ENSP 101

The Tragedy of the Commons

  • There is no technical solution to the problem of nuclear war

    • If my tic-tac-toe partner knows the game perfectly, I cannot truly win unless I change my definition and kill or drug him??

    • THESIS: THE population problem has no technical solution

  • What shall we maximize?

    • Population grows exponentially

      • Do we have finite resources?

      • Population growth must eventually be zero

        • It is not possible to maximize 2+ variables at the same time

    • Energy: maintenance and work calories

      • To maximize population work calories must be close to 0

    • Maximum good for each person is impossible because each person wants different things

  • No prosperous population with a growth rate of zero

  • the most rapidly growing populations on earth today are (in general) the most miserable

  • The invisible hand: an individual who intends only his own gain were led by an invisible hand to promote public interest

  • Tragedy of Freedom in a Commons

    • The benefit for you to take advantage is high, but the downsides are low because they are shared with multiple people

      • In other words, every user reaps the full benefits of their private use but the costs and consequences are distributed across all users

        • The cost equation: -1(1/w), where W is the number of Boston citizens

      • Locked into a system to increase herd sizes in a finite world

    • What the Tragedy actually is

      • 1. Conscientious users receive less, but those who exploit the commons get more

      • 2. Leads to a lack of incentive to conserve, therefore being over-exploited. Race to the bottom

    • Overfishing in the oceans

    • National parks are steadily made worse by being free to all

      • He thinks that we should change how you get in

  • Pollution

    • The environment is a commons

    • Must redefine property rights

  • How to Legislate Temperance

    • Increased population means that we cannot be as wasteful as before

    • Administrative law

  • Freedom to Breed is Intolerable

    • If we were in nature and kids died then it would be normal to have a bunch

    • UDHR: Families can choose how many kids to have

  • Conscience is Self-Eliminating

    • We cannot control the breeding of mankind with appeals to conscience

  • Pathogenic Effects of Conscience

    • Double bind: no matter how you act people will judge you for it

    • Rhetoric in politics to produce guilt on noncooperators

      • no good has come from being guilty

  • Mutual Coercion

    • Morality of bank robbing is easy to understand

    • We support collective taxes to ease the horrors of the commons

      • Our legal system is unjust yet we deal with it because there isn’t anything better

  • Recognition of Necessity

    • the commons is only justifiable under low population density

    • every new enclosure of the commons involves the infringement of someone’s personal liberty

    • Freedom is the recognition of necessity

9/4 Notes

  • What is a commons?

    • Example: Boston Common    

      • Original intent was to allow people to hold cattle and livestock

        • Government eventually had to limit the amount of cows someone could have

          • People took advantage of it; everyone got too many in order to benefit themselves but then they ran out of grass and overgrazed the area

      • Cattle had free reign of the space; no specific areas for each person’s cattle

  • Environmental Resources

    • Commons is a resource with the following features (Common Property Open Access Resource)

      • Rival: use by one person makes less of the resources available to others

      • Non-excludable: you cannot stop people from using the resource. even if you exclude newcomers, people who can get in will overuse the resource

    • Public Goods are resources with the following features

      • Non-Rival: use by one person doesn’t take away from someone else’s use of the resource or experience

      • Non-excludable: you cannot stop people from using the resource. even if you exclude newcomers, people who can get in will overuse the resource

      • Examples

        • Rainforests

          • genetic diversity, lungs of the planet

          • When considering Timbering: commons

        • Ozone Layer

        • Pandas (?)

          • in their natural habitat

          • thinking about them doesn’t degrade someone else’s ability to do the same: nonrival

            • Unrelated activity by third parties, such as poaching or cutting bamboo down, can degrade the public good too

      • Problem with public goods

        • 1. Individuals have no incentives to help create the public good. Costs are high but benefits are smaller

        • 2. Actions taken by third parties can degrade the private good because they get benefits from it

  • Behaviors that Degrade Environmental Resources

    • Externalities

      • You are forced to experience something that is chosen by someone else

      • Examples

        • congestion on half dome at Yosemite

        • noise pollution garage band

        • sulfur dioxide and acid rain

      • Why do externalities happen?

        • no way to force the offending party to consider the effects of their actions

        • no social compact/moral conviction

        • no policy/legal framework

  • How to solve the Tragedy of the Commons?

    • Ethical Approaches

      • Attach moral stigma to bad behavior

      • educate the public to voluntarily avoid bad behavior

      • collective action

    • Policy Approaches

      • ban bad behavior

      • attach a cost to bad behavior (fines or tolls)

      • property rights

      • Let courts handle disputes

9/9 Notes: Nature-Culture Divide

  • Defining Environmental Humanities

    • Core is to address the planetary crisis by investigating the relationship between nature, culture, and power

    • Draws on various traditions and practices from the humanities

    • Expands our understandings of life beyond humans to include non-human life

      • Understand social relationships between us and non-human things

    • Emphasizes cross-sector collaboration between government actors, activists, artists, and local communities, etc.

  • Attending to Intertwined Life

    • Conceptual-Empirical Approach

      • Reality is a continuously changing variation of cultural and material elements

    • Core Questions

      • How do we relate to nature?

      • Why protecting nature?

      • What is perceived as nature?

  • Thinking through the Milieu

    • Ecological media such as water, air, land

    • Sociomateriality: the assembly of discursive and non-discursive elements, human and non-human, structures, and events

      • Air-Suspension

      • Water Flow

      • Land Decomposition

      • Energy Transformation

    • Illustrates nature

  • Four Regimes of Nature

  • 1. Capitalized Nature

    • Nature is viewed as a resource to be exploited for limitless profit

    • Examples/Origins

      • World System/Colombian Exchange, Industrial Revolution, Caribbean Plantations

    • Rationalized by telling ourselves that we are separate from nature

    • Outcome: Leads to commodification and market-based solutions like the carbon market

    • The Great Divide

      • Modern thought divides the world into distinct realms: nature, and culture. There is also a made-up division between humans and nonhumans

        • The Proliferation of Hybrids and the “Nonmodern” Reality: undermines the great divide by combining nature and culture, human and nonhuman, or even technical and social

          • Ozone layer hole, AIDS, global warming, international treaties, all blend science with industry, politics, and moral concerns

  • 2. Environmentalized Nature

    • Shifts to stewardship and conservation. Our relationships with nature comprise a complicated network.

