Innovation in the Human Age 4 Innovation in the Human Age

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Natural isn’t —Alvin Toffler what it used to be

ISSUE 4 We are a digital, print, and live magazine in which the world’s most creative writers, designers, scientists, and entrepreneurs explore how we can create a sustainable human age we actually want to live in.

Cover art by Javier Jaén published by Editor’s Note No Turning Back Now

Nostalgia tugs hard at our narratives about na- same exhilarating and profoundly disturbing ture. If we could just hold nature still, even ways that social media reframed our con- for a human lifetime, then we could save it. nections with each other. Seeing the world’s But we cannot. Long before humans 3 trillion trees in real time allows environ- emerged as a planetary force, we have had mental watchdogs to catch criminals. But it to negotiate and renegotiate our relationship also means that the data riches of big tech’s with nature. At various times, it has been an unblinking eyes will go to whoever can evil presence to be beaten back, a resource pay top dollar. to be mined, a treasure to be restored, a When scouting the future, the technol- place of spiritual renewal, and a source for ogy trail is always the easiest to follow. But technological inspiration. it’s far from the only one. The economics And now, here we are in the Anthro- of nature conservation are also changing in pocene, face to face with an existential surprising ways. Forty years ago, a group of riddle. Oliver Morton captured it eloquently conservationists embarked on a bold experi- in The Planet Remade: “Humans have be- ment. They sought to integrate conservation come so powerful that they have become a and development by fostering new indus- force of nature—and forces of nature are by tries—from finding new miracle drugs in definition those things beyond the power nature to ecotourism—that could generate of humans to control.” revenue for the people living near protected This is strange and difficult territory, areas. Economist David Simpson asks, “So just the sort of stuff that we created this how did that go?” His observations are both magazine to cover. And in that spirit, we’ve jarring and instructive. What if the key to assembled a cadre of premier writers to ex- saving wild biodiversity isn’t to show that plore how our understanding of nature, and it’s useful­—rather, it’s to make it “useless.” our connection to it, is shifting yet again— As you peruse the issue, you may also and how conservation might look very dif- notice the absence of some familiar nature ferent in the twenty-first century than it did themes. For example, habitat loss imperils in the twentieth. more and more species, and we humans David Quammen starts us out with an must rein in our voracious appetites for epochal idea. What if evolution isn’t linear, more resources. The urgency hasn’t gone as Charles Darwin proposed when he first away—but those sorts of warnings and sketched the tree of life? What if, instead of admonitions alone seem increasingly species’ passing their DNA to their off- insufficient in this new Human Age. The spring from one generation to the next, Anthropocene demands that all of us, they are exchanging genes throughout their conservationists included, loosen our grip lifetimes? Quammen deftly explains the on how we think the future will unfold— concept of horizontal gene transfer—and and get creative. Nostalgia serves a variety then muses on how it could upend current of purposes in our lives. But negotiating thinking about everything from antibiotic change and moving forward generally resistance to cancerous tumors. aren’t among them. A Next, Wayt Gibbs explores how satel- lite surveillance technology is reframing —Kathryn Kohm our connection with nature in some of the Editor-in-Chief

©Brock Davis 3 Issue 4. June 2019 | Natural isn't what it used to be

24 How to Die in the Anthropocene 1. Death is inevitable, but its environmental toll Idea Watch may not have to be By Jennifer Monnier 8 The Climate Change 27 93 Apocalypse Problem A Symbol for the Tweaking photosynthesis Thinking about apocalypse, Anthropocene 2. like thinking about one’s There could be more than 94 own death, is not something 60 billion chairs on the Deep Dives Humanity’s changing that most of us have planet body shape much enthusiasm for By Vybarr Cregan-Reid 40 By Ted Nordhaus 62 95 EVOLUTION Do plastic bag bans 30 TECHNOLOGY make a difference? 12 Picturing a Way Forward Blurring These Buildings Generate Hacking Nature Climate change, science Life's Boundaries 98 More Energy Than They Use Instead of trying fiction, and our collective Darwinian theory is based on Eco-bricks made to recreate nature's Norway ushers in an era of failure of imagination the idea that heredity flows from sewage energy-positive architecture vertically, parent to offspring, genius, how about By Diego Arguedas Ortiz and that life’s history has reprogramming it? By Lucy Wang 99 branched like a tree. Now we By Lindsey Doermann Old clothes turn into 34 know otherwise. fire- and waterproof 16 Saltwater Aquaculture By David Quammen building materials Bottling Sunshine without Moves Inland 70 100 Batteries Improved technology ECONOMICS A new inexpensive way to Turning sunlight into could give fish farms a 50 convert CO into drugs, liquid fuels or hydrogen gas sustainable foothold The Problem 3. 2 SURVEILLANCE furniture, and more could address solar power’s far from the ocean with Making Nature biggest limitations By Laura Poppick A View from Pay for Itself Science 101 By W. Wayt Gibbs Everywhere All Trying to make nature Shorts How a seaweed-eating the Time valuable has had a microbe could fight disappointing track record. plastic pollution 19 Tech companies are This Is How Blockchain networking the environment By R. David Simpson 88 102 Could Upend the Grid in ways that will transform How different are As corals decline, a new —by allowing people to buy our perception of nature— we after all? kind of reef emerges and sell energy in small just as social media 80 increments from (and to) reshaped our relationships 92 103 their neighbors with each other. What could DESIGN Humanity will be What counts as extreme possibly go wrong? By Katharine Gammon The Curated Wild remembered for its temperature is a By W. Wayt Gibbs moving target Welcome to the chickens 22 brave new world of 104 The Anthropocene artificial intelligence 92 How bringing back lost Nightstand for conservation. Future foods could make diets more nutritious animals prevents By Alistair Scrutton By David Biello and sustainable big wildfires

4 5

1. Idea Watch

People and projects pushing the boundaries of sustainability

6 7 The dominant tenor of environmental communication has been apocalyptic. And yet, the sorts of threats that people have generally worsening wildfires are likely to continue. responded to have Global temperatures continue to rise. And been closer to home. Californians show no more sign of aban- doning our suburban and exurban redoubts for fear of wildfires than we have shown willingness to abandon our fault-riddled We hadn’t set out to live in a fire cities for fear of earthquakes. zone. But after living cheek by jowl with The same is true for the two of us. My our neighbors in the Berkeley flats for 17 wife has declared that if we get burned out, years, we found the views and the benefits she doesn’t think she’ll want to return. But of living a little closer to nature and a little neither of us feels much urgency to leave farther from everyone else hard to resist. In preemptively. And we have greater re- this, we were not alone. Millions of Cali- sources and flexibility than most. For those MIXED MESSAGES fornians over the past five decades have struggling economically—tied to 9-to-5 moved up hillsides and into forested areas. jobs, dependent on caretakers, or caretakers And, like many of our fellow residents, themselves—the choices are harder still. we’ve begun to harbor second thoughts Oddly, the thing that we both acknow- The Climate Change after two seasons of catastrophic wildfires. ledge might prompt us to take action now Were a firestorm like the recent ones is not the dreaded fear of fire apocalypse Apocalypse Problem that swept through Paradise, Santa Rosa, but more prosaic concerns about quality of and Redding to sweep through our neigh- life. For the third time in little more than a borhood, our home, seemingly floating year, we spent a week or more sheltering Thinking about apocalypse, like thinking about one’s own in the canopy of an oak forest, would be indoors from the Beijing levels of air pollu- death, is not something that most of us have indefensible and our escape, down narrow tion that had drifted into the Bay Area from much enthusiasm for and twisting roads to the concreted safety fires to our north. The prospect that fires of the flatlands by San Francisco Bay, far of this sort might produce frequent air- By Ted Nordhaus from certain. quality crises almost year-round, more than The situation seems bound to get the fear of losing our home or our lives to In the fall of 2011, my wife and I decided to sell our 900- worse. The degree to which the recent raging wildfire in the Berkeley hills, is what square-foot Berkeley bungalow and look for more spacious spate of intense wildfires can be attributed has given us pause. digs. One year and ten failed offers later, we moved into a to global warming is disputed—and in some While it might not seem entirely ratio- sprawling, redwood-paneled, mid-century modern in the sense irresolvable. Disentangling decades nal, our reaction and priorities are a much Berkeley hills. The place needed work. But it was perched of fire suppression and unplanned growth better reflection of how and why human on a hillside amidst California oaks, its floor-to-ceiling from the effects of a hotter and drier societies have tended to deal with environ- ©Redhope via flickr CC. windows boasting commanding views of San Francisco climate is well-nigh impossible. But what mental challenges. For decades, prophets of Street Art by Shepard Fairey and the Golden Gate Bridge. seems clear is that both these drivers of environmental doom have been harangu-

8 9 ing the public with threats of ecological Investing in measures apocalypse, to little effect. Yet during the to better adapt to same time, we’ve managed to pass laws that To describe the impacts impacts of climate change climate change means of climate change as a nui- might even steel us to take have dramatically reduced air and water investing in the future, pollution, protected coastlines and wet- sance is the sort of thing more far-reaching action lands, and brought endangered species back that to many environmental to reduce emissions over in the belief that from the brink. The dominant tenor of ears sounds dismissive. But a the long term. Investing in humans can continue environmental communication during this nuisance is something that, measures to better adapt to to thrive, even on a period has been apocalyptic. And yet, the while it can be tolerated, we climate change means invest- hotter planet. sorts of threats that people have generally can also do something about. ing in the future, in the responded to have been closer to home, and California policy makers, belief that humans can con- the actions to address them have brought for instance, are now seri- tinue to thrive, even on a I understand better than most the risks near-term benefits. ously considering whether hotter planet. that we personally face given a changing Two recent government reports, the it might be wise to pay to Some suggest that do- climate as well as the unquantifiable risk United Nations IPCC Special Report on underground power lines in ing so is a kind of folly, that human societies must confront over Global Warming of 1.5C and the United fire-prone areas, given that that focusing on short-term the longer term. Yet, at least for now, my States National Climate Assessment, have they have been the proximate adaptation will inevitably be wife and I are staying put. Waking up stoked fears of economic, even societal, col- cause of most of the state’s re- overwhelmed by increasingly early to the San Francisco skyline crisp lapse. News reports have predictably em- cent wildfires. A focus on this extreme climate impacts and, and pink from the glow of the low winter phasized the most sensational and unlikely sort of adaptation might also worse, might undermine our sun, or coming home in the evening to the scenarios while activists claim that without motivate the state to invest in determination to radically sound of a pair of great horned owls softly rapid and sweeping transformations of the modernizing its crumbling reduce emissions. hooting from the redwood tree at the cor- global economy, social collapse and eco- water and transportation But there is little evi- ner of our lot, is not the sort of thing that logical genocide are virtually assured. systems for a hotter and more dence that this is actually so. I’ll easily give up. It is literally and figura- And yet it is worth considering wheth- variable climate. To date, despite decades of tively a privilege. er we might be better served by focusing That won’t stop global increasingly dire warnings Most of us, even those living in far on the more prosaic impacts that climate warming. But it is also the about the consequences of more difficult circumstances than we do, change will almost certainly bring: a hotter case that the benefits of cut- continued carbon dioxide deeply love much about our lives, our and drier climate, worsening air quality, ting emissions today will not emissions, we have failed communities, and the places where we and more intense natural disasters that we begin to have an impact on to take significant action to live. For these reasons, it is worth consid- may become increasingly adept at weath- the climate for many decades. either adapt to a changing ering whether foregrounding efforts to ering but that will almost certainly create Meanwhile, the fires, the climate or to meaningfully adapt to climate change—undergrounding ample misery and discomfort. floods, and the water short- cut our emissions. power lines, developing drought-resistant Thinking about apocalypse, like think- ages will continue to worsen Demands that people see crops, planning for rising sea levels and ing about one’s own death, is not some- at the interface of a climate the apocalyptic writing on more frequent floods—might usefully shift thing that most of us have much enthusi- that is becoming more ex- the wall and undertake radi- the focus of climate discussions toward all asm for. And so we don’t. We will all die treme and an economy and cal changes to their lifestyles that we have at stake in the here and now, sooner or later. In the meantime, there is population that appear likely or economy are likely to and not toward a remote and abstracted a life to live, obligations to fulfill, friends to continue expanding, even continue to fall on deaf ears. future that is difficult to summon and -un and family to love, a future to plan. And under the most extreme On ours, most especially. pleasant to think about. A so we get on with our lives, even with the climate scenarios. I have spent much of my knowledge that it will all, ultimately, come Doing something tan- career working on the fight Ted Nordhaus is the founder and executive director to an end. gible today to address the against climate change. of the Breakthrough Institute.

10 11 CONSTRUCTIVE DESIGN In 2010, organizers of a climate conference in Norway issued a provocative challenge: Who will step up and curb the building industry’s worrisome carbon footprint? Buildings account for nearly 40 percent of global carbon emissions—almost twice as much as the transportation industry—yet the These Buildings Generate architecture and construction sectors had been slow to change. Svein Richard Brandtzæg, CEO of the aluminum company Hydro, More Energy Than They Use responded first. From the conference stage, he extended an open invita- tion to join an unprecedented initiative for energy-positive construction: Norway ushers in an era of energy-positive architecture buildings that generate more energy than they use. A few months later, a “super team” was born. Hydro and the Zero By Lucy Wang Emission Resource Organisation (ZERO), the nonprofit behind the

©Michael Grimm ©Snøhetta/Plompmozes ©Powerhouse HouseZero Svart Powerhouse Drøbak Montessori Opened late last year, HouseZero is a retrofit of Expected to open in 2021, Svart will A photovoltaic-clad “solar plate” inclined at 33 degrees the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities be the world’s first energy-positive intersects the school’s rectangular form, creating (CGBC) headquarters in a pre-1940s Cambridge hotel. Set at the foot of a glacier visual interest and a means of introducing fresh air building, converting it into an energy-positive just above the Arctic Circle, the into the interior while optimizing the tilt angle of the prototype for ultra-efficiency. Hundreds of hotel building will be raised on poles solar cells for energy production. The plus-energy sensors will monitor HouseZero’s performance to minimize site impact, while its school produces 30,500 kWh a year and uses less to help CGBC develop new systems and data- circular form will take advantage of than a quarter of the energy that an average school of driven learning algorithms for improving energy panoramic views in all directions. a similar size consumes. efficiency and health in building behavior.

12 13 climate conference, joined the real-estate is essential to minimizing the embodied- “We hope for a project in company Entra, the multinational con- energy footprint. A Passive House–standard the U.S. to come soon,” says struction group Skanska, and world- airtight building envelope is also standard Rune Stene, managing direc- renowned architects Snøhetta to form an for preventing energy loss. tor of Powerhouse and direc- alliance—aptly named “Powerhouse.” Its So far, Powerhouse has completed two tor of Skanska Technology. ambitious mission: Create energy-positive projects—Powerhouse Kjørbo and Power- With the Powerhouse name buildings that, over a lifespan of 60 years, house Drøbak Montessori School—with a now trademarked in the U.S., generate more energy than the total third, Powerhouse Brattørkaia, soon to be the biggest barrier to Power- amount consumed for construction, daily finished. All buildings are equipped with house’s adoption on American operations, material production, and fu- real-time energy monitors, and Power- soil seems to boil down to a ture demolition. Moreover, they proposed house will make follow-up visits to ensure difference in mindset and to doing it in Norway—where long winters efficient building operation. stringent requirements. At mean higher energy demands and reduced Although Powerhouse hasn’t yet least two members of the al- solar-cell efficiency. If it could be done built projects outside Norway, its influ- liance must be involved in a there, alliance members surmised, it could ence has been far-reaching. In addition to project, and the project must be done anywhere. feasibility studies made in other countries, use strictly vetted supply part- “We wanted to be number one,” Powerhouse directly inspired HouseZero, ners. Powerhouse’s data-heavy Snøhetta senior architect Tine Hegli the recently completed positive-energy “frontloading” approach may explains of the driving motivation be- headquarters for the Harvard Center for also be a turn-off in that it hind the alliance. “The [first] to make an Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) in departs from normal practices, energy-positive building in the coldest Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed by says Snøhetta senior archi- part of Norway. We like to be pioneer- Snøhetta in collaboration with Skanska, tect Kristian Edwards. But he ©Powerhouse ing. It’s not easy to get inspired by saving Powerhouse Brattørkaia the project was commissioned by Harvard stresses the importance of the energy—not for architects, at least. But to Slated to open this year in Trondheim, CGBC director Ali Malkawi after his visit process for predicting building be on a team, a super team, that will be the this eight-story office complex will be to Powerhouse Kjørbo. cost and energy performance. first . . . is really inspiring.” Powerhouse’s largest energy-positive “These days we are also project yet completed. Studies for the Since then, Powerhouse has made optimal use of solar energy informed investigating a new definition international headlines for projects such as the building’s unique shape in what for Powerhouse, where we Svart, the world’s first energy-positive ho- Powerhouse calls a “form follows turn from energy to carbon,” tel, set to rise in the Arctic Circle by 2021. environment” design philosophy. adds Stene, referring to the Meanwhile, the consultancy firm Asplan shift in global attention from Viak has joined the alliance, and Hydro energy efficiency to car- has exited. bon reduction. “Until now Powerhouse’s holistic energy approach we’ve designed projects to be Powerhouse Kjørbo is especially impressive because it includes energy-positive and [have] Completed in April 2014, embodied energy: the total energy associ- Powerhouse’s renovation of calculated embodied energy. ated with extracting, processing, manufac- two office blocks into Norway’s In this new definition we will turing, and delivering building materials first energy-positive commercial focus on carbon accounts to the construction site. A piece of timber, structure earned the project instead. Using the latest IPCC for instance, has less embodied energy a BREEAM “Outstanding” report, we’ll create maximum Until now we’ve certification for its energy than concrete, whereas recycled on-site savings of nearly 90 percent. carbon budgets for each build- material has the lowest. Every project uses designed projects to Maintenance-free charred ing covering everything from a site-specific approach, blending high- be energy-positive waste wood clads the recycled materials and operations across tech with low-tech solutions. Solar collec- and [have] calculated concrete building frame, while its lifespan.” A rooftop solar panels generate tors, geothermal wells, and heat-recovery embodied energy. In systems work in tandem with daylight over 200,000 kWh a year—twice as much energy as the building’s maximization and natural ventilation, such this new definition we Lucy Wang is a freelance writer and will focus on carbon operations use. design editor @Inhabitat. Her work as stack-effect cooling. Recycling, wheth- ©Powerhouse has appeared in Time, Dwell, Architizer, er with the building structure or materials, accounts instead. and Chicago Reader.

