Growing knowledge and healthy food

Oxford student Gratia Sullivan unearths a bunch of radishes destined for the campus kitchens and community consumers. Photo by Kay Hinton.

From Emory Magazine

As an undergraduate biology major at Clemson University, Daniel Parson recognized the disconnect between environmental sustainability and traditional agriculture. He went on to get a masters degree in plant and environmental science from Clemson and spent more than a dozen years working in organic farming in Georgia and South Carolina.

"We look at nature as wilderness, but we also need things from nature and we need to learn how to get them without destroying it," says Parson.

He joined Emory's Oxford campus in 2014 to run the Oxford Organic Farm, an 11-acre piece of land that provides produce for the university's dining halls and farmers markets and unique learning opportunities for students.

"We try to match the seasons with when students are on campus so our work-student students who are here every day have the best experience possible and so we can work with faculty to connect course curriculum to the farm," says Parson, whose official title is farmer-educator. "For economics classes I might talk about how we set prices and interact with markets, but for other classes I may just be talking about the experiences I've had and how that connects with what they are discussing in class."

Click here to read more.

Mandatory state policies work best to curb power plant emissions, study finds

“Due to the current void in national leadership on the issue of climate change, efforts at the state and local level are more important than ever,” says Eri Saikawa, an assistant professor of Environmental Sciences. Saikawa is part of an Emory delegation to the U.N. Climate Change Conference talks in Bonn, Germany, which includes two faculty and 12 students.

By Carol Clark

U.S. state policies aimed at mitigating power plant emissions vary widely in effectiveness, finds a new study by researchers at Emory University.

Nature Climate Change published the analysis, which shows that policies with mandatory compliance are associated with the largest reductions in power plant emissions.

“Based on the results of our study, we recommend that states adopt a policy of mandatory greenhouse gas emissions registry and reporting for power plants,” says Eri Saikawa, an assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences. “We also found a significant impact in states that adopt public benefit funds aimed at energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. These two policies not only are effective in reducing power-plant emission levels but also emissions intensity.” 

Saikawa, an expert in public policy and the science of emissions linked to global warming, co-authored the study with Emory graduate Geoff Martin, whose thesis project focused on the topic. Martin received his master’s degree in environmental sciences in May and now works as an energy coordinator for the town of Hartford, Vermont.

Their findings were released today as the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP23) opens in Bonn, Germany. Delegates from around the world are gathering to hammer out details for meeting the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The United States was among the 195 countries that committed to this framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — although the Trump administration has said it plans to withdraw from this historic accord.

“Due to the current void in national leadership on the issue of climate change, efforts at the state and local level are more important than ever,” Saikawa says. “U.S. cities and states need to step up and do what they can.”

Emory is one of 50 universities from around the country to hold official U.N. observer status for COP23. Saikawa and Sheila Tefft, senior lecturer from the Department of English, will be on the ground in Bonn — leading a delegation of 11 Emory undergraduates and one graduate student as part of their co-taught class, “Climate Change and Society.”

The students will report news live from the event on Twitter under the hashtag #EmoryCOP23. They will also post longer reports, podcasts and videos on a web site they created for the event, Climate Talks Emory University.

Global atmospheric CO2 levels increased at record speed last year, to reach a level not seen for more than three million years, the U.N. warned in a report released last week. The U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment, also released last week, affirmed that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action and detailed how the country is already experiencing more extreme heat and rainfall events, more large wildfires and more flooding due to the warming climate.

About 30 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from the electric power sector. For the Nature Climate Change paper, the researchers started out to review the potential impact of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan — which established the first national carbon pollution standards for power plants. When President Trump took office, and announced plans to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the researchers shifted focus.

They analyzed 17 policies adopted by various states relating to climate and energy. States that adopted a mandatory policy for power plants to register and report greenhouse gas emissions, along with three to four other policies, showed the largest reductions, at an average of 2.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per year.

The second most significant policy involved public benefit funds allotted for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. That policy was associated with a reduction of about 1.5 million tons of CO2 emissions from power plants, when adopted with three to four other policies.

It’s unclear whether one of these single policies was the actual driver of the reduction in emissions, or an indicator that a state takes climate change mitigation seriously and is attacking the issue on many fronts, Saikawa says.

For instance, three states — New York, Connecticut and Oregon — have each adopted both of the top two most effective policies, along with at least eight other policies.

In 2007, China surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases globally. “But the per capita emissions in the United States are more than double that of China,” Saikawa notes.

The Obama administration played a key role in securing the Paris Agreement, to keep global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

“It will be interesting to hear the take of officials from the Trump administration this year,” Saikawa says. “U.S. coalitions from the state and city level are forming and they will likely have a strong presence at side events for COP23,” she adds. “Many groups are working at the local level around the world to try to meet the goal of the Paris Agreement.”

Emory is co-hosting an event on Thursday, November 16 at COP23, focused on ways to mitigate climate change impacts in the developing world. Saikawa will appear on a panel, along with John Seydel, director of sustainability for the city of Atlanta.

“We’ll be discussing how efforts at the city and state level in the United States might be replicated in other parts of the world,” Saikawa says.

This marks the third year in a row that Emory has sent a delegation to the U.N. climate talks.

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The growing role of farming and nitrous oxide in climate change

Evolutionary ecology could benefit beekeepers battling diseases

An electron micrograph shows a Verroa destructor mite (right) on an adult honeybee host. The parasitic Varroa mite and the numerous viruses it carries are considered the primary causes of honeybee colony losses worldwide. (USDA photo) 

By Carol Clark

Some commercial beekeeping practices may harm honeybees more than help them, scientists warn in a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

“Western honeybees — the most important pollinators for U.S. food crops — are facing unprecedented declines, and diseases are a key driver,” says Berry Brosi, an evolutionary biologist at Emory University and a lead author of the review paper. “The way commercial operations are managing honeybees might actually generate more damaging parasites and pathogens by creating selection pressure for higher virulence.”

The paper draws on scientific studies to recommend ways to reduce disease impacts, such as limiting the mixing of bees between colonies and supporting natural bee behaviors that provide disease resistance. The paper also highlights honeybee management practices in need of more research. 

During the past 15 years, ecological and evolutionary approaches have changed how scientists tackle problems of infectious diseases among humans, wildlife and livestock. “This change in thinking hasn’t sunk in with the beekeeping field yet,” says Emory evolutionary biologist Jaap de Roode, co-lead author of the paper. “We wanted to outline scientific approaches to help understand some of the current problems facing beekeepers, along with potential control measures.”

Co-authors of the paper include Keith Delaplane, an entomologist at the University of Georgia, and Michael Boots, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Managed honeybees are important to the production of 39 of the 57 leading crops used for human consumption, including fruits, nuts, seeds and vegetables. In recent years, however, managed honeybee colonies have declined at the rate of more than one million per year, representing annual losses between 30 and 40 percent.

Two drone pupae of the Western honeybee infected with Varroa mites. (Photo by Waugsberg via Wikipedia Commons.)

