The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi ISBN-13:978-1597808217 Night Shade Books
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi ISBN-13: 978-1907411106 Little, Brown Book Group
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi ISBN-13: 978-0356502120 Little, Brown Book Group
Many writers have described seemingly far-fetched inventions that eventually leapt off the pages of a manuscript and became a reality. E-readers, closed-circuit television, credit cards, universal translators, and “smart” homes are all good examples of real-life tools that had their start in fiction. In some cases, the authors’ imaginative ideas anticipated the technological and social developments that would lead to innovation; in other cases, inventors were inspired by what they read and worked to make those literary products and processes a reality. Either way, this is a powerful example of how fiction can help readers to envision and connect with the idea of astounding new objects unlike anything in their own contemporary universe.
The collision of science and literary art has also had enlightening effects beyond the technological realm. For example, fiction has helped readers learn about and consider the ramifications of genetics (as in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and Guillermo del Toro’s and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain series), computing (as in Robin Sloan’s Mr Penumbra’s 24- Hour Bookstore and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash), and astrophysics (as in Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy).
One field that has been surprisingly absent to date is conservation science and its ecological underpinnings. There are certainly stories with pro-nature themes—Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer uses the character of Deanna Wolfe to send the message that top carnivores should be treasured rather than hunted; Laline Paull’s The Bees takes a stand against pesticide use and the overdevelopment of urban spaces; EO Wilson’s Anthill is both a blatant indictment of destructive human activities and a rallying cry for conservationists.
These narratives, however, occur in our own, familiar world—unlike science fiction stories, which tend to plunge the reader into more unfamiliar settings by sending them off to the future, out into space, or onto an entirely different planet. There is something powerful about that total immersion, which can force readers to grapple with focal issues and ultimately lead to a more visceral response to, and connection with, the material. Surely this is exactly what is needed to generate a sense of urgency about the environment.
The potential of this technique is on full display in the work of Paolo Bacigalupi, who is best known for the Hugo Award-winning The Windup Girl (2009), The Locus Award-winning Ship Breaker (a young adult novel, 2010), and his most recent publication, The Water Knife (2015). Bacigalupi’s settings are dystopian, resulting from environmental degradation caused ultimately by human greed and an unwillingness to admit and respond to the reality of incipient environmental disasters.
The Windup Girl explores the impacts of sea-level rise, fossil fuel depletion, and misuse of biotechnology. Bacigalupi imagines the miserable weather conditions that would prevail in a much warmer 23rd Century, and the infrastructure that might be required to keep this hotter, wetter nature at bay. He explores possible alternative sources of energy and ponders the nearly nonstop deluge of disease we might face if we create a world filled with homogeneous agricultural crops and antibiotic-resistant diseases. Global warming and inundated coastlines are also a feature of Ship Breaker, which, among other things, questions what type of economy might arise when humans must revert to an almost Neolithic survival mode in the wake of extreme ecological disaster.
Bacigalupi’s most recent novel is set in an imagined future that is as dry as the others are wet. The Water Knife takes place in the American Southwest in a not-too-distant future when residents can survive only in “Arcologies”, which are apartment complexes that act as perfectly calibrated ecosystems carefully recycling and reusing that most precious of resources: water. The complex plot is based on the actual geological, hydrological, and climate conditions in the Colorado River basin, and considers the impacts of politics and policy on the environment—and vice versa. The arcologies that Bacigalupi describes may not be in existence today but are certainly the ultimate goal of the sort of sustainability architecture advocated by relief organisations such as the Building Research Establishment (BRE). Bacigalupi’s characters drink from “Clearsacs”, which filter urine so that it can safely be consumed as clean water—not dissimilar from actual technology that has been developed for American astronauts living on the International Space Station.
Each of these novels is primarily about people: what they believe, how they react to different situations, how they interact with each other, what they are capable of. These things can, of course, be explored in any fictional setting but are particularly poignant in the context of a hypothetical future ecological disaster because most readers will recognise that we are, in real life, standing on the brink of such a disaster right now. Bacigalupi’s descriptions— whether of an agricultural crop succumbing to a devastating pestilence, or a corporation greedily acquiring natural resources at any cost or of regular people refusing to help each other in times of crisis—are all too familiar. The books may be fiction, but they are, quite obviously, based on truths.
The horror of Bacigalupi’s imagined futures is strikingly well realised and is, therefore, both memorable and motivating. Within a few chapters, readers are likely to find themselves monitoring electricity and water use, rethinking what they buy in the produce aisle, appreciating the biodiversity outside their windows, donating to a conservation group. The worlds in which Bacigalupi’s fiction occurs are not places we ever want to find ourselves, and so it seems prudent to make better choices in our own world now. It doesn’t hurt that the stories have intricate plots, excellent pacing, and realistic characters; these features just draw the reader even further in and make the events of the books all the more compelling.
Conservation-minded authors should consider taking a page out of Bacigalupi’s book—no pun intended—in order to better help readers comprehend what scientists really mean when they raise warnings about environmental issues. Rather than talk about how many metres the sea level might rise, create a fictional world in which that has happened and think about what it would be like to live there. Instead of saying that invasive species are pushing out ecologically important natives, describe a future where invaluable ecosystem functions are missing and consider how humans might have to deal with the resulting stresses. When people are drawn in and can imagine themselves in those circumstances, the implications suddenly seem much more real—plus there is always the chance that a creative writer could come up with a solution that can be implemented in reality.
It may seem a bit far-fetched to suggest that literature could have a noticeable impact on public opinion and policy, but there are precedents. Zombie apocalypse stories such as The Walking Dead have sparked discussions about serious issues like morality and the meaning of civilisation, as well as prompting people to learn a few survival skills and stock up on canned goods “just in case”. As these stories have increasingly captivated the public imagination, zombie apocalypse scenarios have been run by public health officials practising for major disease outbreaks, and by epidemiologists modelling transmission patterns.
If authors created equally engrossing tales about environmental apocalypses, might that open more dialogues about the relationship between humans and nature, and perhaps lead to greater awareness and more eco-friendly behaviours? Could it help readers better visualise a world with harsher weather, fewer ecosystem services, and less natural beauty? Bacigalupi’s canon suggests the answers to these questions might just be “yes”. Writers, consider this your call-to-pens.
Agriculture and overexploitation of species continue to drive the decline of biodiversity, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The authors analyzed threats facing more than 8,000 near-threatened and threatened species listed on IUCN red list.
“Quantifying the relative prevalence of biodiversity threats is important because it can help guide discussions and resources towards the biggest threats,” says the lead author, Sean Maxwell of the University of Queensland, Australia, in an email.
Maxwell says the study was motivated by pure curiosity, “to actually quantify the relative prevalence of more traditional threats.” The team, comprising researchers from the University of Queensland, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the IUCN, found that three-quarters of the assessed species were threatened by over-exploitation such as hunting, logging and fishing at rates that cannot be met by reproduction or regrowth.
The Sumatran rhinoceros, Western gorilla, Chinese pangolin—three of more than 2,700 species— are hunted for their meat and body parts or for the pet trade; illegal logging is contributing to the decline of more than 4,000 forest-dependent species, such as the Bornean wren-babbler and the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey. Above sixty per cent of the species, the study says, are threatened by land converted to growing food, fodder, fuel crops, livestock, and aquaculture.
The species include Africa’s cheetah, Asia’s hairy-nosed otter, and South America’s huemul deer are among more than 2,300 species affected by livestock farming and aquaculture. Land-conversion for growing food, fodder or fuel crops is affecting species such as the Fresno kangaroo rat and the African wild dog, two among more than 4,600 species facing a similar threat. Human-induced climate change—whose effects include extreme temperatures, drought, flooding, and severe storms—is currently affecting less than 20 per cent of species listed as threatened or near-threatened.
Hooded seals-one among the 1,688 species affected by climate disruption-fell by 90% in abundance in the northeastern Atlantic Arctic, the result of warming and consequent melting of regional sea ice over the past few decades and the lack of availability of sites for resting and raising pups.
Maxwell says that he is surprised at the prevalence of threats from overexploitation and agricultural activity, “Demonstrating that 72% and 62% of near threatened and threatened species are impacted by overexploitation and agriculture means that we need serious action to minimise the impact of these activities if we are to tackle the biodiversity crisis.”
The paper, published a month before IUCN World Conservation Congress (1-10 September) in Hawaii, garnered great attention at the Congress, according to Thomas Brooks, a co-author of the analytical study and the head of science and knowledge at the IUCN. Brooks says, in an email, IUCN deliberated on the theme mentioned in the paper. He adds that two out of three themes discussed in the Members’ Assembly aligned with the most prevalent threats mentioned in the paper: “Conserving nature in the face of industrial agriculture”, “Preserving the health of the world’s oceans”, (which had a heavy focus on unsustainable fisheries) and the third theme, “building constituencies for nature”.
These themes also feature heavily in the new IUCN Programme 2017–2020, he adds and were dominant discussions in the Forum and the subject of much attention from the Resolutions process. Although it’s obviously very hard to tie a single specific publication to discussions and debates among more than 10,000 people over two weeks, Brooks says, his “overall impression is that the threats identified in the paper-based on analysis of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as the most prevalent ones facing biodiversity were indeed the issues that received the greatest discussion at the Congress, along with invasive species, given, in particular, that invasives are such a prevalent threat on islands like Hawaii.”
The most important outcome of the WCC is the establishment of a system for members to make pledges of what actions they intend to contribute to the overall IUCN One Programme 2017–2020,-the idea of operating IUCN’s Programme as a “One Programme” dates back to 2011.
“This is the first time that Members have been able to document their planned actions towards the Programme,” Brooks says. This innovation, he thinks, will be a great step forward in understanding the extent and impact of conservation in addressing threats to biodiversity, and thus what the gaps are and how they can be filled.
References Maxwell SL, RA Fuller, TM Brooks, JEM Watson. 2016. Biodiversity: The ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers, Nature (https://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-theravages-of-guns-nets-and-bulldozers-1.20381)
Discussion of issues of strategic importance for IUCN in the Members’ Assembly: https:// iucnworldconservationcongress.org/sites/default/files/ wcc-2016-1.2-1-annex_1-rev_1_draft_agenda.pdf
Of the 10,000+ known bird species in the world, only 3.5% have been documented to show colour polymorphism—a phenomenon in which individuals of the same species occur in two or more distinct colour patterns. However, this phenomenon, for reasons unknown, is much more common in birds of prey. And among birds of prey, the genus Accipiter is a standout example, in which around a quarter of about 50 species appear in two or more morphs. Why polymorphism is prevalent in birds of prey is still a puzzle to evolutionary biologists. Gareth Tate and colleagues decided to test one long-standing explanation—that different morphs have better hunting success under different light conditions. By setting up video cameras in nests, Gareth and the team were able to compare rates of prey brought back by black and white coloured male black sparrowhawks (Accipiter melanoleucus) at different times of the day. Their analysis revealed that black morphs were more successful in capturing prey in low light conditions while lighter morphs were more successful in brighter conditions.
The team also explored whether there is a relation between the frequency of black sparrowhawks’ morphs and seasonal variation in its range within South Africa. They found that, during the breeding season, the frequency of black morphs declines from more than 75% in the southwest to less than 20% in the northeast of the country. The southwest region of the country experiences cloudy wet winters, whereas winters in the northeast are clear and dry. In other words, dark morphs are predominant in areas with higher rainfall. Thus this study provides compelling evidence to show that polymorphic birds spread across large geographic landscapes are impacted by local light conditions in their ability to hunt and survive.
Reference: Tate GJ, JM Bishop and A Amar. 2016. Differential foraging success across a light level spectrum explains the maintenance and spatial structure of colour morphs in a polymorphic bird. Ecol Lett, 19: 679–686. doi:10.1111/ele.12606
Photographs: Gareth Tate, Doctoral candidate, Percy FirzPatrick, Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town
Cameras have long been a critical part of the conservationist’s toolkit. Both still and moving images have been used, among other things, to record the existence of new species (or those once so rare as to be considered extinct), document the appearance of species in new or unexpected habitats, capture evidence of interesting and unusual animal behaviours, and captivate audiences who might never have a chance to interact with wildlife in person.
Over the past few years, it has become progressively easier for nature enthusiasts to set up their own outdoor cameras in order to record footage of a variety of species. For less than £100, bird lovers can purchase nest boxes with hidden built-in cameras that will wirelessly stream footage of breeding activity to the owner’s computer. For a similar or slightly larger investment (usually around £125-£150), it is possible to acquire a trail cam that can be positioned at watering holes, feeding stations, and paths frequently used for animal commutes; these motion-sensitive devices are generally fitted with infrared lights to facilitate the collection of images of shy, nocturnal animals as well as more commonly seen diurnal species.
Luckily for those nature-lovers who lack technology of their own, there are a number of websites where it is possible to view footage—in many cases real-time streams—from cameras that have been set up around the world. A number of zoos and aquaria broadcast live feeds of animals in their collections, while nature preserves and conservation organisations provide films of animals living in the wild. Birds are perhaps the easiest and most common subjects, but mammals such as bats, wild cats, and ungulates are also frequently targeted.
Although some viewers find it difficult to watch the footage when things go “wrong”—nests are abandoned, individuals are injured in fights, a predator is seen dismembering its prey—the public has generally responded very positively to these behind-the-scenes glimpses into the daily routines of animals. This has been true even in the case of species that are not particularly attractive or popular. Case in point: the California condor, an impressively large (if not beautiful) bird whose online feed has captivated hundreds of thousands of viewers despite the species’ lack of obvious star quality.
The condor is one of many live-streamed animals whose video feeds were originally developed not for entertainment, but for the purpose of research and conservation. In the American state of Ohio, for example, trail cams have been used to document the return of apex predators such as bobcats and coyotes to a watershed that was once ravaged by mining activity; footage showing a female bobcat and her young kittens has suggested that the ecosystem is finally rebounding. Elsewhere in the state, a separate project uses the same technology to locate and eradicate invasive pigs that destroy the habitat.
As the technology improves, the devices will likely become smaller, more affordable, and more energy-efficient, with greater storage capacity and the ability to produce clearer images. Perhaps they will be coupled with audio and image recognition so computers can automatically analyze content, or be paired up with citizen science efforts so that viewers can collect rigorous data while watching footage for fun. There has been a similar trajectory in the realm of audio recording, which has led to, for example, the creation of publicly accessible databases of recordings and also free analytical software for lay enthusiasts. Comparable developments for film recordings could increase public interest even further and help even more people establish their own camera feeds.
Given the popularity of digital media in general and videos/video feeds in particular, live nature feeds are likely to continue multiplying, adding more species and habitats as time goes on. Cameras have come a long way since they were first invented in the 19th century, and this latest application is a powerful way to both bridge knowledge gaps and engages non-scientists. Although one day, video footage might be all that remains of many species, there is also every reason to hope that film technology could be a critical factor in collecting the data and promoting the attitudes needed to save threatened wildlife.
Case study: Interview with Supervisory Wildlife Biologist Joseph Brandt, from the Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) California Condor Recovery Program.
How did you first get the idea to install monitoring cams for your project? From 2001 through 2005, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) observed low reproductive success in condors nesting in California. Many of the condor nests were failing because parents were collecting small, coin-sized pieces of trash such as pieces of plastic, bottle caps, glass, and metal washers and bolts (collectively referred to as micro trash) and feeding these items to their chicks. Over time, this would lead to impaction in the digestive tract, causing the chicks to slowly starve, suffer from stunted growth, and eventually die.
The Service partnered with the Santa Barbara Zoo in 2007 to develop a nest management strategy that was meant to closely monitor nests and reduce nest failure by intervening when problems such as micro trash were observed. Nests were monitored by human observers for 30-40 hours each week, and once a month biologists would enter the nest to check on the egg or chick.
In 2010, a USFWS student biologist, Katie Chaplin, spent countless hours researching and learning how to set up Internet protocol (IP) cameras, wireless networks, and solar power systems in order to improve the condor program’s ability to monitor breeding activities and more quickly identify potential problems at the nests. Her work to develop the camera system was instigated by a condor nest that had failed despite being monitored and checked. She believed that cameras placed in nests would allow the team to better monitor the nesting behaviours and the development of the eggs/chicks. She was right.
After testing the system at a feeding site at Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in 2011, we installed the first nest camera in 2012 at the South Potrero nest. For the first time, biologists were able to closely watch and record condor nesting behaviour in the wild. Since that time, we have used cameras to monitor 11 of 35 condor nests. Six of the nests monitored with cameras have successfully fledged chicks (16 chicks in total-fledged during that time).
What unique benefits did the technology add to your project? Camera systems have provided us with a much more detailed and efficient way to monitor condor nests in the wild. Previously, biologists would spend hundreds of hours watching nests over the course of the breeding season, and they could only do this from hundreds of meters away using a scope. With the cameras, we have a record of all daylight hours at each nest; observers only watch for a few hours every few days and can quickly review footage at an increased frame rate in less than an hour. We also no longer need to disturb the birds at the nest by visiting in person. Ultimately, while it does take a lot of work to set the cameras up, we end up using a lot fewer resources—and recording much more detailed data— than when monitoring the nest directly in the field.
Thanks to our partnership with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the camera has also been an incredible outreach tool. We approached the Lab in 2013 with the hope of streaming one of our nest cameras live on their website (allaboutbirds.org/condors). This required some additional funds and the introduction of infrastructure capable of connecting the nest camera feed (in a remote site) to a location 20 miles away that had the capacity to upload the footage to the Internet. We were finally successful in 2015 when we were able to broadcast a live stream of a condor chick that was four months old. In 2016, we were able to start our live stream much earlier and viewers were able to watch a condor egg hatch in the wild; audiences have since been following the development of a condor chick that is now very close to taking its first flight.
Many hundreds of thousands have now had the opportunity to observe condors as they nest and interact with their young. It has been incredible to see people’s reactions change as they begin to develop a connection with condors. Being North America’s largest vulture (and largest land birds), condors might not be the easiest on the eyes, but they make up for their looks with comical and endearing personalities.
Do you have plans to continue using this technology? We will continue to use cameras for monitoring nests and as an outreach tool. We may try using different styles of cameras and power systems to improve our view of the nests. We also may use IP cameras to help us with other types of monitoring; for example, cameras could be used to observe the behaviours of captive-reared condors that are held in our flight for a time before they are released into the wild. We have also advocated for the use of nest cameras at other condor release sites. Additionally, we have been able to provide technical advice to other researchers and conservationists who have approached us in the hopes of setting up cameras to monitor other bird species, such as white pelicans, seabirds, grasshopper sparrows, and golden eagles.
What are the greatest conservation benefits of using camera technology? The work that we are doing proves that camera technologies can be used as a tool for endangered species management. The remote and less intrusive form of monitoring that cameras allow could be used in a variety of applications to better understand specific threats to particular individuals, species, or habitats. In terms of our particular project, the footage we collect is influencing condor management decisions in real-time.
It has allowed us to prevent nest failure in a number of ways. We have rapidly detected egg predation such that we were able to substitute a missing egg with a captive-laid egg so that the wild nest could continue. Cameras have also allowed condor chicks that were treated for injuries to remain in the nest rather than be held captive since the cameras allow us to monitor their recovery closely. For example, we had a chick with a broken bone in its foot; a consulting veterinarian could inspect our footage remotely rather than disturbing the chick and/ or taking it into captivity.
Nest cams aside, what else should people know about the condor project? While we are managing nests to increase the number of condors produced by the wild population, the leading impediment to recovery in condors is mortality from lead poisoning. Condors are exposed to lead by ingesting the remains of animals that have been shot with lead ammunition. We are doing a lot of work to educate the hunting and ranching communities about the impacts of lead ammunition and how making the switch to a non-lead alternative can provide an uncontaminated food source to condors and other scavenger species.
For more information about those efforts, please see hunting with nonlead.org, a website managed by our partners at the Institute for Wildlife Studies. We also are reaching out to schools with award-winning curriculum called Condor Kids (condorkids. net). We will soon be rolling out an educational tablet-based game called Condor Country (condorcountrygame.com). Both target youth who might not otherwise be exposed to conservation efforts such as the California Condor Recovery Program, with the goal of connecting them to the natural world and teaching them about the importance of endangered species conservation. While the condor program has many partners, The Santa Barbara Zoo has partnered with us on these educational projects, our Facebook page (Condor Cave), and the condor field program in Southern California.
We also produce a comprehensive annual report of our condor field program, and this is available online athttps://www.fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Region_8/ NWRS/Zone_1/Hopper_Mountain_Complex/Hopper_ Mountain/Sections/What_We_Do/Conservation/ PDFs/2015_Annual_HMNWRC_Condor_Field_ Report_Final_24AUG2016.pdf
By its very name, anthropology tends to restrict itself to the study of humans. But in the early 2000s, anthropologist Piers Locke found himself questioning that constraint while conducting fieldwork for his PhD, which dealt with the lives and practises of elephant handlers in Nepal.
“I suddenly realized that it’s not just the humans that are my informants,” explains Locke, who is now faculty at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. The training of an elephant involves active participation on all sides: the human and the nonhuman must get to know each other during this process, forming a bond that may last decades. In Locke’s terms, elephant training is a “multi-species rite of passage.” To focus on just one half of this process is to miss the actual picture—and yet there is a clear practical challenge to focusing on both halves. Anthropologists are not trained to work with or think about animals. How do you begin to perform ethnographic research on a subject whose language you do not speak?
One step that Locke took was to fully immerse himself in the process by which trainers themselves get to know young elephants. Over the course of his PhD research, Locke served an apprenticeship with elephant handlers at the Khorsor Elephant Breeding Center in Chitwan, Nepal. In anthropology, such immersion is called “active participant observation.” Anthropologists recognise that they are always a participant in that which they study: as in the case of Schrödinger’s proverbial cat, there is no way to fully decouple one’s data from the act of observing that data. To actively participate in observation, then, is to accept and control one’s participant role, while seeking a fuller comprehension of the object of study.
Such an approach may seem alien to an ecologist. In ecology, as with all of science, the invisible wall between (human) researcher and (non-human) observed is held to be almost sacred. Scientists are trained to detach, to efface themselves and their own subjectivities from the research that they do. It wasn’t so long ago that Jane Goodall was criticised just for naming her chimpanzee subjects. But to go beyond that, and attribute to animals their own agency, histories, and emotions is to step far outside the traditional bounds of the subject. Ecology, as a discipline, is largely lacking in the vocabulary to speak about the inter-species relationships that Piers Locke saw in Nepal, just as anthropology grasps for the right tools of study when it comes to personal interactions that involve the non-human.
The present “animal turn” across the social sciences and humanities attempts to address this particular disciplinary blind spot — as does the rising body of work in animal behaviour studies that looks at nonhuman culture and cognition. But Locke points out that the paucity of academic precedent in examining how humans and nature intertwine is no accident. This gap goes back to the historical divide between the natural and social sciences, which itself says something about how we conceive of humanity. As a species, we tend to view ourselves as transcendent above the natural world. The Enlightenment ideal of “civilisation” places, as its opposite, the primordial soup from which we rose, along with the entire animal kingdom.
But we live right now in the so-called Anthropocene, where our culpability as a species in the dismal state of the natural world far outweighs our ability to rectify the damage or outrun its effects. As boundaries between nature and civilization break down, Locke points out that we need to be blurring disciplinary borders as well.
“, you’ve got all these increasingly specialised people who don’t understand how to talk to each other,” Locke explains. “And yet all the real-world problems—climate change, disasters, how humans and elephants share environments— require the kind of expertise that traverses .”
A desire to foster conversations about human-elephant coexistence across academic specialities brought an unlikely assortment of people—including Locke and his graduate student, Paul Keil—to a conference on the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus in Bangalore, on a series of sun-burnt days in April 2016. The School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London, has held many cross-disciplinary animal-themed conferences in past years (revolving around the camel, the donkey and the war horse), but the conference held by SOAS and hosted by the Centre for Ecological Sciences at IISc was the first to deal with the elephant. The SOAS conference spanned a wide swathe of topics: from the need to take elephant individuality into account in Gudalur’s crisis-level human-elephant conflict situation (by Tarsh Thekaekara of the Shola Trust) to how mammoths once migrated the globe in response to a changing environment (by Régis Debruyne of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris). Each talk was an act of translation: Debruyne diagrammed phylogenetics for the non-biologists in the audience, while Rachel Dwyer of SOAS defined the concept of umwelt—a German word adopted here to describe one’s personal experience of the world. In this case, Dwyer referred to the challenge of understanding the parallel world that is viewed through an elephant’s eyes. But given that it can be an impossible task even to understand the umwelt of another human being, how do we come close to knowing the world of an elephant?
Sitting over coffee on the morning after the conference, Piers Locke and his graduate student, Paul Keil, talked about the idea of how to know someone else’s world: how to translate between long-divided disciplines, and what changes when you view an animal as a person. Locke has coined the term “ethnoelephantology” as an umbrella term for the interdisciplinary conversation he hopes for, borrowing a page from ethnoprimatology. The term echoes both ethnography and ethology, two disciplines that Locke says have much to learn from each other.
One could argue that the word ethnoelephantology represents an objectively impossible task. As described above, ethnography and ethology have deep philosophical differences that are difficult to reconcile. And viewing animals as people runs the real risk of anthropomorphism: instead of describing an animal’s point of view, we might just be reflecting our own.
Phanit bathing his elephant without getting wet
But more than natural scientists, researchers in the social sciences and humanities are trained to think deeply about words and metaphors as entities in themselves. Word choice matters, because words both shape and reflect thought. How you label a problem decides how you approach it. Thus, for Locke and Keil, ethnoelephantology represents not an endpoint where widely divergent disciplinary methodologies and philosophies are evened out, but a dialogue. Likewise, introducing the word umwelt into animal studies is an invitation to a question: how do our stories and our methods change when we see animals as thoughtful, biased beings? Paul Keil’s research out of Macquarie University in Australia deals with elephant trails in Assam. The rugged terrain of Assam comes under a region that some scholars have called Zomia—a geographically contiguous area across the mountains of Southeast Asia, from China to Nepal to Burma.
Political scientist James Scott argues, in The Art of Not Being Governed, that Zomia has managed to stay marginally autonomous until the present day because of its inhospitable geography that only locals know how to traverse. What Keil’s work builds upon is the theory that the human world of this isolated realm was shaped by elephants. People followed in the footsteps of elephants, who physically broke trails through the forests.