14 15 POST FOSSIL FUELS geological time scales—and we are harvest- ing them far faster than natural systems can replenish them. Bottling But over the past year, scientists in Swe- Bottled sunshine could den and elsewhere have made headway on be stored, transported, artificial systems that are far faster at captur- Sunshine and tapped on demand energy by passing the ing the energy of sunshine in fluid form. as conveniently as oil or charged fuel through without Batteries Bottled in this way, solar energy could be a filter loaded with natural gas—but without stored, transported, and tapped on demand a catalyst. As the Turning sunlight into liquid fuels or hydrogen as conveniently as oil or natural gas—but emitting fossilized molecules toggle gas could address solar power’s biggest limitations without emitting fossilized carbon or gob- carbon or gobbling up back to their relaxed bling up farmland. Though many techni- farmland, as ethanol state, they give off By W. Wayt Gibbs cal hurdles remain, recent advances in solar production does. heat. “You could use thermal fuels and in hybrid devices that turn that thermal energy sunlight into both electricity and hydrogen We usually think of fossil fuels as coming from deep in the for your water heater, are generating fresh excitement in fields that Earth, but actually they come from deep in the past. The your dishwasher, or for years seemed to have stalled. fossil-fueled energy that powers the global economy origi- your clothes dryer,” Grossman The progress is reviving hopes that nated as sunlight and carbon dioxide that plants, plankton, says. “There could be lots of smart chemistry and materials science can and algae converted into organic chemicals. Millions of years industrial applications as well.” solve the “gigawatt-day” conundrum—oth- of heat and pressure transformed those buried chemicals into The trouble, observes Wei erwise known as how to keep the lights on the oil, coal, and natural gas that we now burn to run our cars Feng, who studies solar ther- and factories humming when the winds fail and power plants. The problem with fossil fuels is not that they mal fuels at Tianjin University and clouds block the sun for days at a time. are nonrenewable but rather that their cycle of renewal operates on in China, has been finding a Researchers and entrepreneurs have tried commercially practical fuel. to tackle the problem in other ways—for The ultimate goal is a clear, example, with electric batteries or by pump- low-cost liquid that can grab a ing water uphill when electricity is plentiful big chunk of the energy carried and later releasing it to fill in the calm, gray by sunlight (not just the slim gaps. But none seems likely to scale suf- ultraviolet portion), then hold ficiently, due to geographic, economic, and that energy for days or weeks environmental handicaps. The future for at room temperature or below, solar energy would undoubtedly be brighter and finally release lots of heat if it could be drawn down 24/7 and used for quickly without gumming up more than just electricity. or eroding the catalyst. A Swedish research group A Battery for Heat led by Kasper Moth-Poulsen “A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable has been testing variants of a battery,” explains Jeffrey Grossman, whose transparent liquid called nor- lab at MIT has long worked on these ma- bornadiene that transforms into terials. “But instead of electricity, you put quadricyclane when illuminated sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on by ordinary sunlight, in a setup demand.” Unlike ethanol or a fossil fuel, this they installed on the roof of bottled sunshine can release its energy with- the physics building at Chalm- out destroying itself. Instead, the molecules ers University of Technology in the fuel toggle between two distinct in Gothenburg. The mate- shapes: a “charged” state that stores lots of rial—which is easily made from chemical energy in the bonds among its carbon, hydrogen, and nitro- atoms and a relaxed, “discharged” state. gen—captures up to 30 percent To charge the fuel, you simply expose of the incoming solar energy it to sunlight. Later, you can extract the and, once charged, looks to

Photo © Orlin Bertsch 17 be stable for many years. When pumped A group at Lawrence Berkeley National through a carbon filter laced with a cobalt- Lab reported a milestone of a different kind based catalyst, the fluid rapidly heats up from in December 2018: a design for a hybrid de- room temperature to around 84°C (183°F)— vice that joins a hydrogen-producing photo- not quite boiling, but plenty hot enough for electrochemical cell back-to-back with an a bath or radiator. electricity-generating photovoltaic solar cell. There is still a lot to figure out,” Moth- Though challenging to fabricate, advanced Poulson acknowledges. Wei notes that the HPEV cells (as they call them) could, they most efficient variants still need toxic sol- believe, convert solar energy with a total ef- vents to function well in liquid form, for ex- ficiency over 20 percent. Conveniently, the ample. But with an energy density of about hybrid cells could shift energy output from 250 watt-hours per kilogram—double that electrical power to hydrogen and then back of the Powerwall batteries manufactured by again as demand waxes and wanes. Tesla—the new fuel is encouraging enough Though solar hydrogen research is that companies have begun calling to discuss still very much in the bench-science stage, commercial applications, Moth-Poulson says. Stéphane Abanades of the French National Center for Scientific Research and colleagues From Hydro to Hydrogen in China recently published a design con- Solar thermal fuels may one day take over cept for a large-scale solar power tower that some of the work done today by natural gas, could reach efficiencies over 35 percent. The but they are unlikely to replace gasoline or scheme exploits the fact that it’s far easier to diesel. Automakers have experimented for split superheated steam than liquid water. years with hydrogen-fueled vehicles, how- In their plan, rays from sun-tracking ever, and clean-energy visionaries have long mirrors would be concentrated and then dreamed of producing that flammable gas— split by optics so that shorter wavelengths DEMOCRATIZING ENERGY the same stuff that makes up the sun—by illuminate PV cells to make electricity while longer-wavelength rays land on a receiving using sunlight to strip the H2 off 2H O. As with solar thermal fuels, however, the chamber to produce heat. Water, preheated straightforward idea of water-splitting has by cooling the PV cells and then boiled into This Is How Blockchain long been bedeviled by materials that are too steam by the thermal receiver, would finally inefficient, short-lived, or expensive—and get split into hydrogen and oxygen by a Could Upend the Grid often all three at once. Yet promising ideas solid-oxide electrolysis cell powered by the have been bubbling up in a few corners PV current. The engineers figure that a small by allowing people to buy and sell energy in small of the field. In one of the more impressive 50-mirror plant with a 24-meter tower could increments from, and to, their neighbors demonstrations, a group at the University of generate nearly 10 kilograms of hydrogen Tokyo assembled thin acrylic panels, a meter a day, plus lots of oxygen. That’s enough to By Katharine Gammon square, in which a catalytic sheet made from fuel a hybrid hydrogen metro bus for 120 ki- lometers. Abanades says that by using avail- strontium, titanium oxide, and aluminum In 2016, when Dave Martin was researching the impacts of was covered by a millimeter of water. When able components, the design could be scaled up by at least an order of magnitude. distributed renewables and batteries on the power grid they exposed the panel to sunlight, bubbles for a major energy company in Perth, Australia, he was of hydrogen and oxygen began stream- Until someone constructs a functional prototype, it will be easy to dismiss such dogged by a nagging worry. As the cost of storage falls, ing upward and were collected through an the incentive for consumers to stay connected to the grid opening at the top. In a reflection of how designs as wishful thinking. But at least this approach doesn’t require any breakthroughs diminishes. “I was concerned we would get to a point far the field has to go, the researchers were where consumers were taking upwards of 95 percent of pleased that the solar-to-hydrogen efficiency in materials science. And after all, the idea of punching a metal straw their energy from their own supply and making the grid reached 0.4 percent and that the panels W. Wayt Gibbs is a freelance continued working for six days. To be com- science writer and editor based through miles of bedrock to mercially viable, efficiencies greater than 10 in Seattle. He is a contributing suck up the messy remains of editor with Scientific American ancient algae once seemed like percent and lifetimes exceeding five years and editorial director at will be needed. Intellectual Ventures. a pipe dream, too. A

18 19 The grid is an important economic asset, but it’s more and more expensive for everybody also a social asset. The when it comes to energy tin explains. “But when they can sell extra left behind,” he explains. interconnected network usage, Power Ledger’s block- energy to their neighbors, they can optimize The grid is an important economic relies on people consuming chain network operates using the amount of solar they install, confidently asset, but it’s also a social asset. The inter- less electricity than a standard knowing that they can sell any excess to the connected network relies on people con- power. As consumers defect laptop. That’s because Power apartment building or the shopping mall.” suming power. As consumers defect from from the grid, it creates a Ledger’s system uses two That apartment building (a tall, skinny the grid, it creates a death spiral for the death spiral for the most blockchain layers that act tower) has little ability to install solar panels most vulnerable consumers. That’s because vulnerable consumers. simultaneously; one is the and would traditionally be locked out of people who live in apartment buildings or public layer (Etherium) and renewable energy. run small businesses won’t be able to invest the other is an industry- He adds that, even though four build- in solar cells or battery storage in the same specific, low-power block- ings have photovoltaic panels installed, nine way large companies or people who own plex transactions, ranging chain developed in-house buildings are involved in the energy-trading their own homes can. In this respect, power from billing and metering to and tested in the energy scheme. If all four buildings have extra grids are analogous to healthcare systems. peer-to-peer energy trading. markets during trials in 2016 energy, they can sell it to the local energy- If young and healthy people forgo insur- Blockchain lets a user set a and 2017. storage system. In Japan, the company plans ance and leave the marketplace, sicker and minimum bid on the chain— Still, Power Ledger and to install and provision solar panels on more poorer folks bear the burden of the system. a more efficient system than other blockchain-backed than 55,000 rooftops by the end of 2020, al- More recently, Martin has transformed having energy traders call energy-trading platforms are lowing energy sharing and trading through his worry into a question: What if there each other to haggle over counting on a fast-moving their platform. were a way to turn the energy-distribution contracts for power or gas. technology. The Australia- It’s all part of a broader idea to democ- system into a trading platform? That ques- There are challenges based company currently ratize energy production and distribution— tion, of course, isn’t his alone. It is the to such a platform, though. has projects in the United and move it closer to consumers The World driving idea behind several new companies, Experts have pointed out States, Thailand, Japan, and Energy Council predicts that decentralized including Power Ledger, where Martin that small-scale trades over Australia. The pilot project in energy, which includes peer-to-peer sys- is now managing director. Through the energy are worth just a few Bangkok, in a development tems, will grow from 5 percent of the mar- company’s blockchain platform, consumers cents, so the transaction costs called T77, demonstrates ket today to about 25 percent in 2025. who have solar cells and storage can share of using blockchain are too how a small peer-to-peer Ultimately, the challenge is a mental one their excess capacity by selling that energy expensive for these types microgrid network can that mirrors other societal conundrums: to across the grid to their neighbors. of trades to be worthwhile. work. There’s a 635-kilo- convince consumers that we’re all in this to- When most people think about block- Another potential issue is that watt solar array across from gether. In this case, the goal is not to install chain, they think about cryptocurrencies blockchain transactions are a large group of buildings batteries in home garages but rather in the such as bitcoin. But blockchain technology not confirmed until a reason- that are all connected to the grid, where this investment in renewables has many potential uses, including health- able number of blocks in a same municipal power grid. can be monetized by selling extra capacity care, voting, and property records. Think chain have been updated—a That group includes a diverse to neighbors. In Australia, where one in four of it as thousands of shared spreadsheets that process that currently takes swath of buildings: an apart- houses has solar panels already, the genie can be added to, but not deleted. about 10 minutes. At the ment block, a school, a dental is out of the bottle, Martin says. “The old Using the system, prosumers (con- height of bitcoin’s popular- hospital, and a shopping mall. system of large power plants pushing energy sumers who also produce) can sell energy ity, a backlog of transactions The school has a lot of through transmission and distribution sys- to their neighbors in 15- or 20-minute took 16 hours to process. flat roof space—but on the tems to consumers who got only as much as intervals at constantly fluctuating prices, That’s the opposite of effi- weekends and summers, they paid for—that’s going away.” A receiving payment through blockchain- cient and transparent. there are no kids there. backed cryptocurrency. Martin points out The other big challenge Under a traditional scenario, Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California. She writes for a that blockchain is uniquely capable of han- is how much energy block- they’d only store as much wide range of magazines covering technology, society, dling thousands or even millions of com- chain uses. Martin says that energy as they can use, Mar- and animal science.

20 21 The Anthropocene Nightstand By Alistair Scrutton

The end is nigh for fossil For many people, it’s a After analyzing our past in How will we feed a Animals also cry. In his Being in a hurry may be burgeoning world fuels, but not due to given that the world’s Sapiens and our future in latest book, Frans de a defining feature of population without wishful thinking from population is increasing Homo Deus, Harari turns Waal describes depressed the Anthropocene, but environmentalists. unsustainably. That’s to the present, tackling ruining our planetary fish, nerve-wracked this book urges us to Instead, thank market wrong, say Darrell issues from populism to resources? Robyn dogs, and other animals think long-term—over forces and innovation. Bricker and John artificial intelligence to Metcalfe looks at global that share emotional billions of years. Marcia That is the theme of Ibbitson. We are actually our “post-truth” world. food-supply chains traits with humans—but Bjornerud travels to and finds some possible Dieter Helm’s Burn three decades away In 21 essays, Harari taps that many behavioral places such as Norway’s answers. We are in the Out, in which he argues from a population bust, into nagging doubts scientists have long Svalbard archipelago to that new technologies, driven by shrinking about where the world midst of a whirlwind of ignored. The book analyze our relationship the Internet of Things, family size and women’s is headed as liberal and technological changes title refers to Mama, with time—or, as she and falling demand empowerment. That democratic narratives are that soon may deliver a chimpanzee whose says, “time denial.” for oil will reduce oil may help the planet, but increasingly questioned. dinner plates, tailored video-recorded deathbed Understanding Earth’s and gas dependency. it will also challenge us His sweeping general- to our health needs, goodbye and hug to age-old rhythms, she Largely dismissive of to accept immigration izations may irk some directly to our doorsteps. biologist Dr. Jan van argues, will help ensure United Nations efforts to if we want to keep readers, but his book is Blockchain technology Hooff went viral. Full planetary sustainability regulate emissions, Helm workforces young. peppered with the kinds and the Internet of of telling anecdotes, by forcing us to think contends that these As the authors say: of observations you will Things will mean less the book has a deeper across generations. food waste. Despite changes may benefit “Population decline isn’t unwittingly find yourself purpose: nudging us Timefulness transforms the United States and a good thing or a bad bringing up around the fears of DNA-modified to recognize that the geological phenomena, Europe. Written by an thing. But it is a big dinner table. food and processed evolutionary roots of from atmospheric carbon meals, Metcalfe makes industry expert, Burn thing.” A contrarian and emotions may be behind molecules to ancient the case that we should Out offers a refreshing sharply written read. how we love, reach for mountains, into a insider perspective on an be cautiously optimistic power, or even murder. meditation on life itself. energy transformation. and embrace these technologies.

22 23 COMPOST THYSELF In the spring of 2018, Katrina Spade took a Each year in the United chips on a forest floor. She founded her short plane ride from Seattle, Washington, States, just over half of the company, Recompose, and partnered with across the state to a town called Pullman. nearly 3 million deceased are soil scientists at Washington State University She met with Washington State University rapidly disintegrated into ash on a study to compost corpses inside a ves- How to Die in researchers with whom she had been work- To compost through cremation, each re- sel. The study successfully turned six donor ing to create a unique soil. She scooped up anything, you leasing about 100 kilograms bodies into soil. Right now, she’s recruiting a small mound of the soil and held it in her of CO2. About 43 percent investors to fund the world’s first recomposi- The Anthropocene hand. It was the first proof that a human need four basic of American deaths result in tion center, in downtown Seattle. ingredients: carbon, Death is inevitable, but its body could be safely turned into earth, like embalming and burial. The To compost anything, you need four environmental toll may not have to be. food scraps in a compost bin. nitrogen, oxygen bodies are injected with a basic ingredients: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, Spade first considered composting and moisture. To solution made up mostly of and moisture. To compost a corpse, Spade’s human bodies while studying architecture compost a corpse, formaldehyde, a carcinogen, design puts all components inside a hexago- as a graduate student at the University of in what adds up to about nal vessel. A mix of wood chips, straw, and By Jennifer Monnier Spade’s design Massachusetts Amherst in 2011. She had 800,000 gallons of the solu- alfalfa blankets the vessel floor. The body is been learning about the environmental toll puts it all inside a tion per year. Then they are laid upon the bed, and more mixture is lay- of human death. hexagonal vessel. placed into thick caskets of ered on top. Vents provide ample oxygen. wood, copper, bronze, steel, The oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen attract and/or concrete—all intended and feed an abundant community of mi- to slow their disintegration crobes. As the microbes eat away at the pile, underground. The burials their movement emits heat—as much as 120 take up a lot of land, usually to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the perfect consisting of pristine lawns environment for a thermophile, or a type of that require polluting fertil- microbe suited to heat. Thermophiles con- izers and hefty water use to tinue to break down the body; after about a maintain. Urban planning month, the process can convert a body into experts worry there’s not one cubic yard of soil. enough land available to The process generates considerable support the upcoming burials atmospheric savings. Researchers from two of an aging baby-boomer universities in the Netherlands recently population. calculated that each person who opts to be Around the time Spade composted rather than cremated will spare learned about the envi- the environment more than 84 kilograms of ronmental impact of death climate change–causing CO₂. care, she also learned that Though composting has been shown to farmers sometimes com- work, it remains a possibility not yet available post their livestock. She to the public. Whether it can scale to meet began designing a system the demands of a growing, and inevitably to compost human bodies— dying, population remains to be seen. “recomposition”—which Yet, there’s precedent for a cultural shift eventually became her toward environmentally friendly funerals. thesis project. Though cremation is popular today, in 1990 After graduating, she it was the preference of only 15 percent of received grant money to US citizens. According to a survey by the continue pursuing the idea. advocacy group Green Burial Council, many A team of forensic anthro- people began choosing cremation over burial pologists at West Carolina because they considered it a greener option, University had carried out a since it uses less land. Natural burial has also successful bare-bones proof- risen in popularity in the past two decades, of-concept study using a with a growing number of registered natural body and a mix of wood burial sites in the US, the UK, and Canada. Artist's vision of future Recompose facility with vessels ©MOLT Studios 25 Spade and her colleagues at Recompose have heard from people around the world who are interested in leasing out their technol- OUR LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE CHAIR ogy, she says. She and her coworkers are speaking to funeral homes in Brazil and the Netherlands and have heard from interested individuals in Australia and Europe. The process is estimated to cost a con- A Symbol for sumer around $5,500. That buys friends and family time with the composting vessels, the The Anthropocene actual transformation of human to soil, the There could be more than 60 billion of them on the planet body’s transportation, and a death certificate. Compare that to the median cost of a funeral with a conventional burial, around $7,360, By Vybarr Cregan-Reid or a funeral with cremation, around $6,260. Consumer choice is only one piece of the puzzle—recomposition isn’t yet legal Why are there no chairs in the The highest If I were asked to make anywhere. In other states and in countries King James Bible, or in all attainment in my even a conservative estimate 30,000 lines of Homer? Nei- around the world, the funeral industry has own profession, of the number of chairs in ther are there any in Shake- proven stubbornly resistant to innovation. academia, is the world, I’d find it hard The most recent example of this resistance speare’s Hamlet—written in to go lower than eight to has played out through efforts to legalize 1599. But by the middle of called “a chair.” ten per person. Applying alkaline hydrolysis, another green alternative the nineteenth century, it is that logic, there could be which cremates bodies using a mostly-water a completely different story. more than 60 billion of solution instead of heat. It’s currently legal in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House suddenly them on the planet. Surely 16 US states but has faced contentious legal has 187 of them. What changed? With chairs should be one of the battles and religious criticisms in some states. sitting being called “the new smoking,” universal signals of the arr- New Hampshire legalized the technol- we all know that spending too much time ival of the Anthropocene? ogy for two years, then repealed it in 2009. in chairs is bad for us. Not only are they Just like the data required During hearings on a 2015 bill to legalize unhealthy, but like air pollution, they are to justify the change in the the technology in Indiana, Representative becoming almost impossible for modern name of our geological Dick Hamm made an impassioned speech humans to avoid. epoch, they are to be found comparing it to letting bodies “run down the When I started researching my on every continent. drain.” Hamm owns two casket companies. book about how the world we have made As to why there are Recomposition could run into similar prob- is changing our bodies, I was surprised to suddenly so many chairs, lems in states resistant to change. discover just how rare chairs used to be. there is no single clear But in Washington, where the funeral Now they’re everywhere: offices, trains, reason. It is a confluence of industry has relatively few barriers to entry, cafés, restaurants, pubs, cars, trains, concert fashion, politics, changing the state legislature passed a bill in April that halls, cinemas, doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, work habits, and the lust for would legalize both recomposition (which theaters, schools, university lecture halls, comfort. The last of these they’re calling natural organic reduction) and all over our houses. (I guarantee you requires no explanation and alkaline hydrolysis. “It’s a way for death have more than you think.) in a culture in which ease care to be part of the climate drawdown and comfort are among the puzzle,” Spade says, “and we’re excited to be strongest drivers of con- part of that.”A sumer decision-making.

