His main point (as is mine, and that of a growing number of conservation scientists) is that we’ve already failed biodiversity, so it’s time to move into the next phase of disaster mitigation. By ‘failing’ I mean that, love it or loathe it, extinction rates are higher now than they have been for millennia, and we have very little to blame but ourselves. Apart from killing 9 out of 10 people on the planet (something no war or disease will ever be able to do), we’re stuck with the rude realism that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

This post acts mostly an introduction to Peter Kareiva & collaborators’ latest essay on the future of conservation science published in the Breakthrough Institute‘s new journal. While I cannot say I agree with all components (especially the cherry-picked resilience examples), I fundamentally support the central tenet that we have to move on with a new state of play.

In other words, humans aren’t going to go away, ‘pristine’ is as unattainable as ‘infinity’, and reserves alone just aren’t going to cut it.

Let me elaborate. It is plainly naïve, overly simplistic, unrealistic and ultimately criminal even to contemplate the notion that all extant species can be saved from extinction. Not only does this go against everything we know about the turnover of species on the geological time scale (i.e., 99 % of all species that have ever existed are now extinct), it erroneously overestimates our ability to solve the complex interaction between biology, governance, socio-economics, religion and politics (i.e., ‘conservation’).

And I use the word ‘criminal’ with sincerity. If you are naïve enough to embrace the outlook that conservation triage is unnecessary or even offensive, I’ve got news for you – you are (inadvertently or ignorantly) consigning many more species to extinction by wasting precious resources on the doomed. I have little time for climate-change deniers, religious zealots or alternative-’medicine’ quacks, so I have just as little time for so-called conservationists that choose to ignore reality.

But acceptance of the ongoing negative fate of biodiversity is insufficient to move us forward. While I agree with Kareiva and colleagues that a semi-religious attachment to the ideal of ‘pristine’ nature is helping no one (not least of which, biodiversity), we can go a lot further than just accepting the ‘new’ paradigm.

As we discussed in a recent post here on ConservationBytes.com, the greatest strides forward in this matured (but doggedly viscous) discipline will be to:

1. Accept that the biology is more or less well-developed. We can further fine-tune our estimates of loss or minimisations of gain, but the concepts defining how and why species go extinct are firmly established;
2. Get extremely practical about what to save. Adolescent idealism about saving everything on the planet will get us nowhere. Part of this is to determine WHICH species are the most important components of ecosystem resilience (ecosystem function), and part is being hard-core about designing algorithms that quantify this importance.
3. Focus on quantifying ecosystem services – which species complexes provide the highest benefits to humanity. Social revolution thus far (and, I argue, will continue to) eludes us, so convincing the blatantly humanist section of society will require some very well-established relationships between biodiversity and human health, wealth and welfare.
4. Accept that technical fixes are the (perhaps largest) areas of potential gain. Without solving our lust for energy at the expense of dwindling and finite resources, biodiversity will continue down the toilet.

So to all those dedicated and well-meaning environmentalist types out there, if you cannot accept these suggestions, then I have to put you in the same group as the self-interested, myopic, greed hounds that oppose any form of conservation. Get out of the way because you have become part of the problem.

I have some hope, but I remain profoundly pessimistic about our own future as a result of biodiversity erosion. We do not appear, after all, to possess a very strong sense of (long-term) self-preservation.

CJA Bradshaw

I suppose the delve from historical/modern ecology into prehistory was inevitable given (a) my long-term association with brain-the-size-of-a-planet Barry Brook (who, incidentally, has reinvented his research career many times) and (b) there is no logic to contend that palaeo extinction patterns differ in any meaningful way from modern biodiversity extinctions (except, of course, that the latter are caused mainly by human endeavour).

So while the last, fleeting days of my holiday break accelerate worringly toward office-incarceration next week, I take this moment to present a brand-new paper of ours that has just come out online in (wait for it) Quaternary Science Reviews entitled Robust estimates of extinction time in the geological record.

Let me explain my reasons for this strange departure.

It all started after a few drinks (doesn’t it always) with Alan Cooper, Chris Turney and Barry Brook when we were discussing the uncertainties associated with the timing of megafauna extinctions – you might be aware that traditionally there have been two schools of thought on late-Pleistocene extinction pulses: (1) those who think there were mainly caused by massive climate shifts not to dissimilar to what we are experiencing now and (2) those who believe that the arrival of humans into naïve regions lead to a ‘blitzkrieg‘ of hunting and overkill. Rarely do adherents of each stance agree (and sometimes, the ‘debate’ can get ugly given the political incorrectness of inferring that prehistoric peoples were as destructive as we are today – cf. the concept of the ‘noble savage‘).

As most readers of CB might appreciate, I generally do not subscribe to the ‘one equation fits all’ hypothesis when it comes to extinctions. Close inspection of the historical record general supports the conclusion that most extinctions arise from a perverse synergy of drivers which increase kill rates beyond the mere sum of their individual effects. Thus, why human overkill and a series of large climate shifts could not have ‘worked’ in unison to drive the major extinction events recorded in the fossil record over the last 100,000 years or so has no real theoretical justification; it seems that many engaged in the debate adhere exclusively to one view or the other. To us, this is clearly a gross over-simplification.

