Formulas for Spreading Misinformation About Nature

This coming week, on Nov. 9, I've been invited to make a presentation about books, articles, and opinion pieces that have sought over the years to deny the danger of invasive species. There's lots of denial out there: denial of problems like climate change, and more recently denial of solutions like vaccines. It was a surprise, though, as someone who has long witnessed how human impacts have thrown nature out of balance, to discover a whole genre of literature that not only denied the problem of invasive species but also attacked people like me who were working to mend nature. 

Through detailed critiques of many of the books, articles and opinion pieces, I was able to uncover the manipulations and skewed logic that made these readings so compelling for an uninformed audience. They all provided readers an applecart to spill and an "Other" to dislike. They portrayed the despised "Other"--mainstream scientists, conservationists, habitat restorationists, i.e. people like me--as narrow-minded, emotional, sentimental, even xenophobic, as we haplessly sought to counter a tidal wave of nonnative species that the writers claimed were actually doing good. By exaggerating our goals, they were able to dismiss those goals as unattainable. They flattered readers by making them feel smarter than the deluded "Other", and reassured readers that a big problem wasn't a problem at all, and that therefor nothing need be done to solve it. Letting people off the hook--promising freedom without responsibility--is one of the most appealing aspects of denial, whether it be of invasive species, climate change, a pandemic, or any other collectively created problem. 

It was therefore with a sense of recognition that I watched a recent John Oliver episode entitled "Misinformation," about how vulnerable people are to misinformation that propagates on social media sites. Oftentimes, the victims, who are also victimizers as they unwittingly pass along misinformation to their friends, are people who speak other languages for which there are few fact-checking sites to counter the misinformation. 

Like the formula for invasive species denial (provide an applecart to spill, an "Other" to dislike, etc) the video offers a recipe for making misinformation appealing:

• claim that a "Harvard scientist helped confirm ancient wisdom"
• "mention some chemicals"
• insult western medicine and culture
• cite your sources

The bit about "cite your sources" could offer hope, but oftentimes it is just another piece of the facade that lends a false sense of legitimacy to the misinformation.

Going Negative On Natives--The Latest Example in the NYTimes

The New York Times is one of the bedrocks of news, which makes it hard to understand why its opinion page would show a weakness for ill-informed attacks on native plants and their proponents. The latest is by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a point-by-point rebuttal of which can be found further down in this post, but his is just one in a series.

First in my memory is George Ball, president of Burpee Seed Company and former president of the American Horticultural Society, who despite these distinguished labels launched an error-filled broadside (Border War, 3/19/06) against people who promote the planting of native flora. In his words, people who promote natives are xenophobic, narrowminded, the horticultural equivalent of radical fundamentalists, utopian, elitist snobs, anti-exotic partisans, and (last but not least) dangerous to a free society.

Then there was Sean Wilsey, (High Line, Low Aims, 7/9/08) who spoke disparagingly of the proposal to plant a ribbon of native species on Manhattan's High Line. Apparently lacking any botanical or ecological knowledge that might have heightened his appreciation of the plan, he made it sound like the High Line would be little more than a linear patch of weedy sumac--a species he may have confused with the ubiquitous non-native Tree of Heaven. Time, and the spectacular congregation of native plants that now thrive on the very popular elevated walkway, have proven him wrong.

(Update, 11.29.13: Another which I forgot to mention when writing this piece appeared on April 3, 2011. In “Mother Nature’s Melting Pot,” Hugh Raffles, an immigrant who had just received citizenship, characterizes native plant advocates as nativists with the same core fear of aliens as the Tea Party. After cherry picking a few beneficial aspects of some introduced species, he calls for an "inclusive" approach, which presumably would include disease pathogens and agricultural pests. As with Klinkenborg's piece, he mentions eucalyptus, climate change, claims that most efforts to control invasives are futile, believes the term "native" to be arbitrary, characterizes any "mythic time of past purity" as an artificial construct, and implies that the rapid introduction of new species from other continents is a natural phenomenon and nothing new. Letters rebutting Mr. Raffles' logic can be found here.)

The latest installment of this attack on native plant advocacy, as mentioned, arrived this past week (Hey, You Calling Me an Invasive Species?, 9/7/13), written by a member of the Times' editorial board, Verlyn Klinkenborg. Avoiding George Ball's name-calling and Sean Wilsey's dismissive tone, his thesis is that the distinction between native and nonnative species is now an arbitrary one, given the passage of centuries and the ever-expanding influence of humans on the natural world.

Klinkenborg's opinion piece was prompted by recent public protests against a plan to thin out a dense forest of non-native eucalyptus trees growing on Mount Sutro in San Francisco. The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) owns the property, which the local fire department has said is in urgent need of thinning in order to protect nearby buildings from the highly combustible eucalyptus. Reducing the dense shade will improve the health of the trees while providing some light for native vegetation to grow beneath them. Sounds benign, yet locals who walk in the forest are calling the proponents of the plan "plant facists" who want to impose the tyranny of nativism on a woods that is perfect just the way it is.

Joining the chorus of protest, Nathan Winograd, an animal rights advocate who blogs on the Huffington Post wrote a post about the Mount Sutro tree-thinning plan entitled "Biological Xenophobia: The Environmental Movement's War on Nature". Adopting the strident tone of George Ball, he has nothing but contempt for the concept of native plants, preferring that "every life that appears on this Earth is welcomed and respected." Apparently, he's never grown any plant he valued enough to save from the weeds.

