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Global climate institutions have embraced the primacy of capital, private firms, and markets—and in so doing have fatally undermined their own efficacy.
I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.
Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.
Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).
I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.
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The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?
Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.
Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?
Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.
Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?
Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.
I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.
Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?
Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.
Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.
Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.
Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?
Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.
Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?
Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.
Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?
Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.
At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.
Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?
Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.
My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.
Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?
Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.
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Author photo by S.M. Sukardi
Relying on the private sector to decarbonize is a recipe for abandoning workers.
Ecological crisis, rural deindustrialization, and real estate speculation have created conditions in which the far right thrives.
For the past 40 years, my mother, Lynne Cohen,* has gone swimming several times a week at her local pool in Ottawa. Beginning in her teens and continuing off and on throughout her life, she swam competitively on teams and in triathlons. Her local pool has served both as her training ground and as her go-to for regular exercise. After decades, she knows most of the other regular swimmers, some of whom have become good friends. The pool has been a central part of her life for years now, but last month her once innocuous activity became unsafe.
Last week, as always, my mother finished her swim and went to the changerooms to shower. She and the other ladies — also regulars at the Nepean Sportsplex — chatted in the showers, catching up on news as they always do. My mother wrapped herself in a towel as she stepped out of the shower. There, facing away from her, was a naked man. Shocked, my mother hurried over to a corner of the changeroom to get dressed. The man, now standing across the changeroom, was over six feet tall, with a combover. He got dressed, turned around and leered at her, then left the changeroom.
Shaken, my mother rushed over to her friend, asking if she had seen “the man in the women’s changeroom.” The other woman nervously confirmed that yes, she had. They continued their conversation in hushed voices, afraid and feeling violated, yet did not mention a thing to community centre staff.
My mother is 66 years old and no shrinking violet. A longtime journalist in Ottawa, her writing reflects her heterodox views and tenacity for challenging dominant narratives. I have never known her in any circumstance to shy away from confrontation. In the decades she has been swimming at this pool, she has had several run-ins with the lifeguards, management, and other swimmers. From too-slow swimmers clogging up the fast lane to the Covid-related mask mandates, my mother has always fearlessly spoken her mind. During Covid, she fought back so relentlessly against having to wear a mask on the pool deck for the few minutes before entering the water that we worried she might end up in handcuffs. She wasn’t charged, but she did face a short-term suspension from all City of Ottawa pools as a result of her protests.
Yet when a man walked naked through the changeroom while she was in her most vulnerable state, my mother went silent.
Ten years ago, this incident would have been viewed unequivocally as a crime. Someone would have called the police, and the man would have been arrested. He would have been labelled a sexual predator and likely charged with voyeurism. But today, not one woman in the changeroom dared speak up, complain, or request help from staff in dealing with the issue.
These women would have very recently been considered the vulnerable population in this situation, and had the power of both social norms and the law on their side, yet now were self-silencing. Why?
We all know why: with four magic words — “I am a woman” — the intruder and potential predator becomes the vulnerable one, thereby protected from criticism, punishment, or accountability. Today’s political climate demands he be welcomed with open and loving arms into the female-only spaces, and that anyone who says different is labelled not only insensitive, but hateful.
The most astounding part of this story is that no one in the changeroom even asked if he identified as a man or a woman. For all anyone knows, this anatomically male individual may have been totally unaware that he had access to a convenient loophole. For all we know he might have answered, “Of course I’m a man, but I wanted to undress in the women’s changeroom.” Why then, did not a single woman say anything?
After my mother told me what happened to her, my initial reaction, like that of my father’s, was outrage. I was furious. To my mind, she was the victim of a crime. I kept asking her, “Why didn’t you say something?” Her answer was, “What’s the point?”
For the rest of the day, I was disturbed and shaken. I had to force the incident out of my mind just to function, to take care of my kids, to act normal. I was afraid not only for my mother, for myself, and for my daughter (how could I ever safely take her to the pool or any other place where she would have to undress, knowing at any moment she could be exposed to a naked man?), but for the entire world.
