How To Survive Whilst Waiting To Thrive? [for GreenBiz.com]

Guest blog for GreenBiz.com:

The New Sustainability: Surviving While Waiting To Thrive
"Not many months ago it was not good form to make serious comparisons between the current global economic recession and the Great Depression. Now it is becoming almost fashionable."

How are green companies and green strategies going to survive the economic crisis? Read more...

Delivering The New Green Economy

There is much talk in and on the air about whether the various economic stimulus plans being discussed and deployed around the world will work. Many of the plans have some sections devoted to greening the economy, for instance promoting more energy efficiency, less waste, and the generation of more renewable energy.

It has been pointed out that to a considerable extent policymakers and economists are flying blind in what a British minister - a close ally of the prime minister - has recently called the worst recession in more than a century, surpassing even the Great Depression. It certainly feels very hard to know what, if anything, will successfully get a nation or the world out of this self-induced catastrophe.

What all of the stimulus plans have in common is that they all desperately want to create jobs. Undoubtedly, if enough money is spent in the right ways then jobs will be created. Whether they will be enduring jobs is another and very important matter, but it is not the point of this piece. In the short run, then, we'll be able to measure the success of job creation quite simply by following the statistics on employment issued by nations. What is much harder to measure is how effective any of the 'green' measures will have been.

The problem comes in at least three parts: despite years of effort, it has proven difficult both to develop and to deliver green programs and policies and to measure their outcomes. If social scientists like Tim Jackson and Doug McKenzie-Mohr are right, there is something quite simple that we can start doing about this suite of problems, and if we don't, it is quite likely that we'll get the same dismal results that many others have had when they have tried to green the economy or even just small parts of it.

There is a lot of literature from social psychologists going back more than thirty years about how individuals and groups react to different methods of 'green' persuasion. Some techniques are quite effective and other techniques are so ineffective that they make a bad situation worse. For instance, just giving people more information, which is the most common strategy employed by both government and many green groups, very often falls into the latter category.

To illustrate this, researchers in Canada took two groups of householders and gave one group information about the benefits and financial savings to their community of watering their lawns less while the other group were much more actively coached and helped in how to reduce their water usage. The second group cut their lawn water usage by more than half. The first group actually increased their lawn watering.

This reaction is not an anomaly - there is increasing evidence that citizens and consumers become confused when bombarded with too much information, and their confusion may easily lead them to turn away from engagement in annoyance or become paralysed into gloomy inaction.

In another unfortunate example, a California energy utility spent more money on advertising the virtues of energy efficiency than it would have taken to have simply insulated the houses whose owners were being targeted. More widely, utilities spend billions of dollars on information programs which may well be a near complete waste of money.

Research shows that human actions, especially habitual ones, are very complex in their causes and pathways, and are very difficult to change. But there are some known techniques which work much better than others - the Canadian example given is not an isolated one-off. The real problem is that policy-makers, program planners and business leaders seem not to know about this important body of work.

With trillions of dollars about to be spent globally, at least in part aimed at developing a sustainable future, the research work on what policies deliver results and which tend to fail needs to be discovered and taken notice of urgently. If not, this possibly unique opportunity to deliver a more sustainable economy, may be still born.

China Enters A New And 'Interesting' Phase

Making observations about geopolitics is often hazardous even for the seasoned analyst - events have a way of intervening in the most embarrassing ways. As we have seen with the economic crisis, a small number of economists did accurately warn about the coming meltdown and were roundly ignored by those in power, who universally said that there was no chance of a recession until the economy was already capsizing.

This is not to blame anyone for this state of affairs. Hindsight is a splendid thing, and when trying to operate in real time, one has to deal with human systems which are (too) complex and inter-dependent, wherein any move is usually met by a quick and often unexpected counter-move or a gambit to exploit an inadvertent opening. Natural eco-systems are not very different most of the time.

The above preamble is a kind of disclaimer. Despite the likelihood of being wrong in prognosis, there are some big picture items that we just have to try to diagnose and discuss even if we don't have the complete picture or anywhere near. One of these is the situation in China. There are several nations that have a disproportionate effect on the world, and China has become one of them. China has been a famous enigma for a few thousand years and it doesn't look as if that will be changing any time soon.

Until recently, it has become the done thing to say that the Chinese economic miracle will carry it through to being the largest economy in the world, and that along with the rising India and a possibly resurgent Japan, the centre of the world will keep shifting towards the East and South Asia. It is possible that this is what will play out, but it might happen in unexpected ways or not all.

