Wood thrush. (Photo by Jeff Whitlock.)

Cross-posted from Cool Green Science.

Mercury pollution — nothing to worry about if I don’t live in the rural Northeast and don’t eat tons of fish, right?

Guess again, says a new report done by the Biodiversity Research Institute (BRI) in conjunction with The Nature Conservancy. The report, “Hidden Risk,” details the widespread and deep impacts of mercury pollution in terrestrial nature — particularly on animals such as songbirds and bats. Researchers are discovering how mercury is causing big declines in reproductive success among these species, as well as physiological oddities — like developmental asymmetries and an inability of some birds to hit high notes.

And the same rain that brings mercury pollution down from the sky falls on us, too. So are these species a kind of canary in the coal mine for mercury’s effects on other vertebrates, including people? And will strict new federal standards limiting U.S. power plant pollution be enough in a world where mercury pollution is on the rise from China and other nations? I talked with two co-authors of “Hidden Risk” — BRI’s executive director, Dave Evers, and Tim Tear, the Conservancy’s director of science for New York — to find out more. (Download the report here.)

Q. Some are going to be surprised that mercury pollution is still a problem — didn’t various agencies and industries take steps to reduce mercury emissions over the last decade in the United States? So why are high levels of mercury still a problem in many wildlife species?

Dave Evers: Yes, a lot of mercury has been taken out of air pollution over the past few decades — but our understanding is growing of how just a little mercury can adversely affect wildlife, and how many species have been affected. More species are being impacted than we had thought, and the toxicity of methylmercury to those species is at lower threshold levels than we ever realized.

Tim Tear: Many of these species and many of the places affected are in people’s backyards. People used to think that mercury pollution was a problem isolated to remote areas of the Northeast. No more.

Q. So, would someone see a bird or a bat acting strangely because of mercury pollution? Or is this something that data is telling you?

Evers: The effects are difficult to see in the field for the average observer. Mercury doesn’t create physical mutations, and an individual animal with mercury will probably die from predation first. But mercury is a neurotoxin that does impact wildlife behavior, and that behavior impacts their survival and reproduction. We focus on data to really quantify the impacts of mercury on the reproductive success of species.

For example, we quantified mercury impacts on the common loon. Common loons need to spend about 98 percent of their time on a nest incubating their eggs to have those eggs successfully hatch. We’ve quantified with over 5,000 hours of observation that loons with high mercury levels spend only 85 percent of their time incubating those eggs. So they spend less time in an incubation posture, and because of that, eggs do not hatch, and because of that, the species’ reproductive success goes down.

Q. Where is the mercury pollution still coming from? And what U.S. regions are of most concern?

Tear: Most of the research has really focused on the Northeast United States — an area that’s been really hard hit by acid rain, which makes mercury a bigger problem. But mercury pollution is happening all over the world. It comes globally from Asia, as well as nationally from power plants in the Midwest, to locally from waste incinerators. We’re going to need to address all sources of mercury to be successful in stopping these impacts.

Q. And in different habitats, right? Most people in the United States who know about mercury in nature know about it through warnings about the fish they eat.

Evers: Yes, there’s been a paradigm shift in new findings. In the past, most of the scientists assessing risk from mercury in an ecosystem would be looking at fish-eating birds and fish-eating mammals — because we knew methylmercury (the organic form of mercury) moved through the food web in aquatic organisms. But there’s been a missing link in looking at mercury in terrestrial ecosystem food webs and looking at how species that eat insects and spiders — what we call “invertivores” — can be affected.

In the invertivore food web, the key pieces are no longer fish, but spiders. A bird that eats a spider that ate a spider that ate a fly — that’s four different changes in the trophic food web. We’ve established that a little songbird like a northern waterthrush or a sparrow that eats spiders can actually be higher up in the food web than a bald eagle, which eats fish — and so that songbird has more mercury in its body than does the eagle.

Tear: We’ve also discovered that mercury is in many more food webs than we realized. It is not just in lakes and ponds. It’s in our forests, our estuaries; it’s in the lowlands and on the mountaintops. It’s in the spiders in the Adirondacks, and it’s in backyard birds in New York City.

Q. You mentioned effects on reproductive success. What are some of the other impacts of mercury on terrestrial wildlife?

Evers: For example, bird song is affected. Two recent studies show that birds with high mercury can’t hit the high notes, and their songs are simplified. I also worry about long-distance migration, because high mercury has been shown to affect the symmetry of development. If a bird’s left wing is 5 percent different in shape than its right wing, that bird is going to fly in a crooked way to compensate for it, which requires more energy to make a flight of thousands of miles to its wintering area. Ultimately, that’s going to affect its survival.

Q. That’s sad. But ultimately, why should humans care?

Tear: First, if you care about the environment and you care about birds and bats and bugs, then you should care that many of these animals are being heavily impacted.

But the second answer is that the neurotoxic rain that contains mercury falls on humans as well as wildlife. We already know that mercury can be a big problem in human health. This research establishes that the effects of mercury are happening all over the planet, all over many habitat types, to vertebrate species other than ourselves. So people should be concerned about these effects, because there’s a link between human health and ecosystem health.

Q. Back to the science of this. How the heck do you measure mercury in a bird population, anyway?

Evers: It’s actually very simple and straightforward. There are nice and easy ways to capture and/or take samples from an individual bird that are quick and are non-harmful to the bird and do very little disruption to its routine, other than just having it in a net or hand for a half hour or so. We take a blood sample — just a drop does the trick. We also can take a feather sample, which gives us more of a long-term picture of how much mercury has come into that individual over time.

Q. But how do you disentangle the effects of mercury on birds and bats from other factors? How do you know that it’s mercury that is causing the decline of the wood thrush or the little brown bat?

Evers: It’s a question we’re still studying. There are multiple stressors at play for many species and habitats, and as conservation biologists, we are trying to understand those. We want to provide scientific information to landscape managers and policymakers, so we will have these birds around for a few more hundred years at least.

Take the olive-sided flycatcher. In the last four years, it’s declined by 80 percent, so 80 percent of this population is gone in comparison to four years ago. It’s a bird that lives in bogs. Bogs are known to have high methylation rates of mercury, but they are not well-studied as a habitat whatsoever. Neither is the olive-sided flycatcher. So here you have a species in a habitat that I think is at great risk to mercury as a potential driver and a primary stressor for why this decline is happening. Mercury is an omnipresent stressor, but the question is always: Where is it a primary stressor?

Tear: I’d also add that, in some places where birds are declining, there has been no obvious habitat change, and many people think of the challenges as being primarily habitat loss, but we certainly know that, for example, some species like the wood thrush within the Adirondack Park, there are fewer wood thrush today than there were 20 years ago. They’re still there, but there aren’t as many. The question is why, and this is part of the disentangling of those different stressors that Dave is referring to.

Q. Is there any relationship between mercury emissions and greenhouse-gas emissions? Is there a climate change connection?

Tear: Well, many of the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxides and other air pollutants — such as nitrogen and sulfur, which cause acid rain, and mercury, which brings us this neurotoxic rain — come from power plants, and all of these air pollutants have negative impacts on our environment. Our research shows that we should be factoring in these ecological impacts when we consider the cost and benefits of regulatory programs such as the recent Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule. But so far, estimating the ecological impact of these air pollutants that are coming from similar sources as CO₂ has not been done.

Evers: Climate change might also be causing great mercury methylation rates into ecosystems or even remobilizing mercury that was stored in the system. For instance, forest fires have become more predominant because of climate change in some parts of the country — and those forests hold a lot of legacy mercury in their systems, which can be released quite rapidly with a fire. Greater storm intensity and frequency could be increasing deposition of mercury from the global atmospheric pool to landscapes below. Increased wetting and drying cycles could be another factor in greater mercury methylation.

Q. It sounds dire. So what can anyone do?

Tear: First, while we need more research on this, there are definitely landscape and wildlife management actions that might help reduce the amount of mercury embedded in the environment.

Dave mentioned that hotter forest fires that occur for whatever reason can release a great deal more mercury than cooler burns — so using fire management in our forest systems could have a significant impact on the amount of mercury that’s released. How we manage artificial reservoirs is extremely important — if we manage those in a way to make the wetting and drying cycles greater, we might also be increasing the amount of mercury methylation.

Evers: Another example: It makes a lot of sense not to log in a riparian area anyway — and it also makes sense from a mercury standpoint. There is a lot of legacy mercury and even new mercury coming into these forest ecosystems, and the less we disturb that mercury the better. There are studies right now quantifying the mercury effects of logging practices in Oregon.

