Category Archives: Tools

Ecological Management, Greenlash

Global change and missing institutions

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In  Science Policy Forum, Brian Walker and others have a policy forum in Looming Global-Scale Failures and Missing Institutions, in which they argue that the the global order of nation-state’s has improved the well-being of many people at the cost of global resilience, and that building global resilience requires more interaction among existing global institutions, as well as new institutions, to help construct and maintain a global-scale social contract.  They write:

Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects. The core of the problem is inducing cooperation in situations where individuals and nations will collectively gain if all cooperate, but each faces the temptation to take a free ride on the cooperation of others. The nation-state achieves cooperation by the exercise of sovereign power within its boundaries. The difficulty to date is that transnational institutions provide, at best, only partial solutions, and implementation of even these solutions can be undermined by international competition and recalcitrance.

…Of special importance are rules that apply universally, such as the peremptory, or jus cogens, norms proscribing activities like genocide or torture. Failure to stop genocide in Rwanda spurred efforts to establish a new “responsibility to protect” humanitarian norm (12). As threats to sustainability increase, norms for behavior toward the global environment are also likely to become part of the jus cogens set.

The responsibility to protect rests in the first instance with the state having sovereignty over its population. Only in the event that the state is unable or unwilling to protect its people are other states obligated to intervene. The challenge is not just to declare the principle but to ensure its acceptance and enforcement. Acceptance is needed for legitimacy, and enforcement will depend on whether states are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. If the responsibility to protect is to apply to the environment as well, these same challenges will need to be overcome. We use three examples to illustrate how institutional development might proceed.

Climate change. International climate agreements must be designed to align national and global interests and curb free-riding. Borrowing from the WTO architecture, the linkage between trade and the environment could be incorporated within a new climate treaty to enforce emission limits for trade-sensitive sectors. New global standards could establish a climate-friendly framework with supporting payments, e.g., for technology transfer, to encourage developing country participation. In this context, trade restrictions applied to non-participants would be legitimate and credible, because participating parties would not want nonparties to have trade advantages.

Coevolution of institutions offers a pathway to further progress. Recently, the Montreal Protocol strengthened its controls on hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), manufacture of which produces hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) as a by-product. HFCs do not affect ozone and are not controlled under the Montreal Protocol. However, they are greenhouse gases (GHGs), controlled under the Kyoto Protocol. The Montreal Protocol should now either be amended to control HFCs directly or else a new agreement, styled after the Montreal Protocol, should be developed under the Framework Convention to control HFCs.

High-seas fisheries. The Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries, which was adopted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in 1995 was a positive step, but because adherence is voluntary, it has had little effect. Another approach would be to develop a norm, akin to the responsibility to protect (12), requiring all states responsible for managing a fishery to intercede when a state fails to fulfill its obligations. Credible enforcement is a challenge, but efforts by major powers to enforce a U.N. General Assembly ban on large-scale drift-net fishing offers hope that an emerging norm can be enforced (13).

Drug resistance. Addressing drug resistance demands global standards. The International Health Regulations (IHRs) are an international legal instrument that is binding on 194 countries, including all the member states of the World Health Organization. It currently establishes minimum standards for infectious disease surveillance, but could be amended to promote standards for drug use. For example, monotherapy treatments for malaria are cheaper but more prone to encourage resistance in mosquitoes than combination therapy drugs. Their use should be limited in favor of the more expensive combination therapy drugs. One approach to global action would be an amendment to the IHRs that obligated all member countries to collective action to promote combination therapies, supported by global subsidies, and to discourage, or even prohibit, monotherapies (14).

Ecological Management, Regime Shifts

Responses to Early Warning Signals for Critical Transitions paper

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The recent paper by Marten Scheffer and other resilience researchers paper Early Warning Signals for Critical Transitions (doi:10.1038/nature08227) has been reported in a number of places including Time, USA Today, and Wired.  While many newspapers just reprint the press release, several articles add something.

