In light of several comments on a recent post, it seems as though a more complete discussion of cost-benefit analysis might be useful. It is a process that is useful in many aspects of biology, from resource management to health issues.

The basic premise is that to make decisions, you need to estimate both qualitatively and quantitatively the potential costs and benefits of the possible choices, and use that information to make the best choice. The magnitudes of both cost and benefits are important, because balancing a large cost against a small benefit will result in a different choice than when the cost is small but the benefit is large.

The mistake most people make when making choices is to consider only the potential benefits, or the costs, but not both simultaneously. For example, the anti-vaccine movement exists mainly because of fears of side effects, specifically autism (a link which has not been established). Yet even if all the potential side effects do occur, they are extremely rare, relative to the benefit received in resistance to disease, many of which can be fatal. True, if only a few school children are unvaccinated they may get by given that disease is less likely to travel through a group that is mostly vaccinated. But this cheating can be harmful even for some vaccinated children, for vaccines that are not 100% effective (such as whooping cough).

The point is that to focus on a vanishingly small cost to vaccination which confers a huge benefit in protection from common disease is a completely irrational choice.

Another context where cost-benefit analysis applies is in the area of climate change. Here, the problem is a bit tougher, because the costs and benefits of trying to do something about it, versus not doing anything, are harder to estimate. One major consideration in this case, of course, is that we only get one chance to do something (and the opportunity to do it may already be vanishing rapidly). We don't get to figure out what we did wrong this time and fix it the next. So what do we do? We first must acknowledge the possibility that climate change could be catastrophic, no matter how small. This is a potentially huge cost to ignoring the issue. The benefit to ignoring it is easier to grasp - short term economic pains in readjusting our energy usage around the world, which is clearly a monumental task, would be avoided.

The benefit to doing all we can to avert a possible worldwide catastrophe is two-fold; first, we potentially save a lot of the planet, and second, many of the measures taken could have positive geopolitical results as well, e.g. reduction in demand for oil, and spurring economic growth in new alternative-energy industries. The cost mirrors the benefit for not doing anything - it is the difficult inertia needed to radically change the way we produce and use energy. The biggest part of the problem in looking at these costs and benefits is that if we choose to do something, the costs are biggest here and now, while the benefit seems far down the road. Most of the people setting policy in the powerful industrial countries that could take a stronger lead on this will likely be dead before the jury comes in on the outcome.

This video goes into more detail about these trade-offs, and convincingly makes the argument that the eventual benefits of doing something now outweigh the costs.

A similar case involves the control of invasive species. Even though most of the time the benefit in controlling them early far outweighs the potential cost of doing nothing, and having to control them later, we still tend to ignore them until they are too late to control. The reason for this is that our political system for government (which is responsible for making and acting on these decisions) overly discounts future benefits. So, time after time, we wait to see whether an introduced species gets out of control before we do anything to control it, and end up spending millions more than it would have cost to control it early on.

Another health example is cancer treatment. With all the progress that has been made, we still know very little about what we are doing in this area. In this case, people tend to focus on hoping for a strong benefit, and accept all sorts of hellish treatment (a significant cost) that may or may not benefit them. But this is one case in which it is very difficult to be objective, because we are dealing with our own mortality, and we buy into the idea that anything that can possibly help is worth doing. Is it possible to make a rational decision? For some people it is, but they are in the minority.

And come to think of it, it is way too much to ask the multi-headed government beast to be rational too. At least it is easy to make the rational choice about anti-bacterial soap.

Labels: economics, environment, health, invasive species

There is a fallacious argument commonly held and cited by pro-private-property advocates. The argument goes that interested parties having private property results in the reverse of the "tragedy of the commons," which holds that public resources are over-exploited because they belong to nobody, and thus are not worth protecting; if I do not grab the resource now, someone else will. The reverse argument is thus that if I alone hold the resources and their future value is also mine alone, then it is worth my while to protect them and not overexploit them.

Of course the main problem with this argument is that it assumes rational economic behavior by human beings, which over the last decade or so has been increasingly shown to be a false assumption. Economic models thus have to be rewritten to take into account that most of us do not act in our best interest, a lot of the time.

This is true in many arenas. There are many versions of the following experiment:

...the ultimatum game. You are given $100 to split between yourself and your game partner. Whatever division of the money you propose, if your partner accepts it, you each get to keep your share. If, however, your partner rejects it, neither of you gets any money.

How much should you offer? Why not suggest a $90-$10 split? If your game partner is a rational, self-interested money-maximizer -- the very embodiment of Homo economicus -- he isn't going to turn down a free 10 bucks, is he? He is. Research shows that proposals that offer much less than a $70-$30 split are usually rejected.

Meaning: humans are a social species, and no one lives in a bubble. Context is everything, even when it comes to financial gain.

Land-use is a different matter however. Private-property enthusiasts will assert that a rancher will happily overgraze public land he is leasing. But if his ranch is all private, he will manage it to ensure a healthier ecosystem, because this makes sense for the long term, right?

In practice this is not so. Certainly, the tragedy of the commons does hold here; public land is routinely overgrazed. But the opposite is not true, because ranchers routinely overgraze their own land, too, even though that is clearly bad for ranch productivity in the long term. Why does this happen?

It happens because decisions regarding land-use are much more complex than a simple formula for maximizing profits over the long term. First of all, ranchers behave as if their leased public land is private anyway; usually these leases have been in place for generations, and are essentially giveaways (often $1/acre), and thus the ranchers have a strong sense of entitlement to the land. Any attempt by the feds to change anything about how the leases currently work is met with outrage because the government is going to "ruin" the rancher. Nowhere is there any publicly stated acknowledgment that the rancher is getting a great deal.

Second, ranching practices (at least in the northwest) have been handed down for generations after being developed in a much wetter era. Economic theory predicting rational behavior makes the enormous assumption that the knowledge is available to make rational decisions. A few progressive ranchers in this area are waking up to the fact that the "drought" the west is suffering is here to stay, and are learning how to change their methods to keep the land healthy in the current environment. For many ranches, this can be as simple as changing grazing practices from using fences to using herders. But for those who do not have the cultural knowledge, this can be a daunting shift.

