Role of science

The Battle for the Soul of Conservation Science

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Dave Skinner ran across this article in Issues of Science and Technology and thought it was worthy of discussion.. I wholly agree.. thanks Dave!

Back in the day as I was getting my Ph.D., there wasn’t “conservation science” and “regular science”, there was just “science.” I believe that through generations of humans and pre-humans, folks have a good general instinct for figuring out who is telling the truth. I think it was Carolyn Daly who said “why do scientists always tell us (rural communities) what we can’t do, and never what we can do?”

Kareiva is neither pessimistic nor sunny about the state of the world. To him, it just is what it is. He doesn’t downplay threats to biodiversity, but he is tired of the unceasing gloom-and-doom narrative that environmentalism has advanced for the past quarter century.

He also believes that the eco-apocalyptic mindset has infected the field of conservation biology with an unhealthy bias. Sometimes, he says, science paints a different picture than that which conservation biologists want the public to see. “I have been an editor of major journals for thirty years, handling papers on migratory bird declines, salmon, marine fisheries, extinction crises, and so on,” he told me. “An article that confirms doom is never critiqued. Any article that reports things are not so bad gets hammered. It is very discouraging to me.”

He recalls one particular episode regarding a paper published twenty years ago in the journal Ecology. Its finding contradicted widely held assumptions that neotropical warblers were declining. “It was reviewed unprofessionally and viciously because folks worried it would undermine efforts to reduce tropical deforestation. I have seen this over and over again.” The conservation community, he says, “is plagued with an astonishing confirmation bias that does not allow questioning of anything.”

The field’s premier journal, Conservation Biology, was rocked in 2012 by similar charges of politicized interference when its editor was fired after she had tried “removing advocacy statements from research papers,” as an article in Science reported.

It was around this time that Kareiva and some of his colleagues began calling for new approaches to conservation. In an essay published in BioScience, he and Michelle Marvier, an ecologist at Santa Clara University, wrote: “Forward-looking conservation protects natural habitats where people live and extract resources and works with corporations to find mixes of economic and conservation activities that blend development with a concern for nature.”

Leading figures in the ecological community were aghast. The essay explicitly challenged Soulé’s founding precepts for conservation biology, which established the field as a distinctly nature-centric enterprise. It was not intended to accommodate human needs or corporate interests. In a rebuttal published in Conservation Biology, Soulé characterized Kareiva and Marvier’s view as “a radical departure from conservation.” We humans, he wrote, “already control more than our fair share of earth’s resources . . . . [T]he new conservation, if implemented, would hasten ecological collapse globally, eradicating thousands of kinds of plants and animals.”

Kareiva is a lightning rod for criticism because of his high profile position at The Nature Conservancy, which is the largest and richest environmental organization in the world. He is also outspoken. In one public talk, he marveled at nature’s ability to rebound from industrial disasters, such as oil spills. He wasn’t condoning such actions; he just thinks that in some cases his peers conveniently overlook an ecosystem’s resilience because it contradicts the fragile nature narrative that has shaped environmental discourse and politics. Additionally, Kareiva has come to believe it is better to work with industry than against it—so as to influence its practices. (This is what TNC has done of late, in partnering with Dow Chemical and other companies on environmental restoration projects). “Conservation is not going to succeed until we make business our friend,” he has said.

The more Kareiva talks like this, the angrier he makes some of his esteemed peers. They have already been on the warpath. In 2013, Soulé, along with Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and others, sent a letter to TNC President Mark Tercek, complaining about Kareiva. They slammed his views as “wrongheaded, counterproductive, and ethically dubious.”

(Sharon’s side note.. if I wanted an ethicist I would not ask a bio Ph.D. To me academics have to pick a lane.. if their expertise is in a particular field, I think they should either stick to that field or qualify their observations with “I’m not an expert on this, but..”.. and it makes me LOL when academics claim that they are up for open discussion, advancing thinking and ideas.. until someone actually disagrees with them..)

The onslaught has not let up. Last year, an article in the journal Biological Conservation by Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm likened Kareiva to a prostitute doing the bidding of industry.

The recent commentary in Nature, with its 200-plus signatories from the ecological community, sought to cool passions and tamp down the debate’s derogatory tone. The authors pleaded for “a unified and diverse conservation ethic,” one that accepts all philosophies justifying nature protection, including those based on moral, aesthetic, and economic considerations. They asked for ecologists to look back to the historic roots of conservation for guidance.

The roots of biodiversity protection

In the early 1900s, when President Theodore Roosevelt was establishing national parks and wildlife refuges, ecology had not yet become a formalized science. People viewed the natural world from a largely aesthetic or utilitarian perspective.

John Muir, the Sierra Club founder who famously went camping with Roosevelt in California’s Yosemite National Park, worshipped nature. It was his church. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” he wrote in his journals. Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman, venerated nature, too. But he also viewed it as a valuable “natural resource”—trees for timber, rivers for fishing, wildlife for hunting.

These two worldviews—valuing nature for itself and for human purposes—have long framed dual approaches to conservation.

By the 1930s, the chasm between the intrinsic and utilitarian perspectives was bridged by the forester Aldo Leopold. He advanced a more holistic perspective of the natural world, and believed that anyone who valued nature, irrespective of motive, should hold an ethic that “reflects an ecological conscience.” This was morally inscribed in his famous “land ethic,” which, for many, became a guiding maxim: “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.”

