Richard Conniff's Blog, page 102

Rhino Madness in Missouri

Black rhinos (by Dana Allen for Wilderness Safaris)

It's World Rhino Day, one of those meaningless designations that clutter our calendars.  But in this case, we're in the middle of a crazy new war on rhinos.  My report from South Africa doesn't come out in Smithsonian Magazine for another month or so.  So in the meantime, here's a report from the current Atlantic about how a price of more than $100,000 for the horns of a single rhino has brought the madness even to such unlikely destinations as Moberly, Mississippi.  The writer is Malcolm Gay:

BY THE TIME I pulled in at the Super 8 in Moberly, Missouri, the parking lot was thick with muddy trucks. In fact, the young clerk told me, the motel was full—she'd just rented her last room to a lady with a sloth.

"It's the auction," the girl said, pointing me in the direction of the closest available bed—some 35 miles south. "We've got people in from all over."

Four times a year, in nearby Macon, Lolli Bros. Livestock Market holds one of the country's biggest exotic-animal auctions and taxidermy sales. When I arrived last spring, preteen girls roamed the halls with marmosets on their shoulders. Amish families looked sternly on as men in camouflage jackets vied for zebras and Bactrian camels. Nearby, a blond woman in a sweatshirt bottle-nursed a baby orangutan wearing a diaper, while a white buffalo calf wandered past a stuffed polar bear.

But what turned out to be one of the auction's most valuable objects was also one of its smallest, residing behind a glass case in the taxidermy room: a 24-pound pair of horns that once belonged to a white rhinoceros.

Long prized as an ingredient for traditional medicine in Asia, rhino horn is in big demand these days. China's surging economy has created a class of consumer willing to spend top yuan for these lumps of keratin—the same stuff that makes up human hair and nails—purported to treat everything from fevers and gout to high blood pressure and rheumatism. The Vietnamese market has become similarly overheated, fanned by tales like the one about a senior politician whose rhino-horn treatments cured him of liver cancer. In 2008, a Vietnamese official was caught by a film crew apparently buying illegally obtained rhino horn outside Vietnam's Embassy in South Africa, where last year conservationists recorded more than 330 illicit rhino deaths. That's a nearly threefold increase over 2009. South Africa has responded by stepping up its enforcement efforts, arresting some 123 suspected poachers in the first half of this year and killing an estimated 20 more.

But increased enforcement and increased demand have conspired to create a robust, if largely illegal, market in taxidermy rhino-horn trophies. Horns now fetch two to three times their expected price at auction in Europe and the United States, and a rash of rhino-horn thefts has occurred at European auction houses and museums. British authorities have responded by prohibiting the sale of rhino horns that are not works of art (carvings, etc.). And last year, the European Taxidermy Federation warned its members against selling to buyers interested only in rhino horn, saying such a transaction "stinks of illegal activity."

"What you're seeing is criminal gangs trying to go around and buy up these horns to smuggle them out of the U.S. and into China and Vietnam," said Crawford Allan, the North American director of Traffic, a wildlife-trade monitoring program. The U.S. regulates the import, export, and commercial sale of most rhino horns, and selling any horn for human consumption is prohibited. Jim Lolli, who runs the auction house with his brothers, told me that the people who come to his auctions are rarely the actual purchasers of rhino horn. "It's all foreign money. These peons that come here is nothing. They're buying for somebody—I'm sure," said Lolli, who demands an affidavit from sellers, but worries that the exorbitant prices are creating a black market. "The Orientals will buy them, but it's illegal to export them, so you've really got to watch what you're doing. I don't know what they do with them."

The crowd at Lolli Bros. swelled as the auctioneers hoisted the hefty, thorn-shaped fore horn and its squat mate onto the counter. When bidding began, however, the Carhartts-and-camo crowd quieted down, as three groups of Asians, lurking on the sale's perimeter, drove the price up from the low tens of thousands. Once the bid passed the $100,000 mark, buyers in the room began to peel off. One group held on for another $20,000, but lost its nerve when a phone buyer dug deep, ultimately winning the pair of horns with a final bid of $125,000. This raw display of capital seemed to set the room on edge. "Why would anyone spend that much on a rhino horn?" one bystander asked an Asian man dressed in black jeans and carrying a leather laptop satchel. His group had kept pace until the action hit six figures. "I don't know," he said, rather unconvincingly, before quickly rejoining his party.

Rhino Madness in the Delta (and I don't mean the Okavango)

Black rhinos (by Dana Allen for Wilderness Safaris)

It's World Rhino Day, one of those meaningless designations that clutter our calendars.  But in this case, we're in the middle of a crazy new war on rhinos.  My report from South Africa doesn't come out in Smithsonian Magazine for another month or so.  So in the meantime, here's a report from the current Atlantic about how a price of more than $100,000 for the horns of a single rhino has brought the madness even to such unlikely destinations as Moberly, Mississippi.  The writer is Malcolm Gay:

BY THE TIME I pulled in at the Super 8 in Moberly, Missouri, the parking lot was thick with muddy trucks. In fact, the young clerk told me, the motel was full—she'd just rented her last room to a lady with a sloth.

"It's the auction," the girl said, pointing me in the direction of the closest available bed—some 35 miles south. "We've got people in from all over."

Four times a year, in nearby Macon, Lolli Bros. Livestock Market holds one of the country's biggest exotic-animal auctions and taxidermy sales. When I arrived last spring, preteen girls roamed the halls with marmosets on their shoulders. Amish families looked sternly on as men in camouflage jackets vied for zebras and Bactrian camels. Nearby, a blond woman in a sweatshirt bottle-nursed a baby orangutan wearing a diaper, while a white buffalo calf wandered past a stuffed polar bear.

But what turned out to be one of the auction's most valuable objects was also one of its smallest, residing behind a glass case in the taxidermy room: a 24-pound pair of horns that once belonged to a white rhinoceros.

