Conservation Magazine by Kathy Kohm

invasive species that love a recession

ShipWreck unleashes Mysterious Plague

Farm the Sahara, cool the planet

Oct-Dec 2009

Conservation cutting-edge science | smarter conservation

The New Math of Population From fertility rates to city size, could bigger be better for the environment?

Troubled Teens Unruly young wildlife wreak havoc in suburbia

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How to survive an ice age, a mass extinction, and a meteor strikeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and live to tell about it

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Contents Conservation | Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009

Be Fruitful & Multiply?

Population growth, from an environmental viewpoint, has always seemed like an open-and-shut case. Less is more. But what if that equation has changed? By David Malakoff page 41

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Fish-free fish feed

A new generation of unruly adolescent wildlife has some experts wondering whether what we’re missing isn’t so much habitat as adult supervision.

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Another black mark for biofuels

By Dawn Stover

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Invasive species love a recession

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Frog legs: yummy but deadly

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Designing an artificial river

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38 Innovations

Up on the Farm Growing 11,000 heads of lettuce in a space the size of five parking spots

Shipwreck unleashes mysterious plague

Sick Puppies Prairie dogs served up Jell-O spiked with ‘black death’ vaccine

Carbon sinks under Antarctic ice

Electric Sweat Synthetic leaf generates power with tiny beads of water

An Ounce of Prevention High-tech chip delivers early diagnosis of coral disease

Invasion of the Flying Fish A wall of bubbles could stop the onslaught of millions of Asian carp

A Shady Scheme Radical plan would grow a massive forest in the Sahara to cool the planet

Think Again

A radical alternative to marine reserves

Lighten Up Cartoons by Sidney Harris

Essay

Survivor By Eric Roston

Book Marks Shades of Green Stewart Brand’s challenge to environmentalists

Troubled Teens

New twist on cold war

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Cities store more CO2 than tropical rainforests

The (Un)Natural Order of Things

Have we unwittingly exchanged the language of the living world—the names of real plants and animals—for a vocabulary of Tony the Tigers and Geico geckos? By Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Journal Watch ■

Plus: Elephants on the Edge, No Impact Man, Picturing Climate Change, and more

From Readers

Bathtub Analogy Doesn’t Hold Water By William L. Chameides

Cover Illustration ©Istvan Banyai Visit us at www.conservationmagazine.org to access the entire Conservation magazine archive, read Journal Watch Online, renew your subscription, and more.

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Kathryn Kohm

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In 1695, a forward-thinking demographer predicted global population would hit 500 million by the year 2000. This sounds laughable at a time when population is closing in on nine billion. But you might be more sympathetic once you realize how complicated the population picture really is. This issue’s cover story (“Be Fruitful & Multiply?,” page 12) uncovers some reasons why population predictions have been so off-base. It also explores some surprises that cutting-edge thinkers have uncovered, such as the environmental perils of depopulation. Such warnings would have seemed ridiculous 40 years ago, when Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb spawned apocalyptic fears. Ehrlich declared population growth would outpace agricultural production and usher in mass starvation. While his core concern—that population would strain resources—was on the mark, Ehrlich couldn’t foresee quantum leaps in agricultural productivity or fertility rates that would decline as countries grew more developed. In other words, unraveling the population equation is far more complicated than Ehrlich and others suspected. That’s because the variables in the population-environment equation—from consumption habits to technological innovation—form an extraordinarily convoluted web. For example, new research suggests that fertility rates keep fluctuating as countries progress; after years of precipitous decline, fertility rates in some highly developed countries are rising again. Some scholars argue that this might be good for the environment. Fearing that a smaller human population might set off a chain of events leading to environmental catastrophe, they say we should aim for the magic number of 2.1 children per woman, which would keep the overall population total steady. As we read through these twists and turns, we notice some eerie similarities between Ehrlich’s 1960s warnings and today’s climate fears. The concerns about climate change and the catastrophes it could bring are valid, and the predictions are alarming. But in a system as complex as global climate, you also have to wonder which elements of the equation will completely surprise us. One lesson is that, even as the scientific and environmental communities sound the alarm, it’s important to train a skeptical eye on our assumptions. As Jim Harrison wrote in the novel True North: “Every day I wake up and wonder how many things I’m dead wrong about.” —The Editors

Journal Watch

Your guide to the latest conservation research

©Thomas Jackson/Getty Images

Climate Change

Urban Chill Factor Cities store more CO2 than tropical rainforests do

more organic carbon is stored in cities and suburbs than anywhere else—even tropical forests. This startling result comes from the first complete carbon-storage tally of human-dominated ecosystems in the contiguous United States. The researchers added up the amount of carbon tucked away in everything from houses to household pets. They found that in 2000, cities, suburbs, and ex-

Acre for acre,

urbs accounted for 10 percent of total land-based carbon storage. Generally, nearly two-thirds of that carbon is kept under wraps in urban soils, its decay slowed beneath pavement and buildings. Vegetation accounts for another fifth of the stored carbon; slow-to-rot garbage trapped in landfills, a tenth; and wood in building struc-

tures, five percent. People themselves, it turns out, don’t lock up much carbon. Neither do their pets. Cities had a denser carbon profile in comparison to sprawling suburbs and exurbs. “Because of the population density (in cities), you have multiple layers of carbon,” explains lead author Galina Churkina, a scientist at the Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research. Churkina says that, to slow climate change, we need to stop taking urban carbon for granted, espe-

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cially since the character of cities is never static. Instead of being seen solely as an environmental blight, cities and towns could be seen as mechanisms to protect or increase carbon stocks. Building homes and furniture that use more wood products could help, as could strategically planted trees and gardens. But storing up carbon isn’t always as simple as it sounds. For example, Los Angeles and New York are already pursuing ambitious tree-planting goals, partly with carbon storage in mind. Churkina cautions that, without taking maintenance needs such as fertilizer and water into account, even planting a tree could backfire and increase net carbon emissions. ❧ —Jessica Leber Churkina, G., D. Brown, and G. Keoleian. 2009. Carbon stored in human settlements: the conterminous United States. Global Change Biology DOI:10.111/j.12652486.2009.02002.x

In the Cold of Battle Wars in Europe are linked to cooler periods

Peace Prize to U.S. President Barack Obama, the Nobel committee noted his efforts to meet the challenge of climate change. Climate change could trigger mass migrations and higher competition for resources, leading to “increased danger of violent conflicts and wars,” the committee wrote. But two scientists argue in Climatic Change that the link between climate change and war has not been adequately quantified.

In awarding the 2009 Nobel

standard deviation

Politics

©Jacques Croizer/iStock.com

Evolution of war conflicts, temperature, and precipitation in central Europe —Conflicts —Precipitation —Temperature

2 1 0 -1 -2 1500 1550 1600

1650

The team analyzed historical records of violent conflicts in Europe over the past thousand years, as well as temperature and precipitation data and climate reconstructions. They found that pre-industrial wars were actually correlated with colder periods, echoing a 2006 study that revealed a similar pattern in China. Those early conflicts might have been fueled by poor harvests, the authors speculate. As Europe became industrialized and agricul-

1700 year

1750

1800

1850

1900

tural techniques improved, the link between temperature and war weakened considerably. Global warming is therefore unlikely to increase violent conflicts in Europe, the team says, but the pattern could be different in the tropics. “It does not follow that a warmer future would be more peaceful,” they write. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Tol, R. and S. Wagner. 2009. Climate change and violent conflict in Europe over the last millennium. Climatic Change DOI:10.1007/s10584-009-9659-2.

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Photo courtesy of Louise Zattelman

Business

It’s a Fish-eatfish World Fish-feed substitutes can keep aquaculture from depleting oceans The aquaculture industry is mired in a

dilemma. On the one hand, 2009 was a landmark year—for the first time, aquaculture provided a whopping 50 percent of global seafood supplies, up from just 25 percent in 1995. And that trend is bound to continue. With wild catch stagnant or declining, aquaculture will play a key role in meeting the seafood demands of a world population that’s zooming toward 8 billion. But a troubling reality looms: the aquaculture industry’s expanding hunger for wild fish, which it uses as feed, threatens the wild populations on which aquaculture depends. Rosamond Naylor, a Stanford University economist, was looking for 6

Conservation Magazine

a way out of this dilemma when she recently convened an international team of scientists and policy experts. Naylor has spent much of her career studying aquaculture and other types of food production and wanted to forge a consensus on exactly how the industry should move toward sustainability. Now, in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Naylor and her colleagues map out not only how far the industry has come but also how much farther it must go. First, the good news: since 1995, the proportion of wild fish that goes into each pound of farm-raised fish and shrimp has dropped dramatically. The bad news? Aquaculture production is rising so fast that the industry is still consuming more and more wild fish overall. With this in mind, the research team evaluated various plans for moving away from wild fish as a feed source.

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009

One key question is how to ensure that farmed fish get adequate protein and fat in their diets. Wild omnivorous fish such as salmon and tuna get these nutrients from the fish they eat—usually anchovies, sardines, and mackerel. Most of the global catch of these smaller species is ground into fish meal (for protein) and fish oil (for fats) and is incorporated into feed pellets—not only for fish but also for pigs, chickens, and pets. And aquaculture’s share of these commodities has doubled over the past decade; the industry now consumes fully 68 percent of the world’s fish meal and 88 percent of its fish oil. Naylor’s team concluded that the most-pressing issue is finding alternatives to fish oil. Not just any oil substitute will do, since it is specifically the long-chain omega-3 fatty acids such as DHA that make fish such a boon for good health. Easy-to-come-by substi-

Naylor, R. et al. 2009. Feeding aquaculture in an era of finite resources. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106(36):15103–15110. (1) Naylor, R. et al. 2000. Effect of aquaculture on world fish supplies. Nature 405:1017–1024.

wouldn’t be enough to reach the EPA’s goal of reducing the hypoxic zone to 5,000 square kilometers by 2015, the team concluded. To meet that target, the U.S. will need to undertake an “aggressive nutrient management strategy,” they say. Possible solutions could include constructing wetlands or building buffer zones to intercept runoff. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Costello, C. et al. 2009. Impact of biofuel crop production on the formation of hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental Science & Technology DOI:10.1021/es9011433.

Energy

More Biofuel Woes Fuel crops stymie restoration of gulf dead zone Meeting U.S. goals for biofuel production will increase nutrient runoff to the Gulf of Mexico, making it more difficult to reduce the size of the gulf ’s “dead zone.” U.S. energy policy dictates that 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel must be produced annually by 2022. But a task force led by the Environmental Protection Agency is also aiming to shrink the Gulf of Mexico’s hypoxic zone, a lowoxygen area that can reach 14,600 square kilometers. Excess nitrate from agricultural runoff is thought to play a large role in hypoxic zone formation, which continuously kills and disrupts marine life. In a study published in Environmental Science & Technology, researchers calculated the nitrate output of various crop combinations that could be used to meet the U.S. biofuels mandate. Relying on crops such as switch grass, rather than corn, for cellulosic ethanol would cut nitrate output by 20 percent, they found. But that still

Economy

Freeloaders in Hard Times Global recession linked to spike in marine invasives As if job losses, foreclosures, and the credit crunch weren’t enough to worry about, researchers have raised yet another possible downside of the economic crisis. Merchant ships are sitting idle at ports, potentially accumulating marine organisms that could be carried to other parts of the world when business picks up. For years, ships that transport organisms on their hulls have likely helped nonnative marine species invade new habitat around the globe, resulting in damage to both ecosystems

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©Ginosphoto/Dreamstime.com

tutes such as canola oil provide calories but not the DHA. Industrial fermentation processes for extracting the so-called healthy oils out of microalgae deliver some hope. They’re already being used to provide DHA supplements in juice and infant formula, and preliminary results for using the ingredients in salmon feed look promising. Australian scientists have also coaxed genetically modified canola to produce long-chain omega3s. But both oil alternatives are still prohibitively expensive. “There’s not a silver bullet out there,” Naylor says. A quick fix would be to eliminate fish meal in the diets of vegetarian fish such as carp and tilapia. According to the PNAS report, farmers have already reduced the share of fish meal in carp diets by 50 percent between 1995 and 2007; during that same period, the fish meal in tilapia diets dropped by nearly two-thirds. Yet tilapia and carp farmers fed their combined stock more than 12 million metric tons of fish meal—more than 1.5 times the amount consumed by all farmed shrimp and salmon. Naylor’s team calls on policymakers to create incentives to encourage feed alternatives and improve management of the underlying fisheries. Without a concerted effort, though, the study’s take-home message is no different from the last line of a cautionary report Naylor published nine years ago in Nature: “An expanded aquaculture industry poses a threat, not only to ocean fisheries, but also to itself.” (1) ❧ —Sarah Simpson

and economies. Coating the hulls can prevent “biofouling,” but many of these treatments lose their effectiveness on inactive ships. For instance, a 200-meter ship could amass more than 20 metric tons of organisms if left unused for a long period of time, the authors write. Since the financial crisis hit, cargo throughput has dropped at several major ports, the researchers say. Singapore, Hong Kong, Busan, Long Beach, and Hamburg have seen declines of 13.7 to 27.1 percent between 2008 and 2009, according to data from port companies. Idle ships are lingering around Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and anchor times longer than three months have been reported, the team writes in Marine Pollution Bulletin. Grounded ships may not be cleaned properly before departure because of the expense and long waits for maintenance, the authors say. That could result in an unusually high number of nonnative marine organisms arriving at destination ports when the economy recovers. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Floerl, O. and A. Coutts. 2009. Potential ramifications of the global economic crisis on human-mediated dispersal of marine nonindigenous species. Marine Pollution Bulletin DOI:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2009.08.

