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Ecological Engineering
Cameron Laird writes "Lou Licht goes beyond, "Pollution is bad, punish someone." Instead,
he uses good
science, engineering, and economics to make environmental
remediation attractive. The basic technology: managing polluting
chemical species through a system of live poplar tree stands. " We've talked about this before on Slashdot, going back a couple years ago. Very interesting stuff - plant usage to clean things up seems like the best of both worlds. Weelll...I suppose not polluting in the first place would probably be the best of both worlds, but you get my point.
The article states using poplar trees to leach potential pollutants out of the soil. However, as most environmental engineers know, the poplar is probably the worst type of hardwood for this particular task. While a poplar stand will leach chemicals from the soil, most of them will be re-released gaseously as waste products of plant respiration. This is due to the dihydritic circulation system of the poplar leaves. However, if one uses a monohydritic circulatory hardwood like an ash derivative, the chance of chemical release will be reduced by about 54% (1992 Study, Bureau of Forestry). Therefore, I suggest you take this article with a grain of salt.
This guy has a doctorate, so I dont want to call him an idiot, but nothing in this interview gave me the idea that poplar trees were really that much better then say oak trees, wheet, or algee [in a pond]. He did in fact say they needed data. I looks to me though like he likes trees, so he is calling trees the solution. Now maybe they are, but I don't see any evidence.
Even if he manages to clean up polution, how is it better to have polution in the cells of trees that your burn and release into the air? Of course organics don't have this problem (much), but other chemicals just get absorbed into the plant and then what? A question I immeadiatly have that isn't answered.
Like I said, the guy has a doctorate in this, he must have done some studing, but I don't see anything that makes me belive he did something.
I'm still pretty sceptical of such high populations in the British Isles. No, exact sizes can't be deduced from physical artifacts or bodily remains directly, but the country ought to be fairly litered with neolithic human corpses if it were true. The level of agricultural efficiency required would be incredible for a neolithic society. Even very advanced civilisations with labour intensive agriculture, like those of 15th century China, were unable to support such large populations. I can't believe that Stone Age tribes could do it. I believe that was your central point.
As Bill Nye the Science Guy says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evidence of larger areas under cultivation in earlier times is not sufficient evidence of larger populations when technology is taken into account.
Be careful in trying to use the legends of ancient peoples as evidence in favour of specific events. Velikovsky got into trouble for exactly that, and now he's remembered as a complete quack.
There is no secure evidence about the prevalence of Rh- types in Europe before the Romans arrived. We do know roughly the sixth century a.D. distribution of Basques, and can make some good guesses about how blood types were distributed in Roman times from that data. Cavalli-Sforza makes a good case for the recession of the pre-Celt European population in the face of invasion by Rh+ types, but connecting this with Celtic and Germanic myth is a tricky and unreliable business.
I'm having trouble following your argument about hidden recessives. The reason hybrid infertility happens in horse breeding is that the new hybrid population is aggressively inbred by the horse breeder. That's part of the standard procedure for improving a breed. Among humans, this doesn't generally occur. The likelihood of hidden recessives appearing in the post contact population is somewhat lower than in the pre-contact population, because of its now greater genetic diversity.
I'm very familiar with genetics, and with both Dawkins and Cavalli-Sforza, but I am unaware of an analysis of any real world population, other than the Basques with their special circumstances, that produced the kind of overall reduction in fertility you describe. The reduction in sickle-cell anemia, for example, among North American blacks compared to Africans is strong evidence of the reduced power of unreinforced recessives in mixed populations. Furthermore, this analysis neglects the positive effects of outside genes, for example the increase in lactose tolerance among Mexicans after the Spanish conquest. Useful traits in the new population are likely to be greater stimulus to fertility than the new fatal recessives are.
The African American population is not known to have suffered dramatically reduced fertility in any period of its history, and birth rates for that population are well documented by owners trying to keep accounts of their property. Mexicans had a sharp population reduction in the period surrounding the arrival of the conquistadors, but the blame falls clearly on smallpox, not hybrid infertility.
