Atlas and the weight of the greedy world

High on the meridian of the winter sky, as we’ve seen, are the Pleiades.  Here’s a closer look at the “Sevem Sisters,” with their names, from my astronomy book for the young.

The brightest star, Alcyone, is about at the center of the cluster, and I use it as reference point when making statements in my online Astronomical Calendar such as “2020 Feb  3 Mon 14h UT Moon 7.2° SE of the Pleiades.”

The five bright stars to Alcyone’s west are her sisters, the thusand fainter stars – mostly also members of the cluster, some in the background – are presumably her cousins, and the two somewhat outlying stars to the east are the sisters’ parents, Atlas (the second brightest) and Pleione.

Their names may mean “very enduring” and “sailing queen,” though they may go back deeper than Greek.  The Pleiades are the “sailing” stars because their heliacal rising – their first appearance in the dawn sky before sunrise – signalled the beginning of the sailing season.

Can you with naked eye separate Atlas and Pleione?  The Pleiades are a perennial subject for visual tests.  Some people see fewer than seven, some a lot more.

Legends said that the offspring of Atlas included not only the Pleiades but the Hyades and the Nereid sea-nymphs.  The fertile life of gigantic Atlas must have been disrupted when he became the leader of the Titans’ doomed rebellion against the upstart younger generation, the Olympian gods led by Zeus.  His brother Titans were sent down to Tartarus, under the volcanoes, but the punishment of Atlas was to bear the infinite weight of the sky forever on his shoulders.

Nonsense.  The sky is lightweight, so his groans are overdone. He should try supporting Earth, as Madeline, age three, is doing.

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Home planet department:

I learned of something massively important from George Monbiot’s description, in the January 8 Guardian, of what he saw in a factory in Finland.

It seems incontrovertible that humanity’s demand for food is going to grow even vaster, yet the capacity to produce food is being diminished by worsening climates, loss of soil, pollution of the seas, and many other factors.

So some chemistry that requres “no great technological leaps,” that uses essentially no space, yet could produce essentially unlimited amounts of food that is essentially indistinguishable from agricultural food, could save millions from starvation, and save the continents from human farming and the seas from human depredation.

I have had great respect for George Monbiot since I learned in 1990 of how he revealed the hellishly atrocious treatment of indigenous tribes in Papua by the Freeport-McMoRan mining company and the military of the Indonesian occupiers.

I saw slight gaps in his lab-grown food article, so I sent a letter, which the paper did not publish, perhaps because you have to submit such a letter even earlier on the day an article appears, so that’s why I’m making my points here.

Monbiot raised and dismissed the objection, apparently made by somebody, that, since intensive agriculture is the problem, the solution is extensive agriculture.  That is a straw man.  Of course using even more land to grow the same amount of food is a ridiculous idea, and even mentioning it was a waste of space in the article.

Instead, what might have been mentioned was the two approaches similar to lab-grown food:

– Meat cultured from a few cells of non-killed animals.

– Vertical farming.

Lab-grown food is perhaps the third and most powerful in this series of advances.

All are already in development and spreading.  Among their advantages are the freeing of a vast fraction of Earth’s surface to return to nature (picture the fields you drive through from town to town); an end to the obliteration of species by habitat loss; an end to the clearing of forests to make way for soya and cattle-fodder; an end to the enormous populations pf domestic animals imprisoned in cruel conditions and belching methane; an end to fertilizers and pesticides; and end to the agricultural ruh-off that spreads dead zones in the sea; an end to the trawling and scraping of the seas; better health; and, we trust, food that is not only more reliable but cheaper and more equally distributed.

Monbiot mentions, though I’m not sure he answers, the objection that lab-growing of food will put an end not only to the agribusiness corporations (who will lobby against it) but to jobs in farming.  I think, though I don’t have the statistics, that mechanized agribusiness itself put out of work a far larger former farming population.

Lab-growing of food is ideally eon, according to Monbiot, in deserts, because it uses solar power.  Vertical farming is typically, though not only, done in greenhouse-like towers on former vacant lots in inner cities, so that it supplies food next door to the mass of consumers – especially the poor – eliminating transport vehicles and cost.  Like lab-growing from microbes, it is controlled, infection-free, hydroponic, recycles water and waste, and is 24-7-12 – unaffected by night, weather, or season.

Krister Swartz has told me of VacantNewYork.com, which tallies the many unused building sites in the five boroughs.  (Aerial photos of their distribution are reminiscent of the satellite pictures of Earth’s light pollution.)

And Anthony Barreiro has sent me a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article about a vertical farm flourishing in South San Francisco.

I had rather expected Krister to object, as Néli Busch did, in defence of at least one form of farming: small-scale organic husbandry, which they practise on their quintas in, respectively, Portugal and France.  My answer is that there could well be more of that, rather than less.  In the edges of a world that is wild, there would be more opportunity for family orchards and free-range chickens than in the edges of a world that is mostly monocultures.

These radical ways of feeding our eight thousand million could buy us time, but we’ll still be in a race.  We notice global heating irregularly and anecdotally, because we live on land.  The ocean is where more than ninety percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is absorbed; the vital top layer of the ocean is heating relentlessly; to new records each year; and the ocean will ultiately control all climate.  We need to abolish emission of carbon dioxide and methane by every other means besides pricking the giant bubble of farming.

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