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

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Photo credit: wildxplorer

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

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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

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Photo credit:  hellochris

Laura Miller at Salon reviews a new book out this week by Judy Pasternak titled, “Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed.” A few excerpts from Miller’s analysis:

In the summer of 1979, an earthen dam over the town of Church Rock, Utah, broke, flooding the arroyo below and then the bed of the Rio Puerco (an intermittent stream) on the southern border of the Navajo Nation. It was a small flood, but a dangerous one. It burned the feet of a boy who stepped into it, and caused sheep and crops along the banks to drop dead. That’s because the pond it came from had been used by a nearby uranium mine to store the tailings (residue) of its excavations — the water kept the radioactive dust from blowing away. The 93 million gallons of contaminated water that poured into the Rio Puerco remains the largest accidental release of radioactive material in U.S. history, bigger than the notorious Three Mile Island reactor meltdown that occurred 14 weeks later.

The Church Rock flood is only one incident among many in the “slow-motion disaster” investigative journalist Judy Pasternak comprehensively recounts in her chilling new book, “Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed.” Based on a prize-winning four-part series she wrote for the Los Angeles Times, “Yellow Dirt” begins during World War II, when secretive government surveyors first appeared on the remote reservation, supposedly looking for deposits of an ore called vanadium, used to strengthen steel needed for the war effort. Uranium was the real prize, and after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ramping up of the Cold War, the American demand for the radioactive substance boomed.

The Navajo Nation and the area around it contained some of the richest deposits of uranium ore in the world, and certainly the most conveniently located. For about a decade, various corporations and government agencies reaped 1.4 million tons of uranium ore from the Monument Valley region alone; Pasternak makes a single mine there, known as Monument No. 2, her primary focus. The mining operations were relatively rudimentary, and by ordination of the tribal government, worked almost entirely by Navajo men. Even the cheapest and most elementary safety practices, such as wetting down blast areas to keep the miners from breathing toxic dust, were neglected in the rush to satisfy the Atomic Energy Commission’s insatiable appetite for uranium.

By the 1960s, the need tapered off, and the mining companies blithely abandoned the sites, leaving piles of radioactive tailings lying around for Navajo kids to play on and their parents to scavenge for conveniently sized rocks with which to build houses, ovens and cisterns. The dust and gravel made seemingly excellent concrete for floors. Monument No. 2, once a mesa, had been nearly leveled, its uranium-laced innards exposed to the open air, reduced to what Pasternak characterizes as a “radioactive pit.” Old quarries filled up with rain- and groundwater, new “lakes” from which local residents watered their herds and gratefully drank.

The next boom, unsurprisingly, was in cancer rates (previously so low among the Navajo that they were thought to be miraculously immune to the disease), and in a birth defect, christened “Navajo neuropathy,” that caused children’s fingers to fuse together and curl into claws. Still, it took decades for the cause to be fully recognized and even longer for it to be addressed; it wasn’t until 2008 and under the lashing of Rep. Henry Waxman, that the federal government made serious efforts to clean up the mine sites, purify water supplies and relocate families living in houses built from radioactive materials.

Read the rest of the review here.

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Photo Credit: Christopher Isherwood

Mitigating climate warming is going to require a dramatic decrease in carbon emission from the transportation sector, through a combination of driving less, using public transportation, and, eventually, switching to electric cars powered by a renewable grid.

There are many urban centers with outstanding public transportation options, but let’s face it— It’s often more difficult to find alternatives to driving in smaller towns and suburbs.

Brunswick, Maine (home to Bowdoin College) is no different than most small towns (population 25,000).  Transportation is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, and the physical dislocation of residential areas, shopping centers, supermarkets, and hospitals makes it difficult to avoid automobile use.  And roads around here are definitely not bike friendly!

This is starting to change as a result of collaborations across institutions from the local to federal levels.

The town just added a new program called Brunswick Explorer, with a fleet of hybrid electric buses that are wheelchair and bike accessible.  The route takes the buses from major residential areas (especially those serving the elderly) to our local supermarkets, hospitals, and shopping malls.

With the extension of the Amtrak Downeaster from Portland to Brunswick in 2012, folks will also be able to travel to Portland and Boston easily by train, especially during rush hour and winter when travel by roads is either a hassle or dangerous.

