Category Archives: Reorganization

General, Reorganization

Water Hyacinth Re-invades Lake Victoria

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From NASA’s Earth Observatory, images showing the speed with which the rapidly spreading S American water hyacinth has reinvaded Lake Victoria. Water hyacinth was introduced to Africa over a century ago, but it did not become a problem in Lake Victoria until the early 1990s. It covered substantial areas of the coastline, particularly in Uganda, blocking waterways, disrupting hydropower, and decreasing the profitability of fishing. Hyacinth also provided refugia for some species from the introduced Nile Perch. It largely disappeared from the Lake in the late 90s, perhaps, but not clearly, due to the introduction of a weevil used for biological control. It experienced a resurgence in the early 2000s. Now following a wet year, which increased nutrient runoff into the lake, water hyancinth has returned.

water hyacinth

These images show the Winam Gulf, in the northeast corner of Lake Victoria in Kenya. The gulf was the most severely affected region during the first hyacinth outbreak in 1998, with as much as 17,231 hectares (67 square miles) of the plant growing on its surface. By 2000, the area covered by water hyacinth was down to about 500 hectares (2 square miles), and in December 2005, when the right image was taken, the lake appeared to be clear. In November and December 2006, however, unusually heavy rains flooded the rivers that feed into the Winam Gulf. The rain and floods raised water levels on the lake and swept agricultural run-off and nutrient-rich sediment into the water. As a result, the Winam Gulf was brown when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite took the top left photo-like image on December 18, 2006. Vegetation around the lake was dramatically greener due to the rains.

The influx of fertilizer and sediments not only turned the water brown, but it also fed a fresh outbreak of water hyacinth. Bright green plants cover much of the Winam Gulf in the top left image. Though other plants such as algae may be contributing, water hyacinth is almost certainly one component of the soupy mass. As the photo shows, water hyacinth was growing along the shoreline, particularly in Kisumu Bay and Nyakach Bay. A comparison between December 2005 and December 2006 shows that Kisumu Bay was entirely covered by water hyacinth in 2006, and the shoreline of Nyakach Bay also appeared to change shape as the plant grew out from the shore.

The photo was taken on December 17, 2006, looking north across Kisumu Bay. The photographer stands on the shoreline and should be looking out over water, but only a field of green water hyacinth can be seen. The photo illustrates the problems the plant poses to the lake. The mat of vegetation is so thick that fishermen cannot launch their boats or bring fish to market on the shore. Sunlight does not filter through the plants, so native plants in the lake don’t get the light they need. The die-off of native plants affects fish and other aquatic animals. Water hyacinth clogs irrigation canals and pipes used to draw water from the lake for cities and villages on its shore. The plants impede water flow, creating abundant habitat for disease-carrying insects like mosquitoes. Water hyacinth can also sap oxygen from the water until it creates a ”dead zone” where plants and animals can no longer survive. Typically, only aggressive measures can control the fast-growing plant.

Cities, Reorganization

Creative Shrinkage

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The Dec 10th New York Times Magazine is a special annual issue on ideas. It has number of fun and interesting new ideas. One that fits with the idea of adaptive reorganization is Creative Shrinkage. The idea that cities with declining populations can re-organize for decline, to take advantage of its opportunities rather fighting against the inevitable. This idea is similar to some of the ideas in Homer-Dixon’s the Upside of Down. The NYTimes writes:

For decades, depopulated Rust Belt cities have tried to grow their way back to prosperity. Youngstown, Ohio, has a new approach: shrinking its way into a new identity.At its peak, Youngstown supported 170,000 residents. Now, with less than half that number living amid shuttered steel factories, the city and Youngstown State University are implementing a blueprint for a smaller town that retains the best features of the metropolis Youngstown used to be. Few communities of 80,000 boast a symphony orchestra, two respected art museums, a university, a generously laid-out downtown and an urban park larger than Central Park. “Other cities that were never the center of steel production don’t have these assets,” says Jay Williams, the city’s newly elected 35-year-old mayor, who advocated a downsized Youngstown when he ran for office.