Long prized as an ingredient for traditional medicine in Asia, rhino horn is in big demand these days. China's surging economy has created a class of consumer willing to spend top yuan for these lumps of keratin—the same stuff that makes up human hair and nails—purported to treat everything from fevers and gout to high blood pressure and rheumatism. The Vietnamese market has become similarly overheated, fanned by tales like the one about a senior politician whose rhino-horn treatments cured him of liver cancer. In 2008, a Vietnamese official was caught by a film crew apparently buying illegally obtained rhino horn outside Vietnam's Embassy in South Africa, where last year conservationists recorded more than 330 illicit rhino deaths. That's a nearly threefold increase over 2009. South Africa has responded by stepping up its enforcement efforts, arresting some 123 suspected poachers in the first half of this year and killing an estimated 20 more.

But increased enforcement and increased demand have conspired to create a robust, if largely illegal, market in taxidermy rhino-horn trophies. Horns now fetch two to three times their expected price at auction in Europe and the United States, and a rash of rhino-horn thefts has occurred at European auction houses and museums. British authorities have responded by prohibiting the sale of rhino horns that are not works of art (carvings, etc.). And last year, the European Taxidermy Federation warned its members against selling to buyers interested only in rhino horn, saying such a transaction "stinks of illegal activity."

"What you're seeing is criminal gangs trying to go around and buy up these horns to smuggle them out of the U.S. and into China and Vietnam," said Crawford Allan, the North American director of Traffic, a wildlife-trade monitoring program. The U.S. regulates the import, export, and commercial sale of most rhino horns, and selling any horn for human consumption is prohibited. Jim Lolli, who runs the auction house with his brothers, told me that the people who come to his auctions are rarely the actual purchasers of rhino horn. "It's all foreign money. These peons that come here is nothing. They're buying for somebody—I'm sure," said Lolli, who demands an affidavit from sellers, but worries that the exorbitant prices are creating a black market. "The Orientals will buy them, but it's illegal to export them, so you've really got to watch what you're doing. I don't know what they do with them."

The crowd at Lolli Bros. swelled as the auctioneers hoisted the hefty, thorn-shaped fore horn and its squat mate onto the counter. When bidding began, however, the Carhartts-and-camo crowd quieted down, as three groups of Asians, lurking on the sale's perimeter, drove the price up from the low tens of thousands. Once the bid passed the $100,000 mark, buyers in the room began to peel off. One group held on for another $20,000, but lost its nerve when a phone buyer dug deep, ultimately winning the pair of horns with a final bid of $125,000. This raw display of capital seemed to set the room on edge. "Why would anyone spend that much on a rhino horn?" one bystander asked an Asian man dressed in black jeans and carrying a leather laptop satchel. His group had kept pace until the action hit six figures. "I don't know," he said, rather unconvincingly, before quickly rejoining his party.

Something Special in the Air? Oh My God, it's a Snail.

The passenger in seat 43B

Traveling from one continent to another inside a bird's digestive tract sounds a lot like flying coach.  I mean the meals especially.  But, hey, hey, no TSA!  No full body scans!

Here's an account of this really cool snail behavior, from Discovery Magazine (I think the writer is Ed Yong, but their web site seems to be awfully stingy with bylines):

Imagine you're living off the coast of California, and you want to get to sunny Florida. That sounds easy enough, but there are three big problems in this imaginary scenario. First, you are a snail, so crossing even a small distance takes a lot of time. Second, there is a continent in the way. Third, you are a sea snail so you are not adapted to crawling on land.

These problems seem insurmountable and yet snails have made the journey. Osamu Miura from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has found that  horn snails crossed from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean around 750,000 years ago, while other individuals made the opposite journey around 72,000 years ago. And they probably flew on bird airlines.

Earlier this year, Shinichiro Wada showed that one species of snail can indeed survive a trip through the guts of a bird, and uses this unorthodox carrier to hop across Japan's islands. I covered this story for the first of a regular column in Discover (the actual magazine) on the adaptive tricks of animal underdogs. Here's what I wrote:

If you have ever complained about flying on a budget airline, spare a thought for the Japanese snail Tornatellides boeningi. The only way for this laggard gastropod to rack up its air miles is to be eaten by a bird and excreted out the other end. And even though the stowaways are slathered in digestive fluids and feces, many of them survive, enabling them to spread their seed over a much larger area than their usual slow-lane pace would allow.

"This could help to explain why the snails are so widespread," says biologist Shinichiro Wada of Tohoku University, who found that snails at one end of Hahajima Island (located south of the Japanese mainland) are as genetically similar to those from the opposite corner as to their neighbors.

Some snail species can survive trips through fishes' digestive systems, but this is the first known to use avian airlines. Wada discovered the snails' odd travel plans after finding undamaged shells in bird droppings. When he fed 174 live snails to Japanese white-eyes and brown-eared bulbuls, around 15 percent of them lived. "One of the snails even gave birth just after passing through the gut," Wada says.

The snails probably survive because of their small size, averaging less than a tenth of an inch in length, and compact shells. Wada suspects that they shield themselves with mucus or seal the gap between their body and shell to prevent digestive fluids from seeping inside.

Now, Miura has shown that other snails have used birds to spread over greater and seemingly impassable distances. He collected snails from both sides of North and Central America and used their genes to chart their relationships to one another.

Miura found that the snails split into two major lineages at the time when North and South America fused together at Panama, separating the Pacific from the Atlantic. You might expect that one lineage hails from each ocean, and you'd be partly right. The Panama land bridge did separate snails into a Pacific group and an Atlantic one. But both groups managed to send delegates to the other. Today, both lineages include snails from both coasts.

