Transcript EVSC 239 - welcome

:-)
Today…
2
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Your homework (activity #2)
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What is a reflection?
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What does it teach us about NRM?
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Writing advice… Precise statements…
Continuing with economic unit and then the Ecology unit
Readings (soft copy) – to complete economic/ecological unit and begin with NRMSF. Already on website
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Next unit: Sustainable Livelihoods Framework
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From ‘tragedy of the commons’ to ‘Governing the Commons’
Ecological civilization
Readings will be added on Tuesday on the page
Moodle
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Will be accessible to you all tomorrow. Any questions – talk to Nadine
Alternatives to GDP
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net domestic product is obtained by subtracting
depreciation of manufactured capital from GDP.
Further adjusting GDP to account for the depreciation of
natural capital yields environmentally-adjusted net
domestic product (EDP): EDP = GDP – depreciation of
manufactured capital – depreciation of natural capital
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requires a monetary estimate for the depreciation of natural capital.
considers how much a nation is saving for the future
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The World Bank’s genuine saving measure (S*) adds a social and environmental
element to national saving rates. A nation’s genuine saving rate is calculated as:
 S* = gross domestic saving – produced capital depreciation + education
expenditures – depletion of natural resources – pollution damage
4
Natural Capital
“We treat the earth like a
business in liquidation.”
Herman Daly
Opportunity cost. Loss is not counted.
How to “account”?
6
Economies are based on natural capital (physical assets provided by
nature), manufactured capital (physical assets generated by human
productive activities applied to natural capital), social capital (trust, mutual
understanding, shared values, and socially held knowledge) and human
capital (people’s capacity for labor and their individual knowledge and
skills). Only the value of manufactured capital (structures and equipment)-and recently, software--is estimated in the current national accounts.
Can you think of ways that the stocks of natural, social, and human capital
might be measured?
What kind of information would be needed?
“accounting”
7
1. Resource functions: the natural environment provides natural resources
that are inputs into human production processes.
2. Environmental service functions: the natural environment provides the
basic habitat of clean air, drinkable water, and suitable climate that directly
support all forms of life on the planet.
3. Sink functions: the natural environment serves as a “sink” which absorbs
(up to a point) the pollution and wastes generated by economic activity.
Different kinds of value
8
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Use value: the values placed on a resource by those
who directly use it.
Non-use value:
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Option value: value of preserving the option of doing something else by doing
nothing
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Existence value: value of preserving something for its mere existence
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Bequest value: value of leaving an undamaged (less damaged) world to future
generations
Another problem with GDP
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Accounting for households: missing
10
Only two aspects of household production are
currently counted in GDP:
1.
the services of the house itself (the rent paid explicitly or implicitly by residents)
and,
2.
the services provided by paid household workers such as housekeepers and
gardeners.
History of exclusion
11
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Households not ‘productive’
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‘too hard to distinguish from consumption’
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Not producing economic goods
Gender split: ‘economy’ – man’s world; ‘home’ – woman’s world
third person criterion: the convention that says that an activity should be
considered to be production (rather than leisure) if a person could buy a
market replacement or pay someone to do the activity in his or her place
‘GDP measures market production’
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GDP aims to only measure production for the market. Since household
outputs are not sold, this argument goes, it is consistent to exclude them
from GDP.
The problem with this argument is that a substantial portion of GDP
already reflects nonmarket production
Accounting for household production
12
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Why? How?
Time use surveys
Accounting for household production
13
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Replacement cost method
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Opportunity cost method
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(for estimating the value of household production): valuing hours at the
amount it would be necessary to pay someone to do the work
(for estimating the value of household production): valuing hours at the
amount the unpaid worker could have earned at a paid job
Many counties, including US, Australia, Canada,
India, Japan, Mexico, Thailand and the United
Kingdom, have conducted or are conducting
national time use surveys to aid their
understanding of unpaid productive activities.
How to measure economic well-being?
14
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Since the goal of macroeconomics is human wellbeing, we need to be sure the indicators we pay
most attention to are ones that relate to the goal
we want to achieve!
