The Natural Patriot

. . . is up at Cephalopodcast — this month’s round-up of blue bloggers (meaning ocean-themed, as opposed to morose and crooning about lost love or some such ill).

I was kindly invited by Ava at the Reef Tank blog to contribute a post to a series they are featuring on climate change and its particular connections to marine ecosystems.

I took the opportunity to organize some of my thoughts from various presentations I’d done recently on climate change in the mid-Atlantic coastal zone of North America.  The result has now been posted: “Bracing for a Sea Change“.

The Reef Tank blog also features lots of other interesting material, including several posts from my colleague and friend John Bruno on coral reefs (see one example here).

Check it out!

[Just returned from two weeks in the Land Down Under.  After a workshop in Sydney, we flew to New Zealand and the family spent a week in Gisborne on North Island – Whale Rider country. Very beautiful – dramatic craggy coastlines, gorges through the mountains cloaked in Paleozoic vegetation, tree ferns everywhere, in the dim shade everything covered with mosses, liverworts, brilliant little coral-colored fungi, delicate creepers, ferns of all kinds. Then there is the ocean, which produced something completely unexpected:]

We’d been told by the restaurant owner next door that a dolphin has made its home in a small Bay south of here on the Mahia peninsula and reportedly enjoys, even seeks out, human company. OK. I’m a natural skeptic, and I’ve also been a marine biologist for almost 30 years, which means that the topic of dolphins regularly comes up from civilians at cocktail parties and what not. Everyone loves dolphins, wants to swim with them, share crystals, etc. But in general my sense has been that dolphins do not want to play with us. Why would they? So I nodded politely at all this.  But I was intrigued.  So with a cloudless blue sky and a free day ahead of us, the boy and I headed south to investigate. There are few roads in this neck of the woods so it wasn’t difficult to find our way and after an hour or so of driving we came on a beach – a beautiful strand framed by rocky headlands, which would surely be thronged with people and snarled lines of traffic anywhere in the USA.

But it wasn’t thronged, not in this awe-inspiring country where people are outnumbered by sheep. The water was calm and from the road we spotted a group of maybe ten figures wading in waist-deep water and, sure enough, on closer examination, a dorsal fin was intermittently visible. We hurriedly donned our swimsuits and jogged down the beach and waded into the cool water. There, an adult dolphin, perhaps 8 or 9 feet in length, was slowly cruising the shallows, carrying a diver’s fin on its muzzle, occasionally prodding the wide-eyed onlookers to toss it for him, circling around, enjoying (apparently) a gentle rub under the chin. We stroked his skin, which had the consistency of hard rubber, with a slick surface. We gamely tossed the fin, patted him as he swam by, dodged his misty exhalations, and generally watched in wonder at this strange phenomenon. The locals call him Moko, which I gathered from our Maori guide the next day is a shortened form of an affectionate word for a child that expresses its belonging to the whole community.  Evidently Moko has been a regular at this beach, hanging with the locals, for two years (two years and two days, one woman there told us).

We spent nearly an hour in the water with him, far and away the closest contact I’ve ever had with a dolphin, the boy (and I) enraptured and I reflecting on what a once-in-a-lifetime experience this was. It jolted me into pondering afresh what goes through the mind, by all accounts of an intelligence rivaling our own, of a dolphin? What could this being, this mammalian fish at home in its intricate seascape of clicks and whistles and echoes, its unfathomable intuition of the shoals where fish gather, the subtle, shifting, borders of watery currents in the sea, its strong family ties, what could this creature want with us? Is it an explorer as some of us are? The odd one that feels more kinship with other species than with its own kind, as again some people do? A lonely outcast from the conventional society of dolphindom? An eccentric?

