Welcome to the plastisphere

Yale e360:

The plastic debris that litters the world’s oceans has developed its own unique and diverse microbial ecosystem, researchers report. The microscopic community, which scientists dubbed the “plastisphere,” includes more than 1,000 species of algae, bacteria, microscopic plants, symbiotic microbes, and possibly even pathogens, the researchers say in Environmental Science & Technology.

Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster

Jesse Anttila-Hughes:

While government responses to disasters have improved in most countries over the past few decades, and disaster warning systems mean that we’ve been steadily reducing fatalities for all but the most sudden of events, there has been very little in the way of systematic study of life after disasters are over and clean up crews long gone.

A timely summary of work he’s done over the past year or so.

9 Years of OpenStreetMap GPS Tracks Available for Mapping

Eric Fischer:

All public GPS tracks ever uploaded to OpenStreetMap are now available for tracing in the iD editor. Click the new “OpenStreetMap GPS traces” option in the background settings panel to reveal an overlay of GPS tracks on the map. You can use it to map roads, check one way streets, or adjust imagery where it is offset.

Check out the crop duster’s tracks. Wild.

Support Per Square Mile—and a worthy cause

Original Per Square Mile t-shirt

A little over a year ago, I started an experiment—I began offering memberships on Per Square Mile. All of the content on Per Square Mile is just as free and accessible as it ever was, but members receive a few perks that make Per Square Mile that much more accessible. Perhaps more importantly, they also know they’re supporting quality, thoughtful writing. In my first year of offering memberships, I broke even.

Per Square Mile is one of my passions, though I’m fortunate in that it isn’t my lifeblood—thankfully I have a full-time job that I very much enjoy—so I don’t feel the need to turn a profit. But as a journalist and editor, I believe that quality writing should be recognized, and the currency of our time is, well, currency. With that in mind, it’s time for a new membership drive, though this year it has new twist.

I’ll be donating 25 percent of membership proceeds to the Children and Nature Network, a nonprofit that works to expose more kids to the wonders of the great outdoors. And once my bills are paid, I’ll donate 100 percent of membership proceeds to the organization.

In the interests of transparency, here’s how much Per Square Mile costs me to run for one year.

  • $480 for hosting the site
  • $24 for hosting images
  • $10 in domain name registration
  • $514 total

Those numbers do not include the time I dedicate to writing, maintaining, and upgrading the site. Since the last membership drive, I’ve written 32 original articles, added hundreds of link posts, and thoroughly reworked the site to look great on desktops, tablets, and smartphones. The time I’ve invested is considerable—anywhere from 5-10 hours in an average week, sometimes more—but I’m not asking to be paid for that. Instead, consider that effort my contribution, just as marathon runners do when they train, raise funds, and compete in charity races.

As before, there are two ways you can become a Per Square Mile member—buy a stylish T-shirt (all new for this year) for $29 or contribute $19 or more. Both are great ways to support a site—and a cause—that I sincerely believe in. I hope you agree.

An Accidental Cattle Ranch Points the Way in Sustainable Farming

Stephanie Strom, reporting for the New York Times about a new business venture by a retired hedge fund manager and his wife:

The couple did not set out to raise prime grass-fed beef at TomKat Ranch, which sprawls across some 1,800 acres in this rural community near the ocean off Highway 1. The plan was to create a model conservation project, demonstrating ways to improve soil health, use solar energy and conserve water. “This wasn’t about cows,” Ms. Taylor said.

But once cows became part of the plan to restore the land, it was not too long before TomKat also became an agricultural project, one that the couple hope will help develop sustainable farming practices that can be put to use far beyond Pescadero.

“Think of the ranch as a huge science experiment,” Mr. Steyer said. “Can you raise animals sustainably? Can the land become the carbon sink that it once was? Can you demonstrate a way of doing agriculture, raising food, that doesn’t damage the environment?

Who Is Conservation For?

