The Natural Patriot

[Editor’s note: This week’s entry comes from Johhny Cash.  That’s right, the Man in Black. The song itself is, of course, an old traditional whose author has been lost to us.  The poetry in this piece comes in the prayer of Johnny’s spoken-word introduction. I don’t know if these are his own words, or those of the anonymous cowboy. But they send shivers down my spine every time I hear them. They are written in the plain Christian idiom of his tradition, but they also speak more broadly to the spirit of natural patriotism. Sixth in a series.]

Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie
Traditional, interpreted by Johhny Cash

Lord, I’ve never lived where churches grow.
I loved creation better as it stood
that day you finished it so long ago
and looked upon your work and called it good.
I know that others find you in the light
that sifted down through tinted window panes.
And yet I seem to feel you near tonight
in this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.
I thank you, Lord, that I’m placed so well
that you’ve made my freedom so complete
that I’m no slave to whistle, clock or bell,
nor weak-eyed prisoner of Wall or Street.
Just let me live my life as I’ve begun
and give me work that’s open to the sky.
Make me a partner of the wind and sun
and I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.
Let me be easy on the man that’s down.
Let me be square and generous with all.
I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in town
but never let them say I’m mean or small.
Make me as big and open as the plains
and honest as the horse between my knees,
clean as a wind that blows behind the rains,
free as the hawk that circles down the breeze.
Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget –
You know about the reasons that are hid.
You understand the things that gall or fret.
Well, you knew me better than my mother did.
Just keep an eye on all that’s done or said
and right me sometimes when I turn aside.
And guide me on that long, dim trail ahead
that stretches upward toward the great divide.

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

The NYT has a great article about Doug Tallamy, a fellow ecologist at the University of Delaware who studies insects.  He and his wife are on a mission to reclaim their farm from aggressive invasive plant species and make it hospitable again for . . . maggots.  Why maggots?  because chickadees love to eat them. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the frightful scene that develops in your fetid garbage can, but rather the larvae of native flies that burrow into goldentod stems and other plants in the yard. And not just maggots but the menagerie of inconspicuous creeping and crawling and flitting creatures that metamorphose into butterflies and that nourish the birds. 

Theirs is a personal project of ecological engineering to support biodiversity.  It resonated with me immediately since, in the warming weekends of spring, I like to go out and whack back the vines and pull out the invasive privet thickets that sprout up everywhere, and clear patches around native saplings that are struggling under honeysuckle, and so on. 

“Restoration ecology” is not quite the appropriate term since some of the plants they foster are not native to their specific region.  On the other hand, they do support native insects, and therefore higher levels in the food web.  And in any case, as climate change and other environmental impacts progress, we need to shift our focus to “emerging ecosystems”.  While remaining (or becoming) aware of the sometimes forgotten baselines of how nature used to look and work, we also need to incorporate the reality that geographc ranges of species are shifting, some invaders are here to stay, and some natives are disappearing inexorably.  How do we maintain biodiversity and functional, resilient ecosystem in this new world order? 

The answers are not yet clear.  But efforts like those of the Tallamys are  small experiments toward finding the answers. Doug has written a book about this, “Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens“, which I very much look forward to reading.  His basic thesis is deceptively simple: bugs are the key link in the food chain.  And bugs tend to be extremely finicky eaters.  Many are strict specialists on one or a few types of plants.  This means that yards and gardens filled with ornamental plants introduced from elsewhere often support only invasive pest species and not the native insects adapted to local conditions and enjoyed by local birds and other animals.  Encouraging native plants — and insects — is a concrete way to restiore ecological balance to the patches of land over which we personally have stewardship. 

And that is an exciting and hopeful message.  We often feel helpless when confronted with all the bad news about environmental degradation.  Here is something we can do personally to sustain biodiversity.  Nurture native plants and the creatures that depend on them.  One yard at a time. Power to the people (and other organisms)!

It happens gradually, of course, so there is no bright line that marks the beginning of the new year.  Crocuses come up through the snow sometimes, long before anyone else would say it is spring.  Daffodils are in full bloom around here.  The small scarlet flowers of the ubiquitous red maples that haze the late winter woods are actually beginning already to fall and collect in drifts around the porch.  Traditionally, robins have signalled the beginning of spring, although in this neck of the woods we seem nowadays to have a few around for most of the winter. 

