conservation winter 2010 (v11n1)

ConservationChOCOlATe & COnservATiOn A BIttersweet MArrIAge Jan-March 2010

the dArk sIde of Green COnsuMerisM

The hOneybee sAGA’s surprIse endIng

cutting-edge science | smarter conservation

Garbage In Garbage Out

When the ocean contains more plastic than plankton, taking out the trash becomes a grueling scientific challenge

+ Why is climate

change denial so seductive?

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12 Garbage In Garbage Out When a single swath of ocean contains more plastic than plankton, the simple act of taking out the trash becomes a grueling scientific challenge. By SuSan CaSey

22 Stung from Behind Researchers may be overlooking a hidden pollinator crisis—one that has little to do with bees and everything to do with booming markets for raspberries, pears, and chocolate. By nathanael JohnSon

28 Wounds That Can Heal A pioneering study of nature’s recovery times delivers a ray of hope —and a respite from apocalyptic storylines. By Marguerite holloway

36 SolutionS

A Flock of Jets Mimicking birds could reduce airline emissions

Cheap Labor Penguins, seals, and petrels drafted to map the sea

Skin Cream for Ships Hulls engineered to mimic whale skin may improve fuel efficiency

Biological Batteries Tapping into the power of the electric eel

Disturbing the Peace War-inducing chemical turns invasive ants against each other

Spider Silk Muscles A two-centimeter rope of spider silk can hoist an SUV

48 think again

Why Is Climate Change Denial So Seductive? By george MonBiot

Cover Art: ©2010 Maarten Brinkman www.maartenbrinkman.nl

Visit us at www.conservationmagazine.org to access the entire Conservation magazine archive, read Journal Watch Online, renew your subscription, and more.

ContentsConservation | Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

3 Journal watCh

■ Coyotes thrive in urban areas

■ Acidic oceans make lobsters larger

■ Fickle appetites for exotic meat

■ CO2 stalls biodiversity losses

■ Smarter reforestation strategy

■ The reverse psychology of green consumerism

■ Whale songs switch frequency

■ Sustainable chocolate goes bust

■ False warnings from frogs?

■ Shrinking carbon sinks

20 lighten up CartoonS By peter oMMundSen

eSSay

33 Shy Affectionate SF Seeking LTR with Nature By kathleen dean Moore

42 Book MarkS Lost at Sea The mysterious disappearance of Cousteau’s conservation legacy

Plus: The Earth after Us, Down to the Wire, Plan B 4.0, Grass: In Search of Human Habitat, and Rewilding the World

46 letterS

Stung from Behind page 22

editorS’ note

printed on recycled paper with soy ink

editor kathryn kohM

senior editor JuStin MatliCk

CirCulation Manager John Brink

essay editor kathleen Snow

Copy editor roBerta SCholz

Contributing editors

CharleS alexander

Stewart Brand

FranCeS CairnCroSS

david w. ehrenFeld

katherine elliSon

exeCutive editor p. dee BoerSMa

advisory board

MiChael Bean

JenniFer BelCher

JaMie rappaport Clark

patriCk daigle BarBara dean

eriC dinerStein

guStavo FonSeCa

Jerry F. Franklin

deBorah JenSen peter kareiva

John C. ogden

Mary C. pearl

ellen pikitCh

MiChael a. Soukup

Steven l. yaFFee

Conservation™ A Publication of the Society for Conservation Biology

TM denotes the Trade-mark/Official Mark of Alberta Conservation Association, used under license

Editorial Office: Conservation magazine, Department of Biology, Box 351800, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195USA; Phone: 206-685-4724; Fax: 206-221-7839; email: [email protected]

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Copyright ©2010 by the Society for Conservation Biology. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the publisher’s written permission. Articles published herein reflect the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Society for Conservation Biology or its partners.

According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Ameri-cans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world is warming fell recently from 71 percent to 57 percent. What’s going on here? Why is climate change denial so seductive? In our Think Again column (page 48), George Monbiot points to research suggest-ing humans may be preprogrammed to avoid signals of their own demise.

Monbiot writes that, to protect themselves against the terror of death, people often engage in what anthropologist Ernest Becker called “immortality projects”— psychological measures that boost self-esteem in the face of trouble. These include rejecting the pos-sibility that death is near. For example, a team of Israeli research-ers found that drivers who are cued to think of death respond by driving faster and taking greater risks. Could this phenomenon help explain why climate change denial is on the rise?

Pew’s report found that senior citizens (i.e., people closer to the end of life) are much more likely than the rest of the popula-tion to deny there is solid evidence the earth is warming or that it’s a serious problem. Could it be that all the apocalyptic warnings are causing people to tune out instead of leap into action?

One of this issue’s feature stories (Wounds That Can Heal, page 28) takes a look at two Yale researchers who think the answer is yes. Oswald Schmitz and Holly Jones are conducting some of the first-ever studies of how quickly ecosystems recover from human disturbances. They’ve found that, contrary to the perception that much of the world is beyond repair, many systems recover within just a few decades.

Jones and Schmitz hope their research promotes restoration—and creates an optimistic message that will engage people in con-servation. Even though much of the world is in peril, the research duo believes a surprising amount of the damage can be repaired. “Screaming and yelling about doom and gloom isn’t going to . . . compel people to change their behavior,” Schmitz says. “But if you can show them what the world will look like when they change their behavior, then maybe they might.”

It’s a controversial viewpoint—you don’t want to give people license to destroy the world—but Schmitz and Jones may be on to something. Amid signs the standard approaches to climate change might be inadequate (Copenhagen, anyone?), conservationists would be wise to consider a new message—one that emphasizes the power of innovation as much as the consequences of inaction. ❧

—the editorS

Journal watChYOUr gUIDe TO The lATeST CONSerVATION reSeArCh

Urban Ecology

Walk on the Wild Side Coyotes thrive in North American cities

Are urban coyote populations rising because the creatures are attracted to human activities or in spite of those activities? This question has vexed researchers for years, and now Stanley Gehrt of Ohio State University is piec-ing together an answer.

In the Journal of Mammalogy, Gehrt and his colleagues chronicle their research on coyotes in the Chicago metropolitan area, where more than

9 million people are spread across six counties. Despite this density, urban coyote populations are on the rise, and research-ers estimate that several hundred to a couple of thousand coyotes live in greater Chicago.

To get a sense of where the coyotes live and why some of them run into

trouble with people, Gehrt’s team placed high-frequency radio collars on 181 coyotes, then tracked them as they navigated the urban morass. The researchers found that coyotes’ territory is usually oriented around a patchwork of habitat spread across public parks and private lands. This

allows the majority of the ani-mals to avoid contact with humans. Still, eight percent of the resident coyotes live purely urban lives in territory that includes industrial parks and has “no measurable patches of natural land use within them,” the researchers write.

© Danielle ricci

Conservation Magazine • Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010 3

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Environmental Intelligence Doesn’t Come Cheap

Despite their proximity to hu-mans—and their reputation for mis-chief—the coyotes cause little trouble. Gehrt’s team found that the animals take pains to avoid people, in part by shifting their activities to nighttime. There also is scant evidence that coyotes are incorporating human food into their diets, suggesting the animals don’t seek out urban settings to scavenge for easy meals.

But there were a few bad apples. Seven of the coyotes generated com-plaints from the public after being sighted near houses (two of them built dens under people’s decks). Gehrt and his colleagues say this goes against coyotes’ natural tendency—the trouble-some animals were either sick (four of them had mange) or being deliberately fed by humans. ❧

—Justin Matlick

gehrt, S.D., C. Anchor, and l.A. White. 2009. home range and landscape use of coyotes in a metropolitan landscape: Conflict or coexistence? Journal of Mammalogy 90(5):1045-1057.

climatE changE

Shell GameSome species may build heavier

shells in acidic oceans

It is widely feared that ocean acidifi-cation—caused by rising atmospheric CO

2—will weaken the shells of marine

organisms. But a new ex-periment shows that certain species actually increase their shell production un-der these seemingly harsh conditions.

To reach this conclu-sion, researchers raised 18 species of marine organisms in seawater acidified by different levels of carbon dioxide. Ten species—in-cluding corals, clams, oysters, urchins, and scallops—produced less shell as CO

2 levels went up. But seven species,

including lobsters and crabs, built heavier shells at intermediate or high carbon-dioxide levels.

Photo courtesy of Justin B. ries

The latter group may be able to convert bicarbonate, which forms after CO

2 dissolves in the ocean, into

the carbonate needed for shell build-ing, the authors suggest. And carbon dioxide may boost some organisms’ photosynthesis, giving them more en-ergy to carry out the necessary chemical transformations.

But it’s too early to conclude that these hardier species will do better overall as the world’s carbon dioxide levels go up, the authors say. For instance, spending more energy on shell building could take away from other functions such as repro-duction. And a predator that does well in acidified waters

could still suffer if its thin-shelled prey goes under. ❧

—Roberta Kwok

ries, J., A. Cohen, and D. McCorkle. 2009.

Marine calcifiers exhibit mixed responses to

CO2-induced ocean acidification. Geology

37(12):1131-1134.


cUisinE

Served RareWildlife farming increases appetite

for threatened species

Upwardly mobile Asian diners have developed a taste for civet, pangolin, and other exotic—and protected—wild animals. In turn, semi-clandestine restaurants serve up rare animals for a hefty price. To reduce this pressure on wild populations, some conservation-ists have proposed establishing farms where the species can be raised for hu-man consumption. But new research in Conservation Letters finds that it’s the very rarity of wild-caught products that drives demand—and consum-ers aren’t likely to be lured by farmed substitutes.

For her doctoral thesis at Univer-sity College London, Rebecca Drury interviewed 77 residents of Hanoi, about half of whom had eaten wild-caught meat, on their attitudes about

wildlife products. She concludes that Hanoians consider wild-caught meat a fashionable luxury item, buying or sharing it to flaunt status and curry favor with friends and business asso-ciates—even though many consumers were well aware of the environmental implications.

Since rarity and expense give the meat its social currency, Drury argues, accessible farmed substitutes may actually stimulate de-mand for the real stuff. The mass-produced version is often regarded as inferior, even as more consumers gain access to it (think wild versus farmed salmon). Those who can afford it are likely to shift to species that are rarer still. What’s more, Drury says, farms often provide a mechanism for laundering wild meat that has been poached.

A case in point is the threatened Asiatic black bear Ursus thibetanus, whose bile has long been used to ward off a variety of ills. As the bear’s

populations declined, Chinese and Vietnamese farms sprang up to harvest the bile of caged bears via permanent abdominal holes. (The cruelty underly-ing these farms is another issue.) Today, the bile is widely available—but wild bears are still poached to satisfy an elite demand.

Drury says social marketing cam-paigns—such as efforts to stigmatize

fur and ivory—are a much-surer strategy to reduce demand for wild-animal products. Still, there are no guarantees. “There are lots of other papers that have made this link between rar-ity and the desire to have something,” she says, “and I’m not sure that’s a human

trait you can necessarily alter.” ❧—Rebecca Kessler

Drury, r. 2009. reducing urban demand for wild animals in Vietnam: examining the potential of wildlife farming as a conserva-tion tool. Conservation Letters 2(6):263-270.

