But do you really know how many bees you’ll need?

I don’t know the exact numbers, but a lot of folks hear about declining bee populations, and seem to assume that’s talking about European honey bees. While it’s good to protect and care for our honey bees, the vast majority of bee troubles in the world are suffered by the myriad of wild species, many of which are specialists, surviving by pollinating one plant in particular. That means that if one bee that almost nobody is aware of goes extinct, it could soon be followed by a plant, and any other organisms that depend on it. That has big implications for any efforts at ecosystem management, so I’m glad that this team of researchers was looking into what sort of bee community is needed for a healthy meadow:

Previous research on bees as pollinators tended to focus on specific plants — frequently crops — or on entire communities of plants as if they were a single entity. This tended to over-emphasize the contribution of the most common bees, especially since 2% of the bee species provided 80% of the pollination in crops. But no previous work had asked the basic question: How many pollinator species are needed to pollinate all the species in a given community of plants?

Roswell and his colleagues have now shown that the more plant species there are, the more bee species are needed for pollination. They found that the less common bees often visited specific plants others didn’t. Their findings shed new light on the role of rare species in ecosystems — critical to conservation efforts because rare species are most at risk of extinction from habitat loss, pollution, climate change and other factors. The study appeared April 13, 2022, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“Our work shows that things that are rare in general, like infrequent visitors to a meadow, can still serve really important functions, like pollinating plants no one else pollinates,” said Roswell, who studies diversity and pollination in the UMD Department of Entomology and is a co-author of the study. “And that’s a really good argument for why biodiversity matters.”

The researchers surveyed 10 plots in New Jersey that included wild meadows and seeded fields over one year. They observed bees from over 180 species making nearly 22,000 visits to over 130 different plant species. The team used these encounters to estimate the pollination services each type of bee provided to each plant, because a plant’s most frequent floral visitors are typically its most important pollinators.

Their analyses showed that an entire meadow community relied on 2 ½ to 7 ½ times more bee species for pollination than a single typical plant species does. They also found that the locally rare species accounted for up to 25% of the important pollinator species, and that number was greatest in meadows with the most plant diversity. This suggests that at larger scales like entire ecosystems, the number of locally rare species that are important for pollination is even greater.

“We were looking at meadows that might be a few acres in size,” Roswell said, “but a typical bee flies over a couple of square miles, which is a really large and complicated landscape filled with lots of different kinds of plants that flower at different times and are visited by different insects. At that scale, even more diversity of pollinators is likely to be important.”

As I’ve said before, I’ve largely given up on stopping climate chaos and mass extinction in my lifetime. My goal is to do what I can to slow it, and to help humanity survive long enough to get our act together. Part of that will need to be ecosystem management. As we work to survive a rapidly warming climate, we should invest whatever resources we can on helping the rest of the biosphere survive as well. Part of doing that is going to be understanding the general shape of a healthy ecosystem, so we can best decide how to help.

Tenrec Tuesday

As you may have guessed, there’s no post from Tegan this week. Grad school has her swamped, and considering that’s the reason we’re in this country, it’s more than reasonable than posting here is pretty low priority by comparison. Instead, you get a low-effort post from me about something that starts with a “T”!

When I was a kid, most of my interests revolved around nature, and specifically animals. A majority of the media I consumed was nature documentaries, and magazines like National Geographic and Ranger Rick. Somewhere among all of that, I discovered tenrecs. I don’t remember when it was, exactly, just that they fascinated me. I now invite you to share my fascination:

When you count the fish, the fish may be counting you…

Once Upon A Time, in a land far, far away from where I’m writing this, I worked for a non-profit science education research corporation called TERC. I did a number of different kinds of work there, but my favorite was designing lesson plans and activities to help people learn about ecology and climate science. One of teams I was on did a lot of outreach to schools, museums, nature centers, aquaria, and other organizations that dealt with science education in New England, with the goal of building connections between schools and “informal” educational institutions, so that kids could do actual research activities as part of their science education.

Climate change ecology is a field that spends a lot of time on phenology – the study of seasonal behavioral patterns. The first lessons in our Climate Lab project involved spring leaf-out, and bird migration, for example, and some of the first research I dug up for a list of recorded changes due to climate change was fish moving north earlier in the season, because the water was getting too warm. It makes sense, right? With the temperature rising, and the weather getting more unpredictable, plants and animals have been getting mixed signals from their environment, and it’s been throwing everything into chaos for at least a couple decades now. Insects and plants come out early because it’s warmer. That’s fine for the insects, but it’s terrible for the plants and the birds. A lot of migratory birds rely on things like day length or some evolved internal clock or sense of Earth’s orbit. That means that they can’t change their timing in response to changes in weather – climate change doesn’t affect that.

So the birds arrive late, because the bugs were out early, and their offspring either starve, or don’t get as good a start on life. More than that, the annual horde of caterpillars are no longer kept in check by birds, so they do a lot more damage to the plants they eat, which in turn makes them less resilient.