Miura found that Pacific snails made it into the Atlantic around 750,000 years ago, while the Atlantic snails crossed over around 72,000 years ago. They had to have flown over land. The snails only live in warm areas so they couldn't have circled round the North American arctic or the South American cape. And their travels long preceded the construction of the Panama Canal in 1914, so they couldn't have stowed away on man-made vehicles.

Instead, Miura thinks that the snails flew inside shorebirds, millions of which share their habitats and regularly fly over Central America. They could swallow and carry the snails just as white-eyes and bulbuls do in Japan. Charles Darwin first suggested the idea that birds could disperse animals like snails over long distances and the horn snails confirm his idea.

Still, these cross-ocean snail swaps have only happened twice in three million years, which suggests that they are unlikely events. Even so, the palaeontologist George Simpson once wrote that "a possible dispersal event, however improbable….becomes probable if enough time elapses." He likened such events to winning a sweepstake. The chances of success are incredibly slim but the payoffs – such as new worlds to colonise – are very big.

Reference: Miura, Torchin, Bermingham, Jacobs, Hechinger. 2011. Flying shells: historical dispersal of marine snails across Central America. Proc Roy Soc B http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.1599

For more on travelling snails, see David Winter's excellent post at Scientific American blogs

Momofuku's Swamp Yankee

Strusinski on the prowl. (Photograph by Andrew Hetherington)

This is a story I wrote about edible biodiversity for the October issue of Outside Magazine.

ONE DAY IN MAY, in a venerable old cemetery somewhere in northwestern Connecticut, a trio of food professionals clusters around a handsome pitch pine tree delicately infused with essence of dead New England farmer. The three of them are greedily plucking pale green buds and stuffing them alternately into plastic baggies and into their mouths. "These are fucking good," says a test-kitchen chef from the Momofuku restaurant empire. "Great texture!" a colleague agrees.

Evan Strusinski, who makes his living foraging wild foods, steps back and sizes up the tree as if he means to collect the whole damn thing. He eyes the car in which they arrived and asks, "Does this Prius have a roof rack?" Then he eats a few more pine buds and his voice pitches up like Regina Spektor singing about tangerines: "Oh! They're so poppy! So juicy! They inspire me to nibble."

"Put it in light syrup, focus on the texture," the Momofuku guy riffs. "Pine poppers! Serve 'em on ice cream." Later they notice the lemony-tasting sheep sorrel on a hilltop nearby, and all of them drop to their knees as though in worship.

A certain lunatic enthusiasm for wild foods tends to infect people who go foraging with Strusinski, especially when he is in his usual hunting grounds, in the mountains of Vermont or on the coast of Maine. It's contagious: Strusinski, a boyish 39-year-old with curly, uncombed hair and a now-and-then beard, will be digging edible roots with his bare hands and suddenly whoop, "I feel like a wild pig foraging for truffles!" Or he'll push back his battered fedora and start to sing as he works his scissors deftly through the perfect threadlike scapes in a sloping field of ramps—"I'm going to be rich"—and then speculate on how many scapes it will take to procure the 1972 Toyota Land Cruiser of his dreams. (The idea is not entirely far-fetched: he recently paid a doctor with wild mushrooms for removing an awkwardly placed tick.)

Filling out a shipping label one afternoon a few weeks later at a FedEx office in North Clarendon, Vermont, Strusinski pauses over the company-name line and writes "Monsanto Gone Wild." He does not have a real company name, and his reluctance to come up with one has become both a running joke and a point of pride. (Other proposed names include Forgive Me My Trespasses and Nibble & Spit.) The Styrofoam cooler boxes he uses, mostly set aside for him by local merchants, carry labels saying "Grindstone Neck of Maine" and "Think Tropical Think Tilapia." In the rush to get everything packed, Strusinski has inadvertently gotten some grass clippings caught under the packing tape. So he scribbles a message along the side: "= Authenticity."

The destinations of the packages he ships that day include some of the most highly ­regarded restaurants in New York City: Danny Meyer's Gramercy Tavern, Mario Batali's Del Posto, David Chang's Momofuku Ko and Ssäm Bar, Franny's in Brooklyn, and trendy new­comers Atera and Torrisi Italian Specialties.

And when the packages Strusinski sends get opened in those busy restaurant ­kitchens, people tend to pause. They gather around to ogle the carefully trimmed cattail shoots, sweet flag, wild ginger, sea beans, and any of about 150 or so other plants, fungi, and even ­lichens in which Strusinski deals. They inhale deeply as the aroma of black locust flowers comes rolling across the prep tables. "It's like opening a treasure chest," says one chef. Another sends Strusinski a text message acknowledging receipt: "Everybody in the kitchen has a culinary boner." Or, as one of Strusinski's New York visitors explains it to the FedEx lady, somewhat more discreetly, "He's a total super­star in New York. All the crazy-famous chefs really adore him."

TECHNICALLY SPEAKING the wild-foods movement has been around since we first slith­ered up out of the primordial ooze. Euell Gibbons ("Ever eat a pine tree?") made it a fad with his 1962 book Stalking the Wild ­Asparagus, and crunchy back-to-the-earth sorts have kept the movement simmering ever since, particularly in Pacific Northwest cuisine. Foraging also has deep roots in Italy, France, Russia, Korea, and Japan, where gather­ing mushrooms and other wild foods is ­almost a sacred ritual.

Widespread queasiness about our dependence on the industrialized food system has encouraged the current wild-foods revival, and the ranks of neo-foragers may now number 100,000. "The basic act of knowing how to find your own food, to feed yourself with a meal you didn't buy," notes food writer Hank Shaw in his new book Hunt, Gather, Cook, "is a small act of freedom in an increasingly regimented and mechanical world."

Restaurants have also pushed the movement toward foods that are local and "traceable," that is, connected as directly as possible to their source. Wild foods take that agenda to its logical extreme. René Redzepi, the chef whose restaurant Noma in Copenhagen has been named the best in the world by San Pellegrino the past two years, is high priest of the movement, making a point, whenever possible, of foraging himself. But when he is in America, he relies, as many top American restaurants do, on wild foods supplied by Evan Strusinski.

