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Chapter 20 The Natural World Again We’ve covered a lot of ground in the last 19 files. Yes, I mean “we,” because I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time pulling them together. I wish I could say they were perfect. What have we missed? There are a few topics that come to mind. On the primary production side, fisheries, for example. For secondary, heavy-equipment manufacturing. For tertiary, TV and film production, not to mention Netflix and the other guys elbowing into entertainment production. But the biggest omission might be the environmental impact of everything we’ve looked at. “What have we done to this place? What’s going to become of it?” That’s the topic I want to consider is this file. We’ll begin with climate change. It’s an odd topic for me, because when I was in school the concern I heard from various professors was the likelihood of another Ice Age. Global Cooling, you might say. They thought it was pretty much inevitable, though they couldn’t say when. As you can imagine, I haven’t heard anyone worrying about this in a while.

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The maps below, of projected temperature change, are crude, but they come from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and are as authoritative as anything you’ll find. The maps on the left show three different IPCC scenarios for temperatures in the 2020s, relative to the 1980-99 average; the panels on the right show the same thing for the end of the century. Oklahoma, for example, is expected to warm more than one degree Celsius in the next decade, compared to what it was 30 years ago. By the end of the century, Oklahoma is expected to be between three and five degrees warmer Celsius, or about twice that much Fahrenheit. If that’s not worrisome, look at the Arctic.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-spm-6.html

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Here are two of the IPCC’s projections for precipitation change. Both show Mexico, Chile, North Africa, and the Middle East more than 20 percent drier at the end of the century than now. The northern half of the U.S. and most of northern Europe and Russia are more than 20 percent wetter.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html

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If you’re skeptical about projections, here are some views of global warming over the last century and a bit. Maybe it’s been welcome news for chilly Finland, but not for Iraq, which could stand a little cooling.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-environment/canada-quebec-islands-climate-change/

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Alaska and most of Canada have gotten much warmer. Sound good?

Maybe, but take away the winter sea-ice that’s protected the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and add in sea-level rise. Result: erosion is eating away at the coast.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/world/climate-environment/canada-quebec-islands-climate-change/

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Here’s an elegant record of rising temperatures. The Japanese for over a thousand years have been recording the date when cherry trees bloom. With warmer springs, the blossoms come about 10 days earlier than they used to.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/04/elephant-bloom

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Winters grow milder. Here’s the picture in six cities, all warmer in January than they were in the period 1951-1980.

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Here’s the picture generalized for the northern hemisphere.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/03/28/the-northern-hemisphere-winter-of-2019-20-was-the-warmest-ever-on-land

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Since 1980, the extent of the Arctic ice-cap has declined by more than half. If you factor in the declining thickness of the remaining ice layer, the decline is even greater: about 75 percent. By 2040, the Arctic will probably be ice-free each summer.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21721364-commercial-opportunities-are-vastly-outweighed-damage-climate-thawing-arctic

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This is bad news for polar bears, but most people aren’t going to change their lives to help bears. (Everyone, it seems, has seen that National Geographic video about a starving bear; it’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JhaVNJb3ag Maybe rising sea levels will make us think twice. Depending on ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica, that rise could be catastrophic for the east coast of the U.S., for Brazil, and for Argentina. The Netherlands would be hurt; so, too, Basra, Karachi, Kolkata, Rangoon, Bangkok, HCMC, and Shanghai.

http://serc.carleton.edu/images/eslabs/cryosphere/areas_risks_from_sea.png

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Think twice before buying property in South Florida, unless you plan on flipping it.

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Miami Beach is mostly less than four feet above sea level and is already investing is raising street levels, building walls, and installing pumps, some with generators in case of power failures.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bracing-for-sea-rise-miami-beach-fights-a-tide-of-angry-residents-11583526613?shareToken=st85b00c5d787a4ab2a372392a5b179fc5&reflink=article_email_share

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Here’s a fragment of a map produced by the U.S. Geological Survey showing land loss and gain at the mouth of the Mississippi. The orange and red tints indicate loss between 1956 and 1999; purple is later loss; green is the formation of new land mostly added in the 1930s. All told, between 1932 and 2010 Louisiana lost about 1,800 square miles. (That’s like driving from Oklahoma City to Dallas and lopping off all the land within four or five miles of the interstate.)

https://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3164/downloads/SIM3164_Map.pdf

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One way or another, the sea penetrates the delta and destroys the forest. The Isle de Jean Charles is now so vulnerable to storms that the state of Louisiana has agreed to relocate its 60 residents, who happen to be Choctaw. They used to hunt muskrats and mink in the woods around their village.

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21727099-has-lessons-americas-climate-change-policy-louisiana-fights-sea-and-loses

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The damage will be even greater in the deltas of South and Southeast Asia, where millions of very poor people would have much more difficulty adapting to change.

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According to estimates published in 2019 (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z) the Mekong Delta could be almost completely submerged at high tides, along with a third or more of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/29/climate/coastal-cities-underwater.html

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The same study predicts that most of the Chao Phraya Delta will be inundated, along with most of Bangkok.

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Most of Mumbai will flood.

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Jakarta, with ten million people, is a special case, because not only is sea-level rising but the land surface is sinking more than two inches a year. That’s because many people pump domestic water from wells. There is a piped supply, but it comes from private contractors quick to drop the many customers who can’t pay. The government could put an end to pumping and could build sea walls, but a local sounds skeptical: “Nobody here believes in the greater good, because there is so much corruption, so much posturing about serving the public when what gets done only serves private interests. There is no trust.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia/jakarta-sinking-climate.html

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There are lots of islands at risk. Here’s Majuro, capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Majuro’s population is about 30,000. Wikipedia has no sense of humor and lists Majuro’s elevation as 9.843 feet.

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It wouldn’t take a lot to flood the island’s only runway. (I took this picture from United’s Island Hopper, which flies west from Honolulu with several stops before Guam.)

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Here’s a more extreme case. It’s Ebeye (pronounced variously but commonly as Eeb-eye). Population: about 15,000, crammed together by order of the U.S. government. The place, part of the Kwajalein Atoll, was basically uninhabited until our military began atomic tests at Bikini and elsewhere. Residents of many islands in the area were given housing here. Decades passed. Families grew. Jobs today are scarce, though some people take a ferry daily to the U.S. military base less than a mile below the photo.

