Landscapes Podcast Episode 8: Nature's Vote
Who speaks for biodiversity? With Dr Emma Gardner
Episode Description
Rescinding the practice of human-exceptionalism may be required to treat animals and other non-human species with more grace. But it might also be required to re-orient how we understand how the non-human world operates and thus the decisions we make that may disrupt the order of the multi-species communities we are all part. Dr. Emma Gardner proposes an "ecological permission structure" or a parallel planning process that takes into account the needs and desires of multi-species communities.
Episode Notes
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays
Safina, C. (2015). Beyond words: What animals think and feel.
Andrew Balmford's summary of land sparing
Gardner, E., Sheppard, A., & Bullock, J. (2022). Why biodiversity net gain requires an ecological permission system. Town and Country Planning Association Journal, 391-402.
Transcript
*The transcript has been modified for clarity and reading comprehension
Introduction
Adam Calo:
When I speak of the concept “freedom of movement,” it's easy to immediately grasp a set of values, predicaments and personal resonance with what it means to move through this world.
At a micro level, I can think of the simple joys of moving somewhere as I go on a nicely protected and labeled bike lane. At the same time, I can immediately conjure the embodied discomfort and anxiety of sitting motionless in a traffic jam when I'm late for something important.
At a macro level, in the European Union, freedom of movement is a legal entitlement, where membership in the Eurozone grants a right to travel and to reside in any member state.
And of course, this is a freedom that is denied somewhat ruthlessly to non-members of the club.
But when it comes to the non-human world, matters of movement and residents, refugees, freedom and justice, frustration of impediments are replaced by a rather alien language of ecology. We speak of island biogeography, landscape heterogeneity, isolation effects, dispersal and connectivity. We also tend to look first at aggregate metrics to understand an entire species, at the same time where it would be absurd to ask something like, what is the best habitat for Americans?
If animals are meaningfully distinct from humans, then of course we need distinct tools to understand them. But as the evidence for a strong human exceptionalism withers away, it may be that our reluctant commitment to relinquish the privilege of distinctiveness is prohibiting our ability not to just treat animals or plants better, but to understand what is happening in the world we all inhabit.
My guest for today's episode is Emma Gardner, a quantitative ecologist and modeler with UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology, and also a fellow with the Landscape Decisions Program. Emma's work has always stood out to me because, from my point of view, it is grounded in the science of ecology to quantify best estimates of how changing a landscape might influence species, but it's done in a very humane way.
Humane might be a strange word to describe the work of a modeler focused on the lives of non-humans. One might often think of the task of models is to squash the complexity of the world into a single map spreadsheet, row, or computer pixel. But I think it is especially relevant here. Part of what I hope comes through in the interview is that Emma argues that the specialized tools and language of ecology often thought to provide deeper insights into the non-human world, may actually create an impenetrable distance from understanding a multi-species community that we are inevitably entangled. Our human commitments to justice, fairness, equal chance of the good life, a sense of the tragic —why do we think we need different core concepts for the non-human world?
It's clear to me that Emma and consequently, her work, views animals as actors with real agency in this world. You'll hear her going beyond representing an animal's point of view through ecological knowledge, to a state of imagining herself as an animal in order to think through the complexity of landscape.
And she is trying to use ecology and other techniques to show that if we ask questions, not about aggregate metrics like biodiversity, but rather about the lives and struggles of a single animal, trying to get from point a to point B —a toad perhaps—then we might start doing the interdisciplinary science and meaning-making required to make more humane decisions about non humans. It is this stance, one against human exceptionalism, that seems to open up promising pathways to do landscape science.
A promise that may only be shut down by a stance that says we ought to study and protect a nature that is out there somewhere else, instead of right in front of our noses.
Interview
Adam Calo: What is the children's story, the Animals of Farthing Wood, and, and what does that say about the way that we imagine animals in nature?
[00:04:30] Emma Gardner: This story kind of starts with the animals in a wood getting together because their wood is gonna be destroyed by developers and they've heard of a nature reserve where they could go and live and not be disturbed. And so they decide to all get together and try and find the nature reserve so they can live there and be safe.
Along with stories like Watership Down, it kind of follows this narrative of nature as a refugee. And this persists in the modeling that we do even to this day. So a lot of our connectivity modeling is to do with how do we join up habitats so that species can flee northwards to escape from climate change. So there's this kind of pervasive narrative of nature as a refugee in our landscapes.
[00:05:16] Adam Calo: And so there's this idea that there is a place out there that is nature and that's where the animals belong or need to get to.
[00:05:22] Emma Gardner: Yeah. This idea of safe places and things can almost be moved out of the way. It's okay to move things out of the way becausethere's somewhere they could go.
[00:05:32] Adam Calo: Something that I've been researching recently is the role of local extinctions in patches of habitat. Even in a nice patch of habitat, species might necessarily be able to persist there, right?
[00:05:43] Emma Gardner: Yeah. So there are a number of issues with this kind of idea that things can get together and go and find somewhere else to live. And one of them is that our landscapes are not very permeable to species. There are some species that can take flight and go and find somewhere else. But there are species that aren't very good at crossing habitats that are kind of alien or hostile to them.
They're afraid to. And if they do, they might get picked off in eaten. If you think of something like a lizard, that's very, very small, it, it's very hard for it to cross say a road. And if you think of something like a motorway, there's no hope of, of anything really getting across that, that can't run very, very fast and chooses its moment.
We get into this problem that only certain species are mobile enough to participate in this fleeing to somewhere else idea. Then we lose species from our landscape that that can't move. And so we are kind of stripping our communities of a whole layer of species that are not mobile.
And then the other thing that, that actually is even represented in the Animals of Farthing wood is the fact that when they arrive there already there are loads of animals living in the nature reserve and there may not necessarily be room for any more animals, even if they did get there.
[00:06:56] Adam Calo: You told me before we started that last night you were out rescuing toads. Can you tell me why you were doing that?
[00:07:23] Emma Gardner: Our particular toads live most of the year in the woods, and then they have to go to the pond to breed. And unfortunately in between the woods and the pond, there is a road and they like to cross the road in the dark. So they tend to wait until it gets dark. And because they're rearing to go, they go immediately after it's got dark.
