As a species, we cannot afford rich people.

Like most of you, I’ve been half-heartedly following the story some some obscenely rich tourists who went to look at the wreck of the Titanic, for funsies, in a submarine that has been described as sub-standard for such extreme conditions. That, plus a seemingly careless attitude from the CEO of the submarine tour company (the sub doesn’t even have an emergency beacon), meant I was actually surprised to see that they’d done this dive successfully at least a couple times since 2021. There have been comments about the appropriateness of using what amounts to a mass grave as a tourist destination, but that’s not something about which I feel particularly strongly.

Growing up, I read about the voyages of the submarine Alvin, and I very much wanted to go on a dive. Having learned more about what that entails, I’ve mostly lost interest in going down there myself, but I’m glad that other people do make such journeys, for the pictures, video, and information that they bring back. This was not that. The huge expense ($250,000 per passenger, apparently) wasn’t for gathering information with a few tourists along to help fund it. That’s an arrangement that makes sense to me, especially in a capitalist society. If bringing a billionaire along on your research trip makes that trip possible, then sure – take their money and bring them along, as long as they don’t get in the way. From what I can tell, this was all about a rich person making money by selling an experience to other rich people, similar to the recent billionaire space flights we heard about.

Very similar, in fact. It turns out that one of the missing billionaire tourists also went into space on Jeff Bezos’ novelty-shaped rocket. Apparently he’s used his wealth to pay for a number of expensive trips to remote locations, and has thus earned the title “explorer”. Regular readers will no doubt be aware of the huge amount of human suffering it costs to make a billionaire, so you may understand my general lack of concern about this. On a human level, I hope the people on that sub survive. Assuming they weren’t killed immediately, suffocating in a sealed metal tube sounds like a horrible way to die. While I do want to take away all of these people’s money, and actually do something useful with it, I would only condemn the actual people to suffer the same sort of life the rest of us lead, but with guaranteed food, housing and healthcare.

Mainly, I’m just tired of rich people. I’m tired of a system that actively rewards people for ruthless, murderous exploitation. I’m tired of the way everyone in the world has to put up with the whims of these people. Astronomers warned that Musk’s Starlink system could devastate Earth-based astronomy, but they couldn’t actually do anything about it. Educators warned that Gates’ plan to “fix” USian education wouldn’t work, but they couldn’t stop him from messing with a generation of students. Most of the world wants to deal with climate change, but the petty greed of a handful of rich assholes has almost completely prevented us from saving ourselves. Trans people are just trying to live their lives, but on Twitter, Musk has decided to actively support his fellow bigots, and given what a petty man-child he is, it’s almost certainly because his trans daughter disowned him, and his ex-wife started dating a trans woman.

And a handful of billionaires go missing on their deep-sea joy ride, and the news breathlessly covers every detail. There has been news about the refugee ship that sank (possibly with the help of the Greek coast guard), but that coverage has been all but drowned out by the submarine story, and that’s just one of many such ships. Those refugees were just a few hundred out of the many millions who’ve been displaced in recent years, by neocolonial policies and wars, and by climate change. The displaced are just a hundred million out of the billions living and dying in poverty, and a huge portion of that suffering could be avoided, if our society even had the capacity to value life over profit.

How much money is being spent, right now, to find those rich tourists and their shitty submarine? US and Canadian coast guards are involved, as are the navies of those nations, and other branches, and an oil and gas corp. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of that effort would have been unnecessary if the submarine had had an emergency locator beacon, of the kind that’s been available for decades.

From what I can tell, the only thing of real value that we’ve gotten from this, is yet another demonstration that the meritocracy is a lie, and that building our society around that lie has had both devastating and ridiculous consequences.

On balance, I hope that the submarine passengers survive. I also hope that, if that happens, the guy running this submarine company has his toys taken away, because it’s very clear that he cannot play with them responsibly, and it is absurd to the point of offensiveness that the governments of two nations are involved in trying to find him and his shitty submarine, because he couldn’t be bothered to spring for a couple extra safety measures. How many times do we have to bail these people out, before we realize that they’re a wholly unnecessary burden? How many ways do we have to bail them out?