And what difference does it make to see these migrating elephants as thinking beings? Keil says that this mindset allows him to push back against anthropocentrism. In Assam, wild elephants live in the midst of human turmoil. “I like to think – are creating their own worlds, their own pockets?” he says. “Are there places that humans can’t go because elephants go there?”
Locke echoes this concept by saying we need to view elephants as “world-makers” alongside humans. For example, in 2013, Locke worked with Charles Santiapillai and Shanmugasundaram Wijeyamohan, researchers at Rajarata University in Sri Lanka, who were developing new methods to resolve human-elephant conflict. The village that they focused on was under a huge amount of stress at that time. “ weren’t getting any sleep, they were being harassed by elephants,” says Locke.
But what was vital here wasn’t just to examine the present crisis but also its historical context, and what that context said about how both sides of the dispute related to this particular landscape. The villagers revealed that they had been absent from the village for 17 years, displaced three times by war. They returned at last to land that had been taken over by elephants. Or, as Locke puts it: “A nonhuman person was thinking of their land as home.”
The solution that Santiapillai and Wijeyamohan came up with was novel. Rather than penning the elephants inside sanctuaries with electric fences (which elephants can learn to circumvent in any case), they put the fences around the people. In addition, the fences were solar-powered and built such that locals could easily fix them and shift them around. “ can expand if their crops expand,” explains Locke. “They can move it in. It’s easy to manage. If it’s easy to manage, it can work. So far, the results are encouraging.”
”Locke points out that the tools of anthropology can also help conservationists work with local communities, in the case of participatory conservation efforts. Ecology students have approached him in the past with the problem that they could not get locals to answer their questionnaires when they needed to gather data about ecological issues. What these researchers really needed, Locke says, was formal training in ethnographic methods. With such training, they would learn that “you need to build relationships of trust and rapport with people before you can start asking questions.” And much closer relationships with people might tell you, for instance, that clipboards and questionnaires can be intimidating for some. “They might associate with government, and they may have a problematic relationship with government,” says Locke. Both Locke and Keil feel that conservation biology could benefit from engaging with the social scientific approach to human communities. “As anthropologists, we give a lot of privilege and gravity to histories and culture,” says Keil.
And yet that empathetic engagement has the potential to go too far, once transferred from the human to the animal. It can be too easy to cross the thin line between accepting that animals have an inner world, and assuming we know what that world must be. “That’s why we need the biological sciences as well, who make concerted efforts to try and detach themselves,” says Keil. “We need the biological sciences to keep us in check.”
It can be difficult to stimulate such cross-talk between disciplines. But one prerequisite, says Locke, is the willingness on all sides to step back and examine disciplinary assumptions and limitations. Only with that deeper understanding of where we stand can we reach out to others and find common ground. This includes researchers across the academic spectrum engaging with the philosophy and history of science: from Karl Popper’s formulation of falsifiability as a driver of scientific progress to Thomas Kuhn’s notion that scientific evolution occurs through paradigm shifts, to Bruno Latour on the social construction of scientific knowledge. “How do we know what we know?” says Locke. “How do we conduct research? What kinds of claims to the status of knowledge do we make?”
The solution that Santiapillai and Wijeyamohan came up with was novel. Rather than penning the elephants inside sanctuaries with electric fences (which elephants can learn to circumvent in any case), they put the fences around the people.
The SOAS elephant conference was the second gathering thus far to fall under the umbrella of ethnoelephantology. The conference followed a symposium along similar lines held at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 2013. The result of that symposium was a book titled Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia, edited by Piers Locke and Jane Buckingham, which will come out in September 2016.
“ is trying to suggest that greater interdisciplinary collaboration can provide new perspectives and policy approaches to dealing with all the dilemmas of elephant conflict and coexistence,” says Locke.
With the current need for better dialogue between the social and natural sciences about human-elephant coexistence, Locke hopes that these two conferences will inspire something much deeper than “a trendy term.” The disciplinary gap where human meets nature could provide us with a new window into troubling environmental times, by recentring our vision of a world in which humanity is only one small part.”
I am actually a sea turtle biologist. I stumbled upon the shark finning issue in 1997, when I was studying the impact of long line fishing on sea turtles. Seeing such a magnificent predator reduced to a finless chunk of meat that gets thrown overboard made me realize the magnitude of the over-fishing problem, the same over fishing problem that is extirpating leather back sea turtles from the Eastern Tropical Pacific.
Shark finning is the horrific practice of catching a shark, hacking off the valuable fins and discarding the body at sea. The inhumane and wasteful shark fin industry expanded on a global scale in the 1980s, fueled by an insatiable demand for shark fin soup, a highly paid delicacy in Asian markets, as well as expanding high seas fishing fleets that target tuna, mahi mahi, and billfish. Sharks are considered bycatch in these fisheries, but are retained for their valuable fins. Some estimate that up to 100 million sharks per year are extracted to supply the shark fin soup industry. The largely unregulated shark fin trade represents one of the most serious threats to shark populations worldwide.
A simple policy to avoid shark finning is to mandate the landing of the shark with the fins attached. The policy was first passed in Costa Rica in 2005, and is now followed by most fishing nations. Asian nations, notably China and Taiwan, have banned shark finning, but use a “fins to body weight ratio” system that is complicated and difficult to implement, facilitating the circumvention of the regulation. Attempts were made by Taiwanese fleets in Costa Rica to land sharks with the fins “tied back on” or “attached to spines”, but the State Attorney has made it clear that the correct interpretation of “fins attached” is “fins naturally attached.”
With a global shark population depletion of 90% over the last 50 years, it is without question that stopping shark finning is of the utmost importance. However, a “fins attached” policy doesn’t address the overfishing problem, nor does it do anything to promote the recovery of shark populations. What sharks need now is for their mortality to be significantly reduced. This may be a challenge, particularly in fisheries where other valuable species are also depleted and shark meat is sold and consumed in domestic markets. Nations such as Costa Rica for instance, consume 2000 tons of shark meat per year. How are we going to save the sharks if we are eating them?
What fisheries managers should keep in mind is that it is NOT a shark problem, it´s an overfishing problem with ecosystem impacts. Sea turtles, sea birds and rays are among the collateral damage. Some species, such as leatherback sea turtles, are now Critically Endangered in the Pacific due in part to the high mortality associated with fisheries operations in the high seas. The only way to help the ecosystem is to implement seasonal and spatial closures when fisheries cease to operate. Mono specific solutions for ecosystem problems just aren’t going to do the job.
I have focused my work on reducing fishing effort, by producing science and attempting to curtail fisheries using various approaches, by closures in critical habitats, creation of marine protected areas, strict protection for certain species, and influencing fisheries policy in domestic courts and international forums (conventions). At the end of the day, it’s not better science that will save sharks, turtles, and other marine endangered species, it will be policy based on that science, and that directly leads to fewer of these animals getting killed.
Forecasting the future with a miniature marine marvel – the implications of climate change for the 99%.
The Earth’s oceans are getting warmer. For example, over the past century, the sea surface temperature (SST) of the Western Indian Ocean has increased by 1.2° C. This is the fastest rate of any region in the tropical oceans. Warming in this region also has implications more broadly. Due to its influence on the circulation of the Asian monsoon and the occurrence of El Niño events, this area has the largest impact of any single region on global mean SST. This link with El Niño is a subject to which we will return later.
The warming of the Earth’s seas is causing many to question what the effects are likely to be for biodiversity in our oceans. However, this is something that is very difficult to measure. The marine ecosystem is enormously complex. Oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface, represent 99% of our planet’s living space and contain literally billions of species. Trying to gauge the impacts of increasing temperature on this myriad of diverse life-forms and species communities is a huge challenge.
However, recent research suggests that, as is so often the case, looking to some of our planet’s tiniest species may provide answers to some of our biggest challenges. Marine phytoplankton is measured in micrometres (μm, one micrometre = 1 millionth of a meter). However, these minute life-forms are the foundation of marine foodweb and are responsible for 50% of global primary productivity, of which diatoms (photosynthesizing algae) are responsible for about two thirds. The energy they produce is a fundamental building block on which much of our marine (and terrestrial) biodiversity depends. Therefore, establishing the ability of diatoms to respond to increasing temperatures will provide valuable information, which in turn will enable us to predict how marine biodiversity is likely to fair if the ocean’s temperatures continue to rise.
The problem is that we currently know almost nothing about the capacity of diatoms for evolutionary adaption in general, let alone in response to changes in temperature. To observe evolutionary adaptation as the water gets warmer, those diatoms that can cope with higher temperatures must be given time to pass those enabling genes on to subsequent generations, while those that cannot are filtered out of the population. This means a (theoretically) temporary dip in the number of circulating diatoms, followed by a resurgence as the temperature resilient genes become widespread and the reproductive success of diatoms generally increases. Finding how many generations it takes diatoms to complete this process under different levels of warming is a critical first step in establishing how quickly diatoms may be adapting to temperature changes in our oceans. Scientists from the Ecological Responses to Climate Change research group at the University of Exeter are investigating this question. Preliminary results from experiments in the lab suggest that diatoms are capable of adapting relatively quickly (within 100 generations, which takes 6 weeks to 2 months) to a relatively moderate 4° C increase in temperature. However, when temperatures rise by ° C, adaptation is much slower, taking 1 ½ years, which is too long in the real world as they would be out-competed by other more adaptable organisms, which do not fulfil the same producer role within the marine food web.
The next question is what are the implications of these results for the future abundance of phytoplankton under the various projections for further temperature increases we could see in the years, decades and centuries to come? As we said earlier, the SST of the western tropical Indian Ocean has increased by 1.2° C over the past century. Based on projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if emissions continue at their current level, global temperatures could rise by 3.7° C to 4.8° C by the end of the current century. However, this is a global average, and as we have seen, the Western Indian Ocean is (a) warming particularly quickly, (b) has a particularly large impact on global mean SST and (c) is of particular importance to marine food webs due to its high biological productivity. So, given the rates at which we now know diatoms can adapt to temperature increases of a magnitude towards the upper end of the IPCC’s projections, this suggests there may be cause for concern.
Researchers from various research groups have been exploring the substance of these concerns in the wild and over longer time-frames by combining two strands of data. The first looks at phytoplankton abundance over the relatively recent past. When there is a high concentration of these tiny algae, they form such dense aggregations that they actually colour the water green. Comparing satellite images of the sea surface taken over the past 16 years, scientists found a 30% decrease in phytoplankton abundance in the Indian Ocean over this period. The second data strand uses computer modelling techniques to explore phytoplankton abundance over the longer term.
Their models suggest that the recent decline revealed by the satellite images is part of a longer trend, and the phytoplankton have declined by 20% over the past 60 years. This is dramatic, and we are already observing effects further up the food chain. In the last 5 decades, tuna catch rates have declined 50–90% in the Indian Ocean, in part due to over-fishing, but also likely confounded by lower levels of primary productivity in the seas in which they live. This is just one example, but it is hardly a good sign. What is more, the patterns of warming are not just bad news for life in our planet’s oceans. Firstly, the productivity of the world’s oceans spills out onto land. We need only think of the bounties we and other species harvest from the seas. Secondly, there are also significant implications for global weather patterns. Here we return to El Niño.
These events occur when temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean increase above a particular threshold, and this heat radiates out into the atmosphere. The Indian Ocean is particularly important in this process, as circular currents cause heat to accumulate, and this region is therefore believed to be playing a major role in the increasing global mean SST, and in the occurrence of extreme weather events such as El Niño. Over recent decades, El Niño events have become more frequent. Meanwhile, 2016 saw the highest temperature ever recorded in India, 51° C in Phalodi, Rajasthan. The India Meteorological Department has cited the current El Niño as the major factor behind India’s record-breaking hot summer, so the increasing regularity of El Niño events suggests that such temperature peaks may also become more common. This story really is hotting up.
The 3.7° C to 4.8° C temperature rise projected by the IPCC is based on a scenario where emissions continue at their current level. So there is hope. Governments around the world are beginning to take steps to limit future emissions, and the climate talks in Paris at the end of 2015 resulted in the first truly global agreement on targets, with this target in mind. One hundred ninety-five countries signed a legally binding commitment to “(hold) the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2° C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5° C”. So now, in theory, ‘all’ that is required is for the governments of those 195 countries to take the steps they have agreed (and in many cases going beyond them) to achieve those ambitious targets. Yes, we know, we can hear your laughter from here. But hold on a second. We would suggest that it is down to every one of us to hold our governments to account. Through campaigning, exercising our democratic rights and making our voices heard in any way we can, to make sure that their promises aren’t broken. A combination of realistic targets, carrots for those who achieve the goals and sticks for those who do not. The diatoms are doing their part. It’s time for us to do ours.
References: Roxy et al. 2015. Indian Ocean warming—the bigger picture. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 96, 7, 1070-1071. Chassot et al. 2010. Global marine primary production constrains fisheries catches, Ecol. Lett., 13(4), 495–505. Roxy et al. 2015.
A reduction in marine primary productivity driven by rapid warming over the tropical Indian Ocean. Geophys Res Lett., 43. Myers & Worm. 2003. Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities, Nature, 423(6937), 280–283. Polacheck. 2006.
Tuna longline catch rates in the Indian Ocean: Did industrial fishing result in a 90% rapid decline in the abundance of large predatory species? Mar. Policy, 30(5), 470–482.
Amitav Ghosh is a highly acclaimed Indian writer and is celebrated for his contributions to Indian writing in English. In 2007, the Government of India honoured Ghosh with a Padma Shri; in 2012, the Sahitya Akademi awarded him the Tagore Prize for his work, Sea of Poppies. Some of his notable works include The Ibis Trilogy, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Hungry Tide and The Glass Palace. In his latest endeavour, ‘The Great Derangement’ Ghosh discusses the apparent indifference to climate change in popular culture and the general public failure to recognize the gravity of the phenomenon.
Kartik Shanker: It’s not that writers, like Melville whom you’ve mentioned, but also Hemingway and Ken Kesey in America, and Tim Winton in Australia have not written about the ‘raw and elemental power’ of nature. Nature does have agency in much of that genre. And yet, even that literature has failed to acknowledge climate change as part of the everyday. Why do you think that is?
Amitav Ghosh: I think the problem lies in part with the word ‘Nature’ itself. This is a word or concept that comes into being during the Enlightenment and all sorts of dualisms are written into it: it has come to signify the opposite of the human. But this is an absurdity of course because humans are in every sense a part of the continuum of living things. This was acknowledged by cultures the world over until the Nature/Culture dualism was invented. But now science too tells us that bacteria and other organisms constitute a large part of the human body; we know that even our mental states are related to our intestinal flora. I think we will never be able to integrate our surroundings into our everyday consciousness if we continue to use the word ‘Nature’.
KS: I was delighted that you started with a scene from ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, my first and easily the favourite of the Star Wars series. But even setting sci-fi films apart, do you think that movies are a more dynamic medium and accommodating of an experiment than books? And if yes, it seems surprising that even movies deal with climate change only in the realm of improbability –like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 for example.
AV: It cannot be denied that the visual media have been more responsive to climate change than literary fiction. And the reason for this may well be that improbable events are easier to convey in images. And the disturbing thing is that some of those events do not seem as improbable now as they once did. The thermohaline patterns in the North Atlantic are already changing in ways that may have very serious consequences for the Earth system.
KS: You are right that Hutton and Lyell’s idea of a steady-state (versus directional change) in geological processes and constancy of natural laws has influenced much subsequent thought from Darwin to the present. Are you suggesting that climate change challenges the notion itself, or merely that we have been so transfixed by it that we are unable to comprehend climate change and its consequences as a new constant in our lives?
AG: I think climate change (or what some call the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene) challenges all our prevalent assumptions – not just those that relate to the workings of the world around us but also our ways of thinking about history and society. Indeed the ideas that it challenges most directly are those that have become dominant over the last couple of centuries.
KS:You write about your visit to Nicobar. One of our field assistants, Agu, a Karen boy was at our sea turtle monitoring camp in Galathea in Great Nicobar (his story is narrated in CC 3.1). The morning of the tsunami, he and several researchers (one of ours and some visitors from Pune) were at the beach, and when the tide receded in an abnormal fashion, he was the only one who thought there was any danger. The others were taking photographs. The long and short of it is that when the tsunami hit, they all died, and Agu survived after 9 days adrift at sea. Do you think that the disappearance from various narrative forms of the extraordinary, the improbable (except in the realm of the fantastic and then we don’t take it seriously) has made us collectively more vulnerable?
AG: It often happens nowadays that people start taking pictures and selfies in situations of danger. It is as if they had become so accustomed to virtual reality that they cannot believe that real dangers exist. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder about my encounter with the tornado of 1978. Were it to happen today would my response be to film it on my phone or to run from it, as I did?
KS:Ironically, significant parts of the environmental (and conservation) movement have been driven by the same capitalist (and neo-liberal) approaches that powered the development model that has caused this crisis. Is a ‘neo-Gandhian’ delinking necessary (and possible) for a solution?
AG: It is tempting to pin the blame on neo-liberalism but I don’t think the connection really holds up. There are many factors other than ideology that are responsible for creating the global dependence on the carbon economy. For example, the dominance of the US dollar is closely tied to its position in the petroleum market – decarbonization would therefore be a grave threat to the current economic order and this is no doubt one of the reasons why there is so much foot-dragging about it in the US. But it’s important to note that the linkage was brought about long before neo-liberalism. Similarly, neo-liberalism was preceded by other ideologies that were similarly extractive and resource-intensive. The 19th-century ideology of ‘Free Trade’ is a good example. In general, I think one must be careful about ascribing primacy to any one ideology for this (or any other) crisis – if not, one runs the risk of conceiving history as being moved primarily by ideas. In other words, one risks producing an idealist (or spiritualist) reading of history.
Fisheries provide a hugely important source of food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people around the world. As the global population grows, this source of food and livelihoods will become even more important but world fisheries production has already peaked.
Aquaculture has increased and will continue to do so, but projected aquaculture growth will not easily cover the gap between supply and demand for seafood. Making the best we can of this situation means taking better care of our coasts and oceans. Fishing and mariculture industries are limited by the environmental damage they cause as well as the other damage from human activities, particularly pollution and coastal development. Ecologists and biologists have detailed the problems caused by ocean acidification from excess carbon in the atmosphere, the massive amounts of plastic suspended throughout the water column in the world’s oceans, dead zones, overfishing, problems caused by runoff and chemicals used in aquaculture and so on.
Enabling our marine environments to be as productive as possible requires persuading humans to cause less damage. Moreover, policies to protect the environment should be equitable in their treatment of the people impacted and align with economic development and other government policies. So the understanding of society is clearly central to the conservation of marine and coastal environments.
Public administration thus requires understanding the humans as well as the non-humans in ecological systems. However, the knowledge we base resource management and conservation policy upon is mostly biological and to a lesser extent economic. Other disciplines have largely not been used to inform marine conservation and resource management policies. In addition, with a lack of reliable knowledge about how particular environmental policies will affect people, politicians and bureaucrats in decision-making roles have settled for policy directions based on the available knowledge plus their best guesses. With an insufficient evidence base, it is also possibly easier for them to choose the path that suits their ideological bent – or that which seems most politically expedient.
Since the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report, Our Common Future, sustainability has been an important policy principle internationally. Since the 1990s it has been widely accepted that sustainability rests equally on three pillars: environmental, economic and social. Yet governments and researchers have struggled with how to bring together the disparate knowledge about the human and non-human elements of the environment. At first, a common response was to have standalone environmental, social and economic impact assessments. However, it is hard to bring reports done independently and with different disciplinary perspectives together into a coherent policy vision. So usually the biological or the economic (or the politically expedient) route was taken, and the social was more or less ignored. Understandings of social aspects of sustainability are much less well explored than biological or economic aspects of sustainability. There have been fewer researchers working in the social sustainability area and fewer established methods for working out what are the social aspects of sustainability and how to evaluate them.
Problems with the lack of understanding about the social aspects of sustainability have emerged. Fisheries policies such as individual transferable quotas that seem to protect the environment better and to make fisheries more economically viable have vocal opponents because they tend to drive out small operators and consolidate fisheries into the hands of a few large companies. Small-scale fisheries make up the social fabric of many coastal communities around the world. There has been a strong push to find policies that foster small-scale fisheries because of the food security and livelihood benefits they bring coastal communities, especially for the tens of millions of poorer people in less wealthy countries.
Some, including fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, argue that small-scale fisheries are environmentally and economically better than large-scale industrial fisheries. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2015 released a set of International Guidelines on Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries. Small-scale fisheries can be a particular challenge to regulate since they are often informal. It is often not feasible to consider monitoring the fishery and enforcing regulations through the usual fisheries methods of keeping records of catches and having fishing vessels registered and licensed. To try to better understand the most effective ways to manage fisheries in terms of conservation as well as food production and economic and social development, researchers have been working in recent years to develop cross-disciplinary, integrated knowledge about the human and nonhuman elements of marine and coastal ecosystems.
One approach that has been tried is to have teams of scientists with different skills – ecologists, economists, social scientists – work with fishing communities to map out their varied concerns and interests in the local marine environment. Through this process, it is possible to work out how different conservation policies would impact stakeholders differently – both economically and socially. Having people involved in the process also helps them understand the trade-offs involved in conservation policy choices, which is another big social challenge for conservation. Inevitably some people will feel disadvantaged by conservation measures, but if they see the overall benefits and thus accept the measures as legitimate and so comply with them the policy is much more likely to succeed.
On the other hand, people often do not accept that conservation measures are on the whole beneficial so they ignore them or agitate politically until the measures are weakened or reversed. This problem has arisen again and again for protected marine areas internationally. Participatory and deeply collaborative approaches between the people affected, socially aware researchers and policymakers are really important for securing effective conservation. Projects along these lines have been conducted in East Africa involving researchers in a group called Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation, and also for the Ningaloo reef off northern Western Australia by scientists from the CSIRO (Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization).
Another really important way to improve understanding of the social aspects of conservation is to conduct a gender analysis. Fisheries have tended to be particularly blind to gendered issues affecting operations because of preconceptions that ‘fishing’ occurs on fishing vessels, which are often predominantly male environments. Many reports worldwide have countered this by pointing out that gleaning in the intertidal zone, often conducted by women, is also really important ecologically in terms of the total amount of animals and plants taken from the environment, and socially in terms of food and livelihoods.
Emerging researcher Dr Danika Kleiber, who is both an ecologist and a gender studies scholar, has highlighted this really convincingly regarding fisheries in the Philippines. When we look beyond actual fishing, moreover, to the whole social context that shapes and enables fishing, the roles of women and the influences of gender relations become really clear. In recent years, the World Fish Centre has in some of its programs taken a gender-aware approach to work with communities for sustainable fisheries and aquaculture development. They have done this through revising their methods for working with communities so as to encourage men and women to enable women’s perspectives to be included in decision-making about the usage of resources. Without a gender-aware approach attempts at community development can miss the mark, since they may result in increased workloads for women, possibly exacerbate problems of violence against women, and increased incomes may not end up benefiting women – and therefore not amount to ‘development’ for half the population. Gender awareness is crucial for the social aspects of sustainability.
The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is being used increasingly in social measurement and planning, including in fisheries management and conservation. Wellbeing is a rounded idea of how individuals or communities are tracking against development goals or how they respond to a change in policy. Building on decades of ‘quality of life’ research that showed deficiencies in simply looking at income levels or assets, this approach recognizes that to have well being involves intangible aspects as well as tangible ones. So in measuring wellbeing it is important to look at the combined elements of material well-being (including incomes, assets and also health status and so on), relational well-being (how well important relationships function to support people, within their communities but also outside to politicians and other powerful people who affect their lives), and subjective wellbeing (how people feel about their lives). Well-being can be used to address the social aspects of conservation policy in various ways. It can be used to track social impacts, by measuring the baseline wellbeing of a community before a policy is introduced and then again afterwards. It can also be used as a framework for setting social and economic goals as part of a conservation policy. For example, in implementing conservation measures, there could be indicators set for biological goals to achieve and also social and economic goals related to sustainability, or to alternative livelihoods if fishing is reduced. These could be measured through employment and income levels, levels of life satisfaction and evaluation of how well social relationships are supporting people in fishing communities.
The whole process of initiating and implementing conservation policy can also be studied as a social process with the aim of finding out how to do it better. The idea of ‘interactive governance’ has been used to gain an overview of the reasons people fish the way they do, and why they respond as they do to conservation measures. Some of the things to consider in the governance of marine resources include diversity, complexity, dynamics and scale. The more diverse and complex and the larger the scale of a fishery the more difficult it can be to govern well. The dynamics are the different human and non-human processes that drive the fishery, such as high market demand, or climate change. A governance analysis involves looking at the policy instruments of governments to see how well they fit the fishery. It is also important to consider what mode of governance best suits the social conditions of a particular fishery. Will self-management be effective for conservation, or is government intervention needed? With government management, will hierarchical top-down methods work well, or does that result in subversion and resistance by fishers? Can collaborative co-management between government and fishers be achieved, and if so how? The socio-economic development context of each fishery affects the possibilities for different modes of governance. How well resourced is the fisheries agency? Do fishing people have feasible access to alternative livelihoods if fishing is restricted for conservation purposes? Are there sufficient financial and other business support services available for fishers to enable them to make the best value from the seafood they catch?
Or are they limited to low-value options through factors such as lack of livelihood skills to explore different business models, and local infrastructure for processing and transport of perishable seafood? Marine ecologies without humans are complex and once we add humans they become even more difficult to understand and steer in sustainable directions. But we have no choice. To manage marine ecologies simply through working out what is best for the non-human elements, making some rules based on that and trying to get humans to stick to those rules has not worked. Humans have their own concerns and drivers in interacting with marine ecologies, and effectively influencing humans to be less damaging to the marine environment means understanding and engaging with those concerns and drivers. It’s a ‘big ask’ to expect single researchers to be able to grasp all the varied human and nonhuman elements of marine ecologies for the purpose of conserving them better. The job requires teams of researchers with different skills to work together. In recent years, groups of researchers in different places around the world have started making exciting progress in this direction. Let’s hope more researchers decide to join this messy and difficult but important field of study so that it can snowball and help turn the tide towards more sustainable use of marine environments.
