A Pimm and Proper World:

posted in: January 2002 | 0

An Interview with Biologist Stuart Pimm

For 15 years, biologist Stuart Pimm studied Hawaiian birds. He no longer works in Hawai`i, but Pimm credits his years here with changing his approach to science. Watching critters go extinct virtually under his nose brought home the realization that the obligations of the scientist today extend beyond mere observation and must now include efforts to protect biodiversity. And that, in a nutshell, is the driving theme in Pimm’s latest book, The World According to Pimm (McGraw-Hill, 2001; 283 pages, $24.95 cloth).

Pimm is senior research scientist with the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia University in New York. The World According to Pimm draws on his field experiences not just in Hawai`i, but also in the Amazon basin, Afghanistan, South Africa, Siberia and other exotic world hot spots, to describe the ways in which and the extent to which humans are depleting the Earth’s resources.

Pimm, born in Derby, England, was educated at Oxford and received his Ph.D. from New Mexico State University. He now makes his home in Key Largo, Florida, where he studies the endangered Cape Sable sparrow – a healthier cousin to the now-extinct Dusky — and commutes to Columbia. Patricia Tummons of Environment Hawai`i caught up with him on a recent balmy December morning in Manhattan and talked with Pimm about his work and his book.

The first thing that strikes me about any book, and this one in particular, is –

The title?

Yes. It’s an extraordinary title. How did you come to select it?

I wish I could say I selected it. I didn’t. I had struggled for years on what the title would be and had never come up with anything that was gripping. My agent read the book and said, ‘It’s “The World According to Pimm” — it’s your world, your view of the world.’

One person told me he would never read a book with such an egotistical title. I got to thinking about that and I thought, well, perhaps it could be egotistical. On the other hand, it could just as well be self-effacing and modest — ‘this is just my own humble opinion.’

And it’s meant in that context. There have been so many times when I’ve stood on top of Pohakupalaha on Maui. All you can see are the tops of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. It recalls that famous picture of the Earth from the moon – the image of how terribly small and fragile our world is. Hawai`i does that in a very powerful way. And it’s those experiences that made me a conservation biologist.

It was with that emotion that I wanted to tell a story about the big facts about the world. It started out as being a technical book. Immediately I realized that these were the numbers I wanted to share with everybody. And I felt frustrated as a scientist by those people who would ask, ‘Well what do you do?’ And I would hand them a reprint in Nature and Science far too complicated for even my undergraduate students to understand. So, I wanted to tell everyone my story, my Hawaiian experiences, everything.

In your last chapter you introduce three characters: Mrs. Jones, Mr. Smith and Dr. Brown, who represent, respectively, a devout Christian, a hard-nosed fiscal conservative, and a scientist, and begin to engage each of them in a dialogue.

Exactly, though there’s a lot of things we must do other than just talk. It’s clear there are two hugely important sectors of society that we must engage. One of them is the business community, who haven’t always seen the unifying influence of environmental factors on the world’s problems. The more interesting one, in some ways, is the dialogue with the religious community, who are extraordinarily diverse.

Opening that dialogue is not going to be a very easy task, because some of them don’t like us at all, and we don’t like some of them. But we can’t avoid that dialogue. Just because we disagree on some things – say, evolution — doesn’t mean to say that we can’t find common ground on others. We can’t afford to push that debate back for a hundred years while we lose what precious areas that we still have in Hawai`i and the rest of the world.

One of the points you raise in the dialogue with Mrs Jones is the idea of Earth’s resources being God’s creation. So you would think there would be some instinct to stewardship.

Exactly so. It’s that stewardship – we have to build a broader consensus to achieve it than we have at present. We all use the expression “preaching to the choir;” we no longer can do that. We have to get every section of society on our side.


“Just because we disagree on some things – say, evolution — doesn’t mean to say that we can’t find common ground on others. We can’t afford to push that debate back for a hundred years while we lose what precious areas that we still have in Hawai`i and the rest of the world.”

The third element that you were addressing was the scientific community in its ivory tower who that rarefied type of research that never quite comes down to Earth where it’s applicable to management decision.

When I was in my early 20s I consciously remember thinking that I would never go to Hawai`i because so many species had gone extinct there and it’s a completely messed up environment. I think there must be some fairy who sits on your shoulder taps you with her wand when one makes such confident statements. She did, and in 1978, off I go to Hawai`i.

I immediately realized that what was happening there was on my watch — that however many scientific papers I published, two generations from now people would look back and say, ‘you were working on the Big Island in the late 70s and all these species went extinct; how could you let that happen?’

That, more than anything else, brought the problem home to me. Ivory tower science could wait. We must just postpone some of our intellectual interests. We have no alternative but to get on with the task of providing the science that’s needed by The Nature Conservancy of Hawai`i, the state biologists, the federal biologists, the full range of people concerned with conservation. We’d better provide them with the tools that they need. If we’re not going to provide them, who will?

And so, yes, I reserve my harshest criticisms for my scientific colleagues who simply do not get involved.

