The Natural Patriot

[Natural Patriot’s semi-trivia contest: My 11-year-old son wants to know if any alert reader out there can identify the source of that quote.]

In the meantime, a note to the Ex-President-to-be: Dude, stick with the flag pin on the lapel. At this stage in your administration’s tailspin, I would recommend accessories that divert, rather than draw, attention. Yes, I know, you were only being polite — and perhaps trying to salvage a few Hispanic votes for the GOP in advance of the 2012 campaign. But it’s really not you.

And on a related note: I realize that this is tantamount to kicking someone when they’re down, but I cannot resist passing on the link to this astonishing video of the Governor of Alaska, allegedly being interviewed after the ceremonial pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey — while its pals are getting the bass-o-matic treatment in the background!:

Check out this videoVerily, truth is stranger than fiction. I know that, strictly speaking, this has little to do with Natural Patriotism, but give a guy a break. After eight years, there’s a lot of stuff pent up here that needs to be cleared out of the system to restore a healthy outlook on life . . .

The degrading global environment has raised concern, even alarm, for many reasons, but one of the most important involves the issue of how loss of species may influence nature’s ability to continue providing life support to us — “ecosystem services” in the common parlance. Ecosystem services include the various processes necessary to life and well-being that we get free of charge, and usually unnoticed, from the natural world: purification of water by percolation through soil and plant communities, moderation of climate by forest cover, production of fish for human consumption, protection of coastal communities from storms by mangrove thickets, and so on.

It’s well appreciated of course that nature, in a very general sense, is essential to our well-being (although this seemingly obvious fact appears to have escaped the understanding of many mainstream economists — see here for an antidote). But what about “biodiversity” — that somewhat nebulous term we hear so frequently these days? What real difference does it make to us whether we have one or ten or a hundred species in our backyards? Can we just pick the several types of plants and animals we think that we will need in perpetuity and plant them under a glass dome on the moon, as some people in surprisingly high positions appear to believe?

The general question is how biodiversity affects the way ecosystems work, and more particularly how they work for us. This question has been a hotbed of scientific research in the last 15 years (and a strong personal interest of mine). Ecologists have conducted hundreds of experiments to determine how the number of species in a habitat affects the total production of plant biomass, the use of soil nutrients, the production of small animals that serve as food for fish, the ecosystem’s ability to rebound from disturbances, and so on.

There are are now enough such experiments that it’s been possible to synthesize the results in search of generalizations, some of which I have participated in myself (e.g., here). These show pretty clearly that, in a nutshell, more species means higher production and more efficient use of resources.

But what about the real world? I have argued that these experiments, despite being small-scale, of short duration, and under artificially simple conditions, are probably conservative — that is, the influence of biodiversity on functioning of ecosystems in the real world is likely more, not less, important than we see in small-scale experiments. But the real test of this idea will come from studies in the real world, studies of how loss of species influences processes that are directly important to us where we live.

A new study published in the open-access journal PLoS Biology does just that. John Swaddle and Stavros Calos tackled a specific question about how biodiversity influences risk of disease, namely the hypothesis of the “dilution effect”. The idea applies to diseases that humans contract from animals in the environment, such as lyme disease, west nile virus, and bird flu. The hypothesis goes like this: when diversity of animal hosts is high, the disease organisms that live in them cannot be transmitted or grow as effectively, because the animal species differ in their susceptibility to infection, the population sizes of individual species tend to be lower (and hence support lower disease populations) in diverse communities, etc. But what is the evidence for this?

Swaddle and Calos used a clever approach to test the dilution hypothesis for West Nile Virus (WNV), which is carried by birds. They compared counties in the eastern USA that reported WNV with adjacent counties that reported no cases of WNV (shown as red and blue respectively — no relation to their political leanings, as far as I know), a pair-wise comparative test that controlled for differences in climate and other regional environmental factors. They also used human census data to account for human demographic and socioeconomic variation between the counties.

Supporting the dilution effect of biodiversity, their analysis showed that incidence of West Nile Virus in humans was lower in counties where bird diversity is high, and that, quite surprisingly, bird diversity explained more variation in disease incidence (roughly 50% of total) than urbanization or socioeconomics. The mechanisms appear complex but support a component of the “dilution effect” by which higher host diversity reduced abundance of those bird species that are the most susceptible hosts.The results of this study generalize previous evidence of the dilution effect, notably the similar finding that lyme disease in humans is more prevalent in areas where diversity of small mammals (the usual hosts of the organism that produces lyme disease) is reduced. In both cases, lower-diversity communities tend to favor the host species most likely to carry and transmit infections. In other words, loss of biodiversity is sickening — not just esthetically and ethically, but literally.

This study is one of a growing number of examples supporting the suggestion that biodiversity enhances ecosystem services not only in small-scale experiments, but also in real-world landscapes.

[Original source: Swaddle JP, Calos SE. 2008. Increased Avian Diversity Is Associated with Lower Incidence of Human West Nile Infection: Observation of the Dilution Effect. PLoS One 3(6): e2488. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002488]

[Below is a letter making the rounds on the internet from Professor Steve Carpenter, an eminent ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, offering advice to President-elect Obama on the importance of serious and prompt environmental action as he begins his presidency. The text of the letter and a petition you can sign (for whatever that is worth) in support of its goals can be found here.]

November 2008

“Dear President-Elect Obama,

Congratulations on your election, which has created a sense of optimism in America that has never occurred before in my lifetime.

Yet earth’s life support systems have deteriorated more in our lifetimes than in any other era of human history. With earth’s population increasing, and consumption per person growing much faster than population, humans are heating the climate, polluting air and water, degrading landscapes and turning coastal oceans to dead zones. America’s food supply depends on a few fragile crops, grown using practices that degrade soil, air and water to yield foods of low nutritional value that harm our health. The U.S. is not investing in the education and innovation needed to create agriculture and energy technologies that can get us through the 21st century. Details are found in a consensus report of more than 1300 leading scientists from more than 90 nations including the U.S. (http://www.MAweb.org). These findings support the following priorities for your presidency.

