The Natural Patriot

In November 2006, fourteen marine scientists and resource economists (including yours truly) led by Boris Worm of Dalhousie University published a paper in Science documenting the functional importance of marine biological diversity and linking it in particular to sustainability of fisheries. The paper generated global press coverage (the breadth of which is illustrated by its appearance on both Fox News and Al Jazeera), primarily because of its suggestion that, if current trends continue, most of the world’s fisheries could be headed for collapse by mid-century.The paper also, predictably, generated a vehement backlash from some quarters.  Alas, many of them appear to have paid more attention to the press release, which headlined with projected seafood collapse, than the paper itself, which focused on links between biodiversity and ecosystem services such as seafood production.

Today’s issue of Science publishes three of the critiques of the original Worm et al. paper, and allowed us to respond (you can read the whole shebang here).  Read the rest of this entry »

[Part 1 in an occasional series on heroes of Natural Patriotism] 

Rachel Carson was born a century ago on this day, 27 May 1907.  With her book, Silent Spring, and her courageous fight against indiscriminate broadcast of toxins into the environment, she gave birth to modern environmentalism.  Largely on the basis of this accomplishment, Time magazine has called her one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. 

Her success in this seminal crusade predictably provoked a bitter backlash from the agricultural and chemical industries, with accusations that she was unprofessional, a “hysterical female” and a communist.  Alas, over the ensuing decades, these hacks have organized into a cottage industry of well-funded and surprisingly savage counter-propagandists whose activity has taken a sharp spike as the centennial of her birth approached. Read the rest of this entry »

[cross-posted at the Earth Forum] 

Global threats to biodiversity are well documented and widely appreciated, yet the socioeconomic factors driving losses of biodiversity are still poorly understood. A potentially central factor in this equation is economic inequality, which has been shown to affect public health and has been linked to various environmental problems.

In a new paper in PLoS One, G.M. Mikkelson and colleagues from McGill University in Montreal asked how economic inequality may be related to biodiversity loss. They found that both among countries, and among US states, the number of plant and vertebrate species listed as threatened or declining by the IUCN increases substantially with the Gini ratio of income inequality. The latter statistic, applied to households at the country scale and families at the state scale, can theoretically vary between 0 and 1. A score of zero indicates that all households or families in a given society have exactly the same income, while one means that a single household or family earns all of the income.

The authors checked the robustness of the trends they found by testing whether the effect of income inequality remained significant after controlling for geography, and for the demise of communist regimes in certain countries. In both analyses among countries and among US states, the connection between income inequality and biodiversity loss persisted even after controlling for these factors, as well as biophysical conditions, human population size, and per capita GDP or income. According to the authors:

“In general, unless current trends toward greater inequality are reversed, it may become increasingly hard to conserve the rich variety of the living world. Conversely, if we can learn to share economic resources more fairly with fellow members of our own species, it may help us to share ecological resources more fairly with our fellow species.”

Original source (free content):

Mikkelson GM, Gonzalez A, Peterson GD. 2007. Economic inequality predicts biodiversity loss. PLoS One 2007 2:e444.

[Photograph: Rhinos grazing in Matopos National Park, Zimbabwe, by Philip Niewold]

Summertime and the livin’ is easy. Not any more.

A NASA study published last month suggests that summers in my neck o’ the woods here in the eastern USA are going to be pretty brutal in the coming century.

The maps shows results of a computer model projection of average daily maximum temperatures over the eastern United States for July 2085 (left) and July 1993 (right). Areas in violet shading show temperatures of 26°C (79°F); green 30°C (86°F); yellow 34°C (93°F); red 38°C (100°F); dark purple 42°C (108°F). Credit: NASA/GISS.

The researchers used one of the global models from the recently issued climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict future changes in atmospheric circulation patterns resulting from greenhouse gas accumulation. This information was then fed into the weather prediction model to forecast summer-to-summer temperature variability in the eastern United States during the 2080s. They found that extreme summer temperatures developed when CO2 emissions were assumed to continue increasing at about 2% a year, the “business as usual” scenario. According to NASA:

“The research found that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons – when precipitation falls infrequently – July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.” 

Ouch. 

Remember Enron?  Of course — who could forget?  The company that looked like it was on top of the world, growing and profiting like gangbusters – until the bottom fell out and thousands of employees and stockholders lost their shirts, not to mention their pants, houses, cars, and any hope of a civilized retirement.  All because the company used deceptive accounting principles that misprepresented the true nature and value of their activities.  What a tragedy.

There is a broader lesson here that hasn’t received much attention in the mainstream press. The world economy as a whole may be in a similar situation, for different reasons, on a colossal scale.  Ecological economist Robert Costanza of the University of Vermont argues in a recent article in the Encyclopedia of Earth that the classical economics that guides major decisions about national and international policy is full of the sorts of blind spots and misleading indicators that distort society’s sense of well-being. These flawed indicators may be leading us to the cliff’s edge of disaster.  Read the rest of this entry »

Environmental Defense is drafting a Declaration of New Patriotism in anticipation of the 4th of July, 2007.  And you can contribute. This is something that the Natural Patriot can get fully behind.  It’s inspiring to see the idea of natural patriotism and bipartisan stewardship of the environment gathering steam. Let’s hope it rolls all the way through Congress and into the 2008 election.

Here is the seed that begins the Declaration, the intention being to incorporate the greater community’s comments (1108 received as of this writing!) in drafting the final document:

Global warming is the crisis of our time.

