Category: Environmental Science

Vaccinations and the war on science: Donald Trump’s championing of the “anti-vaxer” cause takes advantage of scientific illiteracy

Science is a massive, ongoing human undertaking. It is a creative endeavour: the greatest scientific discoveries have involved wild guesses and hypotheses. But it also depends on rigor, self-criticism, and self-correction. The wild guesses must be tested against evidence. Science is the most dynamic of endeavours: the accepted claims of today may be overturned tomorrow. Ambitious scientists dream of changing our understanding of the world.

So how can someone make decisions that rely on science? If science is always changing, if claims are being tested and overturned, if tomorrow’s discovery could change our whole way of looking at things, why should we believe anything scientists say today? How can a creative and dynamic endeavour become a source of legitimate authority to be followed? Most of us are not going to collect and analyze atmospheric data to test whether burning fossil fuels causes climate change, but we have to decide whether to press for reduced emissions based on what scientists are saying.

This decision of the ordinary person to trust scientific authority is made even more difficult because scientific authority can be abused, and has been abused in the past. Take scientific authority in the area of mental illness. The manual of mental illness produced by the American Psychiatric Association is the famous DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We are currently (as of 2013) on the DSM-V. Prior to a change made in the DSM-II in 1973, ‘homosexuality’ was defined as a mental illness. Before the DSMs, in the 19th century, an American physician defined ‘drapetomania’: a mental illness that caused African-American slaves to try to escape. Diagnoses of ‘hysteria’, ‘frigidity’, and many others were used to control women since the 19th century. Psychologist Bruce Levine has argued that diagnoses of ADHD and ODD are similar tools that “psychopathologize” and “medicate” people who are “natural anti-authoritarians”, “before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.”

In this fraught space of mental illness, where scientific authority has been abused and politicized and where scientific understanding is desperately needed, a debate on the causes of autism is taking place in a way that is harmful to public health. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is in the DSM, and diagnoses of autism have been going up and up. The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) shows a prevalence of 6.7 per thousand in 2000 and 14.7 per thousand in 2010. The simplest explanation for this huge increase turns out to be the most likely: that it is the result of changes in the way autism is diagnosed (Science for discussion of the US, Forbes for discussion of a study from Denmark).

Like so much in the field of mental illness, autism is very poorly understood. The diagnosis is based on a checklist of behaviors. Psychologist Enrico Gnaulati wrote sensitively in Salon about a case of “overdiagnosis”, in which a “brainy, introverted” boy was incorrectly diagnosed with autism – something Gnaulati believes is happening all the time.

The solution to the problems caused by trying to treat illnesses we don’t understand is to try to improve our understanding. The discovery of the “overdiagnosis” issue with regards to autism, for example, came from the scientific community. Bruce Levine’s critique of the overdiagnosis of ADHD and ODD is also one grounded in scientific principles. A major recent study has linked antidepressant drugs in pregnancy to increased risk of autism. The way to correct scientific errors, in other words, is to do better science.

But the self-correcting mechanisms of science are slow. While scientists struggle for answers, suffering people have difficulty waiting. They turn to online communities that do not use the methods of science, communities that attack the failures of scientific authority and the limitations of scientific knowledge. A large community has arisen that claims a connection between vaccinations for preventable diseases and autism. The community has grown so large and has convinced enough parents not to vaccinate their kids that public health impacts are beginning to be felt and preventable diseases may be making a comeback. It has seized on a study from the 1990s that found a correlation in a small sample group, a study whose conclusions were later overturned by massive studies of huge sample groups. Unfortunately, the anti-vaccination, or “anti-vaxer” movement, was not placated by scientific self-correction. With celebrity endorsements and a genuine online community, the anti-vaxers have become so numerous that they are being courted by politicians, most famously Donald Trump.

Trump’s rise has been characterized by the willingness to say ever more outrageous things. The Republican debates have seen candidates compete to see who is most willing to diverge from scientific and moral principles, and who is willing to diverge the furthest. With the anti-vaxer claims, Trump is taking advantage of scientific illiteracy.

