The Stanford Daily Magazine Vol.II Issue 6 (04.27.18) — The Earth Issue

The Stanford Daily Magazine

VOLUME II

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Issue 6

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April 27, 2018

the earth issue

Academics’ adaptations Environmental scholars across disciplines look forward and outward in turbulent times p. 24

DAM DEBATE p. 22

Wild Wyoming p. 30

Life of a Banana p. 32

Welcome to the EARTH Issue We are facing a pivotal moment for our planet. ¶ This past Sunday, April 22, was Earth Day, and we wanted to mark the occasion with a special, environment-themed issue of our magazine. But the Earth and the environment deserve attention more than just one day out of the year, and we hope that this issue of the magazine serves as a starting point for our community to learn more about the environment and Stanford’s relationship to environmental issues. ¶ Climate change continues to pose a significant threat to people around the world, and that threat is only growing. Last June, the Trump administration formally announced its plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement. In the past year alone, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma devastated parts of the U.S. and other countries in the Caribbean; Puerto Rico has still not entirely recovered from the damage wrought. Closer to home, California has endured record flooding and wildfires. The Stanford community has also participated in environmental activism — for example, through the Fossil Free movement, which has, for the past few years, lobbied the Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels. ¶ In this issue, you will find pieces exploring local and global environmental issues, including a column on how climate change is contributing to the refugee crisis, a profile on how Stanford professors are engaging in environmental activism and, in Stanford’s own backyard, a meditation on hiking The Dish. One writer even questions the usefulness of Earth Day in advancing its own cause. You will also find creative works that offer a different way to consider the environmental themes that many of the articles address. ¶ We hope that this magazine provides an opportunity for you to reflect on the environment beyond Earth Day and consider the role that we, as a Stanford community, have in protecting our Earth.

— Sarah Wishingrad, magazine editor

Contents

The Stanford Daily CAMPUS

BEYOND STANFORD

MAGAZINE

Volume II, Issue 6 April 27, 2018

8 DOES EARTH DAY MATTER? Phoebe Quinton discusses what the annual event really means

10 FROM SEEDS TO HARVEST A look at the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm

14 CLIMATE CHANGE Sophie Stuber examines climate change and the refugee crisis

22 SEARSVILLE DAM Activists clash with Stanford over environmental impact

24 FACULTY SPEAK OUT Professors on their role in climate activism post-Trump

32 THE LIFE OF A BANANA Eliane Mitchell explores the inner workings of Stanford compost 42 HIKING THE DISH Reveling in the beauty of our outdoor spaces

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6 CARTOON Staff cartoonist Joe Dworetzky on climate change inaction

FUTURES

ARTISTS

Contents

30 LIGHTROOM Syler Peralta-Ramos trains his lens on the Wyoming wilderness

18 THE SPARROW A short creative piece imagining a dystopia

Q&A

7 ILLUSTRATION Environment-inspired art by Cathy Yang

46 POETRY Environment-themed poems from Nancy Chang and Becca Nelson

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36 POST-WORK A group of writers envisions a world beyond work

20 KERRI WALSH JENNINGS An interview with the Stanford alum and Olympic medalist

Hours Weekdays from 7 a.m. to 12 a.m.

Weekends from 9 a.m. to 12 a.m.

STAFF Editor-in-Chief Hannah Knowles Executive Editor Fangzhou Liu MAGAZINE LEAD Sarah Wishingrad Managing Editors Maximiliana Bogan, Alli Cruz, Courtney Douglas, Emma Fiander, Regan Pecjak, Julie Plummer, Olivia Popp, Bobby Pragada, Laura Sussman, Richa Wadekar, Joshua Wagner, Nik Wesson, Claire Wang LAYOUT Kristel Bugayong, Harry Cole, Emma Fiander, Irene Han, Janet Liu, Josh Wagner, Melinda Wang, Cathy Yang CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Do-Hyoung Park Chief Revenue Officer Kevin Martinez

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CARTOON | Joe Dworetzky ILLUSTRATION | Cathy Yang 6

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Does Earth Day matter?

by Phoebe Quinton

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

W

hen the importance of protecting

the environment seems obvious to many who recognize threats such as global warming and extinction, you may wonder if it is really necessary or effective to dedicate a day to raising environmental awareness. After all, if we should live like every day is Earth Day, why do we need an Earth Day at all?

According to Earth Day Network, at its conception in the 1970s, Earth Day was a national political movement, led by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, to raise awareness for environmental protection and put environmental issues on the nation’s political agenda. But since the ’70s, for many American citizens, Earth Day has faded from its original glory to no more than an out-of-uniform day for some high school students. The political rage that once motivated millions of people to march, protest and demand reform from coast to coast has now become subdued and replaced with defeated acceptance. If we will never be able to halt climate change, then what’s the point of Earth Day and in trying to do anything at all?

In a world dominated by commercialization and false promises, Earth Day may seem superficial and insufficient in meeting the growing demands of environmental sustainability. Big corporations greenwash in an effort to profit off of environmental concern; politicians declare empty wishes for the wellbeing of the environment with fake smiles and no intention to follow through on concrete

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policy reform. And so, it is easy to become disillusioned and cynical about Earth Day. Although the motivations of some large corporations and politicians are questionable, there are positive effects to their environmental actions. Mike Burnett ’18, an Earth Systems major and vice president of an ecology club on campus, sees pros and cons in this complex relationship between activists, corporations and politicians.

“I have mixed feelings about that,” Burnett said. “I’ve had companies who want to do a partnership where we advertise a product because it’s sustainable, and it really seems like sometimes they’re trying to co-opt that cause with the aim of making money.

I’m not super into that, but I suppose it’s better than not having any environmental awareness at all. It’s a balance because raising awareness is good and having companies that have that kind of advertising capacity can be really helpful, but people need to be aware of what they’re really contributing to.”

Additionally, even some genuine proponents of environmental welfare and protection find that Earth Day is not a very memorable event.

When asked how they have spent previous Earth Days, many students, like Vrinda Suresh ’21, draw a blank. Suresh noted in an email that although she is an extremely environmentally conscious person, Earth Day has never stood out to her.

“I feel like I’ve never really done much for Earth Day, which is kind of sad,” she wrote. “I

think my most memorable Earth Day was in like fifth or sixth grade, and all I did was make a poster that said ‘Save the Earth’ or something and post it on the classroom door, which I’m sure was super effective in conserving the environment. But other than that, I would always just do what I’d do on any other day — school, extracurriculars, homework.”

Suresh is not alone in treating previous Earth Days like any other day. When I was in high school, Earth Day was only memorable for the T-shirts with globes plastered on the back that the entire student body was forced to wear.

However, according to Suresh, “that doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way forever.” In fact, many events around campus celebrate the importance of the environment and expanding the local community of environmentalists.

Earth Day as a community-builder I first set foot in the Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building to interview Richard Nevle, deputy director of the Earth Systems program at Stanford. As a selfdiagnosed fuzzy, milling around the Engineering Quad in general is enough to make my stomach bubble with discomfort. Interviewing the deputy director of the Earth Systems program about Earth Day, a subject I will readily admit I did not know enough about, seemed outside of my domain, to say the least. As an outsider to the environmental enthusiast community, I was originally daunted by the prospect of

writing this article. However, I was immediately reassured by Nevle’s easygoing disposition and welcoming personality — two characteristics that are consistent with his hopes for Earth Day. For Nevle, Earth Day is more than just a day to celebrate the environment and all of its beauty; it is also a day to expand the group of people who identify as environmentalists by redefining “environmentalist” and by helping people find their place in the green community. Nevle believes that “every student on this campus has a way to contribute,” whether their contribution is through art, writing, activism or simply spending time appreciating the natural world.

While appreciating the environment and becoming conscious of its aesthetic and functional gifts may seem to add little to the environmental movement, Nevle asserts that since people pay attention to what they love, paying more attention to the environment can “help to deepen that connection with the Earth and help to catalyze a state in which we can be not only more attuned to the natural world but also more thoughtful about ways that we can live in the natural world.” Ultimately, Nevle proposes that becoming cognizant of the environment causes people to “think about the implications of how we’re living and to think of how to walk more lightly on [the Earth]. ” To broaden the definition of an environmentalist, Nevle advocates for the creation of more events like Earth in Color, which took place at the O’Donohue Stanford Family Educational Farm this Earth

Day. Nevle explains that the event aims to showcase how “people of color have engaged with the environment for as long as there’s been an environmental movement.” He finds events like Earth in Color important because “people of color have always been a part of the environmental movement, but in the United States, that movement, for many, has looked very white.” Making the environmental movement more inclusive for marginalized and minority communities is one of Nevle’s goals for Earth Day this year.

“I’m excited by the potential of events of like Earth in Color to broaden how we think about environmentalists and the environmental movement to be more holistic and more embracing of a lot of social movements,” he said.

Like Nevle, many students on campus feel Earth Day is a great community-builder.

Burnett appreciates Earth Day as a “cool way to bring people together and keep the environment and sustainability on the front of your mind.”

Burnett usually spends his Earth Days at campus events like EarthFest, which is held on Columbae’s lawn and seeks to raise awareness and create community. This year, he plans to attend a sustainability fair to talk about environmental issues facing Stanford.

Is Earth Day every day feasible?

Although Nevle, Bennett and Suresh will attest to living life like “every day is Earth Day,” none of them are disheartened by the fact that every day is not Earth Day for the majority

of the population. Instead of viewing this fact as conclusive evidence for an unsolvable epidemic of selfishness and ignorance, the three Earth enthusiasts see the lack of environmental involvement throughout the year as a space filled with potential. Despite being disappointed by Earth Days in the past, Suresh hopes to see more people “taking care of and giving back to the Earth” this Earth Day. Having a day dedicated to the environment undoubtedly assists with outreach for environmental programs and movements. Even for those who cannot dedicate their lives to championing environmental causes, Earth Day serves as a valuable reminder to be conscious of one’s engagement with the Earth on a daily basis.

Ultimately, Earth Day is what you make of it. For me, it became a superficial means of facilitating environmental concern and awareness in my high school community.

However, after speaking with Nevle, Bennett and Suresh, I feel renewed hope and a responsibility to make this Earth Day more meaningful than those prior. The question remains of how to inspire other communities to become engaged in Earth Day in whatever ways are feasible for them. As Nevle aptly puts it, Earth Day is meaningful as “a way of helping the rest of the public who are not as tuned in to environmental issues to become involved.”

Contact Phoebe Quinton at pquinton@stanford. edu.

DEVON ZANDER /The Stanford Daily

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from seeds to harvest: A look at the farm on the Farm

by Melissa Santos

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O

n a rainy Thursday morning, students on bikes whiz past each other on the way to 9:30 lectures — one hand clutching a hood to stay dry, the other steering, trying not to hydroplane. Just a mile away from the hustle and bustle of Main Quad, however, lies a six-acre campus haven absent of the noise that clouds everyday life at Stanford: The Farm’s very own O’Donohue Family Educational Farm.

That rainy morning, local volunteer Razia Mianoor, coterm Lina Khoeur ’17 M.S. ’18, farm production coordinator Allison Bauer and I stand in the barn thinning lettuce sprouts and sipping hot tea together. There is simply something about trekking through the mud, taking shelter in a greenhouse and picking gently through the tender leaves. Khoeur tells me that working at the farm helps her “put things in perspective.” I believe it. Life slows down when you start the day by engaging with the Earth and with people who care about it, she says. It is an exercise in patience, in reflection.

The story of the O’Donohue Educational Farm — established in 2014 by the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences (SEES) — mirrors that of the plants that grow on its grounds: It is a narrative of people from all walks of life coming together to create a space that will enrich a

Photos by ALYSSA DIAZ/The Stanford Daily

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Roots: the farm’s history If there is someone who knows just how much is packed into the farm’s brief history, it’s Farm Director Patrick Archie.

“This [farm] had been a dream, and my job was to help realize that dream,” Archie said.

“And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last, gosh, six-and-a-half years now.”

In his first three years on the job, Archie helped campus planners answer the logistical questions of having an educational farm — where on campus it could go, how big it could be and what resources were necessary to assist its function. When the SEES officially opened the farm’s doors, he also played a major role in ensuring the farm’s operational activity.

Although she only started working at Stanford two years ago, Liz Carlisle, field instructor and SEES lecturer, says she has been involved with the farm since day one. Since the beginning, she has been working alongside her “sweetheart” Archie, her partner with whom she shares a “totally romantic, idyllic” life working and teaching on the farm.

“An educational farm is such a major undertaking that I think it’s really nice to have a collaborator who understands that it’s not just a nine-to-five job. There is a commitment beyond that,” Carlisle said. “It’s wonderful to have a kindred spirit in that work.”

Carlisle describes the farm as a model for small-scale, sustainable, organic agriculture: She and the farm staff select crops that build natural soil fertility and break up pest and disease cycles, undermining the need for commercial fertilizers or chemicals.

Unlike the huge monocrop farms of corn or wheat that often come to mind, the O’Donohue Farm boasts dozens of plant varieties yearround. After wrapping up its winter harvest of kale, chard, cabbage, leeks, onions and garlic, the farm has been gearing up to plant its warmseason crops like peppers, eggplants and tomatoes. The farm also grows flowers year-round to attract pollinators and even raises chickens — a “must-see” for visitors, Carlisle says.

Many of the crops harvested from the farm end up right on our plates. Through a partner-

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ship with Residential and Dining Enterprises, the farm’s fresh produce features in campus dining halls, Stanford Catering and Munger Market. The farm even sells its produce — fresh corn, flour and more — to Flea Street Cafe, a restaurant in neighboring Menlo Park.

Carlisle and Archie are still adding more to the farm every day. Just a few weeks ago, the two were joined by students from Stanford and De Anza Community College, local volunteers and the Santa Cruz-based organization Orchard Keepers in planting fruit trees throughout the farm grounds. The fruit varieties now found on the farm cannot be counted on both hands: plums, apricots, pluots, figs, pears, apples, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, persimmons and a variety of citrons.

“Before this was Silicon Valley, they called it the ‘Valley of Heart’s Delight,’” Archie notes. “It was all orchards from here to South San Jose. So this little orchard is our homage to that.”

As the trees grow slowly but surely over the years, they will provide shade for crops planted beneath them, fruits for the community to enjoy and a wealth of new memories for those who come to help the farm keep growing. “[I was] just imagining someone picking that perfectly ripe, sweet plum off of that tree as we’re digging these holes,” Carlisle recalled. She cited the day they planted the fruit trees as one of her favorite memories on the farm.