The Great Derangement- Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh ISBN-13: 978-0670089130 Penguin Books limited
Amitav Ghosh’s new non-fiction work – the Great Derangement – Climate Change and the Unthinkable, is a tour de force. Written lucidly and forcefully, it does not shy away from stating what many of us know to be true, in our hearts and minds, about the greatest catastrophe to face us all as individuals and as societies. For me personally, both as a writer and as a wealthy person with the associated responsibility of that wealth, it brought both clarity and nuance to many half-baked thoughts and conversations on climate change, and personal and societal responses that I have had over the years. I hope this book will spur renewed and reframed discourse around the globe.
Ghosh uses this slim offering – which is a knitting together of four lectures he gave in the fall of 2015, to make a call to action. The primary actors are to be writers of serious literary fiction. He argues that the climate crisis is a crisis of culture and thus of the imagination. When future generations look back, he writes, they will believe that our time was one “when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight.” And that’s why this era will be known as the Great Derangement.
Ghosh traces the history of the modern novel and compares its journey with those forces of empire and capitalism that drew us into the vortex of the climate crisis. Just at a time when Nature was making her voice heard in the shape of uncanny extreme events – storms and floods and earthquakes, the modern novel was receding into the quotidian and the predictable. As the vast improbable unfolded around us, most writers drew us tighter into ever smaller circles of individual mindscapes, reducing and concealing the reality of larger landscapes. Eventually, all writing about the unknown and the unknowable has been banished into the exiles of ‘fantasy’ or ‘science fiction’.
Ghosh repeatedly makes the point that global warming is a collective predicament that requires cooperative action, but that humanity is in the thrall of a culture where the collective has been exiled from literature but also from politics and economics. He urges, then a “way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped.” So that Nature may not script an epitaph, writers must wake up. “… To think about the world only as it amounts to a formula for collective suicide. We need, rather, to envision what it might be.”
There are many rich threads that Ghosh weaves into this tapestry. He asks bold new questions. Did imperialism actually retard climate change by preventing the colonies from expanding their economies? Since security establishments of powerful modern nation-states recognise that the climate crisis will alter the global distribution of power, is the status quo the real plan? Has the resurgence of Asia bared its own complicity and silences? He also presents a piquant moral poser. Are some of our most treasured ideas about political virtue such as “Be the change you want to see?” completely inadequate? For all Gandhi’s personal austerity, and even though he embodied the consumption patterns that would get carbon emissions down, he could not succeed in preventing India from embracing the path of consumption-led growth. For all Al Gore’s single-minded championing of the cause of greenhouse gas emissions control, his personal lifestyle has been relatively lavish, and media has unleashed detailed descriptions of his personal swimming pool and energy consumption. Ghosh rightly argues that neither individual can be blamed. In fact, by focusing on Gore’s lifestyle rather than his message, we give the climate deniers the exact diversionary tactic they need. Both Gandhi and Gore have forever etched in the public consciousness the discourse on consumption, growth and the consequences for the planet. But no individual can be held responsible for curating the path forward. This requires new forms of governance both at the community level and at the global level. Ghosh sadly does not suggest how these will emerge, but then his focus is mainly on nudging fiction writers to spur such imagination.
Amitav Ghosh brings some of these questions to a climax by then comparing two important documents of the past year – the Paris Agreement and the Laudato Si’ of Pope Francis. One continues with the derangement. “The very syntax is an expression of faith in the sovereignty of Man and his ability to shape the future.” The other acknowledges “how profoundly humanity has lost its way and of the limits that circumscribe human agency” and reminds us that Man is spirit and will but also Nature.
Ghosh concludes on a note of optimism mixed with irony. He hopes that religious groupings joined with popular movements for equity and justice will halt the momentum of destruction. And he explores the irony that “the ever-shrinking time horizon of climate change” will isolate and thereby preserve the culture of communities in some parts of the world. It will be the communities who have retained their healthy respect for nature’s might, their material skills, their relationship to the land and to their people, who will survive best. And poetic justice will be done.
Prose will have to follow. Ghosh ends on a rather romantic note. A new generation will be born, will transcend the isolation of the Derangement and create the new forms of art and literature that will reimagine the Anthropocene. Quills on the ready, anyone?
If 2015 broke all global temperature records, it is unlikely to hold on to that dubious achievement for long. We are currently in the thrall of the hottest pre-monsoon since we have had accurate data, and 2016 will, almost certainly, redefine the charts. For many ecosystems, this is going to be a banner year as species and assemblages struggle to cope with the suite of abnormal conditions that come in the wake of these increased temperatures. And for tropical coral reefs, 2016 is going to mark a watershed unlike any before. Already, large swathes of the Great Barrier Reef have succumbed to the largest coral bleaching event ever recorded, and many reefs in the Pacific are dead in the wake of increased sea surface temperatures. It is disconcerting to note that it is some of the most remote and healthy patches that seem to be directly in the line of fire. In our own backwaters, ocean temperatures are soaring, and we have begun to see early signs of corals turning pale and dying. The full extent of this damage will only become clear by the end of the year.
What is certain is that the way tropical coral reefs respond to these temperature conditions will set them on trajectories that may be very difficult to reverse. In other tropical reefs that have already succumbed to these catastrophic changes, piecing the ecosystem back together is proving much more difficult than it was to take it apart. The scars that this year will leave on coral reefs will stay with us for decades – if they heal at all. And while the rapid unravelling of these spectacular ecosystems would be an ecological tragedy, the consequences of this for the millions of marginalized people who depend either directly or indirectly on the reef for their day-to-day existence would be nothing short of disastrous. The cruel mismatch of global forces and local influences will be felt most acutely by the coastal communities least equipped to deal with these changes. Clearly, a lot rides on understanding the responses of coral reefs to global catastrophic events. Yet reefs are complex systems, and they respond in complex ways. It will require us to grapple with that complexity before we can understand and manage them with any degree of success.
Coral reef responses to climate change Corals are Pre-Cambrian invertebrates whose success as the primary structuring agents of their ecosystems is hinged on the strong symbiotic association they have developed with unicellular algae called zooxanthellae. Housed in the soft tissue of the coral, these algae photosynthesize light and produce sugars and other compounds that constitute the bulk of the nutritive requirements for the host coral and help remove toxic wastes from the coral tissues. This interaction has allowed corals to successfully colonize warm, shallow and clear waters across the tropics, forming extensive reef structures of aragonite that hug coastlines, fringe islands or form ancient atolls over submerged volcanoes. The astoundingly complex architecture of the reef is home to a host of plants and animals, making reefs among the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.
The relationship between coral and its zooxanthellae is a fussy one; under conditions of stress (including elevated temperatures), the coral can no longer sustain the algae and they are expelled into the water column. This results in the corals losing their characteristic colours, bleaching completely white. If waters cool down fast enough corals can sometimes regain the zooxanthallae and recover, but if sea temperatures keep rising, corals remain bleached, becoming physically weaker and more susceptible to disease, eventually dying.
While many reefs typically show some amount of bleaching as summer heats up, in El Niño years, sea surface temperatures rise way beyond seasonal averages, causing widespread coral mortality. Simply put, an El Niño develops when Pacific trade winds fail and the warm waters that are normally restricted to the west coast of South America spread across the oceans, raising ocean temperatures way above normal levels. One of the consequences of manmade climate change is that El Niño cycles are becoming increasingly unpredictable, frequent and intense. In India, at least two major El Niños have affected our reefs – in 1998 and in 2010 – resulting in mortalities of coral that ranged from 20% to nearly 90% in some regions. With this huge die-off of coral, the entire assemblage of species dependent on coral and the complex architecture it forms also declined considerably.
Bleaching episodes, such as the 2010 bleaching of the reefs of the Andaman Islands, can quickly change splendid colourful live reefs into vast swathes of limestone debris. (Vardhan Patankar)
The 2016 El Niño is gearing up to be even more intense than these earlier events but it is far from certain how Indian reefs will stand up to this onslaught. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is that corals themselves have differential susceptibilities to increased temperatures and some corals are better equipped to deal with high temperatures than others. It turns out that the symbiotic zooxanthellae are not a single taxonomic unit and have several separate clades, some of which are able to weather stress much better. In the run up to an ocean warming event, it has been demonstrated that some corals have a remarkable ability to adjust the composition of their zooxanthallae, replacing more susceptible clades with hardier ones.
This in turn appears to be dependent on local environmental conditions: corals in enclosed environments (where water temperatures usually vary considerably through the year) appear better adapted than corals in environments where temperatures don’t vary as much. In mountainous areas, the slopes themselves may protectively shade reefs making them cooler and less prone to ultraviolet radiation. High concentrations of suspended sediments and decomposed litter from mangroves – which in normal circumstances can be a serious problem for reefs – can also provide some protection against ultraviolet radiation, reducing the impacts of bleaching. Local current systems and cool upwellings may also serve to make some areas naturally cooler, thus reducing the impact of sea surface temperature increases. Apart from all these physiological, geographical and oceanographic factors, local weather conditions – cloudy days, rainfall, and high wave conditions – can all act together to influence how corals on reefs respond to ocean warming events.
Given the constellation of factors that together determine reef responses, the best we can do is to make considered guesses based on what we know of our reef systems. The systems we know best are the oceanic islands, where we have been working over the last two decades. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are characterized by some of the most diverse reef systems in India. They form extensive fringing reefs which line the coasts of most of these islands. In addition, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have a large submerged barrier reef, of which very little is known. A combination of high current flows between the labyrinth of islands, high sediment levels and organic content, and mountainous shading provides some amount of natural protection to these reef systems. While the 1998 El Niño devastated many other reef areas in India and the world, the Andaman and Nicobar reefs escaped relatively unscathed.
Fresh coral recruitment depends on the presence of a healthy population of herbivores such as the urchins (in the foreground) and the availability of stable substrates to settle on.
However, the 2010 bleaching affected several reefs across the archipelago leaving large areas dead – from which they are slowly recovering. In sharp contrast, the oceanic atolls of the Lakshadweep have none of these locally protecting mechanisms. Being low-lying islands surrounded by clear, nutrient-poor waters, these reefs declined dramatically after the 1998 event. It took at least a decade for these reefs to recover, only to be affected once more by the 2010 temperature anomaly. Recovery from this second event has been limping at best, and our most recent surveys in April 2016 is showing that even this little recovery is likely to be set back once again if anomalous temperatures do not abate. Thus, while the jury is still out on the Andaman and Nicobar reefs, the Lakshadweep reefs look primed for another mass die-off that it can barely afford.
What factors drive reef recovery after these events? Amidst this rather grim picture, what hope do we have for these reefs recovering? From what we are discovering from the reefs of the Lakshadweep and the Andaman and Nicobar, the ability of reefs to recover depends on a coming together of several factors. All recovery is going to be essentially limited by larval supply – baby corals that get carried around in the water column to colonize the dead reef. To have an adequate pool of recruits requires that at least a few healthy and reproductively viable adult coral patches (a refuge of sorts) survive the bleaching and that these patches produce large enough numbers of larvae that can swim and colonize dead reef patches. Even when larvae are not limiting, finding a good substrate to settle on can be an enormous challenge. Dead reefs can get very rapidly taken over by macroalgae or thick turf, both of which can inhibit and outcompete any newly settling larvae. Herbivore fish and invertebrates such as the urchins play a critical role here: their constant browsing and scraping mow down these algae, ensuring that substrates are kept clean for these larvae to settle upon. After they settle these corals still have to grow, and we are finding that the stability of the underlying substrate can make all the difference in determining how easily they take hold on the reef. Coral larvae settling on unstable substrates may grow for a few years but can then be lost to a single storm event. As the coral grows the population of other coral-destroying species like crown-of-thorns starfish can also limit reef recovery. Keeping these species in check requires a healthy population of predatory fish. This then is the recipe for a relatively quick recovery: a large dose of coral larvae, settling on structurally stable, algal-free substrates with low corallivores or coral eroders. Getting these factors to line up would ensure that our reef systems are as prepared as they can be to deal with the inevitable surprises that climate change is going to throw their way.
This is where local management can make all the difference. Ensuring that fish populations (both herbivores and top predators) remain healthy depends a lot on local levels of exploitation and regulation; making sure that local fishers do not drive fish communities to decline is a critical part of maximizing reef resilience. Herbivore numbers in both the Andaman and Nicobar as well as the Lakshadweep islands are still relatively high: in both systems a targeted reef fishery has not yet begun, focusing on parrotfish and surgeonfish – the key herbivores in these reefs. Hook-and-line fishing in the Andamans however is affecting populations of long-lived predators like groupers and sharks, and this could have unforeseen consequences for the species they normally keep in check. From what we know, many of these long-lived predator species are highly dependent on structurally stable reefs, making them particularly vulnerable to even low levels of fishing pressure especially when reefs are changing so rapidly.
Moving forward Climate change is now the new villain on the block, on whom we can conveniently pin all environmental crimes. A key prerequisite to any meaningful management intervention is to be able to disentangle the impacts of climate change from the rest. Easier said than done; managing coral reef ecosystems is a complex challenge with a unique, unsteady balance of science, politics, and economics. Millions of marginalized, economically backward people of the world depend on these ecosystems to eke out a living. Hence, solutions demand a nuanced approach that can balance the needs of these millions, while addressing global and local threats.
Pale reefs on the Lakshadweep atolls indicating temperature-induced stress – recent surveys indicate that the reefs are on the verge of bleaching
However, we are not the only ones going through a reef crisis; reefs of several countries have been affected by multiple catastrophes in the recent past. A 2009 study predicted the local extinction of many reefs in the next 50 years. This could seriously hinder the ecosystem services they provide us with. However, a few recent studies suggest that understanding and managing local processes e.g. local hydrodynamics, ecological and physical factors, fishing pressure, could play an important role in facilitating the recovery of coral reefs. Studies have shown that some coral species have learned to adapt, switching to algal types that can tolerate warmer waters.
Although global warming may respect no management boundaries, this does not necessarily mean that management can do nothing about it. While international climate politics and negotiations are crucial in addressing issues of human-made global warming, we need to invest as much, if not more, effort and resources in understanding local processes and dynamics. More than two decades of observation and research is showing that the capacity of reefs to resist and subsequently recover from these events can be strongly influenced by local management decisions. From both island systems, we are learning that global climate change makes it MORE important, not less, to pay attention to local anthropogenic factors. It is this nuanced understanding of local factors that can give us a way beyond the easy nothing-can be-done, attitude. Although we may not have a complete understanding of how to live with the global change, we do know that local actions make a difference to reef ecosystems as a whole and they do so across the entire spectrum of local human impacts and oceanographic conditions where reefs occur. By recognizing that coral reefs and our societies are inherently coupled, we can evolve better strategies to manage them, that are ecologically sound, as well as socially and economically equitable.
Photographs: Rohan Arthur, Vardhan Patankar and Naveen Namboothri
Animal lovers come in different flavours. Consider the conservationist. Her love is targeted at the collective – a species or population that needs protection from extinction. But not all species are equal in her eyes, not all worthy of her attention. She chooses wild over domestic. Rare over common. Native over exotic. Contrast her with the animal rights activist. His attention is focused on the individual animal, his love governed by a single principle – no animal shall be harmed or killed. An all-encompassing love, without exception. At this point, if you are thinking “two sides of the same coin”, think again, for there is no love lost between these animal lovers. Their fault-line is killing. The conservationist will not hesitate to kill one kind of animal to protect another. But killing of any animal is anathema to the activist. And he will do whatever it takes to prevent it.
Take the example of Rob Puddicombe- bus driver and animal rights activist(1). In the early 2000s, the US park service decided to eradicate black rats from Anacapa – an island near Santa Barbara, California – by spraying rat poison from a helicopter. The rats are believed to have colonised the island in 1853, while escaping from a sinking steamer. The park service’s justification for eradication was that the rats were decimating the island’s population of Xantus’ murrelet – a small native seabird – by eating their eggs. But Rob wouldn’t have any of it. To him, rat and murrelet were equal. Along with a friend, he sailed from Santa Barbara to Anacapa and furtively spread food pellets mixed with Vitamin K all over the island. Vitamin K was an antidote to the rat poison. Unfortunately for Rob, he and his friend were spotted, arrested and put on trial – probably the only people ever tried for the crime of rat feeding. Though Rob was found “not guilty” on account of insufficient evidence, his attempt to save the rats failed and Anacapa was soon rat-free.
T.C. Boyle’s 2011 novel “When the Killing’s Done” is inspired by the Anacapa incident and other face-offs between the park service and activists in the Channel islands. Boyle takes these incidents and constructs a gripping drama around them involving two characters. Alma Boyd Takesue, a biologist with the National Parks service, wants to rid the islands of introduced invasive species – animals and plants both – to help protect the native species, who, she believes, are the islands’ only legitimate residents. Standing in her way, always, is Dave LaJoy (inspired by Rob Puddicombe) – owner of a home entertainment store chain, wealthy and with time on his hand, who has found his life’s calling in the protection of animals. All animals. The story is told in two parts, each centred around a battle between Alma and Dave. The first is based on the Anacapa incident I described earlier. In the second, the action shifts to Santa Cruz, and involves feral pigs, golden eagles, bald eagles, sheep, dwarf foxes and skunks – I will let you read the book to figure out how the fates of these animals are intertwined.
But the book is more than its central plot. Boyle explores the inconsistencies and contradictions that characterise our personal relationships with animals. Take Dave. He is an animal rights activist for whom “the loss of a single animal…is intolerable, inhumane and just plain wrong”. But he is okay with animals killing other animals. And he feeds cat kibble to the rats. He doesn’t wear leather, rescues greyhounds from racetracks, and doesn’t eat “meat”. But he eats dairy, eggs and fish. And traps raccoons that ruin his newly-laid lawn. But he doesn’t kill them; just moves them elsewhere. Or take Alma. She is convinced that invasive animals need to be eradicated, but it still saddens her to see a dead feral pig, gladdens her to see a pair of rescued racing greyhounds (till she realises they are Dave’s) and is moved to act when she encounters a beached seal pup. Like Dave, she too is a lacto-ovo-pescatarian. When her car runs over a grey squirrel, emotional response and ecological knowledge collide in her head – should she stop and help this poor animal in pain, which is common in its range and at no risk of extinction, and risk being late for a meeting that will determine the fate of numerous species? It is these ironic moments that are, for me, the book’s highlights. In the end, if you are an “animal lover” yourself, you will enjoy the book just for the animals it contains. Here is a sampling to whet your appetite: rat, murrelet, pig, eagle (golden and bald), sheep, fox, skunk, raccoon, snake (rattle- and tree), flying fish, raven, squirrel, sea urchin, shark, scorpion, seal, Angora cat, albatross, aphid, bat, cricket, damselfly, dolphin, frog, gecko, goat, mule, whale, turkey, greyhound, egg, bacon, calamari and sushi.
Josh Donlan is the founding director of Advanced Conservation Strategies, a non-profit organisation that aims to promote novel solutions and ventures, based on solid science, to solve conservation problems. From 2002 to 2006 he served as Chief Scientist on Project Isabela in the Galapagos islands, a bold conservation intervention to rid islands of feral goats that were decimating the natural vegetation. Hari Sridhar spoke to Josh Donlan to find out more about Project Isabela and the animal rights and welfare issues surrounding invasive species eradication on islands.
Hari Sridhar: To begin, can you tell the reader what invasive species are and why they are particularly problematic on islands? Josh Donlan: Before worrying about whether a species is invasive – which necessarily means it is highly interactive with other species — we need to first answer the question: is it native or exotic? Defining non-native species can often be not straightforward and somewhat complex depending on your view of ecological history. In some cases, it is very clear that a species is non-native, such as rats and cats on islands, because very few islands have an ecological history of mammals. In other areas, especially in continental areas, it can be more complicated or grey. Take horses in North America. Most people view horses in North America as non-native, but actually, horses evolved in North America and then radiated out and later went extinct in North America. So, the horses that are in North America today are very similar genetically, and probably ecologically, to the horses that were present here 10,000 years ago. Therefore, whether or not you consider horses ‘non-native’ depends on what your baseline is. On islands, more often than not, it is easier to tell whether a species is non-native because their ecological histories are clearer. For me the first step is always this, to see whether a species is native or not, independent of its impact. Whether it is invasive or not, and what we do about that, is the next step.
HS: Please tell us a little about the history of “Project Isabela” and how you got involved in it. JD: The history of this project is quite long. It began in the late 1990s when a group of experts got together for a workshop in Galapagos to brainstorm on what to do about feral goats. These goats had been on the Galapagos archipelago for a long time – over 100 years – and had recently moved from southern Isabela into northern Isabela island and were having significant impacts on the ecosystem there. At that time, the largest island from which goats had been removed was about 17,000 hectares. Isabela is over 500,000 hectares. If you had asked the average conservationist working on islands and invasive species at that time, he would have probably said it would be impossible to remove goats from such a large area, given the current best practices and success to date for invasive species management on islands. The result of that workshop was that the participants concluded it might be possible to do this using new techniques largely developed in New Zealand and Australia. Next began a long process of fundraising, strategy development, and capacity-building to launch Project Isabela, whose main goal was to first remove goats from Santiago Island, which was around 60,000 hectares and then moving on to Isabela island. My role was of Chief Scientist, working with the practitioners to collect all sorts of data on the eradication process itself — information that could be used to develop methodologies to make eradications more cost-effective. We also collected data to understand, from a biodiversity perspective, both the impacts and the benefits of removing goats from these islands. Project Isabela was successful and a game-changer for the eradication of feral goats and other invasive herbivores from islands. Today, these mega eradications are increasingly common.
HS: What was the problem with the goats? JD: The goats were clearly having major direct and indirect impacts on the ecosystem. The Galapagos Islands have no history of native mammalian herbivores. The goats, through their grazing and browsing, were changing the plant community structure and in some cases leading to local extinctions of plant species, they preferred to feed on. These direct impacts, in turn, had indirect impacts such as altering hydrology patterns and reducing numbers of tortoises, which are the main herbivores and keystone species on the island. After the goats were removed, we have been able to document the positive impacts. For example, the Galapagos rail (Laterallus spilonota), which is endemic to the Galapagos, was thought to be extinct on Santiago island due to the impacts of goats and pigs. Through the use of surveys using an audio playback system, we were able to repeat rail surveys conducted in the mid-1980s. Estimated densities had increased by over an order of magnitude, largely due to vegetation recovery. The benefits of invasive species eradication on the Galapagos Islands have been documented on other islands for other species as well.
HS: Right from the beginning, was it clear that removing goats was the only way to deal with this problem? Were other ways of tackling the problem considered? JD: Certainly other possibilities were discussed, such as control programmes. But it was felt that over the long term the best strategy and certainly the most cost-effective and low-risk strategy was complete removal. Having said that, there still are, as far as I am aware, small numbers of goats that are connected with the local communities on southern Isabela island. So the long-term strategy is to have ‘Judas goats’ out on the island as a biosecurity measure to help manage the risk of reintroduction or reinvasion.
HS: What are ‘Judas goats’? JD: ‘Judas goats’ were originally developed in New Zealand. Project Isabela took Judas goats to the next level, in terms of developing them as a conservation tool for invasive species management. With the proper resources, it turns out it is relatively easy to remove 90% of a feral population, but it tends to be really expensive and really hard to remove the last animals. To give you a real-world example – in Santiago island, around 79000 goats were removed from the island in 4.5 years spending USD 6.1 million. Removing the last 100 goats cost USD 2 million and took almost two years! The last animals are extremely difficult and expensive to remove. Judas goats are a technique to deal with this problem. You capture live goats, radio-collar them and put them out on the landscape to take advantage of the social biology of goats, i.e. other goats are drawn to the collared goat and vice versa. You go find your Judas goats with a helicopter and remove all the goats around them. In our case, we had around 400 Judas goats all across the island, at the same time for a year, to remove the last animals.
HS: Was there opposition of any kind to your proposal to remove the goats? JD: It was definitely controversial. Unlike eradication projects in the US, Europe and New Zealand, the controversy wasn’t so much from an animal-rights or animal welfare perspective. It was mainly opposition from people who were using the goats, e.g. some fishermen claimed that they used the goats on fishing camps, occasionally hunting them. So there was some community opposition with respect to access and use. It turns out that these benefits are probably relatively minor compared to, what could be argued were, the societal benefits of goat removal. But it certainly was controversial, and it is complex on Galapagos because there is a long history of controversy and conflict between the communities and the national parks, mostly around fishing permits. This conflict tends to impact all sorts of management actions by the National Park. So Project Isabela became part of the larger controversy that is long-standing between communities and government agencies that are managing the park.
HS: But wasn’t there any opposition on grounds of animal rights and welfare? JD: No, there wasn’t. It is somewhat surprising given the fact that it was the largest eradication project in the world at that time and still is one of the largest eradication projects. But we did not experience any opposition from animal rights or welfare groups, unlike other invasive species eradication projects I have been part of in the US, which have often gone to court.
HS: For a naïve observer this might seem like a somewhat strange situation – killing thousands of a ‘semi-wild’ species to safeguard another wild species. What would you say to such an observer? JD: That’s one of the main questions that often comes up around this fairly aggressive conservation action of invasive species eradication. My view largely comes down to values and what kind of world do you want to live in. Do you want to live in a world that’s dominated by a few species that are the same everywhere you go – rats and dandelions and goats – or do you want to live in a world where there’s diversity and different species in different places? If you look at the big picture, we are seeing this global homogenisation of biodiversity – if I go to California or the Mediterranean or the west coast of Australia I see the exact same weed species. It is pretty striking. And more so on islands. Islands have been disproportionately impacted by invasive species for a variety of reasons. So the question really is what do we value more? On an island, do we value a rat that exists in lots and lots of places or a bird species that’s on the verge of going extinct, that breeds only on three or four islands in the world? In my view, that’s what often justifies this aggressive action of invasive species eradication.
HS: You mention that in other eradication programmes in the US and Australia/New Zealand there has been opposition, even court battles, on animal rights/ welfare grounds. Can you tell us more about that? JD: You can probably divide the opposition into two different issues – one is a straightforward animal rights and welfare issue. Rats have rights and they deserve to exist on this island whether they are native or not, and whether they are having species and ecosystem impacts or not. These groups are just ethically against killing any animal which is, in my view, problematic since animals die (and kill) all the time. The other issue is around safety. For example, the best practice for removing rodents are toxicants – rodenticides that are often broadcast over an entire island by helicopter. There can be short-term impacts on non-target species. And, in situations like New Zealand, there are often long-term programmes that are using toxicants. So there have been concerns and oppositions around potential impacts beyond the target species. This is a justified concern. And in fact, a lot of effort is being spent on developing practices that are as safe as possible and that mitigate any impacts on non-target impacts. Also, educating the public, not only on the short term impacts but also the long-term conservation benefit is important. It’s a pretty complicated situation and a challenge to communicate that to the public and to the policymakers. In my view, invasive species eradication should be viewed from a cost-benefit perspective. Often, the benefits outweigh the costs.
