Conservation Winter 2010 (V11N1) by Kathy Kohm

chocolate & conservation A Bittersweet Marriage

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The Honeybee sagaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surprise ending

Jan-March 2010

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Garbage In Garbage Out When the ocean contains more plastic than plankton, taking out the trash becomes a grueling scientific challenge

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Why is climate change denial so seductive?

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Contents Conservation | Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

Garbage In Garbage Out

When a single swath of ocean contains more plastic than plankton, the simple act of taking out the trash becomes a grueling scientific challenge. By Susan Casey 22

Journal Watch ■

Coyotes thrive in urban areas

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Acidic oceans make lobsters larger

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Fickle appetites for exotic meat

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CO2 stalls biodiversity losses

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Smarter reforestation strategy

Wounds That Can Heal

A pioneering study of nature’s recovery times delivers a ray of hope—and a respite from apocalyptic storylines. By Marguerite Holloway

Solutions

A Flock of Jets Mimicking birds could reduce airline emissions

Cheap Labor Penguins, seals, and petrels drafted to map the sea

Skin Cream for Ships Hulls engineered to mimic whale skin may improve fuel efficiency

Biological Batteries Tapping into the power of the electric eel

Essay

Shy Affectionate SF Seeking LTR with Nature By Kathleen Dean Moore

Disturbing the Peace War-inducing chemical turns invasive ants against each other

Spider Silk Muscles A two-centimeter rope of spider silk can hoist an SUV

Book Marks

Think Again

The reverse psychology of green consumerism

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Whale songs switch frequency

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Sustainable chocolate goes bust

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False warnings from frogs?

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Shrinking carbon sinks

Lighten Up Cartoons by Peter Ommundsen

Lost at Sea The mysterious disappearance of Cousteau’s conservation legacy

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Stung from Behind

Researchers may be overlooking a hidden pollinator crisis—one that has little to do with bees and everything to do with booming markets for raspberries, pears, and chocolate. By Nathanael Johnson

Stung from Behind page 22

Plus: The Earth after Us, Down to the Wire, Plan B 4.0, Grass: In Search of Human Habitat, and Rewilding the World

Letters

Why Is Climate Change Denial So Seductive? By George Monbiot Cover Art: ©2010 Maarten Brinkman www.maartenbrinkman.nl 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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According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world is warming fell recently from 71 percent to 57 percent. What’s going on here? Why is climate change denial so seductive? In our Think Again column (page 48), George Monbiot points to research suggesting humans may be preprogrammed to avoid signals of their own demise. Monbiot writes that, to protect themselves against the terror of death, people often engage in what anthropologist Ernest Becker called “immortality projects”— psychological measures that boost self-esteem in the face of trouble. These include rejecting the possibility that death is near. For example, a team of Israeli researchers found that drivers who are cued to think of death respond by driving faster and taking greater risks. Could this phenomenon help explain why climate change denial is on the rise? Pew’s report found that senior citizens (i.e., people closer to the end of life) are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny there is solid evidence the earth is warming or that it’s a serious problem. Could it be that all the apocalyptic warnings are causing people to tune out instead of leap into action? One of this issue’s feature stories (Wounds That Can Heal, page 28) takes a look at two Yale researchers who think the answer is yes. Oswald Schmitz and Holly Jones are conducting some of the first-ever studies of how quickly ecosystems recover from human disturbances. They’ve found that, contrary to the perception that much of the world is beyond repair, many systems recover within just a few decades. Jones and Schmitz hope their research promotes restoration— and creates an optimistic message that will engage people in conservation. Even though much of the world is in peril, the research duo believes a surprising amount of the damage can be repaired. “Screaming and yelling about doom and gloom isn’t going to . . . compel people to change their behavior,” Schmitz says. “But if you can show them what the world will look like when they change their behavior, then maybe they might.” It’s a controversial viewpoint—you don’t want to give people license to destroy the world—but Schmitz and Jones may be on to something. Amid signs the standard approaches to climate change might be inadequate (Copenhagen, anyone?), conservationists would be wise to consider a new message—one that emphasizes the power of innovation as much as the consequences of inaction. ❧

—The Editors

Journal Watch

Your guide to the latest conservation research

Urban Ecology

Walk on the Wild Side Coyotes thrive in North American cities

Are urban coyote populations rising because the creatures are attracted to human activities or in spite of those activities? This question has vexed researchers for years, and now Stanley Gehrt of Ohio State University is piecing together an answer. In the Journal of Mammalogy, Gehrt and his colleagues chronicle their research on coyotes in the Chicago metropolitan area, where more than

9 million people are spread across six counties. Despite this density, urban coyote populations are on the rise, and researchers estimate that several hundred to a couple of thousand coyotes live in greater Chicago. To get a sense of where the coyotes live and why some of them run into

trouble with people, Gehrt’s team placed high-frequency radio collars on 181 coyotes, then tracked them as they navigated the urban morass. The researchers found that coyotes’ territory is usually oriented around a patchwork of habitat spread across public parks and private lands. This allows the majority of the animals to avoid contact with humans. Still, eight percent of the resident coyotes live purely urban lives in territory that includes industrial parks and has “no measurable patches of natural land use within them,” the researchers write.

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Photo courtesy of Justin B. Ries

Despite their proximity to humans—and their reputation for mischief—the coyotes cause little trouble. Gehrt’s team found that the animals take pains to avoid people, in part by shifting their activities to nighttime. There also is scant evidence that coyotes are incorporating human food into their diets, suggesting the animals don’t seek out urban settings to scavenge for easy meals. But there were a few bad apples. Seven of the coyotes generated complaints from the public after being sighted near houses (two of them built dens under people’s decks). Gehrt and his colleagues say this goes against coyotes’ natural tendency—the troublesome animals were either sick (four of them had mange) or being deliberately fed by humans. ❧ —Justin Matlick Gehrt, S.D., C. Anchor, and L.A. White. 2009. Home range and landscape use of coyotes in a metropolitan landscape: Conflict or coexistence? Journal of Mammalogy 90(5):1045-1057.

Climate Change

Shell Game Some species may build heavier shells in acidic oceans

that ocean acidification—caused by rising atmospheric CO2—will weaken the shells of marine organisms. But a new experiment shows that certain species actually increase their shell production under these seemingly harsh conditions. To reach this conclusion, researchers raised 18 species of marine organisms in seawater acidified by different levels of carbon dioxide. Ten species—including corals, clams, oysters, urchins, and scallops—produced less shell as CO2 levels went up. But seven species, including lobsters and crabs, built heavier shells at intermediate or high carbon-dioxide levels. It is widely feared

The latter group may be able to convert bicarbonate, which forms after CO2 dissolves in the ocean, into the carbonate needed for shell building, the authors suggest. And carbon dioxide may boost some organisms’ photosynthesis, giving them more energy to carry out the necessary chemical transformations. But it’s too early to conclude that these hardier species will do better overall as the world’s carbon dioxide levels go up, the authors say. For instance, spending more energy on shell building could take away from other functions such as reproduction. And a predator that does well in acidified waters could still suffer if its thin-shelled prey goes under. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Ries, J., A. Cohen, and D. McCorkle. 2009. Marine calcifiers exhibit mixed responses to CO2-induced ocean acidification. Geology 37(12):1131-1134.

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©Paul Hilton/epa/Corbis

Cuisine

Served Rare Wildlife farming increases appetite for threatened species Upwardly mobile Asian diners have developed a taste for civet, pangolin, and other exotic—and protected— wild animals. In turn, semi-clandestine restaurants serve up rare animals for a hefty price. To reduce this pressure on wild populations, some conservationists have proposed establishing farms where the species can be raised for human consumption. But new research in Conservation Letters finds that it’s the very rarity of wild-caught products that drives demand—and consumers aren’t likely to be lured by farmed substitutes. For her doctoral thesis at University College London, Rebecca Drury interviewed 77 residents of Hanoi, about half of whom had eaten wildcaught meat, on their attitudes about

Conservation Magazine

wildlife products. She concludes that Hanoians consider wild-caught meat a fashionable luxury item, buying or sharing it to flaunt status and curry favor with friends and business associates—even though many consumers were well aware of the environmental implications. Since rarity and expense give the meat its social currency, Drury argues, accessible farmed substitutes may actually stimulate demand for the real stuff. The mass-produced version is often regarded as inferior, even as more consumers gain access to it (think wild versus farmed salmon). Those who can afford it are likely to shift to species that are rarer still. What’s more, Drury says, farms often provide a mechanism for laundering wild meat that has been poached. A case in point is the threatened Asiatic black bear Ursus thibetanus, whose bile has long been used to ward off a variety of ills. As the bear’s

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populations declined, Chinese and Vietnamese farms sprang up to harvest the bile of caged bears via permanent abdominal holes. (The cruelty underlying these farms is another issue.) Today, the bile is widely available—but wild bears are still poached to satisfy an elite demand. Drury says social marketing campaigns—such as efforts to stigmatize fur and ivory—are a muchsurer strategy to reduce demand for wild-animal products. Still, there are no guarantees. “There are lots of other papers that have made this link between rarity and the desire to have something,” she says, “and I’m not sure that’s a human trait you can necessarily alter.” ❧ —Rebecca Kessler Drury, R. 2009. Reducing urban demand for wild animals in Vietnam: Examining the potential of wildlife farming as a conservation tool. Conservation Letters 2(6):263-270.

The work is “a rare gem in longterm ecological research,” writes researcher Scott Collins of the University of New Mexico in a related article. But, he notes, scientists will need to perform more experiments to determine whether the results apply to other plant communities. ❧ —Roberta Kwok Reich, P. 2009. Elevated CO2 reduces losses of plant diversity caused by nitrogen deposition. Science 326(5958) 1399-1402.

Biodiversity

N vs. CO2 Smackdown Rising CO2 levels could battle back nitrogen pollution’s assault on plants

by humans into the environment may reduce plant biodiversity, but higher carbondioxide levels could hold those losses in check. University of Minnesota researcher Peter Reich carried out a ten-year experiment to determine the combined effects of elevated nitrogen and carbon-dioxide levels on 16 species of plants. When nitrogen alone was increased, plant diversity dropped by 16 percent. But when both nitrogen and carbon dioxide were high, diversity decreased by only eight percent, Reich reports in Science. Carbon dioxide appears to be canceling out some of nitrogen’s detrimental changes, the study says. For instance, it increases water content in soil and the carbon-nitrogen ratio in plant roots, both of which are reduced by nitrogen. Thus, the worst-case scenario of increased carbon dioxide and nitrogen acting together to reduce biodiversity is not supported by the study, Reich writes.

