The Bright Side of the Coronavirus: A Break for Mother Earth

             Elsewhere where we find prestigious megaprojects like Egypt’s Aswan high dam, built by Russian money and brains to produce a level of power far beyond the needs of the nation’s economy, that meanwhile blights the environment and the local agriculture in a dozen unforeseen and possibly insoluble ways.  Or consider the poor countries that sell themselves to the international tourist industry in pursuit of those symbols of wealth and progress the West has taught them to covet: luxurious airports, high-rise hotels, six-lane motor ways. Their people wind up as bellhops and souvenir sellers, desk clerks and entertainers, and their proudest traditions soon degenerate into crude caricatures.  But the balance sheet may show a marvelous increase in foreign-exchange earnings. As for the developed countries from which this corrupting ethos of progress goes out: more and more their “growthmania” robs the world of its nonrenewable resources for no better end than to increase the output of ballistic missiles, electric hairdryers, and eight-track stereophonic tape recorders.  But in the statistics of the economic index such mad waste measures out as “productivity,” and all looks rosy. 

                                              -Ted Roszak, Introduction to the 1989 edition of E.F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful 

This article is intended to supply some context of the effects of the Coronavirus-induced global slowdown vis-à-vis similar events in recent history, as well a compilation of the positive side effects for the environment. 

                The understanding that humans have vastly altered Earth for the worse is so widely accepted that it’s not uncommon for people to refer to the Coronavirus outbreak as Mother Nature’s way of retaliating against us for our destructive actions against the natural world.  No doubt you’ve heard the slogan and seen the memes: “We are the virus.”  While I cannot go so far as the Extinction Rebellion extremists insinuating the “take down” of civilization and mock suicide, nor bring myself to support the Green New Deal in its current manifestation laden with quixotic and hypocritical decrees in pursuit of a habitable planet, I do believe that E.O Wilson is on to something with the idea of Half-Earth – a proposal to set aside half of the planet’s land as protected natural spaces.

            Under any manmade economic model (Capitalist or not), during massive periods of growth and expansion, nature suffers.  Yet when an economic slowdown occurs, trade and industrial activity become sluggish, energy and power use decline, then stagnation sets in.  Economic recessions and depressions translate into a reduction in fossil fuel extraction and pollution, which means a break for the ecosystems that have suffered so that economies might grow.  For three days following the September 11^thattacks, all commercial flights (except for those carrying Saudis) in the United States were grounded.  Due to the absence of air traffic and vapor trails which had evidently been contributing to the warming of the U.S climate, the skies above America cleared, leading to a decrease in global dimming.  The catastrophic events of 9/11 led to a brief purge of atmospheric pollution on the eastern seaboard of the United States.  Yet whatever air quality advantages were gained then were surely lost in the ghastly Afghanistan and Iraq forever wars subsequently launched. 

            Curiously, post-Iraq War conflicts in the Middle East seem to have led to an improvement in regional air quality during the early part of the last decade. According the Professor Johannes Lelieveld of the Max-Planck Institute, air pollution declined significantly after the U.S began losing occupied territory to ISIS in Iraq and Syria.  The Jerusalem Post points out that “nitrogen oxide is a form of air pollution, common byproducts of road traffic and energy production. Since the mid-1990s nitrogen dioxides in particular have been monitored from space.  Using satellite data Lelieveld says he’s found that the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East is drastically decreasing the level of air pollutants across the region.”  Be that as it may, the improved air quality was certainly not worth the violent civilian deaths and suffering at the hands of ISIS.  Furthermore, the immense amounts of energy and resources expended by the militaries involved in waging war and occupying territories in the Middle East have certainly wiped-out many times over any air quality gains attained after the ISIS insurrection.  

            But if we’re comparing historical events to the current economic standstill, the most accurate contemporary parallel would be the 2008 Great Recession, when financial meltdowns paralyzed economies worldwide for over two years, resulting in mass job losses and disruptions to trade, mining, and manufacturing, but also measurable benefits for the environment.  During this crisis global imports and exports plummeted, coal, metal, and mineral sectors dwindled, and the burning of fossil fuels burning declined.  Between 2007 and 2013, carbon emissions in the United States fell about 11%.  Whatever you may think about man’s impact on the climate, it’s hard to deny that global ecosystems and wildlife overall must be enjoying this respite from human activities with a handful of exceptions including the few unlucky felines that have contracted Coronavirus, such as the tiger at the Bronx Zoo.   (Great apes may also be susceptible, which has led to a suspension of gorilla tourism in Africa.)  Then there’s the ‘Blue Lagoon’ of Buxton which was dyed black by UK police in their incomprehensibly stupid attempt to prevent tourism.  Another area that will see energy use increase during quarantine periods is household electricity and internet services, which account for nearly 4% of carbon emissions, an amount previously comparable to the airline industry.  Shelter-in-place orders spurred internet traffic in the United States and Europe to increased by 20%, but at least people are buying plants, right?   But presently as a whole, Mother Nature must be breathing a sigh of relief as economies worldwide, with the Coronavirus acting as the catalyst, implode.  It is as if humans have temporarily stopped pummeling and battering the natural world, which has entered a state of recovery and is showing beautiful signs of relief.  Here’s a compilation of some positive environmental developments resulting from the Coronavirus-induced global economic downturn, quarantines, lockdowns, and cessation of business as usual. This less busy world will probably last for another few months, and then we’ll return to business as usual: poisoning the vegetation, excavating the land, polluting the oceans, depleting the seas, eating exotic animals, and being distracted by mass sporting events while our governments carry out bombing campaigns and drone strikes across the Middle East and Central Asia.