Scientists are not without blame in all this. Whenever scientists fail to explain science in simple language, whenever scientists rely on authority rather than trusting people to understand scientific argument and evidence, they create space for people like Trump. People need to feel empowered, like science is something that belongs to them, not something that is done to them by alien creatures in mysterious laboratories. In the case of vaccines and many others, popular science, and going further, people’s science, are actually matters of life and death. The only long-term protection against Trump and pseudo-science on the one hand, and illegitimate scientific authority (whether it’s “drapetomania” or diagnosing anti-authoritarians with ODD) on the other, is if ordinary people are able to reach an understanding not just of specific scientific claims, but of how to think scientifically. It’s a huge responsibility for proponents of science. If we’re not up to the task, the Trumps of the world will be waiting.

First published TeleSUR English January 12, 2016

A review of Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’

A review of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein (Simon and Schuster, 2014), 576 pgs.

Review first published at TeleSUR

Sources of misery in the world are difficult to rank, but any short list would have to include inequality, war, and environmental degradation. People who are concerned about inequality and war have historically been called leftists. Those who are concerned about the planet have been called environmentalists. Over the decades, they have distrusted one another, and synthesis has been elusive.

Environmentalists have argued that waiting for “the revolution” in order to try to save species from extinction, or prevent the planet from boiling over because of climate change, is denying the urgency of environmental problems. They have argued that, given the urgency of environmental problems, we have to use whatever mechanisms are available to us, from high-tech solutions to market mechanisms, to rich philanthropists. They point to spectacular environmental failures by the communist governments of China and Russia, as well as to numerous failures by left-leaning social democratic governments. They note how worker’s unions, who try to preserve work and jobs, can campaign to do so at the expense of nature.

On the other side, leftists see environmentalists as willing to displace people from their lands in order to preserve species against human influence and create biological reserves that are, in theory, inaccessible to anyone, but in practice, are usually accessible to elite tourists and scientists. They see environmentalists as willing to accept compromises with elites in ways that ultimately compromise not only left, but also environmental values. They view the concerns of humans as primary, and other species as a much more distant concern, which many environmentalists do not understand.

Some of the views environmentalists and leftists hold about one another are true, others are caricatures, and still others might be true now but could potentially change through dialogue and common action. Such a dialogue is urgent, since the planet, and the people, have the same enemy.

Naomi Klein’s new book This Changes Everything is a step towards such a synthesis. It is interesting that the synthesis came from a writer of the left who spent years studying and working with the environmental movement, and becoming a part of it. Though Klein’s personal journey to meeting and joining the environmental movement, is described in the book, it is fundamentally an analysis and synthesis of the problem of climate change as a problem for social movements (or, in other words, as a problem for leftists).

Klein’s method of writing, which was followed in her previous book, The Shock Doctrine, is to carefully study the words and ideas of those in power, and then to travel the world and see what people are doing, learning from the analyses of movements that are contesting state and private power and combining them, revealing connections that, for those heavily involved in local struggles, can be hard to see. The result, in this book as in The Shock Doctrine, is to reveal a common enemy, to reveal common methods that the enemy uses, and to share methods of resistance that might prove promising.

In The Shock Doctrine, Klein described how the most vicious neoliberal doctrines were thought of as crazy ideas in the decades following WWII. The neoliberals persisted with their crazy ideas, and today we are all living under their heel. In the same spirit, This Changes Everything starts with an analysis of some of the crazy ideas of this moment, presented at right-wing climate-denying conferences which she attended and reports on. The deniers, Klein notes, deny the science of climate change because they don’t like its implications: that in order to prevent environmental catastrophe, societies will have to make massive changes to the economic system, a system that is serving the deniers and their funders very well. Klein argues that in their recognition that deep changes in the direction of equality would be needed to stabilize the climate, the right-wing deniers are not wrong. Indeed, they grasp something that many in the environmental movement fail to grasp: that economic changes deep enough to stabilize the climate are too deep to leave existing inequalities completely intact. In order to tackle climate change, Klein argues, we have to return to many of the social-democratic, Keynesian policies that are so despised by neoliberals: economic planning, regulation, progressive taxation, and redistribution, led by democratic governments playing a major role in the economy, with active movements pressuring them.

To recap: the book observes that the reason for climate denial is not that the political right lacks an understanding of the facts and the science, but instead that they deny the facts because they recognize better than most what the facts actually mean. Building on this observation, This Changes Everything proceeds to try to help readers in the environmental movement discard some bad ideas that have plagued the discussion of solutions to climate change.

The first illusion to discard is that the environment is an issue that unites the wealthy and the poor, an issue that transcends inequality.

