Does the existence of New Orleans make ecological sense?

(New Orleans and Katrina.  How many more times will we rebuild it?)

As an ecologist and an environmentalist I have often wondered whether New Orleans makes any sense at all. This major city is located on the Louisiana coast 2-6 meters below sea level. Using the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, we try to build structures that block the waters of the Atlantic Ocean from flooding this historic metropolitan area of about 1,000,000 people. I have concluded that given the costs of rebuilding the city’s structures and housing, and the probability that future disasters due to hurricanes and flooding are probably 100%, that it does not make sense to continue supporting this endeavor.

My argument goes like this. When we know that a particular disaster has a high probability of occurring, we should minimize our investment of resources in that location. We know the following with virtual certainty at this point: polar ice caps are melting, sea level is rising, and cyclonic storms that arise over the warming oceans of the world are likely to be more common and more intense than in the past. This means that Katrina-like events will occur again along the Louisiana coast. The question is whether humans can design and build structures that will hold out against these powerful natural events. Maybe we can learn something from a place in the world that has been fighting this battle for centuries: the Netherlands.

From Wikipedia, we find that “After the 1953 disaster, the Delta project, a vast construction effort designed to end the threat from the sea once and for all, was launched in 1958 and largely completed in 2002. The official goal of the Delta project was to reduce the risk of flooding in the province of Zeeland to once per 10,000 years. (For the rest of the country, the protection-level is once per 4,000 years.) This was achieved by raising 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) of outer sea-dykes and 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) of inner, canal, and river dikes to "delta" height, and by closing off the sea estuaries of the Zeeland province. New risk assessments occasionally show problems requiring additional Delta project dyke reinforcements. The Delta project is one of the largest construction efforts in human history and is considered by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the seven wonders of the modern world.”

In other words, given 2,000 years of experience with trying to keep the ocean at bay in a country where 27% of the land is below sea level, the Dutch have developed a system that is so extensive and so elaborate that it is considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world. The jury is still out as to whether even this will continue to work against rising seas. Now, I am not an expert on this topic, but it appears that the storms that pound the Louisiana coast are more powerful in terms of wind than what typically comes from the North Sea, and the Caribbean storms occur more frequently. In other words, the chances of Americans designing a system that can prevent the kind of disaster we saw in 2005 from occurring again and again seem remote to me.

I realize it is not politically correct to talk about abandoning a city with a 300-year old history. And New Orleans is an important conduit for oil, natural gas, and other products entering through that deep-water port. However, I am sure that some kind of elevated housing could be constructed for those who choose to remain there to work in those industries, which are vital to U.S. commerce. I envision that something like an oil rig structure could be devised that would serve the purpose. But to spend billions of dollars and to squander hundreds of tons of physical materials to rebuild repeatedly seems like folly, not to mention the future human suffering that this encourages.  I would make the exact same argument for development of any kind on the floodplain of rivers, on an active earthquake fault, or next to an active volcano.  It is not a matter of IF disaster will occur again, it is only a matter of WHEN.

I have often admonished my children that the future is not likely to look like the past, and to behave accordingly. This is particularly true in a world that is so populous that we are even changing the climate. It is time that global planners incorporate more ecological thinking into their repertoire. Southeastern Louisiana was once a vast wetland at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and I suggest we let it revert to its natural state.

Is Obama, or would McCain, be better for the environment?

(Is the jackalope a product of the law of unintended consequences?)

It is nearly impossible to be a blogger and not comment at least once on the presidential race of 2008. For starters, I will put my cards on the table and tell you that I was for Barack Obama all the way. My wife and I first got excited about Obama when we heard him give a speech in the Jewish synagogue in downtown Denver, Colorado in March 2007; later that month my wife and I put “Obama for President” bumper stickers on our car. By the way, that car is a SUV, so you now see all my cards.

But the question here is which man as President, McCain or Obama, would be better for the environment. The answer to that important question is not abundantly clear to me, and in thinking about it, I realize how complicated and convoluted the answer could be. Traditionally, we environmentalists tend to think that Democrats are more favorable for the environment than Republicans. However, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the conservation legislation that many tout as the single most important environmental law ever written, was enacted under the Republican Richard Nixon. On the other hand, President Reagan (a Republican, who is quoted as saying “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all”) appointed James Watt as Secretary of the Interior, which most environmentalists considered a disastrous choice for such an important position as the manager of the nation’s natural resources. Generalizations seem to have low predictive power in this kind of analysis.

