Originally published on Grist.

Even before the election, food luminaries had started brawling over President Obama’s legacy. In a New York Times Magazine cover story, author Michael Pollan accused the administration of bowing to the demands of corporate agribusiness. “They went wobbly in the knees,” former Sen. Tom Harkin said in the piece. Sam Kass, the former White House chef and food czar, fired back, saying that people like Pollan dismiss steps forward because they fall short of their “idyllic” vision of farming. “We are so good at turning our wins into losses, it’s stunning,” he said. (Here’s an elaboration of Kass’s case).

Then America elected a president who loves fast food and overcooked steaks. While Donald Trump has explicitly pledged to roll back Obama’s actions on climate change and health care, he hasn’t said what he’ll do on the food and agriculture front. In fact, despite filling out the rest of his Cabinet, Trump has yet to pick a new agriculture secretary, leaving his intentions extra murky. With someone as capricious as Trump at the helm, this is a terrible time to predict the future of American agriculture, but it’s the perfect moment to take a hard look at the past and ask what policies have made a difference.

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack served as ag secretary for the entire eight years of the Obama administration — outlasting all other Cabinet members. Appointing Vilsack to lead the department was arguably the biggest farm policy decision made by the outgoing president: The massive Department of Agriculture runs everything from nutrition policy to farm conservation programs.

Vilsack and I discussed the Obama administration’s record on reducing the environmental footprint of food and ag. We had half an hour — not enough time to delve into every campaign promise and thwarted initiative — so I asked Vilsack what real progress he would point to to define the administration’s legacy.

Vilsack said the administration had succeeded in moving the needle in several ways: by working collaboratively — rather than via confrontation — for conservation, by stimulating new business in rural economies, by making climate action part of the culture at the USDA, and by helping poor people get healthier food. He also discussed bridging the growing divide between the priorities of farmers and the priorities of consumer groups.

In preparation for our interview, I contacted farmers, food policy experts, environmental activists, and industrial ag reps from across the spectrum. They had widely different views, but pretty much everyone said they liked Vilsack: People appreciate his straightforward, square-dealing style.

As a reporter, I appreciate him too — he responded to my questions directly, without sidestepping or reframing, using evidence and detail to defend the administration’s environmental legacy. That’s increasingly rare as press and politicians become more confrontational. Here’s a recap of our discussion.

The big picture on conservation

Vilsack preferred to wield the carrot rather than the stick in trying to protect the environment. The USDA rolled out one voluntary rule after another, emphasizing cooperation and partnership rather than regulation and enforcement.

Some environmental groups say this was a mistake. Take a look at USDA data and you’ll see that since Obama took office in 2009, farmers have converted an area the size of Kansas from prairie and range to row crops. Similarly, US Geological Survey measurements of fertilizer and manure in the Mississippi (where a lot of the Farm Belt’s runoff winds up) keep rising.

So we’re plowing more land and washing more fertilizers downstream. Those two big-picture indicators suggest that the overall environmental quality of our nation’s largest farming region is diminishing, I told Vilsack.

“Well, I’d put a cautionary note on that,” he said. He didn’t dispute the numbers, but suggested another way of looking at them: the amount of land required and pollution created per unit — of food, fiber, and fuel — that farmers grow.

Calculated that way, you can make a case that the numbers are going down, he said. For example, corn yields keep going up, but the amount of fertilizer used per acre has been steady since the late ’70s. That means we’re using less fertilizer to grow each kernel. It’s only because America is growing more crops that the absolute pollution numbers are increasing.

Record corn prices from 2011 to 2013, driven by the world’s growing appetite for meat and biofuels, encouraged farmers to plow up more land. Now that prices have dropped, the USDA is seeing “incredible interest” in conservation programs that pay farmers to keep erodible acres and important habitat wild, Vilsack said.

“We do know from assessments that we’ve made that it isn’t a single conservation practice that’s gonna do the trick,” Vilsack said. “It’s combinations working in concert: It’s not just no-till or cover crops, but also buffer strips. Not just buffer strips, but also better irrigation systems and different crop rotations.”

