Friday Flora Littoral/litter edition

Some sand verbena (Abronia latifolia), Oregon Dunes. 

A lovely day at the dunes a week or so ago.  The dunes are a most interesting ecosystem--it seems you always find fascinating ecosystems in crappy environments, and a sand dune is a pretty crappy environment for a plant.  The beach is also of interest, at low tide it's flat and well over a hundred meters from dunes to water. 

This being a Pacific coast beach in 2013, there was plenty of garbage to be picked up.  I hiked out with thirty pounds of fishing float and styrofoam and nylon rope on a stick, carried like a yoke.  Brother M. & sweetie carried crammed-full knapsacks and bags of plastic bottles from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.  The beach is lovely, but it is so hard to see all the debris we have put there and not think of this.  Warning--link will make you feel very, very bad. 

About that paper on organic food...

A good biology paper will make you think about life; a few of them make you think about your own life.  A research paper came out this week that made a bit of a splash, and prompted a lot of people—a lot of non-scientists, who may not be used to thinking scientifically—about what they are doing and why.  The paper was a meta-review: essentially, an attempt to compare lots of different studies, with different methodologies, different foci, and different motivations, and reach a coherent conclusion.  The question that the authors were trying to answer is in the title of their paper: “Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?”

The answer is very, very close to “no,” followed by some asterisks.  Some of the asterisks are whether the government approved levels of pesticides are actually safe, and that while the levels of bacterial contamination were comparable, the contaminants in conventional foods were more likely to be antibiotic resistant.  But on the whole, no difference. 

Looking at NPR and the NY Times blogs and their commenters, a few have their faith shaken by facts, but most have their faith reinforced by being liberated from facts.  They turn to attacks on the paper and its authors.  There’s also a fair amount of triumphal crowing from folks who (like my dad, a biochemist) refuse to buy organic on principle. 

So, as a person who tends to buy organic and pay attention to science, what do I think?  I think I’m going to have a heart attack and die of not surprise.  Whether produce is good and good for you or not—as long as it falls within guidelines for pesticides and other contaminants—is a matter of whether the farmer was competent and the food has gotten from farm to you in a timely and careful fashion.  So, why do I tend organic?

I’ll set aside human reasons, although conventional ag inevitably causes worker exposure to nasty chemicals, which is a good reason to favor organic.  I’ll set aside whether there is any safe level of pesticides in food, because there isn’t yet any scientific agreement on the subject.  I’ll also set aside (for now) the effects of using huge amounts of antibiotics that can leak into the environment.  Instead, I’ll (predictably) focus on microbes, since they make the world go ‘round and are more important than people in the long run. 

I love long-term studies (I mean, what is our planet but a long term environmental study?).  The Swiss government started just such a study in 1978, comparing three variations on farming for typical Swiss crops:  conventional agriculture with pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizer supplemented with animal manure, organic farming with no herbicides or pesticides and only animal or plant manures, and “biodynamic” farming.   They did not address which produce is better for you, or which tastes better; they’re Swiss, so the conventional stuff was within pretty tight government regulations, and they’re scientists, so all the crops were equally fussed-over.  What they did compare was the performance of the farms as if they were factories, and the health of the farms over the course of decades.  (Just to simplify things, I’m lumping together the results of biodynamic and organic practices, since they were essentially the same.)

I’ll start with the result my dad would point out:  yields in the organic fields just weren’t as high as in the conventional fields.  Potatoes, beets, barley, wheat, it didn’t matter, yields from the organic fields rarely equaled those from the conventional fields, and were generally about 80% of the conventional yields.  This is not a trivial point in a world that’s trying to feed 7 billion people with limited amounts of cropland and ever-more-difficult access to water. 

However, there are other factors that are limiting, and energy is right up there.  Comparison of the energy inputs to get those crop outputs is illuminating.  The researchers figured out how much energy was needed for farming activities such as tilling, and added the substantial energy for making mineral fertilizers, nitrogen, pesticides, and herbicides.  Over a six-year period, they discovered that organic farming took slightly more than half as much energy per hectare, so even though yields per acre were slightly reduced, organic farming was still vastly more efficient.  (I’ll also note that about when this study was published, my dad abandoned his SUV for a Prius.)

Soil is the factory that produces food.  Clearly, organically farmed soil is a different kind of factory from conventionally farmed soil—more efficient with energy, though less efficient with space.  It’s the architecture and the workers in the factory, and how they interact and affect each other, that make the difference. 