And that’s just one set of relationships. It doesn’t touch on how mammals fit in, the effects on things like pollination, or how the damage to the migratory bird population affects the ecosystems in South or Central America where they spend their winters. As I studied this stuff, I got a distinct feeling that although I couldn’t see it, the entire surface of the planet was seething around us, like the ripples on the surface of a pot of water just about to boil. Plants and animals are evolving – changing their shapes and sizes in response to their changing environment. The birds I mentioned before are changing their migratory timing, but they’re doing it the hard way; the individuals who migrate too late often can’t keep their young alive, and those that migrate earlier do a little better. Generation by generation, death by death, everything around us is changing; but it’s not changing fast enough.

If we ever get our act together, politically, and start trying to actually clean up our mess, we’re going to want to know what’s been happening in the ecosystems around us. That will give us the tools we need to help shore up their weaknesses, and help rebuild the ecosystems on which we depend. That’s why it’s essential that the sciences continue to be a priority as we deal with this chaotic new world, and why I was so proud to be part of a project that was teaching people how to participate in that research, even without any actual training in science.

The activities I helped design were often based on the specialties and resources of the nature center in question, be it fish or fowl, and at the tail end of my time at TERC, I started working on materials connected to the Mystic River Watershed Association (MRWA. In particular, we were focused on fish migration. Salmon are probably the most famous (and in my opinion best-tasting) anadromous fish, but the waters of the world are teeming with fish that live most of their lives in the ocean, but swim up streams and rivers to breed. Probably the second most famous, at least in the Boston area where I used to live, is the Alewife. The Alewife is an anadromous herring that historically ran in streams along the northern Atlantic coast of North America. It’s the name of the northernmost station on the MBTA’s Red Line, and the name of a nearby brook. Alewife brook used to be filled with the fish every year, but in living memory, it has been a polluted roadside canal inhabited by algae and invasive carp.

That said, there have been conservation efforts along the coast, in contrast to the control efforts further west, where canals and shipping have turned them into an invasive species. The MRWA is responsible for one of the conservation successes, and they oversee a fish ladder to allow Alewife and their cousin species the blueback herring to get over a dam and into the Mystic Lakes, where they spawn. In this case, “oversee” is literal, as they’ve got a camera to record the fish during their seasonal runs, to help track the population.

The problem is, the only way to be sure of their numbers is to literally count them. It’s a monumental task, and one that’s ripe for counting errors. They’ve found a brilliant solution, and it gets back to the kinds of educational activities I mentioned at the beginning. There’s a website where anyone in the world can look at sections of video, count how many fish they see, and enter that number. The video presented is random, and your count is considered along with everyone else who entered a count for that same video. That means that if I count a leaf as a fish, your more accurate count basically cancels out my error. When you have a dozen different people looking at each video, the odds are pretty good that an accurate consensus will emerge. There’s no need for a supercomputer or for someone to spend countless hours watching blurry fish go by a window, and trying to stay focused enough to get an accurate count.

Some poor intern, or maybe a graduate student, working late into the night for far too little money, running on cheap coffee and food from the vending machine down the hall. Everyone else is in bed by now, but he has to count the endless stream of fish, and every time he loses track, he has to restart the video, until time seems to blur together and his Sisyphean task becomes a surreal daydream. And now the fish aren’t just swimming by. They’re looking at him through the window. No. It’s a video. He’s in the computer lab but… They see him. He’s certain of it. Are they- could they be counting him?

The image shows Ancient Aliens producer Giorgio Tsoukalos saying,

This brings us to the reason I wrote this post.

Suppose there are some coins on the table in front of you. If the number is small, you can tell right away exactly how many there are. You don’t even have to count them – a single glance is enough. Cichlids and stingrays are astonishingly similar to us in this respect: they can detect small quantities precisely – and presumably without counting. For example, they can be trained to reliably distinguish quantities of three from quantities of four.

This fact has been known for some time. However, the research group led by Prof. Dr. Vera Schluessel from the Institute of Zoology at the University of Bonn has now shown that both species can even calculate. “We trained the animals to perform simple additions and subtractions,” Schluessel explains. “In doing so, they had to increase or decrease an initial value by one.”

Blue means “add one,” yellow means “subtract one”

But how do you ask a cichlid for the result of “2+1” or “5-1”? The researchers used a method that other research groups had already successfully used to test the mathematical abilities of bees: They showed the fish a collection of geometric shapes – for example, four squares. If these objects were colored blue, this meant “add one” for the following discrimination. Yellow, on the other hand, meant “subtract one.”

After showing the original stimulus (e.g. four squares), the animals were shown two new pictures – one with five and one with three squares. If they swam to the correct picture (i.e. to the five squares in the “blue” arithmetic task), they were rewarded with food. If they gave the wrong answer, they went away empty-handed. Over time, they learned to associate the blue color with an increase of one in the amount shown at the beginning, and the yellow number with a decrease.

