The Natural Patriot

Yes, I’ve previously sung the praises of maggots. And lightning bugs. And I stand by that.

But there are legions of others of our humble brethren (is there a parallel politically correct, gender-neutral word? sistren? Never mind) out toiling in the world at the less savory but nevertheless critical professions that make the world turn (figuratively speaking) and make life better for you and me. By, for example, cleaning up you-know-what.

A brief piece in Newsweek, of all places, has recognized this neglected proletariat of our terrestrial ecosystems. And there are other, similar creatures that clean up lakes and oceans. And I quote:

“Of all creatures great and small, it is the charismatic megafauna—tigers and rhinos and gorillas and pandas and other soulful-eyed, warm and fuzzy animals—that personify endangered species. That’s both a shame and a dangerous bias. “Plants and invertebrates are the silent majority which feed the entire planet, stabilize the soil and make all life possible,” says Kiernan Suckling, cofounder of the Center for Biological Diversity. They pollinate crops and decompose carcasses, filter water and, lacking weapons like teeth and claws, brew up molecules to defend themselves that turn out to be remarkably potent medicines: the breast-cancer compound taxol comes from a yew tree, and a leukemia drug from the rosy periwinkle. Those are tricks that, Suckling dryly notes, “polar bears and blue whales haven’t mastered yet.”"

And here’s my favorite bit:

“If Earth’s species are a living library, then polar bears and other cuddly mammals are the best-selling beach reads. Everything else is the volumes of history and literature and other scholarship, written in the alphabet of DNA: 99 percent of all animals are invertebrates. To understand the history and the majesty of life requires reading, and thus preserving, those volumes.”

Well said. Hail the the other 95% of the animal kingdom.

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.

I’m excited to announce the inauguration of the Timberneck Creek Biodiversity and Habitat Restoration Project, Phase I. Although it has also been called, more prosaically, “cleaning up my yard”, I prefer to think about it in a larger context as one small step in the goal of world domination of suburban backyards in the service of facilitating native wildlife (of all sizes), battling the spread of invasive species, and promoting truth, justice and the American way generally.   

So far, the project has one unpaid employee (me), though I have received additional in-kind matching support from Liz, who has agreed to free a portion of my time that would otherwise be devoted to folding laundry so that I can hack weeds and grub around in the dirt instead. 

History 

A bit of background may be in order here.  In 1995 we bought this house, a modest Virginia farmhouse built in 1920, on 1.6 acres of land along Timberneck Creek, a tidal creek bordered by salt marsh cordgrass and marsh elder bushes.  It is by general agreement a beautiful spot, which explains why we bought the place despite the absence of a driveway, a stove, or central heat and air conditioning, a palpable breeze around the edges of the closed windows in winter, and an appalling abundance of shed snake skins in the attic.

But I digress. The place had been bush-hogged shortly before we saw it, doubtless to show off the panoramic view of the adjacent creek to best effect, but over the ensuing years, the exuberant vegetation of the area had sprouted up again with remarkable vigor.  A few years ago the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that we could not even see the water any more — in its place, our panorama had become deepest darkest jungle.  This was partly due to strong recruitment of sassafras trees, which can easily grow 2-3 feet in a year in this neck o’ the woods, but was primarily the fault of the diabolical duo of privet, an infernal invasive alien shrub, and greenbrier.  Greenbrier is a native vine that resembles barbed wire except that it’s alive. It seems to prefer the company of privet, and grows with it in impenetrable thickets.

This would not do. 

The first campaign

I have always aimed to maximize native diversity on the property.  Over the years I had planted various trees and shrubs, and ripped out bits of greenbrier and privet here and there, mostly haphazardly.  Sought out, for example, the only sweetgum on the property and cleared the vines and surrounding saplings to give it a little breathing room.

