Collide-a-scape

On Friday, when most environmentally-inclined people were despairing about the the torturous climate talks in South Africa (since ended, good roundup and assessment here), a short op-ed appeared in the NYT, arguing that despair over the fate of the planet was getting a bit stale. The three authors of the piece–a journalist and two scientists–don’t downplay the massive footprint of humanity, and the stress it has put on the planet’s ecology. That said, as the authors note,

humans have been changing ecosystems for millenniums. We have learned that ecosystems are not — and have never been — static entities. The notion of a virgin, pristine wilderness was understandable in the days of Captain Cook — but since the emergence of modern ecology and archaeology, it has been systematically dismantled by empirical evidence.

Yes, it’s time we made peace with this fact. That doesn’t mean throwing in the towel, the authors write:

We can accept the reality of humanity’s reshaping of the environment without giving up in despair. We can, and we should, consider actively moving species at risk of extinction from climate change. We can design ecosystems to maintain wildlife, filter water and sequester carbon. We can restore once magnificent ecosystems like Yellowstone and the Gulf of Mexico to new glories — but glories that still contain a heavy hand of man. We can fight sprawl and mindless development even as we cherish the exuberant nature that can increasingly be found in our own cities, from native gardens to green roofs. And we can do this even as we continue to fight for international agreements on limiting the greenhouses gases that are warming the planet.

The authors go on to suggest that it’s time for “a new, more positive and forward-looking environmentalism” to be built:

This is the Earth we have created, and we have a duty, as a species, to protect it and manage it with love and intelligence. It is not ruined. It is beautiful still, and can be even more beautiful, if we work together and care for it.

But can environmentalism rise to this challenge? Can it abandon doom and gloom over what’s done and move on to a new narrative for the new epoch?

Roger Cohn, the editor of Yale Environment 360, conducted an interesting interview with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a scholar who studies the intersection of ecology and religion. This is a perennial interest of mine, even though I’m a life-long atheist. Most people in the world (including many scientists) possess a religious faith or seek out some kind of spiritual connection that can’t be satisfied by science.

Make of that what you will, but it’s a reality that can’t be wished, argued, or scornfully waved away. So count me among those who believe that science and religion can coexist. There really is no choice, either; they have to. (Yes, that puts me at odds with folks like Jerry Coyne, and this is something I intend to explore further in the near future.) One reason I say this is that people come at environmental issues and concerns from different places. If your object is to expand the constituency for the environment, it makes no sense to alienate those with different worldviews who might share your end goal.

Which brings me back to the Yale interview with Tucker, who agrees

that scientific facts are critical and necessary, and policy papers and legislation are indispensable. But they may not be sufficient when it comes to dealing with an environmental crisis. That may require other disciplines and other ways of looking at the world, including religion.

Tucker is also one of the producers of a new film that showcases the splendor of the natural world as a means to connect with people on a different level. Here’s an excerpt of the Yale Q & A that speaks to why she took this approach:

Yale Environment 360: I was struck by the fact that your film, Journey of the Universe, ultimately is a celebration, unlike a lot of environmental-related literature and film that’s filled with a heavy dose of doom and gloom. This film is optimistic and even celebratory in many ways. Why did you choose that approach?

Mary Evelyn Tucker: We decided that so many people are aware of the huge and complex environmental problems we’re facing — ranging from climate change to toxicities to species extinction and so on — that people are so overwhelmed that they go into paralysis and despair. We didn’t want to take people there. We wanted to engage their sense of awe and wonder, because humans are moved fundamentally by either wonder or by disaster. We wanted to draw out the wonder.

So in this film, we put the consequences of humanity’s planetary presence — our burgeoning population, our overwhelming resource use, all the consequences of having exploded in one century from 2 billion people to 7 billion people — and we put that in the last 10 minutes of the film, where we do speak about humanity’s impact and our current environmental crisis. We felt it was more effective there, because first you need to get a sense of the unfolding of a universe that is 14 billion years old, the evolution of our planet, and life emerging out of this tremendous journey. We wanted to give a sense of how late we humans arrived, and yet, how in a relatively short period of time, our impact has been enormous.

