tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87333472912956197032024-03-13T13:49:07.117-07:00A true point of beginningOne wandering attempt to understand what it means for
ecosystems to be services in a changing climate.Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-57827951372594797372015-09-03T07:40:00.001-07:002015-09-03T07:40:04.142-07:00AAG 2016 CFP: Political Ecologies of Technology<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline;">AAG 2016 CFP: Political Ecologies of Technology</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; vertical-align: baseline;">#AAGpoet</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black; line-height: 1.38;">Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 29 March – 2 April 2016, San Francisco</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Anthony Levenda | Urban Studies, Portland State University</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Dillon Mahmoudi | Urban Studies, Portland State University</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Eric Nost | Geography, University of Wisconsin - Madison</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Heather Rosenfeld | Geography, University of Wisconsin - Madison</span></span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Ashton Wesner | Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California - Berkeley</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">New
forms of data production, management, analysis, and use are
increasingly coming to bear on realms familiar to political ecologists:
conservation, agriculture, resource extraction, the city, and the body.
Political ecology (PE) is marked by its attention to situating
socio-environmental change materially and discursively through the
political economic contexts of concrete “land managers.” This has meant
examining the making and application of knowledge about environments
(Lave 2012) as well as the social movements and identities that arise
around and through nature (e.g. gender; Carney 1993). Urban political
ecologists (UPE) in particular have used infrastructure to show that the
circulation of power is bound together with nature’s production and
circulation (Heynen et al. 2006). As such, political ecologists have
long dealt with various technologies - broadly defined, and digital or
otherwise (e.g. GIS - Weiner et al. 1995; remote sensing (RS) - Robbins
2001) - often noting how their introduction changes specific landscapes,
livelihoods, and access to resources.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">With
growing interest in and use of digital tools to know and transform
nature, a renewed focus on the political ecology of technology is
necessary. In environmental governance, for example, new kinds of RS
hardware, ecosystem modelling tools, and data visualization programs may
both extend and transform existing gender, colonial, capitalist, and
other relations through automation, rapid processing, displacement of
existing knowledge regimes, and integration of ecosystem data with
financial logics (Johnson 2013). Taking technology as a focal point,
political ecologists can learn from feminist and critical race scholars
who through studies on the industrial revolution of the home and DNA
sequencing/mapping, have pointed to the ways in which technologies tend
to embed and entrench existing social relations and patterns of
accumulation (Cowan 1985; Wajcman 1991, 2008; Tallbear 2013). However,
the conditions under which such technologies are developed and deployed -
and the nature of the technologies themselves - remain understudied in
the subject areas familiar to political ecologists, raising questions
about how to characterize the contexts and actors driving environmental
change (Robbins and Bishop 2008; Rocheleau 2008; Braun and Whatmore
2010; Meehan 2013) and socionatural “metabolism” (Heynen et al. 2006).</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">We
believe political ecologists are well-equipped to approach these
questions and that PE’s emphasis on contextualization offers unique
perspectives to critical technology studies in general, beyond the
realms of conservation and development. We invite topical and conceptual
papers from political ecologists and others addressing the relationship
between software, data, technology, and environment, with a critical
lens on how these technologies produce, transmute, and/or subvert social
relations along intersecting axes of race, gender, class, ability, and
immigration status. Specifically, we seek papers that address the
following questions:</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What kinds of landscapes are produced by algorithmic decision-making? (Weiner et al 1995; Robbins 2001)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If
we take Angelo & Waschmuth’s (2014, 2) call for urban political
ecology (UPE) to examine “the dimensions of urbanization processes that
exceed the confines of the traditional city,” how might we examine the
UPE of digitally enhanced infrastructures that facilitate flows of
nature into the city (and urbanized nature out of it)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What
does it mean to see like a “cyborg state”? (Scott 1998; Haraway 2013)
How do new technologies, such as “dashboards”, facilitate abstraction,
quantification, and representation, changing state strategies for
conceptualizing and acting on socio-ecological complexity and enabling
control and discipline?</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In turn, how do land managers use
social media, new kinds of RS, and other technologies to resist this
control, or in conservation politics in general? (Büscher 2013)</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In
what ways does "nature" - in various guises - appear in software
engineering and software architecture to serve as a guiding metaphor
(e.g. software "ecosystem" or data “mining”)? In turn, what are the
"ideologies of nature" (Smith 2008 [1984]) that arise from and alongside
specific technologies?</span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What monsters, creatures, and other
figures can help us critically approach and better understand uneven
human-technology-environment relations?</span></span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">We
wish to do so while opening up fruitful discussion around conditions of
historical context and social relations in PE. Ultimately, with PE's
focus on social and environmental justice and equity, we ask, alongside
Robbins and Moore (2015), under what conditions does technology embody,
enact, and enable more abundant socio-ecological futures (Collard et al.
2015)? Under what conditions does it perpetuate violence?</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Those who would like to participate in the session should contact <a href="mailto:nost@wisc.edu" target="_blank">nost@wisc.edu</a> by
October 22 with a brief statement of interest or an abstract. Session
participants will need to submit an abstract and register for the
conference by October 29.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">References</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Braun, Bruce and Sarah Whatmore, eds. 2010. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and Public Life</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 319pp.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Büscher B. 2013. Nature 2.0.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;"> Geoforum</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 44 (May):1–3</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Carney,
Judith A. 1993. Converting the Wetlands, Engendering the Environment:
The Intersection of Gender with Agrarian Change in Gambia. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Economic Geography</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 69(4): 329-348.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Collard, R-C., J. Dempsey, J. Sundberg. 2015. A manifesto for abundant futures. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Annals of the Association of American Geographers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 105(2): 322-330.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.62; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Haraway, Donna J. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">. Routledge, 2013.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Heynen,
N., M. Kaika & E. Swyngedouw. (2006). “Urban political ecology:
politicizing the production of urban natures.” In Heynen, N., M. Kaika
& E. Swyngedouw (eds.) </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">In the nature of cities: Urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">. New York: Routledge, pp.1-19.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Johnson, L. 2013. Catastrophe bonds and financial risk: Securing capital and rule through</span></span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">contingency. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Geoforum</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 45: 30-40.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Lave, R. 2012. Bridging Political Ecology and STS: A Field Analysis of the Rosgen Wars. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Annals of the Association of American Geographers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 102 (2):366-382.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Meehan, K. 2013. Tool-power: Water infrastructure as wellsprings of state power. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Geoforum</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 57 (1): 215-224.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Robbins, P. 2001. Fixed Categories in a Portable Landscape: The Causes and Consequences of Land-Cover Categorization. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Environment and Planning A</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 33 (1): 161–80.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Robbins, P. and K. Bishop. 2008. There and back again: Epiphany, disillusionment, and rediscovery in political ecology. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Geoforum </span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">39: 747-755.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"></span></span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Robbins, P. and S. Moore, 2015. “Love Your Symptoms: A Sympathetic Diagnosis of the Ecomodernist Manifesto” </span><a href="http://entitleblog.org/2015/06/19/love-your-symptoms-a-sympathetic-diagnosis-of-the-ecomodernist-manifesto/" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">http://entitleblog.<wbr></wbr>org/2015/06/19/love-your-<wbr></wbr>symptoms-a-sympathetic-<wbr></wbr>diagnosis-of-the-ecomodernist-<wbr></wbr>manifesto/</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">. Accessed July 24, 2015.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Rocheleau, D.E. 2008. Political Ecology in the key of policy: from chains of explanation to webs of relation. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Geoforum</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 39: 716-727</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Scott, James C. 1998. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Yale University Press.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Smith N. 2008. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"> 2nd edition,</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Stengers, Isabelle, and Jane Bennett. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">. Edited by Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2010.</span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">TallBear, Kim. 2013. Genomic Articulations of Indigeneity. Social Studies of Science 43(4): 509-534.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Wajcman, Judy. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline;">Feminism Confronts Technology</span><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">. Penn State Press, 1991.</span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;">Weiner,
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Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-27638141212767817792015-08-23T18:36:00.001-07:002015-08-29T11:13:39.897-07:00Katrina 10 roundupI've compiled links to articles - everything from brief news stories to longform pieces - surrounding the ten year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I've also tried separating them into categories or genres. This is obviously a work in progress and I'll update this as the week leading up to the actual anniversary continues, and afterwards. What've I missed?<br />
<br />
last updated: 8/25/15<br />
<br />
<i>Memoir/personal reflection</i><br />
"Essay: Claire Z. Cardona, a ‘Katrina Kid,’ on weathering ‘The Big One’" Dallas News<br />
<a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20150822-essay-claire-z.-cardona-a-katrina-kid-on-weathering-the-big-one.ece">http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20150822-essay-claire-z.-cardona-a-katrina-kid-on-weathering-the-big-one.ece</a><br />
<br />
"NASA vs Nature, " ArsTechnica<br />
<a href="http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/nasa-versus-nature-august-29-2005/">arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/nasa-versus-nature-august-29-2005/</a><br />
<br />
"I worked for the governor of Louisiana during Katrina. Here are 5 things I learned." Vox<br />
<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9176225/hurricane-katrina-government">http://www.vox.com/2015/8/20/9176225/hurricane-katrina-government </a><br />
<br />
"Ten years after," The New Yorker <br />
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/ten-years-after-comic-strip-ronald-wimberly?mbid=social_twitter">http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/ten-years-after-comic-strip-ronald-wimberly?mbid=social_twitter</a><br />
<br />
"New Orleans' beautiful complexity was the one thing Katrina didn't wash away," The Guardian
<br />
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/23/new-orleans-hurricane-katrina-funeral-best-party?CMP=twt_gu">http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/23/new-orleans-hurricane-katrina-funeral-best-party?CMP=twt_gu</a><br />
<br />
"How One of Katrina’s Feel-Good Stories Turned Bad," Buzzfeed<br />
<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/petermoskowitz/how-one-of-katrinas-feel-good-stories-turned-bad#.bfpMJEobb">http://www.buzzfeed.com/petermoskowitz/how-one-of-katrinas-feel-good-stories-turned-bad#.bfpMJEobb</a><br />
<br />
<i>Coastal preparedness</i><br />
"Since Katrina: NASA Advances Storm Models, Science," NASA.com<br />
<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/since-katrina-nasa-advances-storm-models-science">http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/since-katrina-nasa-advances-storm-models-science</a><br />
<br />
"New Orleans area's upgraded levees not enough for next 'Katrina,' engineers say," NOLA.com<br />
<a href="http://www.nola.com/futureofneworleans/2015/08/new_levees_inadequate_for_next.html">http://www.nola.com/futureofneworleans/2015/08/new_levees_inadequate_for_next.html</a><br />
<br />
"Policy: Hurricane Katrina’s lessons for the world," Nature<br />
<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/policy-hurricane-katrina-s-lessons-for-the-world-1.18188?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews">http://www.nature.com/news/policy-hurricane-katrina-s-lessons-for-the-world-1.18188?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews</a><br />
<br />
"Offshore oil and gas industry adapts, but risks remain 10 years after Katrina," NOLA.com<br />
<a href="http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/energy_industry_adapts_but_sto.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter">http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/energy_industry_adapts_but_sto.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter </a><br />
<br />
“How to Save a Sinking Coast? Katrina Created a Laboratory,” New York Times<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/science/louisiana-10-years-after-hurricane-katrina.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/science/louisiana-10-years-after-hurricane-katrina.html</a><br />
<br />
"Protecting a New Generation of Poisoned Kids After Katrina," National Geographic<br />
<a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150819-new-orleans-katrina-lead-poisoning-hurricane-children-environment-health-pollution/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20150819news-katrinalead&utm_campaign=Content&sf12147598=1">http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150819-new-orleans-katrina-lead-poisoning-hurricane-children-environment-health-pollution/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_content=link_tw20150819news-katrinalead&utm_campaign=Content&sf12147598=1</a><br />
<br />
"10 Years Later, Did We Learn Anything from Hurricane Katrina?" Forbes<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2015/08/14/10-years-later-did-we-learn-anything-from-hurricane-katrina/">http://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2015/08/14/10-years-later-did-we-learn-anything-from-hurricane-katrina/</a> <br />
<br />
<i>"From the archives"</i><br />
"And Still They Rise: Confronting Katrina," Edge of Sports<br />
<a href="http://www.edgeofsports.com/2007-08-29-280/index.html">http://www.edgeofsports.com/2007-08-29-280/index.html</a><br />
<br />
"The Superdome: Monument to a Rotten System," Edge of Sports<br />
<a href="http://www.edgeofsports.com/2005-09-06-152/">http://www.edgeofsports.com/2005-09-06-152/ </a><br />
<br />
<i>Photography </i><br />
"THEN AND NOW: See how New Orleans has bounced back 10 years after Hurricane Katrina," NY Daily News <br />
<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/new-orleans-10-years-hurricane-katrina-article-1.2334354">http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/new-orleans-10-years-hurricane-katrina-article-1.2334354</a><br />
<br />
"How Katrina changed us: 9 essays of loss, perseverance and rebirth," NOLA.com<br />
<a href="http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/katrina_-_how_it_changed_us_9.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter">http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/katrina_-_how_it_changed_us_9.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter</a><br />
<br />
<i>Cultural change, policy change, and gentrification</i><br />
"<span class="markup--strong markup--h2-strong">Remembering Katrina in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement," Medium</span><br />
<a href="https://medium.com/@amprog/remembering-katrina-in-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-dd91367aa9d4">https://medium.com/@amprog/remembering-katrina-in-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-dd91367aa9d4</a><br />
<i> </i><br />
<br />
"Hurricane Katrina proved that if black lives matter, so must climate justice," The Guardian<br />
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2015/aug/24/hurricane-katrina-black-lives-matter-climate-justice?CMP=share_btn_tw">http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2015/aug/24/hurricane-katrina-black-lives-matter-climate-justice?CMP=share_btn_tw</a><br />
<br />
"Hurricane Katrina, ten years later: When the investor class goes marching in," UMN Press Blog<br />
<a href="http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2015/08/katrina-10-years-later-when-investor.html">http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2015/08/katrina-10-years-later-when-investor.html</a> <br />
<br />
<i>"</i>New Orleans, the Reluctant 'City Laboratory'" CityLab<br />
<a href="http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/08/new-orleans-the-reluctant-city-laboratory/401144/?utm_source=SFTwitter">http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/08/new-orleans-the-reluctant-city-laboratory/401144/?utm_source=SFTwitter</a><br />
<br />
"“It’s not just a party, it’s our life”: Jazz musicians led the way
back to the city after Katrina — but what is this “new” New Orleans?" Salon
<br />
<a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/08/23/its_not_just_a_party_its_our_life_jazz_musicians_led_the_way_back_to_the_city_after_katrina_but_what_is_this_new_new_orleans/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow">http://www.salon.com/2015/08/23/its_not_just_a_party_its_our_life_jazz_musicians_led_the_way_back_to_the_city_after_katrina_but_what_is_this_new_new_orleans/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow</a><br />
<br />
"<span id="socialHighlighted"></span>Who Killed Public Housing in New Orleans?" The Nation<br />
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/requiem-bricks/">http://www.thenation.com/article/requiem-bricks/</a><br />
<br />
<u>In fact, check out this week's entire issue of The Nation:</u><br />
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/issue/august-31-september-7-2015/">http://www.thenation.com/issue/august-31-september-7-2015/ </a><br />
<br />
"10 New Orleanians on How Katrina Changed Their City" Next City<br />
<a href="https://nextcity.org/features/view/new-orleans-hurricane-katrina-local-stories-housing-gentrification-race#calvinjohnson">https://nextcity.org/features/view/new-orleans-hurricane-katrina-local-stories-housing-gentrification-race#calvinjohnson</a><br />
<br />
"'Death of My Career' What happened to New Orleans' veteran black teachers" Ed Week<br />
<a href="http://neworleans.edweek.org/veteran-black-female-teachers-fired/">http://neworleans.edweek.org/veteran-black-female-teachers-fired/ </a><br />
<br />
"“Reform” makes broken New Orleans schools worse: Race, charters,
testing and the real story of education after Katrina," Salon<br />
<a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/08/03/reform_makes_broken_new_orleans_schools_worse_race_charters_testing_and_the_real_story_of_education_after_katrina/">http://www.salon.com/2015/08/03/reform_makes_broken_new_orleans_schools_worse_race_charters_testing_and_the_real_story_of_education_after_katrina/</a><br />
<br />
"10 years after Katrina, a look at Obama’s promises to rebuild and protect New Orleans," The Lens<br />
<a href="http://thelensnola.org/2015/08/20/10-years-after-katrina-a-look-at-obamas-promises-to-rebuild-and-protect-new-orleans/">http://thelensnola.org/2015/08/20/10-years-after-katrina-a-look-at-obamas-promises-to-rebuild-and-protect-new-orleans/</a><br />
<br />
"A Housing Crisis Amid Tens of Thousands of Abandoned Homes," The Atlantic<br />
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/new-orleans-blight-hurricane-katrina/401843/">http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/new-orleans-blight-hurricane-katrina/401843/</a><br />
<br />
"Starting Over, " The New Yorker<br />
<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/starting-over-dept-of-social-studies-malcolm-gladwell">http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/starting-over-dept-of-social-studies-malcolm-gladwell</a>Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-82681283695989681622015-03-09T07:02:00.000-07:002015-03-09T07:02:49.320-07:00The limits and value of big data: towards a political ecology approach<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's been quite a while since I've posted here. I've been working a bunch with UW-Madison's Center for Culture, History, and Environment on our new site, <i><a href="http://edgeeffects.net/">Edge Effects</a></i>, including <a href="http://edgeeffects.net/quantum-computing/">a post</a> on the use of site selection models in conservation, and now as an editor. Check it out!</span><br />
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In fact, I've been thinking more and more about the use of tools like site selection models in the practice of conservation: what they do, the political economy behind their production, and how people use them.</span><br />
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And so I've been looking more and more into how "big data" is coming to bear on the environment. I was scheduled to give the paper below at the recent <a href="http://politicalecology.org/">Dimensions of Political Ecology conference</a> at the University of Kentucky, but my session was already jam-packed! So I'm posting it here instead. I make several arguments in the paper: 1) though much of what we hear about big data comes from the realms of healthcare, academic research, and corporate finance, new kinds of data analytics are indeed coming to bear on familiar territories for political ecologists: conservation, agriculture, resource extraction, and the body; 2) political ecologists are well-equipped to tackle big data; 3) political ecology may in fact offer a unique perspective to critical data studies in general, beyond the realm of conservation and development. These arguments are somewhat superficial here, nor is the paper fully referenced. It is a first draft and I appreciate any feedback you may have:</span><br />
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My research focuses on the tools of environmental governance. I’ve looked at ecosystem assessment methodologies that produce viable markets in nature; my dissertation is looking at the political economy of new visualization tools and models, and data collection techniques being brought to bear on coastal land loss and marsh restoration in Louisiana. I’m asking: how are these tools produced and utilized and with what effects in the service of adaptive management and the valuation of ecosystem services. <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So when I saw this John Deere promotional video, I couldn’t help but be intrigued. [It’s a little slow-moving – you might fast forward to the 3 minute mark].</span></span><br />
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Promoters of these kinds of “data-driven solutions” to agriculture, business, health, government, and conservation suggest that a frontier of existing and constantly coming online information – big data - and the new tools and techniques associated with compiling and making sense of it - can fundamentally change how individuals and institutions go about decision-making. Political ecology (PE) has always concerned itself with the question of how land managers make decisions, with a critical eye towards contextualizing these decisions within broader political and economic processes and forces. So what if anything does PE have to say about this particular situation?</span><br />
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</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">PE, I argue, has the conceptual tools and interests to engage with these kinds of situations. PEists should be engaging with these kinds of situations – in fact, given its long-standing emphasis on questioning the scalar and political premises of knowledge’s production, circulation, and application it is uniquely positioned to, in ways that would add to the conversation around new forms and objects of data analysis as a whole. Not only should it, but in many ways it must if it want to continue being its critical role as a “hatchet” for what science, state, and capital expect from those working the land.</span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In this paper, I spell out what big data is, to illustrate briefly three different ways data is being taken up in environmental governance, and ultimately, what PEists can do with big data – what we can ask, what we can show, and how we might practice it ourselves.</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kH0_RxVhTHc/VPz8atqt6aI/AAAAAAAAFYM/6FMUmwOmOU4/s1600/body.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kH0_RxVhTHc/VPz8atqt6aI/AAAAAAAAFYM/6FMUmwOmOU4/s1600/body.jpg" height="320" width="155" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">"The Body as a Source of Big Data." http://ihealthtran.com/wordpress/2013/03/infographic-friday-the-body-as-a-source-of-big-data/</span></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What is big data?</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Even just spelling out what big data is an improvement upon most accounts, which give it an unearned mythical status:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Simply put, because of big data, managers can measure, and hence know, radically more about their businesses, and directly translate that knowledge into improved decision making and performance. <a href="https://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution/ar">Harvard Business Review</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s crucial yet difficult to pick apart what we mean by big data. It has a certain parallax – that is, it’s an object that looks different when we look at it from different advantages. At one level we might say big data necessarily comprises an object, a method or practice, and a tool – on another level it’s: data, new tools for collecting it, and new tools for analyzing and making sense of it. Let’s look at each in turn.</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Object</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Colloquially, there’s a sense that big data is simply datasets that Excel can’t deal with. More precisely, this means data where there are more columns than rows, or, as many or more attributes of events and things than those events/things themselves (<a href="http://www.nap.edu/catalog/18374/frontiers-in-massive-data-analysis">National Academy of Sciences</a>, 2013). But big data does not just mean big much less numerical data (spreadsheet-ready or not). A more formal definition might include not just voluminous, but: disparate (that is, coming from various sources – different sensors, let’s say, but also different texts), heterogeneous (of different data types – text (e.g. police records) vs. spatial), and uncertain (of varying quality, accuracy, and so on). For some observers and promoters, this translates to: “volume, velocity, and variety.”</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-El-yuXqkpCc/VPz9fo988NI/AAAAAAAAFYY/dOkejRQJKOA/s1600/vvv.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-El-yuXqkpCc/VPz9fo988NI/AAAAAAAAFYY/dOkejRQJKOA/s1600/vvv.jpg" height="160" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">"Big Data? Volume, Velocity, Variety." Some also add a fourth v: value (see below!) http://www.wired.com/2013/06/is-big-data-in-the-trough-of-disillusionment/</span><br />
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Method</i></span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Whatever the data itself looks like, it won’t speak for itself. There’s a practice to big data, and there are two important moments to consider here.</span></span></span><br />
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<u>Data collection</u></span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">First, big data is marked by the use of new technologies that can record more and more observations, more and more rapidly, and perhaps above all, more and more </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">remotely</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> - that is, at some (physical, social, computational) distance from where, who, and what is in fact sifting through the data. Some of the foremost big data stories we hear about fall into one – or often more - of three kinds of a remote governance:</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">1) Enhanced remote sensing (RS). Political ecologists have regularly both employed and critiqued RS (Turner 2003), but: 1) this is in many ways RS on steroids – one company, <a href="http://www.skyboximaging.com/">Skybox</a>, is interested not simply in capturing land cover, but extremely fine details of land use (such as the number of cars parked at a mall on a given day); 2) one of the interesting new developments we’re seeing is the integration of remotely sensed data and user-provided data. For instance, satellites are </span></span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">capturing spectral data in west Africa, which algorithms then parse into general land cover categories. Managers of </span><a href="http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/02/space-age-technology-points-african-herders-right-direction" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">a program out of Cornell</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> then provide incentives to local pastoralists to actually go out and confirm, or “ground truth” the cover type. As my friend Patrick Bigger put it, “</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">It's like <a href="http://time.com/3633469/uber-surge-pricing/">Uber surge pricing</a> for environmental surveillance.”</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span></span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2g5Alr5V7QE/VP0M93WqLeI/AAAAAAAAFZw/M1dk7D8VkHI/s1600/rs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: small;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2g5Alr5V7QE/VP0M93WqLeI/AAAAAAAAFZw/M1dk7D8VkHI/s1600/rs.jpg" height="143" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">This leads us into the second kind of remote sensing: 2) self-reported data. Data collected unconsciously (or sometimes consciously) – with permission or without it – from location-based apps or perhaps from website activity (your “clickstream”). This kind of data collection ultimately raises important fears about privacy. But those in the “</span><a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3ccb11a0-923b-11e0-9e00-00144feab49a.html#axzz3TqmWGVkb" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">quantified self</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">” movement embrace collecting as much data as they can about themselves, in the hopes of optimizing say their health or even their investment strategies; 3) Finally, an emerging connectivity of devices – from smart phones to servers to satellites - gathering, transmitting, and analyzing data at a distance has some tech leaders envisioning a so-called “internet of things,” an objectification of everything – literally everything, from trees to buildings (see video below) – into governable sources of data. California has set up water level sensors to give them real-time feedback on lake and reservoir levels, and the USFS is experimenting with real-time monitoring of all sorts of different forest measures.</span></span></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oGgkksaLXbM" width="560"></iframe><u><br /></u></span><u style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />Data analysis</u><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 1in;">The promise of new sources of information means little, however, without the conceptual and practical apparatuses that allow the data to be understood (as some might put it, for the data to become information or knowledge). I’ll name a couple of the key maneuvers “data scientists” make here. I focus on the practice of analysis, but will note the here: analysis is becoming a commodity (what Wilson (2014) calls “Analytics TM”), bringing with it the promise that the world is “infinitely” analyzable. But making the earth suitable for analysis requires first indexing it. For one company, the goal is: “<a href="http://www.inc.com/audacious-companies/jill-krasny/skybox-imaging.html">To index the earth the way Google indexes the Internet</a>,” that is to, from each particular observation of the earth’s surface, discretize certain phenomena and values (e.g. extent of deforestation or, as above, number of cars in a parking lot) and then associate these objects with the observation, allowing for easy aggregation, statistical manipulation, and retrieval.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 1in;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 1in;">Next, for many, the volume of data suggests that traditional tenets of statistical representation can be set aside. When n=N – when the sample of data is in fact the population, when we are able to collect and index all crime data for a city - we do not need to try to extrapolate, which introduces uncertainty in prediction or in analyzing new information</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 1in;"> (</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2000007629395px; text-indent: 0px;">Mayer</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18.2000007629395px; text-indent: 0px;">-Schönberger and Cukier 2013)</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 1in;">. Instead, simple yet surprising and powerful correlations and trends –for instance that Wal-Mart’s sales of strawberry pop-tarts skyrocket before hurricanes - are enough, enough for Wal-Mart to keep the shelves stocked, but probably not ask </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 1in;">why</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 1in;"> strawberry pop-tarts go so quickly. This has led some – Chris Anderson, famously - to declare “<a href="http://edge.org/3rd_culture/anderson08/anderson08_index.html">the end of the theory</a>.” Data need no explanation – the trends speak for themselves, allowing for prediction of future events (such as what you’ll order next on Amazon). Data scientists’ final move has been to develop more and better algorithms by which these correlations and predictions can be made. This involves “machine learning” – or the recursive tweaking of equations to “fit,” or properly explain, the data so that predictions can be made. There are generally two kinds of algorithms at play here, which will be familiar to those working with RS: supervised and unsupervised (It’s also worth noting that even though there are much more advanced algorithms at play (e.g. neural networks) these are the basics, and they have their roots in many of the tools that social scientists might use: PCA, linear regression, and so on.) I’m going to skip over an explanation of the differences between these, but you might get the impression that “unsupervised algorithms” are artificial intelligence come to life. While many big data proponents suggest that the “data speak for themselves” – and that’s what the phrase “machine learning” suggests, that machines alone can discover and interpret patterns - data managers will be the first to note that even unsupervised algorithms require active intervention and subjective choice: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis">clustering</a> – an important unsupervised algorithm involves an initial choice on the part of the analyst as to how many clusters to look for; clusters must also be meaningfully interpreted.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZUOGdHp1yko/VP0DGQQdPrI/AAAAAAAAFYw/hmeKxQNxFTM/s1600/ayasdi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZUOGdHp1yko/VP0DGQQdPrI/AAAAAAAAFYw/hmeKxQNxFTM/s1600/ayasdi.jpg" height="208" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Ayasdi's analysis of key basketball "positions" as illuminated by the visual topology of the data. http://www.ayasdi.com/wp-content/uploads/_downloads/Redefining_Basketball_Through_Topological_Data_Analysis.pdf</span></td></tr>
