Richard Conniff's Blog, page 23

Discovering Dinosaurs (and Much More)

The first depiction of a dinosaur feather-by-feather in its natural colors.

Matt Shipman published an interview this week about my new book House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaur, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.  Here’s Shipman’s opening:

I first visited the Peabody Museum of Natural History in the company of hundreds of science writers. The museum was hosting a social event for the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers, which gave me the opportunity to explore its exhibits in the company of people who were exceptionally well-informed and gifted storytellers. It was the best possible introduction.

I visited again a few years later, this time in the company of family and friends. The enthusiasm our kids showed for the exhibits was contagious, as was my friend Jeff’s passion for discussing anything related to geology. I could have spent all day there. The Peabody, in my limited experience, is just that kind of place.

So, when I saw that Richard Conniff had written a book about the Peabody, House of Lost Worlds, I wanted to read it. And I had questions.

How do you assemble a coherent narrative based on the wildly diverse research done by hundreds of people over more than a century? How do you decide what to focus on? How do you decide what to leave out?

Conniff recently took the time to answer some of my questions, ranging from the characters he left out of the book to the future of natural history museums.

Communication Breakdown: You attended Yale as an undergrad. Did you spend much time at the Peabody while you were a student?

Richard Conniff: I was an English major, and Science Hill was largely foreign territory—except for the Peabody Museum. But I realize now that I was missing the real story, both as an undergraduate and during repeated visits as an adult (often with my kids). I gawped at the dinosaurs, like everybody else. But I had no idea that T.H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” thought the horse fossils were important enough to spend five days at the museum working through them with paleontologist O.C. Marsh, or that Darwin himself thought

the horse fossils and the toothed birds afforded “the best support to the theory of Evolution” in his lifetime.

Nor, for that matter, did I have any notion that Mr. Burns of “The Simpsons” and a character named Lily Bancroft had had sex in a second floor diorama at the museum, with penguins looking on.

CB: What first made you think that you wanted to write about the Peabody?

RC:I was skeptical when folks from Yale University Press and the Peabody first suggested … (Click here to read the full interview on Shipman’s blog.)

 

When Animal Rights Sabotage the Natural World

My latest for Takepart.com:

There are times—too many times, in truth—when understanding and protecting the natural world demands that we band together to stop the killing: The macho practice of shooting wolves in the American West comes to mind as an example. So does the relentless slaughter of elephants and rhinos in Africa. But at other times, protecting the natural world requires us to kill, and this is the painful reality some animal rights activists refuse to understand.

It’s not a failure to communicate. Animal rights groups are often brilliant at communicating. It’s a failure to reason in the face of scientific evidence, and it comes up almost endlessly for people who do the real work of protecting the natural world.

The latest case happened in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The city wanted to cull a booming deer population that is destroying the forest understory, damaging local landscaping, and causing car accidents (88 last year, double what it was just five years ago). Then both the Humane Society of the United States and the local chapter of the Humane Society—two separate entities—showed up to cry, “Cruelty!”

But, hang on, why should the rest of us care about Ann Arbor, a university town of 113,000 people 45 minutes west of Detroit? It matters, says Christopher Dick, a plant ecologist at the University of Michigan, because “HSUS is pitting its huge resources and cherry-picked science against every small town in the eastern U.S. that is having deer overabundance issues and considering lethal options.”

Activists put on a reasonable face when they come into town to

meet with local officials, typically proposing an experimental project with nonlethal methods, meaning sterilization or contraceptives. Among other things, that experiment requires catching and tranquilizing a large percentage of the deer for either surgery or a contraceptive implant, at great expense, and it has never succeeded anywhere else. But local politicians rarely know better. Then, “when it comes time to implement,” HSUS imposes “a condition that there can be no killing of deer for an extended period.” It’s all part of the strategy, says Dick: “Start the ‘experiment’ (destined to fail), stall the shooting, and meanwhile help to generate a political storm so that local governance will not want anything to do with deer management.”

And it matters, in fact, well beyond the eastern United States; because animal rights groups everywhere play on our emotions to protect a few favored species at the expense of entire ecosystems. HSUS, for instance, claims to be dedicated to creating “a humane and sustainable world for all animals.” But what this generally means is protecting warm, furry mammals—for instance, outdoor cats. Upwards of 20 million of them now roam the American landscape, and they kill billions of birds. But rather than culling the cats to protect the birds and other innocent victims, HSUS supports the failed policy of “trap-neuter-release.” This effectively creates vast, permanent populations of “community cats” to do their killing, though mostly out of our sight.

Likewise, 58,000 wild horses are now browsing the American West down to nubble, destroying ecosystems on which other species (and the horses themselves) depend for survival. But rather than culling the horses, HSUS advocates “compassion and concern.” That attitude does nothing to stop a developing ecological apocalypse as the horses pound grasslands and the underlying soil to dust. Nor does it allow any sensible alternative to the current practice of housing 45,000 formerly wild horses in “retirement” facilities, at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $77 million a year.

But back to Ann Arbor, now home to somewhere between 500 and 1,500 deer. As the deer have multiplied, they have had a devastating effect on habitat. “Almost nothing, even junipers, are spared during late winter when there has been snow cover and the deer are starving,” said Larry D. Noodén, a retired University of Michigan biology professor. “The beautiful spring flora gets devastated…and the orchids are the first to be hit even when there is plenty of deer food.” The deer also like to browse down oak saplings, and they die out, changing the structure of the forest. Barberry shrubs often move in to replace them.

