Learning from excellence in sport

This year’s Sports Personality of the Year award saw Dave Brailsford take the award for best coach and one of his athletes, Bradley Wiggins, win the overall award (to go with his Tour de France yellow Jersey and Olympic gold medal).  It is worth asking what lessons can be learnt from the team (British Cycling) which won 8 Olympic gold medals, 2 silvers and 2 bronzes as well as the Tour de France and numerous Paralympic medals.  One quote in particular, from Dave Brailsford, caught my eye. 

Following the announcement of the 2013 tour route Bradley Wiggins initially stated that he thought it would be more than likely that he would support his teammate, Chris Froom in his 2013 bid to win the yellow Jersey as the route would be more favourable to Chris.  However, more recently Bradley has changed his mind and decided that he would like to challenge Chris for the position of team leader (the rider which other riders of the team sacrifice their own chances of winning to support).  So Dave Brailsford was faced with a challenge: select last year’s winner and the nation’s favourite athlete as team leader or select the athlete who played a large part in Bradley’s success and who is thought to benefit from the change in the tour route?

I think that the following quote, from Dave Brailsford regarding how he will select the team leader is extremely telling ‘We've certainly got some plans now, and as we move through the season, we'll use evidence and results as we move along’ (bold used for own emphasis).  Brailsford will not base his decision on who he would like to have the best chance of winning, he will not base his decision on who he currently thinks would have the best chance of winning the tour, he will not let the possibility of offending the ego of the nation’s favourite sportsperson affect his decision.  He will keep an open mind and make the decision he believes to be best for the team based on evidence and results.  If you are sceptical then you only have to look at his decision to drop the nation’s most successful Olympian, Chris Hoy, for Jason Kenny in the individual sprint, an event which Jason Kenny won gold in.

Likewise conservation should be underpinned by evidence and results.  Decisions should not be taken on the basis of what one person thinks will work (according to their ‘common sense’).  Decisions should not be taken so as to minimise offense to anyone’s ego.  Considering the size of the challenge conservation faces, there is no room for egos among scientists, only for finding out what works and making it happen.

To call each thing by its right name

Do you have a friend who, when you mention a film, will rattle of the name of the director, their style and all the other films they have directed before doing likewise for a few actors and actresses?  I find this show of knowledge annoying as the film boffin shows off.  But I expect that another film boff would appreciate this show of knowledge and could strike up a conversation about the merits of the director etc.  Conservation organisations are knowledgeable about the sights they conserve but, just as most go to the cinema for a few hours of enjoyment, so most people go to their local woods or nature reserve to enjoy the outdoors not to analyse it.  I think that conservation organisations face a tricky challenge in finding the balance between letting individuals come and enjoy a place on their own, giving them a little information which might make their visit more interesting and enjoyable or giving a full introductory course to evolution or behavioural ecology which can fundamentally affect the way we see the world.

There is no substitute for a good guide.  A good guide has no ego, they have no need to show you just how much they know.  All they are concerned about is you, how can they make your experience more enjoyable or fulfilling (which may be by doing nothing at all).  This person does not simply act as a guide delivering a pre-written speech, this person reacts.  They react to what you find interesting with no notion of what you should find interesting.  Importantly, this guide would not point out and name every species they saw.  For many it is intimidating be overloaded with information when visiting a nature reserve.  A visitor may interpret too much information as a show of knowledge, a message that the reserve exists for those within in the club who ‘know how to appreciate nature’ who can put a name to the varieties of life they see.  I obviously don’t believe that this is the intention of the nature reserve.  But, the visitor would not be wrong.  Visitors cannot be wrong in their emotional reactions; if they feel intimidated then they are intimidated. 

Obviously conservation organisations don’t have enough money to offer every visitor a personal guide and so they have to rely on written leaflets etc to make the experience of the visitor more enjoyable/interesting/enriching.  The result is that visitors who want some form of guide are normally directed in a particular direction.  I think that with the abundance of cameras a better alternative might be to send people of into the woods/around the lake etc suggest that they find somewhere they like, stop, take some time to enjoy it and if they have any questions then take a photo or make a mental note, visitors could return to the visitor centre (assuming there is one) and talk to a member of staff, their own guide who they would have questions for.  I am not suggesting that the staff member would be able to answer every question.  I am suggesting that visitors should be able to discuss their experiences of nature on their own terms with members of staff who are interested not in what the visitor should see or enjoy but in what they have seen and found enjoyable.

I know that this blog is written by someone on the defensive who might seem to have a chip on their shoulder.  I enjoy being outdoors.  I enjoy stopping somewhere and watching life.  Yet I am awful at naming species and when the names of species are banded about with the assumption that everyone present knows these species by name it can be intimidating.  I recognise the value of naming species, having to describe each species every time you wanted to talk about it would turn discussing nature into a huge game of charades (though perhaps we should try that sometimes).  I also recognise that in learning the name of a species one is making an effort and in this way learning to call each thing by its right and proper name can be humbling.  At the end of the day I think it is worth remembering that, though it is very useful to name a species, the name really is the dullest feature of most species, much duller than their feathers, fur, eyes, claws, wings or behaviour.

The Accidental Conservationists

Those who study ecology become accustomed to a relationship between the humans and biodiversity: the more humans affect an ecosystem, the more they reduce biodiversity.  Yet, there are periods in human history when this was not the case.  By learning from the ways in which humans affected ecosystems in these periods and their motivations for doing so, there are opportunities to recreate these interactions and benefit biodiversity.  Before the industrial revolution many land management practices increased the heterogeneity of (variety in) the landscape.  Examples include the planting and maintenance of hedgerows to divide fields before enclosure and the maintenance of coppiced woods to provide fuel for small scale iron production.  It may be tempting to look back on the relevant individuals as purposefully working to increase biodiversity but in reality it was usually coincidence that the practices which were economically viable for land managers also benefited biodiversity.  More recently, throughout the 20^th Century farmers were incentivised by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to reduce this heterogeneity, to remove hedgerows and form larger, more uniform fields.  Farmers did this as it made economic sense and one consequence has been the great reduction in farm land birds (presumably mirrored across other taxa).  Viewing the history of our landscape as the history of selfish individuals making economically motivated decisions (some of which benefitted biodiversity and provided ecosystem services and some of which harmed biodiversity and decreased the provision of ecosystem services) opens up new opportunities for conservation.  The ecosystem services movement allows policy makers to appreciate the value of conservation.

It is for these reasons that the leaders of the country’s biggest conservation organsiations wrote an open letter to the Times with the subheading ‘Farmers are vital guardians of our landscape and wildlife, but they need financial backing to be able to do this’ in responce to threats to funding for angry-environment projects.

Just as individuals once helped nature because it helped them (divide fields or grow timber to use as fuel), helping nature must once again help farmers (gain funding from agri-environment schemes).  Farmers must be paid to help nature.  But who should pay?  I think that it is only fair that everyone who benefits from the farmer’s actions, which is...everyone, should pay.  You already pay farmers to farm, through the Common Agricultural Policy, surely farmers should be offering you a benefit in return?  Benefits like increasing bird populations for you to enjoy, ensuring the water running off their land is clean so that your water bills don’t increase to cover the cost of water treatment works to remove pollutants or managing land to increase carbon sequestration so that the costs of climate change, which you pay, are reduced ever so slightly.  These ‘public benefits’ are what farmers are paid to attempt to bring about through the one quarter of the CAP system which subsidises agri-environment projects.  However, it must be noted that this whole system relies on farmers either being paid to carry out actions which are known to bring about benefits or for bring those benefits about.   This may seem a trivial difference but currently many farmers are paid to carry out actions which are thought to bring about benefits where, infact, they may result in no benefits.  This problem could be solved by rewarding farmers for results rather than efforts where the effectiveness of the efforts is not well known.

Before I finish this blog I wish to add some notes of a more personal flavour.  So far I have written from the perspective of a theoretical economist, assuming individuals to be rational.  I accept (as economists do) that this assumption is flawed, not all individuals are completely rational.  For example, many farmers define their job as producing food not as a means to earn an income (which they happen to earn by producing and selling food).  Such individuals may rather use every available hectare of their land for producing food than for set aside a hectare for Skylark Patches even if the profit they would generate by ‘maintaining’ Skylark Patches was greater than the profit they would generate through farming that land.  I strongly believe that individuals should not be criticised for not acting ‘rationally’, for not attributing the same values to things as you.  Whereas the RSPB might prefer Skylarks, a farmer might prefer carrots in his field over extra money in his pocket.  On the other hand, some farmers may carry out interventions which increase biodiversity (or provide ecosystem services) when doing so is a net economic cost.  Such individuals prefer birds in their fields (and nearby land) to money in their pocket.  Therefore, in my opinion, the most that conservation organisations can do is educate, to make sure that the payments for agri-environment schemes reflect the value of the public goods they generate or protect and to make sure that land owners are aware of the options available to them.

Solving the problem of the lack of evidence based conservation, a project proposal.

In 2004 William Sutherland et al outlined the need for a revolution in conservation, a revolution which bases science at the centre of conservation (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169534704000734).  I

will try to avoid recapping the entire article; it's short and easy to read so read it for yourself.  The key points are that every conservation intervention represents an opportunity to increase the knowledge base that is 'conservation biology' by carrying out appropriate monitoring (Sutherland later established www.conservationevidene.com as a central repository for this knowledge). In turn, conservation practitioners should basis their choice of intervention not on 'common sense' but on evidence (which can be found on www.conservationevidence.com). 

I have now been working for an organisation which carries out extensive conservation work.  Monitoring is not an integral part of this work.  In fact I think it is fair to say that it is not a significant part.  I want to change this. I have an idea which can change this not just at one site in one organisation but the whole organisation and beyond to other organisations.  I will start by considering how to integrate monitoring into all conservation work, from here I will demonstrate that using evidence to inform decisions should follow naturally.

Monitoring is not carried out for the following reasons:

*       Practitioners see no need to base conservation interventions on anything other than common sense and are therefore ignorant of the benefits of monitoring.

*       Practitioners undervalue the importance of monitoring

*       Practitioners are forced to chose between monitoring and implementing conservation interventions (I think it is human to view monitoring as a 'waste of resources' under these conditions) and chose implementing interventions

*       Funding does not extend long enough for meaningful monitoring, this is a common problem as, even where funding exists specifically for monitoring, it normally expires after 3 or 5 years.

I have designed a method of monitoring which will primarily address the last issue but in doing so will raise the profile of monitoring within the organisation and will therefore address the first three issues.  I will now outline my monitoring design:

*       I will partner conservation organisations with schools, specifically sixth form Biology teachers

*       I will work with organisations carrying out conservation interventions to highlight where they might benefit from monitoring their work

*       I will design a monitoring program including statistical analysis to monitor this work over a period of 10 years (or more depending on the project)

*       I will work with sixth form Biology teachers, providing this monitoring program which can form the basis of the students' coursework whilst students study and monitor succession etc in the field.  Students

will also have the opportunity to publish the results of their monitoring via conservationevidence.com (provided my program was sufficiently well designed and followed).  Students will also be able to use this monitoring work as the basis of their John Muir Award (http://www.jmt.org/jmaward-home.asp)

*       Successive A level classes can return to repeat the monitoring year after year to build up a long term data set.

This relationship between schools and conservation organisations will have the following benefits for each party. Where A level students carried out monitoring (including establishing appropriate controls) as a part of their studies then the awareness of monitoring work within the organisation will be increased.  Where students present their findings to the staff of the conservation organisation (as well as publishing them online) then I hope that individuals will be forced to recognise the opportunities that they had missed, opportunities which

had been taken by 16 and 17 years olds, opportunities they were capable of taking themselves.  In this way I hope that these monitoring projects will result in the relevant staff integrating monitoring work into

their own job.  Moreover, I would like to make such monitoring trips an annual event with the school, a part of the curriculum.  Where this is achieved and A level students return year after year then long term data sets will be collected at little or no cost to the conservation organisation.  These are the benefits of this partnership which will accrue to Conservation Evidence and the conservation organisations. 

Students, and therefore schools, will also benefit from this partnership.  They will learn about the design of scientific experiments in the field and be able to discuss how the project they are involved with could be improved.  They will have an insight into real conservation and ecology work which may help them decide whether this was a subject they wished to pursue at university.  They will be published online which will, presumably, strengthen their university application and they could gain a John Muir award whilst carrying out

their monitoring work.

I anticipate objection on the grounds that 'A level students can't carry out real science, they are not skilled enough'.  I believe that this objection does not withstand scrutiny. ConservationEvidence.com was established with the aim of allowing conservation practitioners to publish the results of their own monitoring.  Many of these practitioners will not have studied science at university and many will not have studied biology at university.  If conservation practitioners can carry out appropriate monitoring then so can A level students.

