Computers, Society, and Nature

On November 21st, I attended a talk by Dr. Robert McKleman from the University of Ottawa regarding human migration and settlement patterns in response to climate change. As Culture Kid points out below, McKleman studied Oklahomans’ adaptations to the American Dustbowl of the 1930’s. He found that migration and settlement patterns were largely dependent on one’s capital endowments. He used capital in a very broad sense, to include economic capital (money, and material capital like cars), social capital (social networks and connections) and cultural capital (ethnicity, heritage, labour characteristics). For example, McKleman found that an Oklahoman was likely to migrate to Northern California if he or she had enough money and a means of transportation, had friends or family en route to and in California, and if he or she had skills and characteristics compatible with Californian culture. McKleman concluded that future human adaptation to climate change would likewise be constrained or assisted by one’s capital endowments.
I found McKleman’s argument quite intuitive. For example, if I were to pick up and leave home I would obviously need money, a means of travel, a place to go, and cultural characteristics that would be accepted at my destination. I felt, however, that McKleman’s analysis begged an essential question concerning human (non)adaptation: why did the Oklahomans find themselves in a position where migration and settlement was their only means to survive? Why did they not adapt before crisis came? If we could determine the answers to this question then we might be able to understand our current situation regarding climate change. In all likelihood, we’re on a path that will end in the need for many people to migrate and settle elsewhere, to give up their homes and livelihoods, or risk death. Why, then, are we not able to change course now, preventing the harrowing outcome of our current actions?
Many people are currently trying to change the course we’re on. Many others, however (McKleman included), have already resigned themselves to the fact that crisis is now inevitable. Did Oklahomans, with the soil turning to desert under their feet, also recognize the consequences of their actions? And if so, why didn’t they prevent the Dust Bowl from occurring?
As Culture Kid states below, McKleman’s talk invoked strong parallels to Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Diamond also asks questions similar to mine. He proposed a framework that might prove useful in addressing these questions. In his chapter “Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?”, Diamond first suggests that a society may fail to anticipate a problem (Oklahomans may have failed to anticipate that intense agriculture would deplete their soils of nutrients and water). Second, Diamond states that a society might fail to perceive a problem as it’s occurring (soil nutrients are invisible, thus early farmers would not know why their crops were failing). Third, a society might fail to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived (maybe change was not in the interest of the powerful elite). Fourth, perhaps a society has values that predispose it to disaster (Easter Islanders cutting down the last trees to build statues to the gods). Last, even after a problem is perceived and society is committed to solving it, solutions might be unsuccessful. An interesting study would be to apply this framework to the 1930’s Dustbowl disaster, in addition to more modern examples. Determining the barriers to change before one’s only options are migration or death would not only help us understand past disastrous outcomes, but help us understand our current situation.

On November 12th, I attended a talk by Dr. Line Gordon of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She talked a little about a number of topics including resilience, the Earth’s water balance, the effects of agriculture on global water vapor flows, and the types of ecosystem services fulfilled by agricultural (domesticated) lands. The last topic in this list is the focus of this post.

The idea that domesticated lands can fulfill a number of ecosystem services intrigues me for a number of reasons. First, as Gordon notes on her blog, ecosystem services that are usually associated with forest ecosystems such as carbon sequestration, erosion control and evapotranspiration, can be fulfilled by properly managed domesticated lands. The idea here is that domesticated lands (such as pastures, croplands etc.) can be managed in such a way that vital services are rendered available. This idea leads to my second point of intrigue.

As the human population continues to increase, so too will its food demands. To meet these demands a number of ecosystems will have to be domesticated (e.g. as forests are razed and replaced by croplands). One can easily foresee in the near future a number of conflicts will arise between conservationists and preservationists seeking to protect ‘pristine’ ecosystems and those responsible for securing food for the world’s growing numbers. In all likelihood, the needs of the hungry will trump the goals of the environmentalist. If, however, the newly domesticated lands are correctly managed, then valuable ecosystem services can be retained. There is ample room for both sides to achieve its goals.

To me, there is little doubt that an increasing percentage of the Earth’s land will be domesticated in the years ahead. This increase in domestic lands will come at the expense of a number of terrestrial ecosystems. If we can manage the newly domesticated lands so that they replace the services lost during domestication (carbon sequestration, erosion control etc.), then one of the most important aspects of ‘natural’ ecosystems will not be lost at all.

Though I desire a world where these concepts would not be needed, and where ecosystems would not be under constant threat of domestication, reality demands a number of compromises and trade-offs. As conflicts between environmentalists and those responsible for food security increase, knowing where we can compromise and where we cannot is essential. Thus, more research should focus on the types of services that can and that cannot be fulfilled by domesticated lands, and how best to manage and design these lands to carry out those services.