Farmers have been using these practices as part of the ecosystem-scale regional conservation programs the Obama administration piloted. These efforts pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars from regional partners, and people up and down the food chain cooperated so they weren’t working at cross-purposes. One of those big conservation partnerships is the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Initiative.

The efforts in the Chesapeake Bay region are a model for the rest of the country, Vilsack said. There, “99 percent of the ag acres are now involved in some form of conservation,” he said. The benefits are tangible: “We’ve seen expansion of underwater grassways, we’ve seen improvements of aquahealth — oysters and fish coming back.”

Shifting rural economies

There’s a fundamental change in rural America that empties out small towns: The average American income is rising, but food prices are steady. This means that most farmers need to produce more food and become more automated if they want to keep up with the Joneses — or just stay on the farm.

It’s an inexorable economic force making farms larger while providing fewer rural jobs.

“You are inevitably going to have more automation, more mechanization, more technology, more efficiency.” Vilsack said. “Some people may argue it’s good, some people may argue it’s bad. To me, it’s not an appropriate argument, because it’s inevitable.”

Although it may be inevitable that the percentage of the national labor force working on farms would drop, it’s not inevitable that this will cause rural economies to collapse. And Vilsack worked hard to midwife the birth of a new rural economy.

The administration had a hand in creating new markets for rural sectors by promoting exports and breaking down trade barriers, Vilsack said. Total US ag exports topped a record $1 trillion during the Obama years. The administration also poured $1 billion into local and regional food systems, leading to new farmers markets and farm-to-school programs.

Research and policies that nudge businesses to turn agricultural waste into fuel, chemicals, or material spurred what Vilsack calls the “bio-economy.” And although it started growing before 2009, “there is now almost a $400 billion bio-based industry,” Vilsack said. “It employs 4 million people. And some of those people are being employed, some of those opportunities are being created, in rural areas.”

Vilsack reeled off statistics as evidence that the USDA’s efforts were successful. Rural unemployment dropped from 10 percent in 2009 to 5 percent today — about the same level it was before the Great Recession.

“The poverty rate has dropped rather significantly, and I’ve been told that it’s the steepest drop we’ve seen in 25 years,” he said. “You mentioned food insecurity: lowest rate among children ever. And the population declines that rural America was seeing just a couple of years ago have now been essentially halted.”

Then, in the closest he got in our conversation to taking a jab at Trump, he added: “Now, if tomorrow, if all of this investment and all this effort is abandoned, one can expect that we’ll see a return to the higher rural unemployment, higher poverty rates, more food insecurity, and kids feeling that they don’t have options.”

A culture of climate action

When I asked him about his environmental legacy, Vilsack started his answer with the climate.

“First and foremost, within the department, we have a greater awareness of a changing climate,” he said. To turn awareness into action, the USDA set up 12 climate hubs across the country, which provide practical information to farmers and foresters trying to deal with climate change. The agency also rolled out a voluntary plan that is supposed to trap 25 million cars’ worth of greenhouse gases by 2025.

The USDA contains the Forest Service, and the administration made a new policy that — for the first time — makes forest managers plan for water conservation and a changing climate. Outdated planning rules and drought have led to massive wildfires in recent years.

Additionally, the USDA directed money to research on everything from renewable energy and allergen-free peanuts to carbon capture in soils and wooden skyscrapers. And there are lots of other cool ideas in the works (seriously, it’s neat stuff — check out Vilsack’s essay on food and ag innovation).

Fewer hungry

When it comes to environmental justice, both Vilsack and Obama made it a priority to improve options for people living in food deserts, and for those who simply couldn’t afford good food. There are 8 million fewer people struggling to feed themselves than there were eight years ago.

The USDA has opened up access to food assistance by pushing the states to do a better job, so that people who qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (a.k.a. food stamps) get help. In 2009, roughly 72 percent of people who were eligible for the program received assistance. Today it’s around 85 percent, Vilsack said.