Q. What else?

Tear: We need greater investment in this country’s mercury monitoring network. A stronger network would help us gather data systematically and also help us know whether current efforts to reduce mercury pollution — like the EPA’s recent Mercury and Air Toxics Rule standard — are enough to improve these areas already damaged by mercury.

We also need continued research on this issue. We’re just beginning to understand the impacts of mercury on both ecological and human health. And we need to support efforts at all levels to reduce mercury — global, regional, and local. Mercury is coming from multiple levels, and no single level will be enough.

Evers: On the importance of a national network — I’ve been fortunate to work with both U.S. Senate and House representatives to introduce bills that would establish the first national mercury monitoring network, which we need from a federal accountability standpoint. But industry also has been supportive of this idea. Industry likes certainty, and a national monitoring network could really help provide a standard playing field for the industry in terms of installing emission protections on their smokestacks.

And a national monitoring network could also help the United States politically wrangle with other countries where mercury emissions are increasing. About 50 percent of mercury emissions have been taken out of U.S. sources between 1990 and 2005 — but the global pool of mercury continues to increase because countries like China are putting in a new coal-fired power plant once a week. A standardized mercury monitoring program provides us the way to really track our progress both spatially and temporally.

Photo: Scott Pena

Let’s say the rise in sea level that climate change will bring us — from melting ice caps and expanding seas — won’t be “all that bad” by, oh, the year 2080. Maybe … just half a meter (a little under 20 inches). We can deal with half a meter, right?

Well, yeah — if we’re ready to “deal with” almost 50 percent more affected people and 73 percent more property losses from a typical Category 3 hurricane — all because of the higher storm surge that’ll come from that additional 20 inches of sea level. (“Storm surge,” in case you don’t know, describes the ocean water that a storm’s winds bring ashore, in addition to what’s usually there with normal tides.)

Those kinds of losses are the scenario the southern shores of Long Island, N.Y., are looking at, according to a new peer-reviewed study in the journal Natural Hazards. And it’s a scenario that could apply to lots of other U.S. coastlines, says Christine Shepard, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow with the Nature Conservancy’s Global Marine Team.

Unfortunately, she adds, sea-level rise hasn’t been on the radar of most U.S. coastal planners until recently. So is there any good news? Yes, says Shepard: The study offers a set of approaches and accessible tools with which those coastal planners can start mapping their own communities’ vulnerabilities. (Are you listening, Islip, N.Y.?) I caught up with Shepard to find out more.,

Christine Shepard.Q. Why did you choose to study sea-level rise and storm surges along the southern shores of Long Island? How typical are these places of other U.S. coastlines?

A. First, it’s a very densely populated area, so the modeling gives us a good look at how damaging storm surge can be to such an area. We also have access to some very good elevation data on the area. And there’s also a history of storm surges here — they had an intense Category 3 storm in 1938. All that made it a good area to test the development of our methods.

But while Suffolk County is one of the most populous counties in the United States, the results that we found are comparable to other studies that evaluated the effect of sea-level rise on storm surge in less densely populated areas. So we can definitely extrapolate these results to other U.S. metropolitan areas or coastal cities.

Q. We’re talking about 20 inches of sea-level rise. (The height of an English Springer Spaniel, if that helps anyone visualize it.) Just how damaging could 20 inches be?

A. Just a small amount of sea-level rise increases the damage — especially in areas with intense development and a high concentration of people and properties stretching from the coast inland, like the area of Long Island that we studied. Also, the damage per property increases with the depth of the water. Even just a slightly higher storm surge gives you more damage per property — you can really see these impacts at the town level.

Q. Besides having high concentrations of people and development, what else makes a coastal community especially vulnerable to storm surge? In your study, the town of Islip (which has a population of almost 325,000) already has a lot of risk today, and 0.5 meters of sea-level rise is going to accentuate that quite a bit.

A. Two variables: socioeconomic considerations, and critical infrastructure and facilities.

Some of the common socioeconomic characteristics of communities that are more likely to have disproportionate impacts from coastal hazards include having 1) areas with high population density and housing unit density, 2) areas with a lot of poverty, or 3) areas with a lot of households that lack access to vehicles they could use to evacuate.

Part of the point of this study was to create maps that communities can use to develop targeted approaches to hazard mitigation. We created a social vulnerability index to help map these communities so that hazard mitigation policies or grants could be targeted towards communities that are socially vulnerable, to reduce their risk. And for critical facilities and infrastructure, just to have easily accessible maps of where these are with respect to present and future storm surge risk is very valuable for community planning.

It’s also valuable for conservation. I’ve been working on maps that prioritize marsh restoration projects adjacent to population centers and vulnerable communities. These marshes may help mitigate storm impacts, so that kind of planning could be a win-win for coastal communities and conservation.

Q. The 0.5-meter sea-level rise estimate by 2080 you used – that’s a pretty conservative estimate, isn’t it, given some of the modeling that’s now out there?

A. I would say it is pretty conservative, so you could conclude that the results from this paper are conservative. And our estimates of damage are also conservative because our analysis only incorporates losses due to flooding, not wind.

Q. Why haven’t coastal agencies and towns in the United States taken sea-level rise into account when they’ve thought about managing storm surges?

A. First, FEMA didn’t really acknowledge sea-level rise and the impacts on storm surge until the last couple of years. There’s been a cultural dichotomy between the people who analyze the impacts of sea-level rise versus those who plan for hurricanes and storm surges.

But most municipalities aren’t currently planning for increases in inland extent of storm surge. Their proposed maps for a variety of strengths of hurricanes assume present conditions and don’t incorporate sea-level rise. The same goes for flood maps.

Q. The study gives communities a methodology for getting prepared. What do they need to do to tap into it?

A. It’s never been easier for them to do their own planning for storm surge and sea-level rise. The tools that we incorporate into our approach are readily available, and the organizations or government agencies that provide them provide training for them. And we tried to pull from those processes and tools that someone with an intermediate level of GIS [geographic information systems] expertise — someone who would be a typical GIS analyst for a county or a city — could use with training offered by some of the agencies that provide the tools, such as FEMA and NOAA.

Q. 2080 is an awfully long time off. Is there anything in this report that should set off alarm bells for ordinary people, either for right now or 10 to 20 years down the road? Should they be buying property in places vulnerable to these kinds of storm surges?

A. If they’re thinking about purchasing coastal property, they definitely need to consider that current flood zone maps do not reflect any sea-level rise. Those maps may soon be obsolete.

Joanne Wilson surveying coral reefs in Raja Ampat

You’ve probably heard about coral bleaching — the mass die-off of coral reefs because of warming sea temperatures, a dynamic that can be attributed at least indirectly to climate change. It’s a problem of growing concern to the hundreds of millions of people whose lives depend on reefs and the fish they shelter. But as ocean temps continue to rise, is there any hope for coral?

Science to the rescue! Researchers are learning tons about which kinds of coral species are either resistant to bleaching or bleach more quickly — and using that data to figure out which reefs are going to be more resilient to climate change … which will feed into where to focus protection efforts. As part of the work, marine scientists often need to do painstaking fish and coral surveys in beautiful but remote locations — which is why The Nature Conservancy sent a science team led by Joanne Wilson and Sangeeta Mangubhai to spend two weeks in November in the Indonesian archipelago of Raja Ampat, known as the global center of marine biodiversity. I caught up with Wilson and Mangubhai — barely dry from all their diving — to get the skinny on what they found, including giant clams and an anchovy fish ball.     

Q. You found less coral bleaching on this expedition than you’d thought you would. How significant is that finding? Should we be less worried about coral bleaching than we were before?

Joanne Wilson: Coral bleaching occurs when water temperatures are warmer than normal — for example, during La Niña events like the one we experienced last year. The increasing frequency and intensity of these warming events is associated with climate change. Fortunately, during our expedition, water temperatures were within normal ranges, so corals on Misool reefs were not bleaching. But with bleaching events predicted to increase in the future, we are still vigilant and concerned about Raja Ampat’s reefs.

Q. OK, so we’re still concerned about bleaching — but what can we really do about it?  

JW: We can help build reef resilience. During the surveys we did find a few pale corals, indicating slight temperature stress. These corals belonged to a species that is very sensitive to temperature stress. Studying those corals will help us better understand the different responses of coral species to increased water temperatures. By combining this new knowledge with information on the distribution of coral species, we can predict with increased accuracy which reefs are likely to be more vulnerable to bleaching in the future — which can in turn can guide reef resilience efforts.

