It’s rare to hear our planetary environmental issues talked about in celestial terms. But the other night in the countryside north of Quebec City – an early snow falling outside – I heard French Canadian Hubert Reeves take our future into deep space. The Montreal-born astrophysicist is a fixture on television and stages in his adopted hometown of Paris and environmental conferences around the world, in which he attempts to explain complex science to a popular audience. This night the so-called “poet of the stars” illustrated with one image just how big – or small – our problems here on Earth really are. Projecting just a solitary photo of our galaxy, with Earth just a pin-point among millions of other stars and planets, the Einstein-haired, one-time NASA adviser (whose PhD thesis was titled “Thermonuclear Reaction Involving Medium Light Nuclie”) paints a not-so-pretty future for our blue orb.
Planet Earth, just a tiny dot on the far left
“Imagine two planets meet. One is grey and white, denuded of life. The other is blue and green and vibrant. Blue Planet asks Denuded Planet what’s wrong?”
“I’ve been sick, suffering from Human-itis. As you can see, it has nearly killed me. My atmosphere is polluted, land destroyed,” says Denuded. Blue Planet responds reassuringly. “Don’t worry. I know that disease. It doesn’t last long and once its gone, you’ll recover quickly.”
Using statistics on energy use (the oil on this planet took hundreds of millions of years to create and we’ve managed to use half of it in just one century) and man’s rapacious consumption of natural resources Reeves laid out a not particularly bright future. “In thirty years – so, your children live to see it – we will know the results of how we’ve treated the planet. It could be a very dark future.”
Asked whether he was optimistic or pessimistic about this planet’s future he paraphrased a French politician who helped orchestrate the rebuilding of post-war France and Germany. “He was asked the same question and said, ‘Neither. I’m determined.”
“That’s what we have to be in regard to the environment,” said Reeves. “Determined. We must try to make changes, to fix the mess we’ve made. We can’t give up. In regard to climate change, for example, some of the things being talked about and worked on will be successful. Some will not. But we must try. Saying things are ‘impossible’ to change means we have given up.”
Astrophysicist Hubert Reeves
With fish darting amongst them in a blue lagoon, the Maldivian president and his cabinet staged an elaborate stunt to publicize climate change. Billed as the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting, President Mohamed Nasheed and 11 ministers, decked in scuba gear, held a meeting thirteen feet underwater.
While officials said the event itself was light-hearted, the idea is to focus on the plight of the Maldives, where rising sea levels threaten to make the nation uninhabitable by the end of the century. Reported by the BBC’s Olivia Lang, the event reminded the world that Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected president, has become an important global voice for climate change since he won in polls last October.
“We have to get the message across through a course of action which resonates with ordinary people,” the president said, as the boat neared our destination. “What we are trying to tell the people is that we hope there is a better deal at Copenhagen.”
The presidential speedboat took 20 minutes to arrive in the turquoise lagoon off Girifushi, in North Male atoll. The cabinet – minus two members, who begged off citing health concerns – then zipped themselves into diving suits and donned goggles and tanks of compressed air before jumping in the water.
Major Ahmed Ghiyaz, the co-ordinator from the Maldivian National Defence Force (MNDF), said all measures had been taken to protect the president, which included checking the coral for dangerous creatures.
“I am 99.9% sure there will be no harmful creatures,” he told the BBC before the dive. “I’m sure there won’t be any sharks. The nastiest thing would be a moray eel, but we have checked the reef”.
A horseshoe-shaped table was set up around a dark green coral reef with blue tips and home to an array of sea creatures in one of the world’s most famed diving spots.
The president and his team took their seats at 10 a.m. at the bottom of the lagoon, sitting at desks with name tags while colorful parrot fish and black and white damsel fish darted around them. Using hand signals to gesture that they were OK, ministers then passed round an “SOS” to be signed – an agreement calling for carbon emission cuts.
“We must unite in a global effort to halt further temperature rises,” the message reads.
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Mohamed Nasheed
President of the Maldives
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“Climate change is happening and it threatens the rights and security of everyone on Earth.”
