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« Older Entries |Obama: Something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010
Below are a few excerpts from President Obama’s comments on the Gulf oil spill (courtesy of CBS News—click here for the full transcript).
Do the American government, private industry, and the rest of us have, in his words, the sense of urgency and courage to confront our energy challenges in this country?
For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked – not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.
The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight. Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.
We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny.
This is not some distant vision for America. The transition away from fossil fuels will take some time, but over the last year and a half, we have already taken unprecedented action to jumpstart the clean energy industry. As we speak, old factories are reopening to produce wind turbines, people are going back to work installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses are making solar panels. Consumers are buying more efficient cars and trucks, and families are making their homes more energy-efficient. Scientists and researchers are discovering clean energy technologies that will someday lead to entire new industries.
Each of us has a part to play in a new future that will benefit all of us. As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of good, middle-class jobs – but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation – workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.
When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill – a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.
Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy – because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.
So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party – as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development – and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.
All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny – our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how to get there. We know we’ll get there.
…The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face. This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again. What sees us through – what has always seen us through – is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/happeningfish/3007746661/
Tags: Gulf oil spill, Obama
Posted in behavior, energy, nature and culture, solutions | No Comments »
Will the Gulf spill be a catalyst for change?
Saturday, June 12th, 2010
In Tom Friedman’s column in the Sunday NY Times, he describes a poignant letter written by a friend in the Pentagon to his hometown South Carolina newspaper:
“I’d like to join in on the blame game that has come to define our national approach to the ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This isn’t BP’s or Transocean’s fault. It’s not the government’s fault. It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word. It’s what we do as individuals that count. For those on the left, government regulation will not solve this problem. Government’s role should be to create an environment of opportunity that taps into the innovation and entrepreneurialism that define us as Americans. For those on the right, if you want less government and taxes, then decide what you’ll give up and what you’ll contribute. Here’s the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I’m sorry. I haven’t done my part. Now I have to convince my wife to give up her S.U.V.”
Read the rest of the column here.
And the photo above is a bicycle parking garage in Amsterdam. Here’s a cool rendition of a recently proposed bike station in Philadelphia that could replace a 100-car lot with a 690-bike garage. If fully utilized, and assuming single-occupancy commutes, this could generate up to a 7-fold reduction in vehicle use. One good idea in a suite of many that will be needed.
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/redjar/113013177/
Tags: Gulf oil spill
Posted in behavior, energy, nature and culture, solutions, sustainability | No Comments »
NY Times Op-Ed: Public opinion on climate warming stronger than expected
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
A new poll by Stanford communication researchers helps dispel recent notions that most Americans don’t believe climate warming is human caused or a serious problem. Indeed, as the title of the article suggests, there seems to be a climate majority in terms of values and policy recommendations.
This is an interesting and important piece that’s worth reading in full. Here are a few snippets:
On Thursday, the Senate will vote on a resolution proposed by Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, that would scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to limit emissions of greenhouse gases by American businesses.
Passing the resolution might seem to be exactly what Americans want. After all, national surveys released during the last eight months have been interpreted as showing that fewer and fewer Americans believe that climate change is real, human-caused and threatening to people.
But a closer look at these polls and a new survey by my Political Psychology Research Group show just the opposite: huge majorities of Americans still believe the earth has been gradually warming as the result of human activity and want the government to institute regulations to stop it.
….Fully 86 percent of our respondents said they wanted the federal government to limit the amount of air pollution that businesses emit, and 76 percent favored government limiting business’s emissions of greenhouse gases in particular. Not a majority of 55 or 60 percent — but 76 percent.
Large majorities opposed taxes on electricity (78 percent) and gasoline (72 percent) to reduce consumption. But 84 percent favored the federal government offering tax breaks to encourage utilities to make more electricity from water, wind and solar power.
And huge majorities favored government requiring, or offering tax breaks to encourage, each of the following: manufacturing cars that use less gasoline (81 percent); manufacturing appliances that use less electricity (80 percent); and building homes and office buildings that require less energy to heat and cool (80 percent).
Thus, there is plenty of agreement about what people do and do not want government to do.
Posted in behavior, energy, environmentalism, nature and culture, solutions | No Comments »
Herbert: The bitter reality of the American present
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010
Bob Herbert’s column in today’s Times forces us to look in the mirror not only with regards to the Gulf oil spill but to the political-economic foundation of social and environmental problems in general:
The response of the Obama administration and the general public to this latest outrage at the hands of a giant, politically connected corporation has been embarrassingly tepid. We take our whippings in stride in this country. We behave as though there is nothing we can do about it.
The fact that 11 human beings were killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion (their bodies never found) has become, at best, an afterthought. BP counts its profits in the billions, and, therefore, it’s important. The 11 men working on the rig were no more important in the current American scheme of things than the oystermen losing their livelihoods along the gulf, or the wildlife doomed to die in an environment fouled by BP’s oil, or the waters that will be left unfit for ordinary families to swim and boat in.
This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.
No one knows how much of BP’s runaway oil will contaminate the gulf coast’s marshes and lakes and bayous and canals, destroying wildlife and fauna — and ruining the hopes and dreams of countless human families. What is known is that whatever oil gets in will be next to impossible to get out. It gets into the soil and the water and the plant life and can’t be scraped off the way you might be able to scrape the oil off of a beach.
It permeates and undermines the ecosystem in much the same way that big corporations have permeated and undermined our political system, with similarly devastating results.
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisjman/3338514389/
Tags: Gulf oil spill
Posted in behavior, energy, environmentalism, nature and culture, pollutants, toxics | No Comments »
Parker: What happened to the seasons?
Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
This interesting piece by John Parker can be found in this quarter’s Intelligent Life, the lifestyle and culture magazine from The Economist.
With a seemingly distant and global challenge like climate warming, it’s been a struggle for science to convey the realities that warming is underway and that it’s likely human caused.
What would it take to persuade the 50% of Americans and others around the world who are unconvinced that warming is happening and that is has the potential to fundamentally alter our lives and experiences? A catastrophe like sudden, major ice loss from Antarctica or Greenland?
Subtle shifts like the timing of flowers, the lengthening of spring, the migration of birds, or thawing permafrost—things we have been documenting and writing about since the 1990s— seem to happen unnoticed.
Or perhaps not, as Parker indicates…
In the Indian state of Orissa, the black-headed oriole is the messenger of spring. It appears in the villages in January to greet the season’s start and flies away to the forest in March, signalling its end. Richard Mahapatra’s mother used the oriole’s fleeting appearance to teach her son about the natural rhythms of the world. “People like my mother remember six distinct seasons,” says Mahapatra, an environmental writer who now lives in New Delhi. After spring (basanta) and summer (grishma) came the rainy season (barsha). Between autumn (sarata) and winter (sisira) came a dewy period called hemanta. Each season lasted two months and the appearance of each was marked by religious festivals. “She had precise dates for their arrival and taught me how to look for signs of each.”
Damselflies gathered thickly a week before the rains began. Markers of the monsoon, they did not cluster at other times. The open-billed stork alighted on the tamarind tree on Akshaya Trutiya, a festival which usually fell in April or May and traditionally marked the start of the agricultural year. Farmers said that if you forgot the day, the bird would remind you, so predictable was its arrival. In the Mahapatra family’s garden, the nesting of bats in the peepal tree marked the onset of winter; when the tree flowered, it was midsummer.
Lately the heralds of the seasons have become unreliable. Damselflies swarm not only in the rainy season but in winter, the driest time of year. The stork no longer appears just on Akshaya Trutiya, but at other times, too. Villagers hear the song of the oriole in summer and the rainy season, not just spring. And this, Mahapatra says, is because spring is no longer a distinct season. Instead of six periods of equal length, Orissa now has two, a brief rainy season and a burning eight-month summer. Winter is a mild transition between the two, and spring, autumn and hemanta have been relegated to little-noticed interludes of a mere week or so.
“When I return home”, says Mahapatra, “my mother mourns the death of the seasons. Her memories of Orissa’s climate are alien to the generation I belong to. For me, my childhood Orissa is dying. The state now has a new and strange climate that nobody can understand or predict.”
Read more here…
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ddsnet/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, climate change science, communication and framing, environmental literacy, nature and culture | No Comments »
Earth Day at 40: A new Gallup poll on the state of environmentalism
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Riley Dunlap has an interesting article, At 40, Environmental Movement Endures, With Less Consensus, with new Gallup poll results that’s worth reading.
April 22 marks the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day, an event widely considered to be the birth of the modern environmental movement. Few social movements survive 40 years, so in this sense alone, environmentalism might be considered successful. On the other hand, the movement has had limited success in policy arenas in recent years, leading to allegations of the “death of environmentalism.” In addition, this year’s Gallup Environment poll finds historically low levels of public worry about environmental problems (particularly global warming) and support for environmental protection. Are we witnessing the end of environmentalism as a significant social movement and, in the eyes of many, a major progressive force in the United States?
Read more to find out…
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/southernpixel/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Posted in behavior, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, communication and framing, environmental ethics, environmental history, environmentalism, nature and culture | No Comments »
Stavins: “What’s the Proper Role of Individuals and Institutions in Addressing Climate Change?”
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
That’s the question asked by Robert Stavins at Harvard. This piece is worth reading. He wrestles with many of the same questions that many of us in higher education have thought a lot about (here, here, here, and here):
My view of a university’s responsibilities in the environmental realm is similar. Our direct impact on the natural environment — such as in terms of CO2 emissions from our heating plants — is absolutely trivial compared with the impacts on the environment (including climate change) of our products: knowledge produced through research, informed students produced through our teaching, and outreach to the policy world carried out by faculty.
So, I suggested to the students that if they were really concerned with how the university affects climate change, then their greatest attention should be given to priorities and performance in the realms of teaching, research, and outreach.
Of course, it is also true that work on the “greening of the university” can in some cases play a relevant role in research and teaching. And, more broadly — and more importantly — the university’s actions in regard to its “carbon footprint” can have symbolic value. And symbolic actions — even when they mean little in terms of real, direct impacts — can have effects in the larger political world. This is particularly true in the case of a prominent university, such as my own.
But, overall, my institution’s greatest opportunity — indeed, its greatest responsibility — with regard to addressing global climate change is and will be through its research, teaching, and outreach to the policy community.
Although I applaud the call for more emphasis on environmental teaching and the addition of environmental courses, several impediments exist in higher education and beyond which make it difficult to translate these actions into a more environmentally literate society:
- Disciplines, departments, and majors have long been divided into separate silos. We reward specialization and expertise over the kinds of interdisciplinarity that is needed to conceive of and deal with global change problems. As we have seen in previous posts, it’s time for higher education to consider adding problem-centered approaches to the general curriculum.
- As a result, training students about the environment is often the responsibility of environmental studies and science (ESS) programs. This is a problem because it absolves most departments and faculty from having to engage the environment as a serious issue. Many programs at a typical university operate as if humans have little or no connection to the natural world. Until human systems are properly embedded in natural systems and students are encouraged/required to explore these linkages, there is little reason for students to associate the human experience with impacts on the natural world.
- These kinds of structures are problematic. At best, it means that most students in higher education receive little substantive training in how their lives connect with the natural world. At worst, students are trained to perpetuate disciplinary tradition that (1) ignores the relationship between human societies and the environment and (2) values high achievement in a world that is ecologically unsustainable and socially unjust as a measure of success.
- There can be limits to a “more knowledge” approach. Namely, as we have seen with climate communication, cultural values shape the perception/reception of information. Just as scientific facts seldom speak for themselves, we can’t expect a push for more education to always solve environmental challenges either. The way messages are framed is important. And the cultural context of the target audience is also critical. Most people in the world have a very different cultural background than Harvard undergraduates.
Posted in behavior, communication and framing, higher education, nature and culture, sustainability | No Comments »
The hidden global CO2 emissions of consumerism
Monday, March 8th, 2010
It’s been easy for citizens of the developed, industrialized world to criticize China and India over their rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions. This was one of the major reasons why the Kyoto Protocol was never ratified in the United States.
As many have pointed out, however, there are several flaws with this argument:
- The per-capita carbon emissions in China and India remain much lower (1/4 and 1/16, respectively) compared to the U.S..
- Perhaps more importantly, some of the carbon emission in these countries is caused by the production of export goods to fuel consumer demand in wealthy nations. Thus, we are responsible for “shadow carbon emissions” that get attributed to developing nations.
Until today, there haven’t been very good estimates of these kinds of shadow emissions.
In the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Steven Davies and Ken Caldeira examine how much CO2 is embodied in the import and export of goods.1
Their results are interesting (excerpts below—If you can get a copy of the article, check out figures 1 and 2; they are terrific visuals for this information. Alas, copyrights don’t allow me to post them):
- Approximately 6.2 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2, 23% of all CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning, were emitted during the production of goods that were ultimately consumed in a different country.
- Emissions imported to the United States exceed those of any other country or region, primarily embodied in machinery (91 Mt), electronics (77 Mt), motor vehicles and parts (75 Mt), chemical, rubber, and plastic products (52 Mt), unclassified manufactured products (52 Mt), wearing apparel (42 Mt), and intermediate goods (654 Mt).
- These imports are offset by considerable US exports of transport services (49 Mt CO2), machinery (42 Mt), electronics (26 Mt), chemical, rubber, and plastics products (25 Mt), motor vehicles (22 Mt), and intermediate goods (263 Mt).
- [G]oods imported to Western Europe and Japan embody much more CO2 per US$ than do their exports, reflecting the import of energy-intensive products from elsewhere.
- The carbon intensity of imports to China, Russia, India, and the Middle East is consistently far less than that of their exports.
- China is by far the largest net exporter of emissions, followed by Russia, the Middle East, South Africa, Ukraine, and India and, to a lesser extent, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and areas of South America.
- The primary net importers of emissions are the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy. Although the overall mass of emissions is much less, the other countries of Western Europe are all net importers, as are New Zealand, Mexico, Singapore, and many areas of Africa and South America. Similarly, Canada, Australia, Indonesia, the Czech Republic, and Egypt are among the countries whose net exports of emissions are small.
- On a per-capita basis, net imports of emissions to the United States, Japan, and countries in Western Europe are disproportionately large, with each individual consumer associated with 2.4–10.3 tons of CO2 emitted elsewhere.
Their conclusion:
Consumption-based accounting reveals that substantial CO2 emissions are traded internationally and therefore not included in traditional production-based national emissions inventories. The net effect of trade is the export of emissions from China and other emerging markets to consumers in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. In the large economies of Western Europe, net imported emissions are 20–50% of consumption emissions; the net imported emissions fall to 17.8% and 10.8% in Japan and the United States, respectively. In contrast, net exports represent 22.5% of emissions produced in China. Thus, to the extent that constraints on emissions in developing countries are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.
1Steven J. Davis and Ken Caldeira (2010). Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions PNAS : 10.1073/pnas.0906974107
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deks/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
Tags: China, India
Posted in behavior, climate change science, climate economics, energy, nature and culture, technology, transportation | 1 Comment »
Land consumption and open space loss across U.S. cities
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
The issue of land use change is a complex, with many factors being important historically, such as
- population growth (more land required for more people)
- technology (e.g., automobiles made suburban expansion feasible)
- economics (cheaper land and rents in suburbs compared to cities)
- policy (things like 30-yr mortgages, mortgage insurance, and FHA loans had a large impact on urban sprawl because they often made it cheaper to own rather than rent)
- cultural values (the romanticized notion of a detached home in a safe, pollution-free neighborhood with good schools)
In this week’s PLoS One, Robert McDonald and colleagues1 examined land use change for 274 metro areas (figure 1) in the U.S. to determine tends across cities.
Their results were interesting (excerpts):
- 1.4 million ha of open space was lost, and the amount lost in a given city was correlated with population growth.
- American cities vary by more than an order of magnitude in their MSA-wide per capita land consumption. Generally large cities have small per capita land consumption, with the five smallest in 2000 being New York (459 m2/person), Miami (476 m2/person), Philadelphia (519 m2/person), Los Angeles (535 m2/person), and Washington, DC (536 m2/person). Conversely, many small cities have large per capita land consumption, with the five biggest in 2000 being Grand Forks, ND (5394 m2/person), Bismark, ND (3913 m2/person), Flagstaff, AZ (3381 m2/person), Enid, OK (3249 m2/person), and Cheyenne, WY (3073 m2/person).
- The per capita land consumption (m2/person) of most cities decreased on average over the decade from 1,564 to 1,454 m 2/person, but there was substantial regional variation and some cities even increased.
- Cities with greater conservation funding or more reform-minded zoning tended to decrease in per capita land consumption (scroll to table 1) more than other cities.
- The inequality of land consumption varied geographically, with less inequality on the East Coast compared to the West Coast (scroll to figure 4).
They provide a simplified snapshot of how development changes with history and geography (for a more-thorough yet readable treatment of land use in the U.S., check out Crabgrass Frontier by Kenneth Jackson):
The process of development plays out differently in cities with different socioeconomic histories. Moreover, cultural differences exist among and within many U.S. cities, leading to varying spatial patterns of development. However, a general historical pattern exists. In many U.S. cities, an urban core existed in the decades or centuries prior to the widespread use of the automobile, and these neighborhoods have high population density and small amounts of developed area per capita. The surrounding suburban and exurban areas, created predominately after WWII, contain residents living at lower population density and consume more land per capita. There are substantial economic links between these two zones, and in contemporary U.S. cities commuting occurs in both directions. Northeast U.S. cities that developed before the automobile typically follow this narrative. Many have a relatively dense urban core, but have adopted zoning policies that ensure contemporary suburban settlements occur at lower density. While they remain dense compared to other U.S. cities, they are getting less dense over time, as proportionally more of the population is in suburban areas. The declining manufacturing cities of the Rust Belt and the Southern Appalachians are an extreme example of this spreading out of population.
Southeastern U.S. cities, excluding Florida, are often newer and have less of a legacy of a dense urban core. They do not appear to be getting markedly denser, and the relatively fast population growth of these cities implies that their total impact on natural habitat in coming decades will be large. In contrast to the Southeast, Western cities appear to be getting denser, including those that do not have a historical legacy of a dense urban core such as Phoenix. These Western cities are often still growing quickly and consuming a great deal of land, but contemporary development is making these cities denser than they were previously. Many of these Western cities have a strong conservation culture, and the degree of conservation funding and reform-minded zoning correlates with how much denser they are getting. However, it should be noted that contemporary development in Western cities is still well below the densities found in the dense urban core of Northeastern U.S. cities, posing problems for designing effective public transit systems.
1McDonald, R., Forman, R., & Kareiva, P. (2010). Open Space Loss and Land Inequality in United States’ Cities, 1990–2000 PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009509
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Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobjagendorf/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
Posted in behavior, land use, nature and culture, policy, population, sustainability, transportation, urban | 1 Comment »
Marine protected areas help coral reefs too
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
As mentioned in an earlier post, marine protected areas (or MPAs) are a great idea for eliminating fishing pressures and allowing fish stocks to recover.
It’s less well known whether these underwater reserves help preserve reef-building corals, which most fish and other critters depend on one way or another—for habitat or food.
In today’s online issue of PLoS ONE (open accress), Elizabeth Selig and John Bruno conduct an analysis of MPAs worldwide and conclude that these areas are able to stem the loss of corals.1
That’s good news.
However, they offer this conclusion in the context of several important caveats:
MPAs can play a critical role in the protection of coral reef ecosystems, particularly fisheries. Our results suggest that MPAs are also generally effective in reducing or preventing coral loss. Nonetheless, we were not able to assess their effects on other metrics of reef health including changes in other key taxonomic species, coral composition, richness, reef heterogeneity and other factors that could also indicate that there has been a decline in reef health. MPA benefits may appear modest in the short term, but over several decades could lead to large and highly ecologically significant increases in coral cover as the cumulative importance of small annual effects becomes more important and the number of years of MPA protection increases. However, it remains to be seen whether the observed benefits of MPAs are sufficient to offset coral losses from major disease outbreaks and bleaching events, both of which are predicted to increase in frequency with climate change. Given the time lag for maximizing MPA effectiveness, implementing new MPAs and increasing enforcement should help maximize the ability of MPAs to prevent future coral loss.
Who cares? Lots of reasons:
- Coral reefs are incredible ecosystems. If you have never dived or snorkeled on a healthy coral reef, put it on your list of 10 things to do before you die. My recommendations are the Great Barrier Reef (Australia), the Cayman Islands, Hawaii, and the islands of the Netherlands Antilles. We owe it to future generations to preserve these ecosystems in the wild rather than in books and aquaria.
- Reefs are incredibly species rich. Protecting them protects a significant fraction of coastal marine biodiversity.
- Reefs are very productive ecosystems that provide a food source and habitat for thousands of species. Protect the corals, and you end up protecting many other species.
- Many coastal communities depend on reefs for their livelihoods (e.g., seafood harvesting and tourism). This makes reef management critical for economic as well as ecological sustainability. But, as this article suggests, local management is challenged by the fact that global threats, such as ocean acidification, disease, and rising temperature impacts on coral bleaching, may trump what local people can control.
1Selig ER, Bruno JF, 2010 A Global Analysis of the Effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas in Preventing Coral Loss. PLoS ONE 5(2): e9278. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009278
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Photo credit: One of my photos that you can see at my flickr site.
Tags: coral reef
Posted in biodiversity science, nature and culture, sustainability | 2 Comments »
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