Decrease America’s dependency on coal and oil and increase the supply of energy from non-polluting technologies: We must decrease emission of greenhouse gases, and the era of cheap oil is over. We must accelerate development of clean energy technologies using wind, sun and tides. These investments must be based on scientific information to avoid bogus remedies, such as grain biofuels, that sound good but do not in fact solve the problem. We must increase conservation through better buildings, efficient transportation, and renewal of industry. We must improve agriculture and forestry practices to reduce energy consumption and increase carbon storage in soil.

Stop subsidizing agriculture that destroys land, water and health. Create incentives for agriculture that maintains land and water resources and yields healthy food: Agriculture must shift to practices that use less energy for tillage and transport of food, produce healthy food for local consumption, train more people in diverse farming practices, build soil instead of degrading and eroding it, and maintain clean water and air. These reforms can be accomplished by reforming federal subsidies.

Have a population policy: In global impact, the U.S. is the world’s most overpopulated nation, mainly because of our high per-capita consumption. Our population is growing rapidly. Global population growth is a key driver of degraded land, water, air and climate. Education of women is a powerful lever to restrain population growth. If all the world’s women are educated to high-school level, human impact on our life-support system will be more than 30% lower by 2050. As a father of daughters, it is especially appropriate for you to support education for all of the world’s women.

Invest in the education and innovation needed to create a society that could thrive in the 21st century and beyond: Even though our universities and research centers are the envy of the world, science education of the general population of the U.S. is weak and must be made stronger. Education must be reformed to encourage creativity. There are enormous opportunities for innovations in agriculture, energy, and infrastructure that will lead to a moderate climate, rich landscapes, and clean air and water into the future. These technological opportunities are being seized by other nations while the U.S. lags behind. We must restore American leadership in creating technology that maintains our life support system while providing the energy, food and shelter that people need.

Sincerely yours,

Steve Carpenter

Stephen Alfred Forbes Professor of Zoology
Center for Limnology
University of Wisconsin
Madison, Wisconsin 53706 USA”

[I beg your pardon if this seems a bit over the top. They don’t let me out of my cage very much . . . and how often do we get a chance like this?]

What a time to be an American!

After so long in a dark age, we can finally see the light. It has been said thousands of times in the last weeks and months that this is an historic election — that is not just media hyperbole. Who would have dreamed even two or three years ago that a black man — and one with a so clearly foreign name — would be the next President of the United States? Who could have guessed that we would arrive so soon at a time when “the race card” — one of the central boogeyman of politics and of America’s ambivalent soul for centuries — essentially evaporated? Who would have imagined that in 2008 we could have a national political discussion (to use a charitable word for the usual public discourse on politics) about two candidates for the highest office in the nation — many would say in the world — that had so little mention of the issue that has so often in the past been the elephant in the room? I personally doubt that it is possible to truly reach the oft-mentioned ideal of a “color-blind society” — some degree of prejudice is probably hard-wired into our genes, in the sense of inherent distrust of the unfamiliar or different. But it can be overcome. This election proves as nothing else could that this country has made a quantum leap in that direction.

I have felt repeatedly in the last two days like a sudden flood of sunshine has come into a dank cave that we’ve been in for so long, a hole that the idealogues of the current administration, through a combination of criminal ineptitude, arrogance, and paranoia, have dug us into and from which we’d begun to despair we would ever get out. I am not so naive to think that it will all be sweetness and light from here on out. President-elect Obama inherits a catastrophe on nearly every front — military, economic, geopolitical, environmental — and it will surely get worse before it gets better, at least financially. We are all in for a rough ride. But even with all that, the mere fact that this nation, which had devolved in the eyes of the rest of the planet to a bunch of myopic, superstitious bullies, could come together and elect a black man as President — by a two to one margin — that alone can only cause a sea change of almost unprecedented proportions in our image in the world. And the news and reactions I see here in Portugal amply bears that out.

Yet, despite its far-ranging significance, even the historic election of an African-American is in some sense almost a side issue. The most important thing is that we have elected not another cookie-cutter political product buoyed along by slogans and spin machine but an actual thoughtful statesman who successfully avoided the toxic culture of personal destruction that has increasingly consumed American politics in recent decades. Living in Virginia, where for the first time in decades we actually saw campaign ads for President, I can attest to this: Obama focused on his opponent’s voting record. Not on ties to ancient scandals (though McCain has some), nor on his choice of running mate (shockingly irresponsible as it was), not on convoluted claims of financial connections to alleged terrorists. Not even on McCain’s apparent uncertainty about the USA’s alliance with Spain. Obama refused to stoop to the level of is opponents. He rose above it all. Against all odds, and no doubt against the judgment of many seasoned advisors, he kept the focus on real issues. And it worked. In addition to everything else that’s been said about him, Obama made some small but important progress back in the direction of a civil society. Democracy is working again.

Hail to the Chief.

[And: You go, Judith Warner!]

The big day has arrived at last (son: “Dad, will we still have to watch politics every night after the election?). I am on my way out the door to two meetings in Europe, plane leaving Philadelphia at 4:35 this afternoon. I am already experiencing withdrawal symptoms about not being able to watch the blow-by-blow tonight while in the air (perhaps they’ll have the cheesy airport version of CNN on the plane for all the other junkies like myself). On the other hand I’m very intrigued at being able to see the immediate aftermath of the election from the other side of the pond. If time — and jet lag — permit, your ace correspondent will report on the election results from Portugal tomorrow. Stay tuned . . .