February 27, 2006
Scale, nature and our infinite capacity to rationalize
If you accept the evidence that 65 million years ago about 75% of all the organisms living on this planet were taken out by a giant comet afterwhich, in a million or so years, the planet recovered its diversity, you might be willing to rationalize that the current mass extinction will, eventually, reverse itself. If you believe that the earth is only 10,000 years old and that the rapture is near, you may be willing to dismiss environmental concerns and trust to God's plan. The first proposition, predicated on a scale of millions of years and reasonably solid evidence, reflects a justifiable long term viewpoint, the second most probably reflects the difficulty we humans have in visualizing scales beyond our own life-times. The planet will almost certainly find a way to heal itself after humanity as we know it now is gone from the planet. I will certainly die sometime in the next 40 or so years, and will no longer require the planets resources. So, if we can get through the next 40 years, I'll be fine; a million or so and the planet will be jake, too
The problem is that neither of these scales takes into account the time in between and because of that, they allow us to rationalize our behaviors as somehow unimportant. I'd like to think that my child and her children will have some sort of future beyond the next 40 years that doesn't involve, environmental collapse, starvation, chaos, brimstone and gnashing of teeth.
Almost any argument we have about the environment is an argument of scales: temporal scales, spatial scales, economic scales, genetic scales. Most of us don't really understand scales well enough to apply them consistently, so we pick and choose based on our comfort zones, belief systems and ambitions. Most of our scales suffer from being either too personal or too broad.
The folks at the lottery commission will tell you that the odds of winning at Powerball are 1 in 36.6 games, that's what it says on the back of the ticket. That's the advertiser's scale and it's absolutely true, statistically speaking. The lottery folks want you to buy tickets. You have to dig a bit deeper to discover that the odds of winning more than $100 is 1 in 584,432 and the odds are 1 in 146,107,962, if you're aiming to win the jackpot. Nothing teaches scale more neatly than the lottery. And nothing illustrates our capacity to rationalize our behavior by ignoring scale better than the lottery.
Any statistic that gets cited will be colored by the scales chosen and the motives of those who've chosen the scale. By sliding the scale around, one can accentuate or trivialize any claim. Being struck by lightning? depends on where you live and whether you golf. Being shot? depends on whether you own a gun, who you associate with, where you live. Dying in a car accident? depend on where you drive, how much you drive, what distractions you indulge in while driving. In each case the exact odds depend on what the scale is, but they're all still better than winning more than $100 at the lottery.
And even in the face of clear odds, we rationalize our behaviors. The probability of an American male getting prostate cancer is something like 1 in 3, yet most men will likely forego a checkup and play the lottery instead.
Endangered Marbled Murrelets? The Bush administration, operating from the scale of the whole population claims that, because murrelets are not endangered in all parts of their range, they do not need to be protected in the parts of their range where the populations have shown significant decreases. Folks in Oregon, Washington and California, where Marbled Murrelets are in unequivocal decline have issues with the federal governments choice of scales.
Dying of West Nile Virus? well, you have to be bitten by a mosquito that can carry the virus AND the mosquito has to be infected with the virus. Not all mosquitos can carry the virus, most mosquitos that can carry the virus don't. Even if you do get bit by an infected mosquito, odds are you'll be unable to distinguish the resulting disease symptoms from a cold and you won't come close to dying. Vector control folks would like to kill every mosquito in every pond to reduce the odds of West Nile Virus even further. Those concerned about the ecological effects of mosquito control at this scale question the policy. On the scale of these things, universal health care and gun violence are probably a greater public health issues, but mosquitos don't have a lobby.
The planet is changing. Glaciers and icecaps are receding. The oceans are rising and warming up. Climates are changing. The number of people on the planet is increasing, the natural resources people depend upon on, shrinking. The amount of carbon dioxide and other gaseous chemicals in the atmosphere is increasing. The extinction rate is increasing. It is also fairly certain that humans are a principal agent in all of these changes. These are all statistical facts, numbers on a chart. The degree to which we take these changes and our hand in them seriously is a matter of where we choose to set the scale. We can choose a scale focused on the now and the me, a scale that allows us to dismiss the trend data and rationalize our behaviors, or we can choose a scale with a longer view toward tomorrow and our children. And we can choose the scale for our definitions of "tomorrow" and "our children".