The economic crash has taken China by surprise, as it has every other country. The reduction in economic activity is causing a huge increase in unemployment, which is not easy to cope with in any country (neither for those without jobs nor those trying to govern), but in China the situation is rather more tricky, because every year it has to absorb six to eight million new migrant rural workers into the eastern industrial and heavily urbanised part of China.

It is said that every percentage point of Chinese growth (per year) creates about a million jobs. One can readily see why it is necessary for China to grow at a rate in excess of 8% per year. Anything less risks social destabilisation. However, China's growth is showing signs of falling below this number (leaving aside the question of whether the growth figure may be exaggerated).

Signalling that all is definitely not well with the Chinese industrial machine, some 20 million of the roughly 130 million migrant workers are now reported unemployed. This number does not show up in official unemployment statistics because migrant workers are not counted. There is little question that such a huge number of displaced unemployed people showing up in the poverty-stricken villages of China has the potential to cause trouble.

The Chinese leadership is only too painfully aware of the situation and is trying to introduce policies to stabilize and reverse the economic decline. They are doing this for a number of reasons including the fact that they don't want to see social order break down (which government does?) and they also see signs that the economic miracle has promoted the regions too much leading to an age-old problem of local and potentially uncontrollable power bases developing.

It is therefore imperative that the Chinese economic stimulus, now underway for two months, work quickly and effectively. Specifically in response to the rural migrant worker problem, the measures include subsidies and training programmes, and encouraging the formation of new small businesses, though there is little optimism that the latter will have much traction in the poorest, most cash-starved areas, at least in the short term.

Rural health care systems are being proposed, and much more boldly, China has just announced that it will spend $123 billion to provide universal health care within two years instead of eleven. This in itself could relieve a lot of potential social and economic tension (as it might in America, were it ever to be tried).

The economic stimulus package is also going to spend massively on constructing new inter-city rail lines - $88 billion is proposed, with $44 billion having already been spent last year. If China were able to power these trains with renewable electricity instead of coal or imported diesel, it would have moved a long way to having a sustainable transport system. Given Chinese expansion in wind and solar PV, such an idea cannot be ruled out.

The Chinese leadership knows there is plenty of trouble with the country, but they are certainly taking vigorous action. There are signs of incoherence and conflicting policy aims, but China has weathered these before. With the petroleum price now fallen so far from last year, however temporarily, and waning industrial activity, China is importing less oil even as it builds its own new strategic petroleum reserves.

There are many other problems besides those mentioned here and the stimulus and other policies may not all work as intended. But for the world, the consequences of China's new path may be easier to grasp, however unwelcome in some quarters, because whether China succeeds or not, it looks like it will start pulling back from the heavy emphasis on global export trade as it concentrates on domestic development. It should be noted that it is unlikely to pull back from its need to import oil, especially if the domestic stimulus works.

A withdrawing China would have some interesting effects to put it mildly, and one of the most interesting would be if China starts liquidating its holdings of US treasuries just when America needs China - and anyone else - to start buying even more. China has withdrawn from the world before, but this does not appear to be what China is planning now, rather a refocusing on domestic issues and infrastructure, not least because it does not wish to emulate the kinds of collapse that the economies of Japan or the Asian Tigers underwent after growing too fast.

It is a trite and now cliched saying, but China really does look as if it is heading into 'interesting times', with both danger and opportunity in its own future and in its relations with the rest of the world. As a broad brush stroke, that much at least is not too hazardous an observation. The unfolding details may be another matter.

Sources: NYT, WSJ, Reuters, FT, Stratfor: Baker Friedman, CIA, P&C

A Cheer For Critical Thinking [O'Reilly blog]

Even in hard times we should still apply critical thinking to the strategy and products of science and technology, rather than being tempted to cheer uncritically. Read the full article on my O'Reilly blog page: 'Cheering For Green Tech - Critically'

Some Observations On Social Media

One of the advantages of living in San Francisco is that you can meet people who are in the thick of all things online and web 2.0. Over the last couple of days I have been to three different events with a social media or social networking focus. I shall be writing about these matters in more detail in the future, but for now, a few things seem clear(er):

1) Although there is a torrent of information about social media both online and offline and there are even ways of making money from it (indirectly) if you are good at SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization), the key for most people will be to stick to what you love - blog, talk or tweet about what you are really interested in and like doing. Be natural, don't try to fake it and don't try to sell anything too overtly - think about giving rather than taking. Blunt selling messages don't work, unless perhaps you are trying to sell your old sofa for five bucks (3.85 euros). Even then, CraigsList would probably be better.

