Three Entries a Month

It’s been a busy month due to work and guests, but that fact alone doesn’t account for falling woefully short on the three-journal-entries-each-month goal.

To a great extent the reason for the three entry goal is that it forces me to think through an issue sufficiently to write about it in a way that feels meaningful. This month I’ve started on a few entries, only to abandon the draft after discovering that there was either more to it than I first realized, or that I wasn’t sure what I had to contribute on the topic.

One subject that seemed like it might be interesting to write about is de-extinction. For the first time in history the technology exists to literally bring back an extinct species, and we may soon live in a world that again has passenger pigeons and dodo birds in it. While at first glance that might seem like an unmitigated good – mankind could have a second chance to atone for the horrendous sin of wiping an entire species from existence – upon further investigation the process isn’t exactly the miracle that it might seem. Among other issues, rather than taking DNA from a preserved passenger pigeon and producing a clone, the process is more like Jurassic Park in that “gaps” in the DNA would need to be filled in with DNA from similar species. In the end it isn’t entirely clear that the animal science produced would truly be a passenger pigeon and not a partial hybrid that never actually existed in the wild. Hopefully someday soon we will be able to bring back an animal that is 100% passenger pigeon, but for now there needs to be a lot more discussion about the moral issues given the limitations of current technology.

A second subject that seemed like a worthwhile journal topic was that of collective action problems, which describe so many of the issues we face today. The gist of the idea is that there are many actions which could be undertaken by humanity to collectively improve life for everyone, but those same actions would put individuals at a disadvantage if any member of the group failed to participate. Global warming is a prime example – the world benefits if all countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but any country that chooses not to participate would continue to exacerbate the problem while simultaneously gaining an economic advantage over those who implemented reductions; the end result is that no one wants to do something about the problem until everyone agrees to do something. To cite another example that is a bit closer to home, San Francisco and LA face housing shortages that have caused costs to skyrocket, created massive sprawl, and generated traffic nightmares as people have been forced to drive great distances to get from the places they can afford to live to the places where they work. The solution is to increase housing density, but no one wants their neighborhood to change and you end up with San Francisco fighting development under the guise of preventing gentrification while cities like Santa Monica try to pass ballot measures to make it nearly impossible to develop projects over two stories tall. In both cases, the result of neighborhoods fighting to maintain the status quo is that costs increase, traffic gets worse, and quality of life decreases.

Both of the above topics are subjects that would have been interesting (to me at least) to explore in a full journal entry, but in the case of de-extinction it turned out to not be as simple a subject as I expected, while in the latter case my limited writing skills proved insufficient to write anything meaningful about a problem that doesn’t really have a good solution. With luck whatever strange forces control the neurons in my brain will be poring over simpler topics next month, and the journal schedule will return to normal.