Not so mighty: The IUCN Red List in July reported that a third of all conifers are under threat due to logging and disease.
Museum scientists are planning the next stage of a study to reveal the global destruction of plant life. It is the second phase of a collaborative project between the Museum, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which began in 2005. The information from the study feeds into the Red List Index, an online barometer of animals, plants, insects and fish at risk of extinction, produced twice-yearly by the IUCN.
The first phase, completed in 2010, was a desk-based analysis of some of the six million plant specimens in the Museum's herbarium collection and the seven million at Kew to monitor the status of the world's plants.
The specimens have been collected over hundreds of years by thousands of botanists, including Charles Darwin, and are preserved for study in the collections. They provide data to show where certain plants have been living in the past.
Darwin meets Google Earth
The team then used satellite imagery, including from Google Earth, to compare the historic data with what can be seen living on the ground and used to illustrate which habitats have been reduced or destroyed altogether. Assessments of different areas then allowed them to create a map of hotspots of plant diversity and threatened species.
The researchers concluded in 2010 that more than 20 per cent of the world's plants, or one in five, are threatened with extinction, with a further 10 per cent classified as near threatened.
Truth on the Ground
The second phase of the project, for which funds are being sought, involves going out into the field, or ground-truthing, to measure the desktop assessment with the situation on the ground, to plot decline and target certain areas for conservation. Some plants on the Red List haven't been seen for 150 years.
Other species have never been seen on the ground and are only known from the scientific paper where they are first described. There have even been cases of plants newly discovered in a collection that have already gone extinct in the wild.
Loss of Habitat
The overwhelming threat to natural habitat is anthropogenic (caused by human activity), through habitat conversion to agriculture, for development or mining, or through the introduction of invasive species.
'A good example of this is the volcanic island of St Helena in the south Atlantic, where several species of a shrub, Trochetiopsis, were indigenous', said Museum botanist Neil Brummitt, who has worked on the project from the beginning.
'Local deforestation for fuel and ship-building, as well as for agriculture, disturbed the habitat, which was then put under further pressure by the introduction of goats by the Royal Navy to feed sailors stationed on the island. The goats fed on the endemic species, causing havoc to the island's ecosystem. '
Biodiversity Jigsaw
The latest Red List, published last month, assessed 71,576 species of animals, plants, insects and fish and reported that 21,286 are under threat.
'If you can't preserve everything, it becomes a value judgement deciding what to preserve,' Brummitt said. 'We're losing a large proportion of the world's biodiversity without knowing what the knock-on effect will be on other species, such as birds and insects. We're losing pieces of a biodiversity puzzle.' Eighty per cent of calories consumed by people around the world come from just 12 species of plants.
'Plants provide the foundation for the entire world's ecosystems,' Brummitt said. 'Biodiversity is important because it's essential not to rely on a handful of species to provide the ecosystem services most developed countries still depend on, for food, shelter and clean water.'
Antibiotic Resistant: New research, including a study of crow feces, provides evidence that antibiotic resistance has spread beyond hospitals and farms to wildlife. Image: Linda Tanner/ Flickr
New research provides evidence that antibiotic resistance has spread beyond hospitals and farms to wildlife
By Lindsey Konkel
WORCESTER, Mass. – One afternoon last winter, Julie Ellis unfurled a long, white tarp under a stand of trees near Coes Pond where hundreds of crows roost. Her mission: to collect as much bird poop as possible.
Back in the laboratory, Ellis’ colleagues combed through the feces. Testing its bacteria, they discovered something unusual – genes that make the crows resistant to antibiotics.
Drug-resistant infections are a fast-growing threat to human health, due largely to overuse of antibiotics in human medicine and livestock production, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 2 million people each year in the United States alone are sickened by infections resistant to drugs.
Now new research, including the crow poop study conducted in four states, provides evidence that antibiotic resistance has spread beyond hospitals and farms to wildlife. Some experts worry that contaminating wildlife with such genes may hasten the spread of drug resistance. Nevertheless, the consequences for human health remain poorly understood.
“We’ve documented human-derived drug resistance where it shouldn’t be – in wildlife and the environment. But we know very little about how this may impact public health. There just isn’t that smoking gun,” said Ellis, a research scientist at Tufts University’s veterinary school. In addition to crows, resistance genes have been detected in gulls, houseflies, moths, foxes, frogs, sharks and whales, as well as in sand and coastal water samples from California and Washington. The spread to wildlife is “an indicator of the wide-reaching scale of the problem. Microbes connect the planet,” said Lance Price, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University.
The spread to wildlife is “an indicator of the wide-reaching scale of the problem. Microbes connect the planet,” said Lance Price, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University.
“The danger is that we enter a post-antibiotic era in which even our last-line drugs won’t work and routine infections become life-threatening,” he said. While antibiotics have revolutionized medicine in less than 100 years, antibiotic-producing bacteria have existed in nature for millions of years. Natural antibiotics likely evolved as weapons in a biological arms race between competing bacteria. But the environmental drug resistance that Ellis and others are now seeing is different – it’s manmade.
“What has changed is that we’ve placed great selective pressure on bacteria with our use of antibiotics,” said Ludek Zurek, a microbiologist at Kansas State University who participated in the crow study. Bacteria can swap genes with one another, so those that survive can pass along the genetic equipment to withstand an antibiotic assault to unrelated bacterial strains, spreading resistance across the globe, microbe by microbe.
“Those bacteria that pick up resistance genes survive better in an environment where antibiotics are being used. They can outcompete all the other bacteria,” said Price, who advocates against the use of antibiotics in livestock.
In the crow research, scientists collected nearly 600 fecal samples in four states – Massachusetts, Kansas, New York and California. Fifteen of the crows sampled, about 2.5 percent, harbored genes for resistance to vancomycin, a drug of last resort for hard-to-treat hospital-acquired infections. Crows with the resistance genes were found in all of the states except California.
“The vancomycin resistance gene is rare [in environmental samples], so the fact that they readily found it in crows is significant,” said Amy Pruden, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech who studies antibiotic resistance genes as emerging contaminants in water bodies. What’s alarming, say the researchers, is that some of the vancomycin-resistant bacteria in the crows were resistant to several other antibiotics widely used in human medicine and livestock feed. It’s very difficult to trace the resistance back to a source.
“Because birds are so mobile, it’s possible they may acquire resistance genes from multiple sources in their travels,” said Ellis. “Maybe they visit a dumpster or sewage treatment plant one day and later a farmer’s field.” The source of antibiotic-resistance cannot always be determined because many drugs are used both in human and animal medicine. However, the vancomycin resistance in the wild crows bears the signature of a human clinical source, the study authors concluded.
They speculate that waste sites may be a potential source of the crows’ bacteria. “Traditional wastewater treatment approaches may not destroy genetic material,” Pruden said. Much of the research on drug resistance has focused on hospitals and healthcare settings. The CDC estimates that 50 percent of all antibiotics prescribed to people are not needed.
More recently, researchers have begun to turn their attention to the environment as a source of drug resistance. Many more tons of antibiotics are used in U.S. livestock production – to prevent and treat disease and to promote growth – than in human medicine. An estimated 30,000 tons of antibiotics each year are sold for use in food-producing animals. “People who consume these foods can develop antibiotic-resistant infections,” according to a CDC report issued in September. It’s unclear what role, if any, crows and other wild animals may play in hastening the spread of these infections or creating new ones. “Wildlife may be an important piece of the puzzle,” Pruden said. “It’s certainly an area that warrants more research.”