Williams’s strategy calls for razing derelict buildings, eventually cutting off the sewage and electric services to fully abandoned tracts of the city and transforming vacant lots into pocket parks. The city and county are now turning abandoned lots over to neighboring landowners and excusing back taxes on the land, provided that they act as stewards of the open spaces. The city has also placed a moratorium on the (often haphazard) construction of new dwellings financed by low-income-housing tax credits and encouraged the rehabilitation of existing homes. Instead of trying to recapture its industrial past, Youngstown hopes to capitalize on its high vacancy rates and underused public spaces; it could become a culturally rich bedroom community serving Cleveland and Pittsburgh, both of which are 70 miles away. Continue reading →

Ideas, Reorganization

Gates and Rockefeller Foundations to fund African Green Revolution

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation are launching a new program Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) designed to fund a new Green Revolution for Africa.  Seperately, but with similar goals, George Soros is donating $50 million to pay for fertilizers, seeds, classrooms in Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Promise project.The original Green Revolution helped greatly increase farm yields in Asia and Latin America., but in never succeeded in Africa. The Green Revolution’s increase in crop yields greatly increased human wellbeing, but also had major negative environmental impacts and often failed to benefit poorer farmers.

Hopefully this Green Revolution will follow the advice of the former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, the applied ecologist Gordon Conway. His 1997 book The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century argued that a new increase in crop yields are needed, but unlike the first revolution this new revolution must work with rather than against local ecosystems (see previous posts on low input agriculture, Ecological synergisms in agriculture, and benefits of multifunctional agriculture).

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Ecological Management, General, New Orleans, Reorganization

Mississippi meanders

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NASA’s Earth Observation newsroom presents satelite images to go with the geological map of Mississippi Meanders used to make the top image of this blog.

NASA EOS image

NASA explains:

As it winds from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River is in constant flux. Fast water carries sediment while slow water deposits it. Soft riverbanks are continuously eroded. Floods occasionally spread across the wide, shallow valley that flanks the river, and new channels are left behind when the water recedes. This history of change is recorded in the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944.

This map of an area just north of the Atchafalaya River shows a slice of the complex history of the Mississippi. The modern river course is superimposed on channels from 1880 (green), 1820 (red), and 1765 (blue). Even earlier, prehistoric channels underlie the more recent patterns. An oxbow lake—a crescent of water left behind when a meander (bend in the river) closes itself off—remains from 1785. A satellite image from 1999 shows the current course of the river and the old oxbow lake. Despite modern human-made changes to the landscape, traces of the past remain, with roads and fields following the contours of past channels.

In the twentieth century, the rate of change on the Mississippi slowed. Levees now prevent the river from jumping its banks so often. The levees protect towns, farms, and roads near the banks of the river and maintain established shipping routes and ports in the Gulf of Mexico. The human engineering of the lower Mississippi has been so extensive that a natural migration of the Mississippi delta from its present location to the Atchafalaya River to the west was halted in the early 1960s by an Army Corps of Engineers project known as the Old River Control Structure (visible in the full-size Landsat image).

The delta switching has occurred every 1,000 years or so in the past. As sediment accumulates in the main channel, the elevation increases, and the channel becomes more shallow and meandering. Eventually the river finds a shorter, steeper descent to the Gulf. In the 1950s, engineers noticed that the river’s present channel was on the verge of shifting westward to the Atchafalaya River, which would have become the new route to the Gulf. Because of the industry and other development that depended on the present river course, the U.S. Congress authorized the construction of the Old River Control Structure to prevent the shift from happening.

For some related reading, John McPhee discusses the Old River Control Structure and US Army Corps attempts to regulate the Mississippi in his great 1989 book the Control of Nature. John Barry provides a history of the regulation of the Mississippi in his book Rising tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

I previously wrote about the ecology of the Mississippi, Michael Grunwald has an article in Grist Rotten to the Corps arguing that the Corps is behind New Orleans destruction, and wikipedia has an article about levee failures in New Orleans.

General, Reorganization, Tools

Using Tera Preta increase soil resilience

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A Nature News article Black is the new green (10 August 2006) explains research that aims to reinvent Terra Preta, anthropogenic highly productive charcoal rich soils, to improve soil for agriculture while sequestering carbon.
New ways of producing biofuels can to produce charcoal that can be used to enrich soil. This carbon is stored in the soil, and may be able to produce carbon negative fuels in a way that can boost agricultural productivity. From the Nature News article:

…[a group met at the] World Congress of Soil Science. Their agenda was to take terra preta from the annals of history and the backwaters of the Amazon into the twenty-first century world of carbon sequestration and biofuels.

They want to follow what the green revolution did for the developing world’s plants with a black revolution for the world’s soils. They are aware that this is a tough sell, not least because hardly anyone outside the room has heard of their product. But that does not dissuade them: more than one eye in the room had a distinctly evangelical gleam.