2) The world of social media has not yet been professionalized and the worlds of marketing and advertising are still feeling their way. Somehow some of the services like twitter, Zannel etc are going to have to be seriously monetized, because as we saw in the first dot.com era and will see now even more, given the credit crunch and worse, if the tools that make social media possible don't make any money, ultimately they will go away. Advertising is not an easy sell in the social media context for many reasons, but maybe the confluence of many strands, including audio and video and various forms of interactivity, will make it possible for enough money to be made to keep the social media superstructure in development and maintenance.

3) Despite the missing business model and despite the grim times, the world of social media is fantastically vibrant and upbeat, especially here in San Francisco, where many of these services have started. Even so, I think everyone realises that at some stage the champagne has to be augmented with some meat and potatoes. From what I can see, the people at the forefront of social media were strongly involved in web 1.0 and many have quite fresh and hair-raising stories - and wounds - to prove it when things went wrong in 2001. Making social media financiall sustainable is a real and insistent question.

4) Audio and video recognition and search tools don't work very well yet, which may hold back audio-video from becoming a really integral part of social media. There is a lot of work being done on this and there should be no underestimating how difficult these kinds of pattern recognition problems are. The predictions of the 60s and 70s regarding voice and video recognition, not to mention Artificial Intelligence, have been hopelessly even ruinously optimistic. Even so, it would be great to see a lot of progress in this area (maybe some of the TARP money could be directed into this?).

5) At sfAMA Charlene Li talked about the need to tie different elements of social media together, including, for instance, single sign-on and cross-application information mining leading to applications being much more integrated. There are signs that this is happening with OpenId and ways in which Facebook and other similar apps can receive feeds from other streams. There are of course security and privacy issues that may be very knotty and should not be underplayed.

6) There is no substitute for real life. Believe it or not. But that can be a huge advantage of social media - it helps bring people together in real life, for talking, laughing, dancing, eating, you name it, and it keeps you connected in between. You don't have to join a mailing list, and you see (parts of) all kinds of conversations that can keep you in the loop, keep you feeling connected and belonging, and very often inform you of an event you had not heard of. In some ways, it's like being in an old fashioned pub - you hear a snatch of conversation and go over and listen or you see someone you were not expecting and are able to connect. People seem very friendly about this and non-cliquish, thank goodness.

In sum, there is a refreshing air of conviviality and inclusiveness about social media, especially twitter, which is so lightweight and inviting without being burdensome. Social media is about joining and belonging, and more than ever, in our fractured contractarian societies facing great economic hardship, anything that helps people connect in diverse yet guilt-free ways can help increase life chances and work chances.

I am willing to bet that through social media trust, social capital and mutual reciprocity are all being augmented, along with an increased awareness of common pool resources, but I don't have the data to prove it (yet), but I can say that social media are fun and an extraordinary resource and definitely increase levels of serotonin and oxytocin by somewhere between one and 100%. Or maybe more.

The Great And Most Fortunate

The Great And Most Fortunate - not to mention Invincible - Spanish Armada set sail late in May in 1588 from the occupied port of Lisbon. Philip II was not pleased with Elizabeth I and was determined to put a stop to her activities by invading and conquering England. This would also disrupt some Dutch operations which were harming Spanish interests and prevent the British from attacking Spanish ships laden with gold and silver plundered from South America.

The slight problem was that the mission was an abysmal failure and helped to bankrupt Spain. Again. Yet Philip II later assembled more armadas which also failed. And his policies caused Spain to suffer more bankruptcies. Spain once had the largest empire on the planet, but it was based on flimsy economic foundations and poor policies and once decline set in Spain never really recovered.

Is Spain unique? No. Military adventures and associated expenditures have bankrupted or ruined country after country, and in even the more successful empires, the gains whilst impressive-seeming from some points of view, are always temporary.

It is possible that if someone is going to attack you, you might conclude that you had better attack them first rather than be slaughtered. This unfortunate and destabilizing behaviour seems to be inherited from some of our primate ancestors. However, it is not an iron law and it surely doesn't explain all modern military aggression, and even if it did, I think that rational leaders would look at the long-term costs and should conclude that wars don't pay.

