Consensus For Action

As the migrant crisis in Europe continues to heat up, everyone is quick to recognize the immediate cause: people are fleeing war-torn regions, this time primarily Syria and ISIS-controlled strongholds.  But, hiding underneath that proximate cause is a long-term driver that will need to be recognized and dealt with if we hope to keep Europe’s migration crisis of today from becoming the new normal worldwide.  That driver is rapid population growth.

As global change scientists who have long studied why species ebb and flow, we see over and over again that, in non-human species, when so many offspring are born that food and living space become too scarce for comfort in the species’ home range, the youngsters make the risky decision to disperse, in search of new territory and a richer life.  So, too, with the human race.  It is no coincidence that migrants are fleeing exactly those regions where population growth has been extremely high over the past couple of decades. Birth rates up to four times higher than in most European countries have, over the past three decades, nearly doubled the population of the top migrant-producing countries today. 

Would-be immigrants at the Greek-Macedonian border. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, By Bundesministerium für Europa, Integration und Äusseres (Arbeitsbesuch Mazedonien), originally posted to Flickr by Österreichisches Außenministerium 

 As people escape poor, dangerous living conditions they flow towards nations with more resources, which typically also have lower birth rates and more stable population densities. Such immigration is now fueling population growth in many developed countries, including western Europe, despite those countries exhibiting birth rates so low that the number of old “native-born” residents are beginning to outnumber the young.  Europe is not alone in seeing a migrant influx, of course: the USA houses more immigrants than any other country, some 20% of the world’s migrants.

What connects the dots of too-rapid population growth, war, and migration?  Rapid population growth ultimately results in an intensified competition for resources, jobs, and even such basics as food and water.  If this takes place where long-standing animosity between different religious and/or ethnic groups also exists, the situation ignites into full-on war, and people literally flee for their lives. That is exactly the case where ISIS has been expanding strongholds, and why, in 2014, war-torn Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia accounted for nearly 20 million of the refugees knocking at the doors of other nations. These areas saw their populations increase between 66% and 160% since 1990, compared to the world average of 27%. In fact, greater than 60% population growth and internal war since 1990 marks fifteen of the twenty-two countries that consistently produced most refugees in the 21st century.

As we go into the future, all demographic models show population continuing to skyrocket in the poorest countries, notably in Africa and the Middle East, including many nations already showing internal conflict. Exacerbating the problem will be impacts of human-caused climate change.  Already, unusual climate events have contributed to the refugee-producing crises in Southeast Asia, northeast Africa, and to the Arab Spring uprising, and it is exactly the poorest, most densely populated, and politically least stable regions of the world that are predicted to be hit hardest by rising sea levels, disruption of water and food supplies, and energy shortages slated to intensify as the world tips into a new climate regime. This is the perfect recipe to continue to feed mass migrations.

Without full recognition of these underlying drivers, immigration problems will certainly intensify. Walls and rhetoric will never solve the problem. Refugees will continue to pour across borders by air, land, and sea. However, recognizing that rapid population growth plays the key role in triggering mass migration reveals solutions to the problem that will be effective in the long term.  

Scaling the border wall between Mexico and Arizona.  U.S. Navy photo by Steelworker 1st Class Matthew Tyson, via Wikimedia Commons. 

One critical piece of the solution will be to address the overarching problem of rapid, unsustainable population growth by international programs that provide educational opportunities and basic health care to women in parts of the world where they currently are unavailable. Numerous studies document the rapid reduction of birth rates that result. 

Another is international cooperation to improve living conditions in poor parts of the world, and to stabilize fragile governments.

At the same time it will be essential to minimize climate disruption to prevent relocation of hundreds of millions of climate refugees. This can be accomplished through rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy production in the developed world, and leapfrogging over fossil fuels to produce clean energy in developing countries.

Finally, the most important ingredient may well be the heightened influx of immigrants now underway, which provides rich opportunities to learn how to live alongside people from distant lands. Ultimately, fixing the global problems that lead to the immigration crisis will require tolerance and melding of ideas and knowledge from all the diverse cultures that comprise the human race.  By accepting the biological realities of immigration, and embracing the chance to learn about each other, we just may be able to build a global society that is more vibrant in the coming decades, rather than one that is increasingly fragmented by fear and isolationism.

