Last week, an oil pipeline on the California coast ruptured and poured 105,000 gallons of crude oil onto the coast and into the ocean near Santa Barbara. It's not known for how long oil was pouring out of the pipe, but what is know is that the oil company did not have an automatic shut-down valve on the pipes, and it did not have county oversight which would have required such a valve.
What Plains All American Pipeline did have was an over-inflated sense of confidence, despite previous mechanical problems on the pipe on either side of the rupture point. And this is not the only instance of disregard for safety regulations they have shown: Plans All American Pipeline has a terrible history of oil spills, with 175 federal safety and maintenance violations since 2006. This is not a company that should be in charge of oil extraction anywhere on this valuable planet.
Because this is what the real tragedy of the spill is: the environmental cost. Once oil has been released into the ecosystem, it can never be fully removed. The chief executive of Plains All American Pipeline has vowed that they will help clean up until "everything has been restored to normal" - but that's just not possible. "Normal" is not something that happens again after an oil spill. The impacts of oil spills last for years, if not decades.
Why such long-lasting impacts? In high concentrations, it can poison animals through ingestion, or drown them by getting caught in feathers and fur. This usually happens during the early stages of an oil spill. But as the oil continues to spread out from the initial spill site, and disintegrate into smaller and smaller particles that are invisible to the naked eye, it continues to have a profound effect. This "invisible" oil can seep into sand, reefs, and beaches, smothering small organisms that form the foundation of ecosystem food webs. And it impacts organisms higher in the trophic web, as well: even in small amounts, oil can impair the development of fish eggs and embryos.
These impacts on organisms cause a long-term bottom-up shift in the ecological landscape. Imagine: out of 100k gallons of oil poured into the ocean, how much of that has already begun to seep into the sands of the Santa Barbara coastline? How much has already been carried off by tides and wave motion, and is no longer recoverable? Effects of this spill will be seen for years to come. What Plains All American Pipeline (and many companies before it) has done is literally irreversible.
The sad thing is: making Plains All American Pipeline pay out for this probably won't make much of a difference to their future behavior. After all, they've paid out for 175 other violations and spills over the last 9 years and it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference to their attitude toward environmental and social responsibility, so why should we think they'll learn another lesson this time? What we need to do is change how we talk about regulation and enforcement of oil companies and their pipelines: we have to fight these spills long before they even happen. Better yet, maybe one day soon we'll finally talk about scaling back these activities in favor of greener options (but that's a whole other conversation). Meanwhile, we need to make sure that irresponsible entities like this one can't slip through the cracks.
California, my heart is with you even if I can't be there in body.
25 May 2015
11 May 2015
Kiel sunshine
Enjoying these beautiful sunny days in Kiel, and the gorgeous bike paths running through it.
06 May 2015
Earthworm enthusiasts
Back in December we had an amazing seminarist come to speak to us in Poitiers, which was a very bright light on what was at that point a rather bleak academic horizon. Patrick Lavelle, a prominent French earthworm scientist residing and working in Colombia, spoke to us about soil sciences via the principles of James Lovelock's earth-as-a-system Gaia Theory. In other words, he presented the soil as an underground world of inter-species cooperation (rather than competition) fuelled by the tireless work of soil's greatest ecosystem engineer: the earthworm.
Two of my classmates and I summed up his week-long seminar in a few blog posts for the IMAE website: mine, on competition versus cooperation, you can find below (and here); Laura & Lina's, which will give you a good background on types of earthworms and their function, is here (and feel free to dig through the blog archives to get a better glimpse into our IMAE world - that's short for "International Master in Applied Ecology" in case anyone's forgotten!).
Competition versus Cooperation Under the Ground
Among the first topics a biologist studies is Darwin’s trip to the Galapagos in 1859, and his subsequent (very famous) Theory of Evolution. This theory, which outlines the process by which organisms speciate over time, is based on the idea that competition drives species interaction. In other words, the competition for food, water and nutrients causes species to evolve certain characteristics that allow them to outcompete surrounding organisms, and achieve a higher probability of survival. In our seminar with Patrick Lavelle, however, we were introduced to a very different view of species interaction: that the relationship that predominantly governs species interaction is cooperation.
Cooperation versus competition is a controversial viewpoint for Darwinian biologists: the idea that competition drives speciation is widely accepted. Take, for example, the rainforest: the relentless competition for sunlight and a spot in the canopy has favored the evolution of (tens of) thousands of different kinds of plant species, from opportunist pioneer species that grow rapidly when canopy space opens, to epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants) that grow on tree branches high in the canopy. Bizarre species such as the strangler fig achieve their spot in the canopy by subterfuge: they start their life as epiphytes, and then send roots down to the ground that strangle their host tree and steal its place in the canopy. Meanwhile certain tree species produce flaky or toxic bark that prevents plants from growing on them and strangling them or weighing down their branches. It is easy to describe adaptations such as these in terms of competition.
