Month: August 2016

Forgotten but not gone

Forgotten Grasslands of the South. Natural History and Conservation by Reed F. Noss. Island Press 2013

Walden Warming by Richard Primack. University of Chicago Press 2014

Reading Noss’s work, I recall Faulkner’s words, “The past isn’t gone. It isn’t even past.” Forgotten, neglected, tragically diminished, but not gone. Noss describes his travels to visit what was once a vast archipelago of grass-dominated ecological communities, ranging from endless longleaf pine savannas (see my post on Looking for Longleaf) to tiny rock outcrop barrens. This island landscape stretched across the southeastern United States from Texas to Virginia. In fact, though Noss does not discuss them, these communities are found up into the mid-Atlantic and New England. Today, the remaining islands, in a sea of agriculture, industrial forestry and urbanization  only hint at what has vanished beneath the waves of “progress.” But remarkably, there is enough to form the core of a restored landscape, something that will be a major challenge for 21st century ecologists.

Many types of habitats fit under the term “grassland.” Woodlands have trees, but their crowns cover less than three-fourths of the ground, allowing herbaceous plants, especially grasses, to thrive. Savannas have scattered trees, with less than about fifty percent cover. Meadows, glades, barrens and balds have only isolated patches of trees. Noss also describes plant and animal species endemic to the southeastern grasslands. An endemic is a kind of organism found in a particular type of community or a local area, and nowhere else. Many of these are critically imperiled, occurring today at only one or two places. The book is illustrated with his photos of the communities and the rare plants.

Noss has really interesting things to say about the factors that have maintained open, grass-dominated habitats over ecological and evolutionary time. The main ecological question is: what is preventing tall woody plants from taking over? The climate is warm enough, and rainfall is adequate for trees. It could be lack of a deep, firm soil that roots can penetrate to support tall stems. It could be that the soil stays wet or dry too much of the year. It could be constant disturbance by flood, wind, fire or herbivores. It could be lack of sufficient nutrients to support trees and shrubs. At any particular site, it’s most likely a combination of two or more of these factors.

The evolutionary question is: how have the species that comprise these ecological communities arisen and survived in a dynamic landscape? The answers are tentative and complicated, especially those related to changing climate. The distinctiveness and diversity of the endemic species, especially their adaptations to fire, imply a long evolutionary history. Some of the endemic plant species, such as those in certain rock outcrop barrens, may have evolved recently, while others, like the ones in the longleaf pine savannas, have been around for a very long time. This field of research is called phylogeography because it looks both at phylogenetic (evolutionary) relations among different populations and species and at the geographic patterns of climate (and so, the species’ habitats) now and in the past.

Many authors have stated the grasslands originated only as a result of disturbance by humans, who do not seem to have reached America before 30,000 years ago at the very earliest. If the grasslands originated before the Pleistocene ice ages, how did they survive the periods of peak glaciation and cold? Noss cites pollen data to show that most of the southeast had a cool temperate climate during the ice ages, but evidence from geomorphology suggests that there were periods of boreal conditions with deep seasonal frost or even permafrost. Aeolian landforms, created by strong winds coming off the glaciers, include dune fields, sand sheets and the famous Carolina bays. These indicate that there were periods where there was little vegetation to stabilize the surface. One possibility is that the pollen record is incomplete, because the intervals without vegetation produce essentially no pollen. Another is that, if the Gulf Stream stopped during the coldest intervals, the Gulf of Mexico would have been a tremendous heat reservoir, keeping the coastal areas warm, while inland sites were cold. On maps of the ice age drop in sea level, the additional dry land, just on the west side of peninsular Florida, looks nearly as large as North Carolina. Thus, a lot of grassland species might have retreated there.

Noss’s book and a recent article (Noss, R. F., Platt, W. J., Sorrie, B. A., Weakley, A. S., Means, D. B., Costanza, J. and Peet, R. K. 2015. How global biodiversity hotspots may go unrecognized: lessons from the North American Coastal Plain. Diversity and Distributions 21: 236–244), which includes the coastal plain up to Cape Cod, call the region a biodiversity hotspot. This is based on the great numbers of plant, vertebrate and insect species in the region and the number of those species that are endemic to it.

The article calls for the North American Coastal Plain to be listed as a global biodiversity hotspot. A colleague who studies southern grasshoppers told me that the group behind the effort to achieve listing had several more papers in the pipeline that they expected would be needed to convince the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund to add the NACP as hotspot number 36 They succeeded on the first try, just after the article was published (http://www.cepf.net/news/top_stories/Pages/Announcing-the-Worlds-36th-Biodiversity-Hotspot.aspx) Hooray!

