Anyway, I thought I’d nip out for some bread and milk. But the local cornershop is closed up. There are police and PCSOs everywhere. The supermarket was open but here is the bread aisle:

What a mad day.

And I’ve been well away from the worst of it. This is not Tottenham, Brixton, or Hackney. It’s actually quite a nice part of suburban, outer London.

So why is this happening?

Irresponsible, criminal behaviour of course.

But why?

A lot of these rioters are just kids. “Where were the parents?” is a rhetorical question I’ve already heard several times today. Philip Larkin understood. So too the Nazca boobies:

None of that is in any way inconsistent with this:

[clickable] More here:
http://www.poverty.org.uk/09/index.shtml

Throw in a real lack of this:

And it’s hard to see how the global context of the last three years or so can be entirely unconnected:

The shooting in Tottenham last week was just the trigger. It all makes sort-of sense, but it’s still difficult to see how anyone could have anticipated the events of the last few days. And what’s worse, I suspect there are other problems we don’t yet know we’ve even got.

Post title inspiration, of course, here.

Firstly, it succeeds. If the aim is to make people feel a little better about the future of mankind and the planet, it’s hard to close the final page without feeling exactly that. It’s a beguiling narrative, well-argued and well-referenced (I somehow suspect he’s unlikely to be flat-out wrong on any significant point of fact, although how selective he is in his use of evidence is another question… and one I will have to leave hanging, like most readers I lack the time to trawl through notes and references). It’s possible to disagree on some aspects of his arguments on some topics while remaining well disposed to the main thrust of the book: that despite the prevailing gloom of the pessimists, “it’s-a not so bad” after all.

It’s a fusion of what essentially seems to be the neoclassical vision of economics (though importantly, it acknowledges the dynamic rather than steady state ‘equilibrium’ nature of markets) with Darwinian natural selection. The natural selection here is operating in the realm of ideas (ie Richard Dawkin’s memes). Overall though there seems to be more economics than anthropology or biology here. Which is a shame, because the early chapters, with a more ‘biological’ take on the evolutionary advantages of specialisation and exchange, are the strongest. The importance of specialisation and exchange— the “specialisation of production and the diversification of consumption”— is a recurrent theme, as are the importance of innovation, the ‘bottom-up’ emergence of institutions and Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”. Adam Smith, Hayek and of course Darwin, make repeated appearances.

While accepting the general idea that things probably aren’t as bad as we think, I do have several quibbles— some small, and one or two biggies.

• Failure to demonstrate causality. A couple of examples: exchange may have preceded agriculture (apparently this is an important point) but did one really lead to the other, or was there a more profound underlying shift in early human cognition that enabled both developments to occur at about the same time? Did Diocletian’s bureaucracy contribute to eventual fall of Roman Empire, as Matt Ridley asserts, or did it delay an inevitable collapse that actually had other causes (see Homer-Dixon)?
• Nothing in here that really resolves any of the usual contradictions/inconsistencies that seem to be rife in economic thinking; markets requiring strong institutions which require stability which often requires strong governments which become monopolies which aren’t good for markets etc etc
• Selective use of sources; suspect some of this in the climate change chapter (maybe betraying my own preconceptions here).
• Northern Rock. Is it unfair to raise this? (Matt Ridley was a non-executive chairman of the first UK bank to have a run in 150 years). Categorically  no, this a huge issue when the book is so emphatic in it’s promotion of the ‘everything’s going to be fine’ mentality which was characteristic of nearly all politicians and economists pre-2007 (wrt the global financial system).  This is briefly alluded to at the start of the book, at which point Ridley admits that Northern Rock’s collapse made him mistrustful of markets in capital and assets, while markets in goods and services remain hunky-dory. He supports this by quoting some interesting research by Vernon Smith that suggests that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption are the ones that work well  [this supports a suspicion I took away from the few introductory economics lectures I've attended: that the price mechanism works great for the illustrative chocolate bars used as examples in introductory economics lectures, but is an imperfect tool for almost everything else]. Well, yes. It’s all very well quoting such research retrospectively, but I seem to remember lots of talk about how innovative capital and asset markets were; certainly very complex and specialised. Like many in the UK, I still feel angry about the banking crisis, and the lack of foresight and political leadership (admittedly without really understanding how it all came about and how similar situations can be avoided in the future). But dammit, there were warning signs, there was greed and lack of caution, and I’m not sure Matt Ridley’s book really helps us distinguish why those in charge were irrationally optimistic back then when it came to the global financial system, but are rationally optimistic now when applying similar arguments to future human and planetary health. In short, it opens up a gaping credibility gap that colours everything else in the book.
• False dichotomy. Why can’t the water level in the glass be 50%? In other words, I’m not sure how helpful it is to talk in terms of blanket optimism or pessimism when considering big global issues, when it’s usually possible to use value-neutral terminology, and— based on our assessment of the evidence— perhaps be optimistic about some aspects of global problems at some scales, and pessimistic about others at different spatial or timescales. I’m not sure why this book is encouraging us to pin our colours so firmly to the optimism mast, when the world is clearly more nuanced.  At one point Ridley makes a passing dig at the precautionary principle, but this woolly rule of thumb cuts both ways: there’s an extensive passage describing the madness of growing biofuels in terms of consequences for human food supply and ecosystems (with which I am in complete agreement), but surely a precautionary approach to a ‘switch to biofuels’ policy would be a good thing here?