But a couple years ago I decided to get serious.  I declared war on the jungle and went at it with hedge clippers and a bowsaw, which required no fossil fuel, exposed me to fresh air (as well as thorns and the occasional attack by angry yellowjackets trampled underfoot), and most importantly, allowed me to be selective, axing the bad guys and nurturing the good, such as little volunteer dogwoods.  I have now almost eliminated privet from most of the property and cleared out a substantial part of the greenbrier.  We can now see the sunshine glinting off the little waves on the creek, and the leaves of trees (as opposed to solid jungle) fluttering in the breeze.  The azaleas are beautiful in spring.  The dogwoods and redbuds have reached the age where they are beginning to produce big masses of flowers.  Ma and Pa can sit on the porch and survey our domain with a lemonade.  Or, more often, a martini.

Back to the future

The next phase began after I chanced on a piece about Doug Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home in the NY Times (see my previous post).  I bought the book and read it.  I cannot say enough about this book — it fundamentally changed the way I think about my yard specifically, and American suburbia generally.  Here at last is something of substance — something practical — that we as individuals can do to stem the receding tide of biodiversity where we live.  And by becoming intimate with the plants and creatures and ecosystems to which we are connected, we gain a lot more besides.  I enthusiastically recommend the book to any homeowner, gardener, educator, or for that matter anyone simply interested in the natural history of their surroundings (albeit the details are focused on the mid-Atlantic region of the USA).  

The basic premise of the book is that we should actively promote vegetation native to our particular areas because it supports native (beneficial) insects, which in turn support a variety of native wildilfe.  In contrast, the introduced plants that have escaped and gone feral all over the place are mostly (with exceptions, of course) less hospitable to native wildlife because they lack a shared evolutionary history.

Shortly after I began reading the book, I took my weathered old green clothbound copy of A Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-Central North America and went out into the yard.  I have always been perversely proud of the fact that there are no more than perhaps a dozen shoots of grass in my yard.  The rest is a motley meadow of various wildflowers (the polite term for weeds).  But I was disturbed to find, as I looked up one plant after another, that virtually every plant in my lawn was an alien.  The problem, according to Tallamy, is that many such weeds do not support insect herbivores, and thus their production is not transferred up the food chain to bluebirds and warblers and frogs and box turtles and what not.  And that’s the lawn.  Then there is the ground cover under those trees where I had pulled out all the privet and greenbrier.  It’s mostly covered now by a tangle of alien honeysuckle.

I resolved then and there to transform our property into a model of structurally complex, diverse native vegetation explicitly designed to support native wildlife.

So: first, the jungly understory.  The challenge here is what to use for a native groundcover.  Two falls ago, I planted a bunch of azaleas on the site of the former privet thicket by the driveway (turning up two burrowing worm snakes in the process, much to 9-year-old Conor’s delight).  The interstices have since filled in with honeysuckle and various fast-growing (alien) annuals.  This is the spot shown in the photo at top right.  I started ripping this stuff out, which was relatively easy.  By a happy coincidence, just as I was cogitating on all this, I heard that the local chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society was having a sale nearby. So I bought a bunch of stuff.  For ground cover in this shady spot, I planted several “sensitive ferns” (Onoclea sensibilis, above left), which are supposed to spread and form colonies. 

In another part of this shady area I planted several mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum, at right in pots), which are also supposed to form colonies, and of which I have very fond evocative memories from high school days backpacking in the Appalachians, where one periodically sees big swaths of them among the trees. 

Interspersed among the azaleas in here I planted fern-leaf bleeding hearts (which flowered a few days later!) and various other species. You get the picture.

Bring in the bugs

By this time I was on a roll.  The following weekend (last), on my way back from EarthFest, I returned to the VNPS sale and bought another bunch of native plants.  These are, primarily, for a butterfly garden, which is something I have always wanted to have. I came home and dug out a square yard or so of turfy “grass” (and alien weeds) at the corner of our frontwalk and planted ‘em all. Last summer we bought a butterfly bush which indeed attracted a lot of butterflies, then senesced, after which we left it to fend for itself through the winter in a pot on the patio.  It’s still hanging in there, so I planted that in the middle of the butterfly patch.  Ditto for some little sprouts of black-eyed Susan in another feral pot.

