Ecological Engineering 108
Cameron Laird writes "Lou Licht goes beyond, "Pollution is bad, punish someone." Instead,
he uses good
science, engineering, and economics to make environmental
remediation attractive. The basic technology: managing polluting
chemical species through a system of live poplar tree stands. " We've talked about this before on Slashdot, going back a couple years ago. Very interesting stuff - plant usage to clean things up seems like the best of both worlds. Weelll...I suppose not polluting in the first place would probably be the best of both worlds, but you get my point.
Re:Futile straw men burning (Score:1)
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Score:1)
There's a book about this, and where it leads.
You all must read it. It is called, "Kaze no Tani no Naushicaa", or, "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind."
It has my highest recommendations.
Go to http://nausica.net/ to learn more about it.
(Nausicaa should be released as a movie in the US some time in the relatively near future.)
Take care, Lion =^_^=
Re:Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Score:1)
Correction: It's http://nausicaa.net/
=^_^= . o O ( Oops. )
Re:Nanotech - friend or foe? (Score:1)
Funny you should mention that. A while ago some show that airs Saturday 1:30 PM on CNN (some tech/future show) did a little piece on a engineer in China who also accelerated landfill breakdown simply by placing the contents into some type of high-pressure chamber, cranking it (pressure) UP, and ending up with some type of material that could be used for road/building construction and others with non-organic material, while previously organic material could be used as high quality fertilizer. I don't remember the rest of it but I was thinking that that solution could very well help solve our current landfill problems.
Natural bacteria can clean up even nasty chlorine. (Score:1)
Re:Nanotech - friend or foe? (Score:1)
The Root of the Tree Problem (Score:1)
Parable of Br'er Rabbit (Score:1)
Kind of like racism, I guess.
Re:Steaming clams... (Score:1)
But you are correct, steaming will kill off the local fauna and most flora. However so will the contaminants. The difference is that with rare exceptions inland areas will recover quicker from steaming than conventional techniques because the toxins have decades less time to poison the environment and there will be more time to repopulate.
Beaches automatically qualify as "rare" just like wetlands. They are bordered by environments that are inhospitable to the local life and have to be treated carefully. I didn't say "usable anywhere" when I described the technique for a reason. It's totally ineffective in a soil system that is totally saturated with water, for instance. Used on a wetland you'd get lukewarm gumbo.
However it is one more tool that should be used when appropriate and I feel that it is not being used when it should.
Re:So Far, So Good, but... (Score:1)
Our lake is one that contains land-locked (freshwater) salmon. Kokanee salmon. Special sort of fish. And disappearing all too rapidly.
Why?
Because some pointy-head -- the sort of person you claim will "stop and think" -- introduced a species of fresh-water shrimp to the lake to feed the fish. Well-fed fish wil reproduce more, and the population will grow.
Instead, those shrimp compete for the salmon's other food sources. To the point that they're dominating the food chain. And they tend to live more toward the surface than the salmon like to live. And salmon don't seem to particularly like eating shrimp.
So the fish stocks are now declining even more rapidly.
And all because someone with a bright idea convinced everyone that he'd stopped and thought about it all...
--
Re:Trees are great, but... (Score:1)
I live in Vernon, BC, Canada. We have some of the right ideas: a wastewater effluent spray system that seems to be garnering worldwide attention; a proposal for a grey-water return system (dual water supply; water your lawn with grey water); and a good recycling program.
Specifically, we have a blue bag system that doesn't require sorting (though it still requires us to rinse containers). It accepts several types of plastic, paper and metal. Provincially, we have a bottle deposit system that's been expanded to include some non-glass containers. We pay an eco-tax on purchases of tires, batteries and paint; and are expected to return these to the recycling depot.
I do have some issues with the taxation end of things. Or, in political-speak, the "Eco Fee" structure. Gah.
Where I'd like to see this province go next is in offering recycling facilities for electronic equipment. There is a ton of poisons in every television, amplifier, computer and microwave. And the silly thing is, melting them down would probably pay back more than the cost of collection and recycling.
After that, I'd like to see some sort of Canada-wide mandate for manufacturers to be responsible for cradle-to-grave product ownership. As in Germany, where car manufacturers take their old vehicles back, break 'em down and recycle the parts.
This planet can sustain our billions and billions of people *IF* we get our act together and start thinking of the long-term benefits of re-use and recycling.
--
Re:Tobacco - The Great Leach (Score:1)
As an aside to reasearch he had been involved in on using tobacco plants for cleanup of chemical and nuclear waste, they did a side study where they could pinpoint where tobacco had been grown based upon radioactive and chemical signatures in the tobacco.
Tobacco is a very effective weed. Left on it's own it will completely strip the soil of all nutrients and any other chemicals, even to the point where it can no longer survive.
Kinda puts another spin on the ol' tobacco wars...
chris
Re:Liability helps for this. (Score:1)
I don't mean to belabour the point (but I will anyway), but such incentives are only effective if the landfill owners think in the long term. If they think they can circumvent punitive fines by acting doing nothing in the short term, then selling up and getting the hell out of Dodge before sewage happens, that's what they'll do.
Tax incentives also help with this, again by providing a short-term reason to do things, but can be politically difficult to implement
Woo, there's my point again. 'Politically difficult' is practically synonymous with 'no short-term gain'.
Re:Not polluting in the first place (Score:1)
Not polluting in the first place just isn't an option.
I assume that you're not making the trivial point that absolutely no pollution is not possible. Working on this assumption I'll assume that you're saying that the vast majority of our current pollution is unavoidable. I don't believe this to be true. We waste huge amounts of energy and produce their concommitant pollutants needlessly. It should be possible to reduce our pollution footprint drastically.
To use your analogy of the cottager and the stove, due to the efficiency of the wood-burning stove and his double-glazed windows he produces far fewer pollutants than his neighbour with the old stone fireplace and the open windows.
Technology and the environment are not at odds with each other, we just have to adjust technology so that we get an acceptable environment and lifestyle
--Crush
Re:Not polluting in the first place (Score:1)
because concentrated pollution is easier to control and manage than dispersed pollution[...] the benefits of the consumption accrue to many neighborhoods, but only one actually gets the pollution
But I don't agree with it. There are dose-dependent/critical concentrations of pollutants. If those are not exceeded then there may be no statistically measurable impact on organisms exposed to lower concentrations. So for some things it is better to disperse them if the environment can cope with it. The nuclear waste example is one in which we would suspect that the environment may not be able to cope with it. But if you were to consider for example CO2, a localized concentration above certain levels would be lethal, but if we blow it off into the atmosphere, allow it to disperse and be dealt with by plants it would be fine.