Q. Marine protected areas like the one you were visiting often have “no-take” zones where fishing is restricted or banned. You were studying whether fish were bigger and more numerous in these zones — essentially, whether these zones were serving as “fish banks” for the rest of the region. Are they?

Sangeeta Mangubhai: Our expedition took us to the Southeast Misool MPA [marine protected area], which is still in the process of being zoned, though there is currently one 425-square-kilometer [164-square-mile] no-take zone that is being actively enforced. Our data show that the fish biomass and abundance were higher within the existing no-take zone, especially in areas with high current (often at the points of islands) where many fish species tend to aggregate. We also recorded more sharks in the no-take zone as compared to other areas of the MPA where fishing continues. So yes, the existing no-take zone is acting as a fish bank. However, given how overfished the reefs are in Misool, it will take a few more years before the no-take zone accumulates enough fish to spill over into adjacent areas.

Q. How do you determine whether fish are bigger and more abundant in a particular region? How do you know you’re not just finding a lot of big fish that day?

SM: Over the last two years, we’ve been classifying the reefs in Misool to give us a better understanding of the range of coral reef habitats there. We do this because we know all coral reefs are not the same — they differ depending on the habitat and oceanographic conditions they are exposed to, and so do their fish populations. The fish population in a lagoonal reef is going to be different — both in terms of species and numbers — from the fish population in an adjacent reef that’s exposed to waves and wind.

When we do our reef health surveys, we make sure that we are surveying similar reef habitats so that the data is comparable. We also survey multiple reefs belonging to the same habitat type, so that we can develop an average that reflects the general condition of the reefs. In addition, we know which fish tend to spread themselves out on a reef, and which tend to aggregate in large schools, and we take this into account when we do our surveys and when we interpret the data.

Q. Speaking of aggregation, you also found a “fish ball” of anchovies — which I’m guessing isn’t something that goes into a Caesar salad. What is it? Why is it significant?

JW: An anchovy fish ball is an aggregation of perhaps millions of these small silver fish. By following the principle of safety in numbers, these anchovies were hoping that at least some of them would escape being eaten. Anchovies form the base of the food chain — they’re a staple meal for fish like tuna, for sea birds and for many whale and dolphin species. They are also caught by the ton and then dried and sold for human consumption in Indonesia. So it’s important that anchovy habitat is protected and the anchovy fishery is well managed to provide for both a healthy ecosystem and a sustainable harvest.  

A veritable Dr. Seuss book of coral. From left to right, cynarina, physogyra, euphyllia ancora and lobophyllia coral.Q. One scientist I know described the fish and corals in the Coral Triangle (CT) like something out of a Dr. Seuss book — totally wild. You both have done a lot of diving in the CT — did you see anything this time you’d never seen before?

JW: Absolutely. This is the center of reef biodiversity, so we certainly saw a lot of creatures that are not commonly found in other reefs and had us poring over photos and reaching for the reference books each evening! Some of the coral species form weird and wonderful fragile shapes in very sheltered coves among the limestone karst. We found a strangely shaped anemone that looked a lot like a black fern and also came across mating octopuses on two occasions.

Q. A number of Indonesian scientists helped you do the monitoring on this expedition. Does that presence help the credibility of your findings with the people who live in Raja Ampat? And how are your findings going to be used there?

SM: There are a number of reasons we have mainly Indonesian scientists on our trips. First, the Conservancy feels that if we work in a country like Indonesia, it is important to invest in long-term capacity and empower local scientists to lead the monitoring work themselves instead of relying on outsiders. Second, it does create real credibility for our findings at the local level as well as a great sense of pride for communities to have locals involved in an expedition and collecting data on their reefs. And third, it is the Indonesian scientists that will be working with outreach staff and the local communities to finalize a zoning plan for the MPA — to do this, they need to be experts with firsthand knowledge and understanding of the reefs, to enable them to stand on equal footing with local communities while discussing the communities’ resources and how best to manage them. Local scientists know how to speak to their government and communities better than outsiders.

Q. Everybody thinks diving is fun and glamorous, but Raja Ampat isn’t an easy place to work — you had to bring in everything you needed from a town 98 miles away across open ocean, which I understand is 16 hours by steamboat. What was the most challenging thing about this expedition?

SM: Given how remote this region is, we had to put a lot of thought and planning into the trip before it began. There was no shop we could duck into to pick up something we had forgotten, so we needed spares of essential equipment. We had to be prepared to fix any equipment that malfunctioned or broke down ourselves. Every night, on top of entering our data, we also had to take inventory — check how much fuel we had used, investigate the state of our gear, and decide where we could safely anchor the boat each night, taking into account that there were many unmarked reefs we couldn’t afford to damage. In some areas, we had to rely on the local knowledge of our community monitoring assistants to safely navigate narrow passages. With no accurate information available on tides and currents, we had to make sure that, when we chose dive sites, the currents were not too strong. And we had to be prepared to put into place additional safety measures, if they were required for the dive.

Q. Coral reefs are in trouble worldwide — most everybody knows that. But are you as scientists more hopeful now than you were before the expedition about our ability to protect them? Why or why not?

JW: We came away from the expedition with mixed feelings. Raja Ampat is certainly a very beautiful and diverse area, but even this far-flung corner of Indonesia, the reefs showed signs of overexploitation and damage from bomb fishing.

But we saw strong positive signs, too — all of the local community members on our expedition used to be illegal fishermen, and now they’re now active conservationists. There’s now an agreement between Misool Eco Resort — a local dive resort — and local villages to sustainably manage local reefs while creating livelihood opportunities. We’re also supporting the local government’s efforts to develop management plans for all of Raja Ampat’s marine protected areas. This will give some communities their first opportunity to affect the decisions that determine how their resources are used and accessed. So while there’s still reef exploitation, these developments give us hope.

New York City’s High Line Park. Nature is everywhere, if you know where to look.Photo: John Dalton.

Emma Marris asks these and other icon-busting questions her new book Rambunctious Garden — potentially the most optimistic and controversial work about the future of nature to appear in years. Marris, a former correspondent for Nature magazine, takes big issue with enviro doom-and-gloomers and last-great-places conservationists, arguing in Rambunctious Garden that pristine wildness has been a myth for at least 13,000 years and that we live on a thoroughly domesticated planet whose nature it’s up to us to manage … and even improve upon. It sounded so heretical that I had to call her up and ask her to explain.

Q. The title of your book — Rambunctious Garden — encapsulates your vision for nature, as a garden that we as humans firmly control, consciously making decisions about which kind of nature goes where. You know that’s going to raise the hackles of a lot of environmentalists, don’t you? It has connotations of playing God and engineering nature solely for our benefit.

A. Yes. I decided to go for it and be provocative, because the title is meant to describe what the Earth is and can be. Because the planet already is a garden, and we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t admit the depth of human influence over nature. We’re in charge about where plants and animals are, either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s our space that we’re landscaping now.

Q. Like a farm?

A. It doesn’t have to be a sterile, formal garden that doesn’t have any sort of oomph or spirit to it. It can have this rambunctious and free side to it. We can let parts of the garden go feral, and it can have a lot of energy and beauty to it, but it’s still ultimately a garden. We’re still ultimately in charge.

The flip side of that phrase also describes the future home garden. I’m sitting at my desk right now, looking across the street at my neighbor here in Columbia, Mo., and her front yard is a very short, neat, tidy lawn and about half‑a‑dozen hybrid, sterile, ornamental flowers in a row. If you replace that with something much more biodiverse, much more untended, weedy-looking, buggy, your biodiversity is going to go way up. Your conservation value can go way up, and you get a more rambunctious kind of garden aesthetic. So I meant for the phrase to work on both scales — the whole planet, and your backyard.

Q. That’s a big theme for the book — that nature is everywhere, and why don’t we embrace that? That nature isn’t just some spectacular landscape, the way most conservation organizations talk about it, but that it’s your backyard, the sliver of median strip you drive by every day, and in vacant lots and industrial waterways, and that’s the sense of nature that we should be cultivating, as background to our everyday lives. But doesn’t that argument really reemphasize the marginality of nature, a nature that’s weedy and degraded and that no one will really fight for?

A. When you use the phrase “marginal” to describe this kind of nature, that’s a tip-off as to where you’re coming from. Because nature isn’t marginal. Dirt is underneath everything — the built landscape floats like islands on the sea of nature. Some of that nature pokes through in skinny bits, but when you connect those together, there’s a lot of nature.

