Peoplesystems

PeopleSystems and Sustainability: This Week in the Global Environment

Pandemics? Really?

Feb 20 2012 10:24AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

Population biologists and animal and plant ecologists have been all over predation and competition as processes that control the structure of ecosystems. Our heroes—MacArthur, Wilson, Ehrlich, Hutchinson, Clements, Elton, Gleason, even E.P. Odum—all started out deeply vested in predation and competition. If anybody thought to mention parasitism and disease as ecosystem-structuring processes, it was as an afterthought and cited to a lack of information.

In terms of ecosystems theory, I think we are still behind the curve regarding the critical roles that parasitism and disease play in the day-to-day operations of the biosphere. As a practical matter, however, experience has made us righteously aware of the potential for disease organisms to structure the human component of the environment.

We’ve analyzed and re-analyzed the pandemic plagues of the Little Ice Age. Seen hemorrhagic viruses come and go without achieving their feared destructive potential. We’ve got novels and movies premised on natural and especially human-engineered microbes running rampant.

For all that, it’s still reasonable to ask if we’re paying proper attention. The 15 January 2012 Washington Post, under the byline of Brian Vastag, reports on efforts by the Centers for Disease Control to monitor viral loads in African “bush meat” reaching the U.S. Bush meat is a tradition in many African cultures, a once-in-while celebratory feast, something like fruit bats in Pacific Oceania, turtle in China, or turkey in North America. Bush meat is often, unfortunately, of primate origin, monkey or ape. The Post article refers to chimpanzee and monkey parts confiscated at east coast airports. Much of the remainder of the bush meat reaching American shores seems to be from the giant cane rat.

We’ve learned to fear viruses vectored by wild animals from HIV, which jumped from chimpanzees to humans several times in its recent evolutionary history, the SARS virus carried by civet cats intended for food in Asia, and from the varied threats proffered by Lassa, Ebola, Marburg, Lyme disease, West Nile, and avian influenza. In a world with shrinking wild lands and transportation-linked human populations, conditions for a catastrophic restructuring of the ecosystem—with people being the component most drastically reduced—are ripe.

Thus it is something of a shock to read in the Post story that the CDCs total budget for bush meat monitoring is less than $60K and that next year’s funding is uncertain. Given the known propensity of disease organisms to evolve into human threats from animal vectors, and the horrendous nature of some of the zoonotic viruses in particular, you would think there would be substantially more scientific and regulatory interest in these things. Early in the history of ecology, we underestimated the importance of disease processes. In today’s world, with our present knowledge and experience, that’s a dangerous road to walk.

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Threads of Connection

Feb 13 2012 8:48AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

The 8 January 2012 print edition of the Washington Post offered some disparate items related to the environment. Let’s see if we can’t connect ‘em up.

Years ago, I worked in central California, in the Coastal Chaparral right behind the Pacific Ocean beaches. Seal, sea lion, and sea elephant carcasses were common flotsam. A proportion of them—via informal survey, about a third—had bullet wounds in their heads. Apparently there are still fisherfolk who think they are in competition with marine mammals. Competition worthy of violence.

I was reminded of this by a short item in the paper regarding the bludgeoning deaths of two to four Hawaiian Monk Seals. Reporting that the killings are under investigation and the perpetrators are unknown, the Post did mention that “…the deaths are coming up as the federal government steps up its efforts to protect the seals, leading to simmering resentment among some fishermen…”. Implying, at least, that “simmering” resentment boiled over in a few cases.

Then there’s a full story by David Brown regarding efforts by scientists to get the White House to reverse Health and Human Services Director Kathleen Sebelius’ decision, against the advice of Food and Drug Administration scientists, to continue to restrict the availability of morning-after contraceptive “Plan B”.

Finally, an excellent letter by Shaun Martin, director of the World Wildlife Fund Climate Change Adaptation program. Mr. Martin says (in part): “The traditional response to environmental degradation has been to protect what is left and restore what is damaged. That is no longer a viable paradigm…Instead, we must proactively make our cities and our ecosystems more resilient to the impacts of climate change and take steps to ensure that nature can provide the services that people and other species rely on. Drought-resistant crops, mangrove forests, rainfall-absorbing green spaces and urban pavement materials that absorb less heat are just a few examples of measures that are now required.”

Mr. Martin gets to the big-picture of things. It is imperative that human beings stop managing the biosphere by default (which we do now) and start managing it deliberately. Our control of the biosphere is essentially total, as climate change reveals. It is time we recognize this and act accordingly.

