From: Raymond Bouchard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, July 6, 2003 11:02 PM
To: Cordell, Arthur: ECOM
Subject: Meme 035
|
The |
Drachma-Denarius |
July 6, 2003
| From: | Raymond Bouchard |
| To: | Arthur Cordell |
| Subject | Meme 035 |
Dear Arthur
Here's the latest edition of the Meme Pool, the
newsletter of web articles that 'deserve' to be repeated, re-used and re-cycled.
Articles of interest to futurists and strategic planners are presented about once a week. They highlight the appearance and
disappearance of trends, technologies and paradigms.
Ecology and the
Environment
The Dying Oceans
Oceans have always captured the imagination of humanity. They are
seen as a last frontier, a roadway to exotic lands, and a bountiful resource.
The sea is a powerful _expression_ of nature's force that must be treated with
care and respect or it will inevitably destroy the sailors and fishermen who
venture out on its waves. Our sense of awe, standing at the edge of a pounding
surf is the same now as it was for great writers of the sea such as Conrad and
Melville.
Yet methodically, and in many ways invisibly, the oceans are being destroyed. A recent report by the Pew Oceans Commission illustrates the extent of the devastation and of the impacts on humanity.
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A recent National Academy of Sciences study estimates that the oil running off our streets and driveways and ultimately flowing into the oceans is equal to an Exxon Valdez oil spill - 10.9 million gallons - every eight months.
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The amount of nitrogen released into coastal waters along the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico from anthropogenic sources has increased about fivefold since the pre-industrial era, and may increase another 30 percent by 2030 if current practices continue. Two-thirds of our estuaries and bays are either moderately or severely degraded by eutrophication.
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More than 13,000 beaches were closed or under pollution advisories in 2001, an increase of 20 percent from the previous year.
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In the U.S., animal feedlots produce about 500 million tons of manure each year, more than three times the amount of sanitary waste produced by the human population.
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Based on EPA estimates, in one week a 3000-passenger cruise ship generates about 210,000 gallons of sewage, 1,000,000 gallons of gray water (shower, sink, and dishwashing water), 37,000 gallons of oily bilge water, more than 8 tons of solid waste, millions of gallons of ballast water containing potential invasive species, and toxic wastes from dry cleaning and photo-processing laboratories.
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Introduced species crowd out native species, alter habitats, and impose economic burdens on coastal communities.
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More than 175 species of introduced marine invertebrates, fish, algae, and higher plants live in San Francisco Bay.
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A salmon farm of 200,000 fish releases an amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and fecal matter roughly equivalent to the nutrient waste in the untreated sewage from 20,000, 25,000, and 65,000 people, respectively.
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Over the past decade, nearly one million non-native Atlantic salmon have escaped from fish farms and established themselves in streams in the Pacific Northwest.
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Global air temperature is expected to warm by 2.5 to 10.4oF (1.4 to 5.8oC) in the 21st century, affecting sea-surface temperatures and raising the global sea level by 4 to 35 inches (9 to 88 cm). Recent estimates suggest an increase in mean sea-surface temperature of only 2oF (1oC) could cause the global destruction of coral reef ecosystems.
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Worldwide, scientists estimate that fishermen discarded about 25 percent of what they caught during the 1980s and the early 1990s, about 60 billion pounds each year.
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Bycatch of albatrosses, petrels, and shearwaters in longline fisheries is one of the greatest threats to seabirds. Bycatch in the Atlantic pelagic longline fishery may be jeopardizing the continued existence of the loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles off the eastern U.S. seaboard
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Fishing gear that drags along or digs into the seafloor destroys habitat needed by marine wildlife, including commercially fished species. Typical trawl fisheries in northern California and New England trawl the same section of sea bottom more than once per year on average. Bottom-dwelling invertebrates can take up to five years or more to recover from one pass of a dredge.
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As of 2001, the government could only assure us that 22 percent of fish stocks under federal management (211 of 959 stocks) were being fished sustainably. Overfishing often removes top predators and can result in dramatic changes in the structure and diversity of marine ecosystems. By 1989, populations of New England cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder had reached historic lows. In U.S. waters, Atlantic halibut are commercially extinct-too rare to justify a directed fishing effort. Populations of some rockfish species on the West Coast have dropped to less than 10 percent of their past levels.
There are many culprits in the assault on the oceans. Advancing technology is one but there are others - an inability to see the damage being caused, a lack of governance mechanisms, and insufficient understanding of a complex and invisible ecosystem. The Pew Commission does give hopeful recommendations to turn the situation around, but if you look at the number of action items it is apparent that the solution will not occur in the near term.
The report, though long, is very accessible, with plenty
of diagrams. Print it off and bring it to the beach this summer.
[Pew Oceans Commission]
Risk Management
The
Precautionary Principle as Societal Panic Attack
"Do you know what fluoridation is Mandrake? Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have had to face" - U.S.A.F. Commander Jack D. Ripper. It may seem amusing now, but 35 years ago, when Dr. Strangelove was filmed, there was genuine concern about lacing the water supply with a known toxin, without telling people about it.
