Lions, Tigers and Bears – Oh, My!

Why we need top carnivores

When Dorothy set off to find the Wizard of Oz, she and her companions encountered a lion in the dark wood – just as they had feared. But, the cowardly beast only drew their disdain for what good is a spineless lion?

Therein lies the dichotomy between our visceral fear of large carnivores and our psychological need for lions, tigers and bears to be wild, fierce and free – a ‘varmit’ or an icon. One gets them killed, the other immortalized. And, neither will help them survive.

Neither perception tells us why lions, tigers and bears are important. Remove the carnivore and prey populations multiply exponentially. Grazers mow down vegetation, producing more young and increasing in number until food sources are used up. Disease and starvation then finish them off.

A wolf pack takes out the weakest of the herd, controlling not only numbers but removing the least adaptive genes from the population’s gene pool. A dynamic balance results between wolves, deer, and vegetation, and countless lives dependent on them benefit, too.

That we do not understand the importance of this relationship was memorably recorded by Aldo Leopold. He wrote about an experience shooting wolves one afternoon – a common practice among Forest Service rangers then – wolves were vermin that needed eradicating. Leopold had watched the “fierce, green fire” in the wolf eyes fade in her death.

Dawning on his consciousness was the realization of a bigger death, a death of wild things and something greater still: the very foundation of a healthy ecosystem. The wild, beautiful landscapes that inspired Leopold, that support man’s livelihood, were created over centuries among myriad species until the climatic stage in a community was reached and wherein dynamic balance of populations is achieved by an elaborate set of checks and balances.

The wolf he had just killed was one of the key checks and balances where it lived.

Until that moment Leopold lacked the understanding that he later reflected only a mountain could possess. Mountains have the long view, he wrote, whereas humans are newcomers. A mountain has no fear of wolves … only deer – because the deer will mow down its trees and the rains will wash away its topsoil and cause all kinds of havoc on the mountain.

Thinking like a mountain requires that we look down the long road behind us and way ahead to understand the present truth.

The cattleman who compares the life of a wolf against the current market price of his cow misses the much greater value of leaving the wolf wild and free. That “home on the range” where his cattle roam depends on a well functioning natural community to maintain it.

Leopold was writing about this phenomenon in 1949. One would hope that nearly six decades later, we would be a wiser country, wiser for the scientific data that supports the wisdom Leopold gained through patient observation.  We know, for example, that the return of large carnivores to their native habitat can lead to an increase in plant and animal diversity and ecosystem complexity:

“Their removal can unleash a cascade of effects and changes throughout all ecosystem trophic [feeding] levels reducing biological diversity, simplifying ecosystem structure and function, and interfering with ecological processes.  Their return to impoverished ecosystems can reverse the cascade and restore diversity and complexity to ecosystems.

We are witnessing such ecological rebirth in Yellowstone National Park following the return of the wolf to that ecosystem.  Riparian willows and cottonwoods are returning because elk spend more time moving and hiding to avoid becoming wolf scat.  With their table reset, beavers are returning to the streams.

These ‘ecological engineers’ provide homes for myriad critters from aquatic insects to fish to songbirds.  The extent of changes is certainly far more complex than we can observe or document.”   [Dave Parsons, Conservation Biologist, The Rewilding Institute’s Carnivore Program[1]]

Yet even with our increased knowledge wolves are still exterminated as happened in Alaska. The governor of the state supported an illegal aerial hunt on 14 denning adult wolves followed by the point blank murder of fourteen pups. The justification given was to boost caribou populations in Southwest Alaska. Short term solutions will eventually deliver the opposite result if conservation biology is correct.

Ironically, Alaskan wildlife agency personnel were the arbiters of the killings. Over the sixty years since Aldo Leopold’s epiphany, a lot of good science has been conducted, laws put in place as safeguards of keystone species—a species that influences the ecological composition, structure, or functioning of its community far more than its abundance would suggest[2]  In other words, lions, tigers, and bears…

In 1996 I attended a public meeting in Springerville, Arizona convened over the “elk problem.” Present were the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Arizona Game and Fish Commission, White Mountain Apache biologists and tribal officials, ranchers, tourist industry reps, a hunter’s association, residents and students. It became apparent right from the start that a classic show down between conflicting interests was about to happen, and a full airing of our dichotomous American character.

The problem appeared to stem from an exponential increase in elk populations. A ranch owner testified how elk herds of 600 to 1,000 head could be found in her valleys and meadows on just about any given day, leaving in their path a swath of denuded range. She demanded that Game and Fish raise the limits for hunters to help bring the population under control. As she made her plea she turned to the Apache contingent. For they did not kill elk unless they needed meat and entertained the elk herds’ presence within the boundaries of their reservations at night when the animals sought refuse there. The vast reservation stretches as far south as Phoenix encompassing 1.67 million acres. The rancher wanted the Apache Nation to help kill elk and bring the herds under control. They would not, they said, based on ethical principles and the belief that restoring the natural systems would be the only true answer to controlling the population. (I think I caught a twinkle in one tribal elder’s eye as this statement was made.)

Tourist agencies pleaded that the presence of elk, seen from the freeways and in the camp or motel areas, drew thousands of families who enjoy seeing wildlife. Tourism brings millions of dollars in revenue to the community they reminded the assembly.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deferred to the Arizona Game and Fish Commission. But first they made a statement about the traditional range of the Mexican gray wolf, a natural keystone species of the disrupted ecosystem. Reintroduction of the gray wolf in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest and southern Arizona’s Gila River communities was just getting underway.

Mention of the wolf acted like a match on tinder. The auditorium erupted in arguments from the ranchers and tourism folks alike who didn’t welcome wolves in the woods.

Then, a rancher rose to speak. He had the look of one who spends his days in the sun.

“We are victims of our own schemes – me included. First we saw the wolf as our enemy and we systematically exterminated it. We saw it killing too many elk, too many cattle. We feared for our own lives. Once it was gone we began to notice how the elk and deer populations grew each year. Now we watch as they eat the meadows down, even strip the bark. Well, maybe its time we examined our own nature to see how we can control that!”

Back at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy got her wish to go home, the tin man a heart, and the lion, courage. Maybe the wolf, the lion, the tiger, the bear, the shark, the grizzly will be restored, too, at some time when our own wizardry returns us to the natural order of things.

When flowers bloom…

Scientists have demonstrated that, in the face of climate change, alpine plant populations may sit at cliffs’ edge in more ways than one. Some plants initially compensate for the physiologically taxing effects of persistent warming with increased growth rates or expanded ranges. But new results from long-term studies show that even a gradual climate change can push a species past its tipping point, leading to a sudden population crash.

Determining where trade-offs and thresholds exist helps scientists better anticipate biological responses to climate change. Studies like this will help them predict which species may be able to adapt to increased temperatures and which may be most vulnerable.

Read more at Research.gov

The timing of seasonal events – phenology – is lending evidence of climate change impacts.  In this National Science Foundation report alpine flowers may bloom about two weeks earlier due to both warming and subtle genetic changes.  So what’s the big deal?  That change in flowering may be devastating to insects, birds of animals whose life cycles are in sync with the flowering times of the plant.  The use of phenology to study seasonal changes over time has resulted from the rich records of flowering events by both amateur and professional observers.

Capturing the timing of these seasonal events is the study of phenology. Well-known recorders include Gilbert White who noted events in 18th century Selborne, England and Henry David Thoreau who recorded in Concord, USA in the 19th century. Once, phenological records were perhaps simply considered interesting but of little other value. Now, long-term datasets of seasonal events are widely sought-after for their potential to reveal how the natural world responds to climate change. Historical records have been the subject of recent analysis and several phenological recording networks have been established or revitalized in response to this resurgence of interest.  Read more here.

Truth Be Told – Part II

Last night I watched Earth Days film by Robert Stone with several other friends at our local food coop.  I had viewed the film when it was first shown on American Experience for the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, established in 1970.  Earth Day heralded a wave of environmental activism which increased the general public’s awareness that we are part of a big natural web of life—not individuals with our own manual of operations.

Rather than leaving us filled with hope, the film documents how American society missed a critical turning point at which we could have charted a different energy future and today would be far less imperiled ecologically.  Beginning with John Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Bush I and II each publicly declared energy independence and ecological protection as values.  Some were sincere, others did what was politically expedient, but all nonetheless kept the nation pointed toward the right goal post.

Jimmy Carter struck a bold path when he created a national policy away from fossil fuels toward solar, wind and other alternatives and for which he was later scorned.  Reagan wasted no time ripping the solar panels off the White House roof.  Hunter Lovins—who founded Natural Capitalism Solutions to educate senior decision-makers to restore and enhance natural and human capital—makes the point that Carter made a critical mistake by portraying the future as restricted by self-imposed restraint to limit growth.  PAY ATTENTION HERE!  This is the crux of our current political divide.

Obama knows that he cannot use that language—the language of limited growth—in the body-politic because it is the deathnell of any American President.  Thus both candidates for the next leader of our nation are talking economic growth and prosperity without the mention of the natural capital that fuels our wealth.  Environmentalists have been more than frustrated with Obama for not leading on climate change, including me.  Yet if he did so, he can kiss the Presidency good-bye.

This is the moral and political quagmire of our times.

At the end of the film which takes us to a time of massive climate change from the burning of fossil fuels, viewers are left to wonder.  One person asked out loud:  What happened to all those electric cars that were produced in the 70’s?  I did not know we had started to produce those then!  What happened?

And another person said, “This film is dark. What can we do now?”  The film suggests its too late.  That we missed the critical juncture in our nation’s historic path as the world leader…a place of power and dominance that is ever waning.

Look for Stone’s next film, Pandora’s Promise, which explores the resurgence of interest in nuclear power as a way to fuel civilization’s growth and development.

BRUSH UP ON YOUR ECOLITERACY TO LEARN WHY LIMITS TO GROWTH IS THE LAW OF NATURE…THE LAW HUMANS INTEND TO CIRCUMNAVIGATE.

Visualizing a Plenitude Economy – Judith Schor

Juliet B. Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Her recent book: True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy (Penguin, 2011, previously published as Plenitude).  Go here, to the Center for Nature and Humans to read more about her work and other books.

Truth Be Told – Part I

Deregulate! From the mouths of Republicans this call resounds across the land fueled by a growing national appetite for development starved by the recession.

Truth be told this nation is in decline—decline in its once visionary goals, perhaps present only briefly, imperfectly rendered, but THERE among men in power.  For it took only a Presidency or two before capitalism replaced democracy.  Since Hamilton America’s path is measured by the gross national product (GDP).  America’s physical body, the great continent of wilderness and abundance, has declined in direct relationship to the GDP as unhindered greed unravels the vast web of life that was once our greatest promise.

Deregulate! From the mouths of Republicans this call resounds across the land fueled by a growing national appetite for development starved by the recession.  Jobs, jobs, jobs yell the politic…jobs at any cost.  Perhaps our starved brains forget what is before us:  specifically because of regulation the Gulf coast states are now receiving millions of dollars to repair ecosystems, food webs, and economies damaged by the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in one of the nation’s most productive oceans.

The Clean Water Act imposed penalties upon British Petroleum Oil for damage to watersheds, marshes, bays and oceans along states from Texas to Florida.  The Restore Act, just passed by Congress, will bring from $500m (lowest estimate) to $2.3 billion (highest estimate) to Florida alone through application of the CWA.  Our Republican Governor Rick Scott and republican leaders in the state legislature are only too happy to receive this money.  So why then do these same leaders and their national counterparts in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan espouse deregulation, even dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency?  Isn’t this “throwing out the baby with the bath water?”

The Clean Water Act (CWA) is a legal structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters. It was first called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (1948) but it was reorganized in 1972 when the public became concerned about widespread point source pollution. It came to be called the “Clean Water Act” with use.

Signs of America’s decline include the following:’

  • Participation in wars that were originally to seek revenge;
  • Documented descent into use of torture with war prisoners;
  • Decline in tradition of open-mindedness and inclusion:
    • Mean immigration policies
    • Hatred of gays
    • Roll back of women’s right to control over their body
    • Religious intolerance.
  • No serious response, leadership in regard to climate change;
  • Deterioration in public education:
    • Federal dollars to charter and religious-run schools
    • Teaching to arbitrary tests set by politicians
    • Relegation of education to workforce objectives
  • Loss of the space program and underfunding science and technology in general except for workforce innovation and economic development;
  • Citizen’s United Supreme Court ruling that gives corporations the same right to political speech as individuals (rise of super PACs).

Wildcats on the Prairie

Click the link on this blog for NASA’s “Vital Signs of the Planet” web site.  I spent sometime on it yesterday.  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration site is actively monitoring climate change indicators such as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, polar ice melt, and key gases such as methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  Go to the site and use their interactive tools to study how each indicator has changed over the decades.  A recent study on methane gas levels caught my eye.  Scientists have been puzzled at a leveling off of methane gas in the atmosphere.  The study reports on 30 years of data for ethane/methane and was published in the journal Nature on August 23.  Here is an excerpt:

In results published Aug. 23 in the journal Nature, the team led by UC Irvine chemistry professor Donald Blake reported that the observed leveling-off in atmospheric ethane/methane is largely a result of changes in fossil fuel use – specifically, reductions in fugitive emissions of natural gas that can occur during fossil fuel exploration. Fugitive emissions include venting and flaring, evaporative losses, and equipment leaks and failures, but exclude combustion of fuels. The study finds these measures probably account for up to 70 percent of the slowing growth in atmospheric methane levels observed at the end of the 20th century.

This is pointing to positive steps Americans can take right now in the upcoming election.  A vote for Romney-Ryan team will likely lead to increases not only in carbon dioxide emissions but also methane emissions because the duo plans to open up drilling and other policies (giving states the right to choose how their coal, gas reserves are managed) that will most likely lead to increases in both these gases if history tells the truth .  Obama’s administration has not shown strong leadership in this direction either but the record tends in the right direction, whereas the Republicans will throw us back into even greater emissions of both CO2 and methane.  Voters from both parties will need to be actively engaged with their leaders and representatives to make sure policies are not short sighted (what is not economically feasible in the short-term may be very feasible and prudent in the long-term).

Long ago it was determined that the maximum safe level of heat energy in earth’s atmosphere should be no more than 350 parts per million or less of carbon dioxide (CO2 being the most abundant heat-trapping molecule in the atmosphere).  According to the NASA site, we are at 393 ppm and rising.  Go see for yourself.  Add more methane to the atmosphere and the heating goes up at a faster rate – 20 times greater.  Think of fracking, one of the new technologies that will be unleased by the policies being unveiled on the republican platform.

Right now my state, Florida, is on a path to converting from coal to mostly natural gas for its primary energy source.  This is a trend nation-wide.  Obama is tooting clean fuels.  How clean are they?  NOAA scientists who started measuring air pollution near well-sites in Colorado’s oil and gas fields found they were leaking methane at substantial rates.  The industry representatives they spoke to indicate that measuring pollution from wells is expensive and not economically feasible.

The Republicans and Democrats are concentrating on jobs because the public demands it.  Yet it will be GAME OVER if we reach a temperature threshold that substantially changes the atmosphere.  How will that will be economically feasible?

We are brimming on the edge of that threshold now.  Yet, our leaders are silent about climate change because voters – the American public – in substantial numbers ignore the scientific data.  If you are one such person, ask yourself why you turn a blind eye to incontrovertible evidence that our climate is changing and that the human thumbprint is in large part the reason for dramatic increases in temperature (carbon dioxide emissions the culprit).  We know with certainty that our combined human activities – demands for more and more energy – are creating conditions for environmental degradation on a scale unknown to humankind. (Remember also that Americans per capita are the energy hogs of the planet. Sorry, its just the truth.)

Logic tells us we should look for less polluting fuels, and energy conserving strategies.  WE NEED THAT LEADERSHIP SORELY AND WE MUST DEMAND THAT WHOMEVER IS ELECTED RESPONDS WITH PLANS TO REDUCE THE LEVELS OF CARBON DIOXIDE AND METHANE IN THE ATMOSPHERE.

Yet we are wildcats on the prairie again with hydraulic fracking the earth’s surface to get at the natural gas reserves.  In doing so, we are releasing increased amounts of methane into drinking water in adjacent watersheds and into the atmosphere. Its bad policy and will be judged as immoral in a more desperate future if we choose that path.

Democrats and Republicans both need to check the facts.

 

It’s About Nature…

The debate between left and right is, at its conceptual basis, about how we relate to nature.  It is an old debate, known in the early conservation years as one between Preservationists and Wise-Use advocates.  That’s been waging for about 200 years in America.

But it has always been much deeper than policies and economics, hasn’t it?  Aldo Leopold put it simply:  How can I live on a piece of land without destroying its ability to renew itself over and over again?

That renewing quality is a complex thing, perhaps truly unknowable, though we try to understand how it works.  By accident or neglect we have learned what happens when ecosystems breach their carrying capacity, when populations are disrupted by over harvesting, or by removing keystone species like wolves or bears.  We know this, have witnessed it time and again.  We also know that if this occurs, the economic potential of that resource base declines or is used up forever.

No, this is not about the economy.  This is about how we view Nature: part of us or outside of us/us part of Nature or us outside of Nature.

That piece of toast you have at breakfast is a fine example of the debate.  It can be seen as a wheat commodity whose value is set in a global market and depends on demand—comprised of the mental/emotional gestalt of market purveyors at any point in time.  It can also be seen as the product of temperate air produced by forests half a world away that produce clouds and rain; soil organisms numbering in the thousands of species whose interconnected activities produce nitrogen, sulfur, and other elements plants needs to grow; of insects, butterflies and birds that pollinate and spread the seeds; and countless other elemental resources that go into making the stuff of production, delivery, storage and display (trucks, tires, electrical circuits, asphalt, cardboard for delivery, and refrigeration – all dependent on the elements of this earth – all made by processes that tick along and are observable but which are no longer observed by humans as a whole).  All this has become expected – a Right.  Yet if you stop, and stopping is a value-laden activity that requires will, then you readily see it…that all things are interconnected and not separate things to be bought and sold, used and discarded by you.  Therefore, a conscious being uses discernment to make choices not based on the market as its primary basis but rather on the totality of its impact on all, with the market factored in.  Otherwise we join with the unconscious or semiconscious who daily speculate with their own lives, yours and mine.

Think of it.  This is the debate…your thoughts?

The Two American Minds

The past two months I have been reading and rereading many of the works of America’s great conservationists and philosophers, even returning to read the biographies of our early founders, especially Ben Franklin.  For example, in the early part of the 1900s Teddy Roosevelt posed to the nation that how we conserve and also use land was the most important domestic issue before Americans of the era.  Aldo Leopold, the most outstanding of America’s modern conservationist, and a forester by profession, concluded that the central dilemma for humans was how to live on a piece of land without destroying its capacity to support them.

In 2012 that dilemma encompasses not just America but the whole of the planet as our numbers approach 9 billion and the impacts of resource depletion have made earth’s ecosystems less resilient.  Food stocks are dwindling.

I like to read the early novels and essays from the founding of the West, satisfying my hunger to know what was lost before I was born – the deep topsoil from which crops flourished, uncut forests and communities of life within them that are simply unimaginable in our day and time.  The unraveling of the continent’s great natural resources through our desire to work the land as we see fit, and to make the greatest profit possible (American ideals of personal freedom) required an ethic that did not exist in most people’s minds until Roosevelt and Leopold began to question those ideals in light of the responsibility to protect the nation’s “seed corn” for future generations.

The two American minds exist together: the pioneer mind, free to act on what he owns and the communal mind which is concerned with whether its welfare is enhanced or diminished by individual actions, and for the generations coming who wish the same generous portion of opportunities.  This push me-pull you consciousness is ever-present in the American psyche to this day and I believe is the basis of the heated political arguments in Washington about who will lead the country.

The problem has always been that we do not have the values incorporated in our Constitution that are required to make fair and healthy decisions about land, resources, and people’s well-being. The pursuit of happiness has been grossly misunderstood by modern America. To John Adams and other founders, it meant the freedom to pursue an education, to develop the life of the mind.

For all the national emphasis on science literacy and scientific research, we are sorely in need of an education about how to live as members of an ecological community.  That knowledge is perceived to “knock up against” our cherished value of personal freedom.  Yet if we dig just a little deeper into our relationship with land, we would readily understand that there is no freedom in wanton destruction of nature for short-term profit because the result is utter ruination and a life not worth living! The Dust Bowl is our own nation’s living example.

The key is to create sane conversations that use the wisdom of the greats like Roosevelt and Leopold, who were not against use of resources for human benefit, but who realized a new set of principles are necessary when making decisions that challenge one or the other perspectives.

Leopold’s Land Ethic is simple:  “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.  It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”  (Sand County Almanac, The Land Ethic)  Of course the complexity of this kind of thinking requires the ability to consider the complex nature of our individual and collective relationships with the land community.  It requires what Leopold eventually called The Ecological Conscience—a way of thinking and being that is whole: intellectual and intuitive, economic and esthetic, personal and communal.

We’ve been using one American mind almost exclusively.  This can be seen most recently in our rush to exploit national coal and oil reserves that has resulted in sanctioning of violent technologies (mountain top removal and fracking) that leave lands barren, water poisoned, animals and plants destroyed and communities impoverished for the future.  Both parties in Washington have supported these new ventures.

We are using the old way of thinking in our fear and uncertainty, never drawing the connection between the economic downturn and the dwindling natural capital on which all our wealth depends.

Good Company

I am continuing to read Round River—a meditation of immense wisdom in journal form.  What am I learning?

  • That land is different than country
  • That the hobbies of common people following their own curiosity can be more powerful than the most sophisticated science because these humans are puzzling-together the life story of a  plant or an animal, its natural history
  • That trying to change a person’s mind or behavior by threatening them with calamity does not work
  • That we are diminished in direct proportion to the incremental loss of wilderness

With Aldo Leopold I enjoy easy company with a man who understood what it means to be human.