The next generation of urban infrastructure will not be built. This is to say, that a sustainable future will not come from new technologies. Urgent demand is already overwhelming adequate risk management and urban governance capacities. While indeed carbon-free light rail, driverless cars and desalination plants will be in unquenchable demand, none of it will happen successfully without a bankable environment that aggressively manages the social, political, financial and environmental risks of new infrastructure. The barriers to the next generation of infrastructure [1] are neither technical nor financial; rather they’re social and political. Effectively responding to the unprecedented need for urban infrastructure hinges on the successful process over the high-tech outcome.
New Urban Dynamics
Cities have replaced national governments as the de facto drivers of global economic growth and human development. In fact, 300 of the largest metro economies worldwide, containing just 19% of the world’s population, delivered nearly half of the global economic output in 2011 [2]. A recent analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute reveals that by 2025, more than two thirds of global GDP will be produced by just 600 cities – the majority of them in emerging countries [3].
But importantly, economic growth does not alone create stability. Spanning from the least to the most developed, the fate of cities is one of increasing vulnerability to climate change, resource scarcity and rapid population growth.
Hyper-Urbanization
By the year 2030 world urban population will increase to nearly 5 billion persons (1.35 billion more than present), increasing the planet’s urban area by an astonishing 150% in less than 20 years. Sixty percent of the area to be urban by 2030 has yet to be built [4]. Contrary to the trend of the 20th century, the majority of this urban growth (and commensurate economic growth) will occur in developing countries and mainly in second-tier and lower cities. From now to 2030, the world will need to build the equivalent of a city of one million people in developing countries every five days. Their intense demand for the rapid construction of new infrastructure threatens their already challenged risk management and urban governance capacities.
Nexus Issues
Incongruous to this rapid urbanization, is the reality that current growth is no longer supported by sustainable inputs, as we are already 50% in “overshoot.” In other words, human systems are presently using 50% more than the annual productivity and assimilating capacity of the planet’s ecosystems [5]. This unsustainable consumption of ecosystem services to subsidize the growth of cities is progressing ever farther along the urban-to-rural gradient. One result is an ominous energy-water-food nexus of demand confronting city, regional and national decision makers.
As urbanization reaches farther beyond its geopolitical borders to satisfy ever-greater metabolic demands, rural communities and families are linearly assimilated into “foreign” urban economies, with marked social and cultural impacts. Families with rural legacies can be insurmountably challenged by joining an urban economy yet remaining spatially disconnected from services. In the end, urban migration is more often not so much a quest for economic prosperity, as it is a survival strategy for the rurally displaced.
Climate Change
Continued urban development is made more complex by a third, interrelated, crosscutting element: climate change. Increasing climate disruptions are changing the fundamental rules of city planning and administration. Rapid climate change is altering both the risk (threats) and the fitness (responses) landscapes of cities. Unfamiliar risks and new statistical criteria have rendered historical “business-as-usual” strategies increasingly ineffective and detrimental with direct implications on safety, quality of life and the economic performance of cities. Uncertainty is now a fundamental core element of urban development, along with non-linear growth patterns, runaway positive feedback/ cascading failures, hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points. The rapidly reshaping insurance industry is but one example of shifting solutions – with increased disaster intensities and frequencies, the utility of insurance to guarantee major new infrastructure investments becomes increasingly untenable.
As urban economies mature in developing countries, and as cities become increasingly more vulnerable, their decision-making power is rising and yet becoming more complex at the same time. The speed of urbanization and the new risk landscape present a profound managerial and policy challenge for municipalities. Cities and metropolitan governments are now obligated to deal with exponential rates of urban immigration; protect and conserve the surrounding landscapes and ecosystem services sourced outside their geopolitical boundaries; ensure sufficient energy supplies for their industry and residents; finance, construct and maintain hard infrastructure; respond to the pressing challenge of sea level rise; attract private industry and foreign investment; negotiate with multilateral development banks (MDBs) and engage with foreign government official development assistance (ODA).
Spanning from the least to the most developed, the fate of cities is one of increasing vulnerability to climate change, resource scarcity and rapid population growth. The fate of the world has become the fate of cities. There has emerged with great immediacy, a revolutionary worldwide discourse on how to best make cities more sustainable: building resilience, enabling transformation and de-risking the economy.
Addressing Vulnerabilities
The thoughtful development and management of new infrastructure is a powerful way to de-risk cities. But often overlooked in the speculative, investment driven rush to build, is the fact that infrastructure impacts the sustainability of urban systems in several ways; some of them less immediately apparent to elected officials.
Infrastructure’s impact on urban sustainability includes positive performance gains, but additionally, it can also create negative pathway dependencies and the commensurate loss of “optionality.” However, thirdly and most importantly, the demand for urban infrastructure creates a unique circumstance – when often disparate socioeconomic groups briefly share an orbit around an issue involving a public good or a common pool resource. This is a critical opportunity to generate and strengthen urban social capital – the key success attribute for the next generation of infrastructure.
Estimates suggest that US$ 53 trillion must be spent on infrastructure worldwide by 2030 to adequately manage the rapid growth of cities [6]. In 2011, the High Level Panel on Infrastructure for Recommendations to the G20 pointed out that the key constraint to infrastructure development is not a lack of funding. After all, financing can technically be created to support low-risk investments. Rather, they identify the principal barrier to rapid infrastructure development as the absence of a strong pipeline of bankable projects [7]. This is to say, infrastructure projects must be low-risk to qualify as “bankable.” Infrastructure in developing countries is an asset class highly vulnerable to political, regulatory and execution risk. Therefore, managing the social, political, financial and environmental risk of infrastructure projects should be the priority when pursuing the performance gains of new infrastructure.
The most important investment a city can make today is developing integrated, cross-disciplinary capacity within the “infrastructure development process,” and the commensurate tools and methods to mitigate the social, political, and financial risks. Building this systemic capacity allows successful urban development along a range of fronts, among them the “next generation” of infrastructure.
To create goal-seeking behavior towards sustainability and avoid the development of unsafe slums and unsupportable resource-intensive path dependencies, it becomes essential that all sectors of civil society have a seat at the table to participate in the selection, design, launch, management and perhaps ownership of infrastructure projects.
Collective Actions and Horizon Lines
Cities are Human-Environment Systems (HES), appreciably comprised of common pool resources and public goods. These interact in ever-shifting equations to one day ostensibly arrive at an equitable, circular economy.
HES are considered to be complex adaptive systems because they consist of influential, interacting smaller systems that self-organize as a whole. As they grow, the challenging issues of overuse and equity must continually be addressed. More specifically, growing cities are subject to social dilemmas and the problems of collective action and inter-temporal resource allocation. Collective action challenges in cities relate to the fact that individuals and subgroups make decisions based on particular desires without considering the impacts their decisions may have for others in society. Inter-temporal resource allocation dilemmas involve individuals and subgroups making decisions locally in time (short time horizon, or equivalently applying a high discount rate) without considering the long term/ global consequences of these choices.