On top of this, any subsistence ranching or farming is concerned much more with maximizing profits in the immediate future, without worrying about the long term. The most obvious example of this is farms in the deforested tropics. Everyone knows the soil in tropical forests is extremely poor, and after just a couple years of farming, the nutrients are fully depleted and the farms are abandoned. Does this keep people from cutting down forests for subsistence farms? No, because when you are living hand-to-mouth, you are focused on getting through the current year. Economists call this "discounting" the long term effects of decisions, so that a benefit obtained years from now is worth much less than one obtained now. This is a rational position, but it is arguable that for most people (such as those who obtained adjustable-rate mortgages in the last few years) the future is discounted much more highly than is mathematically "rational."

Although the threats facing ranchers are not equally severe, the idea of having to quit production on a family ranch that has been working for generations is nothing less than disaster to those who face it. Their culture and tradition, and thus their entire sense of self, is wrapped up in that ranch. In Texas, for example, it is common for a "rancher" to keep a few cows on an overgrazed piece of family-owned land at a loss, while working a full time job in the city to actually make a living. It makes no financial sense to keep the ranch going, but it saves cultural face which is obviously much more important.

Finally, there is the obvious difference between individuals trying to make a living and corporations which need to maximize short-term profits at all costs. Our financial system seems to reward this corporate strategy, because the actual individual making a decision can jump ship before it is time to pay the piper for a bad one. They themselves do not own the resources they are exploiting, so making the resources privately owned (by the corporation) makes no difference to their protection. It is much easier for a corporation to run a ranch into the ground and then sell it off in parcels for development (although many private ranch owners do the same thing eventually) because a corporation has no cultural connection to the land.

The value of federal lands is that although they can be overexploited, there are mechanisms in place, such as regulation and public comment, to put a halt to their destruction. A hundred years ago, certainly the attitude was that the National Forests were there precisely for maximizing exploitation - after all, some private landowners might not want their land to be logged. Today, though, the ethic is different. Ecosystems have an inherent value to many more people than they once did, and this has changed forest service policy to include preservation as a mandate. Though the inertia to bring it about might be extreme, there is at least the possibility that public pressure can change federal land-use policy to better reflect the majority's conservation values. Naturally, those who make a living exploiting federal land view such policy changes as a "taking." But it is really a taking-back for the taxpayers who supplied that land for free in the first place.

Labels: economics, environment, humans

There is a tendency or those on the political right to invoke economic theory when developing or critiquing environmental policy. This can make sense or not, depending on the context. For example, a cap-and-trade system for dealing with the emissions causing acid rain (sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides) has contributed to significant reductions (though of course not elimination) of these pollutants, and as a result acid rain is currently less of a threat to northeastern U.S. ecosystems than it once was. So, many advocate a similar system to control carbon dioxide, which has recently become recognized as a pollutant for its role in exacerbating global climate change.

The basic premise of cap-and-trade is that government - such as the E.P.A. in the U.S., or state government - sets a total cap on allowed emissions for the whole country or region within it. They then issue a set number of licenses totaling that cap. These licenses can then be traded on the open market, so that companies emitting CO2 can either spend money reducing their emissions, or buying more licenses - whichever makes more financial sense. If the cost of reducing emissions (through special technology or alternative energy production, for example) is low for most companies, the price of the licenses will drop. If, however, the cost is high, licenses will go up too. because of the increased demand. Advocates of the approach support its reliance on the free market rather than excessive top-down regulation.

There are problems as well. For the system to accomplish its intended purpose, the cap must be set using the most objective scientific means possible, which seems an unlikely prospect, especially given the current political climate. But even if science is given a chance, CO2 is a global pollutant. That is, everyone's CO2 emissions affect everyone else. By contrast, acid rain in the northeastern U.S. was easily traceable mainly to coal-burning power plants in the east and Midwest, and thus the emissions were a local problem solvable by local policy. The harm done by carbon dioxide is genuine, but much less tangible and not at all direct. This is used by those opposed to emissions caps to insist that capping our own country's CO2 would be meaningless if other countries do not do the same, and it would somehow destroy our economy to do so. (This is despite the obvious counter argument that a genuine government mandate to develop alternative energy sources would spur a whole new economy for the U.S. However, the tangible economic benefits would not be immediate, but long term, which does not play well in capitalist societies.)

Of course, this is the point of the Kyoto treaty - to get as many countries on board as possible. Kyoto is a necessary first step because in practicality countries do have different levels of wealth and technological ability to control emissions, so to expect them to do so equally off the bat is absurd. The idea is that asking more of the fully technological countries will motivate the development of alternatives to greenhouse-gas-producing energy, that could then be implemented in other countries as well. But without the world's biggest emitter on board, it all breaks down completely.

We all know that getting the world to agree on scientifically reasonable global carbon dioxide limits is somewhat less likely than the proverbial snowball in hell. More recent coverage will give cap opponents more ammunition to argue there is no point in even trying. Should we really use the problems to excuse a mentality of "winner take all, and who gives a damn what the world is like in a few decades, after I am gone?" What if instead, the U.S. (as suggested often by Thomas Friedman) made a conscious decision to be a world leader in alternative technologies? (Mandating ethanol production from corn to justify huge taxpayer giveaways to corporate agriculture does not count.) What if the U.S.'s mantra turned into, "this is a great opportunity to show the world's people, most of whom hate our guts right now for our arrogance, greed, and imperialism, that we are the leader for remaking our planet's future." Even the cynics who only care about money surely see the benefits of replacing foreign oil, the defense of which has cost enormous amounts of resources and lives over the years, with foreign good will, which is a benefit?

