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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.
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.
Poplars are generally the tree of choice for primarily one reason: growth.
It is one of the fastest growing and one of the most common trees of North America. It also has a tendency to be hardy.
Poplars also have a different root system than what most perceive to be the "standard tree root system." They can shoot off runners that will grow into trees. Within a short geological instant, a forest of poplars can be grown with a strong, interwoven root system. In this case, the root system can be viewed with some qualities as a sponge, in an environmental sense.
Oak trees don't do that.
Wheat doesn't do that.
Algae doesn't do that.
A few plants in a pond do work just as well:
Cattails are one of them.
Moss is another.
Unfortunately, moss is generally hard to grow and takes a long time to have enough in a biosystem to make a really strong impact. If you want to go the moss route, you need an established biosystem: a peat bog.
Swamp/Marshland is the best natural filtering system North America has. There are actually a few towns that do utilize this efficiently yet they still get a lot of red tape because because mother nature isn't as 100% monitorable/predictable as a human-made waste treatment center.
Other downside is: not too many people like living by swampland.
-Vel
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.