In this study, there is a visible difference between organic and conventional soils. 

In this picture of winter wheat seedlings, the biodynamically farmed soil shows more weeds, but the soil looks friable and there are plenty of worm casts.  These differences are quantifiable; water drainage is improved, as well as the ability of the soil to cohere. 

The workers in the factory of soil are microbes and small invertebrates.   It’s not too surprising that organically and biodynamically farmed soil has a lot more life in it—the Swiss study found twice as many earthworms, spiders, and beetles, and much more root-associated fungi.  The sheer mass of microbes was higher, as was both their genetic diversity and (as has been found in similar studies) their enzymatic and metabolic diversity.  We are constantly told that a more diverse workplace is better, and at least in the work done in the soil, this seems to be the case.  To really understand this, though, we need to see what these workers do.

We might think of plants as rugged individualists, gamely taking sunlight and water and CO₂ and pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.  In reality, they depend upon soil microbes, both bacteria and fungi, for making many (or most) of their nutrients available and delivering them to their roots.  These microbes break down the components of wood so that the elements therein can be absorbed by plants; they convert chemically inert atmospheric nitrogen into a form that the plant can absorb; symbiotic fungi called mycorrhizae, which grow both in soil and extend their threads into the cells of plant roots, capture these liberated nutrients and inject them directly into the plants.  All the players in this system, plants, fungi, and bacteria, have evolved to work with each other, and all fail to thrive in the absence of the others.  A plant is a visible expression of the health of the soil community.

The Swiss study, as well as studies on Italian rice, Dutch onions, California strawberries, and other combinations of crop and soil, have found that the diversity of the soils microbes and mycorrhizae are higher in organic soils.  (Indeed, as soils go, the champions are wild, uncultivated soils, with many different types of plants growing in them—but that’s not agriculture.)   These soils show increased ability to break down manure, an increased ability to mobilize nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and increased interaction between mycorrhizae and plant roots.     

When the Swiss researchers examined conventionally farmed soil, they found limited microbial diversity, and reduced metabolic diversity (that is, the number of different types of biological reactions occurring).  However, they found increased metabolic activity (that is, the amount of microbial nutrient consumption aimed at just making energy to live, as measured by the amount of CO₂ the microbes exhaled).   In the simplified environment of conventional soil, the microbes had to work harder to do less.  This is not a fluke; a similar observation was made in comparing organic and conventional strawberry fields in California.

This illuminates the gross productivity and efficiency differences seen between the conventional and organic systems in the Swiss study.  The conventional soils had greater yield, but (because they are less efficient factories) they required much higher inputs of material and energy.  Organically farmed soils are healthier.  Arguing for conventional farming because arable land is a scarce resource ignores the fact that, unless there is a large input of energy and skill, conventional farming can result in the degradation and loss of that same scarce resource

Of course, factories have more than one product; even the most efficient factory will produce some waste.  Even here, organic farming has some benefits, and these benefits also are a result of the more diverse and efficient microbial community in organically-farmed soils. 

The job of any factory is to convert raw materials into a mix of useful products and waste, hopefully with an emphasis on the former.  Farmers, whether organic or conventional, add raw materials to their soil factory, and they are particularly mindful of the nitrogen they add.  Organic farmers add various forms of manure for their nitrogen content—chicken or cow wastes, or composted legumes.  Conventional farmers will supplement or replace these nitrogen sources with calcium nitrate or anhydrous ammonia (as an aside—production of this fertilizer consumes upwards of 1% of the global human energy budget).  This is the raw material that enters the factory; some of the nitrogen gets incorporated into the plants, but a lot of it will disappear as waste.  And here is where there is a significant difference between conventional and organic soils, again due to their microbial composition. 

Nitrogen compounds are neat.  Most of the earth’s nitrogen is in the form of nitrogen gas (N₂) in our atmosphere; this is inert, so chemically unreactive that it is used to protect precious documents and Guiness beer.  A few microbes have learned how to “fix” this atmospheric nitrogen, to make ammonia (NH₃), which is like rocket fuel for plant growth.  Lots of soil microbes love to eat ammonia too, but rather than using it for growth, they oxidize it for energy; in the process called nitrification, they take ammonia and make it into nitrate (NO₃-).  Nitrate is a mixed blessing; plants can use it, though not nearly as well as ammonia.  Mostly it leaches out of the soil and pollutes waterways, leading to algal blooms and their resultant die-offs and dead zones.  Microbes can also take nitrate in the soil and use it for respiration the same way we use oxygen, in a process called denitrification.  Some denitrifiers convert the nitrate into nitrous oxide (N₂O), which disappears from the soil as a gas; it’s not a good thing, given that it can degrade ozone and is also, gram for gram, about 300 times more effective as a “greenhouse gas” than carbon dioxide.  Other denitrifiers use the nitrate more effectively, and convert it back to nitrogen gas. 

