chain. Woohoo! Did I mention that manufacturing pesticides and fertilizers has a huge greenhouse-gas and natural-resource impact?

Unless they’re independently wealthy, farmers can’t go back to the way things were in the olden days (when people used complex planning and planting techniques to avoid pest outbreaks, and didn’t stake their entire business on one or two crops), because they need the profits of industrial agriculture to stay ahead of their creditors, and because it takes years and much effort to get your soil community balanced again, figure out better ways to deal with pests, work out a more appropriate crop rotation system, and deal with the inevitable repercussions of transitioning a simplified system back into a complex management framework. You are NOT profitable during this time, and it’s hard, and most farmers simply cannot afford to do this. They are stuck.

Monsanto et al. use the claim that what they do is necessary because they are Feeding the World. I have several problems with this:

1. The world is not being fed. The U.S. and other countries produce huge surpluses of food, but there are still plenty of malnourished people all over the place, because the food doesn’t go where it’s needed. It’s about economics and war and weather and all sorts of things. Meanwhile, we waste huge amounts of perfectly good food by leaving it in the back of the refrigerator until it comes back to life as zombie-food. A third of all the food produced in the world is wasted. Food access is a complex problem, but in general it has little to do with the ability of giant factory farms, on completely different continents from where the hungriest people are, to produce corn out the wazoo. Using (well-tested) GMOs to help farmers in poverty is another topic, although one could argue that without the profitable U.S. enterprise, nobody would be trying to use GMOs elsewhere in the world.
2. Monsanto and Dow and all the rest are discouraging other ways of farming, both at home and abroad–partly through lobbying efforts that get the government to direct farm subsidies their way (or to farmers who do things their way). These companies are in effect creating a world that can’t feed itself without them, because all the alternatives are gone.
3. If properly cared for, an organic farm can produce similar yields to a conventional farm; maybe slightly less, but a lot more sustainably and without relying so much on expensive inputs. Of course, there are scale and efficiency issues here, but in the end it’s better for global ecosystems if we rely on many more, smaller farms that produce food using good planning and knowledge of the environment than on just a few huge, efficient farms producing food unsustainably. However, that would require a lot more people to be farmers, which may or may not be possible.
4. Even if this giant industrial farming operation were necessary to feed the world, then what? I have a hard time believing we’re going to stop trying to eat ourselves out of house and home anytime soon, so it’s a vicious cycle. All we’re doing with GM technology (and a lot of other technology) is temporarily avoiding dealing with the consequences of our actions. *Temporarily.* I doubt it’s possible to fundamentally change human nature, but I think we DO have the capacity to be smarter about our actions, and one important change we have to make is to stop enabling stupid, unsustainable behavior with temporary fixes.

I do want to mention here that there are applications of genetic modification in agriculture that can be good for the environment. No-till agriculture, responsible for saving a lot of soil in recent decades, depends largely on the pesticide-heavy approach–the soil conservation benefits must be weighed against the issues with pesticides. Engineering plant strains to use resources more efficiently means less need for heavy fertilizer use, which is a general win. Other applications help with human health (such as getting rice to produce vitamin A). I tend to think that such uses are addressing symptoms and thereby allowing us to ignore the larger underlying problems–but until we can deal with those problems, we may as well use less fertilizer and get more vitamins. Again, the issue is whether increased efficiency will actually lead to a slowdown in resource use, or if we will just use that wiggle room to plant more areas in monoculture or populate places that can’t actually support us in the long run.

Changing our behavior is the only real long-term answer to our environmental issues, but it is also way harder to achieve than technological fixes. GMOs are a pragmatic solution that may end up discouraging us from making the long-term changes necessary to be proper stewards of our planet and resources. But again–maybe we can’t make those changes anyway. It’s all up in the air. I’d like to be optimistic about our ability to change our behavior, but historically this has not occurred. In the end, it’s likely that a mix of technology and behavior change is our real solution. After all, farmers still have to be able to make a living, and we don’t want to sacrifice more intact ecosystems to make way for agriculture–which may well mean we need to farm intensively.

In summary, the GMO issue is not really about the safety of genetically modified food (it’s as safe for human health as anything else). It’s about trying to fight a pernicious system of input-heavy monoculture farming propped up by ethically questionable companies; a system that destroys pretty much everything in its path that isn’t corn or soybeans. However, the tactics being used by many environmental groups right now are also, at least in part, unethical, alarmist, and, yes, selectively anti-science. Good luck figuring this out, America. And don’t forget to vote!

Go hug a tree

A Forest Service report found that trees save hundreds of lives a year. Aside from helping release the oxygen we breathe, providing wildlife habitat and somewhere to build treehouses, giving us something to build treehouses from, and making us happier, they also pull all kinds of pollutants out of the air–a service that, according to the USDA, saves 850 lives a year and prevents hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks and other respiratory episodes. And that’s just in the United States! Urban trees are especially important pollution filters, so next time you nearly stumble over a tree root sticking out of the cracked sidewalk, don’t curse. Instead, turn around and give the tree a big ‘ol hug, and maybe even an appreciative massage*. It deserves it, just for being what it is.

