Design, General

From Science Fiction to Viridian Design: Guardian Interview with Bruce Sterling

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The science fiction writer turned design theorist, Bruce Sterling is interviewed in the Guardian (June 1/2006) about the future of green design.

TG: In your book Shaping Things, you describe climate change as the result of technology pioneers like Edison and Ford. Yet you say the only solution is to press forward with technology and shift to a new type of society.

BS: Not many science-fiction writers write industrial design manifestoes, but I was commissioned by Peter Lunenfeld of Arts Centre College of Design in California, where I was visionary in residence. Why do you want a sci-fi writer in a design school? You want someone who’ll think outside the box. The book talks about a new tech phenomenon with six or seven terms attached: the Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computation, Everyware, Ambient Findability, Spimes (my term).

My own theory, which has gone into Shaping Things, is the key element is the identity for objects. It’s putting tags on things that allow them to interact with digital networks. That is the key concept around which other things accrue. My goal in this is sustainability. I want us to invent a better way to put our toys away. We are emitting too much junk. Google is good at sorting garbage. We could do something similar if we tagged our garbage, basically, everything we make.

Ideally, we need to tag an object before it exists. We need to tag the blueprints and then the manufactured object. Then, when it’s junk, we need to read it, know where it goes, have it ripped apart and recycled.

TG: Where does the concept of Spimes come from?

BS: Spimes was one of those spontaneous neologisms I came up with at a conference, a contraction of “space” and “time.” The idea is you no longer look at an object as an artefact, but as a process. A modern bottle of wine in one sense does exactly the same as the clay jug and stopper that the ancient Greeks used. On the other hand, it is now mass produced industrial glass, with a machine-applied label containing a barcode and a host of other information, even an associated web page. These invite you to do more than just drink the wine. These innovations link this product into a wider relationship.

Yet the moment the bottle is empty, we make a subtle semantic reclassification and designate it “trash”. The logistics of manufacture and distribution will already have tracked the bottle from factory, to warehouse, to store. But the relationship is not a closed loop. The moment you buy the wine, it’s your responsibility. The onus is on you to recycle it, or it’ll spend eternity in landfill. We really should be thinking about the trajectory all this stuff follows. We are in trouble as a culture because we don’t have a strong idea of where we are in time, and what we might need to do to deserve a future.

Amazon.com, for instance, allows you to study lots of information about physical products (books) without needing to consider the physical artefact itself. Or bookcrossing.com, a site where you can track physical books from reader to reader. Wheresgeorge.com does the same with dollar bills. Spimes are both the physical object and the metadata related to that object. Then, as with Amazon’s reviews, we can start adding correspondence on the nature of objects, creating a forum to discuss all our stuff and what to do with it.

TG: So how do RFID (radio frequency identification) chips relate to this?

BS: To study spimes we need to be able to track them. RFID chips are the next evolutionary step from bar codes. They allow objects to have an identity that can be easily read. They were invented by the Pentagon’s shipping, tracking and logistics agency, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, inspired by some work at MIT. Unlike the barcode, which needs to be scanned up-close, you can just ping a whole warehouse, or delivery truck or cargo container, and an RFID scanner will simultaneously detect and log everything in there. You also see them in swipe cards. These tags make it extremely easy to assign identities to objects and connect them to databases.

Greenlash, Ideas, Vulnerability

Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour

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The world’s oceans are warming, rising, and acidifing due to human action. The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) on May 31 2006 released a new report on climate change and the world’s oceans, The Future Oceans: Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour, that synthesizes current knowledge on climate change and oceans. They state that climate change in combination with over-fishing is threatening already depleted fish stocks. Sea-level rise is exposing coastal regions to mounting flood and hurricane risks. They argue that to keep the impacts on human wellbeing within manageable limits it is necessary to both increase coastal and ocean resilience and reduce the amount of future global warming and ocean acidification. The WBGU recommends that societies act to:

Limit acidification and temperature rise
Adaptation measures can only succeed if sea-level rise, ocean warming and ocean acidification are limited to tolerable levels. The only way to do this is through aggressive climate protection policies. WBGU has already recommended previously that the rise in global mean temperature be limited to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level. Ocean conservation is a further reason for imposing this limit. Furthermore, in order to restrain acidification it is essential to reduce not only emissions of the overall basket of greenhouse gases, but also to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions in particular are sufficiently abated. It follows in WBGU’s view that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will need to be approximately halved by 2050 from 1990 levels.

Strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems
To strengthen the resilience of marine ecosystems to elevated seawater temperatures and acidification, it is essential to manage marine resources sustainably. In particular, over-fishing must be stopped. In addition, WBGU recommends designating at least 20–30 per cent of the global marine area as conservation zones. The international community has already adopted goals in this regard, for instance at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. These must now be implemented, and the regulatory gap for the high seas closed by adopting an appropriate international agreement.

Develop new strategies for coastal protection
About every fifth person lives within 30 kilometres of the sea. Many of these people are put at immediate risk by sea-level rise and hurricanes. Coastal protection is thus becoming a key challenge for society, not least in financial terms. National and international strategies for mitigation and adaptation need to be further developed and harmonized. This includes plans for a managed retreat from endangered areas. In developing countries, financing needs to be secured by means of both existing and innovative financing instruments such as micro-insurance.

Give legal certainty to refugees from sea-level rise
At present, international law neither establishes a commitment to receive people who are forced to leave coastal areas or islands because of climate change, nor is the cost question resolved. Over the long term, a quota system is conceivable, under which states would have to adopt responsibility for refugees in line with their greenhouse gas emissions. This will require formal international agreements and the establishment of dedicated funds for international compensation payments.

Use carbon dioxide storage only as a transitional solution
To mitigate emissions, carbon dioxide can be captured in energy-generating facilities and then stored in geological formations on land or under the sea floor. Direct injection into the deep sea is a further option under debate, but this lacks permanence and harbours a risk of ecological damage in the deep sea. WBGU therefore recommends prohibiting the injection of carbon dioxide into seawater in general. In contrast, storing carbon dioxide in geological formations under the sea floor can present a transitional solution for climate protection, complementing more sustainable approaches such as enhancing energy efficiency and expanding renewable energies. Permits should only be granted, however, if such storage is environmentally sound and is secure for at least 10,000 years.

Ideas, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Vulnerability

Ecology and Development: the MA & MDGs

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Strategy for Sust Dev - Sachs & Reid Science 2006 The economist Jeffrey Sachs, the director the development oriented Millennium Project, and the ecologist Walt Reid, former director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment have written a joint policy forum in Science (May 19, 2006) Investments Toward Sustainable Development. They note that both projects have broad agreement about the need to integrate ecology and poverty alleviation.  They recommend that the world invest in ecological infrastructure in poor countries and establish a periodic assessment of the benefits that people obtains from ecosystems. They write:

The United Nations (U.N.) Millennium Project and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment highlighted the centrality of environmental management for poverty reduction and general well-being. Each report emphasized the unsustainability of our current trajectory. Millions of people die each year because of their poverty and extreme vulnerability to droughts, crop failure, lack of safe drinking water, and other environmentally related ills. The desperation of the poor and heedlessness of the rich also exact a toll on future well-being in terms of habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate change.

The goal of the Millennium Project is to develop and to promote practical plans for achieving the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for ending poverty, eradicating hunger, achieving universal primary education, improving health, and restoring a healthy environment. The MA, in turn, examined the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and analyzed options for conserving ecosystems while enhancing their contributions to people. The MA and the Millennium Project reached strikingly parallel conclusions:

  1. Environmental degradation is a major barrier to the achievement of the MDGs. The MA examined 24 ecosystem services (the benefits people obtain from ecosystems) and found that productivity of only 4 had been enhanced over the last 50 years, whereas 15 (including capture fisheries, water purification, natural hazard regulation, and regional climate regulation) had been degraded. More than 70% of the 1.1 billion poor people surviving on less than $1 per day live in rural areas, where they are directly dependent on ecosystem services.
  2. Investing in environmental assets and management are vital to cost-effective and equitable strategies to achieve national goals for relief from poverty, hunger, and disease. For example, investments in improved agricultural practices to reduce water pollution can boost coastal fishing industry. Wetlands protection can meet needs of rural communities while avoiding costs of expensive flood control infrastructure. Yet these investments are often overlooked.
  3. Reaching environmental goals requires progress in eradicating poverty. More coherent and bolder poverty reduction strategies could ease environmental stresses by slowing population growth and enabling the poor to invest long term in their environment.

We recommend the following measures in 2006. First, we call on the rich donor countries to establish a Millennium Ecosystem Fund to give poor countries the wherewithal to incorporate environmental sustainability into national development strategies. The fund would support work that focuses on how poverty reduction can enhance environmental conservation (e.g., by giving farmers alternatives to slash and burn) and how environmental sustainability can support poverty reduction (e.g., watershed management to maintain clean water supplies). It would also support national ecosystem service assessments to help decision-makers factor the economic and health consequences of changes in ecosystem services into their planning choices.

