Although crowdsourcing is all the rage at the moment, there has to be a worry that this is just the latest fad in the world of technology, and will soon follow portals and the blink tag into justified oblivion. Occasionally, though, an application of crowdsourcing appears that seems to address a real problem in a way that would be otherwise intractable.
The concept of the commons derives from common land. This still lives on in England, in the form of commons - like Clapham Common - and as national forests that all can use. Against that background, I am naturally appalled that the coalition government proposes selling off our forests in order to raise a few pennies to throw into the bottomless pit of our National Debt.
The campaigning site 38 Degrees if fighting this with a petition, and is also encouraging Brits to write to their MPs. Here's what I've just sent using WriteToThem:I am writing to you about the proposed sell-off of Britain's forests.
Although I broadly agree that our currently very onerous national debt needs to be reduced, it is important that efforts to achieve this do not result in rash or irreversible actions. I believe that selling off our forests would be such an action.
If forests are sold, they will be bought with a view to profit maximisation. This will inevitably lead to felling and destruction of habitats up to the limit of the law (and probably beyond if buyers think they can get away with it).
Indeed, it is quite likely that many buyers will be from overseas, particularly in those countries that have large cash reserves. They will have no compunction in destroying the environmental resources of another country, since they wish to extract the greatest profit in the shortest time possible, and will certainly not be overly worried about local effects caused by their actions.
Once damaged, these resources will take hundreds of years to regenerate, and may well be lost for ever. At a time when the environment is under pressure on many fronts – not least rising population and climate change – it would be foolish to reduce national holdings of this key assets. If anything, the Government should be *increasing* the extent of national forests.
As well as providing valuable resources, they offer Britons a much-needed refuge from the pressures of modern life. Again, if forests are sold off, access is bound to be reduced (not least by felling activities); this will lead to a general loss of the quality of life – hardly something that the Government should be encouraging.
For these reasons, I urge you not to support these sell-off plans. I would be grateful if you could please convey my concerns to the ministers concerned, and to ask them to reconsider.
If you care about the commons - or just like trees - please consider sending a brief email to your MP.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.
We need more trees. This is what they did 500 years ago:The massive depopulation of the Americas via smallpox, hepatitis and other diseases introduced by Westerners (perhaps as much as 95 percent of the existing population died in vast pandemics) and the large landscape-altering scale of agriculture practiced across the "New World" by pre-Columbian cultures are two of the big themes of "1491." Both popped up in a presentation made by two scientists at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union last December. (Thanks to MongaBay for the tip.)
The scientists contend that after the die-off, massive reforestation on abandoned agricultural land occurred on a large enough scale to contribute significantly to the period of global cooling between 1500 and 1750 known as the "Little Ice Age."
After examining soil samples and sediment cores from numerous locations in Central and South America, Richard Nevle, a visiting scholar at Stanford's Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Stanford, and Dennis Bird, also from Stanford, concluded that the reforestation sequestered as much as 10 to 50 percent of the carbon necessary to cool the earth. Up until 1500, the soil samples showed a steady increase in charcoal content, likely generated from human-caused fire used to clear forest. After 1500, the scientists discovered a drastic drop in charcoal content. No more burning.
The good news is that we've cut down so many trees, there's huge scope for harnessing this effect to mitigate climate change by planting lots of trees.
When is this apology for an international body going to sort itself out - or be shut down?The World Bank has been in a hurry to get its Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) up and running, meaning that the process to date has been "rushed" and "corners have been cut," according to a new report by scientists from the Forests and the European Union Resource Network (FERN) and the Forest Peoples Programme.
...
The report points out that while various scientists and research organisations have identified recognition of indigenous peoples' tenure rights as an essential first step for an effective REDD mechanism, the issue has been neglected. None of the country notes explicitly deal with the need to clarify land ownership, nor do they address human rights issues, it laments.
Moreover, the scientists find that the notes do not require 'Free, Prior and Informed Consent', a concept recognised in international law as mandatory for any project affecting indigenous and tribal peoples. They also claim that the REDD process failed to consult local peoples and civil society organisations.
Hence the report argues that the FCPF promotes centralised planning, and is thus in danger of repeating the mistakes of past experiments with centralised forest management strategies. This would lead to increased deforestation and corruption, pushing local communities into poverty and alienating them from their land, it concludes.