Also consider the nearly intractable problems of trying to get that "one neighbourhood" to agree to be chosen.
--Crush
Re:Trees are great, but... (Score:1)
The problem in environmental pollution is scale. Some things that are innocuous or beneficial on a small scale are bad on a large scale
I totally agree with what you've said here. But it can be slightly confusing to put it just in terms of scale. It's hard to know where to draw the boundaries of the "things" that are being called large or small. Sometimes this is manifested in making the assumption that small always equals good - some strange results could stem from that. Take for example transport: the efficiency of mass-transit for city environments means that a large-scale infrastructure is far better than the small scale use of private automobiles, but implementing a transit system like this in a small rural village would probably be wasteful and counter-productive. Similarly using the converse of your sewage example, it probably would be wrong to try and build conventional tertiary treatment plants (sewerage) in every small community.
--Crush
Re:Natural bacteria can clean up even nasty chlori (Score:1)
I'm a little suspicious about any one-choice-fits-all approach though: this seems to be an aerobic species, which introduces limitations on applicability (specifically, you may need to add oxygen). Not every place in the world has lots of dissolved oxygen, indeed the nastiest sites are often anaerobic.
Far more interesting (but I have a bias here) is the anaerobic dechlorinator Dehalococcoides ethenogenes [sciam.com], which operates in the absence of oxygen.
Re:So Far, So Good, but... (Score:1)
Actually, they are European Starlings; and it happened in the 1890's. Eugene Schieffelin brought to New York each type of bird mentioned in any of Shakespeare's plays. In Henry IV Part 1, Act 1, Scene 3, Shakespeare wrote:
and so did Schieffelin bring several dozen starlings to New York. (Sources vary as to the exact number--some say 60, some 100, some 120, some 60 followed by 40 a year later.)
There are also scattered reports that other Starlings made it to North America prior to Scheiffelin's introduction, but it was most likely his that have spawned the millions of starlings that now inhabit the continent.
There are some who think that the Starling largely took the ecological niche that had been occupied by the passenger pigeon, which was very quickly disappearing at the time the starlings were introduced. Numbering about 5,000,000,000 in 1800, there would be hundreds of millions of passenger pigeons in a flock, but overzealous hunting (e.g. contests where participants would need to kill at least 30,000 to be a contender but especially commercial hunting) caused the numbers to dwindle which in turn caused the flocks to collapse. Passenger pigeons were extirpated from the wild in about 1900 and became completely extinct in 1914.
Starlings, as a alien species, have absolutely no Federal protection, so hunters can kill as many as they like as often as they like any time they like.
I have been hearing of this for decades (Score:1)
I just wish that the eco-politicos would stop messing around and let the industrial revolution march, with defrence to techniques like this.
Re:Its all a matter of perception (Score:1)
Honestly, as Utility-Maximizing entities (Economics speak) we humans will choose the lowest cost solution that gives us the highest level of benefit.
Alternatives for killing ants in the kitchen:
Product Cost Risk / Environmental hazard
Raid $10 mild carcinogen
Rip apart house & steam / boil ants out
$10000 creates lots of waste
Hire Orkin-Man
$100 Probably same risks as Raid.
Thus, most people just buy the damn bottle of ant poison and leave it on the counter for a few weeks.
Continuing on, this principle will show itself over and over and over again in much larger systems, such as Positive Crankcase Ventillation (the most important anti-pollution system on your car) (costs an extra $20 to have it). Low cost solutions to environmental problems, and solutions that financially incent people to be environmentally responsible are the only solutions which will work in the long run.
Cyano
Re:Steam Clean the environment (Score:1)
Re:Poplar tree stands -- bad example? (Score:1)
Spyky
Re:More limited application than dude implies (Score:1)
I think the main point is that the long-term storage approach is not a real solution, because the containment eventually fails. When that happens, the waste that leaks is just as bad as it was when it went into "storage." If you control timely degradation of the materials instead, that eventual loss of containment results in safer materials leaking out. So, water is used as part of that timely-degradation process, if I understood the article correctly. Capping with trees allows holding back water or "inserting" water (via over-irrigation), according to the controls desired by the owner of the site.
At least, that's my take on it...
One less canned solution (Score:1)
Dandruff is caused by a pH inbalance on your scalp. To correct this pH balance, take some vinegar (any kind will do, but apple vinegar smells good) into the shower with you, shampoo your hair with vinegar, and rinse. The dandruff will be gone, and the smell will dissapear quickly.
Obviously the shampoo industry doesn't want you to know about this. Their shampoos use harsh detergents to strip off a layer or two of skin, getting rid of your dandruff for a bit. Of course, the harsh detergents make the pH inbalance on your scalp even worse, so you're going to have to keep on using their product until it makes you bald.
Have a nice day now. :)
Re:Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Score:1)
Most comic book shops should have the re-issues in a 4 volume digest, so it should be pretty easy to find.
(incidentally, I do my cat faces slightly differently == )
Re:Its all a matter of perception (Score:1)
you can buy from www.garden.com. Here is a link for "beneficial insects" [garden.com]
I also used to get them from Burpee, but I haven't checked ther in some years
That isn't a problem most of the time (Score:1)
--
Licht's patent (Score:1)
Mike Roberto
- roberto@soul.apk.net
-- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Re:Photoremediation (Score:1)
This is a good point -- that's how they are grown in the lab. Work in our department on A. thalania is mostly directed towards sequencing, with "off-shoot" projects such as photoremediation. Another lab is working on a gene in Arabidopsis that affects its leaf growth cycle, but its analogous gene in humans acts our internal alarm clock(!). Its size and short growth cycle is a real advantage for plant scientists, reasons that molecular biologists use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
2.If their roots are shallow then doesn't it just clean up the surface? Does one then have to take contaminated soil and spread it out in thin layers?
Probably at least as thin as the root tendrils could reach.
