Conservation Magazine Summer 2011 by Kathy Kohm

Wetland restoration increases airport safety

Salvation through Cheap

cookstoves

Wind Turbine Color is a life-or-death matter

Talking to the Turtle

Whisperer

Conservation cutting-edge science for smarter conservation

Summer 2011

Closed-Source

Crops When the genetic material in a seed can be

privately owned, whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the fate of biodiversity?

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Society for Conservation Biology

Institute for

Ocean Conservation Science

Photo courtesy of Shell Foundation

at Stony Brook University

Conservation is published by the Society for Conservation Biology in partnership with the above organizations. Learn more about joining the partnership at: www.conservationmagazine.org.

Definition of a Good Cookstove 1. Reduces fuel use by more than 50% 2. Reduces black carbon by more than 60% 3. Reduces childhood pneumonia by more than 30% 4. Affordable (US$10 retail or less) 5. Cooks love it 6. Gets funded No stove had ever met all six criteria at once (Page 38)

Summer 2011 Conservation Magazine

Volume 12

Number 2

F eatures

18 Closed-Source Crops

By Paul Salopek

A handful of giant corporations are laying claim to the germplasm of the world’s major food crops. And when yield is the grail of profit, biodiversity isn’t a priority.

26 Ultra Zoom Photo Gallery

An ordinary camera and an extraordinary technology create billion-pixel images that allow viewers to virtually fly deep into a landscape and explore nature in stunning detail.

32 Greener Pastures By Judith D. Schwartz

What goes on in the stomachs and under the hooves of cows might be the key to turning deserts back into grasslands—and even cooling the planet.

38 To Build a (Better) Fire

By Burkhard Bilger

A kind of hippie Manhattan Project in rural Oregon tackles climate change, air pollution, and deforestation by bringing together the best minds in the field to invent cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves for 3 billion people. Cover illustration by Daniel Reiter

Conservation Online Explore hundreds of conservation articles, ideas, and photos—and join in on conversations with a broad community of conservationists from around the world at www.conservationmagazine.org

Conservation

™

A Publication of the Society for Conservation Biology editor

Kathryn Kohm senior editor

Celeste Bernard editor at large

David Malakoff Interns

Ambar Espinoza Lindsey Doermann Circulation Manager

John Brink essay editor

Kathleen Snow copy editor

Roberta Scholz Vulture Restaurants, Page 51 contributing editors

Charles Alexander Stewart Brand Frances Cairncross David W. Ehrenfeld Katherine Ellison

executive editor

P. Dee Boersma

DEPARTMENTS 6 Conversations

John Nielsen talks with Alexander Gaos

Journal Watch by David Malakoff Alaskan avalanche is a case study in energy conservation ■ Jet contrails contribute to global warming ■ Bats are a boon to U.S. economy ■ Windturbine color is a life-or-death matter ■ Are the vines taking over? ■ Colorblind sharks ■ Grim outlook for monarch migration ■ Plastic wine stoppers threaten cork-oak habitat ■ Tourists may spread deadly virus to gorillas ■ Biodiversity in rivers means less water pollution

advisory board

Michael Bean, Jennifer Belcher, Jamie Rappaport Clark, Patrick Daigle , Barbara Dean, Eric Dinerstein, Gustavo Fonseca, Jerry F. Franklin, Deborah Jensen, Peter Kareiva, John C. Ogden, Mary C. Pearl, Ellen Pikitch, Michael A. Soukup, Steven L. Yaffee TM denotes the Trade-mark/Official Mark of Alberta Conservation Association, used under license Editorial Office: Conservation magazine, Department of Biology, Box 351800, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195 USA; Phone: 206-685-4724; Fax: 206-221-7839; email: kkohm@u.washington.edu Copyright ©2011 by the Society for Conservation Biology. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the publisher’s written permission. Conservation (ISSN 1936-2145) is published quarterly by the Society for Conservation Biology, a nonprofit,

47 The Essayist Of Ants and Men by Tim Flannery 50 Solutions

Perennial agriculture ■ Vulture restaurants ■ Algae can treat your wastewater and then fill up your tank ■ Limestone scrubbers transform powerplant emissions into ocean antacid ■ Innovative wildlife bridges ■ Wetland restoration could increase airport safety

57 Book Marks by Carl Safina

■

A Sea in Flames: The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout Short Reviews ■ Conservation Crochet

tax-exempt organization, 1017 O Street NW, Washington, DC 20001-4229. Periodical postage paid at Washington, DC., and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address

62 Think Again Is it “greener” to read an e-book or an old-fashioned paper book? By Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris

changes to Conservation Magazine, P.O. Box 460104, Escondido, CA 92046.

64 Lighten Up by Pete Mueller

EDITOR’S NOT E

Reaping and Sowing If the quickest way to a person’s heart is through their stomach, then it makes sense for conservationists to take a seat at the table. In that spirit, we’re dishing up a number of articles that ponder the connection between hunger and environmental conservation. The cover story by Paul Salopek takes you right to the crossroads of biodiversity and food security—the humble and all-powerful seed. For almost the entire 11,000 years that humans have been farming the earth, seeds have been an open and ever-changing source of biodiversity. Farmers, gardeners, and hobbyists have collected, tinkered with, planted, and replanted crop seeds in all their shapes, sizes, and genetic variations. But a dramatic consolidation of the seed industry in just the past ten years is undermining that tradition. One corporate seed giant has engineered a “terminator seed” that goes sterile after a single generation. Salopek won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his reporting on the human genome project. There’s an eerie echo of the same issues throughout his seed story. Can the genetic codes of our major food crops be privately owned? And in an era of wrenching climate change, does agriculture’s success hinge on technology or biodiversity? The answer may be more nuanced than you think. Powerful new plantbreeding technologies could open the door to a whole new brand of conservation farming. David Malakoff describes efforts to develop perennial crops that conserve soil, nutrients—and habitat—because perennials bypass annual plowing and put down huge root systems. Then, we switch from crops to cows. Judith Schwartz profiles Alan Savory and his counterintuitive and controversial ideas about cattle grazing. To many people, cows are a conservation scourge. Savory thinks of them as a conservation tool. For four decades, he has been designing grazing systems to turn parched landscapes green. Recent successes at his 2,600-hectare ranch in Zimbabwe are worth noting. Finally, at the back end of the issue, we switch gears again to ask a question near and dear to an environmental editor’s heart—What’s the “greenest” way to read? Does the magazine in your hands or the book on your bedside table squander dead trees? Would we be better off with e-readers such as the iPad and Kindle? In “Think Again,” Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris do the ecomath. Take a look. Their answers might surprise you.

In this issue, we’re taking note of a bit of received wisdom.

editorial mission. Conservation is a science magazine on a mission to foster creative thinking about the big environmental issues of our time. Without preaching, pleading, or bias, we explore conservation topics from novel angles using cutting-edge science. Our recipe is a mix of world-class journalism and provocative ideas, spiced with offbeat illustrations to add a touch of irreverence and delight. Articles published herein reflect the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Society for Conservation Biology or its partners.

Partnership opportunities. One of the defining features of Conservation magazine is the partnership behind it. Our goal is to bring dynamic, environmentally minded companies, organizations, and agencies together to facilitate an exchange of ideas that will push smart, science-based conservation to new heights. For more information on partnership opportunities, contact the editors.

—Kathryn Kohm, Editor C O N S E RVAT I O N

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CONSERVAT ION Onli ne www.conServationmagazine.org

Conservation Videos Scan the QR code above with your smartphone or mobile device to view a video that explores issues raised by Paul Salopek’s cover story. Take a closer look at Native Seeds/SEARCH efforts to preserve agricultural biodiversity. You’’ll need a card reader application to scan the code; get one for free via NeoReader or QuickMark. No mobile device handy? You can still tune in at http://vimeo.com/23346274

This Week In Conservation Science Heard about how medieval knights changed Europe’s ecosystems? The creepy rise of vines in tropical forests? The dogs that sniffed out a new species of Vietnamese box turtle? Read This Week In Conservation Science, and you’ll be up to date on these stories and many more. Every week, visit conservationmagazine.org for the most important and provocative papers from our scan of more than 100 leading journals.

The video is part of Conservation Bridge, an online video library highlighting innovative approaches to on-the-ground conservation happening around the world. Look for a link to Conservation Bridge and other creative, environmental videos at www.conservationmagazine.org. Have a great video to share? Email us at conservationmagazine@gmail. com with “video” in the subject line.

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Illustration by David Badders

CONVERSAT IONS

Poachers don’t share secrets with strangers. Why did they talk to you?

When I was a kid, my family traveled in Baja California, living out of our car and hanging out in fishing towns. We learned the language, and I got good at meeting strangers. I idolized fishermen—they always knew exactly where the fish were. I think that sense of respect communicated itself years later. It also helped that I was with my wife Ingrid, who is also a turtle expert, and my baby boy Joaquinn. Did you tell people that you were a conservationist? That was not the word I used. These were folks who thought of “conservationists” as people who got you thrown in jail, got your beach closed, and turned it into a turtle project. I tried to tell them I was not there to take names, call the cops, or bag on them for eating turtle eggs. When they asked me whether I ate turtle eggs, I sometimes told them: “Yes, sure, I’m not going to lie to you.” Then I’d challenge them, telling them that scientists thought hawksbills were extinct. They’d say: “No, they’re rare, but still around . . . we’ll take you out to see them.”

Turtle Whisperer Last year, biologist Alexander Gaos drove his derelict pickup truck thousands of miles along the western coasts of Mexico and Central America. His mission? First, coaxing suspicious fishermen—and even poachers—into revealing where he could find critically endangered eastern Pacific hawksbill sea turtles, which are often killed for their elaborate, colorful shells. Then, transforming these potential enemies into allies. It’s a mix of science, diplomacy, and grassroots organizing that Gaos—a founder of the nonprofit Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative and a member of the IUCN’s Marine Turtle Specialist Group—sees as essential to twenty-first-century conservation.

John Nielsen talks with Alexander Gaos Any one turtle that has stuck with you?

I was snorkeling one night when a fisherman flicked his light toward the bottom. It lit up the shell [of an adult turtle] and showed how beautiful it was—only hawksbills look like that, which is why they are endangered. It slowed down and looked up, as if to say: “Now, what is that?”

Tell me about your pickup . . . does

these folks? Because they have already pushed hawksbills very close to extinction, and they aren’t slowing down. Because there’s just no way you are going to find your way around those places if you don’t have the locals helping you.

Well, we’re giving local fishermen incentives not to poach. In Nicaragua, we’ve started paying a fishing cooperative $40 for

So, how do you win them over?

“Blue.” That’s what Joaquin called it. A ’93 Ford 150 with a half-seat in the back—that’s where the car seat goes. And a camper shell. It’s one of the most common trucks in Central America, so there are always parts. That’s a point worth stressing: If you want to do this kind of work, you’re gonna need a good truck. ❧

it have a name?

Why make the effort to work with

More often than we expected. They showed us how the juveniles hid in small, underwater caves. They took us into mangrove swamps, where the females laid eggs. Honestly, when I started, I thought I’d end up writing a paper that said: “It’s true, we couldn’t find any, they’re doomed, forget it.” Now, we’ve found about 500 new nest sites in El Salvador and Nicaragua alone. (1)

Did they?

every nest site they protect. Last year, they protected more than 200—that’s nearly half the known population!

1. Gaos A. et al. 2010. Signs of hope in the eastern Pacific: International collaboration reveals encouraging status for a severely depleted population of hawksbill turtles Eretmochelys imbricata. Oryx doi:10.1017/S0030605310000773.

Illustration by David Badders

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David H. Smith Postdoctoral Fellowship Program | www.smithfellows.org A partnership between the Cedar Tree Foundation and the Society for Conservation Biology

Apply now!

Study

c? o d t s o P is te for

Past Smith Fellows cond ucted researc in these conse h rvation biolog y topic areas Invasives : Fire Ecology Freshwater E c Marine Eco ology log Climate Chan y ge Ecoregional P la Avian Ecolog nning y Social Science Genetics Forestry 1 1 0 2 due: eptember 16 S

scientists affiliated with a United States institution and can begin in early to mid 2012. Applications for the Smith Fellows Class of 2012 are due 16 September 2011. Visit www.smithfellows.org for proposal guidelines and direct questions to smithinfo@smithfellows.org.

JOURNAL WAT CH

ENER GY

Electric Slide Alaskan avalanche becomes case study in energy conservation

severed the main electric line into Juneau, Alaska, has given researchers a unique look at how high electricity prices can cause long-lasting changes in how people use energy. The April 2008 slide cut power lines that connect the city of 30,000 to its main power source, two hydroelectric dams about 40 miles away. Diesel generators kicked in to replace the lost

An avalanche that

Journal Watch written by David Malakoff

electrons. But the new power was pricey—500 percent more than usual. It was “an unprecedented electricity price shock,” report Wayne Leighty of the University of California, Davis, and Alan Meier of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Energy Policy. When the power company estimated that repairs could take months, residents braced for a expensive spring. Within days, however, they had managed to cut electricity demand by an astounding 25 percent without seriously disrupting daily life. It was “the quickest and greatest reduction in electricity consumption that has ever occurred in the absence of blackouts”

and “an extreme example of change,” Leighty and Meier write. To understand how Juneau achieved those savings, nine months after the disaster the two researchers surveyed residents. Although their 424 replies did not constitute a “statistically representative” sample, it did reveal some noticeable trends. Nearly 80 percent of respondents reported taking action to conserve power within one day of the avalanche. And many were aware of the “Juneau Unplugged” campaign the city had started in order to encourage conservation. On average, respondents reported taking about ten actions to reduce power use, including installing efficient light

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Airplane contrails across the English Channel. Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC

bulbs, turning off lights, switching to wood heat, and hanging clothes out to dry. “Local stores reported selling out of compact fluorescent light bulbs and clotheslines,” the authors write. Notably, even after the cheap hydropower came back online 45 days after the avalanche, many residents continued their newfound energy-saving practices. As a result, Juneau’s power use was still about eight percent lower than it had been before the disaster. “The event jolted the citizens into a higher awareness of their electricity use,” the authors conclude, and “behaviors learned during the ‘crisis’ became new habits.” ❧ Leighty, W. and A. Meier. 2011. Accelerated electricity conservation in Juneau, Alaska: A study of household activities that reduced demand 25 percent. Energy Policy doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2011.01.

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C L IM ATE Ch ange

On the Vapor Trail Jet contrails contribute to global warming

those wispy contrails drifting across the sky in the same way again. Despite their delicate appearance, the cloudy streaks created by aircraft appear to be aviation’s biggest contribution to global warming, a new analysis finds. Contrails can last long after the plane that created them has touched down, scientists have found. Indeed, they’ve even named a certain kind of cloud—“contrail cirrus”—after the streaks that make them. Contrail cirrus include both the “young, line-shaped contrails and the older, irregularly

You may never see

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shaped contrails that arise from them,” Ulrike Burkhardt and Bernd Kärcher of Germany’s Institute for Atmospheric Physics report in Nature Climate Change. To see how the clouds might contribute to warming, the pair built a computer model that simulated how contrail cirrus clouds spread and how the vapors trap and reflect radiation. It suggested that the clouds can cover two percent of Europe and one percent of the United States—and that the warming associated with contrail cirrus is nine times greater than that caused by line-shaped contrails alone. At the same time, however, contrail cirrus also “cause a significant decrease in natural cloudiness, which partly offsets their warming effect,” the authors note. The next step, they add, is to plug their data into studies that seek to tally aviation’s total contribution to

warming—and find ways to reduce it. The forecast for climate studies, it seems, remains cloudy. ❧

©Ambar Espinoza

Burkhardt, U. and B. Kärcher. 2011. Global radiative forcing from contrail cirrus. Nature Climate Change doi:10.1038/nclimate1068.

million bats would have consumed up to 1,320 metric tons of insects, the authors note. Such numbers highlight the “urgent” need to take action, they conclude. And because it can take years for colonies to recover from losses, “a wait-and-see approach to the issue of widespread declines of bat populations is not an option.” ❧ Boyles, J.G. et al. 2011. Economic importance of bats in agriculture. Science doi:10.1126/science.1201366.

