The Geographer: Biodiversity (Autumn 2010)

The

Geographer Autumn 2010

The newsletter of the

Royal Scottish Geographical Society

A rocky situation for wildlife?

Taking stock of biodiversity and geodiversity In This Edition...

•N ews Features: Christchurch After the Earthquake, Iceland After the Eruption •C ountry in Focus: Pakistan After the Floods •E xpert Views on Biodiversity & Geodiversity •J ames Croll - A Forgotten Genius?

•O ff the Beaten Track: Chasing the Devil •R eader Offer: High Light HIGH LIGHT A

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.”

Sir David Attenborough, RSGS Livingstone Medallist

V I S I O N

O F

W I L D

S C O T L A N D

COLIN PRIOR

plus other news, comments, books...

RSGS – Making Connections between People, Places & the Planet

The

Geographer

biodiversity & geodiversity

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t has been reassuring to see the development of the Fair Maid’s House proceeding as it is. We can now see clearly the four spaces that we will have available to bring to a wider public, not only the history of the Society but also the continuing importance of geography, particularly in view of the global issues faced by this and future generations.

Work is proceeding on the interpretation and display elements of these spaces which will, of course, include the fascinating history of the building itself.

However, never has it been more important to demonstrate that we have not inherited the planet from our parents but that we are simply looking after it for our children.

Our small staff at headquarters have expanded to four and a half, thanks to a generous anonymous donation from a member who correctly recognised that this is a critical time for the Society. And, as a regular visitor to Perth, I can tell you that the Society is fortunate to have such committed and enthusiastic employees.

But they cannot, of course, do everything. Mike tells me that he has calculated the work of all the volunteers in the Society equates to almost the same as our staff in headquarters. And I was reminded again of a comment by one of my predecessors, “If it wasn’t for the volunteers, Barrie, the Society would be finished”.

I cannot thank them enough; none receive payment for their services and many do not even claim the expenses to which they are entitled. All, however, share our conviction that the Society got it right all these years ago, and that it is now even more important to continue to pursue its objective of inspiring people to develop a greater understanding of all the issues affecting our planet.

The Fair Maid’s House development will give the Society the best opportunity yet to promote its aims to a wider public, but for this we will need even more volunteers. I ask you all to give serious consideration to putting your name forward to help. All of our current volunteers enjoy making a contribution, in whatever way they do, and I can promise that you will all be given appropriate training before the time comes (currently expected to be around late spring 2011). If you are interested in helping, please just give your name to headquarters.

I conclude my comments with another of my ‘straws in the wind’. Last week, Fiona told me that she had recruited three new members who had rung our doorbell and said they were interested in joining the Society. It cannot be anything but a good sign.

Barrie Brown, Chairman

RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU tel: 01738 455050 email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org Charity registered in Scotland no SC015599 The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS. G rand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone Park, Wyoming (part image) © Yann Arthus-Bertrand Masthead image: J apanese macaques bathing in Jigokudani hot spring © www.istockphoto.com

Cover image:

Yann Arthus-Bertrand Receives Inaugural Geddes Environment Medal Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the legendary photographer, journalist, reporter and environmentalist, came to the Edinburgh Filmhouse in September to accept the inaugural RSGS Geddes Environment Medal, and to speak at a screening of his award winning documentary film, Home.

The evening was a great success and, addressing the audience, RSGS Chief Executive Mike Robinson gave a few of the reasons Yann was chosen for the accolade, stating “We require to be continually reminded of our place in nature, to be mindful of the beauty and fragility of our planet, and to be inspired to want to protect it... Yann has captured that beauty, reminded us of that fragility, and enthralled millions of people in more than a hundred nations around the world, inspiring them to make the connections between people, places and the planet and to work towards positive long-term change.”

HQ Open Day Work on the Fair Maid’s House is progressing well, and is expected to finish in early November, a little behind the original schedule because of under-pinning required on the existing old wall.

To coincide with the Ray Mears event in Perth, the RSGS headquarters at Lord John Murray House will be opening its doors from 2.00pm to 4.30pm on 28th October 2010, giving members the opportunity to visit the HQ, to learn more about the development of the Fair Maid’s House project, and to get an insight into some of the other work of the Society.

RSGS – Making Connections between People, Places & the Planet

The

Geographer

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Autumn 2010

NEWS People • Places • Planet The scale of the Asian vulture problem is immense, with populations down by more than 96% since the early 1990s, and several species critically threatened with extinction in the near future. The white-rumped vulture was so abundant in India in the 1980s, that it was probably the most common large bird of prey in the world. Only one in a thousand now survives.

The services provided by vultures in cleaning up large carcasses were taken for granted until the birds were gone. Now there are huge health issues, and economic and cultural losses. Conservation organisations have been pressing for a total ban on the use of veterinary diclofenac (which causes kidney failure in vultures who eat

Betting on Food RSGS staff were particularly concerned to hear the recent reports highlighting the increased price of chocolate after financial speculators moved in to the cocoa markets. But the actions of speculators are also influencing the price of other more basic foodstuffs.

Research published at the end of July by the World Development Movement (WDM) shows that financial speculation on the future price of food creates instability, pushes up global food prices and is forcing millions into poverty and malnutrition.

Jim Carson OBE FRSGS We are delighted that Jim Carson’s long-term dedication and outstanding contribution to geographical education in Scotland has been formally recognised, with the awarding of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s birthday honours list of May 2010.

the carcasses of recently treated cattle), and have established captive breeding centres where birds can be reared before release into areas where diclofenac is no longer a threat.

Some progress is being made, but it is slow. Diclofenac has been banned in some countries, but is still used in others. In July, for the first time, all three of the critically endangered Gyps vultures successfully bred and fledged young in captive breeding centres in India – but there were only ten young in total. And in September, the annual census of vultures in Cambodia showed that three species were stable or even increasingly slightly, giving hope that Cambodia can act as a refuge, and eventually a source from which the vultures can spread out and repopulate all of Asia – but the total number for all three species was less than 300.

Liz Murray, head of campaigns for WDM in Scotland said, “Bankers are quite literally gambling on hunger. In 2007-8 there was a huge rise in food prices fuelled by financial speculation; the price of wheat shot up dramatically by 80% and maize by 90%. These sudden price hikes are catastrophic for the world’s poor who spend most of their income on food.”

WDM is calling for regulation of the food commodity markets and for strict limits on the amount that bankers can bet on food prices. To find out more about WDM’s food speculation campaign, see www. wdm.org.uk.

Jim’s tremendous efforts towards the teaching and encouragement of geography in Scotland and further afield, his work on behalf of RSGS as chair of the education committee and in running the schools essay competition for 30 years, and his crucial role in establishing and developing the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers into the successful body that it is today, make his OBE richly deserved.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, and fittingly this year is the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). From 18th to 29th October, Nagoya in Japan will play host to officials from 193 countries, seeking to agree how to tackle biodiversity loss, to set targets for the next ten years, and to develop a vision for 2050.

The Convention has three main objectives: 1C onservation of biological diversity 2S ustainable use of its components 3F air and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources

Bio- & Geodiversity

Vultures

In August, Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the CBD, told a high level forum in Chengdu, China, “The target set by world governments in 2002, ‘to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level’, has not been met. …

No government claims to have completely met the 2010 biodiversity target. Indeed, the current biodiversity statistics are as worrying as ever.

Species that have been assessed for extinction risk are on average moving closer to extinction. … The five principal pressures directly driving biodiversity loss (habitat change, overexploitation, pollution, invasive alien species and climate change) are either constant or increasing in intensity.”

Ray Mears to visit Perth Bushcraft expert and star of recent ITV series Survival, Ray Mears is bringing his unique one-man show to Perth Concert Hall at 8.00pm on 28th October 2010.

Ray will also be presented with the RSGS Mungo Park Medal, in recognition of his work in adventure travel and his distinguished contribution to popularising geographical issues. In his turn, Ray has agreed to present the 2010 RSGS University Medals, given to the best graduating honours geography student in 28th October each of the Scottish universities.

Tickets (£15 for RSGS members, £21 for nonmembers) are available from Perth Concert Hall (www.horsecross.co.uk or phone 01738 621031).

Inspiring Sponsors We are grateful for the financial support we have received so far from our generous sponsors, towards the 2010-11 Inspiring People programme of illustrated talks. Our appreciation goes to Airdrie Savings Bank, Glasgow City Council, The Green Insurance Company, Hillhouse Quarry Group, Magnox North, Neilson Binnie-McKenzie, and Scottish Power. Thanks also to Spex Direct Scotland, which supported the RSGS Dunfermline Centre’s traveller’s talk in September.

NEWS People • Places • Planet New Staff Member

RSGS’s Chief Executive was asked by Stewart Stevenson MSP, the Minister for Transport, Infrastructure & Climate Change, to chair a Scottish Parliamentary Short-life Working Group this summer, to find a resolution to the setting of annual targets in carbon emissions, after the proposals presented to the Parliament by the SNP back in June were thrown out. This group, of MSPs and civil servants, reviewed the basis for target setting and the sorts of measures that will be needed to achieve a 42% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020, and considered what was currently being proposed, what else could be added, and whether any form of action had been overlooked.

Thanks to a donation from a generous member, the RSGS has been able to appoint a much needed staff member to assist with the talks programme, media, the website and in supporting Susan and Mike in producing The Geographer. Kirsten Smith joined us on 10th June, having graduated from Glasgow Caledonian University in 2009 with a degree in Media & Communications.

Kirsten has previously worked in PR, and volunteered for six months with Conservation Volunteers Australia whilst travelling around the country.

The group has now concluded its deliberations and the Minister is expected to bring a new proposal in front of the relevant Committee, and ultimately the Parliament, in late autumn. The Government is working with a number of bodies and advisory groups, including the 2020 Business Leaders Group (on which Mike also has a seat) to develop the next step, the Report on Policies & Proposals (RPP), which will lay out the Government’s plan of exactly how it intends to reach these targets from now until 2022.

Some hope for Bengal tigers In September, a BBC

natural history camera crew filmed a ‘lost’ population of Bengal tigers living in the mountains of Bhutan, at a higher altitude than any others known.

The Bengal tiger is the most numerous of all tiger sub-species, but habitat loss and poaching have reduced numbers in the wild to only c1,850. The creation of tiger reserves in the 1970s helped to stabilise numbers, but poaching inside the reserves has again put the Bengal tiger at risk. This new discovery could be crucial; creating a nature reserve around these tigers could connect up fragmented populations across Asia, helping to prevent their extinction.

The Plastiki After sailing more than 8,000 nautical miles and spending 128 days crossing the Pacific in a boat made of 12,500 plastic drinks bottles, the Plastiki expedition (inspired by the famous Kon-Tiki voyage) and her crew successfully reached their destination of Sydney.

The inspiring, one-of-a-kind catamaran set sail under the shadow of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in March 2010. With a crew of six, the Plastiki set out to alert the world to the shocking and unnecessary effects of single use plastics on the health of our oceans and its inhabitants.

sea turtles die when they become entangled or ingest plastic pollution.” said expedition leader David de Rothschild.

“This is a complex, challenging and now hugely catastrophic issue that scientists estimate is causing devastation on an unprecedented scale - every year at least one million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and

The vessel, which is fully recyclable and is powered by solar panels and wind turbines, sought to turn attention to the state of our oceans, in particular the colossal amounts of plastic debris, by showcasing waste as

Sad Losses We are sorry to announce the deaths of three of the Society’s long-standing colleagues and friends.

On 31st July 2010, Ronald McLaren, a former Chairman of the RSGS Kirkcaldy Centre, passed away peacefully at the age of 78 in Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy.

A beloved husband, father and grandfather, he will be greatly missed by all that knew him.

