Author Archives: Charles Krebs

10 Limitations on Progress in Ecology

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Ecological science moves along slowly in its mission to understand how the Earth’s populations, communities, and ecosystems operate within the constraints of human impacts on the Biosphere. The question of the day is can we identify the factors currently limiting the rate of progress so that at least in principle we could speed up progress in our science. Here is my list.

1. A shortage of ecologists or more properly jobs for ecologists. In particular a scarcity of government agencies employing ecologists in secure jobs to work on stable, long-term environmental projects that are beyond the scope of university scientists. Many young ecologists of high quality are stalled in positions that are beneath their talents. We are in a situation similar to having highly trained medical doctors being used as hospital janitors. This is a massive failure on many fronts, regional and national, political and scientific. Many governments around the world think economists and lawyers are key while environmental scientists are superfluous.

2. The lack of proper funding from both government, private companies and private individuals. This is typified by the continual downsizing of government scientists working on natural resource problems – fisheries, wildlife, park management – and continuing political interference with scientific objectives. Private companies too often rely on taxpayers to fund their environmental investigations and do not view them as a part of their business model. Private citizens give money to medical research rather than to environmental programs largely based on the belief that of all the life on Earth, only the human component is important.

3. The deficiency of taxonomic expertise to define clearly the species that inhabit the Earth. The estimates vary but perhaps only 10% of the total biota can be given a Latin name and morphological description, leaving out for the moment all the bacteria and viruses. Equate this with having a batch of various shaped coins in your pocket with only a few of them giving the denomination. This problem has been identified for years with little action.

4. Given adequate taxonomy, the lack of adequate natural history data on most of the biota. This activity, so critical for all ecological science, was called “stamp collecting” and thus condemned to the lowest point on the scientific totem pole. The consequence of this is that we try to understand the Earth with data only on butterflies, some birds, and some large mammals.

5. A failure of ecologists to map out the critical questions facing natural populations, communities, and ecosystems on Earth. The roadmap of ecology is littered with wrecks of ideas once pushed to explain nearly everything, and we need a more nuanced map of what is a critical issue. There are a considerable number of fractures within the ecological discipline about what needs to be done, if people and money were available. This fosters the culture of I win = you lose in competition for money and jobs.

6. The confusion of mathematical models with reality. There is a strong disconnect between models and data that persists. Models rapidly proliferate, data are slow to accumulate, so we try to paper over the fragility of our understanding with mathematical wizardry, trying to be like physicists. Connecting model predictions with empirical data studies would go a long way to righting this problem but it is a tall order in a world that confuses the number of publications and h scores with important contributions.

7 The fact that too many ecologists do not adopt the scientific method of investigation, to carry out experiments with multiple alternative hypotheses with clear predictions. Arguments continue endlessly based on words (‘concepts’) that are so vaguely defined as to be meaningless operationally. If you need an example, think ‘stability’ or ‘diversity’. These vague words are then herded into pseudo-hypotheses to doubly confound the confusion over what the critical questions in ecology really are.

8. The need for ecologists to work in stable groups. Serious ecological problems demand expertise in many scientific specialities, and we need better mechanisms to foster and maintain such groups. The assessment of scientists on the basis of individual work is long out of date, the Nobel Prize is an anachronism, and we need strong groups concentrating on important issues for long term studies. At the moment many groups exist to do meta-analyses and fewer to do science.

9. Placing the technological horse in front of the ecological cart. Ecology like many sciences is often led by technology rather than by questions. The current DNA bandwagon is one example, but we should not get so confused to think that that most important questions in ecology are those that use the most technology. Jumping from one technological bandwagon to the next is a good recipe for minimizing progress.

10. The fractionation of ecology into subdisciplines and the assumption that the only important research work has been done since 2000. Aquatic ecologists do not talk to terrestrial ecologists, microbial ecologists live in their own special world, and avian ecologists do not talk to insect ecologists. The result is that the existing literature is too often wasted by investigators who have no idea that question XX has already been answered either in another subdiscipline or in existing literature from 50 years ago.

Not all of these limitations apply to every ecologist, and at best I would view them as a set of guideposts that need to be considered as we move further into the 21st century.

