Will your new car be your last?

Posted on 19 January, 2018 by alloporus

It is a sunny day in 2037. An autonomous electric vehicle pitches up to take you to work, complimentary with your skim latte with one. Siri is ageing now but she can still alter your order given you are really trying to reduce your sugar intake.

This routine happens one, maybe two days a week because there is not actually much office style work needed anymore. On the other days you “work” in your service jobs that are really more like recreation activities that ensure you and those you help are not sent insane with boredom.

Monday you are golfing followed by a visit to the hospital to chat with Fred who is old but has cancer and no family to visit him. On the way back you get the car to stop at the lookout on the escarpment because, after all, there is no hurry.

Tuesday you have a virtual meeting with your nerdy mates who still want to design the ultimate solution to world peace by growing enough food. The conversation is recorded, summarised and logged so later you can flag the good bits. The AI has done this a few times already so there will be very little chaff to remove. Turns out that, as usual, the gems were few and far between.

Wednesday your meetup is in the coffee shop. When the car gets to your place it has already collected a couple of your other meetup buddies who live nearby. They have to wait while you put the groceries in the fridge that ordered more milk. Obviously, the supermarket drone sent bacon and cheese too, to max out efficiency.

Thursday you don’t need the car. It’s your quiet day.

Friday comes along and you fancy a swim. The nearest beach is 70 clicks away but the train is so fast that you cover the ground almost instantly. This system of rapid public transport and small autonomous vehicles connected to transport hubs works pretty well now that most journeys are to places of interest and recreation rather than the CBD. Virtual conferencing is now so real that even the big companies that seemed to want to hang on to their boardrooms have realised that the expense of face to face dick waving can’t be justified. Given their workforce is either a robot or working from home the central office is empty anyway.

On the way back from the beach you look into a holiday via the voice-activated screen in the car that has not even looked like it would have an accident in a million years.

All your options from the last time you thought about this flash up along with suggestions from a few thoughts you voiced in the virtual chat you had earlier in the day with your cousin in Turkey. The choice is too overwhelming so you ask for the ‘our choice for you’ option that has been spot on every time so far.

It has been quite a while since you even thought of asking the AI to look for offers on buying a car. It’s not even worth the search. Cars are way too expensive to own and ownership has no additional utility.

Welcome to the new world.

Post revisited – Leaders not heroes

Posted on 12 January, 2018 by alloporus

This revisit was a challenge. I am often confused and confounded by what defines true leadership. There are qualities and attributes that are easy to see and then there is a secret ingredient that only the great have. It is something to do with knowing, a sixth sense perhaps that allows true leaders to do and say the right things at the right times so that they first connect and then take people along with them.

Anyway, have a read of this thought from 2011.

Leaders not heroes

Leadership is hard to define, not easy to learn and is, perhaps, only gifted.

True leaders inspire us and we trust them. We listen to what they say and we accept what they decide. This is because leaders do and say things that make us feel good about ourselves. And what they do we believe in, often without need of explanation or a spelling out of logic.

Heroes are a little different. They motivate us because they are admirable. They do what we would like to do. We can imagine ourselves slaying the dragon and winning the adoration of the damsel or, if you prefer, as a heroine beating up the patriarchy to create equality and emancipation. Our heroes actually do these things. Heroism generally requires conflict.

In our modern ritualized world, our heroes do our fighting for us or they act bravely in the face of danger. Leaders can do these heroic things for they too have courage. Only they do them without having to fight.

Leaders show the way forward as not only the logical but the truthful path. They do this instinctively; picking their way with ease through the complexity of options to choose those that really make sense. They can slay the dragon if needs must, only they will more likely convince it to live happily on the top of the mountain.

They also have vision. A clear notion of what the future looks like that is not an idealized utopia but achievable and likely futures. And leaders are not afraid to explain the future to followers and skeptics alike. The dragon will live on the mountain and will not visit the valley unless invited.

