Doom and gloom won't save the world

Doom and gloom won't save the world

The best way to encourage conservation is to share our success stories, not to write obituaries for the planet, says Nancy Knowlton.

18 April 2017

Early in my career, I witnessed first-hand the depressing side of the job. The coral reefs off the north coast of Jamaica, where I had spent several magical years as a graduate student in the mid 1970s, were struck by a category-5 hurricane in 1980. Then came mysterious ailments that devastated two of the most important coral species, along with a species of sea urchin that, because of previous overfishing, had become the last defence against a tide of seaweed that was choking the struggling coral. Ten years after my first dive in Jamaica, the reefs I'd studied were all but gone.

These days, students studying reefs spend their time investigating bleaching and acidification, terms that were never mentioned when I took my first coral-reef class in 1974.

As we observe Earth Day on 22 April, it's worth recounting how researchers like myself have managed to rebound a bit from all this depressing news.

In 2001, my colleagues and I at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, founded the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Core to our programme was an interdisciplinary summer course, which brought together students ranging from marine biologists to physical oceanographers, economists and anthropologists. We thought of it as medical school for the ocean.

We began with what we thought was a logical starting point — the state of the ocean. These were depressing lectures. Doom and gloom consumed the entire course. Basically, we were training our students to write ever-more-refined obituaries for the seas.

We quickly realized the folly of focusing so much on the problems — we could see it on our students' faces. There had to be another way. After all, in medical school the focus is on preserving life, not describing death. So in 2009, my husband Jeremy Jackson and I began running symposia at academic meetings called 'Beyond the Obituaries', which were about success stories in ocean conservation. A small workshop in 2014 led to a Twitter campaign, #OceanOptimism, which has now reached more than 76 million Twitter accounts.

On the weekend of Earth Day, the first ever Earth Optimism Summits will take place. In Washington DC, more than 235 scientists and civic leaders from 24 countries will share their success stories of conservation on land and water. Sister summits and activities are being held in nine countries around the globe. The goal is to learn from each other, and change the conservation conversation.

This journey has taught me several lessons. First, unrelenting doom and gloom in the absence of solutions is not effective. Social scientists have known for decades that large problems without solutions lead to apathy, not action. Yet much of conservation communication still seems to be focused on scaring people into caring.

As a community, we seem to be addicted to despair. For example, when the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus) was bumped down from endangered to threatened status under the US Endangered Species Act last month, many environmentalists protested and worried about relaxed protections, rather than celebrating the practices (boat speed limits and winter-refuge safeguards) that enabled the animals' partial recovery.

Second, an extraordinary number of success stories are largely unknown — not just to the general public but also to conservation scientists, policymakers and philanthropists. Searching Twitter for #OceanOptimism (and its offspring #EarthOptimism) is still one of the best ways to find examples. My favourite instance of unrecognized success was the 2015 announcement of the recovery of seagrasses in Tampa Bay, Florida, to 1950s levels. Of the 300 or so people I have mentioned this to (including 200 marine scientists at a research meeting in Tampa), fewer than 10 were aware of this important conservation achievement, which was the result of keeping fertilizer-filled run-off waters from flowing into the bay. Elsewhere, stocks of Chilean loco (an edible sea snail), Madagascar octopus and marine fish in parts of the Philippines are healthier thanks to the establishment of small-scale, locally empowered, sustainable fisheries.

Many young people have told me and my colleagues that our messages of optimism energize them and provide direction and inspiration. They also tell us that they almost left the field because so many of their courses were dispiriting.

Let me be clear: I am no Pollyanna when it comes to the future of the planet. The catastrophic coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef this year and last cannot be denied. The problems remain huge: daunting even. Conservation is often two steps forward, one step back — or frustratingly, one step forward, two steps back.

But we must also celebrate successes: species brought back from the brink of extinction, landscapes and seascapes protected or newly restored, and the integration of sustainability into corporate boardroom decisions. Even when these success stories are shared, we often undermine them with caveats and bury the story of how they were accomplished. Yet talking about these successes is how we will learn to expand them.

