From Swimming Pools to Vernal Pools

The Wall Street Journal last month reported a great story on new ecosystems that are emerging from California's foreclosure crisis. As families lose their suburban homes, immaculately maintained backyards are growing into wild steppes, and formerly fluorescent blue swimming pools are accumulating nutrients and turning a murky tea-green. Can you spot the foreclosures in the aerial photo below?



But as swimming pools evolve into vernal pools, health officials are sounding the alarm about resurgent mosquito populations bringing diseases like the West Nile Virus into these neighborhoods. So governments are breeding and distributing small fish that eat mosquito larvae into abandoned pools:

"The Gambusia affinis is commonly known as the "mosquito fish" because of its healthy appetite for the larvae of the irritating and disease-spreading insects. Lately, the fish is being pressed into service in California, Arizona, Florida and other areas struggling with a soaring number of foreclosures...

"The mosquito fish is well suited for a prolonged housing slump. Hardy creatures with big appetites, they can survive in oxygen-depleted swimming pools for many months, eating up to 500 larvae a day and giving birth to 60 fry a month. That can save environmental crews from having to repeatedly spray pesticides in the pools while the houses grind through the foreclosure process."

Unfortunately, not everyone is happy with this solution:

"First you have fish, then you have birds that eat them" and then bird droppings, says Arnie Shal, a retired accountant, who lives next to several foreclosed houses with pools in Clearwater, Fla. "It's not really a healthy situation."

Suburb-dwellers, so accustomed to a landscape of control, are uninterested to having wild ecosystems next door. But the reporter found a different attitude towards the fish on the Left Coast:

"This is how we are supposed to take care of things,'' says Robert Kloepping, who lives next to a vacant home with a pool containing mosquito fish in Antioch, Calif. "I think it's cool, man. It's organic."

California's Contra Costa County also maintains an indoor colony of mosquitoes and has hired a staff entomologist, Steve Schutz, for scientific research on these new ecosystems of suburban foreclosure. One of Mr. Schutz's responsibilities is to keep the research mosquitoes alive with a regular "blood meal."

"He usually reads a book or works on a puzzle while the mosquitoes bite him for about 20 minutes. 'I have been doing it so long that it doesn't even itch that much,' he says. The district used to use a bobwhite quail for the blood meal, but Mr. Schutz says it's less hassle to offer up his arm."

Catch of the Day

As seen on Treehugger:
The Surfrider Foundation packages the bounty of our beaches into seafood containers, which are then sold locally at farmers' markets. So Californians in Newport Beach can enjoy this fillet of condoms (note the safe handling instructions: "Every day, 1.3 billion gallons of partially treated sewage and trash are dumped into the ocean"), and Texans can partake of the Aerosol Valu-Pak:



Butts and Bits from Venice Beach:

The geography of "cyberspace"

The first time I used the internet was during my freshman year of high school, in 1994, when I walked across the football field to use Bonny Eagle Middle School's new computer labs and "surf the web," as they called it back then. I didn't know what URLs were or how to run searches, so my browsing was limited to following chains of links on some of the first web pages: from an MIT student's page, to the Mentos home page (one of the first commercial advertisement web sites, I think), to a web site of exploding Twinkie experiments that I thought was really funny.

In hindsight, we clearly had no idea what the internet would become, or even really what it was good for. The Internet seemed so strange, in fact, that we actually assigned it a completely new geography: "cyberspace," "the information superhighway," etcetera. We made up terms that defined it as a strange sort of parallel universe, because generally speaking, the stuff on "cyberspace" had little to do with what was in real space.

Now, of course, things are completely different. Lots of people have figured out that the internet is a great way to publish and share information, or to create and manage groups of people, for practically no cost at all. I just finished reading a great book by Clay Shirky called Here Comes Everybody, which details some of the remarkable things that the internet has enabled, and that we sometimes take for granted.

For instance, we now use the web to convene clubs, to read the news, to stay in touch with old classmates. We use it to conduct commerce with each other. And we use it for political activism and to blow the whistle on regressive government bureaucracies. In other words, the internet isn't a separate geography anymore: it's strongly integrated with real life, and it's made a lot of formerly difficult things cheap and easy to do.

Shirky's book struck me with this fact several times, but I'm particularly fond of this passage about the fading geography of "cyberspace":

"The idea of cyberspace made sense when the population of the internet had a few million users; in that world social relaions online really were separate from offline ones, because the people you would meet online were different from the people you would meet offline, and these worlds would rarely overlap. But that separation was an accident of partial adoption... In the developed world [today] the experience of the average twenty-five-year-old is one of substantial overlap betrween online and offline friends and colleagues. The overlap is so great, in fact, that both the word and the concept of 'cyberspace' have fallen into disuse... our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life."

