Brenda Cooper's Blog, page 14

Reading Recommendation: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, by Ramez Naam

There are writers and futurists who are swimming upstream against a tide of people screaming about the sky falling. Ramez Naam is one of the them, offering practical tools and illuminating the power of imagination and initiative.

In The Infinite Resource:  The Power of Ideas on a  Finite Planet, Ramez describes a future full of prosperity and new ideas.

This is, of course, generally what has happened before. Even though the future never turns out exactly like we futurists or anyone else imagines it, our progress along the arrow of time has almost always been positive. We live longer and better lives, we live in less repressive societies, and we have more opportunities.

We still have problems.  Maybe our most serious challenges so far.  Ramez offers up solutions and plans that appear to be possible.  He tells stories about our past to illuminate how we have prevailed before, and could do so again.

One of the things I particularly liked about The Infinite Resource is that Ramez’s positions about the most functional roles for governments and businesses are very closely aligned to mine.  He makes a strong case for government regulation where it’s needed, but of the type that encourages innovation rather the stifling prescriptive regulation style that has never worked as well.  He provides examples of how good regulation has worked to make the market stronger and to encourage new businesses and business practices. He also strongly supports the power of a functional free market.  I’d call this book a celebration of  practical capitalism with a progressive agenda meant to help us protect the Earth.

Note that some of the things Ramez talks about are not popular with environmentalists, but I encourage readers to keep an open mind and do independent research.  There were a few ideas here where I had to do the same thing.

The Infinite Resource left me – an optimist – feeling even more positive about the future.

Some other ways to learn about this book:

Blog entry about the race to save the planet on Ramez’s site.  Video of Ramez talking at Ingnite Chicago.

This is one of a number of books I consider a resource for my Backing into Eden blog series.

Backing into Eden Chapter 8 – Do we save the whales or the mud snails?

I wake up for coffee and the New York Times, enjoying both in the still crack of morning when the birds greet the day with soft songs. On one such morning in the spring of last year, I was still deciding whether or not to steal valuable time from my fiction career to do this work.  An article in the Times helped to convince me.  It was entitled “To save some species, zoos must let others die.”

I thought about that article for days.  It’s obviously still with me – I found it again and linked to it below.  I encourage you to read it, and to think about it.

Early on in this series, I talked about the anthropocene extinction, which is the casual destruction of entire species of plants and animals by a single species (us). Ecocide.

Most of us aren’t even noticing.

Here are a few recently-extinct species: The Formosan clouded leopard, the eastern cougar, the western black rhinoceros.  The Japanese river otter.  The Pinta Island tortoise.

I didn’t notice any of those specifically until I looked them up.  But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

In the last chapter we talked about land use planning with an eye to the preservation of the critical resources we need to live.  There have been many successes, but we need more, and on a grander scale.

Typically, humans plan when there is a goal, and at least some risk of shortage along the way to achieving that goal.  This shortage can be will, time, resources, or raw materials.  In this case, we’re short of all of those.  That means we’re going to have to plan carefully, monitor, and make choices.

Zoos are making these choices by deciding which radically endangered species to breed and care for.  Even as they twist some of their mission to conservation, and communicate with each other all over the globe, there aren’t enough resources in all of the zoos in all of the world to save all of the animals.

They know this.  Many zoos have banded together to create what is called the Frozen Ark.  Re-usable DNA and cell samples are probably going to be critical to increase diversity in animals we are trying to save in the wild, or to restore animals after they become extinct.

But it’s even more important to do what we can to preserve biodiversity now and soon.

That’s still about making choices.  Can we save all of the whales?  Or will we need to abandon some populations of specific whales, or even whole types?  The problem is complex.  For example, scientists in the Pacific Northwest are studying the decline of killer whales in the area.  There are a lot of pressures on these beautiful beasts, and one of them may be lack of food.  The salmon they prefer are also threatened.  If we save the salmon, we might accidentally also save the whales.  If we save the whales from whale-watching boats and ocean acidification but don’t save the salmon, the whales may die anyway.

The news is not all bad.  Species are being removed from lists as well as added.  Sometimes we declare a plant or animal extinct and then find we were wrong.  We are doing a good job of protecting some habitats and of blending wild and human spaces better.  There have been increases in bald eagles, whooping cranes, and prairie dogs.

But the trend is still – strongly – to the negative.  The great work that has been done so far isn’t enough to get us out of having to make choices.

Thankfully, we probably don’t have to directly decide to kill any species.  But we may have to kill individuals of one species to save another whole species.  We do this when we weed, and when we remove non-native species to restore ecosystems to native form.  Recently, forest managers chose to kill invasive barred owls to save spotted owls in the Northwest forests.

Notice that the ethics get a little harder and a lot more complex as we move from plants to animals.  I would find it nearly impossible to shoot a barred owl to save a spotted owl.

Most of our choices have been focused on one species at a time. They have been from the heart.  Actively choosing how to spread a thin layer of money, attention, and labor across a thick layer of endangered species will be harder.

We can’t leave it all up to zoos.