EC O NO M I C S

Billion-dollar Bats Flying mammals are a boon to U.S. economy

the belfry are worth billions. By keeping insect pests in check, bats save U.S. farmers as much as $53 billion each year, according to a new tally in Science. But all could be lost if policymakers don’t move quickly to address threats that are killing millions of the flying mammals, the authors argue. Bats are remarkable insect-killing machines. In Indiana, for instance, biologists estimated that just a single colony of 150 big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) ate nearly 1.3 million insects in a year. In Texas, that kind of bat pest control was worth $12 to $173 per acre to cotton farmers, concluded another study. Those benefits are eroding, however, as white-nose syndrome (a fungal disease) and wind-power turbines threaten bat populations. By 2020, research suggests, turbines in the MidAtlantic Highlands alone could be killing 33,000 to 111,000 bats annually, and white-nose syndrome has already killed more than 1 million. Those

Those bats in

w ild li fe

Hue and Die Wind-turbine color is a life-or-death matter The evidence isn’t black and white, but paint color could be contributing to wildlife kills at the world’s growing number of wind turbines. Field experiments in the U.K. suggest that common turbine hues attract insects, and the buzzing food supply might in turn lure hungry birds and bats too close to the whirling blades. A few studies have suggested that insects could be attracted to turbines

by their color or by the amount of ultraviolet (UV) light they reflect (many insects see in the UV spectrum). But the idea hadn’t been rigorously tested until researchers at Loughborough University in Leicestershire decided to take paint chips in hand. On 59 occasions over three years, they displayed ten differently colored cards at a wind turbine located in a meadow near the university, both at mid-day and after sunset. The colors ranged from two common shades used to make wind turbines less obtrusive— “pure white” and “light gray”—to racier shades that might be more attractive to insects: “red lilac,” “traffic yellow,” and “opal green.” Each time, they counted how many insects landed on each card during a ten-minute window. By the end of the experiment, they had counted 2,012 insect visits to the cards. And discriminating insects they were. The pollen-like yellow card proved to be “the most attractive overall,” while purple was the least popular, the researchers report in the European Journal of Wildlife Research. Also high on the list, however, were the common turbine shades of white and gray, although “it is not entirely clear why.” One possibility is that the paint’s UV signature resembles that of light reflected by leaves and flowers, and the insects “are drawn to it for foraging, mating, or resting opportunities.” The findings suggest wind-farm builders might want to “consider alternative turbine colors for future installations, particularly in areas known to be high in insectivore activity,” they conclude. But “a logical next step would be to paint turbines at known sites of wildlife interaction” to investigate the effect of “moving” colors. Ultimately, the researchers hope, such

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studies will make picking the right palette for a wind farm more than just a matter of taste. ❧ Long, C., J. Flint and P. Lepper. 2010. Insect attraction to wind turbines: does colour play a role? European Journal of Wildlife Research doi:10.1007/s10344-010-0432-7.

From: “The Ruins” ©Dreamworks LLC 2008

FLO R A

Creepy Are the vines taking over? If the meek don’t inherit the earth, maybe the vines will. A recent study appears to confirm a controversial finding that climbing plants are overwhelming trees in tropical forests in South and Central America. There’s no agreement on what might be driving the shift, but researchers say it could have a major impact. “We are witnessing a fundamental structural change in the physical makeup of forests that will have a profound impact on the animals, human com-

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munities, and businesses that depend on them for their livelihoods,” says Stefan Schnitzer of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Schnitzer and Frans Bongers of Wageningen University in the Netherlands wrote the study, which appears in Ecology Letters. Nearly a decade ago, ecologist Oliver Phillips of the University of Leeds in the U.K. sparked debate with a study that showed vines were running rampant in Amazonia, growing faster than trees and accounting for a greater proportion of the forest’s biomass. To see whether that trend was repeated elsewhere, Schnitzer and his team reviewed a range of studies. Together, they provide “irrefutable evidence that vines are on the rise not only in the Amazon, but throughout the American tropics,” he says. In tropical forests, “lianas”—the technical term for woody vines— can make up some 25 percent of all woody species. They can get a leg up by spreading “a large canopy of leaves above those of the host tree, competing aggressively for sunlight, water, and nutrients,” Schnitzer says. On Barro Colorado Island in Panama, such strategies have helped vines to more than double the proportion of trees they’ve invaded over the past 40 years, to some 75 percent in 2007. In French Guiana, vine growth increased 60 percent faster than tree growth from 1992 to 2002. Researchers reported similar trends from Brazil, the Bolivian Amazon, and subtropical forests in South Carolina. In contrast, two studies of forests in tropical Africa did not detect accelerated vine growth. Why are woody vines gaining the upper hand? Researchers aren’t sure, but lianas may be better at using

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available water and also less vulnerable than trees to droughts, hurricanes, and other kinds of disturbance. Lianas also thrive on increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Besides altering ecosystems, the rise of the vine could force climate scientists to rethink their models, since vines process carbon and nutrients differently than trees do. And “vine creep” could have implications for North American forests, too, where more than 80 nonnative lianas have now taken up residence. Although freezing winters can help keep the creepers in check, some forests have already experienced reduced tree growth due to the competition from vines such as kudzu and honeysuckle. ❧ Schnitzer, S. and F. Bongers. 2011. Increasing liana abundance and biomass in tropical forests: emerging patterns and putative mechanisms. Ecology Letters doi:10.1111/j.14610248.2011.01590.x.

OCEA N S

Red Fish, Blue Fish But sharks can’t tell the difference

color, according to some new work by vision researchers—but that blind spot might help keep the big predators out of trouble. Whether sharks have color vision has long been a vexing question, with various studies coming to different conclusions. The new evidence—that they

Sharks can’t appreciate

Illustration by Ahmad Shawkash

can’t tell blood red from navy blue— comes from Nathan Scott Hart and colleagues at the University of Western Australia and the University of Queensland in Australia. They collected 17 kinds of sharks from commercial fishers and then used a technique called microspectrophotometry to measure light-sensitive pigments associated with color-sensing “cone cells” in the eye’s retina. They found no evidence of cone cells in ten species and just one kind of cone pigment in the seven others. That suggests sharks are color-blind “monochromats,” they report in Naturwissenschaften. The find raises some intriguing ideas for protecting sharks from be-

coming unwanted “bycatch” in ocean fisheries—and even for preventing shark attacks on humans. “Contrast against the background, rather than color per se, may be more important for object detection by sharks,” says Hart. So low-contrast fishing lures— or high contrast warning markers on nets—could be “less attractive” to the predators, he says. And human swimmers who don’t want to become a meal might consider leaving those high-contrast swimming togs in the trunk. ❧ Hart, N.S. et al. 2011. Microspectrophotometric evidence for cone monochromacy in sharks. Naturwissenschaften doi:10.1007/s00114010-0758-8.

M IG RATION

Monarch Decline Grim outlook for mass butterfly phenomenon Mexico’s population of overwintering monarch butterflies appears to have rebounded slightly from last year’s record low, researchers say—but the showy, long-distance migrant is facing growing threats to its survival. In the winter of 2009–2010, researchers recorded the smallest clusters of overwintering monarchs seen in the 17 years they have collected data, a multinational research team reports in Insect Conservation and Diversity. Each

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This Week in Conservation Science your online guide to the best conservation research from over 50 journals 6 conservationmagazine.org We Do the Legwork So You Don’t Have to

winter since 1994–95, they have tallied the total area covered by the insects, millions of which travel to northern Mexico each year to cling to trees in forests on a few mountainsides. Overall, the butterflies have occupied an average of 7.24 hectares since the count started, with a high of 20.97 hectares in 1996–97 and a low of 1.92 hectares in 2009–10. Last winter (2010–11), the total rose to 4.01 hectares. Still, the trend isn’t promising. Over the full 17 years, “the decline is statistically significant,” the authors note. “Three factors appear to have contributed to reduce monarch abundance,” they note: 1. Extensive illegal logging in the overwintering forests, despite the creation of monarch reserves. “For example, between 1971 and 1999, 44 percent of the high-quality overwintering forest was degraded within the area that became protected as the Monarch Butterfly Special Biosphere Reserve by presidential decree in 1986.” 2. The loss of breeding habitat in the U.S. due to the expansion of genetically modified crops that resist herbicides, which led to the widespread loss of the milkweed plants on which the butterflies lay eggs. 3. Severe weather. Researchers estimate that a cold, five-day rainstorm in 2009– 10, for instance, may have killed up to 50 percent of overwintering monarchs. The problems, the authors conclude, “call into question the long-term survival of the monarchs’ migratory phenomenon.” ❧ Brower, L. et al. 2011. Decline of monarch butterflies overwintering in Mexico: is the migratory phenomenon at risk? Insect Conservation and Diversity doi:10.1111/j.17524598.2011.00142.x.

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Cuisine

Pop That Cork Plastic stoppers threaten cork-oak habitat

the plastic bottlestopper may be threatening biodiversity, according to a study of bird life in the Mediterranean oak forests that produce traditional corks. “Montados” in Portugal and “dehesas” in Spain are agricultural grasslands dotted with the cork oak (Quercus suber) and holm oak (Quercus ilex) trees. These cork oaks produce much of the fibrous bark that keeps fine wines from spilling and spoiling. In a centuries-old tradition, corkmakers take long strips of bark from the oaks every nine years, starting when the trees are about 25 years old. The bark then regenerates. But cork forests do more than just provide jobs for nearly 100,000 people, Ana I. Leal of the University of Lisbon and colleagues note in Biological Conservation. In particular, montados “are very important for Mediterranean birds.” Exactly how debarking influences bird biodiversity, however, hasn’t been carefully studied. To fill that glass, in 2008 Leal and her colleagues surveyed birds and arthropods (including insects) at a large cork forest in Portugal. In particular, they examined how bird abundance and density differed between trees that had recently been

That merlot with

©Ranplett/iStock.com

stripped and those that had had up to nine years to recover. Overall, they found that cork age didn’t influence species richness, but that areas with recently debarked trees tended to have slightly lower bird densities. They also found that one group of birds—“gleaners” that pick their prey out of bark crevices—tended to be a bit less common in recently debarked areas. At the landscape and regional scales, however, these debarking impacts were slight: “In fact, even for bark gleaners, the exploited montados are still the most favorable habitat available in the study region,” the authors note. The real threat to the birds, they write, is “growing competition between cork stoppers and synthetic bottle stoppers.” Wine experts say plastic corks and screw tops now seal up to 30 percent of the world’s wine bottles—that means bottlers aren’t buying billions of real corks. And “without the high

income resulting from the production of cork stoppers, montados may lose their economic viability,” the study warns. “This may result in its replacement by other types of land cover, much less valuable for birds and for other components of biodiversity.” Worldwide, other researchers estimate up to 2.2 million hectares of cork forests could be at risk, with nearly one-third of the total in Portugal and one-fifth in Spain. To keep the cork forests intact, rural residents will need “clear signs . . . that their land is economically, ecologically, and culturally valuable and viable using traditional land management practices,” the authors conclude. Perhaps a toast, then, to putting a cork in it? ❧ Leal, A.I. et al. 2011. Impact of cork extraction on birds: relevance for conservation of Mediterranean biodiversity. Biological Conservation doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2011.02.0

DISEA SE

Sick Leave Tourists may have spread deadly virus to wild gorillas

researchers in Rwanda noticed a female mountain gorilla coughing as she fed in her forest home. Within days, she was dead—and researchers now conclude that she and an infant gorilla were killed by a virus that appears to have spread from human visitors. “We usually think of viruses as jumping from wildlife to humans, but what we often don’t realize is that this is a two-way highway,” says Gustavo Palacios, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) who studied the incident. The threats posed to humans by pathogens such as the avian and swine flus are well publicized. Less discussed

In June 2009,

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Photo by Bradley Cardinale

are the diseases that humans can pass on to our closely related ape relatives. That threat is particularly relevant in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the world’s 786 remaining mountain gorillas live in two national parks popular with tourists. “An ecotourism industry for viewing human-habituated gorillas in the wild is thriving in all three countries,” Palacios’s team notes in Emerging Infectious Diseases. The visitors help “ensure the sustainability of the species by generating much-needed revenue and increasing global awareness,” they add. “Tourism, however, also poses a risk for disease.” Particularly problematic are respiratory diseases, which account for 20 percent of sudden deaths among gorillas (second only to poaching-related trauma). To protect the gorillas, all three governments restrict tourist numbers and proximity, and the Democratic Republic of Congo mandates that visitors wear masks. But “the frequency and severity of respiratory disease outbreaks 16

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among mountain gorillas . . . have recently increased,” the researchers report. From May through August 2008, for instance, outbreaks occurred in four gorilla groups in Rwanda. Researchers recorded a fifth outbreak in June 2009 in a group known as “Hirwa.” Ultimately, researchers documented moderate-to-severe respiratory disease in 11 of the group’s 12 members. They gave drugs to five of the animals to help fend off the sickness. Now, tissue samples from the two dead gorillas have revealed the probable cause: a human metapneumovirus (HMPV). The virus is known to have killed chimpanzees exposed to tourists, so it’s not surprising it would kill gorillas, too. Exactly where the virus came from is a mystery, although tests show it is related to strains circulating in South Africa, more than 1,000 miles away. ❧ Palacios, G. et al. 2011. Human metapneumovirus infection in wild mountain gorillas, Rwanda. Emerging Infectious Diseases doi:10.3201/ eid1704100883.

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BIODIV ERSITY

A Room Full of Mini-rivers Showing how biodiversity cleans up water pollution

isn’t enough. That’s why Bradley Cardinale built 150. In an experiment that colleagues are hailing as “elegant,” the University of Michigan biologist used dozens of small artificial streams to prove a point: more biodiversity can mean less pollution. Past studies have suggested that ecosystems with more plant species tend to remove more pollutants from soil and water than those with fewer— but the exact mechanism wasn’t clear. In a bid to clarify matters, Cardinale explored how biodiversity affected efforts to remove one common water pollutant: nitrogen, a nutrient that has

Sometimes, one river

become a major problem worldwide. In each of his lab streams, Cardinale grew different combinations of eight common kinds of diatoms and algae. He also varied how fast the water flowed in his mini-rivers to create different ecological “niches.” Fast flows, for example, favored diatoms that liked riffles, while slow-moving water favored those that prospered in pools. After about two months, he ended up with stream ecosystems composed of one to eight species in various population sizes. More species turned out to be better for removing a nitrogen compound called nitrate, he reports in Nature. An eight-species mix, for instance, removed nitrate from water an average of 4.5 times faster than did a single species. Researchers might not see such dramatic differences in natural rivers, Cardinale warns. Still, the findings provide the first “solid evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between biodiversity and water quality.” They also expose a potential chicken-andegg challenge, he adds: since nitrogen pollution tends to reduce the very species diversity that can help neutralize the nutrient, it will be critical to take action before nutrients overwhelm a river and tip it into a kind of ecological death spiral that could be hard to escape.❧ Cardinale, B.J. 2011. Biodiversity improves water quality through niche partitioning. Nature doi:10.1038/nature09904.

