PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment
A Glimmer of Guanxi
I made my first trip to China in the early 1990s. At the time I was along for the ride on a cross-governmental marketing visit. This rather formalized setting necessitated endless lunch and dinner banquets in various venues across the eastern third of the country. Almost every evening, the banquets involved dishes composed (we were assured by our hosts) of organisms that were “very rare. Almost none left. You are lucky to be eating some of the last in the world”. Thus, to my ongoing shame, we ate frogs, fish, snakes, turtles, birds, and mammals nominally harvested from threatened or endangered populations.
My second trip to China was less formal and menus were more under our control. This time we didn’t eat any rare, threatened or endangered species, although we did see plenty of them in markets.
Personal wealth is expanding at a great rate in China. And that wealth, bleeding out into world markets, has been hard on organisms that are valued in traditional folkways, for food and especially medicine. Thus great pressure accrues on tigers, rhinoceros, bears, small cats, snakes, and civets whose body parts are used in folk medicine. And fish, snakes, turtles, bats, and other animals are harvested for food. With a large human population and growing purchasing power, poaching and black markets serving China are ongoing problems for a number of species around the world.
Guanxi is the modern Chinese word reflecting the web of personal and professional relationships embedded in the larger social system. The word conveys much more than can be easily translated by single terms in English. Guanxi encompasses friendships, favors owed and done, interpersonal histories, family ties, and more. From a systems analytic perspective, Guanxi is the process component, the flows and feedbacks among individuals in a personal network. The concept could be applied to ecological systems as a handy term for the dynamics of a network.
Recently, there is a bit of good news about the Guanxi of the network tying Chinese consumers to their food sources. The 20 October 2013 Washington Post has a front page story under the byline of Simon Denyer titled “In China, a Rare Victory for Conservation”. Specifically, the story reports that an unexpected consortium of business interests, NGOs, celebrities, students and journalists has made real headway in reducing demand for dried shark fins made into celebratory banquet soups.
In recent years, several shark species have been severely depleted by fin collectors who habitually harvest the fins of fish from lines or nets and toss the body back in the water where the animals die a nasty death and go on to feed scavengers and decomposers. Shark fin soup is a traditional delicacy of great antiquity. Its social qualities outweigh its culinary value. I’ve eaten shark fin soup in China, Europe, Canada and the U.S. While it is interesting to unfamiliar westerners, mostly for its fine gelatinous texture, it is in fact rather bland and unexciting. The Post reports that activists, led by a San Francisco based NGO called WildAid, marshaling Yao Ming as an advertising icon and buoyed by businesspeople of conscience, have driven demand for shark fin down by 50 to 70%. Quite unexpectedly (because of the enormous diversity of celebratory mores in China and the depth to which shark fin soup is embedded in celebratory culture), political and business leaders and a substantial chunk of the general populace quickly absorbed the educational messaging and are more than willing to eschew shark fin or consume soups made with vegetable-based substitutes.
This is a remarkable success story. It is an example of a principle of growing importance for the interaction of people and the environment. As wealth increases, people demand cleaner, more sustainable environments, and have marginal capital to invest in environmental management.
This “Second Demographic Transition” is an unexpected and welcome outcome of economic and social systems. It means that the most effective and efficient route to sustainability lies in income equality and education. As people have the money to use more resources, they also demand that those resources be provisioned via sustainable means.
This is in stark contrast to the more common belief that wealth and resource demands cause direct environmental degradation. In practice, it turns out that wealth drives greater investment in environmental management and application of more sustainable alternatives.
Hopefully, we can build on the shark fin success. It is time for tiger, rhinoceros, bear and other animals to be relieved of the harvest (often illegal under international and nation-specific laws and treaties) for traditional medicine, decorative ivory, and food.
Building the guanxi in our relations to the ecosystem-at-large is important for the future of the biosphere. Good, sustainable processes mean we’ll leave a better world for our children and their children. The shark fin example shows that we can do it, with creative activism fueled by enlightened information.
Xexe—thank you for checking in to the PeopleSystems weekly weblog. Go forth and establish some guanxi with your environment. We’ll all benefit!
PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment.
