Backing into Eden: Chapters 6, 7, and 8
Brenda Cooper
2013-06-28 00:00:00
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Backing into Eden Chapter 6 – What we know about the animals



In the last chapter of this blog, I talked about how our ever-growing compute power is helping us gain insights into complex ecosystems.  Knowing where an elephant herd is could help save them from poachers (particularly if the poachers don’t also have the same data).  Knowing how elk herds migrate can help us plan interstates in ways that keep their freeways open to them.  But good analysis depends on having good data.  In this chapter, I’ll talk about how we’re gathering that data today, and touch on how we might gather it in the future.

We all have more data than ever, and a lot of that data is about location.  Our phones broadcast our location to emergency responders.  Many of our cars can be tracked (think LoJack or OnStar).  GPS devices live on our bicycles, our wrists, and our tablets.

We own three dogs and they are all both chipped with RFID and collared with active GPS.   Neither technology is at all invasive to the dogs, although the GPS is a little invasive to us since we need to charge the little devices attached to the dog’s collars.





Our dogs are tagged with RFID and GPS.




Larger and wilder animals are also tracked with GPS collars and human minders.  For example, bears are tracked all over the world – polar bears, black bears, grizzly bears.   We learn what they eat, what they do, what other wildlife they encounter, and how they die.  While I was researching bear tracking, I came across a really wonderful art piece called Bear71 which tracks a grizzly through her whole life.  It’s a thoughtful, poetic piece that explores the difficulties for wildlife on human lands, which is essentially a part of what this blog series is about. I recommend that you actually spend the time to look at it, and to interact with it – don’t just watch.  Use your mouse.  Or your finger.  But touch the video.

So how might this kind of data actually be useful?  A recent study of tagged white sharks identified that all of the tagged sharks mated at the same location, but the population of females split in order to have their babies.  The part of the study that discussed conservation said, “If further tracking reveals that females are philopatric [return to] to very specific pupping grounds, the preservation of genetic diversity will depend upon the proper management of both the adult females and pups that support specific nursery area.”  In other words, these researchers learned that they must keep three specific sites safe in order to protect genetic diversity in white sharks.

Perhaps even more importantly, the article about sharks (linked below) is available under a Creative Commons license.  That means that the information can be fairly easily re-used and combined with other information – and big data tools – to add to our ability to understand what we could do to protect vulnerable species. In fact, exactly this conclusion was arrived at in an article about the tracking of elephant seals. “Much of the data still needs to be analyzed… But for the first time, because of the tracking, the data exists.”

We are also using other tools to gather data.  Video and still cameras provided data about starlings, and sophisticated software analyzed the positions and behavior of specific birds.  This provided new knowledge of how bird flocks are formed and how birds stay together.  And it no longer takes a lot of money to track and monitor animals with cameras.  Wildlife cameras are now common, and can even be ordered from Amazon.com for a little over $200.00.  People can set them up and use them with their home computers.  In other words, you and I or our neighbors can have motion-activated cameras to watch trails or watering holes or our own backyards.

So what about the future?  Problems with animal tracking today include catching and tagging the animals, monitoring them with human labor, battery replacement, and the animals moving out of range of the home device.  In the future, animal tracking devices could be much smaller and less invasive (more similar to the ID chips under our dog’s skin than to the much larger GPS units on their collars), or may be off of the animal altogether.  If we can watch areas and monitor who and what goes through specific locations, similar to trail cameras today, and stitch all of that information together, we might be able to see how wildlife moves without touching it.  We might be able to track a grizzly (or for that matter an elephant, a whale, or a rabbit) by its movement across grids of cheap and networked cameras and sensors rather than by invading the animal and hanging something heavy and a bit obnoxious onto it.

Virtually all of the animal tracking data that we have is recent – as we track more and more animals through their full life-cycles and multiple generations, we’ll be able to learn more about how they interact. We’re still learning how to collect data and what to do with it, and of course, it’s the doing that matters.  The tsunami of data and the power of the tools we can use to understand that data is swelling.  With luck and care, we can turn the data into knowledge to help us act, to mitigate our affect on the wild world, and to give animals a better chance as surviving the next few decades.

