Collide-a-scape

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.

The social/ecological relationship is one that fascinates me. It seems to have been the theme of this year’s annual Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) symposium, which Piper Corp reports on at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) blog. For those unfamiliar with LTER’s, this gem of a program is in its third decade and is overseen by the National Science Foundation. In 1999, I wrote in Science magazine about some surprising findings from the Phoenix LTER–one of two urban study sites.

The ESA post interested me because of a thorny dilemma highlighted by new research from the Phoenix LTER, which Corp lays out here:

Ecologists frequently consider how to preserve the resilience of ecosystems—how to make sure that they will continue to produce important services as they face stresses like climate change and water shortages. But we can’t have it all. At some point, said Kelli Larson (Central Arizona– Phoenix LTER), we’ll have to make some tough tradeoffs, depending on which services we value the most. Larson’s work looks at residential landscaping in the Southwest, where traditional lawns use more water but homes with pebble-covered yards use more energy to keep cool and more chemicals to control pests artificially. Sustainable living, it seems, begins not with a to-do list but rather with a question: what do we most want to sustain? (And, importantly, what do we need to sustain?)

As recent controversial developments involving renewable energy suggest, the path to sustainability will require us to make all kinds of uncomfortable tradeoffs. Inevitably, those last two questions–what do we most want to sustain and what do we need to sustain will be decided by human values.

Goes to this sci-fi sounding post. You just gotta read about how the baby cane toads are no match for the meat ants.

That’s the title of a fantastic piece by Chris Turner in the October issue of The Walrus, a Canadian magazine. He turns the typical environmental tale of crisis on its head, suggesting that,

We need a new kind of story, a new template for our ecological philosophy — one that acknowledges what we have lost and the emerging limits of what can be saved, but does not lament. To borrow the terminology of the linguist George Lakoff, we must first change the frame.

To do that, the author argues, we have to acknowledge that we are living in the Anthropocene epoch.

Turner’s story is one of the best examples of long-form environmental journalism that I’ve seen in years. An array of topics are crosscut: discussions of climate change, ocean acidification, the imminent death of the Great Barrier Reef, geo-engineering, sustainable communities, the history of scuba-diving, and a compelling, new ecological concept called resilience science.

That new branch of ecological science seeks to bridge both nature’s and society’s needs. It recognizes that complexity is inherent and change a constant. As Turner describes it,

Resilience embraces change as the natural state of being on earth. It values adaptation over stasis, diffuse systems over centralized ones, loosely interconnected webs over strict hierarchies. If the Anthropocene is the ecological base condition of twenty-first-century life and sustainability is the goal, or bottom line, of a human society within that chaotic ecology, then resilience might be best understood as the operating system..that encourages sustainability in this rapidly changing epoch.

Until last year, I was an editor for nearly a decade at Audubon magazine, America’s premier environmental magazine.  During that time, a common theme–almost a guiding philosophy–was to produce stories that at least gave people hope for a better future, instead of hammering a relentless narrative of degradation and destruction. I credit David Seideman, the editor-in-chief, for that piece of editorial guidance. He grew up with Audubon Magazine as a child, is an unabashed environmentalist but also a history buff. And he knew enough about that depressing environmental narrative (which had its place in the 1960s and 1970s) to realize that Audubon readers had grown weary of it by the 2000s.

True, plenty of stories in environmental magazines, including Audubon, still celebrate the innate wonders and beauty of nature. But the dark flipside always seems to be imminent or irreparable loss, usually because of some human action.  What Seideman did–and is still doing with a great team at Audubon–is is to focus the magazine more on how to fix longstanding environmental problems. (Trust me, this was no easy feat during George W. Bush’s two terms.) A shining example of this is the latest issue, which includes a special feature on green design.

But if I were creating an environmental magazine from scratch today, I would cede the “lament” and “inspirational” narratives to my colleagues and use the twin concepts of resilience and the Anthropocene as my foundation. Combined, these two concepts offer more than a rhetorical frame–they suggest the makings of a new paradigm, one that provides the “operating system” to grapple with the world’s increasing complexity and fragility.

If the science of resilience has arrived to guide us, then the stories showing us how should follow.

H/T: Resilience Science

That’s the title of today’s column by John Fleck over at the Albuquerque Journal. What I really like about this piece is that the focus is on ecosystem services, which to me, seems firmer ground to build this concept on, rather than the climate security link.

