Cass Marketos

Cass Marketos (CM) is a friend of WITI/writer and digital strategist based in Los Angeles. She’s built communities at Kickstarter, Google, and the Obama White House. Call her for your most interesting content strategy and community engagement projects. - Colin (CJN) Cassie here. Last week, I was browsing through saved tabs when I came across an article in the New Yorker regarding the success of a national composting initiative in South Korea. The piece is objectively fascinating for both the simplicity and scalability of the effort (fees for trash disposal, widely available and automated recycling bins, basement mushroom farms), but what jumped out at me most was a simple, contextual fact about food waste: organic matter, deprived of oxygen as it decomposes in landfills, emits methane—a climate poison cited as 56x more deadly than carbon. Why is this interesting? When it comes to the health of our natural world, more seems out of hands than under our control, and the options we have as individuals seem despairingly limited. Too many of the “solutions” presented by the market simply overlay existing consumption habits—clothing brands market their (allegedly) sustainable supply chains, airlines offer the option to purchase carbon offsets—versus requiring us to make real, meaningful change, and it can be hard to parse where and how our independent efforts might add up to something actually impactful. Enter the landfill. The United States has the highest landfill emissions of any country. Put another way: “the equivalent of thirty-seven million cars on the road each year.” That’s a staggering amount, but also a potentially significant leverage point:...recycling of organics—food waste, yard waste, pretty much anything that rots—remains voluntary, even though such material makes up about a third of New York’s trash. All but five per cent of the city’s organic waste goes to landfills.According to GrowNYC, organic material (i.e. “food”) comprises a full 21% of NYC’s waste stream. The city then pays for much of this material to be shipped out-of-state to be disposed of in landfills, where it rots and generates methane. This is comically counterproductive, particularly because most neighborhoods in New York City offer curbside pick up for composted material, an offering that remains woefully underutilized:About a third of New Yorkers can sign up to have their organic waste collected from their homes, in brown bins, but many people are unaware of the program. Even in participating districts, only about ten per cent of organic matter is diverted from landfills. I asked a middle-aged man listening to music if he knew what a brown bin nearby was for. “Bones?”’I’m doubtful that these programs see lax participation because people are disinterested. My guess is that they simply don’t know. (Casual conversation with otherwise very well-informed friends has revealed a stunning dearth of knowledge around how waste management relates to climate justice, generally.) Statistics from other cities with mandatory organic waste recycling programs reveal promising results. San Francisco, for instance, “San Francisco launched mandatory organics recycling in 2009, and now diverts eighty percent of food waste; a comparable model in Seattle has led to about sixty percent of total waste being recycled.”Ideally, composting emerges as a new American habit through a system of subsidies and state-supported infrastructure, which enables individual households to easily and affordably take part. Transitioning to these types of programs is not always cheap (updating truck infrastructure, building, and maintaining disposal and redistribution sites), but the long term could be extremely beneficial for public health and, yes, even the economy.In the meantime, there are plenty of options for the at-home composter who would choose to take initiative. First, you can find out if curbside pickup is typically available in your neighborhood. (Worth noting: many programs, unfortunately, have been temporarily suspended in respect to COVID.) Second, you can purchase a modestly-priced composting bin for your own kitchen. This urban composter kit is $40. If you’re feeling thrifty, food scraps can be collected in discarded yogurt containers or old milk cartons. Even a plastic bag will suffice. To avoid odors, you can also store these items in your freezer. A bittersweet side effect of the COVID-related shutdown has been a significant reduction in emissions, which has permitted people in typically pollution-choked areas to suddenly, well, see. Mountaintops are visible for the first time in decades, as are city skylines and basic parkways.  If there was ever a time to motivate regarding an ongoing commitment to reducing toxic emissions, now is it. And while I don’t pretend that households deciding to compost is a silver bullet for saving the planet, it certainly represents an essential step. (CM)Photo of the Day:According to the Library of Congress, “Poster shows boy with hoe chasing fleeing vegetables to illustrate the success of growing food in local "victory gardens." Part of the National War Garden Commission's campaign to encourage Americans to raise more food and free resources for the United States military needs in World War I.” Artist: Maginel Wright Barney (1877-1966) (CM)Quick Links:More info on composting at home and disposal in New York City (CM)Food artist sending Sourdough Around the World (CM)WWII Victory Gardens make a comeback (CM) Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Cass (CM)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting - The Composting Edition 

Cass Marketos (CS) is a digital & content strategist based between New York and Los Angeles who's worked across art, tech, and government. Cass here. Over the last decade or so, efforts have been underway in Joshua Tree National Park to identify areas of the landscape that would prove most stable through extreme variations in weather patterns across the coming decades. The hope is that these zones, called “climate change refugia,” would provide stable havens for the park’s titular tree species—and, perhaps, save them from dying out altogether.Why is this interesting? Until relatively recently, “conservation” work, broadly speaking, meant restoring an area of land to some past ideal state. Areas once mined for resources and degraded into ecological dead zones could be recaptured by federal entities and deliberately re-engineered as the wetlands they once were, inviting back plant and animal species that had sometimes been decades absent. Coral reef “recovery programs” transplanted lab-grown corals onto wild reefs, returning them from the brink of overfished, nutrient-deprived death to flourishing life. These projects, and others like them, were focused on identifying an environment’s past peak ecological function and then turning back the clock with a series of technical interventions. However, as climate change becomes more and more of an irrefutable reality, we have a grim environmental fact to face: the way things used to be may no longer be applicable. We may no longer be able to go “back”—and, instead, will be forced to think ahead. What does environmental conservation look like in a (quickly) changing climate? What plant and animal species might any given area be able to support in ten years? What about fifty? Projects like the one in Joshua Tree National Park, and the more general concept of “climate change refugia,” are just one approach to reckoning with this intimidating new reality. What can we save? What will have to change?Right now, there is no clear consensus on an answer. Creating climate change refugia is becoming one increasingly popular approach, with projects to identify climatically-resilient zones springing up all across the United States. Some seek to save glacial lakes and spruce-fir forests, another one the entire Mojave Desert. Broadly, their goal is to create a “slow lane” for climate adaptation, giving plants and animals a second to catch up to shifting weather norms, and then expand back out into the surrounding territory, repopulating areas that would otherwise be devastated. Land managers and forest service employees tasked with helping heavily burned areas recover are also tinkering with their own warming-aware strategies. They recognize that the forests burned down today are not likely to be the same forests that will thrive in a climatically changed future, and that reseeding requires careful calibration for species type and diversity in order to both fire-proof and future-proof an area. Take this example from foresters working to restore burned areas in Butte County, CA, a region historically populated by a mix of native pines and cedar: The plan for the burned region, largely located at lower mountain elevations below 4,000 feet, will include a mix of measures: thinning and burning back shrubs to help [native] oaks naturally resprout; replanting some areas with a seed mixture with more hardwoods and fewer conifers than were there before; and sourcing seeds from lower elevations. It may be a bit of a gamble, but with climate change looming it may be riskier to just plant the same trees again, [Wolfy Rougle, a project coordinator]  says. “We need to have the humility to try a few different things.”Elsewhere, some are turning to genetic analysis—and even engineering:Scientists are also using genetic analysis to understand on a more granular level which traits enable a tree to cope with future drought or heat. A gene variant might, for example, result in trees having more roots in proportion to shoots, which means they can draw more water while limiting moisture loss from leaves. Once they’ve identified individuals with traits like this, researchers can study saplings in test environments to see how well they do.Huge challenges face these projects. Climate models are unpredictable because uncertainty looms about how effective (or far-reaching) carbon-reduction strategies will be. Species planted today that are meant to survive in warmer climates, may not germinate properly in our current, still-cooler temperatures. Trees in California, particularly, are highly specialized. A conifer seed that would germinate at 200 feet of elevation might lay permanently dormant just a few hundred feet higher.  Although each of these projects varies in their approach and methodologies, what they have in common is a distinct shift from the attitude of conservation efforts in the past. No longer is it a given that we can simply go back— “restore.” It seems that our only remaining option is to forge ahead. (CM)  Website of the day:Electronic musician Bana Haffar is doing an MMD for us soon. Her website is great: A google sheets doc, with a twist! (CJN)Quick Links: Film as a Subversive Art (CM)How to Report Bugs Effectively (NRB)Why longtermism is the world’s most dangerous secular credo (NRB)--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.The payments landscape. The payments world took an economic hit from the pandemic, just as others did. Indeed, in 2020, global payments revenues declined for the first time in 11 years. But today there’s reason for hope: the decline was smaller than anticipated, and indicators show a nominal rebound for 2021. The latest edition of McKinsey’s long-running global payments report helps to unpack the industry’s dynamics overall and looks closer at topics such as digital currency, transaction banking, and new revenue models. Check it out.--Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Cass (CM)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.

The Futureproof Conservation Edition

Cass Marketos (CM) is a friend of WITI/writer and digital strategist based in Los Angeles. She’s built communities at Kickstarter, Google, and the Obama White House. Call her for your most interesting content strategy and community engagement projects. Her first compost edition is also worth re-reading here. She’s got a new newsletter on compost you should subscribe to. - Colin (CJN) Cass here. I don’t know anybody who has good luck with compost tumblers. I get three to four calls a week about compost—people asking me to “fix” their piles—and almost all of them are from people who have compost tumblers. Why don’t they seem to work? Theoretically, they’re great. A seemingly tidy, aesthetically-pleasant compost solution—but all the things that make tumblers appealing to the amateur composter (no smells! no animals! no having to look at it!), are all the reasons, in my opinion, that they fail. In order to make your compost good, you need to be able to get to know it. What do you see? What do you smell? Is the pile crumbly and dry? Is it slimy? These simple and observable features will help you make small adjustments, over time, to what you add and when you turn so that you can work your way toward an ideal pile. In my experience working with other people’s compost, tumblers often get… simply forgotten. They’re too easy, which becomes psychologically counterproductive. (“Oh, it just takes a few seconds to turn… so I can do it later…”) They also get overstuffed, leading to compaction, less airflow, and decreased decomposition rates.Why is this interesting?In general, any good compost pile needs the correct balance of nitrogen (a little) and carbon (a lot), plus air* and water. Nitrogen comes from things like food scraps, coffee grounds, grass clippings, and animal manure. Carbon comes from woody matter and brown yard waste, like dead leaves or woodchips. Air comes from turning the pile, or incorporating sturdy carbon materials that help break things up. Water comes from rain or, you know, a hose. Keeping these elements in productive ratio to each other is, simply, so much easier when you can just look at the pile directly.Here are a few other things to look out for, and some suggestions about what you might do to correct them:Compost that smells like ammonia. This means you have too much nitrogen in your pile. Add more high carbon inputs, like dead leaves or wood chips.Compost that has formed big, damp clumps. Break it up! Add more nitrogen, to encourage decomposition, and make sure you’re turning the pile frequently.Compost that smells bad, like rotting garbage. Add more carbon, baby. Add wood chips, dead leaves, sawdust, newspaper, or even soil. Anything to help break up your food scraps.Compost that is very dry. Simply add water! If you live in a state with a lot of chlorine in your tap water, it can be helpful to let the water sit out for 24-36 hours, first, so that the chlorine evaporates. (Chlorine can have a suppressing effect on microbial communities, I hear.)As a rule, I’m skeptical of any compost solutions that are “pretty” or even remotely expensive. You can build your own bin for, at max, $10 worth of supplies from Home Depot. Cinder blocks, wood slabs, chicken wire, and old trash cans all make excellent compost containers. So does digging a hole. I often make this point to people who ask me about my compost: your greatest source of information about your pile is observation. I think you’ll be surprised at how joyful that becomes, and how good your finished compost is. Give it a try (and feel free to send me questions).  (CM)--WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Hybrid work and your DEI strategy. New research details what empowered employees love about hybrid work models and the risks to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) if managers get the evolving flexible workplace wrong.  A new article suggests three practices to prioritize to build a more inclusive culture.–-Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Marketos (CM) —Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).