Open Season on Chickadees:A Field Guide to the Anthropocene

Mark W. AndersonSchool of Economics &

Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions

With appreciation for Geddes Simpson…

Remembering David Smith…

With apologies…• I am neither an historian or a scientist• Practice of economics requires both• Ecological economics as my discipline• My use of historical analysis in economics– Robert Heilbroner, Lewis Mumford, William

McNeill, David Landes, E.J. Hobsbawm, Alfred Crosby, William Cronon, J.R.R. McNeill, Jo Guldi & David Armitage, Simon Schama, Roderick Nash, Ian Morris, David Christian…

A Proposition

Maine should adopt an open season for hunting chickadees (the Maine State Bird) with firearms. Every hunter with a license can shoot as many as he or she wishes per year.

What do you think?

Many people find shooting chickadees for sport to be unacceptable, yet…

Domestic “free ranging” cats have the same effect

• Cats kill 1.4-3.7 Billion wild birds annually in the U.S. (Loss et al. 2013)

• Including unlimited chickadees in Maine

Not a new insight…

September 1921 Garden and Home Builder

From Cassie Gibbs’ delightful new biography of Edith Patch, Without Benefit of Insects

Human “Hobby”keeping domesticCats – a “servile” species

Free-rangingDomestic CatsKill Songbirds

Acceptable outcomewhich would beotherwiseunacceptable

This is what Anthropocene Looks Like

• Cats are favored by humans over wild species (song birds) less favored by humans

• Humans become the force dictating natural outcomes Wood thrush

Technology Example Communications towers kill millions of migratory birds a year in North America. (Longcore et al., 2013).

So, text a friend, kill a bird…Welcome to the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene Concept

• “Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of nature” (Steffen, et al., 2007).

• Therefore we have moved from the Epoch termed Holocene to a new one called Anthropocene.

• …and we are the reason for this change.

Source: The Economist

Anthropocene Idea• Humans develop as hunter gatherers• Development of Agriculture, 10 – 12

thousand years ago changes human/ nature relationships (McNeill & McNeill, 2003)

• Industrialization, about 210 years ago (Landes, 1969)

• Fundamental change in matter/energy appropriation by humanity• We now control the destiny of the

planet

The Great Acceleration

J.R. McNeill says in his environmental history of the 20th Century, there was “Something New Under the Sun”

That New thing – the Anthropocene

From Steffen et al., 2009p. 617

From Steffen et al., 2009p. 617

Like we need field guides foridentifying wildlife…So too for the Anthropocene…

How do we recognize it in the field?

Why a Field Guide Needed

• A phenomenon we need to understand to address its challenges

• Many of the attempts to explain importance of the Anthropocene are:– Abstract– Aimed at academic audiences–Not intuitive– For example:

Planetary Boundaries

Rockstrom et al., (2009).

Ecological Footprinting• Metaphorically powerful• Yet still abstract and indirect

Source: Wackernagle et al. (2002).

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations --

powerful yet abstract and indirect

Awareness exercise

• Making the evidence of the Anthropocene concrete

• Think about the cars around you• How much do cars weigh?

Awareness exercise

• How much do cars weigh? – say 3000 pounds to be conservative

• How many new cars are there every year? Let’s do just the U.S.

Awareness exercise

• Say 17 million new cars @ 3,000 pounds each

= 25,500,000 tons of steel, rubber, plastics, glass, etc.• 25 million tons every year in the U.S.

alone• To make this real, stand on the

corner and count car weights…• Humans as the great force of nature.

Make the Anthropocene Concrete

• 25.5 million tons is a number that is too big to understand

• Start looking at cars, buildings, and other stuff around you

• “Stuff” that humans have extracted from nature and will have to some day go back

• Humans -- the “global geophysical force” for change greater than nature?

Anthropocene – Turf Grass Footprint

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Lawn/lawn2.php

Anthropocene – Turf Grass Footprint

• Lawn = 3 x area of irrigated corn in U.S.

• Lawn turf largest irrigated “crop” in U.S.

• Monoculture• Bee food?• Gasoline for mowing?• Pesticides?• Count lawns

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Lawn/lawn2.php

Other signs of Anthropocene but not as concrete…

• Use of Benefit-cost Analysis (BCA) to make decisions about the environment

• Biased– Presentism (ignores the past and literally

discounts the future)– Methodological individualism, community

not counted– Weighted to reflects values of wealthier

people– Anthropocentric – nature only counts if

humans say soSee: Anderson et al. (2015).

Assuming that the Anthropocene Needs to be Simply Accepted

…and this is from the Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy

If you see these in the fieldyou are seeing the

Anthropocene, hence…• “What has changed in recent

history, long after our moral codes were developed, is the human ability to employ pervasive and powerful technologies, as humans exert more and more dominance over natural systems. The effect of these changes on human morality is that we live in a hugely expanded moral universe of human responsibility.” Norton (2005).