©Paul hilton/epa/Corbis

6 Conservation Magazine • Vol. 11 No. 1 | January-March 2010

instance, is “brighter” in color than forests and therefore reflects more ra-diation, producing a cooling effect. In turn, many models have suggested that, if forests were to replace croplands and grasslands at higher latitudes, it could create an undesirable net-warming effect. The reason? The new, darker forests would soak up enough heat to offset—or even reverse—the cooling benefit provided by increased CO

2

absorption.Montenegro and his colleagues

suggest that past studies have overesti-mated the albedo-related warming that might occur due to mid-latitude refor-

biodivErsity

N vs. CO2 Smackdownrising CO

2 levels could battle back

nitrogen pollution’s assault on plants

The nitrogen pumped by humans into the environment may reduce plant biodiversity, but higher carbon-dioxide levels could hold those losses in check.

University of Minnesota researcher Peter Reich carried out a ten-year experiment to determine the combined effects of elevated nitrogen and carbon-dioxide levels on 16 species of plants. When nitrogen alone was increased, plant diversity dropped by 16 percent. But when both nitrogen and carbon dioxide were high, diversity decreased by only eight percent, Reich reports in Science.

Carbon dioxide appears to be canceling out some of nitrogen’s det-rimental changes, the study says. For instance, it increases water content in soil and the carbon-nitrogen ratio in plant roots, both of which are reduced by nitrogen. Thus, the worst-case scenario of increased carbon dioxide and nitrogen acting together to reduce biodiversity is not supported by the study, Reich writes.

The work is “a rare gem in long-term ecological research,” writes re-searcher Scott Collins of the University of New Mexico in a related article. But, he notes, scientists will need to per-form more experiments to determine whether the results apply to other plant communities. ❧

—Roberta Kwok

reich, P. 2009. elevated CO2 reduces losses

of plant diversity caused by nitrogen deposi-tion. Science 326(5958) 1399-1402.

ForEstry

Middle GroundPlanting trees in mid-latitudes—rather

than the tropics—keeps the planet cool

Carbon-offsetting schemes often focus on planting new forests as a means of lowering atmospheric CO

2. Most cli-

mate models have suggested that this strategy will be most effective in the tropics, where forests are more productive and can therefore store more car-bon. But a new study in the journal Global and Planetary Change says those models might be wrong, or at least misleading. In fact, says Al-

varo Montenegro of St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, forest planting would have the greatest cooling ben-efit not in the tropics but in mid-latitude regions—including much of Europe and North America.

The problem with the earlier models, Montenegro says, is that they didn’t cor-rectly account for a critical factor called albedo, which measures how the earth’s surface reflects solar radiation. Albedo depends on land cover; cropland, for

©pryzmat/iStock.com

estation—in part by projecting forest cover where no forests could actu-

ally grow. Rather than merely simulating the effects of forest cover spreading over broad re-gions, Montenegro’s team used high-resolution satellite data to examine land-cover effects on a finer scale. They focused only on agricultural lands having potential to support forest cover and that presum-

ably would be forested in the absence of human activity. For these areas, they calculated changes in CO

2 storage and

albedo that would be expected if each


credit for recent good deeds may feel they have a “moral license” to behave more selfishly afterward. A churchgoer who has just been to confession, for example, may put less money into the

offering plate. Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, both assistant professors at the University of Toronto, won-dered whether moral license might also apply to “green” consumer choices.

In a paper soon to be published in Psychological

Science, they report that purchasing green products can make people more selfish and more likely to steal. To reach this conclusion, Mazar and Zhong con-ducted three experiments with student volunteers.

The first experiment tested stu-dents’ impressions of green consumers. Not surprisingly, the students rated people who purchase green products as more cooperative, altruistic, and ethical than people who purchase conventional products.

In the second experiment, some students were assigned to check out an online store offering mostly green products, while other students were assigned to an online store carrying mostly conventional products. Half the students in each group were asked to rate the products in the store, and the other half were asked to purchase products.

Afterward, all the students played a seemingly unrelated money-sharing game. The students who had merely rated the green products shared more money than the students who had rated the conventional products. But students who had made purchases in the green store shared less money than those who had shopped in the conven-tional store.

In the third experiment, the stu-dents played a computer game that tempted them to earn money by cheat-ing. The green consumers were more

Psychology

Buyer BewareThe dark side of green consumerism

Do you feel a little better about yourself when you opt for the organic yogurt, recycled paper towels, and com-pact fluorescent light bulbs at the store? If so, you may be surprised to learn that buying environmentally friendly products might make you more likely to engage in unethical behavior.

Research done in the past decade shows that people who give themselves

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25-square-kilometer pixel of cropland were converted to forest.

Despite considerable regional vari-ability, the researchers found that many of the areas with the most-favorable net balance between CO

2 uptake

and albedo are at temperate latitudes. The study finds that forest planting, where viable, will always result in cooling at latitudes ranging from 40 degrees south to 60 degrees north—an area that extends far beyond the tropics and includes broad swaths of Australia and Canada.❧

—Scott Norris

Montenegro, A. et al. 2009. The net carbon drawdown of small scale afforestation from satellite observations. Global and Planetary Change 69(4) 195-204.


activities, that can backfire,” he says. Being aware of this moral-license ef-fect can help people avoid it, Zhong says. He encourages consumers to view green buying as the least they can do, and to make it a habit rather than a special achievement. ❧

—Dawn Stover

Mazar, N. and C.-B. Zhong. 2009. Do green products make us better people? Psychological Science, in press.

likely to cheat than the conventional purchasers, and they stole more money when asked to withdraw their winnings from envelopes on their desks.

Green marketers have long trum-peted the notion that, when consumers make small steps toward sustainability, this will lead to bigger, more meaning-ful steps in the future. But the notion of moral license suggests that making virtuous purchases may actually reduce motivation for self-improvement. Mazar and Zhong now plan to test whether this also applies to recycling and other green behavior.

Zhong says the new research doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t buy green products or that green consum-erism can’t be a force for good. What matters, he says, is why people make green choices: if you do it because you believe it’s more ethical, you may give yourself a free pass at the next ethical crossroads. “If you moralize certain

finding came as researchers analyzed historical recordings of seven types of blue whale songs taken in the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, and Indian Oceans. The most-extensively monitored type of song, recorded in the eastern North Pacific, dropped in tonal frequency by 31 percent between 1963 and 2008. The other six song types also have steadily moved to lower frequencies, the researchers found.

Why such a widespread shift? Changes in ocean temperature and acidity, which might modify sound propagation through the water, are too slight to explain the trend, the

authors say. The team also considered the possi-bility that blue whales are responding to an increase in human-generated noise in the ocean. But if whales wanted to overcome the noise by singing more

ocEans

Deep-sea SerenadeBlue whale songs are mysteriously

changing frequencies

In a puzzling development,

blue whales around the world are singing in deeper tones. This

©Amos Nachoum


agricUltUrE

Not-so-sweet DealThe boom and bust cycle of

shade-grown tropical chocolate

The marriage between chocolate and conservation might be more bitter than sweet. For years, conservationists have chased after the goal of making shade-grown cacao farms a win-win for busi-ness, poor farmers, and the environment. But a new study in Conservation Let-ters explains how economic boom-bust cycles have got-ten in the way.

Led by Yann Clough of the Uni-versity of Göttingen, Germany, the researchers chronicle how most new ca-cao plantations are planted in thinned tropical forests, where shade and

fertile soils initially allow the plants—and biodiversity—to flourish. But a problem arises when the cacao plants mature. Once the plants form a canopy of their own, farmers almost invariably cut down the other tree species in their midst. In the short term, the cacao flourishes in the direct sun, causing yields and profits to spike upward. Then a downward slide begins.

Over time, the increased sun stresses the cacao plants and opens the door to new pests and diseases. Farmers fight these with increased amounts of fertilizer and pesticide. Yet these provide little defense. Crops are decimated. Yields become unpredictable. Profits plummet.

At that point, the farmers typi-cally abandon cacao. In Brazil, strug-gling cacao crops were razed in favor of full-sun coffee. In Malaysia, cacao gave way to oil palms. In other words:

loudly, they would be more likely to shift their frequency up rather than down, says coauthor Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics.

Another potential explanation is the recovery of whale populations, prompted by the decline of commercial whaling. If whale numbers are rising, the team speculates, males might face more competition for mates. Since females may favor deeper tones, males could be lowering the frequency of their songs to improve their chances of success. McDonald also notes that louder sounds are easier to produce at higher frequencies. In denser popula-tions, males may not need to sing so loudly to reach their listeners—and thus can sing more deeply. ❧

—Roberta Kwok

McDonald, M., J. hildebrand, and S. Mesnick. 2009. Worldwide decline in tonal frequencies of blue whale songs. Endangered Species Research 9:13-21.

Cacao beans in the hands of an ecuadorian farmer ©Diana lundin/iStock.com


WildliFE

Frog FictionAmphibians may not be canaries

in a coal mine after all

Scientists are challenging the wide-spread idea that amphibians are more sensitive to environmental contamina-tion than other species. Amphibians are thought to provide early warning signs of environmental damage because they

tropical areas that once housed func-tional forests are ultimately replaced by traditional agriculture. Making matters worse, the demand for cacao is shifted to other parts of the world, opening new farming frontiers where the boom-bust cycle takes place once again.

The authors point out that sustainable cacao re-mains theoretically possible, perhaps through schemes that pay farmers to keep their shade trees. But the reality to date underscores an old adage: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. ❧

—Justin Matlick

Clough, Y., Faust h., and Teja Tscharntke. 2009. Cacao boom and bust: sustainability of agroforests and opportunities for biodi-versity conservation. Conservation Letters 2(5):197-205.

have permeable skin, diverse diets, and habitats spanning both land and water. But some scientists argue that amphib-

ians’ supposed sensitivity is not backed up by scientific evidence.

A research team studied more than 23,000 toxicity tests from a U.S. Environ-mental Protection Agency database, covering 1,075 spe-cies and 73 chemicals. While amphibians were strongly

affected by one category of com-pounds called phenols, they showed only low or moderate susceptibility to pesticides, heavy metals, and inorganic contaminants when compared to other species.

Some compounds may threaten specific amphib-ians, the team notes. But on the whole, amphibians are “not particularly sensi-tive and might more aptly be described as ‘miners in a coal mine,’” the research-ers write in Ecology Letters. They say the recent devastation of the world’s amphibians could mean that more vulnerable species are in greater danger than we thought. ❧

—Roberta Kwok

Kerby, J. et al. 2009. An examination of amphibian sensitivity to environmental con-taminants: are amphibians poor canaries? Ecology Letters 13(1) 60-67.

©Christopher ewing/iStock.com

climatE changE

Shrinking SinksSome forests may sequester less

carbon as climate warms

As global warming lengthens the growing season for many ecosystems, trees may suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere—or so some have

hoped. A study of a subalpine forest, however, shows that the exact opposite can happen.

Researchers studied nine years of data on a Colorado for-est composed mainly of pine, fir, and spruce. During the years with the longest growing seasons, the trees actually took up the least carbon dioxide, they found. The reason, it appears, is that longer grow-ing seasons were caused by

shallower winter snow pack, and trees depended heavily on water from snow melt to support photosynthesis.

The results, reported in Global Change Biology, don’t apply to all eco-systems. For instance, other research has suggested that boreal forests do increase their carbon uptake with longer growing seasons. But the study doesn’t bode well for the mountain-ous western U.S., where snow pack has been decreasing. Climate change is expected to reduce snow pack even more, the authors say, and may weaken this natural carbon sink. ❧

—Roberta Kwok

Hu, J. et al. 2010. Longer growing sea-sons lead to less carbon sequestration by a subalpine forest. Global Change Biology, 16(2):771-783.