The soil scientists, archaeologists, geographers, agronomists, and anthropologists who study terra preta now agree that the Amazon’s dark earths, terra preta do índio, were made by the river basin’s original human residents, who were much more numerous than formerly supposed. The darkest patches correspond to the middens of settlements and are cluttered with crescents of broken pottery. The larger patches were once agricultural areas that the farmers enriched with charred trash of all sorts. Some soils are thought to be 7,000 years old. Compared with the surrounding soil, terra preta can contain three times as much phosphorus and nitrogen. And as its colour indicates, it contains far more carbon. In samples taken in Brazil by William Woods, an expert in abandoned settlements at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, the terra preta was up to 9% carbon, compared with 0.5% for plain soil from places nearby
…Take the work of Danny Day, the founder of Eprida. This “for-profit social-purpose enterprise” in Athens, Georgia, builds contraptions that farmers can use to turn farm waste into biofuel while making char. Farm waste (or a crop designed for biofuel use) is smouldered — pyrolysed, in the jargon — and this process gives off volatile organic molecules, which can be used as a basis for biodiesel or turned into hydrogen with the help of steam. After the pyrolysation, half of the starting material will be used up and half will be char. That can then be put back on the fields, where it will sequester carbon and help grow the next crop.

The remarkable thing about this process is that, even after the fuel has been burned, more carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere than is put back. Traditional biofuels claim to be ‘carbon neutral’, because the carbon dioxide assimilated by the growing biomass makes up for the carbon dioxide given off by the burning of the fuel. But as Lehmann points out, systems such as Day’s go one step further: “They are the only way to make a fuel that is actually carbon negative”.

Day’s pilot plant processes 10 to 25 kg of Georgia peanut hulls and pine pellets every hour. From 100 kg of biomass, the group gets 46 kg of carbon — half as char — and around 5 kg of hydrogen, enough to go 500 kilometres in a hydrogen-fuel-cell car (not that there are many around yet). Originally, Day was mostly interested in making biofuel; the char was just something he threw out, or used to make carbon filters. Then he discovered that his employees were reaping the culinary benefits of the enormous turnips that had sprung up on the piles of char lying around at the plant. Combining this char with ammonium bicarbonate, made using steam-recovered hydrogen, creates a soil additive that is now one of his process’s selling points; the ammonium bicarbonate is a nitrogen-based fertilizer.

update: WorldChanging has a bit more on the article

Ecological Economics, Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Ecological Engineering and New Orleans

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Robert Costanza, William Mitsch, and John Day, three ecologists with long experience with wetlands, New Orleans, and ecological economics, have an editorial in the journal Ecological Engineering on Creating a sustainable and desirable New Orleans (pdf). Their arguement is a more ecological version of the vison of a new bright green city presented by Alan AtKisson in his post Dreaming a New New Orleans.

Costanza et al write:

The Federal government has pledged over US$ 100 billion for the New Orleans and Gulf coast region to be rebuilt after this terrible (but predictable) tragedy. The question is not if but how it should be rebuilt. What was there can simply be replaced, but this would merely be setting the pins up to be knocked down again by a future big hurricane, the destructive powers of which are increasing worldwide, probably due to global warming. In addition, sea level is rising and New Orleans continues to sink, making the city even more vulnerable over time.

What is needed is a new vision of a truly New Orleans—one that can provide a sustainable and high quality of life for all of its citizens while it works in partnership (not in futile opposi- tion) with the natural forces that shaped it. This New Orleans can serve as a metaphor and a model for the sustainable devel- opment of western industrial society more generally.

…

The built capital of New Orleans has been radically depleted and must be rebuilt. We can recreate the vulnerable and unsustainable city that was there, or we can reinvent New Orleans as a model of a sustainable and desirable city of the future. To do this, we need to redesign and restore not only the built infrastructure, but also the social, human, and natural capital of the region. How do we do this and what would a truly sustainable and desirable New Orleans look like? Here are some of the elements of a sustainable vision:

1. Let the water decide: Building a city below sea level is always a dangerous proposition. While parts of New Orleans are still at or above sea level, much of it had sunk well below sea level since the first quarter of the 20th century. It is not sustainable or desirable to rebuild these areas in the same way they were before. They should be either replaced with coastal wetlands which are allowed to trap sediments to rebuild the land (see below), or replaced with buildings that are adapted to occasional flooding (i.e., on pilings or floats). Wetlands inside the levees can help clean waters, store short-term flood waters, provide habitat for wildlife, and become an amenity for the city. Coastal wetlands outside the levees should be rebuilt so that the city has both wetlands and levees to protect the city.

