Big companies can do big things

Slate has an interesting article about how Walmart is the by far the biggest player in the commercial rooftop solar market:

Big, mature companies often struggle to innovate and adapt to changing consumer demands, but Walmart's experience with solar and organic foods (and Home Depot's with sustainably-harvested lumber) show that big companies can also have a big impact, simply by virtue of their size. While it's entirely possible that Walmart is coming out ahead financially from these investments, the less-tangible benefits in the form of positive buzz and brand equity are surely a big driver of the push.

Additionally, Walmart is implicitly hedging against future policy action by governments, both national and regional, to combat climate change. Companies that proactively set themselves up to respond quickly to a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system (by investing in clean energy and acquiring talent) will very likely see themselves with an enviable competitive advantage.

Climate change adaptation

Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia has opened the country's first academic institution focusing on climate change adaptation. The hope is that by locating in a city that's very exposed to climate change risks, the institute will have opportunities to work with government and economic stakeholders free of political strife.

A core mantra of climate change adaptation is competition between places: if certain regions or cities are struggling with costs associated with climate change, labor and capital will naturally flow away to find safer harbor (so to speak). Norfolk is betting that investing now in resilience strategies will pay off in the future by reducing the costs of adaptation. Preemptively measuring the effectiveness of various interventions may be possible by comparing things like insurance premiums along coastal cities, although the massive Navy base (and the implicit government guarantee it represents) could pose a methodological problem.

An electricity sharing economy

Matthew Crosby of the Rocky Mountain Institute says rooftop solar and other emerging technologies will enable peer-to-peer electricity markets:

For more than a century, the electric grid has relied almost exclusively on centralized infrastructure, such as large power plants and long-distance transmission lines. But distributed energy resources (DERs) -- and the customers buying, installing, and using them -- are changing the economic landscape for the power sector. Energy efficiency, demand response, distributed generation such as rooftop solar, distributed storage such as batteries, smart thermostats, and more are poised to become the front lines of a sharing economy revolution for the grid. Shared economy solutions will help to increase asset utilization rates and improve consumer and overall system economics, just as they have for other sectors.

The Knowledge Problem has further commentary on the idea, and Brad Plumer at Vox has been following the solar beat, most recently with a good article on trends in financing mechanisms for rooftop solar. The environmental and economic resilience aspects of transitioning to a more distributed electricity market are clear. With current interest rates so low, now is the time for governments to encourage investments in enabling infrastructure like smart grids--instead of speculating big on high-speed rail megaprojects with uncertain return on investment potential.

Sousveillance and ecological change

Most wearable tech incorporating always-on sousveillance devices is currently being used for experimental, largely silly purposes (like life-logging). As these technologies become cheaper and more ubiquitous, they will increasingly be applied to novel situations and processes that produce real value. One potentially useful application of the Narrative Clip is to use it to catalogue environmental changes in ecologically stressed regions. Scientists, historians, and civil bureaucracies like the U.S. Forest Service would greatly benefit from having access to a constant, searchable database of photos covering the same region over time. Such a rich data set (generated by say, lending hikers a Narrative Clip to wear during their trip) would likely enable computational ecologists to understand physical changes in patches of wilderness in a completely revolutionary way. Get out your grant-proposal-writing pens now...

Environmental Gentrification

CityLab has an interesting piece covering some new research into the effects of brownfield reclamation on nearby housing prices. Establishing causation in environmental areas like this is notoriously difficult, but if there is a real effect here it leads to an interesting question about the process of gentrification: will proposed environmental improvements come to be seen as threats to low-income communities, just like new condos or transit links? I sort of doubt it. But why?

Typically anti-gentrification groups fight a new development because they see it as having the potential to raise housing costs, pushing existing residents out and destroying embedded community value. Via the process of public reasoning, some projects are seen to have benefits that outweigh these risks, while others are not and are opposed. In this framing, residents might accept environmental improvements simply because the benefits of reducing exposure to environmental hazards are seen as a worthwhile tradeoff compared to gentrification risks.

An interesting feature of this is the large overlap between environmental justice coalitions and anti-gentrification coalitions. Whether environmental improvements are projects that might split these two groups is a really interesting question. More fundamentally, to what degree does the ideal of environmental justice conflict with the ideal that residents should be free to make their own personal decisions regarding the tradeoffs between environmental quality and housing price?

Are Zoos Morally Okay?