And what does it feel as it weaves among the pairs of lumbering legs and through the cacophonous splashing and shouting of these apparently aware but unintelligibly strange creatures at the edge of the dry world? Does it know that these legs belong to the same creatures that are inexorably changing the watery world its ancestors have known intimately for some millions of years? How could it not know? Surely an animal with the intelligence that its brain size and structure and behavior suggest it possesses could not have escaped the realization, the connection, between us and the growing sickness of its underwater home, that the noisy boats and nets and hooks that relentlessly drag away its food and habitat are operated by these same curious bipeds. Surely the dolphin, its kind if not this individual, has made the connection, as its eyes breach the surface along its wide wanderings, between the density of humans and the sediments and trouble washing off the land to murk up the adjacent sea and confound its sonic seascape? Could this individual even be a missionary of sorts, a lone voice in the deteriorating marine wilderness attempting to make contact in the desperate hope that, for lack of a better word, love might turn the tide? Almost certainly we will never know.

And it suddenly strikes me as perverse that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars launching modern-day rosetta stones into space and monitoring the faint trickle of cosmic electronic noise at the far reaches in a grandiose search for “intelligent life” in the distant universe, somehow – astonishingly – missing that the most incredible manifestations of intelligent life are immediately under our noses, and all we can think to do with them is render their carcasses into meat and oil, or wrench off their long tusks to make baubles and leave the rest rotting on the savannah in view of their own children, or confine them behind plate glass with a beach ball.

What exactly do we mean by intelligent life?

My colleague John Feeney has been working tirelessly to break through the widespread taboo against discussing the root cause of global society’s manifold, seemingly unrelated, yet accelerating problems: there are too many of us.  And we use too many resources, of course, but let’s not let that divert our attention from the very basic fact that the earth is finite and we cannot sustain continual growth in population or per capita resource use.

John has organized an effort to get the issue of overpopulation back on the table, and into the conversation, by recruiting a number of people working in areas related to population and resources to speak out about population during February 2009 (that’s now!) via the Global Population Speak Out (GPSO).  Several media outlets have gotten on board as you can see at the GPSO’s media page.  Last week John and I were interviewed by Caroline Harding at KRFC radio in Fort Collins, Colorado as part of this effort — my comments were about how human population growth threatens the oceans and can be heard here (scroll down to the KRFC logo).

As John asks in a recent article published at the BBC’s “Green Room”:

“Fundamentally, we need to ask what is the greater threat to human welfare: the possibility that humane efforts to address population growth might be abused, or our ongoing failure to act to prevent hundreds of millions, even billions, dying as a result of global ecological collapse?”

Speak up!

Carnivals, that is. The latest incarnations are now online. Blue at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Sea Notes blog. And, on a related note, oceanophiles may also enjoy checking out Rick MacPherson’s links to various marine-themed blogs he likes here . . .

And the Green is at EverydayTrash. Lots to read and think about here. Bon voyage.

A few months ago I happened to pick up a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s classic first book, The Silent World, less from a burning desire to read it than for the mysterious and evocative cover photo, and out of a sense of comradely solidarity with this pioneer submariner. It gathered dust on my bedside table for a while, as books often do, before the opportunity arose to read it, in this case during a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place, appropriately enough, dominated by the edge of the Ocean.

What a book. I would be the first to admit that Cousteau is not the most talented writer — the prose is often pedestrian and the organization a bit clunky. But this is not a novel to be read for the art of its language. This is the real McCoy. It is a tale of exploration of a fabulous new world hitherto almost completely unknown. After reading The Silent World, I’m left with the powerful sense that Cousteau was an explorer in the classical mold, in the company of Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and the early astronauts.

It’s fashionable in some professional circles to dismiss Cousteau with a condescending wave. He was not a “real oceanographer”, they might say, and this is true enough. He had no formal training in marine biology, though he did have the naval Captain’s years of practical knowledge of the Sea. And he had some engineering background. Many passages in the book describe activities that the team undertook in the name of research to learn about animal behavior and diving physiology and so on, which seem quaintly sophomoric to us in the modern world where we’re accustomed to seeing the wonders of the universe in high-definition while we loaf on the living room sofa.