President Obama eating frog legs. ©Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Cuisine

Last Legs The not-so-healthy appetite for frog legs Overharvesting has long been considered a contributor to frog declines, but no one had ever quantified the harvest. Now, researchers have used 20 years of United Nations statistics to find that roughly 8,000 to 10,000 metric tons of frogs’ legs are traded internationally each year. Add in estimates of those eaten in the countries where they’re caught, and the research team thinks as many as 1 billion wild frogs are harvested annually, a great many of them in Indonesia and Vietnam. Overall, the biggest frog importers are France, the U.S. (where they’re a Cajun specialty), Belgium, and Luxembourg. Such importing nations started out with local, seasonal harvests of native species; when those declined, they began importing. In the 1970s and 1980s, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan were the biggest suppliers. As frog populations there dropped, Indonesia and other Asian nations stepped in. Now Ecuador and Brazil appear to be developing export markets, too. Led by Ian Warkentin of Canada’s Memorial University, the research team fears a disheartening

©Dan Barnes/iStock.com

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parallel to the fishing industry, notorious for depleting one stock and then moving on to tap out another. Still, a lack of data on what species are in trade or exactly where they come from prevents the researchers from being certain any given frog harvest is unsustainable. (One problem: frogs are usually skinned before shipping, which confounds identification.) As important first steps, the scientists recommend gathering better population data and tracking and certifying frog legs that enter the global market. ❧ —Rebecca Kessler Warkentin, I.G. et al. 2009. Eating frogs to extinction. Conservation Biology 23(4): 1056–1059.

Engineering

Do the Twist Researchers build an artificial river to hone restoration technology

how to make a river meander in the lab, according to a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research could help determine the best strategies for stream restoration. The team carved an artificial streambed with one bend into a 17-meter-long basin filled with sand. They planted alfalfa sprouts on the sides to strengthen the banks, then ran water through the channel for 136 hours. By the end, the river had developed five bends and appeared to function like a naturally meandering stream. One key element was the use of sand to plug small channels along the sides of the river, the authors say. This goes against a common practice in stream-restoration projects, which Scientists have figured out

photo courtesy of Thierry Work USGS

often aim to eliminate fine sediment. Maintaining stream-bank strength with vegetation was also critical. Now that scientists have a working lab version of a meandering river, they can test different stream restoration techniques and build computational models of the process, says lead author Christian Braudrick of the University of California, Berkeley. Researchers could then use the models to predict how streams will change over the course of decades, rather than over just a few years. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Braudrick, C. 2009. Experimental evidence for the conditions necessary to sustain meandering in coarse-bedded rivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106:16936-16941.

Oceans

Wrecking a Reef Abandoned ship triggers hostile ecosystem takeover Around 1991, the long-line fishing vessel Hui Feng No. 1 mysteriously foundered on Palmyra Atoll, a group of Pacific islets fringed with spectacularly lush coral reefs. While little is known about the crash itself—the wreck was never reported to authorities and appears to have been simply abandoned— scientists are piecing together a picture of how its aftermath threatens to decimate the atoll’s pristine reefs.In 2004, a marine biologist exploring the

wreck noticed a few unexpected residents in the area. They were Rhodactis howesii, coral-like organisms that, by growing in monocultures, occasionally cover sections of a reef, blotting out the other marine life. A year later, more of the organisms appeared, and by September 2007, R. howesii had spread over roughly one square kilometer of reef surrounding the ship—the biggest corallimorph invasion on record. Scientists are nearly certain that the wreck and the invader are linked— the invasion radiates from the ship, with the number of R. howesii decreasing with distance—but they are still trying to piece together exactly how. Thierry Work, a wildlife disease specialist monitoring the wreck, and his colleagues suspect a few R. howesii were living humbly on Palmyra well

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Photo courtesy of Rear Admiral Harley D. Nygren, NOAA Corps

before the long-liner came crashing in. Iron leaching from the wreck might have sparked the corallimorph bloom. Now Work fears the invasion may be self-perpetuating. Corallimorphs can reproduce asexually; every storm washing through the reef fragments the organisms, creating new ones that continue the spread. Work hopes money can be found to remove the iron-spewing wreck, but after that not much can be done to stem the corallimorph takeover. Meanwhile, the wreck of the Hui Feng No. 1 serves as a warning that abandoned ships and other man-made debris may pose a greater danger to reefs than previously suspected and should be removed as soon as possible. ❧ —Rebecca Kessler Work, T.M., G.S. Aeby, and J.E. Maragos 2008. Phase shift from a coral to a corallimorph-dominated reef associated with a shipwreck on Palmyra Atoll. PLoS ONE 3(8):e2989.

Conservation Magazine

Climate Change

Southern Exposure Retreat of Antarctic ice uncovers new carbon sinks

and glaciers in parts of Antarctica has exposed thousands of square kilometers of water, opening up new habitat for plant and animal communities that could act as carbon sinks, according to a paper in Global Change Biology. Many climate-change studies have focused on “positive” feedback loops: the worse things are, the worse they’ll get. For instance, the melting of sea ice due to global warming will cause the Earth to reflect less light, heating up the planet even more. Climate change is also predicted

The loss of ice shelves

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to reduce forest area, leaving fewer trees to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The new paper views climate change through a different lens: the authors studied how sea-ice loss might actually counteract global warming. Using historical data, photographs, and satellite images, they calculated that the Antarctic Peninsula had lost 23,900 square kilometers of sea ice and coastal glacier cover during the past half-century. The exposure of underlying waters has enabled the formation of phytoplankton, zooplankton, and seabed animal communities— which could contain 910,000 metric tons of carbon, the team estimates. Those plants and animals hold about as much carbon as 6,000 to 17,000 hectares of tropical rainforest, the authors say. As Antarctic ice continues to retreat over thousands

of years, they predict, new marine life could fix more than 50 metric megatons of carbon per year. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Peck, L.S. et al. 2009. Negative feedback in the cold: ice retreat produces new carbon sinks in Antarctica. Global Change Biology. DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.02071.x

©Dbvirago/Dreamstime.com

Fisheries

Fish Here Researchers propose radical alternative to marine reserves

effective in bolstering fish populations, but implementing them is often difficult. Despite dire warnings about fisheries nearing collapse, less than one percent of the world’s oceans are currently protected. In a recent paper in PLoS ONE, two Canadian researchers offer a bold new approach to achieving the goals of fisheries sustainability and marine species conservation. Natalie Ban and Amanda Vincent, of the University of British Columbia, say it’s time to turn conventional wisdom on its head: rather than debate which ocean areas should be protected, managers should focus on which areas should be open to fishing. Ban and Vincent’s conceptual approach begins by imagining a maximally protected ocean with no commercial fishing. A modeling tool is

Marine reserves have proven

then used to sequentially “open” highly productive fishing regions until a desired level of catch is reached. The goal of the exercise is to achieve potential harvests close to those of today while minimizing the total area fished. Ban and Vincent explore the new approach using spatial catch data for 13 commercial fisheries in British Columbia. Results show that 95 to 98 percent of current catch levels could be achieved by opening just 70 to 80 percent of the areas currently fished, leaving roughly one-quarter of British Columbia’s marine habitat protected from commercial harvest. Although not chosen for their ecological value, the protected zones—under a five-percent catch-reduction scenario—would include significant percentages of all major marine-habitat types. The authors acknowledge that their approach is highly data-dependent and needs further refinement. Nevertheless, they say it offers several advantages over today’s methods for identifying and establishing large-scale reserves. The process could achieve yield reductions in each individual fishery, leaving none disproportionately affected by closures. Debates could shift away from the costs and benefits of each proposed reserve area to the broader question of to what extent catches should be reduced in order to meet sustainability and conservation goals. And for any targeted harvest level, the model offers multiple alternatives for open and closed zones which could then be negotiated among fishers, managers, and conservation organizations. ❧ —Scott Norris

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

We Do the Legwork So You Don’t Have to

Ban N.C. and A.C.J. Vincent. 2009. Beyond marine reserves: exploring the approach of selecting areas where fishing is permitted, rather than prohibited. PLoS ONE DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0006258.

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Cover Story

in a suburban parking lot wedged between a busy supermarket and a sit-down restaurant. It was October 1969 in Hayward, California. About 100 young activists—dubbed “anti-population protesters” by reporters—were staging a “starvein” to dramatize the perils of overpopulation. Just the year before, Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne had published The Population Bomb, a bestseller warning that the planet faced too many people consuming too much. Now, one of Ehrlich’s former students, a creative type named Stewart Brand, was organizing the faux-famine to carry his mentor’s message to the streets. “Are you ready to die?” asked a sign posted by the activists, who pledged to fast for a week in a makeshift enclosure christened “Lifeboat Earth.” Fast-forward 40 years and Brand—who went on to create the influential Whole Earth Catalog and to pioneer online communities—has made something People were starving to death

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Population growth, from an environmental viewpoint, has always seemed like an openand-shut case. Less is more. But what if that equation has changed?

By David Malakoff Illustration by Istvan Banyai

of an about-face. Now, he’s worried that Lifeboat Earth could ultimately end up with too few people to stay afloat. About half of the planet’s people now produce too few children to replace themselves. Russia alone has lost nearly five percent of its population since 1993, with no end in sight. In a provocative new book*, Brand warns that this sort of plummeting birthrate could be “terrible news for the environment,” since the trend could sow social and economic chaos. And he’s not the only one worried. For decades, the leaders of baby-poor nations have struggled to reverse the decline—with little success. Some new—and controversial—research, however, could ease fears of a pending population implosion. In August, demographers revealed that birth rates in the wealthiest nations are rising again, reversing declines once deemed irreversible. One scholar said the surprising news opened an exciting “new chapter” in the planet’s population story. And The Economist gushed that the baby boomlet could herald “the environmentalist’s nirvana of uncoerced zero population growth.” Wait a second, you say? Fewer babies bad for the planet? More people create a green nirvana? It’s enough to make a population bomber’s head spin. 7

Best Guesses: A Sampling of Forecasts for World Population in 2000 In 1695, one demographer predicted global population would reach about 500 million by the year 2000. Although forecasts have gotten more accurate over time, predicting population remains tricky due to complicated variables ranging from consumption rates to technological innovation.

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6.3

Well before Brand and his crowd were smoking

dope and starving in a suburban parking lot, a quieter and more-academic revolution was taking place among demographers. After World War II, the nascent United Nations asked a Princeton University demographer named Frank Notestein to launch a

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*Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand (2009). See page 43 for an excerpt.