Over the years zoos have successfully repositioned themselves to be educational and research institutions affiliated with the environmental conservation movement. This is a far cry from their original incarnation as a more carnivalesque freakshow designed to trigger awe, wonder, and even fear.

With the animal rights movement and an increased concern for animal welfare, zoos are put in an awkward position. Imprisoning animals and depriving them of their capability to flourish in settings with limited human interaction is clearly an increasingly challenging thing to justify. Offsetting this morally questionable dimension of zoos are the potential upsides. Now of course, to hardcore animal rights advocates, no amount of social benefit makes zoos morally justifiable. But let's take a look.

Most often you'll hear arguments about protecting endangered species. I'm not too familiar with the effectiveness of zoos in this regard, but it seems unlikely this point is all that effective in the light of massive structural forces like economic growth, habitat destruction, etc. And the types of animals that are deemed worthy of zoo protection aren't necessarily those that are most crucial from an ecological integrity perspective. My suspicion is that much of the conservationist rhetoric surrounding zoos is a marketing strategy designed to maintain the institutional and historic inertia of zoos.

The educational mission of zoos is the strongest argument for a social benefit potentially large enough to offset their moral problems. Showing young children in a directly-experiential way that there exists a larger world out there is a great way to build up cosmopolitan and environmentalist ethics.  Whether the cheapness of air travel, the growth of information on the internet, and the explosion in popularity of nature-themed entertainment like Planet Earth makes this benefit of zoos more replaceable and thus zoos less morally justifiable is an open question.

Climate Change Adaptation and Issue Salience

I recently listened to a great On Point podcast with geographer and author Jared Diamond about environmental challenges. He made some interesting points on the topic of climate change that really made me curious about the current academic literature exploring the connection between climate change adaptation as a process and the salience of the issue in the media, policy institutions, and individuals.

Climate change adaptation is basically the process by which social institutions reduce the net human costs of negative climate change effects. This is distinct from mitigation, which tries to reduce the effects themselves, and resilience, which tries to reduce the costs of adaptation by preemptively modifying institutional arrangements.

For a huge number of reasons, significant action by the federal government on the mitigation front is unlikely. The most likely climate change scenario is a somewhat boring adaptation process by which everybody muddles through, with some winners (regions, communities, businesses, and individuals providing solutions to climate change problems) and some minor losers (regions, communities, businesses, and individuals that are insulated from climate change problems) and some big losers (regions, communities, businesses, and individuals that are highly exposed to climate change problems). By and large the last two groups are separated by economic power: access to money and resources makes adaptation easy (buying a new home, paying higher air conditioning bills etc.), while lack of money makes it difficult (and painful).

This leads me to my question: if the climate change adaptation process does little to disrupt existing social cleavages (rich vs poor, educated vs uneducated etc.) and results in little absolute reduction in the wellbeing of social elites, what are the prospects for the issue's salience going forward? We tend to assume that climate change will effect everyone personally, and thus everyone will notice its negative effects and care about the issue. But under very optimistic adaptation scenarios, might there be a dimension of blowback whereby only low-power, low-status groups notice or care about the issue?

I tend to think the concept of environmental inequality is slightly incoherent, and what's really important are the absolute environmental capabilities of those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. But the interaction between adaptation and issue salience is one potential example of the pattern of environmental capability being important.

Quote of the Week

"Scientific forestry was originally developed from about 1765 to 1800, largely in Prussia and Saxony. Eventually, it would become the basis of forest management techniques in France, England, and the United States and throughout the Third World. Its emergence cannot be understood outside the larger context of the centralized state-making initiatives of the period. In fact, the new forestry science was a subdiscipline of what was called cameral science, an effort to reduce the fiscal management of a kingdom to scientific principles that would allow systemic planning. Traditional domainal forestry had hitherto simply divided the forest into roughly equal plots, with the number of plots coinciding with the number of years in the assumed growth cycle. One plot was cut each year on the assumption of equal yields (and value) from plots of equal size. Because of poor maps, the uneven distribution of the most valuable large trees (Hochwald), and very approximate cordwood (Bruststaerke) measures, the results were unsatisfactory for fiscal planning."

That's from Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott. It's a fantastic analytical history of the terrible damage caused by central planning initiatives throughout the twentieth century.

