Fire and Knowledge

Like most companies, my local garbage company is getting on the “green” bandwagon. So much so that their website logo now reads “Think Green. Think Waste Management.” And they have an entire major site section called “Environmental Stewardship.” Impressive — they seem serious.

But the other day, when I drove beside a large dump truck, I had to laugh. The side of the truck read, “Our landfills provide over 6,000 acres of refuge for animals.”

From the NYT:

This year a new weapon against smog was introduced in the United States: cement. Called TX Active, it was developed by the Italian company Italcementi. Enrico Borgarello, Italcementi’s head of research and development, says the product can literally “kill” pollution.

The cement’s chemical composition is enhanced with titanium dioxide, which under the right conditions can neutralize some harmful pollutants. When exposed to sunlight or ultraviolet light, the titanium dioxide is “activated,” Borgarello says, and pollutants that come in contact with the surface of the cement are oxidized. Hazardous nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides, for example, are transformed into harmless nitrates or sulfates, which simply rinse off the building with rainwater. This also keeps it especially clean.

Titanium dioxide, commonly used to make paints bright white, was added to the standard cement’s mix. It was only later that Italcementi realized that TX Active had pollution-busting properties. For instance, in Bergamo, where Italcementi is based, a stretch of road downtown was coated with a layer of TX Active. Borgarello says that residents reported better-smelling air within 4.5 square miles. The company says their research shows that if 15 percent of the surface area of Milan were covered in TX Active, air pollution would be reduced by 50 percent.

It is a failing of our species that we ignore and even despise the creatures whose lives sustain our own.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 308

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

–E. F. Schumacher in Joseph Pearce, Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered (ISI Books: 2006), p. 152

Bill McKibben talks about how evangelical Christians are starting to care about the environment and includes a brief history on how this has come about.

Even with … cautious parameters, selected in a biased manner to draw a maximally optimistic conclusion, the number of species doomed each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3.

If past species have lived on the order of a million years in the absence of human interference, a common figure for some groups documented in the fossil record, it follows that the normal “background” extinction rate is about one species per one million species a year. Human activity has increased extinction between 1,000 and 10,000 times over this level in the rain forest by reduction in area alone. Clearly we are in the midst of one of the great extinction spasms of geological history.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 280

We have an “environmental crisis” because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, God-given, world.

–Wendell Berry, “The Total Economy” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 64

At the Tambopata Reserve, Terry Erwin used a bug bomb to collect all the insects from a single leguminous tree in the rain forest. I identified the ants in his sample and found 43 species in 26 genera, approximately equal to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 198