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Tool</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Regardless of whatever fanciful things algorithms can do to “reveal” the pattern of a dataset and make predictions, these results need some translation out of R or whatever analysis software package they’ve been developed in. While proponents suggest data speak for themselves, it might be more accurate to claim that </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">data visualize themselves</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">. That data patterns and results can and must be </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">seen</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;"> is a tenant of data science, meaning that whatever goes on in the analysis should be translated into some visual medium, all the better to communicate with decision-makers around. And so we see alongside new analytics, new tools: for instance, “dashboards” and “decision support tools” that collate data and results, providing decision-makers “levers” to pull to move forward.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IRL0V06RM28/VP0DoAYNryI/AAAAAAAAFY4/6S3xWu-4yWU/s1600/palantir.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IRL0V06RM28/VP0DoAYNryI/AAAAAAAAFY4/6S3xWu-4yWU/s1600/palantir.png" height="159" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Palantir's tool for "adaptively managing" salinity levels in the San Joaquin Delta. https://www.palantir.com/2012/09/adaptive-management-and-the-analysis-of-californias-water-resources/</span></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What does big data have to do with ecology?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Increasingly, conservationists, other land managers, and powerful actors in environmental governance (financiers, policy-makers, etc.) are adopting these tools. Conservation has a long history of the use of technology for management, all the way from mandating best available pollution control technologies to RS and GIS to big data today. For many conservationists, the claim is explicitly that new technologies “<a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/article/wwf-spotlights-the-tech-that-is-conserving-the-planet/">can help save the planet</a>.” This is an important claim to investigate on several accounts: 1) the word help is important, but is always vaguely defined. To what extent is this a proposal that ecological degradation simply needs a technical fix (as opposed to addressing the root social causes)? 2) the claim embeds a particular scalar argument (save <i>the planet</i>, not just certain ecosystems). Political ecology has always been concerned with both of these kinds of questions. I offer three very short vignettes simply to illustrate what happens when big data and conservation meet, and to point to areas of research where political ecologists should be working.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3kyjATGwFbY/VP0FPQxorjI/AAAAAAAAFZE/YY5BM2aB_kc/s1600/climate.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3kyjATGwFbY/VP0FPQxorjI/AAAAAAAAFZE/YY5BM2aB_kc/s1600/climate.png" height="220" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Finally, Data You Can Actually Use." Climate Corporation. http://www.climatepro2015.com/</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Smart farming is everything in the John Deere promo linked to above. Smart farming advocates aim for the integration of field, equipment, and meterological data to support precision planting and optimizing crop yields. The idea is that this data – made accessible through interfaces and dashboard tools – can help farmers limit unnecessary applications of fertilizers (through near real-time, sub-meter access to satellites able to pick up near-infrared light, allowing insight into nutrient deficiencies and growth rates), and plant the right kinds of crops in the right place given current climatological and soil conditions. A number of different firms have set themselves up in this market, including Skybox, which bills their recently launched private satellites as providing “Big data. From space,” and <a href="http://www.climate.com/">Climate Corporation</a>, which collects public weather data, translating it onto a private platform to sell to farmers (and was recently acquired by Monsanto).</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
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<i>Valuing nature</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">While smart farming aims to increase the value of agricultural production by conserving inputs, conservationist organizations themselves are aiming to use big data to value ecosystems in their own right. They have set up a couple of cases using social media data to reveal the otherwise unknown or, by default, zero economic value of nature. In California, The Nature Conservancy uses user-generated data from the <a href="http://ebird.org/">eBird</a> app to identify where migratory birds are during particularly important intervals and then pays rice farmers in key gaps along the birds’ routes to keep their fields flooded for longer, preserving habitat that can be hard to come by in the context of the state’s long drought. These mini-wetlands are called “<a href="http://www.conserveca.org/our-stories/all/2-blog/132-precision-conservation">pop-up habitats</a>,” and TNC is also talking about it in terms much like smart farming, calling it “precision conservation.” Elsewhere, researchers from the Natural Capital Project – a coalition of academic ecologists and conservation non-profits – have <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/october/natural-capital-photos-101813.html">used Flickr data</a> to estimate the recreational values provided by different ecosystems, as a way of making clear to policy-makers the job and revenue creating aspects of nature. Instead of providing surveys to tourists to ask them how much they visited a national park, the researchers used Flickr data as a proxy for visitation, and to guess at how environmental degradation at these parks might change recreational attendance.</span></span></div>
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<i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hedging bets</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Finally, some data analytic firms are pushing the boundaries of new data forms in their use for valuing nature. These firms write algorithms that sift through satellite imagery and other economic data to make sense of and correlate environmental and economic change, then package this information and sell it to hedge funds in need of investment advice. For instance, <a href="http://www.wired.com/2013/06/startup-skybox/">Skybox says</a> that it can monitor say gold production from mines across the globe, giving investors in real time literally a bird’s eye view of this facet of the economy. Without having to wait for Newmont Mining’s quarterly statement, investors can with the help of Skybox’s algorithms, more or less spy on the mining giant’s operations to get a feel for whether output is on the rise. The same goes for logging in tropical rain forests, oil and gas wells, and, again, crop condition. In the case of forest monitoring, Skybox suggests that not only can this data be useful for investors, but for activists as well. They’d like to sell their analytics to both sides.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Questions to ask and possible perspectives<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1. Material effects</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These three vignettes, brief as they are, raise a number of questions and suggest several general lines of inquiry. First and foremost we need to better understand what sort of material impacts are detectable and attributable to big data in practice<s>. </s>What difference does big data analysis make in the transformation of certain landscapes, in comparison to earlier modes of governance? Might it increase the speed at which change occurs (a la pop-up habitats) or improve conservation outcomes by illuminating unseen trends? What is the environment effect of, for instance, Palantir’s tool for managing Delta water salinity? Are water levels actually optimized? What and who do the landscapes reflect? What in ecological terms is a “pop-up habitat”? Moreover, we could also better understand and communicate <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html">the environmental impact of server farms</a>: the greenhouse gas emissions stemming from work and life now situated in “cloud” space, the SO2 emissions from diesel generators, and the water usage to cool down servers.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oYEnPYQIOTs/VP0Fm-c_I9I/AAAAAAAAFZM/tb5MhkjrH6Q/s1600/oil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oYEnPYQIOTs/VP0Fm-c_I9I/AAAAAAAAFZM/tb5MhkjrH6Q/s1600/oil.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">"Data is the new oil" http://dismagazine.com/issues/73298/sara-m-watson-metaphors-of-big-data/</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2. Data as waste and value</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-indent: 0.5in;">Political ecologists focused on the intersection of cultural and environmental politics have fruitfully been investigating questions about waste and value, noting that capitalism relies on discursive translating bodies and landscapes as alternatively waste and as valuable (Moore 2013; Goldstein 2013; Gidwani and Reddy 2011). What is previously deemed waste(land) can be enclosed and incorporated as value, and valuable labor can be laid to waste (only to be speculated upon as someday bearing value again). In many ways this is exactly how data managers talk about big data - as a kind of hoard, a resource to be mined, something that in a kind of parallax view, splits the difference between waste and value [I'm grateful to Mohammed Rafi Arefin for making this point clear to me]. They believe that there is value in the data waiting to be realized, just as oil is waiting in the ground, ready to be extracted, refined, and transported to realize its value. This may help us understand data privacy issues in a new way - the unsolicited collection and analysis of data may be a sort of enclosure of otherwise waste information. Big data also more directly promises to be (environmental) economists’ holy grail: long have they sought ways to understand how people value things whose value is not revealed by markets. With big data capturing all sorts of “traces” we leave behind as we click around the Internet, the idea is this data can serve as proxies revealing preferences. When there exists a dataset like Flickr, the story goes, we have a much better sense of just how much people value wildlife. </span><br />
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</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">No matter what, we should not accept some managers’ techno-optimism without reservation. Like hoarders, analysts fear being overwhelmed by their data. </span><span style="background: white; text-indent: 0.5in;">The actual work of having to sort through the data mess just as easily gives the analyst a sense of dread as it inspires hopeful visions of data-driven decision-making. Acknowledging data mining’s limitations, managers vividly describe the problem of having to sort through too much stuff to get to the valuable parts as one of powerlessness. “Without a clear framework for big data governance and use,” one consultant<span style="color: #444444;"> </span></span><a href="http://blog.edgewater.com/2012/05/18/are-you-paralyzed-by-a-hoard-of-big-data/">writes</a>, “businesses run the risk of becoming paralyzed under an unorganized jumble of data.” For one manager reflecting on a massive dataset, “<a href="http://blog.edgewater.com/2012/05/18/are-you-paralyzed-by-a-hoard-of-big-data/">the thought of wading through all THAT to find it stops you dead in your tracks.”</a> Another similarly evoked the feeling of being stranded at sea: “<a href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/sizing-up-big-data-broadening-beyond-the-internet/?_r=0http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/sizing-up-big-data-broadening-beyond-the-internet/?_r=0">There’s a lot of water in the ocean, too, but you can’t drink it.</a>” Continuing the drowning theme, others simply acknowledge that in big data analysis there is a risk that the analyst will be overwhelmed by inconsequential results: "This set of patterns [in a big dataset] often contains lots of uninteresting patterns that risk <a href="http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresArticle/wisId-WIDM1063.html">overwhelming</a> the data miner.” Indeed, data miners are anxious about not finding the true or most interesting pattern, and instead finding only what they want: “Data is so unstructured and there’s so much out there, <a href="http://www.news.wisc.edu/22265?utm_source=iUW&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=iUW2013-11-05">you are going to find any pattern you want </a>… whether it’s true or fake.” They fear finding themselves in the data. This is analogous to the<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> “ecological anxiety disorder” (Robbins and Moore 2013) ecologists find themselves in where they either see their concepts as too normative or that humans are a negative influence in ecosystems. We should leverage this concern. As political ecologists might ask what climate change adaptation programs in the developing world expect of their target audiences, we can ask, what do new digital technologies for conservation, farming, and environmental governance expect of their users?</span></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fhYf8wsB89A/VP0HSUQ1csI/AAAAAAAAFZg/0gaOCEQ1YMk/s1600/drowning.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fhYf8wsB89A/VP0HSUQ1csI/AAAAAAAAFZg/0gaOCEQ1YMk/s1600/drowning.png" height="183" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Drowning in big data. Intel. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/big-data/big-data-101-animation.html</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I think in many cases we’ll find that these tools expect their users to be rational actors who predictably respond when provided a particular set of informational inputs. That is, the conceit of these tools is to ignore the political economic contexts which shape the extent to which users will even be able to acknowledge, decipher and act upon them (as well as the political economic contexts of their making). There are good reasons, political ecologists know, that a US farmer – especially a small-scale one, but we can also think about the average age of farmers, the fact that most work off-farm jobs - will be unable to perform the sort of decision-making John Deere presents. Yet it is not just these farmer-centric limits to analysis that will be key to recognize – we can think also about the political economic structure of data collection and analysis today: its centralization (like GMO seeds, farmers may or may not own their data) and monopolization (Monsanto recently bought out Climate Corporation), and the limits to “data-driven” action these introduce. Data and new tech are not black boxes for farmers just because they are technically overwhelming and once removed from farmers, but because they are </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">socially</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> boxed off as well.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3. Visualizing like a state <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More specifically, with the increasing emphasis on data-driven solutions to everything, we should expect to see “analysis paralysis”, or situations in which too many options and too much information are presented to decision-makers for them to be able to take any coherent action. This may be particularly true for policy-makers, the kind targeted by tools like Palantir’s salinity monitor: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">…our analysis tools “can give policy makers maximum insight into the relationships between the variables that affect the Delta’s health and allow them to make decisions that appropriately weigh the interests of all parties involved.” <a href="https://www.palantir.com/2012/09/adaptive-management-and-the-analysis-of-californias-water-resources/">Palantir</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What exactly is “maximum insight”? What does it mean for tools to objectively weigh interests? There are many reasons that the kind decision-making subjects envisioned here doesn’t and won’t actually exist. Many actually existing policy-makers do not even know what kinds of tools are technologically possible – they don’t know what to ask for from programmers. The ones I’ve been talking to tell me things like “someone told me I wanted a dashboard” – in other words, they do not actually know they need the kind of easy to use tools Palantir is offering them, but are instead convinced by the discourse that tells them they do need such tools. And even if decision-makers do seek out dashboards, what they’re often asking for is the “easy button,” the button that gives them an answer spelling out what to do. Yet many programmers will reply that that’s something they can’t give them. It’s not their place to give the one answer, but to provide only maximum insight and present all interests, letting the decision-maker do the rest and pinning accountability on them. Or, merely “suggesting” changing the type of seed to plant, like the tool in the John Deere video. In other words, tools lure decision-makers with the promise of easier, more defensible basis for their choices, while at the same time deflecting as much of that responsibility back towards them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4. Ideologies of Nature</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally - and I’m grateful to Dan Cockayne for pushing me on this – we should ask how big data and analysis rely upon and change ideologies of nature. As Neal Smith (1984) argued, not only does capital physically produce nature, but it produces ideologies of nature, bourgeois notions of capital, race, gender and so on as natural. How does TNC’s creation of “pop-up habitats” change how we think about nature? In what ways might we start to think about environmental protection in terms of “surge-demand” and “precision” and understand ecosystems as “real-time” or “pop-up” events? What about the reverse- when instead of talking about nature through data, we start to <a href="http://dismagazine.com/issues/73298/sara-m-watson-metaphors-of-big-data/">conceptualize data using our existing languages for talking about nature</a>? What is the effect of describing computation as happening in an “environment,” or more perniciously, naming data as a resource – an object like oil, coal, or gas to be mined and extracted?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Conclusions</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What can PE in particular say to the larger conversation surrounding big data? Below, I name three points political ecology can make in this discussion, three points that summarize the questions and perspectives sketched above. I end with an argument for a political ecological practice of big data.</span><br />
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</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I believe political ecology is equipped not only to adequately analyze the kinds of situations I sketched above, but that through these sorts of “knowledge politics” critiques it can usefully inform critical data studies. Much in the way of reflexivity on big data concerns its implications for privacy, its heightening of the digital divide, and its use as an academic research tool. Much as political ecologists know the problematic epistemologies of remote sensing, these reports usefully point out that social media data in particular cannot provide the kinds of information or insights many analysts want it to – much data isn’t geotagged, and even the images or tweets that are do not necessarily indicate that the person can be adequately related to that location (boyd and Crawford 2012; Crampton et al. 2013; Wilson 2014). But we should not stop at these critiques of big data as our own method for understanding the world (nor stop at crucial questions of what work big data does as a governance “meme” – Graham and Shelton 2013) – we must extend them to the particular situations in which big data becomes an applied analysis tool regardless of its foundational epistemological flaws. In terms political ecologists are familiar with: we can illustrate not just data’s moment of production, but its moments of circulation and application. Indeed, Crampton et al. (2013) call for a kind of contextualization or “situating” of big data, as research tool if not means of decision-making. This kind of intimate grounding through case studies is what political ecologists excel at.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">We must articulate that </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">big data is produced</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, and we must show how and why. Not content to merely illustrate that new technologies constrain or afford certain actions by governance actors or land managers, we should provide “chains of explanation” beyond our research contexts back to larger forces at play. We can provide crucial inroads into questions like: what’s the political economy that allows a firm like Skybox to index the earth? Who’s producing these tools? How do private firms rely on and generate value out of public data? How does big data gain “value” for firms or farms? What is it that allows data name value in the world, as TNC and the Natural Capital Project believe it does?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Likewise, big data is something which is </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">practiced with people,</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> in spite of the mystification of algorithms as wholly autonomous entities. Political ecology has a long-standing concern with understanding the concrete, embedded decision-making and social situatedness of land managers – as opposed to discursively idealized subjects (like rational actors) or, to use one of Piers Blaikie’s images, bureaucrats in airplanes (designing a population stabilization program based on abstract concepts and figures the like of which, Blaikie wryly notes, are not in the minds of two lovers as they lay down to bed. This concern should lead us to consider data managers as very much the kind of land managers Blaikie started from and focused on in his Political Economy of Soil Erosion: “actual people making decisions on how to use land.” I mean this in two ways: 1) those making decisions that have concrete bearing on the treatment of particular ecologies, as when TNC’s data analysts, with the help of their algorithms, decide where to extend migratory bird habitat; 2) I also mean it in the sense that those we traditionally consider land managers – farmers, pastoralists, peasants – are fast become data managers in and of themselves, be it as “smart” farmers or as pastoralists incentivize to go out and ground truth RS imagery.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Finally, we must understand the actual effects and outcomes of new techniques of data management. While it is crucial to recognize how data potentially connects domains in novel ways – i.e. when Skybox syncs ecological data with financial data – we should try not to reproduce discourse that “algorithms will rule our world.” If we do, we miss key resistances and ambiguities. We should remember that <a href="http://www.techtimes.com/articles/18787/20141028/google-gives-non-profits-access-to-fresh-satellite-images-through-skybox-for-good.htm">Skybox supports activists</a> who feel that the technology can offer more visibility to illegal extraction activities be it in the Amazonian or Appalachia. We should be reminded to look for these fractures and to try to widen them, to realize that we can engage in a “politics of measure” that either questions the very measurability of things (Mann 2007; Robertson and Wainwright 2014) or asserts the strategic utility of doing so (Wyly 2007; Cooper 2014).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
Which leads to the last big question to pose here: do we as political ecologists employ big data ourselves in support of our “hatchet and seed” mission? Is data just the object of our critique, along the lines I have laid out here? These are questions human geographers are asking themselves right now (Graham and Shelton 2013, special issue), some seeing it as an opportunity to rethink empirical social science in a more interdisciplinary way (Ruppert 2013), with others more cautious, suggesting big data are the epiphenomena of the real issue, and the real need is to question the datafied production of knowledge, to question the idea that big data is truth that simply needs mining (Wilson 2014). I think political ecologists have a lot to gain by reflexively engaging with the analysis of massive data sets, extending PE’s tradition of sitting critically if sometimes awkwardly (Walker 2005) between political critique and ecological fieldwork, cognizant that its own tools of research are often those it seeks to criticize (a la Lave et al. 2013; Turner 2003).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In short, I’m reminded again of Piers Blaikie, when in the 5</span><sup style="text-indent: 0.5in;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> chapter of PESE,he sketches out what a grounded study of peasant political economy in the context of soil loss would look like. Literally sketches out what he calls “a schematic and heuristic</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">device which suggests the way in which these complex relationships (between people, and between people and environment) can be handled.” And what does it look like? </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</span> </span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PiSkupllJnU/VP0HGvUsK4I/AAAAAAAAFZY/lg9A_X012PM/s1600/blaikie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PiSkupllJnU/VP0HGvUsK4I/AAAAAAAAFZY/lg9A_X012PM/s1600/blaikie.jpg" height="203" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Blaikie's heuristic for understand land use decisions and soil erosion. </span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</span> <span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">What else but a massive, complex, messy matrix of variables and objects of study (in this case, households? A big dataset. What is his critical relationship to this heuristic? He describes it as a watch – a watch keeps time, but it does not give its user any clue on how to use time. In the same way, the heuristic and the data it organizes are meaningful only in the context of political economic theory – it “maps” political economy onto the case study and “attempts to calibrate part of it precisely.” In other words, political ecologists might have our big data cake and eat it too. I’m not entirely sure what this engagement would look like concretely – the <a href="http://globe.umbc.edu/">GLOBE project</a> at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County is a likely candidate - but it seems to me that’s where we ought to be headed.</span></span></div>
Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-91030713727269026672014-10-16T10:09:00.003-07:002014-10-16T10:14:14.874-07:00Can technology save the planet?A <a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/article/wwf-spotlights-the-tech-that-is-conserving-the-planet/?utm_source=October+2014+Newsletter&utm_campaign=NatCap+Newsletter&utm_medium=email">provocation</a> from WWF's chief scientist John Hoekstra that's exactly where I end up in my <a href="http://edgeeffects.net/quantum-computing/">new post</a> over at Edge Effects. It's a fun intro to quantum computing that backs into a discussion of the assessment and geodesign software tools that conservationists are deploying around the world to better measure restoration interventions, track environmental change, and fight back against environmental crimes like illegal logging. Ultimately, I'm less sure than Hoekstra that the answer to his question is a resounding yes.<br />
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The post comes right on the heels of a few interesting stories out the past few days. First, yesterday the Natural Capital Project has <a href="https://class.stanford.edu/courses/HumanitiesSciences/NCP-101/">launched a MOOC</a>, where you can learn about their toolset. <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/07/optimal-natures.html">I've written speculatively</a> about some of those tools here before, but it's great to have the chance to go behind the scenes. Second, Hoekstra held <a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/article/wwf-spotlights-the-tech-that-is-conserving-the-planet/?utm_source=October+2014+Newsletter&utm_campaign=NatCap+Newsletter&utm_medium=email">a Twitter-mediated conversation</a> last week during SXSWEco, discussing the potential for drones, big data analytics, and other emerging technologies to, well, save the planet. I'm not even convinced yet that what we're seeing conservation right now qualifies as big data - the term seems loosely applied - but Hoekstra led an important conversation about how to do big data in conservation while recognizing issues of security, digital divides, and privacy.</div>
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So check out the post, and be sure to bookmark or follow Edge Effects while you're at it. It's an amazing new site run by grad students affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison's <a href="http://nelson.wisc.edu/che">Center for Culture, History, and Environment</a>. </div>
Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-57061021483676397982014-08-21T05:20:00.000-07:002014-08-21T05:21:41.714-07:00Where does the value of nature come from?<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">$125
trillion is no small chunk of change. You could, without a doubt, buy
a lot of stuff with that in your pocket. In fact, it's more than the
world's gross domestic product (GDP), or the value of all the goods
and services produced in the global economy each year - everything
from cars to haircuts to World Cup tickets. But according to <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378014000685">a
recent study</a> led by Bob Costanza, $125 trillion is also the
dollar equivalent of what all the work the world's ecosystems do for
us - things that aren't normally counted in GDP, like the flood
damage a coastal wetland prevents. The $33 trillion mark and other
figures like it vary widely while provoking much controversy...and
are increasingly taken by world political and business leaders as
self-evident, touted as the next big thing in conservation.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">$125
trillion is a best guesstimate. It's a follow-up to Costanza's
<a href="https://www.pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.sustainability/files/Costanza%20et%20al.%20EE%201998.pdf">landmark
1997 paper</a> in which he and colleagues suggested the number might
be more like $33 trillion. At the time, <a href="http://portal.nceas.ucsb.edu/working_group/valuation-of-coastal-habitats/review-of-social-literature-as-of-1-26-07/WoodwardWui%202001.pdf/attachment_download/file">other
researchers</a> had reviewed existing valuation studies, finding that
overall an acre of wetlands might be valued anywhere between six
cents and over $22,000! Other commentators noted that looking at just
one particular ecological function (say, flood prevention), the
values researchers came up with could differ by two orders of
magnitude from site to site. For <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7107/full/443027a.html">many
critics</a>, these numbers imply the reduction of nature to something
to be bought and sold, which is particularly problematic if they're
going to fluctuate so wildly. For others, no matter the range of
values, they just aren't helpful - they're all a "<a href="http://cmbc.ucsd.edu/content/1/docs/toman.pdf">serious
underestimate of infinity</a>" because we simply can't do
without many of things nature does for us, like provide breathable
air. Still, for a growing number of conservationists and
decision-makers, putting some number - often a dollar value - on
ecosystems is exactly what's needed to save it, to show policy makers
and businesses the economic importance of nature, in hopes of
preventing its destruction and encouraging its conservation.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>So
where do these numbers come from?</b></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">It's
appealing to write-off statements like, "the value of an acre of
wetland is six cents," as simply the work of ivory tower
intellectuals busily justifying their own existence. After all, the
scholars who published the most recent study are all affiliated with
an academic institution. It's also easy to get the sense that these
numbers come from no place in particular. That's the feeling you get
reading histories of the ecosystem service concept (see <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800913002954">here</a>
and <a href="http://foreststofaucets.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/The-History-of-Ecosystem-Service-in-Economic-Theory-and-Practice-Journal-Citation.doc.pdf">here</a>).
