Tag Archives: collapse

September 2023 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: “the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth“. Green growth, in my own words, is the state where technological innovation allows increased human activity without a corresponding increase in environmental impact. In other words, this article concludes that technological innovation may not be able to save us. This would be bad, because this is a happy story where our civilization has a “soft landing” rather than a major course correction or a major disaster. There are some signs that human population growth may turn the corner (i.e., go from slowing down to actually decreasing in absolute numbers) relatively soon. Based on this, I speculated that “by focusing on per-capital wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.”

Most hopeful story: Autonomous vehicles kill and maim far, far fewer human beings than vehicles driven by humans. I consider this a happy story no matter how matter how much the media hypes each accident autonomous vehicles are involved in while ignoring the tens of thousands of Americans and millions of human beings snuffed out each year by human drivers. I think at some point, insurance companies will start to agree with me an hike premiums on human drivers through the roof. Autonomous parking also has a huge potential to free up space in our urban areas.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Venice has completed a major storm surge barrier project.

Are humans a cancer on the planet?

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This is the premise of Warren Hern in a new book called Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth.

The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem…

These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.

Salon.com

I don’t want to believe this. We know the universe is ultimately tending to random disorder. Somehow, physical forces are able to buck this trend and create small pockets of order like stars, planets, solar systems, and complex chemical compounds. And then on only one planet that we know of in all the universe, something called life has arisen from these chemical compounds, which has an extraordinary ability to construct ordered systems in our random universe. And then in only one species we know of in all the universe, something called intelligence has arisen from that life with the ability to create hitherto unimagined complex ordered systems. I don’t want to believe that this process has come to its conclusion and that the conclusion is one that ends the entire forward progression forever. Of course, if we are not the only intelligent life in the universe and if intelligent life is in fact common, then the situation looks much less bleak. Our particular malignant form of intelligent life can destroy its host and thus itself, and in fact this can happen in the vast majority of cases, but somebody somewhere can carrying on with the project of creating order and beauty in a cold indifferent universe. This, in my view, is the meaning and purpose of life. It just isn’t looking at the moment like we will be the ones to do it. And if in defiance of all reason we are the only intelligent life that has arisen or ever will arrive in the universe, then the future is an eternity of cold indifference, and we will be the ones who blew it.

WEF Global Risks Report 2023

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And now, without further ado, the top ten global risks for the next ten years according to the World Economic Forum:

World Economic Forum

Well, what is very clear here is that environmental issues are at the forefront here. We can’t just pretend our human activities are a small part of the larger biophysical system any more, and that the biophysical system therefore has an inexhaustible ability to support our human activities.

Here’s another way they look at it. This is pretty but maybe it tries to do too much in one picture.

World Economic Forum

So climate change mitigation, adaptation (adaption?), natural disasters and natural resources, which were at the top of the “top 10 list”, are relatively small bubbles in terms of “risk influence” here. But then they drive “large-scale involuntary migration”, “cost-of-living crisis” (food is too damn expensive?), “collapse of a systematically important supply chain” (not enough food at any price?), “geoeconomic confrontation” (war?), “state collapse” and “erosion of social cohesion” (riots over prices, food, immigration, military conscription?). It’s pretty easy to see how these things can interact, with our ongoing squandering of the planet’s biophysical stability as a root cause.

2022 in Review

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First, my heart goes out to anyone who suffered hardship or lost a loved one in 2022. People still died from Covid-19 of course, not to mention other diseases, violence, and accidents. People are living, dying, and suffering horribly in war zones from Ukraine to the Middle East to Myanmar. Having said all that, for those of us living relatively sheltered lives in relatively sheltered locations like the United States, 2022 does not seem like it will rank among the best or worst of years in history.

Highlights of the Year’s Posts

These are the posts I picked each month as most frightening and/or depressing, most hopeful, and most interesting.

