Bill McKibben | What Can the Coronavirus Teach Us?

08 March 20

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07 March 20

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THE SMALL DONORS HAVE NOT STOPPED - As is always the case the small donors do not give up, regardless. A few somewhat larger donations to match that effort would do wonders right about now. Sincere thanks to all. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Bill McKibben | What Can the Coronavirus Teach Us?

Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "There's nothing good about the novel coronavirus - it's killing many people, and shutting millions more inside, with fear as their main companion."

 However, if we’re fated to go through this passage, we may as well learn something from it, and it does strike me that there are a few insights that are applicable to the climate crisis that shadows all of our lives.

Some of these lessons are obvious: giant cruise ships are climate killers and, it turns out, can become floating sick wards. Other ideas evaporate once you think about them: China is producing far less carbon dioxide, for the moment, but, completely apart from the human toll, economic disruption is not a politically viable way to deal with global warming in the long term, and it also undercuts the engines of innovation that bring us, say, cheap solar panels.

Still, it’s worth noting how nimbly millions of people seem to have learned new patterns. Companies, for instance, are scrambling to stay productive, even with many people working from home. The idea that we need to travel each day to a central location to do our work may often be the result of inertia, more than anything else. Faced with a real need to commute by mouse, instead of by car, perhaps we’ll see that the benefits of workplace flexibility extend to everything from gasoline consumption to the need for sprawling office parks.

Of course, that’s a lesson that can be learned in reverse as well. The best excuse for an office is people bouncing ideas off one another, and the best excuse for a society is just people bouncing off one another, something that’s getting harder right now, as events start cancelling. But the “social distancing” that epidemiologists now demand of us to stop the spread of infectious diseases is actually already too familiar to lots of Americans. Living lives of comparative, suburban isolation, we already have fewer close friends than we used to. (Health-care authorities warned, on Thursday, of a serious epidemic of loneliness, which older Americans are more vulnerable to. The research shows that, when controlling for all other variables, older Americans who reported being lonely are twice as likely to die prematurely than those who aren’t.) But the patterns that produce this solitude in our culture are so ingrained that we’ve come to take them for granted. Perhaps, in an odd way, the prospect of forced isolation may lead us to embrace a bit more gregariousness when the virus relents. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be penned up in a Wuhan apartment; I can guess, though, that liberation will feel sweet when it comes, not only because people presumably will be safe but because they can be social. A certain kind of environmentalist has long hoped that we’ll learn to substitute human contact for endless consumption; maybe this is the kind of shock that might open a few eyes. (Also, strained global supply chains are a good reminder that local agriculture has very practical benefits.)

This might also be the moment when we decide to fully embrace the idea that science, you know, works. My grandfather was, for many decades, doctor to the tiny town of Kirkland, Washington, now a suburb filled with software execs, which has turned into an American coronavirus ground zero. So I’m thinking frequently of the brave nurses and paramedics carrying out front-line care, and also the researchers who have scrambled with remarkable speed to produce prototype vaccines. Élites seem a little better when they come bearing cures. And that should probably carry over to other realms: Americans, polling shows, are wary of Trump’s cavalier disregard for reality when it comes to global warming; now he’s claiming that the virus is a hoax, as well. Given his contention that maybe a “miracle” might make it “disappear,” I’d expect that skepticism to keep growing.

And one would also expect a growing awareness that what happens elsewhere matters—that there’s no real way to shut out the rest of the planet. That’s true for the virus, which seems to have seeped through most of the world’s borders in a matter of days. It’s even truer, of course, for the CO₂ molecule. Not even a guy in a hazmat suit, clutching a temperature gun, can slow down the warm air cascading up to the Arctic, or the hurricane headed across the Atlantic. So maybe it’s a moment when we remember that coöperation with the rest of the world is a boon, not a trap.

