See? Even the economists are doing it.

Encouraging responsible economic growth, that is. In the May 28 edition of Business Week, Clayton M. Christensen (professor at Harvard B-School) and Scott D. Anthony (president of Innosight, a consulting firm) urge managers to shift away from paradigms that maximize profits for shareholders in the short term, to ones that focus on responsibly growing the companies in the long term.

Christensen and Anthony advise managers to tell people who hold their company's shares:
"You are investors and speculators, not shareholders, and you temporarily find yourselves holding the securities of our company. You are responsible for maximizing the returns on your investments. Our responsibility is to maximize the long-term value of this company. We will therefore act in the interest of those whose interests coincide with our long-term prospects, namely employees, customers, the communities in which our employees live, and the minority of investors who plan to hold our securities for several years."

They continue:
Well-intentioned, smart managers are systematically destroying companies by failing to take actions they know are right in the long term. . . managers should find ways to reward investors and stakeholders who want innovation, not plunder.

Kudos to them.

Development in the Black Hills

I grew up in the Black Hills of western South Dakota, which I think is one of the loveliest places on Earth. Every time I go back for a visit, some piece of forest or field has been sliced up to make way for a new strip mall or housing development. Even worse is Wal-Mart, which paved over a significant chunk of undeveloped land in the 1990s to open their first store in my hometown, only to have abandoned it a few years ago to smother an even bigger area on the other side of town with a Super Wal-Mart and a sea of parking lot. Their original building remains an empty eyesore for which they, of course, bear no responsibility.

The unchecked development in the Black Hills is a difficult problem to tackle for two reasons. First, with only about 250,000 people spread over an area of about 4,500 square miles, open space seems relatively abundant in the Black Hills, and not like the precious commodity that it is. Second, the local (and national) political and legal structure is such that economic development is king, but one that doesn't answer to the costs it imposes on its communities, citizens, and the environment.

First, the seeming abundance of open space. I currently live in the DC area where space is anything but abundant. I've see how the sprawl of big box stores and cookie cutter condos has eaten up pretty much every open space for miles and miles in any direction. Even though sprawl in the DC area has caused thick smog, massive traffic back-ups on the Beltway, and long commutes for many residents, development still continues mostly unmanaged. People here seem to be just starting to realize that more compact, controlled development might make more sense environmentally, and even economically. Although the Black Hills are a long way from being as heavily developed as DC, I'm worried that, like in DC, lawmakers and developers won't recognize the value of controlled development until everything has already been paved over.

Second, the dominance of economic development. The local Planning & Zoning Board puts economic development above all else, including the environment, aesthetics, and even future economic development. Spearfish is a pretty town, with lots of trees and sandstone buildings on Main Street, but you wouldn't know it until you were well into the downtown. Coming into Spearfish on I-90 from the east, you'd pass dozens industrial-looking, aluminum-sided buildings, housing everything from a chainsaw store to a credit card company to a beauty salon. In fact, pretty much the whole stretch of I-90 between Spearfish and Rapid City has become littered with ugly, cheap-looking businesses that obscure the true beauty of the area. A large part of the economy of Spearfish comes from tourism and tourists come to the area for its untouched natural beauty. If we junk up the area, who's going to want to visit?

I'm not proposing we halt development. I'm saying we need to plan development with a more long-term vision in mind, keep it more compact and within city limits (except for farms), encourage businesses to move into empty existing buildings, and establish building codes that take aesthetics and the environment into account. We also need to consider the costs of development to the community and its environment. In that way, we can keep the area growing and beautiful.

Still relevant almost 60 years later

I'm reading A Sand County Almanac this week. It's my dad's copy, which has a short poem penciled in the front to my dad from an old girlfriend of his. But what I really wanted to share is this paragraph written by Aldo Leopold in 1948 in the introduction.

Our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

And from the Center for a New American Dream, a page of ideas on living better, with less stuff.

http://www.newdream.org/live/

A step towards socialism: Land redistribution in Venezuela

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is taking privately owned idle farmland and creating farming cooperatives, as part of his plans to reduce the amount of food Venezuela imports and to construct a "socialist fatherland."

