Category: policy

Common cause . . .

You know, it is not often that you can draw a direct analogy between events here in the US, and events in places like sub-Saharan Africa . . . but today we have one!  Sadly, it’s not a happy one.
Yesterday, the Beeb reported on protests in Malawi over an effort to set the retirement age at 55 for women and 60 for men.  Why the protests, you ask?  Well, because life expectancy in Malawi is about 50 years . . . so this is a bit like asking the US to accept an increase in the age of retirement for social security to 80.
Well, the analogy doesn’t hold all that well – actually, most of my colleagues in Ghana, where mandatory retirement from state-funded jobs starts at 60, would like to see that age lifted to 65 or more so they could keep earning a salary.  But this points up a larger issue – that these colleagues of mine are highly educated and make good (by local standards) salaries.  They are also more likely to live well past the average lifespan in Ghana (about 59 years).  For those with less education, working in lower-paying jobs, even a retirement age of 60 is a bit of a cruel joke, as they are unlikely to ever get there.  In other words, there is an income dimension to life expectancy that makes the issue of a single, blanket retirement age in places like Malawi and Ghana inherently unfair . . .
So, it is really interesting that, just as we start hearing about various plans to reduce the US deficit, and indeed our massive national debt, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ran a study on life expectancy and retirement ages, and came to an African-sounding conclusion here in the US:

Raising the retirement age for Social Security would disproportionately hurt low-income workers and minorities, and increase disability claims by older people unable to work, government auditors told Congress.

The projected spike in disability claims could harm Social Security’s finances because disability benefits typically are higher than early retirement payments, the General Accountability Office concluded. (via Businessweek)

Paul Krugman makes the point a bit more starkly:

Working until you’re 69, which may sound doable for people with desk jobs, is a lot harder for the many Americans who still do physical labor.

But beyond that, the proposal seemingly ignores a crucial point: while average life expectancy is indeed rising, it’s doing so mainly for high earners, precisely the people who need Social Security least. Life expectancy in the bottom half of the income distribution has barely inched up over the past three decades. So the Bowles-Simpson proposal is basically saying that janitors should be forced to work longer because these days corporate lawyers live to a ripe old age.

Can we spend money forever?  No.  But is it fair to start pushing the benefits people have contributed to for their whole lives via their taxes out of reach in the name of deficit reduction?  No.  We are going to have to create a very nuanced set of reforms here, that recognize whose benefits should start when, if we are to have anything that looks like justice – either here or in Africa.  One size fits all is not, in fact, fair . . . and as someone whose retirement age would likely be raised under any plan (given my income and job description), I am strongly in favor of justice, even if that means some people get to retire before I do . . . besides, according to the GAO, we need to consider this or we will blow up social security even sooner, which means no benefits for anyone.  Now, let’s see if people can grab onto this point and use it to force a real conversation about spending that doesn’t turn deficit reduction into another hammer used on the poor, here or abroad.
And why, oh why, is there really no discussion about raising the Social Security taxed maximum wage (the “cap”)?  I wonder how many Americans understand that Social Security taxes are only collected on the first $106800 of wages, and after that they disappear.  Yep, that means that the bulk of Americans (roughly the bottom 92%) pay Social Security taxes on roughly 85% of their taxable income, while the top 8% enjoy what amounts to a 6-ish percent tax cut on that income after $106800.  This is obscene.  While there is significant debate about how much additional revenue we would gather from eliminating this largely arbitrary cap, or how much that income would help, removing the cap would certainly raise revenue, help the situation, and correct an absurd component of our tax system . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

Big shifts coming . . . or not

Well, this is interesting, to say the least.  Someone decided to get cute and leak the draft of the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review – yeah, the one marked NODIS (No Distribution).  State runs a tight ship, so my guess is that someone on the Hill leaked this.  Hard to say why, exactly.  But it is very interesting reading, both from the perspective of someone in one of the agencies in question, but also from the perspective of development studies in general.
Well, now it is out there, so go here to have a look.
I will refrain from offering my comments – I think that probably steps over a line given my current official position – but have a look and see what you think.  I do think that Josh Rogin’s story on this has a very interesting set of comments from Todd Shelton at InterAction.  I will note, though, that we heard informal messages from the upper reaches of the Agency that this document is a draft, and by no means finalized . . . though one wonders what impact this leak will have on the editing process.