In particular, the wars started by America since the end of World War II, seem to have been very bad value for money, even if to an increasing extent it was someone else's money. Looking at the fascinating and not much studied Bretton Woods money system, it is surely reasonable to conclude that whatever flaws it had (plenty), from America's point of view it was a very useful system and that it was brought down principally by the costs incurred by the Vietnam War.

It is possible to argue that the ending (officially in 1973) of the Bretton Woods agreement was one of the factors that allowed the recent, and now clearly disastrous, economic bubbles to form. However, it can also be argued that some of the seeds were planted by the agreement itself, in particular that Bretton Woods allowed the US to live beyond its means, a habit which once cemented in by the unique operation of the dollar, continues to this day.

In particular, America has used its special relationship with the world monetary system to build up a staggering and frightening military machine that it is all too willing to use overtly or covertly (by arms sales for instance). Few people think this is good for the world, and only a minority of Americans now appear to think it is good for America.

Why have such a huge and expensive military capacity? Which nation is going to attack the US mainland directly? The British tried it a couple of hundred years ago, but they seem to have been quite friendly lately. Mexico or Canada? Not very likely, since each nation is massively dependent on exporting goods and resources to the US, particularly energy resources.

Therein lies a clue. America's dependence on foreign oil imports is one of the reasons why it could argue that it needs a huge military. Interesting then to consider that the cost of running that military, not including the extra amount required for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention the war on terror and the war on drugs) is about the same as the amount that America pays for all its imported oil - very roughly half a trillion dollars.

The good news is that if the Fed's printing presses ever run out of ink or the Chinese stop buying US treasuries, Washington could always put the military on unpaid leave for a decade or two and use the money to pay the oil import bill. Any pennies left over could be used to buy some wind turbines and solar panels, thus delivering both fiscal prudence and energy security, which should please politicians and public of every stripe and help America avoid the fate of nations that fight too many wars.

'Terroir': Creating A Sense Of Place

"Tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart or in the head? How begot, how nourished?" Shakespeare asks. And replies "It is engender'd in the eyes, with gazing fed."

Looking at the picturesque town of Epoisses in France I at least can easily agree with Shakespeare, and making a sort of bad pun for which the bard had a weakness, one might add it is fed by grazing too, since Epoisse is famous for its cheeses.

The picture shows the cheese-making enterprise of Jean Berthaut. Making this cheese is a complicated art, involving washing (the cheese) with salty water, then by a month in a humid cellar, followed by more washing, now with a mix of rainwater and a rather lethally strong alcoholic spirit called Marc de Bourgogne - not just once, but two to three times a week.

Much of this process is dedicated to the matter of ripening the cheese, called affinage. Quite reasonably enough it is carried out by an affineur, who also rotates and nudges the cheeses (a little like the remueur who twist the champagne bottles - a process known in English as riddling).

I tasted some of the rich and delicious Berthaut Epoisses cheese today (in San Francisco, not France) in the presence of the master cheese-maker himself, which is what prompted me to find out more.

French cheese is an ancient tradition, and like wine, terroir is a central concept. Terroir means land, but the real essence of the word does not translate into English very easily, but a key element is a sense of place, of being rooted somewhere. Terroir points to the unique aspects of soil, climate, situation and farming methods used to produce certain kinds of food like cheese and wine (though it can also apply to tea and coffee).

The quality of being 'rooted' is becoming increasingly rare for many of us, but the story of many of the old cheeses (and wines like champagne) is actually also one of serendipitous experimentation, which serves as a reminder that a sense of place and of traditions which in turn give people a sense of belonging all have to be invented by people trying different things out.

Many people will be trying new things out today, whether they want to or not, but one of the fruits may be new senses of terroir and belonging, as well as a renewed sense of the importance of local food whilst having the chance to learn from other places, directly and indirectly.

Getting To The 'Deeper Why'

A friend of mine said to me today that if Wall Street bankers were surgeons he wouldn't want any of them to operate on him. Yet almost no-one has been seriously taken to task and the banking system and the bankers who helped create the disaster look like they are about to get another 350 billion dollars - apparently with slightly more oversight this time.

I find all this quite mind-boggling. The amounts of money are staggering and the amount of planning and oversight seems to be absolutely minimal. I don't have any special access to Wall Street or Washington DC but I do know from former lives that what you read in the media is the acceptable face of some of the truth. The blogosphere helps, and things leak out onto the web that can shed more light on what is going on. But the thing that is missing - and which is so vital - is that so often we don't know really know why something is happening.

