5th August 2022. Noise | Lovelock
Electric cars will still be noisy and bad for our health // The Gaia theory was a long way ahead of its time
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1: Electric cars will still be noisy and be bad for our health
There’s a comfortable myth wandering around that once we have managed to transfer the world car fleet from combustion engine to electric the problems with cars will go away. Of course, it’s not true. Apart from the land take, and the material impact of production, and the deaths and injuries, cars shape our cities in particular ways.
(Urban freeway. Image: pxhere.com, CC0)
And over at The Conversation, Erica Walker has a helpful guide to the levels of noise pollution that cars will continue to generate even when they go electric, and its geographical incidence. It’s in the site’s ‘Curious Kids’ section—“for children of all ages”—but it definitely needs a wider audience.
Walker is the founder of the Community Noise Lab at Brown University’s School of Public Health, in the US, and as such she’s interested in the way we respond to ‘unwanted’ sounds, and the effects of this on public health. And just to be clear, not all unwanted sound is unwelcome. But generally that’s not true of noise from cars.
But let’s start with how noisy cars are:
Many factors influence how loud a car is on the road, including its design, how fast it travels and physical road conditions. On average, cars moving at around 30 mph on local roads will produce sound levels ranging from 33 to 69 decibels. That’s the range between a quiet library and a loud dishwasher. For cars traveling at typical speeds on the interstate (motorway), which is around 70 mph, sound levels range up to 89 decibels. That’s equivalent to two people shouting their conversation at each other.
At low speeds, electric and hybrid cars are quieter—so much so that in the US, auto designers are required to add noise to them when they’re travelling at less than 18 mph (30 kph) so that they’re emitting between 43 and 69 decidels by way of aural warning.
But this isn’t true at higher speeds. Tyre noise and wind noise are pretty much the same, regardless of the engine type. And the quality of the road makes a significant difference, which is worse (of course it is) in poorer areas:
Cracks, depressions and holes in roads can increase sound levels as cars travel across them. Lower-income communities tend to have poorer-quality streets and highways. So failing to fix roads could drown out any improvements in a community’s soundscape from EVs, quite literally.
And although she doesn’t mention this, larger, noisier roads, in most urban areas, tend to be routed through poorer areas. Bigger roads also have worse air pollution effects, from tyre and brake particulates—which electric cars will still throw off. Poorer areas also tend to have fewer facilities to encourage quieter and healthier modes of transport, such as walking and cycling. Sometimes this is precisely because they also have large, dangerous, multi-laned urban highways running across them.
Brown points out that this is a form of what the US Environmental Protection Agency calls ‘environmental injustice’, although I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until the Supreme Court hears a test case that outlaws such language by Federal regulatory agencies.
The article links to the interactive urban sound maps produced by Possible, which I’ve mentioned here before. This is New York: play with the sound on.
The question of noise and health has been moving up the public health agenda for a while. But it still has some way to go:
Many people think of noise as a nuisance that’s less urgent than other, more pressing environmental issues like air and water pollution. As a result, governments fail to plan for noise, measure it, mitigate it or regulate it in any meaningful way. In fact, noise is a significant environmental stressor that negatively affects everyone’s health and well-being, especially those who are most vulnerable.
2: The Gaia theory was a long way ahead of its time
It’s been a few days now since the pioneering environmental scientist James Lovelock died at the age of 103. Resurgence magazine—which is probably the oldest environmental magazine in the UK—took the opportunity to re-publish an article that Lovelock had written for them in 1988 about his Gaia theory. It’s called ‘I speak for the earth’.
(Image: NASA Space Observatory/flickr. CC BY 2.0)
Gaia is a theory that proposes (thank you Wikipedia) that
living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
In his article, written a couple of decades after the Gaia theory was first published, Lovelock uses the analogy of a tree to explain his theory of the earth. Both have a live exterior wrapped around matter that is now dead.
Around the circumference on the surface of the Earth is a thin skin of living tissue of which both the trees and we humans are a part. The rocks beneath our feet are like the wood, and the air above is like the bark. Both are dead matter, but the air and rocks, like the wood and the bark, are either the direct products of life or have been greatly modified by its presence. Is it possible that the Earth is alive like the tree?
As with other people, this re-imagining of the earth was a result of seeing the photos of Earth from space. Of course, it was more or less completely at odds with mainstream science:
Although some of my colleagues in science are beginning to take it seriously as a theory to test, most mainstream scientists prefer to see the Earth as just a ball of rock moistened by the oceans, a piece of planetary real estate that we have inherited. In their view, we, and the rest of life, are just passengers.
Obviously this ‘ball of rock’ view has at its core a scientist post-Enlightenment view of the world, that if we can’t measure it, see it, or weight it, it probably doesn’t exist. And the Gaia theory certainly challenges this: it implies, instead a certain sentience for the planet as a whole.
But what if instead the Earth is a vast living organism? In such a living system species are expendable. If a species, such as humans, adversely affects the environment, then in time it will be eliminated with no more pity than is shown by the micro-brain of an intercontinental ballistic missile on course to its target. If the Earth is like this, then to survive we face the hard task of reintegrating creation. Of learning again to be part of the Earth and not separate from it. If we choose to go this way, the change of heart and mind needed will be great and it will include also the reintegration of religion and science.
Since he first developed the theory, science has started to catch up. Whether or not you agree with the Gaia idea, researchers are increasingly exploring the types of questions that the Gaia hypothesis points us towards. We certainly know much more about sentience than we did then, and are more willing to believe that non-human systems exhibit forms of sentience. Fungi, for example.
And in the 1988, the notion (below) that one could and should speak for the bacteria must have seemed way out there. But as I wrote here a few weeks ago, there are now proposals that every organisation should have such a shop steward, mooted by Lovelock in his article:
I speak as the representative, the shop steward, of the bacteria and the less attractive forms of life. My constituency is all life other than humans, because there are so many who speak for people but few who speak for the others.
—
(James Lovelock in 2005. Photo: Bruno Comby via Wikipedia. CC BY-SA 1.0)
If you want to know more about Lovelock, the New Scientist has published and put outside of its paywall, at least for the time being, an interview with him that it published at around the time of his 100th birthday. It runs through his whole, long, career. There’s a delightful symmetry in the fact that the interviewer is called ‘Gaia’.
The idea for the Gaia theory came to him when he was working for NASA in the 1960s and his boss asked him how you’d detect whether there was life on Mars:
He then asked: “What would you do if you wanted to detect life on Mars?” Without thinking, I said I would look for an entropy reduction. Well, that made him spurt with laughter, but he gave me two days to come up with a practical experiment to find life on Mars or I was out.
A reduction in entropy means an increase in complexity; it implies that life is creating order. But how could you measure it?
In bed at night, it suddenly came to me: all you have to do is analyse the atmosphere of Mars. If it has got gases in it that react with one another, then it is at a low entropy.
Because otherwise, they would have reached an equilibrium, which implies raised entropy?
Exactly....
And this led to your hypothesis of Earth as a self-regulating living system?
Yes, because the amount of oxygen in our atmosphere is far too high – it’s a huge entropy reduction and it doesn’t make sense. But if you look at it as a system that produces organic matter and oxygen in the atmosphere, making a combustible mixture, and that energy then feeds back into the living system…
The name ‘Gaia’, by the way, was suggested by the British novelist William Golding, famous for The Lord of the Flies and The Spire.
Thanks to The Browser for pointing me to the New Scientist article.
j2t#355
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