Actual World Population in 2000: 6.1 Billion

The seeming contradictions, however, reflect some shifting and increasingly nuanced views of population growth that have emerged over the past 40 years. Some scholars are challenging conventional notions about the environmental impact of more people and embracing some seemingly counterintuitive solutions, such as bigger cities. Others say that fixating on forecasts of total global population—now projected to be 7.8 billion to 10.8 billion by 2050—is a bad idea. “Sheer numbers do not tell the whole story,” argue demographers George Martine and José Miguel Guzman. “A world population of 7.8 billion could actually inflict greater damage on the global environment than one with 10.8 billion.” Such ideas are bound to “make some environmentalists uncomfortable,” Stewart Brand says. But he believes “the core environmentalist panic about overpopulation is quietly being undermined, but the news hasn’t gotten around.”

1695 1924 1928 1936 1945 1957 1963 1965 1966 1968 1973 1974 1977 1978 1979 1979 1980 1980 1980 Source: Caselli G., J. Vallin, and G. Wunsch (eds.). 2006. Demography: Analysis and Synthesis, volumes 1–4: A Treatise in Population. Academic Press, Burlington, Massachusetts.

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Head Count If it were a reality show, they might call it “The Ultimate Head Count.” But while forecasting global population might never make for compelling cable, the problem has fascinated scholars for more than 300 years. And it seems they’re getting better at calculating credible numbers. Even before Thomas Malthus warned in 1798 that humankind faced “gigantic inevitable famine,” an English civil servant named Gregory King had already made the earliest-known prediction. In 1695, he tallied births and deaths and figured that there would be 780 million people on Earth in 2050—a mere 7 to 10 billion below current estimates. Since then, demographers have learned there is more to forecasting population than just life and death. They also must take into account wealth, urbanization, education levels, access to birth control, and even natural disasters and war. How has this more-sophisticated calculus fared? Much better, concludes a four-volume 2005 tome titled Demography: Analysis and Synthesis. (1) It looks back at 20 efforts, dating from 1924 to 1980, to project Earth’s population in the year 2000—which turned out to be about 6.1 billion. In general, the earliest estimates were too low by half, while a few from the late 1960s were a bit too high—“perhaps due to apocalyptical talk of the time on the population explosion.” By the 1990s, however, the most-widely used projections produced by the United Nations were off by less than one percent, concludes a 2001 study in Demographic Research. Now, demographers are focused on 2050. Their best guess for world population then is 9.1 billion—but it will be another 41 years before we know whether their numbers are right. ❧

1. Caselli G., J. Vallin, and G. Wunsch (eds.). 2006. Demography: Analysis and Synthesis, volumes 1–4: A Treatise in Population. Academic Press, Burlington, Massachusetts.

©Peter Mason/Getty Images

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broad study of population trends. As Notestein crunched the numbers, he noticed something that had also intrigued a few researchers before him: As people got richer and more urbanized, they tended to have fewer babies. Indeed, at some point, richer people stopped having enough babies to replace Total Fertility themselves, leading to Rate shrinking populations. t In a 1945 treatise, n 1975 8 Notestein dubbed this s 2005 6 phenomenon “the demographic transition”—and ever since, it has shaped 4 how we think about 3 population growth. The concept, for instance, has 2 forced modern demographers to pare back some 1.5 of the highest estimates of 1.2 peak populations (which have ranged up to 15 bil0.3 0.6 0.8 0.9 0.95 lion) because economic Human development index growth has outpaced expectations, putting downward pressure on Back on the Upside Conventional wisdom reproduction. holds that, as countries “I wish I had realized that the professional grow more developed, demographers were really rolling their eyes at all fertility rates decline. However, new research of our frantic heaving around,” Brand says now. indicates that fertility “They were essentially right about the impact rates in some highly of the demographic transition.” developed countries Today some 60 nations, accounting for are rising again. (1) about half of the world’s population, have “transitioned” and no longer produce enough children to stave off population declines without immigration. In some countries, birthrates have dropped to just 1.2 children per woman—far below the “magic number” of 2.1 needed to keep a population stable. Most are wealthier nations such as Italy (1.2), the United States (about 2.0) and Russia (1.1). But some aren’t, such as heavily Catholic Mexico (2.0) and Brazil (1.3); even China’s birthrate has dropped to about 1.7. In the nations with the lowest birthrates, population declines could be shockingly rapid. Brazil’s birthrate of 1.3, for instance, could ultimately mean its population will be cut in half in just 45 years—and then in half again within the next 45 years.

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This may seem like cause for environmental celebration, but not everyone is letting their guard down—at least not yet. Shrinking populations can mean there aren’t enough young workers to sustain a vibrant economy or pay for social welfare programs that support the poor and the elderly and help tamp down political instability. Low birthrates “could mean perpetual economic crisis, which would be terrible news for the environment,” Brand notes. “In an economic crisis, there is neither money nor attention for responsible stewardship. There is no long-term thinking or action. Wars become more likely, and wars are deadly for the environment.” To avoid that scenario, many barren nations are experimenting with “pro-baby” policies. France, for instance, provides free daycare and cash bonuses to willing parents. And Australia launched a “three-child” campaign: “One for mum, one for dad, and one for the country.” So far, however, they haven’t made much of a dent in the overall trend. Most pro-birth policies have failed to push fertility rates above 2.1. And as a startling new paper in Nature suggests, those political leaders (and Australian ad-copy writers) may be up against far larger forces than they ever imagined. (1) Indeed, those forces may throw yet another unexpected curve into the human population trajectory. In August of this year, the Nature study revealed that in 18 of the wealthiest nations— including the United States, Germany, and France—birthrates appear to have mysteriously started climbing again after decades of decline. (1) The unexpected reversal provides a different outlook for the twenty-first century, conclude the authors, led by demographer Mikko Myrskylä of the University of Pennsylvania. Myrskylä’s team looked at how two factors influencing population changed in more than 100 nations between 1975 and 2005. One was “total fertility”—the number of children a woman living in a particular nation was expected to have. The other was a human development index (HDI) score developed by the United Nations. The HDI combines per capita GDP, education, and life expectancy to measure how

developed a given country is. Scores fall between remain below the 2.1 replacement threshold. As zero and one; higher scores signal higher levels a result, the demographic reversal “will not make a big difference for total global population—it of development. Myrskylä’s study found that, in 1975, de- will continue to be driven by growth in develvelopment scores were rising in many nations oping nations.” —and birthrates were falling—but no nation was very close to an HDI of 1.0. By 2005, Some experts have dubbed this phenomhowever, several dozen nations were closing in enon “the demographic divide.” In the richer, on that perfect development score. And, surpris- developed nations of the north, populations ingly, in many of those with the highest scores are generally getting older and stagnant; in the poorer, developing (above 0.9), birthrates south, however, they are had started rising, putA world population of 7.8 billion getting younger and still ting a fishhook into could actually inflict greater damage growing, although more what had been a sharply on the global environment than slowly. descending curve. There one of 10.8 billion This variation means were a few exceptions, that estimates of gross such as Canada, Japan, and Korea, where cultural or other factors may world population are, in some ways, just be holding down birthrates. But the bottom big useless numbers. What’s probably more line, Myrskylä’s research suggests, is that wealthy important from an environmental perspecnations need not necessarily fear rapid, destabi- tive is understanding how regional or nalizing population implosions. Percent of growth The Economist reacted to the news with tional populations are t typical boldness in a story headlined “The best shifting—and where 45 of all possible worlds?” While it is too early to people live, how age 40 know exactly where the upward population and sex shape their becurve in highly developed countries is headed, havior, and how much 35 The Economist envisioned a kind of demo- they consume. 30 Sheer numbers graphic paradise in which a fertility rate of 2.1 25 produces a stable workforce that could support do not tell the whole 20 civil society and spin off enough wealth to pay story, demographers George Martine and for environmental protection. 15 Professional head-counters were more José Miguel Guzman 10 measured but nevertheless excited. The study of the United Nations 5 had made a “fundamental contribution” by Population Fund argue “opening a new chapter on our understanding in a recent collection of 0 China USA of fertility transitions,” blogged Stanford Uni- essays, Rethinking Deversity anthropologist and demographer James velopment in a CarbonHolland Jones. Others quickly cited the study Constrained World. (2) in declaring an end to “lowest-low fertility.” It is “unrealistic,” for instance, to believe that A few scholars, however, are skeptical. Mark problems such as climate change and habitat Lauer, an independent statistician, has posted loss “could be easily resolved simply with masan animated analysis (stubbornmule.net) that sive family-planning programs in the poorer concludes the reversal is a statistical illusion. It countries.” In the climate arena, for instance, focusing could take years to settle the debate. In the meantime, Hans-Peter Kohler, one of on overall population has little value, argues the study’s authors, says it is important to keep David Satterthwaite, Senior Fellow at the Intersome caveats in mind. Even with the uptick, national Institute for Environment and Develfor example, birthrates in most wealthy nations opment in London. “There is and will be little

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n Population growth n CO2 emissions growth

India

South Korea

Japan

Big Gain, No Pain New research shows surprisingly little connection between population growth and emissions growth. It might be wiser to focus on consumption patterns as a harbinger of climate change. (3)

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David Malakoff is a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia

connection between population growth and energy technologies to land and biodiversity emissions growth,” he argues in a recent paper preservation. in Environment and Urbanization, “if most of Martine and Guzman argue that such comthe growth in the world’s population is among plexities mean we can no longer view populalow-income households in low-income nations tion growth “as a simple issue of the pressure who never ‘get out of poverty.’”(3) Perhaps one- of numbers against resources.” Solutions, they sixth of the world’s population is so poor, he and others say, will require humanity to adnotes, that it makes virtually no contribution dress overconsumption in some places—and to global greenhouse-gas emissions. In contrast, overpopulation in others. the wealthiest 20 percent accounts for the vast majority of new emissions, in large part because Brand, for his part, tips his hat to Paul Ehrlich it consumes massive quantities of fossil fuel. “for one of the great self-defeating prophecies These consumption patterns could change in history.” He believes “greens can take a bow in unexpected ways, however, as wealthier coun- for dramatizing the importance of populatries age and poorer nations urbanize—com- tion early and for promoting the education, plexities that researchers birth-control techare just beginning to niques, and prosperBrazil’s birthrate of 1.3 could appreciate. Some recent ity that helped reduce ultimately mean its population will be research, for instance, birthrates worldwide.” cut in half in just 45 years—and then suggests that the rapid Even so, he’s a realist. in half again within the next 45 years aging of populations in World population will developed nations could grow by some 3 billion significantly reduce averpeople over the next 40 age long-term emissions, since older people years, mostly in the developing world, and he tend to live in smaller spaces and travel less. In acknowledges that this poses “an enormously contrast, changes in family structure—such as complex challenge.” moving out of multifamily compounds or miYet if Brand were to stage Lifeboat Earth grating away from the farm to the city—could again today, it would be hard to imagine what boost emissions in even the poorest nations. it would look like or what the sound bite might Other researchers are looking at how men and say. Perhaps that’s a good thing. As the Nobel women differ in their consumption patterns Prize–winning development expert Amartya and environmental impacts. Sen put it, “There is a danger that in the conEnvironmentalists may also have to recon- frontation between apocalyptic pessimism, on sider their traditional hostility to the growth the one hand, and a dismissive smugness, on the of cities, some researchers say. “Paradoxically, other, a genuine understanding of the nature of cities also hold our best chance for a sustainable the population problem may be lost.” ❧ future,” Martine and Guzman argue. Not only do they tend to promote lower birthrates, but “if well designed and administered, the com- Literature Cited: pactness and economies of scale of cities can reduce per capita costs, reduce energy demand, 1. Myrskylä, M., H.-P. Kohler and F.C. Billari. 2009. Advances in development reverse fertility declines. and minimize pressures on surrounding land Nature 460:741-743. and natural resources.” By some estimates, for instance, Tokyo with its 12.7 million people 2. Palosuo, E. (ed.). 2009. Rethinking development in but superior mass transit system actually pro- a carbon-constrained world: Development cooperation duces less carbon dioxide (the major warming and climate change. Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Helsinki, Finland. gas) than San Diego, which has one-tenth the population but more car use. Other experts 3. Satterthwaite, D. 2009. The implications of populanote that cities also tend to produce wealth tion growth and urbanization for climate change. that can be plowed into everything from clean Environment and Urbanization 21(2):545-567.