And the problem with that is that in spring when they're going immediately after it's got dark, it's rush hour. So they coincide with quite a lot of cars. Toads don't walk fast. So we pick them up and we move them to the other side of the road so that they can get there without getting squished basically.
[00:07:39] Adam Calo: But Emma, that seems like you're intervening in natural things to save these species. What, what would you say to someone who's saying that we should just let you know nature be, because that's how it always is out there?
[00:07:52] Emma Gardner: If we were going let nature be then we would not have cars going down the road in the way, I would say. So, yeah, this is kind of an attempt to compensate for the fact that we are not letting nature be.
[00:08:03] Adam Calo: You know that from working with you in the past that I'm always talking about land justice and access to land for people who need or want it. And that, that's a really important dynamic. But you've added to this and suggested that, Adam, if you're going to call for access to land for people, then shouldn't we also be thinking of access to land for non-humans too?
[00:08:21] Emma Gardner: Yeah, I think it would be huge. I mean, if you think about, say if someone's got a pond in their garden, I've got a pond in my garden and the frogs have been using that pond way before I moved into the house. So the question is, who's pond is it? Is it, my pond? Because I now have a piece of paper that says that I live in this house?
Or is it the frog's pond? Because they've been using it for longer than that. Is it the person who created the pond who was the person before? Who does this belong to? And if I decide to fill in the pond, where are they going go? I mean, that's the resource that they use. And their lifecycle can't be complete without a pond. Yes. who, who owns that pond is quite an interesting question.
[00:09:05] Adam Calo: Yeah, that's really interesting because you know, in the in access theory, you think about a lot of different ways to control a resource. And in the history of property you have doctrine of discovery, for example. So who was there first? Or you have maybe the best user of land or who can use it most efficiently. The frog has these claims to access in the, in the traditional way that, humans make claims to access to resources. If you were to decide to fill in the pond, none of those rationales would be heard or validated. In any of those cases, the frogs would always lose to your decision to fill it in.
[00:09:39] Emma Gardner: Oh. Personally, I wouldn't be able to do it because I would feel the guilt, of what I'd removed from them. But if you didn't understand, if a person didn't understand, then they wouldn't feel that guilt of removing this resource. And so yeah, they could certainly do.
[00:09:56] Adam Calo: We have this way of viewing the world, like you said, always disregards the voice of animals. How do we do that? Why do we do that? Why do we other animals?
[00:10:06] Emma Gardner: I think for the same reason that we other other people. I find often these questions are easy to answer if we say, why do we do this within the human realm? And I suppose it's easier, it's easier to get away with doing what we want and not taking their needs and requirements into account. If we dehumanize them, if we say they won't feel it or it's not important. And we have this conversation quite often, with my colleagues, that I want to use the word dehumanize, but obviously that's quite specific to people, but there's no equivalent word for animals.
[00:10:43] Adam Calo: I think that's really profound. Because I feel like a lot of the anthropologists who study human nature interactions say that this dynamic, the way we treat animals, really says more about humans than it does about animals.
[00:10:57] Adam Calo: For example, Raymond Williams, who's a Welsh academic who was really written really early on about this idea of nature as a human created concept kind of emerging out of particular disciplines and groups of people. He wrote,
“One touch of nature may make the whole world kin, but usually when we say nature, do we mean to include ourselves?”
And Carl Safina, who's an anthropologist and author of Beyond Worlds, what Animals Think and Feel writes,
“We are all kin under the skin.”
From a lot of works like this, it seems like there's more and more biophysical evidence about animal sentience, uh, in the brain of animals or how they feel or or interpret the world, that there is no real good rationale to separate humans from other non-human nature.
So what is going on here?
[00:11:42] Emma Gardner: Yeah. I think there's kind of like two sides to ourselves, aren't there? On the one hand you've got people who are keeping them very at a distance in order to do these things. We talk about a metric. Or we reduce them to numbers. And we don't think about the fact that these are lives.
And then at the other extreme, you've got people who actually live with animals every day. If you think about people and their pets, because they're exposed to them every day and they're living with them. They begin to see the way that they experience things, that we experience things, they're hungry, I'm hungry.
They're cold, I'm cold. And they can see how they have the same experiences as we have. So you get this affinity. And then on the other hand, you've got, say, farmers maybe exemplify this duality more than anyone in that they have to be, have a certain hardness in that this is an animal.
I know it's not going to survive, so we need to put this animal down, or whatever. Or, I'm raising animals to eat them. So you need a certain hardness there. But also by being with them every day and caring for them, you've got this empathy there at the same time, and I think it's about this balance. How do we get this balance back that perhaps we've lost this balance because we are not exposed to animals or interacting with other species to the same extent that we used to.
[00:13:04] Adam Calo: Even if we do establish that this human exceptionalism is a problem and in order to do work, we have to discard the view of the animal in order to do things like we do, like build roads, cleared forest clear brush, spray pesticides, build houses over fields. But then the problem becomes, let's say we want to try and represent that voice.
How do we know what non-humans want?
[00:13:26] Emma Gardner: That's quite tricky. It's hard. And the key is that we have to bring information from lots of different sources together. So there's a lot of inequality in terms of which species are studied. So some species have been studied, or groups of species have been studied a lot more than others.
So if you look at birds and things like that. They're in a way quite easy to study because, you can go out, you don't even need a pair of binoculars. And people are interested them in them. And so we get lots of data, not just from researchers, but also from volunteers who are collecting observations and sending them in. So then we've got these species that are really, really well studied in quite an official way. And then we've got other species that are harder to study, they're harder to notice. You can't detect them so well. Less people are interested in them. They are less fashionable to study.
So researchers are less likely to get money for a grant proposal to study them. All of these things pay apart. And so it means that when we need to know what a species needs, we have to almost be like a detective that you're bringing together all of these different clues from different places. So you might be looking at the scientific literature, you might be looking at an ecological study, or you might be going to local conservation volunteers who interact with these species on the ground every day.
Or you might be going to a land manager who has them on their land and they know how they behave and live on that land and the solutions they found to live there and what they need. So you have to pull all of this together.
[00:15:04] Adam Calo: You mentioned that we need to use all these different sources, but in conservation science there are a few models that kind of emerge to be dominant to try and be “the one tool to represent them all.”
