The Great Unravelling

SUBHEAD: Part of a discussion series on adapting to the environmental crises we have created.

By Asher Miller on 28 October 2020 for the Post Carbon 
(https://www.postcarbon.org/is-the-great-unraveling-upon-us/)

Image above: Firefighters conduct a back-burn operation along Route CA-168 during the Creek fire as it approaches the Shaver Lake Marina on Sunday, Sept. 6, 2020. Photo by Kent Nishimura for The Los Angeles Times. From (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-09-27/times-photos-california-fires).

Introducing “The Great Unraveling?”, a series of interviews with some of the world’s foremost experts on a broad range of environmental and societal challenges, culminating with a powerful discussion on what these converging and accelerating crises mean, and how we can respond.

What if we don’t look back on 2020 as the year from hell, a painful and surreal slip on the otherwise generally smooth path of progress? What if, instead, we look back in five or ten or twenty years to 2020 as the moment when everything started to really and truly unravel?

Of course, what I’ve presented is a false choice. The truth is that for billions of people (and other species!) the unraveling has been occurring for a long time, assuming they had anything that could be unravelled to begin with.

People who have been left behind or churned up by the relentless machine of exploitative capitalism. People and natural ecosystems already on the frontline of the climate crisis. Communities that have lost their social cohesion and ability to confront problems collectively.

2020 has exposed and supercharged the fragility, unsustainability, and injustice of so many of our global systems:

• untenable economic and racial inequality;
• brittle, globalized supply chains controlled by a relatively small number of corporations;
• a global climate system that’s already fevered at 1.2ºC warming;
• growing political instability, distrust, and the rise of authoritarian governments;
• the collapse of biodiversity and the crossing of other planetary boundaries;
• an economy dependent on growth, consumption, debt, energy, & population;
• the failure of governmental institutions to respond to, let alone anticipate, crises;
• the likely peak in the amount of energy available to power modern society.

These crises were already here or looming long before the coronavirus pandemic hit us broadside this year. In fact, my colleagues at Post Carbon Institute, the many writers who we have featured here at resilience.org, and allies across the globe have been sounding the alarm for decades that the Great Acceleration would inevitably lead to a Great Unraveling or even collapse. That forewarning may now be moot.

To begin considering how to navigate the “Great Unraveling,” we must first try to understand how various environmental and social systems may interact. So a few months ago, Post Carbon Institute and Anthropocene Actions asked some of the world’s foremost experts to share their views of where things stand with some of our most pressing environmental and societal challenges, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.

We then hosted a powerful discussion with an esteemed, diverse panel on what these converging and accelerating crises mean, and how we can respond.

Facing up to these interconnected crises requires unprecedented cooperation and coordination, if we have any hope of creating a sustainable, equitable, and resilient world. To this end, campaigners, politicians, companies, governments, and communities all across the world are pushing for and enacting change. 

But these efforts will have to remain robust, flexible, and resilient in the face of growing destabilization. And they must be grounded in an understanding of the systemic nature of the predicament we face.

The wrenching disruption of the pandemic presents barriers to change, as shown by those seeking to reinforce the pre-pandemic status quo. But this historic moment also presents opportunities to move toward a sustainable society that benefits all. The key to a better future is to learn how to manage the compounding crises of a more destabilized future – how to navigate the Great Unraveling. 

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The Great Pause

SUBHEAD: While we can never fully go back, if we try something approaching normalcy will return.

By Albert Bates on 22 March 2020 for The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-great-pause.html)


Image above: Selfie by Albert Bates holding up in Mexico and wearing mask. From original article.

Fifteen years ago, when I began blogging, I called my page “The Great Change.” My premise was that the world was at the cusp of a phase shift in civilization.

The era of cheap oil had passed, and with it was gone the abundant energy that had created the growth-imperative economics everyone was so accustomed to.

Homo sapiens was going to be graduating, after a rite of passage, from an adolescent species, ever-expanding its niche by out-competing all others, to a mature adult species engaged in complex relationships to build a more stable steady-state within which to gracefully inhabit Earth.

