All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Cities, New Orleans, Vulnerability

Lessons of Katrina

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From TimeIt was roughly two years ago that New Orleans spectactularly failed to cope, technologically and socially, with Hurricane Katrina. Over 1,8oo people died, neighbourhoods and livlihoods were destroyed, and the storm is estimated to have caused over $80 billion in damage.

One of the fundamental principles of successful ecological management is learning from your mistakes, and incorporating those lessons into management practices. Two recent retrospectives, one in Time and the other in Mother Jones, on what has followed the storm indicate not a lot has been learned by the various institutions responsible the ecological management of the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast.

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Cities

Rooftop gardening in Montreal

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Rooftop garden at McGillMontreal’s Rooftop gardening project has had a demonstration garden outside my office at McGill this summer. Montreal is very dense, it has a lack of gardening space, but many people have balconies and external staircases where they can have gardens. The rooftop gardeners aim to produce good healthy food, in a way that also improves urban environmental quality.

The Rooftop gardening project have been working with McGill Architecture’s global edible landscapes project, which is workingin Colombo, Sri Lanka; Kampala, Uganda and Rosario, Argentina, as well as Montreal. The McGill reporter had an article Garden of eating about the project in May 2007.

The Rooftop gardening project have made a film about their work Des Jardins sur les toit (Rooftop gardens) – it is in French with English subtitles.

Photos from the Montreal Rooftop gardening project and the AASHE weblog.

Ecological Economics, Ecosystem services, General

Terroir in the USA: reinventing local food traditions

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renewing america’s food traditionsThe Geography of Flavor a August 22, Washington Post article describes how the French concept of terroir – the idea that the social-ecological context of a food’s production shapes its character – is spreading to the USA.

This idea is being promoted to enhance the profitability of agriculture, the quality of food, and the ecology of food production regions. For example, ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan is part of this movement and worked with the US Slow Food movement to cofound the Renewing America’s Food Traditions Project.

Terroir has the potential to promote a variety of interests in ways that simple origin labeling, as with Vidalia onions, can’t. Farmers believe that the focus on growing conditions and production methods will make their products stand out in a market where low prices reign supreme. Economists see terroir as a device to help restore and protect rural communities; if farmers can earn more money, they’re more likely to stay on the land. Others believe that promoting terroir could help quell fears about food safety.

…

“We went to the Industrialized Age almost immediately,” Trubek said. “We never had cute little towns with wine-and-cheese traditions. The American experience is all about expansion, to make it bigger, to keep moving.”

Two hundred years later, an unlikely coalition is joining forces to invent American tradition by linking foods to the places they come from and, like American winemakers before them, to romance. Their hope is to offer a counterbalance to the commodity mentality that a strawberry from California is interchangeable with one grown in Florida.

Studies show that the strategy can be profitable. According to a May 2004 survey conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, 56 percent of respondents were willing to pay at least 10 percent more for a place-based food, or “produit du terroir.” The survey also revealed that 65 percent of respondents preferred products that would give farmers a higher percentage of profits than processors, distributors and retailers.

The theory has borne out for fishermen on Lummi Island. Five years ago, they formed a co-op and agreed to catch salmon with reef nets. The contraptions, a modernized version of a Native American invention, consist of an artificial underwater reef made of plastic ribbons. Fishermen stand on tall towers above the water and watch for salmon to swim into the reef, then pull up the nets, spilling the fish into an underwater pen in the boat’s center. The fish are then moved into a separate tank, where their gills are cut and they swim slowly to their deaths.