Sometimes you just feel it in the air, something you can’t quite put your finger on, like that warm, portentious wind that Pliny is said to have believed impregnated the mares prancing in the spring pastures. 

But for me, the real turning point, the signal that always fills me with the excitement and beauty of the world waking up again is the first evening when I hear the unmistakable chorus of spring peepers in the woods (you can listen here).  Generally it’s a warmish night shortly after a good strong rain.  The frogs have emerged from their winter torpor and are looking for love, so to speak, and a good little pond to lay their eggs in.

This year, spring began two nights ago, when we came home from work a bit late and suddenly the chorus emerged into consciousness from the background noise.  Winter is gone!

Pseudacris crucifer (formerly known as Hyla crucifer) are tiny little frogs only an inch or so long as adults.  The genus name comes from the Greek meaning “false locust”, presumably because they sound like a cricket or locust (and are not much bigger than one, for that matter).  The species name crucifer comes from the cross-shaped marking on its back.

I can vividly remember seeing them for the first time in my life — maybe the only time, though I’ve heard them many times – when I was maybe eight or nine at Bull Run Park in Northern Virginia and being mesmerized.  As a suburban kid this was real, exotic wildilfe to me. Complete animals, so tiny and beautful.

A year or two ago, I heard them calling during daytime, strangely enough, from a drainage ditch near the dump.  It gave me a surge of hope that, even in this tired landscape, Nature remains resilient.  Many happy returns, little friends.

Interesting editorial in Nature today. It details a phenomenon that, sadly, is characteristic of this administration, thankfully now a lame duck.  I quote the editorial in full:

The EPA’s tailspin

The director of the Environmental Protection Agency is sabotaging both himself and his agency.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is fast losing the few shreds of credibility it has left. The Bush administration has always shown more zeal in protecting business interests than the environment. But the agency’s current administrator, Stephen Johnson, a veteran EPA toxicologist who was promoted to the top slot in 2005, has done so with reckless disregard for law, science or the agency’s own rules — or, it seems, the anguished protests of his own subordinates.

On 27 February, to take the first of two examples that surfaced last week, Senator Barbara Boxer (Democrat, California) used a routine budget hearing to give Johnson a grilling. Why hadn’t he given her state permission to regulate the carbon dioxide emissions of vehicle exhausts? California needs a waiver from the EPA to regulate in this way, and in the past such waivers have been granted easily. And, Boxer reminded him via a series of leaked memos and PowerPoint presentations, Johnson’s own top-level staff begged him to sign the waiver in this case. “This is a choice only you can make,” one colleague wrote to him. “But I ask you to think about the history and the future of the agency in making it. If you are asked to deny this waiver, I fear the credibility of the agency that we both love will be irreparably damaged.”

In December, Johnson announced he would refuse the waiver, an act that would also deny permission to more than a dozen other states seeking to base their exhaust regulations on California’s. Johnson argued that climate change is not a local phenomenon, so dealing with it isn’t what the authors of the Clean Air Act intended for the waiver system.

Although logical, this argument is similar to that made by Johnson’s EPA in an earlier case involving Massachusetts, when the agency fought against CO2 regulation all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost. His insistence on using it again can perhaps best be understood from the fact that Johnson answers to a White House that is hostile to regulation on principle. It is also worth noting that his refusal documentation, made official on 29 February, extensively quotes an industry trade association, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

The second example came on 29 February, in the form of a joint letter to Johnson from the four labour unions representing most of the EPA’s professional staff. Listing examples of alleged bad faith by Johnson, the unions essentially refused to work with him until he cleans up his act. Among the complaints was an assertion that he repeatedly ignored the EPA’s official Principles of Scientific Integrity, citing “fluoride drinking water standards, organophosphate pesticide registration, control of mercury emissions from power plants” — and the waiver refusal.

In a rational world, Johnson would resign in favour of someone who could at least feign an interest in the environment. Alas, it seems that he will probably stay on until January 2009, refusing waivers, fighting lawsuits and further depressing employees’ morale. In the meantime, we can only offer those employees a fantasy: the White House doesn’t want the agency to do anything, so shut it down until next January. Take some fully paid sabbatical time to relax, and prepare for a return to the old-fashioned protecting of the environment that so many of you joined the agency for.