Fate can take strange forms, and so perhaps it does not seem unusual that Captain Charles Moore found his life’s purpose in a nightmare. Unfortunately, he was awake at the time, and 1300 kilometers north of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

Returning to Southern California from Hawaii after a sailing race, Moore had altered the course of the Alguita, his 15-meter cata-maran. Veering slightly north, he had the time and the curiosity to try a new route, one that would lead the vessel through the eastern corner of a 13-billion-hectare oval known as the north Pacific subtropical gyre. This was an odd stretch of ocean—“the doldrums,” sailors called it—a place most boats purposely avoided. So did the ocean’s top predators: the tuna, sharks, and other large fish that required livelier waters flush with prey. The gyre was more like a desert—a slow, deep, clockwise-swirling vortex of air and water caused by a mountain of high-pressure air that lingered above it.

The area’s reputation didn’t deter Moore. He had grown up in California with the Pacific literally in his front yard, and he possessed an impressive aquatic résumé: deckhand, able seaman, sailor, scuba diver, surfer, and finally

When a single swath of ocean contains

more plastic than plankton, the simple

act of taking out the trash becomes a

grueling scientific challenge

captain. Moore had spent countless hours on the ocean, fascinated by its vast trove of secrets and terrors. He’d seen a lot of things out there, things that were glorious and grand, things that were ferocious and humbling. But he had never seen anything nearly as chilling as what lay ahead of him in the gyre.

It began with a line of plastic bags ghost-ing the surface, followed by an ugly tangle of junk: nets and ropes and bottles, motor-oil jugs and cracked bath toys, a mangled tarp. Tires. A traffic cone. Moore could not believe his eyes. It was as though someone had taken the pristine seascape of his youth and swapped it for a landfill.

How did all the plastic end up here? How did this trash tsunami begin? What did it mean? If the questions seemed overwhelming, Moore would soon learn that the answers were even more so and that his discovery had dire impli-cations for human—and planetary—health. As the Alguita glided through the area that scientists now refer to as the “eastern garbage patch,” Moore realized that the trail of plastic went on for hundreds of miles. Depressed and stunned, he sailed for a week through bobbing, toxic debris trapped in a purgatory of circling


Feature

gArBAge IN gArBAge OUTBy Susan Casey • Art by Maarten Brinkman


currents. To his horror, he had stumbled across the twenty-first-century Leviathan. It had no head, no tail. Just an endless body.

“Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” This Andy Warhol quote is embla-zoned on a two-meter-long magenta-and-yellow banner that hangs—with extreme irony—in the solar-powered workshop in Moore’s Long Beach home.

Since his first encounter with the garbage patch 12 years ago, Moore has been on a mis-sion to learn exactly what’s going on out there. Leaving behind a 25-year career running a furniture-restoration business, he has created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to spread the word of his findings. His tireless effort has placed him on the front lines of this new, more-abstract battle. After enlisting scien-tists to develop methods for analyzing the gyre’s contents, Moore has sailed the Alguita back to the garbage patch several times. On each trip, the volume of plastic had grown alarmingly. The area in which it accumulates is now twice the size of Texas.

At the same time, all over the globe, there are signs that plastic pollution is doing more than blighting the scenery; it is also making its way into the food chain. Some of the most obvious victims are the dead seabirds washing ashore in startling numbers, their bodies packed with plastic: things such as bottle caps, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, and colored scraps that, to a foraging bird, resemble baitfish. (One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic.) And the birds aren’t alone. More than a million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless fish die in the North Pacific each year, either from mistakenly eat-ing this junk or from being ensnared in it and drowning.

Moore soon learned that the big, tentacled balls of trash were only the most visible signs of the problem; others were far less obvious and far more evil. Dragging a fine-meshed net known as a manta trawl, he discovered minuscule pieces of plastic, some barely visible to the eye, swirling like fish food throughout the water. He and his researchers parsed, measured, and sorted their

samples and arrived at the following conclusion: by weight, this swath of sea contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton.

This statistic is grim for marine animals, of course, but even more so for humans. The more invisible and ubiquitous the pollution, the more likely it will end up inside us. And there’s growing—and disturbing—proof that we’re ingesting plastic toxins constantly and that even slight doses of these substances can severely disrupt gene activity. The fact that these toxins don’t cause violent and immediate reactions does not mean they’re benign: scientists are just beginning to research the long-term ways in which the chemicals used to make plastic interact with our own biochemistry.

In simple terms, plastic is a petroleum-based mix of monomers that become polymers, to which additional chemicals are added for suppleness, inflammability, and other qualities. When it comes to these substances, even the

syllables are scary. To take just one example,

we deploy annually about 450 million kilograms of chemical compounds called “phthalates”—despite the fact

that California recently listed them as chemicals known to be toxic to our reproductive systems. Used to make plastic soft and pliable, phthalates leach easily from millions of products—pack-aged food, cosmetics, varnishes, the coatings of timed-release pharmaceuticals—into our blood, urine, saliva, seminal fluid, breast milk, and am-niotic fluid. In food containers and some plastic bottles, phthalates are now found with another compound called bisphenol A (BPA), which scientists are discovering can wreak stunning havoc in the body. We produce nearly 3 billion kilograms of BPA each year, and it shows: BPA has been found in nearly every human who has been tested in the United States.

Most alarming, these chemicals may disrupt the endocrine system—the delicately balanced set of hormones and glands that affect virtually every organ and cell—by mimicking the female hormone estrogen. In marine environments, excess estrogen has led to Twilight Zone-esque discoveries of male fish and seagulls that have sprouted female sex organs.

Nurdles now account for ten percent of

plastic ocean debris


Nurdle SoupTiny plastic particles infest a vast swath of ocean

In August 2009, scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

set sail on an unprecedented research mission. Their goal: start unraveling plastic’s

impact on ocean ecology.

The research team headed west from San Diego to the North Pacific garbage

patch, where they encountered a surprise. Based on previous reports, the scientists

had expected to find an ocean blanketed in large pieces of floating trash. Instead,

they saw “a soup of small particles,” according to James leichter, associate

professor at Scripps.

These particles were about the same size as plankton, underscoring how

easily they can be consumed by marine species and raising an ominous question:

is ocean plastic creating a way for toxins to enter the food chain? The Scripps

team is mulling how to investigate this, perhaps by studying whether plastics leach

chemicals as they age, then testing marine species for these compounds.

The researchers are also looking into whether trash might transport

invasive species. The garbage patch is littered with what leichter called “floating

ecosystems”—abandoned fishing nets and other large objects teeming with

organisms such as crabs and barnacles. To determine whether species are being

carried to new habitat, leichter envisions recording which animals live on particular

trash islands, then tracking those islands with satellite tags.

even as the researchers pursue these projects, the most-important goal might

be to figure out how to stop plastic from ever entering the sea. “even if you could

clean this material up, you still need to understand the sources,” leichter said.

“Otherwise, you’ll just have it right out there again.” ❧


BreakdownPlastic may decompose in seawater

Plastic poses a deadly threat to marine organisms that swallow or become

ensnared in it, but researchers have long wondered whether plastic also affects

marine species on a molecular level. Now, a team of Japanese scientists has

uncovered the first evidence that plastic may decompose in seawater—suggesting

that it could contaminate marine life from the inside out. (1)

led by Katsuhiko Saido of Nihon University, the researchers conducted

lab experiments finding that polystyrene-based plastics, thought to be virtually

indestructible, can actually break down at seawater temperatures. To test whether

this degradation’s byproducts were present in the sea, the researchers analyzed

water samples collected from the northern Pacific Ocean and from waters off

Malaysia and the western U.S. The samples were found to contain styrene

monomers, dimers, and trimers, the researchers reported at a recent meeting of the

American Chemical Society.

Previous studies suggest styrene monomers are carcinogenic in mice, but

exactly how these particles might affect marine species is unclear. ❧

1. Saido, K. et al. 2009. New contamination derived from marine debris plastics. Presented at the 2009 national meeting of the American Chemical Society.


This news is depressing enough to make a person reach for the bottle. Glass, at least, is easily recyclable. You can take one tequila bottle, melt it down, and make another tequila bottle. With plastic, recycling is more complicated. Unfortunately, that promising-looking triangle of arrows appearing on products doesn’t always signify endless re-use; it merely identifies which type of plastic the item is made from. And of the seven different plastics in common use, only two of them—PET (labeled with #1 inside the triangle and used in soda bottles) and HDPE (labeled with #2 inside the triangle and used in milk jugs)—have much of an aftermarket. So no matter how virtuously you toss your chip bags and shampoo bottles into your blue bin, few of them will escape the landfill—only 3 to 5 percent of plastics are recycled in any way.

“There’s no legal way to recycle a milk container into another milk container without adding a new virgin layer of plastic,” Moore says. He points out that, because plastic melts at low temperatures, it retains pollutants and the tainted residue of its former contents. Turn up the heat to sear these off, and some plastics release deadly vapors. So the reclaimed stuff is mostly used to make entirely different products, things that don’t go anywhere near our mouths, such as fleece jackets and carpeting. Therefore, unlike recycling glass, metal, or paper, recycling plastic doesn’t always result in less use of virgin material.

What’s more, “Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” Moore says, describing how the mate-rial’s molecular structure resists biodegrada-tion. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: even when plastic breaks down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.

Ask a group of people to name an overwhelm-ing global problem, and you’ll hear about climate change, the Middle East, or AIDS. No one, it is guaranteed, will cite the sloppy transport of nurdles as a concern. And yet

nurdles, lentil-sized pellets of plastic in its rawest form, are especially effective couriers of waste chemicals called persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, which include known carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.

The U.S. banned these poisons in the 1970s, but they remain stubbornly at large in the environment, where they latch on to plastic because of its molecular tendency to attract oils.

The word itself—nurdles—sounds cuddly and harmless, like a cartoon character or a pasta for kids, but what it refers to is most certainly not. Absorbing up to a million times the level of POP pollution in their surrounding waters, nur-dles become supersaturated poison pills. They’re

light enough to blow around like dust; to spill out of ship-ping containers; and to wash into harbors, storm drains, and creeks. In the ocean, nurdles are easily mistaken for fish eggs by

creatures that would very much like to have such a snack. And once inside the body of a bigeye tuna or a king salmon, these tenacious chemicals are headed directly to your dinner table.

One study estimated that nurdles now account for 10 percent of plastic ocean debris. And once they’re scattered in the environment, they’re diabolically hard to clean up (think way-ward confetti). At places as remote as Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, 3,380 kilometers northeast of New Zealand, they’re commonly found mixed with beach sand.

In 2004, Moore received a $500,000 grant from the state of California to investigate the myriad ways in which nurdles go astray during the plastic manufacturing process. On a visit to a polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe factory, as he walked through an area where railcars un-loaded ground-up nurdles, he noticed that his pant cuffs were filled with a fine plastic dust. Turning a corner, he saw windblown drifts of nurdles piled against a fence. Talking about the experience, Moore’s voice becomes strained and his words pour out in an urgent tumble: “It’s not the big trash on the beach. It’s the fact that the whole biosphere is becoming mixed with these plastic particles. What are they doing to us? We’re breathing them, the fish are eating them, they’re in our hair, they’re in our skin.”

Plastic is seeping from the ocean

into the food chain


Though marine dumping is part of the problem, escaped nurdles and other plastic lit-ter migrate to the gyre largely from land. If that polystyrene cup you saw floating in the creek doesn’t get picked up and specifically taken to a landfill, it will eventually be washed out to sea. Once there, it will have plenty of places to go: the North Pacific gyre is only one of five such high-pressure zones in the oceans. There are similar areas in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Each of these gyres has its own version of the garbage patch as plastic gathers in the currents. Together, these areas cover 40 percent of the sea. “That corresponds to a quarter of the earth’s surface,” Moore says. “So 25 percent of our planet is a toilet that never flushes.”

