Can We Treat The Oceans’ Tummy Aches With Antacids–And Help Slow Global Warming?:
Since the advent of the industrial age, the oceans have absorbed about one-third of humanity’s heat-trapping carbon emissions. Were it not for that immense buffer, the planet would be substantially warmer and more tempestuous than it is today. As carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean, however, it reacts with seawater to form carbonic acid, which disrupts the ocean’s chemical balance and reduces its capacity to absorb more carbon. Prolonged acidification will severely threaten marine ecosystems and fisheries on which more than one billion people depend.
To counteract these effects, scientists have proposed a type of geoengineering known as ocean alkalinity enhancement, which essentially involves concocting antacids for the sea. Modifying the planet’s chemistry in this way allows more carbon to flow from the atmosphere to the ocean, where it can be stored for thousands of years. Experts emphasize that such mediation would be entirely ineffectual without first slashing greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet they also agree that emissions reductions alone are no longer sufficient to prevent the planet from warming two degrees Celsius above the preindustrial base line, at which point extreme weather, sea-ice decline, species loss and crop failures would be anywhere from two to 10 times as bad as they are now and at which tens of millions more people would be subjected to severe heat, flooding and water scarcity. Given that the oceans cover more than 70 percent of the planet’s surface and are fundamental to climate regulation, it seems inevitable that they will be part of these supplemental efforts.
A ‘Ghost Forest’ Reemerges In Florida? No, this is not a story about the latest ICE prison. Although…:
On New Year’s morning, Captain Erika Ritter wakes before dawn in the cabin on Florida’s Ocklawaha River her grandfather built in 1937 out of pine logs and cypress timber from the nearby swamp. She operates river tours aboard her pontoon boat, “The Anhinga Spirit,” and has to prepare for back-to-back charters.
Ritter’s passengers usually opt for trips upriver to see what’s left of the wild Ocklawaha, a spring-fed stretch that winds through canopy forests with sidelong palm trees and sleeping alligators. But ever since fall, she’s been busy showing them a part of Florida hidden for the past sixty years: The miles of river drowned in 1968 for a federal project called the Cross Florida Barge Canal.
Every five years or so, Florida’s state Department of Environmental Protection draws down the 9,500-acre Rodman Reservoir that flooded the Ocklawaha. The drawdown breaks up matted aquatic plants to improve navigation. In October, dam-keepers opened the metal gates to begin releasing impounded water into the northward flowing St. Johns River.
As the water dropped, a ghost forest began to emerge: First the jagged tips of bald cypress and swamp tupelo that had hung on the longest, and then their hollowed trunks. By winter, thousands of petrified trees, snapped off at 10 to 12 feet, stood like bleached bones in the dark reservoir. Once a hardwood swamp with oaks and elms, red maples and palms, now totems to a drowned past.
Along the historic river channel, two of the estimated 20 freshwater springs lost to the reservoir began to bubble to the surface from the ancient aquifer below. Tobacco Patch Springs came to life as a turquoise shaft of light in a brown patch of mud. Cannon Springs emerged on its forested bank like a blue-crystalline lens, offering a view of what a restored Ocklawaha might one day look like.
The Ocklawaha rises from lakes in central Florida and winds north for 74 miles. It traverses the Ocala National Forest and connects with the spring-fed Silver River before curving east to join the state’s largest river, the St. Johns, near the city of Palatka.
The river is one of the oldest continuously flowing in Florida, older than the St. Johns. Paleoindians likely spent time on its banks at least 12,000 years ago. The riverbed turns up their flint spear points and other stone tools, along with the elongated tusks and teeth of mastodons, mammoths, and saber-tooth tigers. The region’s hundreds of artesian springs, including one of the world’s largest at nearby Silver Springs, became hubs of sustenance and culture for early Floridians.
George Saunders is my favorite writer. He has a new novel coming out. That means–interviews:
“Yeah, well, there’s a guy who, he’s one of these climate-change-denial architects who’s now in the last night of his life. And his name is KJ Boone. And he’s got a couple of ghosts, many ghosts, who come to see him. And one of them is the ghost of this woman, Jill. And she died at 22 and 1976. And her idea about things, because of an experience she had at death, is that nobody is to blame. Nobody should take credit. We’re just these vessels that live out karma. And therefore, the only thing to do is to be kind and comfort one another. That’s her view. There’s a Frenchman who died in the 1800s whose view is not that. He’s a kind of vengeful presence. So those two throughout the book are going back and forth over how to approach this sinner in the bed. And so those are the two viewpoints I kept trying to refine.”
I highly recommend you listen to the interview as opposed to reading the transcript.
The Mormons’ ‘Recalcitrant’ Support Of Immigration:
This unusual sequence of events—a hometown senator bringing forth an immigration enforcement provision that is defeated so roundly it kills the program for years—is emblematic of the contradictions of Salt Lake’s unique, even bizarre, political culture around immigration. A mix of genuine ideological affinity for the idea of the refugee, fostered by the Mormon church, and a cultural tendency toward minding one’s business has engendered a sort of recalcitrant support for immigration. This attitude developed largely on its own, parallel to a mainstream conservative approach that has diverged toward a totalizing xenophobic revulsion, first focused on the undocumented and eventually spreading to foreign students, workers, and humanitarian immigrants.
When filmmaker David Lynch moved to Philadelphia in 1965 to attend the erstwhile Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, he was instantly moved by the city. Though not exactly charmed.
The city’s crime, corruption, and urban blight impressed themselves on the young artist’s mind and lent to his uncanny vision combining the sinister and the absurd. The Twin Peaks creator, however, only spent a short time living in the city.
By 1970, he had decamped to Los Angeles to study at the American Film Institute and work on his first feature, the cult classic Eraserhead.
But Lynch’s relatively abridged tenure as a Philadelphian has had an outsized impact. Consider him the Terrell Owens of Philly weirdo transplant artists.
In the year since his passing, retrospectives of his films have dominated programming at Philadelphia rep cinemas and art houses, Callowhill (where Lynch used to live and work) got a makeover as “Eraserhood,” and the neighborhood’s Love City Brewing’s hazy “Eraserhood IPA” grew in popularity.
Now, a new podcast is digging deeper into Lynch’s influence on Philadelphia, exploring the extent to which the city impressed itself upon his life and work — from PAFA to Hollywood to the soapy subterfuges of the Twin Peaks universe.
Let’s close with one of David Lynch’s favorite songs. Sounds ‘Lynchian’ to me:
