The Steady Stater
The Steady Stater
Extinction as Shakespearean Tragedy – The Romeo Error (with Chris Haney)
Heading into the holidays we take a rare optimistic detour in the world of conservation. Our guest is Dr. Chris Haney, President of Terra Med Applied Sciences, a public interest ecological research company. He and Brian discuss the fate of the ivory-billed woodpecker – the bird that keeps scientists guessing no matter how often it’s declared extinct. Hear the only known recording of the woodpecker, and consider: is it really gone? Or is Woody getting the last laugh?
Chris's book, Woody's Last Laugh: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/changemakers-books/our-books/woodys-last-laugh-making-thinking-errors
From the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, this is The Steady Stater, a podcast dedicated to discussing limits to growth and the Steady State Economy.
Brian Czech:Welcome to the show. I'm your host Brian Czech, and our guest today is Dr. James Christopher Haney, President and Founder of Terra Mar Applied Sciences, an ecological and economic research company devoted to science-driven solutions for land or sea. Chris has been a Pew Marine Fellow at Woods Hole, a wildlife faculty member at Penn State, and a forest ecologist at the Wilderness Society. But I met Chris somewhere around 2002, when he was in Washington, D.C. as the Chief Scientist for Defenders of Wildlife. I know Chris to be a creative scientist, who happens to be an outstanding communicator, a talented administrator, and a great mentor to students and early career professionals. Chris Haney, welcome to The Steady Stater.
Chris Haney:Thank you, Brian. It's good to be here.
Brian Czech:It's great to have you in. Hate to do this, but I want to put you on the spot right off the bat. Which of those places the Woods Hole, Wilderness Society, or Defenders of Wildlife? Which one was your favorite?
Chris Haney:Well, there's without a question. It was Woods Hole, because I love the sea. And not only was my office a block away from the ocean, I lived in a small cottage that overlooks Sippewissett Marsh and a beach. So you know, I was around the sea every day for three years. And it was pretty hard to beat that.
Brian Czech:Oh that sounds wonderful. A lot of our listeners have some familiarity with government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, and colleges, and universities. I'm guessing that far fewer know much at all about consulting firms, and especially the type of firm you run. Let me read the first sentence from your website-- Terra Mar Applied Sciences, LLC, conducts ecological and economic research in the public interest, then applies it creatively using principles of civic responsibility and environmental stewardship. You guys almost sound like a federal science agency with a statement like that. But give us some examples of what you actually do, Chris?
Chris Haney:Sure. Well, we work very, very closely with federal agencies. In fact, our core suite of projects encompass advising and sometimes field research on behalf of such agencies as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the US Geological Survey, US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So we do this often in partnerships that involve other entities besides the federal government, but we include them and also may include such things as universities and research institutes. So it generally means that the public interest aspect of our portfolio means we deal with environmental issues that are largely driven by what the public can benefit from, not necessarily what private business benefits from.
Brian Czech:Okay, well, one thing I know about your career is that you've been able to meld a good deal of ecological expertise and economic insight into the programs you've run. And now you've got a new book hot off the press called Woody's Last Laugh - How the Extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker Fools Us Into Making 53 Thinking Errors. Chris, before we delve into the contents of this very unique book, I'm really curious, what was the impetus for taking this on? And who is your target audience?
Chris Haney:Well, you know, I'll start with my target audience, Brian. It's almost anyone who wants to think more clearly, who wants to make better decisions, and who wants to be less -- I guess -- influenced or biased by one's own mind, but also the attempts of others. So it's really something for almost everyone. If you're interested in American environmental history, if you're interested in conservation, biology, wildlife biology, science, I think it will also interest you. How did I get involved in it -- it was it was a rather long path. I became fascinated in 2004 by how crazy, nutty, confrontational, and downright mean people were about this bird, especially after its putative discovery and rediscovery in 2004 and 2005, so that was part of my interest. The other thing that piqued my interest was it seemed like there were contradictions about the basic life history of the bird. And these two things, pulled me in and hooked me. And I couldn't make sense of it until -- I remembered some time that I spent with economists back in my fellowship days at Woods Hole. And they used to teach me about heuristics, about these mental shortcuts that we take. And so I started an exploration into cognitive psychology, reading books that might be standard in economics, like Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. But these ideas are really not so well-known inside natural science. And as I discovered conservation biology, and especially about ivory-billed woodpecker, we make lots of little mistakes.