After a lengthy treatment for cancer, Alan McAndrew, a long serving trustee and advisor to the Society, passed away on 7th August 2010, at St Columba’s Hospice, aged 57. He is survived by his wife Heather, and sons Hamish and Finlay.

Barrie Hepworth, a former

a resource and demonstrating real world solutions through its design and construction.

See www. theplastiki. com for more information.

Chairman of the RSGS Helensburgh Centre, passed away peacefully on 24th August 2010, in the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley. He is survived by his wife Jane, and two children Grace and Adam.

Our condolences go out to all friends and family, and we would also like to thank each of these men for their work and dedication to the RSGS over the years.

Bio- & Geodiversity

Finding the target

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Geographer

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Autumn 2010

NEWS People • Places • Planet Letter from New Zealand After the Quake Moira Mallon At 4.35am on Saturday, an earthquake hurled me out of bed and into the violent roar of a natural disaster.

Other than a few bruises, I am unharmed. Other than numerous cracks, splits and holes, the structure of the house is unharmed, though the inside of the house was literally tipped upside down. So unharmed? Yes. But OK? No. Not at all. It has been the most terrifying, violent, traumatic experience. There are no words. No words.

Whilst it is an utter miracle that there have been no fatalities, the sense of loss and trauma is profound. To see this beautiful city destroyed is so heartbreaking, to see friends and neighbours with their homes and belongings destroyed is overwhelming, and to be woken up by a 7.0 Richter scale earthquake is terrifying (I will never again groan at the sound of a car alarm).

I don’t quite know how to describe the experience that lasted for 17 minutes (and has been ongoing ever since).

It’s like being mugged and then someone jumping out of a cupboard to say ‘boo’ every few minutes. It was like roaring thunder inside your head, vicious roars of the earth opening up and splitting open, volcanic-like pressure from underneath rippling through the floor, the whole house shaking violently.

I was being thrown around on the floor at a rapid speed, and there was nothing to hold onto.

I could hear everything smashing and falling around me, glass smashing, furniture being flung through the doors and into the walls, pictures falling, chimneys crumbling, the wall

cracking. The first thought I had was ‘Haiti! Oh god this is what those poor people went through but they had it so much worse’.

My gut instinct was to reach out and call out to connect with someone, but there was no one there, no power, no phones, nothing. My instinct was to get out of the house and out of the danger of everything falling around me, but I couldn’t – it was impossible to move.

Many of us are now motion-sick from the constant rolling of the earth. For the first 48 hours, we had aftershock earthquakes every 20 minutes. Now they are down to every couple of hours.

They are quite unsettling. I am just so tired now that I think I might just sleep through a few!

I think I will sleep tonight and I am looking forward to it.

Whilst the headlines and news stories around the world have changed, it is our only story.

It’s not a headline for us, it’s a lifeline. I cannot tell you the depth of gratitude we all feel to be alive, but whilst there has been no loss of life there is a profound loss of emotional, social and psychological wellbeing. The eerie silence after such brutal noise, adults and children vomiting and urinating in fear and terror, the flocks of birds disappearing seconds before another earthquake, the disappointment that you are in fact not a bird and can’t fly off with them, the constant hum of sirens and fire-engines, the need for people to be close to each other, and the delightful reassurance that everyone around you knows what you are going through. It is one day at a time at the moment...

I need to settle down for the night as the earth continues to settle back down to its natural state of being. The process of nature settling down is scary...

Last night we had our worst night since Saturday, with two

very bad earthquakes through the night.

I was jolted violently from my chair onto the floor by the most violent aftershock yet. It was so gut-wrenchingly terrifying that it left many of our poor emergency workers in tears. It is just too much and we are not done yet. It was only 5.4 on the Richter scale, but only 6km below the surface. More things broke and fell over, and more buildings were destroyed and roads and pavements cracked open in seconds. We did manage to get a few hours sleep, which we are all in desperate need of; 350,000 sleep-deprived and frazzled individuals doesn’t help when we have so much to do.

Christchurch is still in a state of emergency. Schools are closed, the city is cordoned off, the water is contaminated, and each day our historical buildings and friends’ homes get pulled down.

We crawl around on our hands and knees regularly and check our survival kits daily. We laugh every day, but not about this!

We know that only good will come from this, and there is a strong future for Christchurch and we will re-build and re-open for business. Our spirits are resilient and our communities determined. But right now we are not in that space. The future will evolve when the earth settles. Right now the present priority is the physical and emotional safety and wellbeing of people, and getting through each aftershock, and providing support to each other and those most affected. We all need to talk about it and it’s all we talk about here. It’s our coping mechanism.

All my love from ‘continuing-tocrumble’ Christchurch.

Moira

At 4.35am on 4th September 2010, New Zealand’s South Island was struck by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, the most powerful to hit the country in almost 80 years.

New Zealand straddles the boundary between the Pacific and IndianAustralian plates, at a point where the nature of the plate boundary changes fundamentally: to the north of New Zealand, the Pacific plate moves beneath the Indian-Australian plate; within the South Island, the plates rub past each other horizontally; to the south of New Zealand, the Indian-Australian plate moves below the Pacific plate.

The tremor’s epicentre was about 90km from two active faults, the Alpine fault and the Hope fault, and about 50km west of Christchurch, the country’s second largest city, which suffered widespread damage.

The earthquake toppled building facades, buckled rail lines, and damaged 100,000 homes in the city of 350,000 people. Prime Minister John Key has described the lack of fatalities as a miracle.

NEWS People • Places • Planet Sharks The battle against shark extinction has found some unusual allies. Nine shark attack victims, in association with the Pew Environment Group, have called on the UN to ban finning, a practice where fishermen cut off a fin for shark fin soup, then throw the shark back into the water to drown or bleed to death.

Conservationists have said that nearly a third of all shark species are, or are on the verge of being, threatened with extinction. Scientists argue that eradicating sharks, the ocean’s top predator, will have a disastrous ripple effect on the rest of the marine environment. Yet unlike other ‘atrisk’ species, there is no global management plan for shark fishing and no limit on how many can be caught.

Bio- & Geodiversity

Krishna Thompson, a New York banker who was nearly killed after a shark attack that took his left leg, stated, “I was attacked by a shark. Yes it was a tragedy, but that is what sharks do. I can’t blame the shark for what it did, you have to put that aside and look at the bigger picture: 73 million sharks killed yearly for shark finning”.

Scottish Beaver Trial

© Steve Gardner

Simon Jones, Scottish Beaver Trial Project Manager This ground-breaking five-year project began in May 2009, with the release of three Norwegian-born beaver families into Argyll’s Knapdale Forest. The trial, run by Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and Forestry Commission Scotland, sees the first formal re-introduction of a mammal back into the wild anywhere in the UK. Two of the families have settled well, establishing territories on freshwater lochs, and building substantial lodge dwellings and dams to allow them easier access to feeding areas. Most importantly, and to the delight of many, these beavers have now bred successfully, with a single ‘kit’ born to each tightknit family group. This highlight followed earlier low points, when the third family dispersed from the trial area, and two male beavers died soon after release. Although the loss of these beavers has been a disappointment, it is to be expected in the establishment of any reintroduced population.

This summer, the beavers enjoyed a time of plenty. Field staff recorded beavers making repeated diving sessions through the lily beds, to dig up individual tubers of water lilies, a favourite food. This scientific monitoring work into beaver behaviour, and the effect of beavers on aquatic plants, is being recorded and analysed, along with studies into woodland structure, dragonfly communities, fish populations, water chemistry and the hydrological impacts, all coordinated by Scottish Natural Heritage. This will give a picture of how beavers affect the local natural environment, complementing a study on the economic impacts too.

In only 12 months, the Knapdale beavers have proven themselves to be a real attraction to local people and visitors, and many people have been rewarded, after patient vigils, with the sight of these remarkable creatures happily going about their business, blissfully ignorant of all the excitement, fuss and attention that surrounds them. www.scottishbeavers.org.uk

Paris, London, Amsterdam…

Dumfries On 7th September 2010, Dumfries joined the likes of Paris, London and Amsterdam, when Scottish Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson formally launched the first public bikehire scheme backed by the Government in Scotland. The scheme, Bike2Go, will make 30 bikes available at nine different docking stations around the town, which users can access 24

Excellence Group in Geography Formed As part of the plan for developing Curriculum for Excellence, the Cabinet Secretary has set up a number of ‘excellence groups’, comprising a mixture of teachers and others within the education sector with individuals who are widely recognised as experts or leaders in their particular field.

These groups are looking at the skills, attributes and features of excellence in education in each of the subject areas, with the aim of promoting deeper learning, better teaching, active learner engagement, the development of skills, and enhanced achievement. The messages from the groups will be fed into a report which will be published in the spring of 2011.

The groups are looking at questions such as: •W hat promotes essential knowledge in curriculum content in the context of Curriculum for Excellence?

hours a day by entering a PIN code. Membership is charged at an annual rate of £10, with the first 30 minutes riding free and £1 per hour thereafter. See www.hourbike.com for more information.

•W hat promotes the high standards we seek to promote through Curriculum for Excellence?

•W hat is innovative subject practice in the context of Curriculum for Excellence?

Groups have been set up in 15 subject areas: English, Modern Languages, Gaelic, Maths, Science, Technologies, Geography, History, Modern Studies, Business Studies, Physical Education, Food and Health, RME, RERC, and Expressive Arts.

The members of the geography group are: Liz McGlashan, Dalkeith High School & SAGT (Chair); Caroline Robertson, James Young High School; Deirdre Cassidy, Hermitage Academy; Lisa Allan, Barrhead High School; Jim Bruce, HMIE; Julie Gallacher, Learning & Teaching Scotland; Alan Barclay, Scottish Qualifications Authority; Mike Robinson, Royal Scottish Geographical Society; Vanessa Collingridge, BBC Radio 4 presenter.

Rory Stewart Receives Livingstone Medal The 2009 Livingstone Medal was presented to Rory Stewart, at a very enjoyable event in Stirling’s Albert Halls in August. Rory received the Medal in recognition of his work in Afghanistan, and his establishment of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in 2006.

Speaking about his Livingstone Medal, Rory stated “I am very honoured to have received this award and don’t feel deserving of it at all. Of course, I am very excited as so many of the past winners are my childhood heroes.

However, really the award should be going to the people who looked after me on my way, and also those who run the projects at Turquoise Mountain.”

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NEWS People • Places • Planet After the Eruption Professor Roger Crofts The summer 2010 edition of The Geographer reported the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. For the moment it has stopped, but the consequences for the land and the people certainly have not. Farmers, local elected and paid officials, priests, and land restoration specialists interviewed all expressed concern about the longer term mental health of residents in the directly affected area. Two farmers had already left the area and did not intend to return, such had been the trauma.

They had sent their stock to the farms of relatives elsewhere in Iceland. Another two farmers were seriously thinking of leaving.

Those remaining were concerned that their livestock, which had been removed from the area to avoid ingestion of noxious fluoride on the vegetation and to find new pastures, considered that there was insufficient action by government agencies and a great deal of buck passing.

For many families, coping with the potential of an eruption and memories of eruptions in the nearby Vestmann Islands were kept private, as were the normal tensions between people in the home. The eruption and its aftermath brought many of these problems to the surface.

A priest described to me that people had lived in a box with their emotions private, but the ash had got into the box and forced the individuals out and exposed them in an uncomfortable way.

Already two couples had divorced.

And many had been treated for mental illness locally or in Reykjavik, almost 100 miles away.

The attention of the media had caused a great deal of harm and little identifiable benefit.

Journalists continually pestered families looking for stories and novel angles. The locals felt that sometimes they made up stories just to report something, One has to question the morality of the media in these situations, where getting a story is more important

than those traumatised being allowed to cope with the situation.

At least the support of many Icelanders who just turned up and said “what can we do to help?” was warmly welcomed and gave great comfort.

