The cosmopolitan ecologist

I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed. It’s a brilliant and well-written. In a set of case studies of collapsed civilizations, Diamond reviews the role environmental degradation played in causing the collapse. While he discussed political and cultural causes of societal failure, his emphasis is clearly on the environmental issues that he believes are often the root causes of collapse. In some of the case studies, particularly the Rwanda section, one feels that these political causes deserve more attention, and Diamond comes close to environmental determinism. In general, however, one comes away convinced that environmental degradation has played a key role in many collapses.
The section of the book that’s most interesting to me is simply entitled “Why do some societies made disastrous decisions?” The answer, of course, is “it depends on the society.” There are some cases where societies simply failed to anticipate or perceive an environmental problem, and thus failed to react appropriately. More interesting is when societies perceive an environmental problem, and yet fail to respond. As Diamond correctly points out, this may be because of a purely irrational response by the society (Diamond highlights the Greenland Norse’s stubborn refusal to eat fish even though there was plenty of it around), or because of rational processes of decision-making leading to a suboptimal outcome (the famous example of this is the “tragedy of the commons”).
It strikes me that this question, of rational (yet flawed) and irrational responses to environmental problems, is something environmental NGOs today need to think about. The mainstream
NGOs are focused on “win-win” solutions, which assumes global society has simply not responded rationally to the scientific evidence of environmental degradation. However, it may well be that for many issues like climate change, the rational response of some actors (a company that benefits from an activity that causes degradation of the environment, or a citizen of the developed world more generally that benefits from the vast environmental inequity between the developed and developing world) will be to maximize current personal welfare while damaging the overall system. If most environmental problems require “win-lose” solutions they are, I’d argue, much harder to solve. That’s not to say that “win-win” solution, so-called “no-regrets” actions, should not be taken by NGOs, as the low-hanging fruit. But my reading of Diamond’s book suggests more fundamental environmental problems are “win-lose” situations, that are fundamentally political battles, not simply a matter of ignorance of scientific facts.

Posted by ecologist at 05:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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

 

Posted by ecologist at 04:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

    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.

Posted by ecologist at 10:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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?

Posted by ecologist at 09:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I grew up in North Carolina hearing boasts that Mount Mitchell (named after a UNC geology professor who fell to his death while surveying) was just a bit taller than Mount Washington, and hence won the title of the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi. I spent lots of free time backpacking from Mount Mitchell up and down the Black Range, that cragged spine of spruce and fir. One of my fondest memories is lying in a mountain pass on the Black Range and watching the clouds crash into the peaks and get pushed through the saddle.

Nevertheless, Mount Washington always had an allure for me as a kid. An honest-to-god mountain, with krumholtz and a tree-line and alpine tundra and everything! Its reputation for having some of the worst weather on Earth also seemed exciting. Anyway, in the spirit of doing things that I would regret having lived in Boston and not done, I west Wednesday and climbed Mount Washington.

Even the decision to climb one of these peaks on foot requires a certain amount of faith- both Mitchell and Washington have roads that lead to the top for the more lazy, although the latter seemed decidedly more pricey and upscale. I departed from Pinkham Notch around 8am, and began the long steady climb up Boott Spur Trail. I soon reached the alpine zone, with gorgeous views down into Tuckerman’s Ravine. The flowers here were all in bloom, even what looked like Dwarf Cinquefoil (although I didn’t spend long botanizing). One frustration as I went farther up was how the trail ceased to be a path made out of dirt, and became a series of cairns that mark a route through a field of boulders and small rocks. This rock hopping was fun at first, but in the end killed my knees, leaving me wistfully remembering the black soil of Mt. Mitchell’s trails. Once I gained the spur, I had a snack, walked quickly down to the pass, and began the steep 0.6 miles up to the peak. Once there I had an ice cream (so civilized!) and relaxed on the observation deck, before the descent down the Lion’s Head trail, another rock hopping exercise. What I love about hiking is how fatigue reduces my usual buzz of thoughts down to a single-minded focus on where to step next. It becomes a sort of enforced meditation, and I was reminded of the beautiful passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that makes this point. I took frequent breaks on the way down, and read a book my mother gave me by Anna Quindlen called A Short Guide to a Happy Life. At the time the book seemed to me a bit too plain-spoken to be my kind of essay, too ethically simplistic. Now, perhaps because I’m older and more sentimental, I found it to be a gem of a book, bringing a tear to my eye. All in all, it was a glorious day.