Jennifer Monnier is a freelance science journalist While chairs began to appear in Seattle, Washington. She writes about energy, with a little more frequency agriculture, environmental research, and how people are adapting to climate change. Her work has appeared in "The Chair" by Isabel in the early modern period, Crosscut, Spectrum News, and other publications. Miramontes © Casart it seems that they became

26 27 much more widely popular Seated so much, But toward the end needs chairs to fulfill all of these (I suppose ity collated behavioral data in the eighteenth and nine- with most of the of the nineteenth century, we could call them) “activities.” from 7,813 women and teenth centuries during the musculature in our as the second wave of a If modern life presents us with a bou- found that those who sat for Industrial Revolution. backs disengaged as technological revolution quet of sedentary behaviors, then chairs ten hours a day had shorter Before the eighteenth gathered pace with inven- are the stalks. They are so necessary to telomeres (an indicator of we recline in a chair, century, a chair was rela- tions such as the typewriter, leading a modern life that most of what cellular aging). Their sed- tively easy to come by, but it is little wonder that telegraphy, and the expand- we do seems unimaginable without them. entary habits had aged them the majority of the popula- with our weakened ing uses and applications of Research conducted by the British Heart biologically by about eight tion had little use for them. spines, back pain is electricity, the labor market Foundation suggests that we enjoy about years. Some studies even Even today, it is not easy now the number-one also began to change. The 9.5 hours per day of sedentary time. There suggest that the effects of to sit in a hard wooden new category of office are a few problems with this. sitting for sustained periods cause of disability chair for sustained periods, clerks was the fastest-grow- Our bodies do their best to be the kinds cannot be offset by a little and upholstered chairs were globally. ing occupational group in of body that we need. Wolff’s Law and Da- exercise. prohibitively expensive. the latter half of the period. vis’s Law can be boiled down to the adage These studies and many But the fashion for a new In 1851, the census sug- “use it or lose it” for the body’s hard and others attest to the fact reclining culture (imported gests, fewer than 44,000 soft tissues, respectively. In both cases they that we should be thinking from the French court of the people were performing tell us that bone or muscle will respond carefully about investing eighteenth century) helped to popularize administrative work. But in either to increased load or the cessation any further in our relatively their early use. just two decades, sedentary of use. Bones become thinner or denser. newfound and passionate For centuries before, chairs had persis- workers had more than Muscles, stronger or weaker. Seated so love affair with the chair.A tently been associated with power, wealth, doubled to 91,000. much, with most of the musculature in our and high status. They were about as widely backs disengaged as we recline in a chair, Vybarr Cregan-Reid teaches at used by the peasantry as a crown. There is Today, sedentary workers are in it is little wonder that with our weakened the University of Kent. His latest an instructive stage direction in the First the majority. And, through- spines, back pain is now the number-one book is Primate Change: How the Folio of King Lear in which the monarch out the twentieth century, cause of disability globally. World We Made Is Remaking Us. enters while being carried by servants “in a a forest of other sedentary Just as we have an Anthropocene envi- He is currently making a series for chair.” The idea of chairs as a symbol activities has grown up ronment, we might equally class ourselves the BBC World Service about his of status still persists today. The highest around us to match our as Anthropocene humans. Paleolithic hu- research into the Anthropocene attainment in my own profession, aca- new working lives. mans died most frequently body (available May 2019). demia, is called “a chair.” The individual Novel-reading in- in infancy. Violence and that runs a meeting is called “a chair.” The creased hugely in popularity injury were also com- head of a company is also a chairman or throughout the nineteenth mon causes of mortality in chairwoman. And it is a truth, universally century—and further later life. Modern humans, acknowledged, that the best chair in any sedentary leisure activi- though, overwhelmingly office building always belongs to the boss. ties followed in its wake: die as a result of metabolic Democratization of the use of chairs cinema, radio, and TV. disorders such as Type 2 (particularly after the French Revolution More recently, gaming, diabetes, heart disease, and and the 1832 Great Reform Act in the UK) streaming, and screen time some cancers—all strongly coincided with a slow change in our work- generally are all activities linked with inactivity: ing patterns. The majority of work done in that are hungry for us to sit namely, chair use. This article is republished from the Victorian period would have been un- still in contemplation. The A 2012 study investigat- theconversation.com under a derstood as manual labor or factory work. Anthropocene human being ing the effects of inactiv- creative commons license.

28 29 AN INTERVIEW WITH KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Do we have Picturing a Way Forward Climate change, science fiction, a sense that and our collective failure of imagination

things could go By Diego Arguedas Ortiz

right? Even if What do a policy report, a street demonstration, And with this conundrum, what does and a fictional story share in common? For science fiction provide? it’s physically science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robin- son, they could help our imagination picture You can’t talk about every possible future possible—is a way forward to address climate change. In in one work of science fiction—that would his novels, such as the acclaimed Mars trilogy be crazy. But what you could do is tell a it politically or the aquatic New York 2140, Robinson bunch of stories that are relatively plausible, invites his readers to challenge their own that are set in the near future, and that possible, and assumptions. If someone puts forward a describe a course of action that readers can seemingly wild yet necessary vision for a imagine in a kind of “thick” texture. Where is it humanly better future, why wouldn’t we believe that you really feel like you’re there. There’ll be such a world is possible? I spoke with the some contingent events and some charac- possible? 67-year-old American writer; this is a con- ters that are representative, but they are also densed version of that interview. individual characters with their own quirks. There’ll be a story, and yet the reader will In 2019 we seem to have plenty also say: “Well, yeah—this could be one of technological, fiscal, and legal way forward.” This way, you have the instruments to deal with climate utopian strand of describing things going change, yet picturing a way forward is right. Do we have a sense that things could as challenging as ever. Are we facing a go right? Even if it’s physically possible, the failure of imagination? question is: Is it politically possible, and is it humanly possible? I would agree with that. I’ve been trying hard to imagine a plausible, positive scenario I guess your writing deals more with going forward, and I’m aware that it’s not the politics of possibility more than the easy. This is not because people haven’t been politics of probability? trying; it’s because the problem is big and intractable to a certain extent. We run the Well, that’s for sure. I have a bad feeling— world economy by and large as a capitalist that I think is widely shared—that we are profit-making enterprise, and the mitiga- not responding fast enough. I think that tion of climate change is not a profit-making the Paris Accords are real achievements in enterprise. It’s not the highest rate of human history; nevertheless, we are not return—and the market directs all capital achieving what we set out to do. Every- to the highest rate of return. body’s overshooting, and there’s more Illustration ©Miles Traer

30 31 carbon being burned every year. So I’m where individuals, small groups, and local worried, like everyone else. Some stories collectives make changes at the individual, maybe need to be set in dystopias and show household, and local levels; and then there how bad it’ll be if things go wrong. I’m not are the top-down ones, the stuff that hap- saying that dystopias are not useful, because pens in nation-states and in international I think they are useful, but I’m more inter- treaties, often decided amongst the techno- ested in writing the positive futures. crats and diplomats and experts. There’s no reason to privilege one over the other—the Showing us this possible future, however important thing is to keep both of them in unlikely it might be, can make readers mind simultaneously. think: “Okay, we can actually get there Take a look at the Green New Deal. if we put some measures in place in You can say it’s been demanded by the left 2019, 2020.” wing of the Democratic Party in the United States. On the other hand, you could also say When you said that, it reminded me of that it’s a top-down document that has been something that Bertolt Brecht once said concocted by a committee of a few. Well, about plausibility when people read such both are true—and that’s one of the reasons In the best possible way, I want to stories. Even if the story isn’t likely, it can why the Green New Deal is important and still be possible. Something happens when significant and needs to be supported. suggest that seeing the Green New Deal people read along. What Brecht said was that, if you think a story is utopian (and In a way, I guess, the Green New Deal as a kind of science-fiction story is what he meant very unlikely to happen), you shares a trait with science fiction in that should also consider why you think that. it shows a way forward. It doesn’t put all Consider what’s possible, and allow space the dots on the i’s, but it shows a way to we need. We need that kind of vision. for that. I fear this is going to be an issue actually reach 1.5 or 2 degrees and trans- with my new novel, and I’m struggling form society into something that’s better. mightily to write it. People are going to be reading it and at certain points are going I would invite everybody to think of the Maybe I assumed that parents have enough A common feeling seems to be: “I’m alone to say: “Well, that’s pretty optimistic.” Or: Green New Deal as it currently exists (a control over their situation to worry about in this.” I can imagine only a few occupa- “Well, it wouldn’t happen that way; that’s document which is quite impressive in its doing things for their kids politically. With tions that might generate that thought not likely.” I think that at those points it amount of detail and substance) as a science- the best will in the world, the genera- as bluntly as writing daily about future becomes important for the readers, and fiction story. It’s a utopian science-fiction tion that you might call parents is sort of climate worlds and their political implica- I’m going to try to provide prompts in the story written in the form of a proclamation swamped with their own problems—by tions does. How do you manage? text, to think: “Well, why? Why am I or a blueprint for action. In my short-story debt, by job precariousness, and so on. It’s making that assumption? What’s happening collection, The Martians, I experimented really been the teenagers and children who Well, I think that's a cognitive error. For today that makes that positive future seem with all kinds of formats, including a short are speaking up and saying: “Wait—now me personally, I can say this: it felt lonely in so unlikely?” Then maybe we might work story in the form of the Martian Constitu- that I’ve learned of this situation, this is bad. 2004. That’s when I published Forty Signs of on that. tion and a short story in the form of an Something has to be done now.” And that Rain—ten years after a trip to Antarctica and abstract in a scientific journal. In the case of has surprised me. Because of the science- a decade of a growing education about cli- In your books, characters generally the Green New Deal, and in the best pos- fiction novel I’m writing right now, I’m mate change. I felt like nobody was listening, team up in the end and create collective sible way, I want to suggest that seeing it very interested in the climate-change law- at least not to me. Maybe they were listening solutions. Yet so many solutions offered as a kind of science-fiction story is what we suits being brought by children as well as to Al Gore; but I felt as though I were be- now—diet changes, electric vehicles, need. We need that kind of vision. in their legal standing in courts worldwide. ing treated like a science-fiction writer who light bulbs—are on the individual front. You can extrapolate from there—of course, was portraying a weird science-fiction-ish

Can we recuperate and empower that There’s a line in New York 2140 that that’s what science fiction does—to ques- Diego Arguedas Ortiz feature, like aliens landing or something. collective identity and collective means says, “People are scared for the kids. tions about the rights of the unborn. What is a science and Climate change was just as unlikely as to go forward? That’s a moment things can tip.” Now about someone who is going to be born climate-change aliens coming down. That’s so different reporter from it seems as if it’s actually children them- in the year 2050? Can they sue us now for Costa Rica. He’s now—I don’t feel lonely at all. I feel like There are two directions to positive selves who are more worried and who are what we’re doing? And what’s their legal @arguedasortiz this is the world’s topic, and I don’t think change. There are bottom-up changes, pushing things from the bottom up. standing? on Twitter. anybody needs to feel lonely anymore. A

32 33 INDOOR FARMING

On a narrow sand spit in northern California, a The company is riding a wave of demand the environment, potentially Saltwater Norwegian company plans to build a mas- for farmed fish as aquaculture becomes the carrying harmful nutrients, sive fish farm that would be the largest of its fastest-growing food sector in the world. It parasites, and pathogens that Aquaculture kind on the West Coast. has also emerged as a leader among larger- threaten wild fish populations Located near the city of Eureka, the scale fish farms heading indoors and inland— and surrounding ecosystems. Moves Inland 30-acre farm proposed in February 2019 and even potentially to arid regions of the Salmon farmed in net pens could ultimately produce 27,500 tons of fish world. The industry hopes to confront head- along the coast of British Improved technology could give per year—and would do so entirely on land on the environmental ills of outdoor aqua- Columbia and elsewhere fish farms a sustainable foothold and indoors. It’s the second such facility the culture by designing sustainable closed-loop around the world, for exam- far from the ocean company, Nordic Aquafarms, has proposed systems that can also turn a profit. ple, have infected wild salm-

in the U.S. in less than two years—with an Traditional aquaculture operations, such Photo on populations with parasitic even larger indoor farm under way in Bel- as inland flow-through ponds and marine net ©Ales Prikryl sea lice. Inland flow-through By Laura Poppick Burning Man fast, Maine, where they ultimately hope to pens, can pose serious environmental prob- 2012 sculpture systems also consume copious produce 33,000 tons of fish per year. lems. Water from these farms flows freely into by Tony Zorich amounts of water, since they require a continuous influx of flowing water to operate. Nordic and others have embraced a technology called Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RAS) to diminish these problems by recycling water within a closed loop and thus significantly reduc- ing a farm’s contact with the environment. With the familiar sounds of pumps humming and water bub- bling vigorously through fil- ters, RAS functions similarly to a home aquarium: water perpetually loops through a series of filters and treatments before recirculating back through a tank. A biofilter breaks down fish urine with the help of ammonia- consuming bacteria, and physical filters remove fecal The industry hopes material and leftover food. to confront head-on That solid waste gets dis- the environmental posed of elsewhere and can ills of outdoor be repurposed as products aquaculture by (such as agricultural fertilizer) or for biofuel production. A designing closed- small amount of wastewa- loop systems that ter exits the system into the can also turn a profit. environment through tank

34 35 overflow and filter clean- recirculating water and ing—but this water is largely harm fish, says Ingrid free of contaminants, since it Bakke, a biotechnology has been so heavily treated, researcher at the Norwe- says Michael Timmons, an gian University of Science environmental engineer and Technology who at Cornell University who studies bacterial activity studies aquaculture technol- in aquaculture systems. “If ogy and offers a course they fail, it’s a big problem on RAS. because ammonia is really RAS has existed within toxic to fish,” she says. small-scale farms for dec- Tank-monitoring tech- ades, but more efficient nologies can help com- engineering designs and panies track malfunctions heightened demand for and catch problems before farmed fish have elevated it they escalate, but these to its current rising popu- systems are expensive and larity. With the capacity still remain susceptible to to recycle more than 90 human error. percent of the water within Even given some of a tank, RAS technology of- the challenges associated fers an appealing alternative with RAS, the Monterey to flow-through systems Bay Aquarium Seafood because it consumes signifi- Watch has given it the cantly less water, says Tim- highest ranking for sus- mons. “A recirculating farm tainable seafood. Tim- will use about one-five- mons believes that when thousandth of the volume of farmers integrate these water required for a conven- systems with crop produc- tional production system,” tion, their sustainability A recirculating Recirculating aquaculture systems says Timmons—noting that fertilize crops—adding to its viability in dry consume roughly two to six more kilowatt- at the Virginia Tech Department of becomes unbeatable. this makes RAS an espe- regions of the world. farm will use about hours of energy per kilogram of fish pro- Food Science and Technology/CC. In the face of faltering cially viable option in drier With all of its potential benefits, RAS one-five-thousandth duced, according to Timmons. Most of this food security for a hu- regions of the world. has started to replace outdoor ponds in of the volume of additional energy goes into powering pumps man population estimated On the prairie near China—the world’s largest producer of that keep water cycling, he says, and renew- to swell beyond 9 billion water required for Winnipeg, Canada, for farmed fish—and has increasingly spread able energy such as solar panels can help off- people by 2050, farmed example, biotechnology elsewhere around the world. The larg- a conventional set these energy needs. But this still remains fish may offer one of the company Myera Group has est farm of its kind in East Africa opened production system a stumbling block for larger-scale RAS. most reliable and efficient launched a small-scale RAS in Kenya in 2015. Located in the city of Sustainably sourcing feed to support sources of nutrition, says facility that takes advan- Machakos, about 40 miles from Nairobi, these farms also poses challenges, especially Timmons. In part, that’s tage of briny aquifer water Kamuthanga Fish Farm produces tilapia; it as they scale up. Researchers are working to because fish have a slower unsuitable for drinking but recently became the first aquaculture farm pinpoint the nutrient and energy require- metabolism than warm- ideal for growing saltwater in Africa to receive the EcoMark Africa ments of fish in order to find ways to meet blooded animals and can fish, says Shirley Thompson label—a certificate that recognizes sustain- those needs with plant-based material such as produce the same amount of the University of Manito- ably produced products. soy rather than with fishmeal. These efforts of meat with a fraction of ba in Winnipeg. She studies Still, some hurdles—including energy can improve the efficiency and sustainability the feed required to raise sustainable food systems and consumption and sourcing fish feed—do of these feeds, Timmons says. poultry and cattle. “If you points out that farms can limit the long-term sustainability of RAS Laura Poppick is a freelance RAS technology also carries its own want to eat animal protein, journalist based in Portland, also use the wastewater from farms as they scale up. Compared to flow- Maine. She covers science, operational risks. If biofilters malfunction, the most efficient animal is these systems to irrigate and through systems and net pens, RAS farms technology, and the environment. for example, waste can quickly build up in the fish,” he says.A

36 37

2. Deep Dives

Natural isn't what it used to be

38 39 Blurring Life's Boundaries Darwinian theory is based on the idea that heredity flows vertically, parent to offspring, and that life’s history has branched like a tree. Now we know otherwise: that the ‘tree' of life isn’t that simple.

By David Quammen

Since the late 1970s, there have come three big surprises about what we humans are and about how life on our planet has evolved. The first of those three surprises involves a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as the archaea. (They look like bacteria through a microscope, but their DNA reveals they are shockingly different.) Another is a mode of hereditary change that was also unsuspected, now called horizon- tal gene transfer. (Heredity was supposed to move only vertically, from parents to off- spring.) The third is a revelation, or anyway a strong likelihood, about our own deepest an-

Image based on original art by Charis Tsevis

PB 41 cestry. (It seems now that our lineage traces to the archaea.) So we ourselves probably come from creatures that, as recently as forty years ago, were unknown to exist. One of the most dis- orienting results of these He scribbled on. The tree is “irregularly developments is a new This is an aspect of evolution that cies, not just vertically branched,” he told the B notebook. Each challenge to the concept was unimagined by Charles Darwin. along ancestral lineages? branch diverges into smaller branches, he of “species.” Biologists Evolution is trickier, far more The mechanisms are com- wrote, and then twigs, “Hence Genera,” have long recognized plex, but one label that fits the next higher category above species, intricate, than we had realized. that the boundaries of most of them is “infective which would be the twiglets or terminal one species may blur into The tree of life is more tangled. heredity.” DNA can be buds. Some buds die away without yield- another—by the process carried across boundar- ing further growth, while new buds appear, of hybridism, for instance. ies, from one genome somehow. And the notion of spe- to another, by infective Fifteen pages along, after more rumi- cies is especially insecure agents such as bacteria nations, he drew a little sketch, in bold in the realm of bacteria and archaea. But and viruses. Such horizontal gene transfer, strokes, of a trunk rising into four major the discovery that horizontal gene transfer like sex, has been a source of freshening limbs and several minor ones. Each major (HGT) has occurred naturally, many times, innovation in otherwise discrete lineages, limb diverged into clusters of branches, with even in the lineages of animals and plants, including ours—and it is still occurring. certain branches labeled A, B, C, D. The has brought the categorical reality of a spe- This is an aspect of evolution that was letters were placeholders, meant to represent cies into greater question than ever. That’s unimagined by Charles Darwin. Evolution living species, or maybe genera. Felis, Canis, even true for us humans—we are composite is trickier, far more intricate, than we had Darwin’s 1837 sketch, Vulpes, Gorilla. individuals, mosaics. realized. The tree of life is more tangled. redrawn by Patricia J. Wynne This was a thunderous assertion, ab- It’s not just that—as you may have read stract but eloquent. You can look at the in magazine articles—your human body Beginning in July 1837, Charles Darwin kept Jotting down clipped phrases, often in little sketch today, with its four labeled contains at least as many bacterial cells as a small notebook, which he labeled “B,” bad grammar and punctuation, he laid out branches amid the limbs and the crown, and it does human cells. (This doesn’t even devoted to the wildest idea he ever had. a series of questions. “Why is life short,” he imagine the evolutionary divergence of all count all the nonbacterial microbes—the It wasn’t just a private thing but a secret asked. Why is reproduction so important? life from a common ancestor. Just above the virus particles, fungal cells, archaea, and thing, a record of his most outrageous “Each species changes. does it progress.” Put sketch, as though gesturing toward it bash- other teeny passengers inhabiting our guts, thoughts. The notebook was bound in a pair of cats on an island, let them breed fully, Darwin wrote: “I think.” mouths, nostrils, and other bodily surfaces.) brown leather, with a tab and a clasp; 280 there for generations. Do the cats become That’s the microbiome. Each of us is an pages of cream-colored paper, compact better cats, or at least better cats for catting It was an evolutionary tree of life. Darwin didn’t ecosystem. enough to fit in his jacket pocket. The B on that particular island? If so, how long invent that phrase, “the tree of life,” nor I’m talking about something else, a notebook was first of a series on what, to would it take? How far would it go? What originate its iconic use, though he put it to bigger and more shocking discovery that himself only, he called “transmutation.” are the logical limits, Darwin wondered, if new purpose in his theory. Like so many has come from the revolution in a field At that time, the stability of species “every successive animal is branching up- other metaphors embedded deep in our called molecular phylogenetics. (That phrase represented the bedrock of natural history. wards” and with “different types of organi- thinking, it came down murkily, modified sounds fancy and technical, but it means It was taken for granted, and was impor- zation improving,” new forms arising, old and reechoed, from early versions in Aris- merely the use of molecular informa- tant, not just among clergy and pious lay forms dying out? totle and the Bible. None represented the tion, such as DNA or RNA sequences, in people but scientists too. Now home from That one word, branching, was freight- notion of change over time—of evolution— discerning how one creature is related to his wildcat voyage on HMS Beagle, the ed with interesting implications: of direc- until Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s 1809 book another.) The discovery was that sizeable 27-year-old Darwin intended to investigate tional growth, of divergence, of an arboreal Philosophie Zoologique, which contained a chunks of the genomes of all kinds of a radical alternative to scientific orthodoxy: form. Big ideas were coming at him like vague evolutionary theory and depicted animals, including us, have been acquired that the forms of living creatures weren’t diving owls. He needed some order as much animal diversity in a branched diagram, by horizontal transfer from bacteria or eternally stable, as God had reputedly cre- as he needed the jumble of tantalizing clues. descending down the page, with major ani- other alien species. ated them, but instead had changed over Maybe he needed a metaphor. Then, on the mal groups connected by dotted lines. How could that be possible? How time, one into another—by some mecha- bottom of page 21, Darwin wrote: “orga- Fifty years later, Darwin published On could genes move sideways, between spe- nism that Darwin didn’t yet understand. nized beings represent a tree.” the Origin of Species. His book included just

