The Greek island of Samos off the coast of Turkey is—and has been since the Mediterranean filled with water—subject to the quintessential Mediterranean climate. Think central California chaparral. Warm, moistish winters, hot dry summers. Very few permanent water sources.
On Samos there was a permanent stream, presumably with a nice wetland dominated by willows and palms, populated by streamside birds, probably with endemic fish and invertebrates. Something of an idyllic Eden, a lot like the wetland adjoining Space Launch Complex 4 at Vendenberg Air Force Base where I used to work. It was an oasis in a desert, rich in life and history. I imagine the spring on Samos was a lot like that.
Unfortunately the capital city was on the other side of a mountain named Kastro, and the leader, formally called a tyrant (presumably without the present-day negative connotations, but you never know) named Polycrates assigned his chief engineer Eupalinos to find a frickin’ way to get the water to the city in a manner secure from opposing armies. Eupalinos wasn’t a simple-minded guy. His method was to start digging at both ends of the one kilometer mountain and hope to match up in the middle. Actually, he used a trick called a dogleg to make sure he could hook the tunnels up. But it was still the bronze age. They dug this tunnel with trowels and crowbars and buckets. And the aquaduct itself, of course, had to run downhill the whole way.
Whoa nelly. They got it done. On time and on budget. Protecting the city’s water supply from military threat.
It also, of course, destroyed the original watercourse and wetland. But the cool thing about dry climates is that biological residue lasts a long time. I’m betting a couple students with sieves and bottles and some cold retsina could find half a dozen extinct species easily by poking around the old watercourse for a week or two, and maybe some living representatives in the tunnel itself. I commend this field work to a master’s student seeking a historical biodiversity thesis project. I only request you let me use the material in my forthcoming book on military environmental history. Good digging!
New stuff around the weblog horn. See http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the whiniest in cancer diaries, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for some rock ‘em sock ‘em movies slugging it out, and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for Bad Art By Dave.
What Do You Do if the Weapons Don’t Work? Well, if you’re the United States in the desperation of Vietnam, you go to as many random forms of destruction as you can think of. A nice new book—War and Nature, by Jurgen Brauer (2009, Altamira Press, New York) covers this topic nicely. Actually, the book’s title is a little grandiose. Brauer addresses Vietnam and the Persian Gulf in detail, and pays some attention to Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. But not much else. Oh well. I suppose I’ll just have to write that one!
Anyway. Brauer catalogs U.S. non-weaponry: massive habitat bulldozing (same objective as herbicides), attempts to manipulate weather (!) (mostly to increase precipitation along the western border and the Ho Chi Minh trail—this, of course, in a region where the monsoon is absolutely massive…), deliberate flooding by breaching dams and field berms, and antipersonnel gas. For the latter, Brauer reports huge DOD purchases of gas, and does report a lack of evidence or record of combat application. The simple fact of the purchase, though, is pretty damned disturbing.
Brauer also reports that neither the combat effectiveness nor environmental consequences of any of this have been studied in any detail.
Duh!
New material up around the horn. I’ve been sick, I apologize for being a day late with this stuff. Check http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the cancer diary, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for photos and a little ecology, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for the best in pop culture. And thanks again for stoppin’ by—every time you guys read this stuff, I feel a little more life come back to my battered frame!
That is, the landscape that was degrading…or ready to degrade…before the war. War can devastate landscapes de novo. Although as we’ve seen in prior essays, in otherwise healthy and stable ecosystems, such damage, while it may be noticeable for decades or even centuries (trench systems from the 19th and early 20th centuries are visible in Europe and North America, fortifications and trenches from much earlier in parts of China), has minimal ecological significance.
What about landscapes that are already stressed or susceptible to stress? As with most things in this field, this topic has not received substantive quantitative investigation. There is abundant speculation, hypothesis, and supposition.
Let’s consider the now-desert ecosystems of Jordan. Redman [1] cites references suggesting that the use of lime plaster, which required cooking steps in its preparation, might have deforested an area of 3 km around each village in southern Jordan around 6000 to 8000 BC. Having been to Jordan, I can certainly report that there is little functional soil anywhere in the country, and there is certainly no timber, and no real soil, in the southern part of the country.
In addition, the ground surface in rural Jordan is covered by a patina of goat and, in places, sheep, feces. Redman suggests that the practice of allowing herds to pass through fields, harvested or fallow, late in the season contributed to the degradation of the soil and therefore to the transition from a generally wooded to a desert condition [1].
A final factor cited by Redman and his sources is the generally sharp topography of Jordan, which made the soils that had developed before human agriculture took over the landscape vulnerable to erosion and farming practices might well have contributed to the loss of functional soil.
Redman’s suggestions mirror the damaged landscape hypothesis raised by McNeill for the Mediterranean in general [2], and which has been argued against by others [3]. My point in raising the issue here is that “scorched earth” was a common weapon of war as civilization developed and expanded in the Mediterranean. A particularly harsh example was practiced by Sparta against Athens during the Peloponnesian War. In the spring, the Spartans would march to Attica, force the farmers to abandon their lands and retire to the walled protection of Athens itself, and devastate the land [4]. It wouldn’t have taken many seasons of this treatment—and it went on for years—accompanied by a little drying or, more drastically, wet stormy climate shifts—to erode the soil and make the entire region less arable and less rich in ecological resources.
We may well see, written in the Mediterranean landscape, the environmental effects of wars that took place millennia ago. There is certainly worthwhile research to be conducted to determine if this hypothesis is viable.
New stuff up around the weblog horn this week. Be sure, if you have a few minutes, to visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for the weekly cancer diary update, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for the natural world, and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for the best in modern culture. Thanks for stopping by!
Notes
[1] Redman, Charles L. 1999. Human impact on ancient environments. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
[2] McNeill, James R. 1992. Mountains of the Mediterranean world. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
[3] Grove, A.T. and Oliver Rackham 2001. The nature of Mediterranean Europe: an ecological history. Yale University Press New Haven.
[4] Kagan, D. 2003. The Peloponnesian War. Viking, The Penguin Group, New York.
We’ve talked about the role that toilet hygiene (or lack of same) played in North Africa in World War Two. Soldierly (and to some extent, civilian) health played a similar, but even more important role, in the struggle for control of Stalingrad.
The Wehrmacht, when it was enthused and operating according to plan, was an awesome logistics machine. The pre-war build up, partly in secret, support of nationalist rebels in the Spanish Civil War [1], and the early blitzkrieg successes were built as much on state-of-the-art transport and supply systems as on training and first-class weapons [2].
The Southern Front in Russia started out the same way. The German army, supplemented with Italian, Romanian, and Hungarian units, spilled across the windy steppe until they could smell the Volga River and the petroleum works south of the city. Fuel, ammunition, rations (including schnapps), equipment, and replacements poured along behind them as they moved east. Famously, the big screw-up in supplies was supposed to have been the decision not to issue winter uniforms, as the campaign was expected to wrap up successfully before they were needed.
That didn’t work out. By October, winter was collapsing around the combatants. The History Channel network has a nice experimental piece illustrating the performance delta between Soviet and German winter uniforms even when the latter had been issued.
But that’s only part of the story. The Wehrmacht suffered a number of health crises during the multi-year campaign, including exceptional rates of tularemia, a microbial disease vectored by rodents (in North America it is particularly prevalent in wild rabbit populations, and hunters need to account for it in cleaning and consuming their catch). It has been surmised [3] that the Soviets used biological weapons at Stalingrad, specifically weaponized tularemia bacteria (Francisella tularensis). Ken Alibeck, in his excellent post-Cold War memoir Biohazard [4] posits the tularemia-as-weapon based on his knowledge of Soviet bioweapons and the fact that many of the Stalingrad cases on both sides involved respiratory exposure.
