A scene from the 22nd Annual Convention of the United Auto Workers, held in April 1970 to correspond with the first Earth Day

Via the History News Network:

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, the largest demonstration in U.S. history.  Millions of Americans took part on and around April 22, 1970, with events at nearly every college in the nation, in 10,000 secondary and elementary schools, not to mention community centers, parks, and places of worship.  The public outpouring catalyzed Congressional support for a raft of epochal environmental legislation.  Perhaps even more important, Earth Day participants—who were more often than not supporters of diverse causes—discovered a kinship with one another, and together began identifying themselves for the first time as “environmentalists.”

But as the modern environmental movement took shape in Earth Day’s wake, a crucial question remained unanswered.  What, precisely, constituted the environment?  Earth Day’s founder, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, lobbied for an expansive definition of the word.  “Environment is all of America and its problems,” he explained to his audience in Denver on the first Earth Day.  “It is rats in the ghetto.  It is a hungry child in a land of affluence.  It is housing not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not fit to inhabit.”  His nascent environmentalism was largely indistinguishable from his Great Society liberalism.  Accordingly, he lobbied for the creation of thousands of federally funded conservation jobs, as well as for the reallocation of resources from waging war in Southeast Asia to cleaning up domestic pollution.  “The objective,” he concluded, “is an environment of decency, quality, and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.”

This broad view of what environmentalism would be, one that bound it tightly to social justice initiatives, appeared elsewhere on the first Earth Day.   (more…)

• Great pictures and story on the banteng, “the most beautiful of all the wild relatives of cattle.” Compared to the Kouprey, banteng are doing pretty well in SE Asia. But then, the Kouprey are probably extinct. That’s probably what happens when you set aside new land for carbon sequestration, and ignore the threats from hunting. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, one woman is hunting the hunters (and by “hunting”, the headline writer meant tracking and trying to carry out legal enforcement against poaching, not killing in cold blood).
• This paper probably marks the end of the pendulum swing against individual actions in the Global War on Climate Change. If everybody worked on cutting household emissions, the U.S. could reduce carbon emissions by about 20% in the next decade. Call this Obama’s vaunted “Check your tire pressure” initiative.
• This is crazy: some migratory birds push out a second brood after migration. “He noted that orchard orioles might raise a first brood in the Midwestern and south-central U.S. and a second on Mexico’s western coast, yet both sets of offspring find the same wintering area in Central America. The question is how both groups find the right place, since they must travel in different directions.”
• Some discussion has arisen about conservation targets due to a recent publication in Conservation Letters. One problem with setting a target may be seen in Britain, where rare species appear to be increasing in abundance (i.e. doing better), while common species are in decline. Sometimes the whole thing feels sort of like the little boy with his finger in the dam. The newly-released IUCN Red List suggests that about 36% of the species analyzed are threatened with extinction (CJB weighs in).
• Interesting profile of the new National Parks head, Jonathan Jarvis. Jarvis is the first trained biologist to head the NPS.

As we approach next year’s CBD meeting, people are beginning to speak up about the quality of the IUCN Red List. My basic philosophy is, yeah, it’s not great, and it’s definitely not scientific, and people shouldn’t be publishing papers about extinction risk using the Red List, but we just aren’t in a position to assess every species on earth comprehensively, and this is our first, best attempt. And the architects of it are aware it’s not perfect, and they’re trying to improve it. That said, there are a couple of good, fairly even-handed articles and editorials from The New Scientist (+editorial) and the Telegraph. Given that climate change appears to be undergoing a small (hopefully dead cat bounce) renaissance of non-believers (“Rising View that Climate Risk Exaggerated“), it’s easier to recognize that it’s important not to over-state the case for endangered species. I know I’ve argued for an over-statement of climate change dangers — well, to be more nuanced, I want scientists to present their knowledge within the framework of public discourse, not the framework of scientific discourse — but if doing so has increasingly led to a fear of exaggeration, I might have to re-think that. Unfortunately, it’s unclear who’s causing that fear of exaggeration: maybe people are reading big, scary headlines, but then mis-hearing scientists as saying it’s no big deal*. In that case, the problem would be scientists not being hysterical enough.

Since I’m more familiar with the IUCN Red List and its problems, it’s easier for me to say that we shouldn’t depend too heavily on it. Nevertheless, as in most things conservation, if used properly and with the correct understanding, and so long as people are working to improve it, it’s a good start. As far as I can tell, that’s becoming my conservation mantra: a good start.

*Recall that, while the IPCC report has a specific definition of “very likely” as >90% of happening, most people view that as a less than 66% chance of happening.

(Also see: Framing and climate change).

