Environmental Studies

Studying the elephant-sized issues of living with elephants

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 18:35:43 +0000

Studying the elephant-sized issues of living with elephants Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 08/12/2024 - 12:35

Rachel Sauer

On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence

Almost every night, Tyler Nuckols can hear fireworks and shouting—not celebrating a holiday or marking an occasion, but trying to drive elephants back into the forest.

In Ruam Thai, Thailand, where Nuckols is conducting socio-ecological fieldwork as he pursues a PhD in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, elephants emerge from the trees of Kui Buri National Park almost every night in search of pineapple.

Over many years, elephants have learned that an easy and accessible meal is in farmers’ fields—to the detriment of those fields and farmers’ livelihoods. As farmers lose their source of income and means of supporting their families, elephants risk injury or worse as farmers—also risking injury or worse—try to deter them.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD student Tyler Nuckols (left, conducting research in Thailand) and Karen Bailey, assistant professor of environmental studies, emphasize that human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation.

For a lot of people—mainly those who don’t coexist with elephants—this may not seem like much of a problem. Elephants, after all, are among the world’s most beloved and charismatic animals, credited with an emotional range that some claim matches or even exceeds that of humans. People visit a zoo and return home daydreaming about backyard elephants.

But on World Elephant Day, being celebrated today, Nuckols emphasizes that the challenges and successes of human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation that communities and populations worldwide are tackling as climate change fundamentally reshapes how humans coexist with wildlife.

“We’re interested in supporting and partnering with local communities to look at solutions to human-elephant conflict beyond the predominant approaches of ‘Where do you farm? What do you farm? How much money do you make farming?’” Nuckols explains. "Our research and community-based conservation approach looks to explore a more complex focus related to factors like identity, access to resources and historical and political factors, among many more layers that may shape how households can engage in solutions to human-elephant conflict and participate in the first place."

Studying coexistence

Nuckols has been working with elephants for more than 10 years, starting with the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri, Cambodia—an ethical sanctuary and retirement home for elephants that had worked in tourism or logging. After earning a master’s degree at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ State University, and after COVID curtailed his plans to return to Cambodia to study mitigation techniques to prevent elephants from entering agricultural fields, he began working with Karen Bailey, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder assistant professor of environmental studies who leads the WELS (well-being, environment, livelihoods and sustainability) Group.

Bailey completed postdoctoral research in southern Africa with communities living outside protected areas “who were living with the threats of climate change and the impact of sharing the landscape with wildlife,” she says. “Some of the impacts of crop raiding by elephants in southern Africa were significant predictors of potential food insecurity. When that’s combined with the threats of changing seasons and changing climate as well, the realities of human-elephant coexistence in communities in and outside of conservation areas become really pronounced.”

Tyler Nuckols (second from left, blue shirt) and colleagues from Bring the Elephant Home in Thailand. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

As part of the Human Elephant Coexistence Through Alternative Agricultural Research (HECTAAR) working group with the human-elephant coexistence research organization Trunks & Leaves, Bailey and Nuckols partner with researchers and conservation groups from around the world to study the reasons for conflict between agriculturalists and elephants, as well as develop and test interventions that support livelihoods and work to rebuild community resilience and landscapes in different countries and cultures.

Nuckols began researching in Thailand in 2022, partnering with NGO Bring the Elephant Home to study human-elephant conflict and how elephants interact with different types of agricultural crops. Nuckols’ research also focuses on environmental justice and resilience, and how communities define ecological justice for both humans and elephants.

The community where Nuckols’ research is based is not only a human-elephant conflict hot spot, but also a success story for conservation and community-based tourism.

“But despite the positive impacts of tourism and some grassroots efforts, conflict occurs every night,” Nuckols says. “You can hear fireworks and shouting and people trying to get elephants back into the forest every night. So, one of the ideas that community members are evaluating is crop transition. Research has shown that elephants won’t eat lemongrass, ginger, chili, citronella, so farmers are interested in growing these crops, but the community is asking how to ensure it’s sustainable and equitable.

“Changing crops is a high-risk decision, when they know they can sell monocrop pineapple that they’ve been growing for decades.”

Risk vs. reward

A significant challenge in human-elephant coexistence is the disconnect between people actually living with or near elephants and the rest of the world that is watching and loves elephants, or at least the idea of elephants.

“Even in Thailand, there’s a huge disconnect between major urban centers like Bangkok and rural provinces,” Nuckols explains. “These farmers are often villainized or portrayed as invaders. They’ve been told they should just pack up and give elephants back their habitat, but that’s not feasible or tenable or just for those people who are being told to leave. It’s very grim, but we’ve had people die in our community from negative encounters with elephants, victims who’ve been attacked in the night while they were guarding their crops.”

Almost every night, farmers in Ruam Thai, Thailand, deal with elephants in their pineapple fields. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

Bailey notes that while the world may be watching and feeling invested in the plight of elephants, “there’s an inherent framing of environmental justice that we more equally share the costs and benefits of the environment. We as people globally benefit from elephants existing—we get a warm feeling when we think about them—but we have to remind people that there are costs. We have to think about how to more equitably share the costs and benefits. Anyone who loves elephants and might call themselves an elephant person should know and should be clear that elephant conservation simply will not work if we don’t think about those humans and elevate the human components.”

A complicating factor in some climate change discourse is the argument that humans caused it and animals are blameless in it, so animals should be prioritized in human decision making. “The important nuance is that the rural farmers in Thailand didn’t do this,” Bailey says.

“It’s the wealthy individuals all over the world who are, per capita, emitting many more tons of carbon. There’s an inherent inequity in who is causing the environmental problems, and often the people and communities experiencing the realities of environmental change aren’t key drivers of this change.”

In the community where Nuckols is studying, which is in the rain shadow of a mountain range, drought is a very serious concern. During the last dry season, the reservoir that supplies water to the community nearly dried up. Many farmers in the area grow pineapple for many reasons, one of which is that it’s considered a crop that can survive in high-heat and low-water conditions.

“In the past few years, though, temperatures in the field can soar to 43, 44 (Celsius) and so even now pineapple is struggling to survive,” Nuckols says. “Those conditions are also driving elephants more and more to the edge of the national park, where a lot of the habitat restoration has been funded by large corporate subsidiaries that don’t have time to trek into the forest and dig a water hole.

Elephants at the edge of Kui Buri National Park in Thailand. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

“So, you get a concentration of elephants on the edge of the forest, and as climate change gets worse, as resources get more sparse in the forest, elephants are going to go for high energy, high reward crops like pineapple. In a short hour they can devour an entire patch of pineapple that gives them the nutrients and sugar they would spend days foraging for in the dry forest. It’s basic risk versus reward.”

Just listen

In researching the complex factors influencing human-elephant conflict and coexistence, Nuckols emphasizes that a foundational principle of the work is that it’s community-driven and community-led.

“We’re involved in study and data collection, but we do everything in a framework of participatory action research,” Nuckols explains. “We pilot everything we do with focus groups in the local community, we run everything by a group of trusted stakeholders like the village chief and elders working with our organization. We ask them, ‘Is this appropriate?’ and a lot of things were thrown out the window because they’re like, ‘No way.’

“The whole group that’s growing and testing alternative crops now, which is 16 people, are community members who created a collective and are working together. We as researchers act as a bridge to help support the trial, to help find funding. We use our skills to elevate the work that this community is already doing.”

