Author Archives: Abhishek Kastiya

Posts by Abhishek Kastiya

Downstate Stakeholder

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

Currently, about 90% of New York City’s drinking water comes from the Catskill-Delaware watershed system west of the Hudson River. The area encompasses most of the Catskill Mountains, a rural area of farms, forests, small towns and a growing number of vacation home developments. Unlike most other major metropolitan cities with surface water systems, until the last quarter of the 20th century, New York had been able to avoid the enormous expense of building filtration works to treat and purify its drinking water.

In the recent decades, the Catskill-Delaware area has become much more developed and agriculture-heavy, which has been negatively impacting the watershed system that Upstate and Downstate stakeholders relied on. The City decided that instead of paying to clean up the results of polluting and degrading the pure water producing Catskill watershed, it would pay to protect the rural Catskill environment that was providing it with the world’s best urban drinking water. It wanted to continue to use the ecosystem services that the Catskills provided and preserve them so that it would not have to spend billions on a filtration plant.

Ecosystem services not only produce superior environmental and social results, it produces them far more cheaply than traditional environmental strategies. Therefore, investing in the City’s watershed environment, both its natural and human resources, was the best way to insure the City a long-term source of pure drinking water. Ecosystem services are potential profit centers, not cost centers, so the protection of these services is environmentally and financially beneficial for Upstate and Downstate New Yorkers. It is clearly observed and calculated that the cost of creating a filtration plant and maintaining it would cost the city billions of dollars, while protecting land and using it for its ecosystem services costs much less and results in a higher water quality for all.

If existing institutional structures and existing patterns of environmental regulation and investment do not allow for those environmental benefits to be obtained, those economic profits to be realized, then we need to create new ones, using the political capital that getting something better for less always creates. This entire watershed system that New York has in place shows the value of identifying and targeting a high level of ecosystem services, since the higher the level of service the level of economic benefit. It is clear that maintaining the current system of New York’s watershed program is beneficial for both Upstate and Downstate stakeholders since it provides everyone with clean drinking water while minimizing expenses.

Source: Appleton, Albert F. “How New York City Used an Ecosystem Services Strategy Carried out Through an Urban-Rural Partnership to Preserve the Pristine Quality of Its Drinking Water and Save Billions of Dollars and What Lessons It Teaches about Using Ecosystem Services.” (2002): n.pag. Web. 2 Dec 2012. <http://www.ibcperu.org/doc/isis/8095.pdf>.

Questions for Emma Marris

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

1. What are some examples of efforts that you have made to help the environment?

2. Where did your idea of a “Rambunctious Garden” come from?

3. What example, if any, would you give of a place that is effectively conserving its ecosystem?

4. What changes do people have to make in their mindset in order for your idea of a “Rambunctious Garden” to thrive?

5. According to you, what is the order of importance for the seven goals of conservation?

Poster Questions

Posted on October 7, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

1. How does the rate of lung cancer differ in the different neighborhoods of New York City? What are the possible causes for these rates to differ? What are some environmental factors that cause lung cancer?

2. How do the concentrations of cockroaches differ around NYC? Why is there a greater presence of cockroaches in certain areas? How do cockroaches have an effect on human health?

3. How does the quality of drinking water differ in the neighborhoods of NYC? What are the reasons behind these differences in water quality? How do certain water contaminants affect human health?

Rambunctious Garden Chapter 10 Response

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

In the final chapter in “Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris summarizes all the different goals that conservationists can aim to achieve. They can have different views on the value of nature and thus have different goals that they want to see in nature. The many different goals that she describes are protecting the rights of other species, protecting charismatic megafauna, slowing the rate of extinctions, protecting genetic diversity, defining and defending biodiversity, maximizing ecosystem services, and protecting the spiritual and aesthetic experience of nature. This chapter summarizes many of the points that traditional conservationists would make. Throughout the book, she had been talking about alternatives to traditional conservation methods, while in this last chapter she focuses on things to focus on for conservationists. Her ideas about these various goals are pretty much in agreement with the conservatives who follow them. These goals are simply different ways of looking at nature conservation. For example, rather than just thinking about conservation as something that involves pushing the ecosystem back in time to a certain baseline, the goal of protecting genetic diversity would define conservation as the path to reach that goal.

