As a followup on my post on human intervention in the food web, our Dutch correspondent JP reports that the harsh winter has killed a third of the animals in the Netherlands’ Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve. The Oostvaardersplassen is an interesting place – after the land was reclaimed from a lake (a “polder“) in 1968, managers introduced wild Heck cattle and Konik horses to prevent dense vegetation from taking over waterbird habitat. Now the Oostvaardersplassen “represents a wetland ecosystem that is not unlike those that would have existed on river banks and deltas previous to human disturbance.”

Twelve hundred of the estimated thirty-six hundred cattle, horses, and deer have perished from winter starvation. Scientists and managers have deemed the deaths normal. According to this poorly Google-translated article (which I quote directly since the translation is hilarious):

According to State, which administers the area, this is not to panic mortality of touch. “There are also many new animals born,” says forester Hans Breeveld. “The animals that no longer will make, we and we deliver them from their suffering.” The animals are ‘no additional winter food. With the support of the Cabinet and the Lower House is a few years ago agreed that nature are going to go in the Oostvaardersplassen.

Ecologist Frans Vera, at Wageningen University, supports this approach. He is a mortality of 30 percent not shockingly high. “Even though the 50 percent, then it’s good to do. Earlier that 25 percent is considered quite normal.”

However, according to JP and to the equally poorly translated comments, people are not very happy that the government is letting the animals die. They see the Oostvaardersplassen as more of a zoo than a wild space, since the terrestrial park of park is 1900 ha, or only 7.3 square miles. As one commenter says (again, poorly Google-translated):

Eight legal arguments and totally obsolete. There is no question of a chance to draw what is in nature or occurs. There is too little habitat that these animals in the harsh winter fully enclosed zitten.

So are these animals wild or are they in a zoo? And what then should be the human responsibility? Personally, I think the managers are doing the right thing to maintain a healthy population within the park’s carrying capacity. But similarly to the NJ dolphins, it’s hard to sit back and watch animals starving to death. I suspect issues like this will become more and more common as we enter…dum dum dum….THE MANAGED WORLD.

Thanks, JP!

Macquarie Island, before and after cat elimination. (From 80 Beats at Discovery Network)

There is no place on earth, no matter how remote, untouched by humans. We are mighty: we can trawl the deep, explore the South Pole, and fish every single island in the South Pacific. But as every young nerdling knows, with great power comes great responsibility. The Managed World is an occasional series in the Oyster’s Garter that explores the hard choices that come from a human-dominated world.

Most food webs look more like a tangled web than the Great Chain of Being – since predators eat each other and most animals eat more than one prey species, their relationships are complicated. But sometimes changing the population of a single predator can bring the entire ecosystem down like dominoes. It’s called a trophic cascade.

The New York Times has two examples of humans changing the populations of key species, and the consequences that result. The first took place on Macquarie Island, a small island between Australia and Antarctica. Like on many isolated islands, the native birds evolved without predators and live in burrows. Introduced cats were eating the birds and running amuck. So researchers embarked on an intensive cat-elimination program. Sounds good so far – kill the kittehs, save the birds.

Elk feeding. (NYT)

The only problem is that there are also introduced rabbits and introduced plants. With no more cats, the rabbits bred like rabbits and ate all the native plants. Introduced plants took over the bare slopes and prevented the native birds that this was all supposed to help in the first place from nesting in the best burrowing sites.

The second involves a lawsuit over feeding elk in Jackson, Wyoming. When elk were depleted and starving at the turn of the century, people started feeding them. Now Jackson has an elk overpopulation that eats all the native willows and breeds disease (that can then be passed on to cattle). But if the lawsuit wins, stopping the elk feeding would cause a kind of economic cascade – there’s an entire tourism economy built around the easy-to-find elks. And while unnaturally large populations of elk breed disease amongst themselves, starving elks stealing cattle feed would pass disease, too. So nobody knows what to do. (I don’t suppose anyone wants to introduce more wolves? They’re proven to control elk and I bet they’re good for tourism!)

The conclusion: it is  very, very hard to predict (as Donald Rumsfeld would say) the unknown unknowns. There’s a million stories like these – even Lyme disease in the Northeast is thought to be connected to a trophic cascade with wolves, deer, mice, and ticks. To end with a slight non sequiter, this is why I’m leery of geoengineering. If we can’t even properly manage the ecosystem of 21-mile-long Macquarie Island, I worry that the cure for global warming could be even worse than the disease.