Does it matter? Barberry, an invasive species, tends to grow in dense stands that are habitat mostly for deer mice and deer ticks, a recipe for Lyme disease. And here’s the thing about oaks: They provide homes to caterpillars from 534 species of butterflies and moths. The butterflies and moths, in turn, are essential food for birds. So when you encourage overpopulation by deer, you end up driving out dozens of other species.

The good news from Ann Arbor is that city officials saw through the HSUS smokescreen of nonsense and lawsuits. They went forward with their cull, taking out 63 deer earlier this year. The venison went to food shelters. It remains to be seen whether ecological common sense will endure through another round of emotional assaults before next winter’s cull.

Here is the bottom line, for when HSUS shows up in your community. Because those two words, “Humane Society,” start the name, a lot of people donate to HSUS under the assumption that their gift supports local animal shelters. That’s how HSUS was able to collect donations totaling $135 million in 2014, and it’s the reason even some University of Michigan faculty thought it was almost sacrilegious to criticize the group. In fact, HSUS has no direct connection to local animal shelters, and only a tiny fraction of its budget goes in direct grants to animal shelters. Its main function, according to its tax statement, is “advocacy and public policy”—that is, lobbying.

The people at HSUS are no doubt decent and well meaning, and compassion for animals is a good thing. But they parse out that compassion on extremely narrow lines and largely in ignorance of how the natural world works. That means your gift to HSUS—and many other animal rights groups—supports a vision of a cute, cuddly America, when the desperate need is to stop the decline of a wild America that is already rapidly vanishing around us.

 

How Natural History Museums Save the World

Triceratops, by O.C. Marsh at the Peabody Museum

My latest for The New York Times:

When people talk about natural history museums, they almost always roll out the well-worn descriptive “dusty,” to the great exasperation of a curator I know. Maybe he’s annoyed because he’s spent large sums of his museum’s money building decidedly un-dusty climate-controlled storage sites, and the word implies neglect. (“Let me know,” the curator advises by email, “if you want to hear me rant for an hour or so on this topic.”)

Worse, this rumored dustiness reinforces the widespread notion that natural history museums are about the past — just a place to display bugs and brontosaurs. Visitors may go there to be entertained, or even awe-struck, but they are often completely unaware that curators behind the scenes are conducting research into climate change, species extinction and other pressing concerns of our day. That lack of awareness is one reason these museums are now routinely being pushed to the brink. Even the National Science Foundation, long a stalwart of federal support for these museums, announced this month that it was suspending funding for natural history collections as it conducts a yearlong budget review.

It gets worse: A new Republican governor last year shut down the renowned Illinois State Museum, ostensibly to save the state $4.8 million a year. The museum pointed out that this would actually cost $33 million a year in lost tourism revenue and an untold amount in grants. But the closing went through, endangering a trove of 10 million artifacts, from mastodon bones to Native American tools, collected over 138 years, and now just languishing in the shuttered building. Eric Grimm, the museum’s director of science, characterized it as an act of “political corruption and malevolent anti-intellectualism.”

Other museums have survived by shifting their focus from research to something like entertainment. A few years ago, in the Netherlands, which has a rich tradition of scientific collecting, three universities decided to give up their natural history collections. They’re now combined in a single location, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, and the public displays there struck me on a recent visit as a sort of “Animal Planet” grab bag, with cutout figures of a Dutch version of Steve Irwin steering visitors, with cartoon-balloon commentary.

The pandering can be insidious, too. The Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, which treats visitors to a virtual ride down a hydraulic fracturing well, recently made headlines for avoiding explicit references to climate change. Other museums omit scientific information on evolution. “We don’t need people to come in here and reject us,” Carolyn Sumners, a vice president at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, explained to The Dallas Morning News.

Even the best natural history museums have been obliged to reduce their scientific staff in the face of government cutbacks and the decline in donations following the 2008 economic crash. They still have their collections, and their public still comes through the door. But they no longer employ enough scientists to interpret those collections adequately for visitors or the world at large. Hence the journal Nature last year characterized natural history collections as “the endangered dead.”

This view of the natural history museum as moribund is a terrible misunderstanding, on many counts. Natural history museums do indeed store specimens from millions or even billions of years in the past. (They even store dust, only it’s called “pollen.”) Their collections, one museum director told me, are where “we have placed our entire three-dimensional record of the planet that sustains us.” But these collections are less about the past than about our world and how it is changing. Sediment cores like the ones at the Illinois State Museum, for instance, may not sound terribly important, but the pollen in them reveals how past climates changed, what species lived and died as a result, and thus how our own future may be rapidly unfolding.

These specimens routinely affect our lives in ways we barely recognize. In the summer of 1996, for instance, a New York developer named Ingram S. Carner noticed that the sugar maples in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn were struggling. He collected a suspect beetle, and Richard Hoebeke, then an entomologist at Cornell University, soon identified it as an Asian long-horned beetle, the first to be found in this country. If it had gone undetected, a study by the United States Forest Service later estimated, it could have killed a third of the trees in cities nationwide. Instead, the discovery touched off a major campaign to contain the invasion at a handful of sites. The unsung hero? A natural history museum: Dr. Hoebeke was able to identify the species so quickly only because Cornell happened to have a single specimen from China in its collections.

