Decommissioned oil rigs look dull and lifeless as you drive by them or look at them from afar. Below is another story. There’s teeming life. There are 12,000 oil rigs worldwide, and at some point they stop being useful to the oil companies, too costly to maintain. Removing them is expensive as well as labor intensive and leaving them as they are can be dangerous to marine life. But as of 1984 with the US Congress National Fishing Enhancement Act the benefits of artificial reefs have been recognized. The Gulf states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Texas have converted some 500 rigs into reefs. In time the substructure rigs provide the skeleton for coral reefs. They become nurseries for certain species, and can be bountiful human made marine habitats for colorful fishes, crabs, starfish and mussels to congregate there. Sometimes they can be more protected from predators than they would be in other parts of the ocean. Converting platforms into reefs is an attractive options for oil and gas companies which can save them millions of dollars. Campaigners for decommissioning the rigs say that it is a win/win situation for those companies. They are allowed to spend half their savings for the state artificial reef program to maintain the platforms, marine conservation and education. In some areas in the Gulf of Mexico, the abundant marine life there have made them hot spots for diving, snorkeling and recreational fishing. As the world moves away from fossil fuels, a viable solution for decommissioned rigs needs to be found. I for one like the reefing one because it takes something that has been harmful to the environment and redeems it to be helpful.
Category: Social Issues
Trust in Science
We’ve all had to make so many adjustments to Covid, not all of them to our liking. And yet Covid has brought out a few good things, the change in the 8 hours work day for one. Another is our trust in science. The Wellcome Trust, a charitable organization based in London, commissioned an international survey of how people viewed science and scientists. One of their areas of interest is public health, one reason being that public health policy and programs which usually come from governments cannot succeed without the public’s trust in science. What was surprising to many in view of some of the reactions to Covid was that as a whole trust in science has increased. The report that was issued showed that 80% of people from 113 countries trusted science either a lot or some. Roughly the same, about three fourth of the people surveyed (119,000), said they trusted scientists also either a lot or some. The percentage of people who said they trusted science a lot rose about 10% in East Asia, including China, Latin America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. In the United States, as one would expect, the picture is more complex. 54% of people said they trusted scientists a lot, an increase of 9% over the previous Wellcome Trust poll in 2018. While to no one’s surprise, trust in science follows party line, an important factor here is that more people trust science and scientists than trust government and what government say or ask. While that finding has big implications for policy makers, and I hope they will pay attention, the point is that trust in science is making small inroads despite our polarization.
That’s why I wanted to share this with you, because it’s easy to look at our divisions and not see the cracks where the light gets in—if I may borrow a Leonard Cohen’s lyric.
The Too Big Technological Background
I needed a new phone and in the process changed carriers which means I needed my number ported from the old to the new. A process which normally takes no more than 3 hours and can often be done in minutes took 72 hours over four days, from Sunday afternoon until Wednesday 3pm. I dealt with several people at the store and each were trying to do their job, each was trying to deal with a situation they couldn’t understand along with a customer who kept asking where was the problem and pressuring them to resolve it. Each day brought a new crop of people, each with their own way of dealing with the issue. But none seemed aware of the huge background of technical inputs, processes and technicalities involved. They said first they didn’t have my correct zip code, when they did, but as I discovered it was probably entered incorrectly. Then they said there was 2 port requests, while the original carrier said there was not. At a loss for what was causing the delays they blamed the original carrier meaning it was out of their hands, they could do nothing. The point of all this is that whether with phones, or so many other daily necessities, cable, streaming, utilities, banking, all involve a technical backdrop which may be becoming too complex, certainly too complicated for the average person or the average worker. The people I dealt with were good with people, but unaware of potential issues behind the parameters of their jobs, not out of ineptitude or laziness, and I am not sure due to poor and inadequate training. They were knowledgeable within the confines of their very small sphere.
It’s easy to berate the tech support people we speak to on the phone, to get angry at those who are helping us when they give what looks like wrong answers, it’s easy to be angry at not being helped and be frustrated by the consequences, but the problem, I believe, is not the workers but the immensity of the technological grid. Each worker is tasked with the equivalent of a piece of the puzzle, and they do what they are to do, but there seems to be few who can see the whole picture. And as the picture continues to get bigger and bigger, it becomes an issue of concern. It is a concern that includes a lot more than the smooth functioning of our individual lives, but the functioning of a nation, its national security and relations with its allies. Several international issues relying on technology and its increasing ability to link, connect, compute, track… reveal the inherent complexities. Human trafficking is one where the technology can help but also add to the difficulties. It all points to the old issue inherent in the phrase too big to fail. Increasingly we need to keep asking when is big too big for our own good?
Sound Pollution–an Artist’s Take and Us
The pandemic brought lockdown. The lockdown brought a different soundscape. In cities throughout the world regular sounds are absent and in some like San Francisco, one can hear birds. Stuart Fowkes a UK based artist has been mapping the sounds of cities since 2014. He’s trying to map sounds all over the world and noticed that one thing lockdown brought out were sounds like church bells which were no longer lost in other city sounds. They could now be more noticed. To Fowkes so many sounds have been lost to noise pollution. In fact the World Health Organization thinks of noise pollution as an environmental stressor and a public health risk. On an everyday level we may not be aware of how sounds affect us, but they do. The vibrations hit our senses as well as our bodies, and usually result in a reaction from not only our physical bodies, but also our emotional ones. Sound pollution is so much part of urban life that we forget to notice its impact. Traffic of course, delivery trucks, ambulances, other sirens, revving motors, blaring music.. each bearable by themselves perhaps, but when added to the others affect us in ways we forget to recognize much less acknowledge. It’s not hard to see that sound pollution does stress us and that stress on an ongoing basis can be a health risk. Fowkes now has more than 4000 recordings of sounds from 100 countries, and was planning to issue a report last March. When Covid 19 hit he began recording those sounds, or their absence, and incorporated those recordings into The Future Cities Project so that we will not only know what cities sounded like before the virus, but also now. Whatever Fowkes’ reasons for undertaking that project, how sound affects us is something we ought to think about. Some sounds can make us relax, and some interfere with what we feel and even more with our thought processes. And for those of us who are also sensitive to what is transcendent, being aware of sounds and their effects upon us is certainly a must.