We do have tools to help.  We have detailed mapping, the ability to track many kinds of animals well, and big data tools to help us grasp problems and opportunities.

We don’t yet understand all of the interdependencies such as salmon and whales (and for the salmon, storm-water management on-shore, the day-lighting of streams, and more).  The knowledge we need is growing fast, and there’s enough of it to act now. While we’re funding the science we need, it’s time to keep executing the work we’re pretty sure tilts the balance the right way (setting aside land to protect ecosystems, managing development new population ends up in the cities, de-toxifying as much as possible, managing carbon and climate change).  Maybe most important, we have to keep educating.  Projects with bad communication often fail.  We need to keep up the pressure of knowledge that forces us to act.  To notice to species we are losing and use their passing to illustrate how important it is to save what we can.

We can’t save all of the animals.  It probably wouldn’t even be smart to try. Extinction is a variable in the evolution equation.  The problem isn’t extinction per se, it’s the speed and stupidity and scale of the anthropocene extinction event that we need to turn around.  Success will be one of our defining moments as a species.  Failure, of course, means increasing our own risk of joining the extinction.

The idea of making conscious choices about what to save is profoundly disturbing and unsettling.  I believe we can save enough to thrive, to thread the needles of the near-future and come out on a side where biodiversity is growing faster than its shrinking. But this discussion skirts the edges of human hubris, and takes us perilously close to playing god when we are not that.

 

As usual, here are some of the links I’ve been following as I put this together:

To save some species, zoos must let other die, By LESLIE KAUFMAN Published: May 27, 2012, The new York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/28/science/zoos-bitter-choice-to-save-some-species-letting-others-die.html

Conservation Triage:  Say you have an ark. Which species do you save?By Michelle Nijhuis|Posted Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013, at 12:08 PM  http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/animal_forecast/2013/02/conservation_triage_which_species_should_be_saved.html  

Saving Species:  http://savingspecies.org

Peak at Swoon’s Anthropocene Extinction, Brooklyn Street Art, May 2011:  http://www.brooklynstreetart.com/theblog/2011/09/03/peak-at-swoons-anthropocene-extinction-opening-at-bostons-ica/  (This one is because art is a powerful form of education)

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species:  http://www.iucnredlist.org  and related, a pretty long list of endangered animals and plants all together – the size of the list alone is daunting:  http://www.earthsendangered.com/index.asp

The Frozen Ark:  Saving the DNA of endangered species:  http://www.frozenark.org

One Endangered Species Eats Another:  Killer  Whales and Salmon,   NOAA Fisheries, January 22, 2013: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/stories/2013/01/1_22_13killer_whale_chinook.html

Killing one Owl Species to Save Another:  NPR, June 12, 2011: http://www.npr.org/2011/06/12/137090033/killing-one-owl-species-to-save-another

Reading Recommendation: Huntress, by Malinda Lo

This came to me as an ARC from the World Fantasy convention late last year.  I brought it home and stuck it on Toni’s to-read pile since my own pile was too big with books I’d promised various people to read and a few new ones from favorite authors. Toni finished it in days, at the most.  She stayed up late in bed, reading it, keeping me  a bit awake with the light on.   Since I often like the books that she likes, I picked it up the first chance I got to add something un-required to my list.

I loved it.

Malinda has confident and easy voice, and stuffs you right into her world without so much as a by-the-by.  I like this technique when it’s executed well, and reading Malinda’s prose was quite close to experience reading Neil Gaiman’s prose.  She simply brings a magical world fully to life.

I also liked that this is unapologetically a YA with a central love relationship between two girls.  We do live in a world that’s changing, and its good to see same-sex relationships treated with respect and delight an yet not in-your-face.  Well done.

 

Backing into Eden Chapter 7 – Call for a Framework

This Sunday, I’ll hop on my bicycle at home, where we live in a charming neighborhood of older tract houses with grass lawns and flower gardens. I’ll zip down a trail beside a freeway into Redmond, the home city for Microsoft, and enter the 640 acre Marymoor park to arrive at the start of a Cascade Bicycle Club ride.  A hundred or so other riders will have driven or ridden in from the surrounding urban areas, most travelling for less than thirty minutes.  We’ll ride up a hill dotted with homes that all have land – mostly about an acre each, down the backside of that hill, and through farmland and small towns, returning to the park after riding about 60 miles.

This is possible because Washington State, and then our county (King County, which includes Seattle) did a great job of land use planning.  In 1990, the state passed the Growth Management Act (GMA), which is designed to push urban dwellers together, reduce sprawl, save farmland, and preserve open spaces and vital waterways.

The joke is that we passed the GMA because the Californians were coming, and we saw what they did to California, and didn’t want them to mess up Washington, too.

Earlier in this blog series, I established that whether we like it or not, humanity as a collective has chosen to own pretty much all of the land.  We’re using most of it.  We use it for cities, suburban housing, livestock, food crops, and public utility  like parks and national forest, roads, and sports courts.  Much of our land in Washington is now used in line with the grand plan of the GMA (although certainly not all of it).  But the uses of most places in the world are less planned, and much of the land serves short term needs at the cost of long-term human health.