The fund would initially need roughly $200 million over 5 years. It would enable universities and scientists in dozens of the poorest countries to incorporate the science of environmental sustainability into poverty reduction strategies. The programs would generate evidence for countries to use in setting priorities for national development and environmental investments.

Second, the United Nations should establish a cycle of global assessments modeled on the MA and similar to the climate change reports produced at 4- to 5-year intervals by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The MA and IPCC cost roughly $20 million, and each mobilized in-kind contributions of that magnitude. A global network of respected ecologists, economists, and social scientists working to bring scientific knowledge to decision-makers and to the public can clarify the state of scientific knowledge, help to mobilize needed research, and defeat the obfuscation led by vested interests.

Ideas

Paradox of the clumps

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Sean Nee and Nick Colegrave comment on the Scheffer and van Ness PNAS paper on the formation and persistence of ecological lumps (see the earlier post by Buzz Holling, and the commentary Discontinuities in ecological data by Craig Allen in PNAS).

Their commentary, Paradox of the clumps (Nature May 25, 2006) suggest that ecological clumpiness of species may change how we think about species. They write:

…Scheffer and van Nes have revisited a well-studied classical model of competing species and discovered something new. Even in the absence of any environmental discontinuities, they find that assemblages of species will self-organize into clumps of species with very similar niches within a clump and a large difference between clumps. So, paradoxically, species both do, and do not, organize themselves into discrete niches.

In the Origin of Species, Darwin asked: “Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?” This evolutionary question has a closely related ecological counterpart: how similar can species be to one another and still coexist? … With a single, continuous niche axis, how many species can you pack along it? Or, is there a limit to how close the species can be along this axis?

…

Previous analytical results produced single species widely spaced along the niche axis. But Scheffer and van Nes find widely spaced clumps of species occupying very similar niches. Why the difference? Analytical work looks at the long-term equilibria of models, whereas a simulation study allows the system to be observed as it moves towards these equilibria. Scheffer and van Nes take the simulation approach, which starts out with a large number of species along the axis and then evolves the system according to standard equations that govern competition between species. The clumps they observe are transient, and each will ultimately be thinned out to a single species. But ‘ultimately’ can be a very long time indeed: we now know that transient phenomena can be very long-lasting and, hence, important in ecology, and such phenomena can be studied effectively only by simulation. There is also good experimental evidence for long-lasting coexistence between similar species.

…

The emergence of clumps of highly similar species resonates with a proposed solution to another possible problem: the coexistence of large numbers of species in environments that do not seem to allow for much niche differentiation. Plankton and tropical forest plants are the usual examples. These organisms have a simple set of requirements: light, carbon dioxide and a few nutrients. How is it possible to carve out thousands of distinct niches from so few requirements? It has been proposed that such high numbers of species can coexist precisely because their niches are so similar that exclusion takes a very long time, perhaps on the same timescale as speciation.

…

We can go further: on what basis did Darwin make his assertion about the discreteness of species? This question is distinct from debates about the definition of species in nature. Blackberries reproduce asexually, and it is impossible to agree on how many ‘species’ there are; but, nonetheless, we all know a ‘blackberry’ when we see one and do not wonder if it is actually a raspberry. Great tits, blue tits and coal tits are all quite distinct when considered as a set, but are surely just more-or-less continuous variants on a tit theme when compared with flamingos. Bacteria that are vastly different genetically are all called Legionella because they clump along the single niche axis that matters to us: they all cause Legionnaire’s disease.

So what is the correct or meaningful frame of reference when thinking about the ecological nature of species? As well as providing stimulating theoretical results, Scheffer and van Nes have revitalized the fundamental question of how we should look at the ecological identity of species.

Greenlash, Ideas, Regime Shifts

Pollution risks Yangtze’s ‘death’

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From BBC news, Pollution risks Yangtze’s ‘death’, briefly describes China’s fears that how large scale eutrophication and pollution is impacting human wellbeing and economic growth prospects along the Yangze.

YangtzeThe Yangtze, China’s longest river, is “cancerous” with pollution, reports in the country’s state media have said.Environmental experts fear pollution from untreated agricultural and industrial waste could turn the Yangtze into a “dead river” within five years.