But can the fish apply this knowledge to new tasks? Had they actually internalized the mathematical rule behind the colors? “To check this, we deliberately omitted some calculations during training,” Schluessel explains. “Namely, 3+1 and 3-1. After the learning phase, the animals got to see these two tasks for the first time. But even in those tests, they significantly often chose the correct answer.” This was true even when they had to decide between choosing four or five objects after being shown a blue 3 – that is, two outcomes that were both greater than the initial value. In this case, the fish chose four over five, indicating they had not learned the rule ‘chose the largest (or smallest) amount presented’ but the rule ‘always add or subtract one’.

Computing without a cerebral cortex

This achievement surprised the researchers themselves – especially since the tasks were even more difficult in reality than just described. The fish were not shown objects of the same shape (e.g. four squares), but a combination of different shapes. A “four”, for example, could be represented by a small and a larger circle, a square and a triangle, whereas in another calculation it could be represented by three triangles of different sizes and a square.

“So the animals had to recognize the number of objects depicted and at the same time infer the calculation rule from their color,” Schluessel says. “They had to keep both in working memory when the original picture was exchanged for the two result pictures. And they had to decide on the correct result afterwards. Overall, it’s a feat that requires complex thinking skills.”

To some it may be surprising because fish don’t have a neocortex – the part of the brain also known as the “cerebral cortex” that’s responsible for complex cognitive tasks in mammals. Moreover, neither species of fish is known to require particularly good numerical abilities in the wild. Other species might pay attention to the strip count of their sexual partners or the amount of eggs in their clutches. “However, this is not known from stingrays and cichlids,” emphasizes the zoology professor at the University of Bonn.

She also sees the result of the experiments as confirmation that humans tend to underestimate other species – especially those that do not belong to our immediate family or mammals in general. Moreover, fish are not particularly cute and do not have cuddly fur or plumage. “Accordingly, they are quite far down in our favor – and of little concern when dying in the brutal practices of the commercial fishing industry”, says Vera Schluessel.

I’m afraid it’s true; the whole science education and alewife thing was just a red herring.

Aside from all the other ways this kind of research is useful and interesting, I think it makes a good reminder of how evolution actually works. Contrary to popular mythology, no species on this planet is more or less “evolved” than any other. We’ve all been here the same amount of time, and we all evolved as conditions guided us. When being able to do just a little math helps something survive and reproduce, then that ability will stick around. It’s the same as light-sensitive cells evolving into eyes. Natural selection isn’t random, but the fact that we ended up where we are as a species is random.

As sapient animals, we’re in this weird position where we survive by killing and consuming other life forms, but we can also recognize that those life forms are literally our relatives. I have yet to square this feeling with the fact that I’m not a vegetarian, but when I learn something like this about a fellow animal, I just want to cheer on my “cousin” for being smarter than we realized.

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Sunday Sermon: From sewer to stovetop, it’s the little things.

Folks who’ve been reading this blog for a while might remember that when I moved into my current flat, its appliances were in less than stellar condition. It was almost two months before I had a fridge that was more than an insulated cabinet with a light, for example. The other noticeable problem was that only three out of four burners on the glass-top stove worked, and one of those three had a big crack across it. A couple months ago, the cracked burner died, and one of the two that remained would blow a fuse if we didn’t cut off power to the stove before turning the burner on or off.

I’m telling you all of this, because this week the property management company finally got around to getting us a new stovetop, and it’s frankly delightful to have a clean, functional stove.

It’s easy to under-estimate just how wonderful modern appliances are. In addition to your standard range of gas and electric ranges, I’ve cooked on wood stoves, a variety of camp stoves (one of which dumped boiling water on me – I don’t recommend it), and camp fires of various sizes. Through high school and college, I spent a lot of time camping in pretty much all conditions that occur in New England, including three summer jobs that had me doing so professionally. My preference for that has always been your standard camp fire (in high school I often had to light them without matches or lighters), but the reality is that there’s a lot of work involved in using and maintaining wood stoves. Not only that, but cooking with wood indoors generates enough air pollution to do real harm, over time.

Having a modern stove isn’t as important as having clean, running water, but I think it’s something that many of us are too inclined to take for granted.

It’s also something that’s worth considering, as it’s one of the uses of energy that a lot of people are going to have to change, if we ever get around to ending fossil fuel use. It’s my understanding that gas is the preferred stove type for people who love cooking, and I do understand why. It gives you the ability to easily control temperature, and switch from full heat to none at all almost instantly. Electric stoves take longer to reach the desired temperature, and to cool down. This means that you’ve got a dangerously hot surface just sitting there when you’re done with it, but it also means that if you want to reduce the heat of something you’re cooking, you have to remove it from the surface, like you would with a wood stove. That fact alone tends to mean that you need a bit more space to cook the same meal on an electric or wood stove than you do with gas.

That said, we have to stop extracting fossil gas. We should have stopped years ago. For most of us, that means the kinds of electric stoves I’ve been using for most of my adult life. For some people – and I’ve no idea how this would be decided – there is a renewable source of cooking gas that will always exist in reliable proportion to our population, plus livestock. That source, of course, is sewage. Biogas is not a new thing. The fact that every sewage treatment plant and garbage processing center in the world doesn’t have a biogas setup is yet another grim example of just how little our leaders care about climate change. The technology has been cheap and easy for so long that it was a key part of Mad Max: Beyond The Thunderdome, when I was was one year old:

There’s no question that the potential biogas supply, at least from human waste, is smaller than the fossil gas supply, but all of the carbon in biogas came from the atmosphere, and so at worst it’s carbon-neutral, and when it comes to replacing fossil fuels, reliability may count for almost as much as actual energy production. It means you can count on that amount of power being available, always in proportion to the population, just like you can count on the daily fluctuations in solar power generation.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that the amount of power that can be generated this way is significant.