“It’s feeling that sense of a long-term investment in something that people will always enjoy,” Carlisle said.

Educational mission As its name suggests, the O’Donohue Family Educational Farm also has a mission to educate its visitors and enrich the Stanford academic experience.

“I love the idea that students understand where their food comes from, how it’s grown, what kind of resources it takes, the value of it,” says Professor Jeffrey Koseff M.S. ’78 Ph.D. ’73, founding co-director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and member of the farm’s advisory board.

Koseff, who co-teaches THINK 40: “Sustainability Challenges and Transitions” — an intro-

ductory Thinking Matters course targeted at freshmen with a variety of academic interests just beginning their academic journeys at Stanford — describes class visits to the farm as integral to learning firsthand about class themes like food, energy and water.

“Having the farm as a centerpiece to all of it helps bring a lot of it to life in a more real way,” Koseff says. As both Koseff and Carlisle note, field trips to the farm enhance learning for a variety of classes — not just the expected ones like THINK 40.

“We get courses from all over campus,” said Carlisle, who designs and leads the farm field trips. “We’ve had art professors bring their Drawing 1 class, we’ve had [Science, Technology and Society 200A] come and talk about food systems in society.” Carlisle said that this quarter, students enrolled in the BIO 30: “Ecology for Everyone” course came to the farm to do a composting workshop with their own food scraps.

Engineering students from the “Design for Extreme Affordability” class also use the farm as a space to take their ideas from blueprint to reality. According to program coordinator Jessica Gonzales, students have prototyped a wide range of projects, from affordable chicken coops to be used in Tanzania to wireless water sensors to help drought-conscious farmers save water.

Various classes are taught on-site at the farm, such as Archie’s EARTHSYS 180: “Principles and Practices of Sustainable Agriculture” and Carlisle’s EARTHSYS 136: “The Ethics of Stewardship.” Riya Mehta ’18, an Earth Systems student advisor, said that Archie’s class made her “fall in love with the farm.”

“I just love that [these classes] take place at the farm. They get students excited about and engaged in the actual agriculture,” Mehta said.

“I really do consider it just as important as all the classes I’ve taken in classrooms, maybe even more important.”

Gonzales echoed Mehta’s sentiment.

“You can’t get this experience in a lab. You can’t get it in a classroom. It’s unique,” she said.

“I think these are the kinds of experiences that people hold on to and remember.”

The heart of a community When asked about their vision for the future of the farm, Archie, Carlisle, Koseff, Mehta and Gonzales all gave more or less the same answer: They hope that Stanford students, as well as the surrounding communities, think of the farm as a welcoming space to make connections and nurture community.

Mehta, founder and co-president of the student group Stanford Farmers, helps organize students to come to open volunteer hours on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, and leads events such as the fall Harvest Festival.

She has even hosted yoga in front of the newly constructed Terry Huffington Barn overlooking the lush, green fields. For Mehta, volunteering on the farm provides an avenue to connect with people she would have otherwise never meet — from families with ever-curious children to students from nearby colleges.

“When you are working side-by-side with someone, it doesn’t really matter if you come from really different backgrounds or study completely different things,” Mehta remarked.

“You’re engaged in the same task.”

Now that construction on the farm has neared completion, Gonzales said she is working toward increasing community outreach.

Last summer, the farm sponsored a program for 20 high school students — half from Asia, half from the Bay Area — to learn about sustainability through the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. In the spring, Archie will teach a practicum for students to lead a fifth-grade field trip program for students from lower-income schools. Stanford students will learn to make different topics — from entomology to exploring farm systems and soil science — accessible to the fifth graders.

Gonzales expressed her hope that the farm will continue to grow into an inviting place that makes people want to come out to learn and connect.

“I think it’s really valuable to have a safe space where you’re encouraged to learn and try things, whether it’s trying an organic chicken egg or learning how to use a saw for the first

time,” Gonzales said, encouraging any and all to come see for themselves what the farm has to offer. “Smell things, touch things, taste things — this is your farm.”

Just years ago, the multi-acre plot consisted of an oak tree savannah overgrown with weeds and grass. Now in its fourth growing season, the farm serves the Stanford population as well as surrounding communities, welcoming all to partake in the agricultural process from seeding to harvest.

The dream of having a campus farm — voiced for decades by students and faculty alike — was made possible by Laura and Kevin O’Donohue

MBA ’87, who met at Stanford over two decades ago. Using the O’Donohues’ contribution, the University has worked to transform the O’Donohue Educational Farm from an empty grove into a fully-functional farm facility.

“We’ve been really fortunate that the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences really saw the value of an educational farm as a living laboratory ... and really went for it,” Carlisle said.

Contact Melissa Santos at melissasantos@stanford.edu.

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Displaced: A dearth of policy as millions relocate due to climate change

by Sophie Stuber

Between the years 2008 and 2015, approximately 22.5 million people have been forced to relocate — temporarily or permanently — due to climate and other “weather-related” disasters. There are estimates that by 2050, the number of persons displaced due to climate may eclipse the number of “traditional” refugees as defined by the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol.

Despite this, there currently is no international consensus on how to aid persons displaced due to climate change. Though the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are aware of the increasing severity of climate change and migration challenges, these organizations have not issued clear recommendations or policies to address these issues.

Abnormally hot and cold weather in agricultural nations is already contributing to a rise in asylum requests in the European Union (EU) from citizens of the affected nations. A recent study

by Wolfram Schlenker and Anouch Missirian concluded that the growth in asylum applications could be fully attributed to “temperatures in maize-growing countries that hit during the growing season, in the area where crops are grown.”

Schlenker and Missirian also created models for predictions of future effects of climate change in agricultural regions. If the average temperature rises by 2 degrees Celsius, the EU will likely see approximately a 28 percent increase in asylum applications.

However, if carbon pollution rises at its current projected rates, annual application rates could grow by 188 percent by 2070.

In gross numbers, this would translate to over 650,000 asylum

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applications in the EU per year.

Forced displacement due to climate change is a nuanced threat, as the effects of climate change manifest themselves through a multitude of environmental alterations. It is likely that climate change will contribute to environmental challenges, such as increased drought, rising sea levels and more severe natural disasters. Each of these may require a different international response.

Water scarcity: the Sahel The Sahel comprises the semiarid area in Africa between the southern rainforest and the arid north. And though rainfall patterns and temperature are often capricious, the region is experiencing drought and rainfall patterns out of the ordinary.

Historically, Lake Chad has been essential for the survival of people in the Sahel. As Ben Taub writes in his article for The New Yorker, “Lake Chad is the principal life source of the Sahel.”

Taub also adds, “The lake used to give the islanders everything: they ate from it, drank from it, and built houses from its reeds.”

However, Lake Chad began receding in the 1970s, a phenomenon that scholars and scientists have recently begun to label as a phenomenon of climate change. In the past 30 years, average temperatures in the Sahel have risen between 0.2 and 2.0 degrees Celsius, and rainfall levels have decreased across the north and south. The Sahel desert is growing in size as Lake Chad gradually disappears, and water sources are becoming more difficult to find.

The effects of the drought on Lake Chad are severe and potentially permanent. Though the giant lake used to fill roughly

the same area as the state of New Jersey, today, it is less than 5 percent of its original size — a little over twice the size of Lake Tahoe. Desertification has claimed most of the northern basin.

Furthermore, according to the U.N., the Sahel’s population has doubled over the last several decades and is predicted to double again in the next 20 years. The growing population places stress on essential environmental resources such as food and water.

Repeated drought, severe chronic food insecurity and shrinking average precipitation levels contribute to these scarcities. The impacts of drought and lower rainfall cause a decrease in tree species diversity and density, as well as more common water shortages and higher cases of malaria and diarrhea.

Climate change is predicted to cause higher levels of food scarcity. This could lead to severe food stress for approximately 50 percent of the total population of 60 million people in the Sahel. Research projections show that climate change and continued water scarcity will cause the Sahel to accumulate approximately 250 million tons of food deficits by 2020.

Historically, famine has been a principal driver of mass migration in the Sahel region, but now, as John Grolle writes, “Food insecurity had evolved into a chronic state, as evinced by the incorporation into everyday livelihood systems of villagelevel strategies that had been used only during famines (for example, sale of wild food plants, fodder, firewood).”

Historically, family migration to the savanna has been a vital survival tactic for the agrarian Sahelian people, and the savanna has been a haven for families who need to resettle due to drought or famine. However, today, there is evidence that these movements are less successful than they have been in the past

because the savanna is close to its resource capacity.

Indeed, in Niger, famine can no longer be classified as a distinct crisis, and in nearby Ghana, there are higher levels of progressive rural-rural migration within the country. Chronic food insecurity is one of the driving factors behind this movement of people.

In response to increased threats of climate change and lower feasibility of migration, scholars are studying adaptation techniques in the Sahel. However, though populations in the Sahel have recently put more energy into adaptation efforts, there has not been an official governmental overhaul in any country. Many of the countries in the region lack strong central governments, so adaptation implementations face even greater challenges. There are few disaster plans or streamlined processes.

In the immediate future, governmental bodies and international organizations should focus on raising awareness about climate change and water scarcity. Awareness will educate people about both the origins and effects of desertification.

Solomon Islands: surging seas and relocation In the past two decades, the rates of rising sea levels in the Solomon Islands rank as some of the most rapid in the world, with an average increase of between 7–10 millimeters annually.

Throughout the northern Solomon Islands, over 11 islands have either disappeared entirely or are undergoing rapid erosion.

On Taro Island, the capital province became the first town in the Pacific forced to plan relocation due to climate change.

This effort to move the approximately 1,000 residents has been taking shape over the past 20 years.

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There are challenges to the planned relocation of an entire town. For example, the government can only build on small pieces of state-owned or official registered land. The only land that fits this formally registered qualification near Taro is next to a mangrove swamp. Thus, the relocation requires complex planning so that the new capital will be able to survive future challenges of climate change.

Though the government of the Solomon Islands acknowledges that planned climate relocation efforts are a vital interest because of rising sea levels and the threat of tsunamis, there is no existing policy or legislative action in place to oversee relocations. There is also the threat that government-ordered relocation efforts can disrupt traditional community structures.

This was enumerated by Simon Albert and others in a recent article in the journal Regional Environmental Change. The authors write: “Investigation of previous resettlement schemes within the Solomon Islands suggests that relocation must be considerate and cohesive with local communities’ traditional needs.”

Jakarta: sinking city Jakarta is a showcase of what can happen when metropolises are threatened by climate change. Through a combination of factors including rising sea levels and sinking land, Jakarta could be submerged in 10 years.

However, because there is not yet much accessible data in Jakarta on the shifts in factors such as air temperature, higher sea levels and the societal effects of climate change, it is hard to evaluate the impacts. Furthermore, though private organizations and government bodies are both developing strategies to respond to climate change, there is no collaboration between the two.

One thing is certain, though: Jakarta is sinking. This phenomenon is known as land subsidence. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) defines land subsidence as “a gradual

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settling or sudden sinking of the Earth's surface owing to subsurface movement of earth materials.”

In recent years, the severity and prevalence of flooding events in Jakarta have increased due to land subsidence. Rising sea levels have exacerbated the problem. Residents are illegally digging wells that are slowly draining the aquifers below the city, making the sinking issue worse.

In an article for The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman explains the destruction in Jakarta.

“Jakartan developers and others illegally dig untold numbers of wells because water is piped to less than half the population at what published reports say are extortionate costs by private companies awarded government concessions,” he writes.

From 2011 to 2014, groundwater extraction in Jakarta rose by 24 percent and is projected to keep increasing. Additionally, land subsidence created greater vulnerability to both inland and coastal flooding. Rivers and canals near the city have sunk so much that they no longer flow to the ocean by gravity alone.

Instead, pumps are necessary to drain the river.

Kimmelman writes: “In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise — so surreally fast that rivers sometimes flow upstream, ordinary rains regularly swamp neighborhoods and buildings slowly disappear underground, swallowed by the earth.”

According to hydrologists, northern Jakarta will be underwater in a decade if it does not take action to stop the sinking, which would damage a large portion of Indonesia’s economy. Unless there is serious reversal and a technological transformation in infrastructure, Jakarta will not be able to hold back rising river and sea levels.

Extreme flooding is expected to increase in frequency as a result of climate change and land use practices. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that coastal flooding will occur even more often because of rising sea

levels and greater intensity cyclones as a result of climate change combined with population growth and land subsidence.

However, there are governmental plans to attenuate the risks of flooding. Three years ago, the Indonesian government partnered with Dutch officials to undertake the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development (NCICD) program to design dikes to barricade Jakarta from rising sea levels. The collaborative project is projected to cost about $40 billion.

The proposed seawall would be 32 kilometers in length and is designed in the shape of the Garuda bird, Indonesia’s national emblem. With this wall, Jakarta Bay would transform into two “fresh-water retention lakes.” The seawall would also be a toll road that could improve traffic circulation to alleviate Jakarta’s terrible congestion. Behind the seawall, private developers plan to create 17 artificial islands that could house around 1.5 million people.

However, the future of the project is unclear due to concerns about environmental damage and destruction of the fishing industry, as well as accusations of corruption. Jakartan officials are no longer convinced that the megadistrict is feasible. Though the construction of the dike is moving forward, many experts are critical of the project.

Kimmelman writes: “As environmentalists have pointed out, if the city doesn’t first clean up its rivers and canals, a dike will turn an enclosed Jakarta Bay into the world’s largest cesspool.”

The success of the NCICD plan is heavily dependent on the success of other projects, such as cleaning up the city’s septic drainage systems. Currently, aside from the megacity, there is no government plan to address these challenges that would preclude the district. For now, citizens and government officials remain paralyzed while the city sinks and sea levels rise.

Though predicting the effects of climate change is inherently complicated, climate change already poses a challenge to international norms and security. In an interview, Major

General Munir Muniruzzaman, the chair of the Global Military Advisory Council on climate change, stated, “Climate change is the greatest security threat of the 21st century.”

Rising sea levels, drought and shifting weather patterns are slow-building crises, but they have serious implications for the affected populations. Already, the Solomon Islands plans to entirely relocate a major village, and this is just the first. The Maldives is projected to disappear entirely due to rising sea levels. Jakarta, a major city center, could be submerged in 10 years. On the other end of the spectrum, drought and continued water scarcity have disrupted traditional migration patterns for villagers in the Sahel. Across the world, populations are already experiencing the effects of climate change. Where will these people go?