It sounds cruel, but Lummi Island fishermen claim it’s far less stressful than contemporary methods in which fish die full of adrenaline, struggling for breath on the deck of a commercial fishing vessel. “Reef-net fish have this amazing flavor,” co-op member Ian Kirouac said. “We wanted to identify ourselves with a strong sense of place. There’s a big difference between what we do and what other people do. ”

By advertising their technique and the place of origin, this Lummi Island co-op has been able to command a premium for its fish, both from retailers and restaurant clients. Commodity sockeye salmon sell for about $3.25 a pound wholesale, while Lummi Island’s fetch as much as $5.25 per pound.

via Agricultural biodiversity weblog

Ideas

Seven Ways to Improve Environmental Education

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An essay in PLOS Biology The Failure of Environmental Education (and How We Can Fix It), by Daniel Blumstein & Charlie Saylan propose seven ways to improve environmental education. The proposal has some good points, but is both US-centric and and some of their points are overly based on the assumption that everyone agrees on what environmental outcomes are desireable (1,5) and that we know what is needed to create a sustainable society (2, 6). Their seven proposals are:

  1. Design environmental education programs that can be properly evaluated, for example, with before-after, treatment-control designs. Such approaches represent a sea change from programs today, and we expect considerable resistance from environmental educators. But the environmental community at large must stop rejecting criticism as negative and must embark on a policy of continuing self-evaluation and assessment. To be deemed effective, environmental education and the funding process that supports it must also work backward from specific environmental problems by evaluating the degree of actual impact on a specific issue versus the amount of money and energy spent on public education. …
  2. Many environmental issues facing us today are caused by over-consumption — primarily by developed countries. Changing consumption patterns is not generally a targeted outcome of environmental education, but we believe it is one of the most important lessons that must be taught. The magnitude of our impact, as first proposed in 1971 by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren, can be viewed as dependent upon population size, affluence (specifically, per capita economic output), and technology (specifically, the environmental output per unit of economic impact). As countries develop, their environmental footprint may expand, and consumption control may become more important. … Thus, we need to radically overhaul curricula to teach the conservation of consumable products. Teaching where and how resources come from—that food, clean water, and energy do not originate from supermarkets, taps, and power points—may be an important first step.
  3. We need to teach that nature is filled with nonlinear relationships, which are characterized by “tipping points” (called “phase shifts”): there may be little change in something of interest across a range of values, but above a particular threshold in a causal factor, change is rapid. For instance, ecology, which focuses on understanding the distribution and abundance of life on Earth, is a complex, nonlinear science. If environmental education is linear—in other words, if you teach that recycling one beer bottle will save “x” gallons of water—people will not have the foundation to think about linkages or nonlinear relationships. …
  4. We need to teach a world view. … A greater appreciation of the diversity of cultures and peoples in the world should help us realize the selfish consequences of our consumption. “Not in my backyard” is not a sustainable rallying cry in an interconnected world when we are faced with global climate change. We are too late for “think globally and act locally” to work. …
  5. We must teach how governments work and how to effect change within a given socio-political structure. We suspect that many individuals will be offended by the thought that large industries have so much sway on the wording of state and federal legislation. We all suffer from polluted water and greenhouse gasses, but lobbyists are very effective in diluting potentially costly legislation meant to safeguard our water supplies or prevent rampant climate change. Understanding how the system works will empower subsequent generations to change it.
  6. We must teach that conservation-minded legislation may deprive us of some of the goods and services that we previously enjoyed. Self-sacrifice will be necessary to some degree if we are to avoid or minimize adverse effects of imminent environmental threats with truly global consequences.
  7. Finally, we must teach critical thinking. Environmentally aware citizens must be able to evaluate complex information and make decisions about things that we can’t currently envision. True scientific literacy means that people have a conceptual tool kit that can be applied to a variety of questions. Unfortunately, much science education is not inspired, and students are required to learn facts without being given the ability to manipulate and analyze those facts. …
Ecological Economics

Pathological overproduction

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fast foodMichael Pollan writes on potential reform of the US’s pathologic farm bill in the New York Times Magazine:

A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

General, Greenlash

Great Lakes hemorrahagic fish virus surprise

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Viral hemorrhagic septicemia (V.H.S.) is an invasive virus that causes internal bleeding and organ failure of most of the sport and commercial fish in the Great Lakes. It has already killed tens of thousands of fish in the eastern Great Lakes, and is now spreading through the Great Lakes. It is likely to indirectly change the Great Lakes’ already unstable ecological structure. A New York Times article Fish-Killing Virus Spreading in the Great Lakes and the Toronto Star article Pathogen stalks fish report on the spread of the virus:

One of Dr. Casey’s colleagues researching the virus, Dr. Paul Bowser, a professor of aquatic animal medicine, added, “This is a new pathogen and for the first number of years — 4, 5 or 10 years — things are going to be pretty rough, then the animals will become more immune and resistant and the mortalities will decline.”

No one is sure where the virus came from or how it got to the Great Lakes. In the late 1980s, scientists saw a version of V.H.S. in salmon in the Pacific Northwest, which was the first sighting anywhere in North America. V.H.S. is also present in the Atlantic Ocean. But the genesis of a new, highly aggressive mutated strain concentrating on the Great Lakes is a biological mystery.

“We really don’t know how it got there,” said Jill Roland, a fish pathologist and assistant director for aquaculture at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “People’s awareness of V.H.S. in the lakes was unknown until 2005. But archived samples showed the virus was there as early as 2003.”

Scientists pointed to likely suspects, mainly oceangoing vessels that dump ballast water from around the world into the Great Lakes. (Ships carry ballast water to help provide stability, but it is often contaminated and provides a home for foreign species. The water is loaded and discharged as needed for balance.)

Fish migrate naturally, but also move with people as they cast nets for sport, for instance, or move contaminated water on pleasure boats from lake to lake.

The United States Department of Agriculture issued an emergency order in October to prohibit the movement of live fish that are susceptible to the virus out of the Great Lakes or bordering states. The order was later amended to allow limited movement of fish that tested negative for the virus.

“Getting rid of it is extremely hard to foresee,” said Henry Henderson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Midwest office in Chicago. “These species spread, and reproduce. It is a living pollution.”

From the Toronto Star:

The deaths to date are just a small fraction of the millions of fish in the lakes. Even so, governments around the lakes are worried enough to try unprecedented steps to contain the virus.

VHS is suspected to be the latest on a growing list of destructive species – including zebra mussels and round gobies – brought into the lakes from Europe and Asia, usually in the ballast water of ocean-going ships.

The potential impact on fish isn’t the only concern. VHS doesn’t harm humans, but that doesn’t mean others that follow will be so benign, says Jennifer Nalbone, of Great Lakes United, a cross-border advocacy group based in Buffalo that for years has demanded strict controls on ballast.

“It’s a wake-up call that the lakes are vulnerable to any pathogen getting in here. We need to try to slow the spread but also to close the door.”

 

General

How to write consistently boring scientific literature

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Danish biology professor Kaj Sand-Jensen has a new Oikos paper (2007 – 116: 723-727) which provides advice on How to write consistently boring scientific literature:

A Scandinavian professor has told me an interesting story. The first English manuscript prepared by one of his PhD students had been written in a personal style, slightly verbose but with a humoristic tone and thoughtful side-tracks. There was absolutely no chance, however, that it would meet the strict demands of brevity, clarity and impersonality of a standard article. With great difficulty, this student eventually learned the standard style of producing technical, boring and impersonal scientific writing, thus enabling him to write and defend his thesis successfully.

I recalled the irony in this story from many discussions with colleges, who have been forced to restrict their humor, satire and wisdom to the tyranny of jargon and impersonal style that dominates scientific writing. Personally, I have felt it increasingly difficult to consume the steeply growing number of hardly digestible original articles. It has been a great relief from time to time to read and write essays and books instead.

Because science ought to be fun and attractive, particularly when many months of hard work with grant applications, data collections and calculations are over and everything is ready for publishing the wonderful results, it is most unfortunate that the final reading and writing phases are so tiresome.

