 My professor, Dr. Lanham, had us discuss a timeline of ecological events in the last 100 years that were important to us. I separated my list into environmental organizations, disasters, media, policy, innovation, and personal events. Some events won't make sense to some environmental people (I'm a big nuclear power advocate and think that the Crocodile Hunter is a demi-god, for example) but I felt it was important to list these events for easy access and a reminder next time I forget when Earth First was founded or how much advocacy work has occurred in the last century.
Environmental organizations When I learned of the environmental organizations in the United States, I didn’t feel alone in my local efforts. I didn’t know anything about the conservation movement as a whole, let alone the history or national players. At the time, I was focused on cleaning wetlands and learning about plants. Understanding that there were organized groups with specific focused on land and biodiversity conservation changed my entire perspective. 1935 – The Wilderness Society is founded 1947 – Defenders of Wildlife was founded 1948 – The IUCN is founded 1951 – The Nature Conservancy is founded 1961 – World Wildlife Fund is founded 1967 – Environmental Defense Fund is founded 1970 – National Resource Defense Council is founded 1971 – Greenpeace is founded 1977 – Sea Shepherd is founded 1980 – Earth First is founded 1987 – Conservation International is founded 1988 – IPCC is established Disasters When I was developing my relationship with conservation I saw the threats to the environment as chronic, persistent, and ubiquitous threats from constant habitat destruction and pollution. While I don’t diminish any of those threats and still see them as the primary causes of concern, I had never experienced the trauma of a major catastrophe as I did with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon event. The impacts of that event motivated an entire shift in how I approach conservation issues. 1928 – Thomas Midgley develops chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) 1929 – Swann Chemical Company develops polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) 1939 – DDT was used as an insecticide 1946 – GI Bill allows for low cost loans for the suburban housing boom, and subsequent sprawl to occur 1957 – KB Homes is founded and is the first home-building company to be traded on the NYSE 1969 – Santa Barbara oil spill 1969 – Cuyahoga River Fire 1984 – Bhopal disaster 1986 – Chernobyl 1989 – Exxon Valdez oil spill 2010 – Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill 2016 – Dakota Pipeline construction started 2017 – President Obama left office 2018 – East China Sea oil spill Media The Crocodile Hunter was my favorite show as a teenager and I tried to watch every episode possible. When he died in 2006, I was devastated. I built my environmental education programs around his philosophies and from that found that many other people considered his work an inspiration. 1949 – Sand County Almanac is published 1962 – Silent Spring is published 1968 – Apollo 8 picture of Earthrise is taken 1968 – Desert Solitaire is published 1997 – First episode of the Crocodile Hunter airs Policy The Endangered Species Act, with all of its flaws, is my favorite American policy. It is truly impressive and its scope is a philosophical and paradigmatic shift. I hope that there is a current trend that will involved another shift in intrinsic, holistic, and eco-centric values: nonhuman persons’ rights. The first official declaration of nonhuman persons’ rights is with India declaring dolphins and whales as such. 1970 – First Earth Day 1972 – Marine Mammal Protection Act 1972 – Clean Water Act 1973 – Endangered Species Act 1987 – Brundtland Commission is published 1987 – Montreal Protocol is signed 1992 – The Rio Earth Summit 1997 – Kyoto Protocol 2006 – California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (Assembly Bill 32) 2010 – Citizen’s United Supreme Court ruling 2013 – India declares dolphins and whales are non-human persons 2017 – New Zealand gives legal rights as humans to a river and a mountain Innovation Until a remarkable lecture I heard in 2012, I had never considered the positive power of technological innovation on conservation other than solar panels. Until then, I had always thought that technology was related to consumerism which negatively affected biodiversity conservation. In this presentation I learned that whale conservation started not because altruism but because refined oil and electricity were cheaper and more efficient than whale oil. The technological innovation decreased the need to exploit whales. Since then, I’ve tried to look at the impact of technology, positive or negative, on conservation. 1954 – The first nuclear power plant generates electricity 1958 – Mauna Loa Observatory begins monitoring CO2 levels 1968 – First formal acknowledgment of the Green Revolution of modern agriculture 1975 – Catalytic converters are included on all vehicles 1984 – Solar Energy Generating Systems opens thermal power station in Mojave Desert 2009 – 9 Planetary Boundaries concept 2017 – Doughnut Economics concept published Personal I’m really proud of my personal conservation history. I’ve accomplished a lot in accordance to my values and I’ve worked hard to achieve meaningful conservation metrics. I’ve had several significant events in my personal conservation history. All of the following are memorable but when I saw a wetland restored and opened up to the Pacific for the first time in 100 years in 2006, I saw that it was possible to fix things. 