Ickiness, Well Documented
Human civilization is festooned with closely coevolved fellow travelers. Where people go, commensals, parasites, and disease organisms follow. And their impact on urban ecosystem patterns and processes are not trivial. Rats and mice vector diseases and compete with us for food resources. Cats and dogs hunt the rodents, but leave substantial pollutants via urine and feces, and vector other diseases. Starlings, pigeons, and house sparrows are ubiquitous and suppress populations of native birds. Insects from roaches to flies (including mosquitoes) are pests and disease vectors themselves. Mites and nematodes dwell in, on and around us to the degree that yields the parasitology aphorism that “if you took away all the anthropogenic things in the biosphere except mites and nematodes, you’d be left with a ghostly three dimensional model” of the biosphere. And the microbial community of human ecosystems is phenomenally diverse and productive.
There are many ways to view and investigate the people-dependent components of the larger ecosystem. An interesting and important aspect that is in general under-studied is the relationship of pests and parasites to social status and wealth of their individual human hosts. Dawn Biehler at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) has tackled this relationship in a creative and up-to-date survey, a study about to be published as a book titled “Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats” by the University of Washington Press. A well-written summary of the book, with insights into Biehler’s methods and objectives, is available in the summer 2013 UMBC Magazine. Based on that preliminary read, and given the obvious importance and immediate relevance of the subject, I recommend that the book be read by a wide audience, including educated lay city dwellers along with scientists and urban ecosystem specialists. I have my copy pre-ordered, and I commend the book to you, whether or not your specialty has any direct relationship to urban ecosystems. We all depend on the social and physical functioning of cities. This book will provide important insights into one of the many monkey wrenches on its way into the ecosystem machinery.
PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment.
Locking and Loading the Landscape Weapon
Throughout history, manipulation of land and water have been part of the arsenal that human beings apply to each other in war and other acrimonious relationships. Classic cases include flooding via dam breaching (as in the World War Two bombing of upstream dams on the Ruhr River), wildfire (burned crops and croplands in Russia and the Ukraine during World War Two), landform reconfiguration (the enormous anti-tank trenches around Kuwait in the early 1990s) and others.
One matter not usually viewed as an issue of war and weaponry is the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. The ecological facts are straightforward. Over time, millions of Irish farmers switched from diverse crops and crop cycles characteristic of smallholding farms to potatoes. And not just any potatoes. Cheap, vulnerable potato varieties, grown mostly for export. It was the English, at the time nominal overlords of Ireland, who shunted Irish agriculture into potatoes. According the Washington Post (book review dated 13 January 2013), the English saw the potato famine as a necessary offset to an inherent “laziness” of the Irish, and also as a way to solve some of their own regional overcrowding by moving people from densely populated areas to parts of Ireland recently rendered under-populated. Two excellent books on the topic came out early this year. American John Kelly published The Graves Are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People (published by Henry Holt); and Tim Pat Coogan published The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (Palgrave Macmillan).
These books take different analytical approaches. Kelly is driven by cold facts and documents the “nuts and bolts” of the potato famine. Coogan is more polemic, perhaps befitting an Irish historian.
The facts are that Irish farms by the 1840s eschewed crop diversity and grew potatoes. And only potatoes. And only one variety of potatoes. The result, when a fungus Phytophthora infestans hit and spread, was an ongoing sequence of crop failures. By 1851, Ireland’s population was reduced from more than eight million people to about six and a half million. And the country has yet to recover. The population remains below the level of 1845.
Basically, the English instituted a system that virtually assured mass starvation and emigration. Basic ecological principles tell us that intensive and large scale monoculture of an inherently physiologically weak crop will result in crop failure. In general, a year of crop failure would trigger a response in the form of more diverse plantings going forward. In mid-19th century Ireland, the farms continually planted potatoes. Year after year. And crop failures occurred year after year. The English accomplished their bizarre objective of depopulating Ireland simply by assuring that a single, vulnerable crop was monocultured for decades. Big problem, easily predictable and easily solved, if the English had any interest in “solving” it.
Landscape manipulation as a large-scale weapon continues deep into the twenty-first century. In Vietnam in the 1970s, the U.S. applied infamous herbicide Agent Orange to denude forested lands. In Africa in the Sudan and Somalia, factional warfare includes crop destruction, land ruination, and usurpation of arable areas.