What is coming will be wonderful, I said.

The manipulation of the price of energy — essentially issuing future government debt (to nature) to hide the real price of a commodity (shale, tar sands, or deep offshore crude oil, and fracked gas), using unbelievably expensive and wasteful corporate, military and clandestine means — fascism by definition — allowed our happy-go-lucky, motoring, consumerist society to keep on its merry way until dramatically catastrophic climate alteration began forcing us to notice what we were doing.

By then, we had overdrafted accounts with the planet to such an extent that foreclosures were cascading — floods, hurricanes, droughts, climate refugees, biodiversity crashes, fracking Ponzi busts, reactionary governments, and Coronageddon, to name a few.

The Great Change, over the course of all those years, gradually migrated from giving advice about prepping for the coming economic hardship (including recipes for tasty meals from your organic garden) to tracking changes in the weather, and then proposing solutions (biochar) that could increase the nutrient density of those homecooked meals while turning down the atmospheric thermostat over the course of the next century, employing a novel curative program we called the Cool Lab.

Enter Covid-19.

Those who have been following our recommended steps and have full pantries of canned goods, know where their water and power comes from and their sewage and plastics go, tend gardens even in winter, and have stockpiled books, DVDs, and a good assortment of sharp and well-oiled tools, will have little difficulty now sheltering in place, homeschooling their children, and caring for elderly relatives. 

For sure, the pandemic will be an emotional roller coaster for the next few years, and then we will all be trying to return to some semblance of normalcy. And, while we can never fully go back, with enough people trying, something approaching normalcy will return. Until we summit the coaster track and it plummets again.

It will be a roller-coaster if for no other reason than that it is now evident that full-on lockdowns, envisioned by government emergency committees as lasting a few weeks, or maybe a month, cannot realistically be extended for a year and beyond. 

That strategy is neither socially nor economically viable, even if it may be pandemic-control-appropriate from a medical standpoint. What may happen instead is that regional lockdowns will open and close as Covid cases rise and fall.

One bright spot: the discovery that smart thermometers build big datasets that allow rapid medical intervention, hotspot to hotspot, days or weeks before hospital admissions spike enough to advise CDC, WHO, or others attempting to monitor the outbreak. That technology is a real blessing. Smart thermometers should be distributed free-of-charge to every family and used daily. 

They can be uploading their data to number-crunching epidemiology centers that can dispatch health workers to the right places at just the right moments. Lockdowns, if needed, can follow in those discrete areas.

There is an assumption that immunity is conferred upon those who survive this disease. This has not been proven and nor has the notion that the disease cannot be spread by those who had the disease and then got well again.

Because of this uncertainty, we don’t know whether Covid-19 is a passing virus or one that will be with us until such time as an effective vaccine can be developed and tested, and hopefully, also, safe and effective treatments emerge. That will be at least a year from now and possibly much longer.

Anthropogenic aerosols in the atmosphere — the products of our industry that we exhaust to the air— bounce sunlight back to space. It is generally thought by science that this effect contributes a net cooling of between two-tenths and one-and-a-half degrees centigrade to the world’s average surface temperature.

In this video, Paul Beckwith provides some calculations for the temperature impact of the coronavirus closures as aerosol pollution is reduced.


Video above:Paul Beckwith talks about effects of coronavirus on climate-change. Part I of III. From (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y5X182LqFU).

Beckwith explains that the most widely cited estimates for the global dimming effect are between 0.25 and 0.5°C. Because coronavirus closures do not completely remove dimming (air traffic is reduced but coal plants still run), the reduction might be something like 0.03°C. According to ScienistsWarning.org:

There is also some question as to how long regional impacts might take to show up in the average global temperature (AGT) data. In any case, it is not likely that the temperature increase would be as much as 1.0°C. This is the number often given by those who exaggerate this effect. Paul Beckwith has called this a “completely absurd number.”

