By Richard Conniff

People who work in the natural world often get asked how on Earth they came to devote their lives to gastropods, or ground beetles, or whatever other species happens to have found its way into their hearts. What the questioners generally mean is that becoming a naturalist is a little enviable, but also odd. As kids, they may have dreamed of becoming Jane Goodall. Then they forgot, setting it aside as a childish thing and becoming plumbers or investment bankers instead.

This would not ordinarily be so terrible. We need plumbers and maybe investment bankers, too. But lately, without realizing it, we also seem to have set aside nature itself.

We like to imagine ourselves as active and outdoorsy. But the reality is that hiking, backpacking, camping, and fishing have all declined sharply over the past 30 years, as have visits to U.S. National Parks and other public lands. The trend is particularly ominous among American children, who now spend fewer than seven minutes a day in unstructured outdoor play—and seven hours a day in front of an electronic screen.

But technology may be too easy a scapegoat. Naturalists at a workshop on the topic that I recently attended showed little appetite for technology-bashing. On the contrary, much of the conversation was about how technology can draw people back to the natural world. And the general consensus was that naturalists themselves need to change if they hope for natural history to thrive in this distracted new world.

The workshop sponsor, the Natural History Network (naturalhistorynetwork.org), is a new group dedicated to “reawakening human connections with the natural world.” The participants were mostly people who teach natural history or otherwise earn a living as naturalists. As we looked around the room, one target for change was immediately apparent: we were exclusively white, in a nation where whites will cease to be a majority just 30 years from now. And we were largely middle-aged or older, the same dwindling-party demographic that worries the Sierra Club (where the average member is 60 or older) and The Nature Conservancy (65-plus). “The arrogance of asking somebody to come to us isn’t working,” one workshop participant declared. “We have to find ways to go to them.”

Hispanics, for instance, often get ignored by conservationists but typically display greater environmental concern on surveys than other ethnic groups, including whites. Fishermen and hunters sometimes face open disdain, though their shared interest in good habitat ought to make them a natural affinity group. And whatever they may think about the origin of species, certain fundamentalist Christian groups take as strong a position against climate change as any conventional environmentalist.

Reaching these nontraditional audiences means learning to think and talk differently. (Sometimes, another workshop participant suggested, it’s better just to sit quietly and listen). Moral superiority does not play well, nor does the long lament—the dirge-like recitation of human population growth, climate change, habitat destruction, and loss of species. These are clearly critical issues that need to be addressed. But as with warnings about what to do in the event of nuclear accident, people have trouble paying attention after line two. Moreover, the endlessly repeated message that nature is dead or dying just encourages people to step back from the natural world, the way they sometimes distance themselves from a friend with a terminal disease. It’s a form of emotional self-preservation.

“So much of environmental work tends to be based on fear rather than love,” said Tom Fleischner, an organizer of the workshop who teaches conservation biology at Prescott College in Arizona. Fear can, of course, get people motivated about the environment. But that’s often for only one issue, one neighborhood, or one period of time. By contrast, “Natural history is the process of falling in love with the world. That’s a very powerful thing.” What he means by “natural history” isn’t a dusty business practiced by experts in the back rooms of museums. It doesn’t require a high-school diploma, much less a PhD. In fact, it’s open to anybody who likes to look at living things and puzzle out how they work. Giving people the means to do that, preferably early in life, is the best way—the deepest way, Fleischner argued—to reconnect them to nature. The trick is to take down the barriers that keep them out.

Scientific names, for instance, are basic tools of natural history. But they can also seem like a private language for naturalists. “We need to think about what there is in natural history for all those people who don’t want to learn names or buy field guides,” said Kent Redford of the Wildlife Conservation Society. “I’m married to an artist who loves natural history, but it’s all about color and light. There are a lot of people like that.”

So how to reach them? An ingenious contest sponsored by British newspaper The Guardian, together with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, invites entrants to give evocative “common” names to species now known only by their scientific names. Introducing this year’s contest, author Richard Mabey acknowledged the importance of scientific names. But he went on to write, “Common names are a kind of time capsule, a record of the powers of observation and literary inventiveness of ordinary people. They log resemblances, uses, sounds, mythic associations, smells, seasonal appearances, kids’ games, superstitions, habitats. They’re witty, concise, evocative, sometimes even satirical.” Thus contest winners have turned Megapenthes lugens into the Queen’s executioner beetle and brought Xerocomus bubalinus to life as the Ascot hat mushroom. The aim is to get participants—artists, schoolchildren, and maybe even molecular biologists—to look at the animals in question, perhaps for the first time. It is also easier for most people to care about the fate of St. John’s jellyfish than about the almost-unpronounceable Lucernariopsis cruxmelitensis.

But the problem is not limited to scientific names. Professional naturalists inadvertently shut people out even when they think they are speaking plain English. For instance, “biodiversity” may seem like a quick way of stating a big idea. But in a recent British opinion poll, people asked to define the word often answered that it was a new brand of laundry soap. Speaking more plainly—for instance, talking about how many kinds of plants and animals live in a place—doesn’t mean dumbing down the conversation; it’s about making it less abstract and more specific, which is after all the essence of natural history.

Likewise, environmental policymakers have lately latched onto the phrase “ecosystem services” with the idea that they can sell conservation more readily by demonstrating that nature provides important material benefits such as flood control and crop pollination. But this is not a phrase that stirs the soul, and it often leads away from—not toward—natural history. “It’s all about trees, but not which trees,” said Redford. It’s about one function, such as carbon sequestration, rather than about how a community of plants and animals lives. Likewise, ecologists often talk about a particular animal group as “a good system” for testing some hypothesis or another, leading one workshop participant to exclaim, “They’re not systems! They’re birds.”

Technology, on the other hand, can lead people back into natural history. In some cases, it’s literally about which tree and which bird. Let’s say you’re curious about a handsome old maple in your neighborhood, but you’re unsure whether it’s a black or sugar maple. With a smartphone app called iNaturalist, you take snapshots of relevant features—leaves, flowers, bark—and zap them off. Other users browsing through the site then get back to you with likely identifications, often narrowing down the possibilities over the course of a series of comments.

Other citizen-scientist apps focus on one taxonomic group or one place. For instance, the new “Batphone” app (technically, it’s called iBats) allows users to record the sounds of bats with the help of a cheap, ultrasonic microphone. The recordings, tagged with their geographic locations, get uploaded to a database where specialized software can identify any of 900 species worldwide. And in Kenya, the Mara Predator Project has come up with a technological cure for the tendency of tourists in webbed vests to snap off countless shots without ever actually “seeing” the animals in front of them. (I call this “wildlife photographer fantasy syndrome.”) The project asks tourists to upload their lion photos to a database—and also to identify and age the individual lions in their photos with the help of a field guide to ear markings, mane length, and other key features. It makes the photographers think about what they’re seeing; later, they get an email response letting them know whether they got it right. Additionally, conservationists get a handy tool for charting home ranges and population trends.

At the Natural History Network workshop, though, most of the excitement was about iNaturalist, and it felt like the giddy way Ivy League kids used to talk during the early days of Facebook. One day at lunch, Josh Tewksbury, who teaches at the University of Washington, sent off a picture and, to his delight, got an identification back just four minutes later. As with Facebook, the social dynamic quickly kicks in, with everyone wanting to rack up as many good observations as possible, preferably with accurate identifications. “I started using iNaturalist four days ago,” said Tewksbury, “and within a day I was picking up field guides I haven’t used in years so I don’t get yelled at by my friends.”

Apps such as iNaturalist cleverly exploit people’s technological infatuation to get them back outside. The smartphone becomes a tool to resurrect their curiosity about the natural world—and even get them actively contributing to the science. In the past, professionals often dismissed any claim by an uncredentialed naturalist to have seen a rare species or one that was out of its normal range: “You only think you saw a bog turtle. What you saw was a spotted turtle.” Now the amateur can post the photographic evidence, complete with geotagging. “That old barrier—I am an expert and you are not—is starting to erode because of these technologies,” said Tewksbury.

Technology is also changing the way the professionals do science, and Tewksbury believes that will help make natural history rebound in the twenty-first century. Physicists, chemists, and astronomers, he said, have always had to work in teams and share their data because of the expensive equipment they require; collaboration has enabled them to do Big Science. Naturalists, on the other hand, “can do a heckuva lot with a tape measure. So we don’t have to get along to publish.” As a result, in one random selection of National Science Foundation grants for ecological studies, the vast majority of the data remained “dark” or unpublished; compare this to “dark data” levels thought to be near zero in physics, astronomy, and molecular biology. “And dark data dies,” said Tewksbury. But granting agencies increasingly require publication of data. The new practice of logging observations on public databases with a smartphone will force the change in any case. Amateur reports on when flowers bloom in different places may sound like small, even mini, science. But when you can analyze how the timing changes from year to year, it offers a much more detailed picture of climate change than any satellite image—and at far lower cost. Suddenly natural history looks like Big Science, too.

I came away from the workshop thinking fondly about a story told by a sea-bird biologist named Julia Parrish. She’s a college professor (University of Washington again) and, at first glance, looks the part—thin, with a long neck, pale, freckled skin, reddish hair pulled back, and the corners of her mouth drawn slightly down, as if you are about to earn a B plus in Life 101 if you don’t shape up now. Asked to give a talk on sea birds at a venue in the coastal city of Everett, Washington, she arrived at the address on the appointed day and found herself in a dive inhabited by “people who at 4 p.m. had obviously had more than their first drink.” She was starting to think C minus.

But at the appointed hour, about 20 people gathered around, drinking beer and eating nachos, and Parrish got up on the dingy carpeted stage normally reserved for bar bands doing covers of Journey’s greatest hits. Parrish talked about sea birds, and one man in the audience, a retired gillnet fisherman, mentioned a study he had helped work on years before. It turned out Parrish had designed that study, and from that point on, everything was copacetic. People were genuinely interested in her work. They asked good questions. Their inner Jane Goodalls, that childhood sense of being in love with the world, inched back toward the surface. At the end, the bartender announced that he had “something to say about natural history.” Just a week earlier, a mountain beaver had inexplicably made its way into the city, ending up in this very bar. It ended badly for the beaver, and the bartender went to his refrigerator to retrieve the evidence. Then Parrish and her audience gathered around to commune over the cadaver, sipping their beers and chatting about sea birds.

Maybe it wasn’t quite T.H. Huxley delivering his lectures to working men on the new science of evolution. It certainly wasn’t the contemplation of nature at its prettiest or most perfect. But as an instance of how to reach out and make natural history matter for ordinary people who deserve to know, it was a very nice start.

– Richard Conniff’s articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He is the author of many books, including The Natural History of the Rich, Spineless Wonders, and Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time. His latest book, The Species Seekers, comes out in paperback in November 2011.

By John Carey

As a scientist working on breakthrough lighting technologies, Jeff Tsao is a firm believer in the magic of energy efficiency. After all, the numbers are compelling. Replace traditional bulbs with far more efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and, studies suggest, the U.S. could cut the electricity used by lighting by at least on e-half. Perform similar efficiency-boosting tricks with cars, buildings, appliances, and industrial processes, and the U.S. could slash greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 23 percent—and save money.

But a few years ago, Tsao, the chief scientist of a lighting research center at the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, had a troubling conversation with a leading LED-industry executive. The CEO said that his company isn’t in the business to save energy, Tsao recalls. Instead, the executive expected that LEDs would create whole new uses for light, so that people would buy a lot more LEDs than they did regular bulbs—and as a result, consume more energy.

That conversation caused Tsao and his colleagues to begin crunching their own numbers on the relationship between the efficiency of light and the amount of energy it consumes. Using historical data from around the world, they discovered that as the efficiency of light improved—as it did when oil lamps replaced candles, and electric lights replaced oil lamps—the use of energy jumped. “Each time the technology changed, the cost of light dropped dramatically and the consumption of light skyrocketed,” Tsao explains.

The spread of super-efficient LEDs, the researchers predicted, would continue that trend. LEDs could create “a massive potential for growth in the consumption of light,” they concluded last year in the Journal of Physics (1). That’s because LEDs are cheaper to operate and the technology could prompt consumers and architects to equip homes and offices with more and brighter lights. And LEDs could even “unleash new and unforeseen ways of consuming light,” such as glowing floors, shimmering jackets and tablecloths, or walls that display ever-changing artwork. The increased LED-light consumption could quickly wipe out much of the energy savings, Tsao’s team concluded.

That study is just the latest in a long line of studies that have arrived at the same counterintuitive conclusion. More than a century ago, an English economist named William Jevons noted that as the new steam engine and other technological advances made coal use more efficient, the use of coal soared. His provocative observation that efficiency improvements can actually cause energy use to climb is now known as the Jevons paradox—or the “rebound effect.”

Now, new studies such as Tsao’s are again suggesting that modern efforts to improve energy efficiency could lead to big rebound effects; they’re touching a nerve and prompting debate in energy and climate circles. Governments and think tanks have launched studies of the paradox, and stories in the New Yorker and New York Times have even suggested that energy efficiency, far from being a savior, could actually be bad for the environment. “The stakes are actually pretty high,” says Roland Geyer, professor of industrial ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coauthor of a recent review of the rebound literature.

On the Rebound

No one involved in the current debate doubts that rebounds occur. Nor is there much debate that rebound effects come in different flavors. First, there are so-called “direct rebounds.” If you trade in your SUV for a Prius, for example, you’ll save a lot of money per mile on gas, so you may decide to drive a lot more miles. As a result, much of the energy savings from the higher mileage would be wiped out.