The Explorer and Downeaster are certainly no silver bullets, but they accomplish a few important goals:

• The Explorer allows people in much of downtown Brunswick the opportunity to forego driving for simple, routine tasks, especially during winter when walking and biking are treacherous.
• The hybrid fleet and high-occupancy vehicles will help reduce emissions.
• Reliable bus service makes it easier for families (who are able) to downsize from two vehicles to one vehicle, with the added benefit/incentive of saving on gas, repairs, taxes, registration, and inspections.
• At a cost of $1 per ride or $2 for an all-day pass, the Explorer buses provide an important social service to the elderly and other citizens who may not be able to afford cars.
• It builds transportation resilience in the community, especially for low-income citizens who may find it increasingly expensive to get around the next time gas prices spike.
• The Downeaster provides a redundant transportation network, which makes long-distance travel easy when there are unexpected travel delays due to weather, construction, or accidents.  It also has the potential to take many cars off the road for the sizable population that commutes daily between Portland and Brunswick.
• The Explorer bus program provides a model of community collaboration that may be exportable to other towns.
• Perhaps most importantly, they help break the mindset and habits of routine personal vehicle use.

These are small steps, indeed, but they have the ingredients to be successful:  alternatives to personal vehicle use that are both cheap and convenient, with substantial community buy in.

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Photo courtesy of Bowdoin College

I remember driving on a freeway in Phoenix after midnight in 1990.  The temperature was a cool 102 degrees F after breaking the all-time heat record of 126 F that day.  Deserts are good at cooling off at night.  But with all of the built environment in Phoenix storing heat from the day, the sidewalks, roads, and even swimming pools felt like they were being heated.

We all have probably experienced urban heat islands—the mass of dark asphalt and concrete absorbing solar radiation and radiating it back to space as heat.  The lack of water exacerbates the situation because there is little-to-no evaporative cooling.  Waste heat from cars, machines, air conditioners, and even human bodies also heat up the air.  And the warmer it gets, the stronger the tendency to crank up the air conditioners, generating even more waste heat.

The problem is potentially large in areas like the Middle East, India, parts of Africa, and the American Southwest, where rapid urbanization in warm, dry environments has the potential to make some urban areas much warmer at night than surrounding rural areas.

In a forthcoming article in Geophysical Research Letters¹, Mark McCarthy and colleagues at the Met Office, Hadley Centre, UK used a climate model that examines what climate might look like in a doubled CO₂ world and calculates the added warming caused by urbanization and wasted heat.

Their results were eye-opening:

• Urban regions in places like the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, and India may experience night time warming by as much as 3-5 degrees C above and beyond that caused by doubled CO₂ alone.
• The number of hot nights per year (defined as temperatures in the 99th percentile of nonurban areas) increase in the following cities:
  • London: 1-2 hot nights now vs. up to 10 hot nights in 2050
  • Sydney: 1-2 hot nights now vs. up to 15 hot nights in 2050
  • Delhi: 5-10 hot nights now vs. up to 30 hot nights in 2050
  • Beijing: 3-6 hot nights now vs. up to 50 hot nights in 2050
  • Los Angeles: 8-12 hot nights now vs. up to 40 hot nights in 2050
  • Tehran: 20 hot nights now vs. up to 60 hot nights in 2050
  • Sao Paulo: <5 hot nights now vs. up to 80 hot nights in 2050
  • Lagos (Nigeria): <5 hot nights now vs. up to 150 hot nights in 2050

As mentioned in an earlier post, we only need to remember Chicago in 1995 to recall the deadly impact that heat waves can have on urban people.  And as we saw in that unfortunate example, the victims were disproportionately the elderly and African American.

Although we may not be able to mitigate this warming, basic adaptation steps should be set into motion, including re-thinking urban design, making cities more resilient to hot environments, developing better energy and technology solutions (including cooling), installing green roofs, and putting into place emergency disaster plans and social safety nets for vulnerable populations.

¹Mark McCarthy, Martin Best, and Richard Betts (2010). Climate change in cities due to global warming and urban effects Geophysical Research Letters : 10.1029/2010GL042845

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Photo Credit:

As we saw in a previous post, food aid is a complex issue.   On one hand, it’s critical for acute crisis situations where people are starving because of things like war and natural disasters.  On the other hand, in more chronic situations of malnutrition, food aid and cheap imports have the capacity to undermine local food production, which, in the long run, harms the prospect of people feeding themselves through local production.