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You still can’t take photos of that island, which is kind of funny since Google Maps came along.

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Along with sea-level rise, storms are likely to grow stronger. We had good examples of such events in 2017. Here’s a snip of the arrivals board for Miami airport on September 11 that year. Hurricane Irma had just passed through.

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Here’s Houston traffic two weeks earlier (August 20th), with Hurricane Harvey.

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While Houston was flooded, the weather in Norman was very nice. We still felt the storm, even if we didn’t know anyone in Houston. How? Take a look at the refinery closures that week.

The_Wall_Street_Journal_20170831_B012_5 https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvey-ripples-through-u-s-global-energy-markets-1504137861

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With the refineries shut, the price of gas went up throughout the country. (It didn’t help that the Colonial Pipeline was shut down for several days. It supplies gasoline from Texas to the East Coast.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvey-ripples-through-u-s-global-energy-markets-1504137861 The spike in Oklahoma City was brief.

http://www.gasbuddy.com/Charts

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Such storms are likely to be more common as the climate warms in coming years. That seems to be the scientific consensus, at least. This tidy chart strikes a cautionary note, however. Are storms really getting more severe?

WSJ, Sept 11, 2017

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A couple of weeks after Harvey, Hurricane Maria took Puerto Rico apart. Here are two satellite views of the island, one before the storm and another after the island’s power system was almost destroyed.

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21729762-island-faced-economic-collapse-even-storm-struck-puerto-rico-could-feel

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After the storm, every Hilton hotel on the island was “sold out,” either because it was damaged or full with a mix of wealthy but displaced residents and relief workers.

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I shouldn’t be so parochial, with all my examples from North America. Here’s London Heathrow on February 9th, 2020, when Storm Ciara severely disrupted operations.

One flight that did operate normally just before the storm’s arrival was BA 174. It caught a jet stream, hit speeds exceeding 800 mph, and landed an hour earlier than usual.

. https://flightaware.com/live/flight/BAW174

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Vegetation patterns will likely rearrange themselves. The Mediterranean, for example, will see more forest fires and crop failures.

http://www.climate-and-freshwater.info/climate_change/

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Here’s a “the sky is falling” prediction. I’d take it with a grain of salt, but it does outline a worst-case scenario.

http://corn.agronomy.wisc.edu/Management/L005.aspx

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Here’s a more probable version, showing reduced productivity in the southern High Plains but also in Argentina, across most of Europe, and in the semiarid parts of Africa, India, and Australia. The areas benefiting from warming are chiefly the subarctic belts of Canada and Russia—areas now in boreal forest.

http://www.thepigsite.com/swinenews/37704/more-land-fewer-harvests-in-climate-change-impact-study/

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Many coffee growers are likely to be hurt by rising temperatures, perhaps most of all in Vietnam. For them, the best hope may be plant breeders developing varieties more tolerant of warmer weather.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-rising-temperatures-mean-for-coffee-bean-farmers-11570629999?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

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Farmers in Iceland, on the other hand, (yes, there are some) will be much better off. So will tourists curious about the Arctic. The map below shows the itinerary of the Crystal Serenity, a 13-deck cruise ship that carried 1,000 passengers on a month-long trip through Arctic waters during the summer of 2016. (Fare: $22,000 each.) Notice (in dark blue) the ice shrinkage since 1985.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/luxury-cruise-to-conquer-northwest-passage-1462872605 Here’s the promo for 2017.

http://www.crystalcruises.com/special-offers/2017-northwest-passage

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And the ship.

One recent analysis suggests that if no measures are taken to check warming over the next century, the economies of Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia will double their GDP per capita, while GDP per capita in most tropical countries will be cut in half. Viewed another way, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And people think that migrants are a problem now!

https://next.ft.com/content/796f0844-886a-11e5-90de-f44762bf9896#axzz3rENT6

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The analysis above is probably too simple, because it simply correlates economic productivity with temperature.

http://web.stanford.edu/~mburke/climate/

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Still, here is what one research group came up with. The black lines indicate the likeliest paths; shaded areas indicate greater or lesser degrees of confidence in the prediction. By this analysis, Europe’s economy is almost certainly going to continue growing, while North America’s growth will be reduced to almost zero because of excessive warmth. The rest of the world is in much worse trouble.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7577/full/nature15725.html

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Welcome to uncertainty. What’s certain, however, is that greenhouse gases, which act to warm the atmosphere, have over the last century been pumped into the air in greater and greater quantities. Of these gases, CO2 is being added in the greatest volume. (Caution: not all greenhouse gases have equally great impacts on the atmosphere; some gases are much more harmful than C02.)

http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html

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Here’s the trend of CO2 emissions just from burning fossil fuels. As the preceding chart showed, there are other sources of this gas. They include respiration, plant decay, and deforestation.

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Do you think the curve has levelled off since 2010? The answer is “no, it hasn’t.”

https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2020/04/23/why-tackling-global-warming-is-a-challenge-without-precedent

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Who’s adding this CO2? China, the U.S., and the EU contribute more than half of it.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

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Electricity generation, chiefly from coal, is the biggest source, followed by motor vehicles (light and heavy), followed by the iron and steel industry. Cement is an interesting case, by the way, because it’s impossible to clean up the industry. You could run the plant with solar power and you’d still produce a lot of CO2, because it’s inherent in the chemical reaction that makes cement.

https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2018/11/29/what-would-it-take-to-decarbonise-the-global-economy

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Where are the power plants? Asia is the biggest culprit, producing 160 percent as much electricity as North America but 212 percent as much CO2. Inference: power plants there are dirtier than power plants here, probably mostly because they are more reliant on coal.

http://carma.org/dig/

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Here it is on a map. The five top offenders, by tons emitted annually, are Russia, China, India, the U.S., and (surprise) tiny Japan.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_world_map.PNG China is producing a lot more CO2 than either Europe or the U.S., but don’t be too quick to scold.

https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21737558-clear-thinking-and-united-front-are-needed-they-may-not-be-forthcoming-decades