Bailey adds that the lessons learned in researching human-elephant coexistence—though the details can vary broadly between cultures, countries and regions—may inform human-wildlife coexistence in other areas, including ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ.

“There are tons of parallels and tons of lessons to be learned that we can apply more broadly,” Nuckols says. “One of the biggest is just to listen to community members and help empower those community members. Don’t ever go in assuming you know best. Spend time in the community and pilot your work before you go in and think anything is going to work within a community. Make sure community members feel heard, have a meaningful seat at the table and feel empowered to solve these problems.”

Top image: Asian elephants living in Thailand's Kui Buri National Park (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

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On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence.

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Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution

Anonymous — Tue, 28 May 2024 16:28:05 +0000

Scholar has a front-row seat to the global fight against plastic pollution Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/28/2024 - 10:28

Rachel Sauer

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis

In the past year, Clare Gallagher has gotten very interested in ghost gear, which she admits is “a really depressing Google search” if you’re not already familiar with it.

Ghost gear is the umbrella term for lost, abandoned or discarded fishing gear that contributes to the crisis of plastic pollution in Earth’s oceans and can trap fish and marine mammals, causing them to die by suffocation or exhaustion. In the upper Gulf of California, for example, abandoned gillnetting has contributed to the vaquita porpoise nearing the brink of extinction.

When Gallagher, a PhD student in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, joined an observer delegation at the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution April 23-29 in Ottawa, Canada, she learned that fishing gear is included in a proposed international treaty on plastic pollution that would be discussed at the weeklong gathering.

Clare Gallagher, a PhD student in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, by a sculpture outside a U.N. treaty negotiating session in Ottawa, Canada. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

However, after attending several all-day—and sometimes into the night—negotiating sessions, “I learned that fishing gear is almost like a side note to the greater problem. Single-use plastics are so nefarious, and this is the next climate change fight,” Gallagher says.

“To be able to go sit in conference room for 14 hours a day for nine days straight—and the final meetings went until 3 a.m.—I was pretty in awe of the dedication of the people in these meetings. But then at the same time, it was also incredibly frustrating when there’s not a lot of progress made. It’s just the way of global geopolitics, and I was getting a crash course in this—there will be some countries or blocs of countries that don’t want strong treaties, like oil-producing countries, just as there are countries that have been against strong environmental treaties for the last several decades.”

The gathering Gallagher attended was the fourth session of the U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution and focused on the marine environment. The committee’s stated goal is to have a completed treaty written by the end of the year.

For Gallagher, attending the session not only was eye-opening to the intricacies of global geopolitics, but also brought several other key insights, including:

Abandoned fishing gear is one problem of many in the crisis of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans

“Microplastics were a huge, huge topic at the treaty discussions,” Gallagher says. “From a health standpoint, I was really surprised to see so many endocrinologists there. The endocrine destruction from chemicals that are being added to plastics is linked to the obesity epidemic, to the epidemic of anxiety and depression. It’s actually pretty terrifying.”

Among the discussion topics were plastic pellets, sometimes called nurdles, which are commonly used as a raw material for making plastic products. They are frequently shipped via container, and if pellets ever spill from those containers into a marine environment, the environmental damage and harm to living creatures can be devastating.

“So, some of the discussion was about classifying them as hazardous waste,” Gallagher says.

However, abandoned fishing gear is a big problem

“Ghost gear is the colloquial term,” Gallagher explains. “The more scientific term is abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear, or ALDFG, and it’s just a terrible thing. Let’s say you a have huge vessel that’s fishing tuna in the Pacific and use purse seines, which are these crazy kilometer-wide nets that can cinch up entire schools of tuna.

“Say that net gets lost or is intentionally cut by crew or just gets stuck on something or there’s a full-on accident. That net will continue to fish whales, dolphins, turtles, you name it after it’s lost contact with the vessel. That’s why we get term ‘ghost,’ because fishing continues to happen in a worst-case scenario.”

Gallagher notes that purse seines typically are made of nylon, which sinks in water because of its density, so they’re not a significant contributor to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is now about the size of Alaska. However, lighter density nets and fishing line made of high-denisty polyethylene wash up on shorelines around the world, “so it’s pretty incredible that this treaty is trying to address fishing gear as its own plastic pollution sector because almost all commercial fishing nets and lines are made of plastic polymers, so this treaty could address industrial, global and local fishing economies.”

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD student Clare Gallager attended the fourth session of the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiation Committee on Plastic Pollution as an observer. (Photo: Clare Gallagher)

Many perceive plastic pollution as a symptom a bigger issue

“The biggest thing is production,” Gallagher says, “stopping primary plastic production. That’s one of the things that’s so interesting about this treaty process, because it’s almost the same story, it’s the same players, it’s the same perpetrators as the international debate over fossil fuel emissions.”

In fact, Gallagher notes, the Center for International Environmental Law analyzed the affiliations of registered attendees for the session and found almost 200 lobbyists for the fossil fuel and chemical industries were registered.

The problems of plastic pollution are daunting, but there’s room for hope

“I felt, not being a United Nations treaty expert, pretty overwhelmed by the scale at which countries around the world need to compromise and work together to create any international treaty, especially environmental treaties,” Gallagher says. “It’s pretty overwhelming to think this is how humanity governs itself at the top level.

“That being said, I have hope that the most ambitious countries will continue to push for a strong treaty on plastic pollution. I don’t know if remorse is right word, but there is sadness that many of the countries suffering the most from plastic pollution are not producing the plastic. They’re the ones that have to deal with plastic trash and plastic pollution, the ones that have to fight for a strong treaty, and there’s a real power imbalance that I find so disgusting and disturbing.”

Gallagher says one of the most impressive coalitions she observed at the session was the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS): “There was a woman from Easter Island, which, granted, is part of Chile, and she told a story about how every time her young son goes surfing, which is like every day, she has to wash his hair because there’s so much microplastic in it when he’s done.

“People from some of the smallest, poorest countries repeatedly said, ‘This is not complex. We don’t want your trash; we need to stop this.’ I think that bravery and that fight—these Davids taking on Goliaths, as seen in the Rapa Nui Declaration—is what is going to make the world a better place.”

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD student Clare Gallagher finds reason for hope amid the complexities of negotiations to craft a U.N. treaty addressing a worldwide crisis.

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Advocating for more conservation than the bear minimum

Anonymous — Tue, 21 May 2024 21:54:32 +0000

Advocating for more conservation than the bear minimum Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/21/2024 - 15:54

Bradley Worrell

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ researcher argues that setting minimum targets for wildlife conservation inevitably excludes other worthwhile goals, including restoration and ecosystem management

Although the grizzly is featured prominently on the California state flag, the golden bear has been extinct in the wild since the 1920s.

In response, some conservation advocates have promoted the idea of returning it to the California wilderness, modeled on other wildlife-reintroduction efforts. And while there are instances in which large mammals have been restored to their historic range, there also are hidden obstructions keeping bears on the flag but off the land, according to Benjamin Hale, an associate professor of philosophy who teaches in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, where his focus is on environmental ethics.

In a recently published paper, “The Bear Minimum: Reintroduction and the Weakness of Minimalist Conservation,” Hale and co-authors Lee Brann and Alexander Lee argue that conservation policies too often gauge the success of conservation initiatives by setting minimum targets for conservation, which can be short-sighted.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scholar Benjamin Hale argues that conservation policies too often gauge the success of conservation initiatives by setting minimum targets for conservation, which can be short-sighted.