But that is part of the point. Cousteau was not an egghead product of the universities as many of us are know. There was essentially noone to teach him the skills and understanding that we take for granted today, either as marine biologists or sport divers. He was, to use the old cliche, a student in the school of hard knocks. He and his buddy Emil Gagnon invented underwater breathing, something that humans had been trying to figure out for literally thousands of years. That alone is enough to qualify him for heroic status.

But there’s more. The human stories behind the Cousteau saga are fascinating. The aqua-lung, as they called their creation, was cobbled together from scrounged parts while Cousteau and his homies were laying low in Nazi-annexed France during the war. They tested the thing out in a hidden cove to escape the attention of Italian occupation troops. They fed themselves in those lean times by spearing fish. Everything was trial and error, including terrifying dives to great depths, in caves, and such places where divers not infrequently passed out or lost their bearing from nitrogen narcosis. Some never came back.

After the war, as a naval officer, Cousteau was detailed to Marseilles to run “a collecting center for returning sailors in a commandeered castle.” He convinced his superiors that the aqua-lung had promise in a variety of naval applications and wheedled their permission to conduct a series of explorations. His buddy Taillez quit his job as a forest ranger, and a motley crew was assembled as the “Undersea Research Group.” Their activities included location and salvaging of wrecks, which led them eventually to the wrecks of cargo ships from classical times, the merchant marine of Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The treasures they found had been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean since they sank two millennia ago, and offered unprecedented insights into the life of those times. Cousteau was, without a doubt, larger than life.

“I have recounted how the first goggles led us underwater in simple and irresistible curiosity, and how that impulse entangled us in diving physiology and engineering, which produced the compressed-air lung. Our dives are now animated by the challenge of oceanography. We have tried to find the entrance to the great hydrosphere because we feel that the sea age is soon to come.” 

Reading these tales of high adventure half a century or more later inevitably brings the wistful sense, all too familiar nowadays, of what has been lost from the oceans, which were still comparatively virgin in the 1940s and 1950s when Cousteau first penetrated them. The descriptions of schools of gigantic fishes moving placidly among colorful reefs, which Cousteau and company were the first humans to see in their natural habitat, are almost nowhere to be found in the world oceans of today. But I am willing to bet that the situation would be far worse had the mysteries and beauty of the Ocean world not been brought to such wide popular attention by Cousteau’s lifelong passion.

What “professional” ocean scientist today can claim that kind of victory?

Egad, it’s been a month again. Just thought I’d drop a note to let concerned readers know that I am indeed still alive. For the last two weeks, I’ve been pedal-to-the-metal doing field research in the Caribbean, around the island of Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles to be specific (the previous three weeks, and for that matter the last several months, require a more prosaic excuse, with which I will not bore you). For some reason, it’s always very difficult to convince people that I have been working my you-know-what off on a tropical island. They invariably jump to the conclusion that we’re sitting around drinking fruity drinks with little umbrellas in them. Which is not true at all — we never use those little umbrellas. I do realize that this does not qualify me for hardship pay. Hence the title of this post.

Don’t misunderstand me — I’m not complaining. If you’re going to be working somewhere, a tropical island is a favorable place to do it. Our team was on Curacao as part of a research project, supported by the National Geographic Society, studying the ecology and biogeography of symbiotic Caribbean shrimp, which I have alluded to before. This may sound a bit obscure (OK, it is obscure) but we argue that the high diversity and clearly definable habitats of these shrimp, which inhabit living coral-reef sponges, makes them an ideal group for studying general questions about the origin and maintenance of coral-reef biodiversity. And, since the Carmabi Research Station where we set up shop is surrounded by hotel beaches and tiki bars, we got a lot of practice honing this argument for the constant stream of mildly amused random passers-by who were wondering what on earth we were doing so intently while they lay all day in a state of sun-and umbrella-drink-induced torpor. I hope I don’t sound like an ingrate.