There is a saying, “Where there is no God, there is absurdity.” I am a religious person and believe this statement in a literal sense. I believe that human beings are not only physical beings, but deeply spiritual ones. Once our food and shelter are managed, we search for meaning. Humans have souls that require sustenance just as our stomachs do. A Higher Power and religion meet the needs of our spiritual longing and free our minds to deal with this physical world and all of its infinite challenges.
But I also believe that in this quote “God” can be interpreted to mean “objective and universal truths” — transcendent truths, immune to the whims of man. Where there is no truth, there is absurdity.
Postmodernism and gender ideology have helped society cast off the chains of objective, universal and verifiable truths. Mercurial self-identification is now the North Star that guides us. We left God and are now knee-deep in absurdity.
I won’t even address the massive issue that is decades of hard fought for women’s rights eroded within just a handful of years on account of gender ideology and the belief that “trans women are women.” Many more intelligent and stronger women have taken this issue head on.
I’m just a little person: a stay-at-home mom trying to launch each one of my children into this world. But what is a world or society where a woman is violated and can’t speak up because everyone will turn on her and call her a bigot? Where a person cannot name a crime and perpetrator? Where a person cannot speak the truth about the reality before her eyes?
We’ve become two different peoples speaking two very different languages and believing in two modes of living. One camp believes in some form of objective truth and labels humans as either male or female. There are endless variations in the ways that humans express themselves, but there are only two sexes. The other camp believes in a post-modernist version of constructed truth and that there are dozens of “fluid” genders that negate sex and biology. They also believe that anyone who does not subscribe to this belief is a heretic and as evil as a Nazi.
How do these two camps speak to one another? The two belief systems require very different laws and social norms. If there are only two sexes, the man in my mother’s story is not allowed in the women’s changeroom. If sex is a social construct and can change through self-declaration or self-perception, that man can be a woman and is therefore allowed in the women’s changeroom. Today, it seems the latter camp has won, and we no longer share a common understanding of basic truths or even of language. Words like “man” or “woman” that were once universal are no longer.
A society that does not have a shared language cannot share thoughts. A society that is divided on whether or not there is an objective truth, outside of our own feelings and emotions, cannot set laws or policies that work for the broadest range of people.
A society where women and girls are cowed into silence when a crime is perpetrated against them for fear of being labelled the enemy is a shaky society indeed.
*Editor’s note: Lynne Cohen, the author’s mother, gave permission to publish her full name in this piece on June 11, 2023, after original publication.
Lindsy Danzinger is a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her three children. She lives with her husband and children in Toronto, Ontario.
The post My mother is courageous, but faced with a man in her change room at Ottawa’s Nepean Sportsplex she went silent appeared first on Feminist Current.
A well-known climbing coach said that the biggest obstacle in the way of people’s growth as climbers is, basically, fear of embarrassment.
When people want to get better at climbing, they try to do it privately, so that no one can see them doing things badly. They’ll go to the climbing gym when no one is watching, or hang out in a corner hoping no one is looking. But they’re missing out on the biggest opportunity — feedback from people who can see things they can’t see.
And the thing getting in the way is fear of embarrassment.
I’ve found that this is true no matter what you’re trying to learn. No matter what you’re trying to grow in. Fear of embarrassment will stop you from getting real growth and transformation.
My belief is not that we should just get over that fear. It’s that we could learn to see embarrassment as an integral part of the growth process.
I’ll talk about why in a moment. But first, let’s look at a few more examples where the fear of embarrassment stops people from growing:
Hopefully you can see that this can be applied anywhere we want to grow — personal development, taking care of ourselves, deepening in a relationship, dealing with the overwhelming chaos of life. We struggle to get beyond where we are, because we are too embarrassed to get support, feedback, coaching that might take us to the next level.
We hope to grow and learn without embarrassing ourselves. If we can learn in private, and then show how good we are //after// we’re really good at it … then we won’t feel embarrassed. We want to avoid that feeling at all costs, even if it means never learning at all.