Two parallel developments at this time—one in the emerging science of ecology and the other in the U.S. wilderness preservation movement—combined with Leopold’s philosophy to shape attitudes toward nature and conservation for decades to come. Ecologists believed then that healthy ecosystems were closed, self-regulating, and in equilibrium. Disturbances, in the form of weather, fires, or migrating organisms, were not yet factored in, except when the disturbance was thought to be human-induced, in which case the prevailing belief was that the system was thrown off its normal balance.

This model of stable ecosystems that needed to be guarded against human disturbance (such logic, of course, meant that humans must exist outside nature), gave scientific impetus to the cause of wilderness preservation.

Most ecologists have since discarded the “balance of nature” paradigm. But as the environmental writer Emma Marris noted in her recent book Rambunctious Garden, “The notion of a stable, pristine wilderness as the ideal for every landscape is woven into the culture of ecology and conservation—especially in the United States.”

In a paper he is readying for publication, Kareiva writes that the balance-of-nature paradigm has been “at the core of most science-driven environmental policy for decades.” But the paradigm goes deeper than just the science. American attitudes towards nature have been strongly influenced by iconic authors, from Thoreau and Muir to Leopold and Edward Abby, the grizzled nature writer whose books celebrated the stark beauty and loneliness of Southwestern desert landscapes. Many people looking to commune with nature go in search of transcendent outdoor experiences; they venture into a human-free landscape—the wilderness—to experience what seems to be nature in its truest, purest state.

This mindset took on added ecological value when concerns about endangered species came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s. Designated wilderness and national parks—be they forests, prairies, or wetlands—helped preserve habitat for imperiled species. The sanctuary model extended itself further when conservation biologists in the 1980s began identifying the significance of ecological processes and a wider community of plants and animals. This new strand of ecology-based conservation had one key tenet: genuine nature, the kind that contains biodiversity, is devoid of people.

These Western-style ideas of ecological conservation were exported by ecologists, environmentalists, and policymakers who pushed for the establishment of national parks and nature preserves in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It was the wilderness model of nature protection gone global. Yet numerous studies have shown that even as more parcels of land have been set aside around the world (equaling 10 to 15 percent of the earth’s land mass) global biodiversity in the protected areas continues to decline. How could that be?

In his 2009 book, Conservation Refugees, the investigative journalist Mark Dowie, who had been covering environmental issues for decades, reported: “About half the land selected for protection by the global conservation establishment over the past century was either occupied or regularly used by indigenous peoples.” Much as the loggers of the Pacific Northwest depended on the forests for their livelihoods, so had these local inhabitants depended on the now-protected lands to forage, hunt, or graze their livestock. The people were part of the ecosystem. Removing them had consequences.

In 2013, the International Journal of Biodiversity published a meta-review of national park case studies from Africa. It found that the creation of protected areas in African countries has resulted in the killing of wildlife “by local people as a way of protesting the approach.” There are other factors that have undermined the effectiveness of national parks in the developing world for protecting biodiversity, such as regional climate change and insufficient funding for oversight. But it is the “fortress conservation” aspect that has turned many people who had been living with nature into enemies of nature. As Dowie noted in his book, “some conservationists have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people…are generally doomed to fail.”

Embracing the Anthropocene

Last spring, Kareiva emailed me an intriguing paper that had just been published in Science. Researchers had sought to quantify the decline of species diversity in 100 localized, ecological communities across the world. Globally, there was no question, as the authors were careful to point out, that biodiversity was being lost. They had thus assumed that the global trend would be mirrored at the local level. “Contrary to our expectations, we did not detect systematic [diversity] loss,” the scientists wrote. What they found, instead, was much evidence of ecological change that altered the composition of species, but not its richness or diversity.

It’s the kind of result that many conservation biologists would probably find maddening. Kareiva, though, was fascinated by the implication. “Think about it,” he said. “If you live to be 50, one out of two species you saw in your back woodlot will have been swapped out for a different species—but the number of species would not have declined.”

Access to federal sage-grouse workshop criticized

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I had been subsumed in graduate study but looking through the Denver Post grouse articles I found this story from the AP..from October. It sounds like an approach that the FS would get in trouble if they tried.. does anyone have more info?

GRAND JUNCTION — A meeting next week in Fort Collins about the greater sage-grouse has drawn fire from several western representatives who want to know why public attendance is limited while regulators focus on possible land use issues.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey are conducting a workshop Wednesday and Thursday to discuss scientific questions about bird populations. Interior Department officials say the panel includes government agencies, tribes, industry and local conservation organizations.

The department says people who were invited to attend were drafted with help from wildlife agencies so they could focus on scientific issues.

According to The Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, critics say scientists who favor federal limits are invited, while industries and other critics are being excluded.

“It is disappointing that the Fish and Wildlife Service workshop does not also include an examination of the data relating to population trends, in addition to questions of genetics, since many have questioned the … lack of clear data that Greater Sage Grouse populations range-wide are declining,” according to a letter sent from 18 local representatives to the Department of the Interior.

The letter urges Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell to cancel the workshop and gather population and other data before the Fish and Wildlife Service decides whether to list the greater sage-grouse as threatened or endangered. Estimates on the number of sage grouse vary from 100,000 to 500,000, raising questions over the need for stricter limits on development.

Sage grouse are chicken-sized birds that live in sagebrush and grasslands. They are known for gathering in spring in breeding grounds called leks, where the males puff themselves out and dance for females searching for mates.

A listing would affect the way lands are managed in 11 states, including Colorado, where state and local officials say it could hamstring the energy industry, particularly in northwest Colorado.