The international community must develop strategies that both address the root causes of climate change and offer response solutions, including local adaptation strategies and an asylum framework for persons displaced due to climate change. Poorer, developing countries will likely experience the effects of climate change earlier and at a greater magnitude. The irony is that it is powerful, developed nations that have chiefly contributed to manmade climate change. Should larger, wealthier countries accept responsibility for climate change and offer support to the nations most affected? It is a difficult concept to sell internationally, and it would be challenging to implement and enforce such an international and comprehensive reparations system. Yet, as climate change worsens and displaced populations grow, the moral dilemma is increasingly important to consider.

Contact Sophie Stuber at sstuber8@stanford.edu.

17

right b “I’ll be

18

by Mark Yor

k

Jr.

ack.”

ow

e Sparr h T

The child blissfully, perhaps naively, believed him, her wide bright eyes full of precious awe as she saw him disappear into the overgrowth — a dense, unexplored region of shadowy forest. Five years have passed since then, and those words soon became tragic lies; she’s 10 now and that innocent child is gone.

The girl woke up expecting something different — new air to fill her lungs, new light to strike her eyes — but instead, she woke up in the same solitary cottage on top of the same solitary hill. Apparently, this place used to be a farm, and all sorts of folk would come to pick up their bounties. Those were the days when man and nature worked together, but not anymore; ever since that final December, there weren’t any folk to be seen. Not that it bothered the child any; that was before her time. She only mourned blurs and daydreams.

Every day she walked along the safety of the trail — littered with bullets, disabled automobiles and widespread forest — collecting food along the way. When she was younger, the girl skipped through the trenches and hopped over the wire. She would admire what used to be minefields, now dead and covered in wild grass. There was something calling her to the inorganic, but she was too old for that. Her eyes got baggy, and the child settled for what she had in the now: She had the trail, and she had herself.

She littered the ground with leftover peanut shells for landmarks, though mostly out of habit — the girl knows the way inside and out by now.

One day, a shrill cry — sharp as knives — stopped the child. She looked for the source and found a baby sparrow, no larger than the palm of her hand, entangled in a shrub. The plump bird had a coat of acorn brown with dirt and twigs caught between its rustled feathers.

The bird shivered uncontrollably as it continued shrieking. She heard it and she was prepared to walk along, but her feet stopped in their tracks. There was something about that sparrow that lured the child. It was probably the eyes, she thought. Its wide bright eyes, soaked in a loneliness she knew all too well.

The girl dropped everything and inspected the sparrow, noticing its broken wing, and with a firm nod, she lifted that bird as if her own glass heart were inside that hatchling. She took it home, she shrouded that bird with her favorite towel and she prepared a box for the bird to rest in — just as that faceless man would have done, she’s pretty sure. The bird cooled in its cries, and the girl stood there, unsure of what she had just done. She had made a decision, and a simple one, at that. Why was she so tired now?

This simple decision later turned into a methodical routine. Every morning she checked the

box, always expecting the bird to disappear, though it never did. Afterward, she mashed up any food she found for the sparrow, and everything the bird didn’t like was, without hesitation, spat in her face. The bird grew a bottomless appetite and constantly shrieked for more.

It annoyed her, but it was a tender annoyance, an irreplaceable irritation that painted a warm smile on her face.

Eventually, she would tell the hatchling some stories. She would tell of Jack and Jill, who fetched some water, of Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall, of the earth-shakers that painted the skies black. Who knows where those stories came from? Yet she remembered them all the same. She had food, she had shelter — yet stories were the only thing she felt she could give that little bird. The only thing that would last, anyway.

The bird was her only companion, a soul to return to; it became less about survival and more about two outcasts, rejected by the world, working together to see a tomorrow. It was a partnership of love and nutriment.

Perhaps she nurtured the sparrow too well; before she knew it, the bird was as spry as ever.

Fear turned into anxiety and the sparrow often glided across the cottage in bursts of energy.

No more spoon-feeding was necessary — no more early mornings, no more constant chirping. It was time to let the sparrow go. Deep in her heart, she knew that once the bird was free, it would fly off into the eternity; she wouldn’t be needed anymore. She’d just become another faceless ghost, like her caretaker had long ago.

At first, the child refused, but that changed when she looked at the sparrow. It was then that she noticed sadness in its beady black eyes. She realized that this little hatchling was looking for something that she was running from the whole time, and she would never be able to give it to him.

On an especially humid sunrise, she took the box outside. The air felt tight around her shoulders, but she marched on only to find that, just as she expected, the bird flew off without hesitation. Like a bullet, it left her and flew right into the shadows of no return: the overgrowth. She ran out of footsteps and her gaze locked on the sight, dumbfounded.

Days passed, then weeks, then months, and she was plagued by this all-consuming emptiness. The cottage was filled with a suffocating silence and she felt countless pins pierced into her heart. That sparrow, that beautiful creature, had left her.

She felt bonded to that same trail, chained to an ever-repeating routine, but how foolish that was! There weren’t any chains on her legs, no broken wing to excuse her cowardice — just vague phantoms of a distant past.

Why didn’t she follow that bird? What stopped her from scaling that distant mountain or climbing that colossal tree? What did that sparrow have that she didn’t? She hated asking those questions, but then she would look at that mirror and she would find a spiteful creature through the looking glass — a girl who utterly despised her.

One sunny day, as she stared lingeringly at the empty box, she made a dangerous decision.

She ran out of the cabin and, kitchen knife in hand, she crept towards the overgrowth, each heartbeat synchronized with her footsteps. The forest grew darker. Autumn leaves descended like fallen angels. Any ounce of control she had over her body faded away; she wanted to go back to the cabin and cloak herself in her old blanket, enjoying the soothing aroma of a lit candle and eating her favorite nuts and berries on her old coffee table. Yet she kept walking.

The ground grew muddier and her boots began to sink in the earth. Eventually, she slipped on the slimy trail and fell on her knees. Panicked, she looked back, only to see that the cottage was hidden in the shadows; only darkness remained. She finally broke down; tears fell down her face and her cheeks grew blush red.

She shouted at the top of her lungs, cursing the overgrowth, that wretched hellscape that stole her freedom, her companionship and now the life from her frail little hands. She began to get cuts and bruises from pounding on the hard, sloppy ground. She sobbed until she ran out of tears to shed. However, with newfound firmness, she wiped the tears on her muddy sleeve and kept walking. She lost all feeling in her feet, but she kept walking. She wanted to turn around, but she kept walking. She was not going to sit there like the scared little sparrow because there was nobody left to nurture her. The forest wasn’t her predator, nor was it her governor. She realized that the overgrowth was her fear, an amalgam of all her suppressed, darker emotions; it was a part of her.

She walked into the darkness, blindly making her way through branches and shadows, as she silently said goodbye to the sheltered, comfortable life she lived before. She didn’t even hear the peanut shells crunching from beneath her shoes. The woman marched on, and never came back.

Contact Mark York at myorkjr@stanford.edu.

19

Q&A Kerri Walsh Jennings

by Jose Saldaña

Three-time Olympic gold medalist and former Stanford women’s volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings ’00 was inducted into the 2018 Pac-12 Hall of Honor in March during the Pac-12 men’s basketball tournament.

The Hall of Honor was initially created in 2002 to recognize athletes and coaches in men’s basketball from each team in the conference. The 2018 iteration, however, marked the first year that student-athletes and coaches from other sports were inducted. Walsh sat down with The Daily to discuss her feelings on being recognized by the Hall of Honor, her time at Stanford, her new ventures and her reaction to the NCAA’s problems with pay-for-play.

TSD: Stanford is literally the Home of Champions. There is an incredible amount of tremendous athletes that have competed at Stanford. What does it mean to be the first Cardinal recognized now that every former student-athlete is being considered?

KWJ: Any recognition that I get because of my time at Stanford is absolutely so special to me, and I cherish and honor it with all my heart. The Pac-10 at the time (now the Pac12) was such a special place and an inspiring conference in which to compete. It was literally iron sharpening iron every single weekend. It really set my career path up for great success because I learned what was required to have sustained excellence, and I learned what it felt to have a huge target on our back because we kept winning Pac-10 titles.

TSD: Four in a row, right?

T

he Stanford Daily (TSD): How do

you feel about the Pac-12 conference having taken so long to recognize non-men’s basketball athletes with the Hall of Honor?

Kerri Walsh Jennings (KWJ): I think the time is now and I think that it’s so wonderful that the [Pac-12] finally adopted more athletes, so I’m so proud to be here ultimately.

Everything takes time. We all love tradition.

We all love evolution. And I think that’s what this ceremony signifies.

TSD: College women athletes haven’t gotten

their due recognition despite their incredible achievements, especially at Stanford. How does it feel to be honored by the Pac-12 as a female athlete?

KWJ: I am really proud to be here in that

capacity for sure as a female athlete. Every female athlete here considers themselves a baller.

Women are responsible for so much positive growth and inspiration within the Pac-12.

There have been a lot of pioneers who have fought for this day.

20

KWJ: I think four in a row. Not that we were perfect every season, but the Trojans of the world, the Bruins and even Washington State — everyone just made us better. I’m really proud of this honor. I really didn’t understand the gravity of it, but being here and seeing Rafer [Johnson’s] name and Cheryl [Miller’s] name… This is an incredible class to be a part of, so it’s just really humbling.

TSD: Do you still keep in touch with Stanford women’s volleyball? Is there any specific player that you have an eye on?

KWJ: They are all awesome. Every year I go to the Final Four, so I have been fortunate enough to watch Stanford the past two years. I was there the year they won it. Kathryn Plummer is a superstar. She plays beach [volleyball] as well, which is really fun. My cousin is on the team, Kate Formico. She is a sweetheart and kind of a silent assassin. She just gets the job done. Those are two of my favorites, but I just really appreciate the team. I appreciate [Stanford head coach] Kevin Hambly, and I love the leadership he brings. [Associate head coach]

Denise Corlett is literally my most favorite part about Stanford. I love following them all.

TSD: Do you have a favorite Stanford volleyball memory? A favorite Stanford memory unrelated to volleyball?

KWJ: My freshman year, we came in with a real good group of freshmen, and we came in with an even greater upperclassman group, and they took it to us. Preseason, as a freshman, I think just every single day grinding it out and learning from the best of the best, learning what it takes and surviving, to me is one of my favorite memories because it set the tone for my entire four years at Stanford.

It was all about excellence. There were no excuses, no settling. It was like we were going for one thing and one thing only and that is to be our best as a team and we are going for excellence. And even the losses, all that just fortifies you, so it’s pretty wonderful.

Non-volleyball memory ... I think studying

by Lake Lag, you know just kind of a daze where you get lost in the spring and studying for finals. Those were always good memories.

Just simple joys like walking around campus, and my best friends were on the team. Sarah Clark Bemus was in my same graduating year and living life with her as a teammate and as a friend was really fun.

TSD: How has Stanford changed as a school and athletic program since you left? Do you like those changes?

KWJ: I wouldn’t be able to speak with [a large] amount of knowledge about the changes. Stanford is always in the upper trend. They are always leading-edge. They always recruit the best of the best. Not just athletes, but the whole human being, and I assume those things have not changed about Stanford. I know the facilities have improved dramatically and they have really committed to the athletes and to the facilities.

TSD: Beach volleyball is now officially an NCAA sport that Stanford has! Do you think that having this available to you in your time at Stanford would have changed the trajectory of your career in any way?

KWJ: You know, I don’t know! I’m actually really glad that I didn’t have the opportunity because I appreciate the foundation that indoor gave me, and I was really hungry when I moved from indoor to beach. I think that hunger and that insecurity drove me to work hard to get my feet underneath me.

But it’s a beautiful thing that these girls have these chances. The more choices, the better. It’s amazing that more young women are playing volleyball in a different platform. That’s really beautiful.

TSD: You’ve recently talked about the p1440 event series. The p1440 website states, “Join the movement to elevate the sport of beach volleyball.” How will the p1440 lead to your goal of making volleyball an all-season sport?

KWJ: We are an event series, so ultimately our events are going to feel like festivals, with a professional beach volleyball tournament at the heart of who we are. Around the beach volleyball tournament, which will have the best in the world turning up to compete for the first place crown, we will have a personal development area where you can come work out, train and have fun. Then, there is a health and wellness village where you can learn about leading-edge practices, mindfulness and nutrition. Ultimately, it’s going to feel like a rad, badass health and wellness festival.

It’s going to elevate the game because we are going to treat the athletes as professionals and increase the prize money. The current state of beach volleyball is that people have to work two to three jobs in order to sustain their hobby of beach volleyball. And the U.S.A.’s standing in the world with respect to volleyball is going down because of it. The world is rising and we are going lower because of that nature. We are going to elevate the prize money. We are going to build brands. We are going to build stars. I’m sick of being the face [of volleyball]. I am very proud of being the face of our sport, but we need to create new stars. We just have a holistic vision of growing the game. Then, ultimately, we are going to have a technology platform and resource center where anything in the realm of volleyball training, health and wellness training and personal development will exist on-site. So you can live with us for 365 [days] and not just at eight of our events. Events are finite, but the platform isn’t.

TSD: Are the events already scheduled?

KWJ: The events are scheduled. They will be in San Jose at the end of September or early October. We are waiting for the final papers there, so we will be close to home, which makes me so excited. We would love to have an event at Stanford. We are talking to the events operator over there and I asked him if Frost Amphitheater was almost ready because it would be amazing to have our concert there.

We have a 10-acre footprint, which is a very

big footprint for our event, but I picture it like Big Game with tailgates, which are allowed to take over the track. We want to go from beach volleyball all the way to Frost. Having that setup would be cool. That is my dream, and I’m going to put it out in the universe. Let’s get it done. It would be perfect for Stanford.

Stanford taught me how to dream big and taught me how to go after my dreams. Having a p1440 event there would be wonderful.

TSD: The NCAA is currently facing issues and scandals with regard to paying studentathletes. Being a former student-athlete, do you think student-athletes should be paid or be able to monetize their brand and image while in school?

KWJ: From my perspective, I have a limited knowledge of the topic. My experience at Stanford was that I was more than well taken care of. I felt like my gift and the way I was paid was in this amazing opportunity to get a college scholarship at the best university in the world. I know a lot of athletes go just for two years and then they go to the NBA or the NFL. I think that’s a different situation. It’s a personal choice. I had this thought that it would be incredible, instead of perhaps paying the athletes, and since Title IX has done so much good for women, maybe add more men to club teams or support athletes in other ways.