Either way, as a result of this nitrogen cycle, a farmer can add nitrogen to the soil and watch some of it disappear as waste; it’s just a matter of whether the added nitrogen disappears by leaching (and polluting the water) as nitrate, by going into the atmosphere as pollution in the form of nitrous oxide, or by going into the atmosphere as benign nitrogen.   Since the nitrogen cycle is largely driven by microbes, and since organic and conventional farming techniques result in different soil microbiota, it seems like a reasonable hypothesis the way nitrogen leaves the soil would differ in organic and conventional situations. 

No matter what form of agriculture, human activity dominates the addition of nitrogen to the soil.  Conventional farmers add over 80 million metric tons of ammonia to the soil every year, and organic farmers add manure.  This, combined with using legumes in crop rotation, determines the start of the nitrogen cycle.  However, according to a study comparing organic and conventional apple orchards in Washington state, the fate of the nitrogen differs significantly.

In the organically fertilized orchard, nitrogen was added in the form of manure; the soil microbiota broke down the manure, so nitrogen entered the soil more slowly, making it easier to be assimilated.  Of the nitrogen that was not used by the trees and left the soil, only 10% leached out as nitrate.  Because of the denitrifying microbes in the soil, 10% was denitrified to N₂O, and 80% was denitrified to harmless nitrogen gas. 

In the conventional orchard, nitrogen was added in the form of calcium nitrate, a common agricultural fertilizer.  The same amount of nitrogen was added, and the trees grew as well, with the same amount of nitrogen in their leaves and a comparable amount of nitrogen leaving the orchard as waste.  Here, only 20% of the nitrogen left by microbial denitrification, half as N₂O and half as nitrogen gas.  The remaining 80% of the added nitrogen left by leaching out of the soil as harmful nitrate.  There is a striking correlation between the richer microbiota of the organic orchard and the increased ability of the soil to process nitrogen into environmentally benign forms—with, as the authors of this study note, no effect on the yield of fruit. 

Which brings us back to the whole question of whether or not to go organic, and thanks to the news-making review, we can ignore questions of nutrition.  Those who argue against organics point to increased cost, and less efficient use of land.  I think that some of the costs of conventional agriculture are distributed or hidden—increased energy inputs per acre, and the costs of dealing with increased pollution.  Land use may be less efficient in the short term, but unless there is active and conscientious management of conventional soils (another hidden cost), organic soils are healthier and more sustainable. 

The goal is aspirational; right now, organic stuff is more expensive, and that’s a hardship for some.  Many farmers (not to mention some pretty enormous agribusinesses) are pretty set against organic growing.  There’s also situations that are really difficult to address with anything but conventional means.  I am an example; I am using Crossbow to clean up blackberries and poison oak and vinca that have accumulated after several years of neglect.  But, the goal here is a transition to organic, and it is doable and right.

So, imagine I offered you a couple of MP3 players for sale; they are functionally identical, and both will fill your ears and satisfy your musical desires.  However, one costs 20% more than the other.  What’s the difference?  One is made in a coal-powered factory that produces a large amount of toxic wastes and causes damage to its local environment, while the more expensive one is from a renewably-powered factory that actually collects and recycles waste, cleaning its environment.  Which would you choose?

Galván, Guillermo A.,  István Parádi, Karin Burger, Jacqueline Baar,  Thomas W. Kuyper, Olga E. Scholten, and Chris Kik (2009).  Molecular diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in onion roots from organic and conventional farming systems in the Netherlands.  Mycorrhiza 19(5): 317-328.  Onions, with their weak roots, are quite dependent upon mycorrhizae; since the farms were in polders, the soils were very new to agriculture, but even so, mycorrhizae were present. 

Kramer, Sasha B., John P. Reganold, Jerry D. Glover, Brendan J. M. Bohannan, Harold A. Mooney (2006).  Reduced nitrate leaching and enhanced denitrifier activity in organically fertilized soils.  Proceedings Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103: 4522-4527.  A neat paper about denitrification, free access. 

Lumini, E., M. Vallino, M. M. Alguacil, M. Romani, and V. Bianciotto (2011).  Different farming and water regimes in Italian rice fields affect arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal soil communities.  Ecological Applications 21 (5): 1696-1707.

Maeder, Paul, Andreas Fliessbach, David Dubois, Lucie Gunst, Padruot Fried, Urs Niggli (2002).  Soil Fertility and Biodiversity in Organic Farming.  Science 296: 1694-1697. This paper documents the Swiss long-term experiment; since this was published, many more details have come out. 

Orr, Caroline H., Angela James, Carlo Leifert, Julia Cooper, and Stephen P. Cummings (2011).  Diversity and Activity of Free-Living Nitrogen-Fixing Bacteria and Total Bacteria in Organic and Conventionally Managed Soils.  Appl. Env. Micro. 77(3): 911-919. 

Reeve JR, Schadt CW, Carpenter-Boggs L, Kang S, Zhou J, Reganold JP (2010).  Effects of soil type and farm management on soil ecological functional genes and microbial activities. International Soc. Microbial Ecol. Journal 4(9): 1099-1107.  Good paper, underlines the microbial difference between organic and conventional soils.  Also, for brother M:  Watsonville strawberries. 

Smith-Spangler, Crystal, and, Margaret L. Brandeau, Grace E. Hunter, J. Clay Bavinger, Maren Pearson, Paul J. Eschbach; Vandana Sundaram, Hau Liu, Patricia Schirmer, Christopher Stave, Ingram Olkin, and Dena M. Bravata (2012).  Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives?: A Systematic Review.  Annals of Internal Medicine 157(5): 348-366.

Views may differ

Nobody sees the same thing the same way. I see the quail sitting in the morning sun on our pile of scrap metal, and I think about a bird that makes my life richer with its plumage and charmingly dorky quiff. The foundation contractor, seeing the same bird, notes "them's good eatin'."

I subscribe to a handful of magazines, and it can be amusing how differently they see the same thing. As a tree-hugger, I get the official organ of the Sierra Club. Nerd that I am, I get Science, official organ of the AAAS. I recently started getting The Economist, which I like for good writing and its acknowledgement of the existence of countries other than the US and the EU, but seems to be the official organ of people with a deal of money who want to make damn sure that they will always get more. Needless to say, how these rags see the same thing often differs.

What sets me off on this observation is the latter magazine's special feature on the Arctic in an era of climate change. You might view the Arctic as being kind of like a distant uncle--almost a stranger, partly because he's so damn hostile that he tries to kill you when you visit, but really interesting and exotic. We are in a situation where we are just starting to find out some amazing things about this uncle--but at the same time, we know that he's dying. All three magazines acknowledge that the Arctic that humanity has known for all of recorded history is toast, and own that it is due to human activity*. It's their views of the basic facts that vary.

Sierra's is boringly predictable, if justified--their hair is on fire. Science is more interesting. They remind me of a dispassionate doctor, attentively monitoring the pulse of the dying uncle, reporting the ebb and flow (actually, just the ebb) of arctic ice, the disappearance of habitat, the relentless northward creep of ecosystems, pointing out calmly exactly what is going on and how and why. Occasionally there will be an editorial suggesting that, while the uncle is dying, we really ought to at least slow the rate of decay. These editorial outbursts are rare, and as striking as Star Trek's Spock breaking down in tears.

And then there's The Economist, far and away the most interesting in how it views the matter--in the way that sociopaths are interesting. The entire thrust of the special feature on the Arctic was this: Our rich, fascinating uncle, who has been affecting our lives for as long as we have lived, and has so much to tell us, is dying. Whoohoo! I hear he has a gold watch--we can cash that in! He's got property that we can liquidate for profit, profit, PROFIT! We can actually hasten his demise by trying to get at this stuff--but he won't care if he's dead, and it will get us the stuff quicker! Hell, he's going to die anyway, so it's practically a moral obligation to hurry up! What? Oh, yeah, I suppose it's sad he's dying, but hey, PROFIT!!!

Oh well. I suppose I should give The Economist some credit for being arch-conservative and actually acknowledging anthropogenic climate change as a solid, undisputed fact. It's how you can tell The Economist is not an American magazine.