“When conservation policy sets minimum standards for the protection of nature, objectives like restoration, novel ecosystem management, rewilding and other novel issues in intervention ecology become unsupported and underrepresented,” the authors note.

Recently, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Arts and Sciences Magazine asked Hale to expand on these topics. His responses were lightly edited and condensed for space.

Question: What, specifically, is wrong with doing the bare minimum when it comes to conservation?

Hale: Well, first of all, it’s a losing proposition for conservation to do as little as possible or to only set a minimum goal and not aspire to something greater. I think that it ultimately ends up being self-undermining of conservationist efforts.

As it is, many times the protections kick in once it’s already pretty late in the process. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for error, partly because we tend to focus efforts on protecting what little remaining value there is in the world. That is to say: Here is a valuable entity, let’s try to protect it and prevent harm from coming to it.

And once these minimums are imposed, very often the discussions about how conservation can best proceed are effectively over, even in the face of new developments. From the standpoint of keeping the discussion open, I and my co-authors have suggested that we should take steps to focus more on establishing communities of experts offering their expertise in an ongoing way.

Varieties of conservation minimalism and their alternatives

Benjamin Hale and his co-authors identify and explain five varieties of conservation minimalism, as well as reasons why they might fail:

Mere existence minimalism: Attempts should be made to ensure that there is at least one representative of a species “alive” somewhere in the world—in the wild, in a zoo, or perhaps in a genetic bank. However, scientists and conservationists don’t know how to successfully prevent extinction if species are only protected once they face existential threats, and some will be lost.

Viability minimalism: Conservation efforts seek to preserve up to a minimum population to ensure that a species does not go extinct within some time frame. However, it is typically not concerned with species’ historic numbers or declining quantities.

Sustainability minimalism: Conservation goals that assess success are based on long-term sustainability, presenting a view of sustainability as the minimum standard for conservation efforts. However, sustainability minimalism overlooks other conservation considerations.

Path of least resistance minimalism: These are conservation measures that are generally easy to achieve, cheap and not in competition with alternative interests. This minimalism is the protection of nature that is not under particular threat, which a vague and meager assurance that something is being conserved.

Habitat minimalism: Conservation efforts aim to protect only the minimum habitat that is essential for the survival of a species. It generally emphasizes the current habit range rather than the historical range.

Alternatives to minimalism

Three alternatives to minimalism, as well as reasons why those ideas might not be feasible, include:

Maximalism: If protecting nature is good, it may seem worthwhile to protect all of nature. While such expansive environmental concern has intuitive appeal, it is not practical and is unattractive because it will be overly demanding.

Optimalism: Optimalism tries to optimize two or more conflicting values. For example, conservation efforts to optimize between ecosystems and pollutants could include setting an “optimum” level of pollution versus a minimum level. This rationale implies some level of pollution is morally and politically permissible.

Rationalism: Rationalism is rooted in the idea of rational self-interest, which introduces the problem of ecosystem triage or species triage. However, in the rationalist approach there is not a perfect overlap between what is beneficial to human beings and what is beneficial to environments or species.

Hale notes that some of these ideas have few, if any, adherents. Still, he says it was important to highlight competing ideas before making the case for his own preferred method for addressing conservation issues.

Question: Why do you believe many conservation efforts seem to focus on minimum goals rather than something more expansive?

Hale: I think it’s just the direction we’ve been going since the Endangered Species Act was passed. When policies are set, they impose restrictions on whole groups of people, and when groups of people object to the imposition of those policies, generally the question becomes something like, ‘Well, how much can we do?’

That question, I think, yields the minimalist position. There’s some minimum threshold that you’re aiming for, resulting from a practical concern, which ends up being a sort of default position for a lot of conservationists.

Question: In your paper, you talk about ‘new conservation science.’ How is it different from traditional conservation, and how does it fit into minimalist conservation?

Hale: New conservation sort of burst onto the scene in the past 10 or 15 years with some work by folks like Peter Kareiva, the former chief scientist and vice president of The Nature Conservancy. He and some other folks basically thought that traditional approaches to conservation were protectionist and that traditional conservationists were using the Endangered Species Act in ways that were absolutist.

The ‘new conservationist’ science advocates thought we should be more careful to triage conservation efforts, given that there is a limited amount of natural resources. New conservation scientists also suggested we redirect conservation efforts for more anthropocentric concerns.

A lot of people in the old conservation community saw those ideas as a kind of threat to what they had committed their lives to do, which is to protect nature for its own sake.

This has been a very hotly debated topic, and in fact, I co-authored another paper with some of my other ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ colleagues, including Dan Doak and Bruce Goldstein, in which we directly challenged the ideas put forth by Peter Kareiva. That article was heavily cited at the time we published it.

Even today, the debate is ongoing.

Question: Conservation minimalism can take a number of different forms; are there also a number of alternatives to minimalism?

Hale: Yes. I guess the first thing I should say is that when we are outlining these varieties of minimalism, we don’t intend to suggest that all of these are descriptive of actual, deeply held commitments on the part of some in the conservation community. Rather, we’re sort of using some methodologies of philosophy to try to explore the idea of minimalism in its various forms and to highlight potential issues with those concepts.

This allows us to then make the argument, ‘OK, if I can’t be a minimalist, then what should I do?’

And it is also worth pointing out that the alternatives to minimalism (presented) are not widely held beliefs. Some are conceptually absurd. For example, we introduce the idea of maximalism, which is the idea that we should protect all of nature. A maximalist about grizzly bears might say, ‘Let’s maximize grizzly bears. How many grizzlies can we pack onto this planet?’

Nobody in the conservation community today is really advocating for that. We’re introducing this idea so that the reader can challenge it and then dispense with it.

Question: In your paper, you put forward the idea of using ‘reasonabilism’ to make decisions about conservation. What, exactly, is reasonabilism and why is it a better alternative to the other methods?

Hale: Well, it is a made-up term. We created it as a way of talking about getting us to consider a reasonable approach to conservation in which all participants are engaging with one another in a kind of deliberative, discursive exchange, almost like a town hall.

The idea behind reasonabilism is that it’s not dependent upon a small panel of experts to dictate what the ultimate outcome is going to be. Conservation is better served when we take more aggressive steps to democratize the process through which conservation decisions are made.

Reasonabilism is sort of a playful term, but the hope is really that it can serve as a useful contrast to rationalism, which is actually quite common in the environmental policy discourse.

Question: Would reasonabilism suggest that grizzly bear reintroduction in California is possible, maybe with certain stipulations or limitations?

Hale: I think it’s possible, although maybe politically challenging. If you were to get all the communities together that are going to be affected by grizzly reintroduction and try to develop a process for the reintroduction of the grizzly that would help justify it, the outcome of that process wouldn’t necessary make everyone happy, but it would at least provide a process for deliberation. It’s important to have all voices at the table.

I will say by way of comparison that it’s relevant that the recent effort to reintroduce the wolf to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ was determined by plebiscite (a popular vote). I think ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, in some ways, is doing it right by trying to get as many people as possible involved in the discussion.

Again, this is not to say that we’re going to avoid all conflict, because conflict is common with these kinds of pretty significant environmental changes, but it is important to make these decisions through the democratic process. That’s the kind of idea we’re after. We think this is what would make it “reasonable”: because people can reason through it.