There is a counterperspective that the Nazis were exposed simply to endemic tularemia due to the breakdown of sanitation, sewage management, and rodent control in the combat zone [3]. For one thing, both sides suffered. The Soviet Air Force lost enough pilots to the disease to be operationally impaired, and the rodent infestation itself was sufficient to cause maintenance problems with aircraft. For another, the tularemia epidemic in the region was noted many months prior to the initiation of battle. Apparently the tendency for pleural manifestation of the symptoms was associated with the use of rodent-infested straw and hay for bedding in the trenches and other military infrastructure. Soviet microbiologists mobilized and developed and tested a live vaccine, and implemented effective pest control protocols when the danger was realized. The Germans failed to follow suit.
The Wehrmacht also suffered from starvation. A medical examiner was flown in to investigate, his findings were unambiguous and his recommendation immediate—provide a tinned product translated as “meat paste” (I believe a vaguely similar thing remains available in North American supermarkets as little cans labeled “potted meat food product”). The nutritional imbalances in the starving soldiers were such that the high-fat, high-electrolyte tinned meat accelerated deaths [5].
Ultimately, the Germans simply overextended themselves in Russia, and when Hitler seized control of the battlefield planning so that his amateur tactics replaced those of the professional generals, the Wehrmacht was destined for toast. However, the lack of attention to hygiene and health issues played at least as great a role in the German defeat as did more specifically military factors.
Notes
[1] It was Nazi units operating on behalf of Franco and the rebellion that bombed Guernica in 1937, leading to Picasso’s works of the same name. The Wikipedia article on the Spanish Civil War appears to be authoritative and well referenced, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War
[2] A very interesting, if uneven and of unknown providence (it appears to be by a Russian historian), discussion of German logistical capabilities in the War is available at http://militera.lib.ru/h/stolfi/11.html
[3] A well-researched paper on this topic is available at http://cns.miis.edu/archive/cbw/tula.htm and the History Channel network has a nicely produced one-hour show emphasizing hygiene and public health parameters at the Battle of Stalingrad.
[4] Alibeck, K. and S. Handelman 2000. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It. Delta Publishers. Available at Amazon and other online book retailers. An excellent and very readable exposition of chemical and biological weapons programs through the collapse of the USSR.
[5] Kaplan, R. 2000. Medicine at the Battle of Stalingrad. J R Soc Med 93:97-98. I found my copy online.
I’ve told you that the doctors are entertained by my throat cancer because it is exceedingly rare to see tumors like mine in a nonsmoker. Indeed. When you think of smoker’s illnesses, you naturally think of lung cancer and COPD. But smoking is associated with a variety of cancers, from nasal and oral cavity to larynx and pharynx to bronchi and lungs to pancreas, kidney, and bladder [1].
Any way you slice it, breathing sticky goop into your lungs is not a good idea [2], and the chemical components of tobacco are particularly virulent carcinogens.
There are distinct peaks in per-capita cigarette consumption of men in Britain corresponding to both world wars [3]. Women missed the World War One spike, but caught the one for World War Two.
Why should this be? There are reasons bad and (remarkably) good. On the “good” side, it’s a matter of relative risk. As Greaves [1] puts it “tobacco’s narcotic properties could nullify both fear and hunger. The result? Fields full of the dead or addicted”. Smoking among the troops was encouraged by the officer corps from the Thirty Years War, the Crimean War, the Napoleonic Wars, and of course the world wars.
For Americans, during the First World War, Pershing said “You ask me what we need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets. Tobacco is as indispensable as the daily ration; we must have thousands of tons without delay.
[4]. So tobacco use was not just a cultural phenomenon, it was an officially encouraged part of being a soldier. In 1918, the U.S. government bought the entire output of the Bull Durham Tobacco Company to ship to the doughboys overseas.
During World War Two, cigarettes were included in front-line ration tins for all soldiers, and tobacco companies shipped their entire output of popular cigarette brands—free—to Americans fighting overseas [4]. The “Best Generation” was hooked like a largemouth on a plastic worm, and smoking rates in the developed world peaked following the Second World War.
Oddly, Nazi Germany conducted substantive research on the health effects of tobacco [1]. And acted on the findings [4]. In 1943, Germany enacted a law forbidding public tobacco use by anyone under 18. Weird, huh? For all the bullshit, philosophy-driven fake scientific research conducted under the Third Reich, the one good piece of work they did was to show tobacco as the public health threat it is. Actually, Hitler was a rabid anti-smoker. This may have been just another perverted bit of results-oriented pseudo-science. Except it matched up with the real science being conducted simultaneously in the West.
Put THAT in your Philip K. Dick irony generator and…uh…smoke it!
Fresh material up across the weblog empire. Please surf on over to http://docviper.livejournal.com/ for a festive seafood dinner from the grill, http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ for some movie reviews, and http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ for update on the cancer melodrama. Most of all, remember I love you all, and I’m grateful that you’re taking the time to read this stuff. Thanks!
Notes
[1] Mel Greaves’ Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2000] devotes a chapter to smoking and cancer and recounts the epidemiologic linkage of varied cancers and smoking.
[2] Greaves reports that Chinese cooks who stir fry intensely contract a form of lung cancer unrelated to smoking that is characteristic of inhaling hot cooking oil.
[3] http://www.laia.ac.uk/factsheets/982.pdf
[4] http://www.tobacco.org/resources/history/Tobacco_History20-1.html
Easter Island—Rapanui—was deforested a few centuries after wayfarers from islands to the east arrived. The rather dense palm forest (the palm was endemic and now assumed extinct) was cut to the last tree. The timber was put to many uses, and the newly opened spaces may have been used for agricultural. However, armed conflict played an enormous role in the disposition of the Rapanui landscape. The inhabitants divided themselves among a suite of clans, primarily for the purpose of carving, transporting and erecting the giant stone figures—Moai—that still dot the island and watch over visitors. The clans came into rivalry, competed for manufacturing the biggest Moai, and went to war with each other. The palms were instrumental in Moai production (providing, among other things, leverage for moving and erecting the stones), and when Moai competition was intense, it is likely the palm harvest was correspondingly so. In addition, they likely provided weaponry, and did provide raw material for canoes and dwellings, along with food (the endemic palm had a nutritious edible fruit). Ramped-up human activity meant a ramped-down palm population.
Eventually, after canoes were no longer available due to loss of palms, the now stuck-in-place islanders came to accord and substituted a sporting-style competition among champions for deciding annual leadership of the whole human population. Not long after, westerners arrived in sailing ships and the population crashed under the weight of disease and other artifacts of contact. But the impact of the loss of the palms was irreversible. The post-palm landscape remains in place—herbaceous, grassy, and shrubby vegetation on thin soils over the rock substrate, which emerges over large land areas. The original fauna and flora were drastically and permanently altered. All but one of the known bird species found on the island are extinct. The vegetation is less diverse, lacking sources of propagules to rebuild biodiversity. But the habitats in place do, of course, support an ecosystem that reflects current conditions. Life on Rapanui goes on, different from what it was, but flourishing in its own way.