Posted on by Ed 1

Page proofs . . .

are killing me.  But, the book is here, and I am cleaning it up.  I hate page proofs.  Deeply.  This is the sort of detail work I loathe – combing back through 90,000 words looking for misspellings and erroneous punctuation.  It is taking days, because you can only focus that hard for so long.  And at the same time, I am cleaning up the index.
Oh, and that is on top of the article that was due back in today – I worked with two of my Ph.D. students, Mary Thompson and Manali Baruah, to produce a paper that examines how REDD+ functions as a form of unacknowledged environmental governance (defining legitimate terms and actors within debates over how to implement terrestrial carbon sequestration projects in forest areas).  We’ll see how it does in this round of peer review.
And then there is the talk I am supposed to be giving at UNC – Chapel Hill on Friday.  I’ll be discussing how we think about livelihoods in development, how current framings might have carried us as far as they are going to, and what a new framing might look like.  Yeah, it is coming together, but not as quickly as I’d hoped.
But, without further ado, the first few hundred words of Delivering Development:

Posted on by Ed 0

Global food prices again . . . but maybe a solution!

New Scientist has an interview with the authors of a recent report that blames food price shifts on financial market manipulation and speculation.  Worth reading – they are quite clear in their argument.

Is this another crisis like the one we had in 2008?

Not quite. Maximo Torero of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC notes that oil, the real driver of food prices and of the 2008 crisis, is relatively cheap, at around $75 a barrel, not over $100 as it was in 2008.

In 2008, both immediate grain prices, and the prices offered for future grain purchases in commodities markets, climbed steadily for months, whereas now they are spiking and dipping more unpredictably, which economists call volatility.

“The market fundamentals – supply and demand – do not warrant the price increases we have seen,” says Torero. Not all harvests have been bad, and after 2008 countries rebuilt grain stocks. “There are enough stocks in the US alone to cover the expected losses in Russia.”

The food riots in Mozambique were not due to world grain prices, he says, but because Mozambique devalued its currency, making imported food more expensive.

So what has been happening this year?

Markets are responding nervously to incomplete information. First there was a series of shocks: Russia’s export ban, lower maize forecasts, then, days later, a US ruling to allow more bioethanol in fuel which seemed likely to further reduce the maize – the main source of bioethanol – available for food. Meanwhile there was no reliable information about grain stocks, which is strategic information that most countries keep secret.

The result was nervous bidding and sporadically surging prices in commodity markets. And that attracted the real problem: investors wielding gargantuan sums of speculative capital and hoping to make a killing. When speculation exacerbated the price crisis of 2008, Joachim von Braun of the University of Bonn, Germany, then head of IFPRI, predicted that it would continue causing problems. “We saw that one coming and it came,” he says. “Food markets have new design flaws, with their inter-linkages to financial markets.”

Volatility also makes it harder to solve the long-term, underlying problem –inadequate food production – by making farmers and banks reluctant to invest in improved agricultural technology as they are unsure of what returns they will get. “Investment in more production alone will not solve the problem,” says von Braun. As long as extreme speculation causes constant price bubbles and crashes, either farmers will not get good enough returns to continue investing in production, or consumers will not be able to afford the food.

“Without action to curb excessive speculation, we will see further increases in these volatilities,” he says.

h/t to Resilience Science

This is very interesting, but what I found intriguing about this article was the researchers’ suggestion for how to address this uncertainty – transparency and information about supplies via remote sensing:

All the major producers already use remote sensing technology to watch each other’s fields. If countries would reveal just once what stocks they hold, says Torero, the satellite images can be used to calculate whether those stocks have risen or fallen, as growing conditions change. “All we need to know is the baseline,” he says. Reliable information about stocks could offset unwarranted jitters about crop failures, such as the ones that are contributing to the current market volatility.

