Prairie Paradise

One of the implicit goals of ecosystem based management is to help foster communication and cooperation between natural resource stakeholders.  Part of its recent popularity is that it offers a potential way to diminish acrimonious and unproductive conflicts between stakeholders over how best to manage and use natural resources.  While the ecosystem based approach provides one potentially useful tool, the devil is always in the details.  Each management issue has its own unique historical, social,  political, and economic contingencies that can still make finding consensus difficult.  I think this story from the New York Times describes a good example of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/us/vision-of-prairie-paradise-troubles-some-montana-ranchers.html?smid=pl-share

It describes a privately organized and  funded effort to create a prairie reserve in Montana, and the backlash and concern this has created among some local residents.  On the face of things the goals and actions of both sides seem very compatible with each other, and yet there is still an ample amount of distrust and resentment on both sides.  The article implies this has more to do with the social backgrounds of the people involved than anything else. 

A New Agriculture?

Although I am a big fan of fruits such as apples.....not to mention wine..... most of the world is fed through the cultivation of annual crops.  This annual bias in agriculture dates back to our very first efforts at domesticating wild plants.   Converting a perennial plant into an annual one is one sure pathway to increasing yield.  Why do you think that is?  However, from a broader sustainability perspective annual agriculture can create some potential problems such as fostering soil erosion and requiring intensive energy inputs.  Some have argued that we might be able to create perennial versions of our staple crops that would improve the overall sustainability of agricultural systems.  Wes Jackson is probably the undisputed leader of this perennialization movement.  Check out this interview with him that just appeared in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/opinion/bittman-now-this-is-natural-food.html?smid=pl-share

The picture above is of Jerry Glover, a prominent crop perennialization researcher.  A story about him (with more cool pictures) is here: http://libarts.wsu.edu/nexus/issues/2010/02/jerry-glover.asp

Conflicting Messages

On my way through the San Antonio airport the other day I noticed these advertising placards.  They seem to be sending two very different messages. The text of the Nature Conservancy ad talks about how climate change will irrevocably alter the planet. I was mostly amused by the juxtaposition, but I think these two ads illustrate the very real and profound challenges we face when developing policy approaches to mitigate and adapt to the consequences of climate change.  These policy decisions need to balance a whole range of sometimes conflicting interests.  Our policy actions also represent a collective  vision for what type of world we want to live in.  Reaching this collective vision is difficult, and it can be way too easy to fall into a depressingly polarized conceptual cul-de-sac.  Check out John Robinson's more uplifting approach forward:

It's us

The  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued its latest report on the state of scientific knowledge about climate change.  The report's main headline conclusion is that we are the principal cause of a significant and rapid warming of the planet.  If you paid attention to the last report this conclusion should come as no surprise.  There is plenty of dire predictions in the report, and a good deal to be pessimistic about, but as Andrew Revkin points out in his dot earth blog, one of the report's findings provides a significant measure of hope: 

By the mid-21st century the magnitudes of the projected changes are substantially affected by the choice of emissions scenario.

Not all is lost or preordained.  We can still shape our future.  The powerful combination of free enterprise, innovation, science, technology, and dynamic and responsive political systems created the climate quandary we are in.  It can also solve it, if we have the will.

While pondering those lofty issues, you might enjoy Revkin's carbon soundtrack:

What's in the water?

Agriculture increasingly relies on managed water systems to irrigate crops.  This is particularly so for crops in the relatively arid western U.S., where battles over limited water supplies have been long, bitter and notorious.  These conflicts only seem likely to increase as demand for water (from industry and urbanization as well as from agriculture) increases and supplies are potentially disrupted as a result of climate change.  This looming threat is spurring research to help make agriculture more water efficient as well as to expand the usability of low quality water.  This story in the Oregonian describes one of these projects taking place at OSU.   The research is investigating whether onion growers can safely use water that is contaminated with potentially harmful bacteria. 