A USA Today article Predicting tipping points before they occur quotes Brian Walker:

“This is a very important paper,” says Brian Walker, a fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Center at the University of Stockholm in Sweden.

“The big question they’re trying to answer is, how the hell do you know when it’s coming? Is there any way you can get an inkling of a looming threshold, something that might be a warning signal that you’re getting to one of the crucial transition points?”

Wired magazine article Scientists Seek Warning Signs for Catastrophic Tipping Points quotes several sceptical scientists:

“It’d be very nice if it were true that there were precursors for tipping points in all these diverse systems. It’d be even nicer if we could find these precursors. I want to believe it, but I’m not sure I do,” said Steven Strogatz, a Cornell University biomathematician who was not involved in the paper.

The difficulty of early detection is especially pronounced with markets. Computer models can replicate their bubble-and-crash behavior, but real markets — buffeted by political and social trends, and inevitably responding to the very act of prediction — are much cloudier.

“It is hard to find clear evidence of bifurcations and transitions, let alone find an early warning system to detect an upcoming crash,” said Cars Homme, an economic theorist at the University of Amsterdam.

The most promising evidence of useful early warning signs comes from grasslands, coral reefs and lakes. Vegetation-pattern-based early warning signs have been documented in several regions, and transition theory is already being used to guide land use in parts of Australia.

The U.S. Geological Survey is currently hunting through satellite imagery for signals of impending desertification at two sites in the Southwest. They’ve studied desertification there by painstakingly measuring local conditions and experimentally setting fires, removing grasses and controlling the fall of water. But so far, the vegetation patterns that indicated tipping points in the Kalahari haven’t shown up here, though this may be due to poor image quality rather than bad theory. The researchers are now looking for signals in on-the-ground measurements of vegetation changes.

“These things aren’t going to be foolproof. There will be false positives and false negatives, and people need to be aware of that,” said Carpenter. “There’s still a great deal of basic research going on to understand the indicators better. We’re still in the early days. But why not try? The alternative is to get repeatedly blindsided. The alternative is not appealing.”

Time magazine in Is There a Climate-Change Tipping Point? quotes co-author Steve Carpenter:

So, how do we know that change is at hand? The Nature researchers noticed one potential signal: the sudden variance between two distinct states within one system, known by the less technical term squealing. In an ecological system like a forest, for example, squealing might look like an alternation between two stable states — barren versus fertile — before a drought takes its final toll on the woodland and transforms it into a desert, at which point even monsoons won’t bring the field back to life. Fish populations seem to collapse suddenly as well — overfishing causes fluctuations in fish stocks until it passes a threshold, at which point there are simply too few fish left to bring back the population, even if fishing completely ceases. And even in financial markets, sudden collapses tend to be preceded by heightened trading volatility — a good sign to pull your money out of the market. “Heart attacks, algae blooms in lakes, epileptic attacks — every one shows this type of change,” says Carpenter. “It’s remarkable.” 

In climate terms, squealing may involve increased variability of the weather — sudden shifts from hot temperatures to colder ones and back again. General instability ensues and, at some point, the center ceases to hold. “Before we reached a climate tipping point we’d expect to see lots of record heat and record cold,” says Carpenter. “Every example of sudden climate change we’ve seen in the historical record was preceded by this sort of squealing.”

The hard part will be putting this new knowledge into action. It’s true that we have a sense of where some of the tipping points for climate change might lie — the loss of Arctic sea ice, or the release of methane from the melting permafrost of Siberia. But that knowledge is still incomplete, even as the world comes together to try, finally, to address the threat collectively. “Managing the environment is like driving a foggy road at night by a cliff,” says Carpenter. “You know it’s there, but you don’t know where exactly.” The warning signs give us an idea of where that cliff might be — but we’ll need to pay attention.

Visualization

An information visualization manifesto

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infovisInteraction designer Manuel Lima of VisualComplexity (a website that collects visualizations of complex networks) has published an information visualization manifesto, which has generated an interesting discussion.