Natural history museums are so focused on the future that they have for centuries routinely preserved such specimens to answer questions they didn’t yet know how to ask, requiring methodologies that had not yet been invented, to make discoveries that would have been, for the original collectors, inconceivable.

THE people who first put gigantic mammoth and mastodon specimens in museums, for instance, did so mainly out of dumb wonderment. But those specimens soon led to the stunning 18th-century recognition that parts of God’s creation could become extinct. The heretical idea of extinction then became an essential preamble to Darwin, whose understanding of evolution by natural selection depended in turn on the detailed study of barnacle specimens collected and preserved over long periods and for no particular reason. Today, those same specimens continue to answer new questions with the help of genome sequencing, CT scans, stable isotope analysis and other technologies.

These museums also play a critical role in protecting what’s left of the natural world, in part because they often combine biological and botanical knowledge with broad anthropological experience. So when museum curators travel to a difficult habitat to conduct an environmental inventory, said Debra Moskovits of Chicago’s Field Museum, a team will typically work at the same time to understand the needs of surrounding communities.

After one such inventory in Ecuador, Dr. Moskovits stood up to withdraw from a meeting when it seemed as if an outsider should not be part of the discussion. The attendees told her to sit down again, saying: “You have no nationality. You are scientists. You speak for nature.” Just since 1999, according to the Field Museum, inventories by its curators and their collaborators have been a key factor in the protection of 26.6 million acres of wilderness, mainly in the headwaters of the Amazon.

It may be optimistic to say that natural history museums have saved the world. It may even be too late for that. But they provide one other critical service that can save us, and our sense of wonder: Almost everybody in this country — even children in Denver who have never been to the Rocky Mountains, or people in San Francisco who have never walked on a Pacific Ocean beach — goes to a natural history museum at some point in his life, and these visits influence us in deep and unpredictable ways.

Paul B. MacCready, for instance, became famous in the 1970s for building Gossamer Condor, the first successful human-powered aircraft, and then Gossamer Albatross, the first such craft to cross the English Channel. But growing up in New Haven, before engineering took hold of him, he used to visit the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History to indulge a childhood obsession with winged insects. Years later, Dr. MacCready revisited the museum. One thing he still vividly recalled, in the aftermath of his triumphs, was an image on the wall of a diorama he came across, something between an entomological drawing and Breugel’s “Fall of Icarus”: It depicted a dragonfly on the wing, over a body of green water.

Maybe it was a trivial detail. Maybe most of our visits to natural history museums can seem trivial, just a way to pass Sunday afternoon with the family. But standing beneath the figure of Tyrannosaurus, or staring back at the skull of an early primate, or reliving the feats of Polynesian mariners, we dimly begin to understand the passage of time and cultures, and how our own species fits amid millions of others. We start to understand the strangeness and splendor of the only planet where we will ever have the great pleasure of living.

 

The Big Thing Killing Off the World’s Only Lemurs

Verreaux’s sifaka ballet dancer in a croisé (Photo: Kevin Schafer/Arkive)

My latest for Takepart.com:

Once, in Madagascar, I ordered lunch at an outdoor restaurant. A cluster of street kids gathered on the other side of the railing, plainly famished, to watch me eat. Some beany dish, if I recall correctly, with bits of chicken in it. It might even have tasted good under other circumstances.

In any case, I ate. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed by beggars in places like that, and maybe I thought it would be rude to the restaurant owner to indulge them. Maybe I was also hungry, or at least hungry by American standards, after two weeks in the bush eating a lot of rice. Or maybe I was just a callous bastard. In any case, what happened next stunned me: I got up to leave, and the kids instantly reached over the rail to grab my plate and lick it clean.

Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on Earth and always seemingly getting poorer. But like most visitors, I was there to look at lemurs and other wildlife, not poverty. In particular, I saw sifaka lemurs, with their stark, staring, reddish-brown eyes, and theirartful way of leaping from branch to branch like ballet dancers in perfect partnership with the trees. They were gorgeous. The idea of killing and eating them seemed like an abomination, especially since lemurs occur nowhere else in the world, and 94 percent of the 110 or so lemur species are now threatened with extinction.

But a new study in the journal Biological Conservation makes clear that understanding and addressing

the poverty is the critical point if you want to have any chance of saving Madagascar’s lemurs from extinction. Roughly 70 percent of the 20 million Malagasy get by on less than $1 a day. Malnutrition afflicts more than a third of the population, and it is especially destructive for children. In these circumstances, you and I might just hunt lemurs too. And all the solutions typically pursued by conservationists—educating people about extinction, introducing the economic benefits of ecotourism, and providing access to some alternative animal food—don’t work.

For her study, lead author Cortni Borgerson, a physical anthropologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, conducted painstakingly detailed interviews with the residents of a village in northeastern Madagascar. It’s one of 36 villages bordering the Masoala National Park, part of a peninsula of the same name that is a United Nations World Heritage Site. Ten species of lemurs live there. Half are endangered or critically endangered, and 90 percent are threatened.

Borgerson has worked there for the past nine years and has earned enough local trust (and patience) that at least one person from each of the village’s 36 households acquiesced to a 600-question interview. (She speaks the local dialect of Betsimisaraka.) Her ambition was to test 11 different hypotheses about who hunts lemurs and why they hunt them, as well as what measures might get them to stop.

Teaching them that lemurs are endangered made no difference, it turned out. “The people who hunt lemurs do not believe they are endangered anyway, they think it’s laughable,” said coauthor Margaret McKean, a political economist at Duke University. That’s partly because lemurs that feel threatened elsewhere tend to move into nearby protected areas. “So people there may say the population is increasing, everything is fine.”