Brian Czech:Well, you definitely took a deep dive into human reasoning and cognitive bias and the use of those heuristics. Actually, let's start with that. Because the word and concept of heuristic trips a lot of people up I think, so please tell us, Chris, what exactly is a heuristic?
Chris Haney:Sure, Brian. Heuristic is simply a shortcut, a mental shortcut that we take. And when we do, they help us make decisions quickly. And so that's the good side of them. The bad side of heuristic, or a shortcut, is our decisions are often inaccurate, incomplete, or biased in a particular direction.
Brian Czech:So what would be an example of a heuristic that's commonly used in wildlife conservation, then?
Chris Haney:Well, there are lots of them in biology, unfortunately. One of the ones that I've been most worried about stems from our neglect of probability. And in the case of wood, claiming extinction for various wildlife or plants, we often err on the side of declaring a species gone or dead too soon. That bias comes from something called base rate fallacy. That is to say, we ignore a background rate in nature that we ought to pay attention to. And we think that our reasoning is infallible, that we know the answers all the time, and we simply don't.
Brian Czech:And that base rate fallacy, is that what leads to this type of error that you wrote about the Romeo error? And why is it why is it named Romeo error?
Chris Haney:Yes, exactly. So Romeo error is named for the Shakespearean tragedy, in which Juliet wakes up to see that Romeo has already killed himself, because he thought she was dead. And then when she sees him dead, she takes her own life as well. So it's almost a double tragedy here. And so in conservation biology, when we declare an animal or plant gone too early, we might back away from protections, we might back away from conservation practice, we might stop any kind of protection that might have been in place, and that can lead to even further tragedy. So it was given the name Romeo error in the early 1990s. And it's kind of stuck.
Brian Czech:It's a lose-lose. Do we have any clues about the prevalence of this Romeo error?
Chris Haney:We do. A paper about -- oh I guess almost 10 years ago now -- found that in the last century and a quarter, we have refound somewhere between 350 and 400 species of animals that were thought to be gone, but were rediscovered.
Brian Czech:Wow.
Chris Haney:Yeah, it's a large number. In fact, that number is just increasing. So we're actually getting an acceleration in the rate of these rediscoveries. Those animals and plants that are refound are called Lazarus species. Because they can that -- from a distance, it looks like they were dead and then resurrected. Of course, we know that's not the case. But it's prevalent in mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, as well as lesser known invertebrates and plants.
Brian Czech:What other kinds of mental pitfalls influence our beliefs about wildlife extinctions? And does that mess up our approach to the economics of conservation, too?
Chris Haney:Yeah, so let me try to draw a direct parallel between wildlife conservation and economics. Suppose that we have a belief about how something affects our economy, just like we have a belief about how it might affect a species prospects for survival or extinction. If we fail to incorporate new information when it comes in -- that is to say we stick rigidly to our original beliefs -- we fall to a bias called Bayesian conservatism, or-- put another way -- a lack of Bayesian caution. In other words, we become anchored -- that's called an anchoring bias. Your listeners might recognize this when they go in and lease a car, buy a car, and the car salesman tries to anchor you on a higher price that you don't want to pay. And then when they come down 1000 or 2000, you think you've got a bargain. But when we don't move our beliefs enough, we're guilty of two or three biases, including anchoring and Bayesian conservatism.
Brian Czech:What's the one where -- I think you talked a little bit about if a species is merely out of sight, yet we call it gone forever? Isn't that like what babies do? And their mother leaves the room, they conclude that she's gone for good?