HS: Does opposition along animal rights/welfare lines usually come from organisations or from the local people? JD: From both. Depends on the context of the species that you are eradicating and the techniques you are using. I find that, as long as we are safely eradicating a species and we frame it in the big picture, we often end up convincing people of the value of invasive species eradication. I’ll give you an example. There is an island called Guadalupe where Layson albatrosses (Phoebastria immutabilis) were being decimated by feral cats. A female albatross, with a chick on the nest, would go off on a feeding trip–flying tens of thousands of kilometres up to Alaska-to find food for its chick. It returns, feeds its chick, and makes the long journey again. Then, one day, the chick is killed by a feral cat. In such a situation, who is one to say that the cat has priority over the albatross? That’s why the animal rights argument is problematic, because it’s relative. In my view, it is easier to make the argument that Layson albatrosses are more important than cats, in this case, because cats are more widespread. So I think the real debate, the more useful debate, should be about whether we are conducting these eradications in a safe way, and whether the benefits outweigh the costs. However, you are never going to convince everybody.
HS: I notice you have been involved in the eradication of many different invasive animals – cats, rats, pigs, donkeys, beavers, goats etc. Does eradication become more of a challenge in the case of animals that humans share a strong bond with? For example, is rat eradication easier than cat eradication? JD: On average I would say yes. You don’t often see people rallying in the defence of rats – although it has happened in the US – in comparison to cats, which people keep as pets. And the island conservation community is finding itself having to deal with such issues more and more. As we have got better and better at removing invasive species from islands, we are taking on larger and larger islands. What this means is that we are now dealing with islands that are human-inhabited. This adds a complex social layer – whether its pets, livestock, or a perceived or real risk to humans. Practitioners are having to deal with this human angle more and more, and are starting to do the social science and education to engage stakeholders, both on and away from the island, in order to get support for the eradication. This is all the more important in a place like India where you have a very different culture around animals and wide prevalence of vegetarianism. So we really need to tailor our strategy based on the species and the place.
HS: Does it also matter whether the invasive species is wild or domestic? For example, the Chital (Axis axis) is considered invasive in the Andaman islands in India, but it is also found wild in forests in mainland India. JD: My view is that it raises a major challenge in communication. The general public doesn’t necessarily appreciate ecological history or whether a species is native or exotic. In India, people have heard about and seen wild Chital (Axis axis) in forests on the Indian mainland but they might not be aware that they never existed on Andaman island and might be bad for the ecosystem. I think it definitely raises a lot of social challenges, as well as policy challenges. We are increasingly seeing situations like this where practitioners are trying to navigate those challenges.
HS: Do you also take into consideration the positive impacts that invasive species might have on the ecosystem?
JD: In my view, it all comes down to ecological history. If you take any typical oceanic island, chances are it has never had a native mammal. So it’s hard to make an argument that a non-native mammal will be having positive impacts on the ecosystem, whether it’s in terms of species interactions, biodiversity, or some ecosystem service. But there are exceptions. For example, there is a small Hawaiian island where an endemic goose called the Nene (Branta sandvicensis) went extinct. Now, conservation practitioners are using tortoises as an ecological substitute, in an experimental way to see if the tortoises can browse on the vegetation like the Nene did. So that’s a situation where they are hypothesising that the tortoise –a non-native species – can act as an ecological proxy for the extinct Nene and that it will have a “positive impact” on the ecosystem. A similar situation comes up with goat eradication. There are some striking examples where practitioners have removed goats from islands and you see this explosion of weedy plants. So now, in the last decade, practitioners have started to take more of an ecosystem approach to invasive species eradication by conducting invasive plant control operations at the same time as the goat eradication.
HS: Now, in the programmes you are involved in, do you reach out to animal rights groups and other stakeholders right from the beginning? Do you also run outreach programmes to explain to people why you are doing what you are doing? JD: Certainly best practices have improved over the past decade or so. Nowadays, when conservation groups are planning eradication programmes one of the things they do first is to engage with groups that might have issues with the eradication or oppose the project. What a lot of people don’t realise is that, in eradication programmes, the actual eradication – getting rid of rodents is a perfect example –might take one day with a helicopter. But in order to drop poison from a helicopter in one day, you are probably going to spend a year or two planning, getting permits, working with policy-makers, and getting all the stakeholders on board. So the planning and getting permits is usually the bulk of the work, compared to the actual on-the-ground eradication. And that’s becoming increasingly the case because practitioners are starting to tackle these very complex eradications. Andaman Islands are a good example. The Andaman Islands are amazingly complex, not only because of social, political, and cultural factors, but also because there is a big city on the island. Not to mention, indigenous groups living in isolation nearby. This is not to say that the removal of invasive species would be easy, but the big challenge is the people. It is a people problem.
HS: Since you have visited Andaman and seen : Since you have visited Andaman and seen the problem first-hand, what is your view on the Chital issue? Do you think that the solution there too lies in eradication? JD: From my limited experience in my trip over there, my view is, at the minimum, there is limited evidence suggesting that the species is having a negative impact on the ecosystem. We know that it’s non-native. And that there is a whole suite of other non-native species that are likely having an impact. So the next obvious step is to commission a feasibility study that will objectively look at the available data – scientific as well as social – and try to make a roadmap for a cost-benefit analysis to explore a whole portfolio of potential management interventions, of which eradication will only be one. I think it is probably premature to say we should eradicate them, without doing the homework and looking at each of the management interventions that are possible The purpose of my trip there was to help start this long process and try to educate the stakeholders on what is possible. Technically, based on what has been done elsewhere, removing Chital from the Andaman islands is probably technically feasible. But whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and whether it is feasible from a policy and social perspective are unanswered questions.
HS: I have one final question. The motivation to remove invasive species is because we see them as man-made changes. What we are trying to do is move the system back to what we see as more natural or pristine. But one could argue that humans today are part of the planet’s natural system and eradication is just replacing one human-induced change with another. How do you decide where to draw the line? How far back in history does one go to consider something natural? JD: Obviously, that’s a very complex question. In terms of how we decide, I guess my initial reaction would be that it is above my pay grade! I don’t make that decision. But, in general, I think it comes back to what I said earlier – it is asking what kind of world we want to live in. What is natural and unnatural is a loaded question, and we can argue about it forever. Instead, I would ask myself, or the people I am talking to, about these complex issues – what type of world do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a world filled with rats and dandelions, or do you want to live in a world where there are all these cool endemic lizards on Andaman islands, even if you may never see them? Does that add value to your life? We know we are increasingly living in a world of rats and dandelions. Are these aggressive, and often controversial, conservation actions justified in order to maintain some of the biodiversity around the world? In my view, it is. As long as we can do it safely. And, as long as we are transparent about it. I think that’s a simpler view than trying to say what is natural and what is unnatural. And like I said at the beginning, ecological history can provide a kind of a roadmap to where we want to go.
Australia has the largest wild horse herd in the world. There are, likely, more than 400,000 wild horses (and millions of wild donkeys) spread across nearly all landscape types of the continent, from snow-covered ranges to tropical savanna to desert. These horses are generally known as ‘brumbies’, and are free-ranging, descended from domesticated horses either escaped or released into the wild by their owners. Horses were imported into Australia with what is known as the ‘First Fleet’ – the initial group of British colonisers landing in Sydney Cove, in 1788 with orders to establish a British colony. The British brought with them a microcosm of the Old World: animals, plants, social and labour practices, and intellectual structures – all transplanted into the very different context of the ecosystems of the island continent. The first century and a half of settlement were founded on the importance of animals – sheep and cattle pastoralism – with horses essential to these herding activities as stock and draught animals and bred for strength and endurance in Australia’s harsh conditions.
These characteristics were valuable when armies needed cavalry mounts. Hundreds of thousands of Australian horses, known as ‘Walers’ (from the state of New South Wales), were supplied to armies all over the world, from the 1830s to the 1940s. India, too, has a part in this story, as Australian horse breeders sent Walers to the British Indian Army and to allied armies in India, in both the First and Second World Wars. Some sources suggest more than 80,000 Australian horses were sent to India. The import of Australian Walers into British India had negative impacts on India’s own horse breeds, particularly the famed Marwari warhorses of the Rathore Rajputs in northwest India. Marwari horses were celebrated for centuries as renowned and revered cavalry mounts, and Marwar lancers fought under the British during the First World War. But the British occupiers preferred other horses, including Walers, and tried to eliminate Marwari and other horses they considered inferior ‘native breeds.’
Humans have, at least, a 6000-year association with horses, and there are similar deep cultural connections in many communities and countries all over the world. The horse’s role in Australia’s exploration, colonization, pastoralism and warfare, as well as in recreational riding and racing, has given it an iconic position in Australian society. There are over a million horses in Australia, including the brumbies, and the horse racing industry alone is a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
But the wild horse occupies a challenging and problematic position in Australian landscapes: cultural icon of settler, rural and Aboriginal histories, but potentially damaging to ecosystems. A species that joined humans in domestication, but then re-established wild and independent populations (in several countries ’feral’ horses are caught and re-domesticated for sale as riding mounts). The horse’s cultural charisma is strong: they are daylight animals, form easily understood social groups, and are large and beautiful. They are also often remarkably easy to approach in free-ranging situations, appearing curious and open to human interaction. Many Australians highly value the sight of wild horses galloping across snow-covered mountainsides, but conservation managers contend that these hard-hooved animals have negative impacts on native wildlife and therefore should have no place in local ecosystems.
Like Australia, the United States, Canada and New Zealand too, have significant wild horse herds, and their presence and management is consistently controversial. Ironically, horses are also part of ‘re-wilding’ efforts in other countries, including in Europe, being re-introduced to landscapes that once supported ancestral wild horse breeds.
In contemporary debates about conservation, judgements about ‘feral’ species are complex. These debates are particularly relevant and difficult in Australia, which is the nation that has lost the highest number of mammal species to extinction in modern times, and also has an enormous number of introduced species, some of which have very significant environmental impacts. Some introduced species in Australia will never be eliminated, and in fact, are barely successfully managed. One argument suggests that conservation managers see horses as an easy target, although foxes, cats, pigs and rabbits, have far greater documented impacts on native ecosystems. Out of eight priority ‘pest’ species in southeast Australia, horses are the ones for which there is least scientific evidence of their ecological impact. Also, the ecological impact of introduced species need not always be negative. The north of Australia has a feral population of Banteng cattle (Bos javanicus), which is valuable because its wild population is classified as endangered in its original habitat in southeast Asia. Elimination of the feral Australian population could hasten the extinction of the species overall.
People who are supporters of Australia’s wild horses include both those who could be classified as animal rights advocates and those who are committed to a cultural understanding of Australia’s landscapes. For many of Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people, who historically formed the backbone of the pastoral industry as mounted stock herders, wild horses represent the families of the horses they rode and loved, and they feel the horses should be left to live their lives undisturbed. Horses, for them, are legitimate members of the ecological and cultural community. Many Aboriginal people are also strongly opposed to ‘shooting to waste’ – shooting large numbers of horses from helicopters and leaving the carcasses to decay where they fall – a strategy used in landscapes in northern and central Australia.
At its heart, conservation is a social activity underpinned (but not always) by science. Effective conservation in the transformed environments of the twenty-first century is a much-debated issue. One broad argument suggests that we need more and better versions of old-school Yellowstone-model protected areas and control of introduced species, to avert a conservation catastrophe. But another emerging strand argues that these ‘no analogue ecosystems’ and hybridizing populations are the new form of biological diversity, more fit to flourish in a climate-changing world, and our conservation strategies should appropriately embrace this change. How we engage with Australia’s wild horses will, no doubt, continue to be contested and uncertain, but an acceptance of this uncertainty and change, as fundamentals of every day, might be the basis for developing more environmentally and socially benign relationships between people, animals and landscapes.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Jen Owens for her work with brumby advocates in this research.
Zoos are a contentious issue for some, but for me, they are a necessary part of modern conservation because of their intrinsic value to learning more about the ecology, biology, and behaviour of animals. However, I feel that zoos must be able to justify the species they house, and explain why these species need human management. From both an academic and applied point of view, the living collections that zoos manage should be selected, not for social or historical reasons, but because they are important biologically, and provide an opportunity to conduct valuable scientific research.
There is much that we do not know about the species that need our help, and zoos in the 21st century are being asked more and more frequently to provide homes for threatened, yet poorly understood, species that, in some cases, may not have been placed in a captive setting before. Similar or related species already housed in zoos can help build our knowledge of what is required by these rarer cousins. Likewise, as wild populations of these seemingly common species dwindle, it is important that we continue to tweak and adapt zoo husbandry regimes to ensure that all such species have a secure and viable future.
Common as muck, right? Not quite. Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) populations have crashed across Africa and this much-loved and very familiar zoo staple is now in real danger. As such, research into best husbandry practices of zoo-housed giraffe is vital to underpin their management to conserve the wider population of this species well into the future.
The modern zoo should no longer be a living stamp collection of weird and wonderful wildlife for humans to gaze upon in awe. Zoo collections must contribute, either directly or indirectly, to conservation work, visitor education, and the attainment of scientific understanding. Species that do not thrive in captivity reduce the value of the animal collection and the raison d’être of zoos overall. I am a firm believer that not every species has a place in the zoo, and collection planning must take into account the relevance of a species actually being in captivity in the first instance.
Zoo-housed species that do well can be used to tell the story of specimens that are much rarer and of real conservation concern, but which are much more difficult to look after in captivity–species that need very specialist care, either in field-based conservation centres or away from humans completely. This “storybook approach” can be very species-specific, for example, the plight of the rare and fragile James’ flamingo (Phoenicoparrus jamesi) can be explained using the sympatric Chilean flamingo (Phoenicopterus chilensis); conservation work to secure the precarious future of the Javan (Rhinoceros sondaicus) and Sumatran (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) rhinoceroses can be promoted to visitors by displaying the equally threatened, but easier to care for, Indian rhino (Rhinoceros unicornis); the Madagascar pochard (Aythya innotata), the world’s rarest duck and possibly even the rarest bird, housed in situ in Madagascar and bred for reintroduction, can be championed by all manner of similar wildfowl that abound in captivity.
This storybook approach can also be much more general. The world’s shark populations have taken a nose-dive in recent years and not many aquaria have the space, facilities, or budgets to house large and threatened species, such as the great white shark (Carcharadon carcharias). However, sharks, in general, are aquarium staples and captivate the imagination of the public. Smaller and easier-to-house species can be excellent ambassadors for those other sharks less suited to life in a tank. The current global amphibian decline ranks second—preceded by coral reefs and followed by large Asian mammals—on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) priority list of organisms threatened with imminent doom. Zoo involvement with field-based amphibian conservation initiatives is much more accessible to visitors if commonly-kept (zoo) species are displayed in an engaging and relevant manner.
In the UK, at least, zoos have a legal requirement to facilitate and undertake research within their animal collections. As part of the Zoo Licencing Act, which incorporates the EU Zoos Directive from 1999, a specific document termed the Secretary of State’s Standards for Modern Zoo Practice describes the need for a research programme to be implemented into the running of the zoological collection. The governing body of UK zoos, BIAZA (The British & Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums), as well as other regional associations, such as the Europe-wide institution EAZA (the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria), have research committees that help support, evaluate, and critique zoo-based research programmes, to ensure that they generate data that are useful to those working with the animals directly, as well as to those managing the larger population of individuals of a species. Ultimately, these data will have a beneficial impact on captive individuals, ensuring that they are managed in the most biologically appropriate way possible.
We know that the wild does not confer the limitless freedom that it may seem to, and those wild animals are constrained by a variety of stresses and environmental pressures (for example, between- and within-species competition, unpredictable resource access, predation threat, and territorial limits). We also know that we need to replicate these wild interactions within modern zoo enclosures to ensure that species remain healthy and behaviorally normal. However, it is not always possible to reconstruct all elements of the natural habitats of all species. This is where research into individual species’ needs can help zoos to determine what types of animals should be maintained on their collection plan.
Research suggests that not all species should be managed in captivity and that some species are better preserved out in the wild with minimal human influence over what they do. Species that do not do well outside of their range states, but still require a more intense level of management, can be maintained by zoological collections in the countries where the species occur naturally, thereby helping to bolster dwindling free-living populations. Conservation work will be more successful if species’ management decisions are based on evidence that keeps populations healthy and viable.
The number of flamingoes in a flock will affect the chances of successful breeding. Past research has provided zoos with information on the minimum number of birds for i) overall good welfare and ii) stimulation of nesting behaviours.
Seminal work on carnivores, for instance, has shown that aspects of their behavioural ecology (notably territory or home range size) can predict whether or not the animals will display stereotypic, or abnormal, behaviour patterns in zoos. Some species of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) may experience shortened lifespans in captivity because we cannot recreate all the important facets of their natural habitat—for example, the complexity and size of the marine environment—and, hence, we should use other species that are more easily and healthily managed in zoos, to tell their story for them.
Research tells us that some species do especially well in captivity. There is a reason why meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are so popular, for example. We can use measurable indicators of positive welfare, such as the performance of appropriate behaviour patterns or temporal physiological changes, to determine the suitability of a managed environment for a particular species. Research into wild ecology allows the formation of best practice guidelines, which are shared between zoos to ensure species are managed to the highest standard possible. The output of research on wild populations and that conducted in captivity (to evaluate which forms of housing and husbandry work best) are brought together into a management regime known as “evidence-based husbandry”, which provides the foundation for how an individual species is managed in captivity, regardless of what zoo is keeping it.
Fussy eater? It can be difficult to provide the correct diets for proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus) outside of their native South-East Asia. Results from dietary studies have shown that this species is best managed by collections that are able to provide these highly-specialised primates with the types of foliage most similar to what they would forage on in the wild.
For example, information on preferred climatic conditions, optimum dietary formation and nutrient requirements, individual space usage and environmental complexity, social grouping and population structure, and when and how often breeding occurs, enable positive welfare to be maintained across the course of each species’ life stages within a captive setting. The use of noninvasive physiological measurements (i.e., metabolites of reproductive hormones taken from faecal and urine samples) is now used with excellent results to assist in the breeding programmes of numerous highly endangered species, including Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and black rhino (Diceros bicornis). Likewise, measurement of glucocorticoids enables evaluation of an individual’s stress response, which can provide information to help support changes to enclosure layout, visitor flow, housing, and husbandry, in order to maintain an overall positive welfare state. It should be remembered, however, that stress can be beneficial and as increases in adrenal glucocorticoids can occur with excitement, zoos need to maintain a dynamic environment that provides physical, physiological and psychological stimuli. Scientific explorations of environmental enrichment methods can help create such variety.
Ultimately, contented animals, with naturalistic behaviour patterns and biological rhythms are more likely to produce healthy and viable youngsters—a necessary outcome for conservation work. The IUCN is working on a new way of managing threatened species that breaks down old boundaries and simultaneously considers both wild (in situ) populations and zoo-based (ex situ) populations in the development of a single metapopulation management strategy; this is termed the One Plan Approach (OPA). The ultimate aim of the OPA is to integrate more closely the work of those in the field and those working with the same species in the zoo, to collect further evidence on the optimum methods of management and conservation planning, as well as to direct and focus research and knowledge where they are most needed. In an age of climate change and continual anthropogenic pressures, a species’ viability is likely to remain highest when all aspects of its population (captive and free-living) are managed as a whole.
Just a brown duck? Knowledge of the requirements of similar pochard species that have been maintained in captivity for far longer has helped in the development of husbandry protocols for one of the world’s rarest birds, the Madagascar pochard (Aythya innotata)—a species on the brink of extinction that is the focus of multi-zoo, multi-conservation organisation protection work.
Population management is integral to the future security of all species housed in zoos, regardless of how threatened they are. Research using zoo records is particularly important in assessing trends in population growth or determining (and hopefully) halting any population declines. The Zoological Information Management System (ZIMS) contains information on individuals contained in zoo populations around the world, facilitating largescale research projects on robust and statistically sound data sets. This allows researchers to conduct meta-analyses on topics such as longevity, time to maturity, and lifetime reproductive success, producing results that can be shared with other institutions, in order to facilitate the development of stable captive breeding groups.
European zoos have also been collaborating to further increase access to the output from research projects; these partnerships have resulted in the launch of a new, open-access peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Zoo & Aquarium Research (www.jzar.org). It is hoped that by encouraging zoo professionals to submit short case studies or husbandry reports to a free-to-read, fast turnaround scientific journal the dissemination of research output will reach a wider audience and generate further interest in the important research work conducted by modern, evidence-based zoological collections.
The red panda (Ailurus fulgens) is one species for whom a successful OPA has been applied, and a population viability analysis of both wild and captive animals has allowed for the production of a sturdier and more stable and future conservation strategy for this species.
The thorny ethical issue of keeping wild species in captivity may never be fully resolved, but I firmly believe that science-based zoological collections are an essential part of informed conservation practice. “The wilderness”, as many perceive it, may no longer fully exist; complete and boundless freedom is probably never experienced by even the most “wild” of wildlife. However, we should always remember that the species zoos house, have evolved to fit into a specific part of a wider habitat, and, though they may live in captivity, are not domesticated. Therefore, a species should not be made to fit the husbandry provided for it; rather, the husbandry must be tailored to fit each species’ evolutionary and behavioural needs.
Only by using captive collections to conduct research programmes that further advance the science of zoo biology can we uphold the value of a zoo’s animal collection. Some zoos may get bad press for the ways in which their animals are housed, but the vast majority of professionally accredited collections work together to advance zoo husbandry techniques, promote conservation breeding, and conduct worthwhile research on their charges. Zookeepers, curators, and directors are some of the hardest working individuals that I know, and who regularly volunteer their time for “extra-curricular” responsibilities, with the sole aim of improving a lot of the animals in the collection. Zoo science is ultimately good science, and long may it continue.
Further reading: BIAZA. 2015. BIAZA Research Committee. https:// www.biaza.org.uk/Research/biaza-research-group/: British & Irish Association of Zoos & Aquariums. CBSG. 2015. The one plan approach to conservation https://www.cbsg.org/our-approach/one-planapproach-conservation: IUCN SSC Conservation Breeding Specialist Group. Hosey G, Melfi V, Pankhurst S. 2009. Zoo animals: behaviour, management and welfare. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Mason G, Burn CC, Dallaire JA, Kroshko J, McDonald Kinkaid H, Jeschke JM. 2013. Plastic animals in cages: behavioural flexibility and responses to captivity. Animal Behaviour 85 (5): 1113- 1126. Mason GJ. 2010. Species differences in responses to captivity: stress, welfare and the comparative method. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25 (12): 713- 721. Rees PA. 2011. An introduction to zoo biology and management. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Paul Rose is a PhD student at the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, University of Exeter, UK, p.rose@ exeter.ac.uk.
Photographs: Kartik Shanker, Paul Rose, WWT, Lewis Rowden
The trans-Himalayas are cold, dry, stark and sparsely populated. Spiti valley is inhabited by Buddhist communities that have practised agro-pastoralism for many centuries. They combine farming, during the short summer, with rearing livestock for a dual source of living. People mainly rear sheep, goats, donkeys, horses, cows and yaks and attach high value to them. However, the situation is different in Kaza, the capital of Spiti, which is largely inhabited by Spitians from across the valley, who work in government jobs, and by non-local government officials. As a result, very few, if any, livestock is reared in this town.
Kaza is also home to a blossoming, resource-intensive hotel business that supports rising tourism in the valley. Food waste generated from these hotels during the tourist season is an easy resource for free-ranging dogs. During the long winter, when the livestock give birth, several newborn calves do not survive their first year. With no systems to manage garbage in the smaller villages where livestock are reared, these calf carcasses too, become easily available to dogs. The lack of effective garbage management has led to an increase in the dog population. Large parts of this population are free-ranging in nature and actively hunt livestock too. While Kaza and its neighbouring town of Rangrik are the epicentres of the flourishing dog population, the impacts, in terms of the livestock depredation, are mainly felt by the villages adjacent to these towns.
In order to assess the scale of the problem, we interacted with local herders from villages adjoining Kaza and Rangrik. This effort, to systematically collect data on the livestock predation caused by dogs, threw up a few unexpected surprises.
Between January 2009 and December 2010, a total of 809 livestock were reported dead in 25 villages. Of this, predation by free-ranging dogs was the biggest cause of mortality (338 livestock heads). Free-ranging dogs were killing more livestock than snow leopards and wolves combined. While snow leopards and wolves tended to hunt larger-bodied livestock, like yak, cows, donkeys and horses, free-ranging dogs specialised in hunting smaller-bodied livestock like sheep and goats. Even with the most conservative estimates of livestock prices, these damages by free-ranging dogs translated into monetary damages of no less than 1.6 million rupees (US$.25,000), incurred over a period of two years in the 25 surveyed villages. Little surprise then that Spitians saw free-ranging dogs as a major threat. Similar data collected over subsequent years confirmed these trends. So severe was the problem that several villages had stopped rearing sheep and goats for fear of losing them to dogs.
The other risk from free-ranging dogs was to wildlife in the landscape. By 2012, there were reports of packs of free-ranging dogs trying to chase herds of blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur) and ibex (Capra sibirica). There were also reports of them chasing snow leopards off their kills, of a Himalayan wolf staying with a pack of dogs close to one of local villages and also of attempts to mate between a Himalayan wolf and a free ranging dog. Such interactions of free-ranging dogs with wildlife, as predators and competitors, added a new dimension to the challenge in conserving wildlife populations in these high altitude landscapes.
To add to this complex dynamic, free-ranging dogs compounded the problem through the possibility of them acting as disease vectors. Any breakouts of rabies, parvo-virus or canine distemper within the wildlife population could be catastrophic. Clearly, there was an overlap of interests, for the local community who were facing steep losses from these dogs and for conservation practitioners, like us at NCF, who were hoping to eliminate conservation threats the dog population posed in this fragile landscape.