These papers do important work revealing that the valuation of nature
just didn't come along in 1997 with Costanza et al.'s first estimate
of the value of the world's ecosystems. But beyond having a history,
behind Costanza et al.'s new number and the “<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Is-Conservation-For-/142853/">modelling
sausage</a>” that spit it out is a body of literature, a set of
theories, and communities of scholars called environmental and
ecological economics. And this community and its history is grounded
in place. Valuing nature didn't just appear from out of nowhere.
Environmental, and its younger, upstart cousin, ecological, economics
and the basis for valuing nature come out of a long-standing
engagement with wetlands, especially coastal marshes, and
particularly as they faced development pressure, often from the
oil/gas industry. When ecologist Eugene Odum and economist Len
Shabman <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08920757909361812#.U_XY38VdVc0">sparred</a>
in the 1970s over how exactly conceptually and empirically to get at
nature's value, their material was Gulf Coast marshes. Today, in a
post-Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy world, when we hear prominent
arguments for restoring or conserving ecosystem services because of
their value, it's coastal places like Mobile Bay, AL that are paraded
out as examples of where coastal restoration "<a href="http://ensia.com/voices/one-of-the-smartest-investments-we-can-make/">show
strong returns on dollars invested</a>." </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>It's
the US Gulf Coast that has defined nature's valuation as we know it
today</b></span></span><span style="color: black;">
- its methodology and policy advocacy - and will continue to shape it
in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">The
Gulf Coast oil and gas industry's payments to oystermen for access to
lay pipelines across harvesting grounds mark economists',
conservationists', and others' earliest struggles with valuing
nature's goods and services beyond the confines of established
markets. The Gulf's hydrocarbon industry grew significantly following
World War II in order to meet growing demand from suburban consumers,
as Jason Theriot details in his <a href="http://lsupress.org/books/detail/american-energy-imperiled-coast/">great
new book</a> about the twin histories of the industry and wetland
loss and protection in the Gulf. But, of course, companies like
Tennessee Gas needed to get their products to market - mainly on the
rapidly urbanizing east coast - from wells in the middle of
Louisiana's marshes. To do so, they laid hundreds of miles of
pipelines in canals carved through wetlands. These areas, however,
were often the same spots where oystermen had traditionally
harvested. At the time, in the 1950s, the ecological consequences of
the kinds of hydrological disruptions caused by canals were already
to some extent understood by fishermen and scientists alike: the
catch would likely be diminished from any nearby canals. In part
because many working in the hydrocarbon industry were local oyster
experts themselves and in part because of the influence the fisheries
community had historically exerted on state regulators, oil and gas
companies went out of their way to provide compensation for direct
damages from pipelines. What the industry paid was simply what the
expected catch would have fetched on the open market. In paying
oystermen for losses to their harvest, oil and gas companies were
acknowledging:the broader effects of their activities, but still had
some market signal to guide them; they were not trying to compensate
for things without market prices like water quality that
environmental economics pioneers like Dales were first proposing at
the time. The industry's payments were ad hoc and not meant to be a
systematic assessment of all of the what we would now call ecosystem
services a wetland provided. Still, conservationists seemed to be at
least considering for the first time about what values the market
wouldn't capture. For instance, the chief of the Oyster Division of
Louisiana's Wildlife and Fisheries Commission was particularly
concerned that compensation would not account for long-term,
large-scale effects: </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">“</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>we
feel that the long range effects resulting in permanent ecological
changes are by far the most serious and the most difficult to assess
damages for</b></span></span><span style="color: black;">.
Direct effects are largely a matter of obtaining ROW [right of way]
and making adjustments for damages at the time of construction. The
area involved is comparatively small and involves only the path of
the canal and the immediate vicinity on each side. Ecological and
hydrographic changes may be permanent and may affect extensive areas
ten miles or more on either side of the canal.” (58)</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">Into
the 60s and 70s, conservationists at Louisiana's state environmental
agencies and at Louisiana State University (LSU) continued calling
for a more formal recognition of the importance of wetlands, as part
of a growing movement nationwide to daylight corporate and government
decision-making that had impacts on the environment. As the story
goes, in1969, the <a href="http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke/Papers/SBOilSpill1969.pdf">massive
oil spill</a> offshore of Santa Barbara, CA inspired Congress to pass
the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which required all
federal agencies to undertake a formal review of the costs and
benefits of any action with a major effect on the environment. NEPA,
however, did not require agencies to monetize these costs and
benefits in order to evaluate projects. Ultimately, with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/07/us/reagan-order-on-cost-benefit-analysis-stirs-economic-and-political-debate.html">executive
orders from Reagan</a> and successive administrations requiring more
cost benefit analysis (CBA), monetization became the default. Already
by the 70s, the Army Corps of Engineers had been conducting CBAs of
its projects. As Tennessee Gas looked to the dock price of oysters to
account for some of the broader effects of its pipeline canals, the
corps might determine whether or not to build a dam based on the cost
to fisheries weighed against the benefits, measurable in dollar
terms, arising from new recreation opportunities.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">CBAs
accounted for only so much of what conservationists thought was
important about coastal habitats. </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>←
This if anything is </b></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>the</b></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>
constant refrain throughout the history of nature's valuation, from
both advocates and critics: what are we counting? </b></span></span><span style="color: black;">CBA
might assess how a levee project would cost in damages made to
fisheries, but at the time there were few techniques for accounting
for the loss of storm surge protection that came from impounding
wetlands. Easily the landmark piece decrying the limits of CBA was
James Gosselink, Eugene Odum, and R.M. Pope's 1974 paper, “<a href="http://morgan-robertson.com/Wetlandia%20Files/Gosselink%20et%20al.%201974.pdf">The
Value of the Tidal Marsh</a>”. It was a short white paper written
for the LSU Center for Wetland Resources, but nonetheless recieved
remarkable national attention from wetland conservationists as they
made their case in the 70s for increasing resource protection.
Gosselink et al.'s aims were to counterbalance development pressure
on coastal ecosystems by expanding what ought to be counted as
monetary cost from development. For instance, they valued the waste
assimilation capacity of wetlands by looking at what it might cost
regions to fully treat their sewage if all wetlands imply vanished
and were replaced with wastewater plants. This “replacement cost”
was not a market price, but was an existing signal (and it's measures
like these that led to some of the most famous examples of
institutional payments for ecosystem services, namely <a href="http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/dynamic/article.page.php?page_id=4130&section=home">New
York City's payment to farmers</a> in the city's watershed to
conserve natural habitat, which has reduced the region's water
treatment costs.) The group, in the end, described wetland value in
terms of $/acre/yr, but how they got their was through the concept of
"emergy.” Emergy is a neologism for the amount of solar energy
embodied in an ecological good or service. This could be converted
into monetary terms by comparing the caloric requirements for service
production in a wetland to the price to burn calories in things like
oil that do have a market price. It may sound a little convoluted
today, but the idea still has some traction. What's important about
the emergy argument is that it proposes that nature's value is
intrinsic; value arises from ecological transfrormations of energy,
rather than supply and demand. Not surprisingly, this upset many
economists, some of whom thought the idea went against some of the
fundamental tenets of their discipline, in which value is
fundamentally relative, dependent on the vagaries of supply and
demand, and ultimately, how much rational subjects desired certain
things. This is precisely what Gosselink et al. were skeptical of: if
we believe neoclassical economics, nature has no value because it has
no market price. But of course nature has value and so it must reside
</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>somewhere</i></span></span><span style="color: black;">
in nature. As one research team later <a href="http://www.fsd.nl/downloadattachment/71372/58843/Valuation%20and%20Management%20of%20Wetland%20Ecosystems.pdf">put
it</a>, “The point that must be stressed is that the economic value
of ecosystems is connected to their physical, chemical, and
biological role in the overall </span>
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">system,
</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>whether
the public fully recognizes that role or not</i></span></span><span style="color: black;">.”
(emphasis in original) Politically, this perspective translated into
an argument to not leave wetland protection to the whims of the
market, but for better government planning. That would be something
at least Gosselink would be more involved with in the next decade,
contributing to the consolidation of Louisiana's modern oil/wetland
regulatory regime while leading environmental reviews of projects
like the massive Louisiana Offshore Oil Port.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">One
student of </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Howard</i></span></span><span style="color: black;">
Odum – Eugene's brother and collaborator - was none other than Bob
Costanza, lead author of the 2014 paper valuing the world's ecosystem
services at $33 trillion. After graduating from the University of
Florida in the late 70s, he got a job at LSU. <a href="http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/153491/">As
he recalls it</a>, he was in part drawn there by the presence of
Herman Daly, whose work was moving in similar directions and had been
an inspiration, and who happened to show up at his job talk. LSU at
the time would have been a hub of activity focused on valuing nature,
through coastal marshes, with Gosselink, Costanza, and Daly all
pioneering in their own way and <a href="http://www.oceanography.lsu.edu/index.php/people/faculty/eugene-turner/">Eugene
Turner,</a> another freshly-minted student of Odum, making headway on
understanding the ecological effects of oil and gas canals on the
coast. Throughout the 80s (and to some extent into today) Costanza
would publish on the ecological and economic facets of Louisianan and
Gulf wetlands. In <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http://www.fsd.nl/downloadattachment/71372/58843/Valuation%20and%20Management%20of%20Wetland%20Ecosystems.pdf&ei=SNv1U538BdSdygTzvILYCg&usg=AFQjCNGQWg25JT9Z_Zfp3tnc-CgNjP5yZg&sig2=JPY-HFXwZJidVxvBePVtoQ">one
paper</a> in particular, 1989's “Valuation and Management of
Wetland Ecosystems,” he and his co-authors produced another
estimate of Louisiana's wetlands, a follow-up to Gosselink et al.
Like Gosselink et al., Costanza, Maxwell, and Farber conducted an
emergy analysis. But they also did something different: besides
counting calories or looking at the market rate of fish raised by
coastal estuaries, they actually hit the pavement (a boat ramp
parking lot, actually) and asked people what wetlands were worth to
them. The technique is known as contingent valuation. What they were
after was people's "revealed" preferences - the amount each
person spent on gas to get themselves to a wetland to fish could be
considered part of its value, as a provider of a recreational
service. The researchers were also interested in "stated"
preferences - what people say they would pay to protect a wetland. If
you're thinking that preferences </span><span style="color: black;">sounds
a lot more in line with t</span><span style="color: black;">he
neoclassical economics approach than with the emergy perspective,
you'd be right. We might read Costanza et al.'s paper as a sort of
continental divide in the valuation of nature: the first half an
emergy analysis focused on elucidating the inherent values of nature,
a perspective that was prominent up until that point, the second half
all about new techniques to get after how much society desires
wetlands in practice, regardless of what nature has to say about it,
new and exciting methodolgies that were about to get their trial by
fire (see below). And this sort of split reflects where Costanza et
al. end up in the paper when it comes to policy recommendations: they
suggest that oil and gas companies provide bonds to cover the
mitigation of their impacts. The amount of the bond would be based on
the predicted extent and nature of the impacts, and depending on the
final ecological outcome, the company would get more or less of its
bond back. The researchers' argument here was not for better planning
to restrict where the oil and gas industry could work, but to modify
the industry's accounting practices, something that is all the rage
now, with <a href="http://www.teebweb.org/">TEEB</a> and <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/12/green-is-good">TNC</a>
working hard at incorporating green accounting in business.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">Here's
the thing about contingent valuation: it doesn't work. Economists
often expect people to behave rationally, but asking people how much
they would pay to protect pelicans has presented economists with a
number of persistently thorny issues. <a href="http://darp.lse.ac.uk/papersdb/diamond-hausman_(jep_94).pdf">For
instance</a>, when researchers ask people how much they would pay to
protect a nearby natural area from a hypothetical development
scenario, people regularly act strategically and give “protest”
answers. They'll say $0, insinuating that the park is priceless, or
offer some absurdly high price, all in the belief that there may be
an actual development project in the works and that their answers may
stop it. It also turns out that people don't value twice as much
wetland at twice the price. It was another “largest to date” oil
spill – the Exxon Valdez tanker leak in 1989 - that brought to a
head many of the methodological concerns surrounding the use of
contingent valuation (in theory and applied to real cases).
Economists and regulators alike <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.8.4">asked
themselves</a>, how do we figure out how much damage the tanker spill
has caused to wildlife? What about the value someone in Iowa places
on the mere existence of some species in Alaska? NOAA, in charge of
the clean-up, commissioned a study led by some of the top minds not
just in environmental economnics but economics writ large - Nobel
Prize winners like Kenneth Arrow - to see if contingent valuation was
a proper method to use. They found that it was, and the courts have
affirmed NOAA's prerogative to use it. <a href="http://www.rff.org/RFF/Documents/RFF-DP-10-31.pdf">But
rarely it has</a>.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">Instead,
NOAA has tended to employ good ole replacement cost. If it costs $100
million to buy all the construction equipment, fill, and plants to
replace a wetland degraded by a Chevron oil spill, then Chevron must
pay that amount. Like contingent valuation, the problem with
replacement cost, as practiced in NRDA compensation, is that it
doesn't work. The cost of replacing ecological structure doesn't
necessarily equal the cost of lost ecological functions. It's one
thing to put the right kinds and quantity of plants back in; it's
another to make sure that the ecosystem is providing the same kind of
flood mitigation service, for instance.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Doubts
about the object and goal of compensation are precisely what are
haunting economists yet again following the lastest “largest oil
spill to date,” the Deepwater Horizon spill. It inspired <a href="http://web.pdx.edu/~nwallace/EPA/CVJEP.pdf">a
revisiting</a> of the contingent valuation question with some authors
revising their position from 20 years ago post-Exxon Valdez. Diamond,
for instance, <a href="https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.26.4.43">is
now even more critical</a> of contingent valuation and more skeptical
that it could ever be of much use. Some number is </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>not
</i></span></span><span style="color: black;">better
than no number. Meanwhile, the spill has become a poster child for
ecosystem service valuation advocates. In the monumental <a href="http://www.teebweb.org/wp-content/uploads/Study%20and%20Reports/Reports/Synthesis%20report/TEEB%20Synthesis%20Report%202010.pdf">TEEB
synthesis report</a>, the section on “Applying the Approach”
begins with the lamentation that if only the value of wetland
services had been properly accounted for in business practice, BP
would have never let the spill happen.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: inherit;">What
is clear from the Deepwater Horizon fallout is that beyond whatever
BP ends up having to pay to compensate for affected wetlands, they're
going to have to pay separate fines into another fund to be used for
large-scale restoration of the coast, beyond specific places the
spill reached. This is a (bitter) windfall for conservationists; as
one put it -"This is a once in a lifetime opportunity" to
do something about Louisiana's land loss problem. BP money, at least
in Louisiana, will be funneled into the <a href="http://www.coastalmasterplan.louisiana.gov/">Master
Plan</a> the state's CPRA has developed. The Master Plan lays out
restoration principles and priorities (e.g. let nature do the work -
harness the Mississippi River to deliver sediments to open water to
build new land) and describes a suite of sites selected for
restoration. These sites were selected based on their cost
effectiveness, which in part has been a question of how many
ecosystem services restoration will bring - how much flood prevention
or how many alligators, for instance. The question here has is not so
much the cash value of these services; the authors of the Plan
explicitly note: "We didn't have the time this time around to
look at that." As the head of the CPRA noted, however, this kind
of analysis is <a href="http://thelensnola.org/2014/04/22/for-all-the-breast-beating-about-diversions-decision-to-build-them-has-yet-to-be-made/">in
the works</a> for the next version of the Master Plan, coming in
2017. At the heart of the matter is the development and deployment of
economic valuation techniques for evaluating public spending.
<a href="http://theadvocate.com/news/8916401-123/cost-benefit-a-factor-in-deciding">Economists
are hard at work</a> determining what kinds of restoration are most
worthwhile: how many acres will $X in sediment diversions bring in
over time compared to other methods of marsh creation? So far,
acreage - a fairly straightforward metric - has been the target,
which makes sense giving land loss is measured in acres, but expect
to see ecosystem services migrate into the accounting. The goal in
valuing the land building and protecting services provided by coastal
wetlands is to spend public money wisely in an era of austerity.
These metrics allow decision-makers to evaluate tradeoffs. Already in
the master plan, the increase in certain ecosystem services like
carbon sequestration were argued to outweigh and justify the decrease
in other services, like shrimp habitat. Again, these were not yet $
valued. This time around, it certainly won't be emergy used to derive
the value of these public goods. Instead, what we are seeing <a href="http://thelensnola.org/2014/04/02/coastal-restoration-financing-is-uncertain-but-state-has-ideas-for-more-money/">hints
at is a move toward marketizing services.</a> Instead of developing $
metrics to inform planning or to build new public institutions (via
bonding a la Costanza), some important Louisiana decision-makers are
turning to potential carbon and nutrient markets to help value (and
pay for) wetland benefits. There's no need to do contingent valuation
of a wetland function like carbon sequestration that is traded in
California's cap and trade market at $10 a ton - that's the value
right there.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Where
does nature's value come from? In no small part, from those working
to understand and protect Gulf Coast marshes. The practice of
assigning the environment a dollar value continues to evolve and does
so as practitioners – regulators, economists, scientists - engage
with these ecosystems, providing certain opportunities and obstacles.
Indeed, an ongoing question within the field is the role of
environmental science and the extent to which ecologists can provide
the kind of information about nature economists want and need to do
valuation. The complexity of ecological functions - their
nonlinearity, dynamsism, etc. - has long been acknowledged as a
stumbling block, from Westman's prescient 1977 </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Science</i></span></span><span style="color: black;">
<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/197/4307/960.citation">article</a>
to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment to even the most ostensibly
gung ho supporters of valuation, TEEB. These difficulties do not mean
that the champions of the valuation of nature feel defeated. Just
consider how Costanza felt in 1997, "….although ecosystem
valuation is certainly difficult and fraught with uncertainties, one
choice we do not have is whether or not to do it". Besides
environmental economics' struggle with its existential dependence on
externally produced knowledge, its practitioners struggle with
understanding their own conditions for knowing nature's value.
There's still much question about whether contingent valuation will
work. We've seen a few here: people don't always act rationally, and
they also reject the survey techniques researchers employ to come up
with their numbers. This is setting aside what is perhaps the
trickiest question, that of <a href="http://www.ecosystemvaluation.org/benefit_transfer.htm">benefits
transfer</a>, or the practice of taking the monetary values for
ecosystems in one part of the world and using them in a different
part of the world. After all, as one scholar <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11273-013-9283-9">put
it</a>, "An acre of coastal salt marsh seaward of New Orleans is
many times more valuable …than an acre of abandoned farm pasture in
Nebraska” and it's being able to say how much more valuable and how
locally specific to get that troubles many researchers. Finally, what
kind of policy angle environmental economists ought to take is still
open to debate (the riff between so-called environmental and
ecological economists itself is a part of that). Is nature open for
business and up for sale? Or is the goal simply better planning and
perhaps $ numbers aren't needed? You can expect those questions to be
asked if not resolved in any good paper today. Yet, as one group of
historians of the ecosystem services paradigm <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800913002954">notes</a>,
these uncertainties are </span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>not
</i></span></span><span style="color: black;">the
</span><span style="color: black;">growing
pains we might expect from an emerging research perspective. As is
clear when we look at the history of coastal marsh protection in the
Gulf Coast, nature's valuers have had at least 40 years experience to
figure things out. Instead, what lingering questions and simmering
debates reflect are genuine obstacles to a rightly controversial
practice.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">In
attempting to answer these questions and close these debates, how
economists, regulators, and scientists go about valuing nature will
evolve. This of course is happening globally. One only has to follow
the Natural Capital Project around the world, from Colombia to
British Colombia, to get a sense of the importance of these places to
how the vision of nature as capital is being articulated and
materialized. But Louisiana and the rest of the Gulf Coast will
undoubetedly continue to be a sort of lab for experimenting on the
policy, science, and economics behind the valuation of nature - the
place where many of the important conversations ongoing about the
future of conservation in the face of climate change are worked out.