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Lighten Up

101 Funny Things about Global Warming By Sidney Harris & Colleagues Bloomsbury USA, 2007 Available through ScienceCartoonsPlus.com

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Cartoons by Sidney Harris Conservation Magazine

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Have we u nwittingly exchanged th e language of th e living world— th e nam es of real plants and animals— for a vocabulary of Tony th e Tigers and Geico geckos?

Th e UnNatural By Carol Kaesuk Yoon • Illustration By Daniel Horowitz

I was raised on the milk of science. Both my parents were working scientists. On rainy Saturdays I played with my father’s laboratory mice on the living room floor or chatted with my mother as she tinkered in the federally funded laboratory set up in our basement. Before I hit puberty, before I knew the power of love or sex or good hair, I had become well-versed in the power of various statistical techniques (chi-square was our family favorite). I married a scientist, most of my friends are scientists, I

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became one myself, and I’ve spent most of the last two decades writing for The New York Times about the amazing and wonderful new findings that scientists have come up with. So, not surprisingly, when I set out some years ago to write a book about the ordering and naming of the living world—the practice known as taxonomy—I intended to write about how this work was carried out by the real experts: scientists. I took it as a given that any other ways that people might order life—insofar as they

Feature

Order of Things differed from science—were wrong. People, I knew, should defer always to science in the ordering and naming of life, as they reliably do. So imagine my surprise, then, when I began to see that science was neither the best nor the only valid way to order and name the living world. Instead, I realized that the ordering and naming of life was and always had been at its heart something much more democratic, even subversive to the dominion of science, and much more interesting. Reclaiming the order-

ing and naming of life from science, I began to realize, might be the key to ending humanity’s rapidly growing disconnection from the wild life all around us. The trouble first began when I started looking

into the ways in which other cultures ordered the living world—something with which I was, at the time, entirely unfamiliar. I thought it might be amusing to include, along with scientific orderings of life, some of the curious orderings

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created by other people. I found it instantly intriguing to see just how confused—that is, how different from science—people were on the point of how to order life. One anthropological study showed that some New Guinea tribesmen, despite being excellent naturalists, classified a giant bird as a mammal. Another study described how Filipino headhunters appeared to conceive of orchids as human body parts, explaining to a bewildered anthropologist that here grow the thumbs, there the elbows. But to my surprise, all was not disorder and chaos; quite the contrary. Not only did all peoples order life, but anthropologists, I soon realized, had found that beneath the great va-

of life. That is why we are not surprised at the very surprising fact that a toddler can recognize what the entity “dog” or “cat” is after seeing just a few of the beasts. When you think about it, there are many kinds of dogs, in many shapes and sizes, and it is not that simple to describe how one can distinguish them in a glance from all the other furry, four-legged creatures such as cats, cows, or goats. Nor are we surprised that a child or anyone else can recognize a tiger, even if it is a strange albino white and even if it has mutated to have two heads or been mutilated to have only three legs. How do we know so much based on so very little? For we do know astonishingly much about the living world

Th e ordering and naming of life was and always had been at its h eart som eth ing much more democratic, even su bversive to th e dominion of science, and much more interesting. riety in ordering and naming, there were deep, undergirding similarities. That is, people around the world ordered the life around them in very similar, even stereotyped ways, regardless of where they lived, what language they spoke, or which animals and plants they were ordering. People, it turned out, unconsciously followed a strict set of rules, universally creating a hierarchical ordering of living things based on how living things appear, that is, on similarities and dissimilarities in how they look, smell, sound, and act—the same sort of taxonomy that professional scientific taxonomists have ever been after. The countless varieties of folk taxonomies were fundamentally variations on a single theme: that same basic and effortlessly perceived natural order that people everywhere see. Things got even more interesting when I learned that psychologists had been studying the ordering of life by children, including infants, for years. What they had shown quite clearly was that these youngsters were ordering the living world—and doing so quite skillfully—even before they could walk or talk. Without realizing it, we expect everyone, babies included, to have a kind of savant-like fluency with the ordering 24

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without effort or thought. Knowing what an organism is—in particular, where it lies in the great natural order—does indeed come surprisingly easily to all of us, so easily as to fit neatly into our subconscious. Children appear not only to be very adept at this but also to be drawn early and deeply to learning the ordering of life, the names and groupings and organization of living things. Still other psychologists have actually identified groups of brain-damaged patients who suffer the unlikely-sounding illness of being unable to order and name living things. Oddly enough, many of these people have suffered damage in the same part of the brain—leading some scientists to hypothesize that there might be an actual place, a physical location in our gray matter, where the ability to order and name the living world resides. Taxonomy, the envisioning and perception of the natural order, it seemed, might be much more than what it has been reduced to today— an abstract laboratory science. The classification of the living world began to take on the look of something instinctual, something that, like hope, would spring eternal in every newborn

Science vs. Instinct

How is it that scientists could deny the reality of fish? Yet, absurd as it sounds, that is exactly what the scientists known as “cladists,” from the Greek klados (“branch”), did in the early 1980s. Their goal was Darwin’s: to order the living world strictly according to evolutionary relatedness. That is, they resolved to recognize and name only those groupings of animals that were complete groupings of descendants of a single evolutionary ancestor, with no extra lineages thrown in and none left out— which seems sensible enough. So how could such good sense have done away with fish? The cladists began by asking a simple question: What would the evolutionary tree of salmon, lungfish, and cows be? The answer, it appears at first glance, is simple. Salmon and lungfish, being fish, would cluster nicely together on one branch, and very non-fishy cows would be off on a separate branch. Right? Wrong. Contrary to what you might expect, what you see below is their evolutionary tree. Working up from the root, the lineage that leads to salmon branches off first. Keep tracing up the tree, and you’ll see that the lineage from which the salmon branched off eventually branches into two new lineages: the one leading to lungfish and the other leading to cows. In other words, a cow and a lungfish are more closely related to one another than either is to salmon. How could that be? It’s because lungfish are no ordinary fish. They are part of the lineage of fish that—with lungs and a host of other curious characteristics—dragged themselves landward and gave rise to any number of land-loving animals, including cows and even bears, dogs, birds, and ourselves. Fine, you say; you can accept this tree. But once you do, if you agree with the cladists’ equally sensible insistence that all named groups be complete groups of descendants of one ancestor, you’ll see you’ve done in your precious fish. If you choose to describe fish as, say, all the animals descended from the salmon lineage, then you’ve left out lungfish. Oops. If you choose to include both the salmon and the lungfish, you’ll see that one descendant of that original fishy-fish that gave rise to salmon and lungfish likewise gave rise to the cow. Suddenly, you’re stuck with either having the fish include the cows and humans, which no one wants, or no fish at all. Hello, modern evolutionary science; goodbye, fish. ❧

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child. It might be one of the essential and, at least early in life, irrepressible functions of being a human being, of being alive. that captures this universal view of the living world, this perceived natural order that we all share. It is the “Umwelt” (pronounced OOM-velt). Literally it means “the world around,” but scientists studying animal behavior have used it to evoke something much more specific. For these biologists, the Umwelt signifies the perceived world, the world sensed by an animal—a view idiosyncratic to each species, fueled by its particular sensory and cogni-

There’s a German word

is and is not. So what is it that now rules over our vision of life? Science. Our deference to science and mistrust of ourselves is the reason for a number of phenomena, including the ever-increasing number of interpretive centers. We need to have life— the life right before our eyes—interpreted for us, because we have reached a point where we believe we really can’t see, hear, or understand it by ourselves. In fact, we’ve reached a point in the process, the exact point where I was when I began this book, where we don’t even remember that there is any valid way, other than science, to determine what a living thing is or is not.

You migh t need a naturalist interpreter to h elp you make sense of th ings as you walk th rough th e local forest, but you would never need such assistance wh en wandering th rough th e mall. tive powers and limited by its deficits. Most of us aren’t familiar with the term, but we are more than familiar with the idea. We know that our dogs live in a universe painted not in colors, which they cannot see, but in smells. Bees, with their multifaceted eyes, see ultraviolet light that is invisible to the human eye. But not only dogs and bees have an Umwelt, all animals do, even humans. We might call it reality, but it is indeed an Umwelt, an idiosyncratic sensory picture of the living world around us. And I believe it is the Umwelt—this shared perceived world—that gives us our stereotyped, hard-wired way of perceiving the order in living things. But the Umwelt is more than just a facility for the doing of the science of taxonomy. For countless millennia, the Umwelt was humanity’s best and most-intimate connection to everything that lives. Yet today, most of us have forgotten that a natural order even exists. Why? Because we modern-day citizens of the world have abandoned our Umwelt, that ancient vision of an order of life, without even realizing it. We have something else to determine what our vision of life should be, what the reality of the living world is—something else to which we routinely hand over the power to say what 26

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Most of us, whatever our profession, our class, our race—wherever we live, in cities or small towns, in long-inhabited rural countryside, or newly built suburban developments— are profoundly disconnected from the living world. Whatever language we speak, we have nearly lost the language of life. We are so unfamiliar with the ordering of life, so removed from it, that we have quite literally lost the words for the living world. We walk down the street past what many of us know vaguely as “trees” and “bushes.” “Flowers” bloom and “bugs” pester or frighten. But if our modern Umwelt is largely devoid of a

vision of order in the living world, what exactly is in there? Here’s a hint: What can we easily recognize? What can we order and name hundreds upon hundreds of? For most of us, the answer is branded merchandise, all things buyable. I believe that the Umwelt of most modernday humans is, in fact, stuffed to the gills with various kinds of distinctive-looking, -smelling, -tasting, -sounding, and -feeling—that is, differently packaged, branded, and logocovered—products. Today, we effortlessly perceive an order among the many different kinds

of human-made, purchasable items. Instead of sorting living things by size, shape, color, smell, and sound, we sort merchandise this way, obsessed and immersed as we are in a world of products. And we end up armed with an excellent taxonomy of goods. That is why we are so masterful at sorting at a glance the Gulden’s mustard from the Grey Poupon, the Ford from the BMW, the Adidas from the Nike. Even when faced with products that are nearly identical in shape and in packaging—like cereal, each in the same rectangular cardboard box—we prove ourselves to be phenomenally skilled at homing in on our favorites, on shelves stuffed with other similar boxes, quickly sorting through the many color schemes and logos to find the one we want. Without even realizing it, we have traded a view of ourselves as living beings in a living world for a view of ourselves as consumers in a landscape of merchandise. We have unwittingly traded a facility with living things for a savantlike brand expertise that exchanges the language of the living world—the names of real plants and real animals—for a vocabulary of Tony the Tigers and Geico geckos. The world we live in, our simple reality, is the world of purchasable items. We have, without even trying, absolutely gotten what we’ve paid for. You might need a naturalist interpreter to help you make sense of things as you walk through the local forest, but you would never need such assistance when wandering through the mall. Not surprisingly, we are also simultaneously trading the actual world of living things for a world filled instead with human-made products, with factories to build them, with stores to sell them, with homes to fill them with. While we’ve been busy shopping and the world’s diversity of human-made things has been increasing, the world’s wealth of living things has been dwindling. with our merchandise-clogged Umwelts, smack-dab in the middle of the sixth great mass extinction of life on earth. It is a dieoff of species estimated to be more rapid than any other ever seen in the history of the planet— one with the potential to be bigger and more powerful than the one that did in the dinosaurs and so many other forms of life now unknown. So here we sit,

