The cosmopolitan ecologist

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I’m on a plane from National Airport to Chattanooga, along with probably half the ecologists of the District of Columbia. We’re on our way to the Society for Conservation Biology meeting, where scientists who study the natural world get together to share our results. There is a cruel irony that we’re flying to a meeting about saving what’s left of wild nature, given that the plane is now spewing out loads of carbon dioxide and worsening global warming. Still, these meetings are enormously important for the exchange of ideas that flows more freely during a face-to-face interaction. Perhaps more important, these meetings give us hope.

William Faulker once famously said, at the height of the cold war, “I decline to accept the end of man.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote, and perhaps Faulkner’s whole speech captures some of the hope that drives conservation biologists to keep working. “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” This sentence describes a fear that all conservationists have, that something worthwhile in the world is being lost as we develop. A (perhaps naïve) hope permeates these meetings that something can be done. While many conservation battles are lost, every year we win a few. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” In a conference that is occasionally pessimistic, I always try to keep Faulkner’s hope alive.

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It has been an odd week in climate change and presidential politics. John Edwards made an excellent speech where he referred to climate change as “the great moral test of our generation.” And so it is, for what humanity does in the next couple decades will determine the climate our grandchildren inherit. In the same week Edwards gave this powerful address, Hillary Clinton got caught staging a question about climate change at a campaign event in Iowa. What’s worse, her answer to the canned question wasn’t even that inspired or well written!

See the rest here

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    Sometime this year, humanity will become an urban species: for the first time ever, the majority of people will live in cities. By 2030, 1.7 billion new people will move into cities, and new urban neighborhoods will cover an area the size of California. Most of these settlements will be in the developing world, where new-found urban lifestyles and increased affluence could lead to dramatically increased energy use. This energy use, especially of oil and other fossil fuels, will have implications for the security of nations. Humanity is essentially buildings a city the size of Vancouver twice every week: how does the form of these new cities affect citizens all over the world?

    One specter of the future can be seen in Bangalore, or to be more precise its busy Hosur Road. Cars ease into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the street, which connects the town to its high-tech research park, Electronic City. The economic boom in Bangalore, combined with a desire to ape the dispersed landscape of Silicon Valley, has led to a dramatic increase in the kilometers each person drives a day. It’s a quite predictable response; traffic engineers can estimate the vehicle kilometers traveled if they know the average density of the city and the proportion of people who can afford to buy a car.

    Multiply such changes by the thousands of cities in the developing world, and you have the potential for millions of new cars a year. China alone may have 37 million additional automobiles on the road by 2020. This promises to put a strain on already tight global oil markets. Even under the somewhat optimistic scenarios of the International Energy Agency, over the long-term potential oil demand is likely to rise faster than oil supply, raising oil prices and increasing price volatility. The price consumers pay at the pump in, say, Los Angeles, will be affected by how cities like Bangalore grow. For those interested in studying oil security, oil demand will become as central as oil supply, placing urbanization on the top of their research agenda.

    Another specter of the future is found in the piazzas of Venice, which are flooding with greater and greater frequency. Each decade global sea level rises by about 2 centimeters, and this small increase, combined with geological subsidence, is slowly dooming the ancient squares. Under worse case scenarios, with the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, sea levels could ultimately rise by up to 6 meters. The cause of this sea level rise is global warming, the rise in average temperature caused by an increase in greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which trap outgoing heat from the Earth. A warmer climate will melt glaciers on land and expand the waters of the oceans, and will pose other serious problems for agriculture and human welfare.

    How bad global warming will be depends fundamentally on how much more greenhouse gases are emitted, and that depends in no small part on the form new cities take. Cities with adequate planning of public transit will use cars less, and have fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Modern insulation and building design can reduce heating and cooling costs substantially, ultimately reducing emissions from power plants. Most importantly, building more efficient neighborhoods in the developing world locks them in to a level of per-capita energy use that will persist for decades to come.

    A more rosy vision of the future can be seen in Curitiba, the capital of the Brazilian state of Paraná. Here a large network of cheap, efficient bus rapid transit shuttles workers from their homes, strategically located along the bus lines, to the downtown business district. The public transit system is used by 85% of residents, and the average personal automobile is driven 30% less than elsewhere in Brazil. The town is a testament to the fact that modest urban planning can achieve significant energy savings, even in a developing country context where public funds are often limited. Unfortunately, Curitiba is one of the few exceptions to the general rule that most new neighborhoods in the Global South are essentially unplanned. There are more than 1 billion people who live in slums, unregulated settlements whose residents often lack clean drinking water or toilets, and are too poor to consume much energy per-capita. As many developing countries experience some much needed economic growth, middle- and upper- class residents are often retreating to Western-style suburbs, which are low-density and car-dependent.

    How the thousands of cities in developing nations grow thus will affect everyone on Earth, for better or worse. Many of the steps toward more sustainable urban development will necessarily be taken by municipal and state governments. Foremost among these steps is the reform of urban governance, bringing development for the poor within the law’s oversight, for it is simply untenable to plan for sustainability when most neighborhoods are unplanned. Paradoxically, this may involve easing restrictions on urban land conversion in some cities, acknowledging that substantial growth will occur, but making sure it meets minimal health and environmental standards.

    There is also a small but crucial role the developed world can play in this search for urban sustainability. Technology and knowledge transfer is obviously a part of this role, as already codified in international policy instruments like the Kyoto Protocol and the Commission on Sustainable Development. However, what is needed is not necessarily the invention of new technologies– enough is already known to perhaps double the energy efficiency of neighborhoods in the developing world– nor some small programs to facilitate “transfer”. The main obstacle to the implementation of proven technologies is the chronic fiscal shortfall of cities in the Global South, who are never able to afford to make infrastructure investments they know they should make. The developed nations can help fill some of this gap between actual and needed funding, through programs structured like the Clean Development Mechanism. Properly conceived, this is not charity by the developed world, but a prudent investment in their own security.

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I returned from visiting my wife at Stanford, and as I stepped off the plane it was raining in East Boston. This made me indescribably happy. After several weeks in the unchanging, beautiful Palo Alto summer- always sunny and 80F- I was frankly bored. Granted, seeing the oleander in bloom, smelling the hibiscus (my only memory from my natal state, Hawaii), hearing the hummingbirds buzzing around my head, I was happy. And I got a lot of thinking done, as I walked down long streets designed for cars. But perhaps because I didn’t have any job to stress me out, the days slipped by one by one, pleasantly. Even the fruit in the farmer’s market was ridiculously ripe, bursting with flavor. It was paradise. It was monotonous. In a way, isn’t this the dream of suburbia, a life smooth and cool?

