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Science and the Public Trust in a Full World:
Function and Dysfunction in Science and the Biosphere

George M. Woodwell
Woods Hole Research Center, 13 Church Street, P.O. Box 296, Woods Hole, MA 02543

The ecological symptoms of unsustainability include shrinking forests, thinning soils, falling aquifers, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, and rising global temperatures. The economic symptoms include economic decline, falling incomes, rising unemployment, price instability and loss of investor confidence. The political and social symptoms include hunger and malnutrition, and, in extreme cases, mass starvation; environmental and economic refugees; social conflicts along ethnic, tribal, and religious lines; and riots and insurgencies. As stresses build on political systems, governments weaken, losing their capacity to govern and to provide basic services, such as police protection. At this point the nation-state disintegrates, replaced by a feudal social structure governed by local warlords as in Somalia, now a nation-state in name only.
Lester R. Brown, 1995

The Transition from Empty to Full

That grim prospect from Lester Brown summarizes lucidly the course of the current civilization in the eyes of pragmatic ecologists who deal daily with the dependence of the human undertaking on the long-sustained biotic functions of the earth. It has little to do with “biotic diversity” and much to do with the erosion of the capacity of the biotic systems of the earth to continue to support a vigorous, successful, and continuing civilization. The phenomenal technological and economic successes of the current moment mask the elementary fact of the

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dependence of all life on a habitat of diminishing dimensions. It is the current diminution of the biosphere that is the subject of this forum and this paper.

Herman Daly, the economic philosopher, has observed that the world has made a transition from “empty” to “full” and that the rules for success in management of human affairs have changed (Daly 1993). No longer are resources large in proportion to demands; the easy compromises available among competing interests in an empty world are of the past. The transition is recent, the product of the decades since 1960 as the human population has doubled once again and technology has offered an even more comprehensive capacity for turning the earth to human succor. The intensification of use of the whole earth comes to focus in a series of problems with biotic resources, although the immediate issues might appear to be energy, such as oil in the coastal zone, or the disposal of wastes, or the commitment of land to roads or to shopping malls or to industrial uses. The critical issue in each instance is a threat to one or more biotic resources, including food, human health, and the normally biotically controlled function of the biosphere.

Science has a special role in defining what will work in a biophysical sense in this new world, in which intensification of use will continue but in which each use must be held within dimensions of resources that are in fact diminished by the current use. The sum of these local activities is the world as a whole, the biosphere. Suddenly, in recent decades, within this century, incremental local disruptions of normal biotic functions are accumulating as global disruptions. The transition presents a major political challenge to governmental systems that were developed when resources seemed globally abundant and opens a new realm for the definition of civil rights. In a democracy, we establish government to protect each from all and all from each. What are the dimensions of protection as challenges to the human habitat become more acute and effects of local actions accumulate as global disruptions or impoverishment? The issue of how the world works and how it can be kept working in the largest interest of the public becomes central. The question is biophysical first and only secondarily economic and political, but success in the evolution of all three realms is essential. Science in general and ecology in particular have responsibility in joining in the definition of human rights in this new world—rights to clean air, clean water, food that is free of poison, a wholesome habitat that is not drifting into biotic impoverishment, and a world that is not itself being steadily impoverished biotically. What is clean air? Clean water? A stable and healthful habitat? What are essential human rights in a full world? What is it that we form governments to do for us all? And who will define that task and hold governments to it?

The Evidence that the Earth is Full is Global Biotic Instability

The most powerful evidence of the transition to a world that is full, as opposed to empty, is the series of global transitions under way now. The most important are the warming of the earth and the progressive reductions in the capacity of the earth for supporting life: biotic impoverishment. The two are mutually

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reinforcing. The accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is the cause of the warming. The accumulation is due in part to the destruction of forests. A rapid warming has the potential for speeding the destruction of forests and accelerating the warming (Houghton and others 1998; Woodwell 1995; Woodwell and others 1998). The two processes are also open-ended, actively developing, directly threatening to human welfare, and, at the moment, not addressed effectively by any government or society despite various agreements to act. We have squandered trillions of dollars in the second half of this century on the mere possibility that the mismanagement of international affairs might lead to a nuclear war that could reduce the earth to a cinder in a few hours. We are currently engaged in vicious arguments over whether it is worth any effort to deflect the global changes that are in fact bringing increments of global impoverishment that move the world toward the same end, only more slowly. The difficulty is in part that the increments of change are small to the point of being inconspicuous to ordinary people; they are obscure for the moment but have the potential intrinsic in exponential growth for emerging suddenly as overwhelming problems that might, at that moment, have surged beyond control. The difficulty is also that action requires a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, a step that is unpopular with politically powerful commercial interests around the world.

