A Guide to Understanding the Fundamental Principles of Environmental Management

Front matter

©2021 The Author(s)

This is an Open Access book distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits copying and redistribution in the original format for non-commercial purposes, provided the original work is properly cited. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). This does not affect the rights licensed or assigned from any third party in this book.

This title was made available Open Access through a partnership with Knowledge Unlatched.

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Part Il: Stuff Happens and for Every Action There is a Reaction

Chapter 5

Contents

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Chapter 8 The answer to what is next, summary, and conclusions 8.1 The Answer to ‘What Next?’: Public Policy —- When 8:5. “CONCIUSION 4 vised eset gacter ive decency eee news ee oes

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Foreword

Technological innovation, which has given humans dominance over land and water and made once scarce resources readily available, is a two-edged sword: it has freed much of humanity from the shackles of food and resource scarcity, but it does so at the cost of environmental degradation. The latter comes, ironically, from excesses of what makes life possible.

The research that I and my fellow scientists conduct documents the adverse impacts of ill-management of natural resources and illuminates solutions to the dilemma. Nevertheless, if progress towards sustainability is to be achieved, the science must be translated into action. In other words, managing and protecting the environment means making decisions on how resources are used. Not all decisions are alike. We naturally want the action to solve the problems we face, but the likelihood that it does so depends substantially upon how well the problem has been defined and the appropriateness of the response. There is no set script to guide actions for the manager to follow. Scientific knowledge is ever evolving in the context of ever-changing human demands on natural resources made ever more complicated within a changing climate. The successful manager must know how to construct responses to these difficult challenges on sound scientific principles. He or she must know or anticipate, as if instinctively, where the sword will slice, and how to seek appropriate scientific guidance.

Andrew Manale and Skip Hyberg provide an excellent introduction to today’s enduring and existential environmental problems, as well as the key scientific principles underlying them. The latter are, regretfully, too often neglected. The authors have extensive experience in the trenches of programmatic and policy battles over whether or not and how to achieve environmental sustainability.

x Guide to Understanding the Principles of Environmental Management

Their efforts have not gone without considerable success. I know this is to be so. I have known and worked with them for many years in many contexts. Their book, targeting the introductory student, the lay person looking for insight into the sticky problems of today, and the policy and manager professional needing a core grounding in the science, provides a framework for identifying what can work towards achieving the goal of an environment in balance and how to measure progress. It should be read broadly.

Rattan Lal Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science, SENR

Director, CFAES Dr. Rattan Lal Carbon Management and Sequestration Center

IICA Chair in Soil Science and Goodwill Ambassador for Sustainable Development Issues

Adjunct Professor at the University of Iceland and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute JARI

Past President, International Union of Soil Science December 8" 2020

Preface

Possibly, in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth — its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being.

— Aldo Leopold (from Thomas Tanner, ed., Aldo Leopold,: the Man and His Legacy, Soil and Water Conservation Society, 2012)

If you are a beginning student in environmental sciences (at college or postgraduate level) or a beginning practitioner of environmental management, you should read this book. The intended audience also includes nonscientists with a keen interest in the environment who will acquire an introduction to the seemingly intractable, so-called sticky environmental and natural resource issues vexing modern society. Using plain English, we explain the core scientific principles underlying environmental management — everything goes somewhere and gravity is omnipresent—, presuming only a rudimentary background in the basic sciences. We build upon the readers’ innate knowledge of these principles to provide a framework for understanding how elemental components of the natural world interlock. Stressing the importance of observation (and measurement as necessary), we provide tools for identifying options in managing problems and, by building upon what they know, bolster readers’ confidence in applying these.

© IWA Publishing 2021. A Guide to Understanding the Fundamental Principles of Environmental Management. It Ain’t Magic: Everything Goes Somewhere xii It Ain’t Magic: Everything goes Somewhere

Readers will learn to ask questions that help unravel the complexity of environmental and resource management. You will learn to see how seemingly disparate headline-grabbing issues, such as ever more severe flooding, persistent water quality problems and even climate change, interconnect. We use basic insights, “easy rules,’ that use common sense and direct observations/ experiments (empirical knowledge), to explain the core scientific principles underlying environmental management and how these relate to the basic functioning (the balancing of environmental cycles) of our natural world. The book draws upon case studies (“stories”) derived primarily from temperate ecosystems in and around agricultural systems and the modified, i.e., human-altered environment. The examples apply broadly not just to the United States but also to other parts of the world with developed agroecosystems. Experiments engage the reader in observational exercises that use their personal experience to reinforce and extend their understanding of the basic principles.

