Speeding along the pre-dawn Mass Pike en route to Logan Airport, my brother-in-law stretched languorously in the passenger seat, laughed and said, “how about those losers who spent all day at the Apple store for the new iPhone launch. Who would use a vacation day just for that?”

I knew the answer and so did he: I would.

I’d just devoted portions of three vacation days to getting one of the 75-million iPhones apple had prepared for this launch, so friends back home in Vietnam could have the newest, hottest tech before anyone else. And I’d missed the Climate Strike to do it.

I’d come to the U.S. a month before for a wedding and to see friends and family but, when word came down from on high – my wife in Ho Chi Minh City – that I had to drive an hour to a certain mall to buy a phone, computer and watch, I rumbled off to New Hampshire.

It was a hot day and, at a food-court counter that made blended smoothies, I ordered something fruity and handed them the travel cup I’d brought with me for the purpose. As usual, I felt a little smug that I’d remembered it.

The youngster serving me was nonplussed and stuttered for a moment before turning to her supervisor and holding out my cup questioningly. “No,” the supe said, with a sympathetic tone, “company policy. We can’t use your cup.

“But,” I frothed inanely, “but…on the very day of the student climate strike?!” Okay, I’m not proud of it but, yes, I said that. Eager to soothe me the first clerk said helpfully, “I can’t use your cup, Sir, but I can use one of ours and pour it into yours…would that work?”

Needless to say, that did not work and, still thirsty, I headed through the mall to get my stuff. But something was clearly wrong as I approached the Apple store: there was a mob in the neighborhood. Was this part of the climate strike?

In fact, these weren’t kids milling around. Instead, in lines six-shops long on either side of the store entrance, were several hundred Gen-Xers and Boomers. They weren’t holding protest signs, but their own current, and perfectly viable, iPhones: texting, chatting, photographing, gaming, working, videoing, and posting, all while waiting breathlessly for their new iPhone 11, which, I learned, had just come out that day.

I, too, was one of those middle-aged posters, and after finding my place in line I posted this:

A pleasant lady in the group on the right said, “no, no, this line is only for people with an appointment between noon and twelve-thirty.” Appointment?

I checked and indeed, in order to pay well over a thousand dollars for one of their new products, an appointment to stand in line was needed. Yet making an appointment turned out to be superfluous anyway: the darned things were already sold out across the East Coast.

I finally got a slot to pick up an Apple Watch between two and two-thirty, which gave me plenty of time to ponder the greenomics of this absurd phenomenon.

As GetOrchard.com reports, “On one hand, Apple arguably created the (annual upgrade) cycle by releasing a new iPhone every year. Major design changes are saved for every second year, making devices look obsolete, even if they still work perfectly.” In other words, their goal is to get us to upgrade annually. Then our phone plan providers — nicely aligned with the manufacturers — also try to hustle an upgrade every other year when our contracts are up.

Apple’s own environmental report documents many steps they have taken to lighten their overall corporate impact, but they also list an iPhone’s carbon phone-print as averaging about 79 kilos of CO₂ over the device’s lifetime and about 80% of that — 63 kg CO₂ — is in the manufacture. In other words, even if the buyer never uses it before replacing it with a new phone, that 63 kg of carbon dioxide – and a host of other greenhouse gases — is already baked in.

Let’s see, 79 kilos per phone, times 75 million initial units, carry the one and…hmm. By my count that comes to just under 6 Billion kilograms of CO₂ in the first week of this launch alone. But wait! They’ve actually ordered around 180-million units for the sales year, which ups our calculations some to, uh, let’s see, 79 kilos times 180 million… I put it at 14.2 Billion kilograms or, more succinctly, 14.2 Million metric tonnes of carbon.

Consider that the total carbon emissions of greater Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2015 was 14.7 million tonnes and it’s clear that almost as much carbon will be released by launching the iPhone 11 this year as a major metropolitan area releases in the same period.[1]  This, of course, only refers to the iPhone and not to any of the millions of units of the other products sold in the same stores.  

What does it mean when millions are standing in solidarity for the climate on the same day millions more are standing in line to buy the newest phone launch?

And what does it mean when that launch represents billions of tons of carbon added to the atmosphere?

Now there’s no need just to pick on Apple. The other manufacturers are in the same boat, and so are we all. It took me, and millions of others, an hour to get to the mall in a personal automobile — not so carbon friendly. Besides, this is how we communicate, work, date, memorialize, innovate, play and view. I have at least ten weekly meetings on my laptop that I would not be able to attend effectively otherwise.