The fact is that all interests, commercial and public, will suffer in a world afflicted by the chronic and rapid climatic disruptions already inevitable as a result of past accumulations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The changes entail cumulative and progressive increments of biotic impoverishment. Although the increments might be obscure minute by minute and are further obscured generation by generation as each generation starts with a baseline that is already eroded, the effects ultimately become conspicuous as erosion of the human habitat.

The rate of the warming offers one criterion for appraising the global rate of disruption. The warming has proceeded at a global average over recent decades of 0.1–0.2°C per decade. It is expected to proceed at that rate or higher throughout at least the next century. It has proceeded and will continue to proceed at 2–3 times that average rate in the higher latitudes, according to both experience and the most widely accepted projections (Houghton and others 1996). While the global warming was about 0.5°C between 1895 and 1990, the average for Canada as a whole was about 1.0°C and, for the Mackenzie District of northwestern Canada, about 1.7°C (Gullet and Skinner 1992). We might inquire as to the historical rates over recent millennia to establish a basis for judgment of how the biosphere was functioning before massive intrusions by humans. Even during the glacial periods, the rates of temperature change globally appear to have been closer to 0.1°C per century than per decade. Such a rate is consistent with the time required for the regeneration of forests and fish populations that must establish themselves in new habitats and consistent with adjustments in migratory patterns of animals.

The greatest hazard associated with the warming may be the systematic and rapid impoverishment of forests and tundra of higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere in response to the speed of the warming with the release of large

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additional quantities of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere (Woodwell and others 1995). Insurance against such an event—a disaster in any appraisal—would argue for intensive efforts now to stabilize, or even to reduce, the current burden of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The effects go far beyond forests to involve virtually every use of land, including agriculture, aggravating well-known problems there by introducing continuous changes in patterns of precipitation and temperature globally.

If there is doubt as to the details of the effects, examples of the extremes of impoverishment are abundant. Locally, they appear as the salinized playas of agricultural India that support no agriculture or higher plants or as land eroded to rock by the effects of the combination of intensive agriculture, intensive grazing, and erosion under monsoonal rains, a baking sun, and winds. Government experts in India a few years ago acknowledged that one-third of the land area had been removed from agriculture into impoverishment by those processes and other human uses. Such land has little or no value and is not normally incorporated into national statistics or economic appraisals, but the transition from forest through various forms of agriculture to impoverishment is probably the greatest current land-use transition (Houghton 1997). It is already affecting human food supplies, as summarized so brilliantly over recent decades by Lester Brown (1997). Irrigation from the earliest times, including the civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, has resulted in salinization and the destruction of agricultural productivity and contributed to the demise of successive waves of civilization (Fagan 1999). The process continues, and the effects are accumulating and are all too often irreversible.

The Starting Point for a World that Works

The causes of biotic impoverishment include virtually any chronic disturbance, from mechanical and physical to chemical and biotic (Woodwell 1990). The effects are similar in all instances. But the question of where to start the measurement of incremental change remains. It is one of the classical questions in ecology, similar to “What is undisturbed?” and “What is climax?” The analysis is useful, but a definitive answer is hardly necessary. Our interest is pragmatic, immediate: we might identify it as the “integrity of biotic function”, thereby setting forth a new goal, whose identification, measurement, and defense become major challenges to science. In so doing, we acknowledge that we know more about the conditions necessary to keep biotic functions substantially intact than we know about the functions themselves. And it is possible that we will know how to tell in a simple, comprehensive way the extent to which we are successful in protecting details of the human habitat. Most of all we need a simple, quantitative basis for appraising increments of impoverishment.

Measurements of Impoverishment

The most systematic approach to definition, where the degree of disturbance could be measured directly and objectively, has come from experimental studies

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of systematic disturbance. One of the most revealing studies involved the effects of chronic exposure to ionizing radiation on a late successional oak-pine forest in central Long Island, New York (Woodwell and Houghton 1990). In that instance, perhaps surprisingly, a virtually perfect physiognomic gradient in size and structural complexity was produced in both the residual community and the successional community that developed later. The most sensitive species was the pine Pinus rigida, which was removed from the intact oak-pine forest at exposures that were low enough to have little or no effect on the oaks or other species. At slightly higher exposures, the oaks, with the exception of the scrub oak (Quercus ilicifolia), were eliminated. The scrub oak, a high shrub, was eliminated at slightly lower exposures than the shrub cover of Vacciniaceae. Within the shrubs, the taller-statured huckleberry (Vaccinium baccata) was more sensitive than the ground-hugging lowbush blueberry (V. pennsylvanicum). The pattern of greater resistance in low-growing, ground-hugging species persisted within the herbaceous plant community and extended to mosses, lichens, and soil fungi. The less the stature, the more resistant to disturbance. The response left certain mosses and lichens to the inner zones where the radiation exposures were higher and certain soil fungi to the innermost zone from which even the most resistant lichens were excluded. The gradient was spectacular and obvious, although there was no basis in earlier studies for the assumption that chronic exposure to ionizing radiation would produce anything approaching a systematic community-level response.