The framework is not just an academic exercise. It is a tool that can be employed to avoid environmental missteps and make conservation efforts more effective. We give examples illustrating the critical role that observation and monitoring play in assessing the effectiveness of a plan and the power of environmental accounting. We will help the reader see how soils provide critical environmental services that support the quality of air and water and interact with every component in our biosphere.

The first chapters provide an introduction to key scientific concepts and then relate this science to issues of environmental and natural resource management. Later chapters guide the reader along in seeing how human actions affect natural resource quality and why it matters. The case studies illustrate how poorly conceived management strategies to address one problem can have unintended effects that create larger problems. The case studies show the consequences of not examining the full path of materials as they move through the environment and not making a comprehensive accounting of where they go. Poor decisions, with few exceptions, lead to poor outcomes. The examples give the reader the opportunity to apply the methods and tools in asking what went wrong and what could make the situation right. We conclude with a discussion of when cooperative action is necessary and the role of public policy.

With the completion of this book, the reader will be able to recognize how major environmental problems relate to each other and to identify shortcomings of practices and policies for managing them. Most importantly the reader will recognize that to make even small strides toward fixing today’s major environmental and natural resource issues requires that the basic principles be incorporated into any strategy.

This book is not is a chemistry, biology, ecology, or physics text that grounds the beginning or advanced student in the core knowledge of the respective science. Rather, this book equips you with a basic understanding of core concepts in environmental management and a sensitivity to the complexity of persistent

Preface xiii environmental and natural resource problems, challenging you to delve deeper by providing recommendations for additional reading and more detailed answers. In doing so, we draw upon many scientific disciplines, including the social sciences and, from them, distill the essential lessons for the introductory student or informed layperson with an interest in resource management. Although the messages are based upon numerous laws of science, as noted above, we leave more in-depth instruction in these subject areas to others. We demonstrate how drawing upon a few core principles helps you identify the areas of expertise you need to develop for your career, to interact with professionals with the expertise in these sciences, to develop appropriate strategies, and to ask critical questions regarding proposed alternative management options. With these skills, you will understand better the processes affecting climate change, water quality, floods and droughts, soil health, habitat loss, and water quality degradation and how they interrelate. By the concluding chapter, it should be clear to you why and how the above problems act as systems problems that require systems solutions.

About the Authors

The authors have ample real-world experience in probing the sticky, difficult environmental and natural resource issues confounding decision-makers today. They have worked on these issues at every geographic scale, explaining and providing advice to a wide expanse of interested parties, from local community groups to global international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, from farmers and high school and college students to members of Congress and political leaders domestic and abroad. They draw upon their backgrounds in the biological, chemical, and social sciences.

Andrew Manale, M.S. M.P.P., is a retired public policy analyst, biochemist, and researcher who spent many years in the policy office of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and at California’s Air Resources Board. He is also a Fellow of the German Marshall Fund and John J. McCloy Foundation, and a LEGIS Congressional Fellow.

Bengt ‘Skip’ Hyberg, PhD, is a retired economist and scientist from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Service Agency. During a 32- year career with USDA, he served as a senior advisor to USDA’s Chief Scientist and as an Exchange Officer with the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the Economist of the Year award, the Fred Woods award for sustained excellence in policy leadership and the John E. Lee Award from the USDA Economist Group, the Honors Silver Metal from the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Wetland Conservation Achievement Award from the conservation organization, Ducks Unlimited.

