National Pollinator Week is coming up (21-27 June), and I just ran across this great website that offers free downloadable guides to improving habitat for these essential animals in your yard or area.  If you live in the USA, you can scroll down to the link on lower right (”Free pollinator friendly planting guides!”), enter your zipcode, and download a concise, illustrated guide that summarizes the importance of pollinators to the ecology (and economy) of your region, describes some of the important types of pollinators in your area, and — most useful of all — lists native plants of the region with their flowering times and characteristics, which allow one to engineer the habitat to support a diverse array of pollinators throughout the year.

There is also a really nice pollinator curriculum for grades 3-6 here. The curriculum includes a bunch of specific activities and lessons, even a community service module, that can be done with kids.

One of the especially troubling themes that has risen to dominance in recent years as a result of reports from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the IPCC on climate change, and so on, is the idea that the world’s ecosystems are undergoing a fundamental and potentially irreversible shift into alternate states from which we may not be able to return. There is a good deal of evidence in support of this idea. And the question of how and whether ecosystems can recover form the wounds we inflict on them is a critical one because humanity is rapidly running out of wild nature to exploit. Thus, fixing degraded systems is now central to a sustainable future. Can we pull it off? Conventional wisdom’s answer is rather pessimistic.

So I was quite intrigued, and heartened, to read a new paper in the open-access journal PLoS ONE by by Holly Jones and Oswald Schmitz that set out to test this idea with quantitative data. They scoured the scientific literature for studies that had examined how fast ecosystems recover from disturbances. They found 240 studies — spanning land, sea, and freshwater and including a wide range of habitats –  that met their criteria.

The results were surprising: across a broad range of ecosystem and perturbation types, they found that most ecosystems appear capable of rebounding surprisingly quickly—within a few decades—if treated properly (see the figure). The last point being the trick, of course. Forests rebounded most slowly, and agriculture and multiple stressors had the longest lasting effects. But, overall, most ecosystems were able to recover to something like their pre-disturbance state within a decade or two.

The analysis offers an unexpected ray of hope that damaged ecosystems may be much more resilient on average than previously expected.

Now, the glass might alternatively be seen as half-empty given that roughly half the systems and variables examined had not recovered by the end of their respective studies. In many cases this is probably because they had not been monitored long enough. Intriguingly, only 5% of the ecosystems showed evidence of shifting into an alternate stable state, suggesting that this phenomenon may rarely explain non-recovery despite the high-profile attention such regime shifts (as they are called in the technical literature) have received in recent years.

There are, of course, the usual questions about how representative are the published data found through an electronic literature search, and also the more specific spectre of “shifting baselines” affecting the results, that is, in trying to determine what the actual “natural” or equilibrium state of an ecosystem is in the absence of disturbances.

To me, perhaps the most sobering issue, which was not considered by this study, is that ability to measure recovery is only possible once the perturbation has been relaxed. Yet many of the pressures humans are now imposing, such as climate heating and agriculture, are long-term, sustained perturbations that are unlikely to be relaxed in the foreseeable future. The analysis also found that recovery is slower from multiple stressors, which is increasingly the situation facing most ecosystems.

Despit these caveats, this new analysis provides a first quantitative benchmark against which future refinements can be evaluated. Equally importantly, in my view, these data provide a valuable psychological jolt to an increasingly entrenched sense of resignation and hopelessness about the state of wild nature. While there is no arguing with the magnitude of impacts humans have had on ecosystems, this paper offers at least a hint that nature is more forgiving and resourceful than many have assumed.

[Original source (open access): Jones,H.P. and O. J. Schmitz. 2009. Rapid Recovery of Damaged Ecosystems. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5653. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005653]

Well, to be truthful, some of the things advertised in the title I already knew, and others I learned from trying to grow things outside in general, rather than from this particular zucchini per se. But the larger point is that growing things teaches one several important lessons that are difficult to get from the everyday, fast-paced, air-conditioned, hyper-caffeinated, homogenized, insular, virtual world that most of us inhabit.

