Pave the Pasture & Pay the Price

I have always considered farm land to be a tremendously valuable asset, it enables one to have some degree of self sufficiency whether that be as an individual or as a country. My work takes me all over Canada, with most of the travel being by air (that is why my carbon foot print is so embarrassingly huge). While flying I spend a lot of time looking out the window. Flying South from the "almost arctic" where I am now We go over tundra, boreal forest, commercial forests, farm land and finally city. There are some spectacular views in Northern Quebec. With my geology background I get quite absorbed just staring into the landscape. Although Farms are not a natural part of the landscape I really enjoy seeing the long thin cultivated fields that seen to make up the agricultural landscape in southern Quebec. I don't know how long this land has been cultivated, maybe 200 or 300 hundred years, by Europeans at least, some of it perhaps longer by native people. Eventually the farm land passes into city, this is my least favorite part of the journey. I see once productive fields that for generations provided a home and source of income for a families and food for 1000s or people, being dig up, paved over and built on. Not with tidy little houses, but stupidly big places, perhaps 2 or 3 per acre in some cases. The worst examples I have seen are actually in Ontario, I was going to use an example from google earth, but my connection is too slow. have a look around Brampton Ontario.
I grew up on a farm, so seeing a farm destroyed upsets me more than I would like to admit, while this is probably an irrational attachment I have due to fond memories of growing up on a farm there is also a practical side.
Farms are not just nice places for kids to grow up, they provide us with food, take a look at any meal you eat, unless it is fish, caught in the ocean or wild game of some sort, it had to be grown by someone somewhere. In our global economy it may well be more cost effective to ship food from distant sources to meet our demand, most of your next meal will probably come from over 1000km from your kitchen.
What if our changing climate leads to crop failures where our feed is now grown, what if the fuel used to ship our food runs out, or becomes too expensive (financially, or environmentally) What if we find our selves at war with our food supplier or shipping routes are disrupted by war??? If all our arable land has been built on where are you going to get food from? It might be possible to bring new land into production, or even reclaim land from suburbia, but it takes many years to convert a section of wild land into productive farm land. If, or when it comes to a crunch and we need farm land we will not be able to bring it into production fast enough to meet the demand, just think of the consequences - not good!
What is the solution? It is not good enough to just stop building on farm land, There is a reason it is being built on. In our present short sighted economy the land is worth more with houses on it than with crops. The land only becomes available to developers if the farmer sells up, so we need to figure out how to keep the farmers on the land. If a farmers can make a decent living they will most likely keep the farm and keep it in production.
We all love to pay less for food, more money for other stuff right? Food is probably cheaper now than it has ever been if you take into account inflation. One hours pay will probably get you significantly more than you grandfathers hours pay when he was your age. The fact is someone somewhere, some when someone is paying the price. Somewhere, would be where ever your food is grown now - it is cheep because the people growing it are not paid a fair price for their work, or at least not what you would expect to be paid. Some when, well who knows when, but every time we purchase cheep food from outside our country a farmer in our country looses a few bucks and gets a few step closer to selling up to a developer. once that land is gone, it's gone for good.

Fortunately there are some obvious answers to this problem.
-Buy local, the 100 mile diet is something that has been talked about a lot recently, while this may be impractical in many parts of Canada, the idea of how far your food has traveled is something that is worth considering, both from an environmental aspect and in supporting local growers. About 10 years ago My family decided to purchase locally grown vegetables when they are available, which is now most of the year. While these vegetables may cost a little more than those from a supermarket I think it is worth it, the Vegetables taste better, I have no evidence to support it, but I feel they are better for us as well, and we actually get to meet the person who grows them.