Our oceans are turning into plastic—are we? Wrist-slit-tingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Green arch- itect and designer William McDonough has become an influential voice, not only in en-vironmental circles but also among Fortune 500 CEOs. McDonough proposes a standard known as “cradle to cradle” in which all manu-factured things must be reusable, poison-free, and beneficial over the long haul. His outrage is obvious when he holds up a rubber ducky, a common child’s bath toy. The duck is made of phthalate-laden PVC, which has been linked to cancer and reproductive harm. In the United States, it’s commonly accepted that children’s teething rings, cosmetics, food wrappers, cars, and textiles will be made from toxic materi-als. Other countries—and many individual companies—seem to be reconsidering.

Thanks to people like Moore and Mc-Donough, awareness of just how hard we’ve slapped the planet is skyrocketing. None of plastic’s problems can be fixed overnight, but the more we learn, the more likely that wisdom will eventually trump convenience and cheap disposability. In the meantime, let the cleanup begin: The National Oceanographic and Atmo-spheric Administration has investigated using

satellites to identify and remove “ghost nets,” abandoned plastic fishing gear that never stops killing. (A single net recently hauled up off the Florida coast contained more than 1,000 dead fish, sharks, and one loggerhead turtle.) New biodegradable starch- and corn-based plastics have arrived, and Wal-Mart has signed on as a customer. A consumer rebellion against dumb and excessive packaging is afoot.

The gray plastic kayak floats next to Moore’s catamaran, Alguita, which is birthed in a slip across from his house. It is not a lovely kayak; in fact, it looks pretty rough. But it floats, a

sturdy, two-and-a-half meter two-seater. Moore stands on the Alguita’s deck, hands on hips, staring down at it. On the sailboat next to him, his neighbor, Cass Bastain, does the same. He has just in-formed Moore that he came across the abandoned craft yesterday, floating just off-shore. The two men shake

their heads in bewilderment. Watching the kayak bobbing disconso-

lately, it is hard not to wonder what will become of it. The world is full of cooler, sexier kayaks. It is also full of cheap plastic kayaks that come in more attractive colors than battleship gray. The ownerless kayak is a lummox of a boat, 25 kilograms of nurdles extruded into an object that nobody wants but which will be around for centuries longer than we will.

And as Moore stands on deck looking into the water, it is easy to imagine him doing the same thing 1200 kilometers west, in the gyre. You can see his silhouette in the silvering light, caught between ocean and sky. You can see the mercurial surface of the most majestic body of water on earth. And then, below, you can see the half-submerged madhouse of forgotten and discarded things. As Moore looks over the side of the boat, you can see the seabirds sweeping overhead, dipping and skimming the water. One of the journeying birds, sleek as a fighter plane, carries a scrap of something yellow in its beak. The bird dives low and then boomerangs over the horizon. Gone. ❧

Susan Casey is editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. This story is adapted from an article that originally appeared in Best Life.

Artwork ©2009 Maarten Brinkman www.maarten-brinkman.nl.

Plastic’s problems can’t be fixed overnight, but wisdom will

eventually trump cheap disposability


The Plastic Sausage MachineNew factory can turn almost any plastic into a useful product

©2009 The Economist Newspaper limited, london (August 18, 2009)

Despite efforts to recycle plastic, mountains

of the stuff still end up in dumps and landfills. The

problem is that plastic bottles, lids, containers, and

the like must not only be clean but must also be

sorted into their various types, if recycling them is not

to be prohibitively expensive. recently, though, a fac-

tory has opened which changes those calculations.

It is the first to be capable of taking mixed plastic

waste—even dirty waste—and turning it into an

environmentally friendly substitute for plywood.

Most plastics are made by coaxing the carbon-

containing compounds found in oil into long mol-

ecules called polymers. A plastic made from a single

type of polymer can usually be washed and shredded

into reusable pellets. But when different polymers—

and contaminants such as food residue, bits of glue,

and shards of metal—are mingled, the resulting

recycled plastic may contain flaws that cause it to

tear or break.

The new factory, set up in luton, U.K., by 2K

Manufacturing, turns mixed plastic into a composite

board called ecoSheet. The board has been tested

by Bovis, a construction company supporting the

project. ecoSheet costs about the same as plywood

and, like plywood, can be used to build a variety

of things including advertising hoardings, flooring,

and the shuttering used to contain concrete. It has a

number of advantages over plywood, however. It is

easier to work with because it does not produce inju-

rious splinters. It does not rot. And, unlike plywood,

which usually ends up in landfill because it contains

adhesives and preservatives and is often painted,

ecoSheet can be recycled into more ecoSheet—even

if it is painted and full of nails.

2K Manufacturing was set up by Omer

Kutluoglu, a bond trader-turned-businessman, and

Turul Taskent, a process engineer who used to build

composite structures for racing cars. Their production

process uses a form of encapsulation called powder-

impression molding. Workers at the factory grind

mixed plastics into powdery flakes, spread the materi-

al over a polymer skin, cover it with another skin, and

sinter it. Sintering produces objects by shaping them

out of powder and then heating the powder to just

below its melting point so that the particles adhere

to one another. During the 2K process, air is blown

through the sandwich to create a spongy-looking

core. Once the material has cooled and hardened,

it acquires mechanical strength from its composite

structure.

In its first phase, the factory in luton will be

capable of making 360,000 sheets of the material a

year. Mr. Kutluoglu is hoping to double that with a

second production line and, eventually, to open an-

other ten plants in the U.K. so that the waste plastic

can be collected locally and transported over shorter

distances. The U.K. uses about 5 million metric

tons of plastic a year, but barely one-fifth of that is

recycled or recovered, according to the Waste

and resources Action Programme, a government-

funded agency. Kutluoglu and Taskent hope to

change that.❧


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Stung

Distracted by a mysterious rash of dying bees, researchers may be overlooking a

more insidious pollinator crisis. It has little to do

with bees and everything to do with booming

markets for pears, raspberries, and chocolate

By Nathanael Johnson

Beekeeper Eric Olson has lost so many bees in the past few years, he’s had to consider closing shop. But nothing prepared him for what he found when he went out early one November morning to do a final check on “his girls,” as he calls them. The first hive was dead—completely empty. So was the second one. And the third. He began to wander through the yard, lifting lids at random, “just to see how drastic it was,” he says. “It was such a shock, I had to find out if we had anything left.” He had lost 90 percent of these bees, which had been buffeting blueberry flowers in western Washington a few months earlier. “What the heck happened that in one month those beehives went from sky-high, jam-packed, full of bees, doing great—to dead?”

You may already know about the global pollinator crisis. Over the past 50 years, the number of domestic honeybee colonies in the U.S. has dropped by more than half. Olson watched the number of bee-keepers in Washington fall from around 45 to only eight today. At the same time, wild pollinators have been disappearing. No one has seen a Franklin bumblebee (native to Oregon and California) since 2006 or a rusty-patched bumblebee (once common in New York) since 2005. As if this were not enough, beekeepers began telling stories about something utterly strange: sterile worker bees were abandoning hives, leaving their

Feature


It’s not that the dire stories were false; they just didn’t represent the big picture. Call it a scoping problem—the conclusions you draw from looking through a microscope may be opposite to those you arrive at after examining the same evidence through a telescope. By draw-ing on both perspectives, scientists have come to a new, more-nuanced revelation: a pollina-tor crisis does indeed loom, but the crisis they see has little to do with a decline in bees and everything to do with economic globalization and the world’s growing appetite for raspberries, cashews, chocolate, and other luxury crops. You don’t have to don a protective suit and poke around beehives to see this crisis: it’s there in your local supermarket when you find water-melons for sale in December.

The first person to point out the scoping problem was Jaboury Ghazoul. Ghazoul is an ecologist with enough sense of whimsy to poke fun at himself: his curriculum vitae webpage shows a picture of him looking beleaguered, with a crying infant straining from his backpack. “Jaboury Ghazoul,” the caption reads, “. . .he has a hard time with his children.” Perhaps it was this willingness to acknowledge human foibles that allowed Ghazoul to stand against the incoming tide of orthodoxy. The examples of pollinator declines were absolutely accurate and troubling to Ghazoul. But he was also troubled by the fact that scientists were using these zoomed-in, microscope-type observations

queens and pupae behind to die. In 2006, re-searchers began calling this phenomenon colony collapse disorder and pegging it as the source of a global pollinator crisis. The media picked up the story, and it quickly embedded itself in the public consciousness—and in the scientific community.

It’s a truly cautionary tale. Instead of a crisis that impacts humanity directly, such as a tidal wave or a pandemic, this one hits us as collateral damage through our ecological part-ners. As such, it’s tempting to use this crisis as an object lesson: we mess up the environment, pollinators suffer, harvests fail—and in the end, the cascade triggered by humanity rolls back on us in the form of hunger. Perhaps this circular justice was too poetic to resist; perhaps stories from beekeepers such as Olson were a little too compelling—because in all the excitement, few researchers stopped to question whether the bee crisis was a genuine global trend.

Then, last year, Argentine scientist Mar-celo Aizen hit upon an elegant way to test that assumption. If there really were a crisis, he fig-ured, harvests from crops that depend on bees and other pollinators should be declining or at least leveling out. Yet the yields of pollinator-dependent crops have grown at about the same rate as those of wind-pollinated crops. With Lawrence Harder, Aizen went on to show that instead of crashing, the total number of com-mercial honeybees has increased 45 percent in the past 50 years.

1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

120-

100-

80-

60-

40-

20-

0-

—global—Without USSr —Without USA

Percentage change in number of hives

6

0 10 20 30 40 percentage change in number of hives

350-

300-

250-

200-

150-

100-

50-

0-

1971

1961

1981 1991

2001

Percentage change in agricultural

production6

Despite fears of collapsing bee pop-ulations, the number of honeybee hives has been growing steadily for decades. So have the yields of pollinator-dependent crops.

Source: Aizen, M.A. and l.D. harder. 2009. The global stock of domesticated honey bees Is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. Current Biology 19:915–918.


to make generalizations about the big picture. In 2005 he wrote an opinion piece in Trends

in Ecology and Evolution, pointing out that, while many pollinators had decreased, others had surged to take their place. (1) Furthermore, he wrote, most of our staple crops—rice, corn, wheat, soy—don’t rely on pollinators. Despite all the talk, there was no evidence that crop productivity was going down.

Ghazoul’s purpose was not to defend big agriculture but to protect the credibility of

conservationists. Big-picture claims should be evaluated using big-picture data, he wrote, “lest we overplay our hand in demanding conserva-tion action for the wrong reasons.”

The paper was incendiary. “There are still some people who practically don’t speak to me anymore,” Ghazoul said. A group of scientists shot back a heated critique of this opinion piece, citing still more pollinator declines—along with historical examples of crop decrease due to loss of pollinators and studies showing that crops closer to wild habitat were more productive than plants in the middle of the field.

Still, there was no big-picture analysis to show whether the declines were actually trans-lating into crop losses. To prove this—or to prove, as Ghazoul suspected, that crop yields were doing just fine—scientists would need to assemble information on every farmer’s harvest worldwide. They’d need to find a vast store of data.