I think that these goals are all connected and that through proper conservation techniques, most, if not all, of these goals can be achieved in the future. I think that she is introducing all of these goals in order to encourage readers to develop an interest in conservation, if they were not before, by siting all the different benefits that can come from conservation. Even if readers do not have a scientific goal that they have an interest in, they may still want to conserve nature in order to protect the spiritual and aesthetic experience that it provides. I feel that she did a good job with giving a diverse selection of reasons for making an effort towards conservation.

Marris also mentions that conservation can take place in a variety of places. It does not always have to be extensive. She also points out that the costs of conservation methods certainly does need to be included when considering whether or not and how many resources should allocated towards conservation.

In the end, she makes it clear that conservation is definitely needed in nature in this day and age. “In a nutshell: give up romantic notions of a stable Eden, be honest about goals and costs, keep land from mindless development, and try just about everything.” (170) This shows that Marris wants people to understand that conservation is a long process that does not have a clear solution. In the coming years, we need to focus on conservation in all parts of the world. Since humans have already altered all parts of the world, it is useless to try to take those alterations out of nature. Rather, we should focus on how to conserve what we have and to make nature a better place for all organisms to live in. This is the message that I feel Marris wanted to tell readers in “Rambunctious Garden.”

Rambunctious Garden Chapters 8-9 Response

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

In chapters 8 and 9 of “Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris describes various innovative alternatives for conservation around the world. In chapter 8, “Designer Ecosystems,” she talks about people engineering ecosystems in order to reach a particular goal. This way, they can design the ecosystem to function the way they want it to and to get the species diverse and its appearance a certain way. This method is certainly different from most conservation techniques. “But the most radical kind of designer ecosystem is not emulating any baseline at all but building de novo to achieve a particular goal. This is heady stuff for restoration ecologists, who until recently made their living trying to recreate ecosystems at historical baselines.” (126) This shows that designer ecosystems, rather than focusing on making an ecosystem look and act like it did in the past, function so that there is greater species diversity and the new changes, whether biotic or abiotic, are accounted for. In this method of improving the ecosystems, ecologists focus more on the current environmental conditions and think about the future and how to make it more sustainable going ahead compared to more traditional conservationists who try to make ecosystems look the way they once did before. This idea of designer ecosystems may in fact be better than our current conservation methods because it accounts more for the changes that have been made to the ecosystems. Rather than making them appear pristine and untouched, we should aim towards creating a more sustainable and healthy environment for various species to coexist and thrive in. In chapter 9, “Conservation Everywhere,” Marris describes many different styles of nature conservation. “Rewilding, assisting migration, and embracing some exotic species and novel ecosystems may seem like disparate strategies, but they are all at some level about making the most out of every scrap of land and water, no matter its condition.” (135) This shows that she is trying to get the point across that people can make small changes in their own lives and still benefit the overall ecosystem. I found her idea about turning backyards and other parts of peoples’ homes into a conservation site. “What’s wonderful about these kinds of strategies is that private citizens do not have to wait and hope that their government or some larger conservation organization will carry them out. Every owner and renter can make any space work for nearly any conservation goal, whether they have a tiny balcony, a slot in a community garden, or a ranch in Texas.” (145) This is especially important for people who live in cities for example, because they may feel like they do not have adequate space to make an effort for conservation. Although the beneficial lawn may not be as aesthetically appealing compared to more traditional lawns, they are certainly better for the ecosystem since they are able to house more species, thus increasing the species diversity right in a person’s backyard.