The USDA has also expanded what people can buy with that assistance. More than 1,600 farmers markets now have machines that allow people to pay with SNAP cards.

“Finally, we have been encouraging grocery stores to locate high-poverty areas where they have been absent, and working to expand the food choices that people have from convenience stores where they are the only food source,” Vilsack said.

Organic? Industrial? What about just pragmatic?

There’s a growing divide in the US between farmers and eaters. Urban foodies rail against industrial ag and call for more rules, while many farmers view any attempt at regulation as creeping tyranny. It’s a tough conversation to mediate, because it’s made up of a lot of shouting and very little listening.

I asked Vilsack if he had made in progress in refereeing that debate and finding common ground. He chuckled and said he had been thinking a lot about this. We’re going to have to learn how to communicate if either side wants to make progress, he said — and he told the story of cage-free eggs to demonstrate his point.

Lots of food companies have promised to stop buying eggs from hens kept in small cages. But it looked like they were setting themselves up for failure because no one had stopped to ask where all the cage-free eggs were going to come from.

“So I asked the question: How many commitments of this kind have been made, and how many eggs are we going to have to produce?” he said. “It means going from 17 million layers today in cage-free environments to over 200 million. It means that the people raising these hens have to invest about $8 billion in changing the way in which their hens are treated.”

As this flowchart illustrates, it’s pretty risky for farmers to make the switch and become a cage-free operation. So there’s a real chance that this national movement could fail because there simply won’t be enough cage-free eggs to go around.

The solution is to get everyone around a table to figure out a plan that won’t crash and burn, Vilsack said. He started that process by convening meetings of activists, farmers, and food industry leaders.

If we’re going to move agriculture forward, Vilsack said, the conversation has to include not just what’s moral but what’s physically and economically possible. And that’s true whether we’re talking about conflicts as small as an egg or as large as the 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

This piece, originally published on Grist, is the third in a series on how to tackle poverty while protecting the environment.  Read the intro. 

The women collected dead butterflies and attached their wings to wire-frame silhouettes of animals; then, at least in theory, they’d sell them. That was the plan for improving life and protecting the landscape around the Mexican village of Tres Reyes.

The nonprofit U Yool Ché hatched this plan in hopes of providing an environmentally friendly alternative to hunting and clearing land for cornfields. The tiny town of Tres Reyes is in the Yucatan Peninsula, in the buffer-zone surrounding the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, 1.3 million protected acres of tropical forests, palm savannah, mangrove stands, marshes, and dunes sheltered from the sea by a barrier reef.

The conservationists hoped to protect the wildlife — jaguars, ocelots, deer — moving in and out of Sian Ka’an and give the people of Tres Reyes an alternative way of making a living that wouldn’t tarnish the land — turning them into artisans.

There was only one problem with this plan, and it was a really big one: Nobody had thought through the economics.

It’s a typical problem. When conservationists set out to protect environmental resources in poor countries — the trees of Haiti, say, or the wildebeest on Botswana’s savanna— they often confront a basic concern: People live off those resources. Trees can be sold as charcoal; wildebeest tastes just dandy when food is short. No one will ever make their children go hungry to save the environment. Without some change in the underlying economic conditions, as soon as the environmentalists leave, the local people go back to making charcoal or hunting wildebeest.

And so, nonprofits dedicated to protecting animals and ecosystems have started focusing on people — building health clinics, sponsoring business development, or advocating for payments to rural communities — in order to protect natural areas.

Craig Leisher, a senior scientist at the Nature Conservancy, noticed such a profound shift in thinking that a few years ago he checked to see if there had been a corresponding shift in the way nonprofits described themselves.

“More than half the large-scale conservation NGOs changed their mission statement to specifically include people,” Leisher said.

Pretty much every environmental group acknowledges the importance of improving the lives of people in the areas they want to protect, but there’s a fundamental split over how to do this. Is the goal to have people stay in natural areas, or move elsewhere?