Because we now have good maps, big data tools, and the internet to communicate across, we can create a vision. Once we have a vision, we can act.

In fact, environmental groups all over the world are acting.  They are setting aside land, working to protect hypercritical systems like the Amazon basin, or even sailing around on big ships risking jail to save the whales.

One way to think of all of this work is many excellent visions…working…not quite together.  At best, forces for good are in periodically cooperative competition with each other.  Most of them are not directly about land use – they’re going after it to save an animal here and a plant there, or perhaps a whole delta.

But it’s all really one coordinated system.

It’s time to agree on a framework.

We’ve spent a lot of money developing models of the whole globe in order to study climate change.  I suspect these models already include a lot of the information and structure that we need to design good land use policies.

To keep the mind-exercise small enough, lets start with the Cascadia ecosystem which includes Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and possibly parts of northern California and Idaho.  It’s already been well planned compared to much of the rest of the Earth. There is still a lot of open space.  There’s variety:  cities and mountains and rivers and ports, wineries and ranches and a lot of raging, rocky coastline.  It’s not all good. We have one of the worst superfund sites in America.

We could map out the ideal way to manage this land – design our garden if you will.  Do the GMA exercise on a larger scale.

Cities:  You’d have to put those where the cities already are and plan around them.  Any region needs cities, preferably as attractive and functional as possible.  These are economic engines and hotbeds of innovation.  Not only are urban centers a cheaper place to keep people, but they’re where most people want to live.  Over fifty-percent of the world’s population now chooses to live in cities.

Wild spaces:  We have a lot.  Keeping the ones we have is probably also a constraint. But we can certainly add to them, and if necessary we might be able to trade one for another in order to aggregate or spread out open spaces, and to protect the right land.  This is harder than it looks.  In some cases, we’ve protected pretty places that depend on vulnerable land or water we haven’t protected.

Farming:  Keep a lot of open space for farmland, but reduce it.  Use vertical farming to grow far more produce on far less land, and to farm inside cities.

This smacks of video games from Civilization to Sim City or Farmville.  Planning a world is something many humans enjoy.  If we look at Cascadia as garden plot, we’ve done quite a bit right, but we’ve also almost wiped out our salmon runs, thrown freeways down across major wildlife corridors, and soiled the beautiful Puget Sound and the great freshwater engine of the Columbia River.

Of course, this isn’t a real game and we can’t start over from scratch.  I believe we can start with what we have, and make it better.  Significantly better.

Governments have a role.  They set land use parameters, manage utilities and parks, encourage or discourage development.  Governments can (and do) use zoning and taxation and other tools to manage economic behavior.

Governments, however, are limited by their own boundaries.  They can collaborate across them (usually with great difficulty).  But non-profits are not boundary-limited. One of our regional non-profits,  ForTerra, has purchased land, encouraged swaps of development rights to move development into the cities, and created shared visions for conservation of huge swaths of land in the Cascadia region.  Perhaps even more important, they market ecological land use to people and businesses in ways that make it attractive.   Some of their major sponsors are our biggest companies.

When I’m riding through forests and farmland for hours, the idea of humans as gardeners of the world feels like pure unadulterated hubris.  But all of that land I’m riding through has allowed uses, and disallowed uses.  Because of that, I can take my pretty rides.  Between government and NGO’s (and others), we need to get about the business of creating a framing vision for land use on a grander scale than we’re used to.  I don’t mean detail-managing every piece – centralized control is devastating.  But a framework and clear principles that are flexible enough to allow for change and backed by laws would go a long way.

Understanding what we have and seeing what we want to create matters.  We know enough now to get going on that job.   Then perhaps my grandchildren will be able to take large group rides from their urban doorsteps across wild lands from wherever they live.

 

Links:

The link list is a little more eclectic than usual.  Bear with me.

The Vertical Farm:  http://www.verticalfarm.com

Where farming is headed, we don’t need soil, business insider, March 26th, 2013, Dina Spector.  http://www.businessinsider.com/farmedhere-vertical-farming-chicago-2013-3

ForTerra: http://www.forterra.org

Environment Washington:  Defending Washington’s Waters: http://www.environmentwashington.org/programs/defending-washingtons-waters

Discussion on banning architecture at The Hieroglyph Institute: http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/forums/topic/banning-agriculture

 

 

Backing into Eden Chapter 6 – What we know about the animals

When I was a child my parents loved to sail.  We travelled from the California coast to Catalina Island on weekends, and I remember one specific trip back when the waters were full of bioluminescence. Dolphins surrounded us, jumping alongside the boat in playful streaks of light.  They might have been fairies from another world. In those days, I had no idea where they came from or where they were going.  All I knew of them was the magical moments when their lives intersected mine in the same space, when a land-being leaned over the water and water-beings leapt up into the air and we could see each other.