• Mark Tercek, new TNC CEO (and former Goldman Sachs investment banker), interviewed at Mongabay.
• The title of the article is “When science hijacks conservation funding.” When NSF starts giving grants for direction conservation actions, it will make a lot more sense.
• A totally engaging review of the U. of Oregon’s Public Interest Environmental Law Clinic. (Bare-breasted women attacking Julia Butterfly and climate change conspiracy theories).
• The Bay Area is the second “birdiest” city in the country (after Dauphin Island, Alabama, that renowned urban center).
• Don’t worry about climate change — species can adapt.

There’s been an ongoing conversation about Revkin’s post about Al Gore and George Will both “overstating” their case for and against climate change. On the one hand, Gore was presenting a potentially incorrect figure, that he has subsequently taken out of his talk. On the other, George Will represented a finding from the 1970s in the opposite way the authors had intended, been called out on it by the authors, and refuses to apologize (as does the Post ombudsman). In a followup, Revkin warns that “every time an overstatement is exposed, it threatens to further disengage people who are already either doubtful or misinformed.” Really? So then all those climate deniers who read Will’s column are going to concede that global warming is real? Are you insane?

Here’s how science in the public realm should work: scientists (and advocates like Gore) present evidence to the public. If some of that evidence is wrong, journalists and anyone else with an interest in the matter state that it’s wrong. The scientists and advocates then make a judgment about whether it’s actually wrong, and adjust their presentations accordingly. In that way, the uncertainty that is inherently involved in things like natural science (or, say, finance), is addressed. It would help if the general public were educated to the level of understanding the modern scientific process (as opposed to the dis-proving a Null that is hammered home in high school physics). But regardless of the public’s understanding, the Gore “overstatement” occurred exactly as it should.

Now consider George Will’s blatant mis-leading — no mistake, just out and out mis-representing the truth. There’s no way you read the paper he referenced and come to the conclusion he did. If you want to have a debate about something, have an honest debate. Concede when you’re wrong. Don’t lie. These seem so obvious, and yet for some reason Andy Revkin is now digging himself further into denial about the horrors of over-statement on both sides of the debate, as though there were equal interests and honest actors on both sides.

Unfortunately, environmental doomsdayers are put in an incredibly awkward position because journalists are so unwilling to present both sides of this debate honestly. There is uncertainty in climate models, but science journalists are doing a terrible job presenting the downside to the uncertainty. If we spend 1-2% of global GDP for the next 10 years on developing clean and renewable energy sources, and preventing deforestation, developing carbon-trapping technology, etc. etc., but climate modelers were wrong and global warming wasn’t going to be a problem, then we end up with a healthier planet and a stronger global economy. If we don’t do any of that, and climate modelers end up being right (and remember, the way things are going, pretty much every week we get new findings that show that, if anything, we’re underestimating the effects), then we have global catastrophe. But because those risks are so uneven, and journalists so incapable of presenting them accurately, it almost becomes necessary for advocacy groups to become shrill and over-state the dangers. It would be preferable if the world understood the ways of science, but it’s not happening. So we get Gore, somebody who’s immersed himself in climate science for decades, presenting some potentially incorrect evidence and then correcting it versus George Will, baseball guy in a bow tie, deliberately mis-leading his readers. What on earth is his motivation for doing so? I guess we’ll never know, since they’re both to blame.

• This paper’s got legs! Over the past 50 years, more than 80% of the world’s conflicts have taken place in and around the most diverse places, according to a new paper by Thor Hanson et al. in Conservation Biology. Picked up by, among others, Revkin, GEF Blog, SCB Journal Watch, PlanetSave, Scientific blogging, inkbluesky, Reuters, and AFP. It’s a cool study, but the question is if there’s any causation, and in which direction (Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01166.x).
• One day after its minister of environment approved a plan to convert peatlands into oil palm plantations, Hillary Clinton and the UN praise Indonesia for its work on climate change.
• Another new mammal species has been described. It’s the Hamiguitan hairy-tailed rat.
• Thanks in large part to efforts by WCS, Cameroon has a new national park for gorillas.
• The Bushmeat Crisis Task Force is celebrating its 10th year.
  
• More on the line between science and policy from Kent at Uncommon Ground. Meanwhile, James Hansen will be demonstrating against a coal power plant in D.C. Fortunately, if EPA has anything to say about it, the whole thing may be unnecessary.
  