There are times in history when what we really need is a little more government in select areas, not less. Since the "anti-government" crowd happily uses fear to justify the invasion of personal privacy, why isn't there, in vocal opposition, an actively pro-government voice that uses hope to stop the sub-prime mortgaging of our future? Probably because bringing up difficult truths doesn't win elections.

Labels: economics, environment, politics

Apparently it has been an assumption for a long time in some circles that early sex by teenagers results in their later delinquency. Two recent papers demonstrate just how muddled this theory is (along with most theories generalizing about human behavior), because they differ in their conclusions based on how the data were analyzed. The first paper's ( Armour, S. and D.L. Haynie, 2007. Adolescent sexual debut and later delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence 36:141-152) purpose was to use data to support the theory, which it does. The second paper (Harden, K.P., J. Mendle, J. E. Hill, E. Turkheimer and R.E. Emery, 2008. Rethinking timing of first sex and delinquency. Journal of Youth Adolescence, in press) uses the same dataset to reach the opposite conclusion, that earlier sex reduces future delinquency.

The second group of authors of course claim that their analysis is the better one, and in this case it is true. These papers, in fact, are a good demonstration of one of the major problems of large-dataset human studies, which is that they only control for factors (in this case, survey responses about race, income, parent's education, GPA, drug use, etc.) that the researchers imagine could affect the data, and not all the other hundreds of factors that also could but are ignored out of practicality or researcher bias. The authors' hope is that their use of a giant dataset will obscure the fact that important information is lacking.

(Once again, we will put aside the first major problem of such studies, the use of self-reporting data. Of course since both groups of authors rely on them, neither mentions how unreliable they are, especially, one might assume, with regard to sexual experience. And one might also imagine that the group of people who are most likely to lie about sexual experience is teenagers.)

The reason the second study is the better analysis is because the authors recognize that pooling all the data loses important information. Meaningless averages are calculated by pooling teenagers from all cultures and walks of life. To a repeat a very nice analogy used by the authors of the second paper: if you wish to correlate meat consumption with life expectancy, and you compare two countries, one primarily meat-eating and another not, you find a positive relationship - higher meat-eating correlates with higher life expectancy. But a third ignored variable also correlates positively with meat-eating, and that is level of industrialization. So to truly understand the relationship between meat-eating and life expectancy, you must control for industrialization. When the analysis is rerun within one country, the correlation between meat-eating and life expectancy is negative.

In addition, what is found in both papers is simply correlation, not causation (a trap that first-year undergraduates are taught to avoid, and yet catches so many human-behavior researchers). That is, the only information one has after the meat study is that meat-eating is associated with lower life expectancy. The study has not shown that meat-eating causes lower life-expectancy.

These were the two main problems with the first paper. The authors pool individuals across a wide range of cultural norms, which gives them a spurious result, and then conclude that early teen sex causes delinquency when the two are only correlated. Even though they use a crude control for cultural influence (average reported age of first sex for a given teenager's high school) they ignore any potential unstudied factor that could cause both (just as industrialization causes both higher life expectancy, and more meat-eating), obscuring the results for individuals.

The second paper solves that problem by analyzing only the identical twins in the dataset (which was large enough for them to have data for 289 twin pairs), and therefore controlling for both genetics (which the twins share exactly) and environment (which twins living in the same household largely share). This is an appropriate twin analysis because (for this main point at least) the authors don't care about trying to separate genetics and environment to answer their question. (Twin studies that do confound objective data with subjective assumptions.)

On top of all this, though, is another major flaw in the dataset, which the second group of authors strangely acknowledge despite their analysis. The supposedly "independent" (time of first sex) and "dependent" (delinquency) variables are by definition related from the start, because in much of American society, teen sex itself is considered delinquent behavior. What they are doing is a bit like asking whether or not shoplifting is correlated with delinquency. This certainly confounds the first study.

What does it mean that the second study found that identical twins who have their first sexual experience earlier than their siblings are less likely to engage in delinquent behavior? The authors seem to feel they have no choice but to conclude that there is probably no relationship between these factors at all. Perhaps that is exactly what they would have found statistically if they had used a Bonferroni correction for their dozen or so analyses. Either that, or delinquency is caused by sexual frustration, and the problem of misbehaving teens is now solved.

Labels: behavior, environment, humans, morality, statistics

As suggested in my previous post, it seems unlikely that the clear results of the Science studies will actually affect policy given the hard-to-crack corporate influence on government. Fargione et al. point out that "the recently enacted US Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 specifies reductions in life-cycle GHG emissions, including land use change, relative to a fossil fuel baseline."

Here are some relevant bits. The first is included under section on grants for biofuels research, amending Energy Policy Act of 2005:

(4) develop cellulosic and other feedstocks that are less resource and land intensive and that promote sustainable use of resources, including soil, water, energy, forests, and land, and ensure protection of air, water, and soil quality.

The second amends the Biomass Research and Development Act of 2000:

(5) the improvement and development of analytical tools to facilitate the analysis of life-cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions, including emissions related to direct and indirect land use changes, attributable to all potential biofuel feedstocks and production processes; and

(6) the systematic evaluation of the impact of expanded biofuel production on the environment, including forest lands, and on the food supply for humans and animals.

Does the law take into account land use changes beyond those of the United States, in developing countries where the local impacts are much more distructive? There is another growing fear that conversion of food-crop land into biofuels production, which is more profitable due to international demand, could cause even more devastating famines in Africa (for example) than are already occurring on a regular basis. According to the African Biodiversity Network, a car tank of ethanol requires the amount of grain that could feed a child for a year (Bonn, 2008).

But there does not seem to be any specific provision in the law that will call a halt to the madness if the results in biofuels research that companies like ADM wants are not found.

And of course industry is not going to sit there and give any policy ground to actual scientists. From the Times article:

Industry groups, like the Renewable Fuels Association, immediately attacked the new studies as "simplistic," failing "to put the issue into context."

"While it is important to analyze the climate change consequences of differing energy strategies, we must all remember where we are today, how world demand for liquid fuels is growing, and what the realistic alternatives are to meet those growing demands," said Bob Dineen, the group's director, in a statement following the Science reports' release.