2. One should avoid abrupt boundaries between deepwater sys- tems and uplands. Gentle slopes with wetlands are the best division, and avoid putting humans, particularly those who have few resources to avoid hydrologic disasters, in harm’s way. Of course the abrupt boundaries of the levees are nec- essary, since wetlands alone cannot protect the city, but we need to use both as appropriate.

3. Restore natural capital: Coastal wetlands in Louisiana have been estimated to provide US$ 375/acres/yr (US $940/ha/yr—these and all subsequent figures have been converted to US$ 2004) in storm and flood protection services. Hurricane Katrina has shown this to be a large underestimate. Restoring Louisiana’s coastal wetlands and New Orleans levees has been estimated to cost US$ 25 billion. Had the original wetlands been intact and levees in better shape, a substantial portion of the US$ 100 billion plus damages from this hurri- cane probably could have been avoided. Prevention would have been much cheaper and more effective than recon- struction. In addition, the coastal wetlands provide other ecosystem services which when added to the storm pro- tection services have been estimated to be worth about US$ 5200/acres/yr (US$ 12,700/ha/yr). Restoring the 4800 km2 (480,000 ha) of wetlands lost prior to Katrina would thus restore US$ 6 billion/yr in lost ecosystem services, or US$ 200 billion in present value (at a 3% discount rate).

4. In order to do this we should use the resources of the Mississippi River to rebuild the coast, changing the current system that constrains the river between levees, and allow the resources of freshwater, sediments, and nutrients to flow into the deeper waters of the Gulf. Diversions of water, nutrients, and sediments from the Mississippi are a major component of the LCA plan. These planned diversions should be greatly expanded in order to allow more rapid restoration of the coastal wetlands. Levees are necessary in some locations, but where possible the levees should be breeched by structures in a controlled way to allow marsh rebuilding.

5. We should restore the built capital of New Orleans to the highest standards of high-performance green buildings and a car-limited urban environment with high mobility for everyone. New Orleans has abundant renewable energy sources in solar, wind, and water. What better message than to build a 21st-century sustainable city running on renewable energy on the rubble of a 20th century oil and gas production hub. In other words, New Orleans should be built higher, stronger, much more efficient, and designed to make extensive use of renewable energy. One can imag- ine a new pattern for the residential neighborhoods of New Orleans with strong, multistory, multifamily buildings surrounded by green space, each with enough water and fuel storage for several weeks, and operating principally on wind and solar energy.

6. We should rebuild the social capital of New Orleans to 21st-century standards of diversity, tolerance, fairness, and justice. New Orleans has suffered long enough with social capital dating from the 18th (or even the 15th) century. To do this the planning and implementation of the rebuilding must maximize participation by the entire community. This will certainly be difficult for a number of reasons, including the historical antecedents of racism and classcism in the region, and the fact that much of the population has been forcibly removed from the city. But it is absolutely essential if the goals of a sustainable and desirable future are to be achieved.

7. Finally, we should restore the Mississippi River Basin to min- imize coastal pollution and the threats of river flooding in New Orleans. Upstream changes in the 3 million km2 Mississippi drainage basin have significantly changed nutrient and sediment delivery patterns to the delta. Changes in farming practices in the drainage basin can improve not only the coastal restoration process, but also improve the nation’s agricultural economy by promoting sustainable farming practices in the entire basin.

Ideas, Reorganization

Peñalosa @ World Urban Forum

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In Vancouver’s Tyee.ca, Charles Montgomery reports from the World Urban Forum on The Mayor Who Wowed the World Urban Forum – Enrique Peñalosa, fomer mayor of Bogota, Columbia who helped transform Bogota from a city famous for murder and cocaine, to a city famous for its bike paths and bus system.

Enrique Peñalosa presided over the transition of a city that the world–and many residents–had given up on. Bogota had lost itself in slums, chaos, violence, and traffic. During his three-year term, Penalosa brought in initiatives that would seem impossible in most cities, even here in the wealthy north. He built more than a hundred nurseries for children. He built 50 new public schools and increased enrolment by 34 percent. He built a network of libraries. He created a highly-efficient, “bus highway” transit system. He built or reconstructed hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, more than 300 kilometres of bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, and more than 1,200 parks.