Nature

544,

271

(20 April 2017)

doi:10.1038/544271a

A Century Later, Lenin's Legacy Lives On

Ian Morris, Stratfor

 On Easter Sunday exactly a century ago, a train pulled out of Zurich's central station, beginning one of the most famous railroad journeys of all time. On board were Vladimir Lenin, his wife and 30 of their closest friends. Eight days later, after two boat trips and a second train ride, the little band of revolutionaries reached Russia. The rest, of course, is history.

Shipping Lenin home in a sealed train to foment a revolution and thereby take Russia out of the First World War was the idea of Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign minister at the time. Germany launched several similar plots in that stage of the war, including inciting a Republican rising in Ireland, Islamist jihadism in the Middle East and — the one for which Zimmermann is best remembered — a Mexican invasion of Texas. All except the Russian gambit failed; but though Lenin succeeded in doing what Zimmermann wanted, he succeeded in several other, very different ways, too.

While Lenin's ambitions were chiefly sociological and ideological — to create a socialist paradise — Zimmermann's were more geostrategic, and through most of the 20th century it seemed that Zimmermann had gotten more of what he wanted than Lenin had. On Easter 1918, one year after Lenin's trip, his most obvious accomplishment was getting Russia out of the war and freeing up a million German troops for a last great offensive on the Western Front, exactly as Zimmermann had intended. By Easter 1927, however, a decade after the train left Zurich, Lenin's most important consequence seemed to be the creation of a crusading communist state spreading revolution across Europe. By Easter 1967, half a century after Lenin, his main legacy appeared to be a nuclear-armed superpower capable of ending civilization if the doctrine of mutual assured destruction broke down.
Seen from Easter 2017, however, the geopolitical effects that were so important in the 20th century seem to have faded. Pundits regularly suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin's grand strategy differs little from that of the czars before him. But that doesn't mean Zimmermann and Lenin have been consigned, as Trotsky said of Lenin's socialist rivals, to the scrapheap of history. Rather, the importance of Easter 1917 now looks to have more in common with Lenin's sociological and ideological aims than with Zimmermann's geostrategic ambitions.

Imposing Equality, by Any Means Necessary

In 1962, just as the geostrategic consequences of Lenin's trip were reaching a terrifying peak in the Cuban missile crisis, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm published a classic book called The Age of Revolution. In it he argued that the modern world had been born between 1789 and 1848 in linked economic and political revolutions. On one hand, the British Industrial Revolution gave humanity access to undreamed-of amounts of energy trapped in fossil fuels; on the other, political revolutionaries argued over what kind of society should replace the monarchies and aristocracies that had ruled almost every state on Earth for 5,000 years.

In an earlier column, Jason Lopata and I drew attention to the account that anthropologist Ernest Gellner offered in his 1983 book, Nations and Nationalism, of what he called "Agraria" — a simplified model of how premodern states worked. In these agrarian states, Gellner suggested, "the ruling class forms a small minority of the population, rigidly separate from the great majority of direct agricultural producers, or peasants.

"Below the horizontally stratified minority at the top," Gellner went on, "there is another world, that of the laterally insulated petty communities of the lay members of society" — that is, peasant villages. Gellner called these villages "laterally insulated" because peasants did not get out much: Throughout most of history, few farmers went more than a day's walk from their birthplaces. In Agraria, peasants in each district tended to have their own dialects, rituals and traditions — living, says Gellner, "inward-turned lives, tied to the locality by economic need if not by political prescription."

 In Gellner's diagram, broken vertical lines symbolize the fragmentation of the peasant world, while a solid line marks the chasm dividing the masses and elite. States of this kind persisted for five millennia because, at the end of the day, both masses and elites needed each other. Peasants could get on with farming only if managerial elites established a monopoly on violence and used it to back up courts of law and other institutions that made peace, trade and markets possible. Meanwhile, managerial elites could survive only if peasants paid taxes to support them (often in considerable luxury). Agraria was basically a protection racket.

