Adapting to new reality a big-picture project
The conclusion of Max Ehrmann's century-old inspirational poem Desiderata springs to mind when contemplating David Farrier's beautifully written and astonishingly erudite new book, Nature's Genius.
To wit: 'In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.'
The sources of noisy confusion are everywhere, of course, but in the moment they seem most amplified by the grifter-in-chief in Washington, whose anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-environmental machinations are an increasing source of despair for the future of the planet.
Nature's Genius
But you wouldn't know it reading Farrier, a professor of literature and the environment at the University of Edinburgh. He looks at four billion years of evolution on Earth and sees that life has always been infinitely adaptable, given time.
What is different in the present is that human impacts on nature are causing change faster than most living things can adapt. But no need to panic, he seems to be saying, because 'human civilization is now the greatest evolutionary force.'
That's right. We can fix the mess with the same drive, curiosity and inventiveness with which we created it, he argues.
Take, for example, domesticated animals. It took 40,000 years for man to create dogs by domesticating wolves.
Then, in the 19th century, a Russian scientist found that wild foxes could evolve to tame foxes in 50 months using selective breeding, which became the template for domesticating all sorts of animals and breeding them to suit our tastes.
Which led to the current situation in which 40 per cent of the planet's surface is dedicated to agriculture, much of which is used to feed the billions of animals that humans eat annually.
But what if, instead of eating flesh, we switched to pancakes made with a common soil bacterium that can be ground into 'golden flour' that 'tastes deliciously buttery' and is 60 per cent protein?
And bonus points: Switching from flesh to bacterium would require a tiny fraction of the land surface now used to raise meat, freeing up millions of acres for re-wilding and carbon sequestration.
As revolutionary as selective breeding was a century ago, it is too slow to keep up with climate change. But gene-editing technologies could make evolution an overnight sensation.
While these ideas as presented here might seem simplistic or far-fetched, in Farrier's detailed explanations they become calm and reasonable solutions to the seeming intractible challenges of our times.
And this is only a small sample of the myriad ideas Farrier has collected from dozens of interviews with some of the thousands of researchers dedicated to saving the planet and enriching all life.
Their work, and Farrier's determination to explore and explain it with wit, wisdom and compelling intelligence, won't silence the 'noisy confusion' of climate deniers, profiteers or grifters, but together they point to the only way forward.
This review started with a reference to the poem Desiderata, a word that means 'things that are desired.'
It's a word that could be applied to this inspiring book by a gifted writer and thinker.
Gerald Flood is a former Free Press comment editor.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Adapting to new reality a big-picture project
The conclusion of Max Ehrmann's century-old inspirational poem Desiderata springs to mind when contemplating David Farrier's beautifully written and astonishingly erudite new book, Nature's Genius. To wit: 'In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.' The sources of noisy confusion are everywhere, of course, but in the moment they seem most amplified by the grifter-in-chief in Washington, whose anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-environmental machinations are an increasing source of despair for the future of the planet. Nature's Genius But you wouldn't know it reading Farrier, a professor of literature and the environment at the University of Edinburgh. He looks at four billion years of evolution on Earth and sees that life has always been infinitely adaptable, given time. What is different in the present is that human impacts on nature are causing change faster than most living things can adapt. But no need to panic, he seems to be saying, because 'human civilization is now the greatest evolutionary force.' That's right. We can fix the mess with the same drive, curiosity and inventiveness with which we created it, he argues. Take, for example, domesticated animals. It took 40,000 years for man to create dogs by domesticating wolves. Then, in the 19th century, a Russian scientist found that wild foxes could evolve to tame foxes in 50 months using selective breeding, which became the template for domesticating all sorts of animals and breeding them to suit our tastes. Which led to the current situation in which 40 per cent of the planet's surface is dedicated to agriculture, much of which is used to feed the billions of animals that humans eat annually. But what if, instead of eating flesh, we switched to pancakes made with a common soil bacterium that can be ground into 'golden flour' that 'tastes deliciously buttery' and is 60 per cent protein? And bonus points: Switching from flesh to bacterium would require a tiny fraction of the land surface now used to raise meat, freeing up millions of acres for re-wilding and carbon sequestration. As revolutionary as selective breeding was a century ago, it is too slow to keep up with climate change. But gene-editing technologies could make evolution an overnight sensation. While these ideas as presented here might seem simplistic or far-fetched, in Farrier's detailed explanations they become calm and reasonable solutions to the seeming intractible challenges of our times. And this is only a small sample of the myriad ideas Farrier has collected from dozens of interviews with some of the thousands of researchers dedicated to saving the planet and enriching all life. Their work, and Farrier's determination to explore and explain it with wit, wisdom and compelling intelligence, won't silence the 'noisy confusion' of climate deniers, profiteers or grifters, but together they point to the only way forward. This review started with a reference to the poem Desiderata, a word that means 'things that are desired.' It's a word that could be applied to this inspiring book by a gifted writer and thinker. Gerald Flood is a former Free Press comment editor.