All over the world, environmental groups are trying to figure out how to balance nature and people in carbon-rich biodiversity hotspots like Sian Ka’an. And this is tricky. It’s really freaking hard to find ways for people to live and make money without affecting the environment in some way. These projects seeking to help people and conserve ecosystems exist on a spectrum: Some prioritize incomes, while others prioritize the environment. The right balance probably depends on context. But the case of the Tres Reyes butterfly project suggests that you can’t tilt all the way toward the protection of environment and also expect an economic windfall.

Anthropologist José Martinez-Reyes has spent more than a decade studying the situation in Tres Reyes. He tells the story of how environmental groups attempted to build sustainable businesses there in his new book, Moral Ecology of a Forest.

In 2000, a nonprofit called Amigos de Sian Ka’a launched a plan for villagers to trap and sell parrots as pets, but that was torpedoed three years later when the government outlawed the practice. There were many attempts to start ecotourism businesses, but the locals couldn’t compete with rival ecotourism outfits from Cancún and Tulum.

The butterfly project

Project leaders instructed women of the village to catch butterflies with hand nets to determine which species were most abundant. But this was strictly a catch-and-release operation, for research purposes. The community wasn’t supposed to kill even the most plentiful butterflies. Instead, the women would walk along the highway searching for butterfly roadkill, which they would collect in plastic bottles. Afterward, they would spend hours in the village church, crafting butterfly-wing sculptures. But it was unclear where they would sell their works of art, or who would buy them.

While the women of Tres Reyes were in the thick of this project, Martinez-Reyes’ wife, Camille, visited, and the women asked her how much they should charge for their work. Camille asked how much they had spent buying materials, Martinez-Reyes writes:

“She realized that, given their costs, the number of women involved, and the amount of time they had invested, it seemed unlikely that they could make a profit. Not knowing what to say, she had trailed off into an awkward silence, wondering if this had come up before.”

It hadn’t. The nonprofit and the government bureaucracy had insisted on scrupulous proof that the community was doing absolutely no harm to the environment with its new business ventures, and all those official hoops — paperwork, and delays while waiting for approvals — made it impossible to turn a profit.

The butterfly project was great for the goals of environmentalists — the conservationists wanted members of the community to live lightly on the land and devote themselves to monitoring plants and animals — but it utterly neglected the goals of the community.

In an email, José Palacios, director of U Yool Ché, suggested that strict environmental regulations forced the nonprofit down this route. Sebastian Proust, a coordinator for the Nature Conservancy in the Yucatan, vouched for U Yool Ché, noting that the butterfly project happened nearly 15 years ago.

“They have a really good reputation,” Proust said. “It’s just really hard to get more money for sustainable products. You can have the best product in the world, but it won’t work if it doesn’t connect with markets — that’s a key challenge for everyone.”

When the United Nations funders of the project brought it up for review in the spring of 2002, a biologist on an evaluation panel was outraged that the women were using butterflies, and the panel declined to extend funding. Picking up dead butterflies was just too environmentally intrusive.

The “leave no trace” wilderness ethic is great for middle-class backpackers in a national park, but that ethic just doesn’t work for people who depend on the land for their sustenance. Fighting poverty is hard enough on its own. It’s virtually impossible if we stipulate that the process must leave no mark on the environment.

For the people of Tres Reyes, these failures are infuriating: Time and again, the community members sat through endless meetings and training sessions. Time and again, they devoted days of unpaid labor laying the groundwork.

“The guaches (outsiders) come with projects, but we never see the benefits,” one community member told Martinez-Reyes.

Nature for nature’s sake, or nature for people?

The people of Tres Reyes aren’t alone: An effort to get Ugandans to harvest coffee that grew wild in the forests failed when organizers found they couldn’t get a high enough price for the beans to justify the time it took to collect ripe berries. When the ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s started buying wild-harvested Brazil nuts from indigenous people in the Amazon, it scored a runaway success with its Rainforest Crunch flavor. But it didn’t slow deforestation because it didn’t change the incentives of the ranchers burning down the forest. After a scandal over labor exploitation, Ben and Jerry’s discontinued the flavor.