    • Origins

      • Deforestation of islands: Green Imperialism

      • Romanticism, especially German Romanticism (Goethe, Humboldt, lowkey Mary Shelley) perpetuated the sublimeness and raw beauty of nature

    • Modern Environmentalism: emerges in the 1960s as a counterculture

      • Feminism calls for situated knowledge

      • Rachel Carson’s Silver Spring

      • Earth from the moon image

      • Critique of development from Latin America

    • Outcome: sees nature as the “symbiotic real,” weakening anthropocentrism, and allowing for the creation of Natural Parks, and the concept of “partner of nature”

  • 3. Animist

    • Challenges the other two views entirely, asserting that nonhumans still have intrinsic value and personhood

    • Origins

      • the emergence of the Global Indigenous Movement (1990s)

      • criticisms of extractivism in the Global South

    • Amerindian Multinaturalism: nonhumans are people, not simply culture or nature

    • Outcome: intrinsic value of all life and the push for rights of nature laws

  • 4. Technonature

    • Social and Technological Milestones   

      • Technoscience: mediation between history and biology

      • discovery/manipulation of DNA

      • Cyborgs as a metaphor for new forms of being

    • Examples include transgenic foods and terraforming

    • Biocoloniality: the intersection of biology and indigenous knowledge

  • These four regimes are often combined and intersected to form new ideas and compete in our modern world

    • Signify a call to action for us to move beyond traditional thinking and connect humans with nature in a deeper way.

9/11 Class Notes

  • Smog is really bad for you

    • Sulfur oxide, PM, acids, etc

      • Get caught up in the water cycle (stay in the atmosphere for a few weeks. Average is 11 days)

      • Bronchitis and pulmonary emphysema were common causes of death

  • Atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and then oxygen

    • Particulate matter as well

      • PM10: dust, pollen, mold, etc. less than 10 microns in diameter

      • PM2.5: organic compounds, metals, etc. less than 2.5 microns in diameter

      • These PMs can get trapped in water droplets, they get removed by precipitation

        • Whatever comes up comes back down

        • Violent volcanic eruptions create a year or two of cooling because of the PMs

          • Continents ripping apart created a lot of CO2 emissions

          • The length that the PMs spend in the atmosphere govern the response to emission changes

    • Natural forms of PM

      • volcanoes, plants (pollen), wildfires, dust, sea salts,

    • Human forms of pollution

      • any combustion process (engines, coal power plants), fires, microplastics, aerosols from spray cans, smoking, pesticides, tilling soil for agriculture

  • 1 million premature PM deaths/year

    • Cardiovascular disease!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    • Cerebrovascular issues

    • Inflammation and oxidative stress

    • pulmonary disease/lung disease

    • Higher mortality from other issues

  • Less than 15.4 micrograms PM per cubic meter of air is fine (0-50 AQI)

    • Moderate level is 51-100 AQI

  • Owens Dry Lake: biggest PM10 emitter in North America

  • Some places you cannot get the levels down because they’re mostly natural dust particles, not man-made

  • Things that lower PM2.5s

    • Air purifiers

    • Catalytic converter on your car

  • LEAD POLLUTION

  • Lead added to gasoline to prevent engine knocking

    • Guy who discovered this died of lead poisoning

    • People in factories with lead went crazy

  • Usage peaked in the late 1960s

  • Lead study

    • They had data from lead levels in blood from the government

    • The amount of lead in the atmosphere at different times

      • Cross referenced with the blood lead levels

    • Looks at the idea that these children measurably lost IQ points as a result of lead poisoning

      • Causes issues with conflict resolution and other mental health issues, emotional regulation, fine motor skills, decreased earning potential

  • Greenland lead poisoning

    • Roman Empire used a lot of lead in their aqueducts and their products in general

  • Acid Rain story in the 1900s

    • pH of Rain is like 4 throughout the country, very acidic (like lemon juice)     

      • 100x stronger than normal

    • Other indications

      • damage to native vegetation

    • Rapid economic expansion in the U.S. following WW2 created coal overconsumption

      • Most coal is carbon but there is some nitrogen and sulfur which can make acids (nitric (HNO3) and sulfuric acid)

  • Winds can transport these pollutants hundreds of miles away

    • Environmental Justice

    • Timber industry gets really mad

      • Acid rain strips nutrients from soil and kills fish

        • Diversity of fish and number of them drops significantly when water pH is lower than 6

  • Clean Air Act of 1990

    • EPA specified how much sulfur can be emitted, and that each power plant can only contribute a certain amount

      • If you didn’t pollute, you can sell the permit to someone else and make money off of it

    • SO2 emissions got cut a whole lot

    • pH of rain has started to rebound and recover

      • 4.5 in the 90s, closer to a 5.5 today

9/16 Class Notes

  • Overview of US Environmental Policy

    • Clean Air Act passed in 1970

      • Significant changes in 1977 and 1990 for sulfur oxides

      • Prior to this, it was generally up to the states

        • Lots of variation in air quality throughout the country

      • GOAL: The Act tasked the EPA with writing specific regulations for US industries for important pollutants, called Criteria Air Pollutants

        • Congress also asked the EPA to develop standards against known or anticipated risks to human health (primary standard) and the environment (secondary standard)

        • Criteria air pollutants: lead, CO, Ground-level Ozone, Sulfur Dioide, Nitrogen Oxide, Particulate Matter (PM)

        • Hazardous air pollutants: benzene, asbestos, metals like mercury, cadmium, chromium

    • Other common pollution policy approaches

      • Command and Control policies

        • Pollution quantity standards combined with technical standards

        • MOST COMMONLY USED

      • Market-Based policies

        • Tradeable pollution permits

        • Taxes on overpollution

        • Bubble policy

          • if the pollution comes out of the bubble is fine, then we are happy. In one physical location, making one smokestack out of five in one factory work more and the others work less, doesn’t change anything bc the total is the same

        • emissions banking

  • How did the EPA decide on the specific standards and limits?