Comparing apples to apples

Sometimes it can really be hard to make meaningful comparisons between apples and apples…

But a recent review article makes a valiant effort at making such a comparison. Which is more efficient—this solar panel:

Or this one?

(The answer is coming…but make your guess now!)

It’s useful to note that this really is an apples-to-apples comparison. We’re used to thinking of life as being powered by chemical energy—you know, breaking down ATP or burning glucose, or photosynthesis making glucose. It may come as a shock that the energy underlying all these chemical processes is electrical energy—the movement of electrons from high-energy states to low energy states.

A surface view of what goes on in a photosynthesizing leaf is that energy from sunlight is used to combine carbon dioxide and water to make glucose. However, a deeper view is that this is an electrical process. Energy from sunlight is used to take a low-voltage electron, one slumming around on a molecule of water, and exalt it to an amazingly high potential. Once energized, the electron can be put onto a carbon atom*. This trick is managed by a handful of pigments, including chlorophyll, and a whole mess of protein enzymes.

The point of chlorophyll is to do the first part of photosynthesis: use light energy to give an electron a kick in the pants. Chlorophyll absorbs only certain colors of light. It loves blue and red, can use a little green and infrared, but essentially can’t use any of the other UV or other light energy that hits the earth. Different colors of light have different energies, which is why you will get a nasty burn from UV, but not red light. When chlorophyll absorbs blue light, it wastes a bunch of the energy stepping the light down in energy until it’s essentially the same energy as red light. Only then will it energize an electron, and the remaining energy is wasted as heat.

So here’s one powerful strike against photosynthesis—it only uses a fraction of the solar energy that hits the earth, and it makes inefficient use of most of that fraction. Compare that with a silicon solar cell: in principle, it can make use of any photon from UV through the visible spectrum to far infra-red. Here’s a chart (very loosely adapted from Blankenship et al) showing how many photons of different colors hit the earth:

So, lots of different colors besides the visible ROY G BIV hit the earth. In fact, since a UV photon packs more energy than a visible photon, most of the energy hitting the earth is invisible. How many of these photons—how much of the sun’s energy—can photosynthesis use?

Not so much—it can’t make much use of yellow or green, or any of the UV. How does this compare with a silicon solar cell?

Woah!

The second part of photosynthesis is the synthesis: using a hot-to-trot electron to make glucose. From a casual inspection, this is amazingly efficient—nearly 100% efficient, in that every electron that gets energized finds its way to glucose, without any losses. However, this estimate has to be tempered by biological reality. Unlike solar cells, whose raison d’etre is to make voltage for our use, the point of a plant—a point shaped by billions of years of evolution—is to make another plant. So, this photosynthetic system is not just making glucose for us to burn, it’s making membranes and proteins and pigments and DNA and so on. If we measure efficiency in terms of how much of the original sunlight gets converted into energy we can use, 100% gets whittled down to slightly over 1%.

How does this compare with a silicon solar cell? The best of these converts photon energy into voltage with an efficiency of about 18%. If we want to make an apples-to-apples comparison with a leaf, then we can use our solar cell to electrolyse water and make hydrogen gas. This process has some efficiency losses, so it brings the efficiency of a silicon solar cell down to about 14%.

OK—did you guess right about which was more efficient? I sure didn’t. But, as the authors say, “the efficiency advantage clearly goes to photovoltaic systems.”

So, is silicon really greener than a leaf? Well, yes and no. photosynthesis is an evolved, not a designed system. So, many key elements of photosynthesis were jury-rigged from other parts. And, if you start with a jury-rigged system, there’s going to be severe limits on how much it can be improved. (The authors of this review article use a wonderful euphemism, “legacy biochemistry,” to describe this historical baggage that all living things carry around.) Also, there’s the pesky fact that organisms are interested in making more organisms, not helping us.

However, we now know enough about biology to do a little bio-engineering. We have reached a point where we can contemplate taking an inefficient, evolved system and subjecting it to some intelligent re-design. We can make the components more efficient, and make the system’s main purpose energy production rather than reproduction.

Chlorophyll is a good start. It’s thought to have evolved on earth at a time when other organisms had already figured out a way to use green wavelengths of light for making energy. (These organisms are still around—they give salt ponds their spectacular purple hue. If you take the spectrum of visible light and absorb all the green and a little yellow-orange, as these guys do, you are left with purple.) Therefore, chlorophyll evolved to make use of the leftovers, blue and red. UV and infrared were eschewed because they’re just too dangerous for living things to deal with. Some researchers have been tinkering with modifications to chlorophyll, and have succeeded in making it absorb new wavelengths of light.