But as I am want to do, I digress (there will be much more of this in the next few months as Alan, Chris, Barry and I finalise a few analyses on this subject for the Holarctic, late-Pleistocene megafauna extinctions). The issue about which I am writing today (and the subject of the paper in question) is the precursor to all this debate, for how can you possibly determine the contribution of possible drivers if you don’t really know when species x went extinct?

You can see where I’m going with this if you know a little about fossils. As you can appreciate, most dead things don’t fossilise, and even if they do, the rate and extent at which fossilisation occurs can be extremely variable. Plus, there’s the added complication of finding the bloody things (we haven’t yet dug up the entire surface of the planet). So the probability of an animal dying in the right place, having the right conditions for fossilisation, persisting through time in some state of preservation and being found by one of those strange people who like digging for the fossilised remains of long-dead creatures (that bizarre breed of human known as a ‘palaeontologist’) is mind-numbingly small.

Thus, trying to figure out the ‘last’ time extinct species x walked the planet isn’t as straight-forward as it might initially seem simply by dating the most recent fossil in a series of fossils. Who’s to say the ‘most recent’ is indeed that? Then, off course, there’s the added uncertainty in the dating method itself; radiocarbon methods used to date fossils from several thousand to about 60,000+ years ago have a certain margin of error that increases the farther back in time you go.

You might be beginning to get the picture – fossil records generally are pretty crap for inferring extinction times.

Now, several clever people have attempted to incorporate all this uncertainty together in fairly sophisticated statistical models to estimate the time that a species actually went extinct. One of the most famous was the application by Solow and Roberts of the Weibull distribution to a series of known dodo sightings prior to their demise (although in this case, Solow and Roberts assumed that there was no uncertainty in the dates); Solow and colleagues went on to modify the approach to incorporate radiocarbon dating uncertainty. And there are others.

However, all approaches developed to date make certain assumptions about the underlying distribution of the probability of fossilisation and discovery, and few make any attempt to correct for sampling artefacts in the time series themselves (i.e., how many fossil records are there?). Enter us.

Our paper describes a new method built on one constructed by McInerney and colleagues that incorporates most of the uncertainty, as well as making no assumptions about the underlying distribution. We call it the ‘GRIWM’ method (‘Gaussian-resampled inverse-weighted McInerney’ – I know, a clumsy mouthful, but the acronym helps) because it resamples the dates within their radiocarbon confidence bounds, and it weights the most recent fossils more heavily than older ones to account for sample-size differences among series. The McInerney method itself is based on the sighting interval (time between fossil discoveries) to predict the probability of another one being found.

While the maths might be a little impenetrable for some, it’s really a rather straight-forward approach that I hope will get a lot of use. The links to the modern biodiversity crisis are manifold – if we can decipher the set of conditions leading to some of the biggest extinction events in the history of the Earth, we should be better placed to prevent some of the worst ravages in the future

CJA Bradshaw

Paul has recently blogged about the ‘species’ concept as it relates to DNA barcoding, which I highly recommend. It also prompted me to write this post because now the video of the discussion is available online (see below).

Now, the panel was a bit of a funny set-up in a way – I was really one of the only ‘conservation biologists’ represented (Patrick O’Connor and Andy Lowe perhaps excepted), with the rest mainly made up of molecular people (Pete Hollingsworth, Bob Hanner, Karen James) – and I was told prior to the ‘debate’ that I was meant to be the contrarian (i.e., that there is no role for DNA barcoding in conservation).

Fundamentally, I don’t actually embrace the contrarian view on this one given that I see no reason why DNA barcoding can’t enhance or refine our conservation knowledge and skills. But the ‘debate’ did raise some important issues about technological advancements in the application of conservation science to real conservation.

I suppose that prior to getting stuck into the polemic I should define DNA barcoding for the uninitiated; it’s a basic technique that analyses short sequences of DNA with the sole purposes of identifying from which species they come. Imagine walking through the bush with a barcode scanner and pointing at random species you see and getting an instant identification read-out without actually knowing the species beforehand. You can see why it’s called ‘barcoding’ because it is like running products through the check-out to get instant price details.

Some of the advantages for conservation should be immediately obvious – ‘forensics’ of the wildlife or illegal timber trade can be enhanced by letting authorities know the origin and pathway of illegally imported or marketed animal or plant products. This can give bodies like customs and quarantine departments a big legal stick to smash poaching rings, et cetera. Another is determining the presence of a rare species that is difficult or impossible to survey – for example, identifying DNA fragments of rare fish in samples of river water. Once identified using DNA barcoding, a legal argument to preserve that habitat on the basis of threatened wildlife legislation can be made without the expense and uncertainty of traditional wildlife surveys.

I suppose the main point of contention about DNA barcoding is that it merely refines our capacity to survey species we probably already know are in trouble. I submitted during the discussion that we could probably kill every single conservation biologist in the world and not really handicap ‘conservation implementation’ in any major way because we have the main aspects of the science sorted (fragmentation is bad; more habitat area = more species; climate change is bad; invasive species are bad; too few individuals is bad; small populations tend to go extinct; drivers of extinction synergise to make things worse – see full list on Conservation Classics). The principal conservation science discoveries have been made; now we need to manage the resource consumption of 7 billion humans more than anything else. You can also read more about conservation science ‘mucking around the edges‘ in a previous post here on CB.

Another potentially questionable application of barcoding to conservation is that it merely tells us if something is there, not how many or in what state. With a simple binary output, we lack some essential information regarding the value of an area based on mere presence/absence. Certainly we do now do area prioritisation based largely on presence/absence data, but how many more cryptic species identifications do we need to prioritise habitats for preservation?

Those somewhat philosophical beefs aside, I’m still very much in support of the concept of quantifying species better than the somewhat subjective and categorical binomial genus-species system we currently use. I’m also excited by the prospect of using DNA barcoding to quantify ecosystem health better by measuring soil and water microbia composition, and perhaps even starting to get a handle on soil fungus diversity. If we can even improve DNA barcoding to become ‘q-barcoding’ that quantifies relative abundance in addition to identification, we’ll really have a massively important tool for measuring ecosystem and species health.

I’ll be interested in CB readers’ opinions on the subject.

CJA Bradshaw

Filed under: anthropocene, conservation, DNA, ecosystem function, genetics, mycorrhiza ]]> http://conservationbytes.com/2012/01/05/does-conservation-biology-need-dna-barcoding/feed/ 1 -34.917731 138.603034 -34.917731 138.603034 CJAB dna http://conservationbytes.com/2011/07/09/life-death-and-linneaus/ http://conservationbytes.com/2011/07/09/life-death-and-linneaus/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 04:10:28 +0000 CJAB http://conservationbytes.com/?p=5940 ]]>

Barry Brook (left) and Lian Pin Koh (right) attacking Fangliang He (centre). © CJA Bradshaw

I’m sitting in the Brisbane airport contemplating how best to describe the last week. If you’ve been following my tweets, you’ll know that I’ve been sequestered in a room with 8 other academics trying to figure out the best ways to estimate the severity of the Anthropocene extinction crisis. Seems like a pretty straight forward task. We know biodiversity in general isn’t doing so well thanks to the 7 billion Homo sapiens on the planet (hence, the Anthropo prefix) - the question though is: how bad?

I blogged back in March that a group of us were awarded a fully funded series of workshops to address that question by the Australian Centre for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis (a Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network facility based at the University of Queensland), and so I am essentially updating you on the progress of the first workshop.

Before I summarise our achievements (and achieve, we did), I just want to describe the venue. Instead of our standard, boring, windowless room in some non-descript building on campus, ACEAS Director, Associate Professor Alison Specht, had the brilliant idea of putting us out away from it all on a beautiful nature-conservation estate on the north coast of New South Wales.

What a beautiful place – Linneaus Estate is a 111-ha property just a few kilometres north of Lennox Head (about 30 minutes by car south of Byron Bay) whose mission is to provide a sustainable living area (for a very lucky few) while protecting and restoring some pretty amazing coastal habitat along an otherwise well-developed bit of Australian coastline. And yes, it’s named after Carl Linnaeus.

'The Crab', Linneaus Estate

But more than representing a refreshing change from the development carnage found just a bit to the north (the Gold Coast scar), it is also spectacularly beautiful. What a place to have a modelling workshop! We were housed in a building known as ‘the crab’ (because it superficially looks like one) within a noisy friarbird’s (Philemon corniculatus) cackle from the beach. With mobile wireless internet, a top-class kitchen from which chef Kate brought us goodies at all-too-often intervals, and the sound of the pounding surf and melodic cacophony of native birds wafting in through the open doors, we were in ecology-geek heaven. Did I mention that the sun shone the entire week? I bet you’re saying to yourself right now – you jammy bastards.

Yes. Yes, we are.

Right. To the science. For a complete synopsis of what we were aiming to achieve, do read the previous post, but here’s a brief list of our achievements during Workshop One:

1. Our first major achievement was the development of a spatial community simulation to examine various assumptions underlying species-area relationships (SAR). Fangliang He developed the code to simulate landscapes populated by many species following various abundance patterns and aggregation coefficients; Barry Brook developed the sampling code to construct SAR and endemic species-area relationships (EAR), incorporating aspects of extinction debt; and I developed a spatial habitat-destroying routine that constructs harvest patch distributions from completely random to highly clumped (based on the negative binomial distribution). We haven’t yet put it all together, but most of the base code is written. If you’ve been following the minor dust-up in the ecological literature about SAR, you’ll understand why the first photo above is funny.
2. Lian Pin Koh, Stephen Gregory, Xingli Giam and Cagan Sekercioglu worked feverishly on constructing biogeographical realm- and Hotspot-scale SAR for birds and mammals at a global scale. Lian Pin and Tien Ming Lee have put together a series of land-use projections (incorporating deforestation trends and climate change expectations) and we will combine these with the global-scale SARs to estimate extinction rates in these taxa.
3. Nigel Stork focussed on putting together papers and datasets looking at relaxation times (extinction debt) for various taxa. Our goal here is to put together a meta-analytical paper on relaxation times.
   

