Jonathan Franzen pissed off a lot of environmentalists by criticizing the strategy of the environmentalist movement, which is committing wholesale to climate change remediation at the expense of biodiversity. I think fighting to get CO2 emissions down is essential, but the problem is that bit about “at the expense of”. How we achieve a sustainable climate is as important as getting there.
He starts off with an example that is close to home.
Last September, as someone who cares more about birds than the next man, I was following the story of the new stadium that the Twin Cities are building for their football Vikings. The stadium’s glass walls were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked. Around the same time, the National Audubon Society issued a press release declaring climate change “the greatest threat” to American birds and warning that “nearly half ” of North America’s bird species were at risk of losing their habitats by 2080. Audubon’s announcement was credulously retransmitted by national and local media, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be “nothing.”
How about that? Williams is making the environmentalist version of a “Dear Muslima” argument! And that, of course, is a recipe for paralysis, which is exactly what the anti-environmentalists want. How can we possibly lobby for bird-safe glass on a stadium when the wetlands in Minnesota are drying up? How can we campaign for the wetlands when the arctic ice is melting? How can we worry about the arctic when the oceans are warming? Dammit, how can I get up in the morning and drink a cup of tea when the WHOLE PLANET IS DYING??!? And the Minnesota Vikings cheered.
Of course, there is no reason to think that asking a ridiculously profitable sports organization to make a minuscule investment to protect local birds detracts in any way from efforts to combat global warming, any more than that making my morning tea means I am incapable of doing anything else.
Read the rest of the Franzen article. There are tradeoffs everywhere, and progress requires taking a balanced, long-term view.
Here’s another local example. When I first moved to Minnesota in 2000, every Fall was lit up with the arrival of the monarch butterflies. They were everywhere. You’d find them fluttering solo in every yard, and every once in a while you’d find a tree that had been arbitrarily chosen to be the group meeting place, and every branch and twig would have a butterfly clinging to it, while clouds of them would be swirling about. They were so ubiquitous that we actually incorporated them into our introductory biology course, and we’d send out our students with nets to carefully capture and tag them.
We don’t do that anymore. Only a few years after I got here the population had crashed so much that it was an exercise in frustration to send students out: they’d come back disappointed with no butterflies found. Last fall, I saw no monarchs at all the entire season.
No, I take that back. I saw one dead one alongside the road.
Is it global warming that’s killing the butterflies? Maybe. It could contribute to habitat shifts and disruption of their migration patterns. But a bigger factor has to be that we’re starving them to death. Monarchs only live on milkweed, and that’s not a cash crop. We’re spraying everything with herbicides. We’re eviscerating the Conservation Reserve Program, which encouraged maintenance of some plant diversity in the state, all in the name of dedicating more and more acreage to corn (which, you may know, does not help the monarchs at all).
And why is there so much emphasis on planting more corn, corn, corn? For ethanol and biodiesel production, to reduce our dependency on foreign oil, and to supposedly shift our oil habit from fossil fuels to renewable sources (an illusion, though: corn ethanol isn’t a net energy gain for us). So, in the name of combating global warming and putting food on our table, we’re turning the Midwest into vast sea of nothing but corn, soybeans, and wheat.
We lose monarch butterflies. We gain ethanol pumps at our gas stations.
Chris Clarke has a characteristically thorough piece on the anti-Franzen frenzy.
Franzen may have made some mistakes in his piece, but his thesis — that a focus on climate change makes it harder to talk about preserving species and habitat — is essentially sound. If you don’t frame those threats to wildlife in terms of climate change or the fossil fuel use that causes it, climate activists simply do not want to hear it. They won’t write about it, they’ll criticize you for saying anything about it, and if journalists or scientists write about the conflict between climate activism and protecting wildlife, the climate activists will assiduously deny that that work even exists.
Which is why those climate pundits have reacted to Franzen’s piece with such outrage. His essay may have been a poorly aimed blast of buckshot, but a bunch of that shot nailed the Climate Orthodoxy in its ass.