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Now what would interest me is if 1) this approach can work better that the usual eco-apocalypse fare, and 2) it can appeal to a broad religious demographic.

We have an annual event in the U.S. that I think is kind of hokey but also well-meaning.

After reading this dispatch from the recent Ecological Society of America conference, I thought maybe the idea could be broadened a bit, into something that allowed a local pastor to tag along with an ecologist or climate scientist for a day.

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote:

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Since the late 1800s, the notion of wilderness as nature incarnate has been an animating force in American culture. A host of seminal, hugely influential environmental writers and activists, from John Muir and Aldo Leopold to David Brower and Edward Abbey, have idealized and championed wilderness.

In the 20th century, the wilderness ethos gave rise to the Sierra Club and the first wave of nature-centric environmentalism, energized the nascent conservation movement and influenced the emergent science of ecology.

The ideal of nature as undisturbed by humans and civilization was codified in the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined the characteristics of wilderness as

an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain; an area of underdeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation and which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions.

Before going any further, let me just say that I’m as big a fan of wilderness protection as anyone. So is environmental historian William Cronon, who sits on The Wilderness Society’s Governing Council, but who also published this provocative 1995 essay. Here’s his thunderclap of an opener:

The time has come to rethink wilderness.

This will seem a heretical claim to many environmentalists, since the idea of wilderness has for decades been a fundamental tenet—indeed, a passion—of the environmental movement, especially in the United States.

And indeed, such a claim was treated as heresy of the highest order. Cronon argued that wilderness, while intrinsically valuable, was nonetheless a cultural construction that encouraged a romanticized view of nature.

The blowback at the time was fierce (which Cronon responded to here), foreshadowing a similar outcry that followed ten years later, after this larger critique of environmentalism appeared. To me, the respective environmentalist tantrums of 1995 and 2005 exhibited a green movement stuck in a state of arrested development. (For more on why this is still the case, look for a follow-up post later today that will serve as a bookend to this one.) Alas, in the uproar over Cronon’s demythologizing of wilderness, this other important point he made in his essay got lost:

…the convergence of wilderness values with concerns about biological diversity and endangered species has helped produce a deep fascination for remote ecosystems, where it is easier to imagine that nature might somehow be “left alone” to flourish by its own pristine devices.

What’s the problem with this, you ask? Later on in his piece, Cronon writes:

Without our quite realizing it, wilderness tends to privilege some parts of nature at the expense of others.

Fortunately ecologists have matured, as I noted last year in a discussion of this article on urban ecology. More evidence of an important paradigm shift underway comes in this NYT piece on Emma Marris and her newly published book: The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World.

In the NYT interview, Marris says:

We’re at a moment in ecological and conservation thinking where this notion of the “wild pristine” gets pulled apart, and we see that wild and pristine are almost opposite. You can never have 100 percent pristine, you can only approach the pristine. It’s a little bit of any empty concept in some ways because it presupposes that there was some sort of magical moment when everything was right.

And because everything has been a moving target forever, there was no real magical moment. So “pristine” is a word that we use when we mean things looking like they did at the beginning of our cultural memory, which tends to be very short.

I’m thrilled that we’ve finally arrived at this moment in time, where our ideas of nature and ecological restoration have become more sophisticated. I just wish there was more public discussion accompanying this shift in cultural and ecological consciousness.

Because as ecologist Daniel Botkin writes in the postscript to his pioneering book, Discordant Harmonies:

Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable.

Andy Revkin wrestles with Tim Flannery’s new book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, in a NYT book review:

An overwhelming majority of scientists agree that humans have upended hosts of ecosystems and are exerting a growing and potentially calamitous influence on the climate. Some, perhaps in response to public indifference, have a tendency to push beyond the data in arguing for action. “Here on Earth” places Flannery in this group. I had a moment, about halfway in, when I was ready to give up in the face of overheated descriptions of environmental problems. But I stuck it out and was heartened to see Flannery abandon the rhetoric of shame and woe and turn to a more reasoned assessment of a young, intelligent species that finds itself in quite a predicament. After all, it’s not easy being the first life-form to become both a planet-scale force and — ever so slowly and uncomfortably — aware of that fact.

