MPA Watching

It was another great day aboard the LA Waterkeeper boat, monitoring activity in and around the Point Dume SMCA** and SMR**.  We saw dolphins today, but the video above is actually from a July 25th MPA watch.

It's always nice to see people recreating in Marine Protected Areas and fishing in the waters just outside of them, but today it was especially satisfying given yesterday's NatGeo post about two recent studies suggesting that MPAs not only *quickly* contribute to higher fish yields, but also that the cost of implementing MPAs can be recouped by the fishing communities themselves within five years. These correspond to findings in a study of the impacts of California's MPA policy published earlier this year.

Many people in California's fishing communities were understandably concerned about how MPAs would affect their livelihoods, especially when it became clear no-take zones would be put in place in January 2012. There are always transition costs with new policies (especially bans on commercial activities), and California's fishermen shouldered most of the burden of implementing limited and no-take zones, but based on February's Marine Protected Areas Report -- and anecdotal stories from LA Waterkeeper's outreach guru -- they appear to be doing okay less than two years out. Let's hope California's coastal ecosystems and economies are not just recovering, but flourishing, well in advance of the five-year mark.

**MPA Designations
State Marine Reserve (SMR): fishing/harvest of all marine resources is prohibited
No-Take State Marine Conservation Area (SMCA): fishing/harvest of all marine resources is prohibited.
State Marine Conservation Area (SMCA): fishing/harvest of some marine resources permitted (specific take policy varies from one SMCA to the next)

will wetlands soften the blow of climate change?

The Smithsonian & Science Daily report that a recent study indicates that wetland plants can absorb nearly 1/3 more carbon dioxide than they currently do. Until recently, scientists assumed plants would reach a threshold and stop responding to rising levels of carbon dioxide. When it comes to wetland plants, that no longer appears to be the case. Evidence suggests wetlands might be Mother Nature's regulatory mechanism for managing increased levels of carbon in our atmosphere.

borders

President Obama has broken the record for highest number of deportations.

Yes, some of the deportees are criminals, but over all, immigration is a good thing. Granted the less free the United States becomes, the weaker the moral imperative to allow people from even less free nations come here, but still.

Even if your moral compass doesn't point toward the freedom of movement as an inherently good thing and you don't believe in natural rights, look at the numbers. And the science.

Immigrants Create More Wealth Than Native-Born Americans

A recent report from the Partnership for a New American Economy found more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Eighteen percent (or 90) of the 500 companies had immigrant founders. The children of immigrants started another 114 companies. (A copy of the report can be found here.)

http://blogs.forbes.com/stuartanderson/2011/06/19/40-percent-of-fortune-500-companies-founded-by-immigrants-or-their-children

Immigrants Bring American DNA

Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion.

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Poker-Can-Teach-Us/48641/

Social-Ecological Resilience

”Waiting for a single worldwide `solution´to emerge from global negotiations is also problematic.”
Elinor Ostrom

When policymakers speak about climate change, one gets the impression that the global warming problem is so clear and so tidy, that we're merely a few stubborn votes away from a one-sized-fits-all solution that'll save the world. Anyone with an understanding of the principles of ecology, however, knows that top-down mandates are hardly compatible with the ways of Mother Nature.

We had certainly hoped that the Nobel committee's recognition of Ostrom's and WIlliamson's work would encourage more people to explore the possibilities of market solutions and local decision making. It may take time for policymakers to catch up, but it's refreshing to see so many scholars getting attention for asking the right questions.

Thanks to research institutions like the Stockholm Resilience Center (which, it should be noted, was founded in 2007, before the Nobel committee had cottoned onto the idea), there's ever more literature available on the importance of adaptability as we face extreme weather patterns and other challenges of climate change.