Krebs, C. J. 2006. Ecology after 100 years: progress and pseudo-progress. New Zealand Journal of Ecology 30:3-11.

Majer, J. D. 2012. Critical times: How has ecological research responded over the past 35 years? Austral Ecology 37:149-152.

Sutherland, W. J. et al. 2010. A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25:1-7.

On Biodiversity Science

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Biodiversity science features heavily in articles in Science and Nature and it is a good idea to look at the accumulated wisdom to date. We can begin with the Cardinale et al. (2012) paper in Nature (“Biodiversity Loss and Its Impact on Humanity”) which gives us six consensus statements:

Consensus statement one: There is now unequivocal evidence that biodiversity loss reduces the efficiency by which ecological communities capture biologically essential resources, produce biomass, decompose and recycle biologically essential nutrients.

Consensus statement two: There is mounting evidence that biodiversity increases the stability of ecosystem functions through time.

Consensus statement three: The impact of biodiversity on any single ecosystem process is nonlinear and saturating, such that change accelerates as biodiversity loss increases.

Consensus statement four: Diverse communities are more productive because they contain key species that have a large influence on productivity, and differences in functional traits among organisms increase total resource capture.

Consensus statement five: Loss of diversity across trophic levels has the potential to influence ecosystem functions even more strongly than diversity loss within trophic levels.

Consensus statement six: Functional traits of organisms have large impacts on the magnitude of ecosystem functions, which give rise to a wide range of plausible impacts of extinction on ecosystem function.

followed by four emerging trends:

Emerging trend one: The impacts of diversity loss on ecological processes might be sufficiently large to rival the impacts of many other global drivers of environmental change.

Emerging trend two: Diversity effects grow stronger with time, and may increase at larger spatial scales.

Emerging trend three: Maintaining multiple ecosystem processes at multiple places and time requires higher levels of biodiversity than does a single process at a single place and time.

Emerging trend four: The ecological consequences of biodiversity loss can be predicted from evolutionary history.

I encourage you to read this paper and consider how well it describes a blueprint of past and future research on biodiversity. Here I offer a few thoughts on why I think it consists of a set of worrisome generalizations.

First of all every biologist would like to think that biodiversity is important. But we should consider what the equivalent statement might be for chemistry – chemicals are important. Surely this is both true and of little use, since we can never define scientifically the word ‘important’. Biodiversity is so broadly defined as to be a rather poor noun to use in scientific statements unless it is strictly defined. But you can take any kind of biodiversity measure – species number (richness) for example, and you might find that species X is a terrible weed that is not desirable for farmers but is beautiful in your home garden or useful food for butterflies. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes are not particularly desirable members of the local biological community. But let us all agree that biodiversity is important because it is an ethical belief but not a scientific statement as it stands.

If we look at the consensus statements as scientific hypotheses (I note the word ‘hypothesis’ appears only once in this article), we can ask how you could test them and what the alternative hypotheses would be. For consensus 1 for example, what would be the result of finding a community that increased productivity if certain species were lost from the system? This finding would not be viewed as contrary to consensus one because it would be said that the increased productivity was not done efficiently. It is probably best to assume these statements are not hypotheses to be tested.

As we work our way through the consensus statements, we find they are filled with weasel words that are useful in eliminating contrary evidence. Thus for consensus statement 2 we can stop at biodiversity (many definitions) and then stability (perhaps 70 different metrics) and finally ecosystem functions (of which there are many) and time (weeks?, years?, centuries?). The consensus which sounds so solid is empirically rather empty as any guide to the world.

I am left with many questions. Could not all of these consensus statements have been written 30 years ago? All of them have contrary instances that could be given from the literature, if the terms were rigorously defined. But this many not matter. Let us concede that these generalizations may be right 90% of the time. The bottom line is that we should conserve biodiversity. But this is what everybody has been saying for decades so we are no farther ahead.

The singular problem that concerns me the most is that these kinds of consensus statements are of little use to the land manager or the wildlife manager or the politician who has to make applied decisions at the local level. If we wish to arrest the decline of a particular songbird, what is the utility of these kind of statements? I have concluded that these kinds of papers about biodiversity are a kind of pablum for conservation ecologists to show that Nature and Science really are concerned about conservation issues while at the same time they devote 97% of their issues to the technological fixes that will ‘solve’ all the problems conservation biologists continually point out. As such these kinds of papers are useful statements for political ecology.