Here is a brief and highly simplistic analogy to demonstrate how there can be both intended and unintended effects on the environment. Let’s consider two families in the U.S., the Greens and the Slobs. Mr. and Mrs. Green read Al Gore’s book on global warming and they took it seriously. They turn off the lights when they leave one of the rooms in their house, they run their major appliances at off-peak hours, and they bought a small car (their second car) that gets 35 mpg. They built their 3,500 square foot house, well-insulated, in the woods from which they drive 10 miles to get to work everyday. They take a winter skiing vacation in Colorado and a summer vacation to Europe or Costa Rica most years that, of course, involves flying. Did I mention that the Greens have three children and two cats?

The Slobs haven’t read a book in a decade (the last was a Danielle Steele romance novel), they keep their electric home really warm in the winter and really cool in the summer, and they even throw trash out of their car when driving down the road. The Slobs live in a 1,500 square foot house in a run-down suburb of a major city. The Slobs drive an SUV, but they live only about 1 mile from their jobs. Their vacation in the summer involves driving to the beach about 50 miles away and staying in a cheap rental for a week with their only child.

If we were to do a carbon footprint analysis of these two families, it would surprise no one here that the Greens contribute much more to climate change than the Slobs, even though the Greens are trying to do their best. In fact, the two additional children that the Greens have will, alone, result in a much greater impact on the environment over the roughly 75-year years in which those two humans live in the U.S. than any energy the Greens could possibly save while those children are still living in their home. During those 7-8 decades, those two additional humans will consume tons of raw materials in the products they buy, use millions of joules of energy, and generate hundreds of tons of waste. In the short run, the Greens are also responsible for permanently eliminating a chunk of habitat from the forest in which they built their house, reducing and/or degrading biodiversity in the process. In short, although the Greens “intend” to reduce their impact by watching their energy consumption and their waste generation, their “unintended” impact is much greater than the Slobs, who are basically clueless about the whole issue. And if we compare the Greens to almost any of the 4-5 billion people living in developing countries, their relative impact is enormous.

Obama and McCain both intend to cut carbon emissions by 2050: Obama wants an 80% reduction over 1990 levels and McCain wanted a 60% reduction. Both of them have opposed drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The League of Conservation Voters graded each senator’s lifetime voting record in 2008 with regard to environmental issues—McCain got 24%, Obama got 86%. Overall, Obama seems to be the candidate likely to be better for the planet, a conclusion also reached by others who are examining this issue (http://www.observer.com/2008/obama-vs-mccain-environment-opening-bell).

What about the unintended consequences? What if Obama, who has written a book about being hopeful, engenders enough optimistic feeling in the U.S., or even the world, that the birth rate ticks up .1%-.2%? Sounds far-fetched, but birth rates historically increase when people feel the future is going to be bright. Or, what if McCain had been able to stimulate the housing market to the extent that several million more houses were built than would otherwise have been the case? All economists think this would be a good thing, but try to estimate the increase in energy consumed, habitat lost, and materials used. Both candidates promise to stimulate economic growth and lower gas prices, but this tactic is almost certainly bad for the environment. For example, lower gas prices stimulate greater use of that resource and contribute more to climate change. These are enhancements that might be “good” for most of us in the short term, but be “bad” for us all in the long term. Isn’t this the classic dilemma?

Most of us do not engage in very deep analysis of these environmental issues, even when a general election is at stake. We take at face value what each candidate says they are going to do, compare what they say, and make a decision. My argument here is not that they may be lying, or naïve, or simply misinformed about what is possible to accomplish. That may be true. I am arguing that evaluating the consequences of having one man as President over another is pretty complicated because of the probable chain of interactions and unintended consequences of policies that may have nothing directly to do with the environment. But, then, isn’t that an incorrect statement? Doesn’t everything we do have an effect on the environment?

