Richard Conniff's Blog, page 10

It’s Time for a Carbon Tax on Beef

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(Illustration: Igor Bastidas)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Let me admit up front that I would rather be eating a cheeseburger right now. Or maybe trying out a promising new recipe for Korean braised short ribs. But our collective love affair with beef, dating back more than 10,000 years, has gone wrong, in so many ways. And in my head, if not in my appetites, I know it’s time to break it off.

So it caught my eye recently when a team of French scientists published a paper on the practicality of putting a carbon tax on beef as a tool for meeting European Union climate change targets. The idea will no doubt sound absurd to Americans reared on Big Macs and cowboy mythology. While most of us recognize, according to a 2017 Gallup poll, that we are already experiencing the effects of climate change, we just can’t imagine that, for instance, floods, mudslides, wildfires, biblical droughts and back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes are going to be a serious problem in our lifetimes. And we certainly don’t make the connection to the food on our plates, or to beef in particular.

The cattle industry would like to keep it that way. Oil, gas and coal had to play along, for instance, when the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency instituted mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. But the program to track livestock emissions was mysteriously defunded by Congress in 2010, and the position of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association at the time was that the extent of the emissions was “alleged and unsubstantiated.” The association now goes an Orwellian step further, arguing in its 2018 policy book that agriculture is a source of offsets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Agriculture, including cattle raising, is our third-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, after the energy and industrial sectors. At first glance, the root of the problem may appear to be our appetite for meat generally. Chatham House, the influential British think tank, attributes 14.5 percent of global emissions to livestock — “more than the emissions produced from powering all the world’s road vehicles, trains, ships and airplanes combined.” Livestock consume the yield from a quarter of all cropland worldwide. Add in grazing, and the business of making meat occupies about three-quarters of the agricultural land on the planet.

Beef and dairy cattle together account for an outsize share of agriculture and its attendant problems, including almost two-thirds of all livestock emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. That’s partly because there are so many of them — 1 billion to 1.4 billion head of cattle worldwide. They don’t outnumber humanity, but with cattle in this country topping out at about 1,300 pounds apiece, their footprint on the planet easily outweighs ours.

[image error]The emissions come partly from the fossil fuels used to plant, fertilize and harvest the feed to fatten them up for market. In addition, ruminant digestion causes cattle to belch and otherwise emit huge quantities of methane. A new study in the journal Carbon Balance and Management puts the global gas output of cattle at 120 million tons per year. Methane doesn’t hang around in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide. But in the first 20 years after its release, it’s 80 to 100 times more potent at trapping the heat of the sun and warming the planet. The way feedlots and other producers manage manure also ensures that cattle continue to produce methane long after they have gone to the great steakhouse in the sky.

The French researchers, from the Toulouse School of Economics, decided to take a look at a carbon tax on beef because the European Union has committed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions more than half by midcentury — and that includes agricultural emissions. The ambition is to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, widely regarded as a tipping point at which cascading and potentially catastrophic effects of climate change could sweep across the planet. Their study found that a relatively steep tax, based on greenhouse gas emissions, would raise the retail price of beef by about 40 percent and cause a corresponding drop in consumption, much like the sugar tax on sodas and the tax on tobacco products.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to put a carbon tax on fossil fuel, a larger source of greenhouse gas emissions? You bet. But many people who now commute in conventional gas-fueled automobiles have no better way to get home — or to heat their homes when they get there. That broader carbon tax will require dramatically restructuring our lives. A carbon tax on beef, on the other hand, would be a relatively simple test case for such taxes and, according to the French study, only a little painful, at least at the household level: While people would tend to skip the beef bourguignon, they could substitute other meats, like pork and chicken, that have a much smaller climate change footprint.

The tax would also reduce the substantial contribution of beef and dairy cattle to water pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss and human mortality. (A 2012 Harvard School of Public Health study found that adding a single serving of unprocessed red meat per day increases the risk of death by 13 percent.) Those factors have already driven down beef consumption in the United States by 19 percent since 2005.

Zohra Bouamra-Mechemache, a co-author of the French study, readily acknowledged that the proposed carbon tax on beef has no chance of becoming reality, “not even in Europe” and certainly not in the United States. Our politicians continue to regard the beef industry as, well, a sacred cow. And even if the rest of us acknowledge the reality of climate change, we tend to put off actually doing much about it in our own lives. It’s a J. Wellington Wimpy philosophy: We want our hamburgers today, on a promise to pay on some future Tuesday, probably in our grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Still, the idea of a carbon tax on beef makes me think. I crave the aroma of beef, from a burger, or a barbecue brisket cooked low and slow. It’s just harder to enjoy it now when I can also catch the faint whiff of methane lingering 20 years into our increasingly uncertain future.

Bill McKibben: Green Mountain Man

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Bill McKibben (Photo: Mark Teiwes / Lesley University)

by Richard Conniff/Yankee Magazine

It’s a mid-September afternoon, and Bill McKibben—author, climate change activist, nemesis of the fossil fuel industry, cross-country skiing addict, devotee of small-town New England life, and drinker of local beers, in more or less that order—is at the wheel of his electric-blue plug-in hybrid, heading north out of Providence.

He and his wife, writer Sue Halpern, have been away from their home in the Green Mountains outside Middlebury overnight, on a trip to promote his first novel, Radio Free Vermont. It’s a funny book, and McKibben is not known for funny books. Well, it’s funny unless you happen to be a Walmart manager: McKibben starts his fable with small-town renegades flooding a new Walmart store knee-deep with the contents of the local sewer system. (Oh, come on, that’s funny.) And it’s funny unless you think there is something deeply alarming about Vermont seceding from the bigness and manifold badness of the United States at large. McKibben says the independent Republic of Vermont is just a plot device, not a movement. But his passion for his home state is genuine. As he hits the on-ramp out of Providence, he is almost quavering in anticipation of getting back.

[image error]McKibben is, of course, better known for books that are genuinely alarming. Climate change is his subject, both as an author and an activist. Fellow climate journalist Andrew Revkin describes him as “the ultimate endurance athlete of climate campaigning.” In a series of books and articles beginning with The End of Nature in 1989, McKibben has meticulously laid out the evidence that the rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, from our massive burning of fossil fuels, is destroying the world as we once knew it. “The basic issue of the planet right now,” he told Revkin in a recent interview, “is that it’s disintegrating.” He refers to “my last grim book,” as if grim books were a genre, and has described his life after The End of Nature as 25 years of “sadness” and of “looking for ways out, for places that work.”

For McKibben, Vermont is one such place. Even in his grim books, he writes yearningly, sentimentally, about the maple cream cookies that a neighbor brings to the annual town meeting, about stopping to visit “the farm of the six Dutch brothers,” about “the sun shining through the winter-bare ridge at dusk,” and about the consoling mantra of local names—Camel’s Hump, Bread Loaf Mountain, Otter Creek—with which he lulls himself to sleep while on the road. The mountainous country around Lake Champlain, he writes, is “the landscape that fits with jigsaw precision into the hole in my heart.”