So far, opinions of the redistribution are predictably mixed, or at least you'd think so by reading New York Times. The landowners and the wealthy naturally hate it, but Chavez remains popular on the whole. The landowners make up a small minority of the total population (around 3% own 77% of the land, according to Greg Palast for commondreams.org), a fraction that is greatly overrepresented in the New York Times article, which offers four quotations by former landowners, and only two short quotations by co-op members.

The NYT article also reports that the plan for Venezuela to grow more of its own food may not be working and cites recent sugar shortages, even though a few paragraphs earlier in the article, it states that the co-ops are replanting sugar cane fields with crops that are more suitable for the area, like corn and manioc. The Times does not comment on whether production of those crops has increased or not.

Surprisingly, the Washington Post paints a clearer, if somewhat reluctant, picture of just how popular Chavez is in Venezuela, citing his "overwhelming re-election" in December and the modest economic headway he's made on reducing poverty and creating jobs.

I'll be interested in seeing not only how this story unfolds, but also in how the media chooses to cover it.

More Talk, Less Action!

On Monday, President Bush gave a speech in the Rose Garden about reducing gasoline use in this country. Funny how "it's important the president hear from all sides on this in a reasoned and deliberative fashion," according to Bob Greco of the American Petroleum Institute, in this interview from Marketplace on American Public Media. Considering all sides, thinking things through, and moving cautiously have never seemed to be priorities for President Bush before.

Lots of gems on the speech in this piece by CNN Student News. A few years ago, you'd rarely hear this kind of criticism of the president on CNN. But now that he's an unpopular president, they're all over it. My how CNN has changed its tack.

(CNN Student News) -- May 15, 2007

Transcript

First Up: Fuel-Saving Drive

ELIAS: First up today, President Bush is looking for ways to help the environment. He wants new rules for fuel efficiency and vehicle emissions in place by the time he leaves office in January 2009. So he's ordering several agencies to start working on the plans to make it happen. CNN's Ed Henry was at the White House for the president's announcement Monday, and he talked to Wolf Blitzer about it afterward.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ED HENRY, CNN REPORTER: Clearly there's a legal reason: the Supreme Court ruling last month that the federal government has to regulate these greenhouse gases. But clearly also a political reason: the White House nervous about the fact that the national average for gasoline has now climbed above $3 per gallon. Also in some areas it's climbing up close to $4 a gallon. That's worrisome. But it sounded like more talk from the president today in the Rose Garden, really no new action.

The president signing an executive order that merely directs the relevant cabinet secretaries to take the "first steps" towards reducing gasoline consumption, but actually not doing anything to reduce that consumption. The president kept using the word "action" in the Rose Garden, as if that would make it seem like there was some new action. But his own press secretary Tony Snow admitted that in the short term, this will do nothing to help consumers.

U.S. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The American people expect common sense and they expect action. The policies I've laid out have got a lot of common sense to them. It makes sense to do what I proposed, and we're taking action by taking the first steps toward rules that will make our economy stronger, our environment cleaner and our nation more secure for generations to come.

TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: No, it's not going to have an immediate effect. On the other hand, if you take a look at what the president has been proposing for a long time, this president had proposed an energy policy upon taking office and it took years to get Congress to act on it.

HENRY: Now, the White House clearly trying to shift the blame to Congress there. But up until January of course it was a Republican Congress, Wolf.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: So what's the chance, what's the likelihood that Congress will pass legislation that the president will sign into law that will have a significant impact?

HENRY: Well, very little chance right now. The president saying today that he's directing his cabinet secretaries to use as a starting point his 20-in-10 plan. That's the plan to cut federal consumption by 20 percent in the next 10 years. When you know, he unveiled it in January in his State of the Union, the last four months there has been very little action. Something to pay attention to: The president in the Rose Garden today said he wants his cabinet secretaries to deal with this by the end of 2008 in terms of the legal maneuvering and what not. What's significant about that? By 2008, the end there, we'll have a new president-elect. So it really looks like he's kicking this to the next administration.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Apple and Greenpeace

In response to being ranked dead last on a Greenpeace list of the environmental friendliness of 14 electronics companies, Steve Jobs posted a letter on the Apple site about the company's green plans and current policies.

