In 2005 on Resilience Science, Line Gordon, wrote about recent research that we may have already passed tipping points in the Arctic.
NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice News Fall 2007 is providing weekly updates on the state of Arctic sea ice, which has reached record low coverage this year (the previous record low was in 2005).
The figure shows daily ice extent for 2007, 2005 and to the 1979 to 2000 average.
The drive for agricultural efficiency is driving the loss of the capacity for agriculture to cope with shocks and adapt to future change. This pattern fits that general pattern of the pathology of natural resource management that Buzz Holling has described previously.
The FAO, in collaboration with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other groups, surveyed farm animals in 169 countries, to produce a report of global livestock diversity “The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources.” This report shows that many local varieties of livestock are declining due to the promotion of common varieties.
Nature News has an article on the FAO report Local livestock breeds are dying out as commercial breeds sweep the world.
Many of the world’s indigenous livestock breeds are in danger of dying out as commercial breeds take over, according to a worldwide inventory of animal diversity. Their extinction would mean the loss of genetic resources that help animals overcome disease and drought, particularly in the developing world, say livestock experts.
…The survey reports that 11% of the investigated breeds are now extinct (some having disappeared many decades ago), 16% are currently at risk, 38% are unthreatened, and the security of the remaining 35% is unknown.
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Local breeds, nearly 70% of which are found in the developing world, are often better suited to their environments than commercially marketed animals bred for their high yields and short-term profitability, Seré argues. Red Maasai sheep, for example, are naturally resistant to intestinal parasites, and Uganda’s indigenous Ankole cattle are particularly drought-hardy.
Until recently, natural selection allowed animals to adapt, but now a lot of this is falling through the cracks.
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But the dominance of big breeding companies, mostly based in industrialized countries, means that these populations are being supplanted by the most common commercial breeds. Holstein-Friesian cattle, the stereotypical black-and-white dairy cow, are now found in more than 120 countries throughout the world.
The spread of such animals means that many farmers are now working with livestock that are poorly adapted to their environment, Seré says. “Until recently, natural selection allowed animals to adapt, but now a lot of this is falling through the cracks,” he says.
The pursuit of high-yielding animals means that genetic diversity is in crisis even in the established commercial breeds, says Shirley Ellis of the Institute for Animal Health in Compton, UK. She estimates that the roughly one billion Holstein-Friesians in the world were sired by the same few dozen bulls in North America. The advent of cloning for the most prized males will make the inbreeding problem worse still, she says.
Exporting strains such as Holstein-Friesians to the developing world is short-sighted, experts point out. “They don’t cope very well with local climate and diseases,” Ellis says.
“Wall Street is a machine for turning information nobody cares about into information people can get rich from.” Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, Aug 26 NYTimes in his article about catatrophe bonds – which are used to share disaster lossses – Nature’s Casino:
From Miami to San Francisco, the nation’s priciest real estate now faced beaches and straddled fault lines; its most vibrant cities occupied its most hazardous land. If, after World War II, you had set out to redistribute wealth to maximize the sums that might be lost to nature, you couldn’t have done much better than Americans had done. And virtually no one — not even the weather bookies — fully understood the true odds.
But there was an exception: an American so improbably prepared for the havoc Tropical Depression 12 was about to wreak that he might as well have planned it. His name was John Seo, he was 39 years old and he ran a hedge fund in Westport, Conn., whose chief purpose was to persuade investors to think about catastrophe in the same peculiar way that he did. He had invested nearly a billion dollars of other people’s money in buying what are known as “cat bonds.” The buyer of a catastrophe bond is effectively selling catastrophe insurance. He puts down his money and will lose it all if some specified bad thing happens within a predetermined number of years: a big hurricane hitting Miami, say, or some insurance company losing more than $1 billion on any single natural disaster. In exchange, the cat-bond seller — an insurance company looking to insure itself against extreme losses — pays the buyer a high rate of interest.
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everywhere he goes, he has been drawn to a similar thorny problem: the right price to charge to insure against potential losses from extremely unlikely financial events. “Tail risk,” as it is known to quantitative traders, for where it falls in a bell-shaped probability curve. Tail risk, broadly speaking, is whatever financial cataclysm is believed by markets to have a 1 percent chance or less of happening. In the foreign-exchange market, the tail event might be the dollar falling by one-third in a year; in the bond market, it might be interest rates moving 3 percent in six months; in the stock market, it might be a 30 percent crash. “If there’s been a theme to John’s life,” says his brother Nelson, “it’s pricing tail.”
On the Ecological Economics weblog Dave Iverson reminds us of the great American economist Albert Hirschman‘s book The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.