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A collapse of the Game of Thrones ice wall holding back the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica could raise average sea levels around the world by one foot, or maybe 10 feet “if it draws the surrounding glaciers with it”. The good news is that no army of zombies would pour out.
  • FEBRUARY: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.
  • MARCH: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
  • APRIL:  The use of small nuclear weapons is becoming more thinkable. Just a reminder that nuclear war is truly insane. Assuming we manage to avoid nuclear war, food insecurity might be our biggest near- to medium-term issue. One lesson of World War II is worries about food security played a role in the diseased minds of both Hitler and Stalin. And food prices right now are experiencing a “giant leap” unprecedented over the last couple decades. Food security, natural disasters, sea level rise, migration, and geopolitical stability all can form ugly feedback loops. And no, I couldn’t limit myself to just one depressing story this month!
  • MAY: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.
  • JUNE: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
  • JULY:  One way global warming is suppressing crop yields is by damaging pollen.
  • AUGUST: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.
  • SEPTEMBER: If humans are subject to the same natural laws as all other species on Earth, we are doomed to certain extinction by our limited genetic variety, declining fertility, and overexploitation of our habitat. So, how different are we? I can spin up a hopeful story where are evolving and overcoming our limitations through intelligence and technology, but time will tell if this is right or wrong.
  • OCTOBER: Hurricanes are hitting us (i.e., the United States: New Orleans and Puerto Rico being the examples) and we are not quite recovering back to the trend we were on before the hurricane. This seems to be happening elsewhere too, like the Philippines. This is how a system can decline and eventually collapse – it appears stable in the face of internal stressors until it is faced with an external shock, and then it doesn’t bounce back quite all the way, and each time this happens it bounces back a bit less.
  • NOVEMBER:  Asteroids could be used as a weapon.
  • DECEMBER: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: LED lighting has gotten so efficient that it is a tossup on energy efficiency with daylight coming through a window, because no window is perfectly sealed. Windows still certainly have the psychological advantage.
  • FEBRUARY: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.
  • MARCH: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
  • APRIL: While we are experiencing a disturbing homicide wave in U.S. cities, violent and overall crime are not necessarily at historical highs and are more or less flat. And yes, this was the most uplifting story I could come up with this month. Brave politicians could use the Ukraine emergency to talk about arms control, but if anybody is talking about that I am missing it.
  • MAY: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?
  • JUNE: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
  • JULY: Kernza is a perennial grain with some promise, although yields would have to increase a lot for it to be a viable alternative to annual grains like wheat, corn and rice.
  • AUGUST: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).
  • SEPTEMBER: Metformin, a diabetes drug, might be able to preemptively treat a variety of diseases colloquially referred to as “old age”.
  • OCTOBER: Gorbachev believed in the international order and in 1992 proposed a recipe for fixing it: elimination of nuclear and chemical weapons [we might want to add biological weapons today], elimination of the international arms trade, peaceful sharing and oversight of civilian nuclear technology, strong intervention in regional conflicts [he seemed to envision troops under Security Council control], promotion of food security, human rights, population control [seems a bit quaint, but maybe we would replace this with a broader concept of ecological footprint reduction today], economic assistance to poorer countries, and expansion of the Security Council to include at least India, Italy, Indonesia, Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and Egypt [maybe this list would be a bit different today but would almost certainly include Germany, Japan, Brazil, India, and Indonesia].
  • NOVEMBER: A review of Limits to Growth suggests our civilization may be on a path to stagnation rather than collapse. Or, we may be on the cusp of a fantastic science ficition future of abundance brought to us by solar energy, asteroid mining (there are those asteroids again!), and biotechnology.
  • DECEMBER: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Brilliant Synthesis

Technology

The last couple years, I led off with other things and came around to a technology roundup towards the end. This year, I’ll just shake things up (yes, I’m wild and crazy like that) and lead off with technology developments during the year.

Solar energy has been a long time coming, but 2022 was a year when it really started to be at the forefront of the energy conversation and hard for the skeptics to ignore. We keep hearing that it is now the cheapest form of energy to build and put into operation. That means it is now limited by the materials needed to produce the panels, by the space needed to deploy the panels, and by the transmission and temporary storage infrastructure. Building rooftops take up a lot of space and are mostly not used for other things, so this seems like an obvious place to put the panels. The oceans of pavement we use to operate and park vehicles make up another somewhat obvious place – we can toughen the panels and drive on them, or we can put cheap roofs over the pavement and cover them with panels. Materials can be an issue because many of them are mined and sold by unsavory characters and governments, and there is clearly an environmental impact. But remember that we are trading this off against today’s coal, oil, and natural gas industry, not against some socially and ecologically blameless party. This industry intentionally lied to the public for decades and in the process did immeasurable damage to a planetary biophysical system.

Metals and minerals are also just limited. But even in hard-nosed economic terms, if solar panels are the lowest-cost option as we are hearing, they are holding their own with the costs of extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels. We could tax social and environmental impacts at international borders if we had the courage to do so, but even without that it is hard to imagine a system more damaging and irresponsible than the one we have been dealing with for the past century or so.

People will also say we haven’t kept the distribution infrastructure up to date, and this is true. In the United States at least, we don’t keep public infrastructure in a state of good repair. But we do create infrastructure when big business demands it, and they will demand an electric grid that can support their products when it comes to electric vehicles, devices and facilities. There may be a period of pain between when big business demands it and when the U.S. government provides it, and other countries will almost certainly outdistance us.