The author of the website you link to makes the claim that he has evidence of exactly that sort of reduction in fertility in populations in contact, but never cites anything. I'm sceptical that it exists, but I'm willing to consider it if you have a reference.
Interbreeding does not generally reduce infertility - all the evidence I know of shows the opposite in general, if any difference at all.
Mitochondrial DNA studies of the British public reflect that Britan's many invaders mostly came without their women. Roman soldiers came, got local girlfriends and spread their sperm throughout the island. Viking men came in the long ships, raped and pillaged, and either stayed or left, but never brought their women. Getting invaded usually means the invaders are soldiers almost never accompanied by their women.
A larger study would have shown that Scandianvia, and especially Iceland, are full of mitochonrial DNA from Ireland, because the Vikings came, took women slaves, and dragged them off to wherever they lived. This didn't lower their birthrate one bit. France is full of invader's genes - the country's very name comes from the name of a Germanic tribe that took over in the sixth century (or was it the seventh? I forget.) Before the Germans, Celtic Gaul was invaded by Romans, and one out of every three modern Frenchmen counts a foreigner among his or her great-grandparents. Yet French fertility didn't fall off until after WWII.
America is quite racially mixed. Few contemporary Americans count a single European ethnic group among their ancestors, and a surprising number count non-Europeans among them. The black and hispanic populations in the US are well known to have higher fertility than whites on the average, yet they are the both much more likely to have mixed ancestors.
The only example I know of where interbreeding reduced fertility in general is the Basque country, and there is a simple and straighforward reason why: Basques tended traditionally to be Rh negative. Rh syndrome does reduce fertility.
As for carrying capacity in neolithic times, it may be higher than was thought, but it still wasn't very high. Agricultural practices didn't change much for thousands of years until the rise of mechanisation. The amount of food produced, and the island's carrying capacity can't be deduced by comparing the amount of land under cultivation then with the amount now. Modern agriculture is far more intese than anything possible in the neolithic era.
There is no chance at all that the British Isles supported a hundred million people at any time in its history.
There's a high-speed way to clean highly polluted sites that's been neglected for years that I read about in an engineering magazine (Engineering News Record, IIRC). Unlike conventional filtering techniques or leaching techniques like the trees, this kind pumps pressurized boiling water into specially drilled wells where it turns to steam, vaporizing a huge number of volatile chemicals. The vapor is captured and the toxins distilled out.
It uses far less water than traditional methods (meaning less secondary pollutants) and can clean up a superfund site in about 5 years (at about $3 million/year), as compared to 15-20 years with convention methods at $1 million/year. However since it impacts the annual bottom line harder (even if it saves more money in the long run), few companies will go that route.
If you want alternative or high-speed cleaning methods, push the government to reclassify the cost of clean up in accounting/SEC statements. If the total projected clean-up cost was classifed as a debt it would have a greater impact on their "paper" bottom line. I think. (Anybody who understands SEC annual statements and GAAP policies for handling site clean up want to correct me?)
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
Tobacco plants have been used to clean radioactively contaminated soil because of their amazing ability to leach anything from the ground.
"All new Laramie strontium flavored cigarettes.. They're radioacterrific!"
Your Working Boy,
The effluent is free of harmful organisms by this point, although I have doubts regarding its cleanliness in terms of heavy metals and whatnot.
We have a large grove of poplar that is a testbed for accelerated growth. These trees are becoming lumber-ready many years earlier than they would be without the effluent fertilizer.
Our town's next step is to start using a grey-water return system in new developments. Read it here: dual water supply
I wish I could find some links for you all, but this town, so advanced in its treatment of shit, seems to be right clueless about the Web.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
For decades, we've more or less all been aware that environmental protection makes economic sense; I don't think anyone doubts that. Unfortunately, it rarely makes immediate- or short-term sense, which is why we see millions of hectares of rainforest disappearing annually. Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
As mentioned in the article, though, owners of potential pollution sources (like landfills) are liable for any pollution that they cause down the road. This gives them a strong incentive to take measures _now_ to prevent themselves from having to shell out a lot of money later.