It also did not stop people to know that hunting is illegal and can mean severe punishments. Family circumstances obliged lemur hunters and trappers to take that risk. Likewise, employment in ecotourism made no difference. The study found that “households with more members working in ecotourism also had slightly more lemur trappers,” possibly because “community-based ecotourism as actually practiced can also fail to improve human livelihoods.”

But the most disheartening finding was that providing an alternative animal protein source also failed to prevent lemur hunting. In India, the development of poultry stands in almost every village has been an important factor in reducing pressure on wildlife, according to conservationists I spoke with there. But in Madagascar, many families lack cash money or other means to invest in poultry. Moreover, people there eat poultry and lemurs in different seasons, and they may prefer the taste and relative fattiness of lemurs.

So if all these methods make no difference in ending the killing of lemurs, what will? Borgerson found that just three factors predicted the likelihood that a household will turn to lemur-eating: the number of sick days in the household during the prior month, the size and materials of the house, and low body mass index in the children, all marks of extreme poverty.

The results pose a direct challenge to conventional thinking in the conservation community. The standard refrain among conservationists is that they need to be “talking to the local people,” said coauthor Laurie Godfrey, a University of Massachusetts paleontologist who has worked in Madagascar since the 1970s. “But what they mean is talking at the local people, rather than embracing the local people,” she said. Borgerson embraced the community, but her work does not yet provide any logical way forward. “This is really complicated, really messy, and the quick things you think up as solutions aren’t,” added McKean. Essentially, what we now know is that nothing we know seems to work—and that poverty is critically important.

Borgerson, meanwhile, is back in Masoala pursuing her research. The question is not just whether she can come back with some practical way forward—but whether there will be any lemurs left in the wild when she does.

 

Risky Business: Releasing A Live Cougar from a Trap

Letting Fishermen Stake Out A Turf Saves Jobs–and Fish, Too

Gaffing a halibut. (Photo: Scott Dickerson/Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart.com:

The way the world is currently consuming (and wasting) seafood, we will soon be living on our familiar blue planet, but with oceans that abound in plastic debris rather than marine life.

What if we could make a few relatively simple reforms and start seeing improved fisheries worldwide in just ten years?

What if those reforms could ensure that 98 percent of the world’s fisheries would be biologically healthy and feeding the world on a sustainable basis by 2050?

What if, finally, it doesn’t require the old, and deeply unpopular, method of shutting down fisheries and leaving fishing boats idle at the dock?

That all may sound too good to be true, and there are critics willing to say so.  But it’s achievable, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers looked at the current status and trends in 4,700 fisheries around the world, representing 78 percent of the world’s reported catch.  Then, they projected the future prospects of those fisheries under three different management regimes: business as usual, management to maximize long-term catch, or something called rights-based management.

Their conclusion is that rights-based-management simultaneously feeds more people, boosts profits, and protects the marine resource.

If rights-based management is so good, why aren’t we already doing it?

We are, in fact, said study co-author Amanda Leland of the Environmental Defense Fund—just not enough.

“One of the really great stories is the red snapper fishery in the Gulf of Mexico,” Leland said. “When new management reforms were being considered 12 years ago, the snapper population was at just four percent of historical levels.” Regulators had tried to protect the redfish by the conventional method of making the season shorter.

“The fishermen were really struggling, trying to compete with one another, catch as many fish as they could, as fast as they could,” she said.  In practice that often meant spending more time at sea during the season, in all weather, consuming more fuel, to catch fewer fish.

Fed up, the fishermen voted in 2007 for a rights-based management system called Catch Share.  It works like this:  Regulators set each year’s maximum sustainable catch. Then each boat in the fishery prior to 2007 gets the right to a guaranteed share of that catch.

Instead of wasting fuel racing to beat the other boats, said Leland, fishermen can now maximize profits by timing their fishing according to when the weather is best, or when market conditions provide a better price.  And under the new system, revenues have more than doubled even as the population of red snapper has tripled.

The growing reliance on rights-based management in U.S. fisheries has resulted over the past 15 years in a dramatic turnaround, according to Leland.  It’s the reason, for instance, that you can now routinely find halibut in the supermarket: A season formerly limited to just two days a year is now open almost year-round.  “The number of species considered overfished has declined from 92 to 29, a 70 percent decrease,” she said.  “The number of ‘rebuilt’ species,” meeting the federal definition for recovery, “has gone from zero in 2000 to 39 today.”

The same sort of turnaround is happening in Belize, she said, since its 2011 decision to allow fishing communities to cordon off specific fishing grounds for local use only, establishing—and enforcing—their own Territorial User Right for Fisheries (TURF).

But asked about the triple promise of such systems—more food, better profits, and more fish in the sea—one critic was skeptical. “Oooh, win-win-win!” said Rashid Sumaila, a fisheries economist at the University of British Columbia.  In a 2010 paper, he called such systems primarily “an instrument for promoting economic efficiency, rather than conservation or equity.” The experience in British Columbia, he said, is that more efficient fishing companies, or those that simply had more capital, bought out the less efficient ones, often leading to unemployment and other problems “that get pushed back onto society.”  He conceded there are good elements to such systems, if managed with care and closely monitored.  “I’m not throwing everything out,” he said. “But watch it.”