The first and perhaps most pedestrian thing I learned is that I can do this.  Born in the suburbs and having spent most of my life foraging shrink-wrapped pseudo-food from more or less identical supermarkets throughout the 50 states and the world, even I can do this. It’s only one zucchini so far, but there are two or three more on the surprisingly gigantic plants out there, and a pile of green tomatoes ready to spill out of the patch and lots of basil. I’m optimistic about the beans and at least a few leaves of spinach too. And you can do it too (no doubt many of you could give me long lessons about this), with even a few square yards of soil or a few large pots. It doesn’t take much to get started, and then you start seeing all kinds of opportunities.

I learned to be keenly aware of the weather, and in fact to like rain. At least rain of a certain sort and frequency — gentle, sustained for a few hours, coming after we haven’t had any rain for a week. Now, instead of seeing rain as an annoyance as so many of us do in modern life, getting exasperated about getting my shoes wet on the way to the car, my skin feels like it’s gratefully absorbing the moisture as I think of the soil and little root hairs drinking up life-giving water, and the two rain barrels filling up to see us through the next week or so. Well, not always — I still get annoyed when I get soaked on the way to the car.

Most importantly, I learned that eating fresh produce has a satisfaction that is far deeper than just filling one’s stomach with the fuel necessary to keep tapping at the computer. Knowing the source of food, knowing its history, having seen it grow from a flower bud, through hot sun and rain, having tended it and checked on it every morning, heard the birds singing around it, maybe picked off a pest or encouraged a friendly insect, all of this gives eating a satisfaction not only to the body but to the soul that is impossible to appreciate without having done it.

And I didn’t even mention that it was the best zucchini I ever had — firm but tender, mildly flavored with no hint of bitterness, no seeds. Raw or sauteed in a bit of olive oil (I tried it both ways). I could almost feel the vitamins and healthful essence spreading through my body. Nourishment in a much broader sense that we usually think about.

OK, I’m off now to check the garden.

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

I bring this up only as backdrop for one email I received recently that somehow, inexplicably, survived my highly practiced finger on the delete button. It is a very thoughtful, thought-provoking, and compelling essay by Amitai Etzioni in the New Republic arguing (much as Bill McKibben did in Deep Economy) that runaway consumer culture is the real root of America’s–and the industrialized world’s–creeping malaise (stop me if you’ve heard this one).

It would seem easy to dismiss such philosophical arguments as woolly-headed dreaming. But let’s not be premature. As Etzioni notes,”This mentality may seem so integral to American culture that resisting it is doomed to futility. But the current economic downturn may provide an opening of sorts.”

“The kind of culture that would best serve a Maslowian hierarchy of needs is hardly one that would kill the goose that lays the golden eggs–the economy that can provide the goods needed for basic creature comforts. Nor one that merely mocks the use of consumer goods to respond to higher needs. It must be a culture that extols sources of human flourishing besides acquisition. The two most obvious candidates to fill this role are communitarian pursuits and transcendental ones

I will leave you with this thought, and encourage you to read the whole article:

“All this may seem abstract, not to mention utopian. But one can see a precedent of sorts for a society that emphasizes communitarian and transcendental pursuits among retired people, who spend the final decades of their lives painting not for a market or galleries but as a form of self- expression, socializing with each other, volunteering, and, in some cases, taking classes. Of course, these citizens already put in the work that enables them to lead this kind of life. For other ages to participate before retirement, they will have to shorten their workweek and workday, refuse to take work home, turn off their BlackBerrys, and otherwise downgrade the centrality of labor to their lives. This is, in effect, what the French, with their 35-hour workweeks, tried to do, as did other countries in “old” Europe. Mainstream American economists–who argue that a modern economy cannot survive unless people consume evermore and hence produce and work evermore–have long scoffed at these societies and urged them to modernize. To some extent, they did, especially the Brits. Now it seems that maybe these countries were onto something after all.”

