Heliophage

While it has nothing to do with what this blog is notionally “about”, it seems a good idea to link to this fine piece about Google by Tom Slee, for reasons that may become apparent to any reader who clicks through, and if you are a reader with a blog I urge you to do so too (especially if by chance your blog is a searchblog). However, by happy coincidence, I find that Tom’s fine self-pimped piece about toilets says wise things about how to drive environmentally friendly innovation which fit into the themes of this blog on their own merits:

The story shows that the state/market dichotomy is false, and that the phrasing of the question is at fault. Posing the issue as “state versus market” loses touch with reality in the face of this intricate cross-pollination between municipalities, the US Environmental Protection Agency (who is likely to develop a labelling system based on the Veritec tests), Veritec itself (which is a private consultancy) and quasi-state bodies such as the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association. The closer we look, the more dependent on the specifics it becomes…

Perhaps the message is that, when we look closely enough, economics falls apart and gives way to sociology and psychology. Perhaps it is that history is, after all, made by individuals, specifically individuals who are prepared to spend hours developing “test specimens” and flushing them down toilets over and over and over again. Perhaps it is that we need to seek a Buddhist-like middle way between the Scylla of the market and the Charybdis of the state, but a middle way that has a more human side to it than the metric driven public-private partnerships.

On the basis that this could be taken to mean “let a thousand flowers bloom”, here are some photosynthetic toilets as a final adhesive with which to cement these ideas firmly into the fabric of this blog.

Image from (nz)dave under a creative commons license

From Profiles of the Future

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

Pictures: Hubble ultra deep field image from NASA; “Minehead Blue” by Gary Newman, all rights reserved (and with many thanks)

I’m more marginally martian than mainly martian these days, but my old enthusiasms are remembered in some interesting places — so I was happy to be invited to talk about the new “Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art” contemporary art show at the Barbican on Radio Four’s Front Row yesterday. I’m afraid I don’t have time to blog on it now, except to say a) the concept is a bit overdone, b) there’s good stuff and not so good stuff there and c) Michael Craig-Martin’s An Oak Tree (pictured) is in the first of those classes. It reminds me hugely of Stranger in a Strange Land, and has the advantage of being a lot shorter (nb that’s a cheap jibe, not a serious diss). Here’s part of the artist’s accompanying text; if you want to imagine the Answerer as Michael Valentine Smith in order to grok it more fully, be my guest…

Q. To begin with, could you describe this work?

A. Yes, of course. What I’ve done is change a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass of water.

Q. The accidents?

A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size …

Q. Do you mean that the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?

A. No. It’s not a symbol. I’ve changed the physical substance of the glass of water into that of an oak tree.

Q. It looks like a glass of water.

A. Of course it does. I didn’t change its appearance. But it’s not a glass of water, it’s an oak tree.

More on Oak Tree here, and here’s the listen-again realplayer link to hear the program, for those interested — martian stuff about 15 minutes in. The listen-again link will rot in a week.

Oak Tree image copyright Michael Craig-Martin — used with respect but without permission

Not that it’s really very likely, but I’m sure those who disagree with David Attenborough will be on to it. According to Earth2Tech it’s a Vestas windmill in Denmark, in a gale, with faulty brakes. The government is investigating.

Upside — as ecogeek points out, this is a pretty good counterargument to people who think there’s not much energy in wind.

Downside — pretty obvious.

Meanwhile, brownouts in Texas. No technology is perfect…

And also via EnvironmentalCapital, a rather neat map of global wind and solar resources

Update: the original version of the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvvRHhsQhi8, vanished so I’ve put up another one.

Despite the urgent need to publicise my appearance at the Brighton Science Festival’s Big Science Sunday, I wasn’t planning another South Downs conservation post, but synchronicity forced my hand. Shortly before leaving work tonight, I was irritating my colleagues by voicing my probably irrational dislike for programming by David Attenborough. (It has at least vague justifications — I particularly dislike the way that he sees wonder as immanent in nature itself, rather than a creation of the way in which we position ourselves with respect to nature — but this is probably not the place for them, and honesty compels me to admit there may be a bunch of things like grandfather hang-ups at play too).