ScientistsWarning.org further cautions against putting too much faith in the 9/11 effect:

A US study by Dr Gang Hong of Texas A&M University has found that daily temperature range (DTR) variations of 1.0°C during September aren’t all that unusual and that the change in 2001 was probably attributable to low cloud cover.

Whether the virus affects the temperature or not, we are due for more extreme weather, and we could well see new high temperatures this summer and more global weirding next winter.

After sending my latest book, The Dark Side of the Ocean, off to my publisher, I had gone to Belize at the beginning of March to run a 2-week permaculture design course and continue work on the Cool Lab prototype planned for a small Mayan village there. When borders started closing, particularly singling out USAnians in the case of Guatemala and Mexico, I became concerned and cut my intended stay short.

Masked and gloved, I crossed the border into Mexico and retreated to my winter office off the north coast of the Yucatan. From this location I had authored The Post Petroleum Survival Guide in 2005 and thus it has always been well stocked with my prepper supplies, medicines, books and DVDs, and is a relatively secure place to self-quarantine for the next little while. Who knows? I may even write another book now.

In Albert Camus’ The Plague, written in 1947, Camus describes life under quarantine in a small village. With a well-founded fabric of trust, life was manageable, even joyful. What we should not lose under any circumstances, he said, is the decency that binds us.

Many unscrupulous officials will try to use this moment to stir passions against foreigners — Chinese and Europeans this month, USAnians next month, if you find yourself abroad like me

Camus said that after observing the misery, generosity, fear and nobility that people experience during quarantine, that “in the midst of so many afflictions” what one learns is that “in man there are more things worthy of admiration than of contempt.”

On January first, just as the virus was enveloping Wuhan, I reached the end of my 73rd year and embarked upon year 74.

They say it is not the years that get you but the miles, and in my case I have no shortage of scars and pains gathered from an active life, among them 3 of the 5 conditions that signal an elevated risk of mortality should a Covid cell lodge in one of my lungs.

Because of that, my intention now is to #StayHome and self-quarantine as best I can. If the internet gods smile upon this small thatched palapa, I should be able to keep posting from here, otherwise the blog may go silent for a spell. In either event, I wish everyone good luck, safe shelter, and all the benefits of this pause for reflection and renewal.
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Coral Death Epidemic

SOURCE: Bradley Jones (bjesquire@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: U.S. Geological Survey says a coral disease outbreak along Kauai’s North Shore is nothing short of an “epidemic.

By Chris DeAngelo on 22 November 2012 for Garden Island News -
(http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/usgs-coral-disease-outbreak-an-epidemic/article_ca64e85a-347a-11e2-bb8b-001a4bcf887a.html)


Image above: Photo by Terry Lilley of a diseased piece of rice coral is pictured in Anini Bay. This photo shows a cyanobacterial/fungal disease attacking a piece of coral — the black ring is the disease, and the white area is the coral’s dead skeleton.From original article.

A diagnostic report released Wednesday by the U.S. Geological Survey says a coral disease outbreak along Kauai’s North Shore is nothing short of an “epidemic.”

“Given the scale of the event, the large numbers of corals affected, and the consistent preponderance of a few agents (cyanobacteria and fungi) associated with gross lesions that look similar in both Makua (Tunnels Beach) and ‘Anini, this outbreak would have to qualify as an epidemic,” Dr. Thierry Work, head of Infectious Disease for USGS, writes in the report.

Work says this is the first time a cyanobacterial/fungal disease on this scale has been documented in Hawaiian corals and that he feels “very comfortable” describing the situation as he sees it.

“I wrote (epidemic) down in there because it’s true,” he said Wednesday, shortly after releasing his report. “The bottom line is the definition of an epidemic is an unusual or above-background occurrence of a disease. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a lot of animals.”

Work went on to say that reefs along Kaua‘i’s North Shore look “horrible” and that locating diseased corals at Tunnels and ‘Anini was not a difficult task.