    • Congress told them to set the standards so that these pollutants have no known or anticipated health risks to the general population

      • Very difficult to achieve for some materials (ex. lead), so they use a 1 in a million probability as their threshold

      • Human health is driving their decisions

    • Out of attainment: not in compliance with standards

      • In attainment: yes you’re in attainment and good

    • Attainment standards

      • If in an non-attainment area and an existing source, use
        Reasonably Available Control Technology ($)

      • If in an attainment area and a new source, use Best
        Available Control Technology ()</span></span></p></li><li><p><spanstyle="font−family:sans−serif;"><span>Ifinanon−attainmentareaandanewsource,useLowest</span></span><br><spanstyle="font−family:sans−serif;"><span>AchievableEmissionRateControlTechnology()</span></span></p></li><li><p><span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span>If in a non-attainment area and a new source, use Lowest</span></span><br><span style="font-family: sans-serif;"><span>Achievable Emission Rate Control Technology ($)

        • STANDARD DICTATES THE TECHNOLOGY YOU USE

    • Generally, existing sources are kinda left alone due to politics

      • Could hurt communities if they tighten the screws on one factory

        • Existing sources that get renovations are subject to new source review

          • Businesses hate this bc it triggers required upgrades if the renovations and changes are big enough

  • Market-Based Solutions IN DEPTH

    • Tradable pollution permits

      • Government decides the industry wide limit and lets the companies themselves divvy up who gets what

      • Sulfur oxides

        • 1990 amendments to the CAA required that the industry cut sulfur emissions in half by 2000 but didn’t mandate how

    • Thought Experiment

      • Trading pollution permits

      • A is $2, B is $10.

        • B will buy A’s permit for like 6 dollars bc then B is only paying 6 instead of 10 and then A is making 4 dollars of profit after paying the fine

  • When are Market-Based better than Command + Control

    • Costs can be reduced by 50% or more compared to command and control

    • Firms have an incentive to invest in technology to reduce permits purchased

      • thereby reduces pollution

    • Tradable permits and pollution taxes raise revenue for the national government

  • Dark sides to Market-Based policies

    • Tradable permits can make pollution hotspots

    • They convey that you can buy the right to pollute

    • Unfairly cost/benefit some people over others

    • Give large firms market power

  • Costs of pollution control

    • We have spent nearly a trillion dollars since 1970 to prevent/reduce environmental damage caused by industrial and commercial zones

      • 2.3% of our GNP a year

        • Roughly 4.2% of the GNP is K12 education for reference

    • If we use either Tradable Pollution Permits or Pollution Taxes for our entire regulation portfolio we could fund roughly 600 william and mary’s every year

9/18 Class Notes

  • Air as a fluid element

    • Air is an ecosystem of different gases and solid particles, including nitrogen, oxygen, dust, and pollen

    • Anaximenes: geomythology

    • Air is involved in almost everything

  • yellow dust experiment

    • people could see the yellow water vapor which caused people to actually understand and care more about it

  • Inquiry into Suspension

    • Material Phenomenology

      • Air is the medium through which we see everything else

      • Being in the middle of a medium

        • We perceive not only things and people but fluxes and currents

      • The medium constantly self-differentiates itself and gives rise to new entities, forces

    • Breathing is an automatic action through which the body interchanges air.

      • I think that sharing breath with other people can help create a deeper connection and meaning. Breathing is the most basic of our instincts, and I think that makes it slightly vulnerable when we do it with other people at the same time. It reminds us that we are all human and we all have the same basic needs at the end of the day.

  • Atmospheric Anthropology

    • Theory of culture and the production of atmospheres. Human dwellings in breathable environments

  • Breathers

    • Being interpelated (hailed) as a breather, not as a subject

      • Interpelation is the mode of existence of a subject within a social discourse structured by class, racial, gender divisions

  • Planetary Conditions

    • Globalization: focuses only on the history of humans

    • Planetary: consider “we” as a species, humans as part of the general history of life on Earth

    • Environmental citizenship and our responsibilities to the natural world beyond humans

  • Affective Atmospheres

    • Air is affect: it relates bodies through sound and waves

      • Affect: bodies and their capacities to affect and be affected by something.

    • Fudo-weather

      • studied climate and its phenomenology

        • Ordering of certain things that create an atmosphere: complex entanglements of different factors that also affect culture

        • Example: feeling cold is a subjective experience

    • Environmental Justice example: Bronx-Levanon Incinerator

      • Medical incinerator to burn medical waste was located outside the city because of taxes but still very close. They moved it to the Bronx. It was close to housing and schools, creating health issues

  • Risks

    • Non-perceptible: we cannot perceive them

      • Causal interpretation: we need science to identify them

    • Non-locality: risks have global effects

    • Social risks positions: inequalities of class, gender, race

    • Catastrophism: exceptional, odd conditions become normalized

  • Reflexive Modernity

    • Principles of equality, civil rights, deliberation

    • Focuses on the political dimension and how risks can destabilize authority and redistribute power

    • Extended peer community: partial connection between experts and lay stakeholders

9/23 Class Notes

  • Overview of the Chesapeake Bay

    • Nation’s largest estuary that is a mixed body (both fresh and salt water)

      • Watershed includes 6 states and Washington DC

    • What is the value of a clean Chesapeake Bay?

      • Fishing/food, tourism/recreation, biodiversity

        • Greater than 110 billion dollars a year is generated by the Chesapeake Bay

    • Bay is currently considered “impaired” by the EPA

      • SAV is 60-70% below historical levels (water grass coverage)

      • Turbidity is high (cloudy, unclear water)

        • Sunlight cannot penetrate, which hurts organisms that need to photosynthesize

      • Dissolved oxygen levels are very low

        • Fish kills and things like that are effects

      • Fisheries are declining

  • Critical Question: When and how did human activities begin to degrade the Bay?