Forestry

instance, is “brighter” in color than forests and therefore reflects more radiation, producing a cooling effect. In turn, many models have suggested that, if forests were to replace croplands and grasslands at higher latitudes, it could create an undesirable net-warming effect. The reason? The new, darker forests would soak up enough heat to offset—or even reverse—the cooling benefit provided by increased CO 2 absorption. Montenegro and his colleagues suggest that past studies have overestimated the albedo-related warming that might occur due to mid-latitude refor-

Middle Ground Planting trees in mid-latitudes—rather than the tropics—keeps the planet cool

The nitrogen pumped

Carbon-offsetting schemes often focus

on planting new forests as a means of lowering atmospheric CO2. Most climate models have suggested that this strategy will be most effective in the tropics, where forests are more productive and can therefore store more carbon. But a new study in the journal Global and Planetary Change says those models might be wrong, or at least misleading. In fact, says Alvaro Montenegro of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, forest planting would have the greatest cooling benefit not in the tropics but in mid-latitude regions— including much of Europe and North America. The problem with the earlier models, Montenegro says, is that they didn’t correctly account for a critical factor called albedo, which measures how the earth’s surface reflects solar radiation. Albedo depends on land cover; cropland, for

©pryzmat/iStock.com

estation—in part by projecting forest cover where no forests could actually grow. Rather than merely simulating the effects of forest cover spreading over broad regions, Montenegro’s team used high-resolution satellite data to examine land-cover effects on a finer scale. They focused only on agricultural lands having potential to support forest cover and that presumably would be forested in the absence of human activity. For these areas, they calculated changes in CO2 storage and albedo that would be expected if each

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

25-square-kilometer pixel of cropland were converted to forest. Despite considerable regional variability, the researchers found that many of the areas with the most-favorable net balance between CO2 uptake and albedo are at temperate latitudes. The study finds that forest planting, where viable, will always result in cooling at latitudes ranging from 40 degrees south to 60 degrees north—an area that extends far beyond the tropics and includes broad swaths of Australia and Canada.❧ —Scott Norris Montenegro, A. et al. 2009. The net carbon drawdown of small scale afforestation from satellite observations. Global and Planetary Change 69(4) 195-204.

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Psychology

Buyer Beware The dark side of green consumerism

about yourself when you opt for the organic yogurt, recycled paper towels, and compact fluorescent light bulbs at the store? If so, you may be surprised to learn that buying environmentally friendly products might make you more likely to engage in unethical behavior. Research done in the past decade shows that people who give themselves

Do you feel a little better

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• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

credit for recent good deeds may feel they have a “moral license” to behave more selfishly afterward. A churchgoer who has just been to confession, for example, may put less money into the offering plate. Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, both assistant professors at the University of Toronto, wondered whether moral license might also apply to “green” consumer choices. In a paper soon to be published in Psychological Science, they report that purchasing green products can make people more selfish and more likely to steal. To reach this conclusion, Mazar and Zhong conducted three experiments with student volunteers. The first experiment tested students’ impressions of green consumers. Not surprisingly, the students rated people who purchase green products as more cooperative, altruistic, and ethical than people who purchase conventional products. In the second experiment, some students were assigned to check out an online store offering mostly green products, while other students were assigned to an online store carrying mostly conventional products. Half the students in each group were asked to rate the products in the store, and the other half were asked to purchase products. Afterward, all the students played a seemingly unrelated money-sharing game. The students who had merely rated the green products shared more money than the students who had rated the conventional products. But students who had made purchases in the green store shared less money than those who had shopped in the conventional store. In the third experiment, the students played a computer game that tempted them to earn money by cheating. The green consumers were more

©Amos Nachoum

likely to cheat than the conventional purchasers, and they stole more money when asked to withdraw their winnings from envelopes on their desks. Green marketers have long trumpeted the notion that, when consumers make small steps toward sustainability, this will lead to bigger, more meaningful steps in the future. But the notion of moral license suggests that making virtuous purchases may actually reduce motivation for self-improvement. Mazar and Zhong now plan to test whether this also applies to recycling and other green behavior. Zhong says the new research doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t buy green products or that green consumerism can’t be a force for good. What matters, he says, is why people make green choices: if you do it because you believe it’s more ethical, you may give yourself a free pass at the next ethical crossroads. “If you moralize certain

activities, that can backfire,” he says. Being aware of this moral-license effect can help people avoid it, Zhong says. He encourages consumers to view green buying as the least they can do, and to make it a habit rather than a special achievement. ❧ —Dawn Stover Mazar, N. and C.-B. Zhong. 2009. Do green products make us better people? Psychological Science, in press.

Oceans

Deep-sea Serenade Blue whale songs are mysteriously changing frequencies

In a puzzling development,

blue whales around the world are singing in deeper tones. This

finding came as researchers analyzed historical recordings of seven types of blue whale songs taken in the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, and Indian Oceans. The most-extensively monitored type of song, recorded in the eastern North Pacific, dropped in tonal frequency by 31 percent between 1963 and 2008. The other six song types also have steadily moved to lower frequencies, the researchers found. Why such a widespread shift? Changes in ocean temperature and acidity, which might modify sound propagation through the water, are too slight to explain the trend, the authors say. The team also considered the possibility that blue whales are responding to an increase in human-generated noise in the ocean. But if whales wanted to overcome the noise by singing more

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Cacao beans in the hands of an Ecuadorian farmer ©Diana Lundin/iStock.com

loudly, they would be more likely to shift their frequency up rather than down, says coauthor Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics. Another potential explanation is the recovery of whale populations, prompted by the decline of commercial whaling. If whale numbers are rising, the team speculates, males might face more competition for mates. Since females may favor deeper tones, males could be lowering the frequency of their songs to improve their chances of success. McDonald also notes that louder sounds are easier to produce at higher frequencies. In denser populations, males may not need to sing so loudly to reach their listeners—and thus can sing more deeply. ❧ —Roberta Kwok McDonald, M., J. Hildebrand, and S. Mesnick. 2009. Worldwide decline in tonal frequencies of blue whale songs. Endangered Species Research 9:13-21.

Conservation Magazine

Agriculture

Not-so-sweet Deal The boom and bust cycle of shade-grown tropical chocolate

chocolate and conservation might be more bitter than sweet. For years, conservationists have chased after the goal of making shade-grown cacao farms a win-win for business, poor farmers, and the environment. But a new study in Conservation Letters explains how economic boom-bust cycles have gotten in the way. Led by Yann Clough of the University of Göttingen, Germany, the researchers chronicle how most new cacao plantations are planted in thinned tropical forests, where shade and The marriage between

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fertile soils initially allow the plants— and biodiversity—to flourish. But a problem arises when the cacao plants mature. Once the plants form a canopy of their own, farmers almost invariably cut down the other tree species in their midst. In the short term, the cacao flourishes in the direct sun, causing yields and profits to spike upward. Then a downward slide begins. Over time, the increased sun stresses the cacao plants and opens the door to new pests and diseases. Farmers fight these with increased amounts of fertilizer and pesticide. Yet these provide little defense. Crops are decimated. Yields become unpredictable. Profits plummet. At that point, the farmers typically abandon cacao. In Brazil, struggling cacao crops were razed in favor of full-sun coffee. In Malaysia, cacao gave way to oil palms. In other words:

tropical areas that once housed functional forests are ultimately replaced by traditional agriculture. Making matters worse, the demand for cacao is shifted to other parts of the world, opening new farming frontiers where the boom-bust cycle takes place once again. The authors point out that sustainable cacao remains theoretically possible, perhaps through schemes that pay farmers to keep their shade trees. But the reality to date underscores an old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. ❧ —Justin Matlick Clough, Y., Faust H., and Teja Tscharntke. 2009. Cacao boom and bust: sustainability of agroforests and opportunities for biodiversity conservation. Conservation Letters 2(5):197-205.

©Christopher Ewing/iStock.com

have permeable skin, diverse diets, and habitats spanning both land and water. But some scientists argue that amphibians’ supposed sensitivity is not backed up by scientific evidence. A research team studied more than 23,000 toxicity tests from a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database, covering 1,075 species and 73 chemicals. While amphibians were strongly affected by one category of compounds called phenols, they showed only low or moderate susceptibility to pesticides, heavy metals, and inorganic contaminants when compared to other species. Some compounds may threaten specific amphibians, the team notes. But on the whole, amphibians are “not particularly sensitive and might more aptly be described as ‘miners in a coal mine,’” the researchers write in Ecology Letters. They say the recent devastation of the world’s amphibians could mean that more vulnerable species are in greater danger than we thought. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

Some forests may sequester less carbon as climate warms

hoped. A study of a subalpine forest, however, shows that the exact opposite can happen. Researchers studied nine years of data on a Colorado forest composed mainly of pine, fir, and spruce. During the years with the longest growing seasons, the trees actually took up the least carbon dioxide, they found. The reason, it appears, is that longer growing seasons were caused by shallower winter snow pack, and trees depended heavily on water from snow melt to support photosynthesis. The results, reported in Global Change Biology, don’t apply to all ecosystems. For instance, other research has suggested that boreal forests do increase their carbon uptake with longer growing seasons. But the study doesn’t bode well for the mountainous western U.S., where snow pack has been decreasing. Climate change is expected to reduce snow pack even more, the authors say, and may weaken this natural carbon sink. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

the growing season for many ecosystems, trees may suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere—or so some have

Hu, J. et al. 2010. Longer growing seasons lead to less carbon sequestration by a subalpine forest. Global Change Biology, 16(2):771-783.

Kerby, J. et al. 2009. An examination of amphibian sensitivity to environmental contaminants: are amphibians poor canaries? Ecology Letters 13(1) 60-67.