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I say that because the picture per capita is very different. Americans produce 20 tons of CO2 per capita per year and are closely followed by Saudi Arabia and Australia. The Chinese are way down the list, producing five tons. If China ever uses power per capita as we do, either they’ll have a completely different source of power or we’ll have the mother of all problems. Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ethiopia each have more than 100,000,000 people and produce one ton or less of CO2 per capita. No rich country uses as little power as they. The ones coming the closest are France and Sweden, but that’s because the French rely heavily on nuclear power, while the Swedes rely heavily on hydroelectric power.

http://www.eoearth.org/files/112301_112400/112389/620px-National_carbon_dioxide_co2_emissions_per_capita.png

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Here's roughly the same data on a map. In the Middle East, it seems that oil producers generally are heavy emitters, but this generalization doesn’t apply to Iraq and Iran, whose economies have been hugely disrupted by recent economic upheaval.

http://mcs.mines.edu/Research/BPC/new/BPC_Projects/CSCI261/Carbon/Carbon%2520Footprint_002.png Here’s a variant in which emissions include those produced by forest fires. The most striking change involves rainforest destruction in Brazil, but fire also accounts for the change in Malaysia and Indonesia, too. Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi all appear to be big CO2 emitters, though this has little to do with smokestacks and a lot to do with matches in the forest.

http://mcs.mines.edu/Research/BPC/new/BPC_Projects/CSCI261/Carbon/Carbon%2520Footprint.png

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Here’s a still more precise rendering, this time of emissions irrespective of national boundaries. In the U.S., India, and China, areas of heavy emissions correspond to areas of dense population. In the case of Germany, you can make out the Rhine Valley; similarly, the North China Plain and Sichuan.

http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/img/part/co2_map_big.png

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Should we do anything about this? There are still some smart skeptics, though you’d never know it from the media, which damns every doubter as a fool or knave. If you want to meet a couple of smart ones, look up Bjorn Lomborg and Richard Lindzen. Neither denies that the climate is changing and that we’re at least helping it change, but both think there are better ways to spend money than forcing society to produce less greenhouse gas. Both are in the minority, and so a first big push to reduce greenhouses gases came with the Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force in 2005 and now has 192 participants. (Canada joined but later withdrew, and the U.S. never joined.) Nearly all the countries of Europe, along with Australia, committed themselves to greenhouse-gas reductions. Many countries, especially China and India, signed the treaty but escaped compulsory targets after they pleaded poverty and the moral right to economic growth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kyoto_protocol_parties_and_2012-2020_commitments.svg

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The treaty obliged signatories to meet targets expressed as a percentage of emissions in 1990. The chart below compares those targets to what actually happened in the period 1990-2009. Instead of barely increasing above the 1990 level, Australia’s emissions rose over 50 percent. New Zealand and Norway were almost as bad. Surprisingly, some countries reduced emissions much more than they were required to by the treaty. Some of these countries were small, like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but some were big, such as Russia and, with a whopping 62 percent reduction, Ukraine. These countries were producing energy in a wasteful way to begin with, and it was relatively cheap to adopt more efficient and cleaner methods. The expense was often borne by European countries, which could pay for the technological upgrades and then claim some of the reductions on their own accounts.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Kyoto_Parties_with_first_period_%282008-2012%29_greenhouse_gas_emissions_limitations_targets_and_the_percentage_change_in_their_carbon_dioxide_emissions_from_fuel_combustion_between_1990_and_2009.png/637px-thumbnail.png

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Since then, there have been many attempts to clamp down further on greenhouse gases. Here’s the U.N.’s own timeline. Don’t bother memorizing it unless you really want to understand this stuff! My point is simply that this has become a fantastically intricate issue.

http://www.un.org/climatechange/towards-a-climate-agreement/

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New talks were scheduled for Paris in late 2015. The key issues were: 1. Would decarbonization targets be set, along with dates for meeting them? 2. Would producers of CO2 be forced to pay, either through taxation or through a cap-and-trade system such as the one used in Europe after Kyoto (and in a few states in the U.S.)? 3. Would poor countries be paid to install clean but expensive generating facilities? 4. Would heavy CO2 producers be liable for the damage done by climate change to poor countries? Early in December, 195 nations gathered in Paris and signed a climate agreement in which they agreed to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature to well below 2°C about pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels….” They also agreed on the need for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation....,” on working “to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty,” and on the “importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.” Each signer agreed “to communicate a nationally determined contribution every five years…” and that “developed country Parties should continue to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance….” Was this agreement a success? Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, said, “This is truly a historic moment. For the first time, we have a truly universal agreement on climate change, one of the most crucial problems on earth.”

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On the other hand, James Hansen, who’s generally considered the scientist who first drew attention to increasing CO2 concentrations, was completely dismissive. “It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will continue to be burned.” Perhaps the biggest impediment is that for many Asian countries economic growth remains Job No. 1. It’s non-negotiable, and it implies generating more energy. For the time being, that means lots more coal.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-asia-king-coal-hard-to-dethrone-1449692644

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Burning more coal makes it hard to meet the two-degree target, let alone the 1.5-degree target. If the signers of the agreement only live up to what they’ve pledged, temperatures will still rise more than two degrees. Getting them to pledge more will be a big job, and they of course may not even live up to their pledges. The U.S. is a special case, with President Trump announcing in 2017 the withdrawal of the U.S. from the agreement. Many U.S. companies have said in response that they will continue to act as if the U.S. were still abiding by it.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-dispute-2-degree-model-guiding-climate-talks-1448829047

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Think this problem’s going away? Consider these three maps. The first shows CO2 emissions from the top 15 emitters in 1990. The U.S. and EU are way ahead of everybody else and are each emitting almost 6 billion metric tons of CO2 annually.

On a business-as-usual scenario, by 2030 China is far and away tops, with 16 billion tons. The U.S. has risen from slightly under to slightly over 6 billion. India and the EU aren’t far behind.