The 'deeper why' is hard to get at for all kinds of reasons. One might take the example of the Russia-Ukraine natural gas dispute. I am not favouring one side or the other, but on the one hand, the Ukraine has been paying a really low price for the gas that it takes - or rather, it has not even been paying a low price, because it is badly in debt to Russia for what it has used. On the other hand, why did Russia wait till a viciously cold winter period to shut off gas, since the debt had been building up for a long time.

The matter is not just about natural gas and being a bad payer. Although Ukraine has few energy resources compared to its huge neighbour, it has one thing that Russia really needs - well located ice-free access to the sea. The Ukraine is also an important transit route from Russia to Europe for many things besides energy. Russia is therefore very alarmed by Ukraine's moves into western arms - if such a move were completed, it would have serious security implications for Russia, not least because the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is at Sevastopol on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

The above analysis is all gleaned from public sources. I hope it gives a slightly better and more balanced picture than some media reports, but the 'deeper why', the real motivations and machinations will likely be hidden for decades or eternity. And so it goes for almost every other important issue in every nation on the planet.

Does not knowing the deeper why matter? For the serious historian, the answer is surely yes, but if one asks the question in a different way, I think the answer would be yes for all of us, at least in the future: does all of this covert manoeuvring lead to an efficient use of resources - especially money and energy - and good macro planning?

Surely the answer is no. What we need is a lot more transparency and the ability to ask more and deeper why questions. The next question is how to do this in such a complex society with so much at stake, and thus so much to hide. It would be so much easier if the surgeons of Wall Street were genuinely interested in the wider economy and society and would use their diagnostic skills to help the body politic. Since that is not the case, we need some new surgeons and some new approaches to anatomy that actually treat the body as precious instead of disposable.

Take A Bike On The Wild Side: Making City Cycling Safer And More Convenient

I had already decided to change my homeward route to something both safer and with luck having fewer steep hills (going up that is). One of the advantages and disadvantages of riding a bicycle is that you get to learn the topology in a very intimate way - every downhill beckons like an old friend into a warm pub, while the uphills, though good for anaerobic stimulation, cause a sinking filling in that part of the brain set aside by nature for mapping bicycle excursions (unless you are a competition cyclist).

You also get to see the social ups and downs of a place, and something had told me that returning at 10pm via the road I had come along at 7pm would be a bad idea. It wasn't a good idea at 7pm, but I had no idea until I was actually going along it that I had picked a worrying street, and once on it, I didn't want to risk getting lost or potentially going into an even more alarming district.

So it just as well that I had worked out a quite different return route, because as I was leaving my meeting-which-turned-out-to-be-a-big party (put on by SXSW in San Francisco) a distraught young fellow asked me which way I was cycling home. He had a skateboard under his arm, so I spent a moment trying to do mental somersaults - did he want me to give him a tow home? Perhaps he needed directions, in which case I am about the last person on the planet to ask, unless I have a GPS device in my hand.

I told him I had arrived by the street behind us but was contemplating a different route. Then he blurted out that someone had just pulled a gun on him on that street, and he had fallen off his skateboard, smashing half his watch and catching some grazes. Mainly however he was scared - which seemed like a very sensible reaction.

I took his advice and mine, and went home in a completely different direction - which happily also avoided most of the hills. I was very wary all the way - always a good idea on a bicycle, though one is not normally, I hope, watching out for people with guns. But maybe city cyclists need a couple of extra markings on the cycling maps, beyond which streets have less cars on them: how about something to show the gradients of hills in flashing neon (there are a couple of maps with gradients marked, but the markings are too tame) and something to show which areas are not so safe at night. Both of these could be interactive, as long as the printout came out well.

Utilitarian cycling will just have to become much more popular for many reasons and it will be much easier to promote it if people, especially women, feel fairly safe whilst doing it, which in turn will make it easier to enjoy one of the great benefits of travelling without being sheathed in a metal box, namely that you can start to get to know your locale in a much more intimate and detailed way.

Significant Sorcerers, But Still Apprentices: How Nature Can Dispel Our Ocean Dead Zones

In pursuit of covering significant science stories I was going to write something about the perennial problem of excess nitrogen on the land, which I shall mention briefly, but the story led me to a reminder of a deeper principle, that should encourage us to analyse as much as possible before taking actions at scale.