A farmer’s worst enemy is free food and cheap imports.

In recent years, we have seen this play out in Africa, as Oxfam acknowledges.  MSNBC is running a story today, “With cheap food imports, Haiti can’t feed itself,” about how the same thing has happened there.  Worth reading.

There is also a larger debate at play here about the implications of free trade and industrialized food production.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days.   There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.

I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on.  Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:

• Doctors Without Borders USA
• AmeriCares
• An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.

When hurricane Jeanne swept across the Caribbean, flooding rains killed over 3,000 people in the small nation of Haiti. Only 18 people died in the Dominican Republic on the same island.  Haiti has one of the highest population densities in the Caribbean. Its 8.7 million inhabitants live on less than half the land occupied by 9.4 million Dominicans, so population density is roughly two times greater.  Puerto Rico’s population density is as high as Haiti’s, but only seven people died in the storm.

Why, if Haiti’s population size is similar to the Dominican Republic’s and population density is the same as Puerto Rico’s, did Haiti suffer such a devastating loss of life?  Some argue that the loss of forests, with their capacity to prevent soil erosion, was a main reason why so many people were killed: heavy rains let loose massive mudslides on deforested hillsides.¹

Deforestation of Haiti’s landscape for agriculture and the manufacture of charcoal have left only 3% of the land surface forested.² Charcoal, produced by cutting trees and slow burning them in mud pits, meets about 85% of energy needs as cooking fuel.³ We see a ravaged countryside today and are tempted to blame this on Haiti’s high population density.  What is not as apparent, however, is how environmental degradation stems from a legacy of colonial resource extraction, slavery, corrupt governments, foreign intervention, and choices about energy, agriculture, and industry.

The mudslides and mortality did not occur in surrounding countries, which have less poverty and deforestation.  In fact, forest area is actually increasing in countries like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic where economic growth is rapid. Puerto Rico’s forest cover, for example, has risen from less than 10% to more than 40% in the last 60 years.¹ These forests are recovering on abandoned farmland with the transition from agriculture to industry.

It is therefore too simplistic to blame Haiti’s high population density and consumption of forest resources for the current state of the environment.  Human population growth drives environmental change but is seldom the sole factor behind environmental problems.  Instead, we need to figure out how population changes go hand-in-hand with social, economic, and technological changes so that we can explain environmental impacts.  Understanding and solving environmental challenges often requires simultaneous attention to demographic, economic, political, technological, and cultural values.

Haiti’s indigenous inhabitants practiced subsistence-based agriculture of corn, yams and cassava until their Columbus-era enslavement and genocide. Later, French colonists planted sugar cane in the well-suited warm, wet climate, and developed large, labor-intensive plantations. Throughout the 1700s, France imported thousands of African slaves to Haiti each year such that there were half a million working in 1789. During the colonial period, Haiti’s population was seven times larger than the Dominican Republic’s, which carried forward in time. Haiti exported tens of thousands of tons of sugar and most of the lumber from its forests back to France. The heavy exploitation of land for timber and sugar took a toll on the environment because of widespread land clearing, but it made Haiti one of the most profitable colonies in the Caribbean.

After Haitian independence in the early 19^th century, the nascent government was unable to support its own people in developing cash crops for export. To re-establish trade and diplomatic relations with France, Haiti’s government was forced to pay reparations for land and slaves lost during the revolution.  As much as 80% of Haiti’s budget went to pay these reparations, driving Haiti into significant debt from which it has not yet fully recovered.⁴

Today, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with the lowest combination of lifespan, education, and standard of living of any country outside Africa.⁵ Demographic, social, and economic changes happening elsewhere in the Caribbean are not happening as rapidly in Haiti. The abject poverty in which 80% of the population exists deteriorates the country’s environmental and political conditions and constrains economic development.  People are forced to choose between life in urban slums and life as poor, small-scale, subsistence farmers.  More than a million Haitians have emigrated to the United States and elsewhere since 1950.

In recent decades, many Haitian farmers have abandoned agriculture in search of greater profits from supplying charcoal to large urban and rural populations. With the collapse of agricultural and industrial exports, an unemployment rate of 33%, and sliding deeper into poverty, Haitians are forced to destroy remaining forests for charcoal fuel production. Consumption of natural resources just to stay alive is contributing to degraded environmental conditions.

