By Dan Kempner, Managing Editor, Valutus Sustainability R.O.I.

This morning I had a meeting via UberConference with Daniel, he in his New York office, me in my den in Vietnam.

It was late for him but still early for me, so I hustled out of the meeting and ran to the living room, as I had a call scheduled with a friend under lockdown in California. I reached him on WhatsApp and we swapped obligatory COVID-19 stories and caught up.

After that I pulled out my Vietnamese language homework as my class was starting soon. All in-person sessions had been cancelled, so we were working via Go-to-Meeting.

My kids came in while I was studying, wanting me to play. My five-year-old was repeating her new mantra: Daddy? Can I watch teeee-vee? Pleeeaase? because school’s been closed since January due to coronavirus. To say she has cabin fever is not saying nearly enough.

I gave them a couple of minutes, then rushed upstairs to class, dialed in, and went over the dialogue I’d been practicing. The tones of this language are a little tougher to hear online than in person, but I did okay.

I have a standing coffee date with another of the students after class every week. We usually hit a local café and chat over cà phê sũa dá – iced Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk. But no need for my travel thermos today: the coffee was real, but the date was virtual.

My wife makes heavenly coffee, so I shouted downstairs asking for some – in my experience at least, if Vietnamese aren’t shouting between rooms there’s something wrong – and jumped on my friend’s Skype link.

Our usual café has a koi pond with fish that could swallow a U-boat, and I miss that. But unfortunately, all cafés – and now everything else in the city – are closed by fiat.

I asked my wife to join us, but she was busy texting on Facebook, by phone, and on Zalo – a Vietnamese social platform – with the usual dozen friends at once. Meanwhile, she was on Facetime with her younger sister, who arrived back from the ‘States last week and is in quarantine nearby.

Incredibly, she was also prepping to teach her English class, looking up lesson plans and settling a whiteboard in front of her computer for the remote learning session. How does she do all that at once?

Soon it was time for me to prep my own English class. I have four students, including three Vietnamese teenagers hoping for acceptance at Western universities, and of necessity the class is now on Skype or Messenger. We are reading Charlotte’s Web over the web, which is odd. Still, I’m petrified I’m going to cry at the end, as I always do. Perhaps I can fake it better online, so long as I don’t blubber into the mic.

Class over, I played with the kids, and went back to my office for work. I shared drafts of several articles with Daniel – via Google Docs and Dropbox – and talked to him about them on the Webex Meeting platform.

A playdate was in progress – rare in these days of COVID-19, and this was to be the last one before the shutdown. There was rampaging going on, so I slid upstairs to my mother-in-law’s apartment and worked from there for a while, sending off emails and collaborating with a friend on via Webex document.

A quick call on Google Voice to my cousins locked down in Illinois, and that reminded me to Messenger text my bro-in-law in Mumbai, in lockdown too. He can’t get back to his wife in Singapore, as that country closed their borders also.

I worked for a while, grabbed dinner with the whole shut-in family gang, then it was time for my men’s-team meeting. The twelve of us logged onto Zoom for 90 minutes, and the discussion, as always, was intense. The fact that we weren’t around a firepit in someone’s backyard – as I always was back in Massachusetts – was of no consequence. This week one member was in Mexico, one in Cuba, another vacationing in Costa Rica, and the rest were sprinkled around the U.S., Canada, and Asia.

These men and I also keep in touch all week long via Marco Polo, a sort of video walkie-talkie app that allows individual or group discussions with no need for coordination: you talk when convenient, watch when convenient, respond when convenient. It is incredibly intimate despite time and distance and here, twelve time zones ahead, this comes in mighty handy. For scheduling and stuff, we use Slack.

I had some work to do later in the evening and I sometimes get distracted so I dialed into my scheduled SpaceWorks online co-working space.

Look, there is a downside to social distancing, no doubt. Daniel is writing about just that this week, delineating why and how we must be careful once this crisis is over. If remote work and remote school became the norm, we must guard against ‘distance’ becoming ‘isolation.’ He is making an important distinction between physical distance and social distance.

Some friends in Massachusetts held a gathering on their lawn this weekend – one of those hobbies requiring knitting needles, I think. They set up folding chairs six feet apart and knitted… or crocheted or something. Physical distance, yes. Social distance, no.

Now, Daniel and others correctly point out that the water-cooler chats are not so easily replaced. The pop-in office confabs that – legend has it – lead to brilliant solutions, may be lost the more people work remotely. It will take time to learn whether any online platform can adequately take the place of the casual chance encounter due to office proximity.

It is also understood that there’s value in nearness, in contact, in being able to assess body language. Simply knowing someone else is around has real, measurable physiological and psychological impacts, and Daniel’s upcoming article will expand on all of that. I have my family around me for company and contact, as I’ve explained, but by no means everyone does.

One solution is the growing trend towards work hubs, co-working offices – both virtual and physical. Shared offices, where unrelated people can gather to work with others wanting both office space and company, seems to solve a lot of the problems distance working may create. Work, chat, grab a coffee, perhaps meet that special someone, all without venturing into the home-office digs or staying home alone. If this model were decentralized, as easy to find as a café but equipped for business, that could represent a game changer.