While pesticides and land-use changes are factors involved in these losses, parasites are a primary driver — especially the aptly named Varroa destructor. The parasitic Varroa mite and the numerous viruses it carries are considered the primary causes of honeybee colony losses worldwide.

Varroa mites are native to Asia, where the Eastern honeybee species co-evolved with them before humans began managing bee colonies on commercial scales. As a result of this co-evolution, the Eastern honeybee developed behaviors — such as intensive mutual grooming — that reduce the mites’ negative impacts.

The Western honeybee species of the United States and Europe, however, has remained relatively defenseless against the mites, which spread to the United States during the late 1970s and 1980s. The mites suck the blood of the bees and reduce their immunity. Even more potentially destructive, however, are the multiple viruses the mites transmit through their saliva. Deformed-wing virus, for instance, can cripple a honeybee’s flying ability and is associated with high bee larval mortality.

Following are some of the potential solutions, in need of further study, outlined in the Nature Ecology & Evolution paper.

Reduce mixing of colonies: A common practice at beekeeping apiaries is to move combs containing brood — eggs and developing worker bees — between colonies. While the practice is meant to equalize colony strength, it can also spread parasites and pathogens.

Colonies are also mixed at regional and national scales. For instance, more than half of all honeybees in the country are involved in almond pollination in California. “For a lot of beekeeping operations, trucking their bees to California for almond pollination is how they make ends meet,” Brosi says. “It’s like the Christmas season for retailers.”

Pollination brokers set up contracts for individual beekeepers on particular almond farms. “If the brokers separated individual beekeeping operations beyond the distance that the average honeybee forages, that could potentially help reduce the mixing of bees and the rate of pathogen transmission between the operations,” Brosi says.

Varroa destructor (USDA)

Improve parasite clearance: Most means of dealing with Varroa mites focus on reducing their numbers in a colony rather than wiping them out, as the mites are developing increased resistance to some of the chemicals used to kill them. Such incomplete treatments increase natural selection for stronger, more virulent parasites. Further compounding the problem is that large commercial beekeeping operations may have tens of thousands of colonies, kept in close quarters.

“In a natural setting of an isolated bee colony living in a tree, a parasite that kills off the colony has nowhere to go,” de Roode explains. “But in an apiary with many other colonies nearby, the cost of parasite virulence goes way down.”

Allow sickened colonies to die out: Keeping bees infected with parasites and viruses alive through multiple interventions dilutes natural selection for disease resistance among the bees. In contrast, letting infections take their course in a colony and using the surviving bees for stock could lead to more resistant bees with fewer disease problems.

Support behavioral resistance: Beekeepers tend to select for bees that are more convenient to manage, but may have behavioral deficiencies that make them less fit. Some honeybees mix their saliva and beeswax with tree resin to form what is known as propolis, or bee glue, to seal holes and cracks in their hives. Studies have also shown that propolis helps keep diseases and parasites from entering the hive and inhibits the growth of fungi, bacteria and mites.

“Propolis is sticky. That annoys beekeepers trying to open hives and separate the components so they try to breed out this behavior,” de Roode says.

The paper concedes that commercial beekeeping operations face major challenges to shift to health management practices rooted in fundamental principles of evolution and ecology.

“Beekeeping is a tough way to make a living, because it operates on really thin margins,” Brosi says. “Even if there are no simple solutions, it’s important to make beekeepers aware of how their practices may affect bees in the long term. And we want researchers to contribute scientific understanding that translates into profitable and sustainable practices for beekeeping.”

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The top 10 policies needed now to protect pollinators

Georgia Climate Project creates state 'climate research roadmap'

Environmental sciences instructor Daniel Rochberg, chief strategy officer for Climate@Emory, says the Georgia Climate Research Roadmap aims to create "Georgia's Top 40," a set of targeted research questions to help the state understand and address climate change. (Emory Photo/Video)

By Kimber Williams
Emory Report

Scientists, researchers and environmental experts from across the state convened at Emory last week to draft the “Georgia Climate Research Roadmap” — a set of targeted research questions that could help Georgia better understand and address one of the century’s defining challenges.

The goal of the May 22-23 gathering was to formulate “Georgia’s Top 40,” key climate research questions that could eventually aid decision-making and planning for Georgia policymakers, scientists, communities and service organizations.

An initiative of the Georgia Climate Project, the roadmap was a response to the fact that communities across Georgia are already exploring strategies to address the impact of climate change, says Daniel Rochberg, chief strategy officer for the Climate@Emory initiative and an instructor in the Rollins School of Public Health and Emory College of Arts and Sciences, where he focuses on climate change and sustainable development.

Some Georgia communities are actively assessing vulnerabilities and strategies to build resilience to potential climate change impact, while others are developing technologies and policies to begin reducing emissions, according to Rochberg, who has also worked for the U.S. State Department as special assistant to the lead U.S. climate negotiators under presidents Bush and Obama.

“To inform this work, decision-makers at all levels need credible and relevant information from across the natural, applied and social sciences,” says Murray Rudd, an associate professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences and member of the climate research roadmap steering committee. “The Georgia Climate Research Roadmap seeks to fulfill this need by identifying the key research questions that, if answered, can lay the groundwork for the state and its residents to take effective, science-based climate action,” he says.

Read the full story in Emory Report.

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How will the shifting political winds affect U.S. climate policy?

How will the shifting political winds affect U.S. climate policy?

Emory seniors Emily Li (left) and Jennie Sun were part of an Emory delegation to Marrakech, Morocco, in November for a U.N. Climate Change Conference. Shortly after the event began, Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, won the U.S. presidential election. “We need to think about how to move forward," Li says, "because focusing on the negatives is ultimately not going to be useful.”

By Carol Clark

“No U.S. president has been as vocal about climate change, or as focused on mitigating it, as Barack Obama,” says Eri Saikawa, an assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences and an expert in public policy and the science of emissions linked to global warming.

President-elect Donald Trump, however, has repeatedly called climate change a hoax.

“The concern about how Trump will deal with climate change is worldwide,” Saikawa says. “We all share the same atmosphere and the United States is a leading emitter of greenhouse gases. The impacts of global warming will affect the entire planet.”

Among Obama’s initiatives is the U.S. Clean Power Plan – which established the first national carbon pollution standards for power plants. U.S. leadership was also instrumental in the historic Paris Agreement to combat climate change. The 2015 agreement, organized by the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), brought more than 190 countries together to commit to a framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Paris Agreement is an amazing achievement, and there was so much momentum and excitement surrounding it,” Saikawa says.

On November 7, delegates from around the world gathered in Marrakech, Morocco, to hammer out details resulting from the Paris Agreement. Saikawa headed a 10-member Emory delegation to Marrakech for the two-week event, known as the U.N. 22nd Conference of the Parties (COP 22). (Emory, one of the few universities approved as an official U.N. observer by the COP, also sent a delegation to the Paris talks last year.)

