The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 Read online

  The orthodox climate-alarmist view describes the problem of climate change as involving only two reservoirs of carbon, fossil fuels and the atmosphere, ignoring the other three. This simplification of the problem makes predictions seem more certain and more dire. Nothing is said about the large fertilizing effects of carbon in the atmosphere and in topsoil upon food crops. Nothing is said about the large fluxes of carbon into the atmosphere caused by the plowing of soil. For reasons that are not clear to me, the public debate about the environment is dominated by climate scientists who are expert in fluid dynamics, while experts in soil and land management remain silent. The problems of climate change become much more tractable if we look at them through a broader lens.

  Having lived for thirty years with these unorthodox opinions about the climate-change debate, I was amazed and delighted to read Manning's article. Here is a story about two farmers in Minnesota who actually make a living by raising beef on grass instead of on feedlots. This is just what I have been hoping for the last thirty years. The prevailing method of raising beef is to keep the animals in feedlots and to grow corn and soybeans to feed them. This method is prevalent partly because it is profitable and partly because it is subsidized by the United States government. It has at least six seriously harmful effects on the environment. First, it requires massive amounts of fertilizer to keep the corn growing, and the fertilizer carried off by rainwater causes excessive growth of green algae in rivers and lakes, using up the oxygen in the water and finally killing fish in the Gulf of Mexico. Second, it decreases the ability of the land to retain water and increases the frequency of serious flooding. Third, it increases the erosion of topsoil. Fourth, it destroys habitat for birds and other wildlife. Fifth, it raises the price of corn for poor countries that need corn to feed humans. Sixth, it is cruel to the animals and creates a stinking atmosphere for human farm workers and their neighbors. When the Minnesota farmers switch from feedlots to grass, all six environmental insults disappear. The grass is efficiently fertilized by the animals, the rainwater mostly stays in the ground instead of running off, and the erosion is reduced to zero.

  These two farmers are not the only ones. It turns out that many others in different parts of the country are doing similar things. This might be a growing trend, and it might have a major effect on the environment. Raising beef on grass without plowing means reversing the flow of carbon out of the soil into the atmosphere. It means pushing big quantities of carbon down into the roots of the grass and turning a substantial fraction of it into topsoil. Instead of shouting, "Stop burning coal!" the climate alarmists might shout, "Stop plowing soil!" The effects on climate of plowing less soil might be as large as the effects of burning less coal, while the eco nomic costs might be smaller and the ancillary ecological bene fits might be greater.

  For a farmer, it is not enough to be environmentally virtuous. A farm must be financially profitable, and it must be economical in its use of land. Manning brings us the splendid news that the farmers who switched from feedlots to grass are doing well. On the average, they are making net profits about eight times larger than the government subsidies that they received for their feedlots. Since the quality of their beef is superior, they have no difficulty selling it for good prices to food stores and restaurants. In addition, they are using less land in grass than they used for the same number of animals in feedlots. They can raise roughly two steer per acre on grass instead of one steer per acre on corn and feedlot.

  We do not know whether the switch from feedlot to grass could be practical for a majority of Midwestern farmers. Farming on grass requires skills and motivation that an average farmer may not possess. It is at least possible that a massive switch to grass farming may be practical and profitable, with or without a change in government subsidies. Until we explore these questions, we cannot say that reducing consumption of coal is the only remedy for climate change. Richard Manning estimates that switching the entire American Midwest from feedlot to grass would remove from the atmosphere to topsoil about one quarter of the total greenhouse emissions of the United States. Raising beef on grass will not solve all our environmental problems, but it might give us a powerful push in the right direction. Even the reddest-blooded Americans do not live on beef alone. Additional environmental benefits will come from raising pigs and chickens or vegetable crops on unplowed land in other parts of the country.