2003 – I started volunteering for environmental causes 2003 - I saw my first California Least Tern 2003 - I saw my first endangered species – a butterfly 2004 - I saw my first California Sea Otter 2005 – I sailed from Boston to southern California via the Panama Canal for an environmental non-profit 2005 - I did my first research on an endangered species 2005 - I saw my first endangered plant – Salt Marsh Bird’s Beak 2005 - I saw my first Western Snowy Plover 2005 - I started my first environmental company 2006 - Bolsa Chica Wetlands are opened to the Pacific Ocean for the first time in 100 years 2006 – The Baiji was declared extinct and I baked my first Fuck the World Cake 2006 - I hired my first employee 2006 - I saw my first Peregrine Falcon 2007 - El Nino where giant Humboldt Squid came north from Mexico, bringing Orcas down 2008 - I set up my environmental internship program 2009 – California Brown Pelicans are delisted 2009 - I worked in Chilean Patagonia 2009 - Los Cerritos Wetlands Authority is formed 2009 – Western Peregrine Falcons are delisted 2010 - I advocated in California’s Senate House for the first time 2010 - I worked on swordfish conservation in Hawaii 2011 – The Western Black Rhinoceros was declared extinct and I baked a Fuck the World Cake 2011 - I met Jared Diamond 2011 - I received my first $100k check for environmental work 2012 – A wetland I worked on, Colorado Lagoon, is restored 2013 - I met Joy Zedler 2013 – The Formosan clouded leopard was declared extinct and I baked a Fuck the World Cake 2013 - I received my first contract to work on an endangered species 2014 – Traveled to Iceland as photography assistant 2014 - I saw my first California Condor 2015 - I started my conservation radio show and podcast 2015 - I worked in Montana on technical conservation work 2015 - I worked in New Zealand on duck conservation 2016 - Obama approves federal designation of San Gorgonio 2017 – Chilean Patagonia is protected 2017 - I saw the endangered Red-Cockaded Woodpecker
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I learned a lot this week. Not too much from my classes but because I think I read more than normal. Two cross-country flights and a day of down time were filled with too much reading. I learned about Salgado, Neotony, and Resilience vs Adaptation. I also destroyed Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty and am still recovering from his analysis and predictions of current patrimonial capitalism.. Sebastio Salgado Holy hell this is good photographer. Now in his 70s, Salgado focuses on victims of globalization and postmodern capitalism primarily but he’s been turning his camera toward environmental issues later in his career. A Brazilian who resides in Paris, Salgado got his Economics PhD in his 20s, picked up a camera in his early 30s and created the rest of his globe-trotting photojournalist existence from there. I’m picking up his big (I mean BIG!) environmental photo book called Genesis from the Clemson Library this week and am pretty excited. His website is here: https://www.amazonasimages.com/ but if you just google images his name you will find better results.    Neotony
The way I understood this through a text I came across was as length of parental investment (18 years for humans, 0 time for Sea Turtles, etc) or even length of gestation (9 months for humans, 2 years for elephants, etc). But, looking it up Neoteny is more about “the retention by adults of traits previously seen only in the young.” Humans are neotenous as they look generally the same as babies. Resilience and Adaptation I’ve been using Resilient wrong. From Angela Duckworth, Paul Tough, and the positive psychology movement, I learned of the importance of resilient behavior through human development stages. However, I had always used it as the ability to adapt to situations. I’ve used Adaptive Management as it is technically defined, adjusting your strategy to achieve goals. However, I learned from Dan Flores’ American Serengeti that resiliency is maintaining the same strategy, or in the case of evolution - the same physical development, in regards to challenges. Adaptation however is doing whatever is necessary to survive the challenge. I am going to play with these concepts more. This week was the first where I got into my schedule fully. 55 hours of classwork, research, and studying. I'm in it fully. The three this week are Standard Deviation, Ecosystem People and Biosphere People, and the intertwined concepts of Community, Social Capital, and Social Value. Standard Deviation A friend’s family member asked me earlier this summer what I would be, what I would do, if I wasn’t in conservation and if there were no limitations keeping me from that career. I was stumped. I choose conservation for specific reasons: it’s one of the only things that keeps my interest, I see conservation as having global importance and meaning, not very many answers are known in the field, it has the ability to be adventurous and exciting. Nothing much else meets these criteria for me (plus, I’m not really good at anything else). After a couple weeks of thought on that whole “no limitations” thing however, it occurred to me that I would be a Theoretical Physicist. Oh my goodness, how amazing would that be?! I’m fascinated by simple ideas like velocity, gravity, and light let alone dark matter, black holes, and subatomic physics. But then there is the math, the arcane and obscure markings on the wall, the incantations that explain the natural world. I’ve never been inclined towards numbers. I’m more of a colors and shapes and shiny objects person. The scrawl upon the blackboard in those old Einstein photos are a terrifying bouncer at the physicist club. The concept of a Standard Deviation is basic for anyone past high school math. However, to someone who studied art but has been fascinated by the wizards who can manipulate numbers this is an idea that has confused me. In working with the environment you hear it occasionally: well, this population is within one standard deviation. Well, why is it standard? What are you deviating from? How does deviating standardly from anything tell you anything meaningful? In statistics we’ve been moving at a breakneck speed (for me). We covered standard deviation around day 4 and have moved on and are approaching week 5 quickly. But wait a second, I’m still staring at this equation trying to figure out how the magician pulled the doves out of his sleeves.  I’ve asked questions in class and stared meaninglessly at the textbook but it just didn’t make sense. I put some YouTube videos on and found the exercises at the end of the chapter. Four hours later a sense of enlightenment that had gradually enmeshed my brain peaked into understanding and transcended into a larger connection: the language the wizards use is … knowable. I think the larger connection was not much more than a dissolving of my preconceived assumptions that math is unknowable but still it was huge for me (although, now that I figured it out it looks easy – so it goes).