   Working hard on the extinction rate estimation problem

4. Damien Fordham, Stephen Gregory and I focussed on constructing SAR for coral reef fish on the Great Barrier Reef using species richness and abundance predictions we published last year (see relevant papers by Camille Mellin and colleagues here and here). We’ll be projecting coral bleaching events using combined global circulation model predictions of sea surface temperatures, and predicting reef fish species loss based on the extent of predicted bleaching.
5. Finally, Fangliang He and Cagan Sekercioglu worked on putting together bird range-loss data to estimate population size reductions based on a model Fangliang developed.

In short, we accomplished a lot in one week. The challenge will be to see these analyses to fruition (publication); luckily, we have another workshop scheduled at the same place in early November where we will likely tie up any loose ends and add fresh datasets. Many group members who couldn’t make it this time (Tien Ming Lee, Mark Burgman, Andy Lowe, Chris Johnson, Bill Laurance and Steve Williams) will hopefully be able to attend the second workshop.

I’d also like to point out that Navjot Sodhi was scheduled to participate in these workshops, but as most of you already know, he died suddenly last month. We dedicated our work to his memory.

I’ll make sure I report on our progress as analyses are completed and published. Thanks to my fellow group members for making it a great and productive experience, to Alison Specht for her incredible organisational skills, efficiency, generosity and good nature, to the rest of the ACEAS organisational team, to Linnaeus Estate for providing the best workshop venue I’ve ever experienced, and to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology who scheduled the marvellous winter weather.

CJA Bradshaw

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Few people have read the dense volumes published by the economist Milton Mountebank, but his work has affected you, me and every single person on the planet. Dr. Mountebank has revolutionized economic thought, and now he has been recognized for his singular efforts. Yesterday at a gala reception in Stockholm, Sweden, the chairman of Sveriges Riksbank, Peter Norborg, presented Dr. Mountebank with the Nobel Prize in Economics for his lifetime of work on infinite planet theory.

In his presentation of the award, Mr. Norborg stated, “Dr. Mountebank has demonstrated imagination and inventiveness beyond what the rational mind can comprehend.” Indeed, it is because of his theories that we all do what we do economically. Nations strive for continuous GDP growth and endless expansion of consumption thanks to infinite planet theory. Mr. Norborg went on to say, “All of our banks, including Sveriges Riksbank, owe him a huge debt. We finance economic expansion. Our actions and decisions would be morally suspect if we lived on a finite planet.”

In a light-hearted moment during the presentation, Mr. Norborg asserted that Dr. Mountebank had provided an even greater service to humanity by reducing stress on individuals. “Best of all,” he said, “is that we can extract, consume and digest resources guilt-free. Planetary constraints have been conquered. They have gone the way of the dodo, the Roman Empire and the world’s major fisheries.”

Although Dr. Mountebank’s books have failed to reach mainstream audiences, his work has been highly influential among elite political and corporate leaders. Ronald Reagan is a prominent example. President Reagan once famously said, “There are no limits to growth and human progress when men and women are free to follow their dreams.” That’s a close paraphrasing of Dr. Mountebank’s conclusion to his magnum opus, Infinity and Beyond: The Magical Triumph of Economics over Physics. Phillip van Uppington, former vice president at Lehman Brothers, asserts that Dr. Mountebank was a huge influence on his firm. “We used to quote him all the time. One of the highlights of my career was the symposium I arranged a few years back with Mountebank and Milton Friedman. We called it ‘Double Milton Day.’ It really opened our minds to the possibilities of innovative finance. Once we implemented the double Milton doctrines, we made more cash than most small nations.”

In his acceptance speech, Dr. Mountebank told the story of how he developed infinite planet theory. “Equations, equations, equations,” he said, “I would see them dancing across my eyelids as I laid down to sleep. In the morning I would wake up and write them out. I did this for three straight years until I finally put it all together.” The centerpiece of Mountebank’s mathematical demonstration of the feasibility of infinite growth is his conjury equation, a recondite multivariate differential expression that, by common agreement, is understood by fewer than four economists in the world. “It’s why I’m standing on this stage today,” Mountebank said. “Unfortunately the equation is too long to fit on the screen behind me, but it’s the key to infinite economic growth. Fortunately, though, you don’t have to be an economist or a statistician to use it as a guide for your daily actions.” Dr. Mountebank continued by holding up a globe in his hand and stating, “We all recognize that the earth is a sphere, and from basic geometry, we all understand that a sphere has no beginning and no end. If you set out in one direction on the surface of a sphere, there is no stopping point—it’s infinite.” He spun the globe and walked his fingers around it to prove his point. “Q.E.D. No end. And that means it can be infinitely exploited for economic gains.”