3.If one is doing this (excavating and trucking huge masses of contaminated soil) then how does using plants compare to using a chemical engineering approach or a bio-reactor?
Growing plants is an energy-efficient and largely waste-free way of remediation. Let the sun feed the plants. No nasty solvents and complex, expensive separation protocols involved.
Conceivably, a bio-reactor could be used here. The transporter gene that Rea's lab works on was added to common baking yeast (S. cerevisiae) for the purpose of isolating metal tolerant strains. So why not add this gene to E. coli, add some cadmium-laced sludge and let it go to work?
I would argue that the reproduction and unintended spread of a microorganism like E. coli is much more difficult to control than a plant. While this hypothetical metal-eating machine clearly would benefit humans in a very specific situation, there is no telling of the ecological consequences of this organism getting wild.
4.Does the promise of miraculous clean up technology lull the public about current pollution and detract from alleviating the core problem of production of pollutants?
No technological solution will work to completely solve the complex problem of waste. I agree 100% that behaviorial changes must be made -- from the multinationals down to the individual -- to curb waste production. (And especially by the United States, a country with the gall to ask developing nations not to pollute so much or sell its petrol so expensive when it fills up its SUVs with premium!)
Question on the article.. (Score:1)
We do not do much with government at the moment, like the Department of Energy or EPA directly. The DOE has quite a bit of money, but frankly, I've known too many small companies that have been too dependent on government contracts. They're not always reliable payers, and they're kind of a tar baby sometimes.
Can anyone explain the meaning of the term "tar baby" in this context? I cannot imagine a racist term was intended, what are the other meanings?
Re:Lack of research/data? (Score:1)
He mentions that the poplar can grow roots from bark, and thus that you can plant a STICK instead of a sapling and have a reasonable chance of success. So that would write off oaks.
I didn't have the time to read the whole article, so I didn't see if he addresses the rest of your questions. It's plausible that he's depending on the wood as a long-term sequestration of the contaminants. If you end up with heavy metals or PCBs incorporated into a log, then you can stack the cordwood somewhere and they'll stay out of the biosphere for a significant time.
But he was talking about using trees to handle (heavy?) metals, and also talking about using the wood as fuel for the poor. I don't see how both can work. If you use the tree to handle lead, the lead has to go somewhere. If you then burn the tree to heat a home, the lead goes right back into the atmosphere. Or into the welfare mother.
(as bluGill Said)
Re:Ecology=medicine for the environment (Score:1)
I agree with what you are saying though. I think I'd augment that and the argument I forwarded by saying this: There's place for western philosophy - in the case of emergencies. I wouldn't expect oriental medicine to help with serious brain injuries and hemorraging - you know the stuff of ERs. No kind of prevention and wholistic approach can stop a guy from bleeding to death from a gash in his body. That's where the realm of western medicine is most useful. So it is with ecology. Western philosophical approach (not so philosophical, actually) is the one that cleans up the oils spills and the like.
This is also very much in line with what Bill Joy is saying about technology - and nanotechnology. Technological advancements are often used to fix social problems or problems caused by other technologies. We will develop new technologies that will cause new problems which we will just develop newer technologies to fix.
endless cycle.
Re:Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (Score:1)
Princess Mononoke, recently released in the U.S., is a more mature, more developed story of the same theme. Unfortunately, it is also short and lacks the depth that a manga series can attain.
Consider a Spherical Cow... (Score:1)
In 1991 or thereabouts, I participated in the Summer Institute for Creative Engineering and Inventiveness [uiowa.edu] (SICEI, appropriately enough) held at the University of Iowa - a program in which high school students were given the chance to "delve into" certain types of research. I was part of the environment-oriented team, which focused on the use of poplar trees to remove pollutants - led by Lou Licht. We spent plenty of time both in the classroom and out in the Iowa country, learning about Lou's ideas and approaches. These and other activities would be my first exposure to engineering problem solving, drawing upon the book Consider a Spherical Cow. My experiences led me to pursue engineering as a major and a profession. (Now I'm a DBA, but that's beside the point.)
Today, seeing this article, I think about how Lou Licht - a vibrant individual whose enthusiasm rubbed off on at least one impressionable high schooler! - and his poplars are partially responsible for my reading Slashdot in the first place. Funny how things come around like that, I suppose, rolling around like bovine globes. Well, in the future, I'll be ready for when Lou, Slashdot, and I cross paths again. (And maybe I'll have a profound ecological thought, too!)
Kudos, Lou!
The Former Priestess of the Spherical Cow
Use what talent you possess:
the woods would be very silent if no birds sang
except those that sang best.
Re:So Far, So Good, but... (Score:1)
Also, degrees don't mean much, they just let you make bigger mistakes. I mean, as a former B Gross Anatomy student and TA, I've never killed a patient in surgery, but you wouldn't want me to (try and) take out your appendix.
Re:Question on the article.. (Score:1)
You can see how that sort of thing would come to mind if you were working with the government a lot...
Re:Question on the article.. (Score:1)
BR>I can't imagine that, I had all the other details - it was from a story, etc., etc.,
Not really as good as it sounds (Score:1)
There is definately a practical use for many biologically based cleanup methods...however some people think that nature magically turns over everything and the solution to all the worlds pollution problems is just a lot more trees and geneticaly engineerd bugs.
Fact is that most bio methods only work on breaking down things like hydrocarbs and other organic compunds etc. Things like tritium, heavy metals (mercury, lead etc) plenty of other poisons don't go anywhere, they just go into biostorage in plants, which ends up climbing the food chain anyway...
Biology being inherantly dynamic, thus doesn't tend to come with with particularly good long term storage/distribution methods...one must not let the "Captain Planet" - biology is invincible and can do anything - mentaility take over and realize that most of the toxins do not have efficient biological solutions./P
Re:The Root of the Tree Problem (Score:1)
This leaves only a small range of applications for thousands upon thousands of dead poplars. And most of these will be pretty temporary, so the wood will rot and release everything again.
Finally, how much use is poplar wood for these applications compared to other varieties? Might it make more sense to use a more practical building material which grows a little slower?
Don't get me wrong, I think this technique has great potential, I'm just wondering about a few details which the exceptionally and excessively kindly interviewer failed to bring up.