That would make it unable to sustain marine life or provide drinking water to the booming cities along its banks.

The Yangtze rises in China’s western mountains and passes through some of its most densely populated areas.

The government has promised to clean up the Yangtze, which supplies water to almost 200 cities along its banks.

But experts speaking in China’s state media say that unless action is taken quickly, billions of tonnes of untreated industrial and agricultural waste and sewage are likely to kill what remains of the river’s plant and wildlife species within five years.

China’s rapid economic development means that many of the nation’s waterways are facing similar problems.

Last year the authorities announced that the country’s second-longest river, the Yellow River, was so polluted that it was not safe for drinking.

Correspondents say that 300 million people in China do not have access to safe drinking water.

They say that government efforts to clean up the country’s polluted lakes and waterways are being thwarted by lax enforcement standards.

Ecological Management, Regime Shifts, Vulnerability

Does Rainfall Increase in the Sahel Mask a Degradation Trend?

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There have been heated debates about the dynamics of land degradation and climate change in the Sahel region in West Africa. The region has suffered a number of extreme droughts since the 1960’s causing famine, loss of livestock and reduced vegetation. However, a ‘greening trend’ trend has recently been detected. To a large extent this trend appears to be driven by increased rainfall (although some scientists argue that this alone can not explain the full extent of the greening trend).

Several studies, based on remote sensing, have now analyzed the reduced vegetation during the drought years and compared it to current land cover. Interestingly, they have not detected any land degradation that can be attributed to land management, which is in contrast with earlier studies suggesting that livestock management in the region is reducing productivity and increasing the systems vulnerability to drought.

A recent paper ‘Desertification in the Sahel: a reinterpretation’ by Hein and De Ridder published in Global Change Biology, suggests that the analyses based on remote sensing may be flawed and that land degradation may have been masked by rainfall.

Hein and De Ridder’s reasoning builds on the way that previous studies linked net primary production (NPP) (or actually a vegetation index – NDVI) to rainfall. These previous studies assumed that for a given site with no land degradation a linear relationship exists between NPP and rainfall (i.e. the Rain Use Efficiency (RUE) is constant). When they did not see any change in RUE over time they assumed that there has not been any land degradation.

Hein and De Ridder studied RUE in six field sites and found that in the absence of land degradation the relationship between NPP and rainfall was non-linear (followed a quadratic curve). When they looked at expected RUE values based on their quadratic estimates they found that the RUE from satellite estimates were lower than the expected ones, and thus land degradation may have occurred. They conclude:

If anthropogenic degradation of the Sahel is demonstrated, this would have repercussions for the debate on the causes of climate change in the Sahel. Currently, a weakness in the argumentations … that anthropogenic land cover changes have contributed to the occurrence of the extreme Sahelian droughts of the last decades of the 20th century is a lack of evidence of degradation from remote sensing data. Hence, if new remote sensing analyses confirm anthropogenic degradation, this would support the hypothesis that degradation of the vegetation layer, in particular through sustained high grazing pressures, has contributed to the occurrence of the 20th century droughts in the Sahel. Furthermore, if degradation of the Sahelian vegetation cover is confirmed, this would indicate that Sahelian pastoralists may be more vulnerable for future droughts than currently assumed. Because degradation of the Sahel in the 1980s and 1990s has been masked by an upward trend in annual rainfall, the consequences of a future drought for the local population could be unexpectedly severe.

Design, Tools

Designing Resilient Software?

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Daniel Jackson has written an article, Dependable Software by Design, on how software design tools can be used to improve the resilience of software. In Scientific American he wrote:

An architectural marvel when it opened 11 years ago, the new Denver International Airport’s high-tech jewel was to be its automated baggage handler. It would autonomously route luggage around 26 miles of conveyors for rapid, seamless delivery to planes and passengers. But software problems dogged the system, delaying the airport’s opening by 16 months and adding hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns. Despite years of tweaking, it never ran reliably. Last summer airport managers finally pulled the plug–reverting to traditional manually loaded baggage carts and tugs with human drivers. The mechanized handler’s designer, BAE Automated Systems, was liquidated, and United Airlines, its principal user, slipped into bankruptcy, in part because of the mess.

…Such massive failures occur because crucial design flaws are discovered too late. Only after programmers began building the code–the instructions a computer uses to execute a program–do they discover the inadequacy of their designs. Sometimes a fatal inconsistency or omission is at fault, but more often the overall design is vague and poorly thought out. As the code grows with the addition of piecemeal fixes, a detailed design structure indeed emerges–but it is a design full of special cases and loopholes, without coherent principles. As in a building, when the software’s foundation is unsound, the resulting structure is unstable.