• 408 mammal species have been discovered in the past 15 years.
• “Remarkable footage” of arctic unicorns narwhals.
• Hurray for more climate change hysteria (no sarcasm — I think a little scientific hysteria is a good thing): Australian fires are a “wake up call.” Much as we saw after Katrina, some are proposing that climate change be taken into account when re-building. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s environment chief has banned climate change ads for being “insidious propaganda.” Um, okay.
• No, seriously. We need to get more hysterical — a recent study showed that the words used by the IPCC in its recent climate report are understood very differently than they are meant. Although “Very likely” is specifically defined as “more than 90% chance”, more than half of the participants in the study often scored “very likely” as less than 66% certain! And yet Vicky Pope at the Guardian is concerned that scientists are OVERplaying the dangers. Right… that’s how we get environment ministers banning ads about climate change.
• Honestly, I say this about once a month, but Keith Rizzardi’s coverage of the Endangered Species Act is a phenomenal effort and product. Here he goes through a bunch of recent news (homeless man jailed for eating steelhead trout!), and here he posts recent ESA findings. It’s kind of a one-stop place to stay up-to-date on endangered species in the USA.
• I can’t quite explain how excited I am to see CJB posting stuff that didn’t quite find the right place to be published. BLOGSCIENCE!
• Your Lands, Your Wildlife has released a report on “Restoring Balance to the Management of Our Public Lands” (pdf).
• Since it’s all over the wires, I’d be remiss in mentioning this nice study of migrating songbirds. “Tiny backpacks” appears to be the buzz word. (Stutchbury et al., Science, 323:896, doi 10.1126/science.1166664).

I’ll leave you, without comment, Thoreau’s thoughts on the wood thrush song, which really is quite delightful (and claimed among its other fans Edwin Way Teale):

As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. It lifts and exhilerates me. It is inspiring. It is a meidcative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary. How can they be contemporary when only the latter is temporary at all? How can the infinite and eternal be contemporary with the finite and the temporal? So there is something in the music of the cow-bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink. This thrush’s song is a ranze des vaches to me. I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes. A New Hampshire everlasting and unfallen…All that was riped and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece.

• Chris Bodle has a public art project called Watermarks, projecting onto buildings throughout Bristol the projected high-tide level should Greenland melt.
• Two of the more heavy-handed conservation techniques are transplantation and cloning. Looks like the former is promising (though still expensive), but Corey really doesn’t like the latter (“I’m appalled that this continues to be taken seriously!”). Setting aside the problems laid out (cost, inefficiency, low likelihood of success, etc.), I love the idea of cloning something like a T-Rex or a woolly mammoth. But is it so much of a stretch, then, to argue for the re-introduction of the passenger pigeon or the Carolina parakeet? It’s true it might not (okay, probably won’t) work, at least not yet. But I can imagine a technology that would be able to increase genetic diversity of cloned individuals. And, most importantly, I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game: money that would go to bringing back the mammoth will not necessarily be put to, say, protection of land. One major drawback to the potential for cloning is that it relieves the burden of extinction. What happens when extinction is no longer forever? I don’t think that captive breeding / cloning / transportation is a great solution to the biodiversity crisis, but I do think it’s an exciting technology for bringing back charismatic species we’ve already lost.
• Who says fortress conservation is dead? They’re putting up a fence in Hawaii.
• Chu says that California might lose all of its agriculture AND ITS CITIES due to climate change by the end of the century. Now that’s the kind of hyperbole that we need.
• There’s a special issue of FREE on ecosystem services (funded partially by TNC). Here’s a brief run down in Science Daily.
• There was a great article published last week in Science by Ana Carnaval et al. on modeling biodiversity hot spots. One of those classic “I wanted to do that!” ideas. (doi: 10.1126/science.1166955). It’s part of a special issue on Darwin and biodiversity that deserves more attention than just a bullet point. Fortunately, GEF blog is on the case!
• Louis Ducos du Hauron created the first color photograph; Ulysses S. Grant defeated a soon-to-be-deceased Horace Greeley; Brigham Young was arrested for polygamy. And, in a remote corner of the Wyoming Territory, the world’s first National Park was born. That’s right, PBS nuts, cue up Ashokan Farewell — Ken Burns is directing a 6 part documentary on National Parks (“The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” is the official title, though I hear the working title appended “… or BESTEST idea, amirite???”) (Fine Ken Burns skewering available here.)
• Newsflash: protected areas not so protected.
• The Pentagon is buying land credits by paying landowners around military lands to conserve endangered species, which allows them to continue training on their own lands and bombing the crap out of cute things. This is explicitly being done around Ft Hood with the golden-cheeked warbler, but probably elsewhere, too. Honestly, I don’t think I have any problem with this (as long as it works).