Above all, I think, a physical shock like COVID-19 is a reminder that the world is a physical place. That’s easy to forget when we apprehend it mostly through screens, or through the cozy, contained environments that make up most of our lives. We seem to have a great deal of control, right until the moment that we don’t have any. Things can go very, very wrong, and very, very quickly. That’s precisely what scientists have been telling us for decades now about the climate crisis, and it’s what people have learned, from Australia to California, Puerto Rico, and everywhere that flood and fire has broken out. That planets get sick slightly slower than populations do—over a few decades, not a few weeks—doesn’t change the basic calculation. Biology doesn’t really care what we think of it, any more than physics or chemistry does. Reality is capable of biting, and biting hard.

Passing the Mic

Jerome Foster II just finished Week 57 of climate-striking, every Friday, in front of the White House. The high-school senior has become a force—just last month, the Audubon Naturalist Society gave him its Youth Environmental Champion award (and, since youth are now driving the environmental movement, this is no niche prize). This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What’s the essential message that young people would like to get across to older people about climate change—what do you think older generations are not understanding correctly?

Two things. In order for substantive progress to take place to stymie the climate crisis, humanity needs to operate from a standpoint of intergovernmental solidarity, empathy, equity, and moral clarity. These should be the pillars on which we forge the pathway to a sustainable future. Also, what older generations are not understanding is the meaning of the Native American proverb, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”

What was it like to walk in that crowd in Washington, D.C., last September, during the Global Climate Strike, and realize: I helped make this happen?

I felt a great sense of optimism, community, and belonging, but I also felt mad, because we invited our elected officials to speak and none of them could provide us a real plan to get us out of this crisis. What I hoped for was not just for fifteen thousand people or twenty thousand people to show up. I wanted a real policy announcement from our national representatives, saying that we have your back and we will make sure to hold the fossil-fuel industry accountable.

Tell me about OneMillionOfUs, which you helped start last March.

It is a national nonprofit youth voting and advocacy organization, which is working to educate, empower, and mobilize a million young people to register and turn out to vote in the upcoming 2020 elections and after. So far, OneMillionOfUs has partnered with the Climate Strike Movement to facilitate mass voter registration on April 24th, the third day of planned Earth Day climate strikes, from April 22nd (a.k.a. Earth Day) to April 24th. Also, we have partnered with March for Our Lives, the Women’s March Youth Empower, 350.org, March for Science, Black Lives Matter, and many more to create a plethora of events before November. To find out how you can start a OneMillionOfUs chapter at your high school, college, or community center, go to www.onemillionof.us.

Where are you headed next year for school?

I don’t know yet. I haven’t heard back from any colleges. :-(

Climate School

Thinking twice about touching that subway pole? A new study details just how much worse it is for the climate to hop in an Uber or a Lyft: about sixty-nine per cent worse than the average emissions of the ride it replaces, including driving your own car, taking mass transit, walking, and, charmingly, “simply staying put.” That’s largely because the ride-sharing-app driver is “deadheading,” which includes circling while waiting for the next fare.

Media Matters for America reported that broadcast coverage of climate change on the evening news and Sunday-morning news shows increased sixty-eight per cent over the previous year. This means, in practice, that climate-change coverage occupied 0.7 per cent of the news hole, or two hundred and thirty-eight total minutes of the news year this past year on NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. And that, actually, was slightly less than in 2017. Someday, historians will look back on these numbers in wonder.

The Financial Times covered, in real depth, one of the sadder sagas of the moment: the shale revolution is producing vast quantities of natural gas, which, as we are increasingly coming to understand, we don’t want to burn in power plants (or even in kitchens). So now the industry has decided to use all of that gas to create new mountains of cheap plastic, even though “doubts are emerging about the wisdom of a huge expansion in capacity that will leave the world awash in products that can take hundreds of years to decay,” according to F.T. Perhaps wise public policy would involve just leaving it in the ground. An in-depth essay in Rolling Stone this week brought home the scale of the problem—you’ll have a visceral sense when you look at the picture that accompanies it.

Scoreboard

There was a big win on the infrastructure front, as environmentalists, many of them in upstate New York, forced an end to the Constitution Pipeline, which would have carried fracked natural gas from Pennsylvania. Their eight-year battle persuaded the Oklahoma-based company that was backing the project to throw in the towel, because the return on the investment “had diminished in such a way that further development is no longer supported.” The win came too late for one family in Pennsylvania: to make way for the pipeline, work crews had already cut down five hundred and fifty trees on its land, including the family sugar bush.

