writer, geographer, designer / sometimes G. Papamattheakis, Y. Efharis, or M. Aldo / georgepapam[at]icloud[dot]com / short vita 2024
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As the northern coastline passed before her windshield, she struggled to keep her eyes focused on the waterway. This trip took too long and the densely built up mountain hills in front of her blurred into a bunch of greyish patches on the landscape. It wasn’t anymore the whitewashed little cubes scattered on the endless blue, that the visuals of the climate campaigners had sort of promised. She clinched and focused back again. No, she thought, she had to complain about the workload; these past days were not the balanced vacations she was promised. Climate volunteerism is all nice and fulfilling, but she didn’t come all the way from northern Sweden just to move sand around. Sweating under the sun is different than lounging idle under it, like she used to do in her fat Greek holidays.
When she decided to offer her service a few years ago, it was perhaps her seventh time visiting Lefkada. By then, there were already more than forty beaches employing enhanced weathering as a negative emissions technology and at least two tourist operators specializing in attracting and hosting climate volunteers for the associated labor work, most of them in the East coast of the island. The carbon sequestration technique being used is a method of enhanced silicate weathering via the dissolution of a mineral called olivine. As it is now well studied, the chemical weathering of silicate minerals is a dissolution process that produces alkalinity and binds carbon dioxide as bicarbonate in aqueous form. Besides expanding the ocean’s capacity to store CO2, enhanced silicate weathering also has the potential to counteract ocean acidification, which is another significant threat to marine environments from the ongoing climate change. Studies and applications of enhanced weathering have mostly engaged with olivine, a greenish rock that both dissolves faster than other silicate minerals and can be found in relative abundance. In Greece, there are large olivine ores in the central-northern part of the country, which is where the olivine arriving in Lefkada is sourced from. According to the Hellenic Statistical authorities, the olivine nourishment of the beaches in East Lefkada necessitated approximately 2.5 x 106 cubic meters of olivine last year, but this amount is only expected to grow as more and more beach operators join the coalition. All this unnecessary information, which she somehow retained from the introductory sessions of the program, now circled in her mind as her boat smashed on the calm waves of the Ioanian sea.
The process mainly necessitates two types of human labor work, they had told them: transportation and cleaning/nourishment. Besides mining and grinding, which are taken up by the extracting industries themselves, the olivine silicates have to be transferred to Lefkada, deposited, and kept in optimum distribution in shallow coastal waters. On the one hand, somewhat between 35 and 40 trucks connect the beaches to the mines daily, in a schedule that necessitates more than 100 drivers at any moment. On the other hand, a fluctuating crowd of so-called “grainscatterers” facilitate the last-mile delivery of olivine and the distribution to the beaches, while others make sure that the material is well stretched in the appropriate shallow depths, shoveling and remixing where necessary. You don’t want to be a trucker! Can you imagine coming for holidays and ending up cruising the shitty highways of northern Greece? Gosh... No, she joined the grainscatterers. Most of them were volunteers visiting from the global North. They were all organized by a major eco-tourism operator that has acquired the rights by the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change to oversee operations. Crucial is also the presence of the East Lefkada Environmental Observatory (ELEO), that has set up an advisory body comprised mainly of chemical engineers and environmental scientists, and which collaborates with academic institutions across Europe, monitoring and optimizing the process. She couldn’t believe that on top of her volunteering duties, she also had to compile a report before she leaves for her boring job back in Sweden.
She hit the reverse and turned the steering wheel aggressively. She pressed the button for the trailer door and turned her head to look behind her back, towards the beach. The men standing at the shoreline were waiting and already shouting directions at her—like men do. She couldn’t bother. What did the groomers , these mere beach janitors know? She just made sure all the olivine grains are unloaded as quickly as possible. Her icy paloma awaited back at her hotel veranda.