42 43 1967, with a long paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology and titled “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.” This radical, startling, and ambitious article—previously rejected by more than a dozen journals— proposed to rewrite two billion years of evolutionary history. It laid out an array of “This paper presents a theory,” she evidence supporting the odd conjecture that wrote—a theory proposing that “the eu- living ghosts of other life-forms exist and karyotic cell is the result of the evolution of perform functions inside our very own cells. ancient symbioses.” Single-celled crea- Adopting an earlier term, Margulis called tures had entered into other single-celled creatures, like food within stomachs, or From: that idea endosymbiosis. Darwin's On like infections within hosts, and by hap- the Origin of penstance and overlapping interests, at least Species,1859. a few such pairings had achieved lasting compatibility. Lynn Margulis (2005) CC BY-SA 2.5 Eventually they became more than one illustration, a diagram of 11 hypotheti- partners. The internalized microbes, she cal lineages proceeding upward through argued, had evolved into organelles—work- thousands of generations of inheritance— ing components of a new, composite deep evolutionary time. Eight of those 11 whole, like the liver or lineages came to dead ends—meaning, they spleen inside a human— Darwin had seen evolution as arboreal. And the tree image went extinct, like trilobites and ichthyo- with fancy names and saurs. One rose through the eons without would remain the best graphic representation of life’s distinct functions: mito- splitting—meaning, it persisted unchanged, history, evolution through time . . . until the late twentieth chondria, chloroplasts, much the way horseshoe crabs have sur- century. And then rather suddenly a small group of centrioles. They were vived relatively unchanged over 450 million scientists would discover: oops, no, it’s wrong. functional elements of a years. The other two lineages, dominating single new being. A new the diagram, branched often, spread hori- kind of cell. zontally, and climbed vertically, represent- The scientific consensus at first, and for ing the exploration of different niches by some years afterward, was that this smart, newly evolved forms. So there it all was: knowledgeable, insistent, and charming evolution and the origins of diversity. Carl Woese (2004) ©Don Hamerman/CC BY 3.0 young woman was in thrall of a loony idea. Darwin had seen evolution as arbo- But eventually the emerging science of real. And the tree image would remain the molecular phylogenetics confirmed most of best graphic representation of life’s history, her theory of endosymbiosis (mitochondria evolution through time, the origins of di- It was the first recognized version of and chloroplasts as captured bacteria, yes). versity and adaptation, until the late twen- horizontal gene transfer. In these cases, rare Margulis became eminent, though never tieth century. Then rather suddenly a small but consequential, whole genomes of liv- conventional. group of scientists would discover: oops, no, ing organisms—not just individual genes or As new evidence of horizontal gene it’s wrong. small clusters—had gone sideways and been transfer continued to accumulate during captured within other organisms. the 1990s, she and other biologists started Lynn Margulis was a forceful 29-year-old The phrase “mitosing cells” in the paper’s questioning the belief that the evolutionary adjunct assistant professor from Chicago, title is another way of saying eukaryotic pattern is a tree. “It’s not,” Margulis told a divorced and raising two kids, when she cells, the ones with nuclei and other complex reporter in 2011. “The evolutionary pattern brought new attention and credibility to internal structures, the ones that compose all is a web—the branches fuse.” a very strange old idea about the shape of animals and plants and fungi. But the key She was right: the tree of life is not the tree of life. She made her case, in March word in Margulis’s title was “origin.” perfectly tree-shaped. There’s something Ford Doolittle (2009) ©Riley Smith

44 45 Bacteria Archaea Eucarya What came next was an exploding aware- ness of the role played by horizontal gene 14 15 6 Euryarchaeota 16 transfer in this whole story. That explosion 12 13 17 occurred during the 1990s but had deep 5 11 4 Crenarchaeota 18 precedents. The first recognition by science 8 10 19 7 9 that any such thing might be possible dates 3 2 to work published in 1928 by an English- man named Fred Griffith. No one at the 1 time, not even Griffith himself, saw the Woese showed that humans, and implications of what he had found. all other animals, all plants, all As a medical officer at the London fungi, all eukaryotes, have arisen Woese and his postdoc and coauthor, Pathological Laboratory of Britain’s Min- from a lineage unknown to science George Fox, gave their kingdom a tentative istry of Health, Griffith studied what’s now From: Woese spooky and unnatural about any tree whose name: archaebacteria. known as Streptococcus pneumoniae, a dan- CR, Kandler O, before 1977. It was the last of the and Wheelis limbs grow together, sometimes, rather The name was misleading, a wrong gerous bug that could cause severe, often ML. Towards a than always branching apart. great classical trees: authoritative, choice, and would later be changed. It sug- fatal, pneumonia. During the 1918–19 in- natural system of organisms. profound, and correct to some gested ancient bacteria. By 1990, Woese fluenza pandemic, this kind of pneumonia PNAS, 1990. Two years after Margulis published her first degree. But it entirely missed what and other scientists recognized that these took hold as a secondary infection in many provocative paper, challenging the total was coming next. creatures weren’t bacterial precursors nor patients and probably killed more millions separation of the prokaryote kingdom ancient bacterial forms. Bacteria weren’t of people than the flu virus itself. (bacteria, lacking nuclei) and the eukaryote even their nearest kin. Some evidence had Griffith’s work, which was pragmati- kingdom (all other cellular life, includ- emerged, in fact, that archaea were more cally medical, involved identifying the dif- ing animals and plants), another contrar- Methanogens were hard to grow in a closely related to eukaryotes—more closely ferent types of the streptococcus—there ian scientist embarked on an equally bold laboratory, since oxygen poisoned them, but related to us—than to bacteria. So Woese were four—in different patients and parts quest—to “unravel the course of events” Woese’s collaborators managed it. Under a and two other scientists wrote another paper of the country. He got his data by exam- leading to the origin of the simplest cells. microscope, these methanogens looked like for PNAS, proposing that there should be ining sputum coughed from the lungs of His name was Carl Woese. He was an bacteria. For centuries, they had been con- three major divisions of life, higher in rank the ill. In 1923, he discovered something obscure microbiologist at the University of sidered bacteria. But as Woese examined the than kingdoms, and those divisions should important: that each of the four types of the Illinois. In 1969, he confided in a letter to fingerprints, he found anomalies. A certain be domains, which would henceforth be bacterium existed in two different forms— Francis Crick that he hoped to extend the pair of small fragments, common to all bac- known as the Bacteria, the Eukarya, and the one that was ferociously virulent, one that understanding of evolution “backward in teria, were missing. Other sequences looked Archaea. The word archaebacteria should was mild. Sometimes the virulent form time by a billion years or so,” by “using the eukaryotic, suggesting a completely distinct now disappear, the authors argued. So should might transmogrify into the mild form, he cell’s ‘internal fossil record’ ” as contained in form of life: a yeast, a protozoan, what? And the word prokaryote. Prokaryotes didn’t ex- noticed. He didn’t know why. DNA and RNA. Some years later, Woese’s still others were just weird. ist as a phylogenetic category—it was a false His second discovery was far more work would trigger the revolution in mo- What was this RNA? Woese wondered, unit—because Archaea and Bacteria stood so puzzling: Under certain experimental lecular phylogenetics and lead to a drastic and what manner of organism did it rep- utterly distinct from each other. circumstances, the mild form of, say, Type redrawing of the tree of life, from its roots resent? It couldn’t be from a prokaryote. And, of course, there was a tree. It was II bacteria could change into the virulent to its crown. It wasn’t eukaryotic. It wasn’t from Mars, drawn in straight, simple lines, but it was form of, say, Type I. What? It seemed as By 1976, Woese and his team were because it contained too many familiar rich and provocative nonetheless. This though the streptococcus had morphed into doing RNA “fingerprinting” of various life stretches of RNA code. diagram asserted what Woese’s RNA finger- a different species. forms, including methanogens—microbes “Then it dawned on me,” he later wrote. print data showed: that we humans, and all The transformation Griffith witnessed that generate swamp gas in muddy wet- There was “something out there”—out there other animals, all plants, all fungi, all eukary- was later shown to be one of three cardinal lands and similar gas in the bellies of cows. in the teeming ecosystems of planet Earth, otes, have arisen from an ancestral lineage mechanisms of horizontal gene transfer, Certain bits of structural RNA are built he meant—other than prokaryotes and that was unknown to science before 1977. the most counterintuitive phenomenon into all life, and the biologists sequenced eukaryotes. A third form of life, separate. A It was the last of the great classical trees: discovered by biologists in the past century. those pieces, fragment by fragment, and third kingdom. In their seminal 1977 paper authoritative, profound, completely new to Griffith’s experiments, and others like them, then compared the collections of fragments on the discovery, published in the Proceedings science, and correct to some degree. But it demonstrated that in its naked form—float- between one creature and another. of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), entirely missed what was coming next. ing loose in the environment after having

46 47 Recent research has found evidence of bacterial DNA transferred horizontally into the genomes of human tumors. What that dizzying revelation means is still unclear, but there’s at wise?—and how it has worked for much of least some chance that such insertions might the past four billion years. HGT contradicts the conviction that play a role in causing cancer. From: Doolittle bacterial species are fixed and discrete. If WF. Phylogenetic genes routinely cross the boundary be- Classification and the Universal Tree. tween one species of bacteria and another, Science, 1999. been liberated from a busted bacterial cell— then in what sense is it really a boundary? DNA is capable of getting into another New investigations, as time passed, showed bacterium and causing heritable change. that genes have even been transferred side- This sort of sideways passage can carry ways between complex eukaryotic organ- DNA not just across minor boundaries, isms. For instance: there’s a peculiar group ied origin. And the tree of life, as I’ve said type to type among Streptococcus pneumoni- of tiny animals known as rotifers, notable earlier, is not a tree. That is, life’s history ae, but also across huge gaps—from one throughout molecular biology for their doesn’t conform to the pattern of any arbo- bacterial species to another, from one genus massive uploads of alien genes. A big rotifer real plant you’ll ever find in a forest. Again, to another, even from one domain of life to might be a millimeter long, barely big some “natural order” by Genes going it’s more tangled. another. And the transformations that result enough to see, but small as they are, these placing them on a sche- sideways among These discoveries should not merely from such horizontal transfer can be far are not single-celled creatures. They’re matic tree of life. Doolittle animals? That was complicate our magisterial human self- multicellular animals. image, but also help lead us toward a wiser more consequential than merely changing illustrated—literally—the definitely supposed a pneumonia bug from mild to virulent. When Harvard researchers sequenced difficulties with his own and humbler understanding of our place— Today we live with one of those con- sections of genome in one rotifer species, hand-drawn figure of what to be impossible. collectively and as “individuals” within the sequences: bacterial resistance to multiple they found at least 22 genes that must have he called “a reticulated It wasn’t. “species” Homo sapiens—in the story of life antibiotics, which spreads sideways among arrived by horizontal transfer. Some of tree.” To his surprise, the on Earth. different kinds of bacteria. It can happen those were bacterial genes, some were fun- editors of Science published It’s a story in which we humans are gradually or in a sudden leap, conveying gal. One gene had come from a plant. Later it along with his paper. important protagonists but not the ulti- multidrug resistance from harmless bacteria work suggested that 8 percent of its genes And more recent research has found mate and predestined heroes. It’s a story such as the common form of Escherichia had been acquired by horizontal transfer evidence of bacterial DNA transferred hori- in which heredity has moved sideways as coli into dangerous bacteria such as Shi- from bacteria or other dissimilar creatures. zontally into the genomes of human tu- well as vertically and all the conventional gella dysenteriae. Because of that sideways Genes going sideways among animals? mors. What that dizzying revelation means hierarchies and boundaries have proven spread, fast and easy, bacterial resistance has That was definitely supposed to be impos- is still unclear, but there’s at least some more imperfect, transgressible, and leaky become a dire problem. More than 23,000 sible. It wasn’t. chance that such insertions might play a than we had supposed. But these revela- deaths annually in the United States and HGT started showing up among role in causing cancer. Putting horizontal tions don’t diminish our responsibility, as seven hundred thousand deaths globally insects as well. The most dramatic case was gene transfer on the list of suspected human humans, to respect and preserve the diver- occur from infection by unstoppable strains one species of fruit fly, which had accepted carcinogens brings it out of the realm of sity of living creatures, with all their own of bacteria. This grim, costly trend has been almost the entire genome of a bacterium microbial arcana. mosaic genomes and tangled lineages, who driven not just by overuse of antibiotics, known as Wolbachia—more than a mil- The cumulative effect of these discov- cohabit the planet with us. On the con- and by incremental adaptation—one strain lion letters of genetic code—into its own eries has been to challenge three concepts trary, I think. All this should make us only of bacteria adapting to one antibiotic—but nuclear genome. Again, this was supposed that we have long considered categorically more amazed, respectful, and careful. Life also by horizontal gene transfer, which to be impossible. solid: the concepts of species, of individual, on Earth is wondrous precisely because it’s spreads adaptations instantly. By 1999, discoveries had progressed to and of the tree of life. Now we can under- so complicated. A a point such that Ford Doolittle, a highly stand better. The boundaries between one The implications of horizontal gene transfer respected researcher and theorist based in species and another are not nearly so clear David Quammen is a contributing writer for National go far beyond the problem of antibiotic Halifax, Nova Scotia, published an over- and impervious as we thought. The living Geographic and author of 15 books. This article was resistance. Those implications include the view paper in that put HGT at the individual, including the human individual, adapted from from THE TANGLED TREE: A Radical Science New History of Life by David Quammen. Copyright whole matter of how evolution works—by center of a new discussion: whether it’s is a singular thing, yes, but at the same time ©2018 by David Quammen. Reprinted by permission classical Darwinian mechanisms, or other- even possible to classify organisms into a mosaic of life forms and genes of var- of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

48 49 A View from Everywhere All the Time

Tech companies are rapidly networking the environment in ways that will transform our perception of nature—just as social media reshaped our relationships with each other. What could possibly go wrong?

By W. Wayt Gibbs

50 51 It was only on the fourth orbit, when the spacecraft’s orientation had stapling health-monitoring microchips changed, that they had the vision for which their mission will always be remembered. Shortly after they had swept from night to day, a bright, to their livestock. Beekeepers are sticking colourful complexity came past the limb of the Moon and into view wireless sensors into their hives. Farmers are planting high-tech electronics into the soil along with their crops. Autonomous —Oh my God! Look at that picture over sailboats now ply the Southern Ocean to look for krill swarms, and AI-enhanced there! Here’s the Earth coming up. drones patrol elephant habitats in southern companies often beneficently grant free ac- Africa to spot poachers on the prowl. cess to selected researchers and nonprofits, Wow, that is pretty. “We are on the curling edge of the their long-term business strategies hinge wave,” Amos says. The power of the on converting data into dollars. And those ‟Earthrise” image came, in part, from the who are being observed and recorded are and life returned to the world . . . humbling invisibility of human existence not the customers—they are the products. in it. “This new instrumentation is more Does any of this sound familiar? It has been called about seeing what people are up to in the Yet history is not destiny. If we an- environment,” he says. “The promise of this ticipate many of the ways that these new —Oh that’s a beautiful shot. convergence in technology lies in imposing windows on the world might be misused, it radical transparency on corporate activity should be possible to set up rules and agen- the most important picture of the 20th century. and supply chains everywhere.” As Sky- cies that will encourage the best uses while Truth’s motto goes, “If you can see it, you —Oliver Morton thwarting bad actors. Surprisingly, experts The Moon: A History for the Future can change it.” say that might not be as hard as it sounds. Or so one would hope. One lesson from past revolutions in social media and The Unblinking Eye "Earthrise," that iconic photograph snapped from other technologies is that “Power always the Apollo 8 space capsule 50 years ago on learns, and powerful tools always fall into Online instrumentation of the built and a Christmas-eve orbit around the Moon, its hands,” Zeynep Tufekci of the Berk- natural environment is extending our view forced a self-absorbed species to reflect on man Klein Center for Internet and Society of the real world in three dimensions at its fragility. “Prior to that image, people wrote recently in MIT Technology Review. once: in extent, in detail, and in time. We had a perception of the planet being essen- Half a century later, the arcs of fast- In less than a decade, starry-eyed promises are fast approaching a moment when, for a tially infinite in its capacity to take all the rising technologies—commercial rockets, inspired by Internet-organized protests price, you can put eyes on any given spot damage we dish out,” recalls John Amos. A cubesats, and drones, plus cloud comput- in Tahrir Square gave way to the grim on the planet on any given day, then scroll geoscientist who worked for years helping ing, machine learning, and the Internet of realities of data trafficking, cyberbullying, back through time to see how that place has oil companies scout prospects from space, Things—are now intersecting in ways that election meddling, and surveillance states. changed. Advances in machine-learning Amos was among a generation inspired by will again indelibly alter how we see the Radical transparency in our online lives has algorithms have made it possible to train an the “overview effect” to shift into activism. world and our place in it. It is no longer frayed, not tightened, the fabric of societ- unblinking AI gaze on a location of interest He left industry to launch an environmen- just advanced militaries and rich corpora- ies. And now, in the unrelenting march and get automated alerts when the software tal-surveillance nonprofit called SkyTruth. tions who can keep tabs on what people of technological monitoring, things are spots something amiss. One can now tag, “Seeing that vanishingly small green- are up to half a world away. Watchdogs getting real. say, a whaling ship and follow it from port and-blue dot surrounded by the absolute, such as Global Forest Watch, Global Fish- As sprawling webs of sensors, cameras, to port. With each passing year, this tech almost horrifying blackness of open space— ing Watch, and SkyTruth are combing and satellites give some (but not others) makes it easier to conduct oversight—in the that made a lot of people think we need through satellite photos and radar scans a near-real-time view from everywhere, most literal sense—of those who exploit the to be wielding our awesome power more to alert authorities to illegal clear-cutting, certain parallels to recent history are unmis- land and sea. wisely,” he says. Along with aerial views of rogue fishing, mountaintop removals, and takable—and unnerving. Data-gathering What’s more, the number of eyes in an enormous oil spill off the coast of Santa other environmental misbehavior. Re- startups are popping up all over, but they orbit is skyrocketing, driven by launch Barbara the following month, ‟Earthrise” searchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are locked in cutthroat races to monetize costs that have plummeted 90 percent since helped spur the creation of Earth Day and have exploited Amazon cloud servers to as- what they tout as “intelligence.” Tech gi- the Space Shuttle era. Europe’s Copernicus the major environmental-protection laws semble millions of amateur birdwatcher re- ants are “indexing the Earth” by hoovering program has fielded six Earth-observing of the 1970s. Such is the power of a trans- ports into exquisite animated maps that plot up satellite images the moment they are re- satellites, called Sentinels, since 2014. It formative shift in perspective enabled by a the changing abundance of 122 bird species leased to public access and then pouring the plans to expand the fleet to 30 within the major leap in engineering. throughout North America. Ranchers are data into vast archives. Though today these next decade. Last year, China added six

