CancunCocoon#14: "Either with us or against us"

The ultimate consequence of our behavior with our environment is the extinction of a species.

Under normal circumstances, species thrive and grow in population. When the volume of the population grows unsustainably beyond the constraints of the ecological niche where it can live, then the population is reduced naturally. If there is not enough food, the weakest will starve leaving food for the strongest, who will eventually survive.

When a species becomes extinct, it is because its ecological niche is not able to support it any longer. Either food has ran out, or basic protection or humidity levels of quality of the air or water has deteriorated. When a forest is cut down to build a neighborhood, all the animals that lived in the forest cannot live on the streets. Animals have not learned to be homeless.

In 2010 alone, more than 100,000 species of animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms have become extinct. Most of them has to do with human behavior. We are cutting down forests, and this reduces habitats or ecological niches for those species. We dump thousands of tons of toxic chemicals into the ocean and that kills small microbes on which larger species feed. So both the microbes and their predators are disappearing.

I do not foresee a rapid change in our behavior that will prevent species from growing extinct. My concern is the realization of the interconnectedness of our behavior and the extinction of a species. It is a chain reaction. Although we are not predators of the species in some cases, the satisfaction of our needs is pushing the limits for more forests, for more consumption, for more food.

The waste we generate accumulates where we don't normally see it. Somewhere behind the mountain or into the desert or at the bottom of the sea. Waste chemicals are usually invisible. The east garbage patch is a floating garbage dump composed of an estimated two trillion pieces of plastic. It floats on the Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Hawaii and Japan. It covers an area twice the size of the state of Texas, or twice the size of France.

What if we collect that garbage and process it by adding some heat and reshape it in the form of highway divisions to prevent car crashes? This could be a triple-win situation: we would be reutilizing waste, we would be cleaning the environment for millions of animals that die trapped in plastic containers, and we would be reducing deaths in our highways.

If non-human nature had a voice, it would probably be hollering "are you with us or against us?" Truth being said, it should be us asking the exact same question: are we with "us" or against "us"? The planet is one. The global ecosystem is one. Extinction of a species is a threatening symptom about our own behavior. We cannot thrive as a civilization without trees and forests; without clean sources of water to drink; without fertile land to grow our food.

Giving animals a break is giving ourselves a break. Have I said my health has never been better as it has been since I became a vegetarian? Plus, I lost 16 kg (38 lb) in the process. Try it. Or at least do it for a few days at a time. Culture is what we make of it. It is constantly changing. Help our culture change.

CancunCocoon#13: Where Have All The Forests Gone?

When we got married, my wife and I decided to have an alternative celebration. We gathered our closest friends and relatives for a tree-plantation ceremony. We requested people to dress on a white top (not everyone did, much to our dismay) so that pictures would have a nice contrast between faces, white outfit and green, natural scenery around. The pictures look beautiful!

Anyway, we decided to plant trees because we thought our relationship had to be like caring for a garden or a forest. It needed nurturing, attention, sensitivity. So far it has worked beautifully. And the trees are growing strong too!

When a tree is planted, it absorbs carbon from the air as long as it lives. Growth of trees is the accumulation of carbon for its trunk and branches. Not only does a tree absorb carbon from the atmosphere. It also releases oxygen as part of its respiration process, and releases water vapor, pure and pristine, that later becomes clouds and rain. Trees clean our air and our water.

It would sound like a good business, then, to grow many trees so that we ensure there is always abundant -at least sufficient- clean water and air for our consumption. Well, it's perhaps the two elements we can't live without, right? And still what is happening is completely the opposite: we are tearing down trees at a rate of 20 football fields per minute, all day, every day. At that rate, all the rainforest of my paradisiac Costa Rica would be chopped down in 15 weeks. A horrible thought. Somewhere in the world in the next 15 weeks a forest of 25,000 square kilometers will be converted into, well, whatever a forest becomes when it lacks trees: grassland, and eventually desert.