Another thing to Consider it the value of Farm land to the country, because it gives us a better chance of supporting our selves in the event of changing climate or war, it offers us a significant degree of (that much loved word) "Security". Just like a well trained military I think Farm land should be considered a strategic asset and just like a well trained military it must be maintained, even during peace time. Just as the military is funded by tax dollars, Farms should be entitled to more funding in the form of government agricultural subsidies. Currently Canadian farmers receive a fraction of that received by US farmers. I am not suggesting that we should be trying to boost or exports to the US, but Canadian farm products should be able to compete with US goods on the Canadian Market

I am sure there are some more solutions, but I have been trying to post this blog for over a week now, so I will just post it now. You can comment if you wish.

CO2 offsets

Going on a trip? you might consider buying carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are intended to be a way of negating you carbon foot print, this is often used when people travel by air. If your trip produces X tons of CO2 you can pay a company a few dollars per tone to off set the carbon produced by your trip. Sounds great if you are feeling a bit guilty about the cloud of CO2 left behind as you jet your way around the planet.
Most of the companies that will take your money for the CO2 you made will use it to plant trees, which is nice, I like trees, but you just burnt a load of fossil fuel on your trip, that came from crude oil that was locked away in the earth millions of years ago and was supost to stay there. Planting trees is great, but any bit of land left long enough will probably end up with trees on it, so paying someone to plant them just speeds up the process a bit. Trees also die, wither they are cut down for wood, or just die from old age they will eventually release all the CO2 they absorbed during their life back into the atmosphere, they are only a temporary carbon sink. It might be more effective to pay someone to bury a tree in anaerobic mud so it can be converted to coal over the next few million years, however this is probably not practical.
You could decide to invest you offset money in a company that does research into carbon sequestration, basically catching the carbon released after fossil fuels are burned, then hiding it away somewhere. There are several ideas, of how to do this. The CO2 could be pumped down oil wells, this would help pressurize the reservoir and allow more oil to be produced - Great, more fossil fuel!
CO2 can also be reacted with minerals like Olivene and Pyroxene to produce minerals like Calcium Carbonate and Magnesite. These reactions occur naturally but only where CO2 is in contact with the rock. To lock away a significant volume of CO2 would require a large surface area of Olivene or Pyroxene, so significant of mining and crushing would be required - how much CO2 would be produced by this activity, not to mention transporting the CO2 to the crushed rock.
You could also invest your money in companies that promote energy efficient appliances in 3rd world countries - great fit Africa out with Compact Fluorescent light bulbs! (you know my feelings about those) Looking at the problem in the long term there is a finite(ish) volume of fossil fuel on the planet so efficient light bulbs may just allow us to keep using fossil fuels for a bit longer, but but eventually putting the same volume on CO2 into the air.

As far as I see it we have to leave that Carbon that is locked away in the form of Coal or crude oil, it has been naturally sequestered by the earth millions of years ago, why mess with that?

My answer is to invest money into companies or organizations that are doing research into alternative energy, that does not tap into any fossil fuels, or non-renewable resources. At some point we are going to have to use non-fossil fuels for our energy as fossil fuels will run out one day. Why not attempt to stop using them before they run out, it is a bridge we are going to have to cross one day better to do it while we have the choice then when we are forced to.

Lots of research has been done into alternative fuels in the past, during WWII and the energy crisis in the '70s people experimented with wood gas as a fuel 100s of trucks and tractors were successfully converted to on wood, so when the need is there it can be done - unfortunately the current need has not been recognized.

I am not going to pay some company to plant trees to I can feel less guilty about flying around the planet for my work, but I am going to look into investing some money into companies that are working on viable alternatives to fossil fuels as an energy source for industry and transportation. I can't wait to fly in an Ethanol or BioJet fuel plane, or maybe throw a junk of wood in the car for a trip into town.

Gravity in a hollow Sphere

So This blog has taken a bit of an environmental slant, but that is because that is what was on my mind - but it is not all I think about.

Recently I was talking to a colleague about physics, and we got onto the subject of gravity in a hollow sphere - don't ask how we got there, I have no idea.