Infinite planet theory has gained almost unanimous acceptance in economic circles, but there have been some vocal critics. On the day of the award ceremony, a small band of protestors formed a picket line outside Sveriges Riksbank. One protestor was carrying a sign that said “Steady State.” When asked why she was protesting, she said, “Mountebank? You can’t be serious. They should give the Nobel to Herman Daly.” Dr. Daly is known for his work on the limits to growth and the steady state economy, concepts which fly in the face of infinite planet theory. The Club of Rome provided the original critique of the theory when it published its best-selling book, The Limits to Growth. In his writings, however, Dr. Mountebank has dismissed the notion of limits. One of the passages in Infinity and Beyond says:

The end of cheap oil, species extinctions, climate change, deforestation, resource depletion, crippling poverty, loss of ecosystem services, soil and aquifer degradation—these are trifling problems, so long as we continue to grow the economy toward its ultimate size: infinity and beyond. Under no circumstances should we allow creeping thoughts about a finite planet or constraints handed down by universal physical laws to get in the way of building a bigger economy. And certainly we should shut our ears to the dreary doomsayers who continue to rain their inane facts upon our parade of growth. Growth, alone, is the moral and political ideal.

Dr. Mountebank ended his acceptance speech on a personal note, observing how infinite planet theory had soothed the fears of his young grandchildren. He said, “They told me they were scared about what was happening to the environment. I patted their little heads and told them not to worry. After all, you can’t harm nature on an infinite planet. By definition, there’s always more.”

Dr. Mountebank is the eighth Nobel laureate in economics from Fantasia University.

Rob Dietz

This post doubles as a Conservation Classic and a new take on an old concept. It’s new in the sense that it updates what we believe is an advance on a major milestone in conservation biology, even though some of the add-on concepts themselves have been around for a while.

First, the classic.

The ‘evil quartet’, or ‘four horsemen of the ecological apocalypse’, was probably the first treatment of extinction dynamics as a biological discipline in its own right. Jarod Diamond (1984) took a sweeping historical and contemporary view of extinction, then simplified the problem to four principal mechanisms:

1. overhunting (or overexploitation),
2. introduced species,
3. habitat destruction and
4. chains of linked extinctions (trophic cascades, or co-extinctions).

Far from a mere review or list of unrelated mechanisms, Diamond’s evil quartet crystallized conservation biologists’ thinking about key mechanisms and, more importantly, directed attention towards those factors likely to drive extinctions in the future. The unique combination of prehistorical through to modern examples gave conservation biologists a holistic view of extinction dynamics and helped spawn many of the papers described hereafter.It would now appear prudent to add a fifth ghoul to the team - severe anthropogenic interference with the global climate system. The response of biodiversity to past global climate change characteristically unfolded over thousands to millions of years, whereas anthropogenic global warming is now occurring at a greatly accelerated rate. If carbon emissions are not reduced rapidly, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report 2007 projects a rate and magnitude of 21^st Century planetary heating that is 5–9 times greater than that of the past century. This is comparable to the difference between now and the height of the last glacial maximum.

A clear lesson from the past is that the faster and more severe the rate of global change, the more devastating the biological consequences, and as I’ve covered before here on ConservationBytes.com in a separate Conservation Classic, this has seriously negative implications for biodiversity.

Now it’s time though to add a sixth rider – extinction synergies (Brook et al. 2008). For example, exacerbating the problems associated with recent climate change is that species trying to shift distribution must now contend with massively modified landscapes. Even in cases where global warming might allow species to expand their range, these benefits can be outweighed by other threats such as habitat change. The new conditions and altered communities might also allow more invasions by alien species that outcompete native species or act as predators to reduce their populations further. Harvest, habitat modification and changed fire regimes will also interact with and probably enhance the direct impacts of climate change.

In summary, we now appreciate that most extinctions involve a synergy of these factors (Brook et al. 2008), with individual causes being difficult or impossible to isolate. These synergies thus represent a situation where the combined effects are substantially more problematic for biodiversity than the mere sum of their individual effects.

To extend the apocalypse analogy further, it’s as though the horsemen’s orgy of species destruction has finally produced a bastard son far more evil then his vile parents.

We should no longer talk of the ‘evil quartet’ – it is now (at least) the ‘evil sextet’.