Question: Do you think the idea of reasonabilism could catch on with conservationists, if not broader parties that would be involved in conservation discussions?

Hale: It may or may not catch on. I don’t know about the idea itself, but I think that the objective of the paper is to say: There is an alternative to imposing of the standard value propositions that dominate the conservation discussion and then insisting upon one of the varieties of minimalism or maximalism or rationalism.

Part of the job of the conservationists and wildlife managers is to pay attention to the variety of voices that contribute to this effort—even if they’re dead set against the grizzly’s reintroduction, or wolves, or whatever the case may be.

In a way, that’s what we’re doing in ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s environmental studies department. We have faculty from across campus with diverse areas of expertise, but we’re all coming together in one unit with the objective of expanding the discourse.

Top image by Jean Beaufort

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ researcher argues that setting minimum targets for wildlife conservation inevitably excludes other worthwhile goals, including restoration and ecosystem management.

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Why the first Earth Day went viral (pre-social media)

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 16:30:26 +0000

Why the first Earth Day went viral (pre-social media) Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/18/2024 - 10:30

Doug McPherson

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professors explain Earth Day’s history, impact, what it’s become and if it’s still relevant

If you were at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder in April 1970, you were likely aware―very aware―of the first Earth Day on April 22. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder was all in and almost stretched the day into a full week, kicking things off on April 18 when the campus was dotted with green flags and abuzz with special events, speeches, films, symposiums, rap sessions and panels.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder was just one of about 1,500 universities celebrating Earth Day, not to mention 20 million Americans and more than 10,000 cities, churches and other organizations, says Paul Sutter, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ professor of environmental history.

That first Earth Day went viral long before viral was cool. No social media, no email blasts, no group texts. Just TV, radio, word of mouth and, in Boulder, an old-fashioned paper-and-ink brochure listing the scheduled events.

“One of the remarkable things is that Earth Day came out of nowhere and was organized quickly, bringing together large numbers of activists who had worked separately before and had not put a name to their movement yet,” Sutter says.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder scholars Paul Sutter (left) and Steve Vanderheiden have studied Earth Day's history and impact.

“Earth Day was also decentralized, which meant that it manifested itself in different ways in different places. This was one key to its success. In many ways, we’ve forgotten how powerful and radical these events were. Organizing these events helped to democratize environmentalism.”

So what led to that first Earth Day? And have subsequent Earth Days had the same impact?

Some, including Sutter, say the time was right and argue that even though it sprouted quickly, there were forces at work decades before its birth.

“Americans emerged from WWII concerned about the destructiveness of the war and the state of the global environment―particularly the relationship between population growth and natural resources,” Sutter says. “Early postwar environmental concern was decidedly global.”

And there was worry about the atomic bomb and nuclear technology. “The first detonation of an atomic bomb … was a watershed moment in the nation’s environmental history, and postwar antinuclear activism culminated with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963,” Sutter says.

Many cite Rachel Carson’s book on environmental science, Silent Spring, as an added spark as well.

Another factor: The space program, which allowed humans to view Earth from space for the first time. Sutter says that sight gave people “a sense of the planet’s finitude and limits.”

Still relevant?

As successful as that first Earth Day proved to be, after more than a half century, some question whether it’s still relevant, and ask if there’s something else that could make a bigger difference.

Steve Vanderheiden, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of political science and environmental studies, says anything that’s been observed annually since 1970 is “bound to have diminishing returns” over time, and that today’s iteration “will be less consequential” than the first one.

One of the remarkable things is that Earth Day came out of nowhere and was organized quickly, bringing together large numbers of activists who had worked separately before and had not put a name to their movement yet.”

“I don't mean to suggest that there isn't still a role for what Earth Day has become―an occasion to teach about environmental issues or hold events where people reaffirm the importance of environmental protection―but rather that we shouldn't expect it to make much of a difference in public opinion or to build momentum for legislation, which we still need,” Vanderheiden says.

“Those goals are now better served by more oppositional forms of political organization and expression that are more willing or able to challenge the status quo.”

While Vanderheiden says that the original Earth Day was “a powerful focusing event” for the U.S. environmental movement, he sees subsequent Earth Days as having made “relatively little difference,” and that any of the past 40 Earth Days have not swayed public opinion on most environmental issues.

“Part of this is a function of the original Earth Day [that was] intended as a consciousness-raising event, for which it was wildly successful. Consciousness now having already been raised about such issues, these later iterations have less potential to accomplish the same objective.”

Vanderheiden adds that Earth Day has also not evolved to reflect activism or resistance. “That might make it too threatening to the status quo to continue enjoying the wide but shallow support that it now receives. In a way, Earth Day has … maintained its popularity because it doesn't really challenge anything anymore. It’s somewhat like how we still celebrate May Day but almost never with much of its original critical content.”

Interested in learning more about Earth Day? Sutter recommends Adam Rome’s The Genius of Earth Day.

Top image: The partly-illuminated Earth rising over the lunar horizon as recorded by Apolo 11; the Earth is approximately 400,000 km away. (Photo: NASA)

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professors explain Earth Day’s history, impact, what it’s become and if it’s still relevant.

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The climate crisis is a market failure, noted expert says

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 23:45:06 +0000

The climate crisis is a market failure, noted expert says Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/15/2024 - 17:45

Rachel Sauer

Harvard scholar Naomi Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in Environmental Studies, highlights how free market fundamentalism has thwarted the science of climate change

The best way to define market fundamentalism is in terms of what Ronald Reagan called “the magic of the marketplace.”

“It’s the idea that ‘the free market’ is powerful, efficient, effective, rational and that most problems can best be solved by allowing the market to do its thing,” explained Naomi Oreskes, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University and an affiliated professor of earth and planetary science. She added that market fundamentalism also must be understood as a force that has long blocked, and continues to block, climate action.

Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in the Department of Environmental Studies, presented some of the findings from her research at a lecture April 4. In it, she detailed a decades-long campaign to cast doubt on science and block political action on climate change—buoyed by the argument that the free market is best poised to tackle the issue.

However, “there is not such a thing as the free market,” Oreskes said. “Markets can be very effective for many kinds of things, but our argument is not all things.”

Naomi Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in the Department of Environmental Studies, presented some of the findings from her research at a lecture April 4.

In her 2023 book, written with Eric Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, Oreskes began with the “very notion of the free market—this idea that the market exists, it’s a thing, it exists unto itself, it has agency and even wisdom. I think of the metaphor of the invisible hand of the marketplace, which is often talked about as if it’s not a metaphor, as if there actually is an invisible hand,” she said.

“The reality is that we make markets. They have been around since biblical times and are associated with the rise in capitalism, and people have been studying them for just as long—you can find rules for how markets should operate in Leviticus. But there is no such thing as ‘the free market’ and never has been. The reality is that government has always been involved in markets, in protective tariffs … in many cases, governments have created markets.”

In the headlines in the ‘80s

Oreskes began her presentation by displaying a story that appeared on the front page of The New York Times on June 24, 1988, headlined “Global warming has begun, expert tells Senate.” The expert was James E. Hansen of NASA, described in the story as a leading expert on climate change, who said “that there was no ‘magic number’ that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather. But he added, ‘It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’”

Oreskes further noted that in 1992, George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which he described as “the first step in crucial long-term international efforts to address climate change.”

“So, a few years ago, I got interested in the question ‘What the heck happened?’” Oreskes said. “We had a Republican president and Democratic leaders in Congress, so why didn’t we take those concrete steps that Bush promised us?