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F e at u r e

A handful of giant corporations are laying claim to the

c lose d - source

Crops B y P aul S alope k

Illustration ©Daniel Reiter

germ plasm of the world’s major food crops. And when yield is the grail of profit, biodiversity isn’t a priority

LOOK at the seed It is Oblong .

tapered like a bowling pin, ashy black, smaller than a peppercorn.“You can see it’s not really domesticated,” Chris Schmidt says. Schmidt, who is prematurely bald, soft-spoken, a bit monastic, a noticer of small things, looks exactly like an entomologist from the moment you meet him—long before he actually tells you that’s his specialty. He curates a community seed bank in Tucson Arizona. Right now, he is abrading a seed’s tough skin with his gardener’s battered thumbnail before placing it on a moist paper towel to sprout. “Most modern food crops are bred for thinner seed coats,” he explains. “It speeds up germination. But if you breed the coat too thin, you’re susceptible to disease.” The seed in question is a pip of Proboscidea sp., devil’s claw, an annual of the desert Southwest whose extravagantly hooked fruit was once dispersed on the woolly fetlocks of bison. (Ranch cattle now do the honors.) It was indifferently cultivated by Arizona’s Tohono O’odham people for centuries as a source of food and basketry pigment. They never quite slimmed down that coat. Humankind’s tinkering with seed coats—“testae” to botanists—is just one small step in a saga of plant husbandry that began perhaps 11,000 years ago, when a hungry genius in what is now Syria first tried cultivating wild rye grass. His experiment unwittingly launched an agricultural revolution that arrested our species’ nomadic impulses, built towns and empires, and ultimately spawned monotheism, organized warfare, and the Food Network—not to mention specialized jobs such as “seed bank curator” and “journalist.” Yet the latest epic change in our long journey with seeds remains nearly as invisible to the public eye as a grain of wheat lodged in a pants cuff. An unprecedented monopoly on food seeds is taking root, particularly in developed countries, that may decide farming’s success or failure in an era of wrenching climate change. And a debate is growing in food-security circles regarding the wisdom of concentrating our crops’ germ plasm, or genetic inheritance,

within the board rooms of a shrinking number of Big Ag corporations. Schmidt’s nonprofit conservation group, Native Seeds/SEARCH, is a small but strategic player in this veiled controversy. A walk-in freezer in his lab holds more than 1,800 jars of heirloom seeds. The varietals have been collected over decades from the surrounding U.S.-Mexico borderlands. “White Sonora Wheat,” “Acoma Squash,” “Tarahumara Goat-eye Beans”—the exotic names on the jars are somehow comforting. The antique seeds suggest that, regardless of the furies unleashed by looming weather shifts, by a population spiking to 9 billion by 2050, and by rapidly degrading farmland, our deep legacy of plant breeding offers us a safety net—a genetic trove from which to mine adaptable new crops. Like a lot of things in life, this may be wishful thinking. Ancient humans utilized roughly 7,000 different plants to meet their food needs. Today, by and large, our agricultural diet has been whittled to perhaps 150 species. True, there are 4,000 corn hybrids available to grow in the U.S., but they’re kissing cousins teased from a handful of races. And only four multinational chemical and pesticide companies now control most of that crop’s germ plasm—as well as 56 percent of the planet’s multibillion-dollar commercial seed trade. When yield is the grail of profit, biodiversity isn’t a priority. “Monopolies reduce choice,” Schmidt says. “We’re living at a time when we need choices more than ever.” Schmidt’s cooler is chilled to 45 degrees Fahrenheit. He hunches inside, hands tucked under his armpits, bare feet strapped into sandals, staring at the myriad seeds. His two assistants were recently laid off due to budget cuts—a commonenough fate befalling today’s struggling community seed banks. The seeds sit there, and he looks at them. They appear to be communing. He regards them doubtfully, with a knowing exhaustion, the way couples do on the brink of divorce. Then he pushes the big steel door to leave. Civilization hangs on the thickness of a seed coat.

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with toxic bacterial DNA germinate plants that kill boring insects without resorting to pesticides. But the company’s most Bayer. Together, they represent that truly rare thing, a visible important product by far is a piece of paper. corner being turned in human history: the rise of the first global, Monsanto, like other transgenic seed sellers, requires farmseed-based food oligopoly since the dawn of agriculture. ers to sign a “technology stewardship” agreement that forbids Most Americans are probably vaguely aware that the bulk customers from replanting the seed. This is understandable. The of seeds growing the bounty for their tables—and the cotton contract ensures returns on the firm’s investments in biotechnolthey wear, the ethanol burned in their cars, and the fodder that ogy, which can run to tens of millions of dollars per seed variety fattens their broiler chickens and beef cattle—is controlled by in research and regulatory costs. But it also shatters a hallowed a startlingly small club of conglomerates. And many may not farming practice of saving local, perhaps more biodiverse seed care. After all, industrial monoculture is phenomenally producstock for future use. tive. Since 1930, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, Today, this seed-saving tradition, a rite of genetic sovereignty and genetically modified seeds have all propelled corn yield in dating back to the Neolithic, is fading away. That’s because, in a the U.S. from 20 to more than 140 bushels per acre. Soybean perverse sense, farmers don’t own their new hi-tech germ plasm. production has more than doubled. Factory farms feed not only Monsanto and the other corporations do. And the U.S. public but much of the world. Monsanto’s enormous market share—roughly Yet there are some hidden casualties one-third of the corn and soybean seeds grown within the efficiencies of this “seed-industry in the U.S.—means that when the company consolidation.” The first appears to be a comjacks up its seed prices 50 percent, as it did bepetitive marketplace. tween 2005 and 2008, farmers grumble quietly. With the introduction of genetically modified seeds—that is, seeds with alien genes The biological bottleneck Because they don’t want to be cut off. Cheaters attempting to replant modified implanted to resist insects or herbicides—in of corporate seeds is changing seeds, meanwhile, can be reported anonythe 1990s, hundreds of smaller, “convennot just how we eat, but mously on a Monsanto toll-free hotline. The tional” seed firms in the U.S. simply got who gets to think our way biggest purveyor of proprietary seed on the winnowed out of the business. They couldn’t out of hunger. globe even dispatches private investigators to afford the biotech R&D. After a frenzy of stalk suspected “patent infringers.” When necacquisitions and mergers—one Midwest essary, it sues them—including some farmers trade group, the Independent Professional who claim their fields were accidentally infected by wind-blown Seed Association, has lost two-thirds of its 300 members—the seed. Bare-knuckle tactics such as these have earned the firm top ten seed giants have walked away with 67 percent of the some uncharitable epithets, among them “Gestapo.” world’s branded-seed market, according to the calculations of Monsanto customers “are afraid to speak in public, worried one sustainability watchdog. (1) By most economists’ definithat they will become victims of retaliation,” a DuPont executive tion, this is a monopoly. Yet food crops are such a vital human complained. DuPont filed an anti-monopoly suit against Monresource—apologies to Microsoft and Google—that the U.S. santo in 2009. (DuPont controls its own third of the country’s government started probing the industry for price-gouging and seed-corn market.) other antitrust abuses only two years ago. “We believe that competition in the seed industry is quite Consider the case of Monsanto. Any corporation whose robust, and we have full confidence in the integrity of the DeWikipedia page contains subheadings such as “Child labor,” partment of Justice’s review process,” Tom Helscher, a Monsanto “Farmer suicides,” and “Indonesian bribing convictions” might spokesman, wrote me. He stated that farmers can choose from fairly be said to have an image problem. Yet St. Louis–based dozens of companies’ genetic technologies. “The fight to win Monsanto, the favorite bogeyman of the renewable farming the farmer’s business is intense.” movement, seems inured to controversy. I think about all this while I take Chris Schmidt, the Tucson That’s partly because its technicians have invented the seed-bank curator, to lunch at his favorite Mexican restaurant. most popular genetically altered seeds on the market. The firm’s At the table, over chips and salsa, I ponder what Jim Orf, a bestselling Roundup Ready system produces crops that stand soybean breeder at the University of Minnesota, told me about up to the powerful herbicide glyphosate, which allows farmers the erosion of our folk intimacy with seeds. to clear weeds without costly labor. Monsanto seeds implanted The four big corporations are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and

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In 1900, roughly

7,100 types of apple trees

were grown in the U.S., of which 6,100 are now extinct

In 1949, Chinese farmers grew nearly

10,000 Wheat Varieties

By the 1970s, only about 1,000 varieties remained in cultivation

Sources: FAO and Worldwatch Institute

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Seed Industry structure Seed Company

(Acquisitions 1996â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2008)

Pharmaceutical/Chemical Company

Other Company

ChinaSeed

CNDK

FTSementes

AdvantaCanola Bruinsma

Petoseed

Genecorp

(1994)

(1995)

(1994)

Seminis

Gustafson Calgene

DeRuiter

Horticeres Agroceres

RoyalSluis (1995)

Agracetus

AssocFarmersDelinting CaliforniaPlantingCotton Ciagro

EIDParryRallis

Monsanto

Holdens

InterstateCanola Poloni

(1995)

HybriTechEurope

(1995)

Sensako

Paras

CottonStates

PauEuralis

HybriTech (1995)

EmergentGenetics

Biogemma

LimagrainCanada

CornStatesIntl

Mahendra

AgriProWheat

AlyParticipacoes

Agroeste

Indusem

BrownfieldSeedDelinting HollandCottonseed

JacobHartz

CustomFarmSeed

Daehnfeldt

Cargill

Cargill Intl.SeedDivision

DeKalb

Stoneville

HelenaCotton

Terrazawa

Ecogen

DeKalbAyala Unilever

GermainsCotton

CDMMandiyu Renessen

PBIC

Ayala

SyngentaGlobalCottonDivision Marmot

Asgrow ChoongAng

RelianceGenetics

DeltaPineLand

Peotec

ISG

Carnia

Barham

Hungnong

Western

Monsoy

FirstLine

Mahyco CornStatesHybrid SementesAgroceres

CarlSperling

AustralianGrainTech

Hazera Kyowa

WilsonSeeds Diener

ChannelBio

MidwestSeedGenetics

Crows

Trisler

CornBelt

MoweaquaSeeds

TrelaySeeds

REA

LewisHybrids

BoCa Sieben

StoneSeeds Hawkeye Goldsmith

ConradFafard

ExSeed

HubnerSeed

Hybrinova Gutwein

Verdia

InterstatePayco Garst AdvantaNACornSoybeans

Fischer Novartis

Maisadour Agritrading

Zimmerman

Syngenta Sandoz

AgriPro

Zeneca

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Mogen

Astra

AWB

ZeraimGedera Sanbei

DuPont

DiaEngei

GoldenHarvest

AstraZeneca

ProteinTech. Int.

PSAGenetics

DoisMarcos

LongReach

SturdyGrow

SvalofWeibull

BASF

CropDesign

Jung

SPS

ResourceSeeds

Thurston

NorthrupKing

CibaGeigy

VandenBerg

HeartlandHybrids

EridaniaBeghinSay

KoipesolAgrosemAgra

Westhove iCORN

Fontanelle CampbellSeed

HeritageSeeds

Innoseeds

CeeKay

FieldersChoice

ASI

StewartSeeds

Limagrain

BioSeeds

SpecialtyHybrids

NCPlusHybrids

NebraskaIrrigated

AdvantaEUVegetable

GoldCountry

Kruger

Sunseeds

Pioneer

OptimumQualityGrains CurrySeed

GreenLeafGenetics ShandongDenghaiPioneer

DunhuangPioneer

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Denghai

Dunhuang

Full Ownership

Nidera

Partial Ownership

Paragon

NideraSemillas

Nunhems

RioColorado

(1995)

SeedEx

Nunza

LeenDeMos

(1986)

AgrEvoCotton

Proagro

Hoechst

Bayer

CottonSeedIntl

PGS

Granja4Irmaos

Schering

GeneXSorghum

AgrEvo

Aventis

SementesRibeiral MitlaPesquisa PlanTecBiotech

Sunseeds SementesFartura RhonePoulenc

(1995)

RhoBio

CPBTwyford

“When I ask farmers what seeds they used last year, or the year before, they’re not even sure,” he said. “They say ‘Syngenta’ or ‘Monsanto.’ Or they wait ’til I suggest something. They’re paying closer attention to the price than to what they’re planting.” Orf is convinced that genetic diversity is declining in America’s crops but says nobody really knows by how much. He says that our thousands of soybean varieties look impressive in catalogues, but many are the same varieties—multiply branded by agribusiness. It is all so complex. So murky. So unprecedented. Few can keep up with it. No one can predict where the loss of our collective seed memory will ultimately take us. I stare into my plate of enchiladas. I imagine Monsanto gazing back. Its proprietary seeds and franchised genes are there, reincarnated inside at least 80 percent of the corn in my tortillas. I offered to take her camping. I hauled my surplus U.S. Forest Service pack over to her apartment and yanked a sleeping bag nicknamed Old Greasy from its main compartment; out tumbled two forgotten, rotting potatoes that had sprouted etiolated stalks and leaves. She laughed. A seed was planted.

When I was dating my wife,

Wensman

KWS

Agreliant

Clause

LochowPetkus (1967)

ProducersHybrids

Swaghat

Cenex Hytest

YuanLongping

ABIAlfalfa

Land O’Lakes

SOYGENETICS

CenexHarvest

Agriliance

HarvestStates

FarmlandIndustries

HarrisMoran SpecialtyGrains

FFRCoop Avesthagen

CooperativeBusinessIntl UnitedAgriseeds Triumph

BiogeneticaDeMilho

VerneuilHolding

Sudwestsaat

DairylandSeed

Brodbeck

HibridosColorado Dow

Mycogen

DuoMaize

Agromen DinamilhoCarol

Morgan Phytogen

JGBoswell

Technology/stewardship agreements required for the purchase of genetically modified seed explicitly prohibit research. These agreements inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good unless the research is approved by industry. As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology, its performance [and] management implications . . .

AdvancedAgriTraits IllinoisFoundation

MTI

BioPlantResearch

The biological bottleneck of corporate seeds. It’s changing not just how we eat, but who gets to think our way out of hunger. Stewardship agreements that farmers must sign with seed companies don’t simply bar replanting. They prohibit virtually all outside experimentation with corporate DNA. Until recently, this even precluded most independent product testing of transgenic seeds. Any farmer or college teacher who attempted it could face patent-infringement suits. Here is part of an open letter sent to the Environmental Protection Agency in February 2009 by a group of 26 public-sector corn crop scientists:

EmpresaBrasileira

RenzeHybrids

3 Shifting Orbits In 1998, seed companies were largely independent. A decade later, more than 200 had been acquired or had formed joint ventures with large pharmaceutical or chemical companies. Watch an animation of this graphic on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBBXLZWyXBQ.

CargillNorthAmerica Size proportional to global seed market share (2007)

Source: Philip H. Howard, Michigan State University Howard, P.H. 2009. Visualizing consolidation in the global seed industry: 1996–2008. Sustainability doi:10.3390/su1041266.

question of industry’s zealous control of information, which Such frustrations have been building in public research blocks scientific innovation and the knowledge of how to feed circles for years. Agro-industry’s highly restrictive and—critics ourselves. Many researchers complain that patent rights hinder say—overly broad gene and technology patents have essentially their ability to compare gene-modified crops to conventional allowed the new seed oligarchy to rebuff scrutiny. What’s strikcrops grown using organic or sustainable farming methods. ing, though, is that all but one of the letter’s authors—college (Syngenta flatly prohibits independent labs from testing its professors, government entomologists—chose to remain anonyseeds against any competitors.) mous. Pinched by vanishing public funding, they feared losing And then there’s the blue-sky question: who owns a seed? grant money from Big Seed. Should the whole life form be patentable? Does a seed belong to And so there it is, that lone ship that Joseph Conrad the company that inserts a single gene imbuing it with disease describes in Heart of Darkness—firing cannonballs, almost resistance? Or is it the property of generations absurdly, into the immense jungled coastline of ordinary farmers and public-sector plant of Africa. The missive is a salvo from another breeders who notched up the seed’s yield time, when seeds were a public legacy—when or perhaps perfected its testa—that allthe improvement of our food supply involved important coat? individual farmers, garden clubs, county ex“It is challenging on the tech side,” allows tension agents, academics. That era is largely Andy La Vigne, president and CEO of the gone. The initiative in seed research has American Seed Trade Association. “There are slipped decisively into corporate hands. The Monsanto, like other communications issues. Scientists. Industry. green revolution, the oldest one, once open to transgenic seed sellers, Two ships passing in the night.” all, is being narrowly privatized. requires farmers to sign a La Vigne runs what is possibly the big“technology stewardship” gest commercial seed lobby in the world Look at the seeds. Then look at the numbers. agreement that forbids (consolidation’s toll since 2000: a drop from The U.S. Department of Agriculture says customers from replanting 584 members to 428). His group has helped industry spending on crop research exploded negotiate more transparent science protocols 14-fold, to about $600 million a year, bethe seed. The contract between seed companies and nonindustry tween 1960 and 1996. Though more recent ensures returns on the firm’s researchers. But he sees the eclipse of public figures are sketchy, it’s believed to be many investments in biotechseed science as a long-term societal challenge. times higher now. Monsanto alone poured nology. But it also shatters Fewer than two percent of Americans now live $1.5 billion into its Roundup Ready research. a hallowed farming practice on farms. Seed development, a foundation of Public-sector expenditures have stagnated at our high-caloric lives, has a dwindling public about $200 million a year for decades. of saving local, perhaps constituency in the developed world. “Where’s “You used to see ag professors driving old more biodiverse seed stock the support for land-grant colleges?” La Vigne clunkers on campus,” Philip Howard, a seedfor future use. asks plaintively. “How do we sustain that?” industry analyst at Michigan State University, Aliens landing on our climatically volatile says. “Suddenly they’re driving Mercedes. That planet would take one glance at our modern tells you where the research is going.” approach to seeds, a bedrock food source, and fly away scratchGood for long-suffering university ag professors. They ing their heads. need incentives, too. Except that, like everything else in the For instance, an international seed bank operating a brave new world of manufactured seeds, there remain thorny “doomsday” vault on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen has had questions with ambiguous answers. difficulties scraping together even a quarter of its $250-milThere is the question of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, a law lion budget to assemble a global collection of crop seeds—the that allows public research institutions to commercialize their ultimate nest egg of plant genetic capital stored away against inventions. Thus, according to one survey published in Science potential agricultural collapse due to climate change. magazine, up to a quarter of all the patented biotech discoveries Meanwhile, the consolidated seed industry has developed a now padding seed companies’ bank accounts have been made so-called “terminator seed.” This Monsanto novelty, also dubbed by taxpayer-funded universities. The value of this transferred a “suicide seed,” is genetically engineered to go sterile after one intellectual capital easily runs to billions of dollars. There is the 24

