Assisted Colonization?

Colonizing ground next to a sidewalk. Wikimedia Commons.

   It’s well known that the climate emergency is threatening the continued existence of numerous species, especially those in places subject to extreme habitat change or loss, such as on the Pacific island of Palau, where the combination of sea level rise with hotter temperatures could make Palau uninhabitable for many species found nowhere else. In response, the conservation community has floated the idea of moving populations of endangered species to other places thought to provide hospitable habitats, to prevent them from extinction. The name for this is “assisted colonization.” The downside of assisted colonization is that it is impossible fully to predict the consequences, bad as well as good, of introducing a new species into an ecosystem. Needless to say, the conservation community is not of one mind about this. The introduced species might well survive, but it might also become invasive and crowd out other species in the habitat, as happened when lake trout were introduced in streams to benefit recreational fishing, but it turned out that it was at the expense of other species of trout whose populations became endangered. Besides, the original intention of conservation ecology (aka conservation biology) was restoration of ecosystems to an earlier, healthier condition; assisted colonization would be a very new kind of goal that would, presumably, divert energy from conservation as originally conceived. Against this it is argued that humans have, intentionally as well as unintentionally by way of travel and exploration, introduced new species to ecosystems; assisted colonization would be just a more carefully considered way of doing what has been done for tens of thousands of years anyway, but this time explicitly for the benefit of the endangered species and for continued biodiversity.
    In 2006 I lectured to folklorists and ethnomusicologists about the advantages of an ecological approach to musical and cultural sustainability. This idea of sustainability caught a tailwind and now, fifteen years later, the research into cultural sustainability is widespread, though more often from the standpoint of economics than ecology. Yet the contemporary debate over assisted colonization is worth considering in this light. Could endangered music cultures, for example, be assisted in moving to new geographical locations? In case this strikes you as a solution waiting for a problem, consider Old Regular Baptist singing, the oldest religious music in continuous oral tradition in the United States and identified as a national treasure. Old Regular Baptists’ “habitat” is in the upper South, in central Appalachia, where for the past hundred years most made their living from coal mining. But now mining is no longer viable and the music culture, which for generations fended off threats from other religious musical traditions, such as gospel singing, faces a different kind of threat: economic rather than cultural. They need to find another way to make a living and if they cannot in that place they will have to move. Where? Should applied ethnomusicologists direct them as a group to move en masse to a new location where they can prosper and maintain their religious communities and music? Certainly not; the idea is preposterous. The analogy between environmental and cultural intervention appears to break down at this point. Besides, the words "colonial" and "colonization" have a bad odor about them these days. And yet, it appears that some Old Regular Baptists are migrating on their own anyway, and have been doing so for decades, following the paths of Appalachian out-migration to southern Ohio, for example, and more recently into Florida, where they prefer to establish new communities of Old Regular Baptist families, and then later out-migrants feel attracted to move into these new communities, smaller of course than those in central Appalachia, and build some churches for themselves.
    Perhaps, then, applied ethnomusicologists could partner with community scholars to study these patterns of out-migration and community establishment, and see which ones have more success than others, and try to learn why. For example, a few churches were erected for Old Regular Baptists in Washington State in the last century, but these appear to have become extinct, so to speak, while the ones in Ohio have managed to maintain themselves. Possibly there is a role for applied ethnomusicologists here after all, acting more or less as consultants who would share the results of their studies with those considering out-migration as well as with those who have already out-migrated, with a view to strengthening their new communities by developing resilience. In this small way, assisted colonization might be something that ethnomusicologists and folklife specialists could do.

