Threats

"Sustainability." That word gets thrown around so much today. What does it really even mean? According to Wikipedia, sustainability is "1) The capacity to endure. 2) The ability of biological systems to remain diverse and productive over time. 3) The potential of long-term maintenance of [human] well-being in environmental, economic and social dimensions."

This month's CSA news from the Crop and Soil Science societies of America is entitled "Sustainability: Learning the lessons of past civilizations." There is a drawing of the iconic Easter island statues on the cover. Easter Island has become the poster child of unsustainable human activity - deforestation, soil degradation, over population. UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond has written a book called "Collapse: How Societies Fail or Succeed." At the 2010 tri-societies meeting in Long Beach, he used the Easter Islanders as an example of the kind of damage we are doing to our planet with massive deforestation, over population and un-sustainable agricultural practices. He issued the warning that once we destroy this planet, we will have no where else to go.

In my August blog post about abstaining from plastic, I referenced a site describing the detrimental effects of plastics in our oceans and briefly mentioned the “garbage patch” in the North Pacific Gyre. Many people allude to this large concentration of plastic waste when appealing to the public to ban plastic bags or increase plastic recycling programs. Recently, there has been some debate about the actual size of the plastic waste expanse in the North Pacific Gyre.

A few months back I was invited to a policy and technology forum at Stanford University, whose goal was figuring out how to overcome constraints to ramping up solar energy production in California. The forum brought together scientists, engineers, policy makers, and leaders of the solar industry and conservation organization to develop a “blueprint… to meet the challenges presented by the implementation of large scale solar.”

It has become a habit for politicians and journalists in the USA to point the finger at China when referring to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, the Chinese government has been much more proactive than our own and is becoming a leader of climate change mitigation efforts.

From childhood, we can all remember special places that played an important part in our development. Growing up in the west, one significant place for me was the Columbia River George and High Desert Basin section bordering Oregon and Washington from Portland to the Tri-Cities. I was born in Baker City and spent many years traveling either by plane, train, bus or car up and down the Columbia. A week ago, on a road trip to Coeur d'Alene.

This week, I’ve been looking into the sustainability of bioenergy. The cover story on my CSA News (crop, soils and agronomy magazine) is called “Sustainable Bioenergy: Fueling Biomass Plants without Degrading the Land.” Can we do that? We’re having enough difficulties growing food without degrading the land. It would surprise me if we could produce energy from agriculture without further increasing soil degradation.

 “Survival of the fittest.” Those best adapted to survive under certain circumstances will reproduce and pass their genes to offspring. What exactly does that mean for humans? The most physically strong? The most stereotypically beautiful by a given culture’s standards? The wealthiest? The smartest? The most self-promoting? Evidence of the “typical” human doesn’t support any of these ideas.

Last week a colleague from the lead Forestry school in France came to visit me in Olympia. Yves told me a story he read in the Smithsonian (2004) about forest decline following drought-years in Morocco, where Barbary macaques were found stripping the bark of Atlas cedars to eat the moist and nutritious tissues underneath. Authorities want to get rid of the monkeys but they are endangered.

As I was sitting in the office one fine June day in 2009 watching a severe weather cell steamroll its way through the Willamette Valley, I couldn’t help but marvel at its awesome, enveloping presence and destructive potential. My officemates and I were first alerted to its impending arrival by the rapid darkening of the skies to the East and South of us.

I found that I was getting depressed every day when I took a piece of bread out of a bag to make French toast, open a pill container to take my allergy medicine, or peeled back the wrapper from a block of cheese to make an omelette, so I took a vow not to buy any new plastic for one week. Plastics aren't just in grocery bags, which I can avoid most of the time. They're in food wrappers, diapers, hair care, appliances, toys, computers, writing utensils, art supplies, pet supplies, eyeglasses, business envelopes, you name it.