Meanwhile, a handful of journalists kitted out in snorkel gear and swimming around on the surface tried to get a glimpse of the action below.
Emerging out of the water, a dripping President Nasheed removed his mask to answer questions from reporters and photographers crowded around on the shore.
“We are trying to send a message to the world about what is happening and what would happen to the Maldives if climate change isn’t checked,” he said, bobbing around in the water with his team of ministers.
“If the Maldives is not saved, today we do not feel there is much chance for the rest of the world.”
After the dive, the president told the BBC he had seen a stingray swim nearby during the meeting. “There was a sergeant fish that was particularly interested in what was going on,” he said during a typically Maldivian lunch of fish curry and coconut juice.
“I’ve never been worried about reef sharks and I’ve been diving for a long time,” the 42-year-old added. He says other Maldivians had heard about the event and wanted to get involved in some way. On the island of Kuda Huvadhoo, some islanders reportedly created a sealed box and put their TV in it so they could watch the footage of the meeting underwater.
“They told me, ‘if the president is under water, then they want to be too’,” Nasheed said.
But he was keen to push the need for action.
The 1,192-island chain is at severe threat from rising sea levels, with 80 percent of its islands less than a metre above sea level. “What do we hope to achieve? We hope not to die. I hope I can live in the Maldives and raise my grandchildren here,” says Nasheed.
Chris Rasch is attempting to build a temporary island out of an unremarkable pile of plywood, rope, and empty barrels that once held 50 gallons of maraschino cherries each. Construction of this man-made island on the Sacramento River delta in California is running something like 24 hours behind schedule, but by the end of the second day, Rasch and a few dozen like-minded souls have finished enough of the project to relax over a dinner of kabobs, chili and curry served aboard their mostly finished homestead.
The result may look a bit ramshackle, complete with a pirate flag flying from a mast that was a spare piece of lumber, but the roughly 125 people who gathered here earlier this month believe it represents the first step toward conquering humanity’s next frontier: the colonization of the world’s oceans.
“A lot of people interested in seasteading have never been on the water before,” says Rasch, a 37-year old programmer whose day job is a programmer for Marketocracy in San Mateo, Calif. “They don’t know what the problems are. They don’t know what it’s actually like. Having events that are in a safe environment where they get some experience — where if anything goes wrong they can easily recover — is a good thing.”
Call it a blueprint for sea-cession. Supporters of the Seasteading Institute, a Palo Alto, Calif.,-based non-profit group that organized the three-day floating event, predict there will be enough interest in “seasteads” — permanent dwellings on the high seas outside the territorial waters claimed by the world’s governments — to make them viable in a decade or so.
That makes the hand-built contraptions that dotted the Sacramento delta this month an intentional prototype of a permanent presence on the high seas, perhaps in the same way that Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight and the Apollo program eventually led to the creation of the International Space Station and tourist voyages like the one recently taken by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté.
The laissez-faire vision of a kind of floating Hong Kong is what led the libertarian-leaning Peter Thiel to chip in $500,000 to launch the Seasteading Institute. “We may have reached the stage at which it is economically feasible, or where it soon will be feasible,” Thiel wrote in an essay for the Cato Institute. “It is a realistic risk, and for this reason I eagerly support this initiative.” (Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal, appeared on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans last year but, after losses at his Clarium Capital fund, dropped off the list for 2009. He also is an investor in Facebook.)
“I think seasteading, long term, will create a place where people can go to and be much more free than what we have now,” Rasch says. “The two freedoms that particularly drive me are the freedom to move — to immigrate — and the freedom to innovate, especially medical innovation. I think a lot of new scientific advances are stifled in the United States because getting a new drug or medical device approved can be in the range of half a billion dollars.”
As any undergraduate political science major can attest, wildly different political structures are entertaining discussion topics. But the practical challenges of engineering a seastead are formidable: Even hostile environments on land don’t need to weather the full brunt of typhoons and prepare for the possibility of sinking into the deep. And fresh water and arable soil aren’t readily available on the high seas.
