The Sun on Earth
Cadarache:In the dusty highlands of Provence in southern France, workers have excavated a vast rectangular pit 17 metres down into the unforgiving rocks. From my raised vantage point, I can see bright yellow mechanical diggers and trucks buzzing busily around the edge of the pit, toy-like in the huge construction site. Above us, the fireball Sun dries the air at an unrelenting 37°C.
Diggers excavate the construction site
These are embryonic stages to what is perhaps humankind’s most ambitious project: to replicate the Sun here on Earth. Read more…
Requiem for a tortoise
I met Lonesome George a couple of years ago in his enclosure on the main Galapagos island of Santa Cruz. The craggy giant was a ‘living fossil’, the last of his sub-species and a a poignant relic from a pre-human time. Because, sadly, wherever humans go around this planet, we leave in our wake the skeletons of once mighty animals.
With a giant tortoise on the Santa Cruz highlands
Giant tortoises, like giant birds, giant sloths, giant kangaroos… there used to be such creatures and large numbers of them. Then humans found them and one by one, most of the world’s megafauna has been wiped out. The giant tortoises of the Galapagos are being protected – belatedly. There are breeding programmes and various attempts to repopulate the islands with near-extinct subspecies. They tried to mate George with closely related subspecies of tortoise – for what? To enable part of his DNA to persist, I suppose, in an enclosure or perhaps back on the island of Pinta where his clan once lived. Anyway, it was unsuccessful. George was uninterested, perhaps infertile, perhaps gay? So he died at 100-years-young, middle age for a giant tortoise, and the last of his type. No doubt there will be talk of trying to clone him.
Wallowing: giant tortoises like to take the weight off
Although George was already a living fossil and kept as a museum piece in his enclosure, in walks across the islands I encountered several other giant tortoises roaming free. So, in our changed, human-centric world, we have decided to keep a place for these giants, and it makes me very happy. They are incredible animals: huge, heavy ancient reptiles that wallow in the mud, graze, fart and poo green pats like cows, carry their houses on their backs and regard you with the expression only otherwise seen on very old men. They are also iconic animals, made famous by Charles Darwin, and the focus of a very lucrative tourist industry.
The future: baby tortoises at a breeding centre
So as another species bites the dust – the extinction rate in the Anthropocene is 1000 times the natural rate – there’s an excellent chance that tortoises born on the islands’ breeding centres will still be around in a couple of hundred years.
RIP Lonesome George (here’s a piece by his biographer and my pal Henry Nicholls).
Two tribes go to Rio
London: Delegates from around the world gathering in Rio de Janeiro ahead of next week’s Earth summit, have few reasons for optimism. Twenty years have passed since the original summit in the same city produced a raft of environmental management treaties and declarations including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the basis for governments attempts to curb global warming gases.
The wealthy part of Rio as seen from a slum (favela)
In the past two decades, almost all environmental problems targeted by the summit have worsened rather than improved. Indeed progress on addressing the most critical global challenges, such as climate change, has reached a farcical level Read more…
Future city
Tianjin: It takes less than an hour on the new high-speed train line to travel the 150 km from Beijing to Tanggu, the dirty coastal port town of nearby Tianjin, China’s third biggest city, where Europeans stopped long enough, a century ago, to leave fine colonial architecture among the gleaming modern high-rises. I am driving a few minutes up the coast from Tanggu, the world’s fifth biggest port, to see what’s billed as the city of the future – a place so new that most of it is still being built.
A scale model of the city – notice the unusual amount of green space
Few things can be certain about the future, as philosophers wiser than I have pointed out, but one trend that’s likely to continue is urbanisation. The Anthropocene will be peopled by city dwellers, in contrast to the rural demography of the past millennia. Nowhere will this be felt more keenly than in China, home to more than 1.3 billion people, more than half of whom now live in cities (as of the end of 2011) – an urban population that at 690 million is double the entire US population. By 2030, 75% of Chinese will live in cities; fifty years earlier, in 1980, less than 20% did.
While the government is encouraging urbanisation, most people are moving to improve their prospects – salaries are at least double in cities, and there are far more employment opportunities, especially for those whose rural situation has been made intolerable by pollution, drought, industrial encroachment or compulsory purchase for urban development. Read more…
Shanghai Express
Shanghai: At the mouth of the mighty Yangtze, halfway between Beijing and Hong Hong is China’s biggest city – indeed the world’s biggest by population (if suburbs are excluded). Yet Shanghai is (literally) a breath of fresh air after Beijing. It feels less crowded, the traffic is more considerate and the roads are a more manageable width, it’s warmer and wetter – a relief from the dry acrid chill – and it’s far, far prettier.
The 16th century old Shanghai
Glittering 21st century Shanghai
Oriental arrival
Beijing:“May you live in interesting times,” the Chinese curse goes. Times are certainly interesting right now in this land of superlatives. The speed of change is phenomenal. The rate of construction, economic growth, infrastructure, urbanisation, manufacture, production and resource use has rocketed. It’s an exciting time to be here, perhaps like being in Britain 150 years ago during the industrial revolution, only the pace is so much greater.
Old meets new in Beijing
The capital city, unremittingly ugly, shoots up in blasts of loud, dirty construction under a tobacco-stained fug of sky. Flat, with grey upon grey of concrete and those peculiarly ugly shades of glass that architects choose for hi-rises, interrupted only by the brightness of advertising billboards and the colourful luxury items they display, it’s perhaps not surprising that China is becoming a nation of aspirational shoppers. Materialism has replaced idealism as in so many other places, but here in a supposedly communist state, the resulting blatant social inequality makes for a particularly uncomfortable political setting.
Mahjong players
- Mahjong in action
Not that it seems to be impacting the popularity of China’s one-party state, according to the Chinese I ask. So long as economic development continues apace, Read more…
Planetary boundaries or opportunities?
London: In the morning, I leave my house in the inner-London borough of Lewisham (‘Levesham‘ is the Saxon for ‘dwelling in the meadows’) and walk over the covered river Quaggy (from ‘quagmire’ or watery bog’) to cross the busy main road of Loampit Vale (‘good soils digging spot in a wide river valley’). Only the names bear any sign of this once rural area. Brick factories carved up the sides of Loampit Vale in the 1800s. My bog-standard Victorian terrace was built in the 1880s out of bricks cut from the hill on which it stands.
One hundred years later, another huge building transformation was underway. I take the Docklands Light Railway, a once-futuristic fully automated driverless train, remembering the excitement of my first journey on it 25 years ago. The boxy 80s designed cars take us into another utterly transformed landscape – within my lifetime – whose former use is also knowable only through the signs: West India Quay, Custom House…
Planet Under Pressure panel of scientists
The Planet Under Pressure conference this week in London’s glass and steel towered Docklands recognises that Earth has undergone a dramatic and recent change, and that humans are now the dominant biophysical force across the planet. We’re now in the Anthropocene rather than the Holocene. Read more…