Tax incentives also help with this, again by providing a short-term reason to do things, but can be politically difficult to implement (best way is probably just to let companies write off plantings like this as a tax expense, thus halving their after-tax cost).
This is a valid consern. However, in the big picture some is going to stop and think before doing this. When you use the example of the Kudzu, the person who brought that in to the midwest was probably not a PhD, or even a high school graduate for that matter.
I think any of the bacteria that are being made to "eat" toxins only feed on those toxins and thus die if they have a lack of them. In a sense, they starve to death. However, makeing and introducing a bacteria that lives on toxins and other naturally local material is bad idea. However, this made not be true, but to me it seems to put a backdoor or some other trap so that the bacteria no longer can live when they have done their job.
Linux O Muerte!
I'll assume that you're saying that the vast majority of our current pollution is unavoidable.
That's not what I was saying. I was trying to get across the point that consuming causes pollution. The more people consume, whether it be food, electricity, gasoline, etc, the more they pollute. There's no way around it. Getting back to the cottager, let's say he has your wood burning stove and double glazed windows. He is now using his energy more efficiently. But somewhere a foundry and a glazier have made some pollution as well. There is less pollution compared to the cottager using a chimney and open windows, but what pollution now exists is concentrated.
I am of the mind that this is better because concentrated pollution is easier to control and manage than dispersed pollution. In the previous case, the cottager subjected his nieghbors to smoke and stench (and their thatched roofs to stray sparks), but in the latter the benefits of the consumption accrue to many neighborhoods, but only one actually gets the pollution.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Also consider the nearly intractable problems of trying to get that "one neighbourhood" to agree to be chosen.
Ah yes! The origin of NIMBY and the reason why people get so upset with zoning changes. It's also why property values are cheaper next to a factory than they are next to a forest.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Pollution is an unfortunate byproduct of consumption. Get rid of all industry and you'll still have the cottager burning wood on his stove.
Technology has a benefit in that it makes the consumption of energy more efficient. It also has the drawback the the lesser pollution created is also more concentrated. The nuclear power plant produces far, far less pollution than the equivalent in wood burning stoves, but that tiny bit of pollution is now concentrated in tiny lethal pellets.
Not polluting in the first place just isn't an option. But using the poplar trees to counteract the pollution is a great idea! I say shoot all those nuclear waste pellets into space on a trajectory intersecting the sun, the ring the launch facilities with forests.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
--Crush
I wouldn't bet on it. A wood fire in a conventional fireplace or wood stove is very dirty. This page has some information from the Department of Energy on pollution from burning wood. I have read EPA literature that states that wood burning stoves are by far the worst polluting residential source of energy.
He mentioned that poplar grow quickly (thus convert more nutrients quickly), and they can produce roots from the trunk (thus easy to grow and some options for shaping a root field). That's what is important about them.
The advantage of doing this is that the trees remove the pollutants from hard-to-clean soil and concentrate it in wood. Wood is chemically much simpler and can be dealt with in other ways. If nothing else, the contaminated wood can be transported to a better disposal facility (ie, removing lead and chromium from areas near housing). Wood can be incinerated and the metals trapped in ash and stack filters. Wood can be dumped in molten iron and the metals become part of the mix or the slag. Eventually, we'll be able to dump them into industrial-sized mass spectrometers and separate all the individual elements (once we get thermal furnaces about 10 times hotter)...but may as well get them growing now so we can harvest them and move the pollutants someplace safer.
Of course, many organics just need the biosystem around the roots to get degraded. The trees may leak some organic fumes, but the site was going to leak that stuff anyway either downward or upward more slowly.
Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head. The point isn't small is good, but that given the scale of the problem the solution changes.