Then there are indirect effects. If you drive your new Prius the same amount of miles as before, you’ll have more money. Now you can spend that money on a vacation to Europe that will burn a lot of jet fuel—perhaps more than was saved by your car. Similarly, if a new process for making steel is more efficient, the price of steel will drop and builders will use a lot more of it. And if a new, more efficient technology creates whole new industries (as the steam engine did), then the economy can grow dramatically and use a lot more energy—though researchers argue about whether this really should be called a rebound effect.

The experts, however, do disagree about just how big rebounds can be. In a recent report, the Breakthrough Institute, a New York City–based nonprofit, reviewed a number of studies and issued a stark warning about the implications of rebounds. (2) “The more efficient that engines, motors, electricity generation and transmission, lighting, iron and steel production, computing, and even modern lasers have become, the more demand for each has grown,” the report noted. The bottom line: “Rebounds are real and significant, with the potential to erode much (and in some cases all) of the reductions in energy consumption from efficiency improvements.”

If true, big rebounds pose a big problem for those advocating rapid efficiency improvements as a way to solve climate and energy problems. Efficiency advocates have “overstated the potential” of energy savings, says Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado political scientist and a senior fellow at the Breakthrough Institute. To ensure energy security and combat climate change by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, he believes, governments will need to go far beyond just improving efficiency—they will also need to vastly increase supplies of clean energy. “In the end, what matters most is energy supply,” he says, “not efficiency.”

Seductive Message

But that’s not what most governments are pushing. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, for instance, says that energy efficiency can bring major, inexpensive reductions in carbon emissions. “It is an extremely seductive message, which politicians love, that we can get gains through efficiency at little cost,” says Harry Saunders, a Danville, California, business consultant who has been researching and modeling the rebound effect on his own time for two decades. But it’s also wrong, he argues. As U.K. economist Leonard Brookes puts it: “There isn’t a free lunch.” Brookes, former chief economist at the U.K.’s Atomic Energy Authority (and former World War II R.A.F. pilot), has a key idea in the rebound debate named after him—the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. Some rebounds are so big, the postulate says, that they completely overwhelm the initial energy savings they create, a concept economists call “backfire.”

Not so fast, retort the advocates of aggressive action on efficiency. “It seems like this issue comes up every decade or so, but this time it has some staying power and needs to be dealt with,” says John A. “Skip” Laitner, director of economic and social analysis at the American Council for an Energy-
Efficient Economy (ACEEE) in Washington, D.C. Laitner and many others still see energy efficiency as the cornerstone of policies to reduce energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions—and they say that the lunch is still pretty cheap.

The fact is that rebounds just aren’t that big, he and others argue. “The claims of large rebounds are not empirically substantiated, and there is increasing reason to think they are modeling artifacts,” says Amory Lovins, chairman and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who for more than three decades has been one of the nation’s leading apostles of the gospel of energy efficiency.

So who’s right? The data show—and most experts agree—that direct rebounds are relatively small. For instance, Steven Sorrell of the University of Sussex, chief author of a 2007 UK Energy Research Centre report on the rebound effect (3), finds that direct rebounds are typically less than 30 percent—meaning that efficiency improvements still net a solid 70-percent gain.

Smaller rebounds make sense when you think about human behavior, many researchers argue. For example, will you really drive that new Prius a lot more than your old SUV? Probably not, suggest studies by Lee Schipper, a senior research engineer at Stanford University’s Precourt Energy Efficiency Center in California, and others. After all, your commute doesn’t get any longer.

Similarly, you’re unlikely to crank up the thermostat in winter just because you’ve installed a higher-efficiency furnace. In Vermont, for example, a concerted effort to boost energy efficiency in dairy farms, ski resorts, homes, and offices didn’t bring an increase in energy use. On the contrary, the state now uses 10 percent less energy than past forecasts predicted it would, says Michael Dworkin, director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School in South Royalton and former chair of the Vermont Public Service Board. “I regard that as pretty strong evidence for a lack of a rebound effect,” he says. “If there is an elephant in the living room, why didn’t we stumble across it?”

There are some exceptions. Big rebounds can occur when energy costs represent a large share of the total cost of a product or service; that’s because efficiency gains bring big reductions in cost. A classic example, says Stanford’s Schipper, is air travel: as airlines bought more-efficient jets that used less fuel, they were able to lower their fares. So more people were able to travel by air, and the number of trips soared. But such cases are relatively rare, he says.

Efficiency or Wealth?

The situation gets murkier, however, when economists look at indirect effects. Will you spend the money you saved on gas for that European vacation? Or might you invest in new technologies that do more things, such as a super-efficient new computer that offers so many new applications and capabilities that you’ll use it far more than the old one?

Harry Saunders’s economic modeling suggests that the answer to questions such as these is “yes”—that indirect rebounds can be as large, or larger, than the initial savings from the more efficient technology. That would help explain why the U.S. now uses 40 percent more total energy than it did in 1975 despite the introduction of much more efficient cars, computers, and appliances.

But those models are far from definitive proof, efficiency proponents say. “Harry is an honest and nice guy, but he has not realized that his modeling is confused,” says Lovins. One problem, he says, is that the models suffer from incomplete data, which causes an unrealistically wide variation in the rebound size among different parts of the economy. (For his part, Saunders accepts some of this critique, saying he hasn’t been able “to come up with a clean explanation” for the variation).

There’s a larger question here as well. Are energy-efficiency gains really the key factor underlying economic growth and increasing energy use? Consider the advances that Jevons observed more than a century ago. Then, the invention of steam engines, the Bessemer process for making steel, and other improvements slashed the price of everything from power to coal mining. That made it possible to build a vast rail network which in turn carried coal more cheaply to far-flung factories. The resulting leap in productivity “was the basis for the Industrial Revolution,” says U.K. economist Brookes. The birth of modern industry also had some very big indirect effects, he adds: It propelled vast increases in wealth and population—which ultimately translated into big increases in energy use.

But it’s not correct to say that efficiency gains caused the growth in energy, argue the efficiency advocates. Schipper, for instance, has a “new 37-inch LCD TV [that] is twice the area of my old 28-inch tube TV but uses one-third less energy,” he says. But was the new model’s improved efficiency the “cause of my buying a bigger TV? No.” The real cause, he says, was wealth: Schipper could afford the bigger screen. And the industrial world’s wealth is, in large part, the result of productivity gains from new technologies—from computers to cell phones, which also just happen to be more efficient. “The reason we are using more energy now is because of new technology, not because of energy-efficiency improvements,” says Schipper.

Amory Lovins agrees. He argues that transformational technologies—such as the electric motor or the Internet—typically aren’t invented to save energy. “People wanted a more convenient way to turn a shaft or move information around,” and the increased efficiency “was a side effect,” he says. The upshot is that “rebound is not the correct description of what’s going on” and policy makers shouldn’t let the debate distract them from aggressively pursuing major energy-efficiency improvements—now.

Meeting of the Minds

Without more hard data, it’s impossible to put a firm number on indirect rebound effects and settle this debate. Yet the two sides may not be as far apart as they appear.

“When we step back and sum up what’s what, everyone is saying energy efficiency is a great thing and we should do more of it,” says Ken Ostrowski, senior partner in the Atlanta, Georgia, office of consulting giant McKinsey & Company. He’s the coauthor of a landmark 2009 McKinsey report (4) that found $700 billion in possible savings from efficiency gains. Even Pielke, who calls for dramatically expanding clean-energy supplies, says, “efficiency is really important; we should be pursuing it at every opportunity.” Adds Lovins: “We have to invest in the best buys first—and we get the most benefit per dollar with efficiency than with supplying more energy.”

The two sides even generally agree that there is an effective—if politically challenging—way to prevent big rebound effects: raise the price of energy. It’s basic economics. When oil prices plunged in the mid-1980s, for example, Americans flocked to buy gas-guzzling SUVs. When oil prices rose, the SUV craze stalled. Similarly, Tsao’s LED study found that a relatively small 12-percent rise in the price of energy would prevent the rebound effect caused by switching to more efficient lights.

• Electric Slide
• Dim Bulbs

Such win-win solutions, however, face tough opposition from anti-tax politicians. And rebound skeptics worry that the Jevons paradox could be used—misused, they say—to justify inaction on energy efficiency. In the past, Schipper recalls, the U.S. auto industry fought higher fuel-economy standards by claiming that improved efficiency wouldn’t save oil, since people would just drive more. Now, efficiency supporters fear that argument will be echoed by other industry groups. “I find no other topic as abused with malice,” says Schipper.

For the moment, the rekindled rebound debate is illuminating the complexity of solving energy and climate problems—and showing that it is hard to view efficiency as a completely free lunch. That was the lesson Jeff Tsao took home from his foray into looking at the consequences of LEDs. “Energy efficiency is still a good thing,” he says. “But it’s not quite so simple a good thing.”

– Veteran science and environment writer John Carey has served as a senior correspondent in Business Week’s Washington Bureau, as an editor for The Scientist, and as a writer for Newsweek, where he covered science, technology, and health.

Note: After this story went to press, Lee Schipper, one of the experts who was playing a prominent role in the rebound debate and who was a key source for this story, died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 64

Literature Cited

1. Tsao, J. et al. 2010. Solid-state lighting: An energy-economics perspective. Journal of Physics doi:10.1088/0022-3727/43/35/354001.

2. Jenkins, J. et al. 2011. Energy emergence: Rebound and backfire as emergent phenomena. Breakthrough Institute. At: thebreakthrough.org/blog/Energy_Emergence.pdf.

3. Sorrell, S. 2007. The rebound effect: An assessment of the evidence for economy-wide energy savings from improved energy efficiency. UK Energy Research Centre. ISBN 1-903144-0-35.

4. Granade, H.C. et al. 2009. Unlocking energy efficiency in U.S. economy. McKinsey Global Energy and Materials. At: www.mckinsey.com/
USenergyefficiency.

Text by Lindsey Doermann

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Bionic Handling

The elephant’s trunk re-imagined as a graceful machine

An elephant’s trunk has more than 40,000 muscles—more than the entire human body. It is strong enough to topple a tree and agile enough to pick up a single coin.

The Bionic Handling Assistant is a lightweight, fluidly moving, robotic arm inspired by the strong but flexible trunk of an elephant. Made of the polymer polyamide and containing no iron or steel, the arm is strong enough to lift objects yet supple enough to work safely alongside humans. Air chambers within the arm allow it to stretch and bend, while a wrist-like component fine-tunes the gripper’s position. The gripper fingers are also strong and flexible, mimicking the structure of fish fins. The Bionic Handling Assistant may be used in medicine, as an aid for the handicapped, or as a support for industrial assembly processes. The German engineering company Festo, along with the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials, developed the design through the Bionic Learning Network. The initiative links up renowned universities, institutions, and development companies in order to apply principles from nature to new technologies. ❧

Learn more and watch demonstrations of the Bionic Handling Assistant at http://www.festo.com/bionic.
Image courtesy of Festo

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A Better Spin Cycle

More-efficient washers and dryers inspired by dogs

Big, furry animals tend to have loose skin, which produces large accelerations when the animal shakes back and forth—like cracking a whip. Small animals must shake faster to generate enough water-shedding acceleration.

Andrew Dickerson and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology drenched 27 animals (including a lab mouse, six different kinds of dogs, and a tiger from Atlanta’s zoo) and filmed the animals, at up to 1,000 frames per second, shedding the water. They discovered that shaking speed relates to body size and can be described with a simple mathematical model. The new insights into animals’ shaking could be used to develop more efficient washers, dryers, painting equipment, and spin coaters. ❧

Dickerson, A. et al. 2010. Wet-dog shake. Bulletin of the American Physical Society doi: arXiv:1010.3279v1.

Graph courtesy of Andrew Dickerson, Georgia Institute of Technology

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Chemical-Free De-Icing

Repelling water like a bug’s legs

The water strider’s non-wetting legs allow it to navigate effortlessly on the surface of the water. A single leg can support about 15 times the insect’s body weight without breaking through. Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University has taken a hint from the water-repellent texture of the hairs on a water bug’s leg to address the costly problem of de-icing aircraft wings. Instead of using chemicals to melt the ice, Aizenberg and her team are developing a nanostructured surface for planes that could prevent ice formation in the
first place. ❧

Mishchenko, L. et al. 2010. Design of ice-free nanostructured surfaces based on repulsion of impacting water droplets. ACS Nano doi:10.1021/nn102557p.

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A woodpecker can strike a tree as fast as 22 beats per second, creating decelerations of up to 1200 g. A human will experience a concussion at an average of 95 g.

Extreme Shock Absorber

The woodpecker school of hard knocks

Using CT scans and video, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley

parsed out the shock-absorbing features of a golden-fronted woodpecker’s head. The findings are inspiring a new generation of shock-absorbing systems for electronics. For example, a layer of rubber stands in for the tongue-supporting, load-distributing hyoid, and closely packed glass beads mimic the bird’s spongy bone. The bio-inspired system withstood shocks of up to 60,000 g in lab tests. ❧

Yoon, S. and S. Park. 2011. A mechanical analysis of woodpecker drumming and its application to shock-absorbing systems. Bioinspiration and Biomimetics doi:10.1088/1748-3182/6/1/016003.

Image courtesy of Digital Morphology

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Paint without Pigments

Peacock feathers provide the key to brighter, less toxic paints

Nature’s strategy for producing iridescence is an ancient one. In 2003, biologists found a 50-million-year-old fossil of a beetle with its metallic blue color still present.