It's better than nothing, but it would still be nice if they made it easier for people to get products repaired, especially iPods. Right now, once an iPod stops working or the battery dies, you either have to figure out how to fix it or change the battery yourself, or get a new one because Apple won't service them.

And in the Greenpeace response to Jobs' letter, they note that while Apple is phasing many toxic chemicals out of their products and offering recycling to customers in the US, the recycling program may not extend to people in other countries and the company still has plenty of room for improvement.

Bike to Work Week

This week is bike to work week around the country and this Friday (May 18) is Bike to Work Day. I've started riding my bike to work a few times a week. It's about 5 miles each way and it only takes me about 10 minutes longer than it would to drive and find parking. The ride is nice and I've seen a few fawns and even a bright yellow tortoise, but what I like most is how much more energy I have and how much more focused I feel on those days. Today I didn't ride and I feel like I'm still not totally awake.

More info

Info on the DC area Bike to Work Day

Re: Planktos to dump iron around the Galapagos

wdk posted the comment below in response to my post about Planktos dumping iron near the Galapagos and I thought it was worth posting for a couple of reasons.

First, I suspected that it was a generic form letter the company posts to blogs critical of their policy. A quick Google search confirmed my suspicions. You can find the same comment, pretty much word for word, after articles questioning Planktos's plans on RealClimate and on Grist.

Second, I'd like to respond to comments. Mine (in white) are below the comments from wdk (in grey).

Finally, the following sites provide more in-depth and scientific analyses of the plan to dump iron in the oceans than I can.

ETC Group

Blog about chemical and ecological effects of iron fertilization

Real Climate

As a Planktos member, would like to assure J that our initial pilot project will be conducted over 300 miles west of the Galapagos islands and will in no way affect that area. The Galapagos waters have their own coastal shelf iron sources and thus harbor one of the healthiest ecosystems in the Pacific. It is the open ocean or pelagic waters out to the west and north that are increasingly anemic and lifeless and in need of a little help.

While 300 miles from the coast of the Galapagos may seem like it's far enough to be a safe distance, the ocean is a highly interconnected system. Oil from the Exxon Valdez spill traveled over 600 miles. Admittedly, oil, which floats on the surface of water and is more susceptible to being blown by wind, is not perfectly analagous to iron. But the oil spill was about 11 million gallons of oil (roughly 37,400 tons, converted here), where Planktos is planning to dump several hundred thousand tons (see below).

Even if the iron doesn't make it to the Galapagos ecosystem, the ecosystem where the dumping occurs is still valuable and not some giant lab to test out what is as of yet an unproven theory. Eighteen years after the Exxon Valdez, the damage still hasn't been completely repaired. I'm afraid to speculate how long it would take the ocean to recover from dumping several hundred thousand tons of iron into it. As someone who has done research in the Galapagos and witnessed firsthand the rare biodiversity and untouched beauty of the area, I'm even more afraid that damage to it would be irreversible.

The big story missed by both reporters and commentators alike on this subject thus far is that plankton restoration is not just about carbon credit economics or the threat of global warming. It's about an already ongoing catastrophic die-off in the sea. The establishment science community studies cited below are only a sample of recent research indicating that the ocean phytoplankton which produce most of the planet's oxygen, sequester an equal measure of its CO2 and feed every higher form of ocean life are disappearing at a shocking rate. According to NASA we have lost 6~12% of these vital plants globally just since 1980 and according to Behrenfeld's 12/06 Nature report there are now 50% die-offs in huge areas of the equatorial Pacific.

