Overshoot day

Posted on 29 December, 2017 by alloporus

Overshoot day is the day in the year when human activities have used up the amount of the Earth’s natural resources that can be renewed within one year.

Ideally this is sometime in very late December or better still, January, February or later in the in the subsequent year. Overshoot day celebrated then would mean we are either in balance or slightly ahead using less resources than are renewed each year. This was pretty much true up to the late 1960’s.

In 2017 overshoot day was 2nd August.

This leaves another 151 days left in the year to keep everyone going on resources not renewed within the year. We are using up credit, reserves of resources that sit in the renewable pool.

There is more bad news if you are Australian. Our Aussie lifestyle chews up more resources than most. If everyone lived like us then overshoot day arrives on 12th March, almost half a year earlier.

Put another way, if everyone lived the Aussie lifestyle, we would need 5.2 Earths worth of renewable natural resources per year. And if we all had the British stiff upper lip or Italian suits, then it would be 3.0 Earths.

This is a serious problem folks. I mean it. We are overextended taking up at least a third more than is renewed. It is like having a salary of $100 a week and spending $130 a week. It is only sustainable for as long as your savings or credit card allows.

Aussies should be ashamed that they are the most profligate being ahead even of the Americans (5.0 Earth’s in their case); not that finger pointing helps. All the wealthy people in the world are collectively living on credit. We are borrowing from the pool of reserves without an ability to pay back in. The risk in this transaction is not secured against any collateral other than the technology mantra.

In natural resources terms, buy now, pay later, becomes use now, worry about shortages later. And it could become use now, deal with collapse later.

If laboratory rats run out of food they get hungry, then they fight each other, and then they eat each other.

It is ugly.

Our system of credit, supply chains, and technology applied to renewable resources will buffer us for a while. It is why we don’t feel shortages or, indeed, hunger for those of us living on $100 plus a day (a little under $50,000 a year before tax).

It is also why we buffered this system after the GFC even though we knew it was built on sand and so much of the extra credit promised ended up in just a few pockets. We should pay much more attention to all this. But I digress, here is the key message.

Overshoot day is the most important day of the year. If we are smart, less greedy and less fearful we could even make it a biannual celebration.

So when you are pondering your New Year’s resolutions and reflecting on another year lodged into history, with full stomachs and the lingering indigestion of Christmas cheer, spare a thought for the day in 2018 when we overshoot our renewable resources for another year.

Eating your pet

Posted on 22 December, 2017 by alloporus

A while ago I was on the road in rural NSW looking at the conservation value of native vegetation patches. A fascinating tale of dual consent, blinkered minds and koalas. These stories will come later for I have another I must tell first.

On my travels, I chatted with a government vegetation officer who is also a farmer. For many years Dave has legally hunted on his property to remove feral animals and reduce the number of kangaroos and wallabies that eat his crops. This is standard practice in the Australian bush and a necessary function.

Although all native animals are protected under NSW law the balance between kangaroo numbers and the interests of landholders means there are commercial licenses to supply meat and skin products and non-commercial licenses for the purpose of damage mitigation and public safety. The commercial harvest is regulated through a quota and every step in the kangaroo supply chain is licensed and monitored. Around 1,800 professional roo shooters ply their trade across Australia.

So when David shoots animals on his land it is all above board. What he does with the meat was what we chatted about.

He makes biltong, a better kind of jerky if you will. And by all accounts it is delicious. I am a big fan of biltong from my time in southern Africa so we had a fascinating yarn about his techniques, recipes, the best animals, and the best cuts. Loin from smaller wallabies, dried in a dehydrator with a good hit of chilli, in case you were wondering.

Excited on my return I began to tell my wife about this kangaroo biltong when she yelled ‘yuk’ and demanded that I stop.

“You can’t eat a pet,” she screamed.

Now I should explain that we have a swamp wallaby that visits our backyard during wet periods, usually with her joey in tow or pouch. Wallabies have a certain cuteness but are as wild as a ferret and definitely not pets. They are responsible for the loss of many an edible garden plant.

I should also say that my wife is by no means a nature lover. Movies, shopping and a good yarn with her friends are more her thing. She is also a keen carnivore who has been known to berate vegans for not feeding animal products to their kids. But clearly, she connected with this emblem of the nation.

Somehow she has acquired a visceral response to eating it.

I was taken aback. My biltong story remained untold and my own curiosity over why we have not made more of this protein source for sale to eager Asian markets was not aired. I had to be quiet misreading badly the depth of feeling for wild animals that I saw as a resource, David too presumably.

So you can’t eat your pet, even if it is not actually your pet.

This is a more severe dampener on a market for kangaroo meat than I had imagined. Pragmatologists beware, we have a long way to go.

Teaching ecology

Posted on 15 December, 2017 by alloporus

Peer-reviewed paper series

Dangerfield, J.M., Boar, R.R. & Montgomery, P., 1987. Teaching ecology to undergraduates: a practical course using projects. Journal of Biological Education, 21(4), 251–258.

“In these practicals students learned how to derive facts through experimentation.”

This is a quote from my first ever peer-reviewed publication that appeared in the Journal of Biological Education, exactly 30 years ago. The irony that it wasn’t strictly research but some pedagogy gleaned from an undergraduate practical course I designed and delivered with my colleague Ros Boar that we thought would get students familiar with the process of research by experimentation. We were young and idealistic at the time but had a passion for education that was, and still is, a good thing.

The course began with some facts about three species of woodlice. One was common everywhere in the UK and the other two, whilst closely related (classified in the same genus) were rare. We presented the students with vast numbers of live specimens of each species from laboratory cultures along with some instructions on how to look after them responsibly, then asked students to test the hypothesis that it was the behaviours of these species affected their recorded distributions.

Next we said, ‘Well, there you have it folks. Form small groups and go conduct some experiments.”

It was a bold plan even for the University of East Anglia that, at the time, had a reputation for innovation in teaching. We were trying to put the ‘open needed learning’ paradigm that we believed in, to the test and, almost without realising it, I have followed this approach throughout my time as an educator.

Open-ended explorations of carbon budgets, all taxa biodiversity inventories, the spatial distribution of plants and animals, and even millipede mating behaviours found their way into subsequent teaching efforts. I am not sure that all students benefit from being thrown in at the deep end of the scientific method without any flotation devices. In later years I became convinced that the approach exposed secondary school education that no longer teaches “thinking” to any useful purpose. But in those heady days, we just knew it was worthwhile.

Between them, the UEA students interpreted behaviours with experiments on habitat preference, vertical distribution, survivorship, feeding and growth, and palatability. All the likely suspects for the global hypothesis you would have to agree. Only this was a learning exercise and so we did not expect much light on what makes Porcellio scaber so ubiquitous. That said, it almost certainly has to do with the weaker physiologies of its congeners, and out students were on that track.

We did ask the students how they went and from what they said we concluded

The majority of students (80 per cent) initially expected their conclusions to support the ecological theory that they had explored during their lecture course. Interestingly, only 25 per cent subsequently claimed that they would expect this if they were to begin another piece of work. All of the students who replied to our questionnaire that they would now be less accepting of theory.

So we created sceptics.

An inspired outcome, even if I do say so myself.

Nice one

Posted on 8 December, 2017 by alloporus

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see”

Scott Pruitt, Head US Environmental Protection Agency

This is an awesome quote on so many levels.

Like all good quotes, there are truths. Measuring with precision is indeed challenging and the impact of human activity on climate is, without doubt, a source of disagreement.

Then there is an opinion. And you would expect the Head of the EPA to have one, just maybe not one that is opposite to the official view of the agency he leads.

There is also a subtle admission; “the global warming that we see”. Lucky he put that in before some of the biggest storms on record. It’s also an admission somewhat at odds with the rest of the quote. Presumably, you are supposed to look past that inconsistency.

So here is a question to think about.

At what point should a public servant talk up his personal view or that of his immediate political masters over the official policy setting?

Perhaps never.

If public servants simply disregarded the current policy it makes a mockery of the democratic process. Those elected to create policy rely on the system to implement whatever they decide in good faith. And those who elect their representatives expect the system to work too.

This means public servants tasked with designing and delivering workable policy should get on with it even as the politics dances around them. They should stand firm and deliver the flavour of the day.

So to be fair to Mr Pruitt his frame is a new policy and not that of the previous administration.

And then there is the reality.

Here are some Alloporus thoughts on climate change

If this is leadership, heaven help us

Post revisited — the missing link

Can you answer these four easy questions?

Soil carbon — what we think

Staggering

Posted on 1 December, 2017 by alloporus

“The US surveys consistently show that ‘reading proficiency’ as exemplified, for instance, by the ability to ‘compare viewpoints in two editorials’ is possessed by only 13 per cent of the US adult population.”

From ‘The Challenge of Things: Thinking Through Troubled Times‘ by A. C. Grayling

This is a remarkable quote.

If the numbers are true, then roughly 8 out of 10 average Americans can’t discern viewpoints from what they read. This is both an indictment on levels of literacy and on the consequences of them being so low.

It could be that most people are not aware that they do not know what the written words mean. They readily form opinions from what they hear and see on conventional media and have those views reinforced by their social media feeds. When all that they read comes in the form of a tweet then there is hardly any discerning to be done. It’s too easy to find the reinforcement of your worldview.

It could be even simpler than this. Maybe people do not make up their minds. Instead, they just listen and take everything they hear as gospel.

So here is one consequence of this staggering reality.

There is very little point in editorials.