“The answer is not a lack of scientific communication. Lots of people at the time thought that scientists just weren’t doing a good enough job explaining the science, but what (Conway and I) showed … was a politically motivated campaign to cast doubt on that science and block political action.”

This has been exacerbated, she said, by negative belief in government and hostility to government action, especially government regulations: “Market fundamentalists will tell you that government needs to get out of the way and let markets do their magic.”

For more than 100 years, she said, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers have partnered with scientists and economists to stoke hostility toward government regulation, framing it as a backdoor to communism and antithetical their definition of freedom.

We’ve had conservative physicists who made common cause with the fossil-fuel industry and libertarian think tanks. Why would educated, intelligent people deny basic scientific findings—especially about things as established as the harms of tobacco use or as big as the hole in the ozone layer? The answer is politics.”

“We’ve had conservative physicists who made common cause with the fossil-fuel industry and libertarian think tanks,” Oreskes said. “Why would educated, intelligent people deny basic scientific findings—especially about things as established as the harms of tobacco use or as big as the hole in the ozone layer? The answer is politics.”

Together, politics and business have framed “free enterprise” as one of the United States’ founding principles, but it “appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence, nowhere in the Constitution, and if you know anything about the history of America in the 19th century, governments at the federal and state level were massively involved in developing the economy.”

American capitalism has not protected freedom, Oreskes said, and “freedom is not protected by our systems of distributing goods and services, but by our forms of government. If you think about it in terms of the political economy, there’s the political part and the economic part. The political part has to be supported by governance; freedom is supported by our laws and also by our civic norms, what we accept as legitimate and what we reject as not legitimate.

“A common American error is the belief that freedom is the absence of state authority. One part of the reason why so many Americans have made this error is because this is what we’ve been told for more than a century by powerful people, powerful organizations and some powerful academics.”

She said that the climate crisis can be seen as a market failure and that free-market fundamentalism has triggered “a race to the bottom.”

Quoting the author Kim Stanely Robinson, Oreskes said, “The invisible hand never picks up the check.”

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Harvard scholar Naomi Oreskes, the 2024 Patricia Sheffels Visiting Scholar in Environmental Studies, highlights how free market fundamentalism has thwarted the science of climate change.

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But seriously, folks, climate change is a laughing matter

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 18:30:24 +0000

But seriously, folks, climate change is a laughing matter Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 04/05/2024 - 12:30

Rachel Sauer

‘Stand Up for Climate Comedy’ unites ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder student performers and professional comedians in a show that encourages the audience to laugh together and then work together

The Green Bachelor was not impressed with Oceana Sea and her 2 million followers—despite her name, she hates the water and doesn’t know how to swim. Nor was he impressed with Petrolina Exxon and her daddy’s helicopter. They clearly weren’t there for the right reasons.

Not to spoil the true-eco-love ending, but the Green Bachelor, a marine biologist, was smitten with the contestant who rode her bike to the Green Bachelor mansion and knows the flow of her local watershed.

Pause scene.

"Stand Up for Climate Comedy" is at 7 p.m. April 15 at Boulder Theater, 2032 14th St. Admission is free.

“I think we should say, ‘What is your local watershed and what are you doing to support it, hmm?’” says Elizabeth Smith, a junior majoring in environmental studies.

This followed discussion of defining Oceana as someone who obviously doesn’t know her bodies of water, and advice from Beth Osnes to remember that the sketch is “a physicality thing, so get it up on its feet as soon as you can.”

It was a Tuesday morning in the Climate Change Communication class, and students were laughing at climate change.

Not the reality of it, of course—it’s the defining issue of their generation and there’s nothing funny about it—but in preparation for Stand Up for Climate Comedy April 15 at the Boulder Theater. The show, which is in its ninth year, will feature comedians and science communicators Chuck Nice, Rollie Williams and Kasha Patel, as well as students from the Climate Change Communication class, who write and perform either solo stand-up or group sketches that they create together with support from Osnes and Ben Stasny, a PhD candidate in theater and teaching assistant for the class.

“Comedy has always taken on serious, heavy, depressing social issues,” explains Osnes, a University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of theatre and dance who teaches the class. “Instead of people just yelling at each other about these issues, approaching them through comedy makes engagement with the issues not only positive, but helps us process them in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming or hopeless.

“Comedy relies on double meaning. I think it’s easy for us to get stuck in binary thinking, things are one way or the other, and once you get locked into one thought, you’re stuck. Comedy can help us get unstuck, and the gorgeous thing about it is when it works, our response is involuntary, that burst of laughter, and all of a sudden everybody’s having that same response and we’re having it together. It’s golden. When we’re talking about climate change, we need things that are going to help us burst through our set ways of thinking and that we do together.”

Laughing together

Stand Up for Climate Comedy is the brainchild of Osnes and Max Boykoff, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of environmental studies, who also are two of the project leaders for Inside the Greenhouse, a collective effort that aims to creatively frame and tell the stories surrounding climate change through video, theatre, dance and writing.

Osnes and Boykoff figured that people might have a better time carrying or reframing the burdens of guilt and despair that shadow climate change if they were laughing together rather than shouting at each other. It’s not so much “laugh to keep from crying,” she says, but more “laugh and get moving.”

The first year of Stand Up for Climate Comedy “was basically Max and me downstairs (in the Theatre Building) with a $250 budget,” Osnes says.

Not long after, however, they were approached by representatives from the Argosy Foundation “who came to us and said, ‘We’re so sick of people screaming at each other; if we gave you $25,000, what would you do with it?’” Osnes recalls.

Beth Osnes (center) works with Lief Jordan (left), Jayden Simisky and Taylor Gutt as they prepare their stand-up comedy performances. (Photos: Rachel Sauer)

They would make the show bigger, they would organize events across the country, they would bring in luminaries of comedy who also know their science and they would integrate students as a key part of the show. That last part—student involvement—is especially key, Osnes says, because students have deep knowledge of the issues of climate change and are demanding action.

Hence the environmental hostility.

‘The seas are rising, and so are tensions!’

“My best bit is, ‘I’m sick of all this environmentally friendly shit. I’m environmentally hostile now,’” says Taylor Gutt, a senior in environmental studies.

“That’s a good bit,” says Lief Jordon, also a senior in environmental studies. “Environmental hostility is funny.”

They’re sitting with Jayden Simisky, a senior in environmental studies, and Cate Billings, a senior majoring in creative technology and design, at the top of a staircase in the Loft Theatre, workshopping the stand-up routines they’re writing.

None of them has performed stand-up before, “but why not, right?” Jordan says with a laugh. “If you’re going to go down, go down big.”

Billings is taking her stand-up in a multimedia direction, complete with a PowerPoint presentation “so it’s a little educational,” she explains. “I have a slide of coral bleaching and I say, ‘Up here on the surface we bleach our assholes, but coral is way ahead of the trend.’”

That earns an appreciative laugh from her classmates. Meanwhile, Simisky is thinking out loud about how to make carbon dioxide funny.

“The biggest thing for me with CO2 is they’re always saying, like, ‘7,000 tons of CO2,’” he says. “So, there’s this whole-ass neighborhood of carbon dioxide in the sky. Maybe something like, ‘There’s so much CO2 in the air that they’re starting to weigh it in terms of cruise ships. I’ve started to live in fear of a boat falling out of the sky.’”