As a senior adviser to America's Wetland Foundation </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/news/9350979-171/private-investment-may-be-another"><span style="color: #3333ff;">recently
put it</span></a></u></span></span><span style="color: black;">,
“We can test it better than anyone.”</span></span></div>
Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-14220286948664984032014-07-17T08:49:00.003-07:002014-10-16T10:12:06.939-07:00What's so natural about natural capital?<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378014000685">A recent study</a> - "Changes in the global value of ecosystem services" - has found that the value of the world's ecosystem services - the benefits nature provides to society, like the ability of wetlands to stem flooding - is somewhere in the neighborhood of $145 trillion. That is, without a doubt, a lot of money. It's in fact much more than the global economy as currently accounted for produces. In statistics like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) we count everything from the value of goods like cars to services like haircuts, and while we generally count the goods that nature provides, like timber and food, we've so far consigned the counting of nature's services to academic papers.<br />
<br />
An important chunk of the $145 trillion is the $12-47 billion Louisiana wetlands generate in lessening the impact of storm surges, providing habitat for commercial fish species, and sequestering carbon dioxide. Worldwide, wetlands - and in particular, coastal marshes - are the single most monetarily valuable ecosystem. However, in Louisiana, they are being lost at a rapid rate because of oil and natural gas development, sea level rise, and levees along the Mississippi River that prevent sediment from settling out in floodplain marshes and building new land. In <i><a href="http://elr.info/sites/default/files/batker.pdf">Gaining Ground</a></i>, a study outlining the value of Louisiana's wetlands (featuring Bob Costanza, lead author of the "Changes" paper) researchers found that restoration of wetlands in the Mississippi River Delta could increase this ecosystem's asset value to $62 billion. The report's authors write:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"natural systems tend to appreciate in value rather than depreciate and fall apart as built capital does....natural capital is self-maintaining and lasts for a long time; it is fundamentally different from built capital, which deprecates quickly and requires capital and maintenance costs."</blockquote>
Similarly, as <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F06%2F05%2Fscience%2Fearth%2Fputting-a-price-tag-on-natures-defenses.html&ei=77_BU7-rIYKkyAT4k4KoBA&usg=AFQjCNE0spngNa5FGUIIMw_ffU5_S1jrEw&sig2=M3CEo70oMwmYQ52EXd2HvQ">a write-up</a> on the "Changes" paper put it - in pivoting from a point about the cost of flood protection levees raised by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina - "And while it’s expensive to maintain man-made defenses, wetlands rebuild themselves."<br />
<br />
What we get from both viewpoints is the sense that nature, as natural capital, does all this unpaid work for us. A wetland is like a factory worker: it gets up in the morning to go to work soaking up carbon dioxide, coming home at night to rest and reproduce itself for another day. Even better, it's a worker that only gets better with age. Natural capital, it seems, is any good businessman's holy grail: it's an investment that is self-valorizing.<br />
<br />
But, really? Despite protest from area fishermen, any major restoration of the Mississippi River Delta wetlands is likely to feature diversions of sediment from the river through engineered breaches in levees, projects that are expected to cost up to several hundred million dollars each. The <a href="http://www.coastalmasterplan.louisiana.gov/">2012 Master Plan</a>, a document written by Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to organize the state of coastal science and direct funds towards specific restoration sites, acknowledges that any large-scale restoration of the region's wetlands won't work without using the river. Sediment diversions are intended to harness the power of the river to do work building wetlands, but harnessing is a far cry from self-maintenance. Restored wetlands simply won't exist without the upkeep and ongoing operation of diversion megaprojects - built capital to be sure. It's equally naive to assume that wetlands will maintain themselves without legal efforts to prevent further degradation. Such efforts would be directed at stemming climate change and minimizing if not eliminating the ongoing impact of the oil and gas industry from spills and subsidence.<br />
<br />
So is natural capital long-lasting, as the <i>Gaining Ground</i> authors suggest? With the right amount and kind of sediment input, wetlands do build themselves over time in relation to the sea level. Louisiana's Master Plan predicts diversion projects could provide decades of land-building. Even more forward-looking, scientists <a href="http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2014/04/mississippi_river_will_carry_e.html">have determined</a> that there is enough sand in the Mississippi River basin to build wetlands for at least <i>600</i> years. On the other hand, other projects are not so resilient. Some parishes in Louisiana are <a href="http://www.eenews.net/Greenwire/2012/01/30/1">creating new marshes</a> by dredging and piping up material from the bottom of the Gulf. But given current forecasts for irreversible sea level rise, these wetlands are expected to last only 20 years, perhaps functioning fully for only 5 years. Everyone knows it, but the short-term payoff from these massive engineering projects appears worth it.<br />
<br />
In short, natural capital is not so separate from other other kinds of capital, like built capital. As the authors of <i>Gaining Ground</i> acknowledge, the restoration projects proposed in the Master Plan do not amount to "a cut-the-river-loose scenario." What they do amount to is a set of hybrid infrastructures that blur the lines between what we typically think of as natural and social. And even when the Mississippi does get cut loose, or rather, cuts itself loose, it may work <i>against</i> capital. A couple of years ago, a crevasse <a href="http://thelensnola.org/2014/07/11/two-year-old-breach-in-mississippi-river-could-be-formally-named-mardi-gras-pass/">opened</a> up in a levee south of New Orleans, delivering freshwater and sediment to flow into nearby marsh ecosystems. It is the Mississippi's first distributary to form in several decades. This is about as close to "natural" capital as one gets: the river is autonomously rebuilding coastal wetlands (though to deem it natural, you'd have to overlook the fact that it's breaching at the spot of an old spillway). But in the process, the crevasse has flooded several roads the oil/gas industry needs to access wells. The industry would rather have the breach fixed, while environmentalists say this is the very kind of thing the Master Plan calls for, except that it didn't cost a dime to happen. As the director of CPRA <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://thelensnola.org/2013/03/27/natural-river-diversion-at-mardi-gras-pass-gains-support-from-political-commercial-interests/">reflected</a>, “If we can benefit the coast for ‘free,’ we would like to do that." That is the holy grail after all: a self-valorizing investment, or what Karl Marx <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch44.htm">called</a> "free gifts of nature to capital." But... “The challenge is making sure that we are making decisions with our eyes open." That means making sure natural capital works for the oil/gas industry. The question that has to be asked here is not how much natural capital is the so-called Mardi Gras Pass creating, but under what conditions do ecosystems become capital? What is the line between an ecosystem service and disservice and who decides?<br />
<br />
"Capital is a process not a thing," geographer David Harvey notes in his <a href="http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughts-pikettys-capital/">recent review</a> of Thomas Piketty's miraculous hit of a book, <i>Capital in the Twenty-First Century</i>. (To see how far the natural capital concept now reaches, just look at one of the last chapters of the book, where Piketty adopts the term. He essentially rehashes the Stern Review point that money invested now to fight climate change will pay off in the long run.) For Harvey, Piketty's asset-based conceptualization of capital - as inert and static pieces of stuff (cars) or discrete services (haircuts) plucked out of the world and made valuable - is inadequate. Capital is always in motion - it has to be, since for Harvey (and Marx) it is "a process of circulation in which money is used to make more money." Nothing can be capital unless it is being used productively.<br />
<br />
Nature, then, simply is not "natural capital". In <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/289/5478/395">an early and influential paper</a> on the value of ecosystem services, Gretchen Daily, alongside Nobel Prize-winning economists Kenneth Arrow among others, declared, "the world's ecosystems are capital assets. If properly managed, they yield a flow of vital services..." Similar sentiments are to be found throughout the green accounting realm. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), an EU-funded program promoting ecosystem services amongst decision-makers, wrote in their initial report on the first page in big bold lettering: "Maintaining stocks of natural capital allow the sustained provision of future flows of ecosystem services." But both Daily and TEEB get the formula backwards. Ecosystems are not capital with maintenance costs, much less self-maintaining capital, as the <i>Gaining Ground</i> report suggests. It is only after ecosystems are "properly managed" that they become something resembling capital, and then only if they work for capital. Marx already had <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch44.htm">hinted</a> at this: "Natural elements entering as agents into production, and which cost nothing, no matter what role they play in production, do not enter as components of capital." It is only when they are labored upon that " a new additional element enters into capital."<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 16px;"> </span>Realizing the potential $62 billion in asset value from Louisiana's wetlands does not mean harnessing some pre-existing, natural capital, but investing in infrastructure to <i>produce</i> nature <i>as </i>capital. It requires assemblages of what we usually consider separate social, or human, (engineered diversions, legal mandates) and natural (sediments, <i>Spartina </i>grasses) things to work. Our long-held distinctions between what counts as "natural" and what counts as "social" simply aren't helpful to understand the important work of ecosystems.Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-12898494311620855262014-02-11T19:29:00.001-08:002014-02-11T19:35:36.266-08:00Finding common ground in the Anthropocene<span style="font-family: inherit;">You won't get very far in the world of conservation today without hearing about how we're now in the Anthropocene: the epoch recognizing humanity as a geologic force with its fingerprint everywhere. For some, like The Nature Conservancy's Peter Kareiva, this represents a chance to rethink how to do conservation, focusing less on preserving an impossible wilderness apart from society and instead focusing on the valuation of ecosystem services. Others, like conservation biologist Michael Soulé, worry that we are forgetting to value nature for its own sake. There's been a rather unproductive back and forth focused on exactly this point since at least after Costanza et al. 1997, when Toman <a href="http://cmbc.ucsd.edu/content/1/docs/toman.pdf">wrote</a> that Costanza et al.'s calculation of the world's ecosystem services at about $33 trillion was "a serious underestimate of infinity." "And <span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">it goes on and on..." is how</span> Paul Voosen <a href="https://twitter.com/voooos/status/412741436120268801">reflected</a> on yet another partisan weighing in. There seem to be few moderates, but <span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think both sides have something wrong and right.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Below is an</span><i> </i>essay on the debate I originally wrote for Bill Cronon's American Environmental History seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 2013 [contact me for the full version with citations]. <span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; line-height: 18px; white-space: pre-wrap;">In many ways, today's debate reflects those between conservationists and preservationists in the US over the course of the 20th century. </span>A version of the paper was also recently presented at the <a href="http://che.nelson.wisc.edu/">Center for Culture, History, and Environment</a> graduate student symposium. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />---</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
There’s a growing struggle within the ranks of conservationists, one that will have profound implications for how we deal with some of today’s most pressing environmental issues. At the heart of the matter is a choice about what constitutes conservation’s guiding question: is it about the role humans play in nature, or is it what role nature plays for humans? I’ve found myself stuck in the middle of the ensuing debate, wondering what to make of it and how to move it forward. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
I first found myself in this conversation a couple of hot and sticky Junes ago at a conference called Ecosystem Services Markets: Making them Work. Ecosystem Services is a bit of jargon no one likes but everyone has gotten the hang of for naming what nature does for society: mitigate floods, provide clean water, and so on. The conference brought together nonprofit conservationists, federal agency staff, and VPs from corporations like Pepsi, Disney and Dow to figure out how to re-purpose corporate accounting ledgers to get conservation more money for saving mangroves and restoring prairies. I took in everything I could - I more or less transcribed every session I went to - all the while meditating on the irony of a group of nature-lovers sitting in air-conditioned luxury all day. Rest assured, there was a field trip, though you might call it a pilgrimage really. It was out to the chicken-coop-turned-weekend-get-a-way where Aldo Leopold sojourned every weekend from Madison to restore of bit of prairie habitat on a degraded piece of farm ground. It was here that Leopold first tested the principles of restoration ecology as an art and science, and it’s become a sort of sacred ground for conservationists.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Just up the road from the shack, we had stopped to observe a “constructed wetland” that a local conservation group had recently paid to put in. Their goal was to generate credits that would allow them to sell the ecological benefits of the wetland to interested buyers, in an ecosystem service market. The wetland was designed to take in excess runoff from a stream and filter out nutrients and chemicals before they made it too far down the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Glad to finally be outside, I was disappointed by it. It hadn’t filled up yet because of the unusually dry summer and so no wetland plants had yet colonize it. We stared at caked earth while we learned about the project. What made the disappointment sting was that this wetland was supposed to illustrate the benefits of everything we had been talking about all week: the ability of market incentives to generate investment in improving habitats.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Aldo Leopold at his shack north of Madison. Source: http://www.news.wisc.edu/story_images/4373/original/leo0537l__550px.jpg</span> </span></div>
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As a huge poster in the conference hotel lobby proudly proclaimed, the goal had been to “price the priceless.” Yet, in what was one of the two core tenets of his land ethic, Leopold himself had remarked, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” For conference-goers, treating land as a commodity had become, in fact, the very means of treating it with love and respect. The conservationists gathered in Madison held two ideas together at once: at Leopold’s shack, we celebrated his respect for the power of nature as something to which we belong, yet still apart from us. At the wetland just up the road, nature mattered only to the extent that it became a priced service. How do we understand these two, seemingly bipolar perspectives, and what do we do with them? Leopold’s call for us to belong to land as part of a community is appealing, while I remain uncertain about the prospect of commodifying nature. Environmental history is useful here, as it tells us how different perspectives on the ambit of conservation have evolved over time, and by paying close attention to untold and other sides of stories to see how conflicted conservation has been at times. People often see conservationists in stark terms, as “tree huggers” unwilling to cede ground to humans on any account. An environmental history approach can show conservationists have always been more complicated than that, and suggest a way out of the dilemma. In part that’s because environmental historians have also been active and influential participants in the conservation conversation.</span><br />
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The traditional reading of environmental politics in the US, as told by historians like Roderick Nash and Samuel Hays, starts at the battle of Hetch Hetchy. In the early 20th century, a national conflagration erupted over whether San Francisco should dam the valley in Yosemite National Park in order to provide the city with a long-term drinking water supply. Lines in the sand were drawn. On one side stood those who saw themselves as balancing the protection and enjoyment of nature with unavoidable future growth. Among such “conservationists” were Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot. On the other side stood preservationists like John Muir, who declared in no simple terms that the place was sacred – a temple - since it was free of the artifacts of civilization. The preservationists lost the day, but their organizing efforts established an important base for later campaigns.</span><br />
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Though the typical reading draws a straight line from Hetch Hetchy to the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964, others have rightfully complicated that story. The anti-dam base did grow into a concerted movement for wilderness protection, one led by the Wilderness Society that organized over decades to establish set asides for nature. But this was not, in fact, a repeat of Hetch Hetchy. As historian Paul Sutter has pointed out, the concern of the Wilderness Society was directed at increased tourism and recreation in new nature reserves rather than attempts to use such places for production. Nor was their view of wilderness founded in a sense that in these places one could find the sublime. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">John Muir in the Sierras in 1902. Source: http://www.americaslibrary.gov/assets/jb/recon/jb_recon_muir_1_e.jpg </span></div>
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The Wilderness Society played a pivotal role in the passing of the Wilderness Act, which established legislative procedure for reserving permanently areas “untrammeled by man”. It’s worth taking a second to pause and consider the definition of that word, because it’s regularly used by critics of wilderness who see its advocates blindly chasing an illusory pristine nature removed from the human footprint. Indeed, it sounds an awful lot like “walked upon.” The Oxford dictionary, on the other hand, defines it as: “not deprived of freedom of action or expression; not restricted or hampered.” For advocates, wilderness represented nature able to grow to its own ends, rather than spaces where nature was not tread upon by mankind. The distinction is subtle but important, and we only have to look at the case of ecological restoration to see why. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Leopold was a founding member of the Wilderness Society, and indeed, for him, wilderness was in large part a framework for learning from nature. On the prairie at his shack and at the University of Wisconsin’s arboretum, he was also one of the first to champion the cause of restoring ecosystems. Seeding the prairie and aiding it in its growth and functioning was undoubtedly an intervention in nature, yet it was one meant to give the big bluestem, compass plant, and associated fauna a freedom of expression. Restoration ecology, as a coherent unit of academic study and as a field of practice did not coalesce until the 1980s - well after Leopold’s time - and is still only gaining traction. Now and then, restorationists have split between a desire to get back to nature as it looked before settlement and restoration as means for “inventing” novel landscapes.</span><br />
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While Wisconsin’s William Jordan was busy assembling restoration ecology as we know it today, UC-Santa Cruz’s Michael Soulé set out to establish a related field, conservation biology. Blending scientific rigor and eco-advocacy, a coalition of academic researchers like Soulé and activists like EarthFirst!’s Dave Foreman lobbied for large wilderness areas to be established not as a way to preserve a sacred sublime, but to preserve biodiversity. Eschewing EarthFirst!’s strategy of highly visible political action, Foreman joined with Soulé to start the Wildlands Project, which they saw as a group that would more aggressively and directly campaign at a variety of levels of government for more and larger wilderness designations than the Wilderness Society.</span><br />
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The resurgence of preservationism came to a head in 1995. That year, the US Supreme Court ruled that the under the Endangered Species Act, to “harm” the habitat of threatened species like the northern spotted owl was to illegally “take” it. In a way, the ruling justified the Wildlands Project’s scientific and political argument that large spaces free of economically productive activity, like forestry, were necessary to protect biodiversity. But it also goaded foresters and others adopting the banner of “Wise Use” to claim that preservation was blind to or willfully ignorant of rural people’s concerns about jobs and economic growth. The ruling was a flashpoint for tensions between preservation and conservation. </span><br />
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The same year an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including environmental historians, stepped into the fray with their edited volume Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Meant to reach a wide audience, the volume provocatively directed its line of attack at wilderness proponents. Bill Cronon, for instance, wrote that “wilderness is no more ‘natural’ than nature is - it’s a reflection of our own longings, a profoundly human creation.” The argument drove at the heart of how advocates saw the wilderness concept as legitimate, while retaining a sense that humans have a responsibility to nature, one in the form of our own making. Richard White tackled the economic growth question head on by reflecting on the Wise Use bumper sticker slogna, “Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?” He showed how labor was just as much a relationship to the natural world as recreation, but his point was not to cede ground to Wise Use activists who claimed that their work gave them a privileged relation to nature. Instead, he noted that they had confused their “labor” with property rights - a specifically capitalist relation to nature. White made the case for a more inclusive conservation, without turning it over to the markets.</span><br />
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Uncommon Ground stirred a raft of critiques and counter-criticisms, but it wasn’t the only major intervention into such territory at the time. In 1997, several ecologists and economists launched another front against the kind of preservation advocated by the Wildlands Project. While the authors of Uncommon Ground deployed persuasive social theory as their tactic and many of them, like White, countered calls to see capitalism as a viable social relation to nature, monetary valuation was this group's policy Trojan Horse. The reframing of conservation’s object of concern to ecosystem services shared several arguments with Uncommon Ground: wilderness overlooks the nature that is close to home; it ignores the importance of achieving economic growth. Gretchen Daily, like Soulé a student of famous biologist Paul Ehrlich, edited 1997’s Nature’s Services. The effort was a first cut attempt to conceive of nature as composed of quantifiable and monetizable services that provide direct benefits to society, rather than existing for it’s own sake. The same year, Bob Costanza famously declared the dollar value of all of the world’s ecosystem services (ES) to be more or less $33 trillion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">The team of economists and ecologists who published Costanza et al. 1997, valuing the world's ecosystem services at roughly $33 trillion. Source: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/projects/2058 </span></div>
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These admittedly rough estimates were meant to appeal to CEOs and Senators alike, and as they got better, they did. Resistance to the project has grown as well. The use of an ES framework to prove to policy-makers the value of conservation has set up a debate rather reminiscent of Hetch Hetchy. It’s Soulé who plays the part of Muir; the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva, plays Pinchot. This time around, the struggle is not focused on one site or one project (though there are plenty of small skirmishes), but addresses head on the larger question of whether conservation and capitalism are joined at the hips, just good friends, or perhaps anathema to each other. For Kareiva, conservation set asides simply haven’t lived up to their promise, they harm the global poor, and, adopting Cronon’s critique, wilderness lacks a solid conceptual grounding. Instead, he proclaims the Anthropocene - the recognition of humans as a geologic force in nature with its fingerprint everywhere - as conservation’s gospel. Alongside this, he offers the solution of harnessing the same capital that has historically degraded environments in order to direct investment to protecting and enhancing environments: “Instead of scolding capitalism,” he and his co-authors write, “conservationists should partner with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature's benefits into their operations and cultures.” The ES framework has become what Kareiva calls the “new conservation,” and even “conservation science” as means to legitimize itself explicitly in contrast to conservation biology.</span><br />
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Soulé has responded directly to Kareiva and his colleagues. He notes that conservationists (reserving that moniker for himself and his allies) do understand that nature is everywhere, and have since Rachel Carson warned of the bodily dangers posed by DDT. Dubbing Kareiva et al. as “environmentalists,” he puts them in the camp of selling out (literally):</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Most human beings and many environmentalists never doubt that biological diversity and every every thing every where is meant for human consumption, exploitation or recreation. Theirs is a world of resources and hoped for wealth. It is Old Testament view. In stark contrast, the goal of conservationism is other-centric. It stresses the intrinsic (for itself) value of non-human biological beings and aims to protect earth’s five million or so kinds of surviving creatures for their own sake.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Which bring us back to 2011 and the ecosystem services markets conference in Madison, where “pricing the priceless” was about determining the value of non-human biological beings for our own sake. In spite of Soulé’s impassioned argument, it’s clear that Kareiva currently has the edge, as The Nature Conservancy and other leading international conservation non profits work the world over with companies like Dow to value ecosystems and the services they provide. </span><br />
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I am not, however, telling the story of the final triumph of the Anthropocene after its flag-bearers have vanquished the forces of preservation. We have to see history as the art of people muddling through, and to document it, making things seem as messy as they truly are and as they truly were, rather than retreating to the conceit that the story has one final outcome, writing off the contradictions. As we’ve seen here, conservation is complicated; so too are conservationists. Today, even Kareiva’s project and the ecosystem services framework are not one in the same: he and his colleagues, for instance, critique the main international ES project to date, the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. The ecologists working in ES still cherish many of the landscape ecology principles conservation biologists promoted. Historically, there’s been important rifts in the conservation community when it comes to knowing what nature is and what’s important about it: between wilderness as the sublime and nature as a source of use values to be conserved for future generations; wilderness as a temple, wilderness as enjoyment, and wilderness as a lab; between restoration and preservation; species biodiversity and recreation; human and eco-centric impulses. These valences have split not only figureheads like Pinchot and Muir, Kareiva and Soulé, but are often simultaneously embodied in a single person, perhaps an average conference attendee rather than a prominent advocate. Conservationists today muddle through conflicting mandates and mixed messages. It’s no surprise we see them at once praising Leopold for how he wanted to create a new, non-commodified relation with nature on its own terms, while at the same time seeking to “price the priceless” and make ecosystem services markets work. </span><br />
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We should embrace these contradictions rather than walk away from them. The general thrust of the Anthropocene project is noble: to take responsibility for natures we as a society have made. Its proponents rightfully build off of critiques of wilderness as exclusionary and illusory. But as a way of guiding our actions today, the Anthropocene is not without its own flaws. When plugged into arguments for capitalizing ecosystem services, it raises a number of red-flags, also about exclusion and who stands to benefit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">What’s needed is a common ground: a perspective that envisions nature as “untrammeled,” but everywhere rather than reserved far away, and not subject to the whims of market forces to secure its value. The standoff between conservation biology and conservation science doesn’t have to be just a repeat of conservation vs. preservation, of nature for human values vs. nature for nature’s sake. I have a hunch of where to find such space. It would be a way of talking about and doing conservation that holds in tension the project of recognizing the world is more-than-us with the realization that today’s human interventions in nature are unparalleled to anything in history. What’s needed is a posthuman Anthropocene.</span>Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-70090758137629345762014-01-17T10:45:00.000-08:002014-01-17T11:28:09.500-08:00Much ado about the causes of wetland loss in Louisiana<div>
You might remember that last summer, the levee board responsible for protecting much of metro New Orleans <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-climate-adaptation-lawsuit-in.html">filed a landmark lawsuit</a> against some 90 oil and gas companies. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Production Authority - East (SLFPAE), formed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, claimed that the canals these companies carved across coastal wetlands to set up drilling operations were significant drivers of wetland loss in the area historically, losses which could have mitigated storm surges. Pointing to industry, government, and academic reports alike they claim that the companies have not fulfilled their responsibility to fill in the canals and restore exploration and drilling sites. </div>
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Wednesday, in <a href="http://www.slfpae.com/presentations/2014%2001%2016%20-%20Oil%20&%20Gas%20Litigation%20-%20Gladstone%20Jones.pdf">a must-view PowerPoint presentation</a> to the state's Coastal Planning and Restoration Authority (CPRA), SLFPAE <a href="http://theadvocate.com/home/8091849-125/coastal-authority-levee-board-attorneys">made a pretty compelling defense of their case</a>. What they did was zoom in on one particular case - the Delacroix area in St. Bernard parish - where canals have led to saltwater intrusion, erosion, and ultimately the conversion of marsh and swamp land into open water. I've gathered the slide by slide time series they presented into a handy GIF to illustrate their argument:</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Wetland loss between 1956 and 2008 in the Delacroix, LA area. Canals that were dredged in order to move oil equipment are drawn in red arrows. Source: SLFPAE presentation.</span></div>