Shared virtual offices, where others working at the same time give a feeling of togetherness, and a moderator keeps you onpoint, are another brilliant option during this crisis and for anyone who ever works in isolation.

We may not know for a while just what the effects of all this are. Whether people forced online during a crisis will embrace it thereafter, and whether companies will want them to.

We needed astronauts to spend a year in space before we could tell for sure if human muscles atrophied or cells broke down in zero gravity. We may need some time here, too.

Personally, I am a convert to the online experience. I well remember leaving my wife and baby behind and heading off for ten hours or more of physical and social proximity with people I did not particularly care for at work. Some of them felt the same for me, I fancy, which was no fun either. Was I isolated? No. Distanced? No. Alienated? Yes.

As you can see, in no way am I socially distanced now. Not at work, not with friends, not with anyone. I am surrounded only by the people I choose, with a few work exceptions online. I’ve never felt more social, more connected.

I can walk out of the office and kiss my wife and daughters whenever I wish – though the sooner those kids get back to school, where they can run around and learn to socialize properly, the better! And, once this crisis passes, I can go out any time and crowdsource an actual crowd in the real world whenever I choose.

There seems little doubt that we’ll come out of this with a new understanding, a pretty good idea what works and what doesn’t when it comes to social and working distance. The scientists will get busy too, and we’ll get readings on the brain, the heart, the feelings of those who regularly operate online.

When they do, there’s bound to be a webinar we can jump on to have it explained. See you there!

By Dan Kempner, Managing Editor, Valutus Sustainability R.O.I.

I once spent a month going cross-country via Greyhound. New York City to Toronto, and thence across the broad expanse of Canada to Vancouver, courtesy of Greyhound’s brand new unlimited travel Ameripass program. Ninety-nine days for 99 dollars, anywhere in the U.S. and Canada.

I made full use of it, skirting the great lakes, then across the prairies and up, up, up to Banff and the glorious Canadian Rockies before nestling, happily, in Vancouver’s pristine embrace.

Down the rocky Pacific coast a week later to San Francisco and a night at the Wharf, turning the last streetcar of the night by hand, and eastward now, through the wide-open west to Amarillo, then across the Mississippi in the dark, and on homeward through the Blue Ridge and up the East coast, home at last.  

Buses are somewhat unique in that they wind through otherwise untraveled hamlets and stop in front of Dime stores in every small town. I began by keeping count of the ‘Main Streets’ and ‘Broadways’ but quickly gave it up — every town had at least one.

A day out from Toronto, north of Lake Huron, we found ourselves in the center of a town I’d never heard of. The bus pulled up with the usual wheezy exhalation of brakes and the doors sighed open.

“Where are we?” I asked my seatmate, as he shook me awake. He pointed and, following his finger I saw a huge, enormous Canadian nickel, raised on a pedestal, dominating a nearby hill.

“Sudbury, Ontario”, he replied. “Armpit of the Universe.”

 “Why?” I asked groggily. “I mean, why is this the armpit, specifically?”

His answer was lost in the rush for hot coffee and restrooms. But now, with apologies to the inhabitants, I may have an answer. The story is a common one in the broad brush of its unforgiving and unsustainable history, but so uncommon in its severity, that it’s worth detailing here. There is also good news, too, in that the city is apparently working hard to restore its habitat.

It begins something like this: In late 1849, Ojibwe natives objected to the Quebec and Lake Superior mining Companies’ operations on their own land, and asked to have their resources back or compensation for same. In a familiar refrain in such cases, “The government… was not willing to provide compensation for valuable mining locations, nor participate in any negotiations – a refusal which flew in the face of Indigenous law and the Royal Proclamation of 1763,” notes Sootoday.com

 Some of those Algonquin Ojibwe attempted to disrupt the mine’s activities, in what is now known as the Mica Bay incident.

The ‘incident’ ended, inevitably, with several of the Indian leaders arrested. Treaties were quickly effected along Lake Superior and Lake Huron, in which the British Crown became the new owner of what had been Algonquin Ojibwe land for an estimated nine-thousand years — since the Wisconsin glacier melted[1] after the last ice age.

In exchange for the land, “the Crown pledged an annuity to the First Nations people, originally set at $1.60 per treaty member and increased ‘incrementally’,” the last such increment being in 1874 and bringing the annual sum to $4. per member. That remains the number today. (Sigh.)

The natives moved to pre-established reservations, copper mining operations continued unmolested, and Sudbury, Ontario, was born.

In the early 1880s, the huge pine forests attracted some 11,000 loggers and a railhead was established, bringing yet more Europeans to the area for railway work. Blasting for the railroad revealed more rich mineral deposits — specifically nickel-copper ore — and hastened yet more settlers.