That is not a statement that climate change denialists can take solace in — no one with any sense is denying the pressing importance of climate change remediation. The issue is how. If your solution to reduce the Earth’s temperature is to pave over the prairies with corn, to cover the deserts with sheets of photovoltaics, or to geoengineer the oceans, you don’t get to ignore the cost to life on Earth in your proposal. Paneling the planet in silicon might cool us down, but at a terrible cost to species other than our own (and unless you’re a fan of minimalist/modernist sterility, to us as well).
And come on, environmentalists. If you can’t convince the Minnesota Vikings to spend one tenth of one percent on reducing bird deaths, how can you argue that you’ll get the world to invest even more on major changes in how we produce and use energy?
As a biodiversity specialist dealing with the human and ecological impacts of environmental change this argument makes me nuts. Chris Clarke & this post from PZ state the obvious – but some climate activists just don’t get it, even though the majority of climate scientists, and the recent IPCC reports, are clear that climate change action must not and need not jeopardise biodiversity. There is no valid scientific argument that says that climate action and biodiversity conservation are ever mutually exclusive. Folks who lose their shit over the idea that we have to be cautious about the measures we take to mitigate climate change are at the fringe, noisy as they are.
One thing that strikes me is that this call for caution is accepted politically by every country that has ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity (the CBD has a programme of work on ecological impacts of mitigation, including geo-engineering) . The US has not ratified the CBD (and never will as long as the GOP have any say in the matter), which might to some extent link with the fact that the most vocal squealers against Franzen’s piece (which as PZ & Chris have said, is not perfect) are US-based.
*Paneling the roofs and parking lots* in silicon would, in broad strokes, account for our energy needs.
I wonder if the “corn ethanol” thing was at some level a deliberate well-poisoning strategy to get reasonable people to write off any approach to biofuels.
Good point, the same could go for Mark Lynas’ argument that we can combat climate change without making any fundamental shifts in how we run our economy since we can depend upon a techno-fix. Yes technological progress can deliver a range of innovations that will help mitigate climate change, but climate change is just one of a range of crises resulting from our continued overuse of resources. We managed to reduce the threat from nuclear weapons with the SALT treaties, and we managed to (largely) resolve the problem of ozone depletion with the Montreal protocol. We are still facing mortal threats to the environment, and we shall continue to do so. For instance, how many of us hear about the dangers from soil erosion? It is potentially every bit as dangerous as climate change:
http://www.monbiot.com/2015/03/25/3703/
No doubt there are other threats to the environment we cannot even foresee. If we don’t alter our way of life we may be able to prevent climate change, but we will be engaged in a continual game of apocalypse whack-a-mole
The birds that hit my windows just fly away.
I saw Apocalypse Whack-A-Mole open for The Montreal Protocol in ’89.
similar to the opposition to wind turbines for power generation: “turbines kill birds”. With no mention of how a bird, colliding with the turbine, damages the turbine as well, so the developers of wind turbines are working very hard to mitigate that hazard. But opposers won’t listen to the “Big Windmill” execs. They will invent anything that gets the turbines NIMBY.
What ever happened to “Think globally act locally”?
In environmentalists’ defense, Ethanol was never an environmentalist solution, but rather the Bush administrations attempt to appear to be doing something about climate change (remember pre ODS, even McCain in his Presidential run declared Climate Change to be a threat) while not actually challenging the status quo, while making his core constituencies even richer (oil companies, and massive Midwest farm operations).
“The environmentalist movement” is a single entity with a unified strategy now? Did I miss a meeting or something? Was there a memo?
As far as I can see, we can’t convince anybody of anything. We just happen to occasionally provide useful props for other people with other agendas.
It’s worth noting the Audobon Society’s response: They say that Jonathan Franzen intentionally misquoted Jim Williams, and that Williams never made a Dear Muslima argument, and that the Audobon Society has pushed to save birds in all ways (including speaheading the fight against the Viking stadium glass).
https://www.audubon.org/news/friends-these
a3kr0n @ 4:
And? I can guarantee you that not every bird that slams into your windows will fly away to enjoy good health. Do you track each bird that slams into your windows?