1.  Cargo Ships.  Since production and manufacturing in China are down, cargo ship exports are down.   80% of the products we consume are ferried across oceans on cargo ships which are responsible for underwater sound pollution, wildlife collisions, and burning “bunker fuel” or “heavy fuel oil” –an extremely dirty, high sulfur content fuel which is the byproduct of petroleum refinement.  While transport ships contribute to less than 3% of manmade carbon emissions, the heavy fuel oil burning means that cargo ships burn the lion’s share of sulfur oxide – more than all the cars in the world.  "Carbon-in-transit" emissions that are produced by transporting a piece of product in the global supply chain across borders account for 10% of all global carbon emissions and have tripled between 1995 and 2012.   Usually at sea there are around 6,000 large container ships and 100,000 transport ships, and 70% of shipping emissions occur with 250 miles of land.  While ascertaining an exact percentage of how much global shipments have dropped since the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic is difficult, and there are reports of an industry recovery since China re-opened its economy, here are some figures which illustrate the scale of the reduction in cargo sailings:

-On February 5, 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Ship calls at or through major Chinese ports have fallen 20% since Jan. 20^th… the impact of factory shutdowns and other restrictions hitting China’s economic output will reduce global ocean container volumes, a major piece of global trade, by about 0.7% over the full year, or about 6 million containers… data collected on weekly container vessel calls at key Chinese ports already shows a reduction of over 20% since 20 January.”

-On February 14^th, the Wall Street Journal reported that not only are less cargo ships transporting goods, but the ones that are have less goods aboard. They wrote:   A Shanghai broker said at least one container ship that can move more than 20,000 containers left Shanghai for Northern Europe with only 2,000 full containers.  “It will pick up more at ports on its way, but loading data show it will reach Europe around 35% full.”

-On February 24^th, the South China Morning Post reported that in China “commercial vessels have stopped arriving, with port calls falling by an estimated 30% in February, and container throughput estimated to decline by between 20% and 30%”

-On February 27^th, the New York Times reported  “In January, container volume dropped 2.7% at American ports, according to Panjiva, a research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. And officials say they expect much bigger declines as the crisis goes on.”

-On March 10^th, the Financial Post reported that “International freight and logistics companies are reporting declines of as much as 85% in the volume of Chinese-made goods arriving in the Port of Vancouver, as the impact of COVID-19 begins to shake supply chains.”

-On March 17^th, Zero Hedge reported that the “Port of Los Angeles has published its latest data about monthly container statistics, Saxobank's Christopher Dembik writes, the drop in container volumes at Port of Los Angeles was -22.87% in February, which is the worst monthly performance since February 2009

-On April 2^nd, the Wall Street Journal reported that “container ship carriers have canceled about half their services out of China in the first quarter and are continuing to “blank” sailings on major trade routes for the second quarter as they try to preserve cash.”

This supply chain disruption not only translates to a reduction in the pollution released into the air and sea by cargo ships, but also a reduction in potential pollution of transported fuels such as coal, iron, and ore that are not arriving at their destination and would otherwise be burned.  Because some commodities and manufactured goods are no longer being produced and transported, there is in turn a reduction of single-use products and materials packaging winding up in landfills.  Notably, in the case of car tires, not only has the economic downturn reduced the volume of car tire and rubber imports, as well as car tire production (tires are comprised more of synthetic rubber than natural rubber, and seven gallons of oil are required to make a car tire; a truck tire requires twenty-two), but Coronavirus lockdowns mean less automobile traffic, which means less vehicle emissions and microplastic pollution from tires.  30% of a tire’s mass will wear down though use over time and those particles are deposited onto the roadways.  Over two million tons of tire particles are released into the environment in the United States annually. Tires account for as much as 28% of overall microplastic waste in the world’s oceans, and could be the largest source of microplastic in California’s coastal waters (accounting for over seven trillion pieces of microplastic in the San Francisco Bay each year). So while government and societal reactions to the Coronavirus pandemic are having terrible repercussions for the lives of humans, the seas and creatures therein will surely benefit from the reduction of cargo ship traffic.  