As a species, we cannot afford rich people.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Defeat By Small Victories

We all dwell on missed opportunities from time to time. Maybe there was a job you almost took, or a trip you almost went on. Maybe you regret going somewhere or doing something when you just wanted to have a little time to yourself. Maybe there was a company you should have invested in, or an investment you shouldn’t have made. For me, the one that nags me the most isn’t one from my own life, but the time that’s been wasted on climate change. What would the world be like if governments had acted when scientists and corporations all knew what was going on, back in the late 1970s, early 1980s? I think it’s entirely possible that we couldn’t have “solved” the problem, but there’s no question that we had a chance for a drastically different future. If we’d been making the kind of steady, deliberate change that was being called for, the planet would be a cooler and less chaotic place, today.

We had a chance, and it was squandered before I was born. Worse than that, the same choice has been made every damned day since then, and so now big changes are all that’s left. Either we change our entire society in a major way, or it will be “changed” for us by the rapidly warming climate. The oceans are doing scary shit right now, and it seems like the powers that be are moving ahead with their plans to use violent repression to deal with the crisis they’ve created.

But hey – fossil fuel lobbyists will have to identify themselves at the next conference that’s supposedly about responding to climate change:

The move by the UN to require anyone registering for the summit to declare their affiliation was heralded as a victory for transparency by campaigners who have been increasingly concerned at the growing presence of oil and gas lobbyists at climate talks.

Scott Kirby, a campaigner from Youngo, which represents youth campaigners at the UN climate talks, said: “When young people see the number of fossil fuel lobbyists present at UN Framework Convention on Climate Change conferences, it makes us question the ability this process has to solve the biggest challenge threatening our futures. This is why we welcome the step to increase transparency of observer interests in the talks.”

Many campaigners said the change to make potential conflicts of interest more apparent should be only a first step towards excluding fossil fuel companies from the talks, or from key parts of them.

Hwei Mian Lim, of the Women and Gender Constituency, said: “We can only meaningfully tackle the climate crisis when we kick big polluters out. Fortunately, we have the real solutions, including gender-just climate solutions, and have the power in collective feminist movements to prevent untold suffering, in particular among women and girls in the global south.

“This is strengthened with weeding out the undue influence of big polluters that seek to undermine climate action. Cop28 is our best chance to start implementing them and we must do so in the most gender responsive, and effective and impactful way.”

Hey, we did it guys! We won!

In all seriousness, this is a good thing. It’s good that they will have to identify themselves, and it’s even possible that most of them will do it. My problem, in case it wasn’t clear, is that this is the kind of change that should have been made, once again, before I was born. We’ve gotten to the point where global warming is already displacing millions of people every year, and it’s worth a headline that fossil fuel lobbyists have to identify themselves as such at a conference that should be about eliminating their entire industry? At this rate, we’ll be celebrating their ban from the conference some time after the flooded ruins of Miami are finally abandoned.

I want to be clear – I have no problem with the people who fought for this rule change, and it’s clear from the article that they also view this as a very small victory, compared to the scale of what needs doing. If nothing else, their efforts are needed to show why it’s so important for people to organize and take direct action, rather than relying on a political and economic system that might as well be designed to drive us to extinction.

And hey, at least the conference will be limiting the influence of oil interests, right? That’s progress!

The change came as nations wrapped up nearly two weeks of talks in Bonn, where officials tried to lay the groundwork for Cop28, which starts on 30 November.

The event will be held in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil and gas producer, and chaired by Sultan Al Jaber, who is head of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc. The company is planning a large expansion of its production capacity, and last year it sent scores of executives to the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.

Al Jaber attended the Bonn talks for two days last week and spoke only briefly in public. He said: “The phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable. The speed at which this happens depends on how quickly we can phase up zero-carbon alternatives, while ensuring energy security, accessibility and affordability.”

He failed to give an assurance that a phase-out of fossil fuels would be on the official agenda at Cop28, despite a concerted push by many developed and developing countries for its inclusion. The UAE Cop28 presidency has insisted it is up to all the countries represented at the talks to make decisions on the agenda.

Anyway, remember what I said about organizing? I feel like it would be good if we didn’t have to rely corrupt governments to solve our problems. Having an organized and empowered working class won’t fix everything, but it seems pretty clear that it can’t be worse than giving power to people based on how good they are at exploiting others.