Whereas much of the color in nature comes from pigments that absorb light at certain wavelengths and reflect it at others, peacocks use a different strategy. The iridescence of peacock feathers is created by two-dimensional crystal structures. The spacing of these structures corresponds to the wavelength of the light that is reflected back. Small variations produce the many brilliant colors of peacock and hummingbird feathers, along with that of lustrous butterflies, moths, and beetles. This strategy for producing iridescence in nature is the inspiration for pigment-free paint that changes color when viewed from different angles. ChromaFlair paint, developed by JDS Uniphase, contains flakes layered in such a way as to reflect light at specific wavelengths and give off brilliant color. The paint is often used to give automobiles and electric guitars that oil slick–like, iridescent look. ❧

Zi, J. et al. 2003. Coloration strategies in peacock feathers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences doi:10.1073/pnas.2133313100.

Image: ©Kathryn8/iStock.com

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The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a single cell containing millions of nuclei that all divide at the same time. These plasmodial slime molds creep along at a maximum speed of one mm/hour.

Traffic Decongestant

Slime mold leads the way to efficient road networks

Much like humans trying to get from point A to point B, the slime mold Physarum polycephalum seeks out food sources along the shortest, most efficient pathways to optimize nutrient transport to remote parts of its single-celled body. Andrew Adamatzky and Jeff Jones, computer scientists at the University of the West of England in Bristol, represented the U.K.’s major urban areas with oat flakes on sheets of agar shaped like Great Britain and observed how the slime mold foraged from its starting point in “London.” The resulting network looked very similar to the U.K.’s existing roadways, though the slime mold did suggest a couple of new routes. Adamatzky has also tested the slime mold’s ability to efficiently travel between cities in the U.S., Canada, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. ❧

Watch videos of the slime mold’s journeys

Adamatzky, A. and J. Jones. 2010. Road planning with slime mould: If Physarum built motorways it would route M6/M74 through Newcastle. International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos doi:10.1142/S0218127410027568.

Image ©Andrew Adamatzky

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A Gentle Breeze

Twirling seed is a prototype for efficient ceiling fans

The seedpod of a sycamore maple tree rotates on its own as it falls, thanks to the balance between the weight of the seed and the length of its wing. The shape of the seedpod has inspired a quieter, more efficient fan. A single, aerofoil-shaped blade can match the airflow of conventional flat-bladed fans while operating at a lower speed. The bio-inspired fan reduces turbulence, wind noise, and energy use.❧

http://www.sycamorefan.com/

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Fog Harvesting

Desert beetles capture water out of thin air

The Namib Desert receives less than half an inch of rain per year. The Namib beetle stays hydrated by attracting droplets less than 40 μm in diameter—much smaller than raindrops—to its bumpy back.

In the Namib Desert on the southwest coast of Africa, the Namib beetle has developed a slick adaptation to stay hydrated. Its wings are covered with bumps with water-repelling peaks and water-attracting valleys. When it positions itself toward fog rolling in off the Atlantic, it condenses water vapor onto its back and channels it to its mouth. Shreerang Chhatre of MIT is developing a fog-harvesting mesh material inspired by the resourceful beetle. The mesh attracts water droplets out of the air, and in field tests it has captured one liter of water per square meter per day. The fog-harvesting devices could be used to generate clean water in arid regions as well as at the tops of skyscrapers, to eliminate pumping. ❧

Chhatre, S. et al. 2010. Scale dependence of omniphobic mesh surfaces. Langmuir doi:10.1021/la903489r.
Parker, A. and C. Lawrence 2001. Water capture by a desert beetle. Nature doi:10.1038/35102108.

Image ©Hans Hillewaert

By Judith D. Schwartz

In reports of rising CO₂ levels, it’s easy to get the impression that the carbon-and-oxygen molecule is a kind of toxin, some alien vapor coughed up by a century-plus of heedless industrialism now coming back to haunt us. But on closer inspection, it seems that the problem isn’t the carbon itself—it’s that there’s too much in the air and not enough in the ground.

When we consider our CO₂ predicament, we tend to fault our love affair with the car and the fruits of industry. But the greater culprit has been agriculture: since about 1850, twice as much atmospheric CO₂ has derived from farming practices as from the burning of fossil fuels (the roles crossed around 1970). Over the past 150 years, between 50 and 80 percent of organic carbon in the topsoil has vanished into the air, and seven tons of carbon-banking topsoil have been lost for every ton of grain produced.

So, how do we get that carbon out of the air and back into the soil? Some suggest placing calcium carbonate or charcoal (aka “biochar”) directly into agricultural soil (see “Black Is the New Green,” Conservation, Summer 2010). But a growing number of soil and agricultural scientists are also discussing a low-tech, counterintuitive approach to the problem that depends on a group of unlikely heroes: cows. The catalyst for reducing CO₂ and restoring soil function and fertility, they say, is bringing back the roving, grazing animals who used to wander the world’s grasslands. The natural processes that take place in the digestive system and under the hooves of ruminants might be the key to turning deserts back into grasslands and reversing climate change. In other words, a climate-friendly future might look less like a geo-engineered landscape and more like, well, “Home on the Range.”

Perhaps the most steadfast advocate of this future is Allan Savory. A 76-year-old native of Zimbabwe, Savory has the relaxed, weathered look of a lifelong outdoorsman more attuned to the etiquette of the bush than that of the boardroom. In the 1960s, as a young wildlife biologist in what was then called Southern Rhodesia, he noticed that, when livestock were removed from land set aside for future national parks, “almost immediately, these wonderful areas suffered severe loss of both plant and animal species.” Cattle, he began to realize, could play—if properly managed—the crucial role in grassland ecology that used to be occupied by herds of wild herbivores. They could help prevent and even reverse land degradation and the desertification of grasslands, combating in the process both human poverty and the disappearance of wildlife. Over the course of several eventful decades—during which he was elected to the parliament, served as an opposition leader against Rhodesia’s white-minority government, and spent four years in political exile—Savory developed a program to put these ideas into action.

Savory’s singular insight is that grasslands and herbivores evolved in lockstep with one another. This means that to be healthy, grasses need to be grazed. Animals eat plants and stimulate their growth; they cycle dead plants back to the surface, which allows sunlight to reach the low-growing parts; their waste provides fertilizer. When a predator—say, a lion—comes into this bucolic scene, the animals bunch together and flee as a herd, their hooves breaking up and aerating the soil. Then, on a new patch of land, the process starts again. This way all plants get nibbled, but none are overgrazed. And none are overrested, which leads to accumulated dead plant material that blocks sunlight and hinders new growth.

Allan Savory. Photo by C.J. Hadley, Range Magazine

To Savory, the conventional wisdom that grazing degrades the land is an oversimplification; what matters is how livestock are applied. He readily acknowledges that the confined animal feeding operations usually associated with large-scale cattle ranching are problematic, and he opposes cramming cattle into lots on industrial farms. But he contends that this degradation by overgrazing is a matter of time rather than numbers; he’s fond of saying that one cow continually foraging in one spot will do damage where a hundred moving from place to place will not. Where feedlots will harm the land, he claims, herds of well-managed grazing animals, nibbling on native grasses and roaming from spot to spot to elude predators and seek fresh pasture—managed in a way that mimics their behavior in the wild—will restore the land’s natural dynamics.

For years, many in the academic and ranching establishment dismissed Savory as a gadfly, someone outside the agricultural and scholarly mainstream who did his research in the open air and presented his counterintuitive conclusions in unscientific language. Undeterred, Savory continued to refine his framework and expand his training programs, and today his successes have become hard to ignore. Farmers, ranchers, and other land stewards who have attended his training programs have brought land back from the brink across Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. In 2010, his Zimbabwe nonprofit, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, received a $4.8 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to expand its work in Africa. More recently, Savory won the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize, a prestigious award that supports a proposal with “significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.”

The centerpiece of Savory’s work is the 2,630-hectare Dimbangombe Ranch in northwestern Zimbabwe near Victoria Falls, home to his Africa Centre for Holistic Management. In the hot, dry, depleted landscape of this region, “the rains are not what they used to be” is a frequent refrain. But Dimbangombe looks as though it’s been uniquely favored by the rain gods. It has lush, varied grasses, flowing rivers and streams, and thriving livestock—some four times the number of neighboring ranches. Thanks to the renewed flow of the Dimbangombe River, elephant herds no longer have to travel to pools but can water on the river. Women who used to walk as much as five kilometers daily for water now have it available in their communities. Dimbangombe has become productive and vibrant while its neighbors, and similar environments around the globe, are turning to desert. How? “Two things: we brought in increased cattle numbers with holistic planned grazing, and [we] minimized the fires,” says Savory.

The Dimbangombe experiment began in 1992, when Savory donated land he had purchased in the 1970s to develop the ranch as a nonprofit demonstration site. (A larger parcel of land owned by Savory is now the Kazuma Pan National Park, part of the five-nation Transfrontier Conservation Area.) In the early days, when funds were tight, he generally camped on the land. Even now, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, director of development at the Centre, live in a mud-and-thatch hut on the riverbank. Savory says this is “not a hardship, as I have lived much of my life like this and simply enjoy living amongst Africa’s big game and wildlife more than in a house.”

As the ranch grew, Savory and his colleagues ran cattle on the land, beginning with what they could afford. “We also invited farmers in the neighboring community who had run out of feed to add their cattle to the herd,” Butterfield says. “They needed to keep their animals alive, and we needed numbers to restore the land. Sometimes we had 600 cattle, sometimes 300. We kept them constantly on the move.”

The other key intervention, creating firebreaks, put a stop to uncontrolled clearing fires and to fires set by animal poachers, who sometimes torch the grass to obliterate their tracks. These woodland and grassland fires, Butterfield says, can go on for hundreds of miles. “Africa is burning to death, many parts of it,” adds Savory. “809 million hectares of grassland are burned annually. The reason we’re burning them is that there are not enough herbivores to keep the grass alive.” What he means is that fires are used to clear decaying plant material and promote fresh growth—functions that grazing herbivores are uniquely equipped to do better. Savory contends that planned grassland fires cause numerous problems, including leaving exposed soil (which oxidizes and leads to runoff) and promoting fire-dependent plant species over the more diverse and soil-enriching grasses that animals eat. Another result of grassland fires is added atmospheric CO₂. In one hour, says Savory, a half-hectare fire pumps as much CO₂ and other pollutants into the air as 4,000 car trips.

With these strategies applied in Dimbangombe, “each year things got better and better,” Butterfield recalls. “Gradually over the years, the grass was thickening up and the ground would close in, covered with plants. Then we started noticing, ‘oh, the wetlands are expanding along the upper reaches of the river.’ We started seeing sedges and reeds growing many yards up from the riverbanks and could now see a huge swath that was becoming wetland. In the past few years especially, it’s been quite dramatic.”

Allan Savory, in his laconic way, makes it all sound elementary. “All we’ve done really is make the rainfall more effective.” Parched and unproductive regions throughout the world are not necessarily suffering from less rain, he says. The problem is that the water leaves too quickly, through runoff or evaporation from bare soil. Water needs to infiltrate and remain in the soil, entering the stream and river system, and leave only through plant growth or by entering aquifers. “All of this we’re doing with the livestock,” says Savory. “We keep operating on sound scientific principle, enhancing the organic matter and porosity of the soil, and keeping water in the system.”

The key to improving water conditions lies in the carbon cycle. In Savory’s words, “The fate of carbon and water tend to follow each other.” Carbon in the soil acts as a giant sponge, keeping rain water in the ground rather than allowing it to stream off. “Every one-percent increase in soil carbon holds an additional 60,000 gallons of water per acre,” says Steven Apfelbaum, founder of Applied Ecological Services, Inc., a landscape-restoration company based in Brodhead, Wisconsin. “This means reduced erosion and sedimentation and downstream flooding.”

Desertification—and associated problems such as flooding, wildfires, and water shortages—can be seen as a symptom of the carbon cycle gone awry, says Savory. In the same way that plants need animals, as seen in the relationship between ruminants and grasses, soil needs plants. “For soil to form, it needs to be living, and to be living, soil needs to be covered,” says Australian scientist Christine Jones. Without a cover of plants in various stages of growth and decomposition, much of the carbon oxidizes and enters the atmosphere as CO₂.

So soil carbon has huge implications for climate change. Rattan Lal, Distinguished Professor of soil science in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University, estimates that soil-carbon restoration can potentially store about one billion tons of atmospheric carbon per year. This means that the soil could effectively offset around one-third of human-generated emissions annually absorbed in the atmosphere. Building soil carbon would also enhance food production; and, because carbon-rich soil holds significantly more water than its dried-out counterpart, it would help to secure watersheds and protect against flooding and drought.

“I teach my students that the goal [in agriculture] is to produce a positive carbon budget: the amount of carbon returned to the land should be more than the amount that is leaving the land,” says Lal, noting that soil-carbon levels worldwide are dropping wherever extractive farming is practiced. He says much of Africa, Asia, and parts of Central Asia have soils which contain as little as 0.1 percent carbon, whereas the minimum for functionality is 1.5 percent to two percent. Savory’s model, he says, offers valuable insight on how to increase soil-carbon levels and therefore increase fertility.

Despite his evident successes, Savory still occupies an equivocal position in the ranching and agricultural world. His methods have stirred surprising passions not only among farmers and ranchers who have used them with success but also among skeptics and detractors, who have called them “hocus-pocus” and “more religious belief than science.” Savory himself has been likened to “the Wizard of Oz”—big on fanfare, empty of real ideas.

