The Natural Patriot

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 . . .

As the evidence for ongoing climate change has grown incontrovertible, there is increasing urgency to the question of what these changes hold in store for us.  Some wondered why Al Gore and the IPCC should be awarded the Nobel peace prize for promoting climate science?  Is there really a connection?  One source of insight involves querying the past: what consequences have past climate changes had for human society? 

In a relatively new study (published in December 2007 — I’m a little behind the curve here), David Zhang and colleagues exploit new high-resolution paleo-temperature records to address this question. The paper assembles evidence from five to ten centuries of human history to show that climate variation drives changing food production, which among animals typically results in what we ecologists call “intraspecific competition”, that is, competition among members of the same species.  Among humans we call it war.

The Figure at left shows the northern hemisphere temperature variation (as anomalies from the long-term average, panel A), war frequency, and rate of change in human population from 1400 to approximately the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1900. The number of wars is shown for the northern hemisphere as a whole (bright green line, and right axis scale), Asia (pink), Europe (turquoise), and arid areas of the northern hemisphere (orange). Panel C shows number of wars worldwide as recorded by three different authors using different thresholds for defining war — as can be seen, the trends are roughly similar. Finally, panel D shows the 20-year population growth rate in Europe (turquoise), Asia (pink), and the northern hemisphere as a whole (blue), as well as the 50-year fatality index in the region (bright green). Cold phases of history are shaded in gray. The bright green curves correspond to the right axis. 

What to make of all this?  First, we can see that climate varied during this time between cool and warmer periods that lasted decades to a few centuries. More importantly, these cool and warm periods coincided with times of unrest and relative tranquility, respectively.  Considering the whole global data base, there is a strongly significant negative correlation between war and temperature, with temperature anomaly explaining 28% of the variation in war frequency.  Even more telling, this “rhythm of history” was roughly synchronous across the northern hemisphere. Since, during these centuries, China and Europe were still largely isolated from one another, the synchrony of these trends over such an area, comprising much of the northern half of the planet, is difficult to explain by any factor other than the clear signal of large-scale global climate. 

The relationships are even more pronounced in the finer-resolution record for China during the longer period from AD 1000 - 1900 (see figure below): here each of the cool periods (gray shading) saw a major spike in the number of wars.

 

What is the mechanism behind these patterns? The answer appears to be pretty simple, and readily predictable from basic principles of population ecology.  Climate cooling reduces agricultural production, mainly by shortening the growing season and reducing available land for cultivation. Because the political boundaries of states in these agrarian societies were less porous than they are today, there was little opportunity for mass migration during the resultant shortages of food (and, since the problems were regional, nowhere to go in any case).  So the four horsemen – death, famine, war, and pestilence — mounted up and rode in.             

The figure at right summarizes in diagrammatic form the pathways by which long-term climate variation influenced frequency of war and human population dynamics in China and Europe during preindustrial times (i.e. up to 1900). Solid lines indicate direct effects, and dotted lines indirect feedbacks. Thicker arrows indicates stronger correlations.  There are several inrerrelated impacts of climate change mediated by the interactions of humans with our food supply and with each other, but food supply is central. 

So, OK, this data comes from back when people rode horses and peasants grubbed for potatos all winter long and so forth.  Why should we care in the 21st century?  We have refigerators and grocery stores!  Besides, the climate now is warming, rather than cooling, so it should all be good, right?  The most general message for us today is that climate variation has profound impacts on the global ecosystem’s ability to provide vital services, which in turn have profound implications for human society and well-being.  Although a warming climate has been good for us in the past, and will surely be good for some people in some places in coming decades too, we are facing a much bigger and faster warming than the earth has seen in a very long time.  And one of the consequences is change in rainfall, which is an even more powerful regulator of agricultural productivity than temperature.  And when food runs low, conflict is inevitable, as we are seeing in Darfur.  Too little (crop)land to go around was evidently a key match to the flame in Rwanda during the 1990s also.