I figured out how to calculate a Standard Deviation. While the stats professor went over it I still feel I taught it to myself. The idea that I could do that caught me off-guard – I didn’t know I could teach myself this stuff. I’m still struggling with probability, null hypothesis equations, and Z tables but after conquering this concept I feel empowered to undertake these other ideas. Maybe Theoretical Physics isn’t as far off as I had believed (or didn’t even know I believed)… Ecosystem People and Biosphere People This is a simple concept and almost not even worth elaborating on but it is both new vocabulary to me and vocabulary that frames the narrative new. Ecosystem people are those who are dependent on their local environment for basic needs (e.g. burning gathered wood for your food, trekking to the local water hole and carrying it back, etc). Biosphere people are “urban dwellers of the industrialized societies and people engaged in high-input agriculture and animal husbandry…They do not depend on local ecosystems for their basic needs; the catchment area for their resource needs is the whole biosphere.” I like this binary better than first-world/third-world or developed/underdeveloped. It speaks to the usage and the material engagement better. I’m going to continue to under this paradigm when looking at conservation issues. Social Capital, Social Value, and Community In my philosophy course we’re reading about Community, Social Capital, and Social Value and how people respond to these ideas through everyday life and through their leisure. As someone on the introverted end of the scale but also as someone who deeply appreciates quality relationships and a community that is stronger than the sum of its parts, I resonated with these readings. The researcher Troy Glover comments that “community is ironically one of the most palpable comforts and anxieties of our time.” He distinguishes between the various terms stating that “community and social capital are different, albeit complementary. Community is a source of social capital, and social capital represents the value of community.” Basically, “social capital is premised upon the notion that an investment (in social relations) will result in a return (some benefit or profit) to the individual…” We have this belief that the more you put in to a community (be it your neighborhood, church, colleagues, etc) it will give you something tangible. But that return of profit is rarely tangible. The result you get from “investing” in a community is seen through emotions, through a sense of safety, or a sense of purpose. A type of neurosis occurs when normal concepts of “capital” are conflated with social capital. You can’t withdraw your investment at any point because “social capital is not embodied in any particular person, but rather is embedded in social relationships, even though it is realized by individuals. If the relationship fails to endure, social capital, presumably, diminishes, perhaps even disappearing altogether.” When you withdraw your investment, you demolish the investment, the currency, and potentially future earnings. In trying to relate them to conservation I am reminded that conservation is a social study, a values-based field, and dependent upon human decisions and interactions. Conservation, in the end, isn’t about how conservationists view the world; it’s about developing positive relationships between humans and nature that benefit both individually and mutually. This manifests itself through working to benefit humans through increased market and labor opportunities, benefitting nature through increased ecological structure and function, and benefitting them both mutually through an intersection of creative solutions to develop both. Once you withdraw the investment you collapse the relationship. I’m wondering if we can reverse the paradigm from exploitation of nature to one of “additionality” (another concept I learned that will be shared later) for humans and nature? I’m wondering if we can do that through a social capital framework?
 The American Lion is an extinct megafauna species of southern California. A giant predatory cat, it relied on other large mammals (deers, sloths, horses, bison, mammoths, etc) for food. There is evidence that early North American people contributed to its extinction. To slow or even stop current human-caused extinction, we need to learn about our interactions with rare animals. **A friend and enviro-artist, Alicia Murphy, asked me to write an article for a zine that was to be released for a show she was doing. It was my honor and I wrote about endangered species. You can find info on the zine and her music here: aliciamurphymusic.com. Below is the full article with photos... ** There are 450 of them. They used to follow giants to wait for their carcasses to open up and share their rancid muscular tissue. They fly thousands of feet in the air throughout the Southwest. There are between a thousand and two thousand of them. Each can fit within a small coffee mug and they look exactly like beach sand. When they move in a group, it looks like the entire dune has shifted. There are a little more than 2,500 of them. They use tools, they like to hang out with each other and they like to argue. They are constantly in cold water, are not fish and have no thick layers of fat to keep them warm. There are, well, no one knows how many there are. But they travel from Alaska to Patagonia seemingly on a whim and have been doing that with their six cousin species for about 100 million years. Two birds, a mammal and a turtle. These animals are what are known as Endangered Species and they share that dubious distinction – and protection- with about two thousand other plant and animal species in the United States. Of the 2,000 nationally, there are about 130 animal species and about 180 plant species federally listed in California. They are either listed as Endangered or Threatened and about 75% of them have Recovery Plans that are publicly accessible repositories of knowledge of the specimen’s life history, taxonomy, threats, and conservation actions with associated costs. The people studying them can tell you how much it will cost to recover these animals and when that will occur. But what they cannot do is tell you why you should want to or why you should care at all. If you make the effort to search them out, I think you will get a better understanding though.  