This may be as much about delivery as about science. Part of the resistance stems from the far-reaching nature of Savory’s claims. Some skeptics who might be receptive to his ideas in the realm of animal husbandry balk at proclamations of a total “paradigm shift” with the ambition to rethink agriculture from the ground up. Others associate the language of his programs—“holistic management,” “holistic decision-making”—with a New Age sensibility that seems unscientific. Then there’s the inevitable resistance to new ideas, especially ones that bypass established business and technological systems. Apfelbaum says that most practitioners who balk at holistic management “simply are skeptical of change from their status quo and ‘the way ranching has always been done.’”

Another factor is that Savory’s system is less a recipe than a way of understanding the land. This means that even when his methods work, it can be hard to know exactly what prompts success. George Wuerthner, a photographer and author who has written extensively about western landscapes, says, “One thing Savory’s methodology does is make ranchers pay more attention to what they’re doing on the land. That may help in and of itself, regardless of the ecological assertions, which I don’t buy.”

Some ecologists are also concerned by the impression that Savory promotes “bring in the cows” as a one-size-fits-all panacea. These critics often conflate planned holistic grazing, which involves continual monitoring and adjustment, with more formulaic grazing strategies such as “short intensive grazing” (scheduled on-off grazing cycles) and, the latest craze, “mob grazing” (very large herds moved several times a day). “Grasslands are tremendously diverse,” says Jason Neff, associate professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Some have been grazed for thousands of years, and some not at all. You need to look at the cultural and ecological history of a place. I work in semi-arid lands that are sensitive to grazing. For example, the Colorado plateau—increase grazing out there, and the land will suffer.”

Savory himself does not claim that his methods are equally applicable everywhere. They must take the specific local ecology into account and are best suited to what he calls “brittle environments,” parts of the world that are dry most of the year, with seasonal rainfall. These areas are less forgiving of land management problems than are more temperate regions: “If, say, England had the climate of Israel, it would have desertified,” he says. “The dry periods show up the faults [in how the land is managed].” But given that the grassland, rangeland, and savanna—where holistic management is most successful—cover two-thirds of the world’s landmass, the potential of his ideas is still vast.

The strength of Savory’s ideas may derive from the fact that he brings an outsider’s eye—even a poet’s eye—to environmental cycles. (Nature writer Gretel Ehrlich, who has spent time with Savory in the African bush, calls him “the best observer of wildlife I’ve ever met.”) Seen from a holistic perspective, the secret of Dimbangombe is no secret. It simply required looking back to the land’s prehistory—and learning a management principle from no management at all. ♣

JUDITH D. SCHWARTZ is a Vermont-based author and freelance writer who regularly publishes in Time.com, Miller-McCune and elsewhere. Her current writing explores the many ways soil plays into climate change mitigation, biodiversity, economics, and health.
www.judithdschwartz.com

The North Carolina State University Insect Museum is using GigaPan technology to allow anyone with an Internet connection to dive deep into its 2,700 drawers of over 1.5 million specimens. Photo courtesy of Matthew Bertone and Andrew Deans

When NASA’s twin Mars rovers began sending detailed pictures to Earth in January 2004, Randy Sargent, a computer scientist working on visualizations of those images, was enthralled by the sense of actually exploring Martian terrain. Onboard each rover, a camera known as the Pancam swiveled and tilted on command from NASA scientists. Sargent and his colleagues combined each exposure into a stunning digital panorama of the Red Planet’s landscape. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, could interact with the images on their computer screens, zoom in on fine details, hypothesize about what they were seeing, and pick the rovers’ next destinations. “The pan had so much resolution, it felt like peering through a little hole in the wall into another world,” recalls Sargent’s manager, robotics group leader Illah Nourbakhsh at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, who was then on sabbatical from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “What stunned us was this feeling of presence, which a simple picture that is not interactive doesn’t give you.”

That experience led directly to a technology that has become a powerful tool for teaching and public engagement with science and the natural world. Scientists are also using it for projects as diverse as analyzing Middle Eastern petroglyphs, monitoring an urban forest, archiving a museum insect collection, studying a collapsed honeybee colony, keeping tabs on glaciers, examining erosion in a jaguar reserve, and viewing Galápagos fish clustered into a bait ball.

Soon after the Martian panorama renderings, Nourbakhsh challenged his team to think creatively about “blue sky” projects they could tackle. Aware of the intense reverence astronauts felt as they gazed at Earth from space, Sargent proposed bringing that kind of experience down to Earth by building affordable equipment anybody could use to create explorable images. Nourbakhsh immediately recognized the idea’s potential for changing the relationship between viewer and image. “An explorable image is a disruptive shift away from the static image you just glance at, because now you have the power of exploration,” he says. “That sets people up with a different mindset because they decide where to zoom, where to go, what structures and details to see. And it’s not virtual, it’s not a video game. It’s real.”

Sargent developed a prototype for what is now the GigaPan system. Users punch numbers into a keypad on a robotic mount for a digital camera, specifying how expansive they want their panorama to be. A microprocessor calculates the size and number of exposures needed for the pan and moves the camera accordingly. A small robotic finger pushes the shutter button for each exposure. These are stitched together to form a panorama with a resolution 1,000 times that of HDTV. The largest GigaPan has 100 gigapixels.

The final image contains more data than most personal computers can handle, so Nourbakhsh and his team developed a massive server system and website, www.gigapan.org, for storing and accessing GigaPans. When viewers zoom in on an area of an image, they seem to fly into the image itself. The result is an immersive, interactive experience that can reveal surprising details—an ant on a leaf in a forest, or a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower in a backyard. It’s like viewing nature through a huge magnifying glass.

—Karen A. Frenkel

From: “Panning for Science” by Karen A. Frenkel. Science 330:748.
Reprinted with permission from AAAS.

GigaPan in Conservation Science

Biologist Alex Smith of the University of Guelph in Ontario uses GigaPan images as digital field notes to record habitat details as he studies insects on the slopes of Costa Rican volcanoes. Explore this image online at http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/72097/

Image size: 4.556 gigapixels
Capture time: 1 hour, 26 minutes
Number of photos stitched: 1,104

Photo by M. Alex Smith

COLONY COLLAPSE

Entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp studies colony-collapse disorder in honeybee populations. This diseased frame, photographed at a quarantined apiary in Pennsylvania, serves as an interactive tool for teaching bee biology and disease identification. Explore this image online at http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/27538/

Photo by Michael Andree and Dennis vanEngelsdorp

PANNING FOR FISH

Jason Buchheim, a marine biologist and inventor, has taken the GigaPan concept underwater. He has invented an iPhone application to precisely track his camera’s position as he snaps multiple frames that he can later assemble into wraparound panoramas, such as this one of salema fish in the Galápagos. He’s also developed a 3-D stereo viewer for GigaPans, www.3d-360.com. Explore this image at http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/34815/ Photo by Jason Buchheim

JAGUAR CONSERVATION

Craig Miller at Defenders of Wildlife is using GigaPan to monitor jaguar-habitat restoration efforts in the U.S.-Mexican border region. This image shows one of several study sites where Miller zooms in on vegetation changes and erosion hotspots following the removal of livestock from the area. Explore this image at http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/35185/

Photo by Craig Miller

NANO GIGAPANNING

Jay Longson of NASA’s Ames Research Center has rigged the GigaPan system to a scanning electron microscope. This image of an ant holding a fly is composed of 288 photos taken at 400X magnification. Explore this image at http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/28295/

Photo by Jay Longson and Molly Gibson

By Paul Salopek
Illustration by Daniel Reiter

Look at the seed. It is oblong, tapered like a bowling pin, ashy black, smaller than a peppercorn.“You can see it’s not really domesticated,” Chris Schmidt says.

Schmidt, who is prematurely bald, soft-spoken, a bit monastic, a noticer of small things, looks exactly like an entomologist from the moment you meet him—long before he actually tells you that’s his specialty. He curates a community seed bank in Tucson Arizona. Right now, he is abrading a seed’s tough skin with his gardener’s battered thumbnail before placing it on a moist paper towel to sprout. “Most modern food crops are bred for thinner seed coats,” he explains. “It speeds up germination. But if you breed the coat too thin, you’re susceptible to disease.”

The seed in question is a pip of Proboscidea sp., devil’s claw, an annual of the desert Southwest whose extravagantly hooked fruit was once dispersed on the woolly fetlocks of bison. (Ranch cattle now do the honors.) It was indifferently cultivated by Arizona’s Tohono O’odham people for centuries as a source of food and basketry pigment. They never quite slimmed down that coat.

Humankind’s tinkering with seed coats—“testae” to botanists—is just one small step in a saga of plant husbandry that began perhaps 11,000 years ago, when a hungry genius in what is now Syria first tried cultivating wild rye grass. His experiment unwittingly launched an agricultural revolution that arrested our species’ nomadic impulses, built towns and empires, and ultimately spawned monotheism, organized warfare, and the Food Network—not to mention specialized jobs such as “seed bank curator” and “journalist.”

Yet the latest epic change in our long journey with seeds remains nearly as invisible to the public eye as a grain of wheat lodged in a pants cuff.

An unprecedented monopoly on food seeds is taking root, particularly in developed countries, that may decide farming’s success or failure in an era of wrenching climate change. And a debate is growing in food-security circles regarding the wisdom of concentrating our crops’ germ plasm, or genetic inheritance, within the board rooms of a shrinking number of Big Ag corporations.

Schmidt’s nonprofit conservation group, Native Seeds/SEARCH, is a small but strategic player in this veiled controversy. A walk-in freezer in his lab holds more than 1,800 jars of heirloom seeds. The varietals have been collected over decades from the surrounding U.S.-Mexico borderlands. “White Sonora Wheat,” “Acoma Squash,” “Tarahumara Goat-eye Beans”—the exotic names on the jars are somehow comforting. The antique seeds suggest that, regardless of the furies unleashed by looming weather shifts, by a population spiking to 9 billion by 2050, and by rapidly degrading farmland, our deep legacy of plant breeding offers us a safety net—a genetic trove from which to mine adaptable new crops. Like a lot of things in life, this may be wishful thinking.

Ancient humans utilized roughly 7,000 different plants to meet their food needs. Today, by and large, our agricultural diet has been whittled to perhaps 150 species. True, there are 4,000 corn hybrids available to grow in the U.S., but they’re kissing cousins teased from a handful of races. And only four multinational chemical and pesticide companies now control most of that crop’s germ plasm—as well as 56 percent of the planet’s multibillion-dollar commercial seed trade. When yield is the grail of profit, biodiversity isn’t a priority.

“Monopolies reduce choice,” Schmidt says. “We’re living at a time when we need choices more than ever.”

Schmidt’s cooler is chilled to 45 degrees Fahrenheit. He hunches inside, hands tucked under his armpits, bare feet strapped into sandals, staring at the myriad seeds. His two assistants were recently laid off due to budget cuts—a common-enough fate befalling today’s struggling community seed banks. The seeds sit there, and he looks at them. They appear to be communing. He regards them doubtfully, with a knowing exhaustion, the way couples do on the brink of divorce. Then he pushes the big steel door to leave.

Civilization hangs on the thickness of a seed coat.

The four big corporations are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Bayer. Together, they represent that truly rare thing, a visible corner being turned in human history: the rise of the first global, seed-based food oligopoly since the dawn of agriculture.

Most Americans are probably vaguely aware that the bulk of seeds growing the bounty for their tables—and the cotton they wear, the ethanol burned in their cars, and the fodder that fattens their broiler chickens and beef cattle—is controlled by a startlingly small club of conglomerates. And many may not care. After all, industrial monoculture is phenomenally productive. Since 1930, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified seeds have all propelled corn yield in the U.S. from 20 to more than 140 bushels per acre. Soybean production has more than doubled. Factory farms feed not only the U.S. public but much of the world.

Yet there are some hidden casualties within the efficiencies of this “seed-industry consolidation.” The first appears to be a competitive marketplace.

With the introduction of genetically modified seeds—that is, seeds with alien genes implanted to resist insects or herbicides—in the 1990s, hundreds of smaller, “conventional” seed firms in the U.S. simply got winnowed out of the business. They couldn’t afford the biotech R&D. After a frenzy of acquisitions and mergers—one Midwest trade group, the Independent Professional Seed Association, has lost two-thirds of its 300 members—the top ten seed giants have walked away with 67 percent of the world’s branded-seed market, according to the calculations of one sustainability watchdog. (1) By most economists’ definition, this is a monopoly. Yet food crops are such a vital human resource—apologies to Microsoft and Google—that the U.S. government started probing the industry for price-gouging and other antitrust abuses only two years ago.

Consider the case of Monsanto. Any corporation whose Wikipedia page contains subheadings such as “Child labor,” “Farmer suicides,” and “Indonesian bribing convictions” might fairly be said to have an image problem. Yet St. Louis–based Monsanto, the favorite bogeyman of the renewable farming movement, seems inured to controversy.

That’s partly because its technicians have invented the most popular genetically altered seeds on the market. The firm’s bestselling Roundup Ready system produces crops that stand up to the powerful herbicide glyphosate, which allows farmers to clear weeds without costly labor. Monsanto seeds implanted with toxic bacterial DNA germinate plants that kill boring insects without resorting to pesticides. But the company’s most important product by far is a piece of paper.

Monsanto, like other transgenic seed sellers, requires farmers to sign a “technology stewardship” agreement that forbids customers from replanting the seed. This is understandable. The contract ensures returns on the firm’s investments in biotechnology, which can run to tens of millions of dollars per seed variety in research and regulatory costs. But it also shatters a hallowed farming practice of saving local, perhaps more biodiverse seed stock for future use.