“I have never seen a cyanobacterial disease like this killing corals to this degree in Hawai‘i,” he said. “This is truly an unusual event.”

North Shore tests

In August, Work traveled to Kaua‘i to complete tests on the diseased coral at Tunnels reef. An official report was filed Sept. 4 outlining the reef’s poor condition.

“The overall picture was one of a severely degraded reef impacted by sediments and turf algae,” Work wrote in the September report.

In late-September, Work — along with Dr. Greta Aeby, a coral expert with the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawai‘i, and Amanda Shore, a UH graduate student — accompanied Terry Lilley, a biologist and Eyes of the Reef volunteer who first alerted scientists of the unusual outbreak, to ‘Anini to photo document lesions, sample coral and apply a marine epoxy to affected corals to try and stop the disease’s progression.

At that time, paired normal and lesion tissues were collected from 15 different coral colonies. Work’s findings were outlined in Wednesday’s report.

“Live coral cover appeared unusually low as compared to what would be expected on a healthy reef,” he wrote. “On microscopy, of the 17 samples with lesions, 10 had tissue death (necrosis) associated with cyanobacteria, five had necrosis with cyanobacteria and fungi, and the remainder had no recognizable microscopic lesions.”

As for non-lesion coral samples, microscopic changes in tissue suggests the animals are undergoing some type of stress, according to the report.

“Based on the large percentage (59 percent) of corals affected by cyanobacteria only at ‘Anini, I suspect this organism is playing a primary role in causing lesions, with the likelihood that fungi may pose a complicating factor,” Work writes. “In aggregate, 88 percent of corals with lesions at ‘Anini are infected with cyanobacteria and fungi.”

The reefs at both ‘Anini and Tunnels are heavily overgrown by turf algae, have low coral cover and large amounts of suspended solids in the water column, according to Work. And while sedimentation and the presence of the disease appear closely associated, Work says that remains to be proven through further scientific testing.

“That said, the similarity of the findings at Makua (Tunnels) and ‘Anini strongly suggests a common underlying cause, and it is difficult to conclude that the degraded environmental conditions at both sites are not, in some way, driving the occurrence of these infectious diseases on corals,” Work writes.

What’s next?

As a scientist, Work says his job is simply to provide data on his findings. After that, he says it is up to decision-makers and the community to decide what they want to do about it.

The next step of his work will be to determine the disease’s cause.

“Is it coming from Hanalei River? Is it coming from Hanalei Stream?,” Work questioned. “The first question is where is the source.”

Another big concern is whether this new strain of cyanobacteria is infectious to humans and marine life. Work says he and other scientists involved in the ongoing study have spotted puffer fish with skin discoloration and unusual lesions on their fins.

“Right now I have no evidence that there’s any relationship between the coral disease and what’s happening to the turtles and fish,” Work said. “We’re going to try to come out next week to look at the fish, to see what’s causing the lesions.”

The bottom line, according to Work, is that Kaua‘i’s reefs are heavily degraded and infected with a rapidly-spreading white coral disease unlike any seen here before. How they got this way is yet to be determined by Work, Aeby and other scientists.

“I think people need to know what’s going on with their reefs,” Work said. “It’s actually quite serious.”

See also:

Ea O Ka Aina: State denies Hanalei River polluted 5/6/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Poisonous mud in Hanalei 3/5/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Mud in Hanalei Bay 11/11/11

 

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Varroa mites kill bees two ways

SOURCE: Michael Sheehan (hanaleirivermichael@gmail.com) SUBHEAD: The mites not only eat bee blood but also carry a devastating bee killing virus. By Jan TenBruggencate 7 June 2012 for Raising Islands - (http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2012/06/varroa-mite-kills-honeybees-two-ways.html) Image above: A pre-pupa drone being attacked by three varroa mites. From (http://www.scienceimage.csiro.au/mediarelease/honeybees.html).