Posted by ecologist at 03:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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…”

Posted by ecologist at 08:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I found myself recently driving south again on the magnificent Taconic Parkway, headed for Millbrook and the Institute of Ecosystem Studies. I had been lucky enough to be invited to participate in the Cary Conference, somewhat annual events that often are pivotal to the science of ecology. The theme for 2007 was urban design and ecological science, with the stated goal of infusing ecological knowledge into design, thus creating more sustainable and resilient cities. It was a fascinating several days, and I thought I’d offer a few ideas to my reader that I kept thinking about.

First, there was shockingly little agreement on the meaning of the terms we were all ostensibly discussing. “Ecology” was seen by the ecologists as a science, with a body of knowledge created through the scientific method, while the designers saw “ecology” as a useful word to describe any system of interrelating parts. “Resilient” became a true buzzword, reflecting whatever the speaker thought was preferable, rather than the strict technical definition now favored by ecologists, which asks: resilience of what ecosystem property, to what perturbation? This lack of agreement over terminology was made more problematic because of who was invited to the conference. For the most part, the designers were preeminent academic theorists rather than practitioners. Similarly, we scientists were all academics, rather than those who actively consult and help with ecological engineering. The two groups were thus very far apart conceptually, and not really inclined to think practically and bridge that gap.

But there was also a deeper disagreement over what the interface between the two groups could or should be. The scientists present wanted to transfer their ecological knowledge efficiently to the designers, driven by a deep sense of urgency that Gene Likens spoke eloquently about. We believe there are facts about how different designs affect technological sustainability. We want these facts considered during all design projects, much as all design projects conform to building safety codes. Ecological concerns are thus not necessarily central to a design’s aesthetic, any more than the meter of a sonnet determines the meaning of the poem. On the other side, the designers are each interested professionally in finding their own unique aesthetic. Many of them are now postmodernists, in the (non-technical) sense of not believing in any objective, empirical facts. Ecology thus becomes just a useful discourse to riff off of, like feminism or suburbia. I kept saying to the designers quite passionately “Ecology is not a metaphor!” I was unknowingly echoing Sokal’s Fashionable Nonsense, where he argued science is not a text, at least not JUST a text, but that there was some other objective content there as well. Given the deep ecological crisis the world faces, that objective content is what society so desperately needs to infuse into its urban design.

Posted by ecologist at 04:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m in the Other Side Café, which is its usual punk rock chaotic self (god, I love this place). As usual, the espresso’s really strong and the music’s really loud. It’s a nice counterpoint to the stuffiness at the Museum of Fine Arts, where I just was. How funny it is, that art museums manage to take some of the most vibrant offspring of violent souls and make them an object of quiet reverence. Maybe 50 years hence their will be a retrospective on this whole scene here in the Other Side Café, and it too will become 2-D. History is always about those who emerge from a certain victorious vantage point, that of the winners, the famous. We who listen to history always know how the story will end, and so we don’t experience the utter craziness, the soul-wrenching uncertainty of not knowing whether your ideas are worth anything. Instead the historical narrative makes it seem like one long march to greatness.

Several works stood out this time at the MFA: Copley’s famous portrait of a man being eaten by a shark; Turner’s slave ship sinking; Stella’s Old Brooklyn Bridge; Calder’s cow. Beautiful objects all, that left me feeling a little inspired. I feel a bit guilty saying that somehow, as if as an ecologist I should only be inspired by wilderness.