As a complex adaptive system, HES can demonstrate goal-seeking behavior. So it is important to point out that the rapid expansion of cities is not impeded by the absence of adequate planning, transportation, housing, finance or attention to risks. Rapid urbanization occurs whether infrastructure is planned or not; “electricity and cable are first stolen and later gentrified” [8]. To create goal-seeking behavior towards sustainability and avoid the development of unsafe slums and unsupportable resource-intensive path dependencies, it becomes essential that all sectors of civil society have a seat at the table to participate in the selection, design, launch, management and perhaps ownership of infrastructure projects. Citizen access to and participation in public decision making, along with building coalitions and multi-sector partnerships will not only significantly increase the success of infrastructure projects, it will also unlock latent circular economies and subsequently advance the sustainability of the Human-Environment System.
The Renewable Power of Shared Learning
One method to efficiently enable integrated capacity and multi-sector collaboration along the infrastructure development process is by creating peer learning environments among municipal government officials as well as civil society. Research demonstrates that the bottom-up accumulation of knowledge by professionals via peer-to-peer learning experiences is one of the most important factors in the types of projects and policies that make their way into successful strategic planning and policy proposals [9]. Peer learning builds capacities of all stakeholders and decision-makers, promoting effective functioning beyond a single project, including the next generation of infrastructure.
Over the past four years, the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) has developed a methodology for creating shared learning environments, culminating in the organization of Sustainable Community Leadership Academies (SCLA) with the explicit purpose to accelerate urban climate adaptation and sustainability [10]. These intensive three-day academies bring together 10-15 multidisciplinary teams of 5 or 6 senior level practitioners and municipal government officials from cities and metropolitan areas. To date, teams from more than 400 cities have participated in these Leadership Academies, generating a wealth of results, tools, and networks that can accessed by anyone.
This past April 15-17 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Mississippi Sea Grant Consortium [11] and ISC kicked off an 8 month “Gulf Coast Community Resilience Program.” Utilizing ISC’s peer-learning methodology, leaders from 6 Gulf Coast communities created an informal network to advance and accelerate resilience. During the workshop, the practitioners shared experiences and tools, each identifying two to three key implementation ideas to apply in their communities over the summer. Tailored technical assistance within the informal network will help the participating Gulf Coast communities apply their resilience implementation ideas. In the fall, the same six communities will come together again for a follow-up Climate Leadership Academy (CLA) to share results and lessons learned, solidifying the informal network.
One highlight during the April CLA plenary was when Dr. Pam Jenkins of the University of New Orleans’ CHART [12] Program facilitated a community mapping clinic. Using a structured process, each community team identified coastal adaptation initiatives that led to “therapeutic” or “corrosive” communities. For example, after the recent Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, factions with differing interests and opinions on financial settlement options led to a “corrosive” community atmosphere. On the other hand, after recent natural disasters, many teams sponsored “therapeutic” community celebrations that featured actionable dialogue on coastal adaptation strategies. As a result of the clinic, community leaders now have the tools to foster therapeutic approaches for the design of climate-adaptive infrastructure choices.
Internationally, another contemporary example of cities using peer learning to develop the next generation of climate-adaptive infrastructure is occurring in Southeast Asia. ASEAN [13] cities are some of the fastest growing in the world, and yet at the same time, some of the most vulnerable to climate change – forcing more adaptive approaches to urban development. As a result, city practitioners across the region are designing and building more resilient, ecologically integrated urban infrastructure, engaging their populations in inclusive decision-making, and collaborating across jurisdictions. These activities are generating innovations and investment opportunities that are shaping growth throughout the region. In a partnership between U.S. cities and ASEAN member states, ten teams of senior municipal officials from second- and third-tier cities will be participating in an SCLA on Urban Adaptation next August, [14] with a primary focus on sharing lessons of managing the social, political, financial and environmental risks of urban infrastructure. After the SCLA, a selection of cities will participate in partnerships with U.S. Cities to gain more exposure to innovative approaches, good governance tools and appropriate infrastructure technologies.
The results of ISC’s Leadership Academies across diverse cities and broad geographical range, support the research that concludes shared learning environments and exchange among practitioners can effectively overcome information overload as well as resource constraints, spawning innovation and greatly increase the likelihood of policy transfer [15]. What’s more, peer learning affords practitioners the ability to not only learn from their colleagues, but also to teach them – offering a sense of empowerment. Growing and strengthening the leadership capacity of these municipal leaders builds the overall profile of the profession – the resources generated from peer learning provides a core knowledge base for city sustainability practitioners and civil society organizations.
Going Forward
So while infrastructure is a key physical and technological asset of cities – representing critical capital investment – more important is the knowledge, shared ownership and collaboration that the next generation of urban infrastructure embeds in the Human Environment System. Successful public infrastructure is a legacy to the surmounted social dilemmas, collective action challenges and path dependencies resolved leading up to its construction.
The next punctuated equilibrium will not come from advanced or new technologies. Rather it will emerge from shared learning, multi-sector coalitions, integrated planning, public-private partnerships, the skillful advocacy of civil society and good governance. This is how to best reframe urban development and economic growth to include the capacity of the biosphere.
References
[1] The next generation of infrastructure is defined by its service to urban sustainability.
[4] Seto, Karen C., Burak Güneralp, and Lucy R. Hutyra. “Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 40 (2012): 16083-16088.
[5] Wackernagael, M. et. al. 2002. “Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economcy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. July 9, 2002 vol. 99 no. 14
[6] OECD, Strategic Transport, Infrastructure Needs to 2030. (Report, OECD, March 2012) ISBN 978-92-64-16862-6.
[7] Thiam, Tidjane -Chairman. High Level Panel on Infrastructure, Recommendations to G20 (Final Report. 26 October 2011).
[9] Marsden, Greg, Karen Trapenberg Frick, Anthony D. May, and Elizabeth Deakin. “Bounded rationality in policy learning amongst cities: lessons from the transport sector.” Environment and Planning A 44, no. 4 (2012): 905-920.
[15] McCann, Eugene. “Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: toward a research agenda.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no. 1 (2011): 107-130.
Remarkably, the past week saw the release of two major publications detailing the condition of American cities, both from respected authors but each taking a very different view of things. Let’s compare them. (Warning: this is not a short blog post; there is too much meat in these publications to address glibly.)
This is a very upbeat book. It argues that, in the 21st century, metropolitan regions provide the true scale of “cities,” not the archaic boundaries that separate formal jurisdictions from each other. I couldn’t agree more: we sometimes have to work with political jurisdictions to get things done, but neither economic nor environmental factors respect those boundaries. Indeed, Katz and Bradley go so far as to argue that there is no “American” economy; to the extent that a national economy exists, it is a composite of metropolitan economies.
Moreover, the authors posit, cities and metros are the true economic leaders, especially in the post-recession, still-recovering economy. They are no longer waiting for a dysfunctional federal government or inconsistent and fickle state governments to assert leadership. Indeed, much of the new energy in our economy isn’t about political institutions at all, but rather about other kinds of leadership, about networks. The result is that cities and metros are happening, and Getting Things Done:
“The real, durable reshaping is being led by networks of city and metropolitan leaders—mayors and other local elected officials, for sure, but also heads of companies, universities, medical campuses, metropolitan business associations, labor unions, civic organizations, environmental groups, cultural institutions, and philanthropies. These leaders are measuring what matters, unveiling their distinctive strengths and starting points in the real economy: manufacturing, innovation, technology, advanced services, and exports . . . They are remaking their urban and suburban places as livable, quality, affordable, sustainable communities and offering more residential, transport, and work options to firms and families alike. And they are doing all these things through coinvention and coproduction.”