Vermont is also, however, what transformed him from author to activist and led him reluctantly to spend much of his life away from home. The turning point, he says as he heads north on 95 across Massachusetts, was a five-day protest march for climate action, from his hometown of Ripton to Burlington, in 2006. “We slept in fields,” he recalls, and had potluck suppers at Methodist churches along the way, “potluck suppers being their sacrament.”

He meant the protest to be a one-time thing, “but when I got to Burlington, 1,000 people were marching with us, and in Vermont, 1,000 people is a lot of people,” he says. “But what was amazing was to read the story in the paper the next day.” It was 17 years after The End of Nature, and nine years after passage of the Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement on climate change. An overwhelming abundance of scientific evidence had demonstrated the reality of climate change and the human role in causing it. And yet a newspaper story was describing 1,000 people walking across Vermont as the largest U.S. demonstration ever against climate change. It dawned on McKibben that writing books and making meticulous arguments wasn’t enough.

“It was blindingly obvious that we had all the things you need for a movement,” says McKibben. “We had the scientists, the policy people, the concerned citizens—everything except the movement. So it was clear that we needed to do it, and we needed to do it around the world.” Together with a small band of students at Middlebury College, where he was a scholar in residence, McKibben went on to found 350.org. They took the name from the maximum carbon dioxide concentration, in parts per million, that scientists say the atmosphere can handle without spinning the planet into chaos. (The CO² concentration today is somewhere above 400 parts per million, up from 280 in the preindustrial era, and as it rises, chaos has become our daily news, in the form of droughts, floods, wildfires, rapidly warming oceans, and back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes.)

The walk across Vermont also taught McKibben the value of shaping protests, even using “smoke and mirrors,” he says, to achieve an impact beyond mere numbers. “We did 1,000 people in Vermont. If we had done 5,000 people in New York City, it would have been worse than doing nothing.” So for its first effort, 350.org orchestrated 5,200 simultaneous demonstrations around the world. Some of them attracted as few as 10 people, others thousands, but the global synchrony of the effort made it news everywhere, and CNN later quoted the organizers calling it “the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history.”

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(Photo: South Bend Voice)

Creative protest became McKibben’s new specialty. Among other events, he led thousands of people in forming a human chain around the White House in 2011, to persuade President Barack Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline. McKibben was arrested, along with 1,252 other protesters, in “the biggest civil disobedience action” in decades, he writes. When he got around to organizing a climate march in New York City, in 2014, it attracted not 5,000 people but more than 300,000—plus hundreds of thousands more in simultaneous protests in 156 countries around the world.

Now 57, McKibben has become the public face of the climate movement worldwide. At 6 foot 2 and 180 pounds, with a slight scholar-athlete hunch, he does not look the part of the political firebrand. His hair has receded to a few close-cropped islands of gray above a high, narrow forehead; deep-set eyes; and a long, slightly protuberant upper lip, the mouth habitually drawn down at the corners. It is the haunted face of a Norwegian minister who cannot quite get eternal damnation out of his mind.

But McKibben is also capable of making the odd quip on our path to hell, and he has proved to be an adept public speaker—deeply informed, entertaining, and unflappable. During McKibben’s 2011 appearance on The Colbert Report, host Stephen Colbert, in his right-wing-pundit persona, asked him, “You’re from Vermont? Did you ride your bicycle down here? Did you drive an oxcart down here? How’d you get down here? Do you have a vehicle that runs on hypocrisy?” Smiling, McKibben replied, “There is no doubt that I am a hypocrite,” and then added his hope that the work of organizing a global movement against climate change would ultimately repay the necessity of “spewing carbon behind me as I went.”

Inevitably, McKibben’s car runs, like most of our cars, mainly on gas, albeit with a little boost from electricity, and the first stop north of Providence is a gas station in Lexington, Massachusetts. This also gives McKibben a chance to explain the origins of his belief in the value of resistance. He grew up in this town, around its battle green, where local militia in April 1775 first stood up to British troops. In high school, McKibben passed a history test that allowed him to serve as a licensed guide for tourists, holding out his tricorn hat afterward for tips.

[image error]“I told the story of the American Revolution hundreds of times,” he says. He points out the statue of John Parker, commander of the local militia, and repeats the passionate cry attributed to him, “If they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” The British won the first victory of the Revolutionary War in Lexington, killing eight local men, McKibben recounts, and then marched on to Concord, where “they suffered the first defeat.” He seems most engaged by the British retreat back through Lexington, “where the Americans first figured out guerrilla warfare. The British thought it was very unsporting.” The lesson he took away, he says, was “that ordinary citizens were supposed to play a role in the political and civic life of the nation.” A taste for guerrilla tactics may also have adhered.

In 1971, when McKibben was just 10 years old, John Kerry led a Vietnam Veterans Against the War contingent to town, staging “guerrilla theater” antiwar events en route from Concord to Boston. But Lexington’s selectmen, “who were more conservative than the people,” says McKibben, ordered the veterans to come into town single file and denied them permission to camp on the battle green. McKibben’s father, a business journalist, was one of the sympathetic townspeople who went out to join the veterans on the green that night. “All 500 were arrested, taken to the DPW garage, held till 4 a.m., and had to pay a $5 fine,” McKibben recalls. “They were home by breakfast—but it made a big impression on me.”

He turns the corner and points to the offices of the Lexington Minuteman, where he began his career as a writer. In junior high school, he worked as a stringer reporting school sports. “At 25 cents an inch,” he recalls, not too ruefully, “I could make the description of a basketball game go on a long time.”

But Vermont irresistibly beckons, and as he turns the car back onto the highway north, the conversation shifts away from the Boston suburbs and toward the value of small-town life. McKibben lived in New York City for five years after college, writing “Talk of the Town” pieces for The New Yorker. But in 1987, he and Halpern, then newlyweds, bid good-bye to the city for the wildness of the Lake Champlain region. Their first stop, in the New York Adirondacks, “was a very rural, sort-of-forgotten town,” Halpern interjects from the back seat. “Not the sort of place people summer in. Bill got involved with the Methodist church. It was falling on hard times, and he agreed to teach Sunday school. He even got me involved—which is hysterical, because I’m Jewish.” Halpern also worked on building a local library from scratch (an experience that she relocated to Riverton, New Hampshire, for her own new novel, Summer Hours at the Robbers Library). Going all-in, she says, “was our gateway into the community.”

It was the same, adds McKibben, when they moved 50 miles across the lake, to Vermont, in search of a better school for their daughter. “There’s this whole mythology that you can’t be a Vermonter for seven generations, and we found that was not true,” he says. “If you are willing to work on things other people are not wanting to do, and if you’re careful not to boss people around, or tell them how to do things, they accept you.