Longer term, as Fully Automated Luxury Communism tells it, space for solar panels will not be a problem because we will put them in, well, space. And this is not a far-future fantasy. The technology to gather the energy in space and beam it to the Earth pretty much exists now and governments and companies are seriously working on practical implementation. They swear it is safe, and even if it is not totally risk-free remember again all the death, pollution, and permanent planetary destruction the fossil fuel sociopaths have wrought.

Now, what about nuclear power? If we had really focused on it decades ago, we might not be in the climate change mess we find ourselves in now. It could still be a solution to the climate change mess in the future. But given how long it takes to bring new nuclear technology online at a large scale, and how fast solar energy appears to be scaling up and how reliable it appears to be, is it time to stop working on nuclear? I’m talking about known fission technology here. As for fusion, given that it is “always 20 years away” (no matter the year we are actually in), is it time to stop working on it and just throw all our research efforts at solar?

And materials will not be a problem either because we will produce them from asteroids and bring them to Earth, ending material shortages forever. I say, good but better to just use them to build things in space because we are running out of capacity to absorb the byproducts of the materials we already have down here. Just digging things up that were already in the ground and pumping them into the atmosphere and oceans has caused enough trouble.

By the way, once we are in space and messing around with asteroids, government and private actors will be able to divert their trajectories. It is easy to imagine scenarios where this is a great thing that actually saves all life on the planet. It is also easy to imagine scenarios where industrial accidents or intentional government actions threaten life on the planet. An international treaty and some oversight of this seems like a good idea as the messing-with-asteroids industry really starts to get going.

I don’t have my pet mini-mammoth yet, but biotechnology is continuing to gain steam. The idea of treating aging as a disease to be cured seems almost too obvious, but it seems to remove some bureaucratic obstacles that have been holding science and medicine back. Covid-19 was probably, maybe, perhaps not a lab leak. But it could have been, because the technology to make something like it, or much worse, exists in labs right now. It could be made if it has not already, and it could be leaked accidentally or intentionally, if it has not been already. And like nuclear technology, it will proliferate. Compared to nuclear technology, I think it will proliferate much faster and be much easier to hide. I have trouble envisioning any solution to this that does not involve heavy-handed surveillance.

On the positive side, biotechnology may be able to feed us when there are a lot more of us. With cellular agriculture, we can theoretically make meat or just about any kind of plant or animal tissue, and then we can eat it. We may finally be on the verge of modifying plants so they can make more efficient use of the sun’s energy, which is both exciting and scary. With a combination of abundant cheap electricity (from solar energy), abundant cheap materials, and highly efficient lighting though, we might be able to grow all the food we need in high rises without needing frankenplants.

And finally, the idea of controlling the weather with windmills is pretty fascinating. If we figure this one out, we might be able to end damage from floods, droughts, and hurricanes. But obvious Bond villain Elon Musk will also be able to use this to hold the world hostage for ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS. That doesn’t really matter though because he is probably already planning to crash an asteroid into us anyway.

Propaganda, Social Media, and Truth

Social media is being blamed for a lot of our social ills at the moment. When we hear “social media” discussed, it seems to mean first and foremost interactive sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. where anyone can post a short snippet of any information they want and make it available to anybody else on the platform. Youtube also seems to fit this mold to some extent, although Youtube is a mix of personal and professionally-produced content. Then, underlying all this are Google search and other algorithms or “search” engines which are searching both for content to show individuals and individuals to show content. There are bloggers using WordPress and a million other tools and sites trying to get their content out, usually not all that widely if my personal experience is any indication (to the 5 or 6 people worldwide who read this blog regularly?) Then there is the huge ecosystem of Amazon and all the other sites trying to sell us stuff. Then there is professional journalistic media and traditional publishing companies trying to have their say (and sell us stuff), and finally there is some sense of the broader internet underlying all this.

Beyond trying to sell us stuff, corporations and non-profit entities are trying to manipulate all these communication channels to get their messages into our heads. This is propaganda, with the main goal being to sell us stuff and a secondary goal being to create awareness and positive images of their brands so they can keep selling us stuff. Also so people won’t complain to politicians about whatever the corporations are doing and risk those politicians meddling in the system in ways that are averse to corporate profits. At the same time, these companies and special interest groups are paying off the politicians to support their interests behind the scenes. This works out well for them (the corporations, special interests and politicians).

Finally we have the U.S. government and governments around the world trying to influence public opinion, occasionally by providing accurate information, sometimes outright lies, and often something in between.

