Conservation Magazine April-June 2010 by Kathy Kohm

E.O. Wilsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2DC;s novel idea

Bullet-proof snails inspire military armor

breathalyzer test for Whales

April-June 2010

Conservation cutting-edge science | smarter conservation

The New Normal Finding ecological value in a human-dominated world

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Contents Conservation | Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010

As though working through the five stages of grief, more and more ecologists are reluctantly accepting that we live in a human-dominated world. And some are discovering that patchwork ecosystems might even rival their pristine counterparts. By Emma Marris

Building on the Fly, page 18 3

Journal Watch ■

Wind turbines harness cyclones

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Dams trigger extreme weather

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Climate-change home economics

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Buying green is only skin deep

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Warm waters alter fish personality

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Prescribed fires cut CO2 emissions

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Antibiotic resistance in polar bears

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Dolphins rebound after Katrina

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No thirst for "green" wine

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Lifting fog threatens redwoods

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Lobster fishermen reject ecolabels

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Medicinal benefits of carbon cuts

36 Solutions

Beetle Mania A scientist, a pool hustler, and an avant-garde composer fight a fearsome insect invasion Dandelion Tires Your next set of wheels could be made of weeds

Cartoons by Pete Mueller

A Healthy Glow Light-emitting walls could be twice as efficient as fluorescent bulbs

Essay The Known World By Rob Dunn

The iCat Is on Your Tail Robotic feline keeps tabs on your home energy consumption

Book Marks

Letters

Up Up and Away

As pikas and other alpine species are pressured by global warming, many observers warn they will be pushed higher and higher until they vanish like deserving souls into the ether. But new science suggests the “rapture hypothesis” doesn’t tell the whole story. By J. Madeleine Nash

Lighten Up

Plus: Diet for a Hot Planet, The Coming Population Crash, The Atlas of Global Conservation, The Flooded Earth, and How to Cool the Planet

Building on the Fly

Could the bizarre, decentralized logic of insect architecture provide a blueprint for revolutionary and sustainable human habitat? By Philip Ball

Breathalyzer Test for Whales Remote-control helicopters sample bacteria from moving giants

God of Small Things Jeffrey Lockwood reviews E.O. Wilson’s foray into fiction

The New Normal

Rain Maker New windmill wrings drinking water straight from the air Bullet-proof Snails Tiny gastropod inspires a new generation of armor 48

Think Again Forgive Me, Planet, for I Have Flown—Frequently By Anthony B. Robinson Cover Art by Darryl Brown Courtesy of George Fox University

Conservation A Publication of the Society for Conservation Biology editor

Kathryn Kohm

™

Editors’ Note

senior editor

Justin Matlick Editorial Intern

Amelia Apfel Circulation Manager

John Brink essay editor

Kathleen Snow copy editor

Roberta Scholz contributing editors

Charles Alexander Stewart Brand Frances Cairncross David W. Ehrenfeld Katherine Ellison

executive editor

P. Dee Boersma advisory board

Michael Bean Jennifer Belcher Jamie Rappaport Clark Patrick Daigle Barbara Dean Eric Dinerstein Gustavo Fonseca Jerry F. Franklin Deborah Jensen Peter Kareiva John C. Ogden Mary C. Pearl Ellen Pikitch Michael A. Soukup Steven L. Yaffee TM denotes the Trade-mark/Official Mark of Alberta Conservation Association, used under license Editorial Office: Conservation magazine, Department of Biology, Box 351800, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195USA; Phone: 206-685-4724; Fax: 206-221-7839; email: kkohm@u.washington.edu Subscriptions: An annual subscription for individuals is $30 in the U.S., $36 outside the U.S., and $21 in developing countries. Institutional rates are $75 in the U.S. and $80 outside the U.S., payable in U.S. funds on a U.S. bank. Copyright ©2010 by the Society for Conservation Biology. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the publisher’s written permission. Articles published herein reflect the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Society for Conservation Biology or its partners.

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we put the conservation movement on the psychiatrist’s couch? Would the analysis of conservation’s trajectory look something like “the five stages of grief ”—the theory used to explain how people struck by tragedy progress through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression before accepting that their world has irrevocably changed? It occurs to us that the conservation movement may have spent the last couple of decades working through denial and depression. Now, a handful of ecologists are venturing into the fifth stage. This issue’s cover story (“The New Normal,” page 13) explains how, instead of fixating on returning human-damaged ecosystems to a pristine state, these ecologists are starting to accept that we live in a human-dominated world. Along the way, they’re making an intriguing discovery: some ecosystems that have been heavily influenced by humans are as ecologically vital as their pristine predecessors. It’s a radical possibility, given the widespread belief that human-blighted nature can never be as valuable as what came before it. This isn’t to say that untrammeled reserves shouldn’t be a key part of conservation strategy—they should. But it might be time to turn the page on the era of denial and anger and start accepting ideas we have previously rejected. A key part of our mission at the magazine is keeping an eye out for solutions that could push conservation forward. In this issue, we explore everything from rubber made from dandelions (page 37) to “glowing walls” that could be far more efficient than compact fluorescent light bulbs (page 38). As we sift through story leads, we have also come to realize that environmental solutions are more than a series of proposals—they’re a mindset that becomes far easier to adopt when you filter out old biases and focus on the latest science. Maybe that’s one of the bright spots of arriving at acceptance. ❧ —The Editors

What would happen if

Journal Watch

Your guide to the latest conservation research

©Mona Plougmann/iStock.com

Energy

The Power of Many Connecting eastern U.S. wind stations could reduce gaps in power

with wind power is that it’s not constant. But a 2,500-kilometer-long grid of wind generators, oriented in roughly the same direction that cyclones travel, might overcome this difficulty.

One of the biggest problems

Researchers envision placing the system of linked wind generators off the eastern coast of the U.S. The wind at each station would fluctuate, making its power output unreliable. But stations at other locations on the grid, where wind conditions are different, could step in to fill the gap. Using meteorological data, the researchers simulated how the grid would have performed from 1998–2002. The

power output “shifted up and down but never stopped,” they write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Developers should base their site choices on weather patterns over a large area, the authors say, instead of just focusing on one particularly blustery spot. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Kempton, W. et al. 2010. Electric power from offshore wind via synoptic-scale interconnection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI:10.1073/pnas.0909075107.

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©Junne24 | Dreamstime.com

Engineering

Will This Dam Self-destruct? Large reservoirs trigger extreme weather

to withstand a certain amount of flooding. To determine this amount, engineers look at historical patterns of flooding and extreme precipitation. But what if the creation of the dam alters these patterns by triggering higher precipitation levels? Could future flooding exceed the dam’s original specifications? The answer could be yes, according to a new study by Faisal Hossain of Tennessee Technological University. Dam construction produces large changes in land cover in two key ways:

Dams are engineered

Conservation Magazine

by creating reservoirs and by triggering increases in downstream agriculture and development. With this in mind, Hossain set out to pin down the extent to which large reservoirs may be shifting regional rainfall patterns. Hossain analyzed rainfall data for areas within 800 kilometers of 633 large dams worldwide. On average, he found that precipitation levels in the heaviest rainfall events (the top one percent) in these “near dam” areas increased in magnitude by about four percent a year following dam construction. The rise in extreme rainfall totals attributable to dams was greatest in

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arid and semi-arid regions, including southern Africa, India, central Asia, and the western U.S. The trend suggests that water evaporating from large reservoirs may play a surprisingly significant role in regional climate and hydrology. As a result, some dams may be facing heavier floods over time, even as their floodcontrol capacity is decreasing due to sedimentation. ❧ —Scott Norris Hossain, F. 2010. On the empirical relationship between large dams and the alteration in extreme precipitation. Natural Hazards Review DOI:10.1061/(ASCE)NH.15276996.0000013.

©Sierra Club

Climate Change

Change Does Begin at Home A few household actions could carve a France-sized chunk out of U.S. CO2 emissions

face is the widespread presumption that individual or household behavior doesn’t matter. So finally, some smart people— led by Thomas Dietz of Michigan State University—did everyone a favor and ran the numbers. And it turns out that, while consumers can’t stop global warming on their own, they can have a measureable impact. The researchers found that, by taking 17 steps that would result in “little or no reduction in household wellbeing,” U.S. consumers could reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions by more than seven percent. If that doesn’t seem like much, consider that this is equivalent to the total emissions of France. It’s also equivalent to the combined emissions of the petroleum-refining, iron-andsteel, and aluminum industries. Now, that seven-percent estimate doesn’t even assume that everyone in the U.S. would start taking these steps. Rather, the research team assumed a certain “plasticity” for each action. For example, they figured that 90 percent

One problem environmentalists

of the population could be cajoled into weatherizing their homes, while 80 percent would install low-flow showerheads and efficient water heaters. But only about 15 percent could be talked into carpooling. Even at that, we’re still looking at reducing U.S. emissions by one-thirteenth, which is nothing to sneeze at. Contrary to some perceptions, the researchers say, there’s no evidence that people who take these steps excuse themselves from larger burdens. There hasn’t been much empirical data on that question, but existing evidence suggests just the opposite—that as a person begins to feel good about one set of small actions to help the planet, he or she is likely to start considering larger and bolder steps. ❧ —Robert McClure Dietz, T. et al. 2009. Household actions can provide a behavioral wedge to rapidly reduce U.S. carbon emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(44):18452-18456.

©Ron Berg/Getty Images

Psychology

Brand-name Environmentalist When green is only skin deep All those people driving Toyota Priuses

aren’t necessarily acting out of concern for the planet, a new study suggests.

Rather, consumers may buy environmentally friendly products in order to make themselves appear superior. Being a green consumer doesn’t always make economic sense. After all, many green products are more expensive and lack some of the features of conventional products. But “buying green” may stem from a desire to flaunt one’s wealth and environmental consciousness, researchers hypothesize in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The team put its idea to the test by studying 168 college students. One group of students read a story intended to make them aspire toward high social status, while another group read a different story or no story. Each student was then asked to choose between a series of green and conventional products. The products had the same price and brand, but the green option had lower performance and fewer luxury features. Students who read the “status” story were more likely to choose the green product, the researchers found. For example, 54.5 percent of those students picked the ecofriendly car, whereas only 37.2 percent of students in the control group did the same. Another experiment showed that statushungry students were less likely to buy green if told they were shopping online rather than in a store—that is, when no one else was watching. The team also ran a third experiment where the prices of the green and conventional products were different. Students in the status-seeking group showed an increased preference for green products when those products were more expensive, suggesting that they wanted to maintain the appearance of wealth. So reducing the cost of

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Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J.M., and B. Van den Bergh. 2010. Going green to be seen: Status, reputation, and conspicuous conservation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98(3):392-404. DOI:10.1037/ a0017346

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Animal Behavior

Hot and Bothered Warmer waters cause reef fish to turn aggressive Octopuses, hyenas, spiders, and fish are just a few of the critters shown in recent years to behave consistently across situations and time— to have personalities, if you will. Much like people, some individuals are naturally bold, some are meek; some are active, some are couch potatoes; and so on. But what happens when—as may be the case with climate change—you turn up the heat a little? A new study shows that warmer water changes reef fishes’ personalities, making them more active, bold, and aggressive—and more likely to get eaten. Researchers led by Peter A. Biro of Australia’s University of Technology Sydney stumbled upon the discovery

Conservation Magazine

while testing the personalities of lemon damselfish, Pomacentrus moluccensis. The researchers were monitoring the damselfishes’ activity levels and their reactions to a simulated attack or to another fish. To the researchers’ surprise, they quickly noticed that a given fish behaved quite differently in the mornings than in the slightly warmer afternoons. Intrigued, they ran speckled damselfish, P. bankanensis, through similar tests while carefully varying the water temperature within a normal range of three degrees Celsius. Not only were most fish dramatically bolder and more active at slightly warmer temperatures, but some changed more than others. What’s more, a given fish’s boldness and activity scores changed in lockstep as the temperature rose. Biro thinks that, in cold-blooded animals such as fish, these personality traits—along with aggression—may be linked as a byproduct of metabolism. Warmer water entails higher metabolic needs that more aggressive, bold, and active fish have the get-up-and-go to accomodate. Other studies have shown that, because these fish are less wary and spend more time foraging instead of hiding out, they’re more likely to be gobbled up by predators. Which leads Biro to speculate that warmer, potentially more variable temperatures brought on by climate change could result in higher mortality rates as more fish wind up in nets or predators’ bellies, casualties of their own hopped-up bravado. ❧ —Rebecca Kessler Biro, P.A., C. Beckmann, and J.A. Stamps. 2010. Small within-day increases in temperature affects boldness and alters personality in coral reef fish. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 277:71-77.