So (as the old explorers’ tales go): there we were. Very interesting place, Curacao. Quite different than anywhere else I’ve been in the Caribbean. Looks more like Texas. I’m told that the name Curacao derives from a Portugese term that translates roughly as “wasteland”. And it surely must have seemed so to exhausted 16th century sailors looking for decent food, water, and precious metals. The island is very arid, with a negligible layer of debris that passes for soil covering the limestone rock and supporting a burnt-looking vegetation of vicious thorn scrub (Acacia of some sort) and saguaro-like cacti. Not much good for anything other than goats. And lizards of several sorts, which are ubiquitous. Those enterprising colonialists did manage to find a use for the place as a hub of the slave trade, which they would no doubt be happy to forget. Nowadays, however, it’s a bustling place with a population of 150,000 people supported mainly by the massive oil refinery that processes the fruits of Venezuela’s wells a few miles away on the South American mainland.

For our specific purposes it was an equally interesting place. Great diving: clear water, and lots of the magic coral rubble that produces shrimp, in relatively shallow water. Indeed, the reef at Eastpunt, at the windward eastern end of the island removed from much human influence, had without a doubt the highest coral cover and diversity of any place I’ve seen in the Caribbean in the last few decades. Easily 80-90% cover of live coral. And small but healthy thickets of the formerly dominant shallow-water Caribbean corals Acropora cervicornis and Acropora palmata, which have long since succumbed to disease and various other stresses elsewhere. Very strange — like a visit several decades back in time. A rare and much valued ray of hope in a bleak outlook for Caribbean reefs. It is a tremendous relief to know that these reefs exist at least somewhere. Hope springs eternal.

To be continued . . .

The National Wildlife Federation has just released an important new report “Sea-Level Rise and Coastal Habitats of the Chesapeake Bay“, which provides the most detailed and comprehensive view yet of the likely impacts of climate change on specific habitats within the Chesapeake Bay region. The full report , as well as a 12-page summary are available here.

Among the highlghts:

“Coastal habitats in the Chesapeake Bay region will be dramatically altered if sea levels rise globally about two feet by the end of the century, which is at the low end of what is predicted if global warming pollution remains unaddressed. Under this scenario, the region would lose:

• More than 167,000 acres of undeveloped dry land
• 58% of beaches along ocean coasts
• 69% of estuarine beaches along the bay
• 161,000 acres of brackish marsh
• More than half of the region’s important tidal swamp

These important wetland habitats would be replaced in part by over 266,000 acres (415.6 square miles) of newly open water and 50,000 acres of saltmarsh.”

I participated in the press conference to summarize the likely effects on wildlife and ecosystems of the Chesapeake Bay. The story was reported by the Baltimore Sun, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the Daily Press, among others.

Here are the points I made:

There’s now strong international consensus among scientists that climate change is real, and already happening. But most previous research has focused on very broad continental scales. The new report by the NWF is important because it shows in unprecedented detail how climate change is affecting our local Chesapeake Bay region.

The bottom line is that this is not a future threat. Rising temperatures and sea levels are already changing distributions, life cycles, and interactions of key animals and plants in our area. And those changes are disrupting important ecosystem services that coastal communities depend on—fisheries, water quality, shoreline protection.

The life cycles of animals and plants are closely tied to temperature, which determines when they emerge from dormant stages, reproduce, start seasonal migrations, and so on. For example, recruitment of commercially important fish and shellfish is highly sensitive to variation in both temperature and rainfall patterns. Springtime in the Chesapeake is starting about three weeks earlier now than it did in 1960. And the summers are getting hotter. In the Chesapeake, we may be in danger of losing more northerly species such as winter flounder and softshell clams.

One serious concern involves how changing climate affects “foundation species”, that is, key species that support entire ecosystems. One of these is eelgrass, an underwater plant that forms dense meadows throughout Chesapeake Bay and is a critical nursery habitat for young fish and shellfish, including blue crabs, rockfish, and speckled trout, among others.

Eelgrass is highly vulnerable to climate change, first because it’s near the southern end of its distribution in the Bay and thus already near the highest temperatures it can tolerate, and second because it’s already stressed from poor water quality. We got a preview of this in summer 2005 when we had record high water temperatures throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Eelgrass was wiped out in a matter of weeks from large areas of the Bay, and still hasn’t returned to some.