And there is one more critical element that sets leaders apart from both heroes and mere mortals: they can combine fearless vision with timing. They know instinctively how to act and when to act to achieve the desired outcome. Heroes are presented with their opportunity and instinctively move to the front of the cowering throng sword in hand. Leaders anticipate the dragon’s arrival and go outside the village to engage the foe on neutral ground.

It takes courage, smarts and conviction to be a leader. It also needs a certain lightness of hand (and word) dispensed with ease and grace. And wisdom helps, preferably born of experience, or where time has yet to allow for this, then from instinct.

There have always been leaders who have most of these things and these people have become important in our societies. You could probably name your own favorite. And if we did a survey of favorites, the majority of the many leaders that people would chose to name as inspirational come from the past. Many favorites will be historical, a few will be modern, but hardly any will be in public office. Bar the notable exception of a few charismatic entrepreneurs, our current leaders do little to inspire us. This is especially true in politics.

And then there is one final, and perhaps the most critical, quality of leaders, one that seems to be missing from all modern politicians. That is the ability to realize that leadership is not about them, even though they must be strong, stand out and even be heroic. Leadership is actually about the outcome, the means proposed to get there and the timing of the actions. So true leaders must have humility. The quality of knowing that it is just a channel that they present to the people who look to them.

People follow what they intuitively know to be right. All they need is for it to be presented. Sometimes we are conned. A few infamous historical leaders have taken their people down horror roads through force of rhetoric and oratory but have all fallen when the truth came out. When it became clear they lacked humility they were ousted. It sometimes took a great effort but they did not survive any more than the pathways they proposed.

So in the end leadership cannot be about being heroic because actually we lead ourselves. All that leaders really do is show us the way. Outcomes happen as each one of us as individuals take responsibility.

Mental musings on leadership might help a little. The real issue is what the future holds and who will lead us to it.

In our children’s lifetimes we will reach 9 billion souls, oil will be $200 a barrel making alternative energy an economic imperative, agricultural soils will show the symptoms of overuse and we will have to wrestle with the consequences of land, water and food shortages. These things will happen with or without climate change and we will want wise heads to lead us through the challenges with confidence and surety.

Can we expect this from our political elite? Yes we can. Indeed we should demand it. We should ask for courage, smarts, timing and, most of all, humility.

The implication from all this is that we are bereft. Even the apparent honesty of Obama’s ‘yes we can’ was bogged down in partisan politics and mostly failed to shift anything. We have witnessed a generation of working-class stagnation as, simultaneously, economies have concentrated wealth.

This has given the US Trump, a mandate to the UK leadership who decided to pass, and a Russian keen to take his shirt off.

So at this time in human history, true leaders are few and certainly not appearing through the democratic process.

It is not that we are short of causes. We truly need help navigating growing inequality, precarious economies, the evils of terrorism, and any number of specific social problems. But who is strong enough and has the humility to show the way?

Revisiting this particular post was indeed a challenge. I have an idea of what is needed but the times make it almost impossible for it to happen through one or two charismatic individuals. The causes lack obvious conflict and are too diffuse for single voices.

The leadership we need has a morality to it that can belong to everyone and so let everyone lead. It is an awareness of self and empathy to others but without a bleeding heart; for the system of supply and demand is still the foundation that holds everything up and we cannot easily replace that life support.

Can we lead the way as a collective? Maybe.

As a great man once penned, ‘We can be heroes, just for one day’.

Optimism

Posted on 5 January, 2018 by alloporus

I see the glass as half empty far more often than I would like.

It’s the cynic in me that does this, a nimble imp that jumps around incessantly to skilfully sneak up and strike when I’m not looking.

And I am not alone.

Many of us are pestered by negativity fed incessantly by the imp and his allies in the mainstream media with their constant peddling of bad news as something we just have to know. It is enough to depress the most ardent of us.

The psychology is simple enough. We are shown bleak accounts of impending and real doom to make us feel hopeless and in this stupefied state we don’t need to try to fix anything, we can just keep on consuming our way to distant happiness.

The imp just loves it.

He gets to play silly buggers with us and there it is, a glass half empty.