Emory’s Marrakech delegation included six students and three staff members. They split into two teams, with half participating at COP 22 during the first week and the other half during the second. 

Emory delegates on the ground in Marrakech, including senior Emily Li (front left), and, from upper left: Kate Lee (clinical fellow and staff attorney for the Turner Environmental Law Clinic), sophomore Maya Bornstein, senior Jennie Sun and Tyler Stern (an Emory grad who is now a Residence Life Fellow).

Emily Li, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and English, was there when the U.S. presidential election results were announced.

“Everyone was in shock,” Li says, of the surprise victory by Trump. “You could tell which delegates were from the U.S. because they just looked so tired that morning. The U.S. press office was total chaos.”

Li also struggled to take in the turn of events. “It was discouraging at first,” she says. “I’m really passionate about mitigating climate change and to have a national leader who doesn’t recognize it as an important issue is really disheartening.”

During the election campaign, Trump threatened to ax the Clean Power Plan and to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. After winning, Trump seemed to soften his stance somewhat, saying he would keep an “open mind” about the agreement. But he tapped Myron Ebell, a well-known climate-science denier, to lead his administration’s revamping of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Li summed up the post-election mood at COP 22 in a blog post called “Talking about the Elephant in the Room.” You can read it, along with posts by other members of the Emory delegation, on the Emory Climate Organization (ECO) web site, founded by students focused on understanding climate change.

The mood at COP 22 soon shifted from shock to a sense of renewed urgency. “A lot of the younger delegates, in particular, were saying how the Trump administration could help bring people together and motivate more engagement and action,” Li says. “We need to think about how to move forward because focusing on the negatives is ultimately not going to be useful.”

Local initiatives are more important than ever, she noted. For her senior thesis in environmental sciences, Li is zeroing in on ways that climate change may affect public health in Atlanta. “I’m doing a lot of research, looking at different studies to learn the scientific consensus. I’m also interviewing policy makers and people affected by events like the drought and the recent wildfires,” she says.

She plans to translate the science into engaging stories that she will post to a public web site, along with possible solutions. “I want to help communicate the direct effects of climate change on public health in Atlanta, so people living here can better understand the potential impact on themselves and their children,” Li explains. “I think that the more local an issue is, the more people tend to care about it.”

Geoff Martin, who is working on a master degree in environmental sciences, participated in the second week of COP 22. “In the month leading up to Morocco, I was really excited,” he recalls. “The Paris Agreement had finally gotten things moving in the right direction and I was going to this great event, COP 22, the first step towards implementation.”

The election results took the wind out of his sails, but only momentarily. “Being at the conference helped me regain my perspective,” Martin says. “People from all different levels and areas – government officials, those from the private sector and from non-governmental agencies – found reasons to still be hopeful.”

One of the major take-home messages for him is that the international community is going to continue to move forward in combating climate change, with or without the United States.

Another theme he heard repeatedly was that governing is a lot different from campaigning. “Trump will likely find that many of the things he said he was going to do during his campaign, like dismantle the EPA and cancel the Paris Agreement, may be easier said than done,” Martin says.

He also draws hope from the fact that the energy market is shifting. “The price of renewable energy keeps going down, making it increasingly competitive with fossil fuels in many places,” he says. “Regardless of government policy, the market could continue to drive a transition towards renewable energy.”

Martin is at work on a thesis, focused on analyzing the effectiveness of state-level climate and energy policies. He agrees with Li that the election of Trump could serve as a wake-up call for those concerned about climate change to take action at the local level, and not wait for the federal government to take the lead.

“Lots of talks at COP 22 were focused on sub-national efforts to mitigate climate change, not just in the United States, but throughout the world,” Martin says. He cites the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a successful cap-and-trade program for the power sector comprising nine U.S. states in the northeast.

The recent victory by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to block the $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline is another hopeful sign, Martin says. “Their victory was entirely a result of grassroots activism,” he says. “It shows how, if people really care about an issue and come out to protest and pressure government officials, they can make a difference.”

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Chimpanzees choose cooperation over competition

Video shows chimpanzee cooperation task. All chimpanzees must manipulate the handles at the same time in order for the food to be delivered. Video from Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

From Woodruff Health Sciences Center:

When given a choice between cooperating or competing, chimpanzees choose to cooperate five times more frequently, Yerkes National Primate Research Center researchers have found. This, the researchers say, challenges the perceptions humans are unique in our ability to cooperate and chimpanzees are overly competitive, and suggests the roots of human cooperation are shared with other primates.

The study results are reported in this week’s early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To determine if chimpanzees possess the same ability humans have to overcome competition, the researchers set up a cooperative task that closely mimicked chimpanzee natural conditions, for example, providing the 11 great apes that voluntarily participated in this study with an open choice to select cooperation partners and giving them plenty of ways to compete. Working beside the chimpanzees’ grassy outdoor enclosure at the Yerkes Research Center Field Station, the researchers gave the great apes thousands of opportunities to pull cooperatively at an apparatus filled with rewards. In half of the test sessions, two chimpanzees needed to participate to succeed, and in the other half, three chimpanzees were needed.

While the set up provided ample opportunities for competition, aggression and freeloading, the chimpanzees overwhelmingly performed cooperative acts – 3,565 times across 94 hour-long test sessions.

Read more about the study.

Measuring happiness and well-being across cultures and incomes

Emory anthropologist Peter Little visits with a family in Baringo, Kenya. He is studying low-income communities to understand the relationship between material well-being and reports of overall well-being.

By April Hunt, Emory Report

How is it that people living in rural, poor areas of the globe can report being happier than those who live in the relative affluence of the United States?

Emory anthropologist Peter Little and philosopher Mark Risjord aim to answer that question as part of a team that has been awarded a “Happiness and Well-Being” grant. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation and St. Louis University, their work is part of a larger research program in the growing field of well-being.

“The idea is to compare the subjective meaning of the good life and see if that affects the relationship between material well-being and reports of happiness and overall well-being,” says Little, the project’s principal investigator.

The project, which includes economist Workneh Negatu of Addis Ababa University, will study two specific low-income communities: South Wollo, Ethiopia, and Baringo, Kenya.

Little has long studied the politics, economy and ecology of eastern Africa. When he was completing his dissertation in 1983, there was only one college graduate in the Chamus Maasai community of Baringo, Kenya, where he studied. Since then, there have been significant social changes and there are now dozens of college graduates among the Maasai-related pastoralists population, he says.

That makes that area in Kenya a good place to understand relative well-being and poverty where, as in the U.S., people are poor relative to their neighbors. South Wollo, by contrast, remains populated by those in absolute poverty. A bad harvest there, or lost jobs, still can lead to dire hardships and even starvation.

The United Nations’ annual World Happiness Report this year ranked Ethiopia a dismal 115 out of 147 countries according to citizens’ happiness levels. The United States ranked 13th in the analysis, which looked at factors such as life expectancy, health and freedom from corruption in government and business.

Yet Ethiopia ranked 94th on the 2012 Happiness Index, the most recent available from the New Economics Foundation. The United States ranked 105th in that study, which included a factor called “life satisfaction.”

Kenya, likewise, ranked poorly in the U.N. report, at 122nd, but also bested the United States with a rank of 98 on the Happiness Index.

“This is huge for public policy,” Little says. “Kenya’s therapy industry is starting to emerge, because people’s expectations of what the good life is have changed drastically, and they’re not meeting those expectations.”

Risjord’s role will be to help provide a philosophical framework for the qualitative study. In his section of the project proposal, Risjord wrote that past study of well-being seems to take sides on longstanding philosophical disputes on whether it is a universal sense or different in different contexts.

Risjord, who is teaching philosophy of science in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in southern India as part of the Emory-Tibet Sciences Initiative, says his role will be to understand how the feeling varies with context based on historical, cultural and economic data gathered in both Ethiopia and Kenya.

“The philosophical contribution of this project will be to develop a more robust and articulate conception of how human well-being varies with social, economic and environmental context,” Risjord writes in his proposal section.

The study will become part of the larger Happiness and Well-Being project at St. Louis University, which is designed to promote dialogue and collaboration among well-being researchers across a broad range of disciplines. Little, whose proposal was one of just 21 funded from a pool of 300, says he hopes to begin travel under the $248,000 grant by August.

He will build upon that work back in Atlanta, too. Long-term, he plans to get students to look at the Ethiopian diaspora here, to gauge if their sense of well-being changes when they arrive in the U.S.

“To me, it’s really exciting to do cultural interpretations of well-being and poverty,” Little says. “It’s a fascinating way to look at culture.”

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Conspicuous consumption may drive fertility down

"As competition becomes more focused on social climbing, as opposed to just putting food on the table, people invest more in material goods and achieving social status, and that affects how many children they have," says anthropologist Paul Hooper.

By Carol Clark

Competition for social status may be an important driver of lower fertility in the modern world, suggests a new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

“The areas were we see the greatest declines in fertility are areas with modern labor markets that have intense competition for jobs and an overwhelming diversity of consumer goods available to signal well-being and social status,” says senior author Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University. “The fact that many countries today have so much social inequality – which makes status competition more intense – may be an important part of the explanation.”

The study authors developed a mathematical model showing that their argument is plausible from a biological point of view.

Across the globe, from the United States to the United Kingdom to India, fertility has gone down as inequality and the cost of achieving social status has gone up. “Our model shows that as competition becomes more focused on social climbing, as opposed to just putting food on the table, people invest more in material goods and achieving social status, and that affects how many children they have,” Hooper says.

Factors such as lower child mortality rates, more access to birth control and the choice to delay childbirth to get a higher education are also associated with declining fertility. “While these factors are very important they are insufficient to explain the drops in family sizes that we are seeing,” Hooper says.

In addition to Hooper, the study authors include anthropologists Mary Shenk, from the University of Missouri, and Hillard Kaplan, from the University of New Mexico. They are pioneers in an emerging field of “computational anthropology,” which blends methods from biology, economics, computer science and physics to answer fundamental questions about human behavior.

The study is featured in a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, devoted to how evolutionary approaches can help solve the puzzle of why human fertility varies substantially.

Hooper first became intrigued by variability in human fertility while researching the Tsimane indigenous people of Bolivian Amazonia. The Tsimane (pronounced chee-mahn-AY in Spanish) are foragers and horticulturalists who live in small, isolated communities along the Maniqui River in the Amazonian rainforest.

“In a hunter-gatherer society, parents have a limited number of things available to invest in: Food, clothing and shelter,” Hooper says. “The average Tsimane family has nine children and they can provide these basic needs for all of them.”

Hooper noticed a pattern, however, when Tsimane families leave the rainforest and move closer to Spanish-speaking towns where they come into contact with market economies and industrialized goods. “When they start getting earnings for the first time, they spend money on things you wouldn’t really expect, like an expensive wristwatch or a nylon backpack for a child attending school, instead of sending them with a traditional woven bag,” Hooper says. “I got the impression that these things were largely symbolic of their social status and competence.”

The Tsimane family size also tends to drop when they move closer to town, he adds: From eight or nine children in remote villages, to five or six in villages near town, to three to four in the town itself. 

Hooper hypothesizes that a similar pattern plays out as societies develop from mainly agrarian to more urban and affluent. “In my grandparents day, it took a lot less investment to be respectable,” he says. “It was important to have a set of good clothes for church on Sunday but you could let the kids run around barefoot for the rest of the week.”

Today, however, keeping up with the Jones has become much more complicated – and expensive. 

“The human species is highly social and, as a result, we appear to have an ingrained desire for social standing,” Hooper says. “The problem is that our brains evolved in a radically different environment from that of the modern world. Evolution didn’t necessarily train us very well for the almost infinite size of our communities, the anonymity of many of our interactions and the vast numbers of goods that we can use to signal our status. Our evolved psychology may be misfiring and causing us to over invest in social standing.”

Related:
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Image: Thinkstockphoto.com

Pollinators vital to food supply facing extinction, U.N. report warns

“I hope this report will raise the visibility of this issue globally and help spur more efforts to reverse the trend of pollinator declines,” says Emory biologist Berry Brosi, shown tending his research hive. (Bryan Meltz, Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

A growing number of species key to the world’s food supply, including 40 percent of invertebrate pollinators, are headed towards extinction, warns a new United Nations report – the first global assessment of pollinators.

“If pollinator declines continue at this rate it will have serious implications not just for human food security and economics but also for biodiversity and the health of ecosystems in general,” says Berry Brosi, an assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences and one of the lead authors of the report.

Brosi, a biologist and ecologist whose research focuses on both managed honeybees and wild bees, was among 77 international experts who worked on the pollinator assessment for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity Ecosystem Services (IPBES). They spent two years evaluating information from more than 3,000 scientific papers, as well as indigenous and local knowledge from more than 60 locations around the world. The summary of the report will be posted online February 29.

Seventy-five percent of the world’s food crops depend on pollination by at least one of the 20,000 species of pollinators, including bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles, birds, bats and other vertebrates. And yet, the report warns, more than 40 percent of invertebrate pollinator species, particularly bees and butterflies, face extinction. And 16 percent of vertebrate pollinators are under threat.

“When we lose even one pollinator species from an ecosystem, it can degrade the functioning of the system overall,” Brosi says. “Studies have shown this relationship between biodiversity of pollinators and both agricultural productivity and plant reproduction in wild ecosystems.”

The report cites diverse pressures on pollinators, many of them human-made, including habitat loss; use of pesticides such as neonicotinoid insecticides; parasites and pathogens; and global warming.

“Pollinators are important to many of the foods that are key sources of the vitamins and minerals in our diets, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds,” Brosi says. “Nutritionally, the pollinator declines will likely have the biggest impact on the poorest people of the world.”

Many crops also represent an important source of income in developing countries, such as coffee and cocoa.