Skyler Behrens (foreground) times her group's comedy sketch on a practice run-through.

That’s good, his classmates agree.

Elsewhere in the theater, Skyler Behrens, a sophomore studying engineering and education, and Claire Grossman, a junior in creative technology and design, are considering what contestants on a climate change-informed “Love Island” would say.

“What if he just says, ‘Wow, that’s hot’?” Behrens suggests.

“That’s perfect,” Grossman says, and soon Behrens is running through the sketch introduction again: “Welcome back, everyone, to the most exciting season of ‘Love Island’ yet! The seas are rising, and so are tensions!”

Nearby, Marcus Witter and Jake Mendelssohn, both seniors in environmental studies, and Austin Villarreal, a junior studying environmental design, are working with Osnes on their sketch involving three guys on a chairlift deciding who has to jump off.

“I don’t really like murder,” Osnes observes. “I think it’s funnier if an act of God knocks you off.”

Many of the students have not done this kind of performance before, and certainly not on a stage the size of Boulder Theater’s. They admit to nerves and to thinking about jokes so much that they stop being funny, but they’re excited, too.

“It helps that we’re doing it together,” notes Danielle Harris, a senior in environmental studies who plays Oceana Sea on “The Green Bachelor,” and her comedy partners nod in agreement.

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‘Stand Up for Climate Comedy’ unites ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder student performers and professional comedians in a show that encourages the audience to laugh together and then work together.

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Organic farms decrease and increase pesticide use, study finds

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 15:20:11 +0000

Organic farms decrease and increase pesticide use, study finds Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/21/2024 - 09:20

Daniel Long

Responding to a pesky problem, a paper co-authored by PhD candidate Claire Powers offers a potential solution—clustering similar farming practices together

Organic agriculture may be as old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean its impact on pesticide use is fully understood. Claire Powers is doing her part to change that.

Powers, a PhD candidate in environmental studies at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, has co-authored a paper published today in Science. Powers and co-authors Ashley E. Larsen of the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Frederik Noack of the University of British Columbia investigate how organic agriculture influences the pesticide use of neighboring farms. Does it increase it? Decrease it?

The answer, they learned by analyzing thousands of field observations, is it depends.

Claire Powers, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder PhD candidate in environmental studies, and her research colleagues found that farms neighboring organic fields both decrease and increase pesticide use, depending on the type of agricultural operation.

Location, location, location

“We found that conventional fields that are adjacent to organic fields tend to increase their pesticide use,” says Powers, “and organic fields that are adjacent to organic fields tend to decrease their pesticide use.”

Precisely why this is the case is unclear, but Powers, Larsen and Noack suspect it has to do with how organic farms—many of which use pesticides, albeit organically approved ones—implicate the larger ecosystem.

“Organic fields leverage the benefits of natural enemies that reduce the number of pests on their fields, like birds and bugs that eat smaller problematic pests,” says Powers.

These natural enemies and pests then venture onto neighboring fields for shelter and food. If those fields are conventional, farmers will likely have to increase their pesticide use, and if they’re organic, farmers will likely be able to decrease their pesticide use.

This may sound like a win for organic farmers, but not so fast.

When organic and conventional farms are distributed randomly across a landscape—meaning there’s no specific reason why one type of field sits next to another—it’s often both conventional and organic farmers who lose, Powers explains.

“I have not talked to farmers specifically, but I think that, from a conventional farmer’s perspective, it can be a bummer to be adjacent to organic fields, because it means that you will spend more on pesticides. Similarly, organic farmers with neighboring conventional fields may have smaller populations of natural enemies and so larger populations of pests to treat.”

Yet thanks to Larsen, Noack and Powers’ paper, this predicament may someday be a thing of the past.

“The big takeaway from this research is to stack organic fields next to organic fields and conventional fields next to conventional fields,” says Powers. Doing so will likely reduce pesticide use overall and thereby benefit both the environment and farmers’ bank accounts.

A data dilemma

Completing this research was not without its challenges, says Powers. One was finding usable data.

“You have to be able to identify specific fields in a spatial data format, link that spatial data to each field’s pesticide-use rates, and also determine which fields are organic and which are conventional,” says Powers, adding that this information comes from several sources that are tough to combine and that annual agricultural spatial data and pesticide use aren’t particularly well tracked, especially outside of California.

“The big takeaway from this research is to stack organic fields next to organic fields and conventional fields next to conventional fields," says ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researcher Claire Powers.

But Powers, Larsen and Noack were able to find one county that kept such detailed records and made them publicly available: Kern County, California, an agricultural belt of land at the southern tip of the Central Valley and, as far as Powers and her co-authors were concerned, the golden ticket of the Golden State.

“Kern County has annual spatial data for their agricultural fields that can be linked to the two other crucial datasets—pesticide use and organic-crop producer IDs—which is really rare,” says Powers.

Yet the rareness of this data created a separate challenge: convincing the reviewers of the Science paper that it was enough. How reliable could data from just one county in just one state be?

Pretty reliable, says Powers. For one thing, Kern is a high-crop-producing county with many farms, which gave her and her co-authors a lot of room to check for pesticide spillover across a decent sample size. For another, its mix of organic and conventional farms closely resembles that of the nation, making it a useful case study.

Plus, Larsen and Noack put the data through a series of “robustness tests”—tests designed specifically to assess the data’s strength and generalizability—all of which it passed.

Nevertheless, Powers admits that she would jump at the chance to expand the research from the Science paper outward to other counties in California as well as to other states.

“It would be awesome to be able to do that.”

Past, present and future

Powers began this research while a master’s student at the Bren School at UCSB, where Larsen was one of her professors. Since coming to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder to pursue her doctorate, she has moved in a different direction, focusing on the impact of climate change on several species of alpine plants.

Organic fields leverage the benefits of natural enemies that reduce the number of pests on their fields, like birds and bugs that eat smaller problematic pests.”

Yet the thread holding all her work together, Powers believes, is her interest in land conservation and management.

Growing up in Santa Paula, California—in “ag land,” as she calls it—Powers spent a lot of time on farms. She wasn’t a farmer herself, she’s quick to point out, but many of her family members and close friends were, and that gave her an appreciation for the outdoors.

Her passion for conservation then crystalized while she worked for five years as a field instructor for NOLS, an outdoor education provider, which took her across the United States and around the globe, including to places like India and South America.

“That got me interested in thinking about land management in a way that is inclusive and recognizes the need for working landscapes that support wildlife and native plants,” she says.

That interest drives her to this day, pushing her to ask questions, conduct research and publish papers like the one in Science, which she calls “a small step forward” on the long and winding path of scientific discovery.

“And there are lots more steps to take.”

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Responding to a pesky problem, a paper co-authored by PhD candidate Claire Powers offers a potential solution—clustering similar farming practices together.

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Putting climate on the ballot

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 21:04:27 +0000

Putting climate on the ballot Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/19/2024 - 15:04

Matt Burgess

Climate change matters to more and more people–and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election

If you ask American voters what their top issues are, most will point to kitchen-table issues like the economy, inflation, crime, health care or education.

Fewer than 5% of respondents in 2023 and 2024 Gallup surveys said that climate change was the most important problem facing the country.

Despite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections. Climate change opinions may even have had a large enough effect to change the 2020 election outcome in President Joe Biden’s favor. This was the conclusion of an analysis of polling data that we published on Jan. 17, 2024, through the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures.