In North America, since the Pilgrims pulled up in the Mayflower and disembarked into a New World, more than 600 kinds of living things (and likely many more that no one even knows about) are known to have gone extinct. We ran off the passenger pigeon, the Eastern elk, the Texas red wolf, the Badlands bighorn sheep, the sea mink, the heath hen, the Carolina parakeet, and the California grizzly, to name just a few. Even though this happened in our backyards, it is hard to feel, let alone care about, these grand-scale losses when our perception of life has become so stymied, so stunted and numb. There are so many reasons we’ve been able to reach this point, this biodiversity crisis, but more than one traces right back to the Umwelt. Stuffed today as it is with logos, the Umwelt has actually become part of the problem, one of the key engines driving a process of brand recognition, admiration, and accelerating acquisition of thing after thing. The Umwelt, once the guardian of a vision of life, has been subverted to the point where it is actually helping to drive the conversion of what’s left of the wild world into packages on the shelf at the mini-mall. But a mass extinction in which so many species of things—blazing beacons, from gorgeous wildflowers to impressive carnivores—can disappear without anyone even noticing is about more than a misplaced desire for stuff. A mass extinction that worries us hardly at all is possible only because we have discarded the view of the living world we once regularly cherished, studied, and dwelt in. There is good reason to hope that we can reclaim our Umwelt. Life persists, exists, intrudes, exudes, creeps, and pokes up everywhere. And our Umwelt—if given a break from priced and tagged items—is ours to use, to soak up a full, rich view of that living world. It may need a bit of retraining, off Gucci and Versace, off Macs and PCs, off Eddie Bauer and Banana Republic, Hummers and Fords and VWs, onto living things. We will need to learn enough to teach our babies better; but hope does and should spring eternal. We have another chance, another eager learner of living things each time a new little human appears, reliably keen to begin understanding the living world and feeding its hungry Umwelt. ❧ Conservation Magazine

Carol Kaesuk Yoon has a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology and has been writing about science for The New York Times since 1992. Her latest book, from which this article was adapted is Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science, available at: http://books. wwnorton.com. ©2009 by Carol Kaesuk Yoon with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Feature

On a dark night last fall, 11-year-

old Joe Hess was playing a backyard game of hide-and-seek with his younger brother and two friends near Grand Coulee Dam in eastern Washington. Lying face-down in the grass, Joe thought he saw Magellan—a huge housecat that lived next door—out of the corner of his eye. When the cat pounced on the boy’s head, Joe leaped to his feet and yelled, “No!” But it wasn’t Magellan—Joe was staring at a cougar that looked a little bigger than a German shepherd. Joe slowly backed away from the animal, then turned and ran inside the house. He had a few shallow scratches but was otherwise unharmed. The wildlife agents who responded to the scene told Joe’s parents that the cougar was probably a young animal, about a year old, that had recently left home to begin life on its own. Joe’s lack of serious injuries might have meant the cat was just playing with him. Or maybe it was simply an inexperienced predator, unsure of whether a boy belonged on the menu. Cougar encounters like this one are becoming increasingly common in the United States. Most people assume that’s because cougar populations are growing, or because the big cats are coming into closer contact with the expanding web of human suburbs. But Robert Wielgus, director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Lab at Washington State University, believes there is something far more complex at work. In research that has stirred controversy in academic and policy circles, Wielgus argues that poorly designed hunting policies might be triggering an increase in cougar-human conflicts. As hunters kill disproportionate numbers of mature, male cougars, a generation of disorderly teenage cats is taking over their turf. Without adults to keep them in check, Wielgus believes, the unruly juveniles are more likely to run afoul of humans, livestock and pets. Cougars aren’t the only species with troubled teens. Off the Florida coast, small sharks attack swimmers more often than large ones do. In Africa, orphaned male elephants have killed humans and rhinoceroses. And in the southwestern U.S., young

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Tro

A new generation of unruly adolescent wildlife has some experts wondering whether what we’re missing isn’t so much habitat as adult supervision.

ubled Teens By Dawn Stover

California condors have destroyed roof tiles and torn off windshield wipers after being released into the wild. The naughty condor behavior decreased markedly when researchers began a “mentoring” program that houses puppet-reared chicks with an adult condor for about a year before they are released. And the marauding elephants calmed down when older bulls were introduced. In a provocative theory that suggests adolescent wildlife may be surprisingly similar to human teenagers, some scientists believe adult supervision could be the key to better behavior for cougars, too.

a lot of media coverage, which builds an outsized impression of cougars’ presence. In Wielgus’s home state of Washington, this perception was furthered by a 1996 ban on using hounds to hunt cougars—which many believed would reduce the number of cougars killed by hunters—as well as a rising number of cougar complaints. In 1995, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife registered 247 cougar complaints. By 1998, that number had skyrocketed to 927. Wielgus’s study—published in 2006, three years after the radio-collar monitoring was completed—found that the cougar population was “Sometimes they hiss at you as you’re climbactually declining rapidly. (1) What really struck ing,” says Hugh Robinson, a University of Wielgus’s team was that they found almost no Montana researcher who, as a graduate student, male cougars older than four years of age. helped Wielgus track down cougars. For more Wielgus suspected hunting policies were than a decade, Wielgus’s research teams have the culprit. Wildlife managers have long seen been fitting the big cats with radio collars and hunting as a way to keep cougar populations in monitoring their movements. To locate the check, placating ranchers and homeowners who cougars, researchers get up at 4:30 on winter worry the cats will prey on livestock or children. mornings and set out on Wielgus thought hunters snowmobiles. If they find might be picking off most Cougars spend a surprising fresh tracks in the snow, of the big, mature males, amount of time cruising the the researchers bring in a which make the best troedges of suburban neighborhoods, houndsman with trained phies. To test his theory, undetected dogs to follow the scent Wielgus added two more and drive the cougar into groups of cougars to the a tree. Once the cat is treed, the team moves tracking program—one in a heavily hunted in and shoots it with a tranquilizer dart. If the area and another in a comparable but lightly cougar doesn’t then jump—or fall—out of the hunted area. In a recent study in Ecology, he tree, a researcher climbs up and lowers the cat and his coauthors concluded that heavy huntto the ground with a rope. ing indeed decimates older males. (2) Another From 1998 to 2003, Wielgus’s team turned study showed the size of the cougar population up some unexpected findings as they tracked a in the heavily hunted area did not change, but group of cougars in northeastern Washington, the population structure shifted toward younger northern Idaho, and southeastern British Co- animals. (3) lumbia. At the time, cougar populations were Conventional wisdom holds that eliminatbelieved to be exploding across the U.S. This ing large male cougars keeps people and liveperception was driven in part by an increase in stock safe. But Wielgus believes this paves the cougar attacks. Beginning in the 1970s, cougar way for a bigger threat: unruly young males who attacks on humans went from about four per move in from nearby areas and, unlike mature decade in the U.S. and Canada to about 18 per cougars who have learned to avoid humans, decade, says Paul Beier, a Northern Arizona don’t always mind their manners. University professor who studies cougar attacks. Although such altercations are rare compared The life of a male cougar is not an easy one. with, say, attacks by domestic dogs—which kill Raised by a single mom, he is forced to leave about 16 Americans every year and send another home by the age of two. His father, who marks 386,000 to the emergency room—they generate and patrols a territory that may include the

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No Country for Old Cougars Dispersed from mother at 1.5 years old on 5/9/03

Cle Elum

Harvest by Hunter 11/6/03 6/26/03

When Bron the cougar got old enough to live on his own, he faced the same threat as all male cougars: His father essentially told him to find his own turf—or else. Rather than risk getting killed by his territorial dad, Bron (a nickname given by the researchers who tracked him) set out from his home near Cle Elum, Washington, in search of a place of his own. This was no easy task in an era when much of the prime habitat is occupied by people or other cougars. As this chart of Bron’s travels shows, he first wandered more than 160 kilometers south, following the crest of the Cascade Range and stopping periodically to feed on deer. Ending up near the Oregon border, Bron apparently didn’t like the open country where he found himself, because he turned around and headed back toward a moreheavily forested area southeast of Mount St. Helens. Bron was still too young to compete with an older male, but he found a small home range where he could hide out and wait for a larger territory to open up, says Gary Koehler, a research scientist at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife who has studied Bron and other cougars in partnership with Wielgus and his students. Bron never made it to adulthood, though. Less than five months after the cat settled in his new home, a hunter shot Bron and turned in his GPS collar, which contained a record of the cat’s journey. ❧

Washington State

©James Balog/Getty Images

kilometers 40

1. Utt, A.C. et al. 2007. The effects of rearing method on social behaviors of mentored, captive-reared juvenile California condors. Zoo Biology 27:1–18.

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Condor puppet and chick ©USFWS

Cougars aren’t the only species that need adult supervision to keep them in line. When the California Condor Recovery Program began releasing the first captivity-bred condors in 1992, the young birds ripped apart cabins, tore windshield wipers off cars, and pestered humans for food. “They are naturally curious birds, but they didn’t have a healthy fear of or respect for humans,” explains Amy Utt, a PhD candidate at Loma Linda University who coauthored a 2007 study of how rearing methods affect condor behavior. (1) The problem stems from parental guidance—or lack thereof. To produce as many chicks as possible in captivity, zookeepers use a technique called “double clutching”: when a female lays an egg, the keepers remove it so that she will lay a second one. The condor parents raise the chick that hatches from the second egg, but a human wearing a condor-like hand puppet raises the first chick. Puppet-reared condors can fare well in the wild, but only if they do some growing up before they are released. Utt’s study found that more than one-third of the puppet-reared birds died in the wild, and 19 percent of them had to be recaptured because of behavioral problems. One reason for the problems was that the birds were released when they were only six to nine months old. Normally, a condor stays with its parents until it is nearly two years old, learning how to fly and forage. Eventually, the parents kick out the youngster so they can lay a new egg. With this in mind, the captivity program’s researchers changed their strategy. Now, most condors are not released into the wild until they are about 17 months old. This gives researchers time to house the puppet-reared juveniles with one or more other juveniles and an adult “mentor” deemed to have healthy behaviors. The adult condor’s job is to teach the juveniles to act like condors—the adult’s aggressive behavior helps put the younger birds in their place. More important, the juveniles “learn by example that humans are not something you want to be around,” says Utt. Now that there are several established populations of California condors in the wild, released juveniles can continue to learn from adults until they reach maturity around age 5 or 6. Mentoring has proven to be an important factor in long-term survival, Utt says, and naughty behavior has decreased markedly.

home ranges of several females and cover hun- pects that teenage immigrants in the heavily dreds of square miles, does not tolerate other hunted area may be responsible for most of the adult males in the area. So the son strikes out on trouble. In other words, hunting policies that alhis own, traveling long distances in search of a new home where he can find food and females. low a disproportionate number of males to be Only about 40 percent of young males survive killed may be exacerbating the very problem they set out to solve. Paul their first winter alone, Beier’s studies of attacks sometimes by occupyInstead of one old cougar on humans support this ing the loosely defended fringes of an older male’s that keeps his nose clean, you’ve got counterintuitive notion. three teenagers wreaking havoc Beier says that at least half territory. A young male of the cougars involved in lucky enough to find an these attacks are juvenile unoccupied territory will spend the rest of his life guarding the boundar- animals, typically around a year old. “The older ies established by the previous occupant. “It’s ones are smarter and know how to behave betlike a home going up for sale,” says Wielgus. ter,” Beier says. The scientists have also discovered that, in “The property remains the same; there’s just a the heavily hunted area, the home ranges of the new owner.” These homeowners are elusive creatures. new arrivals are much larger and overlap more Harley Shaw, who spent 27 years as a wildlife than in the lightly hunted area, because the biologist working in cougar country for the animals are not old enough to maintain strict Arizona Game and Fish Department, has seen boundaries. “It’s territorial chaos,” Wielgus only four cougars without the help of tracking says. “Instead of one old cougar that keeps his collars or hounds. But studies using GPS col- nose clean, you’ve got three teenagers wreaking lars have found that cougars spend a surprising havoc.” amount of time cruising the edges of suburban neighborhoods, undetected. Some biologists Wielgus’s ideas don’t sit well with everyone. cite this as proof that humans and cougars can His critics and even some of his own former peacefully coexist. “Usually they are inclined to graduate students are not completely convinced avoid us,” Shaw says. “If they didn’t, we would that age is a key factor in human-cougar conhave a lot more attacks and encounters.” flicts. “Hunting definitely does cause an influx of Wielgus worries that these elusive tenden- juvenile males,” says the University of Montana’s cies are breaking down. When older males die, Robinson, but he doesn’t yet see solid proof that they leave behind an open territory that’s often juveniles are more trouble-prone than older cats. within range of human settlements. The males “It’s still just a hypothesis,” he says. who move in are younger, unaccustomed to Maybe increased attacks have nothing to humans, and—possibly—more brazen and do with a cougar’s age but instead simply result curious. But can this really make them more from the cats’ being new to the area. In many likely to run afoul of people and livestock? cases, the new arrivals have been squeezed out of This question weighs heavily on the mind remote wilderness habitat and forced into areas of Ben Maletzke, a WSU graduate student where they are more likely to encounter humans. who is comparing cougar complaints from the “There’s so much more to the equation than heavily hunted and lightly hunted areas. His just being a young cat,” says Mat Alldredge, a preliminary findings suggest that the heavily researcher at the Colorado Division of Wildlife hunted area has five times as many complaints who is studying cougar demographics and huper capita, and eight times as many livestock man interactions along the Front Range. And predations, as the lightly hunted area—even with few cats surviving to a ripe old age, there though the density of cougars and livestock may be no way to know whether older animals is about the same in both areas. Wielgus sus- would be better behaved than youngsters. “I