Von Braun goes farther: he says there should be a global technical organisation that keeps track of world grain stocks and production, and which decides, using complex computerised models of world food markets, what range of grain prices are actually warranted by real supply and demand. Then if speculation starts to drive prices up out of this band, countries could intervene on markets, buying and selling just enough to counter speculative pressure. “This doesn’t stop speculation, just extreme speculation,” he says.

He thinks it would take a fund of $20-$30 billion to do the trick. In September the World Bank extended a $2 billion fund to respond to food price crises, but that is aimed at helping the poorest survive price spikes rather than intervening to stop them happening.

You may or not like the idea of a global organization or fund, but the idea of actually monitoring the supplies of the commodities to examine if pricing reflects actual market dynamics (supply/demand controlled for expected future conditions) is fantastic and already possible.  The only people who would lose here are those whose only skill set is in exploiting the uncertainty and lack of information in the market for their own profit – especially those willing to exacerbate uncertainty and opacity to generate larger profits.

Posted on by Ed 1

Well, maybe . . .

UNDP has launched its 20th anniversary edition of the Human Development Report.  In the report, they argue that development is working better than we realize – and use this to argue that aid is therefore working better than people think.  However, there is an important caveat in the report which calls this general claim into question.  As the BBC reports “There has been most progress in the areas of health and education, sectors which have received most focus in development assistance.”
This is a huge caveat.  These are the sectors that are easiest to measure – at least through traditional indicators.  Development programs have been designing programs around clear indicators and pumping money into achieving those indicators for some time – the same indicators used by the human development report.  Of course literacy rates are up.  Of course life expectancy is up.  These are low-hanging fruit.  But what does this really mean for the quality of life of people living in the Global South?  Are they living better, happier lives?  Or are they living longer, in greater misery than ever before?  Are any of these gains sustainable, or are they predicated on continual flows of aid?  There is no answer here – and it is an answer we need to obtain not through indicators, but by getting out there and talking to those we intend to help with development.  Get on your boots, and get out of the SUV/Mission Office!
I do, however, like that this report is trying to make an evidence-based case for the persistence of market failures around public goods.  We have seen, time and again, that when governments fail to provide security, access to healthcare, and education for their populations, the markets DO NOT step in to fill the gap.  A lot of poor, vulnerable people get left behind.  (Given recent trends and this week’s election results, it is entirely likely that South Carolina will empirically demonstrate this  can happen even here in the US, at least in the area of education, over the next four years).

Posted on by Ed 0

Manifestos can be fun . . .

especially when they sound half crazy, but I still largely agree with them: Kick it over manifesto
Mostly it’s an overwrought rant against neoclassical economics (though it could be applied much more widely to the discipline of economics), but I do love this:

You claim to work in a pure science of formula and law, but yours is a social science, with all the fragility and uncertainty that this entails. We accuse you of pretending to be what you are not.

Oh, so true, so true.  I’m on the same page with them . . . here . . . and here . . . and here, etc.
Perhaps this manifesto answers the question I asked at the end of this post.

Posted on by Ed 0

Shouldn't accounting rules apply to everyone?

Hoorah!  The World Bank is officially recognizing that environmental impacts are an example of a colossal market failure, and moving aggressively to get the cost of these impacts built into country’s national accounts.  To quote World Bank President Robert Zoellick:

“We know that human well-being depends on ecosystems and biodiversity,” said Mr Zoellick.

“We also know they’re degrading at an alarming rate.

“One of the causes is our failure to properly value ecosystems and all they do for us – and the solution therefore lies in taking full account of our ecosystem services when countries make policies.”