The prolonged warm, bright weather has also heightened spirits. But there are real fears about the onset of the dark winter nights, the potential for further eruptions and the recurrence of the nightmares of the two eruptions. Their concerns were not helped, they said, by the President of Iceland suggesting on UK TV that much larger eruptions could occur. Whilst he acknowledged this point in an interview, he felt it necessary to warn other European countries of the need to prepare effective contingency plans. The memories of the darkness during the daytime, the overwhelming and constant noise of the eruption and the accompanying thunder and the brightness of the lightening during the night time severely disrupting sleep, were still real. Conditions in the houses were difficult as the fine volcanic dust penetrated everywhere despite double glazing, necessitating wearing of masks indoors and causing breathing difficulties and sinus problems.

On the ground there are always longer standing effects.

Massive amounts of ash were spread across Europe, but much has landed locally around Eyjafjallajökull and Fimmvorðuhals. The ice cap is black with the ash to a depth of almost a metre. The snow beyond the glacier is covered with ash, giving beautiful circular patterns as the snow slowly melts. The highland grazing areas have largely disappeared under the ash, and above 600m there are virtually no signs of growth. Below that, the grass is beginning to show through following a long warm spell. But there is a very significant reduction in the area

of land for sheep to graze, and alternative sources of feed have had to be found. It is very difficult to © Chapman-Burton reseed these areas because they are not accessible for machinery, so the traditional pattern of taking the sheep to the highlands in June and gathering them in September is diminished. Fortunately, the fodder crops on the lower ground are growing, but initially with a reduced production. The milk from the cattle has, to everyone’s relief, been passed as fit for human consumption.

The river valleys and the deep canyons are filled with ash. A 90m deep lake at the front of the glacier where the main flood came is totally filled with sediment! The water released by the eruption under the ice cap carried vast quantities of ash down the valleys across the fields and over the roads. The rivers are now being dredged to allow for more ash to be carried down once the autumn rains begin, otherwise it will spill out over the fields and block the roads and threaten the farm houses.

Will the volcano erupt again?

Geologists are uncertain. The last time Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 1821/22, there was a second eruption seven months after the first. The adjacent Katla volcano, fed by a separate magma chamber, is overdue an eruption, the last having been in 1918. More to the point, locals are worried about the possibility of another eruption and the continuing consequences of the last one: ash blow, flooding and mud flows. Whatever happens in practice, the local population are not looking forward to the dark winter nights and the memories they will bring back.

“Conditions in the houses were difficult as the fine volcanic dust penetrated everywhere despite double glazing, necessitating wearing of masks indoors and causing breathing difficulties and sinus problems.”

On the Map

Global Surface Temperature Anomalies

T

his July 2010 global map of surface temperature anomalies, relative to the average July in the 1951-1980 period of climatology, provides a useful picture of current climate.

It was more than 5°C warmer in areas of eastern Europe and eastern Asia, and unusually warm in the eastern United States. Substantial areas appeared cooler, including central Asia and southern South America. The emerging La Niña is now moderately strong, evidenced by the cool band along the equator in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean.

© NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS temperature analysis)

Indus River Flooding, August 2010 The Indus, the world’s 21st largest river, really defines Pakistan – the country is virtually split lengthways by this river. Much of the land to the east is low lying and is a flood plain, especially the Punjab. Perhaps this is no surprise – Punjab means ‘five rivers’, part of the reason the area is so rich in nutrients, (it is the ‘breadbasket’ of Pakistan), but also explaining © NASA/GSFC/METI/ ERSDAC/JAROS, and US/ Japan ASTER Science Team

This 18th August 2010 ASTER image shows the extent of flooding in and around the city of Sukkur in Pakistan’s Sindh Province. The Indus River, Pakistan’s longest, snakes vertically through the image (dimensions 62x77 km).

its propensity to flood during the monsoon.

This summer however, according to some reports, nearly a third of the country was underwater, and the Punjab bore the brunt of what have been seen as the worst floods for generations. In the neighbouring region of Sindh, too, more than seven million people have been affected, and according to the UN, flood waters are still spreading as we go to print.

Pakistan typically receives about half its annual rainfall of 250–500mm during July and August, so reports of 24-hour totals in excess of 300mm, particularly in the head waters of the Indus River, were exceptional.

Thanks to the Met Office and Mike Thomas for providing helpful information for this piece.

The weather and airflow patterns over the whole of Asia had been very disturbed, resulting in record-breaking high temperatures in Moscow, leading to fatalities, forest fires and damaged crops, a once in a thousand year event according to Russian meteorologists.

Another consequence was the excessive rainfall over China, which caused major mudslides and filled the Three Gorges Dam almost to capacity.

The Indus River formerly flowed east into the Ganga system. It became diverted by tectonics to its present course five million years ago, since when its lower channel has shifted many times in response to extreme floods and climate changes.

The Indus, with one of the highest sediment loads among world rivers, discharges on average 6,600 m3/ second to the Arabian Sea. Reports indicate that the recent floods reached over 31,000 m3/second at Sukkur. The mountain catchment of the Khyber region received six times its average rainfall, and downstream Khanpur received nearly 16 times its average.

Lahore, however, had lower than

average rain.

NASA reported a probable transition to La Niña conditions in July, which have been a factor in the strengthening of the Asian monsoon. An unusual jet stream in the upper atmosphere, flowing from the north and replacing the normally dominant westerly flow, is thought to be mainly responsible for the formation of large scale (Walker) cells of exceptional weather.

Such strong fluctuations away from ‘average’ conditions must, however, reflect deeper causes, and global climate warming is a likely candidate.

The World Meteorological Office argues that the extreme weather events of 2010 accord with predictions by the IPCC. None of this should obscure the human component of these tragic events: increasing population spreading across the floodplains, combined with water control measures to provide 80% of Pakistan’s irrigation from the Indus River, have both contributed to the tragic consequences of extreme natural events.

Donations to help the victims of the Pakistan floods can be made to The Disasters E

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Country in Focus: Pakistan

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Autumn 2010

The Flood Problem Dr Brian Cook, IHP-HELP Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science, University of Dundee The flooding in Pakistan represents a catastrophe that borders on unimaginable for those fortunate enough to live in the relative safety of the developed world.

The hardship and suffering expose the natural environment as both provider and menace. This duality is rarely more evident than in agriculturally productive floodplains, which are periodically inundated to the detriment of inhabitants, the people dependent on the produced resources, or the neighbours forced to accommodate displaced people, disease, and needs. This type of event provokes questions of ‘what should be done?’, implicitly seeking a solution to the flood problem.

While we must be cautious when comparing developed and developing world disasters, the floods in Pakistan provide us with an opportunity to reflect on the changing nature of hazards and their management. Furthermore, in the context of recent flooding in the United Kingdom (Midlands 2007, Bowmont Valley 2008, Cockermouth 2009), there is a need to consider how understandings, expectations, and approaches should evolve to promote sustainable social, economic, and environmental development.

Managing Environmental Hazards Management of the natural environment has undergone significant change over the past 100 years. Historically, with a growing understanding of the natural world and a corresponding growth of technology, people were confident in their ability to shape the environment to suit their needs. This allowed society to make use of floodplains in ways that would have been too risky for earlier generations. With hindsight, such actions appear misinformed and perhaps misguided. Instead, we now recognise endemic unpredictability and uncertainty within environmental systems.

With less predictable and more extreme events, we have at least three forces pulling in opposite directions: 1) the relative infrequency of extreme events results in an ill-prepared populace liable to make poor decisions; 2) increasing extremes of drought and flooding suggest that higher, stronger, and

more extensive infrastructures are required to deliver the same level of security enjoyed by previous generations; and 3) the ongoing development of floodplains increases the concentration of people and wealth within high-risk locations. These issues suggest both that disaster prevention is impossible and that disaster mitigation is more difficult than envisioned.

In the case of Pakistan, there is coupled environmental and societal change, fuelling significant uncertainty.

Extreme events are unpredictable and occur seemingly at random, with concerns over drought oscillating to flood year on year; infrastructure is both aging and insufficient for extreme events, with government challenged to weigh long-term preventative planning against immediate concerns; and population growth is forcing intensive development and occupation of floodplains. In addition, Pakistan must address these issues within the context of poverty and the associated inequalities.

How Poverty Exacerbates the Impact of Flooding Disasters can be detrimental (for people whose homes are damaged) or beneficial (for people who build or repair houses). Furthermore, an individual may experience immediate detrimental impacts (loss of crop) while enjoying long term benefits (recharged soil moisture and nutrient replenishment). The complex and diverse range of experience suggests that pre-disaster conditions are a critical determinant.

Poverty exacerbates disasters in multiple ways. The poor often must inhabit undesirable and high-risk locations (hill slopes and floodplains), increasing the likelihood of exposure. People in poverty do not have food and resources to fall back on. Poverty, and its resulting malnutrition and chronic ill health, affects people’s susceptibility to water-borne diseases, eg cholera and dysentery.

are further hardships faced by women, children, minorities, and day labourers. These groups receive less of what little there is, and are often first to lose their livelihoods during disasters. Finally, such weakened and resource-poor individuals are vulnerable to unjust relations, direct force, price escalation, and profiteering by those capable of mitigating impacts, producing situations in which the least able face the largest detriments.

Conclusion While there are significant differences between the UK and Pakistan, there are also common themes and opportunities to learn and share knowledge. For both nations, the problem of catastrophic flooding is unsolvable: bigger structures will fail, floodplains will continue to be populated, and the environment will continue to change.

Large-scale technical solutions are unlikely to be economically viable outside of densely populated, urban, or culturally significant locations, which may be protected at great economic and social cost. Elsewhere, individuals and communities will need to assume greater responsibility, emphasising the importance of pre-existing resources, abilities, and opportunities for all vulnerable people. Thus, in response to those asking ‘what can be done to resolve the flood problem?’, we require an understanding that does not assign blame to a changing or unpredictable environment, but rather an understanding that accepts responsibility for how our decisions contribute to catastrophic situations.

“The poor often must inhabit undesirable and high-risk locations (hill slopes and floodplains), increasing the likelihood of exposure.”

Thanks to Ben Wisner for his helpful suggestions on this commentary.

Amongst the impoverished, there

Emergency Committee at www.dec.org.uk or by phoning 0370 60 60 900

Off The Beaten Track

Don’t Miss the Boat Ed Gillespie, co-founder of specialist sustainability communications agency Futerra, and a global, slow traveller

Ed trying on an immersion/ survival suit

Arriving at Brisbane, Australia on the cargo ship Theodor Storm from Singapore

“We were fantastically remote, potentially vulnerable, yet constantly lifted and inspired by the vivid blue beauty of sea and sky: rolling cloudscapes, wildly flamboyant sunsets and star-peppered nights.”

Ed is speaking to RSGS audiences in Perth and Stirling in March 2011.

This time two years ago I was literally in the middle of the Pacific. Rolling in a gentle swell just north of the equator, on the 32,000 tonne container ship, the Hansa Rendsburg. It was a 175m long Chinese-built vessel with what one of the crew described charmingly as a ‘deciduous’ engine – it regularly shed parts.

Tahiti, our last port of call, was 2,000 miles behind us, and the next, Ensenada in Mexico, was 2,000 miles ahead. In the context of ‘getting away from it all’, I’m not sure how much further away we could possibly have got.

because, after several months at sea, the crew, if not exactly sick of the sight of each other, at least appreciate some fresh faces and new conversation.

We occupied a ‘suite’ that was pleasant and spacious enough – in a Slough Travelodge sort of way. There was also a fridge, which we stocked with beer from the ship’s store (sadly, no Möet).

Onboard with us were 21 crew, a mixture of Kiwis, Ukrainians, Filipinos and Kiribatis (from a remote group of equatorial Pacific atolls).