…Now a new generation of software design tools is emerging. Their analysis engines are similar in principle to tools that engineers increasingly use to check computer hardware designs. A developer models a software design using a high-level (summary) coding notation and then applies a tool that explores billions of possible executions of the system, looking for unusual conditions that would cause it to behave in an unexpected way. This process catches subtle flaws in the design before it is even coded, but more important, it results in a design that is precise, robust and thoroughly exercised. One example of such a tool is Alloy, which my research group and I constructed. Alloy (which is freely available on the Web) has proved useful in applications as varied as avionics software, telephony, cryptographic systems and the design of machines used in cancer therapy.

Daniel Jackson has also recently written a book Software Abstractions: Logic, Language, and Analysis. The book’s website describes the book:

Daniel Jackson introduces a new approach to software design that draws on traditional formal methods but exploits automated tools to find flaws as early as possible. This approach–which Jackson calls “lightweight formal methods” or “agile modeling”–takes from formal specification the idea of a precise and expressive notation based on a tiny core of simple and robust concepts but replaces conventional analysis based on theorem proving with a fully automated analysis that gives designers immediate feedback. Jackson has developed Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstractions simply and succinctly, using a minimal toolkit of mathematical notions. The designer can use automated analysis not only to correct errors but also to make models that are more precise and elegant. This approach, Jackson says, can rescue designers from “the tarpit of implementation technologies” and return them to thinking deeply about underlying concepts.

via ThreeQuarksDaily

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.

Ideas

Thoughts on Simple and Complex Causes of Lumps

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Reply of Buzz Holling to a message from Marten Scheffer:

I did like your models (Scheffer and van Nes) that show that lumps of species emerge naturally from competition, augmented with predation (see post on self-organization of ecosystem lumpiness). I like also that the simulated lumpy distributions you demonstrated are very evolutionarily robust. That is what has been shown in so much of the multi species community data and experimental manipulations that have been published by various authors.

But let me offer some other empirical evidence that suggest something else may ALSO be operating. Then I’ll end with some words on the philosophy of science!

First, in one of my tests in my “lumpy paper” I asked if herbivores and carnivores had different lump patterns among the mammals in each of the communities of the boreal prairies and boreal forests (Holling, C.S. 1992. Cross-scale morphology, geometry and dynamics of ecosystems. Ecological Monographs. 62(4):447-502). In my mind, this was a crude, crude test of the role of competition and predation in forming body mass lump patterns. Herbivores and carnivores turned out to have the same lump patterns, suggesting that something more than competition must be causing the similarity.

Second, I asked if mammals compared to birds in the same communities (boreal forests and boreal prairies) had different or similar lump patterns. It turned out that the patterns differed when compared by untransformed masses, but were very similar when the bird masses were expressed as Mass to the third power and mammal masses as untransformed mass. Birds, it was argued, therefore must see their world in three dimensions, and mammals in one dimension. Some behavioral data seems to conform to that conclusion. But note the data and tests only applied to two systems, and clearly more ecosystems need to be compared. Adding bats, mammals that fly, offers a set of additional tests that would be very valuable. Data, however, are tough to get. Such tests need data on masses of birds, non flying mammals and bats from the same ecosystem communities.

Third , one of my colleagues, Jan Sendzimir, asked if body mass lump patterns among birds or mammals in different ecological communities around the world were more similar if they came from the same type of community. In essence, for example, are lump patterns in boreal forest communities in Europe and North America more similar to each other than to patterns among totally different communities? The answer was that they were more similar to each other, even when comparing different continents. That suggests that patterns on landscapes over a wide range of scales is central in defining lumpy patterns.

Fourth, Craig Allen has discovered a remarkably consistent pattern that the masses of endangered and invasive species of birds and mammals, exist disproportionately on the edge of the body mass lumps. He has shown that for at least five ecosystems around the world. It is as if crisis and opportunity are shared there, where, I suppose, the resources available at those scale breaks were poor. As scales increase, points are reached where the available resources suddenly change. (Think of viewing a high resolution satellite image of a landscape at different powers of ten from meters to tens of thousands of kms). Initially you see leaves and branches , and suddenly a scale is reached where you see trees and vegetation types- and on and on. What you see, I thought, is what you can , potentially eat or , better, utilize).

