GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE PRESENTS ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES TO the quality of humanity’s future. In the arctic, the Inuit have firsthand experience with climate change impinging on their daily lives: they are literally on thin ice. Some Inuit collaborate with scientists to carry out research to better understand climate change and share their wealth of knowledge about climate. These are valuable contributions that challenge common notions of who can make new knowledge because the Inuit do not have their own written language.
Most of the world’s population lives in temperate and tropic environments where a typical weather forecast includes the high and low temperature and odds of precipitation: “Today you can expect a high of seventy, a low of fifty, and an eighty percent chance of rain.” From those estimates we make our daily personal decisions, such as what we wear and whether we might jump in puddles today. Those who live in arctic climates are not so temperature and precipitation oriented. It’s almost always freezing, and there can be snow in the air at any time, either falling from the sky or blowing up from the ground. For people at extreme high latitudes, factors in daily personal decisions can be, quite literally, blowing in the wind.
Wind is one of the weather conditions that matters most and is less predictable with climate change. As Elaiya Mike, an Inuk in Iqaluit, the largest city in the Canadian territory Nunavut, reports, “Nowadays we are getting wind from everywhere. The winds are shifty and constantly changing their point of origin. The weather signs point toward a clear, calm day, but the wind suddenly whips up, and that is how it seems to operate in this day and age.”
Inuit hunters in Nanuvut travel on land, ice, and open water to harvest ringed seal, caribou, Arctic char, narwhal, polar bear, and ptarmigan, to name a few. All told they hunt about twenty-six species of mammal, bird, fish, and invertebrates. In places like Clyde River (known by the native Inuit as Kangiqtugaapik), a community of about 850 people, the hunters deliver a share of their harvest to the elders and invite others in the community to come and collect some.
Since 2009, Shari Fox Gearheard has led the Silalirijiit Project (Silalirijiit means “those who work with or think about weather”). Gearheard, a geographer and research scientist employed by the University of Colorado–Boulder, has lived in Clyde River since 2004, and has established a collaborative working relationship with many Clyde River hunters and elders. Through the Silalirijiit Project she and a team of expert hunters and scientists compared climate data and Inuit knowledge of wind speed and direction over time. It was not surprising to the team to discover that scientific data and Inuit knowledge do not always align to tell the same story; instead they tell complementary stories.
Inuit have been reporting an increase in the variability in wind speed and direction since the 1990s. Inuit hunters pay close attention to the wind, which affects the amount of blowing snow, the size of the waves, whether fog is likely to roll in, and the speed of moving ice, among other things. Inuit say that the prevailing wind direction used to be from the northwest. A steady prevailing wind creates relatively stable snow drifts (uqalurait) that are a reliable aide to navigation. Now, however, the Inuit report that the prevailing wind direction changes frequently. The direction of the snow drifts change, and people can become lost; with navigation thus more dangerous, some Inuit now carry personal locator beacons and satellite phones.
The data from the local weather station reveals no detectable change in the prevailing wind direction and barely any change in wind speeds over time. Unlike expert Inuit hunters, weather instruments are stationary, near the sea on flat terrain at the Clyde River Airport. The wind instrument there records hourly wind speed via a two-minute average taken at the beginning of every hour. Analysis of the data have shown that on an annual basis, the proportion of high winds (those exceeding thirty kilometers per hour, at which point travel is dangerous) had not changed over time, and the proportion of low winds (lower than twenty kilometers per hour, when travel is safe) had decreased slightly.
The weather station is not malfunctioning; nor are the Inuit wrong. They are observing different phenomena. The weather station is not representative of the fjords where the hunters travel. Inuit are sensitive to sudden and unpredictable changes in wind because they affect their safety and navigation. Indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge are different, and Gearheard stresses that neither is superior; both need to be interpreted and applied correctly.
The lack of alignment between scientific and local knowledge in this example highlights the need for citizen science in rapidly changing environments (though neither Gearheard nor the Inuit who collaborate with her call what they do citizen science). An important lesson from Gearheard’s study is that there are valid forms of knowledge, such as Inuit knowledge, apart from conventional scientific research. Bringing together scientific information and indigenous knowledge can be extremely useful and illuminating, but what exactly is combined and how this is done needs to be carefully considered. As Gearheard explains to me, there is a lot more to saying that bringing traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge together is important (many studies say this), because actually doing this work can be challenging.
Many researchers over the years have interviewed Inuit and found recurring stories, particularly with regard to another important weather variable: sea ice. For many of us, ice is a cube of frozen water that we take from the freezer and put in a tall glass of lemonade. For people in the far north, ice is the landscape. Sea ice varies in strength, thickness, salinity, and texture. Across the landscape, ice is a patchwork of types. New ice is typically smooth and thin (up to thirty centimeters), and ice in its first year is thicker (up to two hundred centimeters), and often rough; older ice is the thickest (over two meters) and has lower salinity and greater strength.