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generation of growth. Farmers would need to buy new stock every year. The technology is on hold; there’s been an outcry from developing countries. But it may be unnecessary, anyway. With stewardship contracts, the seed lords do fine with human terminators called lawyers. In a 1957 essay titled “How Flowers Changed the World,” the naturalist Loren Eiseley imagines the first humans to pluck “a handful of grass seed and hold it contemplatively”: In that moment, the golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. But just as industrial farming gives, so it takes away. Of the roughly 7,000 varieties of apple that grew in the U.S. at the turn of the last century, more than 86 percent no longer exist. Chris Schmidt, the taciturn seed banker, drives me an hour south

of Tucson to his organization’s test farm. There are border-patrol checkpoints on a curving desert road and then high, yellow grasslands. Devil’s claw probably grows out there somewhere, wondering where all the buffalo went. At the farm, an experimental heirloom crop is sprouting— White Sonoran wheat, introduced to northern Mexico by Spanish missionaries in 1770. Schmidt says it shows commercial promise for baked goods. Its leaves feel like silk. One of the founders of Native Seeds/SEARCH, Gary Paul Nabhan, lives in an isolated house above the farm. Nabhan is a MacArthur “genius” Fellow and a prolific writer on food-crop diversity. He says Big Seed’s days are numbered. This is news to me. But he insists. Choking thickets of technology patents, proliferating antitrust lawsuits, hugely expensive gene research and regulation—the Goliaths are losing their nimbleness in a swiftly changing agricultural environment, he says. (Monsanto’s stock did take a knock last year, partly because its latest, heavily “trait-stacked” seeds proved disappointing on yield.) “With rapid climate change bringing new pests and viruses every year, farmers aren’t going to wait around for Monsanto to come up with another patented seed,” says Nabhan, an energetic man in an unruly prophet’s beard. “The corporations’ heavyfootedness actually favors us—a resurgence of local experiments with tons of open-source seeds.” There is evidence for this rebellion. A guerrilla food movement, albeit limited mostly to richer countries, is pushing back against the rule of King Seed. In the U.S., the rising popularity of locally produced vegetables and meats (“locavore” diets)

has encouraged some mass-market stores such as Wal-Mart to embrace heirloom varietals. But the market share of these older, biodiverse crops remains tiny. And the intense backbone labor required to grow them without gene-splicing technologies and herbicides—Nabhan’s preference—will be a serious hurdle for a post-industrial society long unaccustomed to fieldwork. In the meantime, the world’s powerful seed merhcants are already pivoting aggressively to where the money is. A report issued by the ETC Group, a sustainability think tank, showed how just eight companies—the usual suspects among them—have cornered patents on 77 percent of 262 known gene-family traits that boost plant adaptability to extreme climate change conditions: drought, salinity, cold, and flooding. (1) And like Big Pharma, which shuns unprofitable drugs, the seed oligopolists will likely cater their bottom lines to affluent customers in the global North. In the poorer South, where scientists say far more people are at risk of climate-warped famines, farmers will have to rely on Nabhan’s age-old methods of seed husbandry. Which seeds, then, will rescue us? Whatever the balance—traditional or technological—the ultimate answer rests squarely on our tongues. In essence, we have to learn how to eat all over again. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that modern-day humans consume, on average, just 12 different plants in our diet—a ghostly remnant of an agricultural cornucopia that’s been whittled for yield by generations of industrial farming and now, even more drastically, by seed market consolidation. “Wait,” Nabhan says. He springs up from a living-room chair. “I want to show you something.” He wanders off in search of the winning entry in a recent chili-judging contest in Mexico. Local campesinos’ seeds handily beat out a transgenic seed giant, Siemens, in taste, yield, and disease resistance. A lovely elderly woman, perhaps Nabhan’s mother, returns a few moments later, bearing a jar of the triumphant peppers. Their seeds float like pale sequins in vinegar. I ask her if she likes them. “Oh,” she says, smiling warmly. “I can’t eat that.” ❧ 1. Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the Commodification of Life. ETC Group, November 2008. www.etcgroup.org

Paul Salopek is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist based mostly in Africa. He’s currently working on The Mule Diaries, a book about wandering.

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ultrazoom An ordinary camera and an extraordinary technology create billion-pixel images that allow viewers to virtually fly deep into a landscape and explore nature in stunning detail

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II SS u um mm m er er 22 00 11 11

PHOTO GALLERY

The North Carolina State University Insect Museum is using GigaPan technology to allow anyone with an Internet connection to dive deep into its 2,700 drawers of over 1.5 million specimens. Photo courtesy of Matthew Bertone and Andrew Deans

When NASA’s twin Mars rovers began sending detailed pictures to Earth in January 2004, Randy Sargent, a computer scientist working on visualizations of those images, was enthralled by the sense of actually exploring Martian terrain. Onboard each rover, a camera known as the Pancam swiveled and tilted on command from NASA scientists. Sargent and his colleagues combined each exposure into a stunning digital panorama of the Red Planet’s landscape. Scientists at

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, could interact with the images on their computer screens, zoom in on fine details, hypothesize about what they were seeing, and pick the rovers’ next destinations. “The pan had so much resolution, it felt like peering through a little hole in the wall into another world,” recalls Sargent’s manager, robotics group leader Illah Nourbakhsh at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, who was then on sabbatical from CN O SNESREVRAVTAITOI N O NI IS uSm u m er m er2 021011 1 CO

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HOW IT WORKS Install a digital camera onto the GigaPan mount and set the image boundaries. The system automatically pans and tilts the camera, triggers the shutter, and creates an array of images. GigaPan Stitch software then blends the photos together into one large composite image.

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “What stunned us was this feeling of presence, which a simple picture that is not interactive doesn’t give you.” That experience led directly to a technology that has become a powerful tool for teaching and public engagement with science and the natural world. Scientists are also using it for projects as diverse as analyzing Middle Eastern petroglyphs, monitoring an urban forest, archiving a museum insect collection, studying a collapsed honeybee colony, keeping tabs on glaciers, examining erosion in a jaguar reserve, and viewing Galápagos fish clustered into a bait ball. Soon after the Martian panorama renderings, Nourbakhsh challenged his team to think creatively about “blue sky” projects they could tackle. Aware of the intense reverence astronauts felt as they gazed at Earth from space, Sar-

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gent proposed bringing that kind of experience down to Earth by building affordable equipment anybody could use to create explorable images. Nourbakhsh immediately recognized the idea’s potential for changing the relationship between viewer and image. “An explorable image is a disruptive shift away from the static image you just glance at, because now you have the power of exploration,” he says. “That sets people up with a different mindset because they decide where to zoom, where to go, what structures and details to see. And it’s not virtual, it’s not a video game. It’s real.” Sargent developed a prototype for what is now the GigaPan system. Users punch numbers into a keypad on a robotic mount for a digital camera, specifying how expansive they want their panorama to be. A microprocessor calculates the size and number of exposures needed for the pan and moves

the camera accordingly. A small robotic finger pushes the shutter button for each exposure. These are stitched together to form a panorama with a resolution 1,000 times that of HDTV. The largest GigaPan has 100 gigapixels. The final image contains more data than most personal computers can handle, so Nourbakhsh and his team developed a massive server system and website, www.gigapan.org, for storing and accessing GigaPans. When viewers zoom in on an area of an image, they seem to fly into the image itself. The result is an immersive, interactive experience that can reveal surprising details—an ant on a leaf in a forest, or a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower in a backyard. It’s like viewing nature through a huge magnifying glass. —Karen A. Frenkel From: “Panning for Science” by Karen A. Frenkel. Science 330:748. Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

Biologist Alex Smith of the University of Guelph in Ontario uses GigaPan images as digital field notes to record habitat details as he studies insects on the slopes of Costa Rican volcanoes. Photo by M. Alex Smith Image size: 4.556 gigapixels Capture time: 1 hour, 26 minutes Number of photos stitched: 1,104 C O N S E RVAT I O N

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COLONY COLLAPSE Entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp studies colonycollapse disorder in honeybee populations. This diseased frame, photographed at a quarantined apiary in Pennsylvania, serves as an interactive tool for teaching bee biology and disease identification. Photo by Michael Andree and Dennis vanEngelsdorp

PANNING FOR FISH Jason Buchheim, a marine biologist and inventor, has taken the GigaPan concept underwater. He has invented an iPhone application to precisely track his camera’s position as he snaps multiple frames that he can later assemble into wraparound panoramas, such as this one of salema fish in the Galápagos. He’s also developed a 3-D stereo viewer for GigaPans. Photo by Jason Buchheim Jaguar ConservatioN Craig Miller at Defenders of Wildlife is using GigaPan to monitor jaguar-habitat restoration efforts in the U.S.-Mexican border region. This image shows one of several study sites where Miller zooms in on vegetation changes and erosion hotspots following the removal of livestock from the area. Photo by Craig Miller

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NANO GIGAPANNING Jay Longson of NASAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ames Research Center has rigged the GigaPan system to a scanning electron microscope. This image of an ant holding a fly is composed of 288 photos taken at 200X magnification. Photo by Jay Longson and Molly Gibson

// EXPLORE MORE ONLINE

Gigapan.org hosts an interactive gallery of over 40,000 gigapixel images. Users can pan, zoom, and mark interesting discoveries in a wide range of panoramas from cityscapes to forests to Antarctic landscapes. View 3-D GigaPan images at www.3d-360.com.

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Greener pastures it’s easy to What goes on in the stomachs and under get the impression that the carbon-andthe hooves of cows might be the key to oxygen molecule is a kind of toxin, some alien vapor coughed up by a century-plus turning deserts back into grasslands, of heedless industrialism now coming back and even taming climate change. to haunt us. But on closer inspection, it seems that the problem isn’t the carbon By Judith D. Schwartz itself—it’s that there’s too much in the air and not enough in the ground. We tend to blame our carbon problems on our love affair with the car and the fruits of industry. But a greater culprit has been agriculture, which displaced fossil fuels as the primary source of atmospheric CO2 around 1970. Over the past 150 years, between 50 and 80 percent of organic carbon in the topsoil has vanished into the air, and seven tons of carbon-banking topsoil have been lost for every ton of grain produced. So, how do we get that carbon out of the air and back into the soil? Some suggest placing calcium carbonate or charcoal (aka “biochar”) directly into agricultural soil (see “Black Is the New Green,” Conservation, Summer 2010). But a growing number of soil and agricultural scientists are also discussing a low-tech, counterintuitive approach to the problem that depends on a group of unlikely heroes: cows. The catalyst for reducing CO2 and restoring soil function and fertility, they say, is bringing back the roving, grazing animals who used to wander the world’s grasslands. The natural processes that take place in the digestive system and under the hooves of ruminants might be the key to turning deserts back

In reports of rising CO2 levels,

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Illustration ©John Holcroft/Corbis

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Before 2006

into grasslands and reversing climate change. In other words, a climate-friendly future might look less like a geo-engineered landscape and more like, well, “Home on the Range.” Perhaps the most steadfast advocate of this future is Allan Savory. A 76-year-old native of Zimbabwe, Savory has the relaxed, weathered look of a lifelong outdoorsman more attuned to the etiquette of the bush than that of the boardroom. In the 1960s, as a young wildlife biologist in what was then called Southern Rhodesia, he noticed that, when livestock were removed from land set aside for future national parks, “almost immediately, these wonderful areas suffered severe loss of both plant and animal species.” Cattle, he began to realize, could play—if properly managed—the crucial role in grassland ecology that used to be occupied by herds of wild herbivores. They could help prevent and even reverse land degradation and the desertification of grasslands, combating in the process both human poverty and the disappearance of wildlife. Over the course of several eventful decades—during which he was elected to the parliament, served as an opposition leader against Rhodesia’s white-minority government, and spent four years in political exile—Savory developed a program to put these ideas into action. Savory’s singular insight is that grasslands and herbivores evolved in lockstep with one another. This means that to be healthy, grasses need to be grazed. Animals eat plants and

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stimulate their growth; they cycle dead plants back to the surface, which allows sunlight to reach the low-growing parts; their waste provides fertilizer. When a predator—say, a lion— comes into this bucolic scene, the animals bunch together and flee as a herd, their hooves breaking up and aerating the soil. Then, on a new patch of land, the process starts again. This way all plants get nibbled, but none are overgrazed. And none are overrested, which leads to accumulated dead plant material that blocks sunlight and hinders new growth. To Savory, the conventional wisdom that grazing degrades the land is an oversimplification; what matters is how livestock are applied. He readily acknowledges that the confined animal feeding operations usually associated with large-scale cattle ranching are problematic, and he opposes cramming cattle into lots on industrial farms. But he contends that this degradation by overgrazing is a matter of time rather than numbers; he’s fond of saying that one cow continually foraging in one spot will do damage where a hundred moving from place to place will not. Where feedlots will harm the land, he claims, herds of well-managed grazing animals, nibbling on native grasses and roaming from spot to spot to elude predators and seek fresh pasture—managed in a way that mimics their behavior in the wild—will restore the land’s natural dynamics. For years, many in the academic and ranching establishment dismissed Savory as a gadfly, someone outside the agri-

After 2009

Dimbangombe Ranch. Photos courtesy of the Africa Centre for Holistic Management

Gradually over the years, livestock—some four times the number of cultural and scholarly mainstream who did the grass was thickening up neighboring ranches. Thanks to the renewed his research in the open air and presented his and the ground would close in, flow of the Dimbangombe River, elephant counterintuitive conclusions in unscientific covered with plants. Then we herds no longer have to travel to pools but language. Undeterred, Savory continued to started noticing, “oh, the can water on the river. Women who used refine his framework and expand his trainwetlands are expanding along to walk as much as five kilometers daily for ing programs, and today his successes have the upper reaches of the river.” water now have it available in their commubecome hard to ignore. Farmers, ranchers, nities. Dimbangombe has become producand other land stewards who have attended tive and vibrant while its neighbors, and similar environments his training programs have brought land back from the brink around the globe, are turning to desert. How? “Two things: across Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. In 2010, we brought in increased cattle numbers with holistic planned his Zimbabwe nonprofit, the Africa Centre for Holistic Mangrazing, and [we] minimized the fires,” says Savory. agement, received a $4.8 million grant from the United States The Dimbangombe experiment began in 1992, when SaAgency for International Development (USAID) to expand its vory donated land he had purchased in the 1970s to develop work in Africa. More recently, Savory won the 2010 Buckminthe ranch as a nonprofit demonstration site. (A larger parcel of ster Fuller Challenge prize, a prestigious award that supports a land owned by Savory is now the Kazuma Pan National Park, proposal with “significant potential to solve humanity’s most part of the five-nation Transfrontier Conservation Area.) In the pressing problems.” early days, when funds were tight, he generally camped on the land. Even now, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, director The centerpiece of Savory’s work is the 2,630-hectare Dimbanof development at the Centre, live in a mud-and-thatch hut gombe Ranch in northwestern Zimbabwe near Victoria Falls, on the riverbank. Savory says this is “not a hardship, as I have home to his Africa Centre for Holistic Management. In the lived much of my life like this and simply enjoy living amongst hot, dry, depleted landscape of this region, “the rains are not Africa’s big game and wildlife more than in a house.” what they used to be” is a frequent refrain. But Dimbangombe As the ranch grew, Savory and his colleagues ran cattle on looks as though it’s been uniquely favored by the rain gods. It the land, beginning with what they could afford. “We also inhas lush, varied grasses, flowing rivers and streams, and thriving