Well, super.  We’ll see how this goes over when a bunch of countries see the accounts they use for planning head into the toilet – my guess is massive pushback from countries that can (China, India, pretty much the entire Global North), which means the only countries that will be forced to deal with this revaluation are those in the Global South too small to resist World Bank pressure.  Enforcing this change in accounting unevenly will be remarkably unfair, if this is how it plays out.  Think I’m a bit alarmist?  Continue reading the article, right down at the end:

The draft agreement ministers are considering in the main negotiations here calls for “the values of biodiversity” to be integrated into countries’ development and poverty reduction strategies.

But delegates are still arguing over whether to call for integration into national accounts.

Only developing countries have to create poverty reduction strategies and development strategies.  So if these values are used in these strategies, but not in national accounts more widely, we are going to be hitting the poorest countries pretty hard while doing nothing ourselves.
However, there is a larger problem here – the valuing of everything via markets.  While this is an interesting effort, neither the science nor the economics are very well worked out, so the value of many ecosystem services (the goods and processes we get from ecosystems) is hard to calculate.  So, will we end up only dealing with this in ecosystems where the economics and science is further along (forests, for example – and temperate forests, at that)?  Or will we risk arbitrary valuations that lead to their own kinds of market failures?  The first option runs into the uneven enforcement problem I raised above – not every country has well-understood forests, so only some countries would have to deal with this revaluation.  The second is not an improvement on the current situation – indeed, it would give us the false impression we know what we are doing, when we do not.
Watch this space . . .

Posted on by Ed 1

Explaining myself

So, today I was challenged by an old friend, and a very well-known senior scholar in my field, about working for USAID.  He did so on two of the largest listservs in my field – admittedly, because I had just posted an offhand follow-up to some AID job postings to the list inviting people to apply.  Ben is great guy, and one of the founders of what might be thought of as hazards research – he’s also got his own political positions (which are evident below).  I like him a lot – he pushes me all the time, which I find very, very productive (and that is his intent).  I think his challenge, and my reply, help articulate why more people ought to be straddling the academic and practice worlds in development.
First, Ben:

Dear Ed,

I am sure all of us involved in Africa specialty group as well as the CAPE discussion list would benefit by hearing more detail about why you feel that the land tenure team at USAID has “an outstanding reputation” and why you believe “USAID is dead serious about its goal of becoming an intellectual leader in development…”.  Furthermore, if you are correct about the agency’s dead seriousness, what are the constraints and obstacles that have to be overcome?

From my point of view, until USAID is removed from its current position within the Department of State and made an independent agency like DFID in the UK or GTZ in Germany, everything done in the development field by anyone, alas, even you dear comrade, falls under the shadow of US geopolitical special interest.  There is also a case one could make that, in particular, all research on issues of resource access, land tenure falling into this category, needs to be free of ALL national and international development assistance agencies because of their usual commitment to what UNDP calls “alignment with host country interests.”  So, for example, to follow up on the World Bank’s recent report on land grabbing, it is doubtful if any development assistance partner (USAID, DFID, GTZ, UNDP, FAO, etc.) would criticize the corrupt practices in many countries leading to land grabbing.

Those seem to me to be macro and meso challenges to your optimism and jolly invitation to join you.  Finally, at the micro scale, it would seem, a fortiori, that those of us who work in the mode of participatory action research, something as you well know from your excellent past work demands a great deal of trust, can ask our friends and informants in various parts of rural Africa to put aside generations of mistrust of the great powers that ravaged their continent with surrogate conflicts during the Cold War and which continue to prop up corrupt regimes with development assistance.

Your scholarly credentials and intelligence are so obvious to those who know you, I am sure you must have good reasons for your sojourn at USAID and for your widely disseminated invitation to others to join you there.  Please share them with us.

All the best,

BEN

Dr. Ben Wisner

Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College London, UK

Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, USA

And my reply:

Hi Ben (and all):

One of the things I love most about Ben is his ability to pin me down – whether arguing about the modeling community or agreeing about the tragedy that was the Spanish anarchists in Catalunya during the Spanish Civil War.  There’s no such thing as an offhand invitation!  So I am happy to elaborate, at least as much as I can in a generally-circulated email – and please note, I am speaking for myself here.  No official agency messages coming from my mouth . . .