In most wars, ecosystem degradation is an outcome. In Ireland in the 1840s, it was a weapon. A weapon that continues in use. This illustrates a fundamental problem of ecosystems science. Our work is filtered through political and social systems. It doesn’t take an ecologist to apply the landscape weapon. But repairing, restoring, or eliminating landscape weaponry definitely requires ecological expertise. As far as I know, there is no uniformed service of ecologists to play these issues out during war. Perhaps it is time to rethink this. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a component of the U.S. Department of Commerce, has a uniformed service of vessel operators. Maybe the U.S. Department of Defense needs an ecological services branch to monitor and respond to weapons oriented application of the biosphere. An odd thought, I know. But one that seems to be of growing utility in a world where wars are now mostly local or regional and susceptible to such weaponry. With a little forethought, USDOD might innovate to obviate or neutralize landscape weapons.
What do you think? Is there a role for ecology in wartime military? This presumably means continual support of ecologists in peacetime as well. But the investment might well be worthwhile. The case of England and Ireland illustrates why!
PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment
Ecologists make their way into some obscure corners of the biosphere. Examples? How about the study of Mural Vegetation, in this case “Mural” meaning “wall”? There is indeed an active, if small, community of researchers who study the ecosystems of vertical surfaces, most (but not all) of human origin. Another is fossil cave dung. Much has been learned by deconstructing and reconstructing the ecology of fossilized ground sloth dung, and the debris piles left by rodents in certain caves, mostly in South America but also in Africa. And human commensal invertebrates have a technical following. Did you know that there is at least one species of nematode found only in beer mats in German bars? And that about 75% of human beings are colonized by “eyelash mites”, tiny arthropods that live at hair follicles and apparently survive by absorbing nutrients from the semi-liquid goo generated at the root of the hair.
But we could do this for page after page. One seemingly obscure aspect of the biosphere that has been favored for study sporadically over the decades is aerial plankton. I turns out that the atmosphere is populated by an amazing abundance and diversity of microscopic life. Recently, Popular Science provided a brief report on aerial plankton surveys conducted by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, USA (fair disclosure: my youngest son is a student at Georgia Tech). You can find summary information at http://m.popsci.com/science/article/2013-06/bacteria-33000-feet . Basically, by filtering air while flying at 6 miles altitude, investigators determined that about 20% of the total particles were not only biological in origin, they are living cells! The atmosphere is not purely a physical and chemical phenomenon. It is biologically active, and linked in potentially important ways to other components of the biosphere. For example, among the cells identified, E. coli bacteria are present. Likely swirled into the atmosphere by hurricane cells over cities, it might well be the case that diseases are spread over vast distances by aerial plankton.
Since any atmospheric particles are associated with weather, clearly bacterial aerial plankton play a role—unquantified and uncharacterized to date—in determining weather conditions. It is possible that there is a functional nutrient cycling in situ, affecting the chemical composition of precipitation and therefore its quality and quantity.
Without much more investigation (particularly hypothesis generation and testing), it is impossible to say whether or not aerial plankton is more than an inert oddity. But at the biomass and diversity levels reported by the Georgia Tech researchers, this seems unlikely. It appears to me that there is much potential for important processes, unknown to date, to be occurring at high atmospheric altitudes.
I encourage you all to formulate some working and testable hypotheses next time you find yourself cruising at high speed and high altitude on your way to a technical colloquium, project meeting, vacation and R&R, whatever. This is one of the few remaining scientific endeavors to which meaningful contributions can be made simply by thinking. Take advantage of it when you can!
PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment
Lions and Tigers and…Ants, and Enzymes, and Bacteria, and… .
Leaf-cutter ants of the genus Atta are among the most fascinating and complex creatures on earth. Actually, Atta themselves are unable to live simply as “creatures”. They require an enormous and enormously complex ecosystem, managed carefully and constantly, to survive and prosper.
Wood-“eating” insects, of course, lack the enzymatic ability to digest and process lignin and cellulose, putting wood off-limits as a direct food source for various roaches, beetle larvae, termites, and ants. Rather, they have a gut flora of microbes that CAN process wood into digestible and nutritive biochemical subcomponents.
Atta ants operate differently from “conventional” wood-degrading insects. Rather than relying on their gut flora, attines use external fungi to break down cellulose and lignin in large underground nests. The nests contain extensive chambers that serve, in a quite literal sense, as farms. The ants cut leaves into appropriately-sized pieces, carry them into the farm chambers, add them to the growing fungal/leaf complex, and then work to maintain the farm chambers. Humidity is carefully controlled, wastes are removed, and the nutritive fungal products are harvested to maintain the metabolism of the entire colony.