Wildlife

Frog Fiction Amphibians may not be canaries in a coal mine after all

the widespread idea that amphibians are more sensitive to environmental contamination than other species. Amphibians are thought to provide early warning signs of environmental damage because they Scientists are challenging

Climate Change

Shrinking Sinks As global warming lengthens

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When a single swath of ocean contains more plastic than plankton, the simple act of taking out the trash becomes a grueling scientific challenge

Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 1300 kilometers north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered the course of the Alguita, his 15-meter catamaran. Veering slightly north, he had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 13-billion-hectare oval known as the north Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean—“the doldrums,” sailors called it—a place most boats purposely avoided. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it. The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in California with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally

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captain. Moore had spent countless hours on the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand, things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre. It began with a line of plastic bags ghosting the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill. How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so and that his discovery had dire implications for human—and planetary—health. As the Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “eastern garbage patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling

Feature

Garbage In Garbage Out By Susan Casey • Art by Maarten Brinkman

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currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the twenty-first-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body. “Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want

samples and arrived at the following conclusion: by weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton. This statistic is grim for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is emblazoned on a two-meter-long magenta-and-yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home. Since his first encounter with the garbage patch 12 years ago, Moore has been on a mission to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based new, more-abstract battle. After enlisting scien- mix of monomers that become polymers, tists to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s to which additional chemicals are added for contents, Moore has sailed the Alguita back to suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. the garbage patch several times. On each trip, When it comes to these substances, even the the volume of plastic had syllables are scary. grown alarmingly. The area in To take just one example, Nurdles now account which it accumulates is now we deploy annually about for ten percent of twice the size of Texas. 450 million kilograms of plastic ocean debris At the same time, all over chemical compounds called the globe, there are signs that “phthalates”—despite the fact plastic pollution is doing more than blighting that California recently listed them as chemicals the scenery; it is also making its way into the known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. food chain. Some of the most obvious victims Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates are the dead seabirds washing ashore in startling leach easily from millions of products—packnumbers, their bodies packed with plastic: aged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of things such as bottle caps, cigarette lighters, timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and ama foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal niotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 bottles, phthalates are now found with another pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine scientists are discovering can wreak stunning mammals, and countless fish die in the North havoc in the body. We produce nearly 3 billion Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eat- kilograms of BPA each year, and it shows: BPA ing this junk or from being ensnared in it and has been found in nearly every human who has drowning. been tested in the United States. Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the endocrine system—the delicately balanced the problem; others were far less obvious and far set of hormones and glands that affect virtually more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as every organ and cell—by mimicking the female a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of hormone estrogen. In marine environments, plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque like fish food throughout the water. He and his discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their sprouted female sex organs. 14

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Nurdle Soup

Tiny plastic particles infest a vast swath of ocean In August 2009, scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography set sail on an unprecedented research mission. Their goal: start unraveling plastic’s impact on ocean ecology. The research team headed west from San Diego to the North Pacific garbage patch, where they encountered a surprise. Based on previous reports, the scientists had expected to find an ocean blanketed in large pieces of floating trash. Instead, they saw “a soup of small particles,” according to James Leichter, associate professor at Scripps. These particles were about the same size as plankton, underscoring how easily they can be consumed by marine species and raising an ominous question: is ocean plastic creating a way for toxins to enter the food chain? The Scripps team is mulling how to investigate this, perhaps by studying whether plastics leach chemicals as they age, then testing marine species for these compounds. The researchers are also looking into whether trash might transport invasive species. The garbage patch is littered with what Leichter called “floating ecosystems”—abandoned fishing nets and other large objects teeming with organisms such as crabs and barnacles. To determine whether species are being carried to new habitat, Leichter envisions recording which animals live on particular trash islands, then tracking those islands with satellite tags. Even as the researchers pursue these projects, the most-important goal might be to figure out how to stop plastic from ever entering the sea. “Even if you could clean this material up, you still need to understand the sources,” Leichter said. “Otherwise, you’ll just have it right out there again.” ❧

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Breakdown Plastic may decompose in seawater Plastic poses a deadly threat to marine organisms that swallow or become ensnared in it, but researchers have long wondered whether plastic also affects marine species on a molecular level. Now, a team of Japanese scientists has uncovered the first evidence that plastic may decompose in seawater—suggesting that it could contaminate marine life from the inside out. (1) Led by Katsuhiko Saido of Nihon University, the researchers conducted lab experiments finding that polystyrene-based plastics, thought to be virtually indestructible, can actually break down at seawater temperatures. To test whether this degradation’s byproducts were present in the sea, the researchers analyzed water samples collected from the northern Pacific Ocean and from waters off Malaysia and the western U.S. The samples were found to contain styrene monomers, dimers, and trimers, the researchers reported at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society. Previous studies suggest styrene monomers are carcinogenic in mice, but exactly how these particles might affect marine species is unclear. ❧

1. Saido, K. et al. 2009. New contamination derived from marine debris plastics. Presented at the 2009 national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

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This news is depressing enough to make nurdles, lentil-sized pellets of plastic in its rawest a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is form, are especially effective couriers of waste easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. POPs, which include known carcinogens such With plastic, recycling is more complicated. as DDT and PCBs. The U.S. banned these poisons in the Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows appearing on products doesn’t always 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large signify endless re-use; it merely identifies which in the environment, where they latch on to type of plastic the item is made from. And of plastic because of its molecular tendency to the seven different plastics in common use, only attract oils. The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nurand shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of dles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re light enough to blow around them will escape the landfill— like dust; to spill out of shiponly 3 to 5 percent of plastics Plastic is seeping ping containers; and to wash are recycled in any way. from the ocean into harbors, storm drains, and “There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into into the food chain creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore creatures that would very much like to have such says. He points out that, because plastic melts a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn are headed directly to your dinner table. One study estimated that nurdles now up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. mostly used to make entirely different products, And once they’re scattered in the environment, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think waysuch as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, ward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling in the Cook Islands, 3,380 kilometers northeast plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin of New Zealand, they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand. material. In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant What’s more, “Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small from the state of California to investigate the amount—every bit of plastic ever made still myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during exists,” Moore says, describing how the mate- the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit rial’s molecular structure resists biodegrada- to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as tion. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier he walked through an area where railcars unfragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the loaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his elements. And none of these untold gazillions pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: even Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of when plastic breaks down to a single molecule, nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and it remains too tough for biodegradation. his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not Ask a group of people to name an overwhelm- the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the ing global problem, and you’ll hear about whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. plastic particles. What are they doing to us? No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, transport of nurdles as a concern. And yet they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.” Conservation Magazine

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Though marine dumping is part of the satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic lit- abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops ter migrate to the gyre largely from land. If that killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New landfill, it will eventually be washed out to sea. biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a the North Pacific gyre is only one of five such customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are and excessive packaging is afoot. similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s these gyres has its own version of the garbage catamaran, Alguita, which is birthed in a slip patch as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it floats, a corresponds to a quarter of sturdy, two-and-a-half meter the earth’s surface,” Moore two-seater. Moore stands on Plastic’s problems says. “So 25 percent of our the Alguita’s deck, hands on can’t be fixed planet is a toilet that never hips, staring down at it. On flushes.” the sailboat next to him, his overnight, but neighbor, Cass Bastain, does wisdom will the same. He has just inOur oceans are turning into eventually trump formed Moore that he came plastic—are we? Wrist-slitacross the abandoned craft tingly depressing, yes, but cheap disposability yesterday, floating just offthere are glimmers of hope shore. The two men shake on the horizon. Green architect and designer William McDonough has their heads in bewilderment. Watching the kayak bobbing disconsobecome an influential voice, not only in environmental circles but also among Fortune lately, it is hard not to wonder what will become 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manu- It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come factured things must be reusable, poison-free, in more attractive colors than battleship gray. and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 25 is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a kilograms of nurdles extruded into an object common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of that nobody wants but which will be around phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to for centuries longer than we will. And as Moore stands on deck looking into cancer and reproductive harm. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, same thing 1200 kilometers west, in the gyre. and textiles will be made from toxic materi- You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, als. Other countries—and many individual caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of companies—seem to be reconsidering. Thanks to people like Moore and Mc- water on earth. And then, below, you can see Donough, awareness of just how hard we’ve the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and slapped the planet is skyrocketing. None of discarded things. As Moore looks over the side plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping the more we learn, the more likely that wisdom overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One will eventually trump convenience and cheap of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. begin: The National Oceanographic and Atmo- The bird dives low and then boomerangs over spheric Administration has investigated using the horizon. Gone. ❧

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The Plastic Sausage Machine New factory can turn almost any plastic into a useful product

Despite efforts to recycle plastic, mountains of the stuff still end up in dumps and landfills. The problem is that plastic bottles, lids, containers, and the like must not only be clean but must also be sorted into their various types, if recycling them is not to be prohibitively expensive. Recently, though, a factory has opened which changes those calculations. It is the first to be capable of taking mixed plastic waste—even dirty waste—and turning it into an environmentally friendly substitute for plywood. Most plastics are made by coaxing the carboncontaining compounds found in oil into long molecules called polymers. A plastic made from a single type of polymer can usually be washed and shredded into reusable pellets. But when different polymers— and contaminants such as food residue, bits of glue, and shards of metal—are mingled, the resulting recycled plastic may contain flaws that cause it to tear or break. The new factory, set up in Luton, U.K., by 2K Manufacturing, turns mixed plastic into a composite board called EcoSheet. The board has been tested by Bovis, a construction company supporting the project. EcoSheet costs about the same as plywood and, like plywood, can be used to build a variety of things including advertising hoardings, flooring, and the shuttering used to contain concrete. It has a number of advantages over plywood, however. It is easier to work with because it does not produce injurious splinters. It does not rot. And, unlike plywood, which usually ends up in landfill because it contains

adhesives and preservatives and is often painted, EcoSheet can be recycled into more EcoSheet—even if it is painted and full of nails. 2K Manufacturing was set up by Omer Kutluoglu, a bond trader-turned-businessman, and Turul Taskent, a process engineer who used to build composite structures for racing cars. Their production process uses a form of encapsulation called powderimpression molding. Workers at the factory grind mixed plastics into powdery flakes, spread the material over a polymer skin, cover it with another skin, and sinter it. Sintering produces objects by shaping them out of powder and then heating the powder to just below its melting point so that the particles adhere to one another. During the 2K process, air is blown through the sandwich to create a spongy-looking core. Once the material has cooled and hardened, it acquires mechanical strength from its composite structure. In its first phase, the factory in Luton will be capable of making 360,000 sheets of the material a year. Mr. Kutluoglu is hoping to double that with a second production line and, eventually, to open another ten plants in the U.K. so that the waste plastic can be collected locally and transported over shorter distances. The U.K. uses about 5 million metric tons of plastic a year, but barely one-fifth of that is recycled or recovered, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme, a governmentfunded agency. Kutluoglu and Taskent hope to change that.❧

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Lighten Up

“Frankly, the wolf reintroduction has been a mixed blessing.”