First, I am at USAID out of a serious desire to bridge the absurd and growing gulf between the academic and practitioner communities in development – we all know that the practitioner community is not reading the academic lit (and indeed they are not, though the reasons for this are complex, and include the fact that the agencies do not have subscriptions to the journals because they have difficulty justifying the expense [yes, this is absurd]), but the academic community does not spend a heck of a lot of time reading the practitioner stuff either – except mostly to throw (intellectual) stones without actually understanding the institutional context of the various documents they are critiquing.  Let’s be honest, the number of development geographers out there that have actually worked in a development agency (not just consulting, but actually in the organization) is tiny, which means that most of us (including me, at least until about 6 weeks ago) are critiquing something we understand very poorly, at best.  The result: two parallel literatures, and very little productive interplay.  So I am learning about how to translate between these communities to facilitate greater communication and cooperation.  It seems there is tremendous mistrust on both sides of this divide, for good reason and for not so good reasons.  I suppose I am trying to parse through those reasons as well.

That said, you certainly can call the “authenticity” of my experience into question.  I occupy a unique space here at USAID.  I am a fellow, which gives me freedom to move around beyond my obvious job description and to challenge things that I see as problematic.  Further, I am on leave from South Carolina – I did not surrender my position or my tenure.  So, I have a lot of security – I don’t worry about speaking up in a meeting (or responding to an email) in a manner that might have repercussions for my career – the worst that can happen to me is to be sacked before my fellowship is up and sent back to my tenured position.  So I cannot say that I fully understand the pressures that some of my colleagues must feel on a day-to-day basis.  Then again, I know my positionality and, trained as a poststructuralist, I’ve long thought that authenticity was sort of crap, anyway . . .

At another level, I fear that I (and perhaps many on this list share this feeling) was at risk of becoming the new extractive industry.  Speaking for myself, I found that I was going to various places in the world, doing serious fieldwork, writing it up and trying to push the literature forward . . . only to watch that work gain no traction at all in the policy and practice world. The same mistakes just kept happening.  So, all that my research really did was get me promotions and pay raises.  Going to a place in the Global South, gathering a resource (in this case knowledge and information), and then redistributing that resource in the Global North to my financial benefit?  Sounds like extraction/expropriation to me . . .  I found that untenable, and I am actively looking for ways to make my research “do something”.  Yes, this is fraught and intellectually dangerous territory.  But I found the alternative unacceptable.

Second, your critique of USAID’s position vis a vis US foreign policy is to the point – we are absolutely constrained by State’s vision for the world, and this does limit us somewhat.  That said, there is a lot of critical awareness of these limitations at USAID (much, much more than I’d expected), and significant efforts to push back and shift the views that are seen as problematic.  For example, there is excellent work on environment-conflict connections coming out of my bureau that aggressively challenges the absurd “water wars” mentality that seems to drive some corners of our foreign policy, referencing really good academic work on the nuanced, difficult connections between environmental change/resources and conflict.  Hell, they have Homer-Dixon thoroughly beaten.

At the same time, I don’t want to fall into the position of arguing from one end of a continuum (“thoroughly compromised”?), with academic research implicitly at the “free and untainted” other end.  There are a hell of a lot of unacknowledged politics in academic research (though I know from our conversations you are quite aware) – for example, NSF sets priorities all the time which are shaped by Congressional funding and partnerships with various agencies in the executive branch (CNH sound familiar, there CAPE-ers?), and we all run off to apply for these funds as if they were apolitical – a terribly naive position.  Put another way, one could argue that it is much easier to be critically aware of one’s position, role and influences when they are clearly articulated in a memo.

