Climate Threat Inflation

As the legitimacy and urgency of climate change have sunk in, the scope of considered impacts has broadened. One area drawing increasing attention is national security - issues that affect the integrity of nation-states. What does it mean to take a "national security" approach to climate change?

In June 2007, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in which he connected political instability in the Darfur region of Sudan with drought exacerbated by climate change. For at least the last five years, nations with Arctic borders have been contemplating a new tangle of claims over previously inaccessible domains. Dramatic decreases in sea ice over the Arctic are opening up vast areas of ocean bordered by Canada, Russia, the US and Nordic countries - all of whom see in this change a variety of opportunities (like new shipping lanes) and strategic conundrums (like who owns what). More recently, Senator Kerry has made the national security implications of climate change a central issue, and it seems the Pentagon has been listening.

Of course, Pentagon concerns draw their own concerns. Climate change skeptics, like James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, are clearly wary of lending climate change any more credibility with the imprimatur of military concern, while more liberal-minded scholars are worried about the inverse, justifying military investment with the imprimatur of climate change. Regardless of the political motivations, the Pentagon has in fact begun to explore national security implications of potential climate change impacts: flood, drought, environmental refugees and mass migration, and wars over natural resources. Potential conflict, of course, draws the most attention.

Interestingly, there is actually a large body of empirical evidence showing that nations are more likely to find peaceful solutions than go to war when faced with competition over scarce natural resources - like water. Aaron Wolf, a professor of Geography at Oregon State University and director of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, has compiled an enormous database on this exact issue. In a recent report for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he and his colleagues pointed out:

• No nation has gone to war specifically over water for thousands of years.
• Between1945 and 1999, instances of cooperation between river-sharing nations outnumbered conflicts by more than two to one.
• In the last 50 years, only 37 disputes involved violence, and 30 of those occurred between Israel and one of its neighbors.
  
• Outside of the Middle East, researchers found only 5 violent events while 157 treaties were negotiated and signed.

Violent conflicts do occur, of course, but they mostly occur within nations, rather than between nations. Think on that. The authors conclude that water is actually a "pathway to peace" rather than conflict between nations.

Surely climatic instability has the dire potential to create social instability. How can people get along if they are worried about survival? But threats carry the potential for unity as well - especially common threats. According to an old Asian proverb, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The trick is to define the threat/enemy clearly and in a way that highlights our common interests in defeating this threat together. It has been done before and it can be done again.

Counting Trees

On Friday morning I attended an informational session on the current tree inventory that is being conducted for the City of Chelsea. The inventory is being led by the Urban Ecology Institute (UEI), though it includes a variety of other governmental and non-profit participants. The tree inventory is a count of street trees only, although aerial imagery is being analyzed at the University of Vermont to calculate total canopy coverage for the whole city. The survey is not complete yet, but preliminary results seem to show that Chelsea is seriously lacking in tree coverage - about 9% of the city's area is covered by tree canopy, compared to Boston's average of 29%. It is worth noting, however, that East Boston (where this author lives) had a calculated tree canopy coverage of only 6% when Boston's tree inventory was completed in 2006. The lowest in the city.

The vegetative cover in urban areas is vitally important for the healthy functioning of the city itself (i.e. mitigating storm runoff, moderating temperature extremes, reducing air pollution), as well as quality of life issues. Interestingly, the analysis for Boston, and the soon-to-be-released report on Chelsea, reveal the potential for a substantial increase in vegetative cover.

In 2007, the City of Boston announced a plan to plant 100,000 trees by 2020 with the goal of increasing the city's canopy coverage from 29% to 35%. While ambitious, it seems that Boston's goals are quite tame in comparison to other cities' tree planting programs.

The tree survey of Boston, and the one going on in Chelsea, are focused on street trees. However, according to UEI's John Walkey, Director of the Sustainable Cities program, street trees represent only 8% of the city's canopy coverage. The rest is on private property. This presents an interesting problem for devising policies to increase canopy coverage.

Spread World PEAS

On Thursday Neenah and I attended the New Entry Sustainable Farm Tour in Dracut, Massachusetts. The tour was arranged by World PEAS (People Enhancing Agricultural Sustainability). We and about 100 other curious visitors were invited to see how the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project trains people with limited resources who have an interest in small-scale commercial agriculture, to begin farming in Massachusetts AND to see how the food that the World PEAS CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) sells is grown. This is the second year that Neenah and I have been members of the World PEAS CSA and it was quite exciting to meet the people who grow our veggies and to see how the whole operation works.

We visited two working farms where a number of current trainees manage acre-sized plots (an acre is A LOT of land) to grow a variety of crops for market, to learn how to grow food organically, and to prepare to get their own commercial farms up and running. It was a beautiful day to be out - sunny, mild and dry. Of course, the nice weather belied the struggles the farmers have had with this year's unusually wet weather. Large areas of the farms were unusable because they were still too wet. Worse, the outbreak of late blight has devastated this season's tomato crop, especially for organic farmers. Nevertheless, the farmers we met were happy to share their experiences and answer questions.

The farmers we met with were a testament to the breadth of this program:

• A group of young people from inner city Lowell who are part of UTEC (United Teen Quality Center), a safe-haven program for youth development and grass-roots organizing. Teens involved in the UTEC Fresh Roots Program grow and cook healthy food to feed and educate their community. This group manages a two-acre organic vegetable plot in Dracut and a commercial kitchen in downtown Lowell. THEY DO COMMERCIAL CATERING for anyone in the Merrimack Valley. In fact, they prepared a full buffet for our visit, using the food they had grown, and it was incredible.
• Bill the farmer, an affable man and quick to laugh. When asked how he had come to the New Entry program, he said, "Through the unemployment office." He was out of work and needed to change directions. Now he's preparing a business plan for his own farm. He provided us with a bumper crop of peppers this season, and was one of the very few organic farmers to actually get red tomatoes!
• Adisson from Haiti. Adisson is a trained agronomist with experience in managing coops. He and his teenage daughter are growing a variety of vegetables with the idea of going back to Haiti to teach others how to grow food without pesticides.
• A Korean woman who already has a full time job and but manages her farm on the weekends.
• A number of farmers from southeast Asia who are experimenting with ways to grow tropical crops in Massachusetts.

The New Entry program and the World PEAS Coop represent a remarkably progressive approach to sustainable and socially just agriculture. Their goal is to advance local, organic agriculture by helping small scale farming operations by immigrants and others of modest means succeed. This is more than just environmentally friendly agriculture; it is a program to help empower otherwise marginalized people to help themselves and others.

Grit Over Smarts for Success

This Sunday's Ideas section in the Boston Globe contains an article about research on an underappreciated mental quality that Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the UPenn, has termed "grit". Grit is a quality of stick-with-it-ness that seems to be common to those who are successful in life. More specifically, researchers are accumulating evidence that grit is a better predictor of future success (not explicitly defined in the article) than more conventional measures of aptitude or potential such as IQ. Indeed, some researchers argue that focusing on IQ may not only be misleading, but may in fact set a person up for failure. The implications for education are, of course, important.

The value of understanding grit seems quite practical. The article spends some time on the search for ways of better measuring grit, and more importantly, ways to encourage or instill it. There are at least two implications from this article, however, that I find a little disturbing.

• Implication #1: Success is achieved through narrow and sustained focus, while lack of success happens from wandering interests. The article states: "While parents and teachers have long emphasized the importance of being well-rounded - this is why most colleges require students to take courses in all the major disciplines, from history to math - success in the real world may depend more on the development of narrow passions."

This issue is at the heart of the debate on the purpose and value of a liberal arts education. If one sees a college or university education as simply job training with the objective of higher pay and status, then yes, one might be better served by simply choosing a subject and studying only that: no science for English majors, and no Literature or History for Biology majors. Of course, one should still ask: is this form of 'success' the purpose of education? It's interesting to note that the article suggests that MCAS and similar tests may be missing the point by focusing on IQ, but I think that the point is still being missed.

• Implication #2: Success in life is based on an individual's traits, not political or social circumstances.

This one is always a doozy. The second half of this implication is never actually stated in the article, but it should be clear enough. More importantly, I think this implication deserves more scrutiny because it is something that too easily resonates with the American myth of "pulling yourself up from your bootstraps," and is therefore more likely to be embraced uncritically. Social and political context are certainly not everything, but there is too much evidence from history and the social sciences demonstrating, repeatedly, that for the vast majority of human beings, the social and political hand you are dealt is most important. If anything, it is important to recognize ideas or perspectives that may serve to de-politicize important social issues. We already give ourselves and our political representatives too many excuses to duck and cover from complicated things.

My point is not to dismiss or even diminish the idea of 'grit' as an important ingredient for success. Rather, I hope that we can extract its more useful possibilities without stretching the meaning to justify other, less constructive, agendas.

You can you can take the 'grit survey' at www.gritstudy.com to get a measure of your own grittiness.