And just because I want people to get out and get excited about the vines growing in the alley doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also get excited about going to national parks, or that conservation should swerve away from having big interconnected pieces of undeveloped nature for some species. What I’m really proposing is a shift in our value system. What we value and don’t value can change. “Weedy” is an interesting cultural concept — in reality, weeds are successful plants. We should celebrate them, because they’re the plants we don’t have to worry about it. They’re gong to be fine. They’re the resilient part of nature.

But you’re right — we do have a long road to go before we look at an empty lot and, instead of thinking “neglected,” “weedy,” “trash,” we instead think: “Oh, I wonder what species are here. Gosh, there must be lots of pollination going on in this area, and, boy, if I come here at a certain time of day, maybe I can see some neat bird species. And, oh, gosh, isn’t this pretty?” But the weeds are the nature we’re beating back constantly.

Q. Is there enough of that kind of nature around to make a difference, both for biodiversity and for what nature gives us?

A. My argument comes down to acreage. Big national parks have an impressive amount of acreage, but if you look at doing conservation in all these little spaces, the combined acreage of those could kick the ass of the acreage of the big parks. It’s just a huge playing field that we can do conservation on. It’s practically everything. Getting a certain amount of conservation value out of farm management, for instance — that would be a huge victory globally.

Q. You write a lot about conservation in Europe versus how it’s practiced in America. Is Europe ahead of America in understanding this?

Emma Marris.

A. Yeah, absolutely, and not necessarily because they’re massively enlightened. It’s because they don’t have the Grand Canyon to distract them. They don’t have the grand wildernesses to take over their mental space, so they’ve been able to see the beauty and complexity of nature in these much smaller canvases. And they’re constantly fiddling with their conservation efforts. Management of nature is just second nature to them. They have to work really hard not to manage things, whereas we have to sort of grit our teeth to admit to ourselves that we do have to manage things.

Q. You have this fascinating chapter on the Oostvaardersplassen, a nature reserve outside of Amsterdam in which an entire landscape has been designed by an ecologist to run as it did 10,000 years ago, except the predators are largely gone, so it’s been created for nothing to look as if nothing had ever changed. Except, of cour
se, that it’s one of the most intensely managed places you could possibly find outside of agriculture. How do you feel about re‑wilding projects like this? Are they valuable? Are they curiosities? What are they saying to us?

A. I love that place. I mean, here you are, in one of the tidiest, densest, most organized countries in the world, and then you go through these gates, and all of a sudden, you’re in the savannah, with huge herds of animals running around. It’s fascinating and just unbelievable.

And if part of what we value about nature is that sense of awe that it can give us, I was awed by that place. They’ve also had a lot of success attracting animals that have showed up voluntarily and responded well to the habitat. So I think that if that keeps happening, then the Oostvaardersplassen is an argument that re‑wilding projects are not just curiosities but can be really valuable conservation tools.

Q. Back to the garden idea: You’re advancing a radical idea in this book — that people can make more nature or better nature than we have now. That cuts directly against the usual pessimistic paradigm of environmentalism — as advanced by Bill McKibben and others — which assumes that there is a set amount of nature, that nature left alone is the ideal, and all we can do is defend it against the ravages of rampant development. How did you come to this idea?

A. Partly because I was never classically trained as either an ecologist or an environmentalist. So I came to the ecology and conservation beat at Nature as an outsider, and while I sort of casually held a number of the sort of common beliefs about what is wilderness and what counts as nature, I wasn’t really wedded to them culturally. So it was easier for me to see where some of the more traditional ideas of conservation and environmentalism are starting to come apart at the seams a little bit, the more we learn about paleoecology and the dynamic nature of ecosystems and how nature has always been changing. And this thinking has been popping up at ecology conferences over the last few years.

I also had a childhood where I spent a lot of time in really crappy ecosystems and had a ball — in badly maintained city parks and third-growth forests — and it just never occurred to me that I wasn’t in nature.

Q. But you’re basically saying there is no wilderness anymore — that nature as we once thought about it, a place apart from humanity, untouched by it — doesn’t exist.

A. That’s now generally acknowledged in the literature. I have to add: My personal experiences in nature have always been pretty close to the road, and when I started hanging out with ecologists, I found that they were sticking pretty close to the road, too. Then it sort of suddenly hit me: Everything is now close to the road. You have to work really hard to get away from it.

Q. Conservation doesn’t come off really well in your book — it seems dogmatic, nostalgic, sometimes even anti-scientific, and not ready to take up the challenge of the economic and cultural forces that seem to be arrayed against it. In your view, how can conservation catch up?

A. First, I hope I don’t come across as really beating up on conservationists, because I admire them very much, and I feel that what they’re trying to do is a really important thing.

One priority I think conservation has to focus on more is genetics. I’ve very fond of using a genetic lens — genes are the raw material of what we have to work with for the future, so it seems a smart move to throw out as few genes as possible.

But I do think that keeping conservation and environmentalism separate from other progressive movements like human rights and global human development has made environmentalism just another special interest fighting for its place, almost in competition with some of these other positive movements. That’s got to change. You can’t just care about nature and not care about humanity. So an ideal mix would be a conservation movement that was also strong on human rights and human development, with a mix of priorities that was decided on in a very fair, democratic way.

I also think that there will be change toward the directions I outline in the book — whether the conservation field wants them or not — just on the basis of generational turnover of its scientists. There’s that old chestnut about there are no revolutions in science, you just wait for the old guard to die, and I think there’s probably a bit of truth to that in this case, too.

Q. In the book, you talk about a number of bêtes noire for conservation — including assisted migration of species in the face of climate change to other geographies where they might have a chance of surviving. That’s still a really controversial topic with conservationists.

A. Conservationists should get on board with assisted migration, because the industry is going to lead the way. What is industry going to move? Timber species, crop species. They might, if they’re clever, move the wild ancestors of crop species, so that we’ll still have good pools of them to play with, and they might move horticultural species. But who is going to move everything else? Who is going to move the little squiggly guys that aren’t as glamorous or aren’t commercially valuable? If conservationists find the whole thing too distasteful because it’s meddling with nature, then they might as well stand back and watch those squiggly guys turn to charcoal.

Q. Final question: What’s your favorite place on Earth, and does it match up with the kind of nature that in Rambunctious Garden you’re asking people to revalue?

A. I grew up in Seattle, and I really like the forests in the Pacific Northwest. They don’t have to be old growth. What I really love is the bounce of the turf in a forest with lots of cedar and Douglas fir, because of all the needles that have accumulated in the turf.

Q. So not necessarily a managed place?

A. No, although I’m also thinking about a place I haven’t been to in years in the Cascade Mountains, which a childhood friend’s parents owned, which had third-growth forest with mostly alders and salmonberries and other early successional stuff, and then some big, old stumps from when it had been logged. I spent many happy summers there just really enjoying the space. It never really occurred to me that the nature there wasn’t good enough.

Cross-posted from Cool Green Science.

Want to know how climate change might affect a seashore near you? Look at what it’s already done over the past 20 years to a stretch of the Florida Gulf Coast, according to a pathbreaking new study published in the journal Climatic Change.

Sea-level rise along the Waccasassa Bay area (90 miles north of Tampa) is already picking winners and losers in nature there — and the losers include the habitat the iconic Florida black bear and the bald eagle depend upon. People up and down Florida’s Gulf Coast might soon suffer, too, if sea-level rise destroys the coastal wetlands that produce world-class sport fishing and protect cities from storm surges.

A rendering of Florida coastline with 3.3 feet of sea-level rise.Image: Dave Sag

But will these losses continue? And what can anyone do about them? Laura Geselbracht, senior marine scientist with The Nature Conservancy and lead author of the study — one of the first to test a sea-level-rise model using existing data from the past — gives some answers below.

Q. Why is sea-level rise such a big deal for Florida?

A. Because so much of the Gulf Coast here is under 4.9 feet in elevation. If the Earth experiences 3.3 feet of sea-level rise over the next 100 years — and that’s the most recent “moderate” scenario projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — that will mean very substantial change for Florida, not only to our coastal wetlands and natural systems, but also for people who live along the coast.

Q. The Waccasassa Bay area is one of the best places in the world to study sea-level rise — why is that?

A. First, it isn’t very populated. So you can really study the effects of sea-level rise without having to worry about development getting in the way.

Second, there have been 20-plus years of field studies done there, and you can very clearly see over that period how sea-level rise has affected that habitat. You can see where coastal forest has transitioned into salt marsh and tree islands. When you go out in the field, you come across tree trunks all over the place in the salt marsh. The habitats are changing fast, and it gives us a glimpse of what will happen in areas that aren’t as low-lying.