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The key to improving water conditions lies in the carbon vited farmers in the neighboring community who had run out cycle. In Savory’s words, “The fate of carbon and water tend of feed to add their cattle to the herd,” Butterfield says. “They to follow each other.” Carbon in the soil acts as a giant sponge, needed to keep their animals alive, and we needed numbers to keeping rain water in the ground rather than allowing it to restore the land. Sometimes we had 600 cattle, sometimes 300. stream off. “Every one-percent increase in soil carbon holds We kept them constantly on the move.” an additional 60,000 gallons of water per acre,” says Steven The other key intervention, creating firebreaks, put a stop Apfelbaum, founder of Applied Ecological Services, Inc., a to uncontrolled clearing fires and to fires set by animal poachers, landscape-restoration company based in Brodhead, Wisconsin. who sometimes torch the grass to obliterate their tracks. These “This means reduced erosion and sedimentation and downwoodland and grassland fires, Butterfield says, can go on for stream flooding.” hundreds of miles. “Africa is burning to death, many parts of Desertification—and associated problems such as flooding, it,” adds Savory. “809 million hectares of grassland are burned wildfires, and water shortages—can be seen as a symptom of annually. The reason we’re burning them is that there are not the carbon cycle gone awry, says Savory. In the same way that enough herbivores to keep the grass alive.” What he means is plants need animals, as seen in the relationship that fires are used to clear decaying plant between ruminants and grasses, soil needs material and promote fresh growth—funcplants. “For soil to form, it needs to be living, tions that grazing herbivores are uniquely Savory’s singular and to be living, soil needs to be covered,” says equipped to do better. Savory contends that insight is that grasslands and herbivores evolved in Australian scientist Christine Jones. Without a planned grassland fires cause numerous problockstep with one another. cover of plants in various stages of growth and lems, including leaving exposed soil (which This means that to be healthy, decomposition, much of the carbon oxidizes oxidizes and leads to runoff ) and promoting grasses need to be grazed. and enters the atmosphere as CO2. fire-dependent plant species over the more diverse and soil-enriching grasses that aniSo soil carbon has huge implications for mals eat. Another result of grassland fires is climate change. Rattan Lal, Distinguished added atmospheric CO2. In one hour, says Savory, a half-hectare Professor of soil science in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University, estimates that fire pumps as much CO2 and other pollutants into the air as soil-carbon restoration can potentially store about one billion 4,000 car trips. tons of atmospheric carbon per year. This means that the soil With these strategies applied in Dimbangombe, “each year could effectively offset around one-third of human-generated things got better and better,” Butterfield recalls. “Gradually emissions annually absorbed in the atmosphere. Building soil over the years, the grass was thickening up and the ground carbon would also enhance food production; and, because would close in, covered with plants. Then we started noticing, carbon-rich soil holds significantly more water than its dried‘oh, the wetlands are expanding along the upper reaches of the out counterpart, it would help to secure watersheds and protect river.’ We started seeing sedges and reeds growing many yards against flooding and drought. up from the riverbanks and could now see a huge swath that “I teach my students that the goal [in agriculture] is to prowas becoming wetland. In the past few years especially, it’s been duce a positive carbon budget: the amount of carbon returned quite dramatic.” to the land should be more than the amount that is leaving the land,” says Lal, noting that soil-carbon levels worldwide Allan Savory, in his laconic way, makes it all sound elementary. are dropping wherever extractive farming is practiced. He says “All we’ve done really is make the rainfall more effective.” much of Africa, Asia, and parts of Central Asia have soils which Parched and unproductive regions throughout the world are contain as little as 0.1 percent carbon, whereas the minimum not necessarily suffering from less rain, he says. The problem is for functionality is 1.5 percent to two percent. Savory’s model, that the water leaves too quickly, through runoff or evaporation he says, offers valuable insight on how to increase soil-carbon from bare soil. Water needs to infiltrate and remain in the soil, levels and therefore increase fertility. entering the stream and river system, and leave only through plant growth or by entering aquifers. “All of this we’re doing with the livestock,” says Savory. “We keep operating on sound Despite his evident successes, Savory still occupies an equivocal scientific principle, enhancing the organic matter and porosity position in the ranching and agricultural world. His methods of the soil, and keeping water in the system.” have stirred surprising passions not only among farmers and 36

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Allan Savory. Photo by C.J. Hadley, Range Magazine

ranchers who have used them with success but also among skeptics and detractors, who have called them “hocus-pocus” and “more religious belief than science.” Savory himself has been likened to “the Wizard of Oz”—big on fanfare, empty of real ideas. This may be as much about delivery as about science. Part of the resistance stems from the far-reaching nature of Savory’s claims. Some skeptics who might be receptive to his ideas in the realm of animal husbandry balk at proclamations of a total “paradigm shift” with the ambition to rethink agriculture from the ground up. Others associate the language of his programs— “holistic management,” “holistic decision-making”—with a New Age sensibility that seems unscientific. Then there’s the inevitable resistance to new ideas, especially ones that bypass established business and technological systems. Apfelbaum says that most practitioners who balk at holistic management “simply are skeptical of change from their status quo and ‘the way ranching has always been done.’” Another factor is that Savory’s system is less a recipe than a way of understanding the land. This means that even when his

methods work, it can be hard to know exactly what prompts success. George Wuerthner, a photographer and author who has written extensively about western landscapes, says, “One thing Savory’s methodology does is make ranchers pay more attention to what they’re doing on the land. That may help in and of itself, regardless of the ecological assertions, which I don’t buy.” Some ecologists are also concerned by the impression that Savory promotes “bring in the cows” as a one-size-fits-all panacea. These critics often conflate planned holistic grazing, which involves continual monitoring and adjustment, with more formulaic grazing strategies such as “short intensive grazing” (scheduled on-off grazing cycles) and, the latest craze, “mob grazing” (very large herds moved several times a day). “Grasslands are tremendously diverse,” says Jason Neff, associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Some have been grazed for thousands of years, and some not at all. You need to look at the cultural and ecological history of a place. I work in semi-arid lands that are sensitive to grazing. For example, the Colorado plateau—increase grazing out there, and the land will suffer.” Savory himself does not claim that his methods are equally applicable everywhere. They must take the specific local ecology into account and are best suited to what he calls “brittle environments,” parts of the world that are dry most of the year, with seasonal rainfall. These areas are less forgiving of land management problems than are more temperate regions: “If, say, England had the climate of Israel, it would have desertified,” he says. “The dry periods show up the faults [in how the land is managed].” But given that the grassland, rangeland, and savanna—where holistic management is most successful—cover two-thirds of the world’s landmass, the potential of his ideas is still vast. The strength of Savory’s ideas may derive from the fact that he brings an outsider’s eye—even a poet’s eye—to environmental cycles. (Nature writer Gretel Ehrlich, who has spent time with Savory in the African bush, calls him “the best observer of wildlife I’ve ever met.”) Seen from a holistic perspective, the secret of Dimbangombe is no secret. It simply required looking back to the land’s prehistory—and learning a management principle from no management at all. ❧

Judith D. Schwartz is a Vermont-based author and freelance writer who regularly publishes in Time.com, Miller-McCune and elsewhere. Her current writing explores the many ways soil plays into climate change mitigation, biodiversity, economics, and health. www.judithdschwartz.com.

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38 CON S E RV AT I O N Illustration ÂŠDan Page

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To build a (better) fire by Burkhard Bilger

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fork of the Willamette River. They spent their days designing wo men walked into a bar called the Axe and and testing wood-burning stoves, their nights cooking under Fiddle. It was a Thursday night in early August the stars and debating thermodynamics. Stove Camp was a in the town of Cottage Grove, Oregon, and the week-long event hosted by the Aprovecho Research Center— house was full. The men ordered drinks and a the engineering offshoot of a local institute, education center, vegetarian Reuben and made their way to the and environmental collective. Now in its tenth year, the camp only seats left, near a small stage at the back. The taller of the had become a kind of hippie Manhattan Project. It brought two, Dale Andreatta, had clear blue eyes and a long, columnar together the best minds in the field to solve a single, intractable head crowned with gray hair. He was wearing a pleated kilt, problem: how do you build cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves festooned with pockets and loops for power tools, and spoke for 3 billion people? in a loud, unmodulated voice—like a clever robot. His friend, Peter Scott, was thinner and more disheveled, with a vaguely Biblical look. He had long brown hair and sandaled feet, sunA map of the world’s poor is easy to make: just follow the smoke. baked skin and piercing eyes. About half the world’s population cooks with gas, kerosene, or The featured act at the bar that night was a burlesque troupe electricity while the other half burns wood, coal, dung, or other from New York called Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad. Just how solid fuels. To the first group, a roaring hearth has become a they’d landed in the Oregon woods wasn’t clear, but they stuck luxury—a thing for camping trips and holiday parties. To the stubbornly to their set list and met with only polite applause. second group, it’s a necessity. To the first group, a kitchen is an Finally, near the end of the show, one of the arsenal of specialized appliances. To the second, performers—a spindly comedian with thick, it’s just a place to build a fire. black glasses and a T-shirt that said “Freak”— Clean air, according to the U.S. Environpeered out from under the spotlight and fixed mental Protection agency (EPA), contains fewer her eyes, a little desperately, on Peter Scott. “Do than 15 micrograms of fine particles per cubic you have a job?” she said, almost to herself. meter. Five times that amount will set off a The average smoke alarm. Three hundred times as much— cooking fire Scott said no, then yes. roughly what an open fire produces—will produces about “That sounds fishy. What is it you do?” slowly kill you. A well-made stove can easily Scott fidgeted for a second, then mumbled, clear the air by piping the smoke out through as much carbon “I make stoves for Africa.” a chimney or burning the fuel more efficiently. dioxide as a car “You what?” Yet most appliance manufacturers see no profit “I make stoves for Africa.” in making products for people who can’t pay for them. And most aid agencies have found easier Scott was being modest. In the small-but-fanatical world ways to help the poor—by administering vaccines, for instance. of stovemakers, he is something of a celebrity. (“Peter is our Stovemakers are a chronically underfunded bunch, used to toilrock star,” another stovemaker told me.) For the past seven ing in the dusty margins of international development. Aside years, under the auspices of the German technical-aid agency from a few national programs in Asia and the Americas, their GTZ (now GIZ), Scott has designed or built some 400,000 projects have tended to be small and scattershot, funded a few stoves in 13 African countries. He has made them out of mud, thousand stoves at a time by volunteers and NGOs. “We’ve brick, sheet metal, clay, ceramic, and discarded oil drums. He been watering this rock for a long time,” Dean Still, the head has made them in villages without electricity or liquid fuel, of Aprovecho, told me. where meals are still cooked over open fires, and where burns Lately, though, the rules have changed. As global temperaare among the most common injuries and smoke is the sixthtures have risen, the smoke from Third World kitchens has leading cause of death. In the places where Scott works, a good been upgraded from a local to a universal threat. The average stove can save your life. cooking fire produces about as much carbon dioxide as a car, He and Andreatta were in Cottage Grove for Stove Camp. and a great deal more soot, or black carbon—a substance 700 A mile or two from the Axe and Fiddle, a few dozen engineers, times as warming. Black carbon absorbs sunlight. A single gram anthropologists, inventors, foreign-aid workers, and rogue acawarms the atmosphere as much as a 1500-watt space heater demics had set up tents in a meadow along a willowy bend in a running for a week. Given that cooking fires each release 1,000

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Dean Still at the Aprovecho workshop. Photo courtesy of Aprovecho Research Center

to 2,000 grams of soot in a year and that 3 billion people rely on the fires, cleaning up those emissions may be the fastest, cheapest way to cool the planet. The engineers of Stove Camp, in other words, found themselves suddenly, blinkingly, in the spotlight—like raccoons caught digging through a scrap heap. “Kill a million and a half people, and nobody gives a damn,” one government official told me. “But become part of this big climate thing, and everyone comes knocking at your door.” the bleary-eyed participants gathered around some mismatched Formica tables in the lecture hall—formerly a meat locker in a slaughterhouse. Dean Still stood before them in a baggy T-shirt and shorts, wielding a pink Magic Marker. He had the look and manner of an old hippie, with his mop of white hair and wide, walrus mustache;

On the first morning of camp,

yet he had trained a generation of stove designers and built one of the world’s premier stove-testing facilities. “This is now the definition of a good stove,” he said, turning to the whiteboard behind him and scrawling out some bullet points: 1. Reduces fuel use by more than 50 percent. 2. Reduces black carbon by more than 60 percent. 3. Reduces childhood pneumonia by more than 30 percent. 4. Affordable (US$10 retail or less). 5. Cooks love it. 6. Gets funded. No stove had ever met all six criteria at once. “So this is what we have to do this week, my dears,” he said. “Save the damned world.” He grinned. “I mean, you didn’t want an easy problem, did you?” C O N S E RVAT I O N

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Watching Water Boil

After boiling and simmering water for 30 minutes on five different stoves, researchers measured total greenhouse-gas emissions (normalized here to grams CO2 equivalent). (1) Photos by Nordica MacCarty

The global warming impact of five cooking stoves

Three-stone fire

Charcoal Jiko

Karve gasifier

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543

405

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Building a stove is simple. Building a good stove is hard. Building a good, cheap stove can drive an engineer crazy. The devices at Aprovecho looked straightforward enough. Most were about the size and shape of a stockpot, with a cylindrical combustion chamber and a cooking grate on top. You stuck some twigs into the chamber, set them on fire, and put your pot on the grate—nothing to it. Yet one stove used a pound of wood to boil a gallon of water, and another used two. Fire is a fickle, nonlinear thing and seems to be affected by every millimeter of a stove’s design—the size of the opening, the shape and material of the chamber, the thickness of the grate—each variable amplifying the next and being amplified in turn, in a complex series of feedback loops. “You’ve heard of the butterfly effect?” one engineer asked me. “Well, these stoves are full of butterflies.” Like science and religion, stove design is riven into sects and disciplines. Some engineers use only low-cost materials such as mud or brick; others dabble in thermoelectric generators and built-in fans—cleaner and more efficient, but also more expensive. Most stoves are built for combustion: they consume the wood, reducing it to ash. But a few are designed for gasification instead. These stoves heat the wood until it releases its volatile compounds, which are ignited in the air. (All that’s left of the 42