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©Serhiygeol | Dreamstime.com

green products may actually make them less appealing to customers who crave prestige, the authors say. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

Forestry

Slow Burn Prescribed fires could lower carbon emissions in western U.S.

bigger and more severe in the western U.S., and the problem could get worse with global warming. In turn, these fires could exacerbate climate change by releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. A new study in Environmental Science & Technology proposes a seemingly counterintuitive solution to this problem: reduce forest fire emissions by lighting more fires. Prescribed fires, which are lit deliberately under controlled conditions, tend to be less intense and burn fewer live trees than true wildfires. Analyzing fire data from 2001 through 2008, the research team estimated that the western U.S. would emit 18 to 25 percent less carbon dioxide from fires if prescribed burning were performed. Five forest types showed potential emissions reductions of 52 to 68 percent. And many of these forested lands are managed by federal agencies, which the researchers say are better equipped than private landowners to carry out large prescribed burns. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

Wildfires have become

Wiedinmyer, C. and M.D. Hurteau. 2010. Prescribed fire as a means of reducing forest carbon emissions in the western United States. Environmental Science & Technology 44(6):1926–1932. DOI:10.1021/es902455e.

©U.S. Coast Guard

Medicine

Seeking Immunity When antibiotic resistance hops between species, a mild bug can become dangerous

to antibiotics are becoming disturbingly common in people. Even more worrisome, genes conferring this resistance are showing up in bacteria found in other animals. When resistant bacteria hop between species, that can increase the rate of evolution and turn a mildly resistant bug into a serious threat. This has left researchers wondering how resistant bacteria get into animals in the first place. One possibility is that genes for antibiotic resistance circulate naturally in wild populations. Another possibility: human antibiotic use has

Bacteria resistant

promoted the circulation of resistance genes to other species. Until recently, most studies looking at bacteria in such species have concentrated on domestic animals. But a research team led by Trine Glad and Monica Sundset at Norway’s University of Tromsø have now looked in the wild. In fact, they have gone just about as wild as possible, examining polar bears on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. They chose these bears because they neither interact with people nor prey on animals that spend time near humans. The team theorized that, if the circulation of genes for antibiotic resistance was a natural phenomenon, they would find these genes even in this isolated population. If it was not natural, they

reckoned, the bears would carry few, if any, bacteria with such resistance. To complete their analysis, they needed feces samples. Simply traveling to the icy plains of Svalbard, however, and searching for polar-bear droppings was not practical; such droppings might have become contaminated after they left the animal. Instead, the team searched for bears by helicopter and tranquilized each one they found with a dart. Once a bear went down, they landed and collected a sample directly from its rectum. The team tested the bacteria found in samples from ten bears for the presence of blaTEM genes, which encode resistance to common antibiotics. Cultures from the samples were grown on

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Mother and juvenile bottlenose dolphins ©NOAA

two sorts of media. One contained an antibiotic to which blaTEM confers resistance; the other, acting as a control, did not. The resulting colonies were then analyzed to determine which strain of bug they had grown from. The researchers report that they were able to isolate only four strains of bacteria carrying blaTEM genes. In previous work with bulls, horses, and domestic pets, an average of 13 strains of bacteria per species were found to be carrying blaTEM genes. In pigs, the number was 16. (In human hospital patients, it is a staggering 40.) The discovery that animals in pristine environments have few bacteria

Conservation Magazine

with resistance genes makes it likely that human antibiotic use is indeed the cause of much of the antibiotic resistance found in other species. Much, but perhaps not all. The bears are so isolated that Sundset doesn’t believe they could have picked up from people the resistant strains they do have. The only explanation she can offer is that the bears have a natural, if low, level of antibiotic resistance. ❧ Glad, T., et. al. 2010. Bacterial diversity in faeces from polar bear (Ursus maritimus) in Arctic Svalbard. BMC Microbiology 10:10 DOI:10.1186/1471-2180-10-10 ©2010 The Economist, (February 11, 2010). London.

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Marine

After the Storm Dolphin reproduction in Mississippi Sound spikes after Hurricane Katrina

the Gulf Coast in August 2005, wiping out commercial fishing boats and reducing recreational fishing. A new study has revealed that, while the storm was disastrous for Louisiana, its fallout may have encouraged more dolphins to reproduce. In the years since the storm struck, researchers have speculated that the enHurricane Katrina struck

—Roberta Kwok Miller, L.J. et al. 2010. Potential effects of a major hurricane on Atlantic bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) reproduction in the Mississippi Sound. Marine Mammal Science DOI:10.1111/j.17487692.2010.00371.x.

©Mehmet Salih Guler/iStock.com

suing downturn in fishing might have paved the way for Atlantic bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) to take advantage of increased fish populations. And dolphin calves may have died during the storm, causing female dolphins to become fertile the following season. To investigate these questions, a research team monitored Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in the Mississippi Sound for three years, scanning e a c h e n c oun tered group for calves. The average number of calves seen per kilometer traveled by the team more than quadrupled between the summers of 2005 and 2007, according to the study in Marine Mammal Science. While the proportion of calves to other dolphins was around one percent immediately before Katrina, it went up to about seven percent by spring 2007. The fishing reprieve may have given female dolphins more food to feast on, boosting their chances of successful reproduction, the authors say. And since dolphins can expend energy avoiding boats, the dip in recreational fishing might have allowed the animals to focus on hunting prey instead. ❧

This Week in Conservation Science your online guide to the best conservation research from over 50 journals 6 conservationmagazine.org

Cuisine

Sour Grapes Consumers have little thirst for green wine Many people are willing to pay more for products labeled with environmentally friendly terms such as “organic.” But that may not be the case for wine, researchers have found. In fact, consumers seem to value ecolabeled wines even less than other wines. A team discovered this trend while analyzing 13,426 California wines produced from 1998 through 2005. When grapes were certified for ecofriendly production, the resulting wines tended to receive higher quality ratings from the Wine Spectator and sold for 13 percent more. But the price increased only for wines whose green credentials weren’t advertised on the bottle. When vintners disclosed their green practices by putting ecolabels on the bottles, the price dropped by 20 percent.

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We Do the Legwork So You Don’t Have to

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Consumers may shy away from an “organic” label because they associate that term with lower-quality wine untreated with preservatives, the authors say in a paper published in Business & Society. The data, however, suggest that sustainable methods actually result in better wines. In other words, oenophiles who turn up their noses at “green” wine might be missing out. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Delmas, M.A. and L.E. Grant. 2010. Ecolabeling strategies and price-premium: The wine industry puzzle. Business & Society DOI:10.1177/0007650310362254.

Climate Change

High and Dry Redwoods suffer as fog lifts

known that coast redwoods rely on frequent baths of moist air—i.e., fog—to stay hydrated during dry summer months. Suspecting also that fog levels are changing, possibly due to climate change, they have struggled to monitor the historical variations. Now, James Johnstone and Todd Dawson of the University of

Researchers have long

Conservation Magazine

California, Berkeley, may have cracked the code—and possibly shed new light on the redwoods’ future—by using an unlikely data source: airport records. The researchers looked at data on the height of cloud ceilings at airports along the California and southern Oregon coasts. The records, which date back to 1951, show that the number of foggy summer days fluctuates widely from year to year, with an overall decline through the 1980s and 1990s. To determine fog frequency prior to 1951, the researchers looked at variations in the regional climate. In summers with extended periods of high pressure, temperatures in inland northern California soar while cool, moist air remains trapped at the coast. Fog frequency is closely correlated with this coastal-inland temperature contrast, allowing the researchers to infer fog levels by looking at historical temperature readings. While the number of foggy days has gone back up a bit in the past decade, Johnstone and Dawson conclude that California’s coastal fog has decreased by about 33 percent since the early twentieth century. So what does this mean for redwoods? The present distribution of the coast redwood falls within a band where fog frequency is 35 percent or higher, the researchers say. If the reported trends continue, fog incidence could soon drop well below that number, depriving redwoods of their primary mechanism for reducing water loss. ❧ —Scott Norris Johnstone, J. and T.E. Dawson. 2010. Climatic context and ecological implications of summer fog decline in the coast redwood region. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI:10.1073/ pnas.0915062107.

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Fisheries

In the Red Ecolabeling may not be worth it for Maine lobster fishery These days, many North American fisheries are scrambling to get their seafood certified as sustainable in hopes that the ecolabels will attract consumers. But this expensive practice might not pay off for Maine’s lobster fishery, researchers argue in Marine Policy. The Maine lobster industry has been suffering on multiple fronts. Prices have gone down as a result of the economic crisis, and restrictions on herring catch have driven up the cost of bait. If the fishery received sustainability certification from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), some believe, customers might be willing to pay more for its product. To find out whether the investment would be worth it, researchers surveyed 305 people in 42 states across the U.S. About one-third of respondents said that price was the factor most likely to affect their lobster purchases, while 27 percent chose freshness and 18 percent chose taste. In contrast, only one percent said that environmental damage or overfishing was the biggest consideration. People who say they will tolerate a higher price tag for sustainable products “may not actually do so in practice,” the authors write, citing two examples of MSC-labeled seafood that

failed in Europe. Instead of pursuing certification, they say, the fishery might lure more customers by emphasizing connections with local fishermen. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

©Günay Mutlu/iStock.com

Goyert, W., Sagarin, R., and J. Annala. 2010. The promise and pitfalls of Marine Stewardship Council certification: Maine lobster as a case study. Marine Policy DOI: 10.1016/j.marpol.2010.03.010.

Public Health

A Cadillac Health Plan Cutting carbon emissions could be a public health boon Scientists, economists, and politicians

have long debated the environmental benefits of reducing emissions, but they have paid far less attention to how many lives could be saved or improved by cutting carbon. A series of papers in the British medical journal The Lancet took on this question, showing that emissions cuts could be a boon to public health. Take India, where an estimated 826 million people cook their food and heat their homes by burning firewood, coal, or cow dung. According to one of the Lancet papers, Indian stoves make a huge contribution to air pollution and climate change. If 150 million of them were to be replaced with improved, low-emission stoves over the next decade, India’s greenhouse-gas emissions could be reduced by the equivalent of 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide during that period. Such large-scale stove replacement would prevent an estimated 2 million premature deaths from respiratory infections, heart disease, and other pollution-related health problems.

Indian stoves are only one example of the potential health benefits of emissions reductions. The Lancet series looked at specific economic sectors, including electricity generation, household energy use, urban transportation, and food and agriculture. Within each sector, the researchers used case studies from a high-income country and a low-income country to assess health effects. In the transportation sector, for example, researchers examined the potential impact of curtailing vehicle use and mandating loweremission vehicles and alternative fuels in London. They found that such measures could reduce heart disease by 10 to 19 percent and breast cancer by 12 to 13 percent—but only if Londoners sometimes substituted “active travel” for car travel. To achieve the health benefits, the city dwellers would have to walk more than twice as far as they now do and pedal eight times farther— amounts comparable to activity levels in cities such as Copenhagen and

Amsterdam. The London government would encourage this behavior by reshaping streets and sidewalks for pedestrians and cyclists and by adopting measures such as carbon rationing and parking restrictions for drivers. A similar impact would be seen in Delhi, India, where loweremission vehicles and increased walking and biking could reduce heart disease by up to 25 percent, diabetes by as much as 17 percent, and road-traffic injuries by 27 percent. With these results in mind, the papers make a strong case for looking beyond environmental benefits and aligning climate policies with health goals. ❧ —Dawn Stover Wilkinson, P. et al. 2009. Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: household energy. The Lancet 374(9705):1917-1929. Woodcock, J. et al. 2009. Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: Urban land transport. The Lancet 374(9705):1930-1943.