It’s been a long time since we had a Managed World entry, and it seems appropriate to start again with our namesake, the mighty oyster. Atlantic oysters (Crassostrea virginica) aren’t so mighty in Chesapeake Bay these days. They’re down to less than 1% of their historic populations due to overfishing, disease, and pollution.

A lack of oysters not only means that we are denied sweet fried goodness, but that the Chesapeake has lost the ability to clean itself. In the mid-1800s, it’s estimated that oysters filtered all the water in the Chesapeake in 3.3 days. Now there are only enough oysters to filter the water once each year. No oysters means too much phytoplankton which means hypoxia and more oyster death. And despite a $58 million attempt (a somewhat half-hearted attempt, but a lot of money nonetheless) at oyster restoration, populations have not rebounded.

Now the Army Core of Engineers and Maryland Department of Natural Resources is proposing to introduce the Suminoe oyster (Crassostrea ariakensis) to the Chesapeake. The Suminoe oyster is native to Asia, and theoretically resistant to the diseases that have decimated Atlantic oysters. The idea is that sterile (triploid) Suminoe oysters will be introduced to the Bay to filter their little patooties off, thus improving water quality and paving the way for a native oyster recovery. Unfortunately, a small percentage of sterile triploid oysters have the power to revert to fertile diploidy, meaning that the Suminoe oysters could likely establish themselves permanently in the Bay.

Non-native bivalve species do not have a particularly dignified history. Zebra mussels certainly have improved water quality in the Great Lakes, but at the cost of $5 billion a year and significant loss of native species. Atlantic oysters introduced to the West Coast brought along a whole passle of invasive species that grew on and around their shells, including tunicates and snails. And Asian clams accidentally brought to San Francisco Bay may cause selenium poisoning in the wildlife that eats them.

So the Suminoe oyster introduction could have unforseen consequences to the Chesapeake’s tattered ecology. However, this project could be an expensive boondoggle even without the potential for invasion. Suminoe oysters are not resistant to hypoxia (low oxygen). And the Chesapeake tends to go hypoxic every summer. So Maryland could spend a lot of money outplanting expensive new oysters to have them all keel over a year later.

It seems ludicrous to me to introduce a new species before getting pollution and overfishing under control. Water quality is poor because the last housing boom wrecked the last of the intact watersheds and fertilizer and chicken poop still run off right into the Bay. Hypoxia and disease are just going to keep getting worse unless the water gets better. And the Bay’s fabled watermen are fishing their way to self-destruction. Blue crabs are overfished to functional extinction – 60% of all the crabs in the Bay are removed every year, including reproducing females. And oysters are still harvested even as their populations reach historical lows.

If you care about the future of oysters in the Chesapeake, now’s the time to make your feelings known. The Proposed Environmental Impact Statement on introducing non-native Suminoe oysters is open for public comment until December 17th. Managers are going to read every single comment (as they are required to by law) and then choose their favorite plan, or as it’s termed, “preferred alternative.” Here’s the plans (“alternatives”) they are considering. NOAA’s Chesapeake Office has even more information. I’ll be telling them to stop fooling about with species introductions and to concentrate on water quality and Alternative 3 – closing the oyster fishery and compensating watermen.

Southern California would seem like the ideal place for solar and wind power. It’s sunny almost half the days of the year, and the deserts get their fair share of wind. In California, most of the people live densely packed along the coast, while the interior is either desert or farmland.  The price of solar on the residential scale (i.e. on the roofs of those densely built buildings and houses) is still too high to be economically feasible (though the price is dropping every day, it seems) but economics of scale make large solar plants feasible.

For SoCal, that means putting up big renewable energy farms out in places like Riverside and Imperial Counties – especially Imperial County, which has a tiny population and tons of empty land. Even though the the U.S.  Bureau of Land Management recently put a halt to all new solar projects, enough are already underway to substantially shift Southern California’s power generation to renewable sources (There’s a state mandate to get up to 20% by 2010). Unfortunately, there’s this pesky problem: Getting the electricity from hither to yon, known more specifically as Imperial County and San Diego County.

First, you’ve got these big ole mountains in the way. Well, not big so much as dramatic. The topography of the land east of San Diego made it impossible to build a railroad from San Diego eastward for a hundred years, and even now there’s no highway that runs straight east (locals might think of I-8, but in fact it bends far to the south, almost to the Mexican border). The same problems that made it hard to build a railroad or highway make it difficult to build a high voltage transmission line from the up-and-coming renewable plants (and the already existing Sempra-owned natural gas plants, in Arizona) to San Diego.