Re:Ecology=medicine for the environment (Score:1)
Re:So Far, So Good, but... (Score:1)
The US government has frequently made attempts at 'biological control' of unwanted plants & animals by introducing species that prey on them. However, the scattershot methods that are employed - introducing perhaps a dozen new species with very little ecological impact assessment either before or after the event - is asking for, and occasionally triggers, a disaster.
Ecological control of pollutants could well face the same problems, as the features which species will be chosen for, such as robustness and speed of growth or reproduction make them very effective invaders.
Re:Question on the article.. (Score:1)
Thus - a tar baby is anything that gets you trapped, dragging you in further and further. CF "quick sand", "black mail pay-off", "tobacco", and "campaign promises"
Re:Question on the article.. (Score:1)
A tar baby figures in the Uncle Remus story "Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby", where Brer Fox fashions an anthropomorphic figure out of tar and places it alongside a road for Brer Rabbit to see. Sure enough, Rabbit comes a-hoppin' and a-skippin' along and greets the tar baby. Receiving no answer, he gets angry and strikes the tar baby for its rudeness, and of course is immobilized by the gooey tar. Brer Fox, of course, comes along and captures po' Brer Rabbit.
It's a racist term only in the sense that it has entered our vocabulary through the medium of paternalist Jim Crow-era children's books and movies (have you ever seen Disney's "Song of the South?")
Chris
Re:Nanotech - friend or foe? (Score:1)
Re:Good, but probably futile (Score:1)
Re:Lack of research/data? (Score:1)
It's not pollution in plant cells - that's the whole idea. The plant takes up these species in a toxic format and either (1) volatilizes them, releasing them into the atmosphere (no, this is NOT air pollution...several of these substances are fixed by other organisms, so it's more like recycling) or (2) metabolized into a non-toxic form and then stored in the plant cells. These plants can then be fed to people/animals with deficiencies, acting like a mineral supplement.
Re:So Far, So Good, but... (Score:1)
Re:More limited application than dude implies (Score:1)
So...If he wants to use water to control/accelerate the degradation process, then he is going to have to deal whith the toxic water/runoff somehow...and dude's solution to this is to use the trees...to do what? If he is talking about genetically engineered trees to eat the heavy metals and other pollutants like others have suggested, then he doesnt really bring that out in the article. If he is just talking regular poplar trees then they probably wont prevent this type of pollutant from leaching into groundwater, etc.
Trees are good for a lot of things but I wouldnt expect them to be efficient filters for things like cadmium, mercury and organic pollutants, that you are likely to get coming out of a landfill. Though I honestly dont know.
Re:plant (Score:1)
This is very mean, (Score:1)
Poplar tree stands -- bad example? (Score:2)
Lack of research/data? (Score:2)
This guy has a doctorate, so I dont want to call him an idiot, but nothing in this interview gave me the idea that poplar trees were really that much better then say oak trees, wheet, or algee [in a pond]. He did in fact say they needed data. I looks to me though like he likes trees, so he is calling trees the solution. Now maybe they are, but I don't see any evidence.
Even if he manages to clean up polution, how is it better to have polution in the cells of trees that your burn and release into the air? Of course organics don't have this problem (much), but other chemicals just get absorbed into the plant and then what? A question I immeadiatly have that isn't answered.
Like I said, the guy has a doctorate in this, he must have done some studing, but I don't see anything that makes me belive he did something.
Re:Keeping things in perspective (Score:2)
As Bill Nye the Science Guy says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evidence of larger areas under cultivation in earlier times is not sufficient evidence of larger populations when technology is taken into account.
Be careful in trying to use the legends of ancient peoples as evidence in favour of specific events. Velikovsky got into trouble for exactly that, and now he's remembered as a complete quack.
There is no secure evidence about the prevalence of Rh- types in Europe before the Romans arrived. We do know roughly the sixth century a.D. distribution of Basques, and can make some good guesses about how blood types were distributed in Roman times from that data. Cavalli-Sforza makes a good case for the recession of the pre-Celt European population in the face of invasion by Rh+ types, but connecting this with Celtic and Germanic myth is a tricky and unreliable business.
I'm having trouble following your argument about hidden recessives. The reason hybrid infertility happens in horse breeding is that the new hybrid population is aggressively inbred by the horse breeder. That's part of the standard procedure for improving a breed. Among humans, this doesn't generally occur. The likelihood of hidden recessives appearing in the post contact population is somewhat lower than in the pre-contact population, because of its now greater genetic diversity.
I'm very familiar with genetics, and with both Dawkins and Cavalli-Sforza, but I am unaware of an analysis of any real world population, other than the Basques with their special circumstances, that produced the kind of overall reduction in fertility you describe. The reduction in sickle-cell anemia, for example, among North American blacks compared to Africans is strong evidence of the reduced power of unreinforced recessives in mixed populations. Furthermore, this analysis neglects the positive effects of outside genes, for example the increase in lactose tolerance among Mexicans after the Spanish conquest. Useful traits in the new population are likely to be greater stimulus to fertility than the new fatal recessives are.
The African American population is not known to have suffered dramatically reduced fertility in any period of its history, and birth rates for that population are well documented by owners trying to keep accounts of their property. Mexicans had a sharp population reduction in the period surrounding the arrival of the conquistadors, but the blame falls clearly on smallpox, not hybrid infertility.
The author of the website you link to makes the claim that he has evidence of exactly that sort of reduction in fertility in populations in contact, but never cites anything. I'm sceptical that it exists, but I'm willing to consider it if you have a reference.
You have to be joking (Score:2)
Mitochondrial DNA studies of the British public reflect that Britan's many invaders mostly came without their women. Roman soldiers came, got local girlfriends and spread their sperm throughout the island. Viking men came in the long ships, raped and pillaged, and either stayed or left, but never brought their women. Getting invaded usually means the invaders are soldiers almost never accompanied by their women.
A larger study would have shown that Scandianvia, and especially Iceland, are full of mitochonrial DNA from Ireland, because the Vikings came, took women slaves, and dragged them off to wherever they lived. This didn't lower their birthrate one bit. France is full of invader's genes - the country's very name comes from the name of a Germanic tribe that took over in the sixth century (or was it the seventh? I forget.) Before the Germans, Celtic Gaul was invaded by Romans, and one out of every three modern Frenchmen counts a foreigner among his or her great-grandparents. Yet French fertility didn't fall off until after WWII.