Scholars have long sought, with only partial success, to explain the conflicts that repeatedly plague civilization. The results of this paper indicate that human ecology is –- or was — forced to a surprising degree by the same basic environmental drivers and by similar, if more destructive, mechanisms of competition that regulate populations of other animals.

There is hopeful news too. We have learned a thing or two in the last millennium.  As the authors note:

“In the long run and at a global scale, technological and social development raised the population growth rate . . . reduced climate dependence of growth rate of population (after A.D. 1400), postponed the time of population decrease, and accelerated subsequent population recovery . . . The gradual increase in time delays for [northern hemisphere] population declines as we moved into the modern era may reflect that at least some social mechanismsmay becoming more effective over time at the macroscale.”

At the same time:

“these adaptive choices that are positive to humanity have not let the human race escape from social calamities such as population collapse caused by severe cooling at both the global and continental scales as shown in the history of the past millennium. For armed conflict, the positive social mechanisms could neither reduce the number of wars nor indefinitely postpone the times of war outbreak in any cooling periods . . . Although we have more robust social institutions at both international and national levels, and much more advanced social and technological developments at present, a much larger population size, higher standard of living, and more strictly controlled political boundaries will limit some adaptive choices to climate change. We hope that positive social mechanisms that are conducive to human adaptability will play an ever more effective role in meeting the challenges of the future.”

[Original source (open access): Zhang, D.D., P. Brecke, H.F. Lee, Y.-Q. He, and J. Zhang. 2007. Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104:19214-19219.]

[The painting shows the English victory over the French at the battle of Agincourt in 1415.] 

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 . . .?

 

Fresh air, wildlife, purple mountains’ majesty.  This country’s national parks have long been considered a jewel in the crown of American democracy – all accessible to anyone for a nominal charge or even for free.  And ever since ol’ Teddy Roosevelt established the park system, Americans and people from all over the world have flocked to them for inspiration, recreation, and escape.

Until recently, that is.  After half a century of steady increase, from the beginning of regular record-keeping in 1939 through the late 1980s, visits to National Parks increased steadily.  But then, something curious happened: visits began a decline, equally steady, that continues to this day.  What happened?

Two years ago, Oliver Pergams and Patricia Zaradic, who first documented this pattern, stirred up a lot of  attention and controversy by showing that the rise of electronic entertainment (time spent on the internet, playing video games, and
watching movies) was a remarkably strong statistical predictor of this downward trend in park visits.  They concluded that:

“we may be seeing evidence of a fundamental shift away from people’s appreciation of nature (biophilia, Wilson 1984) to ‘videophilia’, which we here define as ‘the new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media’.  Such a shift would not bode well for the future of biodiversiy conservation.” 

Indeed. That study rightly generated major attention and controversy.  Commentators suggested several possible reasons why the national park visitation data might not be representative of nature recreation as a whole, incluing declining market share of parks relative to other outdoor lands, decaying park infrastructure and staffing declines, etc.

Now comes a new paper from Pergams and Zaradic that tackles these criticisms with a wide variety of new data sources.  Building on their initial data from American national parks, they examined data from national forests, state parks, and land owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), as well as visits to national parks in Japan and Spain.   The quality of data varies among these sources, but all show downturns in recent decades.  As do the trends for fishing and duck hunting licenses.  In summary, “most reliable long-term per capita visitation measures of nature recreation peaked between 1981 and 1991, are declining at approximately -1.2% per year, and total to date -18% to -25%.”     

The graph below shows the time trends for visits to American national parks (NPV), national forests (NFV), state parks (SPV), BLM lands (BLMV) and foreign parks (JapanNPV, SpainNPV).