The report found that the annual total value of global crops directly affected by pollinators is between $235 billion and $577 billion.

“Pollinator decline is a multi-faceted issue with many drivers contributing to it,” Brosi says. “We can’t just fix one thing and have the problem go away.”

The report provides a portfolio of ways to reduce the risk to pollinators, including the promotion of sustainable agriculture, reducing pesticide use and maintaining patches of natural habitat amid agricultural fields.

“I hope this report will raise the visibility of this issue globally and help spur more efforts to reverse the trend of pollinator declines,” Brosi says. “We need a global-scale effort and coordination among different countries and regions.”

The global assessment follows several calls for action at a national level, including the National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honeybees and Other Pollinators launched last year by President Obama.

Some additional findings by the global assessment:

The volume of agricultural production dependent on animal pollination has increased by 300 percent during the past 50 years.

Nearly 90 percent of all wild flowering plants depend at least to some extent on animal pollination.

In addition to food crops, pollinators contribute to crops that provide biofuels (canola and palm oils), fibers (cotton), medicines, forage for livestock and construction materials.

Pollinators, especially bees, have also played a role throughout history as inspirations for art, music, religion and technology. Sacred passages about bees occur in all major world religions.

Related:
Biologist Berry Brosi on Obama's 'plan bee'
Bees 'betray' their flowers when pollinator species decline

Reporting from Paris: Student updates on COP21

Among the 10 undergraduates representing Emory at COP21 are, from left: Savannah Miller, Naomi Maisel, Taylor McNair, Mae Bowen and Siyue Zong.

“In a basement auditorium in a quiet Parisian neighborhood, writer Naomi Klein held an event to talk about the ‘Leap Manifesto: A Call for a Canada Based on Caring for the Earth and One Another,’” reports Emory junior Clara Perez from the scene.

“Climate change, Klein said, is the catalyst to transformative change in all kinds of struggles – indigenous, class, anti-racism, among many others. She called for addressing climate change in a way that is ‘based on justice and redressing historical wrongs.’”

Now midway through a two-week trip to Paris, a delegation of Emory undergraduates are providing real-time updates on the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) and related events.

On the web site they’ve created, the students have posted photos of a demonstration that happened shortly after they landed in Paris. And they are gathering “snapshot” bios of other attendees, under the heading “Humans of COP21.”

Senior Taylor McNair writes: “From a business perspective, carbon pricing at COP21 is arguably the most exciting news to emerge from the first few days of the conference.”

Senior Mae Bowen was intrigued by an event at the Kedge Business School in Paris. Jean-Christophe Carteron presented a Sustainability Literacy Test he developed as a tool for universities and corporations to assess and develop the knowledge of their community members.

“While ‘sustainability’ is still a complicated term,” Bowen writes, “the goals of the Sustainability Literacy Test are admirable and a step in the right direction. No business or government leader should be able to claim ignorance when making decisions that negatively affect the future of our planet and humanity.”

Watch the web site for daily updates and follow the students’ updates on Twitter: @EmoryinParis.

And check out the podcasts that the students created as part of the Emory course “Paris is an Explanation: Understanding Climate Change at the 2015 United Nations Meeting in France.”

Related:
Peachtree to Paris: Emory delegation headed to U.N. climate talks

Peachtree to Paris: Emory delegation headed to U.N. climate talks

On a recent Saturday, 30 students represented a country, or block of countries, to simulate the U.N. talks. Naomi Maisel, right, made the case for India. "You have to rethink your reality based on all the countries involved and figure out how to make it work," she says. (Beckysteinphotography.com)

By Carol Clark

More than 40,000 people from around the world are expected to descend on Paris, France, from November 30 to December 11, for what many see as the best chance yet for a universal climate agreement. The goal of the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) is to keep global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Everyone from President Obama to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will be on the ground in Paris for high-stakes conversations about the fate of the planet. Ten Emory undergraduates and two faculty are also joining the historic event with the status of official U.N. observers.

“This is an unprecedented time,” says Taylor McNair, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and business. “People are coming into this conference with a mindset they have never had before. I’m optimistic that there will be some progress coming out of Paris, and that we will see some serious change during the next few years.”

McNair and three other Emory students will actually spend part of COP21 inside the main hall where delegates from 195 countries will negotiate reductions of their greenhouse gas emissions. And all 10 of the students will be gathering information from the milieu of related conferences, demonstrations, exhibits and informal discussions that will be humming around the main COP21 meeting.

The students will post photos and dispatches on a special web site they are creating for the event (http://climate.emorydomains.org), through the Emory Writing Program's Domain of One's Own. And they will use social media to further connect Emory and the Atlanta community to what’s happening in Paris, as it happens. You can follow their conversations on their Twitter handle @EmoryinParis, and via their hash tag: #PeachtreeToParis. Senior Tyler Stern is helping develop the team's social media platforms, which also include Instagram (EmoryParis15) and Snapchat (EmoryInParis).

After four hours of tense negotiations, students participating in simulated U.N. talks were only able to achieve caps on greenhouse gas emissions for a temperature rise of 3.5 degrees Celsius, short of the 2 degrees goal. 

“Climate change is not an issue that is coming in 100 years. It’s happening now,” says Naomi Maisel, a junior majoring in anthropology who will be making the trip. “We want to convey the sentiments of the people that we meet and give Emory students a sense of how the rest of the world is thinking about and dealing with climate change."

The students plan to also bring back lessons for what everyone can do to get involved. They will help organize an Emory “Climate Week” and a series of COP21 related events on campus in the Spring – including art exhibits, panel discussions and special lectures – in conjunction with the Climate@Emory initiative.

Debating the fate of the planet.

“I’m optimistic that some kind of meaningful deal will be reached in Paris,” says Mae Bowen, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and political science, who is headed for COP21. “But once a deal is made, that’s when the real work starts, making that deal come to fruition.”

The Paris trip is the capstone to a Coalition of the Liberal Arts (CoLA) course, aimed at integrating the liberal arts experience across the humanities and sciences. The course, “Paris is an Explanation: Understanding Climate Change at the 2015 United Nations Meeting in France,” was developed and taught by three faculty: Wesley Longhofer, an expert in organization and management at Goizueta Business School; Eri Saikawa, an expert in climate science in the department of environmental sciences and Rollins School of Public Health; and Sheila Tefft, senior lecturer in the Emory Writing Program. Bowen and another undergraduate, Adam Goldstein, also helped develop the course.

Both Longhofer and Saikawa will accompany the students on the trip to Paris.

Throughout the fall, the students are exploring climate change from environmental, business, media and political perspectives. Saikawa led discussions about the complex atmospheric science surrounding emissions. Longhofer organized mock UN negotiations so that the students could better understand perspectives of the various countries involved. Tefft focused on issues of communications and trained the students in journalistic techniques and technology, including podcasting and social media.

The Emory students have a range of research interests that they plan to hone in on as COP21 is underway. Below are brief bios, and a guide to their plans for Paris.