Any way My colleague said that in a Physics class he had learned that there was no gravity in side a hallow sphere. Ever since I was pretty young I have pondered the idea of what happens to gravity at the centre of the earth, or any other spherical object, I had sort of assumed that there would a a point where Gravity would be Zero - because there is an equal ammount of earth each side of you, so the gravitational force exerted by one side would the equal to the force from the other side, so you wouldn't move if you were right in the centre (ignoring all the other problems you would be having) I had assumed that as soon as you move from your place in the centre, you would be closer to one side than the other and the gravity from the closer side would have a stronger pull than that from the further side and you'd end up stuck to the wall.

However according to the Gauss-Ostrogradsky theorem at every point inside a hollow sphere gravity is Zero. there is all sorts on nasty math to "prove" this but I think the general idea is that if you move off your point at the centre, there is more sphere behind you than in front, so the fact that is further away is made up for by there being more of it, so the force exerted by the wall in front and behind you are still the same. I am still not 100% convinced - I think a practical demonstration is called for.

The end of Incandescent bulbs in Canada

Yep, Ottawa has decided to phase out the old incandescent bulbs by 2012 for the full story visit CBC.
I think this is more of a political move, but it is a sign that the government has realized that the public are becoming more aware that we are of what we are doing to our environment.
The fact that there is enough concern in the public that it has a political significance is encouraging. Hopefully this is the first step on a new path that will see our government take a lead in implementing environmentally conscious legislation.

Future Cave man?

We do have many advantages over past civilizations, the main one being that we are aware of past failures, however it does not look to me like we are putting out knowledge to good use, it is a pretty ugly truth and it is easier to ignore it than to do anything about it। After all our life style depends on progress. Look at your computer, ten years ago this would have been an amazing piece of technology, now it is an every day thing. In the past things of value were passed down through the generations, now we chuck them out after a few years, no because they no longer work, but because we want better ones. I guarantee you will not be using this computer in 40 years. Without progress the economy would collapse and take our civilization, as we know it with it.

There has to be some way out, but it would have to be a radical change, not just burning less oil, cutting down fewer trees, being nice to animals or cleaning up a pond some where. It would have to be a massive shift toward sustainability. The planet produces a finite amount of resources every year, Everything we use comes from the planet. Energy is a slightly different matter, Most of our power actually comes from the Sun, whether it be ancient solar power stored in oil, hydroelectric power from water lifted by weather, or solar power, but there is a finite amount of that available for practical use and the bulk of what we are using is non-renewable fossil fuels.

One answer would be some sort of global resource audit. We look at resources we, as a global civilization use, and look at what is available to us on an annual basis from the Earth, then our consumption of materials and energy would have to be limited to what ever the planet can provide us with in a year. This is basically the ecological foot print idea I guess. This idea suggests that there is about 2 hectares of useful planet for each of us humans, this 2 ha must be able to provide us with all our requirements for food, shelter, energy and waste disposal. of course these 2 ha are not distributed amongst us evenly, in the western world we use shockingly more than someone in a third world country.

Well that is it for today - bed time for me. Check out the ecological foot print page, post a comment here let us know your foot print।

---The link to the Ecological footprint caluclator has been updated as the orriginal one got poached or something.---

The Modern Cave Man

Last year, while working on an exploration project in Sudbury Ontario I was asked if I was an environmentalist. I have always cared about what we are doing to the planet and have tried to reduce my impact on the environment, but I would not consider my self an environmentalist. It seems to me that the term "environmentalist" is used to describe people with extreme often impractical views on protecting the environment and I am not one of these.

It is obvious to me that if our society keeps going as it is we are in trouble from many fronts: climate change, clean water shortage, poor air quality, fuel/energy shortage, food shortage, the list goes on, there is also a list of other possible global catastrophes that are realistically out of our control: Meteorite impact, super volcano, and a few others that I can't think of right now.

I think the problem is that we think in the short term and that we are immune to factors that effect other organisms because we are so much smarter right? Bacteria in a petri-dish will keep growing exponentially while there is an abundant supply of nutrients until... oh crap! all our food has run out then the population takes a massive dive and if any survive it is back to square one with out any easy food. Bacteria don't don't have the ability to sit and ponder the future, it is all about NOW for them. Lucky for us we are so much smarter right? Well I think the is well established that we are more intelligent, but It seems like we are driven by the same fundamental forces that drive those single celled organisms.

