Archive for July, 2008

Language and Evolution: Frequency selection and Bursts

Published by Garry Peterson on July 30, 2008 in Adaptation. 0 Comments

John Whitfield has an interesting review article Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution in PLoS Biology (PLoS Biol 6(7): e186) on language and species evolution.

One parallel between living things and languages is that their most important components show the least variation. In biology, this means that genes such as those involved in the machinery of protein synthesis change so slowly that they can be used to discern the relationships of groups that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago. Likewise, the most commonly used words, such as numbers and pronouns, change the most slowly. Looking at 200 of the commonest words in 87 Indo-European languages, Pagel’s team found that the frequency with which they are used in everyday speech explains 50% of the variation in the rate of word change [4]. Similarly, Erez Lieberman, an evolutionary theorist at Harvard University, and his colleagues have found that over the past millennium, English verbs have become regularized at a rate inversely proportional to their frequency [5]. The frequency effect means that some rates of lexical replacement are comparable to the evolutionary rates of some genes, says Pagel; he thinks that these words might allow researchers to build family trees showing the relationships between languages reaching back 20 millennia, compared with the 8,000 years or so that most linguists currently think possible.

…

Earlier this year, Pagel and his colleagues uncovered another parallel between linguistic and biological change. Languages, they found, change slowly for a long time, and then undergo a sudden burst of change [6]—what biologists call punctuated equilibrium. These bursts seem to coincide with periods of linguistic speciation, when populations split and their languages diverge. Looking at trees of Indo-European, Austronesian, and Bantu languages, the researchers found that those languages that had gone through the most splits had changed more, with up to a third of changes being associated with split points. Pagel suggests that languages change when populations split because groups consciously or unconsciously use how they talk to define themselves and separate insiders from outsiders—as in the Old Testament book of Judges, when the men of Gilead identify their Ephraimite foes by their inability to pronounce the Hebrew word for an ear of grain, shibboleth, now a general term for a linguistic password.

Crop per Drop vs. Water for Ecosystem Services

Published by Garry Peterson on July 26, 2008 in Ecosystem services and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. 0 Comments

Colin Chartres the International Water Management Institute’s director general writes Invest in water for farming, or the world will go hungry.  In SciDev.net he writes:

The world’s population is projected to grow from 6 billion to 8.5 billion by 2030 and unless we change the way we use water and increase water productivity — ie. produce more ‘crop per drop’ — we will not be able to feed them. That is the conclusion of the IWMI’s recent Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture and its book, Water for Food, Water for Life, which drew on the work of 700 scientists.

While I agree that increasing agricultural water productivity is important, I think an underappreciated message of the CA (which is available online) is that globally we need to increase ecological water productivity.

A focus solely on agricultural production is likely to continue to cause declines in other valuable ecosystem services, sometimes to the extent that they outweigh any benefits gained from increases in agricultural production (See Millennium Ecosystem Assessment for many examples).  Agriculture provides benefits, but it also imposes costs.  Agriculture that ignores its ecological context has lead to coastal hypoxia, dryland salinization, and land degradation.  These problems reduce other ecosystems services, such as fisheries, while also decreasing the ecosystem support for agriculture.  These problems are increasing and overall are expected to worsen due to climate and other human caused global environmental change.

The quality, quantity and reliability of water flows connect agricultural and non-agricultural ecosystems. Water is also essential to the production of agricultural and most non-agricultural ecosystem services. Where these connections are strong requires an integrated approach to the management of water across landscapes and regions to ensure the reliable production of multiple ecosystem services.  However, in many cases we currently lack the practical knowledge to effectively manage agricultural and non-agricultural ecosystems for the multiple ecosystem services that depend upon water.  This research area is relatively underdeveloped and it is critical for ensuring human well-being in an increasingly unpredictable and resource intensive world.

Integration of Social Sciences: Mazlish’s the Uncertain Sciences

Published by Garry Peterson on July 26, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Many ecologists argue that solving the world’s ecological problems requires a more integrated understanding of human behaviour.  MIT historian Bruce Mazlish argues that the social sciences need more integration to understand humanity. Chapter one is available on the New York Times site.

