When I was growing up in the ’80s in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet dictatorship, air quality was the environmental problem most present in our lives. It determined whether we could drive that day, how overwhelmed hospitals would be, and whether or not we would have physical education at school.

Global warming was unheard of. And plastic was our friend: a cheap, versatile, and durable material that let us play, move about, and simplify our lives. We never anticipated its long-lastingness would become a problem.

During those politically tumultuous years in the country, my childhood was marked by a comforting routine. We still had four recognizable seasons, with gray and rainy winters and long, warm summer days. On Sundays my family ate lunch at my grandparents’ apartment: white rice and turkey topped with applesauce, boxed ice cream and “dulces chilenos” (traditional sweet pastries) for dessert, and Coca-Cola or bottled juice to drink—a special treat reserved only for weekends.

In my household, among my father’s few domestic responsibilities was being in charge of the reusable bottles. I can recall how diligently he kept tabs on them, filling their crate in the laundry room to ensure that each PET (for polyethylene terephthalate) or glass bottle we used found its way back to the market.

In those days, deciding to use returnable bottles was not necessarily driven by environmental consciousness or finances. It was simply how things were done. Buying liquids meant planning ahead, returning empty bottles to our local Almac (short for almacén, or grocery store)—which later became Ekono (económico, Spanish for thrifty), and then Lider (acquired by Walmart in 2009). My dad would insert the bottles one by one into the mouth of a reverse vending machine, and receive a ticket. Then, when he brought the crate, filled with new drinks, to the checkout counter, he would present the ticket and get a discount.

In 1989, Chile had its first presidential election in 20 years. Democracy returned and a new sense of freedom emerged. The country was not only experiencing important political and social changes, but also economic growth that promoted development and consumption. Soon, going to the grocery store became an overstimulating family trip with upbeat music, store specials announced over speakers, and furry “mascots” offering hugs and frightening kids. Previously predictable shelves now showcased new brands, with fancier packaging.

With all the new choices, consumer behavior changed too, spontaneous purchases became the norm to many Chileans, and planning ahead fell by the wayside. The bottle vending machines vanished from supermarkets—supposedly due to high maintenance costs and the need for extra personnel to handle the delicate glass bottles. We began buying single-use plastics. Our family’s old red crate never left the house again.

Plastic was not originally intended for single-use. Marketers promoted Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic invented in 1907, as “the material of a thousand uses.” Its logo was the symbol of infinity. But somehow, the promise of making life easier turned throwaway into a lifestyle.

In the years since, plastic production has sharply increased worldwide, more than doubling over the last two decades to more than 450 million tons annually. It contributes to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, and disproportionately affects marginalized communities living close to plastic production and waste sites. A great deal of plastic waste ends up in the oceans, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that advocates for a circular economy.

On our current track there could be more plastics than fish in the seas by 2050. This waste degrades marine habitats and endangers species. It also poses threats to human health through the food chain, and affects the tourism, fishing, and aquaculture economies.

Currently, 50% of the plastic produced worldwide serves a single-use purpose. If we reused just 10% of our plastics products, we would divert almost half of the plastic waste that winds up in the oceans each year.

Chile, where things are once again shifting, can help show the way. There, in 2012, an entrepreneur named José Manuel Moller brought back the old vending machines—with a new twist. For low-income households in Chile who live day-to-day, non-perishable staples like rice became unaffordable when sold in one-kilogram, pre-packaged plastic bags. Such families had to purchase smaller bags, with significantly higher costs per gram—in effect, paying a “poverty tax.”

To address the problem, Moller’s company Algramo began dispensing products such as rice, beans, lentils, sugar, and laundry detergent into returnable containers, installing vending machines in small local grocery shops to distribute the items. It made the staples affordable. It also helped small businesses and low-income customers reduce plastic waste.

Over the years, Algramo extended its reach from Chile as far afield as supermarkets in the U.K. Recently, Moller received the Champion of the Earth Award, one of the United Nations’ highest environmental recognitions. Chile has further encouraged reuse through new regulations like the country’s 2022 single-use plastic law, which not only prohibits disposable utensils like forks, knives, straws, plates, and cups, but also compels supermarkets and convenience stores to provide and receive reusable bottles.

While working for the Chilean Plastic Pact, part of the Plastics Pact Global Network, which connects national and regional initiatives to implement solutions towards a circular economy for plastic in response to global plastic waste and pollution, I’ve learned that the problem is not plastics, but the way we use them. That is why the goal is to build a new plastics economy that allows this long-lasting material to circulate endlessly, never reaching landfills or littering our oceans. Recycling alone, which reaches only about 9% of the U.S.’s plastic waste, won’t be enough. Reusable packaging is key.

I see glimmers of promise.

In the U.S., nonprofits like Upstream and companies like Blueland are leading the push toward reusable packaging. Last week representatives from 175 countries are meeting in Canada to advance a legally-binding global treaty to end plastic pollution, following previous rounds of talks in Kenya, France, and Uruguay. Reuse standards for global scalability and its possible financial mechanisms should be a central part of the document.

For me, reuse connects me to my Chilean childhood, a time when life was simpler and followed a different rhythm. It’s time to return to the symbolic red crate.

The post Could My Chilean Childhood Combat Plastic Waste? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That kind of victory was once inconceivable for California’s environmental justice organizations, said USC sociologist Manuel Pastor, a panelist at last night’s Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event, “Can California Solve Its Air Quality Inequality?” But the win, a decade in the making for the grassroots coalition STAND-L.A., shows how far these organizations have come. Today, they work directly with researchers and policymakers to achieve their goals. This was one of the major takeaways of the evening: making progress in combating air pollution, which is distributed unequally across racial and economic lines around the state, requires individuals and organizations to join forces.

Moderator Saul Gonzalez, KQED correspondent and co-host of The California Report, began the discussion by looking back to 1985. “When I take a breath of California air in 2022, how does it compare,” he asked—generally speaking—to air quality back then?

Former California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols recalled that when she moved to California in 1971, the state violated federal clean air standards almost 250 days of the year. “It has improved,” she said. However, she cautioned, “the picture is not a steady line in the direction of progress by any means.”

Pastor, whose new book, Solidarity Economics, co-authored with fellow USC professor and public policy expert Chris Benner, explores how people can lead progressive social change, agreed. He also pointed to overall progress as obscuring research showing that your race and ethnicity remains the greatest single factor in determining how unhealthy your air is, regardless of your income or location. Unequal distribution of polluted air due to factors like freeway location and zoning remains “a reflection of structural racism.”

Climate change, which causes record temperatures and wildfire smoke, only exacerbates this inequality, said Central Valley Air Quality Coalition executive director Catherine Garoupa White. In the San Joaquin Valley, which ranks among the nation’s worst regions for air pollution, “we suffer epidemic levels of sickness,” they said, and “it’s not distributed equally. There are particular neighborhoods where people of color, low-income communities, and all of these other social and economic vulnerabilities are layered.”

Gonzalez asked Garoupa White to imagine the year 2050: What do you fear if temperature rise continues at the rate of current projections?

“We need to have hope that things can be different,” said Garoupa White. “There are a lot of solutions. There are a lot of things that we can transform and change now so that in 2050, that won’t be our reality,” including designing “resilient communities where people will be protected regardless of what happens.”

By Soobin Kim.

Still, it’s an open secret that agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley today is not sustainable. “That’s why we have the worst air pollution in the United States, because we are over-exploiting the system. We are putting more pollution into it than it can possibly sustain,” Garoupa White continued. California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), will help alleviate some of this burden. But, they said, “it would be a lot better if we crafted, regionally, a vision for what type of agriculture we wanted.”

Looking back, Gonzalez asked the panelists, what did we get wrong when it comes to policy around air pollution?

Considering air quality from a regional approach rather than at a city, community, or neighborhood level, said Nichols in reference to the federal Clean Air Act. “What that didn’t take into account is that at the local level, and where people actually are breathing this stuff, there really are differences,” she said. “And it didn’t take into account that not all pollutants are equally distributed, so some types of pollutants, like for example, the toxic chemicals that come out of diesel vehicles, are going to be more harmful. There are more of them, and more people will breathe them when they’re right next to the freeway or the port or the distribution center.”

What’s one solution—possibly even painful—that you would embrace today, asked Gonzalez, for cleaner air?

“The oil industry—let’s remove their subsidies,” said Garoupa White. Emission credits and market-based approaches are not working, they continued. Rather, they are “concentrating pollution in low-income communities and communities of color” while allowing oil companies “to take credit for something that happened in some other place.”

What about land use policy, Gonzalez asked: How much will this impact the environment?

Land use policy plays a major role, said Nichols, and can even be a form of discrimination. “If you continue to require people to move further and further away from where they work, or from where there’s opportunity, you’re also making it impossible for them to use mass transit in many cases or to live a healthy life by walking to various kinds of amenities,” she said.

Before wrapping up the discussion, Gonzalez asked a recurring question raised in the live YouTube audience chat: What is something that everyday people can do to help their neighbors breathe easier?

Make this more than an individual fight, said Pastor.

“My own behavior isn’t going to change things unless I link up with other people who want to change the concentration of power and change the policies that we pursue,” he said. Pastor called on listeners to “figure out how you can organize your community to accept more affordable housing, to change the zoning, to push for free public transportation, to get the state of California to pay special attention to hotspots, to make sure that we’re dealing with the inequities in the Central Valley.”

The post Why Can’t All Californians Breathe Clean Air? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This question is a difficult one. In fact, it is considerably easier to start with the opposite question: What can the deep history of the oceans not tell us about the future? Understanding what ocean history is unable to tell us—and then what it can reveal—establishes the limits of our current knowledge and provides a window onto what may lie ahead.

The deep history of the oceans definitely cannot tell us about the consequences of human-caused pollution with long-lived materials, such as non-biodegradable plastics or radioactive waste. Also, it cannot explain the consequences of pollution from other harmful substances, such as highly toxic synthetic chemicals that had never existed before we manufactured them, or heavy metals that only recently appeared in such concentrated forms—thanks to human processing. The impact of such products only can be understood by careful study and monitoring of the effects they have going forward.

Common sense plays a role as well. For example, we intuitively know that animals, large or small, will not survive having their innards stuffed full of plastic, or being severely entangled in plastic debris. Yet, we first allowed ocean plastic pollution to grow to frightening proportions before we began to think about tackling the problem. But at last things are beginning to change, following several years of graphic news coverage about large-sized plastic pollution and microscopic particles.

But for some subjects only serious study will do. For example, the impacts of radiation on the marine ecosystem resulting from nuclear testing, spillages from shipwrecks, and shore-based accidents, are surprising. These effects seem limited, both at Bikini Atoll, which endured 23 nuclear test explosions, and around the site of the Fukushima reactor accident. It turns out that the main problem for ocean animals lies not with passing through radiation in the water, but with direct ingestion of radioactive materials. This is because radioactive substances are quickly diluted in the vast volumes of the oceans, and because water itself is a good radiation absorber. Radioactive pollution in the ocean therefore is a major concern only close to its release points, as it enters the food web. It’s less of a concern for animals that occasionally pass through—which is good news, given that humanity enthusiastically dumped radioactive waste in the oceans from 1946 until well into the 1990s.

It turns out that the real killers are invisible chemicals—especially polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) previously used in paints, coolant, electronics components, and fluorescent lights. These substances have been released in vast quantities and can be traced through the food web, from the smallest plankton at the beginning to sharks and whales at the top. Similar to other long-lived pollutants, PCBs accumulate to higher and higher concentrations from bottom to top in the food web.

The scale of the PCB problem is enormous: Up to 10 percent of all PCBs produced have now made it into the oceans. That’s a large amount, but it also means that up to 90 percent of PCB pollution in oceans is yet to come, since oceans are the final station for everything carried by water. We need to prevent the PCBs from entering the environment, which requires a massive clean-up operation focused on waste-collection sites (especially landfills). This is progressing, but some 83 percent of PCBs remain to be eliminated.