Katz and Bradley cite example after example of the Creative Class – knowledge-based and new-technology workers – bringing a new era of accomplishment. The passage below, although a bit long for the usual blog post, is very worth reading to get the positive, enthusiastic tone of the book with regard to both the economy and the environment:
“With innovation the clear driver of economic growth and productivity and federal innovation funding at risk, metros like New York are making sizable commitments to attract innovative research institutions, commercialize research, and grow innovative firms. With human capital the necessary ingredient for successful firms and places, metros like Chicago are overhauling their community college systems to ensure that students are trained for quality jobs that offer good wages and benefits. With infrastructure the platform for global trade and investment and no national freight policy in place, metros like Miami and Jacksonville are modernizing their air, rail, and sea freight hubs to position themselves for an expansion in global trade.
“With companies and consumers demanding communities that are more spatially efficient and federal funding for transportation uncertain, metros like Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago are largely self-financing the building and retrofit of their own transit systems. With global demand rising and the future of federal trade policy unclear, metros like Portland, Syracuse, and Minneapolis–St. Paul are reorienting their economic development strategies toward exports, foreign direct investment, and skilled immigration.
“With the world undergoing a systemic shift toward sustainable growth (a third industrial revolution) and federal energy and environmental policies under siege, metros like Seattle and Philadelphia are cementing their niches in energy-efficient technologies. And with immigration altering the social fabric of American society and national immigration reform seemingly impossible to achieve, metros like Houston are taking innovative steps to integrate tens of thousands of new immigrants into economic and community life.”
The theme is clear: our cities aren’t deferring to other levels of government, and they certainly aren’t waiting for the feds and some states to get over their current partisan paralysis. Oklahoma City (by: Serge Melki, creative commons)Note also the references to companies and consumers demanding more spatial efficiency, and the emphasis on energy-efficient technologies. This is what Katz in Governing called “the synergy between enterprise and the ecosystem.”
I can relate to aspects of this in my own career. I began it as someone quite enamored of the potential of public policy to get things done, particularly at the federal level. Indeed, I still believe strongly in the importance of federal and state regulation to guard against excesses of business, and in government support for innovative private action. Business frequently lacks economic motivation to do the right things for the environment and for human welfare on its own.
But, if that is still frequently true, it is no longer always true. Today, in many cases business interests do align with the public interest in a clean, fair and healthy environment. Regulation, while important to prevent bad activity, has seldom been good at advancing innovation (though it has been sometimes). Today, I personally find more excitement and potential for accomplishment by working directly with the more creative parts of the private sector, on the ground in neighborhoods and metropolitan regions.
Regions, say Katz and Bradley, provide the right scale for innovation. The Metropolitan Revolution puts it succinctly:
“Cities and metros aggregate people and places in a geography that is large enough to make a difference but small enough to impart a sense of community and common purpose.”
Even in places such as Detroit and northeastern Ohio, Katz and Bradley are finding reason for optimism.
I, too, am optimistic about cities and metros, for many of the same reasons that the Brookings authors cite. I also see a resurgence in the growth of inner cities and suburbs, a slowing of suburban sprawl, and demographics that are only going to strengthen urban places. The road will be bumpy in some places, and care will have to be taken to ensure that benefits flow to all sectors of society, but all the trends are in the right direction. I confess that I haven’t yet read all of Katz and Bradley’s book – I was limited to the portions that were made available to the press in advance of formal publication – but I like what I have seen so far. A lot.
This video presents the gist in 46 succinct seconds:
The glass is draining quickly, and it’s worrisome
One gets a far less robust picture of the condition of American cities from State of the City: 5 Trends Impacting America’s Cities, released on Monday by Living Cities, a consortium of philanthropic institutions working “to improve the lives of low-income people and the cities where they live.”
Here are the five trends detailed in the report:
Fiscal strain is causing city governments to reduce services and scale back capital investment.
Failing infrastructure is inhibiting economic growth, sustainability and overall mobility of goods, people, and information.
Stagnant educational outcomes have implications for talent production, attraction and matching to jobs.
The changing economic landscape is creating unemployment and shifting centers of job creation.
The collapse of the housing market and the tightening of the rental market are creating material pressure on household economics and the health of communities.
In other words, where Katz and Bradley see excitement, innovation, leadership, and economic recovery, Living Cities sees declining city services, crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, unemployment, and struggling households.
The purposes of the two reports are quite different, explaining part of the differences in tone. The Brookings Metropolitan Center, which Katz heads, has for years been stressing that we now live in a metropolitan world, not an “urban” one, and The Metropolitan Revolution is designed, in part, to strengthen that case. State of the City (courtesy of Living Cities)Living Cities, by contrast, is focused on poverty, and only incidentally on the larger economy. And, as a philanthropic collective, it may be stressing (more by implication than direct language) where philanthropy might spend its resources to produce the greatest results from limited resources. If The Metropolitan Revolution emphasizes the creative class and innovation, State of the City emphasizes the plight of those left behind by the creative class and innovation:
“Many books and organizations have emerged touting the key role of cities in building tolerance among people, spurring economic growth nationally, and accelerating new ideas that improve how we live. The level of attention being paid towards American cities is long overdue, but noticeably absent from these conversations is the fact that low-income people face tremendous hurdles to accessing the opportunities that cities create.”
Among the more specific details cited by Living Cities are these:
City budgets are strained particularly by rising health care and pension costs, and rising costs for maintenance and repair of water, electric, sewer, and transportation infrastructure.
Our educational system is broken, its dysfunction compounded by a changing workplace whose skill needs are evolving too rapidly for schools to catch up (“the skills we’re teaching people are not necessarily the skills the global workforce demands. This skills/job mismatch trend, therefore, must be considered an extension of the education trend. We can no longer rely on the outdated education and worker training systems that no longer consistently lead to employment opportunities”).
At the same time as lower-income citizens struggle to afford for-sale housing, there is an undersupply of rental properties, ”as multifamily home production is at its lowest in 17 years.”
The report is surely correct in observing the near-tautology that economic hardships fall disproportionately on lower-income Americans. For the most part, it does not address environmental issues, but it does discuss inefficiencies in public transit service. And Living Cities doesn’t shy away from controversy, attacking rail transit investments as siphoning resources away from buses, for example, and asserting that “low-income transit riders tend to live further from the urban core, resulting in less access to transportation.”
As an advocate of both bus and rail transit, I don’t share the implication of the first assertion that the two are inexorably in competition for the same dollars; in fact, some research suggests that the two have synergistic rather than competitive impacts, with cities with the most rail service also having the most bus service. As to the latter, lower-income transit riders in the far suburbs do face ridiculously bad service in many cases. But it would come as a surprise to many low-income residents of inner cities that most low-income transit riders are in the far suburbs. bus transit in Culver City (Los Angeles), CA (by: Javon Stoneham, creative commons)(Maybe the author meant to say that most transit riders in far suburbs are low-income; that is undoubtedly true, if a very different statement.)