    • SOLVE THE QUESTION WITH SEDIMENT CORES

  • Sediment levels and things that were tested

    • Microfossils, lead, pollen, nitrogen, etc.

    • POLLEN: 1770-1850: deforested oak and pine trees to graze animals and grow food. Less oak pollen, way more ragweed, which is something that comes in after a disturbance

      • Leads to grown of Foraminifera, plankton that are O2-poor tolerant

  • Other microorganisms

    • Dinoflagellate: algae

    • Ostracods: microscopic shrimp

    • Diatoms: photosynthetic plankton

      • Look at the ratios of these to others to see how oxygen levels are in the water

  • Putting all of this in historical context

    • Timeline

      • Remember the 1700s with the deforestation; less roots to hold soil in place, leading to more sediment

        • In the 1950s, we start to see a rise in the O2-poor tolerant microorganisms. This is due to the increased use of fertilizers and runoff from fertilizer into the Bay

  • Eutrophication: too many nutrients, causing excess algae. When the algae dies, it puts a bunch of oxygen into the water, which is consumed, creating anoxia and dead zones

  • 26% of the CB watershed is agriculture

    • Related pollutants: fertilizers, bad runoff, animal waste, dust/loose soil from tilling, pesticides/herbicides, diesel farm equipment, air pollution, septic/wastewater treatment

  • Tropical Storms can bring mud/waste into the Bay

    • Storm Lee in 2011 brought 6 years of mud into the Bay

  • Phosphorus and sediment are a package deal

    • Similar trends when it comes to deposits in the Bay

  • IMPORTANT: Residence time of water calculations for Chesapeake Bay

    • What would need calculated?

      • Flow in/flow out

      • RESIDENCE TIME: Amount of water in reservoir divided by ALL flow in/time OR ALL flow out/time

  • Problem: We love cheap chicken

    • More than 600 million chickens every year are raised on the Delmarva Peninsula

      • Not really regulated, so the runoff and manure goes into the Chesapeake Bay

  • LOTS of money has gone into Bay restoration

    • > 6 billion in the 1980s spent

      • We’ve been able to get a grip on municipal wastewater

9/25 Class Notes

  • Review of the Commons

    • also called Common Property Open Access Resource

  • Fishing and the Commons

    • Even conservation-minded fishers will overexploit the resource because they know others will too. Sacrifice would be for no reason

  • History of the North Sea Herring Fishery (EXAMPLE)

    • Start with a few fishers and lots of fish, but then stocks decline. Effort remains constant but catch declines, which leads stock to collapse and fishers to leave

  • History of a West African Fishery (EXAMPLE 2)

    • As catch increases, so does fishing intensity, generally. However, biomass decreases with both as well. But if biomass gets low enough, catch doesn’t rise to keep up with fishing intensity

  • Stock Dynamics for Fisheries

    • Stocks at time = Stocks last year + growth

    • Growth/Decline (Recruitment) of stock

      • Inputs

      • Outputs

      • DeltaS: Size of stock and its rate of change

    • Carrying capacity: max size of stock in its natural state

    • Max Sustainable Yield: max recruitment rate of the stock

  • Renewable resources can regenerate over time

    • Trees and living organisms

    • FISH

  • Nonrenewable resources do regenerate over time but the time is immense and not useful

    • Groundwater

    • Oil and Natural Gas

    • Soil

  • If harvest is bigger than growth, we are overfishing

  • If stocks are less than the stocks for the max sustainable yield, the fishery is overfished: current stocks are too low

    • healthy fisheries don’t partake in overfishing and are not overfished

  • Warning Signs of problems

    • Vessels can enter and exit really easily

    • Ecological situation is unfavorable

FISHERY MANAGEMENT

  • Time Restrictions

    • Initially no management, but now managers place time restrictions and Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for the fishery

    • Fishers react and catch more in secret

    • Managers tighten time restrictions

      • They failed to address the Tragedy of the Commons

  • Gear restrictions

    • Prohibit the use of specific gear and set total allowable catch

      • Usually combined with time restrictions

  • Virginia Oyster Fishing

    • Establishes Baylor Grounds which means that fisheries can buy property rights to specific areas

      • Fixes the commons issue

  • Individual Fishing Quota

    • Divide the TAC amongst the different fisheries

    • Benefits

      • Doesn’t incentivize wasted resources

      • Fishers fish at their leisure, which leads to benefits with stock of fish

      • Fishers more profitable

    • Drawbacks

      • IFQ allocation may not be completely fair

  • Charge a tax

    • Fee every time you fish?

  • Vessel Buybacks

    • State starts buying and retiring vessels

  • Marine protected areas

    • Outlaw fishing in vulnerable areas

Collective Action

  • How to avoid TOTC

    • SOCIAL CONDITIONS: Stable environment, traditions, and established norms for behavior

    • POLICIES: Defined boundaries, rules based on local needs, sanctions for bad behavior, free from central government control

9/30 Class Notes

  • Blue Humanities

    • Critical and creative works that recognize water as a physical element as well as a symbolic force

    • Oceanic movement: challenges static modes of thinking about place-based identity

    • Space characterized by movement and continual reformation

    • Unrooted identities: cosmopolitans, creoles, hybrids. Not simple demographic information

    • Lessons from human experiential thresholds such as slavery

  • The Ocean as Striated Space

    • Control and Measurement: ocean can be organized into a striated space through human imposition

    • Coordinates and Grids: relies on precise coordinates, shipping lanes, and territorial waters

    • Directed Travel: Sailors looking for specific fish shoals travel directly from one defined point to another

    • Purpose: exploration, adaptation, and a different kind of freedom

  • Ocean as Smooth Space

    • Forces and Trajectories: The ocean can also be experienced as a space dominated by natural forces and dynamic trajectories

    • Nomadic travel: Circumnavigating with directions, nomads travel openly across the sea, adapting to the environment rather than strictly adhering to fixed paths

    • Intuition and flow: movement is guided by understanding of the ocean’s inherent qualities and energies

    • Purpose: exploration, adaptation, and a different kind of freedom

  • We must also consider racial questions

    • historical colonization and structural racism are at the center of how we inhabit the earth. We must recognize that these movements miss the form of violence that exacerbate the domination of the enslaved, the colonized, and racialized women

      • I think that this is an interesting point, and not really something that I’ve seen applied to the ocean before. I have heard a lot of people saying that we must recognize how the past shapes the present, but not in this context. I do think that it is valuable and makes sense, though.