So how have you become involved? Is there any kind of useful result emerging from your work in Hawai`i?

A qualified yes. One of the examples was the `Alala. Twenty years ago, Cynthia Salley had evicted the scientists from her land because she didn’t like what they were doing. And with hindsight I think she was probably right. Ten years ago she was being sued by Audubon. The Fish and Wildlife Service and Mrs.Salley were defendants. Audubon was saying, ‘you’re not pursuing the protection of the `Alala with sufficient vigor.’ The other view was. ‘we should just leave the birds alone. There’s two, three pairs of breeding birds on the McCandless land, let’s let them just continue.’ And the other people were saying, ‘no, we need to bring those birds into captivity to add to the flock at Olinda’ [the state’s captive breeding facility on Maui]. I was part of a National Research Council panel that came up with a solution that was neither of those things. It was a solution that recognized that if we left those birds alone, eventually they’d be extinct. We recognized that by managing the flocks together there was a hope of saving the `Alala.

Now, we are certainly not out of the woods with the `Alala but I think the fate of the `Alala is more hopeful than one would have imagined 12 years ago.

There are other cases where it’s desperate and too late — the Po`ouli being a case in point. But I think overall we are beginning to learn what we can do and what we can’t, and that there are times and places where we have to have that science. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that science is everything, that scientific solutions are complete. But there are a lot of areas where, without good science, we cannot be involved.

You subtitled your book, “a scientist audits the Earth.” And that audit involves the attempt to assign a value to nature’s services and figure out how much of those services are consumed by that fraction of living beings called humans. You come up with some amazing figures — 42 percent roughly of the production of terrestrial biomass, 35 percent of the coastal fisheries or continental shelf fisheries. Somebody coming at this from just an economic standpoint would say, oh, 40 percent, that still leaves 60. Or 35 percent, that still leaves 65. But all the rest of the Earth has to survive on what remains, to say nothing of generating the next generation of biomass that we’re going to consume.

Given that the Earth’s population is growing by leaps and bounds, even if the rate of growth tapers off, a lot of new people are added each day. How can that consumption be reined in? Or can the Earth be made more productive? How would you approach that problem of consumption?

The issue is not one of how many people the Earth can support. My colleague here at Columbia, Joel Cohen, has written a huge book about that, a very thoughtful book. To use John Kennedy’s famous idea, I ask not what the planet does for us but what we do to the planet. At 42 percent, we’re already beginning to see a substantial amount of harm to the planet. The question then is, given what we do, can we be much better stewards? Can we protect the variety of life on Earth? Can we not overharvest our fisheries? Can we not overgraze the land and so on?

The answer is yes. There are things we do that we do not need to do. We can have our planet and eat, too. We have learned a lot of lessons from the past.

Examples?

A hundred years ago one of the major environmental problems for Hawai`i was the massive soil erosion. People had cleared the forest. The foresters of the day were bringing in trees from all over the place. Hawai`i is extraordinary in having these completely alien rainforests, but they did solve the environmental problem of the day..

With hindsight we would probably now want to restore the native forests. There are some substantial areas in Hawai`i where, yes, we could probably get rid of those eucalyptus and grow `ohi`a or koa. I don’t blame the 19th century foresters, but there are clearly ways in which we could have watershed protection and maintain it with native vegetation. It’s a small local example, but it does sort of show us some of the things that we did in the past that we can begin to undo.

The fact that we overharvest so many of our fisheries at such a gross scale is incompetent. We have to tackle, among other things, perverse subsidies. The world’s fish catch is worth $50 billion, and we pay a hundred billion dollars for it because we subsidize people to catch fish. And that’s bad for the economy and that’s bad for the fish.

It’s always a tough political choice to take on somebody else’s subsidy. But the reality is that subsidies are a major cause of environmental harm. .

When it comes to fisheries we support the fisheries as a whole by giving low-cost loans to people who want boats, spending a huge amount of money on fisheries research, a whole variety of things that subsidize the fishery effort. Then we try to regulate it. But enforcement and regulation all cost money.

There are other tools we could begin to use. One of them is to admit that conventional fisheries management doesn’t work. Let’s set aside marine protected areas so that we remove some of the fish out of the system for harvest.

Now, that doesn’t address the perverse subsidy issue. But clearly we need to educate our politicians about the fact that this is a finite world and in a finite world you simply cannot go out and encourage people with tax breaks and other perks to do environmentally damaging things.

And that’s a large part of getting the public engaged — getting the public involved in a dialogue. We want to get together with together with fiscal conservatives who are as upset as we are that out of a global GNP of something on the order of $20 trillion, the perverse subsidies account for several trillion dollars. Something on the order of 10 percent of the global GNP is spent on doing environmentally harmful and economically harmful things. It’s a big target for conservation action.

But it’s more than just subsidies, isn’t it? In the last century we’ve had technological developments that don’t require a lot of subsidies. Any bass fisherman can put a fishfinder on his boat and go out and catch the last fish in the lake. And those types of technological developments have made it all the more difficult to manage resources.