But the dogs, sadly, were nobody’s responsibility. Spiti doesn’t have a municipality to worry over them. Technically, the Forest Department, Animal Husbandry or any other government department was not mandated to manage them. It was only the Spitians who felt the pinch. Conscious of this, the community had, even earlier (c. 2000), come together to catch the dogs and physically transport them out of the valley. It worked only for some weeks after which most of the dogs returned. People did not resort to culling them as they believed that would earn them bad karma. But speaking with some of them suggested a feeling of helplessness. In an area where basic amenities can be hard to come by, an organised effort to control the dog population seemed unrealistic to most locals. Patience was running low, and there were sporadic reports from a few places in the valley of attempts to cull dogs.
On most summer days, one is likely to find Skalzang sitting leisurely, basking in the morning sun, in the space adjoining the little hotel he runs in Kaza. As you pass him by, he’d greet you with a loud “Juley! Cha thung cha”; an invitation to join him for a cup of tea over some juicy local gossip. But on this particular day, he looked rather animated. This former archer, who once represented India at the Olympics, seemed to be taking a fresh target. “What’s up?”, I asked. “I’m guiding the youth of our block. It’s our turn to catch dogs today!”. We need to go back in time to make sense of this seemingly absurd statement.
The year was 2009. Project Snow Leopard had just been approved by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Acknowledging the uniqueness of sparsely populated high altitude landscapes, Project Snow Leopard aimed to conserve its wildlife through landscape-level planning and approaches that would include local communities in this process. Taking a lead on proceedings, Himachal Pradesh became the first state to identify a landscape of c. 4000 km2 to conserve under this project, in Spiti valley, which lies in the trans-Himalayan region of Himachal Pradesh, above an altitude of 3000m from mean sea level. The Upper Spiti Landscape (or USL) as it came to be known, was carved out of the upper catchment of Spiti River, and included Kibber Wildlife Sanctuary, along with the surrounding area covering close to 30 villages of the valley.
In 2010, the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department (HPFD), along with Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) began preparing a management plan for the landscape, that would guide research and conservation work over the next 5 years. A team of young wildlife researchers, forest officers and a handful of Spitian youth, who worked with NCF, was formed to make the plan. I also was part of this team. A key component of the plan was to assess threats to wildlife and local livelihoods through field surveys and community interactions which would guide future work. As the team began to visit and speak with Spitians across villages, a rather unexpected threat kept cropping up in conversations—livestock predation by free-ranging dogs.
In August 2013, the Divisional Forest Officer of Spiti convened a meeting in Kaza to initiate a discussion on this issue. Organising such a meeting was a suggestion made in the Project Snow Leopard management plan that had been prepared for the Upper Spiti Landscape. This meeting was attended by some key individuals of Kaza: local representatives of the Tribal Advisory Council, officers from the Additional District Collector’s office, the Animal Husbandry Department and the Forest Department, the Pradhan of Kaza Panchayat and his deputies. After a rather sceptical start, everyone warmed up to the fact that action was needed but were unsure of what that could be.
The suggestion of organising a camp to sterilise dogs was made, but that threw up more questions: who would operate on them, where would the medicines come from and, most important of all, who would go catch the dogs? Nevertheless, despite these unknowns, by the end of the meeting, the participants agreed to try and organise a sterilisation camp in Kaza. Through follow-up meetings, our team secured support from the Forest Department, Animal Husbandry and the District Administration to set things in motion to organise a sterilisation camp. Unclear of how to conduct the camp, we reached out to Dharamsala Animal Rescue, an NGO that works in animal welfare, who promptly volunteered to send two of their experienced veterinarians. One of these veterinarians, Dr Takpa Tenzin, who was also a Spitian, took great pains in guiding the preparations. Within a matter of two months, everything was ready, except for one minor detail: who would and how would we catch the dogs?
The Pradhan of Kaza Panchayat helped to solve this problem. An astute leader, who villagers looked up to, the Pradhan promised he would get the villagers to help. The following day, we were invited to a meeting where almost the entire village gathered. After briefing villagers about the situation, he said: It’s up to us now. Suggestions started pouring in from all the people present. It was heartening to see that people were suggesting measures that would require their participation. No one was trying to pass the buck. Eventually, this was the suggestion that was most popular: each family would catch a dog, bring it to the sterilisation camp, and take care of it for four days after the operation, before letting it back out on the streets. Families who chose not to participate would have to pay a fine of five hundred rupees! We left the meeting, that day, unsure if anyone would turn up with dogs for the camp.
But we needn’t have worried because as we reached the venue on the day of the camp, there were at least 30 dogs waiting patiently with their new masters. We learnt that people had caught the dogs by setting out food, petting them and winning their trust and eventually getting them on leashes. The more elusive dogs were caught by the village youth, by baiting them and then catching them, using dog-catching nets. As more and more people showed up at the camp in quick succession, things started to get a little chaotic. But, here again, the Spitian youth, led by the Kaza Pradhan, stepped up to quickly get things in order. They made a list of people who had come in with dogs, regulated the flow of dogs into the operation room and also handed them back safely to their owners. There were no para-veterinarians to help, so Dr Tenzin gathered a few young volunteers and trained them with some basic instructions to handle dogs.
Having handled livestock all their lives meant that most of them found it easy to handle dogs as well. Over the next week, the camp saw a continuous flow of animals. The team of four doctors managed to operate close to a hundred dogs. Pups less than seven months and pregnant females, which could not be operated upon, were given shots for rabies and released. This effort, which started in one village, later spread to cover 6 villages. In all, over 275 dogs were sterilised in 6 villages, in a span of three years. That accounts for roughly a third of the valley’s dog population, based on an assessment made in 2012. How did we fare in this exercise? When we started our efforts, setting up a sterilisation camp seemed like an unrealistic target to meet. Therefore, that we have managed to set up a sterilisation camp in an area as remote as Spiti, is very encouraging.
More impressive was the fact that the people from the area shouldered a lot of the responsibilities. In addition to catching dogs, villagers helped in every way possible —from helping set up the camp, to feeding the camp staff and volunteers, to managing the efficient running of the camp. The veterinarians also deserve a lot of credit. They toiled hard at each of the camps and ensured that, even with limited resources, the camps were managed professionally. They set important ground rules – no sterilising of pregnant females and ensuring adequate post-operative care – and these were followed strictly. We also learnt several lessons along the way. A key one was that we needed to focus on improving post-operative care of the dogs. We initially relied completely on the community to manage postoperative care, which we realised, was a stiff task. We are now moving towards looking at more proficient ways to manage post-operative care.
Has the work brought any real success? That would depend on what scale one used to measure success. One indirect positive spinoff has been that organising sterilisation camps and initiating the effort for animal birth control has helped Spitians believe that it isn’t beyond them to work towards solving their own problems. But in terms of directly meeting our aims, we haven’t been very successful. Studies suggest that one would need to sterilise more than 70% of the breeding population and that the proportion of breeding females may have to be less than 20%, to see a stabilisation of numbers over an extended period. On that count, this effort clearly falls short of ensuring any reduction in the dog population. With no reduction in dog numbers, people have started questioning the efficacy of these initiatives. Their patience is running out largely because their losses haven’t reduced, and the sterilised dogs are still around and continue to kill their livestock.
Several villagers, especially from smaller villages, have even tried to trans-locate dogs from their villages into the larger towns— like Kaza—much to the disdain of these towns’ residents. Such is the gravity of this problem that anyone caught releasing dogs in Kaza stands to pay a sizeable fine. Despite this, a village elder told us, people from smaller villages get pups at night and dump them in Kaza. But people in the smaller villages understand that it’s only a matter of days before new dogs come and take over the newly vacated territories. Wouldn’t culling dogs be a more permanent solution, they ask, in reducing dog numbers and cutting their losses? Voices to remove dogs are gathering strength.
Clearly there is a need to better communicate to the community about how sterilisation programmes require sustained long-term effort. There is also space to discuss other options or even a combination of multiple options. One such option being tried out is to look at improving garbage management. Working jointly with the Forest Department, five villages have now built fenced enclosures to dispose of carcasses and organic waste so that they are unavailable to dogs. In Kaza too, the local Panchayat has initiated attempts to collect, segregate and dispose of waste. But only time can tell how effective all these measures will be. Even so, a question that often comes up is: if these measures do succeed in reducing resource access for dogs, how would the dogs respond? Would their numbers dwindle? Or, would they take to killing more livestock and wildlife?
Our experience of the last three years has been a humbling one. From a point where we saw little hope, we managed to collectively make a few interventions. However, we are far from solving the problem. If anything it has only given us a deeper understanding of the problem and the challenges surrounding it and left us with more questions than answers. So while we continue working our way to solving the problems, there is room for greater participation, especially from animal welfare agencies that have a better understanding of these issues. Without sustained efforts, however, the risk of desperate Spitians resorting to the mistreatment, or even culling, of dogs could become a very real one.
Acknowledgements:
This work was made possible by funding and support from the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department and Leonard X Bosack and Bette M Kruger Charitable Foundation.
Further Reading: Jackman J and A Rowan. 2007. Free-roaming dogs in developing countries: The benefits of capture, neuter and return programs. In Salem, D.J. and Rowan A.N. (Eds.) The State of the Animals IV: 2007. Humane Society Press.
Suryawanshi K, Y Bhatnagar, S Redpath & C Mishra. 2013. People, predators and perceptions: patterns of livestock depredation by snow leopards and wolves. Journal of Applied Ecology, 50, 550–560. Photograph: Nature Conservation Foundation & Snow Leopard Trust
The first step in our understanding of how complex ecological systems might respond to environmental change is to know all the possible ecological links among constituent species. Research in this context, so far, has been partial to feeding interactions and paid less attention to non-trophic ones. In a first-of-its-kind study published recently in Ecology, Sonia Kefi and colleagues describe a comprehensive ecological network including all known trophic and non-trophic interactions among 100 species living in the marine intertidal areas of the Chilean coast. Hari Sridhar spoke to Sonia Kefi about the origins of this study, its main findings, and its implications for our understanding of the resilience of complex systems.
Hari Sridhar: In your paper, you say that most of the work on ecological networks so far has focussed on one single interaction at a time, i.e. food, mutualistic interactions like plant-pollinators and plant dispersers, and host-parasite interactions. You make the point that non-trophic interactions, especially positive ones, haven’t received as much attention in network approaches to understanding ecological communities. Why do you think this is the case? Is it because of the difficulty of identifying them in the field or have there been analytical challenges?
Sonia Kefi: It is probably a combination of all of that. For long, there was a bias in studying negative interactions – particularly predator-prey and competitive interactions. To some extent that makes sense, but it is also based on a certain conception of nature, the idea that those processes are the ones that structure ecological communities, the ones that we need to understand. In addition, like you say, a lot of non-trophic interactions are non-trivial to measure. Trophic interactions can often be observed – an individual eats or does not eat other individuals – but a lot of non-trophic interactions are not directly observable and require experiments. On the more theoretical side, people have built simple models (small communities) incorporating trophic and non-trophic interactions, but complex networks are often built on a single interaction type.
HS: Is this study a first of its kind – a unipartite network that includes trophic and, positive and negative, non-trophic interactions? Are there any other examples of that?
SK: Very recently, a paper from Sander, Wootton and Allesina used a similar dataset from Tatoosh Island, although this network seems to have fewer non-trophic interactions. The other work that is along the same lines is the paper from Michael Pocock (Jane Memmott’s group), published in Science in 2012. It’s based on a different approach merging several bipartite networks (plant-pollinator, plant- disperser, host-parasite, plant-herbivore and so on). For a unipartite network, I think that the Chilean web is quite unique for now, but such data sets are probably going to become more frequent in ecology.
HS: And what made this possible for you is the availability of this huge dataset from Chile, right? SK: Yes, intertidal communities have been studied very well from the point of view of non-trophic interactions for decades, and also in an experimental way.
HS: You mean this particular intertidal community or in general? SK: There is a long tradition of natural history and manipulative experiments in intertidal communities in general. Sergio Navarrete and Evie Wieters have done immense work in that area, but many others as well such as the teams of Robert Paine, Mark Bertness or Bruce Menge for example. I am not sure why this tradition is there in intertidal communities. Maybe because some non-trophic interactions are particularly obvious there – e.g. refuge provisioning, competition for space, recruitment facilitation. This is why those communities are such a great opportunity to incorporate all that knowledge in a network context along with trophic interactions.
HS: I would like to talk a little more on how this collaboration came about – between you and the team in Chile. Can you tell us about the history of this project?
SK: My PhD focussed on drylands – I was working on models of vegetation dynamics. The idea was to investigate how catastrophic shifts emerge in these ecosystems. Toward the end of my PhD, it seemed natural to wonder what would happen if plants were not treated as one whole component (as classically done in models of dryland vegetation dynamics) but instead as individual species with different characteristics. The question is then how taking this plant diversity into account affects the ecosystem dynamics, its resilience and the behaviour of the indicators. This was how I started thinking about food webs and networks and how I became familiar with the body of ecological theory looking at species diversity and coexistence. I applied for a postdoc with Ulrich Brose in Germany who is a specialist of food web dynamics. My postdoc project was about studying resilience of complex ecological networks with different interactions types between species. I realised quickly that I had no idea where to introduce non-trophic links in such complex networks. The possibilities were immense. I had no idea even how frequent those interactions were. Around that time, Eric Berlow and Carol Blanchette organized a workshop in California with Sergio Navarrete, Evie Wieters, Bruce Menge, Lucas Joppa, Spencer Wood and others. I went to that workshop and that’s where the idea of building the Chilean web came up.
HS: Over what period of time was the data that went into the paper collected? SK: They did not collect field data specifically for that paper but they used their own expert knowledge of years of observation and experimentation along the central coast of Chile. They also dug into the rich literature about these communities to compile the data set. Sergio and Evie started working on the data set at the workshop in 2009, and I think that we had a first version of the ecological network in 2010.
HS: How long did it take from idea to publication? When did the workshop happen? SK: The workshop took place in 2009, the Ecology Letters paper came out in 2012 and the Ecology paper in 2015.
HS: Did the authors meet as a group often? SK: The first meeting was at the workshop in Yosemite in 2009. After that, from 2011, I have been going to Chile once a year to meet with Sergio, Evie and Eric. But, basically, most of our discussions were over email.
HS: Can you give us a simple step-by-step breakup of the process of going from data in the field to the final published network? SK: Before even thinking of the data, there was enormous discussion about what type of information we needed in what format. There was then discussions with experts, going through the literature and gathering everything that’s known about every pairwise interaction of species in the dataset. There was a lot of work in making the dataset “clean” categorising every interaction as “certain” or “uncertain”. For example, maybe we found only one paper on a particular pairwise interaction which means that there is a question mark over that particular pair. Then, once the dataset was ready, there was the question of the analyses. We decided to focus on three ‘layers’ – the trophic interactions on the one hand, the non-trophic interactions on the other hand, and within non-trophic interactions whether the interactions were positive or negative. So, we split the network into three networks that we thought were most relevant for the analysis and later for incorporation into ecological theory. When we started doing statistics on the network, we went back to the field experts, to get a feel of whether the patterns emerging made sense, whether they corresponded to their intuition based on field experience. Little by little, we identified some mistakes – species that were misidentified or interactions that were mislabelled – and corrected them.
HS: What are the main take-homes from this study? SK: It was surprising that all those non-trophic interactions were a lot more frequent than we had assumed. In the Chilean web, there are actually two times more non-trophic than trophic interactions. Moreover, they are structured – their structure is not random relative to the trophic interactions. So, we need to start investigating whether they matter for community dynamics and resilience and how. Can we identify key interactions and key structures in these networks that matter for the functioning of ecological systems? Collecting this kind of information is very time consuming, so the message is not that we should all start collecting all those different types of interactions everywhere, but rather that we should start investigating the possible consequences of the presence of this variety of interactions and their interplay. Mathematical models might help addressing those questions, especially now that some data sets start being available that can help constrain the structure of the modelled interactions networks.
HS: You say that modularity and nestedness are important characteristics of a network from the point of view of stability. Can you tell us why? SK: There has been quite a lot of work on mutualistic networks that have shown that certain types of structures, like nestedness – for example, that more specialist pollinators tend to pollinate a subset of plant species pollinated by generalists – stabilize mutualistic networks, i.e. it makes them less vulnerable to breakdown when species are lost. For antagonistic networks, especially food webs, researchers have shown that a modular structure, where you have groups of species that are more connected with each other than with the rest of the web – is very stabilizing. The idea is that perturbations tend to remain within the modules or compartments. That’s why in our network we wanted to know whether we observe such structures, especially whether the trophic network is more modular than expected and whether the facilitative network is more nested than expected. We found some evidence of both modularity and nestedness in the Chilean web.
HS: In general, what would you say are the implications of this study for our understanding of how complex systems respond to external changes? SK: We really need to go on with the next step, which is modelling such complex networks. This work has given us some hints about how to model such complex systems – where to put the non-trophic interactions, how abundant they are compared to trophic interactions etc. Based on this, we can integrate non-trophic interactions in a more realistic way into food web models and examine how they affect the stability of ecological networks to external perturbations. Right now I am unable to say more, except that we are in the process of building such models.
HS: Stepping away from this piece of work, I find a common theme underlies all the different research projects you lead – trying to understand how resilient ecological systems are to change. Is that coincidental or a conscious choice? SK: Ecological resilience was my initial interest and probably one of the reasons why I went to ecology, particularly theoretical ecology. As a student, I was fascinated by work on the non-linear behaviour of ecosystems. I really liked mathematics and I thought that theoretical ecology would be such a nice combination of interesting mathematical questions with possible concrete applications. My original interest was trying to understand emergent phenomena and responses of complex systems to perturbations – what determines the ability of a system to absorb a perturbation and to come back to an initial state or not.
HS: Can you tell us how you got into ecology – are you a mathematician by training? SK: No. There is this undergraduate option in France in which I had one-third biology, one-third physics and one-third maths for two years (so-called ‘classes préparatoires’). I then passed a national exam and went into an engineering school – Agro Paris Tech – where you basically pick what you want to study (in the broad field of engineering and life sciences). It’s more oriented toward life sciences but with a lot of math and computer science. In the last year of that school, I did a master in ecology at Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.
HS: At the undergrad. level did you already know you wanted to do ecology? SK: When I finished high school I really wanted to do maths but I had a hard time projecting what I would do for a job if I studied pure maths. I wanted to work on questions that might have an application not too far off into the future. This is how I discovered theoretical ecology, and I thought this is what I want to do – use maths to model ecosystems.
HS: You say that you were interested in maths but wanted to do something that had an application. Is conservation and management of natural resources always at the back of your mind when you choose your research projects? SK: There is a double motivation. I am very interested in the fundamental understanding of these complex systems. My belief is that if we understand those mechanisms well enough, we have a chance of creating tools that might be useful for their management. The degradation indicators I am now working on have to be further developed before that can be used for management – we are still at an early stage, trying to figure out in which cases they are expected to work and how robust they are. My hope is that whenever we are more confident about the degradation indicators, they can be picked up by managers and be actually used in the field. This is one of the objectives of the European project CASCADE, which I am part of.
References : Kéfi S, EL Berlow, EA Wieters, LN Joppa, SA Wood, U Brose & SA Navarrete. 2015. Network structure beyond food webs: mapping nontrophic and trophic interactions on Chilean rocky shores. Ecology, 96(1), 291-303.
Pocock MJ, DM Evans & J Memmott. 2012. The robustness and restoration of a network of ecological networks. Science, 335(6071), 973-977.
Sander EL, JT Wootton & S Allesina. 2015. What can interaction webs tell us about species roles?. PLoS Comput Biol, 11(7), e1004330.
12th April, 1961 – Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person to enter outer space, completing one orbit before returning safely to Earth, 1 hour 48 minutes after launch.
15th December, 2015 – the Soyuz Rocket is, at the time of writing, the latest space flight to launch from Earth, transporting astronauts to the International Space Station for a six month mission.
Today – More than 200 miles above Earth’s surface, the International Space Station is in orbit. You are aboard. Travelling at 17,500 miles an hour, you complete an orbit of the Earth every hour. Watching out of the window, your view is down to Earth. You see oceans, continents. But there is more, the image is not static or one dimensional. There is movement and texture.
In the atmosphere, nitrogen, oxygen, argon and carbon dioxide are the most common gases, alongside less common ones like krypton, xenon and ozone. Weather systems race, eddy and swirl, like milk in a cup of coffee. The greater part of the planet’s surface is covered with water, a blur of blue, turquoise, violet, purple and black. On land, vegetation flashes green and yellow, while snow and ice gleam white at the planets poles. Even in the short history of human space exploration, this view has changed. The images you now see will not correspond exactly to those seen by Gagarin just 54 years ago. Weather systems now follow different courses. Seasons come earlier. There is less white at the poles.
Meanwhile down on the Earth’s surface, in Paris, there has been another planetary shift, this time in the world of environmental politics. Three days earlier on the 12th of December, two weeks of climate talks ended with the first truly global agreement on climate change. 195 countries committed to take action in response to recent climatic changes. During the last 100 years, the Earth’s temperature has risen by 0.5°C. The warming has not been equal across all areas however. Temperatures in the polar regions have increased by 2–3°C in just the last 50 years and its consequences are already being felt. The aim of the Paris talks was to produce a declaration, signed by all nations present, containing legally binding targets to limit further temperature increases. In an unprecedented feat of global diplomacy, and defying the predictions of many, representatives from almost all the countries on Earth ended negotiations by signing this document, pledging to “(hold) the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND WILDLIFE CONSERVATION
Although less obvious than large scale climatic change, no less dramatic are the changes for wildlife. Changes in distribution, timing and synchronicity (more on this in a moment), and consequently changes in interactions between species. Broadly, ecologists are seeing two trends. First, species are physically changing their geographical ranges, shifting both towards the poles, and to higher altitudes. Imagine the rising temperatures as a flood (an analogy all too prescient for many areas) with heat flowing out from the equator, effecting low altitudes first. As the temperatures reach new areas, some species shift northwards, or to higher ground. Some species actually follow the tide line, taking advantage of the advancing warm to colonise new areas as they become climatically clement. For these species, warming will mean a range expansion. For species whose range is restricted however, either by a physical barrier, or because they already inhabit the most northerly latitudes or highest altitudes, there is nowhere to go. So polar species and those found on mountain tops are in serious trouble and show the highest rates of extinction due to recent climate change.
The other major change is temporal. As temperatures increase, some species are beginning their yearly cycles earlier. In a meta-analysis of 203 species in the northern hemisphere, amphibians were found to be bringing their breeding seasons forward more than twice as quickly as butterflies, birds and trees. Meanwhile, butterflies are advancing significantly faster than the first flowering herbs. These asynchronies may have serious consequences. For example, just because one species can adapt, this does not mean that other species in its ecological web can do likewise. Butterflies rely on particular plant species, on which to feed and lay their eggs. If these plants have not yet emerged, the butterflies will have no food. Similar issues are affecting many bird species.
In Europe, blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) coordinate the hatching of their eggs with peak caterpillar abundance. Mistiming of laying, due to rapid changes in life cycles of their prey species, is already affecting the reproductive success of these birds. Migratory species may find it even more difficult to adjust their cycles. If the weather is warmer than usual in Africa, will this also be true in Northern Europe? If snows persist in the Himalayas, will it still be winter in the high Arctic? One study found that, of 1598 species, 59% had changed their phenologies and/or distributions over the past 20 to 140 years.
CLIMATE CHANGE, CONSERVATION AND A PLAN FOR THE FUTURE
So what relevance do the recent climate talks have for dealing with these ecological changes? Based on available evidence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified 5 ‘reasons for concern’, (RFCs, described in the appendix below), or the primary ways in which the planet will be affected by climate change. Of particular importance to ecology and biodiversity are RFCs 1 and 3. RFC 1 highlights the ‘Risk to Unique and Threatened Systems.’, which includes threats to ecosystems, endangered species and biodiversity as a whole. RFC 3 addresses the ‘Distribution of Impacts’. This RFC is concerned with the unequal regional impacts of climate change, acknowledging the fact that some will experience greater harm than others, while some may even benefit. In the graph below, predictions for the worsening impacts of each RFC are shown as global temperatures increase. The temperature ranges from just below, to increasingly far above pre-industrial levels, with colour indicating the severity of the effect. As the graph shows, ecosystems and regional variations are two of the greatest risks from future climate change, which will experience high levels of impact with relatively minor further increases in temperature.
At a recent international conference, another question was raised – what if different individuals of a species respond differently to climate change? My ears perked up at this point because such individual differences are my own area of research, but I had not previously thought about this within the context of climate change. We all know that some people cope better than others when the weather is particularly hot. This individual variation in regional thermal tolerance is also seen in other species, and one would predict that as global temperatures rise, that the individuals that can cope will do better than those that cannot. However, we don’t have the data yet to be able to predict how variation among individuals will affect species responses to climate change. So we can model, predict, estimate, and we can have confidence in the results of these studies, as far as they go. But they will never be able to reflect the full systemic and pervasive impacts of climate change.
The only thing we can be certain of is that there will be significant environmental changes that all forms of life on our planet must overcome. There are a number of truths we must accept, whichever scenario we see:
1) Life as we know it will not continue.
a. Global migration patterns of all species will change. The distribution of human and non-human species will be forced to adapt to changes in temperature and sea-level rise.
b. Many species will go extinct. We cannot hold life on the planet in stasis, even if we wanted to, and some species will not adapt fast enough to the changing environment. But that is the nature of evolution. Since life first began, it has constantly been evolving in response to changing environmental conditions. We must decide however, how drastic are the changes we are willing to accept. This ranges from the relatively minor changes under a 2°C warming scenario, to a mass extinction, including maybe humans, and the reinitiation of evolution from simple, resistant forms of life. Under this second scenario, life will begin again, adapting to whatever planet it finds after we have gone. Given that the current rate of warming is unprecedented in the history of life on Earth, we are currently heading towards the more dramatic end of this range.
2) Continued use of fossil fuels will a) exasperate the climatic changes which we have to respond to, and b) run out anyway. How much the climate changes is down to how much we reduce emissions, and in some cases reverse the effects of greenhouse gases. Any reduction in emissions will lead to lower global warming.
It seems to me that what gives the Paris agreement the greatest chance of achieving its aims is the institution of 5-yearly reviews, to check on the progress being made by each country. The current climate policies of signatory nations are known to be insufficient to hit the 2°C targets, and further pledges must be made and adhered to if it is to be reached. The 5-yearly reviews are designed to ensure our governments are taking the required steps, and where they are not, holding them to account.