  I find another feature of Manning's story attractive. The key to the efficient raising of beef on grass is low-tech rather than high-tech. No genetic engineering or other controversial biotechnology is required. The key technical innovation is polywire, a simple and cheap electric-fencing material. Polywire makes it possible to move the animals frequently from place to place by moving fences, so that they eat the grass more uniformly. This simple technology will be easily adaptable to big and small farms and to rich and poor countries. It will not raise religious or ideological opposition. I also find attractive the fact that the switch to grass came from the bottom up and not from the top down. Social changes that come from the bottom up are usually more solid and more durable. In the eyes of most ordinary citizens, Minnesota farmers have more credibility than professors of economics.

  The last two stories in Part Six are staged in India and China. They reinforce the evidence that Manning's story brings from Minnesota. India and China are now the center of gravity of the world's population and of the world's environmental problems. The fate of the planet, from an ecological point of view, is being decided by India and China and not by the United States. These two stories, one in India and one in China, bring us good news. Neither India nor China is about to stop burning coal, but both countries are taking environmental problems seriously. Each in its own way is putting big efforts into the healing of nature's wounds. Indian entrepreneurs and Chinese government officials are like Minnesota farmers. When they see something obviously wrong, they are willing to take responsibility and work hard to put it right. They take a long view of the future and try to solve only one problem at a time. They do not despair. They are happy if they leave their piece of the planet a little healthier than they found it. The lesson that I learn from these stories is that our future is in good hands.

  FREEMAN DYSON

  PART ONE

  Visions of Space

  ANDREW CORSELLO The Believer

  FROM GQ

  ONCE IN A WHILE, this planet gives birth to a child with freakish talent—freakish not only because it is vast but because it is ready upon arrival, with batteries included and no assembly required. One need only open the box and step back.

  In this case, the talent belongs to a six-year-old boy with a rather odd name. The year is 1977, and Elon (pronounced Ee-lon) Musk lives in the most odious country in the world: South Africa. It's summertime, and Elon and his kid brother and sister and their cousins have been playing outside their grandmother's suburban Pretoria home for hours. Now it's getting dark. The other children head for the house. Come on, Elon. Let's go.

  But Elon doesn't want to go inside and doesn't understand why the others do. It's beautiful out here in the dark.

  Elon and his siblings and cousins start to argue. Come on, Elon. No! Come, Elon! I won't! Please, Elon.

  Tosca, the three-year-old, starts to yell, then cry. Then she blurts out what the other children are thinking.

  "Elon, I'm scared!"

  Tosca's mummy has come outside to see what the tears are about. Huddled there on the porch are Tosca and Kimbal—the middle sibling, fifteen months Elon's junior—and the cousins. And there at the tree line is Elon. The light has mostly waned, but Elon, he's so white, skin as pale as a fish's belly, and Maye Musk can see his face so clearly. Beaming. Euphoric. Because he knows.

  Elon hasn't been bickering with his sister and brother; he has been evangelizing. And now he raises both arms to make sure they can see, as well as hear, the good news.

  "Do not be scared of the darkness!" Elon Musk calls out to them from the wilderness. "There is no
thing to fear—it is merely the absence of light!"

  Though Elon has been issuing such pronouncements for several years, it seems to Maye Musk that the distinct way her son has of inspecting the world around him—so precise, so sober—was fully formed even before he could speak. A carefulness was evident, a stillness. Now, at six, he is creative and imaginative, but not in a fanciful way. Other than a fondness for comic books and Tolkien, he doesn't engage in make-believe, doesn't make things up. There are no imaginary friends—a surprise, since he doesn't have many real ones—or monsters in the closet. Elon simply isn't interested in things that are not there. Only in things that are, or plausibly could be. Facts. Elon needs facts the way he needs air.

  And so he reads. Four, five hours a day, even as a first-grader. He forgets nothing he reads. Tosca will say, "I wonder how high up in the sky the moon is!" and Kimbal will respond, "A billion kilometers!" And Elon, smiling, sharing, will say, "Actually, it is 384,400 kilometers away." His siblings will stop and look at him then, and Elon, interpreting the silence as an invitation, will add, "On average."