CJA Bradshaw (& Navjot Sodhi, William Laurance & Barry Brook)

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References

• Brook, B.W.; Sodhi, N.S. & Bradshaw, C.J.A. (2008). Synergies among extinction drivers under global change. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 25: 453-460
• Diamond, J.M. (1984). ‘Normal’ extinction of isolated populations In: Extinctions, M.H. Nitecki (Ed.), 191-246, Chicago University Press, Chicago, USA

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© T. Toles

Resolving the ‘Environmentalist’s Paradox’, and the role of ecologists in advancing economic thinking

Aldo Leopold famously described the curse of an ecological education as “to be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise”. Ecologists do have a tendency for making dire warnings for the future, but for anyone concerned about the myriad of problems currently facing the Earth – climate change, an ongoing wave of species extinctions and impending peak oil, phosphate, water , (everything?) crises – the continued ignorance or ridicule of such warnings can be a frustrating experience. Environmental degradation and ecological overshoot isn’t just about losing cute plants and animals, given the widespread acceptance that long-term human well-being ultimately rests on the ability for the Earth to supply us with ecosystem services.

In light of this doom and gloom, things were shaken up a bit late last year when an article¹ published in Bioscience pointed out that in spite of declines in the majority of ecosystem services considered essential to human well-being by The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), aggregate human well-being (as measured by the Human Development Index) has risen continuously over the last 50 years. Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne and the co-authors of the study suggested that these conflicting trends presented an ‘environmentalist’s paradox’ of sorts – do we really depend on nature to the extent that ecologists have led everyone to believe?

The article has generated quite a bit of attention, as it challenged one of our most fundamental perceptions of our relationship to the natural environment. If it were possible for humans to supersede nature, then our current march through the Anthropocene and into a four or six degree-hotter world shouldn’t be of much concern for us (biodiversity might not be so lucky). Raudsepp-Hearne and colleagues tested four main hypotheses to try to explain this finding: that well-being is not measured correctly, provisioning services such as food production, which are increasing, are more important for well-being than other services, technology has decoupled humans from our relationship with nature, and the prospect of a time lag in humanity’s response to diminishing ecosystem services.

The article has been discussed in more detail in a more recent issue of BioScience, where Anantha Duraippah pointed out (and as hinted at by Tim Beardsley in the original editorial) that aggregating estimates of human well-being at the global scale can mask declines and inequalities across sub-global and country-level scales. Duraippah also questioned the reliability of the Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of human well-being, and pointed towards findings of the recent Stiglitz Report on the Measurements of Social and Economic Progress, commissioned by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The report identified numerous factors that make up well-being: those that can be measured objectively including employment and income, and subjective measures such as emotional happiness. Both types of measures – objective and subjective – were regarded as critical to obtain a well-rounded view of society’s genuine progress and well-being.

The response by Gerard Nelson argued that better technology, data and economic accounting will help to resolve the paradox, while most commentators across the blogosphere (see here, here, and here) focussed mainly on the final hypothesis proposed by Raudsepp-Hearne to explain the paradox – the expectation of a time lag in humanity’s response to diminishing ecosystem services. Technology (or more likely, cheap fossil fuels) and social innovation might be contributing to this time lag, and perhaps delaying the onset of a tipping point in ecosystem function and subsequently human well-being.

Interestingly, there have also been some comments (here and here) directed from an alternative perspective – that humans simply don’t rely on natural resources to the extent that environmentalists purport, and the continued positive trend in HDI in the face of environmental degradation is confirmation of this assertion. The environmentalist’s paradox is not a paradox because global growth in human capital (such as knowledge and individual skills) is substituting for our reliance on natural capital – ultimately meaning that human well-being will continually improve without restriction.

Fig. 1. Neoclassical (mainstream) economic view of the economy (http://goo.gl/F3ZSA). © www.irconomics.com

To understand this argument better, it is worth looking at the issue from first principles – beginning with the circular flow model of mainstream economic theory (Fig. 1). Here all economic activity is considered to be contained within a whole, self-contained system, where the environment is a subsystem of the greater economy. Resources produced by the environment (i.e., natural capital) are converted to human capital during the economic process, but environmental degradation associated with this conversion is not necessarily a problem since human-made capital could effectively substitute for the loss of natural capital. Increased efficiency in the conversion of natural to human capital, coupled with technological advancements, mean that according to this viewpoint the economy can increase in scale without any limits, and as such human well-being can continue to increase indefinitely.

The main problem with the circular flow model is that it is effectively a perpetual motion machine – a model that violates basic physical laws such as entropy and the conservation of mass and energy. Viewing the economy as a whole, isolated system that generates no wastes and requires no additional inputs is like describing an animal in terms of its circulatory system, but ignoring its digestive tract². If the circular flow model of the economy system is to satisfy the laws of thermodynamics, the system cannot be a ‘whole’, but instead sits within a larger system, the Earth, which is bounded by biophysical limits (Fig. 2). These limits mean that there are indeed limits to scale of the human economy relative to the natural economy, and that aggregate human well-being is ultimately constrained by these limits.

Fig. 2. Ecological economic view of the economy (http://goo.gl/F3ZSA)

So we have two alternative viewpoints – one which stresses the importance of the environment for human well-being, and another which argues that the environment perhaps isn’t so important after all. The conclusion reached by Raudsepp-Hearne and her colleagues argue that to resolve the paradox, ecologists need to direct efforts into understanding the links between ecosystem services and multiple aspects of human well-being, trade-offs and synergies between services, the role of technology and better forecasting of changes and potential tipping points in the future supply of ecosystem services. That being said, I can’t help but feel that the discovery of ecological tipping points – especially at the global scale – might not be something to cheer about while the Earth remains on its unsustainable trajectory with no ‘Plan B’ in sight.