Paul Voosen has a wonderful article at the Chronicle of Higher Education about the debate that has been roiling in the conservation world. It’s far too nuanced to capture in one, two, or even three neat pull quotes, but it’s well worth the read. 

New China Cities: Shoddy Homes, Broken Hope

Ian Johnson, reporting for the New York Times on Huaming, one of China’s booming cities built to house rural migrants:

Signs of social dysfunction abound. Young people, who while away their days in Internet cafes or pool halls, say that only a small fraction of them have jobs. The elderly are forced to take menial work to make ends meet. Neighborhood and family structures have been damaged.

Most worrying are the suicides, which local residents say have become an all-too-familiar sign of despair.

As China pushes ahead with government-led urbanization, a program expected to be endorsed at a Communist Party Central Committee meeting that began Saturday, many worry that the scores of new housing developments here may face the same plight as postwar housing projects in Western countries. Meant to solve one problem, they may be creating a new set of troubles that could plague Chinese cities for generations.

The comparison with post-war projects is particularly intriguing—and worrisome.

South Florida Faces Ominous Prospects From Rising Waters

Nick Madigan, reporting for the New York Times:

In the most dire predictions, South Florida’s delicate barrier islands, coastal communities and captivating subtropical beaches will be lost to the rising waters in as few as 100 years.

Further inland, the Everglades, the river of grass that gives the region its fresh water, could one day be useless, some scientists fear, contaminated by the inexorable advance of the salt-filled ocean. The Florida Keys, the pearl-like strand of islands that stretches into the Gulf of Mexico, would be mostly submerged alongside their exotic crown jewel, Key West.

I flew over much of Florida a week or so ago on the way to a conference. It had been a number of years since I had been there, and I had forgotten how omnipresent water is in the state, especially in the southern part. It literally surfaces all over the place, and as our plane passed over the Everglades and Miami, I was asking myself the same question raised in this article—how long does Florida have?

San Francisco Bay Area at night

sf-bay-area-at-night

This fantastic view of the San Francisco Bay Area was captured from aboard the International Space Station using a standard DSLR camera—nothing fancy. The large blank spots are either water or mountain ranges (with the exception of some areas in the north and west of the frame—top and right—where farmland dominates).

Cut in Food Stamps Forces Hard Choices on Poor

Kim Severson and Winnie Hu, reporting for the New York Times:

“I try to get most of the things my daughter eats because I can hold the hunger — I’m an adult — but she cannot,” she said. “They don’t understand when there’s no food in the fridge.”

Cost of renewable energy’s variability is dwarfed by the savings

John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica:

The fuel savings from not running the fossil fuel plants adds up to $7 billion, meaning the added costs are, at most, two percent of the savings. The fuel burned when spinning up the fossil fuel plants also makes a minimal contribution to pollution, either in the form of CO2 or in terms of nitrogen and sulfur compounds.

Perhaps the most significant news, however, is that the worst problems come earlier in the transition to renewables. “In terms of cycling costs,” the report notes, “there may be a big step in going from 0 percent to 13 percent wind/solar but a much smaller step in going from 13 percent to 33 percent.” In other words, once the percentage of renewables reaches a critical point, then the amount of adjustments we have to make becomes incremental.

Perhaps the hardest part of the transition from fossil fuels to renewables is the shift in costs from long- to short-term. Fossil fuel energy requires constant feeding to produce; most renewables do not. Low up-front costs are appealing to consumers, but clever financing models may shift that equation, which could help push renewables them through those tipping points.

Nat Geo Maps Show Big Changes Since First Atlas

Michael Fry, writing for National Geographic News:

Mapmaking in the 21st century is, of course, a much different affair than it was in the 1960s. While still laborious and time-intensive, it’s now less manual and more computer-driven. Gone are the days when platoons of specialized cartographers and cartographic staff—designers, researchers, place-name compilers, typographers, draftsmen, editors—marshaled their skills for months or years toward the production of a single map or atlas plate. The first edition required the efforts of no fewer than 39 cartographers, plus additional editorial and production staff. The tenth edition will employ many fewer hands and take far less time to complete.