The most informative report, as opposed to opinion, on the San Francisco controversy that I could find is here. The university describes the plan this way: "Under the guidance of an outside licensed arborist, UCSF will remove approximately 1,250 trees, each less than 6 inches in diameter, while also thinning shrubs and mowing non-woody perennial plants in the 100-foot buffer zone. All told, the work will encompass approximately 15.6 acres of the 61-acre Reserve."

Here is a point by point rebuttal of Mr. Klinkenborg's opinion piece:

"Since the 1880s, there have been blue gum eucalyptus trees growing on San Francisco’s Mount Sutro, which lies just south of Golden Gate Park. Recently, the University of California, San Francisco, which owns most of Mount Sutro, has been trying to thin the dense eucalyptus forest. The reason is fire control — eucalyptus trees are “fire intensive,” shedding a lot of debris and burning with unusual volatility. But the effort to cull the Mount Sutro forest has been met with strident protest by residents who want to see the eucalyptus left untouched."

Mr. Klinkenborg only mentions fire once in the oped, but fire hazard is a big deal in the California landscape, and the planting of Eucalyptus trees close to structures has doomed many a building when the trees' high flammability causes them to explode. The link he offers, another opinion piece in a distinguished scientific journal, Science, actually offers compelling reasons to alter the forest. There's the current fire hazard to reduce, and the opportunity to improve habitat for the resident great horned owls by re-establishing some native flora. 

By the standard of the California Native Plant Society, eucalyptus, which were brought from Australia, are officially nonnative trees because they were introduced after the first European contact with the New World. But the trees on Mount Sutro have been there within the memory of every living San Franciscan, and to the generations who have grown up within view of them, it seems almost perverse to insist that they are aliens.

No science here, just an anthropocentric view that wishes the rest of nature to conform to the human sense of time.

To keep a clear distinction between native and nonnative species requires nearly geologic memory. 

No, one hundred and thirty years, or even three or four hundred, is not even close to a geologic scale.

But humans, like most species, don’t live in the past, where the distinction originates. In the present, the difference is largely immaterial. 

This isn't true. Though wildlife don't literally live in the past, their tastebuds do. Herbivores tend to be extremely conservative in their food preferences. Whether it be deer or the larvae of moths and butterflies, they continue to reject exotic species introduced hundreds of years ago. They still prefer to eat the native species, which gives exotics a competitive advantage, which makes native plants rare, which then limits wildlife's food options. 

Native or nonnative, California’s eucalyptus trees, like the starlings of Central Park, have come to seem original just because they predate us.

Again, he imposes an anthropocentric view on nature.

Of course, the vast majority of nonnative species have not been intentionally introduced, as the Mount Sutro eucalyptus were, but have been distributed accidentally, unnoticed baggage in the wanderings of our species.

Whether a species is introduced intentionally or unintentionally has no bearing on the potential harm the species can do, just as the impact of human-caused global warming will bear no relation to whether we have intended to change the climate or not. 

Some species — invasive ones like kudzu, Japanese knotweed, rabbits and rats — find almost unlimited room for expansion in their new environs, often overwhelming native species. But not all introduced species are invasive, and pose a threat only when they outcompete native species.

Excellent! It's so important to make the distinction between invasive and non-invasive species. 

It’s important to remember that the distinction between native and nonnative depends on an imaginary snapshot of this continent taken just before European contact. 

Not so imaginary, really. Though American Indians transformed the landscape, spreading some plant species along trade routes, favoring some species through cultivation or burning, or denuding the landscape, e.g. around Teotihuacan to heat the plaster for their pyramids, the massive influx of species from other continents did not begin until Western colonization. It's well known which species are or were part of a particular plant community. The bur oak savannas of the midwest, which had disappeared due to the invasion of buckthorn and other exotics, were pieced back together through research and restoration, and now flourish once again. Whole books describe in detail the various plant communities of a given region, such as this one detailing the plant communities of North Carolina. 

               That distinction is becoming even harder to make as climate change alters the natural world.

A new study from the University of Exeter and Oxford University finds that plant pests and diseases have been migrating northward and southward an average of two miles a year since 1960. This suggests that the plants on which they prey have been moving at similar rates. In places like the Adirondacks, for instance, you can follow the boundary between southern and northern tree species as it shifts northward, year by year. As plants and their pests adjust their range, under the influence of global warming, what becomes of the distinction between native and nonnative? 

Plants and animals have been shifting their regional boundaries throughout the last four hundred thousand years, as glaciers advanced and receded. Human-caused climate change is happening much more rapidly, which is one reason why it is proving so destructive, but most plant species have broad geographic ranges. Climate change doesn't mean that plant communities developed over millenia suddenly have no integrity. 

To any individual species, it doesn’t matter whether it’s native or not. The only thing that matters is whether its habitat is suitable.

 Again, because herbivore food preferences tend to remain unchanged hundreds of years after the introduction of exotic species, suitable habitat tends to equate with native plant species. 

And this is where we come in.
For the most part, we don’t have an immediate impact on the species that surround us. But we do have an immediate impact on their habitat, which determines whether they survive or, in some cases, shift their ground.
Nearly every habitat on this planet has been affected by humans, no matter how remote it is. In the past decade, for instance, the habitats of grizzly bears high in the Rocky Mountains — places most of us never get a chance to visit — have been significantly altered by global warming. As the climate warms, the mountain pine beetle has managed to winter over and destroy vast tracts of whitebark pine trees, which produce pine nuts that bears eat.