I recently founded an online community for a brick-and-mortar organization and our internet beachhead is growing far, far faster than the earthbound wing. The commute? From bedroom to living room. That’s a lot of gas saved.

It is possible — and I did not find any direct data on this — that all these phones, tablets and laptops, have reduced the number of home TV sets — I don’t feel a need for one, for example — boomboxes, radios, satellite dishes, movie cameras and projectors, trips to the theater, visits to the photo developer and many, many other things we all used to do. Could that be enough to offset this insane, carbon-mad consumer frenzy?

Meanwhile the line had been thinning and it was my turn. I was shuttled between blue-shirted staffers, and the third of these and I waited about fifteen minutes for my watch to emerge from the holy-of-holies, the mysterious Apple back room.

I took the opportunity to ask my young companion, “So…what’s so great about this new iPhone anyhow?” She looked upward for a moment, and said with a little shrug, “Not much, I guess.”
Oh.

I followed up doggedly though, with, “What about this watch, what does that do?”
“Well,” she said, “it works with the iPhone to count your steps, keep track of stuff, you can make calls with it…stuff like that.”
“So, you’re saying I need an iPhone in order to use the watch?”
“Uh huh,” she said blithely.

I ran out — still thirsty — and drove to the nearest climate strike to show my support. But it was too late: the kids had gone, I knew not where. I already knew where their parents were.

References:
[1] Vancouver is the 31^st largest city in North America, with a population of 2.5 million.

Thanks for reading and, of course, your comments are very welcome. – DK

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, legendary pilot and author of such books as Night Flight and Flight to Arras (French: Pilote de guerre), wrote of his forced landing in a Saharan desert, and of his chance meeting with a Little Prince there among the dunes. It is to be hoped that we are not forced down so, for the land below us is as beautiful as the Sahara, yet even more forbidding.

Oh yes, I should have said that I am writing at just under 38,000 feet. My Boing777-200, an enormous craft build to hold hundreds comfortably, is more than two-thirds empty. Even as I luxuriate in all the space, I am aware of the paradox: sending a plane of these proportions on an intercontinental flight with 200-or-so open seats seems immoral. With no internet up here I can’t do the needed calculations and, of course, it’s rather too late to fret about it now.

Even so, it is charting a course from Washington, D.C., to Tokyo, some 6,800 miles over the pole as the frozen crows fly. We’ll get to the greenomics of such a flight later, but for right now, I’m captivated by the view below.

It is morning as we fly west across the Siberian hinterlands and I must be discreet, as all other window visors are tightly shut. The sun is in blinding contrast to the somberly dark cabin.

By the way, I must beg your indulgence for the quality of some of the photos. This was impromptu, and my phone just wasn’t up to the glare. My eyes were, though, and I feasted them on the sights.

From this height the horizon is about 240 miles away, and my Olympian view encompasses something like fifty-thousand square miles. All of it, all that I can see, is semi-frozen tundra. There are thousands of glistening pools, nestled in earth all of varied browns and tans. Some of these are actually large lakes, and there are river systems meandering through, threading the lands from west to east as we fly south-west towards Japan.

The largest of these I believe to be the Kolyma. It is tremendous, rivaling the world’s largest[1], with tributaries woven around it like veins around an artery. Ice dots the land here, sheets of it cover some of the pools yonder, all without hint of mankind. I see no cities, no towns, no roads or masonry, not a sign that a race which could build the massive plane I’m on exists or ever existed.

Since we sighted land from the East Siberian Sea it’s been the same view below. Thirteen hours over the pole to Asia makes it clear just how small the world really is. Then again, a landscape that goes on endlessly below suggests it’s still a vast and lonely place.

If water covers more than two-thirds of this planet, and lands like this cover so much of the rest, then mankind, for all our works, inhabits just a tiny fraction of it.

Yet as we fly over Srednekolymsk — a town of 3,525[2] lost in sudden cloud cover — en route to the mythical-sounding Sea of Okhotsk, I know that the lands below have already been dramatically and permanently altered by our hands. The very plane that has carried me safely this far — just under 4,000 miles — has burned, I calculate, about 90 tonnes of jet fuel — I read that even our wings are tanks — and we have more than 2,000 miles yet to go.

I don’t know whether the tundra here would have been completely frozen in years past at this time of year. But I do know the temperature / carbon equation has changed by our hand. I have written extensively on tundra for R.O.I., so I have an idea of the finely-honed knife-edge this landscape is on, and that the carbon it stores is being paroled far too quickly for us to manage.

In our last issue of R.O.I. we noted a report of a possible reprieve on this front: more warming in the tundra bringing more plants, for a possible short-term carbon sink. Looking from this height at the bleak lands below, devoid to my cloud-level eyes of any vegetation, that seems far-fetched.