Researchers studying honey bees in Hawai'i have found that the varroa mite, besides weakening and killing bees itself, also spreads a devastating bee-killing virus. Indeed, in places where the mite has spread, infections of the deformed wing virus (DWV) have increased from being in 10% to 100% of the bees in infected hives. An international team of researchers, including two from the University of Hawaii, used the relatively new infestation of varroa mites in the Hawaiian Islands to study how the virus spreads along with the mite.

Their work is in the June 8, 2012, issue of Science and the June 7 issue of Science Express. In other parts of the world, the combination of the mite and the virus has led to colony death. That has also happened in Hawaii, but only after the mites have been in place for a long period to time--two years or more.

Varroa mites are sucking pests that live off the blood of bees. They will often begin feeding on bees that are still in the larval stage. The DWV can spread on its own, but is much more effectively spread by the mite, which can inject the virus directly into the bee's body.

The researchers also found that as the mites spread the virus, they have also played a role in the genetics of the virus, resulting in significantly lower viral diversity. In varroa-infected colonies, only a single strain of DWV is now dominant, they found. The varroa mite is in all the state's major bee-farming islands except Kauai.

A 2005 study by University of Pennsylvania Diana L. Cox-Foster and Xiaolong Yang found that varroa mite infestations reduce bees' immune response, making them more susceptible to infection. Some reports indicate that in the absence of the mites, bee hives can sustain infection with DWV, but that instances of actually deformed bees increase when mites are present--perhaps because of the mite-induced reduced immune response.

There are signs of hope with regard to the mite, whose scientific name is Varroa destructor. Some strains of honeybees have a self-cleaning gene that causes them to groom the mites off themselves. And, researchers in both Great Britain and the United States are studying fungi that may help control varroa mites.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture report on this is here: ( http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/oct04/bees1004.htm).

The Hawaii mite-virus work paper is:

"Global honey bee viral landscape altered by a parasitic mite" by Steven J. Martin and L. Brettell, University of Sheffield; A.C. Highfield and D.C. Schroeder, Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom; E.M. Villalobos and S. Nikaido, University of Hawaii; G.E. Budge and M. Powell, Food and Environment Research Agency, York, UK.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: They're Here! 5/31/12 Ea O Ka Aina: Pesticide and Beehive Collapse 4/5/12 Ea O Ka Aina: Nicotine Pesticides and Bees 12/13/11 Ea O Ka Aina: Neonicotinoid pesticides kill bees 1/24/11 Ea O Ka Aina: Let's talk about bees 1/18/11 Ea O KA Aina: Mystery of westside bee decline 7/5/10 .

Beginning of the end for bananas

SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com)
SUBHEAD: Most bananas eaten in the United States are now threatened by a new—but old—enemy.  
By Dan Koeppel on 22 July 2011 for The Scientist -  
(http://the-scientist.com/2011/07/22/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-bananas/)

 
 Image above: Bananas in Hanapepe Valley in 2005 that died from virus. Photo by Juan Wilson.

Our standard supermarket banana, a variety called Cavendish, may be at the brink of disaster. Chosen for its resistance to a fungal pathogen that wiped out its predecessor, the Gros Michel banana, the popular fruit has long battled a related fungus, which has all but devastated the banana industry in certain parts of the world. Now, it appears the Cavendish variety is facing a new threat—the very same fungal disease that drove Gros Michels off the market. Cavendish bananas account for about 45 percent of the fruit’s global crop, with an annual export value of US$8.5 billion, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

It was chosen to replace the original Gros Michel banana after a deadly fungal infection, known as Panama disease (Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. Cubense), wiped out much of the world’s banana crop in the first half of the 20th century. Farmers adopted the Cavendish variety because it appeared to resist the blight, as well as about a dozen other banana diseases that also threaten the worldwide crop. But it wasn’t long before it too started suffering from disease.

In the late 1980s, a mysterious malady began to wipe out Asian Cavendish plantations. Soil samples were sent to plant pathologist Randy Ploetz of the University of Florida’s Tropical Research and Education Center, who made the shocking identification: Panama disease was back, in the form of a new strain, which he dubbed Tropical Race 4. Race 4 is just as virulent to Cavendish as Race 1 was to Gros Michel. The fungus enters the plant via its roots through infected soil or water and spreads via the plant’s vascular system.

