Tag: conservation

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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…I have spent 63 years trying to cultivate hope, but my thoughts wander in this direction too often these days. Why protect the wildflowers that grow in our yard when all the emerald yards nearby are drenched in herbicides and when their purely ornamental shrubs are drenched in insecticides? Why trouble myself to keep the stock-tank ponds filled with water when every spring there are fewer and fewer tree frogs who might need a nursery for their eggs? Why turn off the lights to protect nocturnal creatures when all around me the houses are lit up like airport runways? Why bother to plant saplings when a builder will only cut them down later, after my husband and I are gone, to make room for yet another foolishly large house that glows in the dark? …

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying? …

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others…

In saving the leaves for the moths and the fireflies and the dark-eyed juncos, I am still trying. And in the trying perhaps I can save my own soul.

— Margaret Renkl, from “How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark” (NY Times, December 9, 2024)

Miracle. All of it.

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although all things
are present, a

fact a day a
bird that warps the
arithmetic of per-
fection with its

arc, passing again &
again in the evening
air, in the pre-
vailing wind, making no

mistake—yr in-
difference is yr
principal beauty
the mind says all the

time—I hear it—I
hear it every-
where. The earth
said remember

me. I am the
earth it said. Re-
member me.

— Jorie Graham, from “Poem” in Swarm (Ecco Press, 2000). (via Thoughts)

Notes:

  • DK Photo: Gull @ Twilight. October 25, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”

Guilty…

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One evening in the spring of 2015, I filmed a 15-second video out the window of an Amtrak train as it rattled across the barren flatlands of southern New Jersey. There’s nothing artful or interesting about the clip. All you see is a slanted rush of white and yellow lights. I can’t remember why I made it. Until a few days ago, I had never even watched it. And yet for the past nine years, that video has been sitting on a server in a data center somewhere, silently and invisibly taking a very small toll on our planet…

Data centers and data-transmission networks now account for as much as 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption…

With other forms of consumption that are bad for the planet, we all understand that the main burden of responsibility falls on the big players—industry, government, the rich and powerful. But we also acknowledge that everyone else has a part to play too. I stop running the water while I’m brushing my teeth. I carry groceries in a burlap tote. I turn off the lights whenever I step out of my apartment, regardless of whether I’m leaving for five minutes or a week…

Every time we make a new video or send an email, or post a photo of our latest meal, it’s like turning on a small light bulb that’ll never be turned off…We’ve got to think about whether it’s really bad to carry on with our current digital practices.”In other words: To help save the planet, should we be using less data? Given how much of modern life depends on megabytes and teraflops, the answer could be a key facet to living nobly in the AI age…

By my estimate, following a formula included in a recent research paper, storing my train video has created about 100 grams of CO2 over the past decade. At first blush, this is effectively nothing: less than one three-100ths of a percent of the yearly CO2 emissions from a pet cat. But data slough off us like skin cells. Last year, I sent 960 videos to the cloud. Because phones record videos in much higher quality these days, most of these clips are larger than that 15-second video from 2015. And like many other people, I have a sprawling digital footprint; many of my stored videos have been either sent to or received from at least one other person who is also storing them on one or two cloud platforms…

We just need to start to think around the impact of every button we press ‘Send’ or ‘Upload’ on,” Jackson told me. As a first step, he suggests going back through your phone and computer and getting rid of all the data that you’ll never use again. (The industry term for such detritus is dark data; much of Jackson’s research focuses on teaching companies to reuse old information instead of making new bytes.) That’s easier said than done. When I was looking through old videos for this story, I found many clips that sparked cherished memories. None of these videos was particularly fascinating. But a data center had conserved the data for so long that watching them now transported me, joyfully, to a simpler time. Deciding whether to scrap any of these is not the same as deciding whether to turn a light bulb off when you step out of a room. “The light bulb, you can just come back and switch it back on,” Jackson admitted. “Once you’ve gotten rid of data, it’s gone.” Even my feelings about the train video—which did not spark any fond memories—remain unresolved. For now, it’s still up there…