Beef

Science fiction is often as much about critiquing contemporary social norms as it is imagining alien futures.  Beef by famed science fiction writer Brian Aldiss is no exception.  For a few more days you can listen to a reading of his short story on the BBC here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ncbx0

The segment is introduced by the author himself.  Beef was published in a collection called Supertoys Last All Summer Long.  The title story from that volume was made into the Steven Spielberg movie A.I.

More than One Potato

Paradoxically while plant breeding (either planned or unplanned) creates novel and useful genetic combinations, the widespread use of improved varieties can also reduce the overall genetic variation that is the very basis for the valuable traits that plant breeders and farmers want.  This wasn't a very big issue during most of our history as plant breeders.  If anything, localized and small scale breeding may have increased levels of genetic diversity within some crops (depending on your scale of measure).  However, more modern practices now threaten to severely diminish the pool of available genetic diversity for many of our most important crops.   Potatoes are a great example of this story.  Check out this cool video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6XMTUbPwEY&feature=share&list=PL03468DEB0456E448

Last of the Lemurs

Lemur's are cool, and unfortunately like a long list of other very cool animals they are in danger of going extinct.  This cool video describes some of the challenges in conserving lemurs and their habitat in Madagascar.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Anyone trying to grow plants (from large commercial farmers to backyard putterers) knows that fertilizer can do wonders.  For most of human agricultural history fertilizer was expensive,difficult to come by and just as difficult to deliver to plants.  That changed dramatically in the later half of the twentieth century when these roadblocks were lifted  in large parts of the world.....although note that for many of the world's poorest farmers fertilizer is as rare and precious a resource as it has always been.  The fertilizer revolution has created a number of impressive benefits as well as a host of profound problems.  This article in this months National Geographic provides a nice summary of both of these.  If you can, get a hold of the actual printed article that comes with all the nice pictures.

Saving America's Wetland

Just before the start of the term Rick and I were on a trip to southern Louisiana.  A significant part of our trip involved helping the Woodlands Conservancy monitor and restore one of the last remnant patches of bottomland hardwood forest between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.  Check out this news story:
http://theadvocate.com/news/neworleans/5513550-148/california-college-students-delve-into

The Diversity Within

Check out this story from the LA Times that describes the miraculous treatment of a common and debilitating intestinal infection using fecal transplants.  Yes, you read that correctly: fecal transplants.  This medical advance is a direct result of our growing appreciation for the immense diversity of microbes that inhabit the human body ecosystem.....and the important ecosystem services this diversity can provide. Check out these two recent scientific articles describing recent advances in our understanding of the human microbiome:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7402/full/nature11234.html
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032118

And this link to the Human Microbiome Project: http://commonfund.nih.gov/hmp/

And this cool interactive feature from Scientific American (were the picture above comes from): http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=microbiome-graphic-explore-human-microbiome

Times they are a Changing

The federal government has just released a draft of the nation's third climate assessment report, a comprehensive analysis of the latest and best peer-reviewed science on the extent and impacts of global warming on the United States.  The conclusions aren't very reassuring.  The country is hotter than it used to be, rainfall is becoming both more intense and more erratic, and rising seas and storm surges threaten U.S. coasts.  Also,the assessment warns that with the current rate of global carbon emissions, these impacts will intensify in the coming decades.

The global policy response to this looming threat has so far been an abject failure.  And the recent performance of our own national government in dealing with the relatively mundane and simple task of agreeing on a budget for next year does not offer much hope that nations will cooperate to take any meaningful action on climate change any time soon. Yet, humans are capable of fixing large looming global problems when they set their mind to it.  The most recent example has been the international response that curtailed the use of Chlorofluorocarbons, which were eating away at the earth's protective ozone coating.  The latest data suggest that as a result of this international effort ozone in the upper atmosphere is on the mend.  We were able to act  in time to keep our ozone; will we act in time to avert catastrophic disruptions to our climate?