The Industrial Revolution swept Agraria away. To take advantage of the flood of energy released by coal and later oil, societies needed much more sophisticated divisions of labor. "Perpetually growing productivity," Gellner noted, "requires that this division be not merely complex, but also perpetually, and often rapidly, changing." This meant that rather than staying on the farm and doing as their forefathers had done, people had to be able to learn new skills and move where labor was needed. "The immediate consequence of this new kind of mobility is a certain kind of egalitarianism," said Gellner. "Modern society is not mobile because it is egalitarian; it is egalitarian because it is mobile."
Consequently, a diagram of industrial society would not be full of lines, like the diagram of Agraria. It would be an empty rectangle, within which people move freely — because, as Gellner put it, "A society which is destined to a permanent game of musical chairs cannot erect deep barriers of rank, of caste or estate, between the various sets of chairs which it possesses."

Agraria had worked by drawing lines, not just between the elite and the masses but also between men and women, free and enslaved, believers and heretics, pure and defiled, and countless other categories. Each group was assigned its place in a complex hierarchy of mutual obligations and privileges, guaranteed by the divine will (as explained by a priesthood) and state violence. Fossil-fuel society, by contrast, needed to erase lines, creating a homogeneous community of interchangeable citizens, each equally free to move to whatever place they would be most useful.

As a result, if traditional expectations about how people should worship, whom they could marry, and what jobs they might do interfered with the growth of the markets needed to supply the labor fueling an industrialized economy, and to buy the goods and services that it could produce in such abundance, then those traditions had to go. "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify," Marx and Engels rightly observed in 1848. "All that is solid melts into air."
The great challenge of the past two centuries has been how to erase the lines within Agraria. The shift was always going to be traumatic; but in Western Europe and its overseas settler colonies, it was never as violent as Marx and Engels had expected. This was partly because traditional agrarian elites mostly mounted fighting retreats across the 19th century. Rather than making last-ditch stands, they compromised with their critics and even became critics themselves, thereby hanging onto much of their wealth and power as the world changed around them. In the face of such slippery tactics, the critics increasingly turned toward buying cooperation by pursuing liberal, nonviolent transformation.
Yet this hadn't always been the case. In Britain, the kind of new elite that Charles Dickens' novels criticized so savagely initially herded paupers into workhouses and deported felons to Australia to create a more open society, while Euro-Americans first drove Native Americans beyond their borders and then confined them on reservations. But as the 19th century wore on, that changed. As early as the 1830s, British governments legislated on workplace conditions, and in the 1860s the United States deployed massive state violence — not to expel or eliminate African-Americans but to turn them (in principle, at least) into full citizens. By the 1870s, most liberal regimes had legalized trade unions and introduced free compulsory primary education. Some governments even offered savings plans for retirement, public health programs and unemployment insurance. The very word "liberal" changed its meaning, from someone who believed in having the smallest possible state consistent with protecting the individual pursuit of wealth, to someone who believed in governments big enough to intervene to guarantee equal liberties for everyone.

The physical energy released by fossil fuels and the social energy released by the new liberal deal between governments and citizens made Western societies vastly richer and stronger than any others in the world. And unsurprisingly, some non-Westerners began pursuing industrial revolutions of their own. Like the Western liberals, they recognized the need to sweep away Agraria's ancient internal barriers. But outside the West, their opponents were often much more deeply entrenched, and much more willing to shed blood to defend the old ways. Predictably, perhaps, non-Western reformers proved equally willing to try violent, illiberal paths toward a world of homogeneous, interchangeable comrades.

Lenin's legacy for the 21st century was in being the first person to show how an illiberal path to modernity could work.

A Permanent or Temporary Triumph?

In the late 19th century, industrializing autocrats generally did well in their uppermost aim of holding onto power. Between 1911 and 1925, however, all of them — Qing China, Romanov Russia, Habsburg Austria-Hungary, Hohenzollern Germany, Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Persia — collapsed under the strain of mobilizing to fight modern wars against more liberal powers. As the historian Robert Gerwarth shows in his recent book, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, the violence this process let loose was often even worse than that of World War I, and almost all of these ex-Agrarias ended up on extremely illiberal paths toward modernization.