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And here’s 2030 with the pledges made by countries signing the Paris agreement. China has dropped from 16 to 14 billion tons. The U.S. is down from under six to four, and India and the EU have made modest improvements. If you’re an optimist, you’ll say that Paris focused our minds and made us take our first step. You’ll also be pleased with a legally binding decision in 2016 to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a refrigerant in use since chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The HFC agreement was signed by 150 countries in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, in October, 2016. Under its terms, HFC levels will be capped in 2024, reducing global warming by about half a degree Celsius. That sounds like small beer, but it’s equivalent to stopping for two years all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Replacement coolants will be needed, of course. They’ll probably be expensive.

http://graphics.wsj.com/climate-talks/

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Before we leave the topic of climate change, it’s worth noting that fewer than half of all Americans are “very concerned” about it. That’s much lower than the concern expressed by Brazilians or Ghanaians or Ugandans or Indians or Vietnamese.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/06/map-where-climate-change-is-a-big-deal-and-where-it-isnt/

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How can we explain this? The survey authors found that people in Latin America and Africa were more worried about drought than we are, presumably because drought affects peasants more than it affects city dwellers. We’re insulated, in other words.

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There’s something else: Americans who self-identify as “liberal” are more than twice as worried as “conservatives.” This may not be surprising, but what is surprising is that this gap is so much wider in the U.S. than in Europe. In Germany, for example, there’s almost no difference between liberals and conservatives: a majority of both think climate change is “very serious.” Implication: it will be much harder for the U.S. than for the Germans to act on this issue. Why is the gap so wide in the U.S.? I don’t know, but it’s part of the the polarization of our politics: if one side says “yes,” the other side automatically says “no.”

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You can plot it regionally. Just as you’d expect, the people in Democratic states are most supportive of tight controls on coal-fired power plants.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/21/climate/how-americans-think-about-climate-change-in-six-maps.html?_r=0

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CO2 emissions have risen far more in Texas than in Oregon. That’s true even on a per capita basis. Why? Oregonians vote Democratic and are more worried than Texans about climate change. Guess what: Oregonians drive smaller vehicles and are more likely to use public transit. Says the Texan: “Wimps!”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/10/climate/driving-emissions-map.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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So much for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions—or not. Here’s another problem. The map shows air pollution in real-time, November 12, 2015. Conditions are worst in Europe and China.

http://waqi.info/ On July 17, 2019, conditions had deteriorated in the United States. India looks much worse, but this is probably because data was coming in from more stations.

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Here, still from July 17, 2019, India has bad readings in the Ganges Valley, while China is worst across the North China Plain.

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Here’s a close-up, with the worst reading at Tianjin (209). South Korea around Seoul doesn’t seem much better than the North China Plain in general.

Compare that with China in November, 2015, when cold weather had people using coal heaters.

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In November, 2017, pollution in Delhi got so bad that United suspended its one daily flight from the U.S. Airlines often suspend service in the event of political unrest, storms, and volcanic eruptions, but this may have been the first time ever that service was suspended anywhere because of air pollution.

https://www.united.com/CMS/en-US/travel/news/Pages/travelnotices.aspx

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Here’s a CNN story of conditions that day.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/10/health/delhi-pollution-equivalent-cigarettes-a-day/index.html

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Air pollution is responsible annually for 400,000 premature deaths in Europe. The problem is worst behind the old Iron Curtain, thanks largely to coal-fired power stations, but Western Europe doesn’t get off scot-free. Notice the Po Valley, where industrial development is sheltered in the lee of the Alps so pollution can build up the way it does around Los Angeles, wedged against the San Gabriel Mountains.

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21679419-while-paris-focuses-climate-change-air-pollution-kills-400000-europeans-year-choking-it

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There are many air pollutants, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has focused on six so-called “criteria pollutants.” They are ozone, PM or particulate matter (dust and soot), carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and lead. Standards are published for each so that counties can be labelled as attainment or non-attainment areas. In the latter case, plans must be drawn up to bring the county into compliance. The upper map shows non-attainment areas for particulates; the lower shows them for ozone. PM seems to be a problem mostly in the west; ozone is so much more widespread that only a few cities are in compliance. The most obvious is windy Chicago.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6001a5.htm

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Air quality in the U.S. is getting better for at least several of the criteria pollutants.

But there’s still a way to go, especially in California.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/19/climate/us-air-pollution-trump.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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The U.S. looks mighty good compared to Asia. Here’s a map showing how the atmospheric load of particulates under 2.5 microns, the ones most dangerous to human health, has changed over the last 20 years worldwide. The U.S., like the rest of the Americas and Europe, is better than it used to be, but Asia is worse, largely because of crop residues are burned in the Indo-Gangetic Plain and forest are burned for palm-oil plantations in Indonesia. China I’m not so sure about, but I’m betting that coal burning for power generation is a big part of the story. So: what’s the takeaway? Depends where you look, doesn’t it? Countries that are crowded and poor are the ones with the biggest problem. Not exactly a surprise, but maybe this map will come to mind when somebody a few years from now offers you a job in Beijing or Shanghai.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/health-science/lost-years/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.24fc767d4e87

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What about polluted water? Again, the EPA has published standards and set up monitoring sites. The map below shows sampled wells. Those in red are contaminated in excess of the established standards, or benchmarks.

http://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/studies/domestic_wells/distribution.html

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One of the most urgent and unexpected water-pollution problems of recent years has been the production of huge quantities of salt water produced by fracking. Many Americans celebrate the new oil boom, but every barrel of oil comes up with five or ten barrels of brine. Finding a place to put it is a challenge, especially since pumping it underground can trigger earthquakes. Here’s a photo of a well in the Permian Basin near Midland. The Permian Basin produces a thousand Olympic-size pools of brine every day. It’s being trucked or pipelined to places where the geology may tolerate injection.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-big-bet-in-fracking-water-1534930200?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

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You can see the business opportunity here: here’s one outfit that wants your salt water right now.

http://www.milestone-es.com/Locations/Pecos/

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What about domestic water? We all heard in 2015 about the disastrous lead pollution in the water supply of Flint, Michigan, but the U.S. has about 20,000 water-supply systems, and the small ones in particular, financially strapped, are often in violation of national water-quality standards. A professor says, “They’re struggling to maintain their aging infrastructure, and they’re struggling to keep up with the latest water treatment techniques.” Where are the systems most often in violation of national standards? The answer is particularly embarrassing to Oklahomans because President Trump’s first Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency came from Oklahoma and wanted to cut his agency’s budget.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/climate/drinking-water-safety.html

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The EPA monitors and administers a regional pollution-control program for the Great Lakes, where agricultural runoff feeds algae especially in Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron and on the western side of Lake Erie.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/trump-epa-rollbacks/?hpid=hp_no-name_graphic-story-b%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

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Ditto with a program aimed at restoring Chesapeake Bay.