Re growth in production per capita, need to ask:
what, for whom, and how
Well-being reducing products? Defensive
expenditures? Loss of leisure? Loss of human and
social capital formation? Well-being reducing
production methods? Unequal distribution?
Other indicators
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Index of sustainable welfare (1989)
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Genuine Progress Indicator
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a measure of economic well- being that adds many benefits, and subtracts many
costs, that are not included in GDP. This measure is calculated by the nonprofit
group Redefining Progress.
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- starting point is the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) component of GDP
for each year, as calculated by the BLS, on the reasoning that this number
approximates the welfare associated with consumption. Then include externalities:
(+) values; (-) social costs; (-) environmental costs
Human Development Index
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an index of well-being made by combining measures of health, education, and
income. Calculated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
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Life expectancy at birth; An index reflecting a combination of the adult literacy
rate and statistics on enrollments in education; GDP per capita
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Index: between 0 and 1 (Lebanon. 2007. 0.803)
Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare
(ISEW)
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1.
2.
3.
partnership between an economist, Herman Daly, and a
theologian, John Cobb.
They construct an indicator of aggregate welfare by
taking into account the current flow of services to
humanity from all sources (and not only the current
output of marketable commodities which is relevant to
economic welfare)
They deduct spending whose purpose is defensive or
intermediate and not welfare- producing
They account for the creation and losses of all forms of
capital by adding the creation of man-made capital
and deducting the depletion of natural capital
Resources – as defined in economics
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How do economists define resources?
Public goods and common property resources
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Rival: Goods whose use is limited to one user at a time.
Excludable: The right to use or consume the good can be refused to others.
A good that is both rival and excludable is called a private good.
Music at a concert is – non-rival and excludable. Why?
Club-goods: the “access-right” is the membership, which allows the members to enjoy all
the club’s facilities in common
Common property resources: rival and non-excludable
Public goods: non-rival and non-excludable
Congestion threshold
Excludable
Rival}
Non-rival}
Non-rival,
congestible
Market Good:
Food, clothes, cars, land,
timber, fish once captured,
farmed fish, regulated
pollution
Potential market good
(Tragedy of the “noncommons”)but inefficient:
patented information,
Pond, roads (congestible),
streetlights
Private beaches, private
gardens, toll roads, zoos,
movies
Non-Excludable
Open Access Regime:
(misnamed: Tragedy of the
commons)
Oceanic fisheries, timber
etc. from unprotected
forests, air pollution, waste
absorption capacity
Pure Public Good:
climate stability, ozone layer,
clean air/water/land,
Biodiversity, information, habitat,
life support functions, etc.
Public beaches, gardens,
roads, etc.
Open Access Resources
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Overuse of non-excludable or open access resources is
a phenomenon that has been called the tragedy of the
commons
paradox of aggregation: if everyone tries to obtain
more for themselves, this behavior results in less for
everyone. The pursuit of personal interest leads each
individual user to take as much as possible of the
resource, which increases the overall level of extraction
of the resource and drives it irremediably to its
destruction – and to the ruin of all the users.
Global commons: When the scope of a resource is
regional or even global (ex: oceans. Atmosphere)
Tragedy of the commons
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Overuse of non-excludable or open access resources is
a phenomenon that has been called the tragedy of the
commons
paradox of aggregation: if everyone tries to obtain
more for themselves, this behavior results in less for
everyone. The pursuit of personal interest leads each
individual user to take as much as possible of the
resource, which increases the overall level of extraction
of the resource and drives it irremediably to its
destruction – and to the ruin of all the users.
Global commons: When the scope of a resource is
regional or even global (ex: oceans. Atmosphere)
Another perspective
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Governing the Commons: The evolution of institutions
for collective action. (1990). Elinor Ostrom.
In-depth analysis of several long-standing and
viable common property regimes
 Swiss
grazing pastures; Japanese forests; irrigation
systems in Spain and Philippines
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Delineated a set of 8 ‘design principles’ common to
each of the cases.
What do you think?...
Ostrom – governing the commons
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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Group boundaries are clearly defined
Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and
conditions
Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules
The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external
authorities
A system for monitoring member’s behavior exists; the community members themselves
undertake this monitoring
6.
A graduated system of sanctions is used
7.
Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms
8.
For CPRs that parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement,
conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested
enterprises
Ostrom
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“If this study does nothing more than shatter the
convictions of many policy analysts that the only
way to solve common pool resource problems is for
external authorities to impose full private property
rights or centralized regulation, it will have
accomplished one major purpose”
OPTIONAL  Activity #3 – due in one
week (Sunday night)
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Examine other forms of economic measurement
(other than GDP) and compare them with wellbeing.
Discuss relationship between economic growth and
poverty reduction.
Discuss relationship between natural resource
imports, natural resource exports, and economic
growth?
Next unit: ecology
Readings: in the office, and to be added to the
website
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What is Ecology? …. Oikos = home
“By ecology, we mean the body of knowledge concerning the
economy of nature -- the investigation of the total relations
of the animal both to its organic and to its inorganic
environment; including above all, its friendly and inimical
relation with those animals and plants with which it comes
directly or indirectly into contact -- in a word, ecology is the
study of all the complex interrelationships referred to by
Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for existence.”
Ernst Haeckel, 1870.
Ecology is the science by which we study how organisms
(animals, plants, and microbes) interact in and with the
natural world.
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Questions of Scale: Ecological Systems
Large and Small
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Individual Organism (“No smaller unit in biology
... has a separate life in the environment...”)
Population (many organisms of the same species
living together)
Guild (a group of populations that utilizes
resources in essentially the same way)
Community (many populations of different kinds
living in the same place)
Ecosystem (assemblages of organisms together
with their physical environment; community +
physical environment)
Biosphere (the global ecosystem, all organisms
and environments on earth)
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17
The Science of Ecology
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Need to understand the dynamic in historical terms
Try to understand the general principles that govern
the operation of the biosphere
Thus: human activities must be included
No valid distinction between ecology and human
ecology
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Human ecology: interdisciplinary study of relationship between humans and their natural, social and
built environments
Ecological systems… human view
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Science of ecology
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An ecosystem is > sum of its individuals parts
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Interactions
Interdependence
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Rarely any simple relationships
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Not all relationships are equally important or equally sensitive
“the living and nonliving parts of ecosystems are so interwoven into the
fabric of nature that it is difficult to separate them.” [eg: evolution. eg:
succession]
Because of the interdependence: concept of community v
important
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Diverse organisms live together. Reciprocal interactions.
Science of ecology – human activities
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Human activities
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Adding species: invasive, exotics
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Subtracting species: habitat loss; exploitation; climate change
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Pesticides vs biological control / community aspect.
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DDT to kill mosquitoes (Borneo). DDT killed lizards (direct contact and prey)
 decrease in village cats  increase in poisonous lizards  increase in
straw-loving caterpillars inhabiting the thatched roof; end result: plague of
rats + destruction of roofs of villagers’ huts
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Biological magnification / bioaccumulation
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Many synthetic chemicals affect species composition of plankton in ocean 
impacting structure of oceanic food chains + atmospheric carbon dioxide
Pesticides…
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Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
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“Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply
because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and
destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against
nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged
as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our
maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."
Interested in relationship between pesticides and breast cancer?
http://www.silentspring.org/ - Silent Spring Institute
Of the 3,000 high-production chemicals used in the United
States, 43 percent have never undergone basic toxicity tests.
Only 7 percent have been tested using the full battery of
standard toxicity tests.
Toxicologists: guided by 3
principles
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Principle 1
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Principle 2
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In terms of measuring chemicals - you only find what you are looking for,
and only if it is present in sufficient quantity to be detected by the method
used to measure it.
The dose makes the poison! Paracelsus (1493-1541) is credited with this
dictum when he wrote, “All substances are poisons, there is none which is
not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.”
Exposure is the magnitude, duration, and frequency with which organisms
interact with biologically available toxicants.
Principle 3
“No instrument has yet been devised that can measure toxicity.
Chemical concentrations can be measured with an instrument but only
living material can be used to measure toxicity.”

John Cairns, Jr. and D.I. Mount, 199, Environmental Science and Technology
Biological control
1.