It rained long and generously after both planting episodes, which I take to be a favorable omen.  Everyone appears to be thriving. Last night, as we came home in the dark after Conor’s baseball game, there was another favorable omen: I heard the call of the great horned owl that I had not heard around here for perhaps a year. 

Stay tuned for Phase II. 

 

OK, not exactly live – It’s a day after the fact.  But who would have paid attention if this read: Yesterday from EarthFest!

Yesterday I participated in EarthFest 2008, sponsored jointly by NASA Langley and Christopher Newport University here in Tidewater, Virginia.  I was part of the “Ask a scientist” panel, answering questions from the brave-hearted studio audience of about 20 people who had forsaken the fabulous spring weather to sit in a darkened lecture hall and ask questions such as these of scientists.

And a shout-out to the VIMS Green Team and the Williamsburg Climate Action Network, among the many other organizations represented there.  I’m told that parts of our panel discussion will evntually be posted in YouTube - stay tuned.

Following is the text of the two-minute presentation with which I began my part:

 

“What makes Earth different than any other body in the known universe is the presence of life. From space, life appears only as an impossibly thin green film on the rocky surface of the planet.  Yet life has changed everything about this planet profoundly—creating the oxygenated atmosphere that allows us to live here, regulating its temperature within narrow bounds that make it comfortable for us, and so on.     

Locally, for you or I standing here on the ground, life is not a thin green film. It’s a fantastic variety of plants and animals and microbes that have become linked in complex networks of interactions that we call an ecosystem.   

We usually take the ecosystems around us for granted because we are so much a part of them that we don’t even think about it.  But we need to. 

Ecosystems are like nature’s factories. Living organisms provide the natural infrastructure that creates natural products and services essential to our comfort and even our survival—food, clean water and air, favorable habitat in which we can live, and of course the stable climate that we hear so much about these days.

We’re now at a critical turning point in earth’s history.  For the first time in the 3.8 billion years of life’s tenure on this planet, a single species literally controls the fate of all the others, and of the biosphere itself.  That species is of course us.  It’s a mind-boggling responsibility. 

 

 

And — sad to say — we’re dropping the ball. When we dump our wastes into the air and water, when we destroy natural habitat, and harvest animals faster than they can reproduce, we are throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of Nature’s factory and its parts get broken.When that happens the machine stops working, and the products and services disappear. 

But that doesn’t have to happen.  Humans are incredibly ingenious.  We’ve sent people to the moon.  We’ve invented the internet, and cars that run on french fry oil.  We need to harness that ingenuity to make the world safe again for our fellow creatures.  Because, in the end, we literally cannot live without them.”
 

Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!

 

See also here to get involved. The US House of Representatives’ Education and Labor Committee is currently considering the No Child Left Behind Act (summary of the Act here, complete text here), which would promote environmental literacy and education integrated into an environmental context (as shown in the video).  Write your Congressperson and help raise the next generation of Natural Patriots!

[Editor’s note: This just in — and in time for Earth Day (barely). I reprint below an extract from the new, second edition of Richard Louv’s classic and inspirational book, Last Child in the Woods.  The new edition is expanded and contains more practical suggestions (here are a few more), as described below. I intend to use them since this week is my son’s “TV turn-off week” (this also includes computers) suggested by his school. I sure had a lot of fun with dirt when I was a young’un.]

BEYOND NATURE-DEFICIT DISORDER
It’s Time to Turn Consciousness into Action
By Richard Louv
Author of Last Child in The Woods

Got dirt? “In South Carolina, a truckload of dirt is the same price as a video game!” reports Norman McGee, a father in that state who bought a small pickup-load of dirt for his daughter and friends.

McGee is turning consciousness into action. So is Liz Baird, who keeps a “wonder bowl” available for her children.