To answer fully, and with illustrations, your concerns for issues like land grabbing and “alignment with host country interests” is impossible in a public forum.  First, I don’t speak for the Agency.  Second, examples would invoke countries, and that is a bad idea when you can be seen (incorrectly, in my case) as speaking for US foreign policy.  Third, there are really good people here in the Agency who are actively working to address the very things you are worried about in a lot of different ways . . . many quite subtle.  It is not fair for me to place them in the spotlight without their consent.  You will have to trust me on this – which is hardly evidence in and of itself, but you do know me well.

The desire to become an intellectual leader in development seems sincere.  Sure, broad public statements may or may not have much meaning.  However, I have been struck by the pride folks have in the mission of this organization – and the rage they feel over the ways in which the Agency was downsized and stripped of many of its best thinkers over its recent history.  This is not merely a front office “feel good” thing – I see this as a feeling that permeates the agency, from the administrator down to the line offices and the field missions.  To that end, they are staffing up – and they seem sincere about bringing highly qualified people in to develop cutting-edge programming.  How this will play out if those highly qualified people start pushing back against existing programs and policy, I have no idea.  But this agency is not a monolith, and a lot of people I interact with are very open to criticism and respond very quickly and positively to it – again, to an extent I have found surprising.

And it is from this that I issued the invitation – either to apply for these jobs, or to consider taking an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship, or for you more senior types (am I more senior?  Nah) a Jefferson Science Fellowship, and serve a sabbatical or leave year at AID.  They want good people.  Most of the folks I work with want to be challenged constructively.  And if those of us who have the training, experience and critical faculties don’t apply for these opportunities, we cede the field to a bunch of people with MAs in Political Science who for their research likely ran massive regressions on the relationship between conflict and natural resources without bothering to contextualize either the type of conflict or the natural resource in question (yes, I have actually seen this very project proposal – structured because they could not get a large enough N to regress if they parsed by natural resource.  Mercifully, the researcher in question is not here at AID).

Finally, your point on addressing generations of mistrust is an excellent one, and one that I have no good answer for.  USAID is particularly challenged in this regard because it implements so little of its own programming – basically, most of the agency’s programs are contracted out, and AID staff are generally limited to monitoring the contractors and their products.  This creates a major problem for the agency – I think there is a real gap between what people in the agency know about what is really happening in the world, even at the level of the field missions, and actual events in the world.  This was a central point of my book <<plug alert>> (Delivering Development – forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan in February, available for preorder at all major booksellers now!) and it seems to be borne out by my experiences thus far.  But given budgetary constraints, likely to be tightened starting roughly a week from today, USAID will never be allowed to staff up to levels necessary to implement its own programs, and therefore get that handle on what really happens in the world.  I will be interacting with country missions quite a bit over the next several months, and I suspect I might pick up some insights along the way . . . or at least I hope so.

I’ve spent way too much time on this response, and anyone still reading at this point probably wants the last 10 minutes of their lives back.  Ben, I am genuinely thankful for you and the challenges you pose – you make me a better thinker and person.  And one with less sleep, dammit.

Best,

Ed

Posted on by Ed 1

When business people assume they can do climate vulnerability analysis . . .

things often go wrong.  Take, for example, the climate change vulnerability index produced by Maplecroft.  At first glance, this looks interesting – a scale of risk that can be mapped to visually represent the levels of challenge presented by climate change to any particular place.