Where liberals used state power to erase boundaries by making everyone equally free to exercise the rights of citizens, illiberals used state power to erase the people themselves if they did not seem to fit into the in-group, defined in terms of class by communists and race by fascists. The path away from Agraria that Lenin forged was deeply paradoxical, subjecting citizens to harsh discipline in the name of equality, deploying armies of slave laborers in the name of economic progress, and swinging back toward treating rulers as semi-divine superhumans in the name of the people. The original cult of personality was Lenin's own, implying at his funeral in 1924 that concentrating all power in the hands of one man was actually the same thing as giving all power to the people, because the Communist Party's leaders were so wise that they singlehandedly embodied the general will. Between 1917 and 1939, these wise leaders killed more than 10 million of their comrades who did not fit.

There were several points in the 20th century, especially during the 1930s and 1970s, when Lenin's illiberal path toward industrial society seemed to be moving faster than the liberal one. 1945 and 1989, however, seemed to falsify such claims, the latter so decisively that political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously announced that the world had reached "the end of history" because liberal democracy had outperformed all its conceivable rivals. Freedom House even provided statistical support for this claim, calculating that while in 1972 just 29 percent of the world's societies were free and 46 percent unfree, by 1998 the proportions had been reversed, with 46 percent free and 26 percent unfree.

In the nearly 10 years since the financial crisis of 2008, however, the forward march of liberalism has been checked. Since the 1980s, China's post-Maoist version of illiberal development has consistently provided faster economic growth than the liberal versions. Admittedly, it began from a much lower starting point than the West and, despite being able to pluck a lot of low-hanging fruit, has generated environmental disaster, massive corruption and violent protests. But some observers nonetheless conclude that illiberal policies might be the best option for growth in the 21st century.

Voters in Turkey, Hungary and Russia certainly seem to think so, returning to power the self-proclaimed "illiberal democrats" Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin, all while 2016 brought nationalist and populist backlashes against liberal globalization to the Western core. Comparing Donald Trump, Theresa May or Marine Le Pen to Hitler — as some shrill journalists do — reveals a profound lack of perspective, but the fact remains that in the 2010s, more people seem attracted to illiberal paths than at any time in the past 40 years. Lenin's legacy continues to mutate; today it is the example he set as the founding father of the first modern but illiberal society that most commands our attention. And a century after Lenin's train left Zurich's central station, the long-term triumph of liberalism is once again in question.

 

Even union economists accept cutting penalty rates creates jobs

Even union economists accept cutting penalty rates creates jobs

by Aaron Patrick, Australian Financial Review

Even the brains behind the unions' penalty rates argument believe that lowering the cost of employees on Saturdays and Sunday will create jobs. All that the experts involved in the case disagree on is how many.

"There may be some small [positive] employment effect in the sector," says Professor Jeff Borland, a Melbourne University economist who spent six hours in the stand at the Fair Work Commission fighting the change on behalf of the United Voice union.

The Labor Party and Australian Council of Trade Unions don't accept that cutting regulated wages can create jobs. They have mounted a ferocious campaign against the Fair Work Commission's modest reduction in penalty rates on weekends in restaurants, bars, hotels, shops and pharmacies.

Reducing the standard rate for full-time and part-time staff from 175 per cent of to 150 per cent on Sundays (casuals are unaffected) will damage the economy by shifting profits from staff to employers, they say, an argument that is being used to attack the Turnbull government.

Union leaders are now shifting their attention to the ACTU's attempt to increase the minimum wage by $45 a week to $37,420, which ACTU secretary Sally McManus proposed last week at the National Press Club.

"A low minimum wage provides a big incentive for employers to destroy good, steady fairly paid jobs by outsourcing them, cancelling agreements and using labour hire," McManus told the press club in Canberra last week.

Mixed messages

The economic arguments made by the unions' experts, in some cases, contradict the messages from leaders of the labour movement and Labor Party.

In a study cited by shadow finance minister Jim Chalmers to attack the government on Sunday, the Australia Institute, a left-wing thinktank, suggested some businesses would struggle to find staff at the lower rate. It didn't acknowledge that they could just pay more than the award minimum.