In and around Washington, DC where I live, for example, lower-income residents tend to live on the east side of the inner city and in the eastern inner suburbs, while higher-income residents live to the west, both within the city and in the far suburbs; it’s not about who lives closest to the core. These quibbles aside, I certainly don’t dispute that our nation’s dispersed land use patterns and limited public transit systems create gross inefficiencies in travel time, distance and convenience for transit-dependent Americans.
The report observes that many of the challenges faced by cites and their lower-income residents are due to or profoundly influenced by large social and economic forces, and are so fundamental that new, more systemic approaches are needed to achieve reform. Indeed, Living Cities has some sharp words for the place-based world of community development, which it seems to view as largely obsolete in today’s world. These is from the report’s lead paragraphs:
“In the decades following World War II, the challenges the urban poor have faced in the U.S. have primarily been blamed on geographic isolation in blighted neighborhoods. Conventional wisdom had it that if leaders improved such neighborhoods — by upgrading buildings, attracting employers, and delivering programs to strengthen the social fabric — residents’ opportunities and incomes would improve as well . . .
“However, the world has drastically changed over the past few decades. Jobs that once flourished in downtown factories and offices have moved beyond city limits to the suburbs and abroad; technology has changed how people interact and what defines community; and poverty is no longer concentrated solely in the urban core, with failing schools, foreclosed homes, and high unemployment rates plaguing all communities.
“Despite this reality, the community development sector has failed to keep up with these enormous changes. . . . Place-based efforts, while beneficial to some, are not sufficient to reaching the scale necessary to fix these broken systems.”
I know from personal conversations that this point of view is not limited to Living Cities. I’ve heard it from at least two other largephilanthropic institutions.
The report is less clear on what new remedies should be addressed to these new realities, though at the end of the discussion of each trend it includes brief mentions of “emerging responses” that, if not sweeping, are innovative.
The glass is murky, but maybe brighter than in the recent past?
I have really struggled with how to comment on these disparate views of cities. There is truth in both views, I think, but where does that leave us?
homebuilding for low-income residents in Payson, UT (courtesy of Local Initiatives Support Corporation)I’ll start by saying that I’m not sure the shot at place-based community development is entirely fair, even though I’ll concede that it seems to be gaining currency in the philanthropic field. While I couldn’t agree more that we require systemic change to address chronic poverty (and, for that matter, a deteriorating environment), and that the geography of socio-economic challenges is changing, in my opinion we continue to need place-based efforts as well. Indeed, it’s possible to simultaneously address places and systems, for example, through an instrument of change such as LEED for Neighborhood Development, which provides aspirational but achievable standards for better development in particular places; LEED-ND at its core is a system designed to affect positive change, but it operates in particular places. Some are using the system in its traditional (and somewhat complicated) role of certifying new development, but its greater power may lie in more creative applications, as model standards for municipalities and as an informal planning framework for distressed neighborhoods.
LEED-ND is now in the implementation stage, both formally and informally, and it is critical that it be deployed and evolved in a way that establishes models for better living conditions where poverty exists, be it in inner cities or suburbs. The establishment and spread of those models then becomes systemic change.
The same is true, by the way, for the Green Communities program of Enterprise Community Partners (disclosure: I worked on both LEED-ND and Green Communities), which sets voluntary criteria for greening affordable housing. It has proved enormously useful in providing lower-income families with healthier and more environmentally sustainable homes, but it has done so through the instrument of community development in particular places. The work that another major supporter of community development, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, has done with NRDC to reconceive low-income neighborhoods around principles of green development is enormously exciting. Yes, we’ve worked in particular places, but the idea is to establish models that can be applied more broadly. Neither LEED-ND nor Green Communities is mentioned in the report, even as “emerging trends.”
GreenMarket, Kansas City, KS (courtesy of Local Initiatives Support Corporation)Does place-based community development need to add more geographically diverse approaches, and more holistic approaches that go beyond bricks and mortar? (On the latter point, the report cites with approval HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods program, which addresses the needs of communities with multi-faceted approaches.) Absolutely, and kudos to Living Cities for saying so. But let’s don’t write off the model. Personally, I see a lot of positive energy in the field right now; I don’t see it as obsolete or lacking approaches that can achieve scale.
I also think there are risks as well as potential benefits in newer, more systemic approaches. I’ve been through enough funding cycles and strategic planning exercises to know how seductive broad, systemic reform appears, promising more “bang for the buck” from limited resources. And the strategy can deliver, at least in theory, when it works and works quickly.
But sometimes putting one’s eggs in the basket marked “systemic reform” can come at a price. The environmental community was delivered a lesson in political reality as a result of our devoting a large portion of our resources to a decades-long effort to secure systemic federal climate legislation that, for reasons beyond our control, ultimately proved unsuccessful. That was followed by huge philanthropic and environmental-community investment in hoped-for systemic reform of federal transportation law. That, too, produced less than optimum results. In the end, both of those efforts, which appeared promising when initiated, carried opportunity costs. (Both outcomes also strongly support Katz and Bradley’s central thesis that the federal government is too broken to be available any time soon as an instrument of change; philanthropies and NGOs alike are now struggling with what the right non-federal approaches are.)
It has been said that life is what happens while we’re making big plans. So we had better pay some attention to the here and now, too. Frequently, the best opportunities for change are going to come in places where the right ingredients are aligning for added value to make a difference. While we may not be able to afford to be anything less than strategic in choosing the right locations, we also may not be able to afford lengthy periods of concentrating on systemic efforts that don’t pan out while largely neglecting the local level.
Boston (by: Nicholas Erwin, creative commons)Moreover, I would argue that innovation is inherently local in nature. Katz and Bradley make a very interesting point to the effect that the strengths and innovations that can emerge in Pittsburgh will likely be very different than those that emerge in, say, San Diego. How can groups like the one I work for – and indeed, Brookings, and the partners in Living Cities, too – harness that innovation to the right social and environmental ends? In a lot of cases, it will be because of ingredients that first exist in a particular place and time, and then spread from there.
All that said, it’s hard to disagree with the well-documented problems cited by Living Cities in its report. Anyone unaware that the US public educational system is horribly broken, for example, simply hasn’t been paying attention. Although I am paid to advocate for the environment first, I’m not sure there is a more important problem for either innovation or philanthropy to help solve. (Heck, I believe that inferior city education is an environmental problem.) Too many of our disadvantaged kids are losing ground compared to affluent kids, and nearly all of our kids are losing ground compared to those in other countries.
I don’t disagree with other big trends, either – diminishing municipal capacity, aging infrastructure, unemployment, household strain – but those problems are so daunting that I’m not sure they are soluble by an exclusively big-picture approach. I keep coming back to experimentation, innovation, and the propagation of models that are locally developed.
When you come down to it, the folks at Brookings know a lot more about the new metropolitan economy than I do (though I know more than a little), and the folks at Living Cities know much more about poverty and community development than I do (though, again, I know more than a little). Who is right? Should we be optimistic about the future of cities, or pessimistic? I’m notorious for being the latter – I’m always convinced my favorite sports teams will lose – but, when it comes to cities, I’m more with Brookings.
I believe the state of cities (or, if you prefer, the future of metros) has never looked brighter in my lifetime. Yes, the inequality created by wealth distribution in our country is appalling; so is our educational performance; and many people are still hurting from the recession.