He writes:

When Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas wrote about Vernacular Visualization, in their excellent article on the July-August 2008 edition of interactions magazine, they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye. The recent outburst of interest for Information Visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community, which in turn lead to many new projects and a sprout of fresh innovation. But with more agents in a system you also have a stronger propensity for things to go wrong.

… after one of my lectures in August 2009, the idea of writing a manifesto came up and I quickly decided to write down a list of considerations or requirements, that rapidly took the shape of an Information Visualization Manifesto. Some will consider this insightful and try to follow these principles in their work. Others will still want to pursue their own flamboyant experiments and not abide to any of this. But in case the last option is chosen, the resulting outcome should start being categorized in a different way. And there are many designations that can easily encompass those projects, such as New Media Art, Computer Art, Algorithmic Art, or my favorite and recommended term: Information Art.

Even though a clear divide is necessary, it doesn’t mean that Information Visualization and Information Art cannot coexist. I would even argue they should, since they can learn a lot from each other and cross-pollinate ideas, methods and techniques. In most cases the same dataset can originate two parallel projects, respectively in Information Visualization and Information Art. However, it’s important to bear in mind that the context, audience and goals of each resulting project are intrinsically distinct.

He proposes 10 directions for any information visualization project (the original article explains the points and includes responses, and follow-up article reflects and elaborates):

  • Form Follows Function
  • Start with a Question
  • Interactivity is Key
  • Cite your Source
  • The power of Narrative
  • Do not glorify Aesthetics
  • Look for Relevancy
  • Embrace Time
  • Aspire for Knowledge
  • Avoid gratuitous visualizations
Scenarios

Resilience economics: a scenario

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Jamais Cascio presents Resilience Econmics as a scenario of an economy in 2030. He also presents two alternatives – Just in Time Socialism and Robonomics in his column in the business magazine Fast Company.  Jamais writes:

Resilience Economics

United States: Resilience Economics employs a mix of regulations and norms (i.e., non-regulated but expected behavior) to shift standard business processes away from a focus on efficiency towards a focus on flexibility.

Resilience Economics (RE) emerged out of the realization that Neoliberal Globalized Corporate Capitalism made money hand-over-fist when everything was working right, but was like a rapidly-spinning top–seemingly stable, but if it hit too rough a patch, it went wildly out of control. The RE world, conversely, is less-lucrative during growth periods, but weathers downturns so well that most folks don’t even notice when “recessions” hit.

Proponents of NGCC dismissed RE as unable to compete with the 20th century way of making money, and that appeared to be correct up until the Great Retreat of 2017 hit, the downturn that made the 2008-2010 recession pale in comparison. Ironically, most folks figure that it was because we didn’t fix the problems in the first real 21st century recession, just offered bailouts and slaps on the wrist, that we got hit by the Great Retreat a decade later.

Three key characteristics of Resilience Economics shape the way we live:

  • Polyculture markets means that no one economic (or financial) institution ever gets “too big to fail,” or so big that it distorts markets the way WalMart used to. This was probably the most politically controversial set of rule changes, but the least visible for most everyday people.
  • Transactional Transparency upset some politicians and executives, too, but really worked to smooth out markets. All along, economists said that capitalism depends on transparent markets, where buyers and sellers know all the relevant details, but that was always the one aspect of capitalism that most “capitalists” ignored.
  • Collaborative Flexibility, aka the “Lego Economy.” The result of the previous two characteristics, really. Lots of small companies, individual entrepreneurs, even part-time workers able to come together as necessary for big projects.

Is it perfect? No. It’s noticeably less efficient than the 20th century model, and a lot of older folks say that they don’t feel as “rich” as they did a few decades ago, but it’s hard to say how much of that is from RE, and how much is just that we’re all trying to deal with adapting to a global environmental crisis.

Ecological Management

The Dark Side of Business Management

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darksideMy colleague Emmanuel Raufflet has co-edited an timely new management book, The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business. The press release describes the book:

The discredit of a certain brand of capitalism – and the managers that practice it – continues apace. The increasing lack of tolerance for short-term thinking and a systematic neglect of the social, regulatory, and economic conditions in which business ought to operate means we are entering a time of trouble and questions – an era of economic, social, and environmental turbulence.