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Ideas, Reorganization

Urban ecology & the World Urban Forum – universities as catalysts of innovation

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Michael M’Gonigle is co-author of Planet U: Sustaining the World, Reinventing the University, has an article in the Toronto Star How universities can help Canada’s troubled cities.  He writes that universities can help cities solve their problems and help build sustainable liveable cities:

The idea of many such cities and regions co-operating directly, as well as globally, is intriguing. To help it happen, I have a strategy, too, one that involves an unlikely ally —one with massive and diverse expertise, potentially boundless youthful energy, a large land base, and lots of power, prestige and wealth

I’m referring, of course, to the university. The “higher education industry” is arguably the most important industry in the world. A recent study of the American industry (with 6,500 accredited colleges and universities) put its economic impact at $1.2 trillion per year. At any time, 20 million Americans either work for, or attend, an “institution of higher education.”

Of Canada’s total R&D, 35 per cent (or $9 billion worth) was done by universities. This investment sustains a million jobs, contributes more to the country’s GDP than pulp and paper, automobiles, or the arts, entertainment and recreation industries combined.

These locally situated colleges are also plugged into countless worldwide networks; they are truly a global intelligence. Indeed, with millions of university graduates staffing the high-tech firms and hospitals and manufacturers that make up today’s knowledge economy, the university is actually the mother of all industries.

Today, universities generate huge traffic problems and massive quantities of greenhouse gases. Yet, some now save millions of dollars by giving every student a free transit pass. Local demand for buses has shot up; the need to drive has dropped. Fifty American universities issue passes to more than 825,000 students and staff.

Now, instead of 50 colleges, imagine 5,000. And, looking beyond just the bus pass, think of all these campuses building only state-of-the-art “green buildings,” revitalizing local farming and food systems, shifting to renewable energy suppliers, and redirecting institutional investments into community enterprises. Where a university adopts a mandate of comprehensive local innovation, its potential is truly Earth-changing.

With this week’s gathering asking how we might create sustainable cities despite the intransigence of national governments and transnational corporations, we have an answer: Look to your own backyard.

Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Vulnerability

Rebuilding New Orleans: Don’t build on quicksand

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Down to Earth points to a Washington Post editorial (June 7th) that writes:

… the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted responsibility for much of the destruction of New Orleans. … As the Corps’ own inquiry found, the agency committed numerous mistakes of design: Its network of pumps, walls and levees was “a system in name only”; it failed to take into account the gradual sinking of the local soil; it closed its ears when people pointed out these problems. The result was a national tragedy.

…the New Orleans disaster has illustrated the folly of building flood defenses for vulnerable low land: Some of the worst-hit areas would not have been developed in the first place if the Corps hadn’t decided to build “protections” for them. Encouraging the Army Corps of Engineers to build Category 5 defenses for all of Louisiana, including parts that are sparsely populated for good reason, would not merely cost billions that would be better spent on defending urban areas. It would encourage settlement of more flood-prone land and set the stage for the next tragedy.

On Down to Earth, Daniel Collins comments on how this behaviour falls into the pathology of natural resource management:

The engineering that the Corps offers provides residents and residents-to-be with a false sense of security. There is an implicit belief that since we have re-worked nature as much as we have in the past, or that we have been given dominion over the Earth, that we can continue in the same vein without limit. Modern societies endeavour to isolate themselves from the vagaries of the environment. What that has given us is a higher quality of living, offset by disasters like Katrina. Hurricanes will continue to roll into Louisiana, with or without global warming; New Orleans will continue to sink; and eventually the Mississippi will transfer its discharge into the Atchafalaya.

Building buffers against nature is a sound strategy, but it should be supplemented by building into society a degree of resilience and flexibility. Part of this is the ability (strength even?) to impose limits on building in unsafe regions. This may constrain liberties, but Katrina constrained the ultimate liberty of at least 1,800 people.