Anyway, having just fulminated over-expressively I pick up a newspaper on the train taking me home and read of the great man himself doing something very impressive: trying to talk a bunch of Sussex nimbys in my sometime hometown of Lewes out of their opposition to a largish windmill proposed for the Glyndebourne opera house. Quoth Sir David:

“I greatly applaud the plan to erect a wind turbine. That such a celebrated institution should pay such regard to its environmental responsibilities seemed to me to be wholly admirable, demonstrating that some communities really do take the ecological challenge seriously and do not simply utter pious words and leave it to others to take action.

“A wind turbine, with its graceful lines, collecting energy from the environment without causing any material damage, is a marvellous demonstration of the way we can minimise our pollution of the atmosphere if we wish to do so. It would help protect not only the countryside we have known for centuries but also the wider world beyond.”

I don’t think one windmill in Sussex makes much of a difference either way — wind’s role in the UK will surely be mainly off shore. And a windmill for an establishment that also maintains a helipad is a trifle absurd. But such things do have symbolic power, especially when coupled with a cultural attraction of such excellence and renown. And the arguments against windfarms — that they damage views that they often enhance, and that they, as interventions that will last a century at most, in some way do lasting damage to landscapes, rather than to the amenity they provide to those in the happy position of inhabiting those landscapes and unwilling to see them change — seem so wrong headed that I find myself broadly in favour of the things on principle. Besides, I like the energy-as-flow symbolism that they embody so gracefully; look at a wind turbie and you know that your seeing an open process, not a finite stock, and that’s a good lesson in how we have to understand energy in the decades to come.

In the grand-old-man stakes it seems odd to find myself on the same side as Attenborough, whose work I mainly dislike, and the opposite side to Jim Lovelock, whose work I deeply respect. But attitudes to the countryside do funny things to us all.

Picture from near Glyndbourne under a creative commons licence from SussexWalkabout

The Observer brings a conservation story that strikes a chord — complaints over the plan to let Cuckmere Haven, on the Sussex coast, flood. This is a national story because pictures of the Seven Sisters from Cuckmere are iconic (see above) and because a landowner who is to be inconvenienced is a major figure in publishing, which is the sort of connection that can help a story. It is a news story thanks to the fact that one of the little cottages overlooking the haven from the west is the setting for some of Atonement, which is probably not going to win many (any?) oscars tonight (my suspicion is that it has no real chance in any big category and that the craft stuff it might win for will mostly be taken by Sweeney Todd, though Keira Knightley’s modelling may secure a win in the costumes category; more in this vein below).

The flooding plan would allow the haven to revert to wetlands by ceasing to make efforts to control the ingress of the sea. This will mean that the current rather managed feel of the area will be lost (and that people walking from Eastbourne to Seaford at low tide, as I did a few years ago, will no longer be able to take a short cut by wading across the mouth of the river and so will have to walk a mile or so inland to Exceat and back out, which could, I’ll admit, be a drag). At the same time it will improve the area for wildlife and save a bunch of money.

It will also, according to Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury, who owns one of them, endanger the three Atonement-linked coastguard cottages that stand to the west. They are, frankly, not as pretty in real life as they can be made in photos, but if I owned one I’ll admit that the thought of it being undercut by erosion would not be welcome to me.

That said: you buy cottages on clifftops with certain risks attached. If there weren’t any erosion going on there wouldn’t be a cliff. And I imagine there is some sort of compensation in place (if there weren’t, surely the article would have mentioned it). And there’s a chance the erosion won’t do the cottages in. More generally, the point of conservation is not — or should not be — simply to keep things as they were. Conservation in the current world must also be about maximising potential and managing change. If one is to take seriously the idea that diminishing wetlands are bad for the environment, then saving money by getting one re-established makes a lot of sense; if we do this sort of thing enough maybe Britain’s overpowerful bird-watcher lobby will be more amenable to seeing sense on matters such as the Severn Barrage.

Cuckmere was the way it was, and we have lots of pictures and (if we are lucky) memories to prove it. It will be the way it will be, and we will build up images and memories of the process by which it changes. More than one set of images of the place seems to me to be a plus, not a minus, for those of us lucky enough to see the transition. In some ways I’d love there to be more change. I sometimes feel genuinely, though I’ll admit also absurdly, sorry that I will not live to see another ice age, in part because I would love to see the sea cliffs of the downs from the lowlands that would then be beneath them. He know nothing who only the Holocene knows…

What’s all this got to do with Eating the Sun? Well the South Downs play a role in the book (at some time I’ll get round to posting the chapter they’re in online as a sample). And I’m getting down that way next week for the Brighton Science Festival’s Big Science Sunday, (where Jim Endersby and Richard Fortey are speaking too, as it happens…). But also just because, the more distant I get from having written Eating the Sun, the clearer its central message is to me: processes trump things. Think of energy in terms of flows, not in terms of stocks of fuel. Think of nature the same way. Appreciate places — including peculiarly lovely ones, like Cuckmere — as the intersection of a skein of processes. Expect them to change and appreciate it. Don’t be fatalistic — there’s bad change as well as good. But don’t overvalue the static, even when you love it.