(The knock-on effects of this decline are immediate and tragic. The phytoplankton-dependent krill populations in the Southern Ocean which are the staple food of all the great baleen whales are now down by 80% and the shortfall is now also starving local fish species, penguins and seals.)

Restoring open ocean plankton populations to known 1980 levels of health would not only annually sequester at minimum 3~4 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 (or half our global warming surplus today), it would regenerate tens of billions of tons of missing nourishment for fisheries, seabirds and marine mammals.

And this restoration can be quickly and affordably accomplished, just by replenishing missing iron micronutrients to the sea. The iron was traditionally delivered to the open ocean in wind-borne dust from arid lands which has now been depleted by 30% or more by modern agricultural practices and the increased levels of atmospheric CO2 (which allow grasses to live longer, spread further, and anchor more iron-rich topsoil dust).

I recognize that trying to repair the ecosystem is a worthy goal. However, pretty much any time we've tried to throw chemicals at an ecosystem or a biological system we've damaged or want to control, the results have been disastrous. See also: DDT and other pesticides, BGH, antibiotics, fertilizers...

Each molecule of iron returned can fix over 100,000 molecules of CO2 and generate a proportionate amount of nutritive biomass. While nearly 80% of that is recycled in the marine food web, 20% or more disappears into the deep ocean for centuries or millennia.

In other words, at maximum efficiency it would only take several hundred thousand tons (or about two supertankers full) of iron dust to restore the lost plankton to 1980 levels and solve half our global warming surplus, too. More likely until the technology is perfected, it will take a small fleet of research ships working with several times more dust to accomplish this task, but still we are talking a very feasible challenge that would at most be reseeding less than 2% of surface ocean waters.

If we undertake this for the benefit of sea life and the climate and stop at the known 1980 baseline, where is the harm? Iron restoration simply replenishes a vital micronutrient that human activity has dangerously diminished.

We have caused these crises and to attempt to resolve them in most natural and benign way available is not geoengineering, it's generally known as restitution, healing or just merciful common sense.

It's gratifying that the carbon credit market has arisen to underwrite the needed restoration activity, because no one was lifting a finger or spending a cent to address these die-offs before. If you oppose restoration now simply because it may finally be both possible and profitable, you might as well also oppose the practice of medicine, environmental law and public health.

I don't oppose the plan because it's profitable (I am actually starting business school in the fall and hope to work with companies to make it profitable for them to act responsibly on social, environmental, and animal rights issues). I oppose the Planktos plan because it's untested and totally irresponsible, and, if it damages the oceans, the ecosystem and the people of Ecuador will have to pay for the mistakes of Planktos, who will get off scot-free.

Also, none of the articles listed below even suggests that the solution to the problem is just dumping hundreds of thousands of tons iron in the ocean; they simply state the deficiency.

OCEAN PLANT LIFE SLOWS DOWN AND ABSORBS LESS CARBON
NASA News, September 16, 2003
"This research shows ocean primary productivity is declining, and it may be a result of climate changes such as increased temperatures and decreased iron deposition into parts of the oceans. This has major implications for the global carbon cycle," Gregg said. Iron from trans-continental dust clouds is an important nutrient for phytoplankton, and when lacking can keep populations from growing... the amount of iron deposited from desert dust clouds into the global oceans decreased by 25 percent over two decades. These dust clouds blow across the oceans. Reductions in NPP in the South Pacific were associated with a 35 percent decline in atmospheric iron deposition.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/2003/2003091615946.html

[IRON STRESSED] PLANKTON FOUND TO ABSORB LESS CARBON DIOXIDE, BBC, 08/30/06
The amount of carbon absorbed by plant plankton in large segments of the Pacific Ocean is much less than previously estimated, researchers say. US scientists said the tiny ocean plants were absorbing up to two billion tonnes less CO2 because their growth was being limited by a lack of iron.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5298004.stm

The evidence in the BBC article even points against dumping more iron in to absorb carbon:

The studies showed that it did boost phytoplankton growth, but it did not deliver the results that models had predicted.

