As People Live Longer, Threats to Wildlife Increase ∞

Brian Bienkowski, reporting for Environmental Health News:

The researchers examined social, economic and ecological information for 100 countries to determine which factors are most strongly linked to endangered and invasive birds and mammals. Human life expectancy is rarely included in such studies but turned out to be the best predictor of invasions and endangerment in these countries, according to the study published in Ecology and Society.

“Increased life expectancy means that people live longer and affect the planet longer; each year is another year of carbon footprint, ecological footprint, use of natural resources, etc. The magnitude of this impact is increased as more people live longer,” the authors wrote.

The uncanny valley of commerce, and what it means for your community

■ target

Your grocery store. Google. Target. What do these three have in common? They all gather personal information, and they all do it—and I’m paraphrasing here—”to serve their customers better.” In the case of your grocery store, they profile your habits to get you in the store, to buy more things. Same with Target. Google mines your personal information to hit you with ads you’re more likely to click on. In each case the company is looking to make money off their knowledge of you. It’s not that different from the way business used to be run. With one big exception.

In the past, when you visited a store, you may have known the owner. The owner of the hardware store knew you were a repeat customer, so he may have given you a deal on a new drill, knowing you’d probably be back for screws, lumber, and glue. Or maybe the owner of the shoe store, which you’d been shopping at for years, would cut you a deal on your kid’s new sneakers. In each case, they wanted to keep you as a customer. Your repeat business ensured future revenue, which is more valuable than a few extra dollars today.

Big businesses know this, too. They know that repeat customers are among the most profitable—that’s why there are frequent flier programs, club memberships, and loyalty cards. But somewhere along the line, they also realized they were sitting on a treasure trove. With every signup, with every logged purchase, people gave away personal information that hinted at what kind of customer they were. Companies started to mine that data, looking for patterns that would reveal even more intimate details. Target is perhaps best at this among large retailers, famously predicting their customers’ pregnancies weeks before they even know.¹

And therein lies the problem. Massive databases of personal information allow companies to do the same things businesses did in the past—offer deals to loyal customers, personalize offerings, and so on—but they do so without any sort of meaningful relationship. “Steve” may be genuinely interested in your budding family. Target is not, except to sell you more diapers. These companies are able to do make personal offerings, but in such a way that it’s clear no human is behind them. Call it the uncanny valley of commerce.

In commerce, though, relationships matter. That’s part—a large part, I’d argue—of what makes us queasy about data mining. Personalized deals are one thing when someone you know is offering them. But in the absence of a person we know, we don’t know what’s behind the gesture. Without a personal relationship, we can’t trust that these companies have our best interests in mind.

Now, things weren’t all sunshine and daisies in the past. Small operators used to disappear in the middle of the night, absconding with their customers’ money.² And while personal relationships can keep some vendors in line, it holds little meaning for others. It’s true that big companies can be held more accountable in many circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we trust them any more. There’s a reason they’re called “faceless corporations.”

Massive multinationals exist because of economies of scale, which has been shifting our economy from one driven by small proprietors to one dominated by large companies. It’s also changing the relationship between seller and buyer. And just as economies of scale have transformed businesses, they’ve also fostered population growth. The two go hand-in-hand. Because we’re now so numerous, we’re easier to deal with in bulk than one-on-one. But I suspect that transformation is also subtly altering our communities, displacing some of the relationships that were built around proprietors and customers. It’s not clear to me what’s taking their place.

There will always be opportunities for small businesses. How many? We don’t know. But there are certain to be fewer. Personal relationships in commerce will continue to wane, and I’m guessing it’ll have an enormous impact on our lives, our finances, and our communities.

  1. Charles Duhigg exposed some of Target’s secrets in his book The Power of Habit, an excerpt of which you can read online. ↩
  2. Though truth be told, the same thing can happen today. It’s called bankruptcy. ↩

Photo by Mr. T in DC

Related posts:

Population density and the evolution of ownership

The Midwest’s big economic miscalculation

Keep your eyes to yourself

Mashable to be a hub of environmental reporting? ∞

After the New York Times mothballed their environment desk, plenty of observers—myself included—wondered aloud what that meant for coverage of environmental topics. Well, it may be moving to upstarts like Mashable, who just hired former Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts.