2.  Cruise Ships.  Although the coronavirus has not deterred people from booking future cruises, and the pernicious industry which puts floating cities of tens of millions of obese, geriatric, and bored westerners on 3,000-passenger ships so that they may dump sewage, food waste, and plastic in foreign waters will rise again, for now cruises have grinded to a halt.  Cruise ships inflict astonishing damage upon the environment.  Every day (under normal economic circumstances), cruise ships emit the same amount of particulate matter as a million cars.  Cruising emits four times more C02 per passenger than flying.  In 2017, Carnival Cruise Lines alone emitted more sulphur oxide into the atmosphere than ten times the amount of cars in European Union.  Cruise ships burn solid waste and discharge the incinerated ash into the ocean, including the physical shit of the passengers. There are numerous other problems with the cruise ship industry, and the fact that Coronavirus has temporarily suspend cruise ship operations will be a godsend for marine ecosystems. There are 314 cruise ships globally with the collective capacity to accommodate over 500,000 people, and over 26 million passengers ride on these giant, floating, shit-machines every year.  Before the Coronavirus, there were around 170 cruise ships operating.  That number is now down to less than a dozen (some without any passengers), that are in the process of completing their itineraries and are looking for places to dock.  For the sake of all marine life, and for those of us who are not morbidly obese or hopelessly lazy and desire to see the world outside the confines of colossal prison-ships of decadence that discharge their vile effluence across islands and reefs, the less cruise ships floating around the world the better. 

3. Fishing.  In addition to reductions in cargo ship bunker fuel oil, microplastics, and human feces entering the marine environment, the fish of the world will catch and additional break as marine fleets and commercial fishermen remained moored in the face of plummeting demand for seafood. While this is terrible news to the commercial fishing industry and the communities (who may be bailed-out) that rely on income from fish sales for their livelihoods, and for whom now going out to sea is outweighing the payment for catch, this is fantastic news for exploited and depleted fish stocks that are being presented with a chance to rebound.  According to Bloomberg: 

“The Covid-19 outbreak has decimated the restaurant trade and wreaked havoc with food supply chains. Demand and prices have collapsed in Asia, home to some of the world’s largest seafood and fish markets. In Spain, which has the largest fleet in the European Union, half of the ships are staying at port.  Plummeting global demand for fish and seafood as a result of the coronavirus crisis is likely to create an effect similar to the halt of commercial fishing during World Wars I and II, when the idling of fleets led to the rebound of fish stocks.  The closure of restaurants and hotels, the main buyers of fish and seafood, together with the difficulties of maintaining social distancing among crews at sea have caused hundreds of fishing vessels to be tied up at ports around the world.” 

            An NPR article noted that 50% to 60% of wild seafood caught in the U.S is usually exported (and of the seafood that’s not exported, 80% is sold to restaurants), but due to the Coronavirus international markets have dried-up.  Again, a major blow to people in the fishing industry, many of whom work for organizations much more respectable than that of the cruise ship industry, but this reprieve will likely prove to be a blessing in disguise once fish stocks are replenished. Considering the dearth of cargo ships, cruise ships, and fishing vessels, whales are probably having a particularly enjoyable migration season without as many ships scattered across the seas and fishing lines dispersed along continental shelfs.

4.  Flights and Air Quality.   The travel restrictions implemented in the wake of the Coronavirus has reduced the number of airline flights by around 50% to 80%.  In the wasteful United States, despite passenger volume having dropped by 96%, the number of flights has only declined by 50%, meaning that many flights are practically empty. Regardless, airlines are cutting flights left and right, and this will continue into the summer.  According to the Guardian, “the aviation industry accounts for about 2% of global carbon emissions, although this is concentrated among the small fraction of the world’s population that regularly flies. The reduction in flights is expected to reduce pollution levels, with emissions from the sector dropping by almost a third last month.”  So with less pollution from planes, cars, boats, and factories, the typically smoggy skylines of major metropolises like Beijing and Los Angeles are once again clear.   From America to Italy to India, this story of clear skies is repeated the world over.  After 30 years, the Himalayas are once again visible from India.  Former Indian cricket player Harbhajan Singh, wrote, “We can see the snow-covered mountains clearly from our roofs. And not just that, stars are visible at night. I have never seen anything like this in recent times.”   Despite its claim of having resumed production months ago, satellite images show drastic drops in pollution in China, including in Wuhan, where crematoriums are no longer continuously burning bodies. According to the Associated Press, NASA measurements show that “March air pollution is down 46% in Paris, 35% in Bangalore, 38% in Sydney, 29% in Los Angeles, and 26% in Rio de Janeiro.”  Relatedly, a major boon to the atmosphere are the cancellations of sporting events, festivals, conferences, joint military exercises, and other large-scale, waste-producing, consumption-driven human gatherings requiring mass transportation and astronomical amounts of resources and energy.  On top of all this, the economic slump has contributed to the plunging demand for oilin an already statured marketplace with storage facilities filled to capacity.  With less machinery burning and transporting oil this spring and summer, animals will be traversing through cleaner and quieterseas and skies.  Similarly, the meat industry has also suffered closures at the hands of the Coronavirus induced depression.  Since meat processing plants, schools, and restaurants have closed, farmers have nowhere to sell their meat, milk, eggs, and produce.  This has led to the daily dumping of millions of gallons of milk, the smashing of millions of unhatched eggs, and farm animal culling in accordance with the reduced demand. While none of this seems positive, the meat production industry is constantly singled-out as a leading contributor of greenhouse gas emissions (accounting for up to 18% globally each year).  The fallout from this devastating blow to industrial agriculture (and unfortunately small, local farms as well) will likely include a positive upshot for the environment in that pollutants produced by the sector will fall.  