Taylor McNair

BUSINESS: Taylor McNair is a senior from West Port, Connecticut, majoring in business and environmental sciences. “I have a big interest in renewable energy,” he says. “I’ve had some work experience in that field and it’s helped shape what I think will be the defining challenge of the future: How will we switch from cheap fossil fuels and power our lives and economies with renewable energy?”

He notes that major companies like Google and Facebook have already announced they will be moving toward renewable energy sources for their datasets.

“We need more market-based solutions for addressing climate change,” he says. “It’s beginning to make economic sense to make investments in energy efficiency and renewable fuel sources. I think more people are waking up to the fact that this transition can not only be beneficial from an environmental and health aspect, but also from a financial aspect.”

POLICYMAKING: Mae Bowen is a senior majoring in environmental sciences and political science. Bowen, who is from Panama City, Florida, personally experienced the social and ecological impacts of hurricanes and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Even after the beaches near her home were cleaned and declared safe following the spill, tourists did not return for years due to public perceptions and media coverage.

Mae Bowen

“I was fascinated and frustrated by that,” Bowen says. “I’ve been thinking about the best ways to communicate environmental issues ever since.”

Bowen’s other passion is policymaking. She is a member of the Emory International Relations Association – a team of students that travels to universities across the country to participate in simulations of U.N. negotiations, based on real-world situations and research. While these exercises help Bowen see the challenges of policymaking, they have not made her cynical. “The fact that we have people from different countries and cultures coming together to try and solve a global problem like climate change – that’s kind of awesome,” she says. “I’m just so excited to go to COP21 and get to hear the actual deliberations over the issue I care most about.”

The Paris talks may not achieve the goal of reducing emissions to reach the goal of 2 degrees, “but it’s going to take us forward,” Bowen says. “I’m a big picture person. I would rather have a deal that goes part of the way than to have nothing at all. You have to take things one step at a time.”

Savannah Miller

EMORY AND ATLANTA: Savannah Miller, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and creative writing is focused on climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts at the local level. She is currently an intern for the city of Atlanta, working with the team developing a major climate action plan. “Emory was an early supporter of the Atlanta Better Buildings Challenge,” Miller says. “The university has been a leader in sustainability for years and our efforts keep gaining momentum.”

While at the Paris talks, she will be researching how other communities from around the world are implementing adaptive technologies and strategies for increasing energy efficiency. “One of our biggest goals is to bring back information about environmental policies and communicate them in a way that reaches our generation,” Miller says.

In addition to contributing to the Emory group web site for COP21, Miller has developed her own site, sustainable-directions.com, for communicating environmental issues. Her first post looked at the connections between climate change and recent historic flooding in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.

Naomi Maisel

AGRICULTURE: Naomi Maisel, a junior majoring in anthropology, is researching the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security. “Farmers are starting to see effects faster and more intensely, especially in the developing world,” Maiesel says. “We don’t know if a lot of food systems can withstand more or less rainfall, more or less heat, and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide.”

Maisel contacted a farmer outside of Paris who has agreed to give the students a tour of his farm and explain his experience of climate change.

While growing up in San Diego, Maisel recalls that many discussions about climate change were debates about whether it was happening. “Now, most of the conversations I’m hearing revolve around questions like, how bad is it going to be and what are we doing about it,” she says. “People are finally starting to take it seriously. And they realize that it is not just a science problem. It’s an economic issue, a security issue and a public health issue. Everybody is going to be affected, so everybody needs to be involved.”

Clara Perez, a junior majoring in sociology and sustainability, is focused on how climate change will disproportionately impact lower socio-economic groups.

Caiwei Huang (a junior majoring in interdisciplinary studies and political science) and Siyue Zong (a senior environmental sciences major) both want to follow the crucial negotiations of the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters: The United States and China. (Huang is developing a web site to introduce students to the fundamentals of Chinese politics: thecapitalc.org.)

Samuel Budnyk, a junior majoring in comparative literature and music, is especially interested in communicating to the general public and hopes to write a post a day for the Emory Wheel during the talks.

Adam Goldstein and Mark Leone (both seniors majoring in business) will be focused on gathering information about climate finance – the move toward investing in low-carbon and more resilient economies.

Biologist Berry Brosi on Obama's 'plan bee'

"The fate of bees will affect people very viscerally," says Berry Brosi, shown tending his hive on the roof of Emory's Math and Science Center.

By Carol Clark

President Obama recently launched perhaps the most ambitious national plan ever aimed at protecting insects. The National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honeybees and Other Pollinators calls for an “all hands on deck” approach to slow their alarming declines. “Pollinators are critical to our nation’s economy, food security and environmental health,” notes the plan, prepared by the White House Pollinator Health Task Force.

“It’s an important wake-up call,” says Berry Brosi, an Emory biologist and ecologist whose research encompasses both managed honeybees and wild bees. “It’s past time for us to realize the vital links between biodiversity, our environment and our own well-being. Ultimately, that’s what this national plan is about.”

Honeybee pollination alone is worth more than $15 billion to U.S. agriculture, “providing the backbone to ensuring our diets are plentiful with fruits, nuts and vegetables,” the plan states. “Pollinators, most often honeybees, are responsible for one in every three bites of food we take.”

“This isn’t about saving an exotic animal in a faraway place, like the panda,” Brosi says. “We’re talking about the possibility of not having nuts and fruits for our breakfast, shortages of tomatoes and melons, and rising milk prices due to a lack of alfalfa pollination.”

Bees are important to more than just food crops, he adds. Cotton plants, for example, need pollination to produce the fibers that are a cornerstone of the garment industry.

“The fate of bees will affect people very viscerally,” Brosi says.

Pollinators are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat.

Many pollinators, including bees, birds, butterflies, bats and other animals, are in serious decline in the United States and worldwide. Brosi is one of 75 authors working on a global assessment of pollinators for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

“In some places in China, people are hand-pollinating apple trees because they don’t have enough of an insect workforce to do it,” Brosi says. “Examples like that should be sobering. Pollination is an extremely labor-intensive task that bees are specially evolved to do.”

Currently, about 2,000 commercial U.S. beekeepers manage their bee colonies as “livestock,” traveling across the country to service pollination contracts with farmers and honey producers. Each year, however, the number of bee colonies has gone down even as beekeepers struggle to rebuild them. Since the 1940s, when there were about 5.7 million colonies in the United States, the number of managed colonies has shrunk by nearly half, according to the USDA.

“Wild bee populations are also declining wherever we look, although we don’t have good long-term data,” Brosi says. “Several species of bumble bees, for example, are declining at alarming rates, and we’ve seen the extinction of at least one species in the United States during the last 20 years.”

The reasons for these losses appear to be myriad and complex, ranging from shrinking habitats to parasites, diseases and pesticide use.

Monarchs need milkweed to survive.

The phenomenon of the winter migration of the monarch butterfly, from across the United States to Mexico, is also imperiled. The three lowest overwintering populations of the Eastern monarch on record have occurred during the last 10 years. The all-time low was recorded last winter, when the monarchs occupied just 0.67 hectares, or 10 percent of the habitat in Mexico that they did two decades ago.

Emory evolutionary biologist Jaap de Roode, who runs one of the few labs in the world focused on monarch butterflies, says that most of this decline is due to disappearing habitat, especially the milkweed plants that monarchs feed on as caterpillars. “Preservation of remaining milkweed and restoration of habitat are key to maintaining the spectacular migration of this iconic insect,” de Roode says.

The White House pollinator strategy outlines specific aims and a timeline to achieve them, including:

Reduce honeybee colony losses during the winter to no more than 15 percent within a decade. 

Boost the overwintering population of the Eastern monarchs by 225 million butterflies occupying approximately six hectares (15 acres) of habitat in Mexico by 2020. 

Restore or enhance seven million acres of land for pollinators over the next five years. 

The strategy recommends an additional $20 million in funding for the USDA specifically for pollinator research and an additional $1.5 million for the Environmental Protection Agency’s pesticide research programs.

“It’s great that the strategy has specific goals and recommendations, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough, particularly in the area of pesticides,” Brosi says.

Ninety percent of flowering plants and many other animals, not just humans, depend on pollinators for their survival.

A class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, for example, are widely used in the United States but banned in Europe due to their effect on bees. While neonicotinoids may not kill bees outright, they can have devastating sub-lethal effects, Brosi says. Even minute doses of these pesticides have been found to hamper bees’ learning, memory and navigation skills.

The national pollinator plan calls for an expedited review of the use of neonicotinoids in the United States, to be completed by 2018. “That’s not soon enough,” Brosi says, adding that the plan’s recommendation for $1.5 million for the EPA’s pesticide programs is a drop in the bucket.

“We need to do serious assessments of the effects on pollinators for a wide range of pesticide types,” Brosi says. “We don’t know much about alternatives to neonicotinoids. Farmers could replace them with something even worse.”

Ninety percent of flowering plants and many other animals, not just humans, depend on pollinators for their survival. “There could be a lot of hidden declines occurring in association with declines in pollinators that we won’t pick up on for a long time,” Brosi says. “A lot of trees are long-lived, for example, so if their populations are not regenerating normally we may not notice it right away. That’s frightening, and one of the areas I’m most concerned about.”

One optimistic note is that bees and other insect pollinators tend to be highly resilient, Brosi adds. “They can thrive in places you wouldn’t expect, such as cities. It’s an interesting conundrum that pollinators do the worst in industrial agriculture areas where we need them the most. A bigger solution to this problem needs to be re-imagining the ways in which our agricultural system functions. When you limit the diversity of plant species and douse fields with pesticides, it can have a lot of unintended negative consequences.”

Related:
Bees 'betray' their flowers when pollinator species decline 
Emory to ban bee-harming pesticides
Mystery of monarch migration takes new turn
Pumping wings: Muscles make migrating monarchs unique
Democracy works for Endangered Species Act

The economics of hypnotic meditation

Graduating senior Hal Zeitlin is set to begin a one-year internship with The Levy Centers for Mind-Body Medicine and Human Potential. He then plans to join the Houston Teach for America corps.

To graduate with honors from the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, students must complete an honors thesis, a comprehensive project that involves months of original research and analysis on a topic of their choice under the guidance of a faculty adviser. The result is a final paper and an oral defense of their thesis to a faculty committee.

Hal Zeitlin's thesis is entitled: "Silent Economics: The Cooperative Effects of Hypnotic Meditation." His adviser was Kelli Lanier, instructor of economics.

"I examined the impact of meditation alone versus the same meditation preceded by hypnotic relaxation procedures on the economic cooperative behavior of 160 undergraduates," Zeitlin explains. "Hypnotic meditation is used to relax a meditator before they practice any scientifically valid form of meditation. There was a significant change of relaxation within the hypnotic group, greater than the change in the meditation-only group. The meditation-only group maintained cooperative behavior for two of three rounds, and the hypnotic group for all three. Since these results could be attributed to random variation, I recommend that the study be repeated with a larger sample."

A growing amount of scientific evidence has revealed that certain meditation practices can positively change the human brain. "I am interested in helping to introduce scientifically valid meditation practices into American schools, for the benefit of youth," Zeitlin says. "My thesis experience provided me an opportunity to begin a professional investigation into meditation and its effects on pro-social behavior."

Read about more honors thesis projects in Emory Report.

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Are hugs the new drugs?

In the Balkans, resilience is rooted in knowledge of wild plants

The unripe fruit of Prunus domestica, in the rose family, is a favorite snack for Gorani children.

By Carol Clark

Traditional communities living in isolated, rural areas with little money or infrastructure tend to have one thing in common: Resilience rooted in intricate knowledge of their natural environment, especially plants.

This knowledge may be relevant to some of the biggest problems in plant science, including climate change, conservation biology, food security and human health, says Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory University.

Quave led an ethnobotanical study centered on a remote corner of the Balkans that was published in the journal Nature Plants. Her co-author is Andrea Pieroni from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy.

“Ethnobotany is the study of the interactions of people and plants,” Quave says, “but it has also been described as ‘the science of survival.’ People’s knowledge of which plants are beneficial, and how to harvest and preserve those plants, can make a huge difference in the overall well-being of a community.”

An Albanian describes plant uses.

Emory’s Center for the Study of Human Health funded the study, with additional support from the University of Gastronomic Sciences.

The study compared how two different cultures used plants in the Gora region of northwestern Albania, near the border with Kosovo. The researchers focused on a rural district of Gora that is one of the most economically disadvantaged in Albania. The two cultures in the study, Albanians and the Gorani ethnic minority, were both Muslim and subsisted primarily on small-scale agricultural, especially potato farming. The area is mountainous and many “roads” are unpaved, rocky paths. Some communities can be cut off completely from the outside world by heavy snows during the long winters.

“This area was heavily affected by the Balkan conflict of the 1990s,” Quave says. “The adults there have living memories of extremely challenging times. Even in peace time, life is difficult.”

The researchers conducted interviews with more than 100 residents about 104 different species of plants in their local environment. They recorded 418 uses of these plants for a broad spectrum of food, health, ritual and economic purposes.

The plant uses of the two cultures tended to overlap when it came to food, the study showed. Stinging nettle, for example, is a dietary staple among both the Albanians in the study and the Gorvani. “They boil nettle and use it the way we would spinach,” Quave says, sometimes mixing it with cheese, and baking it into local pastries known as byrek or pita.

A willow tree next to a Gorani home.

The researchers also found 77 divergent uses for plants between the two cultures, including 43 plant species. “Culture affects the way people view the natural environment,” Quave says. “And those views can affect everything from home healthcare practices to diet and local economies and conservation issues.”

The Albanians in the study, for example, reported less of an affiliation with a species of willow tree known as Salix alba, while the Gorani often choose to plant this tree around their homes and have many uses for it. “It’s what we call a cultural keystone species because it is so entwined with their way of life,” Quave says.