I don’t know what they could change, but I know it is needed.

TSD: What more do you think the NCAA can or should be doing to help its student-athletes?

KWJ: I think the NCAA’s job is, largely, to take care of the athletes while they are studentathletes. I don’t know if there are enough advocates for student-athletes these days.

They’re always put in the middle, and they are kind of at the mercy of everyone. There needs to be a true student-athlete advocate — that should be the job of the NCAA. I don’t think making money is a dirty thing.

I think it’s wonderful that they are able to service the sports and universities. Once you graduate, most people go on to professional careers, so if there is a way to help [student-athletes] in that transition and to prepare for the real world, then there is an opportunity to help them pivot into professional careers.

Contact Jose Saldaña at jsaldana@ stanford.edu.

21

CRAIG MACCUBBIN/Wikimedia Commons

The Searsville Dam and Stanford

by Julia Ingram

S

tanford’s plans to remove the 119-yearold Lagunita Diversion Dam, located in the San Francisquito Creek near Alpine Road, were approved by Santa Clara County on March 1. Plans have been under way since a district judge ordered Stanford to remove the dam on Jan. 16, 2015, following concerns regarding fish passage and sediment flow.

Meanwhile, the much larger 125 yearold Searsville Diversion Dam still stands 65 feet tall at the base of the very same creek.

Originally acquired from Spring Valley Water Company in 1919 to contribute to Stanford’s water supply, the dam now gives rise to many of the same environmental issues as the Lagunita Dam and provides little water.

Since 2011, the dam’s environmental impact has undergone numerous assessments, while University faculty, researchers and environmental stakeholders have debated how and whether to remove or modify it.

Since the release of a list of formal alternatives in 2015, the University has been conducting various studies to determine the potential consequences of these options.

The Daily took a closer look at the history of Searsville Dam and the issues being taken into consideration as the process moves forward.

Environmental concerns The issues surrounding the Searsville Dam are primarily concerned with fish blockage and sediment passage. In particular, steelhead trout, an endangered species that inhabits the San Francisquito Creek, face a greater risk of extinction since the dam completely blocks them from swimming upstream, and their access to their habitat is more limited.

In Jan. 2013, two environmentalist groups, Our Children’s Earth Foundation and the Ecological Rights Foundation, filed a federal 22

lawsuit against Stanford for harming the steelhead population and violating the Endangered Species Act, a 1973 piece of legislation signed into law by President Nixon that aims to protect endangered species from extinction and mitigate the “consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation.”

At the time, University spokesperson Lisa Lapin said Stanford was not harming the trout, referring to the creek as a “thriving steelhead habitat.”

Other issues include sediment accumulation, since the Searsville Lake traps all sediment that is delivered from upstream areas.

The accumulation of sediment results in another issue: flood risk. Given the 4.5 million cubic yards of sediment behind the dam, the reservoir is only at 5 percent of its original capacity, causing it to fill up at a dangerous rate.

“The way our watersheds work around here is that the [San Francisquito Creek] length is quite short, so if it rains up [at Jasper Ridge] at noon, at three in the afternoon there’s going to be a flood in Palo Alto potentially,” said Jasper Ridge director Chis Field Ph.D. ’81. Field is co-chair of the Searsville Dam and Reservoir Steering Committee, a group that examines potential alternative strategies for modifying or removing the dam and also put together the 2015 Recommendations.

In addition to increasing flood risk, the dam’s low capacity means it no can no longer significantly contribute to campus irrigation.

A number of environmental groups, such as Beyond Searsville Dam, advocate for the removal of the dam entirely. The University has resisted large-scale structural changes for a number of reasons, a major one being cost.

“The challenge of next steps with improving the watershed at the Searsville area are going to cost the same as a major

academic building or 25 professorships or tuition for thousands of students,” Field said.

Other concerns revolve around the logistics of removing the 4.5 million cubic yards of sediment that have accumulated behind the dam in the Searsville Lake. To remove it entirely would require hundreds of truckloads, which would be costly as well as cause pollution and traffic increases in the surrounding area.

One environmental activist, however, thinks that there is a way to remove the dam without completely removing the sediment. Matt Stoecker is the founder of Beyond Searsville Dam, a coalition dedicated to advocating for removal of the dam. He described a procedure which would allow sediment from the dam removal project to empty into the San Francisco Bay — a more costeffective and environmentally-safe method.

The Steering Committee took this option into consideration in its 2015 alternatives and has begun research to predict its feasibility.

“All of the analysis that we’ve done so far suggests that the fine sediment would flow to the bay without any meaningful increase in flood risk,” Field said.

However, because the flood risk still remains, sediment release procedures are still under review. Currently, Stanford is developing a set of computer models in coordination with experts from the Bureau of Reclamation, the Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD) and the National Marine Fisheries Service to analyze potential risks, including above-average creek flow which may result from major storms.

The University is also in consultation with the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority (JPA) and the SCVWD to determine the nature of the creek’s current and how modifications to the dam will impact sediment flow.

A history of deliberation In 2010, Stanford’s plans for Searsville in the University’s 2010 Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) stirred controversy due to its lack of a commitment to long-term structural changes to the dam. The plan, which aimed to address issues surrounding endangered species such as steelhead trout, discussed dredging and potential research into fish bypass measures in the Searsville Dam, but did not detail any plans for dam removal.

In a statement released by Beyond Searsville Dam following the release of the HCP, National Marine Fisheries Services Supervisor Gary Stern referred to the HCP as “biologically inadequate” for achieving its goal of protecting endangered species as a result of a “significant lack of quantifiable data, inadequate analysis, significant errors and critical omission of key factors.”

The Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration, another environmentalist group, demanded that the draft of the HCP be retracted entirely and rewritten to “provide adequate environmental review,” or a more thorough analysis of the impact of the dam on the steelhead population.

Similar opinions from the public comment period following the HCP as well as push from environmental and governmental agencies such as the San Francisquito Creek JPA prompted the University to form the Steering Committee in 2011, as well as an Advisory Group of representatives from the groups that criticized the HCP. In April 2015, the Steering Committee released their 41page file documenting their analyses and recommendations, as well as recommendations and comments from the Advisory Committee.

The primary recommendation, listed as Alternative 1-A in the document, is to cut a 50-foot hole in the bottom of the dam’s base to release sediment and allow fish passage.

Stoecker, however, sees a number of problems with this course of action.

“It’s a little bit naïve to think that [cutting a hole is] a viable solution,” he said. “The impact would be a whole bunch of new construction in the channel, and it’s unclear whether or not fish passage would even be achieved with it.”

Though the Steering Committee’s recommendation claims that the orifice would permit fish passage, Stoecker and members of Beyond Searsville Dam point to the anticipated accumulation of debris in the hole, the potential for steelhead to get trapped inside, and the disturbance to the steelhead population during its construction as issues with Alternative 1-A. Stoecker also cited the dam’s age and pre-existing cracks in its structure as obstacles to cutting a hole in it.

“It’s a serious modification to the structure, and it obviously weakens the structure, so there would have to be a massive retrofitting

of the structure to meet modern seismic and structural safety criteria,” he said. “I think that in a lot of ways it’s just cost-prohibitive.”

In its analysis, the Steering Committee did not provide cost estimates for the presented alternatives.

However, members of the Steering Committee said they believe Alternative 1-A will allow for a reduction in flood risk.

“Under normal conditions, the creek just flows through this hole, and under conditions of incredibly heavy rainfall, the hole would be too small for the whole creek to flow through,” Field said. “The basic idea of this is that our creek is a little trickle 99 percent of the time, but that one percent of the time when it’s a big torrent, there [won’t be] a big risk of flooding ... if there’s a hole.”

According to the 2015 document, the plan is contingent on whether Stanford determines that sluicing of sediment downstream — rather than removing it completely with trucks — is feasible. The plan would also require additional coordination with external organizations as well as the JPA to maintain the downstream channel’s sediment accumulation in order to avoid flood risks.

Beyond Searsville Dam is also concerned about the effects of potential maintenance efforts.

“This is right in the middle of Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, so if ... every few years or decades, the reservoir fills in with water and silt, you’re basically destroying the habitat periodically, having huge chronic impact on habitats and species that move back into that habitat and then get flooded out,” Stoecker said.

Considering the uncertainty of some of these issues, Alternative 1-A does not preclude dam removal, according to the document. “[If] it is determined that complete removal of the Dam will not cause unacceptably high negative biological impacts in the watershed, then full removal of the Dam might be warranted,” read the document.

As its secondary recommendation (dubbed Alternative 1-B) the Steering Committee suggested the construction of a fish ladder or rerouted creek to allow for fish passage.

Alternative 1-B is based on the assumption that releasing sediment downstream is infeasible.

Instead, this recommendation requires sediment to be stabilized behind the dam, or lifted up to create upland terraces and be used as topsoil. Alternative 1-B also requires coordination with the JPA and outside organizations to maintain the downstream creek channel and prevent flooding.

Members of Beyond Searsville Dam said they take issue with this alternative due to the required maintenance and debris removal. They added that a fish ladder may make it more difficult for steelhead to travel through the dam by tiring them out before they face predators in the reservoir, putting them at a greater risk of extinction.

Both recommendations pose risks to the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, which will likely be disrupted by the construction necessary to make the changes.

“The dam, of course, produced Searsville Reservoir, providing lake habitat and surrounding wetlands, which ultimately enhanced the biodiversity of the region,” Jasper Ridge director Anthony Barnosky wrote in an email to The Daily. “Whatever the ultimate fate of Searsville Dam, the reservoir will eventually disappear, which will cause a transition in the area. One of our goals ... is to minimize these disruptions as well as any unanticipated longterm impacts of the construction activities.”

Moving forward Since the recommendations were released in 2015, Stanford has met with various outside organizations and is conducting studies on the published alternatives to determine the best possible solution based on anticipated environmental impacts.

“Stanford has been actively working to conduct the various engineering analyses and design efforts necessary to prepare and file applications for regulatory authorizations to implement the recommendations that resulted from Stanford’s Searsville Alternatives Study,” Jean McCown, co-chair of the Steering Committee and assistant vice president and director of community relations, wrote in an email to The Daily.

Daniel Freyberg, a civil and environmental engineering professor and member of the Steering Committee, predicts the release of another recommendation on the best possible course of action within the 2018 calendar year.

“We’re gradually learning more about the cost and benefits of different alternatives, and at some point in the not-too-distant future, I think the University will be ready to say, ‘This is our preferred alternative,’” he said.

The final decision ultimately lies in the hands of Stanford’s Board of Trustees.

Following its decision, however, further action will be delayed until the University obtains the necessary permits and approvals needed to move forward with construction.

“It’ll be a long time after that before things change,” Freyberg said.

Regardless, the first signs of progress — both with Lagunita and Searsville — have given the environmental groups cause for optimism.

“I hope that this experience with Lake Lagunita is kind of a small-scale version of what will happen with [the] Searsville Dam,” Stoecker said. “I hope that myself and ... others at Stanford will ... really take more pride in the creek that flows through the campus and earn the environmental stewardship that they claim to be practicing.”

Contact Julia Ingram at jmingram@stanford. edu.

23

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Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Env

ironm ental

O

n Nov. 9, 2016,

the Associated Press contacted earth systems science professor Noah Diffenbaugh fewer than five minutes after the organization had called the presidential election for Donald Trump. He was asked what the outcome meant for global climate change, and it’s a question he hasn’t stopped hearing since.

“With everything that’s happened,” 24

p ( o t t p a d a s r a l o sch

Diffenbaugh said, “I’m at least glad to be able to be in the position to be asked.”

He’s not alone. Indeed, what the Trump administration means for global climate change seems to be the question keeping environmental scholars across Stanford’s campus and beyond awake at night. Beyond the anxiety, however, the community of scholars seems to have a two-fold approach to their new political climate: doubling down on their research, and doing their damnedest to communicate that research to the public and decision makers.

I first met Diffenbaugh more than three

by Ada Statler

years ago as a starry-eyed freshman in my fall quarter when I stumbled into his 15-person introductory seminar, “Global Warming Paradox.” Although the focus of the class was to understand the tension between the human benefits of energy use and the negative climate consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, there were also questions I would grapple with from a more journalistic perspective: What is the balance between scientific integrity and communication?

Does it matter if we call it global warming or climate change? Is there a difference between saying “climate change causes drought” and

“climate change increases the likelihood of drought?”

During his own time as an undergraduate at Stanford, Diffenbaugh lived in Synergy, a coop known for its vegetarianism, proclivity for activism and more alternative lifestyle. In class, however, Diffenbaugh drew a careful line when it came to communicating his science versus participating in advocacy.

Because of this, I wouldn’t have guessed that Diffenbaugh would come to make semiregular appearances in the opinions section of the New York Times. Yet since the presidential election, Diffenbaugh has been published in four op-eds on topics ranging from the Oroville Dam disaster near Sacramento to the predictability of massive storms like Hurricane Harvey. When I asked if this meant his views had changed on scientific advocacy, he shook his head.

“My approach is to stick to evidence and my expertise,” Diffenbaugh explained. “I avoid being prescriptive because there are a lot of people out there advocating for solutions, and relatively fewer people to just explain the science.”

In fact, Diffenbaugh acknowledged that while some people on the political right may criticize him as a climate alarmist, he is simultaneously criticized by some on the left for not advocating particular responses and solutions to the climate crisis.

“I have a deliberate approach to communication,” he said, referring to his reluctance to suggest solutions. “Not everyone agrees, but what I can say is that I’ve given it a lot of thought and talked to experts who study communication on these issues. Society needs for the people creating the evidence to be at the table explaining it.”

This last point, that scientists ought to be sharing their research outside the bounds of academia, is a viewpoint that seems to be spreading across campus.

“Stanford has a societal obligation to make the best information available in the most scientific depth as possible,” said Stephan Graham, the recently-appointed dean of the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). Graham came to the job with a research background in geology — more specifically, sedimentary basins such as those exploited to produce oil. He emphasized, however, that oil and gas researchers at Stanford respect and appreciate climate work done within the school. Many, he pointed out, have begun to focus their work on reducing emissions from fossil fuel operations.

As for the question of science versus advocacy, Graham emphasized the clear, defensible nature of scientific methods used at Stanford.