Finally, I am delighted with your emphasis on self organization. I have long felt that self organization , integrated with Darwinian evolution, has huge explanatory power, and the combination answers many of the existing puzzles of evolution.

But I also felt that the self organizing patterns were ones that involved not just interactions among biological species of similar trophic relations (like your competitors) but also interactions across trophic categories , and even interactions among organisms and abiotic features. Maybe, I thought, that is why anoxid, pre Cambrian organisms evolved the ability to use the dreadful poison of oxygen to explosively release a new burst of evolution. I imagined oxygen breathing species evolving in water where diffusion of oxygen was slow enough that local concentrations could be built up by organisms with facultative oxygen metabolism. Suddenly anoxic metabolism there becomes a penalty and oxygen metabolism a huge benefit. From those local concentrations, a world with oxygen could bloom.

There are two very distinct ways to suggest and test such ideas. One is via models, where very specific causes are designed and tested as a deductive excercise. That is what your paper does, in a significant expansion of that tradition. The other comes from a larger scale of testing of whole assemblies of potentially interacting variables . The conceptual ideas might come from earlier models. That was what my lump paper attempted as a test of a set of conclusions comparing earlier simulation models of ecosystems. Each of about a dozen models /studies indicated a small number of variables (less than five) at distinctly different scales explained those systems changes in variables. Hence I suggested, real data covering broad scales should show a small number of lumpy clusters. Body mass was chosen as a test because that is the data that are available. The data indeed showed the lumpy structure.

Now what is needed is slightly expanded deductive models with up to five variables/processes, much like those that Steve Carpenter and Buz Brock have structured for economic-ecological mini systems (see papers in Ecology and Society on lakes and fishing). And much more testing is needed with large scale assemblies of variables as I attempted in my lump paper. That is what Craig Allen has been doing, with collaborators, for a number of systems- biological, ecological , economic and social,. A book is about to be published, I believe. He might have some revealing comments that we all could learn from.

C.S.Holling

Ideas, Regime Shifts, Reorganization

Punctuated Equilibrium in Environmental Policy

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Readers familiar with panarchy theory will find a rich set of relevant examples in a new book edited by Robert Repetto, Punctuated Equilibrium and the Dynamics of U.S. Environmental Policy.

In Chapter 2, Frank Baumgartner explains how U.S. environmental policy shows is static for long periods of time, reflecting stable institutional structures, shared understanding of goals, and balance of power among competing interests. Occasionally, however, there are bursts of innovation as public policies are radically restructured. These rare but crucially important bursts of innovation occur across a range of scales, from local to national. Baumgartner makes his case using statistical case histories of policy dynamics.

William Brock, in Chapter 3, explains social and economic mechanisms that cause long periods of stasis interrupted by bursts of enormous change in environmental policy. Brock uses minimal models grounded in well-established social and economic phenomena. The remainder of the book develops case studies in depth.

Some cases have undergone radical change: management of water in California, certain marine fisheries, and timber in the Pacific Northwest. Other systems seem locked in traps: greenhouse gas and climate policy, vehicular fuel economy standards, and livestock grazing on public lands. History suggests that these traps will eventually be broken.

In his introductory chapter, Repetto summarizes the positive and negative feedback mechanisms that underlie punctuated equilibrium. He writes:

Though they [the feedback mechanisms] are fully capable of explaining the observed patterns of stability and abrupt change, their workings are difficult to predict in particular policy struggles because of their complex interactions. The infrequency of policy breakthroughs suggests that most efforts to bring them about will fail. Entrenched interests and ideology will retain their dominance; challengers will be unable to gather sufficient resources, attention, and momentum. Nonetheless, such failed efforts may build a foundation for later success when conditions are more favorable by undermining the prevailing policy image, by mobilizing new interests, and by forming new coalitions. Even knowing that the odds are long, effective policymakers continue to work on their issues in order to be ready and primed when opportunities arise. Timing is crucial . . . . Across the broad range of resource and environmental policy issues, only a few, if any, are likely to have potential for significant change at any particular time. The ability to discern which ones these are is a vital strategic skill.

This pattern is well known to researchers familiar with adaptive cycles and panarchy. Surprisingly, this scholarly and well-documented volume has almost no references to research on adaptive cycles, resilience and panarchy. The lone exception is a citation to the 2002 Panarchy book edited by Gunderson and Holling. I hope that there is more exchange of ideas on punctuated policy dynamics and panarchy in the future.