Matt Burgess is a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder assistant professor of environmental studies and institute fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

What explains these results, and what effect might climate change have on the 2024 election?

Measuring climate change’s effect on elections

We used 2016 and 2020 survey data from the nonpartisan organization Voter Study Group to analyze the relationships between thousands of voters’ presidential picks in the past two elections with their demographics and their opinions on 22 different issues, including climate change.

The survey asked voters to rate climate change’s importance with four options: “unimportant,” “not very important,” “somewhat important” or “very important.”

In 2020, 67% of voters rated climate change as “somewhat important” or “very important,” up from 62% in 2016. Of these voters rating climate change as important, 77% supported Biden in 2020, up from 69% who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. This suggests that climate change opinion has been providing the Democrats with a growing electoral advantage.

Using two different statistical models, we estimated that climate change opinion could have shifted the 2020 national popular vote margin (Democratic vote share minus Republican vote share) by 3% or more toward Biden. Using an Electoral College model, we estimated that a 3% shift would have been large enough to change the election outcome in his favor.

These patterns echo the results of a November 2023 poll. This poll found that more voters trust the Democrats’ approach to climate change, compared to Republicans’ approach to the issue.

What might explain the effect of climate change on voting

So, if most voters–even Democrats–do not rank climate change as their top issue, how could climate change opinion have tipped the 2020 presidential election?

Our analysis could not answer this question directly, but here are three educated guesses:

First, recent presidential elections have been extremely close. This means that climate change opinion would not need to have a very large effect on voting to change election outcomes. In 2020, Biden won Georgia by about 10,000 votes–0.2% of the votes cast–and he won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes, 0.6% of votes cast.

Second, candidates who deny that climate change is real or a problem might turn off some moderate swing voters, even if climate change was not those voters’ top issue. The scientific evidence for climate change being real is so strong that if a candidate were to deny the basic science of climate change, some moderate voters might wonder whether to trust that candidate in general.

Third, some voters may be starting to see the connections between climate change and the kitchen-table issues that they consider to be higher priorities than climate change. For example, there is strong evidence that climate change affects health, national security, the economy and immigration patterns in the U.S. and around the world.

People march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House protesting former President Donald Trump’s environmental policies in April 2017. (Photo: Astrid Riecken/Getty Images)

Where the candidates stand

Biden and former President Donald Trump have very different records on climate change and approaches to the environment.

Trump has previously called climate change a “hoax.”

In 2017, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that legally commits countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Biden reversed that decision in 2021.

While in office, Trump rolled back 125 environmental rules and policies aimed at protecting the country’s air, water, land and wildlife, arguing that these regulations hurt businesses.

Biden has restored many of these regulations. He has also added several new rules and regulations, including a requirement for businesses to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.

Biden has also signed three major laws that each provides tens of billions in annual spending to address climate change. Two of those laws were bipartisan.

On the other hand, the U.S. has also become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, and the largest exporter of natural gas, during Biden’s term.

In the current campaign, Trump has promised to eliminate subsidies for renewable energy and electric vehicles, to increase domestic fossil fuel production and to roll back environmental regulations. In practice, some of these efforts could face opposition from congressional Republicans, in addition to Democrats.

Public opinion varies on particular climate policies that Biden has enacted.

President Joe Biden speaks about his administration’s work to combat climate change on Nov. 14, 2023. (Photo: Susan Walsh/Associated Press)

Nonetheless, doing something about climate change remains much more popular than doing nothing. For example, a November 2023 Yale survey found 57% of voters would prefer a candidate who supports action on global warming over a candidate who opposes action.

What this means for 2024

Our study found that between the 2016 and the 2020 presidential elections, climate change became increasingly important to voters, and the importance voters assign to climate change became increasingly predictive of voting for the Democrats. If these trends continue, then climate change could provide the Democrats with an even larger electoral advantage in 2024.

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that the Democrats will win the 2024 election. For example, our study estimated that climate change gave the Democrats an advantage in 2016, and yet Trump still won that election because of other issues. Immigration is currently the top issue for a plurality of voters, and recent national polls suggest that Trump currently leads the 2024 presidential race over Biden.

Although a majority of voters currently prefer the Democrats’ climate stances, this need not always be true. For example, Democrats risk losing voters when their policies impose economic costs, or when they are framed as anti-capitalist, racial, or overly pessimistic. Some Republican-backed climate policies, like trying to speed up renewable energy projects, are popular.

Nonetheless, if the election were held today, the totality of evidence suggests that most voters would prefer a climate-conscious candidate, and that most climate-conscious voters currently prefer a Democrat.

Matt Burgess is an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Climate change matters to more and more people–and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election.

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In an interconnected world, managing and perceiving risk is key, experts say

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 17:08:10 +0000

In an interconnected world, managing and perceiving risk is key, experts say Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/26/2024 - 10:08

Sarah Kuta

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researcher Steve Miller argues for deeper insight into how people understand risk before shocks, especially those related to climate change, happen in global systems

The world is becoming increasingly interconnected, which has many benefits. Shoppers in ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, for instance, can enjoy tropical fruits in the dead of winter, thanks to vast and complex trade networks.

But this interconnectivity is also risky. A war or drought in one country can have devastating consequences on the availability and affordability of food thousands of miles away. People and governments typically react to these shocks after the fact, such as by implementing trade bans or adjusting crop production, to help mitigate the harm locally.

However, people and governments also try to manage risks proactively, before such shocks occur, which can then affect the broader system. For example, a coastal fishing community worried about the risk of fish-stock collapse because of climate change might diversify its economy by expanding into ecotourism. Their decision to export fewer fish could, in turn, affect the global fish market.

In a recent publication, Steve Miller, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder assistant professor of environmental studies, argues for researching people's perceptions of risk before shocks occur, especially those related to climate change.

In this way, risk is not only a byproduct of a globally interconnected system—it’s also a force that acts upon it, a group of interdisciplinary researchers argues in a new paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“If we want to understand the effects of a risk like climate change, we can't just look at how connections like trade can help us buffer the effects of shocks—for example, droughts and ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ—after they happen,” says lead author Steve Miller, an assistant professor in the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Environmental Studies. “We also have to look at how risks of those events might change where people, goods and information go even before shocks occur.”

The idea that an increasingly interconnected global system creates new sets of risks is widely accepted and serves as the backdrop for many studies and policy decisions. However, the reverse—that risk can change the system itself—often gets overlooked.

To truly understand and assess risks—such as those posed by climate change—the world needs to be paying attention to both, the researchers argue.

“If we don't account for those feedbacks, we're not going to get the costs of climate change right, and we might make some mistakes in how or how much we choose to invest in mitigation and adaptation,” says Miller.

Perceiving and managing risk

Consider the effects of climate change on food availability, for example. Researchers need to understand how crop failure in one nation might ripple through the global trade network and cause severe food shortages elsewhere in the world.

But they also need to back up, long before the crop failure occurs, and look at how governments, farmers, distributors and consumers perceive the risk of climate change-related crop failure—and what they choose to do about it, says Miller. Their efforts to manage risk—such as planting more fail-safe crops or buying more protective insurance policies—ultimately feed back into and alter the broader system.

Beyond that, changes made because of perceived risk may have consequences for both people and the environment—and these downstream effects are not well understood. For instance, the coastal fishing community that begins to rely more heavily on ecotourism must now grapple with new types of risks, such as an economic downturn that dampens tourism.