The big problem is in the long term. How many more trees can we cut without losing the planet's ability to recover itself and to clean our air and water? If we had to pay for the price of cleaning our air and water I am sure it would cost us dearly. In fact, The 11th Hour, a documentary produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, proposes that the value of the function that our natural environment serves us cleaning air and water could cost some $40 trillion dollars, a value far greater than the estimated $18 trillion worth of global economic output per year.

It's not about money. Without trees there would be very little life that could be supported around here. So the need to preserve it is existential as well. Ethical or moral. Principled or rooted on a very humanly inherent will to survive and to procreate into the future.

Perhaps that's what we have lost: a sense of ownership with a future that we won't live to see. The world of our grandchildren and their grandchildren's grandchildren. As a Native American leader said, we need to think about the seventh generation after this one to learn how to preserve nature so that they -whoever that is- will also enjoy it.

We have also lost sensitivity for everything that is not immediate and discardable. The instant fix of satisfaction that goes with the next breath of air and that is costing so much on our nonrenewable resources. Our forests are in a way nonrenewable. We could replant a forest that has been cut down, but it will take as long as it had been standing, if at all, to recover. That's the greatest wealth of primary forests. They have been standing since time immemorial. They carry our history, our genes, our wisdom. Chopping it down is an unintelligent thing to do as a species.

The way to change our culture is to start planting trees, as many as you want. Make an appointment with friends to go plant trees. Watch them grow. Learn about them. Teach our children to care for them. Plant trees on behalf of your faraway relatives. Of the ones that have passed. On the ones that will come. Plant a tree for each child that is born. A tree to celebrate a promotion and a tree when each tooth of our child falls. Make up lame excuses to plant trees and plant as many as you possibly can. We will need to make a coordinated effort, those of us who care, to make a significant impact on our destructive tendency as a species.

Change culture and make it cool so we can have fun in the process. Change has never been boring anyway!

CancunCocoon Episode#11 - Deadliest Catch

Who doesn't know the famous Discovery Channel show about king crab fishing? This is not about crabs, but about everyday vegetables and seafood we eat regularly.

Our food production process is corrupted. We use fertilizers to increase land yield. This makes crops more vulnerable to plague. To combat those, we use pesticides, some of which have been so toxic that they have been already banned, like DDT. At least in the developed world. Or so we hope.

Daniel Goleman quotes an expert in his book Ecological Intelligence explaining an additional problem with fertilizers: “Producing and applying fertilizer contributes sixteen percent of all global greenhouse gases, especially nitrous oxide, which is three hundred times more aggressive than CO2 [carbon dioxide].”

Once the harvest is collected, not only have nutrients been extracted from the soil, but also chemical residue that has been added in the process seeps into the soil contaminating it as well as water reservoirs or nearby lakes and rivers. Some chemicals -like antibiotics we use to combat infection in humans and animals or mercury used in mining- do not biodegrade easily. They flow into water basins and all the way to the sea in some cases.

These chemicals, which pile up in the thousands of tons every year in our lakes, rivers, beaches, and underground aquifers, are being absorbed by marine species, both plants and animals, and in the process, it affects their gene pool. In some cases, they are simply stored on the skin, bones and muscles of those animals and we later eat them ignorantly. Dr Al Sears, M.D., mentions an Environmental Protection Agency test conducted in 300 streams in the U.S., where 100% of all trout sampled accumulated mercury, and two-thirds of them were beyond the maximum threshold that the EPA considers safe. Mercury -he continues- sticks to red blood cells and accumulates in animal muscle, which is the part of fish we eat. Then it gets scary: your body confuses mercury with amino acids, being stored into all tissues and organs of our human body, including the brain, affecting our nervous system. [http://www.alsearsmd.com/mercury-toxins-throw-away-fishing-poles/]

Terrifying what we are doing to ourselves. Those of us who know should spread the word. We need culture change. And fast. Suggestions, anyone?

