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February 19 - March 3, 2021
ago. Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future.
The Chinese raise the famous four together in ponds and have been doing so since the thirteenth century. The practice has been called “the first documented example of integrated polyculture in human history.”
The four species we lump together as "asian carp"
the number of free-swimming carp in China has crashed even as pond-raised populations have soared.
“So that’s the context of all this: How are we going to get rid of this heavy chemical usage and still have some sort of control? And that probably has as much to do with the importation of carp as anything. These fish were biological controls.”
The process is known as “barrier defense,” and it’s supposed to prevent large carp from reaching the electric barriers. If electrocution were a fail-safe deterrent, then barrier defense wouldn’t be necessary, but no one I spoke to, and this included officials like Shea, at the Army Corps of Engineers, seemed eager to see the technology put to the test.
“North America has the most diverse assemblage of mussels of any place in the world,” Duane Chapman, a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who specializes in Asian carp, told me. “Many species are endangered or already extinct. And now we’ve essentially dumped the world’s most efficient freshwater molluscivore on some of the most endangered mollusks.”
The two great basins abut each other, but they are—or were—distinct aquatic worlds. There was no way for a fish (or a mollusk or a crustacean) to climb out of one drainage system and into the other. When Chicago solved its sewage problem by digging the Sanitary and Ship Canal, a portal opened up, and the two aquatic realms were connected. For most of the twentieth century, this wasn’t much of an issue; the canal, loaded with Chicago’s waste, was too toxic to serve as a viable route. With the passage of the Clean Water Act and the work of groups like the Friends of the Chicago River, conditions
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It was a lot easier to imagine changing the river once again—with electricity and bubbles and noise and anything else anyone could dream up—than changing the lives of the people around it.
“Humans know how to overfish things,” Irons told me. “So the question is: How can we use this to our advantage?”
Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, at this point, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.
Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted: “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe. And so a new round of public-works projects is under way. If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.
Because the Mississippi is always dropping sediment, it’s always on the move. As the sediment builds up, it impedes the flow, and so the river goes in search of faster routes to the sea. Its most dramatic leaps are called “avulsions.” Over the last seven thousand years, the river has avulsed six times, and each time it has set about laying down a new bulge of land.
By the 1730s, slave-built levees stretched along both banks of the Mississippi for a distance of nearly fifty miles. These early levees, made of earth reinforced with timber, failed frequently. But they established a pattern that endures to this day. Since the city wasn’t going to move to suit the river, the river would have to be made to stay put. With each flood, the levees were improved—built higher and wider and longer. By the War of 1812, they extended for more than a hundred and fifty miles.
Here, in black and white, was Louisiana’s land-loss dilemma. In the days before floodgates and spillways, a super-wet spring like that of 2011 would have sent the Mississippi and its distributaries surging over their banks. The floodwaters would have wreaked havoc, but they would have spread tens of millions of tons of sand and clay across thousands of square miles of countryside. The new sediment would have formed a fresh layer of soil and, in this way, countered subsidence.
When the Mississippi bursts through its levees, be they natural or man-made, the opening is called a “crevasse.” For most of New Orleans’s history, the term was a synonym for disaster.
drainage system, like its world-class levee system, is a sort of Trojan solution. Since marshy soils compact through dewatering, pumping water out of the ground exacerbates the very problem that needs to be solved. The more water that’s pumped, the faster the city sinks. And the more it sinks, the more pumping is required. “Pumping is a big part of the issue,” Kolker told me, as we climbed back onto our sweaty bicycles. “It accelerates subsidence, so it becomes a positive feedback loop.”
Retreat might make geophysical sense, but politically it was a nonstarter.
But what looks like a defense from one angle can look like a trap from another.
As I wandered past empty homes plastered with No Trespassing signs, I could see the economic logic of the island’s “planned deconstruction.” At the same time, the injustice was pretty glaring. The Biloxi and the Choctaw had come to Louisiana after they’d been dispossessed of ancestral lands, farther east. The Isle de Jean Charles Band had been able to live peacefully on the island only because it was too isolated and commercially irrelevant for anyone else to take an interest in. The band had had no say in the dredging of the oil channels or in the layout of the Morganza to the Gulf project.
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The Louisiana delta is now often referred to by hydrologists as a “coupled human and natural system,” or, for short, a CHANS. It’s an ugly term—another nomenclatural hairball—but there’s no simple way to talk about the tangle we’ve created. A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force; it’s no longer exactly a river, though. It’s hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone.
What was different in the nineteenth century was the sheer pace of the violence. If earlier losses had unfolded gradually—so gradually that not even the participants would have been aware of what was going on—the advent of technologies like the railroad and the repeating rifle turned extinction into a readily observable phenomenon. In the United States, and indeed around the world, it became possible to watch creatures vanish in real time. “For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun,” Aldo Leopold noted in an essay commemorating the passenger pigeon’s passing.
Whole ecosystems are threatened, and the losses have started to feed on themselves.
I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.
Until there was something that could be set against it—technology, art, consciousness—there was only “nature,” and so no real use for the category. It’s also probably true that by the time “nature” was invented, culture was already enmeshed in it. Twenty thousand years ago, wolves were domesticated. The result was a new species (or, by some accounts, subspecies) as well as two new categories: the “tame” and the “wild.” With the domestication of wheat, around ten thousand years ago, the plant world split. Some plants became “crops” and others “weeds.”
Coyotes profit from human disturbance but skirt areas dense with human activity; they have been dubbed “misanthropic synanthropes.”
But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.