“Neighbors have been optional in much of America for the past 50 or 60 years, but they’re not optional in rural places,” he continues. “My belief is that they are not going to be optional for anybody before long. They’re not optional in Florida this week. Or in Houston.” Hurricanes Irma and Harvey had just devastated those two areas; Maria was still two days away from demolishing Puerto Rico. “The old American idea that you can get by on your own is beginning to alter.”

As we head out past the Boston exurbs of southern New Hampshire, McKibben’s undercurrent of restless anticipation seems to strengthen, as if he is beaming down some special North Star energy. “It gets comfortable around Concord,” he promises. “Everything thins out.” And then, leaving Concord behind, he adds, “Just about here we are starting to feel we’re escaping the gravitational pull of the megalopolitan region.” A little later, he and Halpern make their ritual pause at the Methodist Hill rest stop in Enfield, New Hampshire, just before the bridge into Vermont, as if they are about to enter the Promised Land.

McKibben says he noodled around for years with his new novel, partly a New England homage to Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, a celebrated 1970s account of environmental renegades taking on bulldozers and dam builders in the American West. The triumph of Donald Trump and an administration that largely rejects climate change science pushed him to publish now, McKibben writes, with the moral that “when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster.”

[image error]But Radio Free Vermont is also plainly a love letter to the state that sustains McKibben as he struggles with what he flatly terms “the end of the world.” The enormity of that “floored me for a while,” he says of his early years working on climate change. “I was depressed for quite a while. And now I have, to some degree, come to terms with that. The angst is familiar by now.” Humor and entertainment still help take off the edge. “And to be out in the woods whenever I am home is, for me, essential.”

So the new book features a band of aging cross-country skiers and a 72-year-old radio announcer with a fondness for reporting high school sports. There’s a woman who runs the School for New Vermonters (teaching retired but self-important doctors and lawyers how to fell a tree, drive through mud, and volunteer with the local fire department). There’s lots of knowledgeable talk about Vermont microbrews (“Did you know we had more breweries per capita than any place on Earth?” a character asks), plus a truck-jacking ambush that involves dumping 4,800 bottles of Coors Light (and recycling the empties). There’s also a socially awkward young technology whiz with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music: At one point, to inspire followers, he proposes playing any of three versions of “Get Up, Stand Up (for Your Rights)”— by Bob Marley, or Peter Tosh, or Toots and the Maytals, “but really not the Tracy Chapman version, I don’t think.” It’s an unexpected bit of dialogue to have been penned by the leader of the climate movement.

McKibben’s rebels travel under a slogan from Ethan Allen, the original Green Mountain Boy: “The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills.” And it becomes clear that the gods of the hills are McKibben’s gods, too. “When November came and the days grew short, his mood always began to soar,” he writes, attributing the thought to the radio announcer leading the Vermont secession movement. But what comes hammering through is McKibben’s own passion for winter and for cross-country skiing. “Cold meant snow and ice, and snow and ice meant: sliding. Meant the annual exemption from friction, meant that a solid Vermont farmboy became fast and agile. Graceful almost…. It was the sheer painful pleasure of charging fast uphill on a pair of skis, legs pistoning, lungs sucking in air, skis slamming against a hard track.… It never stopped seeming unlikely and magical to him, the way friction just quit, and gravity turned from adversary to ally.”

McKibben’s passion for cross-country skiing is hardly a secret. When he was 37 and in need of “a break from failing to save the world,” he wrote a book, Long Distance, about undertaking a brutal training regimen meant to turn him into a world-class athlete in a year. When the year ended, he kept at it, and what’s surprising is the degree to which it still defines his life. He says he tries to confine his climate change appearances now to spring and fall, and to stay home in the colder months, when, friends say, he can get in more than 100 days a year of skiing. “His love of skiing is pretty legendary,” Andrew Gardner, a Middlebury publicist and professional cross-country skier, later notes. “He’ll call and say, ‘Hey, there’s a half an inch of snow on a field’ that’s barely slideable, and he’ll go ski on it, and I won’t. He has a hard time slowing down, and I don’t think he’d take on the work that he’s doing without that.” McKibben, he adds, “doesn’t socialize normally, doesn’t sit down and chill out.” If he’s going to talk, it will be while he’s skiing, or on a hike, “not sitting in a chair and calmly looking,” but always moving, and usually moving hard. “He has a ridiculously hot nervous system, and that fire gets put out by skiing. It takes him down to a place where he can be sort of comfortable.”

The irony of having chosen cross-country skiing as his distraction and his consolation, as McKibben himself volunteers, is that “no recreation on earth is more vulnerable to climate change.” It’s almost as if the haunted Norwegian minister in him has deliberately chosen a diversion that keeps damnation in front of his eyes. “But no glide now,” he has a character in the novel declare, “and not much for the last few years. The globe had warmed faster and harder than anyone had ever predicted.… He knew he should have been worrying about the people in Bangladesh busy building dikes to keep the sea at bay—but these warm muddy winters were what really bothered him about the change. No glide, just the suck of mud on his boots.”

The drive north takes McKibben and Halpern through Bethel and Rochester, Vermont, river towns submerged by the epic 2011 floods caused by Hurricane Irene. They point out the landmarks of destruction with a certain traumatized awe. A bridge collapse there. That playing field up to your shins with silt.

“Most politicians don’t yet understand that we have to move very, very quickly,” he is saying. The usual political process is to “meet somewhere in the middle and come back in 10 years to see how it’s working. We don’t normally want dramatic change that causes all kinds of economic loss. But my mantra on this has become ‘winning slowly on climate change is just another way of losing.’”

He is on his talking points now, saying things he has written and said before, and will need to say many times again. As an aside, he says, “There is something disconcerting for a writer, repeating the same message over and over, which is not what you set out to do.” A friend, Middlebury newspaper editor Angelo Lynn, later says, “Bill’s not Bernie Sanders. He doesn’t love the limelight. He would rather be writing his books and holed up in Ripton and have that change the world. But it didn’t work out that way; that’s not the life he got called to.” The life McKibben got called to, moreover, is unlikely to let go of him anytime soon. “If you’ve been as all-in as Bill has been for so long,” says Halpern, “there’s no way you can say, ‘I’m done with this.’ The thing about Bill is that he has really good ideas.” She runs through a list of inventive political actions McKibben has instigated to keep the climate movement growing. “If he stopped thinking up these things, that would be a great loss,” she concludes. “And I don’t think he can.”

“The problem with climate change,” McKibben continues, “is that it’s not between two groups of people, but between people and physics, which is uninterested in compromise, unmoved by spin, uncaring that your economy is at a weak point. It means you are going to have to meet the terms of physics, and that means we have to move fast, possibly faster than we know how.” The great hope, he says, is that public alarm about climate change will lead to outspoken and urgent demand for action. And the great fear is that this is a timed test, with President Trump and his gang of climate skeptics running minutes off the clock that the planet can never recover.