The establishment of roasting yards was, it seems, the coup de gras. These were giant pits laid with pine logs over which was poured raw ores. The pine was lit to reduce the ores and, “about 250,000 tons of ore would burn in 100 heaps. After the lighting, the wood burned in about 60 hours. The pile would continue to burn for approximately three to four months,” giving off sulfurous steams that affected man, beast and plant. [2]

“Between 1913 and 1916,” notes Active History, Canada, “the Mond Nickel Company removed all vegetation from the Coniston area to provide fuel for the roasting yard.”[3] Over the next forty years, “100 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas was emitted from the ores, which severely impacted the health of Sudburians and had catastrophic impact on the natural environment.”[4]

In combination with massive open-pit nickel mining throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, “the loss of vegetation in the Greater Sudbury area has caused soils to erode into watercourses, degrading… streams and rivers. This degradation continues today in areas that still have poor plant coverage.” This was true over more than 82,000 hectares (202,600 acres / 820 sq kilometers.)

A group that manages the city’s geological and educational tours takes visitors to the ‘superstack’, a 1,250 ft (380 m) chimney, the second tallest in the world, located atop the Inco mining company’s smelting facility. The tour encompasses enormous fields made of mining slag poured, semi molten, to form a new surface, a sort of man-made volcanic field.

Beyond that, “as mining, stripping, sintering, and smelting operations increased with world demand for metals, Sudbury’s landscape began to look like a barren moonscape. The mining and processing of sulfide minerals released sulfur that contaminated and acidified soils,” noted the American Geoscience Institute.

The tour mentioned above guides visitors past rock formations of a curious dark-black hue. As their materials explain, “Greater Sudbury’s rocks are not naturally black – rather, rock surfaces were stained black by early mining practices. Early smelter emissions contained sulphur dioxide and metal particulate. Sulphur dioxide mixed with atmospheric moisture to form acid rain that corroded the rock and produced a coating of silica gel, which in turn trapped metal particulate fallout to form a black coating,” more than three inches deep.

Much of the plant loss reported in the 1800s still remains today, and “there are still thousands of hectares of land without adequate plant cover. In these areas, continued land reclamation and restoration is needed to begin the long-term healing and recovery of the ecosystem.”

Now, there’s good news here, and I’m getting to that and I’m not trying to pick on Sudbury. Most other towns in North America can also talk of displaced natives and improper use of resources.

But Sudbury stands alone as an example in this sense: its entire reason for being was to rip local resources from the earth with absolutely no thought, care, plan or concern shown for the land, its foliage, its wildlife or its people. The land was literally stripped, blasted, sintered, burned, poured over with molten slag, acidified almost beyond redemption and utterly denuded of vegetation in the service of its logs and minerals.

It had earned the title my seatmate had given it by its sheer, wanton lust for wood and metals. It was, indeed, the armpit of the universe.

Yet, by the time of my advent, most of the damage had happened long before. Remediation was beginning. All I knew was that I was in an exceptionally dirty and denuded town in the middle of nowhere, that the coffee was hot, and the nickel was big. Heck, it was huge!

And Sudbury has been working hard on remediation ever since. So hard that it has won numerous awards, been honored with praise by such environmental luminaries as Jane Goodall, who noted that Sudbury proved, “that determination and persistence can heal habitats.”[5] It was one of twelve cities to receive the Local Government Honours Award at the 1992 Earth Summit for its greening efforts.

There are still 15 active mines in the area, and the challenges are legion. Yet, according to the American Geosciences Institute (AGI), greater Sudbury is now home to, “the largest, most successful environmental restoration program in the world.”

That may sound a bit ambitious but considering that, “when restoration efforts began in 1969, germinating seeds died on contact with contaminated soils,”[6] it doesn’t sound quite so far-fetched.

According to Joseph Casciaro, writing in Prezi.com, “it was 1972 when people became concerned with the destroyed land and horrible air to breathe.”  Ah hah! Three years later, when I passed through, there were already efforts at remediation underway. The mines themselves have made enormous strides to reduce dangerous emissions and remediate the landscape.

Three more years and the Regional Regreening Program was in effect. By the early 1990s, more than 2 million trees had been planted and some animals, birds and fish were coming back to the area.

Due to the acidic soil conditions that, as noted above, kept the land barren, Sudbury laid down a layer of alkaline dolomite mixed with grasses and small plants rather than trees. In a short time trees began to grow in these seeded areas and the process of reforestation was underway. This same process is continuing today.

Yet, as John H. Gunn notes in his 1995 master work on the area, Restoration and Recovery of an Industrial Region: Progress in Restoring the Smelter-Damaged Landscape near Sudbury, Canada,[7] the mainly birch forest stands that have resulted were far too small and isolated to support animal life other than insects. These trees were themselves far more open to infestation and disease from these same creatures.

Over the years since, however, the stands have filled out, pines and other trees have been planted or found their way naturally into the landscape. As of 2018 around ten million trees had been planted by more than 12,300 volunteers.