The laughable irony here is that it is industry and their governmental cronies who have not put it into context. They are the ones who promote this policy as a "green" solution, when it clearly is not, and has been known not to be for sometime.

But of course they are correct that there is a demand for alternatives to fossil fuels. Are those of us criticizing the ethanol policy just short-sighted and naive? Do we reject the need to find alternatives to Middle-Eastern oil? Not at all. It is the biofuels industry that is being disingenuous by suggesting that they are somehow energy saviors. Unfortunately, it is the silver-bullet approach, rarely effective for any complex problem, that sells in today's America.

The energy pundits and power brokers dismiss wind and solar because they cannot supply all our power needs. The environmentalists dismiss ANWR drilling because it would clearly supply our current needs for only a short time, while doing permanent damage. The pro-nukes camp suggests more nuclear plants in order to reduce CO2 emissions, and yet they have failed to solve the waste problem, which is a (albeit smaller) serious environmental problem in its own right. The laudable attempts to remove environmentally damaging dams do not focus on how hydroelectric power will be replaced in a way that does not damage the environment. What the media and all the energy extremists fail to acknowledge is that a combination of all of the currently known types of energy not only would diversify our energy in a way that would help mitigate problems caused by shortages of any one resource, not to mention eliminate massive region-wide blackouts, and make a wide-ranging terrorist attack on energy sources next to impossible (unlike the current situation we have seen in which one blown power plant blacks out the entire northeast).

The reason this approach has not been advanced by any policy maker is that it doesn't create nice simple soundbites that result in huge amounts of public money flowing into a few giant corporations. Ethanol is a good partial solution to our energy problems. Carried to the extreme it's being carried to is a humanitarian and ecological disaster in the making. Biodiesel in the form of used cooking oil is a great way to recycle and create energy at the same time. But if every car did it, it would be an emissions disaster. We need to have ethanol cars and electric cars and keep working on hydrogen cars. We need it all, and the U.S. could be a technological leader in giving the world it all, which would have the added effect of generating a lot of economy that cannot yet be outsourced, as Tom Friedman has tried to advocate. Oil and natural gas need to have the role of back-up to the other energy solutions. Then we will have them when we really need them.

The problem is, policy makers in the U.S. government don't actually give a damn about energy solutions or preventing terrorist attacks on obvious targets. They care about big, deficit-inflating handouts that enrich certain corporations at the expense of the rest of the world. The outrage is that they use feigned concern about the approaching energy/climate change crisis, and terrorism, to gain unquestioned public support for their objectives. Eventually, it will dawn on the public that years of so-called "energy" and "anti-terrorism" policy has only made their lives worse. But of course it will be too late. Maybe it already is.


References

Bonn, D. 2008. Call for moratorium on agrofuels in Africa. Dispatches, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6:6.

Labels: environment, politics

The announcement of two Science papers (Fargione et al., 2008; Searchinger et al., 2008) calculating higher carbon dioxide emissions through changes in land use is making a lot of noise. But will the public get this travesty enough to force a change in federal policy on ethanol?

It didn't take these studies to wake up scientists and more progressive policy makers to the dangers of overemphasis on ethanol.

Yet a quick check on Technorati of responses to this news shows a lot of people still don't get it. Some bloggers gleefully have blamed environmentalists for going to town on ethanol use, but scientists (the great majority of whom are environmentalists, but not vice versa) have known better for a long time - some smart ones just got a couple of easy Science papers out of the hot political potato that biofuels production is becoming. The papers are highly complementary, and both expose the faulty math that has been done to promote ethanol production as "renewable" energy - which is not so renewable after all when rain forests and grasslands are destroyed to produce it.

Fargione et al. calculated actual carbon release due to land clearing in order to create more land for biofuel production, and Searchinger et al. produced a model which uses estimates of these numbers. Both methods produce the same conclusion: the worldwide ethanol frenzy, ostensibly about reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, will actually accelerate the production of atmospheric carbon dioxide through the destruction of ecosystems which have much higher carbon storage than the biofuels plants themselves do. This is not a problem of the future, but is currently happening, both directly and indirectly: either new land is cleared for biofuel production, or the conversion of current crop land (or animal-feed land) for biofuel forces creation of new crop land. The fallacy of this is most extreme in Indonesian peatlands, which Fargione et al. point out are huge carbon sinks, and thus liberating this carbon to grow palms for oil leaves us with a carbon debt that may not be repaid for over 800 years.

Searchinger et al.'s model, as all models do, must make numerous assumptions about the numbers that cannot necessarily be confirmed at this time. However, they take great pains to be conservative in their estimates of carbon released due to changing land use, and the logic in their introduction cannot be denied. They point out what is known from previous studies: the carbon cost of growing biofuel feedstocks, refining them into fuel, and then burning them, is no different from the carbon cost of oil. What supposedly swings the balance in favor of biofuels is that while they are growing they take up carbon from the atmosphere, while the burning of fossil fuels liberates previously sequestered carbon. Given that we know that land conversion means a lot less carbon sequestered in plants grown on the same acreage, the model is practically gratuitous.

So why the big push for "renewable" ethanol? It didn't come from environmentalists. It came from agribusiness, the huge corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland, who have the most to gain from this legislation. By declaring the production of ethanol "renewable," (not to mention running their ads on PBS), they have framed themselves as a company who cares about people and the environment. But the consequences of the ethanol rush would have been obvious to anyone formulating the policy. Simply, like most legislation we've seen over the last decade plus, this is all about money - specifically, taxpayer giveaways to huge corporations whose buddies happen to be running the government.

Given that once again we seem to have failed to find our magic energy bullet, then what is the solution? Are scientists who criticize various alternative energy sources on environmental grounds hopelessly naive? Not at all. They simply acknowledge that our range of solutions is quite a bit wider than that proposed by corporate giants who want all the taxpayers eggs in their industry's personal basket.


References

Fargione, J.,Hill, J., Tilman, D., Polasky, S., Hawthorne, P., 2008. Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt. Science (in press).

Searchinger, T, Heimlich, R., Houghton, R. A. , Dong, F., Elobeid, A., Fabiosa, J., Tokgoz, S., Hayes, D., Yu, T. 2008. Use of U.S. croplands for biofuels increases greenhouse gases through emissions from land use change. Science (in press).

Labels: biodiversity, ecology, environment, forests, politics

The mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae, Coleoptera: Scolytidae) is native to western North America. A finer resolution of its range, however, reveals that it is historically native to some parts of the West, but not others. Specifically, it has generally had a limited presence in Canada, primarily due to very low winter temperatures. Although the pine beetle's cold tolerance is incredibly high because they have the anti-freeze compound glycerol in their bodies, generally sustained (5 or more days) temperatures below -30F kill most of them off. This has reduced the likelihood of mountain pine beetle outbreaks in Alberta, and thus susceptible trees there have historically been protected, but are now exposed and being attacked (Rice et al., 2007).

In the last 5-10 years, however, conditions in the West, including Alberta, have changed. Rising temperatures have meant that for several winters in a row, the northern Rockies have not reached low enough temperatures to kill off the mountain pine beetles infesting the trees there. Even in the U.S., the historical trend was that every few years most of the beetles are killed due to cold, and thus the outbreaks were knocked back. So the pine beetles, which are a native species, have begun behaving like an invasive one: they are multiplying rapidly without a natural check, and expanding their range, attacking populations of trees that are not adapted to them.

Compounding this problem is the recent history of fire suppression in the West. One of mountain pine beetle's favorite hosts, lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) is a fire-adapted species; it is common for lodgepole stands left undisturbed to burn once or twice a century, and be replaced by seeds from serotinous cones (cones in which the seeds are sealed unless they reach the high temperatures of a fire). Lodgepole stands are striking in that usually all the trees are the same age and size due to the burn regimen. Mountain pine beetles prefer older, larger trees. The larger the tree, the more food available for the developing beetle larvae, and the larger the increase in population the next year, if there is not a sustained hard freeze. By suppressing natural fires in lodgepole habitat, we may have enhanced the long term outbreak we are seeing now.

But here's the flip side: mountain pine beetle outbreaks make lodgepole pine stands more susceptible to fire down the road (Page and Jenkins, 2007). For instance, the 1988 Yellowstone National Park fires were highly correlated spatially with trees affected by a mountain pine beetle outbreak about fifteen years before (Lynch et al., 2006). What we may be experiencing now is a mega-outbreak, due to warming and fire suppression, which will eventually contribute to massive forest fires throughout the West in the future (also increasing of course from drier weather), which may have the benefit of being a different kind of check on mountain pine beetle populations. But instead of the historical ecology, in which mountain pine beetle outbreaks occurred for maybe 3-4 years, decades apart, a whole new, different ecology driven by constant high beetle populations decimating the forest, which as a result may burn more often, will remake the landscape in ways that we cannot yet imagine.

Of course there are those who believe that we can replicate the ecological benefits of fire, while keeping the timber available for human use. However, thinning trees mechanically is a blunt instrument that does not mimic the effects of fire at all in the case of lodgepole (Sibold et al., 2007). In fact, there is the danger of unintentionally increasing the density of trees (and necessitating, further, constant thinning effort) if enough of the canopy is opened to encourage new seeds to germinate and grow. There are those who believe humans are all powerful and can easily control insect outbreaks and fires through management if only the wicked, meddling environmentalists would let them (never mind that somehow the forests managed themselves just fine for millennia). In fact, many species are adapted to respond to biotic (e.g. herbivory pressure) and abiotic (e.g. weather) influences in ways we don't even understand. Global climate change is now accepted by anyone rational to be at least partly enhanced by the massive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by industrial humans that would not have occurred otherwise. Fire suppression is an active (and expensive) choice that trades short-term convenience for long-term ecological disruption, whose consequences we are barely beginning to understand. Those who blame "environmentalists" for the hundreds of acres of brown pines they see spreading like a cancer in the West, would find that ecologists (pretty much environmentalists by default) only wish they had such god-like power to affect the ecology of our forests, so they could save them from 150 years of disastrous "management."


References

Lynch, H.J., Renkin, R.A., Crabtree, R.L. & Moorcroft, P.R. (2006) The influence of previous mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) activity on the 1988 Yellowstone fires. Ecosystems, 9:1318-1327.

Ono, H. (2003) Mountain Pine Beetle Symposium: Challenges and Solutions. Kelowna, British Columbia. T.L. Shore, J.E. Brooks, and J.E. Stone (editors). Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Pacific Forestry Centre, Information Report BC-X-399, Victoria, BC. 298 p.

Page, W.G. & Jenkins, M.J. (2007) Mountain pine beetle-induced changes to selected lodgepole pine fuel complexes within the intermountain region. Forest Science, 53:507-518.

Rice, A.V., Thormann, M.N. & Langor, D.W. (2007) Mountain pine beetle associated blue-stain fungi cause lesions on jack pine, lodgepole pine, and lodgepole x jack pine hybrids in Alberta. Canadian Journal of Botany-Revue Canadienne de Botanique, 85:307-315.

Sibold, J.S., Veblen, T.T., Chipko, K., Lawson, L., Mathis, E. & Scott, J. (2007) Influences of secondary disturbances on lodgepole pine stand development in rocky mountain national park. Ecological Applications, 17:1638-1655.


Thanks to T. Etienne for initial information on mountain pine beetle

Labels: ecology, environment, forests, insects, invasive species

What do invasive species and chain businesses have in common? They exist in order to economically benefit a few people, at the expense of most people. They kill off local competitors, which has the long-term effect of destroying communities. We invite most of them into our landscapes and communities where they do their damage, and even help them establish, instead of making an effort to keep them out, or at least making them compete on the same terms as the locals. Each time we invite one in we think that this one couldn't possibly make a difference. We then complain and moan to the government to do something when the cumulative effect becomes obvious over time, but much too late to prevent. They homogenize communities, until over time, it's hard to remember where you are, just by looking around you.