Note that there I provided a lot of links to the research I used below, since I found this topic and the reading to be particularly interesting:

The Use of Biotelemetry in the Study of Animal Migration, Melissa Hay (Department of Biology, the University of Western Ontario) & Nebel Silke (Department of Biology, the University of Western Ontario), Nature Education, 2012:

Tracking Polar Bears by Satellite, USGS Alaska Science Center  and related blog post at Mapping the Marvelous by Marion

Tracking Southern Michigan’s Black Bears, By Howard Meyerson, The Grand Rapids Press, January 14, 2013 at 9:40 AM

Andean Bear Tracking  

National Film Board of Canada, Bear71 

Two-year migration of adult female white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) reveals widely separated nursery areas and conservation concernsMichael L Domeier* and Nicole Nasby-Lucas, Animal Biotelemtry, 2013.

A Tidal Wave of Data on Elephant Seals, By Sindya N. Bhanoo, The New York Times, May 21, 2012 

Birds of a feather… track seven neighbors to flock together, Phys Org, by Anna Azvolinsky, February 8, 2013

Tracking A Puget Sound Orca To Northern California, OPB, Jan. 15, 2013 | AP 







Backing into Eden Chapter 7 – Call for a Framework



This Sunday, I’ll hop on my bicycle at home, where we live in a charming neighborhood of older tract houses with grass lawns and flower gardens. I’ll zip down a trail beside a freeway into Redmond, the home city for Microsoft, and enter the 640 acre Marymoor park to arrive at the start of a Cascade Bicycle Club ride.  A hundred or so other riders will have driven or ridden in from the surrounding urban areas, most travelling for less than thirty minutes.  We’ll ride up a hill dotted with homes that all have land – mostly about an acre each, down the backside of that hill, and through farmland and small towns, returning to the park after riding about 60 miles.

biking with CTSThis is possible because Washington State, and then our county (King County, which includes Seattle) did a great job of land use planning.  In 1990, the state passed the Growth Management Act (GMA), which is designed to push urban dwellers together, reduce sprawl, save farmland, and preserve open spaces and vital waterways.

The joke is that we passed the GMA because the Californians were coming, and we saw what they did to California, and didn’t want them to mess up Washington, too.

Earlier in this blog series, I established that whether we like it or not, humanity as a collective has chosen to own pretty much all of the land.  We’re using most of it.  We use it for cities, suburban housing, livestock, food crops, and public utility  like parks and national forest, roads, and sports courts.  Much of our land in Washington is now used in line with the grand plan of the GMA (although certainly not all of it).  But the uses of most places in the world are less planned, and much of the land serves short term needs at the cost of long-term human health.

Because we now have good maps, big data tools, and the internet to communicate across, we can create a vision. Once we have a vision, we can act.

In fact, environmental groups all over the world are acting.  They are setting aside land, working to protect hypercritical systems like the Amazon basin, or even sailing around on big ships risking jail to save the whales.

One way to think of all of this work is many excellent visions…working…not quite together.  At best, forces for good are in periodically cooperative competition with each other.  Most of them are not directly about land use – they’re going after it to save an animal here and a plant there, or perhaps a whole delta.

But it’s all really one coordinated system.

It’s time to agree on a framework.

We’ve spent a lot of money developing models of the whole globe in order to study climate change.  I suspect these models already include a lot of the information and structure that we need to design good land use policies.

To keep the mind-exercise small enough, lets start with the Cascadia ecosystem which includes Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and possibly parts of northern California and Idaho.  It’s already been well planned compared to much of the rest of the Earth. There is still a lot of open space.  There’s variety:  cities and mountains and rivers and ports, wineries and ranches and a lot of raging, rocky coastline.  It’s not all good. We have one of the worst superfund sites in America.

We could map out the ideal way to manage this land – design our garden if you will.  Do the GMA exercise on a larger scale.

Cities:  You’d have to put those where the cities already are and plan around them.  Any region needs cities, preferably as attractive and functional as possible.  These are economic engines and hotbeds of innovation.  Not only are urban centers a cheaper place to keep people, but they’re where most people want to live.  Over fifty-percent of the world’s population now chooses to live in cities.