The four emerging trends are themselves worthy of another blog. They are vague ideas expressing beliefs that cannot be considered scientific hypotheses without rigorous definitions, and in their present form are almost quasi-religious statements of belief. How they might ever be tested is unclear. I particularly enjoyed the fourth emerging trend since I think that one of the evolutionary laws is that evolutionary history is exactly that – history – not a predictive map of future changes. There is a certain irony of our time that some of the world’s most prestigious evolutionary biologists are anti-religion while biodiversity scientists are trying hard to set up a new religion of biodiversity beliefs.

Cardinale, B. J.et al. 2012. Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity. Nature 486:59-67.

 

On Charles Elton

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Charles Elton was the Father of Animal Ecology and many young ecologists do not learn very much about him. He founded the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford in 1932, and much of the history of his research group is captured in Peter Crowcroft’s book “Elton’s Ecologists” (1991). I was fortunate to spend the winter of 1960-61 at the Bureau while I was completing my Ph.D. at UBC with Dennis Chitty. It was Dennis’ last year at the Bureau, having gone there in 1935 when he had just finished his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto.

The Bureau of Animal Population or BAP, as all connected with it came to call it, had been born in January 1932 and by 1934 Oxford University had guaranteed funds for its core costs for five years with 3-4 scientific staff and a very few assistants. Survival as a unit depended on working on numerous applied projects, and the species receiving attention included Canadian snowshoe hares, Canadian lynx, muskrat, beaver, lemmings, European rabbits, squirrels, voles and the wood mouse. The Bureau was the home of the newly created Journal of Animal Ecology, of which Charles Elton was the first editor.

Charles Elton was a proper English gentleman, a gentle soul who had a coterie of first class ecologists in the BAP. The BAP was very nearly the world centre for ecology from the 1930s to the 1960s when ecology began its great growth around the world, so everyone who was interested in population ecology considered it equivalent to Mecca for science. Every day there was tea in the BAP in 1960, when we all took time to interact with the other postdocs and graduate students in the BAP, a total group of perhaps 15-20. Once a week Mr. Elton (as he never did a Ph.D.) would preside over tea around a table in the BAP Library and give out any news of the week to the staff and students. On most days he wore a tie and a sport coat in the best English tradition, and signed his letters as “Elton”. In 1960 he was compiling a species list for Wytham Woods, a 390 ha forest reserve belonging to the University. He felt strongly that one had to know all the species in a community before you could understand how it operated. So one could see him day after day pinning insects in trays. He was always very serious, and the only joke I ever heard him tell was about how he could never understand Americans. He had gone to the New World after the War, perhaps 1947 or 1948 and was visiting a famous American scientist. They had to get up at 0700 in the morning and rush to work without a proper English breakfast, and so at 0800 they arrived in the professor’s office, and then Elton said he was told ‘now you can relax’. It was not the proper English way to start the day and he could never understand the rush-rush style of the New World.

Charles Elton founded the Journal of Animal Ecology in 1931, now one of our leading journals. In the early days he did much of the reviewing and accepting of papers for the Journal. He had an amusing tale of the classic papers of A.J. Nicholson (1933) on the balance of animal populations. He received this very long paper and he could not find anyone who would agree to review it so he did it himself. He confessed to us one day at tea that he found he could not understand anything in the paper, so he decided it must be very brilliant so he published it immediately. Alas those days are gone.

There were of course no electronic machines even in 1960 and Elton did all his writing by pen and paper. He had just finished the now famous book “The Ecology of Invasions” and his secretary who typed all his work pointed out to me that he never changed a word from what he first wrote. No need for revisions and revisions. He was of course like a god to all of us young ecologists, and so we were very fortunate that this was the year in which he was teaching his Animal Ecology course to Oxford undergraduates. All of us graduate students and postdocs went along, as it was only a series of 14 lectures in the best Oxford tradition. The classroom was full in the first lecture, which was one of the worst lectures I have ever attended. We were rather stunned that such a great man could lecture so hopelessly, mumbling in a monotone, showing slides but almost never referring to them, every mistake in the book. We realized then that greatness could occur in many dimensions and his skill was as a writer. Classroom attendance fell like an exponential and by the fifth lecture no one was left in the classroom but we of the BAP.

