Wildfires, Gangnam Style and Microplastics

why there is no 'away' and what we can do to love our home

You may have heard about (or smelled) the smoke from Canadian wildfires now drifting down the Eastern seaboard. 

Just yesterday, New York City reported some of the worst air quality of any metropolis in the world!  (that's beating out top contenders/offenders like Shanghai and Mumbai).

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But the deeper truth is that this isn't some anomalous weather event. This is how it's going to be from here on out. Whether smog, refugees, fascist uprisings, or financial contagion, we're all super connected in this global society. We're all neighbors on this little blue marble.

And the sooner we can wrap our heads around the stark reality that there is no 'away,' the better we will be at making healthy and ethical choices for our lives, families and communities.

Because what we're seeing this week is just one instance of well-established patterns. And they run even deeper than which way the wind's been blowing.

***

A couple years back, I traveled with my family to the border between the United States and British Columbia. We were heading north to visit old friends in the mountains.

Part of the trip was social—our kids liked each other—but the other part was practical: We were scouting locations where we might want to move. For over a decade we’d been hunting for the Last Best Place in North America to call home. A place with wild lands to adventure in and a community to raise our kids.

Except at the border we got a scratchy voice mail from our friends. “Don’t bother coming up,” it said. “Too much smoke in the valley. We’re getting out of here until we can breathe again.”

Forest fires are a fixture of the American West, and the cooler latitudes of British Columbia offer only marginal relief from dry summers, careless campers, and lightning strikes.

But this was different.

Our maple-leaf Shangri-la wasn’t even burning this time. Sweden was. “This year, it’s an incredible amount of burning,” said Liz Hoy, a researcher at NASA’s space flight center, “and the smoke affects air quality thousands of miles away from the Arctic region.”

Our imagined refuge just wasn’t going to cut it. Even the “early adopters” who’d planted gardens, raised barns, and forged community in that ideal spot were suddenly refugees from events sparked off halfway around the world.

There really is no “away.”

For Doomsday Prepper-types insisting on going it alone, the wilds of British Columbia might still seem too accessible. They’d prefer to think that their own private Idaho or New Zealand or Hawaii might provide a more pristine refuge away from our problems.

But consider the most extreme and remote places on the planet, like the north and south poles.

A team of researchers has recently discovered that microplastics—those tiny little pellets that break down from all of our waste—have found their way into arctic ice cores at nearly the same rate they show up in European towns. 

We’re all eating, breathing, and absorbing the stuff. Even Santa and his elves. Even those adorable marching penguins of Antarctica.

Conditions at the highest and lowest points on Earth—Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench—aren’t much better. Trash left behind by climbing expeditions—empty oxygen bottles and abandoned gear—have been a sad fixture of Himalayan base camps for decades.

But it’s not just climbers leaving a black mark on that mighty mountain.

John All, of Western Washington University, reported that his team at Nepal’s Everest base camp found pollution buried deep in the snowpack. The samples they processed in their makeshift mountain labs were surprisingly dark with contaminants.

“There are little pieces of pollution that the snow is forming around, so the snow is actually trapping the pollution and pulling it down,” Dr. All said from Kathmandu. As alpine winds whip across the tallest summit in the world, they’re bringing the smog of Mumbai and Shanghai with them.

So much for “mountain air fresh.”

A year after the Swedish fires prompted that evacuation from British Columbia, National Geographic published results from deep-sea expeditions into the Mariana Trench—the deepest spot on Earth. And there, thirty-six thousand feet below sea level, a place so remote and extreme that virtually nothing can survive, a high-tech submersible snapped a photo of a discarded plastic shopping bag.

As arresting as that image is, it wasn’t a fluke.

“Last February,” National Geographic reported, “a separate study showed the Mariana Trench has higher levels of overall pollution in certain regions than some of the most polluted rivers in China . . . the chemical pollutants in the trench may have come in part from the breakdown of plastic in the water column.”

We can chalk both of these examples—wildfire smoke and industrial pollution in weirdly remote places—up to two forces, the jet stream and the Gulf Stream. We’re on a rotating planet and air and water circulate in strong and predictable currents. What starts in one place almost always ends up someplace else.

But other elements of our hyper-connectedness are new and shrinking our world whether we like it or not.

***

Consider air travel and the internet. Both germs and memes spread virally.  Biology and ideology whip around this planet rooted in the same basic laws of physics.

As far back as the Black Death in medieval Europe, scholars have traced the same wavelike pattern of epidemic infection. A virus starts in one place and ripples out at a predictable rate, limited only by the average speed of travel.

In the fourteenth century, the bubonic plague hitched along the Silk Road to the seaports of Crimea and the Black Sea. The sickness then spread across Europe at roughly the rate of horse-drawn travel—about two kilometers per day.

The advent of planes, trains, and automobiles pushed that familiar wave pattern underground.

Hop on a plane in Beijing and you (and any virus you were inadvertently hosting) could be in New York fourteen hours later. Attend a conference in Boston or a political rally in London and by the time you got home and started feeling sick, thousands of participants could have carried the illness almost anywhere.

That sort of near-instantaneous teleportation confounded old models of tracking disease. But once network theorists were able to correct for these accelerated rates of transport, the algorithms began to show the familiar wave pattern of transmission again.

But there’s an even more recent contagion that’s virtual rather than physical. And it’s all made possible by the transport of ideas through fiber-optic cables and Wi-Fi signals.

To understand how viral ideas propagate and mutate, we need to examine a horrific example of global infection that makes the others seem tame—the 2012 YouTube spread of the K-pop song “Gangnam Style.”

That year, a strange, atonal, numbingly repetitive song exploded in popularity, becoming the first video on YouTube to pass one billion views.

Researchers have long assumed that digital memes—whether songs, tweets, videos, or jokes —follow the same pattern of growth as biological diseases. Until recently they had no way to prove it.

Trying to track that telltale viral ripple of contagion was next to impossible.

If they tried to follow the geographical trail as they had for the Black Plague, “Gangam Style” seemed to spread randomly from ground zero in South Korea across the world. According to the old modeling, it didn’t make any sense.

“Geographic distance is not the key factor in the spread of information over social networks,” the researchers wrote in MIT’s Technology Review. “That depends instead on the strength of links from one area to another—places that have lots of social ties are likely to receive information more quickly than those that have weak ties.”

Once they were able to correct for social distance versus physical distance, they found that the route to the worldwide domination of “Gangnam Style” matched the old wave pattern perfectly. 

After first getting uploaded, it hopped from South Korea to the nearby Philippines, and from there to the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world.

Google Trends and Twitter mentions of the song matched the ripple effect first noticed with the Black Death: from the speed of horseback, to the speed of airplanes, until today, when the rate of transmission is limited only by the speed of our internet routers.

“The spread of modern memes occurs in just the same way as ancient diseases,” the team noted. “So the ‘Gangnam Style’ video pandemic spread in exactly the same way as bubonic plague. That’s not really a surprise. But it does confirm the extraordinarily deep link between the physical world and the world of pure information.”

The knock-on effects of a world shrunken by travel, satellites, and internet cables make it nearly impossible to escape from our challenges, even at the literal top, bottom, and ends of the Earth.

Pollution, disease, and gratingly catchy dance memes are all only one click away.

Even at the Ends of the Earth, the End of Days will find us.

The question becomes less and less about where we might run and more and more about where we must stand. 

So as we watch the smog map this week and see where it travels, we can take a moment to reflect on those poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.  

(last month vs. this week)

It's all of us.

And that sobering realization just might be the breath of fresh air we need.