Community celebration in Chinatown, San Francisco. Photo: Jeffrey Bruce
But, if you think cities are hurting now, you should have seen them 20 or 40 years ago, when whole districts were being burned to the ground and people of means were fleeing as fast as they could, taking their tax dollars and businesses with them. Crime was so rampant and scary in inner cities that smug suburbanites would have friendly debates about whose inner city was the real “murder capital” of the country.
By comparison, it’s amazing how much positive energy there is in cities (and, to be sure, in metro areas) today. Suburban sprawl has been slowed considerably. Inner cities are growing again. People of means, especially young people, want to be in cities today. While that carries its own set of challenges, I would submit that addressing the challenges of gentrification is a far better problem to have than coping with massive abandonment and rampant crime. It’s telling, by the way, that crime is not mentioned even once in State of the Cities: 20 years ago the report would have been considered hopelessly naïve without discussing it. There is a lot of good news about cities, but you’ll have to read the Brookings book to learn much about it.
On what do the authors agree?
A significant point on which both The Metropolitan Revolution and State of the City agree is that there is no longer a bright-line demarcation between “cities” and “suburbs.” But that’s because if suburbs – especially inner suburbs – are now dealing with problems once thought to be located only in inner cities, our inner cities are now enjoying a resurgence of social and economic activity once thought to be the hallmark of suburbs. To me, there’s more good news than bad in the new paradigm.
Which is certainly not to say that we can afford to ignore the very real negative trends that threaten our most vulnerable citizens. To the contrary, we should find ways to harness the positive energy in cities and metros to address the problems afflicting those left behind by progress.
My guess is that the Brookings authors and Living Cities authors wouldn’t disagree much on the underlying facts. They just each believe they have a story that needs telling. If their two stories have very different points of emphasis, they are both worth knowing.
Green roofs aren’t just isolated islands of nature. They’re also stepping stones for flying insects such as bees, scientists have found.
While it’s clear that green roofs can boost biodiversity in cities, scientists didn’t know whether these patches could act as connected habitat. So a team studied 40 green roofs in Zurich, Switzerland, with plants ranging from succulents to meadow species. From May to September 2010, the researchers caught 48,084 ground beetles, spiders, weevils, and bees from nearly 500 species on the green roofs and at corresponding green spaces on the ground.
The team then looked for links between the arthropod communities and factors such as the size of the roof, the amount of flowers, and distance to the nearest green roof or other habitat. For ground beetles and spiders, the local environment had a big influence on the species present. But for flying bugs such as bees and weevils, “connectivity was by far the most important variable,” the authors write in Ecology.
These roof-hopping insects may help pollinate plants, the team notes. And connected populations are more likely to bounce back from disturbances.
Source: Braaker, S. et al. 2013. Habitat connectivity shapes urban arthropod communities: The key role of green roofs. Ecology doi: 10.1890/13-0705.1.
Central Park in New York City, a world landmark of biophilia and nature preservation.
Biophilia is a term popularized by Harvard University myrmecologist and conservationist E.O. Wilson to describe the extent to which humans are hard-wired to need connection with nature and other forms of life. More specifically, Wilson describes it this way: “Biophilia…is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.” (Wilson, 1993, p.31). To Wilson biophia is really a “complex of learning rules” developed over thousands of years of evolution and human-environment interaction.
Evidence of the emotional and psychological benefits of nature is mounting and impressive (research shows its ability to reduce stress, to aid recovery from illness, to enhance cognitive skills and academic performance, to aid in moderating the effects of ADHD, autism and other child illnesses). Recent research suggests even that we are more generous in the presence of nature; all these values are in addition to the immense economic value of the ecological services provided by natural systems.
Support for the practice of biophilic design has been growing and there are now many exemplary examples of buildings that seek to integrate natural features and qualities. We recognize the need for biophilic workplaces, for healing gardens and spaces in hospitals, and for homes and apartments that provide abundant daylight, natural ventilation, plants and greenery. Less attention, however, has been focused on the city or urban scale, despite the fact that the planet continues an inexorable trend in the direction of urbanization. Urban residents need nature more than ever, and much work is needed to find creative and effective means for incorporating it into urban environments.
It is likely that the benefits of close contact with nature are deeper and even more profound, and the potential to make a difference by integrating nature directly into our lives, even greater than we realize. Nature ought not to be an afterthought, and ought not to only be viewed in terms of the (considerable to be sure) functional benefits typically provided (benefits of trees, green rooftops, wetlands for managing stormwater, for mediating air and water pollutants, for addressing urban heat island effects, and so on). The elements of a deeper concept of integrating nature into everyday living include a recognition of some of the following:
Important Ties to Place. There are considerable place-strengthening benefits and place-commitments that derive from knowledge of local nature; from direct personal contact; enhanced knowledge, and deeper connections = greater stewardship, and willingness to take personal actions on behalf of place and home;
Connections and Connectedness. Caring for place and environment, essential for human wellbeing and in turn essential ingredient in caring for each other;
A Need for Wonder and Awe in Our Lives. Nature has the potential to amaze us, stimulate us, propel us forward to want to learn more and understand more fully our world; Nature adds a kind of wonder value to our lives unlike almost anything else;
Meaningful Lives Require Nature. The qualities of wonder and fascination, the ability to nurture deep personal connection and involvement, visceral engagement in something larger than and outside oneself, offer the potential for meaning in life few other things can provide;
Urbanists and city planners have special opportunities and unique obligations to advance biophilic city design, utilizing a variety of strategies and tools, applied on a number of geographical and governmental scales. The agenda is one that must extend beyond conventional urban parks, and beyond building-centric green design. It is about redefining the very essence of cities as places of wild and restorative nature, from rooftops to roadways to riverfronts. It is about understanding cities as places that already harbor much nature and places that can become, through bold vision and persistent practice, even greener and richer in the nature they contain.
What a biophilic city is or could be is an open question, and it is hoped that this website will help to stimulate discussion of this. As a tentative starting point I offer some of the following as key qualities of biophilic cities:
Biophilic cities are cities of abundant nature in close proximity to large numbers of urbanites; biophilic cities are biodiverse cities, that value, protect and actively restore this biodiversity; biophilic cities are green and growing cities, organic and natureful;
In biophilic cities, residents feel a deep affinity with the unique flora, fauna and fungi found there, and with the climate, topography, and other special qualities of place and environment that serve to define the urban home; In biophilic cities citizens can easily recognize common species of trees, flowers, insects and birds (and in turn care deeply about them);
Biophilic cities are cities that provide abundant opportunities to be outside and to enjoy nature through strolling, hiking, bicycling, exploring; biophilic cities nudge us to spend more time amongst the trees, birds and sunlight.
Biophilic cities are rich multisensory environments, the where the sounds of nature (and other sensory experiences) are as appreciated as much as the visual or ocular experience; biophilic cities celebrate natural forms, shapes, and materials;
Biophilic cities place importance on education about nature and biodiversity, and on providing many and varied opportunities to learn about and directly experience nature; In biophilic cities there are many opportunities to join with others in learning about, enjoying, deeply connecting with, and helping to steward over nature, whether though a nature club, organized hikes, camping in city parks, or volunteering for nature restoration projects.