Which poses an interesting challenge. Ecosystems develop and function in landscapes impacted by warfare. The ecology has certainly been altered, but is there any reason for us to value it less than the original? I think in the short term—while the landscape is being impacted and while the ecosystem reorganizes and restructures—that we can say the system is negatively affected relative to what was there before. Once the ecosystem has pulled itself together, though, it is simply the ecosystem in place. If the inhabitants of Rapanui had wiped themselves out and the archaeological clues to their history lost, we would accept the present ecosystem as “valid”. Which, in the sense of providing the breadth and depth of ecosystem services possible in the landscape-as-it-is, is a rational perspective.
We don’t know how much of a role armed conflict played in the denuding of Rapanui palm forests. But it was clearly one factor.
Another place where modern landscapes have been posited to be an outcome of human use, with at least an assist from armed conflict, is in the mountains that ring the Mediterranean Sea. R.V. O’Neill built a case for the alpine environment’s present spotty tree cover, thin soils, exposed rock, and eroded condition being due to non-sustainable use by human occupation from the bronze age forward. O’Neill’s exposition makes sense. However, other investigators like Arthur Rackham (the botanist, not the illustrator) take issue, and believe these montane ecosystems represent the outcome of hydrology, geology, and biology unique to the region.
On Guam, I had the opportunity to observe the aftermath of war in the landscape. The western half of Guam has a central massif that rises from sea level in a huge escarpment (and, in the other direction, drops into the Marianas Trench). Much of these hills is covered with hard, mineral soils, bare in places and occupied by coarse grasses in near monoculture in others. These steep slopes were subject to horrific bombardment in the runup to the allied invasion to retake the island from the Japanese. There was considerable post-landing combat here as well. The original ecosystem of these heights supported high plant diversity on organic soils formed over millennia. When the vegetation was damaged by war, the soils eroded, and the present landscape is the result. It didn’t help that in the postwar period several enormous typhoons (? Word?) flooded the island with intense precipitation [5]. This is also where the last Japanese soldier walked out of the hills to a seaside bar and surrendered in the 1970s. He said he would have kept to himself except his teeth deteriorated to the point that he could no longer eat the freshwater prawns that kept him alive all those years.
A few years ago in the Maas River valley, I spent a day hiking through suburban Maastricht from the Netherlands into Belgium and up the slope of a hill rising out of the muddy floodplain. This hill turned out to be the residual outer ring of an enormous quarry, which had taken the mass out of hill’s center and replaced it with exposed bedrock. The Sint Pietersberg hill is networked with tunnels, which played several roles in World War Two. When I got there via pure serendipity on my hike, I was delighted to find a nice café at the summit, where I could get free wi fi, frites with mayonnaise, and a couple of pints of ice cold cherry kriek. After refreshment, I did a little brush busting hoping to turn up a viper or ringelnatter. What I wandered into instead was a network of trenches and shell holes going back to both World Wars. The forest had recovered and grown over the earthworks, but slopes in the shell holes were very steep and many had bare side walls. At the bottom of one, I found an oddly smoothed chunk of rock that fit almost preternaturally into my hand. The rock had been broken, and the worn hand fitting piece is all there is. I couldn’t help but think that in this landscape, I could possibly retrieve artifacts from World War Two, or stone age tools exposed by the explosive excavations.
In China, near Nanjing, I visited a village inside a massive fortification from the early Ming dynasty. The village was inside the fort wall, which occupied an enormous acreage. The present wall is just a part of the landscape. Locals have built houses and shops into it, and the ancient gates are now busy gravel roads. But the footprint of this fortress is enormous, and the area still reflects the earthworks from the 1300s. The entire area inside the huge fort, now mostly planted in wheat, is clearly disturbed ground. Many hectares outside the walls are also transformed, probably to provide mass for the walls and outside positions to anticipate attack.
In general, it appears that intense combat modifies landscapes for a long time. Even when the ecosystem has recovered to function however it can in the residual environment (in Belgium, the forest recovered just fine from the shell holes and excavations, on Guam, not so much). Given the extent of war in the course of human history, this is a nontrivial aspect of our relationship to the biosphere!
There’s new material up at all the weblog nodes, so please drop by http://docviper.livejournal.com/, http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/. Thanks!
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, E.O. Wilson wrote a book called “Biophilia” [1]. His thesis was that human beings have an inherent love of and preference for living things. That we are besotted by life. As Wilson put it, biophilia is “the innate tendency [in human beings] to focus on life and lifelike process. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hopes rise on its currents.”
Apparently lacking the gene for cynicism that might let him see brutal inconsistency in his own thinking, Wilson claimed that our innate love for living things is a foundation for repairing and restoring the biosphere. From the damage caused by…uh…us, despite our deep feelings of oneness with all living things.
Anyway, sloppy rhetoric aside, it is clear from archeological ecology studies worldwide that human beings are very consistent when they move into a previously uninhabited area. First thing we do is start to simplify the biota. We may well be “biophilic”, but if we are, there are limits to the intensity of biodiversity we are prepared to tolerate in our neighborhood. For the millennia that there have been human settlements, wherever the residual evidence is sufficient to answer the question, we find that humans reconstruct their environment to contain fewer species and to be structured in a more-or-less orderly fashion. You can find an excellent disquisition (correct word?) of this effect in Charles L. Redman’s book Human Impact on Ancient Environments [2].
Redman compiles archeological evidence from human settlements worldwide, and conclusively demonstrates the suppression of biodiversity over time. More interestingly, he documents consistent patterns in this effect. By landscape modification (for everything from slash-and-burn agriculture to permanent fields and provision of space for residential and commercial growth), preferential hunting, and replacement of locally indigenous species with those already domesticated, humans reconstruct the environment to a simpler, and similarly structured, pattern wherever they settle.
This may seem like simple coincidence, an artifact of the technological development status of human society when new lands were occupied. I’m inclined to think not. It turns out that early life on earth probably resembled single celled eukaryotes more than bacteria. Eukaryotes carry enormous complexity in their genomes, which gives them tremendous residual flexibility to deal with environmental challenges, particularly in cooler habitats where biochemical processes occur at slower rates. The downside of genetic complexity—of stretches of unexpressed genome, of random pieces of genome flopping off the chromosomes to float in the cellular fluids, of viral DNA inserts, redundant genes within and across chromosomes—makes it very easy for replication to fail. A relatively high proportion of daughter cells of such creatures are too genetically warped to survive. They are victims of a sloppy genetic system. Bacteria, it turns out, don’t put up with all the genetic slop. Bacteria retain a single, clean loop of DNA, genes are not redundant, snippets of unused DNA do not accrue. The current theory [3] is that this an artifact of life moving from cooler shallow waters to warm shallows and more importantly, warm deep ocean vent chemosynthetic environments. The high temperatures of such environs run physiological machinery at a high rate, increasing the proportion of failures. To successfully occupy the hostile warmer and biogeochemically novel environments, and to successfully manage the environment to permit long-term survival, the colonizers needed simpler, cleaner genetic systems.
Human beings, of all earthly organisms, do the most effective job of environmental manipulation. We now, and for all the time that we have lived in settlements rather than nomadic family groups, have managed the environment to do our bidding. I think it is possible that humans restructure the environment in consistent fashion because it is difficult to manage more complex ecosystems. The opportunities for failure are too great, there are too many choices to make to reformulate and operate the regional ecology without life-threatening fuck ups.
There may be a method to our madness. We may not be “biophilic”, but we are also not “biophobic”. We are idiosyncratic, knowing what we can handle in an ecosystem, and working to make it so.
I’ll explore this theme in more detail from here. It seems like an important clue to human interaction with the biosphere. It also may be another driving factor for war, since the invariable outcome of armed conflict is ecosystem simplification both in the combat zone and in the regions that provide the raw materials, logistics, and foodstuffs to wage war.