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â&#x20AC;˘ Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010

Feature

the

ne w

normal As though working through the five stages of grief, more and more ecologists are reluctantly accepting that we live in a human-dominated world. And some are discovering that patchwork ecosystems might even rival their pristine counterparts. in a T-shirt and floral-print shorts, is soaking up the diversity of the Hawaiian jungle. Above, a green canopy blocks out most of the sky. Aerial roots wend their way down past tropical trunks, tree ferns, and moss-covered prop roots to an understory of ferns and seedlings. The jungle is lush, humid, and thick with mosquitoes. It is also as cosmopolitan as London’s Heathrow airport. This forest on the Big Island features mango trees from India (Mangifera indica); Cecropia obtusifolia, a tree with huge, star-shaped leaves from Mexico, Central America, and Colombia; rose apples (Syzygium jambos) from southeast Asia; tasty strawberry guava (Psidium cattleianum) from the threatened Atlantic coast of Brazil; and a smattering of Queensland maples (Flindersia brayleyana) from Australia. It also has candlenuts (Aleurites moluccana), a species that humans have moved around so much that Joe Mascaro, a PhD student

its origins have become obscure. There is at least some native Hawaiian representation in the form of hala, or screwpine (Pandanus tectorius), which is pictured on the crest of Punahou School, where U.S. President Barack Obama studied. There are no Hawaiian birds here, though. Mascaro sees plenty of feral pigs, descendants of those brought by settlers from other parts of Polynesia or from farther afield. The soil is black and rich. Mascaro likes it here. Most ecologists and conservationists would describe this forest in scientific jargon as “degraded,” “heavily invaded,” or perhaps “anthropogenic.” Less formally, they might term it a “trash ecosystem.” After all, what is it but a bunch of weeds—dominated by aggressive invaders, almost all of them introduced by humans? It might as well be a city dump. A few ecologists, however, are taking a second look at such places, trying to see them

Illustration by Darryl Brown, courtesy of George Fox University

By Emma Marris

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without the common assumption that pristine ecosystems are good and anything else is bad. The nonjudgmental term for such a place is “novel ecosystem”—one that has been heavily influenced by humans but is not under human management. A working tree plantation doesn’t qualify; one abandoned decades ago would. A forest dominated by nonnative species, like Mascaro’s mango forest, counts—even if humans never cut it down, burned it, or even visited it. No one is sure how much of Earth is covered by novel ecosystems, but Erle Ellis, a map specialist at the University of Maryland, has taken a stab at quantifying it. Defining novel ecosystems as “lands without agricultural or urban use embedded within agricultural and urban regions,” Ellis estimates that at least 35 percent of the globe is covered with them. Their share of the planet will probably expand, and many ecologists think that these novel ecosystems are worthy of study and, in some cases, protection. For one thing, some novel ecosystems seem to provide a habitat for native species— sometimes crucial habitat, if all that the species originally had is gone. They also often do a good job of providing ecosystem services— those things nature does that benefit humanity, such as filtering water in wetlands, controlling erosion on hillsides, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, and building soil. Provision of ecosystem services is a popular argument for preserving intact ecosystems, but many preservation advocates blanch a little when it comes to making the same case for these “weedy” areas. Mascaro actually prefers novel ecosystems to some native ones that are so vulnerable to damage by humans that they require intense management to maintain their “pristine” state. He sees the latter as museum-piece parks. “Do we value the fact that nature contains a list of things that were there 1,000 years ago, or do we value it because it has its own processes that are not under human control?” Mascaro asks. For him, the value is in the processes. Watching such processes unfold has scientific merit to many researchers. Novel ecosystems are often ideal natural experiments for studying things such as community assembly—how species find their way to a place and which species 14

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become permanent residents—and evolution of species in response to one another. In essence, it takes a dynamic ecosystem to study ecosystem dynamics, and these novel ecosystems are the planet’s fastest movers. Mascaro bets that all the rules of thumb and general relationships developed over the years by ecologists working in “intact” or “historical” ecosystems will probably also apply in these new assemblages, but no one knows for sure—because no one has studied them much. There are some questions about the ways in which things might be different in novel ecosystems. Will landscape types remain the same, with forests replacing forests and grasslands replacing grasslands? Will novel ecosystems evolve faster? Will they be dominated by one species, as many who study invasive species fear? Will species composition oscillate wildly for decades or even longer? “We can’t know except to observe it,” says Mascaro.

ne of the first researchers to see the importance of the scrubby parts of Earth was Ariel Lugo, a forest-service ecologist in Puerto Rico. In 1979, Lugo was managing researchers who were measuring the ground covered by trees within pine plantations not being actively managed. His technicians came back to headquarters sweaty and discouraged. “They said that they couldn’t measure the trees without clearing all the new undergrowth,” says Lugo. “They said it was impenetrable. I thought they were wimps.” The idea that ecosystems dominated by pine, an invasive species, were so thick that his workers couldn’t even walk through them contradicted a central assumption of ecology: that native forests will be the most lush. Millennia of co-evolution should have created an ecosystem in which almost every niche is filled, converting the available energy into trees and other species in the most efficient way. Conservationists also generally assume that native ecosystems contribute best to ecosystem services. Lugo went to see for himself. Sure enough, the pine plantations were bursting with vigor, far more so than nearby native-only forests of

the same age. Lugo did a systematic study of the paper and now at the University of Western the pine plantations and some mahogany ones, Australia in Crawley. Some novel ecosystems, finding that the plantation understories were he says, are “alternative stable states,” relatively nearly as species-rich, had greater above-ground entrenched ecosystems that would be very difbiomass (the sheer weight of all the living ficult to drag back to historical conditions. things), and used nutrients more efficiently than Around the time the paper came out, the native forest understories. He submitted his Mascaro became interested in Lugo’s work results to Ecological Monographs. (1) Reviewers and set out to see whether his results could be were horrified. In the end, it took almost a de- replicated on the windward side of Hawaii’s Big cade to get the paper past peer review. Island. Were the many novel ecosystems on the Since then, Lugo has found many novel island nurturing any native species? Were they ecosystems in Puerto Rico and providing ecosystem services? elsewhere that are much more He studied 46 forests growing To think there is diverse than native forests but on lava flows of varying ages largely ignored by ecologists. at various altitudes and domisome kind of Garden-of“That diversity doesn’t count nated by a variety of species, Eden, pristine ecosystem because they are the wrong including albizia (Falcataria is just going to get us species,” says Lugo, shaking moluccana), a fast-growing his head. He’s found alien tree from southeast Asia, and nowhere. trees that, by creating a shaded Australian ironwood (Casucanopy on parched, degraded pasture, make arina equisetifolia). He found that, on average, possible the establishment of native trees that the forests had as many species as native forests. could never cope with such an environment on But by and large, they weren’t incubating natives their own. As a result, he now finds it difficult to as they seemed to in Puerto Rico. (3) despise invasive trees (as he thinks his colleagues Part of the reason for the difference may do), and he even embraces the change. “My lie in the uniqueness of Hawaiian flora, which parents and their parents saw one Puerto Rico,” evolved in isolation for up to 30 million years. he says, “and I am going to see another Puerto (4) Not many plants got to Hawaii in the first Rico, and my children will see another.” place, so competition and predation pressures Lugo wasn’t the only researcher thinking weren’t very fierce. Without having to worry along these lines, but it was not until 2006 that about being eaten by anything larger than an the new approach gained a manifesto—and a insect, raspberries and roses lost their thorns and name. Lugo and 17 other researchers published mints lost their minty defense chemicals. When a paper, “Novel ecosystems: theoretical and people introduced plants from other parts of the management aspects of the new ecological world world along with their attendant herbivores, order,” suggesting that such systems merited sci- Hawaiian plants couldn’t compete. entific attention. (2) To demonstrate the depth of resistance to the idea, the published paper quoted referees’ comments on the submitted ut Mascaro’s results didn’t put manuscript. “One reviewer commented that him off the novel-ecosystem the examples are ecological disasters, where concept. For one, he found biodiversity has been decimated and ecosystem that in many measures of functions are in tatters, and that ‘it is hard to forest productivity, such as make lemonade out of these lemons.’” But Lugo nutrient cycling and biomass, and his colleagues saw it in a different light: “We novel forests matched or outproduced the native are heading toward a situation where there are forests. They might not be natural in the eyes more lemons than lemonade,” they wrote, “and of purists, but they are behaving exactly as they we need to recognize this and determine what should. “These ecosystems, like it or not, are to do with the lemons.” going to be driving most of the natural processes Lemons can have their own value, says res- on Earth,” he said at the 2008 Ecological Society toration ecologist Richard Hobbs, lead author of of America meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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It’s a message that Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy in Seattle, Washington, wants to see move from the academic world to the world of conservation management. “You hear conservationists talk about what they want to save, what they want to stop,” he says. “They should talk about what they want the world to look like in 50 years.” Studies of novel ecosystems could help conservationists “face the facts and be strategic,” Kareiva says, rather than try to beat back the unceasing tide of change. Kareiva is a great fan of the ecosystemservices argument for preserving nature. But he admits that the problem of what to do when novel ecosystems provide better services than the native ones is “a question we don’t talk about that much.” Nevertheless, he is willing to imagine a world in which, for example, exotic strains of the reed Phragmites are allowed to thrive in U.S. wetlands because they provide a great habitat for birds—rather than be torn out in an expensive and potentially fruitless attempt to return native vegetation to dominance. Ecosystem-service arguments are powerful enough to get some ecologists to abandon, or at least put aside, their deep distrust of novel ecosystems. Like many of his peers, Shahid Naeem, an ecologist at Columbia University in New York, says he “would love to get rid of every invasive species on the planet and put all the native species back in their place.” Yet he’s willing to see what can be made of novel ecosystems because he feels an imperative to improve conditions for the billions of humans on Earth. The idea that novel ecosystems provide welcome diversity has also gained traction. Thinking on invasive species has mellowed significantly since the field was first established in the 1950s. Newer work by the likes of Mark Davis at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Dov Sax at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has shown that the vast majority of species that humans move around can slot into new ecosystems without driving anything else extinct—and that the common vision of invasive plants forming dense monocultural stands taking over everything else in their path is actually the exception. Yet the newcomers in novel systems can still be a genuine worry. 16

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Peter Vitousek, an expert on Hawaiian biodiversity at Stanford University in California, puts albizia forests into the category of dangerous invaders because they wipe out stands of ¯ the native ’ohi’a tree (Metrosideros polymorpha). He acknowledges the services that novel ecosystems provide, noting, “They may even support native biological diversity in some important circumstances.” But, he adds, “As with many good ideas, [tolerance of novel ecosystems] can be taken to an extreme at which it is no longer useful. I think most of the albizia-dominated stands of Hawaii represent that extreme.” His point is well illustrated where one of Mascaro’s ¯ albizia forests abuts a native ’ohi’a forest. The albizia trees on the boundary actually lean out ¯ toward the ’ohi’a—growing sideways to escape the shade of the adjacent row, encroaching on the natives’ sunlight, and looking poised to usurp them. It is a menacing spectacle and an apt symbol for their tireless expansion. Mascaro grants the point. “I can understand where a manager wants to bulldoze an albizia forest if they are worried that it is going to exterminate an ecosystem type that is the last on Earth,” he says. “If we want to debate whether to use or conserve novel ecosystems, we will always have to deal with the risk they pose to other systems. But at the moment, we’re scarcely debating it at all.” “If we want to debate whether to conserve novel ecosystems, we will have to deal with the risk they pose to other systems.”

ovel ecosystems are likely to cause at least some extinctions. For example, species that have evolved dependent relationships with other species are less likely to do well in a world in which the pot is stirred and everything is redistributed. Hawaiian honeycreepers, beautiful birds that often feed on only one type of flower, are not doing well; several are already extinct. So for those who care about slowing or stopping the rate of such extinctions, novel ecosystems are a net negative. James Gibbs, an ecologist at the State University of New York in Syracuse, subscribes to

this view. “I think celebrating [novel ecosystems] Indeed, the Garden-of-Eden view, in which as equivalent or improved is not appropriate.” As ecosystems are static, is no longer widely held. an example, he points to Clear Lake in Northern This means that novel ecosystems, far from California, where the number of fish species being a new phenomenon, simply represent has risen from 12 to 25 the latest changes on a since 1800. Sounds like dynamic Earth. Gradual Do we value the fact climatic changes and a success story. But, says Gibbs, species that had sheer randomness mean that nature contains a list been found only in that that some species wander of things that were there 1,000 lake were replaced with around continents over years ago, or do we value it fish that are common vast timescales, fleeing because it has its own elsewhere — so there was glaciers, splitting up, and a net loss in biodiversity. reforming. This is why processes that are not under A similar caveat may hold Davis and some others do human control? for the genetic diversity not like the “novel” label. hidden within a species. “Ecosystems are always Forests dominated by the offspring of a hand- new, from one year to the next,” says Davis. ful of exotic colonizers could be less genetically “Ecosystems are always encountering new diverse than forests that have sat there for thou- species—it might be not from another country sands of years. but from 100 meters upstream. Much more accurate would be to refer to these as ‘rapidly changing’ ecosystems—but I guess that is not n the end, the question of novel catchy enough.” Standing in his Hawaiian forest, Mascaro is ecosystems, like so many questions in ecology and conser- all too aware of change—and it is something he vation, boils down to what values, even if humans did have a hand in the should be valued most in nature. process. He never swore allegiance to preserving For people who value processes, such as Mas- ecosystems as they were before humans arrived, caro, novel ecosystems are great hubs of active as many conservationists of an older generation evolution. For those who value ecosystem did. “People come up to me and say, ‘It sounds services, any novel ecosystem could be better like you’ve given up,’” says Mascaro. “I want or worse than what came before, depending to say, ‘I never took up arms, my man.’ This on how it operates. For those who care about isn’t about conceding defeat; it is about a new global extinctions or about preserving histori- approach.” ❧ cal ecosystems, novel ecosystems are bad news. Gibbs says he values the exquisite complexity of ecosystems that have evolved together over Literature Cited thousands or millions of years. “Why are we 1. Lugo, Ariel E. 1992. Comparison of tropical tree plantations with secondary forests of similar age. worried about the extinction of languages, the Ecological Monographs 62(1):2-41. roots of music, all these weird cuisines?” he asks. “There is something about diversity and 2. Hobbs, R. J. et al. 2006. Novel ecosystems: Theoretical and management aspects of the new our need to steward it. It is the subtlety and the ecological world order. Global Ecology and Bionuance and complexity that makes life interestgeography 15(1):1-7. ing.” Novel ecosystems seem, to him, to lack 3. Mascaro, J., et al. 2008. Limited native plant regeneration in novel, exotic-dominated forests this value, to be artificial, “sort of like eating at on Hawai’i. Forest Ecology and Management. McDonald’s.” 256(4):593–606 To Kareiva, though, that attitude is “one 4. Ziegler, A. 2002. Hawaiian Natural History, Ecolof the reasons the conservation movement is ogy, and Evolution, University of Hawai’i Press. failing. To think there is some kind of Gardenof-Eden, pristine ecosystem . . . There is none! Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature 460(7254):450-3. 2009. That view is just going to get us nowhere.”