Nested Sustainabilities and the US Withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement

     Today US President Donald J. Trump put in motion the Nation's withdrawal from the Paris Climate accords. Musical and cultural sustainability depends on sustainability of the Earth no less than does economic activity, a lesson that ecological economists understand whereas the neoclassical economists that run the US economy do not. In announcing the withdrawal, Secretary of State Pompeo justified the withdrawal on the grounds that the Paris agreement was bad for the US economy, never mind whether it might have been good for the Earth and the nations of the world as a whole.
       As reported, his justification advanced no propaganda against the climate science consensus, because this rationalization was unnecessary. It was purely an economic decision, based on narrow self-interest and incorrect knowledge of how dependent national economies are on global commerce and the Earth's resources. The nation's isolationist economic policies are reminiscent of mercantilism. The withdrawal decision illustrates "economic man" acting on a national level. Adam Smith believed that individuals acting in their narrow economic self-interest resulted in a more prosperous economy for all because competition and the marketplace acted as an "invisible hand" to ensure a good  outcome for all. The rising tide would lift all boats. Never mind that some boats were larger than others and would grow faster. But just as narrow national self interest led to centuries of conflict and war in international politics, so in economics the result was the exploitation of the Earth's natural abundance. Now the Earth is paying us back in the currency of mass extinctions and climate change. There is no invisible hand to ensure a good outcome for the Earth and all its creatures, including humans.
       Even though the Paris accords targets are insufficient to do more than slow down the climate emergency train wreck, as a step in the right direction they could have led to more and larger steps. The withdrawal of the world's largest economy will cripple those accords and the chance to do more to mitigate the worst of the climate dangers on the horizon. Given the US' withdrawal, it will be more difficult for other world leaders to keep their nations in the Paris agreement, as well. But US withdrawal is not a foregone conclusion. The US is set to withdraw officially on Nov. 4, 2020--one day after the next US Presidential election.