Anyway, I have new material up at all sites this week, and intend to keep renewing every week from here out. If you have a moment, please visit http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/, http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , and http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for stopping by!
Notes
[1] Easily available via Amazon and other online sources. No longer routinely easy to find in brick-and-mortar book emporiums. Or is that “emporia”… ?
[2] Redman, C.L. 1999. Human Impact on Ancient Environments. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. Widely available in paperback from Amazon and other online purveyors.
[3] Ridley, M. 2000. Genome. Harper Perennial. NY.
Dave Ludwig
Scientist, ARCADIS, and Director of Education and Training, AEHS
Tim Iannuzzi
Senior Vice President, ARCADIS
This piece is about to published in a large-circulation engineering honor society journal. I think it’s an important essay. See what YOU think!
Weapons were not the only products of the nuclear and thermonuclear bomb programs of World War Two and the Cold War. Ironically, the entire field of Systems Ecology, which merged toolkits of biology and engineering, was an important, if serendipitous, outcome.
From a technical perspective, specific radioactive materials entered the environment during the development and deployment of atomic weapons. These compounds acted as “radiotracers”—they could be tracked from environmental media to organisms and back again. Known half-lives and biochemical behaviors allowed quantification of biological processes that were intractable until that time. This allowed biologists to step back from organisms, populations of organisms, and communities of populations and view the biological hierarchy as a coherent, functional system. The term “ecosystem”, coined in the 1930s, was intended to refer to the relationships of organisms to their physical and chemical environments [1]. By the 1950s, however, it was clear that there was a meaningful hierarchy of patterns and processes in the living world (subcellular organelles, cells, individual organisms, populations, communities, biomes) analogous to that in the physical/chemical world and that “ecosystems”, therefore, had broader meaning and many more dimensions than initially thought. Brothers Eugene P. and Howard T. Odum published a most important book that illustrated the workings of ecological systems [2].
The Roots of Systems Ecology
The realization that ecosystems had an underlying reality that could be applied to understanding the living world brought debate among ecologists. Until the Odum’s book was published, “ecologists” were specialized in subfields—animal or plant ecologists, limnologists (fresh water) or marine biologists, herpetologists (reptiles and amphibians) or mammalogists. Ecologists were suddenly thrown into a world where deconstructing biology into its component parts was inadequate experimental design. Tools were needed to evaluate whole systems—ecosystems—as functional interactive systems. Those tools were fortuitously becoming available as an outcome of nuclear weapons programs.
A key was the understanding that the laws of physics applied not just generally to living systems, they applied very specifically and could be used to quantify relationships among the components of living systems at any scale. Until this time, the science of ecology was conducted primarily by counting. How many organisms of what species are present in what spatial area of a certain habitat? As habitats change with time [3], how do the numbers of species change? Which species drop out of the counts, which ones appear? Through the 1940s, botanists and zoologists who “did” ecology did it by enumeration [4].
In the new world of systems ecology, we added calorimetry—measurement of energy content—to our toolbox. By accounting for the thermodynamic laws, we could now track the flux of energy through the ecosystem, from the sun to the plants to the herbivores to the carnivores. Now we could understand, as one author put it, “why big fierce animals are rare” [5]. In part (large part) it is because energy transfer is inefficient. To get from plants to large carnivores, roughly 50% to 90% of the energy present at each level in the food web is lost to the level above. Physics constrains biology in fundamental ways.
When ecologists turned their attention to whole systems, exploring the transformations of radioactive tracers, they began to realize that there was another aspect of biological patterns and processes “missing” from their interpretations. This was the human element. By the 1960s, it was becoming clear that human beings affected and were affected by ecosystem interactions. A most familiar example was published by Rachel Carson in 1961—Silent Spring. Silent Spring built on the methodologies being developed by systems ecologists but it traced the pesticide DDT (and related molecules) through ecosystems and warned of potential effects of widescale and long-term applications. Silent Spring was important not only because of its innovative application of ecosystems thinking. Carson’s work (in Silent Spring and other books [6]) showed that human behavior, well-being, and economics were integral components of ecosystems. This came as something of a shock to reductionist scientists just learning to deal with whole systems outcomes.
Interdisciplinary Origins
We should have seen it coming. The word “ecology” comes to us from the Greek oikos, meaning house, after the Indo-European weik, with implications of clan, village, and vicinity. Logia is from the Greek via German, “study”. The word “economy” is from the same root oikos, with nomos, management, via Indo-European nem, to assign or allot [7]. In effect, ecology and economics are closely related concepts, the former the study of and the latter the management of, the oikos—the biosphere.
Some ecologists (the Odum brothers and their students and colleagues were among the leaders) understood the importance of humans, economic beings, in the living world where money and its flux and transformation were otherwise meaningless. Attempts were made, and are still being made, to understand outcomes of the nomos for the logos of the system, and for the converse [8]. But it has proven very difficult to find tools that allow us to understand quantitatively what we can see plainly qualitatively—that money changes things.
Why might this be? After all, systems ecology can account for the quantitative effect on, say, energy flow, of the information content of an ecosystem. For example, that systems with a lot of biological information—very diverse ecosystems—have energy flux profiles that differ from those with less information—say, agronomic monocultures. But we have not had the same success in understanding money in this context.
Part of the problem is that it is difficult for non-economists to understand what money actually IS [9]. In my classes, I illustrate this conundrum via the “money stones” of the Yap Archipelago in the Pacific. On these tiny islands are a number of large, heavy stones, cut into various sizes of rock “donuts”. This stone is not available on in Yap. The quarries are on other islands far to the west. Somehow, using ocean-going canoes, the Yapese cut these stones and transported them over hundreds of miles of open water (when I teach this, I can’t help but muse over how many stones—and canoes and canoe crews—were lost in process), and placed them in prominent public spaces on the main island. These stones became a form of currency. A rather abstract form, for sure. On Yap, you might own a portion of a money stone. Say, you own a quarter radius of one of the stones. There are no marks on the stone to indicate who owns what, it is common knowledge. Now you need a dowry for a daughter’s long-planned wedding. You can to bargain a segment of your segment, or your entire segment, as payment for the food, drink, and other festivities, and another portion for the dowry itself. If you serve chicken, the farmer who provides the chickens takes ownership of an appropriate-sized piece of your piece, of the stone. And can use that piece, in turn, to purchase more chicks to raise.
But here’s the thing. These stones are big and heavy. You don’t get to move one just because you own some or all of it. It stays where it is, and knowing who owns how much of which stone or stones is part of the culture. Notice that no energy is transformed or transferred in money stone transactions. You simply own a piece of stone, and you can pay someone with your piece of stone, which they will now own.
Yet the transaction—in the case, the payment-for-purchase—has a large impact on the ecosystem. You’ve purchased a flock of chickens. These chickens are cooked and served, so the farmer needs more chicks, and he needs food, housing and water for the new flock, plus a place to recycle or dispose of wastes. Compiling those things alters the environment. In response to money changing hands. Except it never actually “changes hands”. I just sits there, same place, new owner.
This strikes us odd. In our transactions, “something” changes hands. Cash, a credit card, a credit card number. So there is some flux of matter and energy in non-money-stone transactions [10]. But the energy content of a credit card transaction, while non-zero, is nonetheless very low relative to the ecological outcome of the economic activity. And certainly not proportional. The amount of energy that goes into producing, circulating, and spending $1000 to purchase, say, a case of very high-end Bordeaux red wine is a result and cause of massive environmental changes. The vine pruning, fertilizing, weed control, disease control, harvest, and production of the wine from pressing the fruit through bottling and sale takes an enormous amount of energy in many forms. Diesel tractor fuel, basketry from harvested reeds, the calories people expend in harvest and production. The metals and polymer parts of the pressing and fermentation infrastructure. That $1000 generates big environmental changes.