  Just the facts. They're all Elon needs. What he doesn't seem to need is a mentor, or even encouragement. Sometimes he fires questions at his father, an electrical and mechanical engineer. Problem is, many of his questions involve computers, which Errol Musk dismisses as "toys that will amount to nothing." His son calls this opinion "very silly" and, at the age of ten, buys his first computer and begins teaching himself how to program it. Two years later, he sells his first piece of software—a video game called Blastar—for $500.

  Intelligence like Elon's—self-originating, self-sustaining, seemingly parentless—provokes a reflexive question from everyone who encounters it. Where does such a child come from? It's also a rhetorical question. The better thing to ask is: Where does such a child go?

  This is the more relevant question not only because it is answerable but because it can and must be asked and answered now. Now—when we are more uncertain about one another and about ourselves and about our direction than we have been in decades—it is important for us to hear a story like Elon Musk's. As a reminder. And as a bracing slap to the face.

  Because when children like Elon Musk attain the kind of self-awareness that leads to questions about environment— Where in the world can I go for the license and the room to do what I must do? Where in the world are my peers? —they always, and still, come to the same conclusion.

  Elon Musk knew when he was a child. A remarkable conviction for a child to have, and all the more so because there was no specific dream attached to it. There was no "to build rocket ships" or "to make millions" or "to design computer software." Instead, Elon had this thought, consciously, literally, at the age of ten: America is where people like me need to go. That is where people like me have always gone. A place that was the photographic negative of apartheid South Africa, a place less encumbered than any in the world, ever, by fear.

  "It is as true now as it has always been," says Elon Musk, the man who is endeavoring—as preposterously as he is credibly—to give the human race its biggest upgrade since the advent of consciousness. "Funny how people seem to have forgotten that. But almost all innovation in the world takes place in the United States."

  By the time he's ten he's reading eight to ten hours a day. Elon reads and Elon retains, and his retention armors him. When the negative injunctions You can't and You won't come at Elon the way they come at all children, tens of thousands of times and in every conceivable form, sometimes overt and hard, sometimes insidious and soft, he simply doesn't hear them. Another couple of decades will pass before his biography fills in the specifics, but Elon Musk—the metamorphic intellect, the stuntman brazenness, the aura of immanence—is already there. The twenty-four-year-old physics Ph.D. candidate at Stanford who drops the program after forty-eight hours to become a software programmer who sells his first venture, a media-software company called Zip2, for $307 million? There. The propulsive personality who, within weeks of that sale, starts X.com, an online-banking company that morphs into PayPal before being sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion? There. The thirty-year-old autodidact who then dispenses with digital ephemera in order to become a man, a rocket man, a rocket scientist, and creates Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a company whose short-term purpose is to commercialize an endeavor—orbital rocketry—that has previously been the province of a handful of nations and huge aerospace concerns (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc.) and whose long-term aim is, yup, a mission to Mars? There. The thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur who decides it's time to gin up some ambition already and wean America off the teat of foreign oil while combating global warming and in 2004 makes himself the controlling shareholder and, eventually, CEO of Tesla Motors, manufacturer of the world's first all-electric sports car? There. The thirty-four-year-old penitent who realizes he's just not doing his part, greenhouse-gas-wise, and becomes the chairman and controlling shareholder of SolarCity, turning the company into one of the nation's biggest installers of solar panels? There.

  The above reads like a chronology, which it is, but much of it is also a simultaneity: Elon Musk is currently helming three companies, all of them start-ups, each of them created to address an intractable global problem, two of them on the cutting edge of entirely different engineering technologies, and none of them in even remotely related industries. He is doing so as a businessman (he devised the business plan for SolarCity, which is run by his two cousins, and is the chief executive of the other two) and as a financier (having put more than $100 million of his own money into SpaceX and $55 million into Tesla), and that's something.

  But really, it's nothing, because he's not just the vision guy or the money guy or the marketing guy, although he's all of those, too. He's also designing the stuff. At each of his companies, he knows what the engineers—chemical, mechanical, electrical, structural—know and what the software programmers know, and he does what they do. When the brushed-aluminum pedal of the Tesla Roadster is floored, unleashing 650 amps and 14,000 rpm from the car's 6,831 lithium-ion cells and launching it from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 seconds, the engine roars like ... a cell phone on vibrate mode—a phenomenon made possible not only by Elon Musk's money but by his mind. Likewise, the "CTO" in his official SpaceX title is descriptive, not ceremonial: Elon Musk taught himself how to design and build rockets. "I'd never seen anything like it," says Chris Thompson, explaining what persuaded him to leave a senior position at Boeing to oversee "structures" at SpaceX. "He was the quickest learner I've ever come across. You had this guy who knew everything from a business point of view, but who was also clearly capable of knowing everything from a technical point of view—and the place he was creating was a blank sheet of paper." Musk says (as do the rocket scientists he works with) that after founding SpaceX, it took him "about two years to get up to speed." How is such a thing possible?

  Books. They did for Elon what they'd always done. They gave him what he needed—facts. And, less obvious but just as crucial, they took away what he didn't need: fear, or even any kind of hesitation.

  Did you see what Elon did this fall? It was big. It almost, but not quite, made up for what he did in August, when one of his Falcon 1 rockets failed to make orbit and ended up dumping James Doohan's ashes—Scotty's ashes—in the Pacific Ocean. The achievement might have slipped under your radar, though, because it came at the very end of September, just before the bottom truly fell out. Most of us had already assumed the fetal position by then, thrust our eyes into the softs of our elbows, anything to avoid looking at our latest 401(k) statements. So know this: on September 28, Elon Musk did something that had never been done before, and which experts had repeatedly said could never be done: launched a privately funded rocket built from scratch into Earth orbit. Previously, only nine nations (and the European Space Agency) had independently done such a thing—each after decades of trial and error, dozens of failed launches, and billions (of dollars, rubles, francs...) invest
ed. Musk's Falcon 1 rocket, built for $100 million by a company with fewer than 150 employees, succeeded on only its fourth attempt.

  Walk into the giant hangar housing the offices of SpaceX and you will immediately find your eye drawn to a large glass-walled space named after Wernher von Braun, the Teutonic creator-god of rocketry and, like Elon Musk, a naturalized American citizen. Spend an hour or two at the company and you'll realize that von Braun refers less to a room than a state of mind. "We'll take it to the von Braun"—that's the argot, the invocation, in the face of any conflict that requires immediate resolution. Engineers at SpaceX talk about takin' it to the von Braun the way toughs in dive bars talk about takin' it outside.

  It's early November, late in the afternoon on election eve, as the dozen men who make up SpaceX's senior design team file into the von Braun Room. (Yes, they're all men, ranging from their early twenties to early fifties. Two wear wedding rings; all but Elon sport metal watches chunky enough to deflect gunfire.) There is every reason to believe that this will be a truly terrible meeting for Elon Musk. Actually, meetings are terrible almost by definition in Musk's view. Meetings, he's fond of saying, are what happens when people aren't working.

  But this Monday afternoon is special, thanks to Tesla. October has just proven to be the single worst month for the auto industry in twenty-five years. Despite being a new kind of company making a new kind of car, Tesla isn't immune from what is ailing Detroit. People aren't buying cars, period, much less $109,000 electric sports cars with a 244-mile range—a fact not lost on the venture capitalists Tesla relies on for financing. In recent weeks, Musk has had to close Tesla's engineering office in Michigan, lay off 20 percent of the company's staff (mostly from the Michigan office but also from the Silicon Valley headquarters), and announce a significant production delay in Tesla's Model S—the $57,000 sedan that Musk (and those venture capitalists) have been hoping will broaden the company's client base.