On a small scale, cotton and wool might be the best fabrics, but on a large scale polypro may be better. Cotton is associated with arguably the worst environmental disaster in the last hundred years -- the shrinking of the Aral sea.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Let say we come up with really good ways to clean up messes in the environment using bacteria or trees or genetically altered rabbits, whatever.
Next thing you know, Jerry Bigbucks (CEO of Brown Sludge Inc)discovers that Product X can be produced in a highly polluting fashion and then just plant some trees or place some bacteria to get rid of resulting mess. Mr. Bigbucks ends up saving a lot of money. If anyone complains about the pollution, they just have to commission a study that states the cleanup made things just as clean (or cleaner!) as if there was no pollution in the first place (study paid for by Brown Sludge, Inc, of course). Seems like a lot of room for abuse.
Ultimately, a "medicine for the environment" is a very valuable thing for enviromental accidents. However, it will never be a substitute for keeping pollution down in the first place.
Why? Because as soon as you allow Brown Sludge Inc. (BSI) to sponser "cleanups" rather than forcing environmental responsibility in the first place, the company will start ignoring pollution issues (because it's in their best interest (money-wise) to do so). The pollution generated will be a little more, then a bit more, then a bit more.
All the while, Clean Tree Inc. (CTI) and Bacterial Waste Management (BWM) will get contracts from BSI to clean up after the company. As BSI's generates more and more pollution, CTI and BWM just create more trees and stronger sludge-eating bacteria.
In the end, we will end up with sludge eating bacteria that suddely decide they like eating automobiles or electronics more than toxic sludge. Or trees that have learned to purge themselves quickly of toxins (by emitting them in the air of course).
So many bad things can happen with this. It's much better to try to stay clean in the first place. Use ecological engineering like this as little as possible.
Cool stuff, but why is he focused entirely on trees?
From reading the article, I can only speculate that the reason for using trees is because of their root structure. In order to really clean an area, you have to have a plant that can reach several feet down into the soil, and draw nutrients and process chemicals. The idea behind some of this guys doctorate research apparently was finding ways to plant Poplar trees (fast growing and can grow roots from the bark) to create a deep and dense enough root structure. I wish there was a bit more scientific detail to this article. Perhaps someone can point us to some research papers or something to supplement the interview?
Spyky
Childishly selfish entity, who rarely gives up money, and even when the funds are given, it inevitably sticks to their fingers.
Tightwad.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Trees are pretty good at soaking up energy, carbon and water. This may not seem like a big thing, but put it into context: the purpose of the pollutant-remediation is to soak stuff up. An acre of soil under a black tarp can only support so many kinds of processes, an acre of soil covered with trees can support a lot more. Anything that needs water transpiration, nitrate and phosphate removal, or sugars to feed the bacteria breaking down other things is going to go a lot faster with the support provided by the tree and the interface it provides between solar energy, atmospheric carbon, and the soil and the substances and living things in it.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
You mean, of course, its pre-history, and I would suggest there simply isn't enough data available to make such a confident statement one way or another. Herbert's observation of a vast number of agricultural land plots, elaborate ritual structures, etc. are evidence for his argument. So, no, I am not joking. You can't rate carrying capacity on the basis of durable artifacts that people normally expect. Some native Americans were engaged in fascinating large scale ecosystem management involving periodic and controlled burn-offs of some types of trees and other vegitation that would bias toward acorn productivity. Today we observe an inordinate number of grinding holes in rocks but not much else -- not even densely sub-divided agricultural plots.