Clouds have engulfed us now and I am sad, for I’m yearning to see more of this rugged country. Wasteland. Hardly. I know there are billions of plants and animals below, fish, no doubt, in those pools, and this season there are grasses and gorse and wildflowers and I wish I could see them all.

Hopefully there are plenty of bees, though we know the pressure they are under everywhere. There should be millions of birds, though we learned this month that the United States, at least, lost a third of its birds over the past forty years. There are doubtless billions of mosquitos, too, swarming, buzzing, most of them seeking a meal they will never find.

As a lifelong loather of those creatures — I was allergic and apparently irresistible as a boy — I am torn. I want them away from me. But when I learned this week that researchers have found a genetic breeding method that can wipe out mosquito populations by more than ninety percent in a few months, I was horrified. Destroying them completely seems the kind of human endeavor that is bound to come back to — forgive me — bite us. And this at a time when a million species are already headed for the tank due to our activities. It reeks of hubris.

The view from 38,000 feet is beautiful, yes, and vast. The hand of man is not to be seen, true. But as The Little Prince, that child of Asteroid B-325, was fond of saying, “what is important is invisible to the eye.” So it is with the tundra below. The carbon load from our plane’s engines and from other, more distant causes, is not visible. Yet it is the defining shaper of the landscape to come.

At just under 7 metric tonnes of jet fuel per hour over our 13-hour flight, we contributed our own load of carbon to the thawing of the permafrost below.

Ah! The clouds are clearing now, and we’ve entered the mountains, ridged and corrugated taiga as endless as the tundra was before. Windswept, snow-dappled and rugged, these are not the green and pleasant European Alps. These hills, whose height is hard to determine from here, are jumbled, iron-grey, and frozen.

Looking down now at a pyramidal giant rising up to meet us, it’s hard to fathom that we could have impacted these remote pedestals in any way. But the taiga is at risk from us as well. Last month’s R.O.I. detailed a drought in the Himalayan high country due to climate change, in spite of enormous snow and ice cover and tremendous glacial resources, and it may be so below me as well.

Yet another massive river has appeared, running north-south between the lines of hills. And now I see another as we cross the nearest range, with a third well west of us. We are about to fly over Okhotsk where there is less snow and the mountains are a uniform brown. It is lovely indeed.

The Little Prince was fond of his small planet and tended it carefully. He asked Saint-Exupery for a sheep to keep the baobabs under control. He put his one special flower, a rose, under a glass dome to keep it safe. He tended his three tiny volcanoes — two active and one extinct — with care. He thoroughly cleaned even the extinct one for, as the Prince was also fond of saying, “one never knows.”

We have now crossed the Okhotsk Sea and are over an enormous island lying between that body and the Sea of Japan. The hand of man is easily seen here, with roads and geometric patterns on the land. The fields, however, are brown like the tundra before them: there is no green to relieve the monotony. It’s just over a thousand miles to Tokyo now, and we will no doubt hear the intercom soon telling us to put up our laptops.

When his flower rejected him, The Little Prince travelled the local asteroids until he came to a geographer who counselled him to come next to Earth. “It has a good reputation,” the geographer called after him. Looking below at this stunning wilderness, I can see why.

I hear The Little Prince chanting, “what is important is invisible to the eye,” but I’m afraid in this case I cannot entirely agree with him. Beauty is important. Wilderness is important. And for me, the knowledge that thousands of miles of unspoiled wilderness is still there, is truly important.

I do not have a glass dome big enough to protect this vastness from the hands of man. Yet a view such as this, as the sun dapples the towns of Ohka and Nogliki below, cries out for me to protect it with all I have. The dangers are invisible to the eye. What is important, is not.

References:
[1] In fact, it is the 39^th longest river in the world
[2] Wikipedia

This morning I had breakfast in Manhattan with my oldest friend, a man I met in middle school in 1971. I’ve been travelling in The States the past few weeks to see friends and family and managed to find him through social media. He’s not a Luddite but he doesn’t have the usual Instagram presence, the Snapchat account, or the marketing materials of most people these days, so he’s a bit hard to track down.

Steve is an internationally well-known artist, with drawings in the Morgan Library and paintings in the Whitney’s permanent collection. He spent a summer working in Monet’s home at Giverny and another in residency at the famous Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture in Maine. He knows a lot about art, but not much about sustainability, and as we were catching up he asked naively, “What’s all this sustainability stuff you’re writing about?”