Once exposed, the plant yellows, and begins to look obviously sick—dried-out, sunken, and sagging. As the disease progresses, brown and purple stripes appear on the trunk, and the plant eventually dies. The disease, however, lives on, spreading via infected soil from plant to plant, plantation to plantation. Today the disease has spread across Asia, into the Pacific, and to Australia, where it has devastated the island country’s banana industry.

Though Race 4 has yet to hit Latin America, where bananas imported to the United States are grown, there’s little doubt it will, said Ploetz. But it turns out that Race 4 is not the only threat to Cavendish bananas.

As banana growers have fled from Race 4, replanting their Cavendish trees in areas only known to harbor Race 1, they quickly learned that Gros Michel’s old foe was now tormenting Cavendish bananas as well. In 2010, scientists conducting a survey of plants infected in India, which grows and consumes more bananas than any other country in the world, were the first to conclusively identify the presence of Race 1 in the Cavendish banana.

They published their findings in Plant Disease that November, and this March, Bioversity International—the global umbrella group for banana research—released a report confirming the finding: Race 1 had begun killing Cavendish plants in plantations around the Theni District of Tamil Nadu, India. Banana scientists are still trying to determine why some Cavendish are no longer immune to Race 1.

Altus Viljoenm, a researcher with the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, speculates that this new strain of Race 1 may have evolved over time so that it could attack Cavendish. Other researchers are skeptical of the finding.

Ploetz notes that there have been rare cases in which Race 1 has killed individual Cavendish plants when they were already stressed—due to drought conditions, for example, or flooding. “I suspect that this is the same thing,” he said. But the authors of the Plant Disease paper reported that they had confirmed the finding with laboratory tests on sterile, potted Cavendish. “To our knowledge,” the researchers wrote, “this is the first report of [such] a virulent strain.”

Today, there are no cures, treatments, or even reliable molecular diagnostic tests for either Race, partly due to lack of detailed information on the banana genome, according to Bioversity. Currently, the best available strategy is containment. Ploetz has developed a plan to fight Race 4 if it appears in Latin American plantations, involving the use of strict quarantines on affected plantations to prevent, at least temporarily, the spread of the disease.

But isolating infected plantations is more a stopgap than a solution, Ploetz knows. “It buys time,” he said, but barring any new discoveries, the spread of Panama disease remains inevitable. Ploetz said it’s important that similar agricultural practices be instituted in already affected countries to help prevent the spread to Latin America in the first place.

In the meantime, scientists are working to develop new approaches to quell disaster. Last year, for example, University of Queensland researcher James Dale began the first field tests of a genetically modified Cavendish, which he hopes will provide long-term resistance against Race 4. Banana companies such as Chiquita and Dole are also reportedly working to develop new varieties.

Though genetic modification has long been considered the only way to breed Cavendish, since the variety is completely sterile, recent research conducted in Honduras has revealed that a few Cavendish plants do produce viable seeds. Researchers at the Fundacíon Hondureña de Investigación Agrícola (FHIA) say these non-sterile fruit form the basis of a series of promising hybrids, that can be bred for resistance to the fungi.

It will still be at least six years before the new breeds are ready to be brought to market, however, according to a source familiar with the project, or may never appear at all, now that the banana companies are no longer funding the research.

Most banana researchers agree that the real answer—as has been the case with crops like potatoes, apples, and grapes—is to abandon the monoculture that makes the emergence of a disease so devastating.

A more diverse banana harvest would allow farmers to isolate susceptible bananas, surrounding them with more resistant varieties. If the solution ends up being a Cavendish stand-in that is resistant to both strains, on the other hand, the predicament of the banana monoculture—with its vulnerability to old, new, and yet-to-be discovered pathogens—would continue.

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