Elton organized the BAP as a small research unit and did not believe that any research unit should exceed more than a handful of scientists who interacted all the time over a small subset of problems. In the early days much of the research was on cyclic populations of rodents and fur bearers in Europe and North America, but it moved to insects and broader problems after the War.

Oxford was a strange place to a North American in 1960. Too many of the professors were at odds with one another, jostling for fame we all presumed. It was impossible not to have many enemies within and outside the walls of Oxford, and we as students never quite knew why some were praised and others reviled. Perhaps ideas were confounded with personalities, and no one thought that you could respect a scientist but disagree with his or her view of science. But much was at stake then, and when you were King of Oxford you were king of the hill. Now 50 years later we have many kings of science all around the world, and I hope that Oxford has changed.

 

Crowcroft, P. 1991. Elton’s Ecologists: A History of the Bureau of Animal Population. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 177 pp.

Elton, C. S. 1958. The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. Methuen, London. 181 pp.

Nicholson, A. J. 1933. The balance of animal populations. Journal of Animal Ecology 2:132-178.

 

Science and Money

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Why do we the public support science? The general answer is that science produces products we like, improves our possibilities of a healthy life, and increases wealth. A less general answer is that science informs us about how the Earth works and how the Earth fits into the universe. Most people would agree that science should not provide us with ethical judgments or define good and evil. The result of this dichotomy between science and ethics in the broad sense is that scientists live in a divided world. Each scientist has definite views on what is good for society and what is evil, and these views can differ among scientists in different cultures. But as a scientist he or she cannot use scientific information to define good and evil and therefore to advise governments about what actions to take in particular problems. All this is very vague until you bring it into the arguments of our time – abortion, gay marriage, the death penalty for criminals, nuclear power, fish farming in the ocean, tar-sands oil, fracking – the list goes on.

Scientific information is vital to the decisions made on all these issues. Consider fracking for oil and gas. One scientific question is: Does fracking contaminate the water table? Does fracking release the greenhouse gas methane to the atmosphere? Given adequate scientific information, governments and the public may support or ban fracking, and to support or ban is not a scientific issue but an ethical one. Public opinion of course is affected by scientific findings, and the job of the scientist is to make these findings precise and accurate. But to do that requires money.

The result of all this is that governments and the public have developed a ranking system of the sciences. At the top of the totem pole are physics and chemistry (and their associated engineering sciences) because their findings and products are typically thought to be very useful – cars, computers, IPhones, medical drugs. Not only are they useful but they make lots of money for many people. Geology is also somewhere near the top of the pole because it produces oil and minerals, but suffers somewhat from being responsible for earthquakes and tsunamis. Somewhat lower on the totem pole are the biological sciences. Molecular biology is closely akin to chemistry and offers medical promises so it is high on the totem pole. Biochemistry and physiology follow closely, but they are somewhat suspect unless they promise that their results can be applied to human wellbeing. Near the bottom of the totem pole are the ecologists who describe how the web of life works on Earth and how it has been affected by human actions. The top position of ecology goes to natural history, and bird watching brings much happiness to many people. TV programs like those of David Attenborough bring images of many areas and species that few will be able to visit or see. Descriptive ecology fares slightly less well because it seems harmless to most people but is unable to generate money in any useful manner. Conservation ecology sits at the bottom of the ecology heap, falling into the dark side because it continually points out problems of what humans have done or are doing to life on earth, to ecosystem processes that are essential to a healthy environment. Only climate scientists are lower on the totem pole than ecologists because they are always talking about the coming train wreck of climate change, with the ethical implication that we the public should be doing something by changing our habits.

The results are that funding for scientific work follows the totem pole. Ecologists fare poorly along with organismal biology with the result that we do not have an inventory of life on Earth or an adequate understanding of how most of the Earth’s ecosystems operate. Climate scientists are perhaps fortunate because the gathering of climate data has been extensive because people need weather information to drive to work or plant their crops. Consequently, even though it is at the lower end of the totem pole climate science has much data to utilize, although many do not like the ensuing message. I suspect many governments of the day would like to close down all the weather stations to save money as well as to avoid further negative findings.