Now the hard work begins: convincing people, especially government officials and private conservation groups, to take action. Here in New Jersey, most conservationists still see the coastal plain as a forest region. Natural enough, since fire suppression for the last eighty years has effectively converted what were once woodlands and savannas into dense forests of pine and oak trees and huckleberry shrubs. “Forest,” has such cultural significance in American environmentalism that it is very difficult to convince anyone that this is not what Nature intends. Add modifiers like “old growth,” “pristine,” “climax,” and you have idols that it is very hard to get environmentalists to stop worshipping.

Most people I know in the Mid-Atlantic region tend to blame “development” for loss of natural habitats. To an extent, this is true for the grasslands of the South, especially the loss in recent times of the smaller glades and barrens, but other factors are historically more important. Noss mentioned drainage and conversion to farmland, but this applies mainly to the wetter, richer grasslands. Dense tree plantations have replaced pine savannas. Another factor is loss of large herbivores, beginning with the extinction of much of North America’s megafauna – mammoths, ground sloths, etc. – around 15,000 years ago. To some degree, cattle, hogs and sheep may have supplied their place in the early post-1492 times of open ranges and even today, but livestock can do more harm than good to natural habitats, and they will never be allowed to recreate the vast network of “buffalo traces,” leading to salt licks and waterholes. These trails provided habitat and dispersal routes for grassland plants, as roadsides do today, if we don’t mow them in the growing season or allow exotic invasives to take over.

By far the clearest factor reducing grasslands is fire suppression. Since the advent of motorized firefighting in the mid-twentieth century, the number of fires has changed little, but the area burned annually has greatly decreased (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2484334?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents). This means that fire return intervals have generally become too long to prevent establishment of closed forest canopies. This is fine if you want to grow trees for wood or fiber but terrible for the plants and animals of woodlands, savannas and grasslands.

I have tried for years to convince my friends in the New Jersey Pine Barrens that the greatly increased plant canopy cover since fire suppression began to be effective has caused much of the reported drying out of the landscape. They prefer to blame the loss of wetlands and headwater streams on wells drilled by farmers, developers and casinos sucking water out of the ground. Trees and shrubs are taking just as much water through their roots and evaporating it through leaves, 300-500 pounds of water for every pound of sugar they make in photosynthesis. Some of my conservationist friends and colleagues oppose even moderate thinning of trees in the Pine Barrens. They talk about endangered species’ need for undisturbed habitat, not recognizing that on the coastal plain, far more species are threatened by the loss of open land with herbaceous vegetation – grasslands, woodlands, savannas and meadows. A very experienced botanist I know, however, has become convinced, after seeing species like pine barrens gentian and turkey beard springing up in the wake of forest thinning and reintroduction of fire on managed lands. Too bad the New Jersey Forest Service officials still thinks Smoky the Bear has the last word. They are courting disaster as fuel loads continue to build up in the pines, but they won’t believe that a fire could occur that they could not control. This is incredibly short sighted.

I also wish our environmental community would back off its opposition to natural gas pipelines, which actually create open habitats, and devote more of their resources to stopping the motorized mayhem that’s destroying the last of our native savannas and sand ridge communities all across southern New Jersey. In the Pinelands National Reserve, motorized recreation is not a permitted land use, but pressure from the motorheads has prevented meaningful regulation or enforcement.

Besides these immediate threats, I wonder whether the coastal plain biodiversity hotspot can survive climate change. As shown by Richard Primack in his excellent book, Walden Warming (Chicago 2014) there are already substantial changes in the flora and fauna of New England since Thoreau kept a naturalist’s journal in the 1850’s. Surely, though we lack clear evidence, such changes are occurring in the North American Coastal Plain. For plant populations to persist, they must either acclimate (adjust their flowering and fruiting physiology) adapt locally (through natural selection of individuals that best match the warmer climate) or disperse their seeds northwards. Primack points out that the barriers created by towns, farms and highways make it difficult for native plants to disperse to suitable new habitat.

A look at the map of the coastal plain shows another problem: the northward narrowing of the geologic region, until it peters out at Cape Cod and in the sandy outwash plans of southern New England. Even if species can shift northwards, they will find themselves funneled into increasingly tight confines, reduced even more by sea level rise. Europe’s flora is impoverished compared to its temperate counterparts in North America and Asia, because southward dispersal during the height of the last ice ages ran into the barrier of the Alps. The coastal plain’s denizens may be similarly crushed against the rock ribs of New England.

