Must failure be the only learning experience?

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
― Otto von Bismarck

A relatively short story appeared in the LA Times this week following the magnitude 6.0 earthquake that rocked Northern California this past weekend. It has two items of note in it: First, that several property owners in Napa still had not completed retrofit work to improve the resiliency of their buildings in the event of an earthquake (missing a 2009 deadline), and second, that it took the city government until 2006 to pass an ordinance about this. What remains uninteresting, because it is so expected, is that the government did not have the resources to enforce the requirement, and that property owners ignored it.

As a civilization, and maybe even a species, it takes acts of great catastrophe to move us to action, even in the face of the most common sense issues. In Chicago, we needed young people to die before the City would establish and enforce structural standards for attached porches. It took an otherwise relatively easy-to-contain fire in a high-rise building that did not have sprinklers to finally push the City and State to end the grandfathering of buildings and force all high-rise building owners to install sprinklers. The city of West, Texas experienced tragedy and death when a poorly-regulated fertilizer factory exploded...with the double impact that zoning officials had allowed a school, a nursing home, and a 50-unit apartment building to sit adjacent to the factory.

We do incredibly stupid things.

Even though we know smoking is horrible for our health, almost four decades after getting confirmation from health professionals, and three decades after finding out those who sold them to us knew it. It often takes a heart attack before a person considers the necessary life-altering changes to remain healthy (and even then, it does not always work). Even when we completely understand the risks, and know something can harm or kill us, we still do not always make the right choice...heaven help us when we either do not have the facts or ignore them.

We have seen macro and micro-scale incidents over the last decade that should bring us to put an as-immediate-as-possible end to the use of fossil fuels. From the Deepwater Horizons oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the increasing frequency of heavy-oil-laden railcar crashes to the withdrawal of water for bottling from drought-plagued areas to the increasingly costly weather events linked to the changing climate...do we really need more or greater catastrophe to convince us that we need a complete change in our relationship with energy? Especially when we have the knowledge, capacity, and even the economic ability to make these changes happen, there really is no excuse.

Except of course, that we are human.

Friday Five: July 4, 2014

For decades, we have been told that burning fuels was safe (proven wrong), that transporting fuels is safe (proven wrong), that mining was safe (proven wrong), and most recently, that fracking was totally safe...every year we get more and more evidence that it is not.
Study shows how drilling wastewater causes quakes
"Combined, those wells daily pour more than 5 million gallons of water a mile or two underground into rock formations, the study found. That buildup of fluid creates more pressure that 'has to go somewhere,' said study lead author Cornell University seismologist Katie Keranen.
Researchers originally figured the water diffused through underground rocks slowly. But instead, it is moving faster and farther and triggers quake fault lines that already were likely ready to move, she said."

We do know that mining, transporting, processing, and burning carbon causes significant cost to our health and our economy.  It is about time that we force industry to accurately project those costs when developing or renewing projects.
One judge’s smackdown of a Colorado coal mine could help fight carbon projects everywhere
"This kind of bold decision will ultimately get appealed, appealed again, and maybe overruled. It establishes a precedent, but whether it’s the kind of precedent other judges will believe in remains to be seen. For now, the big winner in this – other than the conservation groups that first filed the suit and the people who like to hike, graze, and shoot things in the Sunset Wilderness Area — is the legal concept of a social cost of carbon protocol itself. It’s already getting a lot more attention than something with that long and boring of a name can reasonably expect to get — and that’s a good sign."

Kudos to the Unitarians for taking steps to divest from fossil fuels, but retaining enough interest to be active shareholders.  Even better, their divestment will be better for their financial interests.
At Unitarian Universalist assembly, a vote to divest from fossil fuels
"About 2.9 percent of the UUA’s $175-million endowment is invested in Carbon Tracker 200 companies, according to information Walden forwarded from the UUA treasurer.
The fossil fuels divestment vote stems from a resolution brought by the group, Unitarian Universalists for Fossil Fuel Divestment and Sustainable Reinvestment, Walden said. The UUA 'has a long history of shareholder activism on a variety of issues, including environmental justice.'"

It is positively crazy that we treat seeds as a patentable product from which a small group of people can gain great wealth while the farmers who put all the work into the actual food production languish in poverty.  Even more striking is that these companies that patent often times do much less work than that for which they get credit.
Linux for Lettuce
"Most classical plant breeders will tell you that their work is inherently collaborative—the more people involved, the better. Baggett had used versions of another broccoli called Waltham, released by the University of Massachusetts in the 1950s, as part of the foundation for his original exserted-head lines. Hoping to advance its evolution by letting others work on it, he and Myers shared their germplasm (an industry term for seed) with breeders throughout the United States. One recipient was the broccoli division of Royal Sluis, a Dutch company that had a research farm in Salinas, California. Through the channels of corporate consolidation, that germplasm ended up with the world’s largest vegetable-seed company, Seminis, which in 2005 was bought by the world’s largest seed company, Monsanto. In 2011, Seminis was granted US Patent 8,030,549—“Broccoli adapted for ease of harvest”—whose basic identifying characteristic was an exserted head. More than a third of the original plant material behind the invention was germplasm that Baggett had shared in 1983."

In order to make great strides against the "wicked problems" that we face, we need every available brain on hand to innovate, communicate, and activate solutions.  For the entire scientific revolution and Enlightenment, we have pushed half of our population away from such endeavors, and it has been to our detriment.  It is time we changed that.
This great ad reveals all the ways we hold girls back
"This all comports with the research that shows that girls and women shy away from riskier endeavors—including majors where getting B's and C's are more likely to happen—than boys and men do. It's not just, or even mainly, about looks. It's about these other pressures on women that leave them little room to screw up. Especially since science, as a field, is about experimenting with things and learning to pick yourself up again and start over if your hypothesis fails. So kudos to Verizon and Makers for getting it right, and hopefully this will encourage further efforts to tackle the real reasons girls find their natural curiosity so frequently stifled while growing up."

Happy Friday (and Fourth)!