    • Historical context: from the 16th century, the atlantic was the central stage for capitalism and the slave trade

      • Slave Labor

    • Paul Gilroy’s thesis: unique space for Black counterculture

    • Beyond Nations: a transnational and transcultural formation, challenging fixed notions of identity and belonging

  • Black Atlantic: Rhizomatic Cultural Formation

    • Martin Delany

      • Charlestown, VA. Abolitionist, writer, doctor, politician

      • Black nationalism focus

      • Commercial travel to Africa

        • Focused on structure of feeling and melancholia

    • Black critical thinking

      • Double consciousness: being and non-being at the same time in the dominant modern world

      • Live experience of the body

      • Love: possibility of human contact and its affirmative effects

    • Ethics - aesthetic and politics

    • Capoeira Angola

      • Spiritual practice that results from the combination of five aspects: movement, music, ritual, philosophy, and history

  • Oceanic Features

    • Oceanic memorial to slavery victims

  • Black Environmental imagination

    • The end of the world is a continuing condition

    • Calculation: Risk analysis, calculation, management of uncertainties

    • Speculation and fabulation

    • Resilience and humor

    • Solidarity and community across lines of race, gender, sexuality, species and generation

  • DeltaS = Input - Output

10/16 Class Notes

  • There have been some improvements, but generally no systematic changes

    • Amount of nitrogen leaving the sewage treatment plants has decreased by a lot

    • Theoretically, phosphorus pollution should be going down, but we aren’t seeing that empirically

    • REASONS

      • Groundwater has a big residence time (moves like 9 miles in a year)

      • Dams trap sediment

      • poultry production

      • climate change

  • As temperature goes up, the amount of dissolved oxygen you can have goes down.

  • Point source vs non-point source

    • point sources release pollution from a concrete place

    • non-point sources release pollution that is a combination of pollution from a large area or diffuse sources

  • Clean Water Act

    • Each watershed is monitored in every state, and they are given a TMDL (total maximum daily load) that determines how much pollution can enter a given watershed in one day

      • include ALL sources, point and non-point

    • Currently there is a hands-off policy with non-point source polluters but this is bad and we should work to change it

  • Payments for Ecosystem Services

    • Pay individuals or communities to take actions that increase levels of desired ecosystem services

      • Payments must cover opportunity costs, aka the landowner’s lost value from potential uses of the land that aren’t realized because of the choices made

      • Participation is voluntary, but do enough people participate?

      • Ethical/moral concerns as well

  • Stormwater Retention Ponds

    • 24-hour detention of the runoff generated by the storm

      • 2.8 inches of rain in one day should be able to be contained in the pond for at least 24 hours

    • Sound good in theory but they often don’t work in practice

10/21 Class Notes

  • History of Capitalism

    • corporations lead to accumulation of wealth

    • We should reform capitalism to get benefits but remove the drawbacks

  • US Economy

    • 29 trillion dollars

    • Continuous growth is unsustainable

      • Resources will be depleted

        • 5 earths would be needed to sustain our growth

    • LEADS TO INFLATION

      • affects consumers, people who have the least

    • Consumption is multifaceted

      • Good reasons: consuming food and water to survive, clothing, transportation, energy, housing/shelter, medicine, entertainment, technology

      • Bad reasons: boredom, social status indicators, trends, coping mechanisms

  • 6 dimensions of consumer wisdom

    • 1. envisioning lifestyle you desire to lead but also recognizing the resources required for that

    • 2. reasoning

    • 3. perspective taking

    • 4. purpose

    • 5. flexibility

    • 6. sustainability

  • Socialism isn’t necessarily all bad but it’s got a stigma in our country

10/28 Class Notes

  • Soil is vital for plants, which means it’s vital for everyone on Earth 

    • Slows down and absorbs water, allowing it to help avoid flooding 

  • Inputs go into a reservoir 

    • How are soil reservoirs built?

      • Plants break down rocks and disintegrate them, making a soil base

        • Old man on the mountain 

      • Natural matter from dead organisms 

      • Microorganisms 

    • Parent materials get broken down over thousands of years creating soil 

  • Factors controlling soil fertility 

    • Climate 

      • temperature, how much precipitation, etc. 

    • Particle size 

      • type of rocks, etc. 

    • Organics

      • forest v grassland v desert

    • Slope

      • good soil runs down towards flat land bc of rain 

    • Time 

  • Lots of mollisols in the US, former Soviet Union area 

    • Central U.S. is dominated by grass, which is annual. It dies and dumps nutrients in the soil, which new grass absorbs to grow 

    • In wet regions, minerals and nutrients are washed away 

  • Rocks can be dated, which helps to show you age of soil

  • Average soil formation rates: .02 mm per year 

  • Outputs of the reservoir, LOSSES of soil 

    • Soil erosion: the physical removal of soil by gravity, water, wind, ice 

  • NO TILL AGRICULTURE 

  • Civilizations often last less than 1-2 thousand years

    • Soil gets messed up, limited resources lead to instability 

  • MORE Food extracted per unit area

    • We need less area to sustain people 

  • Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the things it says about Soil 

    • Threats: Pesticides, Herbicides, Arsenic, 

10/30 Class Notes

  • Normal level of extinction 

    • 10 percent of species lost every million years

    • Mass extinction: 75% loss in less than 2 million years

    • Where we are rn: 25 percent of species in less than a thousand years 

  • Biodiversity is the variety of life 

    • It encompasses all forms of natural variation 

    • Why is it important? 

