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Too good to be true?
Jun. 3rd, 2010 10:36 pmYeah, so there's this giant oil spill, which is destroying Louisiana's coastline and might move on to destroy Florida's as well. It's like a hurricane, but less windy and way more toxic. Inexplicably, while the shrimp industry is reeling under the impact of all this toxic petroleum, the 75th annual Louisiana Shrimp & Petroleum Festival is still slated for this September. So while that's good for an extremely bleak laugh, we could all really use some actual good news. And I'm not going to count the fact that Obama is trying to use the spill to wrangle votes for the climate bill, because thinking about that just reminds me of how little political capital Obama has left.
So here's an almost-too-good-to-be-true article about "The Restoration Economy," which apparently has been growing like crazy for years without anyone noticing. Projects like forest, stream, and coastline restoration, brownfield cleanup, and community revitalization projects apparently create "74 percent more jobs [per dollar invested] than ANY other economic activity . . . and more than five and a half times as much as investments in dirty energy sources like oil, coal, and nuclear."
Even better, embedded in that article is a link to a 20-minute TED talk by a guy named Willie Smits who has managed, in collaboration with a scientific team and the local people, to rapidly restore a rainforest in Borneo on land that has been almost totally barren for decades. Now, rainforests are known for absorbing almost all available nutrients into the biomass, such that if you cut one down, the soil doesn't have nearly enough nutrients left to regrow the forest. The typical solution for agriculture is to not just cut the forest but burn it, and then use the ashes as fertilizer. But Smits's team figured out how to fertilize the soil on a limited budget while reducing the incidence of fires in the region they worked in. They did this with a belt of fire-resistant sugar palms, which also produce sugar for ethanol-based biofuels without having to be cut down--which is ironic, since the main cause of rainforest destruction in today's Indonesia and Malaysia is for oil palm plantations that also produce biofuels. (Smits was also a keynote speaker at the ESRI User Conference last year; I'm pleased to see this because my first job was at ESRI.)
So here's an almost-too-good-to-be-true article about "The Restoration Economy," which apparently has been growing like crazy for years without anyone noticing. Projects like forest, stream, and coastline restoration, brownfield cleanup, and community revitalization projects apparently create "74 percent more jobs [per dollar invested] than ANY other economic activity . . . and more than five and a half times as much as investments in dirty energy sources like oil, coal, and nuclear."
Even better, embedded in that article is a link to a 20-minute TED talk by a guy named Willie Smits who has managed, in collaboration with a scientific team and the local people, to rapidly restore a rainforest in Borneo on land that has been almost totally barren for decades. Now, rainforests are known for absorbing almost all available nutrients into the biomass, such that if you cut one down, the soil doesn't have nearly enough nutrients left to regrow the forest. The typical solution for agriculture is to not just cut the forest but burn it, and then use the ashes as fertilizer. But Smits's team figured out how to fertilize the soil on a limited budget while reducing the incidence of fires in the region they worked in. They did this with a belt of fire-resistant sugar palms, which also produce sugar for ethanol-based biofuels without having to be cut down--which is ironic, since the main cause of rainforest destruction in today's Indonesia and Malaysia is for oil palm plantations that also produce biofuels. (Smits was also a keynote speaker at the ESRI User Conference last year; I'm pleased to see this because my first job was at ESRI.)