Did we mention engineering? Much of what links economic processes to environmental outcomes is engineering. In our example, you will need engineers to design build and maintain the presses and vats, the conformation of the vineyard land, irrigation systems if necessary, the vehicles that get the wines to market and that haul in the fertilizers and fungicides. In this model, engineering enables economics to be linked to ecology with direct affects on the ecosystem. And thus is a crucial aspect, a focal point, of human interaction with the environment. So, for much of our interface with the rest of the world, it is a loose collaboration of engineers, economists, and ecologists who design, produce, operate and manage things.
Ike’s Insight
But things have not been and are not so loosely linked in some contexts. In January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower used his last Presidential address to warn of the consequences of a “Military-Industrial Complex” that he believed had risen in the U.S. in the wake of World War Two [11]. From the perspective of holistic systems analysis, the MIC itself is an example of a self-organizing hierarchical open system. Inputs to the MIC include needs specifications and purchase orders (technical engineering information), money (economic information), and labor and materials (human and natural resources). The MIC infrastructure churns money, materials, and information into product outputs. By having components of the MIC system itself flow both to and from the larger matrix of society in the form of personnel, strategic policy, tactical developments, the MIC helps assure that its environment is favorable for its own stability and growth.
Self-Organization is a Key
Self-organization and environmental modification are key properties of successful biological system. True ecosystems exist at many temporal and spatial scales. While there is a tendency to think of “ecosystem” as landscape-level phenomena, but any organized system with a “skin” or “membrane” recognizably constraining internal vs. external processes can be thought of as an ecosystem. In the heyday of systems ecology, roughly the 1960s through 1980s, endless beer-and-pizza debates were devoted to ecosystem definitions and scale, similar to (and as productive as) Renaissance theological debates about angels fitting on heads of pins. What emerged from graduate school indigestion, though, was a useful and practical definition. An ecosystem was self-organized inside a recognizable membrane such that processes occurring inside and outside the membrane were more active than processes operating through the membrane. And the most successful ecosystems monitored their own immediate environs and modified it when necessary and when possible by sending signals of matter, energy and information across the membrane into the larger world [12].
Careful parsing of the previous paragraph suggests that the ability of a system to modify its own environment is a real key to persistence. Bacteria, both pathogens and free-living forms, are masters at this. Microbial films are formed by cellular exudates, which link the cells to the substrate, and which develop over time, becoming more functionally active and complex. The self-organized bacterial cells in turn organize their environment in favorable ways, maximizing the stability and persistence of the whole system [13].
Of course, at this point, it is obvious that organisms possessing technology and engineering, and with matter and energy surpluses that can be converted to environmental investment (that is, economics) should be most able to modify their matrix and persist. A few animals act as environmental engineers—beavers build dams and winter housing, mole-rats create spectacular specialized tunnel systems and harvest their food sustainably [14]. Some ants and termites create massive infrastructure, and harvester or leaf-cutter ants operate complex and persistent agricultural systems [15].
Technology Rules
But nobody does it like we humans do. Our awesome technological abilities, highly-developed economies, and ability to anticipate and plan for the future have taken us well over the threshold of environmental modification. The entire biosphere is now under our control, whether we like it or not [16]. To date, beginning in the Pleistocene Epoch, we have managed the biosphere by default [17]. Which has led us, in general, to trouble. “Awesome technological abilities” applied without careful, comprehensive, and adaptive planning, is not a recipe for success. Nor, however, it is a recipe for disaster.
Some definitions may be helpful at this point. In one sense, we can simply define successful environmental management as the persistence of human beings in the biosphere. But this is not a very satisfying or useful definition. After all, humans can survive in very difficult environments. If we say that persistence is one element we need to consider, but that quality-of-life or habitat quality is similarly important, we start to see where we need to go. The goal is not survival alone. It is survival at a reasonable standard of quality. We can call this broader standard of success sustainability. A sustainable biosphere allows humans to not only survive, it allows us to prosper. This is indeed a more difficult objective for our species. But it is imperative if we are to leave our children and their children and generations to come with a world worth inhabiting.
We have, in fact, made considerable headway in not only preserving the future of human life, but maintaining a reasonable level of environmental quality. In the developed world, environmental regulations analogous to the U.S. Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Comprehensive Environmental Responsibility, Cleanup, and Liability Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, have substantively improved the quality of our collective habitat. International regulations such as the United Nations Compensation Commission and the Migratory Bird Treaty have helped us advance further. Even in the developing world, where the standard of success is of necessity weighted to survival and persistence as the first priority, environmental quality is generally improving. We have made enormous strides in sustainability since the 1950s [18].
To some extent, we’ve hit a wall in our ongoing efforts to improve and maintain a sustainable biosphere. We focused enormous effort and infrastructure on reducing and controlling environmental releases of toxic industrial chemicals. Which made considerable sense, as Rachel Carson told us in 1961. However, in the process of controlling such chemicals, the environmental management system that we built, incorporating regulators, policy-makers, planners, scientists, environmental and civil engineers, and enforcement specialists, has taken on its own life and forward momentum. We continue to pursue and “manage” industrial chemicals in the biosphere despite having largely solved that particular problem. The “team” of regulators et al. has largely done its job. This is not to say there are not still chemical threats to the environment. There are many, and they are more intense in the developing world. However, on a relative scale, as a society, we have generally succeeded in managing industrial chemicals.
And, while we were accomplishing that worthy objective, we found ourselves as a society more interested, in recent decades, in other levels in the biological hierarchy than the ecosystem. Biotechnology and nanotechnology have largely taken pride-of-place at the interface of humankind and the biosphere. To a degree, the field of “systems ecology” doesn’t exist any longer as a free-standing discipline. Funding, both commercial and research-oriented, flows to biotech companies and nanotech investigators. The interdisciplinary nature of systems ecology, one of its strengths, has lost its reason-for-being as we’ve found it more profitable and interesting to merge chemistry, physics, technology, and biology at the molecular scale rather than the landscape. But the fact that we’ve taken our eyes off the ecosystem ball doesn’t mean the game is won.
The Legacy: Our Kid’s World
The environmental problems that we are handing to our children and theirs are no longer primarily those of uncontrolled chemical releases. Our successes in that arena have let other issues emerge and gain importance. Potable water, nutrient (fertilizer) pollutants, biodiversity, habitat quantity and quality, safe and sufficient food, soil quality and quantity, and an array of potential impacts associated with climate change (including the spread of disease organisms for humans and domesticated animals and plants) are the real issues now. But the teams we built to manage chemical pollution are having a tough time coming to grips with these shifting priorities. The process of managing toxic chemicals is basically (in an abstract “best case”) one of science-driven regulation and subsequent enforcement. That model may be insufficient for the immediate future of the biosphere.
For example, consider the city of Calcutta (or Kolkata), India. In the 1800s, municipal waste was deposited on the eastern boundary of the urban area. Over time, people learned to sort the garbage to recover recyclables, compost organic materials, and farm vegetables on what was (and is) essentially a landfill. In the first half of the 20th century, sewage and surface water (stormflow) were combined and outfalls run to the east of the city. Vegetable farmers took advantage of the water supply to supplement field fertility, and a proportion of the water was run into a sequence of aquaculture ponds. Pond effluent is used for downgradient paddy farming and also taken back to the upgradient vegetable gardens. This tightly integrated and highly effective recycling system has been producing substantive quantities of fish and vegetables for decades. The produce is sold in wholesale markets within the 12,000 hectare area serving the operation, and also in the city itself. All is sold fresh, within hours of harvest.