America is quite racially mixed. Few contemporary Americans count a single European ethnic group among their ancestors, and a surprising number count non-Europeans among them. The black and hispanic populations in the US are well known to have higher fertility than whites on the average, yet they are the both much more likely to have mixed ancestors.
The only example I know of where interbreeding reduced fertility in general is the Basque country, and there is a simple and straighforward reason why: Basques tended traditionally to be Rh negative. Rh syndrome does reduce fertility.
As for carrying capacity in neolithic times, it may be higher than was thought, but it still wasn't very high. Agricultural practices didn't change much for thousands of years until the rise of mechanisation. The amount of food produced, and the island's carrying capacity can't be deduced by comparing the amount of land under cultivation then with the amount now. Modern agriculture is far more intese than anything possible in the neolithic era.
There is no chance at all that the British Isles supported a hundred million people at any time in its history.
Steam Clean the environment (Score:2)
It uses far less water than traditional methods (meaning less secondary pollutants) and can clean up a superfund site in about 5 years (at about $3 million/year), as compared to 15-20 years with convention methods at $1 million/year. However since it impacts the annual bottom line harder (even if it saves more money in the long run), few companies will go that route.
If you want alternative or high-speed cleaning methods, push the government to reclassify the cost of clean up in accounting/SEC statements. If the total projected clean-up cost was classifed as a debt it would have a greater impact on their "paper" bottom line. I think. (Anybody who understands SEC annual statements and GAAP policies for handling site clean up want to correct me?)
Re:Nanotech - friend or foe? (Score:2)
"All new Laramie strontium flavored cigarettes.. They're radioacterrific!"
Your Working Boy,
Sewage Irrigation (Score:2)
The effluent is free of harmful organisms by this point, although I have doubts regarding its cleanliness in terms of heavy metals and whatnot.
We have a large grove of poplar that is a testbed for accelerated growth. These trees are becoming lumber-ready many years earlier than they would be without the effluent fertilizer.
Our town's next step is to start using a grey-water return system in new developments. Read it here: dual water supply [gov.bc.ca]
I wish I could find some links for you all, but this town, so advanced in its treatment of shit, seems to be right clueless about the Web.
--
Liability helps for this. (Score:2)
As mentioned in the article, though, owners of potential pollution sources (like landfills) are liable for any pollution that they cause down the road. This gives them a strong incentive to take measures _now_ to prevent themselves from having to shell out a lot of money later.
Tax incentives also help with this, again by providing a short-term reason to do things, but can be politically difficult to implement (best way is probably just to let companies write off plantings like this as a tax expense, thus halving their after-tax cost).
Re:So Far, So Good, but... (Score:2)
I think any of the bacteria that are being made to "eat" toxins only feed on those toxins and thus die if they have a lack of them. In a sense, they starve to death. However, makeing and introducing a bacteria that lives on toxins and other naturally local material is bad idea. However, this made not be true, but to me it seems to put a backdoor or some other trap so that the bacteria no longer can live when they have done their job.
Re:Not polluting in the first place (Score:2)
That's not what I was saying. I was trying to get across the point that consuming causes pollution. The more people consume, whether it be food, electricity, gasoline, etc, the more they pollute. There's no way around it. Getting back to the cottager, let's say he has your wood burning stove and double glazed windows. He is now using his energy more efficiently. But somewhere a foundry and a glazier have made some pollution as well. There is less pollution compared to the cottager using a chimney and open windows, but what pollution now exists is concentrated.
I am of the mind that this is better because concentrated pollution is easier to control and manage than dispersed pollution. In the previous case, the cottager subjected his nieghbors to smoke and stench (and their thatched roofs to stray sparks), but in the latter the benefits of the consumption accrue to many neighborhoods, but only one actually gets the pollution.
Re:Not polluting in the first place (Score:2)
Ah yes! The origin of NIMBY and the reason why people get so upset with zoning changes. It's also why property values are cheaper next to a factory than they are next to a forest.
Not polluting in the first place (Score:2)
Technology has a benefit in that it makes the consumption of energy more efficient. It also has the drawback the the lesser pollution created is also more concentrated. The nuclear power plant produces far, far less pollution than the equivalent in wood burning stoves, but that tiny bit of pollution is now concentrated in tiny lethal pellets.
Not polluting in the first place just isn't an option. But using the poplar trees to counteract the pollution is a great idea! I say shoot all those nuclear waste pellets into space on a trajectory intersecting the sun, the ring the launch facilities with forests.
Re:Photoremediation (Score:2)
--Crush
Re:Futile straw men burning (Score:2)
I wouldn't bet on it. A wood fire in a conventional fireplace or wood stove is very dirty. This page [doe.gov] has some information from the Department of Energy on pollution from burning wood. I have read EPA literature that states that wood burning stoves are by far the worst polluting residential source of energy.
Why Poplar Popular? (Score:2)
Polluted Wood? (Score:2)
The advantage of doing this is that the trees remove the pollutants from hard-to-clean soil and concentrate it in wood. Wood is chemically much simpler and can be dealt with in other ways. If nothing else, the contaminated wood can be transported to a better disposal facility (ie, removing lead and chromium from areas near housing). Wood can be incinerated and the metals trapped in ash and stack filters. Wood can be dumped in molten iron and the metals become part of the mix or the slag. Eventually, we'll be able to dump them into industrial-sized mass spectrometers and separate all the individual elements (once we get thermal furnaces about 10 times hotter)...but may as well get them growing now so we can harvest them and move the pollutants someplace safer.
Of course, many organics just need the biosystem around the roots to get degraded. The trees may leak some organic fumes, but the site was going to leak that stuff anyway either downward or upward more slowly.
Re:Trees are great, but... (Score:2)
On a small scale, cotton and wool might be the best fabrics, but on a large scale polypro may be better. Cotton is associated with arguably the worst environmental disaster in the last hundred years -- the shrinking of the Aral sea.
Re:Ecology=medicine for the environment (Score:2)
Let say we come up with really good ways to clean up messes in the environment using bacteria or trees or genetically altered rabbits, whatever.