There is unlikely to be any move soon in the relative positions on the totem pole for the different sciences. We ecologists live in a trickle down world where some funding sieves through to the lower layers of biology, partly by accident and partly because there are some who think that we should know more about our Earth’s biological heritage.

Fortin, J.-M. and D. J. Currie. 2013. Big science vs. little science: How scientific impact scales with funding. PLoS ONE 8:e65263.

Haufe, C. 2013. Why do funding agencies favor hypothesis testing? Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44:363-374.

May, R. M. 1997. The scientific wealth of nations. Science 275:793-796.

 

The 7 Generation Rule

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Some of the First Nations people of northern Canada believe that we are stewards of the Earth, and for their particular area the land must be managed within a time horizon of 7 generations, approximately 200 years. If we are serious about sustainability, we need to ask for each situation how the impact of this or that environmental decision will track for the next 7 generations. It is quite clear to anyone who listens to any of the news media that we are not at present even living by a 1 Generation Rule. The guide of governments and corporations of virtually all developed nations is economic growth, producing societies that are more and more inequitable, the rich 1% and the poor 99%. The environment is almost never mentioned. What might we do if we lived by the 7 Generation Rule?

The first item to question might be the transportation system of the world and the use of fossil fuels. All is well you might argue, gasoline and diesel are cheap, we carry on. But if we think of future generations we might worry about whether increasing CO2 is causing climate change; the naïve belief that burning fossil fuels has nothing to do with climate change means that we do not believe any of the laws of physics. There is yet another problem somewhere on the 7 Generation horizon – fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource. At some point sooner or later we will run out of fossil fuels, or as an economist would say fossil fuels will not run out but will get very expensive. How far will you be driving in 7 Generations if the price of gasoline is $10,000 a litre? Round that to $40,000 a gallon if you calculate in those units.

But if I cannot drive my car on gasoline, surely someone will invent a car that runs on solar power. Technology will save us. This is akin to a religious belief for many people, and it might be true. If it is, then we can leave the coal, oil, and natural gas in the ground, which is what we ought to plan in any event if we live by the 7 Generation Rule. It is good to be an optimist but it is also good to have a Plan B.

There is one more problem that might be even more important than driving our cars – the provisioning of food. The demand for food in the world today grows at a rate exceeding the rate of food production. No problem, you say, we have plenty of food as long as we continue to neglect one-third of the people on Earth that are undernourished and as long as we operate with the 1 Generation Rule. There are several ways of solving this problem but many of the suggestions are quite impossible. We can become more vegetarian in our diets, and that would be good. But we cannot develop more farmland because virtually all of it is in use. We can increase the productivity of our crops by genetic means, but we cannot compensate for losses in soil fertility and erosion. Fertilizer which is essential to modern agriculture could be problematic. Nitrogen fertilizer is now made largely from fossil fuel (natural gas) and phosphate fertilizer comes entirely from phosphate rocks which are being mined but are also a non-renewable resource. What does our 4th or 5th generation do when phosphate runs out? Might we consider recycling starting now to prepare for the 7th generation?

Ecologists fight now with minimal funding to describe and protect the biodiversity of the Earth, which might be useful already to generation 3, while governments spend much more money subsidizing the fossil fuel industry that is destroying the Earth. There is little money left for environmental protection. How is your government tracking toward a sustainable planet? What Generation Rule are they following? Ask yourself these questions the next time you vote.

Diamond, J. 2011. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. Penguin Books, London. 608 pp. ISBN: 9780241958681

McKibben, B. 2013. Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist. Times Books, New York. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780805092844

On Alpha-Ecology

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All science advances on the back of previous scientists. No advances can be made without recognizing problems, and problems cannot bet recognized without having completed a great deal of descriptive natural history. Natural history has been described by some physicists as ‘stamp-collecting’ and so has been condemned forever in the totem pole of science as the worst thing you could possibly do. Perhaps we would improve our image if we called natural history alpha-ecology.

