The word 'water', in various languages, projected on a wall of mist

I took my kids last month on President’s Day to see a special exhibit at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland called “Water: H₂O = Life.”  To those who think this means I dragged my kids on their vacation day to an event related to my career, well…you’re right.

However…

First, we also visited an indoor rainforest where they saw orangutans, pythons and crocodiles and then saw a jaw-dropping IMAX movie about prehistoric “sea monsters.” So they had their fun.

Second, it’s not like I work for Allstate and roped them into an exhibit called “Insurance Premiums Through Time.”  They got a lot out of the exhibit, particularly its various hands-on activities.

But I definitely had the most fun. For context, concepts like environmental flows are generally not at the forefront of most people’s minds, and so my job can be somewhat hard to explain. But stepping foot into “Water = Life,” crowded on this holiday, was like entering an alternate reality where everyone understood and cared deeply about the things that I work on.

And all my favorite issues were right there — the importance of flow regimes, the quest for “better dams,” how floodplains and flood pulses drive river productivity and deliver great benefits to people.

Luca removes a dam

How rarely do I actually get to say things like: “You see here, below the dam the flow has high energy and it carries away all the sand. But behind the dam, the water flow doesn’t have energy and the sand drops out and into the reservoir. But now if you remove the dam…”

(At this point, my seven-year old son pulled a lever, removing the model-sized dam that backed up water in a plexiglass flume.)

“…you can see the river has enough energy to pick up all that sand and move it throughout the whole river.”

Such phrases usually aren’t as compelling as “Did you see that reverse jam from LeBron last night?” but here, in this alternate reality, rather than seeing quizzical looks, I noticed several bystanders nodding their heads thoughtfully. And I just knew what they were thinking, “Ah yes, now I can see how dams interrupt processes of sediment transport, thereby impacting downstream channel morphology.” I could just see it in their eyes…

But seriously, it was a great exhibit. My kids watched rainfall percolate through the gravel and sand of an aquifer (cross-sectioned behind Plexiglass) and then worked a hand pump to extract water from the aquifer and watched as the water table dropped until an artesian well stopped flowing.  We sat on a row of painted-on toilet seats to view a short movie about where our water comes from and — simply too good to be true for elementary kids — where it goes after we flush.

“Water = Life” is a traveling exhibit developed by a group of museums lead by the American Museum of Natural History (check out this overview of the exhibit and freshwater conservation). If you’d like to learn more about water and how rivers work, it’s definitely worth a visit. Cleveland is the last planned stop in the United States, ending on April 11, followed by visits to Canberra, Australia and then Toronto. The exhibit may continue traveling after that, so if you’re interested, encourage your local science or natural history museum to sponsor a visit.

Wren and her stuffed frog, oblivious to the Mekong giant catfish lurking just beneath the surface.

(Image credits: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy. For more information about our editorial policy and legal terms of use, see our About This Blog page.

1. A new book says climate change will craft a new world order — United States and E.U. vs. China and Russia. (Climate Feedback)
2. Why the “Stop Aquatic Hitchhikers” campaign is state-of-the-art conservation marketing. (Conservation Maven)
3. The new climate change battleground: The American classroom. (Dot Earth)
4. Greenhouse gases so hog the spotlight — so here’s a look at the neglected airborne pollutants. (The Vine)
5. The 5 movies that should win an Oscar from a green standpoint (yes, yes,”Avatar” is still one of them). (The Daily Green)

Ecosystem services — the benefits to human well-being that nature provides — have become a major focus at all of the major conservation NGOs.

While the idea isn’t new (the concept of “multiple use” on U.S. federal lands is very similar, and dates to the 1960s), it is one of the exciting new buzz words in conservation. I spend much of my time professionally working to make sure that The Nature Conservancy is considering ecosystem services in our conservation activity, fostering conservation that is both good for biodiversity and good for human well-being. But while I’m a true believer in the power of ecosystem-service based conservation, I have some lingering concerns.

To understand these concerns, one has to understand how ecosystem services relate to the market system we all live under. Most ecosystem services are outside of the market — they are benefits that we get from nature for free.

As such, any damage that an economic actor does through pollution, etc., to an ecosystem service is what’s known in the trade as a “negative externality,” because it damages all of us but doesn’t directly fit into that actor’s economic bottom line. Hardin’s concept of the tragedy of the commons most vividly (and simplistically) describes the end result of this process. Rational individual decisions can systematically destroy a common resource such as ecosystem services.

Many ecologists know Hardin’s essay, but not the historical process he was referring to. The common areas of England, which did tend to be overgrazed, were privatized in a process called “enclosure,” where a particular individual got to build a fence around the field and label it as his private property.