I have recently read a book on this theme, perhaps the second book I have finished... ever, I am not much of a reader. Anyway, the book was A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright very interesting! He gives some great examples that we should be learning from, human history tell the same story over and over again. A society develops from hunter gatherers to farmers to a city state, or country over hundreds or thousands of years, at first progress is fine, you replace a pointed stick with a plough and you can feed a larger family or trade food for other goods, but it gets out of hand and can only be sustained by using resources at ever increasing rates. at some point this exponential growth hits a limit and then the society collapses within just a few generations. Archaeologists are digging up these stories all over the world and the ending is always the same.

The point I was hoping to get to is that I think we are looking at the environment in the wrong way, we think of it as small parts. People get very up set if a small section of woodland is flattened for a shopping mall, or if a species of toad disappears from some mud hole some where. I hate to see farm land being built on. We are still We are still basically cave men (Homo neanderthalensis if you want to be politically correct about it), only concerned with our own back yard and what impacts our tribal territory. We live in a global reality, where almost everything we do has a global impact.

Hmmm, time for a coffee.... grown in South America, transported to British Columbia, by a truck burning fuel from the middle east, roasted and ground, packaged in a bag made who knows where and shipped to Newfoundland by a truck burning fuel from the middle east. Just add boiling water, heated with Hydroelectric power generated in central newfoundland by flooding a valley.

Nice coffee, and I take mine without sugar.

So as a cave man in a global society we are not "programed" to think, or care about the big picture. We some times care about an environmental issue out of our tribal territory, but only because we empathize with the people that is is effecting, not because we have a global perspective.

Our Troglodyte ancestors, unlike us lived very much in their natural environment, I am sure they were a pretty destructive bunch, but there destruction was limited and had no major global impact until the discovery of fire (which I believe can be traced in antarctic ice cores). They were probably aware of their impact on the environment and in turn how that would impact them, living in that environment. We, modern Cave men, live our lives isolated from the natural environment. for example I am sitting writing this in my warm bright office about 3 feet from the open tundra of Northern Canada. The Air outside is about -40C with a windchill of about -50C, the only light is the northern lights. Dressed as I am I would be dead in a very short time out there.

It looks like I am not going to answer this one now, so I shall do some pondering and post the sequal at a later date.

(And by the way, Recent studied has shown that Homo neanderthalensis made no contribution to modern human DNA, so is not strictly our ancestor. Perhaps the world would be a different place if we did all have a bit of Neandertha DNA)

Right, Economy Light Bulbs!

When I purchased my house about 5 years ago I decided to invest in a truck load of economy, compact flurescent light bulbs, hoping to reduce our energy consumption, eletricity bill and our impact on climate change. Seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do, compact flurescent bulbs use about 25% the power of a old tungsten incandescent bulbs and we are told they last much longer.

Recently I had a economy bulb over heat to a point where it could have caused a fire, but we smelt it, before it did any dammage. Interested to se why it got so hot I took it appart. I was amazed by all the stuff in the base of those bulbs, there are enough eletrical components you could build a simple radio! Capacitors, transistors, coils, a transformer, resistors and all sorts of other little goodies, not to mention the bulb and the plastic housing hiding the circuit board. My point is there are a lot of components that have to be made, the raw materials have to be mined, transported, processed, assembled, transported a few more times, shipped around the world, used to make light for a while then dumped in a landfill. The old style bulbs are simple they are a glass bulb with a tungsten fillament and not a lot else. I have not done any research on the subject, but I'd be interested to see a comparison on these different bulb types and their environmental impact from cradle to grave, not just during the time they light out homes.

I still use Economy bulbs, but am pondering switching to old style bulbs for bulbs thet don't get much use, like in the bathroom and storage rooms.