Climate change and individual behavior

(Let's open that oven door a little less often.)

Where did this crisis come from? I stand by the 2,500 scientific expert reviewers who signed off on the IPCC 3-volume report in 2007, which was written by more than 800 contributing authors from over 130 countries, and which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The report concluded that we have met the enemy and it is us. Realize that about 30 billion tons of CO2 enter the atmosphere each year due to human activities, in addition to vast quantities of sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane. It would be astounding to me if that did not have an effect on earth’s climate. But this essay is not going to deal with the issue of whether humans caused the climate change problem, or whether it is due to aliens, or farting cattle, or the most recent Milankovich cycle. I want to focus on our individual behavior.

The carbon cycle is an important one for life on earth. Plants need carbon dioxide, which is given off every time an animal breathes, to conduct photosynthesis, and photosynthesis produces oxygen, which is needed by animals. So there is really a gigantic symbiosis there between those two groups of organisms. Everything went along just fine until the past century. We discovered the fossil fuels of coal, oil, and natural gas, which are comprised mostly of carbon and, of course, when carbon mixes with oxygen we get carbon dioxide. These fossil fuels were safely sequestered hundreds of feet below ground for about 200 million years. We dig them up, bring them to the surface, and burn them, which releases carbon dioxide into the air.

It is a worthwhile exercise to think about how to get rid of all that new carbon now that it is on the surface. Basically, you can not. You can let more plants grow, which sequester carbon in their tissues, but eventually they die and decompose and release the carbon back into the cycle. Much of it falls into the ocean, but it is eventually released again as well. One far-out suggestion is to cut down millions of tons of trees and sink them to the bottom of the ocean, which would take carbon out of the system for centuries. Not recommending that. I don’t have the answer, but we need to keep thinking about how to reduce the carbon that is already out of Pandora’s Box.

But what can we do to reduce the amount of additional carbon we put into the already burdened atmosphere from the package in which it is now sequestered—chunks of coal or barrels of oil? We can reduce the annual flow of CO2 into the atmosphere as individuals. I recently bought two books (can you guess where I bought them?) that have helped me get my head around the companion issues of what are the specific sources of CO2 and what can I do about them. Chris Goodall’s “How to live a low-carbon life: the individual’s guide to stopping climate change” has been the most informative piece I have read yet on this topic. Goodall works for a software company, was a Parliamentary Candidate for the Green Party, and holds an MBA from Harvard. The other book is “You can prevent global warming (and save money!)” by Jeff Langholz and Kelly Turner. Langholz received his Ph.D. in my home department at Cornell, and is now at the Monterrey Institute of International Studies.

Goodall estimates that about half of all CO2 emissions to the atmosphere are due to what individuals do in their daily lives: heat and light their homes, travel, etc. The other half comes from producing the food we eat and shipping it to us from afar, heating and cooling office buildings, and construction. His thesis, which is supported with numerous examples, is that we can not count on the governments of our respective countries (Goodall lives in the UK) to reduce emissions by as much as they are needed. Thus, we need to take responsibility ourselves for reducing our individual contribution from about 12.5 tons of CO2 per person per year to 3 tons per person per year, to use his numbers from the UK. (Remember, you can talk about carbon or you can talk about carbon dioxide, but do not mix the two in an apples to oranges comparison. One ton of carbon equals 3.6667 tons of carbon dioxide).

Goodall does an excellent job at taking each of the “systems” of our lives (e.g., lighting, car travel), explaining the contribution of that component to the overall problem, and offering sound advice on how to minimize our impact. The Langholz and Turner book is like a “saving energy for dummies” guide. What exactly and specifically can you do in your home, and what products are available to do it, to minimize your contribution to the problem of climate change. I find that the two volumes in combination (for a total price of about $25) have armed me for my personal attack on this vexing problem.

So I admit there are actions we can take as individuals, even given my usual pessimism about the quantities involved in these global problems of the environment. Much of it seems to be reprogramming our usual habits. If you want to make a real difference, never fly on a plane, and I mean never. But according to Langholz and Turner, if every oven owner in the U.S. peeked at their dinner cooking one less time per year, we would save 7,000 tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere every year. For starters, I think I can manage that.