Matthew Ingram, reporting for Paid Content:

As for what specific areas Mashable might concentrate on when it expands its horizons, Roberts said he didn’t want to go into too much detail because he has just joined the company — but he did say that one topic was the environment. “I think there is a nexus between the smart innovative tech coverage that Mashable has invested in over the years and what’s going with the climate — and with potential solutions or technologies that could be brought to bear,” he said. “That’s something where I’m going to invest a little passion.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t have worried so much when the Times deep-sixed the Green section. Still, I’ll hold my breath until we see what Mashable is able to turn out.

The race to map Earth's threatened rainforests ∞

Ed Yong, with a great story for Wired UK about the use of remote sensing to monitor deforestation:

Using the technology he’s developed, Asner is mapping the shape and size of the trees, down to individual branches, from two kilometres above. He can measure the carbon stored in trunks, leaves and soil. He can even identify individual plant species based on the chemicals they contain. With wings and lasers, Asner is conducting one of the most ambitious ecology studies ever staged. He accumulates more data in a single hour than most ecologists glean in a lifetime. With this data, he aims to influence governments, steer the course of climate-change treaties and save the forests over which he soars.

Turkish tunnel connects Europe and Asia ∞

BBC News:

A railway tunnel underneath the Bosphorus Strait is due to open in Turkey, creating a new link between the Asian and European shores of Istanbul.

The tunnel is the world’s first connecting two continents, and is designed to withstand earthquakes.

[…]

In theory it brings closer the day when it will be possible to travel from London to Beijing via Istanbul by train.

Can’t Get Away From It All? The Problem Isn’t Technology — It’s You ∞

Mat Honan, writing for Wired:

The practice of taking an intentional break from technology and civilization is probably as old as technology and civilization. But it seems increasingly urgent now, in an era when the Internet—and thus most of the planet—is as close as an iPhone. We go to seek waldeinsamkeit, as the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson described it—the feeling of being alone in the woods.

This feeling is prominent in our written history. In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist, Charles Marlow, is driven by his desire to visit the few remaining blank spaces on the map. That is, more or less, how many of us plan our vacations today. Of course, the rivers and valleys and borders were long ago mapped; our blank spaces are the few remaining holes in the global communications network. We go where it’s impossible to connect, no matter what. But quite soon those gaps will all be filled. Before much longer, the entire planet will be smothered in signal, and we won’t be able to find places that are off the grid.

Human population density drives extinctions

mountain gorilla

Sometimes there are scientific studies that seem to confirm the obvious. To wit: The more people that live in an area, the more species that go extinct.

No matter how superfluous it seems, it’s good that scientists undertake these studies, if only to confirm our suspicions, rule out potential confounding variables, or simply make the phenomenon feel more real. All three are the case with the recent paper on population density and animal extinctions. Jeffrey McKee, an anthropologist at the Ohio State University, first published on the relationship back in the early 2000s, and his latest confirms some of his earlier results and predictions.

McKee and his colleagues constructed a few models and fed them data for various variables, including human population density, species richness, GDP, conservation status (vulnerable, endangered, critical, etc.), precipitation, temperature, and others. The first time they ran the model, back in the early 2000s with data for the year 2000, they discovered a very strong correlation between population density and threatened species and nothing else. A later refinement found the population density-conservation status link could be refined by including GDP per unit area. The latest run, published this month using data for the year 2010, not only confirmed the predictions made in 2000 about 2010, it refined the overall predictive power of the model.

This new paper forecasts out to 2050, and the outlook is grim. By 2020, an average growing nation can expect 3.3 percent more threatened mammal and bird species. By 2050, that rises to almost 11 percent. So if a country has 114 threatened mammal and bird species today, like the United States does, it can expect to have 118 by the end of the decade and 126 by 2050. All due to population growth.

Faced with those statistics, conserving biodiversity seems like a quixotic battle. Population growth is beginning to slow, but there’s no way to halt it completely and immediately. Yes, human population growth will level off eventually, but what can we do in the meantime? One answer is to protect high-biodiversity areas from development, though that’s easier said than done. The richness that makes many ecosystems so complex also makes them attractive to humans. If development is to take place in those areas—and I see no reason why it won’t—we’ll have to take special care to support its native species.

The other option is to be more conscientious about where we develop. It’s likely that there’s a middle ground where human impacts can be balanced against losses in biodiversity. Finding it will take forethought and a bit of planning, but as I’ve said before, we can’t just plan the land we’ll occupy, we also have to plan the land we won’t.