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Both programs were eliminated in the budget sent to Congress by the Trump administration early in 2017. The House Appropriations Committee voted to fully fund the programs anyway.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/31/new-epa-documents-reveal-even-deeper-proposed-cuts-to-staff-and-programs/?utm_term=.c75237cf1904

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Overseas? The chart below shows the percent of rural households with access to piped water (not necessarily in the home). China is in pretty good shape. So is India. Africa is in the worst shape, though there are exceptions such as Botswana. Bear in mind that piped water may not necessarily be healthy; nor is water from wells or streams necessarily unhealthy.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.H2O.SAFE.RU.ZS/countries/1W-IN?display=default

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The map below indicates the percentage of the population with access to “improved sanitation facilities,” meaning a flush toilet or an outhouse or pit toilet. Again, Africa is in the worst shape, though South and Southeast Asia are not far behind. The implication is that large fractions of the population must be defecating outdoors. Fecal contamination of water supplies is likely to be a big problem in such areas, whether the water comes in a pipe or not.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.ACSN/countries/1W?display=graph

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Russian television has produced several English-language documentaries on this subject. Here’s one about the polluted Ganges and villagers living without toilets, a situation especially hard on women. The grab below comes from one of these videos and shows funeral pyres along the Ganges at Varanasi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17DE2krqQMg

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Notice the fecal coliform count in the Yamuna River as it passes Delhi. Farther downstream, tributaries add more water to the river and dilute the pollution.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-worlds-next-environmental-disaster-1508511743

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The government of India has pledged to end open defecation and claims that almost everyone now has a household toilet, most likely a pit toilet, not a flush toilet. Is it true? Researchers recently announced that 44 percent of the villagers in U.P. and adjoining states still defecate in the open. More worrisome, perhaps, the researchers said that a fifth of the villagers who had a toilet didn’t use it, apparently because of disgust at the idea of fecal matter piling up in or near the house. For their report, see http://ftp.iza.org/dp12065.pdf (“Swachh Bharat” means “Clean India.” The commas in the numbers below are used in the standard Indian way. Americans would rearrange the commas and understand the headline number as 92 million. Indians would leave the commas as is and read the number as 9.2 crores or 920 lakhs.)

http://swachhbharatmission.gov.in/sbmcms/index.htm

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In case you’re wondering, the EPA standard for fecal coliform is that none should be detectable in 95 percent of samples. In the case of Oklahoma City in 2016, FC (bottom row of chart) was detectable in two of over 3,000 samples.

https://okc.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=7036

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Worldwide, the percentage of people with access to improved sanitation is slowly rising but often from very low bases.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.ACSN/countries/1W?display=default

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Since 1980, the EPA has put some 1,700 of the nation’s most toxic waste sites on the NPT or National Priorities List for remediation. The original idea was that toxic polluters would be compelled to clean up their messes or, if that was impossible (for example because the polluter was bankrupt), the government would pay with money deposited in a special fund, the Superfund Trust, funded by a tax on the oil and chemical industries. Authorization for that funding mechanism expired in 1995. Since then, the trust fund has relied on general appropriations—which is to say, on you and me. The colors on the map below are explained in the caption; the only active superfund site in the OKC metro today is at Tinker Air Force base.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/superfund/#charts

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New Jersey lives up to its reputation, with 112 sites, plus 29 more that have been cleaned up.

Nationwide, there’s been a decline in the number of active sites (red) and an increase in the number of sites that have been cleaned up (purple or gray). Few new sites are being added to the list (yellow).

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More than three-quarters of all superfund sites wait more than 10 years before they’re cleaned up. Part of the reason is that money is tight. The dark bars indicate the balance in the Superfund, now in abeyance; the light ones indicate Congressional appropriations, slowly ebbing. If you’re a Democrat, you’re likely to deplore this situation. Republican? You’re likely to say that we’ve fixed the problem or that the federal government is coming to its senses and leaving the matter to state and local governments.

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Here’s one famous case. With federal approval, General Electric for decades manufactured PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenols, for use in electrical transformers. Production was banned in 1979 after PCBs were declared a carcinogen. By then, however, waste from GE’s factories had left over a million pounds of the chemical in the mud at the bottom of the Hudson River. The company argued that dredging the mud would be worse than letting it stay buried in the streambed, but the EPA insisted on a cleanup. By late 2015 GE had spent $1.6 billion and the EPA was satisfied. The Fish and Wildlife Service reported that only two-thirds of the PCBs had been removed and that fish from the Hudson were still unsafe to eat.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-nears-end-of-hudson-river-cleanup-1447290049

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It’s easy to look up data on toxic waste. Here’s the TOXMAP maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

http://toxmap.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/flex/ You can browse or search. Here’s one of the facilities. We’ll click on the “more” button.

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You can see what the plant has released to the environment—mostly ethylene, not classified as carcinogenic.

http://toxmap-classic.nlm.nih.gov/toxmap/main/triFacility.jsp?&linkback=false&facn=77506PHLLP1400J&year=

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The poster child for toxic-chemical plants may be the lower Mississippi River, where there are some 200 plants whose emissions of toxic chemicals are high enough that they must report to the government.

More are on the way, having secured or in process of securing permits from the state.

https://projects.propublica.org/louisiana-toxic-air/

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Snippet: we’re about thirty miles downstream from Baton Rouge and just upstream from the site of Formosa, a $9 billion plastics plant owned by a Taiwanese company and scheduled to open in 2022. Want to live in the St James RV Park smack in the center?

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Farmers deal with toxic materials all the time, though of course the manufacturers insist that the stuff is safe if used properly. The leading pesticide in the U.S. is Roundup, a Bayer product since Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018. Roundup is a trade name; the chemical is glyphosate. It’s used on about two-thirds of the major crops in the U.S. The EPA says it’s safe, but the World Health Organization classes it as a “probable carcinogen.” 2,4-D, by contrast, is considered only “possibly carcinogenic.” That’s good news for Corteva, a DowDupont spinoff that sells Roundup’s competitor 2,4-D based Enlist.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/roundup-ruled-the-farm-now-its-maker-has-a-challenger-11578328409?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2

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Roundup continues to dominate the industry but weeds are developing resistance to it. Bayer’s solution is to recommend application of the third chemical on the previous page, Dicamba, formulated in a Bayer product sold as Xtendi-Max. The World Health Organization calls Dicamba another “probable” carcinogen.