Some scientists have been conducting a research program for more than decade to see whether nitrogen fertiliser might be useful in the struggle against climate change by aiding carbon sequestration in forests. It's in an interesting and potential important story, but the scientists caution that the systems they are dealing with are very complex, and that they couldn't be sure that their experiment would be net positive in terms of atmospheric carbon reduction.

A wise caveat, since unintended consequences have been a rising and unfortunate fact for us and our world ever since we started trying to control our environment and food supply, which appears to be at least sixty thousand years ago. However, sometimes what we might view as a negative event in nature has a useful unintended consequence, which is something that our scientific and policy analysis should also be watching for.

One of the problems of using a lot of nitrogen to fertilise anything, be it for forests in the research mentioned above, or for crops for humans, is that much of the nitrogen won't stay on the land, but runs off into the water system. As far as I know, absolutely nobody wants this to happen, certainly not the farmers, who have to pay a lot of money for something which mostly ends up in coastal oceans or inland seas. Whereupon, it often forms algal blooms which in turn take all the oxygen at the bottom of the water and thus kill off all the other life forms that live there, which then causes all the creatures which depend on them to die off. Technically this oxygen shortage is called hypoxia (a 'low oxygen event'), but in common parlance it's a dead zone.

Worldwide, these dead zones have increased from 49 in the 1960s to 405 now. Scientific American gives one graphic example of why dead zones are bad news:

A single low-oxygen event off the coasts of New York State and New Jersey in 1976 covering a mere 385 square miles (1,000 square kilometers) of seabed ended up costing commercial and recreational fisheries in the region more than $500 million. As it stands, roughly 83,000 tons (75,000 metric tons) of fish and other ocean life are lost to the Chesapeake Bay dead zone each year—enough to feed half the commercial crab catch for a year.

Various schemes are being put forward to reduce the amount of nitrogen being applied to the land (though the forest experiment I mentioned first would ironically add to the problem), but the article continues:

[efforts at nitrogen reduction] still might not solve the dead zone problem. So much nitrogen is now reaching...coastal waters that much of it ends up buried in sediment [and] even when new nitrogen sources are removed those sediments release that nitrogen over time, perpetuating the cycle.

That inability to recover is driven not only by the nitrogen buried in the sediment but also by water layers that don't mix with one another, despite the massive flow of rivers like the Mississippi. Instead, warmer, fresher water on the surface sits on top of cooler, denser, saltier water...

So what does it take to make that mixing take place?

...it takes the energy of multiple powerful hurricanes to blend the two.

And there's the paradox and complexity. Very few humans want hurricanes, but it seems that because hurricanes exist, time and co-evolving ecosystems have found a way of using this natural force:

For example, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Louisiana coast with its powerful winds blowing faster than 130 miles (210 kilometers) per hour, the monstrous tropical storm delivered a benefit: it mixed the warm, oxygen-rich surface waters with the colder, almost oxygen-free waters beneath, dispelling the largest dead zone in the U.S. for a time. Hurricane Rita followed and finished the work, ending early the seasonal dead zone that forms each year at the mouth of the Mississippi [at the top of the Gulf of Mexico].

That dead zone—which last year stretched over roughly 8,500 square miles or 22,000 square kilometres, an area the size of New Jersey, and is predicted to grow even more extensive in 2008, thanks to the early summer floods—forms because of the rich load of nitrogen and phosphorus the Mississippi carries down from the farm fields of the U.S. Midwest.

The dead zone in question is more than twenty times bigger than the 1976 event which cost half a billion dollars. The Scientific American article was written before the busy 2008 hurricane season really got blowing, so maybe the dead zone was dispelled early again in 2008.

The main point is that despite the extraordinary advances we have made in scientific understanding we keep finding out that everything in nature is more complex than we thought - it's like an endless Russian doll. That doesn't mean we should not keep trying to understand more, far from it, but rather that we should try to remember that large natural events that we find very negative will very likely have positive features seen from a larger systems perspective and that when we start interfering with those systems at scale, we are bound to be interfering with many dynamic systems we don't understand very well.

Thus, even at this late stage, beset with ever more urgent problems - a bit like the Sorcerer's Apprentice - we need to mix caution with innovation. That is not an easy task, though in a sense, all living things in every ecosystem are doing this, albeit unconsciously. We have the advantage and disadvantage of being able to analyse and plan. What we almost certainly don't have is a master magician waiting to bail us out, as it were, so the more we can find out about how things work and work with nature rather than against it the better.