Wild spaces:  We have a lot.  Keeping the ones we have is probably also a constraint. But we can certainly add to them, and if necessary we might be able to trade one for another in order to aggregate or spread out open spaces, and to protect the right land.  This is harder than it looks.  In some cases, we’ve protected pretty places that depend on vulnerable land or water we haven’t protected.

Farming:  Keep a lot of open space for farmland, but reduce it.  Use vertical farming to grow far more produce on far less land, and to farm inside cities.

This smacks of video games from Civilization to Sim City or Farmville.  Planning a world is something many humans enjoy.  If we look at Cascadia as garden plot, we’ve done quite a bit right, but we’ve also almost wiped out our salmon runs, thrown freeways down across major wildlife corridors, and soiled the beautiful Puget Sound and the great freshwater engine of the Columbia River.

Of course, this isn’t a real game and we can’t start over from scratch.  I believe we can start with what we have, and make it better.  Significantly better.

Governments have a role.  They set land use parameters, manage utilities and parks, encourage or discourage development.  Governments can (and do) use zoning and taxation and other tools to manage economic behavior.

Governments, however, are limited by their own boundaries.  They can collaborate across them (usually with great difficulty).  But non-profits are not boundary-limited. One of our regional non-profits,  ForTerra, has purchased land, encouraged swaps of development rights to move development into the cities, and created shared visions for conservation of huge swaths of land in the Cascadia region.  Perhaps even more important, they market ecological land use to people and businesses in ways that make it attractive.   Some of their major sponsors are our biggest companies.

When I’m riding through forests and farmland for hours, the idea of humans as gardeners of the world feels like pure unadulterated hubris.  But all of that land I’m riding through has allowed uses, and disallowed uses.  Because of that, I can take my pretty rides.  Between government and NGO’s (and others), we need to get about the business of creating a framing vision for land use on a grander scale than we’re used to.  I don’t mean detail-managing every piece – centralized control is devastating.  But a framework and clear principles that are flexible enough to allow for change and backed by laws would go a long way.

Understanding what we have and seeing what we want to create matters.  We know enough now to get going on that job.   Then perhaps my grandchildren will be able to take large group rides from their urban doorsteps across wild lands from wherever they live.

Links:

The link list is a little more eclectic than usual.  Bear with me.

The Vertical Farm

Where farming is headed, we don’t need soil, Business Insider, March 26th, 2013, Dina Spector.  

ForTerra

Environment Washington:  Defending Washington’s Waters

Discussion on banning architecture at The Hieroglyph Institute







Backing into Eden Chapter 8 – Do we save the whales or the mud snails?



I wake up for coffee and the New York Times, enjoying both in the still crack of morning when the birds greet the day with soft songs. On one such morning in the spring of last year, I was still deciding whether or not to steal valuable time from my fiction career to do this work.  An article in the Times helped to convince me.  It was entitled “To save some species, zoos must let others die.”

Flower in the CascadesI thought about that article for days.  It’s obviously still with me – I found it again and linked to it below.  I encourage you to read it, and to think about it.

Early on in this series, I talked about the anthropocene extinction, which is the casual destruction of entire species of plants and animals by a single species (us). Ecocide.

Most of us aren’t even noticing.

Here are a few recently-extinct species: The Formosan clouded leopard, the eastern cougar, the western black rhinoceros.  The Japanese river otter.  The Pinta Island tortoise.

I didn’t notice any of those specifically until I looked them up.  But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.

In the last chapter we talked about land use planning with an eye to the preservation of the critical resources we need to live.  There have been many successes, but we need more, and on a grander scale.

Typically, humans plan when there is a goal, and at least some risk of shortage along the way to achieving that goal.  This shortage can be will, time, resources, or raw materials.  In this case, we’re short of all of those.  That means we’re going to have to plan carefully, monitor, and make choices.

Zoos are making these choices by deciding which radically endangered species to breed and care for.  Even as they twist some of their mission to conservation, and communicate with each other all over the globe, there aren’t enough resources in all of the zoos in all of the world to save all of the animals.