When I visited a hillside in Smokey Mountain National Park where hemlock had been wiped out by the exotic wooly adelgid, growing beneath the dead trunks was a riot of native wildflowers and brambles, representing a plant community that deep shade had suppressed. The devastation of whitebark pine trees in the Rockies is tragic, and the loss of that important species may have broad ramifications over time for that ecosystem, but that doesn't mean that native landscapes suddenly lose all meaning and relevance because one species drops out.

CONSIDERED in this light, the natural world as a whole begins to look like Central Park — an ecosystem where human influence is all pervasive. Parts of the park seem almost wild, but every creature in Central Park, native or not, has adapted to a world that is closely bounded by human activity. It is nature bordered by high-rises, intersected by paths and roadways, basking under artificial light at night.

In late August, a group of scientists and students from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College spent the day cataloging all the nondomesticated life forms living in the park. It will take a while to compile and compare the data, but even the anecdotal reports from that single day show how diverse and surprising the park’s ecosystem can be. It isn’t all squirrels and pigeons. The group reported sightings of several unexpected species — a diamondback terrapin in Turtle Pond, a Wilson’s warbler in the North Woods, a bullhead catfish in the Harlem Meer. And though it might seem like a stretch to talk about ecosystems in Central Park, that is exactly what the group found — a healthy mix of species, overlapping generations within many species, and a sense of balance, especially within the aquatic zones.

Actually, a lot of work has been done to restore native species and habitat in Central Park, and it's the only sizable green space for miles for wildlife like birds and insects to gravitate to, so it's not surprising it would exhibit some diversity.

Nature in Central Park can’t be neatly divided into native of nonnative species, and neither can it be on Mount Sutro. The eucalyptus trees that grow there may be naturalized rather than native, but try telling that to all the other creatures that live in those woods or the people who hike there.

 This would be more convincing if it actually described what diversity resides on Mount Sutro. In Princeton, we had a woods that was densely planted in the 1960s with white pine and spruce--species whose native range lies farther north. The woods had considerable charm and a nice mood to it, but it was an ecological desert, with little more than garlic mustard growing in the deep shade and thick mulch of the evergreens, and reportedly an owl or two making use of the dense canopy for protection. (Mount Sutro, from what descriptions I could find, looks to be similarly slim on diversity, dominated by the eucalyptus, with an understory of English ivy and poison ivy, and a stifling and highly flammable thick mulch of eucalyptus litter.) 

Their trunks weak from age and crowding, most of the pines and spruce in the planted woods in Princeton fell during several ice and wind storms, leaving an impenetrable mess that will become a fire trap as the debris dries out. Ash trees, the only seedlings that the too-numerous deer didn't eat, are now taking over, and before long, the introduced Emerald Ash Borer will arrive to kill all the ash.  

A similar fate could await the planted woods on Mount Sutro, in the form of a cataclysmic fire. That, though far more destructive than what the university is trying to do, would not be as controversial, because it would occur due to inaction rather than action. I'm well aware of the capacity for good intentions to go awry, but sometimes inaction can be the most destructive action of all.

And when it comes to the distinction between native and nonnative, we always leave one species out: call us what you will — native, naturalized, alien or invasive.

I don't want to read too much into this, but Mr. Klinkenborg seems to be suggesting here that because we are a species that invaded the American continent, we therefore cannot be judging other invasive species. With such logic, our compromised position brings into question our capacity to understand nature and act upon what we know. 

The attempt to blur the distinction between native and non-native depends on a highly simplified view of nature and evolution. It ignores the deep interconnections species develop while co-evolving over thousands of years.  It sees no symbiotic relationship between soil fungi and plant roots, between an insect and its obligate host plant, between a particular species of ant and the plant that depends upon it to disperse its seeds. Some species, like humans, are highly adaptable to new circumstances. Others are not. Embracing non-native landscapes may give people the comforting illusion of being open-minded, but it closes the door on those more conservative, less adaptable species. 

Related Writings by Verlyn Klinkenborg

It's long been my observation that environmental issues get marginalized on the opinion pages of the news media, likely because columnists and editors tend to lack training in the life sciences. If environmental issues come up, they tend to be treated in isolation rather than seen in the broader context of economics and political concerns. On the New York Times editorial board, Mr. Klinkenborg appears to represent the sum total of biological expertise. His doctoral degree from Princeton University is in english literature. I'm all for self-education, and hopefully he took some biology-related courses along the way. 

Some of his writings for National Geographic appear to contradict his opinion piece dismissing the relevance of native habitats. For instance, an essay on the Endangered Species Act states that people

"discovered, too late, how finely attuned to its home in the cordgrass the dusky seaside sparrow really was. That last bottled sparrow is what a species looks like when its habitat has vanished for good."

In an essay on the tallgrass prairie, rather than downplaying the importance of native plant communities, he seeks a deeper understanding of them:

"The hard part here in the Flint Hills—and in any of the few remaining patches of native prairie—is learning to see the tallgrass ecosystem for itself. It is a study in the power of modesty."