In Metapsychology Maura Pilotti reviews his book The Uncertain Sciences

In The Uncertain Sciences, Bruce Mazlish presents a cunning and visionary examination of the scientific enterprise of understanding the human species and, by doing so, of its ability to address real life problems. He argues that disciplines that traditionally fall under the nebulous umbrella of Behavioral Sciences, such as Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology, and disciplines that are covered by the even more elusive umbrella of the Humanities, such as History and Philosophy, share a common interest, albeit with a different investigative focus. Namely, their desire is to understand the human condition and thus provide useful insights regarding its opportunities for amelioration. As such, they are the building blocks of what Mazlish calls the “Human Sciences”.

The author argues that the shared goal of all these disciplines would be better served if they were to interact more frequently and openly. He goes even further than simply proposing increased communication among the many and diverse disciplines of the “Human Sciences”. To ensure that these disciplines will transcend their own excessively encapsulated territories, he proposes an institutional change that will force communication and focus them all on their common purpose. Namely, he proposes the development and implementation of academic departments of the History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences.

Improve Devlopment Lending to Build Resilience

Published by Garry Peterson on July 24, 2008 in Ecological Economics. 0 Comments

Andrew Revkin writes in the New York Times about a recent world bank report that finds that the world bank is not lending in ways that invest in natural capital or resilience (The report is online at worldbank.org/oed). However, there is increasing awareness that that is a big problem.  Revkin writes that the report states that:

it was vital for the bank and its partners to intensify their focus on measurable environmental protection, given rising vulnerability to environmental risks and the increasing flow of financing for projects related to climate change.

“They need to begin to see the inextricable link between sustaining environment and reducing poverty,” Vinod Thomas, the director-general of the evaluation group, said in an interview. “It is clear now from the Amazon to India that if environmental sustainability is not raised as a priority then all bets are off.”

… Cheryl Gray, the director of the review group for the World Bank, said the lack of consistent internal tracking of the environmental facets of projects was an indicator of how much work needs to be done.

The World Bank Group approved its first set of common environmental standards in 2001, for the first time making environmental stewardship part of its core mission of reducing poverty.

But the new evaluation found a persistent lack of environmental focus in each step along the lending chain — from the priorities that shape development projects to the environmental standards and monitoring required in the field.

Revkin also asked the report’s authors about World Bank’s lack of investment to reduce or mitigate disaster damage. On Dot Earth Revkin quotes

Vinod Thomas, the director-general of the World Bank Group’s independent evaluation group, said a recent report on the Bank’s work on disasters found the same problem. “The bank has done well on the reconstruction side,” he told me. “But even where disasters recur, the preventive side gets neglected, for political reasons. Reconstruction gets photos.”

Things appear to be improving, though, Mr. Thomas said, partly because analysts for the bank and its lending partners are running the numbers on the economic benefits of resilience. “The rate of return on prevention can be 4 to 12 times the investment,” he said.

Often, he noted, there is no inconsistency between environmental conservation and resilience to disasters. He cited the example of maintaining coastal mangrove forests as a buffer against flooding. Communities bounded by mangroves persist while those exposed to the waves vanish. There’s no need to crunch numbers to figure that out.

Short notes: Enivonmental news, cities at night, and social-ecology of lawns

Published by Garry Peterson on July 23, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

Yale Environment 360 is an online magazine offering opinion, analysis, reporting and debate on global environmental issues published by the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

NASA’s Earth Observatory describes the advantages and difficulties of observing the world’s cities at night.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s writes about American lawns in The New Yorker article Turf War:

Americans spend an estimated forty billion dollars each year on grass—and to the academic discipline of turf management, degrees in which can now be obtained from, among other schools, the University of Massachusetts and Ohio State. The lawn has become so much a part of the suburban landscape that it is difficult to see it as something that had to be invented. … the American lawn now represents a serious civic problem. That the space devoted to it continues to grow—and that more and more water and chemicals and fertilizer are devoted to its upkeep—doesn’t prove that we care so much as that we are careless.