Q. So who’s winning and who’s losing in this race against sea-level rise?

A. We were really surprised to find that it’s not the salt marsh — which is closest to the water’s edge — that has changed so substantially. It’s actually the coastal forest, which is set back from the salt marsh. So very small, even modest changes in sea-level rise will have a fairly significant impact on the coastal wetland systems, quite a ways back from the coast. That means that, where development does exist, it will get in the way of coastal wetland systems that are trying to transition to higher elevations because of sea-level rise.

Q. About that transition to higher elevations … what’s going to happen in the future to these coastal habitats, according to your model? (I might add that you plugged the 20 years of data into the model you’re using, to see how accurately it would predict what actually happened … and it was very accurate.)

A. The predictions vary with time and with which sea-level-rise projection you use. In one 25‑year period, tidal flats and salt marsh might do well, but in the next 50 to 100 years, those habitats may be squeezed out against either higher elevations, inappropriate soil types, or coastal development. But coastal forest almost completely disappears in our 3.3-feet sea-level rise scenario.

Q. How are species that depend on the forest going to be affected? Is there anywhere for them to go?

A. Coastal forest supports some of the larger species that we all can relate to, like the Florida black bear. There is a particular population in the Waccasassa Bay area that is a very threatened population. So, as their habitat there gets more fragmented, as large swaths of it disappear due to salt water intrusion, they may not have enough room to forage and do the things that bears do, and they might ultimately die out.

Another is the bald eagle. A lot of people think, “Well, can’t they just fly to some other trees?” But those other coastal forest areas are already occupied by bald eagles, so their populations will be diminished in that area because of the loss of coastal forests. There’s a whole suite of other species that are associated coastal forests that would be impacted as well.

Q. Okay, but that’s bears and eagles. Why should people care, outside from caring about bears and eagles?

A. These effects are important anywhere along the coast. Some low-lying communities along Florida’s Big Bend Coast are going to be very vulnerable — if the coastal wetland systems retreat around those communities, it will leave some of them as islands.

And coastal wetlands are tremendously productive areas for fisheries, including things like shrimp, crab, and the majority of the wonderful sport fish that Floridians and a lot of visitors like to catch.

Finally, these coastal wetland systems help provide protection from storm surges. The marshes act like sponges — they can absorb some of the flooding that might otherwise ensue from a tropical storm, and they can also buffer the storm surge. If those wetlands disappear and become diminished, then the impacts from the storms to coastal communities would be greater.

Q. Sounds dire. So how should urban planners prepare?

A. In a couple of ways. First, it’s really important to maintain the freshwater flows into our systems, whether from rivers, overland flow, or aquifers. When you reduce those flows, your coastal wetlands retreat faster.

Second, development. It doesn’t make sense to build in areas to which coastal wetlands will need to transition. Understanding those transitions over time can help shape where you allow development or discourage it, or even help it retreat over time if that’s possible.

And third, keep our existing natural systems healthy. Transitioning of habitats in and of itself is not a bad thing, but if that change encourages a lot of invasive species that our natural species cannot access or utilize, then that could be a very bad thing. So proper land management — like prescribed fire and invasive control, along with preventing diking and ditching of our coastal wetlands to stop salt-water intrusion — are all really important.

Q. Are local communities on the Florida Gulf Coast listening to these messages?

A. We’re finding that, while some communities and local planners
are becoming aware of sea-level rise, so far a lot of communities aren’t really doing any planning. But we think they will. This research is very powerful. The information helps you understand how your whole coastal system is connected, and how the human system can be shaped to help protect natural systems, which in turn helps protect people. So The Nature Conservancy is trying to help educate local governments and regional planning councils about these types of changes and how patterns of building might change under this improved understanding.

Pistachios: What shell remain? Photo: Patterned

What won’t climate change affect? Well, cross trail mix and cherry pie off that ever-shrinking list. It turns out that crisp apples, chewy almonds, ripe plums, and a host of other nuts and stone fruits might become much more costly to grow — or not grown at all in some spots — because of rising winter temperatures, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS One.

The problem, say researchers: The trees that produce these goodies need a certain number of hours at cold temperatures — or “winter chill” — in order to blossom and produce maximally. And the author’s extensive climate change modeling shows achieving adequate winter chill will become increasingly more difficult in growing zones across the world, from South Africa to southern Australia to California’s Central Valley. (The U.S. fruit and nut industry generates about $93 billion in income annually.)

That could mean lower crop yields unless growers either take either costly measures to adapt to warmer winters or move their stocks northward — a forced migration that might not work in many cases, according to Nature Conservancy climate scientist Evan Girvetz, a coauthor on the study. I asked Girvetz to serve up the nutty details (look out, pistachio lovers!) and to talk about how he as a climate scientists deals with depressing studies like this coming out nearly every week.

Climate scientist Evan Girvetz.Q. What’s the issue here — that fruit and nut trees need lots of cold weather before they can flower properly?

A. Yes, many fruit and nut trees, such as cherries, apples, apricots, walnuts, and almonds, require cold weather during the winter and early springtime to cue the trees to flower and produce good yields of fruits and nuts. These trees have evolved in areas that freeze, and they go dormant during the winter to protect themselves from frost damage. In order to know when to come out of dormancy, they internally keep track of the amount of cold that has occurred over winter. Once a certain amount of chilling has occurred, the plants break dormancy and flower. When there is insufficient cold weather, the trees do not properly break dormancy, often causing reduced yields and even complete crop failures in some years.

Q. We hear a lot about oranges going bad in Florida freezes. But who knew nuts and stone fruits could be really vulnerable — to too much winter warmth?

A. Most species of stone and pome fruits, as well as most nuts we eat, originate from regions with very cold winters, such as Central Asia and the Middle East. Protection from frost has thus been vital during their evolutionary process — so vital that there has been little success in breeding cultivars without a chilling requirement.

Today, the major growing regions of these crops are in very different climatic zones, where winters are relatively warm, compared to the harsh conditions in the original ranges of the species. Many species are only marginally suited to where they are grown, and even small changes in temperature patterns can be a problem. Rising temperatures caused by climate change may reduce winter chill enough to cause serious problems for fruit and nut tree yields, especially those grown in the warmer growing regions, such as in California, Chile, the Middle East, China, Africa, and Australia.

Q. Any crops we should be especially worried about?

A. It depends upon where you are in the world, but in California, for example, I’d be worried about pistachios, walnuts, plums, and peaches, as it looks like there will not be suitable climate there for them by the end of this century. In Chile, from where we in the U.S. get fruit during the winter, peaches and cherries are projected to be impacted by climate change. The problem is that in every growing region of the world, tree species are selected to match the local temperature pattern. So it’s quite possible that all important growing areas will have to make some adjustments.

Q. California’s Central Valley: some big potential impacts there. The paper says that the ecological niche of many fruits and nuts there could move northward, to northern California, Oregon, and Washington … but that it’s not as simple as just picking up and moving to a new state. Why not?

A. It certainly is not simple to move crops. First, the soils and lands in Oregon and Washington are inferior to those in California for growing these fruit and nut trees. Add to that, water limitations for agriculture in Oregon and Washington, which make it difficult to expand agriculture. And finally, it is a big economic cost to move a crop from one place to another — given land prices and the cost of starting a whole orchard from scratch, there is a huge up-front investment to move, especially given the often-small margin for profit in these agricultural industries.

Q. Where else might crop migration be difficult?

A. Migration of tree crops will be difficult everywhere. While farmers of annual crops can choose to grow something new every year or look for land elsewhere, tree crop growers are locked into their investments for several decades. The up-front costs of establishing an orchard must be recovered, and few growers will be ready to uproot their trees and start over elsewhere.

Besides, climate is only one factor that determines a region’s suitability for tree crops. They often require irrigation, they need certain soils, and processing infrastructure for fruits and nuts must be in place. We currently find highly efficient production systems in areas, where all these factors come together, such as in California’s Central Valley. For those reasons, it may be easier to find new crops for current growing regions than new growing regions for current crops.

Q. Now, growers of these crops have some ways to adapt, right? But what might the drawbacks of those methods be?

A. There are some things that growers can try to do to minimize the impacts of climate change on their crops, but all will cost money and they may not always work. There are chemicals that can be used to promote tree flowering, but too little is ineffective and too much damages the plants. Some of these chemicals are also quite toxic, and reliance on such materials may not be desirable. Agricultural management can help create cooler microclimates, but this is difficult and increases production costs. And certainly breeding of new tree cultivars can lower chilling requirements, but this takes a long time and lots of money for research and development with unknown results.