I have therefore tried to identify what characteristics make so much of our scientific writing unbearably boring, and I have come up with a top-10 list of recommendations for writing consistently boring publications.

  • Avoid focus
  • Avoid originality and personality
  • Write long contributions
  • Remove implications and speculations
  • Leave out illustrations
  • Omit necessary steps of reasoning
  • Use many abbreviations and terms
  • Suppress humor and flowery language
  • Degrade biology to statistics
  • Quote numerous papers for trivial statements

Via Erik Andersson.

Ecosystem services, Greenlash, Regime Shifts

Sandstorms and Land degradation in China

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Gaoming Jiang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Botany, writes about China’s failure to restore degraded arid land in a China Dialogue article Stopping the Sandstorms:

In Beijing, the weather forecast says that more sandstorms are on the way. The capital was hit by four sandstorms in March, and even Shanghai was recently smothered by dust clouds from the north. Television reports now describe these events as “sandy weather”, rather than “sandstorms”. But whatever you call them, they are becoming ever more frequent visitors to Beijing in springtime.

While everyone is cursing the weather, I find myself worrying: how many tonnes of soil are being lost? And how long will it be before there is nowhere in China for plants to take root? Academics argue to what extent these sandstorms are “imports” from Mongolia and the former Soviet Republics, or whether they are the “domestic” products of the arid deserts and damaged grasslands of China’s west. But either way, there is no denying the degree of environmental degradation in western China over the last three decades. Regardless of whether the capital’s weather comes from beyond its borders, China needs to put measures in place to restore the grasslands and reduce the risk of sandstorms.

Sixty billion yuan has been invested in projects to control the sandstorms that are hitting northeastern China. Tree-planting projects have also been running for 30 years across north China. But why haven’t they worked? And more importantly – what will?
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Ideas, Reorganization

Gelman’s notes on Black Swans

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Noted Bayesian statistician Andrew Gelman writes his notes on Nassim Taleb‘s book the Black Swan:

As I noted earlier, reading the book with pen in hand jogged loose various thoughts. . . . The book is about unexpected events (“black swans”) and the problems with statistical models such as the normal distribution that don’t allow for these rarities. From a statistical point of view, let me say that multilevel models (often built from Gaussian components) can model various black swan behavior. In particular, self-similar models can be constructed by combining scaled pieces (such as wavelets or image components) and then assigning a probability distribution over the scalings, sort of like what is done in classical spectrum analysis of 1/f noise in time series. For some interesting discussion in the context of “texture models” for images, see the chapter by Yingnian Wu in my book with Xiao-Li on applied Bayesian modeling and causal inference. (Actually, I recommend this book more generally; it has lots of great chapters in it.)

That said, I admit that my two books on statistical methods are almost entirely devoted to modeling “white swans.” My only defense here is that Bayesian methods allow us to fully explore the implications of a model, the better to improve it when we find discrepancies with data. Just as a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg, Bayesian inference is just a theory’s way of uncovering problems with can lead to a better theory. I firmly believe that what makes Bayesian inference really work is a willingness (if not eagerness) to check fit with data and abandon and improve models often.

update: Gelman follows up on his comments with:

Dan Goldstein and Nassim Taleb’s paper writes: “Finance professionals, who are regularly exposed to notions of volatility, seem to confuse mean absolute deviation with standard deviation, causing an underestimation of 25% with theoretical Gaussian variables. In some fat tailed markets the underestimation can be up to 90%. The mental substitution of the two measures is consequential for decision making and the perception of market variability.”

This interests me, partly because I’ve recently been thinking about summarizing variation by the mean absolute difference between two randomly sampled units (in mathematical notation, E(|x_i-x_j})), because that seems like the clearest thing to visualize. Fred Mosteller liked the interquartile range but that’s a little too complicated for me, also I like to do some actual averaging, not just medians which miss some important information. I agree with Goldstein and Taleb that there’s not necessarily any good reason for using sd (except for mathematical convenience in the Gaussian model).