There’s no good data to tell us what types of projects succeed and what types fail. One review of the evidence found that “there is little indication of how the programs in question affected poverty over time.” Another review, which asked if tourism to parks and protected areas boosted local incomes, found that “measurable progress has been rare.” Another group of researchers evaluating these kinds of projects concluded that nonprofits and aid workers rarely record rigorous data, and “exhibit little interest in allowing thorough investigation of ‘their’ community-based conservation projects.”

The failures don’t mean that it’s impossible to do conservation and economic development at the same time. They just suggest that changing things requires compromise. Whenever people are present, that ecosystem is going to have a different character than when people are mostly absent. People tend to protect their livestock and children by killing top predators, creating all sorts of trickle-down effects. And when those people work for the benefits of modern life — education, health care, washing machines — it tends to change the character of the ecosystem even more.

As the conservation world debates this, two camps have emerged: mixers and splitters. “The question is: Is human activity compatible with conservation?” Linus Blomqvist, director of conservation at the Breakthrough Institute, said.

Leisher, from the Nature Conservancy, answers yes. He’s a mixer. “In a world of 10 billion people, people are going to be everywhere, you’re going to have to look at them as part of it.”

Leisher’s former colleague at the Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva, is often identified as a standard bearer for mixers. Biologists E.O. Wilson and Michael Soulé, though, say no. They are dividers. They’d like to see large areas of the earth preserved without people — Wilson wants to devote half the Earth’s surface to nature.

This debate is ferocious — Wilson and Soulé called Kaviera “wrongheaded, counterproductive, and ethically dubious” — but both sides agree that conservation will fail unless it finds a way to take care of people. Wilson’s poverty solution is to have people move to cities, intensify farming, and innovate like crazy to shrink the human footprint.

Leisher’s solution is for people to improve their lives where they are, and for the rest of us to embrace ecosystems altered by people. He wrote, “Conservation needs to ensure local people — many of whom are poor — benefit tangibly from biodiversity. For conservation to be relevant in the 21st century, this has to be a primary focus.”

Martinez-Reyes sides with the mixers — he’d just like to see it done well. The strategy of moving away from the land hasn’t worked well for the people of Yucatan, he told me. Environmentalists have been buying land from the villagers for conservation — a splitter strategy. But the money the people get for the land doesn’t reflect its value to them, he said.

The people Martinez-Reyes knew who sold out and moved into towns had to pay for rent and food for the first time in their lives. Their money ran out fast, and they ended up much worse off than before, he said.

A new way forward

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this debate is that all sides agree that alleviating poverty is what makes conservation possible. When people don’t have to struggle for survival — when they have adequate healthcare and the opportunity to get a good education — they can take care of the environment.

Splitters would accomplish this by having people consolidate into cities, while radically increasing protected areas for wilderness. Mixers aren’t against urbanization, but they think that markets will also have to grow in rural areas, to meet poor people where they are. That’s a big shift.

In the past, a lot of environmental work has focused on stopping things: Halting the bulldozers, blocking the harpoons, choking off the smokestacks. That can be important work. Stopping things, however, isn’t enough. Stopping change can only maintain the status quo and the status quo — poverty, environmental catastrophe — is unacceptable.

But the shift from building things and proposing solutions can feel foreign to people who have been mostly stopping things. Even good solutions can have faults — often, in unexpected ways, they hurt the environment or disrupt cultures.

Conservation groups have mostly accepted that they needs to go beyond preservation, but sometimes — as with the butterfly project — they are so cautious about changing things, that they fail to change anything.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Originally published on Grist.

A big piece that made the front page of the New York Times over the weekend takes aim at two of the most prominent arguments in favor of genetically modified crops: They increase yields (meaning we can get a lot more food from less land) and reduce pesticide use (meaning we’re poisoning that land and ourselves a lot less).