I spend a lot of time around birds, I photograph them. I’ve seen birds fly into glass, doors, etc., with enough force to break their necks, and they don’t die right away. It’s heart-wrenching. Instead of being a clueless asshole, you could learn a bit, including the rate of injuries to birds hitting your windows, and that nice stickers, which will not obscure your view at all, but will aid birds in avoiding a collision with your windows, are pretty low priced, and super easy to put on your fucking windows.
I recall reading somewhere that even if climate change miraculously ended tomorrow, species loss would continue at about 80% of the current rate, as land development is having a much more immediate impact. Climate change may cause say, wetland waters to warm up and stagnate due to reduced rainfall in the region in the coming decades, but draining the wetland and building on it will compress that timeframe down to about a year.
Caine, #11
Ugh, reminds me a few years back when a bird hit a window. I remember opening the door and seeing the poor thing laying on the porch. That’s a tough image to remember. That same day an assortment of stickers went up on that glass.
Saad:
Yeah, that’s bad. My worst one was a bird trying to avoid a strike from a hawk ended up slamming into my back door, which is steel. Definitely didn’t make it. I’m glad you put stickers up, that makes such a difference.
Climate change is part of The Sixth Extinction, not separate from it in any way.
The environmental movement used to proclaim itself as seeing The Big Picture, using whole-systems analysis to comprehend our mutual ecological dependence on maintaining planetary equilibrium. Who let these one-issue-über-alles people out?
And kudos to our esteemed host for revisiting the foremost issue for all modern biology again!
Unfortunately, we aren’t going to have a lot of good options for dealing with climate change–we’re about 30 years of delay too late for those. It is likely going to take nukes. It will likely take geoengineering. Biodiversity and environmental quality will suffer due to some of the solutions we’ll have to adopt.
And because the argument of no longer between right and wrong, but rather between less and more wrong, there will be plenty of hucksters and rent seekers arguing that their little hobby horse is the least wrong. The Audubon Society has never advocated sacrificing biodiversity, and Franzen didn’t reveal his affiliation with American Bird Conservancy in his hit piece
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2015/04/franzen-attacks-audubons-attempt-to-do.html
I expect to see a whole lot more of this as our options become increasingly less appealing.
Climate change and lack of biodiversity are symptoms of the same disease. Both lead to the irrefutable argument that the impact the human species has on this planet is enormous and to argue one is worst than the other is a fools errand.
I don’t like people grouping ‘environmentalist’ arguments as all the same. As atheists, we don’t like it when creationists do that to us, right?
I unfortunately have no confidence that we will make any major progress in environmental management in the U.S. I can’t really say anything about the rest of the world because I do not know much about the rest of the world.
Here in the U.S. most people just do not understand human life and nature and how we are connected utterly dependent.
We live in the man made world and look on wild nature as something for “national park” bears fishing for salmon in a river. We can not comprehend how thin the “biosphere” is how shallow the atmosphere is. When we loo up our sight goes much farther than the air.
We struggle to keep wild nature out of our space with fences, traps, pavement, and vast seas of toxic chemicals that we spread all over our fields, our streets and our houses.
without even stopping to think about what the effects are to the environment nor ourselves.
We have all watched the weed killer commercials. I have seen the “house wife” leaning over with the big bottle with the squeeze pump killing something out by the trash without even gloves. Just yesterday I watched some guy not the home owner spraying with a tank sprayer wearing gloves and a paper mask in shorts. I am sure that he was keeping the garden and the house bug free. That is the goal isn’t? All the effort with as little thought and awareness as possible.
Then there is My idea is better than your idea, I have a great big technological fix that is better than anyone’s.