Diogo Verissimo, a conservation scientist and social marketer, believes that to make the environment a mainstream concern, conservation discussions should focus less on difficulties and much more on positives. He’d like us to see the full half of the glass.

In April 2017 the Smithsonian Institute organised the Earth Optimism Summit to shift the global conservation movement’s focus away from problems and toward solutions. Verissiomo’s own Lost and Found project tells the stories of 13 species once thought extinct but now rediscovered by intrepid and dedicated humans.

The hope is that the good news with the help of storytelling will generate a “more positive vision for the Earth’s future”.

It is hard to be optimistic though. The numbers of people and their needs are scary and our psychology held deep in our reptilian brainstem is not in our favour. Too many posts on this blog have explored this dilemma.

Population clocks

Post revisited – Washing machines

Post revisited – Can we have sustainability?

The biggest global challenges revisited

It seems unlikely that some good news stories will create much more than a temporary salve.

Now I believe we are on the path that Thomas Malthus warned of back in 1798 when he talked intelligently about per capita production and mankind using the abundance of resources for population growth rather than for maintaining a high standard of living.

Sure we slow down population growth rates when affluence is high, counter to the Malthusian trap, but we are doing it after our absolute numbers have reached 7.5 billion. A full order of magnitude more than the 700 million alive when Malthus wrote his famous essay.

These billions are resource hungry and increasingly disconnected from the natural world.

In fact, if I hadn’t been lucky (and resource hungry) enough to visit over 20 countries in my lifetime I’m not even sure I would believe that 7.5 billion people was even possible. But it is here, a miracle that Malthus would have imputed to the almighty.

What the imp knows is that despite the occasional good news story, Malthus was actually right. He got the numbers a bit askew, an understandable error given the knowledge of his day, but the theory is sound.

Resources will become limiting and the consequences will not be pretty or good.

The glass half full may be the view we need but it is a hard one to see.

Overshoot day

Posted on 29 December, 2017 by alloporus

Overshoot day is the day in the year when human activities have used up the amount of the Earth’s natural resources that can be renewed within one year.

Ideally this is sometime in very late December or better still, January, February or later in the in the subsequent year. Overshoot day celebrated then would mean we are either in balance or slightly ahead using less resources than are renewed each year. This was pretty much true up to the late 1960’s.

In 2017 overshoot day was 2nd August.

This leaves another 151 days left in the year to keep everyone going on resources not renewed within the year. We are using up credit, reserves of resources that sit in the renewable pool.

There is more bad news if you are Australian. Our Aussie lifestyle chews up more resources than most. If everyone lived like us then overshoot day arrives on 12th March, almost half a year earlier.

Put another way, if everyone lived the Aussie lifestyle, we would need 5.2 Earths worth of renewable natural resources per year. And if we all had the British stiff upper lip or Italian suits, then it would be 3.0 Earths.

This is a serious problem folks. I mean it. We are overextended taking up at least a third more than is renewed. It is like having a salary of $100 a week and spending $130 a week. It is only sustainable for as long as your savings or credit card allows.

Aussies should be ashamed that they are the most profligate being ahead even of the Americans (5.0 Earth’s in their case); not that finger pointing helps. All the wealthy people in the world are collectively living on credit. We are borrowing from the pool of reserves without an ability to pay back in. The risk in this transaction is not secured against any collateral other than the technology mantra.

In natural resources terms, buy now, pay later, becomes use now, worry about shortages later. And it could become use now, deal with collapse later.

If laboratory rats run out of food they get hungry, then they fight each other, and then they eat each other.

It is ugly.

Our system of credit, supply chains, and technology applied to renewable resources will buffer us for a while. It is why we don’t feel shortages or, indeed, hunger for those of us living on $100 plus a day (a little under $50,000 a year before tax).

It is also why we buffered this system after the GFC even though we knew it was built on sand and so much of the extra credit promised ended up in just a few pockets. We should pay much more attention to all this. But I digress, here is the key message.