There is no exact tally of how many species, like the pupfish, are now conservation-reliant. At a minimum, they number in the thousands. As for the forms of assistance they rely on, these, too, are legion. They include, in addition to supplemental feeding and captive breeding: double-clutching, headstarting, enclosures, exclosures, managed burns, chelation, guided migration, hand-pollination, artificial insemination, predator-avoidance training, and conditioned taste aversion. Every year, this list grows. “Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new,” observed Thoreau.
As the environmental historian J. R. McNeill has observed, paraphrasing Marx: “Men make their own biosphere, but they do not make it just as they please.”
“I’m a realist,” Gates told me at one point. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.” People could either “assist” corals in coping with the change they’d brought about, or they could watch them die. Anything else, in her view, was wishful thinking. “A lot of people want to go back to something,” she said. “They think, if we just stop doing things, maybe the reef will come back to what it was.
“In the coral city there is no waste,” Richard C. Murphy, a marine biologist who worked with Cousteau, has written. “The by-product of every organism is a resource for another.”
Since no one knows how many creatures depend on reefs, no one can say how many would be threatened by their collapse; clearly, though, the number is enormous. It’s estimated that one out of every four creatures in the oceans spends at least part of its life on a reef.
investigating ways it might intercede on the reef’s behalf. These included: deploying underwater robots to reseed damaged reefs, developing some kind of ultrathin film to shade reefs, pumping deep water to the surface to provide corals with heat relief, and cloud-brightening. This last possibility would involve spraying tiny droplets of salt water into the air to create a kind of artificial fog. The salty mist would, according to theory at least, encourage the formation of light-colored clouds, which would reflect sunlight back out to space, counteracting global warming. Wachenfeld told me
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“It’s just absolute hubris and so arrogant to think that we can survive without everything else,” Hardisty said. “We come from this planet.
it was hubris to imagine that people could drive the Great Barrier Reef to collapse without suffering any consequences. But wasn’t it just another kind of hubris to imagine “all-of-reef-scale interventions?”
“If we can extend the life of the reef by twenty, thirty years, that might be just enough for the world to get its act together on emissions, and it might make the difference between having nothing and having some sort of functional reef,” Hardisty told me. “I mean, it’s really sad that we have to talk like that. But that’s where we are now.”
Along the way, something curious happened. In the early phase of the invasion, the toads were advancing at the rate of about six miles a year. A few decades later, they were moving at twelve miles a year. By the time they hit Middle Point, they’d sped up to thirty miles a year. When researchers measured the toads at the invasion front, they found out why. The toads on the front lines had significantly longer legs than the toads back in Queensland. And this trait was heritable.
While carp are a problem in the United States because nothing eats them, cane toads are a menace in Australia because just about everything eats them.
Research on quolls suggests that the marsupials can be trained to steer clear of cane toads. Feed them toad “sausages” laced with an emetic, and they will associate toads with nausea and learn to avoid them. Detox toads, according to Tizard, would make an even better training tool: “If they’re eaten by a predator, the predator will get sick but not die, and it will go, ‘I’m never eating a toad again.’ ”
The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing.
Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these—along with thousands of other species—are goners. The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?
The reasoning behind “genetic rescue” is the sort responsible for many a world-altering screwup. (See, for example, Asian carp and cane toads.) The history of biological interventions designed to correct for previous biological interventions reads like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, in which the Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is asked to clean up after himself: Do you know how he did it? WITH MOTHER’S WHITE DRESS! Now the tub was all clean, But her dress was a mess!
Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it…We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.” Kingsnorth has also observed, “Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Sometimes it is the other way around.”
So much have we altered the atmosphere that one out of every three molecules of CO2 loose in the air today was put there by people.
In either case, the math is punishing. To stay under 2°C, global emissions would have to fall nearly to zero within the next several decades. To stave off 1.5°C, they’d have to drop most of the way toward zero within a single decade. This would entail, for starters: revamping agricultural systems, transforming manufacturing, scrapping gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, and replacing most of the world’s power plants.
self-replicating machines could satisfy the world’s energy needs, and, more or less at the same time, clean up the mess humans had created by burning fossil fuels. They called the machines “auxons,” from the Greek αυξάνω, meaning “grow.” The auxons would be powered by solar panels and, as they multiplied, they’d produce more solar panels, which they’d assemble using elements, like silicon and aluminum, extracted from ordinary dirt. The expanding collection of panels would produce ever more power, at a rate that would increase exponentially.
Reforestation, when combined with underground injection, yields a technique that’s become known as BECCS (pronounced “becks”), short for “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.”
With BECCS the idea is to plant trees (or some other crop) that can pull carbon from the air. The trees are then burned to produce electricity and the resulting CO2 is captured from the smokestack and shoved underground. (The world’s first BECCS pilot project launched in 2019, at a power plant in northern England that runs off wood pellets.)
“All plants need CO2,” Ruser observed. “And if you supply more to them, they become stronger.”
“What a volcano does is put sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere,” Frank Keutsch said. “And that gets oxidized on the scale of weeks to sulfuric acid. “Sulfuric acid,” he continued, “is a very sticky molecule. And it starts making particulate matter—concentrated sulfuric acid droplets—usually smaller than one micron. These aerosols stay in the stratosphere on the timescale of a few years. And they scatter sunlight back to space.” The result is lower temperatures, fantastic sunsets, and, on occasion, famine.
The premise behind solar geoengineering—or, as it’s sometimes more soothingly called, “solar radiation management”—is that if volcanoes can cool the world, people can, too. Throw a gazillion reflective particles into the stratosphere and less sunlight will reach the planet. Temperatures will stop rising—or at least not rise as much—and disaster will be averted.