And I was wondering if we could think about a few of these dominant ideas of ways to represent biodiversity in human decision making. And the first one is the natural capital concept, which we've talked a little bit before on this podcast, which may be able to balance kind of purely human oriented decision making if we understand how conserved biodiversity might contribute to economic wellbeing.
So let's keep bees so that they can pollinate your crops so that we can keep our economy running. You have said that this framework forces biodiversity to represent their interests on economic grounds. Well, what's wrong with that?
[00:15:52] Emma Gardner: So bees are a good way to look at how natural capital does and does not work. If we think about natural capital in terms of pollinators, you could define it as the population of wild animals within a landscape that provide pollination services to economically valuable plants. So that's plants that we make money out of.
So we could say crops. So now we're talking about just the pollinators that visit crops. So already you've cut out a large number of pollinators because only a small number of our pollinators actually visit crops. These are the pollinators that can access their flowers and that want to access their flowers.
So already lots of the pollinators are not included in this measure. And then it's also only going be the pollinators that are living near to crops that visit them. So if you've got a crop visiting species, say if we're talking a species of bee, say a bumblebee, we'll visit your crops. There may be individuals that live near the crop and they visit it.
But you will also have plenty of individuals of that bumblebee who say, live somewhere else in people's gardens or in a nature reserve or just, in a meadow that's nowhere near to pollinate dependent crops. So they never visit them. So their activities are not contributing in any way to the economic, benefits we get from those crops.
[00:17:15] Adam Calo: This is a little traumatizing for me because I think a lot of activities that I do and I prefer, are not contributing to economic production, and there’s a pressure on me to kind of conform those activities.
[00:17:25] Emma Gardner: And it's kind of worse than that in that the crop visiting bees that are around the crop, they might not be living a very healthy or happy lifestyle. Their colonies might not be very productive. It's quite a hard life sometimes living near a crop. So they might only be kept going because you've got other bees coming in, from the non-crop visiting populations to found nests there. So they're being kept going indirectly by these non-crop visiting pollinators who were not really counted by the pollinator natural capital very well. And then also all of these bees that are visiting the crop. The crops only flower for a very, very short window of time in the year. And for the rest of the time they have to visit other wildflowers.
Now those are the wildflowers that are kept going by other pollinators, not just by the crop visiting bees. So these crop visiting bees are relying on habitat that is being maintained by a network of other pollinators that never visit the crops. So there's lots of indirect stuff going on in terms of supporting these crop visiting pollinators.
But if we were to calculate a pollinator natural capital metric, it's only responsive to those crop visiting bees and not to this wider network that is supporting those. If we then want to express our pollinating natural capital measure in units of money, which usually is the answer, we then need to say, okay, what was the yield difference?
What was the increase in yield that our crops experienced because they were visited by those bees? And how does that translate into money? As we all know, crop prices fluctuate massively from year to year. So our pollinator natural capital metric, if it's properly calculated, will be wildly flailing up and down year to year in response to how many pollinated dependent crops we grow, where we grow them in relation to the bees, how many bees that happen to be, and how much we are willing to pay for the produce from those crops.
So there are at least three human dependent factors that go into this metric and only one factor coming from the bees. So actually pollinating natural capital metrics in any natural capital metrics, are not very good indicators for what's going on for the actual species, because it's diluted by all of these human factors that are also feeding into this final number.
[00:19:47] Adam Calo: I am feeling like there's a theme emerging here because it seems like the natural capital framework could be good to represent ‘bees’ in some general sense, but, but really fails to represent ‘a bee.’
[00:19:59] Emma Gardner: It's good at representing whether we are getting what we want from bees, but it's not very good at representing bees interests in their own right.
[00:20:09] Adam Calo: So another broad landscape decision making concept that I've been researching recently that claims to represent biodiversity is the land sparing idea. So Andrew Balmford, one of the leading researchers and proponents of this idea as land use policy, has said
“If biodiversity had a vote, it would prefer this land sparing checkerboard approach with blocks of land holdings specialized in farming or in conservation.
It would prefer that to land sharing approach where we do both things in the same place, or indeed an intermediate approach. If we want these creatures to persist, we have to farm in a sufficiently high yielding way that we can afford the space to spare reasonably large chunks of intact habitats elsewhere.”
Balmford seems pretty confident of what nature prefers and how they would vote. Can you assess these claims and argue from your own experience of what might be left out? Is Balmford correct in nature's vote?
[00:21:06] Emma Gardner: Yeah, he's using a number of highly perspectival terms there. Even if we think what is land sharing / land sparing, that's colored by our human experience of space and what people perceive and the scales that people perceive. if I look at a field, and say, I've put a margin down the side of that field, a grassy margin, and I say, I'm not going to farm right to the edge of my field.
I'm going to leave a little bit at the edge. So you could say that that is land sharing from a human point of view. That's land sharing because we think of a field as a unit and we've left a bit of the field, for say, bugs to live in, birds to feed in, and then we are getting our crop from the rest of the field.
However, if I myself am a beetle, and I spend my life living in that margin, that is land sparing because you've spared a portion of land that was large enough for me to completely live in. So that's my main issue with the use of land sharing / land sparing. And because of the fact that different species use land at different spatial scales, it's quite hard to say if biodiversity had a vote because biodiversity itself is not a thing.
I find I say this quite often. Biodiversity just means the variety of life that happens to occur with within a defined area, within a defined time. So we have to make some choices. Firstly, we choose what types of life we're going to measure and we have to choose what that area is and what the time span is that we're going to measure that over. So as a result, biodiversity is kind of the sum of lots of different species and lots of different lives that have different scales of experience and different needs. It's true that some species can't tolerate being in close proximity to modern human behaviors. And they would like to have a large area of habitat of their preferred habitat where they're not disturbed and they've got space.
But there are plenty of other species that need more than one habitat and they might get that best in a more human modified landscape. And there are plenty of species, quite a lot of red listed species who are associated with farmland. And for them, farming and conservation, as is said in that quote, are not mutually exclusive.
And in fact, they rely on traditional farming techniques to give them the conditions that they need. So for them, they might not necessarily be in the area that has been left. So it's quite hard to answer what Biodiversity's vote would be because it's in itself it's not a thing.
The problem with the word biodiversity is it appears to be a singular word, so it hides the fact there's a multitude of things underneath. So we find that quite often a better word to use is multi-species communities.