Today, this seed-saving tradition, a rite of genetic sovereignty dating back to the Neolithic, is fading away. That’s because, in a perverse sense, farmers don’t own their new hi-tech germ plasm. Monsanto and the other corporations do. And Monsanto’s enormous market share—roughly one-third of the corn and soybean seeds grown in the U.S.—means that when the company jacks up its seed prices 50 percent, as it did between 2005 and 2008, farmers grumble quietly. Because they don’t want to be cut off.

Cheaters attempting to replant modified seeds, meanwhile, can be reported anonymously on a Monsanto toll-free hotline. The biggest purveyor of proprietary seed on the globe even dispatches private investigators to stalk suspected “patent infringers.” When necessary, it sues them—including some farmers who claim their fields were accidentally infected by wind-blown seed. Bare-knuckle tactics such as these have earned the firm some uncharitable epithets, among them “Gestapo.”

Monsanto customers “are afraid to speak in public, worried that they will become victims of retaliation,” a DuPont executive complained. DuPont filed an anti-monopoly suit against Monsanto in 2009. (DuPont controls its own third of the country’s seed-corn market.)

“We believe that competition in the seed industry is quite robust, and we have full confidence in the integrity of the Department of Justice’s review process,” Tom Helscher, a Monsanto spokesman, wrote me. He stated that farmers can choose from dozens of companies’ genetic technologies. “The fight to win the farmer’s business is intense.”

I think about all this while I take Chris Schmidt, the Tucson seed-bank curator, to lunch at his favorite Mexican restaurant. At the table, over chips and salsa, I ponder what Jim Orf, a soybean breeder at the University of Minnesota, told me about the erosion of our folk intimacy with seeds.

“When I ask farmers what seeds they used last year, or the year before, they’re not even sure,” he said. “They say ‘Syngenta’ or ‘Monsanto.’ Or they wait ’til I suggest something. They’re paying closer attention to the price than to what they’re planting.”

Orf is convinced that genetic diversity is declining in America’s crops but says nobody really knows by how much. He says that our thousands of soybean varieties look impressive in catalogues, but many are the same varieties—multiply branded by agribusiness. It is all so complex. So murky. So unprecedented. Few can keep up with it. No one can predict where the loss of our collective seed memory will ultimately take us.

I stare into my plate of enchiladas. I imagine Monsanto gazing back. Its proprietary seeds and franchised genes are there, reincarnated inside at least 80 percent of the corn in my tortillas.

When I was dating my wife, I offered to take her camping. I hauled my surplus U.S. Forest Service pack over to her apartment and yanked a sleeping bag nicknamed Old Greasy from its main compartment; out tumbled two forgotten, rotting potatoes that had sprouted etiolated stalks and leaves. She laughed. A seed was planted.

The biological bottleneck of corporate seeds. It’s changing not just how we eat, but who gets to think our way out of hunger.

Stewardship agreements that farmers must sign with seed companies don’t simply bar replanting. They prohibit virtually all outside experimentation with corporate DNA. Until recently, this even precluded most independent product testing of transgenic seeds. Any farmer or college teacher who attempted it could face patent-infringement suits. Here is part of an open letter sent to the Environmental Protection Agency in February 2009 by a group of 26 public-sector corn crop scientists:

Technology/stewardship agreements required for the purchase of
genetically modified seed explicitly prohibit research. These agreements inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good unless the research is approved by industry. As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology, its performance [and] management implications . . .

Such frustrations have been building in public research circles for years. Agro-industry’s highly restrictive and—critics say—overly broad gene and technology patents have essentially allowed the new seed oligarchy to rebuff scrutiny. What’s striking, though, is that all but one of the letter’s authors—college professors, government entomologists—chose to remain anonymous. Pinched by vanishing public funding, they feared losing grant money from Big Seed.

And so there it is, that lone ship that Joseph Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness—firing cannonballs, almost absurdly, into the immense jungled coastline of Africa. The missive is a salvo from another time, when seeds were a public legacy—when the improvement of our food supply involved individual farmers, garden clubs, county extension agents, academics. That era is largely gone. The initiative in seed research has slipped decisively into corporate hands. The green revolution, the oldest one, once open to all, is being narrowly privatized.

Look at the seeds. Then look at the numbers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says industry spending on crop research exploded 14-fold, to about $600 million a year, between 1960 and 1996. Though more recent figures are sketchy, it’s believed to be many times higher now. Monsanto alone poured $1.5 billion into its Roundup Ready research. Public-sector expenditures have stagnated at about $200 million a year for decades.

“You used to see ag professors driving old clunkers on campus,” Philip Howard, a seed-industry analyst at Michigan State University, says. “Suddenly they’re driving Mercedes. That tells you where the research is going.”

Good for long-suffering university ag professors. They need incentives, too. Except that, like everything else in the brave new world of manufactured seeds, there remain thorny questions with ambiguous answers.

There is the question of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, a law that allows public research institutions to commercialize their inventions. Thus, according to one survey published in Science magazine, up to a quarter of all the patented biotech discoveries now padding seed companies’ bank accounts have been made by taxpayer-funded universities. The value of this transferred intellectual capital easily runs to billions of dollars. There is the question of industry’s zealous control of information, which blocks scientific innovation and the knowledge of how to feed ourselves. Many researchers complain that patent rights hinder their ability to compare gene-modified crops to conventional crops grown using organic or sustainable farming methods. (Syngenta flatly prohibits independent labs from testing its seeds against any competitors.)

And then there’s the blue-sky question: who owns a seed? Should the whole life form be patentable? Does a seed belong to the company that inserts a single gene imbuing it with disease resistance? Or is it the property of generations of ordinary farmers and public-sector plant breeders who notched up the seed’s yield
or perhaps perfected its testa—that all-important coat?

“It is challenging on the tech side,” allows Andy La Vigne, president and CEO of the American Seed Trade Association. “There are communications issues. Scientists. Industry. Two ships passing in the night.”

La Vigne runs what is possibly the biggest commercial seed lobby in the world (consolidation’s toll since 2000: a drop from 584 members to 428). His group has helped negotiate more transparent science protocols between seed companies and nonindustry researchers. But he sees the eclipse of public seed science as a long-term societal challenge. Fewer than two percent of Americans now live on farms. Seed development, a foundation of our high-caloric lives, has a dwindling public constituency in the developed world. “Where’s the support for land-grant colleges?” La Vigne asks plaintively. “How do we sustain that?”

Aliens landing on our climatically volatile planet would take one glance at our modern approach to seeds, a bedrock food source, and fly away scratching their heads.

For instance, an international seed bank operating a “doomsday” vault on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen has had difficulties scraping together even a quarter of its $250-million budget to assemble a global collection of crop seeds—the ultimate nest egg of plant genetic capital stored away against potential agricultural collapse due to climate change.

Meanwhile, the consolidated seed industry has developed a so-called “terminator seed.” This Monsanto novelty, also dubbed a “suicide seed,” is genetically engineered to go sterile after one generation of growth. Farmers would need to buy new stock every year. The technology is on hold; there’s been an outcry from developing countries. But it may be unnecessary, anyway. With stewardship contracts, the seed lords do fine with human terminators called lawyers.

In a 1957 essay titled “How Flowers Changed the World,” the naturalist Loren Eiseley imagines the first humans to pluck “a handful of grass seed and hold it contemplatively”:

In that moment, the golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand.

But just as industrial farming gives, so it takes away. Of the roughly 7,000 varieties of apple that grew in the U.S. at the turn of the last century, more than 86 percent no longer exist.

Chris Schmidt, the taciturn seed banker, drives me an hour south of Tucson to his organization’s test farm.

There are border-patrol checkpoints on a curving desert road and then high, yellow grasslands. Devil’s claw probably grows out there somewhere, wondering where all the buffalo went. At the farm, an experimental heirloom crop is sprouting—White Sonoran wheat, introduced to northern Mexico by Spanish missionaries in 1770. Schmidt says it shows commercial promise for baked goods. Its leaves feel like silk.

One of the founders of Native Seeds/SEARCH, Gary Paul Nabhan, lives in an isolated house above the farm.

Nabhan is a MacArthur “genius” Fellow and a prolific writer on food-crop diversity. He says Big Seed’s days are numbered. This is news to me. But he insists. Choking thickets of technology patents, proliferating antitrust lawsuits, hugely expensive gene research and regulation—the Goliaths are losing their nimbleness in a swiftly changing agricultural environment, he says. (Monsanto’s stock did take a knock last year, partly because its latest, heavily “trait-stacked” seeds proved disappointing on yield.)

“With rapid climate change bringing new pests and viruses every year, farmers aren’t going to wait around for Monsanto to come up with another patented seed,” says Nabhan, an energetic man in an unruly prophet’s beard. “The corporations’ heavy-footedness actually favors us—a resurgence of local experiments with tons of open-source seeds.”

There is evidence for this rebellion. A guerrilla food movement, albeit limited mostly to richer countries, is pushing back against the rule of King Seed. In the U.S., the rising popularity of locally produced vegetables and meats (“locavore” diets) has encouraged some mass-market stores such as Wal-Mart to embrace heirloom varietals. But the market share of these older, biodiverse crops remains tiny. And the intense backbone labor required to grow them without gene-splicing technologies and herbicides—Nabhan’s preference—will be a serious hurdle for a post-industrial society long unaccustomed to fieldwork.

In the meantime, the world’s powerful seed merchants are already pivoting aggressively to where the money is.

A report issued by the ETC Group, a sustainability think tank, showed how just eight companies—the usual suspects among them—have cornered patents on 77 percent of 262 known gene-family traits that boost plant adaptability to extreme climate change conditions: drought, salinity, cold, and flooding. (1) And like Big Pharma, which shuns unprofitable drugs, the seed oligopolists will likely cater their bottom lines to affluent customers in the global North. In the poorer South, where scientists say far more people are at risk of climate-warped famines, farmers will have to rely on Nabhan’s age-old methods of seed husbandry.

Which seeds, then, will rescue us?

Whatever the balance—traditional or technological—the ultimate answer rests squarely on our tongues. In essence, we have to learn how to eat all over again. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says that modern-day humans consume, on average, just 12 different plants in our diet—a ghostly remnant of an agricultural cornucopia that’s been whittled for yield by generations of industrial farming and now, even more drastically, by seed market consolidation.

“Wait,” Nabhan says. He springs up from a living-room chair. “I want to show you something.”

He wanders off in search of the winning entry in a recent chili-judging contest in Mexico. Local campesinos’ seeds handily beat out a transgenic seed giant, Siemens, in taste, yield, and disease resistance.

A lovely elderly woman, perhaps Nabhan’s mother, returns a few moments later, bearing a jar of the triumphant peppers. Their seeds float like pale sequins in vinegar. I ask her if she likes them.

“Oh,” she says, smiling warmly. “I can’t eat that.” ♣

PAUL SALOPEK is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist based mostly in Africa. He’s currently working on The Mule Diaries, a book about wandering.

Literature Cited:
1. Who Owns Nature? Corporate Power and the Final Frontier in the  Commodification of Life. ETC Group, November 2008. www.etcgroup.org

Illustration by David Badders

Last year, biologist Alexander Gaos drove his derelict pickup truck thousands of miles along the western coasts of Mexico and Central America. His mission? First, coaxing suspicious fishermen—and even poachers—into revealing where he could find critically endangered eastern Pacific hawksbill sea turtles, which are often killed for their elaborate, colorful shells. Then, transforming these potential enemies into allies. It’s a mix of science, diplomacy, and grassroots organizing that Gaos—a founder of the nonprofit Eastern Pacific Hawksbill Initiative and a member of the IUCN’s Marine Turtle Specialist Group—sees as essential to twenty-first-century conservation.

Poachers don’t share secrets with strangers. Why did they talk to you?
When I was a kid, my family traveled in Baja California, living out of our car and hanging out in fishing towns. We learned the language, and I got good at meeting strangers. I idolized fishermen—they always knew exactly where the fish were. I think that sense of respect communicated itself years later. It also helped that I was with my wife Ingrid, who is also a turtle expert, and my baby boy Joaquinn.

Did you tell people that you were a conservationist?
That was not the word I used. These were folks who thought of “conservationists” as people who got you thrown in jail, got your beach closed, and turned it into a turtle project. I tried to tell them I was not there to take names, call the cops, or bag on them for eating turtle eggs. When they asked me whether I ate turtle eggs, I sometimes told them: “Yes, sure, I’m not going to lie to you.” Then I’d challenge them, telling them that scientists thought hawksbills were extinct. They’d say: “No, they’re rare, but still around

. . . we’ll take you out to see them.”

Did they?
More often than we expected. They showed us how the juveniles hid in small, underwater caves. They took us into mangrove swamps, where the females laid eggs. Honestly, when I started, I thought I’d end up writing a paper that said: “It’s true, we couldn’t find any, they’re doomed, forget it.” Now, we’ve found about 500 new nest sites in El Salvador and Nicaragua alone. (1)

Any one turtle that has stuck with you?
I was snorkeling one night when a fisherman flicked his light toward the bottom. It lit up the shell [of an adult turtle] and showed how beautiful it was—only hawksbills look like that, which is why they are endangered. It slowed down and looked up, as if to say: “Now, what is that?”

Why make the effort to work with these folks?
Because they have already pushed hawksbills very close to extinction, and they aren’t slowing down. Because there’s just no way you are going to find your way around those places if you don’t have the locals helping you.

So, how do you win them over?
Well, we’re giving local fishermen incentives not to poach. In Nicaragua, we’ve started paying a fishing cooperative $40 for every nest site they protect. Last year, they protected more than 200—that’s nearly half the known population!