All this is competing for our “attention”. Personally, I strongly prefer having more information to less, and I do not want to see regulation aimed at reducing the amount of information available to me. I believe, perhaps naively, that I have some ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from opinion, and objective/honest communication from dishonest attempts to influence me. Regulation to protect children might be an exception to this – if social media sites are facilitating bullying and leading to mental health problems and even suicides, that is worth dealing with.

“Great Power Competition”, the “International Order”, and the United Nations

A major world leader of our time died in 2022. Okay, two world leaders if you really want to count Queen Victoria, but I am talking about Mikhail Gorbachev. To me, he represents a moment when optimism and visionary leadership had a chance to flower to the benefit of our civilization. He had a vision of long-term peace and stability, with powerful nation-states ceding some of their power to some form of world government. The basic vision was that no nation-state, no matter how powerful, would be able to succeed through violent means if it was opposed by all other nation-states acting together. With the threat of catastrophic war mostly behind us, humanity could have focused on solving all the other thorny problems, from food to energy to pollution to inequality. This was a beautiful vision, but unfortunately its moment passed us by, and we are back to the old cynical idea of coalitions of “great powers” arrayed against each other.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we are not focused on solving those other problems. The United Nations was supposed to at least be the seed of that new order that would usher in long-term peace and prosperity for our species. To be sure, the United Nations has accomplished a lot when it comes to human rights, science, agriculture, refugees, and other areas. It has also been a place where all the not-so-great powers of the world can band together and make their voices somewhat heard. But the Security Council was supposed to be the One Ring to Rule Them All and make “great power competition” obsolete. This has failed utterly, with the Security Council considered all but irrelevant at this point. Not only is “great power competition” ascendant, we seem to be proud of ourselves for bringing it back. If there is a devil, he must truly love “great power competition”.

With the threat of catastrophic violence hanging over us, we have failed utterly to solve other existential problems such as food security, global warming, sea level rise, ever-growing concentration of wealth, and the specter of a Captain Trips extinction plague whether of natural or manmade origin.

Resilience. Despite taking a gut punch, at the end of 2022 it feels as though our planetary civilization weathered the storm of Covid-19 and has more or less rebounded to something like the trend it would have been on. This is the textbook definition of resilience, and something to feel good about. If we get some time in between gut punches, we at least have an opportunity to work on our other problems while also preparing for the next gut punch. If we don’t make progress, maybe we can at least reach a state of stagnation rather than a self-actuated collapse. Can a civilization be resilient and stagnant at the same time? Maybe this is where we find ourselves, at least in the near term.

Happy 2023!

Limits to Growth “data check”

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In 2021, Gaya Herrington published a comparison of the World3 model’s (from Limits to Growth) predictions to date. She concluded that we are on a path either to collapse or to a sort of steady state where technology will blunt the worst consequences of pollution but further growth will not be possible.

The scenario that depicts the smallest declines, SW, is also the one that aligned least closely with empirical data. Furthermore, one of the best fit scenarios, BAU2, shows a collapse pattern. The other best fit scenario however, CT, shows only a moderate decline. Both scenarios show a slowdown in industrial and agricultural output. My research results at this point thus indicate that we can expect a halt in economic growth within the next two decades, whether we consider that a good thing or not. (Indeed, as the informed reader knows, economists and organizations like the IMF have been pointing out recently that we’re seeing a “synchronized slowdown in global growth“.) The strongest conclusion that can be drawn from my research therefore, is that humanity is on a path to having limits to growth imposed on itself rather than consciously choosing its own. However, my research results also leave open whether the subsequent declines in industrial and agricultural output will lead to sharp declines in population and welfare levels.

Club of Rome

U.S. not prepared for megadisasters

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The description for this 2006 book Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for Megadisasters and What We Can Do is eerily prophetic. Then again, I can’t rule out the possibility that it was updated in the last year or so to appear eerily prophetic in hindsight.

Five years after 9/11 and one year after Hurricane Katrina, it is painfully clear that the government’s emergency response capacity is plagued by incompetence and a paralyzing bureaucracy. Irwin Redlener, who founded and directs the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, brings his years of experience with disasters and health care crises, national and international, to an incisive analysis of why our health care system, our infrastructure, and our overall approach to disaster readiness have left the nation vulnerable, virtually unable to respond effectively to catastrophic events…

As a doctor, Redlener is especially concerned about America’s increasingly dysfunctional and expensive health care system, incapable of handling a large-scale public health emergency, such as pandemic flu or widespread bioterrorism. And he also looks at the serious problem of a disengaged, uninformed citizenry—one of the most important obstacles to assuring optimal readiness for any major crisis.