Postscript: after that burst of sunday afternoon preaching, some secular prognostication. In order — No Country For Old Men, Daniel Day Lewis, Julie Christie (though Ellen Page would suit me fine), Javier Bardem, Tilda Swinton (on the basis that the Blanchett vote splits, plus she was amazing), The Coen Brothers, Tony Gilroy or Diablo Cody, Coens again. Deakins for cinematography, and then editing is a tough call. Can it really be the Coens yet again? Personally I’d like to see it go to Christopher Rouse, just for the Waterloo sequnce in the Bourne film. But maybe when I get back from There Will be Blood, which I’m just off to, I’ll be all about Dylan Tichenor. And fingers crossed of course for Kevin O’Connell…

Pictures on a creative commons licence from SteveMcN and Abridgeover

I wish I was finding time to write here, but I’m not — however kind Sean has sent me some more trees, rather inspiring ones, and they are as good a post in and of themselves as anything I’m likely to write at the moment.

And since Sean has I’m inspired me to the pictorial, here’s another London snapshot. Those of you not in London (as I am not, at the moment) may not appreciate that though what you see in Sean’s pic looks like a clear winter day, it was in fact a clear very springlike day in the season formerly known as winter. These magnolias camellias [yes I'm a moron] of Nancy’s make the point.

A bit of climate politics, cross posted from Climate Feedback

He also points out that Lieberman-Warner gives away a lot of free permits — “an idea that leaves some environmentalists tearing their hair out” — while Clinton and Obama are talking about auctioning all the permits from day one. The auction approach makes sense both in terms of justice and I think in terms of policy. Whether it makes sense in terms of politics is not so clear. The European Commission, which takes these things seriously, has so far not managed to engineer a consensus on auctioning all permits (though it may get to it sometime in the mid teens). If an incoming president were able actually to set up the sort of aggressive (in a good way) cap and trade system Obama and Clinton are talking about that would be quite something, and it might well encourage the Europeans to go further. Whether it is politically possible in an economy that may well then be in or recovering from recession has to be open to doubt.

What isn’t open to doubt is that it would require a massive investment of the new president’s political capital. One implication there is that if climate is key to your vote, you’ll be best off voting for the Democrat who you expect to have the longer coat-tails, and thus to end up with more and more grateful partisan support on the HIll. But bear in mind that while in the senate, neither Clinton nor Obama have championed climate change in a particularly noticeable way, while McCain has invested quite a lot in it, and did so against the predilections of his party. So I can’t help thinking that any climate legislation that does come through under a Democratic president may end up a fair bit closer to Lieberman-Warner than to the more dramatic stances currently under offer. Happy to be argued out of this stance, or indeed proved wrong.

Which is not to say there are no distinctions to be drawn. Interestingly, Chris doesn’t say much about energy policy, as opposed to emissions goals. Checking out the Popular Mechanics really kinda wonderful Geek the Vote site shows that both the dems have a lot to say about the energy side of the equation, McCain rather less so. The site (which I got sent to by an earlier post of Chris’s) lists 17 Clinton policy ideas in climate/energy/environment areas, 40 (!) from Obama, and one from McCain. Here’s Obama’s energy page, and here’s Clinton’s.

It seems to me that if you want to find a difference between the candidates on this issue, the amount of thought and talk they are putting into smart energy investment (which is something that will be a lot easier for a new president to make progress on than charging politically powerful industries for their carbon emissions) may be a more revealing way of making the distinction than their stated policies for emissions on the 2050 timescale.

Of course Chris would say that if you want to find a difference you should arrange a debate. But opinions differ about that…

(Incidentally, those of you with a subscription to New Scientist should check out Chris’s rave review of Gabrielle Walker and David King’s The Hot Topic.)