Tell me about your pickup . . . does it have a name?
“Blue.” That’s what Joaquinn called it. A ’93 Ford 150 with a half-seat in the back—that’s where the car seat goes. And a camper shell. It’s one of the most common trucks in Central America, so there are always parts. That’s a point worth stressing: If you want to do this kind of work, you’re gonna need a good truck.

1. Gaos A. et al. 2010. Signs of hope in the eastern Pacific: International collaboration reveals encouraging status for a severely depleted population of hawksbill turtles Eretmochelys imbricata. Oryx doi:10.1017/S0030605310000773.

By Fred Pearce
Illustration By Dan Page

The Batwa “pygmies” of central Africa lost many of their hunting lands with the creation of national parks in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo. Washed up at the side of the road and banned from their traditional lives, they seemed doomed. But now—at least if you believe the tourist literature—they are turning into entrepreneurs of forest tourism, taking well-heeled visitors on trails to find the region’s great apes. Is conservation at last working for them?

Meanwhile, in southern Mozambique—one of the world’s great biodiversity hotspots—American philanthropist Greg Carr is pouring his cash into a buffer zone of “green development” around the Gorongosa National Park. In “Africa’s Lost Eden,” CBS celebrated his contribution toward helping sustain people. But anthropologists accuse him of causing havoc, exacerbating complex land disputes, and disrupting local food systems with ignorant idealism—of creating poverty rather than alleviating it. Are they right?

Despite the promises of conservationists that they can deliver green sustainable development, around the world extreme rural poverty continues to show a disturbing correlation with the richest biodiversity hotspots. Natural riches, however well protected, do not translate into better lives for the most vulnerable. Indeed, often those who live closest to nature seem to gain the least from its protection.

As forest-dwellers, herders, fishers, and hunters wait for the green dividend, their would-be supporters in the academic community are mired in dispute. Many social scientists have come out against rich conservation organizations, accusing them of grabbing natural resources from the poor and giving little in return. Moreover, some conservationists wonder whether they should retreat to a narrower definition of their task.

More disturbing, those who live in the hotspots feel betrayed by the failure of big promises. Nineteen years after the Rio Earth Summit—where community-based conservation and sustainable development became the mantra for a generation wanting to create a better, greener, and fairer world—we badly need to know what has gone wrong, why the benefits are proving so elusive.

Exactly what are the links between poverty and conservation? Is biodiversity really the key to economic advancement? Or could it be that dependence on biodiversity is what holds the rural poor back, keeping them poor?

Poverty is a loaded term. Perhaps our notions of sustainable development are weighted down with romantic ideals about noble savages living off the land in harmony with nature. Some may like to believe that even the poorest rainforest dwellers are “rich,” thanks to the natural abundance all around them. They have no need of money, the argument goes. So any definition of poverty based on a daily wage is meaningless. In truth, a life too close to nature can often be nasty, brutish, and short.

Money may not be the right measure, but how about the United Nations Human Development Index? Sadly, it too shows that many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are home to some of the most deprived of our species. That does not mean one causes the other; in part, both arise from low densities of human population. Low densities allow nature to thrive but also mean that people are isolated from the infrastructure and economic networks that generate wealth and sustain human services such as health care.

Yet even those conservationists with a more sophisticated analysis of the needs of humans still face a dilemma. If they try to offer some improved economic prospects for the poor, they run the risk of unleashing a cycle of environmental destruction that ultimately wrecks the biodiversity they are employed to protect. But if they don’t make that effort, they are accused of destroying the livelihoods of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable in order to protect wildlife.

Clearly, the links between poverty and conservation are more complicated and contradictory than a simple take on sustainable development might suppose. This makes it all the more surprising that there have been so few detailed studies into the links between poverty and conservation.

Environmentalists are belatedly waking up to this circumstance. A recent paper by researchers from two of the “big four” international conservation agencies—Bryan Curran of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York and Louis Defo of the World Wildlife Fund—admitted that “to date there have been few long-term studies of the effectiveness of protected areas for biodiversity conservation, nor their impact on local societies.” (1)

Chris Sandbrook of Britain’s University of Cambridge, who recently completed a major study of the impact of well-funded ape conservation projects on poverty in Africa, reached the same conclusion. There is “a startling lack of data. Very few initiatives seem to measure and/or publish the impacts of their work for either conservation or poverty alleviation,” he says. (2) Why so? Do conservationists simply believe their own propaganda? Or are they afraid of what they might find?

At any rate, with billions of dollars spent over many decades on hundreds of biodiversity projects covering millions of hectares (many of which claimed to address poverty as well as conservation), it is an alarming admission. Surely Sandbrook is right: “This is a big problem that requires urgent attention.”

In the absence of hard data or independent research, the growing debate between natural and social scientists has been polarized and acrimonious. In one recent exchange, Kai Schmidt-Soltau, a Swiss social scientist at the International Network on Displacement and Resettlement in Tucson, Arizona, claimed that conservation organizations have willfully dispossessed “upwards of 120,000 conservation refugees [and] plan to resettle 170,000 more” in central Africa. Curran replied that “not a single individual has been physically removed from any of the protected areas created in central Africa over the past decade.” He accused Schmidt-Soltau and a “small but highly productive body of researchers” of publishing and repeating lies.

Partly, this is a dispute about definitions. Park creation today rarely involves outright forced evictions. But conservation’s critics now use the term to include those who move “voluntarily” or who lose access to natural resources as a result of conservation laws. For Curran, this is misleading. Schmidt-Soltau replies by accusing natural scientists of being “ignorant of the global discourse on involuntary resettlement” among social scientists. And he correctly notes that many international agencies include such social disturbances in their definitions of forced resettlement. One imagines the victims do, too.

But partly, it’s about politics—or, rather often, the desire of those wanting to improve the world to keep politics out of their argument.

Conservationists certainly want to “do good.” Their fundraising is built around simple appeals to protect nature and help poor people. They are at pains to distance themselves from local political controversies. But, says Bill Adams, a geographer from the University of Cambridge, in truth “both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation are intensely political activities . . . both generate losers as well as winners and require trade-offs among the poor, between poor and rich, between local and global, North and South, current and future generations.”

Social scientists often criticize conservation NGOs for ignoring these realities in the belief that by ignoring them, greens become co-opted by people whose interests are to preserve the power of the powerful and to marginalize the poor. While professing political neutrality, they say, conservationists too willingly collaborate with national governments of sometimes dubious probity and cut deals with corporations for funding. NGOs make heavy use of corporate funding and co-opt business leaders onto their boards. The suspicion is that in return, greens quietly drop their opposition to big mining or agricultural projects.

At the global level, natural resources are of course vital to human well-being, especially for the poorest. The U.N.–backed study on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) found that in India, 47 percent of the income of the poorest comes directly from natural ecosystems—a figure rising to 75 percent in Indonesia and 89 percent in the Brazilian Amazon.

A symposium on poverty and conservation held at the Zoological Society in London in mid-2010 agreed. However, it also found that “it is often the relatively low value or inferior goods and services from biodiversity that are most significant to the poor.” Resources of higher commercial value “attract the attention of the more affluent groups, often crowding out the poor.” That applies to bushmeat, forest fruits, timber, and even tourists. We should not be surprised, perhaps. But if conservationists get co-opted by the powerful, it is hardly surprising that the poor lose out.

Ecotourism is often cited as a prime example of how the rural poor in biodiversity hotspots can gain cash from their natural environment. Sandbrook, in his study of who benefited from great ape conservation, found that great apes generate “very large amounts of money [but] the proportion shared by local communities is often too low to have any meaningful impact on poverty.” The poor could not even get jobs as guides to the ape grounds, because tourists wanted western scientists and English-speaking guides. Instead, those who shared the land with the apes and knew them most intimately were marginalized. Many lost out because “conservation enforcement” around the ape habitat “led to an increase in poverty.”

There are attempts to get around this. A recent initiative is the Batwa Cultural Trail, launched by the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the United Organisation for Batwa Development in Uganda. In one corner of their domain, these indigenous “pygmies” of central Africa have escaped being pauperized by conservation and instead have a stake in it, taking a slice of the income from tourists who come to see the Virunga Mountains of southwestern Uganda as a human habitat as well as a wildlife habitat. But the Batwa remain fearful of depending on fickle foreigners; in any case, only a few benefit from the trail.

The huge tourism industry around the game migrations on the Serengeti Plain in East Africa looks more promising for the poor. Tourism employs some 50,000 Tanzanians alone. Yet it tells a similar story, according to Manchester geographer Dan Brockington. The Maasai people, who owned the plain until much of it was taken over to create parks, see little of the large tourist revenues, which end up mostly in the hands of Nairobi-based entrepreneurs, the government parks service, or a new network of privately owned nature reserves. Even in areas where Maasai-owned land is leased by private conservancies, most of the revenues end up in the hands of a small, land-owning elite, while poorer pastoralists lose out, according to Claire Bedelian of University College, London.

The news isn’t all bad, however. Other studies suggest wildlife tourism often brings with it ancillary benefits for communities, such as roads, telecommunications, and healthcare facilities. An analysis of 27 tourism projects in Asia, carried out by the Overseas Development Institute in London, found that even though the rich benefited most from wildlife tourism, most of the population benefited to some extent. There was trickle-down. Casual laborers, trinket sellers, craftsmen, and local businesses all got something. Women did especially well.

That’s fine while the going is good, while the tourists come. But tourism is a bubble that can burst—as happened famously in recent years after terrorist outrages in Bali and civil disturbances in Kenya. Tourists can also trample the very travel destinations they wish to experience. And while tourists and the tour companies that bring them can move on to a new and fashionable destination, their hosts are left to clear up the mess.

Probably the biggest review of research into poverty and conservation has been carried out by Craig Leisher of The Nature Conservancy. (3) He looked at over 400 reports and other documents in search of “mechanisms” that regularly delivered both biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction. Pickings for the poor were slim, he found. Only two of the ten mechanisms he assessed yielded a “high” benefit in attacking poverty. One was tourism. The poor might garner only a small share of what was on offer, he found, but even that small share could be important. The other mechanism was no-fish zones created to act as nurseries for fishing in neighboring areas. Coastal fishing is an egalitarian business, with low start-up costs and few barriers to entry. And Leisher found that communities were strengthened by coming together to manage a no-take zone from which they benefited.

But on land, he found only a few studies that could demonstrate any consistent synergies between conservation and poverty reduction. This applied even to those measures typically targeted at the poorest—such as marketing of non-timber forest products. These, Leisher concluded, “can prevent a decline into deeper poverty but rarely sustainably reduce local poverty.”

This is a remarkable finding from a researcher employed by one of the largest organizations whose business it is to make conservation deliver sustainable development. The model, he was telling his bosses, does not work.

Leisher, like other researchers, pinpointed the importance of power and the ability of elites to capture value of resources that theoretically are owned communally. Natural resources in precious natural hotspots are generally not owned. Few forest dwellers have land rights; if they do, they have few methods of asserting them. So whether the business is mining gems or cutting rattan or milking latex, if the resources prove seriously profitable, they are quickly taken over by either elites within the communities or powerful outsiders. The poorest end up at best as indentured workers and at worst simply expelled. Environmental resources, like valuable minerals, can prove a “resource curse” for the poor.

Community-run forests may be an exception here. Today, more than a quarter of all forests in developing countries are legally owned by communities. And this assertion of ownership by the forest dwellers themselves might be doing more for conservation than all the work of all the outside environmental activists. Leisher found “considerable evidence” that community forestry, when it works well, both protects biodiversity and alleviates poverty.

In fact, community forestry seems to work better than conventional, publicly owned parks. In practice, these generally become the playthings of powerful outsiders. Poor locals rarely have the skills to get jobs as rangers, says Leisher. The poor often become the targets of rangers, criminalized for trying to harvest produce from their old hunting and gathering grounds.

Politics and power relationships may not be the only problems in making conservation work for poverty alleviation, however. Our understanding of nature and biodiversity has become confused as well. Natural resources, in the eyes of the rural poor and others who depend most on them, may look very different from what conservationists see. Here, we have to define better another word that has become totemic in the debate: biodiversity. Is talking about biodiversity the same as talking about nature?

The fecundity of the biosphere is not the same as biodiversity. Most conservation today is about preventing extinctions, often of a quite small subset of flagship endangered, endemic, or plain charismatic creatures. But it is biomass rather than biodiversity that matters most immediately for wealth generation. Biodiversity may ultimately be the bedrock of ecosystems, the backstop that prevents biomass breakdown. But most of the time, livelihoods depend on volume rather than variety—whether of timber or fish or game or fruit or rattan or any of the other fruits of the forests.

Leisher found that “what reduced poverty was not increased biodiversity but increased biomass—the amount harvested rather than the variety.” It was size that mattered. “To help a poor fisher out of poverty, the amount of fish he catches is far more important than the variety of fish he catches.”

This is all very depressing. But there may be hope. A modern variant of the traditional protected area is the conservation of specific “ecosystem services,” such as the capacity of intact forests to protect watersheds and store carbon. Here, the trick is to make direct cash payments to the residents of those ecosystems in return for their taking the lead in protection. In essence, such payments recognize that many of the economic benefits from nature arise not at the local scale but at the national or global level. So rather than assuming that this will trickle down to them, locals must be directly compensated for protecting the areas. In cash.

This approach can certainly work for conservation. One shining success is Costa Rica. The Central American country’s government now hands out payments for protection of ecosystems that cover one-tenth of the country. The payments go to forest communities and others for protecting watersheds—a critical resource for a small nation that depends on hydroelectricity for most of its power—and the forests themselves, which generate the large tourist revenues that fund the payments.