Big Back Loop, Ideas, Reorganization, Scenarios

Ecology for Transformation

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David Zaks and Chad Monfreda write on Worldchanging on Steve Carpenter and Carl Folke‘s 2006 paper in Ecology for Transformation (doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2006.02.007):

Ecology has long been a descriptive science with real but limited links to the policy community. A new science of ecology, however, is emerging to forge the collaborations with social scientists and decision makers needed for a bright green future. Stephen Carpenter and Carl Folke outline a vision for the future of ecology in their recent article, Ecology for Transformation. You need a subscription to access the full article, so we’ll quote them at length:

“Scenarios with positive visions are quite different from projections of environmental disaster. Doom-and-gloom predictions are sometimes needed, and they might sell newspapers, but they do little to inspire people or to evoke proactive forward-looking steps toward a better world. Transformation requires evocative visions of better worlds to compare and evaluate the diverse alternatives available to us … Although we cannot predict the future, we have much to decide. Better decisions start from better visions, and such visions need ecological perspectives.”

Ecology for Transformation offers the perspective of resilient social-ecological systems. Simply put, it recognizes that ecosystems and human society are interdependent, and that they need the capacity to withstand and adapt to an increasingly bumpy future.

Examples of resilient social-ecological systems abound in all kinds of notoriously difficult to manage areas, like natural disaster response and rangeland management. Resilience sounds great, but how do we get there? Fortunately Carpenter and Folke offer a theoretically robust three-part transformative framework:

1. Diversity
2. Environmentally sound technology
3. Adaptive governance

Diversity constitutes the raw material we can draw from to create effective technologies and institutions. It reflects the wealth of genetic and memetic resources at our disposal, in the form of biodiversity, landscapes, cultures, ideas, and economic livelihoods. We need to foster diversity as an insurance package for hard times because…

“…crisis can create opportunities for reorganizing the relationships of society to ecosystems. At such times, barriers to action might break down, if only for a short time, and new approaches have a chance to change the direction of ecosystem management. To succeed, a particular approach or vision must be well-formed by the time the crisis arises, because the opportunity for change might be short-lived.”

Environmentally sound technology ranges from incremental advancements in energy efficiency to innovative economic tools like natural capital valuation and markets for ecosystem services. Diversity and technology should sound familiar enough to WorldChanging readers. Ecology for transformation, however, goes on, to challenge us to engage in adaptive governance that recognizes the reality of constant change. The authors define adaptive governance as:

“Institutional and political frameworks designed to adapt to changing relationships between society and ecosystems in ways that sustain ecosystem services; expands the focus from adaptive management of ecosystems to address the broader social contexts that enable ecosystem based management.”

Governance is much broader than what we normally think of as government and encompasses all of the actors who shape the way we work, live, and interact. Communication across various scales, from individuals to institutions, is vital for effective governance. Many of the management and governance structures currently in place are static, but an ‘adaptive’ approach promises more sustainable outcomes by negotiating uncertainty and change.

Steve Carpenter, WA Brock, and I addressed the issue of how scientists can encourage transformations by creating new management models in our 2003 paper Uncertainty and the management of multistate ecosystems: an apparently rational route to collapse (Ecology. 84(6) 1403-1411). We wrote:

…scientists can contribute to broadening the worldview of ecosystem management in at least three ways.

(1) Scientists can point out that uncertainty is a property of the set of models under consideration. This set of models is a mental construct (even if it depends in part on prior observation of the ecosystem). It therefore depends on attitudes and beliefs that are unrelated to putatively objective information about the ecosystem. Despite this discomforting aspect of uncertainty, it cannot be ignored.

(2) Scientists can help to imagine novel models for how the system might change in the future. There will be cases where such novel models carry non-negligible weight in decision, for example when the costs of collapse are high. The consequences of candidate policies can be examined under models with very different implications for ecosystem behavior. Such explorations of the robustness of policies can be carried out when model uncertainty is quite high or even unknown, for example in scenario analysis.

(3) Scientists can point out the value of safe, informative experiments to test models beyond the range of available data. In the model presented here, fossilization of beliefs follows from fixation on policies that do not reveal the full dynamic potential of the ecosystem, leading to the underestimation of model uncertainty. Experimentation at scales appropriate for testing alternative models for ecosystem behavior is one way out the trap. Of course, largescale experiments on ecosystems that support human well being must be approached with caution. Nevertheless, in situations where surprising and unfavorable ecosystem dynamics are possible, it may be valuable to experiment with innovative practices that could reinforce desirable ecosystem states.

I think our second point, the need for creative synthesis, is not emphasized enough in science, which tends to focus on testing existing models. Ecological governance needs new ways of thinking about nature that are useful in governance situations. The creation of novel, practical models is a vital part of connecting science to policy and action. Without practical models, people are unable to develop desirable policy or effective actions.