There was one other passenger, a retired female The trans-Pacific Canadian crossing in the Mountie who Hansa Rendsburg The Hansa Rendsburg in dock in Auckland, “couldn’t was the third of New Zealand stand flying”, four ‘freighter and around 1,000 boxy, metal cruises’ we took as part of containers. These were stuffed our year-long round-the-world with dried milk products, white trip without flying (www. goods, fruit and, in the 150 or so lowcarbontravel.com), sailing as refrigerated ‘reefer’ containers, passengers on cargo ships from fish, meat and ice-cream. We Singapore to Brisbane, then from even had a cargo of ‘low-specific’ Melbourne to Napier in New radioactive material going to Zealand, and finally from Costa Canada.

Rica back to good old Dover.

While we were not actually expected to swab the decks in exchange for our passage, it’s a far cry from conventional cruising. Contrasting cargo ships with cruise liners is like comparing a truck with a limousine – both get you to your destination, but only one has a champagne fridge and leather seats. The luxurious pampering of clubby retirees is all part of the cruise liner experience and comes with a price tag to match.

Cargo ships are very much the ‘no-frills’ option.

With no cinema aboard, the only ‘pirates’ we saw were in the ship’s library of DVDs of dubious origin and suspect titles, of the lewd, nude variety. The male crew, it must be remembered, are alone at sea for very long periods.

The core business of our vessel was to shift stuff around the world. The financial benefit of our presence to the company, when fuel costs run into many thousands of pounds a day, was minuscule. We were essentially a welcome distraction, mainly

Nature was less visible in the mid-Pacific, but there was still plenty to stimulate the senses.

We were fantastically remote, potentially vulnerable, yet constantly lifted and inspired by the vivid blue beauty of sea and sky: rolling cloudscapes, wildly

There were also opportunities for wildlife spotting. On previous ships, we saw pods of whales in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, skittering flying fish off Tahiti, gangs of tiny petrels, and a lone majestic albatross wheeling gracefully around the ship in the Tasman Sea.

flamboyant sunsets and starpeppered nights. We were truly at the mercy of the ocean’s might, which was as profoundly humbling as it was scary.

Cargo ship travel is not for everyone, but in an age when anyone can get on a plane and twang themselves to the other side of the planet, there is something uniquely satisfying about a long voyage by sea. You gain a respect for the crews who spend so many months of their lives each year half a world away from their nearest and dearest.

You get to explore the mechanics of the biggest engines you’ll probably ever see, hang out on the bridge, and try on thick orange Neoprene immersion suits that make you resemble a cross between a Teletubby and a lobster fetishist.

Freighter cruising also gives a fascinating insight into the logistics of the way much of the world’s trade is conducted – sobering when you see first-hand the scale of maritime shipping operations and the challenges involved. Cheap oriental Christmas decorations are seen in a new light when you appreciate how they’ve reached the UK. A cargo ship journey is a contemplative, relaxing experience – if the weather obliges. Freed from the distractions of telephones, the internet and the modern world, that permeate even the remotest holiday resorts, at sea your mind can wander, ruminate and truly escape. The tragedy is that these opportunities are in decline and capacity is limited to a few passenger cabins per ship.

Compounding this, Orwellian security and immigration measures introduced by the US in recent years have created so many headaches for shipping companies that many have simply stopped carrying passengers at all. A long, proud tradition of travel by sea is in danger of disappearing altogether. Don’t miss the boat.

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Expert View: Geodiversity

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Autumn 2010

Engaging with Geodiversity - Why it Matters Mike Thomas, University of Stirling

Geodiversity has emerged as a topic of debate and policy development amongst the conservation agencies of many countries over the last decade.

In this, the International Year of Biodiversity, geodiversity merits enhanced exposure and exploration across the geographical sciences, to highlight its potential for the supply of environmental services to a plethora of stakeholders in environmental management.

Geodiversity provides the essential underpinning for plants, animals and human beings to flourish, and is key to the conservation of geological sites and valued landscapes. It is an asset of national and international importance, that informs us of the globally significant geological processes that shape our world in ways that we rarely fully appreciate; from the drivers of tectonics, volcanism and long-term climate evolution, to the changing meteorological drivers that model the Earth’s surface.

The interface between geodiversity and biodiversity is mediated by the fragile mantle of soils. Geodiversity, however, has a wider relevance as an expression of landscape character and quality, and as a key influence on habitats and species, sustainable management of land, river catchments and the coast, economic activities, and historical and cultural heritage. It is also of crucial importance to how we adapt to, and mitigate the impact of, climate change.

Within Scotland’s cities, there are close links between urban landscapes and open spaces, architectural heritage and geology, thus broadening the concept still further to embrace aspects of the cultural landscape. Geodiversity can be a source of inspiration for art, sculpture, music and literature.

Although this wider concept of geodiversity is now recognised

within the activities of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and the British Geological Survey (BGS), there is a need to extend the discussion, to promote the nature and scope of both geodiversity and biodiversity to a wider audience.

Scope also exists for consideration of the role and range of applications, ‘geodiversity services’, that can potentially be offered in the fields of geoconservation, geotourism, geoeducation, and in development planning and environmental management.

The need for a greater awareness of geodiversity extends to better integration within existing policy frameworks, for example in the conservation of protected sites, in physical planning in urban and rural settings, in flood control and land stability issues, including many coastal and near-shore marine environments, as well as inclusion in climate change adaptation scenarios.

Geodiversity is the variety of the Earth’s materials, forms and processes: it is rocks and minerals, fossils and sediments, soils and water; it is folds, faults and landforms; it is plate movement, sediment transport and soil creation. It is the variety of building stone used in the construction of Scotland’s towns; Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, once a volcano; Glasgow’s city centre drumlins, produced by the passage of great ice sheets; the Flow Country’s peat that supports a wealth of biodiversity; Caithness’s 380 million year old fossil fish; the River Spey, carrying sand silt and other sediment eroded from the Grampian Mountains into the Moray Firth.

Britain has more geological diversity than any other comparable area in the world.

The Wave, Arizona, a sandstone rock formation eroded by wind and rain.

“Geodiversity is a property of the earth’s rocks, landforms and soils, all of which interact to provide the essential underpinning for plants, animals and human beings to flourish.”

The establishment of GeoConservationUK, and the creation of Geoparks in Scotland as a result of UNESCO and European initiatives, further highlight the emergence of geodiversity whilst providing for the involvement of local communities. In its wider relevance, geodiversity has a fundamental bearing on the health and wellbeing of Scotland’s people, and an important contribution to make in delivering the Scottish Government’s strategic objectives and key themes for a greener Scotland.

Geodiversity provides raw materials and supplies water; it affects where and how we can build; it determines biodiversity, cultural heritage and a sense of place. Geodiversity conservation is increasingly seen as important in its own right, and as an essential support to biodiversity and cultural conservation programmes.

It is therefore timely and important to explore the scientific basis for geodiversity studies and to recognise the services that are provided by geodiversity, since these are of key importance to how we plan for a sustainable future through our national policies for the environment, for detailed planning provision, and for formal and informal education.

Dynamic Earth, Holyrood, Edinburgh on Wednesday

The RSGS, SNH, BGS and the British Soil Science Society (BSSS) have organised a conference, sponsored

by Scottish Power and Tarmac, entitled Engaging with Geodiversity - why it matters, to be held at Our 1st December 2010 (see www.rsgs.org/events/ Geodiversity_flyer.pdf). The opening plenary of the conference will be given by Professor Iain Stewart, who will also be speaking about the making of Scotland’s landscapes to RSGS audiences in Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh in late November and early December.

Salisbury Crags, Edinburgh – IPR/126-35CY British Geological Survey. © NERC. All rights reserved.

Opinion On: Geodiversity

James Croll - Joiner. Janitor. Geologist. Genius?

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS

J

ames Croll is one of those characters who has been all but forgotten in Scotland, and is virtually unheard of in his home town of Perth. Yet he made a fundamental contribution to our current understanding of science and the ice ages.

“Finally, at the age of 38, at a time when the average life span was barely mid forties, he got his lucky break, becoming a janitor at the Anderson College in Glasgow.”

This contribution might merit greater attention in itself, but is all the more remarkable in light of his personal story. How did a man of modest birth, plagued throughout his life with ill health, and who left school after only three years, become one of the leading scientific thinkers of his day?

James Croll was born in 1821 to David Croil, a stonemason and crofter, and Janet Ellis, in the crofting hamlet of Little Whitefield, about five miles north of Perth. When he was three years old, the family croft was cleared by the landowner Lord Willoughby. Some families were offered an area of bog-land a mile or so west, in recompense for being displaced. This became the village of Wolfhill, and here David managed to clear four to five acres, and to build a house. It was not possible to feed the family from such a small landholding, so David had to revert to his trade as a stonemason and to travel regularly away from home.

James was afflicted with a pain in his head, and had to wear a hat to keep his head from hurting.

This was enough to put him off attending school, so he was taught in part by his parents, but in the main by his brother Alexander, two years his elder. Sadly his brother died at the age of ten, and James had to attend school himself from

Little Whitefield, near Wolfhill.

that point onwards.

James attended school in Guildtown from the ages of nine to 13, and when he left, to help manage the croft, he was by his own admission below the average student.

But it was around this time that he stumbled upon the monthly Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and suddenly his intellect was unleashed.

James read avidly from this moment forth, and by his late teens he felt he had a pretty good grasp of most of the main disciplines in science. “I remember well that, before I could make headway in physical astronomy,… I had to go back and study the laws of motion and fundamental principles of mechanics. In like manner I studied pneumatics, hydrostatics, light, heat, electricity and magnetism. I obtained assistance from no one. In fact there were none of my acquaintances who knew anything whatever about these subjects.” Ironically, geology was one of the few subjects he struggled to find much enthusiasm for.

At the age of 17, James had to get a job, and he moved to Collace to learn to be a millwright. It was at this time that a leading Swiss scientist, Agassiz, rocked the geological community at a conference in Neuchâtel. Up until this time, most scientists believed that massive rocks which had travelled large distances from their source (erratic rocks) had been washed there in the diluvian floods that Noah survived, either directly or transported in icebergs that floated on the flood waters. The idea that glaciers once covered larger areas was controversial and widely disputed, but in 1837 Agassiz

first presented this idea formally, explaining the theory of an ice age being responsible.

Croll, after almost six years of fairly poor living conditions on the road, finally tired of the job of millwright and moved back to Wolfhill where, at 22, he took himself back to school to learn algebra. A deeply religious man, he helped to build the new kirk at Kinrossie for his friend the Reverend Andrew Bonar, then moved to Paisley where he worked as a joiner until 1846, when his elbow became ossified and he returned again to Wolfhill.

He then made a lifelong friend through a moment of fate – wandering into Perth to seek work, he was handed a leaflet for a new tea and coffee merchant in the High Street. Croll took this as a ‘sign’, went to the shop, befriended the owner, David Irons, and worked for him in Perth for some months, before Irons set him up with his own shop in Elgin.

There, he met and married Isabella MacDonald, but within three years he became too ill to work and had to sell the shop.

Staunch teetotallers, the couple established a temperance hotel in Blairgowrie, but it was perhaps predictably unsuccessful. He then worked as an insurance salesman in Dundee, Edinburgh and Leicester, when his wife became seriously ill, and they moved back to Glasgow where her sister could help with care.

Croll then produced his first book, The Philosophy of Theism, reflecting his religious convictions, and for the next year and a half was a journalist on a temperance newspaper in Glasgow.

Finally, at the age of 38, at a time when the average life span was barely mid forties, he got his

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lucky break, becoming a janitor at the Anderson College in Glasgow.

Paid £1 a week, plus taxes, coal and a house, it was barely enough to sustain him, his wife, and his brother David, who now lived with them after the death of his mother. But James Croll was the happiest in his work that he had ever been. Often his brother would come to work with him and, whilst David did the chores, James would sit and read his way through the books in the extensive library.

