General

Biocultural Conservation at the end of the earth merits 2008 SPES Award

1 Comment

Ricardo Rozzi is this year’s recipient of the Science and Practice of Ecology & Society award for his team’s research activities at Omora Ethnobotanical Park on Navarino Island just off the tip of South America. Rozzi’s contribution to biocultural conservation in the Cape Horn archipelago is detailed in the article Omora Ethnobotanical Park and the UNESCO Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve by Eugene Hargrove, Mary Arroyo, Peter Raven, and Harold Mooney.

Rozzi’s non-linear career path included studies in biology, philosophy, music, and a Ph.D. dissertation on indigenous knowledge of plants and birds in the Cape Horn archipelago. This transdisciplinary perspective appears to have formed the foundation for all of his work that has followed. Ricardo Rozzi (now Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas and Investigator at the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity in Chile) is recognized by his peers as having played a central role in creating Omora Ethnobotanical Park and the UNESCO Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve. The park itself hosts a Miniature Forest Garden trail that showcases the region’s mosses and liverworts (the Magallanes region has the highest diversity of bryophytes in Chile), promoting the value of native biodiversity amongst a spectacular backdrop of forests, fjords, and mountains. The region is also home to the Yahgans, the indigenous people with whom Rozzi has worked closely with, as Darwin himself did a century and a half earlier. Rozzi’s approach combining the human and biological dimensions of place has led to a variety of programs, partnerships, and initiatives that promote biocultural conservation through ecotourism, study abroad programs, research, and guidebooks including a Children‘s Illustrated Dictionary of the Yahgan World.

An interconnected social and ecological system perspective is reflected in Omora Ethnobotanical Park’s goal – to link scholarly work with a long-term commitment to a place, thereby allowing academics to become engaged citizens as well as researchers – as well as in the park founder’s vision of – socially relevant science that focuses on research, education, and conservation, as embodied in the park’s mission statement: Integrating biocultural conservation with social well-being from the end of the earth.

The Science and Practice of Ecology & Society (SPES) Award is an annual award that recognizes an individual or organization that effectively bridges scholarly work on the science of human-environment interactions with practical applications. The award of 1000 Euro includes an article in Ecology and Society devoted to the recipient and written by those who send in the nomination.

Inequality

Kindness

1 Comment

Adam Philips & Barbara Taylor, authors of the recent book On Kindness that uses history and psychoanalysis to examines the idea of kindness in western society, write in the Guardian Love thy neighbour: Why have we become so suspicious of kindness?

Kindness was mankind’s “greatest delight”, the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many people find these pleasures literally incredible, or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know; that as a species – apparently unlike other species of animal – we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking and that our sympathies are forms of self-protectiveness.

Kindness – not sexuality, not violence, not money – has become our forbidden pleasure. In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness – like all the greatest human pleasures – are inherently perilous, they are none the less some of the most satisfying we possess.

Regime Shifts

Climate lurches as global game changers

1 Comment

In response to the Edge.org 2009 annual question, which this year was – What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? Laurence Smith, Professor of Geography and Earth & Space Sciences at UCLA, writes about abrupt climate change in West Antarctica and seven other sleeping giants:

We used to think climate worked like a dial – slow to heat up and slow to cool down – but we’ve since learned it can also act like a switch. Twenty years ago anyone who hypothesized an abrupt, show-stopping event – a centuries-long plunge in air temperature, say, or the sudden die-off of forests -would have been laughed off. But today, an immense body of empirical and theoretical research tells us that sudden awakenings are dismayingly common in climate behavior. …

The mechanisms behind such lurches are complex but decipherable. Many are related to shifting ocean currents that slosh around pools of warm or cool seawater in quasi-predictable ways. The El Niño/La Niña phenomenon, which redirects rainfall patterns around the globe, is one well-known example. Another major player is the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC), a massive density-driven “heat conveyor belt” that carries tropical warmth northwards via the Gulf Stream. … a THC shutdown nonetheless remains an unlikely but plausible threat. It is the original sleeping giant of my field.

Unfortunately, we are discovering more giants that are probably lighter sleepers than the THC. Seven others – all of them potential game-changers – are now under scrutiny: (1) the disappearance of summer sea-ice over the Arctic Ocean, (2) increased melting and glacier flow of the Greenland ice sheet, (3) “unsticking” of the frozen West Antarctic Ice Sheet from its bed, (4) rapid die-back of Amazon forests, (5) disruption of the Indian Monsoon, (6) release of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, from thawing frozen soils, and (7) a shift to a permanent El Niño-like state. Like the THC, should any of these occur there would be profound ramifications – like our food production, the extinction and expansion of species, and the inundation of coastal cities.