Importation of a natural enemy – typically where the pest came from. Classical
biological control; not directly conducted by the farmer or gardener
first major successful example of this method occurred over 100 years ago and involved the
control of cottony cushion scale, a serious pest of the California citrus industry.
2.
3.
Conservation biological control – manipulating to increase the equilibrium density of
natural enemies already native to the region; conserving natural enemies; one of the
easiest ways for producers to initiate biological control on their farms
Inoculation biological control - releasing small numbers of natural enemies at
prescribed intervals throughout the pest period, starting when the pest population is
very low. The natural enemies are expected to reproduce themselves to provide more
long-term control. The expected outcome of inoculative releases is to keep the pest at
low numbers, never allowing it to approach an economic injury level
[another way? multi-culture]
Integrated farming systems
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Integrated pest management
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Physical control [keeping pests away from crops] +
Cultural control [rotating crops] +
Biological control +
Possibly – chemical and resistant crop control
Note: organic food production applies many of the same concepts as IPM but limits the use of
pesticides to those that are produced from natural sources, as opposed to synthetic chemicals.
Homeostatic stability
37
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Homeostasis: include mechanisms of self-maintenance and selfregulation that (may) produce a relatively stable balance or
dynamic equilibrium
Apart from local disruption due to volcanism and earthquakes,
status of natural ecosystems threatened only by long-term
changes in climate and geology and by the actions of humans
Density-dependent causes of mortality; predator-prey cycle
Biosphere: open system in a steady state that is driven fairly
by the constant input of energy from the sun and in which a
finite stock of materials is constantly recycled
Steady state: life cycle
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Sunlight  phytoplankton to giant trees; 
 primary consumers  secondary
consumers  decomposers
 Absence of complexity in human agricultural fields:
responsible for pest problems (monoculture … small is
beautiful…)
 Producers
Steady state: biogeochemical cycles
39
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No boundaries
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Hydrological cycle
Phosphorus cycle
Nitrogen cycle
Sulfur cycle
Carbon cycle
Materials needed to maintain processes of life are used – and
then recycled. Finite quantity of each element. No waste in
nature; one organism’s waste is another’s food
These cycles are interdependent
Human activities: increase in organic waste + nonorganic waste
Albatross
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Largest wingspan
21 recognized species; 19
‘threatened’ and other 2 are ‘nearly
threatened’
Why?
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- interaction with fishing operations,
particularly longlines. A typical
longlining operation involves
releasing a single line (that may be
up to 100km long) off the stern of
the boat with as many as 3,000
baited hooks along its length. They
are common ship followers and strike
at the baited hooks as they are
being set, subsequently drowning
when the line sinks below the water.
- pollution
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The great garbage patch, kills over
10,000 albatross each year.
Unfortunately, many albatross
mistake the garbage for food and
die quite painful deaths from the
consumption of plastics and other
toxins.
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A Physical Model for the Water Cycle
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The biosphere contains 1,400,000 teratons (TT, 1012
metric tons) of water, 97% of which resides in the oceans.
Other water compartments include:
 ice caps and glaciers (29,000 TT)
 underground aquifers (8,000 TT)
 lakes and rivers (100 TT)
 soil moisture (100 TT)
 water in atmosphere (13 TT)
 water in living things (1 TT)
Global water cycle; units in billion
billion grams (10^18)
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Acidic streams from refuse of coal mines (Pennsylvania)
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Steady state: limits of ecosystems
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Why are human-made wastes a problem for
ecosystems?
Ecosystems can survive certain stresses to which they
are adapted –
 if
given enough time and
 if resilient enough
Steady state: price of intervention
51
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Issue of ecosystem disturbance: become an
economic one  trade-offs between benefits and
costs
Steady state: ecological succession
52
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Nature is not static
Living things adjust to their environment & modify their
environment [you can see it…]
Abiotic environment colonized  simple ecosystem  first
colonizers transform  etc… (page 32)
 Differences
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Where do we fit in this scheme? Simplifying system
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Cultivation
Temperate forests; wetlands; …
 Tropical forests – what would happen?
