trees – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Olive oil production in Morocco: so many questions

Posted on October 31, 2017April 5, 2023 by janet.crompton

No standard salad would be complete without olive oil. Our friends the lettuce, tomato and cucumber now come automatically accompanied by the vinegar and the oil, the oil and the vinegar. Perhaps in a bottle, perhaps in a sachet, perhaps in some kind of over complicated vinaigrette processed by a supermarket near you, along with lots of salt and some corn syrup, a 21st century salad in the Western world would be naked without an olive dressing.

This weekend, after an intensive academic seminar in Morocco[1], we studious seminar attendees were rewarded with a field trip. So I was taken out to visit three agricultural holdings in action. They all grew olives, but apart from that, had little in common. These three: large, medium and small producers in turn gave us a hugely insightful opportunity to witness agricultural change in action. Since the turn of the millennium the large site, on previously colonial, then state-held land had been an apple orchard and had now turned to olive oil. The medium one had been focused on cattle, making use of previous common land, that was now enclosed land, and was now diversifying with oil, watermelons, and more. The small producer produced a full range of things including olives for their own oil and most recently had established a side income in both fish and honey production.

Firstly, we learnt how to make money. Morocco’s heavily financed agricultural development programme, Plan Maroc Vert, which aims to intensify the agricultural system into a new-age competitive beacon of the modern food system, offers attractive incentives to spruce up agriculture in the country with new machines. All you need is to write a proposal (a report), have money to invest (from bank credit perhaps) and an impressive part of your money will be returned to you in state subsidies within two years.

So, for example, all three of the small, medium and large producers we visited, had benefited from a 100% state subsidy for irrigation of their crops. In the case of the ‘super-intensive’ large producer this meant state funding for the irrigation of 65,780[2] olive trees from groundwater on a rapidly declining water table. Some of the more landscape-savvy of the seminar group reminded us that olive trees had been grown in the region for centuries precisely because they did not need this kind of constant watering but could grow deep roots and access scarce water themselves. This, however, is not of interest to the ‘super-intensive’ producer. This producer is simply interested in the logic of economic growth, which in this case says: plant the trees closer, and add the chemical nutrients to the water while you’re at it. And so, these 65,780 trees are watered with the addition of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and ammonium, yet no studies are evident of what all these substances may be doing to the groundwater. By any other logic this would be a big concern, nitrogen pollution, particularly. Nitrogen pollution of water supplies, or more simply, of the nitrogen cycle, is one of the only planetary ecosystem boundaries that we have already crossed as a human race. This was not relevant in the lesson of how to make money.

Yet, I work with people, so where were they in the Moroccan olive grove? Well, it seems they have been replaced by a machine in this super-intensive oil production. The company, with links to power as far up as it goes, has invested in a machine that drives over the trees like a bridge. It shakes their branches and collects their olives. So much for an investment in rural employment.

Some new olive trees defy the machine but are pretty un-reliable as employers too. These trees that the machine can’t manage provide jobs for only a very precarious seasonal and short-term workforce. I was told that 100 people would be employed for a space of around 200 hectares, and these jobs would last 2-3 months. The company assured us though that these workers would get both contracts and, in order to have those contracts, bank accounts. Thank goodness the banks aren’t losing out.

I should be kinder in tone about the small and medium sized farmers that we visited. Not only did their olive oil taste a lot richer, but they invited us to tea, and allowed us to share their experience of oil production more closely. They humoured our partial language skills and our many, many questions. This was the second major thing we learnt on the trip – we were a team. We were a slightly chaotic, and erratic team, but really quite effective. A little like slugs on a cabbage, we chewed up every bit of information every which way.

Releasing a group of 13 researchers at a family farm, was a bit like inviting children to a playground, or providing clowns with an audience. Each of us found something to play with, interact with, reflect upon and smile. Some of us looked at the trees or identified the plant specimens. Others wrote notes, or took pictures, or carried out semi-formal interviews with whichever family member we felt most comfortable with. Others played with material toys, climbing ladders, smelling fruit or knocking on enormous oil containers to discover them empty. As we found the olive branches, force-fed powder food through irrigated pipes, or in the smaller farm providing shade for some resident chickens, this seminar group grew together, discovering the knowledge of the peasant farmer. This experience was far richer and engaging than any power point presentation or report.

More images can be found on the original blog.

References

[1] “Workshop on Agricultural Labour and Rural Landscapes in the Arab World” Organised by the Thimar collective and supported by the École Nationale d’Agriculture de Meknès, the Leverhulme Trust and the London School of Economics.

[2] Calculated based on 286 plants/hectare in a cultivated area of 230 hectares, this was the details of the holding advertised by the company.

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This blog is written by Lydia Medland, a PhD student at the University of Bristol’s School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies who is looking at the role of seasonal workers in global food production, specifically in Morocco and Spain. This blog has been reposted with kind permission from her Eating Research blog. View the original blog post.

Lydia Medland

Read Lydia’s other blog: Watermelon work

Hollow: Bristol researchers engage with artists on 10,000 samples of wood

Posted on December 8, 2015April 12, 2023 by janet.crompton

Artist Katie Paterson invited the public to explore a collection of 10,000 samples of wood from almost every country in the world. Commissioned by the University of Bristol, Hollow will be a new permanent public artwork imagined by Katie in collaboration with scientists and researchers. Situations.org met with Cabot Institute researcher Jon Bridle to ask some questions about working with artists, his thoughts on the project, the evolution of species and the future of the planet.
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Hollow exhibition. L-r Katie Paterson and Jon Bridle. Image credit Situations.org

What’s your role at University of Bristol and why is it exciting?

I’m an Evolutionary Biologist, conducting research into how quickly populations can evolve to cope with changes in their environment, and so potentially avoid extinction. Such understanding is crucial for predicting how rapid climate change and habitat loss will affect the species and the ecosystems that we depend on for all human economies. Understanding these evolutionary processes also helps us to understand why one species splits into two, and so why life proliferates into so many diverse and beautiful forms.

What’s really exciting at the moment is that biologists suddenly have the tools to explore the genomic basis of these evolutionary responses. This revolution in genetic techniques could become as significant in transforming our understanding as when astronomers started to use the telescope in 16th Century Europe.

Tell us a little about commissioning a public artwork for the new Life Sciences building at University of Bristol…

The University of Bristol has demonstrated a huge commitment to Life Sciences through its investment in a building where we can do internationally leading research. This reflects how crucial the study of life is to addressing many of the acute challenges that face humanity this century, such as food security, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

Commissioning a public artwork to explore some of these themes is an exciting way to celebrate this, and to allow us to connect in new and previously unimagined ways with some of the beauty, complexity and depth of the natural world. It’s also absolutely fantastic for us as scientists, and for the wider community, to be able to engage with the work of an artist like Katie Paterson.

Jon Bridle at Hollow exhibition. Image credit Situations.org

Katie Paterson’s work often involves long and complex collaborations with researchers in different fields. What does it mean to put artists and scientists in the same room?

I think it’s very useful for both sides. The way I think about the world has certainly been shaped by art that has inspired me throughout my life. Sparks do fly but they’re usually very creative ones!

To me, scientists and artists share a huge amount in that they both have to always be prepared to revise their thinking, to see the unexpected, and to reexamine the familiar. Both cultures depend on curiosity, on confronting uncomfortable complexities, and on escaping any prejudices about how we might like things to be. Most of the artists I’ve known – and most of the historical ones I enjoy – have been fascinated by science, and the same applies to the scientists I know in relation to art.

The only resistance can come from the fear of looking foolish – or of asking naive questions – but that’s the whole point: science progresses by asking simple questions, and being wrong in clever ways that increase our understanding of the world. If you’re worried about being wrong, or being made to feel humble, the last thing you should be is a scientist! I find beauty when the world suddenly becomes more intricate – maybe even stranger – that I’d previously imagined. Both good art and good science takes me to these places. Incidentally, I also think the same is true of good comedy.

For Katie Paterson’s Open Studio, the public are invited to handle some of the extraordinary collection of tree samples and hear stories about each one. What do you hope people might take away from a close encounter with the collection?

Well, I’m sure the public will get inspiration from it in ways I can’t imagine, so all I can talk about is my response to the Open Studio. To me, it’s really helped me engage with the way that all life is connected at a profound level. This is both in terms of all life sharing a common (and in terms of trees, fairly recent) group of ancestors, with all these pieces of wood representing the living tips – or twigs – of this deeply rooted family tree.

In another sense all life is connected physically in that individuals and species come together and interact in ecosystems in real time. In trees, these interactions with pollinators, parasites, other plants, birds, fungi, bacteria and with each other (through sharing pollen, or through sharing space, or air) are clearly visible because they often bear their scars in their leaves and in the bark, and of course in their wood, which was once the living, growing part of the tree.

This physical relationship of the tree with the world around it is recorded even in the cut pieces of wood that now seem rather remote, and rudely removed from the forests where they once grew. Each piece of wood once had gallons of water being pulled through it that entered the soil from ancient rivers, powered by long-disappeared parts of our sun. It’s fun to think about this as we sit around a wooden table drinking coffee. For visitors to the studio, I hope the stories about human relationships with trees will help to unfold these broader truths about how all life is connected, and how we are all part of the biodiversity that the collection is testament to.

Hollow exhibition – wood samples from around the world. Image credit Situations.org

Rethinking our relationship to the natural environment seems increasingly significant for both artists and scientists. What are the key challenges ahead?

Yes – rethinking our relationship with nature is hugely important, especially when many governments seem to be sidestepping these profound challenges for fear of compromising short-term economic growth. This is why public engagement with things like the COP21 talks in Paris, and public awareness of the difference we can make by choosing how we consume are so important.

The challenges are enormous. There’s good evidence that we’ve lost 50% of the world’s biodiversity (and about half of the world’s forests) in the past 40 years, at precisely the time when overconsumption and climate change make that biodiversity increasingly important for the planet’s resilience. However, there is still time to tackle these issues. Unfortunately, the terrifying scale of the loss of this true wealth of our planet is not appreciated by most people, and is certainly not high up on the political agenda, perhaps because those most affected by it are the world’s poor and powerless, as well as our future unborn generations.

The difficult thing is how to accept these difficult truths without feeling powerless and overwhelmed. We need to start living on this planet as if we intend to stay here. And we need to ask ourselves whether overconsumption of the world’s resources, with all the profound consequences it entails, is really making us happy.

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This blog has been reposted with kind permission from Situations. View the original blog on their website.

The Open Studio ran from 4 – 6 December 2015.

Jon Bridle is based in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol. The Hollow art project also involved other Bristol researchers including Heather Whitney, Gary Foster and undergraduates during the open studio.

Why forests are about more than just climate change

Posted on December 1, 2014April 14, 2023 by janet.crompton

It’s National Tree Week, and there is a plethora of talk about all the great things that trees do: encouraging biodiversity, providing a pleasant space for humans, and providing numerous ecosystem services. As well as this, there is some reference to how trees take in carbon dioxide, and the benefits of this for helping to prevent climate change. But what if trees didn’t help prevent climate change? What if actually, they increased climate change?

Afforestation (planting forests) is one of many suggestions as a way to deliberately change the earth’s climate to attempt to reverse the effects of climate change (known as ‘geoengineering’). Planting more trees seems like a an obvious, natural solution. Carbon offsetting, RED+ and lots of other schemes around the issue of climate change have been based on the preservation or increase of forests. But does it work?

We’ve known for some time that boreal forests contribute to climate change rather than help prevent it, because of changes in the surface reflectance (the albedo). But thus far, forests in other places have been thought to be beneficial, storing up carbon and not affecting the albedo so much.

But our recent study suggests that globally, preserving and expanding forests actually causes a net global warming. We used the Met Office’s latest climate model and did simulations of future climate change, with and without afforestion/forest preservation, and we found that though the deforestation has no discernable effect on the climate, the afforestation does.

Does this mean that we are advocating chopping down forests? No. As National Tree Week says, forests are about more than climate change. However much climate change is a key challenge for the future, we can’t forget that other things are important too. The climate effect of the forest preservation and expansion is small – only about 0.1 °C. How do you value that against the mass loss of biodiversity, irrelplaceable ecosystems and ecosystem services that would be lost?

Saving or planting forests is not a panacea for climate change, but neither is it the enemy. Conserving forest is worthwhile for lots of other reasons, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that there won’t be difficult decisions to make about protecting the unique forest habitats, especially tropical forests like the Amazon, and preventing climate change.
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This blog was written by Cabot Institute member, T Davies-Barnard, University of Exeter.

Guest blog: Let’s reach the Size of England

Posted on October 22, 2014April 14, 2023 by janet.crompton

The Size of England is an amazing new charity working to raise £13 million to safeguard 13 million hectares of rainforest, which is the size of England, and coincidentally the area of rainforest that is cut down every year globally.

To us, safeguarding is not about owning land – it’s about encouraging those who need the land to use it sustainably and to empower local people and indigenous communities. It’s about establishing local rights to the land and providing alternatives for fuel and initiating tree planting programs to restore habitats.

We know that Size of England can be successful. Last year, the Size of Wales team reached their target of raising £2 million to safeguard 2 million hectares of rainforest. But as you know, we want to raise the game. However in order to do this we need help.

At the moment we are raising money for a start-up fund via a crowdfunding webpage. This is so we can register as a charity and start doing amazing things for the rainforest and the local community. We already have support from brilliant organisations such as Cool Earth, the Prince’s Rainforest Project, WWF and the Crees Foundation, but we can never have enough! We hope, through communication that we can raise the sum whilst also spreading the word of what we want to do, and getting people to ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘friend’ the project as it develops.

There are currently three of us, all volunteers with big ideas and ambitions. What we’re asking is can you help the Size of England campaign in other ways? Are you a great fundraiser? Could you improve our website? Have you got legal experience? We’d love to crowd-source skills as well as cash.