Not so much World Bank as Worse Bank.
Rare good news:
A unique worldwide tree planting initiative, aimed at empowering citizens to corporations and people up to presidents to embrace the climate change challenge, has now set its sights on planting seven billion trees.
It follows the news, also announced today, that the Billion Tree Campaign has in just 18 months catalyzed the planting of two billion trees, double its original target.
But realistically even severn billion trees won't make a huge difference given the scale of the problems they are trying to counter - deforestation, rising carbon dioxide levels etc; how about making it a round trillion...?
A year ago, I wrote about the plight of urban trees. At the time, I never imagined we'd have a solution as far-sighted as this:A plane tree in central London has been valued at £750,000 under a new system that puts a "price" on trees. How?
A six-foot-wide plane in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, is thought to be the UK's most valuable tree.
Large, mature, city trees like this one are being blamed - sometimes wrongly and often fatally - for damage to neighbouring properties.
But it is hoped a new valuation system will make it harder for "expensive" trees to be felled due to doubtful suspicions they are to blame for subsidence.
...
Putting a price on a tree changes people's attitudes and if developers think in financial terms, then a community asset must be valued in the same currency, he says.
So if a developer is in court for illegally destroying a tree, then the fine could be a reflection of the tree's value, says Mr Stokes. Or if a new development replaces a stock of trees then the builder could contribute to the community a sum equal to the value of that lost stock.
Brilliant. Now, if we could only apply that to all the rest - air, water, animals, plants....
Eben Moglen is probably the most fluent and engaging speaker it has ever been my privilege to interview; proof of his enduring appeal can be found in the fact that I don't get tired reading yet more interviews with him, like this one, which includes the following suggestive passage:One of the things that everybody now understands is that you can treat software as a renewable, natural resource. You can treat software like forest products or fish in the sea. If you build community, if you make broadly accessible the ability to create, then you can use your limited resources not on the creation or maintenance of anything, but on the editing of that which is already created elsewhere. We package them for your advantage, things you didn't have to make because you were given them by the bounty of nature.
And this one, too:If you've become dependent on a commons, for whatever role in your business, then what you need is commons management. You don't strip mine the forest, you don't fish every fish out of the sea. And, in particular, you become interested in conservation and equality. You want the fish to remain in the sea and you don't want anybody else overfishing. So you get interested in how the fisheries are protected. What I do is to train forest rangers ... to work in a forest that some people love because it's free and other people love because it produces great trees cheaply. But both sides want the forest to exist pristine and undesecrated by greedy behavior by anybody else. Nobody wants to see the thing burn down for one group's profit. Everybody needs it. So whether you are IBM, which has one strategy about the commoditization of software, or you're Hewlett-Packard, which has another, whatever your particular relationship to that reality is, everybody's beginning to get it. In the 21st century economy, it isn't factories and it isn't people that make things -- it's communities.
The beauty of all this analysis is that the ideas flow both ways: if free software is a commons like the forests or the seas, then it follows that the forest and the seas share many characteristics of free software. Which is why you read about them all the time on this blog. (Via Linux Today.)
Talking of trees, and preserving them, here's some unwonted good news from a country that sadly seems not to be awash in it:The Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI) joins the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in announcing the creation of the new Sankuru Nature Reserve, a huge rainforest area harboring the endangered bonobo, a great ape most closely related to humans. Larger than the state of Massachusetts, the new reserve encompasses 11,803 square miles of tropical rainforest, extremely rich in biodiversity.
Trees and bonobos? What more do you want? Indeed, I felt compelled to rush off and give my widow's mite on the spot. You might like to do the same.
I've expressed my undying love for trees before, particularly as a way of preserving our atmospheric commons, but I had no idea that they were this good:'Every year, the expanding European forests remove a surprisingly large amount of carbon from the atmosphere,' the study's co-author Aapo Rautiainen stresses. 'According to rough estimates, their impact in reducing atmospheric carbon may well be twice that achieved by the use of renewable energy in Europe today.'
