Brian Skerry: The ocean's glory — and horror

Brian Skerry is a National Geographic photojournalist who captures images that not only celebrate the mystery and beauty of the sea but also bring attention to the pressing issue which endanger our oceans. Using the camera as his tool of communication, Brian Skerry has spent the past three decades telling the stories of the ocean. His images portray not only the aesthetic wonder of the ocean but display an intense journalistic drive for relevance.

JONATHAN FOLEY: GMOs, Silver Bullets and the Trap of Reductionist Thinking

Interesting article about GMOs and the current focus on technology and business models, rather than on the social and environmental impacts they may cause.

 
  

                                                                 Illustration by Erin Dunn

 

February 25, 2014 — Against my better judgment, I’m dipping my toe into the genetically modified organism debate.

 

These are rough waters. GMOs seem to polarize people more than almost any other topic, including evolution or climate change. And the debates around GMOs — especially whether they are safe to eat or safe to grow — can get very fierce. While it takes a lot of effort, I try to stay open-minded on the topic, because this isn’t a simple black and white issue.

But it should be obvious to everyone that the use of GMOs in agriculture — so far, at least — has come with some big problems. Even strong GMO proponents, if they stop and think about it, would have to acknowledge that important difficulties have arisen.

From where I sit, the biggest problem associated with GMOs isn’t the technology per se; it’s how they’ve been deployed. Despite early promises, as GMOs move from lab into the real world, they end up being very disappointing.

In theory, GMOs sound very useful. They are supposed to help us “feed the world” because they will improve food security, dramatically boost crop yields, combat weeds and pests using fewer chemicals, make crops more nutritious, and have tremendous benefits to society. But have they?

No. Not really.

To begin, GMOs have done little to enhance the world’s food security. Mainly, that’s because GMO crops primarily in use today are feed corn (mostly for animal feed and ethanol), soybeans (mostly for animal feed), cotton and canola. But these aren’t crops that feed the world’s poor, or provide better nutrition to all. GMO efforts may have started off with good intentions to improve food security, but they ended up in crops that were better at improving profits. While the technology itself might “work,” it has so far been applied to the wrong parts of the food system to truly make a dent in global food security.

 

Furthermore, GMOs have had uneven success in boosting crop yields. For example, in the United States, where they are in widespread use, it appears that GMOs have not dramatically improved the yields of corn or soybeans. That’s probably because GMOs in use today have not actually changed the biology behind photosynthesis or crop growth. Instead, these GMOs, in the U.S. anyway, mainly replaced older forms of conventional pest control (spraying older, more toxic pesticides) with new ones (planting Bt and Roundup Ready crop varieties and spraying new pesticides). However, it seems that the introduction of Bt cotton did substantially improve yields in India, probably because it was an effective means of combating pests that were limiting yield there before. Canola in Canada is also seeing a measurable boost, and GMOs likely helped the Hawaiian papaya crop, which otherwise might have been hard hit by disease. And, as Amy Harmon points out, future GMOs may be helpful in combating citrus greening disease that is becoming widespread in American orange groves.

So GMOs can claim some successes, but a widespread quantum leap in the yield of important food crops is not one of them. Here, I think a lack of systems thinking — and asking, “What is truly limiting yield to food crops in different locations and different farming systems?” — has hampered the effectiveness of GMOs in this regard.

One of the other purported benefits of GMO crops is that they use fewer chemicals to combat weeds and insects. While this is true in some situations, it turns out that it may not always be the case. Since the late 1990s, there appears to have been a net increase in total pesticide use for GMO corn, soybeans and cotton in the U.S. While insecticide application was down for crops using Bt traits to combat insects, this was apparently offset by a substantial increase in total herbicide use on U.S. croplands (although, to be clear, this is only an estimate of the total volume of pesticides, which may be a poor indication of their impact), likely because more weeds have become resistant to Roundup. And now industry is proposing a new set of GMO crops that are resistant to the more powerful 2,4-D herbicide. But what’s to stop weeds from becoming resistant to 2,4-D, just as they did to Roundup, creating an herbicide treadmill? Again, a lack of systems thinking — which would have anticipated these “rebound” problems with silver-bullet approaches to weed control — seems to have been a problem here.