The topsoil liming continues in areas still deforested to allow the regreening process to begin in those areas as well. This soil is pre-seeded with a charming mixture of forest brush plants:

Fall rye, Canada wildrye, little bluestem, slender wheatgrass, and alsike clover are the precursors of the forests to come. Sudbury now has some of the cleanest air in the Province, according to CBC Radio, and reforestation is partially responsible. The Sudbury Regreening Program’s own 2018 Annual Report sums up the last four decades of restoration fairly well.

“Forty years of regreening effort has achieved remarkable results, transforming a barren, rocky landscape into a green and living one.”

There are still many thousands of hectares to be tended and restored, lakes and rivers to remediate. There may still be a history of native displacement to contemplate and diverse forests yet to fully regrow.

But at least we can say this: the next Greyhound stopping in Sudbury, taking a breath before crossing the great prairies, will do so in a shiny new bus station, in a town surrounded by trees. They will see the same huge nickel on its bright new base at the new Dynamic Earth Science center, presiding over a thriving city with breathable air, blooming wildflowers and budding new forests.

And the next cynical seatmate will have to find another moniker for Sudbury. There’s a long way to go but it is no longer, as it certainly once was, The Armpit of the Universe.

[1] Winterhalder, Keith, Living with Lakes, ch.2, pp.17 [2] Republic of Mining, 2008
[3] Forestry Chronicle, December, 1972
[4] Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), 12/1/2012 Ed.
[5] Goodall, Hudson & Maynard. Hope for Animals and Their World. Grand Central Publishing, 2009
[6] American Geosciences Institute, “Mining remediation in the Sudbury region of Ontario.”
[7] Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995

_____________________________________

Each time we drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway, approaching my sister’s home in northern Manhattan, I’d gaze across the vast sheet of the Hudson, sigh and say, “You know, this must have been so pristine and beautiful when the first settlers got here… ”

Glancing at the passenger seat, I’d see my wife desperately trying to stifle her laughter. “You say it every. Single. Time!” she would gasp. “I’ve just been sitting here waiting.”

Okay, very funny. But the truth is, it was still magnificent. The cliffs on the Jersey shore, known as The Palisades. The Great Grey George Washington Bridge, under which – if you look carefully – you can see the Little Red Lighthouse, of children’s-book fame.

A few miles south are the Plains of Weehawken, to which Aaron Burr and Alex Hamilton were separately rowed for pistol practice, and from which Hamilton returned mortally wounded. (By the way, that was no mean feat: the river is well over a mile across at that point.) There have been some changes since then – since the early days, I mean.

When Henry Hudson, for example, sailed up the Hudson in 1609, there were huge creatures swimming alongside him: sperm whales, humpbacks and other species of cetaceans. One sperm whale famously became entangled and died at Cohoes, NY, in 1652, supplying the town with a vast supply of spermaceti for whale oil. 

But the those pesky ‘first settlers’ came, and the history of the river since then has not been a kind one: the European touch was not light, shall we say. Those who alleged, in the mid-20th, that ‘dillution is the solution to pollution’ were clearly not drinking from the Hudson. By the time I came along, the river was a sewer. 

I was born in Tarrytown, which is ranged along the east bank of the Hudson near its widest point, some three miles across. This is the home of Sleepy Hollow and the Tappan Zee bridge. We lived in Ossining then, also on Hudson, and later in Riverdale, close to the wonderfully named Spuyten Duyvel (spitting devil) creek separating Manhattan from the Bronx.

Perhaps that’s why the wreck of the river – and the constant thought of what it must once have been like – was so personal, and so painful. The pollution of our waterways was a concerted attack from all sides and it was only legislation such as the Clean Water Act that stemmed the tide. 

GE, for example, poured PCBs into its waters for 30 years, until their toxic effects were fully understood, and their use was banned. After 50 years of exposure, one species of fish, “evolved a two amino acid change in its AHR2 receptor gene.” Apparently this made it more likely to pass its PCB contaminants up the food chain through striped bass and beyond. Industry up and down the river added various chemicals, sewage and all the other trappings humanity seems to use but not dispose of safely.

There are major point-sources for waterway pollution and there are non-point-sources too. “…Sediments, nutrients, pesticides, fertilizers and animal wastes, account for more than half of the pollution in U.S. waters,” according to Wikipedia.

But hey, I didn’t come here to whine, not this time anyway. The story of the Hudson – and the Charles and the Great Lakes and many other American bodies of water – is a story of success. 

My last post was about air pollution and how the Clean Air Act of 1970, along with the creation of the EPA that same year, had done wonders for America’s lungs. While researching all that, I couldn’t help but think of the impact the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the EPA’s designation of the Hudson as a superfund site, had on that wonderful river.

Fortunately, many other waterways have also been rescued, among them the Charles River in Boston. That’s good, because two of my wife’s siblings and my nephew capsized their canoe just past the Anderson bridge in Cambridge during Boston’s 4th of July celebration en route to the fireworks. They had to be rescued by a yacht heading in the same direction. (I was just about to dive in to save them when that boat pulled up. No, really I was, honest.)

Thirty years ago this would have been horrifying and I would have aborted the trip and taken them to the hospital. By 2011, when this occured, the Charles – while still not absolutely pristine – was swimmable again.