I found myself missing weather. On our weekend trips up to San Francisco, I loved the cold fog rolling into Sunset, positively sublime, if I can use that discredited word from the 19th century Romantics. I even loved the crazy bums in the streets, the craziest in the United States. At least their were little moments, like when a homeless man came in this restaurant and screamed for no reason, that no one controlled or could have predicted.

This line of thinking is, course, clearly bobo (bohemian bourgeois), for I’ve never lived in a truly bad neighborhood. Maybe one can only fear the suburb when one can afford to live there, and indeed know all the responsibilities of raising a family might push you that way. People want predictability, until they get it.

I chatted with a friend of a friend while sitting in a fantastic coffeeshop, Ritual. She makes her living designing spaces in Second Life. I always wonder whether these online virtual spaces will be more like Palo Alto- predictable and pleasant- or full of the electronic equivalent of the homeless man screaming. Online, people can choose between designing a paradise, or something just a bit more quirky and gritty and unstable. Who knows which will in the end predominate?

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I was a teenage indie rock fan. I grew up in Chapel Hill, back when it was the next big thing, sneaking into clubs and hearing some amazingly good, and some amazingly atrocious, music. I make this admission confessionally, for I’m now to all extent and purpose a young urban professional, a yuppie. Somehow I went from an indie rock kind to a professional ecologist, and I’ve been searching recently for what exactly the connection between the two is.

There was a surprising intensity to life in Chapel Hill, a self-conscious intensity, an idea that a good show and good friends could “crucify the insincere tonight.” My group of friends was rather kindly called by an outside the Philosophy Boys, although while we read that stuff we didn’t know shit about what it meant. We loved Hal Hartley films and their brutal honesty, and Kundera’s novels for their scatological cynicism. There was a pervasive do-it-yourself aesthetic, albeit with a limited scope. It was a radical idea pre-WWW that great music could be made apart from the mainstream world, in this little cultural bubble. We had a studied disdain for appearances, and nominally believed that the clothing meant nothing, the looks meant nothing, the music everything. Anti-consumerism was dominant, and anything popular and mainstream was immediately suspect. However, there was also frankly a lot of nihilism, a sense that most of the adult world was corrupt. I suppose all teenagers feel that, but we took it ideologically a bit farther. One of our favorite songs sang “We are the rats in the garbage of the Western World, so let’s dance.”

I realize now, looking back on my life, that ecology has a lot in common with the indie rock world. We often talk earnestly, if perhaps sometime naively, about a small group of people changing the world. The scientific endeavor is in many ways also do-it-yourself, staffed by people who are by necessity self-driven; as we say in the field, publish or perish. We believe that everyone can add a brick to the great edifice of science, and we all individually hope to do something more, to write something truly great. We too disdain appearances, trusting a man with muddy boots more than a man in a nice suit. I was recently teased by a group of ecologists for looking too dressed up for tucking in my shirt. If anything, ecologists are more anti-consumerist than indie rockers, for consumption is often seen at the root of many ecological problems.

However, there’s something much slower about the scientific mindset. Graduate school, and writing for peer-reviewed publication, is like boot camp for the mind, training it. “Life’s not a horserace, it’s a marathon.” Rather than searching for pinpricks of intensity, we look forward to a lifetime of work. This has made me seem, I fear, rather boring to the outside world, when intellectual and spiritually I am more alive than I have ever been.

Ecologists, at least some of us, have a certain quiet optimism. As a political struggle, we have several, notably for clean water and air. Others we have of course lost. But there is an optimism that with work moderate progress is possible. There’s nothing radical or sexy about us as ecological engineers. I still think of another song though: “We could be heroes, just for one day…”

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I have often defended in this blog zoning and land-use regulations. They have brought many benefits to American cities, and so I felt the need to fight against the growing neo-conservative attempt to define any regulation as a taking. I believe the right to use one’s property is constrained by traditional common law, limited to what does not harm others and contributes to the common good, as defined by the people’s elected representatives.

Despite that general philosophic position, I have come to realize that in many ways zoning policy in United States cities has ominous implications for the environment. For example, I’ve been to dozens of cities that have made substantial investments in mass transit. Yet around the transit stations are hundreds of single-family detached houses, which persist because the municipality does not want to loosen or remove the restriction on density. Despite all the good done by Euclidean zoning system back in the industrial period, it has become today one of the biggest causes of sprawl. Ecologists need to argue that most density restrictions should be eased, and that society should let the free market build more densely in already developed parcels if there’s a market for it.

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Environmentalists spend a lot of time thinking about the future, and pondering what will happen if current patterns of resource utilization are continued (or expanded) in the future. The results of such analyses often look pretty dire, for humanity seems to be significantly degrading the ecosystem services on which it depends. However, we temper our stated predictions for two reasons. First, we know that historically ecologists have gotten many predictions wrong, by underestimating the ability of technological progress to bail humanity out of resource shortages. Second, we frankly are afraid of sounding like Cassandra, constantly saying the world is about to end.

It struck me recently though about how us modern Cassandras have a radically different view of fate than the classical Cassandra. To the Greeks, fate was fate, something that couldn’t be avoided no matter how much one tried. Oedipus was destined to kill his father and marry his mother, and no amount of human action could change that fate. In contrast, we modern Cassandras believe that the future will be whatever humanity makes of it. We would like nothing better than if our warnings about the consequences of the continuation of the status quo cause humanity to change the status quo, thus vitiating our predictions. Our forecasts describe only one of many possible worlds, albeit perhaps a world humanity would do best to avoid.

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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about different ways that the United States might reduce our dependence on oil. One significant component of our oil usage (although by no means the biggest) is passenger airplane transport, primarily between big cities. This is an issue worldwide, but is particularly acute in the US, where there is so little public transit available to move around the country. In part, this is because it’s such a big country. However, we also haven’t invested in other technologies like high-speed rail that can be effective over shorter distances. If we assume a speed of 125 miles per hour for high-speed rail (typical of first generation TGV, off-the-shelf type of technology), with 20 minutes to load and 20 minutes to unload the train, and we compare that to a typical plane (around 600 miles per hour, plus 1 hour to load and 1 hour to unload the plane), we can see that high-speed train is quicker than planes for distances of less than 210 miles. This differential goes up even further if one considers that most airports in the US are around an hour drive from the city center. Thus, if one was considering city-center to city-center travel, high-speed trains are faster for distances of less than 520 miles.