 

And, unfortunately, the effects of GM cropping systems seem to be having an impact on habitats and the environment. For example, ecologist Karen Oberhauser, a University of Minnesota colleague, recently documented a major decline in monarch butterfly habitat in the Upper Midwest, due at least in part to the use of GMO crops and their associated pesticides. “Tragically, much of their breeding habitat in this region has been lost to changing agricultural practices, primarily the exploding adoption of genetically modified, herbicide-tolerant crops in the late 20th and early 21st centuries,” Oberhauser said. “These crops allow post-emergence treatment with herbicides, and have resulted in the extermination of milkweed from agricultural habitats.” Again, GMO technology per se wasn’t the problem here. The problem was how the technology was applied — without a deep appreciation of the landscapes and environmental systems within which GMOs are deployed.

I also become skeptical when GMO proponents talk about developing more sophisticated crops, including those that could be drought tolerant, fix their own nitrogen, be better acclimated to higher temperatures, and so on. Again, these sound great, but we’ve learned a lot about genomics since the early days of GMOs; we now realize more complex plant behaviors cannot be turned “on” or “off” by changing a single gene. So it may be a long while before these crops are ready for the real world. Why not put more effort into improved agronomic approaches — such as using cover crops, mulching and organic-style techniques — instead, which could yield results today? Why is the unproven, high-tech silver-bullet approach better than simpler efforts to address the same problem?

 

Similarly, GMO advocates talk about how biotech crops can boost nutrition and help alleviate disease around the world. “Golden rice” is perhaps the best example of this, where rice is engineered to contain beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. The lack of this important vitamin is linked to the death of hundreds of thousands of children each year. So while golden rice seems a very worthwhile goal, I have to wonder why GMO proponents feel it’s easier to change the fundamental biological character of rice (introducing a trait that could never arise in nature) than to simply grow more diverse crops, especially vegetables that already contain vitamin A? Why pick an expensive, high-tech approach — costing millions of dollars and decades of work, with no guarantee that people will accept and eat orange-colored rice — rather than low-tech, simple solutions that could work right now? Again, there seems to be an obsession with technical, silver-bullet solutions, where a simple approach might be more effective.

Finally, many GMO advocates seem puzzled by the strong social and cultural resistance to their products. This is perhaps best exemplified by the debate over GMO labeling in the U.S. Many GMO proponents criticize labels as “unscientific” because there is “no substantial biological difference” between GMOs and traditional crops. Maybe, but that’s not the point. It’s about respecting people’s deep cultural connection to food and their right to know what’s in it. To people who say GMO labels are misguided, I ask, “Would you be happy if all the meat in your grocery store was simply sold as ‘animal,’ whether it was beef, chicken, pork, horsemeat, dog or whatever?” Even if an “expert” assured you that these meats had no “substantial biological difference” from each other? You’d at least like to know if you were eating beef or horsemeat, right? It would behoove GMO proponents to include social scientists in the discussion to better understand these cultural issues.

What do all of these issues have in common? To me, they show that GMOs have frequently failed to live up to their potential, not because they are inherently flawed, but because they have been deployed poorly into the complex social and environmental contexts of the real world. And I worry that GMOs are sometimes the victims of reductionist thinking, where the focus is on technology and business models, and less on the social and environmental impacts they may cause. Interestingly, this is where organic farming models have much to teach us. While not perfect (no system is), organic farms typically start with a systems perspective on weeds, pest management, soil nutrients and the larger interactions with society and the environment. I think we have a lot to learn from the organic paradigm, and many of these ideas should be folded into conventional farming.