Risks are an outcome of a global, complex system—but they also play a role in shaping it.

“It's a simple point, but there's lots to do,” says Miller.

Future research

The new paper stemmed from a series of backyard chats between Miller and co-authors Laura Dee, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Eréndira Aceves-Bueno, an assistant professor in the University of Washington’s School of Marine & Environmental Affairs.

Members of a commercial fishing cooperative in Mazatlán, Mexico, pull their nets. (Photo: Eduardo Esparza/Mexico News Daily)

The conversation centered around how some lobster fishers and fishing cooperatives in Mexico, Australia and New Zealand primarily sell their catch to markets in China. Each fishery faces many risks, from fluctuations in local lobster populations to changing consumer tastes in China to global supply chain issues.

“How these people understand and respond to those risks got us thinking about the more general challenge of perceiving and managing risks in globally linked systems like our food systems,” says Miller.

To think through this complex topic, the trio looped in other researchers at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder—Meghan Hayden in ecology and evolutionary biology and Amanda Carrico in environmental studies—as well as experts at other institutions: Uchechukwu Jarrett, an associate professor of practice in economics at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and Kate Brauman, deputy director of the Global Water Security Center at the University of Alabama.

Together, the collaborators produced a “Perspective,” a type of peer-reviewed paper that’s intended to stimulate discussion and inspire new approaches. More specifically, the co-authors hope their paper leads to more research on how people perceive and react to risks in systems that are connected by both environmental and socioeconomic links across the globe.

To that end, they suggest some possible research opportunities for theorists, empiricists, behavioral scientists and experts in particular types of connectivity, such as markets or species migration. For example, they propose lab or field experiments that involve presenting farmers with various risk scenarios, then asking them to explain their thought-processes as they assess each one.

“We need a lot more research,” says Miller. “It's a clear case where we need lots of expertise from many disciplines, and folks with transdisciplinary skills to bring it all together.”

‘Make better decisions’

More broadly, the co-authors hope to draw attention to the push-pull relationship between complex systems and risk. Each can affect the other, and their interactions are far from straightforward.

In the future, they say, those working in research, industry, government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) must focus on both if they hope to tackle complex global challenges like climate change.

“If we get better at embedding risk in our models of how these systems work—like food systems, trade in primary resources like timber, or ecotourism—I think we'll get more credible predictions of how things like climate change will impact us and the ecosystems on which we depend,” says Miller. “With those better predictions, we can make better decisions.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about environmental studies? Show your support.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researcher Steve Miller argues for deeper insight into how people understand risk before shocks, especially those related to climate change, happen in global systems.

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‘Climate contrarianism’ is down but not out, expert says

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 18:31:11 +0000

‘Climate contrarianism’ is down but not out, expert says Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/22/2024 - 11:31

Clay Bonnyman Evans

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Max Boykoff documents how the industry-funded Heartland Institute has morphed in the past decade

In 2011, Max Boykoff attended the 2011 Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, D.C., to better understand how the prominent conservative think tank was influencing the climate debate.

The institute was founded in 1984 to “discover, develop and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems,” rejecting the consensus of relevant experts on issues such as climate change, healthcare and tobacco regulation.

In his 2013 paper (co-authored with Shawn Olson-Hazboun), “’‘Wise contrarians’: a keystone species in contemporary climate science, politics and policy,” Boykoff examined the motivations, drive and exhilaration among attendees “that prop up these contrarian stances, such as ideological or evidentiary disagreement to the orthodox views of science.”

Max Boykoff, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of environmental studies, conducts research to better understand climate contrarianism.

Ten years later, Boykoff ventured back into contrarian country to interview attendees of the Heartland Institute’s 14^th climate-change conference and examine how it compares with the earlier conference.

In his recent peer-reviewed article in the journal Climatic Change, Boykoff identified “ten key themes—five comparisons and five contrasts—that point to adaptive strategies deployed in ongoing and wider CCM (climate-change countermovement) efforts that effectively shape sustainability technology and climate policy.”

While in some ways the organization has declined in visibility, Boykoff says it maintains a $6 million budget, largely funded by conservative contrarian entities such as the American Petroleum Institute, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, ExxonMobil, Philip Morris International and the Walton Family Foundation.

“There is a tendency to dismiss them as a bunch of goofballs, aging, largely white men who chip away at people doing good work through (the organization’s) efforts online and elsewhere,” says Boykoff, professor of environmental studies and fellow at CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. “But it is a mistake to dismiss them because of their ongoing activities that they are continuing to pursue often behind the public scenes.”

Understanding climate contrarianism

Through interviews with 21 speakers in the 2021 conference, Boykoff identified five continuities with the 2011 gathering:

Ongoing rhetoric of freedom, appeals to liberty and support for free-market capitalism
Attacks on science, scientists and purported climate “alarmism”
Self-perception as “embattled underdogs”
Righteousness and confidence that their views trump those of relevant experts
A proud “us vs. them” stance and nostalgia for past fights that garnered public attention

“(W)hile they may have viewed themselves as benevolently motivated and careful, critical thinkers, in their prepared remarks, self-assurance, appearances of bold conviction, poor listening skills, sensitivity to criticism, and a lack of empathy were evident … throughout the (2021) conference,” Boykoff writes.

He also identified five key contrasts that have developed over the past decade:

Instances of paranoia—such as doubting Boykoff’s credentials—in the face of shrinking prestige
Waning public-facing influence
“A penchant to feed climate contrarianism into ‘culture wars,’ including anti-vaccination and anti-mask movements”
Reflection on their individual legacies
A shift in focus from federal- to state-level sites of resistance and increased undermining of environmental, social and governmental (ESG) actions to influence climate change

Of those, Boykoff finds the shift to state-level action and influence, the attack on ESG principles and the conflation of climate change with seemingly unrelated “culture war” issues the most concerning.

Through the freedom and liberty tropes, alarmism and attacks on science, many feel like they are embattled underdogs who think they know better than those who dedicate their lives to this issue.”

“Hitching their wagon to culture wars … helps give them a purpose, some semblance of notoriety that some of them seemingly crave,” says Boykoff, adding he was careful to “stick with observation” rather than speculation in writing the paper.

A potent disrupter

Boykoff personally experienced the intensity of Covid-related contrarianism, with one man demanding that he remove his mask.

“Anti-masking rhetoric pervaded my conversations,” he says. “It helps them feel as if they are fighting some heroic, just cause.”

Attacking ESG principles gave participants a “hook to talk about the ‘woke left,’ the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and the Fed (Federal Reserve). … Through the freedom and liberty tropes, alarmism and attacks on science, many feel like they are embattled underdogs who think they know better than those who dedicate their lives to this issue,” he says.

Despite the vigorous contrarianism he encountered, the 2021 conference struck Boykoff as further evidence of the conference sponsor’s fading public-facing influence.

“While this research finds persistent animosity and division fed by Heartland Institute speakers and participants,” he writes, “there are emergent signals that these rhetorical strategies are increasingly being viewed as ossified and fossilized in a decarbonizing world.”

Even so, Boykoff warns that the institute remains a potent disrupter, supporting such efforts as mailing climate-contrarian school materials to teachers who may not have time to fully vet the information.

“These are dated perspectives, and the world is moving on,” he says. “But they are persistent, and they are still getting a lot of funding.”

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ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Max Boykoff documents how the industry-funded Heartland Institute has morphed in the past decade.

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