The synthesis part of photosynthesis is also subject to tinkering: the enzyme that starts the process of making glucose is notoriously inefficient, since it first evolved on earth when there was a much higher concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and virtually no oxygen. In this light, it is unsurprising that this enzyme is really inefficient in the presence of oxygen. Certain plants and bacteria have developed work-arounds for protecting this enzyme from oxygen and locally increasing the concentration of CO₂, but it’s easy for us to simply grow algae in a bioreactor that’s kept nearly free of oxygen, and pump in lots of CO₂ from burning biomass.

There are even more radical proposals for bio-engineering photosynthesis. These are pretty far in the realm of science fiction, but who knows—they may be used to power your oft-promised flying car. The authors of this review suggest a re-engineered algae, something that could only grow in a bioreactor, a slave to our demands for energy. It would have a short life span, because its engineered chlorophylls would absorb all wavelengths of light. It would not grow especially well, because most of the energy it absorbed would be used for making fuel, rather than making more cells. And, since glucose isn’t the best fuel to power your flying car, it would energize electrons from water and use them to make hydrogen gas. Such a system may not achieve the same efficiency of a silicon cell, but the peripherals (processing, hazardous waste produced, etc) may well make it much greener.

There’s no doubt that, sometime in the next century, big oil will be replaced by something else, and that it will probably be solar. The question is, will it be big silicon or big algae?

Robert E. Blankenship et al (2011). Comparing Photosynthetic and Photovoltaic Efficiencies and Recognizing the Potential for Improvement. Science 322, 805-809.

*a proton also goes along for the ride, and an electron and a proton together make a hydrogen atom—so chemically, it looks like hydrogen is being added to CO₂.

And you thought Moody's downgrade of US Bonds was bad...

In Walter Miller's post-apocalyptic sci-fi classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz," one after-effect of the nuclear holocaust is euphemistically called "the Simplification." Most sentient earthlings who pay attention to such things are aware that there is an ecological holocaust in progress. It's been going on since we got handy with spears, but the pace has really picked up in the last century as we've gotten handy with organic chemicals and with bulldozers. As with Miller's (thankfully fictional) holocaust, there is also a simplification.

A good candidate for "most depressing title of a journal article" would be a report from UC Santa Cruz entitled "Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth." These cheery six pages illustrate how, in just about every habitat, there used to be a much more complicated food chain (or "trophic web," as is the preferred term) and a richer, more diverse, more ecologically and economically useful biota. In just about every habitat, deliberate or inadvertent human activity has removed a "top predator" from the habitat, resulting in a much simpler ecosystem--and one that is less ecologically and economically useful.

The "top predators" in each ecosystem don't just skim the cream off the ecosystem, they are essential to maintaining its complexity. Unfortunately, top predators are also the most desirable as trophies, the most sensitive to habitat loss, and the most efficient at bioaccumulating toxins. When these species collapse, a complicated, interconnected trophic web abruptly telescopes into a short, simple food chain--often one that favors weeds or invasive species. As the authors put it, "the transitions in ecosystems that characterize such changes are often abrupt...difficult to reverse, and commonly lead to radically different patterns and pathways of energy an material flux and sequestration."

The authors of this paper provide example after example, from every habitat. For instance, it may be hard to see the causal link between eliminating lions and catastrophic fires, but it's there:

No lions-->more cattle-->rinderpest-->no herbivory-->grassland replacement by trees-->fire.

This isn't bunk; in one of the rare cases of good news, rinderpest (a cattle plague) has been declared extinct as the result of a coordinated international effort. There's a direct correlation between disappearance of rinderpest and reestablishment of grassland.

But really, most of the news is bad, in just about every habitat. It takes an extremely willful blindness to just go along as if everything is OK and the environment doesn't need some sort of protection.

You can make your own conclusions about various politicians here. In Miller's book, the people who drove The Simplification--burning libraries, killing scientists and engineers, and destroying machines--were called "simpletons," an appellation they wore with pride. There are certainly many politicians who like things very simple. Maybe these real-life simpletons are happy that we are experiencing a planet-wide simplification.

James A. Estes et al (2011). Trophic Downgrading of Planet Earth. Science 333:301-306.
Miller, Walter M. (1959). A Canticle for Leibowitz. J. B. Lippincott & Co, Philadelphia.