The Calcutta Waste Wetlands ecosystem was formed, developed, and maintained by combined cultures of the people-in-place. It is not a legislated, protected, or subsidized special operations zone (although it was recently protected as a United Nations RAMSAR site). Land ownership has varied with time, for a period absentee speculators purchased and combined much of the area, but apparently it has more recently been returned to largely smallholders. The local cooperation among farmers, aquaculturists, economists, engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, and technologists is maintained only informally. In other words, the “team” that solved the coupled problems of solid and liquid waste management for the enormous city of Calcutta came together of its own will and successfully addressed many issues that more formal interdisciplinary management efforts have failed at [19].
This is not to say there aren’t ongoing problems and issues of safety, public health, economic fairness, efficiency, and others arising daily. Such issues are constant, and among them is the ever-present pressure on the land from urban expansion, along with the fact that only a portion of the total wastewater flow from the city is used in the Waste Wetlands System, the remainder is released as raw combined sewer flow to the estuary. The important lessons of the Calcutta Waste Wetlands System are in the collective nature of the problem-solving effort, and the on-the-ground accomplishments of flexible and adaptable interdisciplinary webs of relationships.
The latter is a particularly important point if we think back to where we started this essay. The Manhattan Project was an unprecedented and rigorously formal collaboration among physicists, chemists, and engineers, involving government, academic institutions, and commercial corporations. The importance of the private sector grew between the World Wars, and it was natural at the start of World War Two in the U.S. to include companies as integral to the weapons design and production efforts. Academia provided much of the intellect, and government provided the impetus and the muscle to get the job done, partly in the form of investment and partly via military necessity.
The far less formal collaborations that developed and operate the Calcutta Wastewater Wetlands System are similarly multidisciplinary. One reason that success has not repeated itself may well be that it is unique. The informality of the process means it was truly spontaneous, so that “managing” to produce such a cooperative enterprise is a major challenge.
Perhaps we need to leverage the best aspects of the formal—Manhattan Project—and informal—Calcutta—models of interdisciplinary collaboration. The emerging environmental problems, those that we are leaving for our kids to deal with, are inherently complex. Solving those problems is going to require innovation and action across scales of hierarchy, and among many technical disciplines. Our experience as investigators of complex urbanized ecosystems demonstrates that scientists, engineers, and economists can cooperate successfully [20]. And that stakeholders across a spectrum of interests—the private sector, government, academia, and consulting enterprises—can join to get things done that would be impossible for any one or two sectors to handle alone. If we are going to manage our environment by design and not by default, and at the large scale and small reflecting the range of our impact, it is important that we innovate and collaborate. Effective interdisciplinary collaboration, as demonstrated by both the Manhattan Project and the Calcutta Wastewater Wetlands, can yield even more effective innovation. There is no “code” needed. We are talking about the Sustainable Biosphere Project, in a matrix where scientists bring the data, engineers bring the actions, and economists bring investments, and the table that all this is heaped on is occupied by regulators, industrial experts, academics, and consultants. We owe the inheritors of our world our best and hardest work as we prepare to hand things over.
Note I’ll have new material up at all 4 weblog empire nodes this week. http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ are already updated. This will be the entry for http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/, and I’ll get a new song up at http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/. Thanks everyone. Writing these blogs is a big part of what’s keeping me alive through this ordeal, so if you check in occasionally yourself and/or recommend ‘em to newcomers, you are contributing directly to my improving health. And I thank you for that most deeply and sincerely!!!
Notes
[1] Arthur Tansley is generally credited with the concept and the word, in Tansley, 1935, The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms, Ecology 16:284-307. The Wikipedia entry is well-researched, and adds an earlier citation but agrees that Tansley’s article was authoritative.
[2] E.P. and H.T. Odum, 1953, Fundamentals of Ecology. The Odum’s concept of holistic ecology was greatly supported by Lindemann, R.L., 1942, The Trophic-Dynamic Aspect of Ecology, Ecology, Ecology 23:399-418.
[3] The process of change-over-time is known as ecological succession, where one recognizable habitat replaces another in sequential and orderly fashion unless the system trajectory is upset or re-set by outside influences (such as human development). The processes of succession continue after such impacts, but the pathway—the living components of the habitat that reflect the abiotic and other biological conditions—is changed.
[4] This is, of course, a gross over-simplification of the state-of-the-science of ecology at the time. However, in concept it is not far off. For example, some evolutionary ecologists studied changes in organisms with habitat changes. Even that exercise, though, involved enumeration. As in “how many fin spines does fish species A have in habitat B vs. habitat C”?
[5] Colinveaux, P. 1979. Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare. Princeton University Press.
[6] Among other works, Carson published The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea, both emphasizing her perspectives on human interactions with the biosphere. The site http://www.rachelcarson.org/ appears to be well-researched, and the Wikipedia entry on Carson is also reasonably well done.
[7] The etymology is from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, third edition, 1992, Houghton Mifflin Company.
[8] An excellent and innovative introduction to this and may other ideas is Vermeij, G.J. 2004. Nature: An Economic History. Princeton University Press.
[9] Actually, in my experience, economists are similarly far down the learning curve. But the field of economy at least has terminology and grammar that allows it to sound like it knows what’s going on. Whether that grammatical understanding is in fact reflected in the understanding of functions in the “real world” remains, to me, an open question.
[10] I believe the money stones are now more of tourist thing. But that some people retain the ceremonial transfer of wealth via money stone apportioning.
[11] There are many sources providing video, text, and analyses of Eisenhower’s speech. An interesting perspective is available at:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Military-industrial_complex
which cites the film “Why We Fight” as a source that Eisenhower’s children believe his original draft of the speech referred to the “military-congressional-industrial complex”. The Wikipedia entry on this topic is complete but relatively weak regarding source citations. The Wikipedia entry on “Nuclear weapons design” appears to be more reliably sourced.
[12] A substantive proportion of the theoretical ecology literature is devoted to this subject. Particularly interesting and innovative expositions are Conrad, M. 1983, Adaptability: the Significance of Variability from Molecule to Ecosystem, Plenum Press, NY; and Higashi, M. and T.P. Burns (eds) 1991, Theoretical Studies of Ecosystems: the Network Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
[13] For an interesting and practical example, see Page, W.J. and W.G. Martin, 1978. Survival of microbial films in the microwave oven. Can. J. Microbiol. 24:141-143.
[14] Many sources available. Nowak, R.M. and J.L. Paradiso 1983, Walker’s Mammals of the World, Johns Hopkins University Press (4th edition] is complete and accessible to nonspecialists.
[15] Deep details, coupled with entertaining academic debate among specialists in the arcana of agriculturalist ants can be had by referring to Gordon, D. 1999, Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized, The Free Press, NY; and Helldobler, B. and E.O. Wilson 2009 The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, W.W. Norton & Company, NY.
[16] It remains common currency among environmental groups, some academics, and policy shops that “you can’t fool with Mother Nature” and that “Nature is in charge”. For example, http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/ . However, it is becoming abundantly clear that we have indeed fooled with mother nature and that nature is no longer solely in charge, even if she retains a grip on some of the threads of power. The fact of climate change alone should be sufficient to quell this argument, although it has yet to do so.