It’s hard to disagree with the importance of this research direction, but perhaps the most interesting outcome of  Raudsepp-Hearne’s article is that the subsequent discussion has shown how polar opposite conclusions can be drawn as to why and how the environmentalist’s paradox will eventually be resolved, depending on your pre-existing view on humanity’s relationship to the environment.  It might be tempting just to disregard the viewpoint which considers the maintenance of the environment as unnecessary for human well-being, but as John Gowdy and colleagues argued in a recent essay³, it’s worth remembering that mainstream economics perceives the world as in Figure 1, where physics doesn’t exist and the environment is often considered as ‘external’ to the economic system.  This means that the vast majority of economic decision making is driven by an unrealistic view of the world, which has obvious consequences for biodiversity conservation.

Given these stark differences in the preanalytic visions of mainstream economists and ecologists (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2m respectively), it seems that working to resolve the environmentalist’s paradox is only the first step, and that a more systemic perspective is needed to understand how the world is to move onto a sustainable pathway. Raudsepp-Hearne and her colleagues suggest that cross-disciplinary discussion is needed to create a ”…science of sustainability capable of integrating the complexities of culture, human well-being, agriculture, technology, and ecology”. But such a discussion also needs to include a critical analysis of many of the theories which underpin modern economics to become compatible with broader goals for biodiversity conservation and long term sustainability.

Ecologists and conservation scientists in particular have a hugely important role to play in advancing economic thinking – but as Gowdy points out, it can be difficult for ecologists ask the fundamental questions required because of the differences in language used between disciplines. Paul Ehrlich has argued that ecologists should become economists, and vice versa – but while a change in profession might not always be possible, there is still an urgent need for much bigger and louder conversation between ecologists and economists if we are to truly build a science of sustainability.

There are, of course, many examples of ecologists and economists working together – for example, the annual The Askö Meetings which have built a shared understanding by leaders in both fields. Realistically though, these conversations shouldn’t be taking place just once a year in a remote island off the coast of Sweden (although it does sound lovely), but in conferences, within and between university and government departments, in tea rooms, lecture theatres and everywhere that ecologists and economists could potentially cohabitate. Of course interdisciplinary work doesn’t just happen if you throw people into a room together, so what else could be done? A buddy system? Or a trip to the pub? I don’t know what the answer is, but whatever happens, this is a conversation that needs to happen sooner rather than later. Now is the time to be part of the development of a ‘Plan B’.

Megan Evans

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¹Raudsepp-Hearne, C., G. D. Peterson, et al. (2010). Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: why is human well-being increasing as ecosystem services degrade? BioScience 60: 576-589. doi:10.1525/bio.2010.60.8.4

²Daly, H. E. and F. Farley (2010). Chapter 2: The Fundamental Vision. Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications, 2nd Edition. Island Press, Washington, DC.

³Gowdy, J., C. Hall, et al. (2010). What every conservation biologist should know about economic theory. Conservation Biology 24: 1440-1447. doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01563.x

© W. Laurance

I’ve indicated over the last few weeks on Twitter that a group of us were recently awarded funding from the Australian Centre for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis – ACEAS – (much like the US version of the same thing – NCEAS) to run a series of analytical workshops to estimate, with a little more precision and less bias than has been done previously, the extinction rates of today’s biota relative to deep-time extinctions.

So what’s the issue? The Earth’s impressive diversity of life has experienced at least five mass extinction events over geological time. Species’ extinctions have kept pace with evolution, with more than 99 % of all species that have ever existed now gone (Bradshaw & Brook 2009). Despite general consensus that biodiversity has entered the sixth mass extinction event because of human-driven degradation of the planet, estimated extinction rates remain highly imprecise (from 100s to 10000s times background rates). This arises partly because the total number of species is unknown for many groups, and most extinctions go unnoticed.

So how are we going to improve on our highly imprecise estimates? One way is to look at the species-area relationship (SAR), which to estimate extinction requires one to extrapolate back to the origin in taxon- and region-specific SARs (e.g., with a time series of deforestation, one can estimate how many species would have been lost if we know how species diversity changes in relation to habitat area).

The problem with SARs is that they are generally poorly parameterised, uncertain, and until rather recently, have failed to take the composition and configuration of remaining habitat types post-deforestation into account (solved cleverly though by Lian Pin Koh and colleagues in a few recent papers; Koh et al. 2010; Koh & Ghazoul 2010). One remaining issue – and I have to play a little cloak-and-dagger here because of an existing media embargo – is that the sampling used to construct an SAR doesn’t necessarily mean the the same statistical structure is maintained when extrapolating back down the curve. A little bird I know has told me that the problem has been solved and will be published shortly in Nature. Thankfully, that little bird is part of our ACEAS Working Group.