There is a critical need for business educators and trainers to expose students and managers to these issues to examine, explore, and understand the different multifaceted, complex phenomena of our late capitalist era. There is also a need to foster a climate for future and current business managers to reflect, feel, and think differently both ethically and cognitively. The 16 innovative case studies in The Dark Side: Critical Cases on the Downside of Business are designed for this very purpose: to provoke reflection and debate; to challenge and change perceptions; and to create responsible managers.

One way to foster this reflection and change is through motivational talks that focus on ethical leadership. Kurt Uhlir’s talk on servant leadership, for example, can inspire current and future business managers to adopt a more responsible approach to leadership. By emphasizing the importance of empathy, humility, and putting others first, Uhlir’s talk can encourage managers to see themselves as servant leaders who are accountable to their employees, customers, and communities. Such talks can help create a culture where responsible leadership is valued and prioritized, leading to more motivated and engaged employees and a healthier bottom line. Ultimately, by exposing managers and students to critical case studies and motivational talks, we can create a new generation of business leaders who are committed to making a positive impact on the world.

Continue reading →

Scenarios

Ian McEwan’s climate change novel

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Bestselling, and Booker prize winning novelist, Ian McEwan talks about his forthcoming novel on climate change in McEwan’s novel take on climate change:

“It took me a long time to find a way into this subject – I’ve been thinking about it for a number of years,” he says. “And then I spent some time in the Arctic, with a group of artists and scientists; we were living on a boat that was frozen in a fjord. One of the things that struck me about that was there was a sort of boot room, and one of the iron rules of this boat was we had to take off all our outer clothing – boots, goggles, balaclava, skidoo suits – and over the week, the chaos of this boot room grew more and more intense.”

These eminent inhabitants of the Cape Farewell project’s vessel the Noorderlicht began to decline into a kind of genteel chaos. Someone mislaid his boots and, not wishing to delay the departure of a party itching to head out on an exploration, grabbed the nearest pair of a similar size he could find. A domino-effect of similar “borrowings” ensued. Good people, McEwan wrote at the Time (this was March 2005), were impelled to take what was not their own: “With the eighth Commandment broken, the social contract is ruptured too. No one is behaving particularly badly, and certainly everybody is being, in the immediate circumstances, entirely rational, but by the third day, the boot room is a wasteland of broken dreams.”

“I thought ‘well, this is a highly self-selected group of climate change people’,” he says now. “In the evenings we were discussing how to save the planet, and a few feet away through a bulkhead was this utter chaos! And I thought ‘that’s perfect, that’s the human angle on this that I want’. If one thinks of literature and novels in particular as investigations of human nature, then human nature suddenly became at the centre of our problem about climate change: that we’re sort of cooperative but selfish, we’re not used to thinking in long-term eras beyond our own lifespans or immediate spans of interest.

“So I devised a character into whom I poured many, many faults. He’s devious, he lies, he’s predatory in relation to women; he steadily gets fatter through the novel. He’s a sort of planet, I guess. He makes endless reforming decisions about himself: Rio, Kyoto-type assertions of future virtue that lead nowhere.”

Ecological Management

Stephen Pyne on California Wildfires

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ASU fire historian Stephen Pyne on current California wildfires on Island Press’s weblog.  In Two fires he writes:

Then: Southern California burns, 2008
Even for the literal-minded, it was hard not to lump the conflagrations on Wall Street with those in Southern California. The meltdown of 401(k)s with the street signs at Sylmar. The frantic, ever-escalating press conferences and bailouts of any significant credit institution with the desperate deployment of ever-greater masses of engines and helitankers, all equally ineffective. Somehow the spark of a credit crunch managed to leap over fiscal firewalls and spread throughout the economic landscape, much as relatively small blazes blew over I-5 and threatened the power supply of Los Angeles. The general destruction has moved upscale, so that trophy homes burn along with trailer parks, and hedge funds with day traders. When the winds blew, they exposed any combustible object to embers, and threatened to incinerate anything vulnerable. The entire system, it seems, is vulnerable, and everyone knew that the winds always blow. It’s just been convenient to pretend otherwise.

