Word On The River

We are at the beginning of our twelve-week journey, and we may all come into this endeavour from different backgrounds and in different contexts. Over the last two years I have learned about many concepts and ideas in sustainability, which greatly changes how I may interpret future topics compared to others. So, I think that it would be wise to use this first week to look at the question: what is sustainability?

While some concepts and ideas are common in definitions of sustainability in certain groups, at a much broader scale the definition of sustainability is still an open discussion. I have now been asked in three classes to define what sustainability means to me. One common definition of sustainability is “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This is from the 1987 United Nations Bruntland Commission. This definition recognizes the need for development in the present day while highlighting the need to consider future repercussions. Now however, I would like to introduce two supporting concepts.

The first is the concept of the three E's of sustainability. These are environment, economy, and equity. The three E’s framework of sustainability asserts that true sustainability must be in all three senses.

The second concept is the idea of strong and weak sustainability. This idea comes from the field of environmental economics. In short, strong sustainability is the idea that there is both natural and artificial capital and the two are not interchangeable, while in weak sustainability, natural and artificial capital are interchangeable so long as the total amount of capital is maintained. Weak sustainability is deemed as such because it assumes that various kinds of capital can be given comparable value assignments.

Let’s revisit the Bruntland definition of sustainability now that we have two new concepts. There is a possible issue with the definition in that it doesn’t expressly convey the environmental component of sustainability and leaves room for weak sustainability to suffice. In their 1996 article Environmental Sustainability: Universal and Non-Negotiable, Robert Goodland and Herman Daly introduce the three E’s concept and propose defining sustainability in terms of the input/output rule. Essentially, development without producing and consuming faster than the environment’s absorptive and regenerative capacities.

There are many more definitions of sustainability. I encourage you to look for ones that emphasize different scales of community and different aspects of the three E’s, and compare them. Maybe even come up with your own definition. But now that we have a basis for what sustainability is, we can venture further into its topics.

Thank you for reading and thank you for joining me on this journey.

- Joseph

This is a bit of a shorter post, but I want to talk about water security this week. UN-Water defines water security as “The capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability” (Working definition, 2013). There can be many threats to water security: political and economic tensions, along with a changing climate, and water demands for areas of high population density and for economic activities can pose challenges to water availability, with additional issue that some industrial uses of water can raise concerns about water quality. As an activity, I would invite everyone to consider their own water security.

If you want to look at a case study, I would recommend reading about the Cape Town water crisis. The city of Cape Town avoided running out of water, but some of the responses they implemented have been criticized for various reasons. Another case you may want to look at is that of Save Our Water in Elora, Ontario.

Finally, I want to highlight some YouTube videos that can help shed light on current water security issues, especially in North America:
More Perfect Union: Could Texas Run Out Of Water? Wall Street Is Betting Big On It.
More Perfect Union: What Poland Spring Doesn’t Want You to Know
Hank Green: Why is Everyone So Wrong About AI Water Use??

See you next week.

- Joseph

Welcome back. Last week I wrote about the topic of water security, but I felt that the post was not as high quality as I wanted it to be. In the first week I wrote about defining sustainability to give everyone a common starting ground for my future posts, but I realized after last week, that there are more frameworks/concepts/ideas that I want to introduce so that I have a broader vocabulary to use when I talk about things like water security. Since I have much less time to do research for this post, I will introduce the planetary boundaries framework into our toolkit, and likely talk about wicked problems next week.

The planetary boundaries framework was authored in 2009 by a team of Earth system and environmental scientists led by Johan Rockström and Will Steffen. The framework describes limits to various human effects on the planet, past which, the planet’s ability to self regulate would be uncertain. The framework does this through defining nine boundaries, which are: climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities. This last boundary is mostly to do with introduction of chemical pollutants into the environment, which are too new for their effect on the planet to be well known or understood. Some boundaries are broken into two sub-categories, such as climate change which considers CO2 concentration and radiative forcing, and biosphere integrity which considers both functional and genetic diversity. The framework is usually depicted as a radial figure, where each boundary is a “slice of the pie”, and has a ring or central circle representing the “safe” boundary, beyond this each category extends into the area of uncertainty (in the planet’s ability to self-regulate) or even further, beyond the area of uncertainty. Some figures show greyed-out categories, indicating that there is not enough research to quantify these boundaries.

This framework is useful in visualizing the environmental, broad-scale, challenges of sustainability, but more recent adaptations use a doughnut model with the social challenges of sustainability inside the doughnut, and the environmental challenges outside the doughnut. Being that this is not part of the framework currently, its usage in international policy making has been hampered in fears that it will place undue hardship on developing nations.

Next week we’ll talk about wicked problems.