So why is this of any real interest to conservation per se, other than a more precise chronicling of the now full-blown Anthropocene Sixth Mass Extinction?

Species-area relationship models have been instrumental in estimating extinction rates but, like correlative species distribution models, they have been haunted by the assumptions of out-dated statistical techniques. Recent developments and those we propose include the influences of edge effects and matrix habitats. In the same way that metapopulation species distribution models better predict area of occurrence and thus extinction threat for individual species, new species-area relationship models promise to provide more ecologically realistic estimates of extinction rates: knowledge that will have a profound impact on policy.

More accurate and precise models of extinction rates allow policy makers, scientists and conservationists to explore a whole variety of other questions concerning land-use options. Whereas the conventional species-area relationship could be used to predict extinctions based only on the amount of forest loss, better models such as updated matrix-calibrated species-area relationships over a broader range of species could be used to explore the consequences of changes over entire landscapes, including not just the amount of forest but also the quality of the resultant land uses that now comprises the matrix. Not only will stakeholders be able to make more accurate predictions of biodiversity loss from land-use change, they could also use our models to predict potential biodiversity enhancements from improvements in the quality of the matrix. This is a major step forward because we could potentially prescribe measures to increase biodiversity.

The key to dealing with the conflicts of interest between environmental conservation and development in many emerging economies is the ability to evaluate trade-offs among different land-use and development options. This will be another major outcome of our modelling development. Conservationists will be able to use our tools to explore questions such as the trade-offs in biodiversity loss between converting forested landscapes to extensive but wildlife-friendly agriculture, versus converting a portion of the forest to intensive production systems. These practical questions cannot still be easily addressed with the conventional species-area relationship estimates of extinction.

I should mention finally that we’re not focussing only on SARs – we’ll be looking at a lot of species occurrence/disappearance datasets as well and relate these better to deep-time extinctions (see Regan et al. 2001 for an example).

The group is, I must say, world-class, and I’m proud to call them my colleagues (some I’ve worked with before, others not much yet). They include (in alphabetical order):

Barry Brook, Mark Burgman, Stephen Gregory, Fangliang He, Chris Johnson, Lian Pin Koh, Tien Ming Lee, Bill Laurance, Andy Lowe, Çagan Sekercioglu, Navjot Sodhi and Nigel Stork.

Our first workshop will be in early July, and I suspect we’ll have something concrete published by the end of the year. Stay tuned!

CJA Bradshaw

© decostudio.pl

Here’s an idea to garner some appreciation for the dire straits in which humanity finds itself mounting from the global biodiversity crisis. More importantly, I hope that ‘appreciation’ would translate into ‘action’ as a result.

The idea came, as good ideas often tend to, around a table with some mates^1,2 and several bottles of wine. The idea got more outlandish as the bottles were emptied, and I have to say I can’t remember many of the finer details (probably a good thing).

But the nugget of that idea is, I think, a very good one. I’d like to hear your opinions about it, and some suggestions about how to make it happen.

(get to the point, Bradshaw)

Right.

The idea would be to create an international (televised) comedy festival called ‘The Joke’s On Us‘ where very high-profile comedians would be individually matched to high-profile scientists of various areas of expertise. Let’s say we had a climate change scientist like James Hansen sit down with, oh, maybe Eddie Izzard, the famous and highly regarded Gaia creator, James Lovelock, locked in a room for a few days with Michael McIntyre, tropical deforestation specialist, Bill Laurance, matched with Chris Rock, and that population bomb, Paul Ehrlich, with Robin Williams or Jerry Seinfeld. The possible combinations are endless.

What I’d expect would happen would that each scientist would provide the comedian with the latest information on his/her particular subject area, focussing on the evidence and why people aren’t taking it to heart. The comedian would then turn the material into something funny, focussing on our stupidity for destroying our own home via ecological disintegration.

Now, I’m not at all up to speed on who’s funny and who is not (I have my preferences, of course), and I have absolutely no contacts in the entertainment world. Hell, I don’t even own a television (truth). Someone would obviously need to bankroll this, and we’d probably start at a smaller scale (any Australian comedians willing to take it on – Wil Anderson? Shaun Micallef? Tim Minchin?) before the global attack.

I’m sure I could scour my own contacts (many famous conservation biologists listed here) and come up with plenty of people who’d be willing to donate their time. I’ve only really ever seen one semi-related example of such a thing on climate change (very funny), but our idea is to expand it to a full-on, live, on-stage, telecasted, road-tripping comedy phenomenon that would ultimately teach as much as it did entertain.

Clearly other approaches aren’t working.

Suggestions, contacts, and money welcome. ;-)

CJA Bradshaw

I’ve reproduced the lecture here for your viewing pleasure. I hope you find the 45-minute presentation useful. Note that the first few minutes cover me referring to the Biodiversity film short that I posted not too long ago.

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CJA Bradshaw