Now: Southern California burns, 2009
Another round, this time without the Santa Anas to drive them over and through the Transverse Range. More blowups. More houses burned. More evacuations. More declarations of disaster and states of emergency. More crews, more planes, more helicopters, more TV cameras. More posturing. Meanwhile, the Great Recession continues, refusing to be extinguished. Investors applaud each stock market rally as homeowners in Altadena do retardant drops by DC-10s. The fires continue for the same reason the economy continues to smolder, because the fundamentals have not changed. Until they do, we will be left with damaging breakouts and political theater.

* * *
Like economic transactions, fire is not a substance but a reaction – an exchange. It takes its character from its context. It synthesizes its surroundings. Its power derives from the power to propagate. To control fire, you control its setting, and you control wild fire by substituting tame fire.

In fire-prone public lands, where the setting will not convert to shopping malls and sports arenas, some fire is inevitable and some necessary. From time to time a few fires will go feral. Without fire some biotas will only build up combustibles capable of stoking still-more savage outbreaks, and equally, some will cease to function. Fire is a force of “creative destruction” in nature’s economy. Without it, particularly in drier landscapes, nutrients no longer circulate freely but get hoarded. It’s as though organisms hid their valuables in secret caches dug in the backyard or in socks under the bed. The choice is not whether or not to have fire but what kind of fire we wish.

Ecological Management, New Orleans

Dams limit wetland restoration in Mississippi Delta

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Cornelia Dean in the New York Times writes Dams Are Thwarting Louisiana Marsh Restoration, Study Says. She describes recent research by Michael Blum and Harry Roberts Drowning of the Mississippi Delta due to insufficient sediment supply and global sea-level rise (doi:10.1038/ngeo553) that estimates that dams have reduced sediment outflows by 50% reducing the potential for New Orleans wetland restoration:

Desperate to halt the erosion of Louisiana’s coast, officials there are talking about breaking Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans to restore the nourishing flow of muddy water into the state’s marshes.

But in a new analysis, scientists at Louisiana State University say inland dams trap so much sediment that the river no longer carries enough to halt marsh loss, especially now that global warming is speeding a rise in sea levels.

As a result, the loss of thousands of additional square miles of marshland is “inevitable,” the scientists report in Monday’s issue of Nature Geoscience.

The finding does not suggest it would be pointless to divert the muddy water into the marshes, one of the researchers, Harry H. Roberts, said in an interview. “Any meaningful restoration of our coast has to involve river sediment,” said Dr. Roberts, a coastal scientist.

But he said officials would have to choose which parts of the landscape could be saved and which must be abandoned, and to acknowledge that lives and businesses would be disrupted. Instead of breaking levees far south of New Orleans, where relatively few people live, Dr. Roberts said, officials should consider diversions much closer to New Orleans, possibly into the LaFourche, Terrebonne or St. Bernard basins.

“It’s going to be an excruciating process to decide where that occurs,” Dr. Roberts said of the levee-breaking.

Sediment carried by the Mississippi built up the marshes of Louisiana over thousands of years, but today inland dams trap at least half of it, Dr. Roberts said. He pointed out that there were 8,000 dams in the drainage basin of the Mississippi.

In their article Blum and Roberts conclude that significant sea level rise is inevitable even if sediment loads are restored, because sea level is now rising at least three times faster than the building of the Mississippi delta.

Visualization

Vienna Zoo: Wildlife and Humanity

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(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

Sculptor Christoph Steinbrener and photographer Reiner Dempf have modified the animal enclosures of the Vienaa Zoo for summer 2009 (June 10 – October 18) for their show Trouble in Paradise. Their show transforms the idealized wild setting in which animals into settings that contain some our activities that are endangering animal populations outside of zoos.

