Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Timber buildings can help to slow global heating February 4th, 2020, by Tim Radford
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/timber-buildings-can-help-to-slow-global-heating/
Tomorrow’s town planners could take a leaf from nature’s book with timber buildings. More than a leaf: the whole tree and all the cuttings as well.
LONDON, 4 February, 2020 − European and US scientists have a root-and-branch answer to the challenge of tomorrow’s cities: switch to wood, construct timber buildings and reduce the risk of even more devastating global temperature rise.
Their reasoning is bold and simple: it takes energy to make steel and cement, which must be mined or quarried, a process that puts the remaining wilderness at risk.
Forests represent stored atmospheric carbon. If timber from the planet’s forests could be used to construct the houses and offices needed for the additional 2.3 billion urban dwellers expected by the year 2050, then that would mean that the great cities could become sinks or repositories of stored carbon.
And new trees could grow in the space left by the harvested timber to add to the world inventory of stored carbon. The new towns and cities could become a kind of bank vault in which to save up to 700 million tonnes of carbon a year that might otherwise have spilled into the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
“Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have been releasing into the atmosphere all of this carbon that had been stored in forests and in the ground,” said Galina Churkina, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.
“We wanted to show that there can be a vision for returning much of this carbon back into the land.”
Strong fire-resistance
Wood is a fuel. It burns well. Paradoxically tree trunks, and treated timber assembled from laminates, do not. Structural timbers may char in a fire, but this has been shown to make them more resistant to burning. Experiment and research has shown that buildings of engineered timber up to 18 stories in height can be resistant to fire.
In effect, atmospheric carbon, turned into high-strength wood fibre by photosynthesis, could be made as safe as reinforced concrete. But, according to a new study in the journal Nature Sustainability, in 2014 the making of cement spilled 1,320 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and steel manufacture added another 1,740 million tonnes.
And between 2005 and 2015, mining in Brazil alone was responsible for 9% of the loss of all Amazon forest land during that decade: the act of prospecting for or extracting mineral commodities destroyed 12 times more than the areas stipulated in the mining leases.
The Potsdam scientists are not the first to suggest wood as an alternative to bricks and mortar, or bamboo as a replacement for cement, steel and glass. But their analysis may be the most detailed so far of a new way to confront the challenge of tomorrow’s climate-tested cities.
The researchers built a series of scenarios to test their hypothesis. New city structures must be built to accommodate an additional million or more humans every week for the next three decades. The proportion now expected to be fashioned from timber is half of 1%.
A five-storey house made from laminated timber could store 180 kilos of carbon a square meter: that is three times the biomass above ground in natural forests. If construction from wood was stepped up to 10%, new construction could store 10 million tonnes of carbon a year; if the world switched to 90% this figure could rise to almost 700 million tonnes.
“Trees offer us a technology of unparalleled perfection,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a co-author of the study and a founder director of the Potsdam Institute.
“They take CO2 out of our atmosphere and smoothly transform it into oxygen for us to breathe and carbon in their trunks for us to use. There’s no safer way of storing carbon I can think of.
“Societies have made good use of wood for buildings for many centuries, yet now the challenge of climate stabilisation calls for a very serious upscaling. If we engineer the wood into modern building materials and smartly manage harvest and construction, we humans can build ourselves a safe home on Earth.” − Climate News Network
Stop Treating Animals as “Invaders” for Simply Trying to Exist
January 31, 2020
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Wild animals around the world are being removed from human communities and killed en masse. What are the animals doing to deserve this punishment?
https://sentientmedia.org/stop-treating-animals-as-invaders-for-simply-trying-to-exist/
Earlier this month, officials in Australia announced plans to shoot and kill thousands of camels. What did the camels do to deserve this punishment? They were looking for water to drink, and this search brought them into human communities.
Last year, U.S. federal and state governments spent tens of millions of dollars on plans to “eradicate” bands of feral pigs. What did the pigs do to deserve this punishment? They were looking for food to eat, and this search, once again, brought them into human communities.
This year, Denver is poised to kill more of its Canada goose population, after slaughtering 1,600 geese last year. What are the geese doing to deserve this punishment? They are merely trying to live—Colorado is part of their historic range—and are seen as a nuisance.
These stories are the tip of the iceberg. While the details vary, the general theme is always the same. When human and nonhuman interests appear to conflict, we use violence, often in the form of organized extermination campaigns, to resolve these apparent conflicts in our favor.