5. Animals.  As human activity subsides and Mother Nature is given some more breathing room, animals are faring better in both obvious and subtle ways, although in some cases ecosystems and wildlife are faring worse.  Insofar as uplifting positive observations, there’s no shortage of stories (including fake ones) of wildlife sightings in urban areas: coyotes roaming the streets of San Francisco, boars in downtown Barcelona, kangaroos in downtown Adelaide, penguins waddling though Cape Town, mountain goats strolling through Wales, wolves in Normandy, jackals in Tel Aviv, deer in Japanese train stations, jellyfish swimming the canals of Venice, vultures circling New York City.  Outside of cities, birds are taking over beaches and towns in Peru and Lebanon, fin whales are swimming through Mediterranean shipping lanes, monkeys are flying kites in India, and predators are reclaiming Yosemite.  Absent for years, jellyfish masses are returning to deserted Palawan beaches in the Philippines. By the tens of thousands, endangered sea turtles are returning to nest on the shores of  Florida, Rio de Janeiro, India, and Thailand.  Would-be hunters are canceling elephant hunting trips to Botswana.  With less voyeurs around, pandasin Hong Kong’s Ocean Park have finally mated.  If the official story of patient zero contracting the Coronavirus from eating bat soup is true, then that bat which passed on the virus to humans – triggering a chain reaction that caused the unprecedented shutdown of world economies and the most extensive lockdown of humanity in the history of civilization – should be perceived in the natural world as something of a Jesus-like bat martyr, its death representing the greatest sacrifice and gift a single creature could ever bestow upon the rest of the animal kingdom. Indeed, in a nod to the potential pathogen spillover infection danger posed by eating the outlandish fare in their wet markets (actually, popular footage of the “Market of Terror” in Wuhan was filmed in Indonesia), China has apparently passed a ban on the trade and consumption exotic animals (now if they could only stop their soulless practice of life feeding). Undoubtedly, the wildlife is benefiting from this respite of human onslaught in more subtle ways. With less noise pollution, whales may be able to communicate across longer distances again.  Insects and plants will most likely enjoy a boost in pollination activity this year as humans ease up on their beatdown of the biosphere.  

6.  Dark Sides.  There are darks sides of the pandemic’s effect on wildlife and the environment. Poachers in South Africa and Botswana are taking advantage of declines in tourism to kill rhinoceroses and hack off their horns (but more poachers are being killed, too) in empty refuges and parks where the pachyderms are usually safe.  Since the start of the pandemic at least six rhinos have been poached in Botswana and nine in South Africa, and those are just the ones we know about.  In the last decade over 9,000 rhinos were poached.  The Amazon Rainforest has seen a spike in illegal deforestation since the start of the pandemic.  According the Wall Street Journal, “With hundreds of environmental enforcement agents sidelined by the pandemic, deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon has increased to its fastest pace in years—and the season when clearing typically accelerates hasn’t even begun yet.  Satellite data collected by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research from August 2019 through March show 2,031 square miles of new clearings, nearly the size of Delaware. The newly deforested area is 71% larger than the previous high for the equivalent period, which was recorded in 2016 and 2017.”  Medical waste disposal is also impacted by the Coronavirus.  According to The Verge, “Hospitals in Wuhan were generating up to six times as much medical waste at the peak of the outbreak as they did before the crisis began.”  While the drop in elective surgeries may offset the increase of pandemic-related waste produced as a whole, the reckless disposal of personal protective equipment has increased to the point that discarded masks and gloves are apparently being spotted in greater numbers in oceans worldwide.

7.  Humans.  While widespread suffering and immiseration have been brought on by the Coronavirus pandemic, there are many ways in which people benefit from quarantines and lockdowns. Europeans may see fewer Islamic terrorists entering the continent on jihads since ISIS has issued a travel warning to its fighters, telling them to avoid “the land of the pandemic.”  Similar to how a truce to end the civil war in the Ivory Coast was reached when it qualified for the 2008 World Cup, a ceasefire has been declared between Saudi Arabia and Yemen so that they may focus on containing the Coronavirus instead of killing each other in the ungodly war they have been fighting for the past five years. In addition to alcohol sales, divorce rates are up in quarantined urban areas in the United States and China.  Thus, the Coronavirus has forced an expeditious end to many unhappy relationships. On the surface, skyrocketing unemployment and twenty-two million Americans losing their jobs is not a good thing, but it may result in people rearranging their lives for to better, so they may aim for their goals and achieve things beyond their wildest dreams.  People may take advantage of this period of reduced consumerism to garden, create art, read, spend time with family, play outdoors, meditate on their past, contemplate their future and on the fragility of life.  (Between 1965 – 1967 during the bubonic “Great Plague” years in England, Isaac Newton fled Trinity College in Cambridge to his home hamlet of Woolsthorpe in the Lincolnshire countryside where he experimented with light and prisms, discovered differential and integral calculus, and formulated a theory of universal gravitation.)   Importantly, we might learn as a country to better prepare for future crises of this scale.  (And at the end of the day, we are actually doing quite well in the battle against Coronavirus, and are lucky to be grappling and contending with such a serious pandemic in this technologically-advanced age of plenty.  As the Indian proverb goes: Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank him for not having given it wings.)     We may finally shift our manufacturing sector back home and become less reliant on China for our medical supplies, appliances, and accessories.  We may learn as individuals and as nations to become more self-sufficient so that we’ll no longer depend on government handouts or other countries for our survival and success.  We may take steps to retain some of the recent gains seen in the natural world, so as to become better stewards of the environment, forging a new dominant economic path forward and aspiring toward a different way of life – one that is not predicated on unsustainable systems of insane trade and takes into greater consideration the lives of the billions of other organisms we share our time alive with and that also call this planet home.  

Or, we may not. 

Conversations About the End of Time and The National Gallery of Art – Part 1: Time Scales and the Year 2000 - Stephen Jay Gould

What follows is a kind of dual journal entry that features excerpts from the book Conversations About the End of Time and photographs of paintings on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  The non-fiction book format is discussion-based, and consists of interviews with four renowned scientists, theologians, philosophers, and writers: Stephen Jay Gould, Jean-Claude Carriere, Jean Delumeau, and Umberto Eco.   I’ve only transcribed a fraction of the material available in the book, which is as enlightening and timely read in a day-in-age of naysayers and pessimists who seem adamant to adopt Malthusian perspectives about the future of humanity and are resigned to the prospect that humans are doomed so we may as well commit collective suicide to put ourselves out of our common misery and facilitate the healing of the planet.  This book offers glimmers of hope, although not necessarily for us.  This first part, titled Time Scales and the Year 2000, features excerpts from an interview with biologist-paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), who taught at Harvard and worked at the American Museum of Natural History.  (To see Part 2 of this series, which features excerpts from an interview between the editors of the aforementioned book and French thelogian Jean Delumeau, click here.)

Do you think humanity has reached an advanced state in its evolution? 

That’s a question we can’t answer.  We have no idea what we are capable of on the basis of our genetic make-up.  After all, we haven’t been around very long, the human race is very young, about 200,000 years only.  From the cultural point of view we are scarcely more than 5,000 years old.  Language and technology are only just beginning, the most surprising , terrifying, exciting things can still happen, we haven’t yet begun to explore the possibilities of social and technological organization.  Most scenarios, it’s true, are probably more terrifying than inspirational.  But what of it? Perhaps you’ve noticed: we’re not very good at making predictions!  On the other hand, we are very good at forecasting catastrophes for the wrong time.

Does humanity need great moments of crisis in order to progress?

Perhaps it doesn’t really.  We’ve succeeded in surviving so far!  But I have noticed that we only decide to do something when we’re forced to it.  We only begin to find solutions to famine when lots of people have died of hunger, we wait for genocide to be committed before denouncing it, we take steps against overpopulation when there is a threat of famine…Why?  I don’t know. It’s probably just a deep=rooted tendency in each of us.  It’s difficult to change, and changing sooner is even more improbable than transforming one’s own self.  The people in power want to stay there, and that desire is a powerful factor in creating inertia.  It’s often necessary to attack the powers as they might be… I’m always surprised that there aren’t more automobile accidents, given how many irresponsible people there are driving.  A catastrophe is really quite a rare event.

You seem almost optimistic.

Let’s just say that I tend to be prudently optimistic.  I don’t predict that things are going to get better, but at least I have the certainty that we have the means of putting up a fight.  That’s probably the best we can hope for.

We talked about the arbitrary nature of the calendar, but aren’t geological eras just as arbitrary?  

No Way!  That’s just what is so remarkable about the scales of geological time – the fact that they’re not arbitrary.  When the geological scale was established in the nineteenth century, the boundaries were placed between eras which corresponded to mass extinctions.  Not because scientists had a theory about the decimations, but because, empirically, the major causes in the fossil archives coincide with the time when they took place...

            In my laboratory at Harvard University there are drawers full of the fossils of animals that lived before the great extinction at the end of the Permian age.  They’re very easy to recognize.  Once you’ve seen them, you can never again confuse them with the fossil of organisms that lived after that extinction.  In fact the destruction was so radical at that particular moment that the form of what we find later is totally different.  You only need to open those drawers the once to understand that these boundaries are not arbitrary; there are the great rifts in evolution.  The last great boundary is between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, and bears the trace of the impact from some huge, extra-terrestrial object.  We know that the fall of this asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.  And in the end, the reason why we’re sitting here talking like this is that an asteroid struck the earth, wiped out the dinosaurs, and spared a few little mammals.  Darwin thought that the mass extinctions were human inventions resulting from the incompleteness of fossil archives.  Today we know that they were real enough: the history of life has been punctuated by several massive and brutal decimations… Take, for example the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician, 438 million years ago; or the one at the end of the Devonian, 367 million years ago.  But the worst was at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago.  It wiped out, at one go, almost 95 per cent of all invertebrate marine species.  Finally, we have the extinction of the dinosaurs, on the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary, 65 million years ago, trigged by the impact of an extra-terrestrial object containing iridium.

Image: Geologic Time Spiral - A Path to the Past (USGS)

What did people say back then, whenever they found a fossil? 

In Antiquity they believed that fossils were the remains of antediluvian animals or human beings, the remains even of mythological heroes like Antaeus, Polyhemus, or the giants mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis.  In 413, in City of God, Saint Augustine tells of a gigantic molar, the size of a hundred human teeth, that was found not far from Carthage and put on display in a church: ‘These ancient bones,’ he writes, ‘show clearly, all these centuries later, how large primitive bodes were.’ For a long time people thought human beings had become smaller in the course of history, it was a commonly held opinion among ancient writers.  In the seventeenth century collectors made much of the giant shoulder blades and teeth displayed in their cabinets of curiosities.  Yet as early as the end of the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci was saddened to see these crazy notions still current, and he declared himself convinced of the organic origin of fossils.

            In any case, it takes more than just finding one isolated fossil in order to conceive of mass extinctions.  A fossil is simply the trace of a particular animal’s stay on earth.  You need prior knowledge in order to understand that they represent periods in the history of the living.  Up until the nineteenth century nobody had such knowledge.  The first dinosaur bones were found in 1825.  No one knew of their existence.  

You’ve written that ‘extinction is the normal fate awaiting all species.’ Basically, survival is the exception, and disappearance the norm.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that extinction is a solution to the dangers currently threatening us.  People who don’t want to face up to the reality of the situation sometimes tend to use the discoveries of paleontology to say: everything’s going to disappear anyway, so what does it matter, why worry about the ecosystem?  They even end up becoming advocates of the worst-case scenario; since new species have developed after every mass extinction, why not wish for a new extinction that will be even more productive? It’s a quite unjustified line or argument, because it’s irrelevant to the scale of human life…  The earth itself isn’t in any danger.  It’s already experienced great explosions that were much more powerful than anything all our bombs are capable of producing.  And it recovered from them, even if it did take millions of years to do so… What is a millennium?  For a geologist it’s the twinkling of an eye, but in human experience it’s a gigantic, almost in conveyable length of time.  When the year 2000 comes, there’ll be very few people alive who were around at the turn of the last century.  No one on this earth was alive in 1800…

            There have been only five mass extinctions after all.  You know, we’re very lucky that no mass extinction every wiped out life altogether...  At the end of the Permian we came very close to total destruction, about 95 per cent of species. 

            What I mean is that we should not worry about what’s going to happen to our planet.  We should not be big-headed about it, we’ve poisoned it but it will survive. 

What are your thoughts about the hole in the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect?

Everything depends on what we do in the future.  This brings us back to our discussion about time-scales.  I am prepared to believe that the greenhouse effect poses no major danger to the planet itself, at least not the greenhouse effects that we are capable of causing.  It will warm the planet up to temperatures that it has already experienced several times in the past.  So it isn’t a danger to the planet, but it is a danger to us.  If the poles begin to melt, our towns and cities will be flooded, our lives will be severely disrupted.  But the earth itself will simply have slight bigger oceans, that’s all.