“I’m afraid I must check your species bar code.”

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• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

“This place has a reputation as a biodiversity hot spot.”

Conservation Magazine

Cartoons by Peter Ommundsen

“Hello, Cap? This is Trade.”

• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010 21

from Behind

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• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

pear ©Invictus999 /Dreamstime.com | bee ©Alle/Dreamstime.com

Stung

Feature Distracted by a mysterious rash of dying bees, researchers may be overlooking a more insidious pollinator crisis. It has little to do with bees and everything to do with booming markets for pears, raspberries, and chocolate By Nathanael Johnson Beekeeper Eric Olson has lost so many bees in the past few years, he’s had

to consider closing shop. But nothing prepared him for what he found when he went out early one November morning to do a final check on “his girls,” as he calls them. The first hive was dead—completely empty. So was the second one. And the third. He began to wander through the yard, lifting lids at random, “just to see how drastic it was,” he says. “It was such a shock, I had to find out if we had anything left.” He had lost 90 percent of these bees, which had been buffeting blueberry flowers in western Washington a few months earlier. “What the heck happened that in one month those beehives went from sky-high, jam-packed, full of bees, doing great—to dead?” You may already know about the global pollinator crisis. Over the past 50 years, the number of domestic honeybee colonies in the U.S. has dropped by more than half. Olson watched the number of beekeepers in Washington fall from around 45 to only eight today. At the same time, wild pollinators have been disappearing. No one has seen a Franklin bumblebee (native to Oregon and California) since 2006 or a rusty-patched bumblebee (once common in New York) since 2005. As if this were not enough, beekeepers began telling stories about something utterly strange: sterile worker bees were abandoning hives, leaving their

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queens and pupae behind to die. In 2006, researchers began calling this phenomenon colony collapse disorder and pegging it as the source of a global pollinator crisis. The media picked up the story, and it quickly embedded itself in the public consciousness—and in the scientific community. It’s a truly cautionary tale. Instead of a crisis that impacts humanity directly, such as a tidal wave or a pandemic, this one hits us as collateral damage through our ecological partners. As such, it’s tempting to use this crisis as an object lesson: we mess up the environment, pollinators suffer, harvests fail—and in the end, the cascade triggered by humanity rolls back on us in the form of hunger. Perhaps this circular justice was too poetic to resist; perhaps stories from beekeepers such as Olson were a little too compelling—because in all the excitement, few researchers stopped to question whether the bee crisis was a genuine global trend. Then, last year, Argentine scientist Marcelo Aizen hit upon an elegant way to test that assumption. If there really were a crisis, he figured, harvests from crops that depend on bees and other pollinators should be declining or at least leveling out. Yet the yields of pollinatordependent crops have grown at about the same rate as those of wind-pollinated crops. With Lawrence Harder, Aizen went on to show that instead of crashing, the total number of commercial honeybees has increased 45 percent in the past 50 years.

Despite fears of collapsing bee populations, the number of honeybee hives has been growing steadily for decades. So have the yields of pollinatordependent crops. Source: Aizen, M.A. and L.D. Harder. 2009. The global stock of domesticated honey bees Is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. Current Biology 19:915–918.

Conservation Magazine

Percentage change in number of hives 6 120—Global —Without USSR 100—Without USA

It’s not that the dire stories were false; they just didn’t represent the big picture. Call it a scoping problem—the conclusions you draw from looking through a microscope may be opposite to those you arrive at after examining the same evidence through a telescope. By drawing on both perspectives, scientists have come to a new, more-nuanced revelation: a pollinator crisis does indeed loom, but the crisis they see has little to do with a decline in bees and everything to do with economic globalization and the world’s growing appetite for raspberries, cashews, chocolate, and other luxury crops. You don’t have to don a protective suit and poke around beehives to see this crisis: it’s there in your local supermarket when you find watermelons for sale in December. The first person to point out the scoping problem was Jaboury Ghazoul. Ghazoul is an ecologist with enough sense of whimsy to poke fun at himself: his curriculum vitae webpage shows a picture of him looking beleaguered, with a crying infant straining from his backpack. “Jaboury Ghazoul,” the caption reads, “. . .he has a hard time with his children.” Perhaps it was this willingness to acknowledge human foibles that allowed Ghazoul to stand against the incoming tide of orthodoxy. The examples of pollinator declines were absolutely accurate and troubling to Ghazoul. But he was also troubled by the fact that scientists were using these zoomed-in, microscope-type observations

Percentage change in agricultural production 6 350300-

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to make generalizations about the big picture. In 2005 he wrote an opinion piece in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, pointing out that, while many pollinators had decreased, others had surged to take their place. (1) Furthermore, he wrote, most of our staple crops—rice, corn, wheat, soy—don’t rely on pollinators. Despite all the talk, there was no evidence that crop productivity was going down. Ghazoul’s purpose was not to defend big agriculture but to protect the credibility of

decline in average yield for all crops—or, at least, relatively lower yields for pollinatordependent crops. (2) But when Aizen and his coauthors plotted out the productivity gains of plants that need bees alongside those of wind- and self-pollinated plants, they got two lines trending upward in tandem. Chocolate depends on pollinators, and yields from cocoa farms have doubled since 1961. Watermelon, another plant that needs bees, has seen yields increase by 158 percent

The crisis is plainly visible in the produce aisle conservationists. Big-picture claims should be evaluated using big-picture data, he wrote, “lest we overplay our hand in demanding conservation action for the wrong reasons.” The paper was incendiary. “There are still some people who practically don’t speak to me anymore,” Ghazoul said. A group of scientists shot back a heated critique of this opinion piece, citing still more pollinator declines—along with historical examples of crop decrease due to loss of pollinators and studies showing that crops closer to wild habitat were more productive than plants in the middle of the field. Still, there was no big-picture analysis to show whether the declines were actually translating into crop losses. To prove this—or to prove, as Ghazoul suspected, that crop yields were doing just fine—scientists would need to assemble information on every farmer’s harvest worldwide. They’d need to find a vast store of data. That trove of data,

it turned out, was hidden in plain sight. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has kept statistics on global crop productivity for years. “When we came across these data sets, I said, well this is what we needed,” Aizen notes. “Here is the data, which is publicly available, to test this.” In his analysis of the FAO numbers, he notes that, if there really were a global pollinator crisis threatening food supplies, there should be a related

in the developed world and 161 percent in the developing world. This means that, on average, each watermelon patch is producing more each year than it did the season before. These are not numbers that would indicate a crisis. Working with Lawrence Harder, Aizen then turned the telescope provided by the FAO numbers toward honeybees. (The organization tracks the number of commercial hives around the world.) They found that, although the number of hives in the U.S. had indeed dropped precipitously, the global population of managed honeybee hives had increased by 45 percent in the previous 50 years, and total honey production had increased more than 100 percent since 1961. (3) In other words, the bee business has been outsourced. Since the 1960s, U.S. honey producers have been forced out of the industry by cheaper, imported honey. U.S. bee losses have been dwarfed by increases in places such as China, Argentina, and Turkey—countries which now dominate the honey supply. “At least for honeybees,” Aizen said, “the pollinator crisis is not happening.” But that doesn’t mean there’s not a crisis. Aizen

and Harder could have stopped with their repudiation of conventional wisdom, but instead they took their analysis a step further. What they found was sobering. Over the past half-century, the earth’s farmers have doubled their production of

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DNY59/iStock.com

Wild habitat close to farms can lure volunteer pollinators

Cutting commute times

Pollinators are pricey. In California’s central valley—where the local crisis is very real—the cost of renting bee hives during the almond bloom recently tripled within two years: $50 per hive in 2006, $100 per hive in 2007, and $150 in 2008. As the numbers ratchet up, farmers may start looking for a backup plan. Several studies show that wild pollinators can pick up the slack: watermelon flowers in California can receive visits from more than 30 native species of bees, and some wild pollinators can spur the commercial honeybees on—making them five times more efficient. (Researchers think the confused native pollinators try to mate with honeybees, rousting them from a flower where they might otherwise dawdle.) But wild bees can help only if they have habitat close enough to the fields. There have been a couple of dozen studies of wild bees volunteering on farms. In 2008, a group of scientists synthesized these findings to see whether they could draw some general conclusions about how far pollinators were willing to commute. (1) As expected, the farther the farms were from wild habitat, the fewer bees researchers found—on average, 50 percent fewer just one mile from habitat. Some species go more than twice that far, but it looks as though one mile may be a rough rule of thumb for estimating the radius of a bee’s foraging area. Researchers found only weak evidence that lack of bee diversity hurt agricultural production, a finding which may be explained by the use of commercial hives, but farmers are taking note nonetheless. Even those who remain unpersuaded that native bees will help them are often willing to plant bee-friendly plants in hedgerows and windbreaks—just in case. ❧

1. Ricketts, T.H. et al. 2008. Landscape effects on crop pollination services: Are there general patterns? Ecology Letters 11:499–515.