Amazon

I thought we responded okay to 9/11 in terms of the actual local area where it happened. Obviously we didn’t prevent it or prepare for it, and starting two wars with countries that were mostly uninvolved can’t really be considered a response at all. Katrina is another story. When I look back, that failure on a regional scale was a harbinger of our coronavirus failure on a national scale. And coronavirus, awful as it has been, is marginal in terms of what a megadisaster could really unleash – think a disease that kills 99% instead or 1% of people infected, even a limited nuclear war, an earthquake or volcano large enough to devastate an entire densely populated region, sudden ice sheet collapse, or a catastrophic collapse of the food and/or energy systems.

It seems to me that surviving the medium-term future as a nation and civilization requires us to address both the slow and steady long-term trends like global warming, and to be prepared for the sudden catastrophic events we are going to have to deal with. The two are clearly related – dealing with the long term trends can lessen the frequency and severity of some of the short-term events, but not eliminate them.

Our planetary ecological support system is dying. Why aren’t we doing anything?

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That’s my summary (in my own words, not theirs) of this paper from Frontiers in Conservation Science.

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms—including humanity—is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second, we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action. Third, this dire situation places an extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business, and the public. We especially draw attention to the lack of appreciation of the enormous challenges to creating a sustainable future. The added stresses to human health, wealth, and well-being will perversely diminish our political capacity to mitigate the erosion of ecosystem services on which society depends. The science underlying these issues is strong, but awareness is weak. Without fully appreciating and broadcasting the scale of the problems and the enormity of the solutions required, society will fail to achieve even modest sustainability goals.

This is not a paper about solutions. One thing they suggest is “for the scientific community to be more vocal”. I’m not sure. We need well-trained, well-funded scientists to do good science while talking amongst themselves, and then I think we need good science and risk communicators (some of whom might be scientists, but especially journalists and teachers and other types of people who write and speak in public, I think), along with engineers and technologists and economists and many other specialists (and generalists!) to help get through to our political and bureaucratic decision makers on the best courses of action. Facts and evidence don’t just speak for themselves, unfortunately. I certainly agree with the authors of this paper that we are failing to get through.

I’m always looking for that elevator pitch about why Uncle Lou (a fictional hard-headed relative, I don’t actually have an Uncle Lou) should care about biodiversity. Here is their attempt:

With such a rapid, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides have also declined. These include inter alia reduced carbon sequestration (Heath et al., 2005; Lal, 2008), reduced pollination (Potts et al., 2016), soil degradation (Lal, 2015), poorer water and air quality (Smith et al., 2013), more frequent and intense flooding (Bradshaw et al., 2007; Hinkel et al., 2014) and fires (Boer et al., 2020; Bowman et al., 2020), and compromised human health (Díaz et al., 2006; Bradshaw et al., 2019). As telling indicators of how much biomass humanity has transferred from natural ecosystems to our own use, of the estimated 0.17 Gt of living biomass of terrestrial vertebrates on Earth today, most is represented by livestock (59%) and human beings (36%)—only ~5% of this total biomass is made up by wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians (Bar-On et al., 2018). As of 2020, the overall material output of human endeavor exceeds the sum of all living biomass on Earth (Elhacham et al., 2020).

Frontiers in Conservation Science

I don’t think this paragraph will convince Uncle Lou. I think the message for the public is one where floods and fires threaten the value of their homes, and the future of the food supply we have taken for granted over the last century or so comes into doubt. The loss of natural ecosystems and animals is an epic tragedy to some, me included, but not to Uncle Lou down at the racetrack betting on the ponies (I’m not sure exactly who this character is I’ve just created, maybe we can interview him sometime and find out).

October 2020 in Review

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In current events, this was just the month that the fall resurgence of Covid-19 exploded in the U.S. and around the world. Just a month when a new, controversial Supreme Court justice was sworn in. Just the last month leading up to the Biden-Trump election, amid a swirl of questions about a peaceful and orderly transfer of power if the voting goes the way the polls clearly say it is going to. Just a month when my home city erupted in “unrest” for the second time this year and the National Guard rolled in. (Incidentally, Joe Biden is also here as I write this on November 1, and I wonder if the National Guard rolling in is entirely a coincidence.)

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Global ecological collapse is most likely upon us, and our attention is elsewhere. The good news is we still have enough to eat (on average – of course we don’t get it to everyone who needs it), for now.

Most hopeful story: We have almost survived another four years without a nuclear war. Awful as Covid-19 has been, we will get through it despite the current administration’s complete failure to plan, prevent, prepare, respond or manage it. There would be no such muddling through a nuclear war.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are at least some bright ideas on how to innovate faster and better.