Chris Haney:Yeah, exactly, Brian, and this is one of the most fascinating ones for me, and it's ubiquitous with the ivory-billed woodpecker, and frankly, other birds and some mammals that disappear from our site. We are like young children. When a species is gone, we declare it extinct just because we can't see it. That bias is a cognitive one that usually we grow out of as infants. It's called lack of object permanence, meaning that if something isn't there, we think it's gone forever. And that -- object in constancy is another term -- is more prevalent in some of us as individuals than others. That is to say, you might have less of this problem than I would. So it varies among individuals, but it is a contribution to why we declare animals and plants extinct too soon.
Brian Czech:Okay, well, we've got some more questions for you here. But first, we need to take a short non-commercial break with James Lamont. And while we're on break, Chris, I wonder if you can track down an audio recording of an ivory-billed. Meanwhile, take it away, James.
James Lamont:Hello, listeners, we hope you're enjoying our conversation with Dr. Chris Haney, President and Founder Terra Mar Applied Sciences. We at CASSE just want to take a moment to thank everyone listening for their support during 2021. We also want to wish you all a safe, sustainable, and steady-state holiday season. And if you should bump into Santa delivering lumps of coal, show him our position statement on economic growth. It would surely make his Christmas a lot less stressful. And now, back to the show.
Brian Czech:Welcome back to the show. And you know what? We built people's expectations up for a sound file of the ivory-billed. What did we come up with there, Chris?
Chris Haney:Well, I just sent you a file... [sound] ...and it sounds much like a tiny tin horn. And it's not a very loud sound for such a large bird. But it is the only recording that we have from a known ivory-billed woodpecker ever in history, is just this one. And it was taken in the late 1930s by James T. Tanner and a Cornell team of acousticians in the singer track of Northeast Louisiana.
Brian Czech:The famous clip, yes. And to me a lot of woodpeckers sound like they're laughing and so, you know, your book is loaded with not just metaphors alone, but all kinds of figures of speech. And I'm thinking well is that have a little bit to do it to Woody's Last Laugh title, but. Now, Chris, how did you react to that recent proposal by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to delist 23 plants and animals as extinct, including the ivory-billed?
Chris Haney:Well, Brian, I laughed.
Brian Czech:You laughed!
Chris Haney:I did. Because you know, we've been declaring this bird extinct since 1913. So for more than 100 years, we've been declaring this bird is gone. And you know, the bird just doesn't get the memo. It just keeps popping up after long intervals of apparent absence. And I laugh because we are much like the old cartoon strip that you might have heard of from the 1930s and 40s. With Woody the woodpecker. We are Wally Walrus, we get set up again and again by Woody the Woodpecker, and Woody tricks us over, and over, and over again.
Brian Czech:Hey, well, you must have had a number of different titles in mind for this book before you settled on this one.
Chris Haney:I did. They weren't nearly as good, you know. This is actually -- Brian -- I felt this way myself. Can I share a story of how I felt I was tricked?
Brian Czech:Yeah.
Chris Haney:So as a young boy, my grandfather would give me old 1900s -- or late 1800s, early 1900s books about birds. And from reading them, I just assumed that the ivory-billed was extinct. And, you know, I didn't think much more about it, it just put it away, filed it away, and went on. And when the US Fish and Wildlife Service completed their recovery plan for the ivory-billed woodpecker in 2010, I raced over to the appendix. And believe it or not, in its Appendix E, I tallied 100 incidents of people seeing this bird since the 1940s. That was when it was supposed to do have died off.
Brian Czech:Oh.
Chris Haney:And I thought, this is not how an extinct bird should behave. And so you know, what is this? What kind of trick is being played here? And I really did feel pranked. I was kind of annoyed, actually.
Brian Czech:Well, Chris, what makes us so eager to declare this bird gone, then?
