The Atlantic is featuring an interesting back-and-forth between rancher and author, Nicolette Hahn Niman, and philosopher Adam Phillips.

Niman: Dogs Aren’t Dinner: The Flaws in an Argument for Veganism

Phillips: Dogs Aren’t Dinner–and Pigs Shouldn’t Be Either

This debate focuses on whether eating pigs carries the same ethical considerations as eating dogs.   But it has deeper roots in a centuries-old debate about objective vs. relative moral truths in our world.

Update:

For a current example of how this deeper debate is playing out, check out Sam Harris’ latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.

For good examples of the philosophical foundations of this debate, read Anderson, Sen, Nussbaum, and Appiah.

___

Photo credit: nao-cha

In the Policy Forum of today’s issue of Science, a research team that includes recent Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrom, issued a call for innovative interdisciplinary approaches to confronting major environmental challenges:

Tremendous progress has been made in understanding the functioning of the
Earth system and, in particular, the impact of human actions. Although this
knowledge can inform management of specific features of our world in transition, societies need knowledge that will allow them to simultaneously reduce global environmental risks while also meeting economic development goals. For example, how can we advance science and technology, change human behavior, and influence political will to enable societies to meet targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to avoid dangerous climate change? At the same time, how can we meet needs for food, water, improved health and human security, and enhanced energy security? Can this be done while also meeting the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and ensuring ecosystem integrity?

They identified what they call five grand challenges:

(1) Improve the usefulness of forecasts of future environmental conditions and their consequences for people.

(2) Develop, enhance, and integrate observation systems to manage global and regional environmental change.

(3) Determine how to anticipate, avoid, and manage disruptive global environmental change.

(4) Determine institutional, economic, and behavioral changes to enable effective steps toward global sustainability.

(5) Encourage innovation (and mechanisms for evaluation) in technological, policy, and social responses to achieve global sustainability.

And their concluding message resonates with much of what I have been writing about at Global Change (emphasis mine):

These grand challenges provide an overarching research framework to mobilize the international scientific community around a focused decade of research to support sustainable development in the context of global environmental change. … Research dominated by the natural sciences must transition toward research involving the full range of sciences and humanities. A more balanced mix of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research is needed that actively involves stakeholders and decision-makers.

Reid, W., Chen, D., Goldfarb, L., Hackmann, H., Lee, Y., Mokhele, K., Ostrom, E., Raivio, K., Rockstrom, J., Schellnhuber, H., & Whyte, A. (2010). Earth System Science for Global Sustainability: Grand Challenges Science, 330 (6006), 916-917 DOI: 10.1126/science.1196263

Related posts:

From the Environmental Literacy in Higher Education series:

• Overview
• Part 1: What a changing world means for our graduates
• Part 2: Understanding the cultural context of environmental literacy
• Part 3: Framing contemporary problems
• Part 4: making it happen

From the Why Don’t People Engage Climate Change? series:

• The diversity of values held by conservation scientists and why this matters
• The ultimate cause of social disparity in preventative health behavior may be rooted in environmental harm
• Extreme climate and the vulnerability of least-developed countries
• Ecosystem stewardship: sustainability strategies for a rapidly changing planet
• Chicago 1995: How social disparities lead to environmental disasters
• “Can Biotech Food Cure World Hunger?”

___

Image credit: woodleywonderworks

Here’s an interesting idea:  Get a bunch of people writing about environmental disasters to help raise awareness about what these are like (and may become) and to spur planning efforts for preventing/dealing with them.  That’s the latest from io9:

We can’t prevent environmental disasters without preparing for them. That’s why io9 is going to pay $2000 each to two people who write the best stories about environmental disaster. It’s io9′s Environmental Writing Contest – for science fiction and non-fiction.

io9 is looking for stories that deal with environmental disaster, whether caused by random asteroid impacts or oil drilling accidents. We believe that the first step to solving planet-scale problems is to assess, honestly and critically, what it would mean to experience such a disaster. We need mental models that can help policy-makers, researchers, and individuals prepare for the kinds of cataclysmic events that have occurred regularly throughout Earth’s history.