A two-day conference that the Seasteading Institute held in San Francisco before the expedition to the delta (which they dubbed “Ephemerisle”) wrestled with questions about business models, engineering, hydroponic gardening and whether the first ocean ‘stead should be a refurbished cargo ship, a modified cruise ship or a floating platform designed from the start for long-term human habitation.
Mikolaj Habryn, who works as an engineer at Google as a day job, suggested the cruise ship option, estimating that a 381-foot ship could sleep 500 passengers in 231 cabins and cost $8.5 million. A 470-foot vessel with 420 cabins would be closer to $11 million, he said.
Na’ama Moran, an Israeli entrepreneur who previously founded a mobile startup, was looking for investors to fund a medical tourism venture that would begin with a refitted cruise ship and offer cosmetic, orthopedic, dental and other procedures for much less than U.S. health care providers would charge. The idea, Moran said, is to pick up medical tourists from American cities and “couple medical treatment with a cruise vacation” outside any nation’s territorial waters.
Patri Friedman, the executive director of the Seasteading Institute and grandson of the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, was unabashedly optimistic: he envisions creating the world’s first independent ocean settlement by 2015, with at least 50 full-time residents and a living area the size of a football field. The first task, he said, was to figure out where on the world’s oceans would be the most suitable place. “Based on the specific location we’ll create the engineering design,” Friedman said, while simultaneously looking for funding as a for-profit venture.
Some location possibilities: the Mediterranean Sea, where a seastead could benefit from the proximity to wealthy European nations and relatively clement weather. Or a seastead could ply the waters of the Caribbean, which is near the United States market but experiences an annual hurricane season. (Wave height is a crucial concern because the energy of a wave increases exponentially as its height grows. Pacific Ocean waves regularly reach 30 feet, while in the more sheltered Baltic Sea they’re closer to six feet.)
History, of course, is littered with corpses of similar projects that failed. There was Marshall Savage‘s Aquarius Project, which wanted to start by colonizing the ocean surface and then move to the stars.
A Las Vegas real estate tycoon behind the Republic of Minerva wanted to create a no-tax utopian society by reclaiming land on a Pacific atoll; alas, the colonists were given the boot by a few troops from the island-nation of Tonga. The free-marketeers behind Laissez-Faire City who wanted to create the next Hong Kong were never able to find a sympathetic government to lease them land.
Engineer Norman Nixon has been trying for years to find investors for a so-called Freedom Ship, which would be a colossal project three times longer than any existing ship with twenty-five stories above the waterline and a fully-functioning airport. Nixon acknowledged in a bizarre post last July that the project was on indefinite hold because his business partner “turned over our entire bank account to a man who promised him a ‘Peruvian Gold certificate’ worth a billion dollars.”
These are all cautionary tales for the current crop of seasteaders, who are sufficiently aware of their predecessors’ failings that they’ve drafted a critical history of the movement as part of a larger Internet-published book. Friedman believes that the solution is for a permanent colony to grow gradually, and expects that annual temporary festivals will evolve into a full-time presence on the water. In a year or two, he’d like to see the festival floating on the waters of the San Francisco Bay.
Which might explain the eclectic group of ‘steaders who gathered for the first Ephemerisle: the suburban crowd who rented houseboats and talked politics, and the artists who created a remote-controlled glowing squid and illuminated water lillies. Then there were the Burning Man types, including Burning Man board member and onetime Fairchild Semiconductor employee “Danger Ranger”, who labored for days constructing floating platforms that could be used as a communal social space.
“The consensus is that next year we’ll do it again in the delta,” says Rasch, who helped to build the floating platform. “Some people, like me, were attracted to the political aspects. Other people were attracted because they like building things on the water, or solving technical challenges. There’s virtue in the camaraderie you get when you build an art project or a platform. The platforms we’re building aren’t appropriate for the open ocean, but the friendships will survive.” DECLAN MCCULLAGH, CBS NEWS (Declan@cbsnews.com)
Since a 2003 swim in a fish farm net in the Adriatic Sea with ninety-three, 500-600 pound blue fin tuna … I’ve been slightly obsessed with the lifespan and future of the big fish. Once a voracious fan of lightly seared tuna on the grill and anything tuna in my sushi, I’m off the blue fin for a half-year now. Why? Because my voraciousness has been matched around the world by millions – especially in seafood hungry Japan – putting the big tuna at great risk. The World Wildlife Fund predicts at our current rate of rapacious consumption, the world’s blue fin will be gone by 2012.