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Besides air and water pollution and toxic wastes, there’s a trash problem. Plastic is one part of it. Despite all our virtuous intentions, we recycle only about a tenth of the plastic we produce, and our production of the stuff has risen spectacularly since 1950.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-go-to-new-depths-for-ocean-plastic-in-recycling-push-11572875512?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

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Here’s a landing spot near St.-Louis.

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That’s Saint-Louis, Senegal, not Saint Louis, Missouri.

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Some plastic winds up floating in the oceans.

https://governmentshutdown.noaa.gov/ Some of it gets eaten by birds like this unfortunate albatross.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/20/by-2050-there-will-be-more-plastic-than-fish-in-the-worlds-oceans-study-says/?utm_term=.7d3016182a61

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Many jurisdictions, both domestic and foreign, have banned single-use plastics. Notice that Oklahoma is one of a dozen states, including Texas, that have passed laws prohibiting cities from doing this. There are at least two interpretations of this: one is that the states wish to have a uniform ban rather than a constellation of different bans; the other is that the state wishes to have no ban at all. It’s an amazing but perhaps predictable fact that the states with bans are usually, if not always, states that vote Democrat.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/plastic-bans-what-you-need-to-know-11561195802?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2

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Here’s the form letter Governor Stitt sent to a colleague of mine to explain, at least in part, why the governor approved this legislation. It remains to be seen whether he will now propose a ban providing “regulatory consistency across the state.” Reading between the lines, in which the governor speaks about the importance of job creation and minimizing the burden on small businesses, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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Russian TV has done a good documentary on trash in Cairo, notoriously handled by the zabbaleen, literally the “garbage people.” They’re Coptic Christians, in part because they’re the only people in Egypt who will handle pigs, which are fed the edible bits of the garbage. The only thing missing from the video is the stench.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0s7WsoC528

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Here’s the flow of waste paper. The column on the left shows where the world’s rich countries shipped their waste paper early in 2017: mostly from the U.S. and mostly to China. The column on the right shows what happened a year later, after China said it would not accept trash to be recycled if the trash was mixed with more than .5 percent of contaminants. Suddenly, the U.S. had to reduce its waste-paper exports, which meant burying them or burning them or finding other countries (like India) to take them. You can bet that those other countries like India are going to stop importing dirty waste, which means that we either have to do the recycling ourselves, which is expensive, or bury or burn it, or use less stuff to begin with. Not so easy.

https://www.ft.com/content/54749bae-fe9f-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521

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Here’s an intangible kind of pollution: noise. Where are we spared highway and aircraft sounds? Looks pretty quiet out by Lake Thunderbird.

https://maps.bts.dot.gov/arcgis/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=a303ff5924c9474790464cc0e9d5c9fb

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If you live under the DFW flight paths there’s no escaping it.

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Maybe we should call it The Noisy City instead of The Windy City. The red areas are O’Hare and Midway airports.

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Want a quiet spot outside in Manhattan? Central Park is as good as you’ll get. Oddly, there’s a quiet patch on the Lower East Side. It’s a set of high-rise apartment blocks that apparently wall off sound pretty well.

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Now we turn to a third environmental-quality issue, after climate change and pollution. Sometimes it’s called the “biological demolition derby.” Famous examples include the dodo, which the Dutch killed off in 1681, and the passenger pigeon, which we polished off in 1914. Here’s a map showing some of the extinctions of the last 500 years. The three countries with the most losses have been the U.S., Mexico, and Australia. (There’s also the tiny island of Mauritius, just east of Madagascar; this was the home of the dodo, among other terminated species.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2012/sep/03/extinct-and-endangered-species-interactive

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Many of these stories are familiar, at least in broad outline. Here’s a map showing the places where one can still find lions outside a zoo.

https://lionalert.org/page/lion-status-overview The “strongholds” correspond to national parks in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Tanzania, where the lions are at least nominally protected. Where they’re not protected, they’re in trouble.

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Here’s elephants. There appears to be a large refuge for them in Gabon.

http://www.nnf.org.na/RARESPECIES/InfoSys/IMAGES/Elephant/Fig6%20Africa%20Range.gif Don’t be deceived; the actual numbers there are low.

http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/african-elephant-population-by-country_0858#

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You can tell a similar story for fish. Production from the oceans has more than doubled since 1950.

http://www.fao.org/docrep/u8480e/U8480E0f.htm Where are the fish coming from? The catch off the northwest Pacific in 1993 amounted to 25 million tons; the second most intensively fished area was off the west coast of South America, which yielded 15 million tons.

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Who was doing the most fishing? Answer: boats from the countries closest to those two areas.

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Not surprisingly, the same areas rank among the most overfished areas.

http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/28/geography-in-the-news-world-fisheries/

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Under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the U.S. has listed 70 endangered mammals, 80 endangered birds, and 85 endangered fish. It also has listed 688 endangered flowering plants. Overseas, the number of endangered species is much greater for mammals and birds but much smaller for fish and plants.

http://ecos.fws.gov/tess_public/pub/Boxscore.do

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What to do? Deuteronomy 22:6-7 lays down a rule about how to hunt yet preserve species: you can take eggs or young birds in a nest, for example, but not the mother caring for them. (Here’s the King James version: “But thou shalt in any wise let the dam go, and take the young to thee; that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days.”) But hunting isn’t the big problem today; the big problem is habitat loss, which pushes whole ecosystems, rather than single species, toward extinction. The most obvious case is deforestation. There are extensive areas in the U.S. that are no longer forested, mainly because they’ve been cleared for agriculture. There are much larger areas that are forested but which are not at all like the forests of 1492 because we’ve substituted single-species industrial forests for more diverse natural ones. The only ones we’ve left alone are those in the high mountains of the West and in a few spots like the Adirondacks of New York State, the Great Smoky Mountains, and the Everglades.

http://www.wri.org/applications/maps/flr-atlas/#

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The picture from Asia is much worse, with natural forests surviving only in the remotest parts of Burma and Borneo. Across very large areas, the natural forest has been replaced by cultivated fields or scrub.

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Europe has just about cleared away its natural forest, with the exception of the far north. The white areas fronting the Arctic Ocean are tundra.

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Here, for example, is a bit of Giglio, an island off the west coast of Italy. It once presumably had oak forests, but they’ve been gone more than a thousand years. (If the name Giglio rings a bell, it’s probably because the Costa Concordia, a huge cruise ship, ran aground here in 2012.)

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Here’s a bit of southern Spain showing some of the culprits responsible for deforestation. The photo also shows the government’s effort to remedy the problem, though with pine plantations rather than a natural forest. (Yes, there’s an upside! A flock of 60 goats can clear an acre of heavy brush in a week. Every now and then, you read about a land developer using sheep or goats to do just that. One developer near Ardmore, between Oklahoma City and Dallas, recently said, “Goats are the only thing that will eat everything but grass. They mow it down to the dirt because they get the root system too…. And we’re saving at least a couple of thousand dollars per acre without making a lot of noise or burning any diesel.”) http://www.oklahoman.com/ardmore-developer-uses-goats-to-clear-land-for-housing/article/5557272

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Speaking of plantations, Spain has seen a larger increase in its forest area over the last 25 years than any other country. That’s from a low base, however; there’s a lot more forest in Sweden than Spain will ever see.

https://www.economist.com/news/international/21731821-spread-forests-not-always-popular-it-sure-continue-trees-are-covering

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It’s because of such destruction that many people fight passionately to save natural forests. The most dramatic case is Amazonia. Destruction of this forest would not only eradicate habitat but contribute dramatically to atmospheric CO2.

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Let’s take a little field trip into this forest near Manaus.

Clearance.

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Some of the clearings are for crops, but most are probably for pastures.

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Leave them alone, and these places will gradually return to forest. That’s the case here, with about 15 years of regrowth. It doesn’t take long, but how often do landowners actually walk away and let the trees come back? It’s also unclear how long they will stand before they’re cut again.

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Here’s the area in question. Purple dots indicate areas loss of tree cover.

https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/6/1.25/24.07/ALL/grayscale/forestgain,forest2000?tab=analysis-tab&threshold=30&dont_analyze=true Here’s the same area adding green to show the forest cover. You can see how people are eating into the forest along roads and rivers and, more broadly, along the forest’s southern margin.

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I can search for areas in Brazil where tree cover is increasing, and I’ll find some, just not in the Amazon Basin. Have you noticed how certain topics appear and reappear in these files? The destruction of the Amazon forest appeared briefly in the file on agriculture (“a bit of Brazilian forest on its way to a sawmill”), then again in the file on roads (“Roads, they say, are the enemy of forests”). I try to break this huge subject into discrete topics, but reality is full of overlaps and refuses to cooperate.

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The DRC has a comparable but smaller area of rainforest.

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The DRC is in such disarray that there’s little economic incentive to destroy its forests. The reduction in forest cover, in other words, is less intense here than in countries farther west, including Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana.

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It’s the reverse of the United States, where forest cover is increasing (dark blue, as in the South) much more than it’s being destroyed (pinkish purple, as in the Canadian boreal forest).

https://www.globalforestwatch.org/

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Take any state in the south and you’ll see that many counties over the last 40 years have seen an increase in the volume of pine trees per acre.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thousands-of-southerners-planted-trees-for-retirement-it-didnt-work-1539095250

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In response to wildlife losses, the United States has been setting aside wildlife refuges for over a century. The first was the Pelican Island National Wildlife Reserve, proclaimed in 1903. It’s about 150 miles north of Miami, but don’t bother making the trip: there’s no public access.

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Our system now includes much bigger areas, including the Yukon Delta NWR and the Arctic NWR. Each covers about 30,000 square miles, which is almost 10 times the size of Yellowstone.

http://alaska.fws.gov/nwr/images/map.jpg

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There’s a long way to go if you want to protect the world's biological hotspots, the places with the greatest biodiversity. Soybean farmers are keen on plowing the area of Brazil shown here as the cerrado. (The word means “closed” and refers to the original forest, closed in the sense that the ground was mostly shaded.) Loggers are hard at work in the Equator-straddling rainforest in Indonesia and Malaysia. It’s labelled here as Sundaland.

http://www.conservation.org/where/priority_areas/hotspots/Documents/CI_Biodiversity-Hotspots_2011_Map.pdf

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The loss of forest cover seems to be slowing (or was until the election of President Bolsonaro in 2019) to a nibbling at the forest edge. Up in the far north, there’s a zone of old farmland separated from the forest by zones of clearance from 1989-2008 and 2009-1019.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-tries-novel-fix-for-amazon-deforestation-legalize-squatters-11580486956

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The map doesn’t show how the process advances. But look more closely.

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Here’s the satellite view. See Rorainopolis at the bottom?

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Here it is again, with a spine road, branches as tidy as a comb, farms along the teeth of the comb, and intervening forest remnants, likely to be cleared as soon as the settlers have the means. It’s easy to condemn this process, but is it any different than the pioneer settlement of the United States?

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It’s not exactly Dodge City in 1870, but doesn’t it have some of the same atmosphere? First-generation construction: plain, dusty, cheap.

There’s even a cute little hotel in town, the Pousada Sossego, if you want to visit.

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I mentioned Yellowstone a moment ago. It’s another kind of refuge, a national park. Created in 1872, it was the first such park in the world. For many years it was administered by the Army, but the newly created National Park Service took over in 1916. Thank Woodrow Wilson, who signed the law creating the agency. Here are the parks that existed at that time. There weren’t many. The Grand Canyon at that time was a National Monument, a lower grade reservation created by presidential executive order rather than Congressional legislation. That’s why it’s shown here hatched rather than solid. An Oklahoma legislator had been able to have the Platt National Park created near Sulphur; it has since been demoted to the Chickasaw National Recreation Area. Don’t let this hurt your feelings. If it was a national park, Chickasaw would have ten times more visitors. All the parks of 1916 were in the West, because all were created from the public lands, of which there were none east of the Louisiana Purchase. In other words, creating them was cheap: all Congress had to do was declare them closed to settlement and call them parks.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Natlparks_and_RRs_1916.jpg

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Glad we have them? This is Yosemite’s Bridalveil Fall in an unusually wet spring.

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You’ve got company.