They know this.  Many zoos have banded together to create what is called the Frozen Ark.  Re-usable DNA and cell samples are probably going to be critical to increase diversity in animals we are trying to save in the wild, or to restore animals after they become extinct.

But it’s even more important to do what we can to preserve biodiversity now and soon.

That’s still about making choices.  Can we save all of the whales?  Or will we need to abandon some populations of specific whales, or even whole types?  The problem is complex.  For example, scientists in the Pacific Northwest are studying the decline of killer whales in the area.  There are a lot of pressures on these beautiful beasts, and one of them may be lack of food.  The salmon they prefer are also threatened.  If we save the salmon, we might accidentally also save the whales.  If we save the whales from whale-watching boats and ocean acidification but don’t save the salmon, the whales may die anyway.

The news is not all bad.  Species are being removed from lists as well as added.  Sometimes we declare a plant or animal extinct and then find we were wrong.  We are doing a good job of protecting some habitats and of blending wild and human spaces better.  There have been increases in bald eagles, whooping cranes, and prairie dogs.

But the trend is still – strongly – to the negative.  The great work that has been done so far isn’t enough to get us out of having to make choices.

Thankfully, we probably don’t have to directly decide to kill any species.  But we may have to kill individuals of one species to save another whole species.  We do this when we weed, and when we remove non-native species to restore ecosystems to native form.  Recently, forest managers chose to kill invasive barred owls to save spotted owls in the Northwest forests.

Notice that the ethics get a little harder and a lot more complex as we move from plants to animals.  I would find it nearly impossible to shoot a barred owl to save a spotted owl.

Most of our choices have been focused on one species at a time. They have been from the heart.  Actively choosing how to spread a thin layer of money, attention, and labor across a thick layer of endangered species will be harder.

We can’t leave it all up to zoos.

We do have tools to help.  We have detailed mapping, the ability to track many kinds of animals well, and big data tools to help us grasp problems and opportunities.

We don’t yet understand all of the interdependencies such as salmon and whales (and for the salmon, storm-water management on-shore, the day-lighting of streams, and more).  The knowledge we need is growing fast, and there’s enough of it to act now. While we’re funding the science we need, it’s time to keep executing the work we’re pretty sure tilts the balance the right way (setting aside land to protect ecosystems, managing development new population ends up in the cities, de-toxifying as much as possible, managing carbon and climate change).  Maybe most important, we have to keep educating.  Projects with bad communication often fail.  We need to keep up the pressure of knowledge that forces us to act.  To notice to species we are losing and use their passing to illustrate how important it is to save what we can.

We can’t save all of the animals.  It probably wouldn’t even be smart to try. Extinction is a variable in the evolution equation.  The problem isn’t extinction per se, it’s the speed and stupidity and scale of the anthropocene extinction event that we need to turn around.  Success will be one of our defining moments as a species.  Failure, of course, means increasing our own risk of joining the extinction.

The idea of making conscious choices about what to save is profoundly disturbing and unsettling.  I believe we can save enough to thrive, to thread the needles of the near-future and come out on a side where biodiversity is growing faster than its shrinking. But this discussion skirts the edges of human hubris, and takes us perilously close to playing god when we are not that.

As usual, here are some of the links I’ve been following as I put this together:

To save some species, zoos must let other die, By LESLIE KAUFMAN Published: May 27, 2012, The New York Times  

Conservation Triage:  Say you have an ark. Which species do you save? By Michelle Nijhuis|Posted Thursday, Feb. 21, 2013, at 12:08 PM  

Saving Species

Peak at Swoon’s Anthropocene Extinction, Brooklyn Street Art, May 2011    (This one is because art is a powerful form of education)

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species  and related, a pretty long list of endangered animals and plants all together – the size of the list alone is daunting

The Frozen Ark:  Saving the DNA of endangered species

One Endangered Species Eats Another:  Killer  Whales and Salmon,   NOAA Fisheries, January 22, 2013 

Killing one Owl Species to Save Another:  NPR, June 12, 2011