And may I add to that list some of my own favorite communitarian and transcendental activities: walking outdoors, camping, gardening (though I prefer to call it ecological engineering), puttering around looking at bugs and birds, fishing, neglecting the lawn, turning over rotting logs, among others. Mainstream American Economists? No wonder it’s called the dismal science.

The alert reader will recall that I made a resolution of sorts a year or three ago, inspired in part by Doug Tallamy’s wonderful book, to get serious about re-engineering the yard toward a landscape more in harmony with the evolutionary history of the local area, more hospitable to desirable wildlife of all sizes, less thirsty for imported water and industrial fertilizer, more pleasing to the eye and spirit, less work (?), etc. This has involved both a surprisingly satisfying campaign of piched battle against various aggressive and invasive alien plants, as well as a systematic plan to plant a wide range of native shrubs and perennials over the course of the next few years.  Oh, and a vegetable garden too. A major re-imagining of the property.

After starting tentatively last spring with a little butterfly patch and a few pots scavenged from a native plant sale, we decided to launch into this righteously and contacted our local native plant nurserywoman and guru, Denise Green, who produced a coherent plan to convert a large swath of monotonous green “grass” (mostly alien weeds, albeit many with little flowers that are charming in their way) into a structurally diverse sward of native flowers, grasses, and shrubs favored by butterflies and birds. The idea was to have this native landscape meld into an edible landscape that included an existing pecan tree at one end, and our little vegetable plot on the other. The plan is shown below.

So, long story short, I started with the area between the house and the shed, along the sinuous brick path. First the destruction: I cut down a gnarly old black cherry that was hugging the shed and constantly dropping dry sticks around, as well as a “grandmother tree” (Chinaberry) that had been split and broken up and resprouted many times and was basically an eyesore. Then covered the intervening grass area with old newspapers and pizza boxes and then heaped mulch over that. Into this I planted the shrubs — four highbush blueberry plants (of two varieties to ensure vigorous cross-fertilization), a small fig sapling (the only non-native), and an oak-leaf Hydrangea. Put them in in March and they are doing great!  Lots of big fat blueberries on the bushes (now covered with bird netting), the fig leafed out and growing well, the Hydrangea with two nice flower clusters.

Around the same time I installed a second rain barrel along the front of the house so we now have a capacity of 100 gallons (I hope to add a third eventually on the other side but that will require installing a gutter too, which is a bit more advanced than I want to tackle at this point). I haven’t tapped into the well yet this year.

Now the vegetable patch, at the other end of the edible crescent. Last year was my first hack at this and the results were what one would expect. I planted tomatoes, basil, rosemary, lettuce and probably something else I don’t remember. Basil is pretty tough to kill and it did accordingly well –  we had homemade pesto many times during the summer, always a hit. I got a few tomatoes but most fell victim to a fiendishly clever animal, which I have deduced must have been a raccoon because the villain actually pried apart the wire fence stapled to the timbers surrounding the plot (and, to add insult to injury, mostly took one or two bites out of each, then dumped it on the ground). The lettuce was an abject failure, started too late for one thing.

Anyway, I learned my lesson. Installed a heavier-duty fence with lots of staples and no door (I just hop over the short fence) — so far so good. Worked the whole winter’s accumulation of compost into the vegetable patch. Planted three varieties of tomatoes, giving them a bit more space than last year’s jungle, a bunch of sweet basil, two summer squash plants, two rows of green bean seeds, some spinach from seed, and a single pepper plant. Mulched them after they got established. And have watered them regularly with my collected rain. It helps that this has been a great spring for long soaking, gentle rains. Bottom line: all the vegetables are going crazy. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, the stunted pecan tree is coming into its own now that it has been released from the shadow of the old black cherry. In a few years, we should have good crops of pecans, figs, blueberries, and vegetables too.  Oh, and I am also weeding away and nurturing some volunteer blackberry brambles that came up in the general chaos of the yard edge.

Right. About the natives. Along the wasteland between the driveway and the vegetable patch, I have been waging war against the impenetrable privet thickets for a few years now.  The stuff is almost gone. And, to my delight, it is being replaced, right out of the woodwork, by a volunteer stand of Aralia spinosa, the “devil’s walking stick” — so named for its long naked single trunk covered with frightful thorns.  The spray of flowers turning to berries expected late in summer is supposed to be a favorite of birds. In the same area, vacated by the chopped down chinaberry, two native spicebush are taking off. And, also to my delight, the little patch of sensitive ferns I put in last March has come back and is spreading vigorously. As is the Joe-Pye weed planted in the butterfly patch, which is frighteningly buff — looks like it’s been watered with pharmaceutical effluent from a Major League Baseball clubhouse. The bleeding hearts also returned (see photo at top).

Stand by for photos of the insects attracted to this wonderland as it starts to bloom. Don’t look now but I’m thinking about a chicken coop next year . . .

So, on our (no longer very) recent trip to the Antipodes I was able to read two books, seemingly worlds apart but actually with a curious connection between them. Rather against my will, I seem more and more often these days to find myself drifting into ruminations about the end of the world as we know it.  It’s hard to avoid such dystopian daydreams what with accelerating global warming, the sixth wave of extinction underway, the reigning environmental Ponzi scheme known colloquially as “the global economy”, and various other wonders of modern civilization celebrated by our friends at the Cato Institute and such places.

But, to quote Monty Python, “This is supposed to be a happy occasion!  Let’s not bicker and argue about who killed who . . .”

Let’s do the bad news first.  After passing by it in the airport bookstores several times in recent months, even picking it up and leafing through a few pages, I finally succumbed to the macabre fascination and bought a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. What really hooked me in the end was that the story is about a man and his young son traveling through the wasteland together and that hit a nerve.

My impressions: The book is both horrific and irresistible. The End Of The World with no silver lining, no blinking, and no punches pulled. I don’t know how to describe its — it is the bleakest, most disturbing narrative perhaps ever written, the more so because of the growing sense that it could in fact happen. But this also, in some perverse sense, makes it hopeful for me. I can’t believe, or it’s hard for me to believe, that the world could truly be completely destroyed with only humans remaining. Life is simply too strong and tenacious. Though it is possible that we’re dumb enough.

It seems much more probable that we would end up with The World Without Us (which I haven’t read). Perhaps it’s only a question of time scales. Ultimately, at some point, humans will disappear as all species do. The question is whether we will go out with a whimper, such that The World Without Us is left, or with a bang, as in The Road. Even in the latter case, life will return and a new age will begin. But it may well be centuries. Even millennia. Depending on how badly we stumble . . .

But that is hardly a topic for polite dinner conversation. Perhaps it’s best to just move on.  The world is in trouble. It is what it is, as the current cliche goes.  So what are we going to do about it?

That, for the most part, is the subject of the Bill McKibben’s excellent recent book Deep Economy. So let us turn to what might reasonably be called the good news. If you’re tired of reading and hearing about impending disaster (perhaps especially because it’s likely to be true), if you’re suffering paralysis about what you can do constructively to help turn the world from its current alarming path, this book is a real shot in the arm, as would be expected from this true hero of American environmental letters.

Basically, McKibben’s thesis is that the solution to the multifaceted complex of threats facing modern civilization is a return to humanity, meaning the humane life of small, more self-sufficient communities — anti-globalization, if you will (one reviewer of the book described him as the “anti-Thomas Friedman”).  And (horrors!) anti-growth.  Meaning that the dogma of economic growth, which is more fundamentalist than any religious belief worldwide, comes under some harsh scrutiny. Its time to live within our means, not just because it is necessary to prevent the collapse of global civilization (in case that is not sufficient justification) but because it will make us happier. Does economic growth make you happy?  It does if you’re starving.  But most Americans aren’t. We long ago reached the point of diminishing returns on the relationships between consumption and happiness. How much happier has the opening of the new Wal-Mart outside of town made you (even ignoring the several stores that closed in the aftermath)?