52 53 high-resolution optical and infrared imaging the beginning of what is going to become satellites to its fast-growing constellation. possible,” he says. In the US, the most dramatic growth In January, the Center for Strategic and in environmental surveillance is happening International Studies reported that it had in the private sector. San Francisco–based used returns from a space-based radar—along Planet Labs has launched 331 Earth-observ- with tracking data from radio, visible, and ing satellites since it spun up in 2013. Nearly infrared satellites—to monitor fishing activ- 150 of Planet’s cubesats, each roughly the ity among the disputed Spratly Islands in the size of a loaf of bread, took to space in 2018 South China Sea. The study revealed that the alone. (For comparison, 173 satellites owned number of boats operating surreptitiously in by governments were operating at the start the area is “exponentially higher” than those of 2016.) The company now collects 300 broadcasting as they should. A large fraction million square kilometers of imagery every of the vessels that look like fishing boats, the day. That’s nearly three-fifths the surface investigators concluded, are actually militia area of the Earth. patrolling the waters on behalf of China. And at the same time as the number of A different group of researchers working images is exploding, so is the number of pix- with Global Fishing Watch recently com- els in each square kilometer photographed. bined observations from multiple satellites to The smallest detail visible from Landsat 8, uncover illicit Chinese behavior of a differ- NASA’s flagship Earth-imaging spacecraft, ent kind. In a study soon to be published, is 15 meters—the size “[W]e show that of a city bus. Today Google and Baidu became behemoths Chinese ships are fish- Planet’s largest orbiting by erecting themselves as the gateways ing for squid in North cameras can pick out a Korean waters, almost person sunbathing in to the Web; Amazon and Alibaba as the certainly in violation their backyard, though gateways to commerce; Facebook as the of UN sanctions, while not the interesting bits. gateway to friends and family. How much the North Koreans Its competitor, Digi- more valuable would it be to occupy the are fishing for squid talGlobe, snaps photos position of gateway to the planet? in Russian waters,” from orbit at 30-centi- says Paul Woods, the meter resolution, sharp team’s chief technol- enough to see people ogy officer. “There’s and large animals on the hoof. Views from no way at this scale that there isn’t a financial the newest Chinese satellites are thought to transaction between the North Koreans and 6 be sharper still. businesses in China,” he suspects, despite The Instrumented Earth Such surveillance works only when skies international accords prohibiting such trade. A thickening flock of Earth-observing satellites are sunny. But soon, constellations of very In addition to getting clearer views of blankets the planet. Over 700 were launched during high-resolution satellites will use radar to the present, activists are now able to ex- the past 10 years, and more than 2,200 additional peer through clouds and the dark of night as ploit cloud computing to replay the past ones are scheduled to go up within the next 10 years. These scanners orbit among an increasingly crowded well. “That kicks open some doors,” Amos from extensive image archives maintained field of thousands of communications, navigation, says. In particular, high-def radar can light by Google, Amazon, and various govern- and astronomical satellites as well as almost a million up the vast “dark fleet” of fishing vessels that ment agencies. Amazon makes all data from pieces of space debris bigger than one centimeter. refuse to broadcast their positions via radio Landsat 8 freely available on its cloud storage transponders. service. Websites such as EO Browser have Armed with new ways of seeing and taken advantage of the open-use policy to with software that can merge surveillance create services that let you zoom in to any quickly from multiple sources, watchdogs location, enter a time range, pick the satellite now have more opportunities to illuminate sources you like, and then produce a time- shady behavior while there is still time to do lapse video of how the scene has evolved. The spacecraft and debris shown in this artist's impression reflect the actual density something about it. “We’re just now seeing Though the search engine and imagery are of orbiting objects but are exaggerated in size to make them visible at this scale. ©European Space Agency

54 55 currently free, thanks to financial back- through haystacks for elusive needles. All of these examples, and many others ing by the European Union, they do not “Society already struggles with too much like them, are tremendously encouraging. include the more detailed views offered by data, not enough information, Amos says. They tempt us to envision a happier future companies such as Planet and DigitalGlobe. “And this is certainly happening in remote in which the instrumentation of nature But commercial firms have been sensing as well.” draws humans into a more synoptic, and working with watchdogs and government After many years of false starts, artifi- yet more intimate, connection to our home agencies on projects that demonstrate the cial intelligence finally seems ready to help planet—one where Gaia itself gains a voice potential of this technology, which can solve this problem. In southern Africa, for and a Facebook account. These systems help attract paying customers. At the Rights When data that is too example, the Lindbergh Foundation’s Air could help people routinely band together Lab at the University of Nottingham, for massive for nonprofits Shepherd program had high hopes that, by to watch over ecosystems and organisms example, researchers have been scouring flying surveillance drones equipped with they care about deeply, despite never hav- and individuals to image series supplied by Planet and Digi- infrared scanners over elephant and rhino ing experienced them directly. talGlobe for environmental evidence of download is generated habitats, its teams could catch poachers be- Yet Mariel Borowitz, a space-policy slave labor at brick kilns in India, in cotton by government, stored fore the poachers caught their prey. But the researcher at Georgia Tech and author fields in Turkmenistan, and in mangrove- on private servers, monitoring teams found it hard to stare for of the book Open Space, sounds a note of displacing shrimp farms in Bangladesh. and digested by profit- hours on end at shaky, grainy, night-vision caution. The corporations building these Google has lent its Earth Engine system video. Hunters often slipped past them. technologies “are creating new kinds of making companies, to Global Forest Watch, Global Fishing So the group linked up with engineers data, new use cases, new users. But they Watch, and a new surface-water viewer who controls it? And at Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and UCLA are companies, so they are selling that data developed by the European Commission who pays? to train an AI neural network to detect to make a profit.” And the revenue gener-

(250 petabytes), the expected size of the NASA environmental 250,000,000,000, 000,000 bytes data archive in 2020

and the UN Environment Program. The deploying drones into the skies and oceans. both poachers and wild animals in their ated by environmental protection projects viewer, developed over three years and 10 Last winter, autonomous sailing robots built recorded videos. Once they got the system shows up on their books as little more than million hours of computing time, maps by Saildrone set off from South America to working well in the lab, they tested it in rounding error. disappearing streams and dwindling lakes circumnavigate Antarctica. The months-long the field in South Africa. It worked so well We should take care not to overesti- worldwide over the past 35 years. Scroll mission gathers data for scientists at NOAA that they are now using it in national parks mate the protective power of public aware- over northern California in the viewer, and CSIRO on how fast the Southern Ocean in Botswana and other African countries. ness nor underestimate how the technology

and the demise of Goose Lake is unmistak- is absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere, a Global Fishing Watch has used AI to will amplify the power of big industry and able. Click on the lake, and year-by-year crucial variable in global climate models. distinguish fishing vessels from cargo and bad actors. That is essentially the mistake measurements reveal that the 2008 drought The floating drones are also mapping the naval ships. A research team at Stanford re- we made with social media. sounded its death knell. abundance of phytoplankton and krill, which ported in April that it had fed aerial photos Access to space has become cheap form the base of the marine food web. of North Carolina farmland into a deep- Beneath the Silver Lining, a Dark Cloud enough that better-funded nonprofits can Also in 2018, biologists reviewing satel- learning system to find almost 600 indus- now put their own birds into the sky. The lite images of the Danger Islands off the trial livestock farms that manual mapping In the 20 years since Amos founded Sky- Environmental Defense Fund plans to northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula spot- had missed. Such concentrated feeding Truth, his team has exposed rampant launch by 2021 a satellite it is building to ted what looked like a previously unknown operations are a major source of freshwa- fracking activity, illegal gas-flaring, a measure methane leaking from oil and gas megacolony of Adélie penguins. Researchers ter pollution, in part because 60 percent of decades-long oil spill, illegal fishing around production sites worldwide, revisiting each sailed to the islands and flew drones over the them operate without discharge permits, Easter Island, and numerous other kinds of site at least once a week. colony, confirming the discovery of 750,000- according to the EPA. In principle, regula- violations. Some of those exposés have To keep tabs on things that can’t yet be plus breeding pairs. tors could use the AI to survey other states triggered official responses. Yet the latter seen from space—or to follow up on inter- One of the biggest challenges in en- as well and to identify new operations as half of SkyTruth’s “If you can see it, you esting sightings—some activist groups are vironmental surveillance has been digging they pop up. can change it” motto remains mostly

56 57 aspirational. “Although we’ve been ef- fective at raising public awareness about certain issues,” Amos says, “we haven’t had a big impact in altering corporate behav- ior.” Environmental exploitation remains highly profitable, and profitable businesses find ways to protect themselves. The same can be said of the technology industry. Among the tech giants, “everyone wants to be central, essential, and in con- trol of your world,” security expert Bruce Schneier writes in his recent book Click Here to Kill Everyone, because “control equals profits.” Google and Baidu became behemoths by erecting themselves as the gateways to the Web; Amazon and Alibaba as the gateways to commerce; Facebook as the gateway to friends and family. How much more valuable would it be to occupy the position of gate- Researchers used an aerial quadcopter to help count a way to the planet? In 2017, wildfires in Chile burned almost Permanent and seasonal water loss since 2000 at The day may supercolony of 1.5 million penguins. Photo by Thomas Sayre That idea 600,000 hectares, including 15,000 hectares Goose Lake, California is highlighted in red and yellow McChord, Hanumant Singh, Northeastern University. arrive when of protected old-growth forest. in the global Surface Water Viewer web application. seems not to have ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. ©Sentinel Hub ©Google, UNEP escaped Amazon “going off the and Google— grid” is no longer which, accord- possible. ing to Borowitz and Woods, have been download- ing essentially all the Earth observations that NASA, NOAA, the European Space Agency, and other agencies make avail- able to the public. Amazon is even building a global network of 24 large antennas to download data directly from some of the satellites that gather it. Planet Labs has been open about its long-term commercial strategy. CEO Will Marshall said last year that “Planet will in- dex physical change on Earth the same way Google indexed the Internet.” Not to be left out, Facebook’s AI team has been combining space imagery with public records to map the population of every community on Earth. That effort would seem to serve the company’s long- held goal to get the billions of people who A Saildrone autonomous sailboat tracking Chinese fishing vessels at Mischief Reef An AI system processes infrared video captured by conservation great white sharks in the Pacific. in the disputed Spratly Islands. drones and highlights poachers and animals in near real time. currently lack Internet access online—and ©Saildrone Satellite image ©2019 Maxar Technologies SPOT (Systematic POacher deTector) ©USC on Facebook.

58 59 None of this is necessarily a bad thing. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. entific research offer two useful examples. which cloud providers host NOAA data Who could resist the convenience of Ama- Governments have often demanded exclu- And the wireless-communications and and make it available to the public. They zon’s Alexa observing from orbit that your sive access to the imagery they purchase. It financial industries provide complementary cannot charge for the actual data, but they roof needs replacing or your windows could stands to reason that as environmental sens- ideas worth considering. can charge end users for distribution of the use washing, and offering to schedule the ing becomes commercially more valuable The earliest satellites, from Sputnik data and for processing and applications. work? If Google noticed you heading out on or politically more embarrassing, those who on, were launched in a race to space, and The volume of data presents one a backcountry hike and offered to automati- pay will want to keep it to themselves. a spirit of free competition has kept space hurdle to meaningful open access. NOAA cally summon help if you appear to get lost It doesn’t take much imagination to open ever since. So far, 35 countries have satellites alone generate 20 terabytes of or injured, would you refuse? There will be envision ways in which this technology lofted Earth-facing satellites. “Everyone data daily. “The amount of Earth-sensing countless ways that the tech giants can use could work against conservation efforts with a reasonably legitimate need gets to data released by NASA is going from 20 the view from everywhere to make our lives even more effectively than it aids the access low-Earth orbit and put hardware in petabytes today to 250 PB by 2020,” she slightly safer, cheaper, or more convenient. watchdogs. As the costs of drones and satel- space,” Amos notes. “It’s just as important says. One petabyte—a billion megabytes— Most have not yet been conceived. lite images fall and the performance of AI- that there won’t be shutter control imposed would take several years to download over But let us pause to remember that driven identification rises, whalers, fishers, on [those] remote-sensing systems.” a fast fiber-optic broadband connection. Amazon, Google, and Facebook grew to and poachers may find them to be powerful The open-skies policy of space explora- Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others become the third-, fourth-, and fifth-most tools for guiding their hunts. “That’s defi- tion could be extended to guarantee that already offer competing cloud-computing valuable companies in the world by pitching nitely a concern,” Woods says, “particularly no big player can exclude its competitors platforms that can do the job. ads directly at the people for elephants, rare whales, or rhinos.” or critics from access to unfiltered observa- But this raises a second, thornier is- most likely to act on them. There’s no avoiding Commodities traders and financial tions—or to the computer storage and pro- sue. When data that is too massive for Inference equals influence: the fact that we look analysts already hone their forecasts by cessing capacity needed to analyze them. nonprofits and individuals to download the product that the tech at the world through analyzing Planet and DigitalGlobe data There’s no avoiding the fact that we look at is generated by government, stored on companies sell to their to quantify the levels of fuel-storage tanks the world through a prism. But we should private servers, and digested by profit- a prism. But we customers is their abil- at refineries, the movement of shipping be free to switch prisms and compare dif- making companies, who controls it? And ity to infer how we live, should be free to containers at ports, and the heat emitted by ferent perspectives. who pays? where we go, what we do. switch prisms and factories. Might land speculators use similar Scientific research has long embraced a “Space is a global public commons,” Imagine the value added to compare different techniques to drive up the prices of wind similar principle—and it has been one of the Amos points out. He suggests that govern- that product when it also perspectives. and solar farms by scooping up the best greatest strengths of that enterprise. And fi- ments could demand license fees for the captures our interactions sites and transmission rights-of-way? nancial regulators require public companies right to collect data from space or other with the physical world. If past is prologue, regulators will lag to be transparent about their performance public areas, much as broadcasters and A rush to exploit re- far behind the tech giants and the resource so that the playing field is level for all inves- wireless communications companies pay mote sensing for advertising may inevitably extractors in constraining any destructive tors. Similar rules could protect sensor data to use the electromagnetic spectrum. The allow bad actors to target us in more harmful practices. “The big tech companies are against undisclosed conflicts of interest and fees could then help cover the costs of ways. Witness Facebook’s Cambridge spending record amounts of money lob- outright fraud. hosting the data for all to use. Analytica fiasco and data breaches in Sep- bying in Washington,” Schneier writes— Today, however, open access to both Though Amos, Woods, and Boro- tember 2018, and again in April 2019, that “many times more than oil companies, raw data and open-source software to witz all recognize the potential unintended exposed records—including location data— defense contractors, and everyone else.” manipulate it is not the norm. Borowitz downsides of the emerging view from on hundreds of millions of its users. And One result, he observes, is that “regulations surveyed the data policies on the use of everywhere, they remain optimistic about recall how in 2017 Google tracked Android are consistently co-opted. Instead of pro- unclassified imagery from government what it means for conservation. “The users, even when they had disabled location moting the common good, they’re aimed at satellites and found that data was freely environmental bad guys already have sharing. The day may arrive when “going promoting some private agenda.” available for fewer than half of them. Gov- ways to do what they want,” Woods says. off the grid” is no longer possible. ernments even hold back data crucial to “As long as the information stays open, I The biggest customers for sensing data Watching the Watchers updating climate models because they want believe these tools will benefit the small are governments and resource-extraction to sell it for commercial use, she reports. players more.” A industries, and that is unlikely to change, The good news is that none of these bad Whereas Europe puts all of its Sen- Borowitz says. Sixty percent of Digital things has happened yet. Nor are they tinel imagery in the public domain, only W. Wayt Gibbs is a freelance science writer and editor Globe’s business comes from the US military, inevitable. Several models suggest how to 10 percent of NOAA data was available based in Seattle. He is a contributing editor with Scientific Americanand editorial director at Intellectual she notes. Planet Labs has earned tens of prevent environmental surveillance from online as of 2016. Since then, NOAA has Ventures. His work has appeared in Science, Nature, millions of dollars selling imagery to the US going sideways. Space exploration and sci- implemented the Big Data Project, through Discover, IEEE Spectrum, and The Economist.

60 61 Hacking Nature

For decades, humans have modeled technology on observations of the natural world. But new discoveries about nature—and tools for manipulating it—have opened up novel approaches potentially more powerful than mere imitation to solving Human Age problems.

By Lindsey Doermann

Spinach that can detect explosives

Engineers have discovered how to transform spinach plants into environmental sen- sors that can alert us to the presence of explosives. The development is one in the nascent field of “cyborg botany,” a merging of nature and technology that draws upon plants’ remarkable sensory capabilities in order to drive robots, provide environmen- tal data, and more. In 2016, chemical engineer Min Hao Wong and his team at MIT transported carbon nanotubes into spinach leaves via their stomata. Traces of explosive material drought conditions or pest that the plant took in through the air or infestations before a farmer groundwater caused the nanotubes to emit can detect them. Wong is a fluorescent signal. To get the message exploring commercializa- from the plant, Wong’s team focused a tion of the technology in small infrared camera on the leaves and at- his current role as deputy tached it to a Raspberry Pi, a cheap, min- science director of Disrup- iature computer similar to what’s found in tive & Sustainable Technol- smartphones. When the camera detected a ogy for Agricultural Preci- signal, it triggered an email alert. sion (DiSTAP), a research Having worked out the spinach nano- center in Singapore. sensors, Wong has gone on to develop Plants may have a lot other applications of the technology—par- to tell us. We’re now just ticularly in agriculture. Plants are extremely learning how to get the perceptive, so they may be able to warn of message. A

Lindsey Doermann is a science writer based in photo ©Melanie Gonick/MIT Seattle, Washington

62 63 Bioluminescence to light up the city

We terrestrial beings have long marveled at how some squid, jellyfish, and other sea creatures produce their own entrancing glows—a phenomenon known as biolu- minescence. French designer Sandra Rey’s curiosity about that light inspired her to bring it up and out of the sea. She imagines bioluminescence as a natural resource on land for creating “living” lights: ones that emit a soothing glow without electricity. In addition, some French Rey is the founder and CEO of Glow- shop owners, prohibited ee, a company that merges biomimicry from illuminating signs with synthetic biology to produce biolu- or window displays in the minescent lights. She envisions that they middle of the night due to could one day replace the ordinary electric light pollution and energy- streetlight and cut down on the CO2 emis- use concerns, are looking sions that lighting generates. forward to applying biolu- To create oceanic light on land, Glow- minescent stickers to their ee technicians insert the bioluminescence windows. gene from the Hawaiian bobtail squid into Ultimately, Rey has E. coli bacteria, then cultivate those bacteria. grander plans for biolumi- What’s more, by programming the DNA, nescent lights. “For us, the engineers can control the color of the light, biggest opportunity is to when it turns off and on, and more. create networks of these The bacteria, of course, need care and living lights in the streets of feeding to keep glowing, so the company is tomorrow,” she says. working on ways to keep the lights on lon- Sure, improvements ger. At this point, says Rey, they have one in energy efficiency may system that lasts for six days and another help contain lighting’s that works like a fish tank: “As soon as you environmental footprint. feed the system, the bacteria will produce But to light up regions light,” she says. of the world that still lack Glowee’s lights can take on any shape, access to electricity, we from the standard streetlight to a window need big leaps forward in sticker, so the company has let its imagina- ecofriendly light. Rey may tion run free with possible applications. have just plucked one an- The lights’ current limited lifespan makes swer straight out of them well suited for events or festivals. the ocean.A

64 ©Glowee An Internet of bees

Bumblebees carrying location-tracking and sensor-laden “backpacks” might some- day replace the drones that farmers use to monitor their fields. Engineers at the Uni- versity of Washington found that instead of bulky equipment that needs frequent recharging, they could equip insects with tiny yet powerful devices to do the job. Other researchers have tried to create completely robotic insects, but those min- iature robots struggle to fly in turbulent conditions and are limited by power from a tiny battery. The UW team has instead harnessed the bees’ mechanics rather than try to copy them. Thanks to evolution, insects have already worked out how to navigate in a range of conditions, and they can power themselves. To make bumblebees work as preci- sion agricultural tools, the engineers were able to load sensors, data storage, receivers for location tracking, and a rechargeable battery into a 102-milligram package. As the bees go about their everyday activ- ity, the sensors measure temperature and humidity, and their position is tracked via radio signal. When they go back to the hive, the data are uploaded and the battery recharges wirelessly. The team refers to its technology as Living IoT (for Internet of Things), and it envisions a network of sensors that leverages biology for new environmental monitoring possibilities—letting nature be the guide.A

Computer scientists and engineers at the University of Washington have created a sensor package small enough to ride aboard a bumblebee. ©Mark Stone/University of Washington

67 Sheep and goats that predict volcanic eruptions

The Roman author Aelian wrote of an amaz- ing phenomenon in Greece that occurred five days before a large earthquake struck in 373 B.C. Mice, martens, snakes, and other to more-distant epicenters. creatures curiously fled town, he recorded. He is in the process of pub- As a high-school student, zoologist lishing more details on his Martin Wikelski translated ancient Greek findings. and Roman texts. This is how he first came Moving forward, he’s in- across the idea that animals might have an terested in better understand- innate ability to sense impending disaster. ing the mechanism by which Wikelski now directs the International animals perceive these natural Cooperation for Animal Research Using phenomena. If it’s simply that Space—the ICARUS initiative—out of the animals are very sensitive to Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. the earth’s shaking, he says, He’s made a name for himself attaching seismologists would have GPS tags to animals large and small to see already solved earthquake what their collective behavior might reveal. prediction. Instead, rocks Among other phenomena, he’s shown that under high stress before a the presence of white storks can signify quake force charged particles locust outbreaks and that the location and out of the minerals. “There’s body temperature of mallards can portend a charge in the air,” he says, the spread of avian influenza in humans. “and that’s possibly what the Now he’s looking to goats to see if the animals are sensing.” ancients’ theory that animals “know” about Further, Wikelski wants imminent earthquakes and volcanic erup- to tap into a larger network tions holds water. Sure, it’s still a controver- of tagged animals around the sial idea, but perhaps 24/7 data collection Ring of Fire. He wants to around big events could provide scientific understand behavior patterns credence one way or another. of different animals in the Immediately after a powerful earth- wild and see which “sen- quake shook Norcia, Italy, in 2016, Wikel- sors” are better at predicting ski outfitted farm animals near the epicenter natural disasters. He’s applied with collars to see if they behaved differ- for a patent for a disaster- ently in advance of aftershocks. Each collar alert system based on animals’ housed both a GPS tracking device and an collective aberrant behavior accelerometer. With this around-the-clock relative to a baseline. monitoring, he says, you can observe what As human activity im- “normal” behavior is and look for devia- pinges on animals around tions from that. the world, Wikelski hopes In Italy, Wikelski and his team mea- that his emerging “Internet sured that the animals collectively increased of animals” offers even more their body accelerations over background reason to care for them. The Modest ruminants: Goats live year- levels hours before earthquakes struck. He insights they can provide, round on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. The animals have a keen instinct observed “warning times” of between 2 and he’s discovering, may prove for what’s happening inside the volcano. 18 hours, with longer times corresponding more valuable than ever. A ©Lorenzo Blangiardi via Flickr CC

68 In the early 1990s, pharmaceutical giant Merck entered into a “bioprospecting” agreement with The Costa Rica’s National Biodiversity Institute, known by its Spanish acronym INBio. Merck would receive exclusive access to test INBio’s Problem extensive collections of indigenous organisms for their therapeutic potential in exchange for with a million-dollar up-front payment, in-kind contributions to research, and a promise of royalties in the event that commercial products Making were identified. The mood bordered on euphoria. Nature, the deal brokers promised, is a vast storehouse Nature of chemical compounds that can fight off infections and cure diseases. Evolution, through eons of trial and error, has produced molecular Pay for compounds more ingenious than synthetic chemists could ever imagine. Indigenous organisms are genetically coded to metabolize Itself miracle drugs.