So what's the obvious lesson to learn from this? Why, that they should be included in calculations of carbon sinks - and that countries who plant more trees/don't cut down the ones they have should be rewarded in terms of carbon credits:Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries currently do not get emission credits for increasing natural carbon sinks through forestry and agriculture. The Finnish researcher's suggest, however, that this might be a helpful tool. 'Policies that accelerate the expansion of our forest biomass not only represent a win-win for climate change and biodiversity, they also open up economic opportunities,' states Laura Saikku, the third author of the study. 'Land owners can benefit with new industries like forest-based bio-energy production. This could also help to reduce one of the main threats to sustained forest expansion - the need to open land to produce agricultural biofuels as alternatives to fossil fuels.'
Obvious, really.
No, that's not a metaphor (as in social graphs), but literally about people copyrighting trees:Then there’s the Lone Cypress, a tree along California’s famous 17-Mile Drive. It’s probably the most infamous example of someone trying to exert ridiculous intellectual property rights. They must’ve made it sound like a good idea, though, because it seems that the idea of copyrighting trees is catching on.
And this promotes creativity?
In 1987, the Great Storm struck south-eastern England; one result was the mass destruction of many woodlands:Because the hill was effectively a monoculture of mature beech trees of a similar age, it did not surprise Mr White that so many were lost in the storm.
Twenty years on, the woods are growing back - some of them naturally, not in a managed way as they were before the storm. The result?As part of the recovery programme on the hill, the National Trust formed a partnership with English Nature to see what would happen if 50 acres (20Ha) of the 450-acre (180Ha) site was left to recover naturally.
"There is a very high percentage of dead wood in there," Mr White revealed, "which is now home to invertebrates, which birds obviously feed on.
"And the fungi are absolutely magnificent, especially at this time of year. There is a very varied ecology; a mature and advanced ecology."
The lessons for the ecosystem of software will not be lost on readers of this blog....
Parenthetically, I was there when the Great Storm struck. Shortly afterwards, I wrote a cheerful little piece about it, reproduced for your delectation below:Windy City
Some sat at their desks, fiddling with pencils and paperclips. Others stood in the corridors, dimly lit by the emergency power. With no phones and no electricity, there was nothing to be done. An enormous silence hung over the whole building. Outside, there was a clear blue sky.
Upon waking that morning, it was apparent that something was wrong. The alarm radio had not gone off: its display was dead. Throughout the still house all the electric clocks had stopped at the same moment: 4.34 am; it was as if time had had a heart attack. No light, no hot water, no kettle: the tiny marginal acts of civilisation had been cancelled.
People stumbled into work as if in a trance, more out of habit than from any real sense of necessity. Everywhere there were scenes of destruction: huge trees uprooted, lying stricken across the road. Cars were driven under them with white-knuckled bravado, or gingerly past them, up on the pavement. People milled around, some taking photographs. There were no trains and few buses. An occasional ambulance flashed by.
On the radio the police issued urgent pleas for everyone to stay at home; it was pointless going to work they said. And the radio itself was strangely different. Bulletins were broadcast every ten minutes. The mindless music and vacuous ads had all but stopped. Instead, the catalogue of deaths and disasters, the no-go areas and the helplessness of the authorities were hammered home with a kind of crazy glee. A curious jitter ran through people, as if someone had walked over their collective grave. It felt like the end of the world.
It was the Great Wind of '87. 'The worst weather in 300 years', they said, 'the worst disaster since the war'. The dead, though few, were publicly lamented - so alien to this sanitised world of ours is random, violent death through force of Nature. Everyone felt an aesthetic pang at the sight of centuries of trees laid low in the dust; still majestic like fallen royalty, but doomed and irreplaceable. But most of all people felt themselves chastened, as if they had narrowly escaped something unthinkable. A case of presque-vu.
For winds, albeit of record speeds, had shut down the whole seething, pullulating metropolis of London. No transport, no telephones, and worst of all, no power. Mere air had pulled the plug on late twentieth century civilisation in so comprehensive a manner that people could only stand around and stare impotently. Power and telephone lines were restored after some hours, but the effects of that great wind were felt directly for days after, and the scars would remain for decades.
Imagine, then, a greater wind, an unnatural wind whose very touch is death. After a nuclear explosion, following the huge pulse of radiation, but before the even more horrifying fall-out of radioactive debris, there is a shock wave. That shock wave moves across the land like the Voice of God in the Old Testament: it is swift and terrible and unstoppable. In comparison the Great Wind of '87 will seem a light spring breeze. Looking around at our silent, desolated city, were we not right to be windy?