Overshoot day is the most important day of the year. If we are smart, less greedy and less fearful we could even make it a biannual celebration.

So when you are pondering your New Year’s resolutions and reflecting on another year lodged into history, with full stomachs and the lingering indigestion of Christmas cheer, spare a thought for the day in 2018 when we overshoot our renewable resources for another year.

Eating your pet

Posted on 22 December, 2017 by alloporus

A while ago I was on the road in rural NSW looking at the conservation value of native vegetation patches. A fascinating tale of dual consent, blinkered minds and koalas. These stories will come later for I have another I must tell first.

On my travels, I chatted with a government vegetation officer who is also a farmer. For many years Dave has legally hunted on his property to remove feral animals and reduce the number of kangaroos and wallabies that eat his crops. This is standard practice in the Australian bush and a necessary function.

Although all native animals are protected under NSW law the balance between kangaroo numbers and the interests of landholders means there are commercial licenses to supply meat and skin products and non-commercial licenses for the purpose of damage mitigation and public safety. The commercial harvest is regulated through a quota and every step in the kangaroo supply chain is licensed and monitored. Around 1,800 professional roo shooters ply their trade across Australia.

So when David shoots animals on his land it is all above board. What he does with the meat was what we chatted about.

He makes biltong, a better kind of jerky if you will. And by all accounts it is delicious. I am a big fan of biltong from my time in southern Africa so we had a fascinating yarn about his techniques, recipes, the best animals, and the best cuts. Loin from smaller wallabies, dried in a dehydrator with a good hit of chilli, in case you were wondering.

Excited on my return I began to tell my wife about this kangaroo biltong when she yelled ‘yuk’ and demanded that I stop.

“You can’t eat a pet,” she screamed.

Now I should explain that we have a swamp wallaby that visits our backyard during wet periods, usually with her joey in tow or pouch. Wallabies have a certain cuteness but are as wild as a ferret and definitely not pets. They are responsible for the loss of many an edible garden plant.

I should also say that my wife is by no means a nature lover. Movies, shopping and a good yarn with her friends are more her thing. She is also a keen carnivore who has been known to berate vegans for not feeding animal products to their kids. But clearly, she connected with this emblem of the nation.

Somehow she has acquired a visceral response to eating it.

I was taken aback. My biltong story remained untold and my own curiosity over why we have not made more of this protein source for sale to eager Asian markets was not aired. I had to be quiet misreading badly the depth of feeling for wild animals that I saw as a resource, David too presumably.

So you can’t eat your pet, even if it is not actually your pet.

This is a more severe dampener on a market for kangaroo meat than I had imagined. Pragmatologists beware, we have a long way to go.

Teaching ecology

Posted on 15 December, 2017 by alloporus

Peer-reviewed paper series

Dangerfield, J.M., Boar, R.R. & Montgomery, P., 1987. Teaching ecology to undergraduates: a practical course using projects. Journal of Biological Education, 21(4), 251–258.

“In these practicals students learned how to derive facts through experimentation.”

This is a quote from my first ever peer-reviewed publication that appeared in the Journal of Biological Education, exactly 30 years ago. The irony that it wasn’t strictly research but some pedagogy gleaned from an undergraduate practical course I designed and delivered with my colleague Ros Boar that we thought would get students familiar with the process of research by experimentation. We were young and idealistic at the time but had a passion for education that was, and still is, a good thing.

The course began with some facts about three species of woodlice. One was common everywhere in the UK and the other two, whilst closely related (classified in the same genus) were rare. We presented the students with vast numbers of live specimens of each species from laboratory cultures along with some instructions on how to look after them responsibly, then asked students to test the hypothesis that it was the behaviours of these species affected their recorded distributions.

Next we said, ‘Well, there you have it folks. Form small groups and go conduct some experiments.”

It was a bold plan even for the University of East Anglia that, at the time, had a reputation for innovation in teaching. We were trying to put the ‘open needed learning’ paradigm that we believed in, to the test and, almost without realising it, I have followed this approach throughout my time as an educator.