We know from estuaries and coastal regions that these dangerous pollutants have already become widespread in marine organisms. And they’ve even been found in creatures on the sea floor at the greatest depths of the Pacific, our largest ocean. In whales, typical marine apex predators, the impacts include devastating infant mortality when females pass lethal amounts of PCBs to unborn or suckling calves.

Having addressed human impacts that are completely new to the oceans and the wider Earth system, we can now return to the original question of what deep ocean history can tell us about the issues we’ll face in the future. The three main ones are global warming and ocean acidification, oxygen loss in the oceans, and mass extinction.

Deep ocean history gives us particularly good information about the impact and ultimate fate of our large and quickly rising levels of carbon emissions. It is obvious from Earth’s history that this will, in the short term—over decades to centuries—lead to global warming as well as ocean acidification. Because of the speed at which these two processes are developing under our current emissions trajectory, their combination jeopardizes many ecosystems, both in the oceans (including our all-important coral reefs, home to one-third of all marine biodiversity) and on land.

The oceans’ deep history also reveals that nature has no fast mechanisms to cope with these levels of carbon emissions. Over thousands of years, a process called carbonate compensation—where waters affected by ocean acidification interact with carbonate in sea-floor sediments—will start to reduce the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels somewhat. But the geological record clearly demonstrates that a full clean-up of our current levels of carbon emissions will take a few hundred thousand years.

Nature has provided us with a beautiful illustration of this, especially around 56 million years ago, after there was a natural pulse of carbon dioxide and/or methane into the climate system. About 6 C global warming occurred, and carbonate dissolution developed over vast tracts of the deep-sea floor, while oxygen concentrations in large tracts of the ocean fell dangerously low. A wave of extinction swept through the deep sea, with some groups of organisms losing half of their species count. The system needed about 200,000 years to recover.

So nature can, and will, surely cope with our emissions, but not on timescales relevant to society, and not necessarily in ways that humans will appreciate. Deep ocean history shows us that all manner of ecosystem mayhem—including a large-scale wave of death and extinction in the deep seas—is likely to occur while Mother Nature is going about this clean-up.

Another area where deep ocean history gives us a critical warning about the future is de-oxygenation of the oceans. Oxygenation refers to the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, and oxygen is vitally important for almost all life on Earth, except for a few specialist microbes. Warming of the oceans, combined with river inflow that is too full of fertilizers and other nutrients, has changed environmental chemistry so that oxygenation of open oceans and coastal seas has been steadily declining during the past half-century. The volume of ocean with no oxygen at all has quadrupled; the volume of ocean where oxygen levels are falling dangerously low has increased even more.

Deep ocean history is full of episodes lasting several thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, during which deep water in complete ocean basins became totally oxygen-deprived. In those cases, it was often related to natural cycles of runoff from land that washed nutrient-rich soils from land into the sea, and processes that severely inhibited deep-ocean circulation (which brings oxygen into the deep sea).

Today, the problem is mostly related to an enormous amount of artificial and human and animal waste-derived nutrients being dumped into the oceans, and to global warming, which is occurring 10 to 100 times faster than in recent geological history. Given that de-oxygenation is widespread and quickly expanding in the modern ocean, the specter of widespread oxygen deficiency is looming large on a global scale. We see it in many of the world’s major lakes as well. It is a vastly destructive process for ecosystems, and in the deep history of the oceans it has been a player in virtually all major mass extinction events. For smaller events in ocean history, where only a single basin was affected, ecosystem recovery took several thousands of years. For the biggest events, where (almost) the entire world ocean was affected, recovery times ran into the hundreds of thousands of years. After true mass extinctions, recovery times extended to millions of years.

The third main process for which history offers important background information is mass extinctions. Extinctions are always underway: Estimates are that “background” extinction rates are of the order of two species per year for every 1 million species on Earth. Given that there are roughly 10 million species on the planet today, a “normal background” extinction rate would be 20 species per year. Yet recent studies put the actual number of extinctions happening today at more than 1,000 times that “normal background” value. This implies that more than 20,000 species per year are becoming extinct, out of the 10 million species on Earth!

How does this compare to the greatest of the five major mass extinctions of the past half-billion years? Well, reconstructions indicate that Earth’s greatest mass extinction, the End-Permian event 252 million years ago, saw a rate of extinction of roughly 150 species per year, though we cannot exclude brief intervals with higher peak rates. Still, it is clear that modern extinction rates are right up there with the worst nature has gone through in a half-billion years.

The insight that we are living through extinction rates unsurpassed in the last 500,000,000 years puts a fine point on the argument that we are indeed in the beginning of the “sixth major mass extinction.” All five previous mass extinctions were exceptionally hard on complex, specialized organisms, and left more resilient, simpler forms to inherit the Earth. Humans are among the most complex, specialized organisms around today, with a deep dependence on other complex, specialized organisms. If we don’t turn the tide on extinction rates urgently, both in the oceans and on land, then all bets are off for our survival. For the first time in Earth’s history, one species has the power to decide the fate of all others.

The post To See the Fate of the Oceans, Look Back a Half-Billion Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Brower, once head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, is a towering figure in the late 20th century environmental movement—and in my own life. One crucial moment in our relationship came at my parents’ annual holiday party in December 1964. I was 22 and about to graduate from Berkeley and join the Peace Corps for a stint in a Turkish village. We knew the Browers because my mother, Beth, had been friends with David’s wife since the 1930s. I have no recollection of what we were talking about, but Dave interrupted to say, “You have a nice speaking voice. Would you be willing to narrate a film for the Sierra Club?” I gulped and said, “Sure.”

Brower was the first executive director the Sierra Club ever hired, beginning in 1952. He led successful campaigns to block two dams proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, helped spark the creation of Point Reyes and Cape Cod National Seashores and Kings Canyon National Park, and launched the Sierra Club into a successful book-publishing program with oversized word-and-photograph volumes celebrating special places the club was working to save. He increased the membership of the Sierra Club nearly ten-fold and was a familiar figure on Capitol Hill, a skilled lobbyist and publicist for nature.