The "precautionary principle" which requires proof that an
innovation would cause no harm would have stopped fluoridation dead in its
tracks. A poll of scientists, conducted by Spiked, lists automobiles,
contraceptives and electricity as other technologies that likely would not have
passed the precautionary test.
[Spiked
List]
Spiked, along with The Royal Institution of Great Britain and TCS Europe ran a conference in May called Panic Attack: Interrogating our Obsession with Risk. The central idea behind the conference is that our preoccupation with eliminating risk has paralyzed us.
Vulnerability has become a defining condition. Within contemporary culture the word 'accident' is being eliminated insofar as possible in legal and public health institutions. The new thinking is that most injuries are preventable, and that calling them 'accidents' is irresponsible. In 2001, the British Medical Journal declared that it had banned the word accident from its pages, arguing that even hurricanes, earthquakes and avalanches are often predictable events that the authorities could warn us to avoid.
Such changes in terminology often reflect new cultural attitudes which contain a full-blown technocratic and bureaucratic hubris. People find it difficult to accept that some injuries cannot be prevented. An injury caused by an accident is an affront to a culture that believes safety is its own reward, and an admission by authorities that it could not have been predicted or prevented. In many ways the public sector accepts this low-risk, cautious, approach. They are, after all, insurers of the last resort. Moreover, the notion that citizens must be protected against everything gives the public sector meaning and a sense of importance that is gratifying to employees. It makes the payment of taxes seem like an acceptable price to pay.
But there are two important implications for the public policy. The first is that the public sector cannot deliver a level of security in which nothing bad every happens to anyone. This will especially be the case in an era of funding limitations. Currently, soldiers are suing the UK Ministry of Defence for failing to prepare them for the horrors of war. Who would have guessed that war is unpleasant? This might seem ridiculous, but it makes sense in a culture that is uncomfortable with misfortune. In Canada, the Ontario government is being sued by victims of the West Nile Virus because the government did not do enough to prevent it. How long before the fire service is sued for failing to tell its workers that fire is hot? The idea that we should be immunized against accidents is reaching pathological proportions. A massive response to mad-cow disease or to terrorism may work if there is only one problem, but will be difficult to orchestrate as smaller, more frequent problems occur within the same time frame.
The second problem for public policy is that the precautionary principle is driven more by emotion (fear of the unknown) than by reason. Thus, if people think cell phones are dangerous, then they are dangerous, until proven otherwise. This means decisions will be based more on public sentiment than on expertise. The result is that public sector expertise becomes irrelevant. We already see this in the idea that decisions about risk should not be left up to "technical experts", or "scientists". The downward spiral is easy to anticipate - once we eliminate the role of experts, we eliminate the possibility of proof, and the precautionary principle grinds innovation to a halt.
This is not to say that there are not dangers, especially with
technology. But the precautionary principle just shifts the onus of guaranteeing
safety on innovators, who already have enough problems and in any event are not
about look for reasons not to proceed. It is a form of passing the buck, the
lazy man's approach to regulation. An alternative approach is "smart regulation"
in which the regulatory framework is constantly adapting to new circumstances in
an active and intelligent way. Expertise matters, and it becomes incumbent on
regulators to invest in expertise. Some of the principles behind smart
regulation have been explored in a book Smart Regulation: Designing
Environmental Policy which is reviewed in the American Political Science
Association.
[APSA
Review].
Computing
Moore's
Law
"The number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months." This famous statement by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore regarding the pace of semiconductor technology has proven fairly accurate. More recently, he said that the cost of a semiconductor manufacturing plant doubles with each generation of microprocessor thus showing that progress has a price. Sooner or later, it is expected that we will reach the limits of circuit density simply because some chip elements are being reduced to atomic dimensions.
But chip density is only one measure of a computer's power.
Another is the switching speed. IBM recently announced it has created the
world's fastest semiconductor circuit, operating at speeds of over 110 Gigahertz
(GHz) and processing an electrical signal in 4.3 trillionths of a second.
[IBM]
Futures
Research
Amara's Law
Roy Amara, past president of The Institute for the Future said, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." The following article demonstrates this law vividly. Written for Popular Mechanics in 1950, it is a forecast of what life would be like in 2000. They get many things right (sort of), but it is the things they miss that are interesting. Crime and pollution-free cities? Regrettably we do not have these. Stopping hurricanes by pouring oil on the ocean then setting it on fire? Thankfully not.
Even the things they get right are still tied to the view of
current technology. For example, their automated factories use vacuum tube
computers with punched tape databases. It is always difficult to see beyond our
frame of reference.
[Popular
Mechanics]
| The Meme Pool is a free newsletter, produced (roughly) weekly by Raymond Bouchard of Drachma-Denarius, a company specializing in applied futures research and strategic planning. If you have received this letter from a colleague and wish to get your own copy, or if you wish to stop receiving it, just send a note to me at [EMAIL PROTECTED]. |