Thames Water generated enough renewable energy from sewage in 2021 to cook 112 million Christmas turkeys.

The UK’s largest water company created almost 140 million cubic metres (m3) of biogas last year via its sewage treatment process. This was transformed into more than 300 million kWh of electricity.

Crossness sewage works in Greenwich was the biggest producer of renewable energy in 2021, churning out more than 18.5 million m3, enough to cook 15 million turkeys, while Mogden sewage works in Twickenham and Beckton in Newham generated approximately 18 million and 12 million m3 each.

“Creating our own clean, green energy is an important part of our sewage treatment process and we’re generating more and more each year,” commented Matt Gee, Thames Water’s energy & carbon strategy and reporting manager.

“Doing this allows us to power our sites with renewable, eco-friendly fuels, and as we continue to generate more, we want to export it to be used in our local communities.”

Eliot Whittington, director of the UK Corporate Leaders Group, of which Thames Water is a member, added: “As more and more of the world sets strong targets for climate change, it’s essential that action follows ambition.

“Thames Water’s investment in renewable energy is a great Christmas present to the UK’s climate targets and to the communities it operates in and makes a strong down payment on its long-term ambition to be net-zero by 2030.”

The company, which has already cut emissions by almost 70% since 1990, completed a biogas project at Chertsey sewage works in October last year. The £700,000 scheme is the latest in a roll-out which also covers Thames Water sites in London and the Thames Valley. Three-quarters of the firm’s boilers now run on biogas and it is aiming to convert all sites by the end of 2025.

Thames Water has been running biogas plants for a while now, and it’s been generating them a tidy profit, in addition to the ability to honestly say they’re doing something about climate change. They’re also a good example of how far we have to go when it comes to even the lowest-hanging fruit of climate action.

Half the reason global warming is so extremely dangerous to us is the speed at which it’s happening. If we’d stayed on the timeline Svante Arrhenius predicted around the beginning of the 20th century, we’d have hundreds of years before the planet’s temperature got to where it is today, and while we might not have been proactive about that change, we might well have had time to do it from generation to generation, and still avoid catastrophe.

I’m not saying that to frustrate you with what might have been, but to emphasize that reducing emissions really can buy us time, according to the same physics that tells us how great the danger is. There are a myriad of “small” things that can be done at local and regional levels that really will make a difference, and will likely improve people’s quality of life at the same time. Better insulation for homes, more efficient appliances, more people working from home, and yes – more sewage and other organic waste used to generate biogas – really can slow things down, and give us time to adapt, and to do other things that will also slow the change.

This problem is too big for any of us to tackle as individuals, but there are aspects of it that can absolutely be tackled at the local level, an that touch our lives pretty directly. That local action can inspire the same thing to happen elsewhere, and with things like the internet, one community can help others follow in their footsteps. We’ve never faced a crisis like this before, but we’ve also never had more capacity to coordinate with people on every part of this planet.

And we can keep on cooking with gas while we do it. In theory, anyway. I’m still using electric, but that’s more than fine, especially now that I have a shiny new stove!

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: The ongoing harm of French colonialism in Africa

While it could be argued that the colonial era is over, there is zero question that the power dynamics, harm, and injustices of colonialism continue around the world to this day. Occasionally, something will happen that draws attention to this fact – the U.S. government brutalizing Native American people for standing in the way of oil profits, for example. These sensational moments are a very real part of colonialism’s ongoing violence, but I think it’s fair to say that they’re a small portion of the overall damage being done. It’s the sort of subject that can only really be tackled in pieces, simply because of how much of humanity is still dealing with the damage done by the colonial empires. For various reasons, I think I tend to focus on the Americas, but the Gravel Institute has put together a great video on the legacy of French imperialism in Africa:

Having a social life interferes with blogging

Socializing with Tegan’s colleagues, so today you get a discussion of animals that abuse the rules of Physics.

“Animals are the NPCs, plants are the boss.”

– Kayleigh

Edit: Met some cool people, including an Uillean piper who was at the table we ended up sitting at, and joined us to chat about the joys of playing double-reed instruments and gig musicianship.

Weep for Cassandra if you must, but heed her warnings, for humanity’s sake

It’s April of 2022. We’ve had a couple years of disruption, primarily caused by the collision of late capitalism and SARS-CoV-2, which itself followed a couple years of unrest in the United States, and the growing realization that fascism was still a real threat. And in the background of all of this, we’ve had a steady march of disasters fueled by global warming, and scientific reports quantifying exactly how screwed we are.