Strusinski is plainly thrilled by his sudden success. Until two years ago his life was, by his own description, "scattered." He grew up in rural Vermont, after his father, a landscape painter, moved the family from New York City with the dream of living an Andrew Wyeth sort of life. He began foraging when a summer-camp counselor pointed to a picture of a plant in a Euell Gibbons book and said, "Find some of this." At Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, Strusinski studied Buddhism but could not sit still long enough. He transferred home to Bennington College to become a dancer but dropped out because he did not have the stuff. The foraging always called him back.

Since college, Strusinski has spent most of his working life in restaurants and on organic farms, including brief stints around Italy and at Istanbul's Ciya Sofrasi, a restaurant where foraged foods from the provinces sometimes bring Turkish diners to tears at the memory of childhood meals. Even now he has no permanent abode or place of business—just seasonal rentals in Vermont and Maine—and he often ends up preparing shipments in the barns or restaurant kitchens of friends.

His high-end foraging began in 2009, when he was working as a waiter at an upscale ­restaurant in Camden, Maine, and foraging on the side. From a friend, he heard that Momo­fuku founder David Chang needed someone to forage for his restaurants, and he thought, I can do that. Strusinski sent off some samples, and word spread quickly to a clique of like-minded chefs. Now they routinely send him text messages asking for sweet flag ($12 a pound), ramp scapes ($10), or whatever else happens to be in season. Sometimes a chef will say, "Send me what you think I will like." Because there is no conventional market for the stuff he sends, prices can get pulled out of the sky, sometimes literally. When the black locusts flower, money seems to be pelting down like fat New England snowflakes. But mostly it's a mad scramble to find enough of what his chefs want, and they often gently chide him for undercharging. Whatever the price, they just want more.

Strusinski worries that it's all just another food-world fad. "I figure I've got two years at this," he says. But he also dreams of bigger things: "I really want to sell to Dot's Diner down the street."

DRIVING WITH STRUSINSKI along winding New England back roads, you get the feeling he's more likely to hit Dot's Diner broadside. He has his hands in the classic ten-and-two position, simultaneously cradling the wheel and beating out a text message on a smartphone with both thumbs. Then, without look­ing sideways, he yelps, "Angelica! Did you see that angelica? I'm text messaging and I saw angelica!" Angelica is a tall herb with reddish-green flowers, and you can candy the stem. Then he adds, "Elder," for a tree whose flowers, just blossoming, make a good cocktail ingredient. Sometimes he drives with his head hanging backward out the window, tantalized by a promising glimpse of color, pattern, or habitat in the forest. Then he'll suddenly ululate and lurch to the side of the road to collect some chanterelles.

When he goes into the woods, his methods are a testimony to the hidden powers of attention-deficit disorder. In Maine he frets aloud about what he might be missing in Vermont, and in Vermont he frets about Maine. Everywhere, always, he frets about what kind of artistry chefs are up to with the foods he has sent them—Arctic char brined with sweet flag and sprinkled with black locust flowers, or lamb cooked in butter infused with tamarack tree needles. All the while, his eyes are drifting restlessly, alert to certain leaf shapes or, in early June, the combination of tree species and soil disturbance that could mean morel mushrooms.

He finds things, he explains, by not quite looking for them: "I'm just scanning. If you put up an image of the thing in your mind, you're looking through a filter. You're not ­going to find it, because it's not going to match your image. It's more a color or a pattern. I'll scan very generally, and then my eye will catch it and I'll swing back and sort of tease it out from the area."

The rest of the world may be content to get 80 percent of its agricultural tonnage from a dozen dull, reliable plants—corn, wheat, rice, and the like. But Strusinski lives to find strange and tasty (or sometimes just strange) new things for dinner. Standing on a stony beach on Penobscot Bay, with a ­lobster boat rumbling past and a foghorn lowing, he spots a plant growing just in front of the tree line and cries, "Oh! Look at this! It's called sea rocket." He and a visitor nibble but do not spit because it tastes too good. It has the peppery bitterness of arugula but in crisp, succulent leaves packed with sweet and salty moisture, as if the ocean has suddenly become a plant. "We are standing in a gold mine!" he says. None of his clients in New York has ever seen sea rocket before, and he means to get it to them overnight, in pristine condition, even if he has to drive it there himself. "I want them to flip. I want to get to even the most conservative of them." He takes out his scissors, conjures up his best Thor voice, and yells, "OK, let's start pillaging! Let the thunder begin." Later, he mentions that, before today, he had never tasted sea rocket. But he had read about it and seen a photograph. "I knew it grew on the coast, I knew it had that ­mustardy look. One little nibble and that was easy."

His chefs also crave novelty, but sometimes they balk: "'Hemlock shoots… Didn't Socra­tes die from that?'" Strusinski explains that Socrates actually died from a feathery her­b­a­ceous weed that also happens to be called hemlock but is not related. "The only way a hemlock tree can hurt you," he says, "is if it falls on you." When someone asks if milkweed shoots need to be boiled three times to leach out the bitter­ness, he replies, "A lot of that started with Euell Gibbons writing incorrectly because he was eating dogbane, which is similar in appearance."

The combination of extraordinary wild foods backed up with encyclopedic knowledge is one reason chefs have come to rely on Strusinski. Story is a popular buzzword in the food world, and Strusinski's eccentric business practices, though sometimes frus­trating, also make him more appealing, more authentic, to certain restaurants. The stuff he sends "is not some fabricated thing that comes out of a plastic bag," says Matt ­Rudofker, a sous-chef at Ssäm Bar. "You have to pick out the leaves and clean off the dirt," and that's part of the charm. It might be easier if Strusinski concentrated on a short list of menu-friendly foods. But his latest novelties force chefs to think about food in new ways.