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the following people whose support has been critical to this project: Jonathan Beebe, who braved the first draft and who helped prepare the citations and glossary; our friend David Hewitt who helped us launch this project and prepared a rough draft for Chapter 2; Peter Kuch, Marc Ribaudo, Mike Linsenbigler, and Jim Johnson, whose reading and comments on a later draft greatly improved the products; Jerry Hatfield for his time and kindness in sharing his experience and knowledge; Stacy Ritcher and Charlie Schafer from the Agricultural Drainage Management Coalition; Andrew Sharpley, our colleague on the Science and Policy Committee of the Soil and Water Conservation Society; Rob and June Wolcott with whom we have worked so many years; and the numerous persons and organizations who have permitted us to use educational graphics in this text. We thank Dr. Rattan Lal for agreeing to read and then to write the foreword to the book. Finally, we wish to acknowledge Professor Bill Ellis, whose support and provision of his student Jonathan Beebe helped make the book possible.

This book is dedicated to our wives, Shizumi and Lauren, who have enriched our lives, nourished and comforted us, and made us better persons. They suffered through our preoccupation and distraction with this book for many months, and endured our rambling and lecturing. This book would not have been possible without their support.

Part I The Basics or How Stuff Happens Chapter 1 Introduction

Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished.

— Rachel Carson

All of us experience at times the occasion where we read something that elicits the response: ‘That’s obvious, I knew that.’ And we did. This same deep-down understanding of something to which you may have never been exposed but about which you intuitively know can help fathom environmental issues and judge proposals that address them. We are all scientists in the early years of our lives. As infants we conduct experiments to gauge the workings of our environment. To the mother’s or father’s lament, the child takes the cup and spills the contents on the ground. We learn that things fall when there is no opposing force, i.e. the hand, preventing it from doing so. Do you not remember tossing the contents of a cup into the air and laughing as it projects for a short period of time upward until it succumbs to some force that brings it back down to earth?

We as infants and young adults learn important truths or concepts in general basic ways. What we learn about how our physical world functions form our initial view of the world, that is, our understanding of what happens when an action is taken. Water flowing out of a glass always falls down; it does not go up or float in the air. Our developing brains begin to link an action, with a reaction, a cause with an effect. We know nothing about gravity, at this point in our lives, yet we begin to know what it does to objects. In fact, we can observe a baby drop objects

© IWA Publishing 2021. A Guide to Understanding the Fundamental Principles of Environmental Management. It Ain’t Magic: Everything Goes Somewhere intentionally, seemingly to see what will happen. Is the infant experimenting to find exceptions in what is developing as a rule in her perception of her surroundings and how they function? Perhaps this experimentation explains children’s love of helium-filled balloons. Or is her laughing because the action has indeed become a game, one where she begins to know the answer and anticipates subsequent actions as her parents respond to the bouncing or splashing outcome? Maybe both. In time, we no longer need to continue this experiment, we intuitively understand this scientific principle. Later, when it is explained to us in school, we grasp the concept immediately. It makes sense since the principle conforms to our experiential understanding of how the world works. Because we already understand the concept, we use this as a central principle that allows us to examine how changes ripple through our environment.

Childhood experimentation also taught us a second central organizing principle for how the world works and, of relevance here, something basic about environmental management -— everything goes somewhere. Adults play peek-a-boo with infants. This teaches the concept of object permanence. You learned your parents did not disapparate (as Harry Potter would) when they left the room and you know that water does not disappear when it runs off the driveway or soaks into your lawn. This rule applies to all things; this book will help you extend this concept to the core principle — all mass is conserved — it is neither created nor destroyed. Intwined in this concept is the fact that although mass is conserved, materials can change physical and or chemical form. You know that even though liquid water can freeze into ice or evaporate, the water is still there. At the more complex molecular level — chemicals change from one form to another. Yet the atoms that comprise the original molecules still exist in the same quantity after each change. We will demonstrate to you why this is important in environmental management for you to know where things go. We help you follow where things go even as they change form.

The understanding that we develop at an early age addresses our own particular everyday needs. By rediscovering these tools, we enhance them. You begin to ask questions left unanswered or unexplored earlier and learn how to build new databases necessary for an ever more technical and complicated world. The object moves out of sight. What then? We will explore where it goes and how you will know where to look.

Because you already have a sense regarding how these two principles work, you possess a foundation from which to analyze critical environmental issues. However, they do not suffice for other, more complex ones. The book will add to these two principles a third — natural processes maintain a relatively constant ratio between carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in the biosphere and does this by keeping a balance among the atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial, soil, and biologic pools for each element. This process operates at different time frames for different elements and media, so disruptions can reverberate for long periods.