In the last chapter of this blog, I talked about how our ever-growing compute power is helping us gain insights into complex ecosystems.  Knowing where an elephant herd is could help save them from poachers (particularly if the poachers don’t also have the same data).  Knowing how elk herds migrate can help us plan interstates in ways that keep their freeways open to them.  But good analysis depends on having good data.  In this chapter, I’ll talk about how we’re gathering that data today, and touch on how we might gather it in the future.

We all have more data than ever, and a lot of that data is about location.  Our phones broadcast our location to emergency responders.  Many of our cars can be tracked (think LoJack or OnStar).  GPS devices live on our bicycles, our wrists, and our tablets.

We own three dogs and they are all both chipped with RFID and collared with active GPS.   Neither technology is at all invasive to the dogs, although the GPS is a little invasive to us since we need to charge the little devices attached to the dog’s collars.

Our dogs are tagged with RFID and GPS.

Larger and wilder animals are also tracked with GPS collars and human minders.  For example, bears are tracked all over the world – polar bears, black bears, grizzly bears.   We learn what they eat, what they do, what other wildlife they encounter, and how they die.  While I was researching bear tracking, I came across a really wonderful art piece called Bear71 which tracks a grizzly through her whole life.  It’s a thoughtful, poetic piece that explores the difficulties for wildlife on human lands, which is essentially a part of what this blog series is about. I recommend that you actually spend the time to look at it, and to interact with it – don’t just watch.  Use your mouse.  Or your finger.  But touch the video.

So how might this kind of data actually be useful?  A recent study of tagged white sharks identified that all of the tagged sharks mated at the same location, but the population of females split in order to have their babies.  The part of the study that discussed conservation said, “If further tracking reveals that females are philopatric [return to] to very specific pupping grounds, the preservation of genetic diversity will depend upon the proper management of both the adult females and pups that support specific nursery area.”  In other words, these researchers learned that they must keep three specific sites safe in order to protect genetic diversity in white sharks.

Perhaps even more importantly, the article about sharks (linked below) is available under a Creative Commons license.  That means that the information can be fairly easily re-used and combined with other information – and big data tools – to add to our ability to understand what we could do to protect vulnerable species. In fact, exactly this conclusion was arrived at in an article about the tracking of elephant seals. “Much of the data still needs to be analyzed… But for the first time, because of the tracking, the data exists.”

We are also using other tools to gather data.  Video and still cameras provided data about starlings, and sophisticated software analyzed the positions and behavior of specific birds.  This provided new knowledge of how bird flocks are formed and how birds stay together.  And it no longer takes a lot of money to track and monitor animals with cameras.  Wildlife cameras are now common, and can even be ordered from Amazon.com for a little over $200.00.  People can set them up and use them with their home computers.  In other words, you and I or our neighbors can have motion-activated cameras to watch trails or watering holes or our own backyards.

So what about the future?  Problems with animal tracking today include catching and tagging the animals, monitoring them with human labor, battery replacement, and the animals moving out of range of the home device.  In the future, animal tracking devices could be much smaller and less invasive (more similar to the ID chips under our dog’s skin than to the much larger GPS units on their collars), or may be off of the animal altogether.  If we can watch areas and monitor who and what goes through specific locations, similar to trail cameras today, and stitch all of that information together, we might be able to see how wildlife moves without touching it.  We might be able to track a grizzly (or for that matter an elephant, a whale, or a rabbit) by its movement across grids of cheap and networked cameras and sensors rather than by invading the animal and hanging something heavy and a bit obnoxious onto it.

Virtually all of the animal tracking data that we have is recent – as we track more and more animals through their full life-cycles and multiple generations, we’ll be able to learn more about how they interact. We’re still learning how to collect data and what to do with it, and of course, it’s the doing that matters.  The tsunami of data and the power of the tools we can use to understand that data is swelling.  With luck and care, we can turn the data into knowledge to help us act, to mitigate our affect on the wild world, and to give animals a better chance as surviving the next few decades.

Thank you, and please do comment on these blog posts.  I enjoy hearing from readers.  Oh, and really, do go watch Bear71.

 

Note that there I provided a lot of links to the research I used below, since I found this topic and the reading to be particularly interesting:

The Use of Biotelemetry in the Study of Animal Migration, Melissa Hay (Department of Biology, the University of Western Ontario) & Nebel Silke (Department of Biology, the University of Western Ontario), Nature Education, 2012:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-use-of-biotelemetry-in-the-study-96639422

Tracking Polar Bears by Satellite, USGS Alaska Science Center:  http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/polar_bears/tracking.html  and realted blog post at Mapping the Marvelous by Marion, http://mappingthemarvellous.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/tracking-polar-bears

Tracking Southern Michigan’s Black Bears, By Howard Meyerson, The Grand Rapids Press, January 14, 2013 at 9:40 AM: http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/index.ssf/2013/01/tracking_southern_michigans_bl.html

Andean Bear Tracking:  http://www.andeanbear.org/bear-tracking.html

National Film Board of Canada, Bear71 http://bear71.nfb.ca/#/bear71

Two-year migration of adult female white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) reveals widely separated nursery areas and conservation concerns