Chris Haney:Well, I think one is that we let a cognitive bias called anchoring fixate us on the birds extinction. And so there are a couple of pieces that go into this anchoring. One is that the story of its extinction has been repeated so often. And that constitutes an availability cascade. That is to say -- you repeat something often enough, and people will believe it's true, even if it isn't. That's one thing that sort of predisposes us towards extinction. And another one -- and this one really fascinates me. It's called the negativity bias. And we're not an instinctually optimistic species, that is to say, our brains, our minds, don't just naturally go into a kind of happy, cheerful optimism. And so if we're presented with death, and life, death has a whole lot more salience -- that is to say, it's a lot more available to our mind, we will fixate on it. And of course, death is a bit more serious than life. And so it has a greater power to kind of influence us. So these things contribute to -- it's really hard for us to get out of the mindset that this bird may not be extinct.
Brian Czech:Well, that's very interesting in it -- in a way it resonates. And yet, we have this optimism, that's -- I would say, plagued the conservation community for decades now, because it's a false optimism. I think, you know, what I'm talking about the win-win rhetoric, you know, there is no conflict between growing the economy and protecting it, we expose that all the time on The Steady Stater. And that's been a political tool, I guess, running in the face of that tendency toward negativism.
Chris Haney:Well. And actually this problem that you point out-- this picture that the economy can just continue to grow without there being any kind of serious consequences -- that's a framing effect, Brian. It's sort of, it's a way of anchoring the the listeners or the viewers expectations about a topic in advance, and creating a story, a narrative that's hard to get away from, because it's sort of put out there first. And I am an environmental science, not an economist. But I do believe that this idea that economic systems could continue to grow came first. And so it's hard for us to undo that. And that's a framing effect. And that's another bias that we have to be very, very careful about. And it's one that both economics and conservation have to learn more about in order to get the truth out to the public.
Brian Czech:Right. So the 53 thinking errors, most of them are biases of one type or another. Is that the case?
Chris Haney:They are. Both of these are cognitive biases, but I also included some of the more frequent logical fallacies. One of my, I guess pet peeves with the ivory-billed woodpecker is something called the argument from ignorance. The argument from ignorance is a philosophical fallacy, a logical fallacy, basically goes like this -- it tries to prove a point by the absence of data. So in the case of -- you know where this is going in the ivory-billed...
Brian Czech:It's going to fake news, I guess.
Chris Haney:Yes, indeed. So the ivory-billed is extinct, because we cannot prove that it's alive. And of course, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And this is a common error with conservation biology and declarations of extinction. Because it's very, very difficult to prove a negative. It's very, it's quite difficult to demonstrate even with high statistical significance that an animal or plant isn't there, that's hard to do.
Brian Czech:Well, you know, the list of 23 species that fish and wildlife proposed for delisting, and once again, they'd all be delisted, due to real or supposedly extinction. Now, 11 of them are from the contiguous 48 states, almost all in the South and the other 12 are from Hawaii, which of course, is ecologically messed up with all the invasive species especially. But you know, what stood out about the ivory-billed woodpecker to me, Chris, is that when Fish and Wildlife Service described the causes of its endangerment, it listed only one cause -- and that was logging. For all the other 23 species, there are multiple causes identified like agriculture, mining, road construction, urbanization, industrial development, reservoirs, and even outdoor recreation. Does this honing in on logging give us any kind of insights into the biases committed on behalf of the woodpecker?
Chris Haney:Well, yes, it does, in both directions. And what I mean is that we don't actually have strong evidence that logging harmed the woodpecker. We've made some inferences that that's the case. We've made some deductions, we've made some indirect conclusions. But the woodpecker was nomadic, it was a very strong flyer, and most woodpeckers, including the smaller ones, can move away from areas that get logged, and just go to other places. So that's kind of a strange thing. I was also amazed that the declaration of presumed extinction for ivory-billed did not mention direct persecution, shooting, hunting, collecting.
Brian Czech:Right.