As for Herbert's hybrid sterility theory, it isn't really central to my point, but we can discuss it as a fascinating side issue:
It is certainly the case that there was an enormous displacement of Rh-negative peoples by Rh-positive peoples that extended vastly beyond the Basque. The entire mythology of the wars between the gods of the Aesir and the gods of the Vanir is likely related to this conflict. The Aesir, for example, poked fun at the Vanir fertility god and goddess, Frey and Freya, for having an incestuous marriage -- something that would tend to reflect the competition for reproductive resources between Rh negative tribes, for whom intermarriage would be ethnocidal, and Rh postivie tribes, for whom a de facto polygyny based on first child would be a reproductive win. This sort of mockery is still poked at Scotch-Irish "hillbillies" who are, it turns out, quite likely to have have Rh negative blood. US marriage licenses into this century required blood tests that included Rh factor because of the high percentage of the British immigrant population that was still Rh negative. Rh negativity applies to many of the Atlantic populations from north sea Scandanavians groups to western Africa peoples such as the Berbers. The higher fertility rate among populations with greater genetic dominance is predicted fromthe fact that hybrid infertility results, primarily, from the expression of deleterious recessives. Although fertility among European ethnicity hybrids is higher than predicted by Herbert's population crash scenario, it is much less than the more genetically dominant groups. Further, Herbert was reporting on a much more isolated population -- possibly with far more inbreeding and therefore homozygous recessives that would make them vulnerable to introduction of otherwise hidden deleterious recessives during hybridization with genetically dominant tribes. One has to keep in mind that genetic dominance is vastly more complex than the mere expression of a particular protein -- it involves the entire heirarchy of phenotypic expression up to and including extended phenotypic expression.
I agree with you that Herbert is wrong about the degree to which mtDNA correlates with ethnicity -- that Y-Chromosomal correlations are much stronger for the reasons you cite. Indeed Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza assert such in their genetic opus.
Nevertheless, we are operating in a vacum of information about Y-Chromosomes compared to the relatively vast information that has been acquired about mtDNA, so strong our conclusions must be tempered accordingly. (BTW: I'll probably be seeing one of these authors tonight so I'll see if I can get a good reference for recent progress in Y-Chromosome geographic mapping).
In present day populations, we are probably witnessing stablized hybrids that have gone through a period of genetic annealing, as well as the introduction of dominance suppression of hybrid infertility. Indeed, it may be the Bantu/Scotch-Irish hybrids sometimes called "African Americans", and the Spanish-Indian hybrids sometimes called "Hispanics" have been around long enough that their fertility has probably been enhanced by genetic annealing as well as dominance-suppression of hybrid infertility.
Nevertheless, we are still witnessing other populations that have serious fertility problems extending all the way from high rates of spontaneous abortions (probably due to direct nonviable proteins expressing in the zygote) to behavioral difficulties during the years of fertility (which is a vastly complex arena of evolutionary psychology that may involve a lot more extended phenotypics than anyone would like to believe).
Seastead this.
For many, the thought of removing technological civilization from planetary surfaces is simply too radical to consider. They have enough trouble dealing with questions of sustainable human carrying capacity on Earth such as how much does urbanization contribute to solutions or problems of sustainable carrying capacity? For those people I would suggest they at least consider the possibility that carrying capacities approaching present day are feasible under neolithic constraints, focused more on careful breeding practices, as appeared to have been the case in the early societies that gave us domesticated plants and animals.
For example, Blind Genes, Friendly People: Hybrid infertility in humans reports evidence of vastly greater sustainable carrying capacities among neolithic peoples than is commonly taught:
The process has recently been demonstrated in Britain. Using mitochondrial DNA analysis, which follows only female inheritance, scientists have looked at the bones of people who have migrated into the British Isles. The pre-Celtic Britons once lived there in vast numbers. A casual inspection of the English countryside will show terraced hills. Big fields have subtle changes in the color of their vegetation that look like a patchwork quilt. Obviously all of Britain was under intensive cultivation, far more so that now. It is and was a fertile land. They raised more food; they must have been feeding more people. They built vast monuments, including ominously an area around Avebury where there are a number of monuments, each of which resembles monuments from a different area. In other words, from time to time they gathered peaceably from all over Britain. Everyone had a monument like the ones at home.
Then the population crashed. You see, not everyone in Britain was alike. The DNA analysis shows six entirely different groups living there by the time Avebury was built. They had lived there since the English Channel cut them off from the continent thousands of years before. They lived in peace, and at Avebury for the first time they physically got together to cooperate and make friends. They crossbred. They almost died out.