Despite Here on Earth’s evident imperfections, I plan to read it. Flannery, who is Australia’s E.O. Wilson, is similarly a gifted and brainy popularizer of science.

In his new book (according to reviews), Flannery seems to make a case for the “rewilding” concept (just for Australia?) that has recently come into vogue. This strikes me as an ecological fantasy. I reviewed the North American version of this idea a few years ago.

What interests me more are two biological worldviews Flannery puts in opposition, which Revkin describes nicely:

“Here on Earth” begins with the deepest biological context, as Flannery pits what he sees as the mechanistic, soulless conceptions of Charles Darwin against the more holistic, even hopeful, vision of Alfred Russel Wallace, the English naturalist who discovered evolution independently. Whereas Darwin “sought enlightenment by studying smaller and smaller pieces of life’s puzzle,” Flannery writes, Wallace “took on the whole,” envisioning a transcendent human future in which evolutionary fitness is determined by more than simply the ability to out-reproduce — or, according to the Social Darwinists, out-earn — one’s competitors. Flannery cites, too, Wallace’s denunciation of the “criminal apathy” behind the choking urban pollution of the late 19th century, which stunted and killed the poor in particular.

Tracking the rise and spread of the human species, Flannery contrasts two more contemporary visions of the processes in play. The “Medea hypothesis,” developed by the paleontologist Peter Ward, holds that natural selection drives species to exploit resources to the point of ecosystem collapse, and thus ultimately to destroy themselves. While Flannery agrees that this theory describes some extinctions of species and civilizations, he instead embraces the “Gaia hypothesis,” developed by the ecologist James Lovelock, which sees evolution as “a series of win-win outcomes that has created a productive, stable and cooperative Earth” — at least until human selfishness got in the way.

Here’s a good primer  on the Medea Hypothesis, if you need to get up to speed on it. I’ll have to read Flannery’s book, of course, but I’m not exactly enthralled with the two choices–the Medea or Gaia hypothesis–that he’s using to make his argument.

If you thought assigning attribution of individual weather disasters to global climate change was tricky business, imagine trying to establish a causal link between specific ecological problems and global warming.

In this commentary in Nature Climate Change, ecologist Camille Parmesan and her co-authors suggest not going there. It’s not that they think global warming doesn’t adversely affect the biological world; it’s just that it’s too difficult to quantify the measurable impact at an individual species level. The authors assert that there is

a complex interplay among habitat destruction, land-use change, exploitation and pollution, in addition to climate change. The emerging view is that interactions among drivers of change are the norm. For example, after a warming event, corals in overfished areas recovered more poorly from bleaching than those with intact food webs. Effects of habitat fragmentation also interact with those of climate change. Northwards expansion of the speckled wood butterfly (Pararge aegeria) in Great Britain progressed rapidly where barriers were minimal, but was hampered in regions where agriculture had rendered woodland habitat patches too scattered for individuals to find.

At a time when ecological problems are increasingly framed and discussed in the context of climate change, Parmesan and her coauthors are going against the grain with this rebuke (my emphasis):

By over-emphasizing the need for rigorous assessment of the specific role of greenhouse-gas forcing in driving observed biological changes, the IPCC effectively yields to the contrarians’ inexhaustible demands for more ‘proof’, rather than advancing the most pressing and practical scientific questions. This focus diverts energies and research funds away from developing crucial adaptation and conservation measures. To improve estimates of future biological impacts we need research focused on how other human stressors exacerbate impacts of climate change. Most importantly from a conservation standpoint, these other stressors are more easily managed on local scales than climate itself, and thus, paradoxically, are crucial to constructing adaptation programmes to cope with anthropogenic climate change.

The argument underlying this commentary was similar to one made two years ago in Slate by Brendan Borrell:

Climate change has the potential to displace the most impoverished human populations and bring about food shortages, flooding, and drought. But from the perspective of saving species, it’s a MacGuffin: a plot device that may impel the tired conservation narrative forward but is hardly a pragmatic strategy for preserving biodiversity.

Not to mix apples and oranges, but there is an interesting parallel with the recent injection of climate change into national security debates. Geoff Dabelko, noting the embrace of “climate security” as a new rhetorical term, in which socio/environmental and energy concerns have been packaged into a climate change box, has offered his own cautionary advice.