But just then the roads become steeper and the forested hills turn mountainous, and McKibben says, with a kind of possessive delight, “This is our country now. We’re going to climb up onto the ridge of the Green Mountains.” A little later, driving up the dirt road to their house, he sighs and says, “There will be a time in November when there will be snow on the ground from here on up the hill.” The leaves have just begun to turn. “Oh, and they’re really starting to pop!” he says. It’s as if he has been away for weeks, not overnight.

They arrive at the board-and-batten house they built years ago—he calls it “a big screen porch with a few rooms attached,” plus a battery of solar cells on the roof and in the yard. Bill McKibben is home and, at least for the moment, no longer in motion.

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Richard Conniff is an award-winning writer for magazines and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His books include House of Lost Worlds (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Species Seekers (W. W. Norton, 2010).

Guns Kill Kids in Cities, Too. Green Spaces Could Be Part of the Fix.

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Before treatment.

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After

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Outrage over school shootings has dominated headlines, not just because the victims are children, but also because the shootings occur so randomly and in places—Parkland, FL, Newtown, CT– where it once seemed such a thing could never happen.

It’s harder to stir a national debate about the persistent and far larger problem of gun homicides in the nation’s poorest urban neighborhoods, even though more children die in urban gun violence than in school shootings. Maybe it’s just too predictable to hold our attention: The gun violence is extraordinarily concentrated, with a handful of neighborhoods in the nation’s 10 largest cities accounting for 30 percent of all gun homicides nationwide.

Now, though, it appears that predictability and geographic concentration could actually make urban gun violence easier to prevent.  For Columbia University epidemiologist Charles Branas, one answer is a relatively simple and inexpensive infrastructure improvement, involving derelict or abandoned city lots. Such lots add up to about 7.5 million acres of land and about 15 percent of the area of cities nationwide—and significantly higher percentages in mid-size cities like Flint, Michigan, or Camden, NJ.

Derelict lots often become the setting for drug dealing and other criminal behaviors and thus function as a primary threat to the health and safety of nearby residents, according to Branas, lead author of a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  He and his co-authors liken efforts to clean up these lots to the nineteenth-century public investment in sewage treatment and clean water systems as a means of curbing epidemic diseases and making cities livable.  Instead of cholera, says Branas, the “contagion” this time is urban gun violence, which he says spreads—and can be interrupted in its course—like any other epidemic.

For the new study, Branas and his co-authors looked at 541 vacant lots in randomized clusters across the entire city of Philadelphia, which has one of the highest murder rates in the nation. The study, supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, assigned each cluster to one of three experimental options: a control group (meaning no treatment), a basic cleanup, or a “cleaning and greening” treatment, including installation of a lawn, a few trees, and a low perimeter fence “to show that the lot was cared for and to deter illegal dumping.”

The study describes conditions, in the worst neighborhoods, that make the two treatment options seem at first like improbable remedies. Some of the vacant lots being cleaned up were  crisscrossed by footpaths to drug “shooting galleries.” Some were in areas where dealers were paying “weekly rent” as high as $5000 to drug bosses for “the right to sell on blocks where inhabited row homes were interspersed with vacant properties,” according to the study. Against these odds, even the more expensive treatment, cleaning and greening, cost just $9300 for a typical 1000-square-foot lot, and about $50 a year for maintenance thereafter.  And yet both treatments made a measurable difference for local residents.

In response to survey questions –which made no mention of vacant lots–residents in low-income neighborhoods that received the “cleaning and greening” treatment reported a 15.8 decrease in their perception of crime incidence and a 61.9 percent increase in their willingness to relax and socialize outdoors. More impressively, police records for the 18-month period following the cleanup showed a 9.1 percent decrease in gun assaults in those neighborhoods, together with significant decreases in burglaries and nuisance complaints.  When the researchers re-analyzed their data to weed out areas where the lots failed for one reason or another to maintain their assigned treatment, they found a 29.1% decrease in gun violence in neighborhoods where the vacant lots had remained clean. It was such a significant improvement that the funding agencies for the study paid for the 150 lots in the control group to receive the cleaning-and-greening treatment. If extended to vacant lots city-wide, the authors write, that treatment would translate into 350 fewer shootings a year in Philadelphia alone.

The link between greenery and crime prevention is of course not new. Anti-crime initiatives have for decades pushed to clear dense vegetation as potential hiding places and to trim trees to create clear lines of sight. Then a landmark 2001 study of Chicago public housing projects turned greenery into a tool for crime prevention, showing that trees and greenspaces seemed to reduce crime rates by bringing out residents and putting more eyes on the street.  But evidence that greening actually causes a reduction in crime has proved elusive, making it harder to push for public action–until now.

The new study is the first to use a randomized experimental protocol to test the effect of greening on crime. “We knew that violence is generally lower in low-income urban neighborhoods when they’re greener, and we knew that reductions in violence tend to follow greening efforts,” says Ming Kuo, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign specialist on how the physical environment affects human behavior, who was not involved in the new study. “But we didn’t know if the greening was actually responsible for the reduction in violence. Now we know. This is a great advance—one the field has been waiting for. I don’t know if there is much point in asking a scientist what arguments a politician will find compelling. But from a scientific point of view, this should persuade city governments to try. I think it’s fair to say we don’t know for sure that this will have the same effects in every community—but the evidence we have suggests it should.”

Branas notes that cleaning-and-greening vacant lots does not “affect legal gun owner rights,” meaning groups that are otherwise divided by the bitter debate over gun control could agree together to implement such programs as a politically acceptable strategy to reduce gun violence. But Mark S. Kaplan, a public health researcher at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, who was not involved in the study, cautions that such programs “need to be done alongside other things. You have to address the question of social and economic inequality, and greenspace alone is not going to fix that.”  A major reduction in urban gun assaults is unlikely, he adds, “without regulation of the guns that are contributing to the violence.”

Oddly, though, a strength of the new study could just be its minimal approach to larger social and economic inequities: The risk in fixing too many things too fast is that it may attract developers, trigger gentrification, and drive out long-time residents.  Branas and his co-authors worried enough about that possibility that they added a study-within-the-study to check that any improvements they measured weren’t the result of gentrification.  But cleaning and greening vacant lots might be just enough, Kaplan suggests, to bring some sense of ownership and neighborhood identity to those communities, so they can push together for larger improvements—better schools, improved sanitation—and remain in the neighborhood to enjoy them afterwards.

For Branas, one of the most poignant moments in the study—and perhaps the beginning of that neighborhood identity—was the experience of having residents venture out from behind locked doors to greet the works crews as they arrived to clean up derelict lots.  “And they said, ’We called you about this 30 years ago! I can’t believe you’ve finally come to do this!’ Thinking that we were the city of Philadelphia.”

END

Richard Conniff is an award-winning writer for magazines and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His books include House of Lost Worlds (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Species Seekers (W. W. Norton, 2010).