Fertility remains high in Haiti because of high rates of mortality. Maternal, infant, and child mortality rates are high:  Sixty-eight infants and 52 mothers die for every 1,000 live births each year, and the under-five child mortality rate is 123 children per 1,000.  Haiti also suffers from the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in the Western Hemisphere (5.6% of the population). The leading causes of death are diarrhea, respiratory infections, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS—diseases that are preventable or treatable in more developed countries.  However, 40% of Haitians have no access to health care.⁶ Haiti’s unstable governance, poverty, and environmental degradation exacerbate this need for large families as a social safety net.⁷ This is why simple approaches of reducing fertility, such as government support for contraception, have largely failed in Haiti.

Thus, Haiti’s changes in population and economic welfare, from its subsistence-based land use pattern, to an exploitative resource-extraction system, to a poor society where wealth, industry, and commercial agriculture have pulled out of the country, are not characteristic of the economic pattern—in which increasing economic development begets increased welfare—experienced by much of the developed world over past centuries.

Haiti is battling not only mudslides and earthquakes, but a colonial legacy that has predisposed its people to one devastating crisis after another.

References and Further Reading:

¹Aide, T.M. and H.R. Grau (2004) Globalization, migration, and Latin American ecosystems. Science 305:1915-1916.

²Kaiser, J. (2004) Wounding Earth’s fragile skin. Science 304:1616-1618.

³Collie, T. (2003) We know that this is destroying the land, but charcoal is what keeps us alive. South Florida Sun-Sentinel

⁴Hallward, P. (2004) Option Zero in Haiti. New Left Review 27:23-47

⁵Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse; How Societies Choose to fail or Succeed. Penguin.

⁶Farmer, P. (2004) Political violence and public health in Haiti. New England Journal of Medicine 350:1483-1486.

⁷de Sherbinin, A. (1996)  Human Security and Fertility: The Case of Haiti. Journal of Environment and Development 5(1):28-45.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/kretyen/ / CC BY 2.0

Happy New Year, everyone.  Sorry for the lag in posts, but there wasn’t a lot happening in the news or journals over the past week.

A few years ago, I saw a talk by Thomas Schelling (Nobel laureate in economics) who argued that we need to accelerate the economic development of poor countries so that they are able to cope with climate change.  This analysis is interesting, if not fraught with additional challenges, such as development in a carbon-based energy world hastening the very problem to which these nations are attempting to adapt.

In an article¹ in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), Anthony Patt and colleagues argued that the need for assistance by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is dependent on vulnerability, which, in turn, depends on both exposure to climate change and how socioeconomic factors affect the sensitivity of LDCs to climate change.

To assess this hypothesis, they first examined how deaths caused by disasters (floods, droughts, and storms) varied across the level of development in several LDCs.  They used the UN Human Development Index—HDI, a composite metric of income, education, and life expectancy—as a proxy for development.

Here’s what they found…

As you might expect, they found that deaths declined with increased HDI, but interestingly, the relationship had a peak in the middle, suggesting that as the least-developed countries become more developed, they may actually exacerbate vulnerability to climate change at mid levels of HDI before eventually reducing vulnerability at high levels of HDI.

Next, they focused on Mozambique as a case study.  Using the model of deaths vs. HDI they developed for other countries, they projected how Mozambique’s HDI might change over the next 50 years.  To do this, they linked the HDI to different development scenarios outlined by the IPCC’s Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES):

The A2 storyline describes high population and economic growth but low globalization, whereas the B1 storyline describes greater globalization
tied to improvements in environmental quality and sustainability, as well as lower population growth.

Under both scenarios, carbon increases in the atmosphere, but at different rates and to different degrees.  The authors assumed a linear increase in storms/disasters with rising temperatures, indicating that greater warming in the A2 scenario will lead to more disasters and more potential death than the B1 scenario where warming is not as great.

Following the B1 scenario caused the HDI to rise more quickly than the A1 scenario.  Simply put, society on a more-sustainable path (B1) leads to higher social welfare than under a more fossil-fuel intensive path with higher levels of human population (A2).