- Joseph

Ha Ha, got you. We aren’t talking about wicked problems this week, and It’s definitely not a scheduling error on my part. This week we’re talking about soil, and it’s pretty short again. Through their open educational resource (OER) textbook Digging into Canadian Soils: An Introduction to Soil Science, the Canadian Society of Soil Science presents two definitions of soil: “The unconsolidated mineral or organic material on the immediate surface of the Earth that serves as a natural medium for the growth of land plants,” and “the natural, unconsolidated mineral or organic matter on the surface of the Earth that has been influenced by parent material, climate, macro- and micro-organisms, and relief, all acting over a period of time to produce a material different from which it was derived in many physical, chemical, biological, morphological properties.” Comparing both of these definitions, in common we find that soil is both organic and non-organic, and specific the the surface of the Earth. Differentiating the definitions, we find two kinds of ways to approach soil: approaching soil as a growth medium (edaphology), and approaching soil based on the factors leading to its formation (pedology).

Moving on quickly (I do want to get this up tonight), if you’re wondering why you should care about soil, they’re called soil functions (similar to ecosystem services). What they boil down to is that we need soil so that things like food (which we need to eat) and raw materials like wood (which is probably in every house) can grow, we need it to regulate certain things in the environment (like the movement of water and chemicals). It’s also important to biodiversity as a habitat (we’ll talk more about biodiversity in one of the next two weeks). Finally, it provides physical and cultural heritage functions (apparently some people can recognize the smell of the soil from their homeland, but I can’t smell very well), as well as, well, the ground, to put things on.

Now that we all care about soil, I present you with The Soil Security Declaration from Aroura, which is as soil security think tank. The declaration calls for global action to protect our soils (which don’t form quickly and can’t easily be changed by any other means than adding organic matter). Give it a read, and I’ll see you next week for ecosystems and biodiversity (unless I decide to do that the week after, when I’m free the whole week).

Bye.

- Joseph

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. I want to explain why this website exists, because it will particularly relate to the topics for today and next week. After following Alveus Sanctuary for years, and working a summer job in IT a few years back, I realized that while I love tech, I won’t find my motivation working in the tech industry. Having always loved the environment and seeing the impact an organization like Alveus could have, I had an idea where I would find motivation. But that’s as far I thought it through for then.

Last year, near the end of the winter, I tried to do a week-long challenge to choose beef-free meals. And I don’t remember if I brought it up (I assume I did), but I ended up in argument with my friends on Discord about the sustainability of beef (to be clear, I’m not saying you have to give up beef). For context, one of the largest concerns with beef (specifically because we use a ridiculous amount of beef on this planet) is that huge amounts of natural habitat are converted to pasture for beef production. So having made this argument, I brought up some extinction rate number from the World Wildlife Fund. One of my friends simply could not get behind this (although they did concede on habitat loss).

This argument was very long, and I wanted to move it out of the server’s main channel (I didn’t want to annoy people who weren’t part of the argument), so we made a channel called enviro-corner, where I would talk about sustainability related issues. I continued to post there over the coming weeks, and one day while we were hanging out in the computer lab, talking about jobs, I mentioned that I didn’t really want to work in tech. One of my friends mentioned that I really should consider working in a sustainability related field since I was evidently motivated in that area.

I had previously considered this. It was a much more motivating field. But I was about a year away from graduating, and my degree wasn’t in biology or ecology, or geology, or geography, or anything like that. It was in computer science. I scrolled through the subject filter on the University’s course list page (which in hindsight, was not the right page to use), and I couldn’t find anything that seemed right for me (I was looking for a certificate program). I knew there was a certificate program for water science, but that required chemistry, which I didn’t take. I got home and mentioned that I wanted to look for an environment related certificate.

A day of two later, my dad told me that the School of Environment and Sustainability (SENS) had an undergraduate certificate program in sustainability. I looked it up, looked at the course requirements, looked at how it would fit in with my current degree, and wrote out which classes I would have to take to finish the certificate. I registered for a spring/summer course I would have to take, and contacted an advisor in SENS about entering the program (the program wasn’t automated in the University’s system). In the fall of this year, I took an Introduction to Sustainability.

I learned a lot about sustainability in that class, and I learned that I already knew a lot about sustainability. All this time I tried to keep the dialogue alive in enviro-corner, but I realized there was a problem. I was making these posts for my friends in computer science, but I was making them in the context of my understanding of sustainability. I had failed in one of the most important elements of writing: considering your audience. And so, I devised a plan.

For a while I had wanted to make a resource I could refer back to in conversation with my friends, and now I needed a way to give my friends the right context for these conversations. So I made a personal website with the intention that it would host Word On The River which would act kind of as a newsletter or blog to solve my first problem. And I created the Twelve Weeks Project as the beginning to WOTR to solve the second problem. The Twelve Weeks Project is an extension of enviro-corner.

