Surviving the Anthropocene

sc-deer-garbage-1463 — Styrofoam cup collected from the beach of Deer Island. The city of Biloxi sits in the background.

65 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth just off the Yucatan Penninsula, kicking up enough dust in to the atmosphere (and perhaps setting off supervolcanos) to lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Geologists mark this mass extinction event as the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary; it’s called the K-T boundary. Paleontologists see a rapid change in the forms of life fossilized in the rocks above and below the boundary. The element iridium, which is relatively common on asteroids, but rare on Earth, can be found in a thin layer of the fallout from the asteroid impact all around the world.

The Chicxulub Crater, believed to be the location of the K-T asteriod impact. Image from NASA: Short (2010)

Well, the Earth’s going through another mass extinction event right now. In fact, even if humans were to go extinct right now, the remains of our cities and our impact on the global chemical cycles, will leave a distinct signature that geologists millions of years from now will be able to detect.

Geologists refer to the last 10,000 years, the period starting when the Earth warmed after the last glacial maximum, as the Holocene. This time period saw the emergence of agriculture, the rise of human civilization, cities, nuclear weapons, the internet. Now, given the enormous environmental changes we’re wrecking on the planet, some say we’ve entered a new geologic epoch that they’re calling the Anthropocene.

The question is: How long will it last?

Regardless of your philosophy, the recognition that we have entered a geologic age of humanity raises the obvious question of just how long such an age will last.

In the infamous KT boundary geologists can see evidence for a rather short-lived event that also reshaped the planet. Sixty five million years ago an asteroid struck the Earth, driving one of only five mass extinctions in the planet’s history. The loss of the dinosaurs turned out to be an opportunity for our mammal ancestors and led directly to our own age.

Since the Anthropocene appears to mark a sixth great extinction, one has to wonder what it will take for us to make it out of own era with civilization intact.

— Frank (2011): The Anthropocene: Can Humans Survive A Human Age?

What’s Needed for a Nation’s Peace

The Fund for Peace has been doing a lot of thinking about what it takes for a country to be considered peaceful, and what it takes for a state to fail. For the last seven years they’ve been putting together maps of the world with an index of how stable different countries are.

fsi-finland — Finland - the most sustainable state, at least according to the Failed State Index.

While it’s pretty in-depth and makes for rather sobering reading, it’s worth taking a look at the criteria they’ve come up with to determine a country’s stability. It may be useful to include some of this information in the cycle where we focus on peace.

Their criteria for instability include:

Demographic pressure (such as having too many young adults, as we’ve seen in Egypt)
Amount of refugees and internally displaced peoples (refugees are people who’ve crossed international borders). Both leaving or entering refugees can undermine stability.
Historical Injustice – communities can have an understandably hard time forgetting the past, just look at Isreal/Palestine.
Brain Drain – when countries start to fail, the first to leave are the ones who can afford to. Yet these intellectuals and professionals, with their college degree are vital for creating a stable and prosperous country.
Inequality – especially when driven by active discrimination (wealth inequality is something to watch out for).
Economic decline – pushes trade into the black market and increases criminality and corruption.
Illegitimacy of the state – if people don’t believe the people in government have everyone in the country’s best interests at heart, and are only looking out for themselves and their friends, then there’s probably going to be trouble.
Public Services go kaput – It’s a really bad sign when the government can meet people’s basic needs – like picking up the garbage.
The Rule of Law goes kaput – when you’re ruled by the caprice of men, and your rights under the law are not respected, you may begin to consider and agitate for other options for government.
Personal Armies – forces that are tied to individual leaders, like private militias or super-secret police for example, are very damaging to a country’s cohesion.
Fighting elites – healthy countries need robust arguments in their political class – think checks and balances – but it can go too far and lead to things like extreme nationalism and ethnic cleansing.
Invasion – both overt invasion and covert meddling in the affairs of a country are unhealthy for that state’s stability.

It’s also very nice that you can download their index data as a MS Excel spreadsheet, which you can let students analyze to answer their own research questions. For example, I was wondering what was the difference between the best, the worst and the USA, so I plotted this graph.

fsi-best-worst-usa — Comparing the best (Finland), worst (Somalia) and the USA using the Fund for Peace's Failed State Indicies.

The USA is much closer to Finland than Somalia, thank goodness, but should probably watch out for that Uneven Development (wealth inequality).

I think something like this would make a good experiential exercise for the science of geography.

Collecting Garbage on the Beach: The Trip to Deer Island

To the left, a long, narrow, lightly-wooded island. Skeletal trees, dying on the upwind end; drowned by the attrition of the waves. To the right, a narrow, eager, urban strip. Hotels and casinos, pressing against the water’s edge; vying for access to the white sand beaches and gentle waters of the sound. Such different places on either side, yet the one on the right is the reason we’ve come to the one on the left. We’re here as part of our Adventure Trip to pick up any artificial debris that’s managed to float across the sound and collect and contaminate the quiet, isolated beaches of the island.