Image from Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com under a Creative Commons licence

A lovely cartoon by Rosemary Mosco: please visit her site to see more, buy stuff, etc

For comparison: the opening of chapter 6 of Eating the Sun

The agency of animals is a visible thing. Their eyes blink, their gills flutter, their hackles rise, their pulses set the rhythm for their lives. They move back and forth, here and there, drawing their histories out behind them like the blur of a cheetah or the slime of a slug. The lines of their lives criss-cross the world, from the gyres of the ocean-circling albatross to the stochastic pinballing of a fly against a windowpane. The whole point of being an animal is trying to get somewhere else. Quite a few—let’s hear it for the oysters—have given up on this birthright, and rely on currents and providence to bring them their world. But most of us have not.

Plants, on the other hand, very rarely move themselves around; they just grow, and in almost every case they do so imperceptibly. By and large, the agency of plants is invisible. This is the simplest, and perhaps the most profound, of the differences between those that eat light and those that eat others. It is why plants have a relationship with their environment both more intimate and more abstract than that of any animal. It is why they have no faces and no hearts.

This great difference stems from the fact that sunlight is, at the efficiencies photosynthesis is capable of, a rather dilute source of energy….

And while we’re having fun, a tree review (via Sullivan)

…Trees are generally pleasing to look at, with the exception of the birch, which comes off as a bit “uppity”. But what’s below all the eye candy?

Well it turns out that trees make oxygen, which is important to many people worldwide. A tree can also be converted into wood, which has several uses, although once it becomes wood, the tree loses its oxygen-providing capability, so it’s a double-edged sword.

If that’s all there was to it, trees would be a no brainer. But as always, there are complications lurking below the surface.

First of all, trees take a long time to “grow”. You can start a tree now and possibly be dead by the time it starts to provide a significant benefit to you. This requires a degree of philanthropism on your part to even begin the process.

Additionally, leaf-bearing trees generate a huge mess every year, rudely dumping last season’s fashion everywhere with callous disregard to property values or the volume of work required to clean them up.

Trees also provide sanctuary to filthy birds who chirrup endlessly in the small hours of the morning, despite this author’s yells and throwing of little rocks. [Whole thing]

The cartoon’s by  Rosemary Mosco, coloured by Stephanie Yue, all rights reserved, and will be taken down if she has a problem with it …[update: she didn't, except to point out that Stephanie deserved a shout out.] Thanks to Jenny for spotting it

Over the holiday I read Richard Mabey’s Beechcombings (Amazon UK), a fascinating and enjoyable book about which I may well have more to say, but which I currently wish simply to digest and to put into the context of some other current reading.

However, this passage from Edward Carpenter (mystical socialist and, wikilegedly, the man who introduced the sandal into Britain) that he quotes in a chapter called “Electric Beeches” struck such a chord of recognition with me that I thought I’d share it here, along with the passage in Eating the Sun it reminded me of:

It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in quite early spring. Suddenly I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and upturned fingertips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming through them into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots plunged into the earth and drawing the same energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky, and full of the most amazing activity.

– Pagan and Christian Creeds, 1904

Now reverse the polarity:

Think of a beech tree in winter, its leaves lost, its architecture revealed in dark lines against cold grey cloud. Do what Robin Hill used to urge his children to do to cultivate the artist’s eye—take away the tree’s established “common sense” context by turning round, bending over and looking at it upside down through your legs. Its growth looks less like something pushed from the earth than it does something drawn from the sky. Its limbs, branches and twigs spread into the air like ink into blotting paper or cracks spreading through glass, embodying something between desire and transubstantiation.

The tree’s form tells the truth. The tree grows into the air because it grows out of the air. The bulk of the tree is not made from the soil beneath it—indeed, the soil is in large part made by the tree. Both soil and tree are made from carbon drawn from the sky above. Trees are built from sun and wind and rain. The land is just a place to stand.

– Eating the Sun, 2007

“No longer a separable organism” strikes a strong chord with me, and “ramifying into space” always seems like a good idea. Most crucially, “Sharing and uniting the life of earth and sky”, as Carpenter had it, is more or less what photosynthesis does, and as such what I set out to celebrate. But it does it by pumping celestial energies into the earth, not vice versa. As in electric circuits of a more mundane sort, the earth is the sink, not the source.

Beech tree picture from Treehugger, under a creative commons license. And while we’re at it here are some more beeches from talented people on Flickr