 Some time in the summer of 1974 or ’75, I walked 20 miles along riverside trails beside Pete Seeger, on our way to Croton Point Park for his Hudson River Festival. We were raising money for the sloop Clearwater, Seeger’s co-op sailing vessel that plied the Hudson raising awareness about the plight of the river’s water, flora and fauna. I say ‘we’ but I was just a teenager helping raise a few bucks. Seeger, long-time champion of the Hudson, was walking behind the thousands of others, picking up trash they left behind, and I tagged along.

He was an old man, and I a young one, but he was spry and feisty and tall and had a wonderful resonant speaking voice, as I recall. Up close, he was as impressive as his reputation. The late great Harry Chapin was waiting at the park and entertained us all for a while.

A few years later I sailed on the Clearwater, taking my very young nephew – the same who took an unintentional dip in the Charles some years later – for his first sail. We both got an earful on the various states of the Hudson, dredging up crabs and shrimp along with the occasional piece of trash. He was born a few blocks from the George Washington Bridge, in an apartment my sister has occupied for almost 40 years. I guess the Hudson is pretty deep in my family’s bones.

But here’s the thing: the Hudson is back. The quality of water in the area is now higher than at any point in the last hundred years, according to the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. This in a river where fishing had to be banned in spots, along with eating anything that came out of it.

But there have been recent images of beaver in the Bronx and Hudson rivers, an animal that was hunted wiped out in New York before 1700 for its pelts.

Humpbacks have been spotted coasting upriver in the past few years. This is not a fluke – if you’ll pardon the pun – as some 272 were sighted in 2018. This was unthinkable just a short while ago and even as recently as 2011 only five were seen.

And that’s just the big boys. I, for one, was flabbergasted to learn there are seahorses in the lower river. Seahorses! 

The lined seahorse is flourishing, and that means there are tiny shrimp for them to eat, and sea nymphs, and on and on. There are now bald eagles along the central and upper Hudson, and many more sharks than we’re accustomed to are hunting in the estuary. Move over striped bass, the big boys are atop the food chain here now — meaning the Great Whites. That’s likely a good omen, as sharks only go places to hunt and that means fish, and lots of ‘em. There are well over 200 species in the estuary including glass eels, Atlantic sturgeon, several species of catfish, and many others.

The lower Hudson, of course, is not truly a river anymore. Below Troy, New York, it’s a tidal estuary, and the brackish mix of salt and fresh makes for variety of animals and plants that would not be found if the water was fresh alone.

Now, we’re not out of the woods on this, and last year another estuary, the Chesapeake, was damaged by runoff of chemicals – specifically nitrogen and phosphorus – from heavy rains, along with debris, receiving only a D grade from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF). 

The good news is, the Bay had been steadily improving for years. At the same time, it points up how easily all this work can be turned on its head. “The Bay’s sustained improvement was reversed in 2018, exposing just how fragile the recovery is,” Will Baker, the president of the CBF, told the Associated Press earlier this year, and the same is clearly true for the Hudson and others. This is not a ‘win’ where we can sit on our thumbs going forward. 

But for the moment, let’s enjoy the fact that we’ve made huge strides and more is being done. It may not be just the way the first settlers saw it. But for all practical purposes, the Hudson is back!

My wife just returned from a visit to Xiamen, China. Calling me from a tour bus, she remarked on Xiamen’s clean, fresh waterfront air. This reminded me of my own recent trip to the States, and the enjoyable breezes I inhaled in such places as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Boston.

That was a far cry from my boyhood, when approaching any of those towns meant peering through a grimy brown smear. On an early foray to Los Angeles, I saw the thick, hazy rim hanging, stationary, above the great bowl between the mountains. And let’s not mention Gary, Indiana or Elizabeth, New Jersey, where rolling the car windows up was mandatory.

I remember when the air was so thick in New York that it was tough to see the Empire State Building from my place on 13^th street, twenty blocks away. The same nasty stuff hung over Chicago’s skyline. So it was notable that I never gave the air a thought during my trip there this past September.

The air in my current town is a lot more like what I saw during my boyhood. It so happens that just as I flew to the U.S., there was a sudden upswing in air pollution, both here in Hồ Chí Minh City, and in Hanoi.

Since my return, the view from our windows here in Hồ Chí Minh includes a grey, dirty haze, limiting visibility and causing us to buy an air purifier just last week. My oldest daughter — the only one of us to spend the majority of our time in the outside air — has had a persistent cough for most of the past year.

It’s hard to explain the schools here, but hers is three floors of open-air classrooms ranged along open-air corridors in a rectangle around a large open-air courtyard, with flagstones and full-sized trees. By ‘open’ I mean that if it rains — which it does every day during the monsoon season — then it’s also raining in the courtyard and corridors. Whatever the outside air contains is what she breathes all day.