Rather than giving simplified plantings like the eucalyptus on Mount Sutro equal status with native plant communities, he states:

"In most of America, agriculture has meant replacing the incredible complexity of a natural ecosystem with the incredible simplicity of a single crop growing on bare ground."

That incredibly complex prairie ecosystem, however, is threatened by an invasive non-native plant called Sericea lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata). Rather than showing concern about the impact of that invasion, Mr. Klinkenborg worries about the human intervention to counter the invasion:

"There is also a worrying trend toward ground and aerial spraying to control a highly invasive weed called sericea lespedeza, introduced decades ago to curb erosion around mines and provide forage and cover for wildlife around reservoirs."

Now, I happen to know Sericea lespedeza well. I've seen how it moves in and eventually replaces a richly diverse native meadow with a monoculture. Though originally touted as a good wildlife food, both its seeds and foliage provide little nourishment. Its roots release toxins that discourage other plant species. If you're looking for an example of intolerance, of a refusal to "play well with others", Sericea lespedeza is Exhibit A. When it invades new territory, land managers have a choice--either let the noxious weed continue to degrade native habitat, or attempt to limit the weed's destructive impact by intervening, often with selective herbicides.

The objections of Klinkenborg and others to intervention are in part a failure to make distinctions. They want to blur the distinction between native and non-native species. The toxicity of herbicides varies according to type and method of application, but its easier for protesters to demonize them all. Nathan Winograd, in his broadside against native plant advocates, wishes to obliterate all distinctions and treasure every living thing equally. More broadly in national discourse, we see a trend towards accepting all opinions as worthy, whether they are founded on fact or fancy.

Saying that we don't need to make these distinctions, nor intervene to restore native plant communities, sounds less to me like open mindedness than a convenient way of letting ourselves off the hook.

More Skewed Logic on Invasive Species--Bradford Pear

Soon after writing a critique of the NY Times article that demonizes those of us who are concerned about invasive species, I received an email saying "They've done it again!" The email pointed to a NY Times oped by a science writer, Gabriel Popkin, about the Bradford Pear. Called The Ups and Downs of the Bradford Pear, most of the oped tells the standard story of how this tree, introduced by the nursery industry with great fanfare, became an ecological problem years later. Only at the end does the oped take a bizarre turn, using strange math and selective pessimism to conclude that, in a world full of bigger problems, we need not take any action.

The Bradford Pear turns our towns, and increasingly our countrysides as well, white with its intense, incandescent blooms in the early spring. It seems like a beacon after the long voyage of winter, telling us that the comforts of spring are close at hand.

But like many species introduced to our continent with great hopes,

Rationalizing Extinction--an Oped by Alexander Pyron

I know. A lot of you have been feeling guilty about how we humans are causing the 6th great extinction event in earth's history. 40% of all species on earth are predicted to slip quietly into history. But we're good people! For the most part. How could this happen? Well, no use wringing your hands, you hand wringers, you. Because, voila!, extinction turns out to be good, after all, according to R. Alexander Pyron, an associate professor at George Washington University who is trying his hand at opinion writing. Why change our destructive behavior when we can change our ethical standards instead? Demonizing the human race is so last century. Time to rationalize! Time to get anthropocentric about the Anthropocene.

A colleague had sent me the link. The headline (written by the newspaper's editors) sounded like a troll from an online comment section. "We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution: The only creatures we should go out of our way to protect are Homo sapiens."

"Cool!", I exclaimed, looking at the headline on my phone while standing in the parking lot of a nature preserve, getting ready to lead a nature walk on a Sunday afternoon. I shared the provocative title with others who had gathered. We reveled in relief as all that species-guilt we'd been feeling for as long as we could remember drained away, melting into the pavement beneath our feet.

By chance, I'd been analyzing a book with a similar message, "Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, " by Chris D. Thomas. The book may well have emboldened Pyron to write his opinion piece, and given the Washington Post a rationale for publishing it. Both the book and the oped seduce uninformed readers by upsetting the applecart of mainstream thinking, and by letting the reader off the hook. Remember Dr. Strangelove and "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb?" Doctors Thomas and Pyron are doing something similar with the Anthropocene, but with no sense of satire.

Much of their thinking is rooted in books published some years ago--by Marris, Pearce, Orion and others--that vilified habitat restoration and invasion biologists and portrayed invasive species as a blessing in disguise. I thought that line of thinking had long since died of its own strained logic, but Thomas's book appeared this summer, presenting the old arguments in an even more nihilistic form.

If nothing else, Pyron's essay is useful for pointing out some recurrent habits of this genre, which seeks to undermine our trust in mainstream scientific thought. Below are some typical techniques, with quotes from his opinion piece:

Portray the “Other” as emotional, sentimental, and self-serving. In this case, the "Other" is mainstream biological and environmental thinking about habitat restoration and extinction.

• “Yet we are obsessed with reviving the status quo ante.”
• “And if biodiversity is the goal of extinction fearmongers, ...“

Claim that working to restore nature, or otherwise expend conscious effort to reduce humanity's negative impacts, is a waste of time and money.

• “But the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency.”
• “Conserving a species … serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.”
• “whatever effort we make to maintain the current climate will eventually be overrun by the inexorable forces of space and geology.”

Declare the conservationist Other’s words to be meaningless, either by erasing distinctions or mocking the Other’s words with quotation marks.