Many Inuit have noticed that sea ice has become thinner and is present for shorter amounts of time than before. Alooloo Kautaq, an Inuk hunter in Clyde River, describes how snow and seawater now mix into punnirujuk, which is similar in consistency to lard and deteriorates more easily than iced used to, thus posing a danger. The Inuit have also noticed that permanent snow patches, aniuvat, are smaller. The seasons have changed in length and timing. Simeonie Amagoalik, an Inuk from Resolute Bay, provides an example of indigenous knowledge: “I used to go egg hunting, but now it is too dangerous to travel by ice, so I cannot go to the places that I used to go to. I think it is mainly the ice on the sea that has affected me the most.” Inuit know the sea ice is thinning based on how it affects their daily lives and livelihood, rather than by measuring its actual thickness. Jaypeetee Qarpik from Pangnirtung recalls a youth spent traveling by ice as early as November, if not sooner, but now can boat through open water during the twelve days of Christmas. What’s relevant to the Inuit is not the numeric thickness of the ice but how it affects their hunting; researchers, on the other hand, need the exact measurements. Gearheard wanted studies of ice to be relevant to both Inuit and scientific communities.
For five years, starting in 2006, Gearhead led the Siku-Inuit-Hila (Sea Ice–People–Weather) Project. Part of the project involved Inuit collecting measurements of sea ice thickness and sharing the data with Gearheard and an interdisciplinary team of university-and community-based researchers. Once a week during the sea ice season, hunters traveled to measure the sea ice conditions at designated monitoring stations.
Each station was an eight-meter square with four corners made of stainless steel cable suspended from wooden stakes and frozen through the ice and into the seawater below. In the middle were nine wooden stakes in the snow, which a volunteer would examine from outside the grid in order to measure snow depth without disturbing the snow cover. After recording snow depth, they heated each corner cable by applying AC voltage across the top of two cables at a time. Under the ice, the seawater conducted the electric current, which heated both cables. Once they yanked the hot cables free of the ice, the Inuit would haul them up until a wide weight attached to the cable would bump the bottom side of the ice. They would measure the length of the newly exposed cable, from which they computed the thickness of the ice upon which they were standing (and upon which their way of way of life depends).
We may not stand directly upon sea ice as the Inuit do, but all our lives, anywhere on the planet, do rest upon sea ice. The reason scientists take a particularly strong interest in Arctic sea ice is because it influences all life on the planet. Sea ice covers about 15 percent of the oceans for part of the year, but that relatively small fraction has an enormous impact on global climate. Sea ice is frozen ocean, unlike icebergs, glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves, which are freshwater and originate on land. Sea ice reflects solar radiation (heat) back into space, so areas of the ocean stay cold. Sea ice is the opposite of paved blacktop surfaces, which absorb heat and feel hot. The ocean works as a conveyor-belt style circulation system that essentially moves weather across the planet. That conveyer belt is driven by sea ice: new sea ice is salty, but as it ages, it pushes salt into the ocean underneath and the saltier, colder water under old sea ice is dense and sinks. It moves along the ocean floor toward the equator, pushing the mid-depth warmer waters from the equator toward the poles. The warm air above the tropical ocean waters moves right along with those waters, making midlatitudes comfortable for us and our crops.
The data collected by the Inuit at the monitoring stations catalog some sea ice basics—time of freeze-up, time of breakup, sea ice thickness, and snow thickness—and are informative to local residents. Plus, with the data collected at sea ice stations, the research team can figure out the processes governing growth and melt at the surface and at the bottom of the sea ice.
Of equal value to the research team is the knowledge the Inuit elders and hunters have from oral history and personal daily experience on the sea ice. For example, the sea ice study identified different drivers of ice growth and melt at different locations. The town of Qaanaaq proved to be the most unexpected; it is the coldest town in the region, but its ice was 20 percent thinner due to an unexpectedly high rate of bottom melting. It was ascertained that a warm ocean current must be preventing ice growth, making the region more susceptible to climate change than places farther south. This information helps the town plan adaptation. The entire town depends on thinning sea ice so that hunters can access the water for hunting, travel, and to harvest icebergs for fresh water in winter when the local creeks dry up. If the ice gets too thin, the town won’t be able to harvest passing icebergs with the front-end loader trucks that bring the bergs to the water-processing facilities. They are starting to plan now for the inevitable time when the ice becomes too thin.
Collaborative efforts between scientists and community members has not always been the norm in the Arctic but, increasingly, visiting scientists are recognizing Inuit knowledge, and Inuit are taking more leadership roles in research projects and programs. For generations, Inuit hunters and elders have used traditional weather forecasting methods based on a variety of indicators including cloud patterns, wind, animal behavior, and the twinkling of stars. Climate change means unpredictable weather patterns; if the system is unpredictable or more variable, does it make it more difficult for elders to pass on their knowledge (called Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or IQ) to younger generations?