I will stop now I have no more words
uncle frogy
I live in the Alleghanies and a lot of windmills are going up in the good locations. And of course people try to block their construction. One of the arguments against them is a sort of tone-troll that they will kill birds (it’s odd when oil, fracking, and coal fans suddenly get concerned about birds) and .. ruin the deer hunting and ,, um, wildlife. I hiked down to the base of one to see if I could count bird skeletons and most of what I found was beer cans and used condoms.
Meanwhile, my field has a largeish patch of milkweed that I allow to grow for the monarchs. Last year, none came. When I first bought my place, 12 years ago, every spring was greeted with armies of spring peepers hopping all over the place. Last year there were none. I didn’t see a single one.
I hear people say “this is going to get bad” and I reply “it’s already bad.” Shit’s gonna get worse.
Following ealloc’s link at #10, there’s a further link to Williams’ actual words:
Seems kind of unfair to portray that as dismissing the Vikings stadium issue. His own words (here and here for instance) seem to show that he doesn’t consider it a waste of time which could be spent on a bigger picture.
I wrote an essay several decades ago, pen on paper, regarding John Muir’s “wilderness & beauty preservationism” vs Gifford Pinchot’s “wise-use resource conservationism”, and how those two perspectives evolved over time. I thought both attitudes had remained coherent and somewhat in opposition to one another, even as the protections they both offered to life on the planet became less stringent. Wilderness was replaced as an objective by biodiversity. Wise-use conservation was replaced, perhaps mostly in words, by a focus on ecosystem services. In each case I viewed wilderness and biodiversity to provide ethically superior justification for guiding our economic decisions and policies.
My views on this haven’t changed much since back then. I’ve wondered if using this same old lens is blinding me. Or if maybe it could be useful for someone else.
We managed to reduce the threat from nuclear weapons with the SALT treaties
Oh, you fell for that one? LOL.
The SALT/START treaties were the US and USSR agreeing to take out of service a bunch of systems that were unreliable, unsafe, and obsolete. It also allowed a fig-leaf for the nonproliferation treaty article 6 (in which the existing nuclear powers agreed to disarm over time… uh, do you see that happening? me either) Meanwhile the US has begun a $1 trillion upgrade to its nuclear arsenal.(*) We’ve spent about $8 trillion on nukes since their invention, and fortunately have “only” used two. We’re sitting on about 5,000 of the fucking things, with about 3,000 ready to go.
Don’t feel safe. Look who controls them.
(* http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/us/us-ramping-up-major-renewal-in-nuclear-arms.html )
Population growth and unsustainable resource consumption have always been the biggest problems. All of the wild places on Earth will be lost if we find easy solutions to climate change. (Climate change may be actually be the solution to the greatest environmental threat on Earth.)
@ Marcus Ranm, # 19
To be fair, that’s not really a good indicator of much, other than the fact that some people like to party and do some lovin’ under the turbines. If you think about it, birds probably die in their thousands in woodlands every year from natural causes, yet most of us walking through woodlands on any given day will see very few (if any) dead birds or skeletons. The reason is that dead animals out in the open get consumed or dragged off pretty quickly by scavengers of one sort or another; crows, vultures and other birds, rodents, foxes, pet cats or dogs can all arrive and get to work on a dead animal within minutes. I once worked on a study in Ireland of the length of time it took for roadkill bats to be removed by scavengers, and we found most disappeared within 1 hour – mostly taken by rats and foxes at night, or crows at dawn (that particular project cost me a relationship with someone who did not appreciate my interest in what happens to squashed things).