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think humans are primarily responsible for all the interaction you see,” Alldredge says. “We’re moving into these areas where cougars and deer are.” As a possible solution, Alldredge is testing scare tactics, which he euphemistically refers to as “aversive techniques.” The idea is to teach cougars to be apprehensive about approaching populated areas. Some of the cougars Alldredge traps and relocates are being released with a special sendoff: beanbag rounds fired from a noisy, 12-gauge shotgun. “It’s an ‘extra’ to see whether it helps keep them away” from populated areas, he explains. A bigger fix might be to revise hunting policies in a way that ensures older, wiser males remain in the cougar population. In a recent study in PLoS ONE, University of Minnesota professor Craig Packer and his coauthors estimated that killing only males that are at least four years old would ensure that they live long enough to produce offspring and protect them from other males. (4) Perhaps there should be a minimum “catch size” for cougars, Packer says, similar to the laws that require sport fishermen to release small fish so that they can grow up to be big fish. “You cannot manage animals like chess pieces,”

says Gay Bradshaw, an expert on animal psychology and neuroscience who heads The Kerulos Center in Jacksonville, Oregon. Bradshaw has written extensively about how elephants, lions, and other species have distinct cultures that humans are only starting to glimpse. Until these cultures are understood and respected, she believes, it will be virtually impossible to live peaceably with cougars and other wildlife. It’s a controversial idea that raises a provocative question: Instead of just eradicating “problem” cougars or other animals, should we try to understand them in the same way we understand humans who come from broken homes or violent neighborhoods? Bradshaw has documented how witnessing a shooting—or living in daily fear of being shot—can trigger posttraumatic stress disorder in lions and elephants. These animals have the 34

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same brain structures and mechanisms that in humans are responsible for intelligence, emotion, and culture, Bradshaw says. And young male elephants seem to behave better when there are mature bulls around. Wielgus has no doubt that cougars follow a similar dynamic, even though this makes him an outlier among his colleagues. Cougars are solitary animals, but Wielgus notes they do come into contact with each other. He believes these interactions may teach youngsters to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate prey and behavior. In turn, Wielgus thinks it’s time to consider how hunting and other human activities can cause social chaos among these animals. Older male cougars may not be role models, says Wielgus, “but they certainly serve as a police force.” If this seems like a bizarre idea, think of it in human terms: imagine what any community would be like if most of the adult men disappeared. We may not understand what makes 18-year-old males more likely than 48-year-old men to do dangerous things, Wielgus says, but we know that the world would be a different place if teenagers were in charge. ❧ Literature Cited 1. Lambert, C.M.S. et al. 2006. Cougar population dynamics and viability in the Pacific Northwest. Journal of Wildlife Management 70(1):246-254. 2. Cooley, H.S. et al. 2009. Does hunting regulate cougar populations? A test of the compensatory mortality hypothesis. Ecology 90(10):2913-2921. 3. Robinson, H.S. et al. 2008. Sink populations in carnivore management: Cougar demography and immigration in a hunted population. Ecological Applications 18(4):1028-1037. 4. Packer, C. et al. 2009. Sport hunting, predator control and conservation of large carnivores. PLoS ONE 4(6):e5941.

Dawn Stover is an editor at large for Popular Science magazine and has also written for Earth 3.0, New Scientist, and Outside. She lives in White Salmon, Washington.

Essay

Survivor ©Pavlo Maydikov/iStock.com

By Eric Roston

Ginkgo biloba embraces the sacred and the mundane like little else in our experience. Its most-ancient recognizable relatives are embedded in fossils

more than 270 million years old. Ginkgo’s survival into modernity was not merely a matter of luck. It needed an arsenal of molecular and systemic weapons against disease, predators, and time. Ginkgo biloba has witnessed most of tree history, the proliferation of land plants, and their transformative effect on the carbon cycle. By any reasonable expectation, it should have vanished into silt long ago. Instead it lives on, playing both Homer and Cassandra, telling great tales of the past and warning of the future. Human beings are the greatest thing to happen to Ginkgo in about 90 million years. Ginkgo trees can be found in Boston, south to Charleston, South Carolina, along the bank of the Detroit River, and west to the Pacific. Nineteenth-century horticulturalists planted Ginkgo in cities up and down the northeastern United States, because the trees tolerated coal soot so well. Today, urban planners put Ginkgo to work where automotive pollution, storms, and seasonal temperature swings expose human residents to some risk. Trees must be robust to survive Chicago. The Moscow of the Midwest shuts down virtually every year after a blizzard. Officials cordon off neighborhoods where wind knocked trees into power lines. In institutional memory, the city’s senior forester told me, no resident has ever called to say the storm toppled a Ginkgo. One Ginkgo withstood the most violent weapon ever deployed. The U.S. Army unleashed the atomic bomb over Hiroshima shortly after 8 a.m. on August 6, 1945. More than eighty thousand people died instantaneously. Many thousands more died of radiation sickness within weeks, months, or years. Bamboo trees five miles from the epicenter ignited and burned. The explosion cleared all brush and herbs within a kilometer. No living thing grew back within 700 meters of the explosion.

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Yards beyond that limit, the Hosenbou temple lay utterly in ruin. In the spring of 1946, something remarkable and unexpected happened. A tree in front of the temple sprouted from its roots, despite the destruction of its trunk. Long a cherished Japanese and religious symbol, Ginkgo biloba one morning became the ultimate symbol of renewal. The mystery and defiance embedded in Ginkgo’s history reached its symbolic apogee that spring morning in 1946. It’s a tree that has taken more than 270 million years to

behind fossils of six families, nineteen genera, and many different species. All are extinct except one. Ginkgo biloba is the only species in the genus Ginkgo, the family Ginkgoaceae, the order Ginkgoales, the class Ginkgoopside and the division Ginkgophyta, within the kingdom Plantae of the domain Eukarya. No one has explained why Ginkgo is a survivor, though few have rigorously tried. Does it have some biochemical defense mechanism? Is it all those thick hydrocarbons in the leaves, keeping bad stuff away like a

One ginkgo withstood the most violent weapon ever deployed prune—a longer history than any other living tree species. Ginkgo has many stories to tell. Beyond its historical and cultural significance, particularly after Hiroshima, Ginkgo is more than a living fossil. It is a living symbol of survival through extremes of conditions and time. Ginkgo’s saga is a fairly straightforward evolutionary story, with a twist. It never died. It should have. It does what any good species is supposed to do. It shows up, then leaves fossil snapshots of a growing family, which just as soon trail off into extinction. Hundreds of species qualify as oaks. The top of the maple phylogenetic tree fans out into more than one hundred species. Ginkgo has just one living species, the sole survivor of a once-populous family. Most plant species live a few million years. More than 120 million years have passed without Ginkgo apparently changing a whit. that proves a phylogenetic rule of thumb. Closely related organisms tend to die out together when their ecosystems change. It makes sense. If nearly everyone living in a town works at the same factory, and the factory moves to another country, everyone loses their jobs. It’s the same in biology. If a bunch of related trees all thrive in the same ecosystem, and something happens to it, they are all doomed. Yet Ginkgo has no living cousins. It’s really quite strange. The order Ginkgoales left

Ginkgo is an exception

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sealant? Geneticists are getting to the plant world, though only parts of the Ginkgo have been sequenced at this writing. And sequencing alone reveals nothing about the mysteries embedded in Ginkgo’s phenotype. “Is there whiz-bang chemical magic going on? The morphological stasis means something,” says Scott Wing, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Paleobotany Division. “I just don’t know what it is.” He’s not alone. One factor undoubtedly is the tree’s ability to regenerate by sprouting from its base, as the Hosenbou Ginkgo did in the spring of 1946. Sedimentary evidence suggests that Ginkgo thrives in “disturbed environments”—riverbeds prone to flooding or land with rapid soil turnover. Usually, plants that thrive in such environs grow quickly, reproduce asexually (which Ginkgo can), and never grow big (which Ginkgo does). Ginkgo’s affection for disturbed environments explains the tree’s success in wooing nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban planners. Sidewalks are as disturbed as any environment. Ginkgo biloba became the urban sidewalk’s perimeter defense against pollution, heat, cold, disease, and insects. Ginkgo ascends columnlike from its block of soil in the pavement, so street managers needn’t worry about it growing over the sidewalk. The lowest branches of a maturing tree are high enough for the tallest pedestrian to clear, which saves time and money on pruning. It’s efficient. Ginkgo tolerates the salt scattered on icy roads.

Predatory insects apparently have little or no appetite for Ginkgo. This natural insecticide led readers in some Eastern cultures, where Ginkgo is a native, to use its leaves as bookmarks. As global warming heated up through the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century, paleobotanists turned to Ginkgo for insight. Ginkgo’s leaves are not only exquisite, but they age well, and the stomata through which Ginkgo leaves inhale carbon dioxide are a key clue to our past, present, and possibly future climate. Scientists have spent the last several years studying the relationship of Ginkgo stomata growth to atmospheric CO2. Sensitive instruments measure the level of CO2 with great precision. By counting the stomata on leaves grown under CO2 conditions known with great precision, researchers can develop a sense of the relationship between leaves and their carbon source. In the laboratory, they can also control the CO2 content, to see if leaves gain or lose stomata when the CO2 increases or decreases. Ginkgo is not the only subject of study. Research and experiments conducted on many plant species show that increased CO2 leads to either widening pores or growing fewer of them. Paleobotanists surmise past climate conditions from counting stomata. When Ginkgo grows in an atmosphere high in carbon dioxide, it needs fewer stomata per square millimeter of leaf to satisfy its appetite. Similarly, when the CO2 content of the atmosphere is low, leaves produce more stomata—more workers to mine a scarcer resource. Understanding how leaves react to varying CO2 is the first step. Next, researchers analyze Ginkgo fossils millions of years old, counting stomata under microscopes or on photographs of microscopic images. Stomata counting itself makes for a less-than-dramatic afternoon, but it has yielded some intriguing results. A team of Chinese and British scientists compared Ginkgo biloba leaves collected in 1998 with others preserved since 1924 and with four fossils, the remains of extinct Ginkgo species. The scientists hoped to find a correlation between the number of stomata in a given leaf and the known CO2 content

of the air. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the atmosphere contained about 380 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide and is increasing by about 2 ppm a year. The study found that, since 1924, the number of stomata per square millimeter in Ginkgo leaves decreased by nearly 30 percent, to 97 from 134 stomata per square millimeter. Low counts on the Cretaceous and Jurassic fossil leaves corroborate other proxy geological evidence of high CO2 levels in those periods. Researchers looked to fossils of four Ginkgo species, from the period from 58.5 to 53.4 million years ago, a virtually identical twin to modern Ginkgo biloba. They found the stomata must have grown in a greenhouse with CO2 values of 300–450 ppm, dates that bracket a major extinction event, the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). The results are too low for CO2 to have single-handedly caused the PETM, one of earth’s five great extinctions (not including the current, human-induced sixth extinction). But that’s an easy problem to have. Many factors can contribute to a hothouse. A methane burst from the oceans may have triggered the PETM. Other sets of stomata data reinforce the correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide that occurs throughout the geological record. Anthropogenic global warming is unique in that we know with certainty what is causing the additional carbon contribution to the atmosphere—industrial combustion and deforestation—and therefore its effect on temperature. The correlations scientists observe today through precision sensing are complemented with indirect evidence— proxies—of temperature and carbon dioxide from the past. Oxygen isotopes ratios indicate past temperatures, as reflected in certain marine fossils. Stomata indices in fossilized leaves of extinct plants, and Ginkgo, suggest the carbon dioxide content of past greenhouses. Today, Ginkgo is on the move again, anticipating a unique episode in its millions of encounters with climate change. Between 1953 and 2000, Ginkgo’s growing season changed in Japan, beginning four days earlier in the spring and ending eight days later in the fall. Ginkgo knows the world is warming again. ❧

