SIREN SONG

Sirens sounded from Missouri Flat Road today, and I wondered if they were related to the CalFire helicopters carrying water to the Caldor fire a few miles away. A few people have already been injured in the fire, and panicked residents are beginning to drive out of this area in case they need to evacuate their homes and businesses. The sirens may be on ambulances, police cars, or fire engines.

Being close to a wildfire is certainly a terrifying experience, but it is entirely new to me. Why, then, does it somehow seem so familiar? Then I realized—the sirens brought back the same dread I felt almost thirty years ago, when an earthquake struck the Bay area.

Harold and I lived in Alameda then, only a few miles from the freeway that joined the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. I had picked him up from work, and as we were driving home, the car seemed to fall into a ditch, then recover. Harold swore and said something unkind about my driving. Then we saw that all the traffic lights were out. Sirens were sounding in the distance. By the time we got home we realized there must have been an earthquake.

Evening came on, our electricity was off, and we sat in the dark listening to the sirens and wondering how bad the quake had been. Battery-operated radio reports gave only a little information at first, but it sounded as if large parts of San Francisco and East Bay cities might have been leveled. After a few hours, the power came on and we were able to get a few television reports showing newscasters standing precariously on the edges of the broken Bay Bridge and below the collapsed freeway. The sirens continued in the distance. The next day we learned sad news of some Alamedans’ deaths below the freeway.

It was only a few days before recovery began. Bad as the quake had been, it was at least not a repetition of the 1906 disaster. Rebuilding the bridge and freeway completely took years, partly because citizens and planners typically disagreed on how they should look, but it did happen. By about 2000 it was finished. There was even a silver lining from my viewpoint: To provide immediate access to The City from the East Bay, the SeaBees came in to build a temporary ferry terminal not far from our Alameda home. The ferry rapidly became my favorite method of getting to San Francisco, as I could savor the view of the Bay while drinking coffee and writing. Later the ferry was replaced with more elaborate boats, and a permanent terminal was built. Another one in Oakland helped provide the triangle of today’s Alameda-Oakland-San Francisco Ferry, beloved by commuters and the occasional savvy tourist.

Though the destruction of these human-made structures was costly in lives and money, the end result for the infrastructure was acceptable. Few drivers on the freeway and bridge today think about the 1989 collapse, but I can still hear the sirens. Worse, I am reminded of another natural disaster, the destruction of our natural environment occurring not far away from my home in the Sierras now. Thousands of acres of trees and associated communities of plants and animals will come back from the fire eventually, too late for me to see it happen. There is plenty of blame to go around. Human-caused climate change has added to natural cycles of drought and abundant water; logging companies used clear-cutting for many years; then we environmentalists urged too many controls over logging.  Among us we destroyed what took thousands of years to create.

Copyright © August 20, 2021 by Carol Leth Stone (a.k.a. RovinCrone)

A NEW ECOLOGY

The roof of the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is a garden that looks odd but merges naturally with the park surrounding it. Having a wide variety of plants, the roof attracts pollinators and provides insulation for the building beneath it.

 

https://www.calacademy.org/exhibits/living-roof

When we drove along a large highway in Canada several years ago we were surprised by passing beneath a huge overpass with plants growing on it. It turned out to be a corridor for wildlife, which had been constructed so that moose, deer, and other animals could cross the highway safely. Like the CAS roof, the overpass was a human-made structure that contributed to the natural biome rather than interfering with it.

The Dutch biologist Menno Schilthuizen has pointed out that evolution is occurring quickly all around us. For instance, some spiders have evolved to be attracted to the lights where insects gather, and starlings have even changed their wing shape in a way that allows them to flee from some urban dangers. As every high school biology student knows, peppered moths rapidly evolved in the nineteenth century, becoming dark to match the sooty backgrounds in their industrialized English environments. Parakeets in Paris are of two distinct genetic types that could mix but do not; like many other animals, they have evolved to remain in slightly different habitats.

Many of Schilthuizen’s examples sound more like variations in species than true evolution, but his point that changes are occurring swiftly within organisms in urban and natural environments cannot be denied. Surprisingly, he is hopeful that we can work with many of the changes rather than resisting them.