Q. So this could impact growers in a big way. What about consumers? Will we be seeing higher peach prices? More costly cashews?

A. There are certainly implications for consumers, but it is hard to say exactly what they are. I would say that this industry is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and in some places may already be feeling the effects. Given the complexity of economic systems, it is hard to project prices, but this research shows that climate change will likely play a role in the future economy for the fruit and nut industry. A crucial outcome of our work is, however, that changes can be anticipated and that based on such predictions, it may be possible to adapt, but that will cost money.

Q. Almost every climate study out today has some new, very depressing projection — it can make people feel fatalistic. As a climate scientist, you read lots of studies like this. How do you stay positive? What actions are you taking, and which do you recommend people take to feel at least a little empowered in the face of this kind of analysis?

A. There is a lot of doom and gloom out there about climate change, and good reason to be concerned about future impacts. But there is a lot we can do to minimize the impacts and help stop climate change. We are learning a huge amount about how humans are changing this planet, but we are also learning how we can help this planet. The innovation that is occurring out there right now is amazing — from clean energy systems and the protection of forests that capture carbon dioxide, to saving mangrove forests that protect people from sea-level rise. And these climate solutions can boost economies and create jobs.

I personally try to do my part by taking the bus and riding my bike to work, and choosing to buy energy-efficient products. But I know that this will take a bigger effort than just individual people, so I think that each person can become part of a larger community that helps our society understand how climate impacts all of our lives and help find innovative solutions to climate change.

The helpful Jerusalem cricket.Photo: Franco Folini

There are 1 billion bacteria in a single gram of soil. (Give or take a few million.)

But how can you get that army — and its insect friends, like the two-inch Jerusalem cricket pictured to the right — to help you grow bigger veggies and prettier flowers?

There’s nobody better to ask than Nature Conservancy soil ecologist Sophie Parker, who recently turned Grist on to the fascinating (and sometimes scary) world of soil organisms. I asked Sophie to give us some tips to make our gardens grow even better — through the power of microbes …

Q. How does this work? Why are microbes so important to good gardens?

A. Bacteria, fungi, and other tiny soil microbes have a variety of ways of making a living, and many of their activities enrich the soil.

First off, they are the Earth’s natural recyclers — decomposing complex substances into smaller compounds that can be used by plants. They do this by producing enzymes — special chemical juices that break things down. Some of these enzymes are like guided missiles with a very specific target. Others are more general and work like a wrecking ball to quickly dismantle large particles. Decomposition in soils is a highly sophisticated, active process, and bacteria and fungi control how it happens.

Another important thing that some bacteria do is pull nitrogen out of the air and convert it into a form that plants can use. This is known as “nitrogen fixation.” Because nitrogen is an essential nutrient that plants need for growth, bacterially driven nitrogen fixation can play an important role in determining how productive soil will be.

Q. So, it’s time to grow vegetables and flowers. What kinds of organisms do we want in our gardens to make sure everything grows huge and beautiful?

A. A garden is an excellent place to see a wide array of organisms at work. Each scoop of earth you turn over with your garden trowel is literally crawling with critters! The majority of these are too small to see without a microscope, but some of the larger soil dwellers are very familiar to gardeners. Earthworms, mites, springtails, and spiders are all important members of the soil food web. They aerate the soil, decompose dead material, and serve as natural biocontrol. Seeing these creatures in your yard is a sign of a healthy ecosystem and good quality soil, which is the foundation of a productive garden.

Pocket gopher — not so helpful.Photo: Ken-ichi UedaQ. And which soil critters don’t we want?

A. Well, gardeners wage all kinds of battles with pests large and small. It stands to reason that the juicy, plump, and luscious fruits and veggies that grow in backyard gardens are attractive not only to people, but to a variety of other animals as well.

One soil dweller that gardeners often complain about in my community is actually not a microorganism: it’s the pocket gopher. I’ve seen a single gopher send calm, gentle gardeners into fits of rodenticidal rage. But beyond gophers, many of the flying and crawling insects that eat our growing plants spend one or more of their life stages (egg, larvae, pupa, or adult) in the soil. Cutworms are a good example of this: these are the caterpillars of moths that hide in the soil by day and chew through the stems of plants at night. However, trying to attack soil-dwelling organisms to control the pests in your garden is much like searching for a very tiny needle in a huge haystack.

Q. We’re organic gardeners, it goes without saying. So what can we do organically to promote lots of good ones and make the bad ones go away?

A. There are many steps a gardener can take to promote a healthy garden without using toxic pesticides. Local botanical gardens and arboretums can typically provide a wealth of information on this topic, but the first step is to start viewing your garden holistically, as the fully functioning, biodiverse ecosystem that it is. All organisms are on the hunt for food and space, and you can use this knowledge to your advantage to control pests and weeds:

• By varying up the foods and flowers you grow, you reduce the chance that your entire garden will fall victim to being eaten, as many pest organisms are specialist herbivores.
• If an insect is eating your plants, try to figure out what species of insect it is and what might eat it or dissuade it. Some of the best controllers of insects are other insects (i.e. think of how effective ladybugs are at controlling aphids), so using a broad-spectrum, chemically-based insecticide can actually make pest problems worse. Mechanical removal of some species is effective; just pick them off plants (or, if possible, get some chickens to do it for you). Removing small infestations before they become big problems is an effective tactic.
• Altering the soil surface by adding mulch (to prevent weed growth) or egg shells (to deter slugs) can really influence which species enter your garden in the first place. Some natural pest control tactics can also be a lot of fun. Invite some friends over one evening to bait slug traps (pour a little beer into shallow containers at ground level), and your vegetable garden could become an impromptu Biergarten.

Scientist Sophie Parker delivers the real dirt.Q. I’m in. What about fertilizer — does that help or hurt the beneficial microorganisms?

A. Synthetic chemical fertilizers can promote some microorganisms while inhibiting others, but the specifics of this relationship will vary from garden to garden, depending on a variety of factors such as the starting condition of the soil. The composition of the soil microbial community will change if fertilizers are applied; some bacteria will benefit and multiply, and others will lose out. This can cause a cascade through the soil food chain, favoring certain amoeba that eat the newly-favored bacteria, the soil mites that eat the amoebae, and the larger insects that eat the mites. Right now, researchers are actively studying these complex soil food webs to understand how the addition of nutrients to soils influences the soil community.

Another thing about synthetic chemical fertilizers: They can require a good deal of fossil fuel to produce. Gardeners interested in minimizing their carbon footprint should begin a compost pile and harness the power of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms to decompose their way towards independence from store-bought fertilizers. Composting not only transforms kitchen scraps and yard waste into valuable plant food, it also diverts waste from landfills. And the rich, earthy smell of a healthy compost pile is its own reward.

Q. Mmmmm … good. So what are some of the coolest of these soil critters in gardens? Can we see them?

A. One of my personal backyard favorites is the Jerusalem cricket (Stenopelmatus sp.), which is also known as the potato bug or niña de la tierra (child of the earth). These insects are up to two inches long, tan-colored, bulbous-headed, cricket look-alikes with a striped brown abdomen. (See photo above.) They feed primarily on decomposing material in the soil, but when they come to the surface their odd appearance can startle the uninitiated. Jerusalem crickets often venture out at night, where they become a favorite food of Pallid Bats (Antrozous pallidus).

The more time you spend outside in your garden, the more chances you will have to see the amazing diversity of soil-dwelling creatures it contains. Happy gardening!

Photo: U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — Pacific Region

Here’s why: Coral already provides the elemental compounds for a growing number of crucial medicines and health products — ranging from antiviral drugs like Ara-A and AZT to anti-inflammatories, painkillers, and even sunblocks. But science is in a race against time: We’ve just started to plumb the depths of coral’s potential to attack the world’s health issues … only to have many reefs on the brink of disaster from threats like warming oceans and overfishing.

So who better than two doctors to make the case for coral as a life preserver? Bruce Chabner, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of clinical research at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Cancer Center, and Daniel Gruenberg, oncologist at Northwest Cancer Specialists in Portland, Ore., sat down with my Nature Conservancy colleagues Kerry Crisley and Jen Newlin to find out what makes coral so valuable for the medical community — and how we can act to help reefs keep healing us.

Q. What is it about the ocean — and coral reefs in particular — that make it a valuable source of medical research?

A. Chabner: There’s an enormous amount of life in our oceans, particularly in coral reefs. Where you have high concentrations of different organisms living together in one place, you have a treasure trove of unique microorganisms — and compounds produced by those organisms — not found elsewhere on Earth.