One of the greatest potential barriers to success therefore will be if these reviews are not properly enforced. So how can we make sure this happens? That is where you, me, everyone comes in. How do you think we can have the greatest impact? Do you already contribute to a particular organisation/petition? Do you write to your local politician?
We would love to hear from you and hope that we might be able to start a conversation about what the most effective form of action for the general public really is. If you have any ideas, you can send them to us via Facebook (https://m.facebook.com/currentconservation/) or on Twitter (@CurrnConsrvtion; #ClimateConservation).
Together, our voices are much, much louder.
Appendix:
IPCC Reasons for concern
1) Risk to Unique and Threatened Systems. This RFC addresses the potential for increased damage to or irreversible loss of unique and threatened systems, such as coral reefs, tropical glaciers, endangered species, unique ecosystems, biodiversity hotspots, small island states, and indigenous communities.
2) Risk of Extreme Weather Events. This RFC tracks increases in extreme events with substantial consequences for societies and natural systems. Examples include increase in the frequency, intensity, or consequences of heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires, or tropical cyclones.
3) Distribution of Impacts. This RFC concerns disparities of impacts. Some regions, countries, and populations face greater harm from climate change, whereas other regions, countries, or populations would be much less harmed—and some may benefit; the magnitude of harm can also vary within regions and across sectors and populations.
4) Aggregate Damages. This RFC covers comprehensive measures of impacts. Impacts distributed across the globe can be aggregated into a single metric, such as monetary damages, lives affected, or lives lost. Aggregation techniques vary in their treatment of equity of outcomes, as well as treatment of impacts that are not easily quantified. This RFC is based mainly on monetary aggregation available in the literature.
5) Risks of Large-Scale Discontinuities. This RFC represents the likelihood that certain phenomena (sometimes called singularities or tipping points) would occur, any of which may be accompanied by very large impacts. These phenomena include the deglaciation (partial or complete) of the West Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets and major changes in some components of the Earth’s climate system, such as a substantial reduction or collapse of the North Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India- Eliza F Kent ISBN-13:978-0199895489. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 256 pp.
With looming ecological crises and an ever-increasing human footprint across the globe, many studies have looked at how communities try to maintain a balance between sustenance and ecology. An unlikely source of ecological insight is religion. Eliza Kent’s book looks across Tamil Nadu, India, to understand the phenomenon of sacred groves – small forests or trees set aside for a deity’s exclusive use. Sacred groves across India have fascinated many for obvious reasons. In a period when environmental degradation and destruction is the norm, their mere presence, apart from the botanical variety they offer, in densely populated areas can be a source of hope and interest. Religious taboos have played a distinct role in villagers not using these groves in spite of having urgent requirements. Kent shows how the origins of beliefs related to sacred groves lie in the 18th century Tamil country rather than having ancient origins.
Travelling and conversing with villagers across Tamil Nadu, Kent looks at how the sacred groves with linkages to village-based Hinduism fare alongside environmental initiatives (CPREEC), governmental control and changing lifestyles. Complementing Kent’s perceptive comments and analytical abilities are the conversations that dot the book. Throughout, she lets the voices of the villagers she converses with, sail through, without obstructing them. The remoteness of the places travelled to alongside the photographs in different timeframes (in the early 2000s) also read as an ecological picture of a land that is in rapid change.
Kent maps the connections between written and everyday practices that influence the lives, groves and histories of these communities and places them in the context of modern Tamil Nadu and environmental politics. What emerges is an endearing portrait of attitudes, mythological accounts of temples (sthalapuranas), and histories of communal identities alongside that of the sacred groves.The deities these sacred groves house are fierce and act as guardians (Karuppaswami-the “dark god’’) for the villagers. They also possess an ambiguity by invoking fear as well as gratitude among the villagers. Though the deities of these groves are located outside the settled everyday life of villagers as in Madurai and Tiruvannamalai, they nevertheless are linked to the political and social dynamics of the villages. Deities like Mariamman and Kaliamman protect the boundaries as well as the residents from strife and disease.
One of the engrossing chapters looks at the ambivalence of roads, which are routinely depicted as agents of environmental destruction. Roads for many of these communities symbolize progress and a chance to connect with modern lifestyles. But they can also bring about a change in how these deities are perceived and worshipped, thus impacting how the sacred groves are seen and approached. They can considerably weaken the longstanding taboos on the usage of the groves as shown at Attipati. Previously, many villagers avoided these groves due to the dread of dangerous predators and for the fear of causing pollution, ‘tittu’ to the deities. With significant changes in conceiving as well as approaching space with the development of roads, these practices are seen as illogical by many youngsters. Thus, what was previously believed to house a fierce deity becomes a property that is in the control of the temple which requires proper management.
The book also throws light on a familiar theme in environmental politics in India wherein a top-down approach under the garb of ‘social forestry’ leads to governmental control, leading to the plantation of economically feasible species, thereby reducing the incentive for the protection of the groves for the villagers. In an interesting as well as a revealing chapter on CPREEC (CPR Environmental Education Centre) in Chennai, Kent throws light on its ‘evangelical religious environmentalism’ whereby it seeks to ‘civilize’ the religious practices of the communities in areas where it has taken up the restoration of sacred groves. Sacred groves in Tamil Nadu are dedicated to deities worshipped by non-Brahmin castes and routinely involve animal sacrifices. The Brahmin-origin CPREEC brought various bans against animal sacrifice among the communities, but they decidedly fell flat. In vigorously supporting a ban on animal sacrifice, CPREEC, while seeking to understand the taboos against felling of trees and destruction of groves, denied the same understanding to rituals and sacrifices that play a vital role for the villagers in cementing the bond between them and the deities who are mostly non-vegetarian.
Influential writers such as Madhav Gadgil showed that it was the primitive belief system that helped the groves remain sacred. It was suggested that once this primitive religiosity disappeared to make way for organized religion such as Brahmanical Hinduism, it would lead to the destruction of the groves. Loss of fear and faith are also seen as primary reasons for the gradual chipping away of the taboos against the usage of sacred groves.
However, Kent shows that the stronger the community solidarity, the easier it becomes for the villagers to impose sanctions on degradation or usage of the groves as evident at Urani. Likewise, as groves slip from the control of temple associations and village leaders of cohesive communities and attain devotees from distant areas, they tend to decrease as seen at Puttupattu.
Whatever be the raging debates on the utility and use of the sacred groves, the book throws light not just on the ecological value of these groves but also their relation to village-based Hinduism, which plays a prominent role. And most importantly, it also brings into focus how the villagers themselves feel about the sacred groves and their ecological habitat.
At times, one feels that the book is filled with details that the author could have done away with. But, that would qualify as a minor quibble in a book that is thoroughly researched and beautifully written and one that is more than welcome in an area that is gradually gaining prominence.
Oil palm plantations are lucrative and are being actively encouraged by the Government across north-eastern India. After the first cut of forests in the region for oil palm in Mizoram, spread across over 20,000 hectares, Arunachal Pradesh State is on track to becoming a major oil palm producer in the coming years with over 100,000 hectares considered suitable for oil palm cultivation. In August last year, the State Government signed contracts with three companies to open up oil palm plantations over 20,000 hectares in the next five years. The rationale seems simple according to a report by the State Government of Mizoram; farmers currently undertaking shifting cultivation, which is perceived as wasteful and destructive, can grow oil palm and improve their own economy as well as reduce the country’s dependence on imported oil palm. But several examples from South-east Asia provide evidence to suggest that oil palm plantation development is riddled with complexity. Let’s first look at the ecological impacts.
Effects on landscapes The forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, countries that produce most of the world’s oil palm, have borne the brunt of oil palm expansion over the last three decades: by the year 2005, oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia affected over 30 million ha of forests. Besides directly causing deforestation leading to biodiversity loss and increased carbon emissions, oil palm plantations have collateral impacts such as soil erosion as well as air and water pollution due to mill effluents and plantation run-off. Water quality in streams is affected by plantations: studies have shown that water from plantations was nearly 4°C warmer, sediment concentration over 500 times higher and the stream health in terms of stream metabolism was lower than forest streams. While oil palm plantations support lower biodiversity relative to other land use types such as rubber, cocoa and coffee plantations, diversity is also lower than in secondary forests formed following shifting cultivation, which involves small-scale forest clearing followed by natural regeneration.
Palm plantations also accentuate the risk of fire in landscapes; while many oil palm plantations in Indonesia are on drained peat forest rather than uplands, low tree density and lack of ground cover can contribute to a hot, dry, fire-prone environment. Industrial manipulation of the landscape for oil palm development was considered a significant factor responsible for more than half the fires that raged across Indonesia last year and affected over a million hectares of forests. George Monbiot, the environmental writer, called this “the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st century so far”.
Impacts on people
Such ecological impacts will affect the forests in the Indian North-east, which besides supporting several endangered flora and fauna are largely managed by indigenous communities. Shifting cultivation or swidden, a mountain farming system practised by about half a million families across a roughly equal area in hectares, annually, is the mainstay of the region. While on the one hand, the practice provides food security in remote mountainous areas, on the other, farming communities also draw strong links between the practice and their own cultural identity. As oil palm plantations spread and replace cultivable areas under swidden, they can be expected to affect the livelihoods of farming communities that subsist on the practice. For instance, palm plantations have affected the Dayak community in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia; following the establishment of plantations, communities had to travel farther to collect forest produce, hunt and prepare their swiddens.
Besides such direct impacts, other indirect social impacts have been documented from Southeast Asia such as lack of transparency regarding the smallholder-plantation arrangement, bonded labour, use of non-local employees, amenities promised by companies not being made available, unsafe use of fertilizers, high rates of injury among plantation workers, corruption between officials and plantations and breakdown of traditional social structures. Further, the perceptions of economic benefits of oil palm vary across different stakeholders–local communities, corporations and governments–and this has led to conflicts between them. Several sites with oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia have reported economic gains but some argue that these gains often accrue to migrant labourers rather than indigenous people.
In most parts of North-east India, settled cultivation or wet rice cultivation provides an important alternative and often supplements the activity of shifting cultivation. Irrigation comes at a premium due to the undulating terrain in the region. Diverting this scantily available resource to water-intensive oil palm plantations could affect the food security and livelihoods of farming communities. The remoteness of the area further complicates the prospects for oil palm. Several parts of North-east India are not well connected with markets and processing units. Where access is poor, product quality may suffer, since fresh oil palm bunches need to be processed within 24 hours of harvest to ensure good quality oil and to avoid the build-up of free fatty acids.
Sustainable palm oil?
Recognizing the problems associated with oil palm plantations, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was formed in 2004 to ensure environmentally sustainable and socially responsible practices and to certify companies that adhere to its principles. Certification should provide some protection for North-East India, however, implementation of RSPO principles has been fraught with issues. Firstly, RSPO membership itself is problematic: 65% of the RSPO are members that trade crude palm oil while only 20% are oil palm growers. The majority, then, have no direct responsibility for practices on the ground.
Secondly, the social, ecological and environmental expertise for effective implementation of the principles of RSPO is lacking in the countries where oil palm is grown. Further, in the year 2012, only a third of palm oil production by RSPO members was certified as sustainable.
Are there alternatives?
Given that oil palm plantations have affected both forests and communities in South-east Asia, and that the expansion of plantations in northeast India is still at its nascent stage, the time is ripe to look for alternatives. However, alternatives are not easy to come by since palm oil is widely used in edible and cosmetic products and oil palm is a highly productive crop in comparison with other oil crops such as soybean, sunflower and rapeseed.
Short-term measures involve improving productivity of existing plantations and avoiding further deforestation for future plantations. Some conservation biologists claim that boycotting oil palm is not the solution since producing oil from a different crop can affect even larger areas. Instead, making existing plantations more efficient and productive and utilizing a portion of the revenue generated from plantations to safeguard other forests has been suggested. Even the focus of the international environmental organization, Greenpeace, is to ‘break the link between palm oil and deforestation rather than for palm oil to be excluded’ .
Long-term alternatives are being researched with some success. In February last year, researchers at the University of Bath, England developed a way to produce the oily yeast Metschnikowia pulcherrima that has the lipid profile of palm oil. While they believe that it can likely grow on most organic feedstock and that its commercial production could be undertaken in 10 to 100 times less area than oil palm, the economically viable production of this yeast may take a few more years of research.
Concluding remarks
The forests in North-east India are already vulnerable to proposed dams, timber extraction, non-traditional shifting cultivation, mining for coal and limestone and previously introduced monoculture plantations such as tea, rubber and cashew, among others. Similarly, the livelihoods of farming communities are affected by policies that discourage shifting cultivation, a practice that provides subsistence to remote mountain farming communities. Introducing another forest conversion scheme at a large scale of several thousands of hectares poses risks to the land and the people.
Learning from experiences in a similar cultural and ecological landscape in neighbouring countries in South-east Asia, it may be more practical and ecologically sound to initially undertake small-scale oil palm plantations in previously cleared sites in North-east India and expand slowly in sites with other land use types without causing further deforestation. The expansion should also be based on learning from successes and failures at initially established sites. In terms of the management of oil palm plantations, companies designated to establish oil palm plantations must strictly adhere to RSPO principles, and local farmers should be involved throughout the decision making process including the actual management of the plantation to prevent negative social repercussions. Otherwise, instead of improving the economic conditions of communities in North-east India which is ostensibly an important reason for oil palm expansion, plantations may further marginalize farmers that subsist on shifting cultivation and cause extensive and irreversible ecological damage.
Acknowledgments:
The article was written during the first author’s Fulbright-Nehru fellowship at the University of Virginia. He thanks the United States-India Educational Foundation for the fellowship and the authors thank Dr. Geoff Hyde for useful comments which improved the article.
References:
Fitzherbert EB, MJ Struebig, A Morel, F Danielsen, CA Brühl, PF Donald & Phalan, B. 2008. How will oil palm expansion affect biodiversity? Trends in ecology & evolution, 23(10), 538-545.
Gillespie P. 2011. How Does Legislation Affect Oil Palm Smallholders in the Sanggau District of Kalimantan, Indonesia? Australasian Journal of Natural Resources Law and Policy, 14(1), 1-37.
Koh LP & DS Wilcove. 2007. Cashing in palm oil for conservation, Nature, 448(7157), 993-994.
Obidzinski K, R Andriani, H Komanidin & A Andrianto. 2012. Environmental and social impacts of oil palm plantations and their implications for biofuel production in Indonesia. Ecology and Society, 17(1), 25.
Raman TRS. 2014. Perils of Oil Palm, 20 August 2014, Newslink (Aizawl). Srinivasan U. 2014. Oil palm expansion: ecological threat to north-east India. Economic and Political Weekly, XLIX, Sep. 06, 2014
I have recently observed a growing trend of illegal resource utilisation that is countered with armed responses across East Africa’s protected areas. Various local and international media link illegal logging with the devastation and extinction of tree species and forests. A recent UNEP and INTERPOL report, titled ‘The Environmental Crime Crisis’, sees illegal logging and associated crimes as threats to human well-being and the broad sustainability agenda. It is especially interesting to note how governments and conservation organisations have responded. There are both news articles and academic discussions documenting an emphasised use of military and paramilitary tactics against illegal resource utilisation. The tactics’ advocates claim that as illegal resource extraction is becoming more sophisticated, armed and well organised, the use of militarised counter-measures is necessary. To show how seriously they are, in June 2014, high-level government representatives from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda announced their intention to curb armed illegal logging with the help of the INTERPOL through the East Africa Initiative on Illegal Timber Trade and REDD+. Likewise, in a recent budget speech, one heard the minister of natural resources and tourism in Tanzania proudly talking about the ministry’s plan to involve the Tanzania Police Force in controlling illegal logging. In the recent final evaluation report of REDD+ pilot projects in Tanzania, there was a recommendation about military training for local forest rangers to enable their ‘self-defence’ against armed and aggressive illegal loggers when carrying out forest patrols and monitoring.
As a political ecology researcher, I see the trend and resulting counter-measures as interesting ‘case studies’ to scrutinise the emerging and intensifying dynamics about violence, conflicts, justice and struggles over natural resource utilisation and conservation. Rosaleen Duffy and Elizabeth Lunstrum have referred to the use of military and paramilitary tactics – actors, techniques, technologies and partnerships – in the pursuit of conservation as ‘militarised conservation’ and ‘green militarisation’ respectively. Though ‘militarised conservation’ is not new (it was practised during the fortress conservation regimes in colonial and early post-colonial era), it is the intensification in terms of actors, techniques and technologies involved, its ill-understood justifications (ethically and morally) and consequences towards justice that seem to capture interests of political ecology researchers (including myself). For instance, in his recent inaugural professorial lecture, Bram Büscher has called the intensification of violence, conflicts, securitisation and surveillance in natural resource utilisation as one of the 21st century ‘development and change’ problematics that need further scrutiny. There is also an upcoming panel, titled Conservation and/as the unending war in sub-Saharan Africa of the Political ecologies of conflict, capitalism and contestation conference at Wageningen University. The panel intends to foster critical discussions for understanding the logic and dynamics behind the surging militarisation and war-making in the conservation frontiers of sub-Saharan Africa.
My interests on the topic are centred on questioning moral and ethical justifications (in connection to local forest justice) for using armed responses to counter illegal resource utilisation in defence of non-human species. Roderick Neumann’s article on moral and discursive geographies, and Rosaleen Duffy and colleagues’ recent back-to-back articles on the nuances of understanding the links between poverty, illegal wildlife hunting and intensified militarised conservation influence my thinking and the arguments I raise in this piece. The idea of shooting or even attempting to shoot a person in the defence of non-human species is seemingly absurd, especially when motivations that drive the person into illegal resource extraction are currently either ill-understood or wrongly conceptualised.
People may illegally extract forest resources as a response to increased demand for certain high-value timber from wealthy populations in the country and abroad; as a form of revenge against increased crop raids and livestock predation as a result of improved forest cover; as a mechanism to cope against restricted forest access (due to decentralised governance regimes) that precludes pre-existing income generating activities etc.
Here, I, therefore, conceptualise ‘militarised conservation’ as a paradoxical approach in three ways: first, the approach does not differentiate subsistence and commercial illegal resource utilisation i.e. it applies similar tactics when countering illegal resource extraction by individuals for subsistence and survival, and by well-organised groups for large-scale profit-making. Secondly, the approach focuses attention only on tackling one end of the illegal resource extraction chain, ignoring the political-economic contexts (at national and international levels) that drive illegal extraction at the local scale, thus creating further injustices. Lastly, advocates for ‘militarised conservation’ see the approach as justifiable in the defence of non-human species, but it does not allow ‘spaces of exception’ in cases where people responsible for forest protection under decentralised regimes fail – due to structural or relational reasons – to fulfil their responsibilities. I use my experience as a political ecology researcher in Tanzania to reflect on the three aforementioned ideas in connection with militarised conservation and justice.
I developed an interest in militarised conservation and justice implications during my fieldwork and research activities as a Masters student at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I spent six weeks carrying out fieldwork (between April and May 2010) in three villages, studying the political ecology of a decentralised forestry scheme in northern Tanzania. I explored influences of power struggles and relations over forest costs and benefit-sharing amongst participating actors in Nou Forest Reserve (NFR). Though it was not the initial focus of my research, I often heard discussions about surging armed illegal timber extraction. In several formal and informal discussions, villagers told me about how ‘clever’ illegal forest users had become as a result of using better weaponry than the local forest rangers possessed (sticks and machetes).
The Joint Management Agreement (JMA) requires rangers to accompany the Village Natural Resource Committees (VNRCs) three times per month to undertake forest patrols and monitoring as part of the villagers’ responsibilities in the scheme. Failure to fulfil such responsibilities could put the scheme into an impasse without the villagers’ consent. Therefore, for the villagers to maintain their ‘distributive justice’ i.e. abilities to derive benefits (mostly through harvesting non-timber forest products, confiscating illegally harvested logs/timber and collecting fines from caught offenders) from the scheme, it was mandatory to perform forest protection duties effectively.
The lack of advanced weaponry to counter the armed illegal loggers’ tactics meant that participating villages were to be seen as irresponsible partners thus being axed from the joint forestry scheme. To avoid that and keep the flow of the benefits, the villages asked the Babati district police force to provide support in terms of personnel and equipment during forest patrols. With limited budgets, the police help did not last long as the villages lacked sustainable funds to cover fuel costs of the police vehicles and per diems of the patrol team members. Unfortunately, the police involvement led to a change of tactics by illegal loggers who started doing their activities at night. With just sticks and machetes and without heavy-duty night-time lighting equipment, the local patrol teams did not dare put themselves into grave danger by carrying out night-time patrols.
Thereafter, the patrols became very irregular as perceived security risks and lack of allowances discouraged local forest patrolling. This meant that the villages would potentially be cut off from the scheme, thus going back to a governance regime where the state (through the forestry department) would oversee forestry under commanding and policing means, which have historically produced long-lasting injustices to forest-dependent people.
Other parts of Tanzania are also experiencing this paradoxical militarised conservation, which has produced or enforced injustices. Cases of illegal logging syndicates made headlines in 2007 as top public officials were involved in illegal extraction in southern Tanzania and trade in high-value timber to China and India (where there is increased demand for such timber). Interestingly, in the crackdown that followed, it was the local people (involved as log cutters, timber makers and transporters) who bore the negative consequences, while powerful people behind the illegal logging avoided the consequences of forceful countermeasures.
In general, I suggest that the use of armed counter-response against illegal resource utilisation indicates a weakness, as illegal activities may contain the hidden message that people are not satisfied with existing governance regimes and the promises they offer. Or they find the regimes and promises inefficient, damaging, or simply irrelevant with regard to local contexts. Likewise, ‘militarised conservation’ reveals the widening gap between policy and practice, indicating how policies are not in harmony with realities on the ground. So policy proponents have to use greater force when the policies falter in the face of local realities.
And this usually does not end well for locals, as recent cases in Pugu-Kazimzumbwi forest reserves show. Here, with an eviction order signed by the Prime Minister, a local conservation NGO financed the Tanzania Police Force to forcefully evict people who were classified as ‘forest encroachers’ by the forestry department and the NGO, but as legal occupiers by the Ministry of Land. Most of the evicted people were farmers and pastoralists who occupied the forestland for subsistence (and a small percentage through charcoal production). This happened at a time when economically and politically powerful individuals in Dar es Salaam were hiring some of the evicted people as their servants in the lucrative charcoal making business. As always, it was local people who faced the consequences of the police force as policemen confiscated their property such as bicycles, harassed them and handed unfair judicial treatments to the ‘local offenders’.
With this piece, I raise two related arguments. Firstly, unless the driving forces for people to engage in illegal resource extraction are well understood and conceptualised within academic and policy spheres, militarised conservation or green militarisation will remain a paradoxical approach. One of the possible ways to enhance our understanding and conceptualisation is by looking at the motivations from a political economy lens, and policymakers must use these analyses in policy development. In a country such as Tanzania where GDP growth has been at 7% over the past ten years, but poverty is still widespread, illegal resource extraction (especially by those doing it for subsistence) may be conceptualised as an outcome of distributive injustice as a result of unequally distributed national wealth and other related political-economic processes. It is such situations where natural resources-dependent people entangled in the broad and complex political-economic processes that leave them without ‘rational’ options, may be involved in illegal resource utilisations.
Therefore, as long as ‘militarised conservation’ does not acknowledge how and why people are motivated to engage in illegal resource extraction, it will remain an approach that may further injustice. In such times of crisis (as illegal extraction surges due to local ‘military’ incapacities), normal laws and regulations about forest protection responsibilities and consequences of failing to fulfil them should not hold, as enforcing them will only increase injustice. ‘Militarising’ local forest rangers can only escalate conflicts between local rangers and illegal resource users, which will raise further questions about moral and ethical justifications of any killing of humans in defence of nature, and even local forest justice. I argue therefore that it is necessary to have such ‘spaces of exception’ as better temporary solutions while working to redress the political-economic processes that motivate people to engage in illegal resource utilisation, thereby reducing injustice and creating long-term equitable solutions.
Further reading:
Cavanagh C, PO Vedeld & LT Trædal. 2015. Securitizing REDD+ Problematizing the emerging illegal timber trade and forest carbon interface in East Africa. Geoforum 60: 72 – 82.
Duffy R. 2014. Waging a war to save biodiversity: The rise of militarized conservation. International Affairs 90(4): 819–834.
Duffy R, FAV St John, B Büscher & D Brockington. 2015. Toward a new understanding of the links between poverty and illegal hunting. Conservation Biology.
Lunstrum E. 2014. Green militarization: Antipoaching efforts and the spatial contours of Kruger national park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104(4): 816–832.
Neumann R. 2004. Moral and discursive geographies in the war for biodiversity in Africa. Political Geography 23: 813–837.
A Future for Cheetahs Dr Laurie Marker; With photographs by Suzi Eszterhas ISBN-978-0615933207 Cheetah Conservation Fund; 1st edition, 2014
CHEETAHS EVOLVED SOME FIVE MILLION YEARS AGO–BUT ARE THEIR DAYS NUMBERED?
“ Everyone who comes to Africa on a safari wants to see a cheetah.” For those who are visiting savannah regions, this is undeniably true. Compared to the likelihood of seeing one of the rarer felines, such as a caracal or a genet, chances are fairly decent that the average tourist will encounter a cheetah at some point during his or her trip. The cats will probably be quietly lounging in the sun, resting or digesting, though some lucky visitors may be treated to glimpses of a hunt, or of a mother taking care of her young.
However, as Dr Laurie Marker writes in her book A Future for Cheetahs, cheetah populations are struggling, and humans—tourists and residents both—are one of the major reasons why. Dr Marker, founder and executive director of the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF), has over three decades of experience working with cheetahs and injects her book with her considerable biological, sociological, and management knowledge.
A Future for Cheetahs starts with an introduction to the biology of cheetahs, then moves on to a survey of contemporary cheetah research. The remainder of the book analyses cheetah-human conflicts, in site conservation efforts, and the use of sanctuaries and other captive environments, all with the aim of predicting the cats’ future.