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major crops that don’t need pollinators. These plants—corn, wheat, potatoes—are staples, and their increase reflects the basic need to fill 3 billion more bellies (the doubling in production roughly mirrors a doubling in population). In that same time period, however, production of pollinator-dependent crops (cardamom, cantaloupes, and cashews) has quadrupled—and the number of beehives has increased. But Aizen and Harder point out that the 45-percent increase in honeybees seems less impressive beside a 400-percent increase in flowering crops. The fact that yields have increased despite the disparity between bees and flowers could

and coffee. It has to do with people in wealthy countries assuming that tomatoes will be ripe and readily available year-round. Bee scarcity, in other words, is an economic problem caused by economic forces. So how does this economic explanation square

with the clear and present biological crisis that Eric Olson faces on the ground in Yakima, Washington? “We are not denying that there are serious biological problems, like in the U.S. with colony collapse disorder, et cetera,” Harder said. “But our argument is that this sort of thing is a short-term episode in a much-longer

While many pollinator populations have decreased,

others have surged to take their place indicate that wild pollinators are supporting farmers. But Aizen and Harder warn that, as more land is devoted to luxury crops and as small, diverse fields are converted to vast, high-tech monocultures, farmers could wipe out native bees—effectively knocking down the prop holding them up. Furthermore, if farmers in Africa turn to the likes of Eric Olson to ship in domestic honeybees, it could compound the problem. “Don’t forget,” Harder told me, “honeybees are an invasive species in most places.” They don’t always contribute to the relationships that have evolved between local species over the eons. They take pollen from native plants but often don’t fertilize them as well as the local bees. This means fewer seeds, fewer native flowers, and fewer wild pollinators. In the process of demonstrating that no global pollinator crisis was occurring, Aizen and Harder found the portents of, well, a global pollination crisis. However, the crisis they foresee is one driven not by mysterious die-offs but by market pressures plainly visible in the produce aisle. It has to do with people in poor nations developing an appetite for good cocoa

declining trend that’s probably more related to the economics of the honey industry.” The very fact that it’s so difficult to wrap your mind around the idea that dying bees could be a symptom of something as abstract as global economics speaks to the essence of the scoping problem: good science takes that which seems obvious to the naked eye and—by looking at it from a new perspective—provides a new and often counterintuitive model for explaining things. It seems obvious, for example, that the sun travels around the earth until you spend some time looking through a telescope. ❧ Literature Cited 1. Ghazoul, J. 2005. Buzziness as usual? Questioning the global pollination crisis. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20(7):365–373. 2. Aizen, M.A. et al. 2008. Long-term global trends in crop yield and production reveal no current pollination shortage but increasing pollinator dependency. Current Biology 18:1572–1575. 3. Aizen, M.A. and L.D. Harder. 2009. The global stock of domesticated honey bees Is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. Current Biology 19:915–918.

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Nathanael Johnson is a freelance writer who contributes to several media outlets, including Harper’s Magazine and public radio. He frequently writes about agriculture, health, and conservation. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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Feature

Wounds That Can Heal A pioneering study of nature’s recovery times delivers a startling conclusion: that some damaged ecosystems bounce back in decades, not millenia. The findings offer a ray of hope—and a respite from apocalyptic storylines.

By Marguerite Holloway 28

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of environmental destruction in the U.S. and in many of the countries he studied or visited during his career as an American diplomat, George Perkins Marsh wrote Man and Nature. Published in 1864, the influential book awakened the American public to the devastation humans were wreaking, the potential consequences of that devastation (Marsh pointed to collapsed civilizations undone, in part, by “man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of nature”), and the possibility of climactic change. At the same time, Marsh drew his readers’ attention to the idea of restoration and proposed that man “… become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged fabric which the negligence or the wantonness of former lodgers has rendered untenable.” Marsh accomplished many things with Man and Nature, including—as environmental historian William Cronon has observed— launching the modern conservation movement. Marsh posited stunning ideas: that people could harm nature on a large scale and that people could do something about it—restoration could repair the “damaged fabric.” He included notes of hope in a dark tale. No such notes brighten today’s environmental narratives, say some conservation biologists. The news is dominated by tales of deforestation, extinction, and climate change— examples of how humans have exacted global, irreversible transformations of ecosystems and the atmosphere. According to some observers, the hopeful piece of Marsh’s message—repair, recovery, resilience—is championed by those in the emergent field of restoration ecology, but not by the public at large and not by most in the conservation movement, who focus primarily on preserving intact ecosystems. This is beginning to change. Since the mid-1990s, some ecologists have been calling for stronger, more-explicit links between restoration and conservation policy. Seeking to incite restoration fervor in their colleagues—with what they call “the audacity of environmental hope”—two conservation biologists at Yale University recently contributed an exhaustive

Galvanized by observations

analysis to this trend. Although controversial in certain regards, their research points to instances of nature rapidly recovering from human disturbances. They urge conservationists to innovate, improvise, and experiment with restoration. Nature, the researchers say, can take it. how rodents destroy seabird colonies by eating eggs and chicks. Since 2002, she has traveled the world, trapping and killing rats in the Channel Islands and the Aleutian Islands. “I was looking at island recovery, and we were doing a lot of these doomsday predictions about ecosystems, about how they are horribly affected and are not recovering,” says Jones, now a doctoral student at Yale. Yet she began noticing that dire predictions weren’t always playing out: “You see recovery and you see it actually pretty quickly, and it can be quite startling.” So Oswald Schmitz, Jones’s advisor and a professor in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, encouraged her to review the literature on ecosystem recovery. “We thought we would look at the evidence, because no one really had,” Jones recalls. What was intended as a brief sidebar to Jones’s dissertation about seabird recovery turned into a yearlong investigation, culminating with a May 2009 paper in PLoS ONE. The study, “Rapid Recovery of Damaged Ecosystems,” found that some impaired ecosystems bounce back, and within relatively short times—on the order of decades, not millennia. (1) The paper is openly upbeat, explicit in its goal to dispel doom and gloom about irreversible harm. To research the paper, Jones and Schmitz started by plumbing the Web of Science database for articles that included words describing a perturbation (such as logging, agriculture, invasive species, and oil spills) and the terms “resilience” and “recovery.” Their search turned up 240 studies that, taken together, described seven types of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and 94 variables. These variables included aspects of the system such as biodiversity, canopy cover, or water quality—aspects that could recover once

Holly Jones knows firsthand

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the perturbation ceased. Some of the ecosystems Jones and Schmitz reviewed had been actively restored, some had been left alone. They found that more than one-third (34.5 percent) of the ecosystems recovered the attributes being examined. Although that might not seem like a lot, Jones and Schmitz argue that, in the face of the public’s expectation that damage to nature can never be undone, this proportion is significant. In general, aspects of marine benthic systems trounced by oil spills bounced back most quickly—within an average of five years. For the authors, this presented one of the biggest surprises. “People believe that oil spills are horrible for the environment and are so long-lasting, but the data indicate that is not always the case,” Jones says. In 90 articles (37.5 percent), the aspects being studied presented more of a mixed bag: some had recovered, some had not. Tropical forests, for instance, took an average of 40 years to recover, but if deforestation was not too extensive, facets of recovery could occur more rapidly, says Schmitz. “Large-scale tropical deforestation does not recover very easily, but there are more modest-sized disturbances that did recover.” Jones and Schmitz note that they could have included the recovered variables in these mixed studies in their “recovered” category, which would have made the conclusion more positive. “The paper presents a more pessimistic picture than what is actually happening,” Jones says. Only 67 studies (28 percent) demonstrated no recovery of any aspect of the ecosystem. Agriculture was far and away the single mostdamaging disturbance. But there were other

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

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Source: Jones H.P. and O.J. Schmitz. 2009. Rapid recovery of damaged ecosystems. PLoS ONE 4(5):e5653. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0005653.

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Jones and Schmitz found that most ecosystems bounce back within decades, even after dramatic disruptions from trawling, hurricanes, and oil spills.

Recovery Time (years) 6

devastating perturbations as well, such as overfishing in the case of cod. “That is an example of where I think things have locked into an alternative state,” says Schmitz. The predatorprey relationships are so changed that stopping the damage (in this case, banning fishing) “won’t be enough to bring [cod] back because there are other things that have happened subsequently to transform the system.” aspects of Jones and Schmitz’s analysis unsettling. Restoration ecology is a relatively young science, one that has been growing robustly since the 1988 founding of the Society for Ecological Restoration International. Because it is young and because the systems and situations it deals with are so varied and complex, many aspects of restoration science are still evolving. Questions abound about how to determine a baseline or “original” state in the absence of good data and about what “recovery” means—should the ecosystem sustain itself, should it be managed, should all the species or aspects of the system be back in place for restoration to have occurred? “The fuzzier the criteria are for recovery, the easier they are to hit,” notes Joy B. Zedler of the University of Wisconsin. “Authors have these various judgments, and they don’t want to talk about failure. We rely on their judgment that they hit the target, which introduces bias into the whole system.” That bias has led to gross overuse of the term “success,” Zedler contends. (2) For this reason, the Journal of Restoration Ecology just added a new section called Setbacks and Surprises. “I Some restoration ecologists found

Recovery Time (years) 6

160120-

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think that is a really good thing to do,” Zedler says, “because up until this time there has not been an invitation to authors to submit work on projects that did not work.” This potential absence of failed restoration projects from the literature concerns Zedler with regard to Jones and Schmitz’s research. “I am thinking there are just all kinds of opportunities for the literature not to be representative,” she says. Margaret Palmer, a restoration ecologist at the University of Maryland, is worried about what might be missing from the literature, too—as well as what might be missing from Jones and Schmitz’s database hits. Studies without “resilience” or “recovery” may not have shown up. Palmer says reports of stream and river restoration in the past five years, for instance, have not documented much success in restoring either overall biodiversity or particular species. In her view, restoration of these ecosystems is failing because the techniques are not working and indeed “might be damaging.” She recently published a review of 78 projects and found only eight showing evidence of positive recovery. (3) Palmer says she now leans toward taking a page from conservation: “The focus needs to be on preserving land and letting it go back to forest. Much more so than on restoration.” Angst is part and parcel of restoration science,

despite its underlying hopefulness. Angst that restoration will justify destruction. Angst about what it means to “play God.” Angst that no ecosystem can return to a self-sustaining, historically biodiverse state—or that those historical states will even be remembered. “Angst is great.

rt m ur u ba litp ti o l e ns oi ls pi ov ll er fis hi ng po w er pl an t tr aw lin g

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You want to have people constantly asking the core questions. A certain number of us should worry. But you can’t let that keep you from doing something,” says Truman P. Young, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis. “Systems can find a way. Mistakes should be repairable. We should go back and fiddle some more.” This kind of thinking is precisely what Jones and Schmitz want to encourage in the conservation community. The authors acknowledge the limitations of the restoration literature and say they intend to probe more deeply in further studies—to look, for instance, at differences between ecosystems left alone to recover versus those actively restored. And, Jones cautions, evidence of resilience “does not give license to exploit; we are not saying go out and destroy the earth.” At the same time, the two clearly delight in having identified a suite of studies suggesting that some wounds can heal. The delight shines in the paper’s language and in their conversation. “People like hope. I think it has been obvious that people like hope!” laughs Jones. The article “spread like wildfire,” Schmitz adds happily. “We got Google updates and we could just see it go around the planet, literally.” They delight in the possibility that this paper could exhort the public and the conservation community to embrace restoration, to experiment more fully with it. Historically, Schmitz says, conservation has focused on protecting intact habitat. “But restoration is really where the value-added is in conservation. I mean, this is where we can make the biggest gain, because

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Marguerite Holloway is Director of Science and Environmental Journalism at the Journalism School at Columbia University and is a contributing editor at Scientific American.

damaged land can be bought for cheap, and with a mixture of passive and active restoration we can do a lot of good things,” he explains. “What we are showing is that there may be more room for experimentation to figure out how we become more sustainable. If we make mistakes, we can recover from them, and pretty quickly. That really gives hope for people to try things rather than do the status quo or the light touch. Because I think with the status quo, you don’t get the kind of innovation you might need.” Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, was so delighted to see the paper, he called Jones and offered her funding for a postdoctoral position so she could analyze some restoration projects more fully. “I have been running around talking about the fact that nature is resilient. We have a wrong-headed metaphor of nature as fragile,” Kareiva says. “What Holly’s paper tells us is that nature does not break that easily in the sense that it becomes irrevocably harmed. This could make a real practical difference in the conservation community because it means that you will consider a wider range of strategies and compromises.” This idea resonates for some other ecologists as well—particularly for those who have been describing links, crossovers, and differences between the fields for a long time. “One could imagine conservation biology becoming a subset of restoration ecology when it becomes clear that most of what we have to do is restorative,” muses Young, who has written about the relationship between restoration ecology and conservation biology. (4) “Less focus on prevention of loss, and more on getting things back: a mindset changing from defense to offense. I can certainly see that it won’t be long before we are in a place where the defensive actions are all done.” As the Anthropocene unfolds, ecosystems may come to look very different from the ones we are familiar with. “As we come into increasingly novel and hybrid ecosystems, we will be drawing from similar and varied tool kits,” says Eric Higgs, director of the school of environmental studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. “There is enormous value that comes to human communities from acts of restoration. They induce states of humility. They make us recognize hubris. There is noth-

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ing like trying to restore an ecosystem to make you humble.” And, Higgs adds, “it is hard not to feel good doing it.” Being drawn to something tangible in an era when the largest environmental challenges seem out of the realm of human and personal control, makes intuitive sense—and it makes psychological sense. People do not respond to apocalyptic narratives, says conservation psychologist and chair of environmental studies Susan Clayton at The College of Wooster. “If they feel hopeless, they see no point to doing anything. If you make them fearful, but they have no ability to address the problem, you are going to motivate denial rather than action.” Clayton points to a recent Pew Research Center survey of 1,500 people as a potential example of fear without a clear route for individual action: between April 2008 and October 2009, the percentage of American adults who believe there is solid evidence for global warming fell from 71 percent to 57 percent. “Our perspective was that if you want to get people behind you in conservation, you have to give them some hope,” Schmitz says. “Screaming and yelling about doom and gloom isn’t going to change things. It isn’t going to compel people to change their behavior. But if you can show them what the world will look like when they change their behavior, then maybe they might.” ❧

Literature Cited: 1. Jones H.P. and O.J. Schmitz. 2009. Rapid recovery of damaged ecosystems. PLoS ONE 4(5):e5653. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005653. 2. Zedler, J.B. 2007. Success: An unclear, subjective descriptor of restoration outcomes. Ecological Restoration 25(3):162-168; doi:10.3368/er.25.3.162. 3. Palmer, M.A. 2009. River restoration, habitat heterogeneity and biodiversity: a failure of theory or practice? Freshwater Biology 55 (suppl.1):1-18. 4. Young, T.P. 2000. Restoration ecology and conservation biology. Biological Conservation 92(1):73-83. Additional Reading: Dobson, A.P., A.D. Bradshaw, and J.M. Baker, 2007. Hopes for the Future: Restoration Ecology and Conservation Biology. Science New Series, 277(5325): 515-522.

Essay

Shy Affectionate SF Desperately seeking LTR with Nature

By Kathleen Dean Moore is a self-described “hard” scientist. He studies chemicals in the brain—how desire actually works in the cells, the little switches and locks. He listens to me talk about what it means to love a place, but he says I can’t just assume that people care about places. He says I need data. “I’m a philosopher,” I told him. “Philosophers don’t do data.” But the fact is, I had been conducting a study of sorts. For several months before we left for the island, I read the love ads in the

Frank, my husband,

Saturday paper. The secret coded yearning, the SWFs and DMs all ISO something—this interested me. I would never have had the occasion or even the temptation to phone the Lonesome Horseman, or send a photo to Teddy Bear, or tell Endangered Species that I’m a rarity myself, but I was curious. Love ads are a data bank of human nature far more revealing than the Human Genome Project: fifty people every week explaining who they are and what they are looking for, in twenty-five words or less. I kept a count of love ads in the Corvallis Gazette-Times, tallying up what people were searching for. The data revealed that more people like “the outdoors” than any other thing. The typical SF, a LARGE & BEAUTIFUL momma, 31, who is shy and honest, likes the outdoors, movies, and walking on the beach (in that order). The typical SM is a VERY FIT MALE, who is very sensitive. He likes the outdoors, romance, and tattoos (again, in that

order). In all, fully two-thirds of the SFs and SMs listed “the outdoors” first on their lists—a clear winner. After the outdoors, the first runnerup was watching movies. Beaches and camping tied for third place. Walks and hikes came in fourth. Then came dancing and dinner, followed by romance. (Let us pause to notice how long it has taken to get to romance—sixth on the list, after all the outdoor sports). After romance, there was a three-way tie among cuddling, fishing, and countrywestern music (although none of the people who liked to cuddle also liked to fish), and one vote each for mountains, darkness, the blues, Harleys, handholding, friendship, and vampires. My research found no significant difference between men and women, except that three women liked sports, which are of no interest whatsoever to the men. So there it is. People like the outdoors best of all, they say, even better than sex. Frank received these data with the mixed astonishment and chagrin that only a scientist can muster. “Kathy, this is bad science.” I know that; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. I don’t want to claim that everybody loves the outdoors; I just want to point out that many people do, and to observe that love for place and love for people

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are mixed together in beautiful and mysterious ways. I know a woman who walked through an ancient cedar forest and fell helplessly in love—with the forest and with the man carrying her sandwich. And I have seen people search all their lives for what would make them happy and whole and never think to look outside the door—perpetual seekers, not sure what they are looking for, but endlessly searching, on the Internet, in catalogs, at the mall. I don’t know if the people who place love ads in my hometown newspaper are typical of people in general. For that matter, I don’t know if Oregonians are representative of human beings. And who knows if the people are telling the truth; maybe they just say they like the outdoors because they think that will attract a particular sort of person. I’m not claiming that the connection between loving a person and loving a place is simple. I just think it’s significant that—more often than not—when people have an opportunity to envision their unlived lives, to dream about starting over and doing it right this time, the outdoors is the setting for their dreams. Big-hearted Bob and 34

Conservation Magazine

Chantilly Lace walking hand-in-hand This is why I was happy to present at the edge of the sea: the raised pulse, Frank with evidence consistent with the rhythmic waves, the crying gulls, the biophilia hypothesis and to sugthe salty, exultant wind. gest one more thing. We are attracted In 1984, Harvard entomologist to the great green earth—and to pink E.O. Wilson advanced the biophilia algae, blue fish, gasping newborn hypothesis, arguing that human be- babies, and suction-cup tadpoles. But ings have an innate attraction to living read the love ads closely and literally: things. This attracISO LTR. In search tion makes sense of a long-term relaPeople like the from an evolutiontionship. The people outdoors best of ary perspective. “To who place ads in my an extent still unhometown newspaper all, better even dervalued in philosaren’t just advertising than sex. ophy and religion,” for partners, they are he wrote, “our exisadvertising for love. tence depends on this propensity, our Like all of us, what they seek is a lastspirit is woven from it, hope rises on its ing relationship—with people and the currents.” I like this hypothesis. It ex- planet—and what they cherish is relatplains a lot: When we wall ourselves off edness, being in caring connection with from the natural world’s wild sources of a person or place. We are creatures who comfort and belonging, don’t we feel a are born to love. It’s more than biophilia self-destructive restlessness, like a single that drives us. It’s philophilia—the love moth in a jar? And Wilson’s hypothesis of love itself. ❧ is hopeful: If humans naturally love the living things on this planet—all the burrowing, breathing, breeding biotic “Shy Affectionate SF” from The Pine Island Paradox systems, the foundations of our very by Kathleen Dean Moore (Minneapolis: MIlkweed 2004). Copyright ©2004 by Kathleen Dean lives—then maybe we can find a way Editions, Moore. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. www.milkweed.org. to act lovingly toward them.

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A Flock of Jets Mimicking birds could reduce airline emissions trumpeted the efficiency of their newest aircraft, the 787 and A350, respectively. Their clever designs certainly make a difference. But a group of researchers at Stanford University, led by Ilan Kroo, has suggested that airlines could take a more naturalistic approach to cutting jet-fuel use. The answer, says Kroo, lies with birds. Scientists have long known that birds flying in formation expend less energy. The air flowing over a bird’s wings curls upward behind the wingtips, a phenomenon known as upwash. Other birds flying in the upwash experience reduced drag and thus spend less energy propelling themselves. Aeronautics expert Peter Lissaman has suggested that a formation of 25 birds might enjoy a range increase of 71 percent. The principles are not substantially different when applied to aircraft. Kroo and his team modeled what would happen if three passenger jets departing from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas were to rendezvous over Utah, assume an inverted V-formation, occasionally swap places so all could have a turn in the most-favorable positions, and proceed to London. They found that the aircraft consumed as much as 15 percent less fuel, with a concomitant reduction in CO2 output. Nitrogen-oxide emissions during the cruising portions of the flight fell by around 25 percent. There are, of course, kinks to be worked out. One consideration is safety—would passengers feel comfortable traveling in convoy? Kroo points out that the aircraft could be separated by several nautical miles. A passenger peering out the window might not even see the other planes. Whether the separation distances involved would satisfy air traffic–control regulations is another matter. It remains to be seen how weather conditions affect the airflows that make formation flight more efficient. In zones of increased turbulence, the planes’ wakes will decay more quickly, and the effect will diminish. Kroo says this is one of the areas his team will investigate further. It might also be difficult for airlines to coordinate the departure times and destinations of passenger aircraft in order to benefit from formation flight. In contrast, cargo aircraft and routine military flights might be easier to reschedule. As it happens, America’s armed forces are on the case already. Earlier this year the country’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced plans to investigate formation flight.❧ Both Boeing and Airbus have

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Solutions

Photo by Ho-Yeol Ryu

Cheap Labor Penguins, seals, and petrels drafted to map the sea The Patagonian Sea is one of the earth’s richest marine areas. Spanning 3 million square kilometers, it’s also so vast that conservationists have struggled to develop a comprehensive scheme to protect its denizens. Now, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and BirdLife International have developed a breakthrough tool: a cutting-edge atlas that could be a blueprint for mapping new marine reserves. The atlas was developed with help from an unlikely—if obvious—source: scores of trackeroutfitted sea creatures. The animals hailed from 16 species including penguins, southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonine), and several

Conservation Magazine

species of albatross. All told, they produced 280,000 individual data uplinks as they swam, nested, and fed—allowing researchers to compile what they say are the most-accurate maps of the area ever assembled. The maps detail locations of deep-sea feeding grounds as well as migratory corridors covering hundreds of kilometers. As ship traffic, development, and fishing encroach upon these areas, conservationists envision using the atlas to develop a new network of wildlife reserves and corridors. It could also help policymakers manage fisheries and change shipping lanes, routing traffic away from critical areas. —Justin Matlick

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Solutions Biological Batteries Tapping into the power of the electric eel In December 2007, a Japanese aquarium hooked up the lights on a Christmas tree to a tank containing an electric eel. Metal plates at the ends of the tank collected the electricity the fish generated, which was used to power the bulbs. It was certainly effective as a publicity stunt. Now some researchers in America have developed a battery that generates electricity in a similar way. The mechanism allowing Electrophorus electricus to produce a shock as strong as a wall socket employs differences in the concentration of sodium ions, which are spread across some 6,000 specialized cells called electrocytes. Normally, these cells are electrically isolated from one another. When the eel locates its prey, it opens cellular gates through which

Skin Cream for Ships

Barnacles and other sea creatures can encrust a ship’s hull after just a few months in the water, slashing fuel efficiency and requiring costly cleanings. In turn, shipping companies have long dreamt of finding a sure-fire way to discourage the growth. Now, a research team led by Rahul Ganguli of Teledyne Scientific & Imaging may have found the solution in an unlikely source: pilot whales’ clear complexions. Unlike some whale species, a pilot whale’s visage is never blemished by barnacles. A few years ago, German researchers uncovered the secret behind this phenomenon: the whales’ skin repeatedly grows and sloughs off a special layer, casting hitchhikers adrift. The new ship system mimics this mechanism. The system calls for a network of hull ducts that ooze liquid chemicals that become viscous upon contact with water. These chemicals spread through steel mesh covering a ship’s hull, forming a thin, slimy “skin.” This skin would regularly dissolve, taking barnacles and any other colonizers with it. Ganguli says the chemicals are nontoxic (they’re already approved for use by the oil-drilling industry) and that the volume released into the ocean would be comparable to that of some existing hull paints. He believes the system, which has been partially funded by the U.S. defense department, would cut down on fuel use and corrosion, lengthening ships’ lifespans and requiring less-frequent maintenance stops. While the research is in its infancy, lab tests on small pieces of metal have demonstrated a proof of concept. Now it’s a matter of scaling up so ships can boast the same flawless skin as pilot whales. ❧ —Rebecca Kessler

Photo courtesy of the New England Aquarium

Hulls engineered to mimic whale skin may improve fuel efficiency

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Solutions

Disturbing the Peace War-inducing chemical turns invasive ants against each other

the ions can flow. This movement of charged ions creates an electric current. David LaVan of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and his colleagues wanted to study the operation of living cell membranes and their proteins. They began by experimenting on artificial “protocells” surrounded by membranes made of fatty molecules. Proteins “floating” in the membranes would let only certain ions pass. Using this system, the researchers realized they might be able to copy the eel’s electricity-generation mechanism. The team fused two protocells, then added a dilute concentration of potassium chloride to one protocell and a more-concentrated solution to the other. To help ions move from the less-concentrated protocell to the more-concentrated one, LaVan’s team installed a protein—called alpha-hemolysin—into the protocell membrane. This functioned as a selective bridge, permitting the passage of positively charged sodium ions but not negatively charged chloride ions. As the selected ions moved in one direction, electrons (which are negatively charged) flowed in the opposite direction. To make use of this electrical current, the team connected tiny electrodes to the protocells. They report in Advanced Materials that they were able to sustain a usable current and that adding more protocells would increase battery life. LaVan calculates that two of his protocells, measuring several centimeters across, could run a portable MP3 player for about ten hours. A novel Christmas present, perhaps? ❧

Argentine ants are masters of destruction. They

displace native ants, raid honeybee hives, drive pollinators away from flowers, and pour into people’s homes around the globe. In fact, one enormous colony extends for thousands of kilometers along the southern coast of Europe. To stop these relentless invaders, Neil Tsutsui at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have come up with a devious solution: stir civil war within the colonies. By applying certain chemicals to an ant, the researchers have found, they can provoke its nest mates into attacking it. All Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) in a colony have on their bodies a distinctive mixture of molecules called hydrocarbons that allows them to recognize other colony members. To create the enemy cocktail, Tsutsui’s team identified hydrocarbons that differed among colonies. Chemists at the University of California, Irvine, synthesized the molecules, which were then used to coat individual ants. The coating adds a scent that makes an ant’s nest mates think it comes from a different colony, thus changing it from “friend” to “foe.” In an entomological version of Rome’s Colosseum, researchers placed each coated ant into a Petri-dish “arena,” added ten nest mates, and watched. The nest mates lunged, flared their mandibles, pulled the ant’s legs and antennae, smeared toxic chemicals on its body, and sometimes even killed it, says Tsutsui. While nest mates showed aggression during roughly five percent of control trials, those levels rose to an average of 35–65 percent with treated ants. While more research is needed to determine whether the chemicals will work in the field, Tsutsui hopes they might someday be used as an environmentally friendly alternative to insecticides. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

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Electron microscope image of spider web strands 73 to 400 nanometers in diameter

Courtesy of the Robert D. Ogg Electron Microscope Lab at the University of California, Berkeley

Spider Silk Muscles A two-centimeter rope of spider silk can hoist an SUV spider silk is strong. But strong enough to lift an SUV and hold it in the air? Researchers at the University of Akron think so and are making intriguing discoveries about how spider silk could revolutionize everything from manufacturing to medicine. Their core finding: by adding or removing moisture to dragline silk—an exceptionally strong silk used to build a spider web’s spokes—scientists can

Scientists have always known

make it contract and expand like a human muscle. To reach this conclusion, a research team led by Todd Blackledge attached tiny weights to silk strands and placed them into a controlled chamber. By adjusting the chamber’s humidity, the researchers caused the silk to raise the weights, hold them in midair, and lower them back down. A single strand of silk, thinner than a human hair, can lift 100

milligrams—about the weight of a toothpick. Now imagine a future where robots use bundles of silk to maneuver enormous loads. A rope just two centimeters thick, for example, could theoretically hoist an SUV. This could mean big energy savings in warehouses and other industrial venues—unlike electromagnets, the strands don’t need a constant stream of energy to hold something aloft. ❧ —Amy Mayer

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When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Book Marks

Lost at Sea

The mysterious disappearance of Cousteau’s conservation legacy reporter asked a 67-year-old Jacques Cousteau whether he had faith in anything, he gave a strange reply: “I believe in the instant.” But even Cousteau, who died in 1997, might be surprised at how quickly his legacy has faded. After all, I (and most of my young colleagues in marine science and conservation) know little about the man— even though he won several Oscars, revolutionized underwater exploration, and introduced millions of people to the mysterious world beneath the sea. Which is why, when I picked up Brad Matsen’s new biography, I was surprised to learn that Cousteau became almost as committed to conservation as he was to celebrity. He didn’t begin that way. Like many notable conservationists, Jacques Cousteau began his career as an avid hunter. He and his friends were ruthless spearfishers. They helped develop new hunting and diving gear to kill fish in greater numbers than ever before. Eventually, the French government had to restrain them by banning certain equipment. Cousteau hunted with spear guns but also with cameras. He set out to perfect the art of underwater filmmaking and assembled a team of devoted followers. In 1950, he purchased his famous vessel, Calypso, and began sportWhen a Seattle newspaper

National Geographic/Getty Images

ing the hallmark red caps that expressed ing we would colonize the oceans and his obvious comfort with celebrity. Six had instead become a full-time conyears later, Cousteau won his first Oscar servationist, which made it difficult to for his documentary The Silent World. keep his constituents happy. Scientists It is clear in the film that Cousteau accused him of showmanship, critics had not yet committed to conservation. accused him of faking scenes, and netAt one point, frenzied sharks feed on a works demanded he keep his films full baby sperm whale that Calypso had hit of intrigue—not Earth-saving rhetoric. in transit. Cousteau calls the sharks the Funders wanted to see more wonder and less gloom—shows “mortal enemies of men” like Cousteau’s earlier as the crew hacks them to work. But the ocean was pieces on the deck. now a very different place. Technological adCousteau would fight to vances revolutionized convince the public and our relationship with the politicians of this for the sea, and humans went rest of his life. from being helpless unIn 1980, at the age derwater to being apex of 70, Cousteau made predators. Technology arguably one of his such as underwater comJacques Cousteau most-important—and munication devices, air The Sea King least-popular—films. In regulators, and UFOBy Brad Matsen Mediterranean: Cradle or looking submarines also Pantheon, 2009 Coffin? he wanted his audiallowed Cousteau’s team to explore the depths. Cousteau’s ence to see how much the ocean had relationship with the sea likewise got changed. The film begins with blackand-white footage Cousteau shot in deeper. The man who had once attempted the Mediterranean in 1946—full of to obtain a live dolphin for an oceanic life such as rock bass, rays, and tuna. museum became opposed to keeping What follows is footage of the same marine mammals in captivity. He spot in 1977. “In only three decades, started exposing his audience to effects the seafloor has become a desert—bleak of industry, development, and tourism as the surface of some barren planet . . . on the oceans. By 1976, Cousteau had the rich abundance has vanished,” says shaken his youthful naiveté in believ- the narrator. By juxtaposing footage Conservation Magazine

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spanning 30 years, Cousteau aimed to visually combat the problem of shifting baselines—that newer generations are willing to accept a degraded state as natural because they were never exposed to what was pristine. Cousteau released Cradle or Coffin on the heels of his successful television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. According to Matsen, the 36 episodes that aired between 1968 and 1977 “changed the way millions of people thought about the sea.” Maybe this is true. But what about the children of those millions of people? I had never watched a minute of Cousteau before seeing Cradle or Coffin. Why has his work fallen so quickly out of the public eye, and what will become of his legacy? Matsen tiptoes around Cousteau’s vulnerabilities: his brother’s pro-Nazi tendencies, his temper, the dissolution of his marriage, his womanizing, and his two illegitimate children. But to ignore the personal dramas surrounding Jacques Cousteau might be to ignore why his legacy as a conservationist has been stunted. Aside from several references to Cousteau’s fiscal irresponsibility, The Sea King ends with only a brief mention of what could be the real reasons for the fall of the Cousteau empire: the disagreements between his second wife and his son Jean-Michel over rights to the derelict Calypso and, more baffling, the Cousteau name. Due to the drama in Cousteau’s private life at his death, it seems that the public memory of Captain Cousteau might go down with his ship. ❧ —Jennifer Jacquet

Jennifer Jacquet is a postdoctoral research fellow working on the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre. She blogs at Guilty Planet.

Conservation Magazine

The Earth After Us What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? By Jan Zalasiewicz Oxford University Press, 2008

Taking the very long view, geologist Jan Zalasiewicz embarks on a provocative thought experiment in his new book: if extraterrestrials landed on Earth 100 million years from now, what traces of humanity would they find? In other words: what will be our geologic legacy? The answer might make you feel less guilty about your ecological footprint. Chances are, in a few million years there will be no trace that you ever existed, let alone any record of your cross-country, carbon-intensive airplane trips. In fact, even iconic human structures—such as the pyramids of Egypt—will be gone millions of years from now. But as Homo sapiens continues to alter Earth’s climate and ecosystems, our collective record in the rocks will not be insignificant. ❧

Down to the Wire Confronting Climate Collapse By David W. Orr Oxford University Press, 2009

Political scientist and environmental thinker David Orr throws his hat into the ring of climate-change prophecies but fails to push beyond the familiar laments. Orr warns

• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

that humans cannot continue with business as usual. And also like his fellow Jeremiahs, Orr laments the uneducated state of the American populace, infantilized by consumer culture. But his prescribed solutions for the U.S. and for the world seem glib for a political scientist. A bulleted list of recommendations in the book’s last chapter includes cutting the Pentagon’s budget by one-half and confiscating all profits from the weapons industry. ❧

Plan B 4.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization By Lester R. Brown W.W. Norton & Co., 2009 As one might expect from the subtitle of his new book, Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 is no modest affair. The founder of both the Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institutes proposes that, to avoid global catastrophe, humans must cut net CO2 emissions 80 percent, stabilize population at 8 billion or lower, eradicate poverty, and restore the Earth’s natural systems— all by 2020. Brown’s enthusiasm is contagious, but what’s really striking is just how familiar his goals have already become—and how Brown fails to outline a specific, workable plan to avert catastrophe. ❧

Short reviews by Judy Wexler

Book Marks

Rewilding the World Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution By Caroline Fraser Metropolitan Books, 2009

WIN-Initiative/Getty Images

Grass In Search of Human Habitat By Joe C. Truett University of California Press, 2009

Grasses—including rice, wheat, corn, and oats—make up only two percent of Earth’s approximately 400,000 species of vascular plants, despite their outsized importance for humanity. Joe C. Truett’s book is a paean to these monocotyledons, which he began studying as an undergraduate in the 1960s. Now a grassland ecologist, Truett writes elegantly about the African savanna of the Pleistocene era, the prairies discovered by Lewis and Clark, and the first golf courses commissioned in the United States. Along the way, he reveals that what you might regard as an 18-hole, country-club centerpiece is actually a carefully designed landscape—one that mimics our evolutionary preferences for the grasslands from which we evolved. Truett’s essays range from memoir to history lesson, but they’re always impassioned, informative, and entertaining. ❧

Amidst the hyperbole and handwringing often found in environmental writing, Rewilding the World is a beacon of clarity. In her primer on the recent history and current state of conservation science, author Caroline Fraser explains how ecological theories, such as mesopredator release and the theory of island biogeography, became integrated into applied conservation. Some case studies from the book are success stories—what once was a heavily fortified border between East and West Germany is now a corridor of habitat for predators such as the European lynx. Some anecdotes end in failure; when the U.S. government reintroduced wolves to the Southwest, many were quickly shot by ranchers. And some efforts, such as the relocation of prairie dog colonies in New Mexico, have trajectories whose outcomes are yet to be determined. ❧

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Letters

Tell us What you

Think

A Missed Opportunity

Did an article spark an idea? Or do you have a counterpoint to share? Whatever your opinion, please let us know. Go to our web site to quickly and easily send a letter to the editor.

I was amazed to read David Malakoff ’s article “Be Fruitful and Multiply?” (October–December 2009) in the pages of Conservation magazine. Conservation is where I would hope to see some careful consideration of how billions more people will drive wildlife off the landscape. If conservation biologists don’t educate one another and the general public about the costs of increased population growth on biodiversity, who will? Philip Cafaro Colorado State University Fort Collins, Colorado

An Unpopulated Argument?

conservationmagazine.org

Conservation Magazine

Unfortunately, your recent article on population (Be Fruitful and Multiply, October–December 2009) does little to illuminate Stuart Brand’s views on population and the environment; the links between population growth, re-

• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

source use and environmental quality; or the thinking that led Brand to his conclusions. Much of the article is devoted to the economic consequences of a stagnating population. The only

environmental issue that really gets a look is our current obsession with the consequences of global warming. Yes, the poor nations currently make few per capita contributions to carbon emissions, and the climate change debacle is largely the creation of wealthy nations. But it borders on delusional to leap from that fact to the conclusion that population is neutral, or even good, for the environment. I believe that people are part of the solution to our environmental crisis. But

packing more people onto an already crowded planet makes those solutions less, rather than more, likely. Andy Park University of Winnipeg Winnipeg, Manitoba

Troubling Ideas

The article “Troubled Teens” (October–December 2009) troubled me. Although I’m aware of research showing that aggressive behaviors of young male rhinos and elephants (species that are social) can be moderated by contact with adult males, I find it hard to understand how this could be extended to cougars. The encounters between adult territorial males and younger males are generally reported to be brief and vio-

lent, not male-bonding or mentoring experiences. And Robert Wielgus’s hypothesis seems speculative. It is almost impossible for hunters to tell whether a treed cougar is male, and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife cougar-kill statistics do not support strong hunter selection for males. California experienced a series of cougar attacks on humans in the late 1980s and early 1990s; two women jogging or walking in wilderness areas were killed. In both cases, the cougar involved was a female with cubs. Perhaps a more parsimonious explanation of cougar attacks on humans is that nursing females and young males like “Bron”—whose long-distance movements were shown in your article—are hungry. Young wandering males and females with cubs seem most likely to have a difficult time meeting their caloric needs, and desperation and starva-

tion would explain unusual interaction, location, and aggression. David A. Jessup

Hot in the Shade

The recent article on growing a forest in the Sahara (A Shady Scheme, October– December 2009) says the plan calls for building desalination plants on the coastline surrounding the desert. Before moving ahead with this, it would be wise to consider that these plants have enormous energy demands. With this in mind, the question becomes: would the Sahara scheme cool the planet or warm it even further? Judith S. Weis Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Jersey

“This eleganT volume Takes readers on a grand Tour of carbon’s role in The universe, from The elemenT’s sTar-crossed birTh billions of years ago To iTs role in The fossil-fuel indusTry and global warming.”—Newsweek “Fascinating … Providing for the layman the ‘connective tissue’ of a vast array of subdisciplines this US-centric monograph is a success, especially in dealing with climate change. It is teeming with unexpected information and is a grand tour of the universe.”—Nature “It wasn’t always a footprint. Follow carbon’s journey from how it is born in stars to how it became the molecular backbone of DNA, plastic, sugar, and fat. There’s a bigger story to this man-made time bomb than makes the headlines.” —Discover “Roston fits in discourses on bulletproof vests, buckyballs and more, quoting everyone from Hippocrates to Yoko Ono. Carbon neutral it isn’t.”—New Scientist Available wherever books are sold. Walker & Company www.walkerbooks.com

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010 47

Think Again Why Is Climate Change Denial So Seductive? By George Monbiot There is no point in denying it: we’re losing.

Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world is warming has fallen from 71 percent to 57 percent in just 18 months. This trend certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the science, which has hardened dramatically. Interestingly, climate beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny there is solid evidence the earth is warming, that this warming is caused by humans, or that it’s a serious problem. Why might this be? There are some obvious answers: older people won’t be around to see the results; they were brought up in a period of technological optimism; they feel entitled, having worked all their lives, to fly or cruise to wherever they wish. But there might also be a less-intuitive reason, which shines a light into a fascinating corner of human psychology. In 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with “vital lies” or “the armor of character.” We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in “immortality projects”—projects and beliefs that boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. Over 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker’s thesis. When people are confronted with things that remind them of death, they respond by shoring

Conservation Magazine

• Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it, and working to boost their self-esteem. One of the most-arresting findings is that this behavior can actually bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the physical self to greater danger. For example, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that people who reported that driving boosted their self-esteem drove faster and took greater risks after they had been exposed to reminders of death. A recent paper by biologist Janis L. Dickinson, published in Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armor but diminish our chances of survival. There is already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency while raising antagonism toward scientists and environmentalists. Their message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism. If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of life might react more strongly against reminders of death? And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how do we confront it? ❧

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