In the U.K., a court quashed plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport. Campaigners have fought this plan for many years, and their victory was all the sweeter because the judges explicitly cited climate change as the reasoning behind the ruling. The government, the judges said, had failed to consider the obligations imposed on them by joining the Paris climate accord, a first major ruling for any court in the world, and one that, the Guardian reported, “may have an impact both in the UK and around the globe by inspiring challenges against other high-carbon projects.”

On the divestment front, Britain’s Jesuits and psychiatrists chose the same day to announce that they were selling off their stock in fossil-fuel companies. As one psychiatrist pointed out, “Greenhouse gas emissions are driving us towards a future that looks terrifyingly bleak, with children’s mental health and well-being a major casualty.”

A very scary study, reminding us how much we’ve already screwed up the planet’s workings, looked at the effects of an unprecedented “blob” of hot water that hung off the West Coast, for seven hundred days, beginning around the middle of the last decade. The hot Pacific altered everything: millions of seabirds died—an “off the charts” event, ornithologists said—and species from cod to sea lions and humpback whales took big hits, too. At the moment, there are signs that the hot-water patch is reappearing off the coast of California.

And Elizabeth Warren did it again, breaking new ground with a plan to use the Dodd-Frank Act, oversight legislation drawn up in the wake of the mortgage crisis, to try to limit financial institutions in their support of fossil fuels. It’s a smart policy, because the “carbon bubble” now inflating is larger than the housing bubble that brought us low in 2008—and if we don’t pop it, we pop the planet. Perhaps she could run some sort of permanent Presidential campaign, because it seems to yield remarkable ideas on an almost daily basis.

Congratulations to Bob Weighton, from Yorkshire, who has become the oldest living man, at a hundred and eleven. He is described by the Daily Mirror as a “climate change warrior,” and he told its reporter, “All power to Greta Thunberg.” He spends some of his time building tiny wooden windmills.

Warming Up

I don’t know many activists who get more done than Emily Johnston, a Seattle-based poet who has helped gather kayaktivists to fight Shell in the Arctic and turned the valve off on a tar-sands pipeline. She wrote to me and recommended a daily listen to Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes singing “Wake Up Everybody,” so it’s probably a good prescription.

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Erik Prince. (photo: DN!)

Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Recruited Former Spies to Infiltrate Liberal Groups
Mark Mazzetti and Adam Goldman, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents."

Mr. Prince, a contractor close to the Trump administration, contacted veteran spies for operations by Project Veritas, the conservative group known for conducting stings on news organizations and other groups.

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

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An Asylum-Seeker Who Was Kidnapped and Tortured With Acid Begged US Border Officers Not to Send Her Back. They Did Anyway.
Adolfo Flores, BuzzFeed
Flores writes: "By the time Elizabeth asked US border agents for asylum, she had been kidnapped, sexually assaulted in front of her daughter, and had her legs burned with acid."
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The World's Scariest Facial Recognition App Company Keeps Lying
Rebecca Heilweil, Vox
Heilweil writes: "How would you like it if anyone armed with an iPhone could figure out a slew of information about you, pull up any Facebook or Instagram picture you've ever been in, and see any other image of you that's been posted publicly online?"
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The Insanity of Making Sick People Work
Mark Bergfeld, Jacobin
Bergfeld writes: "Coronavirus is putting extra burdens on workers, from health professionals to low-paid cleaning staff at the front line of combating infection. Yet many of these same workers don't even have the right to sick pay - meaning they'll feel compelled to work even if it risks spreading the virus."
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Israeli snipers on the Gaza border. (photo: Eliyahu Hershkovitz/Haaretz)

'42 Knees in One Day': Israeli Snipers Open Up About Shooting Gaza Protesters
Hilo Glazer, Haaretz
Glazer writes: "I know exactly how many knees I've hit, says Eden, who completed his service in the Israel Defense Forces as a sniper in its Golani infantry brigade six months ago."
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Mandarinfish are one of more than 1,300 species of reef fish in Palau. (photo: Keoki Stender)

Conservation Nation: How Palau Protects Its Reefs and Waters
Ed Warner, Mongabay
Warner writes: "In 2012 I spent 3 weeks in Palau as part of the 'Micronesia Challenge,' a conservation approach sponsored by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in conjunction with Palau International Coral Reef Center (PICRC) and the University of Guam."

