Daily Quick Read - September 30, 2019

Free Solar  — Alex Honnold’s New Big Climb

One of the life lessons that can be gleaned from Free Solo, the remarkable documentary of Alex Honnold’s climb of El Capitan, is that Honnold is not a daredevil.  He is a highly organized, extremely patient and focused individual.  His El Cap climb was based on a careful study and rehearsal of each  segment of the climb – an incremental approach designed to minimize the danger and optimize the potential for success. The Honnold Foundation is based on that same patient, incremental approach. And, the passion and energy of Alex himself.

Back in 2010, Honnold was also only two years from another important goal: starting the Honnold Foundation. A nonprofit initially supported solely by Honnold himself, now augmented by funds from sponsors and public donations, his foundation helps fund solar projects all over the world. This year it's on track to raise over $1 million.

"If I've learned one thing from climbing," he says, "it's the power of incremental progress."

Honnold believes many global inequalities stem from access to power. He believes they could be alleviated, at least in part, by solar energy. Some 1.1 billion people -- 14% of the world's population -- don't have access to power. To Honnold, that's a tremendous waste of human potential.

"You drive through these villages [in places like Chad] and you see kids playing around. If those kids were born somewhere else, they could be airline pilots or astronauts. They could do anything," Honnold, 34, tells me. "But the reality is they're going to wind up hurting their entire life. That's just the reality of it. They have no access to education, no access to power, and no real way to change their livelihood.

"The unfairness of that bothers me."

The Design of Zoos

Is the display of “wild” animals in a captive environment beneficial to those species in the actual wild?  Some of the world’s zoos are critical partners and often leaders in the conservation of endangered species, but does that good work balance the forced captivity of other animals?  These are tough questions without easy answers. The architecture of zoos has undergone dramatic changes over the centuries.  Changes that reflect human’s relationship to the animals the zoos contain.

“I was amazed by how little literature and discussion there has been,” says Natascha Meuser, author of a weighty new tome, Zoo Buildings: Construction and Design Manual. Meuser, an architect and professor, aims to redress this balance and provide guidance for future zoos. She began researching the topic a decade ago, when a toy manufacturer asked her to design some typical zoo structures to go with its animal figures, a task less straightforward than she imagined.

“There wasn’t a simple answer,” she says. “But I became fascinated by how the architecture of zoos reflected man’s changing relationship with animals: going from a sense of exoticism and wonder, to better hygiene and animal welfare, to the idea that the architecture should disappear altogether.”

While the book is full of such best-practice models, even the boldest proposals – like the series of islands, each housing creatures from a different continent, surrounded by water and dotted with biospheres imagined for St Petersburg – feel like strange anachronisms, curious relics from a bygone age. As Hancocks has pointed out, zoos’ claims of existing for conservation and education are questionable: the main priority is still the display of charismatic “megafauna” for visitors to gawp at. A growing awareness of captivity-related problems – including malnutrition, repetitive activity “zoochosis” and even cannibalism – has caused a number of zoos around the world to close. It might not be too long before Meuser’s thought-provoking guide finds itself in the history section.

Three Billion Bird  Hype?

Last week’s media blitz regarding the loss of three billion birds in North America since 1970 was, to some, another welcome “wake up” call, but did the often overhyped media coverage overlook some critical subtleties?

The finding received widespread media coverage. “Where Have All the Birds Gone?” a headline in The Seattle Times asked. A piece in Vox wondered whether the trend would end in a “bird apocalypse.” (Not necessarily, the piece conceded.) And the headline on a front-page story in The New York Times declared that “Birds Are Vanishing From North America.” The dramatic opening line of the piece: “The skies are emptying out.”

Researchers affiliated with the Cornell team even managed to land an accompanying op-ed essay in The Times the very same day. “The Crisis for Birds,” the headline opined, “Is a Crisis for Us All.”

The declines were certainly notable, but some ecologists have begun to question whether the calculus undertaken in the paper truly warranted this sort of language, and the ominous future it seemed to suggest. And those concerns have raised further questions among some scientists — and even some reflection among authors of the paper themselves — about how high-stakes research, the constraints of high-profile journal publishing, and sophisticated publicity can sometimes combine to drive a story into the news cycle while eclipsing important uncertainties, and perhaps even delivering an incomplete message to the public.

“I’m Melting!”

European glaciers are melting, too.  On Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, the Planpincieux glacier  is in danger of breaking apart, sending 9 million cubic feet of ice (the equivalent of 67.3 million gallons of water) into the valleys below.  Italian authorities have closed down areas on the Italian side of the mountain as a precaution.

The section of the glacier at imminent risk of collapse is currently at an altitude of 12,500 feet and straddles the border between France, Switzerland and Italy. This entire region is supposed to be a crucial venue for the 2026 winter Olympics, which was just awarded to Italy this year. The French towns impacted by the closure are Saint-Gervais-les-Bains and Chamonix in France, where the first-ever Winter Olympics were held.

The dire situation comes as world leaders met in New York for a Climate Action Summit this week. Italy’s prime minister Giuseppe Conte, who attended the summit, said Wednesday that the Mont Blanc disaster is a call to action. “The news that part of Mont Blanc risks collapsing is a warning that should not leave us indifferent,” he said through his spokesman from New York. “It must shake us all and force us to mobilize.”

Getting Gas Out of “The City”

Not to be outdone by those Berkeley hippies, San Francisco supervisors are proposing to require all-electric appliances in all new construction in “The City” effective January 2020.  In July, Berkeley became the first city in the country to ban natural gas in new construction in that city. Natural gas accounts for 27% of Berkeley’s greenhouse gas emissions – about  average for US cities.

The measure would, if approved, require all-electric appliances in construction after Jan. 1, 2020. It also would offer incentives to owners of existing buildings who convert natural gas systems to electric ones.

The announcement by San Francisco District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman and District 5 Supervisor Vallie Brown echoes a recent proposal in the city of San Jose, and the first-in-the-country measure in Berkeley in July that bans the use of natural gas in all new construction.

Original story, July 29: To reach its ambitious climate change goals, California will have to entice homeowners to electrify everything. The state is trying to become carbon neutral by 2045 and around a quarter of the state’s emissions come from energy used by buildings.