Hundreds of scientists are gathered in Oakland this week to share ideas on how to stem the tide of extinctions among plants and animals. On opening night of the inaugural North American Congress for Conservation Biology, they got an earful from Michael Soulé, professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, founder of the Wildlands Network and the Society for Conservation Biology. Considered the “father” of conservation biology, Soule is concerned that the work he started is getting bogged down in the lab. I sat down to talk with him at the conference. This is an edited version of the interview.

What were the biggest problems when you started working on conservation biology?

Lisa Cox/USFWS

Coastal sage scrub and riparian habitat on the San Diego Refuge.

I was a kid naturalist in San Diego. I went around collecting things and going to tide pools and playing in the chaparral, the coastal sage scrub. Those places are gone now; they’ve been bulldozed and they’re now housing developments. So I saw with my own eyes, and was gradually more and more horrified to see, everything I loved disappear, bulldozed.

Later, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I recognized that human population growth was a tremendous factor in changing and shrinking habitats all over the world. And we recognized that pollution — in those days it was DDT — was a big factor in causing the disappearance of brown pelicans, for example, on the West Coast.

And that’s happened all over the world. It’s happening to rainforests now, it’s happening to coral reefs due to global warming and acidification in the oceans. Everywhere the human footprint is becoming increasingly evident and destructive. We’ve overdone the idea of dominion. We’ve become so dominant in the world, that there’s not room for anything else, or there soon won’t be, particularly with climate change.

What’s changed since you began?

Thirty-four years ago we didn’t understand the degree to which certain species have a tremendous impact on their ecological communities, disproportionate to their numbers and size.

The classic example is the consummate predator in North America, the wolf. People love to hate the wolf, and the same thing goes for sea lions. Fisherman love to hate sea lions. But these large creatures permit many other species to survive. When you remove, the wolf from an ecosystem,  the elk and deer become super-abundant. And when they’re super-abundant they eat everything in sight. So there’s nothing for other animals to eat, and their numbers become so numerous they actually prevent the restoration of forests. Back east the white-tailed deer, for example, are so abundant that seedlings of the most important forest trees don’t survive.

That’s kind of a domino effect. You remove the large predator from the system, and its prey animals become super-abundant. They destroy the vegetation, and with the vegetation they can also destroy the lives of many smaller animals. So the whole ecosystem is disrupted and loses diversity. It causes a kind of rolling extinction wave that goes through the ecosystem until the ecosystem has lost most of its diversity, and diversity is key to resilience in ecosystems.

We didn’t know that. So that’s one of the major part of enlightenments in ecology in the last 20 years, is a slow understanding of the impacts of removing these key species.

You’ve emphasized the importance of action beyond the research.

We’ve become a society of planners, of mappers, of conference goers, and we think that that’s doing something. But those things don’t accomplish anything really. They’re all in preparation for doing something, like changing a policy or protecting wildlife.

I say, go the final step, actually get out there and protect what needs to be protected. There’s a fear applied scientists have, that they’ll be thought of as too practical, and not interested enough in theory.

One of the things I’m encouraging young conservation biologists to do, is to get out from behind a desk, out from behind a computer screen and get out in nature. It’s not enough to just think about it, and write about it, and model it and map things, you have to actually protect things.

Is climate change a game-changer for conservation biology, or is it just another insult?

We’ve taken a continent, let’s say North America, and chopped it up into little pieces. The wilder areas are all isolated from one another. National parks are not connected to other National Parks. They might be connected by forests, but those forests are overhunted, over-logged and over-burned. So most of our protected areas are becoming islands in a sea of development.

So when the climate is changing rapidly, as it is now, then creatures have to get out of where they are and move, or perish where they are. And so the need for landscape connectivity, for landscape permeability, for creatures to be able to move from one place to another, becomes more important than it was in the past, when things weren’t changing very fast. Now that climate belts are shifting and generally moving north, it’s more important than ever that we have connectivity on the land.

Is this just about maintaining numbers or does it go beyond that for you?

It’s hard for scientists to talk about beauty, but what’s more important than beauty in our lives? We go to the great museums, and we travel to Europe to see wonderful sculpture and art.

Most of the beauty in the world is natural beauty. The beauty of butterflies, the beauty of birds, the beauty of fish and turtles, and even snakes. Anybody who has cats knows how amazing it is to watch a cat. They flow when they move, and that’s the way the natural world is. It’s uninhibited. It’s free and it’s beautiful.