‘Father of the Green Revolution’ Norman Borlaug was motivated by experiences of starvation in the US midwest during the Great Depression, which made him keenly aware of the knife edge between prosperity and starvation. His Ridley-esque innovations—high-yield crop strains and other intensive agricultural methods— likely staved off massive famine in the developing world. I wonder: had he read a 1930s version of The Rational Optimist and taken the underlying message to heart (admittedly unlikely, given his background), would he have spent the rest of his life striving quite so hard against hunger? In short, it’s the complacency of Matt Ridley’s philosophy, rather than the underlying truth of some of the concepts (sure, ideas evolve) that’s my main bone of contention with this book.

While hardly a household name, she has been a vastly important figure in my professional life— well before I’d even heard of her. For over fifty years she conducted and collated research that largely established the effectiveness of primary care-oriented health systems over and above the effectiveness of specialty-based ones (France, with its secondary care-oriented system but good health outcomes, seems to be the main exception to the rule).

Here’s how:

1. Primary care increases access to health services for relatively deprived population groups.

2. The contribution of primary care to the quality of clinical care.

3. The impact of primary care on prevention.

4. The impact of primary care on the early management of health problems.

5. The accumulated contribution of primary care characteristics to more appropriate care.

6. The role of primary care in reducing unnecessary or inappropriate specialty care.

(Contribution of primary care to health systems and health, Starfield et al. Milbank Quarterly 2005.)

In other words, the World Health Organisation’s 1978 Alma Ata declaration was on the right track.

It’s an unsexy subject for non-public health research interested people, but it would be better for all if her work got wider recognition outside of the population health community. It’s a shame this recognition, when it comes, will have to be posthumous.

From this Guardian article:

The geological signal will be clear from industrial-scale mining, damming, deforestation and agriculture, as well as the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere and nitrates in the oceans. Even the presence of the first human-produced chemicals like PCBs, radioactive fallout and the humble plastic bag could be measured millions of years hence.

Reading between the lines of the various articles, it looks fairly certain this change to the geology textbooks is going to happen, sooner or later. The main debate seems to be around when to set the start date.

I won’t try to second guess the complex deliberations that are no doubt going on in the hallowed virtual halls of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. The Guardian article suggests a compelling reason to set the date at July 16, 1945, with the fallout from the first nuclear weapon detonation generating a worldwide radionuclide sedimentary signature.

But the rash of large and not-so-large animal extinctions caused by humans has been traced back to the end of the last ice age, the late Pleistocene, with consequent alterations in the fossil record going back more than 10,000 years. Pollen stratigraphy shows the imprint of human forest clearance and agriculture going back at least 5000 years. And paleoclimate analysis points towards anthropogenic CO2 level increases dating from a similar period. Perhaps these subtle changes are not enough to define a new epoch.

If you’re wondering what an epoch is, anyway, wikipedia seems ok on this, helpfully defining an epoch as a span of ‘tens of millions of years’. In which case, if we go with a 1945 or industrial revolution-definition for the Anthropocene, the Holocene will only have lasted for some 10,000 years, which seems a little short. Or if we go by CO2 and pollen changes, only 5,000. Use megafauna extinctions as our starting point, and it’s gone completely.

Yet— definitions are only as good as they are useful, and maybe a ridiculously short Holocene is fine if that corresponds to meaningful sedimentary subdivisions useful to actual working geologists, rather than amateurish bloggers. And of course it’s understandable that slices of defined geological time get smaller the closer they get to human observers in the present. And maybe the Nobel laureates and geologists in the news in recent weeks want to underscore the strikingly abrupt, unprecedented nature of the human-induced changes of the last 200 years by suggesting a more recent Anthropocene start date.