The artists describe their show as:

… A sunken car wreck at the rhinos, railroad tracks in the bison pen or toxic waste in the aquarium are unexpectedly interfering with our notions of idyllic wildlife. The viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging ‘natural’ environments while they are increasingly endangered.

…Present-day conceptions of zoological gardens aim at the presentation of animals in an idyllic and apparently natural environment, untouched by civilization. But this is a contemporary conception, since courtly menageries and kennels were adapted to the exposure of animals as decorative objects. Until the early years of the 20th century, animals were part of a preferably spectacular and exotic staging, to the entertainment and amazement of the public. The artificial and the sensational were foregrounded, without creating a realistic setting of the natural environment of the animals.

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

(Photo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf.)

All photos by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf from their webpage.

via Pruned.

Scenarios

Robert Charles Wilson on The Ruins of Tomorrowland

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Canadian Science fiction Robert Charles Wilson writes about shifts in the consensus vision of the future in The Ruins of Tomorrowland

This week ABC broadcast a two-hour documentary special called Earth 2100 that used art, narrative and interviews to sketch a doomsday scenario for the next 90 years. The problems the show enumerates—climate change, population pressure, and ever-fiercer competition for ever-scarcer resources—are inarguably real, though their consequences and potential solutions remain fiercely debated.

What struck me, however, as I watched Bob Woodruff walk us through the collapse of civilization, was how far our consensus vision of the future has evolved. Since when? Well, take as a baseline the year 1955, when TV viewers were exposed to another art-driven, scientifically-based panorama of the near future: Disney’s Man in Space, broadcast in three parts (Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond) on the Sunday-night program then called Disneyland.

For many viewers, Man in Space was probably their first systematic glimpse of space travel treated as a real-world endeavor. Producer-director Ward Kimball mapped out a scenario already long familiar to sf readers: how we would put a man into orbit, followed by the building of a space station, a landing on the moon, the exploration of Mars, and ultimately the launch of a fleet to the nearest star. …

We lived with that consensus future for the next couple of decades. Its apotheosis was the moon landing, and it unraveled along with the Apollo program, Skylab, the shriveling of NASA, and a dawning appreciation of the technical difficulty of prolonged manned space travel. Its legacy—one in which we can take great pride, I think, as a species—is the continuing robotic exploration of the solar system. We didn’t get that big shiny Wheel in the Sky, but we’ve seen the vastness of Meridiani Planum and the icy bayous of Titan’s methane rivers.

In the meantime the consensus future has shifted radically. ABC’s Earth 2100 is much the same kind of program, using art and narrative to sketch a scenario of what science leads us to expect from the future, but it’s more dismaying than Man in Space, the way a cancer diagnosis is more dismaying than a clean bill of health. What it tells us is that our civilization is teetering on the brink of unsustainability and collapse. Earth 2100 presents a scenario that ends with major cities flooded or deserted and a global population decimated by starvation and disease. (And God bless us all, as Tiny Tim might say.) Even the panaceas offered as consolation at the end of the program seem absurdly timorous: better lightbulbs and electric cars. In this world, Disney’s Tomorrowland is either a grotesque incongruity or simply a ruin.

Behind both visions of the future, however, there were and are unspoken caveats. The specter stalking Tomorrowland from the beginning was nuclear war. The implicit promise of Man in Space was not that its glittering future was an inevitability, but that it would be our reward if we managed to sidestep atomic annihilation.

And ABC has given us a stick rather than a carrot, but the implication is strikingly similar: this is what will happen if we are not wise, and prompt, and lucky.

It’s the continuing business of science fiction to explore these consensus futures and to challenge them. Optimism is still an option—we may indeed be wise and lucky—and, even in the worst case, the Earth 2100 scenario still leaves us with a human population and the possibility of creating something better than civilization as we know it.

And in the end the new consensus future will prove just as true, just as false, just as prescient, and just as absurd as was the Disney version. The only well-established fact about the future is that we can never completely predict it. Which is what makes science fiction such a useful and pertinent art. Even now. Especially now.