TED Community » Dean Jacobson

More About Me

I'm passionate about

See the bio! Also, climate change (as told in Down to the Wire by David Orr)

An idea worth spreading

Invasive species are those that have been relocated outside of the ecosystem in which they evolved. They dominate and degrade their new ecosystem, as they are free of natural controls (diseases and predators). Humans are the prime, and most destructive of the invasive species, and inevitable consequence of our evolution and development of language, agriculture, etc. The genie is out of the bottle. Our only hope is to volunteer to limit our own numbers and level of affluence/pollution/ecological disruption, and to become more interested and solicitous to our non-human cousins.

Talk to me about

Phony sustainability vs. authentic long term surviverability

People don't know that I'm good at

swimming through rough surf to reach the coral reefs in my back yard, and international folk dancing

My TED Story

The history of evolution is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the diversity of living protists. The thrill of learning of these intricate, beautiful creatures is something i have long wanted to share, and in 2012 I will finally do this with a book published by Cambridge University Press. By preparing over 200 hand-and mouse-drawn illustration, I portray protists in an appropriately detailed, compelling manner. It is said that describing biodiversity, an endless job, enriches humanity; I try to highlight the ecological significance of the hundreds of phyla (including bacteria) that can only be seen with microscopes.

Comments

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• +2

  A reply on Talk: Paul Gilding: The Earth is full

  Mar 5 2012: Carlos,
  About people always wanting/needing to grow...Maybe the humans you know, but there are humans, on a tiny Pacific Island, that figured this out on their own, and voluntarily limited their maximum population so they did not deplete or polluted their land/ocean, and they also eliminated a destructive aspect of their lives (the keeping of pigs) to safeguard their farms. Tikopia is said to have succeeded because it was small enough to make "conjunctive decisions". Awful hard for 7-8 billion to do this... but with the internet, we can align our thinking and expectations much faster than we could before. Still, prospects look pretty bleak. Yes, as Richard says, equity is key.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Paul Gilding: The Earth is full

  Mar 5 2012: I am documenting in great detail the slow death (by disease) of hundreds of coral colonies in the middle of the Pacific, on Majuro atoll (west of the airport, if you use Google Earth, oceanside). All from sewage of a few hundred people. Overfishing is also caused by people, and fish are getting much smaller, less abundant. Invasive weeds and animals are making ecosytems weak and unproductive (like star thistle on the rangeland of the US west). Entire forests dying of beetles, etc. as the winters get warmer throughout BC and the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska. I have seen this. Nature is being overly depleted, nearly everywhere, so even without the climate crisis we have a protein crisis looming. It is not difficult after living 54 years to see the changes, to know it in the gut and in my MIT-educated mind. A PhD does not make me better, but it did teach me critical thinking. This is for real.
• +1

  A reply on Talk: Paul Gilding: The Earth is full

  Mar 5 2012: Fairness is the key, I think... is it fair to let atoll nations go underwater, literally, even lose their economic zone fishing rights? In Finland I heard (on a TED talk) that fairness in public education is the top priority, not testing, and they get the sort of results the South Koreans get... very good performance, yet local principles get to be in control, not some central agency a la "no child left behind". Fairness works. We must preserve our remaining natural capital so it can be shared fairly (the interest, not the capital), and that is a tough challenge, clearly. Gildings was so articulate and brave, had just the right tone.

• A reply on Talk: Dianna Cohen: Tough truths about plastic pollution

  Mar 5 2012: My god... this is the stupidity (sorry, lack of intelligence) that our species has become so famous for. People who hold this view are simply incapable of understanding physics, and the manner in which some molecules absorb IR radiation. So pathetic.

• A reply on Talk: Dianna Cohen: Tough truths about plastic pollution

  Mar 5 2012: In Vancouver, BC, there was a store with everything I needed (oil, syrup, honey, breakfast cereal, nuts, and even granola etc.) stored in bulk, customers had to bring their own (reusable) containers. It was cheaper and more fun, and you bought exactly what you needed. This is not that hard! (If we demanded it, or considered the possibility of something so logical, so sensible so we could demand it!). And Fred Meyers does it for some of their stuff! So, lets demand that our politicians and corporations require retailers (above a certain size) to do the same! That is if we care about our children's future....