But that’s not how it works. We have to be willing to be bad at something before we can be good at it. The growth process requires us to mess up, to learn from experience rather than just reading about it or watching videos. The growth process requires us to be messy and stumbling in the unknown … and then to get some support when we stumble, think we’re doing it all wrong, or feel like giving up.
And that is embarrassing. It has to be embarrassing, because we are necessarily pushing beyond the boundaries of the self-image we’ve created for ourselves. We’ve stepped into a new area of growth, which means we can’t be the person who has everything figure out, who has it all together. We want to be the person who has it all together, but that’s only possible if we are not growing.
So we choose to grow and learn, to transform, but that means letting go of who we think we are, and who we’re trying to get others to think we are. That’s a letting go, and it’s embarrassing.
If we avoid that embarrassment (which is natural), we will avoid the growth. We will not step into the unknown, which is where real learning resides. Where meaningful work resides.
OK, so you have a fear of embarrassment (of course!), and you can see how it’s holding you back.
How do you work with this fear? It’s a deep topic, but here are some ways to start working with it:
As you let yourself feel the fear and feel the embarrassment, what will happen is that you start to shed your old self. You no longer need to be constrained by doing things perfectly, impressing anyone, showing the good side of yourself, because you are growing into a new kind of becoming.
What would be possible if you let yourself go through the transformation process? If you’d like to practice deeply with me and others, come talk about being a part of my Fearless Mastery program.
The post Embarrassment is an Integral Part of the Growth Process appeared first on zen habits.
Ben Vinson III is a historian, with his focus cast outside of the United States.
Big trees, old trees, and especially big old trees have always been objects of reverence. From Athena’s sacred olive on the Acropolis to the unmistakable ginkgo leaf prevalent in Japanese art and fashion during the Edo period, our profound admiration for slow plants spans time and place as well as cultures and religions. At the same time, the utilization and indeed the desecration of ancient trees is a common feature of history. In the modern period, the American West, more than any other region, witnessed contradictory efforts to destroy and protect ancient conifers. Historian Jared Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet.
Creating a new habit like meditation, journaling or exercise isn’t incredibly complicated — at the most basic level, you tie the habit to a trigger that’s already in your life, start small, and find ways to encourage yourself to remember it and actually do it.
But it becomes a much more complicated and much messier ordeal because:
This is an almost universal thing, in my experience. No one escapes this trap.
So how do we work with it? We can make things really simple (that’s not to say easy) by getting to the heart of this: the resistance.
In addition, it helps to have a way to deal with feeling bad about ourselves when we give in to the resistance. I’ll talk about that after I talk about getting to the heart of resistance.
Let’s say you decide to do a morning habit like writing, meditation, yoga, or journaling …
You commit yourself to doing it every morning when you wake up (after coffee of course). You set a reminder. You wake up. Then …
Suddenly, you really need to check your email and messages. That leads to a bunch of other things that need to be done. Then you decide it’s time to check the news, or social media. Now you have to get ready. You’ll do that habit later.
What I didn’t describe above — and what most people don’t even acknowledge or notice — is the most important part. The resistance. If you can deal with the resistance, you can form a new habit. If you aren’t even aware of it, you’ll think there’s something wrong with you, or you’ll keep looking for better answers to fix this problem you have.
No amount of systems, books, answers will fix the problem of resistance. It’s something we can work with, but it doesn’t go away when you find the right answer. It’s simply fear and uncertainty.
If we can learn to work with that resistance, new habits will form.
Incidentally, it’s the same thing when you want to change an old “bad” habit — like quitting smoking or chewing your nails or eating too many chips. We have the urge to do the old habit (smoke a cigarette), and we have resistance to just letting the urge arise and fall. It’s like checking the email instead of meditating — we think we have no choice but to give in to the resistance.
So what if we didn’t need to give in to the resistance? What if it could be a place to embrace?
Here’s a way you might work with the resistance:
There isn’t a right answer here. Play with it. Keep working with it. Our desire for it to be over and to not have resistance is our greatest stumbling block. Keep creating something new, each time the resistance / urge happens. Eventually, you’ll discover something that works. And along the way, you’ll discover something new about yourself.