On the walk over here I took the oblique turn off Huntington Avenue onto Hemingway Street, a beautiful long residential neighborhood interspersed with Northeastern University and Berkeley Conservancy buildings. It was like discovering a new little world in my familiar Boston.

I once focused on nature in my ecological research, and believed Thoreau’s saying that “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” But now I’m interested in how our urban way of living affects that nature, and so while I still believe Thoreau, I also say that “In cities is the preservation of civilization.”

Posted by ecologist at 04:25 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by ecologist at 12:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My career is an ecologist, trying to elucidate some of the painful details of how development can be made more sustainable. I often have wondered to myself how this career connects intellectually or philosophically with my passion against this war against Iraq, or indeed any such act of imperialism. I did, after all, meet my wife at an anti-war rally.

Recently, I was struck with the idea that perhaps the connection between the two is that both beliefs posit that there is some core of value and worth to each human being that is independent of the circumstances of his birth. Opposition to nationalism is predicated on the ideal that there are certain natural rights every person deserves, regardless of where on Earth’s surface he fell out of his mother’s womb. The fight for sustainable development argues that appropriate access to the natural heritage of mankind should be available to all, regardless of where or when they have been or will be born.

Posted by ecologist at 08:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just attended an excellent symposium on ecosystem services that WWF and The Natural Capitol Project convened. It was a thought-provoking discussion of one of the emerging concepts of modern conservation: natural ecosystems provide services humanity needs, like clean drinking water, carbon sequestration, and spiritual inspiration. My own research fits nicely in this category, for I seek to understand how rapid urban growth affects a few ecosystem services. Recognition of ecosystem services as a key object of study has also clarified the root cause of many environmental problems: most ecosystem services are entirely external to the market. In other words, things like clean drinking water are usually considered as a free resource, without monetary value.

The specific theme of this symposium was payment for ecosystem services, which goes by the cute name PES. This is really being pushed by environmental groups right now, and with good reason. We’re simply happy to bring these ecosystem services into the market system, where they presumably will be more likely to be considered by decision-makers. For once, our actions are backed by economists, who see this as a special case of Pigovian bargaining, which says that if the total transfer payment is equal to the value of the ecosystem service, then an efficient market will be realized.

Interestingly, this theory does not specify who pays. To economists, this is “merely” an equity concern, as one person at the symposium put it. In many international treaties, environmentalists have fought hard to ensure that it is polluters who pay for the cleanup of what they pollute. However, in many of the other emerging markets in ecosystem services that were all the buzz at the symposium, like water, conservationists seem to have dropped this demand. I think this is a bit dangerous, although perhaps appropriate in the case of water, and conservation groups should articulate a clear rationale for who pays for ecosystem services. Our goal must be an efficient and equitable system, to the extent that is politically feasible.

Posted by ecologist at 05:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It is raining today in Harvard Yard, a cold autumnal rain that washes the maple leaves off the trees. They swirl in the rainwater, shimmering orange cascades that flow along the gutters. At intersections in the drainage grates clog with leaves, masses upon masses of crushed biomass, and the pavement is puddle with shallow stagnant pools, too deep to jump across.

And for some reason Homer’s old saying came back to me: “the generations of men are as leaves.” What a ridiculously pompous Harvard kind of recollection! And yet how true that line seems today! It has been a full year since I last suffered through a New England winter, and yet it seems much less. I wrote a few good papers, earned a few gray hairs on my head, had a few memorable moments with my wife, that’s all. I am still a tender young life, and can look down on the fall’s leaves from on high. Yet around me on my little branch are hundreds of new buds, pubescent and just unfolding, and I am sure to them I seem like a true stout leaf. If the generations of men are as leaves, is the fall a tragedy or a miracle? Or perhaps the question is not a proper one, not answerable- the fall just is, come what may.

