Adaptive Management during the hottest week on record.
The expansion of a fossil-fueled global economy over the last century has driven an historically unprecedented growth in global prosperity, technological advancement, and improvement in life-quality for a plurality of our planet’s human inhabitants. Unfortunately this phenomenon has falsely correlated energy consumption with socio-economic growth, because these riches have not come without cost – represented by the looming carbon-driven climate catastrophe.
De-carbonizing our global fossil-fueled economies is imperative. And the most efficient, least expensive, and economically expansive strategy toward this objective would be to use less energy. Implementing this could involve localization of energy generation, manufacturing, supply chains, and food supplies – and investing in local and interstate mass transit.
These changes could provide unprecedented economic growth opportunities, but they will also require significant cultural transformations, particularly in the US, where personal identity and transportation choices are tightly bound, and where “personal choice” has trumped “common good.”
Within this national personality crisis, it is nonetheless crucial that we pivot to energy sources that do not generate climate-detrimental impacts. These include solar, geothermic, geothermal, hydrodynamic, wind, and maybe even thermo-nuclear power. But at scale, each one of these technologies exact their own particular environmental costs.
So as not to continue the catastrophic disruption our global habitat, any of these energy technologies need to be advanced responsibly – by predicting, tracking, and minimizing inevitable environmental disruptions, and employing “adaptive management” to respond to systematic changes as they become apparent.
Although “adaptive management” as a strategic response to observed dynamic changes looks good on paper, how do we respond to environmental changes when they might suggest shutting down the momentum of manufacturing many hundreds of 16 Megawatt turbines mounted on 130 meter (430’) masts?
When one of the coastal development questions involves adapting ports to handle this level of implementation, and building manufacturing operations around those ports that employ thousands of workers, “adaptive management” is unlikely to include “Oops! this industry is compromising the fisheries that provide our food, disrupting the foundation of the marine trophic pyramid, and scaring away the birds and marine mammals we love…”
When I first started “looking under the hood” of the wind farm solution, I was advocating for establishing robust baselines of the physical (and acoustical) characteristics of marine habitats, using ‘soundscapes’ as a proxy for biological (or industrial) activity.
There are many studies on how bioacoustic sounds are correlated to habitat health – commonly weighed in the context of anthropogenic noise density. With wind farms, there are many factors in play – mainly involving the noises of surveys, and the construction and operation of the actual turbines. But there are also these other factors involving how marine animals interact with the physical structures of the turbines and their impact on what has been open ocean “since when” – meaning that most marine life in these habitats have evolved and adapted to habitat not littered with all manner of industrial activities and obstacles, and their respective noises.
So while informing the decisions we can make at this point will have more bearing on the next 1000+ year recovery than the disruptions we can anticipate in the next 100 years, we need to start somewhere…
Given that sound is a proxy for activity, sound (or “noise”) can tell us a lot a about our relationships with the environments we inhabit. Over next few newsletters I’ll expand on these questions in the context of the industrialization of the ocean.