Federal Environmentalism Is Unavoidable

What are his thoughts on dependency ratios? Photo Credit: jacksonhole.net

I'm generally a big fan of environmental action by governments occurring on the state level. Policy and implementation can better utilize local knowledge, achieve a closer fit with local conditions, and experiment with a wider range of ideas. Politically, state-specific issues can create novel coalitions that cut across the calcified Democrat-Republican stalemate. But Sarah Keller in High Country News highlights a problem with this approach:

Wyoming Game and Fish’s plight is indicative of a growing dilemma for wildlife management agencies in sparsely populated, but wildlife-rich, Western states. Wildlife and habitat threats are growing, and agencies are increasingly charged with managing non-game species, dealing with wildlife diseases and invasive species, overseeing controversial predator reintroductions, and helping bring  young people into the outdoors. Meanwhile, the public’s outdoor interests are changing and becoming more diverse. Game and fish departments aren't just hook and bullet agencies, though hunters and anglers still provide much of their funding.

In Wyoming, 80 percent of game and fish’s budget comes from license fees, as well as federal taxes on hunting and fishing gear. But that license pool is shrinking. Ironically, wildlife managers have had to reduce Wyoming’s mule deer and antelope licenses as herds have declined, cutting into the very revenue that would help with studying those declines and improving habitat for the species.

This is a classic story of 'institutional drift': public policy not adapting to changing conditions in the world. In this case, state conservation agencies have bigger agendas than ever, but their funding streams are based on historical patterns of population and outdoor recreation behavior that no longer exist. Given the current trajectories of urbanization and climate change-driven environmental degradation, Western states are sure to see these sorts of mismatch issues intensify in the future.

Western states have a disproportionate share of America's environmental capital. Asking these states to shoulder an increasing burden of environmental management spending while their funding base shrinks raises equity issues. The fact that most federally-owned land is out West further reinforces the case for some sort of cross-subsidy.

Some might see a federal program of redistribution from high-population/low-environmental capital states to low-population/high environmental capital states as unjust. After all, much of the West's beauty and richness is highly experiential and hard to access from big coastal population centers. But given the uncertainty of climate change's effects, some risk-pooling seems appropriate. Additionally, America's environmental endowment is an integral component of the national identity, and deserves to be empowered regardless of population trends.

Adaptation and Resilience Are More Boring Than You Think

For some time now, the hot new thinking in the areas of climate change and environmental degradation has been all about "adaptation": how political, economic, cultural, and biological systems will respond to environmental changes to minimize human suffering (or maximize human flourishing; pick your moral poison). This is in contrast to "mitigation" efforts, like enacting carbon taxes, which seek to prevent harmful environmental changes in the first place. "Resilience" is best understood as adaptation's conceptual cousin: how can we preemptively modify our political, economic, cultural, and biological systems to reduce the human costs of disruption caused by adaptation to environmental changes?

These concepts seem highfalutin, but they're not. In fact, they're so straightforward and mundane that examples abound in any daily newspaper. The Economist recently had a nice piece about how the fishing industry is splitting into two market segments: more efficient, more commoditized "aquaculture" (farming), and costlier, more upscale "capture" (wild). Also in the news has been the "in vitro" burger, a lab-grown synthetic meat product.

It's not just about community spirit guys
Photo Credit: baylocalize.org

The environmental dimension in these stories isn't immediately apparent. After all, these are simple technological changes that one might expect given the similar market dynamics at play. In both cases, we have shortages increasing (or threatening to increase) the price. In beef's case, increasing demand in developing countries is placing strain on available land. For fish, the ocean's collapsing ecosystems are reducing supply. That these market changes are terminal in nature creates a huge incentive for producers to develop low-cost alternatives.

But these two new production methods are also increasing the global food system's resilience. By decoupling the production process from nature (beef from farmland, fish from oceans), these products get less exposed to environmental risk. Adapting to future environmental changes, such as further ocean ecosystem collapse, or marginal farmland becoming unavailable, will be much easier. Beef and fish will still be around for consumption, preventing an economically (and culturally) painful transition away from them.

The more we recognize that existing, mundane market mechanisms are the channel through which most environmental adaptation and resilience will occur, the better off we'll be in confronting future challenges.

Conservative Environmentalism: It's Not Just About Ideology

The New York Times today has an interesting op-ed written by several former EPA administrators on the Republican case for climate change and the executive branch's capability for direct action in light of congress' legislative inaction.

Every time I hear calls for conservatives to embrace environmentalist public policy I'm struck by how logical it seems: conservatives support free- and well-functioning markets, the existence of environmental externalities prevents efficient markets, thus policy that corrects environmental distortions is conservative. Even the marketing angle is tight and clean: conservatives are the "stewards" of the free market, which necessarily implies being stewards of the earth. These logical connections are arguably superior to liberals' attachments to environmentalism, which are numerous, often complex, and always mushy (chemicals are evil, mountains are beautiful, etc.). In politics, simple messaging is the most effective. On this measure environmentalism should be squarely located within Republicans' policy wheelhouse. So why isn't it?

On this issue more than any other, the primacy of identity affiliation in politics is apparent. Political parties are coalitions, often tightly linked to logically consistent moral philosophies, but not always. Through a complex array of contingent historical and demographic factors, the Democratic party became affiliated with environmentalism and Republicans opposed (more on this in a future post). Today, one of the biggest forcing mechanisms holding this status quo together is social identity. Democrats signal their affiliation by supporting environmentalist social trends, policy, fashion, etc. Republicans oppose environmentalism for the same reasons--they don't want to affiliate with all those hippie bourgeois bohemians in cities.

Many of the arguments you hear on both sides of the aisle justifying the status quo in terms of the political parties' established moral philosophies are actually post-facto rationalizations with questionable logical consistency (more on this here). Consequently, the most exciting prospects for environmentalist policy action concerns the identification and manipulation of novel issue dimensions that can confound and muddle the existing Republican-Democrat stasis. Local issues can trump national party allegiance. Big business sectors with a rational interest in preventing climate change doom scenarios, such as property insurers, can leverage their existing links to pro-business Republicans to shift policy. Humanitarians concerned with rural poverty and malnutrition in developing nations can push for more R&D in genetically modified crops, appealing to bleeding-heart Democrats. The list goes on, but one thing is for sure: framing a "Republican environmentalism" is a nice soundbite but substantively next-to-useless in achieving real policy change.

"Naturalness" is a Terrible Concept

But what does it mean? Photo credit: armedwithvisions.com

Yale e360 has an interesting piece about the demise of "naturalness" as a meaningful concept in ecology due to research piling up showing that human impact on environments isn't a recent development in any sense. A deeper trend is the realization that ecosystems are much messier and more random than previously thought. Sustainability, static equilibrium, and even niches are all ecological concepts being re-evaluated in favor of more nuanced approaches like patch dynamics, resilience, and dynamic equilibrium models.

An important question is whether these academic trends will be fully adopted by ecosystem managers and government agencies in charge of overseeing public open space. By decomposing the vague "naturalness" idea into explicit goal-based management frameworks (ecological integrity, hands-off methods, historical fidelity, resilience, etc.), we get clearer performance standards and more opportunity for experimentation and comparative analysis. An added political benefit of organizing ecological management theory along discrete value dimensions is an increased opportunity for novel coalition-building. The zero-sum stand-off between environmentalists and cornucopians entrenches perverse policymaking incentives and masks the tremendous potential for action. Conservationists, insurers, loggers, and the tourism and real estate industries probably have sufficient collective policy influence to spur radical action over wildfire and natural disaster issues.

Free Market Environmentalism on Public Lands

From an interesting op-ed in the Denver Post:

Last year, conservationists in Colorado proposed to buy leases from energy companies on the Thompson Divide near Carbondale. Their reasoning was simple: The area’s value for anglers, hikers, and hunters outweighed the value of the oil and gas beneath the land. The plan, however, lacked the necessary approval from Congress. Today, no deal has been reached, and plans to drill are moving forward.

If compromises are to succeed on public lands in Colorado and across the West, creative solutions are needed. Federal leasing rules that allow contracting between energy developers and conservationists on public lands would promote voluntary agreements while respecting the rights of leaseholders. Regulatory changes to the environmental review process that facilitate direct negotiation would encourage groups to resolve their differences. And market-based leasing reforms that open up the bidding process and allow for conservation leasing would provide an alternative to the controversy and litigation that characterize public lands today.

The issue of how best to allocate public land given the tension between conservation and extraction is a tricky one. On the heels of activist Tim DeChristopher's release from prison after serving 21 months for interfering with a public land auction, I'm glad to see that some reform ideas are out there. Allowing conservation groups to enter the market and bid on public land, or make deals with energy developers sounds like a no-brainer. The status quo--conservationists struggling to exert influence over land which they have no clear property rights--is the source of tremendous conflict. Establishing a simple legal way for anybody to acquire property rights over land they value highly would be a great step forward.

Happy Earth Day

Most 'focusing events'--singular and easily-understood occurrences that help to shift public sentiment and spark policy action--happen by accident (think mass shootings and gun control). Earth Day, started in 1970, was entirely engineered by activists and has been amazingly successful at bringing attention to environmentalism and its policy platform. Here are five interesting things about energy and the environment that I learned recently:

1. The Earth's nitrogen cycle is in bad shape. Climate change, pollution, peak oil, and even biodiversity loss are all issues that get much more coverage than the dangerous inundation of Earth's life support system with technologically-procured nitrogen. While the agricultural efficiency gains have been immense, solutions are needed and the nitrogen issue should start being included in environmentalists' public rhetoric.

2. The Cradle-To-Cradle guys have a new book. It's called The Upcycle, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Their first book helped popularized the 'zero-waste', ecological approach to economic networks (any outputs by a firm are used as inputs by another firm), and took a novel tack by blending everything with the culture and language of architecture and design. The idea of 'upcycling' versus recycling (adding value with used goods rather than simply minimizing the value lost) is a powerful insight and reveals half of an important symmetry that's been mostly neglected. Can't wait.

3. Climate change refugees are beginning to appear. Author Paolo Bacigalupi calls them "yellow card men" in his stories: people forced by worsening environmental circumstances to leave their homes. Although shocking, in a deeper sense this vision of the future where individuals adapt to better themselves reveals how mundane and boring climate change actually is. Poor people living in environmentally marginal locations will face pain, suffering, and dislocation. Rich people will have the resources and capability to adapt without much ill-effect. This is hardly a new social dynamic. Whether climate change requires a qualitatively distinct ethical obligation, versus merely being subsumed within some general moral framework, is an important question. No doubt fewer immigration restrictions between countries would dramatically reduce the suffering caused by climate change.

4. The proposed nuclear waste repository under Yucca Mountain is dead dead dead. Congress basically screwed Nevada thirty years ago by picking Yucca Mountain as the only candidate for a long-term geologic repository. Nevada's population and political power have grown tremendously since then (Harry Reid plus Nevada's early spot in the Presidential nominating process) and it appears Yucca is finally finished. The more data researchers compiled on the mountain's physical attributes, the less safe the location seemed to be. Proponents of Yucca responded by showing that technological add-ons like drip shields could prevent containment failure in the long-run, but ironically this undercut the original justification for Yucca--namely that its geologic qualities made it a good choice. Nuclear energy producers have been paying taxes for decades to fund a long-term fix for their spent fuel problem, but the federal government has nothing on the horizon (waste is currently stored in "temporary" pools on-site). This terrible status quo is quietly accumulating accident risk.

5. This is by far the smartest environmentalist strategy yet. The green movement, bless its heart, has't always employed the best methods designed to achieve environmentalist goals. Eschewing the analytical tools of economics, for example, has lead to the perverse battle over Keystone XL: successfully blocking the pipeline would merely redirect supply along a different (and likely more costly) route while demand remains high. But this news about environmentalists teaming up with insurers to leverage their political and economic clout to enhance resilience and adaptive capacity in the face of climate change horror is brilliant. Unlike some other terrible projects that try and wish business and environmental incentives together, insurers are already on-board.

The Benefits and Costs of Cost Benefit Analysis

Grist has a fascinating interview with legal scholar Lisa Heinzerling about the regulatory bureaucracy of EPA decisionmaking, especially regarding the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Basically there's a lot of opacity and possible unconstitutional implementation of environmental policy statutes because OIRA (The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) likes using CBA to vet new regulations, but EPA and Congress don't always want that. The President, who controls OIRA more directly than he does the EPA, favors CBA. The tangle of formal and informal decisionmaking power creates confusion about who's really in charge.

Using CBA to determine which regulations should be implemented or scrapped seems like total common-sense: if the benefits of a regulation outweigh its costs, it gets a green light. Simple. And alternatives to CBA sometimes result in regulations with unintended consequences: mandating that industries use specific technologies can disincentivize research into solving pollution problems; standards set by political deliberation sometimes work to protect the interests of influential industry groups rather than people; politicians seeking popularity may compete by passing laws that are needlessly costly or based on intuitive toxicology and not science.

CBA has various practical difficulties (measuring the value of a life, comparing the present to the future, etc.), but the main downside is that it's biased in favor of maintaining the current policy status quo. For one it's costly to perform the analysis itself, increasing institutional friction. More fundamentally, however, the costs imposed by a new regulation on existing activity are easily-measured and well-understood. The benefits, conversely, tend to be harder to measure because they're almost by definition predictions about the future. Drawing a direct line of causation from sources of pollution or environmental harms to specific populations is extremely difficult. This asymmetric uncertainty probably results in a systematic understating of the benefits of environmental regulation.

Killing Wolves to Save Them

Derek Mead of Motherboard has a great post about the reintroduction of wolves into Montana and Wyoming, and the evolving rules surrounding their management:

With the contentiousness of the ESA process, the end result is what we’re seeing right now in the wolf ruling: Because a lot of people don’t want wolves around, states have worked with the Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out how few wolves they can keep around while keeping the population relatively stable — and thus within the letter of the law. But that type of management, focused on the lower feasible limit of a population, ignores the effects a single species has on its environment.

Obviously this new regime has some technocratic issues to muddle through regarding the proper balance of ecosystem health and economic health. But the fact that self-interested groups such as farmers attempt to influence the policy process in order to capture economic benefits reveals some nice insights about government regulation. Counter to the conventional wisdom, businesses sometimes want to acquire regulation in order to make it more difficult for competitors to enter their market. Similarly, regulation and the big bureaucratic infrastructure that often accompanies it provides a certain amount of protection against disruptive technology and social changes.

What's true of interest groups outside of government is also true of interest groups within government: environmentalists who want the reintroduction of wolves to be permanent and inviolable have a strong incentive to acquire expansive regulation. Keeping the policy status quo is always harder than changing it, and by establishing a hunting season with licences and all that, the existence of wolves as a major species becomes further entrenched socially, bureaucratically, and politically.

Additional Reading: Yale's Environment360 blog on the crucial role of top predators in ecosystems

Fire and Sagebrush

Last week's Science Friday had a great segment about the changing landscape of the American West caused by invasive species and brushfire. All the interview questions and expert guests were fantastic, but the discussion failed to clearly define the ecosystem management goals--are we opposed to certain invasive species because we want to preserve the historic makeup of the ecosystem? Is ecosystem health and resilience more important? How much economic damage are we willing to tolerate before we intervene to stop a brushfire? Over what timeframe?

Lots of commentary on environmental issues is similarly vague, often framing debates using concepts like "naturalness". These focusing ideas may serve a social role by signalling to others an environmentalist identity affiliation, but hinder progress by muddling the debate and limiting coalition possibilities to pretty much just liberals. Certainly there are benefits to having a huge environmentalist coalition, but by decomposing environmental and natural resource issues into more specific terms, we open up the possibility of forming novel coalitions that cut through the zero-sum partisan logic of our current policy process.

Quote of the Week

"Imagine you are on a boat docked in calm harbor and you want to quickly carry a brim-full cup of water across a stateroom without spilling. Now imagine the same situation but with the boat in rough seas. In harbor, the solution is simple: just walk quickly, but not so quickly that the water spills. At sea, speed is a secondary concern; now the real challenge is to maintain balance on an abruptly pitching floor. The solution now is to find secure handholds and footholds and to flex your knees to absorb the roll of the boat. In harbor, the solution is a simple optimization problem (walk as fast as possible but not too fast); at sea the solution requires you to enhance your ability to absorb disturbance--that is, enhance your resilience against the waves.

"Since the time of the agricultural revolution, the problem of environmental management has been conceived to be an optimization problem, like the example of carrying the water on the boat in the harbor. We have assumed that we could manage individual components of an ecological system independently, find an optimal balance between supply and demand for each component, and that other attributes of the system would stay largely constant through time.

"But, as we learn more about ecological and human systems, these assumptions are being shattered. Ecological systems are extremely dynamic, their behavior much more like the analogy of a boat at sea. They are constantly confronted with 'surprise' events such as storms, pest outbreaks, or droughts. What is optimal for one year is unlikely to be optimal the next. And, the structure and function of the systems continually change through time (and will change even more rapidly in the future as global warming becomes an ever-stronger driver of change).

"Quite simply, the basic framework underpinning our approach to environmental management has been based on false assumptions. In a world characterized by dynamic change in ecological and social systems, it is at least as important to manage systems to enhance their resilience as it is to manage the supply of specific products. In other words, we must apply 'resilience thinking' " 

From Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World by Brian Walker and David Salt (page x-xi)

Power Players: Paolo Bacigalupi

Identifying current trends in technology and culture and projecting them into the future has always been a big part of science fiction, and author Paolo Bacigalupi does this better than anyone with respect to the Earth's environmental conditions. Over numerous short stories (most collected in the spectacular anthology Pump Six) and a full-length novel (The Windup Girl), Bacigalupi describes human civilization trudging along through a bleak environmental dystopia, placing the reader at variable stages of collapse. Most of his short stories focus on one particular environmental facet, but taken as a whole a creepy sense of continuity emerges. Among the horror scenarios detailed are: peak oil, genetically modified food, transhumanism and naturalness, climate change refugees, biological warfare between agribusiness conglomerates, overpopulation, and water politics in a drought-devastated Southwestern U.S.  I recently read The Gambler, a fantastic novelette about near-future internet news coverage and environmental journalism. Check it out here.

The Paradox of Wilderness Intervention

Let's face it, wilderness managers are damned if they do, damned if they don't. When it comes to designated wilderness areas like state parks, active intervention (fire suppression, invasive species control, etc.) means injecting artificiality into systems where artificiality is anathema. On the flip side, however, lack of intervention means important values like native biodiversity, ecosystem function, and ecosystem services, could be lost forever. In Beyond Naturalness: Rethinking Park Wilderness Stewardship in an Era of Rapid Change, editors David Cole and Laurie Yung look at this problem through the lens of several competing wilderness management approaches.

Historically, early approaches to management focused around the notion of "naturalness," but this concept proved to be too vague. Early laws enshrined the language of "naturalness" and caused havoc: its many definitions meant implementation was often arbitrary and ill-coordinated. Additionally, new anthropological research into the impact of early human cultures demolished the idea of a historic "primitive state." Modern ecology, with the adoption of dynamic equilibrium models, destroyed the notion that nature exists in a "natural" equilibrium or climax state. Add to this the global reach of human impact and it's very unclear what our specific management goals are regarding wilderness areas.

Four "post-naturalness" approaches attempt to categorize the different facets of "naturalness":

1. Hands-Off Approach: This is just what it sounds like: not taking any conscious action that manipulates, controls, or hinders the conditions (e.g. habitat), components (e.g. species), or processes (e.g. fire) of an ecological system. Let nature roll the dice. This approach is an alternative to being locked into managing a rapidly-changing system not fully understood. It encourages scientific humility, eliminates the risk of unintended adverse consequences (of intervention), and provides unmanipulated control data. However, this approach may increase the risk to specific elements of biodiversity, and result in the loss of cultural resources (archeological sites, etc.) and property.

2. Ecological Integrity Approach: In this approach, managed intervention is justified in order to maintain ecosystem health, biodiversity, sustainability, etc. Managers must set up specific goals such as: retaining a large population of native species, selecting and monitoring viable indicator species, mixing disturbance regimes (fire, herbivory) over time and area, and ensuring productivity and decomposition operate within limits for system persistence (not too much entropy, example: clear-cutting, bark beetles). This approach is very dependent on the effective operationalization of goals (measuring the right things).

3. Historical Fidelity Approach: Maintain a connection to the past; pass legacy of natural and cultural heritage. Restore past conditions wherever possible. In this approach, species that were historically the most abundant, iconic, or charismatic are the species most critical to ecosystem function (as opposed to keystone species or species that are least redundant). In addition to cultural and philosophical justifications, animals have evolved to fit niches and thus their survival potential is reduced if future environmental conditions deviate too much from the past. A challenge to this approach concerns the inherent dynamism of ecosystems.

4. Resilience Approach: This approach targets an ecosystem's ability to adapt to change, specifically "the capacity of a system to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes." Instead of pursuing specific landscape or ecological objectives, managers should focus on the core goal of sustaining functional, adaptable systems. Ecosystem qualities that typically enhance resilience are diversity and modularity (ecosystem sub-systems are coherent and loosely-connected so that if one fails, others can persist and rebuild).

Each approach has a certain naivete, yet also an understandable appeal. By being so narrow in scope, the trade-offs between approaches are revealed, making comparisons much easier. Clearly some mixture of all four approaches is currently being implemented, by design or by default, which is warranted. However I do believe the resilience framework shows the most promise considering the level of global ecological decline.