Small wonder, then, that superstition seems to be on the rise. Every headline about black goo in a sarcophagus, or climate change revealing ancient artifacts was met with a lot of joking-not-joking about curses, or Pandora’s Box.

For myself, I have to wonder if some early climate scientist broke an indecent agreement with Apollo, so that all future climate scientists would be cursed to speak the truth about the growing threat of climate change, and to be disbelieved or dismissed by everyone with the power to do anything about it. Worse, an entire industry has formed around attacking and discrediting climate scientists. If you want to get a taste of that frustration, you can check out things like The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, by Michael E. Mann.

I once heard someone say that the more you learn about nuclear power, the less it scares you, but the more you learn about climate change, the more it scares you. Imagine, then, the life of someone whose full time job is monitoring this unfolding catastrophe, and reporting on it to what often seems like an indifferent world.

The reality, of course, is that most of humanity is not indifferent. Most of us care very much about what’s happening, we just don’t currently have the power to change anything. That’s something we should be working on, but in the meantime, at least part of our efforts do need to go towards convincing the ruling class to at least stop accelerating towards the proverbial cliff. Climate scientists have been making that case for decades now, and it has been a thankless task.

Among the many attacks levied against them, one that always irked me especially was the claim that climate scientists were “getting political” by describing the implications of their research, and by urging action. It is so obviously insincere, and yet it has hung around. I think part of its longevity is the fact that it does double duty. It casts doubt on the science, and it communicates to the audience that “being political” is an inherently bad thing. That’s dangerous, of course, because if we’re going to have any hope of a better world, we must get political , and at a scale the world has never seen before.

I am nowhere close to being alone in making the Cassandra comparison, and unfortunately it seems to be just as unpleasant as you’d think. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist, published this letter in association with a protest carried out by him and his colleagues:

I’m a climate scientist and a desperate father. How can I plead any harder? What will it take? What can my colleagues and I do to stop this catastrophe unfolding now all around us with such excruciating clarity?

On Wednesday, I risked arrest by locking myself to an entrance to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles with colleagues and supporters. Our action in LA is part of an international campaign organized by a loosely knit group of concerned scientists called Scientist Rebellion, involving more than 1,200 scientists in 26 countries and supported by local climate groups. Our day of action follows the IPCC Working Group 3 report released Monday, which details the harrowing gap between where society is heading and where we need to go. Our movement is growing fast.

We chose JP Morgan Chase because out of all the investment banks in the world, JP Morgan Chase funds the most new fossil fuel projects. As the new IPCC report explains, emissions from current and planned fossil energy infrastructure are already more than twice the amount that would push the planet over 1.5°C of global heating, a level of heating that will bring much more intense heat, fire, storms, flooding, and drought than the present 1.2°C.

Even limiting heating to below 2°C, a level of heating that in my opinion could threaten civilization as we know it, would require emissions to peak before 2025. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in the press conference on Monday: “Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” And yet, this is precisely what President Biden, most other world leaders, and major banks are doing. It’s no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance.

Earth breakdown is much worse than most people realize. The science indicates that as fossil fuels continue to heat our planet, everything we love is at risk. For me, one of the most horrific aspects of all this is the juxtaposition of present-day and near-future climate disasters with the “business as usual” occurring all around me. It’s so surreal that I often find myself reviewing the science to make sure it’s really happening, a sort of scientific nightmare arm-pinch. Yes, it’s really happening.
If everyone could see what I see coming, society would switch into climate emergency mode and end fossil fuels in just a few years.

I hate being the Cassandra. I’d rather just be with my family and do science. But I feel morally compelled to sound the alarm. By the time I switched from astrophysics into Earth science in 2012, I’d realized that facts alone were not persuading world leaders to take action. So I explored other ways to create social change, all the while becoming increasingly concerned. I joined Citizens’ Climate Lobby. I reduced my own emissions by 90% and wrote a book about how this turned out to be satisfying, fun, and connecting. I gave up flying, started a website to help encourage others, and organized colleagues to pressure the American Geophysical Union to reduce academic flying. I helped organize FridaysForFuture in the US. I co-founded a popular climate app and started the first ad agency for the Earth. I spoke at climate rallies, city council meetings, and local libraries and churches. I wrote article after article, open letter after open letter. I gave hundreds of interviews, always with authenticity, solid facts, and an openness to showing vulnerability. I’ve encouraged and supported countless climate activists and young people behind the scenes. And this was all on my personal time and at no small risk to my scientific career.

Nothing has worked. It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.

Martin Luther King Jr said, “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Out of necessity, and after exhaustive efforts, I’ve joined the ranks of those who selflessly risk their freedom and put their bodies on the line for the Earth, despite ridicule from the ignorant and punishment from a colonizing legal system designed to protect the planet-killing interests of the rich. It’s time we all join them. The feeling of solidarity is a wonderful balm.

As for the climate scientists? We’ve been trying to tell you this whole time.