The release of 3 highly endangered California Condors at Vermillion Cliffs, Arizona in September 2014. The event gathered about 100 people and it was celebrated by kids, cub scouts, birders, politicians, and USFWS representatives. The first on the list above is the California Condor and it is not a pretty bird. Ugly and nasty, it soars with a wingspan about as big as most garage doors searching for large dead animals. The second animal is the Western Snowy Plover and it took all of the cuteness from the Condor plus some. The third is the highly intelligent Sea Otter and the last is famous for its role in Finding Nemo as Squirt, the Pacific Green Sea Turtle. I choose them not for their looks or their benefit to humans but because you can spend a Saturday morning searching them out and still be back in downtown Los Angeles for dinner. You can be your own Jacques Cousteau or Crocodile Hunter and find an animal that is so rare and special that you can go to Federal Prison if you touch them (don’t touch them). I recommend making the small effort to get to Santa Barbara for the Plover or to Long Beach for the Turtle because they are on the razor’s edge of whether they will exist in abundance or if they will be gone from our planet forever within the next 20 years. They are the Mona Lisas, the Rodin sculptures, and the Gutenberg Bibles of the natural world. Endangered species are even more precious and unique however for at least three critical reasons: they are the living, breathing evidence of 3.8 billion years of trying to make life work; they are creating themselves anew constantly; and they have no viable replacement. It is as if the Mona Lisa painted its own self over four eras to look perfect within the Louvre’s lighting while simultaneously creating replicas of itself that are all slightly different from the original but live within adjacent galleries. This metaphor may be a scientific stretch but it gives you a glimpse of the rarity of what we are looking at when we see an Otter scream and belch while wrapped in seaweed.  The Western Snowy Plover is an endangered bird that nests and plays on the dunes of southern California. Endangered species are plants and animals that were already occupying a (mostly) small specific niche, filling a critical role within their ecosystem until generalists came in (due to almost exclusively human reasons) and did better than them. To stretch another analogy, a generalist is like a Walmart or a McDonalds: they adapt - they have the ability to. But the endangered species is the café down the street from you or the small architecture office that knows your neighborhood well and can design the most appropriate building for that vacant lot. Genetically, they care about the community they’re in. Don’t get me wrong, endangered species, like all species, would become generalists in a heartbeat and devour what they could without hesitation. But they don’t and there are reasons why. Why do they care about the niche they are in, what relationships do they have that we can learn from? How do they interact with the nearby marketable foodcrops? What kind of disease resistant fungi are they utilizing, depending upon or pointing to? What genetic capacities have they uniquely expressed over the past several eras of their own evolution? We have an opportunity to figure out why these special and specialized taxa have ‘decided’ to express themselves in the way they have. If a species disappears, the ancient genetic lineage dies with it and so does the future of any further evolution from that source. What that means is that no more unique representation of life can occur from that taxon and that is the only way life exists at all: through myriad and rich representations. Life isn’t the static snapshot of what exists at a single moment but the potential within any given range of time to flourish anew. Extinction stops life now and the capacity for future life. The animals listed above I chose because you have a good chance of seeing them and they are captivating enough to make the travel worthwhile. But California is a biological treasure trove and there are special plants and animals all over the place. Outside of Hawaii, California has the highest biodiversity in the United States, some of the most endemism (meaning they can’t be found anywhere else), and southern California in particular is considered one of twelve biodiversity ‘hotspots’ on the planet. So, short of a coral reef or the Amazon, you’re living in a place chock-a-bloc teeming with life. With so much life it only makes sense that we would also have higher than normal levels of special plants and animals – and we do. Beyond the endangered ones, we also have individual Bristlecone Pine trees that were born when Jesus was, Creosote and Spiny Lobsters that are theorized to be immortal (except by predation), and the Ocotillo (an oddly majestic, almost-cactus plant species) that might be one the newest species on earth. Searching for the rare species will find these other specialists as well. Beyond experiencing the wonder of them and beyond enjoying the biological world we live in, endangered species study and conservation is downright revolutionary. In his book Listed, Joe Roman wrote that endangered species represent a pivotal point for us as a species. He elegantly wrote that the Endangered Species Act is “an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. [It] is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing – the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but it’s available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary—and as American—as the Declaration of Independence” (emphasis added).The legislation is revolutionary and when he says ‘unprecedented’, he means not only unprecedented in environmental work but unprecedented as a species. It is an unprecedented, revolutionary piece of cultural expression for our species (any species) to care significantly about species not our own. The truly weird part of that statement is that Roman is not being cavalier or sensational. It is possible to figure out culturally how to stop the sixth great extinction that is occurring right now and the only one occurring due to a species (us) and not a geological cataclysm. There are good examples of how humans have fixed this. Go to any California beach and you will see California Brown Pelicans that were on the verge of extinction in the ‘70’s. Drive up near Hearst Castle and you will see giant Elephant Seals that were hunted down to 2 animals in 1892. On the downtown skyscrapers of Long Beach, Los Angeles, and San Diego you will find the west coast subspecies of the Peregrine Falcon- the fastest flying bird in the world- that recovered from only a handful of chicks 40 years ago. All of these animals have been removed from the endangered species list by humans working diligently to do so. It is possible to save these animals, to pull them from the brink of oblivion. In most cases professionals know how to but for the average person, we don’t know why we should.  