Admittedly, these comparisons are apt only for intentionally introduced invasive species, but most of the worst ones are, because we gave them that leg up that helped them establish. Witness the many horticultural escapees, not to mention European starlings, which failed to establish more than once before an introduction finally took.

The ultimate reason that both invasive species and chain businesses exist is money. The few who expect to make a profit moving species around the world, and planting identical businesses around the world, benefit at the expense of the rest of us. We're the ones who have to expend time and money in a fruitless mission to eradicate pests such as purple loosestrife which was recently still available to buy in many states, even as it was belatedly placed on the noxious weed lists of dozens of other states. We're the ones who would prefer to get exercise, save money, and reduce pollution by walking to a nearby downtown to get what we needed, but who more and more every day have to get in the car and drive for miles to get the merest necessity.

The ecological community changes produced by invasive species and the human community changes produced by chain stores are slow in developing, so usually it is too late when we realize it is a problem. For some reason we do not learn from these mistakes, however. We continue to allow, apparently to serve general principles of economic freedom, importation of alien species which could become invasive, and we assign no responsibility to the importer if they do. We continue to compete for chain stores to open into our communities with tax breaks and other incentives because we are naively convinced by big business that the money brought into the community in the form of property taxes and minimum wage jobs from one employer is somehow better than the taxes and jobs provided by local businesses that will often be driven out of business by the chains. Somehow the profit that goes to local business owners, and thus stays in the local economy, versus the profit from chains that flies out of state seems always to be left out of the equation. Lower prices? Well, of course lower prices are necessary when there is less money in the community to spend. These stores don't arrive to serve an existing need; they create their clientele, rather like cheatgrass creates a fire-dependent ecosystem that extinguishes the natives unable to survive in it, but that suits the cheatgrass perfectly.

We need to stop the transformation of our ecological and economic communities. Downtowns are the heart and soul of small communities, and the small town leaders are letting them be gutted because they fear any consideration but short-term economics. This leads to exurb zoning where no one ever goes outside except to get in their cars. It is too late in many towns, but not all. Some are revitalizing city centers. Community leaders need to hear from those who believe that quality of life, including opportunities to walk and talk to other community members, is more important than a surfeit of minimum-wage jobs, just as nurseries need to hear from those of us who believe that it is not right to sell destructive invasives such as Russian olive trees, even if it is legal to do so.

Once the money, or the native species, leave the community, they are never coming back.

Labels: environment, humans, invasive species

A paper discussed in an earlier post (Alford et al., 2005) relies for much of its justification on a series of papers by Thomas J. Bouchard and coauthors. An expansive claim for genetic heritability of all sorts of behavior and attitudes is found in Bouchard and McGue (2003). Frankly, the arguments made are even more disturbing in this paper.

Why disturbing? What is truly the harm in scientifically separating out the genetic and environmental influences on everything from social attitudes to "vocational interests"? The harm is that such papers serve no function other than to fan the flames of bigotry.

We are likely not yet at the crest of the pro-genetics wave. There are more and more studies being published which claim genetic bases for all sorts of traits (e.g. politics, aversion to new foods, obesity). One walks a precarious path interpreting the actual significance of this work for the general public, who is under the mistaken impression that scientists know far more about human genetics than they actually do. The mainstream media certainly tends to work more as a blunt instrument than as a nuanced filter of published scientific studies, happily being used by authors and journals who have a strong self-promotion agenda.

The straw man constructed by the pro-genetics crowd is that obviously genetic variation exists or we would all be the same. But of course it is biological significance of genetic traits that matters, not whether or not the variation actually exists. Even the most rigorous study that shows valid statistical significance for variation in a trait does not necessarily demonstrate biological significance - in fact, the huge sample sizes often used in these studies, which has the intended effect of increasing the chance of reaching statistical significance, undermine arguments for biological significance (see figs. 1 and 2). If it takes a survey of 10,000 people to detect a difference, then there is clearly so much overlap in the groups being compared that the authors should be hard-pressed to convince anyone that it matters. A slight fluctuation about the mean is much more likely to be amplified into statistical significance, although the direction it is significant is determined randomly. This was brilliantly demonstrated in a pair of papers about birth order and IQ.



Where do all the heritability estimates come from? For example, Bouchard and McGue report "heritability of IQ is about 50%." This of course is based on twin studies. But the logic used by all of these authors (none of whom I have encountered so far are actual geneticists) to produce such an exact value of genetic heritability is flawed. They make the assumption that if you compare differences in scores on surveys between fraternal twins with the differences between identical twins, that difference is the genetic component of the trait. This assumes that the environment in which fraternal twins are reared is as similar as the environment for identical twins. This assumption has naturally been both challenged and defended, but for the moment, let us concede it as valid. That leaves us with the corollary assumption that the difference between fraternal differences and identical differences is therefore entirely genetic. This is where the problems with these studies lie (discounting the obvious problems with using tests or surveys - which are biased by authors, affected by mood of the taker, etc. - to make sweeping statements about genetics).

Identical twins not only share a genotype, but also a phenotype - they look the same. As explained in the previous post on this topic, how you look is going to affect your social attitudes, not to mention self image, mostly because of your interactions with other people, who clearly behave differently to people who look different. Until a study is conducted in which one half of 30 identical twin pairs has a dramatically altered appearance (e.g. is in a wheelchair or has had major facial reconstructive surgery), all the twin studies (even those in which the identical twins were reared apart, long a mainstay of the pro-genetics camp) declaring the percent genetic contribution for any subjective phenotypic trait will be meaningless.