When Baird was a little girl she would fill her pockets with natural wonders — acorns, rocks, mushrooms. “My Mom got tired of washing clothes and finding these treasures in the bottom of the washer or disintegrated through the dryer,” Liz recalls. “So she came up with “Liz’s Wonder Bowl”, and the idea was that I could empty my pockets into the bowl. I could still enjoy my treasures, and try to find out what things were, and not cause trouble with the laundry.”

McGee and Baird are among the thousands of parents who have joined — and are leading — an international children and nature movement. Sometimes known as Leave No Child Inside, the effort is bringing together people from all walks of life, who are creating grassroots regional campaigns, state and national legislation, and changes in their own families to help children become happier, healthier and smarter.

An emerging body of scientific knowledge links nature time to longer attention spans, better cognitive functioning, reduction of stress, and strengthened family bonds. What better way to enhance parent-child attachment than to walk in the woods together, disengaging from distracting electronics, advertising, and peer pressure?

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at Centers for Disease Control, recently describes the clear benefits of nature experiences to healthy child development, and to adult well-being.

“In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health, protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine,” he says. He believes that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. “Of course, there is still much we need to learn, such as what kinds of nature contact are most beneficial to health, how much contact is needed and how to measure that, and what groups of people benefit most. But we know enough to act.”

If you’re a parent who missed out on nature as a child, now’s your chance. Indeed, all the gifts of nature that come to children also come to the good adult who introduces a child to nature.

Young people are acting, too, by becoming natural leaders in the movement. For example, a seven-year-old girl in Virginia rounded up her friends and enrolled them in her own Girls Gone Wild in Nature Club. Together they organize backyard campouts and bug hunts.

In Mississippi, teenager Josh Morrison founded Geeks in the Woods for his friends and fellow geeks everywhere. He defines “geek” as a “gaming environmentally educated kid,” and says he and his friends are “tired of being labeled” tech addicts ” can have their PlayStations and their outdoor time too: “We could be the generation that makes a U-turn back to . . . a balance between virtual reality and what sustains all life . . . nature.”

FIVE ACTIONS YOU CAN TAKE TODAY

1. Go for a family walk when the moon is full. There’s a whole new set of animals, sights and sounds out there. Listen to animals calling. Owls and bats are looking for prey. Watch for things glowing, like worms and fungus on trees. And look up at the stars.

2. Help your child discover a hidden universe. Find a scrap board and place it on bare dirt. Come back in a day or two, lift the board, and see how many species have found shelter there. Identify them with the help of a field guide. Return to this universe once a month, lift the board and discover who’s new.

3. Tell your children stories about your special childhood places in nature. Then help them find their own: leaves beneath a backyard willow, the bend of a creek, the meadow in the woods. Let it become their intimate connection with the natural world.

4. Revive old traditions. Collect lightning bugs at dusk, release them at dawn. Make a leaf collection. Keep a terrarium or aquarium. Go crawdadding — tie a piece of liver or bacon to a string, drop it into a creek or pond, wait until a crawdad tugs.

5. Invent your own nature game. One mother’s suggestion: “We help our kids pay attention during longer hikes by playing “find ten critters” — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, snails, and other creatures. Finding a critter can also mean discovering footprints, mole holes, and other signs that an animal has passed by or lives there.”

Adapted from LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS by Richard Louv, copyright 2008. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

In our families and our communities, it’s time to take action. That’s why the new, expanded 2008 edition of “Last Child in the Woods” contains a “Field Guide” with 100 Actions that families and communities can take, along with discussion questions, a report on the movement, and other resources for parents, educators, conservationists, business people and community leaders.

For more information, see the Second Edition of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder“. To help build the movement, please join the Children & Nature Network.

Richard Louv, recipient of the 2008 Audubon Medal (and an honorary Natural Patriot!), is the author of seven books. The chairman of the Children & Nature Network, he is also honorary co-chair of the National Forum on Children and Nature.

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)!

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.