By Elizabeth A. Hadly, hadly@stanford.edu  and Anthony D. Barnosky, barnosky@berkeley.edu

Hadly and Barnosky are professors of biology at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley, respectively, and authors of the new book: End Game, Tipping Point for Planet Earth? (2015, HarperCollins / WilliamCollins, London), which will be published in the United States in April under the title Tipping Point for Planet Earth: How Close Are We To The Edge? (Thomas Dunne / St. Martin’s Press, New York).

By Anthony D. Barnosky, Professor in the Department of Integative Biology, Curator in the Museum of Paleontology, and Research Paleoecologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.  His new book Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth (University of California Press, Fall 2014) explores in more detail how people can keep wild species and wild places on Earth.

(This is the fifth of six blogs about my reflections on wild places and wild species—what they are and why they are important—written as I traveled through parts of Africa this past summer.) 

Feeling Wild

My soul is at peace.  That's how I know I'm in the wild. 

Maybe part of it is that it feels like autumn, always my favorite season.  Here in Botswana's Okavango Delta, though, it's technically winter and what I'd call an Indian summer day where I come from is occurring in late June, not late September.  Maybe part of my contentment is because I'm sitting here in the shade, outside the little tent cabin Liz and I are sharing, looking out on waving marsh grass, heads like feathers, but much taller than my own six feet of humanity.  Breaks of blue-green water peek out of the grass.  We're on a meander that is right on the edge of the delta.

In the middle of the night we heard hippos splash out of the water and spend some time munching the grass right outside the canvas walls.  On safari this morning, it was quiet when we killed the engine, only the sound of the breeze, birdsong, the rustling of the grass.  Even the elephants were quiet, as we parked there in the midst of a herd that milled around us.  I counted at least fifty; it's my guess the real number was close to a hundred. 

Likewise the lions we came across were serene, resting in the shade, all three of them lazy males.  Liz spotted them there in the tall grass, two of them sprawled out sound asleep, the other one with his paws stretched out in front, hind quarters cocked to the side, head up, quietly watching us watch him.  Crocodile on the bank, fish eagle in the tree, pelicans and flamingoes herding fish in a drying out pond.  Nobody seemed to have a care in the world. Though I suspect the fish did.

The other thing is the smells. At one point there was sage—sweeter than the sagebrush I'm used to, but familiar enough to make me feel good.  Marsh mud, not strong, tempered by the hay-smell of drying grass.  And unfamiliar, yet familiar: animals, different kinds, that had recently gone by, and more pungent yet (but in a good way), the earthy smell of elephant droppings.

Getting here is not all that easy, and I'm sure that's one of the things that makes it my kind of wild.  We took the quickest route, a thirty-minute flight from Maun in a seven-seat bush plane.  From our vantage it was easy to see why driving to the Okavango from our takeoff point would entail six to eight hours in the best of conditions, much of it on a two rut road, and a couple of days if the water is running high, even though it's only an 80 mile drive, give or take.

We're here when the water is fairly high. The rainy season in Angola stopped more than a month ago, but it's taken all this time for the water to finally make its way along the Namibian border and spread out in a broad fan here, where tectonic warping has dropped the land surface a little lower than up north.  From our bird’s eye view, the result looks like loosely braided blue-black ribbons, which are actually of water.  Between each of the watery strands are islands and strips of land, some big, some small, but all of them with their concentric bands of bright green next to the water giving way to golden brown a little higher up where the grasses have already dried, to deeper forest or olive green in the places where the trees never get drowned.  As the season goes on we're told, the bands of brown get wider, and the bright green marshy areas and blue water begin to disappear under the relentless African summer sun. 

The fluctuating water levels and deep sand it leaves behind are why there are few roads into this place, and of those there are, why parts of them are submerged by water and impassable for much of the year.  Even now, it can be touch and go. This morning we dipped our land rover nose-deep into a couple of ponds the road runs through, and I wasn't all that sure we'd make it to other side.  We always did, but not so for two other vehicles in our party, who apparently spent much of their morning stuck in a thigh-deep water crossing.  Where there wasn't water on the road, the sand can make travel tricky—in one place this morning, our wheels just spun, land rover stationary, sand flying, in a maneuver that got us going, but just as easily could have dug us down to our axle.

The lack of roads into and through this area is one aspect that makes it feel wild—indeed, actually makes it wild.  But the Okavango Delta also blends the two other characteristics I've come to realize define wild for me: not only landscapes untamed by people, but in those landscapes, animals untamed by people. My wild has to have both.

And the Okavango Delta does. The delta does what it wants: when the river is high, the going gets tough, and when the river is low, things get easier, for people anyway.  My point is that we don't control this river—it does what it wants.  The river controls us.  Likewise, nobody is controlling the animals that live here. They come and go as they have for millennia, with the rhythms of the river and the seasons.  No fences in sight, once you leave the camps.

The animals seem not too worried by humans, but they don't seem tame. It's more like a tacit understanding between the animals and people—you don't mess with us, we won't mess with you.  I'm willing to bet it's pretty much the same tacit understanding that has existed between people and the animals here since Homo sapiens evolved.  Maybe it's not too different from whatever signal the lions we saw today were giving to the herd of impalas that were also in our sightline:  don't sweat it impalas, too lazy to hunt right now, but don't let your guard down.

I used to think that Paul Martin's old explanation of why megafauna survived in Africa, while succumbing to human pressures most everywhere else, was pretty ad hoc.  He thought that since humans and the big animals evolved together in Africa, they reached some ecological arrangement early on that basically said live and let live, except when you were hungry enough.  Maybe he wasn't so far off though—that's sure what the lions were saying to the impalas today.  

Sitting here in the afternoon sun it's seeming less and less farfetched to me that early humans slotted into the overall ecosystem the same way.  Surely, that's the message we got, and gave, to dozens of wild species this morning. 

It's ironic. It's solace, and it's peaceful, but it's wild.

By Anthony D. Barnosky, Professor in the Department of Integative Biology, Curator in the Museum of Paleontology, and Research Paleoecologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.  His new book Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth (University of California Press, Fall 2014) explores in more detail how people can keep wild species and wild places on Earth.

Peep Show

(This is the third of six blogs about my reflections on wild places and wild species—what they are and why they are important—written as I traveled through parts of Africa this past summer.) 

Sitting in the Nelspruit airport waiting for a flight to Zambia, I'm still troubled about this wild thing, maybe even more so after last night.  Last night we returned to the place where the leopards hang out. 

On the wild side was this:  we came across that big bull elephant in rut, seems like the same one we had the encounter with on foot a couple of days ago.  This time we were in our land rover, but even so he was about twice our size.  He had a standoff with another land rover that was ahead of us.  From a distance, we watched him glare at it, wave his ears, stamp his foot, and then start to move forward.  The land rover moved backward as fast as prudence dictated, executed one third of a three-point turn, and headed off in another direction.  Our driver knew enough to just sit there awhile, let the big guy turn around and amble down the road a bit, and then we followed, keeping enough distance between us and him, maybe fifty yards or so.  Though our prime view was of his rear end, every now and then he'd swing his head side to side, enough to give us a clear view of a dark stripe of pungent ooze dripping out of his musth gland.

The bull at one point stepped off the road, put his shoulder against a tree that was three times his height and with a trunk the girth of his leg, and then began to push.  You could see him strain, the tree began to bend, creak, and crackle, but it held.  He tried again, same result, and then he wrapped his trunk around it and began pulling.  The tree wouldn't give in though, which I guess speaks to how deep and extensive its root system must be.  At last the elephant gave an audible sigh of disgust, and contented himself by reaching skyward with his trunk, wrapping it around a branch about as big around as my leg and twice as tall as me, and with one good tug he splintered it off.  Then he got down to business chewing off the sweet bark, using his trunk to gently rotate it as he threaded the branch through his jaws. The portion of the branch that went in one side of his jaws was covered with rough gray bark; he'd work it with his trunk to push it sideways into the void of his mouth, and it would come out the other side clean and gleaming creamy white, kind of like de-barking a tree in a sawmill. Eventually he had enough, and resumed his slow, deliberate stroll down the road.

On the tame side.  A sundowner stop, gin and tonics, and an orange African sunset silhouetting  black trees, their branches like intricate river networks gathering stars from the darkening sky. Eventually the trees faded into the black of the night, the Southern Cross lit up, and the Milky Way shone spectacularly bright.