In a report published in 2021, Berners-Lee and a team of researchers found that if the information-and-communications sector is going to match the reductions necessary to keep global warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, it will have to cut its carbon emissions by 42 percent by the end of this decade, and 72 percent by the end of the next…’

More fundamentally, maybe we don’t need to turn everything into data. If I put down my phone the next time I’m on a train, it won’t save the planet. But I’ll be looking out the window with my own eyes, creating a memory that emits no carbon at all.

— Arthur Holland Michel, from “Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever.” (The Atlantic, July 5, 2024)

Lightly Child, Lightly. The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

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No matter the circumstance, human suffering matters. Our attending to it matters. Acts of tenderness are not morally trivial. […]

For as Naomi Klein has reminded us, our demise isn’t all or nothing, at least not for the next few centuries. “There are degrees to how bad this thing can get,” Klein says. “Literally, there are degrees.” As we struggle to figure out how to notch back the degrees, so as to mitigate the suffering that a warming planet is going to bring, we also need to figure out forms of relationality—both to ourselves and to each other—that won’t make things worse.

By the time I finished 10:04, I felt like I understood some options: not being ashamed of the desire to make a living doing what we love, while also daring to imagine “art before or after capital”; paying as intense attention to our collectivity as to our individuality; demanding a politics based on more than reproductive futurism, without belittling the daily miracle of conception, nor the labor and mysterious promise of childbearing and -rearing; attempting to listen seriously to others, especially those who differ profoundly from ourselves, no matter how precontaminated the attempts; spending time reading and writing poetry; and more. Far from despair, I felt flooded with the sense that everything mattered, from meticulous descriptions of individual works of art to kissing the forehead of a passed-out intern to analyzing our political language to documenting the sensual details of our daily lives to bagging dried mangoes to the creation of the book I was holding in my hand to my deciding to spend time writing a review of it. “The earth is beautiful beyond all change,” Lerner repeats in 10:04, quoting the poet William Bronk. The inspired and inspiring accomplishment of his novel makes me want to say that sometimes, art is too. And maybe—if incredibly—so might we be, ourselves.

— Maggie Nelson, from “Beyond All Change. On Ben Lerner’s 10:04” in “Like Love: Essays and Conversations..” (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

Notes:

  • Photo: DK 5:11 am this morning at Cove Island Park. For more photos from this morning, click here for birds and here for landscape.
  • Thursday Posts inspired by Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
  • Book Review from The Guardian: “Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship“

Guess.What.Day.It.Is? (Back by popular demand)

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Cows, here and across much of Africa, have been the most important animal for eons — the foundation of economies, diets, traditions. But now grazable land is shrinking. Water sources are drying up. A three-year drought in the Horn of Africa that ended last year killed 80 percent of the cows in this part of Kenya and shattered the livelihoods of so many people…

The global camel population has doubled over the last 20 years, something the U.N. agency for agriculture and investment attributes partly to the animal’s suitability amid climate change. In times of hardship, camels produce more milk than cows. Many cite an adage: The cow is the first animal to die in a drought; the camel is the last…

But among mammals, the camel is almost singularly equipped to handle extremes. Camels can go two weeks without water, as opposed to a day or two for a cow. They can lose 30 percent of their body weight and survive, one of the highest thresholds for any large animal. Their body temperatures fluctuate in sync with daily climate patterns. When they pee, their urine trickles down their legs, keeping them cool. When they lie down, their leathery knees fold into pedestals that work to prop much of their undersides just above the ground, allowing cooling air to pass through.

One recently published paper, perhaps straying from science to reverence, called them a “miracle species.”

— Chico Harlan, from “How Climate Change is Turning Camels into the New Cows” (Washington Post, April 17, 2024)

Read more here.

Notes:

  • Post Title: Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again.