Similar to what they found by examining many countries, Mozambique will become more vulnerable to increased deaths as HDI rises over coming decades (by 2030-2040).  However, after 2050, vulnerability declined significantly in the B1 scenario, less so in the A2 scenario.

A few excerpts of their conclusions:

The results suggest that vulnerability may rise faster in the next two decades than in the three decades thereafter. Importantly, the overall need for adaptation measures will continue to rise… However,
assuming that their development paths fall somewhere close to the range bounded by the A2 and B1 scenarios, by the second quarter of the century LDCs will likely engage in a greater share of this adaptation autonomously, thereby reducing both their losses, and their need for financial assistance. This is especially the case if socio-economic conditions change in a manner close to that described in the B1 scenario.

….Looking beyond 2060 and the crossing of temperature thresholds such as 2 °C, it may well be that steadily rising climate impacts—such as sea level rise or the effects of cumulative changes on ecosystems—create problems that go well beyond the ability of any country, rich or poor, to adapt. Until that point, a primary argument for ramping up assistance slowly—namely, that adaptation needs can only increase as climate change continues—is incomplete, because it ignores the role that socio-economic development and the concurrent changes in adaptive capacity will have to play. Although there are important caveats to our results, they provide a first estimate of how vulnerability will unfold over the next 50 years, if one assumes, as do all of the SRES scenarios, that
incomes will continue to rise. They suggest that the urgency of efforts to reduce vulnerability, including the provision of international financial assistance, is high.

One thing the authors acknowledge is that nobody really has a good explanation for the humped relationship of HDI vs. deaths from disasters.  That’s an important part of their results, which suggests that the very poorest nations may experience more suffering in the initial steps of development.  Understanding this would make a great PhD in development economics.

¹Patt, A. et al. (in press) Estimating least-developed countries’ vulnerability to climate-related extreme events over the next 50 years. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/breadfortheworld/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Think of all the reasons why people advocate sustainable food, and the following things probably come to mind:

• Eat organic—to reduce pesticides and nutrient pollution.
• Eat locally—to reducing carbon emissions.
• Eat free-range animal products—to reduce nutrient pollution, energy use, and animal cruelty.
• Eat vegetarian or vegan— to reduce carbon footprints further and eliminate animal cruelty altogether.
• Eat hormone and antibiotic-free animal products— to improve human health.

How about this one?

• Make sure farm workers who grow all of this food and other poor people have access to cheap, healthy, sustainable food.

Not so much.

And that’s probably why Caitlin Donohue wrote the story, “Out of reach: How the sustainable local food movement neglects poor workers and eaters” in today’s San Francisco Bay Guardian Online.

There’s a lot more that can be written on this topic, and there are a growing number of success stories, including

• the urban gardening movement (here, here, here);
• the increasing acceptance of food stamps (now called SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) at farmers’ markets;
• the movement to feed kids healthy school lunches.

The introduction to Donohue’s article frames the cultural disconnect:

On a sunny afternoon in Civic Center Plaza, a remarkable bounty covered a buffet table: coconut quinoa, organic mushroom tabouli, homemade vegan desserts, and an assortment of other yummy treats. The food and event were meant to raise awareness about public school lunches, although it was hard to imagine these dishes, brought by well-heeled food advocates, sitting under the fluorescent lights of a San Francisco public school cafeteria.

The spread was for the Slow Food USA Labor Day “eat-in,” a public potluck meant to publicize the proposed reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, national legislation that regulates the food in public schools. The crowd was in a festive, light-hearted mood. There was a full program of speeches by sustainability experts and a plant-your-own-vegetable-seeds table set up in one corner of the plaza.

A bedraggled couple who appeared homeless made their way through the jovial crowd and started scooping up the food in a way that suggested it had been a long time since their last roasted local lamb shish kebob.

Their presence shouldn’t have been a surprise; most events involving free trips down a food table are geared toward a different demographic in this park, which borders the Tenderloin.

In a flash, an event volunteer was on the case, nervous in an endearingly liberal manner. “Sir,” she began. “This food is for the Child Nutrition Act.” And then she paused, searching for what to say next. I imagined her thinking: “Sir, this food is to raise awareness about the availability of sustainable food to the lower classes, not to be eaten by them,” or, “Sir, this good, healthy, local food is not for you.”

Continue reading here…

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/77043400@N00/ / CC BY-ND 2.0