Rambunctious Garden Chapters 6-7 Response

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

In chapters 6 and 7 of “Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris focuses on the concept of invasive species. In chapter 6, “Learning to Love Exotic Species,” Marris starts off by describing some of the harms that invasive species may cause in certain habitats. She introduces some of the reasons why so many conservationists argue against the idea of introducing new species into ecosystems. However, as the title of the chapter points out, Marris is actually promoting the idea of invasive species. Her viewpoint is that the benefits of introducing new species are far greater than the risks associating with doing so. “While some exotic species are a huge problem, the vast majority are not. Science is finding that some are quite well behaved and innocuous, or even helpful. An spending time and money battling exotics simply because they are not ‘supposed’ to be where they are drains time and money away from more constructive conservation projects.” (98) This shows that she believes that rather than fighting against invasive species, we should accept the introduction of new species into different ecosystems since they do help them in most cases. She points out that invasive species drastically increase the biodiversity in an ecosystem compared to the state of the ecosystem before they were introduced. In some cases, endangered species that were moved into a new ecosystem end up thriving because they are well-suited for that environment. In chapter 7, “Novel Ecosystems,” Marris further discusses her idea of invasive species in ecosystems. She gives several examples of new types of ecosystems that have been influenced by human interaction since new species were introduced. She talks about how many novel ecosystems are functioning as well as, if not better, than the original ecosystem that was there before without the new species. “These new systems likely do spell homogenization and extinction, in some places. But they can also mean ecosystem services, increased diversity, and brand-new species. And we are going to have to start studying these places. They represent the future of our planet, like it or not.” (122) Marris claims that although there are possible negative consequences associated with invasive species and novel ecosystems, the positives are worth it. She believes that novel ecosystems will be the way to go in the future to make ecosystems more rich and diverse.

From these two chapters, I have learned a lot about the possible benefits that can come from invasive species. Before this, there have been many negatives described about invasive species. Her different point of view does introduce some interesting points. However, I feel that some of the extreme consequences that can come from introducing new species may be too much for many conservationists to start advocating novel ecosystems. Perhaps, sometime in the future, after there is more research and experimentation done about the sustainability of novel ecosystems, they can catch on with other conservationists, but until then, introducing invasive species still seems like a risky thing to do.

The High Line Response

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

I visited the High Line on September 20, 2012. It is a long strip of land ranging from Gansevoort Street to West 34th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. The High Line was built in the early 1930s as an elevated commercial rail line to carry congestive rail traffic above New York City streets. The High Line that I visited has been completely transformed since the railroad was abandoned. Now, the High Line is a beautiful path of nature that lives in the busiest city in the world. It really shows that even in a city as crowded, polluted, and urban as New York City, there can still exist a section of diverse plant life coexisting.

I feel that the High Line does fit many of Emma Marris’ concepts in “Rambunctious Garden.” It is a great example of humans working to preserve nature in a urbanized city like New York. It shows that even though humans have had influences all around the city, there can still be a strip of nature. The diverse species of flowers and pollinators are amazing to see in New York. The High Line goes with Emma Marris’ idea of connecting nature with humans rather than creating a distinct separation between the two. Furthermore, Richard Stalter’s article, “The flora on the High Line, New York City, New York,” supports the fact that the High Line does follow Emma Marris’ idea of the “rambunctious garden.” He states that “Human visitors to the High Line have probably inadvertently transported seeds to the site, a source of new species.” (Stalter 387) This shows that rather than claiming the High Line as tainted and unnatural because it has been affected by human actions, the High Line’s high species diversity is, in part, because of humans interacting with nature. The High Line is a clear example of nature that has been altered by humans, but is still considered to be pristine in its own way. The High Line has some of the most diverse plant species found in New York and is a common attraction. People appreciate the fact that there is a serene bed of nature along the streets of New York and I think that this is exactly what Marris was describing in “Rambunctious Garden.”

I think that the High Line is becoming a vital part of New York City. In the busy streets of New York, where people are yelling and screaming, it is nice to go to a calm and quiet place where there are flowers and bumblebees. There are not many places in New York City where people can see so many different types of pollinators in one place. The High Line has been a great addition to New York City since it represents the coexistence of nature and urbanization.