By the time of that holiday party, Dave was approaching the midpoint of his career and was embroiled in a new fight to the death over two proposed hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon, a venture spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

Brower was giving no ground on these dams, especially after he and his conservation allies had acquiesced to the government’s plan to dam Glen Canyon, just upstream from the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. The move had been a tradeoff to save Dinosaur National Monument, and it was a decision Brower would regret for the rest of his life. Glen was nearly 200 miles long with only the gentlest of rapids, dozens of side canyons of soaring Navajo sandstone, more beautiful than the Dinosaur canyons it was sacrificed to save. The film he asked me to narrate celebrated Glen Canyon, and mourned its loss.

After narrating the film I did my stretch in the Peace Corps, ending in the summer of 1967 with a $5-a-day tour around Europe. From London, I wrote Brower a letter offering my services to the Sierra Club, but claiming no relevant education or experience. Just enthusiasm.

Brower seldom answered his mail. He was, however, known for his long memory, and kept nearly everything on paper for future reference. One of his tenets was that a phone call is nearly always better than a letter, because letters take too long to reach their destinations and get put into piles to be acted on later.

Upon my return from the Peace Corps, I got a job at Head Start. I met a talented young photographer who, when he learned I knew Brower, asked if I’d see if Brower would be willing to look at his work. I phoned, and Dave asked me to drop by his house up the hill in Berkeley later that evening.

The house had been built in 1947 after Brower returned from the war in Italy. River-polished rocks covered most of the horizontal surfaces, and photos and maps adorned the walls. A macaque monkey named Isabelle, rescued from the psychology department at UC Berkeley, roamed the house along with two or three black lab mixes.

Around the dinner table that evening, with plenty of scotch under our belts, Brower asked me to craft a book manuscript from journals and magazine articles written by Norman Clyde, a legendary octogenarian Sierra mountaineer, who also happened to be visiting the Browers. I gulped again, and said, “Yes.”

I went to work for the Sierra Club in May 1968. This turned out to be Brower’s final year at the club, as he had gotten into trouble with his board of directors for various faults, some real, most political. After a vote by the members of the Sierra Club, Dave resigned the following spring and I was fired along with several other partisans.

Dave immediately put the unpleasantness behind him. The rest of us refugees could complain for hours about the injustice we’d just lived through, but Dave had more important things to spend his energy on. He would bravely say that what had just happened was a mitosis, as when a cell doubles itself by dividing in two.

Midway through 1969, Dave, along with a handful of former Sierra Club staffers and volunteers, started Friends of the Earth. It was meant to complement the Sierra Club and other existing organizations, to do the work the club didn’t want Brower to do in its name. This would include a vigorous international program, expansion into campaigns involving energy policy, the protection of public health, pollution abatement, and other concerns beyond forests, parks, and wildlife.

The organization was small and scrappy, and made noise by defeating federal subsidies for a Boeing-built supersonic transport aircraft, delaying construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline for several years (resulting in a far safer pipeline), and leading the crusade against nuclear power, aiming its fire first at the Diablo Canyon reactors on the central California coast.

The Sierra Club board had agreed not to oppose the Diablo proposal in order to save the Nipomo Dunes nearby. A minority on the board thought this a dreadful decision, given Diablo Canyon’s remoteness and beauty. A fierce internal battle erupted within the club. Brower’s opposition to Diablo, in fact, had been one big reason he was chased out of the Sierra Club, the old guard arguing that the club had given its word; others arguing that the club was duty-bound to oppose despoliation of precious stretches of pristine coastline.

At the time, the Sierra Club’s opposition to Diablo was simply because of where it would be built. Later, Brower and many others came to oppose nuclear power altogether because of the plants’ vulnerability to terrorism and natural disasters.

Things went well for a long spell, but in 1986 Friends of the Earth, with finances in bad shape and a deeply divided board, closed up shop in San Francisco, forcing Brower off the board and laying off the staff, leaving only a small operation in Washington, D.C. He must have been discouraged, but again he refused to dwell on the past.

Instead, Dave and several others went to work building Earth Island Institute, which Dave had started a few years prior in case Friends of the Earth decided to dispense with his services. Earth Island is an umbrella that shelters and nurtures dozens of small organizations working on a wide variety of projects in every corner of the world.

I, for my part, took a job with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and stayed in touch with Brower, who by then was approaching 80 years of age. We’d meet occasionally for lunch or drinks; he was always full of ideas and suggestions for new projects.

As I neared retirement in 2008 I was casting about for a big project and Brower influenced my life again. Dave had written two ramshackle autobiographical memoirs as well as a borderline manifesto titled Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. However, at the time of his death in November 2000, no one had written a proper biography about him. More distressingly, he was being forgotten. When I talked with young environmental lawyers they only vaguely recalled his name. “I really must do this book,” I thought, “And I hope that it helps keep his story alive.”

The post Sixteen Years After His Death, a Renowned Environmentalist Won His Longest Fight appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Marquee sporting events are often billed as a great boon for cities and the environment. Chapter 1 of the Olympic Charter tasks the International Olympic Committee with encouraging “a responsible concern for environmental issues.” Cleaning up Rio de Janeiro’s water was a centerpiece of Brazil’s 2009 proposal to host the games, but efforts fell behind or failed to materialize. And this won’t be the first Olympics to struggle to meet environmental promises. As ESPN pointed out, Sydney had its own water problems in 2000, and the smog in Beijing got 2008 dubbed the “most polluted Olympics ever.” We shouldn’t be surprised; environmental cleanup efforts in sprawling metropolises almost always take more time and money than expected, in part because they push against the steady current of environmental degradation that comes with life in the industrialized world.

But Brazil’s rivers are just the tip of the melting iceberg. To paraphrase Naomi Klein, climate change changes everything—including sports. In the sinking island nation of the Maldives, kabaddi players have told my collaborator Adam Flynn that they are adapting their traditional tag game to be played in shallow water. In Alaska, snow was hauled in by train in March to make the Iditarod sled race possible, and even then parts ran over a bone-jarring mixture of ice and dirt. Climate change combines with countless instances of wrecked ecologies—poisoned waters, polluted skies, and dead landscapes—to form a larger environmental megacrisis that will profoundly shape how we spend time outdoors.