Two Laws and One Principle for a Moral Code

for the Anthropocene• First Law of Ecology:– Everything is connected to

everything else

• First Law of Economics:– There is no free lunch

• Hardin’s principle – Category of solutions that are “non-

technical”

Example of First Law of Ecology

• Federal “Renewable” Fuels standard to reduce reliance on fossil fuels

• Subsidies for Corn Ethanol – A good thing?–Declining Monarch butterfly

populations– Increased hypoxia in Gulf of Mexico– Increased global food prices– Possibly no net energy benefit (Pimentel,

2003).

• Intellectual humility is called for in Anthropocene

First Law of Economics

• In the Anthropocene there are no win/win solutions to our problems

• Everything comes at a cost• We should pay our own costs• Be careful when you see this…

Sustainability Venn Diagram

Hardin’s Principle• Most important insight in “The

Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968)

• There is “…a class of human problems which can be called ‘no technical solutions problems’.”

• Require “…change in human values or ideas of morality.”

• Values matter, even more if we are to survive the Anthropocene

Four Ideas for Navigating the Anthropocene

Navigating The Anthropocene -- I

• Economic Growth is not the answer

• Rising Tide Does not Lift All Boats

• Economic Growth does not improve environmental quality

• Economic problem of the Anthropocene is distribution

Source: http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/

Navigating The Anthropocene -- II

• Cultural change should be our first choice in addressing problems

• Technology as a last resort• Intellectual humility called for• We are not as smart as we think

we are

Navigating The Anthropocene -- III

• Resist presentism• Respect the legacy of

the past• Learn from history

(Guldi & Armitage, 2014)

• Leave a bequest for the future (human and non- human): better place than received from the past

Mainers Get This…An Ethic for the Anthropocene

Disagree Strongly Disagree Unsure Agree Agree Strongly0

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We have an obligation to future generations to leave the en-vironment at least as well off as we received it -- Maine Sam-

ple 2013

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Source: C. Noblet et al. Unpublished data.

Navigating The Anthropocene -- IV

• Returning to where we started

• Cats are precious• As are birds• When humans decide

that cats trump birds, we do so at great peril

• We are not as wise as we think we are

And so, three things to remember

1.The Anthropocene needs our attention – look for it in the field

2.We are not as smart as we think we are

3.We are not as wise as we think we are

Intellectual Debts -- Thanks to…

• Roger Howell• Frank C. Spooner• Matilda White Riley• David Vail• Wayne Boucher• Johannes Delphendahl• Steve Reiling• Wally Dunham• Dave Smith

• Kevin Boyle• Mario Teisl• Kathleen Bell• Caroline Noblet

• The University of Maine

Questions or Comments?

• Sources:• Anderson, M., Teisl, M., Noblet, C., & Klein, S. (2015). The incompatibility of benefit–cost

analysis with sustainability science. Sustainability Science, 10(1), 33-41.• Anderson, M. & Teisl, M. (2012). Values in Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability.• Gibbs, K.E. (2014). Without Benefit of Insects: The Story of Edith M. Patch of the

University of Maine. MP 763. Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station, Orono, Maine.

• Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. science, 162(3859), 1243-1248.• Kareiva, P., Watts, S., McDonald, R., & Boucher, T. (2007). Domesticated nature: shaping

landscapes and ecosystems for human welfare. Science,316(5833), 1866-1869.• Landes, D. S. (1969). The unbound Prometheus: technological change and industrial

development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present. Cambridge University Press.• Longcore, T., Rich, C., Mineau, P., MacDonald, B., Bert, D. G., Sullivan, L. M., ... & Drake,

D. (2013). Avian mortality at communication towers in the United States and Canada: which species, how many, and where?. Biological Conservation, 158, 410-419.

• Loss, S. R., Will, T., & Marra, P. P. (2013). The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States. Nature communications, 4, 1396.

• McNeill, J. R. (2000). Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (The Global Century Series). WW Norton & Company.

• McNeill, J. R., & McNeill, W. H. (2003). The human web: A bird's-eye view of world history. WW Norton & Company.

• Norton, B. G. (2005). Sustainability: A philosophy of adaptive ecosystem management. University of Chicago Press.

• Pimentel, D. (2003). Ethanol fuels: energy balance, economics, and environmental impacts are negative. Natural resources research, 12(2), 127-134.

• Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin, F. S., Lambin, E. F., ... & Foley, J. A. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Nature,461(7263), 472-475.

• Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8), 614-621.

• Wackernagel, M., Schulz, N. B., Deumling, D., Linares, A. C., Jenkins, M., Kapos, V., ... & Randers, J. (2002). Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(14), 9266-9271.

Some values reflect the Anthropocene,and some are broader.

Adapted from Anderson &Teisl (2012).