Michael L Domeier* and Nicole Nasby-Lucas, Animal Biotelemtry, 2013:  http://www.animalbiotelemetry.com/content/1/1/2

A Tidal Wave of Data on Elephant Seals, By Sindya N. Bhanoo, The New York Times, May 21, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/science/seal-tagging-yields-huge-set-of-data-in-northeastern-pacific.html

Birds of a feather… track seven neighbors to flock together, Phys Org, by Anna Azvolinsky, February 8, 2013: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-birds-feather-track-neighbors-flock.html

 

Tracking A Puget Sound Orca To Northern California, OPB, Jan. 15, 2013 | AP: http://earthfix.opb.org/flora-and-fauna/article/tracking-a-puget-sound-orca-to-northern-california

Backing into Eden Chapter 6: What we know about the animals

When I was a child my parents loved to sail.  We travelled from the California coast to Catalina Island on weekends, and I remember one specific trip back when the waters were full of bioluminescence. Dolphins surrounded us, jumping alongside the boat in playful streaks of light.  They might have been fairies from another world. In those days, I had no idea where they came from or where they were going.  All I knew of them was the magical moments when their lives intersected mine in the same space, when a land-being leaned over the water and water-beings leapt up into the air and we could see each other.

In the last chapter of this blog, I talked about how our ever-growing compute power is helping us gain insights into complex ecosystems.  Knowing where an elephant herd is could help save them from poachers (particularly if the poachers don’t also have the same data).  Knowing how elk herds migrate can help us plan interstates in ways that keep their freeways open to them.  But good analysis depends on having good data.  In this chapter, I’ll talk about how we’re gathering that data today, and touch on how we might gather it in the future.

We all have more data than ever, and a lot of that data is about location.  Our phones broadcast our location to emergency responders.  Many of our cars can be tracked (think LoJack or OnStar).  GPS devices live on our bicycles, our wrists, and our tablets.

We own three dogs and they are all both chipped with RFID and collared with active GPS.   Neither technology is at all invasive to the dogs, although the GPS is a little invasive to us since we need to charge the little devices attached to the dog’s collars.

Our dogs are tagged with RFID and GPS.

Larger and wilder animals are also tracked with GPS collars and human minders.  For example, bears are tracked all over the world – polar bears, black bears, grizzly bears.   We learn what they eat, what they do, what other wildlife they encounter, and how they die.  While I was researching bear tracking, I came across a really wonderful art piece called Bear71 which tracks a grizzly through her whole life.  It’s a thoughtful, poetic piece that explores the difficulties for wildlife on human lands, which is essentially a part of what this blog series is about. I recommend that you actually spend the time to look at it, and to interact with it – don’t just watch.  Use your mouse.  Or your finger.  But touch the video.

So how might this kind of data actually be useful?  A recent study of tagged white sharks identified that all of the tagged sharks mated at the same location, but the population of females split in order to have their babies.  The part of the study that discussed conservation said, “If further tracking reveals that females are philopatric [return to] to very specific pupping grounds, the preservation of genetic diversity will depend upon the proper management of both the adult females and pups that support specific nursery area.”  In other words, these researchers learned that they must keep three specific sites safe in order to protect genetic diversity in white sharks.

Perhaps even more importantly, the article about sharks (linked below) is available under a Creative Commons license.  That means that the information can be fairly easily re-used and combined with other information – and big data tools – to add to our ability to understand what we could do to protect vulnerable species. In fact, exactly this conclusion was arrived at in an article about the tracking of elephant seals. “Much of the data still needs to be analyzed… But for the first time, because of the tracking, the data exists.”

We are also using other tools to gather data.  Video and still cameras provided data about starlings, and sophisticated software analyzed the positions and behavior of specific birds.  This provided new knowledge of how bird flocks are formed and how birds stay together.  And it no longer takes a lot of money to track and monitor animals with cameras.  Wildlife cameras are now common, and can even be ordered from Amazon.com for a little over $200.00.  People can set them up and use them with their home computers.  In other words, you and I or our neighbors can have motion-activated cameras to watch trails or watering holes or our own backyards.

So what about the future?  Problems with animal tracking today include catching and tagging the animals, monitoring them with human labor, battery replacement, and the animals moving out of range of the home device.  In the future, animal tracking devices could be much smaller and less invasive (more similar to the ID chips under our dog’s skin than to the much larger GPS units on their collars), or may be off of the animal altogether.  If we can watch areas and monitor who and what goes through specific locations, similar to trail cameras today, and stitch all of that information together, we might be able to see how wildlife moves without touching it.  We might be able to track a grizzly (or for that matter an elephant, a whale, or a rabbit) by its movement across grids of cheap and networked cameras and sensors rather than by invading the animal and hanging something heavy and a bit obnoxious onto it.