Posted by ecologist at 12:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I try in my scientific work to remain non-partisan. Still, when I take off that hat and put on my environmentalist’s hat, I find myself overjoyed at the prospect of a Democratic takeover of the House and, perhaps, the Senate. In recent years the Republican party has come to be resolutely anti-environmental, with a few exceptions like the Chafee’s of Rhode Island. It wasn’t always thus- as recently as the Nixon administration Republicans took the lead on environmental protection.

Here then are the legislative initiatives that a newly Democratic Congress could adopt, which would substantially advance the cause of “wise growth” of U.S. cities.

1. The next big highway bill to come out of Congress should build on ISTEA I and II by going beyond authorizing states to use transportation funds for mass transit, to mandating that a certain minimum level of transportation funds must be used for mass transit. This would free cities to use funds as they see fit, rather than the current situation where there is a maximum limit on funds used for public transit.
2. Disbursement of transportation funds should be contingent on each major metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) involved having a detailed land-use plan of their own creation. Furthermore, the plan must be legally binding on jurisdictions within the planning zone. MSAs of course have the right to reject such binding compacts- they will just in the process give up the privilege of receiving federal transportation money.
3. Instead of fighting (and often losing) periodic battles over raising CAFE standards, environmentalists should just set CAFE standards to rise a small fixed percentage a year. This has the added advantage of giving manufacturers certainty, rather than the current situation of uncertainty about when fleet standards will rise.
4. The federal government should help incorporate a fun for short-term, low-interest loans to conservation groups that meet the highest standards of fiscal solvency. Such short-term “bridge” financing already exists in several states and organizations, and frees conservation NGOs to act fast when conservation opportunities present themselves.
5. Whenever possible, revenue-neutral changes to the tax code should shift taxes relating to automobiles from general funds to funds being paid just by automobile users. For example, a rise in gas taxes could be used to finance a significant part of highway construction, with an equivalent amount of money being given as a tax credit to those with no car or those with fuel-efficient cars.
6. The federal government should play a role in crafting model enabling language that, if adopted by states, would make cities have the power to enact more flexible, “new urbanist” zoning laws. Currently in several states this legal authority is lacking. Of course, local jurisdiction have the right to keep their current system of zoning.

Posted by ecologist at 04:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by ecologist at 02:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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

 

Posted by ecologist at 12:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been reading “Environmental Governance Reconsidered”, an excellent collection of essays on how environmentalists are trying to implement policy that leads to a healthier, cleaner world. In an eloquent intro, Robert Durant outlines the “second generation” of environmental governance that is now coming of age and moving out of the shadow of its ancestor, command-and-control legislation. Durant’s conception is really quite similar to James Speth’s idea of “jazz”: a flexible, non-hierarchical set of policies that are bottom-up, not top-down. Durant lists three main themes: reconceptualizing purpose, reconnecting with stakeholders, and redefining administrative rationality. While I agree with all three of these in principle, they also give me a deep sense of unease.

Essentially, “reconceptualizing purpose” means recognizing that most serious environmental problems cross national borders, and thus necessitate cross-border action. An obvious example would be global warming, where the actions of every nation affect every other nation. The difficulty, of course, is that sovereignty stops at the border: all international environmental treaties are essentially promises of better performance, with only weak, ad hoc enforcement provisions. Given this state of international anarchy, international environmental work has to collaborative and flexible. It seems to me quite dishonest of environmentalists to pretend that we are being flexible because it’s the best thing for the environment; we are being flexible because it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. The latter position, if adopted, also allows environmentalists to say clearly that sovereignty matters: meaningful progress on global environmental issues depends on having international enforcement mechanisms with teeth. Indeed, I would second here the calls of others for something like a World Environmental Organization, equivalent in power to the World Trade Organization.

“Reconnecting with stakeholders” is of course always important. I worry though that much of this topic really just advocates political devolution, the return of sovereignty to a level of governance below that at which the problem occurs. The environmental consequences of political devolution have been mixed at best. For example, local-rule for Forest Service lands often ends up empowering resource extraction industries at the expense of environmental interests.

