Assisted migration is the intentional translocation of species outside their historic ranges to mitigate biodiversity losses caused by climate change. While this idea has been around for decades, it has recently become the subject of fierce controversy in the academic literature.

The article was written by IRIS Senior Fellow and York geography instructor Dr. Nina Hewitt and an interdisciplinary team of IRIS-affiliated researchers from biology, environmental science, business, law and social science. It takes stock of the burgeoning academic literature on this topic and identifies possible avenues toward consensus on how to address what might otherwise become an intractable ethical and policy problem.

Joern Fischer of Leuphana Universität Lüneburg in Germany, a leading scientist in the field, wrote about the article yesterday in his “Ideas for Sustainability” blog. He congratulated the article for its thorough analysis of a very complex and polarized debate. It is polarized because many scientists see assisted migration as pitting two conservation goals against each other: the preservation of a single species from extinction, versus the protection of entire ecological communities against the risks posed by introduced species, which can have impacts similar to invasive alien species.

Fischer lauded the article for focusing on the nuances and complexities of the debate rather than accepting a polarized, black-and-white view. He especially liked a figure in the article that presents the arguments for and against assisted migration and their key inter-relationships in a one-page schematic.

Professor Fischer praised the article’s effort to provide a conceptual framework within which scientists and policy makers can find common ground:

“The authors state that the debate is complex, and rather than proposing a simple solution, they try to provide a framework which can help to reach case-specific solutions. Hooray …! I wish more scientists did this. … Hewitt et al. have done a great job of giving an authoritative overview of many relevant arguments. I highly recommend their paper!”

This endorsement from one of the protagonists in the assisted migration debate is a great vindication for the hard work that went into the study, and it suggests that the article will have a constructive impact both on the scientific debate and on conservation policies and practices on the ground. Achievements like this article really help to advance IRIS’s mission as a national and international leader in practical, collaborative and interdisciplinary research that influences policy and decision makers on a variety of sustainability issues.

There is one irony in this story. The research was funded by the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, one of the victims of the Canadian federal government’s recent massive cuts to scientific and environmental programs. These cuts are one of many sad indications of this government’s unfortunate head-in-the-sand attitude toward climate change and other ecological challenges.  CFCAS pleaded with the government, to no avail, to reconsider the cuts and devote adequate funding to weather and climate research.

“Wow!” I thought, “it kind of goes against everything that I have been reading about Peak Oil, for much of the last decade”, so it must be important. And then, I ask myself, who is this Odell? Quickly checking him on Google Scholar, I found that my academic work is cited more than his, and he’s 30 years older than I am. Then, I check him out further, and find some interesting comments in response to an article, in the same vein, that he wrote in The Guardian in 2008. Some of the quite long, coherent, as opposed to the short, incoherent,  responses say things like “Mr. Odell, I request that you get up to speed on what’s happening with the world oil situation. Your misinformation is doing everyone a great disservice” and “Unfortunately, Mr. Odell is woefully unaware of the current oil situation” and “Anybody who knows anything about oil is aware that the R/P ratio is a pointless statistic. If Peter Odell is using it, he either ignorant or disingenuous” and, my favourite, “I seriously don’t see how you could be a professor emeritus of international energy studies and believe the stuff you have written”.

But, it gets better – Prof. Emeritus Odell is on Republican Senator J. Inhofe’s notorious and hilariously debunked list of supposed expert climate change skeptics. For the debunking by Prof. A. Dessler, just go to: http://www.grist.org/article/the-inhofe-400-skeptic-of-the-day1/ and keep changing the number at the end of  the url to 3. And, while you’re at it, check out the very detailed debunking of Dr. Seitz as a climate denier, which is one of Peter Sinclair’s “crock of the week” videos.

A few blogs ago, I outlined what I perceived to be a failure of the Canadian media to carry out proper investigative reporting vis-a-vis Bjorn Lomborg, and, well, it just carries on, unfortunately with a columnist in my favourite Canadian newspaper. This is not the first time that Neil Reynolds has published anti-climate change columns that sort of have an an aura of balanced reporting. In the same way that academics carrying out medical research must reveal all of their sources of research funding when publishing articles, it would be helpful for members of the Canadian Press to reveal their political affiliations. Then it’d be obvious to those readers who are not prepared to dig a little deeper as to exactly where they are coming from.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Michael Enright give an after-dinner speech, and was surprised to hear him decry the appalling state of investigative journalism in Canada. (He named the New York Times as the best newspaper in the world. I started paying a lot more attention to it, and have been forced to come to the conclusion that he probably was right. For TV journalism, I would have to say, that Al-Jazeera English, is also right up there in terms of quality of in-depth reporting, with respect to covering generally ignored issues). I have now come to the sad conclusion that his assessment of the general state of Canadian journalism was also pretty much bang on.

Dawn R. Bazely

It has not gone away, because climate-change deniers are fully invested in launching what appears to me to be an across-the-board attack on peer reviewed science. This has happened before, to whit, the lobbying for and subsequent removal of Robert Watson as Chair of IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change).

How on earth should the scientific community respond? Well, I challenge everyone to hack into your own emails using terms such as “rejection”, “rejected”, “plagiarism”, “trick”, “fix” and see what emails you come up with. Then you can find incriminating phrases that can be taken out of context and used to self-smear your own integrity as a scientist.