Fish and Wildlife is expected to make a decision on the listing by September 2015.

UC Berkeley Gets it Right, and Gets it Wrong

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A Cal-Berkeley fire scientist shows his unawareness of current Forest Service policy but, his other ideas favor active management of our Sierra Nevada National Forests.

Canopy2-web

The situation is compounded by the gridlock between environmentalists and commercial foresters. The former favor thinning, but they want all logging plans to leave the larger trees, particularly those with trunks over 30 inches in diameter. But the timber companies maintain it is necessary to take a significant number of bigger trees to fund thinning and restoration programs.

Stephens generally favors the enviro position. Landscape-scale wildfire damage is driven by vast acreages of small-diameter, closely-packed trees, he says. By leaving the larger trees, the essential character of a natural forest can be maintained, even accelerated. And he thinks markets can be found for products produced from thinned, scrawny trees.

http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-09-26/brush-flame-king-fire-narrowly-misses-proving-fire-prevention

Of course, there has been a ban on the cutting of trees larger than 30″ dbh, since 1993. Ditto for clearcutting! These are two big hot-button issues for most “conservationists” but, there are still people out there who want timber sales banned, altogether. There are others who would love to go back to the Clinton rules of the Sierra Nevada Framework, which would shutdown much of Region 5’s timber management programs. A 22″ dbh tree, underneath a 36″ dbh tree cannot be considered “scrawny”.  Generally, most of the thinned trees are in the 10-18″ dbh size, averaging about 15″ dbh.

Conservation Biologists Urged to Get More Political

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Thanks to a Montanan who sent this link to a Missoulian article entitled “Conservation biologists must take message to politicians, experts say at UM.”

The weeklong gathering has brought scientists, policymakers and journalists from around the world to the University of Montana. While much of the gathering is focused on the latest scientific discipline discoveries, this year’s agenda also features many discussions about getting more science to the general public.

Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, argued that even different political camps can end up following the same policy aims. He said that while the George W. Bush administration caught fire for recommending logging and thinning in spotted owl habitat with little evidence that would help the bird, the Obama administration has pursued a very similar policy.

“The thinning goes forward even though the science says, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” DellaSala said. “With the precautionary principle, the agency has the burden of proof to demonstrate it’s not harmful.”

Based on these quotes, the folks there seem to be pretty sloppy about what is “science.” For example, the precautionary principle is not science, it’s an idea or value. I don’t believe that particular idea is enshrined in law but others can help with that.

Here are some more:

But that’s going to take a higher level of commitment and organization than most scientists are willing to assume, said David Johns, a professor of politics and law at Portland State University and co-founder of the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative.

“Conservationists have abandoned grassroots organizing,” Johns said. “It’s mostly check-writers supporting professional staff. But when you’re only playing the inside game, you can’t match the resources of our opponents.”

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said managing people is much harder than managing wildlife, especially where science is involved. When people “stack facts based on beliefs,” to make political decisions, it becomes extremely hard for scientific evidence to persuade someone to change an opinion.

Ah.. it sounds like conservation “ists” and “biologists” are the same folks.. but “science” is supposed to be objective (or not..). Even Director Ashe as quoted seems to believe that “science” should drive political decisions.

The curious thing about this is that everyone knows that scientists in the real world do have different values and do disagree about things.. in fact, science is supposed to be open and transparent. Plus our government if supposed to be “of the people” not “of the scientists.”

And politicians get that .. that’s why you see scientists of all persuasions testifying at hearings.

Evolutionary Theory and the Practice of Policy (4): Beware of Biologists for Technocracy

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festschrift group 2.

Looking back at this section of the paper through today’s eyes.. I notice that both the Janzen and Soule’ quotes below were published in scientific journals, even though they are their own ideas pretty much about what’s wrong with humanity. Of course, Soule’ doesn’t like the idea that some people know that science is a sociological construct.. it interferes with the idea that they know more and should rule. Let me make this clear, everyone is entitled to their opinions, but when someone says “it’s in the peer-reviewed literature”, this is evidence that all kinds of questionable stuff makes it into the peer-reviewed literature. This is in a review journal, which is kind of like a scientist op-ed, which need not contain much “science”, as we shall see.

I was fairly surprised when I read this, though. Again, back when I learned how to be a scientist, (just past the dinosaur period), this would have been inappropriate for a “scientific” paper. If you’re interested in the cites, I will link to the whole paper after posting each section.

Selection in an academic environment has traditionally been focused on individual scientific achievements and less on work in teams where power is shared. Coupled with a lack of education of many biologists in policy studies, or any social science, for that matter, this can lead to a lack of appreciation for the policy process. Even conservation biology, which considers itself an interdisciplinary policy oriented field, has lacked social science in its curriculum (Noss, 1999). Perhaps this is the source of a lack of respect for the roles of social scientists, citizens and others who participate in the policy process.

For example: “Biologists are in charge of the future of tropical ecology. If the tropics of the world go under, biologists will have no one but themselves to blame. We can see very clearly what is happening, what will be the irreversible consequences for biology and humanity, and how the solutions must be constructed.”(Janzen, 1986). He goes on to say that “the driving force for the reduction of the tropical world is human selfishness, human numbers, human ignorance of its own needs, and the acquisitive nature of life itself applied at all levels.” Despite defining the problem as a basically social and cultural one, he goes on to add that “the true battle is to reprogram humanity to a different goal. The battle is being fought by many more kinds of professionals than just ecologists; however it is a battle over the control of interactions, and by definition, the person competent at recognizing, understanding and manipulating interactions is an ecologist.” The tendency to claim science as a foundation for the legitimacy of one’s perspective and then making statements about an area beyond the expertise of that science, that in fact is the area of a social science, seems rather contradictory, albeit common among some biologists. It is interesting and worthy of comment that the above statements were printed in the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, a scientific publication.