So what should we do? Well, it occurs to me that a snapshot of success in this area looks a lot like the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the EPA, in 1970. We’re just shy of 50 years on from those acts and consider that over this period, GDP has risen nearly 300% while emissions have dropped about 80%. Now that is an accomplishment.

It’s also a little alarming that, for the first time since those incredibly powerful pieces of legislation were passed, air quality in the United States is going in the wrong direction since 2016. The New York Times wrote this week that particulate is up ≈5.5%, enough to be responsible for just under 10,000 extra deaths over the past two years. Yikes!

Now, in spite of this, the U.S. death rate is relatively low. As of 2015, it was coming in at 20.7 deaths per 100,000 people. For context, India, at the top end, had a rate of 223/100,000 with Vietnam in the middle at about 87/100K.

Except that U.S. rates are now rising. More particulate is being pumped into the atmosphere from industry, autos, agriculture and, yes, climate-change-driven wildfires in the West. Having just written about the ravages of indoor air pollution (IAP) in R.O.I. last issue, it seemed air pollution particulate was now an issue for the developing world. Perhaps it’s too soon to make that call.

Under these circumstances, it is comforting that, according to the Washington Post, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently disbanded the expert academic panel that reviewed and advised the agency on its standards for small-particle air pollution and replaced it with fossil-fuel-industry consultants. What?!! Double Yikes!

Yet at least up to this point, the EPA, Clean Water act and the various Clean Air acts, have been spectacularly successful.

Still, if I was hoping Vietnam would follow the U.S. model, the news that AirVisual, an app that monitors air quality in cities around the world, took down its Facebook page, was disconcerting. AirVisual was also unavailable on the various App Store sites after Hanoi recently found itself at the top of their list for bad air pollution. The cause, they said, was a ‘coordinated attack,’ though they did not say by whom. If one were indiscreet, one could make a pretty solid guess, given that Hanoi is the capital. (Incidentally, the site is back up and Hanoi is now fourth on the list behind Belgrade, Delhi and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.)

As an American expat, it is gut-wrenching to find that my government is now in the habit of similar attacks on climate information. It is not shocking here to find that politically unwelcome facts are suppressed but when the EPA’s Climate Change Page went dark for more than a year, it became hideously clear the same was happening back home.

Happily, for those who haven’t checked in a while, I just did and the page content has reappeared.
Yet now we find that enforcement at the EPA is down, leading in part, to the uptick in emissions and, sad to say, to more disease and death.

Living here, where just breathing is deadly, is a stern reminder that going back to the days of smog in America’s big cities should be off the table. I can’t cross my fingers — that’s an inappropriate gesture here in Vietnam. But all the toes on my left foot are crossed that soon, Vietnam can replicate what the U.S. did fifty years ago and make its air breathable again. I’ve crossed the toes on my right just as tightly hoping the U.S. does not do the same in reverse.

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.

…and Pangolins

An article this week in The Los Angeles Times details the culling of the Pangolin, an armored anteater rather like a tropical aardvark. The thousand-or-so scales that protect the animal from its natural predators – big cats: lions, tigers, and leopards — are no match for poachers.

“…Because their meat is considered a delicacy and some believe that pangolin scales have medicinal qualities, 100,000 are estimated to be trafficked a year to China and Vietnam, amounting to over one million over the past decade. This makes it the most-trafficked animal in the world.”

Speaking of tigers, I’ve been fascinated by them since I was a boy, when I watched feeding time at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. One tiger felt a smaller cat had a juicier steak than he, and made a snarl so huge and powerful that — despite the stainless-steel bars, a ten-foot buffer, and a high wrought-iron fence — I leapt back in reflexive fear. They say tigers don’t roar but, whatever this was, it electrified me down to my toes.

Despite pangolin-like poaching, global tiger populations have been rising a bit the past few years, for the first time in more than a century. That’s good news but there is a long way to go. I now live in Asia where tigers are not just found in zoos, but actually roam around loose. Or used to.

In Vietnam, where I live, a 2016 World Wildlife Fund survey counted five in the wild — functionally extinct. Laos and Cambodia? Extinct. Burma has a few and some reside in Thailand.

Why this decimation?

“In China, tigers are considered symbols of courage, bravery, and strength,” according to (appropriately) the Daily Beast. “Traditional Chinese doctors prescribe tiger bones, eyeballs, and other parts to treat a variety of ailments ranging from poor eyesight to impotence. ‘Tiger Feasts’ are allegedly quite popular amongst corrupt government officials and elite businessmen who believe consuming the big cats improves performance across a wide range of activities from the boardroom to the bedroom.”

In addition some — notably in Tibet —also use tiger parts as part of their costume, according to a Save the Tiger report.

I had my nose rubbed in all this when I learned that a relative in the family I married into here in Vietnam once bought and ate a tiger. Status. Magical properties. Oy!

Tigers once inhabited a range from Turkey to the Sea of Japan, and south to Indonesia. Just 7% of that range remains and global population is down from 100,000 a century ago to less than 4,000 wild tigers now.

My family, of course, contributed directly to this.