Open-ended explorations of carbon budgets, all taxa biodiversity inventories, the spatial distribution of plants and animals, and even millipede mating behaviours found their way into subsequent teaching efforts. I am not sure that all students benefit from being thrown in at the deep end of the scientific method without any flotation devices. In later years I became convinced that the approach exposed secondary school education that no longer teaches “thinking” to any useful purpose. But in those heady days, we just knew it was worthwhile.

Between them, the UEA students interpreted behaviours with experiments on habitat preference, vertical distribution, survivorship, feeding and growth, and palatability. All the likely suspects for the global hypothesis you would have to agree. Only this was a learning exercise and so we did not expect much light on what makes Porcellio scaber so ubiquitous. That said, it almost certainly has to do with the weaker physiologies of its congeners, and out students were on that track.

We did ask the students how they went and from what they said we concluded

The majority of students (80 per cent) initially expected their conclusions to support the ecological theory that they had explored during their lecture course. Interestingly, only 25 per cent subsequently claimed that they would expect this if they were to begin another piece of work. All of the students who replied to our questionnaire that they would now be less accepting of theory.

So we created sceptics.

An inspired outcome, even if I do say so myself.

Nice one

Posted on 8 December, 2017 by alloporus

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see”

Scott Pruitt, Head US Environmental Protection Agency

This is an awesome quote on so many levels.

Like all good quotes, there are truths. Measuring with precision is indeed challenging and the impact of human activity on climate is, without doubt, a source of disagreement.

Then there is an opinion. And you would expect the Head of the EPA to have one, just maybe not one that is opposite to the official view of the agency he leads.

There is also a subtle admission; “the global warming that we see”. Lucky he put that in before some of the biggest storms on record. It’s also an admission somewhat at odds with the rest of the quote. Presumably, you are supposed to look past that inconsistency.

So here is a question to think about.

At what point should a public servant talk up his personal view or that of his immediate political masters over the official policy setting?

Perhaps never.

If public servants simply disregarded the current policy it makes a mockery of the democratic process. Those elected to create policy rely on the system to implement whatever they decide in good faith. And those who elect their representatives expect the system to work too.

This means public servants tasked with designing and delivering workable policy should get on with it even as the politics dances around them. They should stand firm and deliver the flavour of the day.

So to be fair to Mr Pruitt his frame is a new policy and not that of the previous administration.

And then there is the reality.

Here are some Alloporus thoughts on climate change

If this is leadership, heaven help us

Post revisited — the missing link

Can you answer these four easy questions?

Soil carbon — what we think

Staggering

Posted on 1 December, 2017 by alloporus

“The US surveys consistently show that ‘reading proficiency’ as exemplified, for instance, by the ability to ‘compare viewpoints in two editorials’ is possessed by only 13 per cent of the US adult population.”

From ‘The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times‘ by A. C. Grayling

This is a remarkable quote.

If the numbers are true, then roughly 8 out of 10 average Americans can’t discern viewpoints from what they read. This is both an indictment on levels of literacy and on the consequences of them being so low.

It could be that most people are not aware that they do not know what the written words mean. They readily form opinions from what they hear and see on conventional media and have those views reinforced by their social media feeds. When all that they read comes in the form of a tweet then there is hardly any discerning to be done. It’s too easy to find the reinforcement of your worldview.

It could be even simpler than this. Maybe people do not make up their minds. Instead, they just listen and take everything they hear as gospel.

So here is one consequence of this staggering reality.

There is very little point in editorials.

Lasts

Posted on 24 November, 2017 by alloporus

A sailor in the 1600’s was the last human ever to see a dodo, the bird species from Mauritius that filled the bellies of sailors so effectively they were collected to extinction.

The sailor, a ship’s cook perhaps, was blissfully unaware of what he had just done when he dispatched the last dodo ever seen. He was just doing his job. Indeed it was only with considerable hindsight that we can even imagine who he was even though his name will never be known. At the time nobody knew that the last dodo had just been broiled.