Looking forward, I would urge GMO advocates to take a collective step back and think more holistically about GMO technologies and their implications for health, agriculture, economics, culture, society and the environment. This is a big job, and it won’t happen overnight. But a good start would be to build more interdisciplinary research and development teams — with social scientists, agronomists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, nutritionists, organic farmers and GMO critics as well as biotechnologists. This is clearly lacking now. In fact, I was recently in a friendly but intense debate about GMOs with biotechnology researchers, and I asked them, “How many of you regularly collaborate with ecologists, social scientists, etc., to try to anticipate and resolve these issues?” Silence. And then, after a long pause, a few admitted that maybe this would be a good idea.

 

I would also like to see GMOs developed with public funding, or through public-private partnerships, where the findings and intellectual property are put into the public domain, to be shared with anyone in the world. Supporting this work with more openness and transparency would help ensure that any potential social and environmental benefits of GMO technology are put ahead of immediate profits. And it would go a long way in improving the broader public understanding and trust of this technology, which is sorely lacking today.

Lastly, I would strongly urge both sides of the GMO debate to do a better job of engaging with each other and the broader public. Frankly, but for a few notable exceptions (including the recent debate sparked by Nathanael Johnson’s work at Grist), both sides leave something to be desired here. Both characterize the other side unfairly, and, frankly, I suspect there is a large, quiet majority in the middle — that is probably skeptical of the extremes on both sides.

Ultimately, no individual or small group will decide the fate of GMOs. We’ll have to work through this together, as a society. And that’s the way it should be, because how we decide to use, or not use, GMOs is too important to leave to just one way of thinking.

Jonathan Foley (@GlobalEcoGuy) is director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. These views are his own, and do not reflect those of the University of Minnesota or any other organization.
 

A WOLF'S ROLE IN THE ECOSYSTEM: Trophic Cascades

A young forest service employee named Aldo Leopold, charged with killing wolves in New Mexico in the early 1900's started to notice that as the wolves died off, the deer population boomed and ate all the plants to nothing. In his groundbreaking work, "Thinking Like a Mountain", Leopold put forth an idea 50 years ahead of his time: predators control ecosystems.

Since the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, we have learned much about the effect large carnivores have on an ecosystem. In the past it was thought that an ecosystem was built from the bottom up... with plant life as the basis from which everything grew. Once healthy plants were established, insects, small rodents, birds, larger herbivores and finally the top predators fell into a balance with each other. Almost all conservation and reintroduction efforts were based on this idea. In a damaged area, biologists would first try to rebuild the plant life before doing anything else. However, some ecosystems could not be fixed before reintroducing an endangered top-level animal. In Yellowstone National Park, the US Fish and Wildlife Service was required by the Endangered Species Act to reintroduce wolves before balancing the plant base and herbivore populations.

In the years since the wolf reintroduction, Yellowstone has become a premiere scientific laboratory for wilderness observation and ecosystem recovery. Scientists have come from around the world to watch the effect wild wolves have on the park. They have discovered that an ecological effect called the “trophic cascade” has taken over Yellowstone, with the wolves initiating a more natural ecosystem balance than has been seen in over 65 years:

LIAN PIN KOH: A drone's-eye view of conservation

Ecologist Lian Pin Koh makes a persuasive case for using drones to protect the world's forests and wildlife. These lightweight autonomous flying vehicles can track animals in their natural habitat, monitor the health of rainforests, even combat crime by detecting poachers via thermal imaging. Added bonus? They're also entirely affordable!

 

DEVELOPMENT: Time to leave GDP behind

Robert Costanza¹, Ida Kubiszewski¹, Enrico Giovannini², Hunter Lovins³, Jacqueline McGlade⁴, Kate E. Pickett⁵, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir⁶, Debra Roberts⁷, Roberto De Vogli⁸, Richard Wilkinson⁹ 
Nature 505,283–285 (16 January 2014)

 

ILLUSTRATION BY PETE ELLIS/DRAWGOOD.COM

 

Robert F. Kennedy once said that a country's gross domestic product (GDP) measures “everything except that which makes life worthwhile”. The metric was developed in the 1930s and 1940s amid the upheaval of the Great Depression and global war. Even before the United Nations began requiring countries to collect data to report national GDP, Simon Kuznets, the metric's chief architect, had warned against equating its growth with well-being.

 

GDP measures mainly market transactions. It ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. If a business used GDP-style accounting, it would aim to maximize gross revenue — even at the expense of profitability, efficiency, sustainability or flexibility. That is hardly smart or sustainable (think Enron). Yet since the end of the Second World War, promoting GDP growth has remained the primary national policy goal in almost every country¹.

 

Meanwhile, researchers have become much better at measuring what actually does make life worthwhile. The environmental and social effects of GDP growth can be estimated, as can the effects of income inequality². The psychology of human well-being can now be surveyed comprehensively and quantitatively^{3, 4}. A plethora of experiments has produced alternative measures of progress (see Supplementary Information).

 

The chance to dethrone GDP is now in sight. By 2015, the UN is scheduled to announce the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of international objectives to improve global well-being. Developing integrated measures of progress attached to these goals offers the global community the opportunity to define what sustainable well-being means, how to measure it and how to achieve it. Missing this opportunity would condone growing inequality and the continued destruction of the natural capital on which all life on the planet depends.

Dethroning GDP

When GDP was instituted seven decades ago, it was a relevant signpost of progress: increased economic activity was credited with providing employment, income and amenities to reduce social conflict and prevent another world war.
 

But the world today is very different from the one faced by the global leaders who met to plan the post-war economy in 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The emphasis on GDP in developed countries now fuels social and environmental instability. It also blinds developing countries to possibilities for more-sustainable models of development.

ABE FOX/AP

GDP has been in use since the 1944 Bretton Woods meeting.

 

Soaring economic activity has depleted natural resources. Much of the generated wealth has been unequally distributed, leading to a host of social problems⁵. The philosopher John Stuart Mill noted more than 200 years ago that, once decent living standards were assured, human efforts should be directed to the pursuit of social and moral progress and the increase of leisure, not the competitive struggle for material wealth. Or as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed: “To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another.”

The limits of GDP are now clear. Increased crime rates do not raise living standards, but they can lift GDP by raising expenditures on security systems. Despite the destruction wrought by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, both events boosted US GDP because they stimulated rebuilding.

Alternative measures of progress can be divided into three broad groups (see Supplementary Information). Those in the first group adjust economic measures to reflect social and environmental factors. The second group consists of subjective measures of well-being drawn from surveys. The third group relies on weighted composite indicators of well-being including housing, life expectancy, leisure time and democratic engagement.

Adjusted economic measures

These are expressed in monetary units, making them more readily comparable to GDP. Such indices consider annual income, net savings and wealth. Environmental costs and benefits (such as destroying wetlands or replenishing water resources) can also be factored in. One example is the genuine progress indicator (GPI). This metric is calculated by starting with personal consumption expenditures, a measure of all spending by individuals and a major component of GDP, and making more than 20 additions and subtractions to account for factors such as the value of volunteer work and the costs of divorce, crime and pollution⁶.

Crucially, unlike other measures in the first group, GPI considers income distribution. A dollar's worth of increased income to a poor person boosts welfare more than a dollar's worth of increased income does for a rich person. And a big gap between the richest and the poorest in a country — as in the United States and, increasingly, in China and India — correlates with social problems, including higher rates of drug abuse, incarceration and mistrust, and poorer physical and mental health⁵.

These adjustments matter. A 2013 study² comparing the GDP per capita and the GPI per capita of 17 countries comprising just over half the global population found startling divergences between the two metrics. The measures were highly correlated from 1950 until about 1978, when they moved apart as environmental and social costs began to outweigh the benefits of increased GDP (see 'Genuine progress flattens'). Tellingly, life satisfaction is highly correlated with GPI per capita, but not with GDP per capita.

Some governments are taking this seriously. Two US states, Vermont and Maryland, have in the past three years adopted GPI as a measure of progress and have implemented policies specifically aimed at improving it.