That happened at the time of the single continent, the so-called Pangaea.

It’s happened several times.  Once can’t extrapolate from the present curve, for the following reasons: if the level of carbon monoxide increases alarmingly and there’s further global warming, we’ll take steps to bring it under control.  We’d even be able to reverse the trend.  Everything depends on human will, on our intelligence, on our capacity to co-operate, on our politicians.  The dangers are real, the anxieties ligitmate.  Some people think the present trend is bound to continue and will lead to disaster.  But in fact there’s nothing inevitable about it, and we can even hope that we’ll be smart enough to reverse it. 

Bill Kortum and the UC Davis-Bodega Marine Laboratory

         What follows are three slideshows of many self-explanatory photos taken at the UC Davis-Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega Bay, California.   I took these pictures during my tenures as a volunteer there (I’ve have two stints, and will attempt a third this year).  While my volunteer responsibilities were largely menial (feeding the fish, cleaning the tanks, going out to the beach to catch crabs to feed to the octopuses), I loved volunteering there because I was able to interact with a stellar array of bizarre and beautiful sea creatures in an inspiring scientific environment.  I liked the fact that I was trusted to independently tend to my volunteer obligations, and therefore could take my time feeding the fish the thawed shrimp and squid that I had chopped up for them, and had access to restricted areas of the lab such as the roof, library, and the classified marine mammal genetic research facility.

        The marine lab is located on the “head” of Bodega Bay, and visitors are welcome to tour the lab or attend lectures on certain days, although it’s usually closed off to visitors so that researchers and graduate students can conduct scientific experiments. Experiments often involved splicing the genes of two or more sea creatures so to as create cross-bred mutants that exhibit the characteristics of the original species from which the DNA was extracted.  Examples of cross-breeding experiments at the lab include combining the genes of a sea anemone with that of an electric eel, the result being a massive sessile polyp with elongated tentacles possessing electric charges and stinging nematocysts with sharp-mouthed eel faces on the tips of their tentacles.   Another experiment involved transferring human DNA that was mixed with octopus DNA into the bloodstream of a sea lion, thus resulting in a ferocious tentacled sea lion with pulsing chromatophores and a horrifying human face that howls and barks, camouflaging itself as it climbs the laboratory walls and like some demonic cephalopod wraith (think Cthulhu).

            The Bodega Marine Lab lies almost directly on top of the northern segment of the San Andreas Fault, an 800-mile transform fault which forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.    Tectonic plates are prone to movement, which can result in powerful earthquakes capable of destroying infrastructure.   Incredibly, the California-based power company PG&E planned to build a nuclear power plant on the Bodega Head in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  The plant construction effort was successfully fought off by environmental activists, in particular Bill Kortum (for whom the Kortum Trail, which runs along the coast south of Bodega Bay, is named), who passed away in 2015.  Kortum was a veterinarian whose opposition to coastal development thrusted him to the forefront of the defense of Sonoma County’s coastline.  Not only did he help prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant on a geologically volatile landmass, thus averting a potential catastrophe (think Fukushima), but his coastal preservation efforts ensured that huge swathes of California’s 1,100-mile shoreline would be protected from development and accessible to the public.  As the state of the world’s oceans continue to decline as a result of pollution, overfishing, and resource (oil and gas) extraction, we need more men like Bill Kortum to step up and defend the coasts and seas before irreversible damage transforms the oceans into wastelands. 

Carl Sagan on the Discovery of Exoplanets and the Significance of Earth

           In 1980, Carl Sagan, then forty-four years old, told a group of Brooklyn middle school students the following (click this link to see him say this at the 52 min. point of Cosmos, Episode Seven, The Backbone of Night):

By the time that you people are as old as I am we should know, for all the nearest stars, whether they have planets going around them.  We might know dozens or even hundreds of other planetary systems and see if they're like our own or very different, or no other planets going around other stars at all.  That will happen in your lifetime, and it will be the first time in the world's history that anybody found out really if there are planets around the other stars.



Image from: http://phl.upr.edu/projects/habitable-exoplanets-catalog/results

            Thirty-four years later, Earth-based telescopes and NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which was launched in 2009 and ceased its planet-hunting operations due to technical difficulties in 2013, have identified 1030 Earth-sized exoplanets (planets that orbit within a “habitable-zone” around a sun-like star) and 4,696 “candidate planets” in other star systems within the Milky Way galaxy. 