Photo by Daniel Coomber

Source:

McKee J., Chambers E. & Guseman J. (2013). Human Population Density and Growth Validated as Extinction Threats to Mammal and Bird Species, Human Ecology, 41 (5) 773-778. DOI:

Related posts:

Extinction debts catch up quickly

Animals seek calm seas in oceans of human influence

Ghosts of ecology

New Study Predicts Year Your City's Climate Will Change ∞

Ben Jervey, reporting for National Geographic News:

“We’re providing a new metric on when ongoing climate change will lead to environments like we have never seen before,” lead researcher Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii told reporters, “when the coldest year of the future will be warmer than the hottest year in the past.”

The study’s authors refer to this new metric as a “climate departure.”

By combining data from 39 different climate models, Mora and his team built a timetable of these climate departures for any given location on Earth. Along with their study, Mora and his colleagues published an interactive map that allows users to find the year of climate departure anywhere on the globe.

Nature's sentience ∞

Ferris Jabr:

In people, nature became conscious of itself. History is the record of nature’s self-discovery.

“You can’t see your own fingers in front of you” ∞

Gywnn Guilford, writing for Quartz about the start of China’s air pollution season in Harbin:

What’s behind the gray-out? Officials blame lack of wind and the burning of corn for the harvest, but the fact that central heating kicked in on Sunday was also a “key factor,” said Xinhua. In Heilongjiang, which is pretty much Siberia, temperatures are already near freezing. And it’s only October. By January, they’ll drop to between -12°C and -24°C (10°F to -11°F), though extreme lows of -42°C (-44°F) aren’t unheard of.

Heating’s a big problem in China. As a study published in May 2013 showed, particulate matter in air north of the Huai River is 55% higher than in the south—and life expectancies 5.5 years shorter. During the 1990s alone, that cost 500 million residents of northern China 2.5 billion life years, said the researchers.

One region, 400 billion trees ∞

The Guardian:

The new findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first estimates of the abundance, frequency and distribution of many thousands of Amazonian trees. Extrapolating the data, compiled over 10 years, suggests that greater Amazonia harbours around 390 billion individual trees, including Brazil nut, chocolate and acai berry.

The area covered encompasses the Amazon Basin (including parts of Brazil, Peru, Columbia) and the Guiana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana), spanning an area roughly the size of the 48 North American states. In total roughly 16,000 tree species are believed to exist in the Amazon, but half the total number of trees are thought to belong to just 227 species.

Animals' role in the carbon cycle ∞

Yale e360:

Wildlife may play a more important role in the global carbon cycle than researchers have previously given it credit for, according to a study from an international group of scientists. Although models generally include carbon cycling by plants and microbes, they often ignore the ways animals contribute to the process.

Cities as refugia ∞

Mark McDonnell, writing for The Nature of Cities:

The take-home message from our Australian experience is that everyone should seriously consider what species are being planted in cities and towns around the world and it is possible to plant species that will, in the future, provide valuable resources for threatened and endangered species.  Cities and towns definitely have the potential of becoming important refugia for threatened species’ in the future.

Will oil companies become carbon capture ones? ∞

David Wogan:

Recognizing that carbon capture and sequestration will likely be one of many approaches to staying within our carbon budget, we should look at the potential pivot in the oil, gas, and chemical industries from a major source of carbon emissions to a major player in capturing and storing those emissions.

Energy and chemical companies are in fact well-positioned to lead in CCS research and deployment.

Are electric utilities days numbered? ∞

Todd Woody, reporting for Quartz:

On Oct. 3, for instance, nearly 60% of the electricity generated in Germany came from wind farms and rooftop solar panels. That’s pushing fossil fuels off the grid and utility profits off a cliff. Utility EON’s profit is expected to fall 40% this year, according to Bloomberg, and it and other traditional power producers are moving to shut down coal and natural gas-fired power plants.

“Solar is most productive in middle of the day when coal is usually fired up,” Chris Nelder, an energy consultant, said yesterday at the Verge green business conference in San Francisco. “Now in Germany, at certain times of day power prices go negative and utilities have to pay to put electricity on the grid.”

Solar power, brought to you by robots ∞

Diane Cardwell, reporting for the New York Times:

Working in near secrecy until recently, the company, based in Richmond, Calif., is ready to use its machines in three projects in the next few months in California, Saudi Arabia and China. If all goes well, executives expect that they can help bring the price of solar electricity into line with that of natural gas by cutting the cost of building and maintaining large solar installations.