Let us start with the biggest problem in biology, the fact that we do not know how many species inhabit the earth (Mora et al. 2011). A minor problem most people seem to think and little effort has gone into encouraging students to make a career of traditional taxonomy. Instead we can sequence the genome of any organism without even being able to put a Latin name on it. Something is rather backwards here, and a great deal of alpha-biology is waiting to be done on this inventory problem. Much of taxonomic description considers low-level hypotheses about evolutionary relationships and these are important to document as a part of understanding the Earth’s biodiversity.

In ecology we have an equivalent problem of describing the species that live in a community or ecosystem, and then constructing the food webs of the community. This is a daunting task and if you wish to understand community dynamics you will have to do a lot of descriptive work, alpha ecology, before you can get to the point of testing hypotheses about community dynamics (Thompson et al. 2012). Again it is largely a bit of detective work to see who eats whom in a food web, but without all this work we cannot progress. The second part of community dynamics is being able to estimate accurately the numbers of organisms in the different species groups. Once you dig into existing food web data, you begin to realize that much of what we think is a good estimate of abundance is in fact a weak estimate of unknown accuracy. We have to be careful in analysing community dynamics to avoid estimations based more on random numbers than on biological reality.

The problem came home to me in a revealing exchange in Nature about whether the existing fisheries data for the world’s oceans is reliable or not (Pauly, Hilborn, and Branch 2013). For years we have been managing the oceanic fisheries of the world on the basis of fishing catch data of the sort reported to FAO, and yet there is considerable disagreement about the reliability of these numbers. We must continue to use them as we have no other source of information for most oceanic fisheries, but there must be some doubt that we are relying too much on unreliable data. On the one hand, some fishery scientists argue with these data that we are overexploiting the ocean fisheries, but other fishery scientists argue that the oceanic fisheries are by and large in good shape. Controversies like this confuse the public and the policy makers and tell us we have a long way to go to improve our alpha-ecology.

I think the bottom line is that if you wish to test any ecological hypothesis you need to have reliable data, and this means a great deal of alpha-ecology is needed, research that will not get you a Nobel Prize but will help us understand how the Earth’s ecosystem operates.

Mora, C., et al. 2013. How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? PLoS Biology 9:e1001127.

Pauly, D., R. Hilborn, and T. A. Branch. 2013. Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Nature 494:303-306.

Thompson, R. M., et al. 2012. Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 27:689-697.

Bandwagons in Ecology

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Scientists are like most people in their attraction to bandwagons. Often this is good, since some parts of any particular science may move more quickly than others, creating a bandwagon for scientists building a career. But sometimes this is detrimental in diverting efforts and money from one aspect of a science to another. All would be fine if the older parts of a science were thoroughly understood, and the new bandwagon opened up the solutions to critical problems.

So what does all this have to do with ecology? Ecology has been one example of a science beset by one bandwagon after another during the past 50 years. Many of these bandwagons were relatively harmless because they started with the promise to solve all problems and ended up contributing a small bit of understanding to the subject as it matured. I am thinking now of energy flow in the 1950s, systems ecology and density dependence in the 1960s, competition theory in the 1970s, and mathematical modelling from the 1980s onward. Other examples could be added to this list. At the moment we have two bandwagons that deserve some discussion – climate change and evolutionary ecology.

Climate change is one of the three most critical problems of our day and so it is understandable that much is written about it. Consequently it appears on all grant and scholarship applications as a relevant field. The problem is twofold. First of all, we should not take weather, the ecological side of climate, as the universal explanation for everything that is changing without considering alternative hypotheses for change. If the geographical distribution of a species is expanding toward the poles, climate change is only one of several possible reasons for this. The factors limiting geographic ranges are multiple and have been studied less well than any ecologist would like. We need to keep in mind that there are other ecological problems out there that are not directly tied in with climate change, and these need to be pursued as well. If you want an example, consider the problem of biological control of invasive species.

Evolutionary ecology is a second bandwagon and I fear it is tilting the entire focus of ecological research. The reason is quite clear – technological advancements in genetic studies. Much of science is driven by technological advances and that is good, but again it should not mean that we ignore other unresolved problems. In particular evolutionary ecology has the great potential to describe the world in great detail without necessarily adding any critical insights. In many cases it is stamp collecting and it reminds me of the saying that “Nero fiddles while Rome burns”. Should we as ecologists be concerned more about the practical problems of our day, or about simply understanding nature? There is no reason of course not to do both, and different individuals have talents in different areas of science. But some ecologists might feel as I do that ecological questions are poorly served by much of evolutionary ecology. I listen to many evolutionary ecologists telling us that their work is solving some ecological question when it is obvious that this is a leap of faith with little substance.