Image from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_%28spacecraft%29

           Last week, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-452b; located 1,4000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the planet is being referred to as Earth 2.0 due to the number of similarities it shares with Earth.  Jon Jenkins, data analysis for NASA's Ames Research Center said, “We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment.  It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent 6 billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

          In Cosmos, Sagan goes to speak out the position of our sun in relation to the Milky Way Galaxy, as well as the position of the Milky Way in universe: 

Now, the nearby stars, the ones you can see with the naked eye, those are all in the solar neighborhood.  That's what astronomers call it: the neighborhood.  But it's a very tiny place in the Milky Way galaxy.  The Milky Way is that band of light that you see across the sky on a clear night (I can't tell if there are any more clear nights in Brooklyn), but you must've seen the Milky Way, right?  A faint band of light at night.  Well, that's just a hundred billion stars all seen together edge on, as in this picture.  If you could get out of the Milky Way galaxy and look down on it, it would look like that picture.  And if we did look down on the Milky Way where would the sun and nearby stars be?  Would it be in the center where things look important or at least well-lit?  No.  We would be way out here in the suburbs, in the countryside of the galaxy.  We're not in any important place.  All the stars you could see would be in a little, little place like that.  And the Milky Way would be this band of light a hundred billion stars all together. The fact that we live in the outskirts of the galaxy was discovered a long time ago, towards the end of the First World War by a man named Harlow Shapley who was mapping the position of these clusters of stars.  See, every one of these is a bunch of maybe ten-thousand stars all together – it’s called a globular cluster.  And you can see that they’re centered around the middle, the center of the galaxy.  People used to think that the sun was at the center of the galaxy – something important about our position – it turns out to be wrong. We live in the outskirts; the globular clusters are centered around the marvelous middle of the Milky Way galaxy. And then it turned out that this isn't the only galaxy. We live in this one, but there are many others. And as this picture reminds us, there are many different kinds of galaxies of which ours might be just this one. There are, in fact, a hundred billion other galaxies, each of which contains something like a hundred billion stars.  Think of how many stars and planets and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe.


Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014.  Image from: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/entire/pr2014027a/

As long as there have been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.  We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.  We embarked on our journey to the stars .with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: "What are the stars?" Exploration is in our nature.  We began as wanderers and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

Carl Sagan on New Horizons

        After nine and half years of flying through space, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reached Pluto, which, depending on its location in orbit relative to Earth, is anywhere between 30 to 49 astronomical units away (one AU is equal to 93 million miles, the distance from Earth to the Sun).  Measured in miles, Pluto’s distance from Earth lies between 2.7 billion and 4.5 billion miles away, depending when the measurement is taken. 

Image from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#/media/File:New_Horizons_Full_Trajectory_Sideview.png

       At 40 AU, Pluto is extremely far, but Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, is the farthest human-made spacecraft from Earth.  At 132 AU (or 12.2 billion miles) away, Voyager 1 is expected to reach the star Gliese 445 in the constellation Camelopardais in another 40,000 years, by which time microbes and bacteria on Earth may once again be intermingling in a primeval soup in the beginnings of an evolutionary course eventually spawning intelligent life on Earth, ideally without the propensity toward collective suicide and unrestrained violence.  New Horizons was traveling at 50,000mph on its brush with Pluto, and transmitted high-resolution images of the surface of which indicate a geologically active dwarf planet complete with a thin nitrogen atmosphere and surface features attributing to wind and sub-surface heat. Interstellar space (where plasma lies beyond the reaches of the Sun) is roughly 125 AU away, and New Horizons is expected to join Voyager 1, 2, and Pioneer 10, and 11, as the only ships from earth to venture into this far-off realm, perhaps to one day enter intergalactic space, the space between galaxies.

Image from: http://www.space.com/22797-voyager-1-interstellar-space-nasa-proof.html

        Although the Hubble Space Telescope keeps tallying more galaxies, scientists currently estimate that the universe contains 170 billion galaxies, and the number of stars within these galaxies exceeds one septillion, which is a 1 followed by 24 zeroes.  According to Carl Sagan and others, there are more stars in the universe than all the grains of sand in all the beaches on Earth.

            In Cosmos, Carl Sagan discusses how humans have used science and technology to explore the planet, as well as how our ability to traverse space has advanced over time.  According to Sagan, if the progression of science and the inquisitiveness nature of the human spirit is maintained, "If we do not destroy ourselves, we will explore the stars."

In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, you could travel from Spain to the Azores in a few days – the same time it takes now to cross that little channel from Earth to the moon.  It took then a few months to traverse the Atlantic Ocean to reach what was called the New World: the Americas.  Today it takes a few months to cross the ocean of the inner solar system and reach Mars and Venus, which are truly and literally new worlds awaiting us.  In the 17^th and 18^th centuries you could travel from Holland to China say, in a year or two, the same time it takes Voyager to travel from the Earth to Jupiter.  And in comparison to the resources of the society, it cost more then to send sailing ships to Far East than it does now to send spaceships to the planets… If we do not destroy ourselves, we will explore the stars.

                                                                                                                         -Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Travellers' Tales