Professor Behrenfeld said introducing iron was complex: "When you first do it, there is an explosion of growth.

"Then you add a bit more iron, and the phytoplankton respond a bit more," he said. "But at the same time you are promoting plankton growth, the grazers that feed on them come to life because they suddenly have a more abundant food supply."

ANEMIC PHYTOPLANKTON ABSORB LESS CARBON THAN THOUGHT
By JR Minkel, Science News
Phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean are starved for iron, and as a result these microscopic plants soak up less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than was previously thought, researchers have found.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0000424F-D77A-14F5-977A83414B7F0000

PLANKTON KILLED BY OCEAN WARMING
SYDNEY: Plankton - the vital first link in the food chain of the seas - will be hugely affected by global warming, a new U.S. study suggests. Plankton forms the main food of many ocean species, and fisheries could be badly hit by the loss of these micro-organisms as a result of warmer waters, according to the paper, published this week in the British journal Nature... Other factors that influence phytoplankton growth include [iron] dust blown from the land, and variations in solar radiation.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/908

EFFECT OF NATURAL IRON FERTILIZATION ON CARBON SEQUESTRATION IN THE SOUTHERN OCEAN
Nature, Vol 446|26 April 2007| doi:10.1038/nature05700
The efficiency of fertilization, defined as the ratio of the carbon export to the amount of
iron supplied, was at least ten times higher than previous estimates from short-term blooms induced by iron-addition experiments. This result sheds new light on the effect of long-term fertilization by iron and macronutrients on carbon sequestration, suggesting
that changes in iron supply from below—as invoked in some palaeoclimatic and future climate change scenarios11—may have a more significant effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations than previously thought.

OCEAN GOBBLES CARBON AT DIFFERENT RATES
NewScientist.com news service
26 April 2007
Dead plankton does not sink at the same rate everywhere in the Pacific Ocean, say researchers. The new findings will boost our understanding of the supply chain to the world's biggest carbon sink - the bottom of the ocean. [Shows 20~50% of dying plankton take their carbon below 1000 meters into the millennial sequestration zone.]
http://environment.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11725

Alice Waters and Chez Panisse on NPR

A couple weeks ago Renee Montaigne did a segment on NPR's Morning Edition about Alice Waters' restaurant, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, which is all about local organic food. It's worth a listen.

Emerson quotation

Last night I was reading The Omnivore's Dilemma and Michael Pollan quotes this line by Emerson:

You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is
concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.

Letter to John Mayer

I just emailed this to John Mayer (john@johnmayer.com) in response to the Waiting on the World to Change blog entry on his website.

Dear John,

I couldn't believe your blog entry on Light Green. Not only is it just plain wrong that we only have to get the lines on the charts to stop escalating (remember back in the 1980s when those lines were considerably lower and yet global warming was still a real threat?), it's completely irresponsible to spread that wrong information as though it's fact. And no, the lines don't literally have to drop by next Tuesday, but figuratively, yeah, they do. The window of time we have left before the damage done is truly irreversible is closing fast.

Also, I looked up the energy it takes to make a plastic bag, and it's about 600 kilojoules per bag. The average household uses 10 bags per week, or a little under 1000 per year, or 600,000 kJ of energy. Know what else uses about 600,000 kJ of energy? Just 4.5 gallons of gas (listed in calories here, converted to kJ here). So, by switching to reusable shopping bags, you're saving about the same amount of energy it would take to drive for a couple of hours in your Porsche, or in other words, not much. Or, put another way, one round-trip private chartered flight from LA to DC takes around 4500 gallons of jet fuel, or about 1000 times as much energy as you're saving by not using plastic grocery bags in a year.

So, while I think it's great you want to take a laidback approach to environmentalism, and using reusable grocery bags is a great start, I think encouraging people to be complacent on environmental issues could do more harm than good. I encourage you not to make real changes in your lifestyle, which is up to you, but to stop spreading misinformation and complacency.