This is an endangered Green Sea Turtle in San Gabriel River. The photo is by Kathryn Boyd Batstone and my company partners with the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust to lead educational tours of this species. In Long Beach, I help lead education tours to share the Green Sea Turtles with the public. I have been criticized for doing so under the rationale that the less people that know about them, the less threat there will be to the turtles. This runs counter to the whole point and purpose of education. The legislation for saving Pelicans and Peregrines needed voter support, it needed an educated and passionate constituency. The more that we as a society choose to learn, the more we choose to value and prioritize. This is why I encourage you to visit these endangered species: visit them, learn about them, share your experience with your friends, give money to organizations working on them, vote for them, and be vocal in your support of them when necessary. More than is probably healthy, I am a pragmatist and so I always ask myself why something deserves my attention or energy. Endangered species have confused me because I have no great, all-powerful answer to why I should care about them. Nevertheless I do and the unsatisfying yet implacable answer, the one I can never get away from, is that I get the opportunity to care about them. I recommend you take that opportunity as well and visit some of the places I have listed below or on my website and I hope the experience is as empowering to you also. For more information: [email protected] TidalInfluence.com PracticePraxis.org/ecology.html Green Sea Turtles Long Beach, California Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust LCWLandTrust.org California Condors Big Sur, California Ventana Society ventanaws.org/wildlife_sanctuaries/ Western Snowy Plovers Santa Barbara, California UC Santa Barbara coaloilpoint.ucnrs.org/SnowyPloverProgram.html Southern Sea Otters Morro Rock Morro Bay, California (you can also visit them at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach) When I was working on a habitat assessment report back in 2011 and documenting how many birds and other animals we had, it occurred to me that I had very little to reference the numbers I was finding to. How many bird species are there in the world? How many snake species exist in California? How many marine mammals are there right off the shore and how many of all them are protected under the Endangered Species Act? I didn't know and I thought it would be great to put that in the report I was writing. But I found it way too difficult to pull those numbers together. So, after some starts and stops and losing and gaining focus since then, I got pretty far after finding NatureServe. The image below has my first compiled draft of this work but it is woefully inadequate. I still need to fill out many more cells, explain some of the information I do have, and cite everything. But, in the meantime, here is what I have pulled together for biodiversity:  I’m drawn to them. I don’t know why. I’ve tried to figure it out but haven’t come up with a good enough answer yet. Endangered species and threatened non-traditionally marketable habitats facing destruction (wetlands, deserts, and the arctic as opposed to logging forests, prairies for agriculture, etc) got me into the environmental world originally. I used to call them the ‘Expendables’ but then a shitty movie was made that had nothing to with ecological concerns. But both the endangered species and special habitats are frankly expendable and have been historically of limited concern to us. Both share the dubious distinction of 1) being exploited directly or indirectly and 2) a difficult argument of why to protect or save them. Working in southern California wetlands, I have focused on the exploitation and argument for that habitat and have touched barely on the work of a few other habitats as well as some endangered species. There have been many guiding intellectuals whose work has propelled my efforts in wetlands, specifically Joy Zedler and Schoenherr. Dr. Zedler did the incredible work of putting dollar amounts to wetlands globally and Schoenherr does work on understanding California habitats. But what made the issue crystal clear for me was EO Wilson’s Future of Life. He conceptualized and contextualized many things but two that are relevant here: the dozen Biodiversity Hotspots and HIPPO. The Hotspots are referenced on my Eco page but they show the 12 most important places that contain the most biodiversity with high levels of endemism. Basically, if we lose or damage irretrievably one of the places on that list, we lose what’s found at that place forever – it will not be found anywhere else now or in the future. HIPPO is an acronym for the 5 most important threats to biodiversity on the planet: Habitat destruction, Invasive species, Pollution, Population, and Overharvesting. These five are not just destroying habitat that contains plants and animals but the plant and animal species that have evolved since prokaryotes over 3.6 billion years ago and have been shucking and jiving, bobbing and weaving through 5 great extinction events.  EO Wilson's HIPPO with Heinrich Kley's hippo That leads us into the current state of our planet, what is being called the anthropocene due to the 6th great extinction event: human impact (the other 5 being ‘natural’ ones: end of Cretaceous and non-avian dinosaurs, end of the Triassic, end of the Permian and 96% of everything, end of the Devonian, and the end of the Ordovician-Silurian). And that leads me into the big question: Why Save Endangered Species? If a small marsupial dies on a remote island in the south Pacific, am I affected? If a dusty brown sparrow living in a salt marsh in Orange County, California ceases to exist as a species, does that matter to an Ethiopian family struggling to gather water, let alone food? Why would we as a species allocate resources into saving other species when we’ve got existential concerns of our own? I don’t know how to answer that well enough to convince an industrialist or someone living below the poverty line that we should.  