On a hot afternoon in the Zambezi valley in 1988, a male black rhino was so frightened and angry with the sides of a mopane pole boma erected to hold him that he bloodied his nose trying to bash them down. Zimbabwe National Parks officers watched at a safe distance doing their job assisting the capture and removal of the animal to a reserve in South Africa as part of a rescue mission to save his kind.

As I felt the brute force of a metric ton of herbivore trying to escape no thought came to me that this could be it. I didn’t think that a greenhorn academic might be one of the last to see such a magnificent creature born, raised and surviving in the wilderness. After all, it looked like it was, captured and caged as though it were already in a zoo. Except that I could have something in common with the ship’s cook of centuries past. I could be the last human to see the last wild black rhinoceros not otherwise manipulated somehow by a human hand, fence or tranquillizer dart. For history will not record it in any more detail than it could for the dodo.

The thing is that on a planet so dominated by one species there is always going to be the last. And lasts will not herald themselves for our attention. They will happen quietly.

During the time it takes you to travel to work there will be at least one last or even two. The global rate of biodiversity loss is estimated at 0.3% per annum means that species are going extinct all the time. A rainforest tree is felled and the last habitat of an unnamed elaterid beetle is gone. The handful of specimens that lived in it is a last that no human noticed.

Taxonomists are not sure but best estimates are that there are 8.7 million species on Earth although most of them have not been described.

The 0.3% rate of loss comes from global analyses of multiple studies that catalogue habitat loss and degradation across all continents and in estimates of change in the world’s oceans.

At this rate and estimated totals the loss is 72 species per day or 3 per hour or roughly one every 20 minutes.

An obvious reaction to a precession of lasts is to prevent them. It should not have to be this way for surely the rhino could be saved from extinction in the wild and the beetle too. Noble thoughts certainly and those worthy individuals taking on the translocations were an embodiment of them. And for a while, it seemed to work. Black rhino numbers increased steadily through to the millennium and for a while afterwards. Even today during a resurgent poaching crisis in Africa black rhino numbers are increasing at around 3% per annum on a global population of 5,000 individuals.

The beetle was not so fortunate. It did not have a rescue plan and became part of the 0.3% of annual biodiversity loss for that year, unrecorded and unseen.

It is nearly 30 years since that rhino bloodied its nose on the sides of the boma. A lot has gone on. There are over 2 billion more people to feed and economically support. Everywhere there is development or poverty with people running around like ants making either happen.

And all the time there are lasts, most of them unseen.

Tube

Posted on 17 November, 2017 by alloporus

In under an hour, an aluminium cylinder rattled through the crisp evening air from Forbes to Sydney even though the path taken was the scenic route across the city. This is customary for Friday evenings that are always replete with similar tubes.

In Forbes the tarmac couldn’t match the sky’s depth and crimson edges or hide its engineering among the fallow fields and winter crops as the tube ran on its own devices and with the tube in a hurry to leave even though control said to wait for a slot at the other end that no amount of strained grunt and propeller speed could allocate sooner.

The air and the darkening blue was big enough to still the haste. So it stood and champed, then left.

Strain before release, pause before a jerk forwards into a rush that should not be possible for such a hunk of metal and for so long that speed gathers up enough lift to do something even more absurd; a tube now higher than the crows running fast over the ground yet still in the vastness.

Then the point is reached quite soon when the whine dips and the bell rings leaving just enough time for darkness to arrive and a descent into a different bigness of orange lights and means for movement of a million people from where they are to where they want or have to be that includes the place where tubes can go to be received and looked after until the next time.

No need for the sky here. The crisscrossing tubes and the glow of the ground suck so much meaning from what is above it that no man can look away from the ground or resist the attempt to capture the scene onto whatever electronic device is at hand.

At one end there is vastness that taunts and at the other, there is interest everywhere from the clutter, chatter and chaos.

And so it is with the human being. A creature fascinated more by lights below than above with unwavering trust in a powered aluminium tube and the need to get back from whence it came.

Go well.