[Long sentence alert]

But if the prolonged interglacial that has hitherto been defined as the Holocene has allowed sufficient climatic stability for Homo sapiens to develop agriculture, initiate a series of species extinctions, clear forests and alter landscapes enough— arguably— to alter global CO2 levels, and this process started only a few thousand years from the time the ice caps receded, and laid the groundwork for industrial civilisation and the current acceleration in human impacts on the earth system— I wonder whether our descendants, if there are any, in another 10,000 or a 100,000 years time will bother with the Holocene at all. Wearing deep time goggles, I imagine the Pleistocene will appear to seamlessly merge into the Anthropocene at the end of the last ice age.

Do these definitional issues really matter? I’m not sure. Whatever works for the working geologists, at the end of the day. But setting a later date for the start of the Anthropocene— one closer to the present— smacks of the same kind of temporal bias, the focus on the here and now, that got us into this mess in the first place.

Further reading:
Economist article (linked above)
BBC article (linked above)
Guardian article (linked above)
Realclimate article (W. Ruddiman) on CO2 signature of early land use
GSA Today paper— Zalasiewicz et al, 2008
Some background on anthropogenic signature in pollen stratigraphy

This week was just as intriguing, and perhaps a little more focused— only a little, mind— and opinionated, with more to disagree with as a consequence. All in a distinct and thought-provoking way; hence this post.

Last night’s instalment, titled The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, might be summarised as follows:

A machine-inspired view of nature being ‘held in balance’ by rigid feedback loops, which has subsequently proven to be wrong, has been mistakenly applied to human society. This is a Bad Thing.

There was lots of interesting stuff I hadn’t come across before: Tansley’s ‘invention’ of the ecosystem concept, described as an interconnected web of species with energy flowing, electricity-like, through different elements; Smuts‘ coining of the term holism to describe a system of interconnected wholes, with sinister racist overtones; interviews with ecologists describing the failure to demonstrate Tansley’s ‘balance of nature’ in empirical research; systems scientist talking heads, such as Jay Forrester; and ex-hippies describing how 1970s communes degenerated into vicious bullying when utopian balanced social systems failed to emerge spontaneously in a ‘no rules, let it all hang out’ environment.

All explained patiently by a mellifluous off-screen narrator (Curtis himself?), over incongruously spliced archive footage of nature, machines, and people, with an other-worldly, bittersweet-nostalgia infused soundtrack.

The trouble is, I don’t really buy it— certainly not all of it— or at the very least, there’s a good deal of simplification going on. And the problem with this style of documentary making is that when the viewer starts questioning part of the message, the highly polemical, stylised way the message gets delivered starts to grate a little. The viewer (ok, me) starts to question it more, and the dissonance of the ideas and the images and music gets quite unsettling. Maybe this is a good thing, but it’s also irritating.

Anyway, two main criticisms: one of substance, and one of style. I think I’ve just made the style criticism, so onto substance— the film’s overcooked aversion to the notion of ‘systems’ in nature and society. I’m no ecologist, but my understanding is that— as indicated in the programme— no serious scientist believes the ‘harmonious balance of nature’ stuff any more. But that doesn’t mean that ecosystems don’t exist at all: it just means that they are dynamic systems, not rigid mechanistic ones; prone to breaking down when stressed and reconstituting in different and unexpected ways, but systems nonetheless. With complex interactions, and energy and resources flowing through different species (‘food’), feedback loops and all. Adam Curtis could have talked about homeorhesis, rather than homeostasis, or of adaptive systems rather than rigid ones, of phase space and ‘attractors’ and chaos theory— but presumably none of this fits the chosen narrative. At times it seemed like Jay Forrester was trying to get into this, and I wonder how aggressively edited those sections were (at one point, there was an off-screen voice helpfully suggesting the word ‘system’ at a key moment in an interview). Maybe there are better terms for expressing these ideas than ‘ecosystem’ or ‘system’, but Curtis doesn’t suggest them, so we are left with only the negative, mechanistic connotations that were loaded onto these words in the first part of the programme.