I feel as though I’ve spent my entire life hearing about small victories in one area or another, and each one will help us a whole lot, at some point in the future. They never seem to deliver on that promise. Some of those victories did pay off, by reducing emissions, but they’re hard to notice because they weren’t enough to stop overall emissions from continuing to rise. The majority seem to just be empty promises, or doomed half-measures like trying to offset CO2 emissions with forests, which definitely never catch fire or anything.

It’s frustrating, and discouraging. It reminds me of the many years now that I’ve seen articles and research reports promising revolutionary new batteries, or new ways to harvest power, or new, safer nuclear designs. Just a few more adjustments, and then everything will be fine! It reminds me of the fallacious incrementalism promised by centrist politicians over the years.

We have an abundance of small victories, and they will never be enough if we don’t demand big ones, and fight for them whether or not the people in power want us to. It says everything bad about our political leaders that fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists aren’t treated as pariahs for their decades of destruction, corruption, and misinformation. Until we have the power to actually bring things to a halt, and force change, these small “victories” are likely to be the best we get, as the world continues to burn. I used to like reading about things like this but these days, it just feels like a reminder of how little progress we’ve made.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Video: New Reporting Adds to Kissinger’s Death Toll

When Henry Kissinger turned 100 last month, there was a lot of talk about how the worst people on the planet seem to live longer than most of us. I’d like to believe that everybody’s clear on why Kissinger has earned all the hate he gets and more, but given that major players in the Democratic Party apparently consider him a friend, I’m not so sure. The Vietnam War was wholly unjustified, and every death in it – American, Vietnamese, or Cambodian, is the fault of the American politicians who started it, and who kept it going. We’ve long known that Kissinger played a major role in increasing the bloodshed, but some recent reporting shows that he was worse than previously thought. His continued freedom, wealth, and comfort prove every day that there is no justice in this society.

Reckless Water Consumption Is Tilting The Entire Planet

There have been many attempts, over the last few decades, to find ways to talk about global warming that convey the immense scale of what we’re doing to our planet, but one of the more effective ones, in my opinion, is being able to point to the fact that through ice melt, we’ve actually moved enough mass to shift the axis around which our planet spins. It’s not something that affects our lives, but it does convey the message that what’s happening really is planet-sized.

Unfortunately, it turns out that’s not the only way in which we’ve been messing with Earth’s axis. As you may be aware, humanity has something of a problem with unsustainable water usage. Even without global warming, we’re pulling it out of the ground far faster than it’s being replenished, and polluting a lot of it in the process. How much water have we been pumping? Enough to shift the planet:

By pumping water out of the ground and moving it elsewhere, humans have shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted nearly 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) east between 1993 and 2010 alone, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, AGU’s journal for short-format, high-impact research with implications spanning the Earth and space sciences.

Based on climate models, scientists previously estimated humans pumped 2,150 gigatons of groundwater, equivalent to more than 6 millimeters (0.24 inches) of sea level rise, from 1993 to 2010. But validating that estimate is difficult.

One approach lies with the Earth’s rotational pole, which is the point around which the planet rotates. It moves during a process called polar motion, which is when the position of the Earth’s rotational pole varies relative to the crust. The distribution of water on the planet affects how mass is distributed. Like adding a tiny bit of weight to a spinning top, the Earth spins a little differently as water is moved around.

“Earth’s rotational pole actually changes a lot,” said Ki-Weon Seo, a geophysicist at Seoul National University who led the study. “Our study shows that among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater actually has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.”

Water’s ability to change the Earth’s rotation was discovered in 2016, and until now, the specific contribution of groundwater to these rotational changes was unexplored. In the new study, researchers modeled the observed changes in the drift of Earth’s rotational pole and the movement of water — first, with only ice sheets and glaciers considered, and then adding in different scenarios of groundwater redistribution.

The model only matched the observed polar drift once the researchers included 2150 gigatons of groundwater redistribution. Without it, the model was off by 78.5 centimeters (31 inches), or 4.3 centimeters (1.7 inches) of drift per year.

“I’m very glad to find the unexplained cause of the rotation pole drift,” Seo said. “On the other hand, as a resident of Earth and a father, I’m concerned and surprised to see that pumping groundwater is another source of sea-level rise.”

“This is a nice contribution and an important documentation for sure,” said Surendra Adhikari, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in this study. Adhikari published the 2016 paper on water redistribution impacting rotational drift. “They’ve quantified the role of groundwater pumping on polar motion, and it’s pretty significant.”