"There's a fascination with information about plants that we as cooks are not ­intimately familiar with," says Michael ­Anthony, exec­utive chef at Gramercy Tavern. He recently served a dessert of marinated strawberries, for instance, and the addition of grated wild ginger from Strusinski "really married well with the strawberries and the lemon, in a way that was surprising and kind of confounding for people.

"More than that," Anthony adds, "it's like somebody who forages is connecting us to a separate universe that is right in front of our noses, part of our natural world that we don't even really see. We've grown disconnected, and this isn't really part of our living culture. And it's strange because not all that long ago, people not only recognized and celebrated these things, they depended on them."

So what are the chances of getting that back, of having ideas from Gramercy Tavern filter down to the diners of the world? Strusinski isn't a businessman at heart, nor a proselytizer for big ideas. "I don't want to be Willy Loman opening my briefcase," he says. But his heart soars for a moment when the chef at a café on a Maine island says he is planning a Wild Foods Friday. Then it turns out he just means mussels, wild mushrooms, and "gazpacho from my garden." Hold the sea rocket.

AT TWO ON A THURSDAY afternoon, Stru­sinski is behind the wheel again, humming the theme from Mission: Impossible, intent on getting a shipment of goose-tongue grass and rose hips to a FedEx office an hour south. First, though, there's a beach where he thinks the sea beans might just be up, and when that turns out to be a bust he switches to a stand of wood sorrel instead. Everywhere, he stops to peer into yards and woods that are known to have produced morels or chanterelles in previous years. "These spots that I have, they're like my children," he explains. "I have to check in on them. I feel their pull."

People often think that what he does is strange, Strusinski says. He once summarily sent a reporter from the Wall Street Journal out of the woods because she did not understand the pleasure of matsutake mush­rooms. "Why not fall in love with mushrooms?" he asks. "It's always surprising when I see the mush­rooms in a new season. I can't be sure they're coming back and then they do, and every time it delights me, it takes my breath away for a moment. When I'm an old man and can no longer go foraging, if you hold a chanterelle under my nose, the smell will make me weep."

That might sound wacky in the context of the United States, he says, but in Italy, for instance, "porcini hunting is not just some light thing. It's an annual ritual, with the whole family going out." It's a way of knowing where they live and even who they are. "People at the train station will stop you so they can smell your porcini."

Now and then, he says, something like that will happen to him in this country, too. Last sum­mer in Camden, Maine, a group of ­Korean tour­ists were walking by, and they caught a glimpse of the matsutake mushrooms in his trunk. "I wasn't really showing, but I was showing, and everybody gathered around. They elbowed me back like a bystander, and everyone was going through the trunk like it was their own. They were wielding them, they were smelling them, they were doing these little dances with them. One woman got into a parked car with a mushroom, and I went over to see what she was doing and she was holding it up to the nose of an old woman, who was inhaling it reverentially." Afterward, they put everything back and left Strusinski behind, beaming. "Their pleasure was my plea­sure," he says.

Maybe it's an impossible dream to think Americans, outside of a few fashionable restaurants, might also feel that kind of excitement. But for a moment, it was almost as if Dot's Diner had come to him.

Eating Less Meat

Sunday's (UK) Guardian has an article on the environmental benefits of eating less meat.  It turns out, instead, to be largely a pitch for eating a fungus-derived protein with the very ill-conceived name quorn.

It also contains this unintentionally laughable tidbit:

Meat-reducing, as the marketers have branded it, may just have acquired fresh momentum. Self-confessed king carnivore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has switched from meat to vegetables as his latest celebrity cause.

But maybe I am just too far across The Atlantic to have experienced the cultural tsunami that is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Even so, these paragraphs in the article are of interest:

The two most pressing reasons for cutting back on meat today are climate change and global population growth. The post-war years have seen an explosion in the numbers of animals intensively reared for meat and milk. This livestock revolution, and the change in land use that has gone with it, however, now contribute nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.

The UN predicts that the number of farm animals will double by 2050. Except, of course, it can't. The livestock of Europe already require an area of vegetation seven times the size of Europe to keep them in feed. If people in emerging economies start eating as much meat as we do, there simply won't be enough planet.

Intensive meat production is a very inefficient way of feeding the world. Farm a decent acre with cattle and you can produce about 20lbs of beef protein. Give the same acre over to wheat and you can produce 138lbs of protein for human consumption. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed instead directly to people, there may be just enough food to go round when population peaks.

Replacing meat with more plant foods would also reduce diet-related diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and some cancers, according to reports in the Lancet.

What Would Don Draper Do?

NPR interviewed me early this week about nation branding ups-and-downs.  What would Don Draper do for Latvia?  Why Kazakhstan needed nation-branding after Borat.

You can go directly to the audio here.

Going Green But Getting Nowhere

Economist Gernot Wagner of the Environmental Defense Fund has an interesting essay in today's New York Times, on the failure of individual sacrifice as a solution to dire environmental challenges, and the need for society-wide action:

YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things.

Good.

Just know that it won't save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action.

You refuse the plastic bag at the register, believing this one gesture somehow makes a difference, and then carry your takeout meal back to your car for a carbon-emitting trip home.

Say you're willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans, about 10 tons.

What about going bigger? You are the pope with a billion followers, and let's say all of them take your advice to heart. If all Catholics decreased their emissions to zero overnight, the planet would surely notice, but pollution would still be rising. Of course, a billion people, whether they're Catholic or adherents of any other religion or creed, will do no such thing. Two weeks of silence in a Buddhist yoga retreat in the Himalayas with your BlackBerry checked at the door? Sure. An entire life voluntarily lived off the grid? No thanks.

And that focuses only on those who can decrease their emissions. When your average is 20 tons per year, going down to 18 tons is as easy as taking a staycation. But if you are among the four billion on the planet who each emit one ton a year, you have nowhere to go but up.

