p. 19 The Mississippi River’s drainage basic is the third largest in the world, exceeded in area only by the Amazon’s and the Congo’s. It stretches over more than 1.2 m suqare miles and encompasses 31 states and slices of two Canadian provinces. The basi is shaped a bit like a funnel, with its spout sticking into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Great Lakes’ drainage basin is also vast. It extends over 200,000 sqyare miles and contains 80% of North America’s fresh surface water supply… drains east into the Atlantic, by way of the St Lawrence River.
The two great basins abut each other, but thety are – or were – distinct aquatic worlds. These was no way for a fish (or a mollusc or a crustacean) to climb out ofone drainage system and into the other. When Chicago solved its sewage problem by digging the Sanitary and Ship Canal, a portal opened up, and the two aquatic realsm were connected. For most the 20th century, that wasn’t much of an issue, the canal, loaded with Chicago’s waste, was too toxic to serve as a viable route. With the passde of the Clean Water ACt and the work of groups like Friends of the Chicago River, conditions improved, and creates like the round goby began to slip through.
p. 106 It’s estimated that one out of every four creatures in the oceans spends at tleast part of its life on a reef. According to Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at Australian National University, were these structures to disappear, the seas would look a lot like they did in Precambrian times, more than 500 million years ago, before crustaceans had even evolved. “It will be slimy,” he has observed.
p. 120 “Cane toads are native to South America, Central America and the very southernmost top of Texas. In the mid-1800s, they were imported to the Caribbean. The idea was to enlist the toads in the battle against beetle grubs, which were plaguing the region’s cash crop – sugar cane. (Sugar cane, too, is an imported species,; it is native to New Guinea.).. in 1935, 102 toads were loaded onto a steamer in Honolulu. 101 of them survived the journey, and ended up at a research station in sugar-cane country, on Australia’s northeast coast. Within a year, they’d produced more than 1.5 million eggs. The resulting toadlets were intentionally released into the region’s rivers and ponds.
It’s doubtful that the toads ever did the sugar cane much good. Cane rubs perch too high off the ground for a boulder-sized amphibian to reach. This didn’t faze the toads. They found plenty else to eat…In the early phase of the iinvasion, the toads were advancing at a rate of about six miles a year. A few decades later, they were moving 12 miles a year. By the time they hit Middle Point, they’d sped up to 30 miles a year. When researchers measured the toads at the incasion front, they found out why. The toads on the front lines had significantly longer legs than the toads back in Queensland.”
p. 172 The first government report on global warming – though the phenomenon was not yet called “global warming” – was delivered to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. “Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical exmperiment,” it asserted. The result of burning fossil fuels would, almost certainly, be “significant changes in termperature,” which would, in turn, lead to other changes. “The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea levels by 400 feet,” the report noted. Even if the process took a thousand years to play out, the oceans would “rise about four feet every 10 years,” or “44 feet per century”.
p. 200 “Andy Parker is the project director for the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative, which works to expand the “global conversation” around geoengineering. His preferred drug analogy for the technology is chemotherapy. No one in his right mind would undergo chemotherapy were better options available. “We live in a world,” he has said, “where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.”
But to imagine that ‘dimming the fucking sun’ could be less dangerous than not dimming it, you have to imagine not only that the technology will work according to plan but also that it will be deployed according to plan. And that’s a lot of imagining… scientists can only make recommendations; implementation is a political decision You might hope that uch a decision would be made equitably with respect to those alive today and to future generations, both human and non-human. But let’s just say the record here isn’t strong. (See, for example, climate change.)
Suppose that the world – or just a small group of assertive nations – launched a fleet of SAILs. And suppose that even as the SAILs are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a reurn to the climate of pre-industrial days or even to that of the Pleistocene or even that of the Eocene, when crocodiles based on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedneted world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.”
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