Also, whether a wind turbine has any appreciable impact on birds is largely dependent upon location. Unless they are on an important migratory route or near important nesting, roosting or feeding habitat, they may have little effect. Unfortunately, the landscape features which make for great turbine locations are often the same features which make for great bird habitat or migration routes. I am VERY pro-wind energy, but it has to be the right design of windfarm in the right location.
mudpuddles@#24
Thank you for your follow-up. I was mostly curious; hadn’t thought about the scavenger effect, etc. We hear a lot about the evils of windmills where I live (because: coal! frack!) and I wanted to see what I could see. I didn’t find the windmill to be particularly noisy, either, which is another thing people say is bad about them. I read somewhere that the bird kill problem can be reduced with things like LEDs on the blades and so forth; I couldn’t tell from where I was if there were any of those kind of mitigations in place. Mostly, the place seemed like a nice peaceful spot — a hell of a lot nicer than the strip mine 10 miles from my house, with all the tri-axle trucks full of coal barrelling up and down the road to the coal-fired power plant at Shawville, PA. There are casualties from those trucks – deer, humans, and other critters – as well. What infuriates me about the issue is that it seems like everybody who’s talking’s got an “angle” that they’re concealing. The coal guys’ll tell you the plant is so abated that pretty much the only thing that comes out the smokestack is … pure CO2. Fuck me sideways. After my visit up to the windmill farm, and living near the strip mine for 10 years, and now seeing the groundwater being depleted by fracking the Marcellus shale beds, I conclude that the only thing people in my area really give a shit about is not having their hunting messed up.
Expansion of cropland may not be the issue here – cropland has, for the past two or three decades, likely been the major reservoir for milkweed across the midwest (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261219410002152 & http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261219400000247) – it takes up most of the available area and thus even though densities were low within the cropland the sheer quantity of cropland makes up for the difference. Roadways and conservation areas make up the bulk of the rest of available milkweed. (ag land accounted, according to the linked articles at least, for ~80x more monarchs than non-ag land)
Better weed control methods (better as in more effective at controlling weeds) then become the primary driver behind reduction in milkweed – this is an inescapable truth – about a 90% reduction in milkweed population has been realized in corn and soy acres between 1999 and 2009 – a change which can be pretty much fully attributed to the improved efficacy of weed control offered in roundup ready crops (a rather obvious, if probably completely illegal solution to the problem presents itself to me immediately…) – for all the benefits of the system compared to that which came before there has to be an acceptance, I feel, that this is one of the probable downsides – a downside, indeed, of any highly effective method of weed control applied to agricultural acreage.
Ewan R:
Yeah, that’s not surprising to me. I wouldn’t have thought the area of cropland has expanded that much so quickly, not enough to account for such a big effect.
Sorry for breaking up your run-on sentences some more. It’s not really obvious what you’re thinking of here. Banning or restricting the use of the round-up crops, pesticides, or something like that? If something like that’s illegal, should the laws be changed or not?
Are you saying we should accept that, because we’re so desperate for corn and soy for all sorts of products, or are you just stating the fact that there are downsides to what we’re doing? Should we be less effective at weed control?
It’s not really obvious what you’re thinking of here. Banning or restricting the use of the round-up crops, pesticides, or something like that?
I think he’s implying that people could run around after the round-up has been sprayed, and break milkweed pods all over the place for the seeds to broadcast.
One of my fields is ~50ac and I let the farmer up the street rotate it through feed corn, soybeans, and hay. I specifically flagged off an area because it’s about an acre of milkweed and it’s where I used to enjoy watching the monarch’s fly. He had a problem with that because it was upwind of the corn field, so he wanted to spray it. So I took seedpods and broadcast seed all over a fallow area where I’m letting it reforest. Problem solved. Still no monarchs, though.
I do think that it would be awesome if activists took it upon themselves to Seed Ninja a bit more. I know one Seed Ninja who regularly broadcasts marijuana seeds on a certain courthouse lawn and in the flower planters (crash preventers) outside a certain county jail. No doubt that’s some kind of crime or other. Milkweed ninja’ing would probably be good – indeed, I could supply pods in the fall if anyone wants to contact me I’ll mail them a box once they dry. I’m afraid it’s already too late, though.
The problem is inherent in the term “weed control” – they aren’t weeds. They are the sole food supply for a threatened species. A bit of milkweed in a corn field doesn’t ruin the crop; the combine will knock that stuff out when it processes the corn. It’s just laziness.