“Our scientists are dedicated and rigorous,” he said. “Being humans concerned about

LINDA CICERO/Stanford News

Professor Noah Diffenbaugh told TEDx Stanford attendees that there’s still time to act on climate change. the future of society, they can’t help but be personally involved.”

University offerings have grown with this seeming need for involvement in communicating the climate problem.

Stanford Earth’s coterminal master’s degree in environmental communication, for example, has rapidly grown since its inception in the 2015-2016 school year.

And at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, offerings like the Rising Environmental Leaders Program (RELP), a program piloted in 2010 for Stanford graduate students and post-docs, and the Leopold Leadership Program, which brings together environmental scholars from institutions across the country, focus on training scientists to communicate within the policy setting.

Heidi Hirsh, a Ph.D. candidate in the earth systems science program and a RELP participant, has appreciated the availability of such training.

“It can definitely feel isolating in academia,” she said. “I know I need to get the data and analyze it, and I know how to do that, but I don’t know feel like I know just yet how to engage with the political side. But it’s also like, if I can’t use my research for good, what was that five or six years for?”

Another RELP participant, civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. candidate Andrew Sonta, said that he sought out the program because he realized that environmental progress requires conversation between science-literate policymakers and policy-literate scientists.

After the election, Sonta noticed that the discussions he led for the Hard Earth lecture series almost always turned to political questions.

“I do think it’s scary to say that any

conversation has a political bent — it’s like science is no longer just science,” Sonta admitted. “As a researcher, you like to think that you’re coming up with solutions. But in this political climate, if you can’t communicate those ideas, you’re risking not being effective.”

Admittedly, science communication wasn’t cast aside prior to Trump’s election. Biology professor and Jasper Ridge Biology Preserve faculty director Liz Hadly, for example, cited the late Stanford scientist Stephen Schneider as an early champion of explaining climate science in her recent piece “Making America great again requires action on scientific knowledge.”

Hadly did say, however, that she’s noticed a sudden increase in the field of people wanting to share their research with the public. Needless to say, it’s a movement she’s supportive of.

“People should spend time to communicate why what we study matters to someone other than ourselves,” Hadly said. “You’ll hear people ask how climate really affects them. But when you take the time to actually communicate how they’re already seeing climate change in their daily lives, they get it.”

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hen I first spoke with Hadly, she quickly introduced me to her dog, Dasher, who was happily wandering her office. When I later asked her how working in the shifted political climate has affect her work, she laughingly answered “puppies.”

“You think I’m kidding, but one of the ways it’s all changed is this puppy,” Hadly said. “In reading the news and following everything that was happening, I was just kind of depressed and flabbergasted. This was a way of re-engaging and finding that energy.”

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It can be demoralizing — working on something for 10 years and having Congress wipe it out with a single sentence in a rider isn’t easy.

-Law Professor Deborah Sivas In some ways, this fits with Hadly’s environmentalist persona. She described her journey toward ecology as never growing out of the curiosity about the world that she believes everyone is born with; gravitating away from the crowded indoors and toward the outside and places with less people. And yet, she insisted that scientists aren’t, and can’t afford to be, hermits.

“My deepest motivation is that I believe in people,” Hadly said.

It made sense, then, that some of the hardest emotional points in her work have come in hearing about conflicts between humans and tigers.

“I do work in the tiger genome, and so for me it’s on my mind that there are less than 3,500 tigers left in the wild,” she explained.

“But it’s hard to see this local-global disconnect on these issues.”

Indeed, when I asked each environmental scholar the moments in the past 14 months they found most difficult, the answers varied according to their research focus.

For Diffenbaugh in atmospheric science, it was Presidential tweets suggesting that perhaps the US “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming” to warm up on cold winter nights. Diffenbaugh groaned a bit as he talked about the tweet, citing a study he co-authored with Deepti Singh, who completed her Ph.D. at Stanford, and five other scientists. The study found that increased extreme cold in the Northeast is not just consistent with global warming, but more likely.

For Richard Nevle, the deputy director of the earth systems program, it has been absorbing environmental news each day.

It’s difficult, but he keeps tuning in: “I keep reading all the headlines and environmental news I can even when it’s depressing because I feel a sort of duty to at least bear witness to what’s happening,” Nevle said.

His position isn’t a unique one. Scholar

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after scholar recounted how hard it can be to continuously hear the news of another rollback or threat to funding. Julia Goolsby, a student in the environmental communication coterm program, told me that she’s taken to putting her New York Times updates in a folder labeled “ahhhhhhhhh.”

For Graham, his biggest worry has shifted toward maintaining research funding since stepping into the role of dean.

“I’m first and foremost concerned about their ability to continue to do the type of research that they do,” Graham said. “That’s job number one for me.”

A forlorn look crossed the dean’s face as he mentioned a project in earth systems science in the climate space that lost funding midstream. According to the dean, the project was left with partial results but no way to finish.

The fear of not finding funding seems to be especially prominent in younger environmental scholars. Graham said that younger professors and graduate students seem to be more on edge, and Hirsh — one of the graduate students and RELP participants — even sent me a follow-up link to a story about the narrow preservation of National Science Foundation funding programs a few hours after we met.

Of course, the concerns about environmental changes in the new administration aren’t just limited to scholars in the sciences.

For Deborah Sivas, director of Stanford Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic,

the most difficult challenge of the Trump administration has been the onslaught of climate policy rollbacks — the Paris Accords and the Clean Power Plan, but also “a whole host of other things around methane and public lands that the media can’t even pay attention to with all the other chaos.”

Sivas describes herself as an environmentalist first and a lawyer second, although the students that work and study in the clinic are driven by a mix of ideological and career goals, as well as the simple desire to attain legal skills. Either way, she says, environmental law and other politicallytargeted fields can be hard due to the lack of linear trajectories toward progress.

“There’s ups and downs, and we’re in a down right now,” Sivas said. “Keeping people motivated and not demoralized is very important to me. And it can be demoralizing — working on something for 10 years and having Congress wipe it out with a single sentence in a rider isn’t easy.”

It’s because of Sivas’ calm persistence that Danny Cullenward, a J.D./Ph.D. and lecturer in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, reached out to Sivas last year to co-teach “U.S. Environmental Law in Transition.”

According to Cullenward, the class was created in part because he could feel panic amongst students following the election. As a last-minute enrollee in the class myself, I had to laugh at how spot-on his analysis was.

But Cullenward also added that he had his a personal reason for wanting to teach.

“Staying motivated can be a huge struggle,” Cullenward said. “If you spend your professional life working on a problem you know won’t be solved and that will cause major consequences for virtually every species, it’s hard to get out of bed sometimes … I know that me putting my shoulder to the wheel every day in my life is going to make an imperceptible difference in those problems.

But what I can do is teach. And when I present primary material to students, they tend to not fall for the lies … that gives me some hope.”

Stanford has a societal obligation to make the best information available in the most scientific depth as possible.

-Dean Stephan Graham, Stanford Earth

C

ullenward and Sivas’ class wasn’t the only student-facing response to the Trump political tide. In the medical school, for example, talk has surfaced about creating a comprehensive class on the health implications of climate change. And even within two weeks of the presidential election, I was added to an “Earth Systems Community” group on Canvas, a website normally reserved for course announcements and academic assignments. The page was described as a place for Stanford community members to “collaborate, educate each other, ask questions, learn new information, form working groups, and figure out how to take action in this new political climate.”

There have also been more formal changes in how Stanford Earth presents itself to Stanford stakeholders and beyond. According to Barbara Buell, associate dean and chief marketing/communications officer of Stanford Earth, there’s been a big push to make ensure that research being produced actually gets read. Buell lead the charge in creating a website for the Stanford Earth Matters magazine, including easy-share options and a subscription list targeted not just at Stanford community members, but also key decision makers in the public and private sector.

Even the school itself (formerly just the School of Earth Sciences) was renamed in 2015 to capture a broader swath of environmental work — although the change predated Trump’s rise. Prior to that, the School of Earth had been born out of the defunct School of Mineral Sciences in 1963. It was soon after this restructuring that a degree in “applied earth sciences” first joined the spattering of offerings in petroleum and mineral engineering.

Stanford Earth is perhaps less recognized on campus than other schools for a reason: by the numbers, it’s small. It boasts the secondto-least number of faculty, four percent of graduate students and just two percent of declared undergraduates. Yet the school’s impact has been undeniably significant, with the Stanford News’ press release page typically being peppered with studies on topics ranging from models of extreme weather patterns to reviews of corporate sustainability measures to surveys of coastal fisheries.

Indeed, Stanford Earth’s programs have continued to grow from the original move toward academic interdisciplinarity initiated by former president John Hennessy. Other entities outside of the school such as the Woods Institute, Precourt Institute, Freeman

Spogli Institute, The Center for Ocean Solutions and more have all taken on climate change in their work, too.

It’s not that all the changes have come directly as a response to the Trump administration — the two new coterminal master’s programs, the M.A. in Environmental Communication and an M.S./M.A. in Sustainability Science and Practice, for example, were already being developed — but that the political changes have caused an increased sense of urgency for such integrated, interdisciplinary approaches.

As Diffenbaugh told me when he explained his role in studying systems, “A wise person

produced as part of the long-range planning process initiated by President Marc TessierLavigne.

Initially, sustainability wasn’t intended to receive its own paper in the process; the four steering groups were established as Education, Research, “Our Community” and “Engaging Beyond Our University.” As Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell wrote on their blog, however, “sustainability was such an important cross-cutting topic that the four steering groups collaborated to produce a single white paper on it.”

About a third of the public suggestions incorporated into the paper focused on

Courtesy of Flickr

Graduate student Heidi Hirsh draws inspiration from her fieldwork on resilient coral in Palau. said that if you can say what discipline you’re in, you’re probably doing something old.”

Dean Graham emphasized that in addition to interdisciplinary work within members of the school, Stanford Earth wants to reach students in all corners of the university.

“We’ve been working on the ‘80x20’ goal for a while now,” Graham said. “By 2020, we want to be touching 80 percent of Stanford undergraduates in some way.”

For Graham, it’s important to encourage students pursuing majors and careers unrelated to the environmental space to gain a basic literacy about how the earth works.

So far the school has felt fairly successful in these initiatives with popular new classes like “Science Outside” and a 200 percent enrollment jump in the school’s introductory class, Earth Systems 10, over the past two years.

The Dean was also excited about the prospects of the sustainability white paper

campus sustainability measures, about a fourth on innovating sustainability on topics from climate science to urbanization and the remaining portion on sustainability education.

“Taken together,” the paper reads, “the collective body of sustainability-related proposals limn a compelling, ambitious, and hopeful vision for Stanford’s future.”

Nevle, who in addition to his role in earth systems served on the Education steering committee, said that he thinks the sustainability paper offers an exciting opportunity for Stanford to walk the talk.

“I think what emerges is a vision of Stanford as an even more committed sustainability leader,” Nevle said. “There really seems to be a desire to make this a core part of our mission at Stanford.” n the often dire-seeming times, it’s the little things that can carry scholars through the rough nights.

I

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Photo courtesy of Stanford Law School

Law Professor Deborah Sivas with students in the environmental law clinic.

For Hirsh, it’s been the experience of doing field research in Palau, a small island nation in the west Pacific Ocean. In the international climate community, Palau is known both for its vulnerability to biological change and its outspoken leadership in responding to such changes. During the Paris climate negotiations, for instance, Palau called for a more aggressive plan to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, rather than the 2-degree limit in the final proposal and the 4-degree trajectory warming that many scientists predict. In the country itself, 80 percent of Palau’s exclusive economic zone — some 500,000 square kilometers of coral- and fish-heavy ocean — commercial fishing is entirely banned in order to protect the ecosystem.

“It’s funny to do fieldwork in Palau and see how different everything can be,” Hirsh said.

“Sometimes I’ll joke that if all goes to hell I’ll just go there, but I also know I can’t run away.

There’s such a contrast of in how even as we’re going backward and stripping away marine protections here, there they are marching forward with hope and respect for what they have. That gives me hope.”

There’s somewhat of analogy between how Hirsh sees Palau as a small spot of political hope and resilience and the marine chemistry work she does there. She studies how different seagrasses might protect shelled-animals, coral and other calcifiers from increasingly acidic water due to carbon dioxide in the

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water. Specifically, her goal is to understand how some small underwater localities have managed to stay resilient even under less hospitable conditions — and then to find ways to mimic that resilience in other locations.

“I know that I’m just one person and that one single person can’t save the world,” Hirsh reflected. “But it is hopeful to think local and find those pockets of resilience.”

F

or many scholars, state and local government in California has served as a sort of pocket of resilience, too.

“Jerry Brown has really had some moments of carrying the flag for us on climate,” said Katherine Burke, deputy director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health.

Situated in the medical school, Burke was the lead author of a Sept. 2016 white paper commissioned by the Woods Institute for the Environment aiming to add a “human face” and health perspective to climate change for the 45th president. Like many Americans, the researchers assumed a different president at the time of writing the paper.

Despite the lack of uptake the paper and its recommendations have received under the Trump administration, Burke maintains that it was still better to put forth an audacious plan.

“It’s better to put bold ideas out there than to pull back,” Burke said. “The way I see it, the election has only made the work we’re able to

do in California more important.”

Across campus at the law school, Sivas expressed a similar sentiment. Normally, she explained, the environmental law clinic is involved in administrative cases pushing governments to do better environmentally.

In the last 14 months, that focus has shifted toward just defending existing environmental protections.

“In the post-Trump world in California, you’ve got state and local governments actually trying to be more progressive than the federal government,” Sivas said.

That’s not to say the local work can’t have a big impact. In one case, for example, law students in the clinic are helping defend efforts by the city of Oakland to ban the handling of coal in city facilities. The efforts have come under fire from industry groups hoping to use the Port of Oakland to ship coal from the United States to China and other East Asian countries.

Like his longtime mentor Sivas, Cullenward also described changes he’s seen within the environmental community. In addition to his research position with the Carnegie Institute for Science on the edge of campus, he’s been directly involved in the policy sphere through the nonprofit Near Zero, which aims to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and was appointed to the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, the board in charge of reviewing California’s cap and trade program

to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. a communicator, she said she has found the hope to be with my community,” Fischer said.