Recently (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/06/130614125647.htm) researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an understanding of Atta farms that reveals far more exquisite complexity than was previously known. It turns out that the ant-leaf-fungus system is insufficient for long-term sustainability. Previously unsuspected bacteria appear to be necessary for the system to operate in the long haul.
And operate it does. Atta process enormous amounts of vegetation, and their colonies reach enormous sizes. The biomass and metabolism of Atta colonies can be dominant herbivores in areas where they occur in high density.
When I was in school, I worked on whole-system agroecosystem study projects at the University of Georgia Institute of Ecology. I am not an agronomist, I’m a systems ecologist and field biologist. The lesson I took from the agroecology studies might have differed somewhat from those the agronomy folks took. I realized that the agroecology minimum-till fields needed the entire ecological complex to be present, accounted for, and operating for the system to operate at its fine-tuned best. This means such seemingly peripheral organisms as birds, small and medium mammals, even herbivorous insects, usually a “problem” in farming, were necessary for the agroecosystem to function.
The work from UWM, it seems to me, reinforces this and should be taken as a lesson for human agroecosystems of all kinds. Properly functioning microbiota can cycle positively into soil-producing and maintaining arthropods, which help support herbivores, which help assure that the crops grow when, where and how they are needed. This is true if the agroecosystem is maximum-tillage, full irrigation, artificially fertilized, or if it is small-scale, locally fertilized, minimum tillage, low-irrigation, low fertilization.
The biosphere is not simple. Components of the biosphere—agroecosystems—are not simple. This makes it tough for us to study them effectively. However, it DOES contribute to (my) belief that components of the biosphere are robust. They are not sensitive, likely to collapse, constantly under pressure, always at risk. They have redundancy, resiliency, and, if managed as carefully as those operated by Atta ants, likely to be highly sustainable.
Or perhaps I’m over-optimistic. But I don’t think so. We live in a robust biosphere. If we handle it effectively, it will last us for a long time. And can not only contribute to our food supply, but our energy as well. The future looks bright to me. Brighter in the context of the underground farmers, the Atta ants.
PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment
Maybe It IS Easy Being Green
Early debates (going back more than a decade now) regarding the potential impacts of global warming were backed up by ecological simulation models of primary production and plant biomass that ignored a key factor—carbon dioxide limitation of much of the vegetation in the biosphere. Recently, more sophisticated models have incorporated this parameter in one form or another, providing what are likely to be seen in retrospect as more accurate, precise, and well-calibrated projections of climate change effects.
This week, Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130531105415.htm) presented a synopsis of work conducted by Randall Donahue and colleagues at the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and published in the Geophysical Research Letters in which the authors attempted to sort out a signal of carbon dioxide increase from the “noise” of the many parameters, such as temperature and moisture affecting plant growth.
The exercise was far from straightforward. Donahue and his people concentrated on arid areas where increased “green” could be quantified by contrast to the dry substrate (as opposed, say, to tropical or temperate forests where leaf cover already exceeds 100%, making remotely-sensed increases in leaf area impossible to ascertain). They established site-specific indices of maximum “green” attainable via a three-year moving average of moisture changes. Then they quantified green exceedances of the index, likely indicating the effect of carbon dioxide fertilization on the landscape.
One thing the authors did not comment on is the fortuitous high value of forcing their work into arid regions. Desertification is one of the greatest environmental problems we face today. If carbon dioxide fertilization can, even incrementally, slow or reverse desertification in key areas of the Sahel, central Asia, the Americas, and even Australia, it will be an enormous boost to the ecological quality of the biosphere. At the same time, it will feedback on human quality-of-life, offering reduced hardships in regions traditionally among the most challenging places for people to live.
I suggest we all take a deep breath and re-read the cover of our copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where it reads, in soothing green letters, “DON’T PANIC”. As scientists and environmental managers, it is critically important for us to be objective, to sort the good and bad effects of global climate change, and incorporate those in our communications to politicians and the public. In this case, CSIRO scores one for the good guys. Climate change may help truncate desertification. Time to tackle other items on the impact assessment list. But those are subjects for subsequent columns.
PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment
Into the Frying Pan—My Opinions on Same
Global warming. Merely uttering the phrase in polite technical company is likely to kick of a melee of opinions and arguments. Add enough good bourbon or rum and you can probably generate a wacky brawl in which skinny laboratory scientists thrash ineffectually at each other.
The first argument comes over whether or not warming is “real”, or just an artifact of the available data. There is little argument about carbon dioxide these days. Clearly the atmospheric content has risen in recent decades. Temperature is more problematic to document, with issues ranging from urban heat island impacts to asymmetries in the historical record. But I believe the biosphere is warming, and that the best evidence isn’t recorded temperatures but the responses of biota, of which a number of cases have been thoroughly documented.
Next argument at our hypothetical dinner party is whether climate change is a “man-made” phenomenon, or a “natural” astronomic outcome. My opinion here is that is really doesn’t matter. Without a technical and engineering deus ex machina, we can’t “fix” global warming. Resources of time, money and expertise are insufficient to devise ways to “re-cool” the earth. We’d best learn to live with a warmer earth.
Finally, the arguments come down to “goodness” or “badness” of warm-earth outcomes. I think it is clear that, from a human perspective, the sea level rise accompanying gobal warming will displace millions of people, and have far-reaching impacts on human biogeography. But beyond that, it is my personal and professional opinion that a warmer earth is a better earth.
How can I say such a thing? Well, for a number of years I compiled published information regarding ecosystem changes in response to temperature increases. It turns out that primary production in general will be much higher in a warmer world, although most of the increase is due to carbon dioxide and not temperature per se. Higher primary production means greater secondary production. Along with these bioenergetic dynamics, biodiversity is higher where and when it is warmer. This has been demonstrated conclusively for marine microfauna over time, and by inter-site comparison in real time.
Not that some species—and biomes—won’t suffer under warmer conditions. Arctic polar bears are already experiencing detrimental effects on their knife-edge survival balance between needing ice for feeding on seals and using open water and coastal strand habitats. And high-altitude species dependent on cold condition will clearly decline in both mass and diversity. But in general, warmer conditions allow/cause increased speciation. Warmth also allows the species-rich tropics and subtropics to expand, increasing biomass by definition over larger areas than present. We can see these effects even in the case of Arctic bear communities. In general, there are three species in the Arctic regions—black bears, brown bears, and polar bears. As polar bears have struggled, it seems a fourth species is in the process of developing. Several specimens taken by hunters and researchers suggest a genetic mash-up of polar and brown bears (despite being in separate genera). If true, this means that the bear diversity of the Arctic will, at worst, remain steady even if polar bears were to be reduced or even driven to extinction. My guess is that polar bears will prove adaptable and become less ice-dependent over time, which would mean warmth increasing the diversity of Arctic bears by one.
Finally, we should ask if gobal warming is an unmitigated evil as far as human beings are concerned. The Washington Post for 29 April, under the byline of Anthony Faiola, reports that wines grown in England are increasing in quality and quantity. Climate conditions in English wine regions are now close to those of mainland Europe. Admittedly they are closest to the Champagne region, which has long been the red line for quality wine produced west of the Rhine River. But quality in Champagne has risen with temperature, and English wines no longer have to bear being a joke in the brotherhood of vintners. In fact, the Post story reports that at least one French house has invested in English vineland with the intent to plant and take direct advantage of climate change. A phenomenon that increases the quality and quantity of wine in the world can’t be all bad. And I think, in general, global warming is not “bad”. From a holistic perspective, considering multiple parameters and variables, global warming is a net “good” thing.
I expect these opinions to be tested by the hard realities of the ecosystem over the coming decades. To those of you who might be skeptical (or worse) regarding my opinion, I can only say—we’ll have our answers soon enough. Assuming that deus ex machina we discussed above fails to appear.
Note that the opinions expressed in this column are the author’s alone and do not reflect positions or thoughts of AEHS. For an excellent and prescient speculative fiction story on this topic, I highly recommend a short story called “The Keys to December” by Roger Zelazny. It is widely available now both on its own and in compilations. It can be found at several sites on the ‘net, or purchased via Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Don’t forget to check out DAC Crossley’s wild west weblog at http://daccrossley.typepad.com/ .