• "There is no such thing as an 'endangered species,' except for all species."
• “We are a part of the biosphere just like every other creature, and our actions are just as volitional, their consequences just as natural.”
• “alien species will disrupt formerly 'pristine' native ecosystems.”

Manage guilt or purge it altogether.

• “extinction does not carry moral significance, even when we have caused it.”
• “Humans should feel less shame about molding their environment to suit their survival needs.”
• "Conservation is needed for ourselves and only ourselves."

Play tricks with time frame. Sure, we're doing harm to nature, but all will be fine a million years from now. Can you imagine such reasoning being used for any other problem we face?

• "Our concern, in other words, should not be protecting the animal kingdom, which will be just fine. Within a few million years..."
• “If this means fewer dazzling species, fewer unspoiled forests, less untamed wilderness, so be it. They will return in time."

Cherry pick evidence. Oftentimes, one positive trait is used to supposedly compensate for all the negative traits of invasive species. The positive trait might be a pretty flower, or nitrogen-fixing ability, or erosion control.

• “ Studies have shown that when humans introduce invasive plant species, native diversity sometimes suffers, but productivity — the cycling of nutrients through the ecosystem — frequently increases. Invasives can bring other benefits, too: Plants such as the Phragmites reed have been shown to perform better at reducing coastal erosion and storing carbon than native vegetation in some areas, like the Chesapeake.”

Most writings in this genre use extinction as the only measure of damage to native species, but Pyron's oped is even more heartless, claiming that extinction is all part of the game, neither good nor bad.

• “Invasion and extinction are the regenerative and rejuvenating mechanisms of evolution, the engines of biodiversity.”
• "The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings."

Make biodiversity purely a numbers game; minimize or ignore the evolution of complex interactions between species

• "South Florida, where about 140 new reptile species accidentally introduced by the wildlife trade are now breeding successfully? No extinctions of native species have been recorded, and, at least anecdotally, most natives are still thriving. The ones that are endangered, such as gopher tortoises and indigo snakes, are threatened mostly by habitat destruction. Even if all the native reptiles in the Everglades, about 50, went extinct, the region would still be gaining 90 new species — a biodiversity bounty."

Present evolution as winners and losers

• “Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. “

Overall, Pyron's writing has an "abandon ship" quality. Ayn Rand's "In Defense of Selfishness" comes to mind. Libertarianism, as described at lp.org, envisions "a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and no one is forced to sacrifice his or her values for the benefit of others." This sort of thinking leaves us helpless to prevent collectively created crises. Opposition to collective action to slow or prevent climate change then necessitates a way to rationalize the tragic consequences. Pyron's political views are unknown, but he essentially extends the libertarian view of the individual to the species as a whole. Hope is invested not in proactive avoidance of disaster, but in the endgame: "we will find a way to adapt." And if that fails, then come back in a million years. Everything's sure to be fine then.

Update: Alexander Pyron later wrote an apology on facebook. 

When Truth Has to Sit in the Back of the Bus: How Journalistic Conventions Undermine Consensus on Climate Change

If you're wondering how the country became controlled by a science-denying president and political party, it's worth taking a look at how climate change is reported by the mainstream press. Below is an "embedded critique" in which a Boston Globe article on climate change is examined paragraph by paragraph, to see how its structure and content sustain controversy and doubt despite the overwhelming evidence that climate change is real, human-caused, and a grave threat to our future.

Here is a summary of what this fine-grained look revealed:

• Controversy and uninformed, contrarian views are front-loaded--in the headline and first half of the article--while compensatory truth, good news and growing agreement (colored brown to reveal the pattern) is forced "to the back of the bus" (the end of the article, which many readers don't reach). I explain in the critique how this article structure could be serving to perpetuate political polarization and paralysis.
• Use of the word "skeptic" in the context of climate change falsely implies a tough-mindedness in people who lack any skepticism about their own stubbornly ill-informed views. A more accurate term would be "rejectionist".
• The article applies a corrupt form of populism, in which the opinions of highly visible but inadequately trained meteorologists are given equal weight with those of climate scientists.
• Readers are left uninformed about the basic mechanisms that drive global warming. Just as campaign coverage focuses on the horse race, and coverage of forest fires describes the damage while offering no insights into fire ecology, coverage of climate change indulges contrarian views while leaving readers ill-equipped to resist false assertions.

The embedded critique below, of a Feb. 13, 2017 article by David Abel, an experienced journalist with the Boston Globe, shows how misleading this seemingly mainstream journalism can be. My comments are formatted left, while the article's text is indented. 

(Click below on "Read more" to access the article.)

Skepticism and Self: Science's Role in Sustaining Democracry

This is a repost from another blog of mine.

"It's a readiness to be wrong that motivates the study needed to be right."
- Yures Trooley

Andrew Zwicker, one of Princeton's two representatives in the state house, spoke this week to a full room at Mercer County Community College. It was part of a monthly series of talks hosted by the NJ Sierra Club. Assemblyman Zwicker is one of our few, perhaps the only, representative in government who is trained as a scientist. I attended not only because Zwicker is a gifted speaker, but also because of the subject.

The title of the talk, "Scientific Literacy and Democracy," struck a chord with me particularly because the plight of nature has increasingly found a parallel in growing threats to democracy. Both are at risk in a time when truth is being attacked, denied, ignored, downgraded, and generally dismissed. There is the national reality of a leader who cannot see beyond his own skin, and a broad-based, corrosive and paralyzing polarization that thrives on a dismissive attitude towards evidence.