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You can see the same result when we focus in on just the past fifteen years With Google Earth imagery, I created another GIF that spans every other year or so from 1998 to the present.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Wetland loss between 1998 and the present in Delacroix. Source: Google Earth.</span></div>
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CPRA's chairman, Garrett Graves, however, is not so convinced by SLFPAE's argument. He thinks that going after the hydrocarbon industry is misguided. Instead, CPRA<a href="http://www.louisianaweekly.com/two-cpra-lawsuits-add-to-recent-coastal-litigation/"> intends to sue</a> the Army Corps of Engineers to get that agency to own up to the role that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River_%E2%80%93_Gulf_Outlet_Canal">MRGO</a>) shipping channel played in altering hydrological regimes in the wetland complex east of New Orleans and in shuttling Katrina's storm surge straight into the city. The meeting yesterday was just the most recent and most visible skirmish in a <a href="http://theadvocate.com/news/6844397-123/fireworks-continue-over-lawsuit-against">war of words</a> between CPRA and SLFPAE over whether the SLFPAE lawsuit is legitimate and whether CPRA's approach would be more effective.</div>
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At first glance, it seems like SLFPAE and CPRA's disagreement is mainly over what they see as the causes of wetland loss in the area. SLFPAE points at oil/gas companies and their extensive network of canals; CPRA the corps and MRGO. But this is not just a debate about who's to blame. As SLFPAE's lawyers pointed out in their presentation, Graves himself has repeatedly acknowledged the part played by the hydrocarbon industry's canals. Everyone agrees, to a significant extent, that the problem has multiple drivers, whether they're as prominent as MRGO or as ubiquitous as oil/gas canals. The two institutions primarily disagree about what's the most politically and economically beneficial line of attack to solve the problem. SLFPAE says getting oil money can more than pay the bills on the state's ambitious $50 billion dollar master plan for coastal restoration; Graves seems to think that would result in less money going to communities for restoration. Obviously, the choice of who to blame has meaningful consequences for <i>what</i> gets fixed, but it'd be a mistake to think that one side doesn't get the ecological reasoning of the other.</div>
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Speaking of who to blame, take another look at the second GIF. If you didn't already notice it, much of the conversion of the Delacroix wetlands into open water happens between 2004 and 2005 (the pic that year was taken in October). Of course, as the first GIF demonstarted, wetlands loss had been occurring there for decades by then. But Katrina appears to have been the coup de grace. <a href="http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2010/finalwebsite/katrina/damage/damage-wetlands.html">Research has shown</a> how hurricanes and other weather events lead to wetland loss: the wetlands in Louisiana east of the Mississippi River <a href="http://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/TheAftermathofKatrina/NewOrleansandtheWetlandsofSouthernLouisiana.aspx">lost up to 25% of their land area after Katrina</a>. The presence of canals undoubtedly exacerbated Katrina's effect here, but the storm itself nevertheless has had a singular and lasting effect on the landscape. </div>
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The easy thing to do is wonder whether all the money the state plans to spend to rebuild barrier islands and wetlands will just be washed away by the very storms they are meant to mitigate. The tougher and more important question to ask is whether decision-makers and conservationists realize this and are prepared to engage in a continual investment to redesign a landscape shaped by climate change.</div>
Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-41848955361369834882013-12-31T13:42:00.000-08:002013-12-31T13:42:18.910-08:00Ecosystem services: some important stories from 2013I've assembled a non-exhaustive, non-representative sample of stories in the ecosystem services world (broadly defined) from this year that promise to be important in 2014. Here they are - what are yours?<br />
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2013 was a year chock full of hotspots of ecosystem services projects and controversy - like the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24899708">debates in the UK over the country's new habitat mitigation market</a> - but among them, Louisiana stands out. Dubbed "<a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=less-is-more-when-restoring-wetlands">the Himalayas of ecosystem services</a>," there's been more than enough to report on there. There's the very beginnings of <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-look-at-restore-act-implementation.html">RESTORE Act implementation</a>, for starters. The Act will take all the cash BP gets fined in its civil trial and put it towards comprehensive wetland restoration and sediment diversion projects across the Gulf. It's a windfall for the region, and state agencies and conservationists there want to spend the money wisely, knowing what they get for their investment. They've written <a href="http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/08/gulf_restoration_council_appro.html">a raft of plans</a> on how to proceed, and ES feature prominently as the objects of concern and the measures ($ and otherwise) of success. We'll see more projects coming online in 2014 and begin to see their effectiveness.<br />
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Speaking of BP's ongoing civil trial, there've been <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-climate-adaptation-lawsuit-in.html">lawsuits left and right</a> in Louisiana this year that revolve around what's the best way to do coastal restoration and who's to blame for the mess of wetland loss. As arguments came to their final stage in BP's ongoing civil trial, the southeastern Louisiana levee board that was created after Katrina to deal with systemic wetland loss in the area drew on some arcane French-era law on levees to <a href="http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059986502">launch a multi-billion dollar lawsuit</a> against oil/gas companies for the part their canals have played in destroying wetlands. That drew the outrage of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, <a href="http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/12/coastal_authority_authorizes_t.html">who says, no</a>, the Army Corps of Engineers and their levees on the Mississippi are to blame. Gov. Jindal had John Barry - the levee board member who advocated for the lawsuit - sacked while CPRA went ahead with its own lawsuit against the corps. The different lawsuits are not just indicative of differing opinions of who's to blame - the corps or the resource extraction industry - but of <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=less-is-more-when-restoring-wetlands">what's the best way to do restoration</a>: fill in old oil/gas canals, or breach levees to divert sediment to form new land?<br />
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If billion dollar plans and lawsuits weren't enough, New Orleans <a href="http://wwno.org/post/new-orleans-picked-rockefeller-foundation-list-resilient-cities">was named one of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 resilient cities</a>. NOLA will get a "Chief Resilience Officer" funded by Rockefeller and the city will also be the test site for some new software made by the same company that makes data mining tools for the CIA that will help the new CRO figure out what investments in resilience will be most likely to payoff.<br />
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In fact, this year we learned that about <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041613000260">half of all federal spending that could be defined as related to ES is on tools for mapping, monitoring, and modelling ES</a>. In the Gulf (and for several other places around the world), The Nature Conservancy and partners <a href="http://coastalresilience.org/">have put together</a> a slick interactive tool that lets users visualize different investment options for restoration. ES monitoring is moving to automation at the same time that folks are figuring out how to build new maps and models. The Forest Service runs several experimental "<a href="http://smartforest.sr.unh.edu/demo.shtml">smart forests</a>" that collect lots of data on many different environmental indicators, and they (and many other resource agencies) are also (<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/05/forest-service-drones_n_4377977.html">infamously</a>) exploring the use of drone technology to manage forest fires. There's <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/12/time-to-chat-mapping-regulatory.html">a growing number of tools for measuring and managing ES</a>, and <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/07/optimal-natures.html">these tools have become fundamental to the ES paradigm</a> (see a great special issue on them in the new journal <i>Ecosystem Services</i> <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22120416/4">here</a>). Watch for new efforts at big data analysis and ES in the coming year.<br />
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2013 saw yet more institutions organizing business and government around seeing environmental degradation as a matter of nature's benefits not having an economic value. That's not to say these new fora and panels actually did anything about the very issues on which they pontificated. I'm thinking here about November's first <a href="http://www.naturalcapitalforum.com/">World Forum on Natural Capital</a>, which was essentially more a feel-good pep talk for corporate leaders and less a hashing out of actionable tasks. <a href="http://naturenotforsale.org/">It didn't go uncontested</a> and in 2014 we should expect to see the same sort of opposition that we've see for carbon as business leaders aim to price any and all other ES. In December, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services <a href="http://www.ipbes.net/">convened in Turkey</a> to finalize their first work plan. It's been years in the making and we'll see in 2014 how it starts to get implemented.<br />
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The story that most fell under the radar this year was the White House's <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/11/01/fact-sheet-executive-order-climate-preparedness">executive order on climate change adaptation and resilience</a>. This year, about 30 federal agencies developed their first-ever set of plans for how they intend to respond to climate change in their operations and outreach. The EO goes a step further and calls on all agencies to revamp their programs to make it easier to fund projects that are meant to support resilience, for agencies like Interior to manage their lands for resilience, for agencies to develop data and tools for recognizing resilience, and for agencies to plan for climate change risk. All these have the potential to be driving significant work in the coming year and beyond.<br />
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The story that wasn't was the US Supreme Court's <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/06/details-koontz-v-st-johns-river-water-management-district/">ruling</a> that <a href="http://wetlandia.blogspot.com/2013/06/koontz-redux.html">appears</a> to constrain regulators' flexibility in determining appropriate compensation for wetland and stream impacts under the Clean Water Act. It's not yet clear whether it'll actually turn out to be problematic. Meanwhile, EPA and ACOE are finally getting around to clarifying what wetlands and streams are within their ambit, a move that environmentalists have long fought for in the legislative sphere. As the <a href="http://water.epa.gov/lawsregs/guidance/wetlands/CWAwaters.cfm">draft guidance</a> currently stands, it could bring in millions of dollars more in compensation work yearly because it expands what counts as a water of the US.<br />
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The single best piece out there this year on ES was Paul Voosen's<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Is-Conservation-For-/142853/"> history of ES</a> as told through Gretchen Daily, Peter Kareiva, and Michael Soule. He does a brillant job showing how even if it looks like it from 30,000 feet not every conservationist is on board with the project of valuing nature, and he ties this in with an on the ground look at ES "modelling sausage." If you haven't read it yet, go do it now. The runner-up is SciAm's recent piece <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=less-is-more-when-restoring-wetlands">characterizing the paradigms and debates in wetland restoration today</a>, with a major focus on differing opinions on how to do work in the Gulf.<br />
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So what did I miss?Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-44236166306307752772013-12-17T11:20:00.003-08:002013-12-17T11:22:43.085-08:00Time to CHAT? Mapping "Regulatory Resistance" in the West<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Mining companies like to say, 'The gold is where the gold is, that's where we need to go,'" said Chet Van Dellen, GIS coordinator for Nevada's Department of Wildlife. "We like to say the animals are where the animals are." <a href="http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2022455189_apxwesterngovernorswildlifehabitat.html">New high-tech maps detail wildlife habitat in West</a>, Scott Sonner, 12/13/13</blockquote>
Late last week a <a href="http://www.westgov.org/initiatives/wildlife/380-chat">coalition of western governors</a> released a new tool meant to help gold miners, transportation designers, energy companies - just about anybody with a natural resource impact - to plan development projects. CHAT, the Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool, going to be one big map for the West, and although it's not entirely filled out yet, the idea is to show those gold miners, hey, here's where our important habitats are. It pays to be clear: the maps are not, as the AP's headline suggests, simply mapping wildlife habitat in greater detail. The tool's resolution is somewhat impressive - down to the square mile - but what it's really doing is visualizing the spaces where project managers can expect to run into problems getting their permits. Some habitats will not be as crucial or as much of a priority as others. The difference may be subtle, but on it turns the role mapping plays in setting the public agenda in environmental governance today.<br />
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Here's how CHAT works. Each state has gathered a bunch of data and assigned weights to different kinds of habitats, on a scale from 1-6 (most to least important). The weights are based on information like the condition of habitat as well as economic significance. Each state has its own process, and very often, it's got its very own personal CHAT tool. You should expect no less from the West, and this brand of formal coordination, was likely what got every single western state on board. What CHAT isn't is a project to get all states on board to a similar standard for evaluating habitat significance. It's just meant to project (in the mapping sense) the standards each one already has. Take a look at some of the screenshots of the map if you haven't already, because you can see differences in regulatory regimes on the map.<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c4NtvXswrR0/UrChjgJJ6DI/AAAAAAAAEbM/6ZBK6Fjup58/s1600/52aa820c250be.preview-620.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-c4NtvXswrR0/UrChjgJJ6DI/AAAAAAAAEbM/6ZBK6Fjup58/s1600/52aa820c250be.preview-620.jpg" height="287" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: normal;">A CHAT map. From: <a href="http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/the-big-picture-western-governors-unveiling-high-tech-satellite-wildlife/article_7b95cf0e-496e-51df-b324-2a5f929a2232.html">http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/the-big-picture-western-governors-unveiling-high-tech-satellite-wildlife/article_7b95cf0e-496e-51df-b324-2a5f929a2232.html</a></span></h2>
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Where you'd expect some important habitats to cross-cut state boundaries, like in Yellowstone, we see that they cut off at Montana, either because the state hasn't gotten around to doing it's categorization yet or because that habitat simply isn't as important to Montana as it is to Wyoming. CHAT is meant to show all western states so that if you're a pipeliner you can see what sort of regulatory resistance you're going to run into across your entire project. Or if you're a gold miner, you can easily see whether it'll be easier to do a project in Utah or Arizona.<br />
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It may have been five years in the making, but it's roots go back way further. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to start at the Articles of Confederation to get a sense of what kind of coordination this represents: <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00045608.2013.754686">federalism</a>. Not only does each state gets to develop and share its own particular habitat standards, the map is a way for states to show federal authorities that, hey, we've got everything under control here, <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2012/07/lucky-lizards-texas-conservation-plan.html">much as they are doing with candidate species rulings</a>. More concretely, though, we only have to go back to the mid 90s to understand why we have CHAT now. Federal listing of endangered species like<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbitt_v._Sweet_Home_Chapter_of_Communities_for_a_Great_Oregon"> the northern spotted owl </a>generated what boil down to two calls, two sides of the same coin really: state-led environmental policy, and economics-sensitive environmental policy. It'd be no understatement to say that most environmental politics in the West for the past 20 years has been an outgrowth, good or bad, to the issues raised at that time. Utah's and Oregon's governors, on separate sides of the aisle, have developed a set of principles they dubbed, "<a href="http://leavitt.li.suu.edu/leavitt/?p=108">Enlibra</a>" that they've promoted in the WGA. Enlibra is a new regulatory regime whose ambit is reconciling economic growth and environmental protection, and we've gotten ecosystem services markets and community forestry alike, to name a few examples, out of it. As a prioritization tool rather than a data display tool, CHAT is straight out of the Enlibra playbook.</div>
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But here's what it all comes back to: I can't help but feeling that CHAT is like showing your opponent your hand in a game of cards. Of course, it's not like the Nevada Department of Wildlife or some other agency couldn't say, "psych!" and go back on their promise of little regulatory resistance: the map isn't immutable. That also means there's no reason they couldn't go back on their promise of <i>heavy</i> regulatory resistance. The map is a curious legal entity. There's no mandate for all western states to make it: it doesn't have to exist or be used. But it sort of justifies its own existence. All I mean is that by putting the map - described as a "pro-development tool" by the Nevada Department of Wildlife - out there into the world, it's going to be hard to take it back. Developers, regulators, and <a href="http://www.fws.gov/Endangered/improving_ESA/listing_workplan.html">even the Center for Biological Diversity like it</a>, and that gives it a ton of legitimacy that goes beyond its ambiguous legal status. </div>
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All the cards are on the table now in the West. It's not clear yet whether that's a good thing. It'll probably make regulators' lives easier, for one. There's also certainly a power in being the one to set the terms of engagement. Either way, maps like CHAT are going to play an important role in the making of the relationship between states, nature, and capital in the near term. Just take a look at the <a href="http://maps.coastalresilience.org/network/">interactive maps</a> the Coastal Resilience Network has set up that allows users to choose how important different economic <i>and </i>ecological variables are to determining great places to do restoration. It's not a regulatory map (yet), but you can imagine some of the opportunities that it would afford regulators. It'd make it easier for them to say, for instance, hey, we made the map based on how <i>users </i>(citizens?), not us, weighted restoration priorities. It's not our fault...Stay tuned for more.</div>
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Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-9218831254029354702013-10-08T16:38:00.001-07:002013-10-08T16:45:07.757-07:00Scaling up? Difficulties in the prioritization, selection, and evaluation of restoration sites for Oregon's ecosystem services marketI gave a talk today at the World Conference on Ecological Restoration here in Madison, WI. It's a take on how restoration sites in the Oregon wetland mitigation market are planned for, chosen, and evaluated, and ends with a discussion of what the case may suggest for other markets. It's something I've addressed in other ways, to other audiences, <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/07/optimal-natures.html">here</a>, <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/03/codenature.html">here</a> and <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/04/measuring-and-marketing-ecosystem.html">here</a>. Oh, and <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/02/teeb-and-spatially-explicit-ecosystem.html">here</a> and <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2013-01-02T10:33:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=7&by-date=false">here</a>, too! My argument in the talk is that efforts to concentrate on watershed needs and processes may not be so easily implemented when it comes to mitigation markets, though that's likely to differ from region to region. Below you can find the slides and text.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/26995810" style="border-width: 1px 1px 0; border: 1px solid #CCC; margin-bottom: 5px;" width="427"> </iframe> <br />
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<strong> <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/ericnost/nost-ser2013-scalingup" target="_blank" title="Scaling up? SER 2013 presentation - Eric Nost">Scaling up? SER 2013 presentation - Eric Nost</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ericnost" target="_blank">ericnost</a></strong> <br />
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Thanks for coming. I’ll be sharing just a slice of some recent research which is part of a larger NSF-funded project on stream mitigation banking here in the US.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The message I hope yall can take home today is this: efforts to concentrate on watershed needs and processes in ensuring greater ecological returns from restoration may not be so easily implemented when it comes to mitigation markets. Outcomes are likely to differ from region to region, however. PES promoters regularly call for spatially-explicit approaches to restoration, but on the ground their efforts run into resistance from the entrepreneurs at the heart of these markets. Their concerns are both economic and ecological.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ll make the argument by taking us through how restoration sites in the Oregon market are planned for, chosen, and evaluated, ending with a discussion of what the case may suggest for other markets.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We’ll start here. Welcome to the HML restoration site in exurban PDX.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s one site in a regional market for aquatic ecosystem services, providing several. The wetland you see stores and delays water, for instance, mitigating flood impacts for downstream homes. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The stream, OTOH, provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And so on January 25, 2012, the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) authorized the sale of mitigation credits representing this salmon habitat to the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation Department (THPRD). Now, it’s absolutely worth taking just a second to make sure we’re on the same page about how mitigation markets work. In US markets for wetland and stream ecosystems, federal environmental regulatory agencies – ACOE, EPA, in conjunction with state agencies like DSL - permit developers to compensate for unavoidable resource degradation by paying entrepreneurs (or, “mitigation bankers”) who speculatively restore ecosystems. At HML, DSL is the banker, but usually it is private industry.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">DSL did not sell the Half Mile Lane (HML) property itself to THPRD. Instead, it sold credits - measures of both the quality and quantity of habitat created after the agency replaced a culvert and performed other restoration there. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">THPRD wanted these credits so it could tell regulators that it had adequately compensated for a trail bridge it is building that will degrade habitat elsewhere in the watershed. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The idea is to ensure some kind/degree of equivalence between resource impact and resource restored, in order to accomplish a no net loss of function and acreage. This is the art and science of assessment. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">HML is operated by DSL, but it is a testing grounds for the WP, TNC and other cons developing what they see as more rigorous assessment methods and protocols for Oregon’s market and beyond. HML embodies 3 big moves in market-based environmental governance. While it’d be nice to go through all of them, given the growing number of calls for watershed approaches to how sites are chosen and evaluated - here at the conference, for instance - I want to focus on this last point. We can chat later about any of them.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Indeed, mapping and modelling landscape interactions at existing and possible restoration sites is increasingly recognized as an important component of site evaluation. The idea is that a site like HML’s ES are spatially dependent, or contextual - relative to what’s going on up and down the watershed. Think of it like this: if you restore a wetland in the middle of nowhere and no one’s around to benefit from how it retains flood waters, does it provide an ES? For many, the answer is no.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The international think-tank for ecosystem services accounting, TEEB, for instance, note that the specific provision of services depends on the site. The work of the wetland at HML to store and delay water matters because there are homes in the 100 year floodplain downstream that benefit.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cons bio and head of NCP, Gretchen Daily concurs. She calls for focusing on the right places in the landscape that leverage high ecological returns on investments.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">HML’s position, for instance, allows it to slow down and cycle the increased runoff from logging, quarrying operations.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Such calls from conservationists have in fact made it into policy. In 2008, ACOE and EPA put out a new rulemaking formalizing many aspects of the mitigation market nationally. The rule called for states and regions to implement </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">strategic</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> approaches to restoration siting, rather than sites being chosen opportunistically, in reference to cost or availability or interest..</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And to bring it back to DSL, the value of a wetland means its opportunity to provide an ecological function/service based on where it is.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So not only is landscape ecological assessment and prioritization on the minds of conservationists and of official interest to the feds, it’s central to DSL, and in the rules in OR. But it’s one thing to be on the books and another to be in force on the ground. The question is: how does restoration siting actually play out in OR?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There are three moments to it, but they are moments that put the interests of regs and cons against those of private entrepreneurs. In the short-term, at least, entrepreneurs’ work is made difficult in 3 ways by regs and cons’ new metrics and approaches. In the rest of this talk I’ll walk us through these 3 moments and 3 difficulties to siting.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the first moment, ecologically-trained consultants to bankers work in the office with several online mapping utilities to gage how ecological processes occur across the landscape and affect the site where bankers have chosen to do restoration. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Here’s one of the key mapping utilities consultants use, called Oregon Explorer. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the HML. Consultants have to answer questions about landscape context by using OE to, for instance, draw a 2 mile radius circle around the site to see how many other similar habitats the site is connected to in the area, or what sources of ecological stress are nearby, like the quarry. The key point here is that the assessment of a banker’s site is relational to the site’s surroundings – but these are things which the banker has no or little control over.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Whatever their score, bankers then have to take their numbers to the agencies and staff judge the offsite stressors and risks consultants find in their assessment, approving, modifying, or denying an entrepreneur’s choice of where to do restoration. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Agencies also categorize wetlands. Some </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">kinds</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of wetlands in the landscape mosaic are more market-worthy than others. For instance, DSL has written farmed floodplain wetland sites off the map in a recent rule. Based on a series of reports on long-term success and failure, DSL doesn’t think they restore a lot of the storm water retention services that the wetlands in urban areas - where the majority of impacts are - provide. They didn’t meet watershed needs. In the rule, a farmed wetland is seen as not hydrologically degraded and so restoring it wouldn’t bring back hydrological functions. Bankers disagree on ecological grounds: these kinds of wetlands have been tilled, tiled, and plowed. They think those are precisely the sites that need to be restored in the landscape. </span></div>
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</div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, when bankers finally do get their bank approved, they get credits to sell. What non-profit conservationists want to see happen in the market is that when a banker brings a site to the market, the amount of credits they can sell would depend in large part on the location of their project. </span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are “priority areas” - habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and collated by TNC. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The idea is that if they were doing restoration in a priority area bankers would get the full amount of credits they normally would and receive less if they were not in a priority area. But potentially restorable properties in priority areas are on average slightly more expensive than elsewhere, and this could cut into bankers’ profits. Perhaps more crucially, it drastically cuts into their potential range of sites to choose from, when finding a site tends to be more luck than anything anyway. And bankers also wonder how priority areas were chosen, often noting that their sites have plenty to offer as important.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The point is that this sort of watershed plan, something called for in the 2008 federal rule, makes some places obviously more valuable than others to do restoration, and that’s a big shift. It may make the market more like any other traditional market, but now working outside a priority may not earn bankers as many credits as it would have. To be clear, this isn’t yet implemented, but it’s very much on the table because of the federal rule.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So we can start wrapping up. We can pull out 3 points of difficulty in the market:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1) The priorities aren’t necessarily what bankers see as priorities, and even the idea of prioritizing is limiting, at least right now, in comparison with current practice.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2 The categorization of wetlands in the landscape isn’t how bankers would address watershed needs..</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">3)They’re asked to account for offsite processes they have little control over</span></div>