Setting a limit on high-speed train connections at around 300 miles, we might consider the 50 biggest metropolitan statistical areas of the US, and ask which ones might be linked by high-speed train. Here are the 15 most important, as ranked by total population (city1 + city2) served:

1.    New York City    Philadelphia        24.5 million people
2.    New York City    Hartford        19.9 million people
3.     Los Angeles        Riverside        16.8 million people
4.    Los Angeles        Las Vegas        14.6 million people
5.    Chicago        Saint Louis        12.2 million people
6.    Dallas            Houston        11.1 million people
7.    Chicago        Indianapolis        11.0 million people
8.    Milwaukee        Chicago        10.9 million people
9.    Baltimore        Philadelphia          8.5 million people
10.    Washington        Baltimore          7.9 million people
11.    Orlando        Miami              7.3 million people
12.    Dallas            Austin              7.3 million people
13.    OK City        Dallas              6.9 million people
14.    Riverside        San Diego          6.8 million people
15.    Atlanta            Charlotte          6.4 million people

Obviously, some of these cities already have regular train service between them, but none of them have anything approaching high-speed service. The one exception is the Acela Express, which can occasionally get up to 125 miles per hour. However, it still takes 6.5 hours to get from Boston to Washington, DC, which means (with stops) that the train is only averaging around 60 mph. The primary problem seems to be that Acela Express makes too many stops: it could stop as many as 13 times between Boston and Washington (a function perhaps of the need of Amtrak to satisfy Congressmen from many states). The desire of Amtrak to use existing track means that it’s often too curvy to reach top speeds.

Shown below is a map of the US, with links shown between major metropolitan statistical areas that are within about 250 miles of one another. While building high-speed train lines may seem expensive ($10 million per mile of track would be pretty normal), it is actually a fairly modest investment compared with other government expenditures. Assuming around (new interstates in urban areas can cost around $6 million per mile). The total network I show in the map is around 5,400 miles, which would be about $54 billion. This may seem like a lot, but it’s one-tenth of what has been spent in the Iraq War to date. Food for thought…

Click here for image

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I went for a long walk today, through the Spring woods of Massachusetts, and I thought a lot about what got me into the field of ecology. I loved the concept of Nature, as something external to humanity, more primeval and primal somehow. I bought into the general public’s belief in the “balance of nature”, that natural ecosystems are relatively stable until perturbed by humanity. And so I entered graduate school at Duke University, to study the science of forest ecosystems. Four years later, I left Duke with nature having been thoroughly disenchanted for me. This is not simply because of the emphasis on a mechanistic understanding of the system, which would have been true for any natural science. Rather, it’s the growing realization among ecologists that our higher-level concepts, like a “forest,” are just a contingent process of evolution and disturbance- things very much could have been otherwise.

So, I’ve been left with a factually correct, but rather barren, concept of a “forest” that interferes with my experience of walking through a real forest. I’ve been looking to other fields recently to see how they deal with this sort of disenchantment. Historians deal with a similar quandary, for history is very contingent- as once was said, “history is just one damn thing after another”! And yet the history of a people or a nation is often crucially, emotionally, important to people. There’s something of this attitude in the work of natural historians, who study the development of the nature of a specific place as a result of what specifically happened there. Sadly, the broad knowledge needed to be a good natural historian is slowly disappearing.

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There has been much buzz in the media this past week about the relatively sharp spike in oil prices. I’ve been frustrated by how the majority of coverage has focused on the (very real) possibility of oil company manipulation, as if we’re searching for a convenient villain in the process. The Bush Administration’s policy response to the price spike has been storyline #2, even though truthfully there’s little a president can do to affect oil prices over the short-term. Sadly, there’s been little coverage of how U.S. oil prices compare to the other G7 counties (they are much lower), except for a brief fact check I saw on CNN International (and even that focused on other countries’ high taxes, without explaining the good policy reasons for them). Even worse, there’s been no coverage of the likely long-term trend in oil prices over the next decade or two. Global supply will remain relatively constant, or at best slightly increase; this is not because of technological limitations like a lack of refinery capacity, but simply because there’s a finite supply of the stuff and what’s left is harder to extract. Global demand, on the other hand, will continue to grow rapidly, as nations like China and India industrialize.

The clear implication is that oil prices will continue to rise over the long-term. In this context, the current U.S. government policy of seeking to maintain steady, low prices seems quixotic. It would be far more honest if the U.S. committed itself to expecting steady 5% annual increases in oil prices. The U.S. economy could absorb that sort of gradual annual increase in prices, as we all slowly adapted, whereas a rapid huge price spike could be very damaging.

Yet the press mentions none of these weighty issues. This seems to be a general problem: the media focus on particulars, not on the underlying trend. Global warming is another great example. There is much discussion of whether this or that hurricane was caused by global warming, an attribution that’s almost scientifically impossible to make. In contrast, the long-term, gradual trends (e.g., glacial melt and sea level rise) that keeps us scientists literally up at night, get little press (Andy Revkin being a notable exception).

Maybe this is just human psychology. We focus on what is nearby in space and time, and forget what is distant. It may also be the failure of environmental scientists like myself to find a good, compelling narrative. It’s just challenging with such a grand process: we’re recreating Noah’s flood by burning fossilized sunlight! Perhaps the best summary was what was once said by Herbert Stein, a conservative economist who served under Nixon and Ford: “What can’t go on forever, won’t.”

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James Kunstler’s new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st century, is bold, important, and flawed. His central premise is that the world does not have enough oil to meet demand in the next several decades. This fact, combined with other ecological and economic problems, means that a fairly radical change in how society functions will have to occur. I wholeheartedly agree with this central premise, and I think Kunstler has made a big contribution just by creating such an evocative title, which captures the essence of the monumental challenge of sustainable development. Still, the devil is in the details, and many of them seem problematic.

Kunstler falls into the same trap that other famous ecological writers such as Paul Ehrlich have fallen into: jumping from short-term trends to long-term scenarios too quickly. Generally, short-term predictions are pretty easy to make, as so many drivers can be treated as constants; there are dozens of studies conducted in the last several years, all of which point to demand for oil outstripping supply, and thus to predictably higher prices. From this solid base, Kunstler leaps into an airy discussion of a totally transformed society. As an imaginative exercise, this has merit, but many of the predictions that Kunstler presents as certain are far from it. He also lapses into an apocalyptic tone that will be repellent to those not already in the environmentalist camp. Kunstler may well be right in his pessimism, but it is perhaps dangerous: from Malthus to Ehrlich to the Club of Rome, our predictions of gloom have often been off.

Kunstler’s analysis is also fundamentally conservative, in that he believes that humanity will mostly deal with expensive oil by reverting to technologies common in the 19th century, like electric streetcars and more compact cities. While I agree that some of these technologies will be crucial, I think Kunstler vastly underestimates the degree of hysteresis in socioeconomic systems, in the sense Steve Carpenter uses the term. The future will not look much like the past, even if the suite of energy sources is similar, just because so much has changed. Beautiful historical case studies, such as Jared Diamond pursues in Collapse, can never be any more than loose analogies to our very unique present.