They did not die out altogether, because modern DNA analysis identifies their descendants. At least a few hundred survived when their numbers were lowest. That is because among humans it takes more than a hundred people in a breeding group or the group will die out because of inbreeding. Yes, excessive inbreeding will kill off a population just as surely as cross breeding. I doubt more than a very few thousand survived, because they must at some time have reached a sort of equilibrium so their numbers could recover, and it is hard to reach equilibrium with a large number of people.
So a population of perhaps a hundred million fell to a population of perhaps under a thousand. Imagine the loss. Imagine the human despair, the loss of cultural treasures, the loss of so much of what makes us human. But this was England, one of the most fertile, safest, most hospitable places on earth. They had a long history of successful cooperation, and for a long time they were free of any outside pressure. They survived.
By the time the Celts arrived in about five hundred BC, the land was still just about empty. The Celts overran Britain, then the Romans, then the Anglo Saxons. There were Viking raids and at last the land was conquered by Normans. And today they have gone back and looked at the DNA. It is ninety-nine percent pre-Celtic. All those other invaders arrived only to interbreed and die out.
Seastead this.
People have gotten focused on using chemicals to
solve every day problems.
Have ants in your kitchen? Get Raid.
Have aphids in your garden? Get a pesticide.
But ladybugs EAT aphids.
And woods like cedar and others can keep
pests out of your home. Not necessarily ants -
but other unwelcome guests.
But people would rather buy a canned solution
because marketing and media have pummeled them
into believing that only the most recent new
and improved spray/gel/etc can resolve their
problems.
Check out Magic Firesheep!
Western medicine has traditionally focused on treating symptoms, basically by abuse or neglect, allow the body to become diseased. Oriental philosophy, on the other hand, has always been more wholistic, seeking balance and well being of the whole person, spiritually, mentally, physically, whatever, thus preventing disease and maintain health. Western medicine has been very reactive - treat the symptom directly, cut off what you can't cure. Most doctors don't work with what is really causing the problem. They just make the symptoms 'disappear".
That said, with the analogy that I've just drawn about ecology being like medicine for the environment, I think we need to not fall into the same trap. Yes, it would be better if we don't pollute in the first place. It is already too late when we see the symptoms of the problems with pollution - it has already done its damage. We must be more proactive in our approach, and the philosophy must be changed in our attitude toward it.
Of course, I have been very general and vague about what we should do - and that's also kind of the point. I'm not proposing anything concrete here, because that's usually the approach when you treat problems symptomatically.
I think that using plants (and bacteria) to clean up pollution is a great idea (it's one of the best reasons for protecting wetlands), but there is a potential downside here. Introducing plants and bacteria ('exotic species') into new ecosystems can have some pretty nasty side effects on the existing inhabitants since the exotics can often out compete the locals. This is why kudzu is such a big problem in the Southern US (and is becoming one in the north rapidly). IIRC, kudzu was imported from Asia to prevent erosion, which it does very well. Too bad it grows faster than any other plant in North America and smothers the existing flora. Similarly, purple loosestrife (sp?) was brought in as an ornamental and is rapidly taking over wetlands in the Midwest, and is really only controlled by LOTS of pesticide, burning, and/or an exotic species of beetles.
Also, somebody imported a dozen european swallows (or swifts, I always get them confused) into Central Park because they were mentioned in Shakespeare (I Am Not Making This Up) and they have literally exploded all over the continent.
I'm not saying that 'Poplars Will Rule The Earth!!!', but nothing is an unmixed blessing.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
Living Machines is, and has been, doing what I think is far more interesting engineering (i.e. going beyond planting trees) using an entire simulated wetland to treat wastewater from a variety of sources (e.g. sewage, industrial runoff). They already have systems running that are treating towns of 10000+. Check them out.
