environment

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Cartography blanche

Guerrilla Cartography highlights the power of maps to inform, persuade and inspire.

“Everyone believes a map. No other narrative device—not story or song or historical treatise—is so readily accepted as true. We have come to accept the map as fact.”

So writes Darin Jensen in Water: An Atlas, a remarkable collection of maps with many ways to view water that was released in 2017.

The maps for this crowd-funded publication were contributed by cartographers and other researchers around the world via Guerrilla Cartography, an open collaboration Jensen founded to “widely promote the cartographic arts.” The group’s first project was Food: An Atlas, a milestone accomplishment in 2012.

Its latest production is Atlas in a Day: Migration, a stunning response to a challenge to research and design an atlas about migration in one day last October. No fewer than 43 maps “interpret the theme of migration in diverse ways, considering the movements of people, animals, climates, physical materials and cultural artifacts over time and space. Some of them represent the culmination of years of research on a critical topic; others are quick sketches inspired by current events and concerns.”

All three atlases can be downloaded free, and Food and Water can be bought as books.

Maps retain plenty of power in print, Jensen points out.

“Guerrilla Cartography is about letting story emerge from data and illustrating the story through the art of cartographic design,” he says. “We give voice to the talents of mapmakers who may have no other platform for a wide and printed distribution of their work and ideas.”

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Watching the river flow

The Thames Barrier is still prepped for decades defending London against high water.

On Tuesday, the warmest winter day ever recorded in Britain, there was not a cloud in the sky over the Thames Barrier. A tug calmly pulled its barge through one of the channels in the Barrier, which shuts off the Thames when the incoming tide will rise over sixteen feet. This offbeat superdam doesn’t look like anything else: a necklace of giant steampunk silver mussel shells stretched a third of a mile across the river. London began seriously contemplating means of protection after a major dousing in the great North Sea storm of 1953. The Barrier went into operation three decades later. It has decades of usefulness ahead; although climate change was not considered in its design, sea levels along the southern English coast aren’t inching up from geologic causes as fast as originally expected. The Barrier has been shut about 200 times, 50 of them in the 2013/2014 season, when the culprit was not super surges from the ocean but super rain surges that incoming tides would have pumped up further. “It is designed to be bomb-proof and failure-proof,” the Londonist once noted. “When a 3,000-tonne dredger hit the Barrier in 1997, the ship sank. The Barrier lost a ladder.” One of these decades, the enormous wall may be supplemented by a much more enormous dike downstream. In the meantime, “the structure is fundamental to the lives of millions of Londoners,” the London Review of Books commented, “which may be the reason very few of them want to look at it.”

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Canaries in a coal-mined world

Environmental writers tell great stories about life across our fast-changing globe.

We’re seeing a remarkable series of stories about climate change and other manmade or partly manmade threats—some even complete with hints of solutions. Here’s a fairly random baker’s dozen from this striking crop (hmm, only two of these pieces come from for-profit publications).

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High water marks

What does the Venice Architecture Biennale say about resilience to climate change? Not so much yet.

Now is the start of acqua alta season in Venice, when high tides occasionally flood low-lying areas like Saint Mark’s Square and sometimes sweep across neighborhoods around the city.* As we jumped on a vaporetto waterbus one warm sunny day, platforms of temporary pedestrian walkways were stacked nearby.

We were off to the Venice Architecture Biennale, the remarkable collection of exhibits from many countries. I was particularly curious about how the huge show would reflect the call for resilience to rising sea levels, scarier storms, droughts, heat waves and the other deadly baggage now arriving courtesy climate change.

Venice has been sinking into its lagoon by about a millimeter a year for hundreds of years. Three decades ago Italy launched the MOSE megaproject, building gates to close three entries to the lagoon against high tides. When and how well the gates will operate still seems uncertain. Perhaps it was unsurprising that Venice’s own pavilion said little about climate change, although it did emphasize advances in predicting tides.