On November 18, 2007 I attended a lecture by Dr. Ricciardi of the MSE entitled “The Future of Biodiversity: How biological invasions and extinctions, driven by human activities, are re-shaping biodiversity on a global scale.” Ricciardi’s talk was split into four parts: He first talked about how many species there are on the planet, then moved to discuss how fast we are losing species, what the causes of biodiversity loss are, and finished by talking about what the consequences of biodiversity loss are.

Most of the presentation was comprised of case studies of biodiversity loss both in Canada and abroad. The two main causes for biodiversity loss are invasive species introductions and land use change (although there are other causes): both driven by human actions. While none of the information was complicated to understand I found that the pace of the talk was a bit too fast and that there was not one clear story to tell, it was just a collection of evidence to support that biodiversity loss is a wide-spread problem. What I found to be the most important part of the talk were the consequences of biodiversity loss: 1) an increase of instability, and reduction in resilience, 2) Loss of ecosystem function and ecological processes. When biodiversity is lost, nutrient and energy transfer in the food chain is disrupted and much of these resources are processed inefficiently, or simply lost within the system. The loss of a or replacement of a species by an invasive can have impacts that cascade through the food web and not only impact the species itself, but every other biotic and abiotic form that it interacts with.

The article that we addressed last week by Finlay and Vredenburg (2007) observed these cascading effects by assessing how trout addition to lakes impacted the mountain yellow-legged frog. While I have always understood aquatic systems to be the ideal study area due to the clear boundaries of a lakeshore (you know what comes in and out), this study proved that the introduction of an aquatic species can have impacts that reach far beyond the shore. Here, the mountain yellow-legged tree frog, a terrestrial species, had fewer food resources (insects) from the pelagic zone of the stocked lakes. The reduced populations of the frogs due to the trout additions, no doubt has consequences for its predators. Many people study how land use impacts aquatic systems (e.x. damming, changing stream courses, pollution, erosion, etc), however perhaps we should start to look at the interactions that run in the opposite direction: how species invasions in aquatic systems can have serious impacts to terrestrial systems. I think that overall, knowing the interactions back and forth between systems (here, land and water) gives more insight to policy makers and managers. Further, understanding the linkages back and forth encourages people to look at systems from an ecosystem approach prior to making changes. The assessment of trade-offs, what you gain by changing the landscape/adding a species compared to what the larger costs are, is essential to balance biodiversity and ecosystem function with the services we want to get from ecosystems.

I attended two talks last week, both generally dealing with the same subject matter: mechanisms of cultural adaptation or change. One was Michael Bollig’s exploration of east African the disappearance and reemergence of pastoralism, and the other was presented by geographer Robert McLeman’s presentation, drawing on the use of the 1930’s Dust Bowl as a model for predicting human adaptations to future, more severe and/or extreme climate change.

McLeman is a geographer from the University of Ottawa, whose fieldwork looks at historical migration of farmers from Okalahoma to northern California during the worst drought years of the pre-war 30’s, and an exploration of why some families decided to stay and attempt to eke out a living on the plains, while others left for greener (literally) pastures the first chance they had. McLeman’s examples invoked strong parallels to Jared Diamond’s more pervasive ideas, as espoused in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. McLeman pointed to several other historical and contemporary examples of humans choosing to live in a place of recognized – and at times, incredibly conspicuous – environmental instability, not including an expected reference to Diamond’s outline of the Easter Islands, but rather the more local southern California coast hillsides (prone to erosion and wildfires) and New Orleans, where the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina aptly advertised potential effects of setting up residence below sea level. McLeman underlined the seeming irrationality of humans continually attempting to live in such areas, even after enduring disastrous effects in the past and knowing such calamities will inevitably happen again. I enjoyed his perfunctory attitude towards future climate change, in which he stated that extreme weather is going to happen, without a doubt; many people are reluctant to make such confident assertions. But the lecture concluded with a vague and markedly unassertive reiteration of the fact that humans are adaptable, and that environmental refugees will become a more and more commonplace factor of the twenty-first century world. I wondered his specific ideas for redress of or reaction to global climate change, as none were mentioned.

Bollig’s talk, as thoroughly outlined below by merle, focused on the changes in productive practices of a society in Kenya generally referred to as “pastoralist.” Bollig focused on the fact that anthropologists usually like to understand social change in a Darwinian time-frame – that is, the reconfiguration of cultural worldview (and the way this metamorphosis is manifested on the landscape) does not typically happen quickly. The Pokot, however, appear to exemplify rapid change, modifying their mode of production three times within a two-century period. What accounts for this change? Why the need to change? Someone in the audience suggested that all societies rely on more than one productive practice, so that for example, in times of drought, they have a back-up plan, thus perhaps the Pokot simply favoured one over the other at different times, but did not actually undergo any cultural change. Bollig, however, did not buy this as a strong enough reason for the Pokot’s alternating pastoralism/non-pastoralism history.

These two scholars’ area of inquiry is pertinent to today’s climate – literally and figuratively. Applied anthropology is one sub-field which draws on such fieldwork and research to work to enact change, or at least help in policy-making, development work, and so forth, but such work is obviously not limited to the one discipline. Nonetheless, such fields, no matter the specific categorization, are contentious; application seems to be equated with “intervention” and “fixing,” both dangerous words in the minds of most cultural relativists. But relativism, in some ways, becomes a term of moot significance in the era of global change. And application and advocacy go hand-in-hand with the precautionary principle here, as uncertainty is often presented as reasons for not acting. However, I will save that lengthy debate for another time. For now, in searching for answers and calls to action in McLeman’s and Bollig’s inevitably, necessarily inconclusive presentations, I reiterate merle slightly in declaring the need for further research on the mechanisms of cultural change and adaptation – in theory and practice alike.

This week I attended M. Bollig talk titled “Rapid Social Ecological Change in an East African Pastoral Community: The History and Political Ecology of the Pokot Pastoralism”. In his talk, M. Bollig described in details the rapid and almost revolutionary transformation of the Pokot community from a non-pastoral lifestyle to a pastoral one and then back again after 200 years to more diversified livelihoods.
According to the oral tradition of the Pokot and corroborated by other evidences, the transition from one communal organization to the other happened in one or two decades and was carried on by the youths against the will of their elders. At least in the case of the first transition, M. Bollig convincingly argued that there had been a main driving factor that caused of the transition: a severe climatic variation. As indicated by the oral tradition, there has been a severe drought on their territory which lasted for about 80 years, between 1760 and 1840. This drought made the maize cultivation impossible and transformed the savannah by changing the previous grass to tree ratios. The Pokot rapidly adapted to their changing world by becoming highly specialized and very successful pastoralists.
Confronted by such a case of rapid cultural and social transformation in the face of a severe change in the natural environment, I think that the question that was on everyone’s mind was whether or not our own civilization could adapt so rapidly to the most likely upcoming climatic changes. And, pushing a step further, whether or not our civilization, which is responsible for most the drivers of climatic changes, could rapidly and preemptively alter some of its basic social patterns to avoid the worst case scenario in terms of climatic changes. Even if it wasn’t the subject of the talk, it did provide some hope on the possibility of adapting to a situation rapidly, but, unfortunately, not preemptively. The case suggests rather that people change their way of behavior only when they are under great pressure and that, even then, the process is not without its opposition, as the case of the protesting elderly suggests. However, one might ask with a bit of hope, is it different if you are confident that you can predict the coming of a catastrophic event? Can we escape the seemingly inescapable circle of collapses followed by reconstructions if we can foresee the factors that will most likely trigger a collapse? Can we then restructure not to have to reconstruct?
I guess that those questions don’t have answers until either the preemptive actions have successfully been taken or it is too late. Not being able to answer them from a purely theoretical perspective might not however be a bad thing, since it could mean that it is now the time for actions, the time to give to ourselves the answers that we want. As Marx said in another context: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Replace philosophers by scientists, if you prefer, it is still true today.

Let’s face it: Global scale research seems sexy. Not only is it large in scale, making it seem more important and far reaching, but also may get more publication attention because of the broad focus. I do feel, however, that some topics do not require to be studied at the global scale to be important for understanding global issues.

Take for example a paper that we discussed last week, by Sieswerda et al. (2001). The authors tried to determine the relationship between ecosystem integrity and human health at the global scale. They performed regression analysis relating an index of ecosystem integrity to life expectancy for different countries. The two seemed to be related but when the authors controlled for GDP (a socio-economic component), the relationship between these two variables fell apart. This is not surprising. If two people (one rich, one poor) are placed in a degraded area, the richer person will be able to insulate her or himself from the potential impacts and therefore their health will be less affected than that of the poor person who must rely on their immediate surroundings. In this way it is no surprise that this relationship is not clear at the global level and that the question could have been better examined at a smaller scale.

When wanting to examine patterns at the global scale using large indexes and averages only mask trends at the smaller scale. I would like to suggest that global studies that compile and compare results from many smaller studies offer more useful information than scaling up. For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment tried to assess the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being at the local, regional, and global scale. They found that the link between ecosystem service provision and human well-being was evident at smaller scales (e.x. the fertility of the soil will impact the well-being of the farmers who rely on it for food provision and income), while the relationship was not clear when using global averages and indexes (most ecosystem services are degraded, while global human well being is increasing everywhere). This assessment is still useful however, because it examined the relationship between ecosystem services and well-being at many levels and found where the relationship held and where it did not, while if it had only looked at global averages this relationship would not be evident. Further, by focusing more locally you may be better able to address differences in climates, cultures, or policies.

I do not mean to minimize the importance of understanding global scale patterns, but I think that the scale of the relationship should drive the scale of the study. If we return to the study done by Sieswerda et al. (2001), it is intuitive to me that the integrity of a local ecosystem will impact one’s health more than that of an ecosystem on the other side of a country. In this way perhaps this relationship should be examined in a series of small studies all of which can be compared to form a global understanding, as opposed to using broad indexes.

Both global and local scale studies can be valid, however, I think that instead of being caught up in the move to think global, researchers need to be more critical about knowing at what scale the relationship they seek to understand acts. This will make the findings more relevant and useful for future study.

While reading old posts, I realized that we identified many reasons or incentives persons may have to harvest or let other harvest from the environment more than what it can sustainably give and to ‘give’ or let other ‘give’ in return more wastes than it can absorb sustainably. We talked about discounting, environmental justice, psychological factors in play when it comes to make some efforts to preserve some species but not others, and so forth. Not feeling very original, I will add two factors to this already long list.

The fist one, I think, is quite similar to the different emotional responses that most of us have toward a ‘cute’ mammal risking extinction or a clear-cut forest scene when compared to the emotional response we have toward a fish risking extinction or a bottom trawling scene. In her talk, Line J. Gordon said that in countries where people where over draining their underground water for agriculture, the general opinion was that water had never been so abundant and therefore that there was nothing to worry about or no planning necessary. As in the case of the line separating the visible above water world from the invisible underwater world, it seems very hard to overcome wide spread opinions or emotive responses which result from individuals own day-to-day experiences and observations. The obvious response is: more information, we need more information! The presupposition is that once people do know what is really happening behind what they can directly observe, their emotional responses and habits will automatically change and they will ask their politician to bring about general changes to redress the situation. I think that the presupposition reveal a certain naivety. I am wondering what kind of information would be required and delivered in what ways to counter the psychological reflexes that we seem to have. Doing some researches (or reading the results of past researches, if any) in psychology and in communication might be necessary to put all the data collecting and synthesis to efficient use when it comes to transforming mentalities.

The second one is tied to the idea that rich people can insulate themselves (at least better than the poor one) from the effects of environmental degradation. This idea, which I no doubt think is true, taken with the idea of discounting gives, I think, a very strong incentive to destroy our planet. Since depleting the environment now often means getting richer and richer through time thanks to our system of interest rates, one can ‘rationally’ think that it is in his/her own interest and in the interest of his/her own children that he/she deplete the environment now (since, anyway, on that line of reasoning, someone else will do it if he/she doesn’t do it), because not only that person is more likely to be able to protect himself or herself from the bad effects of his or her acts, but, through inheritance, to protect his or her children also. On that line of thinking, the “think about your children and grand-children” slogan would not induce an environmentally friendly behavior, but quite the opposite. And this, I think, is quite chilling.

I attended the inaugural presentation of the Peter Brojde Leadership Lecture series last night, as I was interested in both the topic (“Business and the Poor”) and the primary speaker: Madeleine Albright. While I recognize that this was not explicitly an “environmental” lecture, I write about it on this blog post because any general lecture on business and poverty in the modern world must touch on environmental change and degradation, too; Dr. Albright did not fail me in this expectation.

The theme of her presentation was a legal one, in which she provided a rationale for why it should be every nation-state’s prerogative to bring their poorest citizens into the national and global legal realm, to officially recognize their human right to become part of a “formal legal economy.” She posited that we need to “make law smarter,” so that informal acceptance is formalized, so that those living outside the law are drawn into it. My problem with this idea is that Dr. Albright sees legalism as important only in relation to the world’s poor being able to use it as leverage for entrance into capitalist world markets.

She twice cited other elements which are closely associatied with ideas of law and poverty: “the environment,” and “the empowerment of women.” But categorical allusion was as far as she ventured. A woman who heads two companies that deal with ways to eradicate global poverty seemed to only want to pay lip-service to what she sees as entirely separate issues. But I think the missed – or at least failed to cover in her presentation – a crucial point: that poverty and environmental degradation tend to go hand-in-hand. I wrote about environmental justice in my last blog post, and think it directly applies here, as well.

Madeleine Albright is unabashed about her passion for epitomizing and spreading democratic principles; she is an academic, politician, and diplomat who spends most of her life espousing the ways in which the global order needs to change. But she disappointed me in her glossing over ideas of the environment, in her apparent divorcing of what are in reality closely entwined problems. We have engaged in extensive discussion in 650 about what exactly encompasses environmental policy and how it is created and effected. I would be curious to have further opportunities to ask Madeleine Albright, and other figureheads who seek to influence change and create policy, why the disjuncture between wealth – or lack thereof – and environmental degradation is not more conspicuously recognized in public forums.