Chris Haney:Many people believe that was a strong contribution to the woodpeckers scarcity. And I don't know why that information was left out, quite honestly.
Brian Czech:Maybe a little bit of explanatory value for that as that ivory-billed was from that class of 1967 -- you know, that was the first group of species listed pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, and that included 14 mammals and 36 bird species, 6 reptiles, 6 amphibians, and 22 fish species. And I was wondering if you found any patterns, or if you looked at the list of 23 that was recently proposed for delisting, several of them were from that class of 67. And they probably had back then, well, more simplified, simplistic, even I suppose approach to describing the causes of impairment.
Chris Haney:Yes, I -- what stood out to me is that in the case of the island birds, those that were found -- there was one bird, I think, from Guam, and the rest were from Hawaii, with two exceptions, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and the Bachman's warbler. And then there were several freshwater clams or mussels, which are, in some cases, were or are restricted to a single watershed, a single river system. When an animal or plant has that local a distribution, they're already uncommon or rare to begin with, just due to the fact of such a highly restricted range. And so, first of all, it's easier to show that they're not there -- I'm not saying that this was satisfactorily demonstrated in each of those 23 species cases-- but it's easier to tell something isn't there, say in one mountain range on one island. The problem with the ivory-billed woodpecker is it occurred across a dozen states in its original range. And the Fish and Wildlife Service's recovery plan show just between 2000 and 2010, 26 sighting reports across about 7 or 8 states. And it's very much harder to safely conclude that a species isn't there when the range is that large. So I would say if I looked at all of those 23 species in the recent proposal to delist, I would say that this one is the head scratcher. This one is the one I believe is more problematic. It doesn't mean that the other ones are extinct. It just means that the absences for sighting reports for these other animals is probably longer, and they have smaller ranges. So extinction would be more likely just on those grounds. But that's the big difference I see, is that we had two birds in that list, the Bachman's warbler and the ivory-billed woodpecker that had large ranges. And here's another interesting thing, Brian, we do not have 100 sighting reports of Bachman's warbler since the 1940s. But we do for ivory-billed, and that puzzles me. I don't see a good reason for that. Except that maybe one of them isn't really dead.
Brian Czech:Well, yeah, of course, those warblers. They're so alike and hard to spot a lot of times, whereas -- what about the pileated? You suppose some of these ivory-billed sightings may have just been pileated woodpeckers?
Chris Haney:Well, I would say that the likelihood of that happening is high. But here's the other puzzle, a conundrum, enigma. We've been demanded to-- sort of say -- all cases of ivory-billed woodpeckers were expected birdwatchers, who went out, and we're finding what they set out to see and they really saw pileated. There's many problems with that. One is we've only allowed the similarities of these two big woodpeckers to run in one direction. We're expected to have people confuse pileated for ivory-billed. But where are the warnings about confusing ivory-billed for pileated. We don't even have those. The other thing is that the expectation for the last 70 or more years is the bird is dead. So people don't knowingly go search for dead birds. And then you have people that have seen them that have spent 6 or 8, 10 in some cases, 20 or more years looking. And it becomes rather implausible to say that if somebody is impetuous and hasty, why spend 20 years proving that? You know what I mean?
Brian Czech:There's sort of a synergy of these cognitive biases, it sounds like.
Chris Haney:Exactly, exactly. And so what I discovered in my book is that there's actually something -- a predisposition to not report, the ivory-billed woodpecker. One, is it's dead. Two, let's protect it. I don't want anybody to disturb it. Three, if you're a hunter fisherman living in the South, you wouldn't know who to report this to. You're disconnected in social space from scientists and so forth. These and other things predispose us if the woodpecker is still there to actually under-report it, not over-reported.