This claim for superior legitimacy of biologists in policy is echoed by Soule’ (1993) who critiques the “bureaucrats, technocrats, planners, development specialists, lawyers and economists, whose views often determine how governments decide to manage wildlands and biodiversity, or if they should be managed at all.” He goes on to describe some of their good points, but criticizes their lack of biological knowledge, their comfort with the idea that science is a social construct, and their urban backgrounds. Certainly science is a social construct, as is nature. There is a paradox in that scientific information is useful but it is not reality, and science is a social enterprise conducted by humans with all the comedy and tragedy that that entails. Several paragraphs before, Soule acknowledges that the best policy is a mix of science, economics, anthropology, sociology, and local native knowledge, if it still exists. While some would say that social sciences are also sciences (and that makes one wonder exactly what Soule’s definition of a science is), in fact, there are fields such as policy analysis and decision science which are specifically about policy and decisions. Why do some of our most prominent biologists appear to be unwilling to grant scientific legitimacy to social scientists? Why are they unwilling to allow that good policy comes from teamwork from people with different backgrounds? There are too many of these to cite, but particularly egregious are statements such as “the Endangered Species Act is scientifically sound” after a description of incentives, tax code and other issues traditionally the realm of social scientists (Eisner et al. 1995).

Sheila Jasanoff (1994) cites several cases of scientists who “Given a choice, tend to define problems in ecological terms, although other possible framings may coexist in the social domain. To the extent that their shared values promote boundary shifting (by allowing issues to be moved across the society-nature boundary from “politics” to “science”) it is tempting to interpret the values in question as nothing more than the overriding interest of scientists in enlarging the influence of science.” The recent Committee of Scientists report (1999), which predictably focuses the need for science to help make better decisions on public land management and planning. No one would argue that a basis of science is good. However, since scientific information is a product of funding, one must ask the question “does science as used in the process inform citizens in the democratic process or establish a system of experts that (necessarily or not) does an end run around democracy?” Probably due to the lack of social scientists in natural resource departments, these questions remain mostly unexamined. Lee (1994) addresses this question and Profeta (1996) discusses the role of laypeople compared to experts in determining risk. Once again, there is a paradox, by trying to dominate and advocate in the name of science, trust and credibility, the long run chips at the policy table, may be lost long before the stakes get high.

Science-Based or Science-Informed?

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back off man

John Thomas, Jr.’s comment here:

“My point is that science is a large assemblage of parts, and it takes a supple mind to put those parts in order to have a comprehensive result. An artist, if you will. Big Picture person. Visionary. Those people exist and I have seen their work all my life in many aspects of our natural resource economy.”

reminded me of this Commentary I wrote for the Journal of Forestry in 2002 linked here.

I wrote it as the Chair of the Forest Science and Technology Board at the Society of American Foresters. More recently, I was the Chair of the Committee on Forest Policy. Does that give me credibility to talk about these things? I must admit it was sometimes frustrating to be involved in discussions of the 2012 planning rule, given that some external groups treated Science and Scientists more like sacred objects and high priests. Despite the existence of the science of science and technology studies that says that that isn’t an appropriate way to deal with policy. I was always mystified (including during the 2001 Planning Rule, in that case by internal folks) by people who say their science should rule policy, but not other fields of science ;). Anyway, below is the test of the Commentary.

When we use the term “science-based,” I think we really mean that we would like decisions to be informed by the most-current, highest-quality scientific information. Using the term “science-based” can be misleading, as it implies that “science” is the foundation for the decision; in fact, people choose practices that best meet their values. Scientific
and other types of information should inform the decisionmaker of the effects of different choices.

To me, making good resource management policy is both an art and a science. For policymakers or decisionmakers, it’s a little like making lentil soup. They have tasty bits—the research articles, legal expertise, indigenous and practitioner knowledge, and monitoring information. They want each bit to
be of sufficient quality, so they ask us scientists or other experts (the lentil and sausage specialists) for our advice.
The process of turning informational ingredients into policy soup has well-developed sciences to support it— the decision sciences. Researchers in these fields examine the processes for
making decisions and how information can best be used in those decisions in a variety of contexts. Without quality decision science information and quality policy practitioners, taking information from all the disciplines can result in a tasteless jumble rather than a mouthwatering delight.

Potentially even more dangerous is putting the lentil and sausage specialists to work in the kitchen. Since we scientists and other specialists tend to love our particular bit, we tend to overestimate the importance of that bit to the soup, and have an inherent conflict of interest in the soup’s development.

I agree with my colleague Bob Lee at University of Washington that the beauty and attraction of science is that it “gives us rules that protect us from the all-too-human tendency to fool
ourselves, either individually or collectively.”

But because all policy issues cross disciplines, the only truly “scientific” claim for the policy product is that of the decision sciences. I believe that in addition to quality ingredients, our best bet for a nutritious and delicious
policy soup is civil public debate of competing knowledge claims, improving our decision science capacity, and a structured way to learn from our policy practitioners who dependably deliver quality products.