Leading scientific groups and most climate scientists say we need to decrease global annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of current levels by 2050 and much further by the end of the century. And that will still mean rising temperatures and sea levels for generations.

So why bother recycling or riding your bike to the store? Because we all want to do something, anything. Call it "action bias." But, sadly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn't add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. Only the right economic policies will enable us as individuals to be guided by self-interest and still do the right thing for the planet.

Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year. That's not damage you're going to do in the distant future; that's damage each of us is doing right now. Who pays for it?

We pay as a society. My cross-country flight adds fractions of a penny to everyone else's cost. That knowledge leads some of us to voluntarily chip in a few bucks to "offset" our emissions. But none of these payments motivate anyone to fly less. It doesn't lead airlines to switch to more fuel-efficient planes or routes. If anything, airlines by now use voluntary offsets as a marketing ploy to make green-conscious passengers feel better. The result is planetary socialism at its worst: we all pay the price because individuals don't.

It won't change until a regulatory system compels us to pay our fair share to limit pollution accordingly. Limit, of course, is code for "cap and trade," the system that helped phase out lead in gasoline in the 1980s, slashed acid rain pollution in the 1990s and is now bringing entire fisheries back from the brink. "Cap and trade" for carbon is beginning to decrease carbon pollution in Europe, and similar models are slated to do the same from California to China.

Alas, this approach has been declared dead in Washington, ironically by self-styled free-marketers. Another solution, a carbon tax, is also off the table because, well, it's a tax.

Never mind that markets are truly free only when everyone pays the full price for his or her actions. Anything else is socialism. The reality is that we cannot overcome the global threats posed by greenhouse gases without speaking the ultimate inconvenient truth: getting people excited about making individual environmental sacrifices is doomed to fail.

High school science tells us that global warming is real. And economics teaches us that humanity must have the right incentives if it is to stop this terrible trend.

Don't stop recycling. Don't stop buying local. But add mastering some basic economics to your to-do list. Our future will be largely determined by our ability to admit the need to end planetary socialism. That's the most fundamental of economics lessons and one any serious environmentalist ought to heed.

Gernot Wagner is an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund and the author of the forthcoming "But Will the Planet Notice?"

California Acts to Ban Shark Fin Soup

A few months back, I was annoyed by an NPR show that seemed to be turning a proposed ban on shark fin soup into an attack on the Chinese community.  Never mind that the bill was being sponsored and backed by people of Chinese ethnicity.  And never mind that it was about the highly destructive practice of cutting the fins off living sharks and tossing them back in the water to die.

Now California has done the right thing and passed the ban–meaning a slight but significant reduction in pressure on seriously threatened shark populations.

Here's the press release:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. Sept. 6, 2011 — Yesterday, the California Senate passed Bill 376, which would ban the sale and trade of shark fin in the state of California. The Center for Oceanic Awareness, Research, and Education (COARE), applauds the California State Senate for joining them in actively addressing shark conservation issues, and playing a major role in reducing shark fin consumption in the U.S. and worldwide.

Assembly Bill (AB) 376 was introduced to the California State Assembly on 14 February 2011 by Assemblymembers Paul Fong (D-Cupertino) and Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), and subsequently passed the Assembly on 23 May 2011 with a vote of 65-8.  Yesterday the bill passed the Senate with a vote of 25-9, and the bill now moves on to the governor for action.

California is now one step closer to helping the West Coast of the United States enact a full ban on the trade of shark fins, which will help reduce pressure on rapidly declining shark populations.  California's proposed ban complements similar legislation recently signed into law in Washington State and Oregon, and is also preceded by legislative bans adopted by the State of Hawai'i, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).

California is one of the largest sources of demand for shark fin outside Asia and is a major entry for shark fin distribution in the United States.  This legislation represents a significant step towards reducing pressure on rapidly declining shark populations.

Every year, fins from up to 73 million sharks are used for shark fin soup, a dish traditionally served at Chinese weddings and banquets.  This soup has grown in popularity, increasing consumer demand for shark fins and contributing to the decimation of shark populations worldwide as millions of sharks are killed every month, many for their fins alone.  As a result of these fishing pressures, one-third of shark species are already threatened with extinction.

"Sharks have shaped ocean ecosystems for more than 400 million years, but we've pushed many of them to the brink of extinction just in our lifetimes.  This new law represents a much needed shift in the way we treat our ocean's fragile resources, said Alexandra Cousteau, founder of Blue Legacy and granddaughter of conservation pioneer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

As sharks play a vital role in the oceans, their depletion could cause irreparable damage to marine ecosystems.  "Sharks are one of our oceans' top predators, keeping the entire ecosystem in check, but many shark populations are now endangered as a result of human greed and lack of understanding," said Christopher Chin, COARE's Executive Director.  Animals at the top of the food chain, such as sharks, have few natural predators, so they are slow to mature, and have very few young.  "As a result, they are extremely sensitive to fishing pressures, and are slow to recover from overfishing", continued Chin.

"I'm pleased that California can take part in the worldwide movement to protect these important creatures, and that we can continue to provide leadership in important environmental matters," said California Assemblymember Paul Fong, the bill's primary author.  "We're grateful for organizations like COARE, which have provided invaluable support throughout this process."

"We find that some Chinese and Chinese-Americans simply don't understand the issues.  If people knew more about these animals and their crucial role in the ocean, they would want to protect them", continued Chin.  While surveying Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, COARE found a significant number of restaurateurs that served the controversial soup only because they believed their customers expected it.  "This bill helps directly address those informational shortcomings, and provides a simple solution for those who requested, 'make it illegal so we don't have to sell it'," reported Chin.