The location of the groundwater matters for how much it could change polar drift; redistributing water from the midlatitudes has a larger impact on the rotational pole. During the study period, the most water was redistributed in western North America and northwestern India, both at midlatitudes.

Countries’ attempts to slow groundwater depletion rates, especially in those sensitive regions, could theoretically alter the change in drift, but only if such conservation approaches are sustained for decades, Seo said.

I would not have guessed that pumped water would rate higher than melting land ice, but apparently it’s easy to under-estimate just how much water our species uses, particularly for agriculture. I’m saying nothing new here, but we’ve got to stop treating natural resources as though they are infinite, and require no maintenance. We are fully capable of using water more efficiently, it’s just that doing so would require changes in how things are run, and that might as well be the end of the world, for the folks profiting off the status quo.

I don’t believe overpopulation is really a problem we need to work on. That said, the size of our population, combined with the technology at our disposal, means that we can change the surface of this planet in massive ways. That’s not an inherently bad thing – if nothing else, it means we can repair some of the damage we’ve done – but it does mean that if we want our species to continue, and to have a future worth living in, we need to start changing how we use resources, and what we do with them afterwards. Not only is this level of over-exploitation not needed for everyone to have a decent standard of living, it’s actively detrimental to that goal. It is making this planet a worse place to live, all to satisfy the pathological greed of capitalist, and we’re reaching the point where either it ends, or we do.

Colonialism, Cobalt, and the False Promise of Electric Cars

If you get into enough arguments about slavery in the United States, you will encounter people making the claim that reparations aren’t owed, because black people in the U.S. are better off than black people in Africa. Often, this will come with the implication or outright statement that poverty and political instability in present-day Africa is due to some innate deficiency in black people. This is, in case it wasn’t clear from the start, and argument rooted in white supremacy, and like all such arguments, it relies heavily on ignorance and/or dismissal of history. Among other things, it ignores that the continent of Africa wasn’t simply plundered for slaves, and otherwise left alone. It was divided up by European empires, and almost the entire population of the continent was enslaved in their own homes, all to generate wealth for already-wealthy European aristocrats.

The reality is, that never changed. “European aristocrats” has expanded to include billionaires in other regions, like the United States and China, but for much of the continent, every effort at actual self-determination has been met with violence from the imperial powers of the world. One of the worst-hit regions, if not the worst-hit, is what’s currently known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). King Leopold the Second of Belgium laid personal claim to the Congo, and enslaved its entire population for the sole purpose of enriching himself. The Belgian government eventually caught on, and was outraged that the profit from the enslavement, murder, and mutilation of countless humans as going to the king, rather than to the coffers of the Belgian government.

The Congo did gain its independence in 1960, but the leader of that movement, Patrice Lumumba, was promptly tortured and assassinated. His body was dissolved in sulfuric acid, his bones ground, and the dust scattered to prevent any grave site from becoming a source of consolation or inspiration. While Lumumba’s death stood out for the viciousness, assassination is routine result of an African leader fighting for actual independence, and for a better future.

Colonialism did not end. At most, it changed forms, but when it comes to the DRC, that change seems to be barely perceptible. Where Belgium once brutalized and exploited the country for rubber, now many countries and corporations exploit it for minerals, chief of which is cobalt. Congo supplies 63% of the global cobalt supply, without which, we would not have the lithium-ion batteries in our phones and electric cars. China controls and profits from most of that, but since my audience is probably more familiar with USian billionaires, I want you to think about the wealth that has come from just those batteries in that country. Elon Musk became the richest man in the world, for a bit, and it was Tesla that bought him his “Iron Man” reputation. How many other billionaires have been made from smartphones? And hey – if hard work and playing by the rules pays off in a capitalist world, does that mean that the Congolese people mining that cobalt are also doing well?

Of course not. Why would I even ask me such a question? Haven’t I been paying attention?

This is why electric cars are not an acceptable “solution” to climate change. We can’t just swap out power sources, and continue on as we have been. We cannot condemn uncountable millions of people, for centuries to come, to hopeless lives of body-destroying toil, and call that a “solution. If it was good that the atrocities of the past were ended – and it was – then it is good that the atrocities of the present be ended. Complaints about the size of the change are no more acceptable today than they were in the past. One cannot claim that the economy must be preserved “for the greater good”, when that economy’s normal function depends on such murderous exploitation.