Where indigenous people remain, effective conservation strategies involve preserving and studying indigenous knowledge, as well as helping the people find alternatives when rapid environmental change causes long-standing traditions to wane. The Bushmen of the Kalahari of the Desert use an app called CyberTracker to record how they track animals while hunting. The Bushmen are not like deer hunters in the United States, who often hook a chair ladder to the side of tree and sit and wait for deer to come within range of their gun. Bushmen are long-distance runners, and they work as a group to separate an animal from its herd and run it in the desert heat while keeping themselves in the shade when possible; the animal dies of heat exhaustion, but the hunters recover.
Louis Liebenberg, an innovator from South Africa, developed the CyberTracker app in 1996 and has been upgrading it ever since. Trackers don’t read words, but they read animal tracks in the sand and other signs in nature, so it wasn’t a stretch for them to read computer symbols or icons. Liebenberg calls tracking an art and hypothesizes that it uses the same reasoning skills as scientific methods, suggesting that tracking provides insights into the origin of science. Many researchers have posited that the human brain is a paradox of evolution by natural selection. If our ancestors’ brains were adapted to deal with the daily problem solving of hunter-gatherers, why our brains deal with math and physics? As biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson puts it, “That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.” Monitoring animal signs is important for understanding the art of tracking and the potential origin of science, preserving indigenous knowledge, and the conservation of wildlife.
Sometimes the vulnerability of indigenous communities is not from pervasive climate change but from logging by multinational companies, which in turn opens up forests to wildlife poachers and allows urban-based businesses to dominate local trade. Fortunately, some industries, like the Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB) want to meet standards set by the Forest Stewardship Council, a program that certifies responsible forest management. As part of their certification, the CIB aims to minimize the negative impacts of logging on indigenous people. The Bayaka Pygmies in the Congo live as hunter-gatherers in forest tracts the size of small US states; they are stigmatized and marginalized by their urban neighbors. Even though they don’t subscribe to principles of landownership like the majority of cultures in the world, they have many resources in the forest that they depend upon for their livelihood. To protect these resources, including sacred medicinal trees and freshwater springs, they turn to citizen science. The Bayaka Pygmies use Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, with the icons and images displayed similar to CyberTracker, to geotag and map natural resources important to them. CIB uses the maps created by the Pygmies to guide their selective logging and the timing of cutting schedules. The Pygmies also use GPS units to report instances of poaching and the discovery of illegal roads. In this way, citizen science gives voice to the Pygmy people in a country where they are otherwise marginalized and excluded.
Across the globe there are people acting as stewards of natural resources. Stewardship can involve a range of ordinary activities, from placing a bird bath in a backyard to harvesting fish only over a certain size. When it comes to conservation, citizen science is no longer about hobbies or games pursued in one’s free time. It is a necessity, and can be a critical part of how one choses to spend time.
Finn Danielsen and his colleagues are based in Copenhagen, where they organize participatory monitoring for natural resource management with numerous communities—particularly those that neighbor protected areas such as national parks and marine reserves. In 2010 they published a paper quantitatively comparing the effectiveness of participatory monitoring relative to monitoring carried out solely by teams of professionals. In an e-mail exchange, Danielsen explains, “We had encountered skepticism from a number of people who did not believe that community members can monitor biodiversity.” He recalls a specific incident in which visiting biologists completely discounted participatory monitoring during conversations with government staff. Fortunately, the government staff recognized that the academic biologists lacked knowledge of the realities of managing protected areas. Even though it was unfounded, the criticisms by academics drove home the message to Danielsen and his colleagues that they needed to show a quantitative comparison, published in a highly esteemed journal, in order to convince academic natural scientists of the value of participatory monitoring.
What they found was that participatory monitoring helps local people make decisions, like whether or not to go fishing in certain areas, to pass a village bylaw banning the hunting of wild pigs during the breeding season, or to only permit the harvest of shellfish that are old enough to reproduce. The data from professional efforts have informed larger institutional changes, like the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, changing international agreements on fisheries and subsidy policies, and placing threatened species on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. Professional monitoring influences policies on large scales, while participatory monitoring influences real decision making at home.
Danielsen also found that the time between data collection and action differs between professional and participatory monitoring. When natural resource management involves community members in environmental monitoring, people act on the results quickly—usually within months. When only professionals are involved it can take years, even decades before findings are used to inform any type of decisions.
Danielsen explains, “It is not professional scientists who are slow, but it is the professional scientists’ process which is slow.” He says that scientists are too far upstream in the decision-making process. The process is slow even when their studies quickly produce technical reports for government agencies or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) rather than slowly produced peer-reviewed publications. He admits, “The professionals’ research agenda is often out of touch with local community needs.”