Christopher Costello, a resource economist at the University of California—Santa Barbara and the lead author of the new study, countered that it’s possible to “fine-tune the design” of such systems “to achieve socially-desirable outcomes.  Our paper shows that if that is done well, fisheries around the world could be on a very strong path toward recovery.”

Another potential issue is that rights-based management would have little effect on the open seas, where no single nation exerts control. Costello acknowledged the issue but also noted that the vast majority of the global catch occurs in coastal waters, with only about 12 percent coming from the high seas.

The most promising conclusion in the study might just be that the countries with the most depleted fisheries, notably in Asian countries including Indonesia, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines, would see the quickest recovery from the switch to rights-based management.  That is, assuming they have not already raced past the point where recovery is even possible.

 

When the Killing’s Done, Island Wildlife Roars Back

The world’s only oceanic hummingbird, the Juan Fernandez Firecrown. (Photo: Island Conservation)

My latest for Takepart.com:

For conservation biologist Holly Jones, one of the best experiences of her work on island wildlife was the night she went out hunting for an endangered lizard called the tuatara on Stephens Island in New Zealand. The place was cacophonous with seabirds, which also happened to be attracted to her headlamp. At one point, she found herself sitting in the dark with birds in her lap, at her shoulders, and flapping endlessly around her head. It was like Hitchcock’s The Birds, she said, except that she was ecstatic to be part of this island explosion of life.

Stephens Island happens to be the site one of the most notorious episodes in the history of humanity’s enraptured—but rocky—affair with islands. In 1894, a crew of lighthouse keepers arrived there, bringing a cat named Tibbles with them. The cat was soon coming back to the lighthouse with small, flightless birds in its teeth. One of them turned out to be a new species, the Stephens Island Wren. Within a year or two, a rapidly expanding community of cats had driven it to extinction. By 1897, there were so many cats killing so many birds that a lighthouse keeper urged the authorities “to employ some means to destroy them.” It took another 27 years, but the successful effort to eradicate the cats was the chief reason such an abundance of seabirds survived to greet Holly Jones that night on Stephens Island.

What happened there is now standard conservation practice around the world to protect the incredible diversity of species on islands. Jones, who teaches at Northern Illinois University, is the lead author on a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at the long-term effects of eradicating cats, rats, goats, pigs, and other invasive mammals from islands. On the 181 islands where biologists have conducted follow-up studies, Jones and her coauthors found that eradication turns out to be

one of the most effective strategies “for protecting the world’s most threatened species.”

That may seem improbable. Worldwide, we now spend about $22 billion a year on biological conservation. In that context, the tens of millions spent annually on island conservation is a pittance. (And both amounts are trivial in the context of, say, the $600 billion the United States alone spends every year on the military.) Islands are also comparatively small: They occupy just 5.5 percent of the planet’s land surface area. But isolation has made them a natural experiment station for biological variation and evolution. So they are home to 15 percent of all terrestrial species—and 37 percent of all critically endangered species on the authoritative Red List maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Anacapa, in the Channel Islands off southern California, is a typical success story. The buildup to the eradication of invasive black rats was long and controversial. Outraged animal rights groups filed a lawsuit to stop the killing, and Jones once fielded a call from a protester urging that the rats be relocated instead. (“I was like, ‘OK, what’s your address?’ ”) The protesters were perhaps understandably concerned that no harm should come to any sentient being. They just didn’t understand that this was, in effect, a decision to consign entire species to extinction.

The project was also complicated and expensive, at a total cost of $1.8 million, because Anacapa is home to a deer mouse subspecies found nowhere else in the world and vulnerable to the same poison being used against the rats. So the killing, in 2001–02, had to take place in stages, with the deer mice protected on a separate islet and in captivity, until they could be reintroduced after the rats and the poison were gone.

The main goal was to protect the Scripps’s murrelet, said Nick D. Holmes, a coauthor of the new study and director of science at Island Conservation, a nonprofit working on such projects worldwide. These birds breed in caves around the perimeter of the island, and they were being hit hard by the rats. “But almost immediately after extermination, researchers began to see eggs hatching,” Holmes said, and the young birds were no longer being eaten alive in their nests. The population has tripled since then, and 10 years later the ashy storm petrel, a bird not previously known to have occurred on the island, also began breeding there.

Overall, the new study reports, island restorations are now known to have benefited 236 species, a quarter of them threatened with extinction. Removal of invasive animals has so far enabled four species—the island fox, Seychelles magpie, Cook’s petrel, and black-vented shearwater—to be downgraded to a less risky category on the Red List. After a project on Hauturu Island in New Zealand, a type of petrel that had been thought for 150 years to be extinct reappeared and began breeding again.

The study also notes a few negative effects of eradications, including temporary population declines, because some raptors and gulls accidentally died after consuming poisoned carcasses. In four species, the reduction in population is likely to be permanent. On Australia’s Macquarie Island, for instance, removal of invasive rabbits has forced the brown skua, a seabird, to switch back to natural, but less abundant, food sources.

The results, said Holmes, are “reason to celebrate and to be optimistic. It shows that this type of conservation intervention makes a difference, and it illuminates that there is more work to do.” The study counts 804 islands still eligible for eradication of invasive species. Among them are the Juan Fernandez Islands, off the coast of Chile, best known as the setting for Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe. “This is an incredible place,” said Holmes, but it’s also a complicated project because of the varied topography and the social issues involved in working with the human inhabitants.