So, what then can we say about the middle ground, before the long emergency? Ecologists must being to study this no-man’s land, for it’s where the best policy-making takes place. For example, I’ve begun trying to study how patterns of urban growth in the developing world will commit those countries to different per capita oil use rates, with global implications. There’s also a lot of room for an enlightened government here, to conduct what in the Pentagon would be called a war game. Get in the same room an oil trader, a global change scientist, a utility company executive, a factory owner, and an urban planner, and ask how they would respond to different scenarios of oil scarcity. The collective impressions that emerge are likely to be far more accurate than the visions of any one man, no matter how wise.

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I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s marvelous book “Development at Freedom,” and I’ve found it revelatory, not for its novelty, but its clarity. Properly understood, Sen’s definition of “development” is functionally the same as the environmental community’s sacred goal, “sustainable development.” Basically, Sen argues that true development is the increase in the capability, or freedom, to live the way one would wish to live. He categorizes five instrumental freedoms: Political freedom, the ability to participate in the exercise of political power (Cicero’s definition); Adequate economic facilities to allow people to achieve their monetary goals; Social opportunities, arrangements that society makes for education, health care, and other essentials; Transparency guarantees, “the freedom to deal with one another under guarantees of disclosure and lucidity”; Protective security, such as minimal unemployment benefits.

If you stop to think about it, this is the world that “sustainable development” is supposed to create. We environmentalists have simply added three constraints to Sen’s freedom: there must be inter-generational equity, so that future generations have similar levels of freedom as today’s generation; there must be social justice, so that within a society the least free person has adequate freedom; and there must be trans-frontier justice, so that there is adequate freedom in all societies. I believe all three of these qualifiers are implicit in Sen’s writing, and in Rawls’ writing for that matter.

Despite the simplicity and beauty of this argument, I am well aware that it will make many of my fellow environmental scientists cringe. There is a fear that all this talk is too vague, and far too difficult to quantify. More and more though I think this can be overcome: look at the effectiveness of the UN’s Human Development Index, for example. I suspect many environmentalists also cringe because Sen’s definition of “development” explicitly has a political component. If the environmental mainstream really adopted it, it would be much harder for environmentalists to hid behind the vagueness of the term “sustainable development”, and work in authoritarian regimes like the Congo (Kishasha).

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There is a malaise among United States environmentalists. We remain proud of our past victories, and certainly hope to maintain these victories into the future. The Clean Air Act has dramatically reduced SO2 air pollution in the US, substantially decreasing respiratory problems and toxic smog. The elimination of lead from gasoline has saved thousands of children from mental impairment. Even today, environmentalists make progress on some issues: the amount of wild land protected from development steadily increases every year. Still, there’s a deep sense of fear about the future, a sense of powerlessness, like the environmental movement is being derailed by something far more powerful and fundamental than mere anti-environmentalism.

Within the US, the rise of the neo-conservatives to power in the Republican Party means that little progress has been made on any environmental issue since 1994. There seems to be a prevailing belief not that limited and well-run government is wise, but that all governmental action is inevitably flawed. As Grover Norquist put it, the goal is to get government small enough to “drown it in the bathtub.” The obvious corollary is that any government action to protect or conserve the environment. In the limit, this argument could be used to get rid of almost any law: land-use regulation, the Endangered Species Act, the prohibition against illegal dumping of toxic waste, whatever. What’s new here is the existence of an anti-government tendency in the Republican Party- that’s been around for decades- but the shift from a focus on efficient, limited government to a hatred of all government. And so, we environmentalists find out movement in the US derailed, for reasons that have very little to do with the environment itself and much to with the Republican Party’s masterful political strategy over the past few decades.

The most significant environmental problems are now global, not national: Global warming, biodiversity loss, sustainable development, and urbanization are all challenges of the highest order to civilization, and must be dealt with by the international system. And yet US environmentalists find ourselves impotent on this stage as well. The neo-conservative vision seems to be that America’s military and economic power must never be limited by anything, anytime. The clear corollary for the environment is that no environmental treaty should constrain US activities, ever. This is why we can’t sign the Convention on Biological Diversity, or the Kyoto Protocol, or anything else- to sign would be to admit that there was something worthwhile about international governance. Again, there has always been a streak of isolationism in the Republican Party, but in its new form the idea is taken much further: the US is a new empire, and should act like one. And so again, we environmentalists fin the US simply absent from all the international environmental activity, for reasons that have little to do with the CBD or any other treaty, and a lot to do with the invasion of Iraq and the US opposition to the International Criminal Court. What, then, is an environmental scientist like myself to do? All the issues on which I could provide useful scientific input are non-issues, taken off the table, and in truth I feel increasingly useless. I can keep doing my science, but it doesn’t matter one damn bit as long as these larger political tenets of neo-conservatism stay unchallenged.

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James Howard Kunstler’s classic work, The Geography of Nowhere: the Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, remains central to many urban planners and urban ecologists thoughts on U.S. cities. As this particular urban ecologist prepares to teach next semester at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I’ve been meditating on Kunstler’s work. His central argument is indubitably correct: the rise of the automobile, combined with extensive government investment in road infrastructure and the persistent American ideal of agrarian purity, led to massive growth in suburbs, which were simply unpleasant places to live in many senses.

Kunstler commits one great sin during his presentation, a sin all authors must constantly flirt with to some extent: simplification. He shows only the negative aspects of dispersed-style development, and doesn’t adequately discuss the many negative aspect of live in an industrialized city. An economist would argue, correctly I think, that people would only have moved to the suburbs if they felt that on average it was a good move for them and their families. A full understanding of suburbanization requires an understanding of these drivers of migration.

Kunstler’s solution to the banality of current development in the U.S. rests on a firm faith in the power of urban planning to restore some sanity to American growth. I whole-heartedly agree that this is an important goal, and one that the brave practitioners of New Urbanism may hopefully bring into fruition. However, his solution also strikes me as symptomatic of a disease that urban planners and landscape architects are often afflicted with: the belief that bad urban planning, and the bad ideas behind it, is the root of bad development patterns in the U.S. The reality is that most new development occurs without any direct input from an urban planner or landscape architect, in patterns that result from a combination of economic drivers and relatively diffuse laws. Changing these diffuse laws, as Kunstler advocates, is surely important, but at least as much attention must be focused on making the economic drivers reflect the full cost of ecological and sociological externalities.