Evolutionary Theory and the Practice of Policy (3): Disciplinary Fragmentation

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Here's me giving my talk at the Festschrift.
Here’s me giving my talk at the Festschrift.
In this section, I focus on how producing droves of scientists has led to them forming smaller groups, or disciplinary splintering. This has, in turn, led to “reinventing the wheel” plus micro-disciplinary territorial disputes, all of which might be invisible to the naked policy eye. Policy makers, to my mind, must be aware of the sociology of these disputes to really understand what scientific information can contribute, or in some cases, cannot contribute. And I would argue that 15 years after I wrote this paper, we still know little about the environmental effects of genetically engineered organisms, compared to how widely they are dispersed into the environment. Follow the money, as they say, back to the groups who outline “priority research” and panels who decide how the funding is spent. I worked on one research program where bad vibes were given from above for actually including a stakeholder on research panels. Because it did not hold to the sacred NSF model that USDA was trying to emulate at the time, despite Congress’s clear direction for the program (the Fund for Rural America).

When a person in policy or management tries to arrange research developed by the current system into a package relevant to a real world problem, this can leave a somewhat awkward jumble of technologies and strategies as a pool of scientific information. An analogy might be designing a car by contacting a couple of hundred groups and asking them to work on car design. Some might work on door design, others engines. But perhaps no one works on steering or air conditioning. And there’s probably a few who decide that what’s really needed is a train or an airplane and work on that. And it’s no one’s job to ensure that the pieces are all there or that the pieces fit together. Within the research system, there is little to encourage interdisciplinary cooperation as journals, funding agencies and other power structures of research communities tend to be either disciplinary, or from a restrictive subset of disciplines (e.g., ecological economics). This makes the work of taking the discrete nuggets of scientific information and arraying them into a meaningful policy analysis another mix of science, art and intuition.

DIVERGENT SELECTION, INDIRECT SELECTION AND DISCIPLINARY DRIFT

Administrators in research have selected for certain traits in scientists. Certainly it is desirable to measure accomplishments. This has been done for number of papers and grants awarded. However two questions arise. First, are there undesirable indirect effects from this selection? Second, how divergent is this selection from selection in the policy arena, and how would such a divergence influence scientists working with policy makers?

No doubt there are other forces that cause disciplinary fragmentation, but there has been a proliferation of journals and symposia, associations and subdisciplinary communities. This is good for publication records, but difficult to individuals who want to keep up with or synthesize science findings. In terms of worldview, there tends to be some “disciplinary drift” as well.

Each scientific discipline contains the paradox that the more the circumstances are controlled to get accurate data, the less relevant the answer is to the real world. Science used to depend for its legitimacy on designed experiments, which could be replicated and tested. As issues like global climate change come under scrutiny, however, or even evolution, it is recognized that in most cases rerunning the clock is not possible, and even if it were, stochastic forces might lead to a variety of possible outcomes. Therefore, as problems get more complex, science grows less “scientific.” We depend more and more on a given scientific community, rather than reproducibility, to determine what is good science and bad science. But as disciplines splinter and recombine, the scientific communities may be mixing values and science in varying proportions with unquestioned approaches and unstated assumptions and paradigms. Thus in today’s complex world, there may be ultimately no quality control on this science.

In addition, focusing on the production of publications as an organizational target plus disciplinary drift can have the effect of scientists amplifying minor discoveries or reinventing what is commonly known in another discipline. There is also a tendency to make the simple arcane and esoteric so that it appears that the discovery is important. In policy, citizens and their predilections are the key. In research, both citizens and practitioners are often left out of decisions and not the target of communication. This is a major difference between the two worlds.

Scientists can become advocates for technologies they develop, or amplify threats (from someone else’s technology). In this environment, it is difficult for a policy maker to get around the self-serving nature of these debates and get information that is balanced. For example, Jasanoff (1990) cites the Ecological Society of America adopting an influential public position on assessing the risk of releasing genetically engineered organisms into the environment. According to Jasanoff, this action was prompted in large part by a desire to enhance the organization’s professional standing; significantly it postdates a report from the National Research Council, in which the institutionally more powerful community of molecular biologists and biochemists had articulated somewhat different principles, downplaying ecological consequences. Today, almost nine years later, with substantial sums of research funds invested in the interim, we are no closer to understanding the true environmental risks of GMO’s than we were nine years ago. This is clearly an indictment of the scientific establishment’s ability or desire to look beyond its interests in increased research funding by discipline and develop information useful to the citizens of the U.S.

Evolutionary Theory and the Practice of Policy For the 21st Century (2))

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Dr. Bill Libby and I at Unifying Perspectives of Evolution, Conservation and Breeding: A symposium in honour of Dr. Gene Namkoong
Dr. Bill Libby and I at Unifying Perspectives of Evolution, Conservation and Breeding: A symposium in honour of Dr. Gene Namkoong

In this section, I address different framings of the larger issue around forests, and explore how different framings privilege different scientific and other disciplines. This can occur whether a framing is helpful or not to decision makers, or accepted or not by stakeholders, simply due to how research is prioritized and funded (most often, by groups of scientists).

Below is a sample of some ways of looking at the important issues for forests, intended to show the breadth and diversity of approaches that different disciplines can take. As stated above, this tends to be done implicitly, with relatively little debate or discussion among disciplines. It seems likely that discussion across disciplines and with stakeholders and the public about the important issues might serve to focus research to provide better information for future decisions.