 

 

How Forest Certification Fails

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Logging in tiger habitat (Photo: Anatoly Kabanets / WWF-Russia)

When the Forest Stewardship Council got its start in 1993, it seemed to represent a triumph of market-based thinking over plodding command-and-control government regulation. Participants in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit had failed to reach agreement on government intervention to control rampant tropical deforestation. Instead, environmental organizations, social movements, and industry banded together to establish a voluntary system for improving logging practices and certifying sustainable timber.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) soon set standards that seemed genuinely exciting to environmental and social activists, covering the conservation and restoration of forests, indigenous rights, and the economic and social well-being of workers, among other criteria. For industry, FSC certification promised not just a better way of doing business, but also higher prices for wood products carrying the FSC seal of environmental friendliness.

A quarter-century later, frustrated supporters of FSC say it hasn’t worked out as planned, except maybe for the higher prices: FSC reports that tropical forest timber carrying its label brings 15 to 25 percent more at auction. But environmental critics and some academic researchers say FSC has had little or no effect on tropical deforestation. Moreover, a number of recent logging industry scandals suggest that the FSC label has at times served merely to “greenwash” or “launder” trafficking in illegal timber:

In a 2014 report, Greenpeace, an FSC member, slammed the organization for standing by as FSC-certified loggers ravaged the Russian taiga, particularly the Dvinsky Forest, more than 700 miles north of Moscow. Greenpeace accused FSC-certified logging companies there of “wood-mining” forests the way they might strip-mine coal, as a nonrenewable resource, and of harvesting “areas that are either slated for legal protection or supposed to be protected as a part of FSC requirements.”

In 2015, the U.S. flooring company Lumber Liquidators pleaded guilty to smuggling illegal timber from the last habitat of the Siberian tiger in the Russian Far East. Its main supplier of solid oak flooring was a Chinese company named Xingjia, which held an FSC “chain of custody” certification, meaning it was licensed to handle FSC-certified timber. According to an investigator in the case, another Chinese company marketing to the United States offered to put an FSC label on illegal wood flooring in exchange for a 10 percent markup.
In Peru, investigators determined in 2016 that more than 90 percent of the timber on two recent shipments bound from the Amazon to Mexico and the U.S. was of illegal origin. In what it called an “unprecedented enforcement action,” the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative last October banned the main exporter in those shipments from the U.S. market. That company, Inversiones La Oroza, still boasts on its website that it “complies with the principles and criteria of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),” though FSC finally suspended its certification in 2017.

The cases in China, Peru, and Romania all resulted from undercover operations by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “We didn’t mean to go after FSC,” says David Gehl, that group’s Eurasia programs coordinator. FSC just kept turning up in the same places as a lot of illegal logging, he says. Many logging companies … To read the full article, click here.

Gaining Ground in the Fight to Stop Illegal Logging

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Illegal logging of Spanish cedar along the Las Piedras River, Madre de Dios, Peru. (Photo: Andre Baertschi)

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

Strange as it may sound, we have arrived at a moment of hope for the world’s forests. It is, admittedly, hope of a jaded variety: After decades of hand-wringing about rampant destruction of forests almost everywhere, investigators have recently demonstrated in extraordinary detail that much of this logging is blatantly illegal.

And surprisingly, people actually seem to be doing something about it. In November, the European Court of Justice put Poland under threat of a 100,000-euro-per-day fine for illegal logging in the continent’s oldest forest, and last month Poland’s prime minister fired the environment minister who authorized the logging.

In Romania, two big do-it-yourself retail chains ended purchasing agreements with an Austrian logging giant implicated in illegal logging there. And in this country, the Office of the United States Trade Representative, normally dedicated to free trade at any cost, has barred a major exporter of Peruvian timber from the American market after repeated episodes of illegal shipments.

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The Yacu Kallpa (Photo: EIA)

The recent history of a container ship called the Yacu Kallpa is a good example of the push to stop illegal logging. Along with its predecessors, it ran a regular route for decades from the river town of Iquitos, Peru, to Houston, delivering millions of board feet of stolen timber from the Amazon to unwitting American consumers.

Corrupt government agents and the black market happily provided transport documents to draw a veil of fictitious legality over whatever came floating down the river from the Amazon forest. Or as one exporter shipping timber on the Yacu Kallpa put it to an undercover investigator from the nonprofit Global Witness, “This tree miraculously becomes legal timber, just because of a piece of paper.” Exporters could point to that piece of paper and claim to be merely “buyers in good faith.”

That make-believe mind-set sufficed until Peru’s customs service and its forest watchdog agency, together with investigators from the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency, tried to connect export shipments back to their reported harvest sites and found that almost none of the timber came from anyplace legal. [UPDATE: EIA this week published a new report, available in English or Spanish, on the illegal logging crisis in Peru.]

Acting on that information, United States federal agents met the Yacu Kallpa at the dock in Houston in September 2015 and seized 71 shipping containers of timber worth more than $1 million. Investigators would later determine that 92 percent of the timber on that shipment was illegal. The Yacu Kallpa then simply turned around and tried to do it again.

“People are doing these things because they know they can,” said Laura Furones, leader of the Peru campaign at Global Witness. “The level of impunity is astonishing.”

Indeed, on that next and final Yacu Kallpa shipment, 96 percent of the timber was illegal, according to investigators in Peru, putting the Iquitos-to-Houston connection out of business. That was also the basis for the trade representative’s barring of the Peruvian exporter La Oroza. Federal prosecutors in this country and Peru are now conducting criminal investigations against more than 100 people in the Yacu Kallpa case, including American importers that also relied on the “buyer in good faith” fiction.

The last time the Department of Justice prosecuted a major illegal logging case, in 2016, the culprit, Lumber Liquidators, paid a $13.1 million fine. But no company executives have gone to jail for trafficking in stolen timber. And the sort of scrutiny applied in the Lumber Liquidators and the Yacu Kallpa cases is still the rare exception.

So where’s the hope? This may sound naïve, but making the illegality so blatantly obvious ought to drive the timber industry to clean up its own act. Failing that, technology will start to do the job for them. One way to bring the worldwide epidemic of stolen forests under control, according to Alexander von Bismarck, executive director of the Environmental Investigation Agency, would be to require timber concession holders to register their trees in a public database. Every logging truck would then have to report by cellphone, before leaving the forest, which trees it is carrying. The ambition is traceability, right through to the finished product in the consumer’s local big box store or lumberyard. It sounds cumbersome, Mr. von Bismarck admits, except when the alternative is a trade made up of more than 90 percent stolen goods.

In fact, such a system already exists in Romania. A simple app called Forest Inspector, released through the Ministry of Environment there, enables users to type in the license plate number of any logging truck on the road and get an immediate answer: This shipment is legal, meaning the cargo is registered with a national database of approved harvest sites. Or it’s illegal, meaning the police can stop it and confiscate both the cargo and the truck.

In the first 10 days after release of the app in 2016, 30,000 people filed reports on logging trucks. Overnight, the number of trucks applying for permits and registering their loads increased by 50 percent. It wasn’t because loggers suddenly started cutting more trees, Mr. von Bismarck said, but because “they felt they were really being watched.”