Now, tigers have had their innings, too. It’s estimated that around a million people have been killed by tigers since 1500. They make scary neighbors, and it’s easy to see why one might be killed by frightened villagers. But a whole world without wild tigers, because we eat them or use them for trophies?

We may be headed there. The vision has moved beyond the wild and into herding tigers as others do cattle. There are, writes Terrence McCoy in The Washington Post, more than 200 tiger farms across Southeast Asia. With typical Asian pragmatism, they know using this method they can get the same value from the animals with far less danger and work.

“Nowhere else,” says McCoy, “is the animal’s commodification more complete than in tiger farming, where it is raised, butchered for parts and sold for tens of thousands of dollars.”

So what can we do?How do we ensure there are scaly pangolins and magnificent felines in our world for years to come?

The Save the Tiger Fund points to two solutions. The first, guarded preserves, is not working: tigers are being killed even in protected reserves. (Deforestation for palm oil or croplands ain’t helping either.)

The second is more nuanced: creating tiger corridors called Tiger Conservation Landscapes (TCL)[1] where tigers can remain close to humans but have the means to expand their range as young tigers mature, without having any one area become overpopulated.

There are several TCLs in operation, notably in India and the Himalayan regions “in the midst of some of the densest human populations in South Asia,” where tigers have traditionally lived cheek-by-jowl with humans.

This method links fragmented tiger ranges together through conserved corridors, so breeding pairs’ offspring can move to open ranges through preserved forest channels.

“The corridors are built to promote migration and/or dispersion of certain tiger populations giving them the ability to unite with other tigers,” and increase a depleted gene pool to support, “more diversity, higher birth rates, and higher cub survival.” This method increased the population in Northern India from around 1,400 in 2006 to 2,226 in the census of 2015, an excellent result.

However, success assumes a paradigm in which such corridors also “support and enhance local economies and livelihoods and so are in their self-interest.” (Emphasis is mine)

To those whose families and flocks are eaten by tigers, or who need pangolin meat for food, it’s difficult not to empathize, I get it. But as long as there is a rich pan-Asian class to want tigers for the wrong reasons, and a poor pan-Asian class to poach or farm them, this stuff will continue.

It’s clear that, until we educate people like my relative, lure them out of the cultural matrix in which disappearing species are either driven to extinction or exist only in menageries and tiger-meat farms, we will continue to lose ground.

Indians have a long tradition of vegetarianism and of holding certain animals sacred, and the TCL model seems to be going well there. It remains to be seen whether TCL will work in the rest of Asia. We’re going to have to find a way to make self-interest in preserving wildlife stronger than the urge to kill it.

Having heard one roar up close, I have no desire to confront a tiger in the wild. Nor — in Vietnam at least — am I likely to. But somehow I need to know they’re out there, in their huge ranges, vanishing in the tall forest undergrowth in spite of their flashy coats, feasting once again on an abundance of pangolin, terrifying villagers, and keeping the world from a loss deeper and more lasting than we’ve known.

References
[1]
(1) A TCL has evidence of one or more tigers over the last 10 years
(2) A TCL can consist of several adjacent blocks of habitat among which tigers can disperse, up to a distance of 4 km
(3) A TCL need not be restricted to nor contain protected areas, but instead includes the entire landscape over which tigers may disperse and become established
(4) A TCL must meet a minimum core area requirement for its largest block of habitat that is specific to the habitat-type in which it is found
(5) TCL boundaries are defined either where habitat ends with no suitable habitat within 4 km for the tiger to disperse to, or at country or ecoregion boundaries. [Source: DataBasin.org]

One pleasant afternoon there was a knock on our door. Several little neighborhood children looked up at me hopefully and asked, “can we play in your grass?” Just then the cat pushed past me and dove off the front porch, disappearing in the tall stalks with only a rustle and a quiver of stems to mark his passing.

I nodded and the kids also dove off and disappeared, though squeals of delight betrayed their whereabouts.

Later that afternoon the knocker sounded again, but it was a different delegation this time. These were not supplicants wanting to play, but a deputation of those same kids’ parents come to demand we do something about our lawn.  

The backstory is simple. My family had rented a house on a half-acre of hilly grass, dogwood trees, and bushes in a suburban town 40 miles north of New York City. Bucolic, a little stagnant and — with the exception of my parents — quite conservative. The rental included the use of a small riding mower and it was my twelve-year-old task to unplug from Crosby, Stills and Nash or King Crimson and tromp outside to mow the lawn every week.

One day something went ‘sproiing!!!’ under the chassis and I had to push the damn thing down a high berm and into the garage to await repairs. I reported in but my folks were commuting to the city and working late so they never quite got around to fixing the thing.

At some point my dad said, “Ah, the Hell with it, let’s just let it grow,” and in a few weeks we had a summer field three or four feet high, making our property an excellent candidate for a crop circle.

Bees, grasshoppers and many more small-fry made full use of it, and I found it pleasant to walk through the semi-wild landscape on my way to the driveway or my best friend’s house across the street. Field of Dreams it wasn’t, but it would do until Shoeless Joe or James Earl Jones came along.