And yet even in that setting, Cullenward said election to be a case study on the importance “It gave me one of my favorite moments in he’d spent the past couple of years before the of “paying attention to who you’re talking to.” feeling love with my neighbors.” election fighting with people that should have Many scholars also said that they’ve been Now, Fischer is one of the students working been on the same page. These groups realigned impressed by campus activism both in the to preserve that hope and bring healing to the after the election, offering a sort of “catharsis.” climate space and on other hot-button issues. environmental community. For her senior “So on the one hand, the election was a For Stephanie Fischer, another earth systems capstone project, she is co-organizing “Earth complete disaster, Cullenward explained. “On major headed toward the environmental in Color,” an Earth Day event to be held at the other hand, it’s a real opportunity to start communication coterm, those issues are often the O’Donohue Family Stanford Educational a conversation around what it’s going to mean intimately connected.

Farm. to make serious progress on the climate front “I’m focused on the inequities of climate,” With support from the earth systems and not just put a bandaid on and declare she said. “This discourse about race, program up through to administrators like victory.” especially nowadays, is extremely fatiguing Graham and Tessier-Lavigne, Fischer is excited Cullenward cited the emerging preeminence for me. Coupled with the president’s castaway about the prospect of drawing together of environmental justice advocates as an attitudes toward climate, it feels like its two people who may not normally think about example of one of these progressive success. battles at once and that the hill just keeps attending Earth Day events. According to the Sivas cited examples inside and outside of getting steeper.” description, the event is led by “student artists the environmental space, such as the #MeToo Fischer originally came to the earth sciences and environmental justice activists of color movement. as an academic interest, not such a personal who want to see an Earth Day celebration as “Those things just couldn’t break through one. She got her start in paleoclimatology colorful as the people on this planet.” except in this kinda awful time,” she said. research as early as high school. But as a native In addition to bringing in the healing power For almost all the scholars, working with of New York, her perspective was forever of art to the often traumatic environmental students has played a direct role in keeping changed by Superstorm Sandy. Fischer was space (especially for people of color), Fischer motivation high. in her house when the storm came, and told me she hopes to share the power of Nevle described the experience of experienced firsthand the hardship of dealing looking horizontally. witnessing transformation among students with the impacts of the storm for months “It’s necessary more than ever to be with who came to let it out and cry in his office after the media attention faded away. But other people and to remind yourself of what soon after the election to these same students she also noted what she learned from lots of you love and why you’re doing this work,” she coming back for engaged, advocacy-minded communities of color like hers sharing the said. “That’s what keeps me going.” conversations. experience.

“It keeps me young at heart, and it is really Contact Ada Statler at adastat@stanford.edu.

“In some ways, it was also a sort of gem of such a huge privilege to work with students and have these daily interactions,” he said.

Courtesy of Zachary Sichmann For Hadly, it has been not just her dog, but also the freshmen in her first-year introductory seminar who have been particularly inspiring.

“These young students get more eager as the years go by,” she said. “They demand to be learning and making a difference. They’re not waiting.”

Dean Graham was no exception to the pattern: “You know,” he added as our conversation began to wind down, “the other bright spot during this time is you. We’re seeing this big increase in interest from undergraduates in particular in these issues, increasingly taking up advocacy. That’s got to be viewed as a bright spot because you guys are going to be living this life in the next century and you’ll have to take up that role and buy in and be interested.”

From the perspective of a coterm in environmental communication, Julia Goolsby echoed the Dean’s sense of urgency and emphasis on timing.

“It feels like this time is what will be in the textbooks, and it’s cool and motivating to have Stephan Graham, recently appointed dean of Stanford Earth, takes students on an ocean field trip. that kind of accountability,” Goolsby said. As

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LIGHTROOM

Image 1 A female calliope hummingbird fans its wings in preparation for flight while resting on the branch of an aspen tree. Calliope hummingbirds are the smallest birds in the U.S., weighing only 2–3 grams.

A single limber pine sits silhouetted against the golden sunrise over the Gros Ventre mountain range.

WYOMING LAND OF THE WILD

s the least populous state in A the U.S., Wyoming is often imagined as a barren wasteland

— a landscape too isolated and desolate to merit more than a quick passage on an interstate road trip. Unbeknownst to those who pass by, a thrilling landscape lies just beyond. Ironically, the fallacy of Wyoming’s reputation has allowed it to remain as one of the planet’s last truly wild places.

In the absence of people, nature

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dominates, leaving viewers in awe of the once common, but now rare spectacle of the wild; the Milky Way galaxy dominates the summer sky, bison roam through alpine prairies, mountains cast their jagged shadows on the plains and snow blankets the frozen forests of winter. Though hidden from the fast-paced life of many Americans, Wyoming serves as a reminder of a wild world worth protecting.

by Syler PeraltaRamos

Image 3

Image 2

Image 4

Image 1: The Milky Way galaxy sets over the Teton Mountains, cast in the purple light that dominates the sky just before the onset of dawn.

Image 2: Above the Yellowstone Plateau, the setting sun casts long shadows of the scattered sections of pine trees. The lines behind the snow show where the wind has blown across the barren winter landscape.

Image 3: The purple glow of dawn illuminates the frozen and wind-blown sagebrush beneath the Teton range on a cold winter’s morning. The temperature plummeted to -27 degrees just before the sunrise, leaving the entire landscape covered in ice and frost.

Image 4: A small red fox stares at the frozen ground, listening for the

Image 5 Image 6

sound of a mouse under the freshly fallen snow.

Image 5: The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is one of Wyoming's most famous locations. From the air, the whole color spectrum of the spring and its deep blue depths are visible, created by distinctive species of bacteria that give the spring its near-perfect rainbow of natural color.

Image 6: A young great gray owl sits in disguise on the branch of a tall lodgepole pine tree as the last afternoon sunlight hits the treetops.

An old bison keeps watch over his herd while slowly eating a long string of grass in the Hayden Valley of Yellowstone National Park.

A hillside overlooking the Jackson Hole Valley glows with color from the vibrant blooms of early-summer wildflowers.

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an

Th

St

e for journ ey of d’s comp ostables: ba nan by a’s aft e r li f e E li ane Mitchell e on

W

ith the turn of its ignition, the behemoth wakes in early darkness.

The vehicle rumbles as its headlights beam a soft yellow ahead.

The yard by Bonair Siding Road is where the workday begins before dawn, and where other industrial beasts slowly roll out, exit the metal enclosure and begin their route. Inside the cab of one of these monsters, driver Freddy Nava, in a thick grey shirt with orange stripes, turns and rolls its wide wheel with a hefty arm. He guides the massive machine toward its task of collecting Stanford University’s compost.

Dark as night, it is 5:54 a.m.

Last year, Stanford’s campus dining halls, student houses, public buildings and sports venues disposed of about 7,680 tons, or more than 15 million pounds, of food scraps, said Julie Muir, manager of Zero Waste at Peninsula Sanitary Service/Stanford Recycling, or PSSI. About 7,680 tons of food scraps a year translates to 452.6 pounds per person, about the weight of an adult female grizzly bear, on Stanford’s campus.

After discarding a banana peel onto a green bin’s growing mound of compost, we seldom remember that the peel will live on after us.

Ultimately ground up and decayed into soil, the peel has a long journey ahead.

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For its first stop, the behemoth rolls onto the sidewalk beside the Arrillaga Gymnasium and Weight Room. The driver hops out of the truck, unlocks the dumpster enclosure, and pulls out a 64-gallon, metal dumpster behind him. Stepping back into the truck, he presses the vehicle onward.

Lowering arms that have rested over its head, the behemoth extends its green forks. Slowly, the forks enter the pockets on each side of a dumpster whose mouth foams with liquid and slipping food. Raising the dumpster in front of its face, the truck pulls the dumpster over its head.

Gravity swings the dumpster lid open as the truck suspends it in the sky. Green bags tumble down into the truck, and cold air chills the banana peel, which lands in utter darkness.

Nava, the driver for the “Organics Route,” will make about 86 stops and empty 111 containers on this trip. When nothing is in his way, he can latch a brown, 64-gallon compost dumpster onto the truck with ease.

But when there are obstacles blocking the dumpsters, Nava steps down from the truck to retrieve them. He repeats a similar drill for the 95 32-gallon compost carts by student residences and office buildings on campus.

Nava works the entire year, including all minor holidays. He is given Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year’s off.

The cart begins a steady ascent once attached

to the front of the vehicle, lifted as the beast arches back its arms. A glimmer of sunlight lights the cart’s plastic sheen as it levels with the truck’s green roof.

Nava cranes his neck to watch, a red Stanford baseball cap shielding his eyes. The cart traces a quarter-circle in the sky; the truck’s arms whir as they lift. Tilted at an 80-degree angle, the cart’s lid swings violently open.

Meanwhile, inside the truck, a hefty bag of compost plummets down and leans into the banana peel, pressing it deeper into slush. The bags are slick and cold like jellyfish, decorated here and there with errant trails of food scraps.

For a human, the growing mound of compost emits a distinct tang — the sour kind that hooks the back of your nose.

But the peel doesn’t mind. All over campus, students’ alarm clocks nudge them awake.

It is 8 a.m.

The truck makes it through the Main Quad and finishes its route around campus by 11:30 a.m. Sunlight now coats all of campus and its cement roads, brightening them with a yellow glaze.

Before the last leg of the journey, Nava will break for lunch, a time when many Stanford students are still sitting in their first class.

Having started at 4 a.m., Nava is only two hours away from completing his work day. He’ll get overtime pay after completing the 10-hour journey.

Nava eats a lunch of fajitas that he made at home with the other drivers and PSSI workers who eat their midday meals together at picnic tables on the yard. All wear the same grey shirt and a name tag above their right breast pocket.

It’s like family, Nava said.

The workers finish their lunch quickly and their 30-minute break ends just after noon.

Soon, Nava drives the truck onto the yard’s scale. The scale reads six tons: his load is heavy enough for departure yet not too heavy for the road. Nava also checks the sides of the truck, brushing away wayward pieces of food waste that might become projectiles when he takes the freeway. The truck exits the yard, takes Campus Drive, and turns right at El Camino Real.

“La Raza,” or “the people,” 93.3 KRZZ FM, plays in the rumbling vehicle as it merges onto the freeway. Nava likes the “slow, romantic songs,” especially those of Los Temerarios, who sing nostalgic 90s ballads. The songs make him think of his first crushes, he said.

Nava takes the 237 Highway through Milpitas, which connects to the 880 Interstate.

Soon enough, after a busy intersection, a blue sign comes into view, marking the exit for Newby Island/Resource Recovery Park, the destination for Stanford’s organic waste.

The park lives by the bay. The blue expanse of the shore, with land distantly beyond it, can only be glimpsed behind yellow cranes, rectangles of trash and the chain-linked fences that enclose them. The rectangles of tightlycompacted trash are neatly lined in rows.

The green and white behemoth passes these

landmarks on its left, in addition to the rows of blue, industrial Newby Island trucks that slumber to its right.

The truck rolls up onto the scale where it must weigh its load before entering the park.

The scale sits beside a blue booth that is shaped like a one-bedroom house. Nava pays the clerk by the ton.

As the truck rolls up then down the scale, the banana peel’s tendrils settle deeper into mush.

Driving toward the bay, the truck rolls up a dirt incline, passing an earthen arena. There, a few dozen feet to Nava’s side, a yellow CAT loader carries and moves around piles of dirt and soil. Plastic discards, which will likely be moved to a landfill, lie strewn across the dirt landscape. According to a poster that Muir keeps in her office, plastic bags take two to 10 centuries to decompose.

The truck rolls on.

Finally, at the arena for offloading, a mound stands to the left that is about five feet tall and 20 feet wide. The mound consists of plastic bags, whose contents include cardboard Amazon boxes, an empty Froot Loops carton, a styrofoam box and a blue box of consumed Luna Bars. Behind the mound stand posts that are numbered 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 and so on. Beyond that lie prickles of green brush by the shore and a placid waterfront enclosed into perfect rectangles. Distant strips of land enclose these “ponds,” which collect stormwater discharge and prevent run-off from the recovery park from contaminating the bay.

Pressing on into the arena, the beast reaches its destination: the dumping ground where tall mounds of soil, yard trimmings, and groundup pieces of food waste are piled high. There are many fantastic beasts here: other trucks that

have come to offload their burden. Here they encounter excavators with long, yawning heads that scoops up dirt and a long-necked, yellow beast that resembles a feeding giraffe. Loaders offload into this tub grinder’s bowl-like back, from which it spews a homogeneous purée of yard trimmings and food disposal. Out of its head, piles of stewing, mulch-smelling grain accumulate.

Membership in one of these piles will be the banana peel’s fate, too.

A man wearing a neon vest and white hard hat approaches the truck; Nava rolls his window down. The man directs Nava where to dump.

Nava drives the truck forward, toward the piles of mulch, and then steers the beast around.

The inside of the truck shakes as he presses a big button inside and the truck moves forward.

Outside, a long blue metal pole slowly extends, raising the rectangular body of the vehicle from its shoulders. As its body punctures the sky, the gap between the pole, the bottom edge of the truck’s rectangular body and its bottom form a perfect equilateral triangle.

The banana peel, with all the mush, wetness and slippery plastic bags inside the vehicle’s body, slides out, tumbling into dirt. Streaks of brown and yellow remain inside the body of the truck, now a carcass from this trip.

Newby Island receives an average of 625 tons of organic disposal a day, according to its website. In turn, it markets more than 100,000 cubic yards of compost, mulch and wood chips each year to sell to landscapers and farmers, the site says.

After trucks drop off their contents, the facility shreds and dispenses ground compost into large mounds. They screen out contaminants and put the grounds into rows

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100 feet long and eight feet tall before the final stage of allowing it to decay into soil, said Muir.

“It’s a partnership,” she said. “Yes, [Newby Island] can get the contaminants out, but I have to do the most that I can do to not have them there in the first place.”

Her first line of defense against contamination involves educating people on how to separate waste properly through annual trainings and outreach and participation in RecycleMania.

Facility workers take the temperature of the rows, water them and turn them so that decaying compost on the inside ends up on the outside. “When you pull the dirt back you see some of the microbial activity and it’s hot,” she added. “Steam is coming out of there.”

A billion of these microbes that help to break

34

down compost could fit on a teaspoon. They consume the compostables bite by bite and, in turn, poop out soil. An entire ecosystem of millipedes, spiders, bugs and microbes can live in these mounds. At a commercial compost facility, it takes 180 days for all materials of the mound to break down.