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Here’s a map of the public lands as of about 1970. The national parks (shown in olive green) have been extended to the East, where there are two big ones, the Everglades and Great Smoky Mountains. Because there was no federal land in the East, these parks could not be set aside by either the president or Congress. Instead, they were created through the efforts of philanthropists. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was responsible for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, as well as for the Grand Tetons National Park south of Yellowstone. He probably doesn’t get enough credit for these donations, maybe because the public has not yet quite forgiven his father for creating Standard Oil. The tan color indicates lands controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. This is the agency that until the 1930s was called the General Land Office and which administered the homestead and other land laws. The tan area is what was left over by the 1930s, when the homestead laws were shut down. It’s used primarily by local ranchers whose herds graze on the federal lands under the terms of permits. The land’s also important for mining and recreation. Pink on the map represents Indian reservations.

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/national_atlas_1970/ca000202.jpg

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Another prominent color on the map is light green, indicating national forests, administered by the U.S. Forest Service. Although these forests were created as timber reserves, they are probably more important now for recreation and wildlife protection. Notice that there are some national forests in the East, even though there were no public lands there. Once again, as with the national parks, this is a story of land purchase, though here the purchase was by the government, mostly in the 1930s when land was dead cheap and when FDR thought that buying cutover land was smart. That’s how Oklahoma and Arkansas got the Ouachita National Forest.

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All these lands are important for wildlife preservation, but national parks are also at risk of being visited to death. With the weird exception of 1915, Yellowstone didn’t hit 50,000 visitors annually until after World War I. By the end of World War II, visitor numbers had jumped to over a million, and now they’re pushing 4 million annually. It’s even worse at Great Smoky Mountains, where the park service reluctantly installed a traffic light about 1970, as I recall. It was the first in any national park.

https://irma.nps.gov/Stats/Reports/Park/YELL \

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There are comparable stories overseas. Here are Tanzania’s parks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serengeti_National_Park

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The Serengeti has almost a thousand visitors daily.

http://www.tanzaniaparks.com/corporate_information.html#tourismperformance

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The policy in these parks is that you get out of your car at your own risk. This is Kruger park in South Africa. See anything? Neither did I, and I didn’t get eaten. (The location is the Stevenson-Hamilton Grave Memorial. Stevenson-Hamilton was the first ranger appointed here, and he served from 1902 to 1946.)

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On the other hand, the grass hides all kinds of stuff. Make this out? We’re in the dry season, unlike the last picture.

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Oops.

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Easy to miss.

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See the rocks in the pool?

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Not rocks.

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Hard to believe that they can easily outrun you.

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Invent a caption?

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Lots of these fellows around, too.

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How many of them do you spot? At first maybe none, then one, then two and three. There’s a fourth—and maybe others.

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Very, very few of these.

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It’s a grand place, so long as you’re not a villager worried about elephants destroying your crops and lions killing your livestock. Just be careful: not every animal is this gentle.

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The angle foreshortens the neck, but you get a good look at those long legs.

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Zebra seem especially sociable.

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Parks are not only spectacular but economically vital, which is why most governments are unlikely to try to limit visitors. Tourists to Tanzania in 2010, for example, spent $1.3 billion. Without the parks, most of those visitors wouldn’t have set foot in the country. The U.S. is a little different, because about 110 million acres in the U.S. have been officially designated as wilderness—no roads, no vehicles (even two-wheelers), and no permanent buildings. About half of this wilderness system is in Alaska, and almost none (only three million acres) is in the East. (Light green indicates other federal lands, mostly national forests, national parks, and BLM lands.)

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/wilderness-act/usa-map

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It’s unlikely that protected wilderness is ever going to be more than a sliver of this planet, and so from the point of view of ecosystem health, it would be good if people could not press too hard on everything else. That’s a tall order, though it’s implicit in the idea of sustainable development. Can we even do it? Here’s the Sognefjord, Norway's longest. (It may look like a painting, but it isn’t. There’s just a bit of morning mist.)

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There’s a small ferry across the fjord, and it’s taking a half-dozen visitors to see an old church, the Borgund stave church, completed about 1200. Notice the dragon-head gables. Viking stuff. Think the forest behind the church is natural? Not a prayer. The people building the church needed timber, closer the better.

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Life was unbelievably tough, which is why many Norwegians packed up to cross the Atlantic. By then, potatoes had arrived in Norway. They came about 1800. Before then, life was even harder: it was all about rye and hay—and leaves collected to supplement the hay. Did I mention chopping firewood to keep warm?

Things are better now: farmers here even grow commercial raspberries.

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The old distinctive cattle breeds are maintained.

Life is easier in other ways, too. Like perfectly paved roads, courtesy of Norway’s oil revenues. Ironic: a dirty industry makes life better. (The Norwegian government announced in 2017 that it would drop oil and gas stocks from its trillion-dollar sovereign-wealth fund, but it wouldn’t stop producing oil itself.)

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People no longer get home over crazy wooden walkways along rock ledges. I’m not sure how common these things were, but they were common enough to have a name in Norwegian: gald.

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I’m reminded by these last few pictures that there’s something else I’ve sidestepped in this course. It’s historical geography, the ways in which all the things we’ve talked about have changed over the millennia. Big topic, but I suppose we’ve done enough. For now let’s remember that while the Sognefjord seems pristinely beautiful on a clear autumn day, human beings have a hard time being environmentally gentle while also producing the stuff they need or just want. After all, I’m on a ferry with a diesel engine. Flying in from JFK to Oslo, I added about 1,500 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere, roundtrip. Here we are right now, merrily scrolling on Canvas, which is hosted by Amazon Web Services. We’re keeping a server farm busy somewhere running on electricity from somewhere—probably not solar or wind power. Every click makes Jeff Besos a tiny bit richer. It makes me richer, too, since I’m pretty sure my pension funds invest in Amazon. Americans are congenitally optimistic, convinced that they can find a solution to every problem. Maybe we will find a satisfactory way of dealing with climate change, pollution, and biological destruction, but the jury’s out and not coming back soon. Reminds me of the famous old story, not quite historically accurate but too amusing to be forgotten. Richard Nixon asks Mao’s right-hand man to assess the impact of the French Revolution. Zhou Enlai replies that it’s too soon to tell.