The cosmopolitan ecologist

I just finished reading a piece in a magazine that began by quoting Nietzsche about the abyss, and the dangers of staring into it for too long. As an example of the abyss, the author cheekily mentioned Internet advertising, and then proceeded to dissect the industry.

Apart from being so absurd it made me laugh out loud, the contorted intro also got me thinking. As modern technology increases the rate that information and people and goods move around the world, we increasingly feel like our lives are speeding up. Indeed, the spatial and temporal scope of potential impacts of all of our actions is much larger than it was a century ago. As we strive to keep up with the pace of modern life, however, we seem (in America at least) to enjoy our forgetfulness. Our memory, our cultural sense of history, more and more refers to things in recent history, perhaps the last few decades at the most. Maybe this natural trend of forgetfulness has been exacerbated by modern technology but has always been there, in one form or another.

This natural tendency to forget history is both a good and a bad thing. Dark, horrendous events can happen, from the Holocaust to the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, perhaps even made more frequent and intense by humanity’s increased technological power, and yet cultures generally move on, with perhaps a few psychological scars. The abyss Nietzsche was referring to, the existential uncertainty that hides within all of our souls, we moderns mostly forget about too. Our forgetfulness, in other words, helps us deal with the increasing scope for human mistakes to cause tremendous consequences. The only problem with this salve of forgetfulness is that it makes it much more difficult to learn from history. Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I worry sometimes that our high-tech culture, obsessed with the now, is losing its ability to hear the rhymes.

Ecologists like me worry about a version of this problem often. Humanity is rapidly depleting the wealth of nature, reducing the diversity of life and the beauty of the landscape. The problem is that each generation remembers at most the nature that they saw growing up, not the original pristine version. This problem of shifting baselines, of the perpetual “new normal”, is a challenge to wise public policy making. It is arguably harder to motivate action for slow-motion failures than for dramatic crises. Jared Diamond in his book Collapse strongly makes this point: the underlying causes of long-term societal declines are almost always issues that leaders did not place high on their priority list, simply because the underlying process was so slow.

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It’s always great to pick up a new work by an author and realize he’s done exactly what you hoped he would do. Such was my feeling when I started reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, written with Andrew Charlton.

In Stiglitz’s last work, entitled Making Globalization Work, he mostly rehashed criticism from Globalization and its Discontents, leading to my bad review. Basically, he detailed why current patterns of globalization aren’t working, and stopped there.

Finally, in the most recent piece, Fair Trade for All, Stiglitz gets down to details: If he were benevolent emperor of the world, how would he run the WTO and the next round of negotiations? The book actually ventures into lots of messy, policy-wonkish details, so readers without a basic knowledge of economics might be a bit lost. All this messiness is actually kind of liberating to read: an economist actually arguing (with data) that particular countries and cultures require particular development strategies, not some grand philosophy a la “The Washington Consensus”. It reminds me a bit of Jeffery Sachs’ concept of “clinical economics”.

I can’t pretend to pass judgment on all of Stiglitz and Charlton’s suggestions, for I’m not an economist. The central argument is that in a true “Development Round” of WTO negotiations, proposals should maximize gains to poorer countries. Provocatively, they argue that “all WTO members commit themselves to providing free market access in all good to all developing countries poorer and smaller than themselves.” This is, of course, the complete opposite of the current unjust trading system. As a corollary, they present good evidence that it is mainly via increased South-South trade that least developed countries can lift themselves up.

At one point in a parenthetical statement they express regrets about the inclusion of “the infamous Chapter 11 of Nafta” (i.e., foreign firms can sue and win if a country reduces their profit via a regulation, even a totally reasonable one), essentially implying that trade negotiators put it in with Stiglitz and others approving. Anyone out there know if this historically substantiated?

Posted by ecologist at 04:38 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.

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A mist hangs over the City, giving the air a clammy chill. Nevertheless, the daffodils here are in full glory, the ornamental magnolias have their pink blush, and even the red maples have their namesake buds. Traveling here from Boston is like time traveling for a botanist, zooming forward a few weeks floristically.

On my walk up here through Central Park, I meditated on the wisdom of Frederick Law Olmstead’s design, the beautiful ponds and waterfalls, the ballfields and tennis courts, the bridle path with honest-to-god anachronisitic horses. There is a grace to the constant gentl curve of the paths- it feels good to the landscape ecologist to see the contours of topography obeyed- and yet they are almost overdone. The crowds seem to most use the long linear plaza that runs south of Loeb Boathouse, where the lines of impossibly craggy trees are breathtaking in the fog.