Introduction 5

With the principles identified and explained, we add a few tools that you already know how to use. They are these: observe, measure, record, ask, and challenge. Through most of this book we present experiments that can be completed simply by the exercise of watching and seeing what happens. Often, it will be demonstrated that using recorded observations (data) will reveal changes that would not be noticed without someone having taken measurements. When we get to looking at case studies you will see that asking questions and challenging assumptions can help better understand a system and reveal potential undesired consequences.

With these core principles and the tools to use them, you have a foundation for examining how the environment reacts to changes brought about naturally and by human disruption of natural processes. You can use this foundation to identify a curriculum of study, examine proposed environmental management strategies, and interact with professionals involved in developing and implementing environmental management plans. For readers engaged in policy development or implementation or concerned about big environmental or natural resource issues, we provide you with a framework to use in evaluating options or strategies.

1.1 USING THE TOOLS

Predicting the consequences of actions and reactions beyond simple events that we can readily and repeatedly observe demands the recording of observations and often the analysis of these data. At times developing the questions to ask the data and assessing the answers can be more difficult than the observing and recording of data. This is because the question one asks leads to the methods to generate the data to answer the question. Bad questions lead to useless data. Good questions lead to useful data that help advance the inquiry.

As an illustration, let us consider the following example. Being told there is 25% chance of rain may not provide the information we want to know. Let us assume we know that the forecast provides the average probability of rain over the entire metropolitan area, but we know from experience that storms do not always spread evenly over our area. Thus, a 25% probability of rain for this forecast may not mean a 25% probability of rain for the specific area where we live. Perhaps we are more willing to wait out a short storm than carry an umbrella. In that case our concern is the duration of potential precipitation. Is it predicted to be a brief shower or a longer event? Or maybe we don’t mind getting damp, but we don’t want to be drenched. Then our interest is in the intensity of the predicted storms. In each of these cases we want know more than was provided by a general weather summary. The point here is asking better questions helps generate better information so you know whether or not to take an umbrella — in other words a better decision.

1.2 ASKING BETTER QUESTIONS

If we are to understand better the consequences of what appears to us as natural phenomena, especially where these do not seem to conform to our immediate experience, we need to know how to identify what questions to ask. Better understanding these events also helps us to avoid potential negative consequences (e.g. when to take action, what actions are enough, and do we need to modify our behavior). The point of asking better questions is to generate that amount of information to differentiate among choices. In most cases, the choice is between yes and no. In others, it may be short list of options. We generally only need just enough information to confirm or overturn our biases (predispositions).

Asking better questions means knowing what are the key factors that influence outcomes. In the following discussions of how and where formulating better questions is needed, we guide you to where to look and how to get better answers. This in turn will help you understand how factors influence outcomes and their relative importance, all of which leads to better decisions.

1.3 ORGANIZATION OF THE CHAPTERS

We begin in Chapter 2 with water and gravity. Water flows downhill, a cup full of water overturned will cause the water to spill. These experiences with our environment influence our notion of what is, and what will happen next. We do not need to reflect on whether or not a pail of water, when overturned, will cause the water to move, in what direction, relative to an incline, and how far. We know because we have witnessed the experiment, probably more than one time.

In Chapter 3, we expand the concept of everything goes somewhere and introduce you to the conservation of mass. Mass is neither created nor destroyed. What our senses do not tell us is that there is actually another way in which material may seem to disappear. For the vast majority of us, the phenomenon by which a chemical seems to disappear by reacting with another chemical element to form a new compound is relevant to our daily lives and our understanding of how our environment changes.

We explain the concept of conservation of mass with regard to the chemical elements — carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus — their changing molecular forms and physical states (gas, liquid, solid). We focus on carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus for several very basic reasons: they are the key elements of life, and govern how much life there is. These elements determine how much food is produced and the extent of biologic activity. In our living world carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus are the limiting factors to growth. We explain how the three cycle through different pools in the environment (atmospheric, oceanic, terrestrial, biological, and soil), but within the constraint that the mass of each element is conserved.

Introduction 7

Please note that figures presented throughout this book that may appear as point estimates for the amount of material in resource pools should be viewed as best estimates within large confidence intervals. In most cases, though multiple, well conducted studies have generated different estimated values, the relative sizes of the pools have remained fairly consistent. What is important is the concept, not the absolute number, since this can vary for a variety of valid reasons.