Because this makes clear that there's lots of things going on underneath. And this often is a lot more accessible when we are working with planners who work with human communities all of the time. So the idea of a community brings with it a huge number of helpful connotations that you can apply to multispecies communities too.
It's a sum of lots of things that have different responses and different votes. So if we want to give biodiversity a vote, it's like saying, giving women a vote. So if we said women all have roughly the same point of view, so we'll give women as a group one vote, probably we would think that's not an acceptable way to go. But that's roughly what we do when we say, if we give biodiversity one metric and therefore one vote.
[00:24:48] Adam Calo: That's a great analogy. What you're saying reminds me of you rescuing toads. And it also reminds me of thinking about some of the largest habitat patches in, for example, California, where I come from, that when you remove that human impact from it over a long timeframe, you miss some of the dynamics of management that might be useful for some species over others.
And you have these incredibly large forest fires now in some of these areas that were traditionally managed under a low intensity burning regime. And then once those people that were excluded who practices those kind of social ecological techniques, now you have this regular destructive force of forest fires that overall appears to be rather degrading to that large patch of habitat.
[00:25:34] Emma Gardner: Yeah, so I always work in the UK where we are very constrained. We've parceled up the land and removed a lot of the species already. So it is very hard for large scale ecosystem processes to take place. So we really are reliant on people to manage, to do the disturbance and create balance between vegetation types.
People really are part of ecosystems. They are a key part of keeping the balance in ecosystems. In the uk because we are so small and so parceled and we can't have these huge ecosystem processes which take space, they just haven't got room to operate.
[00:26:17] Adam Calo: So you were mentioning this problematizing the idea of biodiversity as a thing. And so the last kind of idea of a way to represent nature's interest in quotes or nature's vote is this concept of Biodiversity Net Gain. And you've written about this, more recently in particular. So can you explain what this is and, and why it's relevant for England?
[00:26:46] Emma Gardner: So biodiversity net gain has arisen because the government has a 25 year environment plan, where the aim is to leave the environment in a better state than before. And part of that, is to try and halt and reverse declines in biodiversity. Biodiversity net gain as a policy kind of says that in attempting to address the human housing crisis, we mustn't worsen the housing crisis that the rest of the species in this country are also facing.
So that being the loss of their habitats. And a challenge with this is the word habitat itself. So we almost use the word habitat so often, as ecologists and now increasingly outside ecology that we've kind of lost sight of what it really means. And habitat means natural home of an animal plant or other organism.
What habitat means is specific to the species. It's almost meaningless to say that something is a habitat without saying what it's a habitat for. So if we think of an easy species like a blue bell (plants have habitats too). It's habitat is a deciduous woodland. If we think of something like a toad, then it's habitat is at least two things.
So it would be a pond to breed in and something like a woodland or a rough grassland nearby for it to hang out in the rest of the time. If we think of something like an adder, it's habitat might be a lowland heath with safe basking places and a hibernaculum if those safe basking places in the hibernaculum are not there, it's not a habitat for adders, even though we might still call it a heath.
And then you can look at some really complex species, say a curlew—a species of high conservation concern. It spends the winter on estuaries where it's probing for things to eat in the mud. And then in the breeding season it comes in land. And it might breed in either the uplands or in a floodplain meadow.
So meadows or kind of grasslands are what it's going for, but not any type of grassland. It has to be long grass to hide the chick and to hide the nest. And then that has to be within walking distance of dam areas for the chicks to feed, because the chicks can only walk and they feed themselves. And that all has to be within flying distance of maybe some sheep or cattle pasture where the adults can probe for food for themselves, because they eat different things to their chicks. Their beaks are much longer.
So that's quite a complex set of requirements. So when we come to biodiversity net gain, it defines habitat in terms of vegetation types, It's thinking about what is feasible for people to measure. So what I would call an anthropo-convenient measure of habitat. So this is all very well if we only care about plants. However, if we start to think about species that are then making use of the plants, we have to think about the fact that habitat might be for them, might be multiple of these vegetation types put together, or it may be specific subtypes of those. So if we don't look at that and account for that, then we are not necessarily going to be meeting the needs of species whose habitat requirements don't match up with the way habitat is defined within the metric.
[00:29:55] Adam Calo: So then it seems like with all this complexity, I imagine biodiversity net gain has some kind of really complex scale of characterizing habitats?
[00:30:03] Emma Gardner: Before the developer develops the site, they have to do a biodiversity net gain plan. So they have to measure what is the value of the biodiversity metric on the site before and after the change. So the biodiversity metric is a calculation. It happens in a spreadsheet. And what it is, is you measure the area of all the different habitat types and you multiply that by their condition.
Are they in good condition or bad condition? Again, this is perspectival. What is good condition for somebody is bad condition for somebody else. Also they're multiplied by their distinctiveness score. This is the key thing. So each habitat is given a distinctiveness score within the metric. And this kind of reflects how rare they are nationally. It's kind of like a habitat top trumps kind of thing. So if you are rarer nationally, then you are more likely to have a higher distinctiveness score. And the idea is that because you multiply the area by the distinctiveness score, if you have smaller area but high distinctiveness, that's okay because your score can still go up if you've increased the distinctiveness.
And this is seen by the metric as habitat enhancement because we make these habitats more distinctive and a more distinctive habitat is assumed to support more biodiversity. But then we have to look back at the word biodiversity, where we said within what area? So these distinctiveness scores are nationally set.
So it's assumed that you contribute more to biodiversity nationally by having a rarer and more distinctive habitat. The problem happens when you look at what biodiversity is already living locally. So you could have a site where you've got an example of a habitat that is considered mediocre from a national point of view.
So it's quite common nationally, but within the locality, say within the parish, this is the only example of it. So actually it's quite rare and important locally. So if we are making decisions just based on how rare things are nationally, we risk not properly valuing how important a habitat patch is for supporting the biodiversity that exists locally.
And if we are not providing for that local biodiversity, then it may be lost. And this is a particular problem if the rare and fancy species that are supposed to be provided for by the new, more distinctive habitat don't move in. And a good reason why they wouldn't move in is if the new habitat patch that is created is not as great as you would expect.
