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“In An Extinction Event, You’ve Got A New Playing Board”

March 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Michael Tennesen is a glass-half-full kind of guy. The author of the newly published The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man tells Lindsay Abrams of Salon that something may extinct humans (his guess: overpopulation), but it’s not that big a deal. Maybe something less shitty will come along and replace us.

A tangent before the interview excerpt: I’ve heard a million times that no one reads anymore and that Amazon has destroyed publishing and that books are dead, but have you noticed how one great title after another keeps emrging, almost more than it’s possible to keep up with? Something there doesn’t compute.

The interview excerpt:

Question:

A lot of us look at these studies about pollution and climate change and extinction on a very day-by-day, headline basis. What was the value for you of stepping back and taking a more pulled-back, planetary perspective on these issues?

Michael Tennesen:

I was influenced by a paper that Anthony Barnosky from the University of California at Berkeley wrote, about his idea that we are entering a mass extinction event. People who study life on Earth think that extinction has a dual side: it could be a catastrophe or it could be an opportunity. The comet that fell out of the sky at the end of the Cretaceous period knocked out the dinosaurs, but made way for mammals and man.

So I’m trying to look at what can happen next. And to get an idea of what can happen next, I kind of had to pull back and look at the history of life on Earth with the idea: how does life recover from catastrophe? What things can you see in both events that might possibly be repeated in the future? I wanted to look at the whole concept. There was a book by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, where he talked about what it would be like tomorrow if man disappeared and how long it would take for man’s infrastructure to come down, for New York to fall. I just wanted to look at it from more of a reality standpoint: What would the biology be like in such an event?

Question:

When you’re looking back at some of these lessons we can learn from past mass extinctions, what are some of the most important things you came across, that we should be paying attention to?

Michael Tennesen:

If you look at the past, the driver of four out of the five mass extinctions has been carbon dioxide. I went to Guadalupe National Park and took a hike with the national park biologist Jonena Hearst to Capitan Reef, which was just this explosion of life that existed back in the Permian Era, 250 million years ago, just before the Permian extinction. It showed just how susceptible life is to chemicals in the environment, and the litany of things that was going on during the Permian extinction, which was the greatest extinction we’ve ever had: 90 percent of life was knocked out of the ocean; 70 to 75 percent on land. The high CO2 content and greenhouse gases and other problems — sulfur dioxide release, major changes in the ocean currents — these are some of the things we’re dealing with now. I don’t know if we’re going to be heading into that massive of an event, but there are lessons there. A lot of people want to go, “Well, what’s CO2? What’s the big deal?” It’s 400 parts per million. That’s a lot.

Question:

As you said, there is sort of a more optimistic way of looking at mass extinction, because there are some positive potential outcomes…

Michael Tennesen:

In an extinction event, you’ve got a new playing board. I went up to Mt. St. Helens and looked at the land around that volcano. They’ve actually separated a portion of the volcanic area as a natural experiment to see how life would come back. Nature actually does a pretty fabulous job pretty quickly.•

Tags: Alan Weisman, Anthony Barnosky, Jonena Hearst, Lindsay Abrams, Michael Tennesen

“One Is Good. Two Is Enough.”

January 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ayatollah Khomeini’s prayers for a massive army of young men to combat Iraq were answered all too well. His urging for fertile females to reproduce with no pregnant pauses spurred Iran’s population to swell to 50 million by 1986. Once the war ended, what was the country to do with all those working-age people who needed jobs, food and clean water? An excerpt follows from Alan Weisman’s Countdown, republished at Matter, which looks at family-planning efforts inside a theocracy.

__________________________________

Secret meetings commenced with the Supreme Leader to discuss the population blessing that was now a population crisis. Years later, demographer and population historian Abbasi-Shavazi would interview the 1987 planning and budget director, and learn that he had met with the president’s cabinet and explained what excessive human numbers portended for the nation’s future. To feed, educate, house, and employ everyone would far outstrip their capacity, as Iran was exhausted and nearly bankrupt. There were so many children that primary schools had to move from double to triple shifts. The planning and budget director and the minister of health presented an initiative to reverse demographic course and institute a nationwide family-planning campaign. It was approved by a single vote.

A month after the August 1988 ceasefire finally ended the war, Iran’s religious leaders, demographers, budget experts, and health minister gathered for a summit conference on population in the eastern city of Mashhad, one of holiest cities for the world’s Shi’ite Muslims, whose name means “place of martyrdom.” The weighty symbolism was clear.

“The report of the demographers and budget officers was given to Khomeini,” Dr. Shamshiri recalls. The economic prognosis for their overpopulated nation must have been very dire, given the Ayatollah’s contempt for economists, whom he often referred to as donkeys.

“After he heard it, he said, ‘Do what is necessary.’ ”

It meant convincing 50 million Iranians of the opposite of what they’d heard for the past eight years: that their patriotic duty was to be forcibly fruitful. Now, a new slogan was strung from banners, repeated on billboards, plastered on walls, broadcast on television, and preached at Friday prayers by the same mullahs who once enjoined them to produce a great Islamic generation by making more babies:

One is good. Two is enough.

The next year, 1989, Imam Khomeini died. The same prime minister who had hailed fertility rates approaching nine children per woman as God-sent now launched a new national family-planning program. Unlike China, the decision of how many was left to the parents. No law forbade them from having ten if they chose. But no one did. Instead, what happened next was the most stunning reversal of population growth in human history. Twelve years later, the Iranian minister of health would accept the United Nations Population Award for the most enlightened and successful approach to family planning the world had ever seen.

If it all was voluntary, how did Iran do it?•

Tags: Alan Weisman, Ayatollah Khomeini

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

September 21, 2013 in Misc. | Permalink

10 search-engine keyphrase searches bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

Tags: Alan Weisman, Kenneth R. Weis

“Cities Will Start To Crumble Faster Than We Imagine”

May 5, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The best science book I read during the aughts was Alan Weisman’s 2007 theoretical tome, The World Without Us. Weisman, a journalist not a scientist, imagines what would happen to all we’ve built if human beings suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth. What would become of oil wells and subways and bridges and apartment buildings if they were untended? Weisman’s findings are fascinating.

mmmmm

An excerpt about New York City sans people from the book: “In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycles move indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate. Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract; joints between walls and rooflines separate. Where they do, rain leaks in, bolts rust, and facing pops off, exposing insulation. If the city hasn’t burned yet, it will now. Collectively, New York architecture isn’t as combustible as, say, San Francisco’s incendiary rows of clapboard Victorians. But with no firemen to answer the call, a dry lightning strike that ignites a decade of dead branches and leaves piling up in Central Park will spread flames through the streets. Within two decades, lightning rods have begun to rust and snap, and roof fires leap among buildings, entering panel offices, filled with paper fuel. Gas lines ignite with a rush of flames that blows out windows. Rain and snow blow in, and soon even poured concrete floors are freezing, thawing, and starting to buckle. Burnt insulation and charred wood add nutrients to Manhattan’s growing soil cap. Native Virginia creeper and poison ivy claw at walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air pollution. Red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons nest in increasingly skeletal high-rise structures.”

Tags: Alan Weisman, Jon Stewart