Subjective measures of well-being

The most comprehensive of these is the World Values Survey (WVS), which covers about 70 countries and includes questions about how satisfied people are with their lives. Starting in 1981, the WVS is conducted in 'waves', the sixth of which is currently in progress. Another example is the gross national happiness index used in Bhutan. This measure uses elaborate surveys that ask how content people feel in nine domains: psychological well-being, standard of living, governance, health, education, community vitality, cultural diversity, time use and ecological diversity.

Subjective well-being has been highly studied, and has even been recommended as the most appropriate measure of societal progress⁷. But subjective indicators are tricky to compare across societies and cultures. For example, self-reported health tracks with clinically reported rates of morbidity and mortality within countries but not across them⁸. And people are not always aware of the things that contribute to their well-being. Few of us give credit to ecosystem services for water supply and storm protection, for example.

Weighted composite measures of several indicators

A comprehensive picture of sustainable societal well-being should integrate subjective and objective indicators⁹(see Supplementary Information, Figure S1), as these measures begin to do. One example is the Happy Planet Index, introduced by the New Economics Foundation in 2006. This multiplies life satisfaction by life expectancy and divides the product by a measure of ecological impact.

Other indices in the third group combine a range of variables, such as income, housing, jobs, health, civic engagement, safety and life satisfaction. The Better Life Index, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, maintains a website that allows users to choose how to weight variables, revealing how the emphasis on different variables can influence countries' rankings.

Many other experiments are under way (see www.wikiprogress.org). None of these measures is perfect, but collectively they offer the building blocks for something much better than GDP.

 

Why are we stuck?

 

There is broad agreement that global society should strive for a high quality of life that is equitably shared and sustainable. Several groups and reports have concluded that GDP is dangerously inadequate as a measure of quality of life — including those published by the French government's 2008 Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress¹⁰, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future¹¹ and the European Commission's ongoing Beyond GDP initiative. That conclusion was also echoed in 'The Future We Want', the declaration of the 2012 Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development agreed to by all UN member states.

Nonetheless, GDP remains entrenched¹. Vested interests are partly responsible. Former US President Bill Clinton's small move towards a 'green GDP', which factored in some of the environmental consequences of growth, was killed by the coal industry. However, much of the problem is that no alternative measure stands out as a clear successor.

Creating that successor will require a sustained, transdisciplinary effort to integrate metrics and build consensus. One potential vehicle for doing this is the setting up of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a process that is now under way to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Established in 2000, the MDGs comprise eight basic targets that include eradicating extreme poverty and establishing universal primary education, gender equality and environmental sustainability. Currently both the MDGs and the suggested SDGs are only lists of goals with isolated indicators. But the SDG process can and should be expanded to include comprehensive and integrated measures of sustainable well-being¹².

If undertaken with sufficiently broad participation, the hunt for the successor to GDP might be completed by 2015. There are significant barriers to doing this, including bureaucratic inertia and the tendency of governments, academia and other groups to work in isolation. These barriers can be overcome with dedicated leadership. Crucially, people can now communicate across the globe with an ease unthinkable in the days of Bretton Woods.

Any 'top-down' process must be supplemented with a 'bottom-up' engagement of civil society that includes city and regional governments, non-governmental organizations, business and other parties. We recently formed the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity (www.asap4all.com) to do just that. This web-based 'network of networks' can communicate research about sustainable quality of life and the elements that contribute to it (see Supplementary Information), and so help to build consensus among the thousands of groups now concerned with these issues.

The successor to GDP should be a new set of metrics that integrates current knowledge of how ecology, economics, psychology and sociology collectively contribute to establishing and measuring sustainable well-being. The new metrics must garner broad support from stakeholders in the coming conclaves.

It is often said that what you measure is what you get. Building the future we desire requires that we measure what we want, remembering that it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

http://www.nature.com/news/development-time-to-leave-gdp-behind-1.14499