The theory proposed by Agassiz that glaciers were once much more advanced, and that their advance and retreat had shaped the landscape, was now much more firmly established. In 1864, Croll waded into this debate and wrote a paper for the Philosophical Magazine, On the Physical Cause of the Change of Climate During Glacial Epochs, based on the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and its effect on the ice ages. He developed the idea that there were several ice ages, brought about in part by changes in the orbit of the Earth round the sun, by the tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun during different seasons, and by the ‘wobble’ of the magnetic poles over time. The combination of these factors, exacerbated by ‘feedbacks’ like changes in the extent of ice and the consequent variation in the Earth reflecting sunlight back into space, could explain the regularity and causes of several historical ice ages, and indeed predict future ones.

This began a period in which Croll corresponded regularly with many of the greatest scientific minds of the day – arguing, commenting on and explaining theories about subjects such as the ice ages, ocean currents, and evolution. His regular correspondents included Darwin, Tyndall, Lyell, Wallace, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Hooker and Fridtjof Nansen, and his reputation grew.

In 1867, he was persuaded by Archibald Geikie (one of RSGS’s founders) to join the Geological Survey of Scotland, despite failing the entrance exam. Unfortunately once again Croll was blighted with increasing head pains which affected his concentration and limited his ability to develop his thinking – something for which he was typically apologetic.

In 1875, he published his most critical work, Climate and Time, the distillation of his theory of ice ages and Earth’s orbit. In 1876, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and an Honorary Member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and was awarded an honorary degree by the University of St Andrews.

Aged 59, forced to retire early from continuing ill health, Croll moved into rented lodgings in Perth. In all, he produced 92 scientific papers, but in his last years he returned to the earlier themes of his religious papers, producing his fourth book, The Philosophical Basis of Evolution, which was rushed to print so that he saw a copy a few days before he died. Reportedly, he celebrated with a glass of scotch, saying “I don’t think there’s much fear of me learning to drink now”.

James Croll died on 15th December 1890, and is believed to be buried in an unmarked grave, close to the area in which he grew up. Maybe it is time to recognise this man from humble beginnings, whose intellect shone through despite his lack of formal education, misfortune and illnesses. A joiner? Yes, by necessity. A janitor? Yes and a happy man with it. A geologist?

Somewhat ironically, given his indifference to it as a young man. A genius? Maybe. But an inspirational individual?

Undoubtedly.

James Croll is one of the pioneer Scottish geologists to be featured in the new three-part BBC TV series Men of Rock, presented by Professor Iain Stewart and due to be broadcast in November 2010.

James Croll’s theory of climate change Dr Diarmid Finnegan, Queen’s University Belfast

James Croll’s scientific reputation largely rests on his book, Climate and Time, which tackles a range of subjects, all related in some way to Croll’s astronomical theory of longterm climate change. The first third of the book is largely devoted to the cause, behaviour and climatic effects of ocean currents. In the middle third of the book, Croll points to some striking and original implications of his theory, and uses it to calibrate geological time. The final third deals with a more eclectic set of topics that in one way or another supplement and develop the book’s central argument.

Against a general scepticism about the influence of orbital variations on the Earth’s climate, Croll argues that when the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit is particularly pronounced, a glacial period is triggered in the hemisphere in which the winter solstice coincides, or nearly coincides, with the Earth being at the point in its orbit furthest from the sun (‘aphelion’). It followed from this deduction that when one hemisphere was experiencing a glacial period, the other was largely or completely ice-free. It also followed that the glacial epochs caused by pronounced eccentricity were characterised by a series of glacial and inter-glacial periods traceable to the precession of the equinoxes.

Vital to Croll’s theory was an account of how the severe winters caused by pronounced eccentricity triggered other mechanisms that more than countered the effects of a short but hot summer. It was only by showing how pronounced eccentricity set in train a series of ‘feedback’ mechanisms that he could overcome objections to any astronomical theory of long-term climate change. In the final chapters of his book, he tackles subjects as diverse as the age of the sun, the causes of sea level change, the behaviour of ice sheets and the physics of glacier motion. Climate and Time is then a book of stunning range and original insight which was well received at the time. Croll’s leading ideas were widely contested and his book fed into a series of important scientific disputes over the age of the Earth, the dating, duration and effects of the ice age (ages) and the evolution of organic life.

Croll, from our perspective, did of course get some things wrong.

On the face of it, he was wrong about the dating of the last ice age and wrong about glacial periods occurring out of phase in the northern and southern hemisphere, amongst other things.

However, taken on its own terms, Croll’s book stimulated significant scientific debate, opened up new research questions and, along the way, captivated scientific and nonscientific readers alike.

It remains a remarkable tribute to a self-educated, coy but tenacious man. © NASA

Expert Views: Biodiversity

Polar bears and their disappearing world Dr Andrew E Derocher, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada For good reason, polar bears have become ‘poster-species’ and embody the perils of climate change. From a reductionist perspective, the problem is habitat loss and their sea ice home disappearing or being fundamentally changed in ways that put their existence at risk.

“Polar bears are marine mammals.

In parts of their range, bears are born, live, and die on the sea ice without ever setting foot on dry land.

Dietary energy comes from the marine ecosystem.”

Polar bears evolved, perhaps as little as 134,000 years ago, during a warm spell called the Eemian interglacial. It may have been the warm spell that removed them from their brown bear ancestors but it was the abundance of naïve seals that drew them onto the sea ice in the first place. In an example of quantum evolution, polar bears rapidly diverged to become the largest and most predatory of the extant bears.

While some consider polar bears to be the largest terrestrial predator, such a perspective is flawed. Polar bears are marine mammals. In parts of their range, bears are born, live, and die on the sea ice without ever setting foot on dry land. Dietary energy comes from the marine ecosystem.

The prey of polar bears is primarily the 70kg ringed seal, the small meal deal, and secondarily the massive big seal meal, the bearded seal which can top 400kg.

Both species are ice-breeders and only found over the shallow continental shelves of the Arctic Ocean and adjoining waters.

Using ice projection models, it is estimated that two thirds of the world’s 20,000-25,000 polar bears will disappear.

Technically, polar bears are the most carnivorous bear but they do not each much meat. It is the massive energy-rich blubber stores of seals that allow polar bears to live in the Arctic.

While most consider polar bears to be the quintessential Arctic species, they are found to latitudes south of Edinburgh in James Bay in Canada. The lifeline for polar bears is sea ice. Throughout the Arctic, sea ice is disappearing and is projected to continue to decline, but the pace of change varies dramatically in the 19 polar bear populations.

The first polar bear symptom is a loss of stored body fat. Being skinnier sounds wonderful from a human perspective, but for polar bears it represents a loss of fasting ability. Polar bears take in the vast majority of their energy during the three to four spring months when seals are giving birth and nursing their pups. During this bout of gorging, polar bears direct the blubber from their prey directly onto their own bodies with astonishing efficiency and use this store when seals are unavailable.

One female in Hudson Bay was caught in the autumn weighing 99kg, but one year later, the now pregnant female had ballooned to 410kg and went on to produce triplets. Such huge females are now history in the area, but they used to fast for eight months while giving birth and rearing cubs on land, before heading back onto the sea ice to feed. Now, earlier sea ice break-up is forcing the bears ashore up to six weeks earlier.

The bears burn almost a kilogram of fat every day spent fasting, and skinnier females produce fewer and lighter cubs that have lower survival rates. There are physiological limits to what the bears can do. Breakup in Hudson Bay in 2010 was the earliest on record, and the western Hudson Bay population has declined over 20% in the last decade.

Some people have either hopefully or ignorantly suggested that polar bears will adapt to a more terrestrial life. Unfortunately, we well know the fate of polar bears when sea ice becomes unreliable. Only 10,000 years ago, polar bears were abundant in the Baltic Sea. Fossil remains from throughout the area attest that they were a common species until the climate warmed. At the end of the Weichselian glaciation, polar bears disappeared from the Baltic even though sea ice still forms in some areas and ringed seals are still present. The ice does not last long enough to support polar bears, and the fasting period is too long.

Such a fate appears to be in waiting for many polar bear populations. Using ice projection models, it is estimated that two thirds of the world’s 20,00025,000 polar bears will disappear.

It will still get cold in the Arctic in winter, but it will not be cold enough to provide sufficient ice for polar bears. The Arctic marine ecosystem will shift to an open ocean ecosystem, with Atlantic and Pacific species moving northward. Such changes are already occurring. Harp seals are pushing north and killer whales are showing up in places they have never been seen before. The new top predator will be the killer whale. Polar bears may hang on to the end of the century at the highest latitudes in the Canadian Archipelago and northern Greenland, but they cannot shift further north.

The science of human-caused climate change is incredibly well founded; we understand the perils of global warming. We can ignore the fate of polar bears and continue along our current path, but future generations will mourn our collective selfishness. Polar bears are not the only species at risk from climate change, but they have come to represent what we stand to lose. By the time polar bear populations are in dire condition, we will be too busy to help them because we will be attending to the humanitarian disasters precipitated by climate change. Nonetheless, there is hope; it lies in reducing our carbon footprint.

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The Exploration of Subglacial Lake Ellsworth Dr Neil Ross, University of Edinburgh The underside of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet might not at first appear the most obvious environment to recover and analyse liquid water containing new and unique microbial life, but a major project led by the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (the ‘Lake Ellsworth Consortium’), is planning to do just that.

Subglacial lakes are surprisingly common beneath the Antarctic ice sheets, and are one of the last unexplored environments and ecosystems on Earth. Two goals are driving interest in subglacial lakes: (i) understanding the origin, evolution and support systems for life in these water bodies; and (ii) the recovery of a record of ice sheet history from the sediments deposited on the lake floors.

Subglacial Lake Ellsworth, beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, has been selected as an ideal subglacial lake for achieving these goals through direct exploration, measurement and sampling. Geophysical surveys have shown that the lake, which is about the size and shape of Windermere, is up to 156m deep and underlain by soft, finegrained muds similar to those at the bottom of the deep oceans.

These discoveries have confirmed Lake Ellsworth as an ideal target for exploration, and have enabled a very specific access location to be defined.

The exploration of Lake Ellsworth is planned for the 2012-13 Antarctic field season. There are evident logistical challenges associated with delivering a major scientific project in West Antarctica. In Antarctic terms,

however, Lake Ellsworth is very much accessible: it is within the typical operational area of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and it is less than 200km from the ‘blue-ice’ runway at Union Glacier run by Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions (ALE). This means that even heavy, bulky equipment can be transported relatively easily from South America (by plane to Union Glacier and by ground-based tractor traverse from there to the lake).

Hot water drilling will be used to create the lake access hole.

Pressurised hot water (produced from melted and heated snow and ice) will be pumped through a long (>3km) hose with a metal nozzle at its end. The nozzle will be gradually lowered into the ice, melting an approximately 36cm diameter borehole through the entire ice sheet. A remarkably straight access hole can be drilled this way, simply by letting gravity do all the hard work.

There are two reasons for using hot water drilling. Firstly, it enables rapid access through the ice in one field season (ice core drilling of similar ice thicknesses normally takes several seasons).

Secondly, and importantly, it maximises the cleanliness of the lake access operation. The cleanliness and sterility of equipment is central to both the success of the science and the environmental stewardship of the subglacial environment, and such considerations are therefore being integrated, from the outset, into equipment design, build and deployment.