Brian Czech:Yeah, that makes sense. I do want to acknowledge that our very last guest actually on the podcast, Ann Vileisis, who you probably know as the author of that outstanding book on wetlands in wetland loss, discovering the unknown landscape. She wrote at length, and we discussed it a little bit in the episode about the wipeout of bald cypress swamps in the South. And certainly that was sort of the top habitat in the broadest of terms -- top, you know, canopy cover and feeding tree and nesting tree, you know, habitat at large for the ivory-billed, so. The logging would have been very important. But yeah, you almost have to wonder if there were some policy implications that were coming into the picture when that was listed.
Chris Haney:Yes. And it's interesting, if you go back and read what some naturalist said in the 1950s, they were not as pessimistic as everyone else. And they said, you know, it's true, the heavy logging at the end of the 1800s and in the early part of the 1900s kind of created a bottleneck. It really-- I think the big unanswered question is whether the ivory-billed woodpecker could have gotten through that logging bottleneck without going extinct. I don't know the answer. I really don't write. But if it did, it might actually be facing a Southeast United States that might have been slapped. That is slightly better shape today than it was that.
Brian Czech:Right. Well, that's true. Well, I still I just have to ask you if you were forced to a gambling table in Vegas, and all these cognitive biases and mental mishaps aside, you with your scientific chops, where would you place the odds of extinction? Extinct per se.
Chris Haney:You're putting me on the spot here, Brian. I would first seek to avoid Bayesian conservatism, a lack of Bayesian caution. And I would run away from 100% or 0% on either one. Okay. So I would allow that the probability is not 100%, but not 0, either. For either extinction or survival, it's somewhere in the middle. And I -- if I were to ask myself, Chris, if you could actually know the truth, which one would surprise you more? To really learn that the bird was dead? Or that the bird was still alive? And so I think I would probably say, it would surprise me just slightly more to learn that the bird was extinct. So maybe, let's say, my odds of survival would be 55% survival, 45% extinction, which is that's not that's not quite 50-50. But it's close. And that's because I can explain most of the nuttiness around this bird -- the contradiction due to cognitive bias, I can -- by the fact I can -- explain all of it to myself, you might not be convinced, but I am. On the other hand, because I'm a population ecologist, or I'd like to be one, we've never had good numbers for the bird. So I could believe that anyone that shows up would be the last one. You know, there's no way of knowing.
Brian Czech:Right. One of the main points you've made, though, I think, all along is that -- well, extinction is forever, of course, but an extinction listing is pretty much forever as well, it closes a lot of managerial and policy doors. And that's one of the biggest problems with the types of outcomes from these cognitive biases.
Chris Haney:It is. And I wish we would adopt the standards of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, BirdLife International. And we'd have this in between category, which is highly imperiled, presumed extinct. It's not quite final, but it's right at death's door. And elsewhere around the globe around the planet, that kind of category is where we park -- birds and mammals and plants, fish and so forth -- where we don't know. I think that's a more logical and more cautious and a more reasonable place to put our uncertainty.
Brian Czech:Well I think that gives us a nice follow up episode. How does that sound, Chris?
Chris Haney:Sounds great to me, Brian.
Brian Czech:All right. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today, and we'll talk to you down the road a bit.
Chris Haney:All right. Thank you, Brian. Good to be here.
Brian Czech:Well, folks, that about wrap her up. We've been talking with Dr. Chris Haney, Founder and President of Terra Mar Applied Sciences. What a unique and exceptional journey he's taken us on, exploring some of the depths of human folly. You know, it's hard to find a silver lining in an extinction announcement, whether it's correct or not. But given such a sour ecological lemon, we got to make some kind of lemonade bittersweet as it might be. We've got to take this announcement of the ivory-billed extinction, as yet another warning to humanity. That's the closest thing to a silver lining we'll get. So we'd better take it. Each one of these species in the USA and in the world upon its extinction gives us one more chance to stop and reflect. In addition to being a beautiful, evolved, priceless creation in its own right, each one of these species is like a canary in the coal mine. Or maybe we should look at it like a feather of the canary in the coal mine. How fewer feathers can that canary take? And where does that leave us? I'm Brian Czech, and you've been listening to the Steady Stater podcast. See you next time.