No question about that. In the fishery context, a solution has to be marine protected areas. We have to put a chunk of the ocean’s resources in protective custody. And that will take care of some of the problem. Clearly, eliminating perverse subsidies will take care of another part of the problem. Then we have the massive problem of the commons – areas that invite a free-for-all scramble for natural resources. Put a 200-mile circle around Hawai`i and you can barely see it on the map of the Pacific. So most of the Pacific is going to be a commons. There are issues of how you harvest tuna across that commons, with all the potential for the sorts of issues a commons implies. The solutions most certainly are not easy ones.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, although there are clearly things we can do. Yes, we’re worried about logging but what can we do about tropical deforestation? We can begin to buy the logging leases. Over a big chunk of the planet those will probably cost on the order of $5 billion over the next twenty or thirty years. That’s not an impossibly large sum of money.

The World Wildlife Fund is trying to purchase 10 percent of the Amazon for roughly a quarter of a billion dollars. So $2.5 billion might buy out all the Amazon leases. You have to look at some of those things; a free-market solution to the extent that you can implement it is not unreasonable. So why should we protect wild areas?

You know, there’s a spectacular example here in New York and it’s sitting right there in front of you. We have the world’s most marvelous tap water – I don’t know if you’ve tasted it but it comes from the watersheds upstate. A few years ago New York was contemplating a larger water supply. The engineering solution was going to cost on the order of five billion dollars to build and a big slice of a billion dollars a year each year to manage. The ecological solution was to improve the existing watersheds and buy more of them. And I think the total cost was about a half a billion dollars. Ecosystem services are not some imaginary event. They make a big difference.

If you have massive soil erosion, your beaches and your ocean in Hawai`i are not going to be anywhere near as nice as they should be. To have a tax structure that rewards people for beating up these lands is just simply nuts. That’s something that needs to be taken care of at a political level. It comes down to `aina, heritage, the whole bit. That’s where we have to get together with many different constituents.

One thing that you argue for is scientists becoming advocates for policies that would lead to increased conservation.

I make a distinction. Advocacy is the dirtiest word in the scientist’s vocabulary. I am not an advocate, but I don’t see a problem in my communicating my science. I’m quite happy with the idea of going to a scientific meeting and telling people what I think. What part of my job description says that I should not take an hour and a half with you over breakfast? Or what part of my job description says that I shouldn’t go and visit your senators and share with them what I know about problems of Hawaiian conservation? Or that I shouldn’t talk about global change with them?

“What part of my job description says that I shouldn’t go and visit your senators and share with them what I know about problems of Hawaiian conservation? Or that I shouldn’t talk about global change with them?”

That is the distinction. I am not an advocate in the sense of somebody who is paid or chooses to adopt a particular position and then goes and pushes that, irrespective of the facts.

What concerns me is that scientists must be prepared to communicate their science to politicians, to media, to the public, and not just merely to their colleagues.

I find it unbridled arrogance that scientists feel that they should only be obligated to teach their scientific colleagues. The fact that I’ve written a popular book, the fact that I’ve spent a lot of time on the Hill, the fact that I will talk to any journalist who will give me the time – that doesn’t make me an advocate. That just simply means that I’m doing my job.

You talk about going to Congress and walking the halls. Do you take on such issues as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?

I’ve been involved in a number of things. I’m on the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists. And they have a very strong record on energy policy and climate change. So I go along as an ecologist on that effort.

This whole debate about drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge makes me angry more than anything else as an American. We are being told that we have to drill in this refuge because we have a patriotic need. I think that is unbelievably unholy and corrupt, because it is simply not true. ANWR isn’t going to come on line for a decade while having CAFƒ [corporate average fuel economy] standards applied fleetwide will have a hundred times bigger impact. That could come into effect with technologies available within a year or two. It’s inexcusable to use the deaths of thousands of people just down the street from here for your own personal profit. So, yes, I’ve become involved in those kinds of issues.

“This whole debate about drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge makes me angry more than anything else as an American. We are being told that we have to drill in this refuge because we have a patriotic need. I think that is unbelievably unholy and corrupt.”
In your book, you mention that the impact of human is not just economic but it’s ethical, and that there’s a moral component to our behavior vis-ˆ-vis nature. Can you expand on that?

Well, there was an interesting survey done of conservation biologists and ecologists (I was not one of them). They all turned out to be a rather godless bunch. But all of them felt powerful ethical and spiritual concerns about the environment. Yes, I go to church. I’m a Christian. For me, it’s just immediately obvious that what we’re doing is making choices in our current generation about the future of countless generations to come.

That strikes me as being not only an ethical issue but one of the most powerful ethical issues that we face.

That said, the interesting thing is that if you prod almost every scientist – and you don’t have to prod them very hard – they will all agree that the planet’s future is an ethical issue. It’s something to be concerned about in a non-scientific way.

— Patricia Tummons

Volume 12, Number 7 January 2002

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