The results, however, were startling in their similarity to familiar gradients of structure in vegetation produced by gradients of stress elsewhere, including chronic disturbance. The immediately obvious parallel was with the transition from forest to tundra, which is compressed on mountains in New England to a few thousand feet of elevation and involves some of the same species and most of the same genera. The same pattern of structural change emerged from later studies of gradients of pollution downwind of smelters (Woodwell and Houghton 1990). Again, the list of species emerges as the most informative data on the status of the community.

If we use the experience gleaned from those gradients, we can establish a scale against which to test other transitions and on which to hang new data as they accumulate. I have pooled my own experience with the effects of ionizing radiation and other chronic disturbances, such as pollution from smelters, with F.H. Bormann's (1990) experience and observations of the effects of air pollution, including acid rain, to prepare a tabular scale showing the steps in impoverishment of forests (table 1).

Bormann came to the conclusion that most of the forests of eastern North America are being affected now by air pollution in various forms and that the effects include not only a reduction in the growth of trees, but also an increase in mortality over large areas. These transitions are in the range of stages IIB, the open-canopy stage, and IIIA-3, the herb stage of treeless savanna, in the classification of damage outlined in table 1. There is little question that the death of red spruce (Picea rubens) on the western slopes of the Appalachians is due to acid rain and air pollution. Succession is under way (the second sorting), and the impoverishment has not yet progressed to the cryptogam or erosion stage, but

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continued chronic disturbance in those zones has the potential for producing these stages as well.

Similar effects are now accumulating in the much more diverse mixed mesophytic forests of the Appalachian plateau to the west (Little 1995). The region would be described in the scale of table 1 as now in stage IIB, the open-canopy stage.

Bormann (1990) also reported the results of research with special chambers designed to measure the growth of trees fed with ambient air and with air treated only by filtration through charcoal. The experiment was carried out in eastern New York in the Hudson Valley and showed that the filtering increased the growth ofpopulus saplings by 15–20%. The implication is that in rural New York in a region that probably has air similar to much of the rest of eastern North America, there is an air-caused inhibition of growth of around 15–20% that does not produce conspicuous symptoms of damage to leaves or other plant parts. The implications are profound: a 15–20% reduction in the amount of energy fixed by forests over very large areas. Similar studies of agricultural crops have shown similar inhibition of growth (Heck and others 1982). The reduction in total energy available to support life in this region is prodigious. By this criterion, the forests of eastern North America, presumably over large areas, are in the stages described in table 1 as I, stressed, and IIA, symptomatic stress.

A somewhat different series of changes in Alaskan forests is being reported by Juday (1997) and Stevens (1997) in response to the warming of Alaska as permafrost melts and destroys roads and as insect pests of forest trees appear and linger in places heretofore protected by climate. The process has long been expected and can only be amplified as the warming proceeds (Univ. of Alaska 1983).

One of the greatest natural tragedies of the century occurred in the tropical moist forests of the Amazon Basin and Kalimantan, the southern two-thirds of the island of Borneo, in 1997–1998. Both regions suffered from an unprecedented drought as a result of the strongest El Niño yet experienced. The El Niño involves a warming of the surface waters of the central and eastern Pacific and global climatic changes that include the severe droughts in the normally moist regions of the southwest Pacific and central South America. Both regions have forests that are being heavily cut, opening the forests to further drying and susceptibility to fires. Both regions are also being settled by governmental programs that open the land to those displaced from industrialized agriculture elsewhere or from overpopulated urban areas. Sources of ignition are abundant, and thousands of acres burned in 1997–1998, covering both regions with smoke so dense that breathing was difficult and airports were closed for days to weeks at a time. A major airplane crash and a collision of ships were attributed to the smoke from Kalimantan, which was dense from Celebes to Singapore. The effect was the substantial destruction of the forests in both places, well within the range of stage IIIA, the savanna stage, in our scale, probably reaching IIIA3, the herb stage of treeless savanna, in extensive areas.

Coastal marine waters are subject to similar impoverishment, although the changes are less conspicuous.

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The Public Interest in a Full World:
Human Rights Require Definition by Science

Recognition that the continuation of current trends in human use of the earth is leading to progressive biotic impoverishment raises basic questions of the role of governments and the recognition and protection of human rights. Again, a focus on the biophysical aspects helps to clarify the social, economic, and political objectives. If the biophysical objective becomes the protection of biotic functions in maintaining the global and local environment, we should have little difficulty in defining the qualities of air, water, and land required to protect those functions. The biota will run itself and perform the functions without human guidance, but the conditions under which the biota can run itself without chronic disruption and systemic impoverishment must be defined and maintained. Success requires that the public recognize an overwhelming human interest in the protection of the biosphere as the only human habitat.