“Environmentalists spoke of climate change as a great equalizer, the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor,” writes Klein on page 52. “Yet all signs are that it is doing precisely the opposite, stratifying us further … divided between those whose wealth offers them a not insignificant measure of protection from ferocious weather … and those left to the mercy of increasingly dysfunctional states.”

But there are many others. Reviewing the record of environmental organizations making alliances with corporations, This Changes Everything finds that compromises beget compromises. The most dramatic example is the story of the extinction of the prairie chicken, whose breeding grounds, after being gifted to the Nature Conservancy, were destroyed by drilling by the Nature Conservancy. This Changes Everything also discards the current fashionable idea that philanthropists can stabilize the climate at the last minute.

The cautionary tale in this section is the story of Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines, who saw the light after watching Al Gore’s powerpoint presentation and proceeded to make grand promises and then to do absolutely nothing of any use for the climate, expanding his highly pollutant industries in the meantime. The brief and completely ineffectual history of cap-and-trade, carbon markets, and other climate market mechanisms that created speculative markets while emissions continued to increase, is also reviewed in the book.

The most terrifying section, however, is a crazy idea that is still sitting on the shelf. However, it’s inclusion in the book is more than merited in order to help inoculate readers before it becomes more prominent, as it likely will: the idea of manipulating the atmosphere directly, spraying toxins into the atmosphere on an ongoing basis to reduce sunlight reaching the earth, instead of trying to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The risks of this lunacy (it would be insulting to call it a strategy) are catastrophic, and the potential benefits would be extremely unequal. The book notes that, when presented with geoengineering-type solutions to climate change, right-wingers who would ordinarily deny climate change are more inclined to believe in it — another piece of evidence that it is the implications that are really being denied, rather than the facts.

Geoengineering is only one of the high-tech bad ideas that are currently on offer to environmentalists. Bioengineering, carbon-capture and storage, ocean “fertilization,” and, of course, nuclear power as an alternative, are all put forward by one or another environmentalist as possible solutions. Because nuclear is an existing technology and perhaps the least crazy of the options, Klein handles it quite gently, advocating a gradual phase out of nuclear power; “prioritizing fossil fuels for cuts because the next decade is so critical,” she writes on page 138, proposing “a moratorium on new nuclear facilities a decommisioning of the oldest plans and then a full nuclear phase-out once renewables had decisively displaced fossil fuels.”

I agree with her conclusions here, but I believe that nuclear advocacy by environmentalists has been another diversion that has lost us precious time, like the others discussed in the middle section of This Changes Everything.

The problem with all of the bad ideas presented in the middle of the book is that they take for granted the world-view criticized in the book’s first section, a world-view that, following anti-mining activists, Klein summarizes as extractivism. In the third and final section of the book, Klein showcases many examples of resistance to extractivism from all over the world, including Canada, Greece, India, Nigeria, and many other places. Those who are fighting against the destruction of ecosystems, the basis of life where they live, are having to do so without institutional support and find themselves having to build their own systems of community and of survival, drawing on old traditions and on new experiments. In Greece, some of these activists used the term Blockadia, which Klein suggests could be seen as the changing, dynamic network of people resisting extractivism anywhere in the world. This section is a breath of fresh air (atmosphere pun intended). Where most environmental books present packages of policies, technologies, or laws, Klein presents the voices of people who are fighting for the lands and communities they live in and love.

The conclusion of the book is in her own voice, and returns to the Shock Doctrine parable of crazy ideas sitting on the shelf.

“Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect,” she writes on page 460.

Read them, and when the opportunity arises, as it will, reach for them, and not for geoengineering, nukes, philanthrocapitalists, and climate markets.

Science and liberation

Published by Briarpatch

A colleague of mine in environmental science recently told me that he is about to run out of funding since his Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) discovery grant has not been renewed, twice in a row. Scientists like him, focused as they are on their work, are encouraged to think their funding has not been renewed because there is something wrong with them or their research. In fact, there are broader social forces at play.

It turns out that the feminist slogan the personal is political is relevant to science as well. For decades, the membership card in the club of Canadian scientists was the NSERC discovery grant. The purpose of the grant was to give every working scientist basic funding to do their research. In recent years, two changes have been made to this paradigm. First, as detailed in a new book by Chris Turner, the federal government has declared an outright war on science, cutting funding for basic research and redirecting it to business-friendly projects. Second, NSERC has moved to a model of rewarding “excellence,” which in fact has nothing to do with excellence but means concentrating funding with smaller numbers of researchers while leaving many researchers with nothing.

Last September, a group of scientists took the unique step of organizing themselves into a movement called Evidence for Democracy. Mounting a series of rallies and media events, they announced a platform targeting the federal government with three demands: to fund research from basic through to applied science; to base decisions on the best available science and evidence; and to make scientific findings open to the public.

While their demands are hardly radical, these scientists have been galvanized to step out of their labs and enter the public sphere because of a Canadian government that, like the North American conservative movement from which it sprang, dislikes science. We are at a point in Canada where Prime Minister Harper’s government controls communications by government scientists from Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. It has eliminated the position of national science adviser. It has scrapped Statistics Canada’s long-form census (vital to research on social inequality) and closed labs and environmental monitoring stations. And more than any other government in the world today, the Canadian government is dedicated to denying the results of climate change science and preventing civilization-saving action at international climate forums.

The conservative movement’s attack on science has several prongs. Where they can attain government office, as in Canada, they use the highly effective tools of funding and de-funding, and regulation and de-regulation, to control government scientists and embolden private interests. The goal is to transfer power and resources from public services and public science to private institutions, while often appealing to moral and religious doctrines in the process.

The success of these attacks on science are partly due to vulnerabilities caused by the way science itself is done in our society, for the word science has multiple meanings.

Science and curiosity

Albert Einstein said that science is the refinement of everyday thinking. In that sense, science is a fundamental human activity: it means paying attention to evidence, using logic, rendering explicit assumptions, and testing hypotheses formally in a way that is repeatable by others. It is this kind of science that is under attack from conservatives and other forms of authority. Let us call this kind of science Science C, where C stands for curiosity.

Today, hacker subculture exemplifies Science C better than academic science does. Hackers are dedicated to following their curiosity wherever it goes, and the open-source, free software movement that most hackers belong to is also dedicated to making information freely and universally accessible. No one exemplified Science C and hacker culture better than Aaron Swartz. Swartz developed Creative Commons, Reddit, and other innovative works before moving into activism explicitly.

Creative Commons is an organization and a licensing system that facilitates the sharing and use of creative work. Like the GNU Public License (GPL) for software developed by Richard Stallman, Creative Commons has an implicit philosophy that creative work is a collective endeavour and that human instincts to share knowledge and information should be celebrated and encouraged, not suppressed. This is the spirit of Science C.

Creative Commons and the GPL are legal tools to facilitate sharing, and in their domains they are analogous to peer review and publication in scientific journals for scientists. However, like the conflict between free and proprietary software, there is a conflict between open access and proprietary access to scientific publications, a conflict Aaron Swartz became aware of as an activist.

Swartz was so appalled by the privatization of scientific knowledge in expensive journals that he took direct action to make the journals public, breaking the copyright of the academic database known as JSTOR. As Swartz explained, without broad public access, “Everything up until now will have been lost.” Swartz believed the commodification of essential knowledge must be vigorously resisted: “Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.”

Facing dire federal charges that could have landed him in jail for decades, Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January 2013.

Science and authority

If Science C is about curiosity, and as such constitutes a potential threat to those with power, science can also mean authority. Anyone making any claim wants to say that science backs them. In popular media, scientists from government and prestigious universities can make authoritative statements because they possess scientific authority. Let us call this aspect of science Science A, for authority. Ideally, the practice of Science C can lead to the authority of Science A. But in reality, the authority of Science A is abused and sold as a commodity.

In a famous case from the mid-’90s, University of Toronto medical researcher Nancy Olivieri discovered harmful effects of a blood disorder drug called Deferiprone. In the stir of controversy that followed, Olivieri was forced to defend herself, her research, and her job against a wide range of attacks from the drug manufacturer and senior staff at her hospital.

The most pressing attack on scientific authority today, however, centres on the consensus of climate scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released its fifth and most dire report this past October. Before resigning from NASA as the world’s leading climatologist, James Hansen once lamented “the politicization of reporting of global warming.” Hansen stressed that with corporate consolidation of the media, the task of resisting the negative politicization of scientific inquiry, including attacks on the credibility of scientists, is “formidable.”

Such direct attacks on scientific authority are relatively rare, but they reveal how powerful business interests seek to discredit scientific authority when scientific findings challenge their profits and social control. More insidiously, such business interests do not merely wait to attack scientific results they don’t like. On the contrary, they have developed sophisticated ways of channelling and controlling scientific curiosity.

Science and business

This is what I call Science B, the business of science. The sad truth is that most of what scientists do is not Science C, exploring the world through systematic investigation. Most of what scientists do is try to raise funds, generate publications in prestigious journals, find students to work on their projects, and keep up with other scientists according to these metrics. Science B operates like other sectors of capitalist society. It is competitive, comparative, and divided by status into superstars, has-beens, and also-rans.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) launched a campaign last summer called Get Science Right. Aiming to overhaul the federal science policy that oversees Science B, CAUT argued for more money for basic science, since funding in the natural sciences has fallen by 6.4 per cent since 2007. Meanwhile, the federal government has increased funding for research partnerships – partnerships between science and business – by 23 per cent since 2011.

The business of science makes science vulnerable to attack by authoritarian governments and conservative movements, streamlining opportunities for the wealthy and powerful to steer science to their own benefit. As a result, we can create tens of thousands of chemicals but haven’t thought much about what to do with them after we’ve used them. Half a dozen countries have nuclear weapons that can destroy whole cities, but no country has a functioning renewable energy system. Human curiosity (Science C) could have solved our environmental problems long ago, but it cannot take flight because it is trapped within Science B.

Writing for the Baffler magazine, the well-known cultural anthropologist David Graeber assessed the problem. “The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

“Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone … if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.”

Graeber gives us an important insight into how Science B has come to trump Science C. Leftists, meanwhile, are natural supporters of Science C, and left-wing scientists like the evolutionary biologist Richard C. Lewontin and the mathematical ecologist Richard Levins use the term “people’s science” to describe how science could be done in a better society. While most of us have a healthy anti-authority streak that can bring us into conflict with scientific authority (Science A), the best challenges to that authority, indeed any authority, are themselves made on the basis of logic, evidence, and inquiry. One of the tasks of the political left, then, is to liberate and encourage the rigorous curiosity of Science C.

Science and social movements

Marx and the early socialists viewed their work as scientific in nature, and even their errors can be understood as failures to act according to their own scientific principles. Generations later, socialists like Trotsky, Luxemburg, and others tried to popularize scientific discoveries and intellectual culture for the people. Today, even though leftists are few in number and not especially influential, the natural and social sciences are good places to look for them.

Leftists try to make change by convincing large numbers of people to take action in social movements. Insights from the social sciences could inform leftists in these efforts. For example, recent studies correlating a wide range of social problems with economic inequality suggest that people are highly sensitive to status and that social policy should be designed to minimize inequality with this in mind. Philosophers have long debated whether human nature has an instinct for freedom, and while scientific knowledge about human nature remains extremely limited, what little science has revealed suggests that humans do have instincts both for freedom and for equality.

Another set of studies, about moral licensing, suggests that voluntarist appeals have severe limitations. In one study, subjects who had made a green or eco-friendly consumer choice were afterwards less likely to donate to a good cause or help an individual in need. Here, too, we find social science research that suggests that relying on solidarity works better than relying on charity, as charity can be brittle.

A third area of research shows that political ideology affects consumer choices. An American study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “conservative individuals were less likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it was labelled with an environmental message than when it was unlabelled.” Today’s capitalist society means that many of these insights are coming from business-oriented research on marketing and organizational behaviour. Leftists shouldn’t shy from studying these insights, discarding the useless ones, and adapting the helpful ones.

No substitute for the left

The scientifically minded do not automatically gravitate toward the political left. Partly because of the influence of Science A (authority) and Science B (business), many scientifically minded people assume that to be scientific means to be neutral, to reserve judgment, to refuse a stance even on the most critical issues of the day. In fact, science says no such thing. Scientific objectivity means being conscious of biases within a given framework and acting to minimize them while testing claims against evidence. It does not mean having no opinion and no point of view (or, for that matter, accepting a given framework without question). In fact, in the book Descartes’ Error, the neurologist António Damásio calls on studies that show rational decision-making is impossible without emotions.

