Daniel Janzen-- Long term "wilderness" conservation

The wilderness is in quotations because DJ does not believe true wilderness exists, at least not in North America since the megafauna was eated some 9000 years ago...

Daniel Janzen speaking at the Long Now foundation, about his role and vision in/for the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in Costa Rica. This is a small patch of land which contains as many species as all of North America, and then some, and which covers a number of habitat zones.

His model for conservation is farming. The wild area should be treated and managed as a farm. He starts with the obvious crop: ecotourists, who pay big bucks to visit, and whose dollars represent a larger part of Costa Rica's income than do all of its other agricultural products combined (and the residents are acutely aware of this). Next, waste management-- he had an orange juice company dump their rinds on old clearcut land, in a layer about a meter deep. The mulch killed all the invasive grasses which had corrupted the land, and soon was full of larvea from a local fly species which eats rotting fruit. The birds were also happy, with so many flies to eat. After one year it was a horrid black ooze. After two, it was a rainforest with a rich loamy soil.

His next big idea-- biological literacy. By this, he means
1) indexing all life by a fixed michocondrial gene (this is being done, worldwide)
2) Cheap, portable sequencing machines so that you, a tourist in the field, can "drop a leg of the bug" into your box and get the species as well as the encyclopedia/field guide/etc knowledge on this bug. My analagy is it would be like a digital camera.

My final thought on biological literacy links it to Jeremy Rifkin's Third Industrial revolution. If the first was based on print, and the second on telephone, and the third on peer-to-peer, then would the fourth be biological literacy?

Jeremy Rifkin-- the third industrial revolution

At the RSA

He begins with the grim picture. 2 events

1. Oil at $147/barrel. This was June, 2011. He calls it the earthquake, the financial collapse several months later was only an aftershock. Our economy is based on oil. Transport, food, energy, clothes, pharmacuticals. And according to the conservative industry estimates, peak oil was in 2006. When oil hits ~150, the economy shuts down. He predicts a continuing 4 year cycle: economy stops, oil price drops, economy re-starts, oil rises until at 150 it shuts everything down again.
   
2. Copenhagen. No agreement on climate change. Yet the median estimate is +3 degrees in the next 50 years, which will radically change weather patterns (each 1 degree change allows the atmosphere to hold 7% more water)
   

Society moves by finding new sources of energy and communication, which then define the social-political realm. First industrial revolution. Water and steam, combined with cheap printing and pervasive public education to create a literate workforce which could function in it. And gave us the top-down, centralized control nation state. Because a nation/state is about as much as can be controlled in a top-down manner. Second i.r. Electricity based communication, oil based energy. Cars and suburbs. These are all elite energy sources. Elite in that they are concentrated and take huge capital investment to make useable. Also need to be militariliy protected. The vision and the reality I will describe it as vision. He claims it is real, today, and Germany is leading the way. First communication: the internet has revolutionized it, just as the printing press did. The key element is decentralization. Anyone can put up a blog. Next comes decentralized engery. Because energy is everywhere. A bit of solar, a bit of wind, a bit of garbage/sewage, a bit of geothermal... He based it on 5 pillars of the third industrial revolution.

1. Renewable, small-scale energy generation (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, biomass).
   
2. Buildings as power plants. Build the power generation into the archetecture.
   
3. Hydrogen storage tech. Hydrogen fuel cells can transform energy much more efficiently than anything else known (add electricty to water, and you get hydrogen + ox. Burn the hydrogen + ox, and you get almost the full amount back as heat).
   
4. Smart power grid. Use off the shelf internet tech (routers etc) to make the power grid a distributed resource
   
5. Electric transport (cars/trucks/trains/shipping).
   

These pillars are now a EU parliament directive.

The cultural shift. Socialism/capitalism is dead. Now the divide is top-down, opaque vs open source, transparent, distributed.

Collaborative consumption revisited

Another TED talk on this subject, by a truly aweful speaker. But two good quotes:

Better stuff, easily shared

and

The brand is the voice, the product is the souvineer

with the last quote ties into earlier comments on Marx and fetishism.

Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish

Dan Barber

Dan Barber is a chef, searching for a tasty and sustainable fish species for his restaurant. He had one, farmed in mid-ocean, until he learned that its primary feed was chickens; the bits that don't sell in grocery stores were turned into pellets and fed to those fish.

Then he found an organic fish farm. It is based on a healthy ecosystem, so they do not need to feed the fish-- the fish get their food from the environment. They measure the health of the farm by the health of the predators. And the farm filters water; its output is cleaner than its input.

But HE NEVER TELLS US THE NAME OF THE FISH!!

How are WE supposed to support it if we cannot buy it?

Urban resiliance

My brother Mike brought this topic up; we have been email on how to measure this quantity for several weeks. My best conclusion was that cities are social constructs, so resiliance is best measured in terms of the community spirit of a place. As long as the spirit survives, the city will be rebuilt.

Turns out "urban resiliance" is its own scientific discipline, branching off from ecology (and specifically the study of ecosystem resiliance). Stockholm University has a center dedicated to the topic.

"Urban Transitions: on urban resilience and human-dominated ecosystems" by Ernstson et al (2010, AMBIO) had some interesting notes.

Cities exist as part of networks involving other cities, linked by dynamic social and technical networks that sustain energy, matter, and information transfer.

He suggests we continue our move from an industrial to a knowledge to an ecological economy. In the ecological economy, competiveness also lies in how effectively one uses/supports the generation of ecosystem services.

Another new buzzword: Panarchy, the title of a book by GUnderson and Holling (2002). A panarchy replaces a hierarchy by allowing the different processes to operate on different time scales. Interactions across these different time scales then become of interest
Looks like wikipedia gives it an older origin and broader meaning.

I should perhaps also read "Superlinear scaling for innovation in cities", Arbesman et al 2009 Physical Review E 79