"The point you make about an increase in jobs is not proven," Chalmers said when asked about the jobs benefit on the Insiders show. "There is not any evidence of that."

Even staunch left-wing economists such as John Quiggin from the University of Queensland accept that a reduction in penalty rates could create jobs – he just doesn't think there will be enough to make the change worthwhile.

"There is an effect but most evidence is that it isn't large," says Quiggin, who was also a union witness in the penalty rates case.

Some people will refuse to work on weekends at the lower rate because they don't need the money that badly, according to the unions' economists. In essence they argue that the market will keep wages above the minimum regulated rate, and therefore there is no or little benefit from cutting it.

"You can't assume wages will come down all the way [because of the decision]" Borland says. "The unions and the Labor Party wouldn't like that argument."

The argument is based in part on a survey by Professor John Rose at the University of South Australia of 472 people who work in restaurants and shops. It found they expected to be paid at least an extra 50 per cent to work Sundays, or $32.10 an hour.

Why business hires:

Economic theory holds that demand for labour increases when the cost is low, and decreases when the cost is high. Workers will be hired if they can increase profits, the theory says, and that won't happen if a company is forced to pay more than the financial benefit they bring to the business.

The theory is used by policymakers to oppose penalty rates and a high minimum wage, which is politically popular and advocated by unions and welfare groups. A paper written in 2015 by a visiting scholar at the San Francisco Federal Reserve estimated that the US minimum wage, which at the federal level is $US7.25 ($9.67) an hour, had cost 100,000 to 200,000 jobs.

The ACTU doesn't accept a higher minimum wage will cost jobs. Because many Australians are working less than they want to, paying them more will get more to turn up to work, according to an ACTU's submission to the Fair Work Commission.

Counter-intuitively, the poor aren't the main beneficiaries of the minimum wage, which covers many people affected by the Sunday penalty rates decision, A study in 2005 by economist Andrew Leigh, who is now Labor's shadow assistant treasurer, found that the poor mostly did not rely on the minimum wage because many of them did not have jobs.

The average minimum wage earner, and even those who earn less than the minimum wage, are members of the middle class, his research found. Presumably that's because they have other sources of income, such as government payments or families.

(Contacted for comment, Leigh says that in families containing at least one worker, the typical minimum wage worker was in the 39th percentile of household income, which he regarded as low income.)

Jobs for the low skilled:

Economists who helped business lobbyists convince the Fair Work Commission to reduce penalties say they want to create more jobs, especially for people with few skills.

"My sympathy is for workers and I don't want to see people unemployed," says Phil Lewis, a veteran labour economist from the University of Canberra, who was a witness for the restaurant, cafe and catering industries. "I think Labor and particularly [leader] Bill Shorten have been particularly opportunistic here."

Lewis presented a picture to the commission very different to the common perception of the penalties debate, which is that hundreds of thousands of the lowest paid are going to suffer from the reduction.

Not many people in hospitality and retailing are paid weekend penalty rates, Lewis says. Small businesses use family members, and pay in cash, or not at all, and some big businesses have negotiated down penalties for higher full-time wages with the shop assistants' union.

Squeezed in the middle are medium-sized businesses. "They have to pay $36 an hour when Woolworths are paying $22 an hour," Lewis says.

To back up its campaign, Shorten is using a Melbourne hotel cleaner, Margarita Murray-Stark, as an example of a victim of the penalty rates decision. But Murray-Stark is a union activist who doesn't know if her employer will cut her wage, according to another newspaper.

The Labor Party blames Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for the decision, even though it was made by an independent arbitrator whose president, former ACTU official Iain Ross, was appointed by Shorten when he was employment minister.

Ross, who is never mentioned in Labor attacks on the decision, rejects the arguments put by his former colleagues.

"The evidence of business owners and operators in these proceedings supports the proposition that the current level of Sunday penalty rates has led employers to restrict trading hours, reduce staff levels and restrict the services provided," he says in the judgment.

"The evidence also supports the proposition that a reduction in penalty rates is likely to lead to: increased trading hours, an increase in the level and range of services offered on Sundays and public holidays, and an increase in overall hours worked."