COARE began development of its Shark Safe program in early-2007 seeking to protect sharks by raising awareness of threats to shark populations and by reducing the demand for shark products.  In 2007, COARE also teamed up with AB 376 co-sponsor WildAid to launch the Shark Friendly Communities campaign.

"By increasing public awareness of the need for shark conservation, we endeavor to change the way people think about sharks, thereby reducing the sale, use, and trade of shark products", said Chin.  "Nowhere else has this matter seen such resistance, but it's been an arduous battle here.  We're thrilled that the California Legislature has done the right thing, and seen past the grousing of special interests."

About COARE

The Center for Oceanic Awareness, Research, and Education, Inc. (COARE) is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Its purpose is to study our oceans and increase public awareness of the earth's marine environment through educational programs and outreach.  COARE seeks to enlighten people, young and old, to the plight of the oceans, to change the way they think and act, and to encourage them to create positive and lasting change.  For more information about COARE, and the Shark Safe certification program, visit http://www.coare.org  and http://www.sharksafe.org.

Tools for Smartphone Naturalists

Conservation Magazine has just published my essay "Natural History Upgrade," and they included this useful sidebar for our smartphone-loving era:

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Natural History Upgrade

People who work in the natural world often get asked how on Earth they came to devote their lives to gastropods, or ground beetles, or whatever other species happens to have found its way into their hearts. What the questioners generally mean is that becoming a naturalist is a little enviable, but also odd. As kids, they may have dreamed of becoming Jane Goodall. Then they forgot, setting it aside as a childish thing and becoming plumbers or investment bankers instead.

This would not ordinarily be so terrible. We need plumbers and maybe investment bankers, too. But lately, without realizing it, we also seem to have set aside nature itself.

We like to imagine ourselves as active and outdoorsy. But the reality is that hiking, backpacking, camping, and fishing have all declined sharply over the past 30 years, as have visits to U.S. National Parks and other public lands. The trend is particularly ominous among American children, who now spend fewer than seven minutes a day in unstructured outdoor play—and seven hours a day in front of an electronic screen.

But technology may be too easy a scapegoat. Naturalists at a workshop on the topic that I recently attended showed little appetite for technology-bashing. On the contrary, much of the conversation was about how technology can draw people back to the natural world. And the general consensus was that naturalists themselves need to change if they hope for natural history to thrive in this distracted new world.

The workshop sponsor, the Natural History Network, is a new group dedicated to "reawakening human connections with the natural world." The participants were mostly people who teach natural history or otherwise earn a living as naturalists. As we looked around the room, one target for change was immediately apparent: we were exclusively white, in a nation where whites will cease to be a majority just 30 years from now. And we were largely middle-aged or older, the same dwindling-party demographic that worries the Sierra Club (where the average member is 60 or older) and The Nature Conservancy (65-plus). "The arrogance of asking somebody to come to us isn't working," one workshop participant declared. "We have to find ways to go to them."

Hispanics, for instance, often get ignored by conservationists but typically display greater environmental concern on surveys than other ethnic groups, including whites. Fishermen and hunters sometimes face open disdain, though their shared interest in good habitat ought to make them a natural affinity group. And whatever they may think about the origin of species, certain fundamentalist Christian groups take as strong a position against climate change as any conventional environmentalist.

Reaching these nontraditional audiences means learning to think and talk differently. (Sometimes, another workshop participant suggested, it's better just to sit quietly and listen). Moral superiority does not play well, nor does the long lament—the dirge-like recitation of human population growth, climate change, habitat destruction, and loss of species. These are clearly critical issues that need to be addressed. But as with warnings about what to do in the event of nuclear accident, people have trouble paying attention after line two. Moreover, the endlessly repeated message that nature is dead or dying just encourages people to step back from the natural world, the way they sometimes distance themselves from a friend with a terminal disease. It's a form of emotional self-preservation.

"So much of environmental work tends to be based on fear rather than love," said Tom Fleischner, an organizer of the workshop who teaches conservation biology at Prescott College in Arizona. Fear can, of course, get people motivated about the environment. But that's often for only one issue, one neighborhood, or one period of time. By contrast, "Natural history is the process of falling in love with the world. That's a very powerful thing." What he means by "natural history" isn't a dusty business practiced by experts in the back rooms of museums. It doesn't require a high-school diploma, much less a PhD. In fact, it's open to anybody who likes to look at living things and puzzle out how they work. Giving people the means to do that, preferably early in life, is the best way—the deepest way, Fleischner argued—to reconnect them to nature. The trick is to take down the barriers that keep them out.

Scientific names, for instance, are basic tools of natural history. But they can also seem like a private language for naturalists. "We need to think about what there is in natural history for all those people who don't want to learn names or buy field guides," said Kent Redford of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "I'm married to an artist who loves natural history, but it's all about color and light. There are a lot of people like that."

Zipper-back hoverfly, aka: Chrysotoxum elegans

So how to reach them? An ingenious contest sponsored by British newspaper The Guardian, together with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, invites entrants to give evocative "common" names to species now known only by their scientific names. Introducing this year's contest, author Richard Mabey acknowledged the importance of scientific names. But he went on to write, "Common names are a kind of time capsule, a record of the powers of observation and literary inventiveness of ordinary people. They log resemblances, uses, sounds, mythic associations, smells, seasonal appearances, kids' games, superstitions, habitats. They're witty, concise, evocative, sometimes even satirical." Thus contest winners have turned Megapenthes lugens into the Queen's executioner beetle and brought Xerocomus bubalinus to life as the Ascot hat mushroom. The aim is to get participants—artists, schoolchildren, and maybe even molecular biologists—to look at the animals in question, perhaps for the first time. It is also easier for most people to care about the fate of St. John's jellyfish than about the almost-unpronounceable Lucernariopsis cruxmelitensis.