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</div>
<hr />
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because of all this, bankers are hesitant about starting new projects. No private entrepreneur has done a project with the new landscape focused metrics and rules yet. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But this isn’t simply because bankers don’t get the gospel of landscape ecology. Bankers’ considerations are both economic and ecological - it’s sometimes bad for business, sometimes not what they see as the right ecological priority. So how have regs and cons been able to put forth such a strong vision of their own in the first place? Markets around the country vary and a lot of discretion about which watershed plans to choose and metrics to use is left to regional, district, or state staff. In a place like OR, with strong institutional momentum behind planning/zoning, regulators are more willing to make and point at maps and say, do resto here. With better data collection and availability, they’re also just more able to. Regs and cons’ ability to come out with a strong plan very much reflects the Oregon context..</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The conclusion to takeaway is that in spite of calls from TEEB, Gretchen Daily, and others, efforts on the ground to improve the assessment and consideration of watershed/landscape needs in restoration run into resistance when implemented in restoration markets. The causes stem from both differing economic and ecological viewpoints, but this resistance will differ from place to place. What’s implied is that in some places, there may be other approaches to addressing watershed needs within a compensatory mitigation framework that are more effective than relying on private entrepreneurs, who have economic and ecological hesitations. We don’t have to look any further than HML - DSL’s own bank - for an example, and similar approaches exist nationally. But that’s going to have to be the topic of another talk.</span></div>
<span id="docs-internal-guid-55fd02ac-9a6c-75e0-2240-327bfb472a54"><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></span></div>
<br />Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-23803521200127640922013-09-04T09:52:00.000-07:002013-09-04T09:52:46.778-07:00A look at RESTORE Act implementationWhat would you do if you had about a billion dollars for ecological restoration?<br />
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That's exactly what the <a href="http://www.restorethegulf.gov/">Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council</a> (or, Council) is trying to figure out. That's no easy task given that the Council is a powerhouse, high-level government entity composed of the five Gulf Coast governors and six executive branch Cabinet members (think secretaries of Agriculture, Interior, Homeland Security, Commerce, EPA administrator, etc.)The Council came into being when President Obama signed the RESTORE Act last year. That Act put 80% of the Clean Water Act fines BP and Transocean are going to pay for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill into the hands of the Council. It's the largest pot of money for restoration in the US ever.<br />
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Question is, how do you even go about spending that much money in a time when any sort of surplus in government hands seems like the work of a divine hand, and so usually gets cannibalized in the ritual sacrifices that follow? [Update: the sequester is already <a href="http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/08/sequester_hits_restore_act_fun.html">taking a 5% toll</a> on RESTORE Act funds] Well, <i>this</i> Council has a <i>comprehensive plan</i>. More accurately, as of late last week the Council has put out their <a href="http://www.restorethegulf.gov/sites/default/files/Gulf%20Restoration%20Council%20Draft%20Initial%20Comprehensive%20Plan%205.23.15.pdf">initial comprehensive plan</a> that describes the principles for how it will distribute money to various Gulf Coast restoration projects and programs. I had the chance to read it; here are my initial reactions: <br />
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1. "The decisions made pursuant to the Plan will be based on the best available science, and this Plan will evolve over time to incorporate new science, information, and changing conditions. The Council will coordinate with the scientific community to improve decision-making." (5)It's a living, breathing document. It's meant to change over time, as funding levels and priorities change, but also with new science. Whether scientists can tell them what they want or need to hear, is of course another question.<br />
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2. No one actually knows how much money there is, since so much of it is tied to pending litigation. The number could go up past 10 billion when BP pays up.<br />
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3. The plan doesn't actually spell out how the Council will fund anything, nor what it would most like to fund. A funding strategy and priorities list come later.<br />
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4. "Storm risk, land loss, depletion of natural resources, compromised water quality and quantity, and sea-level rise are imperiling coastal communities’ natural defenses and ability to respond to natural and man-made disruptions." (4) It's clear that the Council sees ecosystem health as fundamental to community health, though no necessarily vice versa, and that this means a weaker ability to adapt to future climate and other disasters. <br />
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5. Scientists do seem to have gotten across the point that restoring species alone, on postage-stamp size sites is not the best approach to restoration. "The Council recognizes that upland, estuarine, and marine habitats are intrinsically connected, and will promote ecosystem-based and landscape-scale restoration without regard to geographic location within the Gulf Coast region." The planners apparently see themselves as immune to geographic bias and politics, and there's some good landscape ecology here.<br />
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6. It only comes up once, but it's unclear what the role of the private sector is here. However, much ado is made about coordinating with other efforts, in general: "The Council will encourage partnerships and welcome additional public and private financial and technical support to maximize outcomes and impacts. Such partnerships will add value through integration of public and private sector skills, knowledge, and expertise" (7) There are a <a href="http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/dynamic/article.page.php?page_id=9870§ion=news_articles&eod=1">growing number of voluntary restoration projects</a> in the works, not to mention <a href="http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/dynamic/article.page.php?page_id=9870§ion=news_articles&eod=1">talk of linking up with California's cap and trade scheme</a> for wetland blue carbon credits, and how to coordinate these market sector activities with a federal plan will be worth watching.<br />
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7. You don't spend a billion dollars and not have anything to show for it. "The Council recognizes the importance of measuring outcomes and impacts in order to achieve tangible results and ensure that funds are invested in a meaningful way." (7) There's an opening here for ecosystem services accounting, but we'll have to wait and see. <br />
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8. The money quote from the whole thing is the Council's definition of ecosystem restoration. That's kinda what they're about anyway:<br />
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"All activities, projects, methods, and procedures appropriate to enhance the health and resilience of the Gulf Coast ecosystem, as measured in terms of the physical, biological, or chemical properties of the ecosystem, or the services it provides, and to strengthen its ability to support the diverse economies, communities, and cultures of the region. It includes activity that initiates or accelerates the recovery of an ecosystem with respect to its health, integrity, and sustainability. It also includes protecting and conserving ecosystems so they can continue to reduce impacts from tropical storms and other disasters, support robust economies, and assist in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change (per Executive Order 13554)."<br />
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There's a lot going on here! What is restoration? Well, it's not just bulldozers and backhoes, it's methods and procedures. In other words, it's science and technical expertise just as much as it is new wetlands. Watch for this to become controversial, with conservationists claiming that not enough money is being spent on the ground in actual projects. What's the goal? Health, resilience, and mitigation of climate impacts. It's not clear to me that there isn't potentially a huge tradeoff between the ecosystem health and ability to mitigate climate impacts, but we'll see. How do you get there? You initiate or accelerate recover, or you protect and conserve. And finally, how do you measure it all? Straight out of the CWA, it's physical, biological, <i>or</i> chemical properties. Or, ecosystem services. <br />
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9. The last point is, again, the Council won't be just drawing on existing marine and wetland science, and they won't just be incorporating the best available science as it hits the presses, they're <i>producing</i> it. The sense is that there's a lot yet to figure out yet in the planning, technical assistance, and implementation phases of restoration, and that the Council is more than ready to dish out money to "evaluation and establishment of monitoring requirements and methods to report outcomes and impacts; and measurement, evaluation, and reporting of outcomes and impacts of restoration activities." (15) The question will be, what <i>kind</i> of science is the Council interested in funding? <br />
Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-2222975325973075752013-08-21T09:27:00.001-07:002013-08-21T10:40:55.214-07:00Forever forever? What the heck does permanent mitigation mean?In a <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/08/14/environment-conservation-banks-column/2651721/">recent op-ed for USA Today</a>, mitigation banker Wayne Walker argues for establishing prairie chicken conservation banks, as a way to prevent the looming "train wreck" between environmentalist and oil/gas industry interests. It's a well-written piece that tries to spell out in basic terms, what mitigation is all about (EcosystemMarketplace renamed it, "How to explain mitigation to your grandmother"). Sometimes, though, it's deceptively simple. A big part of Walker's case is that offsets, like diamonds, are forever. He points to wetland and stream mitigation: "The logic of permanent easements is straightforward: Draining a wetland to build something is permanent -- not temporary -- and therefore the mitigation should also be permanent. The same principle holds true for the chicken. Impacts to it and its habitat are both permanent – the offset should be as well." Problem is, there's a clear difference between a permanent easement and a permanent offset, a difference Walker doesn't sort out. An easement is no guarantee of ecological function. Sure, the Corps will require an easement, but are they going to come back to the site in 50 years and check in to see what's up? To assess whether the wetland, stream, or prairie habitat is in a condition or performs such that it will account for the original impact the site offset? Maybe, but even if the Corps/USFWS did come around, would they require the bank to do anything about it? Should we even care? If the wetlands your local Wal-Mart paved over today are going to dry up or sink into the sea anyway in the next 20 years because of climate change, does it matter that the compensatory mitigation site Wal-Mart buys credits from function in the same way the wetlands currently do? I've walked through similar issues <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/03/restoring-climatized-ecosystem-services.html">here</a> and <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/06/restoring-climatized-ecosystem-services.html">here</a>. If, as Walker notes, the goal for all sides is "certainty," these are key questions if mitigation banking is to gain a sense of (ecological) legitimacy in an era of rapidly changing climates. <br />
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<br />Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Madison, WI, USA43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875022 -89.723953699999981 43.2586012 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-65739082328540318692013-07-24T08:39:00.000-07:002013-07-30T08:35:32.126-07:00New climate adaptation lawsuit in LouisianaA flood protection agency in Southeast Louisiana <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/us/louisiana-agency-to-sue-energy-companies-for-wetland-damage.html?hp&_r=0">is suing oil and gas companies</a> including BP and Exxon Mobil for damages to wetlands caused by pipeline canals, and their case is making it above the fold of the NYT. <a href="http://slfpae.com/">Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East</a> claims that the canals have altered hydrology in the area in such a way that has caused hurricane damage to increase and that, over time, will cause coastal lands to "slip into the Gulf of Mexico by the end of this century, if not sooner." Though they don't state it as such (itself interesting), the object in question in this case is ecosystem services: "BP and Exxon Mobil, you've destroyed the flood mitigation service these wetlands are supposed to provide to us, and we're going to hold you accountable for our loss" As <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/20/arts/design/changes-needed-after-hurricane-sandy-include-politics.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">cities and states attempt to preserve, design, and restore dunes, marshes, reefs, wetlands, etc. in the aftermath of Hurricane Sand</a>y, SLFPAE's case will tell us more about the extent to which not just these habitats, but the climate-buffering services they provide will be treated by the courts (see Keith Hirokawa's work <span id="goog_1723361607"></span><a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1785345">her<span id="goog_1723361608"></span>e</a> and <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1833603">her</a>e for excellent first answers).<br />
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At first glance, a water agency in SE LA doesn't seem like the sort of entity to be bringing suit against some of the world's most powerful corporations. But they're pulling absolutely. no. punches. The gem of the case is here - to them, the oil/gas pipelines constitute a:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“mercilessly efficient, continuously expanding system of ecological destruction”</blockquote>
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BOOM. So what are they asking for? </div>
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<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"many billions of dollars. Many, many billions of dollars.”</blockquote>
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Um...It's hard not to think of <a href="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lipd4jCnjv1qeb13fo1_400.jpg">a certain late 90s comedy here</a>, making it difficult to take the agency's case seriously. From the starting gates, the flood protection agency is equivocating on the role of the federal government, namely the Army Corps of Engineers, and why that entity shouldn't be held liable as well for its part in reworking the bayou's hydrology.<br />
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At any rate, it seems the lawsuit's hooks are not in the Clean Water Act per se, but in common law: negligence, nuisance, and some archaic LA code dating back to French rule called "<a href="http://digitalcommons.law.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1826&context=lalrev">Servitude of Drain</a>" requiring downstream landowners to provide means for conveying water off adjacent upstream properties. It's not spelled out for us how SLFPAE thinks it applies to this case, but I suppose the argument is that BP and Exxon Mobil have altered the area's hydrology in a way that downstream areas <i>too effectively drain</i>, indeed conveying stormwaters onto higher ground than before.<br />
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Bringing it back: we can probably think of this as perhaps the US's second major climate adaptation lawsuit - NYT explicitly makes the link to the first: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kivalina_v._ExxonMobil_Corporation">Kivalina</a>, the Alaskan community that sued Exxon Mobil for the effects of climate-caused sea level rise on their village. The court there said that Kivalina's case was more a political question than a justiciable one. We'll see how SLFPAE's case pans out, but hopefully it'll regain some ground, as common law applications to the environment become increasingly tenuous, from Kivalina to <a href="http://wetlandia.blogspot.com/2013/07/wetlands-no-longer-part-of-public-trust.html">Wisconsin</a>.</div>
Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-45554520084393910202013-07-24T08:38:00.001-07:002013-07-30T08:35:55.549-07:00ThesisI've been working for the past couple of years at the University of Kentucky on my master's thesis. Building from a bigger NSF-funded project on stream mitigation banking, my research has argued that market planning and design for wetland and stream ecosystem services in Oregon has <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/feb/10/pavan-sukhdev-natures-economic-model">not been as easy a task as some pundits might think it</a>, nor has it as of yet been as <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/06/price-rivers-rain-greatest-privatisation">devastating as others might imagine it</a>. The thesis is available here:<br />
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<a href="http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/9/">http://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/9/</a><br />
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I'll be moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to carry on with the Ph.D. I look forward to keep exploring and communicating how market environmental law and policy is (not) equipped to account for climate change and its effects on ecosystem services.<br />
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<br />Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-22708393569599048842013-07-19T13:22:00.002-07:002013-07-19T14:11:41.682-07:00Optimal naturesRecently, the Natural Capital Project released its new tool for watershed-based ecosystem services decision-making, the <a href="http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/RIOS.html">Resource Investment Optimization System, or RIOS</a> (spanish for rivers). It builds on <a href="http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/InVEST.html">InVEST</a>, NCP's tool for mapping and valuing all sorts of services. Where InVEST could tell you for instance where to invest in a watershed to achieve the best water quality gains (efficiency), RIOS is geared to help you decide between different sets of investment (optimization).<br />
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RIOS joins a fast-growing cadre of other ecosystem services decision-making software tools. A short list includes:<br />
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<a href="http://solves.cr.usgs.gov/">Social Values for Ecosystem Services</a> (SOLVES) - the USGS's tool of choice<br />
<a href="http://www.pmcl.com/iwrplan/">Integrated Water Resources planning suite </a> - led by the Army Corps of Engineers<br />
<a href="http://www.esvaluation.org/serves.php">Simple and Effective Resource for Valuing Ecosystem Services (SERVES)</a> - from Earth Economics<br />
<a href="http://www.itreetools.org/">i-Tree</a> - USFS built this one<br />
<a href="http://www.ariesonline.org/">ARtificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES)</a><br />
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These models literally instantiate <a href="http://ecosystemcommons.org/soapbox/Sigmon">ecosystem services as a framework</a> by providing the means for framing services - ES is a framework for understanding tradeoffs in managing nature and here are the algorithms for modeling them. One of the key points the tools have in common is that they are <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/02/teeb-and-spatially-explicit-ecosystem.html">spatially-explicit</a>; what might distinguish them is whether they aim to inform either investment or policy decisions. Or, since ecosystem service policy tends toward treating nature as always already an investment (or lack thereof), the distinction is probably: what kind of investment (public or private)?<br />
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These tools parallel a number of data analytics firms working with so-called Big Data on the environment. Many, like <a href="http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/solutions/industries/energy-utilities.html">Clouder</a>a and <a href="http://www.ayasdi.com/solutions/use-case-oil-gas.html">Ayasdi</a> work with oil and gas companies to visualize optimize the use of their drilling equipment, in the name of preventing future environmental catastrophes. Others, like <a href="http://remsoft.com/technology.php">Remsoft's suite of tools</a> aim to improve forestry practices by incorporating extensive data on tree health, location, etc. - Google and Microsoft are working on similar software for "seeing the trees <i>and </i>the forest."<br />
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In short, the stated goal of these models is to "optimize" environmental management, which, for many of them, also means optimizing business practice. Is there a difference between optimal and efficient? <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency">For some, maybe not</a>. But Remsoft's tools,<a href="http://remsoft.com/OperationalPlanning.php"> they claim</a>, allow you to "understand and manage the supply-demand balance, identify current and future supply chain bottlenecks, manage production and delivery capacity, forecast costs and revenues, and generate plans that stay within budget." Clearly something more than the sense of efficiency as input/output is going on here. Indeed, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_optimization">optimization</a>, in the language of mathematics and computer programming, means to choose the best from among several alternatives given a particular criteria. Yes, the criterion for Remsoft might be $, but that may or may not be the case for USFS's community forestry tool, i-Tree.<br />
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Where does all this talk of optimization come from? That's hard to say, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Dreams-Economics-Becomes-Science/dp/0521775264">600 pg. tomes have been written about it</a>. But there is a curious perpendicular conversation happening in the weird realm of biology, computer programming, and artificial intelligence themselves meet: where NCP, Remsoft, and others want to optimize nature, these researchers think nature optimizes. They <a href="http://vimeo.com/29875053">"use and abuse"</a> evolutionary concepts (note: optimization is not necessarily about selection pressure) as metaphor for informing tech design, their goals ranging from the everyday to the lethal. Researchers have found that <a href="http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07/what-ants-yes-know-that-we-dont-the-future-of-networking/">ants respond to disaster and disruption - to their environment - in ways that may inform optimal transmission of information over internet protocols</a>. The US military has <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01073.x/abstract">enrolled apiologists</a> to use bee swarms as an analogue for drone maneuvering. The goal, of course, being to optimize surveillance and kill rates. What brings together the "optimize nature" modelers and the "nature optimizes" researchers and designers is the idea that the environment serves as a model for our treatment of it.<br />
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This is not to get us lost in the thickets of environmental philosophy or social theory. The question is: on the ground, what is lost and gained by thinking in terms of optimizing ecosystem services? Who stands to win and lose? These models are meant to inform land use decisions, and in doing so, they help to bring about the optimized world they only purport to represent. If you model it, they will come. In this performance, the way the models are programmed matters. And what differences are there between the flavor of optimization led by the conservationists using NCP and the timber managers using Remsoft's Spatial Optimizer? One has to inform policy, the other business - can optimization serve as an adequate guiding concept for both?Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.640337699999996 -85.149163400000035 38.4408297 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-33240105392987082622013-07-10T08:54:00.000-07:002013-07-10T08:55:44.692-07:00Militant climate particularism?Militant climate particularism: it's a mouthful, but it's an idea to follow-up on <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/06/restoring-climatized-ecosystem-services.html">recent</a> <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/03/restoring-climatized-ecosystem-services.html">posts</a> about the tensions between local and global problems and solutions when it comes to restoring ecosystem services in the face of climate change.<br />
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Flood mitigation is an ecosystem service that this driver who <a href="http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/07/09/200000-ferrari-california-claimed-by-toronto-floods/">abandoned</a> their Ferrari during some <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/weather/2013/jul/09/toronto-storms-300000-without-power">recent severe flooding</a> in Toronto, ON, Canada sorely could have used. <a href="https://twitter.com/TweetsByHira/status/354409192326578177/photo/1">Poor guy</a>.<br />
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Don't feel to bad for 'em. <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/07/10/we-are-wasting-money-trying-to-fight-climate-change-instead-of-adapting-to-it/">In an editorial</a>, the National Post argues for bailing out that driver and all the rich dudes who in the future may face that most dreaded decision to ditch their $200k <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=penis%20compensation">PCV</a>. Why spend money on climate <i>mitigation</i> - wind turbines, solar panels, and carbon sequestration - the newspaper asks, when what these floods and those recently in Alberta tell us is that we need to <i>adapt</i> to changing weather patterns.<br />
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Ignore the gross misunderstanding of climate science here (i.e. their claim that there is no link between extreme weather and climate change and that such extreme weather events and the problems they cause are entirely predictable), and even set aside the fact that this is the worst of "climate resignation" - giving up on the goal of preventing high concentrations of GHGs. Whistle past the part about the limited growth in renewables. Just about the only thing the editorial might have right is that carbon sequestration and offsetting are rabbit holes not worth falling into.<br />
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But what the National Post is calling for is not any flavor of "<a href="http://www.economist.com/node/10134052">climate protectionism</a>" either. Yea, they'd rather keep money in the province, but they're proposing raising tariffs on goods coming in from countries without carbon markets, because they're arguing against setting up something like a carbon market to being with. They're not suggesting taxing imported turbines and panels - the NP would rather have the province abandon new renewable energy projects all together. The argument here isn't even "climate austerity", in which taking action on climate change is believed to be the fix for shoring up dwindling coffers.<br />
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So what's going on here with the newspaper's utter rejection of climate as anything but a very local problem? David Harvey uses the term "<a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/466665?uid=3739680&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102522578687">militant particularism</a>" to describe social movements that are based on particular struggles in particular times and places. He worries that although such struggles can produce intense solidarities and achieve immediately positive and perhaps necessary results, they often aren't informed by - and in turn contribute to - broader movements and approaches. These particular struggles may tend toward single issues over a short time frame, employing responsive tactics rather than embracing a long term strategy.<br />
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That's exactly what's going on with the Post's editorial: let's fix the problems of climate - which amount only to extreme weather - here and now, and call it a day. Let the Pacific Islanders eat carbonated saltwater.<br />
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Now, the National Post is a conservative rag, and what their approach would hardly fall within the realm of what would be called socially progressive to begin with. But as the drive towards climate resilience and adaptation grows stronger, we may see a retreat from the left into a militant climate particularism, where all that matters is saving in particular the city (After all, with all the <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-the-city-of-miami-is-doomed-to-drown-20130620">doom and gloom</a> that surrounds impending climate change as an urban phenomenon, <a href="http://www.variant.org.uk/events/pubdiscus/Swyngedouw2.pdf">it's easy to think</a>: we have to do everything we can, here and now!). The idea that cities - "<a href="http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/"><i>smart</i> cities</a>" especially - are at the heart of responding to a changing climate - and may be <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1833603">best suited</a> to addressing ecosystem service provision - is perhaps the germ of this. Maybe. But even the influential <a href="http://www.usmayors.org/climateprotection/agreement.htm">US Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement</a> is primarily about reducing carbon emissions. The question is, to what extent can climate planning qua city design overcome that most perennial problem of urban planning: the idea that the city is a containerized unit apart from the rest of the world.<br />
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At any rate, I can't imagine that a Toronto-only strategy is something the city will ultimately benefit from, at least with <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/rob-ford-might-be-a-crack-smoker">this guy</a> in charge.<br />
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<br />Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.640337699999996 -85.149163400000035 38.4408297 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-77305156980536098022013-06-28T11:28:00.001-07:002013-06-28T11:30:02.419-07:00Restoring climatized ecosystem services for the market: Part 2In my <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/">earlier post</a> I asked whether and how regulators might respond to the effects of climate change by changing how they ask industry to do environmental restoration as compensation. This week's events provide a good opportunity to follow-up briefly:<br />
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1. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/us/politics/23obama.text.html?pagewanted=all">Obama's climate speech</a>. Not only was this the biggest occasion upon which he's said anything about his plans for mitigating climate change, he also laid out a strategy for responding to the effects. The point? Adaptation is finally on the table in a big way at the <i>federal</i> level.<br />