That feeling will soon intensify, because of recent developments in Earth-orbiting satellites. Early last year, for instance, the high-tech aerospace company Planet completed a constellation of 149 bread-loaf-size satellites, which can now scan every point on Earth several times a week to monitor short-term changes in forest cover.

In Romania, for instance, some logging outfits soon figured out a way to beat the Forest Inspector system, by sending shipping containers into the forest. “They load the raw logs directly into the container and off they go to China, so no one can see on the road that it is a logging truck,” said Micu Bogdan, a consultant to the Romanian Ministry of Environment.

In response, the ministry began to continually scan the entire country with three satellites and superimposed all new logging cuts on a map of legal cuts. A new cut would typically takes weeks to complete, Mr. Bogdan said, and we could “spot an illegal cut in two days.” Mr. von Bismarck and Mr. Bogdan are negotiating agreements to introduce a similar system in Peru.

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Logs awaiting export in the Peruvian Amazon (Photo: EIA)

Even if the means are at hand to protect forests, political will remains a question. In Romania a change in government led to a suspension in satellite monitoring, and in Peru government leaders did not back up their own investigators in the Yacu Kallpa case. Instead, the president at the time, Ollanta Humala, ousted one of the leaders of the investigation.

Peruvian officials also intervened to secure release of the stolen timber in the Yacu Kallpa’s final shipment after Mexican authorities impounded it in January 2016. And this past week, the government approved new road building in pristine regions of the Amazon, potentially endangering three national parks and also several reserves belonging to indigenous people living in voluntary isolation from the outside world.

In this country, the Trump administration does not appear naturally inclined to pursue criminal charges against traffickers in stolen timber. The American timber industry has, however, made it clear that it would welcome such a prosecution. A study by an association of domestic timber producers estimated that competition from illegal imported timber was costing them $1 billion a year — and that was in 2004.

Consumers might also welcome rescue from the lingering suspicion that every time they buy a wood product, from a picture frame to a house, they are unwittingly subsidizing illegal logging. It can happen to any of us.

Ask Donald Trump. According to Mr. von Bismarck, doors manufactured a few years ago with mahogany stolen from a Unesco World Heritage Site in Honduras ended up in Mar-a-Lago.

END

Richard Conniff is an award-winning writer for magazines and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His books include House of Lost Worlds (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Species Seekers (W. W. Norton, 2010).

 

The Deadly Myth of Clean Coal

With Donald Trump preaching the myth of “clean coal,” this piece from 2008 is timely again. Profitable lies, like cats, seem to have multiple lives.

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

You have to hand it to the folks at R&R Partners. They’re the clever advertising agency that made its name luring legions of suckers to Las Vegas with an ad campaign built on the slogan “What happens here, stays here.” But R&R has now topped itself with its current ad campaign pairing two of the least compatible words in the English language: “Clean Coal.”

“Clean” is not a word that normally leaps to mind for a commodity some spoilsports associate with unsafe mines, mountaintop removal, acid rain, black lung, lung cancer, asthma, mercury contamination, and, of course, global warming. And yet the phrase “clean coal” now routinely turns up in political discourse, almost as if it were a reality.

The ads created by R&R tout coal as “an American resource.” In one Vegas-inflected version, Kool and the Gang sing “Ya-HOO!” as an electric wire gets plugged into a lump of coal and the narrator intones: “It’s the fuel that powers our way of life.” (“Celebrate good times, come on!”) A second ad predicts a future in which coal will generate power “with even lower emissions, including the capture and storage of CO2. It’s a big challenge, but we’ve made a commitment, a commitment to clean.”

Well, they’ve made a commitment to advertising, anyway. The campaign has been paid for by Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, which bills itself as the voice of “over 150,000 community leaders from all across the country.” Among those leaders, according to ABEC’s website, are an environmental consultant, an interior designer, and a “complimentary healer.” Other, arguably louder, voices in the group include the world’s biggest mining company (BHP Billiton), the biggest U.S. coal mining company (Peabody Energy), the biggest publicly owned U.S. electric utility (Duke Energy), and the biggest U.S. railroad (Union Pacific). ABEC — whose domain name is licensed to the Center for Energy and Economic Development, a coal-industry group — merged with CEED on April 17 to form the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).

They’re bankrolling the “Clean Coal” campaign to the tune of $35 million this year alone. That’s a little less than the tobacco industry spent on a successful fight against antismoking legislation in 1998, and almost triple what health insurers paid for the “Harry and Louise” ads that helped kill health care reform in the early 1990s. In addition to the ads, the “Clean Coal” campaign has so far also sponsored two presidential election debates (where, critics noted, no questions about global warming got asked).

The urgent motive for an ad campaign this time is the possibility of federal global warming legislation. A cap-and-trade scheme for carbon dioxide emissions may come to a vote in the Senate this June. Coal is also struggling to overcome fierce resistance at the state and local level; Kansas, Florida, Idaho, and California have already effectively declared a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. Nationwide, 59 new coal-fired power plant projects died last year (of 151 proposed), mostly because local authorities refused to grant permits or because big banks withheld financing. Both groups are alarmed about the lack of practical remedies to deal with coal’s massive CO2 emissions.

The coal industry is clearly alarmed, too, if only about its continued ability to do business as usual. In addition to the “Clean Coal” ad campaign, the industry’s main lobbying group, the National Mining Association, increased its budget by 20 percent this year, to $19.7 million. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, individual coal companies will spend an additional $7 million on lobbying. Coal industry PACs and employees also routinely donate $2-3 million per election cycle in contests for federal office. Altogether, that adds up to a substantial commitment to advertising and lobbying.

And the commitment to clean? The scale of the problem suggests that it needs to be big. Coal-fired power plants generate about 50 percent of the electricity in the United States. In 2006, they also produced 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — 36 percent of total U.S. emissions. For a remedy, the industry was banking on a proposed pilot plant called FutureGen, which would have used coal gasification technology to separate out the carbon dioxide, allowing it to be pumped into underground storage. But in January, the federal government canceled that project because of runaway costs. At last count, FutureGen was budgeted at $1.8 billion — with about $400 million of that coming from corporate partners over ten years. That is, the “commitment to clean” would have cost roughly as much per year as the industry is now spending on lobbying and “Clean Coal” advertising.

The business logic of this spending pattern is clear: Promoting the illusion that coal is clean, or maybe could be, helps to justify building new coal-fired power plants now. The tactic is at times transparent: In Michigan recently, a utility didn’t promise that a proposed $2 billion plant would have carbon-control technology — merely that it would set aside acreage for such technology. The proponents of a new power plant in Maine talked about capturing and storing 25 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions, but didn’t say how, and even if they figure that out, the plant would still produce two million tons of CO2 annually.