The scope of A Future for Cheetahs is impressive; even cheetah aficionados are likely to learn something new. Although there is more breadth than depth, the many gorgeous photos are an excellent accompaniment to the text, providing additional insights about cheetahs, their habitats, and their encounters with humans. In fact, the beautiful images are probably the best part of the book, stealing a bit of thunder from writing that is not always as clear, elegant, or even grammatically correct as you might like—especially given that the book costs a not-insignificant $45 (a portion of which goes to the CCF).
Those who have glanced at the fairly sizeable list of cheetah conservation partners on page 208 might be surprised that the CCF consistently takes centre stage, with the photos and text both suggesting that Dr Laurie Marker is the hero of the story. Although this may very well be true, and while the important work of the Cheetah Conservation Fund should by no means be overlooked, the somewhat self-congratulatory phrasing does become a little tedious.
That said, A Future for Cheetahs is to be commended for showcasing all of the hard work that is involved in wildlife conservation—the blend of veterinary science, ecosystem management, political manoeuvring, captive breeding, campaigning, and more. Detail-oriented readers will also be pleased with the appendix, which provides extra data associated with cheetah biology, scientific methodologies, and conservation plans.
The book ends with an honest assessment of the cheetah’s future: Marker writes that “at the current pace, the cheetah is not going to live into too many more generations.” However, as she points out earlier in the book, this is a remarkable species that has successfully recovered from two previous population declines. Conservationists have at their disposal an impressive array of tools that can be deployed to save these magnificent cats. One such tool is the power to educate the public through outreach, and another is to raise money for vital conservation initiatives. A Future for Cheetahs is certainly an admirable bid to achieve both of these important goals.
It is January, and deep in the Mexican tropics, a change is coming. Shifting, swirling forces in the upper stratosphere bring another flowering season to an end, and with it a signal to one extraordinary little bird to begin one of the greatest journeys in the natural world. Almost 4000 miles, the Sonoran desert and both the Rocky and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges separate this tiny traveller from its destination, but this trip must be completed twice a year if it is to breed. A little over 9 cm long and weighing just three and a half grams, the rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) is about to embark on the longest migration, relative to its size, of any bird in the world.
There are five aspects that make this such an astonishing undertaking. The first is simply the distance – 4000 miles one way, an 8000 mile round trip.That is a distance more than twice the length of India. To drive that distance averaging 60 mph would take more than five days. Even to travel by jumbo jet would require a ten hour flight*1! For the hummingbird this amounts to 78,470,000 body lengths. For a human to cover an equivalent distance, would mean walking around the circumference of the earth more than 3 times.
This is all amazing enough, but it is made all the more so if we consider the 2nd astonishing fact – the energy required to live life as a hummingbird. When hovering it must beat its wings 52-62 times per second, and at this time have the highest metabolic rate of any vertebrate. This means that they are never more than 20 minutes from starvation. Truly a life on the brink. To cope with such extreme energetic demands, they possess a number of physiological and behavioural adaptations. They have big hearts for their size and their blood contains a high number of red blood cells. These traits enable them to transport enough oxygen round the body as efficiently as possible.
Other adaptations help them conserve energy. Fat, which yields more energy compared to carbohydrates, is burned during migration. Fat is also burned while resting, but when feeding the birds switch to burning carbohydrates. This keeps fat stores in reserve and avoids the need to use energy, producing the fatty acids which are needed to metabolize fat. What is more – something I’m sure we can all relate to – these birds do everything possible to avoid cold toes. When they are feeding, how far they hold their feet from their body varies with the ambient temperature. When it is particularly nippy, they keep them tucked up in their abdominal plumage, but when it is warmer, they dangle their toes in the cooling breeze. Finally, they maximize energy intake by being very fussy eaters, preferentially visiting flowers from which the nectar flows quickly, or in which sugar composition is particularly high.
Even with these adaptations, the locations this bird chooses to breed in are extraordinary. Their breeding range spans from the northern tip of California, through the mountains of British Columbia – where the altitude of nests can vary from sea level to 1,830m – right up Alaska, the most northerly latitude reached by any hummingbird.
And if they weren’t already burning enough energy, one additional trait exacerbates this even further. They have larger than average brains and possess a range of cognitive abilities which exceed those expected for a bird of this size. This is intriguing, because brains take a lot of fueling, and storing information for any period of time requires significant energetic effort. Consequently, how species choose to allocate their energy resources, particularly when they must be so care-column Matt Creasey fully guarded as with the hummingbirds, gives us a hint to the most important factors influencing hummingbird survival. If their particular cognitive abilities didn’t confer a real advantage, they would quickly lose them.
This unexpected braininess has made rufous hummingbirds the subject of much research investigating both their cognitive and physiological abilities. This research has uncovered a lot about these birds and has revealed a web of relationships between the hummingbirds and other species which span a continent. We now know for example, that the birds are able to remember when they last visited a particular flower, avoiding ones they know will be empty and returning to those which have had time to re-fill with nectar, thus maximizing their foraging efficiency. This memory does not only retain information for short periods of time – individual hummingbirds return to the same breeding and wintering sites year after year, follow similar routes while on migration, and even appear to visit sites where good food sources have been found in previous seasons. This suggests impressive navigation and spatial memory that is maintained between years.
These discoveries reveal a lot about what really matters to these little birds, but also pose a number of questions. Perhaps the most obvious is why do they undertake such an apparently hazardous journey at all? Surely between Mexico and Alaska, there is enough suitable habitat to sustain the whole population of rufous hummingbirds? So why continue north? The answer seems to be that by reaching such isolated and difficult climes, they ensure that they have exclusive rights to the food supplies on offer, avoiding competition with other nectar-feeding species.
The next question is how? What factors enable them to be successful in their undertaking? The physiological and behavioural adaptations which enable them to survive so far north are only part of the answer. After all, the final destination is only a small part of the whole astonishing journey, across a hugely varied landscape. To get a more complete understanding, we must consider the interactions between the hummingbirds and two other, apparently unconnected species. Firstly, along the length of the migration route, humans put out feeders containing sugar-rich water to attract beautiful birds. This provides an important opportunity for the tiny travellers to top up waning energy reserves, enabling them to survive the journey. The second interaction occurs as the birds reach the northern limits of their journey. Here, resident Red-naped sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus nuchalis), small woodpeckers found across the upper states, move between willow and alder trees, using their strong bills to remove circles of bark, and allowing the sugar-rich sap to trickle out. Hummingbirds arriving on the breeding grounds early have learnt that by following the sap-suckers, they can take advantage of this free meal when most plants are yet to begin flowering.
The delicacy of the balance which enables rufous hummingbirds to live is hard to imagine, and harder to predict. Scientists have revealed a great deal about this astonishing little bird, and the complex and intricate web of relationships that cross national and species boundaries and comprise the different ‘compartments’ of their lives. Yet it is still all but impossible to predict what effect small changes at a local level will have for a given species, or even more so, what cascading effects there will be throughout the ecosystem.
Take a moment to think about the species you see every day in your own garden, or that you passed on your journey to work or school this morning. How many of them were migratory? For those that were, what sort of lives, and what world do they experience during the times when they are away in other parts of the world? We get but a snapshot of the whole picture when we see any animal in a single setting, a single-window into a life of many rooms and hidden passageways. In some ways perhaps, this is akin to imagining the people our parents were before we were born. What were their childhood dreams and aspirations? Did they come true, or fall by the wayside? What if our boss or teacher, what are they like when at home eating dinner with their family? We can never truly know someone until we understand the elements which comprise their complicated, messy, fascinating lives. In the same way, we can never truly understand the important elements of an organism’s existence until we recognize its multidimensional nature. Nor can we easily predict how far-reaching changes to one small part will be… if your mother had argued with her parents that afternoon, if she had never attended that dance, then perhaps she may never have met your father, and you would not be here to read this now…
At present, the hummingbirds are listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as ‘of least conservation concern’. How – ever, numbers are decreasing, and the reasons for this are still unclear. Evidence from one study in Alaska has shown this species to be affected by timber harvesting, being completely lost from the study site after felling had occurred. Who would guess that felling a small stand of trees in Alaska could mean that the bird feeders at a house in Mexico remained unvisited? And what of the role that hummingbirds play as pollinators? The birds have been shown to be of critical importance in certain ecosystems, as their warm blood enables them to be active during the cold months of early spring when invertebrate pollinators are yet to emerge, thus ensuring the pollination and seed-set of early flowering plants which are important food sources for a variety of species. If hummingbird feeders are no longer put out in California, will this affect the body condition of bears in British Columbia? Think about this carefully and I am sure you will see how the answer could be yes.
We take the species we see, particularly the common ones for granted. But they live complicated lives, and we should not underestimate the far-reaching effects that environmental damage at a local scale may have. Equally, we should never underestimate the power and influence we can have ourselves. Small gestures for conservation can have significant effects, and we are all part of the great web of life.
James D Nichols has been a wildlife biologist with the US Geological Survey for more than 40 years and a long-time collaborator on conservation research projects in India. At the Student Conference on Conservation Science, Bengaluru (SCCS-Bengaluru)-2015, Dr Nichols spoke about ways to integrate science into conservation decision-making, drawing upon his own experiences working with wildlife managers in North America.
Hari Sridhar spoke to Dr Nichols after the talk, to find out more about his work.
HS: In your talk at SCCS-Bengaluru, you said that the way in which scientists usually engage with park managers and conservation decision-makers is inefficient. Why do you think so?
JN: I guess the first thing I should say is that inefficiency is not a horrible crime. It is just that, in the conservation world today, our dollars and efforts are so limited. If we can do better within our limited means, why not do so? I think the inefficiency comes via a lack of communication and a lack of a central programme within which everyone works. What often happens – or at least what I have seen in my world – is a group of scientists interested in a particular system will get money for studying that particular system, claiming that what they learn will be useful to conservation folks. They will then go out and perform the study, learn something and then give that information to the manager or conservation guy who is actually on the ground doing things. I don’t claim that what is learnt is never useful, but very frequently it doesn’t hit the mark. In other words, what scientists learn is not exactly what the decision-maker needs to make a conservation decision. And that’s where the inefficiency is. So then you basically have two groups who are angry at each other – the scientist says, ‘oh this guy is not paying attention to my work’, or ‘he is not reading the right journal’ or something, and the conservationist guy says ‘well, the scientist is pursuing his own interests rather than thinking exactly about what I need to help me make my decision’. It is in this sense, that I view what we do today, as inefficient.
HS: Do you think part of the problem is that the scientist and decision-maker don’t work together right from the beginning?
JN: Yes, one way that ought to hold promise for getting rid of this problem is having scientists and conservation folks working together from the beginning, and treating science basically as a useful piece of a much larger conservation programme. That way the science itself ends up being directed at things that are most useful to the conservation decision-maker. What might these be? Mainly, trying to predict the effects of the usually pitifully small number of actions we can take on the system that we are working on. Once the scientists recognise exactly what the decision-maker needs, you are ensuring that the kinds of hypotheses tested are directly relevant to the decision process.
HS: In your talk, you called this process ‘Adaptive resource management’. Is this something that has been around for a while in a formal way?
JN: Okay, that’s an interesting story. The fundamental idea of adaptive management is trying to manage in the face of uncertainty. As a conservation guy, if you knew exactly what to do you don’t really need this. But we are involved in so many situations where there is a lot of uncertainty. In such situations, there are two approaches one can take – the old approach would be to have scientists go out and study the problem for a long, long time – 5-10 years – and then provide results that hopefully reduce the uncertainty associated with the management problem – uncertainty associated with how actions translate into responses. The claim of adaptive management is that that’s foolish for a couple of reasons – first is time – bad things continue to happen when the scientist is off trying to learn stuff. The other problem is when the scientist comes back at the end of 10 years or so, almost invariably, there is all kinds of uncertainty still left – you never just solve everything completely. And so a guy named Buzz Holling ended up saying ‘why don’t we go ahead and begin management right away – let’s not delay, but what we will do is try to embed science within the management process so we learn while we are doing’. So, it’s a ‘learning by doing’ kind of an idea.
HS: Can you give us an example?
JN: The United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has, for a long time, been responsible for hunting regulations for ducks in my country. In 1995, there was a political play on this whereby a state got hunting regulations tilted in its favour. They had gone around a process that had been in place for a good 30 years. When this happened, virtually one congressman from every state that had not benefited from this play wrote to the Secretary of Interior saying ‘boy, you really messed up’. People were really, really mad and brought all kinds of political pressure to bear. I’ll back up a tiny bit here – there was a visionary guy named Fred Johnson who, in the early 1990s, realised that for this kind of duck harvest management, adaptive management will be a really smart thing to do. So he formed a working group, of which I and a small number of others were part. From 1991-95 we developed an adaptive management framework for duck hunting, basically saying that if ever the situation came up, this is how we would go about attacking the problem. So when this problem happened in 1995, we went before the USFWS director and made our case. At that time the director was looking for any process that she could claim was transparent and defensible. And so it was just the perfect time for us to march in and present our adaptive management plan, and she readily agreed. For the next six months, folks, where I work, had to drop everything else to take this forward. All the modelling and optimisation stuff that had to be put in place was a huge effort -we called it our ‘Manhattan project’.
Anyway, we (led by Johnson) got the thing together and since 1995 this adaptive harvest management has been implemented for our biggest population of hunted ducks – mid-continental mallards (Anas platyrhynchos). It has been a success story in the sense that it has reduced the contentiousness that accompanied the establishment of hunting regulations each year. It has reduced the uncertainty – to begin with, we had four competing models – four different scenarios of how hunting regulations might affect populations – and now we have ended up having a pretty high degree of confidence in one model, a little confidence in another, while the other two are not good predictors at all. And so this adaptive management tenet, of learning while you are doing, has absolutely happened – we can show you how our formal degrees of confidence in different models have changed over time. The idea is that you don’t just learn, but while you are learning you use what you have learnt. Our idea of what is the optimal/smartest thing to do has changed – we are giving the two best models more and more influence – not in a folksy way but in a mathematical way – in the optimisation process. We are not only learning by doing but we are using what we have learnt at each time step.
HS: This process requires the scientist and manager to work together, to collaborate right from the beginning. Does that mean that the managers need to have an appreciation and an understanding of the numbers that go into it?
JN: I think it is important. However, there are degrees. I don’t think it is important necessarily that the manager knows all the details of how we build our models, how we estimate things like survival rates, and certainly how we do the optimization – that stuff gets fairly ugly. But I do think it is important that the managers have at least a folksy understanding of how the process works. It is very important for those of us who do the more detailed mathematical stuff to try to explain what we are doing to the managers, to the degree possible. A lot of interaction is needed.
HS: Is communicating the uncertainty and likelihood of error in science particularly difficult, especially since people usually think of science as ‘truth’ and ‘fact’?
JN: Yes it is. Getting the ideas of uncertainty across, in terms of how we quantify it, how we can make statements about it, and I guess most importantly how we deal with it when we have to make decisions is difficult. But it shouldn’t be difficult – I mean think about your most important decisions – choosing somebody to marry, how many children to have, where to send your kids to school – every decision we make is characterised by uncertainty. Yet we find a way, through intuition most of the time, to make the ‘right’ decisions. All we are doing differently here is using a mathematical formalism in the place of intuition, not because formal is necessarily good, but because very often the optimal solutions are different from what we might have thought of intuitively. My intuition doesn’t work as well as I would like it to. The other reason to use formalism is transparency – we can show people exactly how we arrived at a decision step-by-step. Anyway, communicating the uncertainty is a big deal for sure.
HS: Especially because managers are likely to be making most others decisions based entirely on their intuition?
JN: Sure, and I get that and maybe that is good a lot of the time. What’s most interesting is that the managers who are most interested in listening to our ideas are often the ones in the most contentious situations. Now if you are a manager and nobody is complaining to you about the decisions you are making, why bother with this tedious process? But the folks we see who are most interested in this stuff are like the USFWS in the duck case. THE USFWS was getting it from both sides – people suing them, taking them to court for allowing hunting and others being angry because they couldn’t shoot enough. Endangered species folks are very interested in this approach. Why? Because they are constantly getting thrown into court and need to defend the decisions they have taken in a detailed step-by-step fashion.
HS: You speak about court cases. At least in working with the manager, you might have the luxury of time, you can sit with him or her for a few days/weeks and explain all this stuff. When you have to make a case using numbers in a short period of time in front of a judge, is that a lot more difficult, to get them to appreciate the nuances of numerical arguments?
JN: It’s difficult for sure. The only court case I was in happened before we adopted this adaptive management sort of approach. It had to do with setting hunting regulations for one species of duck. The law stated that the regulations had to be set in a manner that was not ‘arbitrary and capricious’. So all we had to do was bring in all the computer printouts and convince the judge that we were trying really hard to figure out how this population was doing and what regulations made the most sense. That basically won the day in that case. But I would approach it differently if I find myself in court again in the future – I would actually try to lay out the details of how we come up with a particular decision. Your question brings to mind a famous murder case in our country – the OJ Simpson case. In that case, one very important consideration was how likely it was that the blood at the crime site – which was a very close match to OJ Simpson’s – how likely was it, that it came from someone else. The probability turned out to be very very small. Unfortunately, the guy who came up with the probability made a mistake initially and then revised it. Now, the mistake was ridiculously small – the number was different only after 10 decimal places so it did not change the inference in any way. But yet it allowed the defence to say ‘hey wait, this guy messed up. He gives us one number one day and another number the next day. Why should we listen to him?” Just an illustration of the danger and difficulty of presenting and defending numbers in a court case.
HS: Do you think this process of adaptive management you describe is suitable for certain kinds of systems more than others – e.g. simpler ecological systems where one or two factors are dominant; systems where management interventions are simpler? Or do you think it is useful no matter what the complexity? What if your interest was in a community of organisms and if there were multiple problems that interact?
JN: I think there are two situations where it is not useful. If you really have certainty – if you know, for example, that villagers inside a protected area are 100% the reason for the problem with tiger prey numbers and you know that you can somehow find them a better livelihood outside the protected area, then your problem is solved – there is no need for adaptive management. Adaptive management is designed for situations where there is uncertainty. It is also set up as a recurrent management decision process. In other words, if you are making a one-time decision, and you are never ever going to revisit that decision, and you are not going to make similar decisions in similar situations elsewhere, then there is no need for adaptive management because there is no need for learning. But given there is uncertainty and a need for recurrent decisions it is useful no matter what the complexity of the situation. It is useful but more difficult. Some people use that to say that’s way too complicated and that we can’t possibly go through all these steps and get an agreement. But my claim there is that there is no alternative. What’s the alternative? I guess you just do whatever you feel like and hope it works, but there is no alternative that I would know how to defend.
HS: You spoke about how environmental variation can influence all of this and therefore needs to be incorporated. But what about externalities that influence the management decision itself, e.g. factors outside a park that influence a manager’s decision? Is this process insulated from all of that and are you working with the assumption that the manager has full control over decision making and implementation? Or are you moving to a process that also incorporates externalities – political pressures, changing societal values etc.?
JN: Okay, I guess there are two things I want to say in response. So far we have been lucky that the USFWS, has always accepted and implemented what we come up with every year. But the USFWS director has the power to override what we recommend and say ‘you know, I am going to try something different this year’. I don’t think anybody would ever do it because they would have to defend it, and it would not be possible to defend it. Basically, you have to answer the question – ‘why is it that you are doing something other than what’s been shown to be the smartest thing you can do given your objectives. That’s a hard thing to answer. But you are right, in many cases, the ultimate decision-maker could override you. So the first thing we made sure of is that the main decision-maker is at the table when you are going through all this stuff. You don’t just do it in a vacuum and say – ‘hey, I came up with a smart way to make decisions for you guys’. So you need to have them in from the very beginning and they should formally accept your process, although they always have the power to override. The second point I want to make is about other externalities – if it turns out, as you say, that political support or societal values are changing. We try very hard to ensure that all relevant stakeholders, all people who even think they are stakeholders or should be stakeholders are included in the first part of this setup phase when we are coming up with the objectives. The ‘kiss of death’ for one of these projects would be to have one group that thinks it should be part of this process but is not included. Then, even if you come up with suggestions that are consistent with that group’s point, they might not support you because they are mad at not being included. So, it is crucial that politicians, members of civil society, different groups – conservation groups, hunter groups, etc. – whoever thinks they have something to say about this, is brought to the table when the objectives are being discussed.
HS: In terms of the kinds of interventions possible – is this process more useful in the case of interventions that have a very direct bearing on the problem e.g. allowing or not allowing hunting of a species, as against interventions that might only have an indirect impact, e.g. controlling tourists in an area that houses an important species?
JN: Yes, it is easier to think of it in the former, but I almost think that adaptive management may even be more important in the latter, because there is probably greater uncertainty. For example, I am involved in a re-introduction programme for this duck species called Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri) in the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in Alaska. And there one of the things we talk about is public education. We debate about the importance an education programme that might help reduce hunting by local indigenous people. That’s a potential action in which there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether or not it will be useful to the project. But I think the less certain we are about its influence the more important it is to use a process like this to help you learn how relevant the action might be.
HS: Is this process used widely now?
JN: No, not at all. I am not even sure of a number. I am involved in I guess five different formal programmes right now. As I said earlier, the difficulty is you can’t just convince people by giving a talk or making a presentation. There’s a long way between that and getting it done. In each one of the five programmes I am involved in I have had to spend a lot of time and effort and basically be a part of that programme for a number of years. Obviously, I am not the only guy – I have got a small number of colleagues who have done exactly the same thing. But what that has resulted in is a relatively small number of places where this form of the programme has been carried out. In the duck world, for example, it has been extended now to a number of different species and populations. My vision for the future, for conservation biology, is that this will be something much more commonplace, that it will be the norm, but it’s nowhere close to that right now, either in the US or anywhere else in the world. That vision may be way further off than I would like it to be. But I think the more case studies we present that show that this thing works – that it is transparent and gives defensible results – my hope is, the more widely it would be adopted.
HS: What about in work you have been associated with in India – e.g., do you think this process might be useful in managing the tiger population in Nagarhole? Has it been tried?
JN: We have talked about that. My last visit here, about a year ago, was for that purpose exactly. First, we went to Thailand and then we came here and in both places we were talking about the potential for using decision processes for tiger management. Our duck work started out with that working group and after 3-4 years we were finally able to implement something. My hope would be that, now that the seeds have been planted for a similar programme for tigers, we will see something in the near future, at least an example programme from India. Just three days before this conference we had a meeting on writing the second edition of this book on monitoring tigers. We decided that in the new edition there is going to be a much greater emphasis on embedding monitoring within a larger management framework. So yes, I would like to think that things are rolling in that direction. Has it happened yet? No.
HS: The dynamic between manager and scientist – seems crucial for this process to work. Does the fact that you work for a government agency make for an easier, more equal, working relationship with managers, as compared to, for example, if you were from a university?
JN: I don’t know. I would like to think that a university person could do it. We have this umbrella agency called the Department of the Interior and the USFWS is part of that Dept. I happen to work for the US Geological Survey- it seems strange but they do have a biology group. The idea is that all the science folks work in this Geological Survey and the folks concerned with on-ground management are in places like USFWS or the National Park Service. So even in my case we do have this separation – yes, I work for a government agency but I am identified as a science guy. And a lot of the time I think the successes that we have had have been in spite of, rather than because of, our organisational structure. In other words, because we think it is very very important to interact with managers we have made the effort to do so even though the way in which we are organised is somewhat antithetical to that. If I was developing big organisations I wouldn’t separate managers and scientists organisationally. So even though I am in the government, there is still this big distinction made – maybe not quite as much as between university and managers. Even the mechanics of promotion are different – we are evaluated on scientific stuff, managers are evaluated for different things.
HS: You mentioned earlier in the conversation and in your talk that while science can aid conservation decision-making, the choices we make and the values underlying them need to come from society. Therefore, do you also feel that scientists should have limited, clearly-defined roles – restricted to their research – in conservation?
JN: That’s a good question. I hadn’t thought about it exactly that way so my top of the head thought is this: the role of the scientist is very clear in the process I laid out. In coming up with objectives scientists should have no more say than anybody else in the public. They do have a place at the table, but it absolutely is not any more important than that of anybody else. Like I said earlier, you want to make sure that all the stakeholders are there and the scientist is just one stakeholder at best. Now with regard to the second step – coming up with management alternatives – there, scientists have a somewhat bigger role, but again, the manager is most important here, because he or she knows what’s feasible much better than a scientist. The steps where the scientist has the most important role is in the development of models, development and implementation of the monitoring programmes and the implementation of the decision analysis. That’s interesting – the way I see adaptive management it seems like there are very clear roles for people. I’ll also add that I see a very important role for social science within conservation science. In the process I envision, social science is extremely important in setting objectives. In the cases I have been involved in – I was never trained in that social science stuff – but yet I was sitting there in the front of the room trying to get people who hate each other – or rather hate each other’s ideas – to come up with a compromise set of objectives. I am guessing a social scientist or somebody who is trained to do that will probably have done that a lot more effectively than I was able to. So there is a role for social scientists in this, not necessarily in the development of models or monitoring, but there is a clear role.
HS: But you often find scientists going beyond their science and becoming advocates for particular causes. Often, they weigh in on conservation issues that they might not have researched themselves. Do you think that part of the problem is a mixing of personal values and professional responsibilities, i.e. that many scientists in conservation get into the field because of their interest in protecting wild species and places?
JN: I have no problem in a scientist expressing to people what his or her values are – that doesn’t bother me at all. Any stakeholder should be able to do that. But that my values should be privileged over yours because I am a science guy and I know more than you – that I disagree with. The reason why I value a species might be because it plays an important ecological role. Someone might value it because he or she likes going to bed somehow knowing that it’s out and would feel poorer if it wasn’t. Other people might have other – economic – priorities in mind. So there is no reason why scientists’ opinions should be taken any more important than anyone else’s, with respect to objectives.
Since the adoption of decentralised forestry in the 1980s, foresters’ roles have drastically changed from traditional command and policing roles, to advisory and supporting roles. Besides, today’s tropical forestry realities are highly complex and dynamic due to changing climates, increasing global interests, rapidly spreading science and technologies, and changing social systems due to globalisation, rapid urbanisation and neoliberalisation. In such a world, the need to generate professionals who are well equipped to deal with the realities is essential. But, what kind of professional capabilities do foresters require to solve complex and dynamic forest governance challenges? Joana Ameyaw and colleagues provide a starting point through a study that aimed to explore knowledge and skills needed for today’s professional foresters to move towards improved forest governance in Ghana.