Thanks, tree!

 

*WARNING: Tree massaging may be illegal in some states. Check your local regulations.

Food grows on trees … and out of the sidewalk (but don’t eat it out of the sidewalk)

Maybe it says something about my preoccupation with food, but I’ve always been interested in which plants you can eat and how to prepare them. As a kid, I’d often chew on the lemony leaves of wood sorrel, although back then I was under the impression that this heart-leaved plant was clover, an illusion apparently shared by most people.

Yellow woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta). This is not a clover.
By 6th Happiness [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

I had this My Little Pony when I was eight. She was my favorite.
SHE LIED TO ME.

One of yellow wood sorrel’s common names is “lemon clover,” which doesn’t help, especially since this variety grows all over the place as a weed. Real clover looks like this:

White clover, Trifolium repens
Forest & Kim Starr [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Remember that scene in “Bambi” when they were eating the clover flowers? Those things are delicious.

Even if you’ve repressed the memories of that particular movie because of what happened to Bambi’s mom, it’s easy to tell wood sorrel and clover apart when you know what they are. Wood sorrel has three heart-shaped leaflets; clover leaves look like the symbol for the suit of clubs, with three oval leaflets, and often each leaflet has a little pale-green arc facing inwards. Wood sorrel has more stereotypically “flower”-looking flowers with five petals, and, later, seedpods that look like tiny okra (you can eat the seed pods while they’re green); clover has a raceme (a flower spike) with a clump of tiny flowers that are often white, pink, or mauve, depending on the species.

The great thing about these two plant types, though, is that they’re both edible and they’re both everywhere, so even if you can’t figure out which is which for some reason, you can still chow down. If nothing else, you’ll know as soon as you bite into one; wood sorrel is tangy, while clover is pretty mild, with those sweet compound flowers. You can make tea or salad out of both of them, and dried clover flowers are often sold in health food stores as a dietary supplement.

A plant I’ve discovered much more recently thanks to John Kallas’s excellent book, Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate, is lamb’s quarters, which Kallas refers to as wild spinach. Since I’ve learned what it was, I’ve found it growing all over the place, including right in front of my house:

Lamb’s quarters/wild spinach

A waxy coating covers the leaves and stems, and you have to wash that off before you cook them or the texture is weird; however, once that’s done, the plant apparently makes a great steamed vegetable. I’ve only cooked it in combination with other things, since I haven’t found enough of it to eat it by itself.

Other edible weeds include dandelion, sow thistle, purslane, and plantain (this is that plant with the flattened whorl of leaves that grows along sidewalks and sends up a long green seed spike, as opposed to the banana-like plant featured in African and Caribbean cooking; you can eat the green seeds and the leaves of the weedy one). In fact, there’s a host of edible plants growing all around you, once you start looking. Most weeds are, by definition, plants that thrive in disturbed habitats, often near human activity. This actually makes me sad most of the time: I live in a city, and most of these plants and the soil they grow in are probably contaminated with one thing or another, whether it’s heavy metals, pesticides, or doggie doo. Every time I walk past an abandoned lot, it’s like being in a greengrocer where you can’t eat any of the food. But I’ve stopped uprooting and throwing out the purslane, wood sorrel, and lamb’s quarters that grow in my garden plot, and instead have started using them in my food. They do better than many of my vegetables anyway, and are less of a headache to cultivate.

If you want to learn more about edible plants, check out Kallas’s book, as well as the more encyclopedic Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Wild Edible Plants, by Samuel Thayer. If you want a good online resource for starting out, take a look at Eat The Weeds, run by the sometimes codgerly Green Deane, who provides a lot of interesting information.

You are an ecosystem

Make that thousands of ecosystems.

You might not like to think about it, but your body provides a home for trillions of bacteria — in fact, our bodies contain ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells.  Every nook and cranny is a habitat, from that place behind your ear to the pit of your stomach, and every habitat has residents. Don’t drink Lysol just yet, though: most of our tiny inhabitants are vital for our health, and their ecology affects us. We’ve long known, for example, that the bacteria in our guts are important. They help us absorb nutrients and keep our internal environment in balance (hence the probiotics craze), and their composition may affect everything from susceptibility to asthma to your chances of having a heart attack. In fact, the same bacterial species — E. coli, for example — can be good for us in some situations and make us ill when it gets out of control.

A friend once told me you should never wrap good cheese in plastic wrap because it kills the microorganisms responsible for culturing the cheese, many of which would otherwise keep working (they’re safe to eat); with no competition, other, less desirable microorganisms take over, and you end up with the paradox that is Cheese Gone Bad (aka Your Cheese Is Rotting Incorrectly). One of the downsides of our obsession with antibiotics and antibacterial cleansers is that they may have the same effect: you’re getting rid of bacteria that aren’t harmful and that would otherwise help to prevent hostile takeovers.

(WARNING: Topic of post now veers sharply from cheese to babies.)

