Category Archives: General

General

Short Links: Gorillas, drunky shrews, and jellyfish

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Three nature stories from the New York Times:

In the Congo Republic a survey has discovered a large population (125 000) of Western lowland gorillas.

Trove of Endangered Gorillas Found in Africa

The survey was conducted by the Wildlife Conservation Society and local researchers in largely unstudied terrain, including a swampy region nicknamed the “green abyss” by the first biologists to cross it. Dr. Steven E. Sanderson, the president of the society, marveled at the scope of what the survey revealed. “The message from our community is so often one of despair,” he said. “While we don’t want to relax our concern, it’s just great to discover that these animals are doing well.”

It’s Always Happy Hour for Several Species in Malaysian Rain Forest

German scientists have discovered that seven species of small mammals in the rain forests of western Malaysia drink fermented palm nectar on a regular basis. For several of the species, including the pen-tailed tree shrew, the nectar, which can have an alcohol content approaching that of beer, is the major food source — meaning they are chronic drinkers.

Oceanic food webs shifting to dominance by jellyfish, due to overfishing of top predators, and likely coastal eutrophication and climate change.

Stinging Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans’ Decline

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.

“These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, ‘Look how badly you are treating me,’ ” said Dr. Josep-María Gili, a leading jellyfish expert, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

General

Integration of Social Sciences: Mazlish’s the Uncertain Sciences

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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.

General

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

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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.

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Collapse, Transcendence and Diversity

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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.
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Short links: Greening China, Fish Pirates, Resilient Communities

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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.

General, Greenlash

China’s blue-green Olympics

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Coastal eutrophication is an increasing problem in China, due to their massive use of fertilizers.

china algae

Large blooms of blooms of blue-green algae are clogging parts of the sailing course at one of China’s Olympic sites in Quindoa. Algae are being manually removed by a thousand boats and thousands of people at (AFP, AP, Guardian, NYT, and photos from Xinmin). Bloomberg news writes:

Warmer waters, increased rainfall and high levels of nutrients in the ocean brought about the algae explosion along vast stretches of the 800-kilometer (500-mile) coastline, according to the Qingdao Weather Bureau.

Qingdao, located 830 kilometers from Beijing, is mobilizing more than 1,000 fishing boats to scoop up the algae and contain the outbreak, Wang said.

“We can only haul the blue-green algae manually and we’re doing all we can with our arms full and by the boat-load,” said Wang, a sailing spokesman for the Beijing Games organizing committee. “All you can see is fishing boats along the coast.”

via Great Beyond

update: BBC video of army algae removal

Ecological Management, General

Environmental Cooperation and Resource Degradation

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People commonly assume that environmental degradation and resource depletion will lead to conflict, however  ecological problems can also lead to cooperation.

Earthtrends reviews some recent research in this area in Using Environmental Negotiations Toward Peace:

Ecological resources have factored into many national conflicts–either through competition for scarce resources or greed to exploit plentiful ones. But some scholars see another role for the environment: fostering peace. Resources managed jointly can quell regional hostilities, or better, keep lines of communication open so that a conflict never starts, these scholars say, and it seems the idea is gaining traction.

General

Buzz Holling wins 2008 Volvo Environmental Prize

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buzz holling photoBuzz Holling, the father of resilience science and the founder of the Resilience Alliance (and contributor to this blog) has won the 2008 Volvo Environment Prize. Congratulations Buzz!

On the Prize website they write the justification for the award:

“The Volvo Environment Foundation takes great pleasure in awarding its 2008 environment prize to Crawford “Buzz” Holling, one of ecology’s great integrative thinkers for his pioneering lifetime work on ecosystem dynamics, transformation and resilience, and adaptive management.

Crawford “Buzz” Holling is one of the most creative and influential ecologists of our times. His integrative thinking has shed new light on the growth, collapse, and regeneration of coupled human-ecological systems. Current discussions and debates over non-linear systems, adaptation and change, thresholds, tipping points, and resilience are all part of his rich legacy of writing. His analyses have ranged boldly across scales of time and space. His 1973 paper on the “resilience of non-linear ecological systems” reshaped profoundly thinking on the dynamics and transformation of ecological systems. His 1978 volume on Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management remains the classic work on this important subject 30 years later. Not content with new theoretical insights into the stability and change of human-ecological systems, Holling has profoundly critiqued what he describes as “the pathology of natural resource management,” detailing how things go right and wrong in well-intentioned efforts at resource management. His recent work with Lance Gunderson, Panarchy: Understanding Transformation in Human and Natural Systems, is no less than a far-ranging exploration of fundamental principles of resilience thinking. The newly created Stockholm Resilience Center is itself a highly promising venture built on Holling’s legacy.”