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Emma Marris is a freelance writer based in Columbia, Missouri. She regularly contributes to Nature and is finishing a book, to be published by Bloomsbury USA, about rewilding, assisted migration, and other cutting-edge conservation measures.

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Feature

Building on the By Philip Ball

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Could the bizarre, decentralized logic of insect architecture provide a blueprint for revolutionary and sustainable human habitat? lies a city that is a model of sustainable development. Its buttressed towers are built entirely from natural, biodegradable materials. Its inhabitants live and work in quarters that are air-conditioned and humidity-regulated without consuming a single watt of electricity. Water comes from wells that dip deep into the earth, and food is cultivated self-sufficiently in gardens within its walls. This metropolis is not just ecofriendly; with its curved walls and graceful arches, it is rather beautiful, too. This is no human city, of course. It is a termite mound. Unlike termites and other nest-building insects, we humans pay little attention to making buildings fit for their environments. “We can develop absurd architectural ideas without the punishment of natural selection,” says architect Juhani Pallasmaa of the Helsinki University of Technology. As we wake up to climate change and resource depletion, though, interest in how insects manage their built environments is reawakening. “The building mechanisms and the design principles that make the properties of insect nests possible aren’t well understood,” says Guy Théraulaz of the CNRS Research Center on Animal Cognition in Toulouse, France. That’s not for want of trying. Research into termite mounds kicked off in the 1960s, when Swiss entomologist Martin Lüscher made trailblazing studies of nests created by termites of the genus Macrotermes on the plains of southern Africa. It was he who suggested the chaoticlooking mounds were in fact exquisitely engineered ecoconstructions. Specifically, he proposed an intimate connection between how the mounds are built and what the termites eat. Macrotermes species live on cellulose, a constituent of plant matter that humans can’t digest. In fact, neither can termites. They get around this by cultivating gardens of fungi that turn wood into digestible nutrients. These fungus gardens must be well-ventilated and their temperature and humidity closely controlled—no mean feat in the tropical climates in which termites live. In Lüscher’s picture, heat from the fungi’s metabo-

In the heart of Africa’s savanna

fly Insect sculpture ©Chris Goodwin

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lism and the termites’ bodies causes stagnant air laden with carbon dioxide to rise up a central chimney. From there, it fans out through the porous walls of the mound while new air is sucked in at the base.

All Design is Local Termites of the African species Macrotermes bellicosus have developed two very different strategies to optimize mound ventilation to local weather conditions. On the hot, dry savannas of eastern and western Africa, their mounds are many-spired “cathedrals.” According to biologist Judith Korb of the University of Osnabrück, Germany, this is one instance where heat gradients drive currents of air circulation that sink through the nest and rise in the walls during the day. This circulation gets more-or-less switched off at night, when the temperature gradients disappear or reverse, thus avoiding heat loss and keeping the nest at a roughly constant temperature. In the cooler forests of northern Ivory Coast, though, the same species builds simpler, dome-shaped mounds in which buoyant warm air rises up through the nest and escapes through small holes in the walls. This design seems to trap more heat by limiting outward airflow, ensuring that the fungus gardens that provide the termites’ food are kept at an optimal temperature. Thousands of miles away, another species of termite has developed an innovative way of making sure it gets the most out of the sun. The magnetic termite Amitermes meridionalis of Australia uses Earth’s magnetic field to build mounds elongated in a northsouth direction. The broad eastern and western faces soak up the weaker rays of the morning and evening sun, while a relatively narrow surface is subjected to the fierce glare of the midday sun— helping to keep the temperature relatively constant. All termite mounds, Korb says, seem designed to produce homeostatic conditions in which the inner environment remains as constant as possible. The very different environments in which termites thrive show how successful they are. ❧

Photos courtesy of Judith Korb

Amitermes meridionalis termite mound in northern Australia

Macrotermes bellicosus termite mound in the savanna in northern Benin

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was this idea that it spawned at least one artificial imitation: the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, designed by architect Mick Pearce. Opened in 1996, it boasts a termite-inspired ventilation and cooling system. Or at least it was thought to. It turns out, however, that few—if any—termite mounds work this way. Keeping the temperature and humidity within termite mounds constant while at the same time getting rid of CO2 demands a very efficient process of gas exchange. A typical mound with about 2 million inhabitants needs to “breathe” about 1,000 liters of fresh air each day. To investigate further what might drive such an exchange, Scott Turner, termite expert at The State University of New York in Syracuse, and Rupert Soar of Freeform Engineering in Nottingham, U.K., looked into the design principles of Macrotermes mounds in Namibia. They found that the mounds’ walls are warmer than the central nest, which rules out the kind of buoyant outward flow of CO2-rich air proposed by Lüscher. Indeed, injecting a tracer gas into the mound showed little evidence of steady, convective air circulation. Turner and Soar believe that termite mounds instead tap turbulence in the gusts of wind that hit them. A single breath of wind contains small eddies and currents that vary in speed and direction, with different frequencies. The outer walls of the mounds are built to allow only those eddies changing with low frequencies to penetrate deep within them. As the range of frequencies in the wind changes from gust to gust, the boundary between the stale air in the nest and the fresh air from outside moves about within the mounds’ walls, allowing the two bodies of air to be exchanged. In essence, the mound functions as a giant lung. This is very different from the way ventilation works in modern human buildings. Here, fresh air is blown in through vents to flush stale So simple and appealing

Exoskeletal Skyscraper Designed for the city of Cheongna in South Korea, this 400-meter tower is another example of how ecological thinking is beginning to reshape architecture. Instead of revolving around a central core, the tower is supported by a steel exoskeleton similar to the inside of a turtle shell— the skeleton’s spines vary in depth, width, and rotation depending on the vertical and lateral forces. The tower was designed by Los Angeles-based Emergent Architecture, which patterns its projects after biological ideas and processes.

©Emergent Architecture, www.emergentarchitecture.com

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air out. Turner thinks there is something to be gleaned from the termites’ approach. “We could turn the whole idea of the wall on its head,” he says. We should not think of walls as barriers to stop the outside from getting in but rather design them as adaptive, porous interfaces that regulate the exchange of heat and air between the inside and outside. “Instead of opening a window to let fresh air in, it would be the wall that does it, but carefully filtered and managed the way termite mounds do it,” he says. Turner’s ideas were among many discussed at a workshop on insect architecture organized by Théraulaz in Italy last year. It aimed to pool understanding from a range of disciplines, from experts in insect behavior to practicing architects. “Some real points of contact began to emerge,” says Turner. “There was a prevailing idea among the biologists that architects could learn much from us. I think the opposite is also true.”

ently colored paper to the wasps for each stage of nest-building. This showed that the wasps observe general construction rules based on the configuration of neighboring cells. “For example, they prefer to add cells to a corner area rather than starting a new row,” Théraulaz says. No individual wasp has any idea what the final structure will be, yet by following a simple set of rules—rules that evolution has determined maximize the insects’ chances for survival—the constructions they arrive at are sound. Termites ensure a similarly successful outcome by using chemical signals called pheromones. As the nest-builders chew soil pellets into a cement-like paste, their saliva adds a chemical which, for just a few minutes, can be “smelled” by other builders over a distance of a centimeter or so. This sets up a positive feedback: the more a pillar is augmented, the stronger a pheromone source it becomes, causing the termites to add even more material. Such approaches are anathema to human ideas of design and control, in which a central One theme was the proficiency of termites in adapting their buildings to local conditions. blueprint is laid down in advance by an archiTermites in very hot climates, for example, em- tect and rigidly adhered to. But Turner thinks we could find ourselves adopting a bed their mounds deep into the vast more insect-like approach as techheat sink of the soil—a hugely effecnological advances make it feasible. tive way of regulating temperature. More Online Other species maintain humidity by See more amazing nature- “There’s a huge opportunity for robotics to build systems of agents depositing a slurry of chewed wood based architecture at: conservationmagazine.org linked by a distributed intelligence and grass at the base of the mound. that can remodel a building’s strucThis acts like a giant sponge which, with a capacity of up to 80 liters, can supply or ture as conditions change,” he says. That might absorb water to counteract any humidity fluc- sound fanciful, but really it is just a return to tuations within the nest. Such a trick could be the old human practices of organic building mimicked using water tanks positioned in the and settlement design—in which additions and bowels of a building to restore humidity in hot, alterations were made piecemeal over time in dry climates. “As we come to understand more, response to what went before. Termites face many of the same challenges it opens up a vast universe of new bio-inspired we do in our built environments, and they design principles,” says Turner. Tips might also be gleaned from the con- meet them more efficiently and sustainably. “A struction processes that insects employ. Some mound is in many ways as alive as the termites of the most thoroughly studied nest-building that build it,” says Turner. Human buildings insects are paper wasps, named after the fibrous could soon come to life, too. ❧ material they use to make their combs. These consist of arrangements of tubular cells with hexagonal cross-sections; and while the designs Philip Ball is a freelance writer who has written more than a dozen science books, including Critical Mass, are astonishingly diverse, they are by no means which won the 2005 Aventis Prize. A former editor at random. Nature, he contributes regularly to its online news site. To find out how the combs are made, Théraulaz and his colleagues supplied differ- © 2010 New Scientist (February 22, 2010) 22

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Waiting In the Wings Patterned after the structure of dragonfly wings, this tower was designed by Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut to bring large-scale, sustainable food production into the heart of New York City. It positions housing, offices, and scientific laboratories around a vast, indoor farm that includes everything from poultry farms to organic vegetable crops. The tower is intended to be entirely self-sufficient; its exostructure would trap warm air in winter, and the building would use the crops’ evapotranspiration to keep it cool during the summer. To meet its energy needs, the tower’s south prow forms an enormous solar shield, while its northern edge houses three windmills oriented toward the prevailing winds.