The connection to the Plan B controversy is obvious. Anything that safely and effectively contributes to human population control is a useful and applicable tool. Jack M. Hollander has shown (in his 2004 book The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy, University of California Press) that increasing human quality-of-life is necessary for, not antithetical to, successful management of the biosphere. One aspect of quality-of-life is birth control. Bringing the affluence that brings increased environmental quality requires that women have control of their own reproductive systems.

And those dead seals? Like those in California, they are a sign that we as a society lag in education and in managing individual’s interactions with the ecosystem. If we in the U.S. can’t keep endangered and threatened species from being gratuitously killed, it is hard for us to keep the high ground regarding threats to tigers, snow leopards, Asian rhinos, great apes, and other critically endangered organisms.

The day will come (unless we really screw up) that we as a species develop the toolkit and wherewithal to apply same to sound adaptive management of the biosphere, as Mr. Martin points out. One sign that we are on the road to success will be that at both the largest scale (atmospheric gas balances, hydrologic cycle) and smallest (individual species), we can establish and meet adaptive, sustainable objectives for the ecosystem. The first step is to toss the old paradigms and develop those new, adaptive tools. Go forth and think, everyone!

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The Harmonica: Contributions to Sustainability.

Feb 6 2012 8:17AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

When I was a kid…well, actually, even now…I’m a bad jack-of-all-trades in the rock and blues music field. I can wail bad guitar, bad bass, bad vocals, bad drums, and write bad songs with the rest of the wannabe world. The one thing I couldn’t get good enough to even be bad at was the harmonica. I bought books and blues harps and practiced until my lips bled. Could never master it.

Let’s combine a couple of disparate news stories—both from the Washington Post—this week. In the Arts section for 1 January, Erin Williams reports an interview with young harmonica player Frederic Yonnet. Yonnet is wise beyond his years…or can at least give an interview beyond his years. To quote: “I definitely hope to expand the way that people think about the harmonica. Within that message, I hope that people will extend the way they think about things that seem to be limited in general. Because…the limitations are not in the instruments; they are not in the tools we are using. They are definitely in the minds…There’s always a solution. We should definitely keep our minds open.”

A hearty amen to Mr. Yonnet. Nowhere do we need to keep our minds open to solutions as in managing the biosphere.

In The World section, under the byline of Rama Lakshmi, the Post reports on “India’s urbanizing villages.” The issue is that, instead of moving into already mega-sized urban areas as much of the world’s rural population has done for the past few decades, Indian agricultural villages are outgrowing agriculture right in place. Towns of more than 10,000 people appear all over the landscape. According to the Post, there more than 3500 villages that have lost their “village” character and need to be managed as towns.

The difference between a “village” and a “town” in the Indian system is substantive. Villages are expected to be agricultural, largely self-supporting, and run by local councils. Investment in infrastructure via public resources is minimal. Reaching formal town status brings with it an influx of investment in roads, power, and water.

Here’s a way to think about the problem. A village called Kotwali lies in the back of beyond 120 miles north of New Delhi. It has 12,000 people. Less than 12% remain as farmers. Yet Kotwali still lacks paved roads, has power only hours per day, has no indoor plumbing, and no local hospital. Unemployment is high—without agriculture taking the strain, there are few “village” jobs available. And industry and communications employers need infrastructure to flourish.

The Post story reminded me of a remarkable phenomenon I observed in China. Cities of a million people are common—and many have simply grown in place, from sleepy farming crossroads to enormous urbs, and planning and investment always seem to lag. In a western-style hotel deep in rural eastern China, when the city water system failed, the hotel simply employed some locals to tap the water table out back next to the local lake. You haven’t lived until you’ve taken a shower after watching something like that!

Those of us who reside in the highly developed, paved, wired, lighted, plumbed, and watered northern temperate world need to take some time to think. And think outside the box. It’s hard to argue that countries in which millions lack basic amenities need to cut their carbon footprints on a sudden and dramatic basis. Maybe we need to think about human habitation as integral to the ecosystem, linked to the landscape, constrained by its feedbacks. As infrastructure develops, can we apply the lesson’s we’ve learned the hard way in the developed world? Can we put in place infrastructure that is friendlier to local climate, hydrology, soil, and undeveloped environments? Who pays the freight for that? How do we make it happen? And, most challenging of all, can we generate power locally without contributing to pollutant loads?

This is not a knock on planning authorities in India or elsewhere. It’s more a plea for us as a global society to apply to newly urbanizing systems the lessoned learned from our 5,000 years of urban development. That’s a lot of experience, and in the age of cheap digital memory, nanomaterials, and universal communication, we should be able to do it. It’d be a shame to waste it—like I did my harmonica “skills”.