Q. This recent report by the World Resources Institute — which says that 75 percent of the world’s coral reefs are in trouble — how much does that worry you?

A. Chabner: First, I firmly believe that coral reefs should be protected in their own right so we can be good stewards of our natural habitat. But we have only scratched the surface of what the reefs can offer medically. The sea could very well hold the building blocks of drugs that could treat, or even cure, cancer. We don’t know. But if we lose the reefs, we’ll never find out.

Gruenberg: We think a lot about nature in our anti-cancer strategy. In the oceans, when we trawl in ways that carve up the ocean bottoms, we’re removing organisms we didn’t even know existed that could be valuable for treating cancer, not to mention things like heart disease or diabetes.

One other thing we should think more about is indigenous cultures. These societies have ways of treatment that we don’t fully understand — rich histories in natural healing strategies that may be relatable to other communities. Who knows what can be found in prairie grasses, for instance, that’s beneficial? There are so many natural opportunities we know nothing about. And we don’t have a lot of time to figure it out.

Q. With cancer drugs — how many do we get from nature? And how did science figure out the connection?

A. Gruenberg: More than 90 percent are derived from natural sources. Actually, even drugs like Cytoxan come from nitrogen mustard, as in the gas used in World War I. How did they figure out it had anti-cancer properties? From autopsies at that time, they saw that lymph nodes shrank. Of course it killed a lot of other cells, too. But it’s become important in the treatment of cancers like lymphoma. So I’d actually revise that to say that 99.9 percent of our drugs are naturally derived.

The oncology field has changed so much in 20 years, considering all that we’ve learned about cell division and the immune system. Not only do I see improved survivorship and outcomes, but there’s less toxicity to medications we use. And there are more supportive medicines and natural medicines because of natural sources and better understanding of natural processes. It’s remarkable.

Q. How does getting it from sea to pill work? How does one go from looking at, say, a sea squirt to creating a new drug?

A. Chabner: We start by studying the organism. How does it grow? How does it defend itself? How does it survive in its surroundings? When we’ve found the specific compounds that contribute to its survival we can see where it might be effective in treating certain types of cancers. The drug Ara-C, for example, is the backbone of chemotherapy for leukemia and lymphoma. That was derived from a sea sponge in the Caribbean.

Q. Do we have to keep harvesting the reefs to maintain supplies of these medicines?

A. Chabner: That’s the best part; in most cases, no. Once the compound has been isolated it can often be synthesized and created in the lab. What’s important is that we discover it while it’s still there in our oceans.

Q. Alzheimer’s disease and strokes — there are other marine-based drugs being tested that show tremendous promise in the treatment of these conditions. What else? Are there new drugs in the works?

A. Chabner: Yes. Several new medicines for the treatment of lymphoma and ovarian, breast, and prostate cancers have gone through their clinical trial phases and are close to receiving FDA approval. And — equally exciting — other marine-based medicines are showing tremendous promise in the treatment of strokes and Alzheimer’s disease.

Q. Bring it down to a personal level. Give us one thing that anyone could do to keep the nature-medicine connection a healthy one.

A. Gruenberg: One simple thing is to eat local. It’s good for our bodies. There’s less transport so less pollution and use of fossil fuels. There’s less disturbance to the natural environment and indigenous cultures. You know the agricultural source and it’s local to you and your system and environment.

Q. Do you follow your own advice?

A. Gruenberg: As much as possible. And I try not to eat anything out of season.

LEAF participants enjoy an afternoon at the beach after a morning of work at the Conservancy’s Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge in the Delaware Bayshores region.Photo: Erika Nortemann/TNC

Want your kids to become ecologically conscious as adults? Get ‘em into nature now — that’s the most reliable way to build their love of the outdoors, according to mountains of research.

But in a harried and always-online world (for parents as well as children), what’s it going to take to do that?

One way: Find a program with mentors who guide them through the wonders (and occasional terrors) of the outdoors. That’s the conclusion of a new study of urban youth commissioned by The Nature Conservancy and funded by the Rhodebeck Charitable Trust and the Toyota USA Foundation.

The study looked at alumni of the Conservancy’s Leaders in Environmental Actions for the Future (LEAF) program, a summer stewardship program that puts urban youth attending environmental high schools into paid residential internships doing environmental work on Conservancy preserves across the United States.

LEAF participants are mentored throughout their internships by naturalists and conservation scientists — and the results over the 17-year span of the program are pretty amazing, say researchers:

• LEAF alumni place greater value on environmental issues (for instance, 73 percent rank “global warming” as “extremely serious,” compared with 37 percent of their peer group nationally); are much more likely to volunteer for environmental groups; and are much more likely to point out “un-ecological behavior” to others (like littering).
• They spend as much time outdoors on a typical day as they do watching TV, playing video games, or using computers.
• Parents should like these next two a lot: LEAF program alumni matriculate to college at rates more than 26 percent higher than average for their peer group nationally, and they’re much more likely to graduate high school.
• They’re also more often in full-employment jobs and earning more money than their peer group averages.

Can parents build on these findings for their own children, even if there isn’t a LEAF program near them? I put that question and others about how to get today’s kids into nature to Patricia Zaradic, director of the Red Rock Institute and lead author of the LEAF survey report.

Patricia Zaradic.Q. So what is it about LEAF that’s producing these sorts of results — these increased rates of graduation and volunteerism and good-old-fashioned nature-loving behavior?

A. The program gets these teens outdoors working one-on-one with mentors and conservation scientists in nature for an extended period of time, and that’s absolutely important. They build life and work skills in the program. They also spend time gaining self-reliance in a setting where they feel at peace, where they can build communities with a diverse population of peers and conservation practitioners. And they get time for self‑reflection, personal growth, and confidence-building by living independently in a totally new environment than they are accustomed to. Those are skills that give them a leg up preparing for college life. It’s a really good mix.

Q. Why do they need mentoring? Why not just throw them out there — wouldn’t that teach resilience?

A. A number of studies have shown that, when you take kids who live in urban settings and you put them in a rural, natural setting, their first experience isn’t necessarily going to be a good one. It’s often just because they are being confronted with strange sensory inputs — different smells, different textures, general differences in the environment. Having a mentor that helps introduce youth to these outdoors settings and experiences is very important. They feel more comfortable and come to regard the outdoors as a place that they can feel at home and enjoy.

Q. Remind us: Why is it important for kids to get outside and into nature? What does the scientific literature tell us about the benefits?

A. Science has documented both physical and psychological health benefits to being in nature. Kids in nature tend to be more active, which brings physical well-being. Psychologically, there are long-term benefits in dealing better with stress and becoming more resilient to challenges.

The LEAF program really helps with both. Graduates of LEAF are continuing to spend time in nature, and that might in part explain why they’re more successful in school and in life. And the mentored outdoor work LEAF provides them keeps them very active and teaches them to use the outdoors recreationally in ways they didn’t know about before. In addition to health benefits, the work-based nature of the program may open their eyes to career paths in environmental fields.

Q. What else impressed you about from the study?

A. How the LEAF graduates — who are now adults — are continuing to spend more time in nature even years after their initial summer experience. How these individuals truly become conservation advocates and act on that belief.

They are volunteering for environmental organizations at extremely high rates compared to national averages. And they continue to hike and backpack and spend time outdoors at much higher rates than their overall peer group — and much, much higher rates as compared to their peers in similar ethnic groups. So I think the program has done its work incredibly well.

Q. But how do you measure the impact of the LEAF summer program alone from the impact of the internship plus the environmental curricula these kids are already learning in their high schools?

A. It is hard to tell. LEAF is part of a broader partnership with urban environmental high schools that support the students with environmental lessons during the academic year. That partnership is designed to complement and amplify the outdoor summer experience. But the graduation rates and the college‑bound rates for the LEAF interns are even higher than the overall average for students at the participating schools.

Q. But despite all these benefits, you found that the LEAF graduates lagged the national average of people their age who identify themselves as strong environmentalists. Why are they refusing that label?

A. I can only speculate on that. But I can say there is a stigma for some people around being labeled an “environmentalist.” For all intents and purposes, these kids have the attitudes and behaviors that are consistent with very strong environmentalists.  But there are historical stereotypes of what it means to identify yourself as an “environmentalist,” stereotypes that may not appeal to these diverse, urban youth.

Q. Final question: Educators and parents — especially ones who might not have access to a structured program like LEAF — what should they take away from all this?