And the maps themselves? They’re different, too, though not dramatically. National Geographic’s style and editorial policies have evolved over the years, but a National Geographic map in 2013 is unmistakably from the same cartographic gene pool as its mid-century ancestors.

To most atlas users, then, the real differences will be geographic. Indeed, the world we’re mapping in 2013 is a very different place than it was during the Kennedy administration.

LA plans citywide gigabit for homes and businesses

Jon Brodkin, writing for Ars Technica:

Residential broadband in LA today typically ranges from 5Mbps to 50Mbps from the likes of AT&T, Time Warner, Verizon, Cox, and Charter. Gigabit speeds are available to businesses, but at a higher price than other communities, Reneker said. By expanding gigabit access and hopefully lowering the price, LA hopes to attract new entrepreneurs and keep existing businesses from leaving the city.

Reneker said the network would be open, meaning the vendor would have to sell access on a wholesale basis to other network providers that want to deliver services over the fiber. “We’re not looking at trying to… be monopolistic and try to force anybody out of the market,” he said. The winning bidder should make out well, though, as it would gain lots of new residential, business, and government customers.

Cities are fed up with telcos and cable companies dragging their feet. I can’t blame them. When you look at the price/speed ratios, U.S. cities fare poorly

Scrooge McDucks

William H. Gross, founder and co-CEO of investment heavyweight Pimco:

Having benefited enormously via the leveraging of capital since the beginning of my career and having shared a decreasing percentage of my income thanks to Presidents Reagan and Bush 43 via lower government taxes, I now find my intellectual leanings shifting to the plight of labor.

And:

Developed economies work best when inequality of incomes are at a minimum. Right now, the U.S. ranks 16th on a Gini coefficient for developed countries, barely ahead of Spain and Greece. By reducing the 20% of national income that “golden scrooges” now earn, by implementing more equitable tax reform that equalizes capital gains, carried interest and nominal income tax rates, we might move up the list to challenge more productive economies such as Germany and Canada.

Self-Driving Pod Cars Are Coming to the U.K. in 2015

Damon Lavrinc, writing for Wired:

The U.K. town of Milton Keynes isn’t waiting for Google or General Motors to bring autonomous cars to the masses. Instead, it’s enlisting a fleet of 100 self-driving pods to run between the city’s central train station, shopping center, and office parks beginning in 2015.

The autonomous pods will carry two passengers, plus shopping bags, luggage, or a baby stroller, and will travel up to 12 mph in dedicated lanes inside the city.

Personalized rapid transit, self-driving cars—in the near future, we may not be able to tell the difference.

Camera-Armed Autocopters Mapping Forest Treetops

Wynne Parry, reporting for Txnologist:

Dandois is working on Ecosynth, a suite of tools his team is developing with National Science Foundation funding. Their goal is to allow anyone from a professional ecologist to a citizen scientist to generate an interactive, three-dimensional map of any landscape. He says that a confluence of ever-cheaper drones — Dandois prefers the less ominous term autocopters — with more accessible and user-friendly 3-D mapping and visualization software has made this project possible.

Face scrub micro-beads are choking the Great Lakes

Cory Doctorow, writing for Boing Boing:

Microplastic pollution in the surface waters of the Laurentian Great Lakes, a new paper in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, looks at the prevalence of micro-plastic beads, thought to originate with face-scrub, in the great lakes. These beads pass through water-treatment processing, and have long been suspected in freshwater pollution. The paper has occasioned a pledge from several big cosmetics companies to phase out the use of beads in their products.

Hail to the Minivan, Dowdy but Not Out

J. Peder Zane, writing for the New York Times:

Now, then, is the right time not to bury the minivan but to praise it. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a minivan has never been just a minivan. Like muscle cars and sport utility vehicles, it has also been a powerful symbol and a metaphor, of hopes and dreams, as well as compromises and disappointments. Its history is inextricably braided to major social and economic trends as well as to gender politics that have reshaped America since the 1980s.