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It’s Not Just Fertilizer Anymore.

Jan 30 2012 8:50AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

Who remembers the (first) “Green Revolution”? You had to be around from about 1960 through the 1970s. New, more efficient varieties of domestic grains (beginning with short-stalked wheat in Mexico), coupled with broadly distributed and applied fertilizers, yielded enormous increases in agricultural production [1]. This sounds like an unalloyed good thing, but nothing is noncontroversial. The problems identified include fertilizer-dependence of croplands, increased irrigation with attendant soil salinity, wider use of pesticides, ground water contamination, and the perpetuation of poverty [2]. From a whole-system perspective, other changes cascaded from the targeted alterations in plant genetics and soil fertility. Seeds and bulk fertilizers were driven into the international transportation system, planting and harvest patterns were altered with agricultural machinery and fuel use increased, crop markets moved away from traditional patterns.

In fact, this was not the first “revolutionary” application of fertilizers. It is possible that the invention of the Haber process for nitrate production allowed early 20th century Germany to produce a sufficiency of both fertilizers and explosives to bolster the beginning of World War One [3].

And that was a warning. A primary objection to the Green Revolution involved the use, over-use, or abuse of fertilizers. A possible objection not generally raised at the time was the potential for widely-available fertilizers to be used to produce explosives. In 1997—two years after the Oklahoma City bombing—USEPA produced a warning paper regarding the explosive potential of ammonium nitrate fertilizers [4].

Afghanistan is a hell of a place to produce crops. The soils are mostly old, inorganic, dry, and nutrient-poor. Nevertheless, agricultural products ranging from apricots to opium poppies are grown in various areas of the country. Fertilizer availability is among the (many) limiting factors for Afghan agriculture [5]. Nearly all the fertilizers applied in Afghanistan are produced in Pakistan. Enormous volumes of fertilizers, in 50 kg bags, are trucked across the border every day. And the problem is that some of it is ammonium-nitrate based and is used by insurgents to manufacture improvised explosive devices [6].

This is not an easy problem to solve. Nitrate fertilizers are available in multiple formulations, but ammonium nitrate has unique applications in the fertilizer spectrum [7]. In the world of bulk fertilizers, it is as difficult now as it was prior to World War One to separate the ammonium nitrate bound for explosives vs. fertilizers. Given the large-scale effort to revitalize legitimate Afghan agriculture, it’s a problem likely to be around for a while. There is a crack of daylight offered by technology. A form of ammonium nitrate fertilizer unsuited for explosives application has been developed, but is not yet widely distributed [8].

On a risk assessment scale, solving the problem of explosives applications would seem to take precedence over other potential fertilizer impacts. Just another illustration of how intertwined environmental issues are with other aspects of human life. In later entries of this blog, we’ll tackle the “new” and upcoming version of the Green Revolution triggered by developments in molecular engineering.

[1] an interesting description, although of uncertain provenance, is available at http://www.preservearticles.com/201012312126/the-green-revolution.html. General histories of the Green Revolution are widely available.

[2] the negative sides of the Green Revolution are recounted at http://www.foodfirst.org/media/opeds/2000/4-greenrev.html

[3] an excellent article on nitrogen chemistry and its history, including the Haber process and the possible link to the first World War is at http://discovermagazine.com/2001/apr/featbomb

[4] http://www.p2pays.org/ref/05/04380.pdf

[5] detailed discussion of the state of Afghan agriculture is at http://www.cfr.org/afghanistan/nourishing-afghanistans-agricultural-sector/p19478

[6] http://www.dawn.com/2011/09/01/pakistani-fertilizer-fuels-afghan-bombs.html

[7] an Ohio State University paper regarding fertilizer selection and the unique applications of ammonium nitrate is at http://ohioline.osu.edu/agf-fact/0205.html

[8] a brief description is available at http://www.sulfn26.com/explosives.php

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Swedish Woodlands vs. Indian Trash Dumps

Jan 23 2012 9:12AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

To improve our odds of passing a sustainable biosphere along to our children and their children, we need to swap directed, science-driven environmental management for our present, default approach. It has been suggested (Hahn et al. 2008) that effective ecosystems-based management requires good “governance”, defined as “the process of resolving trade-offs and providing a vision and direction for sustainability…”. Ultimately, such governance would make social networks “sources of resilience in social-ecological systems…transforming a social-ecological system toward a more sustainable trajectory and building resilience in this new trajectory”.