You hope that this will go perfectly. You’ll work with the resistance and you’ll crush this new habit. Yep! That’s exactly how it will go!
Except that part of it going perfectly is that it will include failure. That’s just a part of the growth process. You fail, you struggle, and you find something new in that.
The difficulty is that people take the failure to mean something meaningful about themselves. It becomes such a big deal. I failed! I must suck. Or I can’t do this. Or I’ll never be able to do this. Or What the hell is wrong with me?
Isn’t it interesting that a simple thing like failure carries such huge emotional significance? We feel bad about ourselves, we get discouraged, and we quit.
What if failure (and feeling bad about ourselves) was simply a part of the growth process? Not a big deal, but something to learn from? How would you approach it then?
I won’t give you the “answer” (because there’s not just one) … but I invite you to get creative. What can you try that will help with this part of the growth process? How can failure be embraced, loved, and be a place for curiosity and discovery?
If you can work with this, you will be liberated.
The post Simplify Habits: Get to the True Heart of Change appeared first on zen habits.
Cows are a significant source of methane emissions, primarily due to their unique digestive system. Milk and beef cows are ruminants, which means they have a specialized stomach chamber (called the rumen), which houses billions of microbes that facilitate the breakdown of fibrous plant material. The process is called “enteric fermentation,” and as these microbes work to digest the cellulose found in the cows’ diet, methane is produced as a byproduct. That’s a problem: The EPA identifies methane as being about 25 times more potent as CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Alga Biosciences leaps to the rescue, creating a new feed for cows that dramatically reduces how much burping goes on.
“Enteric methanogenesis, also known as cattle burps — is the single biggest source of anthropogenic methane emissions in the world. During the digestive process of cows, sheep, goats and other ruminants, microbes in the stomach of these animals break down food into smaller components, such as carbohydrates, proteins and fats. As a byproduct of this process, methane is produced and released into the atmosphere when the animal belches,” explains Alex Brown, co-founder/CEO of Alga Biosciences in an interview with TechCrunch. “When we got into Y Combinator, we put all of our money at the time into academic live animal trials to test our product, and found that methane emissions from beef cattle were undetectable with our approach. This is the first time results of this magnitude have been observed in live animals.”
Reducing belching has a side effect beyond just the environment. Methane is full of energy, and Alga claims that roughly 12% of all the calories a cattleman feeds his cow end up being wasted in the form of methane burps. This is a massive hidden cost for farmers, and it poses a huge opportunity for re-directing those calories to meat and milk production. The theory goes that kelp-based feed additives provide a direct avenue to reduce anthropogenic methane emissions; it could also be a massive economic benefit for farmers.
The company raised a round led by Collaborative Fund, and the company now has raised a total of $4 million in funding. In addition to Collaborative, Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, Cool Climate Collective, Pioneer Fund, Overview Capital and others also participated. The company has also received a grant from USDA Climate Smart Commodities.
Caroline McKeon (co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer), Daria Balatsky (co-founder and Chief Technology Officer), Alex Brown (co-founder and CEO). Image credit: Alga.
“The best climate tech startups will build solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions while being cheap, scalable and safe. We are thrilled that cattle farmers, like us, believe that Alga’s solution hits that trifecta,” said Tomas Alvarez Belon, investor at Collaborative Fund. “We are thrilled to support Alga Bio in this journey to create a methane-free world.”
The company is working on producing its feed additive for larger commercial pilots, and the company tells TechCrunch it can already produce at a scale of tens of thousands of head per day. There’s plenty of scale for growth; some sources estimate that there are around 1.5 billion cows in the world.
Alga Biosciences wants to help climate change, one bovine burp at a time by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Dr. Fayneese Miller, the president of Hamline University, lost the confidence of the university’s full-time faculty members.
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Earlier this week, I was at a meeting to discuss the question whether my university should cut its ties with the fossil industry, or else impose additional conditions on working with partners from fossil industries. There was quite some agreement that the university should think hard about spelling out and endorsing a moral framework, and based on those values and moral principles work out what (if any) forms of collaboration would remain legitimate in the future. This led our vice-chancellor to ask the question what else such moral framework would imply for university staff. “Should we perhaps completely stop flying?”, he asked.