So say a meadow is given a very high distinctiveness score because they're very valuable and precious and rare habitats, but if you create a very, very small patch of meadow, what we might really call a wildflower verge, it is never going to support the amount of biodiversity that a large supports.
So if I've got a really nice large meadow, I've not only got my special meadow plants, I've got the invertebrates that feed on them and I've got some larger animals and maybe I've even got some curlews coming in to breed there, there is no way that your curlew is going to come in and breed on a wildflower verge in the middle of a development.
It won't even recognize it as a meadow habitat. So if these small patches of highly distinctive habitat are not actually supported as many species as you would expect, you've got a problem because your metrics said that you increased biodiversity. But in real life that didn't actually happen.
[00:33:29] Adam Calo: It appears to me that one of the main goals of the biodiversity net gain framework is to be able to use offsetting to, once you have that spreadsheet calculation and how it's going to impact capital B biodiversity, you can develop and essentially destroy or influence species in one area as long as it's being preserved over there.
Is that how the policy works or the idea works, is that it's utility to be able to make these decisions across a whole national level instead of at the site?
[00:33:59] Emma Gardner: Yeah, it's to do with, we've only got finite area, so if you're going to lose area on your site to houses, there's only so much you can increase the distinctiveness of habitats still on that site, and you may not be able to get your increase in biodiversity units that is required without also making use of land somewhere else.
So that you can achieve your required 10% increase in the biodiversity metric. And from the developer's point of view, it can be more convenient to offset, to create habitats space for nature somewhere else. Because it means you can keep your development nice and tidy and don't have any messy areas of habitat. So it's presented to developers as an easy option. And this then generates a whole industry of what's called habitat banks, where you've got intermediary companies who are linking up developers and so that the landowner can enhance the habitat they can be the in-between person negotiating with developers who provide the money to do that. It's a new way to make money out of the natural environment. You might use your land to grow crops and in that way you are making money out of the land, but you might also use your land to create and maintain habitats.
[00:35:20] Adam Calo: The first dynamic that I thought of when you were describing this process is, well, if I'm a landowner and I've over the past 30 years degraded my land, then I get rewarded for the ability to then make improvements?
[00:35:31] Emma Gardner: Yes. And so then we are not necessarily restoring habitat where nature wants it to be restored or other species might want it to be restored.
[00:35:41] Adam Calo: So in this article you published in Town and Country Planning, you wrote:
“The tool to be used to assess biodiversity value does not consider how habitat patches are actually used by species and how as a result, it may promote a development response that is measured as a net gain, but in practice may support less biodiversity than before.”
So this story you're telling, it really seems like a great example of how we decide how the world works and the tools we use to observe the world really shape our understanding of what is real out there, and then feeds into the policy responses of things we want to change. So how did this come to be?
How did these, these biodiversity net gain measures, aim to see habitat and where did they go wrong?
[00:36:22] Emma Gardner: Well, people have been working very hard on them for ages, so there has been a lot of thought gone into it. But part of the challenge with it, in England certainly, is a desire to create something that can be used by the developer and whatever ecologist they employ to help them with minimum burden on the developer.
Whereas the approach in Wales and Scotland is different, they're not using a metric at all. So it in Wales, they are indicating that they will rely more on ecological expertise and less on making something doable by somebody who doesn't necessarily have as much ecological expertise. So it's a very different approach.
Do we go for technology or numbers or, or do we go for investing in people?
[00:37:09] Adam Calo: And what's the rationale between both of these approaches? Because it seems like for the developers who might be frustrated with different types of environmental procedures or planning processes, now have this tool to act quicker and resolve the housing crisis for example.
[00:37:27] Emma Gardner: I think the issue is that technological approaches the idea that perhaps we can measure habitats remotely and we can have something that tells us what to do can be cheaper. But there's a danger with this. With biodiversity, many of the habitat distinctions that are important to a species can't be measured remotely. You have to send someone there who can see things that satellites can't see.
[00:37:51] Adam Calo: There's a really big political discourse right now about the speed in which we need to build things in order to address climate and biodiversity crisis. The idea goes, we need tools so that developers can build houses for people, but also not necessarily cause damage or cite the best place for wind turbines or the new electrification grids.
And I feel like this idea of creating these rapid tools really is perhaps in that vein, in order to speed up the ability to make landscape decisions as a key virtue.
[00:38:24] Emma Gardner: I don't think the biodiversity metric is to speed up. It is to minimize burden on the developer. The time and, and the acting quickly thing is difficult. We spend a lot of time thinking about now how we connect habitat across space, but we are not thinking very much about connectivity over time, or we could say continuity through time. The fact that species learn how to live in a place, they learn how to not get eaten in that place. They learn where their food is, they learn where their shelter is, and so they can't necessarily go somewhere else as easily as people can. And I think this is partly because we have become detached from landscapes.
[00:39:09] Adam Calo: And so you have proposed a method … a different method that's grounded in your expertise, in ecological science and modeling techniques that aim to provide humans with an idea of how, a bee or a bird might move through the world, and then that could lead to a different form of landscape decision making. So what is the ecological permission structure and how does it work?
[00:39:32] Emma Gardner: So the idea is that if you change the habitats on a site, you change which species can use that site. So we could call that a change of ecological use. So within human planning, if you change use, that is the definition of development. So if we are changing the ecological use of a site, that means that these instances, ecological development.
So we should really have a planning system set up to run alongside the human planning system that decides whether those habitat changes should be allowed or not. So if we are thinking about use is quite a way a useful way to do that. If for instance, we are creating lots of small wildflower verges, they might go on a biodiversity net gain spreadsheet as meadow.
If we look at how they could be used, so they might be providing habitat for some kind of grassland species that can live in small areas. So we're talking about invertebrates perhaps. And they might also help grassland species move through the landscape, so they could be used for dispersal movements, but they couldn't be used for larger meadow species to actually live in. The same with woodland. If you tried to create a new woodland, if it was very small, you might, that woodland might be useful for say a farmland bird to nest in while it forages out into the open fields. And maybe a woodland generalist bird could make use of it as well as making use of say, gardens next door.
But a woodland specialist bird couldn't live in it cause it's not big enough to provide all the resources it needs. It can only get its resources from the woodland. If you make a larger woodland, it can be used by woodland specialist birds and woodland generalist birds. And probably the farmland birds will only be using the very edge or they might stay away because they don't like a large woodland.