I work now in the department at Harvard that, in a sense, Olmstead spawned, and so I hope to learn something from him. To an ecologist, Central Park is not so interesting, for its flora and fauna are rather common, its role in protecting biodiversity rather minimal. And yet its role in providing a recreational sanctuary is profound, which is important for protected areas near cities.

I’ve been pondering recently a quote from M.N. Pokrovsky, who said triumphantely that “… nature will become soft wax in [man’s] hands, which he will be able to cast in whatever form he chooses.” To ecologists this transformation has seemed horrible, “the end of Nature” as Bill McKibben called it. Yet that is the world we have moved into, where the structure and function of the natural world will be what mankind wishes them to be, or accidentially makes them. What else can we ecologists do, except advise on the wisest way to shape the wax? And yet what arrogance, to think we know enough not to make some mistakes!

Posted by ecologist at 03:14 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)

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)

As an ecologist and urbanist, I’m a big fan of public transit. Boston, my current home, is well endowed in that regard, and certainly has more miles of rails than most cities its size. I’ve been frustrated though how all the discussion about expanding the rail network in Boston is either about minor issues (like whether or not to build a tunnel to connect the two ends of the Silver line), or hopelessly quixotic (like how best to build a ring subway, which may be badly needed but would take billions to build).

I thought that I would put my $0.02 into the discussion, and point out some ways to expand the Boston rail network on the cheap. I do this humbly, for I’m not a mass transit engineer and I’m confident that everything I write has been considered by MBTA planners at some point. I hope to just point out some cheap ways to significantly increase service.

Below is a map of the current Boston subway and commuter rail system (click for a bigger picture). The white shaded areas are areas within 1km of a stop, about the maximum distance that people are willing to walk to a stop. The background image is population density, taken from the 2000 census. Population densities above 1,500 people per square kilometer are useful target areas for rail- any stops in areas of lower density are unlikely to be used much.

Click here for a high resolution picture 

Now, certain areas stand out as not having access to a stop, yet being very close to an existing commuter rail line. If you feel like there’s already too many stops on some of the commuter lines, I’d argue it’s worthwhile to close one of the little-used stops in the far suburbs, and open some closer to the city that will be used more:

1. Between Hyde Park and Roslindale- a new stop on the Attleboro line would solve this problem.
2. Western Brighton and eastern Newton- new stops on Framingham line would solve the problem.
3. Union Square, Somerville- I know there’s talk of someday running the Green Line up this direction, but why not just add a stop off of the Fitchburg line.
4. Winter Hill, Somerville- Why not add a stop on the Lowell line near Broadway Street?
5. Tufts University, Medford- Add stop on Lowell line.
6. Hendersonville area of Everett: Add a stop on the Rockport line
7. Revere/Chelsea- Add a stop near where Rockport line crosses Chelsea River.

Also, at least two existing rail lines seem like fairly cheap ways to add to the rail network in the city:

1. Use the Saugus Industrial Track, which is already owned by the MBTA. This was originally planned to be part of the Orange line- see http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/FutureT/Orange.html. It could be cheaply made into either a spur of the Orange line or a commuter line spur. Stops would serve Malden, Saugus, western Lynn. The line could terminate at Lynn Central Square.
2. Buy the Watertown Industrial Track from the B&M. As far as I can see, this line is little used by industry. It could be a spur of the Red Line, or a commuter line spur. Stops would serve the Mt. Auburn area of Cambridge, the Watertown Mall, Watertown center. The line could terminate at the current Waltham commuter rail station.

Here’s a map of what the new stops and lines that I propose could do to fill in the gaps in the Boston area rail network. I think all of these projects could be done relatively cheaply, especially relative to the $14 billion or so spent on the Big Dig!

Click here for a high resolution picture

Posted by ecologist at 07:28 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)

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)

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)

There's been no shortage of discussion recently on the "death" of environmentalism, and on the ways progressives in general can sharpen their political message. I thought I would offer a brief speech, which some fantasy politician might give to an audience, in order to show how some of these discussions might be put to good rhetorical use. In what follows, I am conceptually indebted in particular to The State of The World 2005, which focuses on environmental issues from a security perspective.