 

n 2012 I spent 3 weeks in Palau as part of the ‘Micronesia Challenge,’ a conservation approach sponsored by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in conjunction with Palau International Coral Reef Center (PICRC) and the University of Guam. TNC’s lead scientist, Rod Salm, had asked me, a geologist, to be his dive buddy to experiment in this citizen science.

Palau is made up of some 400 islands: mostly underwater limestone plateaus in the south, basaltic volcanos in the middle, and limestone atolls in the north. The governance mimics the USA: both federal and states (ten of them). The population is not much over 14,000, 2/3 of whom live in the capital and state of Koror.

Having just returned from revisiting Palau diving as a tourist this time, I spent a day with the director of TNC, Steven Victor, and Palau’s Assistant Attorney General, Orion Cruz.

I was curious to dive on some of the same sites as the 2012 research project, where we had discovered that many of the reefs that were badly bleached in 1998 and had subsequently turned to rubble by tide and storm waves, had made rapid, remarkable recoveries. How had they fared in the eight years between my visits, I wondered?

You may have read about the imminent destruction of the world’s coral reefs, both from increased ocean temperatures and acidification. “What if,” Dr. Salm had mused, “we found the places around the tropics where reefs are still healthy, even with the bleaching and higher acidity. We could then reconsider how we protect areas – not because they are attractive to tourists, but for their natural resilience.”

In 2012, we found reefs that in 1999 were 100% rubble, in 2006 were covered in ‘recruits’ (baby coral), and which by 2012 were covered 30-75%, mostly by table corals (Acropora species). We had also found brightly colored coral varieties growing in the channels between the famous limestone islands of southern Palau where the water was more acidic than anything predicted for ocean acidity levels 100 years from now. The analysis from aquarium studies predicted that coral could not produce its stony skeleton (the mineral aragonite) at a low pH. Yet here in Palau, corals weren’t listening to the biologists.

Every morning for 3 weeks in 2012, we left the boat dock at PICRC and motored over to “Fish-N-Fins,” a wonderful dive operation, to load up 18 tanks for our three dive teams. On the morning of day five, or was it day six, I was looking around the marina when a little light went on. As a kid, I had spent some time around marinas both on Long Island and southern Florida. Boat docks and marinas feature some of the dirtiest waters anywhere, and I was accustomed to seeing floating trash, fuel scum, gasoline rainbows, and always, trash along the shores.

There was none of that at “Fish-N-Fins.” The water was clear and clean, full of fish. The shore was spotless. Nothing floating or bobbing the water. A short video flashed in my head: the day before, we passed a boat heading north that, all of a sudden, stopped, as someone on board leaned over the side and fished an object out of the water, a plastic bottle. I jumped onto the dock where Tova, one of the F-N-F owners, was standing. “How come the marina is so clean?” I asked, and got an extended explanation.

Palau faced a crisis, she’d said. Growing water tourism was producing a rapid increase in trash on the waters and shorelines. If it were America, we would have demanded punishment: laws, fines, lawsuits, political activism, blame. But this being Palau, the country’s leaders, members of the legislature, and local chiefs showed up at the elementary schools where they explained that it was up to every Palauan to keep the country clean.

Micronesian law (known as the bul – like Polynesian kapu) had already been combined with western governance, making principal chiefs responsible for local environmental health – from the top of the hills to the lagoons and reefs in front of the villages. The children went home and explained what was needed to their parents. Local village meetings mobilized the population, as everyone was responsible for picking up after everyone else.