Collapse, Transcendence and Diversity

Published by Garry Peterson on July 22, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

On his weblog Open the Future futurist Jamais Cascio writes about our chances for bridging the innovation gap in Collapse, Transcendence, or Muddling Through:

Techno-utopianism is heady and seductive. Looking at the proliferation of powerful catalytic technologies, and the potential for truly transformative innovations just beyond our present grasp, makes scenarios of transcendence wiping away the terrible legacies of 20th century industrialism seem easy. If we’re just patient, and don’t shy away from the scale of the potential change, all that we fear today could be as relevant as 19th century tales of crowded city streets overwhelmed by horse droppings.

But if you don’t trust the technological scenarios, it’s not hard to see just how thoroughly we’re doomed. There are myriad drivers: depleting resources, rapid environmental degradation, global warming, international political instability, just to name a few. Any of these forms of “collapse” would pose a considerable challenge; in combination, they’re simply terrifying. Most importantly, we seem to be unwilling to acknowledge the significance of the challenge. We’re evolutionarily set to look for nearby, near-term problems and ignore deeper, distributed threats.

But here’s the twist: the impacts of these broader drivers for collapse and of technosocial innovation aren’t and won’t be evenly distributed globally. Some places will be able to last longer in the face of resource and environmental collapse than will others — and (not coincidentally) such places may be at the forefront of technosocial development, as well. The combination of collapse and innovation will lead to profoundly divergent results around the world. …

So the dilemma here is how to construct a global policy that can take into account the sheer complexity of the onrushing collapse. If it was “just” resource depletion, it would be tricky but doable; but it’s resource collapse plus global warming plus pandemic disease plus post-hegemonic disorder plus the myriad other issues we’re grappling with. It’s going to be difficult to see our way through this. Not impossible, but difficult.

The aspects that are on our side:

  • We do have the technology to deal with a lot of this stuff, but not the political will. But we know that we can change politics and society, arguably better than we know we can build some new technologies. A major disaster or three will change the politics quickly.
  • To a certain extent, the crises can cross-mitigate — for example, skyrocketing petroleum prices has measurably reduced travel miles, and are pushing people to buy more fuel-efficient cars, thereby reducing overall carbon outputs. Economic slow-downs also reduce the pace of carbon output. These are not a solution, by any means, but a mitigating factor.
  • We have a lot of people thinking about this, working on fixes and solutions and ideas. Not top-down directed, but a massively-massively-multi-participant quest, across thousands of communities and hundreds of countries, bringing in literally millions of minds. The very description reeks of innovation potential.

Using the web to track disease outbreaks

Published by Garry Peterson on July 14, 2008 in Visualization. 0 Comments

HealthMap an interesting global health alert system that was recently accounted in a PLoS Medicine article Surveillance Sans Frontières: Internet-Based Emerging Infectious Disease Intelligence and the HealthMap Project (Brownstein et al 2008).  They explain the motivation for the project:

As developed nations continue to strengthen their electronic disease surveillance capacities [1], the parts of the world that are most vulnerable to emerging disease threats still lack essential public health information infrastructure [2,3]. The existing network of traditional surveillance efforts managed by health ministries, public health institutes, multinational agencies, and laboratory and institutional networks has wide gaps in geographic coverage and often suffers from poor and sometimes suppressed information flow across national borders [4]. At the same time, an enormous amount of valuable information about infectious diseases is found in Web-accessible information sources such as discussion sites, disease reporting networks, and news outlets [5,6,7]. These resources can support situational awareness by providing current, highly local information about outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts [8]. These data are plagued by a number of potential hazards that must be studied in depth, including false reports (mis- or disinformation) and reporting bias. Yet these data hold tremendous potential to initiate epidemiologic follow-up studies and provide complementary epidemic intelligence context to traditional surveillance sources. This potential is already being realized, as a majority of outbreak verifications currently conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO)’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network are triggered by reports from these nontraditional sources [5,6]. Summary Points

In one of the most frequently cited examples [9], early indications of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Guangdong Province, China, came in November 2002 from a Chinese article that alluded to an unusual increase in emergency department visits with acute respiratory illness [9,10]. This was followed by media reports of a respiratory disease among health care workers in February 2003, all captured by the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) [10,11,12]. In parallel, online discussions on the ProMED-mail system referred to an outbreak in Guangzhou, well before official government reports were issued [13].