• A reply on Talk: Dianna Cohen: Tough truths about plastic pollution

  Mar 5 2012: There is this thing called chlorine that some chemical engineers add to carbon compounds. 4 billion years of evolution has not created microbial (bacterial or archaeal) enzymes that can cut the bonds of most chlorine-containing compounds (such as PVC, and also many pesticides) or even the chlorine-free bonds of most other plastics. Yes, a single species can clean up carbon tetrachloride, slowly, but plastic as an inert solid is much harder to digest. Bacteria are indeed biochemically clever (I am writing a book about it) but not *that* clever. Organic chemical engineers, like nuclear physicists, have opened a pandora's box that bacteria cannot solve. (I prefer an atomic explosion, actually, even with the fallout you still have a healthy coral reef 50 years later, like in the Marshall Islands, where I live, but we now have an entire world ocean full of plastic!)

• A reply on Talk: Dianna Cohen: Tough truths about plastic pollution

  Mar 5 2012: You really think so? Theoretically, but... I wish it were true out in the real world. Rachel Carson, when I was a little boy, wrote "Man has lost the ability to foresee and forestall". Amen, ain't it the truth. There really isn't a nice ending for this, once runaway warming kicks in... the next 1000 years will be a bumpy ride, and it is sad, and just pathetic, that several thousand years of art and music and scientific discovery will be lost along with "civilization", a quaint, euphemistic term for this invasive, aggressively destructive, suicidal madness we all have grown up with.

• A reply on Talk: Daniel Pauly: The ocean's shifting baseline

  Mar 5 2012: Too true... ideologies trump reason until its too late, like on Easter Island!

• A comment on Talk: Daniel Pauly: The ocean's shifting baseline

  Mar 5 2012: Living on a coral atoll in the Marshall Islands with a heavy human population, I wonder how its reefs have changed...I have worked hard to document various diseases related, I think, to human waste, and in less than 10 years have photographed many hundreds of coral, as individuals, being killed (sometimes this takes 6 years, as an infection slowly spreads over a watermelon-sized brain coral). It is slow, gradual, and now with digital cameras people can document the baseline very convincingly (I take over 4000 images each years of coral alone). On the surrounding low-population atolls (and I have been diving on 12 if them), *all* the coral are healthy, beautiful, but not on over-populated Majuro! The conclusion: people living a western life-style and growing above an ecologically tenable density are incompatible with living coral; the remaining coral are all dead, but they just don't "know" it yet. Conclusion 2 (which very view people have the ethical, moral and intellectual strength and courage to admit): non-aboriginal humans are an invasive species gone amuck. There, I said it. What do we do about it? Continue to take pictures while so much of the natural world dies, is overfished, poisoned, over-heated? How about confronting our corrupt political systems! (Also, it was my choice not to reproduce, and not to own a car, but I still eat beef, I've got to stop that...)
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Private Property: Should everything in the world be owned?

  Jan 6 2012: I live in the Marshall Islands, on thoroughly Christianized Majuro atoll. Throughout the RMI there is a real problem of theft, and if one plants papaya trees nearly all the fruit will be stolen. Normally, the gardener gives up in frustration. (I hand pollinated my papaya flowers each day, its was a bit of work). Because of land inheritance, and the inability to buy land, people stay put, and typically grandparents raise their grandchildren, the parents often drink too much or are too irresponsible to take care of their own kids. The society, over-populated by the largess of the US welfare system (as a redress to the nuclear testing) is in crisis, with the highest rates of alcoholism, suicide and teenage pregnancy in the Pacific. Yet because land is not sold, people have not been thrown off their "weto" (so it could be worse!) except where the local chief has allowed a Chinese business to be built in exchange for money. Thus anti Chinese racism prevails (my wife, a published poet, is Chinese but a native born Arizonan, and receives more than her share of this hatred) Money is the cause of Majuro's downfall, and needs its own conversation. Private property can lead to good stewardship and development (i.e, a tall fence will encourage papaya cultivation), but money often causes liquidation of nature and other evils.