Dead zones

I don’t want to stay on this downer too long or I’ll start to attract a disturbing flock of readers, but I do want to take a stab at Dan’s question about what sorts of sink scarcity have us in trouble. Here’s just one example from this morning’s paper (Raleigh News and Observer, p.4A; the source is AP, to whom I will not link due to their peculiar ideas about intellectual property on the ‘nets, so I have typed in this quotation myself in old-fashioned fair-use style, for purely educational purposes of course; AP is reporting on today’s issue of Science, who I doubt they’ve paid for the privilege):

Sea life strained as ocean chokes: Like a chronic disease spreading through the body, ‘dead zones’ with too little oxygen for life are expanding in the world’s oceans. … Pollution-fed algae, which deprive other marine life of oxygen, are the cause of most of the world’s dead zones [about 400]. Scientists mainly blame fertilizer and other farm runoff, sewage and the burning of fossil fuels.

This is actually old news as a general trend; the study in question is part of the ordinary scientific process of adding precision and robustness (note I did not say certainty, which science as an empiricism does not claim to offer).

The problem is not just the fact and scale of dead zones, but their ability to create tipping thresholds in dynamic ecological systems. When things are in dynamic balance (not equilibrium but ‘metastability’) as ecosystems are, change effects are not additive but chaotic. So you can roll a boulder along, sometimes for quite a way, but once you get to the cliff that n+1 bit of push is going to change things pretty dramatically and irreversibly.

The problem, of course, is that the world’s very, very large population has been made possible by the sort of high-intensity farming practices that dump large amounts of fertilizer into waterways; and that population generates lots of organic waste as a natural entropic throughput of converting the food the fertilizer grows into energy; and the waste has to go somewhere, so yet more algae food in the water. (Or you can dry and burn the poo, which gets us into the energy economy and global warming, as does the methane from the poo before you burn it or dump it.)

In the article linked in the last post Daly talks about charging ‘sink rents’ (payments to use global waste-absorbtive capacity) and wonders if OPEC might be in a good position to charge and enforce them with respect to petroleum use. I’m not sure how sink rents would work to discipline human organic waste, although I suppose we could imagine some pretty creative corking technologies being developed. I’m just sayin’.

Update: Thanks to Profacero for a fascinating reflection on various aspects of life in Lima, Peru including this arresting analysis:

Is Lima, then, a viable place to live? In the long term, no, because the smog and traffic will only worsen and with any small problem the city will run out of drinking water – studies have been done which show why. People do not realize this. A minister of the government recently announced that people in the country would just have to migrate to cities so as to have access to potable water (the streams and rivers having been polluted by mining and other activities), because the country cannot afford to put a source of potable water in each town. There are numerous problems with his statement but one of them is that concentration of people in cities is not a solution to the water problem.

It sure isn’t! Certainly not for the folks downstream, poo problem again, and certainly not when the drinking water runs out. Across the ocean Sydney, Australia is also in peril of running out of water due to overpopulation, pollution and climate change. No worries, mate, they’ll just ship it in from Tasmania.