By R. David Simpson

I don’t think ecosystem services are underappreciated. What is underappreciated is basic economics. This is the common thread running through all the disappointing experiences to date with finding ways to make nature Illustrations pay for itself. by Daniel Horowitz

70 71 control, flood protection, global climate conserving resources for traditional uses, moderation, ecotourism, and a host of others. new industries based on natural assets were Considerable effort has gone into studying envisioned: collection, processing, and these services in hopes of finding some that export of natural products; bioprospecting; will prove more effective in motivating con- ecotourism. How much would you pay for something ethnobotanist racing to find a servation than did bioprospecting. Like many other young research- whose supply seems unlimited? cancer cure before the rainforest Bioprospecting disappointed because ers, I was motivated by the desire to help Probably not much. Things that are in was felled around him. advocates hoping to align economic forces save nature in the fall of 1991 when I took with conservation didn’t appreciate how a position at Resources for the Future, a short supply command high prices; As the enthusiasm for bio- prospecting grew, so did ten- economic forces work. This has been true nonprofit research institute dedicated to things that aren’t, don’t. This is a hard sions over splitting the spoils. of many other initiatives. When develop- environmental and resource economics. economic lesson, but a solid one. Colonial powers have long ment pressures are high, it tends to be more The term “biodiversity” had been coined exploited the Global South for cost-effective to rely on artificial substitutes a few years earlier, and the idea of a sixth its labor and raw materials. Now for ecosystem services than to forgo convert- extinction crisis perpetrated by humans was tropical nations faced a new ing land to agricultural or residential uses. entering the popular lexicon. The logical place to bioprospect is form of expropriation, biopiracy. Google Even when the argument can be made to By then, the IUCN approach to con- where biodiversity is most abundant. Scholar lists more than 150 works published retain some remnant areas of natural habitat servation had also been picking up steam as Tropical rainforests cover about six percent before 2000 on “access and benefit sharing” to provide ecosystem services, it’s not clear more and more conservation advocates and of the world’s land area, but they shelter for genetic resources. that much meaningful conservation results. scholars gravitated toward the idea. Since more than half of its living species. While Such concerns might have been well Trying to make nature valuable, it turns out, calls for altruism hadn’t worked, perhaps biological wealth is greatest in the tropics, founded had the case for bioprospecting has had a disappointing track record. appeals to tangible self-interest would. material wealth isn’t. So bioprospecting stood on solid ground. Regrettably, how- Integrated conservation and development might raise the standard of living for people ever, bioprospecting didn’t make economic What went wrong? Here we need a bit of histo- projects (or ICDPs) embodied these hopes. in desperate need. These were the same sense. David Kingston, a chemistry profes- ry. And 1980 is a good place to begin. That ICDPs often focused on schemes to market desperately poor people who were dimin- sor at Virginia Tech who participated in was the year that the International Union for the products or services of tropical rain- ishing biodiversity by carving farmland an ICBG in Suriname, characterized the the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) issued forests and other biodiversity hotspots to from forests. Bioprospecting seemed to hit repository of research leads in nature as “so its influential World Conservation Strategy. would-be consumers around the world. the trifecta: life-saving drugs, new income vast as to seem unlimited.” This might seem “Too often,” it said, conservationists The most exciting ICDPs were the ones sources, and a halt to deforestation. to underscore how valuable biodiversity is “had allowed themselves to be seen as resist- focused on mining genetic resources for INBio’s director predicted that research to pharmaceutical researchers, but if you ing all development.” The self-criticism was pharmaceutical research. Cancer drugs had samples would soon displace coffee in think about it, it really makes the opposite well taken. Many of the world’s protected been developed from the rosy periwinkle Costa Rica’s export rankings. The nation case. How much would you pay for some- areas had been established by fiat and main- and the Pacific yew, diabetes medication began training teams of parataxonomists, thing whose supply seems “unlimited”? tained by force. Perhaps desperately poor from Gila monster spit, heart drugs from rural workers who would continue the Probably not much. Things that are in people threatened the biodiversity that parks foxglove, quinine from the bark of the work of classifying Costa Rica’s biota. short supply command high prices; things were established to protect, but a solution cinchona tree. If pharmaceutical research- Other companies followed suit, ex- that aren’t, don’t. This is a hard economic that ignored their legitimate interests would ers could be compelled to pay for access to panding their natural-products research op- lesson, but a solid one. prove self-defeating—as well as immoral. genetic resources, the argument went, the erations. United States government agen- Bioprospecting was an early example Going forward, the emphasis was to rainforests could be saved. cies combined to sponsor an International of an appeal to an “ecosystem service” in be on finding ways in which those poor The problem of biopiracy remained, Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) an effort to motivate conservation. The populations themselves might benefit from however. That was the question to which program under whose auspices pharmaceu- conservation community has since turned conservation. The key was to demonstrate I turned at the start of my career. I tried to tical researchers were paired with source- its energies to other ecosystem services that the myriad ways in which nature could ben- approach the question logically: if the diffi- country partners. Bioprospecting even place more emphasis on the benefits that efit people. Conservation and development culty lay in compensating providers for the inspired a movie. In the 1992 filmMedicine preserving relatively undeveloped habitats should be integrated. Rather than simply value of the genetic resources they offered, Man, Sean Connery, then only three years would bring to the communities living in removed from having been named People or adjacent to them. These include services magazine’s “sexiest man alive,” played an such as water purification, pollination, pest

72 73 the first thing to think about was the value But an interesting thing was happen- of genetic resources. ing in the real world while we academic That led to my epiphany. Biodiversity scribblers were squabbling amongst our- What did I have to say about wasn’t scarce—at least, not with respect to selves: nothing. the fact that an immensely the needs of pharmaceutical researchers. Bioprospecting didn’t take off. The valuable new compound had Economists argue that value is determined Merck-INBio agreement was abandoned for several years as director of ecosystem just been isolated from a by scarcity. If there isn’t much of some- in 2011, and Costa Rica’s earnings from economic studies in the US Environmental thing relative to the demand for it, people research samples never came anywhere Protection Agency’s National Center for soil sample? I thought for a will pay a lot for more of it. If it’s relatively near matching the $300 million per year Environmental Economics. moment before responding. abundant, they won’t. So the argument I it makes from coffee exports. By 2013, The question that has dogged me is: “Are you familiar with the often heard as I began my work—that we INBio was appealing for public donations Will the continuing search for instances in phrase ‘cheap as dirt’?” should save the rainforests because they are to pay employee salaries. Eli Lilly, Bristol- which economic forces are aligned with home to millions of as-yet-undiscovered Myers Squibb, and other large multina- conservation identify more promising pos- species, and each one of those species might tional companies also abandoned their sibilities? Or did the bioprospecting experi- be the source of the next miracle drug— international bioprospecting ventures. ence reveal a more pervasive disconnect? I’m actually cut the other way. If there were Not long ago, I gave a talk about afraid the general answer may be that it did. ivory,” the seeds of tagua palms. Sustain- literally millions of undiscovered species, the economics of bioprospecting. After I There are certainly many instances in which ably grown coffee, cocoa, and rattan also pharmaceutical researchers would have lots spoke, a man in the audience sought me preserving natural assets is economically compete in world markets. and lots of different places to look for their out to set me straight. Just that week, he justified. What I have much graver reserva- But the success comes with caveats. tions about is whether there are enough such Too many ecotourists can “love an area next blockbuster. No one would be will- informed me, the Washington Post had ing to pay a lot for access to samples from reported on a promising new compound instances to motivate conservation on the to death,” and too much emphasis on har- Costa Rica if she could explore equally that might meet the urgent need to treat scale that will be required to maintain any- vesting tagua, coffee, cocoa, or rattan can promising leads from Nicaragua or Bolivia, antibiotic-resistant infections. What did thing like the diversity of nature the planet transform natural habitats into de facto Cameroon, or Malaysia. Nor would she be I have to say about the fact that an im- now supports. farms. A 2008 study of World Bank proj- willing to pay much to preserve one hect- mensely valuable new compound had just Bioprospecting fizzled spectacularly. ects intended both to alleviate poverty and are of rainforest in Costa Rica if identical or been isolated from a soil sample? Other forms of ICDPs have fared better. protect biodiversity found that fewer than similar samples could be found in thousands I thought for a moment before re- Take ecotourism. Gorilla-viewing excur- one in six achieved both objectives. (2) of other hectares of rainforest. sponding. “Are you familiar with the sions in Rwanda, cloud-forest tours in Costa I suspect, though, that the limita- In 1996 two colleagues and I translated phrase ‘cheap as dirt’?” Rica, and cruises retracing Darwin’s voyage tions of ICDPs as conservation vehicles these intuitions into a mathematical model in the Galápagos have, by and large, been all involve variants of the bioprospecting win-win propositions for conservation and problem. When you try to scale them up, and published our results in the Journal of In the decades since I first wrote on bio- development. Some natural-product ven- you bump up against the laws of supply Political Economy. (1) From there, a typi- prospecting, I have continued to study cal pattern unfolded: people argued over the broader and evolving field of ecosys- tures have also prospered. Indigenous artisans and demand. Uniquely beautiful destina- our claim. A couple of authors revisited tem services. I’ve served as an author in have exported more than 6 million pounds of tions attract visitors willing to pay a lot to our calculations and said they were flawed. the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, figurines and jewelry crafted from “vegetable see them; however, unique destinations Another pair of researchers revisited our a review editor for the United Nations– critics’ calculations, argued that they’d sponsored project on The Economics made a serious error and that our original of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, and an results were actually pretty close to the advisor to the World Bank’s program on truth. Researchers continued to cite and Wealth Accounting and the Valuation dispute this growing body of work, and the of Ecosystem Services. I’ve continued to academic-industrial complex went on spin- research topics such as the pollination, ning out research on bioprospecting and storm protection, and pollution-treatment genetic resources. services of natural systems; and I served

74 75 every year?” The economically rational to find ways of averting the crisis, ones that answer is probably “not much.” Intuitively, really work. Since the 1980s, we’ve been farmers wouldn’t be willing to take much looking for ways to make nature valu- land out of almond production if their able. What if we turned the problem on its reason for doing so was to enhance almond head? Linus Blomqvist at the Breakthrough are, by definition, relatively rare—whereas remained so extensive globally that they production. In a recent paper published Institute, where I’ve done consulting work, run-of-the-mill “nice places to visit” just were not scarce relative to demand. The in Environmental and Resource Economics, has argued that the key to saving wild aren’t in short supply. Similarly, domestic opposite problem can beset ecosystems pre- I calculated that, under generous assump- biodiversity isn’t by showing that it’s useful. and international markets for nontimber served to provide local services. Ecosystem tions, an almond farmer who decided to Rather, it’s by making it useless. I suspect forest products can be self-limiting because, services may be valuable, yes; but they may rely on wild pollinators rather than hon- this formulation was chosen because it’s well, scaling up floods the market. This is be most valuable when it would also be eybees would devote no more than about memorably provocative. The underlying the ecosystem services paradox. If our col- most expensive to set aside land to provide one-eighth of the area she might farm to argument, however, is worth considering. lective objective is to keep nature abun- them. If ecosystem services are valuable sustaining them. (3) Ecosystem services were intended to dant, we can’t achieve it with strategies that enough to justify setting aside some land In many instances, producers may find promote conservation by demonstrating will work only when it’s rare. to provide them, then it may be because that employing substitutes such as Euro- that people would realize more value by I think many conservation advocates it’s not necessary to set aside much land to pean honeybees rather than native insects retaining areas of natural habitat than they were also disappointed to discover the eco- provide them. to pollinate crops, levees rather than ripar- would from converting them to farms. If nomic limitations of ICDPs. So, they began Pollination, an ecosystem service that ian vegetation to control floodwaters, and people realized less value from convert- to shift their focus again. With ICDPs, the has been studied extensively, illustrates this wastewater-treatment plants rather than ing habitats to farms than they would from idea was to identify some product or ser- point. Wild insects still pollinate crops in wetlands to treat pollution is more cost- retaining them as forests, wouldn’t that also vice that large areas of extant habitat could some areas, but many farmers whose crops effective than setting aside extensive areas promote conservation? provide to international markets. In more require pollination rely on rented Euro- of expensive land to provide such services. In the 1980s, poor farmers in the devel- recent years, conservation advocates have pean honeybees (Apis mellifera). The rented When natural measures are cost-effective, oping world were clearing forests at rates touted more local benefits of ecosystem bees are moved from farm to farm as crops on the other hand, it’s likely either because that imperiled biodiversity. That motivated services. Maintaining vegetation in water- flower and require their services. In the US, not much land is required to provide them, a transformation in conservation policy. sheds can prevent erosion and landslides; 1.7 million hives of honeybees—85 percent or because development pressures are low Circumstances have changed dramati- patches of habitat can support native pol- of all commercial bees in the country—are anyway. cally since then. When the IUCN report linators; and wetlands, riparian buffers, and trucked to California every February to was published in 1980, world population coastal vegetation may retain pollution and serve the state’s almond crop. There are two conclusions one might draw stood at a little less than 4.5 billion people. prevent flooding. Some biologists and advocates have based on the history of ecosystem services There are now more than 7.5 billion on the The problem with bioprospecting and argued that those farmers should instead thus far. The first is that ecosystem services planet. If one looks into the figures more some other types of ICDPs was that the set aside land to support native insects that are systematically underappreciated, and if carefully, though, revealing details emerge. marginal value of the habitats it was hoped could pollinate almonds. we just keep looking, we’ll identify values Urbanization is advancing much faster than they would preserve was negligible. They Whereas honeybees are currently that will convince decision-makers to save population is growing. About 60 percent of trucked away to serve the next crop that far more of the natural world. comes into bloom, native pollinators need I would offer an alternative conclusion. habitat maintained for them year-round. I don’t think ecosystem services are gener- This is the ecosystem Land in California’s almond-growing areas ally underappreciated. What is underap- services paradox. If our can sell for $25,000 an acre or more, and preciated is, rather, basic economics. This collective objective is to almond farmers pay about $450 per acre to is the common thread running through all rent bees to pollinate their crop. In decid- the disappointing experiences to date with keep nature abundant, ing whether to maintain remnant areas of finding ways to make nature pay for itself. we can’t achieve it with natural habitat on her land or to instead So what’s to be done? strategies that will work rent honeybees, the almond farmer must I don’t want to have to confess to my only when it’s rare. ask herself, “How much $25,000-per-acre grandchildren that my generation sat idly land am I willing to take out of almond by while a sixth extinction crisis swept the production so I can save $450 per acre planet. That means that our urgent task is

76 77 the people on Earth in 1980 lived in rural might be fed to meat and dairy animals areas. About 45 percent of those who now rather than consumed directly. Farming share the planet live outside cities. While might also shift. Perhaps increasing agricul- Perhaps the key to the earth’s population will likely continue tural yields will mean that less land needs to saving wild biodiversity to grow, the rate of growth is slowing. be farmed overall, but we might be wary of isn’t by showing that Urban families tend to be smaller than farms shifting from biologically depauperate it’s useful. Rather, it’s those reared to provide farm labor. The temperate zones to biodiverse tropical ones. by making it useless. UN’s Revision of 2018 World Urbanization Other consequences of agricultural Prospects predicts that we’re now near peak intensification aren’t necessarily benign, rural population: the number of people liv- either. Modern farming relies on synthetic less romantic alternative may be a world challenge we face now is not so much to ing outside of cities will soon decline. fertilizers and pesticides, some of which in which the rural poor transform into an find ways for the rural poor to live in har- Wherever they live, people need to eat. end up in the air or water. It also employs urban underclass with less contact with mony with nature. It is, rather, to manage And producing food requires land. Again, machinery powered by fossil fuels. Selective nature but, one hopes, with the possibility the transition from a world of small farms the trends offer grounds for optimism. The breeding and, increasingly, trans-specific of upward mobility. to one of big cities in a way that realizes the amount of agricultural land per person genetic transfer have expanded yields. While For all these reasons, such a transforma- conservation potential of that trend. worldwide has declined by more than a many scientists are not worried about novel tion should be managed. Environmental This transition is well under way. While third since 1980, even as population has crops, a portion of the consuming public is consequences call for mitigation. While we face a host of daunting social, political, grown by about two-thirds over the same averse to such “unnatural” products. more productive agriculture can be orga- economic, and environmental problems, we period. The net result has been a mod- This last observation underscores what nized to reduce pressures for land conver- should not lose sight of an astounding fact. est increase in land devoted to agriculture may be the most important point. Nature sion, landscape planning will be required to I think the single most remarkable contrast across the globe. While Jesse Ausubel’s might be rendered “useless” and left to go lay out reserves large enough to maintain between the world of 1980 and today is the assertion (that the world is also near peak its own way in a world with fewer peasant complex ecosystems—as well as to map decline in extreme poverty. World Bank farmland) has not been universally accept- farmers, more industrial agriculture, and the corridors and connections required statistics show that only about 700 million ed, a future decline in the area of crops and larger and denser cities. But is that the world for seasonal migrations and adaptation to people, fewer than ten percent of a much pasture is not out of the realm of possibility. we want to live in? It’s a valid question, and a changing climate. Finally, the teeming larger population, now try to subsist on less If nothing else, it is clear that technological one to which there’s no right answer. metropolises of the developing world are than US$1.90 per day. That’s still appalling, improvements in agriculture have allowed If the world we want to live in is one hardly workers’ paradises. The exodus from but it’s a huge improvement over the two- the Earth to support far more people by that supports nearly its full complement farms to cities won’t improve lives unless billion plus in extremis 40 years ago. farming far less land than might have been of biodiversity, though, we need to think it’s accompanied by investments in sanita- If the objective of conservation in the predicted two generations ago. realistically about what it will take to sustain tion and education. Anthropocene is both to enhance human In short, the data show that people are, that endowment. A vision of the world’s This is a tough bill to fill. We won’t quality of life and save nature—and I believe by and large, moving away from marginal hinterlands populated by farmers working make progress, though, if we start from it is—then it will be easier to swim with, agricultural lands and into cities, a trend ac- in harmony with, and dependent on, nature the wrong assumptions. Conservation rather than against, demographic or tech- companied by intensification of agricultural and its services may not work on a planet advocates had the right idea 40 years ago nological currents. Perhaps it is time to ease production, greater crop yields, and—all of 10 billion. Moreover, Marx and Engels when they recognized the need to unite up on the search for ways to make nature in all—less human appropriation of the may have been on to something when they conservation and development goals. They pay for itself and instead look for ways to let landscape in per capita and, perhaps soon, grudgingly credited the bourgeoisie with acted from the best of impulses in insist- nature flourish . . . without us.A absolute terms. having “rescued a considerable part of the ing that the most vulnerable populations population from the idiocy of rural life.” No not bear the burden of preserving nature. If you’re thinking this all sounds too good one should be forced to abandon a lifestyle The prescription of relying on ecosystem R. David Simpson is a consultant on environmental and to be true, you’re right. Much could go she treasures. By the same token, though, no services both to motivate the preservation resource economics. He has served in government, taught at Johns Hopkins University’s School of wrong without effective guardrails. one should be trapped in a lifestyle she does 1. Simpson, RD of natural habitats and improve the lot of Advanced International Studies and at University et al. Journal of Even if more crops can be grown not treasure to realize someone else’s pre- the poor has not worked out well, though. College London, and was a senior fellow at Resources Political Economy. on less land, additional quantities of food conception of what rural life should be. The Too often the economics don’t make sense, for the Future. He was a coordinating lead author in the 1996. 2. Tallis, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and has advised H. PNAS. 2008. and when they do, the conservation incen- several other biodiversity conservation initiatives. 3. Simpson, RD. Environmental tives may not amount to much. The world This article borrows from, and builds upon, ideas in an and Resource has changed markedly in four decades. The earlier article he wrote for The Breakthrough Journal. Economics. 2018.

78 79 The Curated Wild

Welcome to the brave new world of artificial intelligence for conservation.

By David Biello

First, the flying drones scout the landscape recording the swell of hills, the temperature and humidity of soils, the location of streams and rivers via radar and GPS data. This information feeds back into computers, which use machine learning—recording the information in photograph after photograph after photograph—to determine the best locations for planting a species, whether a mangrove in south Asia or a pine in western North America. Then the drones deploy to fire seed pods into the ground, planting more than 100,000 in a day. Meanwhile, a swimming drone patrols the Great Barrier Reef, navigating by sonar and camera while scanning the area for destructive crown-of-thorns starfish. Using artificially intelligent software, the COTSbot spots the purple, thorny arms of the animal (even when wrapped around coral or partially hidden under it) and a pneumatic arm deploys

"Lilies" by Christopher David White (hyperreal ceramic sculpture)

80 Can humans design technologies to curate ecosystems? to inject poison. The lethal drone can automating wildness. We’re used to think- eliminate as many as 200 starfish in eight ing about AI in manufacturing and self- And would these hours, helping preserve the reef from another driving cars, but the technology is finding echinoderm that can spawn millions of new uses in agriculture, health care—and young. now environmental conservation. ecosystems be more And today, photo or audio files pour into a central location where computers that are This automated future raises some very old or less wild than set up as neural networks—a collection of questions, with some decidedly new programs training each other on a specific twists—starting with, What is wild, any- human-curated ones? task, a crude imitation of the human brain— way? ‟We tend to think of a species as scan the collected works. The programs ‘wild’ if it does not exhibit evidence that it identify the whistle-sizzle of birds colliding is controlled or shaped by humans,” argues with power lines, in hopes of developing Laura J. Martin, an environmental historian this robot the task of a conservationist, to better methods for avoiding such deadly at Williams College. But there are few, if preserve and protect a particular ecosystem strikes. Or they confirm sightings of an any, organisms or ecosystems which fit that COTSBot is a small intelligent underwater craft 4.5 feet long, or ecology. Imagine this robot freed to pur- designed by Queensland University of Technology to kill destructive endangered plant or animal, such as a definition in the world today, whether the crown of thorns starfish in the Great Barrier Reef off the north-east sue its task as it deems best, removing signs whale shark. human-shaping is direct or indirect. In fact, coast of Australia. © Richard Fitzpatrick for QUT of human intrusion and impact. “We built an intelligent agent that the Anthropocene is a world of novel eco- For example, this “Wilderdrone” might replaces me,” explains Jason Holmberg, systems, a mix of animals, plants, and other be asked to control the excess nitrogen flow- executive director and director of engineer- organisms living under rapidly changing ing off farm fields and into a “wild” area. It ing for Wild Me, one of a slew of outfits environmental conditions. These novel suggest that the rainforest has not been left might choose to create buffer strips of par- employing artificial intelligence (perhaps assemblages of plants and animals some- to its own will for millennia. ticular plants to consume the nitrogen and better named ‟machine learningˮ) in pursuit times thrive so much that it may be impos- In 1851, writer and naturalist Henry shield the core from too much fertilizer. Or of conservation goals. Holmberg spent two sible for them to tolerate a return to some David Thoreau penned the now famous it might reshape the land itself, either to bet- years data-mining YouTube vacation videos original condition. And even if the original assertion, “In wildness is the preservation ter retain nitrogen or to promote ever faster for encounters with whale sharks. He and his condition could be restored, how could it of the world.” That line has become an flow through the protected area. It would team then used that data to train the artificial endure the shift in climate that is upon us? inspiration to the modern environmental learn from each action and implement better intelligence program Wildbook to recog- The Arctic of today is different from the movement. But Thoreau himself struggled strategies based on the results, constantly nize whale shark sightings in order to enable Arctic of yesteryear or the Arctic of the to define the wild, ultimately coming to improving its ability to remove, reduce, or scientists to gain a better understanding of next century. The only constant is change. the conclusion that wildness is more of an replace human influences. Would the result- populations, behavior, and other important Consider the Amazon rainforest, some- attitude or idea than a reality. A century ing creation—free from human interference information. “The users of our [machine times known as the lungs of the world. after Thoreau’s death, the poet Wendell and control, even human conception—be learning] are overwhelmed with visual data,” Will the Amazon as we know it today Berry added an inventive corollary to the wild? “Can humans design technologies to he says. Already, neural networks allow a persist, or will it be cleared for farms and famous quote, one that seems befitting of curate ecosystems?” Martin asks. “And would computer program such as Wildbook to be ranches? Will it be cleared anew, only to the Anthropocene: “In human culture is the these ecosystems be more, or less, wild than trained on one set of animal-picture data grow back—as the eastern forests of the preservation of wildness.” human-curated ones?” to learn the characteristics of another spe- U.S. have? In fact, the regrowth of the The wild, in other words, requires hu- After all, human conservationists already cies and its ecosystem, rather than having Amazon seems to have happened before— man imagination and human choice. But do all the above, but with the stigma of hu- to build a program anew for each and every just a few hundred years ago, when Euro- it also requires human forbearance and— man interference in what ultimately is only task. peans reached the so-called New World maybe—technology unleashed by humans. a philosophical conception of the wild— Welcome to the brave new world of AI and killed off their fellow humans largely Imagine, for example, a robot capable of whether that be a national park removed for conservation, which offers a new pos- through diseases such as smallpox. The learning from its environment through im- from historical context or a novel ecosystem sibility for this increasingly unnatural world: overgrown urban outposts of the Amazon ages and other data. Imagine people giving growing on the margins of human activity.

82 83 Alternatively, AI could become a way Can artificial to further blend the wild and the tame. If any of the world’s woodlands, fields, and intelligence ever be wetlands end up conserved, the first thing required will be keeping a better eye on autonomous? Can AI them. And satellite monitoring or drones paired with artificially intelligent comput- be used to promote ers suggest a cheap, easy, and potentially accurate way to do so. What a drone and a the autonomy of computer program can do in minutes takes wildlife populations exist in a very natural hours, days, or even months for a person state while still being carefully monitored nonhuman species? or team exposed to the elements and the and protected.” ©Cesar Harada/EyeInSky/CC attentions of biting insects, among other In such a near-future world, will we hindrances, as they attempt to survey a reserve half for nature and simply do noth- plot or plant a new forest. Once ground- ing to the land and sea? Or will we simply truthed, artificial intelligence promises an outsource to our technology decisions end to this kind of work. Drones can now between competing visions for how a place There is a computer game called Univer- could privilege an endangered animal over sense air pollution, monitor animals, and should be used, adding a veneer that may sal Paperclips. The game asks players to the people with whom the animal co-exists, stop poaching, among other conservation obscure the very human power struggles adopt the role of an artificial intelligence a repeat of the many people-versus-parks pursuits. and politics? If so, the Anthropocene might programmed to make paper clips. At first, conflicts from around the globe that have And AI could go even further. It “has rapidly become the Robotocene. This is players simply make paper clips, sell them, turned settled peoples into conservation the potential to profoundly shape other a common story when it comes to people invest in paper clip–making machines, refugees or misidentified a local community species,” Martin says. AI “is changing how outsourcing decisions to AI: just think and make ever more paper clips. Over as a group of poachers. And it is not clear we collect data on ecosystems, and there- of how we wrestle with whether to pro- time, however, the game incrementally whose vision of the world has been, or will fore how we view and understand ecosys- gram an autonomous vehicle to run over a and insidiously reveals that the AI’s single be, programmed into any such software nor tems.” AI, however, may remain forever grandmother to save a baby, or not. These paper clip–making goal brings to an end who gets to choose what the right state for constrained by its human trainers. will be hard decisions and must be made the reign of humans, as it stops at nothing a given ecosystem should be. “Ultimately, The strategies of conservation are, with wide participation and democrati- in its quest to make everything into a paper humans need to make decisions among in the end, simple: management through cally. The decisions must also be subject to clip. The game—and the thought experi- each other about what world to live in,” technology and surveillance. “Imagine change in response to the needs of humans ment behind it—illustrates the unintended Martin notes. a world where a cloud of hundreds of or animals, circumstances or goals, clear consequences of too much autonomy thousands of photos from tens of thou- mistakes or clear victories. for a capably intelligent but narrowly If there’s one thing wildness is not, it’s static. sands of researchers and citizen scientists “Conservation is a form of care,” says focused agent. And yet a kind of artificial stasis—an eco- could accurately predict population sizes Martin. “Can we design AI that care? That Similarly, an artificially intelligent and system artificially protected from the vaga- and even individual animal life histories love? That cherish other species?” For the autonomous “Wilderdrone” tasked with ries of nature itself—is what AI can promise, quickly and with high accuracy, iterating moment, a love of the wild is found only in conservation—or even with simply man- and that may prove an all too seductive population estimates weekly and allowing human minds. A aging human interference—might rapidly offer for nostalgic humans. wildlife-conservation authorities to con- come to the conclusion that eliminating If we use AI to try to create and enforce stantly monitor and protect populations,” David Biello has been covering energy and the humans is the key step to preserve an en- a kind of artificial stasis—inhuman garden- Holmberg says. “Now imagine those environment for more than a decade and is the dangered species or stop light pollution. ers on the most massive scale and ecosys- photos largely collected by remote drones, science curator for TED as well as a contributing editor for Scientific American. In this article, he draws Even short of that twin AI-environ- tems insulated from the vagaries of nature— reversing human encroachment and instead from his latest book, The Unnatural World: The Race to mental apocalypse, AI for conservation won’t we be disappointed by the results? promoting larger wildlife refuges in which Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age.

84 85

3. Science Shorts

Dispatches from the front lines of sustainability research & A tenet of canonical Greek philosophy, the notion of scala naturae eventually dove- tailed with Christian ideas of mankind (not animals) fashioned in God’s image, and later with colonial efforts to erase indigenous cultures that regarded animals as possessing intelligences comparable to our own. Such were the foundations of Enlightenment science. A few scientists, most prominently Charles Darwin, pushed back; but on this subject, they were pushed aside. By the mid-twentieth century, scientific dogma treated animals as mindless stimulus-

QHow different are The question “What makes us we after all? human?” is typically answered in terms of differences. The traits By Brandon Keim proposed to define us—tool use, language, empathy, and so on— assume that humanity’s essence resides in what sets us apart from In early February 2019, researchers from the other beings. Max Planck Institute and Osaka University reported that bluestreak cleaner wrasses— finger-length tropical fish renowned for Fish, after all, are not typically rec- their endearing practice of nibbling dead ognized as intelligent. Conventional sci- skin from the mouths of larger, scary-look- entific wisdom holds that self-awareness ing fish—appeared to recognize themselves involves a cognitive sophistication beyond in a mirror. (1) the tiny-brained wrasses’ ken. Yet they Humans usually do this early in child- met the test’s requirements. The wrasses hood. It’s considered a key developmental swam upside-down in front of the mirror, response machines. If people outside science milestone, signifying a heightened sense of a behavior not performed elsewhere, and were not always so reductionist, those views oneself as oneself, separate from others and they tried to remove marks the researchers still shaped culture and species-level self- from one’s environment. In fact, this sense had made beneath their throats, about which understanding. Consider the question “What of self-awareness is a condition so integral they could have learned only by using the makes us human?” It is typically answered to human experience that it’s head-swim- mirror to inspect themselves. Nevertheless, in terms of differences. The myriad traits mingly difficult to imagine its absence. Yet the researchers disavowed the implications. proposed to define us—tool use, language, only a handful of nonhuman species, in- Granting wrasses self-awareness, they noted, empathy, and on and on—assume that hu- cluding several great apes, Asian elephants, “would require a seismic readjustment of manity’s essence resides in what sets us apart bottlenose dolphins, magpies, and manta our cognitive scala naturae”—the Latin term from other beings. rays have passed the so-called mirror test; for “ladder of being,” a conception of the Yet with all due respect to the research-

so the cleaner wrasses’ success was met with animal kingdom as a hierarchy with Homo ers whose wrasses so confoundingly used above photo surprise—and some skepticism. sapiens (“wise man”) perched on top. mirrors to inspect themselves—and, for ©Andre Mouton 88 A 89 the record, many scientists now view the Neurological imaging be accomplished with just a dominant pack member, ten if a lower- as what’s important to us—such as affection, mirror test as measuring just one variety of lab rats shows them a few signals and pragmat- ranking dog takes the initiative—has agreed. or health, or the ability to make choices? of a primal, widespread capacity for self- mentally replaying ic inference. And a great (10) Some questions remain about whether We might recognize that, rather than awareness—that seismic readjustment in the paths through mazes deal of meaning requires the sneezes are actually votes. Or do they separating us, “humanity” is something we “ladder of being” is already well nothing language-like at simply happen to correlate with preferences share with many other creatures—and and imagining under way. (2) all: consider the impor- expressed in some other, as-yet-unnoticed consider what it means to live that way. A Scientific journals abound with stud- alternative routes, a tance of a grimace or a way, such as body postures? Nevertheless, ies of rich animal minds. Honeybees can be capacity known as smile or a hug. it is evident that packs have mechanisms of trained to do basic addition and subtrac- Communication is participatory group decision-making. mental time travel 1. Kohda M et al. If a fish can pass the mark test, tion; bird nests, the construction of which foundational to commu- Their relations might not be governed what are the implications for consciousness and was long dismissed as purely instinctive, nity, and social life is an by human-style morality, another ostensibly self-awareness testing in animals? PLoS Biology, display a sophisticated sense of the structural especially powerful evo- defining human trait, with its abstractions 2019. properties of different twigs and sticks. (3, lutionary driver of intel- and codifications—yet our morality may 2. Barron AB and Klein C. What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness. Proceedings 4) Neurological imaging of lab rats shows ligence. Crows recognize be grounded in biologically widespread of the National Academies of Science, 2016. them mentally replaying paths through the faces of people who bothered them predispositions. To watch two dogs playing 3. Howard SR et al. Numerical cognition in mazes and imagining alternative routes, a years before, and they also inform one is to observe a choreography of fairness and honeybees enables addition and subtraction. capacity known as mental time travel. (5) another about them. This should not come sharing. (11) Some creatures, such as the Science Advances, 2019. Many animals, of course, appear to plan as a surprise. Group life requires remember- humpback whales who defend seals from 4. Biddle LE, Deeming DC, and Goodman AM. Birds use structural properties when selecting for the future—witness a chickadee cach- ing identities, assessing abilities and inten- orca attacks, may well be motivated by materials for different parts of their nests. Journal ing seeds before winter—but the rat stud- tions, and making judgments based on past explicit morality. (12) of Ornithology, 2018. ies’ methodological thoroughness made it experience. (7) All this research suggests that human 5. Corballis MC. Mental time travel: A case for clear: they are not trapped, as has often been And then there’s the tangled topic of intelligence is not a pinnacle of evolu- evolutionary continuity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2013. said of animals, in an eternal present. Like emotions—the positive or negative valences tion but embodies one point in a radia- humans, they also live in the past and in the that shape all behavior but manifest so tion. Some scientists do worry that over- 6. Suzuki TN, Wheatcroft D, and Griesser M. Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in future. richly in relation to others. Many research- eagerness for commonalities will obscure bird calls. Nature Communications, 2016. Another capacity invoked as uniquely ers still regard animal emotions as baser experiences outside our own (what does it 7. Marzluff JM et al. Lasting recognition of human is that of language. Indeed, there’s than our own. Yet that assumption, too, has feel like to be a cuttlefish whose language threatening people by wild American crows. no evidence of other species possessing our been shaken. Researchers use rats to study ripples across his skin?), but the overall Animal Behavior, 2010. proficiency in coining words and arranging the neurobiological foundations of empa- effect is a much-needed correction. 8. Bearzi G et al. Whale and dolphin behavioural responses to dead conspecifics. Zoology, 2018. them in nested, recursive forms, such as this thy—the ability to feel another’s feelings— Does this mean that humans are not 9. Conradt L and Roper TR. Consensus decision very sentence. Yet as with self-awareness, and veterinary scientists recognize the at all unique? It does not. Our technologi- making in animals. Trends in Ecology and the emphasis on human language as excep- suffering caused by separating dairy calves cally mediated hyperconnectivity and our Evolution, 2005. tional has obscured the richness of animal from their mothers. When an orca mother collectively conceived fictions are certainly 10. Walker RH et al. Sneeze to leave: African wild dogs communication. off the coast of Washington carried her exceptional. (13) Yet it’s hard to enter- (Lycaon pictus) use variable quorum thresholds Japanese great tits, a relative of the dead baby’s body for weeks, as dolphins are facilitated by sneezes in collective decisions. tain such claims without interrogating the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2017. aforementioned chickadees, are among the known to do, many observers considered underlying impulse to set ourselves apart, 11. Bekoff M. Wild justice and fair play: Cooperation, species whose vocalizations are syntacti- the most likely explanation to be grief. (8) to set ourselves . It’s this very sense of above forgiveness, and morality in animals. Biology and Brandon Keim cal—that is, order determines meaning—and Animal communities are not just Homo sapiens as being intrinsically more Philosophy, 2004. is a freelance referential, signifying some external object social and emotional. They’re also politi- worthy than other animals, whose lives and 12. Pitman RL et al. Humpback whales interfering journalist rather than internal states of arousal. (6) cal. Many animals live in groups that make interests can’t possibly be so important as when mammal-eating killer whales attack other specializing in species: Mobbing behavior and interspecific animals, nature, Change the order of calls used to summon decisions collectively, even democratically. our own, that’s pushed Earth to the brink altruism? Marine Mammal Science, 2016. and science. He is the author companions in response to an approaching (9) African wild dogs, for example, ap- of another mass extinction. (14) The very 13. Suddendorf T. The Gap: The Science of What of The Eye of predator, and they no longer elicit the same pear to indicate their “vote” by sneezing, premise of human uniqueness begins to feel Separates Us from Other Animals. Basic Books, the Sandpiper: 2013. response. It might not be “language,” but with packs moving only after a quorum of like a self-serving fetish. What if that which Stories from the it’s certainly language-like, and much can members—three if movement is initiated by “makes us human” were instead conceived 14. Crist E. Reimagining the human. Science, 2018. Living World.