[17] While there remain holdouts for a more “politically correct” view that human beings were not primarily responsible for the Pleistocene extinction of numerous species of mammals and birds in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, the evidence is in fact overwhelming, see Twilight of the Mammoths: Ice Age Extinctions and the Rewilding of America by Paul S. Martin, University of California Press 2005.
[18] Our belief in improving environmental quality is not, of course, shared universally. Many non-governmental organizations, policy shops, and individuals have a deep stake in environmental pessimism or optimism, and make little allowance for evidence from the alternative perspective. A couple of reliable sources summarizing the state of the environment with a little more objectivity are McNeill, J.R. 2000, Something New Under the Sun, W.W. Norton & Company, NY; and Goudie, A. 2000, The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Entertainingly argumentative, if biased, expositions of the state-of-the-environment can be found in Lomborg, B. 2010, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, Vintage Books, NY; and Friel 2010, The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming, Yale University Press, New Haven. Our own work reconstructing the environmental history of a quintessential urbanized waterway, the Passaic River in New Jersey, provides detailed documentation of the when, where, how and why of environmental degradation, improvement, and still-to-do of a specific ecosystem, and has been expanded to include other urban rivers. Entry to that suite of publications can be gained via recent review-scale articles and books: Iannuzzi, T., J.L. Durda, D.V. Preziosi, D.F. Ludwig, R.G. Stahl, Jr., A.A. DeSantis, and R.A. Hoke 2009. Development of a preliminary relative risk model for evaluating regional ecological conditions in the Delaware River Estuary, USA. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management 6:164-179; Ludwig, D.F. and T.J. Iannuzzi, 2005, Incremental ecological exposure risks from contaminated sediments in an urban estuarine river, Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management 1:374-390; Iannuzzi, T.J. and D.F. Ludwig, An interdisciplinary investigation of ecological history and environmental restoration objectives in an urban landscape, Ecol. Restoration 23:157-165; Iannuzzi, T.J., D.F. Ludwig, J.C. Kinnell, J.M. Wallin, W.H. Desvousges, and R.W. Dunford 2002, A Common Tragedy: History of an Urban Waterway. Amherst Scientific Publishers, Amherst, MA., Ludwig, D.F. and T.J. Iannuzzi 2002. Incremental chemical risks and damages in urban estuaries: spatial and historical ecosystem analysis. Pp 297-325 in Newman, M.C., M.H. Roberts, and R.C. Hale (eds.), Coastal and Estuarine Risk Assessment, Lewis Publishers, Washington D.C.
[19] The Calcutta Wastewater Wetlands is constantly evolving and adapting and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not particularly well documented in formal technical literature. The best approach to learning about them is to conduct your own web searches, pursuing chains-of-citations in the nuggets you will find. Some web portals worth starting at include:
http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-calcutta-wetland-wastewater-agriculture-fishpond.html
http://www.indiawaterportal.org/node/442
http://www.bvsde.ops-oms.org/muwww/fulltext/repind53/calcutta/calcutta.html
A simple economic model of the system is: Bunting, S.W. 2007, Confronting the realities of wastewater aquaculture in urban Kolkata with bioeconomic modeling, Water Research 41:499-505. A widely cited general review is: Ghosh, D. 1988. Wastewater-Fed Aquaculture in the Wetlands of Calcutta-an Overview. Tomado de: Wastewater-Fed Aquaculture / Proceedings of the International Seminar on Wastewater Reclamation and Reuse for Aquaculture, Calcutta, India, 6-9 December 1988.
[20] An economist who has seen this coming and who has a radical and innovative vision for environmental management is Jack M. Hollander. His 2004 book The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, not Affluence, is the Environment’s Number One Enemy, published by University of California Press, should be read by everyone interested in a sustainable future.
Guns, Bugs, and Bunnies
Hank Williams sang “I’ll never get out of this world alive.” Williams wasn’t making a subtle philosophical point. He was simply celebrating the facts of life. And possibly starting to deal with the consequentially-related fact that he had taken to drinking chloral hydrate as a beverage in place of less-intoxicating alcohol. The only use I’ve ever known for choral hydrate was to clear certain specimens of mites and worms for microscopic examination.
There are times in everyone’s life when you think you may be leaving this world not-alive and that it’s entirely too early to do so.
I’ve been held at gunpoint twice in my life. Both occasions were associated with contract work for the U.S. military. And both are illustrative for this week’s topic—the positive environmental aspects of military facilities.
Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California preserves within its borders some of the last high-quality habitats of several kinds. The pre-Columbian regional chaparral vegetation has been mostly lost to development and other disturbance, but large areas remain on the Base. The intertidal marine community is spectacular. It is one of the last places on earth that large abalones not only live in the shallows and intertidal zones, they are stacked several animals deep when the tide is out. And much of the Vandenberg land is culturally important as ancestral home to the Chumash Native Americans.
Vandenberg sits somewhat uncomfortably in densely populated coastal California. There is public access via hard surface road to some of the beaches, although much of the Base activities are highly classified. Security is tight, and control of public access is rigorous.
I worked with a team conducting an Environmental Impact Analysis for some proposed construction activities on the Base. Part of our work involved observational censuses of marine mammals on parts of the coast. So our team was legitimately working on the Sunday morning we hiked out to the cliffs overlooking the beaches and began to count seals, sea lions, and sea otters. Possibly, however, we should have informed Base Security of our operation, and possibly also not brought along a cooler with picnic lunch and one of the local guy’s pet dogs. I spent a distinctly uncomfortable half hour with a young MP holding a weapon to my back while we straightened things out.
The other time was on Guam. Large areas of the Island are in military reservations. Andersen Air Force Base has a program, led by local Chamorro people, for depredation hunting of wild pigs and deer. The objective of the hunting is to keep the populations in check so they don’t interfere with runway operations. In addition, locals forage for other food including papaya. Our project was to work with the Chamorro hunters and foragers to obtain samples of the foods they were collecting as a check to be sure that chemical contamination wasn’t entering the food chain. We got our on-base and “reference” location deer and pig samples, and other items. On the last day of our work, my science technician and I were seeking off-base “reference” papayas as the last samples we needed. They were not as easy to come by as we had hoped. Finally late in the afternoon we found a neighborhood development all laid out with hard top roads but the houses had not yet been constructed. In the maze of suburban streets were trees with ripe papaya. We pulled our rental car over and started to collect, when a gentleman with an old single-shot 12 gauge shotgun walked up behind us and asked why he shouldn’t shoot us on the spot as trespassers and thieves. He was actually fairly intoxicated. We explained what we were doing—harvesting plants to test for food safety—and he got excited. Invited—well, insisted, really—that we accompany him to his “agricultural experiment station”. It turned out, the guy had appropriated—I’m guessing he was squatting, but I can’t say for sure—part of the neighborhood, and he really did have a series of fields where he was experimenting with different growing methods for yams, fruits, and grains, with different low-technology methods for excluding wild pigs and deer, and other agronomic parameters. He was immensely proud of the operation. He forgot about shooting us as he took us on a tour of his fields, then invited us to join him and his two-person crew of Trukese workers for grilled yams and vodka. Which we did. And escaped safely. I still think of Carl-the-drunk-Chamorro, his experimental farm, the Trukese gentlemen who seemed to operate rather like indentured servants, and the strength of my technician Tracy who took the whole scary incident with aplomb and humor.
Oh. It turned out that foraged and hunted foodstuffs were very safe, being virtually free of any industrial or military chemicals.