In many cases, we use militaristic, catastrophizing language to justify this violence against other animals. Instead of portraying nonhumans as fellow creatures who are simply trying to exist, we portray them as enemy invaders who are coming to destroy our communities. For example, as The New York Times wrote last month regarding feral pigs: “Ranchers and government officials here are keeping watch on an enemy army gathering to the north, along the border with Canada.”
The idea of invasive species is political as much as scientific. The U.S. federal government, for instance, defines invasive species as “an alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” By this definition, the mere potential to harm economic interests is enough to qualify a non-native species as invasive. Prominent ecologists like Marc Bekoff note that beliefs about the impacts of “invasive species” are value-laden too–especially when these beliefs inform decisions about whether animals live or die.
When we use invasive species rhetoric, we might not intend for our language to contribute to violence against other animals, but it does. This rhetoric creates distance with other animals, erasing them as individuals who matter morally and erasing the reality that humans attack and kill nonhumans much more than the reverse. This rhetoric makes it easier to rationalize killing other animals rather than searching for ways to peacefully co-exist with them.
Invasive species rhetoric is, of course, not the only way that humans create distance from other animals. We also create distance by calling individual animals “it” and by calling violence against certain animals a “cull.” This language is both a product of, and a contributor to, a deeper ideology that prioritizes human interests above all else, an ideology that supports a policy of dispatching with perceived threats to human interests by any means necessary.
According to this human-centric ideology, humans (or, at least some humans) have the right to self-determination. Every other animal is assigned a role based on their value to our species. At one end of the spectrum, domesticated animals are meant to live in captivity and provide humans with benefits ranging from love to food. At the other end, wild animals are meant to live in nature and provide humans with benefits ranging from beauty to ecosystem services. If wild animals play their role, we might let them be. But if they deviate from their human-prescribed role, we respond swiftly and brutally.
Human activity is increasingly leaving other animals without a place to live. Our species is taking over more of the planet, and is also, through human-caused climate change, making more of the planet uninhabitable. It is no coincidence that pigs, camels, geese, and other “invasive” species are desperately searching for food, water, and shelter. While resource scarcity has always been a threat for nonhumans, humans are making these threats worse and creating new ones. We then punish animals for trying to cope with the problems that we create.
What if, instead of assuming that nonhumans are here for us, we accept that they deserve to live their own lives? We can learn to feel inspired rather than threatened by the surprising, creative ways that other animals adapt. Pigs, for example, only exist in the Americas because humans brought them here for food, yet they have proven remarkably resilient. They can survive in many climates, and are adapting to cold weather in Canada and the northern U.S. by learning to burrow into the snow, creating so-called “pigloos.”
Similarly, what if, instead of scapegoating nonhumans for resource scarcity, we accept that humans are primarily responsible? Our focus should be on the human behaviors that are creating these scarcity problems. Camels, for example, only exist in Australia because colonists brought them there to explore the outback. Camels now live in autonomous communities, and humans are blaming—and executing—them for water scarcity. Yet Australian animal agriculture is much more responsible for this problem, along with other environmental problems.
We also need to be thoughtful when assigning responsibility for violence against nonhumans. Our focus should be on the societal structures that create human-nonhuman conflicts and the people in power who work to uphold these structures. In Australia, for instance, the people most responsible for the deaths of the camels are not the Aboriginal communities who approved the “cull”; instead, the people most responsible are the climate change-denying political leaders (and their supporters) who created this predicament.
Many conflicts with other animals can disappear over time if we restructure society to be more inclusive of other species. The more territory and resources that we protect for other animals (for example, by creating parks and reserves), the less that these animals will need to enter “our” communities looking for food, water, or homes. And, the more accommodations that we create for other animals in “our” communities (for instance, by making buildings and roads more animal-friendly), the less conflict there will be among humans and nonhumans co-existing in these spaces.
As we work to build a more just society for humans and nonhumans alike, what should we do about thirsty camels, hungry pigs, and other such animals? We might not, in this deeply imperfect world, be able to treat everyone in the manner they deserve. But we can—and must—envision better ways of living with other animals now. If we can at least discuss perceived conflicts without describing animals as pests and invaders or treating violence as the default solution, then we might be surprised by how humane we can be.
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