This news is not just a sad reflection on the declining state of American life, although it is assuredly that.  It is more fundamentally disturbing for several reasons.  Scientific studies show that direct experience with nature in childhood is the best predictor of environmental awareness and commitment to conservation among adults.  And, as Nature Conservancy scientist Peter Kareiva notes in a commentary on the Pergams and Zaradic paper, “A poor understanding of basic natural history is sure to undermine our ability to solve environmental probems.”  Perhaps this growing disconnect from nature is one reason that, although 80% of American say they favor stronger standards of environmental protection, they consistently rank the environment in last place after the economy, health care, Iraq, social security, taxes, and even moral values.  Now that’s going to undermine our ability solve environmental problems. 

This is a tough problem — at the moment I sit here writing this, hunched over the computer, my 10-year-old son models my behavior by hunching over his own computer, playing with animals in Zoo Tycoon II rather than hunting frogs and bugs and what not in the backyard (I do admit to some relief that he is playing with animals, even virtual ones, rather than the more popular activities of destroying virtual planets, gunning down virtual cops, or committing virtual grand theft auto).  What’s a parent to do?

It’s time to mobilize.  The Children and Nature Network (C&NN), founded and inspired by Richard Louv’s revolutionary book, Last Child in the Woods (see also here), has emerged as a growing national alliance of people dedicated to healing our broken bond with nature.  The network has spawned local chapters all over the country. 

We need one here in southeastern Virginia (and in your community, wherever you are)!  C&NN has just released a Community Action Guide (PDF here) to get one off the ground.  It’s well worth reading.

Let’s get started!  Who’s ready to commit?

[Original source: Pergams, R.W. and P.A. Zaradic. 2008. Evidence for a fundamental and pervasive shift away from nature-based recreation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA. 4 February 4 2008, 10.1073/pnas.0709893105  (download PDF here)]

Much of the political discourse we hear these days, on environmental as well as other topics, all the Byzantine complexity of geopolitical machinations and jockeying for position among countries at the UN or in Bali or wherever, calls to mind Shakespeare’s “sound and fury, signifying nothing”.  One wonders whether there might be a better way. 

Richard Black of the BBC has hit this nail on the head, and encapsulated a key characteristic of Natural Patriotism: we have come to a point in human history where solving the world’s problems is hindered rather than helped by our cherished, but perhaps anachronistic, concept of geographically circumscribed nations:

“When the primary threats to human health and livelihoods came through wars and invasions, basing the global power system around nation states had a logic to it. But you have to ask if it still has any logic when, as Tony Blair among others has argued, environmental concerns may be the biggest long-term threats to our civilisation. Rising seas will not stop at borders, nor crops magically continue to grow within countries that have cast their votes a certain way in the UN climate convention. The atmosphere does not care whether a carbon dioxide molecule comes from Warsaw or Wellington or Ouagadougou; tuna stocks are affected no differently if ravaged by Libyan or French or Chinese ships.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself (although I took a stab at it a year ago).  Now that’s what I call thinkiing outside the box.  Probably too far outside the box insofar as, obviously, it’s a non-starter in practice.  And overly simplistic in principle too — if democracy works only marginally well in a nation like ours that makes up a small fraction of earth’s population and is pretty well endowed with natural resources and human capital, how could we make it work on a unified planetary scale (the dreaded “one-world-gummint” conspiracy boogeyman that the far-right likes to trot out to rile up the voting base)?  The numerous comments on the BBC site after Black’s essay illustrate the difficulty of this rocky territory.

Still. For the sake of argument, it’s refreshing to hear someone with the courage to go back to first principles and ask whether the basic foundation of how we do things needs reconsideration — to drill through the accreted layers of historical artifact and arbitrary structure that have hardened into the quasi-sacred traditions that we spend so much time and energy and resources killing each other over.  Is there a better way?  Does humanity have the strength and foresight to take control of its destiny?  To fix things that are the way we’ve always done them but are nonetheless transparently counter-productive?  Getting rid of nations sounds radical and over the top.  But isn’t that, in effect, what the European Union is doing, gradually and without much fanfare?  It is becoming a federal system of states much like the USA is, or was at its beginning. And I can’t shake the sense from nearly every news article I read these days that the EU is decades ahead of the USA in progressiveness and forward-thinking policy.  Maybe there is a lesson for us yanks here.