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2. <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/11-1447">The SCOTUS ruling on Koontz</a>. You can find good analyses <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/06/details-koontz-v-st-johns-river-water-management-district/">here</a>, <a href="http://t.co/mLNo7DXrxa">there</a>, and <a href="http://wetlandia.blogspot.com/2013/06/koontz-drops-heavy-blows-to-common.html">over yonder</a>. In short, the case was about a landowner who wanted to turn some wetlands into a shopping mall (sound familiar?), but the local authorities wanted him to dump some cash into area conservation efforts as a condition of him paving those wetlands over. The court was unclear on the merits of this specific case, but ruled that asking for money can constitute an unconstitutional taking of property. At any rate, the points to keep in mind here are: 1. the impact on existing wetland and stream compensation practice is <a href="http://wetlandia.blogspot.com/2013/06/koontz-redux.html">uncertain</a>; time will tell; 2. As Kagan argued in <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/11-1447#writing-11-1447_DISSENT_4">her dissent</a> - and which others have <a href="http://wetlandia.blogspot.com/2013/06/koontz-drops-heavy-blows-to-common.html">duly</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/opinion/a-legal-blow-to-sustainable-development.html?_r=0">noted</a> - part of this uncertainty means that that local regulators will be hesitant to condition developers' permits for fear of litigation. Given that most interest in adapting to <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/03/restoring-climatized-ecosystem-services.html">"climatized" ecosystem services</a> in the US so far has come from local level action, what we might see then is local regulators less willing/able to ask developers to do forms of restoration or compensation that are more than they would otherwise get away with asking for. Concretely: if Local Water Management District X were to say to Developer Y that climate change could mean Y's postage-stamp wetland restoration will fail and so it should pay into an area-wide restoration fund, does it have a takings claim on the basis that such predictions about the effects of future climate change on one particular parcel are uncertain and therefore excessive? Here again we raise the question of how science can and will interface with law.<br />
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So, to put this week's two big environmental law new stories side by side, let's ask: if the feds are getting serious about climate planning, to what extent can they see and account for what so many claim is at the core of a changing climate (and ecosystem services) - localized hydrological impacts? Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.640337699999996 -85.149163400000035 38.4408297 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-15091532300035966282013-04-17T06:38:00.000-07:002013-04-17T15:45:28.313-07:00Measuring and Marketing Ecosystem Services, Functions, and Values in OregonI've linked to my presentation from the Blue/Green Economies session at the recent Association of American Geographers meeting in LA. The text of the talk is below and each paragraph corresponds to a slide. It's about how regulators, conservationists, and entrepreneurs in an ecosystem services market in Oregon are assessing the landscape ecological aspects of restoration sites. Similar to my talk on <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2013/03/codenature.html">"Code/Nature,"</a> I argue that state environmental agencies like the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) and conservationists including the Willamette Partnership are pushing for stronger ways of planning for, choosing, and evaluating sites and that this may prove constraining to mitigation bankers.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/18996688" style="border-width: 1px 1px 0; border: 1px solid #CCC; margin-bottom: 5px;" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="427"> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom: 5px;"><strong> <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ericnost/aag-2013-presentation-nost" target="_blank" title="Aag 2013 presentation nost">Aag 2013 presentation nost</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ericnost" target="_blank">ericnost</a></strong> </div><br />
1. Today I want to tell you about the social relations and spatial logics motivating environmental regulators, conservationists, and eco-entrepreneurs in Oregon plan as they choose, and evaluate where in the landscape to do wetland and stream restoration for a cap and trade-type market. I’ll show how the state’s and conservationists’ efforts to map priority locations for restoration and to point out these places to entrepreneurs are market-constraining, but perhaps only in the short-term. The takeaway here is that many of the new or revamped markets in ecosystem services we are seeing may not be about ecosystem commodification and commercialization so much as they are about state formation, power, and legitimacy.<br />
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2. Let’s start here. Welcome to the Half Mile Lane site in exurban Portland, Oregon. It provides a number of ECS. <br />
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3. The wetland you see stores and delays water, which mitigates flood impacts for downstream homes. <br />
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4. The stream provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range. <br />
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5. A couple of years ago, state environmental agencies like the Oregon Department of State Lands (DSL) and conservationists including the Willamette Partnership undertook ecological restoration on the site, turning old farmland and a straightened ditch into a productive wetland and stream. This work was done for a market where developers purchase offsets for impacts to wetlands and streams. HML also serves a demonstration project for what regulators and conservationists see as stronger metrics for the market, both of what counts as successful restoration, as well as what locations in the watershed are worthwhile to do restoration projects.<br />
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6. As global ECS pundit Pavan Sukhdev explains to us, these markets are supposed to be about valuing nature. <br />
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7. Well, what does that mean? For him – and we hear this quote a lot - “we cannot manage what we do not measure,” which means measuring the nature’s benefits and doing so as a $ price. <br />
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8. Price itself, however, is not an ecological measure. Lest you think the focus on “value” is the domain solely of pundits like Sukhdev, consider what the Oregon DSL – one of the environmental agencies – has to say. For DSL, it means the opportunity to provide an ecological function. <br />
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9. Importantly, this opportunity is location-based; it’s spatial, contextual, embedded. <br />
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10. HML has the opportunity to mitigate flood impacts, because it is upstream of homes<br />
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11. and downstream of logging and mining operations that increase runoff.<br />
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12. So the question is: how do Oregon’s market actors measure the value of ecosystem services? Put more concretely - where in the landscape do they plan and choose to do restoration for the market and why? Sukhdev makes the challenge of resource protection sounds so easy when he says that all that needs to be done to prevent environmental degradation is to “put a value on” nature. But the task of valuation has not been so effortless in Oregon.<br />
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In the rest of this talk I want to walk you through the assessment of restoration sites in Oregon’s market, and how they become valued as places to do restoration. There are three moments to this, but they are moments that put the interests of regs and cons against the interests of entrepreneurs. I want to demonstrate an at least short-term strength of state agencies against entrepreneurs in constraining a kind of accumulation by restoration. New ventures in market governance may not deepen ecosystem commodification and commercialization as much as they throw up roadblocks. While these may only be short-term constraints, we should pay attention to them as potential moments where the market collapses under its own contradictions.<br />
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13. I first want to take a second to make sure we’re on the same page about how these markets work. In US markets for wetland and stream ecosystems, state and federal environmental regulatory agencies – ACOE, EPA, DSL - allow developers to make up for resource degradation by compensating entrepreneurs (or, “mitigation bankers”) who speculatively restore ecosystems. A good example: Early last year DSL authorized the trade of four salmon habitat credits to the Tualatin Hills Parks and Recreation Department (THPRD). <br />
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14. DSL did not sell the Half Mile Lane (HML) property itself, where it had restored salmon habitat. Instead, it dealt THPRD ECS credits. These credits are a measure of both the quality and quantity of habitat functions “uplifted” after DSL replaced a culvert and performed other stream and wetland restoration work at HML. <br />
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15. THPRD wanted these credits so it could tell environmental regulators that it had adequately compensated for a trail bridge it is building that will degrade habitat elsewhere in the watershed. Note that in this case a state agency, DSL, was the one selling credits, but more often it is a private entrepreneur.<br />
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16. Either way, the idea is to ensure some kind/degree of ecological equivalence, and this is the art and science of assessment. <br />
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17. There is at once a strictly ecological assessment, which measures ecological functions on a site, but also these kinds of trade demand an assessment of the value of the ecosystem services in question. Value scores are 1-10 rankings of each function’s (e.g. water storage and delay) ability to provide some service (e.g. flood mitigation). <br />
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18. In the assessment moment, restoration bankers hire ecologically-trained consultants to use several online mapping utilities to gage how ecological processes occur across the landscape and affect the site where bankers have chosen to do restoration. <br />
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19. Here’s one of the key mapping utilities consultants use, called Oregon Explorer. It’s bringing a lot of data from beyond the boundaries of the site together, and showing it to the user in one frame. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site. Consultants have to answer questions about landscape context by using OE to, for instance, draw a 2 mile radius circle around the site to see how many other similar habitats the site is connected to in the area, or what sources of ecological stress are nearby, like the quarry. The key point here is that the value score of a banker’s site is relational to the site’s surroundings – but these are things which the banker has no or little control over.<br />
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20. Bankers and their consultants then have to take their scores to regulators. Agency staff judge the offsite stressors and risks consultants find in their assessment in the regulatory moment when they approve, deny, or modify a banker’s choice of where to do restoration. <br />
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21. For instance, regulators often focus on reed canary grass, an invasive species that can spread rapidly on a restoration site from without and foil a project. They question whether a site and its landscape surroundings will, in the end, prove valuable if there is too much RCG around. Environmental agencies can in this moment modify a banker’s proposal to work on a certain piece of ground that is particularly susceptible to weeds by asking them to put more money into a long-term management.<br />
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22. Bankers then finally have to sell their credits. This is a market moment to value’s measure. What non-profit conservationists like WP want to see happen in the market is that when a banker brings a site to the market, to get their credits to sell, the amount they get depends in large part on the location of their project. <br />
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23. These are “priority areas” - habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and collated by TNC. <br />
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24. The idea is that bankers would get the full amount of credits if they were doing restoration in a priority area and less if they were not. The problem is that if a banker had to do work in a priority area lest they not get as many credits as they expected, they’d be incentivized to work on land they might not normally restore. But being driven to work in priority areas would mean a narrower range of landowners they could work with. And all else equal, bankers want to work on sites where they can get the most credit bang for their restoration buck. This system means having to work on sites with higher costs of restoration and potentially higher land prices, both of which would cut into their profits.<br />
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To be clear: this isn’t how the market currently works, but regulators are using GIS to see/check whether bankers are siting in priority areas, and conservationists are pushing for this trading ratio protocol to be adopted. It is still part of the discussion on the ground in Oregon, about what the market should and will look like.<br />
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25.In general, then, through all three moments, how state agencies in Oregon - with help from the conservationists who have helped map priority areas and author market protocols - how they assess ecosystem service value in site selection proves constraining to entrepreneurs. <br />
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26. Assessment – the landscape context they have to look at weighs bankers down<br />
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27. Regulatory – bankers have to put more capital into long-term management<br />
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28. Market – they will not get full credit, have to work in different places<br />
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29. Bankers are in fact rather unhappy about this way of valorizing restoration – and question regulators’ authority to do it. It’s come to the point where entrepreneurs may take state agencies to court on the issue and stop doing more restoration for the market. And so what we see here is not the state rolling out the conditions for market success, but genuine market constraints.<br />
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30. I do want to caution that this only holds for the current political moment. We know that every crisis can become an opportunity. In the long-term, what we might see is bankers getting used to regulators’ expectations about where it is valuable to do restoration. Indeed, the way state agencies have mapped out priorities might only serve as sort of visual aids to bankers, making it easier for them to find sites. This would facilitate the commodification and commercialization of ecosystem restoration and provide more opportunities for developers to just buy credits for their resource impacts.<br />
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31. And so, to wrap up, what I think this case does for us is two-fold. First, it reminds us to pay attention to the spatial logics of these markets, asking what sort of notions of spatial efficiency and prioritization constitute these markets, besides the idea that there is a difference in opportunity costs between global north and south. Kathy McAfee has called efficiency “the holy grail of environmental economics.” I agree, but I’d add that spatial efficiency, which economists would think about as <a href="http://atruepointofbeginning.blogspot.com/2012/09/life-equimarginality-and-pursuit-of.html">equimarginality</a>, is a similar crusade.<br />
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32. Also, while the search for value might be what makes attempts at ecosystem markets and payments look similar across the globe (Robertson 2012), this case suggests a need to keep paying attention to change over time, within specific historical-geographical contexts to see the moments where neoliberal conservation confronts its own contradictions, and what happens. <br />
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33. In the short-term, we might see moves by the state and conservationists to implement new measures of restoration success not as a deepening of commodification and commercialization, but as having the effect of slowing the market.<br />
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In the long-run, it might only enhance capitalist investment in restoration in particular places at the expense of others, in what several scholars have named as the variegation of neoliberal natures or conservation.<br />
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Either way, demarcating the difference between the two can tell us a lot how about market-oriented conservation projects succeed and fail, and to what effect.<br />
Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.6403287 -85.149163400000035 38.4408387 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-11315056922541967572013-03-28T09:58:00.000-07:002013-03-28T11:18:02.232-07:00Restoring climatized ecosystem services for the market: Part 1<div>
In the foothills of the Cascades in western Oregon, a landowner contracts with a local firm that will restore a stream that runs through her property. Among other things, they'll plant trees to shade the stream during those cloudless Oregon summer days and the restoration company will throw some logs in there to create habitat for salmon and other creatures. The trees might take 20 years to grow to the point where they're really shading the stream, but the logs will work more quickly. The landowner restores the stream with the help of payments from a local water utility that is under state and federal pressure to mitigate for the impact its effluent has on stream temperature, and consequently the salmon that like the water cool.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Salmon are a big deal in Oregon</td></tr>
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All the while, snowmelt from the Cascades is becoming more erratic and there's less of it, both of which spell trouble for the salmon. Because the snow has melted earlier in spring, <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2012/11/bad_news_for_fish_falls_lowest.html">the fall low stream flows are inching their way closer to the high temperatures of summer</a>. The trees might cool things down a bit, but they won't be very tall for several more years. The trees may also soak up carbon dioxide and mitigate climate change in the first place, but what are 600 stems going to do for this particular watershed? These ecosystem services are what I call <i>climatized</i>. In short, this one attempt - on the part of a landowner and regulators - to deal with a local water temperature issue is confounded by the regionalized effects of climate change at the same time that the effort has the possibility to be part of a global solution.</div>
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How states and land managers can enhance ecosystem service provision under changing climate<i>s</i> is a pressing issue, but it's clearly one complicated by the temporal and spatial nature of the problem. In a three part series, I want to problematize how we conceptualize climate "adaptation". In this post I discuss how regulators at local, state, and federal agencies - often the front line of climate response - might be both constrained and enabled to act on the temporal dynamism of changing climates. In the post to follow, I again ask about regulators, but ask who's responsible for, capable of, and willing to respond, focusing on the spatial nature of climate change - the differences between climate change as something globally produced and solvable, but with especially regionalized and localized effects. Finally, I look at the vulnerability of people to the effects of climate change - think increased flooding - and how ecosystem services alone - think restoration of wetlands or sand dunes - may or may not mitigate vulnerabilities.<br />
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There is certainly a literature on climate change, ecosystem services, restoration. I want to pull out three key points: 1) <a href="http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001247">we really don't know how successful restoration is at developing ecosystem function</a>; 2) <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CGIQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpubs.usgs.gov%2Ffs%2F2007%2F3108%2Ffs2007-3108.pdf&ei=UHRUUajEE8LC4AOkxIHQBQ&usg=AFQjCNGqCgvzMZUGRsJgQ4UZ6l9xG38VLQ&sig2=1NnxPrigvA0vIElp9LSCXQ&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg&cad=rja">changing climates will intensify ecosystem processes and make them more variable, dynamic</a>; 3) <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2007EO470006/abstract">climate change is global, but its effects are variegated - some places will fare better than others.</a><br />
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The question is how regulators like those in the scenario can deal with this. For starters, stream services - be it water temperature regulation, surface water storage, or sediment transport - are going to change over time as increased rainfall intensity and shifts in snowmelt timings and quantity reshape streams. In markets or payment schemes for stream restoration - where a landowner like the one we opened with gets paid by a local water utility - what happens when the service the landowner was supposed to provide no longer exists or does not function in the same way anymore because drought and higher temperatures killed off her trees? Can regulators practice adaptive management - going back and revisiting restoration projects and ask land managers to adapt them to the climate du jour? Or can regulators ask for <a href="http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2013/03/25/2">"future-proof"</a> designs that are meant to be resilient over time?<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Newly planted trees at a stream restoration project that provides temperature offsets.</td></tr>
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My answer is one of those typical social sciences cop-outs: it depends. Yes and no. In the yes camp: 1) in PES schemes or markets regulators get a chance to "condition" so that land managers only get to sell restoration credits if certain "<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00045608.2013.754686#preview">performance standards</a>" are met. Regulators may be able to make some of these standards about site performance in the face of regional climate effects. Moreover, regulators, especially after the 2008 federal rule on stream/wetland mitigation markets, can ask land managers to put aside money for <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDwQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwater.epa.gov%2Flawsregs%2Fguidance%2Fwetlands%2Fupload%2F5D_Long_Term_Management.pdf&ei=QnVUUfOFE9TE4APQ44DABQ&usg=AFQjCNGZMiDkhKv-35VQu853bKTgIbw4CA&sig2=_TCPZRLWJrxqbQOIcPB73w&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg&cad=rja">a long-term endowment</a> that will ensure the site will continue to function over time; 2) In these markets, regulators also craft the ecological assessments by which restoration sites are evaluated. They may be able to write these assessments in such a way to "future-proof" restoration, by encouraging restorationists to design streams that are adaptable to changing climates. The authors of a <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CD8QFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oregon.gov%2Fdsl%2FPERMITS%2Fdocs%2FInterim_Guidance_Stream_Mitigation_11212012.pdf&ei=dXVUUY7IH_bi4AP1joHYCw&usg=AFQjCNGaBLn58BOJkgPZudIAKqMb_W-oEg&sig2=GV-sHWh1Bjd50VVBcOGvjg&bvm=bv.44442042,d.dmg&cad=rja">draft stream assessment</a> in Oregon, for instance, want to assess ecological functions as a way of gaging how over time, a site will perform. This is an improvement on how most assessments currently operate, but it raises the question of how to "future-proof" restoration to "unknown unknowns" of climate change. In other words, functions-based assessment provides a good deal of insurance for the future, but it does not necessarily give regulators the authority, 15 years later, to go back and ask land managers to plant more trees, put in more logs, or do something completely different. Most of the times, they're off the hook after 5-10 years. <br />
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In the no camp, I only want to point out that any sort of planning for future ecological conditions always presents a challenge because it leaves agencies open to litigation from those who will say, "you can't ask us to do that." In much the same way that agencies are more or less limited in what offsite factors - think upstream sedimentation - they can ask restorationists to account for, they will be constrained in asking land managers to think about the future. These markets are mitigation markets, where restorationists are supposed to provide "ecological uplift" in a similar kind and degree of impact elsewhere, like when a landowner plants riparian trees to cool streams that have been warmed by effluent from a municipal wastewater plant. And so as long as the landowner can cool the same amount of kcals/day of water that the plant is adding to the system, they are ok. Whether they also provide salmon habitat, refugia for climate affected species, etc., <a href="http://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/ecosystem/land/stacking-ecosystem-services-payments#.UVR1tYWI7r0">is another question</a>. Subsidy payment schemes may have different, potentially more encompassing, criteria. Moreover, as practitioners know, incorporating "ecosystem services" into official regulatory practice is not an easy project. It's not a straightforward term, and it's not in any statute, and it can become another thing restorationists would point to and say, "what is that and why do we have to do it?"<br />
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What it all comes back to is that already existing markets in ecosystem services may or may not be responsive to climate change. At this point, you might be thinking, "this sounds like a lot of 'depends'!" That's my point. The ways that regulators are going to respond to climate effects in markets for streams, wetlands, species, etc. is going to depend on: 1) what level of government they're working in. <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1833603">Federal authorities may have powers that local governments don't - and vice versa</a>; 2) <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00045608.2013.754686#preview">it'll depend on where they're working</a> - Oregon environmental agencies have had different institutional responses to emerging issues like climate than, say, Texas. I'll take up this spatial/scalar unevenness of regulation in more detail in my next post.<br />
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Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY43.0730517 -89.40123019999998642.8875037 -89.723953699999981 43.2585997 -89.078506699999991tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-50134589882049943952013-03-07T09:52:00.001-08:002013-03-07T09:54:06.239-08:00Code/NatureI've posted the slides from a presentation I gave at the <a href="http://www.politicalecology.org/">Dimensions of Political Ecology conference</a> here at the University of Kentucky recently. My argument is pretty straightforward: to have an ecosystem service, like wetland water storage and delay, you have to be able to show where it that service exists in the landscape and software tools like Excel, ArcGIS, and online mapping utilities are really fundamental to that calculation. It's kind of like the old thought experiment - if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? Does a wetland provide a flood mitigation service if it is in the middle of nowhere? I don't mean to get all philosophical on you, but the basic point is that ecosystem services - as valuable benefits of nature to society - might not exist as such if environmental agencies and others weren't able to map where they exist and who they benefit. So, the talk is a modest call to pay attention to regulatory, entrepreneurial, and conservationist exercises in mapping services, like <a href="http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/InVEST.html">InVEST from the Natural Capital Project</a>. I've pasted the text of the talk below; each paragraph corresponds with one slide.<br />
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<strong> <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ericnost/dope-presentation2013-code-naturenost-2" target="_blank" title="DOPE 2013 presentation_Eric Nost_Code/Nature">DOPE 2013 presentation_Eric Nost_Code/Nature</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/ericnost" target="_blank">ericnost</a></strong> </div>
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1. Ok, so I promise you that this picture of people idling in line to get tickets at the Portland airport is relevant to what I really want to talk to you about today: market valuation of ecosystem services. I’m going to show that airport terminals, in fact share a lot in common with the restoration sites through which Oregon conservationists and entrepreneurs value ecosystem services for market. I make two calls in my talk: 1, for ecosystem services researchers to pay attention to spatially explicit ECS valuation, and to ask for whom such valuations work. 2, to call upon political ecologists to keep paying attention to spatial visualization techniques, but to also pay attention to other technologies through which spaces – like airport terminals, and restoration sites - are made and valued.<br />
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2. Welcome to the Half Mile Lane site in exurban Portland, Oregon. It provides a number of ECS. The wetland you see stores and delays water, which mitigates flood impacts for downstream homes. The stream, which you can’t really see, provides habitat for salmon that migrate into the foothills of the Coast Range. A couple of years ago, state environmental agencies and conservationists undertook ecological restoration on the site, turning old farmland and a straightened ditch into a productive wetland and stream.<br />
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3.That these services exist as services is spatially dependent, or contextual. I’ll give you three quick quotes to show how. As you see here, the international think-tank for ecosystem services accounting, TEEB, note that you have to have a specific site to have a service. The work of the wetland at HML to store and delay water matters only because there are homes in the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site that benefit.<br />
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4. Long-time ECS researcher Gretchen Daily concurs. She calls for focusing on the right places in the landscape. HML’s position, for instance, allows it to slow down and cycle the increased runoff from logging operations.<br />
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5.Finally, lest you think this focus on landscapes is the domain solely of pundits like TEEB and Daily, consider what the Oregon DSL has to say. One phrase we often hear in the ECS world – we did in the TEEB quote - is “value of nature”. What does value mean? For DSL, it means the opportunity to provide an ecological function. Crucially, this opportunity is location-based.<br />
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6. Now, DSL oversees wetland and stream ECS markets in OR. The way these markets work is entrepreneurs restore ECS on sites like HML and sell the ecological benefit they create, as a credit commodity, to housing developers, DOTs, and others that are paving over wetlands and streams in different parts of the watershed. In fact, HML here is one such mitigation “bank” of restoration credits. There many different kinds of actors in the market. You’ve got state agencies like DSL with statutory obligations and ecological inclinations, but also NGO groups with conservation missions, and of course entrepreneurs looking to do banking for profit. This raises a key question: to what extent do market-makers account for context, or value? Or for them, is a service just a service, no matter where it’s provided? How do market actors decide where it is most ecologically valuable to do restoration?<br />
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7. What I want to show in the rest of the talk are three things:<br />
1. Digital tools like Excel and GIS allow the OR market to account for context<br />
2. However, these tools and the algorithms that underwrite them are not mirrors of nature. Rather, tools reflect the interests of market actors<br />
3. In Oregon, state agencies and conservationists may have the upper hand in defining and accounting for ECS values.<br />
I make these arguments by outlining three moments in which value is accounted for in OR’s markets. I end by putting out a couple of calls for future research.<br />