The local power company, San Diego Gas & Electric, wants to build a power line running north of the city and then east, called the Sunrise Powerlink. The proposed path will run past several lakes (yes, there are a few out there) and through Anza-Borrego State Park. Naturally environmentalists are upset. An environmental attorney I interviewed spent quality time with me explaining how the law and land-use regulation will make it easier to develop new buildings in places near the transmission line, because the area will no longer be considered “pristine.” This was one man’s opinion, but it makes sense to me that a power line would be the thin end of a wedge of development.

There is an alternative. The legally required environmental review pointed out that they could build the line parallel to the current transmission line along Interstate 8. A spokesperson from SDG&E tells me they don’t want to do that because it puts all their power-transport eggs in one basket. Last fall, when California was last on fire (as it is now again), they had to turn off the transmission line to allow firefighters to safely fight the Witch Fire. SDG&E considers it sheer luck that their transmission line was not itself damaged by the fires (We’ll ignore for now that their power lines actually started the fires). They believe that putting the new line in a separate location will at least spread their risk. If one line goes down, hopefully the other will still be running.

So we face a set of uncomfortable choices: accept the high expense of installing residential photovoltaic, a $20 billion pricetag according to SDG&E; run the line through Anza-Borrego, damaging a pristine desert environment; run the line along Interstate 8 and risk a fire knocking out electricity for most of San Diego County; or do nothing and face future brownouts as San Diego continues to grow.

One note I’ll add, though, is that I think this is a medium-term problem. Another trend in San Diego has been to add solar cells to new buildings or other new construction. There will be a new City Hall in the next ten years or so, and the rumor I’ve heard is they’ll put solar cells on it. The Convention Center, a major power user, is planning to install solar cells on its own roof by 2010. If we can move to a distributed power system less reliant on huge generation plants, that might get us out of the Powerlink dilemma.

Science Magazine reports that the UK is pondering the world’s biggest tidal power generator. The Severn estuary, which separates southwest England from south Wales, has the second-biggest tidal flux in the world – the water rises and falls 45 feet (15 meters) between high tide and low tide. That’s a huge amount of power, and Britain wants to builf a tidal dam, or “barrage”,  to capture it.

A barrage is a huge dam, similar to a hydroelectric dam, built across an estuary. The Severn barrage is designed to let water freely flow into the estuary through sluice gates, which would then close to impound water in the estuary. The water would then slowly be let out through turbines.  Locks can be built to let ships through, but there’s no channel for water critters except through the turbines.

The ecological impacts could be vast and devastating. Over 68,000 birds overwinter in the Severn estuary, feeding from mudflats at low tide and sheltering in marshes. The barrage would essentially eliminate low tide, flooding these habitats and making them unavailable to birds. Also, many species of fish and invertebrates migrate into estuaries to breed, and the barrage could either prevent adults from migrating in or trap the larvae inside. Because of these vast negative impacts, it’s not surprising that Britain’s largest environmental groups have rejected the Severn barrage plan.

However, there’s no way the UK will be able to meet the EU’s goal of 15% renewable energy by 2020 without some drastic changes. Currently, only 5% of the UK’s current power is renewable. The Severn barrage alone would provide another 5% of the UK’s total energy, in reliable, carbon-free, and low-maintenance form. The only comparable barrage, the La Rance Tidal Power Plant in France, has been in operation for 40 years without a breakdown. This type of cheap, reliable, carbon-free power is pretty tantalizing, even at a hefty construction cost of £15 billion and the abovementioned environmental costs.

So again, well-intentioned people have to choose – carbon-free energy, or giant critical habitat estuary? This is the that we must reduce emissions – we are already surpassing the IPCC worst case scenario. But estuaries are critical habitat for hundreds of thousands of species and provide important ecosystem services such as flood control and pollution filtration.

One potential angle that I did not see discussed in my uncomprehensive readup on the Severn barrage is the potential for estuaries to act as carbon sinks. Because estuaries (and mud flats) have little oxygen in their soil, plant matter gets buried and doesn’t decompose for a long, long time. How much carbon is buried in the Severn estuary, and would the barrage release it? This might be one way to decide whether the energy generated by the Severn barrage would be worth the ecological damage.