Andrew Zwicker is a rare breed, a scientist who is also comfortable in front of an audience, and he has taken that extra step of bringing his scientific abilities into the political realm. An evidence-based perspective could be a unifying influence if it caught on among his colleagues at the statehouse.

Having a couple science degrees, I have found myself increasingly aware that my mind works differently from many who lack science training. Most significantly, that training can help direct skepticism not only outward but inward as well, at one's own views.

Most of the world's polarization and radicalism would disappear if people directed as much skepticism inward as outward. Science, and its pursuit of truth, is like a lifeline being extended to a world fractured by unfounded opinion. The political polarization we suffer through is artificially created by people who refuse to adjust their views in the face of evidence.

My views are built on varying degrees of knowledge, experience, and observation. Some of those views are better supported than others, and all are subject to revision in the face of new evidence. Scientific training is liberating, in that it allows facts to exist independent of what we might wish were true. Unentangled from our emotions and sense of self, facts need not be feared or clung to, but can be built into an evidence-based view of the world.

My older daughter went through a phase in which she'd periodically declare, with a mixture of surprise and pride, "I changed my mind!" There's pleasure in that flexibility, that openness to new evidence, and my sense is that many people have lost that openness. Recently I was on an advisory committee, developing a list of proposals for action on climate change. The subject had everything to do with science, but only a few of us appointed to the committee had scientific training. A couple of us with a scientific background made suggestions, with some supporting evidence, expecting that if others disagreed, they would provide counter evidence. Being open to new evidence, I might have changed my mind if someone had a more convincing argument. Instead, people simply didn't respond, and continued to stick to their own views without feeling compelled to defend them. They'd mention something they'd read in a book that they liked the sound of, and it would turn out that even the book, though about science, was written by someone who lacked training in science.

During Q and A with Assemblyman Zwicker, I mentioned this curious phenomenon, that science-related advisory committees and science writing can be dominated by people lacking science training. A science editor for the NY Times once wrote a deeply flawed oped denying the threat of invasive species. Turned out he was a Princeton grad with a PhD in english. There are no doubt science writers who know much more than I do about many aspects of science, and yet there's something about science training that cultivates a healthy two-way skepticism, inward as well as outward. It's a readiness to be wrong that motivates the study needed to be right.

After the Q and A, a woman came up to me and said that data is the issue. Most people don't know what to do with data. Maybe she was referring to an analytical ability that develops over time. Science presents you with data, and you have to figure out what the data is suggesting, if anything, and whether it's strong enough to be conclusive. The process requires a great deal of patience, but it also requires an acceptance that there is a reality outside of oneself that really doesn't care about us and our emotional needs at all.

It's possible to experience that reality out in nature, when one gets far from the ever-expanding footprint of lights and noise, far enough that the only human presence is within one's own skin. For me, it's happened a few times, most strikingly while on an ocean shore late at night. The ocean waves crashed against the sand with a symphony of sound, and the stars shone bright in unfathomable numbers overhead. It was glorious, and yet I was aware that this rich nature cared not a wit about me. The same might be said of truth.

Assemblyman Zwicker, whose first slide included a quote from an astronomer, ended his talk with a quote from Carl Sagan, an astronomer who studied at the observatory I grew up next to:

Would Joe Biden Be President Elect Without Jo Jorgensen?

Update, 1.12.21 As time passes, it becomes more and more clear that if not for the pandemic, Trump would have won reelection, and democracy and government would likely be irretrievably damaged. If not for nature's intervention in the form of an invasive species, voters would have focused on the economy, which Trump had poured fuel on much like the dazzling flames that generate a sense of awe in the "man behind the curtain" scene in Wizard of Oz. In the movie, it is a dog that pulls back the curtain and reveals the fraud behind it. In real life, a coronavirus served that role. Without a pandemic, Trump could have continued to project all evil outward onto someone other than himself. With his imperial facade and silky voice, and his skill at playing an audience, the speech and rally format of a normal campaign would have favored him over Biden. 

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The Hidden Life of Trees -- A Review

A surprise bestseller this past year in the U.S. was "The Hidden Life of Trees," a book that gained popularity in Germany before being translated into english. In a progression of 36 short chapters, the author, forester Peter Wohlleben, draws big conclusions from his experience in a forest he cares for in Germany. Using heavy doses of anthropocentric language, he portrays trees as feeling, communicating and interrelating in surprisingly human ways. It's an appealing notion, and he claims to back it up with a list of sources in the back of the book.

As a naturalist trained in botany and water quality, with decades of involvement in nature preserve management and other environmental issues, I've read and reviewed a number of books that claim to give you the inside scoop on what nature is really like, and have noticed some similar themes. A book will garner more interest if it has an applecart to spill and an "Other" to dislike. In this case, the applecart is antiquated views of trees, and the "Others" to look down upon are narrow-minded scientists and commercial foresters. Another common ingredient is to let the reader off the hook by suggesting we as individuals need expend no energy to compensate for all the ways human activity has thrown nature out of balance.