Timeline spiral of the planet's history Douglas Adams spent his entire Last Chance to See convincing us that Endangered Species (and by extension, all species) are there to be enjoyed and seen and championed. It is a gift, and we need to protect that gift. EO Wilson has many arguments but they all revolve around a similar concept that he calls Biophilia: as humans we have an inherent and innate love of all things life. David Quammen proposed another parallel argument in his Monsters of God. We lose a major part of our psyche when we lose the real world components that helped to create our psyche –the plants and animals that we evolved around (in his book he was specifically talking about the animals that struck the fear of god/s in us). These are all great and they all basically return to a moral argument. But I can’t put weight behind a morality; I can’t walk into a meeting to negotiate land-use with a conflict of values (as all environmental workers, I have, and it can be… de-moralizing). Morality is fantastic to steer the larger memetic discussion and to inspire humanity toward achieving a greater universal self and surmounting previously unattainable concepts (civil rights, space travel, removing religion from civic policy, etc) but it doesn’t offer nuts and bolts very well. So, in addition to the above thinkers, I picked up Jane Goodall, The 6th Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, The Great Ape Project by Cavalieri and Singer, Jeff Corwin’s 100 Heartbeats, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and reviewed the USFWS and NMFS websites to answer Why Save Endangered Species. I like them all and appreciate them but I found much in Listed by Joe Roman. Listed takes the reader through the in’s and out’s, the history, the implications good and bad, and the efficacy of the United State’s Endangered Species Act.  Roman sold me on his book 48 pages in when he exclaimed so elegantly what I’ve been toying around with and trying to understand: the Endangered Species Act is “an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. [It] is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing – the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but it’s available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary—and as American—as the Declaration of Independence” (emphasis added).The legislation is revolutionary and when he says ‘unprecedented’, he means not only unprecedented in environmental work but unprecedented as a species. It is an unprecedented, revolutionary piece of cultural expression for our species (any species) to care significantly about species not our own. So, Why? Why care and Why save endangered species? His absolute best argument caught me off-guard because it is so confusingly simple: “Extinction doesn’t fuel evolution; it chips away at the raw material…it creates a depauperate Earth… and leaves little opportunity for speciation.”(44) It not only kills life but the potential for life. I hadn’t thought of it in these terms before but I guess I had just assumed that with more species dying off, more niches for more new life would fill those niches. But, oh so obviously, evolution is slower than opportunistic generalists (rats, pigeons, starlings and people). Beyond that terrific argument it comes down to money and that logic is unsatisfying to an environmentalist but fantastic to any other sensible person. But you have to take the not so big leap of faith that Endangered Species and the Endangered Species Act is the “edge behind the axe of habitat protection” and habitat protection is important. Endangered Species “have become the flagship for their ecosystem” – basically a tool to work on saving larger habitats. There are three economic factors at work:
Those are good but what would satisfy the ‘Why?’ for me? What would give me more than the value-argument? Anything that provides or assists with human basic needs development (health; safety; access to food, water, shelter; and the opportunity for individual betterment) would help me out. Economics and a criticalness to a habitat (especially one that is marketable) would do that. Satisfying those criteria are necessary for an environmental worker when communicating to people who haven’t drank the kool-aid of ecological importance yet and are focused myopically on bottom-lines.  9 global dangers to human health Kevin Kelly tells us in his What Technology Wants that “choice without value is stultifying but value without choice is equally dry.” For me, then, what is at the heart of this difficulty, I think, is the inability to quantify empathy for a non-human species, let alone a non-human system, because we have never had to. All of our previous fights as humans have been with other humans over other resources or home for other humans. With all of this in consideration, maybe taking a step back and realizing how unprecedented this actually is becomes the novel challenge of Endangered Species conservation. Endangered Species work no longer becomes a question of whether we should or should not save them but could then be seen as an opportunity for us as a species to exhibit true altruism, to exhibit empathy as never before, to push the bounds of our species’ capabilities. We could choose to see the Endangered Species work as an experiment of how humans will value non-marketable aspects of a world we are creating anew. The work on endangered species could be what we need to express our capacities, to teach us social emotional intelligence, to teach us the quantifiable measures of systems-thinking, to show us how we approach the very real challenge of losing the capacity for life on this planet while simultaneously pursuing economic motivations for technological innovation that will help us meet our global basic needs. The lessons learned facing and succeeding at this challenge will prove beneficial when we try as a species to conquer other ‘expendable’ non-market concepts for our own betterment and survival; to start with: the right of universal access to sustainable energy and the internet, a full global defense against impact from outer-space bombardment, and the absolute banishment of genetic and epigenetic diseases worldwide. Endangered Species work will teach us the lessons of how to create the world we want to live on; a world full of life and full of the capacity to express even more life. 
Mr. Nordhaus says this is the vision of the post-apocalyptic world I fear. It is a lived experience for many and to get us past this, energy needs to be worked with rather than fought.
