New policies hurt as well as help

I know this policy blog is meant to be about conservation, but may I briefly bring your attention to a law that was passed in one of the US states just a couple of days ago. This newly passed piece of legislation outlaws miscarriages. Yes, that’s right, miscarriages.^1,2 This means that if you lose a child at any stage of development through natural (or unnatural) causes, you can be taken to court and possibly imprisoned. Nevermind that a high percentage of women lose children during pregnancy (one in four is what I’ve read), that this law sets out to attack those who are at a weak point in their lives (generally miscarriage is not considered to be fun), or that the state which passed this cannot even afford to educate the children they already have (just a few weeks ago they were considering cutting funding for the last year of school – too expensive, and what’s the point anyway?).²

This is an outright attack on half of their population, treating them as incubators instead of people and promoting dishonesty and bad medicine. After all, who will go to their GP to talk about pregnancy, to have tests, or to get advice? If the GP knows a patient is pregnant and she loses the child, she could go to prison. And what if you want to get an abortion? Those are still legal (only just), but if one is denied then there is little else a woman can do, especially frightening for younger women/girls who maybe can’t get out of the state so easily. And what the US really needs is more crazies out there in lynch mobs, thumping away on their bibles and promoting guns.

And one of the constant elephants in the room is, of course, population. So encouraging a state to have more children that they, and we, cannot afford seems to me just as illegal as miscarriage now is. However, population can become a sticky conversation very quickly, so I’ll leave you to make your own minds up about that topic.

I know this is a bit of me being outraged. I despise attacks on human rights, and I abhor stupid people who make rules in order to legalise discrimination. And I’m trying to work toward a safer, cleaner, more peaceful world. I’d like to ensure that ecosystems survive, with all their plants and animals, so that they can evolve and develop and do cool things. I’m working my butt off learning about sustainable agriculture, conservation planning, and ecosystem services, and keeping the planet viable in general.

For these people?

- emma

¹ Google News: Utah miscarriage

² http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-debra-haffner/criminal-miscarriage-or-m_b_478607.html - interestingly, written by a Revernd.

lessons from the tracks

Shortly before you arrive in Oxford, the train from the capital passes by the Didcot Railway Museum. Rolling stock bearing the colours of decades past sit in silent sidings alongside stationary steam engines, a short step from the electrified lines of the modern network. They preserve the last, rare examples of a system that once dominated the length and breadth of the country. In the forty years before 1870, an extraordinary period of active creativity saw the construction of over 20,000km of railway lines. Journey times between the town and the country, between the mill and the market, were reduced on an almost unimaginable scale. In the space of a single generation, the countryside became interconnected. The social and economic impacts of the railway revolution are still being felt today, almost two centuries later.

What lessons can a conservationist learn from looking at the railways? The obvious analogy is between the few remaining examples of once ubiquitous wagons and engines that roamed the rails across the nation, and the now threatened species of wildlife similarly reduced in both number and extent. Like the steam leviathans, there is little room for them in the modernised world; they are assigned the same fate as the inefficient.

Two important reasons, however, make this simple analogy unhelpful. Firstly, we might want to reject the suggestion that, in order to be conserved, plants and animals must be efficient and useful to human society. Surely there are wider reasons to conserve wildlife than simply the use we can make of it? The second reason is more powerful. It concerns the positive ability of a generation to change the world in which they live.

What strikes me about the railway revolution is the time in which it was achieved. Without modern construction equipment. Without JCBs and diesel-driven diggers and four-ton trucks. Without these aids, a generation built a network of corridors that linked the entire country, across fields and pastures, through cities and towns, around and under the chalk sea-swept cliffs and across the mountains, mire and moor. Twenty thousand kilometres of track, in less than forty years.

Alongside many of my generation, I think that the future of conservation must look beyond the old approach of isolated reserves, somehow meant to survive surrounded by a hostile industrial landscape where there is no quarter made for anything ‘natural’. Instead, whilst reserves are still essential, to succeed we must also address the landscape mosaic in which they exist. The future of conservation lies in connecting these vestiges of the natural world in a matrix in which human and non-human society can co-exist in a mutually beneficial way.

The lesson that we should take from the railway builders of the nineteenth century is this: it is possible to re-connect the countryside with itself in the space of a single generation. If we have the will, it can be done. It is a reminder of the incredible creative potential of human societies. It is a message of hope.

th.

Dangerous toys The use of models in biodiversity politics

'You could plan a pretty picnic
but you can't predict the weather, Ms. Jackson...'

Ms. Jackson - Outkast

What will the future bring? This is always an important question to ask. Conservation policy makers tend to be interested in the future, as expressed in the term sustainability (Brundtland report, WCED 1987) which centres around our obligations to future generations.

However, the future is not always predictable. Our understanding of biodiversity and ecosystems is very limited. Most of the species on earth have not been described yet, and we know even less about their roles in ecosystems. Furthermore, although there are some exceptions (see Willis et al., 2007 for an overview of long-term data) most of the data used does not go back more than 60 years.

Mathematical models can be used for forecasting the effects on future biodiversity. In order to develop a model, scientists start by simplifying perceived reality through a number of assumptions, such as “all animals know the locations of all the food items” (an assumption behind the Ideal Free Distribution, a model from foraging ecology) or “all species are equally affected by climate change” (an assumption from Williams and Araujo, 2002). Using a number of predictor variables (such as precipitation, temperature or vegetation) and mathematical relationships between these variables and a response variable (such as species distribution) a model can then be used to predict the future state of the response variable. Subsequently, a model is ideally verified against existing observations of the response variable.


A successful model? Observed and predicted range of the red-backed shrike (Lanius collario) in the 1990’s using a species distribution model. Whatever might govern the distribution of this bird species, it is not quite covered in this model… Figure from Araujo et al., 2005

Although some mathematical models are simple and relatively straightforward (if the mathematical hoo-ha is removed), others are quite complex. For instance, whilst the Bioclim model, used for forecasting the effects of climate change on biodiversity, could be compared to a primary school counting exercise, the spectral models used by the IPCC require skilled mathematicians to translate them.

We think that biodiversity-response models are crucial to conservation planning. Policy makers require, at the very least, the best guess of the scientific community as to what the impact of different policy choices will be. Without these predictions, they would be flying-blind, making decisions on the basis of myth and dogma.

However, we also think it is important that biodiversity policy makers remain aware of the limitations inherent in modelling. We want to remind them that our knowledge of biodiversity is very limited, and that mathematical models are sometimes no more than a way to hide the deficiencies in our understanding. Models, especially the less transparent ones, need a thorough verification and review process. Those making policy decisions want simple answers, clear-cut choices, and in this context there is a tendency to attach too much certainty to uncertain findings through modelling. It is crucial that conservation scientists resist this temptation.

Wouter Langhout and Tim Hodgetts

References:

Araújo, M.B., Whittaker, R.J., Ladle, R.J. and Erhard, M. (2005) Reducing uncertainty in extinction risk from climate change. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 14: 529-538.

WCED (1987) Our common future. Available online at http://www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.htm

Willis, K.J., Bennett, K.D., Froyd, C. and Figueroa-Rangel, B. (2007) How can knowledge of the past help conserving the future? The need for a long-term perspective in biodiversity conservation Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, 362: 175-186

Williams, P.H. & Araújo, M.B. (2002) Apples, oranges and probabilities: integrating multiple factors into biodiversity conservation with consistency. Environmental Modeling and Assessment, 7: 139-151.