Next thing you know, Jerry Bigbucks (CEO of Brown Sludge Inc)discovers that Product X can be produced in a highly polluting fashion and then just plant some trees or place some bacteria to get rid of resulting mess. Mr. Bigbucks ends up saving a lot of money. If anyone complains about the pollution, they just have to commission a study that states the cleanup made things just as clean (or cleaner!) as if there was no pollution in the first place (study paid for by Brown Sludge, Inc, of course). Seems like a lot of room for abuse.
Ultimately, a "medicine for the environment" is a very valuable thing for enviromental accidents. However, it will never be a substitute for keeping pollution down in the first place.
Why? Because as soon as you allow Brown Sludge Inc. (BSI) to sponser "cleanups" rather than forcing environmental responsibility in the first place, the company will start ignoring pollution issues (because it's in their best interest (money-wise) to do so). The pollution generated will be a little more, then a bit more, then a bit more.
All the while, Clean Tree Inc. (CTI) and Bacterial Waste Management (BWM) will get contracts from BSI to clean up after the company. As BSI's generates more and more pollution, CTI and BWM just create more trees and stronger sludge-eating bacteria.
In the end, we will end up with sludge eating bacteria that suddely decide they like eating automobiles or electronics more than toxic sludge. Or trees that have learned to purge themselves quickly of toxins (by emitting them in the air of course).
So many bad things can happen with this. It's much better to try to stay clean in the first place. Use ecological engineering like this as little as possible.
Re:Nanotech - friend or foe? (Score:2)
From reading the article, I can only speculate that the reason for using trees is because of their root structure. In order to really clean an area, you have to have a plant that can reach several feet down into the soil, and draw nutrients and process chemicals. The idea behind some of this guys doctorate research apparently was finding ways to plant Poplar trees (fast growing and can grow roots from the bark) to create a deep and dense enough root structure. I wish there was a bit more scientific detail to this article. Perhaps someone can point us to some research papers or something to supplement the interview?
Spyky
Re:Question on the article.. (Score:2)
Tightwad.
Trees can do things other stuff can't. (Score:2)
Trees are pretty good at soaking up energy, carbon and water. This may not seem like a big thing, but put it into context: the purpose of the pollutant-remediation is to soak stuff up. An acre of soil under a black tarp can only support so many kinds of processes, an acre of soil covered with trees can support a lot more. Anything that needs water transpiration, nitrate and phosphate removal, or sugars to feed the bacteria breaking down other things is going to go a lot faster with the support provided by the tree and the interface it provides between solar energy, atmospheric carbon, and the soil and the substances and living things in it.
--
Keeping things in perspective (Score:2)
You mean, of course, its pre-history, and I would suggest there simply isn't enough data available to make such a confident statement one way or another. Herbert's observation of a vast number of agricultural land plots, elaborate ritual structures, etc. are evidence for his argument. So, no, I am not joking. You can't rate carrying capacity on the basis of durable artifacts that people normally expect. Some native Americans were engaged in fascinating large scale ecosystem management involving periodic and controlled burn-offs of some types of trees and other vegitation that would bias toward acorn productivity. Today we observe an inordinate number of grinding holes in rocks but not much else -- not even densely sub-divided agricultural plots.
As for Herbert's hybrid sterility theory, it isn't really central to my point, but we can discuss it as a fascinating side issue:
It is certainly the case that there was an enormous displacement of Rh-negative peoples by Rh-positive peoples that extended vastly beyond the Basque. The entire mythology of the wars between the gods of the Aesir and the gods of the Vanir is likely related to this conflict. The Aesir, for example, poked fun at the Vanir fertility god and goddess, Frey and Freya, for having an incestuous marriage -- something that would tend to reflect the competition for reproductive resources between Rh negative tribes, for whom intermarriage would be ethnocidal, and Rh postivie tribes, for whom a de facto polygyny based on first child would be a reproductive win. This sort of mockery is still poked at Scotch-Irish "hillbillies" who are, it turns out, quite likely to have have Rh negative blood. US marriage licenses into this century required blood tests that included Rh factor because of the high percentage of the British immigrant population that was still Rh negative. Rh negativity applies to many of the Atlantic populations from north sea Scandanavians groups to western Africa peoples such as the Berbers. The higher fertility rate among populations with greater genetic dominance is predicted fromthe fact that hybrid infertility results, primarily, from the expression of deleterious recessives. Although fertility among European ethnicity hybrids is higher than predicted by Herbert's population crash scenario, it is much less than the more genetically dominant groups. Further, Herbert was reporting on a much more isolated population -- possibly with far more inbreeding and therefore homozygous recessives that would make them vulnerable to introduction of otherwise hidden deleterious recessives during hybridization with genetically dominant tribes. One has to keep in mind that genetic dominance is vastly more complex than the mere expression of a particular protein -- it involves the entire heirarchy of phenotypic expression up to and including extended phenotypic [barnesandnoble.com] expression.
I agree with you that Herbert is wrong about the degree to which mtDNA correlates with ethnicity -- that Y-Chromosomal correlations are much stronger for the reasons you cite. Indeed Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza [barnesandnoble.com] assert such in their genetic opus.
Nevertheless, we are operating in a vacum of information about Y-Chromosomes compared to the relatively vast information that has been acquired about mtDNA, so strong our conclusions must be tempered accordingly. (BTW: I'll probably be seeing one of these authors tonight so I'll see if I can get a good reference for recent progress in Y-Chromosome geographic mapping).
In present day populations, we are probably witnessing stablized hybrids that have gone through a period of genetic annealing, as well as the introduction of dominance suppression of hybrid infertility. Indeed, it may be the Bantu/Scotch-Irish hybrids sometimes called "African Americans", and the Spanish-Indian hybrids sometimes called "Hispanics" have been around long enough that their fertility has probably been enhanced by genetic annealing as well as dominance-suppression of hybrid infertility.
Nevertheless, we are still witnessing other populations that have serious fertility problems extending all the way from high rates of spontaneous abortions (probably due to direct nonviable proteins expressing in the zygote) to behavioral difficulties during the years of fertility (which is a vastly complex arena of evolutionary psychology that may involve a lot more extended phenotypics than anyone would like to believe).