I think we need to ask as ecologists what are the problems we wish to solve, and if we could ever decide on a list of these problems, we could ask where we currently sit in solving these problems. It causes a great focus of the mind to look at a practical problem and ask what ecologists are doing about it. At the moment I am in the Philippines at the International Rice Research Institute, and I am overwhelmed by the ecological questions that interface with sustainable rice cropping in Southeast Asia, of pests and beneficial animals and plants, of migratory birds, of chemical poisons and their impacts on non-target species, the list goes on. The assumption at the moment seems to be that plant breeding and genetics will conquer all problems, but we ought to have a Plan B to look at the community and ecosystem dynamics that centre on a rice paddy, and how that might interface with the changing varieties of rice that are produced. We would be more humble if we moved away from genetic determinism to consider that there are other issues, currently ignored, that only ecologists can solve.

Bandwagons will always occur in science, but we should be careful that not everyone follows the pied pipers of the moment.

The Hippocratic Oath and Ecology

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“Physician, do no harm” (Hippocrates, Greece, 5th century BC) is one of the classic ethical standards of medicine. Of course as medical science has progressed, treatments that were once considered to be beneficial are now known to cause harm, so one has to apply these standards to the time and place of action. How does all of this apply to ecology and environmental science?
All science is or should be evidence-based and the job of the ecologist is to examine and measure the evidence about how the biological world works, how natural populations, communities, and ecosystems operate and continue to exist. Given that evolution is the background to all these operations, in the long term individual species will come and go and change the dynamics we now describe. At the level of basic or “blue-sky” research, ecologists run into few ethical issues. But at the level of applied ecology, we become the ‘physicians of the world’ because we must assess the problems that arise in the natural world from the actions or inactions of humans. Consequently when ecologists investigate problems caused by mining, logging, aquaculture, or agriculture, and the associated issues caused by population growth, we have an ethical responsibility captured by the Hippocratic Oath.
In many situations ecologists and environmental scientists do well, laying out the issues, the science behind the measured effects, and the best predictions they can make about future changes. Climate change science is the best current example. But in many areas the conclusions of our best ecologists and environmental scientists crash head on into the economic train that drives 95% of decision making at the political and business levels. This is the key point where the Hippocratic Oath must enter if we wish to behave ethically. We cannot allow companies or the government to carry out environmental policies that are harmful to the populations, communities and ecosystems of the Earth without our voices being heard. This does not permit us to fabricate evidence or extrapolate beyond what is known. It does permit us to say what is not known and needs investigation, and that the policy of “what you do not know cannot hurt you” is stupidity squared. None of this endears us to the business community or the government bent on economic growth at all costs.
We can hope that this is changing, albeit slowly. Politicians and oil companies now at least talk about ‘sustainability’ while pushing ahead. But if more wealth is gained at the expense of the Earth we are lost in the long term. A major problem for ecologists is that operational changes are made in forestry, agriculture and mining with little thought to their consequences for biodiversity and ecologists are left to pick up the pieces later. If you wish an immediate example, fracking for oil and gas is more than enough. This is not an intelligent way to operate if we wish to be stewards of the Earth. So in every bit of ecology we do, we need to keep the Hippocratic Oath in mind, and do our best to stop harming the Earth.
And at the political level, we could take the radical step of asking that every Minister of the Environment ought to be trained in environmental science and ecology, and understand the environmental problems of the Earth.

Why The Environmental Sciences Always Lose Out

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One of the basic observations of our time in almost all countries is that some sciences are held in high esteem while others are not popular. Science is often confused with technology, so positive marks are typically given for new types of cell phones, tablets and computers, and the sciences that give rise to these technological advances like physics, chemistry, and engineering are viewed as gold stars. Medical advances are also highly regarded out of self-interest and most medical science from basic to applied is given high support in our society. At the other end of the ranking is ecology and in general environmental science. These are viewed poorly by many, so that action on climate-change and biodiversity conservation are supported by a dwindling few. Why are some sciences highly praised and others damned?

