Publication Alert

Fresh off the presses from Progress in Human Geography, a paper I wrote with Jessica Dempsey of the University of Victoria entitled Ecosystem Services: Tensions, Impurities, and Points of Engagement within Neoliberalism.

The nutshell is that ecosystem services, both as economic theory and as policy, has plenty of very interesting internal fault lines and inconsistencies that make it a flexible and adaptive concept whose destination is unknown.  It hardly resembles the cartoon, straightjacketed by market logic, that is often straw-manned by both critics and advocates of market-based policy.

Ok, it's not 50 Shades of Grey, but we do what we can.

Wetlands Carbon: A new methodology

Heads up: American Carbon Registry came out in October with a methodology for defining carbon credits in wetland restoration sites along the Gulf coast.  As they note, deductions for methane will be important and perhaps significant -- it will be very interesting to see how many credits this methodology defines, and whether the market believes in it.

Edit: And a new one here for coastal wetland restoration under the Voluntary Carbon Standard.

Can we get a U MAD BRO?

My friend Becca Madsen at Madsen Environmental has done great work in advancing the merger of the rather nerdy if not actually straightlaced world of ecosystem services policy with the meme-driven communicative style of the modern internet.

I am of course in favor of this (as should be clear from my earlier posts), because something, ANYthing, is good if it helps us break through the wall that separates normal, everyday speech from policy talk.  And if it's not said with kittens or bad grammar -- does it really count as speech anymore?
Kids these days.

Ten Habits of Highly Effective Federal CWA Regulators

I recently had an experience that reminded me of what a distinct and awesome group of people environmental regulators are, and how hard their job is in coordinating between science, stakeholders and blackletter law.  They do have their share of quirks, which I came to admire (and adopt) over my time at EPA.  I scrawled this list some time ago -- it doesn't really refer to any particular people, but some of you may see yourselves reflected... I certainly do.

10. All flora and fauna present at an impact or compensation site are "critters".

9. No matter how much the Corps/EPA/NMFS/USDA/FWS pisses you off, when push comes to shove they are "our sister agency".

8. Every Corps district staffer has the innate right to complain about how long it took to train in the last District Commander.

7. Every EPA regional staffer has the innate right to complain about the lawyers and politicos up at Headquarters.

6. HQ staff get tiny little crushes on field staff who write extremely well-researched comment letters.

5. Corps and EPA would feel secretly neglected if USDA and FHWA stopped trying to tell them how to administer the permit program.

4. Sure, they'd LOVE to handle that HQ data-call/process-mapping initiative/state assumption proposal.  Not.

3. What we say: "Your agency needs better monitoring and reporting protocols on your conservation grant projects."
What we mean: "I'm just jealous at the size of your grants budget."  

2. Everyone has a story about the time they did wetland delineations [in 2 feet of snow/in the century's worst drought/while being attacked by a doberman] and what they have found in wetlands [a '57 Plymouth/4,000 golf balls/Jimmy Hoffa].

1. A Corps PM, an EPA staff scientist, and an NRCS project officer walk into a bar, and the bartender pours each of them a shot of 30 year-old scotch.  The Corps PM says "that looks isolated and non-jurisdictional", and drains it.  The NRCS staffer says "this was converted from grain prior to December 23, 1985", and drains it.  The EPA staffer
         a) says "We need additional monitoring data -- pour me three more."
         b) says "I have to assess the physical, chemical and biotic integrity of this resource," and -- takes it back to the lab for analysis.
         c) slaps a (c) veto on the bottle and makes off with it.

Home News: On Wisconsin!

I've had a wonderful time as a faculty member at the University of Kentucky, and it is truly a stellar Department of Geography, with colleagues that can't be beat.  But it's time to for me to return to my Midwestern roots -- I've accepted an Assistant Professor position at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and we will be relocating in December.

First, let me pause to remember a giant of physical geography and a father of fluvial geomorphology -- Wisconsin professor Jim Knox passed on October 6th, just after retiring last spring.  A dedicated scholar, a winner of almost every major award in our discipline, and one of the truly great mentorly characters ever to wander Science Hall and the hills of southwestern Wisconsin.  It was once said to me that he spent his life trying to understand the river that flowed through his boyhood backyard -- that seems like the best way to spend one's life as a scholar.