Hahn et al. built their analysis via a case study of land-use management in Sweden. They documented local and regional interactions of the social network in driving successful and adaptive sustainable management—the social network did indeed work in this case.

In drawing larger conclusions, Hahn et al. may have overstepped their bounds. Among the general positive outcomes of effective social networks for environmental management, they claim benefits and bridges at national and international levels. As their land-use problem was inherently regional and local, this seems a stretch.

A recent news article (Washington Post, Monday, 21 November 2011) highlights a truly knotty socio-ecological problem that affects sustainability across a hierarchy of human systems from families to worldwide and ecological systems at scales from meters to the biosphere. Trash dumps for urban wastes in New Delhi, India, support almost 300,000 workers involved in collection, sorting, and recycling of wastes. Similar communities have arisen throughout the developing world, with particularly well-known examples in Egypt and Brazil.

Digging saleable recyclables from massive trash deposits is a miserable way to earn a living, and its practitioners are impoverished. However, as several people interviewed for the article pointed out, alternatives are hard or impossible to come by. With hard work and a stoic attitude, families are supported, life goes on in active, vital communities ringing the trash deposits.

Presently, international pressure and policy favors refuse-to-energy incineration systems. Under the Kyoto Protocols, carbon offset credits are available for the provision of such systems. There are likely to be more tangible benefits in reducing the investment of energy, land, and money in trash management, and enhanced production of locally-produced electric power. Incineration systems will remove, essentially overnight, the livelihood of the trash workers.

Here is a quintessential problem of peoplesystems and a sustainable biosphere. Worldwide, millions of people earn a living sorting and recycling urban waste. The social networks involved are complicated and anastomosed, and reach from the lowest levels on the economic ladder to higher rungs as cash changes hands and waste is converted to product. A technological solution to the massive problem of urban trash—refuse-to-energy incineration—seemed almost a no-brainer, a sack of positives with just a small envelope of negatives as tradeoffs.

That is, until we dug a little deeper into the indirect effects and feedback loops. Now we can see a far more complicated picture. And a problem with no single sustainable trajectory that makes easy sense. We have a complicated problem whose solution will require innovative “governance” of both sociology and ecology. The necessary governance will affect, and must address, scales of space and time from individuals to millions of people, and from a dusty few square meters in a tropical trash dump to the gas balance of the biosphere.

Food for thought? We hope so. One of our objectives in posting this weblog is to identify and document the tough systems-level interactions that make true sustainability such an elusive objective. But we’re only going to achieve that objective if we face the hard questions, and come up with innovative and effective answers. Managing the biosphere by direction rather than default is not going to be easy. But it is going to have to be done if we are going to sustain ourselves as a dominant social species in a functionally sustainable biosphere. Think this one over during the week. Give us feedback in the comments section below—ask questions if you have them, we’ll respond to them as you raise them. We can run a productive dialog right through next week at this time, when we’ll throw another hard problem your way!

References

Hahn, T., L. Schultz, C. Folke and P. Olsson 2008. Social networks as sources of resilience in social-ecological systems. Pages 119 – 148 in Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future, edited by J. Norberg and G.S. Cumming. Columbia University Press, New York.

Washington Post, Monday 21 November 2011. In India, a mountain of trash means a living. Rama Lakshme.

A series of startling and hard-hitting photographic images of trash workers is available and well worth a look at http://www.globalpost.com/photo-galleries/planet-pic/5674706/disposable-communities-living-and-working-the-worlds-largest-trash-dumps

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Why You Should Invest A Few Minutes of Your Time Reading This Blog

Jan 17 2012 6:50AM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

In a recent editorial (Ludwig and Iannuzzi 2011), we said “Sustainability is the single most important aspect of human life. Everything else—everything—is contingent on our having a future as a species. Absent sustainability, nothing else matters. Absent sustainability, the game of existence proceeds without us.” If you think about this in simplest terms, it seems a tautology. Of course sustainability is “important”, if we’re not here to experience life, the rest of time is pretty much irrelevant to our species.

But there is a deeper and critically important way to think about this. Absent the complete extinction of the human species—and even the most intense disaster scenarios of the wildest Hollywood and Bollywood, not to mention scientific, imaginations don’t go there—there is another critical dimension to sustainability. That is quality-of-life. Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, itinerant, hard-working, at risk and living short and generally brutal lives. There are many credible futurist scenarios that could get us back to that condition, or some level between our present increasingly social and interactive global society and the complete collapse of our social systems.

Sustainability does not mean the persistence of the human species. It means the persistence of human society, and the successful integration of that society with all other aspects of the biosphere. Some of those aspects are directly necessary for human quality-of-life, some are simply reflections of quality of the environment at large. Sustainability is a complicated thing, and human investment in biological and social sciences, engineering, chemistry, physics, and integration of these, are necessary to understand and guide sustainability.

The field that in times past had the technical “charge” to cover this integration was systems ecology. Systems ecology arose with the nuclear weapons programs of World War Two and beyond, and was a generally methodology for applying engineering tools to the analysis of ecology. The perfect sort of tool to integrate the enormously diverse concerns we have for sustainability.

Systems ecology has, as a technical field, fallen on hard times. Much research investment is made in bioengineering, nanotechnology, and cellular and subcellular biochemical and biophysical systems. We are burrowing in deeper and deeper to the structures and functions of biological systems. Along the way, though, we are losing the diverse perspective of integrative ecosystems science. The objective of this new weekly weblog on the AEHS site is pull some of this balance back. We will dig into the big-picture of weekly issues highlighting patterns and processes at the ecosystems level as they affect the sustainability of the biosphere. The general idea is to make a small contribution to the enormous collective investment we’re going to have to make to hand a sustainable biosphere off to subsequent generations. We’ll keep the weblog brief and to the point, informal but documented (primarily from easily available web-based sources), argumentative when necessary, collaborative at all times. Every week, we will come up with interesting, thought-provoking items and give you our perspective on them. We hope to generate an interactive weblog, where we can exchange comments and responses from week to week. Basically, a fun opportunity for all us all (especially me) to learn something and discover important issues worth thinking about. And we hope you’ll be thinking along with us. Collectively, let’s build a little more of that foundation that’ll help us pass a functional biosphere to our children’s children!

References

Ludwig, D. and T.J. Iannuzzi 2011. Risk assessment, risk management, and a sustainable biosphere. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 17:1015-1017.

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Pulp, Paper, and Christmas Trees.

Jan 6 2012 1:55PM Posted by David Ludwig, Ph.D.

I have a standing challenge for my students and other young scientists. The question is this: which is more sustainable, recycling paper or pulp forestry? From a whole-systems perspective, the answer is complex and I have yet to see a good, quantitative, life-cycle analysis addressing the issue.

The problem is a step deeper than the simple comparison of manufacturing materials and associated processes. Mature forests are perfectly happy to store carbon in the standing stock of trees, standing dead, and slow-decomposing large woody debris. But mature forests don’t sequester much new carbon. They work in a rough annual equilibrium, losing their year’s primary production to the soil where it decomposes via leaf or needle litter with a delay of only a few years. If you want to take carbon out of the atmosphere, you have to plant young trees and let them grow.

Thus the question. Qualitatively, it occurs to me that planting and harvesting pulpwood, manufacturing paper, storing the paper when it becomes waste in very slow decomposing landfills, and replanting the pulp forests might take more carbon from the atmosphere than leaving equilibrium forests in place and recycling paper.

Of course I realize it is not that simple. That pulp forests are not substitutes for more natural forests. That there are other services, and other costs, to be considered on both sides of the equation. But from a systems perspective, it’s a question worth asking.

A similar question comes up annually in another context. That is natural vs. artificial Christmas trees. The most quantitative life cycle assessments on this question recently have come down in favor of natural trees. But I am unconvinced. Much depends on how you define the borders of your system, and conventional life cycle assessments may draw the lines too tightly for fully effective analysis. For one thing, I suspect that users of artificial trees are aggregated in urban areas, those of natural trees in rural. That may render average transportation costs and impacts inaccurate. Furthermore, each kind of tree has social and economic impacts far beyond the immediate production in farm or factory and use in home or office. Natural trees keep farmland in circulation relatively close to my densely populated suburb between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Conversely, artificial trees provide employment in the developing world, and jobs via a chain of chemical production yielding the plastic that is the primary component.

It is often argued (you can get a flavor from the web sites cited below) that planted “forests” don’t provide the services of “natural” forests, and that developing-world plastic factories are unhealthy and economically unfair. But that’s the point. It’s argued. But I have yet to see credible quantitation. It shouldn’t be impossible to develop comparative scenarios for a more comprehensive life cycle assessment methodology, one that would touch on local and regional social and economic conditions along with the more conventional environmental parameters considered in such assessments.

Anybody know of some? Please, let me know.

Web portals regarding paper recycling:

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6403

http://conservatree.org/learn/Essential%20Issues/EIPaperContent.shtml

Web portals regarding Christmas trees:

http://www.science20.com/science_motherhood/ great_debate_real_vs_artificial_christmas_trees

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/business/energy-environment/18tree.html

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