In recent years, the solar industry has wrung enormous costs from developing farms, largely through reducing the price of solar panels more than 70 percent since 2008. But with prices about as low as manufacturers say they can go, the industry is turning its attention to finding savings in other areas.

The writing between the lines says that these robots will supplant people. That’s not entirely unexpected—as industries mature, automation tends to take over, increasing efficiency and lowering costs. Cheap solar is a good thing. So what’s bad about it? Selling solar as a way to create jobs just got a lot harder.

Geography of debt collection ∞

Mostly a grim picture, but I’m surprised by Texas. Never thought it would have some of the strongest regulations on debt collection.

More Republican Districts Have Low Health-Coverage Rates ∞

John McCormick and Greg Giroux, reporting for Businessweek:

Among the nation’s 435 congressional districts, 207 have coverage levels below the average of 85.3 percent for the non-institutionalized civilian population, the census data shows. Of those, 105 are held by Republicans, while Democrats in mostly urban areas represent 100 and two are vacant. The rankings are based on the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey, which includes margins of error for each district.

In addition to the South, Western states dominate the map of congressional districts with below-average coverage rates. Besides often being under Republican control, those areas also tend to have sizable immigrant populations and poverty.

The mismatch between the policy votes of the districts’ federal representatives and the needs of their constituents may be partly the result of voter registration and turnout patterns.

“The constituents that they respond to are not the ones without health insurance,” said Eric Heberlig, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.

Could suburbs be self-powering?

■ solar-roof

It’s no secret that living in the suburbs is a tad energy intensive. Low-density living practically requires owning and driving a car, which consumes a large portion of suburban households’ energy budgets. But there’s an upside to sprawl, too—plenty of space for solar panels.

Researchers in Auckland, New Zealand asked what the energy balance of the suburbs would look like if photovoltaic solar panels were widespread and how that would compare with denser urban centers. They looked at a range of dwelling densities, from a low of about 6 per acre in the outer burbs to a high of 52 per acre in the city. The researchers then imagined what would happen if solar panels were installed in every location that would be viable, typically on rooftops facing north and west (this is the southern hemisphere, after all).

In dense urban areas, the area available for solar panels was low on a per capital basis. In the suburbs, that flipped. The difference was so extreme that solar panels in dense parts of the city could only meet a fraction of the demand. But in the suburbs, there was actually an excess of electricity generated, so much so that households could own—and charge—electric cars and still not consume it all.

Now, there are some caveats to this study, namely that Auckland is a relatively sunny place despite its frequent seasonal rain showers. Solar radiation in the city is 1663 kW h/m2/y, which compares favorably with Barcelona in sunny and solar-friendly Spain, which averages 1613 kW h/m2/y. Not everywhere has the potential of those places. But those that do, particularly in the Southwestern United States, are also hotbeds of sprawl. Widespread adoption of solar power would certainly change energy budgets there.

Solar-powered suburbs wouldn’t be all green—there’s still the issue of habitat disruption and fragmentation. Yet those are concerns for solar power installations, too. There’s still strong demand for low-density living, so if we were to supplant large solar installations with solar panels with houses under them, that may not be such a bad trade-off.¹ Coupled with habitat-rich yards and parks, such developments could even be more ecologically productive than a solar plant (though still less than undeveloped land). That won’t stop some people from ragging on suburbs, but they’ll have a few less reasons to do so.

  1. I’d still like to see a direct comparison of how much less land is required for a solar installation compared with a solar-powered burb before making any final conclusions—this study didn’t go into that. ↩

Image courtesy of John Callas

Source:

Byrd H., Ho A., Sharp B. & Kumar-Nair N. (2013). Measuring the solar potential of a city and its implications for energy policy, Energy Policy, 61 944-952. DOI:

Related posts:

What’s more energy efficient, shopping online or in stores?

How self-driving cars will change cities

America’s suburban future

Amazon ecology: Footprints in the forest ∞

Jeff Tollefson, reporting for Nature:

Studies dating back to the 1950s suggested that small indigenous tribes merely scratched out a living in primitive villages before the arrival of Europeans. But more recently, researchers have proposed that the Amazon hosted complex societies that turned swathes of the forest into farms and orchards. Some estimates place the prehistoric population of the Amazon as high as 10 million — a huge number considering that the current population is around 30 million.

It’s not just the Amazon—researchers are finding these sorts of ghosts in Europe, too.