“The great Existential Environmental Threat that we keep hearing about where we all live in a post-apocalyptic world is basically what the average Somali lives like now. What that is is poverty, what that is is energy poverty.” Mr. Nordhaus, Chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, ended his presentation at last night’s Aquatic Academy with this answer to a participant’s question. That startled me. That startled me partially because I believe that he is right in asserting that globally we are striving for more than that. It also startled me because I can’t imagine that I, as a wealthy Westerner, am so blind to not understand that that feared world is not one of a lack of (or polluted) natural resources but a world that is too poor to access those natural resources. That is too simplistic a view for the plight of an East African famine but it does spark a thought within my head that the causes are only partially environmental and more a case of tribal terrorism, gangsterism, corporate and foreign exploitation, wealth inequality, political corruption, the all-too biological characteristic of congregating and reproducing en masse, and the geographic luck of the draw as far as natural resources go. It makes me think that with better technologies of political development and more wealth for more people, the environmental concerns are exactly what Mr. Shellenberger described as “trade-offs” that will be addressed.
Mr. Nordhaus followed Mr. Steve Chazen, president of Occidental Petroleum. Both individuals shared that there is a growing global trend of oil and gas consumption that will not stop anytime soon. This has nothing to say about morality or whether it is “right or wrong” that this trend is growing but that it is the reality. In fact, the only morality presented by either speaker was whether it is “right” to deny anybody in the world access to energy needs that are available to everyone else. I had to write down my question because I have difficulty understanding how I feel about this information. Here is the question that took me four weeks to articulate: “To get to a ‘green’ planet that addresses environmental concerns and raises the basic needs for 9 billion people, a cheap and clean energy is required. With our best science now, your position is that cheap and clean energy is nuclear and solar. To get there, to get away from high emissions, we need a good transition fuel and that is shale gas or fracking. Mr. Shellenberger mentioned last week that we need to consciously address the “environmental trade-offs” along the way but if we continue down this path, wont the environmental trade-offs become too large? Wont events like the Deepwater blowout and Fukishima hit a tipping point that will destroy the Earth before we get to that point?” His response was perfect: there is little to no scientific evidence that those large-scale events did much lasting harm. Additionally, there is little evidence that there has ever been a tipping point that we as humans haven’t been able to innovate ourselves past. Dr. Schubel carried the response further by saying that the organics from agriculture coming down the Mississippi for over two hundred years has done far, far worse to the Gulf than the Deepwater blowout. His response is that we’ve found that nature is not fragile and we have found that it responds well to anomalies and resiliently bounces back but does not respond well to chronic problems. Dr. Schubel ended by saying that environmentalists are losing this effort and we are losing it big. My question to that is: what are we losing then? And that goes to the heart of the discussion presented by this Aquatic Academy. These new paradigms are waking up to a reality that no matter what, consumer trends are not changing and even if they do, it is absolute fantasy, a mathematical impossibility to believe that we will achieve 350 ppm Carbon in the atmosphere. Our focus needs to be to save our biodiversity, keep our wild-lands wild, raise the global wealth and access to basic needs, and work toward transitioning to cheap and clean energy. In the science fiction parlance that I know, this means taking us to a Type 1 Civilization on the Kardashev scale. And as David Deutsch points out, this is the only way to achieve humanity’s Beginning of Infinity. 
this graphic is awesome and is from the Breakthrough Institute Facebook Page
I'm going to start with summary of what an Eco Modernist wants first:
The reason I want to start with it is because the way those come about is through the non-environmental-orthodoxy strategy of supporting the exploration of fracking and nuclear energy. The Aquarium of the Pacific hosted another speaker at the Aquatic Academy course last night. The talk was as controversial as the previous two classes. Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute spoke about using a new narrative to understand the human relationship with nature and specifically the human relationship with exploiting natural resources. Creatively, Mr. Shellenberger made parallels between the Judeo-Christian trope of a morality that promotes more austerity to achieve harmony. Using the tenets of the religious idea that if we a)recognize we are sinful, b) repent for our sinful ways, c) discipline our sinful desires toward more praising of the Ideal, then we will achieve Heaven. He then compared this to the findings of Cognitive Therapy, where Dr. Aaron Beck found that depressed people have the same three things in common: a)My world is bleak, b) I'm no good, c) My future is hopeless. And to tie it all together, Mr. Shellenberger used both of those narratives to explain the dominating paradigm in the Environmental Movement since the 1970's: human behavior is a greedy consumption-based exploitation that is virus-like and that we need to consume less and be less so that we can live in harmony with nature. Using the Eco-Modernist label that Slate gave him and his colleague, Ted Nordhaus, Mr. Shellenberger states that the orthodox environmental movement is anything but orthodox. Using the the Tennessee Valley Authority as his first of several examples, he shows that what were termed 'environmental efforts' involved a paradigm that benefited humans as well. In essence, he is talking about the Nature vs Humans binary that I have grown up with in my own understanding of the environmental paradigm in ten years of conservation work. He exposes the dubious foundation of the development of this binary and discusses, although not