TUESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2010


KLMNO THE GREEN LANTERN


Achenblog 6washingtonpost.com/planetpanel


Adapted from Joel Achenbach’s blog.


Welcome to the Anthropocene I’ve been thinking a lot about the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the name given by imaginative geologists to a new geological epoch shaped by human beings. It’s not yet officially recognized as a scientific term. And the concept is not as flattering as it may sound at first blush. Ideally, we wouldn’t have so drastic an impact on the world that it shows up stratigraphically. You can see in the rocks of the Earth the pivotal biological moments. For example, the Permian-Triassic boundary can be found in sediments that are 251 million years old, and it marks the sudden disappearance in the fossil record of 95 percent of the planet’s species. (The event is known as the Great Dying.) We’re officially living in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,600 years ago with a sudden warming event and the retreat of the glaciers. The Holocene has been an epoch of climate stability. It’s been pleasant around here. We like the Holocene. Except it may be over. One obvious change is atmospheric, with the spike in carbon dioxide and resulting global warming. There’s also the sudden mixing of species and their relocation around the planet thanks to human transportation. Invasive species and habitat destruction have led to a loss in biodiversity. All this has happened extremely quickly on the geological time scale. Last week I attended the Aspen Environment Forum, which National Geographic’s Dennis Dimick opened with a slide show he titled “The Man-Made World.” It was visually arresting tour of what might be described as the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. Dimick’s premise is that for most of human existence we survived on contemporary sunshine in some form or another. Then we discovered coal, the genie in the Earth. Now we live off ancient sunshine (coal, oil, gas), which has made possible the extraordinary expansion of our population. But all trend lines show that this isn’t sustainable. We have to return to a life based on contemporary sunshine. There are scientists actively trying to persuade their peers


that the Anthropocene is a stratigraphic fact, as real as the Permian-Triassic boundary. In sediments from 1945 and later we see the radioactive elements left over from atmospheric tests of atomic bombs. Or perhaps the Anthropocene started around 1800, when the Industrial Revolution took off. Life in the Anthropocene has many nice qualities. Air conditioning comes to mind. But if it’s not sustainable, then it’s just another way in which we borrow from the future. We take what isn’t ours. We squander resources. We live like there’s no tomorrow.


SCIENCE NEWS


Meditation seems to aid concentration For people who have difficulty staying on task, intensive


meditation may help. So say researchers from several campuses of the Univer-


sity of California, who had 30 participants attend a three- month retreat during which they practiced meditation for about five hours a day. Researchers then periodically tested the participants’ ability to stay focused when confronted with a boring visual task. That chore was spending 30 minutes merely identifying long and short lines that flashed on a computer screen. Par- ticipants were given this test at the beginning, middle and end of the retreat and again five months later. The study also used a control group of 30 people who were familiar with meditation but came to the retreat only for the visual testing. Participants who lived at the retreat center went without


television, phones, the Internet and books. They had instruc- tor-led meditation in the morning and evening, and they spent most of their free time in solitary meditation, said the lead researcher, Katherine MacLean. Before the retreat began, the experimental and control groups scored similarly in keeping track of long and short lines. As the retreat continued, those in the meditation group performed better. Those in the control group showed some improvement after the first test, but their changes we- ren’t as great. Participants who continued to practice meditation daily


after the retreat maintained their increased ability to con- centrate, whereas those who stopped had a drop-off, the re- searchers reported. “The changes that occur [during the meditation retreat] are still with you once you go back to daily life and help you function better,” MacLean said. “Purely mental training can improve your ability . . . to perceive things more clearly, and that can make it easier to pay attention.” The study findings were published in the June issue of Psychological Science. — Leslie Tamura


SCIENCE SCAN VISION


An eye-opening memoir “FIXING MY GAZE” (BASIC BOOKS, $15.95)


Susan R. Barry shares her story of learning to see in three dimensions in this memoir. As a child, Barry had three op- erations to fix her crossed eyes (a condition called strabis- mus), but she didn’t realize that she couldn’t see in 3-D until she attended a college lecture on vision. (A professor was explaining the now disproved theory that people with strabismus would never be able to see in 3-D, even if their eyes were later straightened, because that ability could only develop early in life.) Neurolo- gist and author Oliver Sacks wrote about her in a 2006 New Yorker article, dubbing her “Stereo Sue.” The best moment of the book is when Barry explains the surprises


of seeing a 3-D world for the first time at age 48, after com- pleting visual therapy: “A large sink faucet reached out toward me, and I thought I had never seen such a lovely arc.” As a neurobiologist, Barry is in a unique position to tell her life story because she can, and does, give scientific explana- tions for why her eyes and brain could not produce 3-D imag- es, and how she fixed that problem.


FILMMAKING


Global snapshots “ONE DAY ON EARTH”


What will you be doing on Oct. 10? Grab a video camera and start shooting because a group called One Day on Earth is looking for volunteer filmmakers to tell unique stories about their lives on that day (10/10/10). The footage will be edited down into a two-hour film that ambitiously aims to document snippets of the human experience in every coun- try in the world for that 24-hour period. According to a state- ment on the project’s Web site, this “will foster a greater sense of global empathy and, ultimately, action towards a more sustainable and equitable planet.” Sign up at www.onedayonearth.org.


— Rachel Saslow


TheWashington Post is printed using recycled fiber.