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wood afterward is its carbon skeleton, which can be burned separately as charcoal or used as a fertilizer.) Gasifiers can be remarkably clean-burning, but they’re also finicky. Because the fire burns at the top of the stove rather than rising up from a bed of coals at the bottom, its flames are easily stifled when new fuel is added, turning the stove into a smoke bomb. In the vestibule of the Aprovecho building, Still had set up a small “Museum of Stoves” on facing wall racks. Its contents came from more than a dozen countries, in an odd menagerie of shapes and sizes: an elegant clay chulha from India, a squat steel Jiko from Kenya, a painted coal burner from China (like an Easy-Bake oven). Most were better than an open fire, yet all had failed the test in some way—too flimsy or inefficient or expensive or unstable or unclean or hard to use. “We still haven’t cracked the nut,” Peter Scott said. Scott had come to Stove Camp to build a better injera stove. Injera is the spongy pancake that Ethiopians eat with almost every meal. The batter, usually made of an ancient grain called teff, is fermented until it’s bubbly and tart. It’s poured onto a ceramic griddle, or mitad, then set over an open fire or a concrete hearth. In Ethiopia, injera is often cooked by women’s cooperatives in kitchens that may have 40 or 50 smoky, inefficient stoves running simultaneously—one reason that the country

said. “If the injera doesn’t have the exact size of bubble in the batter, they’ll say it’s garbage.” Over the next few days, I’d periodically find Scott and Andreatta skulking around the Aprovecho workshops and laboratories, looking for tools or discussing metallurgy. Their preliminary tests had not been encouraging: the griddle was 200 degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the center than at the edge. When I asked Andreatta how it was going, he lifted an eyebrow. “The optimist thinks the glass is half full,” he said. “The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty. The engineer knows the real truth: that the glass is twice as large as it should be for optimum utilization of resources.” stovemakers have found, is that it can be remarkably thick-headed. Ignore it, and your shiny new stove may get turned into a flower pot. Cater to it, and you may end up with a new version of the same old problem. grams CO2 equivalent grams CO2 equivalent The campers in Cottage Grove spent half their time agonizing over cultural sensitivity. “We’re highly dominated by elderly, white, engineerhas lost more than 90 percent of The optimist thinks the glass ing types,” a stovemaker who’d worked its forests since the early 1960s. is half full. The pessimist in Uganda told me. “So you get a lot of “In the north, people will travel preposterous ideas that’ll never fly in the thinks it’s half empty. The hundreds of kilometers to get kitchen.” The other half groused about wood, then double back to bring engineer knows the real truth: “design drift.” Too many stoves start out it to market,” Scott told me. A the glass is twice as large as as marvels of efficiency, they said, and good stove, he figured, could cut are gradually modified into obsolescence. that fuel use in half. it should be for optimum Once the engineer is gone, the local For the past several months, utilization of resources. builder may widen the stove’s mouth so Scott and his kilt-wearing friend, it can burn larger sticks, only to draw in Dale Andreatta—a mechanical too much cold air. Or he’ll make the stove engineer from Columbus, Ohio, out of denser bricks, not realizing that the air pockets in the who often did stove projects pro bono—had been collaborating clay are its best insulation. The better the stove, the tighter its on a prototype. It had an efficient ceramic combustion chamber tolerances, the easier it is to ruin. shaped like a miniature fireplace, with a round griddle perched “When we first got into this, we had this utopian vision of above it like a tabletop. Scott had tried using a traditional mitad, working with local communities to build locally grown stoves,” since local cooks would much prefer it, but the ceramic wouldn’t Jacob Moss, a stove camper who works for the EPA and started heat evenly—so he’d switched to steel instead. Steel conducts its Partnership for Clean Indoor Air, told me. “We’ve moved heat much more efficiently than ceramic, and it’s often used away from that—I won’t say 180 degrees, but maybe 160. I don’t for the plancha griddles in tortilla stoves. Injera, though, is an really listen to small-stove projects anymore. When I hear Dean unforgiving dish. Its batter is thin and watery, so it can’t be say that one millimeter can make a nontrivial difference, it’s moved around like a tortilla; any hot spots in the griddle will inconceivable to me that all these local stovemakers can make burn it. “The Ethiopians are unbelievably particular,” Scott Philips Prototype Fan Stove

Rocket Stove with Skirt

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The trouble with tradition,

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On a clear day you can see forever Chicago skyline August 16, 2000 fine particulate matter <10 micrograms/m3

Typical home with open cooking fire fine particulate matter >1,000 micrograms/m3

Chicago Skyline August 29, 2000 fine particulate matter 34 micrograms/m3

Chicago photos courtesy of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Photo by Jay Graham

been scouring the earth to find. all these stoves efficiently. You have to For too long, stovemakers have “There, in this two-dollar coal work in a different way.” treated the developing world burner, was everything needed Three years ago, on a taxi ride in to make the world’s perfect southern China, Still had a glimpse of the as a charity ward instead of a rocket stove,” Still says. future. He was working as a consultant business opportunity. The stove had a telephone for the EPA at the time, passing through number printed on it, so Still the city of Kunming, when he spotted called it on his cell phone. Two months later, he was visiting some odd little stoves for sale on a street corner. He shouted the factory in eastern China where the stove was built. Within for the driver to stop and stepped outside to examine one. “It two years, the factory was producing a stove to Aprovecho’s was like Shangri-La,” he told me. The stove was meant for specifications. Sold under the name StoveTec, it isn’t much to burning coal, so its design was all wrong for wood, but it was look at: a hollow clay tube clad in green sheet metal with an sturdy, compact, and cleanly manufactured. More important, opening in front and a pot support on top. But it incorporates its combustion chamber was made of a hard yet miraculously all ten rocket-design principles with a consistency that only mass light and porous clay—a combination that stovemakers had 44

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chamber could be shipped for a fraction of the cost of a fully built stove and adapted to local designs and cooking traditions. It was mass production and appropriate technology rolled into one. “That’s the goose that laid the golden egg right there,” Bills told me. “That’s the Intel inside.” He had nothing against groups like Aprovecho, he said. They could continue to hold their Stove Camps and sell their stoves made out of clay. “But Henry Ford didn’t stop with the Model T. If we are going to make an impact in my lifetime, it has to be done at scale. And when you have a 3 billion–product opportunity, what is enough scale? One million, 2 million, 5 million? I like to dream big.” Thanks, hippies, he seemed to be saying. 1.9 million people Now, please step aside. die worldwide

production can offer. The StoveTec uses about half as much wood as an open fire, produces less than half as much smoke, and sells for eight dollars wholesale. In the U.S., where it retails for five times as much, it has been especially popular among Mormons and survivalists. Still’s stove is a kind of proof of principle. It shows that an efficient, user-friendly stove can be mass-produced at a cost that even the very poor can afford. But it also shows what’s missing. The StoveTec isn’t suited to some dishes—tortillas, chapatis, heavy porridges—and its life expectancy is less than two years. While it’s much less smoky than an open fire, it can’t quite meet Still’s six criteria.

The search for the perfect stove continues, in other words. Not long before Stove Camp, I visited an organization called Envirofit in Fort Collins, from exposure to Colorado. Envirofit’s laboratories are housed at On the last day of Stove Camp, I stumbled cookstove smoke Colorado State University in a converted power out of bed late, in search of coffee—a timber plant from the 1930s. On the morning of my train having catapulted me awake, as usual, tour, half a dozen experiments were going on four hours earlier. Aprovecho was as busy as a simultaneously. One glass case held nine stoves, science fair. The pulmonologist from the Naall furiously burning pellets fed to them by an automatic hopper. tional Institutes of Health was putting the finishing touches on Across the room, the smoke was being parsed into its chemical a rocket stove made from an oil drum. A Norwegian designer components by a rack of blinking machinery. (Wood smoke may was running emissions tests on a little tin gasifier. And another not be cyanide, as Still put it, but hydrogen cyanide turns out to camper was watching emission measurements unspool across be one of its trace elements.) On a catwalk upstairs, a programmer a laptop. “Look at that!” he shouted. “It’s flat-lining! There’s was modeling green-and-yellow flames on his computer while a almost no particulate matter!” On the whiteboard next door, biologist down the hall was subjecting live human lung cells to the words “Save the World” had long since been erased and wood smoke. “We grow them in the basement, but they’re fully replaced with mathematical equations. functional,” I was told. “They even produce phlegm.” Scott and Andreatta were in a far corner of the workshop, Envirofit’s CEO, Ron Bills, is a former executive at Segway, probing their injera stove with an infrared thermometer. Their Yamaha, and Bombardier. His new company is technically week had seen a succession of setbacks and breakthroughs. a nonprofit, yet Bills believes that, for too long, stovemakers When their first prototype, with its steel griddle, had had too have treated the developing world as a charity ward instead of many hot spots, Scott suggested that they try aluminum. It a business opportunity. “A lot of the poor—call them emerging conducted heat even better than steel and was considerably consumers—get inundated with crummy stuff,” he told me. “So cheaper. A few emails to Ethiopia had confirmed that the we’re going back to Henry Ford.” Envirofit’s first new product metal could be locally cast from recycled engine blocks. By the was essentially a rebranded version of Aprovecho’s stove, made by next morning, Andreatta had roughed out a plywood mold the same Chinese factory with a few improvements in durability for the griddle and they’d taken it to a foundry in Eugene. But and design. In July, however, the company unveiled a new model. the design proved too complicated to cast—it had radiating It was shaped like an ordinary rocket stove, though much more fins along the bottom to distribute the heat. So they’d settled stylish, and had a major innovation at its core: a durable metal on something simpler. combustion chamber. Made of an alloy developed together with The new griddle was one-third of an inch thick and flat Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, it could withstand on both sides. Andreatta had put a ceramic baffle beneath it the caustic fumes of a wood fire for more than five years, yet cost to temper and diffuse the flames, but he still had his doubts. only three dollars a unit to produce. The Envirofit combustion The melting point of aluminum is 1220 degrees Fahrenheit—

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about half as high as the peak temperature inside a rocket stove. bread for the occasion, but they couldn’t find the time—or the If they weren’t careful, the griddle would dissolve before their teff—to make a proper sourdough. So they’d settled for Aunt eyes. Andreatta switched on his LED headlamp and peered at Jemima. “This is our first test,” Scott said, holding up a pitcher the infrared thermometer. For now, the griddle was holding of pancake batter. “People of the world, cut us some slack.” steady at 433 degrees—just five degrees short of the target Then he poured it onto the hot griddle. temperature. Better yet, the center was less than 25 degrees Over the next three months, the stove would go through hotter than the outer edge. “Even Ethiopian women don’t get more rounds of fiddling and redesign. The aluminum would it in that range,” Scott said. prove too conductive for real injera and get Still strolled by, wearing a T-shirt with a swapped out for a traditional mitad. To get giant longhorn beetle on it. He had a groggy the ceramic to heat evenly, the baffles beneath grin on his face, as if he’d just woken up to a it would have to be removed. At one point, redeemed and revitalized world. Sometimes he in Addis Ababa, Scott would nearly abandon In late 2010, the saw the stove community more as Ron Bills the project, only to have an Ethiopian cook U.S. pledged $50 seemed to see it—as a gathering of undiscimake some key suggestions. Yet the result million to the U.N. plined hobbyists engaged in the equivalent of would be even better than it seemed on this building iPods out of toothpicks and aluminum sunny August morning: the world’s first sucGlobal Alliance for foil. But this wasn’t one of those days. Earlier cessful rocket injera stove—twice as efficient Clean Cookstoves that summer, a research group under Vijay and many times more durable than those it to put clean stoves Modi, a professor of mechanical engineering was meant to replace. at Columbia University, had surveyed cooks As the batter hit the griddle, it spread into in 100 million in Uganda and Tanzania who had tested a a circle that nearly reached the edge. Within homes by 2020 variety of improved stoves. In both studies, a minute, it was bubbling up evenly across the StoveTec/Envirofit design had won the its surface. “Yeah, baby!” Scott said. “If we’d highest rating, beating out the most recent tried that last Friday, it would be blackened Envirofit stove in the Tanzanian study. “My char in the middle.” He slid a spatula under people, they aren’t always very smart,” Still had told me. But the batter and tried to flip it, leaving half on the griddle but the they were inventive, resourceful, and doggedly resilient. And, rest well browned. He stared at the pancake. “We can’t really after 30 years of trial and error and endless field research, they fucking believe it,” he said. “I mean, these designs usually take understood fire very, very well. months and you’re still scratching your head.” The stove was The injera stove was the kind of project that might always almost ready, he thought. Now they just had to convince a few fall to them. “What is the market for an improved cookstove, million Ethiopians. ❧ really?” Still said. “People hope that it’s big, but we have an eightdollar stove and it’s not easy to sell. Everyone forgets that poor 1. MacCarty, N. et al. 2008. A laboratory comparison of the people are really poor.” In Africa, where less than a quarter of global warming impact of five major types of biomass cooking the population has electricity and the most efficient technolostoves. Energy and Sustainable Development doi:10.1016/S0973gies are beyond reach, an open fire can still seem hard to beat, 0826(08)60429-9. if only because it’s free. “But you know what? We’re going to Burkhard Bilger’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, do it,” Still said. “A lot of people think that if you don’t make Harper’s, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. a whole lot of money at something, it can’t be good. I think Bilger is now a staff writer at The New Yorker. He served as senior those people are wrong. If you want to do what poor people editor at Discover from 1999 to 2005, and before that he worked need, and you really don’t stop, you’re not going to be rich. Not as a writer and deputy editor for The Sciences. His book, Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish, and Other Southern unless you’re a lot smarter than I am.” Scott came to find me in the meat locker: the prototype was ready for its first pancake. He and Andreatta had hoped to cook true injera

Just before we broke camp the next morning,

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Comforts was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Adapted from: “Hearth Surgery” By Burkhard Bilger. The New Yorker, Dec. 21, 2009

The Essayi st

Of Ants and Men Reflections on Civilization By Tim Flannery and ourselves are striking for the light they shed on the nature of everyday human experiences. Some ants get forced into low-status jobs and are prevented from becoming upwardly mobile by other members of the colony. Garbage dump workers, for example, are confined to their humble and dangerous task of removing rubbish from the nest by other ants who respond aggressively to the odors that linger on the garbage workers’ bodies. Some of the most fascinating insights into ants have come from researchers who measure the amount of carbon dioxide given off by colo-

Parallels between the ants

nies. This is rather like measuring the respiration rate in humans in that it gives an indication of the amount of work the superorganism is doing. The researchers discovered (perhaps unsurprisingly) that colonies experiencing internal conflict between individuals seeking to become reproductively dominant produce more CO2 than do tranquil colonies where the social order is long established. But extraordinarily, they also discovered that about three hours after removing a queen ant, the CO2 emissions from a colony drop. “Removing the queen thus has a clear effect on worker behavior, apparently reducing their inclination to work for

the colony,” the researchers concluded. While it is dangerous to anthropomorphize, it seems that ants may have their periods of mourning just as we humans do when a great leader passes from us. However, ants clearly are fundamentally different from us. A whimsical example concerns the work of ant morticians, which recognize ant corpses purely on the basis of the presence of a product of decomposition called oleic acid. When researchers daub live ants with the acid, the undertakers promptly carry off the acid-daubed ants to the ant cemetery, despite the fact that they are alive and kicking. Indeed, unless they clean themselves very thoroughly

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these trails take on the characteristics of a superhighway. From the ant’s perspective, they are three-dimensional tunnels perhaps a centimeter wide that lead to food, a garbage dump, or home. If you wipe your finger across the trail of ants raiding your sugar bowl, you can demonstrate how important the pheromone trail is: as the ants reach

cases) millions of eggs over ten or more years. The progress of ants from this relatively primitive state to the complexity of the most finely tuned superorganisms leaves no doubt that the progress of human evolution has largely followed a path taken by the ants millions of years earlier. Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just that ant explorers as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, count their steps to determine where they are in relation to ants that lay their eggs in the home. This remarkable ability was discovered by researchers nests of foreign ants (much as cuckoos do among birds), who lengthened the legs of ants by attaching stilts to them. leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovthe spot where your finger erased their ered agriculture. These agricultural by researchers who lengthened the legs trail they will become confused and ants represent the highest level of ant of ants by attaching stilts to them. The turn back or wander. The chemicals civilization, yet it is not plants that stilt-walking ants, they observed, beused to mark such trails are extraorthey cultivate but mushrooms. These came lost on their way home to the nest dinarily potent. Just one milligram mushroom farmers are known as atat a distance proportionate to the length of the trail pheromone used by some tines, and they are found only in the of their stilts. species of attine ants to guide workers New World. Widely known as leafcutThe principal tools ants use, to leaf-cutting sites is enough to lay an ter ants, they are doubtless familiar however, in guiding their movements ant superhighway sixty times around from wildlife documentaries. and actions are potent chemical signals the earth. The attines, say Hölldobler and known as pheromones. So pervasive Ant sex seems utterly alien. Except Wilson, are “Earth’s ultimate superorand sophisticated are pheromones in ganisms,” and there is no doubt that coordinating actions among ants that it’s for short periods just before the mating season, when an ant colony is their status is due to their agricultural appropriate to think of ants as “speakeconomy, which they developed 50 to ing” to each other through pheromones. reproducing, it is composed entirely of females, and among some primitive 60 million years before humans sowed Around forty different pheromonespecies virgin births are common. All the first seed. Indeed, it is in the producing glands have been discovered the offspring of such virgin mothers, changes wrought in attine societies by in ants, and, although no single species however, are winged males that almost agriculture that the principal interest has all forty glands, enough diversity of for the student of human societies lies. signaling is present to allow for the most invariably leave the nest. If a female ant mates, however, all of her fertilThe most sophisticated of attine ant sophisticated interactions. The fire ant, ized eggs become females. In many ant species has a single queen in a colony for example, uses just a few glands to of millions of sterile workers that vary produce its eighteen pheromone signals, societies, reproduction is the prerogative of a single individual—the queen. greatly in size and shape, the largest yet this number, along with two visual being two-hundred times heavier than signals, is sufficient to allow its large and She mates soon after leaving her natal colony and stores the sperm from that the smallest. Their system of worker sophisticated colonies to function. mating (or from multiple matings) all specialization is so intricate that it Pheromone trails are laid by ants as of her life, using it to fertilize (in some recalls Swift’s ditty on fleas: they travel, and along well-used routes they are repeatedly dragged to the mortuary, despite showing every other sign of life. The means that ants use to find their way in the world are fascinating. It has recently been found that ant explorers count their steps to determine where they are in relation to home. This remarkable ability was discovered