Here’s what I found when I searched 4 years of my backed-up emails for “trick“. In a 2007  email, I wrote that Doritos will provide an alternative solution to dealing with the consequences of climate change: “doritos should do the trick”. Please note that Drs. Vicari and Koh, as former students of mine, are clearly fellow members of this conspiracy and we are, in fact, hoping that this snack company will fund our next field season.

Dawn R. Bazely

Like Daniel Simberloff, when I read the chapters in the book on which I would consider myself an expert, I was shocked at the poor coverage of the pertinent literature. My own book with Judy Myers was also published by Cambridge University Press, and I was therefore interested in the overall implications for and interpretations of the quality of their in-house book review system. How had Lomborg’s book gotten through the process, and was it really as bad as it seemed? So, in 2003, I taught a Biology graduate course in which students “deconstructed” the Lomborg book’s chapters. They scrutinized Lomborg’s sources, and detailed the many ways in which he skewed and misrepresented the data. Frankly, if Lomborg was a new Master’s student in Biology, and he submitted any of these chapters to me as essays, he would receive a failing grade. The reason for this would have nothing to do with his polemical positions, because good scholarship is essentially about challenging the status quo, and everything to do with his poor scholarship. But Lomborg has simply never acknowledged his shortcomings. A few years ago I wrote to Scanorama, the SAS airlines magazine (the one you find in your seat pocket), after they profiled Lomborg, and made the following points:

“Dear Sir – I enjoyed your article about Dr. Lomborg in the October 2004 issue
of Scanorama, and feel compelled to share four thoughts I had after reading
it.
1. Dr. Lomborg is photogenic, and I doubt he would have received so much
attention if this was not the case.
2.  As a practicing field ecologist, I learned early on to avoid consulting
colleagues who are trained as pure statisticians for help in analyzing my
data, because they lack practical experience.  I invariably feel more confused
after a conversation with a statistician, than I do beforehand.  Dr. Lomborg’s
book left me feeling both irritated and confused.
3.  It is particularly noteworthy that the people who lodged the formal
complaint against Dr. Lomborg were not environmental activists but first and
foremost, peer-reviewed scientists, with pretty comfortable careers in
academia.  Why did they exercise themselves when they did not need to?
4.  From the point of view of Cambridge University Press, the publisher of The
Skeptical Environmentalist, that there is no such thing as bad publicity when
it comes to book sales.
Sincerely, Dawn R. Bazely, Associate Professor, Biology Department, York
University, Toronto, Canada.”

Apparently some form of my letter was published, although I never saw it. And then, I simply forgot about the book, except that I refer to it as an excellent example of how to misrepresent the biodiversity literature. BUT now, I find that this is the man sponsored by the Munk Lectures to debate Elizabeth May and George Monbiot? And, no one in the Canadian media and certainly not on the Munk Debate website is making any reference to Lomborg’s history as an academic against whom formal charges of dishonesty were brought? The latter event is so rare and huge that it cannot and should not be ignored, regardless of the highly political outcome. Academics gripe and moan about each other, but are loathe to spend time insisting that formal charges of academic dishonesty be brought. I have been directly involved in only one such formal case at York University in the early 1990′s, in which a PhD dissertation was found to contain manufactured data. The entire incident was quite emotionally exhausting for everyone who was involved both in uncovering the fraud and in investigating it.

Contrary to what one might expect in terms of a balanced assessment of Lomborg, the Munk Debates website states that Esquire Magazine described him as: “one of the world’s 75 most influential people of the 21st century”. What, influential like the Jonas Brothers and Simon Cowell of American and British Idol? I would certainly also approach all of Lomborg’s subsequent writing with the working hypothesis that his selective  and biased approach is likely unchanged. Why would it change, when it has served him so well in the past?

This apparent lack of willingness by the Canadian media to research the full picture surrounding Lomborg can be interpreted in a number of different ways, but, if you want an analysis that is more of a political than scientific deconstruction, I would direct you to the Lomborg analysis on The Way Things Break blog, and the post called Lomborg and Playing the Long Game.

Dawn R. Bazely

My issue with finding time for blogging, is that, not only do I have lots of “Administrative Duties” (around here, the Director is as likely to be taking out the trash as to be schmoozing with VIPs), but I also lead active field-based research projects, supervise graduate students, write papers and book, carry out peer-review for journals and governments, and serve on many external bodies – plus I have children (teenagers need as much time and attention as toddlers) and a husband who is on the road a lot.  So, my blogging about sustainability had to be sidelined.  But, no more – I have decided that I will be doing less intensive and more twitter-like blogging, that is much more frequent.  Why?  Because a large part of my job is about being a Connector in a Gladwellian, Tipping Point, sense. The more that I participate in sustainability-related conversations, the more I have come to realize that many concerned people remain hugely unaware of many important issues that relate directly to their concern about sustainability. Additionally, because IRIS is about sustainability in an academic setting, IRIS members – including myself – are also Mavens or information specialists (again, see The Tipping Point).  For example, my research on why many forests in southern Ontario are falling down and are NOT sustained forest ecosystems, is producing new information and knowledge (see photos of Rondeau Provincial Park, and the low density of trees, due to deer browsing on the twigs of saplings, resulting in long-term mortality of high woody species i.e. trees).  

So – as a professor, who cannot resist giving homework – today’s assigned reading is Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point – but if you don’t have time, the Wikipedia page on this one is just fine.

Dawn Bazely