The islands are home to the world’s only oceanic hummingbird—and to a menagerie of goats, cats, rats, and rabbits. The invaders will have to go, of course. But the new study demonstrates that the islands’ rich native diversity will then have an excellent chance to flourish again in its once-and-future isolation.

 

How to Grow More Food on Less Land without Wrecking the Planet

(Photo: Patrick Kuhl/Flickr)

My latest for Yale Environment 360:

For researchers trying to figure how to feed a world of 10 billion people later in this century, the great objective over the past decade has been to achieve what they call “sustainable intensification.” It’s an awkward term, not least because of conventional agricultural intensification’s notorious record of wasting water, overusing fertilizers and pesticides, and polluting habitats. But the ambition this time is different, proponents say: To figure out almost overnight how to grow the most food on the least land and with the minimal environmental impact. The alternative, they say, is to continue plowing under what’s left of the natural world. Or face food shortages and political unrest.

Up to now, the tendency in talking about sustainable intensification has been to focus on the supply side and on exciting technological innovations of one sort or another, from gene editing to satellite monitoring. In his new book Half-Earth, even E. O. Wilson invokes the idea, not too hopefully, that “a new Green Revolution can be engineered” to spare the half of the world he argues should be set aside for nature.

But achieving consensus about what sustainable intensification should mean — or whether it’s the right objective in the first place — has proved complicated and increasingly contentious. “Depending on how one defines it,” one researcher commented, “I’m in favor of it, or against it.”

To critics, the engineering focus has tended to put intensification ahead of sustainability, making it just a re-boot of the original Green Revolution. They say the technological fixes also distract from more challenging social reforms like slowing the rate of population growth, shifting away from crops like corn ethanol that don’t put food on the table, or ending subsidies for livestock production, which currently eats up an appalling

75 percent of the world’s agricultural land. Technological solutions also appeal most directly to large farms in the industrial world, which can afford to invest in them. But the population growth and the clearing of land for agriculture are mainly happening in the developing world.

Fertilizer is a key topic of discussion everywhere — most obviously because sustainable intensification means curbing overuse in the industrial world. The European Union began regulating fertilizer use 25 years ago, to reduce farm runoff that was polluting groundwater and turning water bodies hypoxic. The EU’s Nitrates Directive led to a 30 percent reduction in fertilizer use, even as yields were increasing substantially.

That kind of intensification — more production with fewer impacts — is certainly also possible in the United States. University of Minnesota ecologist G. David Tilman cited, by way of example, multiple studies showing that farmers could get the same yield with substantially less fertilizer, if they were willing to time applications more precisely to the needs of the crop. The pressure to cut fertilizer use is especially urgent in the Mississippi River Valley, where agricultural runoff has created the world’s second largest ocean “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

So far, state and federal agencies have relied on voluntary efforts to reduce runoff, with little success. But the switch from old- to new-style intensification could start to become mandatory, depending on the outcome of a new lawsuit by the City of Des Moines charging upstream Iowa farm counties with polluting its drinking water and imposing huge filtration costs on city residents.

Even as fertilizer use needs to decrease in the industrial world, sustainable intensification advocates argue that it must increase dramatically in the developing world, where there is a stark choice between intensification and extensification. That is, if a farmer’s land yields only a quarter of what it takes to feed the family, one possible fix is to apply more fertilizer, or plant legumes to deliver a crop that also adds nitrogen to the soil. What often happens instead, though, is that the farmer just clears four or five times as much land.

Is it possible to increase fertilizer use without the pollution headaches it has created in the industrial world? And without the economic dependency and increased economic inequality associated with past efforts to increase fertilizer use?

Intensification turns out to be a lot more nitty-gritty and locally driven in the developing world than in industrial nations. In Zimbabwe, for instance, poor farmers were often unwilling to risk the cost of applying fertilizer to an entire field. But a 2010 study demonstrated that “micro-dosing”— that is, applying fertilizer in minute amounts when planting each seed, or as a top dressing soon after emergence – improved yields by 30-100 percent, with a 400 percent return on the investment.

A new study in Mali worked with farmers to develop a sort of sustainable intensification decision tree: If I am fertilizing the cotton crop, and I have this type of soil, what should I plant in that field next, to take advantage of the nutrient carry-over? In the uplands of Rwanda, “vertical intensification is a great thing,” said Kenneth Giller, of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Climbing beans fix nitrogen out of the air and produce twice the yield of bush beans, “and it’s a cash crop farmers can sell in the cities.”

Giller, who has worked on agricultural issues in Africa for the past 30 years, says that new technologies often “sound fantastic.” But the companies promoting them “are really not thinking about the context of the farmer.” They’re often geared to a yield-per-acre mindset, when yield-per-workday might be more appropriate, given that farmers in the developing world must often piece together a living here and there from multiple sources.

Solutions from the industrial world are frequently “like developing a product and not doing any market research,” Giller said, or like having a high-speed chip, “but we don’t have a computer to plug it into.” Instead of being about a technology or a product, effective intensification might involve developing a supply chain to get fertilizer to farmers in Rwanda, or connecting farmers with food processors in Ethiopia to develop a market for chickpeas, with one type for domestic consumption and another that “fetches a very good price on the international market.”

Or maybe intensification isn’t even the right term for this process. “I see no reason to start with productivity as our focus,” said M. Jahi Chappell, a senior staff scientist at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. “The amount of attention productivity gets is incredibly disproportionate to how important it is and to how effective it is” at improving peoples’ lives. It doesn’t even necessarily put more food on peoples’ tables, he said, especially when it’s geared to export markets.