Music's Carbon Footprint

Photo by Helgi Halldorsson

          Music and sustainability involves both the sustainability of music as it is practiced, and the sustainability of the planet. The first involves the sustainability of traditional music cultures and genres, whether indigenous traditional musics endangered by modernization, or music in developed countries such as blues and classical music. Periodically journalists and scholars ponder the future of these musics. Even though we know that these musics have always been adapting and changing, we wonder whether they will change so much as to lose their integrities and identities, becoming so different that they no longer resemble what they once were. The second involves the relationship between music as practiced and the environment. Anyone concerned with music and environmental sustainability will have wondered about music’s carbon footprint. How much does music contribute to habitat loss, species extinction, and global warming?
         For the first half-dozen or so years of this blog on music and sustainability, the sustainability of music as it is practiced was my main concern. But in applying an ecological approach to this problem, one that borrowed principles from conservation biology to see how they might apply to musical and cultural sustainability, it was inevitable that the topic of music and environment would become a concern. At first it surfaced within the larger topic of sound in the environment, and more specifically in the importance of animal sound communication for survival. This topic brought me to ecomusicology, where I found scholars interested chiefly in musical practice and the environment. Many ecomusicologists wrote about composers whose compositions involved nature and environments in one way or another. Other ecomusicologists were interested in music and musicians who were singing to save the environment; that is, to protest environmental degradation and raise consciousness in order to fuel a mass movement. Yet others explored the impact of musical instrument construction on endangered plant species, especially the woods used in making guitars and violins, within the context of environmentally sound forest management. In the hallways during ecomusicology conferences I sometimes heard people wondering about the impact of musical practice on climate change, but until 2014 I didn’t think about addressing this issue.
         In 2014 Denise von Glahn asked the provocative question, “What is the sound of climate change?” and one result was a symposium on “Music in a Changing Climate,” held at the University of Minnesota in 2015. I’ve written about that symposium elsewhere on this blog. But “music in a changing climate” can evoke traditional subjects for ecomusicologists—attention to composers concerned with nature, musicians protesting global warming, and music’s impact on endangered species. For the symposium I took a different approach, asking what sound in a changing climate sounded like, and what it signaled; and in “The Sound of Climate Change” I described the sounds and ecological significance for climate change of a horrific storm I experienced on the Maine coast in the fall of 2014.
         Recently I’ve been thinking about the differences global warming and climate change have made to sustainability thinking in the 21st century, and what this means for music, sound, and cultural sustainability. Before the new century, sustainability thinking was not directed at music nor was it about climate change; it had to do with the Earth's resources, its carrying capacity, and the future of both the environment and life on the Planet, mainly human life. To be sure, conservation biologists were interested in endangered species and habitat loss, but the bulk of sustainability thinking occurred in connection with developmental economics and human ecology, where the major problem was how to feed an exponentially expanding human population, given that the Earth has finite natural resources. The technological solution offered by developmental economics increased agricultural productivity many times over by introducing modern farming methods including the massive use of chemical fertilizers and large machinery. More food could, and did, support an increasing population. Critics, however, pointed out that this came at a cost of traditional ecological knowledges, and traditional cultures. Also, the increase in farmland devoted to monoculture crops pressured biodiversity as it altered habitat and impacted animals as well as plants. Finally, it became obvious that the technological solution involved an enormous increase in energy use. According to a study published in Science in 1976, researchers at Cornell University found that whereas in nonindustrialized agriculture manual farming produces 5 to 50 calories of food energy for each calorie of energy used in producing it, industrial agriculture requires 5 to 10 calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food energy. That is, 5 to 10 calories of energy from fossil fuels and other sources, mainly non-renewable, were used to produce chemical fertilizers, build and run farm machinery, etc. in order to get a single calorie of food energy. This appeared unsustainable on its face, but in the last century even though some were warning about carbon emissions from fossil fuel use and the warming planet, most sustainability thinkers were more concerned with the problem of how to feed an exploding human population and how to raise the living standard in third-world nations where the population increase was greatest.
         But if the major sustainability problem in the last century was the Earth's carrying capacity in the face of increasing human population, today the major sustainability problem is the Earth itself as we know it in the face of global warming and climate change. The link between energy use, carbon emissions, and global warming became well established and accepted in the scientific community in the 21st century, with models showing potentially catastrophic climate change if humans don’t significantly lower our carbon footprint in the near future. The caloric example in the previous paragraph takes on new meaning in this century: not only does it seem outrageous to expend so much more energy to produce a calorie of food, a back-of-the-napkin calculation of energy expenditures related to the production, distribution, delivery and consumption of music today gives cause for alarm. How much does music contribute to our carbon footprint?
         To answer that question we’d need to ask how much energy is expended in the production and consumption of musical instruments, for example, and not just ask about endangered species and habitat loss, important as they are. We’d need to take into account the energy expended in the production and consumption of music’s part of the economy, everything from the food needed to keep people alive and making music, to the energy needed to support music-making (concerts, sound reinforcement, heating large indoor spaces, musicians’ travel, manufacture of music products, etc.), to the energy needed to deliver music on the internet, including the manufacture of computers, smartphones, tablets, the network of cell towers and internet providers, and so on. Insofar as music is a significant part of the economy, it requires a significant expenditure of energy to produce, distribute, and consume. It might be useful in this regard to contrast nonindustrial music-making with industrial (and post-industrial) music-making, just as researchers at Cornell did for agriculture in the last century. How much energy is required for participatory music-making with acoustic instruments, versus presentational or hi-fi music-making as it is delivered in concert tours and over the internet? I suppose that the results will parallel those for nonindustrial versus industrial agriculture.
         We may ask, also, about the social ecology of nonindustrial farming versus industrial, and participatory music-making versus presentational and hi-fi. I’ve written about the latter, contrasting the community-building aspects of participatory music-making with the isolating aspects of presentational music. Wendell Berry has for more than fifty years been making a similar point about farming, contrasting the communal nature of tobacco farming in rural Kentucky with the isolating aspects of so-called family agribusiness industrial corn and soybean farming in the Midwest today. I needn’t go into that here; Berry’s work is widely available and he is much honored in his sphere.
         There is more to say about energy use, fossil fuels, the economy of music and the sustainability of the Planet. I’ve been thinking about this for several years now, and I know other ecomusicologists have been, also. It’s time to channel more of our efforts in this direction. 

Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy--A Conference at UCSB May 24-26, 2018

     In an earlier entry I mentioned the upcoming conference on cultural and musical sustainabilities, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, to take place later this month--May 24-26 to be exact. If you're in the Los Angeles/Santa Barbara area, it might be of interest to you. There is no admission charge. Here is the flyer advertising it: