There was good news and bad at a recent brownbag discussion hosted by the Canadian Studies Center.

First the bad news: “Fisheries themselves are in a state of disarray,” said William Taylor, University Distinguished Professor in Global Fisheries Sustainability.

That might not be a surprise to those who follow environmental news, but the scope of the problem remains staggering: Some 80 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited or overfished. The technology for hauling fish from the sea has outpaced the political will needed to maintain healthy fisheries, Taylor said. “We don’t have the governance system or enforcement that will protect the sustainability of fisheries.”

Taylor and his co-presenter, doctoral student Abby Lynch, noted other factors contributing to widespread overfishing, among which is a public largely unaware of the problem. After all, how can marine life be in trouble when my local grocer always has a fresh selection of seafood on ice?

Perhaps the most intriguing moment in the talk happened after Taylor said fishery managers need to move beyond biology to consider the entire supply chain, and acknowledge that their decisions have a significant impact on real people’s livelihoods.

The dozen or so fisheries students in the room were asked if they’d ever taken a business class.

Not a single hand went up.

How many had taken a course in public policy?

Ditto.

“The human side is what’s driving this,” Taylor told them. “If you want to save the fish, you’ve got to save the humans.”

But, as promised, there was good news.

Taylor, Lynch and Michael Schechter, a professor of international relations in James Madison College, are calling for a United Nations conference to establish a global framework for sustainable fishing.

They have already made significant steps towards this ambitious goal. They held a special symposium at the latest conference of the American Fisheries Society that was attended by representatives of the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and members of universities from all over the globe. The society’s past presidents unanimously passed a motion calling for the conference. The MSU team has a column on the topic in the latest issue of Fisheries, the society’s publication. They’re also publishing a book based on the symposium’s main themes, and updating a volume Taylor co-authored in 2002 on Great Lakes fisheries. Taylor also plans to meet with Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, to get her support for the conference.

“We need to at least have an acknowledgement from nations that sustainability of fisheries is important,” Taylor said. “This is not new, and the questions aren’t new. We’ve been talking about this for years.”

-Andy McGlashen
(Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Michigan’s University Research Corridor launched three years ago. It seeks to bring researchers at the state’s major universities together around topics of shared interest.

On January 20th the topic was environmental health, and researchers gathered at Wayne State to hear Linda Birnbaum, head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Birnbaum, who calls her agency the public health wing of NIH, provided a big picture summons to action. Environmental health calls for collaborative, interdisciplinary work, she said. “No one can know it all.”

She pointed to NIEHS-funded centers at MSU that encourage interdisciplinary research: the Superfund Research Program, the Child Environmental Health Center, and the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Center.

But more importantly, URC affiliates heard from eachother. Norbert Kaminski (MSU), Howard Hu (U Michigan) and Melissa Runge-Morris (Wayne State) gave brief overviews of research at their universities, and then attendees broke into groups around topics of shared interest.

Next steps include a database of researchers’ interests, and ongoing meetings of some of the breakout groups. Conference organizers say to watch the Wayne State research Web site for updates.

As part of the ongoing Bioeconomy and Global Climate Change initiative at MSU, sponsored by the Michigan Agriculture Experiment Station and ESPP, Dr. Howard Frumkin of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control spoke on the public health consequences of climate change.

Following the hour-long lecture, ESPP sat down with Dr. Frumkin to elaborate on a few of his key points, including specific health threats from climate change and why the public health threats are just now emerging in the climate change debate.

Dr. Frumkin’s presentation slides are available on the ESPP climate lectures page.

Temperatures were scarcely above zero and felt well below it last Thursday, with icy   winds slicing easily through parkas and scarves. Not a day for walks across MSU’s vast campus. So it was surprising to arrive at a sizable auditorium in the packaging building and find it overflowing with bodies.

Students and professors filled every seat and all available aisle space to hear what proved to be a fascinating and wide-ranging lecture from Simon A. Levin, the George M. Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University. The lecture – “Sustainability, Discounting and Cooperation: The Need for New Institutions” – was part of the Rachel Carson Distinguished Lecture series, organized by the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability.

Levin has worked closely with Michigan State researchers, including ESPP affiliates Elena Litchman, Richard Lenski and Jack Liu. His lecture came two days before MSU presented him with an honorary doctorate of science.

The talk included what sound like unrelated digressions: Explanations of the prisoner’s dilemma, the roots of fisheries management and the workings of the flu virus, along with video clips of a hawk-harried flock of starlings and of a group of metronomes synchronizing* when placed on a rolling base.

But these apparently disparate parts were woven whole by Levin’s central point: We need to better understand how cooperative behaviors emerge and spread so that we can form adaptable and robust institutions for working toward sustainability, which he called “the central problem facing societies today.”

The latest financial crisis has made clear that our economic institutions can’t be left to govern themselves, according to Levin, and the same is true where human and natural systems meet. We must apply lessons from biology, ecology, economics and numerous other disciplines to craft institutions that allow nations to cooperate fairly and flexibly toward sustainability. “We’re not going to reach agreement if we simply allow the system to self-organize,” he said.

Lessons from war don’t apply to this new problem, Levin added. Violent conflicts have spurred nations to work together because a physical enemy was powerful and encroaching, and other options were untenable. But in our struggle to live sustainably we face an enemy that is as much within us as without. It lives in the future and can be imagined but not seen.

“We can’t rely on cooperation based on opposition to other groups,” Levin said. “There are no other groups. We’re all in this together.”

* Not the same video Levin showed, but it gets the point across.

-Andy McGlashen

Conflicting ideas of sustainability were the focus of a talk by Paul Thompson, Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at MSU, in late November. Thompson’s talk kicked off a series of discussions of sustainability hosted by the Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies (CARRS).

Common models of sustainability show it as the integration of three different goals. The goals are social, economic, and environmental priorities, or “people, prosperity, and the planet,” Thompson said.

This model is so familiar, and so vague, that people often don’t think critically about it.

But for Thompson, examining assumptions about sustainability is vital.

People attribute multiple, often conflicting, meanings to sustainability, he says. He offers an alternative model intended to highlight these.

Thompson’s model links three definitions of sustainability. Some people define sustainability as resource sufficiency, or supplying human needs. Others believe sustainability is about functional integrity, or preserving ecosystems. And for others, sustainability is about addressing societal inequality.

Satisfying all three of these perspectives isn’t easy. For example, giving antibiotics to farm animals can increase production, benefiting resource sufficiency. But it can harm ecosystems by resulting in drug-resistant pathogens and aquatic pollution. There can also be impacts on societal inequality – for example, if information about the antibiotics isn’t shared.

Thompson says that facing these tensions is an essential step toward achieving sustainability.

“It’s in the confrontation of these three perspectives that you would actually start to see growth occur, Thompson said. “Until we surface disagreement, we’re actually not going to have much engagement.”

Audience members reacted against Thompson’s advocacy of confrontation between perspectives. “Is there room for social relations that are not conflictual?” one person asked.

But Thompson stood firm. There are different ethical norms around sustainability, he said, and people need to recognize that diversity. Conflict can be a functional thing, he argued: a source of novelty and growth.

The CARRS sustainability discussion series continues this spring.

Dietz

Tom Dietz, a professor of sociology and environmental science and policy, spoke yesterday with Michigan Radio’s Charity Nebbe about a paper he and colleagues recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group found that policies encouraging households to adopt simple behavioral changes could help the United States cut its carbon footprint by an amount equal to France’s total emissions in just ten years.

The interview was one of several Dietz and his colleagues gave about the study. To see more press coverage, click here.

Last week, Dr. Edward Parson (University of Michigan), spoke on policies that affect the advancement of climate change technologies. It was the second talk in the MAES and ESPP Bioeconomy and Global Climate Change initiative.

ESPP sat with Parson after the talk for his thoughts on technology’s role in mitigating climate change, how major research universities can help, and why he has skepticism about the upcoming Copenhagen talks.

– Andy Balaskovitz

If an ESPP-sponsored Copenhagen simulation is any indication of the real climate negotiations in December, don’t expect an effective climate treaty to pass.

For three hours, students negotiated a climate agreement under the motivating force of ESPP faculty member Laura Schmitt-Olabisi. The simulation exercise they participated in was developed at MIT and has been used nationally and internationally in preparation for the Copenhagen climate talks December 7-18.

The exercise played out like this. Students formed three blocs, representing developed, developing, and least developed nations. Each received briefing materials on its particular concerns and agendas. Through three rounds of negotiations, they attempted to draft a climate pact that all agreed on.

To emphasize the unequal footing of the nations, developed nations sat at a table with chairs, developing nations had no table, and least developed nationals sat on the floor.

Blocs spent rounds deciding what they are prepared to offer in three areas: emission cuts, mitigation through deforestation, and contributions to a global climate fund for adaptation of poor countries. Blocs also negotiated with each other around desired concessions. The moderator then plugged the numbers into a Web-based model which predicts atmospheric CO2 levels by 2100.

Little progress on capping CO2 emissions was made after the first round. None of the blocs conceded much and everyone was surprised to discover that negotiation positions had resulted in devastatingly high sea levels and a rapidly warming climate.

Things got a bit heated in the second round. The developing bloc accused developed nations of trying to strong-arm a deal that put a higher emissions-cutting burden on developing nations. Negotiations stalled as developed nations refused to lower their emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions were well above the goal of 400 ppm by 2100. Back to the drawing board we went.

By round three, compromises were made, emissions were lowered and you could sense the hope of a successful climate treaty.

Though the group succeeded in steeply lowering worldwide CO2 emissions, it was still a failure in terms of the simulation’s goals. The result was a binding agreement among nations that, by 2100, would still generate atmospheric CO2 levels near 500 parts per million and raise average global temperatures by 3 degrees C. The goal was 400 or less with average temperatures rising less than 2.5 degrees C.

Some were disheartened when the final pact didn’t meet the simulation’s goals. How, some said, is Copenhagen ever going to agree on something in real life, with real stakes, next month when we couldn’t do it in a classroom? Others wished the simulation took into account factors such as technology advances and other greenhouse gases in setting emission goals.

– Andy Balaskovitz

This year, the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station and ESPP are bringing distinguished speakers to campus to talk about aspects of the bioeconomy and global climate change. More on this initiative can be found here.

The first talk, held October 15, featured Professor David Zilberman of UC Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. His talk was titled, “Can we fill the car and feed the stomach without destroying the environment?”

Following the talk, ESPP sat down with Professor Zilberman to ask what Michigan can do to best position itself in the bioeconomy, how MSU should handle this type of research and what average citizens can do to help the transition move smoothly.

The next talk in the series, on November 12, will feature Edward Parson from the University of Michigan, who will be speaking on “Climate change policies and technological innovation.”

– Andy Balaskovitz

I’m in Madison, Wisconsin, along with my colleague Andy Balaskovitz, for the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists.  We knew it would be a great trip when we ran into this serendipitous sign early in the drive:

And so far, it’s been teriffic.  I spent yesterday morning on a Great Lakes research vessel, while Andy went birding in the country’s biggest freshwater cattail marsh. More on that later.

This morning the conference headed back indoors for an optimistic address from Al Gore about the upcoming United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen.  He likened the current political atmosphere to a moment in a football game when one team abruptly changes the game’s momentum, and ”the psychology of the contest changes dramatically.”

Gore cited recent defections from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the chamber’s stance on climate legislation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency’s new reporting requirement for major emitters of greenhouse gases, as indicators that an agreement is likely at the U.N. meeting in December.

Gore admitted that his optimism was largely a result of a fear of what would happen should the negotiations prove fruitless.

“The consequences of failure in Copenhagen would, in my opinion, be catastrophic,” he said.

-Andy McGlashen