This was one part of a multinational protest by over 1,000 climate scientists, aimed specifically at the big banks that are funding – and profiting from – our destruction. The notion that scientists ought to be non-political has always been a lie that could only ever benefit the powerful. In a world that seems to only value the sensational, we need acts of civil disobedience like this, and we need to build the capacity to wield collective power for the collective good. These scientists are in the right when they aim for the heart of our capitalist system, and while I really, really want to be wrong about this, I have little hope that our corporate overlords will suddenly decide to do the right thing.

One thing I think we should be doing, beyond organizing and protesting, is finding ways to bring up climate change with politicians and their representatives. Not just climate change, but the ways in which our system – working as it was designed – is making it profitable to turn this planet into a sweltering hellscape. Make it impossible for them to ignore, and when they respond with talking points, challenge those, and the ones that come after them. Individually, we’re limited in how much time and energy we can spend on this. Anyone with a sense of perspective realizes that the mightiest effort of one person is a drop in the bucket, compared to the size of the problem. If we can get enough of us moving in the same direction, those drops can become a relentless storm, and if we can’t force our rulers to at least go with the flow, then maybe we can wash them away.

Thanks to StevoR for requesting the topic.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

What’s with all those big green and brown things that sway in the wind? Are they actually worth anything?

The way our society determines value is deeply flawed. It’s not that there’s no relationship between what things cost, and the resources expended to produce them, but a great many things are vastly over-valued, and many other things – including most life forms on the planet – are vastly under-valued. Those flaws are compounded by the fact that we seem to be increasingly encouraged to view every aspect of our lives through the lens of capitalism, in which things are generally deemed to have no value unless it’s proven someone will pay money for them. Unfortunately, that’s the world we’re still stuck in, so there’s probably some merit to calculating the economic value of life. When it comes to wildlife, the ways in which it benefits humanity are called “ecosystem services“, as part of what I view as a failed attempt to get capitalism to assign any value to a habitable environment. Quantifying their value to us may not do much to change policy or stop environmental destruction, but it does put things in terms to which we’re accustomed:

Trees sequester and store greenhouse gasses, filter air pollutants, provide wood, food, and other products, among other benefits. However, the service value of 400 individual tree species and tree lineages growing in forests and plantations in the contiguous U.S. was not previously known. To determine the ecosystem services value of U.S. trees, researchers mapped the value of trees and calculated the economic contributions to these services of every US tree species and lineage. They measured the net value of five tree-related ecosystem services by calculating the value of benefits provided, minus the direct costs incurred to produce these services. The five key ecosystem services included climate regulating services from carbon storage, filtration of particulate matter from the air that harms human health, and provisioning services from production of wood products, food crops, and Christmas trees.

The researchers found that the value of these five ecosystem services generated by trees totaled $114 billion annually. Carbon storage in tree biomass comprised 51% of the net annual value, while preventing human health damages via air quality regulation, contributed to 37% of the annual value. The remaining 12% of the net annual value came from provisioning services. Trees in the pine and oak families were the most valuable, generating $25.4 billion and $22.3 billion in annual net benefits, respectively. The study had several limitations that likely contributed to an undervaluing of ecosystem services since the researchers did not have access to data for many ecosystem services such as erosion control, flood regulation, and shade-related energy savings. They also did not evaluate disservices of trees. Future studies may provide more accurate estimates of the monetary value of these benefits.

According to the authors, “This study shows that the ‘hidden’ value of trees — the nonmarket value from carbon storage and air pollution filtration — far exceeds their commercial value. Sustaining the value of trees requires intentional management of forests and trees in the face of myriad and simultaneous global change threats. Our study provides information and an approach that can contribute to precision forestry practices and ecosystem management.”

Cavender-Bares adds, “The fact that tree lineages have evolved to inhabit different ecological niches across the continent is important for sustaining the ecosystem services that we depend on for our life support systems. These benefits from trees, however, are increasingly at risk. Our research team found that climate change threatens nearly 90 percent of tree species, while pests and pathogens put 40 percent of the combined weight of all U.S. trees at risk. We also found that the species and lineages of greatest ecosystem service value are the most at risk from pests and pathogens, climate change, and increasing fire exposure.”

One of the most irksome parts of this environmental collapse is that we know what’s happening, why it’s happening, and how to stop it. That’s not even a general “we know what’s happening”. We have thousands of scientists all over the world studying everything. That’s why we’re able to do things like putting a dollar value to trees, or wetlands. Day after day, week after week we hear the relentless accounting of everything that’s going on around us, and yet we still have to try to dress up reality with dollar signs and big numbers in a hopeless effort to get the tiny-minded ghouls who run the world to pay attention to what’s being lost.

It’s draining. But hey – at least we know roughly what trees are worth!

Tegan Tuesday: Etsy sellers are going on strike

Article edited April 15, 2022

Next week, from April 11th through the 18th, there is a seller strike on Etsy. After years of increasingly hostile policies, the new seller fee increase is a step too far. There have been a number of planned strikes over the years, but this is the first one I’ve seen that has had any real traction. Many sellers will be putting their shops on Vacation Mode, as this makes it so that sales cannot be processed, and the strikers request that people not attempt to purchase goods during that time.