Among the national pavilions, mentions of climate change were rare. This didn’t reflect any lack of brilliant conceptions and designs. Strikingly, many of the most intriguing pavilions didn’t focus on new construction. The French exhibit presents 10 abandoned buildings adopted for cultural use or aiding the homeless, for example. The Egyptian pavilion dives into how street vendors capitalize on public spaces in Cairo.  Other exhibits, such as the Argentinian, do highlight natural landscapes and what’s left of them.

You could profitably spend hours in many of these intriguing spaces. I didn’t, and I probably missed a lot of serious thinking about climate resilience. I definitely although accidentally skipped the Antigua and Barbuda pavilion, which was not at the main Biennale sites but in a monastery near the center of Venice. Last year, Hurricane Irma hit Barbuda with winds over 150 miles per hour and destroyed most of the island’s buildings. All 1,800 residents were evacuated. Unsurprisingly, the pavilion’s theme centers on climate change: Environmental Justice as a Civil Right.

Giant dikes and other grand engineering projects will help us deal with climate change, but most of the heavy lifting will come from rethinking local architecture and design. The Biennale was awash in young architects from around the world, our hope for resilience.

*  Two days after I wrote this, Venice was hit by a storm bringing the worst acqua alta event in years, flooding most of the city.

In good weather, Venice is all about eye candy, not just in architecture and art.

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Pub read

It’s a golden age for magazines on science and the environment.

 

Each year as I help to filter out the National Association of Science Writers’ Science in Society Awards nominees, I run across remarkable new-to-me publications.  You could spend wholly unworkable amounts of time on their dazzling stories and videos.

Some of these magazines seem to generate cash (Quartz offers one clue: sponsored content that you actually might want to read.) But most of the pubs run on institutional funding and/or donations, which is not always a recipe for long-term survival. Here are a few favorites, each with a story or two picked fairly randomly (except that I wrote two of them).

Aeon, Votes for the future
Ensia, Could this one simple idea be the key to solving farmer–environmentalist conflicts? and With storms intensifying and oceans on the rise, Boston weighs strategies for staying dry
Hakai, Damming Eden
High Country News, Why western wildfires are getting more expensive
Mongabay, Abandoned by their sponsors, Madagascar’s orphaned parks struggle on
Pacific Standard, Libya’s slave trade didn’t appear out of thin air
Quanta, Artificial intelligence learns to learn entirely on its own
Quartz, AI is now so complex its creators can’t trust why it makes decisions
Sapiens, Sea level rise threatens archaeological sites
Undark, The allure and perils of hydropower and Putting digital health monitoring tools to the test

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Towers of power

Wind turbines go to work 16 miles off the Rhode Island coast.

Offshore wind turbines seemed a bit, well, gimmicky to me until a few years ago when I saw a farm calmly spinning its blades as I flew home from Europe. Anything that keeps working in the North Sea is entirely real. Now they have arrived in 600-foot-form off the New England coast, as I saw last month in a trip to Deepwater Wind’s installation off Block Island (thanks, Noelle Swan and the New England Association of Science Writers!). These giant beasts won’t always be easy to maintain, as we saw watching a crew struggling to jump onto one tower from a support vessel in gentle six-foot swells from Hurricane Maria. The 240-foot blades are no favor to offshore birds. But Deepwater Wind seems to have made every reasonable effort to minimize and monitor the overall environmental impact of the turbines, as attested by the National Wildlife Federation scientist onboard our fast ferry. Ocean wind turbine technology is advancing rapidly, one example being the replacement of the traditional gearbox with a GE direct-drive permanent magnet generator, noted Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware’s ocean wind power program. Wind turbines can tap steady winds at sea, where they can be built much larger than on land, and a wealth of projects are planned along the U.S. east coast. Yes, they’re designed to survive hurricanes, although maybe not a problem like Maria. And although offshore wind still can’t produce power here as cheaply as fossil-fuel plants, European wind costs are already below that mark.

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Public Spectacle

A beacon of hope in a changing climate.

kid Spectacle

On a clear hot August day you can take a ferry to Spectacle Island and walk a winding path up to its northern summit, admiring wildflowers and eating blackberries. The summit is the highest point of land on Boston Harbor, with low wooded islands scattered around.