I am currently an unpaid 'people engagement' intern with an organisation which carries out conservation work.  I have created a monitoring plan (including statistical analysis) to offer to schools which will assess the effect of a valley mire restoration intervention.  More specifically, the effect of damming ditches on the

time taken for the ditch to fill in and slow water flow off the mire will be investigated.  Ultimately, I want to turn this project into paid employment.  If you can help me achieve this or have any constructive feedback then please let me know.

Thank you

Iain Dummett

Marine pollution; out of sight, out of mind

This blog is the first of two regarding the state of marine biodiversity.  In short, it is in a bad state due to overfishing, habitat destruction and degradation and climate change (which is likely to have an increasingly destructive impact).  In my first blog I will explore the ‘ultimate drivers’, the very root of the problem, of marine biodiversity loss and consider how these ultimate drivers differ from those affecting terrestrial (land) species.

It will be important to bear in mind 4 facts: 1) humans do not live in the ocean, 2) the ocean is very big and humans struggle to conceive of its full size, 3) a pollutant may have an effect a long way away from where the pollutant was released and 4) damage to the seas can be hard to see.  That humans do not live in the ocean has spared it of the habitat destruction which has occurred on land to make way for human settlements (with the exception of land reclaimation).  It also means that humans are less likely to notice damage to the marine environment and, as will be considered in my next blog, means that much of the oceans is not owned (unlike land).

For the rest of this blog I will consider pollution.  The problem with marine pollution is that it is so very easy to underestimate.  For one thing the sea is so huge it is easy for us to write it off as near-infinite with a near infinite ability to absorb and dilute whatever waste we discharge into it.  For example, according to a literature review of the dumping of munitions in marine environments, on 8 separate occasions, between 1945 and 1948, over 4,000 tonnes of munitions were dumped into the ocean http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/77CEDBCA-813A-4A6C-8E59-16B9E260E27A/0/ic_munitions_seabed_rep.pdf, page 79.  As the report states, these munitions have significant harmful effects on marine species.

Whilst humans may once have been able to discharge sewage and fertiliser into the marine environment when human densities were low, this can no longer be done without consequence.  When biological waste (sewage or the run off from fertilisers) is discharged in high concentrations then it acts as a fertiliser for algae resulting in algal blooms.  The algae die, are decomposed by bacteria which use all of the oxygen leaving no oxygen for the other species.  The result is a DEAD ZONE.  Our oceans have dead zones because of our actions.

In mentioning agricultural run off I have hinted at another part of the problem.  Fertiliser which runs of a field into a river can have an effect tens or hundreds of miles away.  This distancing of cause and effect means that individuals do not appreciate the effects of their actions and are therefore not in a position to reduce the ecological damage of their actions.  This is where science comes in, to provide evidence that A causes B, to educate the person responsible for A in the hope they will change their actions.  Let me take another example from the Marine Conservation Society website, Chinese lanterns (http://www.mcsuk.org/what_we_do/Clean+seas+and+beaches/campaigns+and+policy/Don't+let+go+-+balloons+and+sky+lanterns).  Chinese lanterns are fire and forget joy, you light them, admire them as they rise and then forget about them as they are carried by the wind.  Yet, that you have forgotten about them does not mean that they have magically disappeared from the world.  A few months back I heard on the radio that the coast guards had asked members of the public to alert them if they were going to release lanterns as members of the public had been mistaking them for flares and alerting the coastguard.  More recently I stumbled across an article explaining the damage they can cause to marine wildlife when they fall to rest on the ocean as litter.  Animals, turtles especially, mistake them for food, eat them and die when the balloons block their digestive systems causing them to starve.

That concludes this blog, let me repeat my main point once more, pollution which affects the oceans can originate many miles away and have effects which humans do not notice.  It is the role of scientists to establish the sources of pollutants which cause harm in the marine environment so that polluters are no longer ignorant and are accountable.  From here, the damage we cause to the oceans can be reduced.  In my next blog I will consider the economics of overfishing.

Losing Stars and Losing Species

Those who live in cities or large towns in the UK are likely to be accustomed to a night sky of just a few stars as a result of light pollution.  Just as light pollution has removed stars one by one from the night sky we see, extinction removes species from the world, forever, one by one.  Each time I spend a long period of time at home or university I forget what it is like to look up on a clear night and see a light studded sky with clouds of stars.  This feeling of wonderment makes up a part of the intrinsic value of a clear night sky, the value of the enjoyment or fulfilment gained not by using or consuming the sky but simply by enjoying it.  It is this value (applied to nature) which motivates most conservationists, it is also the value hardest to convert to a monetary value.