The article concludes that GMO seeds are no better at either than any other form of breeding. As you can imagine, a page one story in the nation’s biggest newspaper with such a strong assertion has opened another front in the GMO wars — and as someone who has been reporting from the front lines of those wars for the past few years, I’ve got some thoughts.

The story is an odd one for the Times because if you take the mildest interpretation of the piece — GMOs haven’t dramatically improved yields, but they are useful — then it’s really not news. Back in May, the National Academy of Sciences said the same thing with much more nuance and detail.

If your takeaway from the piece is that GMOs just aren’t useful, then it runs contrary to loads of evidence — which the story almost completely omits. And it makes comparisons that sound compelling but don’t actually tell you much about the state of farming.

The article relies on a comparison of farm statistics from North America (where we grow GMOs) and farm statistics from Western Europe (where they don’t). The problem with this big-picture focus is that the details on GMOs get really fuzzy. At the international level, there are so many variables — weather, pests, soils, economics, and farming techniques, just to name a few — that it’s near impossible to pick out the effects of biotechnology. So viewed from 100,000 feet, GMOs are a big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

That said, if genetic engineering really had turned out to be a silver bullet for agriculture, we would be able to see the change in the zoomed-out big picture. And if GMOs had proved to be a quantum leap forward, we would see it in Times writer Danny Hakim’s crude country-level comparisons. In that regard, Hakim’s contribution is useful.

The problem here is there’s enough data that you can easily pick the evidence to support your favorite narrative, depending on where you focus. For instance, in a rebuttal to the story, Monsanto’s chief technology officer picked a narrower focus and found plenty of data for a counternarrative making the case for biotechnology. The most balanced approach is to look at all the available evidence — and that’s what the National Academy of Sciences report already did.

Hakim cites the report where it supports his conclusions, but not in the places it contradicts them. He writes that the report found “‘there was little evidence’ that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops.” But Hakim doesn’t mention that the report also noted that genetic engineering increased yields “where weed control is improved” and “when insect-pest pressure was high.” He doesn’t mention the report found that insect-resistant GMOs reduced insecticide use “in all cases examined.”

Perhaps the most compelling stats in Hakim’s story come from a comparison with France, which has reduced insecticide use by 65 percent and herbicide spraying by 36 percent in the past 20 years. The United States has only reduced insecticide use by 33 percent, while herbicide spraying has increased 20 percent over that same period.

But that’s the zoomed-out view. Zoom in and you can see that France started with crazy-high pesticide application levels, which are just now coming down to around the amounts farmers spray per acre in the United States. It’s also odd that Hakim would single out France: Pesticide use there has been declining, but it’s been increasing in other parts of Europe. (See weed scientist Andrew Kniss’s take for more detail on this.)

It’s often hard to see the evidence of important technological changes in zoomed-out statistics. Back in the ’90s, businesses were buying computers like crazy, but overall productivity numbers “failed to suggest that anything unique was occurring in the workplace,” according to the St. Louis Fed. Computers didn’t bend the trend lines for decades. As economist Robert Solow said, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

Because most of us aren’t farmers, we have a hard time seeing the GMO age at all. But US farmers can see it. Farmers aren’t backward dupes who are easily tricked into buying unnecessary technologies. These days, farmers are skeptical and tech-savvy. Many have multiple degrees. They often test yields and pest resistance by planting half a field with one kind of seed and half with another. They clearly think they’re getting something valuable when they pay the extra money for GMOs. Both farmers interviewed in the Times piece — one in France and one in South Carolina — said they thought GMOs were helpful.

One last point: The New York Times story treats GMOs as a single entity to be accepted or rejected. The main thrust of that National Academy report was to suggest that we should stop treating GMOs as a monolith and assess each crop on its merits. It’s not clear that non-GMOs are better: Europe’s rejection of genetic engineering has led to a surge in crops bred via mutagenesis — which has a higher likelihood of generating genetic unknowns — as well as non-GMO crops bred to work with herbicides. Even if we decide that genetic engineering isn’t worth the risks, we’ll face risks in other forms of breeding.