And then there is, once again, a very depressing IPCC report and we must radically change our modes of production and consumption if we want to leave our children (and our older selves) a planet that will remain safe for the human species. And it’s not just about the future, but about the present: urgent action is needed to lower the number of the deadly climate-related events that we have seen over the last years, from increases in wildfires to deadly floodings – that led poor people, who have made almost zero contribution to this problem, lose their livelihoods, and many simply died. So to me it seems obvious that what we change in response to climate change is a very urgent moral question.
Hence the question: Do academics fly too much? Should we simply stop flying at all?
I’m using academics here in the sense of people employed as professors, postdocs, and PhD candidates at universities or other institutes of higher education and research. And it concerns flying for academic activities – most often, presenting one’s research at conferences or as an invited speaker to a seminar series or workshop. Of course, many of the thoughts that follow will apply to other professions too, but since this makes it easier for me to write down my worries, let me start there.
During the pandemic, it was easy: we couldn’t fly. I missed travelling. Frankly, I missed it a lot: I missed the interaction with other scholars working on related questions; I missed the inspiration from meeting the smart and creative people that one tends to meet on such occasions; I missed learning about the new work other people are doing; I missed the feedback on the work that I presented; I missed the intellectual joy of long conversations over breakfasts, lunches and dinners on matters academic, political, and otherwise; I missed the strengthening of my professional networks that travel brought me; I missed seeing friends far away; I missed the adventure of travelling to places; I missed the intellectual energy and inspiration such a trip could give.
Some have argued that the ‘normalisation’ of videoconferencing has taken away any reasons for travel. I love the new habits that are created by zoom, teams, and the other programs – the international paper discussions, seminars, reading groups. But no matter how wonderful these online events can be, many of the good things that come with travelling to workshops and conferences are not part of online events. Perhaps, some might argue, that is simply the price we should pay to stay within our fair emissions budget?
There are other reasons why academics want to travel long-distance by plane. Many want to travel because they feel they need to in order to build their scholarly networks or to strengthen their CV – in short, they feel they need it for their career. I’ve heard some colleagues say that this should be a reason why only junior scholars should be allowed to fly. This strikes me as self-defeating, since some of the most interesting conversations I had when I was a PhD student or postdoc was with older, more senior scholars who came to give a talk – I’ve always felt there is much I could learn from them too. Academia is international, and if we could only interact with our local peers that would be a loss. Moreover, I suspect that there are some very senior scholars who receive a lot of overseas keynote invitations: should they always decline invitations if those would require them to fly? What reasoning could they use that is genuinely sound, and not a form of self-deception?
There is no emissions-free alternative to flying long-distance, which makes travel-by-airplane a scarce good. There are, presumably, many more academics who would like to fly many more miles than would be good for the habitability of the planet. Should we have an open discussion about how much we should allow ourselves to fly, just like we have discussions about how much we should referee? Or should we just leave this, loosely libertarian and without causing offence to anyone, to everyone’s own judgement without a public discussion?
Once the discussion kicks off, there are various arguments one encounters. Here are a few of claims I’ve heard from others or considered myself, when trying to justify why travel by airplane is fine:
(1) It doesn’t make a difference at all whether I fly or not. It’s inconsequential to addressing climate change.
(2) I’ve been invited oversees as a keynote, so if I decline, the organisors invite someone else, and it doesn’t make a difference to total emissions.
(3) It’s bad that I fly, but I’m going to find a golden offset mechanism, and compensate the full damage that my flying does to planet – perhaps 150%.
(4) I wish I wouldn’t have to fly, but I must fly for my job; I commute by airplane. Yes, I could find a non-academic job closer by, but it’s not reasonable to ask from me that I give up my profession for the sake of lowering my emissions.
(5) Why would I have to stop flying if my North-American colleagues on average fly so much more than we [Europeans, Africans, Latin-Americans, …] do? When they limit their flying, I’ll limit mine too.