 

The list (of 50) is out at the Guardian.  There are a number of obvious choices (Al Gore, Wangari Maathai), a few oddballs (Cormac McCarthy? Say what? Leonardo di Caprio? Honestly.), and various ordinary and a few extraordinary unknown individuals with inspiring David-and-Goliath stories. Always good to see Amory Lovins on these lists. We need more like him.

And then, of course, the Guardian’s shameless gimmick to sell papers and generate buzz with a lame contrarian tossed in for “balance”: Bjorn Lomberg. 

Note to Guardian: Bjorn Lomberg is about as likely to save the planet as Jack Abramoff is to clean up Washington.  Unless, that is, he can eventually get a clue and learn to stop deliberately lying distinguish credible evidence from think tank effluent. Interestingly (perhaps this was exactly the Guardian’s plan), Lomborg’s inclusion was the single biggest item of (overwhelmingly negative) discussion in comments on the piece.  Probably sold a lot of papers.

But let’s not get too far off track. I spent some time trying to pick someone on the list to feature as my favorite but couldn’t decide.  Worth reading yourself. 

The Ecological Society of America, the Nation’s leading body of professional ecological scientists (of which I am a proud member), has released a position statement on biofuels sustainability.  The full text is here.  Because these are highly important issues and the ESA’s position is authoritative and well stated, I quote much of it here verbatim. The paper makes three central points, of which the second is of particular interest to natural patriotism:

“1. SYSTEMS THINKING.  A systems approach is crucial to assess the energy yield, carbon neutrality, and the full impact of biofuel production on downstream and downwind ecosystems.  It should take into account all of the flows, controls, and storage of materials and energy. 

2. CONSERVATION OF ECOSYSTEM SERVICES. A focus on ecosystem services will provide the foundation necessary for win-win scenarios. It is easy to design systems for maximum crop yields; over a century of agronomic research has shown that this can be done very successfully. Managing for other ecosystem services also provided by agricultural landscapes is less common but equally necessary.  Lower yields from an unfertilized native prairie, for example, may be acceptable in light of the other benefits provided by native plants in an agricultural landscape. These include:

• A complete and closed cycling of nutrients;
• Minimized flooding and increased groundwater recharge;
• Enhanced  carbon sequestration in the soil because tilling would be unnecessary;
• Fewer pests because habitat for insects and birds that prey on them is left intact;
• Genetic diversity;
• Reduced nitrogen and phosphorus runoff because no fertilizer is needed;
• Reduced soil erosion due to continuous soil cover;
• Reduced nitrous oxide production; and
• Pollinator habitat and resources.

These benefits, in turn, would help ensure ecosystem services such as better water and air quality, crop pollination, flood mitigation, runoff reduction, and food and fiber production. [Note: For a bit more detail on the potential advantages of diverse native prairie plants as a biofuel crop, see my earlier post here]

3.  SCALE ALIGNMENT. Explicit consideration of scale in policy and management is necessary to achieve sustainability goals.”

Details can be found in the original document linked above.  With specific regard to the current mania for corn ethanol in the USA, the ESA has this to say:

“The current focus on ethanol from corn illustrates the risks of exploiting a single source of biomass for biofuel production. A growing percentage of the U.S. corn harvest – 18 percent in 2006 – is directed towards grain ethanol production. This has not only resulted in record-high corn prices, it has produced strong incentives for continuously-grown corn, higher-than-optimal use of nitrogen fertilizers, the early return of land in conservation programs to production, and the conversion of marginal lands to high-intensity cropping. All of these changes exacerbate well-known environmental problems associated with intensive agriculture:

• Continuously-grown corn is more susceptible to insect damage and allows weeds to become more persistent, requiring more insecticides and herbicides.
• Nitrogen fertilizer is the principal contributor to nitrogen pollution of groundwater, surface waters, and coastal zones, and a major source of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.  
• Placing previously fallow land enrolled in conservation programs back into production reduces wildlife diversity, requires irrigation, and releases carbon dioxide.   
• Converting marginal lands to agriculture or farming them more intensively creates new sources of agricultural pollution and, in many cases, disproportionately increases nutrient loss and soil erosion; many of these lands are marginal to begin with because they are on sloping, sandy, or wet soils particularly susceptible to soil and nutrient loss.”

Other position papers from the ESA, on topics ranging from the Endangered Species Act, to GMOs, to forest fire management, to sustainable water use, to links between biodiversity and ecosystem services, can be found here.

 

Allow me to join the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury in wishing everyone a Happy, and green, New Year.  The Archbishop has just released his New Year’s message to the faithful on, yes, YouTube (the times, verily, are a-changin’). 

As reported by The Guardian, Archbishop Rowan Williams calls for a “more balanced future”, criticising our modern culture of “vast material waste and emotional short-termism”.  There is of course a spiritual facet to this:  

“In a society where we think of so many things as disposable, where we expect to be constantly discarding last year’s gadget and replacing it with this year’s model - do we end up tempted to think of people and relationships as disposable?”

 

Now there’s some food for thought in developing those New Year’s resolutions.  Evidently, the Archbishop is not alone in seeking a greener faith.  Indeed, as the equivalent in the Anglican Church to the Roman Catholic Pope, the Archbishop now joins Pope Benedict himself in going on record with the teaching that (I’m paraphrasing here) greenness is next to Godliness (although the Pontiff’s New Year’s message today has been seen in some quarters as back-pedaling on the importance of environmental stewardship).

Alas, these distinguished men of the cloth, along with a growing number of American Evangelicals, still carry the burden behind them of a benighted rearguard gang of paranoid Christian leaders who appear to believe that those concerned about the environment are the incarnation of Satan come to destroy the righteous of the world.  As perhaps the most bizarre example, retired Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, who delivered the Lenten Meditation at the Vatican this past March, warned of a coming Antichrist who is “a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist”. This is in 2007, not 1307.  Honestly, you could not make this stuff up.

Then there is the incomparable, late Jerry Falwell, who back in February massaged the talking points from Senator Inhofe’s global warming denialist screed into a Sunday sermon, but added his own flourish by stating that the growing concern among Evangelicals for environmental issues is, and I quote, “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.” (for an interesting progressive Christian reaction to this stuff, see here).

But the late Rev. Falwell, and the pseudo-retired Cardinal Biffi appear to be somewhat out of step with their flocks, 63% of whom agreed in a poll that “while global warming may be a long-term issue, the problem is being caused today, so we must start addressing it immediately.”

As the great physicist Max Planck is alleged to have said, somewhat indelicately, “Progress happens, one funeral at a time”.

So at this New Year, I look with optimism to the rising generation.  Happy New Year to all.

I know, I used the same subtitle for another recent post.  But I’m not recycling titles out of laziness — well, not entirely anyway. I do so here to highlight the simple, yet perversely (and perhaps intentionally) misunderstood theme whose centrality to the broad range of environmental problems is increasingly obvious.  Hence the “stupid” bit. 

The simple, central, misunderstood theme is this: Despite the rosy optimism one hears from various quarters, We can’t grow our way out of our environmental problems. Yes, of course technology can help, and we need creative entrepeneurship.  But blind reliance on the “free” market is not going to do the trick. 