That trove of data, it turned out, was hidden in plain sight. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has kept statistics on global crop productivity for years. “When we came across these data sets, I said, well this is what we needed,” Aizen notes. “Here is the data, which is publicly available, to test this.” In his analysis of the FAO numbers, he notes that, if there really were a global pollinator crisis threat-ening food supplies, there should be a related

decline in average yield for all crops—or, at least, relatively lower yields for pollinator-dependent crops. (2)

But when Aizen and his coauthors plotted out the productivity gains of plants that need bees alongside those of wind- and self-pollinated plants, they got two lines trending upward in tandem. Chocolate depends on pollinators, and yields from cocoa farms have doubled since 1961. Watermelon, another plant that needs bees, has seen yields increase by 158 percent

in the developed world and 161 percent in the developing world. This means that, on average, each watermelon patch is producing more each year than it did the season before. These are not numbers that would indicate a crisis.

Working with Lawrence Harder, Aizen then turned the telescope provided by the FAO numbers toward honeybees. (The organization tracks the number of commercial hives around the world.) They found that, although the number of hives in the U.S. had indeed dropped precipitously, the global population of managed honeybee hives had increased by 45 percent in the previous 50 years, and total honey produc-tion had increased more than 100 percent since 1961. (3) In other words, the bee business has been outsourced. Since the 1960s, U.S. honey producers have been forced out of the industry by cheaper, imported honey. U.S. bee losses have been dwarfed by increases in places such as China, Argentina, and Turkey—countries which now dominate the honey supply. “At least for honeybees,” Aizen said, “the pollinator crisis is not happening.”

But that doesn’t mean there’s not a crisis. Aizen and Harder could have stopped with their re-pudiation of conventional wisdom, but instead they took their analysis a step further. What they found was sobering.

Over the past half-century, the earth’s farmers have doubled their production of

The crisis is plainly visible in the produce aisle


Pollinators are pricey. In California’s central valley—where the local crisis is very real—the cost of renting bee hives during the almond bloom recently tripled within two years: $50 per hive in 2006, $100 per hive in 2007, and $150 in 2008. As the numbers ratchet up, farmers may start looking for a backup plan.

Several studies show that wild pollinators can pick up the slack: watermelon flowers in California can receive visits from more than 30 native species of bees, and some wild pollinators can spur the commercial honeybees on—making them five times more efficient. (researchers think the confused native pollinators try to mate with honeybees, rousting them from a flower where they might otherwise dawdle.) But wild bees can help only if they have habitat close enough to the fields.

There have been a couple of dozen studies of wild bees volunteering on farms. In 2008, a group of scientists synthesized these findings to see whether they could draw some general conclusions about how far pollinators were willing to com-mute. (1) As expected, the farther the farms were from wild habitat, the fewer bees researchers found—on average, 50 percent fewer just one mile from habitat. Some species go more than twice that far, but it looks as though one mile may be a rough rule of thumb for estimating the radius of a bee’s foraging area.

researchers found only weak evidence that lack of bee diversity hurt agricul-tural production, a finding which may be explained by the use of commercial hives, but farmers are taking note nonetheless. even those who remain unpersuaded that native bees will help them are often willing to plant bee-friendly plants in hedgerows and windbreaks—just in case. ❧

1. ricketts, T.h. et al. 2008. landscape effects on crop pollination services: Are there general patterns? Ecology Letters 11:499–515.

Cutting commute times

Wild habitat close to farms can lure volunteer pollinators

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major crops that don’t need pollinators. These plants—corn, wheat, potatoes—are staples, and their increase reflects the basic need to fill 3 bil-lion more bellies (the doubling in production roughly mirrors a doubling in population). In that same time period, however, production of pollinator-dependent crops (cardamom, canta-loupes, and cashews) has quadrupled—and the number of beehives has increased. But Aizen and Harder point out that the 45-percent in-crease in honeybees seems less impressive beside a 400-percent increase in flowering crops.

The fact that yields have increased despite the disparity between bees and flowers could

indicate that wild pollinators are supporting farmers. But Aizen and Harder warn that, as more land is devoted to luxury crops and as small, diverse fields are converted to vast, high-tech monocultures, farmers could wipe out native bees—effectively knocking down the prop holding them up. Furthermore, if farmers in Africa turn to the likes of Eric Olson to ship in domestic honeybees, it could compound the problem. “Don’t forget,” Harder told me, “hon-eybees are an invasive species in most places.” They don’t always contribute to the relation-ships that have evolved between local species over the eons. They take pollen from native plants but often don’t fertilize them as well as the local bees. This means fewer seeds, fewer native flowers, and fewer wild pollinators.

In the process of demonstrating that no global pollinator crisis was occurring, Aizen and Harder found the portents of, well, a global pollination crisis. However, the crisis they foresee is one driven not by mysterious die-offs but by market pressures plainly visible in the produce aisle. It has to do with people in poor nations developing an appetite for good cocoa

and coffee. It has to do with people in wealthy countries assuming that tomatoes will be ripe and readily available year-round. Bee scarcity, in other words, is an economic problem caused by economic forces.

So how does this economic explanation square with the clear and present biological crisis that Eric Olson faces on the ground in Yakima, Washington? “We are not denying that there are serious biological problems, like in the U.S. with colony collapse disorder, et cetera,” Harder said. “But our argument is that this sort of thing is a short-term episode in a much-longer

declining trend that’s probably more related to the economics of the honey industry.”

The very fact that it’s so difficult to wrap your mind around the idea that dying bees could be a symptom of something as abstract as global economics speaks to the essence of the scoping problem: good science takes that which seems obvious to the naked eye and—by looking at it from a new perspective—provides a new and often counterintuitive model for explaining things. It seems obvious, for example, that the sun travels around the earth until you spend some time looking through a telescope. ❧

Literature Cited1. ghazoul, J. 2005. Buzziness as usual? Questioning the global pollination crisis. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 20(7):365–373.

2. Aizen, M.A. et al. 2008. long-term global trends in crop yield and production reveal no current pollination shortage but increasing pollinator dependency. Current Biology 18:1572–1575.

3. Aizen, M.A. and l.D. harder. 2009. The global stock of domesticated honey bees Is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. Current Biology 19:915–918.

While many pollinator populations have decreased,

others have surged to take their place

Nathanael Johnson is a freelance writer who contributes to several media outlets, including Harper’s Magazine and public radio. he frequently writes about agriculture, health, and conservation. he lives in San Francisco, California.


Feature

Wounds That Can Heal

A pioneering study of nature’s recovery times delivers a startling conclusion: that some damaged ecosystems bounce back in decades, not millenia. The findings offer a ray of hope —and a respite from apocalyptic storylines.

By Marguerite Holloway


Wounds That Can Heal

Galvanized by observations of environmen-tal destruction in the U.S. and in many of the countries he studied or visited during his career as an American diplomat, George Per-kins Marsh wrote Man and Nature. Published in 1864, the influential book awakened the American public to the devastation humans were wreaking, the potential consequences of that devastation (Marsh pointed to collapsed civilizations undone, in part, by “man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of nature”), and the pos-sibility of climactic change. At the same time, Marsh drew his readers’ attention to the idea of restoration and proposed that man “… become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged fabric which the negligence or the wantonness of former lodgers has rendered untenable.”

Marsh accomplished many things with Man and Nature, including—as environmental historian William Cronon has observed—launching the modern conservation movement. Marsh posited stunning ideas: that people could harm nature on a large scale and that people could do something about it—restoration could repair the “damaged fabric.” He included notes of hope in a dark tale.

No such notes brighten today’s envi-ronmental narratives, say some conservation biologists. The news is dominated by tales of deforestation, extinction, and climate change—examples of how humans have exacted global, irreversible transformations of ecosystems and the atmosphere. According to some observers, the hopeful piece of Marsh’s message—repair, recovery, resilience—is championed by those in the emergent field of restoration ecology, but not by the public at large and not by most in the conservation movement, who focus primarily on preserving intact ecosystems.

This is beginning to change. Since the mid-1990s, some ecologists have been calling for stronger, more-explicit links between resto-ration and conservation policy. Seeking to incite restoration fervor in their colleagues—with what they call “the audacity of environmental hope”—two conservation biologists at Yale University recently contributed an exhaustive

analysis to this trend. Although controversial in certain regards, their research points to instances of nature rapidly recovering from human disturbances. They urge conservation-ists to innovate, improvise, and experiment with restoration. Nature, the researchers say, can take it.

Holly Jones knows firsthand how rodents de-stroy seabird colonies by eating eggs and chicks. Since 2002, she has traveled the world, trapping and killing rats in the Channel Islands and the Aleutian Islands. “I was looking at island recov-ery, and we were doing a lot of these doomsday predictions about ecosystems, about how they are horribly affected and are not recovering,” says Jones, now a doctoral student at Yale. Yet she began noticing that dire predictions weren’t always playing out: “You see recovery and you see it actually pretty quickly, and it can be quite startling.” So Oswald Schmitz, Jones’s advisor and a professor in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, encouraged her to re-view the literature on ecosystem recovery. “We thought we would look at the evidence, because no one really had,” Jones recalls.

What was intended as a brief sidebar to Jones’s dissertation about seabird recovery turned into a yearlong investigation, culmi-nating with a May 2009 paper in PLoS ONE. The study, “Rapid Recovery of Damaged Ecosystems,” found that some impaired ecosys-tems bounce back, and within relatively short times—on the order of decades, not millennia. (1) The paper is openly upbeat, explicit in its goal to dispel doom and gloom about irrevers-ible harm.

To research the paper, Jones and Schmitz started by plumbing the Web of Science data-base for articles that included words describing a perturbation (such as logging, agriculture, invasive species, and oil spills) and the terms “re-silience” and “recovery.” Their search turned up 240 studies that, taken together, described seven types of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems and 94 variables. These variables included aspects of the system such as biodiversity, canopy cover, or water quality—aspects that could recover once


the perturbation ceased. Some of the ecosystems Jones and Schmitz reviewed had been actively restored, some had been left alone.

They found that more than one-third (34.5 percent) of the ecosystems recovered the attributes being examined. Although that might not seem like a lot, Jones and Schmitz argue that, in the face of the public’s expectation that damage to nature can never be undone, this proportion is significant. In general, aspects of marine benthic systems trounced by oil spills bounced back most quickly—within an average of five years. For the authors, this presented one of the biggest surprises. “People believe that oil spills are horrible for the environment and are so long-lasting, but the data indicate that is not always the case,” Jones says.

In 90 articles (37.5 percent), the aspects be-ing studied presented more of a mixed bag: some had recovered, some had not. Tropical forests, for instance, took an average of 40 years to re-cover, but if deforestation was not too extensive, facets of recovery could occur more rapidly, says Schmitz. “Large-scale tropical deforestation does not recover very easily, but there are more modest-sized disturbances that did recover.” Jones and Schmitz note that they could have included the recovered variables in these mixed studies in their “recovered” category, which would have made the conclusion more positive. “The paper presents a more pessimistic picture than what is actually happening,” Jones says.

Only 67 studies (28 percent) demonstrated no recovery of any aspect of the ecosystem. Agriculture was far and away the single most-damaging disturbance. But there were other

devastating perturbations as well, such as over-fishing in the case of cod. “That is an example of where I think things have locked into an alternative state,” says Schmitz. The predator-prey relationships are so changed that stopping the damage (in this case, banning fishing) “won’t be enough to bring [cod] back because there are other things that have happened subsequently to transform the system.”