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Innovations Up on the Farm Growing 11,000 heads of lettuce in a space the size of five parking spots Vertical farming has generated plenty of buzz as a way for cities to eat sustainably, but little practical progress has been made—until now. Valcent Products Inc. has developed a vertical farming system for commercial use and is testing it on some tough customers: primates and other animals in the U.K.’s Paignton Zoo. Dubbed “VertiCrop” and positioned in the center of the zoo, the system raises those 11,000 heads of lettuce in less than four weeks. Stacked three meters high in racks, the crops rotate on a conveyer belt while bathing in a precise combination of water, air, sunlight, heat, and nutrients. The crops don’t need pesticides—or even soil—and use 90 percent less water than field crops do. For the zoo and its denizens, this means cheaper costs and a better diet. The system can grow a variety of crops, allowing the animals to eat herbs, vines, and seeds that pack a nutritional wallop but normally cost more than the zoo can afford. Valcent sees the zoo test as a step toward larger vertical farms that could revolutionize agriculture. Managing director Chris Bradford says the company’s next models could fit into a warehouse, use artificial light and—hopefully—run on renewable energy. He says the company’s technology has already caught the attention of investors in the water-starved Middle East and in high-density areas such as Singapore. ❧ —Jessica Leber

Vertical Farming Facts

• • • • • •

Year-round crop production One indoor acre is equivalent to 4–6 outdoor acres or more, depending upon the crop No weather-related crop failures due to droughts, floods, pests All VF food is grown organically: no herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers VF virtually eliminates agricultural runoff by recycling black water VF returns farmland to nature, restoring ecosystem functions and services VF adds energy back to the grid via methane generation from composting VF dramatically reduces fossil-fuel use (no tractors, plows, shipping)

Source: The Vertical Farm Project

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• •

Sick Puppies Prairie dogs served up Jell-O spiked with ‘black death’ vaccine

You’ll have to forgive prairie dogs if they feel like sitting ducks. For starters, the burrowing rodents face an epidemic of sylvatic plague, a disease sparked by the same bacteria as the “black death” that ravaged Europe in the middle ages. What’s more, the researchers behind a new vaccine don’t have the prairie dogs’ best interests at heart: their real goal is to ensure that blackfooted ferrets, who dine on prairie dogs after invading their burrows, have a steady supply of healthy food. To combat the plague, which can wipe out 90 percent of prairie dogs once it infects a colony, a team led by Tonie Rocke of the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, has genetically modified a raccoon poxvirus. The poxvirus has been used to control rabies in red foxes and raccoons, and now wild prairie dogs will be coaxed to eat the vaccine. (In lab tests, researchers used sweet-potato gelatin as bait.) But unlike past vaccination projects, this one doesn’t target the most-endangered animal. Only a few hundred black-footed ferrets survive in the wild, and while this marks steady progress since the population reached a low of 18 in the mid-1980s, the comeback is precarious. The reason: Prairie dogs are key to the ferrets’ diet—a single ferret may eat as many as 100 prairie dogs a year—but some prairie dog species are endangered, their habitat is threatened, and the plague is making things only worse. ❧ —Amy Mayer

An Ounce of Prevention High-tech chip delivers early diagnosis of coral disease attacks, Todd DeSantis and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory started developing a device to detect airborne pathogens released by terrorists. The technology was designed to take a quick census of microbes, allowing officials to raise an alarm if dangerous bacteria appeared. Now, the same technology could be used to assess the health of coral reefs. Corals contain microbial communities that can undergo changes when the corals get sick. Desantis says his team’s system could detect these changes more quickly and cheaply than other methods, offering an early warning of coral disease. Dubbed PhyloChip, the device contains a glass slide blanketed with DNA strands from known microorganisms. In the lab, researchers apply bacterial DNA from coral samples to the slide. Sequences that match DNA on the slide will “stick” to those strands, allowing a computer program to later identify the microbes. In one study, a team at the University of California, Merced, used the PhyloChip to find 1,441 distinct microbes in a single sample, eight times more than a costlier sequencing method. Scientists could eventually use the PhyloChip to identify corals in the early stages of illness, says study leader Shinichi Sunagawa. If the diseases are linked to sources such as agricultural runoff or tourism, managers could act to reduce those pressures before it’s too late. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

After the September 11, 2001,

Electric Sweat Synthetic leaf generates power with tiny beads of water When water evaporates from a tree leaf, it triggers a chain reaction that can pull other water molecules all the way up the trunk of a 90-meter-tall redwood. Each molecule attracts the one behind it, creating a continuous stream from the roots to the leaves. Now Michel Maharbiz, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to harness that process to generate tiny amounts of electricity. Maharbiz’s team has created a synthetic leaf about the size of a postage stamp that mimics the evaporation (or, more accurately, transpiration) of water from trees—but adds a twist to produce power along the way. The synthetic leaf is made of two glass plates, one etched with a network of minuscule branching tunnels. Each tunnel ends in an opening that simulates the pore on a leaf. When the device is filled with water, droplets evaporate from the openings and prompt the remaining fluid to move through the tunnels. That movement alone doesn’t produce electricity. So the team placed two charged metal plates around the main tunnel and injected air bubbles into the water. When a bubble moved between the plates, it changed their electrical charge, resulting in a current. The power output is small—less than one ten-thousandth the amount needed to run a cell phone. But the synthetic leaf could still be useful for recharging batteries in environmental or building sensors, says study leader Ruba Borno, who reported the work in Applied Physics Letters. The research team is now working to replace the manually injected air bubbles with plastic gears so the “leaf ” can run continuously on its own. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

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Courtesy of The Muskegon Chronicle www.mlive.com/muskegon

Invasion of the Flying Fish A wall of bubbles could stop the onslaught of millions of Asian carp In a deft act of ecological

ju-jitsu, Illinois researchers are testing a system that could stop one of the world’s most dominant invasive species: Asian carp. The fish are wreaking environmental havoc across the American Midwest, in part by gobbling up plankton at the base of the food chain. To halt the invasion, wildlife managers have tried everything from mass harvests to electric currents. But with the carp on the verge of entering Lake Michigan, the

new system—a wall of “noisy bubbles” that uses the carps’ exceptional hearing against them—may be one of the last best hopes to end their relentless march. Here’s how the system works. A rubber pipe is stretched across a riverbed, where it emits a curtain of tiny air bubbles. At the same time, sound amplifiers blast high-frequency chirps into the bubbles, which concentrate the noise. The chirps are too high for native

species to hear but are well within the carps’ range. In early trials, 95 percent of the carp that approached the curtain turned back. But native species swam right on through. A comprehensive test is now under way on the Illinois River at a biological station run by the University of Illinois. If the system proves successful, researchers envision using it to herd carp into pens or dead-end tributaries. ❧ —Justin Matlick

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A Shady Scheme Radical plan would grow a massive forest in the Sahara to cool the planet A bold new project calls for transforming vast swaths of the Sahara into a CO2-absorbing forest. Spearheaded by Leonard Ornstein, a cell biologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the plan would start by building desalination plants on the coastlines surrounding the desert. Aqueducts would carry freshwater inland to feed plantations of eucalyptus and other fast-growing trees. In a recent paper in Climatic Change, Ornstein and two colleagues suggest

Conservation Magazine

the trees could soak up almost enough carbon to negate all of humanity’s annual fossil-fuel emissions. What’s more, the forests could become a carbon-neutral power source. Once the trees reach maturity, the researchers envision cutting down sections of the forest and feeding the logs into wood-fired power plants. These emissions would be offset by planting new trees. A similar plan could be enacted in the Australian outback.

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009

The plan’s price tag could be trillions of dollars, and environmental risks include increased rainfall in surrounding areas, which could trigger locust plagues and stop the flow of iron-rich dust from the desert to the ocean. If this sounds bleak, consider the alternative. With little progress being made toward an international climate treaty, the Sahara project’s message might be: Choose your poison. ❧ —Justin Matlick

Book Marks

Shades of Green

Stewart Brand’s challenge to environmentalists Editor’s Note: An icon of the environmental and counterculture movements of

the 1960s, Stewart Brand created and edited The Whole Earth Catalog (1968– 1985). Since then, he has cofounded the Global Business Network, The Long Now Foundation, and the All Species Foundation. Here, we offer you a small taste of his latest book, Whole Earth Discipline. Environmentalists own the color green. That’s extraordinary, an aston-

ishing accomplishment. No movement has owned a color globally since the Communists took over red. Red means nothing now. How long will Green mean something? My theory is that the success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces—romanticism and science—that are often in opposition, with a third force emerging. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and dismissive of any who appear to

stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethical rather than moralistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against one another. For them, identifying mistakes is what science is, and direction change is the goal. It’s fortunate that there are so many romantics in the movement, because they are the ones who inspire the majority in most developed societies to see themselves as environmentalists. But

that also means that scientists and their perceptions are always in the minority; they are easily ignored, suppressed, or demonized when their views don’t fit the consensus story line. A new set of environmental players is shifting the balance. Engineers are arriving who see any environmental problem as neither a romantic tragedy nor a scientific puzzle but simply something to fix. They look to the scientists for data to fix the problem with, and the scientists appreciate the engineers because new technology is what makes science go forward. The romantics distrust engineers—sometimes correctly—for their hubris and are uncomfortable with the prospect of fixing things because the essence of tragedy is that it can’t be fixed. Romantics love problems; scientists discover and analyze problems; engineers solve problems. When concern about climate change went mainstream all over the world in 2007, Greens everywhere felt vindicated. “Today’s torrent of environmental progress,” declared the head of Sierra Club that summer, “rivals that in the heady years around the first Earth Day in 1970.” The world was finally coming around to the Green

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009 43

point of view, and all environmentalists had to do was to seize the opportunity and bear down on their agenda to win final victory. Wrong. The long-evolved Green agenda is suddenly outdated—too negative, too tradition-bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided for the scale of the climate problem. Far from taking a new dominant role, environmentalists risk being marginalized more than ever, with many of their deep goals and wellhoned strategies irrelevant to the new tasks. Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system—climate dynamics. It may seem hardest to change course when you think you’re triumphant, but it’s actually an opportune time. Resources abound; new people with new ideas show up. Worldwide, the political stereotype these days is that Green equals left, left equals Green, and right equals anti-Green. That may be helpful for liberals, grounding them in the science and practice of natural systems, but it blinds conservatives and badly hampers Green perspective. Becoming politically narrow limits Greens’ thinking and marginalizes their effectiveness, because whatever they say is automatically dismissed by anyone who has doubts about liberals. Countless conservatives refused to take climate change seriously because they couldn’t abide the idea of Al Gore being right. A romantic stance, or a political agenda, is fine for giving people a sense of identity and motivating their efforts; but it’s poor at solving problems. ❧ Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand. Copyright ©2009 Stewart Brand.