But community pressure goosed us into getting the mower working, and I spent the next few days choking the blades trying to cut a channel through the brush, but no joy: The darned stuff was too tough, and our mower couldn’t manage. So my dad and I got in the car and trundled down to the local hardware store to buy four scythes, a type of instrument I had never beheld until that day.

It is interesting that the scythe has not changed one iota since the bronze age. Neolithic man could step out of his stone hut, take one look at a modern implement, heft it, and stomp off to cut wild grain. But it took us a while to get the hang of it, used as we were to things that went on-and-off with a switch.

Over that weekend we looked like a family newly tossed from Eden. There the four of us were – two highly educated and sedentary middle-class adults and two would-be hippy teenagers — ranged in a line, bent slightly at the waist, sweeping our arms back and forth, back and forth, until the lawn was mower-friendly once again and we were racked with aches in muscles we didn’t know we had. We were far more tired than suburbanites usually got.

Eventually the grass was down in pungent, unruly piles. The cat was thoroughly confused, and the neighborhood kids disappointed but order — and property values, apparently — had been restored.

We bagged the stuff up in 75-gallon black-plastic bags which, incredibly, are still on the market. There were stuffed sacks everywhere, looking like the giant sandworms of Dune, until Yours Truly hauled them to the curb to be swept away by our regular garbage truck. The neighbors would not have approved had we left it in fragrant heaps to compost itself.

Now, it never occurred to any of us that the clippings might be better left so. That natural lawn was perhaps better than manicured. That the habitat it provided was exactly what was needed for fauna already being pushed to the edge. We were worried about tigers and whales, and never dreamt we were on the brink of losing a million species: that Monarchs and honey bees and birds and the less-glamorous creatures that made up most of the world’s fauna were also in trouble — in part due to lawns like ours.

In fact, aside from an address reading ‘Windmill Drive’, we weren’t thinking green then at all: we were just lazy. And yet for all that, we were way ahead of our time.

We’d allowed our lawn return to its natural state and we’d turned to an old-world, non-mechanical, Pharaonic-era tool to cut it when modern machinery broke down. And maybe that’s the right course all around. Perhaps wild lawns — not even needing the scythe other than to swath from door to driveway, house to garden and porch to mailbox — are a step towards restoring our lands and soils.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries set a limit for arable land the planet can afford to put aside for agriculture at no more than 15% — though this number is contested by some.

“According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, 12.6% of the Earth’s land surface has been converted to cropland. A further 0.6% is covered with artificial surfaces such as cities,” etc., which puts us under the limit currently. Yet, as we’re seeing in the Amazon, Borneo, Vietnam, China and most of sub-Saharan Africa, forests are being denuded — cut or burned — for croplands and orchards at a terrifying rate. We’re certainly on pace to blow through that limit soon.

As for lawns — which are technically considered croplands — they occupy some 30-40 million acres of land in the U.S. alone, according to the Earth Institute at Columbia. That’s about 62,500 square miles, just a tad smaller than the entire state of Wisconsin.

Now, grass plants themselves take up carbon, but lawnmowers account for some 5 percent of the nation’s air pollution, making lawns a significant carbon source. It’s actually worse than this because, as National Geographic reported last year, “More than 75 percent of Earth’s land areas are substantially degraded… according to the world’s first comprehensive, evidence-based assessment.” This means less carbon storage, less water, fewer nutrients and on and on.

Why not let them go to seed or, as many in the American Southwest do, allow only native plants in their wild state?

Second, why not revert to hand-held, non-mechanical tools that can cut where necessary with no fuel spills and an excellent workout in the bargain? Even a push-mower needs no fuel and — as I recall all too well from other homes — offers tremendous exercise.

And third, leave the cut stuff lying there. Let it manage itself and return nutrients to the soil.

Two interesting concepts fall into my little protocol nicely. One is a movement towards farming front lawns rather than seeding them with pretty, but non-native and essentially valueless, grasses.

The second is carbon farming, a trend towards buying carbon-offset credits by paying ranchers in the Western U.S. to sequester carbon in their soil by plant husbandry rather than using it for grazing, allowing some company a bit more flexibility with their environmental footprint. In this way we can restore enormous tracts of tamed pastureland to a wild and carbon-storing state. These aren’t lawns, per se, but the local effect would be the same.

Organizations like the Western Sustainability Exchange are giving ranchers a chance to make money by sequestering the very carbon that is making standard ranching highly problematic. Here’s a link to an article from Montana Public Radio (MPR) on the topic.

I now live in a country where there are virtually no front lawns, and jungle flora riots from every chink and crevice. And yet the scythe is well-known here, in many smallholders’ rice fields. It’s a country of slender, hard-working, industrious and happy people. Frugal by necessity, many of them would love to have a tractor, but a scythe is within their means while a tractor is not.

Perhaps it’s not too late to learn a thing or two from them, and to realize that continuing with lawns as we’ve known them in my home country, is not living within our means.  

Thanks for reading. Your comments are very welcome.