California’s having a drought. God forbid somebody actually blame it on climate change (e.g. “it is nearly impossible to determine how long this drought will last, or whether global warming is a factor“). You know what? It’s time to cut the shit. We’re having a drought because of global warming. Inasmuch as it is impossible to prove a counterfactual, we will never be able to say that if the climate weren’t changing, we wouldn’t have a drought. But this weird obsession that climate scientists have with epistemology is, at this point, excruciating, and it’s misleading. Imagine if you turned on the ball game and heard this:

[Rickey Henderson steals second base]

McCarver: “Boy, Rickey Henderson sure does look good today. Did he just steal that base because he’s the greatest base-stealer in the history of the game?”

Buck (“researcher from the University of St. Louis Cardinals”): “You know, Tim, it’s hard to say. These things are much clearer in hindsight. If we get to the end of his career, and Rickey Henderson appears to have been the greatest base-stealer in the history of the game, we can probably attribute this particular base stolen to his excellent ability to steal bases. In the meantime, any number of factors could affect his ability to steal that base: the pitcher might be a bit slower to the plate today; the catcher’s release point could’ve been off (maybe he slept on his shoulder last night?); the ump might have been poorly positioned; Jeter’s tag could have been off the mark. There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of factors that go into base stealing, and while it certainly seems like Rickey Henderson is a fantastic base stealer — and if he is, we are likely to see just this sort of base stealing in the future from him — we can’t actually attribute this base stolen in particular to his base stealing ability.”

McCarver: “… well, I’m just glad he’s not clogging up the bases.”

[Rickey Henderson steals 3rd]

McCarver: “Wow! Rickey’s on fire today. What a unique talent we have on our hands!”

Buck: “Not so fast, Tim. It is so easy to conflate base stealing with fast running and an ability to read a pitcher’s moves and to predict pitches. But they’re different phenomenon, and it can take years to detect patterns that would unite the two.”

McCarver: “Why is Rickey picking up that base and holding it over his head?”

[and, scene]

From Brian. A fantastic post and a funny video = star of the week.

Guano Mining, Navassa Island

The George W. Bush presidency was airlifted away on Tuesday, letting historians get to work making claims about just what it all meant. These scholars were, if we are to believe cable-news talking heads and the former president himself, his target audience during his lame-duck months—the “legacy building” interregnum.  Following in the footsteps of his predecessor (Clinton signed his Roadless Area Conservation Rule, keeping 58.5 million acres of national forest land away from extractive industries, just over a week before moving out of the White House), Bush looks to etch a place for himself in the exalted narrative of the history of conservation in the United States.  Harnessing the power of the dubiously applicable 1906 American Antiquities Act, he created by executive decree marine reserves throughout the Pacific—in the Northern Mariana Island, the equatorial Line Islands, and the Rose Atoll, a tiny ring of coral making up a portion of American Samoa.

The story told in the media is one strictly about conservation, sparing few superlatives. White House Chairman on Environmental Quality James L. Connaughton (a former energy lobbyist, Superfund opponent, and author of a 1993 article entitled “Defending Charges of Environmental Crime—Growth Industry of the ‘90s”) raved that “These locations are truly among the last pristine environments on Earth.” Agence France-Presse’s account announced these three reserves will “nudge out the Phoenix Island Protected Area, established in 2008 by the South Pacific nation of Kiribati as the world’s largest protected area,” the latter’s measly 164,200 square miles trumped by Bush’s 195,280. The Pew Group’s Joshua Reichert went on Living on Earth last week and admitted, “Frankly, it’s more of the surface of the Earth that George W. Bush has protected than any other person in history.”

So we can tell this story with the former president our modern equivalent of by-gone macho conversationalists Teddy Roosevelt and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. But what other story could be told? What happens when we try to put these reserves not into the history of conservation but into the history of these watery parts of the world?

(more…)

Whoops, I meant to include these reflections on Naess from Dot Earth.

This editorial by Giovannia Bearzi in Conservation Biology reminds me that Arne Naess died recently. First, the editorial:

We think of ourselves as professionals who are aware of environmental problems and work hard to solve them, but we pay little heed to what we do, buy, and consume…I know excellent biologists who spend much of their professional lives condemning unsustainable fisheries or reporting high levels of toxic contaminants in marine megafauna, yet when eating at a restaurant they order swordfish or tuna from overfished and declining stocks. At this point their study subjects cease being endangered wildlife and become food…

The immense, complex, and global problems of our times will not disappear by the time all the members of our conservation elite have abandoned their unsustainable habits. Yet, only then will there be convincing evidence that responsible individual behavior can spring from science-based understanding of cause–effect relationships and only then will there be any hope that, beyond theory and preaching, the inspired and knowledgeable choices of a few visionaries may affect a larger community in a growing spiral of understanding.