For those not familiar, Etsy is a microtransaction website, much like eBay, only it does not offer the bidding set-up, and it has traditionally privileged homemade or vintage objects. Anyone who has ever made the foolish mistake of knitting in public has had at least one person tell them that they should sell their wares on Etsy. Some of those lovely strangers will get quite cranky at the lack of enthusiasm at being voluntold to monetize their hobby. Because of my ability to find easier work elsewhere, I have never been an Etsy seller. But I have been a shopper! I bought my silver and my china on Etsy, I’ve bought furs, and I’ve bought any number of sewing patterns and books. Heck, Abe and I got our wedding rings from a blacksmith’s Etsy shop — I have been a longtime Etsy customer. I haven’t bought much in years, however, for a number of reasons. Initially, as a consumer, it seemed like it was difficult to find anything. I can’t even particularly put my finger on anything specific, but about five years ago I felt that things that I should have easily found were rare, or shops that I used to love were gone. It was confusing, but ultimately didn’t impact my life, so I ignored it, and just bought less.

It turns out there there were a number of policies and decisions happening “under the hood” that were actively making it difficult for sellers to make a living. The first large decision that shaped all the rest was of course becoming publicly traded. As of April 16, 2015, Etsy, Inc (NASDAQ: ETSY) has been a publicly traded company and thus has to answer to its shareholders and drive profit up. Ever expanding upwards! And then began the price gouging and offloading of financial burden to sellers. To quote Denise Hendrick of Romantic Recollections:

In the last couple years they have raised rates and added new, mandatory fees. 15% fees on orders from ads they run and that we cannot turn off. 5% on the amount buyers pay for shipping. They strongly pressure sellers to offer free shipping and run sales. It all adds up fast. They added programs like “star seller” that add to our workload and are hard to meet, but if we don’t hit that goal we’re not listed as highly. At the same time, more and more sellers are selling mass produced junk.”

Last year (or the year before — time has no meaning since Covid) Etsy also strong-armed most sellers into offering “free” shipping. When sellers rightfully asked how that would work, Etsy’s official stance was to artificially inflate your prices to hide the shipping costs. This was also during a push to dodge any responsibility for the many, many, many shipping issues during the pandemic, and allow buyers to recoup their costs with no fault and sellers to have to eat said costs. Now the seller is out the product and the income. This fee structure is so hostile to sellers and many have either left Etsy, or use Etsy only as a way for people to find their personal website. Taylor of Dames a la Mode only lists stock pieces on Etsy and offers limited runs or customizable options on her personal site, as that is her primary selling space. In her statement of intent to strike she says:

Etsy has changed dramatically over the years, and the fee increases are endless. That’s why my stuff on Etsy costs more than my website – their fees are so high! And the worst thing is they force you to pay to promote your items outside of Etsy (I truly, truly hate this but you can’t opt out… infuriation!)

There have been so many new fees, and increased fees, and seller-hostile policies that many sellers have felt their stores are experiencing death by a thousand cuts. Many sellers feel that it’s only a matter of time before their profits do not exceed the overhead at Etsy. The reason for the strike is that with record-breaking profits from last year, Etsy is implementing a 30% seller fee increase on all sales. This is an absolutely ridiculous number. The fact that all sellers received a yearly newsletter congratulating Etsy and thanking their hard work for said profit, only to have this fee thrown in their faces is… very corporate America.

One of the most faithful voices I have heard concerning the many issues plaguing Etsy sellers is that of Sultry Vintage. She closed the Vintage end of her Etsy shop last year due to an ever-increasing hedge of fees with policies encouraging sales and slashing prices. Her recent statement about supporting the strikers went out today and I think sums up the general feeling well.

Storms a brewing. Etsy recently sent out a newsletter congratulating everyone on their record profits. They then shared the news that they’d be hiking fees. Because Etsy is a publicly traded company with a backwards minded CEO, they profit share with investors and squeeze sellers for more to hand over to shareholders.

Sellers are the sole reason Etsy exists at all.

I many not make my entire living off Etsy any longer – Etsy and its hot garbage policies since going public being a contributing factor to that – but I do solidly stand with tens of thousands of independent small businesses who do. Who built Etsy, and who are being taken to the cleaners every time their hard work pays off.

I’m asking three things. One, if you’ve ever said you support small business – mean it. Right now, refuse to shop on Etsy for the week of the 11th-18th. Shop directly with sellers if you need something or plan ahead. Two, spread the word. It’s a small ask with massive, rippling effects. Three, if you can strike for any amount of time, do. Put the message in your vacation banner as to why you’re striking. Etsy has a policy of not allowing you to inform customers that they can shop with you off etsy (hilarious), so let them know now where to find you for that week and that is a crucial moment for support and shopping alternatively, off etsy.

Etsy has decided sellers are puppets meant only to reap them profits. It’s time the corporate structure acknowledge that without its sellers, Etsy ceases to exist, and honor the labor sellers put in that makes them boatloads of money while small businesses drown.

Please spread the word and go directly to the organizers of this movement for more info @etsy.strike

It makes sense that with the absolute nightmare situation that is labor right now, strikes and unions are forming everywhere. The Etsy strike is yet another one, and I think the time is certainly ripe for this strike in particular, and labor rights in general.