They explored root causes of observed and documented weak forest governance in Ghana. Informed by data collected through a mixed-methods approach, they attribute a substantial part of the weakness to professional forestry education that has largely been based on forestry science and silviculture – ‘traditional forestry’ – since professional forestry training started in 1982. Such training largely equips forestry professionals with technical capabilities only. In the times when the forestry sector faces governance challenges such as corruption, weak structures for forest governance monitoring, elite power position of politicians over forestry, lack of staff and logistic=s at the Forestry Commission etc., it is necessary for professional forestry education to put more emphasis on non-technical capabilities. Their arguments are based on the finding that many professional foresters are not equipped with the non-technical knowledge and skills necessary to manage these transformations and address the resulting challenges.
They identify key capabilities that would also necessitate curricula changes in professional education. They emphasise training in leadership skills that enable foresters to make and defend professional decisions against powerful elites’ influence; analytical and critical reflection on forestry realities framed within the political economy approach, to help foresters in developing innovative and transformative ideas for improvement; resource mobilisation skills to deal with inadequacy in materials necessary for effecting forest governance; professional ethics for dealing with the culture of corruption, and acquiring skills for forestry diplomacy, vital to negotiate and lobby for resources required to improve governance. Besides, recognition and validation of the new skills require radical changes in incentive and reward structures within forestry institutions. These are crucial steps for professional foresters to keep pace with rapidly changing forest governance realities.
Further reading:
Ameyaw J, B Arts & A Wals. 2016. Challenges to responsible forest governance in Ghana and its implications for professional education. Forest Policy and Economics, 62: 78–87. doi:10.1016/j.forpol.2015.07.011.
What do the passenger pigeon, the Spanish Ibex and the woolly mammoth have in common? Although officially extinct, they are all now challenging the meaning of the word because, in each case, scientists are working on bringing them back to life. The groups working on the projects are confident that mammoths will graze Siberia again and passenger pigeons will fly over the skies of New York. The genomes i.e. the full DNA code, of the mammoth and passenger pigeon have been sequenced, bringing both species a step closer to what is being labelled de-extinction. But with the project comes controversy. Not everyone in the science community sees de-extinction as a good idea. For some, the fact that technology has evolved to the point where cells can be cloned or engineered to bring back an extinct animal does not mean it should be done. Power should be demonstrated by restraint and not by crossing lines, they say. Others, while agreeing that de-extinction is about power, believe that it is acceptable. After all, humans are driving species to extinction by exerting dominance in very destructive ways. De-extinction is about using that power constructively.
One thing is clear: recent advances in biotechnology are making things possible that may have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago. While these advances may be inevitable, their consequences have to be considered. Conservationists and ecologists have debated a range of both practical as well as moral and ethical issues surrounding de-extinction. One of the key tools for de-extinction is cloning, using preserved DNA from an extinct animal. The process starts with isolating the nucleus of a viable cell from the extinct animal. This nucleus is then placed into an egg from a closely related species, previously emptied of its own nucleus. The egg is then chemically or electrically stimulated in order for the cell to begin dividing. Once the division has happened, the egg is placed into the uterus of a surrogate mother. If the pregnancy is successful, the mother will give birth to a de-extinct animal. This poses numerous practical problems. Cloning requires the use of a surrogate mother to accommodate the foetus during pregnancy. Even though the surrogate mother would be from a genetically similar species, there could nevertheless be complications during pregnancy and afterwards.
In 2003, a group of scientists in Spain succeeded in cloning the Pyrenean ibex, also known as bucardo. The last bucardo, a female named Celia, disappeared in 2000. A sample of her cells had been stored in laboratories in Madrid and Zaragoza. Reproductive physiologists injected nuclei from those cells into goat cells emptied of their DNA and then implanted those into surrogate mothers. There were 57 implantations but only seven resulted in pregnancies. Of those, six ended in miscarriages. Only one mother, a hybrid of goat and ibex, carried a clone of Celia. The group performed a caesarean section on the mother and the first de-extinct Pyrenean ibex was born. But it died less than ten minutes later due to congenital lung problems.
Further experimentation in this field means that many animals will share the fate of the bucardo, being born only to die within minutes, which raises the first ethical question. Animal rights activists would argue that the deaths and suffering of the animals are not justified. However, ecologists point out many more issues. Cloning a single animal does not equate to de-extinction. Entire populations have to be created and rehabilitated in the wild, which could be even more challenging than the biotechnology involved. For example, the Long Now Foundation in California is working at the laboratory level to bring back the passenger pigeon. However, there is the need to create a population of animals large enough to live in the wild. The passenger pigeon used to be very social, flying in flocks of millions of birds. Information from the 19th century confirms the flocks were so big they even darkened the skies. Ben Novak, the lead researcher for the passenger pigeon project at the Long Now Foundation, believes 10,000 would be the minimum number to be reintroduced. Different questions arise: would it be possible to create so many animals through de-extinction? Or even, how would people react to a massive flock of birds flying over their heads covering the streets with droppings? Of course, this may only be answered if the passenger pigeon is ever brought back to life.
The effects of these de-extinct reintroductions on humans is difficult to quantify. Would they become attractions? Surely the return of the mammoth would bring curious visitors to Siberia, willing to behold the majesty of the animal. That these animals might become the centre of attention for tourists is significant, but that is both a risk and an opportunity. It might not differ much from current forms of wildlife and ecotourism and these animals might become flagships to save endangered habitats. But how would they adapt to these habitats? Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, expressed his concern on this issue in an article for National Geographic magazine. The habitats these animals used to live in surely have changed and the de-extinct species might not be able to adapt to them.
Some conservationists argue that bringing back extinct animals could lessen concern about threatened species. If we can bring them back once they are extinct, there is no perhaps a less pressing need to take care of them when they are alive. Cost is another argument against de-extinction for many scientists. Funding is a major constraint in conservation programmes, and de-extinction diverts money that could be used for these conservation programmes. But others say that all the funding of de-extinction laboratories comes strictly from private funds. As long as the project stays within the laboratory walls, there is no direct competition with conservation. The arguments against de-extinction also argue that these de-extinct animals could become invasive species in a habitat different from the one they used to live in. The species may also become vectors for illnesses that could be transmitted to other animals or humans. The pathogens in the environment are constantly changing and an animal whose genotype is based on a species that lived years ago may not be prepared to survive modern diseases.
On the other hand, engineering animals could bring solutions to other endangered animals that need genetic diversity. In the case of the passenger pigeon and the mammoth, it could also restore ecosystems that were modified by these animals. Since de-extinction has not been attempted, the risks are hard to quantify. However, closely one examines similar scenarios, it is still a roll of the dice. The Long Now Foundation is optimistic and thinks the first passenger pigeon will be born in 2022. Then the meaning of the word ‘extinct’ really would be changed forever.
Four of South Asia’s nine vulture species are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as ‘Critically Endangered’ – the very highest threat category short of extinction. These are the Oriental white-backed vulture, the long-billed and slender-billed vultures and the red-headed (or ‘king’) vulture. The battle continues to prevent them from disappearing altogether and combat the major threat posed by the veterinary drugs used as a cattle painkillers, which have proved to be such catastrophic killers of vultures that consume the meat of animals treated with diclofenac.
Oriental white-backed vultures suffered the sharpest declines with 99.9% already gone
It was only in the late 1990s that anyone realised how dramatically fast vultures were disappearing, and then there was a race to track down the cause. Various theories were circulating for investigation before the true cause was identified in 2003, first in Pakistan by the Peregrine Fund team, and quickly afterwards by Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and partners across the rest of the subcontinent. A common human painkiller, diclofenac (a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug– NSAID) which had been switched into veterinary practice on a huge scale and produced very cheaply, turns out to be extremely toxic to all vultures that consume the carcasses of animals that have been treated shortly before their death! It is a relatively safe and quick-acting drug for humans and cattle, and it seemed unbelievable that such a potent drug could be used sufficiently widely to cause these dramatic declines – causing no less than 99.9% of the Oriental white-backed vulture population to disappear in barely fifteen years!
Once the main cause was clearly identified, the task to remove the drug could start, along with the need to take some birds into captivity in time to secure the populations for future release. Various partners came forward to take up that challenge, led by BNHS and Bird Conservation Nepal, with strong support from UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Undoubtedly the biggest breakthrough came in 2006, when the Indian Government (the Drug Controller General of India) took the bold step to ban veterinary diclofenac formulations, making their use illegal. This step was immediately followed in Nepal and Pakistan, and in 2010 in Bangladesh. The fact that at least one alternative drug, meloxicam, was safety-tested on vultures and other species, and found to be a safe alternative was a key element in the willingness of the governments to take this important step so quickly.
Nine thousand km of repeated road-transect and other vulture surveys across India, Nepal and Pakistan showed that the population declines had significantly slowed by 2011 (Chaudhry et al. 2012, Prakash et al. 2012), and heralded what we still hope will prove to be the turning point. There were even hints of the very first signs of localised recovery in some areas, although a further repeat of these surveys this year will tell us more on how well-founded those hopes are. The key to the slowing of population declines is the effectiveness of bans of veterinary diclofenac imposed by the governments of these countries. But having already lost the vast majority of these species in just fifteen years, will this be enough?
Soaring Long-billed vultures these birds have an important environmental cleaning role
The latest information shows that the levels of diclofenac being found in dead cattle have come down quite dramatically (70% reduction by 2010; Cuthbert et al. 2014). But although diclofenac use in cattle (the main food of these vultures) has almost certainly fallen further since then, the usage today is still sufficient to exterminate vulture populations (Green et al. 2006). These unacceptable levels are undoubtedly due to the illegal use of diclofenac formulations designed for humans. Although diclofenac is used extensively for humans, the dose of 2-3ml is all that is required for people, but larger 30ml vials have been marketed which make it all too convenient and cheap for illegal use in veterinary doses. BNHS and some Ministry officials have been seeking to ban these large ‘multi-dose ‘ vials for human use for several years, and in July 2015 this ban has happened in India and is a further welcome breakthrough that should significantly improve the chances for the vultures.
Meloxicam is still the only comparable alternative known to be safe for vultures and the good news is that more manufacturers (now over 70 in India alone) are producing it. Fortunately, it is also out of patent, so any company can take up its manufacture. And a further positive is that the German company Boehringer Ingelheim, which originally developed meloxicam, has released their patent of the formulation for India to further encourage companies to produce it in an effective form.
Just when it seems that the future for vultures is looking a lot brighter, we have learnt of a growing serious worry: there are other drugs (NSAIDs) apart from meloxicam that are taking the place of diclofenac, and we know that some of these are also toxic to vultures. One is aceclofenac, which is a ‘pro-drug’ which is immediately metabolised into diclofenac in the cow, and so is clearly a threat. Others such as ketoprofen, and now we know, nimesulide is already known to be unsafe for vultures, and are picking up in veterinary pharmaceutical markets and practice. Trying to get all such drugs banned will be important, but instead, (and far preferable) there is a need for safety-testing on vultures of any such drugs, before they are introduced to the market. This option has already been agreed upon, together with protocols by the Indian Veterinary Research Institute, but this urgently needs funding and to be put in place before these other drugs gain popularity with the vets.
Removing the first egg to an incubator induces the birds to lay again, and the chick can then be given back to the parents while removing the second egg for hand-rearing
To ensure conservation measures are taken seriously on the ground, on a scale that can really save the vultures, the ‘Vulture Safe Zone’ (VSZ) programme has been developed, working in huge areas within a 100 km radius of important vulture breeding colonies, where intensive advocacy and awareness work is carried out by dedicated teams. The VSZ approach was originally developed in Nepal and involves a range of advocacy and awareness measures, in collaboration with state Government officials, particularly with veterinarians and drug distributors etc. It is now being taken up more widely in South Asia, with programmes led by BNHS in four Indian states and other independent Indian initiatives replicating the approach more widely. Two new VSZ projects are underway, run by IUCN Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Forest Department and coordinated by the Bangladesh National Vulture Steering Committee. It is hoped that the VSZ work alongside the other national advocacy efforts will allow the first pilot releases of birds back to the wild to take place as early as 2016.
Meanwhile, the conservation breeding programme for these species has been established mainly in India as a precaution against total extinction in case these drugs cannot be removed in time and for future reintroduction work. This has been making major headway recently, with support from State Forest Departments particularly of Haryana, West Bengal, Assam and Madhya Pradesh. The total number of birds fledged at the first three Indian centres has already exceeded 180 for all three Critically Endangered Gyps species combined since 2008, with a record 58 produced in 2015 alone. There was also the first successful fledging of a Oriental white-backed vulture Gyps bengalensis in Nepal in 2014—from the birds held at the Kasara centre, Chitwan. A number of other milestones have also been passed in India recently, including all three species being successfully reared by artificial incubation. There was another first in 2014 when four pairs had their first egg removed and artificially incubated to hatching, prompting them to then lay a second egg, which was in turn swapped with the chick from the incubator. This has been successfully replicated on a larger scale in 2015. The parents then successfully reared the first chick, whilst the second egg was artificially incubated and then successfully hand-reared. One further achievement in 2014 was that ‘Phoenix’, one of the first two Gyps bengalensis fledglings from Pinjore, Haryana from 2008, herself reared chicks for the first time.
Progress, so far, has been possible through the concerted efforts of several partners all in close liaison with the Governments. They came together under the umbrella and banner of ‘Saving Asia’s Vultures from Extinction’ (SAVE), which was formalised in February 2011 and has now expanded to include fourteen full partners (a mix of national and international NGOs and Government institutions). The partners meet annually and review the necessary priorities. They took an important further step by developing and updating the February 2014 ‘Blueprint for the Recovery of South Asia’s Critically Endangered Gyps Vultures’ (downloadable from www.savevultures.org) which maps out the actions to 2025 for Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Nepal and Pakistan. SAVE updates the conservation priorities for these species annually and provides a transparent and widely respected identity for these scientifically-backed actions to gain credibility and hopefully attract the resources required to conserve the three Critically Endangered Asian Gyps vultures.
One new spectre has recently emerged more prominently for vultures in the region. This is the problem of people deliberately poisoning animal carcasses to target either large carnivores such as leopards, or probably more often feral dogs that have themselves increased in the absence of vultures (and thereby increasing the problems of dog bites, dog attacks and very significantly – rabies!), but unfortunately these poisoned carcasses often inadvertently kill remaining vultures.
Red-headed vulture is also Critically Endangered and faces similar threats of NSAIDs including diclofenac
Major efforts are urgently needed across South Asia to address the immediate and increasing gap in funding for vulture conservation, which is now jeopardising the whole programme. These efforts will need to include charitable and corporate support from the industry from within the region, as surprisingly, the main resources so far have come from UK charity Royal Society for the Protection of Birds as well as other external sources that SAVE Partners have managed to engage. But even more crucially, only if the restrictions and this safety-testing regime for these lethal veterinary drugs are taken seriously by Governments in time to prevent replacement drugs from becoming popular with veterinarians, can we save these majestic species – the environmental cleaners – from extinction.
Mr Zachary Webb Nicholls Carcharhinus obscurus (ISBN-978-1939535108); November 2013 Carcharias taurus (ISBN-978-1939535108); November 2013 Carcharhinus plumbeus (ISBN-978-1939535610); August 2014 Carcharhinus leucas (ISBN-978-1939535634); August 2014 Deep Sea Publishing.
Peter Benchley, author of the book that inspired the movie Jaws, was well aware that sharks have a public relations problem. He spent many years combatting the misconceptions that have made shark conservation such a tricky issue—namely, the idea that all sharks are giant, ruthless killing machines intent on attacking every human they encounter. This is such a pervasive image worldwide that it’s a difficult one to dislodge, though, as Benchley himself once remarked, sharks are victimised by humans far more often than humans are victimised by sharks.
The late author would no doubt have approved of a new series of books, created by the “hybridist author” Dr Jaws, which disabuses readers of these sorts of inaccuracies and celebrate sharks for what they are—beautiful and fascinating animals that are an important part of their ecosystem and key components of many cultures around the globe.
The books contain art, poetry, infographics and fiction, collectively providing information on both the natural history and biology of each of the titular species. Four volumes have been published so far—Carcharhinus obscurus (dusky shark; 2013), Carcharias taurus (sand tiger shark; 2013), Carcharhinus plumbeus (sandbar shark; 2014), and Carcharhinus leucas (bull shark; 2014). Two more—Mustelus canis (dusky smooth-hound) and Squalus acanthias (spiny dogfish)—are due out later this year.
Each of the books is approximately 50 pages long, and much of the text is printed in fairly large font; as a result, you could easily page through each installment within a half-hour. However, you could just as easily take twice that long if you sit and admire the colorful illustrations, ponder the imagery in the poems, or pause to work out the keyword cypher included midway through each book. You might even take longer if the tidbits spark your curiosity and inspire you to look up further details— perhaps to better understand intrauterine cannibalism, discussed in Carcharias taurus, or maybe to learn the other three sharks included in the “Fatal Four” mentioned in Carcharhinus leucas.
This kind of active engagement with the material is exactly what Dr Jaws—otherwise known as Zachary Webb Nicholls—has in mind; in the foreword to each volume, he encourages readers to do additional exploring outside the pages of the book, and promises that there is a wealth of information available to satisfy the appetite of any budding shark-lover.
That information isn’t included in these volumes because they are intended to act more as an introduction—one aimed primarily at a younger audience. However, while Nicholls recommends the books for secondary school pupils, they could easily appeal to more mature readers in the same way that Finding Nemo is pleasant for both parents and their children. Some may find the mixture of art and science unconventional and unexpected, but the aesthetic appeal of the books is undeniable, and the author’s obvious appreciation for the focal species is infectious.
Each volume ends with a call to “respect the seas and all who call them home.” Readers will surely be inclined to do so after reading Nicholls’ unique and thoughtful books, which make it clear that sharks are much more than merely a pair of jaws bristling with teeth.
The concept of ‘wilderness’ as a place devoid of humans is a dominant theme in conservation. As an ecologist based in Australia, one of the least populated countries, but one that has experienced the highest mammalian extinction rate, I am amazed at India’s rich biodiversity. With a population of over 1.2 billion, projected to surpass China by 2028, in India, humanity is everywhere. Yet it is here where the only population of Asiatic lions persist, where tigers are making a bold comeback and sloth bears are relatively common. Only in India can one say “lions and tiger and bears – oh my!” and mean it.
Jackal are cared for in Banni, Gujarat
Contemplating this contrast on my visit to India, I find the beginning of an answer at the Dattatreya temple at Kalo Dungar, Gujarat. Legend tells of a holy man that fed wild jackals. When drought came and he had no more food to offer, he gave his own body to the starving jackals. The temple honours his selflessness and compassion, by feeding jackals, and any other animal that comes, twice each day with sweetened rice.
Throughout the diverse and rich cultural tapestry of Indian society, runs a thread that binds humans with the rest of the earth’s creatures. This thread is evident in India’s cities and villages that contain much more than the human species. It runs through ‘Ahimsa’, a core value of Hindus and Buddhists, which extends non-violence to all creatures. It weaves through India’s street dogs found napping in every alley and the people that care for them. The thread binds humans and livestock in Gujarat’s Maldharis, nomadic pastoralists that know their cows and buffalos by name, and care for them when they are too old to provide milk. The thread is revealed in simple everyday interactions, such as a truck driver who waits patiently for a cheeky macaque to drop the keys he stole from his vehicle.
When I ask with incredulity about the inevitable conflicts that are bound to emerge in such a dense and multi-species landscape, the thread becomes particularly evident. Time and again I encounter the same acquiescent answer: “sometimes it happens”. “Sometimes… tigers eat people, gaur stampede through villages, bears maul people, elephants chase people, nilgai consume crops, wolves hunt sheep, leopards hunt dogs and chase them into people’s homes”.
A macaque steals a driver’s keys, taking it up a tree to play with for a while, Bangalore.
A testament of coexistence is after all the ability to accept that those we share our space with, can at times cause us harm, and value them nonetheless. Freelance BBC documentary maker Kalyan Varma, has been accompanying the Dhangar herders on their migration. He tells me that these nomadic pastoralists can be exceptionally tolerant of predators, even though they do kill their sheep. “One day, as I was sitting with the herders, a wolf snuck into the pen and ran off with one of their sheep,” he tells. Instead of setting off to kill the wolf, the herder just shrugged and said, “Well, they have to eat too”. The Dhangar herders even appreciate the wolves because they are “good for the sheep by helping keep them on the move and ensuring the land is not overgrazed”.
Stories and laughter are exchanged around the table, as I ask my hosts about the extraordinary ways humans and wildlife live together in India. Sandeep Virmani, founder secretary of Sahjeevan, a community development organisation in Gujarat, tells us of a leopard that was hunting goats belonging to a Jain community. The Jain religion follows strict measures to maintain non-violence, making most Western vegans look heartless in comparison.
“They asked the forest department to catch and relocate the leopard,” Virmani tells. Translocating a wild animal requires a permit, and the bureaucratic system in India can be sluggish. “They waited and waited and the leopard kept killing their goats,” he continued, “so eventually they got fed up and built a trap”.
Wolf running off with a sheep under the cover of darkness.
The trap was successful, and with the leopard secured in the cage, they contacted the forest department once again. But the authorities exclaimed that they had no permit to trap a leopard, hence ensuing a long bureaucratic mess. In the meantime, the villagers grew worried that the trapped leopard would be getting hungry. “They wouldn’t kill a goat, so instead they got together and cooked up a large meal of rotis, and other traditional vegetarian dishes, but the carnivore would have none of it,” Virmani laughs. “When finally after days of debate the forestry official arrived to relocate the leopard, he was shocked to find the large cat hungrily eating rotis”.
Sometimes, however, violence to animals happens too. Even this can be met with a degree of tolerance. Abi Vanak, a fellow of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, studies carnivores in human-dominated landscapes. He was assisting a team that had gone to rescue a leopard trapped in a sugarcane field. The leopard had attacked some villagers who had gone to chase it away, and an irate mob had formed. Before the relocation team could carry out their task, the mob took matters into their own hands. “There was nothing we could do,” Dr Vanak explains sadly, “they were intent on killing the leopard and no one was going to stop them”. With sticks and axes “they killed the leopard right in front of our eyes”.
Years after the event, Dr Vanak still contemplates what should have been done with the killers. “We could have dragged them before the court, sent them to jail, but then what?” he asks. “Had we done that, the leopard would have truly become the enemy”. By letting things boil over, a measure of “coexistence was re-established”. Such a momentary and brutal eruption of violence may act as catharsis by allowing people to move on with their lives, content that predators that have “misbehaved” have been dealt with and the order has been restored.
Killing animals is certainly not taken lightly in India. Farmers who have lost their crops to wild animals may still be reluctant to retaliate with lethal force, even when it is legal to do so. Some states allow wild herbivores, such as nilgai, to be killed when they raid crops. However, deep-rooted cultural values limit the number of farmers who opt for this course of action. In a country where many venerate cows, it can be particularly hard to contemplate killing an antelope whose name (nilgai) literally means ‘blue cow’. Some have resorted to changing its name.
India loves their dangerous wildlife.
In some conservation-dedicated areas of India, however, humans and wildlife are strictly separated. Areas designated as tiger reserves, in particular, delineate no-go zones for humans. In Panna Tiger Reserve, Madhya Pradesh, we are allowed to drive only through parts of the park, in the company of a guide, and are mostly prohibited from stepping out of the vehicle. The local villagers that lived inside the park’s boundary were evicted several years ago, to make way for “nature”.
Panna is indeed a haven for wildlife, containing an extraordinarily high density and diversity of ungulates and other creatures. The tigers too are doing well, and are monitored closely—very closely—by the rangers. They have learned a harsh lesson. By 2009, Panna had lost its entire tiger population to poachers. Raghu Chundawat, who closely studied the tigers at the time, had alerted the authorities to the declining population, and the evidence of dead tigers, but to no avail. “We could see that the tigers were disappearing,” Dr Chundawat explains. “The official tiger counts were being inflated allowing the poachers to wipe out the entire population”. Tigers have since been reintroduced into the park and their numbers have increased steadily.
Like most of India’s national parks, Panna is small, a mere 500 km2. Thus, most of India’s wildlife must live among humans. The world’s only Asiatic lion population in Gujarat is recovering and is spilling out of the Gir Protected Area. The population has nearly doubled in the past two decades, with a current estimate of over 400 lions, a quarter of which live in human landscapes. Concurrent with the recovery are increased incidents of livestock losses, and the loss of human life as well. India, however, remains dedicated to the protection and recovery of its dangerous wildlife.
India’s conservation record is far from perfect, evident by the extinction of the cheetah, continuing (illegal) persecution of wolves and leopards in many regions, severe poaching problems, and cases of intense resentment and violence towards wildlife. Even conditions of apparent harmonious coexistence may in some cases mask severe social repressions, marginalisation and apathy. Yet India has some of the oldest known conservation and animal rights laws and proves that it is possible for high human density to coexist with other species.
India’s success appears to stem from an unshakable belief in the sacredness and inherent value of earth’s creatures. While this is a shared value worldwide, Western conservation tends to advocate for anthropocentric and utilitarian values, often due to a belief that empathy is a weak motivator for conservation. Yet, India reveals that compassion and empathy are key to preserving the earth’s biodiversity in a human-dominated world.
Sitting on the crowded plane as it departs Mumbai, I wonder whether the main conservation imperative of our time is not to reduce our human footprint, but instead to increase our humane footprint. As our global population of 7 billion charges forward, we should take a leaf out of India’s book.
Acknowledgment
I am grateful to my gracious hosts, particularly Dr Abi Vanak, ATREE, who took me by the hand and made me feel utterly at home on my visit to India.
Further reading:
Agoramoorthy G, VV Kumar & P Patel. 2011. Rice-eating jackals of the Rann of Kachchh. Current Science, 101(7), 828.
Bekoff M. (Ed.). 2013. Ignoring nature no more: The case for compassionate conservation. University of Chicago Press.
Ramp D & M Bekoff. 2015. Compassion as a practical and evolved ethic for conservation. BioScience, doi: 10.1093/biosci/biu223
Vucetich JA, JT Bruskotter & MP Nelson. 2015. Evaluating whether nature’s intrinsic value is an axiom of or anathema to conservation. Conservation Biology, 29(2), 321-332.
Photographs: Abi T. Vanak, Kalyan Varma, Kadambari Devarajan, Arian D Wallach