Second, let me in the spirit of promoting my new department, boast about the UW-Madison Geography student who (along with two others) won the 2012 NACIS Student Dynamic Map Competition for creating an interactive map -- The Wetlands Gem Viewer -- "developed in partnership with the Wisconsin Wetlands Association with the goal of providing an online and engaging spatial catalog of information about critical wetlands areas in the Milwaukee metropolitan area."

Video tutorial and live demo of the award-winning interactive map.  Keep an eye on those Cheeseheads -- they'll map the wetlands from right under your feet.  



Edit: See the memoriam page here, and note the clickable donation to the James Knox Geography Community Building Fund.

Jared Diamond and Ecosystem Services

Consider this a one-entry liveblog of the EcoSummit Conference in Columbus, Ohio.  It’s an Elsevier joint that brings together an international community of scholars and researchers on ecosystem service policy development and assessment. I just heard Jared Diamond’s plenary address. 

So right up front I should say that Diamond is a complicated figure for geographers like me.  Guns, Germs and Steel was widely criticized in my discipline, which is also Diamond’s adopted discipline.  It was seen as an intolerable throwback to the bad old days of environmental determinism, in which geographers tended to say that climate and resources determined the fate of civilizations in every detail.  In the case of Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington in the 1920s, they would say that desert climates led inexorably to autocratic politics.   In Diamond’s case, he claims the size, resource base and isolation of a island (for example) determined whether or not the society would suffer ecological collapse, either under its own weight or because of their inability to resist invaders and their weapons.   There continue to be excellent reasons to guard against pointing to nature to explain what are in fact social phenomena, from race to intelligence to gender to  “overpopulation”.  Eternal vigilance, however, does not need a hair trigger.

Diamond’s argument was not (and is not) atypical of the way that ecologists treat complicated social phenomena: black-box them and look for external drivers of change.   In this, the only unique sin he committed was to write a Pulitzer Prize winning book of extraordinary exposure.  Fifteen years later, it’s fair to say that geographers probably overreacted to the implicit determinism in Diamond’s work – it was simply a high-profile version of what one finds every day in environmental writing.  That doesn’t make it less wrong as social science, just less remarkable.  And does anyone doubt that Diamond has his facts right? 

Moreover, I’m not convinced that his critics had it right.  Talking about the strong influence of physical environments is different than determinism, and claiming that Diamond is "an environmental determinist" is about as useful as calling someone a Nazi or a fascist.  It's a weak and overplayed argument, and leaves him the option (which he took in his next book, Collapse) of saying that these societies chose their fate – that human rationality was at the heart of the problem, rather than being irrelevant.

And this is, to me, far more troubling.  Diamond’s invocation of individual responsibility is  precisely equivalent to “responsibilization” in modern social policy.  Poor?  Your choice.  Unemployed?  Your fault.   Successful?  You built that.  The disbelief in any collective social forces such as “class” or “the economy” or “society” is pervasive, and in describing (in his subtitle, in fact) “How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”, Diamond adds his voice to those who treat societies as if they are a rational actor and points the finger at them for their own fall.  It shares all the faults of the “rational actor” model of human agency so common in economics: it assumes perfect knowledge, it assumes utility-maximization, and it has no place for the exogenous collective social forces -- colonialism, capitalism, socialism, whatever -- that so obviously exist in the world.  To me, this is a far worse and more insidious maneuver than trying to resurrect environmental determinism, which I don’t think Diamond was trying to do in any event.

So, to his talk.  In discussing Easter Islanders and the collapse of the island’s ecosystems, Diamond went out of his way to say that “people are all the same” and that we all essentially want the same things out of life.  We behave identically toward resources whether we are Easter Islanders or Chinese or Spanish – we use them for food, shelter, worship and recreation.  “The islanders needed to chop down trees for the same reasons that everyone chops down trees. … Easter Islanders were normal people who had the misfortune to be living on the least ecologically-productive of all Pacific Islands”.

[Diamond stresses this to arm himself against the racism of much environmental determinism. In fact, in the context of its time, environmental determinism was a sort of bulwark against the prevailing genetic racism of the time – determinists said that climate, not genetics, determined one’s intelligence and civilization, so that an African raised in London’s climate could be seen to achieve “European” cultural levels.]

I never cease to be amazed at the capacity for affluent westerners to think that all people basically think and act like them.  Yes, that was a cheap shot, and I include myself in that criticism, but in saying “we’re all the same”, Diamond is saying that, at base, we’re all essentially economic actors who are motivated by the same material concerns.  This is the familiar figure of both economics and ecological anthropology – Milton Friedman and Roy Rappaport alike.  And it bears no resemblance to any real people in the world. 