The common factor in both these incidents was the high-quality habitat preserved on the military installations. Development pressure on land and land prices is one of the most devastating impacts on biodiversity worldwide. My personal and professional opinion is that such habitat pressure dwarf climate change and chemical pollution as key factors controlling the future health of the biosphere.
While environmental quality is not the military’s primary mission (obviously), the defense infrastructure in the U.S. has grown to be effective and important, and serves as a global model. A few years after my Guam incident, I was engaged as outside expert reviewer for environmental awards for the US Navy. Individual operations—bases or vessels—submitted documentation packages regarding their innovative environmental efforts. From zero-discharge ships to a base in northern Spain that developed a first-rate plan for enhancing and restoring habitat for an endangered species of chameleon, I was mightily impressed at the hard work and sound thinking that the military is bringing to its environmental management.
At the moment, military lands are habitat strongpoints for many species-of-special-concern, for rare and disappearing habitats, and for biodiversity preservation. We are all in debt to the military for their willingness to shoulder the burden of environmental quality, and shoulder it with aplomb.
Note there is new stuff up at all 4 sites: http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ ; http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ ; http//:endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ ; and http://docviper.livejournal.com/ . Visit all when you can, thanks so much for stoppin' by!!!
The scientific method. It’s simple. It’s robust. But it’s not magic. Got bias? It’ll spin like Rafael Nadal’s forehand. Got unconscious or subconscious bias? It’ll spin, but you won’t know it. You’ll lie to yourself, like the memory-ravaged protagonist in a Philip K. Dick nightmare.
The elaborate and intricate protocols needed to eliminate bias make science look complicated. Random sampling, blind and double blind study designs, placebos, and control treatments are all accouterments of bias reduction. The scientific method works because the answers to the greatest questions that can be asked come from the nuts-and-bolts, glue-it-together-and-let-it-fly, tee-it-up-and-give-it-a-whack process of experimentation. Science can only answer questions amenable to this kind of manipulative testing. Unamenable (is that a word? The MS Word writing police certainly don’t like it…I kind of do, though) questions are simply, by definition, beyond the realm of science (because science, by definition, is the nuts-and bolts, glue-it etc. method of inquiry). This is why, despite entertaining clashes along the scrum lines of evolution and intelligent design, science and religion are non-overlapping ways of knowing. The scientific answer to the ultimate question of “why are there things in the universe instead of no things, nothing, emptiness?” is going to be something like “because there is an asymmetry in the ninth decimal place between the quantities of matter and antimatter formed in first moments of the Big Bang”. The religious answer is something like “because there is/are a god, God, or gods”. Far from being mutually exclusive, in this case science and religion are simply complementary. If you want to see your god, God or gods, just look over in the ninth decimal place.
The real beauty of the scientific method is in collective enterprise. In the realm it rules—the elucidation of facts of nature—the scientific method is self-correcting and self-adapting. Even if you set it up so your experimental system lets you lie to yourself, the next three people who test your conclusions will root out your bias.
The controversies that spin up in the wake of the ship of science arise because people bring their bias to the broader meaning of the facts. It is a fact that ingesting too much fresh, potable water in a short period of time causes a lethal syndrome of electrolyte imbalance and neural swelling. Whether this makes fresh, potable water a toxicological hazard depends on your perspective. The scientific method makes the facts themselves robust and mostly idiot-proof. It doesn’t protect us from idiotic application and interpretation of said facts.
When I was in school contemplating a major in (among a depressingly long list of other subjects) anthropology, there was a deep systemic bias afflicting the field. It had become fashionable to dismiss reports of aboriginal peoples headhunting, cannibalizing, and ethnic cleansing as western bigotry. In my sophomore cultural anthro class we read pretty much everything published on the Dani people of highland Papua New Guinea. The Dani population was distributed over the landscape in family-linked groups of a few 100s of people per, each group living in a single large longhouse or village of a few longhouses. The borders of the lands associated with each group were sorted out by ritualized spear-shaking dances nominally replacing actual physical combat at the contact points. Unfortunately for the western investigators anticipating gentle, benign behavior from low-tech peoples, it devolved rather frequently that the ritualized dancing degraded into spear-throwing with the inconvenient outcome of the occasional fatality. Once there was a fatality, the balance-of-power between the groups at issue was inflamed until vengeance in the form of a complementary fatality was administered. Sometimes propagating a chain of reprisal killings worthy of highland clan peoples from Scotland to Appalachia.
To us chuckleheaded undergrads the Dani culture was largely defined by a lengthy legacy of murder and counter-murder. To the academics attempting to shoehorn the culture into a model of benign serenity each death was an aberration requiring convoluted explanation usually invoking forecasts of future Dani culture as benign and serene if not quite there by just a smidgen at the present time.
This “friendly natives” dream continues to plague anthropology. A segment of the community has wandered down a dead-end path of political correctness that refuses to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence for massive environmental impacts of Pleistocene peoples. In particular, about the time meaningful numbers of humans hotfooted it…actually, I’m guessing “coldfooted” was more like it…across the Bering Sea, the entire mammalian megafauna of the Americas (except for a couple of cats, the bison and Andean camelids—guanaco, vicuna, llama) went extinct. Coincidence? I’m guessing not. Similarly, as the Caribbean islands were peopled, the weird insular endemic rodents called hutia were eliminated from most places, and the residue were mopped up when Europeans arrived with rats, cats, pigs and dogs in tow. Same fate befell the giant flightless moa birds of New Zealand.
The book “The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II” (2009 by Judith M. Heimann, Mariner Books) is worth a read regarding the sociology of warfare.
The author pieced together a wonderful account of the surviving crew of a B-24 bomber shot down over Borneo. The locals had mostly been Christianized in the preceding decades, and it had been a good ten years or more since the last formal human head taking in the Borneo highlands. But with Yankee airmen in their midst and the prospect of imperial Japanese death and destruction being unleashed in retaliation, the local folks did what local folks do. That is, they killed a dog in ritual fashion, tasted its blood in a ceremonial cup-passing, and pledged to work together to take the heads of as many Japanese military men as necessary. Mind you, the Japanese soldiers, a long way from home and itchy and uncomfortable in the steamy tropical forests, weren’t making it much of a chore for the locals to revive their decapitative trophy collections. Heimann’s research reveals the almost comical tactical tendency of small units of the Japanese army to “split up and meet later”. You know, like the point in the movie where you’re yelling “don’t you guys go to the movies?!?!?” right before the protagonists separate and subsequently buy the farm? 3 or 4 times, the Japanese command sent squads into the Borneo hinterland where they promptly split up and hired local guides who promptly led them right into the almost-but-not-quite-forgot-how-to-use-‘em head collection stations in the jungle. In fact, the transition from headhunting to Sunday-go-to-meetin’ culture had been smoothed by the formal requirements of the headhunting game. The locals were forbidden to take the heads of humans, they could only take the heads of demons who had possessed human bodies. The Japanese rather short-sightedly pre-adapted themselves for head loss by routinely raping, murdering, and otherwise mistreating the locals, who not irrationally started to view the Japanese occupation as inhuman.
Happy endings all around, then, for everyone except the Japanese. Heimann provides a follow-up “what are they doing now” coda on the protagonists of her story (think last scene in Animal House). She didn’t report as to whether or not the Borneo highland people continued headhunting after the war. But it’s possible. I’m guessing that as long as human beings are human beings, grievances will be settled by violence and Long Pig will be at least an occasional menu item. Despite the best efforts of academic sociologists to make like it never happened.