Luckily the stars are not gone and are waiting to be seen by anyone who is willing to get to a remote enough location.  Many of the species already extinct have left no trace, some have left only skeletons and photos and films remain of the species to be forced to extinction more recently.  Yet, just as someone who lives their whole life in a city, by and large, we do not know what we are missing, what it would have been like to sit and see the world by day, to experience the wild nature, and by night to gaze at the full sky hundreds or thousands of years ago.  This ecological forgetfulness which I have considered in another blog (http://valuingnature.blogspot.pt/2012/07/falling-baselines-and-landscape.html) results in us inheriting a world containing less sources of natural wonderment than the one into which we ourselves were born.  Moreover, we consider the world in which we grow to be ‘normal’, how could we not when we have never known otherwise?

Eventually each human generation leaves behind a world more impoverished than the one it inherited and each successive generation is accustomed to a world of less natural wonderment than the generation before.  Next time you are in the middle of nowhere on a clear night, look up.  Enjoy that wonderment and just consider what the wonderment we have lost from the living natural world just as we have lost stars from the city night sky.  Conservationists try to stem this loss and even to reverse it where possible.  I believe this is a truly important cause.  I believe this due to my intrinsic (non-monetary) valuation of nature.

Exploring criticisms of 'Neo-environmentalism'

Having read Paul Kingsnorth’s article regarding ‘new environmentalism’, which was published yesterday in The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/01/neogreens-science-business-save-planet#start-of-comments, I would like to pick out and discuss a few points.  Firstly I would like to state now that I both agree with some points made by the author and disagree with others, infact I think that the author confused himself by treating two different views towards conservation as mutually exclusive whereas in fact they are not.  Secondly, I will be reiterating points which I have already made and will therefore include references to other blogs.

The author uses the term ‘neo environmentalists’ to denote scientists which ‘speak the language of money and power’ to create a ‘business friendly’ argument for conservation.  He states that conservation has failed to changes society’s values as economic growth still dictates the outcome of decisions which have environmental impacts.  In short, I believe that the author is referring to scientists who have recognised that in order to bring about effective conservation they must demonstrate to governments and large businesses that such conservation is economically viable.  For a good example of such a piece of science, here is an article posted on the BBC website on the 31^st of July http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19050796.  I think that it is useful to deem this approach to conservation a top down approach as it attempts to alter the decisions of a few institutions (by better informing these decisions).

The author contrasts this top down approach to conservation with his favoured approach, one of reconnecting people with nature.  He suggests that if people are exposed to nature as a part of their everyday lives then they will come to value this nature and therefore will be more inclined to conserve it.  In this way I believe the author is promoting a bottom up approach to conservation which focuses on altering the attitudes of individuals.  In reading the article I gained the impression that the author feels that the two approaches are incompatible as one promotes an economic valuation of nature and the other an intrinsic valuation of nature.  However, suppose an individual values nature for its own sake and therefore wants to conserve nature.  If this individual feels that they will be most effective by taking a top down, economic valuation approach then promoting an economic valuation of nature and holding an intrinsic valuation of nature are not exclusive.

I would also like to pick up on a few phrases which I believe the author used sloppily.  Firstly he states that under ‘neo environmentalism’ ‘the value of nature is measured by what we can do with it’. This is wrong.  The value of nature is based upon what nature does (and has always done) for us.  Secondly the author states that ‘neo environmentalists’ believe that growth has no limits.  This is not true, such scientists aim to ensure that economic growth is not pursued at the cost of natural capital. 

Lastly I would like to discourage the view that humans and scientists will act as ‘Gods’ managing the planet ‘rationaly’.  This view of nature as a garden created by and for humans does not reflect the current conservation movement which is towards large scale ‘re-wilding’ projects which aim to restore nature to a more pristine state.  If anything these projects move away from the role of humans as Gods present in historical conservation where small sites where micromanaged to achieve very specific (pristine like) habitats which would not occur without human intervention.

I have previously written blogs exploring attempts to value nature economically (http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4254055270310485372#editor/target=post;postID=7495951196544968614) and the importance of humans learning to value nature by being immersed in it (http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4254055270310485372#editor/target=post;postID=6075429287993672434 and http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4254055270310485372#editor/target=post;postID=8039094925610903687) and I would encourage you to read one of those if you found this blog interesting.  I may also pick up on some other points made in the Guardian article at a later date.