Off to the east you can spot a windmill near the huge sludge-digesting eggs of Deer Island, and a second windmill a few miles south at the tip of the Hull peninsula. These two points of land bracket the entrance from Massachusetts Bay to the harbor’s inner archipelago.

One distant day, Deer Island and Hull also may anchor a massive sea barrier, holding off an ocean that’s now projected to climb as much as eight feet by 2100.

Today it’s hard to imagine how we might start to build such a Big Dike, given our current politics.

But you can also see hopeful signs on this Spectacle for our ability to clean up our own messes.

The first time I sailed past the island it was a garbage dump, with the remnants of a horse-rendering plant buried under many feet of still-smoldering refuse.

Now that’s all taken away and replaced by fill from the Big Dig. The island was reengineered and replanted. Rich ecosystems began to reappear. On summer days like this, children swim a stone’s throw away from the site of the old factories.

In wildness is the preservation of the world, as Thoreau said. But not just in wildness.

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Ark de Triage

What should we prioritize to try to save from the flood tide of extinction?

Big_Ark_in_Dordrecht_3

“The world is on fire, and we have to do something about it,” said Kate Jones, an ecologist with University of College in London.

Jones was one of the speakers at two Harvard panels last month about the species extinction perils of our Anthropocene age: climate change, overfishing and overhunting, pollution, loss of habitat, invasive species, sea level rise, ocean acidification and all the ugly rest.

Extinction threats are not like a field of bullets hitting everything equally, noted Jones, speaking at a session on Human Imprints on the Tree of Life. Primates are at greater risk than most mammals. Amphibians, palms and corals are particularly vulnerable. Ditto species on islands. Animals with large body sizes, long lives and small ranges are vanishing. Along with, of course, so many other forms of life.

Facing this global storm of extinction with severely limited resources, what should conservation groups and governments prioritize?

One framework for decisions is to safeguard plants and animals with particular values to humans, as food, fuel, eye candy or just insurance for the future, the scientists said. Another framework is to consider the tree of life—protecting genetic diversity so that we can better understand biology and maybe exploit that understanding down the road. (Saving, for instance, the ginkgo tree, full of idiosyncrasies after branching off from other trees 100 million years ago.)

Habitat protection initiatives don’t always follow these outlines, naturally enough. As one audience member noted, many projects in Britain aim to preserve butterflies that remain happily common elsewhere in Europe.

“Most conservation is local, which is fine,” said Ana Rodrigues of the French National Center for Scientific Research. But very few resources work at a global level, Rodrigues emphasized.

One of the few is the Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered (EDGE) program led by the Zoological Society of London. “We can take attention away from charismatic megafauna like pandas, which are cute and fluffy with big eyes,” remarked Jones. Instead, attention can be paid to offbeat creatures like the pink fairy armadillo. (“It’s another poster child but I think it’s spreading out the love.”)

“We’re in deep trouble,” said Yale botanist Michael Donoghue. “We have to act quickly. The problem is, there are too many things we value.”

Many forms of ecological damage have spread surprisingly quickly across vast areas of ocean, noted biologists at an Ocean Evolution Today seminar. Jellyfish are on the march  as we vacuum up commercial finfish. Two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral died off in two years. “In the Arctic, ice algae is disappearing and the entire food web is compromised,” commented Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia.

All too often this marine damage is invisible to most of us, said Boston University’s Randi Dawn Rotjan. Even survival stories can be worrisome–for instance, the killifish that have evolved to shrug off PCB-laced harbors.

More generally, “I’m worried that my children will jump into the water and not know what they haven’t seen,” Rotjan said.

“The most important ecosystems on the planet are almost unknown,” pointed out Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. One case in point: the ocean animals that migrate in “uncountable numbers” up toward the surface at night and then back down during the day, which brings carbon out of the surface waters.