Iverson writes on Hirschman’s thoughts on dialogue and democracy:
As I read it, I wondered, once again, “How many economic arguments are simply the stuff of reactionary rhetoric?” Too many, I fear.
In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Hirschman gives us three theses to ponder:
- The Perversity Thesis: reform efforts will backfire, tending toward effects opposite those desired
- The Futility Thesis: reform efforts are doomed to fail from the get-go
- The Jeopardy Thesis: reform efforts will unravel earlier (better) reforms, or they will unravel the entirety of whatever system is in play…
Hirschman explains how easily both conservatives and progressives get drawn into the rhetorical standoffs, impasses really: “… To the dangers of action it is always possible to oppose the dangers of inaction. …” Here is how Hirschman frames a hypothetical point/counterpoint:
Reactionary: The contemplated action will bring disastrous consequences.
Progressive: Not to take the contemplated action will ring disastrous consequences.
Reactionary: The new reform will jeopardize the older one.
Progressive: The new and the old reforms will mutually reinforce each others.
Reactionary: The contemplated action attempts to change permanent structural characteristics ([natural] “laws”) of the social order; it is therefore bound to be wholly ineffective, futile.
Progressive; The contemplated action is backed up by powerful historical forces that are already “on the march”; opposing them would be utterly futile.
Hirschman concludes with:
Recent reflection on democracy have yielded two valuable insights …. Modern pluralistic regimes have typically come into being not because of some preexisting wide consensus on “basic values,” bur rather because various groups that had been at each others’ throats for a prolonged period had to recognize their mutual inability to achieve dominance. Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups.
This historical point of departure of democracy does not bode particularly well for the stability of these regimes. The point is immediately obvious, but it becomes even more so when it is brought into contact with the theoretical claim that a democratic regime achieves legitimacy to the extent that its decisions result from full and open deliberation among its principal groups, bodies, and representatives. Deliberation is here conceived, as an opinion-forming process: the participants should not have fully or definitively formed opinions at the outset; they are expected to engage in meaningful discussion, which means that they should be ready to modify initially held opinions in the light of arguments of other participants and also as a result of new information which becomes available in the course of the debate. …
If this is what it takes for the democratic process to become self-sustaining and to acquire long-run stability and legitimacy, then the gulf that separates such a state from democratic-pluralistic regimes as they emerge historically from strife and civil war is uncomfortably and perilously wide. A people that only yesterday was engaged in fratricidal struggles is not likely to settle down overnight to those constructive give-and-take deliberations. Far more likely , there will initially be agreement to disagree, but without any attempt at melding the opposing points of view—that is indeed the nature of religious tolerance. Or, if there is discussion, it will be a typical “dialogue of the deaf”—a dialogue that will in fact long function as a prolongation of, and a substitute for, civil war. Even in the most “advanced” democracies, many debates are, to paraphrase Clausewitz, a “continuation of civil war with other means.” Such debates, with each part on the lookout for arguments that kill, are only too familiar from democratic politics as usual.
There remains then a long and difficult road to be traveled from the traditional internecine, intransigent discourse to a more “democracy-friendly” kind of dialogue. …
One question lingers with me: How far have we, particularly here in the US, backpedaled in our quest for pluralistic reasoning?
When “values” of various stripes are trotted out before us on a daily basis, asking us to pledge allegiance to ‘values’ framed as ‘moral absolutes’ in-ever-more-strident urgings, why are we not in the streets screaming, Stop! We are losing the very platform on which democracy can flourish!
Or maybe I’m just being reactionary?
A graph of global inequality from:
Branko Milanovic, Global Income Inequality: What it Is and why it Matters? World Economics, Vol. 7, No. 1, January-March 2006.
The figure compares the income distribution within France, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Rural Indonesia. The graph shows that the poorest 5% of France are richer than the top 5% rural Indonesians. The poorest 5% rural Indonesian are richer than the poorest 5% of Brzil, but the richest 5% of Brazil are as rich as the top 5% of France.
Branko Milanovic, a world bank economist, is one of the world’s top experts on inequality. His 2005 book Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality is an excellent clear introduction to the problems of understanding global inequality.
via Tim Holland.
It was roughly two years ago that New Orleans spectactularly failed to cope, technologically and socially, with Hurricane Katrina. Over 1,8oo people died, neighbourhoods and livlihoods were destroyed, and the storm is estimated to have caused over $80 billion in damage.
One of the fundamental principles of successful ecological management is learning from your mistakes, and incorporating those lessons into management practices. Two recent retrospectives, one in Time and the other in Mother Jones, on what has followed the storm indicate not a lot has been learned by the various institutions responsible the ecological management of the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast.