Agriculture, Human Carrying Capacity and Ecology (Score:2)
For many, the thought of removing technological civilization from planetary surfaces is simply too radical to consider. They have enough trouble dealing with questions of sustainable human carrying capacity on Earth such as how much does urbanization contribute to solutions or problems of sustainable carrying capacity? For those people I would suggest they at least consider the possibility that carrying capacities approaching present day are feasible under neolithic constraints, focused more on careful breeding practices, as appeared to have been the case in the early societies that gave us domesticated plants and animals.
For example, Blind Genes, Friendly People: Hybrid infertility in humans [wildsurmise.com] reports evidence of vastly greater sustainable carrying capacities among neolithic peoples than is commonly taught:
The process has recently been demonstrated in Britain. Using mitochondrial DNA analysis, which follows only female inheritance, scientists have looked at the bones of people who have migrated into the British Isles. The pre-Celtic Britons once lived there in vast numbers. A casual inspection of the English countryside will show terraced hills. Big fields have subtle changes in the color of their vegetation that look like a patchwork quilt. Obviously all of Britain was under intensive cultivation, far more so that now. It is and was a fertile land. They raised more food; they must have been feeding more people. They built vast monuments, including ominously an area around Avebury where there are a number of monuments, each of which resembles monuments from a different area. In other words, from time to time they gathered peaceably from all over Britain. Everyone had a monument like the ones at home.
Then the population crashed. You see, not everyone in Britain was alike. The DNA analysis shows six entirely different groups living there by the time Avebury was built. They had lived there since the English Channel cut them off from the continent thousands of years before. They lived in peace, and at Avebury for the first time they physically got together to cooperate and make friends. They crossbred. They almost died out.
They did not die out altogether, because modern DNA analysis identifies their descendants. At least a few hundred survived when their numbers were lowest. That is because among humans it takes more than a hundred people in a breeding group or the group will die out because of inbreeding. Yes, excessive inbreeding will kill off a population just as surely as cross breeding. I doubt more than a very few thousand survived, because they must at some time have reached a sort of equilibrium so their numbers could recover, and it is hard to reach equilibrium with a large number of people.
So a population of perhaps a hundred million fell to a population of perhaps under a thousand. Imagine the loss. Imagine the human despair, the loss of cultural treasures, the loss of so much of what makes us human. But this was England, one of the most fertile, safest, most hospitable places on earth. They had a long history of successful cooperation, and for a long time they were free of any outside pressure. They survived.
By the time the Celts arrived in about five hundred BC, the land was still just about empty. The Celts overran Britain, then the Romans, then the Anglo Saxons. There were Viking raids and at last the land was conquered by Normans. And today they have gone back and looked at the DNA. It is ninety-nine percent pre-Celtic. All those other invaders arrived only to interbreed and die out.
Its all a matter of perception (Score:2)
solve every day problems.
Have ants in your kitchen? Get Raid.
Have aphids in your garden? Get a pesticide.
But ladybugs EAT aphids.
And woods like cedar and others can keep
pests out of your home. Not necessarily ants -
but other unwelcome guests.
But people would rather buy a canned solution
because marketing and media have pummeled them
into believing that only the most recent new
and improved spray/gel/etc can resolve their
problems.
Re:Lack of research/data? (Score:2)
Ecology=medicine for the environment (Score:2)
Western medicine has traditionally focused on treating symptoms, basically by abuse or neglect, allow the body to become diseased. Oriental philosophy, on the other hand, has always been more wholistic, seeking balance and well being of the whole person, spiritually, mentally, physically, whatever, thus preventing disease and maintain health. Western medicine has been very reactive - treat the symptom directly, cut off what you can't cure. Most doctors don't work with what is really causing the problem. They just make the symptoms 'disappear".
That said, with the analogy that I've just drawn about ecology being like medicine for the environment, I think we need to not fall into the same trap. Yes, it would be better if we don't pollute in the first place. It is already too late when we see the symptoms of the problems with pollution - it has already done its damage. We must be more proactive in our approach, and the philosophy must be changed in our attitude toward it.
Of course, I have been very general and vague about what we should do - and that's also kind of the point. I'm not proposing anything concrete here, because that's usually the approach when you treat problems symptomatically.
So Far, So Good, but... (Score:2)
Also, somebody imported a dozen european swallows (or swifts, I always get them confused) into Central Park because they were mentioned in Shakespeare (I Am Not Making This Up) and they have literally exploded all over the continent.
I'm not saying that 'Poplars Will Rule The Earth!!!', but nothing is an unmixed blessing.
More interesting work in Vermont (Score:2)
Other people working on things in the same vein (Score:2)
They are also some of the original proponents of composite-body, fuel-cell-driven cars. Neat stuff.
More limited application than dude implies (Score:2)
The problem that gets addressed here is, water pollution from nitrogen fertilizers and manure. For a variety of reasons (not worth gettting into now) these fertilizer have a tendency to run-off into waterways, and ground water. this nitrogen can create several kinds of pollution. one example is that serves as a fertilizer for algae it these waterways. Massive alge blooms follow, and then a dramatically lowered dissolved O2, then dead fish, and other problems.
So what happens is that dude plants his poplar trees and the N2 fertilizes them instead of getting into the water system...also the root systems of the trees hold the soils/N2 in one place. So the issue of pollutants being stored in the trees that some people have mentioned isnt a big deal because we it is good for the trees.
He is using Poplar trees because they grow fast and are easy to plant.
OTOH...the part where dude was talking about running H20 through landfills to decompose the trash faster and using trees there is something I dont think I quite get. The water that runs through would be come toxic as hell, and since we are no longer talking about N2 pollution I dont think the trees would help. In fact most modern landfills want to prevent the trash from decomposing, the goal is simply long term storage. So I am not so sure what he is getting at here
anyway sorry to ramble
Mike
Re:Nanotech - friend or foe? (Score:2)
Essentially, it's a question of how much information you can pump into a piece of matter. It's very hard to imagine taking a chunk of matter of any description and sticking into polluted soil with the result that the piece of matter in question develops a source of energy for itself and starts sorting through the stuff in the soil molecule by molecule.
But if the piece of matter in question happens to be a plant, it does exactly what I just described. A stick from a poplar tree develops its own root system and leaves and starts sorting through the molecules it finds in the soil. That makes it very useful to anyone trying to clean up anything. Cleaning polluted soil is an information problem - you somehow have to flag every molecule in your sample as polluted or unpolluted and the collect the polluted ones. The hard part isn't moving the molecules, it's moving only the right molecules.