Some restoration ecologists found aspects of Jones and Schmitz’s analysis unsettling. Res-toration ecology is a relatively young science, one that has been growing robustly since the 1988 founding of the Society for Ecological Restoration International. Because it is young and because the systems and situations it deals with are so varied and complex, many aspects of restoration science are still evolving. Ques-tions abound about how to determine a baseline or “original” state in the absence of good data and about what “recovery” means—should the ecosystem sustain itself, should it be managed, should all the species or aspects of the system be back in place for restoration to have occurred? “The fuzzier the criteria are for recovery, the easier they are to hit,” notes Joy B. Zedler of the University of Wisconsin. “Authors have these various judgments, and they don’t want to talk about failure. We rely on their judgment that they hit the target, which introduces bias into the whole system.”

That bias has led to gross overuse of the term “success,” Zedler contends. (2) For this rea-son, the Journal of Restoration Ecology just added a new section called Setbacks and Surprises. “I

Jones and Schmitz found that most eco-systems bounce back within decades, even after dramatic disrup-tions from trawling, hurricanes, and oil spills.

Source: Jones h.P. and O.J. Schmitz. 2009. rapid recovery of damaged ecosystems. PLoS ONE 4(5):e5653. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005653.

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think that is a really good thing to do,” Zedler says, “because up until this time there has not been an invitation to authors to submit work on projects that did not work.” This potential absence of failed restoration projects from the literature concerns Zedler with regard to Jones and Schmitz’s research. “I am thinking there are just all kinds of opportunities for the literature not to be representative,” she says.

Margaret Palmer, a restoration ecologist at the University of Maryland, is worried about what might be missing from the literature, too—as well as what might be missing from Jones and Schmitz’s database hits. Studies without “resilience” or “recovery” may not have shown up. Palmer says reports of stream and riv-er restoration in the past five years, for instance, have not documented much success in restoring either overall biodiversity or particular species. In her view, restoration of these ecosystems is failing because the techniques are not working and indeed “might be damaging.” She recently published a review of 78 projects and found only eight showing evidence of positive recovery. (3) Palmer says she now leans toward taking a page from conservation: “The focus needs to be on preserving land and letting it go back to forest. Much more so than on restoration.”

Angst is part and parcel of restoration science, despite its underlying hopefulness. Angst that restoration will justify destruction. Angst about what it means to “play God.” Angst that no eco-system can return to a self-sustaining, histori-cally biodiverse state—or that those historical states will even be remembered. “Angst is great.

You want to have people constantly asking the core questions. A certain number of us should worry. But you can’t let that keep you from doing something,” says Truman P. Young, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis. “Systems can find a way. Mistakes should be repairable. We should go back and fiddle some more.”

This kind of thinking is precisely what Jones and Schmitz want to encourage in the conservation community. The authors ac-knowledge the limitations of the restoration literature and say they intend to probe more deeply in further studies—to look, for instance, at differences between ecosystems left alone to recover versus those actively restored. And, Jones cautions, evidence of resilience “does not give license to exploit; we are not saying go out and destroy the earth.”

At the same time, the two clearly delight in having identified a suite of studies suggesting that some wounds can heal. The delight shines in the paper’s language and in their conversa-tion. “People like hope. I think it has been obvious that people like hope!” laughs Jones. The article “spread like wildfire,” Schmitz adds happily. “We got Google updates and we could just see it go around the planet, literally.”

They delight in the possibility that this pa-per could exhort the public and the conservation community to embrace restoration, to experi-ment more fully with it. Historically, Schmitz says, conservation has focused on protecting intact habitat. “But restoration is really where the value-added is in conservation. I mean, this is where we can make the biggest gain, because

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damaged land can be bought for cheap, and with a mixture of passive and active restoration we can do a lot of good things,” he explains. “What we are showing is that there may be more room for experimentation to figure out how we become more sustainable. If we make mistakes, we can recover from them, and pretty quickly. That really gives hope for people to try things rather than do the status quo or the light touch. Because I think with the status quo, you don’t get the kind of innovation you might need.”

Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, was so delighted to see the paper, he called Jones and offered her funding for a postdoctoral position so she could analyze some restoration projects more fully. “I have been run-ning around talking about the fact that nature is resilient. We have a wrong-headed metaphor of nature as fragile,” Kareiva says. “What Holly’s paper tells us is that nature does not break that easily in the sense that it becomes irrevocably harmed. This could make a real practical differ-ence in the conservation community because it means that you will consider a wider range of strategies and compromises.”

This idea resonates for some other ecolo-gists as well—particularly for those who have been describing links, crossovers, and differ-ences between the fields for a long time. “One could imagine conservation biology becoming a subset of restoration ecology when it becomes clear that most of what we have to do is restor-ative,” muses Young, who has written about the relationship between restoration ecology and conservation biology. (4) “Less focus on prevention of loss, and more on getting things back: a mindset changing from defense to of-fense. I can certainly see that it won’t be long before we are in a place where the defensive actions are all done.”

As the Anthropocene unfolds, ecosystems may come to look very different from the ones we are familiar with. “As we come into increasingly novel and hybrid ecosystems, we will be drawing from similar and varied tool kits,” says Eric Higgs, director of the school of environmental studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. “There is enormous value that comes to human communities from acts of restoration. They induce states of humility. They make us recognize hubris. There is noth-

ing like trying to restore an ecosystem to make you humble.” And, Higgs adds, “it is hard not to feel good doing it.”

Being drawn to something tangible in an era when the largest environmental challenges seem out of the realm of human and personal control, makes intuitive sense—and it makes psychological sense. People do not respond to apocalyptic narratives, says conservation psy-chologist and chair of environmental studies Susan Clayton at The College of Wooster. “If they feel hopeless, they see no point to doing anything. If you make them fearful, but they have no ability to address the problem, you are going to motivate denial rather than action.” Clayton points to a recent Pew Research Center survey of 1,500 people as a potential example of fear without a clear route for individual ac-tion: between April 2008 and October 2009, the percentage of American adults who believe there is solid evidence for global warming fell from 71 percent to 57 percent.

“Our perspective was that if you want to get people behind you in conservation, you have to give them some hope,” Schmitz says. “Scream-ing and yelling about doom and gloom isn’t going to change things. It isn’t going to compel people to change their behavior. But if you can show them what the world will look like when they change their behavior, then maybe they might.” ❧

Literature Cited:

1. Jones h.P. and O.J. Schmitz. 2009. rapid recov-ery of damaged ecosystems. PLoS ONE 4(5):e5653. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005653.

2. Zedler, J.B. 2007. Success: An unclear, subjective descriptor of restoration outcomes. Ecological Restora-tion 25(3):162-168; doi:10.3368/er.25.3.162.

3. Palmer, M.A. 2009. river restoration, habitat hetero-geneity and biodiversity: a failure of theory or practice? Freshwater Biology 55 (suppl.1):1-18.

4. Young, T.P. 2000. restoration ecology and conserva-tion biology. Biological Conservation 92(1):73-83.

Additional Reading:

Dobson, A.P., A.D. Bradshaw, and J.M. Baker, 2007. hopes for the Future: restoration ecology and Con-servation Biology. Science New Series, 277(5325): 515-522.

Marguerite Holloway is Director of Science and environmental Journalism at the Journalism School at Columbia University and is a contributing edi-tor at Scientific American.


Desperately seeking LTR wiTh NaTuRe

Frank, my husband, is a self-described “hard” scientist. He studies chemicals in the brain—how desire actually works in the cells, the little switches and locks. He listens to me talk about what it means to love a place, but he says I can’t just assume that people care about places. He says I need data. “I’m a philosopher,” I told him. “Philoso-phers don’t do data.” But the fact is, I had been conducting a study of sorts. For several months before we left for the island, I read the love ads in the

order). In all, fully two-thirds of the SFs and SMs listed “the outdoors” first on their lists—a clear winner.

After the outdoors, the first runner-up was watching movies. Beaches and camping tied for third place. Walks and hikes came in fourth. Then came danc-ing and dinner, followed by romance. (Let us pause to notice how long it has taken to get to romance—sixth on the list, after all the outdoor sports). After romance, there was a three-way tie among cuddling, fishing, and country-western music (although none of the people who liked to cuddle also liked to fish), and one vote each for mountains, darkness, the blues, Harleys, hand-holding, friendship, and vampires. My research found no significant difference between men and women, except that three women liked sports, which are of no interest whatsoever to the men. So there it is. People like the outdoors best of all, they say, even better than sex.

Frank received these data with the mixed astonishment and chagrin that only a scientist can muster. “Kathy, this is bad science.” I know that; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. I don’t want to claim that everybody loves the outdoors; I just want to point out that many people do, and to observe that love for place and love for people

eSSay

Shy Affectionate SFSaturday paper. The secret coded

yearning, the SWFs and DMs all ISO something—this in-

terested me. I would never have had the occasion or even the temptation to phone the Lonesome Horseman, or send a photo to Teddy Bear, or tell Endangered Species that I’m a rarity myself, but I was curious. Love ads are a data bank of human nature far more revealing than

the Human Genome Project: fifty people every

week explaining who they are and what they are looking for, in twenty-five words or less.

I kept a count of love ads in the Corvallis Gazette-Times, tallying up what people were searching for. The data revealed that more people like “the outdoors” than any other thing. The typical SF, a LARGE & BEAUTIFUL momma, 31, who is shy and honest, likes the outdoors, movies, and walk-ing on the beach (in that order). The typical SM is a VERY FIT MALE, who is very sensitive. He likes the outdoors, romance, and tattoos (again, in that

By kathleen Dean Moore


are mixed together in beautiful and mysterious ways. I know a woman who walked through an ancient cedar forest and fell helplessly in love—with the for-est and with the man carrying her sand-wich. And I have seen people search all their lives for what would make them happy and whole and never think to look outside the door—perpetual seek-ers, not sure what they are looking for, but endlessly searching, on the Internet, in catalogs, at the mall.

I don’t know if the people who place love ads in my hometown news-paper are typical of people in general. For that matter, I don’t know if Or-egonians are representative of human beings. And who knows if the people are telling the truth; maybe they just say they like the outdoors because they think that will attract a particular sort of person. I’m not claiming that the connection between loving a person and loving a place is simple. I just think it’s significant that—more often than not—when people have an opportunity to envision their unlived lives, to dream about starting over and doing it right this time, the outdoors is the setting for their dreams. Big-hearted Bob and

Chantilly Lace walking hand-in-hand at the edge of the sea: the raised pulse, the rhythmic waves, the crying gulls, the salty, exultant wind.

In 1984, Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson advanced the biophilia hypothesis, arguing that human be-ings have an innate attraction to living things. This attrac-tion makes sense from an evolution-ary perspective. “To an extent still un-dervalued in philos-ophy and religion,” he wrote, “our exis-tence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents.” I like this hypothesis. It ex-plains a lot: When we wall ourselves off from the natural world’s wild sources of comfort and belonging, don’t we feel a self-destructive restlessness, like a single moth in a jar? And Wilson’s hypothesis is hopeful: If humans naturally love the living things on this planet—all the burrowing, breathing, breeding biotic systems, the foundations of our very lives—then maybe we can find a way to act lovingly toward them.

This is why I was happy to present Frank with evidence consistent with the biophilia hypothesis and to sug-gest one more thing. We are attracted to the great green earth—and to pink algae, blue fish, gasping newborn babies, and suction-cup tadpoles. But read the love ads closely and literally:

ISO LTR. In search of a long-term rela-tionship. The people who place ads in my hometown newspaper aren’t just advertising for partners, they are advertising for love.

Like all of us, what they seek is a last-ing relationship—with people and the planet—and what they cherish is relat-edness, being in caring connection with a person or place. We are creatures who are born to love. It’s more than biophilia that drives us. It’s philophilia—the love of love itself. ❧

“Shy Affectionate SF” from The Pine Island Paradox by Kathleen Dean Moore (Minneapolis: MIlkweed editions, 2004). Copyright ©2004 by Kathleen Dean Moore. reprinted with permission from Milkweed editions. www.milkweed.org.