A custom-built probe, equipped with an array of sensors, will be used to measure and sample the lake. This probe will be deployed via the access hole and will be linked to the ‘command-centre’ on the ice surface with a tether, through which the probe can be controlled and data and imagery relayed for real-time viewing and analysis. Initially, the probe will descend through the water column, making measurements of the physical and chemical

properties of the water. The sampling sequence will be initiated once the probe reaches the lake floor where it will recover a very short (<10cm) sediment core. During the probe’s ascent back through the lake, a series of sampling bottles and filters will be activated to recover water and filtrate samples from specific lake depths. Following recovery of the probe at the ice surface, a large sediment corer, with the capability of acquiring 2-4m of sediment from the lake floor, will then be deployed.

Analysis of the water, sediment and filtrate samples will later be undertaken in labs at Rothera (the BAS base on the Antarctic Peninsula) and back in the UK to establish: (i) the presence and type of microbial life in the lake water; (ii) how these microbes compare to similar life-forms elsewhere on Earth; (iii) what sustains life in such an extreme environment; and (iv) when the West Antarctic ice sheet last collapsed.

GPS measurement at Lake Ellsworth

“Subglacial lakes are surprisingly common beneath the Antarctic ice sheets, and are one of the last unexplored environments and ecosystems on Earth.”

Opinion On: Biodiversity

Survival: saving endangered migratory species Stanley Johnson

Stanley Johnson is a trustee of the Gorilla Organisation and an Ambassador for the United Nations Convention on Migratory Species. In 1984 he was awarded the Greenpeace Prize for Outstanding Services to the Environment and the RSPCA Richard Martin Award for services to animal welfare.

He is co-author of Survival: Saving Endangered Migratory Species, a richly illustrated and meticulously researched book published

by Stacey International earlier this year.

A few months ago I travelled in a hot-air balloon over vast herds of wildlife as they migrated from Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park into Kenya’s Masai Mara Game Reserve. The sight was unbelievable, unforgettable. As far as the eye could see the plains were black with animals. One and a half million wildebeest; half a million zebra; another half million topis, elands and Thompson’s gazelles.

This truly is one of the world’s great migrations, perhaps the greatest wildlife spectacle on Earth.

For the last five years, as I undertook research for the book Survival: Saving Endangered Migratory Species which I have coauthored with Robert Vagg, I have been privileged to visit the most far-flung corners of the globe. I have been in the Sahara desert, in the very heart of Niger, looking for the addax, the rarest of all desert antelopes. I have trekked gorillas in both Central and West Africa, spent time with giant river otters in Brazil’s Pantanal and in the Amazon, and camped among the orang-utans in Borneo’s now much-threatened forests.

This has been one of the most exciting projects I have ever undertaken. One day, from the deck of a small former fishingboat in Mexico’s Sea of Cortes

(otherwise known as the Gulf of California), I saw at least 20 blue whales, thought to be the largest of all the creatures that have ever lived on this planet, a species which for decades has been hovering on the edge of extinction. On Española Island in the Galapagos, I was able to observe at close quarters colonies of waved albatross. (Of the 19 currently listed albatross species, 15 are classified as threatened with extinction.) I once spent a week with researchers from the environmental charity Earthwatch, pacing up and down a Costa Rican beach to protect the newly-laid eggs of the mighty leatherback turtle. Once there were 90,000 mating female leatherbacks in the Pacific. Today, there are fewer than 5,000.

The book is about the battle to save the world’s endangered migratory species.

Because many of them move from country to country, international action is often essential. Since January 2007, I have been honoured to be an Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Convention on Migratory Species (CMS). Under the auspices of the CMS, more than two dozen international treaties and other instruments have been negotiated with a view to protecting migratory species.

Elephants, African and Pacific cetaceans, saiga antelopes, South American grassland birds and flamingos, Atlantic monk seals, Africa-Eurasian birds of prey, Indian Ocean and Pacific dugongs, gorillas, sharks and houbara bustards – international agreements of one kind or another have been reached in respect of all of these – and more. I pay special tribute here to Robert Vagg, who has so

painstakingly helped to research and record the substance of these measures.

The challenges that remain are great. Treaties have to be implemented, as well as signed.

New threats are constantly arising. As I write, in July 2010, plans are afoot to drive a road right through the heart of the Serengeti with untold consequences for migrating wildlife. Last June, at the meeting of the IWC (International Whaling Convention), the international moratorium on commercial whaling came close to unravelling. The consequences for wildlife, such as marine turtles, of the horrendous oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico have still to be assessed, as do the implications for species like the orang-utan of the mad rush, mandated by the EU, to fill our cars with biodiesel made from palm oil.

Recent research undertaken for the CMS by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) shows that even the subtle changes in environmental conditions that could be caused by climate change could have catastrophic consequences for animals that migrate. At a meeting held at ZSL to launch Survival, CMS Executive Secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema said “Migratory species are particularly threatened by climate change as they depend on different habitats to breed, feed and rest. The findings from the (ZSL) report will facilitate the Convention’s response to assist migratory species in adapting to climate change at a global level.”

It is my sincere hope that this book may play its part in helping create greater public awareness of the astonishing treasure represented by migratory species, and of the threats which they face. I also hope that it may inspire decision-makers, both in the UK and elsewhere, even at this time of budgetary stringency, to press for more effective action to protect some of nature’s most precious resources.

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Geographer

Opinion On: Population

14-15

Autumn 2010

Peoplequake Fred Pearce Here is some good news. We are defusing the population bomb.

And it is being done without draconian measures by big government. Instead, it is being done by the world’s poorest women. Today’s women have just half as many children as their mothers – an average of 2.6.

It’s a reproductive revolution going on round the world, right now. And 2.6 is getting close to the replacement level. Allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, women need to have around 2.3 children to keep up numbers.

They are having that number or fewer in half the world today, including Europe, North America and the Caribbean, most of the Far East from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, and much of the Middle East from Algeria to Iran.

Yes, Iran. In the past 25 years, behind the veil, the number of children that Iranian women are having has crashed from eight to less than two. To 1.7 in fact.

Women in Teheran today have fewer children than their sisters in New York.

How much coercion has been involved in this change? A bit, especially in China. The one-child policy is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more.

When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility in the world – below one child per woman. It was their choice: Governor Chris Patten was not running a covert one-child policy.

Family planning experts used to say that women only started having fewer children when

they got educated or escaped poverty. Pessimists feared that if rising population stopped people getting rich, they would get caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and large families.

two billion before the population growth ceases. But this is mainly because the huge numbers of young women born during the baby boom years of the 20th century remain fertile.

But tell that to women in Bangladesh. It is one of the world’s poorest nations. Its girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. Yet they have on average just three children now.

The good news is that we do not face ever-rising numbers. If, as seems likely, most of the world reaches below replacement fertility, we will see peak population by mid-century. After that, the world’s population will probably begin shrinking.

India is even lower at 2.8, half the figure in 1980. In Brazil, hotbed of Catholicism, most women have two children. And nothing the priests say can stop millions of them getting sterilised.

What is going on? I think something very simple. Women are having smaller families because, for the first time in history, they can. In the 20th century, medical science largely eradicated the diseases that used to kill most children. So today’s mothers no longer need to have five or six children to ensure the next generation. Two or three is enough; and that is what they are doing.

There are holdouts, of course.

In parts of the Middle East, traditional patriarchs still hold sway. In much of rural Africa, women still have five or more children. But the big story is that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with tough government birth control policies or none, small families are the new norm in most of the world.

Now it is true that population growth has not ceased yet. We have 6.8 billion people today, and could end up with another

What does this mean for the environment? Well, it is good news, of course. But don’t put out the flags. Because rising consumption today is a far bigger threat to the planet than a rising head-count. And most of that extra consumption is still happening in rich countries.

Take climate change. The world’s richest half billion people – that’s about 7% of the global population – are responsible for half the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poor 50% are responsible for just 7% of emissions. So there is no way that halting population growth in the poor world is going to have more than a very marginal effect on climate change.

Yes, some of those extra poor people might one day become rich. And if they do – and I hope they do – their impact on the planet will be greater. But it is the world’s consumption patterns we need to fix, not its reproductive habits. Every time we talk about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying the fact that the population bomb is being defused, while we have not even begun to defuse the consumption bomb.

“The good news is that we do not face ever-rising numbers.

If, as seems likely, most of the world reaches below replacement fertility, we will see peak population by midcentury.”

On the Map Opinions On: Biodiversity

Valuing Nature Dan Box Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) report, which aims to do for species loss what the Stern reports did for climate change; that is, put a monetary value on something most businesses have previously been happy to ignore. In the words of their outline report, how do we go about “recapitalising nature”?

“For some, this kind of talk is ugly.

Bringing nature on to the balance sheet involves letting go of the belief that nature is valuable in its own right.”

The city of Nagoya in Japan is one of the major organs in the global body corporate. Its skyscrapers provide offices for Toyota, Mitsubishi and Boeing, and industrial output from the region is the highest in Japan. A telling choice of venue, then, for a meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity to assess whether governments have met their public commitments to protect wildlife, which takes place in October 2010.

By any measure, these governments have failed. The man in charge, Secretary-General Ahmed Djoghlaf describes the situation as “a total disaster”.

One hundred and ninety three countries have committed to the legally binding treaty to reduce species loss, but only 140 have even submitted plans and only 16 have revised those plans since 1993.

The result, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, is a mass extinction of life worldwide. Scientists estimate 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours.

Time then to try something different?

One set-piece event at the 12-day long meeting in Nagoya will be the publication of the final The

As a starting point, take a recent study that put the global value of honey bees and other insect pollinators at $189 billion a year. These insects busy at work ferrying pollen from plant to plant are an example of an ‘ecosystem service’, something that nature provides for free and which humans would have to pay for if the natural system broke down. Others include clean air and water, soil formation, and the health benefits wild green spaces have for those with access to them.

All of these depend upon biodiversity – the range of species in any given area that make up an ecosystem. One landmark study put the estimated global value of ecosystem services at US$33 trillion per year at 1994 prices (almost $50tn today) – far more than the $18tn figure for global gross domestic product (the total value of everything actually produced by the global economy). The TEEB report is now expected to say that saving biodiversity is also cost-effective. The financial benefits that ecosystem services provide are between 10 and 100 times the cost of saving the relevant habitats and species themselves.

For some, this kind of talk is ugly.

Bringing nature on to the balance sheet involves letting go of the belief that nature is valuable in its own right. For those who have long campaigned on this basis against, say, oil companies and mining giants, doing so is like agreeing to fight on your opponent’s ground. For others, it is just about boxing clever.

Putting an economic value on nature is the first step to saying

businesses have to account for the cost of causing natural damage by, say, cutting down a tree to build a road. Historically, companies have never had to do this. Such damage was an ‘externality’, a natural or social cost that they themselves did not have to meet. Yet picture this: a separate recent survey calculated the value of a single tree in central London to be about £78,000, measured in terms of carbon capture, flood prevention, quality of life etc. Imagine if that cost had to be accounted for by the road-builder. Suddenly, nature has an influence where it matters most, on the bottom line. Would that tree still be felled?

Seeing nature in terms of profit and loss would also affect national policy. Given the huge value of what they produce, if ecosystem services were measured up within the national accounts, saving the biodiversity that produces them would suddenly no longer be a liability.

It would be smart economics instead.

Yes, all this means some dedicated conservationists, anti-oil and anti-mine protestors will find the ground shift uncomfortably beneath their feet.

They may resent the cause they have championed for so long being taken up in boardrooms, by men in suits. Yet both the British Institute of Chartered Accountants and the International Accounting Standards Board have discussed new rules forcing companies to publish data on their environmental impacts with Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank banker in charge of the TEEB report. If the tree remains standing, does it actually matter who made the decision to let it remain, a conservationist or an accountant?

Dan is speaking to RSGS audiences in Inverness, Perth and Stirling in October.