Here's an interesting idea on several levels:the Zerofootprint platform, powered by Business Objects, provides urban dwellers the ability to view their “environmental footprint” – the effect their daily habits have on pollution levels and the strain they place on our natural resources.
Enter accessible data — such as miles driven each year, miles flown, kilowatt hours used, location of home and office — and you can easily calculate your effects on the earth. The calculator measures not only the amount of carbon dioxide emitted (the carbon footprint) but also the use of resources such as land, trees and water. Once an individual's impact has been calculated, the Zerofootprint tool provides information on how to reduce it, measuring the results.
I think this makes an important point: if you can't measure something - in this case environmental impact - then you can't manage it. Providing direct feedback to people on the consequences of their day-to-day choices seems a sensible way to engage them in fighting climate change and the destruction of the environmental commons.
Interestingly, there's another level:Much of the data gathered will be stored on the Insight database — and then the real work begins.
The challenge, or challenges, will not stop with the creation of a database. As soon as a representative sample size is available, business analysts and number crunchers everywhere can roll up their sleeves to use the information in meaningful ways.
For instance, imagine a visualization comparing the carbon footprint per kilowatt hour of electricity used in Paris versus Shanghai.
“When we are able to analyze and visualize this data, that is bound to suggest a myriad of solutions,” says Ron Dembo, founder of Zerofootprint, whose mission is nothing less than to change the world by helping people reduce their environmental footprint. “The database created here will be the ‘creative commons’ for building models for many different opportunities.”
Again, this is hardly a novel insight, but it is an important idea. Aggregation of open data in this way provides a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. What's striking is that both this and the idea of providing some kind of feedback lie at the heart of open source and related open endeavours. Modularisation means that people can work on small elements that together contribute to a larger whole; and the feedback they get for their efforts - typically peer esteem - is what keeps them going.
(Via Ars Technica.)
Another great commons under threat:In towns and cities across the country, millions of other street trees are less lucky. Supersized lorries batter their crowns, utility companies dig up their roots, high-density developments squeeze them out, mobile-phone companies and CCTV operators demand they are trimmed back, water-main repairs shut off life-giving leaks, insurers claim they are causing building subsidence . . . and we, the public, sue councils when we trip on pavements made wonky by tree roots.
Simon Phipps raises an important point: what should be done about corporate blog pages when their owner has, er, passed on (as in to another company)? Sun's solution:When we started blogs.sun.com, we had a long discussion about what we should do when employees left. The conclusion we all reached, supported strongly by Jonathan Schwartz who attended the meeting, was that they should simply be left in place, merely closed for further changes. Our view was that, if the blog text had been acceptable when it was published, there was no reason a change of employment status should vary that. Not to mention the desire by Tim to preserve URIs. Interestingly, one of Jonathan's motivations for this was also so that people could pick up where they left off when they rejoined Sun!
But I'd go further. I think that companies have a responsibility to maintain the availability of any materials that they make public. This is because of the changed nature of information these days: it's inherently interconnected, and snipping out a weft here and a warp there isn't good for the rest of the data tapestry.
Publicly-available information forms a commons; removing it constitutes a destruction of part of that commons. Ultimately there should be laws against it, just as there are against chopping down historic trees that form part of the landscape commons.
Blige, I thought, Mikey's seen the light:In a speech today at the Consumer Electronics Show here, Mr. Dell urged the electronics industry to foster the planting of trees in order to offset the impact of their devices’ energy consumption on the environment.
Bless yer, guvnor, you're a gent.
Oh, but wait:He said Dell, the computer company he founded, would begin a program called “Plant a Tree for Me,” asking customers to donate $2 for every notebook computer they buy and $6 for every desktop PC. The money would be given to the Conservation Fund and the Carbonfund, two nonprofit groups that promote ways to reduce or offset carbon emissions, to buy and plant trees.
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Dell intends to cover the administrative costs of the program. Mr. Dell was not able to estimate those costs.
I see: Mike Dell thinks planting trees to offset the energy that computers consume is such a great idea he's asking his customers to pay for it. Of course, it's not that Dell's company causes any damage to the environment independent of the energy its computers use.
But there again, I suppose poor old Mikey couldn't really afford to put his hand in his own pocket since he is getting a bit short of a bob or two, now that he's down to his last $17 billion.
A glimmer of hope: trees as the anti-desert, and the (re-)creators of a new commons.
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