Double Standards, Greed, and Wage Theft

For about as long as I can remember, I’ve had a strong aversion to unfairness. As a kid, it would annoy me to no end that I was expected to do everything perfectly on time, by adults who regularly were late to class or other appointments, or who took weeks to grade and return homework or tests. Later, I had teachers who were mean to students, or whose “teaching” left me unprepared for later classes, and again, it rankled. I’ve generally been willing to take ownership of my screwups, or of times when I just didn’t put in the work for whatever reason, but the fact that someone else could screw up, and that I’d just have to live with the effects of that, pissed me off.

The reality is that these adults who pissed me off as a kid were just people, trying to live their lives, and do their best. They were not responsible for the school system, or the role it plays in society. While I don’t think they were trying for this, the double standards I experienced as a kid actually turned out to be good preparation for the much worse double standards that waited for me as an adult. We’re constantly told that if we follow the rules and work hard, we can get ahead in life, and as you’re no doubt aware, that’s not actually true. There are, of course, a myriad of ways in which those who try to follow that path are tripped up and stymied, but there’s also the simple fact that the people at the top – the ones who have the most power over what the rules are – rarely abide by them, themselves.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. I doubt anybody would deny the army of accountants and other servitors who keep our aristocrats above the law. Tax evasion and bribery of public officials are just the surface stuff – the glint of sunlight that tells us there’s water there. If you want to go deeper, consider Jeffery Epstein, or Coca Cola’s use of death squads, or the child slavery of chocolate corporations, or the endless crimes of the fossil fuel industry. Again – all of this stuff is out in the open. We all know about it, and the people who profit from these crimes are all identifiable. They just get away with it, because the system is set up to make sure that they do.

There’s another category of crime that’s pretty much exclusively committed by the rich. Trump became famous for it, but it’s widespread throughout the United States, and probably most other capitalist countries – they just don’t pay people.

Rich people will just violate contracts. They’ll get goods or services from someone, and then just… Not pay.

If I were to do that, the odds are pretty good that I would be arrested. Whatever I stole – because that’s what we’re talking about here – would be taken from me. It would be used as evidence, and hopefully the victim would eventually get their stuff back, or I would be forced to pay what I was owed, and I would be punished with a fine, prison time, or both, as well as a criminal record. The worst rich people tend to face is being forced to pay what they owe.  This isn’t a small problem, either. Sure, it happens to the folks who do direct business with rich individuals, but it also happens to everyone working for the corporations owned by these rich people.

Workers in the US have an estimated $50bn-plus stolen from them every year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, surpassing all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined. The majority of these stolen wages are never recovered by workers.

Between 2017 to 2020, $3.24bn in stolen wages were recovered by the US Department of Labor, state labor departments and attorney generals, and through class- and collective-action litigation.

Wage theft disproportionately affects lower-wage workers, women, people of color and immigrant workers, and negatively affects local economies and tax revenues.

There are numerous forms of wage theft, from employers not compensating workers for time worked, violating minimum wage and overtime laws, misclassifying employees as independent contractors, not providing legally required meal breaks, confiscating worker tips, or illegally taking deductions from worker wages.

I’ll repeat for emphasis – “surpassing all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined.”

How many billions does the US spend on further empowering its already bloodthirsty and unaccountable police, justified by fear of robbery, burglary, and theft?  How many lives have been destroyed by those cops, in the name of “keeping us safe” from robbers?

Earlier I said that the worst rich people tend to face is paying back what the stole. I stand by that, because as noted above, the vast majority of that theft is just allowed to happen. On rare occasions, however, a corporation will get caught:

Wage-theft violators include some of the largest employers in the US; Amazon paid $18m in November 2022 to settle a wage-theft class-action lawsuit in Oregon, the largest in the state’s history, and paid a $61.7m fine in 2021 over allegations of stealing tips from Amazon Flex drivers.

According to a 2018 report by Good Jobs, between January 2000 to 2018, Walmart paid over $1.4bn in fines and settlements over wage theft violations, FedEx paid over $500m during the same period, and Bank of America paid over $380m.