CancunCocoon#8

Imagine what would happen if greenhouse gases (GHG) and carbon emissions would have remained at ground level instead of rising up into the atmosphere. Billions of toxic gases blurring our vision and contaminating our lungs outside our house. Who would have tolerated. Worse than that, our youngest ones playing out in the street and coming home suffocating with asthma symptoms.

If that was the reality, climate change would have been dealt with a century ago, as no one in the early industrialized countries would have tolerated. Today we tolerate because gases go up and we don't see them, and because the amount of pollution has been accumulating very slowly, over the course of years and decades of running engines and burning fossil fuels to heat our homes, cook our meals and keep our electronic toys running. In sum, to keep our addiction to comfort up to par.

The rate at which we are generating carbon emissions is clearly unsustainable. Everybody knows that. The problem is that action to cap that contamination comes at a very high cost for everybody as well. Now, we are talking about two different types of costs. The monetary cost of transforming industrial processes to be less carbon intensive will cost producers and consumers alike in their efforts to incorporate negative externalities into the supply and demand equation. The environmental cost is less tangible and not so much spoken about.

You see, among the policymakers that rule the world, many are economists of have studied classic economics, a marvelous field of study that lies somewhere between social science, mathematics and psychology. If Economics would also teach about ecology then we would be saved: we would understand, once and for all, that our economies are constrained within our human societies, and that our human societies are constrained within our natural ecosystem. We cannot grow beyond our environment. We cannot live outside the limits of the planet. At least not yet. At least not all of us anyway.

So, as long as this is not a possibility, it is up to us to deal with the problem. If you are not in the oil industry, if you are not a politician that makes promises as a way of living even if they are never fulfilled, if you care about the world you are going to die in, if you would like to inherit onto your descendants a healthy, secure place to thrive as individuals and families within communities, then I suggest you get informed about what needs to be done to change our culture of unsustainable development.

As Jared Diamond wonders in his masterpiece "Collapse," what did the Easter Islanders say the day they cut down their last tree? If we don't want to answer that question, we better start planting more trees than the ones we are cutting down today. So far this year, almost 9 million hectares of forest have been lost worldwide. That is more than twice the total land area of Costa Rica, my beautiful piece of paradise.

Work at GreenBiz.com?

I perceive high affinity between this job and my core competencies.

As a Costa Rican, I understand the value of living in peace with nature. This requires both ecological restoration and innovation on renewable energies. Most importantly, sustainability is a matter of ethics to do good while doing well.

I envision a future where different corporate sectors and world cultures contribute their best practices towards the global transformation of green business: United States’ remarkable entrepreneurial ability to leapfrog technology through innovation; China’s massive funding of renewables; Brazil’s environmental superpower status; Australia’s clean energy potential; Africa’s and Latin America’s potential for organic agriculture and eco-tourism; European Union’s virtuous legal implementation to tackle climate change through a culture change.

Moreover, I consider the coming decade as crucial to reach the necessary tipping point to guide humanity from a degrading lifestyle to a restorative one. Therefore, identifying the key stakeholders at a global level and the best scenarios to engage them in conversation and to broker deals with them will be elemental.

I pay close attention to Brazil as my wife is from there. Apart from the media coverage that the country’s development is having in recent years, it has started to become clear that it is, by far, the world’s environmental superpower and it is playing an aggressive role as world leader in the field. Its private sector is powerful in terms of finances and innovation, and also in social responsibility and environmental friendliness.

In the coming years, Brazil will host the two largest sports events in the world: the football (soccer) World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. This represents a remarkable opportunity to showcase policies, products, partnerships, and lifestyles of a new, green cultural paradigm.

I am willing to relocate, to Oakland or Brazil or elsewhere, the same way I have lived in Costa Rica, Norway, China and Australia. I have been looking for the perfect job that will fulfill my three main interests: to be passionate about it, to contribute the most according to my competencies, and to be well remunerated for the effort. I feel I may have found it at GreenBiz.com.

My full-time academic program at Carnegie Mellon Australia will finish in early December. As of now, I have no scheduled commitments afterwards and am currently searching for a full-time job.