This brings me to the other think about the book that makes me uneasy: I have the sense that Kunstler envisions the end of the automobile era as a reversion to previous transportation technologies. We must acknowledge that there has been a consistent trend toward transportation systems that increase mobility and decrease the per-mile cost of transit. This trend will likely continue into the future, regardless of how the oil economy ends up crashing in the short to medium term. It is a simple fact that development patterns are shaped in fundamental ways by the dominant transportation system, and so new development will by necessity look different than in the past. There is no going back to the city of the 19th century, no matter how much New Urbanist planning we do. There are of course principles from older form of development that we should preserve, but we must not slip into nostalgia. The new developments of the 21st century can be more sustainable and humane than those of the 20th century, but they will above all be new, in style and form.

Posted by ecologist at 09:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of things that ecologists and conservations spend a lot of time worrying about is the process of “parcelization”, which is rampant worldwide. Parcelization is just an infelicitous term used to describe the process by which one parcel of land is split into many smaller pieces of land. It is seen as the first step in a sequence (or spiral) of events that inevitably reduce the ecosystem services that land provides to humanity. First, after some triggering event a large parcel is subdivided legally into a set of smaller parcels, whose boundaries are set by the landowner and the relevant town or county planning commission (in some states, like Massachusetts, landowners have free reign when it comes to how to subdivide their land). The triggering event is often the death of the previous landowner, which usually brings the land into the hand of his descendants, who are often interested in maximizing the sale value of the property by subdivision. Second, these smaller parcels are generally sold to a developer, who builds a set of houses that often perforate intact habitat. What’s worse, from an ecologist’s perspective, is that these small parcels are usually too small to be managed in an ecologically beneficial way- it is impossible to manage for forest resources in a sustainable way on a parcel below a certain size, just as it is impossible to use controlled burns to minimize the risk of catastrophic fire, just as it is difficult to provide habitat to many wide-ranging species. Third, landscapes almost never go back toward a more intact state, but instead the process of parcelization continues further.

I’ve realized recently, however, that there’s an ideological split between this way of talking about land and the old progressive ideal of land ownership. Thomas Jefferson and others propounded agrarianism, the desirability of every citizen having a small farm that provides a measure of self-sufficiency and economic stability. When freed slaves were promised the proverbial (and apocryphal) “40 acres and a mule”, the motivation was similar, to strengthen U.S. democracy by having all citizens having some basic landholdings. In most developed countries today, agrarianism seems irrelevant to the mostly industrial and postindustrial world we live in, but the ideal lives on in a sense in the quest of the U.S. to make sure home ownership is available to a broad spectrum of Americans. In developing countries, of course, land reform remains a contentious topic, and one that I believe must be addressed in countries where old colonial systems of concentrated land ownership persist.

Given this progressive pedigree of the ideal of an equitable distribution of land, ecologists and conservationists must be careful with how they talk about parcelization. We must state honestly what needs are driving increasing numbers of Americans to leave dense urban regions for less dense suburban or exurban regions:
1. Many people are simply moving away from cities in a quest to find an affordable way to own a house.
2. They are seeking access to recreational amenities, like a walk in the woods or the babble of a brook, that are often absent from urban settings.
3. They are fleeing negative aspects of urban like, like higher crime and bad public schools, by going out to the suburbs or exurbs.
Our goal as conservationists must be offer political alternative that satisfy these needs with a minimum of parcelization. These must be offered to the body politic not as solutions to the “evils of parcelization”, which will be inevitably portrayed as elitist, but as ways to more fully satisfy the needs of Americans while preserving the environment. After all, Thomas Jefferson did not present agrarianism primarily because of some mystical quality of the soil (although there’s a bit of that in his writings), but because ownership of small farms led to political opportunity and democratic power. In today’s world, owning a house on a 40 acre ranchette doesn’t bring any more political power to the owner than owning a smaller house on a ½ acre lot.

I can think of two ways that conservationists can begin to address the problem of parcelization. First, we need to make urban areas more livable places. If home ownership can be made more practical to urban dwellers, crime can be reduced, and schools can be improved that much of the things pushing young parents out of the city would cease. There is much work on this front by people pushing affordable housing agendas, etc., which is wonderful. Second, in more rural locations, we need to offer more viable legal means for a set of people to share ownership in a property without legally subdividing the land. For example, states could change their subdivision laws so that instead of having an absolute minimum lot size, an increased number of (small) lots could be created if they were clustered on one edge of a parcel. The remainder of the parcel would go under a conservation easement, and be open for recreational use by all members of the community.

Posted by ecologist at 09:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s an acknowledged secret among ecologists and environmentalists that there’s been a lack of substantial progress toward sustainable development since at least the Earth Summit. That isn’t to minimize the many hours of work that some have put it in to move the world more that direction, nor the very real victories that have been won on some fronts, but is just a recognition that overall there hasn’t been much movement. Partially, it’s just because true sustainable development is such a very difficult task. Much of the geopolitics of the world is driven by economic valuation within the market economy, to which most ecosystem services are mere externalities. The state of anarchy at an international level doesn’t help either, as it makes issues like global warming almost intractable. However, recently these issues (and the many others like them) have come to seem almost like excuses that we environmentalists make, to cover up our ability to set tangible, achievable goals.

This is most glaringly obvious with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs were originated by the UN and a broad consortium of other IGOs and NGOs, in an attempt to define what kind of development is needed in the Third World. Most MDGs are rather broad (e.g., “Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger”), but policymakers agreed to quite specific indicators of progress (e.g. “Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger [as defined by the UN]”). These specific indicators have been fairly effective at mobilizing action at a national and international level, and have at least given policymakers something tangible to aim for. In contrast, the indicator for the environmental MDG (“Ensure environmental sustainability”) is scandalously vague: “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources”. I can understand why the ecologists who drafted this indicator used broad language, for the gap between current development patterns and sustainable development patterns is indeed broad (and anyway, broad language is always politically easier to get agreement on). Still, that’s no excuse – when you stop to think about it, all the disciplines involved in the formation of the MDGs (e.g., public health) faced similarly huge challenges, but managed to come up with some more specific indicators. And our broadness in the formation of the environmental indicators for the MDGs has made them, in my opinion, the least useful and policy-relevant of all the indicators.

What are some specific indicators that ecologists could all agree on? Well, for starters, we could agree on some quantitative targets for the rate of loss of natural land cover in different biomes or ecoregions. For example, a quantitative goal for the rate of loss of tropical forest would be quite useful, for we know that that rate is (imperfectly) related to biodiversity loss. We might also make it a goal to make sure all countries protect at least 10% of their area in conservation reserves. If any ecologists reading this disagree with these specific indicators, that’s fine- just propose some alternative indicators, subject to three rules:

1.) Indicators must be ambitious but achievable in a decade or two (I realize judging what is achievable is a bit of an art)
2.) Indicators must be quantitative, and the data must exist to measure them (otherwise they’re not really indicative!).
3.) Indicators must be easily explainable to the average lay person in less than 5 sentences.

Posted by ecologist at 09:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Rip Van Winkle took his famous nap on the outskirts of Palenville in the Catskill Mountains. In Washington Irving's original story, Rip slept for only 20 years, managing to miss the entire American Revolution in the process. Let us imagine that Rip, being incredibly long-lived due to his many hours of restorative sleep, is still wandering around the Hudson Valley. How different it must look to him! The New York City megalopolis alone now holds more Americans than the Empire State and all of New England did in 1900. Rip has just been the witness to one of the most dramatic transformations of the last century, the shift from a rural to urban existence for the vast majority of Americans. In 1900, 60% of the U.S. population was rural. Today, less than 25% of the population is. It was a transformation that changed the very character of life for Americans, and drove a series of political and cultural changes that continue today.

I've heard that Rip Van Winkle has grown tired again. This time, however, in his quest to find a quiet place to rest his head, he's ventured to a calm spot along the China coast. What can Rip expect to see when he awakens, another 50 or 100 years hence?

See the rest on my post at Z Net:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=56&ItemID=9355

Posted by ecologist at 09:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This piece was written several weeks ago, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed an overhaul of the Endangered Species Act. It was originally intended to be a letter to the editor, which explains its short format. I've signed on to a wonderful letter to congress coming out of the Society for Conservation Biology that I think all ecologists should sign on to, to create momentum against the overhaul in the Senate.

It’s a dark day for the imperiled wildlife of America, and a torrent of species extinctions can be expected if the U.S. House of Representatives reform of the Endangered Species Act passes the Senate. The changes made by Republican legislators emasculate the Act to further a radical property rights agenda and give millions of dollars in entitlements to developers. The central justification for the revision seems to be the argument that any government action that reduces a property owner’s profit for society’s benefit must be financially compensated. This argument, taken to the conclusion its proponents hope for, is absurd: all urban zoning would be a “taking” and be unmanageable, and any restrictions on a factory’s pollution would have to be reimbursed by taxpayers!

Americans need to realize that the House’s “reform” is designed to be unsustainable: developers get to characterize whether their project will impact an endangered species, and to define how much any designation of critical habitat will cut into their profits, with little oversight.  What a recipe for corruption and fraud! Let’s call it what it is: a swindle, at the expense of taxpayers and endangered wildlife.

Posted by ecologist at 08:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The announcement by New York Governor Pataki that he will not seek reelection has occasioned much reflection on his legacy. One consistent theme in the media coverage has been how much of an “environmentalist” Pataki has been. It’s interesting to contrast this coverage with what Massachusetts Governor Romney, another presidential hopeful, will receive soon. Both men have chosen profoundly different strategies regarding conservation. Pataki has chosen to play the environmentalist, and least in terms of protecting openspace upstate. He has consistently mentioned his land protection program in press releases and briefings, and made it a central point of his announcement on Tuesday. His strategy appears to be to use the conservation issue to appeal to a broad section of Democrats and Republicans, knowing only a few hardcore member of the Republican base will disapprove. Romney, in contrast, has greatly reduced land conservation activities in the Commonwealth, compared with his predecessors. He has instead focused much of his political attention on the “traditional” hot button issues for Republicans: the death penalty, abortion (although his waffling backfired), and opposition to gay marriage. His strategy seems to be to appeal to the Republican base, and not worry too much about mainstream voters, who by a large margin care about conservation issues.

Which strategy will be more effective in a presidential race? Well, Romney will have less trouble in the primaries, simply because Pataki will have to justify his environmental tendencies. Pataki, in contrast, would have a useful asset in any general election: a major Democratic trump card, environmentalism.

Posted by ecologist at 08:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Much of the environmental movement is still discussing the “Death of Environmentalism,” the influential article by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (available online here). In my city of Boston, there was even a conversational salon on the topic that I sadly missed (if anyone from the group of organizers knows of another such discussion in the Northeast, let me know!). The basic argument is that the environmental movement is barely holding its own ground, and isn’t advancing a compelling new vision. I’ve come to realize that the same argument can be made about the broader progressive agenda. While there is an important critique of the progressive movement on an ideological level (more about this later), I wanted to talk today about the progressive movement on a tactical level. On many fronts, the movement is engaged in a sense of holding actions where we seem to be slowly encircled. Worldwide, social welfare systems are under attack as unaffordable and anti-competitive. Basic civil liberties, from habeas corpus to the right to privacy, are coming into conflict with counter-terrorism policy. Most major environmental treaties, within the U.S. and internationally, are being inadequately enforced and are in danger of being dismantled.

We should realize that holding actions cannot be merely defensive, if there is to be some hope of advancing the broader progressive agenda. Rather, they must be part of a broader strategy. Given progressive forces relative weakness, at least in the U.S., our only political possibility is a Fabian strategy. A Fabian strategy is the practice of achieving constant, small defeats on the enemy who would win in any direct confrontation. The best example (militarily) in American history is George Washington’s campaign against the British. If we were to crystallize the lessons of Washington’s campaign into a political program, we might find the following rules of thumb:

1. Don’t risk all of your resources on a battle you are very likely to lose. There are no worthwhile symbolic loses.
2. Fight the largest battles that you can likely win. This involves carefully picking battles on terrain that is to your advantage.
3. Most important, have a long term strategy to exhaust and outmaneuver your opponent. This involves changing the dynamics of the overall battlefield, slowly, into a situation where you can win decisively. Redefine the debate to your terms.

Posted by ecologist at 08:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s a battle going on for the soul of conservation biology, and my loyalties are divided. One side might be called the engineers. Conservation planning started in a fairly ad hoc fashion, with land being protected mostly for aesthetic reasons. By the 1980s, however, conservation biology had stepped in and offered a formal planning process, based in science, which was to make land protection efforts more efficient. This trend toward a management perspective has continued, so that now many (including myself) talk in all seriousness about “ecoinformatics,” the full utilization of reams of data to make conservation decisions. The other side of this battle might be called the prophets. This group got its start in the modern era with Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, which focused (in a somewhat one-sided way) on how population growth poses serious problems for the global environment. This critique has broadened considerably over time, first to the I=PAT equation, which recognized the importance of affluence levels and technology, and finally to the internationally agreed-upon concept of “sustainable development.”

Properly construed (that is, as something more than a modest tinkering with the current system that the engineers might prefer), the program requires to achieve environmental sustainability while eliminating global poverty is extremely ambitious. It would require a conceptual revolution in how the global governance system works. It may well be that the prophets are right in this analysis, and that much more than improved planning is required to achieve a sustainable and just world. Still, such talk scares us engineers. There is widespread fear that if ecology adopts the broad sense of sustainable development as a goal, it will cease to be a pure science but will become something akin to sociology, always at risk of losing its credibility in a political dogfight. And so those of us with divided loyalties between the two camps can do little except watch the battle rage, and hope it is not too bloody…

Posted by ecologist at 08:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It is rare that I read a book and find myself mumbling under my breath in anger, but such was my response to reading Simon Morris’ Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. The central thesis of the book is that life was unlikely to have evolved on planets other than earth, but that here the evolution of us, or something like us, was very likely.

Morris begins his argument by accepting the standard Drake equation (here simplified somewhat- see this site for the full equation), that the number of planets with life on them somewhere in the galaxy, Nl, is a estimate by the product of the total number of planets, Np, and the proportion of the planets that are habitable, Fl: Nl=Np Fl. Now, many things have to occur for a planet to be habitable (it has to have the right distance from a star, has to be neither too big nor too small, etc.), and Morris rightly argues that Fl is very small. From this, without quantifying how small Fl is or how big Np is, he leaps to the conclusion that the most likely value of Nl is 1- that is, there’s just Earth!

Morris then moves to the process of organic evolution under natural selection, and cogently describes the process as a path of evolution occurring through a space of possible evolutionary trajectories. The author stress how convergences in traits during natural selection, like the repeated emergence of binocular vision, imply that this “space” may be smaller than previously thought. From this sensible observation, he leaps to the conclusion that this “space” is so bounded that intelligent life is bound to develop, and indeed is destined to look a lot like us humans- binocular camera eyes, big head, probably bipedal, the whole shebang!
As a scientific work, the book is lacking, for its series of fascinating anecdotes do not justify its grand conclusions. However, as a philosophical piece it is fascinating. Morris’ central goal is to reinsert teleology into the universe. Ultimately, he wants to feel that the existence of humanity is not just a cosmic accident, a contingency, but has some sort of inevitability to it. In contrast, I find the contemplation of the contingent nature of the universe somewhat bracing and invigorating By personality, I am closer to the late Stephen Gould, who continually stressed that if one ran back the clock of life and reran evolution, things would turn out very different. As the scientific evidence isn’t adequate to separate out which viewpoint is accurate, the issue becomes a Rorschach test. For some people, as Milan Kundera once said, enjoy viewing life thus: Es muss sein! For others, life could just as well be otherwise (Es konnte auch anders sein).

Posted by ecologist at 08:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Every US newspaper these days seems obliged to write some piece about “Democracy on the March,” usually somehow crediting Mr. Bush for the events in Lebanon and the Ukraine. Leaving aside this somewhat dubious attribution, we might ask what the effect of further democratization would be on the environment. Are democracies able to better control pollution and environmental destruction? We in the environmental movement have sometimes been seen as rather elitist, and indeed have occasionally enjoyed the ease with which deals can be struck with autocratic institutions. At the same time, however, we style ourselves as progressives, and instinctively want to root for democracy.

We environmentalists can thus take heart at the generally positive correlation between democratic governance and environmentally sound decision-making. At any given level of economic development countries with democratic governments generally have more environmentally friendly policies than autocratic governments. This is especially true for key pollutants, like sewage, that also have severe human health impacts. Perhaps the best example of this general rule is China, which has achieved rapid growth in GDP and education levels (which are not well correlated with democratization), but has some of the most severe environmental damage of any country. There, the top-down leadership of the Communist party allows local environmental problems to be effectively ignored.

A general principle of environmental governance should be: regulate (in the broad sense of the word) at the level at which a problem occurs. Thus, aesthetic considerations of land-use should be dealt with by local municipalities. Food safety considerations, regarding what are acceptable levels of mercury for instance, should be set at a national level. And global warming must similarly be regulated at a global level. The challenge of course is that increased ecological knowledge often highlights such international connections, but in the current world of international political anarchy little effective regulation is possible.

Posted by ecologist at 08:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The president was again holding photo-op's last week to push his ideas on social security privatization and reform. While I think his scheme is dangerous and ill-conceived, I'm nevertheless grateful to Mr. Bush for starting a national discussion on the topic, albeit not always the most honest one (for example, the stated goal of many key neo-cons to entirely remove social security is rarely discussed). The president is right that the demographic transition, from a fast-growing young population to a slow-growing old population, is a real problem for pay-as-you-go systems like social security.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Europe, where many countries are experiencing negative population growth- there are fewer births than deaths. It's strange then, that with all the attention paid to Social Security by the media over the past several weeks, there's been little mention of the one factor making the Social Security problem in the US relatively minor: immigration. Let's be honest, the only reason that the Democrats can even argue that this problem is not a "crisis" is because there are hundred of thousands of immigrants a year, both legal and illegal. Without thes many young new workers, there'd be far fewer taxes to support current and future retirees. It's ironic then that some of the Republican leadership in Congress that is vocally anti-immigrant also champion Social Security reform. In fact, I'd go so far as to make a humble proposal: all those who care about saving social security should push for more open borders, as one tactic among several that can narrow future slight deficits. The emphasis should be on decreasing illegal immigration, which poses security threats in a post 9-11 worl and raises less tax revenue, by allowing any persons with employable skills or a familial support network into the U.S. Support immigrant rights, help save social security!

Posted by ecologist at 08:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s snowing outside, fresh virgin piles of white that are quickly covering my windowsill, so there seems something incongruous about reading a book on global warming, Bill McKibben's excellent The End of Nature. I got motivated to read it because it comes up in policy debates in Massachusetts, and is oddly enough used to justify extensive forest management regimes- after all, if Nature’s dead, what’s wrong with wise human control? I had a hunch that this couldn’t really be what McKibben meant, and so I picked up a copy of the book from Harvard’s labyrinthine Widener library.

McKibben argues that climate change and other global environmental dilemmas are so severe as to, once and for all, destroy the concept of nature, wildness, out “there,” separate from human intervention and desires. He’s at his most eloquent when he talks about the psychological transition that accompanies this new reality, the loss of something special and sacred in our lives. As an environmentalist, there’s something immensely appealing about this argument, something I’ve felt in my own heart. However, as a scientist there’s something I find troubling about it too.

And, as I sit here pondering the snowflakes, I think I’ve figured out what it is, or at least given a name to my puzzlement: existentialism. McKibben’s argument is similar, at least, to that cartoon version of existentialism that we non-philosophers get taught. The existentialists critiqued the modern worldview, and science in particular, for removing the enchantment of the world, and giving us something less in return. McKibben feels similarly that the death of Nature, like the death of God, has made the world spiritually depauperate. As a sort of response to the failure of the modern worldview, existentialism posits the idea of authenticity, a fuzzy concept that I must admit to never having fully understood. McKibben’s idea of regaining a sense of the sacredness of the trees and forests even while acknowledging and grieving for the death of Nature seems to me similar, and similarly paradoxical.