So I pointed to his coffee cup and said, “it’s about that.” He cocked an eyebrow inquiringly. I picked up a sugar packet. “It’s also about this,” I said, and he puckered his lips. I took a sip of water and said, “It’s definitely about this stuff, too.”  “Ah,” he said.

I pointed next to the straw the restaurant had automatically put in his glass. “Got it,” he said.

We were seated in the open window of a café on 7^th Avenue, and I gestured towards the cars and buses, the new construction across the street, the paper napkin he was dabbing his lips with after a sip of espresso.

“So…it’s everything,” he said. I thought about this for a bit before realizing that almost all we could see was wrapped up in the sustainability equation somehow. The concrete sidewalks, and the brick piles outside the construction site. The streetlights, the clothing and hair product of the passersby.

The eggs, breads, meats and vegetables on the tables nearby all got a blunt forefinger in their direction. The carafe of cream on our table, too, received its quick, pointed tap. Leather shoes and belts, the gas range and oven in the restaurant’s kitchen, and the electricity to run the fan by our table, received their due scrutiny.

At this point my friend was in the spirit too, and touched the wooden table’s well-scarred surface, then the plastic-coated menu. I added the ink thereon. The air wafting in our window, all of it was in the mix.

It struck me there was nothing within our reach, nothing in sight, which didn’t also have a number of solutions available, right now, to make it more sustainable. Sure, there are climate issues surrounding all these materials, but there are already substitutes, remedies, workarounds and replacements underway for all of them.

What is needed, then, are not necessarily solutions, but awareness, education, commitment. A significant chunk of people with a true stake in the outcome and the energy to take decisive action.

Hey Presto! There is a Global Climate Strike happening this very Friday, fueled by students, young people, who will be walking out of their classes in large numbers to demand a habitable planet for themselves and their own future generations. Students in more than 150 nations are expected to participate and, while we don’t know their numbers yet, it’s likely to be…well, a lot. Just what the sustainability doctor ordered!

Some kids already strike every Friday, in an organization called Fridays for Future, which had its genesis in Greta Thunberg’s every-Friday school strike in Sweden demanding the government get in line with the Paris agreement’s targets. Man! If you have to protest like that in Sweden, it’s not a moment too soon to do it here!

In November of 2016, more than 50,000 people, mostly schoolchildren, participated in the first strike of this kind during the Paris climate change conference, and various actions continued in hundreds of countries on an ad hoc basis. Then in March of this year, almost a million-and-a-half kids walked out of schools worldwide, demanding climate action. Again in May, hundreds of thousands stayed out of schools, marching and demanding a clean planet to grow up in.

New York City — the largest school system in the United States — announced this week that there will be no penalties for students attending the event, which could potentially swell the strikers’ ranks by more than a million kids.

Dragged along in the wake of these students are forward-looking corporations like Ben & Jerry’s, whose stores will close so their staffs can join the strike or strike-related events; Patagonia, which is also in deep behind the strikers, and hundreds of other companies which are closing or expressing their solidarity in some way.

Dragged along also are the world’s governments, many of whom are meeting at the United Nations a few days after the strike to discuss climate change at the U.N. Climate Summit. When they do, everything they see and touch will have both a problematic role in sustainability and with a tenable solution that is available right now.

The question is, will these kids, marching for their very lives, shift the equation so those solutions are adopted right now by those dragged along behind: by us?

The determination being shown by these young people suggests they just might.

Last week I met a microbiologist, a former Vietnam War medic who has travelled the world meeting with other scientists, doing research, and working tirelessly to understand and manage infectious diseases. His dissertation focused on Alexandre Yersin, who developed an anti-plague vaccine at the Pasteur Institute in Nha Trang, Vietnam, and my friend has been working along the same lines ever since.

I rather sheepishly told him of the work I do, and he said, “Man! I wish I could write!

This was through the looking glass stuff for me. This incredible man, who can understand the tiniest mysteries, and tame some of the most virulent disease agents in our world, was envious of my talents?

I, on the other hand, felt my usual awe when meeting a scientist, someone to whom the mysteries of the universe are revealed as numbers and symbolic mathematical relationships. This man has led teams at facilities around the globe, at the CDC, the WHO, and more. He’s helped develop vaccines, and policies that save lives all over the world.

Math and science don’t come easy to me, and I have to work hard just to understand the basic concepts of the work guys like him do every day.

My work on Valutus’ newsletter, Sustainability R.O.I., mashes me up against the newest innovations, the up-to-the-minute science, and the relevant statistics and metrics used in the field.