In the case of climate change, we have an overwhelming and nearly unprecedented scientific consensus, with all the authority Science A can bring combined with all of the know­ledge that Science C has been able to generate. But without major political change, elites are able to continue on a path of greater fossil fuel use and escalating climatic rupture. As with other issues, vested interests direct policy by proactively controlling the direction of science (Science B), using media and government agencies to attack the credibility of scientists, their reputation, and their morale, and hiding or confusing the information available to the public. Facing this kind of resolute political opposition, an approach, a strategy, and a set of political principles must be chosen. Science itself cannot provide these things.

This becomes clear when we consider two different approaches to combatting catastrophic climate change. For many mainstream environmentalists, the path has always seemed clear. We live in a democracy, after all. So, first, we convince enough people that the climate problem is serious. We demonstrate that the technology is available to solve it without sacrificing most comforts and conveniences. Then we convince our leaders to make the necessary technological and policy changes, and if they don’t, then we elect leaders who do. Many of those who make economic decisions aren’t elected, it’s true. But they, too, can be convinced by rational arguments. Business leaders meet with environmentalists regularly. If parts of the planet become uninhabitable and there are a series of climate-related catastrophes, that would be bad for business, the argument goes. So even captains of industry will come along with the right arguments and proposals.

In 2014, as oil and gas production continues at a breakneck pace in Canada and the U.S., we have more than enough evidence to know that such an apolitical approach of lobbying and persuasion has failed disastrously. The basic nature of the system we live in isn’t democratic. It’s a system that takes the elements of life – nature, land, water, energy, cultures, and peoples – and converts them into commodities for profit and control. The system has its own logic. If you are a player in it, you have to follow that logic. You have to take what you can grab – for most people it’s their own lives – and turn it into money. If you’re excluded from the system, you’re excluded from the very means of survival. If you’re excluded and you try to get the means of survival for yourself or your loved ones outside the system, you will be met with violence. Profit, accumulation, and economic growth are more than dominant ideas: they define capitalism as a system of relations.

Thus, for a stabilized atmosphere, we are going to have to defeat some very powerful people and institutions in the process of liberating ourselves – and science – from the dictates of profit. Success in this struggle will require all the tools of social change: organization, communication, demonstration, and experimentation with different actions.

The intelligence that drives scientific inquiry is a profound human capacity, but science alone can never tell us how to act. It cannot provide principles, even though it can help us to act within them once we have them. For this reason, science will never be enough to do political battle with conservative movements or powerful corporations. For that, people have to find moral guidance from other human capacities and other cultural resources: art, literature, philosophy, relationships, and even, in its proper place, religion. In the fight for a just and sustainable world, there can be no substitute for organized political struggle – a fact scientists themselves increasingly recognize.

Justin Podur is an associate professor of environmental studies at York University where he teaches landscape ecology and geographic information systems. He blogs on international politics at podur.org

Should we let Delhi go to the dogs?

An architect from Jamia Millia Islamia has figured out how to minimize conflict between species

Justin Podur
March 3, 2013
First Published on Viewpoint Online (Pakistan)

India’s urban dogs are an unfamiliar sight to a visitor. Their behavior is mysterious. Why do we hear them barking at night, and not during the day? What kinds of territorial disputes are going on between them? Why are some so friendly to humans, while others shy away? Which dogs are responsible for aggression against humans, and why? Do India’s cities have a ‘dog problem’?

Every North American city has an infrastructure dedicated to taking dogs off of the street. There is 1 dog for every two humans in North America, compared to 1 dog for every 50 humans in India. Virtually all of the North American dogs are pets. To a North American, this – bringing the dogs into homes as pets – could be the solution to any conflict that might arise between dogs and humans in the city.

But to Rishi Dev, architect and instructor at Jamia Millia Islamia, this is the nightmare scenario to be avoided at all costs. This is not because Rishi Dev dislikes dogs – on the contrary, he is a true dog lover who has spent the last 13 years studying the animals. But the basis of his philosophy is a scientific understanding of dogs as a species adapted to the outdoors, a species that has a special relationship with humans, and a species that “values freedom more than food.”

“Dogs are a keystone species,” Rishi Dev says. “They keep rats away, they exclude other animals. By bringing them into homes as pets and off of the street, you are creating a vacuum.”