• Great roundup from ESABlawg on changes coming in environmental policy, including these amazing articles from the Oregonian and Seattle P.I. that the Bush administration’s shoddy governance has actually resulted in the timber industry and environmentalists to join forces against proposed rule changes. (“But the timber folks can see going in that, given what the Bush administration has done, the enviros would just waltz into court themselves and slap down the plan revisions the industry has worked so hard to procure.”) Delicious.
• South Africa is putting the finishing touches on the world’s first protected area specifically designed to mitigate impacts from climate change.
• Countries are kicking around the idea of creating a UN panel to address global biodiversity loss, in the mold of the IPCC. The way this article is written, it appears that the ecosystem services argument is convincing a lot of governments — hard to say if that’s just the perspective of the author or not. You know, this obviously deserves a much deeper dialogue, but if money is what ends up convincing the world’s governing bodies to engage with the current biodiversity CRISIS, maybe it really is worth it. It is slowly dawning on me how subtle arguments in favor of protecting biodiversity/natural habitat can be. You have to play to a person’s core values, and money has just never resonated with me the way it obviously does for so many people. If framing the debate in terms of financial opportunity raises the profile of conservation, so be it? Seems to be working for climate change. Of course, like most global capital enterprises, when climate change becomes a financial argument (as opposed to a moral one), it’s usually the poorest nations that suffer the negative consequences.
• The Big Picture strikes again, this time from Antarctica. BTW, Big Picture has a great feature that lets you navigate to each picture using the j/k keys to go forward and back. [enjoy your trip, Dad]

I’d like to respond to Brian’s post about the recent study on shifts in abundance of flowers in Concord over the past 150 years. One theme I’ve been trying to think through these past few months is how we think about conservation and biodiversity: what are we trying to save? How are we doing it? How are we feeling about the future, and what are the consequences?

As I read it, Brian’s really talking throughout about cultural memory: what we as humans highlight. From the Times’ predilection for climate change to the naturalist’s collecting strategy, we all have intuitive filters that preserve some memories while tossing off others. Maybe this is obvious, but the paper published in PNAS, “Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau’s woods are driven by climate change” is about exactly that, but written in the world of climate and genes. The authors found that not only have plants in Concord experienced fairly dramatic shifts in abundance and phenology (timing of life cycles, e.g. flowering time), but that there was a significant genetic component to such effects. That is to say, if you find that one species of aster in Concord isn’t keeping up with climate change, it’s flowering later than it should and suffering the consequences, it’s likely that other asters are experiencing the very same problems. Just as the stories we tell are being shaped and categorized, so too is nature filtering the flowers we study.

Okay, it’s not a new idea. Richard Dawkins did a pretty nice job summing it all up in The Selfish Gene when he coined the whole “meme” idea — that cultural memory was shaped by evolutionary pressures, and that some ideas/arts/governments/&c. were better able to survive and reproduce than others.

We are about to experience, in the natural world, what amounts to a massive cultural revolution. Things that are now abundant may not be abundant in 100 years. Things that are rare may explode and thrive. And yet, I believe that historians and those who study the anthropology of science would say that by observing those processes, we (conservation biologists) are also influencing our understanding of those rapid changes. We as scientists suffer from an inability to say how rapidly nature changes under “normal” conditions. Paradoxically, we as humans also suffer from short attention spans and are easily confused by shifting baselines. That is to say: on a cultural level, I don’t think we’ve quite come to grips with how terrifying the next century could be, given the chance that current climate models are gross under-predictions of potential future change. But I also feel that on a scientific level, we don’t have a good grip on how biodiversity shifts over those time spans.

Imagine, if you will, the massive changes that have occurred in Brian’s current locale and mine. Just 13,000 years ago, Brian would be under 5 miles of ice; 13,000 years ago, I could walk from my home in Berkeley out to the Golden Gate and not get wet. And yet all those plants that Thoreau was writing about were somewhere in or around Concord, and they remain. Not to get all Crichton/Goldblum-y, but life really does find a way.

A final metaphor. In I think the first episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan said that if he had a time machine, he would travel back to the Library of Alexandria. He wanted to know what the ancient world knew, to explore not just their science but also their culture. It’s thought that for every ancient epic we still have records of, 5, 10 or 100 may have been lost. But it doesn’t really matter whether there are fifty or a million copies of The Aeneid floating around — it still exists, and you can still read it. If you make bad enough decisions in high school, you may end up even translating parts of it from the original Latin. What we have saved, we have saved, and what we have lost is forgotten forever. Much like with biodiversity: it’s not the abundances that matter, it’s the binary: present or absent. Extant or extinct.

Willis, C. et al. Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau’s woods are driven by climate change. PNAS, 105:44. (doi: 10.1072/pnas.0806446105)

[A related paper that I didn’t manage to work in but is worth checking out along the same lines, examining small mammal range shifts in Yosemite over the past 100 years was published in Science a few weeks ago: Mortiz, C. et al. Impact of a Century of Climate Change on Small-Mammal Communities in Yosemite National Park, USA. Science, 322:10. doi: 10.1126/science.1163428)