Conservation Magazine

Elephants on the Edge

No Impact Man

What Animals Teach Us about Humanity By G.A. Bradshaw Yale University Press, 2009

The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes about Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process By Colin Beavan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

The plight of wild

elephants—subject to poaching, culling, and habitat destruction— takes on a new dimension in view of the emotional trauma they suffer. When herds are broken up or destroyed, the remaining animals often suffer from the same post traumatic stress disorder that affects humans subject to violence and deprivation. Captive elephants in zoos that are deprived from social contact and often abused at the hands of trainers fare no better. Unless we change our ways, ecologist and psychologist G.A. Bradshaw warns, elephant culture will be destroyed forever. ❧

No Impact Man is Colin Beavan’s account of his now-famous year as a New Yorker striving to leave the smallestpossible environmental impact. Gone are trips to the neighborhood pizza joint (slices are served on disposable plates) as well as visits to the grandparents (the carbon emissions of flying aren’t acceptable). Everything in the life of Beavan—and the lives of his wife and daughter—is subject to “no-impact” scrutiny. It could easily be a preachy, depressing tale, but—to Beavan’s credit—the writing instead is funny and there’s a feel-good family story thrown in for good measure. ❧

Hope for Animals and Their World How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink By Jane Goodall with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson Grand Central Publishing, 2009 Those in need of

an environmental pick-me-up should settle down with Jane Goodall’s new book. Goodall and her coauthors serve up a much-needed menu of success stories. From Madagascar, where an all-night dance and prayer ceremony precedes the release of tortoises into the wild, to Nantucket Island, where a conservationist carries around quail corpses and carnivorous beetles in picnic coolers, the places and people in this book provide relief from environmental doom and gloom. ❧

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009

The Jaguar’s Shadow Searching for a Mythic Cat By Richard Mahler Yale University Press, September 2009 In 1996, a hunter along the Arizona– New Mexico border spotted a jaguar. It was the first time in nearly a decade that the animal had been reported in the United States, and an article about the incident propelled Richard Mahler on a ten-year quest to find the big cat in the wild. Traveling south into Mexico and then to Central America, Mahler met scientists, indigenous peoples, and poachers as he strove not only to spot a jaguar but also to understand the animal’s historical and cultural significance. ❧

Book Marks

Nature’s Ghosts Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology By Mark V. Barrow, Jr. University of Chicago Press, 2009

Extinction in Our Times Global Amphibian Decline By James P. Collins and Martha L. Crump Oxford University Press, 2009

notion to eighteenth-century westerners; it simply didn’t fit into prevailing views of order and perfection in the natural world. Three hundred years later, scientists race to save amphibians, which are dying out at the hands of disease and habitat destruction. Two recent books confront our uneasy and ever-changing relationship with species loss. Nature’s Ghosts chronicles how Americans came to understand extinction and to develop a responsibility to protect vulnerable species. In it, Mark Barrow brings to life the characters—from presidents to museum curators—who fought for the country’s endangered species. Extinction in Our Times details what we know about a massive amphibian die-off occurring in real time across an entire vertebrate class. Its authors, James Collins and Martha Crump, ask what we can learn about the science, ethics, and politics of extinction by studying amphibian declines. ❧

Extinction was a foreign

Greg Wiles examining tree rings near the Columbia Glacier, Alaska

Climate Change: Picturing the Science By Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe W.W. Norton, 2009 What should we make of the fact that global average

temperatures have risen almost one degree Celsius in the past 100 years? Or that the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro has lost 80 percent of its mass or that in the northern hemisphere, some species have been moving north at an average of six kilometers every decade? In Climate Change: Picturing the Science, essays from prominent geologists, physicists, and biologists shed light on what we know about humaninduced climate change and the decisions we must make moving forward. Alongside the text, engaging photos of everything from flooded homes in the U.K. to a geothermal power plant in Iceland tell the visual story of our changing planet. ❧ Reviews by Judy Wexler

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009 45

From Readers

“ S cot t We i d e n s au l ranks among an elite group of writer-naturalists—Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee and David Quammen come to mind—whose straightforward eloquence elevates ecology to the level of philosophy.” —Janice P. Nimura, Los Angeles Times

Economic Nonsense?

Th e G h o s t w i t h Tre m b l i n g W i n g s : Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species “Part natural history, part adventure story (starring Mr. Weidensaul as a kind of ecological-minded Indiana Jones, roaming the world in search of missing species).” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

also available Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent’s Natural Soul w w w.f s g b o o k s. c o m N O R T H P O I N T P R E S S A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Conservation Magazine

“The Water War Mirage” (July–September 2009) buys into the economic nonsense of comparative economic advantage which is used to rationalize globalization. Comparative advantage is nonsense because it excludes the ecological costs of production and trade. The article’s analysis is also flawed in other significant ways. Although it is true that water can be moved around quite easily in agricultural and other products, the overall human footprint is increasing—not diminishing. Moving water does not alter the overall limits of freshwater availability. Further, moving around the products containing water depends on huge energy subsidies (one estimate is that for every calorie we put on the table in the U.S., we spend about 20) and thus puts energy-poor countries and lesspowerful countries at a disadvantage. Importing food to compensate for water scarcity is always possible, but a country needs the foreign exchange to do so and the political will to spend their reserves on food rather than other commodities. Finally, lack of war over water is not the same as lack of violent conflict over water. Conflict often results from the scarcity of food and other products

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009

requiring water, but these conflicts may manifest themselves as low-intensity civil war or class war rather than as cross-boundary disputes. The article also overlooks the fact that the threat of war is often enough to “resolve” some water disputes. Egypt, for example, has made it quite clear to upstream countries that any effort to dam the Nile will result in military intervention. David Johns Portland State University Portland, Oregon

Grim Forecast for Conservation

Balmford et al. (2009) state that falling protected-area visitation is restricted mostly to a few well-off countries (Back to Nature, July–September 2009). If correct, these findings do not negate our concern that disconnect with nature is potentially causing later indifference toward conservation (Pergams and Zaradic 2006, 2008); rather it is reinforced by the authors’ corroboration of these trends in the U.S. and Japan and by their addition of Australia. If people in the wealthiest nations (sources of large donors and substantial global conservation funding) are spending less time in nature, then we are seeing a trend of great concern for biodiversity conservation.

The authors hypothesize that increased foreign ecotourism may be responsible for any increases found. This seems plausible to us in view of a negative correlation with local affluence. However, what proportion of the global nature recreation pie is represented? A 4 percent increase in Madagascar protected-area visitors is likely to reflect many fewer people than a 1.5 percent decline in Canadian protected-area visitors. The authors should show they are not merely documenting minor countertrends. Oliver Pergams & Patricia Zaradic Red Rock Institute Inc. Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Penguins and Their Prey

The indirect effects of global warming on birds and mammals are notoriously difficult to separate from humaninduced changes such as pollution, overfishing, and land-use changes. So I read about the effects of warming waters on the sex ratio of fish with great interest (Operation Sex Change, July–September 2009). This direct and bizarre effect is likely to have consequences for predator populations. Among the predators of marine silversides (Odontesthes spp.) in Argentina are Magellanic penguins (Spheniscus magellanicus). Magellanic penguins are widespread and currently abundant on the continental shelf of Argentina. Silversides are not their primary prey but are important when other forage fish are scarce. Magellanic penguins’ prey are already

at risk from developing fisheries, and a decline in a secondary prey such as silversides would add to the penguins’ difficulties in adapting to a humandominated world.

Tell Us What You

Think

Ginger Rebstock University of Washington Seattle, Washington

The Identity Politics of Fish

I write with some distress about the inappropriate language contained in a recent feature, “Operation Sex Change (July–September 2009). The article introduces confusion between being a transvestite and living as an intersexed animal. The result is a misrepresentation of research and a perpetuation of negative stereotypes. The underlying text in Mills’ article suggests that sexuality is a matter

of appearance, not a function of the biological self. You have done a great disservice to your magazine; to your lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered readers; and to all scientists who are earnestly trying to solve problems with innovative new techniques. John Fraser City University of New York New York, New York

Did an article spark an idea? Or do you have a counterpoint to share? Whatever your opinion, please let us know. Send a letter to the editor at: conservationmagazine.org

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation 1. Publication title: Conservation Magazine 2. Publication number 1936-2145 3. Filing date: 10/05/09 4. Issue frequency: Quarterly 5. Number of issues published annually: 4 6. Annual subscription price: US$30 7. Office of publication: 1017 O Street NW, Washington DC 20001 8. General business office of publisher: 1017 O Street NW, Washington DC 20001 9. Full names and mailing addresses of: (publisher) Society for Conservation Biology, 1017 O Street NW, Washington DC 20001. (Editor) Kathryn Kohm, Dept. of Biology, Box 351800, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1800. (Associate Editor) Justin Matlick, Dept. of Biology, Box 351800, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195-1800. 10 Owner: Society for Conservation Biology, 1017 O Street NW, Washington DC 20001 11. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: None 12. Tax status: Has not changed during preceding 12 months 13. Publication name: Conservation Magazine 14. Issue date for circulation data below: July-Sept. 2009 15. Extent and nature of circulation: No. copies of Average No. single issue Copies Each Issue published During Preceding nearest to 12 months filing date a. Total Number of Copies (Net press run)...............................................9,366.................8,539 b. Paid and/or requested circulation (1) Paid/requested outside.............................6,100.................6,546 county mail subscriptions (2) Paid in-county.................................................0........................0 subscriptions (3) Sales through dealers...............................1,085.................1,078 and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribution (4) Other classes mailed . .....................................0........................0 through the USPS c. Total paid and/or ..........................................7,185.................7,624 requested circulation d Free distribution by mail (1) Outside county..............................................98....................101 (2) In county.........................................................0........................0 (3) Other classes mailed . .....................................0........................0 through USPS e. Free distribution outside ......................................0........................0 the mail f. Total free distribution..........................................98....................101 g. Total distribution...........................................7,283.................7,725 h. Copies not distributed...................................2,083....................814 i. Total..............................................................9,268.................8,438 j. Percent paid and/or ....................................... 99%.................. 99% requested circulation I certify that all information on this form is true and complete. Kathryn Kohm, Editor, Conservation Magazine

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009 47

Think Again Bathtub Analogy Doesn’t Hold Water By William Chameides When we think of sea level, we tend to envision

William L. Chameides is Dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He blogs regularly at www. theGreenGrok.com.

the water level in a bathtub—flat and uniform everywhere. In turn, we assume rising sea level is just like water in a tub with the spigot on, rising evenly along the coasts just as it does along the porcelain walls. But the bathtub analogy is problematic. The unusual tides along the U.S. eastern seaboard—which recently ran anywhere from 15 to 60 centimeters higher than predicted—are a case in point. Certainly the key determinant in seawater height along a coast is the amount of water in the ocean. Add more water to the ocean and sea level will rise, increasing its inland reach. But other factors come into play—wind, for example. An onshore wind pushes water inland, increasing the tides’ height. Offshore winds do just the opposite. And the effects can go way beyond tides. Consider the so-called El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the South Pacific. Periodic shifts in Pacific wind patterns contribute to a sloshing back and forth of the entire ocean basin. Here, the bathtub analogy works: think of water sloshing in a tub. The ocean water moves in one direction during El Niño and piles up along the South American coast; it sloshes in the other direction during La Niña. The shifts from El Niño to La Niña have far-reaching effects, influencing rainfall patterns and temperatures around the globe. It has been speculated that the anomalous U.S. tides are related to a similar phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). During the NAO’s positive phase, there is a

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 10 No. 4 | October-December 2009

large difference between high pressure over the Atlantic in the subtropics and low pressure in the polar regions. As the pressure difference between those regions increases and decreases, air sloshes to the north and then to the south, and the westerly winds over the ocean intensify and weaken. Is the NAO responsible for the high tides along the East Coast? Maybe. A more interesting question is whether whatever is causing the tidal anomalies also contributed to the unusually cool summer weather in the eastern U.S. Regardless, the unusual tides provide a lesson for preparing for global warming. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that sea levels will rise an average of 18 to 58 centimeters by the end of the century without fully accounting for ice sheet melting. More recent estimates incorporating an ice-sheet thaw tend to predict larger rises—at the upper end of the range, nearly a meter or more by 2100. But like the anomalous high tides in the U.S., the sea level increase will not necessarily be uniform around the globe, because global warming will also cause changes in atmospheric circulation. That means changes in winds and thus potential tidal changes. In fact, climate models predict that the northeastern coast of the United States will experience a particularly large rise in sea levels. Two recent papers estimate that the Northeast coast might see an additional rise of about 20 centimeters or 30–50 centimeters on top of the global average. And if all this has you confused, try experimenting in the bathtub. ❧

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