That vacuum is filled first by other dogs – feral dogs from outside the city. This was exactly what occurred after the famous Bangalore cull of 2007, in which 3000 dogs were killed in 3 months. Feral dogs came into the city, bringing rabies, which had not been a problem in the urban dog population. Dog haters didn’t benefit, as feral dogs filled the void. “The ones who did benefit were the pharmaceutical companies, who sold more rabies vaccines than ever, after the cull.” If dogs continue to be excluded, other animals take over – cats, and rats, neither of whom have the kind of special affinity for humans that dogs have.

Rishi Dev, a champion of the Indian-evolved street dog, is quick to remind people not only that these dogs are perfectly adapted to the Indian environment, but also that 79% of bites in Delhi are caused primarily by pet dogs, not street dogs. The street dog is misunderstood in other ways as well. The population of street dogs is not limited by food, but by high mortality, so feeding dogs will not cause an increase in their population. Dogs are hardier than humans, can travel much farther on foot, and can survive much longer with very little food and water. And their hardiness makes them more friendly to humans, not less. “Compare dogs and monkeys,” he says. “Urban monkeys are more aggressive than dogs – partly because they are less hardy species.” On the other hand, he writes in his thesis, their hardiness means that “if pushed to extinction, they are capable of taking measures that would prove absolutely fatal to humans.”

His analysis is based on a multi-year study conducted as part of his master’s degree in ekistics from Jamia Millia Islamia. Based on years of field observation and questionnaires, Rishi Dev classified Delhi into zones where the relationship between humans and dogs was desirable, sensitive, or undesirable. In the undesirable zones, humans and dogs met one another with hostility and aggression. In sensitive zones, dogs lacked the ability to freely enter or exit.

Most interesting was the desirable zone, which included areas like around Metro stations or certain residential areas with specific spatial patterns. Here, there were fewer dogs for each human than in other zones, and the relationship works because humans take advantage of the special behaviors of dogs. As social animals, dogs form packs with defined hierarchies. But – and this is unique to dogs – the minute the dogs are fed by humans, the pack is dissolved and the dogs become loyal to the humans that feed them. Feeding is not to be confused with throwing scraps, however. “Feeding creates a relationship with the human feeding the dog, whereas if you throw waste at the dog, they become protective of the food, including from you.”

By feeding them, dogs in the desirable zones were adopted, classified in Rishi’s study as ‘community dogs’, and regularly fed by the humans. These community dogs, with their territorial instincts, drive off dogs from outside the community. “Dogs respect territory, so that two dogs can drive off twenty.” Weaker dogs, dogs without relationships to humans, also defer to the healthier, better fed dogs that are associated with the community, which also enables a small number of community dogs to exclude larger numbers of feral dogs from the outside.

The adoption of community dogs is the first step to a stable, desirable relationship between people and dogs. After the dogs are domesticated, they can be spayed or neutered to control the population. Without domestication, Rishi Dev argues, animal birth control efforts are futile – some dogs will always escape, and dogs are fecund enough to repopulate the streets unless tremendous effort and expense is put into constantly killing them – which, if done, would bring its own problems, including, as mentioned above, species that have no such special liking for humans. Following a similar logic, the Delhi High Court gave an order that dogs could be fed at defined feeding stations in the city, in order to create these desirable zones.

“This approach,” Rishi says, “is in accord with our customs. In Hinduism, in Islam, we keep dogs, but not in the home. But really it’s a completely scientific approach. I am not looking at this as a dog lover, I am just looking at how we can minimize the conflict.”

Rishi’s vision is of a city of community dogs, with a stable, low population, relating to humans as friends, without fear. The biggest threat to this vision is, surprisingly, the pet industry itself. 67% of the population increase of dogs is from abandoned pets, breeds poorly adapted to urban India that have introduced new health problems and more aggression into the street dog population. The pet industry sees a growing market in urban India: “Communities are breaking down, families are breaking down, people in the cities are alienated, and they turn to pets for companionship. But this eventually leads to greater conflict between the species.”

Rishi started on this path through an intraspecies encounter of his own. “In 1994 I got bitten by a dog. This dog used to sit outside my house every day, and one day I accidentally stepped on him. He bit me on the leg, and I was enraged. I called the municipal corporation. They came and caught him, and I remember the way he looked at me, as if he was asking what did I do? So I asked them to let him go. I thought, maybe it wasn’t his fault. The most amazing thing was, after about five days, he came back. He had some apprehension towards me, but he came back, and I realized, despite the danger to him, he would keep coming. He was kind of confident that he could coexist with me. He was cautious, but confident. And I started to think about how this was all about space, and not about the animal, and that we could design spaces to have a better relationship.”