Best,
j

Plantkos to dump iron around the Galapagos

A company called Planktos is planning to dump loads of iron into the sea near the Galapagos in order to absorb carbon dioxide (see article for details). Great. Haven't we learned that nature isn't a simple equation in which you can just substitute a couple of variables and end up with the same equation?

And we're going to test an experiement which is likely to be environmentally disastrous in one of the most pristine areas in the world? Even better.

Of course, as the Grist article notes, Planktos won't bear any responsibility if the experiment harms the environment.

Click here to give Planktos a piece of your mind.

Paul Watson on Whales

This is a really interesting and inspiring speech by Paul Watson, an animal rights activist who protects whales by sinking ships. He's been called an ecoterrorist (a term that is questionable at best, anyway), but he asserts that his actions are legal under international law, and in fact has never been convicted of a crime. He and his organization have also never injured a single person while protecting animals.

Makes me want to get up and throw myself between a whale and a harpoon.

Yama LLama

A couple of weeks ago I asked one of my friends if she was interested in coming to a film screening that was part of the events for Global Days for Darfur. She friend emailed back, "Sounds interesting! Unfortunately I have kickball every Monday," without any apparent sense of irony, as though I'd asked her to join a knitting club rather than go to a fundraiser to help stop genocide. A few weeks before that, I asked one of my coworkers if he'd be interested in taking a shift at the soup kitchen where our office volunteers once a month. He said something to the effect of, "No thanks, I donate blood," as if there's only so much he's willing to contribute to the community. And then I saw this nauseating post by John Mayer on the Grist site.

In a recent speech Paul Watson mentioned a line by Leonard Cohen, "You are locked into your suffering and your pleasures are the seal." Except that I think maybe that by pursuing our pleasures, we're locking other people into suffering. Of course it's more fun to play kickball than to watch documentaries about the genocide of people halfway around the world. Is she any worse off for her choice? Probably not, provided she can justify her decision and quiet her conscience. But she's certainly not going out of her way to help the people of Sudan. Is John Mayer doing anything to prevent global warming by switching to reusable grocery bags while continuining to drive an SUV and flying a private charter? Nope. He's just figured out a way to stroke his ego enough that he can not only continue to pollute and to feel good about it, but also to encourage others to do the same.

I am afraid of falling into that trap of complacency, and so I've decided to actively work to change my lifestyle so that the decisions I make help, or at least harm as little as possible, other people, animals, and the environment. I've also gone back to being vegetarian after a couple years of being a bit lax, and I'm moving towards a vegan diet. I'm trying to research companies before I buy from them, buy used when possible, and just to consume less overall. Of course, I'm not perfect. I check celebrity blogs first when I get to work, not news sites. I still have a Diet Coke a few afternoons each week, even though I know Coca-Cola is involved in questionable practices. I sometimes drive when I could probably walk. But I am trying to change.

Nor am I against having fun. It's great my friend enjoys kickball and it's nice that John Mayer wants to make environmentalism lighthearted. But I think there's got to be a better balance between fun and making responsible choices.

So I'm also working to become more involved in the issues I think are important by learning more about them, taking part in local events, contributing when I can to non-profits, and volunteering at the local soup kitchen, animal shelter, and the Center for the New American Dream. And I've decided to be more vocal about social, environmental, and animal rights issues I think are important. I'm speaking up at work, in class, and with friends where before I was worried about seeming too radical. This blog is part of that effort to share what I believe in.

When I figuring out what to call this blog, I knew I wanted a name that would sum up, in a word or two, the philosophy that ties together my views on seemingly unrelated topics. And the definition of yama on the Yoga Journal website does just that. And I just like the word llama. Plus, they're pretty darn cute.

Yama

The first limb, yama, deals with one's ethical standards and sense of integrity, focusing on our behavior and how we conduct ourselves in life. Yamas are universal practices that relate best to what we know as the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The five yamas are:

Ahimsa: nonviolence

Satya: truthfulness

Asteya: nonstealing

Brahmacharya: continence [also defined as self-restraint]

Aparigraha: noncovetousness