The challenges to science are large: What does it take to keep the biosphere functioning with substantial stability decade by decade when human populations are increasing and human effectiveness in capturing resources for human use increases daily? How much forest does it take to defend the public's interests in a stable and wholesome landscape, in a stable global carbon budget, in water flows that support the diversity of resources that have evolved over time in each region, and in water quality that is also consistent with stability of the landscape? Such questions challenge virtually all conventional approaches to the environment and to economics and government, but they are scientific and technical issues first and political and economic issues only secondarily. They are, however, the focus of increasing interest in basic human rights in a democracy, as outlined in detail recently for forests by Ann Hooker (1994) in a discussion of the public's interests in forests.

The answers will address the need for defining how land and water are to be used in this world of intensified demands. Answers will involve zoning of land and water in a pattern already becoming clear as attempts are made to preserve coastal fisheries in the United States. The establishment of the system of “marine sanctuaries” ringing the nation offers one of the most progressive steps in acknowledging the absolute need for defining the steps required to keep biotic resources functioning and available in the long term. The program is embryonic and only feebly supported by the public and by government, but it is an essential step that requires intensive scientific support now to determine what will work in restoring the coastal zone. Much is known, but much remains to be learned, especially at the regional level in determining how to provide for both the protection of the zone and its use in the production of indigenous fisheries.

A similar challenge exists on the land starting from both the bottom and the top. The global challenge is conspicuous as climatic disruption at the moment. But the global challenge is also in restoration of normalcy in the global cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, for example. The local challenge might be conspicuous in the need for restoring whole landscapes in Haiti; India; West Africa; Madagascar; Sudbury, Ontario; and Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. But it, too, is global in that

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Figure 1
Continuum of biotic impoverishment as appraised by systemic reduction in
primary productivity. Assumption is made that continuum is linear. It might
deviate from linearity in many circumstances where structure of vegetation changes
discontinuously under chronic disturbance.

no corner of the earth is unaffected by human disruptions that are having biotic consequences and causing increments of erosion measurable on the scalar system of table 1, shown graphically in figure 1.

The stage is set for a rejuvenation of science in definition and defense of the broad public interest in the preservation of a habitable earth. It should come not through an endangered species act or an emphasis on an inchoate interest in biodiversity, but through emphasis on the preservation of the biotic functions locally that keep the water clean, the air clean, and the landscape intact.

References

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Brown LR. 1995. Nature's limits. In: State of the world 1995. Washington DC: The Worldwatch Inst. p 14.

Brown LR. 1997. The agricultural link: how environmental deterioration could disrupt economic progress. Worldwatch Paper No 136 (August): 73.

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Daly HE. 1993. From empty-world economics to full-world economics: a historical turning point in economic development. In: Ramakrishnna K, Woodwell GM (eds). World forests for the future. New Haven CT: Yale Univ Pr. p 79–91.

Fagan B. 1999. Floods, famines and emperors. Perseus NY: Basic Books. 284p.

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Houghton, RA, Davidson EA, Woodwell GM. 1998. Missing sinks, feedbacks, and understanding the role of terrestrial ecosystems in the global carbon cycle. Glob Biogeochem Cyc 12(1):25–34.

Juday. 1997. Fide. The Boston Globe, Science and Health, 15 Sep.

Little CE. 1995. The dying of the trees: the pandemic in America's forests. New York NY: Viking.

Stevens WK. 1997. If climate changes, who is vulnerable? Panels offer projections. New York Times, 30 Sept.

University of Alaska. 1983. The potential effects of carbon dioxide-induced climatic changes in Alaska. Miscellaneous publication #83. Fairbanks AK: Univ of Alaska.

Woodwell GM, Houghton RA. 1990. The experimental impoverishment of natural communities: effects of ionizing radiation on plant communities, 1961–1976. In: Woodwell GM (ed). The earth in transition: patterns and processes of biotic impoverishment. New York NY: Cambridge Univ Pr. p 9–24.

Woodwell GM (ed). 1990. The earth in transition: patterns and processes of biotic impoverishment. New York NY: Cambridge Univ Pr. p 530.

Woodwell GM. 1995. Biotic feedbacks from the warming of the earth. In: Woodwell GM, Mackenzie FT (eds). Biotic feedbacks in the global climatic system: will the warming speed the warming? New York NY: Oxford Univ Pr. 13–21.

Woodwell GM, Mackenzie FT, Houghton RA, Apps MJ, Gorham E, Davidson EA. 1995. Will the warming speed the warming? In: Woodwell GM, Mackenzie FT (eds). Biotic feedbacks in the global climatic system: will the warming speed the warming? New York NY: Oxford Univ Pr. p 393–411.