Organisms can do this because every molecule they contain is custom built atom by atom to carry out a specific task. Organisms contain a huge amount of information about how each molecule is built and how many of which kind of each molecule each cell contains.
Nanotechnology is the idea of using "assemblers" to manufacture useful things atom by atom. Living things having been doing this for some time. (Surprisingly neither Drexler nor Bill Joy seem to know about the information side or the biological side of the story.) Nanotechnology has so much positive and negative potential because it's so much like life.
I discuss all this at some length on my website. Werner Loewenstein wrote a great book called "The Touchstone of Life" in which he shows that molecular biology is all about information.
Nanotech - friend or foe? (Score:3)
This fellow hasn't started down the path of reengineered plants focused on pollution cleanup. It's also interesting that there is no mention made of tobacco. Tobacco plants have been used to clean radioactively contaminated soil because of their amazing ability to leach anything from the ground. At least there are no citings about the holy grail of nanotech that will create machines to clean up after us.
OTOH there has also been some really cool stuff done with bacterias that can be used to clean up pollution.
Cool stuff, but why is he focused entirely on trees?
chris
Futile straw men burning (Score:3)
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
Agreed, which is why you have to adjust the rules of the game so that their short term interests coincide with long-term strategies. Skew the cost-benefit ration of pollution so that it negatively affects the "greed" and "economic self-interest" of the individual asshole that is the typical human and they will go along with it.
The big hassle is getting everyone to agree to these new rules initially, but given that we are all competing relative to each other it won't affect how we do individually in the game if we're competitive and smart - we can see the new rules and play them better than others. An example of this is curb-side recycling in Germany as compared to Ireland. Both were introduced by government programs in major cities. It was a success in Germany but not in Ireland. Why? Initially Irish commentators decried their personalities for being too disorganized as compared to the methodical Germans. However, another analysis is more compelling - in Germany there were economic incentives to recycle: free recycling and charges for pick-up of non-recycling, whereas in Ireland everyone paid a flat distributed fee to the local government and voluntarily recyled "for the environment".
I thought that the interviewer and interviewee discussed a straw-man when they talked about extreme environmentalists that want to "punish" polluters because they're "evil". That may be how owners of polluting corporations feel about having economic disincentives imposed on them, and it may even be how some people feel when they realize that their health is suffering because those companies find it economically self-interested to poison them, but the thinking behind the system of fines has always been that it will encourage a shift in behaviour through short-term mechanisms to acheive long term goals.
I also had another question about the article: what happens to a low-income neighbour-hood that is burning benzene and heavy metal enriched trees? Do you get a lot of carcinogens in the air?
--Crush
Trees are great, but... (Score:3)
The problem in environmental pollution is scale. Some things that are innocuous or beneficial on a small scale are bad on a large scale. Inuit hunters make their anoraks out of seal hide -- it's fine on the level they practice it but if it ever caught on in an industrialized country the world would be depopulated of seals in a few weeks. Spraying sewage on saltmarsh works for a small suburban sewage system, but New York city would require a sizable chunk of the Everglades. If you looked at large tree planting programs such as those run by the timber companies, you find that diverse mixed species forests are replaced with monocultures of fast growing softwoods. If you drive through places where this has been done it's almost eerie -- millions of identical trees -- same species, same size, planted in geometrically perfect lines. I'm not saying this is what the guy is proposing, but you have to put limits on it.
Trees are a great solution to clean up where we've screwed up, but this doesn't mean we can pollute on our merry way and plant a few trees. For one thing, the landfill represents an end point for a long trail of waste and pollution. Toxic such as cadmium could be sequestered in trees, but we'd still be mining it and releasing it into the environment in one form or other. It would be better to recycle.
Actual recycling doesn't just reusing our trash a few times on the way to landfill, but to create closed matter loops in which molecules are used over an over again. Recycling technology will solve the extraction problem, and the landfill problem. Recycling technology allows you to expand a population and economy beyond the carrying capacity of the planet under a extraction and disposal regime.
Re:Lack of research/data? (Score:3)
It is one of the fastest growing and one of the most common trees of North America. It also has a tendency to be hardy.
Poplars also have a different root system than what most perceive to be the "standard tree root system." They can shoot off runners that will grow into trees. Within a short geological instant, a forest of poplars can be grown with a strong, interwoven root system. In this case, the root system can be viewed with some qualities as a sponge, in an environmental sense.
Oak trees don't do that.
Wheat doesn't do that.
Algae doesn't do that.
A few plants in a pond do work just as well:
Cattails are one of them.
Moss is another.
Unfortunately, moss is generally hard to grow and takes a long time to have enough in a biosystem to make a really strong impact. If you want to go the moss route, you need an established biosystem: a peat bog.
Swamp/Marshland is the best natural filtering system North America has. There are actually a few towns that do utilize this efficiently yet they still get a lot of red tape because because mother nature isn't as 100% monitorable/predictable as a human-made waste treatment center.
Other downside is: not too many people like living by swampland.
-Vel
Photoremediation (Score:3)
So far results are promising:
-- http://www.sas.upenn.edu/biology/facult y/rea/ [upenn.edu]
For obvious reasons the EPA is very interested in this work as a means of very cheaply processing abandoned toxic dump (so-called "Superfund") sites. After growing a field of modified Arabidopsis, the material can be harvested and incinerated, separating the compounds for re-use or safe disposal.
Not all biotechnology is about Monsanto taking over the world!
Good, but probably futile (Score:4)
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
We're now looking at Ecolovillage. We want to build a suburb of clustered housing, a small retirement village. That's what we want to do-and treat all the water on-site, really get focused on solid waste management, and grow enough carbon that we have a good running start to be even greenhouse-gas cyclic. You take a field and, instead of putting two-acre mini- mansions on it, you go out there, cluster housing, and keep the rest of the land either in productive agriculture or productive prairie, with wetlands and ecological diversity.
Hands up anyone out there who believes that more than an tiny minority of the peole who can afford mini-mansions would go for this?
Don't get me wrong; I was mightily impressed by this interview, and it convinced me to look further into the project. I don't, however, believe you can rely on the asshole that is the typical human to go along with it.