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I’m about to propose to my girl- friend, and I’d like to declare my love with a gem that causes the least damage possible to the plan- et. How do I go about doing that? In recent years, consumers


have learned to be wary about the political issues involved with gemstones, such as the “blood diamonds” that financed wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the rubies that support the military junta in Burma, also known as Myanmar. But jewels have environmental impacts as well as social ones, and ethical consumers should consider both when buying their bling. There are two types of gem- mining operations: large indus- trial mines and small-scale, in- formal digging sites. Most of the world’s diamonds come from the former, while the vast majority of colored gemstones — rubies, sap- phires, emeralds — come from the latter.


Big mines can have corre- spondingly big impacts. They disturb wide swaths of land and sometimes affect biodiversity in drastic ways. They may use a lot of water for processing the gems, and the huge amounts of waste rock they produce can contribute to acid-rock drainage. (The typ- ical diamond in an engagement ring requires the removal of 200 to 400 million times its volume in rock.) Meanwhile, the ma- chines used to dig diamonds out of kimberlite ore can have hefty carbon footprints.


Small-scale mines, on the oth- er hand, have the potential to be relatively low-impact, since the process is so much simpler. But when they’re poorly run, these small mines can cause great damage, particularly if they’re lo- cated in ecologically sensitive areas. Washing gems in nearby rivers or streams can pollute those waterways with silt and sediment, altering aquatic habi- tats. When laborers flock to a site where gems have been found, forests are often cleared to create more digging sites. Trees also come down for the sake of cook- ing fires, and hunting can deci- mate local wildlife populations. Improper use of machinery can lead to oil spills and excess greenhouse-gas emissions. It’s relatively easy to mitigate these consequences, if you can provide the miners with ad- equate training and organiza- tional support. But that’s a tall order, since thousands of such sites are scattered throughout the developing world, where en- vironmental regulations are of- ten lax. Big mines, run by big cor- porations, are much easier to monitor and hold accountable for their records on both envi- ronmental and human-rights is- sues. In an ideal world, your ring’s mine-to-market journey would be tracked by an independent or- ganization that verified which sustainability measures were in place at each step. That’s not an option, unfortunately. The fine- jewelry


industry is pushing


toward greater transparency and accountability, but it will be some time before consumers can reliably get robust, credible in- formation on the provenance of their baubles, particularly col- ored gemstones.


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80 kWh to grow one carat of dia- mond in a lab. Those data points don’t tell the whole picture: In both cases, you need to consider the energy costs of transporting the gems, and with synthetic stones you need to add in the ex- traction of the raw materials. At the very least, though, the energy that goes into synthesizing a dia- mond doesn’t seem like an envi- ronmental deal-breaker. (A big- ger issue for the Lantern would be where the gem was cut and polished, since there are child- labor and worker-safety issues associated with that process, par- ticularly at the lower end of the market.)


If your beloved must have a MICHAEL SLOAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


If you really want to start your marriage with a clean slate, consider an old ring: Antique jewelry is the greenest, safest option.


If you really want to start your marriage with a clean slate, con- sider an old ring: Antique jew- elry is the greenest, safest option. If you don’t have a grandma with an heirloom gem, there are plen- ty of places where you can find high-quality, new-to-you rings. You should also consider syn-


thetic gemstones. These days, it’s possible to grow rocks that have the same physical, chemical and optical characteristics as their natural counterparts; even trained gemologists often can’t tell the difference. (Their makers like to call them “grown” or “cul- tured” stones, to capture some of that alluring sense of “terroir.”) These “synthetics” are distin- guished from “simulants,” such as glass or cubic zirconium, which merely imitate the appear- ance of precious gems. Mining is still required to pro- duce the raw materials for syn- thetic stones, such as alumina for rubies and graphite for dia-


monds. But Saleem Ali, a profes- sor who has studied the social and environmental impacts of gem mining, notes that those materials are already being mined in large quantities for oth- er applications. So the relatively tiny demand for synthetic jewels isn’t driving mining activity, un- like the way demand drives min- ing for natural gems. It takes some energy to fab-


ricate those flashy rocks, but the total amount used may be com- parable across synthetic and nat- ural gemstone operations, at least when it comes to diamonds. Ali has collected diamond-mine energy-use figures, ranging from 7.5 kilowatt-hours per carat at the Argyle mine in Western Aus- tralia to an average of 80.3 kWh per carat across De Beers’s vari- ous operations. (That includes washing and processing the stones.) Meanwhile, producers of synthetics quoted figures to the Lantern ranging from 20 kWh to


new and natural stone, you’re just going to have to deal with the information gap. The best thing you can do is seek out jew- elers that have stated their com- mitment to buy gems from sus- tainable sources. Many such companies are involved in the cross-sector working group known as the Madison Dialogue; its list of participants would be a good place to start looking for ring-shopping options. (Check out, for example, the work being done by Columbia Gem House at www.fairtradegems.com/home.) The Web site Fairjewelry.org also maintains a list of ethically minded companies. Several ex- perts the Lantern spoke with also had praise for the efforts be- ing made at Wal-Mart and Tiffa- ny’s. However, without an inde- pendent organization certifying a jeweler’s sustainability claims, you’re going to have to decide for yourself whether you trust the company’s marketing depart- ment.


Is there an environmental quandary that’s been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.


Do I cherish the Earth, too? Yes, I do.


Science


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The Green Lantern is a weekly


environmental column from Slate. Read previous columns at www.slate.com/greenlantern.


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