 It was under that night sky we returned to the wild, or at least what initially seemed that way.  Word came again on the radios: the leopards had been spotted.  We were bushwhacking through dense underbrush to follow them.  Three land rovers, each with their spotlights, now totally off road, crashing and snapping through the thicket where the leopards were hunting cane rats.  By then in my mind, the leopards were fugitives on the run, and we were the yahoos with dogs about to put them in chains. 

And then, there they were.  There was no snarling, panicked attempt to get out of our spotlight beam.  Instead, the male stretched out on his belly and crunched happily on a cane rat he'd just caught, not a care in in the world.  The female patiently lay a few yards a way, with what I soon came to realize was a dreamy look of anticipation in her eyes.

And it wasn't anticipation for a bite of cane rat.  She had something far more primal on her mind.   After the male ate every last morsel, he licked the blood off his paws, going through very much the same ritual as your house cat after a meal.  Suddenly he stood, and in two or three strides he was on the other side the female, whereupon he once again plopped down in the tall soft grass, head up, calmly checking us out.

As he'd gone by the female, she'd given a soft growl, something like a loud purr, but more menacing. Now she was up, brushing by the male, making body contact, giving him a good whiff of her hind end.  He growled, she moved off.  But in a minute or so, the same routine.  Next thing we knew the male's on top, a sound like leopard laughter, he's biting the back of her neck.  In less than ten seconds it’s over.  We've just seen leopards mate.  In the wild?

This is where it gets tricky for me.  We watched three rounds of that mating routine, and we weren't the only ones.  Three land rovers surrounded those leopards on one side, a tracker in each shining their bright lights on the whole event.  It was eerily like the leopards were in the spotlights on a grassy stage, a thorny thicket as the backdrop.  And us, and the twenty other people observing the show, we were like paparazzi, the number of camera flashes intensifying pretty much in rhythm with the fireworks presumably lighting up the leopards' synapses. 

If it all sounds a bit like the porn version of Wild Kingdom, with us as the both film crew and audience, well, that's pretty much what it was.  Afterwards our guide told us that those leopards have become completely used to the land rovers over the past few years, and that the after-sun-down chase has become about as familiar to the leopards as your evening cocktail is to you.  It's just what happens right after the sun goes down.  That wasn't too hard to believe.  Certainly the leopards noticed us just about as much you'd notice a fly on the wall; we may as well have been another tree as far as they were concerned.

Except right at the end.  The male finally had had enough, whether of the female, or of us, I have no idea.  But he rose to his feet, and walked towards our land rover.  For one brief second, maybe two, he lifted his eyes and stared into ours, and in that second, it was absolutely clear that he was predator, we were prey.  He suddenly turned, our tracker lifted his feet out of the way as the leopard passed under them, and then both leopards melted back into the dark.  Show over.

So, did I experience the wild?  Certainly it was thrilling, and probably a once in a lifetime experience.  I wouldn't trade it.  But wild?

Now I'm on the plane flying north towards the next destination, Victoria Falls.  It's a bigger jet this time, so I'm far above the fray on the ground.  I did notice as we took off though, there was a dammed river below, and they were being careful about controlling the flow: the riverbed below the dam was almost dry.  All around the reservoir, flames from more-or-less controlled burns were sending their smoke to the sky, the haze largely responsible for that beautiful orange sunset I'd so much enjoyed the night before. 

Reflecting on it all, two images come to mind.  One is sitting on a tour bus, driving through the streets of Soweto, a world much more foreign to me than the African, or any other backcountry.  I was nothing but a voyeur in Soweto, while being shown all the classic sights: the gold mine tailings, the old miners barracks, Nelson Mandela's house, the site of the 1976 tragedy when the police opened fire on marching school kids, the nicer homes that have started to spring up in post-apartheid times, and pockets of truly destitute slums, where goat pens were right next to tattered-tarp family dwellings.  When we stopped for lunch there, some dancers dressed in traditional Botswana knock-off costumes performed for us.

The other image is those mating leopards.  I was nothing but a voyeur there too, staring down from above in my land rover seat.

Maybe there's a difference between those two experiences, but I'm not sure yet what it is.  One thing I do know.  What I yearn for in the wild is being in it, not just being shown it.

Anthony Barnosky is a Professor in the Department of Integative Biology, Curator in the Museum of Paleontology, and Research Paleoecologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.  

His new book Dodging Extinction: Power, Food, Money, and the Future of Life on Earth (University of California Press, Fall 2014) explores in more detail the issues covered in this series of blogs, as well as other ways people can prevent the Sixth Mass Extinction.

First, a little background on these Musings on the Wild blogs. This summer I spent a couple of weeks as an ecotourist, traveling in Africa with a Stanford University Alumni Association trip. My wife, Liz Hadly, was the faculty leader, so even though I’m from UC Berkeley, they let me tag along. 

 The experience reinforced for me why it's so important to keep species like elephants, lions, and rhinos on Earth, and made me think long and hard about the difference between keeping species alive, and keeping wild places alive.  The places we visited made it clear that it's certainly possible to do one without the other, but by the end of the trip, I was more convinced than ever that we need to do both.

In today's  landscape of human domination though, what we're willing to accept as wild is up for grabs.  What should we settle for? That question filled my thoughts for much of the two-week journey.  This blog is the first in a series of six that tracks how my personal answer evolved as we travelled from Johannesburg, to  Sabi Sabi Game Reserve in South Africa, to Victoria Falls in Zambia, to the Okavango Delta in Botswana. 

Part 1. Fencing the Wild

 When I was born there were over a million elephants roaming free in Africa.  When my parents were born, there were more than that, and a million or so rhinos as well.  In my all-too-short lifetime I've seen those elephant numbers more than cut in half.  And rhinos, well, now there are maybe twenty thousand of those left, most of them in a single country, South Africa, and all of them in protected game reserves of one kind or another.

 It's those kinds of stark facts that make me think that maybe what people tell me over and over is right.  Maybe there is no more wild.  But I still search for it.

 That's what I'm doing this week, a couple of short hops in Africa, visiting some of those last wild places.  First stop is Sabi Sabi Game Preserve, right on the border of Kruger National Park.

 We left Johannesburg yesterday on a small turbo-prop, which flew high enough to give the umbrella view of this African landscape but not so high that you couldn't get a good sense of what was going on below.  As we flew east and a little north, the high-rises, the electric-fenced middle-class neighborhoods, the gold-mine tailings, and the slums of old Soweto quickly gave way to another kind of landscape that also was totally made by humans. 

Hundreds and hundreds of miles, as far as the eye could see, of parched brown farmlands.  Admittedly, it’s winter here, maybe they look a lot more productive in the wet season.   But I'm suspicious.  It doesn't do much for my peace of mind about remaining wilderness.  After all, nearly forty percent of Earth's lands now look like some version of this. 

 Another half hour or so of air time, and the farm country finally gives way to a cluster of coal-fired power plants, and I'm not sure if those are nuclear-plant stacks I see down there too.  This time of year there is lots of burning of last year's vegetation, adding to the brown haze that stretches off to the horizon.

 Now it's wilder looking land below, at least some geologic swirls breaking up the plain, and lots of green. Finally bushes, trees, grasses become more common than tilled fields.  But still, the network of dusty brown roads is dense.

 We're following a river now, with about twenty minutes to go--we've been in the air about an hour and a half.  As the plane banks, dropping down as we near the Sabi Sabi landing strip, I notice a few giraffes loping along below.  Stretched out on the river bank I make out a couple of hippos, with a few more mostly submerged in the green water.

 Then we touch down, and climb into the land rovers.  As we bounce towards the camp, our guide points out a few impala grazing on a burned field.  "We burn that periodically, it makes the new grass come up, and the animals come in to eat the new shoots."  Camp is not really the right word--it's much more elegant than that, complete with a spa.  As we sip a mimosa on the deck, four elephants amble over to the water hole below.  One of them is a baby, maybe six months or so old, and we watch it nurse, after its mother playfully blows some water out of her trunk.

Later on during our evening safari, we drive through some mowed fields.  And we notice the electric fences that separate the game reserve from the domestic cattle in the nearby settlements.  We hear the cattle lowing, but don't see them.

 This is not my idea of wild, I'm thinking. 

 Yet, I'm thrilled.  As the sun is going down, we're cruising in the land rover, and come up on a rhino.  I'm seeing, up close and personal, something so rare my kids' kids may never see it--I'm staring at one of the last survivors of a species that's had ninety-eight percent of its kind wiped out. 