To that end, we took video cameras to Tokyo in May for a firsthand look at its Tsukiji market – the biggest seafood market in the world (65,000 employees, $5.5 billion a year, more than 400 species of fish sold six days a week – especially its twice-daily blue fin auction. The tuna, frozen, with their tails cut off to provide closer inspection of its oil and fat content (lots of both is best), go for tens of thousands of dollars each. We talked with fish mongers about the future of blue fin, and all the fish in the sea in general, and they were occasionally painfully honest (“I think we may see the last fish caught”) but more typically deluded (“The problem for tuna is not man, but the whales which eat them!”).
Japanese consume thirty percent of the world’s seafood and in that sashimi-loving nation blue fin are known as “black gold.” Now it appears that even in Japan tuna lovers are starting to realize that blue fin may soon be a thing of the past. A Times report tells the story of the northern fishing town of Oma, where ten, twenty years ago small fishing boats would routinely catch three or four wild tuna a day. Now the town’s fleet of thirty to forty boats is lucky to catch a half-dozen among them on a good day.
“The problem,” – report the fishermen – is that all the fish are being taken by big trawlers that come from elsewhere in Japan, or farther out to sea from Taiwan or Japan. Some of these ships even use helicopters to spot schools of tuna, which they scoop up in vast nets or catch en masse with long lines of baited hooks.” The bottom line is that fishing is no longer about luck and increasingly about high technology. Fish finders, GPS, satellite communication win out over local knowledge or fish sense. That the local Japanese fishermen are growing increasingly frustrated with their own government for not stepping in with limits on who can catch, how much and with what tools is ironic since the same kind of industrial fishing has essentially depleted previously rich blue fin grounds like the Mediterranean and the east coast of the United States.
In Oma, things are even worse than the fishermen’s catch being down. Scarcity has driven up the price of blue fin to such a degree that locals can no longer afford their favorite sashimi.
I’ve spent many weeks along the coast of Vietnam and have a variety of friends who live and work along its low-lying shore so last week when Typhoon Ketsana whacked its beaches and jungles with one hundred mile an hour winds, heavy rains, mudslides and flooding, killing more than one hundred sixty people.
I heard from several living in the center of the country: “The airports in Danang and Hue are closed … both cities are flooded and without power … weather forecasters are predicting more heavy rain later this week … we will keep you updated.” In Vietnam the storm wiped out nearly 200,000 homes and ruined both crops and irrigation systems, leaving some of its largest cities roiled in waist-deep, murky brown waters for days. It could have been worse: More than 246 were killed in the Philippines, where 2.3 million were left homeless.
Storms happen, of course. But in recent years Vietnam has experienced more frequent and powerful typhoons and floods than ever before. The most destructive storm along its coast was 1999, which left 750 people dead or missing.
I’m often asked about the ‘real’ impacts of a changing global climate and I think these more ‘frequent and powerful’ storms are one of the most serious examples. Coincidentally, five days before Typhoon Ketsana slammed Vietnam, Seth Mydans had written a long story in the Times about the long-term potential damage to Vietnam’s coast by rising seas. He quoted a government report suggesting that 17 million people could lose their homes if sea levels rise as anticipated. “Climate experts consider this nation of an estimated 87 million people to be among the half-dozen most threatened by the weather disruptions and rising sea levels linked to climate change that are predicted in the course of this century.”
Unfortunately I think we’ll have to get used to seeing these images of low-lying coastlines around the world flooded, suffering from stronger and stronger storms, whether it’s Danang or Manila, New Orleans or New York City. One friend from Hue wrote: “I spent the day dragging everything in my house up to the roof to dry it in the sun, which has arrived after three days. Luckily I still have a house. Everyone here is worried about … next time.”
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