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8.I’ll tell you first about the assessment moment of ecosystem services valuation in Oregon’s wetland and stream markets. Entrepreneurs hire consultants to do a key part of the work of the market: assess restoration success. In assessment, consultants utilize Excel spreadsheet-based calculators of ecological process. One of these calculators is called the Oregon Rapid Wetlands Assessment Protocol, or ORWAP. There are ones for salmon habitat, water temperature, and other services, but they’re all conceptually very similar, so I’ll focus on ORWAP. Most of them were in fact written by the same person, under contract from DSL and US EPA. He’s been developing these assessments for about 30 years now, which is when he first made a split in assessing ecological process or function, and value.<br />
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9.Consultants score functions in ORWAP through a series of multiple choice questions about things like seasonal surface water extent.<br />
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10. Consultants also do work in the office, employing several online mapping tools for an assessment of value. Here’s one called Oregon Explorer. Hydric soils are the orange/yellow, but we also see the 100 year floodplain downstream of the site. OR Explorer knows, too, about rare species on the site. It’s bringing a lot of data from beyond the boundaries of the site together, and showing it to the user in one frame. The user can thus answer questions in ORWAP about landscape context by using OE to, for instance, draw a 2 mile radius circle around the site to see how many other similar habitats the site is connected to in the area.<br />
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11. What offsite stressors, and risks consultants find in their assessment, regulators can consider in approving or denying a banker’s plan. For instance, regulators often focus on reed canary grass, an invasive species that can spread rapidly on a restoration site from without and foil the project. They question whether a site and its landscape surroundings will, in the end, prove valuable if there is too much RCG around. Theoretically environmental agencies can in this moment deny a banker’s proposal to work on a certain piece of ground that is particularly susceptible to weeds. In reality, however, they are more likely to just modify the banker’s site selection, perhaps by asking them to put more money into a long-term management.<br />
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12. Finally, there is a market moment to value’s measure. What conservationists want to see happen in the market is that when a banker brings a site to the market, to get their credits to sell, the amount they get depends in large part on the location of their project. They would get the full amount if they were in what’s called a priority area and less if they were not.<br />
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13. These areas are an aggregation of habitat sites mapped by state environmental agencies, and put together by TNC. To be clear: this isn’t how the market currently works, but regulators do use GIS to look at whether bankers are siting in priority areas, and conservationists are pushing for this trading ratio protocol to be adopted.<br />
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14. The problem is that if a banker had to do work in a priority area lest they not get as many credits as expected, that could be at least a short-term constraint to the market, especially if land prices in priority areas were higher. In general, through all these moments, how state agencies, with help from conservationists, want to assess value via site selection, will constrain entrepreneurs. At the same time, agencies and conservationists are not now fully determining site selection. Rather, the maps they make give them something to point to and say, bankers should go here rather than there. Or, in other cases, spreadsheets like ORWAP in tandem with maps let them say, look there’s a quarry upstream, don’t go there.<br />
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15. The state and conservationists will want these gestures to be assertive. What underwrites their ability to point to a map in the first place? In large part, code. I want to turn quickly to work in information technology studies as a way of understanding valuation in OR. Recently, geographers Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge wrote a book called Code/Space in which they argued that spaces are increasingly constituted by computer code. An airport terminal is only the kind of space it is if the 0s and 1s that run the check-in stations work; when they crash, the space turns from a hub of international commerce into a den of frustration. In the same way, a restoration site or classes of ecosystems cannot be priority spaces if the software that codes them that way does not work the way it is supposed to. In OR, the ability of ArcGIS to display and combine layers is crucial because layers allow for combining different ecological interests into priorities. Code underwrites how web mapping utilities aggregate different data and draw circles around it as well, allowing foroffsite visualization and valorization. And ORWAP can’t generate a value score without Excel’s ability to run calculations across so many different variables. The state/conservationists’ position is code-dependent.<br />
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16.So to wrap-up: Yes, markets in ecosystem services restoration, at least in OR, do have a spatial calculus of value, as TEBB and Gretchen Daily hope for. State agencies and conservationists work to make the calculation their own, and deploy it to their own ends. But it remains unclear how successful they can be. Their ability to write the code and utilizing the tools with which they see value in space will be crucial to their future market-making work.<br />
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17. And valuation tools will be worthwhile pay attention in other markets as well, as decision-makers continue to call for the price valuation and marketization of ECS. So ECS researchers should continue looking at the work of spatially explicit valuation, but ask, as Norgaard did, for whom does ECS governance work for? Conservationists? Regulators? Bankers? … Landowners? PEists are indeed well equipped to talk about winners and losers. But this is also a call to PEists to keep looking at code. We’ve looked at spatial visualization technologies before, but need to continue, and to look at code not just in GIS but in Excel and other programs. We can do this in partnership with scholars of the geoweb.<br />
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<br />Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.6403287 -85.149163400000035 38.4408387 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-5726652784352953792013-02-25T08:13:00.000-08:002013-02-25T08:13:19.385-08:00TEEB and spatially-explicit ecosystem services valuationI just read the <a href="http://www.teebweb.org/wetlands/">new TEEB report</a> on the state of the world's wetland and water ecosystem services. In case you didn't know, <a href="http://www.teebweb.org/">TEEB</a> is The Economics of the Environment and Biodiversity. They're a group led by <a href="http://pavansukhdev.com/">Pavan Sukhdev</a>, and they're one of the leading champions of ecosystem services accounting out there right now, internationally. Geographers, for one, have had their say about TEEB <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2012.01753.x/abstract">here</a> and <a href="http://meridian.aag.org/callforpapers/program/AbstractDetail.cfm?AbstractID=43093">here</a>.<br />
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There's a lot going on in the TEEB wetlands report. Let's walk through what they're doing and why and how it might matter to the average practitioner on the ground. What the TEEB report's authors are out to do is to assess the current state of the world's wetlands in terms of the provisioning, regulation, habitat, and cultural ecosystem services they provide. Contrary to what a lot of folks expect from TEEB, there's only so much in this report on monetary valuation - that is, coming up with a price amount on services as an expression of their value (a couple of posts back when I said I'd get to value, I meant it!) Sure there are figures like Table 2.2 (pg. 10) that spell out minimum and maximum values (in International $/ha/year - Int. dollars are basically a standardized unit to account for purchasing power) for different kinds of aquatic ecosystems and different kinds of services. But the TEEB authors are at great pains to show you they recognize that the process of valuation - who participates, who benefits, etc. - matters as well.<br />
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The problem is that accounting for the process of ecosystem service valuation is difficult to do in chart form. It's hard for TEEB to keep the pricing cat from getting out of the bag, as it were, since:<br />
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...to ignore the economic value (including monetary value) of nature is to reduce the ability to make robust arguments that have a chance of informing decisions for the conservation of important ecosystems. The use of monetary valuation in many cases enhances the social visibility of the benefits brought about by environmental protection and restoration. By doing so, it can act as a counterweight to the pressures causing environmental degradation, which are driven by economic activities where market prices do not take into account negative impacts on health and the environment (sometimes termed “externalities”). (27)<br />
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Pricing services, or, as the TEEB slogan goes, "making nature's values visible," means that governmental and corporate decision-makers will and thus stop environmental degradation. They might even promote protection and restoration if they can see the economic benefits of doing so. And so that's why in Table 2.2 we see that, for instance, the value of the regulating services of inland wetlands is somewhere between 321 and 23,018 Int.$/ha/year.<br />
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But what are nature's values? Value is<a href="http://wetlandia.blogspot.com/2012/07/functions-services-and-values.html"> something you hear a lot</a> when you're dealing with ecosystem services. For now, I'll offer the following simple definition, and hope you'll come to agree with it: <i>value</i> is the contextual opportunity or constraint to service provision. Ecosystem services and their values are relative, depending on where you are and where you look. The authors of the TEEB report realize this. They write, "Ecosystem functions, the flow of ecosystem services, and the economic value to society and the economy are site specific ...." (TEEB 2013, 08)<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IXvBjHs7hOQ/USt_36N9tLI/AAAAAAAADVE/KIGgq4a_UZ4/s1600/serviceshed_sidebar.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IXvBjHs7hOQ/USt_36N9tLI/AAAAAAAADVE/KIGgq4a_UZ4/s1600/serviceshed_sidebar.png" height="640" width="138" /></a>Likewise, leading ecosystem services advocate Gretchen Daily <a href="http://ensia.com/interviews/gretchen-daily-what-is-nature-worth/">said in a recent interview</a>: "We need to be able to pinpoint places on the landscape or on the seascape and say these places are really the most important for supplying these benefits, and if we were to invest in protecting them, we would get this return on the investment."<br />
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Lest you think value is an esoteric exercise left to the preserve of global pundits, note that state environmental agencies in the US are considered with ecosystem value as well. The word itself is in many statutes, and here's how Oregon's Department of State Lands, for one, <a href="http://www.oregon.gov/dsl/PERMITS/docs/RFG_Section_8_Nov_2011.pdf">sees it</a>: “[Value is] the importance or worth of a wetland function to societal needs. This includes public attitudes and the wetland’s opportunity to provide a given function based on its location.” Again, value means opportunity to provide a function, and this opportunity is spatial in nature.<br />
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Value as opportunity isn't some abstract notion, existing only in the minds of ecosystem services advocates and state environmental regulators. It's getting put into practice. <a href="http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/">The Natural Capital Project</a> is a global coalition of academics out to valorize services. In particular, they're interested in the spatiality of services. They've come up with this <a href="http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/servicesheds.html">serivcesheds</a> idea (see the figure to the right). The idea is to help people conceptualize where nature's benefits come from. So, as the diagram shows, the benefits of carbon sequestration apparently come from and benefit everyone globally. But clean water for fish is a much more specific value, dependent on people's recreational demands.<br />
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What I'm bring this all back to is this: At the same time we see a drive by the Natural Capital Project and some environmental agencies to name value as dependent on where the services are in relation to where the beneficiaries are, we have the TEEB report. TEEB calculates global values. But how can you have one global value for wetlands, when wetland values are always in the eye of the beholder? These global values do just sum up local contextual values, but what good do they do an individual policy-maker? What does it mean that the value of the regulating services of all inland wetlands is somewhere between 321 and 23,018 Int.$/ha/year? Even US President Obama can take little action to save, in one fell swoop, all the world's freshwater wetlands and their regulating values, much less all the world's wetlands and all their values. Maybe he can save a couple wetlands, say outside of his city, Chicago, but TEEB's numbers don't tell him much about the importance of saving those specific ones. Likewise, for an environmental regulator in say Oregon, TEEB's numbers tell them relatively little about the wetland down the street and its worth. So which way do you think we should we have it - global values a la TEEB, or site specific ones like from the Natural Capital Project?<br />
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I'm not sure myself; there's uses to both. Right now, I want to briefly hint that there is a potentially serious discrepancy between local and global values when it comes to climate change in particular. The value of a coastal wetland in New York providing services like water storage and delay that buffer climate impacts like sea level rise is a local value. That local value is only a value because of a global problem. If climate change weren't a threat to New York, there wouldn't necessarily be any value for that wetland to be there. Moreover, the value of a forest sequestration project may be more global than it is local because carbon sequestration benefits everyone.<br />
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In the next post, I'll write more about climate change and ecosystem services. Climate change is so often seen as a temporal problem - it will cause ecosystem services to be less "resilient" over time because of extreme events. But it will also raise some serious spatial scale dilemmas.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Figure from "Servicesheds." The Natural Capital Project. <a href="http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/servicesheds.html">http://www.naturalcapitalproject.org/servicesheds.html</a></span></div>
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Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.6403287 -85.149163400000035 38.4408387 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-81016542352424320412013-01-16T10:28:00.000-08:002013-01-16T10:28:10.240-08:00Ecosystem services justice?"Designing better environmental governance always entails addressing the question: better for whom?" (<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800909004583">Norgaard 2010</a>)<br />
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I've written recently a lot about communicating ecosystem services. Conservationists, regulators, scientists, and entrepreneurs are all struggling to make the concept intelligible to decision-makers (and ultimately make nature qua service intelligible to these politicians and businesses...) But there's another sense communication is at play here, in the idea that the public can express values concerning ecosystem services through some sort of deliberative arena. Let me explain.<br />
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The idea that people can and should discuss their values, preferences, and opinions about the use and maintenance of nature's benefits finds its home in ecosystem services economics perhaps most notably via Bob Costanza. In a sense, he is drawing broadly on folks like Habermas and Sen, who wrote under the banner of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_choice_theory">social choice theory</a></i>. What these authors are getting at is that environmental values per se are of a different nature than mere preferences about the way the world should be and as such cannot be reduced to choices about, say, which brand of carbon credit I want to buy. Instead, they have to be expressed, reasoned, and maybe changed through debate, conservation, and so on. What they are reacting to is <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory">public choice theory</a></i>, whose proponents see political decisions as the result only of rational, conscious decision-making, as if democracy was merely a market subject to the forces of supply and demand. For these folks, preferences about the state of the (natural) world are values, and they are best expressed through market-like arenas.<br />
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The vision of democracy in public choice theory is rather anemic, but what is the vision of democracy in social choice theory? I'm not sure Costanza et al., at least in 1997's<i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Natures-Services-Societal-Dependence-Ecosystems/dp/1559634766">Nature's Services</a></i>, made it out to be much different than what we've currently got. If "society" decides a carbon tax is needed, so be it and make it so through institutions. These institutions may range from to local public trusts or watershed districts, to - and perhaps more likely (in Costanza's reasoning) for something like carbon - Congress. But it should take only a second for even the most casual reader to think, well, how is that going to work out? When was the last time Congress got anything substantive done?<br />
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Don't get me wrong, I'm for more deliberative discussions. Democracy can mean a lot of things, and if it means something like direct democracy, where relevant solidarities can set the terms of the discussion, rather than deliberating a pre-defined or even pre-determined point, I'm for it. And <a href="https://www.pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.sustainability/files/Farley%20and%20Costanza%202010.pdf">Costanza (with Farley 2010)</a> has done a lot of work imagining the role of institutions in ecosystem services provision. At the least, I'm for it since it would mean that decision-makers recognize environmental values that are articulated outside of what we buy and sell. But what this conversation about ecosystem services democracy overlooks is the underlying question of, as Norgaard was getting at, who wins and loses from<br />
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And so a related discussion revolves around the question of whether justice is merely a matter of <i>distribution</i>. Is it a just outcome when everyone receives a similar amount of compensation for a similar amount of, say, ecosystem services provision? It was for this guy called Rawls, who asked us to imagine, under a "veil of ignorance" as if we hadn't been born yet, how we would like wealth in the world to be distributed. Sen <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Idea_of_Justice.html?id=enqMd_ze6RMC">took this idea one step further</a> and argued that there is a <i>procedural</i> basis to justice as well. Essentially, this is the idea of equal opportunity, or as Sen puts it, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach">"capability"</a>. This might mean equal capability to access employment, but in this case it would mean equal capability of participating in conversations about the use and maintenance of ecosystem services.<br />
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Tim Forsyth <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718512002825">recently extended</a> Sen's (and Rawl's) ideas about justice to climate change. He calls for conceptualizing climate justice as an open and procedural act that is defined by a more inclusive determining of climate risks, as opposed to merely a matter of getting the distribution of benefits (and risks or harms) right. He tries to reframe Sen's point as not just about equal opportunity or "capability" in defining the problem. He writes, "Climate change policy is not simply allocating solutions to melting ice. And an inclusive process is not just diversifying discussion of how to do this." (3) But I'm not sure he gets out of the trap of "just diversifying discussion", as I'm still left wondering, if we include more capable voices, don't we just get cacophony?<a href="http://wetlandia.blogspot.com/2012/01/noticed-this-from-usgs-beyond-simple.html"> And is it right to include more voices in, say, the use of local flood prevention services in Africa?</a><br />
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In other words, these authors are unhelpful when it comes to making the analytical distinction, whose voices? But more importantly, to what extent do we actually need to continue to discuss the issue at hand? We know services globally face continued threats, but can a diverse discussion help us talk our way out of it?<br />
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Upcoming: I'll dig more into this question of justice, because has I hinted at in the end, it has a really key scalar component - <i>where </i>do decisions get made? If ecosystem services are embedded in some spatial extent of society and ecology, should decisions about their provision be contextual as well?<br />
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I'll also talk more about this idea of value. Answering why and how ecosystem services are ecologically and socially valuable is of course <i>de rigeur</i>, if not <i>by definition</i>, but to what degree do services' values rely on their context? To whom do they become valuable? And more philosophically - what is this value thing I'm talking about anyway?<br />
<br />Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.6403287 -85.149163400000035 38.4408387 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-29405175393186879172013-01-02T10:33:00.000-08:002013-01-02T10:44:59.250-08:00Communicating ecosystem services, take two"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." - George Bernard Shaw<br />
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I wasn't able to make it to ACES, but I've been reading over <a href="http://eko-eco.com/archive/the-aces-ecosystem-markets-conference.php">some</a> of the <a href="http://madsenenvironmental.com/2012/12/17/communicating-ecosystem-services-presentation/">reports</a>. Seems like a lot of the conference was focused on how to communicate ecosystem services to politicians, corporations, and the public. As one commentator <a href="http://eko-eco.com/archive/the-aces-ecosystem-markets-conference.php">put it</a>, "...it's high time for the ecosystem services community to get its elevator speech ready."<br />
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In an earlier post, I noted that the focus on messaging ecosystem services was kind of ironic since the whole services idea was in large part about getting around the difficulty of communication. In the intro to the 1997 agenda-setting <i>Nature's Services</i>, the rationale was laid out: "[L]ack of understanding of the character and value of natural ecosystems traces ultimately to a failure of the scientific community to generate, synthesize, and effectively convey the necessary information to the public." (xv) Nature was supposed to be a set of functions that provided society with clean air, clean water, etc., and we could count them and maybe even monetize them; the language was supposed to express itself to those in charge. <br />
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I could stop here and say, well, we're spinning our wheels when it comes to how to convince policy-makers and businesses to see nature's benefits and that the failure to do so is bad. After all, I shouldn't need to remind anybody about climate change, loss of biodiversity, floods, water supply, etc. But I think spinning wheels right now might in fact be productive. It's at least indicative of an interesting moment. People might be realizing what they're up against, and that ecosystem service advocacy can't just be about communicating. <br />
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<a href="http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/whats-your-meme-changing-the-climate-change-conversation/">Memes</a> may be one good communication tool, but deeper down there's a bigger issue here. Craig Hanson <a href="http://eko-eco.com/archive/the-aces-ecosystem-markets-conference.php">put it</a>, "Running numbers only gets you so far. There is a political economy game to be played." As much as advocates might speak in business language to corporations, we see that they're not necessarily interested. <a href="http://eko-eco.com/archive/the-aces-ecosystem-markets-conference.php">Indeed</a>, "Ecosystem services management doesn't necessarily generate any new revenues for business, making it a harder sell."<br />
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So people may start trying to figure out how to talk about ecosystem services in a way that doesn't necessarily mean dollars and cents, and that's always a good thing. <a href="http://phg.sagepub.com/content/36/6/758.full.pdf+html">People have certainly been doing that for a while</a>, but maybe now it's becoming more refined, accepted, and visible. What do you think?Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.5037164000000337.6403287 -85.149163400000035 38.4408387 -83.858269400000026tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8733347291295619703.post-81502966115084061172012-09-20T15:08:00.000-07:002012-09-20T15:08:15.347-07:00Life, Equimarginality, and the Pursuit of HappinessEquimarginality....wait, equi-who? Equimargina-what? It's a big word, but it's one many environmental economists use explicitly a lot and a concept others also use frequently, if not stating it as such. And it sets the stage for the politics of ecosystem service markets. <br />
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It's kind of the holy grail or lynchpin of environmental economics really. If "command and control" policies - that is, mandating that each firm, or each sector even, use the "best available pollution abatement technology" - fail, it's because, the story goes, these policies don't acknowledge the fact that each factory or wastewater treatment plant or housing developer has unique cost schedules for dealing with whatever their external cost to society happens to be. Some firms can mitigate emissions, effluents, or habitat impacts more easily than others.<br />
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Outside of a textbook, it's hard to find a good diagram of what equimarginality means. Here's my best shot:<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jz5XsFJiikg/UEPcBjPHSJI/AAAAAAAADRI/OGMpWUfsJx4/s1600/del%2Brio%2Bgonz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="207" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Jz5XsFJiikg/UEPcBjPHSJI/AAAAAAAADRI/OGMpWUfsJx4/s320/del%2Brio%2Bgonz.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Source: Del Rio Gonzalez, Pablo. 2008. <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800907003552">Policy implications of potential conflicts between short-term and long-term efficiency in CO2 emissions</a>. Ecological Economics 65(2):292-303<br />
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Instead of setting a quota on the amount of emissions, the state levies a tax on the emissions (P*), the idea being to change underlying incentives that spur a firm to generate CO2. You can see that if all firms had to produce only, say, EsubB emissions, the regulation would be far cheaper for some (Firm A) and much more costly for others (Firm C). The idea with equimarginality is that, across firms, there is some magical point where "society's" extra buck spent on abatement or conservation doesn't return more than dollar's worth of pollution reduction or habitat protection.<br />
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Where am I going with this boring econ lecture? Treating each polluting or habitat destroying firm as if it had special needs means allowing for more degradation in some spaces/environments and less in others. Equimarginality is marked by two spatial variations on a theme of measurement: <br />
1. In theory, the efficient amount a polluter should abate will depend on <i>where</i> it pollutes. If your car is pumping out SO2 in the middle of the Mojave Desert, I mean, what effect is that having on society, really? (beyond acid rain...) Since the health effects of vehicular SO2 are quite localized, the answer is probably very little, so why should the driver have to pay as much in fees as someone driving the same car in downtown LA. Well, it's extremely hard to know how much each vehicle is driven where...And it's even tougher to pinpoint how much that 1999 Saturn XL CA license plate #304 ACL's exhaust contributes to the weathering of Lexington, Kentucky's grand limestone edifices.<br />
2. By the same coin, where polluters do mitigate will be where it is least costly to do so. All things being equal, if I'm given the flexibility as a wind energy company putting up turbines in the mountain West to abate my turbines' impacts on sage grouse habitat, I'm going to do so where it's easiest to. That's probably where land is most expensive anyway and where the wind isn't as good. That may or may not have anything to do with the quality of sage grouse habitat there.<br />
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These variations on how to measure and mitigate externalities ultimately add up to a bigger question about "<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320708001213">where to put things</a>." My point here is two-fold: there's more to be said for conservation than efficiency; spatial efficiency depends on the resource and who you talk to. There's no one optimal answer. Whether spatial efficiency for an economist means the same thing as spatial efficiency for a conservationist is questionable. The clearest example of where the two most likely do not line up is hotspots - river reaches, for instance, where a disproportionate number of factories dump nutrients and buy offset credits upstream from farmers because the marginal cost for reducing N or P inputs into rivers is much lower for Farmer John than a modern wastewater treatment facility. Apparently, CO2 quickly circulates globally and so hotspots may be less of a concern (but see this <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/march/urban-carbon-domes-031610.html">research suggesting CO2 exacerbates local air quality conditions</a>). Still, think about discussions in global carbon markets: where are the cheapest places to offset emissions? which countries get to pollute more, which should reduce emissions? These are some of the most animating politics of carbon markets and are girded by the <br />
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I find that equimarginality plays out in an interesting way in habitat and species banking, because where firms can destroy or compensate for habitat is perhaps more (ecologically) important than with carbon or water, and so has important political implications for landscape conservation. When it comes to carbon, what you hear is a carbon sequestering forest there is as good as one over here. But with habitat, the wetland here may serve an especially valuable role for species migrations in the landscape, a role that can't necessarily be replaced over there. For conservationists, there's a value in particular ecosystems in particular places. Again, the question is whose values win the day, or in what combination? To what extent can and will state agencies step in and say to developers, "look we don't want you mucking up habitat here. And if you are going to make an offset to an impact, how about not necessarily where it's cheapest for you, how about over here where we think it's going to have the most effect?"<br />
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My goal here has been to show how on its own terms the logic of equimarginality is: 1) in principle, spatial; 2) how this pursuit of spatiality, at a minimum complicates environmental economics, but really, I think, makes the whole notion of equimarginality more or less useless, except as the object of ecosystem service politics.<br />
<br />Eric Nosthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08711800145538431002noreply@blogger.com0Lexington, KY, USA38.0405837 -84.503716437.8404992 -84.8195734 38.2406682 -84.187859400000008