© MapleCroft

However, look more closely and it becomes clear that the product isn’t really useful at all.  Anybody who takes 42 variables and aggregates them into a single category (vulnerability) has created something sort of useless.  OK, so the vulnerability is high.  But vulnerability to what?  Flood, drought, crop failure due to temperature, coastal fisheries collapse?  All of these things are problems related to climate change, but they are not present in all places at all times, and they all have different impacts on people (and Maplecroft should probably note that they have different impacts on investments) that require different interventions.  So the index does not tell you anything diagnostic about this vulnerability.  It is, at best, a first step to thinking about vulnerability and how to address it.
On top of overselling the product and its value, their underlying data is problematic – if you download the map you can see the size of the grid they used for the data – it is huge.  This suggests that they have used global circulation models (GCMs) for their climate projection variables.  The use of global scale data in local cases is highly problematic – downscaling these models to regional or even local levels has proven very difficult because the factors that most influence the global climate are not necessarily the most important factors at regional or local scales.  For example, local deforestation can have a huge impact on local precipitation patterns over time without having a very large impact on global circulation as a whole – so the downscaled model (focused on global circulation) will not capture the importance of this local factor in determining local climate outcomes.  Just looking at Ghana on their free map (you can download a copy from the page above), I can tell you that they have missed a really distressing trend toward the loss of the minor rainy season in the forest (Southern) areas of Ghana . . . which is going to have a massive impact on both cocoa production (national economic impact) and rain-fed agriculture.  If they got this wrong, I am guessing they have missed a hell of a lot of other things.
This is what happens when the business community starts jonesing for climate change, but won’t go to the scientific community to get solid advice on how to get the information they need.  Look at Maplecroft’s core team – only one of the six has really engaged with climate change or global environmental change more broadly in any meaningful way – and he is trained in Business Studies, not climatology, biogeography, ecology, anthropology, political ecology or any other number of fields that produce the people who develop basic knowledge on climate change, environmental change and their related human impacts.  In short, they really don’t know what they are talking about, but they have made a nice looking product that might mislead people into thinking that they do.
What drives my concern here is not some sort of academic/governmental territoriality.  When people approach the issue of climate change and its human impacts without a serious consideration of the science behind these broad issues, there is the potential for very serious problems.  You should see the REDD+-related business proposals circulating out there . . . I’ve seen crazy stuff, like people wanting to plant genetically-modified super-fast-growing eucalypts in the swamps around the Amazon to enhance carbon uptake in otherwise not-so-forested areas, without the slightest consideration for the ecological impact of such a species (which would, according to my biogeography colleagues, surely go invasive immediately).  Without meaning to, people might end up doing a hell of a lot more damage than good if they just run off willy-nilly.
There are a lot of us out here who would love to work with you – we want to help, and we’ve already made a lot of these mistakes.  Let us save you time, and save the folks suffering these vulnerabilities a lot of unnecessary pain.

Posted on by Ed 2

On the use and misuse of anecdotes . . .

Blog The NonSequitor has a post on the use and misuse of anecdotes in discussions of climate change.  It is an interesting, well-reasoned piece that I largely agree with.  However, I think the post sort of misses the point of the politics of climate change – to get anything done on this issue requires thinking very carefully about how to communicate findings and ideas with the public.  While I agree, in principle, that arguing against climate change or climate change science by picking at an imperfect anecdote (i.e. Al Gore making it seem like 20 meters of sea level rise is impending) does not really address the underlying science, or the soundness of the underlying argument, the assumption that John Casey is making in this post is that science and truth are driving political decision-making.  They do not.
The simple difference between politics and science: in science, there are problems and solutions (or at least means of coming to a solution).  In politics, there are issues and interests that require debate, consideration and compromise.  Science and data are just fodder for that process – they always have been.  Scientists fundamentally fail to recognize this when they engage the political process, and tend to become frustrated when what seems self-evident to them ends up debated, and when obvious solutions get watered down or buried.  Folks, we are not doing science when we engage in policy – we are doing politics.  And that means accepting that people will, in fact, “weak man” your arguments by finding one imperfect anecdote and using it against the whole argument.  Yes, it’s intellectually dishonest.  It is also reality.
Politics does not deal in truth, it deals in tactics.  And that means we have to be tactically aware of what we are doing when we lay out examples and anecdotes.  It also means that we have to be aggressive in addressing efforts to “weak man” the evidence for climate change, instead of dismissing such efforts as not requiring attention (see the IPCC’s botched handling of the misrepresented melt rate of the Himalayan Glaciers).  It is good to know the fallacious arguments being used against the science – but only if we are willing to address those arguments.

Posted on by Ed 3