My fellow Americans, I wanted to say a few words today about America's stewardship of natural resources and the environment. For too long, we have let special interests convince politicians to make decisions on environmental policy that have reduced our nation to dependency, fear, and despair: Dependency on foreign nations for the supply of crude oil that moves our economy; Fear of the mercury and other toxins slowly poisoning our nation's waters and ourselves; Despair at the realization that a way of life in our communities is vanishing.

Our dependency on foreign oil has grown gradually over time, but over the next several decades this dependency will cost this country greatly. As worldwide oil supply ebbs and oil demand continues to increase, oil prices will continue to increase. Worse, we will become more beholden to unstable and undemocratic regimes to provide the oil.  The United States must embark on a mission to steer the American economy toward energy independence. This mission, while difficult, can be completed if we harness the full ingenuity of the American people. Every year we delay beginning this mission, the consequences for our future mount.

At the same time, our fear of the effects on our health of the many toxins being released into the environment has grown. As I have traveled around the country, I have realized there are few topics in which American trust of the federal government is less. Too often, the special interests have convinced the federal government to sit on its hand, even though people were clearly being harmed. On mercury pollution, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency has willfully ignored the mounting evidence of environmental hard in the Northeastern U.S., in an effort to shield coal-burning power plants from full responsibility for their emissions. We must restore the scientific integrity of the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies. We need a system of wise regulation that works for the greater good, and gives us all security in our health.

Finally, there is a sense of despair plaguing America, that the changes in our communities are destroying a way of life. While federal government cannot be backward-looking, seeking to preserve some idyllic past, it can empower local communities to protect the cultural heritage that is important to them. Nowhere is this goal more necessary than with current agricultural policy in Washington, which pushes forth a one-size-fits-all solution. As much as possible, decisions on farm policy should be transferred to the state or local level, where effective plans can be made to preserve family farms. Only with this strategy of a wise and prudent return of power to a more local level can a sense of hope be restored to America's communities, a sense that they control their destiny.

Posted by ecologist at 08:40 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)

I once heard Joseph Chamie, Director of the United Nations Population Division, joke that most people consider the work of demographers dull, while the demographers feel like they are recording the most dramatic event in human history: the demographic transition and the concurrent urbanization of humanity. And the more I think about this statement, as an ecologist, the more I must concur. Most of the major changes in global ecosystems, for good (e.g., regrowth of forest in the northern hemisphere) or ill (e.g., fragmentation of natural habitat), are due in one way or another to this massive shift of people from rural to urban areas.
In developed nations, perhaps because of this environmentalist perspective, urbanization is a bad word; when I mention it in conversations people usually talk about population growth or urban sprawl. These are indeed negative consequences: rapid growth in an urban area poses a severe challenge for transportation and urban planning systems, often resulting in ever increasing gridlock on urban roads. Moreover, rapid growth makes it extremely hard to maintain healthy air, water, and forests.

However, there’s an irony for those of us in the developed work, which mostly live in urban areas, attacking urbanization as something bad. First and foremost, urban life offers opportunities, both cultural and economic, that are simply not available in rural areas. In this sense, urbanization is a natural process most economies go through as the mature. Beyond this, there are numerous positive effects of urbanization. From an environmental perspective, resource use is often more efficient, per-capita, in cities than in rural areas. From a governance perspective, an urban middle-class is often one of the prerequisites for the formation of a democracy. Maybe instead of cursing urbanization, for the challenges it poses, we should all bless it, for the opportunities it represents.

There’s another, deeper irony here in the 21st century. The very concept of a dense urban area, with sidewalks and apartments and a core downtown area, is being reconsidered. Each transportation revolution, from trolleys to interstate highways, has increased the distance people can travel for work and decreased the importance of the downtown of cities. Urban areas all over the world are getting bigger in population, but are not getting denser; instead their boundaries just balloon outward. For example, Manhattan had more people living on it a hundred years ago than today. The Internet should further accelerate this trend, for telecommuting workers can easily be several hours commute from the home office, as long as they can make the trip once every several weeks (face-time still being crucial for proper collaboration). This should, I think, radically change cities, with the core area becoming where the young, the rich, and the artists (who often are economically irrational) live, and with parents and kids moving further out into the exurbs. It makes perfect economic sense, and yet I worry something will be lost culturally when people aren’t born, live, and dies all in one place, and interact with other generations...

Posted by ecologist at 08:32 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)

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)