It has recently been found

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So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite ‘em; And so proceed ad infinitum. In the case of the attines, however, the varying size classes have specific jobs to do. Some cut a piece from a leaf and drop it to the ground, while others carry the leaf fragment to a depot. From there others carry it to the nest, where smaller ants cut it into fragments. Then ants that are smaller still take these pieces and crush and mold them into pellets, which even smaller ants plant out with strands of fungus. Finally, the very smallest ants, known as minims, weed and tend the growing fungus bed. These minute and dedicated gardeners do get an occasional outing, however, for they are known to walk to where the leaves are being cut and hitch a ride back to the nest on a leaf fragment. Their purpose in doing this is to protect the carrier ants from parasitic flies that would otherwise attack them. Clearly, not only did the attines beat us to agriculture, but they exemplified the concept of the division of labor long before Adam Smith stated it. You may not believe it, but, like the sailors of old, the leafcutter ants “sing” as they work. Leaf-cutting is

every bit as strenuous for the ants as hauling an anchor is for human beings, and their singing, which takes the form of stridulation (a sound created by the rubbing together of body parts), assists the ants in their work by imparting vibrations to the mandible that is cutting the leaf, enhancing its action in a manner akin to the way an electric knife helps us cut roasts. The leafcutters also use stridulation to cry for help, for example when workers are trapped in an underground cave-in. These cries for help soon prompt other ants to rush in and begin digging until they’ve reached their trapped sisters. One can hardly help but admire the intelligence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intelligence of a very particular kind. “Nothing in the brain of a worker ant represents a blueprint of the social order,” Hölldobler and Wilson tell us, and there is no overseer or “brain caste” that carries such a master plan in its head. Instead, the ants have discovered how to create strength from weakness by pooling their individually limited capacities into a collective decision-making system that bears an uncanny resemblance to our own democratic processes. ❧ ©Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books 2009

Tim Flannery is an internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer, and conservationist. His books include The Future Eaters and The Eternal Frontier. As a field zoologist he has discovered and named more than 30 new species of mammals (including two tree kangaroos), and at 34 he was awarded the Edgeworth David Medal for Outstanding Research. His pioneering work in New Guinea prompted Sir David Attenborough to put him in the league of the world’s great explorers and the writer Redmond O’Hanlon to remark, “He’s discovered more new species than Charles Darwin.”

The Dramatic Story of Planet Earth “by a Rock Star of Modern Science.” —Jared diamond

“[Flannery] brings together planetary history, evolutionary biology, his own practical experience, and some sinister as well as encouraging thoughts for the future. His book is a triumph.” —Financial Times

“a modulated, informed voice . . . a sense of compassion for the world and legitimate reasons to be hopeful.

You get all this and more with Tim Flannery in Here on Earth.” —Barry lopez

In BooksTores now! Atlantic Monthly Press An imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com

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SOLUT IONS

Root systems of annual wheat (left) and perennial intermediate wheatgrass (right). Photo courtesy of The Land Institute

Perennial Agriculture New technologies are reinventing farming from the roots up dreams. Jerry Glover dreams of recurring plants—perennial crops that would naturally re-sprout year after year, saving energy and fertilizer while providing more ecological bang for our buck than annual crops that drop dead after just one growing season. It’s an old idea that is getting a new look, thanks to emerging plant-breeding technologies and increasing environmental concerns. And Glover—an

Some people have recurring

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agro-ecologist at the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas—is one of its most vocal champions. In the past few years, he and his colleagues have published a pile of papers spelling out the potential advantages of perennial crops and arguing for a major research push. Last year, Glover’s passion earned him a nod from the National Geographic Society, which named him one of its Emerging Explorers in search of “exciting new discoveries.”

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Although modern annual crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans produce huge yields, that bountiful harvest isn’t without headaches, Glover and John Reganold of Washington State University recently noted last year in Issues in Science & Technology. Annual crops “must be replanted each year from seed, require large amounts of expensive fertilizers and pesticides, poorly protect soil and water, and provide little habitat for wildlife,” they wrote. “Their production emits significant greenhouse gases, contributing to climate change that can in turn have adverse effects on agricultural productivity.” Perennials, in contrast, have “longer growing seasons and more extensive root systems that make them more competitive against weeds and more effective at capturing nutrients and water . . . In addition, soils are built and conserved, water is filtered, and more area is available for wildlife.” Given those advantages, why aren’t we planting Phoenix-like corn and wheat plants that regularly rise again? One reason is that, historically, plant breeders haven’t been able to overcome the steep physiological tradeoffs between perennials and annuals. Annuals that get just one shot at procreating, for example, tend to put more energy into making seed—a trait that humans have enhanced through millennia of selective breeding. In contrast, perennials typically put more energy into growing roots and leaves and less into setting seed—in part because they get many chances to reproduce. Over the past half-century, a few breeders have tried to create plants that blend the best of both worlds—perennials that produce high yields—but they typically didn’t perform as well as their annual cousins.

Thanks to powerful new gene engineering and to trait screening and selection tools, however, “plant breeders can now, for perhaps the first time in history, develop perennial versions of major grain crops,” Glover and Reganold write. Argentina, Australia, China, India, Sweden, and the U.S. have already launched research efforts into creating crops such as perennial corn and wheat, in some cases by creating hybrid populations derived from annual and perennial parents, Glover’s team noted last year in Science. Even if such varieties don’t have the highest yields, they stated, they could still be useful—because they could thrive in marginal or erosion-prone soils or require less water than annual crops. Such flexible new varieties “could make it possible to develop radically new and sustainable farming systems within the next 10 to 20 years,” Glover and Reganold argue. Such rapid advances, however, will depend on adequate funding—and so far, perennial-crop science is drawing relatively modest support worldwide. To change that in the U.S., one of Glover’s Land Institute colleagues— founder Wes Jackson—has proposed that the government fund about 100 plant breeders, geneticists, and ecologists to develop perennial grain, legume, and oilseed crops. He estimates that the project would cost about $50 million annually—a mere “blip” compared to the more than $250 billion that U.S. taxpayers are due to pump into the farm economy between 2008 and 2012. It’s an idea that budget-conscious lawmakers in Washington may not want to hear—but with advocates such as Glover, the concept of perennial crops is likely to keep coming back up, again and again.❧ —David Malakoff

Vulture Restaurants Feeding stations dish out poison-free carrion have opened in India to provide the critically endangered and ecologically important birds with food that won’t kill them. Vultures used to be a fixture in Indian skies, but now the scavengers are almost gone—due to a commonly used veterinary drug called diclofenac. An anti-inflammatory for humans and livestock, diclofenac causes renal failure in vultures that consume the carcasses of animals treated with the drug. During the past 20 years, 99.9 percent of Asia’s vultures have died off, primarily due to diclofenac poisoning. As they have disappeared, the number of diseases, rats, and wild dogs has increased, threatening human lives and safety. India banned the drug’s use in 2006, but it is still readily available and used by farmers, either out of habit or because they do not understand its ecological effects. One proven way to help vultures is to open up “restaurants” for the birds, protected sites where they can be fed diclofenac-free meat. Of the four new restaurants recently opened in India, one is in the state of Maharashtra and three are in Punjab. “We buy the carcasses—of anything from dead buffaloes, cows, and bulls to other animals—from villagers and place them on bricked platforms with boundary walls at

Four new “vulture restaurants”

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Vulture Restaurants (cont. from p.51)

these restaurants,” Punjab wildlife ranger Ramesh Chander told The Indian Express. This provides the birds with safe places to eat as well as to nest and breed. The three sites in Punjab are all near fresh water, so the birds can bathe themselves after their messy meals. The restaurant in Maharashtra officially opens later this month after a brief test late last year. It’s a pilot project whose success depends on the ability of forest officials to acquire enough diclofenac-free carcasses from local villagers. Officials are paying around $67 per carcass, about three times what local slaughterhouses pay for the same animals. They have a budget of about $1,100 for the first year, according to a report from GlobalPost. All carcasses will be tested for the toxic drug before being left out for the birds. Diclofenac is used in the U.S., but the vultures in North America (called “New World vultures”) are not very closely related to the “Old World vultures” in Asia and may not share the same weakness as their Asian counterparts. Vulture restaurants have previously been established in Pakistan, Nepal, and South Africa where they have been shown to at least slow down the death rate of local vultures. With the birds so close to the brink of extinction in these countries, that might be good enough for now. ❧ —John Platt Reproduced with permission. Copyright ©2011 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

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A Clean Green 2-for-1 Algae can treat your wastewater and then fill up your tank According to researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, just about anything short of mixing a cocktail. They can clean your wastewater, fuel up your car, and then help grow a fish for your dinner. Associate professor of biological sciences Jeff Lodge says his team of researchers initially had more modest aspirations: they were interested in producing biodiesel from algae and were looking for a cheaper source of nutrients to grow the algae. Other researchers had previously grown algae in wastewater from dairy farms, and municipal wastewater seemed worth a try as well. “And we found out our algae just love it,” Lodge says of the wastewater from two nearby municipal treatment plants. “Then it just kind of struck us, well, what are they doing to the wastewater?” The team measured the nutrient levels in the water and found that after about three days of growth, the algae remove virtually all of the undesirable compounds such as ammonia, phosphate, and nitrate. In addition, they deplete carbon dioxide from the water, which raises the pH—and kills off pathogens. To carry out the treatment, the researchers simply add algae to a tank or pond of wastewater and wait. The approach probably wouldn’t be suitable for large, urban plants that must rapidly process high volumes of water. But it could be helpful in rural communities, especially where rapid exurban growth is straining the capacity of existing plants. And since it requires minimal infrastructure, it could also be used in poorer countries where wastewater treatment is currently lacking. After a few days, the team pumps the water out of the tanks, dries out the algae, and then processes the algae to remove the lipids—the raw material for biodiesel. The rest of the algae biomass can be used in aquaculture, burned in a biodigester to produce methane, or converted into ethanol. None of these ideas is entirely new, but the team has combined a number of existing green technologies in a tidy, cradle-to-cradle system. “We’re using the whole algae for everything and there’s no waste at all,” Lodge says. ❧ —Sarah DeWeerdt

Just what are algae capable of?

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Fast CO2 Relief

Limestone scrubbers transform powerplant emissions into ocean antacid with carbon emissions the way nature intended— except a whole lot faster. Increased carbon dioxide in the air also increases carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean. There it forms carbonic acid, causing ocean acidification. Eventually, this acid is neutralized as it comes into contact with calcium carbonate rocks and sediments. This reaction yields calcium bicarbonate, a form in which carbon can remain sequestered for the long term. “In the long scheme of things, any amount of carbon dioxide that we emit is going to be absorbed” through this or a similar process involving silicate rock, says Rau, a scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. But that takes tens of thousands of years, and we humans—let alone the rest of the biosphere—don’t have that long to wait. Rau wants to speed up the process by bubbling carbon dioxide–rich gas emitted by power plants through a device called a limestone scrubber, essentially carbonate rock submerged in water. “The idea is simply to do this weathering, in effect, right in the smokestack of the power plant,” he says. In a laboratory-scale experiment, this method removed 97 percent of the carbon dioxide from a simulated

Greg Rau wants to deal

power-plant smokestack, Rau reported earlier this year in Environmental Science and Technology. (1) Some power plants already have limestone scrubbers installed in their smokestacks, to remove sulfur dioxide. That process generates carbon dioxide, but Rau says the same apparatus could also be used to sequester it. Even better, when the resulting bicarbonate-enriched water is pumped back into the sea, it could benefit the creatures that dwell there. Saltwateraquarium enthusiasts use a similar process to increase calcium bicarbonate and alkalinity in their tanks, helping their corals and shellfish to form shells. In fact, the plastic tubes Rau used in his experiment to replicate a smokestack were bought from an aquariumsupply house. “Instead of reinventing the wheel, I went on the Web,” he quips. The process is probably most suited to combating emissions at coastal power plants, since transporting limestone and seawater long distances wouldn’t be cost-effective. Rau is currently looking for funding and partners for a pilot project using the process in a working power plant. ❧ —Sarah DeWeerdt 1. Rau, G.H. 2011. CO2 mitigation via capture and chemical conversion in seawater. Environmental Science and Technology doi:10.1021/ es102671x.

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Crossing to Safety Innovative wildlife bridges designed to protect travelers on four wheels and four legs Every year, more than 1 million collisions between vehicles and large mammals occur on U.S. roadways. The result is tens of thousands of human injuries and billions of dollars in property damage—not to mention the deadly toll on wildlife, including many rare species. Current attempts to keep animals off the road consist of ineffective tunnels or heavy structures costing up to $15 million and resembling vehicle overpasses. The ARC International Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Competition set out to change this with a contest to spur innovation in the spirit of the X PRIZE. Offering a $40,000 award, it challenged landscape architects, engineers, and ecologists to devise

an ecologically more sensitive, costeffective, and beautiful wildlife bridge. Of the 36 teams from nine countries that entered, a group of engineers and landscape architects from HNTB and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in New York took the prize. The football field–sized crossing they designed for West Vail Pass in Colorado condenses multiple habitat types (from open meadow to subalpine forest) into “lanes” that attract different species. By extending vegetation from the surrounding areas onto the structure, the winning design blends seamlessly into the environment. Further, HNTB and MVVA’s plan calls for lightweight modular components that can be quickly adapted to,

and constructed in, different settings. The structure can be built for approximately half the cost per square foot of existing bridges, according to the Western Transportation Institute, a competition sponsor. ARC’s vision of distinctive wildlife crossings shone through in the contest finalists’ designs. The entry from Janet Rosenberg + Associates (Toronto), for example, envisioned a red structure; target species perceive it as gray, while the bold color draws the public’s attention. Some went beyond merely reconnecting fragmented habitat, proposing public viewing platforms that reconnect people with wildlife as the animals safely roam. ❧ — Lindsey Doermann

Courtesy of HNTB and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates

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Cleared for Takeoff Airport wetland restoration could reduce bird-plane collisions When birds strike a plane, they can shatter the windshield, damage the engine, and force an emergency landing. So the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was understandably concerned when planners at a California airport proposed restoring wildlife-friendly tidal wetlands near runways. But a new study suggests the project could actually reduce the number of bird strikes, making the airport both greener and safer. The Santa Barbara Airport encompasses about 174 hectares of Goleta Slough, a swath of wetlands housing coyotes, rabbits, birds, snails, and fish. The slough used to be a bay but accumulated sediment after years of cattlegrazing and drought followed by intense rains. As part of an airport expansion during World War II, the U.S. Army

Photo by Doug Sonerholm

Corps of Engineers filled in much of the slough and built berms to keep out the tides. The idea of restoring tidal flows to part of the slough was greeted with suspicion by FAA officials, who reasoned that “if it’s higher-quality habitat, it should attract more birds,” says Andrew Bermond, a planner at the airport. “And more birds equals more strikes.” To find out whether these fears were justified, the airport commissioned a study to determine the effects of restoring a one-hectare patch. A team divided a basin into two parts, opening one part to tides and leaving the other closed. Biologists from URS Corporation observed birds in each basin over three years, as well as birds flying over the airfield.

By the third year, a reassuring pattern had emerged. Large birds such as geese and ducks, which are more likely to damage planes, were ten times more abundant in the nontidal basin. In contrast, the tidal basin attracted small birds such as common yellowthroats and Belding’s savannah sparrows. The team also found that dangerous bird flights over the airfield were less frequent to and from the tidal basin than to and from the nontidal basin. While the findings may not apply to all airports on wetlands, the demonstration provides “a neat case study,” says Bermond. He expects airfield crossings to decline further as native plants in the tidal basin grow, discouraging crash-prone birds called killdeer from nesting. ❧ —Roberta Kwok

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Conservation Magazine Announces the Winners of the International Conservation Mapping Competition

Grand Prize

Andrew DiMatteo Duke University, US Worldwide Green Turtle Nesting Sites 2011

Detail of the Grand Prize Map.