Green is in, but for how long? As the number of “environmentally friendly” products and messages grows and grows, people are starting to see the tradeoff that need to be made. Do you care more about organic or local, salmon or renewable energy, energy-intensive paper or petroleum-based plastic?

The New York Times seems to think this is a public relations problem. They label the phenomenon “green noise” and claim it’s “static caused by urgent, sometimes vexing or even contradictory information played at too high a volume for too long.” So their solutions focus on reducing the volume of information.

But that’s wrong. These are real tradeoffs that can’t be fixed by a sleeker message. The recent Wired piece on “Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What it Means to be Green” gets at some of these problems, albeit in a tediously self-satisfied way. (Calling yourself environmental apostates is SO Bjorn Lomborg.)

Wired decided that it cared most about climate change, and made this list accordingly:

1: Live in Cities

2: A/C Is OK

3: Organics Are Not The Answer

4: Farm the Forests

5: China Is the Solution

6: Accept Genetic Engineering

7: Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work

8: Embrace Nuclear Power

9: Used Cars — Not Hybrids

10: Prepare for the Worst

Now, you can take issue with these individual points – and I do. For example, I think their Farm the Forests point – that old growth forests should be razed and made into carbon-sequestering furniture, and new forests should be planted into order to trap more carbon – to be both ludicrous and incorrect. Nonetheless, the Wired article is thinking in the right direction. They focused on a particular issue instead of pretending that all environmental goals are automatically compatible.

We can’t have everything all at once. Living in San Diego, I buy local produce, which is grown in the high desert with water from the San Joaquin delta and Colorado River, all pumped for hundreds of miles over mountains at huge energetic expense and at serious ecological cost to the delta. The part of our electricity that is renewable comes from wind farms, but the windmills kill migrating birds. So, as we try to figure out what world we want, the question is not “should we make compromises” but “what compromises should we make?”

The first Managed World was about a top land predator: wolves in Yellowstone, and whether we really want wild wolves after all. It seems fitting that the second Managed World is about a top sea predator: sea lions in Oregon, and whether we really want wild salmon after all. This is the conflict: salmon are tasty, and sea lions like to eat them. Salmon populations are plummeting over the Pacific Northwest, but sea lions don’t care and still like to eat them, especially when the salmon are conveniently trapped against the side of a dam. So the sea lions get trapped and removed, unless somebody shoots them when they’re in the traps.

Are sea lions and cormorants really competing with people for fish? If they are, does that justify moving or killing them? What if the fish are endangered (as in the case of the Oregon salmon run)? Does it matter that sea lions are fuzzy and charismatic and about as smart as a dog?

Being just as cold-hearted as my beloved marine invertebrates, I would have said that last question was the least interesting. Who cares if the sea lions are fuzzy? It’s the ecosystem that matters. However, that is not how most people think.This article in Slate Magazine by Brendan Borrell, published last week, ponders the morality of killing (or “murdering,” as the headline says) sea lions to save salmon. The article concludes:

We have to ask ourselves if saving salmon will lead to the greatest good for the greatest number, or if the pain inflicted by trapping and killing sea lions year after year will overwhelm whatever greater good is done for our planet.

As soon as I read the headline, I screamed into my coffee, “Stop the false dichotomy! If you really want salmon, take down the dam, put more water into the river, and shoot the California Current instead!” This sea lion issue is just bread and circuses. Pit the environmentalists against the animal rights people against the fishermen against the Native Americans, and watch the dam and big agriculture laugh all the way to the bank. If the salmon populations were healthy and not funneled into tiny areas like fish ladders, the sea lions could become too fat to swim and it wouldn’t make any difference. Nothing kills salmon as effectively as habitat destruction.

Now, I am generously going to assume that the Slate article was written by former lab monkeys on several thousand typewriters, and that it is not the best example of the animal rights case. Borrell describes sea lions as “sentient beings” and uses human words to describe animal-related actions. This tactic is a classic creationist tool (like Ben Stein’s Holocaust-evolution nonsense), ignorant at best, and deeply offensive at worst. I am surprised Slate let this kind of sentence through:

Totalitarian measures that would be shunned in human society—hazing, mass sterilization, forced relocation, and sometimes genocide—are all part of the conservationist’s toolbox.