(6a) Why would I have to stop flying (whether for work or privately) if the really big pollutors, for example in Big Oil companies, keep earning millions destroying the earth? Why should I worry about adding one or two ton CO2 if the biggest polluters are not setting the right example?
(6b) Why should we stop flying if the number of superrich people flying in their ultrapolluting private jets keep flying? Let them stop flying first, and then we can talk about ordinary folks who should stop flying.
(7) I eat vegan, have no car, have put my savings in solar energy production, and have no kids. Given all this, I think I should be morally permitted to fly.
(8) I’m on the academic job market and need to go to any conference I can afford to travel to, in order to improve my chances at landing a job.
(9) I’ve joined Extinction Rebellion (or another group) and I’m making my contribution to addressing climate change there. We should only talk about political activism, not about consumption, such as flying.
(10) I’m only flying if I think it makes a difference not just to myself, but also that the trip is worthwhile for enough others too. And once I decide to fly, I try to get the most out of it in terms of contributing, e.g. by offering to give another talk in a nearby place.
(11) …
(12) … and so on, and so forth.
While I think some of these claims are dubious, others are less obviously so. But which ones are acceptable as reasons in our own deliberations whether to fly or not, and which ones should we reject? How do (or should) we deliberate with ourselves on those matters?
I’ve recently accepted an overseas invitation, and while the climate cost was immediately on the forefront of my mind, after some agonizing claims #2 and #10 made me, eventually, think it was OK to accept the invitation. But was it? I am not just, because of my love for academic travelling, simply fooling myself? And are those of us who keep travelling by plane not fooling ourselves most of the time? Or can a balance be struck without giving up on travel by plane completely?
So, friends, over to you. Given me claims/reasons #11, #12, etc. that you’ve had in your own mind, or heard, and let me know what you think of all these claims. And if anyone has a proposal for a decision procedure we should endorse, across academia globally, on when we are still permitted to fly (if at all), then let us know. Because, as you can can see, I have more questions than answers.
PS: Please be respectful of others’ point of views and arguments; many of us are unsure about these matters and trying to find out what we should think and do. If you’ve thought about this long and hard and made up your mind, good for you, but give others the time too to find out what they decide to believe. I’ll filter out rude or hateful comments.
Concrete is ubiquitous. A mainstay of the construction industry, over 10 billion cubic meters of concrete is used every year. It’s also responsible for up to 8% of CO2 emissions: one ton of ordinary Portland cement creates somewhere between 800 and 900 kilograms of CO2 emissions. Finnish startup Carbonaide has just raised €1.8 million (~$1.9 million at today’s exchange rate) in seed funding to knock down concrete’s carbon emissions, but not the construction industry.
“Our goal at Carbonaide is to create a more sustainable future with cutting-edge tech that doesn’t just reduce the carbon emissions of construction materials like concrete, but that traps more CO2 than they emit throughout their lifetime,” explains Tapio Vehmas, Carbonaide’s CEO. “It is very natural that the constructed environment becomes a CO2 sink, as it is the largest volume of man-made material.”
Carbonaide’s process binds carbon dioxide into precast concrete using an automated system at atmospheric pressure. By reducing the quantity of required cement content and mineralizing CO2 into the concrete itself, Carbonaide believes it can halve the carbon dioxide emissions of traditional Portland cement concrete. If it can introduce industrial waste products, for example, industry slag, green liquor dregs, and bio-ash into the process, it has the potential to produce concrete with a negative carbon footprint.
The next step for Carbonaide is to scale the technology into a production line at its factory in Hollola, Finland, which is where this seed funding round comes in.
“The goal for this funding round is to scale the technology into an industrial-scale pilot factory. With the funding, we can implement the technology into a precast concrete production line that allows carbon curing as a part of the industrial process,” says Vehmas. “When we have done that, we will know exactly the cost structure and needed parameters for effective curing,” because it does need to add up.
“Can we develop technical solutions that also make sense commercially? Low-carbon products have to have a lower price than normal products. Otherwise, we can’t be sure that our technology will prevail,” says Vehmas.