If you are interested in this sort of free-market, high-tech green-tech, check out The Rocky Mountain Institute. They are doing excellent work in developing and propagating technologies and approaches that are simultaneously good for the environment and good for the economy. In particular, they have done great work on green buildings -- I've been to their headquarters, and it's every bit as cool as they claim. It's something like a 4000 square-foot building, at 8000 feet elevation (Snowmass, CO), and the only active heating they need is a pair of small woodstoves. The rest is provided by passive solar. And they grow bananas and other things inside the building during the winter!
They are also some of the original proponents of composite-body, fuel-cell-driven cars. Neat stuff.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
The thing about this that the dude does not mention and that the sycophant interviewer does not ask about, is that this idea has been around for a while and really does not have all the wide ranging applications that dude seems to imply.
The problem that gets addressed here is, water pollution from nitrogen fertilizers and manure. For a variety of reasons (not worth gettting into now) these fertilizer have a tendency to run-off into waterways, and ground water. this nitrogen can create several kinds of pollution. one example is that serves as a fertilizer for algae it these waterways. Massive alge blooms follow, and then a dramatically lowered dissolved O2, then dead fish, and other problems.
So what happens is that dude plants his poplar trees and the N2 fertilizes them instead of getting into the water system...also the root systems of the trees hold the soils/N2 in one place. So the issue of pollutants being stored in the trees that some people have mentioned isnt a big deal because we it is good for the trees.
He is using Poplar trees because they grow fast and are easy to plant.
OTOH...the part where dude was talking about running H20 through landfills to decompose the trash faster and using trees there is something I dont think I quite get. The water that runs through would be come toxic as hell, and since we are no longer talking about N2 pollution I dont think the trees would help. In fact most modern landfills want to prevent the trash from decomposing, the goal is simply long term storage. So I am not so sure what he is getting at here
anyway sorry to ramble
Mike
The reason why biological systems are good at cleaning up pollution is the same as the reason that nanotech poses a potential threat to mankind in the future.
Essentially, it's a question of how much information you can pump into a piece of matter. It's very hard to imagine taking a chunk of matter of any description and sticking into polluted soil with the result that the piece of matter in question develops a source of energy for itself and starts sorting through the stuff in the soil molecule by molecule.
But if the piece of matter in question happens to be a plant, it does exactly what I just described. A stick from a poplar tree develops its own root system and leaves and starts sorting through the molecules it finds in the soil. That makes it very useful to anyone trying to clean up anything. Cleaning polluted soil is an information problem - you somehow have to flag every molecule in your sample as polluted or unpolluted and the collect the polluted ones. The hard part isn't moving the molecules, it's moving only the right molecules.
Organisms can do this because every molecule they contain is custom built atom by atom to carry out a specific task. Organisms contain a huge amount of information about how each molecule is built and how many of which kind of each molecule each cell contains.
Nanotechnology is the idea of using "assemblers" to manufacture useful things atom by atom. Living things having been doing this for some time. (Surprisingly neither Drexler nor Bill Joy seem to know about the information side or the biological side of the story.) Nanotechnology has so much positive and negative potential because it's so much like life.
I discuss all this at some length on my website. Werner Loewenstein wrote a great book called "The Touchstone of Life" in which he shows that molecular biology is all about information.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Well, this certainly blends in well with Bill Joy's excellenct peice yesterday about the danger of Nanotech and BioEngineering.
This fellow hasn't started down the path of reengineered plants focused on pollution cleanup. It's also interesting that there is no mention made of tobacco. Tobacco plants have been used to clean radioactively contaminated soil because of their amazing ability to leach anything from the ground. At least there are no citings about the holy grail of nanotech that will create machines to clean up after us.
OTOH there has also been some really cool stuff done with bacterias that can be used to clean up pollution.
Cool stuff, but why is he focused entirely on trees?
chris
-- I need more coffee. It's Monday. There is no such thing as enough coffee on a Monday.
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
Agreed, which is why you have to adjust the rules of the game so that their short term interests coincide with long-term strategies. Skew the cost-benefit ration of pollution so that it negatively affects the "greed" and "economic self-interest" of the individual asshole that is the typical human and they will go along with it.