Thank you for reading this special edition of WOTR. This is my first post that goes over a page in the word doc I draft it in. If you’re reading this on release, you can still expect another post for the Twelve Weeks Project tonight.

Peace and love.

- Joseph

Welcome back. I was writing the intro to this article, and about four paragraphs in I decided to make it a separate article and posted it as a special edition. I’m going to break this topic into two parts: this week where I will talk about ecosystems and ecosystem services, and next week where I will talk about biodiversity.

An ecosystem is all the living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) things in an environment, and the ways in which they interact with (or are related to) each other. The biotic components of an ecosystem would include all the plants, animals, and microorganisms in the environment. On the other hand, the abiotic factors could include the sunlight, water, wind, and terrain. The ways in which all the biotic and abiotic components of the environment interact with each other takes many forms, and if I knew all of them, the field of ecology would be a lot different. I will however, mention a few of them to give you an idea of what these interactions/relationships encompass.

I think that one of the most well known example of one of these relationships is the food web. A food web is the natural extension of a food chain, which depicts a single path through the trophic levels in the ecosystem. Speaking of trophic levels, I don’t know if it will come up in a future article, so you should check out the idea of bioaccumulation, and subsequently, biomagnification. So compared to a food chain, a food web tries to depict all the paths that food takes in an ecosystem, and can be of varying complexity. Food webs generally only show the relationships between biotic components of the environment, and are not a full energy web.

Examples of interactions between biotic and abiotic components of an environment include the dependence of organisms on water. Living things need water in order to live, and are effected by any changes to the presence of water. Another example is sunlight providing energy to an ecosystem (for photosynthesis by plants). An example of an abiotic-abiotic interaction is erosion of the terrain by wind and moving water. As you can probably see, the effects of these interactions likely cascade into other interactions and relationships. They are modelled at various levels of complexity and often don’t convey the full complexity of a system or its interaction with other systems.

These ecosystems are intricate, but nature seems to have it figured out. And in addition to (as I assert) the inherent value that nature has, these ecosystems do things specifically for us (ok, maybe no specifically for us, but we get the benefits). These are known as ecosystem services. This is the same idea as soil functions which we talked about last week (in fact, the soil itself is an ecosystem), and ecosystem services are organized into the same categories: provisioning services such as providing food, regulating services such as natural pest and disease control (like vultures, who’s stomachs can tank rabies, and reduce rabies spread by scavenging corpses which would otherwise be eaten by mammals that could spread the disease), supporting services which allow for other ecosystem services to be present, and cultural services such as providing a sense of place/identity (for example, as a Canadian, I identify with living through the cold winters) as well as spiritual and historical use, recreational use, and scientific and educational use.

A large number of these services are provided by biotic components of the environment, and if you checked out a depiction of the global boundaries model after I talked about that, you might have seen one that recognizes that we haven’t yet quantified the functional diversity of the biosphere. We have however, quantified to some level, the species diversity of the biosphere. We’ll discuss all this next week when I talk about biodiversity.

Hope you had a happy Valentine’s Day.

- Joseph

This is the second part on the topic of ecosystems and biodiversity. The biodiversity part. I’m going to assume you read last week’s article, and just jump right in. What is biodiversity? Well, it’s the diversity of life, specifically on Earth. That probably doesn’t help you, but here’s the thing: there are a number of ways to interpret biodiversity. One way is in terms of the variability in functions and rolls that are filled (i.e. niches), and this is called functional diversity. Another way could be in terms of genetic variability on the planet, but most often, when we say biodiversity, we are talking in the sense of taxonomy. By biodiversity, we mean species diversity.

Very simply, species diversity is the number of different species in a community (i.e. an ecosystem, a larger region, the Earth). But depending on what we want to know about an environment, this number might not paint the full picture, and so we actually call this number species richness. The issue with species richness is that it doesn’t represent species evenness (the rarity of a species), which takes into account species relative abundance (the proportion of individuals a given species contributes to the community’s total population). For this reason, to represent species diversity, we often use some sort of index that takes into account the number of species as well as the relative abundance of each species. Such indices include Shannon’s diversity index and the Simpson index.

So how is species diversity looking for the Earth? Well here’s the thing, the Earth is big, very big, and most people are not looking through dense vegetation or vast sparse areas, or under every nook and cranny to find new species (although citizen science initiatives such as iNaturalist can help with this). So never mind anything to do with relative abundance, it’s hard just to find the species richness of the planet. But there is a number of described species. Based on data from Table 2 in a 2011 publication How many species are there on Earth and in the ocean? by Mora et al., this number was just under one and a quarter million. Now, sources typically say over two million, based on the data used for the IUCN Red List. However, it is thought to be highly likely that there are many more species than those that are described. This is due to a funny little thing called the species-area relationship.