I’m no financial expert, but it seems likely to me that these fines amount to less than the profit they made through their theft, which is a big part of why they keep doing it. I think it’s also important to underscore that this is the rich stealing from the poor. This is a big part of why folks at the bottom of the ladder tend to stay at the bottom – because the folks on the top are actively kicking them in the head to prevent them from having any hope of a better life. When you hear pundits talking about “job creators”, this is who they’re talking about – people who will hire the bare minimum number of workers needed, agree to pay them as little as possible, and then refuse to even pay that.

Conventional political involvement has clearly not solved this problem. Laws are passed, broken, and barely enforced, and the Supreme Court is pretty openly hostile to organized labor. This means that it’s even more important for workers to organize and and work together. Whether it’s labor rights or civil rights, the progress we’ve made has come from people willing to deliberately violate unjust laws, because there was no legal way to make things change. The reality is that the people at the top – the ones who will demand “law and order” – constantly violate the law in ways that materially harms the people at the bottom. They’ve violated the social contract just like they violate their business contracts, and we should stop pretending that their view of what’s acceptable has any legitimacy at all.

I guess what I’m saying is – workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Some More News: What Are The Real Dangers Of A.I.?

I have mixed feeling about the stuff that’s currently being marketed as “Artificial Intelligence”. To begin with, I believe calling it that was a deliberate choice to mislead people about the nature, power, and “coolness” of the technology. I do think it’s cool technology, and the main reason it worries me is that as with everything else in a capitalist society, it’s being used to further the interests of pathologically greedy capitalists, rather than the interests of humanity as a whole. We already have a vast number of marvelous labor-saving devices that really do work. Worker productivity has gone through the roof in recent decades, but rather than having higher paychecks and/or shorter hours, the benefits have gone to create a class of multibillionaires, while things have gotten harder for everyday people in a number of ways. As corporations use this “AI” to replace workers, keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s possible to have a world in which labor-saving devices actually save us from doing so much labor.

Tremble and Behold: The Rare and Marvelous Irish Piano Spider!

PZ has been after me for Irish spider pictures, and I’m finally able to provide one. This spider narrowly escaped a horrible death in the machinery of a piano being tuned. Apparently, it sought shelter between the piano keys. I’m not sure what sort of spider we’re looking at, or whether it’s an adult or juvenile. Despite its best efforts, Tegan rescued it, transferred it to a plant, and got the best picture she could:

The center of this image is dominated by a spiraling plant tendril. Above it, a serrated leaf, and behind, more leaves, out of focus. Hanging down from the tendril, from an invisible strand of silk, is a tiny spider. It's near the bottom of the picture, is maybe a millimeter long, and appears to be a light tan color. Because of its small size, it's not perfectly in focus, and so it's difficult to see identifying marks.

The center of this image is dominated by a spiraling plant tendril. Above it, a serrated leaf, and behind, more leaves, out of focus. Hanging down from the tendril, from an invisible strand of silk, is a tiny spider. It’s near the bottom of the picture, is maybe a millimeter long, and appears to be a light tan color. Because of its small size, it’s not perfectly in focus, and so it’s difficult to see identifying marks.

Scrying the Wind: New Research Will Revolutionize Biodiversity Tracking

Much of the world around us is dying. We’re in the midst of a mass extinction event, driven by human activity, and at this point it’s unclear exactly how this event will compare to its predecessors. We don’t need an answer to that to know that it’s in our own interest to stop it, but I think that the effort to do so would be aided by a more accurate understanding of exactly what is going on. We measure the mass extinctions of the past by the fossil record- each event was discovered because a huge number of species simply stopped appearing, because there were no more of them to leave remains. We can’t do that for our present crisis, because it’ll be a while before our era has something that could be called a fossil record.

No, if we want to understand the full horror of what we’re doing to our world, we have to find a way to figure out what’s alive now, and track declines or disappearances, species by species. Once Upon A Time, the only way to do that was to go out and literally count individual organisms. A while back I posted about the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to determine the presence of alligator snapping turtles, simply by testing the water. Obviously, it’s a bit ridiculous to call the process “simple”, but it’s safer for scientists, less invasive for the turtles, and this technology means that instead of the time and effort spent laying hands on the organism in question, someone can collect water sample, label it, and send it to a lab. This might be bad news for those of us who like doing that kind of field work (certainly more than I like lab work or data analysis), but it’s great news for our overall ability to understand what’s happening in the ecosystems of which we’re a part. I called that process “scrying for turtles”, because while DNA testing isn’t magic, it sure as hell resembles some forms of it. You use powerful energies, dangerous potions, and complicated rituals, and you gain knowledge of what that water has touched, if you know the right questions to ask.

