Nature

I heard about a case where so-called indigenous people in Vancouver were restored land by the government that they had been kicked off of. As a sovereign nation, they didn't have to follow Canadian law. I heard that they decided to build giant skyscrapers, which prompted people who supported rights of so-called indigenous people to complain that they didn't do what they expected indigenous people to do. I found some coverage. It revealed deep misunderstandings of what indigenous means, as well as what the relevant issues are. For background, I'll start with an NPR Planet Money piece, The skyscrapers that NIMBYs and zoning couldn't stop. It treats the issue as zoning. The piece states that "The development, Sen̓áḵw, is a reserve that belongs to the…

First we pave more land nearby and it's no big deal. In fact, the road or housing development boosts the economy. More people can reach places faster. Then we expand that paved area, again no big deal. The we have to travel to get away from it all. There is no local nature, no chance for solitude in nature. Then we pave over yet more to access more remote places, maybe build an airport, to facilitate getting away from it all. Then we acknowledge that we've wrecked or done away with nature nearby so we feel we have to get away and feel entitled to what we need to get away and to the remote nature we get away to. Then we build adorable little…

Richard Feynman is the Nobel laureate physicist who studied what caused the Space Shuttle Explosion of 1986. He learned that the o-rings likely leaked because past measurements showed cracks in them at low temperatures, like those just before the launch. Anyone my age or older remembers the image. He saw that people who saw the earlier cracks saw that because the cracks only went about a third of the way through, "there was 'a safety factor of three.'" I put the full quote below, which I recommend reading, but the gist is that since the o-rings were designed not to crack at all, there was no safety factor. Any cracking at all meant they failed. The Relevance to Landfills I ran into an old friend. Our…

The New Yorker reported this week: Could Switzerland Become the First Country to Cap Its Population?: The Swiss will soon go to the polls for a novel initiative that could upend the nation’s economy and rupture ties with the European Union. An early paragraph describes the article's main issue. I'll share it plus a couple other paragraphs, then my comments after. On June 14th, Switzerland will vote on whether to become the only country in the world to officially cap its population, with a limit of ten million people until 2050. (The current population is 9.1 million.) The initiative, which was put forward by the Swiss People’s Party (S.V.P.) and in recent polls has been supported by as many as fifty-two per cent of respondents,…

After chopping down half a continent's forests, coal must have seemed like manna from heaven, and later oil, gas, and uranium. Bounty of nature. But you could see why they'd love it. It rewarded people for being smart, for being clever, and most of all for helping others. It enabled people to cross distances faster than ever, to build taller and stronger, to warm the cold, to cool the hot, and so on. I suspect that even as early as the beginning, say soon after Watt's steam engine around 1776, some may have already started suspecting that it might have been too good to be true. At first I doubt anyone couldn't see any meaningful problems. Sure, there was smoke in the air that was…