Life will continue for the banana peel, but in an utterly different form. When its transformation is complete, it will become part of a rich dark compost that nourishes flowering and fruiting plants with calcium, magnesium, sulfur, phosphates, potassium and sodium.

Nava takes the 880 Interstate back to campus.

It is around 1:10 p.m. Back on campus, many Stanford students leave for their second class of the day.

As Nava drives back, a grey highway and blue sky ahead, he thinks about plans for his daughter’s upcoming sweet 16 party. He arrives back at Stanford’s campus and drives home.

After a nearly 10-hour day of work, he will go home and plop into bed at 8 p.m. For him, even waking up at 5 a.m. is a kind of sleeping in, he said.

Meanwhile, the banana peel left behind, browning, patiently awaits rebirth.

Contact Eliane Mitchell at elianem@stanford. edu.

35

Speculations on a

Post Work World

by Bilal Choho, Hannah Frakes, Joe Goodhew, Jake Goulder and Abigail Schott-Rosenfield

34

I

n “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work,” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (S&W) outline the path that they believe we’ll have to follow in order to achieve a post-work world. They do not dwell on what that world might look like, but they do make one point clear: The end of wage labor would not in itself mean the end of capitalism.

The system would still be essentially capitalist insofar as the principal mode of production would still be generalized commodity production, i.e., a system where private actors produce things in order to sell them. This claim raises at least one theoretical challenge that the book does not address: What of surplus value?

It seems like a fairly uncontroversial claim to say that, in Marxist economics, an intrinsic moment of the capitalist mode of production that distinguishes it from other modes of production is the extraction of surplus value from wage laborers by capitalists.

Marx considered his discovery of the category of surplus value to be his most important achievement; it is at the very least a challenge to imagine how capitalism could continue without the extraction of surplus value, or even how the dynamics of class struggle — which S&W believe is the principal motor that will push these changes — could get us to such a point (a point which it seems would signal the quasi-complete defeat of capitalists and their methods of exploitation) without passing through a large-scale revolution. Indeed, if such a revolution were to take place, wouldn’t we expect much more from it than a simple mutation of capitalism? In this essay, you will go down a series of speculative paths to imagine different post-work worlds. We will start by giving an overview of the proposals that S&W make for constructing post-work capitalism, and, without concerning ourselves with strategies for how to bring each of them about, speculatively take these proposals as achieved. Then the idea is to consider different combinations, interpretations and implementations of these proposals, and what worlds these differences might yield, with the problem of surplus value as a central question to be resolved in each case.

S&W detail four main components for the construction of a post-work world, the first of which is Universal Basic Income (UBI). As this is an issue for debate across the contemporary political spectrum, they are intent on clearly differentiating their version of UBI from, say, a libertarian or a social democratic one.

The left version of UBI must necessarily be combined with other measures, first of all, as opposed to being presented as a stand-alone solution to all social questions. This of course means inscribing it in the rest of the post-work program, but at the very least it means not casting UBI as a replacement for any existing social programs: UBI should be implemented in addition to health care, welfare, and so on.

For S&W, basic income means that the amount of money should be sufficient to live on without any other source of revenue. This is a crucial point (and one which, in practice, promises to be a site of intense political struggle) because the implementation of UBI would then mean that no one would be forced to work – more precisely, to work for wages – in order to survive. In a kind of transition period, anyone would still have the choice to work for wages, but this would be a free choice, unburdened by the basic necessity to survive, and would therefore signal a strong shift in the labor-capital balance of power in favor of the former.

The other crucial distinction of a left UBI is the universality. In order to prevent basic income from becoming another vector of oppression, it would have to be given indiscriminately to all people. Universality precludes all markers of race, gender and class, as well as an individual’s potential capacity to participate in the workforce.[1] Crucially, UBI cannot be tied to any notion of citizenship or nationality, or it would fail to address what S&W claim is one of the most important crises of our time: the problem of refugees. This raises a problem that we’ll go into more later on: It seems like, practically speaking, the struggle for a post-work world could conceivably only begin on a national scale. Because of the nature of the global division of labor, however, it would have to be implemented everywhere if it is to truly be a step towards the emancipation of all people, rather than an intensification of the imperialist nature of global exploitation.

The second component is the gradual reduction of the working week. This is a fairly obvious means of emancipation from wage labor and has always been one of the principal sites of class struggle. A shorter working week means alleviating the toll that work takes on us and leaves us with more time to do whatever we please. This includes, of course, organizing class struggle, and more generally, any work that is personally or socially important, but it also includes leisure.

In addition, the result would be the redistribution of labor-time among a larger amount of workers (given a fixed amount of labor-time necessitated by, say, a single firm) and thus less unemployment, which is desirable in itself (pre-UBI, that is) and also shifts the balance of power: with the threat of being fired and replaced gone or lessened, workers are free to strike or use that threat as a leverage point in negotiations. This isn’t, however, a trivial measure to be pushed for: since the 80s and the development of the neoliberal project the working week has actually lengthened in all social strata.[2] Working less has many economic benefits (for example, the immense medical cost of widespread physical and mental illness) and ecological benefits (for example, fewer people driving to work every day).

37

social recognition, is work. For S&W, the main problem with this conception is identifying work with wage labor, or with drudgery. For them, the end of wage labor would in fact free work from the shackles of wage: no work would be constrained by survival. In a post-work world, people would actually “work” much better, because they would work on what they are actually passionate about (just for fun, let’s reiterate that “do what you’re passionate about,” despite being a mantra of neoliberalism, is impossible to realize under the neoliberal system). This would also intersect much more naturally with the space of socially useful work than generalized commodity production does.

The vast void that the disappearance of wage labor would leave in our lives should be seen as a beautiful challenge, rather than a terrifying prospect. Considering the work ethic in these terms, we can see why S&W believe that overcoming it might be the most challenging task among the four.

Easy mode

Level 1

Together with UBI, it hopes to address the problem of surplus populations: a category that includes refugees and the unemployed, but also unpaid domestic workers (primarily women), young people who have never had a job, many forms of extreme precarity (zero-hour contracts, multiple part-time jobs) and people who survive off of alternative economies in the growing slums and ghettos of the work. As Joan Robinson says, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”

The third proposal in S&W’s conception of post-work also addresses an important anxiety of our time: the automation of jobs by robots and AI. The technological possibility for full automation is a huge hypothetical on which the book rests (different studies estimate that anywhere between 40 and 80 percent of current jobs could be automated), but regardless it is a controversial argument, one which is important to hear independently of its feasibility. Just like the other proposals, full or gradual automation seems like a nightmare in isolation. Isn’t it just more and more people losing their jobs, and 38

surplus populations growing ever larger? What S&W ask us to imagine, however, is how this could work as a demand from the working class, rather than as a thing to fight against. One important point to remember is that today, the main reason why jobs that could be automated are still done by humans is not a series of rights that workers have fought for. Instead, it’s simply that human workers are in fact cheaper than the machines that would replace them. This is a rather bleak consideration, on par with the fact that (socially beneficial) innovation has been stagnant for a generation because capitalists do not invest in it. It does remind us, however, of what is at stake when we say that a world without work is possible; this leads us into the fourth and final point of S&W’s program.

Perhaps the most adventurous claim of the book is that at the core, the reason behind the intense resistance to ideas like UBI and full automation, even on the left, is the persistence of what S&W call the work ethic. These proposals are only problematic insofar as we remain tied to the idea that what gives life meaning, or at the very least what gives an individual

This book is trash! Capital won’t let us not work! What are going to do, just vote for UBI at the UN? Go door-to-door convincing people that the only thing worth investing in is the robot that will take their job? Business owners are rich because we work for less than what we produce. If we didn’t, then they wouldn’t keep running their business, and they certainly wouldn’t buy a bunch of fancy new robots.

What we need is a revolution, a dictatorship of the proletariat and then generalized commodity production and the state will gradually wither away until… wait —

Level 2

S&W have a secret plan! This is just a road to socialism with a bonus that Marx couldn’t envision: super smart robots! The advantage of this hot new program – it doesn’t even reek of antiquated Soviet aesthetics, wow! – is that it can attract all kinds of people: UBI fans, robot and AI fans and even people who are just lazy. UBI, a reduced working week and full automation will gradually be won through struggle, and through struggle we’ll develop working class consciousness, i.e., the idea that working sucks. With more and more robots and less and less workers, the rate of profit will gradually go down, and we’ll empty surplus value out of the capitalists’ pockets simply by taxing them for UBI, making fully automated industries public and working less (for higher wages or cheaper commodities). When the last boss can’t pay his final employee because a robot is doing the same job for free, they’ll both go out and pursue their passion for waterskiing like everyone else. But wait, who will the last worker be?`

Intermediate mode

Level 3

When Siri 2.0 will be switching channels for you and hosting every single talk show on American TV, while the entire country of China will be working day and night on one giant work of art during the whole 22nd century and spend the 23rd century interpreting it, who will be building the automatic cars, the artificial wombs, the self-cleaning cities and the robot lawyers? In this scenario, which Žižek has already dubbed “communism for the rich,” there is no more proletariat in the Global North. People of all ages (no more gender or race) use their UBI to buy healthy, sustainable products and happily associate in fashion-, math- or football-themed communes.

The Global South, however, is a toxic wasteland. Exploitation has intensified instead of being eradicated – industrial workers in South-East Asia, farmers in Africa, oil in the Middle East, robot designers and software developers everywhere. The North has kept the exploited in check by a combination of semi-continuous drone warfare and limiting their access to real and virtual resources. The post-work paradise envisioned by S&W is achieved in the North but was made possible and sustained by a re-intensification and diversification of colonialism. Surplus value is still being extracted from those we cannot see, those who don’t matter. We have to be very careful of who we are forgetting when we say post-work, because surplus value will not forget them.

Level 4

Very careful indeed. Let’s assume we’ve learned from the previous level. No human has been left behind in the struggle for post-work.

Accelerated infrastructure-building robots, farmer robots, robot nannies, are equally accessible and in use all around the globe.

Robot-building robots, programmer robots.

Money is no longer wages — it’s just the social cost of creating and maintaining the robots that produce commodities. Price is now merely an indicator processed by the economist-AI so it can increase or decrease production of this or that commodity as a direct function of social need. Robots do what we want them to do, and nothing but that – no dystopian takeover in sight. Where’s the catch? No one sees it at first, because it is everywhere.

One can sense doubts at the First International Symposium for Philosophy Aficionados, where AI is meant to be used to simulate metaphysical hypotheses but where the most memorable debate ends up being between Lucca Shakur, hailing from Bolivia, and BK845*, from factory YT6 on Venus.

The big shock comes with the first court case 39

(presided by a robot-lawyer) to approve the romantic union of a widow and the robot careworker she interacted with at the caring home.

Suddenly everyone is asking the same question: If robots and AI are capable of doing all the jobs that we did, if we can have conversations, debates with them, even fall in love with them, what makes them different from us? Aren’t they humans, or people, or subjects, or whatever you want to call it, just as much as we are? The curse of exploitation has no end — by freeing humans from work we’ve created a cybernetic slave society where the ruling class (humans) is extracting a maximal amount of surplus value from the slaves (robots), only leaving them the bare minimum for maintenance.

Advanced Mode

Level 5

For Marx, under capitalism, things have value only if they’re socially useful, and there has been work done to produce them.

The exception is the period of primitive accumulation, backed by the institution of private property. In a nutshell, within and outside of colonialist countries, those who can (who are already powerful) claim ownership to whatever they want (“Turns out everything inside this fence is my land now!”) by whatever means, including the genocide of indigenous people. This is the main reason for the existence of the fundamental class distinction between owners and workers in capitalism – it comes from an initial inequality, which is preserved or fought against through class struggle.

This initial difference could still exist in the post-work world, even if there is ostensibly no reason to maintain it. For example, gradual full automation could be achieved without an accompanying UBI and the reduction of the working week. Fewer and fewer people would be working, in depreciating conditions, and growing surplus populations would struggle more and more to survive. Robinson’s maxim about exploitation would ring ever truer.

Even if UBI and post-work became a reality, however, the existing ruling class, who would still have control over the means of production, could hoard some commodities away from the masses. After all, we are familiar with the trope of the absurdly rich capitalist, who cannot find anything more to buy with her money but is still compelled to accumulate more and more of it rather than distribute it.

There would no longer be extraction of surplus value, but a congealed majority of it would remain in the hands of the few.

This world could look a lot like Level 3, even if wage labor had gone away, if the most powerful refused to provide the means to build infrastructure in the poorest places, preventing them from evolving out of a neo-primitive state. There is no end to imagining the ways in which the status quo could be maintained – 40

robot armies, biochemical and cyber weapons, the constant threat of embargo… — or the possible endgames: a successful revolution, in the best case, or constant war, or a wiping out of the poorest by some weapon, by famine, by disease ... Perhaps the most terrifying prospect would be that things would go on, as most people resign themselves to mere survival.

Level 6

It’s important to keep in mind — especially since historically, capitalism has developed higher and higher forms of abstraction — that there are other forms of surplus value than the one that comes from exploiting labor. Simply by virtue of being a property owner, one can extract surplus value from rent. Because of the constant small fluctuations of the price of commodities, one can extract surplus value from speculation (in a nutshell, what financial markets do). Finally, surplus value can be extracted through loans in the form of interest rates (in a nutshell, what banks do). Financial markets today make it clear that these forms have some degree of independence from the actual processes of production, as well as very real repercussions on them: crises can be “imaginary” (everyone thinks that everyone else is losing confidence in something and will stop investing, which is what causes that to actually happen) but cause recessions that impact the whole world for a generation. They can also happen with “imaginary debts” whereby all kinds of people are lending out much, much more money than they actually have, until at some point it all comes crashing down.

Let’s try and imagine that these processes could become entirely independent of production, and thus survive in a post-work world. The millions of people who live in perpetual debt today, as well as those who rent, would still be in this situation. The system could be maintained by a ruling class (creditors, landlords, speculators, winners of the primitive accumulation game) with the same oppressive methods as in previous levels. Could we thus imagine an entirely “imaginary” surplus value, with artificial debts, debts on debts in endless recursive loops, artificial crises? With no work to do to pay their debts, individuals would need to artificially starve themselves of certain commodities instead — but the system would be engineered so as to make it impossible to ever reimburse all of your debt. As a whole, we could say that society would be pushing everincreasing amounts of debt further and further into the future, consuming the future before it had even arrived.

