All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
General, Inequality

Poor People Living in Rich Neighborhoods Die Sooner

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A recent theme in epidemiology and health geography is understanding how social inequality impacts health outcomes (for a review see Richard Wilkinson‘s popular science book Impact of Inequality : How to Make Sick Societies Healthier).

Scientific American.com reports on health geography research that shows that:

Poor people die sooner when living in higher-income neighborhoods than in poorer ones, a new report concludes. Researchers analyzed 17 years’ worth of data on thousands of people from four mid-size northern California cities to determine the death rates among different socioeconomic groups residing in the same neighborhoods. Higher rents or property taxes and limited access to free services may explain the paradoxical outcome for poor people with better-off neighbors.

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Inequality, Visualization

Mapping US urban income

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On radicalcartography Bill Rankin has produced some interesting maps of urban wealth patterns in large US cities, which show how patterns of wealth and poverty vary among US cities.

cityincome

Maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the “donut” hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the “revitalized” downtown, and the poor stuck in between.

This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds “wedges” of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.

Greenlash

Increase in Number of Coastal Dead Zones

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Contemporary agriculture uses huge amounts of fertilizer (largely responsible for the doubling of global Nitrogen flows and the tripling of global Phosphorus flows).  The over application and lack of finesse with which fertilizer is used produces a tradeoff between increased agricultural production and coastal ecosystem production.

Agricultural runoff is the main driver of low oxygen coastal ‘dead zones,’ which greatly reduce fish, shellfish, and most other living things, consequently reducing coastal fisheries, recreation opportunities, and sometimes, when there are toxic algae blooms, endangering human health.

A Science magazine news article (Oct 26, 2006) reports on an update to a UNEP assessment of the world’s dead zones.

The number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in global marine waters has jumped by more than a third in the last 2 years, according to a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report released last week. The latest figures reveal some 200 dead zones worldwide, up from 149 since 2004. The affected waters are robbed of fish, oysters, sea grasses, and other marine life, damaging food supplies for millions of people worldwide, the report warns.
Dead zones form when microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton explode in number. When the phytoplankton die, bacteria feast on them and consume vast amounts of dissolved oxygen. The resulting oxygen depletion–or hypoxia–kills fish, oysters, sea grasses, and other marine life. Although phytoplankton are the backbone of marine food chains and their populations naturally wax and wane, abnormally large “blooms” have been on the rise since the 1970s. According to the UNEP report, this has been due to skyrocketing marine levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizers, sewage, animal wastes, and other sources.

Marine biologist Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences in Williamsburg compiled much of the findings on dead zones from exhaustive reviews of scientific journals around the world. Better scientific reporting in recent years likely accounts for some of the apparent increase in the phenomenon, he says; “however, there’s no mistaking the consistent upward trend over the last 50 years.” It is difficult to estimate the total area affected worldwide, but he believes the total is “on the order of” 300,000 square kilometers. About 80% of the zones occur every summer and autumn, he says. Some, such as the Baltic Sea’s 80,000-square-kilometer zone, even persist year-round.

The situation may well worsen. The UNEP report projects that the volume of nitrogen alone dumped by rivers into the oceans will climb 14% by 2030, compared to mid-1990s levels. However, not all dead zones are linked to human activities, says paleoceanographer Kjell Nordberg of Göteborg University in Sweden. His historical and geological studies indicate that natural changes in climate and ocean conditions have caused oxygen depletion in some North Sea estuaries and fjords. Not all hope is lost, however. In some areas where sewage discharge and agricultural practices are implicated, regulations to curb the impacts have helped improve oxygen levels over the last few years, Nordberg says.

Design, General

WorldChanging Book

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WC bookBill McKibben reviews five recent books on ideas on the ecological futures of humanity in the New York Review of Books. He discusses books on climate and energy, and what we can do about it.

His review includes his descrption of the new WorldChanging book – Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century:

It is precisely this question — how we might radically transform our daily lives — that is addressed by the cheerful proprietors of the WorldChanging website in their new book of the same name. This is one of the most professional and interesting websites that you could possibly bookmark on your browser; almost every day they describe a new technology or technique for environmentalists. Their book, a compilation of their work over the last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie bible, retooled for the iPod generation. There are short features on a thousand cool ideas: slow food, urban farming, hydrogen cars, messenger bags made from recycled truck tarps, pop-apart cell phones, and plyboo (i.e., plywood made from fast-growing bamboo). There are many hundreds of how-to guides (how to etch your own circuit board, how to break in your hybrid car so as to maximize mileage, how to organize a “smart mob” (a brief gathering of strangers in a public place).

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Ecological Management, General, Greenlash

Gilbert White: Floods are acts of God, but flood losses are largely acts of man

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Gilbert White a pioneer in understanding the social-ecological nature of natural disasters died recently in Colorado. He died, in early October 2006, age 94 after a long and diverse career that centered on the impact of flooding.