Last year there was a family of bears living on the edge of my cornfield. They were welcome, even though one of them pulled a seatcover off my jeep and shredded it (bored?) The biggest nuisance from the bears was the small army of motherfucking hunter motherfuckers who ignored my posted signs and shot and killed the male. No doubt he’s stuffed and hanging on some motherfucker’s wall because he was beautiful.
Someone needs to, because I sure as hell am not…
Well, one thing was done to the corn and soy to prevent the weed killer killing it, and its not a particularly difficult thing to do.
Mostly I’m simply stating that there are downsides. Weed control as done now is better than it was previously by many measures (overall environmental impact of the approach for one, efficacy of the system in terms of weed control another) however the efficacy itself comes with a clear downside (one which many will simply deny simply because to admit otherwise changes the debate on GMOs away from being black and white and introduces shades of grey I assume).
Personally I don’t think so. I don’t have a great solution to the issue though that is remotely practical or likely (if we massively reduced meat intake in the country pushing cropland out of production that’d be a great start though, although one assumes that management programs would be required to maintain the right mix of weed species (in which case a possible solution would be to push for more managed conservation programs, the opposite of what America does))
Not quite (see above) – this’d require far too much work over the number of acres being discussed. It could possibly work, but implementing it on the sort of scale at which it would be effective would simply require far too much effort (plus it’d be hard to get into the middle of some of the mega fields that exist out there without running a pretty high risk of being shot or some shit for trespassing).
It isn’t just laziness though – the farmer isn’t just going after milkweed (likely the farmer isn’t remotely concerned about milkweed, for the reasons you state), but every weed that might occur. Some of these are major economic problems. Using roundup kills all the weeds (assuming you don’t have resistance issues…) effectively – it saves time, money and has a lower overall environmental impact than the methods previously used.
My guess had been that he was thinking that someone (with sufficient skill, of course) should defy Monsanto’s IP lawyers and engineer a Round-Up Ready milkweed for wide distribution by Monarchist Monkeywrenchers. But you’re probably right.
Perhaps the answer is to revoke football teams’ tax-exempt status and then offer them a small tax break if they take environmentally sound measures such as preventing thousands of birds from breaking their necks.
Ewan R:
Sure, we already do it for corn and soy. So why not milkweed too? I honestly don’t know. There may be some reasons why there would be downsides to yet more engineering, in order to adjust for the downsides of the engineering we already knew about….
But that’s “probably completely illegal”? I don’t think I understand why that would be. Is it because a company has claimed ownership of that, so we (our government/society) don’t have legal control over how it’s used/modified?
Not for the sake of much more important things? Seriously?
This isn’t to discount what you’re saying out of hand but to make sure everybody is on the same page: if I recall correctly, you do/did work for Monsanto. Is that right, or am I thinking of somebody else?
Here’s a bit of a silver lining in regards to Monarch butterflies and milkweed :
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/milkweed-touted-as-oil-spill-super-sucker-with-butterfly-benefits-1.2856029
So maybe it will become a cash crop one day soon. In a follow up story, a company is also testing milkweed as an insulator for extreme cold weather gear.
I just read Franzen’s article in the New Yorker a couple of hours ago, so this fits in nicely. I think a lot of his points are valid, but there’s an elephant in the room that neither he nor PZ mention (and it’s not population growth). Franzen, for instance, is rightly concerned that we’re sacrificing biodiversity to grow biofuels for our cars, but he never says what really has to happen: we have to stop driving. We have to change our whole way of life, so as to be able to rely as far as possible on walking or cycling. We have to change the whole infrastructure of our cities. We have to build smaller houses, and find other ways of cooling them in the summer than airconditioning them down to near-winter temperatures. In warm climates, people have traditionally built houses with thick walls and shutters on the windows, and have reduced their activity during the hottest part of the day. Of course I realize none of this can ever happen, because it would be political suicide for anyone to suggest it.