©Vincent Callebaut Architectures, www.vincent.callebaut.org

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Lighten Up

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Cartoons by Pete Mueller © Pete Mueller www.psmueller.com

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Y A W A UP UPdeleAineND Nash

Illustration ©Steve Dininno

By J. Ma

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r alpine and othe As pikas red by re pressu species a any arming, m global w y will warn the observers and d higher be pushe nish til they va higher un ls into rving sou like dese science But new the ether. re the “raptu suggests tell ’t s” doesn hypothesi story. the whole

Feature The cartoon version of how climate

change will affect mountain ecosystems goes like this. Plants and animals will try to escape rising temperatures by retreating upward until they can go no further. Then, like deserving souls transported to heaven, they will vanish into the ether. Tongue in cheek, one ecologist has labeled it “the rapture hypothesis.” And one of its main corollaries holds that the organisms to disappear first will be those that live on or near mountaintops. Chief among these is the American pika (Ochotona princeps), the fur-ball cousin of rabbits and hares that has recently morphed into a poster child for global warming. So three summers ago, when U.S. Forest Service ecologist Connie Millar was hiking along the edges of a high meadow in the Sierra Nevada, looking for signs of pikas, she didn’t know what to expect. And initially, she says, her quarry did prove elusive. Then her husband Jeff pointed to a scattering of telltale pellets. “Is that what you’re looking for?” he asked. The next day, in the shadow of 3,981-meter-high Mount Dana, the spunky, ginger-haired scientist parked herself on a talus slope to wait out a thunderstorm. There, sheltered from lightning that

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danced on snow-streaked peaks, she heard the pika’s staccato chirps and logged nearly a dozen sightings. Those Mount Dana sightings marked the start of a multiyear quest that sent Millar chasing pikas across 11 mountain ranges in California and adjacent Oregon and Nevada. To her surprise, American pikas proved to be not rare but common. She and colleague Robert Westfall found pikas living amid all sorts of craggy landforms: talus fields, lava flows, cliff faces, even man-made piles of rubble such as mine tailings and stone walls. “Once we started to look,” Millar says, “we found pikas nearly everywhere.” In fact, the more ground Millar covered and the more pellets and pika calls she counted, the more resourceful and resilient these fistsized creatures began to seem. Contrary to ingrained belief, says Millar, pikas continue to occupy a remarkably broad elevational band—broader than that of any of the pine trees she has spent most of her career studying. In the Sierras, she says, pikas can currently be found as high as 3,887 meters and as low as 1,827 meters—lower than the lowest pika population in the historical record. So is the rapture hypothesis mere fiction? Not by a long shot. Like most generalizations, it contains more than a snippet of truth. As a rule, lower altitudes are warmer than those above. Moreover, pikas aren’t home free with regard to global warming. Data collected by wildlife biologist Erik Beever over the past 15 years strongly suggests that climate change has begun stressing pikas in the harsh interior of the Great Basin. Nine of 25 known populations have vanished within living memory. As many see it, these declines foreshadow the fate of pikas across the American West. At present, this gloomy prognosis commands widespread acceptance. Models lend

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it further credence. Scott Loarie, a researcher in the Global Ecology Department of the Carnegie Institution for Science, projects that if greenhouse-gas emissions are not swiftly curtailed, American pikas could disappear from half their current range by the end of this century. No wonder it’s so hard to find a popular article about the impacts of climate change that

fails to mention pikas and their plight. And yet here comes Millar, seemingly out of the blue, saying in effect: Wait a minute. It’s more complicated than that and also considerably more interesting. Millar, as she will cheerfully tell you, is not a pika expert, though she has learned quite a bit about pika biology and behavior. Her strong suit rather is her deep knowledge of mountain ecosystems. Working out of the Forest Service’s Sierra Nevada Research Center in Albany, California, she has progressively widened the scope of her investigations, starting out as a geneticist interested in the evolution of conifers and then moving into paleoecology. Among the many hats she wears is that of cofounder of the Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains. In vertiginous terrain, she often observes, the interactions between climate and biology can be almost unimaginably complex. Climate models, for example, suggest that the world’s

mountains—the Alps, the Andes, the Sierras, the Himalayas—should be strongly warming. But when one looks at the actual temperature data, the picture becomes a great deal messier. Recently, for example, Jessica Lundquist, a hydrologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Nicholas Pepin, a climatologist at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K.,

with height. In Yosemite National Park, for example, the Tuolumne Meadows campground, at around 2,600 meters, is consistently colder than the slopes that rise steeply above it. “We call it cold-air pooling,” says Lundquist. “It occurs anywhere there’s a depression, a spot that’s lower than the surrounding terrain.” Cold-air pooling typically occurs at night, when surfaces

American pika (Ochotona princeps) ©Sally King/NPS

examined temperature records from 1,000 weather stations in mountainous regions around the world. While a subset of the stations (including those on or near summits) recorded a globally consistent trend, others (notably those in valleys) did not. When stirred all together and plotted on a graph, the readings resembled the splatter on a painter’s drop cloth. The explanation lies in topography. Changes in aspect, for example, are powerful modulators of climate. In spring, south-facing slopes warm before north-facing slopes, and plants start greening up weeks earlier. On the other hand, because they are sunnier, southfacing slopes tend to dry earlier. East- and west-facing slopes vary greatly in the amount of precipitation they receive and in their exposure to wind. Wind can affect both temperature and humidity. It can also move snow around, removing it from one place and depositing it in another. Elevation is another critical variable, but not because temperature necessarily drops

re-radiate the heat they’ve absorbed during the day. As this warm air rises, it is replaced by cooler, denser air flowing downhill and often triggering condensation. Another insight into alpine microclimates comes from botanists Christian Körner and Daniel Scherrer at the University of Basel. Starting in the summer of 2007, they deployed an infrared camera to scan soil temperatures at six sites, including Switzerland’s 2,431-meterhigh Furka Pass. As an additional check, they buried temperature sensors in the ground. Both the surface and the root zone, they found, can be best described as a thermal mosaic. As expected, air temperatures did cool with height, but that difference was swamped by even larger variations that occurred at plant level within the same elevational band. Rugged landscapes, it turns out, are rife with places that are sunnier and shadier or drier and wetter on virtually every spatial scale. The implication? Plants and animals might not need to move upslope to escape adverse conditions

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but instead may find the right “thermal niche” pikas showed an overwhelming preference for living in or near ice-sculpted landforms, notably by shifting downslope or even sideways. An example Millar likes to cite comes rock glaciers and boulder streams. In fact, 80 percent of the nearly 400 from 3,425-meter-high sites where researchers Mount Grant, the highfound pikas—or their est point in west-cenAs the greenhouse recent signs—could be tral Nevada’s Wassuck juggernaut bears down, associated with these Range. There, the upper features. It’s not the prestree line presently conthe individual components of ence of ice that seems sists of a sparse growth to matter. It’s more that of limber pines, which present-day ecosystems will associated geophysical are confined to northlikely unravel like threads in a processes—think freezeand northeast-facing thaw and downslope slopes. But it wasn’t altapestry, then come together creep—have constructed ways that way. By dating the equivalent of an airthe dead wood found on to create new designs. conditioned house. other exposures, Millar In summer, explains has been able to reconWestern Washington struct a long-term picture. Over the past 3,600 years, she says, these University geologist Douglas Clark, chilly hardy, long-lived trees have hopscotched their nighttime air sinks into the spaces between the rocks and is trapped by warmer daytime air way around the mountain. from above. In the Sierra Nevada, Millar and For American pikas, the dance with climate Westfall found that summer temperatures in the started during the Pleistocene, some time after talus were 4 to 7 degrees Celsius colder than at their Asian ancestors scampered across the the surface; in Great Basin ranges, the average Bering land bridge. And it has never stopped. difference worked out to 6 degrees Celsius. Provided they can escape from the heat, During the last glacial maximum, fossil evidence suggests, American pikas inhabited lower pikas can handle some rather surprising envielevations than they do today. But as the great ronments. At Idaho’s Craters of the Moon, for ice sheets melted, pika habitat progressively example, exposed rocks sizzle in the summer sun. Yet beneath the surface, pikas have set up retracted upslope. Pikas, it is often said, are cold-adapted house in a honeycomb of lava tubes. Since 1969, creatures, better at retaining heat than shedding Arizona State University conservation biologist it. In addition to thick fur, they have high basal Andrew Smith has studied the pikas that hang metabolisms and body temperatures that hover out in the mine tailings of California’s Bodie just a few degrees shy of lethal. Confined to a Hills, near the Nevada border. The elevation cage on the surface, pikas quickly overheat and at this former Gold Rush site, he notes, starts die, even at comparatively balmy temperatures around 2,600 meters, which makes it “low and of around 25 degrees Celsius. As the owner of six hot for pikas”—especially in August, when rabbits, Millar is familiar with this idiosyncrasy maximum daily air temperatures hit 30 degrees of the lagomorph clan. On warm days, she says, Celsius. “But pikas are smart,” Smith observes. she helps her pets cope by wetting down flag- “If it’s hot, they’re not active on the surface between ten in the morning and four in the stones on which they can comfortably cool. In the wild, though, pikas are not as fool- afternoon, and they’re also active at night.” Among scientists who study pikas, a conish as mad dogs and Englishmen. In the ranges sensus appears to be building that acute heat Millar and Westfall surveyed, for example,

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Robert Westfall and Connie Millar on White Mountain. Photo by Jim Bishop

stress is probably not that important. Changes in other climatological parameters, such as snow line, are emerging as potentially more critical. Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of our warming world that these hardy herbivores, superbly tuned to Ice Age conditions, may now be in danger of freezing. “Pikas can get into the talus to escape from extreme summer heat,” observes Chris Ray, a researcher in the University of Colorado’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “But without an insulating blanket of snow, they can’t escape from winter cold.” Ray, in fact, thinks that the danger to pikas may currently be greatest at mid-elevations—where summer heat is curtailing their ability to forage while a rising snow line exposes them to sub-zero temperatures in winter. Even pikas living in the far north may not be safe, says David Hik, an ecologist at the

University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Hik studies collared pikas, close relatives of American pikas, in the Yukon’s Ruby Range. There, in 1999 and 2000, two exceptionally warm winters turned snow to rain, which then turned to ice. In response, the pika population at one of his study sites crashed by 80 percent. The population has since recovered, but many— including Hik—view the sudden collapse as a cautionary tale. In the Sierra, warmer winters that produce rain instead of snow are projected to become more common. really does seem to be simultaneously half empty and half full, and the same could be said for myriad other species. For as the greenhouse juggernaut bears down, the individual components of presentday ecosystems will likely unravel like threads in a tapestry, then come together to create new

At present, the pika’s cup

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designs. Some organisms will explode in number. Others will dwindle to a precious few. But in the mountains, even these stand a chance of finding some sanctuary where they can hunker down until climate—from their perspective— improves. At least for a while. As time passes, the capacity of mountains to serve as biodiversity arks will be severely strained, says Daniel Fagre, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center. “Because of their geomorphological heterogeneity, mountains do offer many more options for survival than more homogeneous landscapes. But we also can’t ignore the fact that the mountains, too, are changing.” Millar would not disagree. For despite her seemingly contrarian position on pikas, she is no Pollyanna when it comes to global warming. Over the long sweep of time, she says, “climate change has sent species migrating up and down ranges, expanding across basins or contracting into fragmented populations.” And today, she says, the impacts are likely to be all the greater— due both to the accelerating speed of change and to a witch’s brew of other factors introduced by humans, ranging from the alteration of fire and grazing regimes to the spread of exotic pests. These days, when she talks to those in charge of public lands, Millar whips out a palette of suggestions to ensure that as many species as possible make it into the next century. In some cases, such as an invasive plant creeping upslope, the best course of action might be to fight the incursion. In others, Millar envisions building resilience into important biomes— perhaps thinning overly dense forests to decrease the threat posed by fire and disease. The goal, she says, is to develop a policy of “no regrets,” meaning that responses should not be driven by any particular climate scenario but rather seem reasonable regardless of what happens. Millar has even thought about what might be done to help pikas navigate the treacherous times ahead. For example, she says, to ensure that core populations of pikas remain viable, managers of national parks and forests could consider erecting rocky corridors between talus slopes that lie perhaps a few kilometers apart on opposite sides of a mountain meadow. It would be a form of assisted migration, to be 32

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sure, but one with the advantage of being locally focused and allowing the pikas to decide whether to move. But before trying to combat or mitigate the impacts of climate change, scientists caution, it is first essential to understand at a much deeper level the changes underway. It’s not enough to check for the presence and absence of pikas and other creatures, says Robert Klinger, a U.S. Geological Survey ecologist based in Bishop, California. “We need to know the reasons why certain populations are blinking out, and why others are persisting.” Looking for answers, Millar buried over a hundred temperature-data loggers at four pikaoccupied talus slopes last year and then left them to overwinter. As always, she is anticipating surprises. In February, she drove to California’s Mono Lake area, clipped on a pair of skis, and glided six miles over crusty snow past majestic stands of lodgepole pines to check on her sites. When she arrived at the first talus slope, she was startled—and a little alarmed—to find a big expanse of bare rocks. But suddenly, she broke into a grin. For just then she noticed snow draped across the bottom of the slope—right where the resident pikas like to stash their food. ❧

J. Madeleine Nash is a science writer based in San Francisco, California. Her articles have appeared in TIME, Smithsonian, The New York Times, and High Country News. Further Reading: Beever, E.A. et al. 2010. Testing alternative models of climate-mediated extirpations. Ecological Applications 20(1):164-178. Millar, C.I. and R.D. Westfall. 2010. Distribution and climatic relationships of the American pika (Ochotona princeps) in the Sierra Nevada and Western Great Basin, U.S.A.; Periglacial landforms as refugia in warming climates. Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, 42(1):76-88. Pepin, N.C., and J.D. Lundquist. 2008. Temperature trends at high elevations: Patterns across the globe. Geophysical Research Letters, 35, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034026. Scherrer, D. and C. Körner. 2009. Infra-red thermometry of alpine landscapes challenges climatic warming projections. Global Change Biology, DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.02122.x

Essay

©George Grie

The Known World

We see only as far as our tools allow us. The rest is dark and full of possibility. By Rob Dunn of the Amazon as a medical anthropologist. I was baggage. We flew on a small plane to a faraway place where we did not speak the local language, did not know the customs, and more often than not, did not entirely recognize the food. We were often the only ones fully clothed. We were the only ones who did not

My wife was in the middle

sleep in a handmade hammock. We were the only ones who complained about the bugs. We could not have felt more foreign. We were Westerners raised on books and computers, highways and cell phones, living in a village without running water or electricity. There was also the small matter, parenthetically,

that everyone in town believed that we were a “commission” sent to lead an indigenous revolution against the navy. It was easy to go to sleep at the end of the day feeling a little misunderstood. Then one perfect Amazonian evening, with macaws hanging in midair and monkeys calling from beyond the village green, we played soccer. I am

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not good at soccer, but that evening it was wonderful. Everyone knew the rules. We all spoke the same language of passes and shots. We understood one another perfectly. It seemed like a transcendent moment. I was, as the photos show, smiling widely. As darkness came over the field and the match ended, the goalie, Juan, walked over to me and, leaning in, said in a matter-of-fact way,

that way. Yet, as I thought about Juan’s question, I was not sure how much more we could really rule out. I am, in part, an ant biologist, so my thoughts turned to what we know about insect life and I knew that much in the world of insects remains unknown. How much, though? How ignorant are we? The question of what we know and do not know clung to me.

since we began to name those species in the communities beyond our own, we began to believe ourselves close to finding everything. Yet every time we have come close to knowing all the species or even all the kinds of life, some new realm has been discovered. Ironically, discovering so much more about our biological world seems only to affirm our own ignorance. The discoveries

Everyone in town believed that we were a “commission” sent to lead an indigenous revolution against the navy. It was easy to go to sleep at the end of the day feeling a little misunderstood. “In your home, do you have a moon too?” So much for transcendence. After I explained to Juan that yes, we did have a moon and yes, it was remarkably similar to his, I felt a sort of awe at the possibilities that existed in his world. In Juan’s world, each village could have its own moon. In Juan’s world, the unknown and undiscovered was immense and marvelous. The known was a small field in the jungle, the local trees, some bugs, and a livelihood. Juan knew his daily life, and all the rest was conjecture. He had never seen the Andes Mountains, which begin their rise into the clouds just twenty miles south of Juan’s home, just beyond the distance Juan could run. Anything was possible. In Western society, we know that Earth has only one moon. We have looked at our planet from every angle and found all of the wildest things left to find. I can, from my computer at home, pull up satellite images of Juan’s village. There are no more continents and no more moons to search for, little left to discover. At least it seems

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In the last three hundred years, the Western view of the world has changed in many ways. The big discovery is that life is more diverse and less like us than we had imagined. This discovery might be called Leeuwenhoek’s revolution. Copernicus banished man to the edge of the universe. A few centuries of biological discovery have pushed us to the edge of life. The rest of life does not revolve around us, nor is it like us. Yet, in our daily lives we remain central. The astrobiologists, when they get together, talk not about the universe but about each other. We cannot, without repeated reminders to wake up and pay attention, live any other way. Most days you do not look at the stars, and in the same vein it is all too easy to ignore the other life we pass by. The species on our bodies are small, and the crust of the Earth is so far away. Because we focus on just those species like us and around us, it makes it easy to imagine we are close to finding every domain of life, or even every species. There is nowhere to hide a new monkey, the logic goes, and so ever

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will continue, I suspect, unabated. As Carl Woese said in a recent interview, “the depths of biology have yet to be plumbed.” From an evolutionary perspective, the idea that we have not yet figured everything out should not be so surprising. As the tree of life gets bigger and our place in that tree gets smaller, the tree becomes filled with more species, each of them building a simple vision of what the world looks like. Biologists like to map the traits of species onto evolution’s trees. Perhaps now we could map some measure of the awareness each species has of its world. The microbes would understand gradients, measures of the concentrations of nutrients, light and dark. The plants, too, respond to such gradients. They sense each other, feel herbivores on their leaves and fungi on their roots, and measure the sun. The insects check the interstices, the holes and small things we miss. They see the quick movement in the litter. Their world is smaller than our world, more representative of the average way that Earth is experienced.

Then there are the vertebrates, whose view of the world comes nearer to ours. Closest to us we have the chimpanzees, or more generally the great apes. Their view of the world is simpler than ours (no atoms or quarks, no black holes or planetary orbits), but still relatively complex. It would be tempting to look at the chimpanzees and laugh a bit at how little of the world they do understand, but it is also worth remembering the years that separate us. We were, a million years ago, not yet human and not yet uttering words. A few hundred years ago, the sun still revolved around the Earth. We have, in just a few hundred of the four billion years of life on Earth, derived our entire understanding of the world. We seem to expect too much: to understand everything today, to be as knowledgeable now as one could ever be. I am not arguing that we should slow down our search to know everything. I am simply arguing that we ought to be more humble in that endeavor. We ought to leave enough room for awe at what is still possible. After all, a great deal is still possible and will yet be discovered. There are questions we will not answer for a thousand years. There are probably questions we may never answer. As scientists, we are perpetually willing to shine our lights around us, see nothing, and conclude that there is nothing left to see. Our lights are weak, the universe large. Look out just beyond what we know and you will see some movement, some sign of something else just beyond what is visible. Just what is out there, I cannot tell, but I am sure as hell swinging my light, looking and smiling at the raw possibility of what might leap out and catch us by surprise. We have many questions yet to resolve: When, and how many times, did

life evolve on Earth? Did life first evolve on Earth? Has it evolved elsewhere? What are the hottest, coldest, or most extreme conditions where life can live? Is there life in the magma at the center of the Earth (or even: Is there magma at the center of the Earth)? What are the smallest species? Is there a limit to how big species can be? Can life evolve without DNA? Does such life already exist on Earth? Do bacteria make oil and coal? Which kinds of species (bacteria, archaea, vertebrates, plants?) represent the majority of the weight of life on Earth? Do the species on Earth account for all of life in the universe? Is Earth just one of a million planets with life? Do species disperse from Earth to other planets? Not one of these questions is ridiculous, and not one of them is even close to being answered. We just do not know. Furthermore, the biggest discoveries usually seem to result from answering questions we do not yet know are interesting. We cannot even see well what we need to ask. We are still in an orchard of species in which we wander about discovering things. We still see only as far as our lamps, our tools, our means of extending our humble senses, allow us to see. The rest is dark and full of possibility, full of sounds we cannot yet decipher and movement we do not yet understand. In the end, what differentiates us from Juan, the indigenous man in the middle of a Bolivian forest who looked at me and asked if we, too, have a moon, is just that he knew it was not outrageous to ask.❧ From: Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys by Rob R. Dunn. Copyright ©2009 by Rob R. Dunn. Reprinted by arrangement with Smithsonian Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

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Beetle Mania A scientist, a pool hustler, and an avant-garde composer fight a fearsome insect invasion One sticky afternoon last summer, Richard Hofstetter, a beetle expert at Northern Arizona University, picked his way through yellow-green grass on the slopes of Humphreys Peak. Looking up the mountain, he could see the skeletal frames of dead trees amid evergreen forest. The ground was a mess of lifeless branches—about half the conifers were dead or dying. Entering a stand, Hofstetter cut a neat rectangle into a fallen tree and peeled back the bark. Spruce ips, a species of bark beetle, had carved a delta of channels into the underside to feed off the tree’s sap. When enough beetles take up residence, the host tree is overwhelmed and dies. Due to recent droughts, which weaken the trees, and mild winters, which bark beetles prefer, western forests covering an area the size of Maine are under invasion. In the worst-hit regions, such as Colorado and British Columbia, entire forests could be reduced to grassland—victims of the largest insect infestations ever to strike North America. Hofstetter and his colleagues believe they may have found a way to halt this plague: by

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driving the insects crazy. For years, entomologists have studied the chemicals released by beetles for mating and communicating, hoping that they could be manipulated as a deterrent or used for control. This approach has had limited success. But in early 2005, Hofstetter met Reagan McGuire, a former truck driver and pool hustler who had quit his job and enrolled at NAU. McGuire had been thinking a lot about the bark-beetle epidemic, and he came up with a novel idea: perhaps a military crowd-control device he had read about, which emits powerful pulses of sound, could be used to kill the insects. Most scientists would have politely ushered him away, and Hofstetter admits he was hesitant. But McGuire convinced the entomologist that the idea might have merit, and the two started to collaborate. The military technology, it turned out, didn’t have much practical application. But a little Googling on the subject of beetles and acoustics led the two to David Dunn, an avant-garde composer and collector of animal sounds. Dunn had inserted microphones into the pinyon pines surrounding his home

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in Santa Fe and recorded a CD of the noises they captured. Amid the gurgling of pine sap and slow flexing of the trees can be heard a stream of chirps: the calls of pinyon engraver beetles. The recording marked a turning point for Hofstetter. He and his colleagues had been so focused on finding a chemical deterrent that they hadn’t given much thought to exploiting the beetles’ acoustic abilities. Yet Dunn had captured what sounded like a complex communication system. Somewhere in that entomological language, Hofstetter realized, there might be signals that could disrupt the beetles’ behavior. McGuire began his search for a sonic weapon by bombarding the bugs with Guns N’ Roses songs and Rush Limbaugh shows in his laboratory. He later got better results using the aggression calls made by the male insects (recorded with Dunn’s help) together with artificial squawks and bleeps of the same frequency. The effect on the beetles is extraordinary—Hofstetter once witnessed a pair mating and then, after the sound was switched on, watched as the male ate the female.

Solutions In one experiment, the team placed a beetle on a thin slice of pine sandwiched between two clear panes of Plexiglas. The sound prompted the distraught insect to try to escape by tunneling through the Plexiglas. “We drove him crazy,” McGuire recalls with a grin. The team plans to try out a version of this technology in the spring. Dunn has been testing a car-stereo speaker that can produce the high-frequency sounds that beetles hear. He screwed the speaker into a pinyon pine and listened as the output reverberated up and down the trunk. The team believes the device can be used to pump McGuire’s sonic deterrent into vulnerable trees. Fitting every tree in a forest with a speaker would, of course, be impossible. But if the sounds prove disturbing enough to drive beetles out of the trees or to deter new arrivals from burrowing into the bark, a ribbon of trees equipped with these cheap devices could form a kind of acoustic firebreak. Enough, perhaps, to protect some of the many millions of acres of still-healthy forests from the advancing beetle armies. ❧ —Jim Giles © 2010 The Atlantic Monthly, Washington, D.C. (January/February, 2010)

Dandelion Tires Your next set of wheels could be made of weeds Other than being an ingredient of upscale salads, dandelions are pretty useless plants. But one species, Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), may yet make the big time. It produces molecules of rubber in its sap, and—if two research programs, one in Germany and one in America, come to fruition—it could supplement or even replace the traditional rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis. Despite the invention of synthetic rubbers, there is often no good substitute for the real thing. This is because natural-rubber molecules have a more regular structure than artificial ones. For this reason, around one-fifth of an average car tire is made of natural rubber. Moreover, the price of synthetic rubber is tied to that of the oil from which it is made, rendering it vulnerable to changing oil prices. Because oil is likely to become more costly in the future, natural rubber looks to be an attractive alternative, from an economic point of view as well as an engineering one. Natural rubber has problems, though. Growing Hevea in the Americas is hard. In Asia, planting new rubber trees often means cutting down rainforest. And trees, being large, take time to grow to the point where they can yield a crop. A smaller plant that could be harvested for its rubber thus has obvious appeal. Which is where TKS comes in. Dandelions are robust, fast-growing plants that can be pulled up for processing and resown easily, possibly yielding two harvests a year. If they could be turned into usable crops, they could outstrip even Hevea. To this end, Christian Schulze Gronover of the Fraunhofer Institute in Aachen, Germany, and his col-

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leagues have identified the genes that allow TKS to produce usable rubber. In particular, they have discovered an enzyme called polyphenoloxidase that is responsible for making its rubbery sap coagulate. From the plant’s point of view, this coagulation is a good thing. The evolutionary purpose of rubber—and the reason why it appears independently in plants as diverse as trees and dandelions—is to gum up the mouth parts of herbivorous insects. Human users, however, do not want it to coagulate too soon, and Schulze Gronover has found a way to switch off polyphenoloxidase by using a technique called RNA interference. This makes it easier to extract rubber from the plant. Meanwhile, Matthew Kleinhenz of Ohio State University is working on increasing the yield of rubber from TKS. Kleinhenz is doing things the old-fashioned way, growing different strains of TKS, grinding up the roots (where sap is found) to see which have the highest rubber content, and cross-breeding the winners. His aim is to create a plant that is high-yielding and has roots chunky enough to be harvested mechanically. Combining the two approaches—high-tech bioengineering and low-tech plant breeding—may produce a whole new crop species. It would also mark a step on a journey that some see as the way forward: a return to the use of plant-based products that have been overshadowed by the availability of cheap oil. ❧ ©2009 The Economist Newspaper Ltd, London

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Image courtesy of Jonas Samson Product Design

A Healthy Glow Light-emitting walls could be twice as efficient as fluorescent bulbs Installing a wall-sized lamp in your home might not seem like the best way to cut electricity usage. But thanks to an emerging technology, people could one day brighten their rooms with light-emitting walls that are even more efficient than fluorescent bulbs—and produce an attractive glow similar to sunlight. That’s the vision of U.K. company Lomox, which is developing chemicals for lighting devices called organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. An OLED contains organic molecules that produce light when electrical current is applied. While OLEDs have been studied for decades and are already used in some electronics, Lomox claims its chemicals are less likely to be degraded by oxygen and could make the devices less expensive to manufacture. To make an OLED, chemicals are layered onto a flat panel such as glass or plastic. A transparent substance that conducts electricity would be applied first, followed by Lomox’s molecules and a layer of metal. When current passes through the device, the interactions of electrons with positively charged sites called “holes” create bursts of light. The company plans to test the technology on outdoor lighting of traffic barricades and stairwells. Because the OLEDs operate at low voltage, they could easily be powered by a battery charged by a solar panel. The devices would provide efficient, portable lighting without the need for generators or installation of electrical wiring, says product development lead Gene Koch. Next, Lomox will explore home lighting, which could take the form of flexible plastic sheets affixed to walls or ceilings, as well as replacements for fluorescent lamps in offices. The company is aiming to make its technology about twice as efficient as fluorescent lights. And while some fluorescents cast an unflattering bluish hue, OLEDs could produce a warm yellow tint akin to light from incandescents or the rising sun. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

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Solutions

©Philips

The iCat Is on Your Tail Robotic feline keeps tabs on your home energy consumption In search of a better way to get people to conserve energy, researchers Cees Midden and Jaap Ham turned to an unconventional technique: using a robotic cat to scold people when they use too much electricity. Research has found that showing people their energy usage as they program an appliance could significantly

reduce energy consumption. Midden and Ham, psychologists at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, wanted to know whether feedback from a “social” agent would be even more effective. Enter the iCat: a 15-inch-tall, yellow robot in the shape of a cat’s head and chest. Developed by Philips, the

iCat can speak and make facial expressions by moving its mouth, eyes, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Midden and Ham wondered whether the cat might be able to goad people into lowering their energy consumption. So they programmed the iCat to respond to people’s decisions, then used it in a study. Participants were seated in front of simulated washing-machine displays and asked to do virtual loads of laundry. Some people had a meter on the screen, showing their electricity usage, while others had an iCat perched nearby. When people in the latter group used less energy, the iCat congratulated them with a smile and expressions such as “Fantastic!” But when they didn’t act so green, the iCat looked sad or displeased and derided their energy usage as “Terrible.” The iCat group used 47 percent less energy than the group with the energy meter, the researchers found. And the iCat’s criticism had a bigger impact on conservation than its compliments did. Midden and Ham meant their work as an experiment and aren’t planning to deploy the iCat in real homes. However, they do envision incorporating social feedback into household appliances—say, a display of a talking face on the washing machine. But it’s not clear how people would respond to negative feedback over the long term. Midden says the iCat was “sometimes pretty rude,” and the team found that people became irritated when the cat ordered them to use a particular washer setting. In other words, humans may only be able to take so much sass from a robotic animal. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

Breathalyzer Test for Whales Remote control helicopters sample bacteria from moving giants Imagine trying to give a breathalyzer

test to a humpback whale. That’s the challenge that Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse faced when she set out to gather key information about whale disease. A postdoctoral research fellow at London’s Institute of Zoology, Acevedo-Whitehouse knew that collecting blood and tissue samples—the normal method of sampling wildlife bacteria—from the massive, moving animals would be almost impossible. But a whale’s breath contains many of the same bacteria as its tissue, so Acevedo-Whitehouse decided to try to capture the moisture-laden air that whales fire through their blowholes. She started with easy targets: gray

whales and other species that swim close to boats. To snag the whale’s breath, the scientists attached Petri dishes to an eight-foot pole and held it over the animals’ heads. Blue whales and other species that keep their distance from boats posed a bigger challenge—until AcevedoWhitehouse enlisted a professional pilot to guide a remote-control plane. The plane carried Petri dishes over the whales, and the pilot’s steady hand allowed the team to capture breath samples without losing a single plane into the sea. Back at the lab, Acevedo-Whitehouse’s team screened the samples for pathogens. Haemophilius, the bacterial

strain showing up most frequently, can lead to meningitis and pneumonia. The researchers also found the bacterium beta haemolytic streptococci, known to cause disease and linked to incidents where sea mammals become beached or stranded in shallow water. Acevedo-Whitehouse believes her research could help scientists’ quest to better understand whales. Whether it would ever lead to treating whale disease is another matter. The issue is controversial—some wildlife experts believe animal populations should be left to their own devices, even when their health is at risk. ❧ —Heidi Dietrich

Rain Maker New windmill wrings drinking water straight from the air

Bullet-proof Snails Tiny gastropod inspires a new generation of armor farm, startup company Dutch Rainmaker will soon flip the switch on a windmill that wrings water straight from the air. About ten stories tall, the innovative windmill is essentially an oversized, leaky air conditioner. Instead of driving a generator to produce electricity, the windmill drives a heat pump that pulls water vapor from the air and condenses it. The apparatus then collects that water for future use, leading the company’s founders to believe their windmill could help overcome the world’s shrinking—and increasingly polluted—water supplies. Along Africa’s hot, humid coastlines, company engineer Hans Van der Vliet says, the machine could supply 7,500 liters of water a day—enough to quench the thirst of 3,000 people. The windmill would also work in drier climates, although Van der Vliet says the air-to-water yield would drop by as much as 20 percent. One drawback is the price tag— right now, a steep 200,000 euros. But the company aims to halve that number as they scale up production. And to farmers and others whose livelihoods depend on water, a few precious drops could justify the cost. ❧ —Jessica Leber

On a small Netherlands

The scaly-foot gastropod (Crysomallon squamiferum) is one tough soldier. The tiny mollusk not only lives in one of the world’s harshest environments—the ultra-hot, acidic waters surrounding undersea hydrothermal vents—it also faces an army of predators that include fanged, venomous snails and crabs that can squeeze victims for days until they crack. Now, new research from MIT has found that the mechanisms keeping the gastropod safe could be mimicked to create everything from tougher military armor to sturdier football helmets and water pipelines. The scaly-foot gastropod’s path from the bottom of the ocean to an MIT laboratory began in 2003, when materials engineering professor Christine Ortiz wondered how its protective shell could withstand such intense physical and chemical stress. To investigate, Ortiz’s team simulated predator attacks on a computer and used sophisticated tools to gauge the shell’s hardness and stiffness. They discovered that the shell has a unique, tri-layered structure: an unusually thick and squishy middle sandwiched between two stiff layers. Each layer plays a special role in resisting penetration, dissipating heat, and reducing fracture strains—all in a package that’s less than half as thick as a dime. Simply put, the snail’s iron-plated shield is “unlike any other known natural or synthetic engineered armor,” according to a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This explains why one of the paper’s coauthors was Timothy Imholt, a defense contractor from Raytheon. Although multilayered military armor dates back to World War I–era Russian tanks, Imholt says improvements since then have been few and far between. Now, by using the gastropod’s shell as a model, military engineers may be able to cut years off the time it takes to develop new protective gear. Designers may, for example, want to imitate the way the three shell layers interact to protect their host. Under a hard impact, the iron scales form small cracks that distribute the force. The middle layer then acts like a shock absorber. The calcified layer forms a last line of defense. And MIT’s Ortiz thinks snail-inspired armor could be just the beginning. She is now studying urchins, beetles, and armored fish for more of evolution’s ideas. ❧ —Jessica Leber

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• Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010 41

Book Marks

God of Small Things

At the age of 81, E.O. Wilson makes his first foray into fiction as Michael Jordan is to baseball. Greatness on the basketball court didn’t translate to the baseball diamond—and a Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction doesn’t assure brilliant fiction. But Jordan played credible ball in the minors, and Wilson can vividly describe a scene and write believable dialogue, which goes a long way in storytelling. Although Anthill is not great fiction, it is a substantial step toward engaging the public with science. And it comes along just in time, as I was ready to give up on experts writing generally readable books. After all, this is the enterprise that gave us Carl Sagan’s Contact (a passable short story that, unfortunately, became a tedious novel) and, after that, Ishmael. While Daniel Quinn’s book was hugely successful, non-acolytes like me found this tale about a telepathic gorilla telling us to save the world—well, in short, ludicrous. Then there’s Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance. Nobody can deny that Gore’s book shaped public understanding of climate change, but it was as captivating as a PowerPoint lecture. Now, along comes Wilson to restore

E.O. Wilson is to fiction

faith in the capacity of scientists to write for the public. Anthill has three parts. In the first section, we learn about Raff Cody’s childhood and upbringing in rural Alabama, where he comes to love a tract of old-growth pine. He’s a mediocre student but a first-rate amateur naturalist. Fortunately, Raff meets up with a professor from Florida State, and this connection gets him into the university. The second part of the book consists of Raff ’s undergraduate thesis—an overwrought epic of an ant colony’s struggle against rival anthills and insecticide-toting humans. He writes,

“Lamentation and hope were mingled among the Trailheader inhabitants. The ants were like a doomed people in a besieged city.” In the final section, Raff earns a law degree and returns to his home town, where he uses legal acumen to preserve his beloved woods. The tale ends as Raff narrowly avoids murder by a religious fanatic trying to maintain control over the locals. The moral of the story: You can save your corner of the world through enlightened capitalism and environmental law, but watch out for wackos. The plot isn’t breathtaking and the message isn’t earth-shattering. So why praise a middling novel? Because Wilson’s three intuitions about the potential of fiction to motivate conservation are spot-on. First, people like genuine stories—not pontifications thinly veiled as dialogue. And Anthill feels plausible—at least until the end, where, I suspect, somebody told Wilson that fiction must include sex and violence. So in the final section we get cringeworthy lines such as “A wildness consumed her, as she set out to try every position, engage every orifice.” The book finishes with a grisly triple murder

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010 43

that seems far-fetched, like something a screenwriter might have tacked on for Anthill: The Movie. Next, Wilson understands that people don’t care about abstract generalities—we love particular people, creatures, and places. Raff Cody loves the ants in a tract of Alabama woods. Wilson’s portrayal of the kid seems ensconced in the 1950s—girls read Nancy Drew novels and guys notice “well-groomed hair”—even though the timeframe is supposedly contemporary. But this time warp proves endearing because through it, Wilson reveals himself as a man with a sweet disposition and wistful memories of a southern boyhood. We end up caring for Raff and his antsy woods in part because the storyteller is so charming. And finally, people can find natural history profoundly interesting. Although Raff ’s thesis appears unaccountably plunked into the middle of the novel, the Disneyesque piece is an undeniably lovely way of learning about ants (that is, if one doesn’t take seriously that these insects experience fear, hate, sorrow, hope, and love) Conversely, Wilson casts human relations in terms of ant interactions. So, ants are anthropomorphized and humans are myrmecomorphized. But knowing Wilson’s passion for sociobiology and conservation, the topsy-turvy biology is more winsome than off-putting. Anthill is a gutsy effort; Wilson couldn’t reasonably have expected to write stunning fiction on this first attempt (although his memoir, Naturalist, was quite enchanting). But he occupies the bully pulpit of biology, and lots of people will buy the book just because he wrote it. When they do, they’ll find an uneven but readable story about why people try to save wild places. ❧ —Jeffrey A. Lockwood 44

Conservation Magazine

Diet for a Hot Planet The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It By Anna Lappe Bloomsbury, 2010

Nearly one-third of the humancaused global warming effect is food-related, and Diet for a Hot Planet builds on the alreadystrong case for food as a climatechange culprit. Along the way, it busts six myths about the future of food (such as the argument that embracing biotechnology is critical if we are to sustainably feed the world) and concludes with seven principles of a climate-friendly diet—including eating organic, local, real food consisting mostly of fruits and vegetables. It’s a message we’ve heard before, but given the urgency of the problem, perhaps we cannot hear it often enough. ❧

The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future By Fred Pearce Beacon Press, 2010

Fred Pearce skillfully defuses the population bomb with sharp writing and meaty historical references. Pearce argues that there was not and will not be Malthusian catastrophes. Due to advances in agriculture, medicine, and women’s rights, we have averted large-scale famine and, according to Pearce, can continue to shrink birth rates through voluntary means. But as Pearce’s hopefulness about a stabilizing and even declining human population becomes more self-assured, it also becomes slightly less convincing. We’ve

• Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010

engineered heartier crops that can grow in the harsh soils of Rwandan mountains, which has indeed given new hope—for us. What about nonhuman life? Human ingenuity might support billions of Homo sapiens. But will we be ingenious enough to allow Earth’s many other species to also support themselves? ❧

The Atlas of Global Conservation Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities to Make a Difference By Jonathan Hoekstra et al. University of California Press, 2010

For many conservation issues, we need to think big, and maps that help us visualize the impact of humans on the planet can facilitate thinking beyond our usual boundaries and time frames. So rather than simply discuss the usual planetary assets (species distribution, diversity, and habitats) and liabilities (habitat fragmentation, development, population growth, etc.), The Atlas of Global Conservation shows that humans have touched every bit of the globe. Behind each map is lots of data, all current and neatly referenced. The book also includes essays from the frontlines of conservation, including a provocative one on the toxicology of plastics and the rise of green chemistry plus another about bushmeat consumption in Sierra Leone. The news is not all bad. Some figures show the rise in conservation efforts: in 1949, for instance, less than 0.1 percent of land area was protected, compared to 14 percent today. The atlas would have benefited from a larger format, but perhaps the publishers figured the problems were big enough. ❧

Book Marks

How to Cool the Planet Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate By Jeff Goodell Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

Government ministers in scuba gear held an underwater meeting of the Maldives’ cabinet to highlight the threat global warming poses to the lowest-lying nation on earth. ©Mohammed Seeneen/AP Photo

The Flooded Earth Our Future in a World without Ice Caps By Peter D. Ward Basic Books, 2010

Venice is under water. Bangladesh is also flooded, and its refugees rush toward India. The Netherlands, which had the foresight to install floating buildings that could rise and fall with the tide, is in slightly better condition. The U.S. Midwest, faced with freshwater shortages, is unable to cultivate the grains that once made it a breadbasket. Instead, the U.S. heartland sells its soil to Antarctica, where it can be used to grow much-needed crops. These are just a few scenarios presented in Peter Ward’s The Flooded Earth—but it would be wishful thinking to assign this book to the sci-fi genre. If Greenland and Antarctica lose all their ice, sea level will rise more than 61 meters, according to Ward, an expert on the Cretaceous Period and one of the growing number of scientists who believe the IPCC scenarios are too conservative. Ward is determined to get sea-level rise on the scientific and political agenda. His dark portrait of a future without ice resounds loudly, like the glaciers calving from Antarctica into a rising sea. ❧

Some say it’s best not to have a Plan B because then it becomes an option. But after the failure at Copenhagen to meet even modest emission-reduction goals, a Plan B for climate mitigation is gaining appeal. Enter geoengineering, which Jeff Goodell cautiously and responsibly puts back on the table as a way to forestall a climate catastrophe. Drawing parallels to the Cold War era of technological admiration and the early twentieth-century boondoggle of rainmaking, Goodell details the science and the scientists behind schemes to clean carbon from coal emissions, fertilize the oceans, and change the color of clouds. He is careful not to distract from the real issue of reducing greenhouse gases but is also soberly pragmatic: a hot planet might need to be cooled off in a hurry, so it is best to have a backup plan. The problem, which Goodell overlooks, is that geoengineering will also rely on the very features that made the Copenhagen goals unattainable: cooperation, regulation, and an ability to prepare for the future. ❧ Reviews by Jennifer Jacquet

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• Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010 45

Letters

“An important and timely book.” —from the Preface by E. O. Wilson

“[A] vivid history full of colorful characters and spectacular discoveries.” —Kirkus Reviews

Dissecting Climate Change Denial

“Engaging, compelling, and as thoroughly fascinating as life itself.” —BookPage.com

Now in Paperback Wherever Books Are Sold

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I’m a year short of the 65-and-older crowd, but I question the theory that older Americans are particularly unconvinced of global warming because they associate the phenomenon with pending death (“Why Is Climate Change Denial So Seductive?” January–March 2010). Most people (including older people) who truly believe climate change is not human-caused aren’t worried about it; it would be like worrying whether the sun was going to come up tomorrow or whether there was going to be an earthquake—things over which they have no control. My guess is that older Americans are not constructing “immortality projects” by taking cruises and flying around the globe. Rather, I think older Americans have been exposed to many more “Chicken Little” public scares than have younger generations. What’s more, a failure by the scientific community and environmental groups to develop a convincing case for a huge, long-term, and insidious problem—something very difficult to do—has more to do with declining

• Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010

support for global warming as a real phenomenon than do people fearing death and building immortality projects. There’s only so much worrying anybody can do before becoming numb. Jerry Lang North Muskegon, Michigan

Climate Psychology

Monbiot does an important service to conservationists by employing psychological research to explain facets of the public’s reception of science. It’s illuminating—but not defeating—that people tend to defend themselves from “the ultimate terror [of death] by engaging in ‘immortality projects’—projects and beliefs that boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death.” This psychological tendency could work for rather than against conservation and climate-change advocacy, if we better engaged people ourselves. People respond to climate-change science by denying it as an idea that threatens their current immortality projects because the prevailing mes-

sages about climate change are alarmist or purposely obfuscating. The media’s communication about climate change is alarmist because sensationalizing risks is the media’s only tactic for drawing attention to an incremental and highly variable change in trends. We don’t have to leave communication about science to the media; we can capitalize on their awareness-raising groundwork by painting this risk as an opportunity for character-defining action—a new (or revised) immortality project. The empowering message I propose, also informed by the psychology of persuasion, is the following: People’s security and livelihoods are at risk from climate change, as is our very legacy— our covenant with generations across time to leave this planet in a better state than we received it. Just as you would never stand idly by while your children’s inheritance risked burning— because you weren’t sure it would—our descendants will never forgive dithering in the face of climate change. Everyday heroes are rising, changing their actions and invigorating their friends and families to recreate our generations’ legacy. We can be the first generations to realize the dangers of human society run amok and steer humanity to a brighter future.

consumers an acquired taste and not consumed in any large quantities anywhere, even in south Louisiana, where the cuisine was fashioned. Additionally, the frog referred to in the story is Rana catesbiana, or the American bullfrog. This frog is not an imported species, nor is it a rare or endangered one. Rana catesbiana is farmed commercially in the United States and elsewhere for human consumption.

Kai Chan University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia

Pat Cuviello Redwood City, California

Boning Up on Frog Legs

Plastic Solutions

Although frog legs are indeed a “Cajun” delicacy, the consumption of frog legs in the U.S. may be a little overstated in the article “Last Legs” (October– December 2009). While many restaurants offer the delicacy, it is for many

The feature article on plastics (“Garbage In, Garbage Out,” January– March 2010) was very informative and thought-provoking—and, hopefully, action-provoking for readers as well. I also love the associated artwork.

Robert Dailey Woodlands, Texas

Killing Cougars

I believe the term “harvest” is an inappropriate term to use for killing mountain lions or any other animal (“Troubled Teens,” October–December 2009). “Harvest” is a euphemism meant only to soften the brutal act of killing. Until we stop using the euphemisms of those who would kill every last individual of a given species, we will not be able to convince others that killing off individuals, and species, is brutal and detrimental to their species and ours.

In terms of trying to deal with this problem, it seems at least one key includes creating an incentive for individuals or organizations to collect this waste for eventual disposal/recycling. I think two potential solutions could involve “plastic derbies” and marine park “star” ranking systems. A “plastic derby” would be akin to a fishing derby, where a range of cash prizes for different categories of waste would be paid out. There could be an aggregate collected-plastic waste prize, a flip-flop prize (I once counted 127 flip-flops on a lonely, 200-meter stretch of sand in Belize), etc. These would tend to be local efforts with little impact on the global stock of drifting debris out there but could have significant local cosmetic, social, and ecological benefits. These plastic derbies might be most supported in the developing world, where prizes ranging from US$10 to $1000, for example, would represent enormous potential windfalls. My second suggestion involving “star” rankings (e.g., one to five stars, hotel-style) for coastal and marine parks, as ranked by some independent body using clear criteria, might give such parks biannual (or other) rankings in different environmental and social categories—including lack of plastic debris on beaches. Such a scheme might create more local government incentives and actions to address problems and, consequently, reap rewards from eco-minded tourists. Randal Glaholt Calgary, Canada

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• Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010 47

Think Again Forgive Me, Planet, for I Have Flown—Frequently told a Canadian friend who is a pastor that I needed to do penance for all the air travel I’m doing for work. He fired back an e-mail with a link to a new Web site that lets me calculate my carbon footprint and make a donation to offset it. The site was affiliated with the United Church of Canada; my donation would help fund the “greening of the buildings of different faith communities.” While I liked the idea, the Protestant in me wondered whether this were some sort of new system of indulgences. Remember indulgences? In the Catholic Church, they allowed the wealthy to buy their way into heaven or into the good graces of the church hierarchy— or both. At a time of growing debate about whether environmentalism is becoming a religion, are carbon offsets a new form of indulgences? Do you have to pay to have your environmental sins forgiven? Consider this: recently, outdoor retailer Recreational Equipment Inc. came under fire for its efforts to offset its carbon footprint. Critics complain that REI’s sins, caused by its travel business, are actually growing—even if the purchase of carbon offsets is some sort of atonement. In other words, a carbon-offsets program may simply allow sinners to continue engaging in their unrepentant ways and unredeemed lives. That was among Martin Luther’s complaints about the abuse of indulgences way back when.

The other day, I half-jokingly

Conservation Magazine

©Jon Berkeley

Some worry that environmentalism is taking on religion’s unappealing qualities: strict orthodoxy and dogma that admit of no question or challenge and would excommunicate dissidents. While I’m ambivalent on the overall issue, what strikes me as worthy of concern is the idea that nature is the truth and the answer and that all that is needed is to “get back to nature.” One problem with this is that it lets human beings off the hook. To be sure, nature has incredible beauty as well as amazing powers of renewal. But nature, as demonstrated by the recent Haitian earthquake, is not always benign. Christian theology has claimed that human beings have a role and a responsibility as stewards—caretakers who are to enhance nature’s positive potential while mitigating its negative ones. Many would say that we have done just the opposite. And they have a point. The record of human beings

• Vol. 11 No. 2 | April-June 2010

is, at best, mixed. We’ve stripped the hilltops, fouled the air, and polluted the rivers. But we have also restored the land, created productive farms, and protected endangered species. We certainly have the potential, and the responsibility, to be good stewards of the natural world. At their best, religions remind us that we all have a part in the evils we deplore and that it’s not enough—and in fact is dangerous—only to blame others. At their worst, religions neatly (too neatly) divide people into categories of pure and impure, righteous and unrighteous, saved and unsaved. Such easy divides tend to encourage self-deception on the part of those who see themselves as the righteous while sowing the seeds of judgment and division. One thing that strikes me as right about the carbon offsets idea is that it recognizes that all of us are implicated, that none of us is without sin. All of us participate to some degree in increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. So in a sense, carbon offsets remind us that no one is righteous—not completely. I have my air travel problem. You have your own issues. Making a donation to the Canadian site, or another, may help balance things out. —Anthony B. Robinson Columnist Anthony B. Robinson is a former senior pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church in Seattle, Washington.

Karen Graham/iStockphoto

Conservation for a Changing Planet

Society for Conservation Biology

Save the date Registration now open 24th International Congress for Conservation Biology (ICCB 2010) Edmonton, Alberta July 3-7, 2010

SCB Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 2010

Conservation for a Changing Planet

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