Biophilic cities invest in the social and physical infrastructure that helps to bring urbanites in closer connection and understanding of nature, whether through natural history museums, wildlife centers, school-based nature initiatives, or parks and recreation programs and projects, among many others;
Biophilic cities are globally responsible cities that recognize the importance of actions to limit the impact of resource use on nature and biodiversity beyond their urban borders; biophilic cities take steps to actively support the conservation global nature;
These are but a few of the ways a city might be seen as biophilic. What do you think? Are there other ways, and other important qualities or dimensions not listed above?
In a victory of David vs Goliath proportions, policymakers in Arizona stood up for its citizens by rejecting an attempt from the states largest utility to squash rooftop solar. Five months after Arizona Public Service (APS) sought approval to slap hefty new fees on its customers that go solar, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) voted yesterday to uphold Arizona solar savings and energy choice. While the vote was clearly a win for Arizonans, the ACCs approval of a small but troubling new fee makes it clear that there is a significant amount of education left to be done regarding distributed solars tremendous value.
Driving this proposal was that fact that solar is offering customers an affordable new energy option, and Arizonans are increasingly choosing to generate their own power from the sun. Rather than working with its customers and meeting this new market demand, APS attempted to dig in and regulate against competition to maintain its monopoly hold on electricity.
APS Proposal Denied
APS had proposed a new $50-100 monthly charge for solar customers, a discriminatory fee that would have wiped out any savings these customers would currently receive from their solar investment. APS justified the solar fee by saying that net metering a program that ensures solar customers receive full retail credit for power they deliver to the grid for their neighbors to use is a bad deal for Arizonans but thats just not true: private investment in reliable, local power generation benefits all ratepayers. Full retail net metering credit is a simple and proven way for customers and utilities to assign value to that power.
A study conducted this year for SEIA showed that these net metered systems actually deliver much more: $34 million in annual net grid benefits for APS customers alone. Thats before accounting for the social and environmental benefits: cleaner air and thousands of local jobs. APSs proposals were clearly not grounded in a fair accounting for DG solars real value, and our allies argued strongly in favor of undertaking that fair accounting in the appropriate venue: the next rate case.
Despite millions of dollars on spent on a misleading campaign by the utility and its proxies, public outcry against the APS proposal was overwhelming. A poll conducted last week found that, even after months of being blanketed by utility ads, a whopping 81% reject APSs solar fee and 77% would be less likely to vote for a candidate who ends solar savings. Over the course of this long campaign, more than 30,000 Arizonans emailed the ACC in support of rooftop solar.
Arizonans Show Up to Support Rooftop Solar
That support was demonstrated in person earlier this week when 1,000 Arizonans gathered in front of the ACC this week to protest APSs proposed fee. Inside a steady stream of about 100 citizens solar workers, solar customers, non-solar customers, environmental advocates, retirees, veterans, even one passionate 11-year old girl urged the Commissioners to stand up against the utility for the good of Arizonans. Yesterdays vote is a resounding demonstration that the peoples support of solar trumps corporate money. It showed just how out of step APSs anti-solar efforts are with the needs and demands of its own customers, and we were pleased to see Commission acting on behalf of the public they serve.
Interim Fixed Fee Adopted
Its important to note that while the most egregious aspects of APSs proposal were soundly rejected, the Commission did vote by a 3-2 vote to implement a relatively small but still unjustified new fixed fee of $0.70 per kilowatt as a monthly charge for all new residential solar customers (i.e. if you have a 5kW system on your house, you would pay $3.50 a month). The vote broke down as follows: Commissioners Stump, Bitter-Smith and Bob Burns voted yes, and Commissioners Pierce and Brenda Burns voted no, arguing that the fixed fee was too low.
The fee will be collected through the Lost Fixed Cost Recovery (LFCR) adjustor mechanism. APS is already using the LFCR to collect funds from customers to account for the fact that the Company is losing money when customers invest in energy efficiency or DG solar.
The new fixed charge will stay in place until APSs next general rate case, which must be filed in June 2015. However, the Commission did add a clause that allows the ACC to periodically adjust this charge in any APS LCFR reset proceeding, which happen on an annual basis. During the next rate case, net metering will be addressed in more detail.
Existing solar customers will not be assessed this charge, and will be grandfathered under their current rate structure arrangement, at least until the next rate case, though verbally several Commissioners expressed intent that they would be grandfathered from the charge in perpetuity. However, all rooftop solar customers, including existing customers, will soon need to sign a disclaimer that acknowledges that rates can change in the future.
Workshop Process Established
In the interim between now and the next rate case, the Commission has also decided to hold a series of workshops to determine the true costs and benefits, and any associated cost shift, of net metering. Vote Solar looks forward to participating in this process and making sure that individual solar investment is properly valued.
We strongly disagree with the Commission that net metering represents a cost to non-solar ratepayers, and we hope through the workshop process facts can be brought to the table to dispel this myth once and for all. Rooftop solar is helping Arizona families, schools and businesses take charge of their power supply and their electricity bills like never before. This private investment is helping build a cleaner, safer and lower cost energy supply for all of us.
This photo shows the African invader Melinis minutiflora in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park when first studied (left) and 20 years later. (Credit: UCSB)
Among the most impressive ecological findings of the past 25 years is the ability of invasive plants to radically change ecosystem function. Yet few if any studies have examined whether ecosystem impacts of invasions persist over time, and what that means for plant communities and ecosystem restoration.
UC Santa Barbara's Carla D'Antonio, Schuyler Professor of Environmental Studies, has conducted one of the only long-term studies of plant invader impacts that spans two decades. Returning to the same grass-invaded field sites in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park that she used in her 1990-1995 studies, D'Antonio, along with postdoctoral scholar Stephanie Yelenik, gathered new data that shed light on mechanisms regulating exotic plant dominance and community change through invasion. The findings are published online today in Nature.
"We were able to take advantage of detailed studies I and others had conducted in the 1990s. We permanently marked sites we had set up and were able to go back and gain insight into how plant invasions changed over time without management," said D'Antonio, who also is a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology. "Such studies are important because managers have little money to control invasive species or to study how impacts might change without management."
"Non-native plants can have very large impacts on ecosystem functioning -- including altering groundwater, soil salinity or pH and pollination syndromes," said lead author Yelenik, who earned her doctorate from UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology and now works for the U.S. Geological Survey's Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center on the island of Hawaii.
When D'Antonio and Yelenik revisited the study sites, they noticed that the invasive exotic perennial grasses (primarily an African invader called Melinis minutiflora) were dying, so they decided to repeat measures of nutrient cycling and plant community change. They found that the grasses' self-reinforcing effects on soil nutrients had disappeared and the percentage of invader coverage had declined.
Data showed that in the past 17 years, nitrogen mineralization rates at the sites dominated by the exotic grasses declined by half, returning them to pre-invasion levels. Nitrogen mineralization is the process by which organic nitrogen is converted to plant-available inorganic forms.
"Measuring mineralization the way we do is extremely time-consuming and expensive, so we did it in snapshots of time (mid-1990s versus 2010-2012)," Yelenik explained. "This is less than ideal because differences between the two study periods could be due to differences in rainfall."
To eliminate rainfall as a factor, the researchers examined long-term rainfall data for the region to determine if a relationship exists between nitrogen mineralization and rainfall during the study years. The data showed that rainfall during the two study periods was similar. In addition, rainfall did not correlate with differences in mineralization between time points. A mineralization assay in the lab, where moisture was kept constant, showed similar patterns to the researchers' most recent field data, gathered in 2011 and 2012. Taken together, these results suggest that nitrogen mineralization variations between the 1990s and recent years were not due to differences in rainfall.