Palauans live on – and from – their waters, so nobody would leave floating trash to someone else. Furthermore, combining the bul with western science and conservation rules works. If you’re caught breaking the fishing rules, your auntie, of the hereditary chieftain lineage, would smack you across your head. While Palau has male chiefs, they descend from a female lineage. In this small country, everyone knows what anyone is doing, and aunties are the ‘enforcers’.

I learned another lesson after our first meeting in which we explained our research program to Palauan leaders. It seems every meeting in Palau is followed by a meal. My kind of people: live to eat, don’t eat to live.

I found an empty chair and plopped down next to the second principal chief. Palau’s parallel government means that the first and second principal chiefs, who represent the bul, work directly with the president. I introduced myself and made a foolish statement, something like: “I think your local knowledge is really important to marine conservation.”

The chief gave me a stare and said, “We’re sending our young people to college in marine and other areas of science. We expect them to return and lead our conservation efforts.” I was impressed, but not fooled. I’ve worked in the developing world and respect local knowledge. I suspected that Palauans would find a way to combine the two knowledge systems.

I got an example a few days later when talking with Yim Golbuu, executive director of PICRC. He explained how the bul and western science work together. “Fisheries biologists discovered the aggregation of groupers, they come together to spawn in large schools every summer around the same date. Western scientists then realized that the Palauan bul had already prohibited the fishing for grouper for the two weeks before and after the aggregation event. Using science, we focused on the aggregation locations and extended the no-fishing time to six weeks. We have protected our fish populations using local knowledge combined with science.”

Steven Victor of TNC updated me on our day out on the water in Northwest Palau. “The village system had broken down somewhat. Overfishing was affecting grouper populations, especially pressure from the Chinese to buy Palauan grouper. Some of the grouper aggregations has been wiped out or greatly reduced.

We met with local fishermen and asked them what they wanted: more and bigger fish, naturally. Once they understood that they were catching smaller fish which were not old enough to reproduce, they agreed to a 3-year fishing moratorium. The follow up was bigger, mature fish in the catch. Fishermen got it right away. Now we have fishing limits, protected areas, prohibition on fishing aggregations. Next came fishing for pelagic fish instead of reef fish. The more grazers like parrotfish on a reef, the more recovery of hard corals. The ecology and social benefits work together,” he explained (paraphrased from a longer conversation).

At Ulong Channel, the day after the new moon, we witnessed an aggregation of bumphead parrotfish spawning. Bumpheads are the giants amongst parrotfish: large females run up to 100kg, males 200kg. Between 500 and 1,000 of these massive fish were having sex, unmolested by fishermen. The only predator active during that dive were bull sharks, dangerous enough to give me, even after 1,000 dives, a serious adrenaline rush.

The grouper business may not sound like a big deal. It is. In the Bahamas after scientists discovered grouper aggregations and published their work, local fishermen used the knowledge to fish during the aggregations, destroying the populations of Nassau groupers and other fish stocks. Different culture, different outcome.

Here’s the news from 2020: reefs around Palau continue to recover. More slowly, naturally, as coral cover reaches equilibrium. A great example (revisited from 2012) was a site called Peleliu coral garden. Hard coral cover has reached well over 90%. Corals are now competing for space. That’s right, massive Porites that has regrown over patches killed in 1998 is now being killed by Acropora which is overgrowing the massive Porites in a slow-motion war. One coral poisoning a different species to gain space.

Palau has also now banned 10 different ingredients found in sunscreens. I thought the ban excessive (only zinc and titanium oxide are legal for use, and cover a tourist in white paste), but after discussing the reasoning with my new friend Orion, I have come around. If some of these questionable substances are found by science to be benign, well, the ban can be reversed.

But for example, the famous Jellyfish Lake was being poisoned by sunscreen, so it was closed for several years to let it recover. I snorkeled there and can report that the jellyfish are now healthy and the experience is ‘zen.’

The next steps should be educating tourists about Palauan conservation, in which knowledge is king. After 2 weeks there, I returned to Denver without a suntan: I started wearing full body Lycra dive skins many years ago, keep my hands out of direct sunlight, and wear a hat when on a boat. My dermatologist is very happy with me.

This article was originally published on Mongabay.

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