A. For educators: All education programs would benefit from outdoor access and sustained outdoor access — elementary, middle school, high school, college. Educators should look for ways to integrate ongoing outdoor participation into any kind of education program that is going on. If you can manage sustained outdoor exposure, particularly in the company of a mentor who is somewhat familiar with the outdoors, I think that we’re going to be able to raise a new generation of more active, more resilient, more psychological and physically healthy kids that will steward nature well and have a much better chance of addressing the environmental issues we face today.

For parents: Parents should know that they don’t need a structured program to help their kids get more comfortable in nature. Just spending time with your kids in some kind of outdoor setting is a good place to start — your backyard or your neighborhood park. Right now there are a lot of outreach programs and even community and spring clean‑ups that can facilitate the process with very little cost.

Here’s something else parents should know: These LEAF graduates are doing much better in terms of employment and income than the general population of 18-to-24 year olds. So if you’re wondering, “How do I give my kid a leg up in the world?” — getting them outdoors might be part of the answer.

Woman carrying water through the Dharavi slum of Mumbai.Photo: Meena Kadri

Imagine living on less than a bathtub of water for all your daily needs: drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes … and everything else.

By 2050, more than 1 billion city dwellers may be doing just that if we don’t build new infrastructure or begin new water conservation efforts, according to a new study [PDF] by scientists at The Nature Conservancy and other institutions.

And more than 3 billion in cities may suffer similar water shortages at least one month of every year, says the report. The drivers will be urban demographics and climate change — and the shortages are projected to hit megacities on every continent, from Manila to Johannesburg to Mumbai to Mexico City.

The minimum amount of water the study assumes every person needs daily is minuscule: Less than 100 liters — about 2/3 of a bathtub — for all a person’s daily needs. (The average U.S. resident uses 2-5 times that much.)

Rob McDonald, Nature Conservancy scientist and lead author of the study, says there’s still time to take action against these shortages — but we can’t just build more infrastructure to make it work. I asked him to go deeper into the numbers and the potential solutions.

Scientist Robert McDonald.Q. First, where did you get the 100 liters number from? And have you ever tried to live on 2/3 of a bathtub of water a day? What’s it like?

A. The 100 liters threshold is from the World Health Organization, which has said that’s the minimum amount of water needed to maintain “optimum” health long-term. Of course, people in dire situations can survive on much less.

After this paper came out, I tracked my family’s use of water for a week — we average out to around 130 liters/person/day, so a bit above the threshold we used in the paper.

Doing that did help me identify some quick ways I could save water. I have an old house, and I probably just need to install some low-flow faucet aerators. Right now some of my faucets don’t have any aerators, so it turns out I’m wasting a lot of water! I also have old clothes-washing and dish-washing machines. I’m too cheap to change those right away, but once they break I’m now motivated to replace them with low-flow machines. If I did that, we’d be below 2/3 of a bathtub of water a day.

Q. The study says we can’t just build our way out of this crisis with more pipes and aqueducts. Why not? What are the alternatives?

A. Well, cities commonly transport water longer distances to get around water shortages, and that other strategies include desalinization or unsustainably pumping groundwater. But the problem with all of these strategies is that they cost money. One study estimated that the world will have to spend $180 billion a year to meet its urban water needs.

Whatever the real figure is, there’s a serious issue here the world needs to pay attention to. In this paper, we are showing the scope of that problem, and trying to remind planners that there are more ways to solve the problem than just building more dams.

Urban water managers and city planners should look at solutions that involve nature as well as more infrastructure. One solution: more efficient water use by agriculture and industry — two of the biggest users of water worldwide. Payments to farmers to reduce areas of irrigated agriculture might be another partial solution, as well as removal of non-native water-hungry vegetation such as eucalyptus.

Q. The first response that often comes up to studies involving population is “Isn’t this just a matter of overpopulation? People should stop having babies, and that will solve the problem.” How do you respond to that line of thinking?

A. It’s just a really simplistic way to look at a very complex issue, and kind of a cruel way. Having children is one of the most important, life-defining experiences for most people, and many people would argue it’s a basic human right.

You have to look at population growth in the full context of what’s called the demographic transition. In very poor countries, the birth rate is high, but so is the death rate. As countries economically develop, there is a tendency for the death rate to fall first, as very basic sanitation measures are implemented. Then, at slightly higher economic levels of development, the birth rate falls too.

If you look at where some European countries are right now, they are actually losing population, the birth rate has fallen so much. So what is happening in the developing countries is that they are simply earlier along in the demographic transition than the U.S. or Europe. At one point, we too had very rapid population growth — we just got past that stage.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there is significant demographic momentum toward increasing population in developing countries simply because there are so many young people in these countries. Even if every young person alive today in developing countries limited themselves to one child/family, overall population would still go up.

Finally, a lot of urban growth has nothing to do with the population dynamics within a city — it’s a result of urban to rural migration, millions of people moving to cities in search of a better life. The U.S. and Europe went through this same phase too, just 50 to 100 years ago.

Q. The study says up to 3 billion people could also suffer “seasonal water shortages” — living on less than 100 liters per person per day for at least one month out of each year. That’s sounds astronomical, but is this condition as bad as it sounds? I wouldn’t want to go through it, but just how damaging to a person is a month out of every year without adequate water supplies?

A. What we call seasonal water shortages in our paper aren’t that uncommon. Many cities in the western U.S. have seasonal scarcity. But cities traditionally get around this by having dams for storing water, or from diversifying their water supplies so they can find water in those dry months. So the big number of potential future seasonal shortages that we calculate in our models show that there are lots of people — billions of people, in fact — who are in cities that will actively have to search for new solutions to seasonal scarcity, either because the city’s population has grown or because climate change has affected the seasonal distribution of rainfall.

Bottom line: Don’t think of those high numbers as a forecast of doom. They are a call to action.

Q. How does climate change figure into all this? And there are lots of climate change projections — did the disparity in models affect your projections?

A. Climate change just makes the job of urban planners even harder. It’s not just changes in the average precipitation, but changes in the seasonal distribution of rainfall and runoff, which may affect many cities. In some places, the dry months get even drier and the wet months get even wetter.

We did look at several climate change projections, and the exact results do vary among the scenarios. Basically, for some regions of the world, all the different climate change projects are really consistent, and we can make reasonable predictions about what will happen in those places.

For instance, North Africa and the Levant look pretty likely to get less precipitation with climate change, and be drier. Then there are places where the different climate change projections don’t agree, and there’s a lot less certainty about what will happen. For instance, it’s not clear whether Australia will see a decrease in precipitation or an increase.

People can use the Climate Wizard tool (which The Nature Conservancy helped create) to check out the different climate change projections themselves, for their county or city.

Q. You calculated for water that was available to cities right around them, and then you calculated for water available to a city 100 kilometers (62 miles) around it. Cities are going to try to tap water from the surrounding countryside, so does that second set of numbers give us a more accurate picture of how many people are actually going to be short of water?

A. Cities go as far away as they need to to get enough water. That’s why we calculated the amount of water at various distances from cities, to figure out how far away cities might need to go to get water. That correlates with how much infrastructure cities need to build, or how much money they need to spend.

Note also that our study was just looking at sustainable flows of surface and groundwater. There are other ways to get water, of course. Some cities will pay to desalinate ocean. Some cities will build canals to get water from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Both those solutions are really expensive, though. The most common solution, when cities can get away with it, is to unsustainably pump groundwater from an underground aquifer. But that only works for a few decades, until the aquifer is pumped dry.

Q. How hopeful are you that we are going to be able to head off these kind of massive water shortages? What will it take to do so — and do we have the mechanisms in place?

A. I’m pretty hopeful about what you might call middle-income countries. That includes China, India, Mexico — countries that are experiencing urban growth but have some financial resources are generally doing a good job planning for how to bring water to their urban residents. Sometimes these cities are too reliant on grey infrastructure (dams and canals), and ignore the effects of their actions on freshwater ecosystems, but at least they are thinking about the problem. It’s an opportunity for ecologists, really, to try to make the plans of these cities more compatible with freshwater biodiversity.

What I really worry about are cities in some very poor countries, places with very few resources. I think for them, they will need outside help funding the necessary infrastructure or land-use changes.

I think there’s a role for the international community to fund some of this infrastructure creation. Picture this: Instead of each country having to separately borrow funds to build urban water infrastructure, there’s a common pool of money that could finance urban water planning and management in all developing country cities. To some extent, that exists now with some of the major development banks. But there’s a potential I think for that kind of thing to be substantially scaled up.