When a Gorani man wants to propose marriage to a woman, he may dig up a willow sapling and place it by her front door. If the woman accepts the proposal, the family plants the sapling in their field. If she rejects the suitor, the sapling becomes firewood.

Both the Gorani and Albanians use willow branches with leaves as protective amulets over their doors. And they add willow leaves to the fodder of their livestock once a year, along with some other plants, because they believe it helps keep the animals safe and healthy, Quave says.

Another example of a tradition used primarily by the Gorani involves the use of the plant Nepeta cataria, commonly known as catnip, to treat fright. “If a child has a nightmare,” Quave says, “they might brew a cup of catnip tea to soothe them.”

To store up supplies for winter months, both the Albanians and Gorani in the study use lactic fermentation to preserve food. If they need starter culture for fermentation, they use the roots from certain plants.

“They have a great deal of knowledge about their local environment that has been handed down to them through generations,” Quave says. It’s important to record that knowledge, she says, both because it could have possible relevance for science and because it could help communities improve their well-being.

“A lot of international attention has been focused on the Balkans to try to support reconciliation and development,” she says. “If you really want to help local communities in a way that’s sustainable and culturally sensitive, it’s important to have a detailed understanding of how they interact with their environment.”

Photos courtesy of Cassandra Quave

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Understanding China's housing bubble

Apartments in Shanghai: As China has rapidly grown into the second largest economy in the world, one sector it has focused on is real estate and construction.

The Wall Street Journal wrote about a paper co-authored by an Emory economist titled "The Great Housing Boom of China," which was recently published by the St. Louis Fed. Below is an excerpt from the WSJ article:

"A lot of things about China’s housing bubble don’t make sense. How could housing prices continue to rise sharply and investors continue to make money while vacancies are rising, too? Shouldn’t more vacancies mean less profits? Or, looked from a different point of view, shouldn’t rising profits mean that people are clamoring for apartments, so there should be fewer vacancies?

"Economists Kaiji Chen of Emory University and Yi Wen of St. Louis Federal Reserve tackled this issue in a recent working paper. What they found is that that credit bubbles have a logic all their own. When developing nations go through a big spurt of growth as a result of a transformation of the economy—in the case of China, when a state-owned economy turned into a largely private-owned one—gobs of money flow into the real estate market.

"That pushes up prices and profits as investors keep bidding up property. But it also pushes up vacancies because buyers aren’t purchasing property to live in; they are buying apartments as speculative purchases."

Read more in the Wall Street Journal.

Photo by Catherine Roy

Modern population boom traced to pre-industrial roots

By the end of the Roman Empire, humanity had crossed a critical threshold of social organization that allowed more people to take advantage of economies of scale, says anthropologist Aaron Stutz. "The Consummation of  Empire," by Thomas Cole, portrays the wealth and culture of the period.

By Carol Clark

The foundation of the human population explosion, commonly attributed to a sudden surge in industrialization and public health during the 18th and 19th centuries, was actually laid as far back as 2,000 years ago, suggests an extended model of detailed demographic and archeological data.

The Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE) recently published the analytical framework developed by Aaron Stutz, an associate professor of anthropology at Emory’s Oxford College.

“The industrial revolution and public health improvements were proximate reasons that more people lived longer,” Stutz says. “If you dig further in the past, however, the data suggest that a critical threshold of political and economic organization set the stage 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, around the start of the Common Era. The resulting political-economic balance was the tipping point for economies of scale: It created a range of opportunities enabling more people to get resources, form successful families, and generate enough capital to transfer to the next generation.”

Population dynamics have been a hot topic since 1798, when English scholar Thomas Robert Malthus published his controversial essay that population booms in times of plenty will inevitably be checked by famine and disease. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote. The so-called Malthusian Catastrophe theory was penned just prior to the global census size reaching one billion.

Around 1800, the human population reached one billion. "The First Birthday Party," by Frederick Daniel Hardy, celebrates the strong intergenerational ties that helped make this milestone possible.

While it took hundreds of thousands of years for humans to reach that one billion milestone, it took only another 120 years for humanity to double to two billion. And during the past 50 years, the human population has surged to near eight billion.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Stutz says. “The human population has not behaved like any other animal population. We haven’t stayed in any kind of equilibrium with what we would consider a typical ecological niche.”

Economic historians and demographers have focused on societal changes that occurred during the Industrial Revolution as the explanation for this super-exponential population growth. An archeologist by training, Stutz wanted to explore further back in time.

“Archeologists are interested in looking at much earlier changes in human society,” Stutz says. “In addition to looking at data, we dig up things like people’s houses, community courtyards, agricultural fields, harbors and so on. That gives us this sort of holistic view of how human society and the environment influence one another over time.”

During the Roman Empire, "a huge swath of the population was feeding, quite literally, the dynamism that was taking place," Stutz says. "Thumbs Down," by Jean-Leon Gerome, dramatizes just how cruel and capricious life could be for the individual.

His analysis found that that the potential for the human population to burgeon despite environmental degradation, conflict and disease could be traced to a subtle interaction between competition and organization. At a certain tipping point, this interaction created opportunities for individuals to gain more control over their lives and prosper, opening the door to economies of scale.

Stutz cites the Roman Empire, which spanned 500 years, from just before the Common Era to 476 CE, as a classic example of passing through this threshold. One of the largest and most prosperous empires in history, it is noteworthy for economic and political organization, literature, and advances in architecture and engineering. And yet, on an individual level, life was not necessarily so grand. Farm laborers and miners were ground into short, miserable lives to produce all those surplus goods for trading and empire building. And large numbers of young males had to serve in the military to ward off rebellions.

“The vast majority of people who lived under Roman rule had a life expectancy into their late 20s or early 30s,” Stutz says. “A huge swath of the population was feeding, quite literally, the dynamism that was taking place in terms of economic and political development. Their labor increased the potential for providing more democracy and competition on the smaller scale. That, in turn, led to a more complex, inter-generational dynamic, making it possible to better care for offspring and even transfer resources to them.”

A modern-day garment factory in Southeast Asia echoes the Industrial Revolution. "We might wind up being back in a situation where a growing part of the population is basically providing labor to sustain a minority," Stutz says.

The tipping point had been reached, Stutz says, and the trend continued despite the collapse of the Roman Empire. “The increasingly complex and decentralized economic and political entities that were built up around the world from the beginning of the Common Era to 1500 CE created enough opportunities for individuals, states and massive powers like England, France and China to take advantage of the potential for economies of scale,” Stutz says.

This revised framework for the underpinnings of human population dynamics could lead to better understanding of how economic and political organization is affecting modern-day society, he adds.

“We might wind up being back in a situation where a growing part of the population is basically providing labor to sustain a minority,” Stutz says. “You could certainly point to the sweat shops in the developing world. Another potential example is the growing income inequality that’s been well-documented in the United States over the last couple of decades.”

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Dawn of agriculture took toll on health