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A Flock of JetsMimicking birds could reduce airline emissions

Both Boeing and Airbus have trumpeted the efficiency of their newest aircraft, the 787 and A350, respectively. Their clever designs certainly make a difference. But a group of researchers at Stanford University, led by Ilan Kroo, has sug-gested that airlines could take a more naturalistic approach to cutting jet-fuel use. The answer, says Kroo, lies with birds.

Scientists have long known that birds flying in forma-tion expend less energy. The air flowing over a bird’s wings curls upward behind the wingtips, a phenomenon known as upwash. Other birds flying in the upwash experience reduced drag and thus spend less energy propelling themselves. Aero-nautics expert Peter Lissaman has suggested that a formation of 25 birds might enjoy a range increase of 71 percent.

The principles are not substantially different when ap-plied to aircraft. Kroo and his team modeled what would happen if three passenger jets departing from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas were to rendezvous over Utah, as-sume an inverted V-formation, occasionally swap places so all could have a turn in the most-favorable positions, and proceed to London. They found that the aircraft consumed as much as 15 percent less fuel, with a concomitant reduction in CO

2

output. Nitrogen-oxide emissions during the cruising portions of the flight fell by around 25 percent.

There are, of course, kinks to be worked out. One consideration is safety—would passengers feel comfortable traveling in convoy? Kroo points out that the aircraft could be separated by several nautical miles. A passenger peering out the window might not even see the other planes. Whether the separation distances involved would satisfy air traffic–control regulations is another matter.

It remains to be seen how weather conditions affect the airflows that make formation flight more efficient. In zones of increased turbulence, the planes’ wakes will decay more quick-ly, and the effect will diminish. Kroo says this is one of the areas his team will investigate further. It might also be difficult for airlines to coordinate the departure times and destinations of passenger aircraft in order to benefit from formation flight. In contrast, cargo aircraft and routine military flights might be easier to reschedule.

As it happens, America’s armed forces are on the case already. Earlier this year the country’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced plans to investigate formation flight.❧

© 2009 The Economist Newspaper limited, london (December 3, 2009)


SolutionS

Photo by ho-Yeol ryu

Cheap LaborPenguins, seals, and petrels drafted to map the sea

The Patagonian Sea is one of the earth’s richest marine areas. Spanning 3 million square kilo-meters, it’s also so vast that conservationists have struggled to develop a comprehensive scheme to protect its denizens. Now, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and BirdLife In-ternational have developed a breakthrough tool: a cutting-edge atlas that could be a blueprint for mapping new marine reserves.

The atlas was developed with help from an unlikely—if obvious—source: scores of tracker-outfitted sea creatures. The animals hailed from 16 species including penguins, southern elephant seals (Mirounga leonine), and several

species of albatross. All told, they produced 280,000 individual data uplinks as they swam, nested, and fed—allowing researchers to com-pile what they say are the most-accurate maps of the area ever assembled.

The maps detail locations of deep-sea feeding grounds as well as migratory corridors covering hundreds of kilometers. As ship traffic, development, and fishing encroach upon these areas, conservationists envision using the atlas to develop a new network of wildlife reserves and corridors. It could also help policymakers manage fisheries and change shipping lanes, routing traffic away from critical areas.

—Justin Matlick


Biological BatteriesTapping into the power of the electric eel

Skin Cream for ShipsHulls engineered to mimic whale skin may improve fuel efficiency

Barnacles and other sea creatures can encrust a ship’s hull after just a few months in the water, slashing fuel efficiency and requiring costly cleanings. In turn, shipping companies have long dreamt of finding a sure-fire way to discourage the growth. Now, a research team led by Rahul Ganguli of Tele-dyne Scientific & Imaging may have found the solution in an unlikely source: pilot whales’ clear complexions.

Unlike some whale species, a pilot whale’s visage is never blemished by barnacles. A few years ago, German researchers uncovered the secret behind this phenomenon: the whales’ skin repeatedly grows and sloughs off a special layer, casting hitchhikers adrift. The new ship system mimics this mecha-nism.

The system calls for a network of hull ducts that ooze liquid chemicals that become viscous upon contact with water. These chemicals spread through steel mesh covering a ship’s hull, forming a thin, slimy “skin.” This skin would regularly dissolve, taking barnacles and any other colonizers with it.

Ganguli says the chemicals are nontoxic (they’re already approved for use by the oil-drilling industry) and that the volume released into the ocean would be comparable to that of some existing hull paints. He believes the system, which has been partially funded by the U.S. defense department, would cut down on fuel use and corrosion, lengthening ships’ lifespans and requiring less-frequent maintenance stops.

While the research is in its infancy, lab tests on small pieces of metal have demonstrated a proof of concept. Now it’s a matter of scaling up so ships can boast the same flawless skin as pilot whales. ❧

—Rebecca Kessler

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In December 2007, a Japanese aquarium hooked up the lights on a Christmas tree to a tank containing an electric eel. Metal plates at the ends of the tank collected the electricity the fish generated, which was used to power the bulbs. It was certainly effective as a public-ity stunt. Now some researchers in America have developed a battery that generates elec-tricity in a similar way.

The mechanism allowing Electrophorus electricus to produce a shock as strong as a wall socket employs differences in the concentra-tion of sodium ions, which are spread across some 6,000 specialized cells called electro-cytes. Normally, these cells are electrically iso-lated from one another. When the eel locates its prey, it opens cellular gates through which


Disturbing the PeaceWar-inducing chemical turns invasive ants against each other

SolutionS

Photo ©Marc Dantzker, University of California, San Diego

the ions can flow. This movement of charged ions creates an electric current.

David LaVan of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and his colleagues wanted to study the operation of living cell membranes and their proteins. They began by experi-menting on artificial “protocells” sur-rounded by membranes made of fatty molecules. Proteins “floating” in the membranes would let only certain ions pass. Using this system, the researchers realized they might be able to copy the eel’s electricity-generation mechanism.

The team fused two protocells, then added a dilute concentration of potassium chloride to one protocell and a more-concentrated solution to the other. To help ions move from the less-concentrated protocell to the more-concentrated one, LaVan’s team installed a protein—called alpha-hemo-lysin—into the protocell membrane. This functioned as a selective bridge, permitting the passage of positively charged sodium ions but not negatively charged chloride ions. As the selected ions moved in one direction, electrons (which are negatively charged) flowed in the opposite direction. To make use of this electrical current, the team con-nected tiny electrodes to the protocells.

They report in Advanced Materials that they were able to sustain a usable current and that adding more proto-cells would increase battery life. LaVan calculates that two of his protocells, measuring several centimeters across, could run a portable MP3 player for about ten hours. A novel Christmas present, perhaps? ❧

© 2009 The Economist Newspaper limited, london (November 3, 2009)

Argentine ants are masters of destruction. They displace native ants, raid honeybee hives, drive pollinators away from flowers, and pour into people’s homes around the globe. In fact, one enormous colony extends for thousands of kilometers along the southern coast of Eu-rope. To stop these relentless invaders, Neil Tsutsui at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have come up with a devious solution: stir civil war within the colonies.

By applying certain chemicals to an ant, the researchers have found, they can provoke its nest mates into attacking it. All Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) in a colony have on their bodies a distinctive mixture of molecules called hydrocarbons that allows them to recog-nize other colony members. To create the enemy cocktail, Tsutsui’s team identified hydrocarbons that differed among colonies.

Chemists at the University of California, Irvine, synthesized the molecules, which were then used to coat individual ants. The coating adds a scent that makes an ant’s nest mates think it comes from a dif-ferent colony, thus changing it from “friend” to “foe.”

In an entomological version of Rome’s Colosseum, researchers placed each coated ant into a Petri-dish “arena,” added ten nest mates, and watched. The nest mates lunged, flared their mandibles, pulled the ant’s legs and antennae, smeared toxic chemicals on its body, and sometimes even killed it, says Tsutsui. While nest mates showed ag-gression during roughly five percent of control trials, those levels rose to an average of 35–65 percent with treated ants.

While more research is needed to determine whether the chemi-cals will work in the field, Tsutsui hopes they might someday be used as an environmentally friendly alternative to insecticides. ❧

—Roberta Kwok


Spider Silk MusclesA two-centimeter rope of spider silk can hoist an SUV

Electron microscope image of spider web strands 73 to 400 nanometers in diameter

Courtesy of the robert D. Ogg electron Microscope lab at the University of California, Berkeley

Scientists have always known spider silk is strong. But strong enough to lift an SUV and hold it in the air?

Researchers at the University of Akron think so and are making in-triguing discoveries about how spider silk could revolutionize everything from manufacturing to medicine. Their core finding: by adding or re-moving moisture to dragline silk—an exceptionally strong silk used to build a spider web’s spokes—scientists can

make it contract and expand like a human muscle.

To reach this conclusion, a research team led by Todd Blackledge attached tiny weights to silk strands and placed them into a controlled chamber. By adjusting the chamber’s humidity, the researchers caused the silk to raise the weights, hold them in midair, and lower them back down.

A single strand of silk, thin-ner than a human hair, can lift 100

milligrams—about the weight of a toothpick. Now imagine a future where robots use bundles of silk to maneuver enormous loads. A rope just two centimeters thick, for example, could theoretically hoist an SUV.

This could mean big energy sav-ings in warehouses and other industri-al venues—unlike electromagnets, the strands don’t need a constant stream of energy to hold something aloft. ❧

—Amy Mayer


When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.

—Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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When a Seattle newspaper reporter asked a 67-year-old Jacques Cousteau whether he had faith in anything, he gave a strange reply: “I believe in the instant.” But even Cousteau, who died in 1997, might be surprised at how quickly his legacy has faded.

After all, I (and most of my young colleagues in marine science and con-servation) know little about the man—even though he won several Oscars, revolutionized underwater exploration, and introduced millions of people to the mysterious world beneath the sea. Which is why, when I picked up Brad Matsen’s new biography, I was surprised to learn that Cousteau became almost as committed to conservation as he was to celebrity.

He didn’t begin that way. Like many notable conservationists, Jacques Cousteau began his career as an avid hunter. He and his friends were ruth-less spearfishers. They helped develop new hunting and diving gear to kill fish in greater numbers than ever before. Eventually, the French government had to restrain them by banning certain equipment.

Cousteau hunted with spear guns but also with cameras. He set out to perfect the art of underwater filmmak-ing and assembled a team of devoted followers. In 1950, he purchased his famous vessel, Calypso, and began sport-

ing the hallmark red caps that expressed his obvious comfort with celebrity. Six years later, Cousteau won his first Oscar for his documentary The Silent World.

It is clear in the film that Cousteau had not yet committed to conservation. At one point, frenzied sharks feed on a baby sperm whale that Calypso had hit in transit. Cousteau calls the sharks the “mortal enemies of men” as the crew hacks them to pieces on the deck.

Technological ad-vances revolutionized our relationship with the sea, and humans went from being helpless un-derwater to being apex predators. Technology such as underwater com-munication devices, air regulators, and UFO-looking submarines also allowed Cousteau’s team to explore the depths. Cousteau’s relationship with the sea likewise got deeper.