So if we are looking at who can use it, we start to build up a picture of which species and not having their needs met.
[00:41:29] Adam Calo: You're talking about this analysis at the site level. How can we understand the different levels of use from the different multispecies communities? What tools can we do to actually understand that use at a deeper level?
[00:41:43] Emma Gardner: Yeah, so this is when we have to start thinking beyond the site, which is something that actually biodiversity net gain doesn't do. It just says, what is the change on the site? Or in my offsite mitigation, and it only considers that, whereas actually, if you are looking at a site, because many species move around, they will use habitat patches as part of a larger mosaic within the landscape.
So we need to consider the roles that the habitats on this site play within the wider landscape. So, like our toads are a great example. Maybe the woodland is on the site, but the pond is somewhere else. And if you remove one of those two ingredients, then that's the end, for that particular amphibian population.
So in order to assess these roles, you can use models that simulate how species move around the landscape. But we know that models only ever predict the expected average behavior. So they're actually very, very bad at getting it right at site level. Because at site level you've got all these extra site specific peculiarities that the model knew nothing about.
Maybe there's a little extra habitat patch that wasn't in our mapping data, so the model didn't know it was there. Or maybe there's a species that lives here. It's found a new and innovative and particular way to survive here that is not recorded in general scientific literature. As well as using models and digital data sets, you always need a person to go and visit the site and, and see what is peculiar about this place that we need to take into account.
And not just, say, a professional ecologist who might go and do a survey on a fixed number of days, but also it's important to tap into the local community who know that area and observe it constantly day after day for year after year. And who may have knowledge that, the surveyor who happens to visit on a particular day won't encounter.
So it's about bringing together these different forms of information. That's why we recommend that we need these ecological planners who can do this. It can't just be done in a computer, on a spreadsheet. There's different forms of knowledge that are not numeric, that are narrative and experiential, that come from both science and on the ground observation and local knowledge.
And all of that has to be brought together if we're going to make a good decision that represents the interests of local biodiversity as well as national Biodiversity.
[00:44:01] Adam Calo: So the obvious question that follows is, doesn't this effort of building ecological planners for your system involve a lot of transaction costs? Where are these people going to come from? How is this capacity built?
[00:44:14] Emma Gardner: Yeah. This is a challenge. There is a great reluctance to invest in people, I feel at the moment. And it is more attractive to invest in technology that you can then spin out and then make money from. But I think with biodiversity, you always need both. Ultimately, we are dealing with living things and living things are incredibly complex and sometimes you need a complex living thing to understand the complex living thing, and they can be helped by technology and all of this stuff to give them a view that they can't, access this extra information. But you still need that human living insight as well.
Yeah. Where are they going to come from? It requires commitment of money, which is a great challenge for biodiversity net gain. The local authorities already feel that they are not being given enough money to deal with this, but there is huge enthusiasm among young people for environment, for protecting the environment and nature. So yeah, I think we need to have a conversation about how we can do this.
[00:45:18] Adam Calo: It takes me back to thinking about kind of an extreme land sparing position that says the best thing for capital B biodiversity is humans in one small area, and then large patches of quality habitat elsewhere. But then as you were discussing before, where's that capacity for humans to rub up against non-human nature and build those skills?
[00:45:39] Emma Gardner: People are part of ecosystems and the big argument at the moment for not separating people in nature, is a human wellbeing, health and wellbeing thing. But there is another argument that I think should be placed just as strongly. If we continue to detach people from nature—people from other species—they won't notice or understand what other species need.
So the more we detach local communities from other local species. The less chance it is that local people will be able to speak up for their local wildlife. Most of the time now when a planning objection is being objected to it is reliant on the local community to notice the bad consequences that might happen for their local wildlife and speak up for them. If people are increasingly disconnected from nature, nature loses its voice with every person that gets disconnected.
[00:46:34] Adam Calo: In the same paper, you use a lot of language that, to me, stood out as not usually found in the normal lexicon of someone who might be called, you know, an ecological modeler. So you talk of planners needing to see biodiversity in different ways. You write of individual animals having misadventures. You talk of species being accommodated over others and in general you switch back and forth between talking about capital B biodiversity and then also what happens to an individual frog when their habitat is disturbed. You also used the word they instead of it when talking about animals.
I wonder was this use of language intentional? Has this idea of individual agency of animals become part of your worldview and what's the role of language in all of this?
[00:47:16] Emma Gardner: Yeah, I would say individual agency has always been part of my worldview. So at this point, probably I should confess that I am not an ecologist in the normal sense, in that I was actually trained as a physicist. And so I think quite differently from someone who's had a traditional ecological training.
So my background is originally in astrophysics, but the way I do research is always the same. So I'm always doing two things at the same time. On one hand, I'm standing back and outside the thing, the system that I'm looking at and watching how it's working. And at the same time as doing that, I try to be inside the thing and looking out from it to understand what is it experiencing and what would it perceive and what would it do.
And I use that technique, regardless of whether I'm studying a black hole or I'm studying a lizard, or I'm watching an audience when I'm giving a talk and trying to decide what word to use next. So it's always the same technique.
I think language is really important and we need to think more carefully about how we use it. So I'm seeing huge divergences in the way language is used between different decision makers. So if I think about how government policy is talking about biodiversity, they are talking about ecosystem services and natural capital, and metrics. So this language is very transactional and it's very abstract, and it does not see the lives that we are talking about. If I think about, on the ground conservation volunteers, who are doing grassroots action to take care of their local environment …So already I'm using the phrase to take care of.
So the language they're using is relational. We, so when we speak of the toads, we will refer to ladies or blokes, you know, that's male and female toads, and that reflects something of their behavior. That's how they behave and it's not anthropomorphism so much. It's more a recognition that we can see that they behave in different ways. When I speak to the toad patrols across the country, I'm often asking them, tell me about your toads.
And I tell them about our toads, and I'm using the word our, not in the sense of ownership as in this is my car or whatever. I'm using it in the sense this is my sister or my brother or my aunt in that kinship sense. These are ours because these are the ones that live in the same place that we do.
So the language that is coming out at the grassroots level, people who are interacting and actually saving the lives of species and trying to make them better and doing the caring, is relational and, and kinship type language.
The fact that you've got this huge dichotomy between these two types of language and the language we use kind of determines the environment within which we make the decision. If we use a language that allows certain relationships and concepts and responsibilities, it permits those into the discussion. And if we use a language that that doesn't acknowledge the existence of those, we make a very different decision.
[00:50:40] Adam Calo: Now you're speaking like a social constructionist, not like a physicist or an ecological modeler.
[00:50:45] Emma Gardner: I dunno what I am.
[00:50:47] Adam Calo: You talked about the example of how humans have pets and my own young daughter, she understands the dog as a member of the family, as kin. Of course she does. And the only times that her worldview shifts is when I mentioned those differences. It's through that language that is creating her idea of the animal as other in those language moments.
[00:51:11] Emma Gardner: Yes, and the more we use it, the more it reinforces it. And until we step back and say, hang on a minute, think about what you mean. Ecosystem services is an amazing one that we keep coming back to. So ecosystem services assumed that this is the service that people receive from the ecosystem.
If I think about my toad patrollers and I say to them ecosystem services, firstly they, they wouldn't necessarily know what I was talking about if I explained it. There is an immediate disgust reaction that we would have this exploitative relationship. And thirdly, these people are involved in ecosystem services, but it is them providing the service to the ecosystem.
And if you think about local authorities, they are busy providing services to communities all of the time. So if we were to reframe ecosystem services suddenly as the services that we as society provide to the ecosystem. Immediately, that is much easier for a local authority to grasp. You don't have this weird kind of, we do something that, biodiversity responds and then in some way we get something back.
That's a convoluted thing that is ridiculous to quantify. It's much more obvious and simple to quantify: We do this to benefit the ecosystem. So yeah, I'm really keen for us to reframe ecosystem services if we are going to persist with this transactional language, in the other direction.
[00:52:43] Adam Calo: Do you think you could talk about this event that you were a part of where you combined some of these insights from modeling the species view and storytelling and poetry to create a deeper connection to non-human nature, how they would vote, how these multi-species communities act in the world?
[00:53:02] Emma Gardner: So the event was called Freedom of Movement, and it was really about the challenges that animals face trying to get around in our modern world and what we can all do to help them. And it was kind of following on from a previous event we'd done called Animals on the Move, where we were working with visual artists. So I worked with if Oxford Science and Ideas Festival, and we had funding from the Association for the Study of Animal Behavior, and the event itself was a collaboration between me and another landscape decisions research fellow and also local conservation volunteers, a comedian, a poet, and a storyteller.
So you had researchers, local conservation volunteers, and what I would call word artists, all working together. So the first half of the event, we took the audience on a spoken word journey around their local area, kind of introducing them to different species, that live there and thinking about why they need to move around. And why it's difficult for them to move around and what we can all do to help.
We looked at all the different forms of movement that animals can take. So not just migration, but also day-to-day foraging, movements, mate searching movements, really long distance migrations where we're going between countries, and the dispersal movements that juveniles take.
So that's the one-off journey that they make when they essentially leave home. So in the first half we are doing this journey where we in introduced them to these different species and their challenges. And then in the second half we had an interactive story, where the audience were taken to a fictional town, where the town council were having a meeting to decide what to do about a patch of waste ground in their town.
And the main character was called Vanessa. And she just got involved with the council. And she was saying “we should do something for nature.” Let's, plant trees on it so we can provide for biodiversity and help fight climate change. And then other members, fictional members of this town council were suggesting other options like a sports pitch for the teenagers and things like that.
At the end of this town council meeting, the audience who were online, our real audience, got to give a vote as if they were members of the public joining this fictional meeting online themselves. And they had a vote for which option they should go for to make use of the waste ground.
And almost three quarters of them said, let's plant trees on it to make this for biodiversity and fighting climate change. Three quarters of them went for Vanessa's idea. So then the storyteller carried on with the story and he took Vanessa off. She decided on her way home that she was going to visit the waste ground and, and have a look at it herself. And she walked through it and she saw some of the species, some of which the audience had met in the first half. And she talked to a local conservation volunteer who happened to be there. And by the time Vanessa left, she was asking herself, what should we really do with this waste ground to support everybody?
Because she'd come to realize that there were species there that wouldn't like trees being put on it. So at that point, the audience were put into breakout rooms and they all discussed what should be done with the waste ground and came up with their own ideas. And meanwhile, our facilitators were furiously typing their ideas into a live Google doc, which our storyteller, Gabriel was watching.
And he was working their ideas into the end of the story. And so when we all came back together out of the breakout groups, Gabriel told the end of the story of Vanessa's final speech, so the fictional town council incorporated their ideas. And what was interesting was that the audience did a complete U-turn.
And by the end, nobody was saying plant trees all over this space. But the key thing that all of the groups separately came up with, which we never anticipated, is that they all said that this fictional waste ground should have some information boards installed to explain to the fictional local residents about the species that live there and to basically tell them the stuffs that they'd learn in the first half of the event.
They used this storied form to feedback to us and say how valuable what they'd experienced in the first half was and how important they thought these residents of this town should experience what they'd experienced to better understand their wildlife.
[00:57:17] Adam Calo: So it seems like this method of combining these different disciplines to focus on a narrative of what's happening in this space from a lot of different perspectives was effective and transformative even. But I wonder, you know, you called for in that paper, these ecological planners, but, do we need that modeling?
Maybe we just need more environmental storytellers who have the capacity to weave these different elements together? Was it the modeling or the story that was effective?
[00:57:43] Emma Gardner: Yeah, I think that's really interesting. They're, they're doing the same thing in different ways. It's helping people to imagine themselves into the minds of other species and understand their needs. So when I build the models, I'm really, really lucky when we build these computer models that simulate how species use landscapes, I get to spend dedicated time with an expert in that taxon.
Together, we discuss what the model needs to simulate, what's important to the species, what it needs to do, and then we bring in more experts. They tell us how they use the habitat. So we can take an average of lots of different experts with lots of different experience. And then we feed in scientific literature, and then we compare to the observations of on the ground volunteers embedded in landscapes across the country.
So there's a huge amount of human experience, of species goes into these models. And the idea of the model is to then make that accessible to other people. Not everybody can sit down and spend a hundred hours with experts. But as you say, models, computer models, that shows you a map at the end is not accessible for everybody.