“Redefining administrative rationality” seems to mean little more than being flexible, and avoiding command-and-control environmental policies. Cap-and-trade systems would be the preeminent example of a flexible “redefinition” of pollution controls, and have certainly been effective in some cases like the Clean Air Act. However, as the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol shows, these often end up being horribly complex and difficult to administer. They also are easily captured by industry for their own interests.

In sum, “jazz” may be a compelling metaphor, but some orchestration is needed. To stretch the metaphor some more, what we need is not free jazz stylings but a organized big band swing sound. In the international arena, this means strong treaty enforcement powers are needed. Other tactical issues are very important but ultimately secondary.

Posted by ecologist at 03:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I spend a lot of time in my job thinking about landscape fragmentation, the splintering of the land into smaller and smaller parcels, each subject to different ownership and different management. As I’ve discussed before, this is in a sense very democratic- a large proportion of Americans own a little plot of land and gain the economic benefits that entails. Still, the result has not been some Jeffersonian agrarian landscape, but suburbia. All this fragmentation has made land conservation very difficult, as a myriad environmental NGOs chase after ever smaller parcels of land, not to mention some of the other problems of sprawl.

I’ve been realizing though that it’s not just the land that’s becoming more fragmented. Within the US, the demographic data clearly show that our neighborhoods are becoming more and more segregated by class, the rich living with the rich, the poor with the poor. Internationally the situation is even starker: the average middle-class American will never see how the one-sixth of humanity in slums truly lives. Incredibly, Americans are as segregated by race now than they were during the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Perhaps most ominous for us as a democracy, our neighborhoods are now mostly of a single party-affiliation, meaning spirited political debates in public places are all too often a thing of the past.

Indeed, perhaps we live in the era of fragmentation, when we lose the experience of having a shared culture and instead retreat into our own world. The Internet, especially, has fragmented the media bubble. We now all, more and more, consume the news we want, tending to read sources with biases we already share. It’s not that this tendency is completely new- it’s always been there, we’ve all lived in different worlds to some extent. But now the Internet, which so many dreamed would break down barriers (and occasionally can) seems to be more often reifying them: the fragmented world keeps cracking into ever smaller pieces.

Posted by ecologist at 05:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the difference between absolute and relative poverty, and how ecologists often don’t differentiate adequately between the two when we discuss the challenge of achieving environmental sustainability. Absolute poverty is the absence of the essentials of life, such as adequate food, clean drinking water, sanitary facilities, and basic health care. Relative poverty is being significantly poorer than the average in a society but still having access to the essentials of life.

The cause of my cogitating has been Jeffery Sachs excellent book, The End of Poverty, in which he presents a concrete program to eliminate absolute poverty worldwide. Sachs’ program is eminently achievable in economic terms, if the statesmen of the world have the political will. It’s also a program that will not contribute substantially to the environment pressure placed on the world, and if properly implemented could even reduce it.

More challenging for environmentalists is the continued rising consumption of the already wealthy countries, for many (but not all) of the goods consumed have significant negative environmental externalities. As the mean affluence rises in a society, so does the conception of relative poverty: owning a car is now considered a necessity in the US, but was once considered a luxury. While many environmentalists are deeply concerned about the economic inequalities that give rise to relative poverty, we are worried about the prospect of continued rising consumption levels in already wealthy countries, for unless consumption patterns shift greatly this rising consumption will negatively impact the environment.

Environmentalists should be very clear about this distinction: there are no ecological limits to solving absolute poverty, and the world should move rapidly to do so, but there are ecological limits on that rate of many types of consumption in wealthy countries.

Posted by ecologist at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by ecologist at 07:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.”

Posted by ecologist at 07:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by ecologist at 11:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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).

Posted by ecologist at 09:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by ecologist at 09:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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