The man who had once attempted to obtain a live dolphin for an oceanic museum became opposed to keeping marine mammals in captivity. He started exposing his audience to effects of industry, development, and tourism on the oceans. By 1976, Cousteau had shaken his youthful naiveté in believ-

ing we would colonize the oceans and had instead become a full-time con-servationist, which made it difficult to keep his constituents happy. Scientists accused him of showmanship, critics accused him of faking scenes, and net-works demanded he keep his films full of intrigue—not Earth-saving rhetoric. Funders wanted to see more wonder

and less gloom—shows like Cousteau’s earlier work. But the ocean was now a very different place. Cousteau would fight to convince the public and politicians of this for the rest of his life.

In 1980, at the age of 70, Cousteau made a rguab ly one o f h i s most-important—and least-popular—films. In Mediterranean: Cradle or Coffin? he wanted his audi-

ence to see how much the ocean had changed. The film begins with black-and-white footage Cousteau shot in the Mediterranean in 1946—full of life such as rock bass, rays, and tuna. What follows is footage of the same spot in 1977. “In only three decades, the seafloor has become a desert—bleak as the surface of some barren planet . . . the rich abundance has vanished,” says the narrator. By juxtaposing footage

Lost at SeaThe mysterious disappearance of Cousteau’s conservation legacy

National g

eographic/getty Im

ages

Jacques Cousteau The Sea King By Brad MatsenPantheon, 2009


spanning 30 years, Cousteau aimed to visually combat the problem of shift-ing baselines—that newer generations are willing to accept a degraded state as natural because they were never exposed to what was pristine.

Cousteau released Cradle or Coffin on the heels of his successful television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. According to Matsen, the 36 episodes that aired between 1968 and 1977 “changed the way millions of people thought about the sea.” Maybe this is true. But what about the children of those millions of people? I had never watched a minute of Cousteau before seeing Cradle or Coffin. Why has his work fallen so quickly out of the public eye, and what will become of his legacy?

Matsen tiptoes around Cous-teau’s vulnerabilities: his brother’s pro-Nazi tendencies, his temper, the dissolution of his marriage, his womanizing, and his two illegitimate children. But to ignore the personal dramas surrounding Jacques Cou-steau might be to ignore why his legacy as a conservationist has been stunted. Aside from several references to Cousteau’s fiscal irresponsibility, The Sea King ends with only a brief mention of what could be the real rea-sons for the fall of the Cousteau em-pire: the disagreements between his second wife and his son Jean-Michel over rights to the derelict Calypso and, more baffling, the Cousteau name. Due to the drama in Cousteau’s pri-vate life at his death, it seems that the public memory of Captain Cousteau might go down with his ship. ❧

—Jennifer Jacquet

Jennifer Jacquet is a postdoctoral research fellow working on the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre. She blogs at Guilty Planet.

Plan B 4.0Mobilizing to Save CivilizationBy lester r. Brown W.W. Norton & Co., 2009

As one might expect from the sub-title of his new book, Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 is no modest affair. The founder of both the Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institutes proposes that, to avoid global catastrophe, hu-mans must cut net CO

2 emissions 80

percent, stabilize population at 8 bil-lion or lower, eradicate poverty, and restore the Earth’s natural systems—all by 2020. Brown’s enthusiasm is contagious, but what’s really striking is just how familiar his goals have already become—and how Brown fails to outline a specific, workable plan to avert catastrophe. ❧

Short reviews by Judy Wexler

Down to the WireConfronting Climate CollapseBy David W. OrrOxford University Press, 2009

Political scientist and environmen-tal thinker David Orr throws his hat into the ring of climate-change prophecies but fails to push beyond the familiar laments. Orr warns

The Earth After UsWhat legacy Will humans leave in the rocks?By Jan ZalasiewiczOxford University Press, 2008

Taking the very long view, geolo-gist Jan Zalasie-wicz embarks on a provocative thought experi-ment in his new book: if extrater-restrials landed on Earth 100 mil l ion years

from now, what traces of humanity would they find? In other words: what will be our geologic legacy? The answer might make you feel less guilty about your ecological foot-print. Chances are, in a few million years there will be no trace that you ever existed, let alone any record of your cross-country, carbon-intensive airplane trips. In fact, even iconic human structures—such as the pyra-mids of Egypt—will be gone millions of years from now. But as Homo sapiens continues to alter Earth’s climate and ecosystems, our collec-tive record in the rocks will not be insignificant. ❧

that humans cannot continue with business as usual. And also like his fellow Jeremiahs, Orr laments the uneducated state of the American populace, infantilized by consumer culture. But his prescribed solutions for the U.S. and for the world seem glib for a political scientist. A bul-leted list of recommendations in the book’s last chapter includes cutting the Pentagon’s budget by one-half and confiscating all profits from the weapons industry. ❧


Book MarkS

Rewilding the WorldDispatches from the Conservation revolutionBy Caroline FraserMetropolitan Books, 2009

Amidst the hyperbole and hand-wringing often found in environmen-tal writing, Rewilding the World is a beacon of clarity. In her primer on the recent history and current state of conservation science, author Caro-line Fraser explains how ecological theories, such as mesopredator release and the theory of island biogeogra-phy, became integrated into applied conservation. Some case studies from the book are success stories—what once was a heavily fortified border between East and West Germany is now a corridor of habitat for preda-tors such as the European lynx. Some anecdotes end in failure; when the U.S. government reintroduced wolves to the Southwest, many were quickly shot by ranchers. And some efforts, such as the relocation of prairie dog colonies in New Mexico, have trajec-tories whose outcomes are yet to be determined. ❧

GrassIn Search of human habitatBy Joe C. TruettUniversity of California Press, 2009

Grasses—including rice, wheat, corn, and oats—make up only two percent of Earth’s approximately 400,000 species of vascular plants, despite their outsized importance for humanity. Joe C. Truett’s book is a paean to these mono-

cotyledons, which he began studying as an undergraduate in the 1960s. Now a grassland ecologist, Truett writes elegantly about the African savanna of the Pleistocene era, the prairies discovered by Lewis and Clark, and the first golf courses commissioned in the United States. Along the way, he reveals that what you might regard as an 18-hole, country-club centerpiece is actually a carefully designed landscape—one that mimics our evolutionary preferences for the grasslands from which we evolved. Truett’s essays range from memoir to history lesson, but they’re always impassioned, informative, and entertaining. ❧

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A Missed Opportunity

I was amazed to read David Malakoff ’s article “Be Fruitful and Multiply?” (October–December 2009) in the pages of Conservation maga-zine. Conservation is where I would hope to see some care-ful consideration of how bil-lions more people will drive wildlife off the landscape. If conservation biologists don’t educate one another and the general public about the costs of increased popula-tion growth on biodiversity, who will?

philip CaFaro

Colorado State UniversityFort Collins, Colorado

An Unpopulated Argument?

Unfortunately, your recent article on population (Be Fruitful and Multiply, October–December 2009) does little to illuminate Stuart Brand’s views on population and the environment; the links between population growth, re-

source use and environmental quality; or the thinking that led Brand to his conclusions.

Much of the article is devoted to the economic consequences of a stagnating population. The only

environmental issue that really gets a look is our current obsession with the consequences of global warming. Yes, the poor nations currently make few per capita contributions to carbon emissions, and the climate change de-bacle is largely the creation of wealthy nations. But it borders on delusional to leap from that fact to the conclu-sion that population is neutral, or even good, for the environment. I believe that people are part of the solu-tion to our environmental crisis. But


packing more people onto an already crowded planet makes those solutions less, rather than more, likely.

andy park University of Winnipeg Winnipeg, Manitoba

Troubling Ideas

The article “Troubled Teens” (Octo-ber–December 2009) troubled me. Although I’m aware of research show-ing that aggressive behaviors of young male rhinos and elephants (species that are social) can be moderated by contact with adult males, I find it hard to un-derstand how this could be extended to cougars.

The encounters between adult territorial males and younger males are generally reported to be brief and vio-

lent, not male-bonding or mentoring experiences. And Robert Wielgus’s hy-pothesis seems speculative. It is almost impossible for hunters to tell whether a treed cougar is male, and Washing-ton Department of Fish and Wildlife cougar-kill statistics do not support strong hunter selection for males.

California experienced a series of cougar attacks on humans in the late 1980s and early 1990s; two women jogging or walking in wilderness areas were killed. In both cases, the cougar involved was a female with cubs. Per-haps a more parsimonious explanation of cougar attacks on humans is that nursing females and young males like “Bron”—whose long-distance move-ments were shown in your article—are hungry. Young wandering males and females with cubs seem most likely to have a difficult time meeting their ca-loric needs, and desperation and starva-

tion would explain unusual interaction, location, and aggression.

david a. JeSSup

Hot in the Shade

The recent article on growing a forest in the Sahara (A Shady Scheme, October–December 2009) says the plan calls for building desalination plants on the coastline surrounding the desert. Before moving ahead with this, it would be wise to consider that these plants have enormous energy demands. With this in mind, the question becomes: would the Sahara scheme cool the planet or warm it even further?

Judith S. weiS

Rutgers UniversityNew Brunswick, New Jersey

“Fascinating … Providing for the layman the ‘connective tissue’ of a vast array of subdisciplines this US-centric mono-graph is a success, especially in dealing with climate change. It is teeming with unexpected information and is a grand tour of the universe.”—Nature “It wasn’t always a footprint. Follow carbon’s journey from how it is born in stars to how it became the molecular back-bone of DNA, plastic, sugar, and fat. There’s a bigger story to this man-made time bomb than makes the headlines.” —Discover

“Roston fits in discourses on bulletproof vests, buckyballs and more, quoting everyone from Hippocrates to Yoko Ono. Carbon neutral it isn’t.”—New Scientist

“This eleganT volume Takes readers on a grand Tour of carbon’s role in The universe, from The elemenT’s sTar-crossed birTh billions of years ago To iTs role in

The fossil-fuel indusTry and global warming.”—Newsweek

Available wherever books are sold.Walker & Company

www.walkerbooks.com


think again

There is no point in denying it: we’re losing.

Climate change denial is spreading like a conta-gious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there’s solid evidence that the world is warming has fallen from 71 percent to 57 percent in just 18 months. This trend certainly doesn’t reflect the state of the science, which has hardened dramatically.

Interestingly, climate beliefs seem to be strongly influenced by age. The Pew report found that people over 65 are much more likely than the rest of the population to deny there is solid evidence the earth is warming, that this warming is caused by humans, or that it’s a serious problem. Why might this be?

There are some obvious answers: older people won’t be around to see the results; they were brought up in a period of technological optimism; they feel entitled, having worked all their lives, to fly or cruise to wherever they wish. But there might also be a less-intuitive reason, which shines a light into a fascinating corner of human psychology.

In 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposed that the fear of death drives us to protect ourselves with “vital lies” or “the armor of character.” We defend ourselves from the ultimate terror by engaging in “immortality projects”—projects and beliefs that boost our self-esteem and grant us meaning that extends beyond death. Over 300 studies conducted in 15 countries appear to confirm Becker’s thesis. When people are confronted with things that remind them of death, they respond by shoring

Why Is Climate Change Denial So Seductive?By George Monbiot

up their worldview, rejecting people and ideas that threaten it, and working to boost their self-esteem.

One of the most-arresting findings is that this behavior can actually bring death closer. In seeking to defend the symbolic, heroic self we create to suppress thoughts of death, we might expose the physical self to greater danger. For example, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel found that people who reported that driv-ing boosted their self-esteem drove faster and took greater risks after they had been exposed to reminders of death.

A recent paper by biologist Janis L. Dickin-son, published in Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armor but diminish our chances of survival. There is already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency while raising antagonism toward scientists and environmentalists. Their message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to sup-pose that those who are closer to the end of life might react more strongly against reminders of death? And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how do we confront it? ❧

©copyright guardian News & Media ltd., 2009


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