      • food chains can be disrupted

      • Resilience of ecosystems from big changes  

      • we like animals 

    • The above arguments are anthropocentric 

      • We should argue that it has intrinsic value 

  • Important distinctions for biodiversity

    • Unique genetic traits

    • Unique species (THIS IS THE MOST USED ONE) 

    • Unique ecosystems or habitats  

  • Species richness vs evenness

    • Richness describes how many unique species are in one area, but evenness is how evenly distributed they are. So similar number of each species in one area. We want high both 

  • Biodiversity Habitat and Agriculture 

    • Red areas: high biodiversity richness and expansion potential for agriculture 

      • Red means that 

  • 50000square km is the intersection where park size can deliver good biodiversity levels

  • Agriculture policies are generally in conflict with biodiversity

    • Enormous ranges of land are needed

    • Most land is either a commons or privately owned

      • Governments have lesser control because they can’t control private land as much 

  • Endangered Species Act (ESA) 

    • protection offered to species not related to costs or chances of success 

    • GOAL: to add and remove species from the list of threatened and endangered species. Developing recovery plans 

    • Property rights under the ESA

      • Listed species have two levels, threatened and endangered

        • Generally you don’t get de-listed

        • 1600ish listed species 

    • Grizzly bears as an example

      • Grizzlies are endangered

      • Humans are kept away from them during the year 

      • Service lands closed for forestry and road development 

    • Prohibiting a take 

      • A take is killing, hunting, or harassing the listed species 

      • Takes are also habitat modification that kills or impairs essential behavior patterns of the listed species 

    • Preemptive habitat destruction and private land

      • Destroying your own land so that the woodpecker won’t pull up 

Amazon River and the Anthropocene

Pan-amazon area

  • Black water rivers - dark decaying leaves waters (most biodiversity)

  • Clear rivers - clear waters

  • Flying rivers - moister highways, watervapor 

  • Snake-River - ancestral anaconda said to journey through the waters, body serving as a canoe for the first human communities

    • Anaconda was cut up and each ethnic group given a piece 

Amazon watershed form-amplification

  • Biodemiosis: semiosis beyond symbolic representation  

The Forest-City

  • Terra-Preta: dark soils made using advanced landscape management techniques a long time ago by indigenous populations  

People

  • Amerindians (North Amazonia) - high interaction with national societies; a few groups struggle to live in isolations

  • Caboclos - rural Amazonia, little towns along the river

  • Sprawling capital cities -> a lot of young indigenous people are moving there 

Living in the Commons

  • Subsistence - fishing, hunting, gathering fruits

  • Clans hold territorial control over specific areas, controls that are justified by ancient clan myths

  • Ethics of use but not abuse

  • Seasonal use of areas caused by high vs low water seasons helps make sure that no area or water source is overexploited 

“The green hell”

  • Term popularized by Colombia writer Jose Eustasio Rivera -> exploiting people extracting rubber from the amazon 

Sacred places and asking permission

  • Rotational fishing zones and taboos protect fish populations

  • Knowledge transmitted through apprenticeship but it is being lost 

  • Asking owners of the “salados” (soils rich in mineral salts) for permission to hunt (otherwise the community will get a sickness)

11/6 Class Notes

  • Agroecology and Soil Rationality 

    • Why does biodiversity increase closer to the equator? 

  • Vandana Shiva: thinker from India, said “we are what we eat” 

  • Latin America adopted the industrial model of agriculture in the second half of the 20th century 

    • AFTER the so-called Green Revolution

    • Aimed to increase productivity and to produce as much food as possible, lowering hunger

    • Substitution of natural inputs with inputs that were created outside of the farm 

    • Broad spectrum pesticides kill many different species 

      • RACHEL CARSON 

  • Traditional Farming and Agroecology

    • About 1.5 million small holders 

    • Minimal dependence on agrochemical inputs 

    • Diversification of farms 

  • Food Sovereignty

    • The right of people to produce and have access to healthy food in and near one’s territory in an ecologically sustainable manner. 

  • Terrans and Gaia

    • New figurations of the human condition 

    • Humanity as Humus = Soil; not Anthropos 

    • Terrans: people who are bound to the earth 

  • CASE STUDY: Andean Cloud Forest 

    • Warm humid air climbs up the rock walls, where the atmospheric pressure drops, turning the air into fog. 

    • Habitat fragmentation 

      • Reduction of the original amount of original vegetation 

      • Subdivision of the remaining vegetation into fragments 

      • New forms of land-use that replace missing vegetation 

    • Commercial monoculture fields are the primary cause of biodiversity loss within the cloud forest 

  • Soil as a boundary object 

    • It can be treated as a mineral or chemical composition or as a web of living organism 

    • Inhabits several intersecting social worlds

    • BOUNDARY OBJECTS

      • reach multiple disciplines 

  • Don Leonardo and abundance

    • Growing topsoil every single day 

    • Organic compost

    • Abundance: surplus to life vs surplus value 

  • Biopolitics 

  • Care

    • Bioinfrastructure, supports other types of work as well 

    • Obligation to places

    • Labors of mundane maintenance and repair that require agency 

  • Working with local microorganisms 

    • Change nitrogen gases into solid nitrogen compounds that plants can use allow the expression of microorganisms 

    • Variety of relations and functions 

  • Fumigating with life and fumigating with death 

    • plants express nature’s inherent potential and force 

    • Shadow coffee

    • Life-Death-Continuum: form of idling that enables new forms of life 

    • Destruction vs. Devastation 

  • Biological corridors 

    • Paradox: commoning within private property

    • Landscape mosaics of rich biological diversity 

  • Compost Democracies


    • Theories of democracy that include active and passive subjects and objects fall apart as humans begin to interact with nature in different ways

    • Commoning: reclaiming control over forms of life 

    • Agroecology as a practice enacts a relationship between something and something 

  • Ecology of practices and knowledge

    • Capability of local communities to experiment and scale-up innovations

  • Civilizational transitions 

    • Post-development 

      • Collective well-being

      • Rights of Nature

      • Post Extractivism 

    • Degrowth

      • Envisions the decoupling of wellbeing from growth 

      • Cultivation of new values: solidarity, ethics, community, meaning 

      • Beyond industrial capitalism 

11/13 Class Notes 

  • Earth is always changing with or without human intervention

  • Williamsburg used to be underwater, covered by water in the Atlantic Ocean 

    • Why not now?