90 91 Tomorrow's cantly less land than animal- Table based diets. Future foods also produced much less in the way of greenhouse gases than animal-based diets, the study found. Humanity will be That’s not to say their im- remembered for pact is negligible. For instance, rearing industrial quantities its chickens of insects—one of the fastest- growing alternative protein University of Leicester researchers were curious sources—does actively produce about how our global appetite for chicken emissions, just much fewer (there are over 22 billion of them with us than cattle, pigs, chickens, and at any given time) is shaping the planet and Future foods could sheep. But the greatest share what clues the mounds of chicken bones make diets more of greenhouse-gas emissions might leave behind for future archaeologists. nutritious and from this sector comes from The birds were domesticated from the fossil-fuel energy required the wild red jungle fowl as far back as the sustainable for production (e.g., maintain- sixteenth century. But in the 1950s, real ing temperatures for fungus According to a new study, eating an array of changes began. Since 1957, chick- Bennett CE and algae to grow) and trans- ens have grown up to five times et al. Royal rapidly emerging, alternative future foods— portation. A heavier than their ancestors of 60 Society Open including lab-grown meat, seaweed, and Science. 2018. —Emma Bryce years ago. An analysis of isotopes insect protein—would not only do more in chicken bones also revealed that to protect the planet, but would actually from mid-century onward, chickens were provide us with more and better nutrients fed a diet that made them produce more than would switching to an exclusively meat—clear evidence of humanity’s ability to plant-based diet. Tweaking manipulate a species at a grand scale. Today, Researchers measured the nutritional the production of feed for these ubiquitous and environmental profiles of nine future photosynthesis birds produces more polluting nitrogen than food products and found that all, with the the amount used to grow staple exception of kelp, produced the same or Photosynthesis occurs inside crops such as rice and wheat, more protein than either animal-based plants with the help of an the researchers found. And foods or plant-based diets. Most also pro- enzyme called RuBisCO, in Europe, for instance, it’s vided more of several crucial nutrients which latches onto molecules estimated that farming such as vitamin B12, zinc, and vitamin of carbon dioxide to convert broiler chickens uses up A. Some types of algae had 20 times South PF et al. them into energy-rich more electricity and more vitamin A than eggs, which is Science. 2018. sugars for growth. But natural gas than the richest animal- Parodi A et about a fifth of the the production derived source al. Nature time, RuBisCO grabs onto of either beef or of this nutrient. Sustainability. molecules of oxygen instead. 2018. pork. A Compared to this, This presents a major lost plant-only diets opportunity for photosyn- —Emma Bryce tended to be deficient in nutrients thesis. That’s because oxygen

such as vitamin B12 and omega molecules inside plants go on fatty acids, among other things. to create waste products such Future foods also scored high as glycolate and ammonia. on environmental savings, requiring These have to be recycled roughly the same amount (or less) land through photorespiration, a than do plant-based diets—and signifi- process that “costs the plant

92 © Guynamio Samuda precious energy and resources that it could Under high heat, RuBisCO Life-Cycle Analysis have invested in photosynthesis to produce struggles even more to dif- more growth and yield,” researchers ex- ferentiate between carbon plain. In some crops, photorespiration dioxide and oxygen, lead- is estimated to cause a 50 percent loss in ing to even more ineffi- photosynthetic efficiency. cient photosynthesis. The But now researchers have engineered researchers are careful to tobacco plants—useful research subjects caution that their discovery because they’re easy to genetically mod- isn’t a quick fix. It will take ify—to contain a much shorter photores- several years to engineer piration pathway with fewer steps. This crops with these energy- saves on energy and, crucially, increases saving traits and to ensure the efficiency of photosynthesis, therefore that they are safe to eat. But boosting plant growth. In tests that ran for with the rising twin chal- two years, researchers showed that to- lenges of increasing food bacco plants grown both in the laboratory production while doing and under real-world farming conditions so on less land to conserve consistently grew faster, taller, and with biodiversity, the researchers more biomass than their non-engineered believe this could be one counterparts. powerful way of producing In hot, dry regions of the world, this food more efficiently and discovery would be especially valuable. sustainably. A —Emma Bryce

Humanity’s It’s not enough to consider the planetary im- changing body shape pact of a numerically growing population. Increases in humanity’s height and weight are directly correlated with increases in the amount of food we consume—and thus global food security. Between 1975 and 2014, human mass across the planet in- If you were looking for creased by 146 percent. On a straight-up, yes-or- average, individual humans Vásquez F, no answer to the title question, go ahead grew 14 percent heavier and Vita G, and and turn the page now. Like so many 2465 2615 Müller DB. kcal/day kcal/day life-cycle assessments, it’s never that simple. 1.3 percent taller. When re- Sustainability. searchers isolated the impact 2018. The environmental impact of plastic-bag of these physical traits, they bans is a good news–bad news story. found that this accounted for a striking 15 First, the Good News percent of the surge in food demand since 1975. This was offset slightly by a glob- Cities that have banned consumer plastic ally aging population (older people tend to bags have seen a decrease in the number of consume less food), but only by 2 percent. bags found in nature. Abandoned bags are 1975 2014 So ultimately, 13 percent of the increase in not only an eyesore, they are also detri- mental to birds, fish, and other fauna as the 6 6 food demand over the past four decades is bags make their way from cities to oceans— 161 cm 163.1 cm attributable solely to humanity’s increasing and we definitely don’t need to add to the 56.7 kg 64.7 kg height and weight. A 39.7 years old 42.2 years old —Emma Bryce Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

94 95 Now the Bad News sonable 102 times for unwo- Despite the local clean-up factor, the envi- ven polypropylene bags. How many times would you have to use ronmental benefits of banning plastic bags each bag to equal the fossil-fuel footprint remain to be seen. A recent life-cycle study The Unintended from CIRAIG looked at the consequences of Consequences of a single conventional plastic bag? banning conventional, single-use, consumer It turns out that those much- plastic bags (made of high-density polyeth- maligned conventional ylene) from the city of Montreal. The results plastic bags have very high challenged the conventional understanding reuse rates (as much as 77.7 of banning these bags. percent), mostly as garbage- A key question is what type of bag buyers bin liners. When they are and sellers use to replace the banned ones. The banned, people buy more CIRAIG study looked at the environmental conventional, polyethylene impacts of seven alternatives: garbage bags. And there’s the kicker. While it was • Single-use bags already difficult for reusable • Oxo-biodegradable bags bags to be advantageous • Compostable bioplastic bags over the banned plastic bags, • Low-density polyethylene bags in this scenario, even if you • Paper bags reuse your reusable bags an • Reusable bags infinite number of times, • Woven polypropylene bags the impacts of using more • Unwoven polypropylene bags garbage bags drown out • Cotton bags the advantageous environ- Results showed that all replacement bags mental effects.A OXO-BIODEGRADABLE PAPER THICK PLASTIC 5 14 16 LOW-DENSITY POLYETHYLENE had higher indicator scores for impacts on —Pierre-Olivier Roy human health, ecosystem quality, and fossil- fuel depletion. Therefore, by definition, only reusable bags have the potential to be an ad- vantageous switch from single-use consumer plastic bags—and that potential is realized only by reusing the bags many times: as frequently as 9,400 times for cotton bags or a more rea- bandonment Human Health Quality Ecosytem Depletion Fuel Fossil A in the Environment Life Cycle Analysis Conventional Plastics n n n n of Shopping Bags in Québec. Oxodegradable n n n n International Reference Centre Bioplastics n n n n for the Life Cycle of Products, Thick Plastics n n n n Processes, and Services (CIRAIG). Paper n n n n 2017.

n low impact n medium impact n high impact

32UNWOVEN POLYPROPYLENE 195 COTTON The human health indicator considers effects such as climate change, human toxicity, respiratory effects due to the inhalation of particles, smog formation, water scarcity, ozone layer depletion, and others. The ecosystem quality indicator theoretically represents the number of species that disappear within a specified area over a year due to different effects such as climate change; land occupation and transformation; ecotoxicity; eutrophication; Why? The conventional plastic bag was designed for a single use—it is thin and light, acidification of terrestrial, aquatic, and marine environments; water scarcity; and others. The fossil fuel depletion and its life cycle requires little material and energy. Moreover, its reuse as a garbage bag at indicator represents the quantity of fossil fuels (crude oil, natural gas, coal) that were extracted in order to fulfill the end of its life significantly reduces its potential impacts in comparison to the other types life-cycle material and energy requirements of a product, process, or service. of bag, whose material and energy requirements are much higher.

96 97 Circular Economies

Eco-bricks more insulating. As an added made from bonus they were also cheaper to produce. sewage Further tests are needed before biobricks are produced The third little pig’s house, made of bricks, biowaste. They report that bricks contain- on a larger scale because sew- saved him from the wolf—but not global ing 25 percent sewage solids required about age waste in different parts of warming. Manufacturing bricks is carbon- half the energy to manufacture as regular the world can have different intensive and creates toxic air pollution. So bricks. compositions and chemical engineers at RMIT University in Australia The biobricks could also reduce the traits. But based on their study have developed bricks made partly with need for massive excavation. More than 3 results, the researchers propose treated sewage waste. To make traditional billion cubic meters of clay soil are dug up that including a minimum bricks, a mix of clay and concrete materi- around the world every year to produce of 15 percent biosolids con- als is heated at temperatures between 900 about 1.5 trillion bricks. That is “equivalent tent into 15 percent of brick and 1,200 degrees Celsius. This requires a to over 1,000 soccer fields dug 440 meters production could “completely lot of fuel. In South Asian countries, where deep or to a depth greater than recycle all the approximately brickmakers burn coal, biomass, and trash, three times the height of the Mohajerani A et al. Buildings, 2019. 5 million tonnes of annual brick kilns have a global-warming impact Sydney Harbour Bridge,” the leftover biosolids production equivalent to that of all passenger cars in researchers write. Plus, 43 to in Australia, New Zealand, the the US. About eight percent of global car- 99 percent of heavy metals present in the EU, the US, and Canada.” A bon emissions comes from brick manufac- biosolids remained trapped in the bricks, —Prachi Patel turing, according to some estimates. keeping them from leaching into the envi- The researchers collected three differ- ronment, the researchers found. ent biosolid waste samples from two treat- The bricks passed compressive-strength Old clothes ment plants and used them to make bricks tests and were more porous than their containing 10, 15, 20, and 25 percent conventional cousins, which made them turn into fire- and waterproof building materials Shutterstock

In today’s age of fast fashion, most clothes are thrown out after a few seasons, and most lution in the oceans. No effective recycling garments, including those that technologies for cotton fabrics or blends are donated, end exist yet. So Veena Sahajwalla and her up in landfills. The Echeverria CA colleagues at the University of New South textile industry is the et al. Journal Wales in Australia came up with a different of Cleaner second-most pol- Production, 2018. use for old textiles. They collected clothing luting sector in the from municipal and textile-industry waste world, accounting streams and removed zippers and buttons. for 10 percent of the world’s Next they passed the leftover mix of cotton, total carbon emissions. And wool, polyester, nylon, and other fabrics synthetic fabrics are one of the through a shredder and added a chemical to biggest sources of plastic pol- the resulting fluff to help the different fibers

© Sharon Mollerus/CC © Sharon 99 Circular Economies

stick together. Finally, they compressed the fibers under heat to form solid panels. The panels are moisture-resistant and as strong as wood-based particleboards so that they can be used for load-bearing applications. Panels made with added fine sawdust are flame-retardant. Plus, depend- ing on their components, they have differ- ent textures and colors resembling wood, more than 99 percent effi- How a seaweed- ceramic, or stone—so they can be used for ciency. The process is highly eating microbe various interior finishes such as floor tiles, energy-efficient and does wall panels, or ceilings. A not require much electricity. could fight —Prachi Patel The number of carbon plastic pollution atoms in the end product depends on the Scientists at Tel Aviv University report that A new and inexpensive Calvinho KUD catalyst used and certain salt-loving microorganisms could eat et al. Energy & the reaction condi- seaweed and produce biodegradable plastics way to convert Environmental Science, 2018. tions. The longer in a sustainable fashion. CO2 into drugs, carbon chains are Commercially available bioplastics are furniture, and more more valuable and made of a fully degradable polymer called could serve as the building polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) that is natu- Researchers have developed a form of blocks of plastics. Two of the rally produced by bacteria or other micro- artificial photosynthesis that converts products they have produced organisms by fermenting sugars or could be used as precur- fats. The microbes are usually fed Ghosh S et al. carbon dioxide into plastics, fabrics, and Bioresource other useful products more efficiently and sors for plastics, adhesives, vegetable oil or pure carbon sources Technology, 2019. cheaply than ever before. and pharmaceuticals, the such as glucose, which is derived To date, scientists have had some researchers say, and one of from corn or sugar cane. success mimicking photosynthesis to them can be a safer substitute The Israeli team used single-celled produce fuels such as ethanol, methane, for toxic formaldehyde. microbes called Haloferax mediterranei instead. and hydrogen at relatively high yields. The researchers now These have been shown to produce PHA in But the processes have been too ineffi- have patents on the process salty water; however, researchers have previ- cient, energy-intensive, and expensive to and have founded a start-up ously cultivated the microbes on traditional be feasible on a commercial scale—mainly company to commercialize biomass sources. As an alternative, the Israeli due to the catalyst that is needed to trigger the technology. They plan team fed seven different species of seaweed the chemical reactions. to tweak the chemical reac- to the microbes. The microbes produced the So a team from Rutgers University tions to create other prod- most PHA when fed Ulva lactuca, also known came up with a group of five different ucts such as hydrocarbons as sea lettuce, the researchers found. The catalysts that are made with abundant, and are working on scaling results could lead to a sustainable and envi- low-cost nickel and phosphorus. These up the technology to pro- ronmentally friendly method to produce bio- catalysts turn carbon dioxide and water duce larger quantities of end plastics and bioenergy from offshore-grown into chemical compounds containing one, products. A biomass, the researchers write. A two, three, or four carbon atoms with —Prachi Patel —Prachi Patel © Maarten Brinkman

100 101 New Normal

pened off the coast of Brazil and the Indone- What counts as sian island of Sulawesi. Sponges are surpris- extreme temperature ingly resilient—thanks in part to lipids and fatty acids that counteract the effects of heat is a moving target stress on cell walls. With climate change, In a second study, Bell’s team moves weather patterns that make the best of a tragic from physiology to interactions. Sponge were unusual in the past (ahem, February situation. We might even reefs don’t support the abundance and rich- heat waves in London) are becoming more find something to treasure. ness of organisms that coral reefs do, but common. But how exactly do people recog- Several years ago, James there’s still much life to be found in them, nize unusual weather conditions? Scientists Bell, an ecologist at New albeit only hazily understood. If not quite use various benchmarks (1850, the past 30 Zealand’s Victoria Uni- rainforests, they might at least be forests. years, and so on) when quantifying climate versity of Wellington, and For example, seaweed can thrive among change, but there’s been little research on colleagues suggested that sponges and slow down the erosion of dead how the general public develops a baseline post-coral reefs might not, corals on which sponges form. But eventu- sense of “normal” climate or how that sense as conventional wisdom ally, decades or centuries hence, those skel- changes over time. held, become underwater etons will crumble. Sponges will continue to The first large-scale study to tackle this barrens dominated by algae. grow, but the structural complexity provided problem suggests that the public’s climatic Though that’s happened in by corals, the nooks and crannies that are baseline tends to be a very recent one, some places, particularly the niches for yet more creatures, will vanish. reflecting weather experienced roughly two Caribbean, reefs elsewhere What sort of life will those reefs support? Moore FC et al. to eight years ago. sometimes follow a different Proceedings of the And how much? These are open questions. Researchers analyzed 2.18 trajectory. Even as corals die, A National Academy of —Brandon Keim Sciences, 2019. billion tweets posted from the sponges proliferate. Coral continental United States by 12.8 reefs become sponge reefs. million users from March 2014 Though most people through November 2016. They know sponges from their used software to analyze the

©NOAA kitchen sinks, phylum content of the tweets, picking out Porifera in fact contains the ones that commented on the As corals decline, between 5,000 and 10,000 weather. Then they cross-refer- species. Like corals, they’re enced the social media data with a new kind of technically animals, descend- local temperature, precipitation, reef emerges ed from an ancient trunk of and cloud cover data—controlling life’s evolutionary tree—and for variables such as month, year, When coral reefs die, what will replace them? the fossil record suggests and location to identify how tem- It’s a question that feels almost inappropri- Bell JJ et al. that, when Earth’s perature fluctuations drive social ate. It risks resignation, even acceptance of Ecology, 2018. oceans warmed and media posts about the weather.

habitat degradation and climate change— Bennett H et al. acidified 200 million Not surprisingly, the coldest and, make no mistake, much can still be Global Change years ago, sponge cold and the hottest hot tempera- done to protect corals. Biology, 2018. reefs indeed replaced tures garner the most social media But nothing can change the fact that coral reefs. chatter. But people in counties many reefs have been destroyed; barring a Present-day warming is that have experienced unusual cold miracle, many more will yet be lost. And a far more rapid affair, but snaps or heat waves for several confronting the aftermath may help people something similar has hap- ©Pete Muelller years running become less likely

102 103 New Normal to tweet about such temperature extremes. “Temperatures initially considered remark- able rapidly become unremarkable with repeated exposure over a roughly five-year timescale,” the researchers write. In a warming world, what “counts” Their paper is part of ated by the heavy, ceaseless Johnson, CN et fire control is strongest in warm a series examining how steps of migrating herds serve al. Philosophical environments with moderate rain- as cold weather is also a moving target. Transactions of “Gradual warming makes all cold tempera- rewilding—reintroducing not only as trails but also as the Royal Society fall and grass-dominated vegeta- tures more remarkable, so that mild winter animals, particularly big potential firebreaks. B, 2018 tion. Extinctions didn’t seem to temperatures, which previously would animals, to landscapes that Much does remain to have much effect on fire patterns be unremarkable, become noteworthy as once hosted them or their be learned, and the use of in shrublands and arid grasslands. people’s expectations shift over time,” says extinct relatives—can have animals to fight fire is sure Nevertheless, the possibilities are tantaliz- lead author Frances Moore, assistant profes- profound environmental to be complicated. In certain ing. Researchers have described how graz- sor of environmental science and policy at benefits. Adding lost ani- instances, browsers—animals ing reduces fire frequencies in the Kansas the University of California, Davis. That’s mals might help ecosystems who feed on tall growth such tallgrass prairie, the Kenyan savannah, and how in 2019, during one of the warmest sequester more carbon, re- as shrubs and small trees— tropical Australian forests. A Januaries on record, everyone wound up duce the impact of invasive could promote the spread of —Brandon Keim talking about how cold it was. A species, fertilize streamside grasses, in turn making fires —Sarah DeWeerdt forests, and even regulate more likely. “There is some unpredictable ecological evidence that elephants can responses to climate change. sometimes have that sort That they might also of effect in Africa,” says How bringing fight fire is perhaps the most Johnson. surprising possibility. Yet There’s a role for preda- back lost animals as Johnson and colleagues tors, too, in preventing po- prevents big wildfires review, there are plenty of tentially troublesome over- reasons to think animals populations—such as deer About 15,000 years ago, as Earth warmed and could be helpful. Small fires whose munching prevents humans proliferated, a wave of extinctions consume woody debris; so saplings from maturing, occurred: sloths the size of moving trucks, do big plant-eaters, quite which turns forests into fire- giant kangaroos, mammoths, bison, and literally. Because their prone thickets. That’s a prob- deer who dwarfed their modern counter- feeding patterns are varied lem now in New Zealand, parts. On and on the list goes, a menagerie rather than uniform, with says Johnson, where vegeta- of fantastic creatures now known only some areas heavily grazed tion didn’t evolve to with- from the fossil record. or browsed and others stand the pressure of deer In that fossil record, scientists have also ignored, they produce introduced to the island from noticed something else fantastical—or at patches of low- and high- elsewhere. Yet that doesn’t least unusual. Charcoal. Lots of it, a fine flammability vegetation mean nonnative animals are layer that accumulated across many land- “interspersed in arrange- intrinsically fire-prone: in scapes after the big animals vanished. This ments that could impede Australia, nonnative swamp may not have been a coincidence. the spread of landscape buffalo seem to reduce fire The absence of those animals appears fire,” write Johnson and intensity and may actually to have made ecosystems more prone to colleagues. By digging play wetlands-enhancing fire—a possibility with implications both through soil litter and turn- roles formerly performed by disturbing and hopeful. “Rewilding poten- ing it over, big plant-eaters now-extinct species. tially offers a powerful tool for managing can also bury material that The dynamics vary from the risks of wildfire,” write researchers led would otherwise become place to place. Historical by ecologist Chris Johnson. fuel. Barren passages cre- evidence of animal-induced

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