Is the basic problem in forestry how to allocate forests to different uses in a wise, just, and environmentally sensitive manner- “how should we manage a given area of land or landscape?” This is traditionally the area of planners, local governments, and landowners. These groups then use scientific information as available to help make decisions. Other valuable information they use in decision-making includes their own experience, experience of practitioners and indigenous people, history, the law, and the mixture of their own preferences and values.

The role of place is specifically linked to this framing of the question. In an era of globalization, land is the ultimate thing that cannot be moved or shipped. Carey (1998) describes the process of becoming located in a place in these words “over time our perceptions, thoughts and feelings undergo a process of integration with that place. We achieve an intimacy with climate and landforms. Adaptation gives way to coevolution. The place changes us even as we change the place.” He goes on to compare “space” and “place”, “space is defined by numerical coordinates, squares on a grid, longitude and latitude. By contrast place is defined by “human experience, by stories and a sense of connection that is born of years spent observing and interacting with a particular ecosystem.” The poet Gary Snyder (1995) calls bioregionalism and watershed consciousness “ a move toward resolving both nature and society with the practice of profound citizenship in both the natural and social worlds. If the ground can be our common ground, we can begin to talk to each other (human and nonhuman) again.” One of the key tensions in land allocation is between local, regional, national and international rights and responsibilities, and a tension between academic, scientific and local knowledge. Yet, framing the issue as helping local decision makers allocate land leaves a different center and clientele for research than some of the other way of asking the question.

From the forestry or landscape architecture point of view, is the question “how should we design landscapes?” McQuillan (1993) mentions both the aesthetic of architecture and aesthetic of participation in the urban or rural environment. McQuillan also points out that forestry is an art as well as a science, as acknowledged by the Society of American Foresters since 1971. Once again, in forests there is science, but what is its proper role- like that of engineering in architecture? Perhaps forestry and conservation biology have this in common, as Soule’ (1985) states in describing conservation biology “in crisis disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts; crisis disciplines are thus a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information.” Once again real world applications require some mix of intuition, art, and science. Still, looking at the issue as one of design rather than allocation brings art to bear, and a different lens than simply allocation. Framing the question this way leaves science, art, and intuition as partners in design, and on real landscapes, citizens and their political structures.

Is the key question for forests “what practices and technologies should be used?” Certain practices, such as home and road development, logging, and using automobiles, using or not using fire, have effects on water, soil, air, and organisms of all kinds. Can humans decrease our needs, substitute other products, or decrease the negative impacts of these practices? The difficulty with framing the question this way is that in many cases the critical question about practices for a policy maker is not whether it impacts the environment, but what the impacts compared to available alternatives. Often in scientific research, alternatives are not part of the study, which leaves the policy maker to potentially compare apples and oranges, or, more often, kiwifruit and ball bearings. This can lead to the plaintive cry of the scientist to the policy maker along the lines of “if you don’t use my ball bearing in your cake, you are not using the best science.”

Is the question “how can we change human culture to be more sensitive to the environment?” Again, this would be the province of the humanities. Is the problem too many people? Is the problem how to conserve biodiversity? If the question is seen as “how best to protect the environment from people?” or “how can we develop new technologies that provide for people’s needs?” the first group is not realistic because it does not consider that people have needs, while the second group does not consider the social or environmental impacts of its technology. While feeling smug and comfortable within disciplines, reducing the problem into these discrete units is ultimately a political and not scientific action, and leaves us bereft of potential solutions to the problem of harmonizing the needs of humans and other organisms.

Each way of describing the problem has several parameters: different mixes of humanities and sciences to be purveyors of information, different systems of stakeholders and decision makers, paradigms of preservation and use, and different focus on the local compared to general concepts and principles. The paradox is that to some extent each is the problem, the whole problem is each of these and larger than each of these. The paradox is that the answer is a function of the question and who picks the question is a function of values, not science. And we need to base our design of the future on what we know about people and the environment, but also on what resonates with the human soul, a world designed to be a place we would all want to live.

Dr. Law: Role of Forest Ecosystems in Climate Change Mitigation

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Dr. Beverly Law recently gave a presentation titled, “Role of Forest Ecosystems in Climate Change Mitigation.”   Here’s some information on Dr. Law’s background, education and area of expertise, via  Dr. Law’s website at Oregon State University:

Dr. Beverly Law is Professor of Global Change Forest Science in the College of Forestry, and an Adjunct Professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. She is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow. Her research focuses on the role of forests, woodlands and shrublands in the global carbon cycle. Her approach is interdisciplinary, involving in situ and remote sensing observations, and models to study the effects of climate and climate related disturbances (wildfire), land-use change and management that influence carbon and water cycling across a region over seasons to decades. She currently serves as the Chair of the Global Terrestrial Observing System – Terrestrial Carbon Observations (supported by UNEP, UNESCO, WMO), and on the Science/Technology Committee of the Oregon Global Warming Commission.

You can view a PDF copy of Dr. Law’s presentation right here. Below, the text-only version of Dr. Law’s presentation does a nice job of summarizing the myth and reality regarding “thinning,” bioenergy/biomass and climate.

Role of Forest Ecosystems in Climate Change Mitigation
B.E. Law – Oregon State University, February 23, 2014

Key Points:

Activities that promote carbon storage and accumulation are allowing existing forests to accumulate carbon, and reforestation of lands that once carried forests.

Natural disturbance has little impact on forest carbon stores compared to an intensive harvest regime.

Harvest and thinning do not reduce carbon emissions. Full accounting shows that thinning increases carbon emissions to the atmosphere for at least many decades.