These papers harken back to the dark days of phrenology and craniometry - the methods employed are no more scientific, because we know no more about how genetics affects these traits now (more than mere speculation) than we did back then about how the brain functioned. But, the results are used by those who are racist or sexist to defend their views. All traits are a unique combination of usually complex genetics and environment. There is no way to establish that a person a particular "genotype" for intelligence or social attitudes, and even if there were, the expression of that trait will be dependent on the environment in complex ways that are not easily measured. Most important, because of the huge overlap in any trait associated with the brain across all types of people, for any given individual, there is no way to determine what part of their intelligence, personality, or skills are based on their appearance, even if there actually is a true statistical difference in these traits for different races or sexes (Fig 2.). But studies such as these are used by people who wish to have their stereotypes confirmed "scientifically," and frankly one has to wonder if the authors are not such people themselves.


References

Alford, J.R., C.L. Funk, and J.R. Hibbing, 2005. Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99:153-167.

Bouchard, T.J., and M. McGue 2003. Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. Journal of Neurobiology 54: 4–45.

Labels: environment, genetics, humans, statistics

The coqui frog Eleutherdactylus coqui, a native of Puerto Rico, gets its species name from the shrill call produced by males seeking mates, which is surprisingly loud for a beast the size of a quarter. Anyone from a part of the world with native tree frogs generally appreciates the lovely sound of calling peepers in the spring. Unfortunately, when the coqui was introduced to lands without its native predators to keep its populations in check, the lovely peeping sound in the distance was transformed into an overwhelming, piercing cacophony, which can be heard here at the site for Hawaiian Ecosystems at Risk (HEAR), where there is bountiful information on the hundreds of alien invasive species devastating Hawai`i's ecosystems. Listen to the recording. Then imagine playing it through your surround sound system at full wattage, and you will begin to get the idea of one of the problems caused by this species. After dusk, one literally has to yell to carry on a conversation at one house I have visited in Kurtistown (which lies between Hilo and Volcano on the Big Island).

Here is a youtube video of a single calling male. Well, puppies are cute too, but no one wants to live next to a kennel, do they? Even from a purely anthropocentric perspective, this invasive has much more direct effects on property values than any other. Control efforts are detailed at the University of Hawai`i College of Tropical Agriculture site.

While the attempted control of a tiny frog meets with far less opposition than previous plans to kill destructive feral cats in Volcanoes National Park, some PETA-types of course object. But even if you can tolerate the highly unnatural, deafening noise, anyone who cares about the ecological integrity of the Hawaiian Islands understands that coquis are a destructive pest that is incompatible with efforts to conserve endemic Hawaiian species (many of which are of course are living animals also).

Although predators in its native land clearly make an impact on coqui populations, it is remarkable how difficult it is, for humans at least, to localize a single calling frog. Apparently this is what the recent producers of smoke alarms were trying to emulate when they designed the system in which a dying battery causes the alarm to beep at long intervals. If your spouse, like mine, believes him- or herself to be the household's safety police, then you have about a dozen of these things littering your home, in every room. So, being able to find the one whose battery is dying is no trivial task. These contraptions strive to imitate the behavior of chirping frogs: as one attempts to hone in on the sound, they fall silent, in order to confuse and frustrate you, their predator.

As I have stalked around the second floor of the house, frozen for 30 seconds or more at a time, waiting for the next beep, my sympathies fall more into line with my father, who was decidedly not the Safety Monitor of our family. When smoke alarms first became available, my mother, whose very natural fear of house fires was grounded in personal experience, installed a single one in our split-level house. The first time it went off (the usual false alarm, of course, caused by kitchen smoke or whatnot) my father brandished a hatchet at the alarm, threatening over the excruciating whine to chop it to bits. Somehow my mother got the alarm away from him and turned off before he was able to make good.

My patience with the smoke alarms has run thin as well, every time I have to hurl one out the back door because my spouse insists on placing it in the kitchen, in defiance the manufacturer's instructions. "Ever heard of the smoke alarm that cried wolf?!!" I bellow.

But the Chinese-beeping-torture is the worst. I cannot move on with my life until I have ripped the innards from every alarm in the house, looking for the culprit, which is always the sixth or eighth one I've checked. My poor mother though, has seen the karma in her early support of smoke alarms. The Einstein who built the house she moved into several years ago placed a wired-in smoke alarm near the peak on the wall of their two-story living room, with only a narrow stair landing about ten feet below. Wired smoke alarms would seem like a better solution if they too did not have back-up batteries - after all, the power could be out when a fire starts. A note to contractors: even those batteries fail after several years - which my mother and her husband discovered when it started beeping - so, it would be a big help if those alarms were actually ACCESSIBLE! To get to this one required climbing a ladder placed on the landing at an alarmingly steep angle, a task most of us would rather not attempt, given our desire for the smoke alarm actually to save our lives, rather than end it. Thus, the residents had no choice but to wait two days for the services of their local fire department - who sent a fireman to make the climb and deactivate the alarm.

My mother called me shortly after the alarm had been firmly and permanently disconnected, and the haunted tone in her voice made me shudder at her recent trial. "It kept beeping..." she wailed, "Every. Twenty-six. Seconds." Though driven nearly to their wits end, their German short-hair pointer was clearly the most damaged of the three by the experience. Shortly after the beeping began he found the deepest recess of the downstairs guest room and burrowed within it, refusing to come out for anything but the quickest dash outside to relieve himself, after which he returned to his spot, trying, trying but (being a dog of very little brain) not succeeding in escaping the beeping torture. I witnessed his post-traumatic stress disorder on my next visit, when an inadvertent breaker pull caused one stray beep, and the terrified beast nearly knocked me over skidding to his designated burrow. Despite the fact that no more beeps were heard that night, the dog had to be crowbarred out of the corner of the room when I was ready to go to bed.