Noss’s points out that many people feel that preserving nature for its own sake is as important as preserving it for its benefits to us. He recasts Jack Kennedy’s famous dictum as, “ask not just what nature can do for us, but also what we can do for nature.” He estimates that temperate grasslands have the lowest ratio of lands preserved to lands destroyed of any major ecological system on earth. In the North American Coastal Plain this ratio may be even lower, although perhaps with more prospect for restoration than in some areas, because so much has been lost to fire suppression, which is fixable.

Noss is a strong proponent of saving all that we can in whatever ways are effective. He is against any form of ” triage,” writing off of species and communities that we decide in advance can’t be saved. He also criticizes the Nature Conservancy for overemphasizing what they call “working landscapes,” and neglecting the smaller, uneconomical bits, those tiny glades, barrens and rock outcrops that house such amazing numbers of endemic taxa. Noss argues we need to practice preservation on many scales, beginning with a ban on development of any new natural lands. We should be redeveloping abandoned or underutilized sites, close to existing development. I agree, but we need to find some way to effectively transfer development rights, or landowners will block any such policy. He also argues that we need to change the policies and practices of our state and federal agencies and private conservation groups to better manage lands already protected. Too many of the best areas are either over-utilized or neglected.

Both these books are excellent reads, especially the authors’ descriptions of work in the field with their colleagues and collaborators. One gets a sense that there are a lot of very dedicated ecologists working to preserve biodiversity in our changing landscape and changing climate. One of the encouraging developments I have noticed is the great increase in contributions from what are now called, “citizen scientists.” People, who might once have pursued their love of plants, birds or butterflies in isolation, now contribute to both current data collection and preservation of valuable old data (Thoreau’s Journals are a prime example) through projects like iDigBio. More could be done, especially if there were a way to report and then evaluate outliers: unusual sightings, anomalous individuals and things in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where economic interests are involved, we do usually follow up, as with introduced pests, but otherwise many valuable observations in our rapidly changing environment may be written off as misidentifications or just lost. I would like to see more naturalist’s, especially our large crop of butterfly watchers learn when and how to collect proper specimens to verify their unexpected sightings. Scientific collecting is almost never a threat to populations of insects, and a specimen allows positive identification and preservation of a record in a way photographs can’t.

I would strongly recommend these two books to anyone concerned about the future of biodiversity along our Atlantic coast.

Evolution and Revolution

Kelly, Aileen M. 2016. The Discovery of Chance. The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen. Cambridge MA. Harvard University Press. 592pp.

painting by Frédéric Sorrieu

I was drawn to this book on the library shelf because I thought it was about mathematics and probability, but I took it to read because on closer examination, it was about the first thinker to connect politics and biological evolution. He was not, however, a crude social-Darwinist. In fact, Alexander Herzen was thinking about evolution and politics even before Darwin’s theory came out. Besides that, he was a fascinating individual.

This is an intellectual biography of one of the founders of Russian socialist thought. Herzen, an illegitimate son of a minor aristocrat, was born in 1812, the year Napoleon took and then retreated from Moscow. Educated at Moscow University, he was part of the intelligentsia of the 1830s, under strict czarist censorship. As a young man, Herzen experienced several periods of exile to towns in the provinces. Back in Moscow, his circle was influenced by romanticism and various versions of Hegel’s philosophy, but Herzen was distinguished by his interest in biology, especially early evolutionary thought. By the late 1840s, he was in exile in the west, eventually settling in London, where he operated a radical printing house and edited publications aimed at fellow Russian exiles and the reformers and radicals back in Russia.

He came to believe that human societies are subject to the same natural laws as the rest of the living world and do not develop along lines laid down by overarching forces of History or Reason. Kelly’s title reflects Herzen’s view that although ideas like liberty may arise and take root in societies, they are expressed in ways that depend on the individual circumstances, just as the selective value of a biological variant is determined by the environment. Thus it is impossible to predict the future form of society, and there is no final end towards which civilization develops, as Hegel and his followers believed. In Darwin’s theory, the function of a trait, or gene, may change over the course of evolution into something completely different than it had originally. The idea of individual freedom may have one manifestation in the agrarian and proto-industrial world of Jefferson and Hamilton (taking US history as a case) another in the rapidly industrializing world of Lincoln, another in the industrial world of the Roosevelts and still another in the post-industrial world of today. However much conservatives may deny it, these meanings do evolve, and forcing people to accept old understandings is no easier than forcing them to accept a radical utopia. The same is true of policies: in one situation, restriction on markets may be inimical to human welfare, in another, it may be the only way to protect it. Socialism may stifle initiative and essential development, or it may promote them.