            

Assisted Migration Response

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

In the chapter “Assisted Migration,” Emma Marris introduces the idea of helping species survive tough climate conditions by moving them manually. Her idea of assisted migration is based on the fact that since climate changes are brought about by human actions, such as the burning of fossil fuels, humans should be able to help certain organisms that cannot handle the changes in the climate and also cannot easily move to the right climate by themselves. She gives a good visualization for why assisted migration would be a helpful thing. “If you imagine a mountain as a perfect cone, you can easily visualize this effect. The higher you go up the cone, the less there is of it…you can’t make the mountain grow bigger, you could think about moving species to another mountaintop that is either higher or further north.” (77) This shows the reasoning behind assisted migration, which is that because certain organisms either cannot find their ideal habitat to live in by themselves or cannot move there by themselves, we should be able to move them so that they can live in the proper conditions. She argues that because humans are the reason for the climate changes taking place, we should be allowed to help organisms in need of help. There are a couple of benefits that I see in assisted migration. Unlike the idea of rewilding, assisted migration is done to help the organism rather than to create a pristine environment. It can help endangered species thrive by putting them back in the right type of environment, which they would not be able to get to naturally. Another benefit would be that we would be able to have greater biodiversity around the world since more species would survive. Climate change would not be a reason for the extinction of certain species anymore. However, along with all these positives from assisted migration are also negatives. By moving around organisms into other habitats, we are putting those habitats at risk since we do not know the effect those organisms will have there. This possibility of introducing invasive species into ecosystems is a big reason why assisted migration has opposition. I believe that just to possibly save a species, we should not put other species in danger. As Simberloff says, “there are just too many unknowns. I would want to know a lot more about pathogens and insects before I moved things…there is very little evidence that it is going to help.” (93) This shows that assisted migration can possibly be extremely harmful to some species since we do not know the effects that it would produce. I think that assisted migration is a better and more practical idea than rewilding, but there are still improvements that need to be made to the idea. We need to have more solid information about the effects of the species on the areas in which we migrate them to before we do it. I feel like it can be a possible method of helping species in the future, but for now, there are too many risks involved with assisted migration.

Rewilding Response

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

In “Rambunctious Garden,” Emma Marris suggests the idea of “rewilding” as an alternative method of conservation of nature amongst the human-dominated world. In its essence, “rewilding” is an effort to make natural reserves look and act like they are “pristine.” She describes it as “rewilding posits that the main factors necessary to keep ecosystems resilent and diverse are the regulation provided by large, top-of-the-food-chain predators; the room for these predators to do their work; and connections between predator ranges so they can meet, mate, and maintain a healthy diverse gene pool.” (60) She claims that “rewilding” would bring nature to a more “pristine” state because the biodiversity in the area would be more similar to its state before humans made their influence. She gives many examples of how this idea would be beneficial for nature and the ecosystem. For example, to make up for a large predator that is now extinct, “rewilding” would have similar animals put in the area to make up for that preditor. The goal of “rewilding” is to make the organisms move in a cycle in nature. They would be allowed to live and die without human interaction for the most part so this way; the natural cycle that they act in would be able to continue. Compared to other conservationists who aim to preserve nature in its original form by setting it back to a baseline state and then leave it to stay that way, “rewilding” takes into account that every part of nature has been altered by human interaction. Instead, “rewilding” is made possible by humans placing the right organisms in their natural habitats and let them naturally interact as they once did before. As Vera sees it, “the only thing man did was create the conditions, and nature filled it in.” (71) This sort of mentality about nature preservation seems a little more practical and possible than the idea of setting aside separate “pristine” land. However, I find that there are many flaws associated with the idea of “rewilding.” One – it does seem like an ethical way of creating “pristine” nature. I do not think that we should preserve nature by moving animals around the places we think they should be just for our own happiness. Essentially, “rewilding” is simply engineering nature the way we think it ought to be. This is unethical because animals are not for us to treat as objects and we cannot create natural ecosystems by modifying the ecosystem. Two – I feel that “rewilding” is just another example of having biodiversity for the sake of having biodiversity. It does not replicate the way nature was before humans so we should not try to make it appear as if it was. By adding predators and other organisms into natural habitats, we are interfering with natural cycles and making even more changes. The reason conservations work so hard to find “pristine” natural reserves is because everything else has been contaminated by human actions, but “rewilding” will only add to these human actions. I would not consider nature to be nature if it has been engineered to look a certain way by humans.