And it's staring right back at me.  There's no doubt what that animal could do to if we made a wrong move.  It weighs almost as much as our vehicle, and would have no hesitation in challenging us if we gave it reason.  That doesn't happen of course.  Our guide speaks rhino, if you will, and can see it's a young male.  He points out that the way it sniffs at the midden of rhino dung, but doesn't make a deposit there, means that the rhino is not about to let the dominant male in the area (whose midden it actually is) think that he is making a play for the territory. 

That rhino knows his place in nature.  He may or may not know that probably the only reason he still has a place in nature is because he is being watched fairly closely, day and night, by some guy out there in camo who's on the lookout for poachers that would dearly love to put a bullet through the rhino’s brain and cut off his horn, for sale on the blackest of black markets.

We get up before dawn the next day, once again pile into the land rovers, and see two more rhinos, then a pride of lions sleeping in the sun.  Three males, three females, a newly formed pride we're told, which coalesced after the males killed the cubs of the females a few months earlier. They're pretty skinny, not because there's not a lot to hunt, but because they've been too busy thinking about establishing their new social relationships to do as much hunting as they normally would. As we drive back to the camp, I'm struck again by the high electric fences. 

After breakfast, we go for a short hike with our guide.  Before we leave, he chambers four rounds into his .458-caliber rifle.  Stay behind me, single file, he says.  The signals are, one hand up, arm bent at the elbow, means stop.  Same arm position, fist clenched, means bunch together.  And whatever you do, don't run. 

Lots of birds--horn bills, woodpeckers, hoopoes, orioles. The hot sun, the dry grass smells.  Elephant tracks, elephant dung, it's winter dung because there are no dung beetles in it.  Rhino, hippo, and hyaena tracks too.  And leopard tracks, maybe the same one that caused the bush bucks in camp last night to let out an alarm call.  We're getting a lesson in how the twigs of a certain tree can actually be used as a toothbrush, when one of us sees the elephant. It’s a gigantic animal, much bigger than they seem when viewed from the safety of a land rover. Its huge ears are flapping. How something so enormous can get so close without hearing it is a mystery, but there it is, and now we hear it, all right.  It's crunching and breaking down trees, sounding like rifle reports as they snap.  And it smells.  Not bad, but I wouldn't say good either, very strong, a pungent odor something between leather, sweat, and marijuana smoke. 

Now our guide takes the safety off his rifle and makes sure a round is ready to fire.  Back up, slowly, don't run, and stay behind me.  He whistles, shouts, tells the elephant we're there.  What he tells us is that this elephant is very, very dangerous.  He's a young male, in musth. As in, must have sex.  When he smells like that, our guide tells us, even the females run away from him.  So he gets more and more frustrated, and more and more angry, and he's ready to lash out at anything that gets in his way.  

We walk, we don't run, and the elephant backs off.  Afterwards we reflect on the very real danger that was there, and feel lucky to have experienced it.

We get back to camp, and wait for our guide to unhook the electric fence that separates our bungalows from where we saw the elephant.  As I'm sitting here writing this, monkeys are dropping twigs around me as they jump around in the branches above my head.

 And I'm still not sure.  Is this wild, or is it not?  Can you really have wild with a fence around it?

A recent opinion piece by climatologist Michael Mann and a follow-up by environmental journalist Andy Revkin and environmental scientist Ken Caldiera raised the issue of how to tell the difference between communicating science, versus advocating for a cause. 

We too have been forced to reflect on where that line lies as a result of our combined half-century of conducting research in the arena of global change science, coupled with our recent experiences working with politicians to develop and help them use the Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21^st Century: Information for Policy Makers.

Our view is that communicating science means conveying relevant, accurate scientific information in ways that can be easily understood by the target audience.

Advocating for the use of science in decision-making is a slightly different beast—no longer is just pointing out the scientific realities the end goal.  Rather, the point is to stress the importance of how scientific knowledge crystallizes looming problems and can contribute to their solutions.

A memorandum of understanding between California and China to combat climate change.  Such agreements must be based on sound science if they are to solve global problems, making it imperative for scientists to communicate what they know in effective ways.

But our recent experiences indicate to us that there are at least two kinds of advocacy when it comes to science: informative advocacy versus prescriptive advocacy.  The difference is critical when engaging with policy makers and decision makers. 