These payments are widely credited with being the key to making Costa Rica the only country in the developing world to have reversed deforestation. In the 1970s, it had the fastest deforestation rate in the world; by the mid-1980s, forest cover was down to 21 percent. It is now back above 50 percent, according to former environment minister Carlos Manuel-Rodríguez. Moreover, Costa Rica claims that payments for ecosystem services in some areas amount to 30 percent of household incomes.

Such payments are now widely touted as a major source for win-win solutions in the world’s surviving tropical forests. The big hope is that, as part of a future climate treaty, billions of dollars can be channeled to poor forest dwellers in return for protecting the carbon stored in their forests.

Be commodifying carbon, these Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) projects could unlock billions of dollars for forest conservation. But where will the money end up? Some fear little of it will reach the poor. Already, pilot projects are seeing most of the money going to consultants, governments, and a range of middlemen. The cost of consultancy services and other external expertise for a single pilot REDD project is typically around $30 million, almost ten times that originally envisaged.

There is another problem. REDD is intended primarily to reward those who forego deforestation. It is intended to compensate for lost revenues. The premise is that if you aren’t currently destroying the forest, then logically you should not be compensated. As Sven Wunder, an economist at the World Bank–backed Center for International Forestry Research in Brazil, puts it: “The environmentally ideal service provider is, if not outright environmentally nasty, then at least potentially about to become so.”

There are other equity issues, says Wunder. While payments for ecosystem services require that all must participate in protecting the trees or watershed or whatever, it is far from clear that all will benefit equally. “Poverty can be made worse in cases where there is de facto forced participation, and the payments do not offset the losses from land-use changes.” REDD, then, seems to suffer the same problems as other initiatives aimed at combining conservation and poverty alleviation. In the end, the power relationships are usually too skewed for the poor to benefit unless their land rights are first assured.

It seems that in natural landscapes, as much as in man-made landscapes, the poor lack the power to access more than the most basic resources around them. And there must be a lingering suspicion, too, that biodiverse lands are often the last refuges for the oppressed, for exiles and refugees, and sometimes for those simply least able to make their way in the world. Just as cities have ghettos and “sink estates,” so may forests become “sink habitats” for humans. Looked at that way, their lingering poverty is less surprising than at first sight.

Should that absolve conservationists from responsibility for looking after their neighbors in the wilderness? Surely not. But it may mean they have to cede control of the land they want to conserve. Only then, perhaps, can the marriage between protecting nature and improving the lives of those most dependent on nature survive and prosper. ❧

FRED PEARCE is an author and journalist based in London. He has reported on environment, popular science, and development issues from 64 countries over the past 20 years. He is currently the environment consultant of New Scientist magazine and a regular contributor to British newspapers. He is the author of 15 books, including his latest, The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming, published by Random House in 2010.

Literature Cited:
1. Curran, B. et al. 2009. Are Central Africa’s protected areas displacing hundreds of thousands of rural poor? Conservation and Society doi:10.4103/0972-4923.54795.

2. Sandbrook, C. and D. Roe. 2010. Linking conservation and poverty alleviation: The case of great apes. An overview of the current policy and practice in Africa. International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
Leisher, C. et al. 2010. Does conserving biodiversity work to reduce poverty? A state of knowledge review. The Nature Conservancy, University of Cambridge, and International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

By Sarah DeWeerdt

Sometime in mid-2007, the world’s demographic scales tipped. Only a century earlier, urbanites represented just over 14 percent of humanity. But by 2007, a majority of the world’s people lived in cities, and more are on the way. Over the coming decades, cities will absorb all predicted global population growth and then some. According to the U.N. Population Division, there will be 6.4 billion urban dwellers by 2050—as many people as lived on the entire planet in 2004.

That stark reality leads to another: feeding this new urban world with an old agricultural model could be a recipe for environmental ruin—and human misery. The cost of growing food on large plots of land far away from cities and transporting it to the teeming masses has begun to outweigh its benefits. Not only is the carbon footprint of such a system huge, but more often than not traditional farming has been a disaster for natural ecosystems and wildlife. And then there’s the problem of space. Already, over 80 percent of the world’s arable land is in use—some of it highly degraded. Add the 2.5 billion people who are likely to join us on the globe by 2050, and there’s simply not enough room to keep farming the way we have been.

In response, Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, wants to turn the old system on its head. For the past decade, Despommier has been cultivating a vision of farms filling glass-and-steel towers the size of a city block and 30 stories high. Just one high-rise farm, he has calculated, could feed 50,000 people 2,000 calories a day all year round. Scale that up, and skyscrapers could produce enough food to feed everyone in Manhattan in a space roughly one-fifth the size of Central Park.

Despommier’s ideas are a far cry from the backyard chicken coops and vacant-lot community gardens that are most frequently touted by urban-agriculture advocates. But he passionately believes that if we think differently about food production, the big cities of the future might just be able to feed themselves.

His optimism, however, didn’t come automatically. In 1999, students in one of Despommier’s classes decided to explore the potential of rooftop agriculture in New York City. The results of their calculations were depressing: even if all of the city’s residential rooftops were converted to rice paddies, the resulting crop would provide only two percent of Manhattan residents’ caloric needs.

“Why don’t we just put the farms inside the buildings?” Despommier recalls saying. It was a throwaway line at the time. “But the more I thought about it, the more appealing that solution became.”

A 30-story building may not sound like much space compared to acres of rolling Kansas wheat, but the year-round indoor growing season quickly multiplies yields—two crops of tomatoes per year, three crops of wheat, even ten crops of strawberries. Plus, vertical farming is a chance to play a giant game of agricultural Tetris®: dwarf varieties of wheat and corn can be planted at twice the density of standard field crops, and trays of plants can be stacked two, three, or sometimes five layers deep per floor. The harvest adds up fast.

Despommier cites a long litany of vertical farming’s potential benefits. Farmers would no longer be vulnerable to droughts, floods, or storms—a particular advantage in a world buffeted by climate change. There would be no further need to burn fossil fuels for plowing, harvesting, or shipping food long distances to market. Streams and rivers would run clear, unbefouled by pesticide and fertilizer runoff.
“The very best reason for indoor farming is that you save outdoor land for something else,” Despommier says. Vertical farming could shrink the physical footprint of agriculture by upwards of 95 percent—for every acre of land farmed indoors, he has estimated, 10 to 20 acres of current farmland could go wild. Fields would return to forests, sequestering huge quantities of carbon as an added bonus.

The basic idea of growing food indoors is nothing new—the first greenhouses were built in the thirteenth century. And today’s greenhouses, of course, often have massive carbon footprints. But Despommier is doing more than just stacking greenhouses on top of one another. Instead, he’s orchestrating an ecosystem in which energy, water, and nutrients would be recycled from floor to floor.

On one floor of a vertical farm, you might find a kind of indoor marsh, with cattails and sawgrass to filter municipal graywater. The purified water would be piped off to other floors to provide water to small animals and to irrigate crops. Most of the crop plants would likely be grown hydroponically, with their roots submerged directly in water or embedded in a soil-less growing medium such as vermiculite, or aeroponically, suspended in the air and enveloped in a nutrient-rich mist. These technologies use up to 90 percent less water than soil-based agriculture, and to make the system even more water-efficient a network of cold-brine pipes would collect water released by the plants through evapotranspiration so that it could be recycled again.

Each floor of the tower would have specific temperature, humidity, nutrient, and light conditions tailored precisely to each crop. The heat on one floor would be cranked up to grow tomatoes and peppers and turned down on another to nurture cabbage and kale. Nutrients would come from sterilized, dried, and powdered wastewater solids; highly efficient LEDs would supplement natural sunlight. A positive-pressure system much like the ones in hospital ICUs would keep out diseases and pests.

The energy to run all these systems could come from wind, solar, or geothermal sources where feasible. Elsewhere, waste—including the inedible portions of crop plants—could be burned for energy or digested into methane.

If all this sounds a bit futuristic, Despommier points out, the technologies necessary to execute his vision already exist—though they’ve never been integrated into a single system. For example, biosolids (sterilized sewage sludge) are already used as fertilizer in all 50 U.S. states. Modern hydroponic systems were developed in the 1930s; the world’s largest hydroponic outfit produces over 100 million pounds of tomatoes in the Arizona desert each year, and the technology is also used to grow vegetables at McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.

Despommier compares his vision of vertical farming to working with a box of Legos®—the blocks are all established technologies; he’s just putting them together in a new way.

Not all indoor farms would have to be massive. “I’m imagining [some] attached to restaurants, schools, hospitals, or on the tops of apartment buildings,” Despommier says. A one-story, one-acre rooftop structure could yield the equivalent of 16 acres of field-grown produce. He also envisions a smaller-scale, modular version of the system that could be used as a kind of “M.A.S.H. unit for agriculture” in famine-plagued or war-torn regions. Instead of merely receiving food aid, refugees could grow their own food—recycling water and processing human waste at the same time.

A major hurdle is cost. To build a small experimental farm—say, 5 or 10 stories—from scratch would cost somewhere between $20 and $50 million, Despommier believes. Yet consider this: a smaller indoor farm at Cornell University has been able to grow 68 heads of lettuce per square foot per year.  At $2.50 per head, that’s as much as $170 per cultivated square foot per year—or millions of dollars per farm floor.

Still, the potential revenues haven’t been enough to draw a flood of investors. Despite widespread interest in the concept, no high-rise farms exist yet. But they’re getting closer. One of the most promising operations is taking root in Chicago, where John Edel is pioneering the kind of for-profit/nonprofit/academic partnership that could make vertical farming feasible, at least at first. Last year, Edel began collaborating with professors and students from the Illinois Institute of Technology to establish a small test farm in the basement of his Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center. “We have 70 tilapia right now, and we’ve run through maybe five different [crop-] growing systems for testing purposes,” he says.

And now it’s time to scale up. In June, Edel closed on a 95,000-square-foot former meat-packing plant on the city’s South Side. The building will house a 10,000-square-foot, for-profit farm plus a 30,000-square-foot research farm that Edel plans to operate as a nonprofit organization. There, he and his collaborators plan experimental plots to further refine their indoor farming techniques, with the goal of developing a kind of “open-source system” that could be used by other vertical farm endeavors.

“The other half of the building is essentially going to be a food-business incubator,” Edel says—one that will integrate small start-up enterprises into the vertical farm ecosystem. For example, a microbrewery has leased space in the building, and Edel envisions composting the otherwise worthless spent distiller’s grain to use in the farm. Meanwhile, oxygen produced by the plants could be piped out to improve air quality in the various office and factory areas. “Our goal is to get the facility to net zero on energy and net negative on waste.”

If all goes according to plan, the first vegetables should be ready for harvest—or “start coming off the line,” as the sustainable-manufacturing entrepreneur puts it—by Thanksgiving. ❧

Sarah DeWeerdt is a Seattle-based freelance writer specializing in biology and the environment.

Further Reading: The Vertical Farm: The World Grows Up by Dickson Despommier, published by Thomas Dunne Books /St. Martin’s Press, will be available in October 2010.

A lone elephant hurries toward a stand of trees as the whoop-whoop of a helicopter looms overhead. The helicopter swings within a few yards of the elephant, and she breaks into a run—but not soon enough. A rifle shot rings out, and a splash of red erupts onto her thigh. She’s been hit. But she doesn’t stumble and fall. Instead, she continues running because those rifle shots aren’t bullets: they’re darts containing purified pig proteins plus a bit of dye to mark the hit. The goal here at Makalali Reserve in South Africa isn’t to kill these animals but rather to contracept them: to trick their immune systems into preventing pregnancy in order to control populations. It’s the newest approach to a quintessentially modern problem—too many elephants roaming South Africa’s wild reserves, stripping leaves from trees and in some spots mowing the grass until it resembles a putting green. And it isn’t just elephants; on other continents, too many mallards, horses, deer, and kangaroos in the wrong places pose similar problems.
Wildlife contraception may sound a bit loony: an over-aggressive way of meddling with nature. That stigma is nothing new. The search for effective wildlife contraception has been a lonely slog, borne over four decades by a handful of believers who at times managed to attract the scorn of animal hunters and animal lovers alike.

But wildlife contraception has survived and may yet flourish. From game parks in South Africa to suburbs in America, people are desperate for this kind of tool. Authorities in South Africa managed elephant populations in Kruger National Park by culling up to 400 animals per year. After public outcry halted culling in 1996, park managers shifted to capturing elephants and moving them to other reserves. Within seven years, they saturated the market for surplus pachyderms, and the business of moving them ground to a halt, says South African big-game specialist J.J. van Altena, who moved many of the elephants himself. In a turn of fate, van Altena and others who once captured or culled elephants now administer family planning to them instead.

Like it or not, the fundamental goal is to downsize natural ecology to fit the geography of modern niches without altering the behavior of animals or the balance between species. It’s no simple task, but researchers are getting closer. In a world where pristine ecosystems are sacrosanct and the interfering touch is frowned upon, the search is on for an immaculate contraception.

And the demand will only grow, as suburban sprawl fragments landscapes, uncouples wild populations from their natural controls, and creates conflict between humans and animals. The 6th International Conference on Fertility Control for Wildlife in September 2007 in York, U.K., highlighted advances in the field and a wide range of experiments underway: hormonal implants, immune vaccines, cholesterol drugs recycled from flunked human studies, and even viruses or worms genetically engineered to stop reproduction.

Wildlife contraception began at least 1,000 years ago. Bedouins in North Africa are said to have inserted stones into the uteri of camels (possibly the world’s first IUD) to prevent them from becoming pregnant during long desert treks.