Sports, like so many human activities, balance our competing impulses to adapt to and control our environment. We celebrate the endurance required to compete on the “frozen tundra” of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, while underground electric wiring prevents Lambeau’s turf from actually becoming frozen. Golf began as a conversation with the landscape of Scotland; now it is played on designed-from-scratch courses in Arizona that consume more than 80 million gallons of water daily. In a way, these feats of engineering are impressive—just like the Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal. But now we are increasingly forced to adapt to the consequences of our own past attempts to control our environment.

When you’re left gasping during an outdoor run, it’s pedantic to try to draw a crisp line between the harsh effects of a record-breaking heat wave and those of dangerous, choking smog. Both are equally oppressive. (In fact, they compound each other.) The same goes for Rio’s rivers, dying of contamination, and Aspen’s melting snows. Due to the same poor planning that gave us the climate crisis, we’re suffering from a loss of outdoor spaces suited for play.

Winter sports in particular will take a hit. Already the season is becoming shorter, and snowstorms more unpredictable in many favorite ski destinations. Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse told the Senate in 2013:

“Before the end of the century, the number of economically viable ski locations in New Hampshire and Maine will be cut in half; skiing in New York will be cut by three-quarters; and there will be no ski area in Connecticut or Massachusetts.”

Winter sports have long supplemented the elements with artificial snow and ice, but soon fabricated winter may be the norm. Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Games in Russia, was a subtropical beach town. Dubai and Qatar have built indoor ski slopes in scorching deserts that climate change is making increasingly inhospitable. Qatar also plans to use advanced new cooling technology to keep 2022 World Cup players from passing out from the heat in their open air stadiums. Engineered environments like these—and air-conditioned, covered football stadiums—are the beginning of a costly, high-tech effort required to preserve and adapt our great cultural rituals for a warmer planet.

As adaptation to a harsher climate increasingly requires more sophisticated and costly technologies, the danger is that already-expensive sports like skiing or sailing will become even more rarefied drivers of inequality. The very affluent may be able to pay for the privilege of living like climate change isn’t happening, but many of us will be priced out of certain sports for good.

That’s a shame, because sports have long brought together people from all walks of life. Now, we may go beyond the divide between the cheap seats and the VIP box. We may be headed towards a world with two sets of games: those played in the manicured spaces inhabited by the very affluent and those played on the hot, troubled planet left to the rest of us.

This spring I participated in Arizona State University’s “The Future of Sport 2040” Emerge Festival, along with my colleagues at the Applied History Institute. For our installation—“The Games That Got Us Through”—we imagined an American climate migration and the new sports of its refugee culture. The centerpiece was Cistern, a tag-like game of ritualized water raiding that seeks to minimize violence in the struggle over a scarce resource.

It was a timely thought experiment. The Olympics in Rio will, for the first time, feature a team of refugee athletes. With millions fleeing violence, and millions more likely to flee rising seas and broken ecosystems, we need to start figuring out how displaced people can live lives of dignity in the 21st century. And that means figuring out where and how people can run, jump, and play in an increasingly volatile world.

Games and sports can be a great boon for people in precarious situations. They can help settle conflicts peacefully. They can bring communities together, turn suspicions into friendships. They can give young people an outlet for energies that could otherwise turn disruptive or dangerous. Events like the World Cup and the Olympics can be sources of inspiration, excitement, and shared identity for people in difficult times. Thus it’s a productive exercise to think about the games we might play in the future.

The good news is that we can change the games we play much easier than we can change our agricultural infrastructure, or evacuate the billions who live in the path of rising seawaters. We don’t know what new sports the Olympics might include a century from now. But we should adapt, and celebrate new games even as we memorialize the lost ones. Let’s not forget: Just like Venice was founded by refugees, basketball was invented during a storm.

The post Will Environmental Crises Segregate Sports? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As their country has become the “world’s factory,” hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty. At the same time, China has become one of the most polluted places in the entire world.

In researching a new book, Siqi Zheng and I traced the rise of China’s urban pollution. We were trying to understand three things: Why has pollution increased so sharply? How has pollution impacted the population? And how is the government responding to the issue? In the end, we documented an encouraging trend. Newfound demand for a clean environment—”blue skies”—from the growing Chinese middle and upper classes creates a compelling incentive for Beijing and local officials to clean up Chinese cities.

China’s environmental problems are tied to its rapid industrialization. When Mao Zedong became the leader of China in 1949, he ruled over relatively few cities, and they were not industrialized. Early Communist Party leaders located factories near the Soviet Union, China’s main trading partner at that time, and didn’t prioritize environmental protection. Pollution in the country began to worsen in the 1980s, when then-leader Deng Xiaoping launched a new economic development strategy focused on industrialization and increasing exports. Due to the country’s low wages, subsidized energy prices, and weak enforcement of environmental regulations, China soon became the world’s factory. Everything, it seemed, carried a “Made in China” label.

But Chinese cities soon began to suffer from the effects of the black smoke produced by expanding heavy industry and from burning coal to generate power and wintertime heat. Between 1980 and 2012, China’s annual consumption of coal increased from 679 to 3,887 million tons. Today, China is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Based on 2011 data, China produced 28 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions while the United States produced 16 percent of total emissions.

These emissions sharply increase the risk of climate change and greatly decrease quality of life. According to World Bank data from 2013, China’s citizens are exposed to roughly five times the levels of particulate matter as people in the United States. This pollution comes from burning coal as well as a sharp rise in the consumption of high-sulfur gasoline, which fuels the growing number of private vehicles on China’s roads.

Chinese people are noticing the change. Over the last 30 years, China’s economy grew at a rate of 10 percent per year, slashing the share of its population living below the poverty line from 84 percent to 13 percent. Over the same period of time, improvements in medical care and diet have lengthened life expectancy at birth from 66 to 73 years. But despite such progress, Chinese urbanites must reckon with the reality that the nation’s standard of living is not improving as quickly as its economy is growing. In surveys, many report lower life satisfaction than economists typically predict for a rapidly growing economy.