Well, it turns out we can scry the wind, as well as the water. More than that, it seems that we may even be able to ask questions of wind that was trapped in bottles, long ago:

In their new study, researchers including Clare, Allerton, and Brown along with Nina Garrett, York University Toronto, and first author Joanne Littlefair, Queen Mary University of London, tested whether airborne eDNA containing information about the local plant, insect, and other animal life is captured on filters as a by-product of regularly operating air quality monitoring networks that are intended to monitor heavy metals and other pollutants in the atmosphere. After extracting and amplifying DNA from filters sampled at monitoring stations at two locations in the UK, they found an astonishing record of biodiversity trapped on the filters.

Their analyses recovered eDNA from more than 180 different plants, fungi, insects, mammals, birds, amphibians, and other groups. They report that the species list included many “charismatic species such as badgers, dormice, little owls, and smooth newts, species of special conservation interest such as hedgehogs and songbirds, trees including ash, linden, pine, willow, and oak, plants like yarrows, mallows, daisy, nettles, and grasses, arable crops such as wheat, soybean, and cabbage.”

They also note that the filters had DNA from 34 species of birds. The data showed that longer sampling times captured an increased number of vertebrate species, presumably as more mammals and birds visited the area over time.

The researchers contend, based on their findings, that air quality monitoring networks have been gathering local biodiversity data in a standardized way and on continental scales routinely for many years but that “the ecological significance of these samples has gone unnoticed.” In some places, samples are kept for decades, suggesting that existing samples capturing ecological data over time already exist. With only minor changes to current air quality monitoring protocols, the researchers say that these samples could be used for detailed monitoring of terrestrial biodiversity, relying entirely on a network that is already in operation.

Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and it really feels like that applies to this sort of eDNA stuff. I’ve seen the work that has historically gone into environmental monitoring, and it can be brutal. Now, apparently, we can just ask the wind. To be clear – field work will still be needed. We’re able to get this much information from eDNA because people have already collected DNA samples from all those species. It may be that we’ll be able to discover the presence of new species this way, similar to how it’s possible to discover new bird species by pinpointing unidentified songs, but I think it’s likely that we’ll still need people to go lay eyes and/or hands on individuals to get the whole picture. That said, the amount that we can learn through this air sampling is almost certain to be revolutionary.

“The most important finding, to my mind, is the demonstration that aerosol samplers typically used in national networks for ambient air quality monitoring can also collect eDNA,” Allerton said. “One can infer that such networks — for all their years of operation and in other countries around the world — must have been inadvertently picking up eDNA from the very air we breathe.”

“The potential of this cannot be overstated,” Littlefair said. “It could be an absolute gamechanger for tracking and monitoring biodiversity. Almost every country has some kind of air pollution monitoring system or network, either government owned or private, and in many cases both. This could solve a global problem of how to measure biodiversity at a massive scale.”

The team is now working to preserve as many samples as possible with eDNA in mind. While the samples have already been collected, they say it will take a global effort to take full advantage of the biodiversity information they contain.

Because this is not magic, it will require a great deal of work to fully realize the potential that has been discovered here. DNA analysis may be quicker and easier, but the samples still have to be collected and analyzed. I don’t know how long it will be before we really see what this can bring us, but I find it very hard to believe that we won’t be hearing more about it soon. The technology for DNA analysis is everywhere, at this point, and scientists all over the world are going to be itching to get to work on this. Getting started on it will probably be pretty easy for most universities, because everyone already has almost everything they need.

Given the state of the world, I expect that a lot of the news we get from this will be somewhat dire. We’re going to get a lot of new information, but it’s not going to suddenly show that the mass extinction isn’t happening, and scientists just got worse at counting things or something. This won’t change the pre-existing need for rapid political and economic change around the globe, because having more knowledge ends up meaning little, if that knowledge isn’t put to work. That said, the movements for that change continue, and the information that comes from air monitoring stations will almost certainly be of use in that effort. It’s a scary world out there, but it’s not all man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. There are man-made wonders, too.

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