During our time with Professor Lavelle, we were encouraged to look at systems like this from a different viewpoint: rather than being defined by competition, these systems could be defined by collaborative symbioses between species. Take the example of the rainforest, again: the pioneer species that grow rapidly in clearings usually grow after a large tree has fallen, which provides them with sufficient nutrients to grow. By germinating and filling the gap immediately, the pioneer species capture and store important and limited nutrients from the fallen tree, such as phosphorous, before these nutrients are washed away by rain and permanently lost from the forest. As the pioneer trees grow, slower-growing secondary species have time to establish: when the pioneer species fall after 10 or 15 years, the secondary species are sufficiently mature to grow and achieve the canopy. They, in turn, can capture phosphorous and other minerals from the fallen primary species. The rapid drive to grow and fill space in the rainforest, therefore, can be considered a system to maintain nutrients: preventing the loss of valuable phosphorous from the rainforest.
To test whether we supported the idea of competition or cooperation, Professor Lavelle presented us with a scenario involving earthworms. In a field in Fiji there are two species of earthworm: one large, and one small. The small worms leave small pellets/aggregates; and the large ones leave large pellets. Soil samples were taken from the field, and the distribution of pellets was mapped in the white and green grid to the left. The white squares indicate soil containing small pellets, and green squares indicate soil with large pellets. Our exercise was to predict the relationship between the two species of earthworm, based on the distribution of their pellets.
An interpretation of the relationship based on competition might assume that one of these species has an advantage: maybe the small worms are unable to break down large pellets, and therefore cannot move into areas that have been occupied by the larger worms. If the larger worms are able to break down small pellets and leave large pellets behind, then they are gradually excluding the smaller worms: only one earthworm species can exist in this space.
An interpretation based on cooperation would look like this: the small worms can break down the large pellets, and the large worms can break down the small pellets. So each mutually supports the other species: the two earthworm species can coexist in this space.
What do you think?
Two of my classmates and I summed up his week-long seminar in a few blog posts for the IMAE website: mine, on competition versus cooperation, you can find below (and here); Laura & Lina's, which will give you a good background on types of earthworms and their function, is here (and feel free to dig through the blog archives to get a better glimpse into our IMAE world - that's short for "International Master in Applied Ecology" in case anyone's forgotten!).
Competition versus Cooperation Under the Ground
Among the first topics a biologist studies is Darwin’s trip to the Galapagos in 1859, and his subsequent (very famous) Theory of Evolution. This theory, which outlines the process by which organisms speciate over time, is based on the idea that competition drives species interaction. In other words, the competition for food, water and nutrients causes species to evolve certain characteristics that allow them to outcompete surrounding organisms, and achieve a higher probability of survival. In our seminar with Patrick Lavelle, however, we were introduced to a very different view of species interaction: that the relationship that predominantly governs species interaction is cooperation.
Cooperation versus competition is a controversial viewpoint for Darwinian biologists: the idea that competition drives speciation is widely accepted. Take, for example, the rainforest: the relentless competition for sunlight and a spot in the canopy has favored the evolution of (tens of) thousands of different kinds of plant species, from opportunist pioneer species that grow rapidly when canopy space opens, to epiphytes (plants that grow on other plants) that grow on tree branches high in the canopy. Bizarre species such as the strangler fig achieve their spot in the canopy by subterfuge: they start their life as epiphytes, and then send roots down to the ground that strangle their host tree and steal its place in the canopy. Meanwhile certain tree species produce flaky or toxic bark that prevents plants from growing on them and strangling them or weighing down their branches. It is easy to describe adaptations such as these in terms of competition.
During our time with Professor Lavelle, we were encouraged to look at systems like this from a different viewpoint: rather than being defined by competition, these systems could be defined by collaborative symbioses between species. Take the example of the rainforest, again: the pioneer species that grow rapidly in clearings usually grow after a large tree has fallen, which provides them with sufficient nutrients to grow. By germinating and filling the gap immediately, the pioneer species capture and store important and limited nutrients from the fallen tree, such as phosphorous, before these nutrients are washed away by rain and permanently lost from the forest. As the pioneer trees grow, slower-growing secondary species have time to establish: when the pioneer species fall after 10 or 15 years, the secondary species are sufficiently mature to grow and achieve the canopy. They, in turn, can capture phosphorous and other minerals from the fallen primary species. The rapid drive to grow and fill space in the rainforest, therefore, can be considered a system to maintain nutrients: preventing the loss of valuable phosphorous from the rainforest.
To test whether we supported the idea of competition or cooperation, Professor Lavelle presented us with a scenario involving earthworms. In a field in Fiji there are two species of earthworm: one large, and one small. The small worms leave small pellets/aggregates; and the large ones leave large pellets. Soil samples were taken from the field, and the distribution of pellets was mapped in the white and green grid to the left. The white squares indicate soil containing small pellets, and green squares indicate soil with large pellets. Our exercise was to predict the relationship between the two species of earthworm, based on the distribution of their pellets.
An interpretation of the relationship based on competition might assume that one of these species has an advantage: maybe the small worms are unable to break down large pellets, and therefore cannot move into areas that have been occupied by the larger worms. If the larger worms are able to break down small pellets and leave large pellets behind, then they are gradually excluding the smaller worms: only one earthworm species can exist in this space.
An interpretation based on cooperation would look like this: the small worms can break down the large pellets, and the large worms can break down the small pellets. So each mutually supports the other species: the two earthworm species can coexist in this space.
What do you think?
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