Some people are threatened by beauty. Some people see wild nature as a place that’s uncontrolled, that needs to be developed, that we need to have domination over. That’s always been part of the American ideal, to clear away the elements in our environment that we thought were inferior, and leave it for people who could make the best or highest use of it, which means to destroy nature and replace it with something that could generate money. Unless we change some of these values, we’re not going to have a beautiful world.

randomtruth/Flickr

The Bay checkerspot butterfly is one of the species that might need help migrating.

Traditional approaches to preserving biodiversity may not hold up as the climate changes.

One common tool environmental groups use now is to buy land. But that tactic only works if, once the land is protected, the species that live there can stay there. Climate change scrambles that notion. Species won’t necessarily be able to stay where they are in perpetuity. A new study in the journal Conservation Biology (abstract only) examines what it would cost to stick to the current approach and the same conservation goals in one area in California. And that number — again, for just one conservation area — is staggering. By 2100, the study finds, the total price tag will be about $2.5 billion.

“It is a dizzying number,” Rebecca Shaw, the associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund and one of the study’s authors, told me. “And it’s dizzying because climate change is dynamic and our conservation strategies are designed for static systems.”

Shaw explains that the current approach — searching out good habitat, buying the land, hands-on management and monitoring — is expensive anyway. But she predicts that climate change will double the cost.

Shaw studied the Mount Hamilton Project Area, southeast of San Jose. It’s home to animals like the Bay checkerspot butterfly, the San Joaquin kit fox, and the California horned lark. These species are native to the area but they may not be able to stay there. Climate change will likely squeeze them out of their habitats. Some, like the checkerspot, Shaw projects, will disappear from California entirely.

“We need to get creative about how we’re going to conserve species in the future,” she said. “We can save a portion of the species and the habitats, but we’ve got to get economically savvy about what it’s going to cost.”

One cost-saving idea Shaw suggests is to work with private landowners — farmers and ranchers, for example — to borrow or lease land from them as species migrate through their property.

REUTERS/Robert Durrell/Pool

The San Joaquin River flows from the Sierra Nevada to the Central Valley, where much of its water is diverted to aqueducts.

UPDATE: The House has passed the bill, with a vote of 246-175. It now goes to the Senate.

Meandering through the halls of Capitol Hill is a bill that would dramatically change California’s water picture. Sponsored by Tulare County Congressman Devin Nunes, the sweeping proposal would pipe more water to farms, and challenge the largest river restoration project in U.S. history.

Environmentalists and farmers tangoed for 18 years in federal court over the fate of the San Joaquin River, finally agreeing to restore water to some 60 miles of dry riverbed, and bring back the salmon that died off when the river was dammed just above Fresno.

“Most people associate the San Joaquin as a dry toxic river,” says Chris Acree, director of Revive the River, a Fresno-based non-profit. “Now that this water is back in that river, it allows us to identify ourselves with this river as a living river. This restoration program really is the broadest collaboration between agencies, landowners, stakeholders, and water users, where everybody has a voice.”

But Congressmen Devin Nunes says many Central Valley farmers have been left out of water decisions that put fish before farmers. His bill would not only reverse plans to restore salmon to this river, it would relax pumping restrictions in the Delta designed to protect other endangered fish.

“This is a case where the environmental radicals have overstepped their bounds, broken deal after deal after deal to where they’ve left entire communities without water,” he says. “And that simply was never the intent of the endangered species act, and never the intent of of Congress to begin with. This is just common sense.”

Some 70 water districts and a number of farm groups are supporting the Nunes bill. But legislators from Delta communities say the plan is a water grab designed to overturn 150 years of California water rights to benefit a small group of powerful Central Valley farmers.

Even if the bill passes the house, its supporters face an upstream fight to win in the Senate. And the Obama administration has threatened a veto, saying the Nunes bill would unravel decades of work to solve some of California’s most complex water challenges.

Read More:

• Follow the status of H.R. 1873

• Legislative Summary of The Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act (PDF), by Congressman Devin Nunes
• Statement from the White House (PDF), opposing the bill

Lake Powell, the Colorado River's second-largest reservoir, in April 2010 (Photo: Gretchen Weber)

There’s some good news for the 35 million people in the Western United States who rely on the Colorado River for their water, says a new study from the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.

No, the supply isn’t increasing.  And yes, the population is still growing.

But according to the paper, entitled Municipal Deliveries of Colorado River Basin Water, more efficient water use by water agencies across the West is making the supply/demand gap a lot less painful than it could be.

“Although population growth has increased very quickly, the amount of water delivered has not kept pace,” said study author Michael Cohen. “That shows that people have been getting much more efficient with their use of water.”

According to the report:

• Since 1990, the number of people who rely on water from the Colorado River basin has grown by 10 million. But during that time, per-capita water use has declined an average of one percent per year.
• Water agencies in Southern California delivered four percent less water from the Colorado in 2008 than they did in 1990, despite delivering water to almost 3.6 million more people.

Cohen said he was surprised and encouraged by the study results, and while he credited some of the efficiency to short-term policies (such as temporary drought restrictions) and new standards (like more efficient toilets and fixtures), he said that a lot of the change is likely due to changing attitudes.

“People are becoming much more aware of the value of water in the West, becoming sensitive that it is, in fact, a limited resource, and a resource that should be used wisely,” he said.

Not everyone in California is embracing efficiency, however.  Of the 100 water agencies studied, those with the three highest per-capita water deliveries are in California; the City of San Marino and two districts in Coachella Valley.

“They think it’s appropriate to have lawns in the middle of the desert even though they have to water them two or three times a day,” he said.  By comparison, he said, there are other, less affluent parts of Coachella Valley where water usage is about average for the state.

“Lots of agencies say [water usage] is driven by climate, but here’s a pretty stark example of cities or agencies with the exact same climate, but very different water use patterns,” Cohen observed.

Of course, what this study does not look at, is the 500-pound gorilla that is agricultural water use, which uses 70% of the water from the Colorado.  Municipal deliveries comprise just 15%, although it is the fastest growing segment of water use.

It seems that whatever efficiencies can be implemented now in any sector will only serve to ease what’s likely to become an even starker gap between supply and demand.  According to the Bureau of Reclamation, demand has recently outstripped supply along the Colorado, and a new federal study released earlier this month finds that the river’s flow could decrease 9% in the next 50 years due to impacts of climate change.  Meanwhile populations are expected to continue to grow rapidly in many regions dependent on the river.

“The question is, how are they going to balance supply and demand in the future,” said Cohen. “I think this report shows that at least part of that answer lies in more efficient use within the cities themselves.”

Flooded rice fields in the Sacramento Valley. (Photo: Craig Miller)

Most urban dwellers get a water bill each month that’s based on how much water they use. But on some California farms, that’s not the case.

“In many parts of the state, the amount of water farmers use is not measured,” says Susan Sims of the California Water Commission.

Instead, farmers are charged a flat rate for water in some districts. Sims says that makes it difficult for farmers to conserve water. “It’s very hard, even when you want to conserve. I think the first step in saving water is knowing what you’re using.”

Toward that end, the Water Commission votes today on rules that would require water districts to meter the volume of water farmers use — and to charge them accordingly. Sims says many water districts, including some in the San Joaquin Valley, already do this. Others in Northern California don’t.

Water officials hope that having a baseline measurement will set the stage for future conservation measures. “Even minor improvements in conservation for farmers could have huge impact,” says Sims.

The regulations are part of a package of water efficiency measures passed in the Water Conservation Act of 2009. The act also calls on urban water users to cut their use 20% by 2020.

But some environmental groups are concerned that the regulations have been weakened by the Department of Water Resources.

“In our view, DWR has moved away from the chief goal of the legislation and has let a lot of districts propose to measure the water use upstream of farms,” says Doug Obegi, staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So then you’re measuring how much water is going to a whole host of customers without letting the individual customers know how much they’re using.”

Sims says those exemptions were added because water districts lack legal access to the farm itself. According to DWR, nearly 80% of California’s “developed” (pumped or diverted) water goes to agriculture. Farmers irrigate 9.6 million acres in the state.

If approved by the commission, the rules will be open for public comment.

“Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Everybody in California seems to have at least a vague notion of who John Muir was. Now, with the help of a new documentary film, Aldo Leopold may get more of the props he earned during his fascinating life as a forester and conservationist.

Leopold’s following has been growing since his work in the first half of the 20th century. When Steve Dunsky set about with his co-producers creating Green Fire, they heard plenty of superlatives from the biographers, historians and naturalists they interviewed. One called Leopold the third pillar of conservation’s “Holy Trinity,” with Muir and Henry David Thoreau.

He was certainly ahead of the curve in the conservation movement. Decades before climate change was a blip on the radar of most scientists, let alone the general public, Leopold kept meticulous phenology logs, tracking the timing of seasonal changes on his Wisconsin property. His daughter, in her 90s when the film was in production, was still faithfully tracking more than 350 individual indicators — logs begun by her father.

Leopold is best known for his articulation of the “land ethic,” embodied in many writings, including A Sand County Almanac, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Dunsky says Leopold’s ideas are “as or more relevant to the conservation challenges of today, as John Muir’s were. The story of conservation today is about restoration. That’s where the cutting edge is today, it’s in ecological restoration.”