In the last few months alone we’ve written up nano-coated salt batteries, microscopic plastic-eating microbes, mammoth DNA cloning, and a host of other scientific topics. To effectively communicate these things we must do research, compare scientific studies, and just generally come to some understanding of how they work.

Which brings me to my fifth-grade science project.

We all had to do presentations on science or math, usually stuff we’d been exposed to in class. One kid did something with batteries, I think, and others did the usual run of measurements and magnets.

I presented something that, for me, was highly technical — an idea my mom came up with. I presented a numerical system using ‘Base 9’, where numbers sequenced from 0–9 instead of 0–10 — ‘base 10’ i.e., the system we all use every day. Until recently I thought I’d invented it, until a quick Google search revealed the awful truth. Even so, I was proud of my science project.

Then came Danny Bakkin, a tall, fleshy kid with John Lennon granny glasses and long hair parted in the middle. He didn’t play sports, just sat and read and thought. His parents were certified, card-carrying hippies. He took my excellent vocabulary and raised me about a thousand very cool and useful words.

He and I were close at that time — probably because the others could not understand him at all — while I used to listen, clutching at fragments of meaning in his more adult ideas, and broader use of language.

For his project, I remember, he had a blacklight and some other paraphernalia arranged on a table. “I will now,” he said, “demonstrate the photoelectric effect.”

The what?! This was my cue to tuck my ‘base 9’ materials out of sight beneath a table.

Now, the rest of us thought blacklights were cool because they made our teeth and our Day-Glo posters light up in the dark. So it was a mystery to us when Danny turned on his lamp and attempted to demonstrate the experiment that, I now know, earned Einstein the Nobel Prize, introduced new particles called photons, and created quantum physics — bing, bang, boom!

Danny’s blacklight, presumably, was shaking electrons loose from a negatively charged surface so they could stream across a vacuum to a positively charged one, thus proving (briefly!) that light must be a particle rather than a wave.
(Okay, full disclosure: I just watched a video on YouTube.)

I can’t speak for the other ten-year-olds, but I had my mouth open as Danny’s demonstration commenced, and it hung open for the next ten minutes. I don’t think I understood a word of it, but I did feel the power of science reaching out to me, telling me it could unfold the fabric of the universe in a drab Toronto classroom. I also realized in that moment that I might want to take my career in another, less technical, direction even if the stuff enthralled me.

It occurs to me now, as I cull through stories on sustainability, that the science being done, the incredible innovations being created, continue to instill in me that sense of wonder, the feeling I’m in a vast yet orderly universe, where stuff can be figured out by smart people who speak its language.

We’ve used what the Einsteins, Nobels, and Edisons have given us for evil at times, certainly; and for thoughtless squandering of our planet’s envelope. Scientists, after all, are often more concerned with learning than with consequences. And those consequences are not always to be desired.

In Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the author’s surrogate, Jubal Harshaw, spoke with his live-in handyman about technology after a gizmo failed to work:

Larry offered him the ‘panic button’ portable radio link.
“You wanted this, Boss?”
“I wanted to sneer at it. Larry, let this be a lesson: never trust machinery more
complicated than a knife and fork.” 
“Okay. Anything else?”
“…If you see the man who invented the wheel, send him up. Meddler!“

From Prometheus on down, we’ve struggled to make technology and science serve us without creating more problems than they solve. Yet it is those very people we cry out for when problems need solving.

We have a very significant problem right now and, while I can report on the solutions scientists and engineers create — making airplane fuels from forest litter, using sphagnum moss to clean industrial cooling towers, creating mini-turbines people can hang outside their Manhattan windows, and so on — I could never be part of creating those breakthroughs.

Da Vinci was one of the finest engineers, and also one of the finest artist of his day. That is a rare combination. I have always been grateful that there are people in the world who can show me that light is a particle and a wave, who can explain the photoelectric effect and, more importantly, can use what they learn to help the world.

So to my old friend Danny Bakkin, wherever he is, and to my new friend the microbiologist, I say… thanks. Thanks for being able to do what I cannot, for understanding the universe symbolically, so that it can be made to cough up its secrets. Thanks for making some of today’s potentially world-saving innovations possible.

Yet at this point, it is not just about gratitude. Right now I am desperately clinging to faith in their abilities, to the notion that they can create and implement solutions to the climate crisis that will save us from the misused innovations of the past. Surely the combined scientific skills of the world’s universities, science-based corporations, and governments, can get us out of this mess, right?

I am desperately hoping they can. So that, when my own children get to fifth grade in a few years, there will still be a chance they can live in an inhabitable world. In the meantime, when the bright boys and girls come up with something, I’ll be here — to write about it.

Thanks for reading. Your comments are welcomed.