And now Naess’ 7 tenets of deep ecology (adopted by Earth First! among others):

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.
4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.
5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.
6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.
7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

Compare these two (especially Naess) with the current ecosystem services “movement” (if policies supported pretty much top-down by NGOs with billion dollar endowments can be called a movement). As with any contentious issue, this obviously comes down to an ideological vs. pragmatic debate. The ecosystem service argument seems to work a lot better in our capital-driven world: people need to put numbers to things in order to value them. There is no intrinsic value in capitalism. But I also have to believe that people in my field are, at heart, Deep Ecologists (and I don’t mean just, like, really effective at estimating alpha in the Lotka-Volterra model): that is, they subscribe to most of the first 7 tenets, and believe they are adhering to #8. It’s hard to live like that, though. As an ideologue. As somebody once said, “the question we ask today is not whether our [ecology] is too big or too small, but whether it works.”

I think we (I?) have to come to grips with the fact that the world’s human population is not about to change wholecloth into deep ecologists. Especially the ones whom we’re supposed to want to “decrease”! So, then, we must take what is really important from that philosophy, identify the goals inherent in the tenets, and work towards them instead. The ecosystem services crowd have effectively identified the weakest part of the philosophy (that diversity has intrinsic value) and flipped it to say that, not only is diversity important to human survival, it is, in fact, vital. Similarly, I think a lot of Deep Ecologists need to take that next step: that consumption is not inherently bad (an intrinsic cost?), but that our current methods of consumption are. And we should fight the methods, not the root, instead.

• “NIMBY? Really? That’s all that means? Why is that bad? Loving your backyard sounds like a good thing to me. I think this would be a much better world if everybody loved their back yard. My back yard has a lot of open space and wetlands. It supports a diversity of plant and animal species. This is my backyard.” A personal consideration of what we would/will give up in promoting solar and wind in “barren” areas of the U.S.
• A piece from the L.A. Times on Tim DeChristopher (now on Facebook), the young man who bid on all those public lands up for auction in Utah without any money to pay for them. Kind of a brilliant act of civil disobedience — the BLM will have to re-offer a lot of the parcels at a new auction, under a new president. In other words, they may not go back up for sale. Also amazing to see some of the quotes from gas companies about how they paid way more than what the parcels were worth. ORLY? Why’d you pay for them, then? The public leasing system is so fucked, but it’s not exactly top 10 priorities these days. Well, fear not. Those lands that were succfesully leased at DeChristopher’s auction have been temporarily blocked.
• D.R.C. is set to block 60% of its logging operations.

Yes.

• What’s causing brown pelicans to act so fishy (HA)? Possibly a huge winter snowstorm in the Pacific northwest, an area that was previously outside of their range, but has been opened up during recent, warmer times. Is this yet another example of how diminishing populations can be threatened by exogenous events? Or is it a result of the brown pelicans’ recovery, pushing populations out of their traditional range? Oh nature, your pendulum is fickle and confounding.
• Some politicians were doing something they weren’t supposed to. In this case, hunting endangered mountain sheep (argali) from a helicopter. The helicopter crashed, and photographs of the scene suggested their illicit activities. Doesn’t this conjure to mind the myriad animals Cheney could have been hunting all these years with nary a care?
• There are more Asian elephants in Malaysia than previously thought. In an area of about 4,000km2, nobody until now had accurately estimated the elephant’s population size. Hopefully this illustrates how little we really know, about anything. On the other hand, Google Earth is now offering centimeter resolution. Oh, and you can now watch a video of a single electron on YouTube. I suppose the mis-matched attention to detail is more illustrative of our priorities. Still, 600 elephants!

• A big wilderness bill has passed the Senate, and will in all likelihood pass the House. It’ll create 2 million acres of wilderness — that sounds amazing, but much of the area was already in core National Park areas, so not much of a change. Still, fantastic. More on it from California and Oregon.
• It appears that forest re-generation might make the whole rainforest disappearing thing not as bad as it once seemed. Unfortunately, the species adapted to second-growth forest are generally the ones not threatened with extinction.
• When you introduce cats and rabbits to an island that had no cats or rabbits, what do you think happens when you remove the cats? If you answered “rabbit chaos,” you should probably seek a high-level position in wildlife management, because evidently some people aren’t as clever as you.
• Rejoice! The Hispaniolan solenedon has been re-discovered! If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a very weird creature — one of only two mammals (the other being its Cuban cousin) that injects venom through grooves in its teeth. And it’s been around since the dinosaurs. Footage here (not of the dinosaurs, sadly).
• To end on a sad note, a ranger in Virunga has been killed by the Mai Mai militia. If you’re so inclined, you can donate money here — money goes directly to rangers and their families.