Local food, local power generation, local community, yes even neighborliness. These are McKibben’s answers. There have of course been many critics of globalization, and in the hands of a lesser writer, this thesis might sound smarmy and naive. But McKibben’s argument is characteristically informed, measured, balanced, and strongly supported with examples from the real world. Very compelling. And let’s face it — it becomes clearer every day that what the world needs is a fundamental rethinking of the way we do things and think about things. This book makes me think that there may yet be a silver lining.

I took the opportunity to organize some of my thoughts from various presentations I’d done recently on climate change in the mid-Atlantic coastal zone of North America.  The result has now been posted: “Bracing for a Sea Change“.

The Reef Tank blog also features lots of other interesting material, including several posts from my colleague and friend John Bruno on coral reefs (see one example here).

Check it out!

We’d been told by the restaurant owner next door that a dolphin has made its home in a small Bay south of here on the Mahia peninsula and reportedly enjoys, even seeks out, human company. OK. I’m a natural skeptic, and I’ve also been a marine biologist for almost 30 years, which means that the topic of dolphins regularly comes up from civilians at cocktail parties and what not. Everyone loves dolphins, wants to swim with them, share crystals, etc. But in general my sense has been that dolphins do not want to play with us. Why would they? So I nodded politely at all this.  But I was intrigued.  So with a cloudless blue sky and a free day ahead of us, the boy and I headed south to investigate. There are few roads in this neck of the woods so it wasn’t difficult to find our way and after an hour or so of driving we came on a beach – a beautiful strand framed by rocky headlands, which would surely be thronged with people and snarled lines of traffic anywhere in the USA.

But it wasn’t thronged, not in this awe-inspiring country where people are outnumbered by sheep. The water was calm and from the road we spotted a group of maybe ten figures wading in waist-deep water and, sure enough, on closer examination, a dorsal fin was intermittently visible. We hurriedly donned our swimsuits and jogged down the beach and waded into the cool water. There, an adult dolphin, perhaps 8 or 9 feet in length, was slowly cruising the shallows, carrying a diver’s fin on its muzzle, occasionally prodding the wide-eyed onlookers to toss it for him, circling around, enjoying (apparently) a gentle rub under the chin. We stroked his skin, which had the consistency of hard rubber, with a slick surface. We gamely tossed the fin, patted him as he swam by, dodged his misty exhalations, and generally watched in wonder at this strange phenomenon. The locals call him Moko, which I gathered from our Maori guide the next day is a shortened form of an affectionate word for a child that expresses its belonging to the whole community.  Evidently Moko has been a regular at this beach, hanging with the locals, for two years (two years and two days, one woman there told us).

We spent nearly an hour in the water with him, far and away the closest contact I’ve ever had with a dolphin, the boy (and I) enraptured and I reflecting on what a once-in-a-lifetime experience this was. It jolted me into pondering afresh what goes through the mind, by all accounts of an intelligence rivaling our own, of a dolphin? What could this being, this mammalian fish at home in its intricate seascape of clicks and whistles and echoes, its unfathomable intuition of the shoals where fish gather, the subtle, shifting, borders of watery currents in the sea, its strong family ties, what could this creature want with us? Is it an explorer as some of us are? The odd one that feels more kinship with other species than with its own kind, as again some people do? A lonely outcast from the conventional society of dolphindom? An eccentric?