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fire and lack of fire ; ecological poisons ; exploitation
Life is energy
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“Like all biological entities, ecological communities require matter for their
construction and energy for their activities. We need to understand the
routes for which matter and energy enter and leave ecosystems, how they
are transformed into plant biomass, and how this fuels the rest of the
community – bacteria and fungi, herbivores, detritivores and their
consumers.”
Thermodynamics and Ecology
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1st law of thermodynamics - Energy can be neither
created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
2nd law of thermodynamics - spontaneous natural
processes increase entropy overall
 the
total biomass ALWAYS decreases with increasing
trophic levels, as energy is constantly being lost to the
atmosphere
 So?
Lindeman’s Foundations of Ecosystem
Ecology
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The ecosystem is the fundamental unit of ecology.
Within the ecosystem, energy passes through many steps or links
in a food chain.
Each link in the food chain is a trophic level (or feeding level).
Inefficiencies in energy transformation lead to a pyramid of
energy in the ecosystem.
Simple
Ecosystem
Model
energy
input from
sun
PHOTOAUTOTROPHS
(plants, other producers)
nutrient
cycling
HETEROTROPHS
(consumers, decomposers)
energy output (mainly heat)
Models of ecological energy flow
A single trophic level
A food chain
An ecological pyramid of energy
Only 5% to 20% of energy passes between trophic
levels.
60
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Energy reaching each trophic level depends on:
net primary production (base of food chain)
 efficiencies of transfers between trophic levels
- More on this later 
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Plant use between 15% and 70% of light energy
assimilated for maintenance – thus that portion is
unavailable to consumers
Herbivores and carnivores expend more energy on
maintenance than do plants: production of each trophic
level is only 5% to 20% that of the level below it.
Energy: how many lbs of grass to
support one hawk
61
Ocean food pyramid – roughly 2500 lbs/1136 kg of
phytoplankton to support 0.5lb/0.23 kg of tuna
62
Only 5% to 20% of energy passes between trophic
levels.
63
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Energy reaching each trophic level depends on:
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net primary production (base of food chain)
efficiencies of transfers between trophic levels
Plant use between 15% and 70% of light energy
assimilated for maintenance – thus that portion is
unavailable to consumers
Herbivores and carnivores expend more energy on
maintenance than do plants: production of each trophic
level is only 5% to 20% that of the level below it.
Ecological Efficiency

Ecological efficiency
(food chain efficiency)
is the percentage of
energy transferred
from one trophic level
to the next:

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
el
range of 5% to 20% is
typical, as we’ve seen
to understand this more
fully, we must study the
use of energy within a
trophic level
Undigested plant fibers in elephant dung
64
So what does that mean for our activities?
65
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Efficiency of agriculture in feeding people depends
on where food is taken from the chain
 Is
there enough food for all? It depends what we eat.
 And from where we eat it
 And who distributes it.

Industrial energy: energy yield is negative
 US
produces 3x as much food/ha as India – and uses
10x input of energy
 ‘small is beautiful’
Ecological civilization, Fred Magdoff (January
2010. Monthly Review)
The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor, and elsewhere, destroyed
the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along
with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were
laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.
When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so
carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so
they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still
less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for
the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more
furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons….
Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a
conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but
that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and
that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over
all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly
- Engels, 1876
Your project
reminder
67
A livelihoods-based analysis of the evolution of natural
resources management in----68
…a farming “community” in Lebanon
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Teams of 3. Each team examining farmers in a particular village. Each team would follow the same time
line (beginning in '75),
Study how resources are organized in space and time, and how they are allocated, and how it has evolved
through time
assess how the human, natural, financial, physical and social capitals have changed over time, and,
consequently, how the farmers currently have been impacted, and how they manage – using the
Sustainable Livelihoods Framework
Produce a problem tree analyses for particular issues that you find, to root the superficial management
problems and examine their complexity and relationships.
organize joint groups with local people to do a participatory research and come up with hand drawn
participatory maps
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You should have already email me your teams, and the particular geographic community
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 Homework:
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By Sunday: have done a preliminary research on the history of agriculture in your chosen community. E-mail it to me.
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Be prepared to present your research on Monday. Discussion.
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Start researching/finding journal articles/news articles on the topic to share with the class. Starting Monday.