Actually making coal clean would be hugely expensive. In this country, most research focuses on coal gasification, which aims to remove CO2 and other pollutants before combustion. But only two power plants using the technology have actually been built in the United States, in Indiana and Florida, and the purpose of both was to capture sulphur and other pollutants. Neither takes the next step of capturing and storing the CO2. They also manage to be online only 60 or 70 percent of the time, versus the 90-95 percent uptime required by the power industry. In Europe, researchers prefer post-combustion carbon capture. But the steam needed to recover CO2 from the smokestack kills the efficiency of a power plant.

Since neither technology can be retrofitted, both require the construction of new coal-fired power plants. So instead of reducing emissions, they add to the problem in the near term. And the question remains of what to do with the carbon dioxide once you’ve captured it. Industry has had plenty of experience with temporary underground storage of gases — and researchers say they are confident about their ability to sequester carbon dioxide permanently in deep saline aquifers. But utilities don’t want to get stuck monitoring storage in perpetuity, or be liable if CO2 leaks back into the atmosphere. In any case, data from demonstration storage projects won’t be available for at least five years, meaning it will be 2020 before the first plants using “carbon capture and storage” get built. If predictions from global warming scientists are correct, that may be too late.

A better strategy, argues Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign, is conservation, with a cap-and-trade system driving overall emissions down by two percent a year over the next 40 years. At the same time, he says, utilities need to increase their reliance on wind and solar power, supplemented by natural gas. Nilles thinks this may already be happening. In Colorado, Xcel Energy, which generates 59 percent of its power from coal, recently shelved a proposed 600-megawatt “clean coal” power plant; it’s now seeking to develop 800 megawatts of new wind power by 2015.

Finally, industry and environmentalists together also need to figure out a funding mechanism for research to make “clean coal” something more than an advertising slogan. (One possibility being debated in Europe: Instead of giving away cap-and-trade emissions permits to industry, auction them off, with some of the revenue going to research.) Nilles is also holding out for a “clean coal” technology that can be retrofitted on existing plants.

But nobody expects coal to give up dirty habits easily. Some coal advocates are already trotting out one dire study by M. Harvey Brenner, a retired economist from Johns Hopkins University. It takes a hypothetical example in which higher-cost alternative energy sources replace 78 percent of the electricity now produced by coal — leading to lower wages, higher unemployment, and the death of 150,000 economically distressed Americans per year. (In another scenario described by Brenner, 350,000 Americans die annually because they did not show coal the love.) Only a spoilsport would add that the study was paid for by the coal industry and that the article appeared not in a peer-reviewed journal, but in a trade magazine. Someone from ACCCE is probably already on the phone. “BURN COAL OR DIE” is a little crude as an advertising slogan. But the clever folks at R&R Partners can no doubt polish it into something that will make “Harry and Louise” want to get up and dance.

END

Richard Conniff is an award-winning writer for magazines and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His books include House of Lost Worlds (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Species Seekers (W. W. Norton, 2010).

This Makes Me Want to Eat Pancakes. (But It’s Only Thursday.)

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Fish scales in a piranha’s belly (and enlarged at left)

by Richard Conniff

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about piranhas and what they eat. In fact, I wrote a book called Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff with Animals. And, yes, I have also spent a fair amount of time swimming with piranhas.

So naturally this caught my eye:

The piranha that eats scales its whole life, named Catoprion mento, tends to live alone. When it does hunt, it swims up behind its prey, opens its large, Jay Leno-like jaw 120 degrees and pries large scales off the sides of other fishes. These piranhas can tolerate nearly a dozen large fish scales in their stomachs at one time; that’s like a human swallowing a dozen silver dollar pancakes in a single bite.

This all fits nicely with my basic argument that our image of piranhas is wildly exaggerated.  Forget about bloody, churning water. You can read my book for the details, and meanwhile, here’s the press release about a new study on scale-feeding piranhas:

A team led by biologists at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories is trying to understand these scale-feeding fish and how this odd diet influences their body evolution and behavior. The researchers published their results Jan. 17 in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

“We were expecting that with this specialized scale-eating niche, you would get specialized morphology. Instead, what you get is a mosaic of strategies for the end goal of scale feeding,” said lead author Matthew Kolmann, a postdoctoral researcher at Friday Harbor Laboratories.

“This niche has a hidden complexity to it, and it is yet another story about the incredible diversity of life on Earth.”

The researchers compared two species of piranha fish — one that feeds on scales only as a juvenile and another that eats scales its whole life — and two species of characin fish, commonly known as tetras, with similar eating habits as the piranhas. They found that all four of the scale-feeders varied considerably in their body shape and feeding strategy.

The piranha that eats scales its whole life, named Catoprion mento, tends to live alone. When it does hunt, it swims up behind its prey, opens its large, Jay Leno-like jaw 120 degrees and pries large scales off the sides of other fishes. These piranhas can tolerate nearly a dozen large fish scales in their stomachs at one time; that’s like a human swallowing a dozen silver dollar pancakes in a single bite.

In contrast, the characin fish most similar to the piranha in life history and eating preferences gets its food in an entirely different way. The blunt-faced fish, called Roeboides affinis, has teeth on its nose and butts its face into other fish, devouring the scales as they fly off from the force of impact.

The research team gathered its data by CT scanning specimens of each fish at different ages at Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island. Using iodine-contrast staining, they were able to examine the internal anatomy of the four species to better understand what traits are shared by fishes that employ such a rare feeding strategy.

The stark differences in jaw and head shape, combined with how each prefers to hunt, shows a great diversity among the small number of species that have evolved to eat scales, the researchers found.

“This study would have been extremely hard to do without the CT scanning,” said co-author Jonathan Huie, a UW undergraduate student in aquatic and fishery sciences. “We were able to look at the image slices from three different points of view, and could more accurately pinpoint and measure certain elements like the jawbones.”

About 50 fish species are classified as scale-eaters, and all of them live in the tropics. Previous studies have shown — and the CT scans confirm — the fish are able to digest entire scales. The mucous lining the inside of each scale is thought to be appealing to fishes, but there could be other reasons why they prefer the entire scale, Kolmann said.

Most of the piranha and characin scanning was completed last spring during an undergraduate marine biology course at Friday Harbor Laboratories. Huie, then a student in the class, and the other co-authors scanned fish from collections all over the U.S., then meticulously measured a series of traits that are important for feeding, such as the sharpness and shape of various teeth.

The completed scans join a growing online library of 3-D digital fish replicas, pioneered by Adam Summers, a co-author and professor at Friday Harbor Laboratories, with the intent of creating an open-source repository for researchers and the general public to learn about all of the fish on Earth.

Co-author Kory Evans, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, and Kolmann conceived of this project when they both discovered rare, scale-eating fish in their respective field projects involving different fish species in the Amazon.

Kolmann will continue studying the evolution and feeding patterns of piranhas in his new position at George Washington University, where he will have access to the Smithsonian Institution’s fish collections.

That line about silver dollar pancakes makes me want to break out the maple syrup. But, dang, we only eat pancakes on Sunday.  Meanwhile, take a look at my book about piranhas and some of my other adventures with wild things. And here’s a photo of one of the scarier piranhas, which I encountered in Suriname.