      • ICE!! There is a lot of continental ice that holds the water that used to be in the oceans 

      • We are in an ice age right now, with 10 percent of land surface covered by ice 

        • 18000 years ago it was 30 percent (glacial maximum) 

  • Glacial deposits move giant boulders and rocks around 

  • How do we know about the Ice Age?

    • foraminifera on the floor of the atlantic ocean.

      • TYPE OF PLANKTON

      • They record the oxygen isotope when they’re alive through their calcium carbonate shells, allowing us to see how much ice existed 

  • Oxygen isotopes and paleoclimate

    • The ocean has O16 and O18 isotopes

      • 18 drops faster because it weighs more, the sky becomes saturated with O16

      • Cloud waters become more depleted of 18 as it moves poleward, snow and ice become depleted in 18 compared to 16.

        • The level of disparity between oxygen in the shells versus the oxygen in the ice is telling 

    • HIGH 18 MEANS ICE AGE 

  • 100 thousand year glacial cycles - what causes it??

    • Shape of earth’s orbit changes every 100 thousand years from a circle to an ellipses and back again 

      • Moves the earth closer and farther from the sun 

    • 41 THOUSAND YEARS: THE TILT CHANGES

    • These cycles only control like 3-4 degrees either way 

  • Quantity of greenhouse gases is an important climate controller

  • Albedo: how reflective the Earth is 

  • Magnitude of the change is controlled by the above factors

  • 180 ppm CO2 is a maximum, 280 is a minimum 

    • 1.5ish celsius change since roughly 1880

    • After WW2 our Co2 emissions skyrocketed 

      • CO2 and METHANE 

11/18 Class Notes 

  • The Great Acceleration 

    • recent period of the Anthropocene where our impact on the ecosystem is rapidly increasing 

    • Increase in energy use leads to increase in CO2 emissions

      • Probably causal!!!!!!

    • Correlation between GDP and CO2 emissions is SUPER strong (.972)

  • US CO2 sources

    • Increasing reliance on oil and natural gas, less on coal 

    • We need to focus on reducing transportation

    • NEED TO KNOW: biggest sources and demands of energy in the United States

  • 3.7 percent of natural gas produced in the Permian Basin leaked into the atmosphere, which erases much of the progress we made on greenhouse gases

  • POLICIES: Demand-Side Management 

    • Provide similar services with less energy consumed

      • Fluorescent lighting 

      • Motion light switches

      • Move energy consumption to off-peak hours

      • Switch to more efficient appliances

      • Weather-proofing

    • Include other incentives to both consumers and providers  

    • Strategic Behavior

      • forgo subsidy now in the hopes of better programs in the future

  • Rebound Effect

    • part of energy reduction savings is spent on more energy 

    • Range of roughly 8 to 40 percent 

  • Reduction Prediction

    • expected - actual energy savings / expected energy savings 

      • 1 - the percent given!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    • 0 percent equals no rebound effect

  • SUPPLY SIDE MANAGEMENT POLICY 

    • Share of global electricity that is renewable is up to 29 percent 

    • Best ways to reduce carbon 

      • TAX EVERYTHING based on carbon intensity of fuel 

      • this would include energy and consumption goods

  • Issues with renewables

    • Peaks in demand require ability to produce energy quickly 

    • Transmission and Grid loss

      • 7.2 percent of total US power production 

      • Longest cost-effective transmission length is less than 4000 miles

      • Vintage capital 

  • Advances in Storing renewable energy

    • Batteries at small and large scales

    • Gravity storage

      • Hydroelectric dams

  • Why to be Cautiously Optimistic 

    • reduction in CO2 happened without regulation 

    • Technological advancements mean we could become renewable without the energy waste 

    • CAVEATS

      • Low intensity fossil fuels aren’t low because of leaks

      • Tough sectors like transportation and consumption 

      • Can change happen fast enough? 

11/20 Class Notes

  • Prometheus

    • Steals fire from the gods once they fashion creatures from a mixture of earth and fire

    • Domestication of fire and the wedding of techne and logos

    • Pandora’s box problem, relates to technology 

  • Heraclitus

    • Fire as an extraordinary element 

  • We tend to see reality as static, not flowing and changing 

    • The above ideas contradict and challenge this 

  • TECHNOLOGY 

    • Antinomy: Techniques is universally anthropological, culture is a function of technical tendencies 

    • Techniques is not anthropologically universal, technology is understood differently in different culture

    • CULTURE HAS AN IMPACT ON TECHNOLOGY

  • Nonlinear History

    • History does not follow a predetermined destiny or an ideal of progress

    • Bifurcations: describe a nonlinear perspective, highlighting things that are basically the butterfly effect

      • EXAMPLE: Europe wasn’t originally supposed to lead the world, China was more advanced in the 14th century, but the Mongols led to China becoming more isolationist 

  • Fossil Capitalism

    • Late stage capitalism depends on intensified use of matter and energy 

    • Energy intensification leads us away from biotic sources of energy

    • Time-space compresses and shrinks (DAVID HARVEY)

  • Industrial Revolution 

    • Thermodynamics: energy capacity to do work 

    • Europe lit coal powered Promethean fires 

  • Carbon Imaginary 

    • Industrial Romanticism: aesthetic language used to romanticize energy and drama of industrial mechanisms

    • The sublime is something that overwhelms our understanding, very tied to the Romantic era