Ever since the sixties, I have agonized over human alterations to our natural environment. Even our wonderful national parks and wilderness areas have suffered from pollution, urban sprawl, mining, and other obscenities. In traveling in a motorhome throughout North America I have watched the crumbling of many ecosystems. Conservation of current natural resources has seemed like environmentalists’ only worthwhile goal. Perhaps Schilthuizen has the right idea. If some organisms evolve in a way that benefits them and their surroundings, we can encourage them. If some become extinct, their replacements may be worth preserving. Those of us who mourn the loss of familiar plants and animals can try to imagine future ecosystems and design appealing cities for them. We cannot stop evolution, but we can search for new ways to live with it.

 

Copyright © July 25, 2021 by Carol Leth Stone (a.k.a. RovinCrone)

THE LARGE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

The media finally have the message: People care about the environment. It’s nearly impossible to turn on a television channel—especially   PBS—without seeing David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Greta Thunberg, or Bill Gates, of all people, urging us to take care of wildlife, conserve natural resources, and reduce our carbon footprint. As a fervent environmentalist for many decades, of course I am delighted to see that viewers care about these issues and that research on possible fixes is proceeding.

Why, then, am I hesitant to applaud this progress? It’s because I see scarcely any mention of population as part of our environmental  problems. In the 1960s the world population was about 3 billion; today, about 8 billion.  So much damage results from that growth: The huge population easily transmits diseases such as covid-19. Supplies of water are scarce in some areas, while the changing climate causes torrential rains in other areas. We convert large areas of forest or wetlands to space for growing coffee or other desirable foods. There is simply too little useable space for everyone.

In the 1960s population biologists such as Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin began pointing out the necessity of limiting population size. Many of us responded by limiting the size of our families and joining Planned Parenthood. All over the world, people realized the danger of overpopulation. China even instituted a draconian  “one child” program that led to forced abortions and other undesirable results and was eventually discontinued. The world population size that had grown 2% annually in the 1960s now grows at about 1%. That decrease is very encouraging, but 1% of 8 billion is still 80 million, about ten times the size of New York City. Can the planet sustain adding ten New Yorks a year? I think not.

Today, however, the ubiquitous TV programs about nature and climate change seem almost oblivious of how much population size affects the environment. Is it because corporate sponsors discourage it? I don’t know the answer but am suspicious.

Some United States economists actually warn that the country needs more babies. Presumably this is to increase consumption of goods to stimulate the economy, and to provide a larger pool of workers. That’s the dilemma: Stimulating the economy depends partly on population growth, while helping the environment depends on shrinking it. While a larger population may actually be desirable in some ways for some countries, would it not make more sense to encourage more immigration from crowded countries than to boost the number of births? Immigrants are desperately trying to enter some countries to escape terrible conditions in other places. Most are willing to work, to buy goods, to help the economy.

Currently, anyone who encourages limiting population size is likely to be accused of racism or “anti-natalism.” In recent years far-right politicians have taken advantage of religious opposition to abortion to attack Planned Parenthood. The women who began that group around 1900 as a way of helping poor immigrant women control their lives are said to have favored genocide of Blacks. Margaret Sanger, the main founder, was one of eleven children in an Irish family. She personally experienced the sad results of women not being able to control their reproduction. She is criticized greatly now as being a eugenicist, but her goal of helping women voluntarily escape the burden of having too many children is still laudable.

Planned Parenthood and similar groups are attacked by people who oppose abortion. However, the best way to avoid abortion is to provide contraception. Many women in rural or poor areas of the country have no access to free contraception. As a result they are faced with the terrible choice of having an abortion or giving birth to an unwanted baby and adding to the population size. If women have access to education and contraceptives, they become free to better control their lives, to find jobs, to have children in the number and when they choose to. Individuals and society both benefit. Bill and Melinda Gates have seen how important population control is for Africa, and have invested in programs to help women, but who will sound the alarm for America?

Calls for social justice also complicate the overpopulation issue. One proposal for lessening the wealth gap between rich and poor suggests giving each baby born in the US $20,000. Invested over the years, that could help pay for college, a starter home, and other advantages that wealthier people have. Unfortunately, it might also encourage having more children.

Important as population control is, there will always be opposition to it for a variety of reasons. However, the need is overwhelming. Sooner or later, world population size will fall. If it is not decreased by voluntary means, nature will control it for us by delivering pandemics, storms, wildfires, lack of enough food and water for everyone, and so on. We need  to act soon.

 

 Copyright © April 12, 2021 by Carol Leth Stone (a.k.a. RovinCrone)