While the study demonstrates that ecosystem impacts and feedbacks shift over time, it also indicates that this may not necessarily help native species' recovery. Yelenik and D'Antonio conducted a large outplanting experiment to test how a suite of native and exotic woody species responded to shifting ecosystem impacts. They added nitrogen fertilizer to mimic earlier stages of Melinis invasion and reduced Melinis competition to mimic patches during late invasion.
Similar responses occurred in five of the seven outplanted species: Growth rates and survivorship increased due to reduced competition from the exotic grasses as well as nitrogen additions. This indicates that the changing impacts of the grass over time do not alter the seedlings' ability to grow in the ecosystem.
Two nitrogen-fixing trees were exceptions: the native Hawaiian tree Acacia koa and the exotic tree Morella faya (from the Canary Islands but invading Hawaii today). These species did much better in later Melinis invasion conditions, and Morella faya did particularly well.
"The non-native Morella faya did a lot better for various reasons, but primarily because it has a faster growth rate," Yelenik said. "Plus in our sites it is bird-dispersed, which means it gets around and is, in fact, moving into the sites at a frightening rate. By contrast, the native Acacia did reasonably well in the experiment, but it just does not have as robust a growth rate as Morella. It is a very slow disperser and sparse in the region so we are not seeing it entering the sites on its own."
An important lesson here is that even if plant invasions can slow down on their own given enough time, native species may need further assistance in order to make a comeback, the researchers said. Other invaders may be poised to take advantage of reduced competition from the original invader.
"Knowing the mechanisms of how and why invasions alter ecosystems is insightful for predicting what will happen, but without further management we may not get native species back," Yelenik said. "When we see non-native species dying back and getting patchy, that may be the time to plant native species. It might turn out to be the most cost-effective way to get an ecosystem back to a more desirable state."
1.2 million acres of prairies vanish, undermining Obama's green energy goal
ROSCOE, S.D. (AP) — Robert Malsam nearly went broke in the 1980s when corn was cheap. So now that prices are high and he can finally make a profit, he's not about to apologize for ripping up prairieland to plant corn.
Across the Dakotas and Nebraska, more than 1 million acres of the Great Plains are giving way to cornfields as farmers transform the wild expanse that once served as the backdrop for American pioneers.
This expansion of the Corn Belt is fueled in part by America's green energy policy, which requires oil companies to blend billions of gallons of corn ethanol into their gasoline. In 2010, fuel became the No. 1 use for corn in America, a title it held in 2011 and 2012 and narrowly lost this year. That helps keep prices high.
"It's not hard to do the math there as to what's profitable to have," Malsam said. "I think an ethanol plant is a farmer's friend." What the green-energy program has made profitable, however, is far from green. A policy intended to reduce global warming is encouraging a farming practice that actually could worsen it.
That's because plowing into untouched grassland releases carbon dioxide that has been naturally locked in the soil. It also increases erosion and requires farmers to use fertilizers and other industrial chemicals. In turn, that destroys native plants and wipes out wildlife habitats. It appeared so damaging that scientists warned that America's corn-for-ethanol policy would fail as an anti-global warming strategy if too many farmers plowed over virgin land. The Obama administration argued that would not happen. But the administration didn't set up a way to monitor whether it actually happened.
It did.
More than 1.2 million acres of grassland have been lost since the federal government required that gasoline be blended with increasing amounts of ethanol, an Associated Press analysis of satellite data found. Plots that were wild grass or pastureland seven years ago are now corn and soybean fields. That's in addition to the 5 million acres of farmland that had been aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — that have vanished since Obama took office.
In South Dakota, more than 370,000 acres of grassland have been uprooted and farmed from since 2006. In Edmunds County, a rural community about two hours north of the capital, Pierre, at least 42,000 acres of grassland have become cropland — one of the largest turnovers in the region. Malsam runs a 13-square-mile family farm there. He grows corn, soybeans and wheat, then rents out his grassland for grazing. Each year, the family converts another 160 acres from grass to cropland.
Chemicals kill the grass. Machines remove the rocks. Then tractors plow it three times to break up the sod and prepare it for planting.
Scattered among fields of 7-foot tall corn and thigh-high soybeans, some stretches of grassland still exist. Cattle munch on some grass. And "prairie potholes" — natural ponds ranging from small pools to larger lakes — support a smattering of ducks, geese, pelicans and herons. Yet within a mile of Malsam's farm, federal satellite data show, more than 300 acres of grassland have been converted to soybeans and corn since 2006.
Nebraska has lost at least 830,000 acres of grassland, a total larger than New York City, Los Angeles and Dallas combined. "It's great to see farmers making money. It hasn't always been that way," said Craig Cox of the Environmental Working Group. He advocates for clean energy but opposes the ethanol mandate. "If we're going to push the land this hard, we really need to intensify conservation in lockstep with production, and that's just not happening," he said.
Jeff Lautt, CEO of Poet, which operates ethanol refineries across the country, including in South Dakota, said it's up to farmers how to use their land. "The last I checked, it is still an open market. And farmers that own land are free to farm their land to the extent they think they can make money on it or whatever purpose they need," he said. Yet Chris Wright, a professor at South Dakota State University who has studied land conversion, said: "The conversation about land preservation should start now before it becomes a serious problem." Wright reviewed the AP's methodology for determining land conversion.
The AP's analysis used government satellite data to count how much grassland existed in 2006 in each county, then compare each plot of land to corresponding satellite data from 2012. The data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Agriculture identify corn and soybean fields. That allowed the AP to see which plots of grassland became cropland.
To reach its conservative estimate of 1.2 million acres lost, the AP excluded grassland that had been set aside under the government's Conservation Reserve Program, in which old farmland is allowed to return to a near-natural state. The AP used half-acre sections of earth and excluded tiny tracts that became corn, which experts said were most likely outliers. Corn prices more than doubled in the years after Congress passed the ethanol mandate in 2007. Now, Malsam said, farmers can make about $500 an acre planting corn. His farm has just become profitable in the past five years, allowing him and his wife, Theresa, to build a new house on the farmstead.
Four miles south, signs at each end of the town of Roscoe announce a population of only 324. But the town, which relies in part on incomes like Malsam's, supports a school, a restaurant, a bank, a grocery store and a large farm machinery store. The manager of the equipment dealership, Kaleb Rodgers, said the booming farm economy has helped the town and the dealership prosper. The business with 28 employees last year sold a dozen combines at about $300,000 apiece, plus more than 60 tractors worth between $100,000 and $300,000, he said.
"If we didn't have any farmers we wouldn't have a community here. We wouldn't have a business. I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't be able to feed my family," Rodgers said. "I think ethanol is a very good thing." Jim Faulstich, president of the South Dakota Grasslands Coalition, said the nation's ethanol and crop insurance policies have encouraged the transformation of the land. Faulstich, who farms and ranches in central South Dakota near Highmore, said much of the land being converted is not suited to crop production, and South Dakota's strong winds and rains will erode the topsoil.
"I guess a good motto would be to farm the best and leave the rest," he said.
Gillum reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Dina Cappiello and Matt Apuzzo contributed to this report from Washington.
