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How would this company convince you as an ethical shopper to buy its products?
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Stewart Brand
Several days ago, Stewart Brand, the longtime environmentalist and author–please read Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist’s Manifesto if you haven’t–hosted a talk by Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, in San Francisco. It was called Conservation in the Real World, and Stewart summarized it on his blog. I liked Stewart’s account, so I asked him for permission to reprint it, which he kindly granted. Here goes:
Peter Kareiva began by recalling the environmental “golden decade” of 1965-75, set in motion by the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act—which passed the Senate unanimously.
Green influence has been dwindling ever since. A series of polls in the US asked how many agreed with the statement, “Most environmentalists are extremists, not reasonable people.” In 1996, 32% agreed. In 2004, 43% agreed. Now it’s over 50% who think environmentalists are unreasonable.
Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing, ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature—current college freshman have less than a tenth of the childhood experience of nature as previous generations. And there’s a demographic shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a minority in California and soon to be a minority in the whole country. Asked to describe a typical environmentalist, current grade school students say it’s a girl, white, with money, preachy about recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend.
In general, environmentalists have the reputation of being “misanthropic, anti-technology, anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive pastoralists.”
Kareiva gave several examples of how that reputation was earned. In Green rhetoric, everything in nature is described as “fragile!”—rivers, forests, the whole planet. It’s manifestly untrue. America’s eastern forest lost two of its most dominant species—the american chestnut and the passenger pigeon—and never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National Geographic sent a research team there recently, they found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate most of the 5 million barrels of oil.
The problem with the fragility illusion is that it encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to “fortress conservation”—the idea that the only way to protect “fragile” ecosystems is to exclude all people. In Uganda, when a national park was established to protect biodiversity, 5,000 families were forced out of the area. After a change in government, those families returned in anger. To make sure they were never forced out again, they slaughtered all the local wildlife. In the 1980s, Kareiva was a witness in Seattle for protecting old growth forest (and spotted owls). At the courtroom loggers carried signs reading: “You care about owls more than my children.” That jarred him.
When genetically engineered crops (GMOs) came along, environmentalists responded with “knee-jerk anti-technology religiosity,” Kareiva said. How to feed the world was not a consideration. Lessening the overwhelming impact of agriculture on natural systems was not a consideration. Instead, the usual apocalyptic fears were deployed in the usual terms: EVERYTHING’S GOING TO BE DEAD TOMORROW! When Kareiva was working on protecting salmon, he saw the same kind of language employed in a 1999 New York Times full-page ad about dams in the Snake River: TIMELINE TO EXTINCTION! He knew it wasn’t true. Salmon are a weedy species, and the re-engineered dams were letting the fish through.
The Nature Conservancy—where Kareiva is chief scientist working with the organization’s 600 scientists, 4,000 staff, and one million members in 37 countries—promotes a realistic approach to conservation. Instead of demonizing corporations, they collaborate actively with them. They’ve decided to do the same with farmers, starting an agriculture initiative within the Conservancy. For the growing cities they emphasize the economic value of conservation in terms of valuable clean water and air. They started a program taking inner-city kids out to their field conservation projects not to play but to work on research and restoration. An astonishing 30% of those kids go on to major in science.
Kareiva sees conservation in this century as a profoundly social, cooperative undertaking that has to include everyone. New social networking tools can be in the thick of it. For instance, people could use their smartphones to photograph (and geotag, timestamp, and broadcast) the northernmost occurrence of bird species, and the aggregate data could be graphed in real time, showing the increasing effects of global warming on the natural world. When everyone makes science like that, everyone owns it. They’ve invested.
Nothing to add except that we’d all be better off if more NGOs took a practical, science-based approach to environmental problems. Which isn’t to say that we don’t need rabble rousers, too. We most certainly do.
Getting Data From the Ground To the Cloud
(Cross-posted from the Google Public Sector Blog)Last week, the Google Earth Outreach and Google.org teams, in collaboration with the Global Canopy Programme, hosted partners from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for the first gathering of the Community Forest Monitoring Working Group. The goals of the working group are to provide a platform for groups engaged in community forest monitoring activities - across continents - to share knowledge and experience. Equally important is for these groups to provide recommendations for the development of tools, methodologies, and common protocols. For example, the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon is using modern technology to implement their community’s Surui Carbon Project.
This effort isn't isolated, as many NGOs and stakeholders support community-based approaches to forest monitoring for their efficiency, cultural relevance, and reliability. Community Forest Monitoring will play a role in the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) effort which aims to incentivize developing countries to adopt a low-emission path to development. In thinking about best methods for data collection, this working group is tackling a host of data collection issues including usability, security, accountability, cultural relevance, and scalability.
These are all concerns that the team at Open Data Kit (ODK), an open source suite of data collection tools, have fleshed out and iterated upon. ODK was born in 2008 as a Google sabbatical project of University of Washington computer science professor Gaetano Borriello. Borriello wanted to take advantage of Google’s data collection tools: maps, visualization, databases and has said that his team saw a gap in mobile data collection. Thus, Borriello’s team developed ODK Build, ODK Collect, and ODK Aggregate, mobile tools that have attracted thousands of users and dozens of active developers.As ODK iterates and evolves, the Public Sector Engineering team is learning about the challenges and opportunities in mobile data collection and exploring how we can contribute to this space. ODK already gives users the option to visualize data in Google Earth and Google Fusion Tables, and we are exploring how to take advantage of some of Google’s other tools (what if photos collected on the ground could be easily posted to Picasa, or videos to YouTube?) It’s our goal to make sure that all meaningful data is effectively organized and made discoverable, accessible and usable.Ultimately, community forest monitoring represents just one slice of the potential that effective data collection tools create. ODK was initially motivated by the needs of community health workers and has proven flexible enough to be used to track everything from human rights violations in the Central African Republic to water quality in Ghana. As the nature of scientific research diversifies and the volume of data collected increases, reliable, flexible, and lightweight tools will become more and more crucial.What’s next? As the engineering teams continue to work on improving mobile data collection tools, this working group will convene policymakers at the next workshop to discuss standards and best practices. “The greatest barrier isn’t a technological one, but the challenge of leveraging this data so that communities can help ensure better governance for their forests,” says Niki Mardas, Head of Strategy and Communications for the Global Canopy Programme and theredddesk.org. As with many other public data collection efforts, it will become the job of advocates and analysts to shape meaningful narratives and press for the change the world needs. We're proud to be playing a part in this effort and we're committed to working with our partners to transform data collection from a passive, closed process into an active and empowering one.Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach and Jenny Ye, Public Sector Engineering Intern
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