Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Meadoway 2025 report

I have been suffering for a week from a vexing stomach bug that has had me living on nothing but an hourly soda cracker and oral rehydration salts.

It has nonetheless been very exciting to read about the excellent work being done by the Meadoway project, in which a 16 km stretch of hydro corridor has been turned into a giant re-naturalization project. The corridor runs all the way from the eastern edge of the Don Valley to the Rouge and Toronto Zoo area.

Their 2025 annual report is detailed, beautifully illustrated, and inspiring. Toronto has a great opportunity to add new ways of getting around the city on foot and by bike, avoiding cars, while achieving all the erosion and biological benefits of re-introducing native plants at scale.

Their restoration manual is highly interesting too, and shows a laudable desire to share lessons with everybody.

As soon as ground conditions, weather, and health allow, I want to take my first real bike trip of the year to see the early emergence of the plants of interest out in Scarborough.

Daybreak

At Massey College last night I got the chance to play Daybreak: a cooperative board game about solving climate change.

I played with another couple of beginners, but got two crucial strategy tips. Like in real life, greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning in the past persist and accumulate, creating an important incentive to cut quickly as a higher priority even than building green energy to keep up with growing demand. Second, since it’s a cooperative game, all the players should be working to help keep anyone from getting in too much trouble.

As Europe, my two big contributions to the game were stressing the strategy of rapid cuts right from the beginning and using an ability to rescue ‘communities in crisis’ anywhere in the world. It’s nice to see a game that demonstrates the huge range of solutions which can help humanity control the problem, although the game structure where everyone accepts cooperation and works together exists in painful contrast to actual global climate negotiations.

I enjoyed the game a lot and took considerable inspiration from it both in terms of physical game design and implementing game mechanics. I’d like to make a tactile version of my Rivals sim where each player’s completion card goes in a mini-briefcase which can be closed during breaks to keep it secret, and where the steps toward weaponization are represented as physical tokens that get added to the briefcase.

I’m grateful to have had the chance to play a game like this, and to meet more of sort of people interested in playing. This likely creates new avenues toward finishing development on Rivals and getting people playing.

Carney caving on Keystone

More evidence is emerging that Prime Minister Mark Carney is choosing to ignore what he knows about climate change economics to do precisely the wrong thing. He is thinking of reviving the Keystone XL pipeline.

As a world expert on climate change economics, Carney could tell you that the crucial thing is to avoid locking in inappropriate long-term investments in fossil fuels which we will need to scrap early and which will delay and raise the costs of dealing with climate change. Unfortunately, the political imperative to cater to the planet-wrecking industry has overpowered his expertise, honesty, or integrity. The sad fact is, once built, even the dirtiest projects are politically agonizing to shut down. Carney is ignoring the most elementary requirement of controlling climate change: to stop building the fossil fuel infrastructure that causes the problem.

Related:

350.org activities largely suspended in the US

Very sad news from Politico:

Environmental group 350.org, which spearheaded the movement to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline, will “temporarily suspend programming” in the U.S. and other countries amid funding woes, according to a letter obtained by POLITICO.

The move comes as environmental groups have struggled to find their footing and raise money under President Donald Trump, whose threats to investigate left-leaning organizations and rapid-fire dismantling of environmental rules have hamstrung green groups.

The letter to outside organizations from Executive Director Anne Jellema said 350.org had suffered a 25 percent drop in income for its 2025 and 2026 fiscal years, compelling it to halt operations. The group will keep three U.S. staff members in hopes of reviving operations in the future.

“In making these very tough choices, we considered a range of factors, including the political context, the relative need for 350’s work based on the strength of other actors in the ecosystem, the presence or absence of an enabling environment for civil society, and the ability to resource the work needed,” the letter said.

Climate change has never been more serious, and our leaders have never been more unserious about controlling it. It’s a disturbing time to see a group advocating for a better future be forced to cut back.

Open Process Manifesto

This document codifies and expresses some of my thinking on cooperation on complex problems, for the sake of the benefit of humanity and nature: Open Process Manifesto

It is based on the recognition of our universal fallibility, need to be comprehended, and to be able to share out tasks between people across space and time. To achieve those purposes, we need to be open about our reasoning and evidence, because that’s the way to treat others as intelligent partners who may be able to support the same cause through methods totally unknown and unavailable to you, across the world or centuries in the future.

America is demolishing its brain

From NASA to the National Science Foundation to the Centres for Disease Control to the educational system, the United States under the Trump administration is deconstructing its own ability to think and to comprehend the complex global situation. A whole fleet of spacecraft — each unique in human history — risks being scrapped because the country is ruled by an anti-science ideology. They are coming with particular venom for spacecraft intended to help us understand the Earth’s climate and how we are disrupting it. Across every domain of human life which science and medicine have improved, we are in the process of being pulled backwards by those who reject learning from the truth the universe reveals to us, in preference to ‘truths’ from religious texts which were assembled with little factual understanding in order to reassert and justify the prejudices of their creators.