White argued that ‘hard’ engineering solutions to flooding, such as dams and levees, frequently produced pathological results. His PhD research at the University of Chicago “Human adjustment to floods,” showed river engineering had increased, rather than decreased, the costs of floods, because river engineering resulted in more settlement in the floodplain, increasing vulnerability to large flood.

The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder maintains a Gilbert White archive.

The University of Colorado has an obituary. The Washington Post also has an obituary that quotes Gilbert White:

While watching the German occupation of France, I became convinced that man can no more conquer or preserve a civilization by war than he can conquer nature solely by engineering force,” Dr. White told broadcaster Edward R. Murrow for the radio program “This I Believe” in 1951.

“I found that an occupying army or a concentration camp can repress men’s basic beliefs but cannot change them. The good life, like the balance of all the complex elements of a river valley, is founded upon friendly adjustment. . . . It embraces confidence in fellowship, tolerance in outlook, humility in service and a constant search for the truth.”

General

Mapping urban wildlife habitat

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The city of Chicago, but the city has recently released a plan to protect its existing important wild (or feral) areas. A US public radio story describes how Chicago is Making room for wildlife in the city.

Jerry Adelmann’s been a fan of green space in the city for decades. He’s the chair of Mayor Richard Daley’s Nature and Wildlife Committee. Two years back, Adelmann suggested making a comprehensive inventory of Chicago’s last remaining scraps of habitat.

“We have some of the rarest ecosystems on the globe – tall grass prairie remnants, oak savanna, some of our wetland communities are extraordinarily rare, rarer than the tropical rainforest, and yet they’re here in our forest preserves and our parks, and in some cases, unprotected.”

The city recently unveiled a new plan to protect these little places in the city. The Nature and Wildlife Plan highlights one hundred sites, adding up to almost 5,000 acres. Most of the sites are already part of city parks or forest lands, but until recently, they didn’t have special protection.

Kathy Dickhut is with Chicago’s planning department. She says before Chicago’s recent zoning reform, these sites the city wanted to protect were zoned as residential or commercial areas. Now they’re zoned as natural areas.

“Buildings aren’t allowed, parking lots aren’t allowed. This area is not going to be zoned for any other active use whereas other parts of the parks we have field houses, zoos, ball fields, but in these areas we’re not going to have structures.”

Dickhut says even though land’s at a premium in the city, the planning department hasn’t run into a lot of opposition with the new habitat plan. She says she just got a lot of blank looks. Local officials were surprised the city wanted these small pockets of land.

And that actually worked in the city’s favor. The city’s been able to acquire new lands for habitat that no one else wanted.

“As a rule we don’t like to take the throwaways for parks and habitat. But in some cases, habitat lands work well where other things won’t work well. If you’ve got a road and a river and a very skinny piece of land that won’t fit anything else, that’s good for habitat, because anywhere where land meets water is good for habitat.”

The city’s also turning an old parking lot back into sand dunes and elevated train embankments into strips of green space. And though some of this land isn’t exactly prime real estate, the city does get donations with a little more charisma.

In Chicago’s industrial southeast side, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered bald eagles nesting in the area for the first time in a century. The birds were nesting on a 16 acre plot owned by Mittal Steel USA. The city got the company to donate the land.

via Bootstrap Analysis

Ecological Management, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Research Needs

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In an enhanced Policy Forum in Science 314 (5797): 257, Steve Carpenter and several other senior participants from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) that outlines the Research Needs identified by the MA. They highlight the need for:

  • Theory Linking Ecological Diversity & Dyanmics
  • Briding Scales; Monitoring
  • Research that Assesses Policy Success;
  • Improved understanding of Social-Ecological Change
  • Improved methods of Ecological Valuation.

Their comments on Ecological theory, learning from policies, and Social-Ecological theory are of particular interest to resilience research. They write:

We lack a robust theoretical basis for linking ecological diversity to ecosystem dynamics and, in turn, to ecosystem services underlying human well-being. We all need this information to understand the limits and consequences of biodiversity loss and the actions needed to maintain or restore ecosystem functions.

The most catastrophic changes in ecosystem services identified in the MA involved nonlinear or abrupt shifts. We lack the ability to predict thresholds for such changes, whether or not a change may be reversible, and how individuals and societies will respond. Thus, the risks of ecosystem catastrophes are poorly quantified. Major ecosystem degradation tends to occur as syndromes of simultaneous failure in multiple services. For example, the populous dry lands of the world are facing a combination of failing crops and grazing, declining quality and quantity of fresh water, and loss of tree cover. Similarly, many rivers and lakes have experienced increases in nutrient pollution (eutrophication), toxicity, and biodiversity loss.

Relations between ecosystem services and human well-being are poorly understood. One gap relates to the consequences of changes in ecosystem services for poverty reduction. The poor are most dependent on ecosystem services and vulnerable to their degradation. Empirical studies are needed.

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Ecological Management, Greenlash, Ideas, Vulnerability

The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

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Michael Pollan article The Vegetable-Industrial Complex in the October 15th New York Times describes an example of Holling’s pathology of natural resource management in agriculture.

Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.

But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink.

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