“Intensification often goes hand in hand with squeezing out the small farmers and landless rural laborers most likely to be suffering from hunger,”Chappell recently wrote on the institute’s website. “In this light, simply producing more cannot be thought of as sustainable without looking at how that food is distributed, who it is distributed to, and who gets to make those decisions … it cannot simply be left to concentrated and corporate-dominated ‘free markets.’”

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Chappell cited research by Lisa C. Smith and Lawrence Haddad using data on child stunting as an indicator of how the incidence of malnutrition has changed since 1970 in 116 developing countries. The factors likeliest to improve food security and reduce stunting, they found, were access to clean water, access to sanitation, and female secondary school enrollment, in that order. Improvements to the food supply ranked well down the list, and for Chappell, that means that “increased productivity was the outcome — not the cause — of the improvements.”

But Smith and Haddad also noted one factor that makes the focus on food supply more urgent: It “is arguably the underlying determinant most at risk of disruption from climate change,” they concluded, “and considerable effort needs to be expended to maintain production in the face of these increased uncertainties.”

Maybe all this uncertainty, disagreement, and dread are the reasons one aspect of sustainable intensification — food waste – has gotten so much enthusiastic public attention lately. British supermarkets have recently pledged to cut waste 20 percent (though they granted themselves a leisurely 10 years to do it). And environmentalists and food industry representatives alike have supported new legislation in the U.S. Congress to reform wasteful “sell by,” or expiration date, labeling on food products.

The idea that the world now wastes all the agricultural output from 5.4 million square miles of land — an area almost half as large as the United States — doesn’t just offend common sense and beg for urgent solutions. It may also be the only thing about sustainable intensification — or let’s just call it food security and sustainability — on which almost everyone agrees.

 

 

How the Hook-and-Bullet Mindset Still Rules Our Wildlife Agencies

Elk hunter (Photo: William Albert Allard/’National Geographic’/Getty Images)

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In January, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game sent a helicopter into the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness to radio-collar wolves. This incursion violated the rules of the federally protected wilderness area. It also broke the department’s own agreement with the federal government, dating from a prior violation in which Fish and Game sent a trapper into the protected area to exterminate wolves. By the time conservationists filed suit in that 2013 incident, nine wolves in two packs were already dead.

Idaho Fish and Game is, let’s be frank, an outlaw agency. It regards killing wolves as part of its sacred duty to protect elk for hunters. The agency is apparently clueless about the abundant evidence that strong predators make strong habitats and strong prey.

But let’s not pick on Idaho. What happened there fit seamlessly with the entire long history of wildlife agencies manipulating the environment for the benefit of hunters. In truth, that kind of game management dates back at least to Charlemagne and Genghis Khan, and it persists today in the names and the mind-set of the many wildlife agencies that still call themselves fish and game departments.

Predator control tends to get the headlines. But these agencies also engage in large-scale alterations of the landscape—by clearing forests, conducting prescribed burns, building water catchments, removing shrubs from wetlands, and other means—to benefit game animals, with little or no regard for how this will affect all the other non-game species living in that habitat. And the habitat in question is huge. In Scotland, for instance, 58 percent of the total land area

is managed for hunting, mostly upland birds. In Slovenia, it’s 94 percent of the total land area.

The widespread character of this land management caught the attention of Travis Gallo, a doctoral candidate in conservation biology at Colorado State University. He was also interested in how much money goes into game management, especially compared to what other nongame species get. Hunting licenses in the United States contributed $790 million to wildlife programs in 2013, and special duties and taxes on hunting gear, via the Wildlife Restoration Act, added another $550 million.

Gallo’s original idea was that, even if this funding results in a one-sided focus on game animals, there might be inadvertent benefits for nongame wildlife too. Like a lot of people in Colorado, he’s a hunter himself, for deer and elk, and “I really wanted to find some synergy,” he said. What he found instead, he reports in a new study in the journal Biological Conservation, is that hardly anybody even bothers to ask the question.

A broad search of the scientific literature revealed just 26 studies “that directly evaluated the effect of game management practices on non-targeted wildlife.” The effect was positive 40 percent of the time and negative 37 percent of the time, more or less what you would expect by chance.

On the positive side, for example, wildlife agencies removed shrubs from wetlands in the Great Lakes to create habitat for sharp-tailed grouse, a game bird. But that inadvertently also benefited birds like LeConte’s sparrow and the sage wren, which also require open wetland habitat. Water catchments in Arizona turned out to benefit native bats more than the mule deer and other game species for which they were intended. On the negative side, the United Kingdom manages habitat for fallow deer, roe deer, and the Reeves’s muntjac (a deer species native to China), and this inadvertently causes sharp declines in native British birds such as the common nightingale, the willow warbler, and the chiffchaff. Managing for overabundant elk at the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming nibbles down cover that would otherwise harbor migratory shorebirds and songbirds.

In the new study, Gallo and his coauthor, Liba Pejchar, note up front that they aren’t “advocating that hunting be reduced or prohibited on either public or private lands.” They rightly note that a lot of habitat and species now survive only because of hunters. In the United States, big game hunters launched the conservation movement in the late 19th century, just in time to save the bison from extinction. They drove through the passage of the Lacey Act, which remains our fundamental law against illegal wildlife and plant trafficking. They played a major role in creating some of our most important national parks.