The anti-science agenda will have a baleful influence on the young and America’s position in the world. In any country, you are liable to see nerds embracing the NASA logo and pictures of iconic spacecraft — a form of cultural cachet which serves America well in being perceived as a global leader. Now, when an American rover has intriguing signs of possible fossil life on Mars, there is little prospect that the follow-on sample return mission will be funded. Perhaps the near-term prospect of a Chinese human presence on the moon will bend the curve of political thought back toward funding space, though perhaps things will have further decayed by then.

The young are being doled out a double-dose of pain. As Christian nationalism and far-right ideology erode the value of the educational system (transitioning toward a Chinese-style system of memorizing the government’s official lies and doctrine rather than seeking truth through skeptical inquiry), young people become less able to cope in a future where a high degree of technical and scientific knowledge is necessary to comprehend and thrive in the world. Meanwhile, ideologues are ravaging the medical system and, of course, there is a tremendous intergenerational conflict brewing between the still-young and the soon-to-be-retired (if retirement continues to be a thing for any significant fraction of the population). Whereas we recently hoped for ever-improving health outcomes for everyone as technology advances, now there is a spectre of near-eradicated diseases re-emerging, in alliance with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria which we have so foolishly cultivated.

What’s happening is madness — another of the spasmodic reactionary responses to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution which have been echoing for centuries. Unfortunately, it is taking place against the backdrop in which humanity is collectively choosing between learning to function as a planetary species and experiencing the catastrophe of civilizational collapse. Nuclear weapons have never posed a greater danger, and it exists alongside new risks from AI and biotechnology, and in a setting where the climate change which we have already locked in will continue to strain every societal system.

Perhaps I have watched too much Aaron Sorkin, but when I was watching the live coverage of the January 6th U.S. Capital take-over, I expected that once security forces had restored order politicians from both sides would condemn the political violence and wake up to the dangerousness of the far-right populist movement. When they instead jumped right back to partisan mudslinging, I concluded that the forces pulling the United States apart are stronger than those holding it together. There is a kind of implicit assumption about the science and tech world, that it will continue independently and separately regardless of the silliness that politicians are getting up to. This misses several things, including how America’s scientific strength is very much a government-created and government-funded phenomenon, going back to the second world war and beyond. It also misses the pan-societal ambition of the anti-science forces; they don’t want a science-free nook to sit in and read the bible, but rather to impose a theocratic society on everyone. That is the prospect now facing us, and the evidence so far is that the forces in favour of truth, intelligence, and tolerance are not triumphing.

First time at Biidaasige Park

Photo by Jess

I had a great Saturday. It was cool enough not to be oppressive, and I was able to ride down the Don past the Brickworks to the new Biidaasige (bee-daw-sih-geh) Park. The park is very impressive. They have turned the engineered, industrial, concrete landscape around the mouth of the Don River into a real human space again, and an alluring one. There is a large outdoor adventure playground with ziplines, charmingly rendered animal play sculptures, and two-story high treehouses shaped like a raccoon and an owl, the latter of which has a tiny amphitheater in front. Within a large landscape of springy concrete, kids can use human-powered pumps to move water into a simulated watershed with controllable floodgates and sand areas to play in. There are curving paths along the new rivercourse, which is lined thickly with native plants. There are also boat launches and fishing spots.

The park grand opening was happening just a short ride from the Neon Riders BBQ, so I was able to see some friends there and bring one back for another ride through Biidaasige Park. After that, another friend from the Riders had a charmingly creative and playful music gig in Bickford Park, which was further enriched for me by a pair of very friendly dogs who were part of the small audience.

A river mouth should be a geographical anchor and natural point of interest. As someone who has walked extensively all over Toronto, the way the Don came to an end failed to satisfy those expectations. With Corktown Common, Biidaasige Park, and the other park areas still in progress, the city is doing a great job at making the river mouth part of the human landscape again. I have thought for years that Toronto’s greatest planning blunder was cutting off the city from the lake with the Gardiner Expressway. Personally, I would be fine with getting rid of the whole thing through the mechanism of less driving downtown, but while we are waiting it’s great that at least the river is being reclaimed.

The ziplines all had long lines of small children on Saturday, so I will need to return when things are less crowded. I expect Biidaasige Park to become a popular break spot for Neon Rides.

P.S. At an arts and crafts station, I was taught to make ‘seed bombs’ out of dirt, pottery clay, and heirloom open-pollinated seeds of Common Evening Primrose (Oenothera lamarckiana) from the Ecoseedbank in Montreal. The flowers are native to the region and good for pollinators, and the initiative reminds me of charming videos of dogs who help re-seed the forest after fires in Chile.