Montreal’s Rooftop gardening project has had a demonstration garden outside my office at McGill this summer. Montreal is very dense, it has a lack of gardening space, but many people have balconies and external staircases where they can have gardens. The rooftop gardeners aim to produce good healthy food, in a way that also improves urban environmental quality.
The Rooftop gardening project have been working with McGill Architecture’s global edible landscapes project, which is workingin Colombo, Sri Lanka; Kampala, Uganda and Rosario, Argentina, as well as Montreal. The McGill reporter had an article Garden of eating about the project in May 2007.
The Rooftop gardening project have made a film about their work Des Jardins sur les toit (Rooftop gardens) – it is in French with English subtitles.
Photos from the Montreal Rooftop gardening project and the AASHE weblog.
Global use of fertilizer in rich and poor countries (as of 1960) in millions of tonnes as shown in data from FAO.
Fertilizer use in poor countries exceeded that in rich countries before the collapse of the Soviet Union for N, and after for P.
The Geography of Flavor a August 22, Washington Post article describes how the French concept of terroir – the idea that the social-ecological context of a food’s production shapes its character – is spreading to the USA.
This idea is being promoted to enhance the profitability of agriculture, the quality of food, and the ecology of food production regions. For example, ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan is part of this movement and worked with the US Slow Food movement to cofound the Renewing America’s Food Traditions Project.
Terroir has the potential to promote a variety of interests in ways that simple origin labeling, as with Vidalia onions, can’t. Farmers believe that the focus on growing conditions and production methods will make their products stand out in a market where low prices reign supreme. Economists see terroir as a device to help restore and protect rural communities; if farmers can earn more money, they’re more likely to stay on the land. Others believe that promoting terroir could help quell fears about food safety.
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“We went to the Industrialized Age almost immediately,” Trubek said. “We never had cute little towns with wine-and-cheese traditions. The American experience is all about expansion, to make it bigger, to keep moving.”
Two hundred years later, an unlikely coalition is joining forces to invent American tradition by linking foods to the places they come from and, like American winemakers before them, to romance. Their hope is to offer a counterbalance to the commodity mentality that a strawberry from California is interchangeable with one grown in Florida.
Studies show that the strategy can be profitable. According to a May 2004 survey conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, 56 percent of respondents were willing to pay at least 10 percent more for a place-based food, or “produit du terroir.” The survey also revealed that 65 percent of respondents preferred products that would give farmers a higher percentage of profits than processors, distributors and retailers.
The theory has borne out for fishermen on Lummi Island. Five years ago, they formed a co-op and agreed to catch salmon with reef nets. The contraptions, a modernized version of a Native American invention, consist of an artificial underwater reef made of plastic ribbons. Fishermen stand on tall towers above the water and watch for salmon to swim into the reef, then pull up the nets, spilling the fish into an underwater pen in the boat’s center. The fish are then moved into a separate tank, where their gills are cut and they swim slowly to their deaths.
It sounds cruel, but Lummi Island fishermen claim it’s far less stressful than contemporary methods in which fish die full of adrenaline, struggling for breath on the deck of a commercial fishing vessel. “Reef-net fish have this amazing flavor,” co-op member Ian Kirouac said. “We wanted to identify ourselves with a strong sense of place. There’s a big difference between what we do and what other people do. ”
By advertising their technique and the place of origin, this Lummi Island co-op has been able to command a premium for its fish, both from retailers and restaurant clients. Commodity sockeye salmon sell for about $3.25 a pound wholesale, while Lummi Island’s fetch as much as $5.25 per pound.
William F. Ruddiman pose an interesting hypothesis by arguing that humans have had a measurable impact on the climate system for 8000 years. In his book “Plow, Plagues and Petroleum”, the emeritus environmental science professor shows interesting anomalies in the trends of atmospheric CO2 concentration (since 8000 years) ago when Europeans start cutting down forest in Middle and Eastern Europe for agriculture, and CH4 concentration (since 5000 years) when irrigated rice farming started at large scale. This has led to an temperature increase of 0.8 degrees Celsius before the industrial revolution started which led to a similar amount of emissions, but in a much shorter period. Ruddiman argues that instead of heading to a cooler climate, as was expected from traditional climatology (due to regular orbital changes) increased human-induced emissions avoided this cooling down, and may lead to a brief warming period (on geological scale). There is also an interesting chapter where brief declines of CO2 concentrations are related to major pandamics (like black plague), which led to a temporarely regrowth of forests. If Ruddiman’s thesis is true humans have unconsiously entended the K-phase of preferable climate before a dramatic reorganization phase (in the coming years?) occur.