The latest evidence on this front comes from an analysis, across 102 countries, of the impacts of human population density, urbanization, and economic growth on the condition of marine biological communities.  Rebecca Clausen and Richard York set out to quantify the role of changing human social development and economic institutions in the accelerating decline of marine biological diversity.  It’s well-recognized that human impact on the environment is ultimately a result of demographic and economic factors. But there is disagreement about how these processes affect the environment.  Indeed, as they note:

“Neoclassical economists argue that environmental quality is a luxury good and, therefore, only affluent societies are willing to heavily invest in environmental protection. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) describes this hypothetical relationship between affluence and environmental quality. The EKC hypothesis suggests that environmental problems escalate in the early stages of economic development, but eventually a tipping point is reached, after which further economic growth leads to improvements in environmental quality.” 

In other words, the argument goes, once you get to be as rich as the United States, it’s all good.  The idea is that affluence leads to better resource and environmental management.  For example, we often hear that concern over global overfishing is alarmist because we have (some) good fishery management practices in effect in civilized places like the USA, Canada, and New Zealand. Though the latter bit is true, it’s not clear that such practices are becoming more widespread in time or space. 

In fact, there is considerable evidence against the hypothesis that economic development improves environmental quality on anything more than a local scale.  But the aim of this paper was to test the EKC hypothesis broadly, by considering diverse marine ecosystems rather than single fished species or stocks.  As an indicator of marine biodiversity they used the “mean trophic level” of fisheries catches between 1960 and 2003.  The basic rationale here is twofold.  First, mean trophic level roughly estimates the proportion of the catch that is made up of big top predators (tunas, cod, etc.), compared with, say, anchovies, and the abundance of top predators is in turn a good indicator of the degree to which the ecosystem supports a taxonomically and functionally diverse biological community.  Second, fishing tends to target top predators, so the decline in mean trophic level signals increasing human impact.  Indeed, the targeting of top predators is consistent enough that Daniel Pauly and colleagues famously summarized the succession of industrial fishing impacts as “fishing down the food web” (see the figure). 

Clausen and York developed mathematical models to capture the effects on mean trophic level of human population, per capita GDP, degree of urbanization (% of population living in urban areas).  The model included various terms to account for changes in marine productivity, geographic expansion of fisheries, changes in fishing effort, and so on.

What they found is important, if not terribly surprising.  First of all, at the risk of stating the obvious, countries with higher populations, urbanization, and economic growth caught more fish.  Overall, the healthy structure of marine ecosystems, as indexed by mean trophic level of catch, declined as economic growth, urbanization, and human population size increased. 

But there were some interesting twists with respect to the EKC hypothesis.  For example, fishery catch roughly matched the EKC predictions, dramatically increasing with per capita GDP during early stages of economic development, reaching a plateau at ~ US $3000, then declining modestly.  Urbanization, however, showed a pattern opposite to that predicted by EKC:  fish catch by a country initially declined with urbanization, then increased again after ~36% of the population was living in cities.   Importantly, “the total effect of GDP per capita [on MTL] was monotonically negative”, meaning roughly that as average individual income increased, the abundance of predators in that country’s exclusive economic zone declined (see graph at left).  This effect was strongest during early stages of economic development. On the bright side, growth in per capita GDP above $10,000 had little effect on mean trophic level of catches.

Long story short - “Our results contradicted both the economic and urbanization EKC hypotheses, indicating that economic development and urbanization led to marine biodiversity loss. Likewise, population growth clearly led to depletion of marine fisheries.” From a policy perspective, the take-home message is the “grow-your-way-out-of-your-problems” economic theory championed by the likes of Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomberg doesn’t work, at least fr marine fisheries and ecosystem health. 

One might be forgiven for thinking this would be common sense.  How can building more buildings and roads and ships and airplanes and iPods and vacuuming up the earth’s living and nonliving resources to fuel it all reduce our impact on the environment? The simple fact is: it can’t.  Alas, that sense is not in fact common, at least not in mainstream economic theory, which of course is the philosophical guiding light of modern civilization.  Fortunately, there is growing recognition that the physical basis on which the economy is built is finite, and that a sustainable future will require a steady-state economy.