Piranha smile (Photo: Richard Conniff)

Triassic Butterfly Park: Oldest Fossil Unhinges Flower-Pollinator Timeline

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Modern Glossata

By Richard Conniff/Scientific American

For years, researchers studying core samples drilled from deep in the Earth have noticed odd flecks of material, possibly from insects—and generally treated them as a distraction from the real work: They focused instead on pollen and spores as a continuous record for understanding past ecosystems. But a surprising abundance of those flecks in a recent sample from northern Germany has now led a team of researchers to pay closer attention.

Writing in the journal Science Advances, Timo van Eldijk and his co-authors describe their find as the earliest fossil record of Lepidoptera, from about 201 million years ago, at the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. The new find fits the timeline for evolution of the Lepidoptera suggested by molecular evidence and helps correct a puzzling gap in the fossil record.

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Triassic Wing Scale

The study looks at 70 specimens, found in a drill core from more than 300 meters below the surface, and identifies them as the wing scales that give butterflies and moths their spectacularly varied colors and patterns.  A light microscope, and later a scanning electron microscope, revealed the scales to be petal-like structures.  Some of them are beautifully preserved, with neatly ridged surfaces, herringbone webbing between the ridges, “micro-ribs,” and in some cases, perforations in the surface.

The perforations turned out to be a critical detail. They indicate, according to the co-authors, that a moth of that period had the hollow wing scales characteristic of Glossata, the taxonomic group that includes all modern moths and butterflies equipped with a sucking proboscis. The oldest previously known such fossil was from 129 million years ago–just as the flowering plants were making their spectacular emergence across the planet.  And the accepted theory was that the sucking proboscis only emerged at that point as a product of co-evolution between flowers and the insects that pollinate them.

That co-evolution, and the often exquisitely precise matchup between flower and pollinator, have been a subject of perennial fascination for naturalists.  In one of the most celebrated stories in all of botany, for instance, Charles Darwin was examining a shipment of orchids from Madagascar that included one flower with its nectar hidden at the bottom of a foot-long  tube.  “Good Heavens what insect can suck it?” Darwin wrote to a friend.  The next day he conjectured that there must be a moth with a proboscis roughly that long to do the job.  Just such a moth, with an 11-inch-long coiled proboscis, finally turned up 45 years later.

But the new study pushes fossil evidence for the origin of the sucking proboscis back 70 million years and that “challenges the underlying notion,” the authors write, that the emergence of flowering plants roughly 130 million years ago drove the evolution of the Lepidoptera proboscis. They argue instead that the transition among the insects “to exclusively feeding on liquids was most likely an evolutionary response to widespread heat and aridity” during the late Triassic.

While some moths, including species represented in the same drill core sample, continued to have chewing mouthparts, the authors write, others evolved sucking mouthparts for drinking water droplets or sap from damaged leaves.  Although the published paper does not make this point, van Eldijk, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Utrecht University, suggests that the early emergence of the sucking proboscis may even have helped drive the emergence of flowering plants, rather than vice versa.

Other scientists greeted the new find with excitement, for beginning to fill what University of Connecticut lepidopterist David Wagner called “this huge gap in the fossil record.” But Wagner also described the study’s interpretation of this new evidence as “widely speculative and likely wrong.” He questioned the idea that the proboscis evolved in response to aridity: “There are 24 other orders of flying insects” from the same period, he said, “that did just fine without having a suctorial proboscis.”  They got water “the way other animals do, they drink it, lap it, use capillary action, whatever.”  The short, simple proboscis in early Lepidoptera also has little to do, he said, “with the coiled proboscis that later evolved to get nectar from deep within a flower. There are just millions and millions of years of evolution between the emergence in these primitive Glossata and the long, straw-like proboscis for feeding in flowers. Not all tongues are created equal.”

William Friedman, an evolutionary biologist and director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, agreed: “I don’t think this necessarily changes the story of the coevolution of lepidopterans and flowering plants,” he said. “There are lots of biological structures that hang around with one function, and at a later point that function gets changed, or all of a sudden that function has a new context. Even if Lepidoptera are significantly more ancient, which is wonderful, that doesn’t mean that they diversify, that they do a million-and-one things.  They could be like ancient mammals, hanging around, being small and not doing much till the asteroid hits”–or in the case of the Lepidopteran proboscis, until the emergence of flowers.

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Drill core sections

It will take other samples from other drill cores to fill out the fossil record and enable researchers to begin making sense of the evolutionary story, said Maria Heikkilä, a lepidopterist at the Finnish Museum of Natural History.  The specimens in the new study, from less than a third of ounce of material taken from one drill core, at least “show that there is potential.”

Past researchers haven’t looked at the insect material from drill cores in a systematic way, says Bas van de Schootbrugge, a pollen specialist at Utrecht University and senior author of the new study, “because you really need to pick them out. You have to imagine 70 scales amid millions and millions of pollens and spores.  If you want to do this on a larger time scale, it’s going to be a lot of work. But we are hoping that other people are going to follow.”

END

Richard Conniff is an award-winning writer for magazines and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His books include House of Lost Worlds (Yale University Press, 2016) and The Species Seekers (W. W. Norton, 2010).

 

Wildlife Photo of the Day

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OK, folks, too good to be true and no photo credit. Is it real?

Habitat on Our Doorsteps: Making Room for Wildlife in an Urbanized World

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(Illustration: Luisa Rivera)

by Richard Conniff/Yale Environment 360

One morning not long ago, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, I traveled with a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist on a switchback route up and over the high ridge of the Western Ghats. Our itinerary loosely followed the corridor connecting Bhadra Tiger Reserve with Kudremakh National Park 30 miles to the south.

In places, we passed beautiful shade coffee plantations, with an understory of coffee plants, and pepper vines — a second cash crop — twining up the trunks of the shade trees. Coffee plantations managed in this fashion, connected to surviving patches of natural forest, “provide continuous camouflage for the predators,” — especially tigers moving through by night, my guide explained, and wildlife conflict was minimal.  Elsewhere, though, the corridor narrowed to a thread winding past sprawling villages, and conservationists played a double game, part handholding to help people live with large predators on their doorsteps, part legal combat to keep economic interests from nibbling into the wildlife corridor from both sides. It was a microcosm of how wildlife hangs on these days, not just in India, but almost everywhere in the world.

For conservationists, protecting biodiversity has in recent years become much less about securing new protected areas in pristine habitat and more about making room for wildlife on the margins of our own urbanized existence.  Conservation now often means modifying human landscapes to do double-duty as wildlife habitat — or, more accurately, to continue functioning for wildlife even as humans colonize them for their homes, highways, and farms.  There is simply no place else for animals to live.

The ambition to create new protected areas still persists, of course. …. to read the full story, click here.

 

Richard Conniff is the author of The Species Seekers and other books.