Virtually all of the animal tracking data that we have is recent – as we track more and more animals through their full life-cycles and multiple generations, we’ll be able to learn more about how they interact. We’re still learning how to collect data and what to do with it, and of course, it’s the doing that matters.  The tsunami of data and the power of the tools we can use to understand that data is swelling.  With luck and care, we can turn the data into knowledge to help us act, to mitigate our affect on the wild world, and to give animals a better chance as surviving the next few decades.

Thank you, and please do comment on these blog posts.  I enjoy hearing from readers.  Oh, and really, do go watch Bear71.

 

Note that there I provided a lot of links to the research I used below, since I found this topic and the reading to be particularly interesting:

The Use of Biotelemetry in the Study of Animal Migration, Melissa Hay (Department of Biology, the University of Western Ontario) & Nebel Silke (Department of Biology, the University of Western Ontario), Nature Education, 2012:

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-use-of-biotelemetry-in-the-study-96639422

Tracking Polar Bears by Satellite, USGS Alaska Science Center:  http://alaska.usgs.gov/science/biology/polar_bears/tracking.html  and realted blog post at Mapping the Marvelous by Marion, http://mappingthemarvellous.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/tracking-polar-bears

Tracking Southern Michigan’s Black Bears, By Howard Meyerson, The Grand Rapids Press, January 14, 2013 at 9:40 AM: http://www.mlive.com/outdoors/index.ssf/2013/01/tracking_southern_michigans_bl.html

Andean Bear Tracking:  http://www.andeanbear.org/bear-tracking.html

National Film Board of Canada, Bear71 http://bear71.nfb.ca/#/bear71

Two-year migration of adult female white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) reveals widely separated nursery areas and conservation concerns

Michael L Domeier* and Nicole Nasby-Lucas, Animal Biotelemtry, 2013:  http://www.animalbiotelemetry.com/content/1/1/2

A Tidal Wave of Data on Elephant Seals, By Sindya N. Bhanoo, The New York Times, May 21, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/science/seal-tagging-yields-huge-set-of-data-in-northeastern-pacific.html

Birds of a feather… track seven neighbors to flock together, Phys Org, by Anna Azvolinsky, February 8, 2013: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-birds-feather-track-neighbors-flock.html

 

Tracking A Puget Sound Orca To Northern California, OPB, Jan. 15, 2013 | AP: http://earthfix.opb.org/flora-and-fauna/article/tracking-a-puget-sound-orca-to-northern-california

Backing in Eden: Chapter 5 – Big Data

I write in the evenings and in the early mornings.  During the day, I’m a Chief Information Officer.  In my case, that means I’m responsible for the data and information systems for the City of Kirkland, Washington, in the USA.  The topic of the year for people in my business has moved from “cloud” to “big data.”  For those not immersed in technology on a daily basis, that means that a lot of data is now available on the Internet.  Data is also collected in large private datasets.  This includes my Amazon shopping habits, but it also includes a lot of information about the Amazon rainforest.  This data is in what is called the cloud, which really means that a lot of it is accessible.  “Big Data” is all about making that data dance about and yield up its secrets.

This is necessary if we are going to manage our natural resources.

For example, just today, the IMF announced that it thinks energy prices are too low not only in the United States but in many other countries as well.  This conclusion was based on analysis of huge datasets about the cost of gasoline around the world, the cost of extraction and delivery, and the amount and types of tax subsidies.

In January of this year, NASA released an article that warns us about the rate of forest degradation in the Amazon because of droughts caused by climate change. The article is complete with illustrative maps.  Linked from the same page are related articles on climate change predictions and rates of de-forestation (which are getting much better).

About a month ago, I attended Microsoft Research’s Techfest “Day 0” where they let customers and press in to look at some of their work.  Imagine a grown-up version of a high-school science fair.  I watched a young man who was excited about an application he had developed.  The application mapped threats (such as poaching or loss of habitat) on top habitat locations and also identified species on the “red list” of endangered species.  It accessed multiple data sets from many locations to create the single view of the world.  A few years ago, this information would have been hard to locate, the necessary data would have been invisible to most people (hidden behind corporate and government firewalls) and it would have been almost impossible to get big enough data pipes to access the data from different places across the world.

Yesterday, I was back on the Microsoft campus and I saw Excel being used to process huge datasets without almost no secret arcane computer-speak required.

Accessible big data tools means we are on our way to being able to learn some of the many things we need to know to manage ecosystems:

We’ll understand what happens at the edges of reserves and be better able to protect them so that natural processes inside of reserves can remain as undisturbed as possible.
We’ll be able to show the affects of various farming experiments.  For example, we might illustrate how GMO crops actually affect other crops (good and bad), and see the affect of GMO crops on public health data and economic indicators.
We’ll be able to track species movement due to climate change and predict possible extinctions better than we can today (which will let us make choices about whether or not to intervene, and how to intervene if we choose to).
We’ll be able to actually model the various laws that govern private property use.  This is a first step to modifying rights to support worldwide health (I never said this would be easy!).
We’ll be able to combine datasets in new ways, many of which we haven’t even thought about yet.  Perhaps it would be interesting to look at disease patterns compared to insect populations inside of metropolitan areas, or to compare air quality to disease vectors in mice all over the world.
We might map algal blooms and manatee deaths in Florida against changes in currents and surface water temperatures across the world, and run that across historical data to verify assumptions and against climate models about the future to predict mass mortality in manatees.