Buddy Huffaker, executive director of the Wisconsin-based Aldo Leopold Foundation and the film’s executive producer, says that while Leopold is well known to scholars and naturalists, “Film presents a whole new medium to communicate his ideas and introduce him to new audiences.”

Huffaker says Leopold’s core contribution was ‘his foresight and recognition that the future of conservation wasn’t going to be putting fences up around things…but figuring out how to take land that had lost its resilience and restore that health.”

“Leopold understood the environmental economics as well,” says Huffaker, “That we derive all of our health and wealth from the natural world. When we talk about ecosystem services, we can pay for it now or pay for it later.”

The film, edited by Dunsky’s wife, Ann and co-directed by Forest Service colleague David Steinke, is nicely crafted. It weaves together several story lines from scholars and family members, with a series of  Leopold’s personal revelations, one of which provided moving inspiration for the film’s title (Hint: it’s not about a forest fire). Some might be put off by the fact that Dunsky works for the US Forest Service regional office in Vallejo (Leopold worked for the Forest Service). The work is an unabashed homage. But the research and production values that went into the film are first-rate, and the insights well worth a viewing.

Dunsky says he expects it to air on PBS stations within a year or so. It is currently making the rounds in a series of special screenings, some of which have sold out. A second showing was added to Monday night’s screening in Berkeley, after the first sold out. A screening schedule and more background is posted at the Green Fire website.

As any quick web search will reveal, Leopold was nothing if not quotable. Perhaps his best circulated remark has to do with “intelligent tinkering;” the idea that any backyard mechanic worth his salt knows enough to keep all the various parts intact, even if he’s not sure what they’re for. In this age when we’ve moved well beyond the tinkering stage with the world’s ecosystems, Leopold’s words are perhaps more relevant now than when he said them.

“To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”     — Aldo Leopold

Grand illusion? Water rushes over the spillway at Nicasio Reservoir in Marin County. (Photo: Craig Miller)

A high-profile team of experts is calling for a major overhaul of the way California manages its water. In a 500-page report from the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, the authors say decades of well-intended water policies simply haven’t worked, leaving the state vulnerable to major crises, including water shortages, catastrophic floods, decline & extinction of native species, deteriorating water quality, and further decline of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“Our system has been dying a death by a thousand cuts,” says co-author Ellen Hanak, an economist and policy analyst at the PPIC. Hanak says that the state’s water management efforts have been “incremental” and “piecemeal,” with little success to show for it.

Among many other conclusions, the report says water management in the state is too fragmented among hundreds of local agencies and the funding for future improvements should shift from bond issues to a system of fees paid by water users.

“It’s not gonna be easy. It’s not gonna be popular. It’s probably cheaper than the alternatives,” said Jay Lund of UC Davis, one of the co-authors. “There’s not much state money and there’s not much federal money, so if you want to accomplish things for the environment and for water supply and flood control, it’s gonna have to be financed largely locally,” Lund told reporters during a Wednesday conference call.

The report also echoes other recent warnings that Californians are dangerously overdrawn on the state’s underground aquifers.

But there were some notes of optimism. The team of authors, drawn from the PPIC, U-C system and Stanford, say that if cities can cut back water use by 30% from 2000 levels, it would remove a huge strain on the crippled Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The map below, featured in the report, shows areas where Californians are “overdrawn” in their water use.

(Photo: Reed Galin/Lone Tree Productions)

In the last decade, tiny forest-dwelling beetles have wiped out pine trees on millions of acres in the Canadian and American West, including Southern California. The rest of the state has been largely spared, but forest ecologists say that’s likely to change.

Reporter Ilsa Setziol recently spent some time tracking these bugs with an entomologist from the US Forest Service. They found beetles at work in Jeffrey pines and coulter pines in the San Bernardino National Forest, east of Los Angeles.

You can hear her radio feature on The California Report, produced by KQED Public Media. She also put together a slide show, so you see for yourself how these tiny creatures — normally part of a healthy forest ecosystem — can, under the right conditions, quickly run amok.

Flocks of birds near wind turbines in Solano County. (Photo: Craig Miller)

It’s hard to find people who are just flat out against wind energy. As with real estate, attitudes seem to come down to location, location, location. That’s why three of the thorniest issues with wind are project siting, transmission (lines for the power produced), and the industry’s turbulent history with birds and bats. Some of those challenges are highlighted in this slide show, designed to accompany my two-part radio series.