Of course there is a downside. There’s always a downside. Sellers who are barely breaking even can’t afford to strike. Lauren of Wearing History is only striking on the first day, for example. She is financially unable to close for a whole week, and doesn’t have the wherewithal to maintain a site that can reach her international customer base the way Etsy can. I have thankfully seen nothing but kindness and respect to those sellers who say they are unable to strike for financial reasons. I hope that continues as we get closer to the strike, especially as the biggest impediment to strike support is wanting to also support Ukrainian sellers. Elizabeth-Iryna of Bygone Memorabilia, The Boudoir Key, and Marie Theresa and Lumieres has been one of the most vocal Ukrainian makers and offered a clear statement in opposition:

Some of you sent me the “Sellers Ask Customers to Boycott Etsy” news due to increasing fees.

Thank you for thinking of me. 🙂 Unfortunately, selling completely outside of Etsy is not possible for me at the moment. Ukrainian users of Paypal can’t use it for business. Etsy didn’t cancel any fees for Ukrainian shops. When I can, I will open my website. I also use the help of intermediary for a few, because Paypal is still unavailable for Ukrainian business.

I cannot boycott Etsy because selling e-patterns on there is my one and only source of income at the moment. Same for other Ukrainians.

Yes, Etsy is making money on us. But it helps us live, too.

And therein lies the quandary: Ukrainian makers who are trapped in Ukraine or those who are refugees in other countries have very few options for income right now, and digital resources on Etsy have been a staple. Much like the movement to rent Ukrainian AirBnBs to send funds to Ukrainians, many people have sent financial support through Etsy purchases. Strikes are always difficult and often hurt those with the most to lose. I wish the strike well, and I hope that it doesn’t severely impact those sellers relying solely on Etsy for their daily needs. I’m unfortunately pessimistic enough to suspect that it will have little-to-no impact on the decision-makers at Etsy, and Etsy will continue to function as the saying goes: I know it’s crooked, but it’s the only game in town.

Abe here – if you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Action or despair? What’s the result of “climate deadline” rhetoric?

So I’m going to read the new IPCC report, and see if I have more in-depth commentary on it, but I wanted to say a couple words about the rhetoric surrounding the report, and a strategy I think basically anyone making six figures or more should consider.

While I get why it’s being pushed, the “now or never” rhetoric worries me for a couple reasons. The first is just that I’m worried it will push people to give up, since “now” clearly isn’t happening. The second is that I feel like it’s a continuation of the same obsession with the short term and with urgent crises that has gotten us to this point.

I have no evidence to back this up, but I think that if I was involved in climate messaging, I’d probably start making preparations for the world we seem to be creating, and simply talking about them in public on a regular basis. Store food against crop failures, and mention that it probably won’t be enough, if things keep warming. Start building water storage infrastructure, with rationing rules about how that emergency supply is to be used (very little for hygiene, for example). Put around plans to require new hotel construction (among other kinds of facilities) to double as emergency shelters with the capacity to keep indoor air at livable temperatures when it’s 45°C/113°F or higher, even if there’s a blackout. Put around draft regulations requiring new power plants to be able to operate safely under extreme heat wave conditions, because otherwise people will die.

If anyone with political or economic power happens to be reading this, and you actually care about climate change, the most powerful messaging you could probably do is to use the resources you have now to start making preparations for a much hotter world. You can be clear that you’re hoping this won’t be needed right away, but also paint a picture, with references to relevant research, of how our lives are going to change in the coming decades. Speeches will not work to convince people at this point – actions might have a shot.

And if people don’t like what your actions say about the future, then remind them that we know what we have to do to make that future better, we’re just not doing it.

I don’t know if this will be easier for politicians to do than directly tackling the fossil fuel industry right now, but I feel like it’s a powerful message to tell people that since corrupt monsters like Manchin (and many others) are preventing us from doing anything to slow or stop climate change, then it’s their duty to do what they can to help their constituents or communities survive.

Couple rhetoric with action wherever possible, and make it clear what path is being chosen for us with the status quo. I have a feeling that as things get worse, the political cost of opposing climate change adaptation measures will increase. It’s easy to abstract and confuse the causes of climate change, but when it comes to living with the effects, I think you’ll have a hard time convincing people that they don’t need to make any changes to survive.

It feels like we’re still stuck in the “capitalist realism” trap, where nobody seems to be able to conceive of any end to capitalism that isn’t also the end of the world. We know that technology and planning can help us survive more hostile conditions, but it really feels like the collective view is that if we can’t stop climate change from getting really bad, then we might as well just give up and die. It’s not just a bad strategy, it’s also frankly pathetic from a species with ambitions to live on other planets.

I don’t want to live in a world that’s a couple degrees hotter, but I don’t want to live under capitalism either, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up on my life and my species because a few rich assholes can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum for future generations. When we miss climate deadlines, that does mean certain changes are inevitable. It does not mean that if we don’t take action now, taking action a little later will be pointless – it’ll just be harder.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into this. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!