Chapter 4 introduces you to the principle of balance among cycling of the key ingredients of life. It is particularly in this realm that our intuition needs to be supplemented with additional information from several disciplines including soil science, hydrology, plant physiology, and ecology. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon transform from one chemical form and physical state to another very different form and state, processes that are ongoing in the world around us although we observe little if any of its manifestations. The changes over time of their concentrations and relative proportions play a major role in how our environment functions. These relationships determine to a large extent how well we are managing our environment. We explain the role of soils, perhaps our least appreciated resource, in maintaining this balance. Using the framework of the agricultural environment, we illustrate how soils regulate water and nutrient cycles and influence the chemical interactions among carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Soils are the locus of many of the critical processes that determine the availability of bioavailable nutrients, and water and nutrient storage.

Our discussion of soils brings us to Chapter 5 which addresses the question of how we have been managing our environment and natural resources. The focus for this book is the agro-environmental ecosystem that includes the land and soils of our agricultural land. Why agricultural land? Because much of our land is devoted to and affected by agricultural use. The productivity of our air, water, and soil resources depends on their quality and thus how these lands and these resources are managed. Because most of us live in urban settings we do not see the agro-environmental systems on a regular basis. For these reasons we examine how the agro-environmental system functions and explain how their management affects us all.

In Chapter 6, we introduce the reader to the natural and human-induced shocks to the biogeochemical cycles. We present a brief explanation of how the shocks take place and begin to trace the effect of these changes, introducing some of the consequences. These shocks are real and have occurred in our past, are occurring in our present, and will occur again in our future. At this point we assist the reader in using the tools that he or she has gained in the preceding chapters in predicting likely outcomes. Better understanding environmental processes is useful in itself, but we need to relate this science to the changing world around us to understand how change at various scales affects the environment. What happens when land use changes; additional carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus are added into or subtracted from a system; or water flows are altered? These are outcomes that we read about in our daily news. This leads to the discussion of sticky, legacy problems of environmental management, the consequences of human-induced changes to environmental systems. Water and where it goes are also timely issues in the news. What newspapers and the news do not explain is how our environment affects whether or not water is simply an asset to humans or whether or not too much or too little leads to disaster. Gravity will bring the water in the form of rain or snow to earth, but where and how fast it moves upon the land will depend in good part on how we managed soils. We will explain how soils can serve as sponges sopping up excess water and allowing it to seep out slowly, moderating the impacts of excessive precipitation or flooding and minimizing the risk of too little water and hence drought. And water in the form of frozen water or ice can assist in the storage of vast quantities of excess carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, thus maintaining a delicate balance of the reactive forms of these elements on earth. Actions that can mitigate undesirable effects are also presented.

Chapter 7 introduces the concept of ‘the Commons,’ a shared resource belonging to a group of people but owned by no one entity, and the issues that are associated with managing such a resource. Many environmental issues including water and air quality degradation can be traced to these resources being shared. This is followed by a set of case studies that illustrate instances where one or more of the core principles were ignored. The information and tools we have given the reader in the previous chapters should serve as a framework for assessing what could have been conducted to have avoided the problems. And by the way, for dollar values presented we use 2020 as the baseline year, unless otherwise indicated.

Finally, in Chapter 8 we end with a discussion of why we, all of us, should care. It would be remiss of us not to provide you with tools that can be used to improve environmental resource management without suggesting why you might want to use them. Public policy, that is the rules regarding how public resources are managed, varies with the governing system. Nevertheless, there are individual actions, consumption choices, and arguments for these actions that can be made regardless of how our public policy decision structure is constructed. We will discuss a few of these in this final chapter.

Humans will always alter their environment to make it work better, at least in the short term, and immediate to where we live. Understanding how nature will react can, with a little forethought, provide the opportunity to both minimize the adverse consequences of this reaction as well as to anticipate the outcomes so as to prepare and ameliorate their impacts. This can occur through both mitigation of the more consequential elements of our actions as well as adaptation to the circumstances. We will show that just a little bit of forethought can save us much pain. Or as our wise fathers used to say to us when we were teenagers, think before you act.