We’re holding this contest to reward people for coming up with ideas that could help avert the next Deepwater spill and Pacific garbage gyre – or help people prepare better for the next Indian Ocean tsunami and Haiti earthquake. Storytelling is a powerful tool. We want you to use it well.

Our awesome team of judges includes Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker’s environment reporter), Paolo Bacigalupi (author of Ship Breaker and Windup Girl), and Jonathan Strahan (editor of the Eclipse anthologies), as well as others to be announced.

Interested?  The contest rules can be found at the link above.

___

Photo credit:  Reinante El Pintor de Fuego

]]> http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2010/11/writing-about-disasters-as-an-environmental-literacy-tool/feed/ 0 http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2010/11/just-add-water/ http://www.globalchangeblog.com/2010/11/just-add-water/#comments Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:42:20 +0000 Phil Camill http://www.globalchangeblog.com/?p=4971

An amazing night-time photo from the International Space Station showing how human settlement along the Nile River and Delta stand out against the Sahara Desert (shot by Astronaut Doug Wheelock). Click here for a larger image.

___

Courtesy of EMP via Gizmodo via Astro_Wheels via defcon_5

Right up there with climate change, biodiversity conservation is one of the most challenging issues at the intersection of nature and culture.  Part of this challenge arises because of genuine differences in how people value other species.

In an interesting forthcoming article in Conservation Biology, Chris Sandbrook and colleagues at Cambridge University argue that these value differences not only show up in society at large, but among conservation professionals, who—like climate scientists—are drawn to the possibility of developing scientific consensuses to inform policy debates:

Conservation biology has been called a crisis science and a mission-driven discipline. Both the mission, and its urgency, seem clear, and there has been a substantial increase in activities intended to address the rapid decline in the variety of life on Earth at all levels of biological organization (structure, composition, and function). Nevertheless, there are tensions within the field about the values that underpin the conservation mission, particularly concerning the nature and singularity of these values and the role of values when conservation professionals try to inform or influence policy.

Recently, the values held by conservation professionals themselves have been debated. Conservation professionals often refer to both instrumental values (the usefulness of nature for humans) and noninstrumental or intrinsic values, and there may be an element of opportunism when they do so. Thus, although some may privately base the positions they hold on intrinsic values, they may espouse use-value arguments in public, adapting arguments to the interests of their audience. Some call for conservation scientists to return to a conservation ethic derived from intrinsic values

…[Others] propose a more pragmatic engagement with material values of nature in their focus on what they see as the “hard socioeconomic realities in real-world conservation problems.” The environmental philosophy of pragmatism, with its acceptance of both intrinsic and instrumental values of nature, is the hallmark of adaptive management

To study values held by conservationists, the research team posed a set of values to scientists and asked them to rank the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with the statements (Q methodology).  The responses were then run through a set of statistics (factor analysis) to distill the huge pile of value-by-person data into four overarching factors that summarized the main values held.

Their results suggest that consensus building may not only be difficult, it may be counterproductive…

Excerpts edited by me:

Factor 1…reflected the view that the value of biodiversity does not depend on its current usefulness to humans, potential future values to humans, or its importance to human survival.

• In terms of strategies and actions for conservation, the factor focused on global issues, such as changing human population growth rate and to a lesser extent changing the consumption levels of the wealthy.
• At the local level the factor did not express that conservation has a role in addressing poverty alleviation and considered it important to understand how people and nature interact in particular places, which suggests respondents considered that livelihoods of the poor as well as the rich are linked to biodiversity conservation.
• Because the focus of this factor was human population size and resource consumption, respondents appeared to be influenced by the concept of carrying capacity.

Factor 2…reflected a preservationist viewpoint, that conservation should prevent the human caused extinction of species.

• Nevertheless, the views in this factor emphasized social issues in the practice of conservation, particularly understanding how people and nature interact in places and to a lesser extent ensuring that conservation does no harm to human communities and does not displace long-term residents.
• This emphasis and the fact that science driven approaches to priority setting were rejected, suggests that this factor represents the viewpoint that conservation is mainly a political rather than a scientific endeavor.
• In terms of practical strategies, those that adhered to this factor do not believe conservation should focus on protected areas, involve strict law enforcement, or keep areas free from human influence.
• Rather, adherents to this factor strongly supported changes in consumption by the rich, which are actions far removed from the local level of protected areas. At the same time, the factor does not suggest the sole purpose of conservation is human survival.
• The factor also reflects a deep engagement in pragmatic and economic approaches to conservation action. Thus, the viewpoint expressed by this factor was that conservation planning must be local, can involve trade-based
  strategies, and can use incentives.
• This factor also showed there was an interest in holistic solutions, that conservation should not be confined to key priorities or areas and conservation actions should not be focused only where they are most cost-effective.

Factor 3…reflected a viewpoint that emphasized the diverse values of biodiversity, particularly the right of all species to exist and the role of species
in sustaining ecosystem functions

• The notions that trade in wild species can be a tool for conservation and that conservation action should prioritize cost-effectiveness were strongly rejected.
• Instead, priority was given to conservation of species and ecosystems, and the belief was that they should be conserved through implementation of protected areas. Little attention was given to the context and complexities of the practice of conservation, and there was a sense of disconnection between people and their environment at a variety of spatial scales, as evidenced by the focus on protected areas, little emphasis (relative to the other discourses) on understanding how people and nature interact, and rejection of any connection between conservation and consumption by the rich.
• Overall, this factor emphasized reasons biodiversity should be conserved, but gave little attention to mechanisms for achieving this goal.

Factor 4… reflected a view that biodiversity is useful to people, rejecting notions that biological diversity should be conserved for its beauty and that
all species have a right to exist.

• It emphasized the importance of connections between people and the environment, arguing that conservation success requires substantial changes in both human population growth and consumption by the rich.
• Conservation planning was seen to require detailed place-specific knowledge of human–environment interactions and not less-grounded patterns generated through tools such as GIS.
• The position expressed in this factor on economic tools was cautious: incentives are needed and cost-effectiveness is important, but trade in wild species and products was not considered a useful tool for biodiversity conservation.

There are several things I like about this article:

First is the notion that conservation is as political as it scientific— informed by the social sciences (policy, economics, sociology, psychology) and humanities (ethics, history) and ultimately debated by our local, national, and global societies.  It is not the role of science to drive contested, normative debates, although it’s great at providing information to inform these debates.

Second, now you see part of the reason why issues like conservation can be so contentious. There are myriad ways that people value biodiversity and it’s often difficult to reconcile these opposing philosophical positions.

Third, as I have written about previously on the blog, this is a good example of why nature needs to be situated in the context of culture and vice versa in order for challenging environmental problems to be studied effectively, as the authors allude to here (emphasis added):

[O]ur results provide an empirical challenge to the portrayal of conservation as a monolithic activity, driven by a convergent set of Western values, implicitly denying the possibility of differences in viewpoints about conservation at many spatial and temporal scales. The monolithic conception of conservation is based on an assumption that conservation professionals share a core set of values and goals, regardless of the social and economic contexts in which they are embedded and the experiences that have shaped their conservation interests. In reality, most conservation professionals draw on a range of values, from the intrinsic values of species to the use values of nature to humans. We consider it likely that such diverse views exist across a wide range of individuals and organizations involved in conservation.

…We believe conservation science and practice should not try to create a consensus under which conservation professionals can unite and instead acknowledge the diversity of opinions in the field. By acknowledging different
viewpoints, we believe conservation actors can build more honest and ultimately effective relationships with each other and the wider public.

SANDBROOK, C., SCALES, I., VIRA, B., & ADAMS, W. (2010). Value Plurality among Conservation Professionals Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01592.x

____

Photo credit: wildxplorer

Related posts:

Why don’t people engage climate change?

• Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
• Problem 2: Communication Literacy
• Problem 3: Personal perception, values, and behavior
• Problem 4: Political-economic context
• Problem 5: A perfect storm of climate change denial

In a fascinating new article in PLOS One (open access), Daniel Nettle asks why we see social gradients in preventative health behaviors:

People of lower socioeconomic position have been found to smoke more, exercise less, have poorer diets, comply less well with therapy, use medical services less, adopt fewer safety measures, ignore health advice more, and be less health-conscious overall, than their more affluent peers. Some of these behaviors can simply be put down to financial constraints, as healthy diets, for example, cost more than unhealthy ones, but socioeconomic gradients are found even where the health behaviors in question would cost nothing, ruling out income differences as the explanation.

As we often assume with environmental or nutritional issues, maybe simply helping to better educate people is all that’s needed? Probably not, as Nettle points out, and with an interesting twist:

Socioeconomic gradients in health behavior are not easily abolished by providing more information. Informational health campaigns tend to lead to greater voluntary behavior change in people of higher socio-economic position, and thus can actually increase socioeconomic inequalities in health, even whilst improving health overall. Thus, we are struck with what we might call the exacerbatory dynamic of poverty: the people in society who face the greatest structural adversity, far from mitigating this by their lifestyles, behave in such ways as to make it worse, even when they are provided with the opportunity to do otherwise.

What are some of the possible explanations for this pattern, and are they sufficient?

Underlying socioeconomic differences in health behavior are differences in attitudinal and psychological variables. People of lower socioeconomic position have been found to be more pessimistic, have stronger beliefs in the influence of chance on health, and give a greater weighting to present over future outcomes, than people of higher socioeconomic position. These explanations seem clear.

However, they immediately raise the deeper question: why should pessimism, belief in chance, and short time perspective be found more in people of low socioeconomic position than those of high socioeconomic position? These deeper questions are at the level which behavioral ecologists call ultimate, as opposed to proximate causation

To develop more of an ultimate explanation, Nettle hypothesized that lower socioeconomic groups are subject to greater hazard or environmental harm or even simply the perception of living a more hazardous life.  This, in turn, discourages healthy behavior.

To test this hypothesis, he developed a mathematical/statistical model predicting the probability of dying in a given year, which is a combination of extrinsic risks that people cannot control as well as intrinsic risks that they can control through modified health behavior.   Thus, people choosing to take the time to engage healthier opportunities reduce their mortality risk.  Now there’s a tradeoff, however, because the more time people choose to undertake healthy behavior, the less time is left over for leisure activities and other life events.

Overall survival is therefore a combination of all of these factors, which can easily be modeled by assuming a range of values for time spent on health vs. other activities to see what kinds of mortality outcomes arise.

Here are the interesting results he found…

If it is the case that lower socioeconomic position is associated with a greater rate of extrinsic hazards (an assumption which needs justifying, see below), then we should expect people to respond to lower socioeconomic position with reduced preventative health behavior, because the benefits of that behavior to them are indeed lessened. This would in turn make their health outcomes worse, and so the gradient in health outcomes should in general be steeper than the underlying gradient in extrinsic risk exposures. Thus, the observed pattern of substantial socioeconomic gradients in health, which are to a  significant extent mediated by differences in health behavior, is exactly what we would predict if people are behaving adaptively given the environment in which they live.

Previous research on social inequalities in health behavior has found that people faced with socioeconomic deprivation endorse a greater belief in the influence of chance on life outcomes, particularly in the domain of health, are more pessimistic, and devalue future outcomes relative to present ones more sharply, than people of higher socioeconomic position. The model presented here is not in any sense an alternative to these accounts. On the contrary, the model here suggests an ultimate reason why these proximal psychological patterns might persist, and the proximal psychological accounts suggest how the adaptive behavior might actually be delivered. Clearly, people do not perform exact actuarial calculations in deciding whether to adopt a particular health behavior. Instead, they presumably employ some simple evolved heuristics. In this case, these might include something like ‘to the extent you see bad and unpredictable health outcomes besetting your peers, worry about today rather than tomorrow’.

And here’s where the environmental link comes in:

Several lines of evidence suggest that the assumption that lower socioeconomic position is associated with a greater degree of extrinsic hazard may not be unreasonable. First, studies of health inequalities generally find that controlling for behavioral factors (smoking, diet, etc.) attenuates socioeconomic gradients in health outcomes, but does not abolish them entirely. Of course, this could simply mean that not enough controls have been included, but it could also suggest that there is a residuum of health hazard which is extrinsic and thus not responsive to individuals’ behavioral decisions. Second, there are some health risk factors whose spatial distribution is socioeconomically patterned, and which people living in more deprived areas can do very little to avoid save for not living there. The clearest examples are noise, lead, and air pollution in the form of fine particles and nitrogen oxides. The levels of these hazards are higher in poor neighbourhoods, and their effects on morbidity and mortality well established. Third, many studies have found effects of living in poor neighbourhoods on health outcomes, above and beyond the effects of individual level socioeconomic characteristics. For example, poorer neighbourhoods are associated with substantially increased chances of accidental death or homicide, and heart disease, even once individual characteristics are adjusted for. This suggests that there are hazards fundamentally associated with living in these areas, which affect whoever it is that lives there.

In general, the model presented here draws the focus of health policy away from merely providing information or exhorting behavioral change, and onto extrinsic mortality. As with other neo-material approaches to health inequalities, it reminds us of the need to address the fundamental economic inequities which mean that some neighbourhoods contain higher risks of pollution, toxicity, and accident than others. More specifically, it suggests that reducing these structural inequities will reap a double dividend. It will have a primary effect on mortality inequality, and also a secondary effect as people respond to the primary effect by increasing their health-promoting behavior. Indeed, the secular trend in health behavior amongst middle-class people could be interpreted in this way. As economic development has eliminated many of the uncontrollable sources of danger, individuals have increased their investment in behaviors that mitigate those risks which do respond to individual choice. We need to create a similar dynamic in the most disadvantaged areas.

However, whilst changing structural conditions is the most important priority, the model also suggests that it is worth paying attention to people’s perceptions of extrinsic mortality. That is, in poor communities, individuals may perceive the local environment to be extrinsically dangerous to a greater extent than is in fact true (for example, because they are affected by social stereotypes or media portrayals). The model suggests that the psychological mechanisms which underlie behavioral decisions should be responsive to perceived levels of extrinsic mortality. If these perceptions are unrealistic, then they may lead to excessive fatalism and consequent disinvestment in health behavior. Thus, researchers and practitioners could usefully examine the genesis and malleability of people’s perceptions of the extrinsic dangers of their environments, and the relationships of these to their health attitudes and health behaviors.

What I love about this article is how it situates problems of sociology, psychology, public health, and justice squarely in the context of the environment—both actual and perceived.  And it encourages those of us interested in public health and well being to borrow a page from people engaged in environmental justice and just sustainability initiatives.

I also like how this result dismantles traditional notions of environmentalism and public health and forces us to consider new ways of studying pervasive problems in our world, where environmental studies scholars collaborate more with sociologists, psychologists, and historians to understand the ultimate causes of linked social-environmental challenges.

Nettle, D. (2010). Why Are There Social Gradients in Preventative Health Behavior? A Perspective from Behavioral Ecology PLoS ONE, 5 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013371

____

Photo credit: postopp1

The NY Times and Huffington Post are running a story by Kim Severson, Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries, lamenting how hard it is to get people to eat healthy.

The thing that struck me about this article, as its title suggests, is how nutrition in America is often pitched top-down.  A strategy is bound to fail when it consists simply of government experts making recommendations about nutrition, as one of the folks interviewed notes:

“It is disappointing,” said Dr. Jennifer Foltz, a pediatrician who helped compile the report. She, like other public health officials dedicated to improving the American diet, concedes that perhaps simply telling people to eat more vegetables isn’t working.

…The government keeps trying, too, to get its message across. It now recommends four and a half cups of fruits and vegetables (that’s nine servings) for people who eat 2,000 calories a day. Some public health advocates have argued that when the guidelines are updated later this year, they should be made even clearer. One proposal is to make Americans think about it visually, filling half the plate or bowl with vegetables.

The article explores the usual things claimed to be preventing people from eating better—convenience and cost:

“The moment you have something fresh you have to schedule your life around using it,” Mr. Balzer said.

In the wrong hands, vegetables can taste terrible. And compared with a lot of food at the supermarket, they’re a relatively expensive way to fill a belly.

“Before we want health, we want taste, we want convenience and we want low cost,” Mr. Balzer said.

Melissa MacBride, a busy Manhattan resident who works for a pharmaceuticals company, would eat more vegetables if they weren’t, in her words, “a pain.”

“An apple you can just grab,” she said. “But what am I going to do, put a piece of kale in my purse?”

“It’s just like any other bad habit,” he said. “Part of it is just that vegetables are a little intimidating. I’m not afraid of zucchinis, but I just don’t know how to cook them.”

The solution is presented as a problem of overcoming access to good food:

But clear guidance probably isn’t enough. Health officials now concede that convincing a nation that shuns vegetables means making vegetables more affordable and more available.

I’m a fan of nutritional literacy, as I am with environmental literacy, but only as one of several approaches in a portfolio of strategies for improving the quality of life and the environment.  Nutritionists and climate change educators should team up in this regard because they face the same challenge—winning hearts and minds (or, in this case, stomachs) and changing behavior.

The problem is that a top-down nutritional literacy approach, by itself, is woefully inadequate (more information, alone, simply won’t accomplish this), and access to good food is only part of the challenge.

If you want engagement, then nutrition needs to be turned into a bottom-up venture.  It’s not simply a matter of food pyramids and access to good food.  People need to experience growing and cooking their own food.  They need to be engaged with how good it can be, how it can be grown cheaply, and how plant-based diets are easy to prepare.

There are several ways to begin accomplishing this:

1. Start early.  Make gardening and cooking a part of the elementary school experience.  All kids should take an active role in planting, tending, and harvesting food.  Then they should take part in preparing the foods they have grown in ways that are appealing to eat. The power of this should not be underestimated.  The only thing I remember from kindergarten is making bread and butter from scratch.

2. Diffuse this knowledge to home or community gardens.  When kids are taught how to prepare healthy, tasty food, they can bring what they learn home, starting home gardens and helping out with making dinner by showing parents what they learned in school (maybe accompanied by some kind of creative incentive from parents to do this).  People can see for themselves that is is often less expensive to grow healthy food, especially if communities team up and share their bounties, than it is to buy junk food that makes up much of their diet.

3.  Involve the community in a contest to generate a list of the most popular recipes for different fruits and vegetables.  Perhaps engage the help of local chefs for fun.  I have a 100% whole fruit smoothie recipe that most kids would mistake for dessert.

4. Disperse these recipes widely and incorporate them into school education programs and lunches, as Alice Waters is accomplishing in California.

5. Not only should farmers markets accept SNAP (food stamps), there should be classes/demos to show people how to prepare foods.  Also, having samples and recipes that are tasty and convenient would be helpful.  People should be convinced, by seeing with their own eyes and taste buds, that they can do this and that it’s worth their time.

And that’s part of the larger problem:  overcoming the psychological barrier that fresh food prep is time consuming:

“The moment you have something fresh you have to schedule your life around using it.”

Although I see the point here, I think it’s a poor reason for not eating healthy.  People schedule time around education, sleeping, exercising, soccer practice, vacation, being with friends, spirituality, and visits to the doctor/dentist because these things are considered necessary to living well.  Is preparing healthy food not a similarly meaningful part of our lives?  Is it really impossible for families to schedule 30-45 minutes preparing meals?  Should leisure time or other competing interests really be that high an opportunity cost?

Perhaps that’s one lesson:  So long as Americans treat preparing and enjoying healthy meals as a tradeoff with leisure time or other activities, American diets will suffer.  No amount of top-down government nutrition guidelines will overcome that.

Related news:  Bill Clinton now eats vegan

____

Photo credit:  hellochris

A picture of an unprecedented congregation of Munkiana Devil Rays in Baja California Sur has won Florian Schulz the prestigious 2010 title of The Environmental Photographer of the Year. And 20 year old Bulgarian Radoslav Radoslavov Valkov has gained the title of the Young Environmental Photographer of the Year with his macro photograph of a fly.

Organised by the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM), the Environmental Photographer of the Year has exceeded all expectations, receiving over 4,500 entries from photographers in 97 countries in just its fourth year. That’s a record breaking rise in entries of 93 percent from 2009, with this year seeing the first entries from countries such as Tajikistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mongolia, Swaziland, Palestine, Latvia and Bolivia.

The Environmental Photographer of the Year is an international showcase for the very best in environmental photography, honouring amateur and professional photographers who use their ability to raise awareness of environmental and social issues. The categories are Mott MacDonald’s Changing Climates; The Natural World; Quality of Life; Innovation in the Environment (New for 2010); The Underwater World (New for 2010); A View From the Western World (New for 2010); and the Young Environmental Photographer of the Year (Under 16 & Under 21).

• The overall winner:  Flight of the rays, Florian Schultz.  I’m a SCUBA-diving fanatic, and I have never seen anything like this.  Simply spectacular.
• The Young Environmental Photographer of the Year: Fly drinking from a dew drop on a blade of grass, Radoslav Radoslavov Valkov.
• Finalist in Natural World group: Hummingbird attacking a green pit viper, Bence Mate.
• Finalist in Changing Climate group: North Pole sign in melting ice and meltwater, Sue Floods.
• Finalist in Underwater group: Hide and Seek, Kaido Haagen. (Gray seal in Estonia).
• Finalist in Underwater group: Birthplace, Bela Nasfay (Frog eggs in a Hungarian lake).
• Finalist in Under 16 group: Home Sweet Home, Alex Marttunen.

This week’s issue of Science includes a special section on biodiversity.  A review article by Michael Rands and colleagues, Biodiversity Conservation: Challenges Beyond 2010, summarizes the current approaches and challenges for conservation.

Here is an excerpt describing their outlook for the future:

The challenges of addressing the social and behavioral contexts for biodiversity conservation are daunting. We are far from including biodiversity in our conventional measures of well-being, which focus on wealth creation and internationally
recognized estimates of GDP. Although there have been attempts to redefine these (including, for instance, the Human Development Index and green national accounts), the mainstream view of well-being and of national development remains focused on narrowly defined economic growth. Furthermore, the current recession only strengthens the emphasis on growth. The transition to sustainability will not be easy, but it is central to securing a future for biodiversity. Conservation strategies, in concert with other environmental policies, must address seemingly intractable and politically unpalatable issues. In both developed and emerging economies, we need to reduce the carbon and material throughput demanded by current patterns of production and consumption if we are to create viable and democratically acceptable trajectories of contraction and convergence in resource use. In parallel, we must recognize that successful human development agendas are underpinned by functional ecosystems, and by biodiversity. This is the year in which governments, business, and civil society could decide to take seriously the central role of biodiversity in human well-being and quality of life and to invest in securing the sustainable flow of nature’s public goods for present and future generations.

___

Photo credit: Feuillu