Really one of the stranger aspects of the low-periodicity beep torture is that it is not recognized as such by all vertebrates alike. Some friends, a family of four, invited us over for dinner once, and I noticed immediately upon crossing their threshold that they had a smoke alarm on the blink. I politely pointed it out to them, and astonishingly, the response I got was, "We know, it's been doing that for weeks now." Agog, I enquired with the grin frozen on my face, how they could stand it, and they just shrugged and said they didn't notice it after awhile. I tried to bear up under the strain, but by halfway through dinner I just couldn't keep myself from blurting out conversationally, "Wow, it's really amazing that the smoke alarm doesn't bother you." Being astute students of the subtleties of human communication, they finally got the hint, and one of them laughed as he went immediately to extract the offending battery.

I suppose that answers my question about why smoke alarms are programmed with predator-avoidance response. Those of us driven crazy by one are as likely to take a hatchet to it as a new battery (until we sigh to ourselves that maybe, just maybe it will save our lives one day), while the rest of everyone out there just can't be bothered to hunt them down (and may be selected out by unalarmed house fires). I just hope the people of Hawai`i have more success with accepting the grating chirp of the coqui than I have had with the grating chirp of a smoke alarm, because they will likely be there forever.

Labels: behavior, environment, humans, invasive species

Check it out at The Radula.

Labels: biodiversity, carnivals, ecology, environment, humans

Our local wilderness controversy has made national news. The article is suggestive of the growing recognition that land use is a complex problem because of the large diversity of stakeholders, but only scratches the surface of the problem.

The current backlash in Beaverhead County, Montana, is against a consortium of environmental groups (including the National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and Montana Wilderness Association) and logging companies (including RY Timber and Sun Mountain Lumber) who recognize the need for some sort of compromise among those with widely divergent interests in public land. The group is presenting to the Forest Service a plan that exchanges more guaranteed logging in certain forest areas in southwest Montana for more acreage in the forest being designated as wilderness. The plan has the advantages of providing for stable timber harvests that are minimally invasive but will allow logging companies to keep operating, while it recognizes the value of preserving land in wilderness areas to maintain the watershed and prevent overexploitation of resources.

Unfortunately, in this county, "wilderness" and "environment" are the dirtiest words you can say. To put it in perspective, voters in Beaverhead County overwhelmingly supported a 2004 initiative (put on the ballot by an out-of-state mining company) to repeal a ban on cyanide leach mining, which has damaged many an ecosystem and watershed in several states. While the rest of the state was smart enough to understand that no number of local mining jobs is enough to offset the cost of a destroyed fishery, Beaverhead County, whose nearly entire economy is dependent on tourism on its blue-ribbon trout streams and ranching (which also requires clean river water), supported the initiative, apparently seeing the issue only as a vote against the evil environmentalists.

A deluge of letters to the editor is now condemning the proposed logging-environmental draft forest plan simply because it creates a few more thousand acres of wilderness, a small percentage within a sea of exploited forest. The letter writers take the common view that the creation of wilderness somehow takes land away from their use, because they prefer to use ATVs rather than their own two feet (or horses) for their recreation on public land. What has been lacking in every letter by an ATV user so far has been any acknowledgement that some ATVers themselves fuel anti-vehicle backlash when they ride off road illegally, trashing out areas that are no longer available for the enjoyment of others. They also do not acknowledge that hiking and skiing, being quite, no-emissions activities, do not impinge on anyone else's enjoyment of the forest, while the use of ATVs and snowmobiles very much degrades the forest experience of non-users. It is ironic that they claim that the use of the forest is being stolen from them by the addition of a few more acres where they are not allowed, when they have already stolen peace and fresh air from the rest of us in the great majority of the national forest.

They call for "management" of the forest because it is a "waste" to let nature take its course in the form of fires and insect outbreaks - and apparently they are ignorant that the potential new law as drafted allows for management of fire and insects in wilderness areas when deemed necessary, and the grandfathering of grazing rights. In the mythical world of the wilderness opponent, nature can be completely controlled and managed, and any failure to do so by the forest service is blamed on "environmentalists" (who apparently have god-like powers possessed by no one else).

The logging-environmental consortium came together to reach a compromise because all the organizations realize that current management policies are unsustainable. They have drafted a perfectly reasonable proposal that keeps logging alive in Montana, but supports both economic and ecological sustainability, unaddressed in past policies which subsidized logging companies to clear cut huge swaths of land, without remediation. The Forest Service is under no obligation to support the new plan, but would be well advised to do so. Those of us lucky to live in a county that consists mainly of public land would do well to remember that the land is not a personal playground to exploit here and now, but belongs to every single U.S. taxpayer, living and unborn, from sea to shining sea.

Labels: ecology, environment, forests

Go to Geek Counterpoint for the latest Tangled Bank installment, addressing topics from genetics to exoplanets to the continuing discussion about Wikepedia's accuracy.

Labels: carnivals, ecology, environment, genetics

I used to give blood regularly, but am now forbidden because I lived for months at a time in England from 1998-2001, where BSE (Mad Cow disease) emerged in the mid-1990's. I have scoffed at this rule; from everything that I understood, Britain has far greater monitoring of beef than the U.S. True, BSE has been found in thousands of British cattle and very few North American cattle, but then again one is unlikely to find such a sneaky pathogen if one is not looking for it. Unfortunately, the U.S.D.A., which exists to serve agribusiness interests, rather than those the American public which pays for its existence, has at best dragged its feet on increased testing of cattle, and at worst actively has prevented those who would test on their own initiative from doing so.

The U.S.D.A. itself has drastically curtailed its BSE testing in the last few months. The agency presents no data on BSE testing on its website after August, 2006. However, the new policy is spelled out based on the detection rate from the previous sampling:

Since the enhanced surveillance program began, USDA has sampled more than 759,000 animals and, to date, only 2 animals have tested positive for BSE under the program. Both cases were in animals born before the United States banned the practice of feeding recycled ruminant protein to other ruminants. In line with USDA policies, neither of the affected animals detected under the enhanced surveillance program nor the imported cow detected in 2003 entered the human food or animal feed chains.

Based on the wealth of information gained during both the enhanced surveillance program and BSE surveillance conducted in the United States in the 5 years prior, USDA recently concluded that the prevalence of the disease in this co