Recently in Conservation and the environment Category

The 2009 Odum conference will be held April 30 - May 1, 2009 at the E. N. Huyck Preserve and Biological Research Station in Rensselaerville, New York. It will feature speakers on invasive plants; community and evolutionary interactions; aquatic and marine invasions; data, policy, and management; and a managers' roundtable. Poster submissions will be accepted until March 15.

Clipped from the front page of WhiteHouse.gov a few minutes ago

Two items make the front page of President Obama's agenda: (1) the economy and (2) energy and the environment. To read a little more about President Obama's agenda for energy and the environment, click through or go directly to the Energy & Environment page at WhiteHouse.gov

The folks at Shifting Baselines have been writing about threats to marine ecosystems for a long time, but this paragraph is not from them.

NOT much is known about the sea, it is said; the surface of Mars is better mapped. But 2,000 holes have now been drilled in the bottom, 100,000 photographs have been taken, satellites monitor the five oceans and everywhere floats fitted with instruments rise and fall like perpetual yo-yos. Quite a lot is known, and very little is reassuring.

"Very little is reassuring." Who might have written that? Greenpeace? Environmental Defense Fund? Natural Resources Defense Council? The Nature Conservancy? Sierra Club?

No, no, no, no, and no.

Tip O'Neill once said "All politics is local," and we were all told in the 70s to "Think globally, and act locally." Nowhere are those thoughts more true than when it comes to setting aside land for conservation purposes. The Nature Conservancy's Campaign for a Sustainable Planet is designed "to achieve significant, global conservation results in each of the world's major habitat types". It's an enormously ambitious and enormously important project.

But it all started in the Mianus River Gorge on the border between Connecticut and New York in 1955 when the Conservancy provided $7500 to finance purchase of the reserve. The Connecticut Chapter's work over the last 50 years has permanently protected more than 50,000 acres. Among the Chapter's more ambitious projects is in the northwest highlands where it works with the Massachusetts based Berkshire-Taconic Landscape Program

[T]o create a model for living gently on the land -- balancing human impact with the needs of ecosystems, sustaining the ability of our lands and waters to provide for communities and supporting a wilderness in which many plants and animals can thrive.

Why do I bring all of this up?

This morning I noticed that Tim Abbott had some good news. His family sold a conservation restriction on nearly 20 acres of land in Wareham, Massachusetts. Congratulations, Tim!¹

We cannot conserve what we do not understand. We will not conserve what we do not love.¹

Fewer and fewer people have a connection to nature. Too many think milk comes from a grocery store and water comes from a bottle. Getting people to understand the incredible diversity of life and getting them to understand that life's diversity isn't found only in the Amazon or Borneo may be the most important task conservationists face in the next century. That's why events like a BioBlitz can make such a difference. A BioBlitz shows the public how many species are found in their own backyards.

But a BioBlitz is a 24-hour event. It happens once every year or two, and then it's gone -- unless teachers build part of their regular curriculum around it.

The Natural History Museum in London recently launched a much more ambitious project: Open Air Laboratories. Here's the first objective described on the OPAL website:

1. Increase knowledge and awareness
Through interactive websites and community participation, OPAL aims to get over one million people more aware of the open spaces and conservation sites around them and more knowledgable about the contribution individuals can make to protect them.

OPAL takes the great things that BioBlitzes have done and casts its net even wider. OPAL not only introduces science to the public. It engages the public in collecting new scientific data. As that famously liberal² magazine, The Economist, put it:

The next generation of nature lovers, explorers and naturalists need nurturing. They need to be tempted out of their homes, away from their televisions and computer games, and into the muddy forest to hunt for spiders or to fish out something sludgy from a green pond. The children that today are squelching through the mud and discovering the world for the first time will, in 80 years, be able to walk through our countryside and know whether or not things are as they should be. And that is essential if we are to be responsible environmental citizens.

Dot Earth was inaugurated one year, 416 posts, and more than 40,000 comments ago today.

Congratulations, Andy! Dot Earth is a tremendously valuable resource. Here are links to just a few of the posts I've made that wouldn't have happened without Dot Earth.¹

• Climate matters
• Empty oceans
• Climate change denialists
• Sea ice at the North Pole
  

Robert Hahn, Reg-Markets Center at the American Enterprise Institute, and Peter Passell, senior fellow at the Milken Institute, have an op-ed piece in the New York Times today arguing that environmentalists ought to be in favor of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuges and in offshore sites that are currently closed to drilling. They don't try to argue that drilling will have a large impact on gasoline prices, either now or in the future.

The markets in which oil prices are determined are global, not local, and the extra million barrels would represent less than 1 percent of total world consumption in 2025. Thus we estimate that the million daily barrels would lower the price of crude by just 1.3 percent, which few consumers would even detect against the background noise of the weekly ups and downs of fuel prices.

Instead they argue that drilling will produce $1.7 trillion in net benefits to the United States economy, and they ask

If a big chunk of that $1.7 trillion could be spent on preserving wilderness that didn't happen to sit astride vast quantities of oil, would you really choose to spend it on keeping human hands off the currently protected sites? 

Almost 40 years ago Garret Hardin described the tragedy of the commons. "Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons." The problem, of course, is that if all of us share a common pasture, then it always makes sense for me to add more cattle, even if doing so degrades the pasture, because I'll still get more out of the pasture than if I didn't add cattle. And I'm worse off when I don't add cattle, because you probably will, and the cattle I have left won't do as well. Even if you and I and all of our friends agree to limit our grazing, if there's one person who decides to cheat, that person will benefit and the rest of us will suffer.

That's the tragedy, and the good news is that there may be a way out.

Ashwini Chhatre and Arun Agrawal describe research on governance of forest commons suggesting that when local people, those who share the forest resource in common, enforce regulations on its use forest regeneration is more likely. What makes this study striking is that Chhatre and Agrawal also examine the role of other factors in determining the probability of forest regeneration: size of the forest, extent to which local residents depend on the forest for subsistence, commercial value, and collective action. Moreover, their data set also includes a wide diversity of forests, some in wealthy countries like the United States, others in lesser developed countries like Bolivia and Tanzania; some as small as 5ha, others of more than 5000ha.

Not surprisingly, Chhatre and Agrawal find that the impact of each factor depends on context. As Thomas Dietz and Adam Douglas Henry put it in an accompanying commentary,

[T]hey find that the commercial value of a forest increases the chances of regeneration when there is strong local enforcement of rules, but commercial value decreases the chances of regener ation in the absence of local rule enforcement. It follows, as they note, that enforcement matters, as do markets. How each factor matters depends on the other factors.

So there isn't a single solution. There are many, and with careful attention to local context solutions are possible.

My copy of Conservation arrived a couple of days ago.The cover story is "The problem of what to eat" - and it is a problem. Natasha Loder points out that eating locally doesn't do much to reduce your carbon footprint. Over 80% of the carbon footprint associated with food consumption is associated with producing the food, not transporting it. Citing results from a study by Weber et al.,¹ she points out that "foregoing red meat and dairy use one day a week achieves more greenhouse gas reductions than eating an entire week's worth of locally sourced foods."

So if you're concerned about what your eating habits are doing to the climate, eat less red meat and dairy.