Scientists simply preparing a report doesn’t create a compelling case. Participatory monitoring functions like a forum that inspires discussion and thought, followed by rapid action. “When community members are involved, the route to decision making looks very different. It is much shorter,” explains Danielsen. “When community members are involved, just by being involved, observing changes and discussing their findings together with each other, they immediately start thinking about possible actions that need to be taken. Participatory monitoring provides a forum for interpreting trends, for identifying solutions and for taking action. This is very important.”
For example, Danielsen notices that communities will often be drawn into discussions about setting quotas on how many individual animals can be taken from a wild population. When community members are themselves directly involved in collecting and interpreting data on animal populations and proposing the size of the quotas, they are more likely to cooperate with the authorities on overseeing that the quota restrictions are followed in practice. They are more likely to call government staff if they see someone violating the regulations.
Participatory monitoring is a key part of successful conservation strategies for resolving conflicts between humans and desirable wildlife like snow leopards in Asia and koalas in Australia.
Snow leopards are an endangered species native to the Himalayas and protected by international treaties. The Nepalese government took action to reduce the hunting of snow leopards and their main prey, blue sheep. As a result, snow leopard populations in many areas have rebounded but, unfortunately, more snow leopards leads to an increase in human-leopard conflict. Local communities feel that they must bear the brunt of government conservation through losses in their livestock.
Snow leopards live at an elevation of between three thousand and five thousand meters, and are indicators of the health of the mountain ecosystem. In this range, families eke out a living by growing crops and herding livestock, neither of which is easy in an area with cold, harsh weather, and rocky and steep terrain. Herders free-range native yaks, cattle, sheep, goats, horses, mules, and donkeys; these animal provide dairy, protein, fiber, and leather; dung supplement for fuel; dung for fertilizer; transportation of goods and people (tourists); and labor as draft animals for the tilling of land. When snow leopards kill livestock, the economic loss can amount to as much as a quarter of a family’s annual income. Herders sometimes slay snow leopards in retaliation for their monetary shortfall. The healthiest snow leopard populations were observed only around Buddhist monasteries, which was evidence that retaliation was a problem; observant Buddhists don’t kill animals, so the monasteries functioned as holy nature preserves. Conservation biologists realized the government efforts to recover this endangered species would ultimately fail without a way to address the needs of the local people.
A rebounding snow leopard population taking some livestock is a common problem repeated in all the countries where snow leopards live: Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, Nepal, and Pakistan. The most effective solution to human–snow leopard conflict in each of these countries has been community insurance, which compensates for livestock loss. Similar programs exist in the United States, such as NGOs that create a wolf compensation trust for ranchers in the northern Rocky Mountains. Over a couple of decades, conservation organizations paid out over $1 million to ranchers to compensate for wolves taking livestock before the 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act transitioned the program to be run and funded by states and tribes.
In central Asia some insurance schemes to compensate for snow leopard loss rely on tourism funds. A model system in Pakistan involves a collective insurance fund and an ecotourism fund that cofinances the insurance compensation.74 In Nepal, there is a model that is 100 percent community owned and managed, which buffers it from relying on external funds other than seed grants to establish initial credit. In India, communities added a twist of payment for ecosystem services: herders agree to keep their livestock off some pastures for the grazing of blue sheep and other leopard prey; the pastures set aside for wildlife function like preserves, and local villages receive payment at fair market value for grazing land used by the wildlife.
In some locations, communities have added a citizen science component to their insurance scheme. For example, in Ghunsa, Nepal, herders use motion-triggered cameras to monitor snow leopards and blue sheep. Called camera trapping, the activity provides important insights into the ecosystem. With the help of herders, scientists have learned that snow leopards keep blue sheep populations low, which actually makes more grazing available for local livestock. The cameras also provided data on how many snow leopards are in a given area. Perhaps most important for long-term conservation, as villagers learned more about the snow leopards through pictures of these elusive animals, the snow leopards went from being considered pests to being a source of pride; the camera trapping functioned like a snow leopard publicity team.
In neighboring Bhutan, yak livestock are more at risk of disease than snow leopard predation, but similar camera trap programs are growing. Tshewang Wangchuk is the executive director of the Bhutan Foundation and a PhD graduate student studying snow leopards. He hopes that citizen science will make the relationship between herders and snow leopards more meaningful. With just a little training and equipment, the herders can set up and maintain cameras while out herding their yaks. They don’t expect anything in return, and they get excited by the awesomeness of the pictures.