Part, but only part, of the explanation lies in religious beliefs. I do not know of any major religious group that condemns Iphones and computers, or medical advances, or even space research. But many people seem to have objections to biological concepts like evolution and question the role of humans in affecting the earth’s ecosystems. Possibly a larger part of this rejection of environmental science is explained by the fact that environmental scientists bring mostly bad news to the social table, while physicists promise infinite free energy and medical scientists promise cures for diseases. We prefer good news to bad.

The most prominent bad news story currently is climate change and the role of humans in causing these changes. Climate change science is easy to deny. The data are always variable, sometimes it still snows in the wrong month of the year or the summer is particularly cool. But most importantly the problem is slow moving, and humans are not very good at assessing slow moving catastrophes. Few of us will be alive when the climate problems get so serious only a fool would deny them, and our penchant for demanding fast solutions to problems will not work when the reversal of the cause (e.g. CO2 enrichment of the air) takes 100-200 years. So it is better to put our head in the sand and deny everything.

The problem with conservation ecology and biodiversity loss is similarly long-term and slow. To solve these problems we have to do something and we are all in favour of doing something if it does not reduce economic growth. So population growth is favoured since exponential growth is the new God pushing economic growth, and biodiversity loss does not seem to impact on most of us living in large cities. Sustainability thus becomes a meaningless word in both politics and business, talk much and do little. If there is an apparent conflict between economics and the environment guess who wins. Convincing people that economics cannot exist without the environment is the challenge of our time. We could start by electing governments that cultivate environmental concerns on an equal basis with economic concerns.

Oreskes, N. and E. M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press, New York. 365 pp.
Washington, H. 2013. Human Dependence on Nature. Routledge.144 pp.

The Ancient Cedars Trail in British Columbia

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Whistler, British Columbia, is one of the famous ski hills in North America. Just north of the town of Whistler, above Green Lake, is a 4.5 km logging road that leads to the Ancient Cedars Trail, a 5 km round trip to see an old growth stand of several hectares of western red cedars (Thuja plicata). The red cedars are enormous, perhaps 700-1000 years old, and well worth seeing. But what disturbed me as I walked this trail is that this type of old growth forest with its rich diversity of tree species is what much of the forested world of coastal British Columbia and south-eastern Alaska used to look like, and I wonder what are we leaving in this part of the world for our great-grandchildren.

Trees are dollar bills in another form, and so the forestry industry thrives. But this is mostly crown land, not private land, and what do we the public get for this continual ravaging of the landscape? A strong economy to be sure, but is it sustainable? Forestry is sustainable if it allows ecosystem renewal at a time scale that is relevant to a human lifespan. Is modern forestry in British Columbia sustainable? We are told continually that it is.

Perhaps the paradigm is that we should log everything that can be converted into dollars, leaving a few hectares for the ancient cedars to remain. Then once we have logged up to the Arctic Ocean, we can come back south and start again. But will a logged forest ever recover as part of a forest ecosystem? And if it does will it take 300, 500, or 1000 years? If it takes that long, forestry is a mining operation, and from the point of view of our grandchildren the forests are destroyed not renewed.

The key issue for an ecologist is whether the forest ecosystem ever recovers after logging. It certainly does for some species but it is highly probable that other species are lost to the ecosystem. Part of this is because the forests that replace old growth are too often tree monocultures designed for optimum yield rather than for biodiversity maximization. So I think we should be more questioning when we are told an industry like forestry is operating sustainably. If it is sustainable, why are we logging old growth forests? If it is sustainable why are we logging 25° and 30° slopes? And what do we mean when we say that we are developing a forest harvesting plan when the time to recovery from logging is 200-300+ years? That is perhaps 3-4 generations of humans, more than we would like to tell our children. At a time when biodiversity conservation is being seen as more and more important, we are rushing ahead with logging old growth, hoping to get the dollars out before we find out that it was a mistake in management.

In the end we need to ask over and over again – what are we leaving for our grandchildren? And if you go walking in the coastal forests of western North America you need to look and then ask yourself what “sustainability” means, and whether the landscape is being managed sustainably. Perhaps many of our old growth forests in Canada are too important to be left to the management of the forest industry.