We’d gotten on a pontoon at the research lab right after breakfast, so the early adolescents were still a little groggy. Our vessel’s captain asked a question about team mascots which promptly woke up approximately 63.64% of the class, and served as a topic of conversation for the twenty or so minutes it took to get to the drop-off point on the west-north-western end of Deer Island.

sc-shrimp-boat-1830 — Shrimp boat caught in the act of deploying its nets.

Mostly unobserved by my busy students were the half dozen shrimp boats casting their nets in the sound. Long, spider-like, almost robotic arms spread out from the vessel to lower the nets. It’s quite an impressive sight. Commercial shrimping is a major industry all along the Gulf coast.

Deer Island (and its hike). View Coastal Sciences Camp, Gulf Coast Research Lab in a larger map

sc-deer-island-1837 — Mostly dead trees.

The island itself is long and thin, wedge shaped, no more than a couple hundred meters at its widest at the eastern end, but thinning to less than 100 meters to the west. Although wider, almost all the trees seem to have died on the eastern end. Then there is a gap and the trees are mostly alive. Looking at the satellite image, you can see a clear channel cutting through the island. From the image, I’d guess the channel is tidal, with water moving back and forth, filling and draining the sound with each cycle of the tides. The sediment deposited in the quieter waters of the sound (to the north) seem to be forming a small, white-sand delta; the equivalent deposits on the south are probably washed away by the longshore current pretty quickly since that shore is exposed to the wind and waves.

Deer Island is not an active barrier island: twelve kilometers to the south, Horn and Ship Islands do that job today. However, given the shape of Deer Island, it may have once been a barrier when the coastline was further inland. This is all part of the coastal plains deltas, which includes the Mississippi Delta and smaller rivers. These rivers transport sediment from the mountains inland and deposit them in the ocean, gradually building out the land. As the deltas build out, the barrier islands also push out to accommodate them.

sc-deer-island-1852 — Scrambling for dry land. Note the rich, black mud.

The pontoon pulled up on a broad, sandy beach then retreated to deeper waters where the fishing is better. The white sand beach we landed on was an artifice, just like the East Beach Drive beach we’d walked the day before. Our first steps betrayed the secret. Breaking through a thin cover of sand, we sank knee-deep into a rich black mud that’s the natural sediment in a quiet waterway like the sound.

Our guide, on the other hand, seemed to have a preternatural ability to avoid sinking into the mud, or even getting her feet wet, or even touching the water.

sc-1851 — Stephanie, our guide, carefully takes her first few steps off the boat. (no photoshopping was involved in the creation of this image).

References

The first image was distorted using a four point distortion method with ImageMagick.

> convert sc-deer-island-1843.jpg -matte -virtual-pixel transparent -distort Perspective ‘0,0,0,200 0,664,0,564 1000,0,1000,0 1000,664,1000,664’ tst2.jpg

> convert sc-deer-island-1841.jpg -matte -virtual-pixel transparent -distort Perspective ‘0,0,0,0 0,664,0,664 1000,0,1000,200 1000,664,1000,564’ tst.jpg

Osama bin Laden: A Montessori Discussion

[…] the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting.

–Orwell (1945): Sour Revenge in the Tribune. (Found via Megan McArdle).

Over the last couple of weeks, students have been reading and presenting newspaper articles every morning, so, inevitability, we had a few good opportunities to discuss the death of Osama bin Laden.

The discussions were remarkably mature, and quite edifying to hear, because it was pretty much what one would hope to occur among Montessori kids who’ve been dealing with the peace curriculum since pre-school.

There was remarkably little jubilation. So much so, that one student asked, “Are we not supposed to feel happy?”

The answer was that yes we can feel happy and relieved but we shouldn’t “spike the ball”, letting the celebration get so out of hand that it antagonizes bin Laden’s supporters even more, and makes us seem as arrogant as they caricature us to be. If we want to achieve peace we need to be better than that.

Their broader perspective is somewhat akin to what Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen monk, expressed a couple weeks after the September 11th attack (thanks to Julie H. for the link to the interview by Anne A. Simkinson).

All violence is injustice. The fire of hatred and violence cannot be extinguished by adding more hatred and violence to the fire. The only antidote to violence is compassion. And what is compassion made of? It is made of understanding. When there is no understanding, how can we feel compassion, how can we begin to relieve the great suffering that is there? So understanding is the very real foundation upon which we build our compassion.

[…]

There are people who want one thing only: revenge. In the Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha said that by using hatred to answer hatred, there will only be an escalation of hatred. But if we use compassion to embrace those who have harmed us, it will greatly diffuse the bomb in our hearts and in theirs.

–Thich Nhat Hanh (2001): What I Would Say to Osama bin Laden (Interview by Anne A. Simpkinson on BeliefNet.com)

There’s also a poignant reflection by Megan McArdle, a New Yorker, who was, at first, extremely angry and eager for revenge, but has become much more reflective, and cognizant that we share both humanity and mortality with even Osama bin Laden.

McArdle elaborates more here.

Notes

References