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Geographer

16-17

Autumn 2010

Biodiversity teetering on the edge Dr Deborah Long, Conservation Manager, Plantlife Scotland The United Nations has declared 2010 as International Year of Biodiversity, celebrating biodiversity and committing to its long term conservation. This year is a good year to take stock, assess how we are doing and look forward to where we need to be in the future. There is wide acknowledgement that neither Scotland, nor any other part of the UK, will meet the European target to halt the loss of biodiversity.

The most recent assessment of the priority species and habitats in Scotland showed that 61% of species and 56% of habitats were declining or showed no clear trend. Why are we still losing native species and habitats in Scotland, a nation which often defines itself by its wildlife and landscape?

A good place to start is with plants and fungi, the bottom of all food chains. Between 1998 and 2007, the plant species richness in our countryside declined by about 10%. Even in botanically rich areas, plant diversity declined by 12%.

High species diversity confers stability to ecosystems: every species has a role, even if we don’t know what that role is, and every time we lose a species, a tiny piece of the jigsaw falls away. Because plants and fungi are at the bottom of all food chains and ecosystems, their loss has heralded catastrophic environmental change in other parts of the world. Are we watching the decline of our native plants and fungi as a precursor to more dramatic environmental losses here in Scotland? “ The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or a plant: “What good is it?”…If the biota in the course of aeons has built something that we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) Scotland’s landscape is the result of thousands of years of human activity, all shaping the landscape, its species and habitats. Five thousand years ago, Scotland was

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS

heavily wooded. Now less than 3% of our landscape is native woodland. Indeed, if we stopped ploughing, draining, grazing and building, much of the country would revert to woodland, our climax vegetation everywhere, except for the high mountain tops and exposed coasts. Instead, we have largely become used to more of an ‘anti-climax’ vegetation, characterised by over-grazed hillsides, degraded soils, drained peat bogs and mono-cultural agriculture.

Much of the native wildlife that depends on these woodlands has experienced similar declines – red squirrels, pine martens, capercaillie, twinflower, even the Scots pine.

Historical accounts clearly show that there used to be a lot more woodland wildlife than we are used to now: in the 19th century, for instance, more capercaillie were shot in a single day on a single estate in Perthshire than now live in total in the various small pockets from Loch Lomond to Spey Bay. These isolated pockets of wildlife are doomed to continued decline unless we can expand their habitats and start to link these tiny fragments back together so species can spread and thrive.

We are beginning to see efforts to reconnect populations but we have a long way to go before their future is secure.

It is an irony that today, at a time when we have unprecedented levels of understanding of organisms, and when we continue to find new species even in Scotland, we are finding it impossible to stem the rate of their loss.

Despite access to very secure food supplies, available in an ever astonishing variety, all year round, British farmers struggle with ever smaller margins. Despite worries about the increasing use of industrial agricultural technologies, we depend more and more on

a limited genetic range of food plants. There are more than 2,000 varieties of apple known in Britain, yet only 30 of them are grown commercially and as the protection from natural genetic diversity narrows, pesticide use goes up to try to replace it.

Even more worryingly, more than 80% of the world’s population depend on herbal medicine for primary health care. Today, about 15,000 species of medicinal plants are threatened globally, because of habitat loss, commercial over-harvesting, invasive species and pollution. And these are just the species we know about. More than 60% of drugs discovered in the last 20–30 years have originated from plants and they will continue to be a significant source for future cures, if we let them.

We have pushed back, built on, chipped away at, dumped, drained and polluted so many areas of our wild land that only small sections remain in remote corners, where species cling to mountain tops and cliffs, or are being inexorably marched over a cliff into the sea and off the land forever. They would not teeter on the edge of these unstable habitats by choice: they have retreated to these aeries, driven out of more benign spots by our voracious appetite for large scale management. But we can and are seeing some signs of change.

If you need convincing, look out when you next drive through Drumochter. Reductions in deer pressure are leading to saplings of varying heights bursting out of the heather in all directions. It is inspiring to stop and take it all in, for here before our eyes is the birth of a new forest. It can be done.

To find out more, visit www. plantlife.org.uk and download a copy of Plantlife’s Ghost Orchid Declaration: Saving the UK’s wild flowers today.

“To protect the environment costs a lot. To do nothing will cost much more.”

Kofi Annan

Education

Orang-utan research project Graham L Banes

“In 2008, the Society took a ‘leap of faith’ and made a small grant to fund our expedition: by June of that year, Orang-utan ’08 was in full swing.”

Main shot: Kusasi is the dominant male orang-utan.

An orang-utan welcomes us to Tanjung Puting National Park.

Counting ‘nests’ involved looking up at the tree and trying to distinguish the sleeping platforms from the foliage surrounding them. When a tree contained a nest, we tagged it with bright-orange tape to facilitate re-counts and prevent us from counting the same nest twice.

All travel within the Park, including along the crocodileinfested Sekonyer river, was by kelotok, a sort of motorised longboat; here, local children watch us load up.

An infant orangutan.

The RSGS was a notable The Bornean orang-utan is an endangered species endemic exception. In 2008, the Society to the island of Borneo, where took a ‘leap of faith’ and made less than 54,000 individuals are a small grant to fund our thought to remain in a small expedition: by June of that year, number of wild populations. Of Orang-utan ’08 was in full swing. all species, they are among the Over five months, we conducted most closely-related to humans – line-transect surveys of orangwe share 96.5% of our DNA with utan sleeping platforms to orang-utans and their name, from determine population density in Malay, even translates to ‘person Tanjung Puting National Park, of the forest’. Despite Central Kalimantan. Our this, we do little to study was the first to respect our arboreal kin: orang-utans assess the orangare continually utan population threatened by in Tanjung Puting habitat loss, since 2003 and was hunting and the the first to conduct pet trade. More line-transect surveys than 90% of at primary peatoriginal orang-utan swamp forest sites. We habitat is thought to An orang-utan and I sit determined Tanjung have already been companionably around a tree.

Puting to harbour up destroyed. to 9,000 orang-utans, rendering My intention to study orangit home to the world’s largest utans was realised at the orang-utan population. We also University of Aberdeen, while found that the orang-utans there reading my Bachelor’s degree in could adapt well in the long term Zoology. When given the option of writing a ‘standard’ thesis or following logging, once forest going further afield to collect has been left to recover. Notably, primary data, I opted to head we observed no evidence of for Indonesia to study orangorang-utans in sites disturbed utans in the wild. I was fortunate by fire, concluding that efforts to to receive ample support from safeguard Tanjung Puting should academic staff, notably Dr David remain a conservation priority.

Burslem and Prof Paul Racey, I remain eternally grateful to who encouraged me to plan the RSGS: our expedition would an expedition and to recruit three fellow students to assist not have been possible without in data collection. Procuring the support and encouragement financial support was rather of the Society’s board and more difficult, however. Despite members. However, our research having spent months planning doesn’t end here: I remain a sound expedition, and despite committed to the orang-utans of having gained approval from the Tanjung Puting and now continue Indonesian authorities, we were my work at the University of turned down by innumerable Cambridge. Please visit our funding organisations. Nobody website (www.prime.bioanth. wanted to fund undergraduate cam.ac.uk/graham) to read more students, especially those who about our orang-utan research had no experience of field work programme, funded in part by and who had never seen orangutans outside of the zoo. the RSGS.

The

Geographer

Geography can lead the way Erica M Caldwell RSGS Education Convener Part of the conclusion of the report Curriculum for Excellence and Outdoor Learning, published by Learning and Teaching Scotland earlier this year, states “As Curriculum for Excellence becomes embedded in every establishment and other contexts for learning, now is the ideal time for all educators and partners to create, develop and deliver outdoor learning opportunities which can be embedded in the new curriculum.

From school grounds to streets of cities, forests to farms, ponds to paths, coastlines to castles, moors to mountains, Scotland has a rich wealth of outdoor learning opportunities which will help children and young people make connections within and across curriculum areas.”

Geography departments are in an ideal position to lead the way in addressing this aspect of Curriculum for Excellence. Geography teachers have been taking their pupils out of school for a long time, and have built up an expertise which they may not realise they possess. Departments and teachers need to capitalise on their skills in outdoor learning at this crucial time in the development of Curriculum for Excellence in secondary schools.

What kind of skills? Skills such as having aims so that the work is purposeful, enjoyable, safe, and perceived as ‘worthwhile’ by pupils, parents and other staff; getting permission from head teachers and parents; negotiating with other departments; liaising with landowners for permission to visit; working with various organisations (eg Dynamic Earth, National Parks) and bus companies; keeping the minibus driving licence up to date; making lists of pupils, and of tasks to be done before/during/after; preparing work booklets; organising class cover; leaving work for other classes while doing fieldwork during the school week; negotiating with family if it’s at the weekend or during the holidays; booking hostel/hotel accommodation; working with a tour company if going abroad; and, of course, doing the risk assessment!

Geography teachers use these skills regularly. They can share this experience and expertise with other departments to allow cooperation and develop outdoor learning which can also cross subject boundaries and which “contributes to delivering the Scottish Government’s overarching strategic objectives towards ‘creating a more successful country’”.

University of Edinburgh

University of Dundee

Malawi

Professor Alan Werritty FRSGS

Dr William Mackaness was awarded a fellowship by the Scotland Malawi Partnership (SMP) to allow him to work in Malawi for three months this summer. The vision of the SMP is to foster mutually beneficial links between Scotland and Malawi and encourage the development of sustainable projects in Malawi. Dr Mackaness was based at Chancellor College in Zomba, working with staff in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences. The ambition has been to set up two way research, drawing on the expertise of both institutions.

Alan retired from full-time academia at the end of September, after a distinguished career spanning over 40 years. Always a charismatic and engaging ambassador, Alan has contributed greatly to raising the profile of geography, and is internationally recognised for his research into the dynamics of gravel-bed rivers, flood risk and climate change, and sustainable catchment management. Though retiring from full-time duties, Alan’s enthusiasm and commitment to geography remain undiminished and he looks forward to the joys of being more selective in terms of future research projects.

Informal economies Dr Abel Polese is exploring the origins of informal economies in transitional countries using the case study of three regions in both Turkey and Ukraine. Whilst a single citizen’s extra-legal income may have limited relevance, when informal economies become a widespread, and accepted, way to produce welfare, this may be taken as an indicator of two things.

Firstly, if people feel unprotected by their state they may refuse to acknowledge its role as economic regulator, creating a situation similar to pre-state societies.

Secondly, informal economies may also become a way to oppose and renegotiate measures of political economy and can be taken as a sign that state attitude has to be changed.

Open University in Scotland Volcano-Ice Interactions We are delighted that Dr Dave McGarvie has joined us; he will be continuing his long-running research into volcano-ice interactions, a topic that has raised its profile considerably due to Eyjafjallajökull’s 2010 summit eruption. Dr McGarvie has recently returned from a research trip on the Askja volcano in central Iceland, working with a team of US and Icelandic geologists. Askja is a well-exposed and ice-free central volcano which may hold the key to a better understanding of Iceland’s ice-covered central volcanoes. While in Iceland, Dr McGarvie recorded material for a podcast, to be published on The Open University’s iTunes U site, open.edu/itunes, giving an insight into what it is like to undertake geological fieldwork in Iceland.

Historic airmail found on Alpine glacier

Freya Cowan, University of Dundee, with one of the letters that was found.

University News

Curriculum for Excellence and Outdoor Learning:

18-19

Autumn 2010

Geography staff and students made an unexpected discovery during recent fieldwork to monitor conditions on the Miage glacier, Italy. Third-year student Freya Cowan stumbled across a bag of letters from an aeroplane that crashed on Mont Blanc in 1950.

Astonishingly, the letters had survived 60 years in a very harsh environment. Over this time, the glacier had transported them over 3km, with a descent of over 2.5km, to the spot where Freya found them.

The finds include several personal letters, as well as company invoices, banker’s drafts and even a birthday card. Most seem to have been on their way from India to the United States, when the aeroplane tragically crashed on its way in to a stop-off in Geneva.