But the problem is not limited to scientific names. Professional naturalists inadvertently shut people out even when they think they are speaking plain English. For instance, "biodiversity" may seem like a quick way of stating a big idea. But in a recent British opinion poll, people asked to define the word often answered that it was a new brand of laundry soap. Speaking more plainly—for instance, talking about how many kinds of plants and animals live in a place—doesn't mean dumbing down the conversation; it's about making it less abstract and more specific, which is after all the essence of natural history.

Likewise, environmental policymakers have lately latched onto the phrase "ecosystem services" with the idea that they can sell conservation more readily by demonstrating that nature provides important material benefits such as flood control and crop pollination. But this is not a phrase that stirs the soul, and it often leads away from—not toward—natural history. "It's all about trees, but not which trees," said Redford. It's about one function, such as carbon sequestration, rather than about how a community of plants and animals lives. Likewise, ecologists often talk about a particular animal group as "a good system" for testing some hypothesis or another, leading one workshop participant to exclaim, "They're not systems! They're birds."

Technology, on the other hand, can lead people back into natural history. In some cases, it's literally about which tree and which bird. Let's say you're curious about a handsome old maple in your neighborhood, but you're unsure whether it's a black or sugar maple. With a smartphone app called iNaturalist, you take snapshots of relevant features—leaves, flowers, bark—and zap them off. Other users browsing through the site then get back to you with likely identifications, often narrowing down the possibilities over the course of a series of comments.

Other citizen-scientist apps focus on one taxonomic group or one place. For instance, the new "Batphone" app (technically, it's called iBats) allows users to record the sounds of bats with the help of a cheap, ultrasonic microphone. The recordings, tagged with their geographic locations, get uploaded to a database where specialized software can identify any of 900 species worldwide. And in Kenya, the Mara Predator Project has come up with a technological cure for the tendency of tourists in webbed vests to snap off countless shots without ever actually "seeing" the animals in front of them. (I call this "wildlife photographer fantasy syndrome.") The project asks tourists to upload their lion photos to a database—and also to identify and age the individual lions in their photos with the help of a field guide to ear markings, mane length, and other key features. It makes the photographers think about what they're seeing; later, they get an email response letting them know whether they got it right. Additionally, conservationists get a handy tool for charting home ranges and population trends.

At the Natural History Network workshop, though, most of the excitement was about iNaturalist, and it felt like the giddy way Ivy League kids used to talk during the early days of Facebook. One day at lunch, Josh Tewksbury, who teaches at the University of Washington, sent off a picture and, to his delight, got an identification back just four minutes later. As with Facebook, the social dynamic quickly kicks in, with everyone wanting to rack up as many good observations as possible, preferably with accurate identifications. "I started using iNaturalist four days ago," said Tewksbury, "and within a day I was picking up field guides I haven't used in years so I don't get yelled at by my friends."

Apps such as iNaturalist cleverly exploit people's technological infatuation to get them back outside. The smartphone becomes a tool to resurrect their curiosity about the natural world—and even get them actively contributing to the science. In the past, professionals often dismissed any claim by an uncredentialed naturalist to have seen a rare species or one that was out of its normal range: "You only think you saw a bog turtle. What you saw was a spotted turtle." Now the amateur can post the photographic evidence, complete with geotagging. "That old barrier—I am an expert and you are not—is starting to erode because of these technologies," said Tewksbury.

Technology is also changing the way the professionals do science, and Tewksbury believes that will help make natural history rebound in the twenty-first century. Physicists, chemists, and astronomers, he said, have always had to work in teams and share their data because of the expensive equipment they require; collaboration has enabled them to do Big Science. Naturalists, on the other hand, "can do a heckuva lot with a tape measure. So we don't have to get along to publish." As a result, in one random selection of National Science Foundation grants for ecological studies, the vast majority of the data remained "dark" or unpublished; compare this to "dark data" levels thought to be near zero in physics, astronomy, and molecular biology. "And dark data dies," said Tewksbury. But granting agencies increasingly require publication of data. The new practice of logging observations on public databases with a smartphone will force the change in any case. Amateur reports on when flowers bloom in different places may sound like small, even mini, science. But when you can analyze how the timing changes from year to year, it offers a much more detailed picture of climate change than any satellite image—and at far lower cost. Suddenly natural history looks like Big Science, too.

I came away from the workshop thinking fondly about a story told by a sea-bird biologist named Julia Parrish. She's a college professor (University of Washington again) and, at first glance, looks the part—thin, with a long neck, pale, freckled skin, reddish hair pulled back, and the corners of her mouth drawn slightly down, as if you are about to earn a B plus in Life 101 if you don't shape up now. Asked to give a talk on sea birds at a venue in the coastal city of Everett, Washington, she arrived at the address on the appointed day and found herself in a dive inhabited by "people who at 4 p.m. had obviously had more than their first drink." She was starting to think C minus.

But at the appointed hour, about 20 people gathered around, drinking beer and eating nachos, and Parrish got up on the dingy carpeted stage normally reserved for bar bands doing covers of Journey's greatest hits. Parrish talked about sea birds, and one man in the audience, a retired gillnet fisherman, mentioned a study he had helped work on years before. It turned out Parrish had designed that study, and from that point on, everything was copacetic. People were genuinely interested in her work. They asked good questions. Their inner Jane Goodalls, that childhood sense of being in love with the world, inched back toward the surface. At the end, the bartender announced that he had "something to say about natural history." Just a week earlier, a mountain beaver had inexplicably made its way into the city, ending up in this very bar. It ended badly for the beaver, and the bartender went to his refrigerator to retrieve the evidence. Then Parrish and her audience gathered around to commune over the cadaver, sipping their beers and chatting about sea birds.

Maybe it wasn't quite T.H. Huxley delivering his lectures to working men on the new science of evolution. It certainly wasn't the contemplation of nature at its prettiest or most perfect. But as an instance of how to reach out and make natural history matter for ordinary people who deserve to know, it was a very nice start.