In some sense, this is an ecologically and economically rational thing to do, for in principal it removes the incentive to overgraze the common land. However, the process was manifestly unfair and inequitable. The rich and politically well connected got land, while the poor now had to pay rent for land they were able to use for free before.

Many ecosystem-service conservation programs require a similar privatization. A service that once was free, and perhaps has been degraded, is now “paid for” by someone, typically the beneficiary of that service. There’s ample evidence that these kinds of ecosystem-service conservation programs work in terms of reducing degradation of the service over time.

However, there are lots of different ways to set up the system, with very different equity consideration. For instance, in a hypothetical cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions:

• If the allowances are auctioned off, the polluters are paying for the right to pollute;
• But if the allowances are given away for free, polluters are actually given rights with substantial monetary value.

Most conservation NGOs have been careful with equity considerations while creating ecosystem-service schemes. But I do worry that the process of privatizing ecosystem services, if hijacked by for-profit groups, may be profoundly unfair and inequitable.

In The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel argues that the process of privatizing ecosystem services represents the enclosure of nature’s commons. Given that estimates of the total value of ecosystem services are on the same order of magnitude as global GDP, this may be one of the biggest enclosures in economic history.

Given the checkered history of privatization, with the rich and powerful tending to benefit, it behooves environmentalists to be extremely careful about how we introduce the concept of payment for ecosystem services into the market, so that the concept of equity is central to what we do.

(Image: Traditional wooden sheep enclosures. Image credit: spratmackrel/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy. For more information about our editorial policy and legal terms of use, see our About This Blog page.

1. Will South Dakota children soon be learning climate change is caused in part by “astrological dynamics”? (The Vine)
2. How your corked wine bottle is helping conserve biodiversity. (Mongabay)
3. A new effort to save the Siberian Crane, which is critically endangered. (UNEP)
4. Does conserving land reduce local housing supplies? (Conservation Maven)
5. Big surprise (yeah, right): Most people don’t care if the gadget they just bought is green or not. (Retrevo)

1. Ignore the noise from climate skeptics– climate change is still happening, scientists say.  (Mongabay)
2. Ask Umbra offers tips on how to green your takeout and “reduce your carbon forkprint.”  (Grist)
3. The US is merging war training with species preservation on stateside military bases (New York Times).
4. Keeping with that theme:  the Department of Defense is working with organizations like The Nature Conservancy to protect habitat around bases.  (Greenwire via New York Times)
5. Spirit-maker Bacardi reduced its carbon emissions by nearly 10 percent last year.  Party!  (GreenBiz)

If you’re not familiar with international football, let me tell you about Gary Neville. He is the captain of Manchester United, the world’s most popular sports club and a perennial contender for the championship of the English Premier League, the top football league in Britain and possibly the world.

Before you ask…there’s a reason I’m writing about this for Cool Green Science — a very green reason. So keep reading.

Neville is the club’s left back, which means he’s not a flashy goal-scorer, but a meat-and-potatoes, hard-tackling defenseman. He doesn’t have his own shoe/clothing line, or a signature fragrance, and — to the best of my knowledge — the tabloids have never paid any attention to his wife, a neglect that is increasingly uncommon these days in sports coverage. Neville also hasn’t hopped from team to team like David Beckham, but has spent his entire career at Manchester United, rising from the club’s youth system.

I am not a United fan — my Premiership sympathies lie with perennially average Fulham — but Neville is the type of hard-nosed, dedicated athlete you’d be happy to have your sons emulate. (Liverpool fans, please use the comment section below to register your outrage.)

Here’s the environmental connection: Neville is also an unabashed greenie who has contracted the first underground zero-emissions home in the United Kingdom.

I’ll pause to let you read that again. An international football star is building not only an underground zero-emissions home — it’s the first such home in his entire country.

Neville’s foray into green living is a welcome change in the admittedly stereotypical view of the environmentally-friendly male. You know: The fey guy taking the bus to work, wearing hemp and recycled rubber eco-shoes and “vintage” button-downs over a t-shirt with a cryptic green message, and contemplating vegetarianism.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with that guy. It’s just that he’s not likely to convert the baseball-cap-wearing, Bud-light-drinking, SportsCenter-watching, stereotypically red-blooded American male. And we need to convert these guys if this whole sustainability thing is going to really go wide.

To do that, we need more Gary Nevilles. We need more Gary Nevilles coming out to say: “Look, trashing the Earth is just not cool and giving a crap doesn’t make you less of a man.” (Of course in America, Neville is an imperfect example — the mere fact that he is a soccer player significantly decreases his “man points.”)

What we need are NFL players, hockey guys, baseball players, home-improvement show hosts (and NOT on Planet Green — no offense, I love my PG, but you’re preaching to the choir), hunting and fishing guys…heck, even NASCAR guys to come out and start standing up for the environment.

We especially need to bring out the hunting and fishing crowd — the sportsmen. These guys will literally lose the lifestyle they love if we continue to go down the road we’re on. It’s hard to shoot a pheasant in a strip mall parking lot and even harder to catch a trout in a river that’s dried out or irreparably damaged by unsustainable hydropower.

There is absolutely no reason a pickup truck with an NRA seal on the window shouldn’t also have a Nature Conservancy sticker on the other. Why make hybrids so obvious? Why not put a hybrid engine in a Chevy Camaro and tout its fuel efficiency and its power?

There’s already been some fits and starts toward manning-up the green movement. The Philadelphia Eagles have their “Go Green” initiative, magazines like Field & Stream have the occasional debate on environmentally friendly gear and Chevy is rolling out a hybrid version of its Silverado Pickup truck.

But for my money, the best move toward manning-up the green movement is coming from Audi and its “green police” campaign. This campaign launched during the Super Bowl and is built around the company’s A3 TDI diesel, the 2010 Green Car of the Year, which gets an EPA 42 miles-per-gallon highway.

The campaign deftly pokes fun of annoying greenies who chastise people for drinking bottled water and using plastic bags and old-fashioned light bulbs. At first you think the commercial is a jab at the environmental community…until you realize the A3 is in on the joke — it’s an environmentally friendly car that hasn’t given up its manhood.

The commercial is as funny, snarky and self-deprecating as the best bits of The Daily Show.

But the “Green Police” campaign doesn’t end with the Super Bowl commercial. There’s a whole series of fake green PSAs (these are not as good as the original commercial) and a clever YouTube “interactive challenge” quizzing users on some of the basic principals of green living.

Like the Super Bowl commercial, these extensions of the Green Police succeed in manning-up the green movement because they rely on a type of self-referential, slacker, lovable-lout humor that resonates with this audience. Appealing to this demographic is the last step in making green living completely mainstream.

What we need to make green living go mainstream are more regular guys — more Gary Nevilles, more Philadelphia Eagles, more hunters, anglers and lovable louts pushing eco-friendly luxury motor cars.

In short, we need to stop being preachy and defensive — we need to learn to be comfortable living in our own skin.

(Image: Gary Neville. Credit: Austin Osuide via Wikipedia.)

Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy. For more information about our editorial policy and legal terms of use, see our About This Blog page.

Jake Cohen is a senior writer for The Nature Conservancy.

As we peruse the produce section of the supermarket, we’re ever-mindful of the prices we’re paying for fresh fruits and vegetables. But there’s another cost we rarely consider – the price of keeping that food safe and free from contaminants.

Is it worth the cost of making substantial changes to the healthy ecosystems that produce that food? And what if we’re not even getting what we’ve paid for? What if those environmental changes aren’t actually making our food any safer?

These are especially pressing questions in California’s Central Coast Region, which serves not only as America’s vegetable garden but also as a fragile key to the state’s environmental well-being.

And a recent report — spearheaded by The Nature Conservancy with funding from the Produce Safety Project, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University — suggests we need to think about how farms can produce healthy food and sustain the environment.

According to the study, farmers say they’re under increasing pressure from inspectors and food safety professionals to change the way they farm. They’re being forced to alter their farmlands in ways that could substantially harm local ecosystems, and for reasons that may not necessarily make the food on your plate any safer.

The number one priority is providing a safe product, but food safety and environmental conservation are not mutually exclusive. Standards that require farmers to remove wildlife and bodies of water from farms could result in serious impacts to clean water, clean air and healthy soils — and they could create public health implications of their own.

How do we improve those standards? The study suggests we use science to achieve a profitable and sustainable balance between producing safe food and conserving ecosystems.

In order to make this balance work — in order to reduce the pressure current standards place on farmers and the environment — we need science-based, rational and transparent standards. We need the kind of nuance that science provides. And, we need to get this message to national policymakers to ensure efforts underway in Congress don’t fix one public health problem by creating another.

These new standards will be crucial for the Central Coast Region, which produces 50 percent of the nation’s fresh-market vegetables and nearly 80 percent of its lettuce. If the area wants to continue the region’s legacy as a bastion of biodiversity and mecca for fresh food, it may be time for food policy to turn over a new leaf.

(Image credit: robplusjessie/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

1. One way to make the Olympics greener:  Hold them in the same place.  (Grist)
2. Riding in coach is generally less comfortable than business class, but it turns out the carbon footprint is way smaller.  (Guardian)
3. How much is nature worth in real, actual dollars?  (GreenBiz)
4. A 12-year-old American boy is working to save the okapi, one of Africa’s most elusive and unusual animals.  (Mongabay)
5. A research team is figuring out how we can abandon batteries– but will the substitute more be sustainable?  (Spoiler alert:  We don’t know yet.)  (CleanTechnica)

Marissa Ahlering is the prairie ecologist for The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Community-based conservation has become a buzz word in conservation. Basically, it involves empowering entire communities to take control of the sustainable use and protection of their natural resources. The idea is that the people who rely on the natural resources for their livelihood should have the most interest in their protection.

Community conservation projects have begun in many developing countries out of the recognition that biological conservation has to include people. But could it be successful in North America? This is a question I have found myself contemplating as I begin my role as the prairie ecologist for The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota — after having spent time observing a very successful community conservation project half a world away.

For the past 3 years, I have been studying a group of savanna elephants that recolonized communally owned land in southern Kenya. In this region, elephants are increasingly using areas outside of parks, a trend that increases the potential for conflicts, such as crop destruction and human deaths.

My work focused on understanding the dynamics of the elephants living among the Maasai, who are pastoralists. During this time I learned a lot about the dynamics of elephants, but I learned even more from the Maasai about the effectiveness of community-based conservation.

Here’s how it works. With some help from a Kenyan conservation organization, the African Conservation Centre, the Maasai in this area have established a community zoning plan. They designated three zones within the community: the agriculture zone, the communal grazing zone and a community conservation zone. The community conservation zone functions similar to a grass bank. They only graze it in times of severe drought. The rest of the time it is left for wildlife.

The wildlife response to the conservation zone has been amazing. The entire suite of large carnivores is present on the site: lion, spotted hyena, striped hyena, leopard, African wild dogs and cheetah. The diversity of herbivores is incredible, from kudu and eland to oryx and giraffe, and a resident elephant population has been established.

While the wildlife obviously benefit from the increase in resource availability, the Maasai have also benefited by buffering the droughts with a grass reserve and by an increase in tourism from the resurgence of wildlife.

As pastoralists on communal land, the Maasai have a strong sense of community and a strong connection to the land. Therefore, community-based conservation was a relatively natural concept for them to embrace. But I struggle with how this model would work in North America.

Two vital components to the process are 1) a sense of community and 2) connection to the land. In many places in the United States, one or both of these components have been lost. Can these connections be rebuilt, and if so, what would a community-based conservation model look like in North America?

Of all North American ecosystems, grasslands could benefit immensely from a community-based conservation model similar to the Maasai.

U.S. ranchers often have a difficult time supporting their cattle and turning a profit without grazing the land hard and searching for grazing leases on other properties. Working as a community with neighbors to create large expanses of grass available for everyone’s cows would allow the grass to be managed at a larger scale — providing more forage overall and better quality habitat for grassland wildlife at the same time.

But this type of land-management change is challenging for people because it means relinquishing complete control and requires trust of and commitment to others. In the United States and Canada, a handful of projects have started community grazing programs, and results have been extremely positive.

Perhaps in North America, where even our decisions at the grocery store have impacts far beyond our borders, our sense of community and our connection to the land need to start local and extend to a larger scale. We live in a world of increasingly global conservation problems, such as air pollution and climate change, but I think it is still worth struggling to rebuild our connections to community and the land.

Although it is a region and ecosystem historically neglected by the conservation world, the grasslands and the plains are model systems for testing the possibilities and opportunities for rebuilding land and community connections for conservation.

(Image 1: A male elephant in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Credit: Marissa Ahlering/TNC. Image 2: Male cheetahs in the Olkiramatian/Shompole Community Conservation Area, Kenya. Credit: Marissa Ahlering/TNC.)

1. The pika has gone from being the animal most vulnerable to climate change in the United States to not being threatened at all… what happened? (Green Inc.)
2. Has the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) been sloppy with its science? (NY Times)
3. No more greenwashing says the FTC… companies will need to start making eco-claims that are truly meaningful. (The Vine)
4. Check out this clip from a new ocean film featuring the White Shark Cafe, a favorite hang-out of great white sharks. (Treehugger)
5. If you live in the Windy City, you can now charge your electric car at a station powered by… wind, of course. (EcoGeek)