The central government is listening. Since the early 2000s, it has increasingly emphasized sustainable growth and has focused on reducing pollution and mitigating the risk of climate change. On one level, this shift is a surprise: Why would China engage in regulation that could kill the golden goose of industry, raising the cost of production and threatening the nation’s edge as an exporter of manufactured goods? But basic economics provides an explanation. Wealthier people are willing to pay more to avoid risk. They demand safer products, safer food, safer housing, and a cleaner environment. So as a growing middle and upper class demands its blue skies, a central government that seeks to preserve its power and credibility has strong incentives to stop polluting.

It also has a better chance of convincing local officials to devote more attention to environmental challenges. In recent years, Beijing has been changing the performance evaluation and promotion criteria for local officials. Instead of rewarding them purely for output, China now includes environmental goals in performance metrics. Mayors, especially in richer and better-educated cities, also face pressure from the public. With the relaxation of the nation’s domestic passport system and the liberalization of the labor and land markets, Chinese urbanites are able to vote with their feet and move to cleaner cities. Just as in the United States, where homes in nicer areas sell at a premium, apartments in Chinese cities and neighborhoods with better air also fetch higher prices.

Chinese urbanites wear air pollution masks when pollution is elevated.

China’s cities track this variation in home prices and have also used more novel sources of information to study the demand for a better environment. In recent years, the rise of the Internet and social media, coupled with new technology such as cheap air pollution monitors, has increased public awareness of local pollution challenges. Many people use Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, to express concerns about pollution. We have documented that Chinese urbanites purchase more air filters and air pollution masks when pollution is elevated. This shows that people are aware of pollution levels and are willing to take costly actions to protect themselves. The wealthy are the most likely to take such precautions, which suggests that quality of life disparities will worsen unless pollution is improved.

Several promising trends in China’s rich coastal cities suggest that significant environmental progress is likely to take place. Manufacturing is land intensive, so as urban rents rise, industrial activity is leaving the major cities and taking pollution with it. In addition, second- and third- tier inland cities can offer lower electricity prices to manufacturers, making them increasingly attractive destinations for labor and energy intensive industries. Happily, “dirty factories” do not simply migrate from one city to another. The new factories opening up in China’s western cities are more likely to feature clean, modern engineering technology.

China is also making a major strategic investment in the green economy. Since 2007 it has been the world’s largest producer of the photovoltaic cells that produce solar energy; in 2014, exports totaled $14 billion. China’s domestic market for renewable energy is also huge, as the country aims to increase its non-fossil fuel energy capacity to 15 percent of total primary energy consumption. Research and development in renewables is expanding, with the help of engineering professors from top institutions such as Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Science.

China’s post-industrial economic growth will depend on the health, well-being, and happiness of its people—who increasingly clamor for a better environment. It is no accident that so many Chinese people enjoy visiting San Francisco and Los Angeles—high-amenity cities that attract and retain the skilled. Leadership in Beijing has a great incentive to build similar urban centers that could accelerate China’s transition to the knowledge economy.

The post What Does China’s Growing Middle Class Desire Most? Blue Skies. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

All winter, frogs crouch hidden in the leaves, their outsides frozen so hard they’d make a “clink” if you dropped them. They survive because the interior of their cells are propped up by a sugary antifreeze peculiar to frogs. As the weather warms up, they unfreeze and reanimate, like something from a fairy tale. And then they find themselves a nice muddy spot and begin singing.

Frog songs are meepy and beepy, some clattery, others deep. If you have a big enough collection of frogs, the puddles around you will vibrate with a whole froggy symphony, heavy on the percussion. There’s a pond near my house in Maine that fills with spring peepers, whose high-pitched chirps make a loud cacophony that sometimes organizes, for a few seconds, into something like a pattern, before separating. I wonder whether the frogs really sync up, or whether my brain is working overtime to organize the sound. The racket at the pond seems to hijack my brain—thoughts of grocery lists, taxes, and politics are replaced by the seething urgency of frog talk.

Scientists have counted about 7,000 species of frogs worldwide, but modern life is tough on them. Since 1995, 168 species have gone extinct and nearly 2,500 species’ populations are in decline. Frogs respond to small environmental changes: They are sensitive to chemical pollution in water and noise pollution near their breeding puddles. Invasive bullfrogs eat up tasty smaller frogs, the chytrid fungus has devastated frogs in the West, and a parasite that lives in snails has caused deformed frogs. And there is climate change. There are many reasons to mourn the frogs (and even more reasons to save them!) but what I appreciate about them is that their songs give us one of the clearest experiences of what it’s like not to be human. Stop and listen to the choruses in the spring and you get an infusion of froggy priorities: the mad biological cycle of mating, egging, morphing, and frogging.

One winter evening about five years ago, my boyfriend played me his CD of New England frogs. The first songs on the recording were the spring peepers. Then we heard the mournful foghorn of the bullfrogs, the duck-like chuckle of wood frogs, the implosive green frog, the dreamlike trill of the American toad. Listening revealed two things.

First, frogs sing for a purpose. The peepers’ song serves almost like a puffy profile on a dating website: “Here I am! I’m big! My genes are excellent.” When a female hears this call from her species, she’ll hop or swim in that direction. When the male senses a female in front of him, he will give her a big long hug from behind, and try to transfer that package of genes. At this point, the female may realize she’s being hugged by the wrong species of frog and she’ll shout a call that says, “Whoops! Wrong Frog. Release me.” Males who suddenly find themselves hugged by another male also have a “Release me” call. If you grab a frog in a suggestive way with your fingers, the croak you’ll hear is “release me.” If you’re a halfway decent frog, you’ll let that one go. Frogs are often confused, but they aren’t boorish.

Secondly, frog songs make an excellent date night soundtrack. We still put the froggy “mix tape” on and sit side by side on the couch, holding hands. After 300 million years, it’s no surprise that frogs have game.