Earth Day 2010

(What have you done for your "Mother" lately?)

Earth Day 2010 will be celebrated in a few days.  The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970. I was in the U.S. Army on that date and, to be honest, I don’t remember a thing about that event. I’m not all that big on celebratory days anyway. But it is noteworthy that this event has been around for 40 years now, and it has had a positive effect. Environmental legislation was passed, awareness was raised, and an annual remembrance was institutionalized. The following excerpt was copied from Wikipedia:

“Earth Day proved popular in the United States and around the world. The first Earth Day had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. More importantly, it brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform."

Senator Gaylord Nelson, principal founder of the event, stated that Earth Day "worked" because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. 20 million demonstrators and thousands of schools and local communities participated. He directly credited the first Earth Day with persuading U.S. politicians that environmental legislation had a substantial, lasting constituency. Many important laws were passed by the Congress in the wake of the 1970 Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act, laws to protect drinking water, wild lands and the ocean, and the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Earth Day is now observed in 175 countries, and coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, according to whom Earth Day is now the “largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a half billion people every year. Environmental groups have sought to make Earth Day into a day of action which changes human behavior and provokes policy changes.”

But I keep thinking about the resources needed to really clean up planet earth, to protect biodiversity, and to reduce the probable impacts of global climate change. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq war, and committed hundreds of thousands of people to that effort. The irony is that, in my opinion, we have done this primarily to try to protect the flow of inexpensive oil. If successful (jury is still out), we will use more oil because it is cheap, and contribute more to the primary global environmental disaster facing us today—climate change. So, in effect, we are spending tax dollars to encourage the planet to be degraded faster. What is wrong with this picture?

As usual, humans are attempting to maximize short-term benefits at the expense of long-term costs, something I have written about several times. We simply were not selected to worry about events that might occur years in the future. So on it goes. At least, Earth Day encourages humans to think about the future, if only for a few hours.

The depth of our environmental concerns mimics our evolutionary heritage

(Early humans probably traveled only short distances and only worried about short intervals of time into the future.)

Last year at the annual meeting of the Western Political Science Association in San Diego, CA, University of Missouri professor David Konisky reported on the results of his survey of 1,000 adults regarding their environmental concerns in a paper titled "Environmental Policy Attitudes, Political Trust and Geographical Scale". “The survey’s core result is that people care about their communities and express the desire to see government action taken toward local and national issues,” said Konisky, a policy research scholar with the Institute of Public Policy. “People are hesitant to support efforts concerning global issues even though they believe that environmental quality is poorer at the global level than at the local and national level. This is surprising given the media attention that global warming has recently received and reflects the division of opinion about the severity of climate change.”

In other words, people are more concerned about what happens in their own backyard than they are about the global environment. “Americans are clearly most concerned about pollution issues that might affect their personal health, or the health of their families,” Konisky said. Global warming ranked 8th among the environmental concerns reported by the respondents.

Is this really an unexpected result? On the surface, it seems surprising that given all the media attention to the problem of global climate change (e.g., rising ocean levels, melting glaciers, demise of polar bears and penguins, mass extinctions, shifts in agriculture, etc.) that it would not rank as the number one concern among a sample of Americans. But thinking as an evolutionary biologist for a moment, something I try to do a lot, the results could be viewed exactly as expected.

Throughout the Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from about 1.8 million years BP until about 11,000 years BP, humans lived in relatively small nomadic groups, or clans, of related individuals. They probably did not live much past the age of 40 and they probably did not travel long distances. The landscape must have been a dangerous place, so I have to presume that individuals went only as far as they needed to obtain the requisites of life: food, water, animal skins for clothing, wood for a fire. Occasionally there would be a dispersal event to colonize new territory, but the world you knew was only as large as the area you walked during your relatively short life. What another hominid clan did three valleys away had no effect on your life whatsoever, and it seems likely that humans living 100 miles apart never even knew of each other’s existence. What I have briefly described here is what evolutionary psychologists call the “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” or EEA. That is, conditions of life during the Pleistocene were such that humans were selected to be adapted to that environment, where life was short and known distances and effects were spatially small.

But times have changed. Now, the lifestyle of Americans, or Europeans, or Chinese threatens the well-being of a Bangladeshi living on the coast through the effects of global warming and rising ocean levels. The demand for furniture in Japan made of tropical woods can eliminate the habitat and homeland for native wildlife and humans living in parts of Indonesia. Radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine resulted in resettlement of more than 300,000 people locally, but the fallout was detected in North America. And on, and on, and on.

Somehow we have to rise above our evolved concerns focused on immediate issues of time and space, but I still do not know exactly how to bring that about. We are all at least aware of how local actions can have global effects, and that is a start. And many of us pay lip service to our responsibility to future generations. But it seems to me that overcoming the "small distance-short time" dilemma is critical to solving 21st century environmental problems. The evolutionary problem is simply this: what is best for us and our family right here and right now may be harmful to others further away and not yet born. This dilemma manifests itself over and over again. Recognizing it is a first step to overcoming it.

What does cigar smoking have to do with global warming?

(Cover of Cigar Magazine.)

Recently I experienced a convergence of two of my interests that was totally unexpected. I was catching up on past issues of Cigar Magazine when I came across an article in the summer 2008 issue titled “Secondhand smoke and global warming: More connected than you think?” by James M. Taylor. I could not even imagine how smoking and global climate change could be interrelated, so I read on. Realize that CM is a first rate glossy magazine and, in my opinion, is the best rag on the market about all things cigar.

Although CM is a fine resource for finding ratings on various cigars, the history of the industry, new products on the market, etc., there is always a theme running through its pages critical of anti-smoking legislation and the general problem a cigar smoker has in finding a suitable place to indulge in their most cherished hobby. There is plenty of anti-government, anti-Big Brother, and even anti-medical science between the covers of CM. Anytime a writer for CM finds an ounce of reason to believe that medical science got it wrong—that smoking is not as harmful as claimed or that the harmful effects of secondhand smoke is unfounded—they will articulate their argument as forcefully as they can.

So in Taylor’s piece in CM, he uses the “debate” about climate warming as an analogy for the medical science/anti-smoking issue. Taylor claims that there are more scientists who believe that global warming either does not exist or that it is not caused by humans, and he cites the “Global Climate Change Project” and refers us to the website that hosts this project at Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. The site claims to have 31,000 signatures from scientists and other highly-educated people who do not believe in the scientific conclusion that global warming is real and is caused by human activity. Taylor’s argument is that the media often ignores, exaggerates, or misconstrues the “scientific community” in its reporting to the public. Fair enough. But in this argument, he is claiming that the REAL scientific community with respect to global warming is that group who signed the Petition (rather than the climate scientists who authored and signed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report), and that the media is ignoring the Petition Project group. If the media is ignoring these “real” scientists and telling us that climate change is imminent, the media may also be hyping and exaggerating the claims of medical scientists who tell us that smoking is not healthy. His fear is that such propaganda might result in special restrictions and higher taxes for cigar smokers. But this logic all seems to be a sort of anti-intellectual attitude borne out of fear that we may not like the messenger’s message.

There are many criticisms of the Petition Project and these are well-articulated in an essay blogged by Gary J. Whittenberger on eSkeptic in November 2008. I will not attempt to reiterate the points made by Whittenberger regarding what is wrong with the results of the petition, because that is not the point of this essay. My point is that it is usually difficult for the public to know who the real experts are on some topic, to know who is summarizing the experts’ views accurately to the public, and to distinguish what is truth from what we want the truth to be. Taylor does not want the medical profession to be correct about the harmful effects of smoking or its impact on cigar smokers; if all true and the public takes it seriously, cigar smokers might have to change their smoking behavior even more than they have already. Similarly, many people I talk with in the general public do not want climate scientists to be correct that global warming is caused by human activity because, if true, we might have to change our behavior regarding our energy consumption.

Humans have a proclivity to believe what they want to believe, or to continue to believe what they have always believed. I hypothesize that this tendency is usually adaptive, and that what worked in the past is likely to work in the future. But those days may be over. The earth is strained to capacity and changes occur rapidly now. The future may not look like the recent past at all.