Even at our most insidious, we humans probably do not have the capacity to exterminate all life on this planet. We do have the capacity to exterminate ourselves, our children, our presence as witnesses recording the miracle that is Earth. We will undoubtedly take a lot of other species with us.
I will almost certainly be dead in 40 years, but I'm not going anywhere. A million years from now the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen that is me will have been recycled countless times into other organisms, some of them newly evolved, others ancient witnesses to the history of life on Earth. And sometime, 5 billion or so years from now, the Sun, in a giant burp, will reduce Earth to cinders as it runs out of hydrogen, cools and swells. That's the very long view. Whether humanity is around to see it depends on the scales we choose now.
February 12, 2006
Dead Bird Walking
I spent the morning walking Del Rey with the dead bird counters from the COASST crew. We've been collecting data on the beach for several years now as part of a region-wide project doing protocol based data gathering on species of birds that wash up on the beach dead. The recent storm series brought winds gusting to 60 miles per hour and record setting rainfall. It also brought an incredible amount of woody debris from Columbia River which got deposited on the beach.
 Fork-tailed Storm-petrel | Today's count included:Western Grebe 1 |
There's a lot that can be learned from constant effort monitoring ofdead birds. The massive Northern Fulmar die-off that occurred in the fall of 2003 and the annual die-off of Common Murre each summer are two good examples.
This season, Western Grebes and Cassin's Auklets appear to have suffered the greatest impacts from winter storms. Constant monitoring can also yield information on patterns of vagrancy or help with band recovery, as well. Two Parakeet Auklets (rare in Oregon) were picked up last week and a banded Black-footed Albatross was recover last fall.
February 11, 2006
South Jetty repairs impact access
The Army Corps of Engineers is setting up to do repairs of the the South Jetty of the Columbia River. Beginning earlier this week, they began building a road from the parking lot "C" (where the ocean viewing platform is) west over the dunes. This road will eventually go up onto the jetty. Rock will be hauled out to parts of the jetty that have begun failing.
What this means to birders (and other user groups) is that only about a third of the parking lot is currently accessible to visitors. Visitors will not be able to walk directly west to the river beach without dodging trucks. Increased foot traffic through the tidal marsh will almost certainly frustrate shorebird use there and impact saltmarsh wetland plant species.
No one was able to tell me how long the project was expected to take. North Jetty repairs took about 6 months. The current project is for interim repairs only. Funding for a complete rebuild is apparently in the pipeline, though it's hard to imagine that's going to happen around all the recent federal budget cuts. The road being built to the jetty will be removed when the projects are complete and restoration is part of the comprehensive plan, though it is unclear whether these will happen after the interim repairs or the as yet unfunded full repair project.
February 4, 2006
January lowdown
Most of the big news about January centers around the weather and how it affected birds. Record rains, flooding and a storm series that included several systems with winds over 40mph made for an interesting month. Storms in late-December and early-January blew in hundreds of RED PHALAROPES which persisted in puddles and waterways through Jan 10 then disappeared completely.
Storms also took a toll on WESTERN GREBES and CASSIN'S AUKLETS which were the most frequently encountered dead species found on beach counts. NORTHERN FULMAR numbers were surprisingly low.
SNOWY OWL numbers at the South Jetty of the Columbia peaked at five and are now steady at three. Pellet analysis shows a steady diet of BLACK RATS and small ducks (probably BUFFLEHEAD) though they certainly took advantage of the phalarope spike. The storm-driven tides moved a lot of the owls favorite loafing spots around. This coupled with very heavy rains probably had an effect of the persistence of pellets as my ability to find any diminshed quite a bit by the end of January.
In other bird news, the male RUFOUS HUMMINGBIRD continues at Bucky's feeder. A LONG-TAILED DUCK was seen regularly on the Necanicum River in Seaside. An adult GLAUCOUS GULL has also been seen regular on the gull flats there (along with a strkingly similar looking Glaucous x Glaucous-winged Gull with dark eyes).