I can only guess that the author thinks that no Native Americans, African Americans, and Holocaust survivors read its environmental articles. Just to pick one target, comparing relocating some sea lions to the Trail of Tears is unimaginably inappropriate. And on a more scientific note, the premise of the article – cute ‘n’ fuzzy vs. endangered – is doubly wrong. The two Steller sea lions killed in Oregon are also listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Borrell’s poor animal rights arguments aside, here’s the big picture: this entire issue goes back to energy and climate change. The dams are carbon-free hydroelectric power – but they kill the salmon runs. The “unfavorable oceanographic conditions” that caused the salmon failure in the first place may be worsened by climate change. If the shallow streams in which the salmon spawn are too hot (because of climate change and not enough water), the salmon also fail. And there’s not enough water in the streams because the water goes to agriculture, and there will be more agriculture because the price of food is skyrocketing – because of food diverted to ethanol.

So what seems to be a simple case of six sea lions getting shot explodes into a thorny mess of energy policy and water rights. The Slate article does redeem itself slightly by concluding with a discussion of the dam issue, finally saying, “So, the one thing we can all agree on is our own misanthropy: We shouldn’t be holding animals accountable for the damage humans have wrought.”

Too bad. Everything on this earth is accountable, from phytoplankton to sea lions, and they are under our power. In a world with no wild places, we get to decide whether we want feral cats or migrating birds, hydro power or salmon, and bickering over cute fuzzy things or real action.

If we want to have nice things, like coral reefs and top predators, we’re going to have to actively take care of them. There’s too many people with too much technology for a laissez-faire approach. We need to actively choose the world we want to live in – and I am rooting against the world of Oryx and Crake.

So, for this first Managed World: wolves. The American West isn’t as big as it used to be. There’s no uninhabited lands for unprotected wolves to roam – instead, there’s a patchwork of ranches and towns and farms. So do we want truly wild wolves? Or do we only want to have wolves as exhibits in a park-zoo?

This debate has come to a head since gray wolves were removed from federal protection last month. The week after the ban, 10 wolves were legally shot in Wyoming alone, out of a population of 1,500. The management plan only requires a total population of 450.

So, if wolves aren’t on park land and aren’t protected, they get shot. If wolves exist only park land, they aren’t as wild as we like to think. Right now, even the ostensibly wild land of Denali in Alaska cull their wolf populations. Their mandate is to maximize game hunting of elk and bighorn sheep, which means keeping down the top predators.

But a healthy wolf population performs more than one function. This became apparent when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. Rewilding.org has a nice summary:

With the extermination of wolves and the near extermination of mountain lions sixty years ago in Yellowstone National Park, elk populations built up. Lacking their predators, elk grew lazy and lackadaisical, loafing in large herds in river meadows. Their behavior changed so much, it was hard to call them elk. Not only did they overgraze the grasslands, their browsing of willow shoots hampered beavers from reestablishing themselves in Yellowstone. However, with the recent reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, elk have become elk again. They’re awake! They’re moving. They’re looking over their shoulders. They aren’t loafing in big herds in open river valleys. Wolves have changed elk behavior for the better—to a more natural set of behaviors—and thereby are bringing integrity back to the ecosystem. For example, willows are again growing along streams, and researchers expect beavers to return. In addition, wolf-killed elk are a smorgasbord for many species, ranging from grizzly bears to insect-eating songbirds. Between 1921 and 1999, there was “no significant recruitment of new stems into the aspen overstory” in Yellowstone. Oregon State researchers William Ripple and Eric Larsen write, “We hypothesize that disturbance to predator/prey relationships, especially between wolves and elk, has been a major factor in [Yellowstone National Park] aspen decline.”

Some people value wolves for their inherent coolness, and some for their ecological services, but these tend to be the same people. In the Managed World, where management plans are set by democratic political forces, this isn’t enough. In order to have a wildish wolf population, other people need to value having lots of wolves around.

So why not wolf hunting? There is clearly a demand for wolf trophies, so why not work out a compromise between protecting wolves part of the year and a limited hunting season? Such a system has worked out reasonably well for bear. Obviously, since wolves do sometimes kill livestock, this would need to go hand in hand with some kind of reimbursement scheme. Perhaps money from wolf-hunting licenses could go for livestock claims

Now, although I am generally in favor of hunting, I find it tacky to hunt something that a) you’re not going to eat; and b) doesn’t have a gun to shoot you back. Wolf wrestling would count as manly, but wolf shooting? Not so much. But I don’t care. I value the ecosystem services wolves perform and I want to see more of them. (And I think they’re really damn cool.)

Welcome to the Managed World. When there’s no more room for wolves to just be wolves, everybody’s got to make some compromises.