And what does it feel as it weaves among the pairs of lumbering legs and through the cacophonous splashing and shouting of these apparently aware but unintelligibly strange creatures at the edge of the dry world? Does it know that these legs belong to the same creatures that are inexorably changing the watery world its ancestors have known intimately for some millions of years? How could it not know? Surely an animal with the intelligence that its brain size and structure and behavior suggest it possesses could not have escaped the realization, the connection, between us and the growing sickness of its underwater home, that the noisy boats and nets and hooks that relentlessly drag away its food and habitat are operated by these same curious bipeds. Surely the dolphin, its kind if not this individual, has made the connection, as its eyes breach the surface along its wide wanderings, between the density of humans and the sediments and trouble washing off the land to murk up the adjacent sea and confound its sonic seascape? Could this individual even be a missionary of sorts, a lone voice in the deteriorating marine wilderness attempting to make contact in the desperate hope that, for lack of a better word, love might turn the tide? Almost certainly we will never know.

And it suddenly strikes me as perverse that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars launching modern-day rosetta stones into space and monitoring the faint trickle of cosmic electronic noise at the far reaches in a grandiose search for “intelligent life” in the distant universe, somehow – astonishingly – missing that the most incredible manifestations of intelligent life are immediately under our noses, and all we can think to do with them is render their carcasses into meat and oil, or wrench off their long tusks to make baubles and leave the rest rotting on the savannah in view of their own children, or confine them behind plate glass with a beach ball.

What exactly do we mean by intelligent life?

In addition to efforts at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and overhauling energy industries, there have been many suggestions for geo-engineering on a global scale to reduce atmospheric heating. The latter range from the sublime to (often) the ridiculous — huge parasols in space to shade the earth, dumping freight cars of iron filings into the tropical ocean to stimulate blooms of plankton that suck down the CO2, etc. Many such suggestions would be astronomically expensive and some are truly over the top.

Is there really no better way? Why not look to Nature for an answer?  This approach has worked countless times before. Natural ecosystems have had 3-some-odd-billion years to experiment in the face of constant pressure and have discovered a plethora of ingenious ways to solve problems.

Consider the new paper in Current Biology by Ridgwell and colleagues. These authors suggest the ingenious hypothesis that regional warming might be mitigated not by costly futuristic infrastructure but by relatively simple changes in crop varieties that change leaf albedo over large areas.

Ridgwell et al. proceed from the observation that historical conversion of native vegetation to crops with higher albedo (i.e., ability to reflect incoming solar radiation) has reduced warming, and they suggest a low-tech, relatively inexpensive approach that would exploit the existing infrastructure of agriculture.  The idea is to switch crops to known varieties that have leaf glossiness and/or canopy architecture that reflect more solar radiation. By making these changes in the Hadley Centre coupled atmosphere-ocean model, they estimate that summer temperatures could be reduced by a substantial 1 degree C throughout much of the mid-latitude northern hemisphere. These changes could potentially be done cheaply and quickly and might even be improved by selective breeding for higher-albedo foliage.

The figure at left shows the global distribution of croplands. The model of Ridgwell et al. allowed C₃ grasses (crops such as rice, wheat, and soybeans) and C₄ grasses (e.g., maize, sorghum, sugarcane, and millet) to grow within these areas designated as cropland.

The figure below shows the results in terms of  climatic impacts of bio-geoengineering.  The colors show the global anomalies of summer (JJA) and winter (DJF) surface air temperature resulting from a +0.04 increase in maximum crop canopy albedo and an elevated atmospheric CO₂ concentration of 700 ppm, relative to “control” conditions with no change in crop albedo. The small “hotspots” of cooling or warming visible on the map are mostly associated with localized changes in seasonal sea-ice extent or snow cover relative to the control, induced by the cropland albedo changes elsewhere.

To me this is a classic potential application of reconciliation ecology, and also biomimicry, that is creative use of nature’s methods to achieve goals that are important to humanity but minimize impacts on the rest of the ecosystem (in the sense that we already have huge areas under agricultural cultivation and this is unlikely to change).   Plus it’s surely a whole lot cheaper than putting a bunch of colossal umbrellas in space, even if that was likely to work.

[Original source: Ridgwell A, Singarayer JS, Hetherington AM, and Valdes PJ. 2009. Tackling Regional Climate Change By Leaf Albedo Bio-geoengineering. Current Biology 19(2):146-150.]