In an older article on the resilience of societies for governing complex socio-ecological changes, Jonas Ebbeson suggests that when it comes to climate change, we need to learn to deal with uncertainties and surprises because we can't control nature. What does that mean? To summarize Sanford Gaines, we need:

  • flexibility in social systems
  • transparency of institutions
  • local decision making
  • effectiveness multilevel governance
  • promotion of learning
  • social structures which don't restrict options

In other words, following Mother Nature's lead, we need to facilitate the right conditions for experimentation, and watch what evolves.

In Pursuit of Happiness Research

"After controlling for initial health conditions, we find that happiness extends life expectancy."
via @bakadesuyo

Happiness research is certainly interesting, but Will Wilkinson has questioned whether it's reliable and what it means for policy.

Wilkinson draws on the work of (among others) philosopher Dan Haybron:

Happiness itself seems to be multidimensional and plural in constitution, having complex biological underpinnings. First, neuroscientific studies have established that good and bad feelings do not exist on a single continuum—an increment of pleasure does not cancel out an equal increment of pain—and it is possible to feel happy and sad simultaneously.

The Region No One Could Name

Interesting musing on a label that would fit Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Hungary, Serbia, et al. from Boyko Vassilev at Transitions Online:

If it is so hard to name the region’s countries, maybe they are not a region at all. And perhaps they do not want to be one. “Central and Eastern Europe” sounds too dull; “new democracies” like a bunch of newcomers; “ex-bloc” forces them to remember things they would rather forget. They are not interested in themselves. They look more to the West than to one another. “Our countries communicate through Brussels and Washington rather than directly,” said Veselin Vackov, a journalist in Prague. “We may have a common interest, but hardly a common voice.”

Long gone are the times when artists like Pole Jan Englert, singers like Czech Helena Vondrackova, and athletes like Lithuanian Arvydas Sabonis enjoyed fame throughout “the region.” Serbian writers, Polish film directors, and Czech TV series were easily recognizable from Sopot, Bulgaria, to Sopot, Poland. Today there are only distant remnants of that cross-cultural pollination. A Bulgarian might whistle the biggest hit of the Hungarian rock band Omega or put in a disc of ex-Yugoslav rock band Bjelo Dugme. “When we were on the ex-communist reservation together, we had nothing left but to communicate with one another,” said Vackov, a Bulgarian who has been the editor-in-chief of a major Czech daily newspaper for nine years. “Today the whole world is open to us – and thank God.”

In her book, A Biography of No Place, Historian Kate Brown explored the shifting borders and identities of a similar region. What it boiled down to was that only governments seemed to really car about borders and group identity. As Vassilev says "the only things that bind them are memories of totalitarianism and NATO membership. If they need, and find, a common purpose, they will find a common name as well."

Are All Employees Knowledge Workers?

So ask John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davis on the HBR Blog Network:

Their conclusion? If the goal is to mobilize the workforce:

We will begin to redefine all jobs...in ways that facilitate problem solving, experimentation, and tinkering. This will foster more widespread performance improvement. Everyone, even the most unskilled worker, will be viewed as a critical problem-solver and knowledge-worker contributing to performance improvement.

But, there is another kind of boundary that inhibits talent development. With few exceptions, executives immediately narrow the scope of discussion to their own employees. Yet, if we take talent development seriously, we begin to realize that, in the words of Bill Joy, "There are always more smart people outside your company than within it." If we are serious about developing our own talent, we must find more ways to connect with and collaborate with all of those smart people outside our organization. We should aggressively create opportunities for people within our organization to work together with leading edge talent outside our organization so that both sides can develop their talent even more rapidly. In driving scalable learning, we must expand our horizons far beyond the boundaries of our own firm.

First break all the rules

The Economist on health care solutions and the charms of frugal innovation in China and India:

GE and TCS are doing something more exciting than fiddling with existing products: they are taking the needs of poor consumers as a starting point and working backwards. Instead of adding ever more bells and whistles, they strip the products down to their bare essentials. Jeff Immelt, GE’s boss, and Vijay Govindarajan, of the Tuck Business School, have dubbed this “reverse innovation”. Others call it “frugal” or “constraint-based” innovation.