Check out our Facebook and Twitter pages. Also take a look at our crowdfunding site if you fancy and pass it on to anyone else who may find it interesting!

Feel free to message me if you have any questions or email me at olivia@sizeofengland.org.uk

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This guest blog is written by Olivia Reddy of Size of England.

Olivia Reddy

Your planet needs you!

Posted on April 14, 2014April 19, 2023 by janet.crompton

We are under attack. Our assailants threaten to kill millions of people, destroy our homes and wipe out our crops. Who are these fiends?

Us.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) focusses on how we can stop runaway climate change before it’s too late. Despite our “best efforts”, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase at an alarming rate. The IPCC estimates that without any additional effort to reduce emissions, we’re looking at a rise in temperature of between 3.7 and 4.8°C by 2100, although variability in the effects of climate change mean the rise could be as high as 7.8°C. Anything over 2°C means we risk runaway climate change with catastrophic effects felt around the world.

A call to action

The UK energy secretary Ed Davey responded to yesterday’s IPCC press conference by stating,

“we need a worldwide, large-scale change to our energy system if we are to limit the effects of climate change”

and called for an international effort to reduce carbon emissions by 2015.

The question is, are politicians willing to put in the effort needed to reduce emissions by 40-70% in the next couple of decades? It’s hard to put a price on the cost of mitigation, but as Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC team, stated “Climate policy is not a free lunch”. His colleague Professor Jim Skea was more optimistic, saying that,

“it is actually affordable to do it and people are not going to have to sacrifice their aspirations about improved standards of living”.

That’s the kind of thing that politicians like to hear.

Change doesn’t happen unless something dramatic happens to force us to act. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events doesn’t seem to be working, so what would? As the IPCC brief states, “Emissions by any agent (e.g. Individual, community, company, country) affect other agents”. We need to invoke some Blitz mentality; we ARE facing a deadly enemy and we ALL need to do our part to stop it.

How to mitigate climate change

The IPCC used 10,000 scientific references to ensure that their models are properly founded in science and all the uncertainty that entails. The IPCC defined mitigation as “a human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases”, and look at a range of scenarios to find the most effective and efficient methods.

The report particularly favoured low carbon energy sources as a major way to reduce emissions, using natural gas as a transition fuel into renewable energies. Encouragingly, renewable energy comprised over half of all new electricity-generating developments globally, with wind, hydro- and solar power leading the way. The costs of renewable energies are falling, making them viable for large scale deployment in many areas, and Professor Skea enthused that

“Renewables are going to be ubiquitous no matter which part of the world you look at”.

Cities will play a big part in reducing CO2 emissions too; a combination of better urban planning to incorporate public transport and compact walkable city centres will be vital. The report also recommended high speed rail networks between cities to reduce short haul air travel and its associated high emissions.

Replanting forests will be an important way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Plants take in CO2 for use in photosynthesis, but can also be used to remove pollutants from the air and soil, as well as preventing soil erosion and providing important habitats for other plants and animals.

It is important for all nations that mitigation does not mean a halt to economic development. Dr. Youba Sokona, IPCC team co-chair, said, “The core task of climate change mitigation is decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from the growth of economics and population”. This will be the main challenge for governments around the world, but the overwhelming message from the IPCC is that mitigation is affordable, whilst doing nothing is not.

Social justice

There has been an undercurrent of unease alongside the IPCC report; the sticky question of who, exactly, is going to pay for this mitigation? A few days before its release, pressure from unspecified developed nations led to the removal of a section in the IPCC report stating that developing countries should receive billions of dollars a year in aid to ensure that they grow their economies in a sustainable way.

The argument centres on whether developing nations should have the right to exploit fossil fuels to expand their economies, as developed countries were able to do. Dr. Chukwumerije Okereke, one of the lead authors of the report, said that this “is holding them down from developing”, believing that “this is reinforcing historical patterns of injustice and domination”. I would argue that with the impacts of climate change predicted to affect those in developing countries most drastically, perhaps we should adopt the mentality that we are all in this together and help each other to overcome the problem.

Act now

The take home message from the IPCC is that if we act now, we can probably prevent hitting the 2°C temperature increase that would have disastrous consequences for us all. The mitigation strategies suggested are affordable and certainly cheaper than dealing with the consequences of climate change. Will politicians and all the rest of us do our parts to drastically reduce carbon emissions? Only time will tell. A lot of hope rests on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is hoped to yield a global agreement on climate to avoid passing the 2°C safety threshold.

Cross your fingers and turn off your lights.

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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol

You can follow Sarah on Twitter @JoseSci

Sarah Jose