And Diamond knows it – his next example after Easter Island was that some Vikings colonized Iceland and made good choices that led to sustainability, and other Vikings colonized Greenland and made bad choices that led to famine.  And more importantly, the entire premise of the Ecosystem Services approach is that people can be convinced to act on their relation to the natural world in a different way.  If there are dumb Vikings and smart Vikings – if social collectives can achieve material needs in variable ways – then the Ecosystem Services approach has hope and our relationship to resources is fundamentally social.  If everyone is essentially acting on their material needs, with the only difference being the physical setting, then no amount of ingenuity can help us, and the difference between a dumb Viking and a smart Viking is climate or biogeography.

In short, if collective efforts to change the social context for resource use are irrelevant, what the hell are we all doing in Columbus?  If they are relevant, then Diamond and everyone else needs to have a long hard think before they use the words "resource base" ever again.

Diamond typically has it both ways in his writing and speaking.  But he’s very far from being alone on this, so I see no real point in singling him out for ritual flogging.

Messaging Ecosystem Services

A report just out from Resource Media on public communications strategies and "messaging" for ecosystem service policies leans heavily on the fascinating 2010 national opinion survey on "ecosystem services". They're straight up among the most interesting things I've read all year.  Anyone with any stake in ecosystem services should read them.

Because they're kind of, well, damning.

The punchlines are as follows: people HATE the terms "ecosystem services" and "natural capital"; the very concept that nature "serves" us is unappealing; abstract cases for markets are off-putting, and; while Americans across the political spectrum are deeply and strongly committed to valuing nature, dollars are the least preferred way of doing so. 

And the money stat is this:  out of 16 terms used to describe the benefits of nature, "ecosystem services" ranked 13th, and "natural capital" ranked 15th.

Whoa.

Ok, "hate" is too strong a word, but you get the feeling that the pollsters found themselves asking the equivalent of "How do you feel about ice cream?  kittens?  the laughter of children?"  In describing their findings they kept using phrases like "across the board," "overwhelmingly," and  "strong intuitive belief".  Yes, in bold.  There was nothing subtle or equivocal about what they found: these terms that are now so widespread as to have become a master concept in economics and conservation are deeply unpopular with actual people.  Folks, we are in a bubble.

Is this really surprising?  Objectively, if you want to build a broad-based and popular policy movement involving communicating complexity to the lay public, the language of financial capital is probably not your go-to leitmotif.  That would be true even if we weren't amid a devastating national economic crisis widely known to be caused by the financialization of objects whose very existence is unclear and nonintuitive.

And it's not the case that people outside the bubble are simply waiting to be educated about "nature's value" (the term they ranked #1).  Both documents argue that attempting to educate people about the usefulness of the economic frame is badly misguided and likely to be resisted.  Rather, people are already deeply committed to valuing nature without necessarily pricing it, and simply want to know how pricing might work in actual situations that they care about.

Now, to a certain flavor of environmental economist, this is a nonsensical statement.  Value is unobservable; price is, by axiom, the best proxy of value, and is best found in a clearing market.  To talk about valuing benefits but resist pricing them is to resist the entire raison d'etre of environmental economics (but not ecological economics, necessarily): the internalizing of unpriced externalities.  It is, at least, an error to be corrected.  This flavor of economist commands so much academic and policy bandwidth that both proponents and opponents forget what a bizarre and somewhat pointy-headed view this is to most people. But much to their credit, both sets of authors go out of their way to shut down the instinct in readers which might say "Well, people just need to be better-educated on the issue!"

And as you dig into them, the hits keep coming:

• Resource Media just brings the HURT:

  "The language surrounding ecosystem services is a jargon-rich, dense amalgam of scientific, financial, regulatory and conservation parlance. Those working to advance ecosystem services projects struggle to articulate what they're trying to do, and why their approach is more effective and efficient."