Cyberspace is disappearing: the internet, e-mail, and all the rest of the "information superhighway" are no longer a separate space, but an expansion of real space.

In fact, it may be even more than that. In the course of reading this passage, I thought to myself: "it's true, when's the last time you heard the term 'cyberspace'"? Then I thought to myself, what if there were some way to measure the frequency of the use of the word "cyberspace" through the years?

As it turns out, there is a way to measure the frequency of use for the word "cyberspace," or any other word or phrase, and it's on the internet. Google Trends charts out how often people have searched for various words or phrases on Google over time. And here is the trend graph for the word "cyberspace":



In decline, sure enough.

But what strikes me as especially eerie about this is the fact that, in a flash of what seemed like insight, I had a question - "how has the use of the word 'cyberspace' changed over time?" - and a related idea - a statistical tool to measure the use of words over time - and to my surprise, both the idea and the answer to my question already existed on the internet.

Suddenly 'cyberspace' seems again like a strange and fantastic geography - one that contains and expresses my thoughts and ideas before I have them. It reminded me of a concept from philosophical mathematics: the set of all possible thoughts and ideas.¹

Dr. Darryl Macer, a New Zealand bioethicist, has proposed that science should attempt to map this collection of possible human thoughts - a sort of "ideome" project to follow the human genome project. Such a collection is probably infinitely large and has only been talked about in theoretical terms until very recently. But as more and more people use and contribute their thoughts and ideas to the internet, it strikes me that the ideome project is already well underway.


¹Jorge Luis Borges also thought of this stuff and wrote about it in his short story "The Library of Babel," which was published in 1941. The Library of the title contains all possible books, printed with every possible combination of letters, spaces, and punctuation. Like the Internet, the Library contains mostly nonsense - but because it is complete, it must also contain the works of Shakespeare (in every language), a directory of the Library's English-language books, books written in code, and every other great work of literature from the past, present, or future.

Power of the Gulf Conference

I'm blogging today for the "Power of the Gulf" conference, a project of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute and the University of Southern Maine's Center for Law and Innovation. We're learning about ocean-based wind and tidal power development, technology, economic development opportunities, and the rest.

Read all about it as it happens at powerofthegulf.blogspot.com

Biomimicry power plants

Thanks to Mitch for the heads-up on this one.

According to the BBC, a Glasgow architecture firm has won the International Design Awards Land and Sea competition with its proposal to anchor large lily-pad-shaped solar arrays in the middle of Glasgow's River Clyde (pictured). The firm is trying to sign the Glasgow City Council on for a small pilot project in conjunction with the city's science museum. The discs will allegedly rotate as the sun moves across the sky in order to maximize the panels' exposure.

So they'll generate clean electricity and also attract peoples' attention and activities to the river - sounds great. But by imitating lily pads, is it possible that this proposal could have more immediate effects on the River Clyde's ecosystem?

Plenty of urban rivers are too warm or too choked with algae to sustain much life, thanks to runoff that washes phosphates and other chemicals off from hot, sun-baked pavement. By shading the water, lily pads and other floating aquatic plants are able to divert some of the sun's energy from reaching the depths of a pond, which slows down algal growth and provides better habitat for critters.

Maybe too-warm rivers aren't such a big problem in Scotland, but they certainly are in a lot of American cities - especially on the west coast, where rivers like the Klamath and Willamette are getting too urbanized and too hot to sustain their ancient salmon populations. Maybe the shade of some solar lily pads would be just the ticket.

Proposal

Storm drain stencils: a neat idea to get people thinking about how city sewers and storm drains actually work. Here's one in South Portland, Maine:



But how about some alternative messages?



Or, more to the point:

[idea inspired by Pruned]

Victory gardening

Every Wednesday morning before work I wake up early to help the Snell family set up for the Portland Farmers' Market in Monument Square. In return for this work, we receive plants to populate our fire escape garden (shh, don't tell the fire marshall), and produce later in the year. Besides being extra-fresh and delicious, this payment is turning out to be more lucrative than tech stock options.

According to anecdotal accounts from the market's farmers, this is turning out to be a banner year for vegetable and herb plant sales. As food prices rise, it looks as though more and more people are taking up gardening to raise their own calories this summer.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Philip S. Wenz calls for a revival of WWII-era Victory Gardens to neutralize rising food prices:

"During the Second World War, which began while America was still recovering from the Great Depression, both money and the things that money could buy were scarce. Necessities such as food and fuel for heating and transportation were rationed at home in order to supply our soldiers abroad.

The American people and their government responded to the shortages by starting the ambitious Victory Garden program, which encouraged citizens to grow vegetables. Almost overnight, millions of gardens were cultivated in private yards, schoolyards and parks across the nation...

The results were spectacular. Victory Gardens yielded as much as 40 percent of the country's nonmilitary produce."

Of course, those victory gardeners were just coming out of a decade of Depression, and they had a lot more experience in self-sufficiency than today's Americans. We may be at war today, but instead of asking us to conserve resources and grow our food, our government now asks us to go shopping, and instead of a decade's worth of experience in frugality, we're coming out of a decade of morbid obesity. In other words, it's way too soon to tell whether today's gardeners will earn the "victory" label - but at least we can enjoy some better food and more time outdoors.

Image: San Francisco victory garden, from the Chronicle's files.

Maine Granolas OK With Recycling Plastic

In a post last week, I'd written about the Berkeley, California Ecology Center's critiques of recycling plastic. Those criticisms led the Ecology Center to recommend not recycling plastic at all, rather than give people false assurances that might prompt people to consume more plastic than they need to.

That post prompted some more investigation from reader and local city councilor John Anton, who also happens to be on the board of ecomaine, the uncapitalized regional waste management company here in southern Maine. He sent my post to Kevin Roche, ecomaine's general manager, to ask about where our own plastics end up. Here was Roche's response, in its entirety (emphasis and links are my own):

Hi John -

I've been selling plastic scrap since 1989 and have visited many plastic processing facilities during my time in the industry. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, it was tough to find markets for plastic and often times you wouldn't get any revenue for it. But it was still better than sending it to a landfill so we continued to market it to a variety of processors who chip it, wash it, and palletize for the use in new products and packaging. I witnessed this being done first hand so I'm confident that when you put this much effort into processing scrap, that it goes to good use.

Today, the markets have matured substantially...

The non-colored (natural) HDPE milk jugs (marked with a number 2 on the bottom) are now commanding over $800 per ton ($18,000 per trailer load). We sell a lot of this material to a Company in York PA called Graham Packaging which makes new plastic containers for detergents and cleaners (non-food).

The Colored HDPE #2 containers are sold to various markets (including Graham Packaging) at $600 per ton. Again, they make new bottles out of scrap bottles.

The PET #1 containers are sorted automatically by our scanner and sold at $400 per ton to various markets that make carpet or stuffing for sleeping bags and jackets, etc.

The 3-7 plastic we mix and sell together because we don't get enough of any one of them to substantiate accumulating them in separate loads. These markets are in their infancy (just like the #1 & #2 markets were 18 years ago). However they're the smallest percentage of what we process... See below.

Make up of the Plastics we process:

Colored HDPE #2: 28%
Natural HDPE #2: 25%
PET #1: 25%
Plastics #3-#7: 22%

We just started selling 3-7 plastic last year and we've averaged $45 per ton. Not nearly what the other plastics bring in but at least we're getting paid for it. Because there are limited markets for this material right now, we sell it to various brokers. Because they pay us for it, they can't simply afford to landfill it. It's sold to lower end markets but our hope is the markets will improve for this material over time as it has for the other plastics.

I hope this helps. Kevin.

So in Maine, at least, plastic recycling is pretty beneficial. Still, recycling does consume a lot of energy and resources, and note that even here, plastics are "downcycled" - that is, transformed from food-grade to non-food containers, or from water bottles to jacket insulation. And recycling plastics other than HDPE #2 and PET #1 is obviously more problematic, for now. Note that Roche does not know where those plastics end up - it's entirely possible that purchasers may be scouring that 22% portion of our plastic recycling to cherry-pick what they can and landfill the rest.

It's also important to note that ecomaine is a nonprofit owned by its 21 member communities, which helps to make its management considerably more open, progressive, and innovative than most waste management companies. I mean, would Tony Soprano have bothered to write the response above? Unfortunately, most American communities shouldn't expect this level of service from their own local recycling haulers. But as Roche has proven here, it's worth asking them about it.

So using less plastic is still far better than recycling plastic, but here in southern Maine, anyhow, recycling is better than burying or incinerating it with the rest of our garbage. Just make sure your plastic doesn't blow away into the nearest river or coastline when you set it out on the curb every week.