Most Innovative Brad Stratton The Nature Conservancy, US The Land Protection History of The Nature Conservancy in New York

Other winning entries came from the following:

Greatest Social Impact Christopher Walter Cascade Land Conservancy, US Urban Forest Restoration Sites

Logan Berner Best Map by a Volunteer, Honorable Mention Social Impact

Best Use of Science (shared first place) Karin Bodtker Living Oceans Society, Canada Sea Lice on Juvenile Pink and Chum Salmon in BC

Agnese Mancini Boomerang for Earth Conservation, Honorable Mention Science

Adam P. Dixon World Wildlife Fund, US Planning for Conservation in the Ruvuma Landscape

Henry Saul Juarez Soto International Potato Center, 3rd Prize Traditional

Best Traditional Cartography Larry Orman GreenInfo Network, US What Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve Accomplished in Martis Valley

Will Allen The Conservation Fund, 2nd Prize Social Impact Lori Arnold Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment, 2nd Prize Traditional Lucia Morales Barquero University of Bangor, 3rd Prize Social Impact Craig Beech Peace Parks Foundation, Honorable Mention Science Dick Cameron The Nature Conservancy, 2nd Prize Science Mark Endries US Fish & Wildlife Service, Honorable Mention Innovation Brian Kazmerik Ducks Unlimited Canada, 3rd Prize Web Melissa McVee Coral Cay Conservation, Honorable Mention Traditional Andriamandimbisoa Razafimpahanana REBIOMA, Honorable Mention Science Michael Scisco New Mexico Land Conservancy, Honorable Mention Traditional Lori Scott NatureServe, 2nd Prize Web Maegan Leslie Torres GreenInfo Network, 3rd Prize Science Brooke Wikgren New England Aquarium, 3rd Prize Innovation Hans Edwin Winzeler Purdue University, 2nd Prize Innovation

To request your free copy of the Conservation GIS Map Book, please contact bookrequest@esri.com after July 15, 2011. Additional details can also be found at esri.com/scgmaps.

Sponsored by Esri and the Society for Conservation GIS Best Interactive Web Map Andrew Cottam UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre, UK African Pygmy-goose $5,000 was awarded as the grand prize and each of the five first-place categories was awarded $1,000. Copyright ÂŠ 2011 Esri. All rights reserved.

BOOKMarks

Coming to Terms with the Gulf Oil Blowout Book Review By Eric Wagner Little more than a year has passed since the BP drill rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico about 60 miles off the Louisiana coast. Gone are the dashed-off Tweets, the frothing blogs, and the articles hammered out on deadline—and in has come a new crop of books on the disaster. Writing a book allows an author a bit more time to let ideas marinate, to consider a range of sources, and to make connections that might have been overlooked. As a result, the author can offer new insights or, in notable cases, even wisdom.

One such author is Carl Safina. In the immediate aftermath of the blowout, Safina spent several weeks in and around the Gulf, boating through mired marshes and driving across parishes, talking with stunned residents—all the while nursing his own raw feelings. He divides the resulting account, A Sea in Flames, into three sections: “Disaster Chain,” “A Season of Anguish,” and “Aftermath.” Think of these as his stages of grief. In the beginning, he is irate. Enraged. Confused. A writer noted for his lyricism, he is shocked into a trun-

Artwork (above) “Vulning” by David Sullivan www.swampmonster.org

A Sea in Flames The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout By Carl Safina Crown, 2011

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cated, almost shotgun syntax. And as he gropes for ways to explain the details of the spill, the metaphors fall thick and fast. Deep-sea oil drilling is likened at one point to a difficult pregnancy, the mother-to-be about to give birth to a carbonated beverage of oil and natural gas, the extraction of which is made all the riskier when BP decides to pull its star quarterback out of the playoff game in the fourth quarter—right as they get a flat tire. This sense of discombobulation is precisely Safina’s point: everyone was fumbling in the dark. Safina does not bother to go back and temper his early responses, several of which turn out to be unfair—if not outright wrong. And when it becomes clear that the predicted apocalypse might not actually come to pass—that the Gulf is in fact quite resilient if left to care for itself— his initial rage and anguish cool. One sad irony, Safina points out, is that thanks to fisheries closures, some fish populations actually increased in the wake of the spill. Safina brings the reader with him as his feelings evolve. The most telling change in the tenor of the narrative happens when Safina sits down with NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco and U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who coordinated the federal response to the spill. Neither has fared well in the book up to this point, especially Allen. From the outset, Safina referred to him derisively as the “Thadmiral” and lost no opportunity to heap scorn on the mealy pronouncements and perceived kowtowing to BP. But given a chance to put his sound bites into context, Allen is no longer a caricature. The delays that Safina first saw as bureau-

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cratic incompetence were instead, Allen explains, prudent caution. Capping a gushing well at such a depth was an unprecedented exercise. Slowness may have been excruciating; failure would have been catastrophic. In the end, Safina tries to offer some consolation along with a dose of hope. But it is hope with an odd, twisted edge. The Gulf was “hardly a pristine Eden,” Safina writes. Whatever harm the BP/Transocean/Halliburton oil may have done, it is doubled and tripled every year as pollutants stream unabated out of the Mississippi, as hundreds of square miles of marsh are lost, and as a summer dead zone grows bigger and bigger. Still, marine and estuarine life has somehow managed to persist in the face of continuous insult, which leads to another point. To mock and blame Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, is to skip over the real culprit: those of us addicted to fossil fuels. “The real catastrophe,” Safina writes, “is the oil we don’t spill.” Until we wean ourselves of the stuff, we might have to get used to images such as those from the Gulf. Barely a year later, Shell Oil is lobbying to drill exploratory wells in the Arctic, and company representatives are assuring federal regulators that they are prepared to respond to the highly unlikely event of a blowout. The Deepwater Horizon blowout was hardly the first oil spill, and given the complexity and risk involved, it most certainly won’t be the last. History may repeat itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. But what about the third time, or the fourth time, or the fifth? Or the times after that? What about then? Those insights will be harder to come by. ❧

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Let Them Eat Shrimp By Kennedy Warne Island Press, 2011

Mangroves and shrimp. The two are intertwined, ecologically and economically,” writes New Zealand author Kennedy Warne. “They are like a pair of orbiting stars, though one shines at the expense of the other.” Since 1980, 20 percent of the world’s mangrove ecosystems have been lost. At that pace, they’ll be gone within 100 years. One of the primary culprits for that devastation is shrimp aquaculture. As Warne delves into the story, he finds that mangroves have some unlikely champions. For instance, since 2005 the National Football League has planted thousands of mangroves and other trees before every Super Bowl to offset the event’s carbon emissions. Mangroves may be smelly and muddy, they may constitute less than half a percent of the world’s forests; but they can store up to four times as much carbon as other tropical forest, and they serve as the foundation of a rich and varied ecosystem. “It is a home,” he writes, “worth protecting.” ❧

“Shrimp and mangroves.

Click Here The Good Guide www.goodguide.com Learn about the health, environmental, and social performance of everyday products and the companies that make them. Get the easy-to-decipher sciencebased ratings online, or download the app for iPhone or Android. Endangered Species Ringtones www.rareearthtones.org

Marsupial lion skeleton. Australia’s largest-ever mammalian predator. Photo By Karora

Once & Future Giants By Sharon Levy Oxford University Press, 2011

The beasts of the Late Pleistocene put the “charismatic” in “charismatic megafauna.” Mammoths, kangaroos, sabertooth cats, ground sloths, even beavers—everything was enormous. Then, in the blink of a geologic eye, they were gone. What happened to them? And what if we could bring them back? These are the questions that drive Once & Future Giants by Sharon Levy. To consider the vanished menageries, she must navigate a variety of sources and locales. But before anyone gets too excited about Pleistocene rewilding, she cautions, we need to settle our relationships with the apex predators we still have. Consider efforts to reintroduce the gray wolf to parts of its former range. The science may be clear—top-down predator controls provide ecological balance—but the politics is not. For the foreseeable future, Levy writes, “the megafauna is us.” ❧

Download cell-phone ringtones with the call of an endangered species, or display its likeness on your wallpaper—keep a piece of the wild in hand when navigating a concrete jungle. Available free from the Center for Biological Diversity. Nitrogen Fooprint Calculator www.n-print.org Calculate your nitrogen footprint with this interactive tool. See how food and transportation choices affect your footprint, and learn how small changes in everyday life can lessen your impact. Project Noah www.projectnoah.org Document local wildlife sightings in this online ecological database. Earn patches for frequent contributions or join directed missions such as mushroom mapping or emerald ash borer–monitoring.

Let us know about your favorite online conservation tools or apps. Email us at conservationmagazine@gmail.com with “click here” in the subject line.

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Demon Fish

“obsessed with sharks.” But in her day job as a reporter for the Washington Post, she has spent a lot of time swimming among the figurative beasts of Capitol Hill. In her latest book, she decides to learn more about the literal ones. In a sprightly narrative, Eilperin crisscrosses the globe to investigate the full range of human interactions with, and reactions to, sharks. She finds that not everyone is in as much of a rush to get out of the water as the good people of Amity were. In New Guinea, she goes to sea with a shark-caller who believes he can summon them from the deep with chants. To him, sharks are gods. And in Cape Town, surfers are generally equable in the presence of sharks, even as they are occasionally attacked. Interspersed among these spectacular stories are more sobering details about shark conservation and research. “When it comes to sharks,” writes Eilperin, “the golden age of scientific discovery has just begun.” There is a lot more to a shark than just the jaws. ❧

Juliet Eilperin didn’t grow up

By Juliet Eilperin Pantheon Books, 2011

Here on Earth

to tackle not just the earth as a subject, but also the human species. Let it be said, then, that Tim Flannery is audacious. In his latest book, Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, he starts at the moment of creation and proceeds from there. The view from such heights can be a bit dizzying, but Flannery nimbly guides the reader through treatises on everything from the danger of heavy metals to the lost promise of nuclear power to the Arab explorer Ibn Fadlan. What links all of these side trips together is Flannery’s concern for the trajectory of human evolution and our ultimate capacity to act out of an enlightened self-interest: “If our civilization does survive this century,” he writes, “I believe its future prospects will be profoundly enhanced, for this is the moment of our greatest peril.” He finds solace in the idea of the human superorganism, an extension of the Gaia hypothesis. Competition may be evolution’s motive force, but “the cooperative world is its legacy.” ❧

By Tim Flannery Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011

Short BOOK REVIEWS BY ERIC WAGNER

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Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Institution

It takes an audacious biographer

Art & Science

Conservation Crochet The “Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef,”

a unique exhibition and thoughtprovoking fusion of science, conservation, mathematics, and art, was recently on display in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. By engaging local communities to crochet coral reefs, the exhibition celebrates the reefs’ beautiful diversity and speaks to the urgent need to protect these vanishing ecosystems. Shocked by the accelerating demise of corals around the globe, reef curators Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring took action, deciding to tell the story of coral reefs— their beauty and the threats they face— through crochet. As the name suggests, the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef also incorporates the world of mathematics. Throughout the ocean, the diverse forms of kelps, corals, and sea slugs are variations of a geometric form known as hyperbolic space. Mathematicians had long believed this type of geometry was impossible to represent physically, even though it has existed within nature for hundreds of millions of years. Finally, in 1997, Cornell University’s Daina Taimina realized that models of hyperbolic space could be created using crochet—a discovery that astonished the mathematical world. The Wertheims, inspired by the Great Barrier Reef in their native Queensland, Australia, harnessed this

discovery and started crocheting a coral reef. For the past five years, they have been working with communities all over the world to build a global network of crochet reefs that has become an ongoing collective experiment. Since the project began, satellite reefs have been created in Chicago; New York; London; Dublin; Sydney; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Riga, Latvia. The participation of such a vast variety of communities has created a collection of crocheted corals as distinctive and diverse as their living counterparts. “Woolliness and wetness aren’t exactly two concepts that you would initially pair together, but now this project reaches across five continents and has roots that extend into the fields of mathematics, marine biology, feminine handicraft, and environmental activism,” said co-creator Margaret Wertheim. “It’s taken on a viral dimension of its own, and in a beautiful way the development of the project parallels the evolution of life on Earth.” Volunteers crocheted enthusiastically throughout the summer of 2010 to produce the 10-by-16-foot reef that is displayed together with the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef exhibition. ❧ From: The Smithsonian Institution website. Visit http://crochetcoralreef.org for more on the exhibit and satellite reefs.

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POS T S CAGAIN RIP T T HINK

Battle of the Book Is it “greener” to read an e-book or an old-fashioned paper book? By Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris Apple’s new iPad and Amazon’s Kindle touting their vast libraries of digital titles, some bookworms are bound to wonder if tomes-on-paper will one day become quaint relics. But the question also arises, which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book? To find the answer, we turned to life-cycle assessment, which evaluates the ecological impact of any product, at every stage of its existence, from the first tree cut down for paper to the day that hardcover decomposes in the dump. With this method, we can determine the greenest way to read.(1) With e-readers like

Step 1: Materials

One e-reader requires the extraction of 33 pounds of minerals. That includes trace amounts of exotic metals like columbite-tantalite, often mined in war-torn regions of Africa. But it’s mostly sand and gravel to build landfills; they hold all the waste from manufacturing wafer boards for the integrated circuits. An e-reader also requires 79 gallons of water to produce its batteries and printed wiring boards, and in refining metals like the gold used in trace quantities in the circuits. Illustration Javier Candeira

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A book made with recycled paper consumes about two-thirds of a pound of minerals. (Here again, the greatest mineral use is actually gravel, mainly for the roads used to transport materials throughout the supply chain.) And it requires just 2 gallons of water to make the pulp slurry that is then pressed and heat-dried to make paper.

as making the book in the first place. Driving five miles to the bookstore and back causes about 10 times the pollution and resource depletion as producing it. You’d need to drive to a store 300 miles away to create the equivalent in toxic impacts on health of making one e-reader—but you might do that and more if you drive to the mall every time you buy a new book.

Step 2: Manufacture

Fossil Fuels: The e-reader’s manufacture, along a vast supply chain of consumer electronics, is relatively energy-hungry, using 100 kilowatt-hours of fossil fuels and resulting in 66 pounds of carbon dioxide. For a single book, which, recycled or not, requires energy to form and dry the sheets, it’s just two kilowatt-hours, and 100 times fewer greenhouse gases.

Step 4: Reading

If you like to read a book in bed at night for an hour or two, the light bulb will use more energy than it takes to charge an e-reader, which has a highly energy-efficient screen. But if you read in daylight, the advantage tips to a book.

or sourced from well-managed forests and that was produced at pulp mills that don’t use poisons like chlorine to whiten it. The electronics industry, too, is trying to reduce the use of toxic chemicals and to improve working conditions and worker safety throughout its far-flung supply chains. So, how many volumes do you need to read on your e-reader to break even? With respect to fossil fuels, water use, and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between. All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library. ❧

Step 5: Disposal

Health: The unit for comparison here is a “disability adjusted life-year,” the length of time someone loses to disability because of exposure to, say, toxic material released into the air, water, and soil, anywhere along the line. For both the book and the e-reader, the main health impacts come from particulate emissions like nitrogen and sulfur oxides, which travel deep into our lungs, worsening asthma and chronic coughing and increasing the risk of premature death. The adverse health impacts from making one e-reader are estimated to be 70 times greater than those from making a single book.

If your e-reader ends up being “recycled” illegally so that workers, including children, in developing countries dismantle it by hand, they will be exposed to a range of toxic substances. If it goes through state-of-the-art procedures—for example, high-temperature incineration with the best emissions controls and metals recovery—the “disability adjusted life-year” count will be far less for workers. If your book ends up in a landfill, its decomposition generates double the global warming emissions and toxic impacts on local water systems as its manufacture.

Step 3: Transportation

Some of this math is improving. More and more books are being printed with soy-based inks, rather than petroleumbased ones, on paper that is recycled

If you order a book online and have it shipped 500 miles by air, that creates roughly the same pollution and waste

Some technical details—for instance, how those special screens are manufactured—are not publicly available, and these products vary in their exact composition. We’ve based our estimates on a composite derived from available information. It’s also important to keep in mind that we’re focusing on the e-reader aspect of these devices, not any other functions they may offer.

(1) A note about e-readers.

From: The New York Times, April 4, 2010. ©2011 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this content without express written permission is prohibited.

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L i ght e n U p

Cartoons by Pete Mueller www.psmueller.com 64

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