Via Fleck, we learn that a federal laboratory is actively working on the interplay between ecological and national security issues, so there’s something happening beyond the think tanks and U.N conferences otherwise engaged with the environmental security issue. Here’s the money quote from Fleck’s column:

Failing ecosystems and the decline of ecosystem services at regional and global scales pose a long-term threat to U.S. national security as great as the more conventional threats of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and war.

Ecology was once considered the “subversive science.” To a large degree, environmentalism’s legitimacy derives from its long-time alliance with ecology. If environmentalists were going to a big dance, they always chose ecology as their hot date.

That was before climate change became the new girl on the block. Before climate change won an Oscar, became the subject of interminably long magazine profiles, the topic of endless blog chatter, the downfall of civilization.

Ecologists have been sulking about this for the last few years. Mostly in silence. No more. In this essay published today at Yale 360, one ecologist argues that all the attention given to global warming

has had an unintended downside. 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?

Them’s fighin’ words.

On a separate but related note, regarding the essay’s headline, to all my editor colleagues: can we declare a moratorium on the phrase “inconvenient truth”?

While mulling the 6-year disappearance of the possibly extinct Chinese paddlefish, Andy Revkin reminds us of the enduring problem with our own approach to species protection:

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.

This is of course true, but it’s worth noting that we also have a very flawed and controversial Endangered Species Act (ESA), which, for political reasons, will remain flawed and controversial for the foreseeable future. That’s because of this dynamic: every so often (usually when they’re the top dogs in D.C.) conservative Republicans have tried and failed to weaken the act; fearing this, enviros and Dems have chosen not to revisit the ESA–even to improve and strengthen it. Better to have an imperfect ESA goes that rationale, than to risk exposing it to Republican machinations.

So when I examined this stalemate exactly ten years ago for The Sciences (sadly, now defunct), in a piece entitled “Vanishing Act,” I wrote this:

Hailed at its birth a quarter century ago as the strongest and most visionary law of its kind, today the ESA is besieged  from all sides. Developers and local landowners contend that the law is far too sweeping, that it violates their rights and stifles economic growth; environmental advocates complain that the act is poorly enforced, and that it is undermined by insufficient funding and bureaucratic delay. Meanwhile, scientists bemoan the ESA’s “emergency room” approach, which calls for species to be resuscitated only when they are at death’s door.

Legally and politically, nothing has changed since then. However, the point of that ten-year old story was to contrast the traditional single species rescue paradigm with a more holistic one then being implemented in South Florida by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS).  Called the Multi-Species Recovery Plan, its purpose, as I wrote at the time, was to

protect more than 600 imperiled species in an area that includes twenty-three distinct ecological communities, from hardwood hammock forests to saw-grass marshes and coral reefs.

As former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said when the multi-species plan was being unveiled:

We’ve learned that you can’t do these things one species at a time. We have to come to grips with the entire landscape.

In 2005, when I was a senior editor at Audubon Magazine, I wrote another story about how this ecosystem approach was being implemented on an even more comprehensive scale in Tuscon, Arizona. And this effort came after years of meetings and coalition building that involved local politicians, university ecologists, town planners, activists, and the business sector. Called the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, its aim is to rescue 54 plant and animal species.  But as I wrote in my story,

that’s only one cornerstone of something much grander in design. The plan also recognizes that ecosystem repair, via the creation of linked biological corridors, is essential to the recovery of those 54 species, and that creating those corridors, in turn, requires measures to manage Tucson’s sprawling growth. To this end the plan steers future development away from ecologically important areas—perennial streams, for instance, and groves of paloverde, saguaro, and ironwood—and toward existing urban cores. The species targeted for protection were expressly chosen to represent the Sonoran Desert’s diverse web of life.

So while the landmark but badly aging Endangered Species Act remains in place, ecologists have found a way to bypass its limitations. Whether the novel Florida and Arizona efforts are working as intended is another question, one that I should probably try to convince an editor to take a fresh look at.

If you read this article by Carl Zimmer in Yale 360, you might notice that there’s a few looming battles over ecological thresholds.

Climate scientists and climate advocates will be wrangling over acceptable planetary carbon dioxide limits, and conservation biologists and ecosystem ecologists will be arguing over acceptable species extinction levels.

That’s the problem when you try to pin those down elusive tipping points. People don’t even agree on what the tipping point is.