Applying ideas from the natural sciences to human society certainly needs to be done with caution; if this is one of the points the film is making, it makes it well. But I’m not sure the idea that a human society is a balanced, rigid, mechanistic system is as universally accepted as the programme makes out. Such a view would indeed be very simplistic— ‘wrong’ even, if you’re the kind of person who likes absolutes— but as to why this would be such a dangerous thing… I’m not sure Adam Curtis has made the case yet. It’s still not clear what, if any, overarching vision this series is trying to get across. But I’ll try to catch the final part next week to see what happens next.

Further reading:
Guardian article

Addendum 6/6/11:
Just seen part 3. Well, it makes a bit more sense now. It turns out it was all about free will: those pesky machine-inspired interpretations of human biology, ecology and society robbing us of any sense that individuals can make a difference, and of the political motivation to change things for the better. The best of the three, I reckon. Taken as a whole, the series has been excellent: a great fusion of politics, philosophy, and polemic, entertainingly executed. Full of simplifications, non-sequiturs, omissions and contradictions of course (to take just one conspiracy theory/narrative-spoiling point: the machine-inspired ‘selfish gene’ proponents from part 3 have had fierce disagreements with the machine-inspired ecosystem/Gaia folk from part 2). And the conclusions are unsettlingly incomplete. Rejecting insights from evolutionary biology, ecology and systems science wholesale just because you don’t like the way some people are interpreting them is— as S Graham comments below— throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Curtis offers little by way of alternative. Genes may have a major role in determining our behaviour, but it doesn’t have to be a defining role. And being part of a system does not mean we are powerless to change it.

• Highly Allochthonous does differential vulnerability to geohazards; in this case, tornados causing more deaths to the east of the US’s ‘tornado alley’ than in the alley itself. Mobile homes  may be a significant part of this.
• Indeed, housing type is one of several indicators in Susan Cutter’s composite index of disaster resilience. This 2010 paper describes a methodology for evaluating and mapping disaster resilience across the Southeastern United States. Worth a look, and interesting to speculate how the indicators might change according to which particular part of the world you’re interested in.
• Role of mass administration of chloroquine-medicated salt in developing antimalarial resistance in the 1950s and 1960s. And here. Huge public health blunder. Will probably expand this into a full post eventually.
• Andy Revkin’s brittleness of nuclear power.
• The difficulties of environmental health risk assessment.

The fact that Japan organised a prompt evacuation, provided iodine pills and kept radioactive material out of the food chain means that experts expect Fukushima to have a negligible public-health effect, at least in terms of radiation (stress, fear and being removed from one’s home are forms of harm less easily measured). Less widely acknowledged is how well safety procedures for the staff in the plant appear to have worked. According to Mr Masui, not a single worker at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant received a radiation dose of more than 250 milliSieverts, the raised limit for emergency responders set by government dispensation. That is five times the maximum annual dose for a nuclear worker, but it is well short of what is seen as a serious health risk. Given the circumstances—the lack of instrumentation, the explosions, the power outage, the psychological pressure, the possibility of bereavement and so on—the disciplined behaviour needed to avoid really bad exposures has been impressive. There is undoubtedly a lot wrong with the culture of Japan’s nuclear establishment, and various plants have had well-chronicled safety lapses. In this particular case, though, at least one part of the safety culture of the sorely tried workers seems to have held up remarkably.

There are some interesting parallels between these two events. Both were unexpected to some degree—in the case of the impact of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption, spectacularly so.

In retrospect, the surprise is a little surprising. It’s common knowledge that Iceland has volcanoes, and sometimes violent ones. Well within historical times, ‘killer clouds’ from such eruptions are believed to have caused thousands of deaths throughout Europe. Historians and volcanologists researching the 1783 Laki eruption would probably have agreed on the calamitousness of a similar event occurring today; but they may also have recognised, at least intuitively, that planning for such an unlikely disaster has its limitations. In the event of a catastrophic sulphur dioxide smog from an Icelandic volcano, it would be impossible to provide the entire population of western Europe with breathing masks. Having a detailed ‘Laki Eruption Crisis Plan’ might seem like overkill. Where do you draw the line: the Canary Islands Megatsunami Mitigation Plan, or the Comet Impact Plan?

Which is not to say stuff wouldn’t be done. In the event of a Laki-like eruption, modern communications technologies would allow rapid dissemination of expertise from parts of the world that do have to contend with these sorts of problems. At least modern housing would provide some refuge, particularly against particulates, compared to 18th century buildings. Weather forecasting and strong health systems— allowing identification of high risk groups— would allow mapping of risk and preventive measures to reduce the overall population health impact. It would be disastrous, but the continent would go into ‘crisis mode’ and solutions would be sought and implemented rapidly.