Big data in this context is a tool for understanding the natural world. We’ll be able to grasp cause and effect more closely, and to use actual information to help us drive hard political decisions.  Yes, I know it’s not as simple as I’m making it sound.  Verifiable data quality is going to matter a lot, as is ways to share and explain the lessons we learn.  But nevertheless, I am amazed at the possibilities.  I grew up before cell phones and in the first technology job I held, we ran a whole city on less information processing capability than I have in my watch these days.

Big data is going to drive change as fast as the Internet did, and faster than other change drivers like 3D printing and nanotechnology.  Costs are plummeting.  Speed is increasing exponentially.  Humans are curious, and this is going to be a fabulous tool in the fight to maintain our planet.

Links:

Linked Brazilian Amazon Rainforest:  http://linkedscience.org/data/linked-brazilian-amazon-rainforest/

Amazon showing signs of degradation due to climate change, Nasa warns, Jonathon Watts, Guardian.co.uk, January 18, 2013:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/18/amazon-rainforest-climate-change-nasa

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis list of Ecological and Spatial Data Sources: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/scicomp/data

The IUCN Redlist of Threatened Species: http://www.iucnredlist.org

IMF:  Gas prices don’t reflect true costs, NPR, March 28th: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/28/175550949/imf-gas-prices-dont-reflect-true-costs

Reading Recommendation: Leviathan Wakes, by James S. A. Corey

I found Leviathan Wakes to be a very enjoyable and intense SF ride with a perfect amount of tension and interest.  While it starts out as an asteroid-belt detective story, it ends up dealing with far higher stakes.  The book was full of great characterization, simple and powerful prose, and interesting events.  It captured my attention quite thoroughly.  I picked this one up as part of a reading group, but I’ve now dropped the rest of the series onto my too-read pile and I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next.   

Backing into Eden: Chapter 4 – Tools for Gardening a World

In previous essays I’ve covered the idea that we have decided to own almost all of the land on the Earth, and thus we have taken both individual and collective responsibility.  I’ve also discussed the many ways we already choose what happens on most of the land, from growing crops and livestock to living and building businesses, from establishing preserves to strip mining.  The latest entry was all about our fear that we may just not quite be up to that task.

But we can succeed, and there is already evidence of success.

First, we have information.  In general, we know far more than ever about what ecosystems exist where and how they interact with each other.  We are developing data about how they might change as a result of environmental pressures and human management or mismanagement.  For example, river ecosystems are far better understood and monitored in the Pacific Northwest since specific goals were set for salmon recovery.

Between vastly-improved geographical information services, better sensor technology, an increase in the number of tagged animals, and the advent of big data, our ability to map the garden we live in is increasing exponentially.

As a middle-grade student, I was in the 4H program and showed rabbits and horses at regional fairs.  There was never any talk of computers – just healthy feet and coats, feed options, and techniques to look good for the judges.  Today’s 4-H clubs have GIS (electronic mapping and modeling) tools available to them to help their communities with emergency preparedness, and active programs to help them understand wind and water.  The organization Conservation International showcases some of the GIS work that is being done on a global basis.

Second, we have a framework in which to make decisions. Not a perfect one, but a place to start.  Between the UN, Davos, multinational corporations and NGO’s, and the global information web, we have much of what we need and we are, in fact, using it well from time to time.  There’s a long way to go, but there is a path forward.

I read rather widely in order to support my thinking about this blog series, and one of the books I have used is “The God Species,” by Mark Lynas.  This book specifically explores our current world in light of work done at the Stockholm Environment Institute that explores planetary boundaries research.  Take 18 minutes to understand this important research and listen to an excellent TED talk on the subject. John Rockstrom on Planetary Boundaries at TED

I’m in my early fifties.  Throughout my life, I’ve seen many changes in the way we treat animals.  While some have been bad (the industrialization of egg farms, for one example), there is a relentless social pressure to gain more rights for animals and to treat them better. This is necessary if we want the commercial food chain to produce healthy meals for us.  To take it a step further, there is a growing movement to grant animals “personhood.”  This has already been done in some places for great apes and is being discussed for other animals.  The more we actually learn about animals, the less any form of cruelty seems acceptable.  .   Dogs understand fair play.  Elephants have complex and matriarchal family structures.  From better rules and laws about simple animal cruelty to more rights, there are serious changes happening in many countries to improve animal rights.

Fourth, we are gaining the global will to care for the planet.  It is one thing to have empathy and another to do something about it.  Governments all along the East Coast of the United States are working to figure out how to design more barriers to rising seawater after Sandy.  A recent USA Today Poll shows Americans are getting back around to believing that climate change matters.  Reports suggest that China is about to enact a carbon tax.  Climate change is not the only planetary boundary, but it has gotten far more media attention than the others.  Still, I meet more people lately who are also aware of the current rate of extinction, of the dangers of chemical poisons, and of ocean acidification.  Yes, I know that we aren’t doing nearly enough yet.  But there is real progress in the tools we have available to us.  In the next few chapters, I’ll dig a little deeper into once subject at a time.

