In the late 1990s, my grandfather purchased boxes of bats by mail order as a natural approach to mosquito control. The dark green plywood roost was mounted on tall wooden poles in a sunny patch of the yard and secured with tension wire. The catalog promised that the bats would raise their young in the box and eat the mosquitoes that flocked to my grandparents' lakeside yard.
The bat box always seemed like a sure win for all parties (except the mosquitoes). But when he started researching bat boxes for a mosquito-infested property in North Carolina, he learned that some off-the-shelf boxes, like the ones his grandfather used, were basically bat ovens. During hot months, artificial roosts that are poorly located, too small, painted darkly, or lack ventilation can reach lethal temperatures and kill baby bats.
This knowledge disturbed me, and I believe it would have greatly angered my grandfather, who took great pride in environmental stewardship. But this is how science works. That means create a hypothesis, test it, share it, adapt it, and iterate. It's sometimes frustrating, but how do you know if your corrective action is working as desired?
In 2021, several experts discussed it on the pages of . Conservation science and practice Whether bats helped raise awareness of the potential lethality of bat boxes. “Telling people that their well-intentioned conservation efforts are wrong is rarely productive,” wrote Virgil Brack Jr. and Dale W. Sparks, chief scientists at Environmental Solutions & Innovations, Inc. The criticism was addressed by Reed D. Crawford and Joy M. O'Keefe of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: The perception is that “the careless use of inappropriate boxes can expose bats to lethal temperatures.” He responded that he would continue to increase it. Both sides agreed that the design and placement of artificial nests could and should be improved. Again, the calculations are inconvenient, but necessary.
Amateur beekeepers are also reconsidering a few things. Once considered the conservationist equivalent of victory gardens, European bee hives were established in backyards and rooftops across the United States in the early 2010s after reports of “colony collapses.” Resource competition and pathogen transmission,' according to a study published in 2023 by conservationists at Concordia University and the University of Montreal.
“For people who say they want to save bees and have bee hives, that’s like throwing Asian carp into the Great Lakes and saying they want to save the native fish.” said Sheila Colla, professor of conservation at York University. washington post May 2023.
When government policy drives environmental protection efforts, the undesirable effects of good intentions can escalate very quickly. August, science It reported that the 2020 emissions regulations imposed by the United Nations' International Maritime Organization have the desirable effect of reducing the amount of sulfur that ships emit into the atmosphere, while also having the undesirable effect of reducing the amount of sulfur-based clouds. ‘Ship paths’ are formed along shipping routes and reflect the sun away from the Earth.
“By dramatically reducing the number of tracks, the Earth warms faster,” he explained. science Reporter Paul Busen. “This trend is magnified in the Atlantic Ocean, where maritime traffic is particularly dense. Increased light in shipping corridors represents a 50% increase in the warming effect of human carbon emissions.”
In China, electric vehicle (EV) development exploded in the late 2010s, driven by ambitious government subsidies for green energy projects. This can now be easily seen in automobile graveyards across China, where outdated EVs are abandoned. “Not only are these sites an eyesore,” Bloomberg News reported in 2023, “removing EVs too quickly reduces their climate benefits, given that they are carbon-emission intensive and may only gain benefits over combustion vehicles after a few years.” reported. .”
In some cases, personal conservation policies and government environmental policies clash in surprisingly horrific ways. In a September essay titled “We Thought We Were Saving the Planet, But We Were Setting a Time Bomb.” new York Times, Canadian novelist and essayist Claire Cameron shared her personal thoughts on the time she spent planting trees in a logging field in Ontario. She did, but she found out years later that her efforts had helped spark her wildfire.
“This was a very difficult rite of passage for Canadian university students, as it allowed them to earn good money while spending months outdoors with other like-minded young people. I was driven in part by the idealistic views of trees. Planting a tree will always be better than not planting a tree.”
The trees they planted were all of the same species, water-thirsty and flammable, and neatly spaced six feet apart. “We later learned that the trees we had planted, black spruce trees, were so flammable that firefighters called them gas on a stick. Trees have evolved to burn. They have flammable sap, which is made up of resin. “The filled cone will open when heated. Drop the seeds into the charred ground.” To further complicate matters, the tree-planting program was managed by private timber companies but driven by government incentives.
For some people, these unintended consequences may trigger schadenfreude. For others, it's despair. But there is a positive side to this fact. That is, we learn something new every day, every month, and every year about what kinds of environmental management produce good outcomes and what those outcomes cost. Government agencies are not Bayesian actors, but individuals and private companies can be Bayesian actors. At the human scale, we can respond and adapt to new knowledge, avoid or forgo benign disasters, and make choices that positively impact local ecosystems.
In some cases, the best thing you can do for the environment is to leave it alone. Bats have been found to naturally nest in dead tree trunks. My estate is full of them.