Here Comes the Sun, There Goes the Mojave

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Over the past few months, this blog has explored some of the differences between the ways smaller, grassroots non-profit conservation organizations go about their campaigns compared with the actions taken (or not taken) by the largest, most well-funded conservation groups in America. We’ve covered this dynamic as it relates to logging, lawsuits and collaboration…but not how it impacts solar energy development on public lands.

This weekend, the LA Times took at how one smaller grassroots group – the Wildlands Conservancy – working their tails off to protect southern California’s Mojave Desert feels abandoned by many of the biggest, and best known, conservation groups in the country.

AMARGOSA VALLEY, Calif. — April Sall gazed out at the Mojave Desert flashing past the car window and unreeled a story of frustration and backroom dealings. Her small California group, the Wildlands Conservancy, wanted to preserve 600,000 acres of the Mojave. The group raised $45 million, bought the land and deeded it to the federal government.

The conservancy intended that the land be protected forever. Instead, 12 years after accepting the largest land gift in American history, the federal government is on the verge of opening 50,000 acres of that bequest to solar development. Even worse, in Sall’s view, the nation’s largest environmental organizations are scarcely voicing opposition. Their silence leaves the conservancy and a smattering of other small environmental organizations nearly alone in opposing energy development across 33,000 square miles of desert land.

“We got dragged into this because the big groups were standing on the sidelines and we were watching this big conservation legacy practically go under a bulldozer,” said Sall, the organization’s conservation director. “We said, ‘We can’t be silent anymore.’ “

Read the entire LA Times article here.

Virgin Forests Redux

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A very kind editor at High Country News worked with me to improve the “virgin forests” post below. One good thing about this blog is that it helps folks work on our writing.

Here’s the HCN version..
and the original version.

One of the commenters wrote that the piece was “inflammatory.” That may be an honor for someone who mostly writes emails and briefing papers so inoffensive that the interns reading them as part of a litigation record probably need extra caffeine jolts to stay awake ;).

Effects of fuels treatments on the spatial probabilities of burning and final size of recent wildfires across the United States -webinar

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This webinar was interesting, also the questions and responses. Here’s the link to the recording of the webinar.

One of the things that stood out for me was how hard it was for the researchers to get information- still – in this day and age. The other thing that stood out is how much of understanding complex issues depends on modeling rather than observation. That’s what makes it post-normal science, and why trust of scientists, and scientists maintaining trust, is so important.

For me it was just fun to hear about people studying something we’re all interested in and having a seminar for folks from all over the country. And quite a break from the legal issues of the day.

You might also want to check out the Lessons Learned Center here, or firescience.gov, for related information.

From Me to We: The Five Transformational Commitments Required to Rescue the Planet, Your Organization, and Your Life

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Tree submitted the below as a comment, but I thought it worthy of its own post, since it hits on our current theme of discussing the good we should do, in addition to the bad others shouldn’t do. Maybe we could all read it and have virtual book club? I have to say that the idea that all things are connected is not particularly novel for those who are familiar with the world’s spiritual traditions. As Paul said, long before industrial economies (Romans 7: 18-19)
“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

From Tree:

There is new book just published by Bob Doppelt. I have not read it, but it looks interesting.

http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/productdetail.kmod?productid=3587

In “From Me to We: The Five Transformational Commitments Required to Rescue the Planet, Your Organization, and Your Life,” systems change expert Bob Doppelt reveals that most people today live a dream world, controlled by false perceptions and beliefs. The most deeply held illusion is that all organisms on Earth, including each of us, exist as independent entities. At the most fundamental level, the change needed to overcome our misperceptions is a shift from focusing only on “me” – our personal needs and wants – to also prioritizing the broader “we”: the many ecological and social relationships each of us are part of, those that make life possible and worthwhile. Research shows that by using the techniques described in this book this shift is possible – and not that difficult to achieve.

From Me to We offers five transformational “commitments” that can help you change your perspective and engage in activities that will help resolve today’s environmental and social problems. Not coincidentally, making these commitments can improve the quality of your life as well.

Bob Doppelt’s latest book is a wake-up call to the creed of individualism. He calls for recognition of the laws of interdependence, cause and effect, moral justice, trusteeship, and free will. The book will be essential to all of those interested in how we can create and stimulate a sea change in how to enable the necessary behavioral change we need to deal with the myriad environmental and social pressures consuming the planet.

Contents

1 ‘Me’ to ‘We’ throughout history

2 The first commitment: See the systems you are part of

3 The second commitment: Be accountable for all the consequences of your actions

4 The third commitment: Abide by society’s most deeply held universal principles of morality and justice

5 The fourth commitment: Acknowledge your trustee obligations and take responsibility for the continuation of all life

6 The fifth commitment: Choose your own destiny

7 Conclusion: It is up to you


Here’s a link to the author’s website.

Conservation in the Real World: Suckling responds to Kareiva

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Thanks to Sharon for posting the article about Peter Kareiva’s research and thoughts, which recently appeared on Greenwire, as well as linking to Conservation in the Anthropocene, written by Kareiva, together with Robert Lalasz and Michelle Marvier.   The comments section quickly filled up with some great perspectives.  Regular commenter “TreeC123” highlighted the fact that the Breakthrough Journal invited Kierán Suckling, with the Center for Biological Diversity, to provide a response to the piece by Kareiva et al titled Conservation in the Real World.  Below are snips:

Had the article been published a century ago, the author’s decision to frame the environmental movement through a critique of Emerson (1803-1882), Hawthorne (1804-1864), Thoreau (1817-1862) and Muir (1838-1914) might have made sense. But alleged weaknesses of these dead white men is an entirely inadequate anchor for an essay that bills itself as a rethinking of contemporary environmentalism. Indeed, the only 20th century environmentalist mentioned in the essay is the novelist and essayist Ed Abbey. It is frankly bizarre that Kareiva et al.’s depiction of environmentalists is not based on NRDC, the Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, Environment America, 350.org, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, or indeed, any environmental group at all.

Bizarre, but necessary: Kareiva et al.’s “conservationist” straw man would have fallen to pieces had they attempted to base it on the ongoing work of actual conservation groups.

Consider their take on wilderness. The straw man is constructed by telling us (without reference to an actual conservation group, of course) that “the wilderness ideal presupposes that there are parts of the world untouched by humankind.” Then the authors smugly knock it down with the shocking revelation that “The wilderness so beloved by conservationists — places ‘untrammeled by man’ — never existed.”

Do Kareiva et al. expect readers to believe that conservation groups are unaware that American Indians and native Alaskans lived in huge swaths of what are now designated wilderness areas? Or that they mysteriously failed to see the cows, sheep, bridges, fences, fire towers, fire suppression and/or mining claims within the majority of the proposed wilderness areas they have so painstakingly walked, mapped, camped in, photographed, and advocated for? It is not environmentalists who are naïve about wilderness; it is Kareiva et al. who are naïve about environmentalists. Environmental groups have little interest in the “wilderness ideal” because it has no legal, political or biological relevance when it comes to creating or managing wilderness areas. They simply want to bring the greatest protections possible to the lands which have been the least degraded….

At a time when conservationists need honest, hard-headed reassessment of what works and what needs changing, Kareiva et al. offer little more than exaggerations, straw-man arguments and a forced optimism that too often crosses the line into denial. There are plenty of real biodiversity recovery stories to tell, but to learn from them, we have to take off the blinders of sweeping generalizations and pay attention to the details and complexities of real-world conservation work. That’s the breakthrough we need to survive the Anthropocene.

Large-scale bioenergy from additional harvest of forest biomass is neither sustainable nor greenhouse gas neutral

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I’ve been down and out with the crud this week, so some items I’ve been meaning to post have been stacking up.  Researchers from Europe and the United States have ‘collaborated’ on a new study titled, “Large-scale bioenergy from additional harvest of forest biomass is neither sustainable nor greenhouse gas neutral.”  Below is the abstract and a snipped portion from the study.

Abstract
Owing to the peculiarities of forest net primary production humans would appropriate ca. 60% of the global increment of woody biomass if forest biomass were to produce 20% of current global primary energy supply. We argue that such an increase in biomass harvest would result in younger forests, lower biomass pools, depleted soil nutrient stocks and a loss of other ecosystem functions. The proposed strategy is likely to miss its main objective, i.e. to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, because it would result in a reduction of biomass pools that may take decades to centuries to be paid back by fossil fuel substitution, if paid back at all. Eventually, depleted soil fertility will make the production unsustainable and require fertilization, which in turn increases GHG emissions due to N2O emissions. Hence, large-scale production of bioenergy from forest biomass is neither sustainable nor GHG neutral.

Environmental consequences
Homogeneous young stands with a low biomass resulting from bioenergy harvest are less likely to serve as habitat for species that depend on structural complexity. It is possible that succession following disturbance can lead to young stands that have functional complexity analogous to that of old forests; however, this successional pathway would likely occur only under natural succession. A lower structural complexity, and removal of understory species, is expected to result in a loss of forest biodiversity and function. It would reverse the trend towards higher biomass of dead wood (i.e. the Northwest Forest Plan in the United States) to maintain the diversity of xylobiontic species.

Cumulative impacts of bioenergy-related management activities that modify vegetation, soil and hydro- logic conditions are likely to influence erosion rates and flooding and lead to increased annual runoff and fish habitat degradation of streams. Young uniform stands with low compared to high standing biomass have less aesthetic value for recreation and are less efficient in avalanche control and slope stabilization in mountains owing to larger and more frequent cutting. A potential advantage is that younger forests with shorter rotations offer opportunities for assisted migration, although there is great uncertainty in winners and losers (species, provenances, genotypes) in a future climate. Plantations, however, largely contribute to pathogen spread, such as rust disease.

Forests offer several important ecosystem services in addition to biomass and some would be jeopardized by the bioenergy-associated transition from high to low standing biomass. Agriculture provides a visible example for abandoning most ecosystem services except biomass production; communities in intensive agricultural regions often rely on (nearby) forested water sheds for drinking water, recreation and offsetting GHG emissions from intensive agriculture.

Scientific Integrity Policies.. Unintended Consequences?

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Like so many things, “scientific integrity” sounds good. But as I pointed out in some posts on Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog a while back, good public policy is never built on a foundation of fuzzy concepts. Here are the posts: A Policy Practitioner Deconstructs the Science Integrity Guidelines- The President’s Memo, I. and More Deconstruction of “Science Integrity”: The President’s Memo Principles.

So after much ado, including easily hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars worth of the usual DC kinds of work- involving meetings, discussing things, drafting documents, editing, and multiple levels of review, we have the situation described today in Roger’s blog here about the Interior Dept. Nothing could have been more predictable, IMHO. Of course, a good scientific dispute is the most fun way to learn about science!

Here’s the end of Roger’s post:

Who decides what information should and should not be included? Who gets to second guess agency policy makers and the press office on what information should be included or not included? I testified on this issue in 2007 before the House Government Reform Committee during the period when the Bush Administration received similar criticisms (here in PDF). At the time I wrote:

[N]o information management policy can ever hope to eliminate political considerations in the preparation of government reports with scientific content
The issues remain much the same today under a different administration. Even though the political context has changed, the underlying dynamics have not.

The Houser case will likely prompt some additional thinking about these issues and what it means to try to regulate or otherwise manage the scientific content of agency information. I suspect that eventually agencies will have to accept the reality that in many if not most cases the proper place for debate over agency decisions and communications is simply in the broader political arena as part of ongoing policy debate.

As it stands, the DOI scientific integrity policy may foreshadow ever more disputes over science between career government employees and political appointees, and perhaps even a further politicization of agency science. This is probably not the outcome expected or desired by the Obama Administration when putting forward a call for agency integrity guidelines.

Myth-busting scientist pushes greens past reliance on ‘horror stories’, from Greenwire

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At home in differential equations and fieldwork, Kareiva illustrates his more theoretical side during a talk on the population dynamics of turtles at Santa Clara. Photo courtesy of Lauridsen/TNC.

This was circulating around at work today…
From E&E News here..
This is enough to give you a flavor.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Peter Kareiva had come to answer for his truths.

Settling at the head of a long table ringed by young researchers new to the policy world, Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental organization, cracked open a beer. After a long day mentoring at the group’s headquarters, an eight-story box nestled in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he was ready for some sparring.

The scientists had read Kareiva’s recent essay, which takes environmentalists to task. The data couldn’t bear out their piety, he wrote. Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change.

image removed

Inducted last year into the National Academy of Sciences, Kareiva continues to teach part-time at Santa Clara University. Photo by Dave Lauridsen. Courtesy of the Nature Conservancy (TNC).

Many around the table were unconvinced. Some were disturbed.

How could this be coming from the Nature Conservancy?

“We love the horror story,” Kareiva said. He was dressed in New Balance running shoes, a purple sweater and rumpled tan trousers. “We just love it. The environmental movement has loved it. That, I think, is … [a] strategy failure. And it’s actually not supported by science.”

This is not some vague hypothesis, he added to murmurs. He’s seen it in the data.

“The message [has been that] humans degrade and destroy and really crucify the natural environment, and woe is me,” he said. “The reality is humans degrade and destroy and crucify the natural environment — and 80 percent of the time it recovers pretty well, and 20 percent of the time it doesn’t.”

One of the visitors, Lisa Hayward, an ecologist working on invasive-species policy at the U.S. Geological Survey, spoke up. How can that be so? “I feel that does not represent the consensus of the ecological community,” she said.

“I’m certain that it doesn’t represent the consensus of the ecological community,” Kareiva shot back, with a smile and flash in his eyes. A circle of nervous laughter swayed around the room. “I’m absolutely certain of that! Wait two years.”

Kareiva has never feared following the data, or dragging others with him. Already a respected ecologist, for the past decade he has shoved the Nature Conservancy toward a new environmentalism. The old ways aren’t working. Inch by inch, for better or worse, conservation must, he says, enter the Anthropocene Epoch — the Age of Man.

For most of the conservancy’s history, the old way meant one thing: buying and protecting land from human development, through any means necessary. “Saving the Last Great Places on Earth,” the old Nature Conservancy motto went. And it worked. Backed by wealthy donors and corporate deals, the conservancy has long been one of the largest landowners in the United States. Worldwide, it has protected more than 119 million acres.

But not all of its trends point up.

The average age of a conservancy member is 65. The average age of a new member is 62. Each year, those numbers creep upward. Only 5 percent of the group’s 1 million members are younger than 40. Among the “conservation minded” — basically, Americans who have tried recycling — only 8 percent recognize the group. Inspiration doesn’t cut it anymore. Love of nature is receding. The ’60s aren’t coming back.

It’s a problem confronting all large conservation groups, including the World Wildlife Fund, Conservation International and the Wildlife Conservation Society. Quietly, these massive funds — nicknamed the BINGOs, for “big nongovernmental organizations” — have utterly revamped their missions, trumpeting conservation for the good it does people, rather than the other way around. “Biodiversity” is out; “clean air” is in.

“In fact, if anything, this is becoming the new orthodoxy,” said Steve McCormick, the Nature Conservancy’s former president. “It’s widespread. Conservation International changed its mission, and it’s one that Peter Kareiva could have crafted.”

For these groups, it’s a matter of survival. But for ecologists like Kareiva, it’s science.

The conservation ethic that has driven these groups — the protection of pristine wild lands and charismatic species into perpetuity — has unraveled at both ends. American Indians dramatically altered the environment for thousands of years, paleontologists have found; even before then, climate shifts followed the planet’s wobbles. And in the future, no land will be spared man’s touch, thanks to human-induced global warming.

The desire to return to a steady-state baseline, before European settlement or human influence, will never work, these scientists say. Many species won’t be saved; some that are saved will not thrive, lingering in a managed existence like the California condor. There is no return to Eden. Population will rise. Triage is coming.

“Conservation is at a crossroads,” said John Wiens, who served with Kareiva as a lead scientist at the conservancy for several years before joining the nonprofit PRBO Conservation Science. “That’s where we are. And we’re likely to be there for some time.”

Kareiva was not the first to see the crossroads. But unlike those of many writers and scientists, his message has come from the inside. And there is every reason to suspect the movement will push back, said Stewart Brand, the environmentalist best known as the editor of Whole Earth Catalog.

“To be the first going somewhat public with this kind of critique from [inside] an organization framework, it’s not only pioneering and important, but brave,” Brand said. “He’s a guy who’s risking his job.”

Here are the last paragraphs:

Ecosystem services are no panacea, though, said Wiens, the former conservancy scientist. It’s a recipe that can easily miss the nonmonetary values of the environment. And it won’t necessarily help managers make the hard choices on what species to save. How will this triage be decided? There are no tools, no paradigm, that can do that yet.

“We don’t have, right now, the framework to think through those cost-benefit calculations,” Wiens said. “And I think that’s partly because people have been avoiding this notion of triage.”

For now, at conservation and ecology conferences, many young scientists speak exactly like Kareiva, said Marvier, his former postdoc. These are the future conservation managers and agency leaders. A generational dynamic is being played out. Kareiva’s team seems to be winning. Team Biodiversity may soon leave the court.

Back at the conservancy’s headquarters, meeting with the young scientists, Kareiva had finished his beer, an India pale ale from Heavy Seas-branded Loose Cannon. It was a good talk. There would be many more like it. Move conservation into working landscapes like farms, he had said. Value nature’s services. Let go of the ideal. And bring in a base beyond affluent, educated whites. Let Thoreau go.

“Broaden the constituency to those loggers,” he said.

The whole article is interesting and you can sign up for a free trial of Greenwire here.
Here is a link to Kareiva’s paper. I think we may have posted it here before, but not sure.

Green Mountain Lookout Revisited, But Not For Long

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Last July, we blogged about a lawsuit filed against the Forest Service challenging its reconstruction of the Green Mountain lookout within Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness.

A week ago, federal district judge John Coughenour ordered the Forest Service to remove the lookout. It wasn’t a particularly close call either: “The Forest Service erred egregiously by not conducting the required necessity analysis before embarking on such an aggressive course of action,” the judge wrote regarding the Forest Service’s decision “to fully disassemble the lookout, transport the pieces off-site by helicopter, construct a new foundation on site, fly new and restored lookout pieces back in to the site, and reassemble the lookout.”

The judge was unpersuaded that the National Historic Preservation Act was relevant, even though the lookout is on the national registry. He concluded the NHPA imposes procedural, not substantive, duties on the Forest Service and, thus, could not trump the Wilderness Act’s substantive preservation mandate.

However, he did find that “historical use” is a valid management goal under the Wilderness Act. Continuing the line of reasoning first adopted in FSEEE’s High Sierra Hikers case, he faulted the Forest Service for failing to assess whether maintaining the lookout in the wilderness and using helicopters to do so, were necessary to realize the lookout’s historical virtues. For example, he pointed to other historic lookouts that had been preserved by removing them from the wilderness and rebuilding them at ranger stations as visitor interpretative facilities.