Ten months left now . . .

I suppose we should have known it was all too good to be true.  What could be wrong with using plants for fuel?  They take carbon out of the air, so burning them up in the tank just puts it back up there — no net change, right?

Wrong.

We’ve already heard about the massive quantities of synthetic fertilizer and water required to keep a biofuel crop like corn going.  And there is the distinctly distasteful problem that the corn would do a lot more good feeding someone.  Indeed, the headlong rush into converting cropland to biofuel cultivation is already raising food prices.

As if that weren’t bad enough, it turns out that even where the major biofuels would seem to have a hands-down advantage over petroleum, i.e., on the balance sheet for net carbon emissions, the story is quite a bit less rosy than it appears.

A new study by Fargione et al in Science has crunched the numbers to show why. The key advance here is that these authors calculated the amount of carbon present in both the standing biomass (i.e., trees) and in the underlying soils on the land that is cleared for biofuel crops.  They then estimated how much of that carbon is released into the atmosphere, and over how long a time span, by burning or microbial decomposition in exposed soil.  It turns out that a large quantity of carbon is lost gradually from the soil over the course of decades after land has been cleared.  Fargione and colleagues call this the “carbon debt” from land conversion:

“Over time, biofuels from converted land can repay this carbon debt if their production and combustion have net [greenhouse gas, GHG] emissions that are less than the life-cycle emissions of the fossil fuels they displace. Until the carbon debt is repaid, biofuels from converted lands have greater GHG impacts than those of the fossil fuels they displace.”

Greater GHG impacts than petroleum. The figure below shows the numbers for several major types of biofuel operations hat involve land conversion. 

The figure shows for each of nine scenarios (A) the carbon debt, i.e., the CO2 emissions from soils and biomass lost or degraded during habitat conversion, (B)  the percentage of that debt due to biofuel production as opposed to other uses, (C) the annual carbon repayment rate, meaning the greenhouse gas reduction from fossil fuel use displaced by the biofuel production, as well as carbon storage in soils, and — here’s the kicker — (D) the number of years required to repay biofuel carbon debt.   The results are, to put it mildly, sobering.  For example, conversion of native grassland (if you could find some) to cornfields for ethanol production requires 93 years to break even.  In Indonesia and Malaysia, where vast swaths of virgin rainforest are being burned down every year to plant oil palms, it would take four centuries to repay the debt. As the authors note: 

“Our analyses suggest that biofuels, if produced on converted land, could, for long periods of time, be much greater net emitters of greenhouse gases than the fossil fuels that they typically displace. All but two—sugarcane ethanol and soybean biodiesel on Cerrado—would generate greater GHG emissions for at least half a century, with several forms of biofuel production from land conversion doing so for centuries. At least for current or developing biofuel technologies, any strategy to reduce GHG emissions that causes land conversion from native ecosystems to cropland is likely to be counter-productive.”

Now, lest I be accused (again) of being pessimistic, there is some good news of sorts here if you hunt for it.  The main point is that not all biofuels are created equal. As I’ve discussed before, you can avoid the carbon debt by brewing fuel from plants growing on land that is too degraded to produce much of anything else, or from harvesting of natural prairie vegetation that does not require the land clearing that sends all that wood and humus and soil carbon up in smoke.  Doing that on a commercial scale is of course not as straightforward as growing corn or soybeans, but these data emphasize that it is well worth exploring.

Maybe that way we can minimize the hot air.

[Source: Fargione, J., J. Hill, D. Tilman, S. Polasky, and P. Hawthorne. 2008. Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt. Science 319: 1235 - 1238.]

Tired of sifting through the virtual world for interesting stuff?

Blog carnivals in two pleasing, environmentally friendly colors are now online. Get your blue at Kate Wing’s blog, host this time around of the tenth monthly Carnival of the Blue, which covers the waterfront as the saying goes . . .

 . . . and your green at Confessions of a Closet Environmentalist, this week’s host (they’re a bit ahead of us above the tide line). Good stuff at both venues.