As we prepare to celebrate our nation’s birthday, we renew our commitment to the qualities and values that have guided our nation for more than 200 years.

We the undersigned, pledge to:

• Be mindful consumers, by minimizing our personal global warming “footprint;”
• Be active citizens, by pressing our elected officials to take urgent action now, and by pressing all candidates for office to commit to passing strong legislation to cut America’s global warming pollution;

Please help us add to this declaration. Thank you.

My own 2 cents worth:

“The Natural Patriot’s creed is love of, and a strong moral of stewardship for, the homeland.  What sets us apart from the generic Patriot is a broader vision of the homeland, which includes not only the arbitrary nation of birth or the chosen nation of adoption but the entirety of the ever smaller world we all share.  And by the world is meant not just geography but what makes this world unique in the known universe—the interdependent web of life on which rest squarely our own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  What, in other words, is poetically called the Creation.  Today, in the new millennium, people, commerce, and information move largely unfettered across the invisible boundaries of nations, as do the plants and animals that, intentionally or otherwise, associate with us.  Whether we choose to recognize it or not, we are one world.” 

[Photo by Harry122.]

Jerry Falwell is gone, leaving a troubled legacy, and with him goes an era of monolithic fundamentalist influence on American politics. 

The Reverend was a reliable foe of protecting the Creation. Just recently, he famously railed against the growing concern among evangelicals about global warming and environmental issues as a distraction from the “real” issues important to Christians like, you guessed it, homosexual marriage and abortion:  

“It is Satan’s attempt to redirect the church’s primary focus . . . the idea is to divert your energies from the message and the mission and the vision of the church, to something less.”

Or, alternatively, one might interpret Falwell’s statement as an attempt to redirect Christians’ focus from an increasingly obvious problem that most everyone except he and others of like mind recognizes. Evidently, liberals like me are not the only ones who won’t miss his characteristically divisive message. In an interview with National Public Radio, one of the emerging leaders of the “new” religious right, Reverend Joel Hunter of the Northland mega-church in Longwood, Florida, tried to bring evangelical attention back to basics:

 ”The problem has become that we have paid so much attention to the human being in the womb that we have forgotten about the human being out of the womb . . . It’s become such a focus for some leaders that they don’t want to address the other pro-life issues, such as climate change, such as poverty, such as AIDS.”

To that I say: Amen brother. It reminds me of Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s statement some years ago that the policies and priorities of religious Conservatives suggest that they believe that “life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

It’s a relief to hear an evangelical leader — for a change — refocusing attention on the broader issues that any compassionate person, and certainly any thoughtful reader of the Bible, should be concerned about.   Being “pro-life” should mean exactly that – concerned about protecting life in general. Pro-life should include protection for the diverse species that we share the earth with, and that support our own well-being.  Protecting that life, the Creation generally, was, in the words of Reverend Hunter, “the first order we had when we got put into the garden: Cultivate it and keep it.”  And pro-life should also mean protecting the quality of human life everywhere.  By that definition, you can count me staunchly pro-life.  And I vote my values. 

Fundamentalist Christians appear to have a new ally in their crusade against the evil of evolution-based biological science: Fundamentalist Islam. It’s an interesting, albeit frustrating, exercise to read through this nonsense and attempt to decipher the convoluted logic behind the claim that (the coyly unnamed) Al Qaeda and other agents of mayhem are motivated not by religion but by (are you ready for this?) the legacy of the the gentle English naturalist.

Obviously, violence and warfare predated Darwin.  They’ve been with us since the beginning of time.  It is true that our basic human natures, molded in the crucible of our long evolution, have left us with some rather unpleasantly aggressive and selfish tendencies.  Is that Darwin’s fault?  One might as well blame Isaac Newton for the fact that trees sometimes fall on people’s houses.

It is equally obvious that some of the most horrific acts of mass violence in human history have been motivated by religion, or if you prefer, perversions of religion.   Read the rest of this entry »

It’s widely appreciated that the world’s biodiversity is in crisis — that many species are in danger of extinction.  How do we know this?  Because ecologists and other environmental field scientists have studied their abundance and sometimes obscure habits, tracked their movements in space and their fluctuations through time, and done the mathematical modeling to derive forecasts of their likely population trends.

Now the Guardian UK reports that, in Britain, the expertise needed for this tracking of wild species of plants and animals and other “natural resources” is dwindling because ecologists themselves are an endangered species.  Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve got to give creationists some credit for pure mulish stubborn determination. Their strategies to remove evolution from classrooms are themselves a classic example of evolution in response to a changing environment, developing from the initially amateurish claims of “creation science” to the recent hubbub about “intelligent design”, cleverly clothed in its veneer of empirical credibility.  In every case these efforts have been trounced by state and federal courts as transparent attempts to inject fundamentalist Christianity into public education.

Despite its losing record, however, “creation science” is not yet extinct. Like a punch-drunk boxer, it keeps coming back for more. 

Now, in fact, it seems to have come full-circle.  Licking their wounds from the landmark decision of Bush-appointed federal judge John Edward Jones in the Dover school board case (who noted that the suggested textbook disclaimer showed “breathtaking inanity“), the troops are regrouping around their original unabashed embrace of the straight-up biblical creation story as the literal account of the universe’s origin. There remains the nagging problem, however, that no reputable scientific journal has published any paper that supports creationism.

Hence the new International Journal of Creation Research. No, I am not making this up: Read the rest of this entry »