Last fall, even the National Audubon Society, one of the nation’s most stalwart protectors of winged creatures, published a position statement generally favorable toward wind power, calling it a “good news, bad news” proposition. The statement calls California’s Altamont Pass “notorious for killing many raptors, including golden eagles.” A 2003 study by the National Renewable Energy Lab calculated that on average, each turbine in the pass was claiming a bird about once every five years (0.19 birds/turbine/year) — but there are thousands of turbines in the pass, many older models that are more of a danger to birds.

Developers are in the process of “repowering” the pass with newer, larger turbines, less lethal to birds. That may seem counterintuitive but the older, smaller models caused more problems. Since they had lower output, more of them were required. The blades were positioned lower, spun faster, and supported by lattice towers that provided inviting nesting spots, unlike the smooth tubular towers of new turbines.

Altamont is the oldest of California’s four biggest wind energy zones, highlighted on this interactive map.

View Major Wind Energy Pockets in California in a larger map

The Audubon statement concedes that newer turbine designs are becoming more bird-friendly, and finds climate change a bigger threat to avian critters in the long run. The Society went on to call for an extension of the federal Production Tax Credit for wind development, fearing its expiration next year encourages wind developers to rush projects along and “cut corners” on siting.

Meanwhile industry and wildlife groups have joined forces to address the bat mortality issue.

Hear my two-part radio series on challenges facing wind energy development in California on The California Report. Those and all other stories in our series, “33 x 20: California’s Clean Power Countdown,” are archived at our special series page.

Ken-ichi Ueda and Scott Loarie demonstrated the new iNaturalist iPhone app at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (Photo: Richard Morgenstein)

At Jasper Ridge, a biological preserve and study area on the Stanford campus, a dozen of the preserve’s docents gathered this week to learn about a new iPhone application that could ultimately help scientists study how ecosystems are adapting to climate change.

The new app, called iNaturalist, is the mobile version of a citizen-science website by the same name.  The iPhone app is still in testing and not yet available, but the website, iNaturalist.org, is already an active online community of citizen-scientists around the world who use the site to record and share their sightings.

One of the original iNaturalist creators, Ken-ichi Ueda, has teamed up with Scott Loarie, a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institute at Stanford. The two are hoping to leverage the site and the mobile application to engage more citizens to contribute to a growing database of field observations that could help scientists track biodiversity.

“One of things that’s most pressing in conservation is that species are going extinct about a thousand times faster than they ever have before,” said Loarie.  “So the scale of this problem is just incredible. It’s way too difficult for a handful of museums and graduate students to stay on top of.”

With the iNaturalist site, and especially with the new iPhone app, which streamlines the uploading process, Loarie hopes to get as many “eyes on the ground” as possible, documenting where species are, and where they aren’t.

“You can think about species around the world like little lights blinking on and off,” Loarie explained. “Whats happening with climate change and land use change is that those lights are blinking off faster than they are blinking on, and a lot of them are happening totally under the radar screen.”

Ueda originally co-developed the iNaturalist site as a project during his Masters studies at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

“My initial goal with the site was to get people engaged with nature, not necessarily to do the science,” said Ueda. “The scientific data is a really valuable and useful by-product, but my primary motivation is to get people outside and thinking about the plants and animals that they’re seeing.”

But now Ueda and Loarie are trying to take iNaturalist to the next level by finding ways this crowd-sourced data can be useful to scientists.

“It’s really cool if I’m walking around and I see a horned lizard because they are really cool animals,” said Ueda. “But it’s even cooler if I see one here at Jasper Ridge, because no one has seen one here for a long time, and it could be locally extinct.”

An observation like that, he said, could be valuable to scientists. One of the tasks now, he said, is to find ways to connect that data with the scientists who care about it and to establish standards of data quality so that scientists can trust it.

Ueda said the iPhone app may not be ready for the public for another month, but in the meantime, users can easily upload their digital photos from the field to the site, once they get home.   The site is connected with Google Maps, and Wikipedia and the photo-sharing site Flickr, so adding comments, information, and geographical information is easy.  The app, when it’s ready, should make logging observations even easier.

In the field on Friday, Loarie and Ueda were showing off a testing version of the app.

“I think the idea has a a lot of merit,” said Ross Bright, a docent at Jasper Ridge who was at the presentation. “Whether its workable and doable is the problem.  My own personal perspective is that most docents are not necessarily literate in the high-tech gadgetry that’s involved in the this.  There will be a learning curve.”

Ueda and Loarie hope that not only will the docents at Jasper Ridge start cataloging their observations with the new app, but also that the public at large will catch on and record their observations wherever they are.

“There are no geographic or taxonomic restrictions on the site,” said Ueda. “You don’t even really have to know what you’re looking at. You can be like, “Oh, sweet, a tree. There are trees in my yard,”  That’s good to think about.  Anyone can do it.”