But the modern history of wildlife contraception begins in the fall of 1971. Jay Kirkpatrick, a reproductive biologist transplanted from Cornell University, was settling into his new position at Montana State University in Billings, where he planned to culture animal embryos. One Thursday afternoon a cowboy, hat on head and dust on boots, walked into Kirkpatrick’s office and asked him whether he could find a way to prevent wild mares from getting pregnant.

That man was Ron Hall, a wildlife biologist at the Billings office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). You might call Hall a visionary.

Wild horses weren’t multiplying out of control; yearly culls had kept their numbers in check across the Western U.S. But Hall understood that this crudely enforced equilibrium was about to explode. Congress had just passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, which outlawed killing of horses. If culling weren’t replaced with some gentler form of population control, horse numbers would double within a few years, endangering commercial rangelands across the West.

Kirkpatrick was intrigued, and he and his students began studying the horses’ reproductive biology at the nearby Pryor Mountains Wild Horse Range.

Back on campus, Kirkpatrick tried injecting captive stallions with steroids. It deflated their sperm counts and prevented them from siring foals, but—unfortunately—it involved injecting large amounts of liquid into the horses by hand, which in turn evoked the risky prospect of having to capture wild stallions one by one.

These technical challenges were soon dwarfed by problems of a different sort. Local residents accidentally learned of Kirkpatrick’s work in the Pryor Mountains when they overheard a conversation between two of his students at the Medicine Wheel tavern in Lovell, Wyoming—just across the state line from the Pryors. Kirkpatrick hadn’t even begun testing contraception in the Pryor Mountains herd, but rumors of his scientific machinations quickly spread. An editorial in the Lovell Chronicle cast contraception as a threat to wild horses and local tourism. “Go sterilize yourself,” said a personal letter mailed to Kirkpatrick.

The fracas reached Wyoming’s congressional delegation, which pressured BLM. Kirkpatrick was expelled from the Pryors within two months. He quickly understood that public opinion was the single strongest force that would sculpt his work. That force would buffet him again and again.

It wasn’t until a decade later that circumstance finally handed Kirkpatrick his big break. Despite BLM’s attempts to regulate wild horses by capture and adoption, populations had risen across the West, from 17,000 in 1970 to 48,000 in the mid-1980s. The horses outcompeted commercial cattle that shared their rangeland, scouring landscapes of edible greens. Ranchers complained, so Interior Secretary James Watt exploited legal loopholes that allowed them to sell wild horses for slaughter. The public, which had eschewed contraception, finally began to embrace it as a lesser evil.

Kirkpatrick was still struggling with steroid contraception when he learned in 1988 that Irwin Liu, a veterinarian at the University of California at Davis, had quietly begun working with what might be the ideal tool: a failed human contraceptive called porcine zona pellucida, or PZP.

PZP provided a fresh approach to contraception—a vaccine that harnessed immune cells to prevent pregnancy. Zona pellucida proteins distilled from pig ovaries were injected into horses, and these foreign proteins prompted the horses’ immune systems to manufacture antibodies against them. Those antibodies latched onto the surface of newly ovulated horse oocytes, blocking sperm from entering the egg.

When Liu tried PZP in 14 captive horses, it prevented pregnancy in 13 of them. And, unlike steroids, PZP worked in small enough doses that Liu could inject it through a dart fired from a rifle. So in 1988 Liu, Kirkpatrick, and Cornell classmate John Turner of the University of Toledo College of Medicine packed their rifles and headed to Assateague Island off the Maryland coast to try PZP on wild horses.

The results exceeded their expectations. Just 4 percent of vaccinated mares produced foals in the year after darting—compared to 45 percent of unvaccinated mares. Liu and his colleagues published the results in Wildlife Society Bulletin in 1990, and their world changed overnight. “All of a sudden, my phone rang in my office from eight in the morning until the time I went home,” says Kirkpatrick. “The reporters were on the phones, the animal welfare groups were on the phones, and the zoos were on the phones. It was just pure excitement.”

Buoyed by success, Kirkpatrick the Dartman spent weeks each year prowling the bushes, vaccinating horses and deer through his rifle at 40 paces. Back in Billings, he scaled up laboratory production of PZP. He left Montana State and founded The Science and Conservation Center in Billings. With two employees and the help of Turner, he now converts 200 kilo-grams of pig ovary into 5,000 doses of PZP each year. Kirkpatrick himself has darted over 5,000 animals in 19 years—mostly wild horses and white-tailed deer, with occasional forays into more exotic beasts like water buffalo and bears.

But the epiphany that spawned elephant contraception arrived back in 1984. Television personality Roger Caras interviewed Kirkpatrick and Turner for a wildlife documentary. As he watched the program in his living room a month later, he was shocked by what he saw. The show opened with footage of elephant culling in Kruger National Park: female elephants and their nursing calves crumpled side by side as shots rang out. The documentary then transitioned to Kirkpatrick’s work with wild horses, and Caras asked, could animal contraception solve the elephant problem without bullets?

“I didn’t even know they did elephant culls,” recalls Kirkpatrick. “Caras made the connection. That was the birth, in my mind, of elephant contraception.” Kirkpatrick lacked the technology, but the idea of contracepting elephants stuck in his head. The advent of a workable vaccine a few years later made it possible. So in the mid-1990s, Kirkpatrick began working with Henk Bertschinger, a reproductive biologist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. And porcine zona pellucida, dissolved in sterile water with Freund’s adjuvant, arrived on the African savanna.

Kirkpatrick and Bertschinger fired the first darts in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. From 1996 to 2000, they studied the effects of PZP in 31 of the park’s 11,000 elephants. A year after the first dose, 44 percent of vaccinated elephants had fallen pregnant, compared with 89 percent of unvaccinated elephants. By adjusting the darting schedule, they lowered pregnancies to 20 percent.

PZP studies also continue at the much smaller Makalali Reserve, where 73 elephants roam 22,500 hectares of bush. All female ele-phants were vaccinated from 2000 to 2005, and not a single calf was conceived. Managers have since eased back on vaccinations, allowing 2 to 3 percent annual population growth. Bertschinger now produces PZP locally; he and van Altena dart elephants at nine game reserves and parks across South Africa. In a small population where individual elephants are known, “We can actually play God” and decide which females conceive and when, says Audrey Delsink, who studies the social impact of contraception on Makalali’s elephants. It’s an awesome power—and it provokes a profound question: why regulate wild populations that have ostensibly managed themselves for millennia?

The answer lies in the shrunken geography of the modern herbivore’s world. Prior to European arrival, water regulated elephant populations. Unusually dry years forced ele-phants to venture farther from rivers to find food, and calves foundered during those thirsty treks. But even large parks like Kruger now augment natural rivers with water holes supplied by wells. These water spots improve tourists’ odds of sighting Africa’s “big five” game, since animals congregate there, but they also guarantee that elephants can reach any corner of a reserve without straying too far from water.

“Where you would normally get losses of young calves in very dry seasons,” says Bertschinger, “you can now move from one water hole to the next one.” Elephant populations can grow 10 to 12 percent annually in smaller reserves, where fences restrict wildlife from wandering far from water.

Water holes drilled to support herds of cattle and sheep across the rangelands of Australia have also spawned hordes of kangaroo that compete for the same resources—prompting an annual cull of Australia’s most iconic marsupial. North America’s quilted suburban landscapes also provide food and water (often free of predators) to deer who then throw it all away in one mad instant by dashing in front of a minivan.

The common theme is human-sculpted landscapes benefiting some species over others, says Chris Wemmer, scientist emeritus at the National Zoo in Washington, DC. “You get one species thriving and the normal predator isn’t there,” says Wemmer. “It’s a very widespread phenomenon. It’s happening around the world.”

Yet the magnitude of the demand for contraception pushes up against some harsh realities. It’s easy to understand the appeal of contraception to a community overrun by deer when you consider the alternatives: poisoning, shooting, or costly roundups in the vicinity of homes, schools, and strip malls. The same goes for elephants, which South Africa’s urbanites increasingly view as sentient, emotional creatures. But despite the promise of miracles, contraception can do only so much.

Elephants often live 60 years, so even complete contraception would require 15 years to reduce an overgrown population by 25 percent; in the meantime, those overabundant elephants might devour every green thing in sight. And no biologist in his right mind would maintain elephants for a decade and a half at 100 percent contraception; doing so might disrupt the social fabric of pachydermdom. “Having absolutely no babies for an indefinite period of time is detrimental,” says Delsink, “not only to the social dynamics of the herd, but also to the population structure.” Elephant parenting skills are known to develop as juveniles look after younger siblings—a process which 15 birthless years might interrupt. It was this sort of consideration that led Delsink and van Altena to ease up on contraception at Makalali in 2005 and allow elephant numbers to grow by 2 to 3 percent per year rather than by zero percent.

That growth rate represents a compromise. It’s well below the nine percent growth seen at Makalali before contraception—but it could still necessitate the removal of a few animals sometime in the future. In reserves that have already hit their carrying capacity for elephants, contraception will almost certainly have to be combined with culling.

Similar limitations apply to deer in North America. Although deer control remains a goal in dozens of states, contraception will never keep the lid on 25 million deer. Bullets can whittle down deer numbers in a way that darts can’t, and people are lining up to pay license fees for the privilege of doing it. “It’s much cheaper,” concludes Turner, “to put a bullet in a deer than it is to contracept it.”

Hunting, capturing, clubbing, and poisoning don’t work as well in suburbs and small parks, though. It’s these places, where wilderness mingles with humanity, that contraception makes the most sense. Targeting the suburban deer demographic could translate into contracepting 20,000 to 50,000 does across the U.S., says Allen Rutberg, who collaborates with Kirkpatrick, Turner, and Liu from his post at the Tufts-Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Boston. That might mean treating deer in several hundred locales across the U.S., a few dozen to a few hundred animals per site.

The labor of darting that many animals presents the largest technical hurdle. Plenty of studies have found PZP effective if it’s scrupulously applied to most of the females. Yet horses, deer, or elephants were traditionally darted with PZP twice in the first three months followed by annual boosters. It can be a lot for cash-strapped local governments to accomplish.

But newer work presented at the September symposium in York shows progress in making contraception less labor-intensive.

One strategy is to create vaccines that last longer. At the meeting, Turner, Rutberg, and Liu presented the latest results for a controlled-release formulation of PZP intended to provide 2 years of contraception with a single dose. “The long-term goal,” says Turner, “is to get a vaccine that will last three or four years.” Lowell Miller at the USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, showed early results for a newer controlled-release vaccine against gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). The vaccine prevents estrus, ovulation, and mating. Because GnRH is grown in recombinant bacteria rather than derived from animal tissue, as PZP is, its use may present fewer governmental regulatory hurdles than PZP in the long run.

Miller’s group is also preparing to test an oral formulation of GnRH; an oral vaccine would carry huge implications. Rather than darting animals one by one, wildlife managers could mix the vaccine into bait, then wait for their quarry to come and eat it.

The drawback is that GnRH and PZP work in hundreds of mammal species—and some nontarget species will inevitably consume the vaccine from bait stations. But Miller’s team is working on that problem with DiazaCon®, a failed human cholesterol drug which they’re testing as an oral contraceptive in birds. They’re developing bait stations which they hope will specifically deliver DiazaCon to monk parakeets in Florida by relying on that species’ unique combination of strength, dexterity, and beak size. Similar strategies might eventually work in mammals, says Miller.

Others have explored more-aggressive approaches to species-specific contraception. Christopher Hardy and Lyn Hinds at the CSIRO Entomology Division in Canberra, Australia, experimented with recombinant versions of cytomegalovirus and myxoma virus, which express key reproductive proteins when they infect invasive mice and rabbits. The viruses rendered lab animals sterile. Australian authorities might have released such viruses into the wild to propagate and spread—a prospect that provoked plenty of concern—but as of last month’s York meeting, the project was discontinued for technical reasons. Across the Tasman Sea, Phil Cowan of Landcare Research in Palmerston North, New Zealand, is still developing genetically modified parasitic nematodes to sterilize invasive brushtail possums.

But never mind viruses. Even tried-and-true dart contraception still encounters plenty of knee-jerk resistance.

The lengthy debate over contraception has exacted a very real cost: population problems continue to worsen as time passes. Wild-horse populations have doubled in the past four decades. Efforts to contain horse numbers still emphasize yearly roundups and adoption of as many of the collected horses as possible. Unadopted horses are maintained at taxpayer expense on privately run reserves in Oklahoma and Kansas. The number of horses thus living on the government dole currently stands at 22,000.

BLM now performs some contraception—about 500 horses per year, out of 30,000 on public lands—but it took decades to happen. Hall, the BLM man who first roped Kirkpatrick into contraception 36 years ago, eventually made his way to the National Wild Horse and Burro Program in Reno, Nevada, where he pushed hard for contraception before retiring in 2004.

Contraception of deer stands at a similar crossroads, with a few hundred currently treated out of the many thousands of possible recipients. Hunters and the state agencies who license them remain suspicious of contraception to control suburban deer, which they fear—realistically or not—could someday replace hunting in open wilderness. And even as elephant contraception proliferates among small game reserves in South Africa, large parks like Kruger remain aloof to the idea.

“Right now we have the technology to solve 50 percent of the problems that this stuff was designed for,” says Kirkpatrick. “And we can’t get near that 50 percent because the real issues are social, cultural, political, and economic.” Perhaps that’s the nature of family planning.

About the Author

Douglas Fox is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. He has written for New Scientist, Natural History, and Discover and is a frequent contributor to Conservation.