Both of these trains of thought are a bit odd to a scientist, maybe even threatening, for at their core they are hostile to science’s materialistic roots. They both also seem utterly irrelevant to the real struggles for environmental justice (not to mention social justice!) going on in both the developed and (especially) the developing world.

Posted by ecologist at 08:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just got back from a workshop run by The Nature Conservancy, which brought together academics to talk about the state of conservation science. I was struck by the delicious tension in the room. On the one hand, as scientists we were interested in defining a clear problem that could be fully solved with the best available data. On the other hand, as environmentalists we were all concerned with answering the big, grand questions of our global civilization.

The scientist role requires a great deal of humility. So much is unknown in this world, and uncertainty is everywhere. Smart scientists ask questions that are well defined and can be answered with good hard data. The environmentalist role requires, more than anything, a passion for protecting the environment. And passions were indeed high at the workshop, in part because the slowly evolving concept of sustainable development is maturing, and commonalities between movements are coalescing into a more general (and profound) global justice movement.

The challenge for us at this meeting was to find some middle ground between humility and passion. This land is the most fertile for research, but also the most unstable. One has to pose the most grand question that can be fully answered, while at the same time acknowledging fully what is not know. A zen-like challenge...

Posted by ecologist at 08:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If one takes a course in environmental economic nowadays, one is bombarded with information about environmental Kuznet curves, which has become something of an obsession in the field. Environmental Kuznet curves are simply a fancy name for the arched relationship that exists between some environmental pollutants and income: very poor and very rich countries don’t emit much sulfur dioxide, for example, while middle income countries do. Environmental economists have investigated this topic to death, inventing whole categorization schemes of pollutants, describing which obey this relationship and which do not.

Ever since I took a course in environmental economics at Duke, something’s been bothering me about this single-minded focus on one pollutant’s relationship to income levels. It struck me recently that what scares ecologists most about the future is the sheer pace at which surprising negative consequences of man’s activities appear: the rate of problem generation, defined loosely to include everything from pollutants to invasive species to land-use change, seems high. If we consider this rate, in problems per year (r ), as the product of the number of new technologies in a sector (T) and the proportion of new technologies that prove problematic (p), we can begin to grasp the conundrum. If T is increasing multiplicatively, then all else being equal r would increase at the same rate.

Here, however, my investigations as a scientist have come to a screeching halt. Scientists just don’t publish a crackpot idea like this without an example dataset, and I haven’t found a field yet with good enough data. The chemical industry comes closest. Around 800,000 new chemicals are introduced a year (excluding organic chemicals with complex sequences like DNA), and the annual rate grows by about 4% a year. Sadly, the vast majority of those chemicals are never screened for toxicity (except perhaps by computer modeling), and so the known total of dangerous chemicals (on the TCSA list) only grows by around 2000 chemicals a year. Since r is effectively unknown, p is also unknown, and it’s unclear if society’s screening capacity is really getting 4% more effective a year.

Anyway, this is all important because if, for a given sector, T grows multiplicatively in at all the same way as our general economy does, then P must fall at least that fast to maintain screening capacity. This is a very difficult thing to do: it’s far harder to halve the error rate of a screening process than it is to double the input, for example. There seems to be, barring massive technological changes in the screening processes in any given sector, a limit to how high T can safely go. In other words, there’s a limit to how fast our society can change and still filter out bad outcomes.

Posted by ecologist at 08:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have been traveling recently through the green fields of Brittany, down the miles of curvy rural roads that crisscross northern France. The countryside is absolutely gorgeous, lush agricultural fields  bordered by little strips of oaks, which meld smoothly into old stone village centers. For an American, this pastoral landscape seems a little sad because there's so few forests, so few places that feel wild. It is almost entirely an anthropogenic landscape.

American landscape ecologists do not really like to study such landscapes, for the tradition in our field is to study the interplay of natural patterns and processes in national parks and other big chunks of habitat. Perhaps because of this, there's been a relatively slow acceptance of the clear ecological reality that- between land use change, global warming, atmospheric N deposition, and many other factors- there is no place that is really 'wild' in the sense of pristine. European landscape ecologists, in contrast, have always taken the agricultural fields and other anthropogenic land forms as their focus. They thus have little problem admitting the absence of the pristine. In fact, they sometimes sadly take this realization too far, and dismiss the whole concept of natural areas as worthy of protection.

Despite being firmly trained in this American school of landscape ecology, I am beginning to come over to the European point of view. Given the ecological reality of "the end of nature," American landscape ecologists need to move from studying passively landscapes toward active landscape planning, in consultation with urban planners, landscape architects, sociologists, and others. While the need for this transition has been apparent for a while to us, it has proven enormously difficult. Most ecologists got into this field because we loved that taste of wilderness, and so we are all psychologically afraid to let that concept go in any meaningful way. Perhaps the only way to convince most ecologists to go through this transition is to find a way to bring together the American love of wilderness with the European love of the anthropogenic. We would all do well to remember the great contribution of the 19th century generalists like Frederick Law Olmstead, who could embed something akin to wilderness in a human world.

Posted by ecologist at 07:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I first heard about the Inuit suit at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights during a cloistered cocktail party of academics in urban Cambridge. For many in the room, the whole suit, charging the United States with gross negligence in our willful and continuing pollution of greenhouse gases, was absurd, cute but quaint. For me, though, it was a source of pride. Someone needs to put the consequences of the industrial world's actions in human terms. Moreover, the suit is a sign of the further entanglement of the great issues of our day, whether political, social, economic, or ecological.

All this entanglement makes lucid, simple book like James Gustave Speth's Red Sky at Morning even more important. Speth lays out the major environmental challenges of today, and discusses some of their possible solution in broad, vague terms. Among the ecologists at the cocktail party there was some derision at Speth's book, and indeed his whole approach, for being exactly what it was: general and broad. A cynic might describe what passes as "quality" science today in ecology as the thorough survey of a small section of road, locating every pothole, mapping every turn. In this sense, Speth's descriptions are too crude, just as a map inevitably reduces a road's complexity to a single line.

But reading Speth's book has its transcendent moments when the scope of the problem comes into view, which strike me as like those rare moments in a city when one looks up from the street one's on and sees in the distance an imposing skyscraper. Speth's book is like a hand pointing in this direction of environmental sustainability, that glittering ediface. All we as a society can do is head in that general direction, leave our well-traveled little street and head into an unknown city for which we don't even have a decent road map. Perhaps the best thing ecologists can do in this context is thus to leave our comfortable street and scout out the next couple blocks, lest society run into a dead end on the way toward sustainability.

Posted by ecologist at 07:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)