Or we can think of the seafloor hot water vents discovered 40 years ago, which stream out key nutrients and may act “like the ocean’s multi-vitamins,” said Harvard’s Peter Girguis. Life throughout the sea, he added, “is linked to things that happen in the deepest darkest parts of the ocean.”

The scientists applauded the spread of marine sanctuaries, which can provide significant safeguards if established (and enforced) on sufficient scale. So far, sanctuaries have grown most notably in sparsely populated stretches of the Pacific. (The Republic of Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands Protected Area is a coral archipelago the size of California with exactly 24 people, living on one island, Rotjan said.) The High Seas Alliance aims to extend this strategy with protected areas in the no-man’s-lands of the open ocean.

Another positive sign is the rapid growth of sustainable aquaculture, to supplement and replace capture fisheries.

And we also can see payoffs of local and regional marine renewal efforts, such as the massive cleanup of Boston Harbor. Last month, out with a boatful of biologists for a conference hosted by Northeastern University, we were cheered to see harbor porpoises calmly working the clean waters of the Mystic River, in what not long ago was the dirtiest harbor in the U.S.

Top, the “life-size” version of Noah’s Ark built by Johan Huibers of the Netherlands. Bottom, clockwise from panda: Ice algae, pink fairy armadillo, ginkgo berries, mussel.

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10 farm fish stories

What aquaculture experts tell me about the world’s fastest-growing food source.26326495102_757a4e2476_k

  1. Nigerian catfish are bred so densely you can walk across their ponds.
  2. “In an urban environment, why not use a rooftop to grow fish in a couple of recirculating ponds?”
  3. China grows grass carp in quantities equal to the catch of the entire U.S. fishing fleet.
  4. “Everyone’s working hard to reduce the use of fishmeal and fish oil in feed, and to fool the fish into thinking they are eating what they want.”
  5. All the tilapia we eat are male, with females forced that way early in life.
  6. “Many agricultural landscapes are becoming more saline and facing more seasonal inundation from the sea. There’s a big opportunity for aquaculture explicitly to be part of a planned transition that can not only recover but actually dramatically increase the value of these landscapes.”
  7. Shrimp lack an immune system.
  8. “In Africa, the sooner we move past small-scale aquaculture, the better. It’s a dead duck.”
  9. Eight miles off Panama’s Atlantic coast, cobia destined for plates in the United States fatten up in high-tech cages.
  10. The world needs to grow 30 million more tons of fish each year by 2050: “We mostly know how, but is there a will to do it?”

Photos courtesy WorldFish.

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Take a shad song

shad3edit2Commissioner Mary Griffin of the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game and CRWA scientist Elisabeth Cianciola release shad larvae into the Charles.

In spring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grabs adult American shad from the Merrimack River for spawning in tanks at its fish hatcheries in North Attleboro, MA and Nashua, NH. Last week, a Fish and Wildlife truck arrived at Charles River in Waltham with a huge tank filled with a few hundred thousand week-old larvae, each about half the size of a penciled eyebrow.

Shad are the largest member of the herring family and can grow to maybe eight pounds. Present in huge numbers in east-coast rivers, they were easy targets as they swam upstream from the sea to spawn, and they were crucial food fish for native Americans and then early European settlers.

But their range narrowed as dams were built, and like other local fish they were hit further by overfishing, pollution and loss of habitat. A decade ago shad were just about gone from the Charles and the Merrimack.

Both rivers had been painstakingly cleaned up, however. They offered fishways in their lower reaches. And effective technology for propagating shad fry was in hand, as shown by successful restocking programs in Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River.

So the Fish and Wildlife Service joined with the Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game to begin bringing shad back in 2008. The partners now work with the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA) to stock up the river with two or three million larvae annually.

This year, they were pleased to find that in a sample of adult shad in the Charles, most came from the restocking program.

“I’m really happy to return this part of the Charles River to wildlife,” CRWA executive director Robert Zimmerman told the small crowd gathered on the river bank just before the release. Nicely written up in a Boston Globe story, the event was a festive occasion, especially for the sunfish who soon lined the shallows for their best lunch of the summer.