But that doesn’t mean the hook-and-bullet mentality should be ruling our wildlife agencies today, if only as a matter of their own self-preservation. The number of people identifying themselves as hunters (and paying those license fees) is sharply declining, down to just 13.7 million in 2012. But in the same survey, 71.8 million Americans said they were wildlife watchers. One way to get wildlife agencies to broaden their focus to nongame animals would be for those wildlife watchers to begin to take over the funding. That is, you and I should be stepping up to pay a special wildlife tax on our binoculars and our birdfeeders, the way hunters do on their guns.  That was the gist of the Teaming With Wildlife Act of 2009, but it went nowhere in Congress.

The other important take-home message from the new study, said Gallo, is that wildlife agencies need to do real science on how game management impacts nongame species. In particular, they need to investigate the likely compounding effect when they combine outdated predator control programs with unscientific habitat manipulations.

That is, wildlife agencies need to grow up, stop distorting the landscape for the recreational interests of one narrow interest group, and start practicing holistic management for the benefit of entire ecosystems.

 

The Trouble with Saving Nature by Putting a Price on It

Do we really want to put a price on this? (Photo: Lena Trindade/Brazil Photos/LightRocket via Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart.com:

Not too long ago, Mexican free-tailed bats seemed like a perfect example of how conservationists could use the “ecosystem services” idea to save the natural world. These bats feed on insect pests in the Southwestern United States, and researchers have calculated that they provide a benefit to cotton farmers that was at one point worth about $24 million a year.

It would, of course, have taken a miracle worker to get the farmers to pay for a service they had always gotten for free. But before that could happen, technology and market forces intervened: BT cotton, a strain of cotton genetically modified to produce the insecticide BT, came on the market. The BT took over the job of controlling insect pests on cotton farms, and suddenly the free-tailed bats were like buggy-whip makers in the automotive age or newspaper reporters today. The value of their services plummeted by 80 percent.

Cases like this have led a lot of biologists to wonder, as the title of a recent article in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution put it, “Have Ecosystem Services Been Oversold?” These critics increasingly question the validity of the entire ecosystem services movement on practical and moral grounds. They ask, among other things: What happens when technological and market forces make the services a species provides, and thus the species itself, seem worthless? Is it even right to monetize and in some cases privatize nature, the ultimate public good?

The questions are worth asking because the ecosystem services idea is a movement, beloved by many conservation organizations, and the subject

so far of more than 15,000 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. Schemes to pay for ecosystem services, such as REDD, are also a big deal in global financial markets. You might think REDD is a brand of apple ale with really stupid television advertising. But it’s an international program, arguably overhyped, called Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation.

The idea behind REDD is twofold: Forests sequester carbon, harbor biodiversity, and otherwise provide ecosystem services. So why not get corporations, governments, and others to pay to protect those services, if only to offset their own carbon emissions or earn public relations bonus points? Thus Norway, a leader in the movement, has pledged $3 billion under REDD schemes to protect threatened tropical forests in Brazil, Indonesia, and other countries. This is serious money being put to work to protect natural resources, so you can understand why conservation groups might love the idea.

But much as was the case with the free-tailed bats, “there are no markets for many of the goods and services that ecosystems provide,” Jonathan Silvertown, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, points out in the “Oversold” article. The solution for ecosystem services proponents, he writes, has typically been to “invent a market” like the REDD scheme for carbon credits. Or they “pretend there is a market” and ask people how they would value ecosystem services in hypothetical situations. But “make-believe markets” are highly likely to fail when people are otherwise, he writes.

But make-believe markets are highly likely to fail when people are otherwise relentlessly focused on nickel-and-dime realities. The market mentality also degrades nature by attempting to turn it into a commodity. “People are not allowed to sell their organs or their children,” Silvertown writes, citing the 2012 book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. “These have intrinsic value that is beyond price.” That’s true of species and habitats too.

The attempt to sell nature went spectacularly wrong for the government of British Prime Minister David Cameron. When he came to power in 2010, he pushed to sell off the roughly 1,000 square miles of forest that until then had been owned and protected by the national Forestry Commission. The ecosystem services idea seemed to offer the new government a bright, shiny “technocratic rationale for the deployment of its natural capital,” Silvertown writes, with the added likelihood of putting bright, shiny millions into government coffers.

Some conservation groups went along, “taking the view that it is regulation” of the forests “and not ownership that matters.” But Cameron, a conservative, was slashing regulations at the same time. The response from the British public was furious. It turned out that no amount of money could make up for what it perceived as the loss of its forests, and no amount of monetizing could capture the value of simply being able to walk in the woods. Cameron quickly backed down, with one government source describing the whole idea as “a cock-up,” or what Americans might call a FUBAR: “We just did not think.”

So, let’s think. Where does all this leave the ecosystem services idea? Trying to “unbundle” all the things we get from the natural world and put a price on them cheapens nature, and it cheapens us. The people who first developed the idea in the mid-20th century meant that conservation could benefit from showing people how their lives depend, in all sorts of unseen ways, on the natural world: Intact wetlands save downstream cities from flooding, coastal marshes serve as nursing grounds for offshore fisheries, and that air you breathe? Yes, it’s an ecosystem service, provided by healthy forests and obscure ocean microorganisms.

This is the only sense in which the ecosystem services idea deserves to live—as a constant reminder of how utterly we all depend on the priceless blessings of the natural world.