…the presence of sleeping giants makes the steady, predictable growth of anthropogenic greenhouse warming more dangerous, not less. Alarm clocks may be set to go off, but we don’t what their temperature settings are. The science is too new, and besides we’ll never know for sure until it happens. While some economists predicted that rising credit-default swaps and other highly leveraged financial products might eventually bring about an economic collapse, who could have foreseen the exact timing and magnitude of late 2008? Like most threshold phenomena it is extremely difficult to know just how much poking is needed to disturb sleeping giants.

Visualization

Mapping global fires

3 Comments

Global Fires : Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory:

Like plants, fire activity grows and wanes in seasonal patterns. Globally, fires peak in July, August, and September, when summer’s drying heat makes vegetation flammable and lightning ignites the landscape. In addition, summer is the time when many crops are harvested and fields are burned in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of Earth’s continents are. On any given day in July, August, or September an estimated 6,000 fires burn across the world. February is the slowest month of the year, with an estimated 3,000 fires per day. To watch fires move across the globe throughout the year, see Fire in the Global Maps section of the Earth Observatory.

The contrast between the two months is shown in this pair of images made from data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The top image shows all of the fires detected during August 2008, while the lower image shows February 2008. Dense fire concentrations are yellow, while more scattered fires are red. February is clearly the burning season in the tropics. A solid band of red stretches across the Sahel of Africa, and hundreds fires were burning in northern South America, Central America, and southeast Asia. In August, the fire regions shifted into more temperate regions north and south of the Equator. Intense agricultural fires burn in south-central Europe and in southern Africa.

An animation of global fires is available on the Global Maps section of the NASA Earth Observatory

General

Ten most popular posts on Resilience Science from 2008

Leave a comment

Ten most popular post on Resilience Science from 2008

1. The long history of human-environment interactions in China

2. Financial resilience: Taleb and Mandelbrot reflect on crisis

3. Sichuan postcard: after the earthquake

4. Herman Daly on the financial crisis

5. World Press Photos: Evacuation of dead Mountain Gorillas

6. Shipping containers and world trade

7. Mapping global wind energy potential

8. Financial crisis news and analysis

9. Ecological economics of the global food trade

10. Political and economic implications of Arctic melting

Design, Ecological Management

Pedestrians and Urban Life: lessons from Copenhagen

2 Comments

kennymaticChris Turner, author of The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need, writes on WorldChanging Canada about Danish architect Jan Gehl who focuses on the role of pedestrians in urban life in Copenhagen, Melbourne & The Reconquest of the City:

Mr. Gehl’s core message remains so simple it sounds almost like a proverb. It goes like this: “Cultures and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They will gather in public if you give them a good place to do it.”

Urban sustainability rarely seems so straightforward, ensnarled as it is in thorny issues of land use and energy consumption, housing prices and unemployment rates, roads and transit lines, density and sprawl. In many of the world’s cities, however – North American cities in particular – there might be no single problem that encompasses them all as fully as the decision made after World War II to give top priority to the automobile in every urban quarter and under essentially every circumstance. And as Mr. Gehl’s clients are learning, there is no more economical or efficient way to begin sorting out this knot of problems than to simply restore people to their rightful place above cars in the urban hierarchy.

If the pedestrianization movement has a birthplace, it is Mr. Gehl’s hometown, the cozy Danish capital of Copenhagen. Regarded as recently as the 1950s as a dull provincial burgh, utterly overshadowed by dynamic metropolises like Paris and Rome, Copenhagen now routinely tops international quality of life rankings. …

Continue reading →

Ecosystem services

USDA establishes office of ecosystem services

2 Comments

The USA’s Department of Agriculture is establishing an Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets.  The Ecological Society of America’s blog EcoTone writes:

According to their press release, the office will help develop new guidelines and methods to assess ecosystem service benefits and create markets for ecosystem services.  The authorization for this office was approved in this summer’s Farm Bill, which Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer spoke out against.

Ecosystem services are one way that ecologists can place a currency on the valuable services our environment provides, such as water filtration and air purification, carbon sequestration, pollination and recreation. The new office’s first priority will be carbon sequestration. Says the press release:

“Agriculture producers provide many ecosystem services which have historically been viewed as free benefits to society – clean water and air, wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and scenic landscapes. Lacking a formal structure to market these services, farmers, ranchers and forest landowners are not generally compensated for providing these critical public benefits. Market-based approaches to conservation are proven to be a cost-effective method to achieve environmental goals and sustain working and natural landscapes. Without financial incentives, these ecosystem services may be lost as privately-owned lands are sold or converted to development.”

Ideas

Evaluating Ruddiman’s long anthropocene hypothesis

2 Comments

From In The Field a report on a symposium on Bill Ruddiman‘s long anthropocene hypothesis –  that the development of agriculture caused significant global warming:

Ruddiman’s basic argument goes like this: Although the climate has cycled through a series of ice ages and warm interglacial periods for more than a million years, none of those warm spells looks like the one we’re in. In all previous cases, carbon dioxide and methane concentrations peaked just after the preceding ice age ended and then levels of those greenhouse gases dropped until the planet slipped again into a new glacial epoch. The planet seemed to be following the same routine since the last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago. But then something funny happened. After falling for a few thousand years, carbon dioxide levels started to rise about 8,000 years ago and methane values swung upward 5,000 years ago.

As an explanation, Ruddiman suggests that carbon dioxide concentrations started to grow when early farmers cleared vast stretches of forest to plant crops, thus reducing the planet’s ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Later, when people learned how to irrigate rice 5,000 years ago, the paddies created for that purpose led to a jump in methane emissions. Those changes prevented the planet from slipping into an ice age, he suggested.

At Wednesday’s session, Ruddiman took the provocative stance of saying that the case is closed.

“I think we are at the point where it is a dead end to claim that natural [processes] explain the Holocene trends,” said Ruddiman, an emeritus professor at the University of Virgiinia. If you look at the previous interglacial periods, none show the rising pattern of carbon dioxide and methane. Q.E.D.

…

Jean Jouzel, director of the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute in Paris, said “the change in methane is huge. It’s difficult to think it’s not natural.” There were so few people alive 5,000 years ago that it would be hard for humans to account for the methane changes, he said. Jouzel was part of a group that examined the interglacials and made the point that they are each unique in some way. So arguments about the uniqueness of the current interglacial leave some researchers cool.

Scenarios

Scenario-planning for robust development in small-scale farming

Leave a comment

Making Investments in Dryland Development Work: Participatory Scenario Planning in the Makanya Catchment, Tanzania is a new paper my colleagues Elin Enfors and Line Gordon from the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Debbie Bossio from the International Water Management Institute, and I have just had published in Ecology and Society.  Below is part of the press release Scenario-planning help small-scale farming from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Predicting living conditions in 2030
People farming in the world´s drylands are some of the world´s poorest people, their populations are growing, but they have to cope with a variable climate that causes frequent crop failures. Consequently, many governments, NGOs, and scientists are making large efforts to improve productivity in small-scale farming particularly in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The recent development of cheap, farm-scale water management technologies offer the potential for farmers to improve their farm productivity and reduce their vulnerability to drought. However, often many development investments have failed.

To develop better approaches to investments in water management, Enfors, Gordon, Peterson and Bossio worked with famers, local officials, and scientists in Tanzania to identify alternative ways livelihoods, farming practices, and ecosystems could change over the next 25 years.

“We had two parallel objectives with the scenario planning exercise in Makanya”, says author Elin Enfors.

“The first was to analyze how, investments in water system technologies would play out over a range of alternative, but plausible futures, and the second was to initiate a discussion locally about the catchment’s future development”.

From our paper’s discussion and conclusions

Developing participatory scenarios also proved to be a useful tool to rapidly assess some of the major hopes, fears, and thoughts about the future among people in the local community. Such an overview is useful in any project, especially in a start-up phase. In this particular case, where the objective was to assess the relevance of investments in agricultural technologies that are intended for small-scale farmers, this perspective was essential because the farmers’ risk calculations and expectations of the future will influence whether or not, and under what conditions, they will adopt small-scale water system technologies.

Furthermore, there seems to be a risk that development and applied research projects become trapped in a vision that describes how their proposed interventions will ideally unfold over time. Scenario planning may help overcome such biases as it facilitates an understanding of how the project could develop in different kind of futures and because it improves the understanding of events and processes that either may challenge the project or provide opportunities for it.

We conclude that increasing the robustness of water investments should build

A way to increase the robustness of this type of investments is to build capacity among farmers for innovation and learning through experimentation, as this will generate benefits across a range of possible futures. The analysis shows that there is not one ideal type of collaborative partner for research and development projects working with small-scale agricultural technology, highlighting the importance of identifying a diverse set of potential collaborators.

Follow the links for more of Elin’s research in Makanya, and more photos of Makanya catchment.