Now, I don’t want to be misunderstood, since I know certain readers may jump to conclusions here. Obviously, economic development is important, and people need food, of which marine fish are a very important source worldwide and will continue to be.  It would be silly to think that we can or even should stop fishing.  But this and a growing body of other evidence are making it clear that humanity will have to manage marine fisheries and other interactions with the environment much more thoughtfully than we have done if we expect our grandkids to be enjoying them too.  Pretending that “free”-market economics alone will magically solve such problems is a fantasy.

[Original source: Clausen, R. and R. York. 2007. Economic Growth and Marine Biodiversity: Influence of Human Social Structure on Decline of Marine Trophic Levels. Conservation Biology doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2007.00851.x]

 

And now, as the Pythons would say, for something completely different.  Not even quite sure where to file this one.

Have you noticed that houses are getting bigger, with more bathrooms, and more, bigger cars out front, and fewer people in them?  Of course you have.  I grew up (back in the Pleistocene) in a family of eight that had a single car for most of my childhood, and two to three kids per room — and one TV!

What’s going on here?  Obviously, there are many reasons for these changes.  But a new paper by Yu and Liu published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovers an intriguing connection:  the increasing divorce rate is reducing average household size (i.e., the number of people living in a house) and increasing the number of houses.  As a result, a whole range of measures of energy and materials-use efficiency are declining.

And this is not a peculiarly American thing, it’s happening worldwide.

Using international census data, the authors first quantified the trend that conventional wisdom has recognized for some time, that divorce rates worldwide have been rising steadily in recent decades (see graph at left).  Based on the simple observation that divorce splits households, and therefore both increases the number of households and reduces the average number of people living in them, they then asked how divorce influences per capita impact on the environment, specifically in terms of housing.

First they found that, between 1998 and 2002, in the 12 countries studied, divorce was estimated to result in the addition of 7.4 million households above what would have existed in the absence of divorce. This adds to society’s environmental footprint because any house (or apartment, etc.) requires a certain amount of resources to construct, and takes up a certain amount of space, fuel, and so on to maintain regardless of how many people are in it.  For example, it costs the same to heat your house in winter whether there are two or ten people living in it.  Every housing unit has to have a refrigerator, a shower, a plasma TV (well, maybe not that) whether it’s just you or the whole family. You get the picture.

So when the consequences of divorce for increased housing construction, utlility use and so on were tallied up, the authors found several striking results (see graphs at right).  First, the number of rooms per person in divorced households was 33-95% greater than in married households. For example, in the USA in 2005, 38 million additional rooms were required to house separately family members separated by divorce.  This resulted in addditional costs for heating, lighting and so forth.  The divorced households also used an additional 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water above what would have been used had the marriages remained intact. 

Now, many other changes have been happening in society over recent decades that might influence these trends.  So, as an additional check on their findings, Yu and Liu were able to obtain data on that subset of divorced people that remarried.  When the remarried households were compared with their previously divorced incarnations, the environmental impacts fell back to those of households that had remained married all along.  In a nutshell, divorced households in the USA used 42-61% more resources per person than they did before the break-up.

So what’s the message? I’m not touching the social implications of this one. If a marriage goes bad, it’s hard to imagine that environmental impact would carry much weight in attempting to save it.  But these data do provide a sobering illustration of the impact left by our changing lifestyles.  

Perhaps this opens a new door to engaging social conservatives in the cause of environmental conservation (indeed it’s already being used as ammo by Christian conservatives, ironically enough since most such commentators have little interest or sympathy for other, less politically strategic news about the environment).  On the other hand, I’m also reminded of the cheeky bumper stickers from the old days saying “Save water — shower with a friend!” In other words, shacking up (or whatever it’s called these days) should, by the same token, reduce environmental impact.  So, in terms of social policy, it’s a two-edged sword . . .

[Original source: Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu. 2007. Environmental impacts of divorce. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA: 10.1073/pnas.0707267104]