  • Great Acceleration 

    • Cheap energy from oil following WW2

    • Population boomed in the late 20th and 21st centuries 

    • SUBURBANIZATION

    • Invention of the shipping container 

      • promotes international trade

    • Plastic production greatly increases 

  • Energy and Work

    • Work ethic   

      • Fossil fuels fuel a culture of work and productivity 

        • Western cultures place lots of value on productive work 

    • Perpetual motion and the need to be doing something always

    • Racialized ideologies of labor, Cinetic subjectivities, efficiency 

  • Electric bodies

    • Leading energy consumers: ideals of virility, strength, masculinity 

    • Americans often believed that by embracing the nation’s march to industrialization, their bodies would emerge fully powered

  • Geo-ontologies 

    • Biopolitics: Life-Death 

    • Geontopower: Mode of governance of late liberalism: oil can provide the conditions for hypermodern form of life 

    • Deep Time: epoch, species

  • ON THE ROAD BY JACK KEROUAC

    • Beat generation, divorces nature from labor allowing us to really see the land 

    • Nostalgia and grief for residual infrastructures in the 1940s 

    • Public spaces for sociality 

  • LOLITA??

    • Road fiction, sex and death create emphasis on the auto industry

    • Highway as a civic space

    • Oil capacity to incite excitement 

  • Carbon Democracy 

    • Modern democracy is deeply intertwined with carbon-based energy systems they shape political possibilities and limitations. Dependence on oil shapes our decision making 

  • Magical State

    • Venezuelan state acquired the magical attributes in the 1980s 

    • State discourses allowed charismatic presidents to construct a powerful nationalist imagery which contributed to the creation of the Venezuelan state 

  • SLOW Violence 

    • Dakota Access Pipeline 

    • Slow Violence is something that is felt gradually 

  • Free Write 

    • In my area, there is a big reliance on oil because of the Appalachian mountains. Recently, Shell opened a cracker plant about 25 minutes from my house, close to residential areas. Experts say that it will cause cancer, but the reliance on oil means that Shell doesn’t care. Creating alternative ways of energy or relying fully on hydro or solar is unthinkable because we’re obsessed with oil. In my everyday habits, I would likely have to change my transportation habits if I wanted to liberate myself from oil. 

  • Intermittency helps us to overcome challenges

    • Climate anxiety, community and seasonality, leisure, social activity beyond work

  • WALKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO GOOD FOR INTERMITTENCY 

    • Enacts the commons 

    • The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury 

  • John Francis: Planetwalker 

12/2 Class Notes

  • 2024 is the hottest year on record since 1880 

    • Today it’s close to 430 ppm of CO2

      • We don’t want to be above 280, it’s the upper boundary of what’s considered safe

      • 180 in a glacial maximum 

  • 180-280

    • 10 percent covered by glacier - 30 percent covered by glacier

  • Is global warming spatially uniform? 

    • NO!!!!!!!

      • Higher in the northern latitudes, then medium in the tropics, least in the southern hemisphere 

  • Sea ice is frozen ocean water that aren’t attached to land (it’s a glacier if it is anchored to land) 

    • Ocean can’t really get colder than 29 degrees fahrenheit

    • The air can easily get as cold as -40 

      • Oceans are like a reservoir of heat BUT the ice usually blocks it from coming out 

        • If the ice melts the warmth comes out 

  • SEA ICE DOES NOT RISE OCEANS 

    • It assists in melting glaciers and land ice which DOES raise sea levels 

  • Sea level: is the height of the oceans relative to a fixed point on land 

  • Changing ocean volume 

    • Bigger contributors: melting glaciers and thermal expansion 

    • Smaller contributors: melting of Antarctic ice sheet and ice loss from greenland

  • Water density maxes out at 4 degrees celsius 

    • Density = mass/volume 

    • NO NO NO 

  • Greenland/Antarctica are not melting as fast

  • Some spots in Alaska include dropping water levels

  • Southeastern US is built on loose sand that compresses and sinks 

    • New Orleans is sinking and parts are already below sea level 

  • CASE STUDY: Tangier Island in Virginia 

    • Much of the island’s landmass was eaten by the sea 

    • They voted for Trump like 88 percent

      • Leopards ate their face or whatever

12/4 Class Notes 

GUEST SPEAKER

  • Jordan vs. St. John’s County 

    • Property owners thought that the local govt would be required to upkeep the road for the foreseeable future, this was decided by the court to be not true 

  • Takings clause in the Constitution 

    • “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”

  • TAKEAWAYS

    • There are no easy answers and these problems with sea level rise are very complex

    • Law is having difficulty addressing the small number of people with large interest (vocal minority) versus the general public that isn’t as invested

    • Options exist to address this legally

      • Don’t build and create more problems

      • Special conditions 

HICKS

  • Climate Change Challenges  

    • Interconnectedness of all our systems 

      • Silent Spring tells us that chemical poisons don’t stay put, they move through various systems of the Earth 

    • Climate Change 

      • Burning fossil fuels in one place affects the entire planet 

    • War on Nature 

      • Arrogant attempts to control nature rather than work with it 

  • Precautionary Principle 

    • When an activity raises harm to human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established. BURDEN OF PROOF SHOULD BE ON THE POLLUTER

      • Carson says that we shouldn’t wait for absolute proof that something is a carcinogen before regulating pesticides

      • Climate application is that we shouldn’t wait until it’s too late to do something about climate change 

  • Reasons for Optimism!

    • Success is possible

      • Example of the Ozone layer and CFCs, solved by the Montreal Protocol 

        • Scientific consensus, economical substitutes available, global cooperation led by industrialized nations 

    • Technical advances 

      • Renewable energy sources are becoming more efficient and much more affordable 

      • Capacity of renewable sources is increasing rapidly 

    • Global momentum 

      • The world is moving forward with climate action 

      • Other nations are not waiting for the US to start leading 

      • Local actions are driving change independent of federal action 

    • Private Sector Momentum 

      • US companies are holding the line against TrumpÂ