These Web-based data sources not only facilitate early outbreak detection, but also support increasing public awareness of disease outbreaks prior to their formal recognition. Through low-cost and real-time Internet data-mining, combined with openly available and user-friendly technologies, both participation in and access to global disease surveillance are no longer limited to the public health community [14,15]. The availability of Web-based news media provides an alternative public health information source in under-resourced areas. However, the myriad diverse sources of infectious disease information across the Web are not structured or organized; public health officials, nongovernmental organizations, and concerned citizens must routinely search and synthesize a continually growing number of disparate sources in order to use this information. With the aim of creating an integrated global view of emerging infections based not only on traditional public health datasets but rather on all available information sources, we developed HealthMap, a freely accessible, automated electronic information system for organizing data on outbreaks according to geography, time, and infectious disease agent [16].

Wired news writes:

HealthMap … creates machine-readable public health information from the text indexed by Google News, World Health Organization updates and online listserv discussions.

While aimed at public health workers, HealthMap is also usable by the general public. It locates the outbreaks on a world map and creates a color-coding system that indicates the severity of an outbreak on the basis of news reportage about it. Users of the site can then analyze and visualize the data, gaining unprecedented views of disease outbreaks.

By doing it all with publicly available news sources and low operating costs, the service itself remains free. After a small-scale launch in 2006, the site’s model and potential attracted a $450,000 grant last year from Google.org’s Predict and Prevent Initiative, which is focused on emerging infectious diseases.

It would be great if a similar systems could be used to map and monitor environmental change.

Algal Bloom along the Coast of China

Published by Garry Peterson on July 9, 2008 in Regime Shifts and Visualization. 0 Comments

There has been a lot of news coverage of the large coastal algal bloom at China’s Olympic sailing site in Qingdao. The Chinese government claims the bloom is now under control.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has published some remote sensed images of the bloom from MODIS:
MODIS comparison of algal bloom

On June 28, 2008, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of Qingdao and the bay of Jiaozhou Wan. The top image is a natural-color image similar to what a digital camera would photograph. The bottom image is a false-color image made from a combination of light visible to human eyes and infrared light our eyes cannot see. In this image, vegetation appears vibrant green, including the strips of algae floating in the bay and in the nearby coastal waters.

These images show the bay at the beginning of a local cleanup effort. (Daily images of the area are available from the MODIS Rapid Response Team.)

The long history of human-environment interactions in China

Published by Elena Bennett on July 9, 2008 in Regime Shifts. 0 Comments

In a recent paper, JA Dearing and colleagues (J. Paleolimnology 40: 3-31) use paleolimnological techniques to explore the long-term history of the region around Erhai Lake in Yunnan Province. Lake sediment cores (which can explain catchment vegetation, flooding, soil erosion, sediment sources and metal workings) are complemented by independent regional climate time-series from speleothems, archaeological records of human habitation, and a detailed documented environmental history. The authors integrate these data to “provide a Holocene scale record of environmental change and human–environment interactions.”

They use these data to ask:

  • “How sensitive are the studied environmental system processes to climate and human drivers of change?”
  • “Can we observe long-term trajectories of socio-environmental interactions, or periods of social collapse and recovery?”