So I can see why the people paid to consider these possibilities may have been simultaneously alarmed/reassured, and generally resigned to not thinking too much more about such an event, at least in terms of detailed ash cloud-specific emergency planning. Or perhaps they just couldn’t get their warnings heard; Andrew Revkin recently pointed out— in the context of the Japanese tsunami— that lessons from history are quickly forgotten by the people who matter.

But what actually happened was something much less calamitous than 1783. No suffocating smog or crop failures; instead, a problem unique to just one part of one aspect of modern civilisation— the vulnerability of turbojet engines to fine airborne volcanic ash which melts and solidifies on turbine blades, stopping them from turning. (Interestingly, old fashioned carburettor-filtered piston engines would have been much more resistant to the cloud.)

This had been identified as a problem from flights through eruptions elsewhere, so someone might have been reasonably expected to flag this up as a potential issue for European airspace, in advance of the wrong kind of Icelandic eruption and an unfortunate wind direction. But perhaps our collective perception of risk tends to be polarised towards one extreme or the other: in a Laki-like eruption, this would just be one of a cascading series of problems of equal or worse severity. We seem to find it hard to make connections between relatively minor incidents (such as the 1982 Speedbird 9 flight) and major ones (such as a 1783-like Laki eruption). So on the face of it we don’t anticipate the intermediate crises— like last year’s ash cloud— very well, and according to the Daily Mail and its ilk, we overreact.

2009′s swine flu outbreak was also unexpected, at least in terms of timing. The big difference here is that public health bodies had been warning of a new flu pandemic for some years; SARS and avian flu had primed authorities for the possibility, while the 1918 flu pandemic (which killed more people than the world war it followed) is still less than a hundred years ago. Most developed nations had (and still have) detailed pandemic flu plans in place, and were able to implement them rapidly.

Generally, these plans assume a worse case scenario. Here in the UK, this involved resource-intensive active case finding for a period that was probably more prolonged than the severity of the disease really warranted, and the almost indiscriminate dishing out of the antiviral drug oseltamivir. When swine flu turned out to be reasonably mild, authorities were accused of overreacting.

So again, the human perception of risk seems to be polarised towards one extreme or the other, and again, we haven’t dealt with a ‘middling’ threat very well. In these situations we either have proscriptive, over-detailed and inflexible response plans, or we just haven’t seen it coming.

[Seems like a neat way to finish, but in reality a gross simplification. The emerging consensus is that we probably did OK in both the examples discussed here, obviously with lessons for the future (as long as we can remember them long enough for the next time). See here and here. It's a shame when the facts get in the way of a good discussion point...]

As the first commenter wrote: “excellent on so many axes”. Does what all science writing should do, regardless of the audience or context— communicates difficult concepts fluently, in this case making convincing connections between very different branches of biology.

And it managed something extra for me, when it took an entirely unexpected turn half way through. The piece first looks at some early history from the science of ecology, when a limnologist working in the 1930s named G Evelyn Hutchinson used a small glacial lake in Connecticut to further develop the pre-existing concept of the ‘ecological niche’.

So far so good.

Having the spent the last couple of years or so developing an interest in the wider determinants of health— the social, economic, and environmental— and noting the word ‘human’ in the title, I was primed for Zimmer’s article to take a similar direction, comparing the complex web of species interactions in the lake to the complex interconnections of the human environment, at an appropriately larger scale.

But no. Rather than going macro, Zimmer went micro: his ‘human lake’ is not a human economy or society, nor a human-influenced larger natural ecosystem, but a single human gut. Thousands of different species of bacteria can live in human intestines, where they perform a surprising number of different functions. The diverse potential interactions in this ‘microbiome’ can impact the host positively or negatively, and each person has a uniquely composed collection of intestinal fauna. They have different internal interactions, and respond to disturbances differently— much like the diverse ecosystems of Connecticut’s post-glacial lakes.

Fascinating stuff. On reflection, the other article— the one I was expecting from the title and the first few paragraphs— would be much harder to write, probably less focused, and probably less satisfying. Nonetheless, I’d love to see Zimmer (or someone else) give it a go one day. When analogous processes can be demonstrated to work at multiple scales and in multiple contexts, the evidence for their existence becomes more convincing; see consilience.

http://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/
http://www.japanquakemap.com/