Justin Podur is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. This winter, he is a Visiting Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi.

Some environmental books

I gave a couple of environmental talks in Texas over the weekend, which have since been published on the web. One on sustainability in general. The other on climate change, science and politics.

To prepare for them and before and since, I read a bunch of environmental books, that I’ll discuss below.

Derrick Jensen, ‘Endgame’. Recommend this very highly. I came away with great respect for Jensen. It was just refreshing. I don’t agree with everything – I suppose I hope that he’s wrong about civilization being inherently unsustainable more than knowing that he is – but I agree with most, and I just found him to be honest, ethical, and serious throughout.

Chris Turner, ‘Geography of Hope’. Interesting reporting on alternative technologies in different parts of the world. Chris is a little breathless, I think too enthusiastic (though he acknowledges that his enthusiasm is strategic, because what’s needed is some breathless enthusiasm) and his framework is ‘Natural Capitalism’ by Hawken and Lovins (which I’ll also mention below), a framework I disagree with for various reasons. He also does an unfair and unhelpful swipe at Cuba, suggesting that their organic urban agriculture miracle occurred because it’s a dictatorship (as opposed to because their social process enabled them to accomplish things that capitalist societies cannot). But I like his style and I can recommend the book.

Paul Hawken and Amory & Hunter Lovins, ‘Natural Capitalism’. The idea here is that thinking only of financial and manufacturing capital and not of social and natural capital is a mistake. ‘Natural capitalism’ would value natural capital as capital and treat it that way, not as income to be spent. Interesting technology again. But my several problems are as follows. First, if the entire infrastructure created for the automobile is unsustainable, and I think it is, then even vastly more efficient cars are still an error, compared to more collective solutions such as rail and changes to urban form. Second, trying to put monetary value on what are called ‘ecosystem services’ invites tradeoffs for things that cannot be traded off. Jensen actually makes this point well – bringing something into the money economy almost certainly guarantees its doom. The authors of ‘Natural Capitalism’ don’t do too much such valuation, but the framework invites such exercises. Third, the pun of ‘natural capitalism’ implies there’s something natural about capitalism, and capitalism usually implies not just markets, but private ownership of the means of production and hierarchical class society. I can’t accept such things as natural.

David Suzuki and Holly Dressel, ‘Good News for a Change’. Good green technology stuff again.

James Howard Kunstler, ‘The Long Emergency’. Interesting work about how America’s suburban and industrial infrastructure depends on oil, how oil will run out before too long, and all the problems that will result. Kunstler says repeatedly that he isn’t prescribing, but predicting the future. But I disagree with this attitude towards the future. The one thing about the future that we like is that it is at least partly up for decision. Kunstler would probably answer that it is part of delusional fantasies to think we can decide on the future, which is true of some parts of the future but not of others. Kunstler also combines what I think is interesting technological and economic analysis with very conventional and I think off-base geopolitical and domestic political analysis. He doesn’t understand the motivations or the politics or the history of the people the US is fighting and killing in massive numbers in West Asia, nor very important elements of immigration in the US, nor very important racial and economic problems in the US. His analysis of these matters seems to rely on stereotypes, and I’d hoped for better from a contrarian. It’s almost enough to make me not want to recommend the book – but several parts of several chapters (especially chapters 1, 2, and 7) should be read regardless of the weaknesses of the other chapters. I’m prepared to elaborate on this, because separating where he’s right from where he’s wrong is, I think, important and worthwhile.

McDonough and Braungart, ‘Cradle to Cradle’. I really enjoyed this. The idea is that we redesign our industrial system to have no waste. Everything is designed to be re-used or re-incorporated into other products, indefinitely. If they are right and what they say can be done, then perhaps civilization isn’t inherently unsustainable. They are pretty agnostic about what kind of social system would accompany this technological revolution (they don’t seem to endorse capitalism, natural or otherwise, for example) but I really like their technology and their approach to it. Several of the others I’ve read (Jensen and Kunstler, for example) would probably say that ‘Cradle to Cradle’ can’t work.

I think there are others but I can’t remember them. There are also several more on my list that I’ll be reading too.