I called the maker of the CD, frog listener Lang Eliott. He started recording frog songs in southern Missouri in the early 1970s using the same kind of massive reel-to-reel tape recorder that Nixon used for the Watergate tapes. Since then, recording equipment has gotten much smaller, but Elliot has continued to stand up to his neck in swamps both warm and cold to get close to his singers.

Observation is what he does (his master’s thesis was on chipmunk behavior) but observation also possesses him. In 1988, he realized that recording soundscapes of frogs and birds was his calling. “I’m not doing them for scientific or documentary purposes but for their effect on the human psyche. Which is something you get immersed in, hypnotic, relaxing.” He wants listeners to “dissolve” when they put on headphones.

Elliot makes all of his best recordings at night, when there are no planes overhead, no cars in the vicinity, and it’s dark. “It’s a fabulous time to experience in part because you don’t get distracted by seeing. The soundscape is most poignant,” he says. He describes weeks in Florida where he sleeps by day and works in the swamps by night, alone with the sounds. Sometimes, at dusk or at dawn, the birds will sing against the background of the frogs.

The best way to sneak up on a frog, Elliott says, is to avoid getting in the water—frogs sense wavelets. A small frog chorus will immediately get quiet if you come near. (One reason for frog declines is road noise, which discourages frog courtship.) But a really big frog chorus, at the height of breeding season, in an otherwise quiet area, simply cannot be stopped. At that time, you can find specific frogs in the pond by bringing a friend and two flashlights. If you stand at different places and aim your flashlights towards the croak, the spot where your beams cross is where the frog is. Alternatively, you can look for the reflection of their white neck pouch on the water that seems to go in time with the calls.

I asked Elliot if frogs sing in sync. He acknowledged that our brains are always looking for patterns, but explained that frog songs are basically random, though every frog is on a similar rhythmic schedule. In musical terms, they’re not trying to play in unison but they wait the same number of beats between croaks. As a result, they sometimes fall into sync and then fall out again. In addition, some frogs do counter-singing, and some seem to follow each other. Elliot says that if you can sing like a frog you can sometimes get them to follow your lead.

Elliott hasn’t seen signs of the big changes happening with frogs around the world in the mostly eastern frogs he records. Still, climate is having an impact: A study from upstate New York found that the first song of the spring peepers is now 11 days earlier than it was in 1949.

Life as the frog listener has changed Elliot so that his seasonal rhythms skew amphibian. He describes himself as “spring centric.” “I live for it. My mind is planted there.” The spring is the most intense time for him, as he listens as the frogs and birds get louder, “blooming with sound,” and then taper off to the buzz of bugs in the summer. He now sees the entire year as part of spring. “You know what’s a good sign of spring? The first frost.” The first frost starts the winter bird breeding, which leads, inevitably, to spring.

We spend most of our days driving past lovelorn frogs at 65 miles per hour. Spring offers a chance to listen to that great organizing principle of nature—chance: the thin, teeming boundary between the survival of one’s genes and the end of them. In the syncing and separating of the frog symphonies, in their chorus of “pick me” and “release me,” you can hear the combination of randomness and striving that is the history of everything.

The post When Frogs Sing Their Evening Song, Listen for Nature’s Greatest Lesson appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The idea is to create incentives to reduce costly visits to the emergency room caused by asthma attacks. In Fresno, families and insurers spend approximately $35 million a year on these ER visits. Asthma attacks are triggered by pollution, dust mites, mold from swamp coolers, and tobacco smoke. Reduce these elements—especially those in the home—and you’ll reduce ER visits. But our current model of insurance doesn’t pay for medical professionals or equipment to prevent asthma attacks; it only pays to treat them with medicine. Says Anne Kelsey Lamb of the Bay Area-based community collaborative RAMP (Regional Asthma Management and Prevention): “We know what works to address asthma hospitalization—and we can get almost immediate results—but we could never secure a consistent funding stream.”

That’s where the financiers come in, using a tool that’s known as a social impact bond. Investors will put up money for vacuum cleaners and nurse’s home visits and other things that would reduce trips to the ER. If those investments can save the healthcare system at least $5,000 per child, then investors will make money by sharing in additional savings, all the while improving people’s physical and financial health.

The trial is now in full swing, with 200 children who average 1.5 ER visits a year divided into treatment and control groups. The results—expected in two years—are highly anticipated both in the financial world and in Fresno, which has among the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country. (Some official estimates say one in six Fresno children has asthma; others say one in five.)

“If asthma were an infectious disease, there’d be guys in white suits and yellow tape when the ratio hit one in a thousand.” says Kevin Hamilton of Clínica Sierra Vista, who has been working on the treatment and prevention of asthma in Fresno since the 1970s. Instead of bringing in white suits, Hamilton is welcoming investors in black suits, and he’s excited about the project’s implications: “This could change the way we treat chronic illness like diabetes and congestive heart failure. Instead of viewing chronic conditions as a constant leach on the system, this is a way to save money and even make money.” If all goes as expected, the program will reduce ER visits by 30 percent and cut hospitalizations in half.

For this first-ever demonstration of healthcare bonds’ potential in the U.S., the California Endowment put up $1.1 million as an investment; the Central California Asthma Collaborative and Clínica Sierra Vista have provided outreach workers to visit the homes of children with asthma and do evaluations and education. To build a case that profits can be made by investing in preventive healthcare, the non-profit Social Finance, Inc. and a social enterprise company called Collective Health are working to verify savings and prepare to get investors to put up money for the second phase of the project. In phase two, Social Finance and Collective Health will issue a bond to outside investors that will cover 3,500 children, and will offer investors the opportunity to recoup their investments with additional interest—provided the kids stay out of the ER.

When I spoke with him recently, Nirav Shah, a director at Massachusetts-based Social Finance, was preparing to travel to California to check in on the investment by visiting a few homes of children with asthma who are participating in the program. Shah’s background is in finance and banking, with a stint at the federal Office of Management and Budget. He says this project has caused him to reframe the general idea of the bottom line of “profit maximization” that he used to use for hedge fund investors into a more concrete effort to “align financial mechanisms with social progress,” for society in general.

For Shah, the first challenge is to merge the study results with data from insurance companies to show rigorously that preventing asthma attacks saves them money. Eventually, insurers could either invest the money in prevention themselves, or they could sell bonds, allowing outside investors to take on the risk of the vacuum cleaners in exchange for a share of the savings on ER costs. Shah has also been talking with big investors who might put up money for the bonds in the next phase.

Some socially focused investors quickly get the “narrative” of the initiative, and want to invest their money where they can improve people’s lives and ensure the long-term health of the U.S. economy. But another crowd is attracted to investments with little risk—and Shah is working to do analytics to convince them that social impact bonds fit the bill. For risk-averse investors, the greatest argument for investing in vacuum cleaners in Fresno may be that it’s a “counter-cyclical” investment, which means that even if the economy takes a dive, the kids in Fresno will still be earning money by staying out of the ER.

When we talk about little kids gasping for air and counter-cyclical investments in the same breath, I start to feel cognitive dissonance. Is reframing asthma (and other chronic conditions like diabetes and congestive heart failure) as a money-maker really the way to address the failures in our healthcare system? Will this motivate us to reduce air pollution? Everyone I spoke with felt that the experiment in Fresno would change not only the health of the kids but also the incentives of the insurance and investment industries. They hoped to use the project as leverage in the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, which has incentives for quality and outcome over volume. For Shah, financializing asthma attack prevention is a first step in the leveraging of nascent markets in pollution reduction, carbon credits, and affordable housing toward a cleaner environment and better health for everyone.

So far, markets have been cruel to Fresno, which had 56 percent of its mortgages go underwater in 2009, but it’s possible that someday markets could also prove to be kind.

The post Can the Free Market Cure Asthma? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The B shuttle bus arrives. The Carson Circuit is the local city bus; it takes me to my destination or to a stop where I can hop on the Torrance Transit or the Metro. I pay the fare and ask for a transfer to the A shuttle. I take a seat in the middle and look out the fiberglass pane. A Pomeranian sniffs the grass amid the purple petals on the pavement. It squats. Its owner looks on. The bus pulls away from the curb and moves toward 223rd Street.

I’m on my way to CSU Dominguez Hills on Victoria Avenue in Carson, California. I tutor students embarking on their college voyage. I threw all of them out of class yesterday. I told them they lacked courtesy and tact. They sit on their duffs and do nothing, or not enough; they don’t change their ways. They act a fool in class. But I forgive them, for they know not what they do.

The bus turns on Carson Street. A mix of Carsonites—we are a city of Filipinos and Latinos, blacks and whites, Samoans, Tongans, and Asians—gets on at the Main Street stop. So many of us are young, which is suitable for the youngest municipality in L.A.’s South Bay, neighbor of Compton to the north, Long Beach to the southeast, Wilmington to the southwest, and the Harbor Gateway to the west. Up Carson Street past Go Kart World, right before Wilmington Avenue, is Puritan Bakery, a family-owned business that bakes “the best buns in town” for In-N-Out Burger and cranks out fresh wheat, white, and sourdough bread for coffee shops and diners in L.A., Orange County, and beyond. Puritan thrives.

But even in this young city, growth mixes with death. The Freeway Surplus store on Avalon Boulevard is an empty edifice now. My mom bought my school clothes there: corduroys and T&C T-shirts. As a kid, I thought it’d last forever, but it closed its doors a few years ago, when I was in my early 30s. Don Kott, a new and used car and truck dealership, has had to close its doors as well. An economic crisis swept through the city. McCoy’s Market on Sepulveda Boulevard and Main Street is long gone too. My grandpa used to bring home fried chicken from there. A massive white rooster with a red tail and coxcomb overlooked Sepulveda Boulevard and Main Street from the roof of the store. Grandpa would say roosters go kikirikikiriki, and the little chicks go piopiopio.

I transfer to the A shuttle at the SouthBay Pavilion. Every Thursday, the mall hosts the farmers’ market. Folks set up booths and pop-up tents and sell produce and handcrafted items. The driver tells me developers want to build new restaurants and a movie theater to the mall grounds. This will bring money into the city and create jobs. The StubHub Center, home of professional soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy, has done this already. The site on which the venue now stands was once known as the Olympic Velodrome. Cyclists won over 15 medals there in 1984.

I signal my stop. It’ll be a long day. I don’t feel like tutoring, but I have an obligation to the students, even though they sit on their duffs.

At a bus stop, I think about the crisis facing Carson. Two hundred eighty-five homes in the Carousel tract, once prime real estate along Lomita Boulevard, are depreciating in value. The Carousel site sits atop a former oil tank farm owned by Shell Oil, and the soil and groundwater are contaminated with high levels of benzene and methane. Shell Oil says there’s no immediate health risk. Please. There is a health risk. Several residents of the Carousels have cancer and skin rashes, and their pets have tumors. Residents have been told not to eat fruits and vegetables from their yards.

The Carson City Council declared a state of emergency to force Shell to expedite the cleanup of the Carousels. Alan Caldwell, a spokesperson for Shell, told the L.A. Times the company was “disappointed” about the declaration of emergency. “It will not solve the problem,” he said. But Shell hasn’t solved the problem.

I think about my junior-high chums Ryan McCarty and Art Diaz, who lived with their parents in the Carousels. I’d ride a bike with Ryan to Art’s. Both families had picnics and barbeques in their backyards. Apple trees and flowers were planted in the soil. Now it’s like the La Brea Tar Pits, with oil oozing out of the ground. Where will their kids reside?

Shell Oil has sat on its duff and done nothing for too long. So why do I sit on my duff and do nothing in response? What have I done to address the community’s need? Barbara Post, president of the Carousel Homeowners Association, and other residents have banded together and filed a lawsuit against the oil company. Erin Brockovich, famed environmentalist, showed up for a Carson City Council meeting. What about me? I know Shell can do more for the Carousel site. I know the students I tutor can do more for their education. And I know I can do more for my city.

The post Getting Off My Duff in Carson appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.