Level 7

The conclusion of the previous level is extremely speculative, because in a sense it admits the possibility that capitalism could invent new abstractions that are unimaginable to anyone today, and puts those possible

abstractions under the general name of the “future.” Nevertheless, it is also quite concrete in the sense that for speculators (as well as for banks who in some sense “speculate” that those to whom they lend money will pay them back) the future is already an abstraction with a certain amount of value. Different possible futures have different values depending on your investments, and building a good, “valuegenerating” portfolio is about investing in the right proportions on different possible futures.

In a different sense, because everyone’s money depends on where everyone else puts their money in financial markets (hence the “crises of confidence”), people collectively “give value” to some futures, even cause some futures to be brought about, by investing in them. So it is possible to understand the future as a real abstraction and to extract surplus value from it.

However, we can also give a very concrete example of what we are talking about — one with a limit, where eventually the whole future will have been emptied out. This example is the Earth. Indeed, the Earth itself is a process, with resources that it transforms and renews.

The problem is that some processes prevent it from renewing its resources, specifically many human activities. For example, in 2016, articles were published in August claiming that we had already “consumed an entire Earth” for that year. Expanding on this metaphor, we could understand all the natural transformations of an ecosystem as work plus the consumption of the product of this work, and some (human) processes as extracting surplus value from the Earth insofar as they deplete resources without renewing them. Without claiming to have a fully developed Marxist ecological theory, we can imagine that there is an ostensible sense in which we are “in debt” to the Earth. So in light of the previous example, a fully functioning postwork world could still bring about the end of humanity, if at some point the future won’t let us borrow from it anymore — if some essential natural resource has entirely disappeared.

Expert Mode

Level 8

This last series of speculations has to do with the work ethic, which we haven’t really addressed so far. What if it turned out to be much more stubborn than we thought? Let’s suppose full automation happens, because robots and AI become cheap and it’s thus in the interest of capitalists. Further, let’s say we’ve struggled to obtain UBI and have overcome all the challenges of the previous levels. The system is sound, and no one is “working” in the way that we currently understand the idea. But what if people just can’t let go of the idea of work, or some kind of toil, as the meaning of life? How could value, and, more importantly, surplus value, sneak its way out of all the “traditional” senses of the word “work” and

into yet unsuspected realms?

Understanding value as social utility (in as broad a sense as we want that to mean) and thus understanding all work as social leads us down one possible path. Social media occupy an increasing amount of space, time and energy in the lives of many. We are all familiar with the mechanisms of self-valorization that many such platforms end up being about, either implicitly (Facebook and Instagram) or explicitly (LinkedIn and Tinder). Different people have different values on social media, as do different connections, networks, posts and elements of your constructed self-image. It is not very difficult to imagine various hellish developments of social media that could take up all or most of our existence and involve activity that is no different from work in the sense of toil. Value would then be social standing.[3] The primitive accumulation phase would be the varying social standings that everyone would have prior to the appearance of this social media. The surplus value could be many things, but a simple idea is the one illustrated by episode 8 of season 5 of the TV show “Community,” called “App Development and Condiments”: social standing is valuable in itself, but it specifically gives you the potential power to influence others' social standing – the popular kids get to decide who’s cool and who isn’t. Then any act inside this social medium, whether it be a new connection or some way to valorize yourself or a friend of yours, is work that produces (negative or positive) value, as we have shown, but also surplus value, as the (increased or decreased) power to influence value (your own and others’).

Level 9

Perhaps a more disturbing possible location of surplus value is sex work. What would a world where most or all people understood themselves as sex workers look like? Saying sex work is a service is insufficient to understanding how value and, potentially, surplus value, are generated through it. In industries such as prostitution and pornography, there is already a hierarchy of sex-workers (who get paid more or less) so we could imagine an extension of that to the whole of society. In addition, people who employ sex workers (the owner of a brothel, for example) clearly extract surplus value from them, so we could definitely imagine a class system on that basis.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan says surplus value just mimics surplus jouissance (enjoyment), but it isn’t the real thing. This world would therefore be a horrifying dystopia where the “semblant surplus jouissance” (surplus value) would be located exactly where the real one (symbolically) is — in sex. The contradiction between the two would thus be maximally heightened because what stands in for the real thing would also prevent the real thing from happening.

Level 10

Finally, let’s go all out and imagine that we’ve been able to rid ourselves completely of the problem of having a body – specifically one that can be assigned a value and/or one that is subject to the desire for pleasure and to jouissance. For example, we have managed to upload ourselves onto computers, have some kind of automated system of protection and renewal of this medium and interact with each other through bits and bytes. The space of what we would then desire would then be greatly reduced and focused. We’d like to imagine that we would collectively dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of the Truth and the Good.

Presumably, however, this would still have to be done through language. Now if we could not rid ourselves of the work ethic, then we could understand language itself as the means of production, and value as sense, as in the thing we produce in light of the aforementioned pursuit.

But of course, sense itself can be circulated and repurposed. Pieces of knowledge have more or less value depending on the system in which they are understood, and therefore conversations, or any exchange through language, can leave some participants with more extra value than others, based on the system that they already had constructed.

Primitive accumulation for this world has already happened, since everyone has access to a different amount of knowledge, and an additional phase could involve how many bytes of memory are initially allotted to each individual. If we did not put the means of production (language) and their product (sense) in common, then some could hoard

their sense, and thus have a higher access to truth than others.

Contact Bilal Choho at bchoho@stanford.edu, Abigail Schott-Rosenfield at aschott@stanford. edu, Hannah Frakes at hfrakes@stanford.edu, Jake Goulder at jgoulder@stanford.edu and Joe Goodhew at jgoodhew@stanford.edu.

[1] We may immediately think of retired and some differently abled people; a less obvious and fascinating question is whether we must also extend UBI to children – we recommend Shulamith Firestone’s "The Dialectic of Sex" on the question of the emancipation of children.

[2] For many workers, this takes the form of (unpaid) “perpetual work.” See Mark Fisher’s "Capitalist Realism," among others, on how enslavement to our smartphones makes perpetual work ubiquitous. The widespread scientific consensus is that this has caused the onslaught of mental and physical illnesses that we now consider to be banal.

[3] Variants of this arguably already exist, such as China’s “Citizen Trust Score.”

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Photos by DEVON ZANDER/The Stanford Daily

42

HIKING TH

The importance of outdoor c

A

dark jeans, a heavy sweater and riding boots, I was already soaked in sweat. When my friends advised me to wear athletic clothing and sneakers, I ignored their advice because I had little time to accomplish this rite of passage for all Stanford students, one I should’ve done as a freshman. “You can’t just walk The Dish,” they said. “You have to hike it.” Their nonchalant statement echoed in my mind like a mild warning. I was about to endeavor on a personal journey that I hoped would bring the same zen I felt while watching Netflix after turning in a large assignment.

Parking my bike alongside only a handful of others, I gazed at the steep hill in front of me with awe. Even at the bottom, the sadness and anxiety that came with losing an important person in my life less than 24 hours before disappeared. I walked full-speed ahead, not paying attention to the runners who passed me like sports cars on a highway. Under the blazing Californian sun, the moderate 60-degree forecast had me fanning my face as I hiked up what seemed like a mountain. The trek had taken me less than 10 minutes, but I stayed at the top for almost an hour. The scenery was postcardworthy: The San Francisco Bay reflected the solar rays in a way that resembled a sea of blue tinsel, the thick foliage hid building tops like a jungle canopy and the shadowlike mountains faded into the background of the horizon.

But what gave me this view was the hill I stood on, a hill with dry grasses and looming trees and unafraid wildlife. A hill whose initial challenge gives way to a treasure trove of nature. A hill that can’t be found on any other college campus in the country. And so began a series of thoughts that would drive my curiosity over the next few days. With Stanford considered one of the most beautiful, eco-friendly campuses, how do more urban schools compare? How do students feel about the overabundance of cement and asphalt? Are there enough green spaces and parks to accommodate for the lack of natural vegetation? Has Stanford spoiled its students and faculty with well-manicured landscaping and conserved ecosystems? Do enough students take advantage of these beautiful landscapes? I fter the mile bike ride in

emily schmidt

HE DISH

took to asking a few of my high school friends who currently attend urban schools to find out.

Eric Miller, a sophomore at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, describes his campus as one where students have to go out of their way to connect with nature. “There are only about 3-4 places for students to play [sports]. A few times, I [have gone] to a park near Lake Erie; however, I either need a friend to drive me there or bike about 25-30 minutes,” he said. “I also have heard of students going to a local park, but I believe it is about a 45-minute trip. The closest thing [that resembles a park] is a cemetery.”

New York University sophomore Darshana Paramesh considers nearby Washington Square Park to be part of her urban campus, even if there’s relatively little vegetation.

“Washington Square Park is probably the main park that most NYU students take advantage of because it’s literally across the street from the dining halls and academic buildings,” she stated. “Most people chill on the benches or sit in the fountain with their friends or by themselves, just relaxing or eating food.”

While both Miller and Paramesh find their universities to have limited access to green spaces, sophomore Anupama Shah loves the lush lawns of Georgia Tech University in Atlanta.

“Even though our campus is technically an open campus, it really feels like its own place,” she said. “And while you can see the skyscrapers from campus, there’s a lot of green space that makes it nice to study, exercise or just relax.”

As I sat reading their extensive answers on Facebook Messenger, it occurred to me that all three of my friends spoke positively about the effects of nature on students in general. They emphasized how much stress relief a simple walk through a wooded park or laying out in the sun on a grassy field could provide. Although they might need to travel to find these calming environments, all three appreciate what’s offered within the borders of their campuses. They take advantage of the small spaces and sparse trees, even if they’re not necessarily “nature people.”

I wouldn’t consider myself a “nature person” either. Besides being allergic to most trees and grasses, I don’t think I could differentiate a California sycamore from a Quaking aspen. I can’t tell whether a plant

campus spaces 43

is drought- or flood- or fire-resistant. And sometimes when I’m really tired returning to my dorm in the dark, raccoons and jackrabbits look very similar to me. While I find nature incredibly beautiful, I think my ambivalence toward its other ecosystem services has made me blind toward Stanford’s impressive horticultural and conservation efforts.

Mike Burnett ’18, an earth systems student advisor, assured me that I’m not alone. “I think a lot of people may never realize how important it is for a campus to incorporate natural spaces into its design,” he said. “So many people go years here without stopping to notice the beautiful trees or the lively birds, and I don’t know if they’d notice their absence

44

any more than their presence, but I’d wager there’s some subconscious component to it.”

On the mile ride back from The Dish, I felt refreshed, relaxed and unconcerned with the eight-page essay due that night. I slowed down on the footpath that runs parallel to Stanford Avenue. Partially masked from the busy road, the paved trail weaves around wide trees and overgrown hedges, but that’s what I found enchanting about it. I thought about Palm Drive, the Oval, the Arizona Cactus Garden, Lake Lagunita, Wilbur Field, the Arboretum, Meyer Green and other places less known. I’d grown to love each of these places over my short career as a Stanford student, but for what reason? For their iconic status? For their beauty?

For whatever reason I’d subconsciously learned to adore these places of manicured beauty, I hadn’t thought about the effort that goes into planning, maintaining and conserving the landscape of the largest campus by acreage in the country. I wondered if anyone had, really.

Cathy Blake, the University landscape architect and director of campus planning, revealed just some of the considerations that go into planning a new landscape: “What is the status of all existing trees and can they be preserved or moved? How will the space be most useable by students, faculty and staff? How can the landscape both visually and functionally support the architecture? Where will bike parking go and how much and how is it defined

to not unsafely interfere with pedestrian and disability access? Is the plant palette consistent with Stanford’s water use policies, natural type plantings, food production or other goals?”

The number of factors that go into constructing a new place for people to enjoy was much more than I ever expected. The workers dedicated to ensuring actions like mature tree transplantation and seedling reforestation have been successful. They care about tending to the native or drought-resistant plants that make up about 75 percent of all vegetation on campus. It’s also important to know that any reusable waste from trees or shrub clippings is composted or cut into wood chips for all-campus use.

Alan Launer, associate director of

conservation planning, believes strongly that Stanford’s efforts to keep conservation and landscaping closely linked are admirable.

“Stanford does vastly more conservation than is required and does much more than virtually every other entity which [is] not specifically oriented for biological conservation,” he said. “[The University’s] efforts can be grouped into set[ting] aside biologically sensitive lands, managing lands for conservation, working with local jurisdictions, creative environmental ‘enhancements’, funding the conservation program and educating [its faculty and students].”

And when I slowed down to park my bike in front of my dorm, I looked around at

the nameless trees and the bushes covered in mystery berries and the unknown birds pecking at the ground. It didn’t matter that I was sweaty or overloaded with work or saddened by the loss of my family member.

All I felt was calm. Calm in knowing that I can learn the names of trees or berries and birds.

Calm in knowing that I can hike The Dish again in more appropriate clothing. Calm in knowing that I can always rely on Stanford’s natural beauty to bring me happiness.

Contact Emily Schmidt at egs1997@stanford. edu.

45

•NANCY CHANG•

It All Becomes Oblong The length of the snap pea Exactly matches that of my pinky finger: Carbon sequestered, Water to disappear unseen.

I want to become myself, The way that earth turns brown into green.

Frame Rate Maybe if I just describe him completely, Well enough, He'll stay permanently fixed.

I'll never keep him still, in this space.

He is much too voracious, Like a dragon that slumbers on hot coals then Leaves before they can all be acquainted as ash.

The glinting of his eyes suggests affairs with discontent For the sake of amusement In this world where happiness is too light and sickly sweet To be carried

46

•BECCA NELSON•

post-flood i.

Dark water distillate sucks in broken boards and red maple leaves, split sap, downed slash pine.

An empty boat tangles in a tree where grackles rise like reversed rain. ii.

The water gleams the smooth innocence of unbroken glass, lapping as if to say this is it, this lullaby, this immortal, mossy ebb and flow is all there is, all there ever was. The swamp irises unfurl their purple sails infinitely, as they float above where the houses stood, white clapboard and peeled paint.

iii.

Blink and the water comes and recedes, erasing neatly the palm tree where she buried her daughter’s umbilical cord. Their cottage set on stilts dissolves in salt and starlight. Gull-washed and sand-swept away.

The skeleton of a rollercoaster rests above brown water.

The wind whistles through smashed metal the same calliope music, over and over again.

47

HEY, CARD! PRE-ORDER

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