Carbon returns to atmosphere more quickly when removed from forest and put in product chain.

1. Role of forest ecosystems in mitigating climate change – Carbon storage and accumulation

Allowing existing forests to accumulate carbon is likely to have a positive effect on forest carbon in vegetation and soils, and on atmospheric carbon. Wet forests in the PNW and Alaska have some of the highest carbon stocks and productivity in the world. Fires are infrequent in these forests, occurring at intervals of one to many centuries. Old forests store more carbon than young forests. Old forests store as much as 10 times the biomass carbon of young forests (Law et al. 2001, Hudiburg et al. 2009). The low hanging fruit is to allow these forests to continue to store and accumulate carbon.

A key objective is to reduce GHG emissions. Changes in management should consider the current forest carbon sink and losses in the product chain when evaluating management options.

2. Role of natural disturbance in forest carbon budgets
Natural disturbance from fire and insects has little impact on forest carbon and emissions compared with intensive harvest.

Although wildfire smoke looks impressive, less carbon is emitted than previously thought (Campbell et al. 2007). In PNW forests, less than 5% of tree bole carbon combusts in low and high severity fires (Campbell et al. 2007, Meigs et al. 2009). Most of what burns is fine fuels in low and high severity fires, making actual carbon loss much less than one might expect. For example, from 1987-2007, carbon emissions from fire were the equivalent of ~6% of fossil fuel emissions in the Northwest Forest Plan area (Turner et al. 2011). If fire hasn’t significantly reduced total carbon stored in forests, it isn’t going to materially worsen climate change.

In the western states, 5-20% of the burn area has been high severity fire and the remaining burn area has been low and moderate severity (MTBS; www.mtbs.gov). In the PNW, 50-75% of live biomass survived low and moderate severity fires combined, which account for 80% of the burn area (Meigs et al. 2009). Physiology measurements show that current methods used to determine if trees are likely to die post-fire lead to overestimation of mortality and removal of healthy trees (Irvine et al. 2007, Waring data in Oregon District Court summary). Removal of surviving trees from a burned area will reduce carbon storage, and in many cases regeneration.

The release of carbon through decomposition after fire occurs over a period of decades to centuries. About half of carbon produced by fires remains in soil for ~90 years, whereas the other half persists in soil for more than 1,000 years (Singh et al. 2012). Similarly, after insect attack and tree die-off, there isno large change in carbon stocks. Carbon stocks are dominated by soil and wood, and wood in trees that are killed transfers to dead pools that decompose over decades to centuries.

3. How do forest management strategies such as thinning affect carbon budgets on federal lands?

Forest carbon density could be enhanced by decreasing harvest intensity and increasing the intervals between harvests. For example, biomass carbon stocks in Oregon and N California could be theoretically twice as high if they were allowed to continue to accumulate carbon (Hudiburg et al. 2009). Even if current harvest rates were lengthened just 50 years, the biomass stocks could increase by 15%.

Harvest intensity – The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) was enacted to conserve species that had been put at risk from extensive harvesting of old forests. Prior to enactment, the public forests were a source of carbon to the atmosphere. Harvest rates were reduced by ~80% on public lands, which led to a large carbon sink (increase in net ecosystem carbon balance, NECB) in the following decades. Direct losses of carbon from fire emissions were generally small relative to harvest (Turner et al. 2011, Krankina et al. 2012).

Thinning forests – Landscape and regional studies show that large-scale thinning to reduce the probability of crown fires and provide biomass for energy production does not reduce carbon emissions under current and future climate conditions (Hudiburg et al. 2011, Hudiburg et al. 2013; Law & Harmon 2011; Mitchell et al. 2009, 2012; Schulze et al. 2012; Mika & Keeton 2012). If implemented, it would result in long-term carbon emission to the atmosphere because many areas that are thinned won’t experience fire during the period of treatment effectiveness (10-20 yrs), and removals from areas that later burn may exceed the carbon ‘saved’ by reducing fire intensity (Law & Harmon 2011; Campbell et al 2012; Rhodes & Baker 2009). Thinning does not necessarily reduce fire occurrence, particularly in extreme weather conditions (drought, wind).

Slow in and fast out – opportunity cost. Today’s harvest is carbon that took decades to centuries to accumulate, and it returns to the atmosphere quickly through bioenergy use. Increased GHG emissions from bioenergy use are primarily due to consumption of the current forest carbon and from long-term reduction of the forest carbon stock that could have been sustained into the future. The general assumption that bioenergy combustion is carbon-neutral is not valid because it ignores emissions due to decreasing standing biomass that can last for centuries.

Bioenergy still puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere when a key objective is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The global warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not depend on its source. Per unit of energy, the amount of carbon dioxide released from biomass combustion is about as high as that of coal and substantially larger than that of oil and natural gas (Haberl et al. 2012).

Summary
Comprehensive assessments are needed to understand the carbon consequences of land use actions, and should include a full accounting of the land-based carbon balance as well as carbon losses through the products chain. In mature forests, harvest for wood product removes ~75% of the wood carbon, and 30-50% of that is lost to the atmosphere in the manufacturing process, including the use of some of that carbon for biomass energy. The remainder ends up back in the atmosphere within ~90-150 years, and there are losses over time, not just at the end of the product use). These loss rates are much higher than that of forests. Full accounting of all carbon benefits, including crown fire risk reduction, storage in long- and short-term wood products, substitution for fossil fuel, and displacement of fossil fuel energy, shows that thinning results in increased atmospheric carbon emissions for at least many decades.

Wildfire: Study questions U.S. policy of forest ‘restoration’

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Please consider this article from E&E a companion to this February 10th post on this blog. – mk

WILDFIRE: Study questions U.S. policy of forest ‘restoration’
By Phil Taylor, E&E reporter, 2/14/14

Western forests today experience fewer high-severity wildfires than they did more than a century ago, depriving some fire-dependent species and stifling biodiversity, according to a new study.

The study challenges conventional wisdom held by politicians and the Forest Service that the West is experiencing an unnatural burst in uncharacteristic wildfires as a result of a century of wildfire suppression.

In fact, some Western forests are experiencing a “deficit” in high-intensity blazes and in some cases should be encouraged to burn, said the study published this month in the journal PLOS ONE.

It questioned the government’s policy of mechanically thinning, or “restoring,” backcountry areas to ensure fires stay low to the ground and create “park-like” conditions. Thinning to reduce high-severity wildfire can reduce habitat for the imperiled black-backed woodpecker, often requires new roads and can introduce invasive species into the forest, the study authors said.

It’s bound to spark some controversy considering high-severity wildfires threaten lives and property and drain billions of dollars in taxpayer money each year. Moreover, aggressive forest thinning and restoration policies are politically popular because they create rural jobs and seek to mitigate wildfire threats to communities.

“Given societal aversion to wildfires, the threat to human assets from wildfires, and anticipated effects of climate change on future wildfires, many will question the wisdom of incorporating historical mixed-severity fire into management goals,” the study said. “However, a major challenge lies with the transfer of information needed to move the public and decision-makers from the current perspective that the effects of contemporary mixed-severity fire events are unnatural, harmful, inappropriate and more extensive due to fire exclusion — to embrace a different paradigm.”

The study was funded by Environment Now, a nonprofit foundation in California whose goals include “preserving and restoring coastal, freshwater and forest ecosystems.”

It was independently conducted by 11 scientists from several Western universities, the Canadian Forest Service, the Earth Island Institute and Geos Institute.

The study used U.S. Forest Service data and other published sources to explore the historical prevalence of “mixed-severity fire regimes” in ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests in western North America and to try to determine whether mixed-severity fire patterns in those forests had changed as a result of the past century of fire suppression.

On the latter question, it concluded that the past century of fire suppression has not “greatly increased the prevalence of severe fire,” even though fuel levels in Western forests are believed to be much higher.

Since 1930, the rate of young forest establishment fell by a factor of four in the Sierra Nevada and Southwest, by a factor of three in the Klamath, and by half in the eastern Cascades and central and northern Rockies, it said.

The study recommends the government focus its fire mitigation work adjacent to homes in the wildland-urban interface instead of in the backcountry, where managed wildland fires could promote ecological benefits.

“The need for forest ‘restoration’ designed to reduce variation in fire behavior may be much less extensive than implied by many current forest management plans or promoted by recent legislation,” the study said. “Incorporating mixed-severity fire into management goals, and adapting human communities to fire by focusing fire risk reduction activities adjacent to homes, may help maintain characteristic biodiversity, expand opportunities to manage fire for ecological benefits, reduce management costs, and protect human communities.”

But other scientists and policymakers have argued that the societal benefits of taming mega-fires often trump whatever ecological benefits they may produce. In addition, climate change is expected to intensify droughts that create dangerously dry fuel conditions. Fire seasons are more than two months longer than in the 1970s, the Forest Service has said. (Editor’s note: using 1970s as the starting point is disingenuous–the 1950s-1980s were cooler and moister)

A study commissioned by the Interior Department and led by Northern Arizona University last spring found that although hazardous fuels treatments near communities can reduce wildfire risks to homes and people, backcountry fuels treatments are important to prevent mega-fires that can scorch watersheds and drain federal wildfire budgets (E&ENews PM, May 28, 2013).

While fire in the backcountry can be beneficial if it stays low to the ground, landscape-scale “crown” fires can damage watersheds, tarnish viewsheds and threaten communities, NAU’s Diane Vosick, one of the study authors, said last spring.

“In order to get ahead of the cost of large and severe fire, more treatments will be needed outside the wildland-urban interface,” Vosick told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last June.

The Forest Service and Interior Department also face political pressure to restore backcountry areas.

In December 2011, Congress inserted language in its appropriations report ordering both agencies to halt policies that direct most hazardous fuels funding to the wildland-urban interface, spending it instead on the “highest priority projects in the highest priority areas.”

For now, “restoration” across the National Forest System remains popular policy in Congress and in Western states.

According to the Forest Service, the states of Florida, Georgia, Utah, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado have all experienced their largest or most destructive wildfire in just the last several years. Wildfires burn twice as many acres annually compared with the 1970s, and the number of wildfires annually that cover more than 10,000 acres has increased sevenfold.

Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell last week told Congress there are nearly two dozen landscape-scale collaborative forest restoration projects underway that seek to “re-establish natural fire regimes and reduce the risk of uncharacteristic wildfire.”

“Our findings are sure to be controversial as each year federal agencies spend billions of dollars in fuel reduction costs in the backcountry based on the assumption that we have more high-severity fire now than we did historically,” said Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at the Geos Institute, one of the study’s authors. “Fuel treatments are best targeted immediately adjacent to where people live, given that the increasing costs of suppressing fires is not ecologically justifiable and may, in fact, produce artificially manipulated landscapes that need more fire to remain healthy and productive.”