And GMOs really aren’t all associated with industrial farming. The disease-resistant papaya is a wonderful innovation. The insect-resistant eggplant seems to be reducing pesticide use in Bangladesh. This banana, this cassava, and this rice could all truly improve the lives of small farmers if those new crops make it over the technical and political hurdles.

I agree with the Times’s milder point — herbicide-tolerant soy isn’t going to be the key to saving the world. I’ve written that in the grand scheme of things, GMOs don’t matter. If we decide it’s just too culturally fraught to accept genetic modification, we can survive without it — in the same way that we’d survive without computers. We’d figure something else out!

But it would be a shame if we on the liberal coasts decided the technology was useless just because we have a hard time seeing the benefits that are clear to Midwestern farmers. Zoom out far enough, and you’ll eventually reach a point where all human effort barely makes a blip. That’s fine — it’s always useful to step back and look at the big picture.

But if we want to figure how to make our food system more equitable and sustainable, we’re also going to have to zoom in on the realities of agriculture on the ground.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Originally published on Grist.

When the news started to spread about a plan to release genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys, it seemed laughable. The idea was to release hordes of engineered male mosquitoes that would mate with the disease-carrying females and cause them to produce non-viable eggs. The average Facebook post on this was something like: “LOL, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

I don’t see that reaction much anymore. A poll out this week found that 60 percent of Florida residents support tweaking mosquitoes’ genes to fight diseases, while 30 percent opposed. This isn’t statistical noise: Polls are consistently finding that big majorities of Americans support the idea. Conventional wisdom has been flipped on its head. Disdain has morphed into support.

What happened? In a word, Zika. It was the accumulation of those pictures of babies with Zika-related microcephaly, the news that Zika-carrying mosquitoes are buzzing around Miami, and the realization that climate change will usher the disease farther north.

This is a perfect demonstration of the way humans, those peculiar creatures, grapple with risk. There’s a principle at work here that helps explain why we reject some things as being too risky and embrace others. We shrug off the suspicion of cellphone radiation but worry about genetically modified foods, even though neither has any demonstrated harm. We fret about nuclear accidents but don’t think twice about people driving cars through our neighborhoods, even though a total of three people have been killed by nuclear power in the United States, while100 people are killed in car accidents every day.

This can all be explained by what I’ll call, a bit grandly, the self-centeredness principle of risk perception. I’m not condemning this mode of reasoning by using the pejorative term self-centered, just observing that our intuitions about risk are informed by calculations centered on ourselves, not centered on, say, humanity or the planet. The benefits of any change are distributed unevenly and when the benefits are centered mostly on others, or diffused among many, it’s easy for me embrace a scary, sci-fi scenario as a reason for opposition. But if it becomes clear that I stand to benefit, I’ll want to know how likely those scenarios really are; I’ll weigh the pluses and minuses of change.

You can see how this plays out with climate change. The benefits of cutting carbon are diffuse — they go mostly to unborn generations. So if I’m a conservative, predisposed to dismiss climate science, the self-centeredness principle makes it irrational for me to consider the evidence. I’m unlikely to see any meaningful benefit, reading voluminous scientific reports is hard, and changing my mind would make me a villain to my friends.

Or take GMOs. Farmers and seed companies reap most of the benefits. The rest of us get lower food prices — but that benefit is spread so thin that most of us haven’t noticed. Therefore the risks don’t have to be probable, or even plausible, for us to balk. You want to put something new in my food that doesn’t directly benefit me? Hells no. You can line up all the scientists, carrying all the authoritative data you want, but again, I have little incentive to read it.

It’s another story when you see the benefits. Mobile phones are so clearly beneficial that people can’t stop using them, even when they really should — like, when accelerating into an intersection. The outrage over the use of genetic modification to make plants for farmers doesn’t extend to the use of genetic modification to make medicines for us.