The big hassle is getting everyone to agree to these new rules initially, but given that we are all competing relative to each other it won't affect how we do individually in the game if we're competitive and smart - we can see the new rules and play them better than others. An example of this is curb-side recycling in Germany as compared to Ireland. Both were introduced by government programs in major cities. It was a success in Germany but not in Ireland. Why? Initially Irish commentators decried their personalities for being too disorganized as compared to the methodical Germans. However, another analysis is more compelling - in Germany there were economic incentives to recycle: free recycling and charges for pick-up of non-recycling, whereas in Ireland everyone paid a flat distributed fee to the local government and voluntarily recyled "for the environment".
I thought that the interviewer and interviewee discussed a straw-man when they talked about extreme environmentalists that want to "punish" polluters because they're "evil". That may be how owners of polluting corporations feel about having economic disincentives imposed on them, and it may even be how some people feel when they realize that their health is suffering because those companies find it economically self-interested to poison them, but the thinking behind the system of fines has always been that it will encourage a shift in behaviour through short-term mechanisms to acheive long term goals.
I also had another question about the article: what happens to a low-income neighbour-hood that is burning benzene and heavy metal enriched trees? Do you get a lot of carcinogens in the air?
--Crush
they aren't the complete answer.
The problem in environmental pollution is scale. Some things that are innocuous or beneficial on a small scale are bad on a large scale. Inuit hunters make their anoraks out of seal hide -- it's fine on the level they practice it but if it ever caught on in an industrialized country the world would be depopulated of seals in a few weeks. Spraying sewage on saltmarsh works for a small suburban sewage system, but New York city would require a sizable chunk of the Everglades. If you looked at large tree planting programs such as those run by the timber companies, you find that diverse mixed species forests are replaced with monocultures of fast growing softwoods. If you drive through places where this has been done it's almost eerie -- millions of identical trees -- same species, same size, planted in geometrically perfect lines. I'm not saying this is what the guy is proposing, but you have to put limits on it.
Trees are a great solution to clean up where we've screwed up, but this doesn't mean we can pollute on our merry way and plant a few trees. For one thing, the landfill represents an end point for a long trail of waste and pollution. Toxic such as cadmium could be sequestered in trees, but we'd still be mining it and releasing it into the environment in one form or other. It would be better to recycle.
Actual recycling doesn't just reusing our trash a few times on the way to landfill, but to create closed matter loops in which molecules are used over an over again. Recycling technology will solve the extraction problem, and the landfill problem. Recycling technology allows you to expand a population and economy beyond the carrying capacity of the planet under a extraction and disposal regime.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So far results are promising:
-- http://www.sas.upenn.edu/biology/facult y/rea/
For obvious reasons the EPA is very interested in this work as a means of very cheaply processing abandoned toxic dump (so-called "Superfund") sites. After growing a field of modified Arabidopsis, the material can be harvested and incinerated, separating the compounds for re-use or safe disposal.
Not all biotechnology is about Monsanto taking over the world!
For decades, we've more or less all been aware that environmental protection makes economic sense; I don't think anyone doubts that. Unfortunately, it rarely makes immediate- or short-term sense, which is why we see millions of hectares of rainforest disappearing annually.
Basically, you can't rely on human beings to act in their own self interest in anything but the short term.
We're now looking at Ecolovillage. We want to build a suburb of clustered housing, a small retirement village. That's what we want to do-and treat all the water on-site, really get focused on solid waste management, and grow enough carbon that we have a good running start to be even greenhouse-gas cyclic. You take a field and, instead of putting two-acre mini- mansions on it, you go out there, cluster housing, and keep the rest of the land either in productive agriculture or productive prairie, with wetlands and ecological diversity.
Hands up anyone out there who believes that more than an tiny minority of the peole who can afford mini-mansions would go for this?
Don't get me wrong; I was mightily impressed by this interview, and it convinced me to look further into the project. I don't, however, believe you can rely on the asshole that is the typical human to go along with it.