Carbonaide has calculated that a fully operational chain could mineralize up to five tons of CO2 per day and increase production by 100-fold of its carbon-negative concrete products, but it’s not just about making this type of concrete industrially scalable. Carbonaide also needs to bring the naturally conservative construction industry with it.
“The technology must fit in perfectly, otherwise, it won’t make a change,” says Vehmas. “The industry is very conservative, but there is a good reason for that. We build structures that are meant to last, and by being conservative, we can ensure that they will remain in the future.”
It’s easy to say that if something isn’t broken, it doesn’t need to be fixed, but Vehmas recognizes how the carbon footprint of concrete is breaking the Earth, and it does need to be fixed: “I want to see how a low-carbon industry can become a reality in highly conservative markets. If we can make this happen, maybe our generation will have some hope to pay our carbon debt for future generations.”
Importantly, Vehmas has experience in the construction industry that he can bring on this quest, and he believes that the investment that Carbonaide has raised validates both its necessity and viability.
“I also have 20+ years of experience working with concrete, meaning I have dealt with industry my whole adulthood. I basically live and breathe concrete. That helps a lot when introducing new technology into a highly conservative industry,” says Vehmas. “This investment is a sign of good progress for us because we’ve received the support and backing of players in the industry already.”
Backing for Carbonaide comes from Lakan Betoni and Vantaa Energy, which led the seed funding. The round was completed with public loans and in-kind contributions from Business Finland and other Finnish concrete companies and strategic investors.
The concrete and energy companies supporting Carbonaide are doing so in more ways than just financially. They are also able to provide CO2 for Carbonaide’s processes, because believe it or not, while too much carbon dioxide is fizzing its way into the atmosphere, the captive kind that we need for everything from concrete to soda is in short supply.
If Carbonaide’s pilot factory goes to plan, Vehmas hopes that it can have a planet-saving impact on the construction industry.
“After the piloting, our goal is to commercialize the technology. We want to make this process easy to implement by packing the technology into a modular unit that is easy to install and enables easy implementation of the technology on-site,” says Vehmas. “If everything goes as I dream, our technology will start a process where the constructed environment becomes a carbon sink in the future, not a source of massive emissions.”
When life gives you carbon, make Carbonaide by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Enlarge (credit: Walter Zerla via Getty Images)
Say you are a maker of computer graphics cards, under pressure from investors questioning your green credentials. You know what to do. You email your various departments, asking them to tally up their carbon emissions and the energy they consume. Simple enough. You write a report pledging a more sustainable future, in which your trucks are electrified and solar panels adorn your offices.
Good start, your investors say. But what about the mines that produced the tantalum or palladium in your transistors? Or the silicon wafers that arrived via a lengthy supply chain? And what of when your product is shipped to customers, who install it in a laptop or run it 24/7 inside a data center to train an AI model like GPT-4 (or 5)? Eventually it will be discarded as trash or recycled. Chase down every ton of carbon and the emissions a company creates are many times times higher than it first seemed.
Enlarge / If this road is your only route to the outside world, it might not matter that your house didn't flood. (credit: Maurice Alcorn / EyeEm)
Climate change produces lots of risks that are difficult to predict. While it will make some events—heatwaves, droughts, extreme storms, etc.—more probable, all of those events depend heavily on year-to-year variation in the weather. So, while the odds may go up, it's impossible to know when one of these events will strike a given location.
In contrast, sea level rise seems far simpler. While there's still uncertainty about just how quickly ocean levels will rise, other aspects seem pretty predictable. Given a predicted rate of sea level rise, it's easy to tell when a site will start ending up underwater. And that sort of analysis has been done for various regions.
But having a property above water won't be much good if flooding nearby means you can't get to a hospital or grocery store when you need to or lose access to electricity or other services. It's entirely possible for rising seas to leave a property high, dry, but uninhabitable as rising seas cut connections to essential services. A group of researchers has analyzed the risk of isolation driven by sea level rise, and shows it's a major contributor to the future risks the US faces.
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