And so it needs to be kind of complimented with these other methods of understanding. And, and we are storied beings and we remember stories more than anything. And the good thing about the stories is that the decision makers can get involved and they can embody characters within the story who can hold different positions. You can allow the argument or the discussion to go on within the story.
And nobody gets offended because it's not us. The positions are embodied by other fictional characters and it's kind of a safe way to explore this. And so when you have go out and you have a conversation in real life, if you really go to a parish council meeting and you want to stand up and, and make your point, you've had a practice, you've done it before.
And one of the amazing, bits of feedback that we got after the event. One of the people wrote: “I learned that it's worth sticking your neck out and attending meetings that could result in making positive changes for wildlife” because they'd practiced it and they had a positive experience.
They thought they might go and do it in real life. Stories I think, are really powerful, making sure that you've got the voices of people who know the species in there to guide the story.
[00:59:51] Adam Calo: I think you're onto something. I think you're onto a new method for landscape decision making here.
One of the things that you've said to me is that you see a parallel between the way we currently treat other species and the way that those in power have treated marginalized human groups historically.
Can you explain this line of thinking more? Because the thing that I'm keep thinking about is you talk about all these multi-species communities, but who decides which community gets to be there when they have competing interests?
[01:00:18] Emma Gardner: This is relates to offsetting, so within biodiversity net gain. If you're going to lose land to human uses, you've got to create habitats to make up for that.
Either you enhance habitats on the site or you are also allowed to create habitats and enhance habitats somewhere else, so this comes back to animals of Farthing Wood, the idea that we'll use the land here for what humans want and we'll make homes for species somewhere else.
So this is not new. Offsetting is not new. It hap has happened in human communities many times in the past. This idea that we need this land for something different to what it's being used for. We'll make a new home for you somewhere else, or simply you can go somewhere else. So the idea of the highland clearances, we want this land to make more money from sheep.
You can go somewhere else. And also more recently slum clearances. We say, where you are living now is not really good enough. Your accommodation is not good quality. Let's move you out and build you some new homes, some tower blocks to live in. And so whole communities are, are displaced and moved somewhere else.
And, and we feel perhaps at the time that we are doing the best thing, But we know now when we look back that when we displace communities, both human and multispecies, you break connections and you disrupt community functioning. And so we need to look quite carefully at offsetting and really interrogate this and say, are we about to make mistakes that we've made many times now in the human domain? Are we about to repeat those in the more than human domain?
And in which case, we probably need to have some conversations with geographers and historians and ecologists together and think about the extent to which we need to ensure those mistakes don't happen again with other species.
This is the thing. When we can understand it so much more when we see similarities and not the differences between our experiences and the experiences of other species. We are all living creatures. This is, yeah, this is why quite often, with the plannera, we're starting to go towards not saying biodiversity, but saying multispecies communities because we know that when you do placemaking for human communities, you're not just building homes for people.
You are making sure they've got shops. You're making sure they can reach them safely. They've got schools, they've got creches, that sort of thing. If you are doing placemaking properly, you've got all of that stuff together. So if we do multi-species placemaking for a multispecies community, then it means we don't just think about the habitat.
We think about, is this a habitat for something to live in? Does it give them a shelter? A home? Does it also give them food? Or does the food come from somewhere else? Can they get between these two things safely? Is there a creche? So if I'm talking about amphibians, that means a pond, and it suddenly becomes much richer.
[01:03:15] Adam Calo: I want to get back to this one part of that question, which was how do we decide then when there's competing interests? Sometimes, you know, I think because of the rural society of protection of birds, sometimes I think like conservation is for the birds or, or certain species come to dominate. You know, we have this idea of charismatic megafauna and then we orient conservation around certain species.
Do you have any idea of how we would make those decisions about who gets to remain in these competing interests or is that logic of competition just wrong from the start?
[01:03:45] Emma Gardner: This comes back to who speaks for biodiversity. We've got various NGOs who will advocate for particular taxa. A challenge for them is that they are charities and so they are influenced also by what people the general public might be most interested in, which might be fluffy, cute things or feathery things. Less often slimy or scaly things. So already we've got imbalances there in terms of the size of NGOs who can advocate for species. And this is another reason why we advocate for this idea of ecological planners to try and give more equal representation. Particularly if you've got a small NGO, they have to make decisions around which development proposals they can get involved with simply because they've only got so much time and resources.
And again, local communities, you might have an individual within that community who is really into, say, bees or they might be really into dragonflies or whatever. And they will work with their parish council and advocate for habitat for that particular group of species. Which is fantastic. But there may also be other species whose interests are not represented.
So it's kind of moving ourselves towards a position where we are trying to look for balance. How can we balance the needs of different species? We're not maximizing biodiversity. We're trying to help find and maintain balance, and that's a very different place to be compared to the discourse that goes on around maximization and net, which is all coming from economics.
But we need to always be asking ourselves when we're talking about net, benefits for biodiversity or net biodiversity. Again, who is slipping through the net? Who's not being represented?
[01:05:40] Adam Calo: I think this is a good segue to my last question because I think if we had this cultural shift that did away with human exceptionalism somehow, and we just viewed everyone as our kin, then we have similar strategies for making these hard decisions about helping our kin, you know, our neighbors, and maybe we want to empathize with a distant community over proximity, but, we have a language for dealing with this kind of stuff.
So what are you more hopeful for? Capacity of these ecological planners like yourself, who can weave storytelling and modeling to engage in these moments of landscape decision making, kind of becoming a new model of thinking about land and other multispecies communities? Or maybe just this cultural shift around reconnecting and understanding to where we all come from, which is all the same place,
[01:06:30] Emma Gardner: I think the two things would come together. They couldn't come without each other. So if we were going to reject the idea that we were different from other species and use more relational kinship attitudes towards them. Then of course we would have our improved planning process with an ecological planning process that happens alongside.
That would be the natural result of that. If we were going to accept that, we should have an ecological planning system that sits alongside our existing planning system, then in order to do that, we must accept that nature is not other. So they are tangled together, those two things.
[01:07:14] Adam Calo: I think that's a great place to end. Emma Gardner, thank you so much for talking with me today.
[01:07:20] Emma Gardner: That's great. Thank you very much.