The RSGS’s academic journal is available from Taylor & Francis in hard copy or on-line at www.tandf.co.uk/ journals/RSGJ

Making Connections

The Making of Scotland’s Landscape Professor Iain Stewart Having lived away from Scotland for some 20 years, one of the biggest surprises is just how fantastic it is – truly one of the most beautiful places in the world. I’ve always known that on some level, but having been immersed in it for six months, filming and recording, it has really hit home.

Iain’s two TV series, The Making of Scotland’s Landscape and Men of Rock, and the radio series of downloadable audio walks, Walking through Landscape, are being broadcast this autumn.

But Scotland’s great ‘natural’ beauty is anything but natural.

Renowned as a fabulous wilderness, Scotland’s landscape has been extensively shaped by man.

The Making of Scotland’s Landscape looks at how man harnessed five elements of our landscape – wood, earth, sea, water and air – with stories of amazing pioneers who dared to think beyond the parameters of their times, to come up with some terrific breakthroughs that we now take for granted. Take, for example, the episode on water.

Only a few hundred years ago, Scotland was to a large extent a water-logged country, its capacity to produce food stymied by boggy fields, but now there is hardly a river or water way whose path hasn’t been controlled by man.

And along the way, the power that water supplies has been well and truly harnessed. In a waterrich country like Scotland, water represents a new kind of power.

Men of Rock also pays tribute to this land and the inspiration it provided for pioneer geologists.

Scotland is one of the geologically oldest countries in the world, and it was this strange, beautiful stuff beneath our feet which provoked some men to find the answers to things people didn’t even know were questions at that time – men like James Hutton, the father of geology who was once a humble Borders farmer, or Arthur Holmes, who was the first to give a proper geological timescale

of the world’s development, or indeed James Croll (see pages 10-11). It is a rich heritage of thinkers based on a rich heritage of geology.

Our geoheritage is something to celebrate, but it is not as simple as straightforward conservation.

We need to use our resources with the same inspiration as drove these men of the past, to make them work for us sustainably – as tourism attractions, as mineral resources, as power – and as part and parcel of a modern resourcerich country.

Iain is speaking to RSGS audiences in Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh in November and December.

The talk in Edinburgh on 2nd December will be hosted by Sally Magnusson and run in conjunction with BBC Scotland. Tickets are free, and must be booked in advance.

See www.rsgs.org for details.

What Geography Means To Me

An insight into the life of a working geographer

Malcolm Fleming Campaigns & Communications Manager Oxfam Scotland

I

’ve always had an ongoing frustration at the state of the world, its inequality and unfairness.

In particular I get angry that people’s life chances, and even chance of life beyond infant years, are completely and utterly different from others through no fault of their own, but because of where they are born.

Despite high principles that suggest every human life is of equal value, the way the world works means that that is not the reality, and today and every day tens of thousands of our fellow global citizens die from preventable poverty in a world where the number of billionaires continues to rise. Whether it’s malnutrition related, as a result of preventable diseases such as diarrhoea or malaria, or from maternal mortality, I find it incomprehensible that we allow the death toll to continue to rise.

Geography first brought these issues alive for me and helped me begin to understand them.

By comprehending the links and dynamics between people and places and the environment, I was able to begin to get to grips with what is going on in our complex world, and was also spurred to try to do my bit to solve some of the problems.

Given my interest in people and places, it was perhaps inevitable that in studying geography at the University of Aberdeen, I specialised in Human Geography.

And of course where there are people and inequalities to study, understand and solve, it doesn’t take long before you need to consider the power struggles involved in the mix.

That’s perhaps why I started my working life in politics, as a way to try and change things for the better.

Seven years ago I moved to work for Oxfam Scotland, first as a Media Officer and now as Campaigns & Communications

Manager, leading a team campaigning to do all we can to address some of the structural reasons that cause poverty in the first place, such as climate change, broken promises on aid, and a lack of access to basic health and education services.

We also respond to disasters and emergencies such as the recent Haiti earthquake, to publicise what is happening and to raise vital funds which help our colleagues and partners incountry respond with life-saving and life-changing aid.

To really tackle the issues that keep people in poverty, we need to maintain and increase pressure on those who are in power, to ensure that their policies and actions help reduce and end poverty, not increase it. To join our campaigning on these vital issues, please get in touch via our website www.oxfam.org. uk/scotland. It doesn’t need to take much of your time, but people power can make all the difference!

The

Geographer

Off The Beaten Track

20-21

Autumn 2010

Chasing the Devil Tim Butcher In 1906 the members and fellows of the Royal Geographical Society in London heard a presentation by Sir Harry Johnston, a redoubtable explorer and geographer with many years of experience in Africa. In his speech he addressed what was still not known about the continent, focussing his attention, perhaps surprisingly, on Liberia, the small nation on the West African bulge that had been founded in the mid 19th century by descendants of former slaves from America.

He described it as “still the least known part of Africa”.

Scroll forward in time to the 21st century and one could be forgiven for holding the same view.

Years of brutal conflict destroyed links between Liberia and the outside world and although the country is today at peace, its reputation for violence and political chaos make it a rare target for outside travellers.

In part, it was that sense of remoteness that drew me there last year. But I also had some acute personal issues outstanding from the latter stages of the Liberian war which I covered as the Daily Telegraph’s Africa Correspondent.

Back in 2003 when rebels were attacking the capital city, Monrovia, and the regime of the warlord-president Charles Taylor was in its endgame, I had flown to Liberia for my first visit. It was dangerous on many levels, none more so than having to deal with Taylor’s unpredictable and ruthless regime.

My reports brought me to its attention and earned me something I never encountered in 19 years as a war reporter – a death threat.

It meant that after I left it was not prudent for me to return, something that niggled me as a journalist and gave me an unsettling feeling of having failed.

It was in part to deal with that

sense of failure that I went back on a long overland journey in the spring of 2009, a trip conceived deliberately to try to better decode the country, its people and its future.

To help my understanding I used the writings of Graham Greene. As a young writer of 30, struggling to survive as a novelist, he had journeyed through Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1935 and wrote a book about it, Journey Without Maps. If I could follow his same route, his observations would give me fixed reference points from which to chart the development and changes of Liberia’s recent history.

It was a methodology I first used in the Congo, another of Africa’s

more turbulent regions, back in 2004 when I followed the route of Henry Morton Stanley’s first journey of discovery through the Congo River basin in the 1870s, comparing what he saw in the late 19th century with the situation in the early 21st century. It was a journey I described in my first book, Blood River – A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart.

Greene was accompanied by his cousin, Barbara Greene, on a journey that began in Freetown, capital of the then British colony of Sierra Leone in the dry season of 1935. A train took them almost all the way to the country’s eastern frontier with Liberia where they hired 24 bearers and set off along a jungle trail that would stretch 350 miles all the way to the Atlantic.

Theirs was very much a journey of its time, with runners carrying

messages in cleft sticks to villages further down the trail, the two white outsiders sitting down to three-course lunches in the middle of the jungle with bread baked freshly each morning.

Graham Greene wore a sunhelmet and they took hammocks in which they could be carried by their porters, although he appeared only to use his when he got ill. The whole trip was much lubricated by whisky drunk with lime juice squeezed from fruit found along the way.

After a year of planning, I made my way to Freetown and set off for the same eastern frontier crossed by the Greenes. The train was long gone – sold for scrap back in the 1970s – but, with luck, I was able to find the exact same remote border crossing, and from there follow jungle trails to the same villages touched on by the Greenes. I even met, on two occasions, villagers with clear recollections of the Greenes passing through.

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It took a month of walking but after 350 miles, blistered, filthy and exhausted, I reached the coast.

The challenge of the terrain and climate, the risks from lawlessness, the poverty of today’s Liberia and the fact that the near neighbour, Guinea, had a coup just weeks before I set off, all made a remarkable trip, one that I will be describing at a number of talks being hosted by the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.

Tim is speaking to RSGS audiences in Aberdeen, Dundee, Dunfermline, Edinburgh and Glasgow, in early October.

For those who cannot make the talks, I have written a book on the adventure called Chasing the Devil – The Search for Africa’s Fighting Spirit.

Readers can buy Tim Butcher’s Chasing the Devil (RRP £18.99) for the special price of £12.99, with free UK p&p.

To order, please call 01206 255800 and quote the reference ‘RSGS’.

Book Club

Wild Animals Anita Ganeri, illustrated by Mike Phillips Want to know: •h ow to cope with a killer croc?

Colin Prior A leading landscape photographer, Colin captures in this book the transient nature of the Highlands & Islands landscape.

As well as his COLIN PRIOR trademark mountain top panoramas, he explores the detail of nature, with close up shots that reveal order amongst chaos.

HIGH LIGHT A

V I S I O N

O F

W I L D

•w hy you shouldn’t turn your back on a tiger?

•w hat to do if a shark bumps into you?

S C O T L A N D

Colin’s love of mountaineering and photography go hand in hand. His photographic talent is his means of expressing a great passion for the natural world. “High Light is a distillation of my passion for the landscape of Scotland, an attempt to understand my place within it,” he says. “Many of the mountain images in this portfolio are the result of wild camping. Pitching a lightweight, one-man tent on mountain summits allows me to shoot in remote locations at dusk and dawn and to create images not possible by any other means.

“When I finally arrive at the summit, there’s a tremendous feeling of excitement – a combination of anticipation and trepidation. If the weather develops the way you anticipate, anything is possible. Connecting with the landscape is crucial, and I have found that spending a night in its midst is one of the best ways to appreciate its rhythm and nuances.”

With wild animal facts, life-saving tips, and heart-stopping survival stories, this pocket-sized colour book is a fantastic addition to the Horrible Geography range.

“Wild Animals is great, it’s full of facts and funny stories – I have learnt loads from the Horrible Geography books and would recommend them to anyone.” said Jamie, aged 9.

The Faded Map Lost Kingdoms of Scotland Alistair Moffat The Faded Map remembers a land that was once quiet and green. It brings to vivid life the half-forgotten kings and kingdoms of two thousand years ago, of the time of the Romans, the Dark Ages and the early medieval period. In this fascinating account, Alistair describes the landscape through which the men and women of these times moved, and talks of a Celtic society which spoke in Old Welsh, where the Sons of Prophesy ruled, and the time when the English kings of Bernicia held sway over vast swathes of what is now Scotland.

Alistair is speaking to RSGS audiences in Ayr and Helensburgh in late September, and in Dunfermline and Glasgow in early November.

HIGH A

O N V I S I

O F

LIGHT

W I L D

N D T L A S C O

Reader Offer - save 25%

Reporting Live From the End of the World David Shukman When frontline BBC reporter David Shukman switched beat from world affairs to environment, he feared he might be in for a dull life. He could not have been more wrong. His new job has seen him journeying through the fabled North West Passage, chasing after loggers in the Amazon, battling through plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean, and getting trapped in Siberian blizzards along the way. Vivid, engaging and often very funny, Reporting Live From the End of the World charts David’s extraordinary broadcasting adventures, and provides a fascinating eyewitness account of the state of the planet.

David is speaking to an RSGS audience in Dumfries in February.

Offer ends 31st December 2010.

Readers of The Geographer can purchase High Light for £22.50 (RRP £30), including FREE p&p in the UK. Order now by using the special offer code ‘Highlight2’ when ordering by email to cashsales@tbs-ltd.co.uk or by phone on 01206 255800.

IOR N PR COLI

You can help us to make connections between people, places & the planet by joining the RSGS. Please contact us at Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU, or visit www.rsgs.org

Printed by www.jtcp.co.uk on 9Lives Offset 120gsm paper. 100% FSC certified recycled fibre using vegetable based inks in a 100% chemistry free process.

High Light