I’m looking forward to what people have to say in comments or where more discussion happens – on FaceBook or Twitter.  I can be followed on twitter @brendacooper and on FaceBook at BrendaJCooper.

Backing into Eden: Chapter 3 – The Hopeless Voice

A woman came up to me after I gave a talk about the future and said “It’s nice that you say positive things to make us feel better, but you know there isn’t any hope, right?”  I’ve heard similar things after almost every talk.  Usually from one person, sometimes a few more.  Crushed words.  Sadness.  Wistfulness.  Sometimes a deep sense of loss permeates these total strangers.   This is not most of my friends or most of my conversations, but it’s a thread nonetheless.  Some days, I can even hear the same voice inside of me.  A still, small version of the hopeless voice, but a real one nonetheless.

It seemed like a good idea to just get this off of our chests.  If you don’t want to think about your fears, skip this entry and wait for the next one.  But if you need or want a chance to vent out the still small voice inside of you, feel free to let go in comments, or in your journal…

I have my own fears, and I’ll list my three biggest ones at the end of this entry.  But I decided to start by asking others.  At dinner recently, I asked the household sixteen year old what she fears about the future and the natural world.  One thing she said is that she’s afraid we will stay selfish – that we’ll think about immediate gratification instead of the long term, and that we’ll leave all of this for her generation or her children to solve.  Another fear was losing sustainability in a long list of things from animals in general to water to polar bears.  My partner expressed a fear of toxins.  “Whatever we leave behind could be ruined, could be contaminated.”  She had just heard about small nuclear reactors that were portable and is worried about spills.

I asked on Facebook, and people talked about how we’re poisoning the sea and compounding the damage by strewing it with plastic waste.  They talked about excess trash and water, and the dangers of big food.  The front cover of The Futurist magazine sports the headline “From Land Grabs to Resource Wars?  What the global competition for food, fuel, water, and other resources could mean for future security.”  Almost every day a weather-related tragedy somewhere makes headlines, and often kills people.  We are surrounded by bad news about our present that fills our view of the future with fear.

Here are my top three:

Nuclear War:  Perhaps this a product of the pointless climb under your desks, grab your ankles, and kiss you life goodbye drills I suffered as a child.  That was the 60’s.  Fifty years later, we’re still worrying. Israel is rumored to be contemplating nuke-tossing at Iran, which may be on the verge of nuclear capability.  North Korea is outright claiming to be targeting the part of the US where I live.  I am not – perhaps oddly – afraid of nuclear energy.  But I can vividly imagine a scenario where a small country in the Middle East or Africa tosses a bomb in a fit of anger, and then another one, and then another one….

Runaway Climate Change:  We don’t know where the tipping points are.  Over and over again, the wild world – the actual climate – is reacting faster than our models predict.  Sea ice is melting quicker than expected.  Methane is poised to outgas from the Arctic tundra or under the sea or both.  Probably both.  Yet we’re busy digging as much shale oil as possible out of the ground and burning it just because we can, and even though we know we shouldn’t. I feel a bit like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of cool water while the heat is on, unable to feel the slow and inexorable rise in temperature.  Unlike the frog in the pot, if we keep the heat on long enough – do enough damage to the climate – we may no longer be able to help simply by turning off the heat.

Political Freeze:  We have it here in the United States in spades.  Climate change is getting very little ink other than as a threat.  Solutions are pilloried.  Global corporations appear to be doing more damage than good via lobbying here and outright control in other places.  Financial gain for the top trumps livability for the masses.  All can be sacrificed.  The Arab Spring is a messy, messy process with an uncertain outcome.  Mexico is almost a failed state, at least near the borders with the US and many major ports.  What we need is a world governance group that can broker global issues about toxins and overfishing and carbon; what we have is a sea captain chasing Japanese whalers, a few very rich men and women working across political boundaries (think Gates and Branson and others like them), and a multitude of environmental groups doing great work, but sometimes with more faith than science and far less data and money than they need.  In America at least, we’re making decisions inside the long shadow of  a huge mistrust of science.  Maybe one of the worst tipping points we already passed is when we elected George Bush and should have elected Al Gore.

So that’s what scares me.  Feel free to talk about the things that scare you or make you hear that still small voice of despair.  In the next post, we’ll talk more ways we may be able to make our responsibility for the Earth we live on work out a little better.

Note:  There are no specific links for places I researched this entry.  There would have had to be too many, and much of it is the accumulation of essays and blog posts and articles over time, of books I’ve read and lectures I’ve attended.  Eventually I will do a post that lists the books.  In the meantime, I’m looking forward to what people have to say in blog comments or where more discussion happens – on FaceBook or Twitter.  I can be followed on twitter @brendacooper and on FaceBook at BrendaJCooper.