The species-area relationship originates from Robert H. MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, who wrote The Theory of Island Biogeography. At first, the theory tried to predict how many species would exist on a newly created island. Essentially, the idea is that an island has an equilibrium number of species, and as species go extinct on/emigrate from an island, if there is a mainland close enough for immigration to occur, the species that are now gone from the island will be replaced by immigrating species. A 1969 experiment by Wilson and Simberloff, where they fumigated a number of small islands and observed the re-habitation of the islands, found that the islands returned to about the same number of species one year after fumigation. So now we know that these areas have an equilibrium number of species, and people already kind of knew and continued to find that the larger the island, the higher its equilibrium number was. This is a bit of a simplification of how we get to the modern understanding of the species-area relationship, but to cut a long story short, more area likely means more species. Related to the species-area relationship is the species-area curve (which also has a bunch of other names).

The species-area curve relates the number of individuals observed (on the x-axis) to the number of species observed (on the y-axis). Imagine you were counting grass species in the plains. As you begin counting and you have not yet observed any species, the number of new species you encounter is quite high. However, once you have encountered all the common species, you continue to find more and more individuals of the species you already observed, and finding new species becomes less and less common. It turns out this relationship is logarithmic, and if you plot it on a log-log scale you get a nice straight trend line to use for extrapolation. This allows us to get our estimates for how many species are really out there. For instance, that 2011 Mora et al. Paper, estimated that there are about eight and three quarter million species on Earth. Other estimates range wildly from three million to over one hundred million (this is because there might be a ridiculous number of prokaryote species), however most estimates are closer to eleven million.

So then, you ask, what is this biodiversity crisis? Well do you remember the relationship between area and number of species? Let’s say you convert almost all native grasslands an wetlands for agricultural use, yes you haven’t gotten rid of that area, but it doesn’t really have the species-area relationship apply to it because you are controlling what species are there. You want to grow your crop species or raise your livestock, and you remove and keep out any species that might compete with them. So we are reducing the area where nature’s normal regulations take course, and not just a little bit. According to the IPBES Assessment Report on Land Degradation and Restoration, over 75% of land surface on the Earth has been significantly altered, including losing 54% of wetlands since the year 1900 and 87% in the last 300 years. It is this habitat loss that is the cause for concern. However, we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic just how fast things can turn around.

But I don’t want to give you too much hope, or I wouldn’t have anything to write about next week when we talk about conservation.

Thanks for reading.

- Joseph

I’ll admit it, I cheated. You may have noticed it’s Sunday. There are a few reasons I didn’t write this yesterday (yes I do write these the day they are posted), almost all of which were entirely in my control. Never the less, I didn’t want to miss a topic, so you’re getting the article today.

The last two weeks, we talked about ecosystems and ecosystem services, as well as biodiversity. After highlighting the biodiversity crisis that is land use change, I would now like to talk about conservation. This article will be a little different in that I won’t get too deep into what conservation is. In general, to conserve something is to preserve it, protect it from damage, or prevent it from being wasted, and in this article, I am particularly talking about nature conservation, but let’s expressly understand this to include wildlife conservation and conservation biology.

Why is conservation important? If you’ve read the last couple of articles, you’re probably thinking: “because we need to preserve biodiversity to keep ecosystems healthy so they can continue to provide ecosystem services.” And yes, that’s right, but you might also be wondering if conservation works. Does it actually help? A meta-analysis by Langhammer et al., published in 2024, found that it does. They found that two thirds of the time, conservation at least slowed the loss of biodiversity or actually increased biodiversity. In particular, they found that interventions like controlling invasive species, restoring habitat, and reducing habitat loss, which are targeted at the species and ecosystem level are “highly effective and have large effect sizes.”

So who does this conservation? And the answer is a lot of people: including governmental agencies like Parks Canada or the NPS, and NGOs like Ducks Unlimited Canada, the Meewasin Valley Authority, or the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Speaking of, zoos (specifically those accredited by the AZA, CAZA, EAZA, or WAZA) play an incredibly important roll when it comes to conservation science and education. Very promisingly, private parties such as ranchers, farmers, and other land owners, who want to see the benefits of conservation, work (often in partnership with NGOs) to apply sustainable management practices to their lands.

If there’s anything I want you to take away from this article, it’s that conservation works and we are doing it. We definitely need to do more of it (like, a lot more), and it probably wont be enough on its own, but nature is resilient (maybe not all of it) and will heal itself (fast or slow) given the chance. We can help. Find out what organizations around you are doing conservation work and see if you can volunteer.

Regards.

- Joseph