Now a team of researchers has determined that early colonization by different types of gut bacteria in Norwegian newborns (we’re born without the requisite intestinal biota, but start to acquire them almost immediately) may affect the baby’s growth and development. Their study, published in PLoS Computational Biology, found that the detection of E. coli in stool samples during an infant’s first month correlated positively with growth, at least for males; some other bacterial species appeared to have a negative correlation (i.e., more of the bacteria=slower growth).

When you look at the growing body of knowledge about our bodies’ relationship with microscopic life forms, you become aware of just how foolish it is to think we can make it on our own, and how short-sighted the “kill everything we don’t like” attitude can be. It parallels the larger issues in, for example, agriculture, where biodiversity loss from intensive/monoculture farming has led to the degradation of the very environmental functions that support agriculture in the first place. We’re creating dramatic changes in how life functions, both inside and outside our bodies, and it can have unforeseen effects.

Ecology is everywhere — even in the least glamorous places.

Big Trouble

If the world in general wanted to get together and do a really comprehensive, well-researched, rigorously documented scientific study of exactly how bad our environmental problems are, whom would we get to undertake it? The U.N., right? Get an international panel of experts together to look at all the available scientific literature, then have them argue a whole lot and proceed to laboriously synthesize everything and double- and triple-check it and look at a bunch of models, and maybe have them make a few tentative projections, too, based on the trends they see occurring in the planet’s ecosystems, right? That’d be a smart idea. A study of, basically, the state of life on Earth might finally spur true action toward protecting biodiversity! As an environmental-ish-t, I wish someone would conduct a study like that. I’d definitely pay attention to what they said.

What’s that, U.N.? You already did that?

Eight years ago?

…wow, really? Ahahaha. That’s embarrassing.

…

So, uh… *scuff* … what’d you, like, find?

…

r-really…? … how screwed? like, specifically…?

…

oh.

The population implosion?

Today, Science Daily posted a press release by Spanish news service Plataforma SINC about a new population study with a surprising prediction: By 2100, the world will have about 800 million … fewer people than it does now. According to the researchers (at the Universidad Autonóma de Madrid), their model forecasts fit well with the UN’s lowest population projections, a scenario under which population rises to ~8 billion by 2050, then stops growing and gradually declines. Says co-author Félix F. Muñoz:

“Overpopulation was a spectre in the 1960s and 70s but historically the UN’s low fertility variant forecasts have been fulfilled”

“Figure 1: Population of the world, 1950-2100, according to different projections and variants” — from UN DESA’s “World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision.” (2011) Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404072923.htm

What. WHAT?? What about everything everyone’s been telling us for decades — about how the population will keep on growing until we’re like sardines in a can (if sardines still exist)? What about Megacity One? What about Soylent Green? What about [insert dystopian future of choice here]? Monsanto’s main marketing argument’s been based on this for years: “we need to feed more people on less land,” etc. In the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, all four future scenarios were based on projections of population growth to at least 8 billion by 2050 — and the M(E)A’s outlook for ecosystems was quite grim because of this.

So what gives? Can we stop worrying now? Can we start dreaming again about a future that doesn’t suck?

Weeellll…

I hate to dwell on the negative (okay, I love to dwell on the negative), but even the UN doesn’t think its lowball population scenario is likely. Their Population Division is betting on the “medium variant” scenario, where we have 9.3 billion people by 2050, and level off around 10 billion by the end of the century. Their “high projection variant” predicts 15.3 billion people by 2100. So let’s not get cocky, kids. With even the medium scenario, we’re getting another 3 billion people on the planet in the next few decades. You might want to buy real estate before all the good cans are gone.

On the other hand, don’t give up hope.

LIGHTSABER SHARKS

Biodiversity. Is. Awesome.

In a nutshell…

It’s hard to write a good executive summary, especially for people like me, who prefer to ramble on in a stream-of-consciousness fashion for at least 20 pages. But the intro to this policy brief is one of the best summaries I have ever encountered — not only of ecosystem services (or “environmental capital”), but also of just about every environmental problem ever. For example:

The root causes of the degradation of environmental capital are the combined pressures of population growth, rising affluence, and frequent reliance on environmentally disruptive technologies to meet the associated material demands. All of these factors are compounded by bad management, traceable in part to under-appreciation of the importance of environmental capital for human well-being and to the exclusion of the value of its services from the economic balance sheets of producers and consumers. …

In the absence of [government] intervention, individuals and firms are able to capture the benefits of activities that produce … ecosystem disruption but are able to avoid most of the attendant damages, which are spread across society. … Private firms and individuals have little incentive, absent requirements imposed by government, to invest in maintaining or growing capital of this kind.

And:

It is now much clearer than before that the historic drivers of degradation of environmental capital—replacement of complex natural ecosystems with simpler man-made ones, invasive species, overexploitation of commercially valuable plants and animals, chemical pollution—are being compounded and amplified to a rapidly growing degree by global climate change.

Anyway, it’d better be good — it’s for the executive-est of executives.