Wangchuk tells me about one twenty-five-year-old herder in Bhutan who got amazing pictures of three snow leopards feeding on one his yaks. When the herder reported the data, he wasn’t complaining or interested in retaliation; he was thrilled! “Not one, not two, but three snow leopards!” he boasted. It was undoubtedly a hardship for him to lose a yak, but that hardship was overshadowed by joy in seeing the lost yak supply food for a big family of snow leopards. In many countries and cultures, we undervalue joy. In Bhutan, joy is a highly prized commodity and the country quantifies and reports its wealth not simply in terms of gross national product but also with an index of gross national happiness.
With the highest diversity of felines on earth, Bhutan wants to be a premier tourist destination. One of the most popular hiking trails, the Jomolhari Trek, travels through prime habitat for snow leopards and blue sheep. Focusing on the snow leopard hot spots, Wangchuk selected two communities along the trek to participate in snow leopard monitoring with camera traps. Soe Yutoed has twenty-eight households and Soe Yaksa has eighteen; the villagers are yak herders, and the area is mostly above the tree line. Tourism helps villagers benefit from snow leopard conservation; as Wanghuck sees it, “Tourism and citizen science transform snow leopards from a liability to an asset.”
Koalas are another species of tourism interest that can cause conflict when overly abundant. On a single Wednesday in November 2012, over 450 people in South Australia reported on the locations of over thirteen hundred koalas in a citizen science project called the Great Koala Count. Researchers at the University of Adelaide used the data to model koala occurrence and identify suitable habitat. The places where koalas thrive include Kangaroo Island, the Mount Lofty Ranges, and the tips of three peninsulas of South Australia. But this wasn’t always the case.
When Europeans settled in South Australia in the 1830s, koalas were present and doing fine in the southeastern part of the state. A market developed for their thick pelts, and by the 1930s millions had been killed for the fur trade, and koalas were extinct from South Australia. As their numbers got low, starting in the 1920s, koalas were reintroduced to Kangaroo Island and other parts of South Australia. Now the reintroduced koala populations have rebounded with a vengeance, and there are an estimated 200,000. In the Mount Lofty Ranges alone there could be over 100,000 koalas. The Great Koala Count helps to estimate their abundance and distribution on the mainland, and the data support research that can inform management options. The conservation is ultimately determined by what management options people support. For example, by 2001 the Kangaroo Island population was an estimated twenty-seven thousand. Koalas have become a suburban species; it might be difficult for someone outside of Australia to imagine it, but koalas are often considered pests. The government management plan included culling in some states, like Victoria, but when wildlife managers proposed culling the population on Kangaroo Island, mainlanders voiced strong opposition.
Wildlife managers and mainlanders compromised in a program to sterilize koalas. Kangaroo Island is now site of one of the largest wildlife sterilization programs in the world. Meanwhile, in New South Wales, koala populations are declining from rampant spread of chlamydia, which can manifest as a sexually transmitted bacterial disease that can cause blindness and infertility. In some areas, more than half the koalas have chlamydia, and wildlife managers are again proposing culling to stem the spread of the disease in hopes of restoring a healthy population. Similar to management of suburban white-tailed deer in the United States, culling for any purposes is often not only unpopular but met with strong public resistance. Time and again, conservation requires not only scientific insights on what works but public support on what’s acceptable.
A study led by Bianca Hollow and her colleagues at the University of South Australia and at the Department of Environment in South Australia, examined how the Great Koala Count influenced the role of public support on the development of policy for koala management. Hollow compared three groups: participants in the Great Kola Count; those who had heard about and registered with the Great Koala Count but didn’t participate (referred to as onlookers),75 and those who had not heard of the Great Koala Count (considered to represent the general public).
The groups were asked for their opinions toward various ways of managing koalas.
Participants and onlookers differed from the general public in a few ways; for example, they favored banding trees, which involves placing a strip of tin or aluminum around a tree trunk in order to prevent koalas from climbing it and defoliating it. The general public seemed to favor doing nothing, or perhaps translocations, but definitely not banding trees. Similarly, when people ranked koala management priorities, the general public ranked reducing car collisions with koalas as a priority, though participants ranked raising awareness and research into disease as priorities. When the survey focused on cars and the management options of providing road ladders, promoting safe driving, adding more road signs, or minimizing koala access to roads, the general public favored minimizing access, while participants favored the addition of road ladders. For all responses, onlookers tended to be like participants or fall in between participants and the general public.
The views of participants (and onlookers) were not representative of the general public. Hollow contends that the citizen scientists represent highly informed members of the public and therefore are as valuable, or even more so, for informing policy than the general public. Many participants reported that they learned about koalas and koala management, and even changed their opinions about management, during the Great Koala Count. Over 65 percent of participants and over 60 percent of onlookers reported that they had learned something new from their involvement in the Great Koala Count. Furthermore, about 19 percent of participants and almost 38 percent of onlookers said that the Great Koala Count caused their opinions to change, most often related to koala management and particular options like fertility control. Policy makers could engage citizen scientists in dialogues to inform decisions.
The phenomenon of elevated civic engagement among citizen scientists extends beyond koalas, notably with volunteer water quality monitors. There are over 100,000 people in the United States who monitor local water quality, and hundreds of thousands worldwide. They are not monitoring at the spigot, as in the Flint Water Study (see chapter 9), but at the source: in rivers, streams, and lakes. Volunteer water monitoring has a long history similar to the projects featured in part 1 of this book. The primary difference being that projects in part 1 involved national data sets created via a central location for all local data to be shared, whereas volunteer water data has typically been managed at the state level, collected locally, and largely used locally.
Ted Ludwig is a volunteer water monitor in Colfax, Wisconsin. He also recruits and trains volunteers, instructs schoolchildren, and helps scouts earn badges through water monitoring programs. Ludwig is a retired marine and a retired postal worker; at seventy-three years of age, he is brimming with energy and is outside every day. For example, when he and his wife take a trip to visit her parents, who live 230 miles away, they don’t hop in a car. They load up their panniers with food and his bike trailer with camping gear and pedal their bicycles for three or four days.76 There are many streams and lakes for which volunteers can monitor water quality. Not surprisingly, Ludwig does them all.
At the basic level, Ludwig uses a net to sample macroinvertebrates in the water. This is his favorite task with kids because they are often shocked that bugs live in water. By identifying the types, he can report a Benthic Index, a calculation based on the combination and amounts of different types of aquatic bugs. Some types of macroinvertebrates are tolerant of low-quality waters, and others are intolerant; which type is present reveals a lot about the health of the aquatic system. Ludwig runs a test for dissolved oxygen, and estimates turbidity with a special tube. To measure stream flow, he uses the float method, measuring the width and depth of a stretch of a stream and recording how long it takes a ball to float a known distance on that stretch. At the next level, he’ll install a thermistor to continuously measure temperature from May to October, which is something he says helps scientists determine whether a stream should be classified as a cold water or warm water one and indicates what species of fish it can harbor. At the highest level, Ludwig will do special projects like sampling phosphorus and road salt runoff. He enters all the stream data into the database of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, called the Surface Water Integrated Monitoring (SWIM) system. Anybody in Wisconsin making water decisions uses SWIM data. Professionals and volunteers alike add data to SWIM.
Kris Stepenuck, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, studies water quality monitoring. As part of her dissertation research in Wisconsin, she surveyed over three hundred coordinators in the United States to find out how their programs have influenced natural resource policy and management. A paper by Stepenuck and Christine Overdevest reported that new and experienced volunteers did not differ in their knowledge of water monitoring topics, but they did differ in other significant ways: people with lots of experience in water monitoring were more likely to be politically active, to be part of larger social networks, and to have stronger feelings of community connectedness than others.
One common policy outcome was that projects identified illegal bacterial discharges. Also common was that projects were able to upgrade the protection status on a monitored stream by identifying its risks. Sometimes program data informs designation of National Wild and Scenic River status, or it might be used to gain gear restrictions for creek fishing. Ludwig has helped get streams designated as “impaired” so that they receive attention from programs that encourage farmers and other landowners to adopt practices that limit stream pollution and sediment runoff. Ludwig keeps monitoring, but he has not yet seen a stream successfully restored. He muses, “Humans are the only critters who try to wipe out their own living areas.”
Wisconsin supports its volunteer monitors because it relies on them for baseline monitoring. The state provides small grants for equipment, and it provides training. Other states are not as supportive; Pennsylvania had rigorous volunteer monitoring programs in the past, but cut funding in 2009, diminishing the resources available to the more than eleven thousand volunteer monitors in the state. Around the same time, from 2007 to 2012, the state issued over ten thousand permits for hydraulic fracturing.77 Coincidence? How much policy makers, regulators, and managers want an engaged public varies from place to place.
New knowledge is the main product of citizen science. Civically engaged people, stewards of natural resources, communities empowered with new knowledge, and social ties: these are a few of the by-products of citizen science that are key to conservation and environmental justice (as we’ll see in chapter 9).
Some scientists are concerned that the desire for the by-products of citizen science, and their social impact, will compromise scientific integrity. The journal Nature published an editorial called “Rise of the Citizen Scientist” in 2015; though the article praises many aspects of citizen science, it expresses concern about the potential for conflicts of interest: “One reason that some citizen scientists volunteer is to advance their political objectives. Opponents of fracking, for example, might help to track possible pollution because they want to gather evidence of harmful effects.” As we’ve seen, people want to find pollution if pollution is present, which is very different from people simply wanting to find pollution.
The editorial went on to allude to the Koala Count in another potentially problematic example: “When Australian scientists asked people who had volunteered to monitor koala populations how the animals should be managed, they found that the citizen scientists had strong views on protection that did not reflect the broader public opinion.”
That’s not evidence of conflict of interest that leads to bias, that’s evidence of success of citizen science in creating an informed public—at least among a subset of the public most vested in the issue. The success of democracy rests with an informed public. Funding agencies expect good research to produce these types of broader impacts, and that includes by-products of citizen science that support social change.
The concern about biased research and loss of objectivity is not just an issue affecting the credibility of citizen science but something that conservation biologists have always faced. Conservation biology is a value-laden discipline, based on a commitment to conserving biodiversity. Conservation biologists struggle with how objective research and advocacy can coexist. George Wilhere, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, has argued that the answer is to avoid inadvertent advocacy, which he defines as “the act of unintentionally expressing personal policy preferences or ethical judgments in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from scientific judgments.” As we’ve seen with koalas, decision makers arrive at a verdict by combining objective scientific findings with societal values. How that combination happens is key to maintaining trust in science, and now in citizen science. The typical equation would have scientists adding knowledge and the public adding values; decision makers would then mix these to get the optimal policy outcome. With citizen science, people add both knowledge and values; to complicate matters, their pursuit of knowledge appears to alter their opinions and possibly even their values. Citizen scientists need to avoid inadvertent advocacy that arises from conflating knowledge and opinions; this is the same tightrope walked by conservation biologists.
New scientific information is essential in providing humanity with solutions to our problems, but it alone is not sufficient. Just as necessary for producing workable solutions is a way to mix social values and scientific knowledge, both of which are constantly evolving. With citizen science, participants can help find scientific discoveries that feed into a science-policy nexus. Equally important is that they can also bring their perspectives, ideas, values, and opinions into a values-policy nexus. If experiences in citizen science alter what goes into the values-policy nexus, that’s probably a good thing for a well-informed democracy.
Ultimately conservation must involve people because we can’t tell birds when to fly south or snow leopards where to eat. We can only change our own behaviors based on our understanding of our individual and collective influence. We are veritable forces of nature. People are at the center of conservation not just because we create the problems, or even because we are capable of studying the problems, but because only we can create solutions. Citizen science gives us the insight and foresight to manage natural resources sustainably.
Given that participation in citizen science, and perhaps even being an onlooker, has the power to change peoples’ views on conservation priorities and policies, why not foster those connections with people driving the types of economic development that often lead to disruptive environmental change? Given how citizen science can change opinions of crowds, could it change the view of climate change deniers in pivotal positions? If only stockbrokers were willing to note the wind speed and direction, or lawyers could note when ice forms and thaws. Too bad bankers don’t collect data about trees!
Or do they?
In the corporate district of London, I passed through security and rode the elevator to the fortieth floor of the HSBC bank building. I was directed into a conference room where I stood at the window, gaping at the London skyline. I was waiting to meet Bill Thomas, who was pioneering the use of citizen science to change the hearts and minds of high-level banking executives.
At this point I believed that citizen scientists could solve global problems, but I had not thought deeply about the professions held by citizen scientists. I knew citizen scientists could be found among teachers, the clergy, community organizers, plumbers, dental hygienists, and used car salespeople. I’d written about young citizen scientists, senior citizen scientists, and incarcerated citizen scientists. One commonality among participants was that their experiences with citizen science took place at or near home. To learn about people who do citizen science far from home, I had contacted Earthwatch, which arranges for people to spend their vacations as field assistants on research projects in remote, beautiful places around the world; part of the Earthwatch fee goes into the budget of the research project. To my surprise, the people at Earthwatch introduced me to their corporate program, which tackles climate change.
“Hey there,” Thomas said as he walked in. I was disappointed that he was American, because I’d traveled so far. He seemed to appreciate an American visitor, which gave him a respite from tea breaks.
Thomas created the Sustainability Leadership Programme for bank executives. In partnership with Earthwatch, the program sends executives to be citizen scientists at designated Earthwatch field sites around the world.
Thomas was direct in summing up why he created citizen science opportunities for corporate executives: “We have to get leaders out of the building and into the field. In conference rooms, they wouldn’t remember a damn thing. When their hands get dirty, when they are contributing to meaningful research—that puts them in different frame of mind so they are open to changes.”
I thought Thomas was speaking figuratively, but then he showed me a photo montage of well-manicured hands covered in dirt and displayed for the camera; the hands, he explained, were those of CEOs. He thought back to where the photos were taken, at a reforesting project in Brazil run by Earthwatch scientists: “It rained all week. We were all soaking wet. Ahhh, they loved every minute of it!” The CEOs’ lives were changed by getting their hands dirty.
Thomas projected a slide with a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” He explained that the first sentence could describe a typical employee training program and the last sentence could describe why citizen science is effective at changing people.
Anyone who has sat through an employee training program will likely agree that they are not transformative. With the Earthwatch partnership, the exit surveys from HSBC employees in citizen science programs were overwhelmingly affirmative: Yes, the program was of value. Yes, I would recommend it. Yes, I would do it again. HSBC (or anyone else, I bet) has never before encountered a company training program with that remarkable level of success.
Thomas explained that employees tend to dislike traditional team-building exercises, which can feel contrived. Contributing to real science is an authentic, meaningful experience. “A nature walk is not going to do it. They aren’t interested in playing in the woods or the water. They want to contribute. They are hardheaded bankers,” he emphasized. I don’t have a face for poker, which is probably why he continued, with quiet patience, upon detecting my skepticism (or cynicism): “Bank executives are human, like everyone else. They honestly want to make a positive difference in this world.”
Before Thomas was a sustainability leader, he was an information technology specialist with HSBC. And he was a climate skeptic. He believed that climate change was happening, but he didn’t believe that humans were causing it. He went on one of HSBC’s corporate programs to the Smithsonian’s Environmental Research Center in Maryland. There he met scientists who explained climate change in detail and answered his questions. As soon as he was able to discuss the topic directly with scientists, he recognized that he’d been accepting a distorted reality as presented by the media sources he chose. Thomas came to realize not only the reality of humans causing climate change but that it is an environmental, business, economic, societal, educational, and research issue.
He described himself as a changed man when he returned to work; he now had a burning desire to create change in the business world. He quickly came to think of the program he had completed, called Climate Champions, as training the foot soldiers. General bank employees like him weren’t in positions where they could create change within HSBC; they were coming back highly motivated to make a difference, but then quickly becoming frustrated. They were making changes in their personal lives but not their professional lives.
Thomas’s enthusiasm for sustainability led him to become the global head of sustainability engagement for HSBC and begin the partnership with Earthwatch; he created the Sustainability Leadership Programme to train the senior managers (the generals). The graduates of the program are expected to engage others at senior levels in an effort to create significant change in business practices. “I’m not the only one,” he said. “Lots of hardheaded leaders come back changed.” HSBC field trips engage bankers in one of the largest studies of the carbon storage capacity of forests around the world, and they learn about the importance of forests for mitigating climate change. Thomas understood that seeing charts of data doesn’t change people. “We have to get to their hearts, not their heads,” he said.
Thomas retired shortly after we met, and one of his former employees, Matthew Robinson, stepped up as sustainability engagement head at HSBC. Under Robinson’s guidance, HSBC has continued to be creative in its use of citizen science in training bankers to take leadership roles in sustainability. Social scientists have documented the enormous impact of the Sustainability Leadership Programme, and this model is now being adopted by several business schools.
Since 2010, HSBC’s Sustainability Leadership Programme has held more than ninety training sessions, graduating more than a thousand senior executives from over fifty countries, each magnifying their impact from their leadership positions. Robinson has designed the program to be what he refers to as “cross-border, cross-functional, and cross-business.” Sustainability leaders learn skills for teamwork and cooperation because sustainability requires collaboration with partners and customers. Collaboration is tricky in the business world because it is easily undermined by competition. Robinson emphasizes that “building a sustainable business that truly creates meaningful change will increasingly be thanks to leaders (and the stakeholders who they interact with on a daily basis) developing a deeper sense of purpose and mindfulness.”
Early on, HSBC’s sustainability leaders delivered efficiencies within the bank itself. For example, several graduates of the training sessions were later in charge of hiring a firm to manage all HSBC facilities. Their training in the Sustainability Leadership Programme motivated and prepared them to insert into the contract an effective combination of incentives and penalties so that their facilities are managed with energy and waste reductions, thus leading to reduced carbon footprints.
Today sustainability leaders are developing new solutions that resonate with HSBC’s clients, helping others decrease their carbon footprints in order to collectively transition to a low-carbon economy. For example, another graduate of the Sustainability Leadership Programme took a closer look at the procurement of paper. He led efforts to favor the purchase of sustainably produced paper products, such as those certified by the Forestry Sustainability Council, for HSBC as well as their partners and customers. To reinforce this, HSBC also invites the senior executives of companies it partners with to partake in the Sustainability Leadership Programme. Given the experiential learning of the citizen science experience, HSBC wants its partners on the same page when it comes to sustainability.
The ways the graduates of the program find to bring sustainability practices to their work is diverse. For example, when shopping for a vendor to provide information technology servers, a sustainability leader at HSBC screened applicants to ensure that all equipment was Energy Star compliant. Sustainability leaders examine the global supply chain and work to assure sustainable practices from source through delivery. Another sustainability leader actively encourages video conferencing in order to lower the carbon footprint associated with air travel. The list goes on, and each of these programs is a reminder that actions can make a difference. Experiential learning through citizen science helped bankers figure out how to use their influential positions in ways that matter.