Informative advocacy as we see it is a close cousin to science communication without advocacy, in that it uses scientific knowledge to foretell the environmental (in our case) changes of probable societal relevance that lie ahead. It differs from pure science communication, which is simply to inform, in having an important goal of injecting the scientific realities into the many different categories of information that decision makers must take into account when formulating policy.  Informative advocacy also has a second goal that is critical: learning from decision makers about the kind of information they need.  This back-and-forth dialog ultimately opens new doors for decision makers to formulate solutions to complex problems, and new doors for scientists to understand how their science is socially relevant.

Prescriptive advocacy, in contrast, means using your position as a scientist to push for a particular policy action, which can do just the opposite of science communication or informative advocacy.  We have found that prescriptive advocacy narrows choices for the decision makers, and often ignores harsh realities that especially elected officials face: a wide spectrum of societal views on what constitutes the most pressing needs, and economic and technological feasibility.

The lines between communicating science, informative advocacy, and prescriptive advocacy become clear by considering messages about and solutions to climate change.  As an example of communicating science we point to the IPCC’s Summary for Policy Makers.  Every effort is made to lay out the scientific realities, with minimal emphasis on telling policy makers what they ought to do.

As both communicating science and informative advocacy we cite the document we’ve built this website around, Scientific Consensus on Maintaining Humanity’s Life Support Systems in the 21^st Century: Information for Policy Makers, which covers not only climate change, but also extinction, ecosystem loss, pollution, and population overgrowth.  Scientifically sound broad-brush solutions are suggested, recognizing there are multiple paths to desired destinations.  Engaging with policy makers in such ways is crucial, because dealing with the complexities of our multiple global challenges requires political will, not just data juggling.

An illustration of prescriptive advocacy is a letter we were asked to sign, as scientists who helped develop the Scientific Consensus Statement, to place a moratorium on fracking in California, on the grounds that fracking would purportedly exacerbate some of the overarching problems highlighted in the Consensus Statement, notably pollution and climate change. Regardless of our feelings about fracking as residents of the state, we did not sign that letter for two reasons.  First, our scientific credentials do not extend to fully understanding the degree to which significant pollution would result—it may, but the scientific consensus has yet to consolidate on that point.  (Also see Ken Caldiera’s comments on the temptation to extend your scientific credentials farther than is warranted).

Second, and perhaps more importantly, producing more natural gas from fracking may well be a necessary part of the solution in the transition from a fossil-fuel to carbon-neutral economy—if fracking is done in a way that does not pollute fracked areas, and if it is part of a plan to rapidly replace inefficient coal-burning power plants with cleaner-burning natural-gas facilities.  The jury is still out on this hotly-contested issue, but it is clear that reaching the goal of a carbon-neutral energy system will require a multi-pronged approach through the transition period of the next decades, if the goal is to keep the lights on and our cars on the road at the same time carbon-neutral technologies are ramping up.  Taking any potentially feasible options off the table at this critical juncture in fact handicaps decision makers, rather than helping them.

In essence, communicating science involves boiling down the discoveries of the practicing scientific community to their accurate bullet points, and highlighting the societally relevant impacts.  Informative advocacy involves taking that science to decision-makers (and the general public), and pointing out scientifically sound paths to desired destinations.  But it is left to the decision makers (often our elected officials) to decide which of the multiple pathways to solving a particular problem are the most practical to pursue, taking into account the layout of the entire constituency landscape.  

Communicating science and informative advocacy identifies destinations and available paths, but does not barricade some paths in favor others.

Prescriptive advocacy, on the other hand, is all about making arguments that your path is better than any other one.  The problem with prescriptive advocacy is that you can tie the hands of decision makers, making it more difficult for them to find the best route through what is usually a complex maze of needs and opportunities.

While in our view the lines between communicating science, informative advocacy, and prescriptive advocacy are sharp, they nevertheless can be easily crossed. All three have their roles in bringing scientific realities into the decision-making process and the public arena, of course.  But, it is helpful to recognize which one you’re doing when.

 By Elizabeth A. Hadly, hadly@stanford.edu and Anthony D. Barnosky, barnosky@berkeley.edu

Elizabeth Hadly is a Professor of Biology and Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University.  Her research focuses on ecological and evolutionary impacts of global change.  Further information is available from her website. You can follow her on Twitter @LizHadly.

Since 1990, Anthony Barnosky has been on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a paleoecologist who studies how global change impacts species and ecosystems. Further information is available from his website. You can follow him on Twitter @tonybarnosky.