  Boy howdy and amen.  I used to have a professor who pronounced the word jargon as "JAR-GON" -- as if it were some villain from Superman's home planet.  And that's how I prefer to think of it -- something to be banished to the Phantom Zone along with General Zod.
• As both reports say: "Few voters spend time visiting ecosystems," and "Very few Americans think of themselves as living in an ecosystem".  We live in and visit cities, forests, beaches, mountains.  The word "ecosystems" itself is alienating, as is "services". They essentially accuse ES advocates of spending enormous effort to change people's frame of reference to their world, when in fact we can accomplish the same goal using other frames ("public health", "nature's benefits").  Yowch.
• There is no holier chapter in the good book of ES than the story of New York City's watershed management strategy.  It is a cherished story: city conserves watershed land to secure clean water rather than spending a zillion dollars on traditional water plant.  Triple bottom line, check check check.  But this story goes over with non-New-Yorkers like a lead balloon -- it was "one of the less persuasive messages tested".  And that sound you hear is hearts breaking at EcosystemMarketplace.  The lesson?  Local, local, local.  ES may aspire to be a global managerial master concept, but inspirational stories of far-off lands don't feed the bulldog.
• And in line with this, shocking evidence of America's descent into abject socialism: a conservation action's benefits to the community and nearby residents were ranked twice as important as the specific value of an action to a landowner.  People conceive of ecosystem services as inherently socialized.

Resource Media pushes a notion that seems right to me: there is not a strong constituency out there at the moment that is inherently suspicious of green infrastructure or ecosystem service policies -- but that may change, and so the time to develop an effective communication strategy is now.  In that sense I'm reminded of environmentalism circa 1970, or wetland policy circa 1988: it was possible for Nixon and his potential Democratic rivals (McGovern, Muskie, Nelson, etc.) to all jockey for the environmentalist vote and support environmentalism because nobody told them that it was a "Democratic" position.  Because it wasn't yet.  Likewise, George HW Bush could push for "no net loss" in 1988 because the partisan calculus of wetland advocacy hadn't really been settled in the way it clearly was by 1994.  Ditto cap-and-trade.  The point is that, well, history keeps moving, and the case for ecosystem services won't always be the custody of the kind of green capitalist, global policymaker, and academic TED-watching elites who tend to drive it today -- at some point it may become a political football, and we should make hay before that day arrives.

Resource Media is also trying to tell ES advocates something important: Stop trying to roll up three very separate kinds of projects into one term.  "Ecosystem services" is found in three distinct contexts:

• "Making the case": abstract pitches about the need to attach dollar-values to specific services, and the efficiency of markets in achieving conservation goals
• "Incentivizing good land management": specific proposals for markets or PES directed at land-managers.
• "Conservation alternatives": avoiding a techno-fix by using natural design or environmental restoration.

They find that 90% of what's out there in writing is Making the Case, which is a huge problem, because 90% of what actual people care about are "incentives" and "alternatives".   Take a look at the opening lines of EPA's just-released four-pager on ES and watershed protection:

"Healthy, intact watersheds provide many ecosystem services that are necessary for our social and economic well-being.  These services include water filtration and storage, air filtration, carbon storage, nutrient cycling, soil formation, recreation, food and timber.  Many of these services have not been monetized and therefore the economic contributions of healthy intact ecosystems are difficult to replace and most often very difficult to engineer."

In one inch of copy, they require the reader to a) commit to monetary valuation of b) "ecosystem services" (only defined later), which are c) elided with the outcome of "healthy intact ecosystems".  Classic "making the case" talk.  Abstract as hell.  Calling for a paradigm shift before the reader has even sat down is a Bad Rhetorical Strategy.

The take-home message can be summarized thusly:

We usually start with the commandment: Thou Shalt Recognize Ecosystem Services.  Which is essentially saying "once you all start seeing nature as I see it, we can get somewhere."*  Not useful.  Why not start by figuring out what outcomes you all want, and maybe leaving the epistemological battles for later?  Part of the answer, of course, is that for a small minority the point is precisely  to promote "market thinking" rather than to achieve specific conservation outcomes.

These two reports are good medicine against that minority, and the vox pop nature of their testimony makes it all the stronger -- and more devastating to those deeply committed to metaphors  like "natural capital".  The authors are interested in how to move people and how to move projects, not in making cases in an echo chamber, which -- they both find gentle ways of saying -- is something academics and economists are very good at.  While I'm no stranger to making abstract cases in an echo chamber, I'm also a big fan of the notion that the uses of the ecosystem services concept are many, unforeseen, and not to be dictated.


The 2010 poll, btw, was commissioned by The Nature Conservancy and done by a group (FM3) which appears to do all kinds of polling; for this poll they phoned 802 registered voters and conducted focus groups involving people from across the political spectrum.




*a more precisely insulting version of this statement is "once you start consciously seeing nature as I know you already unconsciously do -- we can get somewhere".