I see a connection between Herzen’s thought and the developmental theory of Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker, described in The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intelligence Evolved from Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans (Da Capo Press, 2006). In their view, human intellect and language develop through the interactions of the infant and its caregiver. The inborn genetic potential must be realized through specific interactions to create in each individual a capacity what they call “co-regulated exchanges.” The process cannot be fully controlled or predicted in advance. Furthermore, as societies developed historically through these contingent processes, the environment that individuals encountered varied, applying selection pressure on the frequencies of genetic variations in each separate group. Learned behaviors thus fed back into innate tendencies. It seems to me that these modified Darwinian perspectives on the questions raised by social and behavioral sciences may yield useful understanding. I plan to write more about this later.

Herzen came to despise the allegiance of his fellow radical exiles to ideologies, like communism, that promised a perfect society after the revolution. He argued strongly that one must focus on the present reality and seek whatever opportunity for advancement presents itself. My reservation about this, and I think Herzen would have admitted it, is that unlike plants or animals in the struggle for existence, we humans are influenced by our imaginations, the things we hope for. Since Plato’s Republic, imaginary societies have helped us focus our attention on what we believe to be the good. The trouble comes if we expect them to be made into realities by superhuman forces.

Herzen also became skeptical of the effectiveness of violence, especially after he saw how the revolution of 1848 ended. He was convinced that the way forward in Russia in the 1860s was through the peasant communes, a rudimentary form of socialism, tied to their commitment to common ownership of land. He agitated for a constituent assembly, without distinction of classes, to begin the transition away from autocracy. It never happened. As he feared, the autocracy stood almost until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Herzen was right that the course of history did not follow a progression towards some ideal society, whatever the revolutionaries may have claimed. The outcome was a mixture of the communist idealistic view with the pure naked power of the police state, yielding Leninist and Stalinist totalitarianism. This appeared to have finally faded out under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Post-communist Russia in the 21st century seems to be a mix of elements from the past plus the globalizing ideology of neo-liberalism. But will the old way be given new life under Putin?

Looking at the American 2016 election, what elements in the current debates will be the ones that comprise the next stages in our history? It’s like trying to predict the course of evolution, or trying to see how to give one species an advantage in the struggle for existence: the problem is simply too complex. As in Darwin’s analogy between the struggle for existence and throwing up a handful of feathers, there are too many forces besides simple gravitational pull that determine the precise place each feather will land, where each species will survive or how each society will develop. This does not stop futurologists, but it ought to give the rest of us pause.

I think Bernie Sanders resembles Herzen. He is opposed to the repressive neoliberalism of the current establishment that brings growth only at the cost of rising inequality and environmental degradation. Like Herzen, he hopes for a peaceful transition to Socialism, meaning not abolition of the market and private property or government ownership of industry, but rather, a democratic government restraining the excesses of the free market and the financial system. He wants to insure that the economy benefits everyone, not just the rich owners of private capital. Like Herzen, he knows that history is contingent, not invariably progressive, not moving towards a perfect future, but sometimes presenting opportunities for progress and reform. In that understanding, he gives his support to Clinton, because she promises at least some reforms, and she will be a better guardian of the public interest than the crude nationalist, Trump. Sanders’ followers divide into those willing to go along with the compromise, who see the critical danger in an overthrow of basic values of tolerance and inclusion, etc. and those who want revolution and an ideal world now, no matter how impossible that is. It will be interesting to see which candidate they choose come November.

There are many more interesting ideas in the worthy book, which I think everyone inclined towards radical politics would do well to consider. Herzen’s major work, From the Other Shore, is available online.

 

 

Freedom and Exile in Florida

Giddings, Joshua (1795 – 1864) The Exiles of Florida, Or, the Crimes Committed by Our Government Against the Maroons, who Fled from South Carolina and Other Slave States, Seeking Protection Under Spanish Laws. 1858. Columbus OH. Follett, Foster and Co.

[image: By USMC – NARA archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4012354%5D

I listened to the very fine Librivox recording.

A remarkable polemic by a U.S. Representative from Ohio (1838-1859). This account of events in Florida from the late 1600s to the date of publication, was supported by numerous documents from the records of the US Congress, including treaties, military reports, letters and legal filings. The basic story is very simple: Africans fled from slavery, first in South Carolina and later in Georgia, and sought refuge in Spanish Florida, where Spanish authorities granted them freedom. The slaveowners sought desperately to get them back, even after several generations of the original slaves’ descendants had been settled in communities under Spanish law. Escaped slaves and their offspring were considered lost or stolen property, just like stray cattle. [Note the similarity to some peoples’ attitude towards the children of undocumented immigrants, despite the 14th Amendment.] As time passed, slaves continued to flee to Florida, and joined native Americans, often living in close proximity, sometimes intermarrying. Some of the natives were a subgroup of the Creek Nation, who became estranged from the main body of Creeks, who lived in Georgia. These Africans and Americans became known in Spanish Florida as “Seminoles,” which basically means “exiles” or “runaways.”