Follow the GM mosquito story and you can watch American perspectives do a 180 as we begin to see benefits for ourselves. Last year, a survey of people in Key West found that 58 percent opposed using them to control Zika, whereas, the latest poll found that 30 percent of Floridians were opposed. That’s not exactly comparing apples to apples (all Floridians don’t live in Key West) — but it does suggests a shift. The real test will come in November when residents of the Florida Keys vote on releasing the mosquitoes. That vote will tell us if the people of Key West have gone from feeling comfortable in the status quo, where experimenting with a new technology looks like an unacceptable risk, to feeling uncomfortably itchy and ready to consider something new.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

Originally published on Grist.

If there’s any hope of preventing California from shriveling into a parched wasteland, the state will have to figure out some simple things first. Namely, how much water it has and where it’s all going.

Shockingly, California isn’t tracking much of its water. It’s like a business that’s opted to fire the accountants and operate under the honor system, using an abacus and semi-annual estimates from middle managers. A new report from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, known as PPIC, says that the state’s five-year drought has exposed “serious gaps and fragmentation.”

California has the world’s sixth-largest largest economy (just ahead of France), and it runs on water. But unless it settles upon some sensible way of fixing its accounting for water, the state will only be useful for shooting remakes of Dune and Mad Max.

Other states are far ahead it comes to managing water, but the climate demands that California sprint to the front of the pack. The PPIC report shows what must be done. If the state manages to get this right, there’s hope for the rest of the brittle West. I’ve boiled these problems and solutions down to a few main points.

Problem: No one really knows how much water there is, or where it goes

Only about a third of California’s farm wells have meters measuring how much they are pumping. And when a farmer opens a weir gate to flood a lettuce field, for instance, that’s almost always unmetered.

The state isn’t monitoring a lot of important small streams, and it’s not pulling the riverflow data together at the basin level. You need that data to figure out how to restrict water and protect fish.

What’s being done: A new law says that people taking water from rivers have to measure their flow each month and report the data every year — which still is ridiculously old fashioned. A strong new groundwater law requires local managers to make sure people aren’t depleting aquifers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean those managers will ask people to start installing meters on their pumps.

What should be done: The state should measure the flow from water diversions and wells in real time. It should also measure how much water goes back into rivers, or seeps into the ground after it’s used.

Problem: Crazy old laws

California has attached the right to use water to certain properties. Buy this land you also buy the water right. But if you own a water right that was established before 1914, no one really knows how much water you are entitled to have. There’s another form of water claim, called riparian rights, that isn’t limited to any specific volume. That makes it nearly impossible for state officials to figure out how much you will take, and how much they can ask you to cut back.

The water laws in California are a contradictory muddle and any dispute can turn into decade of litigation — just the opposite of the nimble responsiveness California needs to deal with drought.

What’s being done: Nothing.

What should be done: Clean up the laws to clarify how much water these senior claims get, and empower one authority to act as a referee for disputes.

Problem: The environment is getting screwed

California doesn’t know how much water is required in every ecosystem before fish, birds, and the other species begin to die off catastrophically. As a result, these species are reeling. The drought may have killed the last of the Muir Woods coho salmon last year, and the silvery blue delta smelt is now functionally extinct. In 2015, the number of breeding waterfowl dropped to 46 percent below the long-term average thanks to the drought.

What’s being done: State officials are in the early stages of developing flow temperature and water-quality requirements for some of the important waterways without these standards.

What should be done: It’s not enough for California to know how much water its ecosystems need — the state also has to provide it. In extreme cases, the state can simply take the water from those who hold the rights, but the PPIC report also suggests setting aside money to buy water for environmental uses.

Problem: Water markets don’t work

Water markets could help in future droughts by diverting water from places that have plenty to places in need.

What’s being done: California already has a functioning water market, but it’s encumbered by red tape. There are legislative proposals in the statehouse that could make the market work a little better.

What should be done: California should clean up its complicated rules and build a simple online system for trading water like the one Australia has. To make that work, though, the state would have to get all the other accounting right. You can’t have a market if no one is counting the currency.

Grist is a nonprofit news site that uses humor to shine a light on big green issues. Get their email newsletter here, and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.