Don’t forget ongoing natural resource and conflict problems. The research and policy docket already is crowded with serious conflicts (as well as opportunities for cooperation) over resources, whether they are minerals, water, timber, fish, or land. While climate change certainly poses a large–and potentially catastrophic–threat in many settings, we must not overlook the ongoing problems of rapid population growth, persistent poverty, lack of clean water and sanitation, and infectious diseases that already threaten lives daily. Climate change will likely multiply these threats, but they will continue to exact a high toll even if the climate stabilizes. Presenting climate change as the number one concern and demoting other deadly threats is insensitive to the pressing problems faced by many people in poor and developing countries.

Similar pushback against the “collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems” was expressed two years ago by Jonathan Foley:

In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies?

Anyone seeing a common thread in all these cases?

Via Andy Revkin at Dot Earth, I see that Peter Gleick, living in an imaginary world where tradeoffs never occur, is outraged that some people in California are daring to consider that not all endangered species, because of their dire status, can be saved: 

In a desperate attempt to make it easier to solve California’s complex and contentious water problems, a dangerous new idea has recently been floated — intentionally letting some species go extinct rather than take the difficult steps needed to save them and their ecosystems. This idea should be quashed, smothered, strangled, and quickly tossed in the dumpster of failed ideas.

The first hint of this appeared earlier in February in the 52-page study released by the Delta Stewardship Council. That report argued that it was possible that some species of fish might be so devastated already and their ecosystems so ruined that they were unlikely to survive even with significant efforts to save them.

Unfortunately, in the real world, government biologists and land and water managers have to grapple with the competing needs of society and species. It’s a complex jigsaw that isn’t pretty or fair, as anyone familiar with the ongoing (and flawed) efforts to restore the Florida Everglades is aware.

This doesn’t mean I’m against herculean, against-all-odds initiatives to save individual species. Out West, one such noble effort has been underway for decades, terrifically chronicled by Hillary Rosner in her recent award-winning story.

Still, let’s not kid ourselves. There are winnners and losers in our constructed landscapes.  As I discussed here in 2009,  the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has (unofficially) acknowledged, in an internal, draft-stage planning document (my emphasis):

that some populations and species will be lost, and some will only survive in the wild through our direct and continuous intervention.  We will be especially challenged to conserve species and habitats that are particularly vulnerable to climate-driven changes, but we will dedicate our best efforts and expertise to the task, recognizing that we cannot save everything. We will need to make choices, and we will need to apply ourselves where we can make the greatest difference.

Is there a better way forward than than this cold-eyed, calculating approach? Probably not, at least with respect to determinations of single species made in a real-world framework of limited resources. But as Revkin notes in another post, we’re increasingly faced with individual extinctions because

we have an Endangered Species Act intended to save species on the brink, but not a Thriving Ecosystems Act that tries to monitor and sustain diverse communities of species before bad things happen.

It’s a good day when forest ecology and the prevalence of movie sex scenes can be discussed in the same breath.

The issue of human-manufactured biodiversity is controversial. After all, if humans are overrunning nature and degrading the vital ecosystem services that we depend on, isn’t it rather beside the point if we also inadvertently boost biodiversity on some landscapes?

I don’t think so. More environmentalists need to realize that the boundaries between pristine nature and civilization grow fuzzier by the day. The latest example is a new, intriguing study on pre-Columbian agriculture in the Amazon, published last week in PNAS.

This is the kind of stuff that makes my geeky heart flutter: interdisciplinary research on how ancient farmers engineered their environment in a part of the world that most people today consider primordial nature. Additionally, these findings hold important contemporary ecological lessons, as the study’s abstract explains:

The profound alteration of ecosystem functioning in these landscapes coconstructed by humans and nature has important implications for understanding Amazonian history and biodiversity. Furthermore, these landscapes show how sustainability of food-production systems can be enhanced by engineering into them fallows that maintain ecosystem services and biodiversity. Like anthropogenic dark earths in forested Amazonia, these self-organizing ecosystems illustrate the ecological complexity of the legacy of pre-Columbian land use.