Rambunctious Garden Chapters 1-2 Response

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

In the first two chapters of “Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World,” Emma Marris discusses the efforts made by conservationists in the field of preserving the nature. She summarizes her main points in her thesis: “Conservation can happen in parks, on farms, in the strips of land attached to rest stops and fast-food joints, in your backyard, on your roof, even in city traffic circles. Rambunctious gardening is proactive and optimistic; it creates more and more nature as it goes, rather than just building walls around the nature we have left.” (3) In this, she states that she believes that nature preservation should be done in all parts of a country, rather than creating separate partitions of land set aside for conservation. She proposes for nature conservation to be partnered with the human influences that are made on the land for conservation. Her description about the origin of these conservationist methodologies going back to the late 1800s with the creation of the Yellowstone National Park really provided good reasoning for the way that modern preservations are kept. People try to make these nature reserves as similar as they used to be thousands of years ago in order to truly get the natural feel of the original biodiversity and ecology of the region. Marris talks about how it is nearly impossible to actually backtrack a piece of land to the way it once was because changes in nature are inevitable, such as changes in climate. The method of preserving certain pieces of land, by making it into a national park for example, is flawed because the land will still be influenced by human activity. She points out other reasons why nature conservation this way is not effective. “People often were already living there when the protected area was created. And because the Yellowstone model requires ‘untouched’ nature, the people were often kicked out.” (26) This shows that although natural parks are made to look like they have been that way forever without having any interaction with humans, parks have been made to look that way after their inhabitants were forced to move out.

I believe that Marris makes many strong points against the current way of nature conservation. I agree with her that people are making nature conservation areas for the sake of preserving nature alone. Instead, we should accept that nature has been modified by humans and should work on preserving the nature the way it is. We should not harm it, but we shouldn’t try to fix it back to a previous condition just because we think that is the way it was meant to be. I also agree with her claim that change is inevitable and there is rarely a situation that is always predictably cyclical. Changes will be made to ecosystems that alter the species and land and these changes are not in the hands of humans. Conservationists have to accept the fact that humans have altered nature and that there no part of nature is absolutely “pure” in the world.

Anthropocene Response

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Abhishek Kastiya

The Anthropocene, as described by Kareiva in her article, “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” is defined as the new geological age that we have entered in which humans influence every part of the Earth’s natural system. This transition into the Anthropocene period is a result of the increasing amount of changes that humans have on the Earth. In the post-industrial world, we value economic gains and opportunities greater than we do nature. People transform land in order to help expand their business or clear trees to build roads to make transportation easier. However they do not think about the effect that their actions have on nature and the Earth’s ecosystems. This is particularly why the name Anthropocene makes sense since there is so much human impact on nature. In his article, “Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems,” Vitousek also claims that humans are making changes to natural habitats for economic purposes. He writes that “human use of land alters the structure and functioning of ecosystems, and it alters how ecosystems interact with the atmosphere, with aquatic systems, and with surrounding land.” This shows that people are making changes that effect many different parts of the Earth’s ecosystems. In her article, Kareiva claims that conservation methods are not going to be effective in the Anthropocene era because of the vast impact of humans on nature already. “The wilderness ideal presupposes that there are parts of the world untouched by humankind, but today it is impossible to find a place on Earth that is unmarked by human activity.” This shows that since humans have had an impact on all areas of the world and nature, conservation techniques are not really going to work because humans have already made changes to the land. I think that the concept of the Anthropocene is much better than our current conservation methods for the Earth’s ecosystem. Right now, we are setting land and creating parks in the name of conservationism, which is not really helping the biodiversity or ecology of the Earth. As Kareiva states in her article, as the number of conservations increases, nature has increasingly lost much of its biodiversity. I find her idea about having conservationists partnering up with corporations in a science-based effort to integrate the value of nature’s benefits into their operations and cultures. We cannot continue to blame capitalism for the condition of the Earth’s ecosystems since capitalism is the reason behind some of the greatest economies in the world. Our successful economic practices cannot change so, instead, we should try to combine conservationist tactics with corporation practices so that they can make necessary changes to reduce their harmful effects on nature. If conservationism is able to help poor countries better their economies some how, then there will be much greater overall support for conservationism around the world. Since developed countries have enough resources to give to conservation of nature, getting developing countries would make the conservation effort more of a global effort. The Anthropocene definitely addresses the main reason for the current state of Earth’s ecosystems, but our current conservation efforts are clearly not effective. With the growing population and increasing use of Earth’s resources, effective conservation solutions are needed.

Comments by Abhishek Kastiya