Nearly all of these books are written by non-scientists and reviewed by non-scientists, leaving the public unprotected from any misinformation the books may carry. Though I share the author's sense of appreciation and wonder for all that trees do, the Hidden Life of Trees comes across as a mixed bag of laudable sentiments and cringeworthy anthropomorphism, truth and appealing fiction, nice descriptions and gross generalization. Readers will come away informed and misinformed. Two German scientists who started a petition objecting to the book's claims characterized it as a "conglomerate of half-truths, biased judgments, and wishful thinking derived from very selective and unrepresentative sources of information.”

Where, one wonders with books like this, are those who might check a manuscript for accuracy? Reviews in the mainstream news media, however, tended to minimize the book's problematic aspects. Perhaps impressed by the book's popularity, believing the book's overall message to be medicinal in our age, they cast the scientists who found flaws as mere flies in the ointment.

Wohlleben's advocacy for old growth forest taps into our wish for some oasis of stability and peace in a radically changing world. There's an appealing call to let trees grow slower and live longer. His dream is "ancient forests free from any human interference." But if you read the book, note how little he demands of us in terms of intentional effort to restore nature. The index doesn't even include a reference to restoration. It seems it happens on its own, over hundreds of years, and that "no real sacrifices need to be made." For example, conspicuously missing from several references to fire-dependent forests in the U.S. is any mention of the need to conduct prescribed burns in order to maintain them. He squashes a few exotic insects he accidentally brought home after a trip, knowing that introduced species can do harm, but doesn't grapple with the larger issue of how to reduce the import of potentially invasive species, or how to reduce the harm done by those already established.

A deep love of trees needs to be mixed with an understanding that, for many smaller species that cannot tolerate shade, trees are the enemy. Though the author acknowledges this, that in "deep shade, wildflowers and shrubs don't have a chance..., " and that pollinating insects find little food in forests dominated by species with wind-pollinated flowers, he often speaks of deep, unbroken forest as the all and end all. Any discussion of biodiversity must mention not only forest, but grasslands, savannas, and shrub habitat as well. Though it's important to save old growth forest, preserved open space in central New Jersey and elsewhere in the east is too uniformly dominated by trees to the exclusion of other needed habitats.

Below are some examples of the mix of information and misinformation to be found in the book.

Chapter 1 Friendships
Here, Wohlleben makes broad pronouncements about forests. Since trees in a forest benefit from the "consistent local climate" they create, they have reason to work together, even to the point of nourishing their competitors through interconnected roots. He describes forests as "superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies." Being someone who believes in the importance of cooperation and collective action generally, I certainly sympathize with such a portrayal of the forest. But the author offers as evidence a very misleading story about encountering an old stump in the forest being kept alive by the trees around it. Are the younger trees showing reverence for their elders? Remarkable, you might think, unless you happen to know that the stump and trees he is talking about are beeches. Since beeches create clones, the older and younger trees he describes are not separate trees, not "friends" as he later calls them. They are in fact one tree with many trunks, connected underground by a root system that sends up new stems as it spreads. That he doesn't point this out is a considerable sin of omission.

Wohlleben then overreaches by declaring, "Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible." There may be some forest somewhere on earth where this is true, but none that I know. Certainly not in the fire-dependent pine forests of the southeast where pines would be rapidly shaded out if hardwood trees weren't kept at bay by periodic fire, or the Ponderosa pine forests of the northwest, which require adequate spacing between trees to reduce the risk of wildfire leaping up into the crowns. Certainly not in the many second growth hardwood forests of central New Jersey that are clogged with stunted trees. The author believes openings in the canopy to be the enemy. The sunlight, he says, will heat the soil and cause loss of humus. Wind will get in and blow down the surrounding trees. There may be some truth to the increased vulnerability to wind, but if sunlight never reaches the ground of our forests, only the tree species that can survive in shade will regenerate. There are many kinds of forests, some of which thrive on periodic disturbances like fire. Though he gives a useful description of such forests on page 208, he often presents his forest of oak and beech as somehow universal.

Chapter 4 Love
One thing that baffles people wanting to know nature better is its mind-boggling diversity. They've heard that diversity is a good thing, but the long learning curve can be intimidating. Wohlleben gets around this by making broad pronouncements based on the apparently paltry number of tree species in his forest. He seems to have only two main types of deciduous trees--oaks and beech--but then often writes of them as if they are representative of all the deciduous trees in the world. With this approach, and by speaking of trees as if they were like people who "plan" and "agree" and "go for it," he can simplify nature, make it seem easily knowable, familiar.

Sometimes he begins a paragraph with a misleading statement, like "When beeches and oaks put blooming on hold for a number of years, this has grave consequences for insects as well--especially for bees." Now, anyone familiar with tree pollination will know that beeches and oaks are wind pollinated, and are therefore not much used by bees. He eventually explains this, but not until after he's had the reader imagining starving bees dropping out of the air for lack of pollen.

It's also a bit comic to note that he describes girdling trees in the previous chapter as "brutal," then in the Love chapter describes beeches and oaks as colluding to starve pregnant boar and deer in order to limit their numbers. That's some tough love.

One tidbit I was glad the author included was the tendency of genetically isolated populations to die out over time. "Completely isolated stands of rare species of trees, where only a few trees grow, can lose their genetic diversity. When they do, they weaken and, after a few centuries, they disappear altogether." Some of my more satisfying work involves taking seed from isolated populations of a species and planting them in other conducive locations around town, essentially creating a pollen corridor of sorts, bridging the gap between otherwise isolated populations.

Chapter 16, Carbon Dioxide Vacuums
Here, Wohlleben attempts to debunk the notion that the carbon that trees absorb while living is simply rereleased to the atmosphere after death. It can be discouraging to realize that trees are not some magic fix for climate change. Figuring out how best to sequester carbon in plants and the soil is a vital subject, given its potential to lessen the damage we're doing to the climate, but unfortunately this chapter offers up appealing fictions. For one, he claims that most of the CO2 absorbed by a tree "remains locked up in the ecosystem forever." A dead tree trunk, he writes, is "gnawed and munched" and "worked, by fractions of inches, more deeply into the soil."

"The farther underground, the cooler it is. And as the temperature falls, life slows down, until it comes almost to a standstill. And so it is that carbon dioxide finds its final resting place in the form of humus, which continues to become more concentrated as it ages. In the far distant future, it might even become bituminous or anthracite coal." 

It's a lovely image, and largely fictional. For one, half of the atmospheric carbon fixed by a tree is rereleased as part of the living tree's ongoing respiration. The author acknowledges the tree's need to respire later in the book, in Chapter 33, Healthy Forest Air, where he directly contradicts his earlier description.

"It's not only the trees that are exhaling large amounts of carbon dioxide in the dark. In leaves, in dead wood, and in other rotting plant material, microscopic creatures, fungi, and bacteria are busy in a round-the clock feeding frenzy, digesting everything edible and then excreting it as humus."

That "feeding frenzy" means those organisms are respiring, turning lots of the dead wood's carbon back into CO2. There's also sloppy use of terms. Carbon dioxide doesn't "find its final resting place" or "sink into the muck," because carbon dioxide is a gas. Rather than getting cooler and cooler as one goes down, the deeper soil layers are a fairly uniform 55 degrees, plenty warm for biological activity.

He actually blames commercial logging for preventing coal from being formed, after having explained that the coal we now use was formed under primeval conditions completely different from the upland forests where most trees are harvested, and over a time span that is useless for our predicament. I'd be glad to blame commercial logging for all sorts of things, but preventing coal creation is not one of them.

Another deception quickly follows when the author claims that old trees grow faster than young ones. Ongoing growth among the well-aged is an appealing concept, whether for people or trees. He's got our sympathies as he sets out to upset the applecart of "scientific assumptions," by saying that "Trees with trunks 3 feet in diameter generated three times as much biomass as trees that were only half as wide." But a tree with a trunk twice as thick is not twice as large. It's more like four times as large, given that a trunk twice as thick has four times the area in cross section. It's the younger tree, then, that grows faster for any given amount of space taken up in the forest.

Chapter 30 Tough Customers
This chapter asks a useful question: How do long-lived trees in a forest adapt to rapidly changing climate? His answer is that genetic diversity within a species will allow the trees in his forest to survive even sudden changes in climate. He points to a sudden, dramatic cooling that occurred 14,000 years ago, and to the long north-south range of beeches, extending from the Mediterranean to Sweden. At least concerning the latter, I find some common ground with the author, having myself pointed out the long north-south ranges of species in the eastern U.S. when people claim we need to move southern plant species northward in order to adapt to a rapidly warming planet.

Chapter 32 Immigrants
Anthropomorphism, that is, attributing human characteristics to non-human things, can be charming and comforting. It can help us empathize with other living things. But when it comes to invasive species, that tendency to anthropomorphize has gotten a lot of authors into trouble. Introduced species are not like immigrants. Human immigrants are of the same species as the other humans they join. Introduced species are, by contrast, more analogous to martians--a different species that if they showed up might just mingle among us and look cute, or they might start taking over our homes, in which case we'd think them less cute.

Giving this chapter on introduced species the title of "Immigrants" therefore misleads readers from the get-go. The author then proceeds with some of the stock arguments used by invasive species deniers, whom I know well from having reviewed multiple books, opeds, and articles in the genre. There's the claim that "nature is constantly changing," and the pessimistic view of "attempts to conserve particular landscapes." And there's the seeming reassurance that "most introduced species pose no threat to native trees." He claims, falsely, that the human spread of species is not much different in degree from what has occurred naturally, and that "there is always a sufficient number of individuals that can rise to a new challenge."

But along with these familiar denialist tropes are descriptions of the problems that introduced species have caused. The solution he offers for some invading plant species--plant more trees to shade them out--is less than convincing, but at least he doesn't deny the distinction between introduced and native species, and the potential for introduced species to cause major problems.

Afterword:

The NY Times noted the author's "humble narrative style and the book’s ability to awaken in readers an intense, childlike curiosity about the workings of the world." The author indeed has a gift, but that gift is misused, compromising truth in favor of eliciting the desired response from his readers.

He claims to be on the forefront, pushing against entrenched views of nature, as in this call for plant rights on p. 244:

"Although this point of view has elicited a lot of head shaking in the international community, I, for one, welcome breaking down the moral barriers between animals and plants. When the capabilities of vegetative beings become known, and their emotional lives and needs are recognized, then the way we treat plants will gradually change, as well. Forests are not first and foremost lumber factories and warehouses for raw material, and only secondarily complex habitats for thousands of species."

I have seen, though, how this activism for the rights of individual animals and plants can lead to a dismissive attitude towards the larger ecological workings of nature. Though seemingly progressive in his thinking, Wohlleben also steers us backwards, towards a passive, hand's off relationship to nature--witnesses rather than informed participants.