A few more hot summers like 2005 could give eelgrass the one-two punch that knocks it out for good. That would be bad for the animals it supports and for the coastal communities that depend on them.

Another set of threatened foundation species are the plants that support wetlands such as brackish marshes. These are important in literally holding the land together by trapping sediments to make soil. Roughly two thirds of the Chesapeake region’s commercial fishes depend on coastal marshes for nursery and spawning grounds, and these are highly sensitive to both habitat quality and climate.

Chesapeake wetlands have been declining fast in recent decades. The classic example is the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland, which has been called the “Everglades of the North” because of its great abundance and diversity of wildlife, including the largest population of bald eagles north of Florida.

Blackwater illustrates well how climate change interacts with other stresses. Over the last seventy years, it’s lost a third of its marsh area to sea level rise, sinking of the land, and overgrazing by nutria, an alien rodent. The nutria is currently kept from spreading north largely by its intolerance of cold winters, and there’s real concern that it could spread as winters warm.

Finally, an important impact of climate change is that it alters interactions between species that respond differently to changes, with important implications for food chains and ecosystems. One important case involves the oyster disease Dermo, which proliferates in warmer waters. Starting in the mid-1980s, Dermo spread rapidly up the East Coast from Chesapeake Bay during a series of unusually mild winters and is now found up through Maine, with major consequences for the oyster industry.

These changes have fundamental consequences for coastal ecosystems, economies, and ways of life.

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.

As global society begins to come to grips with the reality of climate change underway, and the James Inhofes of the world fade into obscurity or historical curiosity, the focus is turning slowly to the real work of figuring out how to deal with it. 

A major concern is sea level rise. More than half the American population (not to mention the millions in places like Bangladesh) lives in the coastal fringe that makes up only 17% of the country’s land area. In 2003, 23 of the 25 most densely populated U.S. counties were in the coastal zone.

Last week’s issue of Science features a special section on “Reimagining Cities” (including, among other things, a brief but fascinating piece on the prospects for “vertical farms” that grow crops within urbanized city limits).  One of the articles focuses on the special threats to coastal cities and populations stemming from climate change, starting with a central problem in human nature, exemplified by the psychological inability of New Orleans residents to give up even the flooded low-lying areas that are clearly already lost to Hurricane Katrina:

“Residents of New Orleans are not alone in their dogged determination to place themselves in harm’s way. According to a report last August from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), nearly half the U.S. population lived in counties that had declared flood disasters at least six times between 1980 and 2005, and 29% made their home in a county hit by at least one hurricane in that time. Large swaths of the western United States are at risk of wildfires, such as those that emptied parts of southern California last October. People are willing to gamble by building homes on earthquake fault lines, in landslide zones, and along tornado alleys. ‘Population trends are increasing the nation’s vulnerability to these risks,’ the GAO report noted dryly.”

Hope springs eternal, which is generally inspiring of course, but sometimes blinds us.  Urban planners have made little headway in convincing people or local governments that some of their policies place people and property in serious danger.  But economic forces (take note, skeptical conservatives) are beginning to respond, in the form of jittery insurance companies:

“Allstate Insurance let 120,000 policies lapse in Florida in 2006, after canceling 95,000 the year before. Another major insurer, State Farm, declined to renew 39,000 windstorm policies in 2006. In a sign of how dire the situation has become, the Citizens Property Insurance Corp., set up by Florida legislators in 2002 as the insurer of last resort, is now the state’s biggest property insurer. It has raised premiums by as much as 150% in the last 2 years. Rising premiums may price some residents out of hurricane zones”.

It will be fascinating, albeit unnerving, to see whether we as a society (or societies) can rise above our inherited emotional attachments and act on the rational knowledge we have to make the coming transition without catatsrophe.  Surely we’re smart and resourceful enough to do that . . .?