The authors identify a number of points at which there were major changes in the human interaction with the landscape, including ~9000 cal year BP, when sediment records show a ‘human-affected environment’, ~4800 cal year BP, when major deforestation for grazing led to the extirpation of forest species and some functional units, and ~2000 cal year BP at the introduction of paddy field irrigated farming, and ~1600 cal year BP at which point surface erosion and gullying were caused by increased exploitation of mountain slopes. They go on to suggest that these records indicate several major ‘periods’ in human-environment interactions in this area:

The earliest of these cases probably represents the dispersion of the population away from the established sedentary agricultural units on alluvial fans to the more inhospitable margins of the lake and the valleys. This perhaps signifies the end of the ‘nature dominated’ phase (Messerli et al.) where society could cause significant modification of the landscape but was still vulnerable to the main risks of drought and flood (though the evidence for climate determinism is weak). In contrast, the introduction of irrigation is associated with a trend of weakening monsoon intensity, increasing numbers of centennial scale dry phases, and population growth. It represents an agrarian society in transition, using technological innovation to raise carrying capacities without increasing greatly the vulnerability to drought or flood. The third period is linked to natural population growth, inward migration and metal extraction brought about by the rise of Nanzhao/Dali as a major center”

The authors then ask at what stage of the adaptive cycle the modern Erhai socio-ecological system exists:

At Erhai, the slow processes of weathering and soil accumulation, in association with vegetation cover held fairly constant by a benign early-mid Holocene climate, were interrupted by fast processes of anthropogenic modification of vegetation. For many centuries, this concatenation of ‘slow–long’ and ‘fast–short’ processes led to a resilient land use-soil system (cf. Gunderson and Holling). But increasing perturbations led to system failure, and we can observe that the late Ming environmental crisis represents the end of the last release phase. Thus, the modern landscape may be approaching a conservation phase (K) characterised by minimum resilience.

Dearing and colleagues explore the meanings of this research for current sustainability and conclude that the main threat to the region is high magnitude-low frequency flooding of the agricultural plain and low terraces, which is exacerbated by:

  1. continued use of high altitude and steep slopes for grazing and cultivation that generate high runoff from unprotected slopes and maintain active gully systems, particularly in the northern basins;
  2. reduction or poor maintenance of paddy field systems, engineered flood defences, river channels and terraces; [and]
  3. increased intensities of the summer monsoon.

This fascinating paper is an excellent example of how historical data sources can be integrated to provide a new perspective on social and ecological change over long periods of time.

Short links: Greening China, Fish Pirates, Resilient Communities

Published by Garry Peterson on July 4, 2008 in General. 0 Comments

From ES&T news Will the Dragon Stay Green? China After the Beijing Olympics

China is managing to succeed—by putting in place its tremendous industrial renovation programs, starting up monitoring for emissions, and encouraging green building and sustainable resource use, all while protecting its culture and its people. … Even if all of China’s people are not wealthy themselves, they know their country is, she says. “A fundamental change that’s happened in the last 10 years [is that they have become] wealthy enough as a society to say, ‘We are going to be among the first rank.’ Development is more than just industry; modernity means quality health care, education, clean water—[and] environmental as well as other social services.”  “It’s not going to be perfect,” Seligsohn says, “but I am quite convinced that 5 years from now, you’ll look at the sky [in Beijing], and it’s going to be substantially better.”

BBC NEWS Arms embargo hurts Ivorian fishing

Ivory Coast is calling on the United Nations to lift an arms embargo that it says has prevented the defence of its waters from illegal fishing boats. The falling catches are not only a result of over-fishing, but also of illegal fishing techniques. “These pirates don’t follow the international rules for fishing because they’re thieves,” says Mr Djobo. “This all means we’ve seen a drastic decline in the catches of fishermen in our waters.”

Alex Steffen of WorldChanging writes about John Robb’s security focused idea of Resilient Community:

John’s posts themselves tend to focus on work-arounds for brittle infrastructure, things like smart local networks (sort of the information equivalent of energy smart grids), community scrip and local fabrication …But I worry as well about the role these sorts of ideas seem to often end up playing in the public debate. … Because, it bears repeating again and again and again, responses based purely on localism and scaling-back can’t save us now. We need to remake our material civilization.

Also, the Stockholm Resilience Centre has launched a new monthly electronic newsletter. The first issue presents recent news from the centre.  To subscribe, go to www.stockholmresilience.su.se and enter your email address under ‘Subscribe to newsletter’ in the right column.

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