By the beginning of the 19th Century, conflict was rife along the border between the new United States and Florida. Between 1810 and 1819, the US and Great Britain made various attempts to gain control of the Florida panhandle. The destruction of the “Negro Fort” on Prospect Bluff above the Apalachicola River by the US Navy, resulted in the deaths of over 300 free Africans. The Seminoles, including the remaining free Africans, continued to resist to attempts of the Georgians, white Floridians and Creeks to capture them or drive them out of the border territories. These raids and counter raids led to Andrew Jackson bringing the US Army into the Seminole territory (which was still legally Spanish) to drive the natives out and seize the Africans for sale into slavery. Jackson’s ruthless policies were popular with many Americans but criminal in the eyes of others. In the end, the US acquired Florida from Spain and convinced the British that future trade relations were more important than resisting the violent overthrow of their interests in Florida and Jackson’s arbitrary execution of two of their officers. Congressional resolutions condemning Jackson’s behavior failed. The Seminoles were forced to accept a treaty confining them to central Florida.

The later chapters of the Seminole Wars repeated the pattern: South Carolinians and Georgians clamored for seizure of their lost “property,” namely the Africans living freely in Florida. Raiding and retaliation went on, and the US Army again intervened, only to face guerilla resistance from the Seminole. Throughout the period from 1819 to 1858, as Giddings documents, Congress struggled with the impetuous calls of the southerners for war and the northerners’ demands that existing treaties be respected and the free Africans be left alone. The anti-slavery Members argued that these wars, which cost tens of millions of dollars, were making all Americans complicit in the dirty business of hunting and enslaving people who had been free for generations and who lived on US soil.

The Second Seminole War, from 1835 to 1842, ended with the removal of most of the Seminoles, including the free Africans, to the Indian Territory, where the Creeks and other southeastern Nations had already been forced to go. Along the way, the slavers never gave up trying to get the Africans into their possession, by legal maneuvers or by force, but thanks to the honor and integrity of a few US Army officers, notably General J.W. Worth, the assurances of safe passage to the Seminoles were made good. Giddings particularly commends his handling of the war chief Wild Cat, whom Giddings evidently met in 1857. The peaceful removal of a large body of Africans and Native Americans to the territory was made possible by the respect and trust between Worth and the chief.

Not that the Black Seminoles’ troubles ended after resettlement: they were required, by a treaty to which they were never a party, to settle in the lands assigned to the Creeks. The Creeks and their co-conspirators, the southern slavers, insisted that the Africans were slaves and wanted to seize them. General Matthew Arbuckle did all he could to uphold the honor of the US by sticking to treaty stipulations that those who submitted to removal to the Territory were free. Once the Africans left the protection of the Army’s fort, however, nearly a hundred were seized in a raid by Creeks and slavers, and despite a habeus corpus hearing (before a pro-slavery judge) in Arkansas, were shipped to New Orleans and sold, disappearing into the general slave population. Seeing that they could not expect protection from the laws and treaties of the US, a group of the black Seminoles and some Native allies left for exile in Mexico, where they resided until the late 20th century, serving as border guards in the local militia, and before the Civil War ended slavery, fending off efforts of Texas slavers to seize them. For more fascinating information about the diverse fates of these exiles and their continuing struggles to be recognized and respected, see the Wikipedia article on “Black Seminoles.” The story continues in this Guardian update from 2018.

Giddings was a great investigator, and although his biases are clear, a good reporter. In this account he lays bare the unremitting efforts to force all Africans into bondage, in accordance with the laws of every southern state, which saw all Negros as either someone’s property, or subject to seizure by whomever could lay hold of them. He exposes the duplicity of successive Presidents and cabinet officers, trying to walk the tightrope between the pro and anti-slavery forces and the bitter divisions in Congress over the issue. In 1842 Giddings was censured by the House for persistently bringing up the question of slavery. He resigned his seat, but was immediately reelected by his constituents. Later, he made public the contents of a treaty, which had been kept secret by the Administration, because it contained assurances the lives and property of the Seminoles, including the free Africans, would be protected. When he pointed out how the State of Georgia had been violating these terms by pursuing the exiles, he was threatened on the floor of the House by a Member from Georgia, wielding his cane as a weapon. Giddings died while serving as Lincoln’s consul general in Montreal, before the victory of the Union and passage of the 13th amendment. His The Exiles of Florida is a masterpiece of polemic as well as fascinating history.