In a nice write-up of the study, New Scientist interviews Doyle McKey, the lead researcher, who says:

Human actions cannot always be characterised as bad for biodiversity. Some might be good.

That’s one of those inconvenient truths that purists who subscribe to the human/nature dualism don’t like to hear. But science has come a long way since the publication of George Perkin Marsh’s seminal text.  The increasing collaboration between archaeologists and ecologists is revealing an ancient world that discomfits doctrinaire environmentalists. (In the American Southwest, I’ve written about one such collaboration here.)

Moreover, as the New Scientist article puts it:

The new study is bound to further fuel the debate over whether most of the Amazon rainforest and the associated savannahs are pristine ecosystem.   “To my mind, the debate has been too black-and-white,” says McKey. “Nature and culture are interacting to produce interesting things, and maybe that is the way this debate should go.”

Seems like good advice to me.

**UPDATE: Stuart Pimm, the highly respected conservation biologist at Duke University, emailed me his thoughts on the climate change/global land use dichotomy that is implied by my post. It’s an important perspective. Stuart has given me permission to publish his email in its entirety. You can find it below at this comment.**

Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the debate over climate change science, politics, and policy is that it’s elbowed all other environmental issues off the public stage. This has to drive ecologists crazy. But it seems they’re all laying low in the (invasive) weeds. I don’t see any of them challenging the dominant belief that global warming is the single biggest environmental threat of the day.

Note that I said, of the day. Because I agree with the notion that climate change could well wreak havoc on society and life-supporting ecosystems later in this century. However, we got another tiny little problem on our hands that may do us in long before we overdose on carbon emissions. It’s known within the ecological community as global land use, an innocuous-sounding term even more confusing and vague than global warming. Who knows, maybe that’s one reason why so few are paying attention to it.

Fortunately, some scientists have tried to raise the worrisome profile of global land use. Last October, at Yale Environment Environment 360, Jonathan Foley wrote that there was “an unintended downside” to the sudden emergence of global warming as the most popular environmental concern:

In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies?

Although I’m a climate scientist by training, I worry about this collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems. Learning from the research my colleagues and I have done over the past decade, I fear we are neglecting another, equally inconvenient truth: that we now face a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization.

Just so we’re clear: Foley is not pulling this out of the clouds. As he mentions, there’s a solid body of work on global land use that’s been accumulating over the last decade. The trends are very, very worrisome. Chew on this and this just for starters, if you need to get up to speed. Last spring, when I was a Fellow at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism, I took a course in global land use that blew my mind. Midway through, I was convinced that it easily rivals climate change as a meta environmental issue of urgent concern.

Since then, I’ve also become convinced that the Resilience Alliance represents one of the best conceptual paradigms to address the complex human/ecological relationship.  I wish their blog played a meaningful role in the public debate, but they don’t seem to have the appetite for engaging in the messy and cacophonous daily conversation.

Anyway, all this brings me to a news release from earlier this week that Tom Yulsman made me aware of. It’s a commentary on the ecological factors that have led scientists to informally define the current age we live in as the “Anthropocene.” As the authors of the essay note, the term was coined a decade ago,

at a time of dawning realization that human activity was indeed changing the Earth on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.

The authors carefully argue that the immensity of human-induced change on the earth warrants serious consideration of the “Anthropocene” term being adopted as a new, formal geological designation. But in my reading, they use the build-up of greenhouse gases to make their case. The equally large impacts from agiculture and urbanization seem to be downplayed.

To me, this represents a missed opportunity to put global land use on an equal par with climate change. But it does perhaps reflect the zietgeist that Foley was lamenting in his Yale 360 piece. It also makes me think that a reframing of the climate change debate–centered on “jumpstarting a clean energy revolution,” rather than combating future environmental harms–is the way to go. It not only would chart a less contentious path to a carbon-free energy policy, but it would free up the necessary political and media space for present-day environmental concerns, such as those already in evidence from global land use.

UPDATE: In a perceptive comment below, Geoff Dabelko, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, explains why it’s necessary to find ways to bridge the land use vs climate change dichotomy. He also cautions:

It cannot be a zero sum game in examining one versus another in part because the interconnections make it impossible and counterproductive but also because action will ultimately be limited on key fronts.