The mainstream media (I mean the “responsible ones”) are totally schizophrenic: on one page they talk about the dangers of climate change, on the next they talk about the need to increase economic growth. We can’t solve the first without changing our whole way of thinking about the second. If economic growth depends on increasing consumption, things will simply go on getting worse.
I was born during WWII, and grew up in the fifties. We had a lot less and lived a lot more simply (we lived in a large European city, and my family had neither a car nor a television), but I don’t remember suffering from any sort of deprivation or malnutrition.
Fortunately, I’ve recently been reading a couple of books by Richard Fortey: the one on geology (The Earth: An Intimate History), and his earlier Life; An Unofficial Biography. Both are very good at putting things in the right perspective, and I find them strangely consoling. Life will go on in one form or another, even after we’ve brought about another “Great Extinction”.
Afaik (which isn’t very f) milkweed is considered a noxious weed, so releasing it at all intentionally could well be classified as illegal. Second, releasing any genetically modified plant without getting permits from the government – again, illegal. Third – using a patented technology without the consent of the patent holder – illegal. Would it always be illegal? No reason to presume it would be – perhaps a conversation could be had about the potential for using RR milkweed to alleviate the problem. I can however foresee that garnering opposition from all corners.
If it were unidimensional sure, but it isn’t, there’s a reasonable (I feel) argument to be made that more productive agriculture actually keeps acreage in check to a degree (demand for corn certainly holds this to be reasonably true – the entire corn sector is going to hurt for the next year or two as we work our way through the massive glut of corn produced in 2014 – this has led to significant acreage shrink this year which may well continue into next year) – doing weed control worse will reduce productivity and keep supply pegged back, with the potential to then push ever more acres into production – if we were to abandon (or even restrict, which is a possibility one supposes) roundup ready then farmers would simply move to what came before, which by most measures was worse (it cost them more, it took them more time, it was more GHG intensive, it was higher environmental impact)
Indeed I do (and as such my utterings here are entirely of my own devising, and not of my corporate paylords(as they now prefer to be called)). I’d like to think that my own ties to the methods and products in discussion here don’t skew my viewpoint too much (perhaps it does somewhat, but I do at least operate under the self delusion that I can be against something that is directly beneficial to me in a pretty open manner (animal ag, for instance)).
Ewan R:
Well, one thing was done to the corn and soy to prevent the weed killer killing it, and its not a particularly difficult thing to do.
Ah, you’re implying some basement geneticist could make roundup-ready milkweed?
I know a guy a few years ago was talking about making roundup-ready marijuana. I wonder whatever happened to that idea.
But we’ve already noticed that the amount of acreage is nowhere near enough to account for the butterfly effect (excuse the pun). The more drastic changes revolve around how that land is used, what it’s being used for, and why we think we need to have those products to begin with.
But it’s not a reasonable argument that we need to act like slaves to market forces. You could make projections like that, but there’s no “push” if we can (and should) have control over the outcome. Things like food, fuel, etc., as well as their environmental and economic impacts, are extremely important to everyone, not just farmers or landowners or corporations. So we should have a say on what happens. If your best argument is that “well, that’s what would happen, because they’re the only ones who have a say about it, and we can’t do anything,” then I’m just not following. We can do things about it, and we have very good reasons for doing things about it. And fuck those people and their profits, if that’s what it comes to.
To be precise, mostly Roundup (glyphosate). Kudos to Ewan R., who I know works (or did) for Monsanto, for admitting that this is a downside of the wonderful GMO technology most here so uncritically favour.
I take it, andyb, that you’re volunteering to be among the first to lessen those “biggest problems” by vacating the earth. After all, no fair blaming them on all the black and brown people in Africa, Asia and Latin America who I’ll bet are consuming far less than you do.
QFT.