National Observer
6 days ago
- National Observer
Planetary waves are linked to disasters from heat domes to flooding — and they're increasing
WASHINGTON (AP) — Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says. In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one extreme weather-inducing planetary wave event a summer, but now it is getting about three per summer, according to a study in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Planetary waves are connected to 2021's deadly and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2010 Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding and the 2003 killer European heatwave, the study said. 'If you're trying to visualize the planetary waves in the northern hemisphere, the easiest way to visualize them is on the weather map to look at the waviness in the jet stream as depicted on the weather map,' said study co-author Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist. Planetary waves flow across Earth all the time, but sometimes they get amplified, becoming stronger, and the jet stream gets wavier with bigger hills and valleys, Mann said. It's called quasi-resonant amplification or QRA. This essentially means the wave gets stuck for weeks on end, locked in place. As a result, some places get seemingly endless rain while others endure oppressive heat with no relief. 'A classic pattern would be like a high pressure out west (in the United States) and a low pressure back East and in summer 2018, that's exactly what we had,' Mann said. 'We had that configuration locked in place for like a month. So they (in the West) got the heat, the drought and the wildfires. We (in the East) got the excessive rainfall.' 'It's deep and it's persistent,' Mann said. 'You accumulate the rain for days on end or the ground is getting baked for days on end.' The study finds this is happening more often because of human-caused climate change, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, specifically because the Arctic warms three to four times faster than the rest of the world. That means the temperature difference between the tropics and the Arctic is now much smaller than it used to be and that weakens the jet streams and the waves, making them more likely to get locked in place, Mann said. 'This study shines a light on yet another way human activities are disrupting the climate system that will come back to bite us all with more unprecedented and destructive summer weather events,' said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who wasn't involved in the research. 'Wave resonance does appear to be one reason for worsening summer extremes. On top of general warming and increased evaporation, it piles on an intermittent fluctuation in the jet stream that keeps weather systems from moving eastward as they normally would, making persistent heat, drought, and heavy rains more likely,' Francis said. This is different than Francis' research on the jet stream and the polar vortex that induces winter extremes, said Mann. There's also a natural connection. After an El Nino, a natural warming of the central Pacific that alters weather patterns worldwide, the next summer tends to be prone to more of these amplified QRA waves that become locked in place, Mann said. And since the summer of 2024 featured an El Nino, this summer will likely be more prone to this type of stuck jet stream, according to Mann. While scientists have long predicted that as the world warms there will be more extremes, the increase has been much higher than what was expected, especially by computer model simulations, Mann and Francis said. That's because the models 'are not capturing this one vital mechanism,' Mann said. Unless society stops pumping more greenhouse gases in the air, 'we can expect multiple factors to worsen summer extremes,' Francis said. 'Heat waves will last longer, grow larger and get hotter. Worsening droughts will destroy more agriculture.'
Winnipeg Free Press
6 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Study finds planetary waves linked to wild summer weather have tripled since 1950
WASHINGTON (AP) — Climate change has tripled the frequency of atmospheric wave events linked to extreme summer weather in the last 75 years and that may explain why long-range computer forecasts keep underestimating the surge in killer heat waves, droughts and floods, a new study says. In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one extreme weather-inducing planetary wave event a summer, but now it is getting about three per summer, according to a study in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Planetary waves are connected to 2021's deadly and unprecedented Pacific Northwest heat wave, the 2010 Russian heatwave and Pakistan flooding and the 2003 killer European heatwave, the study said. 'If you're trying to visualize the planetary waves in the northern hemisphere, the easiest way to visualize them is on the weather map to look at the waviness in the jet stream as depicted on the weather map,' said study co-author Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist. Planetary waves flow across Earth all the time, but sometimes they get amplified, becoming stronger, and the jet stream gets wavier with bigger hills and valleys, Mann said. It's called quasi-resonant amplification or QRA. This essentially means the wave gets stuck for weeks on end, locked in place. As a result, some places get seemingly endless rain while others endure oppressive heat with no relief. 'A classic pattern would be like a high pressure out west (in the United States) and a low pressure back East and in summer 2018, that's exactly what we had,' Mann said. 'We had that configuration locked in place for like a month. So they (in the West) got the heat, the drought and the wildfires. We (in the East) got the excessive rainfall.' 'It's deep and it's persistent,' Mann said. 'You accumulate the rain for days on end or the ground is getting baked for days on end.' The study finds this is happening more often because of human-caused climate change, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, specifically because the Arctic warms three to four times faster than the rest of the world. That means the temperature difference between the tropics and the Arctic is now much smaller than it used to be and that weakens the jet streams and the waves, making them more likely to get locked in place, Mann said. 'This study shines a light on yet another way human activities are disrupting the climate system that will come back to bite us all with more unprecedented and destructive summer weather events,' said Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who wasn't involved in the research. 'Wave resonance does appear to be one reason for worsening summer extremes. On top of general warming and increased evaporation, it piles on an intermittent fluctuation in the jet stream that keeps weather systems from moving eastward as they normally would, making persistent heat, drought, and heavy rains more likely,' Francis said. This is different than Francis' research on the jet stream and the polar vortex that induces winter extremes, said Mann. There's also a natural connection. After an El Nino, a natural warming of the central Pacific that alters weather patterns worldwide, the next summer tends to be prone to more of these amplified QRA waves that become locked in place, Mann said. And since the summer of 2024 featured an El Nino, this summer will likely be more prone to this type of stuck jet stream, according to Mann. While scientists have long predicted that as the world warms there will be more extremes, the increase has been much higher than what was expected, especially by computer model simulations, Mann and Francis said. That's because the models 'are not capturing this one vital mechanism,' Mann said. Unless society stops pumping more greenhouse gases in the air, 'we can expect multiple factors to worsen summer extremes,' Francis said. 'Heat waves will last longer, grow larger and get hotter. Worsening droughts will destroy more agriculture.' ____ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