explicitly, William Denevan's discussion of the idea of the Pristine Myth - the myth that indigenous cultures lived in harmony with their surroundings. This is Daniel Quinn's idea of Leavers and Takers presented through his talking primate, Ishamel. The reason this is a myth is that hunter and gatherer/nomad/tribal people did not live in harmony with their surroundings. Instead, they did anything they could to survive because conditions no matter where you live are harsh. For example, evidence is shown that many of the East Coast forests were planted by native peoples, that regular large-scale burning was utilized to hunt game, and damming of rivers and tributaries was a regular occurrence. People did what they needed to to survive. And, as Robert Wright and Steve Pinker point out, the world was more violent as well partially because of the scarcity of resources. Shellenberger mentions that the Environmental Movement has had two accomplishments. First, it has put in our heads that we need to reduce the environmental footprint and, second, that we can live in harmony with nature. His thesis is that while reducing our footprint is exactly what we need to do, the second accomplishment is not possible and that it actually undermines the first. If we are to apply the Nature Vs Humans binary for a second (to understand his argument in terms I can understand), it seems his focus from an environmental perspective is saving as much wild-lands as possible and the rest stems from that. Intuited in this sentiment is the restoration of degraded lands, the consolidation of 'human-influenced' lands (cities, agriculture, etc) and conversion of under-utilized production land toward more wild-lands - primarily, low/non producing agricultural fields. Of the Big Nine Planetary Boundaries that Jared Diamond talks about in Collapse and that were identified by Johan Rockstram's team from the Stockholm Resilience Center, this perspective deals easily with only a couple of them. Not explicit though is how to deal with air, water, and land pollution, and from what I understand he terms those issues as "trade-offs." 
I scanned this from a magazine a long time ago but cannot remember which one. It most likely is an old Scientific American but could easily be from National Geographic.
I have yet to process the information that Mr. Shellenberger presented but I like the foundation that he works from. Particularly, I am uncertain whether minimizing the 'human' footprint should be the number one priority of the environmental movement. But I do understand and enjoy the logic that the 'trade-offs' of pollution can be solved if our footprint becomes our focus. This is an admirable thread that is found from Thoreau to Gary Snyder, where Snyder wanted to the massive consolidation of cities and urban planning that involves 500 years. For the Eco Modernist, the primary goal is a greater and faster energy transition. The paradigm that would entail what I started with:
I'm curious to see how the Breathrough Institute plays with these thoughts more and I will definitely be following their innovative thought.  Jesse Ausubel studies our 'pulses' of energy consumption and what that means. A summary of his talk is that we are doing more with less and that with focusing on innovation and dematerialization we can get ourselves out of the current environmental problem. Last night at the Aquarium of the Pacific’s Aquatic Academy class, speaker Jesse Ausubel presented Creativity and Innovation Got Us Into This Pickle and They are Our Only Way Out; What Will It Take? It May Surprise You. Mr. Ausubel is the Director of the Program for the Human Environment and Senior Research Associate at The Rockefeller University. He presented one of the most intriguing and curious environmental lectures that I have ever seen. Ausubel’s talk flies directly in the face of the “Doom and Gloom” environmentalism and is a kindred spirit to Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature thesis (that society is getting less violent as we progress), David Deustch’s Beginning of Infinity thought (that humans as creators of our own destiny have developed the foundation for infinite growth), and Robert Wright’s NonZero philosophy (that society is progressing toward better on every important metric).
Mr. Ausubel shows a way out of the environmental mess by showing that in many ways we are on our way out. Using Population Growth, Agriculture, and Consumption as his main points, he shows that we while we have more people than ever, that agriculture “is the single biggest rapist of our land”, and that we as a globe consume too much, the trends are not what we are led to believe. Population explosion is unprecedented but the population growth rate in the United States peaked in the 1970’s and has been falling since. In the US, more food is produced on less land and has since the 70’s. And consumption in relation to GDP in the first world has fallen for 89 of 100 of the most popular consumer items (from asbestos to ladders). Globally, he says, the trends are off a bit but the same idea holds for almost every economic sector and nation (for example: China has the lowest growth rate compared to any other country [it takes 6 Chinese adults to create 2 children], more calories are produced on less land everywhere, and while countries get wealthier they only consume more in the beginning and then it levels off quickly – this is called the Kuznet’s Curve). What I took from the talk and what I love is the following:
This is because:
His big caveat is the ocean. All of the above points only to the terrestrial. The ocean is still 100 years behind the curve and ocean exploitation is still within the atavistic hunter gatherer paradigm. The ocean is demonstrably worse off Where I see his argument could use further analysis, study and discussion is the following:
Overall, I believe his perspective is needed and I want desperately to believe it is the truth. I want to believe that trends like he is describing will help us transcend the Type 1 Civilization on the Kardashev Scale that Sagan, Michio Kaku, Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil talk about as being the critical point of transcendence for our species. I look forward to following Ausubel’s work to see how his unique perspective will interpret more global problems and help open the door for more creative solutions. For more: check out Mr. Ausubel's interview here: The Intelligent Optimist |
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