Indeed, but the problem isn’t just the Monarch. Agriculture by its very nature is environmentally damaging. We should not, I feel, simply accept an expansion of millions of acres simply because it doesn’t impact one species – and if corn & soy prices were to go up significantly (which is what would happen if one were to remove weed control methods used for the past 3+ decades) then this is precisely what one would see – marginal acres not utilized for crop production now would be put into use. Not just in the US but globally. If we’re overturning capitalism globally and switching everyone to a less meat based diet simultaneously then we might be fine, but I don’t feel this is a particularly pragmatic approach. (given all the problems both practices cause it strikes me as unlikely that the decline of two species will change things for the better, even if one of those species is very pretty indeed)
I didn’t say it was. The specific problem we were focused on can’t be explained by increasing areas of cropland, so it can’t be addressed as if that were the most relevant variable. To the extent we’re addressing that specific problem (which was my intent with the question about being less-effective weed-killers), it’s much less of a concern than the destructive effects of your company’s products. Of course their downsides hardly end there, and they’re not the only thing to worry about. But that’s what I meant.
This is too strong, but I’ll just note my disagreement and move on.
Agreed. I didn’t say so.
But if it were a general practice that we take responsibility about how we use that land and why (even if it’s increasing somewhat), that would still be beneficial for many other species, not just one or two.
That doesn’t need to be what one would see, if we were regulating those markets (and properties) appropriately. It simply doesn’t need to be that way, but you’re still assuming that.
“Overturning capitalism” is not the issue here. Markets are/can be/should be regulated in a capitalist system. That’s basically all you need to understand to see why your argument doesn’t work.
I’m not claiming that I’m a pragmatist. But it is at least somewhat practical to nail down what the problems are and come up with ideas about what ought to be done about them.
Making predictions about whether the right things are likely to happen is something we can practice later, if we feel like it. Perhaps, after having decided what the right things to do are, we’ll try to increase their likelihood of happening. But I’m not very interested in making such predictions at the moment, if that’s what you mean by being “pragmatic.”
Honestly, I think all bugs are kind of ugly and disgusting, but that’s just me.
Climate disruption will also destroy biodiversity.
It’s a trade off, and those who accept climate disruption (I do) have been told that it’s too late to stop things from going a lot worse, and we have limited resources and it’s already difficult to convince too much of the world that this is a problem.
So do we use our very scant resources to try and reduce the impact of the disruption as much as we can, or we accept some more disruption to preserve biodiversity?
This is not to say that protecting biodiversity is wrong. My heart bleeds at the thought of the loss of diversity that is to come and at the very real price that our lives will pay for it.
But I can see how it can be a tough choice to make.
@2 Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y
Uhm, citation needed? Even if you made all rooftops face some optimal average angle it’s still a lot less efficient than the tracking panels of solar farms, never mind the usefulness of having easy and safe access to whatever machinery best placed on the roof. Also, you’d need rather impressive energy storing capability so that energy is available when needed rather than simply when the sun is shining.
Paving parking lots with solar panels seems like a completely unfeasible idea. Horisontal panels arean’t great for catching sunlight, as sunlight will hit at an angle almost always everywhere. Further, surrounding structures (and the cars!) will shade a significant portion of the sunlight. Making solar panels which actually work that can withstand the wear and tear of automobile traffic seems nontrivial, and the shiny smooth surfaces best suited for solar panels would get insanely slippery when wet. You probably couldn’t even walk across them safely unless you roughened the surface significantly, which would likely disperse the light away from the panels to some degree.
It’s hard to see how (at current technological development) solar energy could be anything but a supplement to more reliable energy sources, especially as you get further towards one of the poles.
I don’t know whether paving parking lots with solar panels is actually feasible (it seems to me like it would be much more expensive than asphalt), but there are people claiming that it is:
http://www.solarroadways.com/intro.shtml
What about roofing the parking lots and putting solar panels there?
In case you aren’t depressed enough, here’s what you’re up against. And keep in mind that isn’t some fringe lunatic, that’s mainstream GOP thinking.
the thinking that all bugs are kind of ugly and disgusting is part of the problem right there. Not an insignificant part either. That any part of nature is of less importance than what we want or what we like is basic to how we find ourselves in this place of having to make hard decisions about what should live and what should die.
uncle frogy