Some wonder why the M.A. landed with a thud. [via Resilience Science blog]

When the huge report first emerged last spring after four years, $24 million and the efforts of more than 1,300 scientists in 95 countries, it made headlines elsewhere. In December, it was awarded a Zayed Prize, something like an environmentalist Nobel. Here in North America, though, the media barely registered its existence.

What a dirty shame. The U.N.-backed Millennium Assessment is the most thorough survey of global ecosystems ever undertaken. It's also the first report of its kind to link ecosystem health to human well-being, and in so doing, strikes the rich, rich vein of human self-interest. Showing people what's in it for them is a great way to get something done.

A first pass answer to the question of why it was largely ignored is that it has the stench of the UN about it, but it isn't as if there wasn't a lot of other eco-news to compete for space, and a limit to the amount of eco-whingeing that the public can consume.

The report itself is deeply flawed as well.

At the press conference, Walt Reid, who directed the study and now teaches at Stanford University in California, restated the report's radical conclusions and issued a stern warning.

The report's basic premise is that healthy ecosystems provide humans with a range of "services" -- things like food, clean water, clean air, buffers from natural disasters and even spiritual renewal. To the extent that these "ecosystem services" are degraded, so is the quality of human life.

This is false. There are trade offs. Some things that degrade ecosystem services enhance the quality of human life. That's why they are done. To get the attention of even a marginally astute audience one must be very clear about this and make arguments for ecosystem services that consider the costs as well as the benefits and show a net increase. People aren't so dumb that they can't tell when a bureaucrat is fluffing himself and trying to deceive them.

And without serious behavior modification, we're headed for a bad run, Reid said. "We've badly mismanaged our ecosystems," he said. "As long as we regard ecosystem services as free and limitless, we will continue to use them in a way that does not make sense." Reid enumerated the main findings of the study he directed, which concluded that 60 percent of the planet's ecosystem services are being run down or used up faster than they can replenish themselves.

This totally fails to make the case for ecosystem services as a benefit to humans. It is nothing but old fashioned fire and brimstone preaching from someone who obviously is obsessed with a narrow vision and wears tin foil lined hats. This may be just a fashion crime, Reid might be a marginally sensible human after all, but it isn't apparent from his words. The phrase "serious behavior modification" drives the audience away instantly. Their minds close to whatever follows those words, and reject subsequent arguments as the ravings of a madman at best, or perhaps fraudulent.

When a forest is wiped out, the people who relied on its animals and plants die.

This is silly. They don't die, they move, often to the city. It isn't that this is good, or that the people don't suffer, it's that making the lunatic assertion that deforestation kills residents is nonsense. And that's a shame since some will in fact die as a consequence of displacement though the greater harm is for those who live but suffer. Perhaps in time they can be judged to be better off for moving to the city - some make this argument - since they can then be educated yada, yada, but in the near term they are harmed greatly.

Last week's briefing focused on what governments can do to reverse these trends. Reid, along with Stephen Carpenter, zoology professor at the University of Wisconsin, and Prabhu Pingali, an economist at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, presented four scenarios for the year 2050 that represent distinct paths into the future. They are all disturbing.

And they wonder why the report is ignored! To make it worse their method was the use of scenarios, just-so stories that provide a way to do stealth advocacy for biased positions held by the authors before the assessment was even done. They twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope madly until they get a few patterns that please them, and then try to foist them off on others as useful analyses of possible future realities, sort of, if you squint a lot. It's a marketing approach to bald advocacy that tries to conceal the agenda a little bit. And it works on those who are susceptible, just as most sales pitches have some effect. Unfortunately it only works on the congregation filling the pews and eager for the preaching. That's not useful, they are already sold. It ends up as entertainment and bias confirmation for the few.

For reports to be credible and have significant impact they must be sensible efforts to truly assess circumstances rather than stealth marketing efforts for predetermined policy choices. Governments are not the principals, not the agents best positioned to use the information of a legitimate ecosystem assessment. Scenarios that focus on government action are useless. The ideas of bureaucrats and government employees are insufficiently creative to cope with large problems. They just don't have the mind set needed to solve problems. They are time servers and rule followers focused on the petty power struggles of institutional life. What is needed is the creativity of those who run screaming from the mindless formalities and procedural inertia of institutional life. To engage their genius the information should made made available. Period. Don't gunk it up with hare-brained schemes and recommendations. That taints the whole report, making it a round file candidate.

We would benefit from more competent bureaucrats that know themselves, that are living examined lives, and so understand that they need the help of society to accomplish any useful objectives. They are not leading, they are serving. The service they can provide is to gather information, make it widely available, and then ask society to consider it, to think about any adverse implications and if they are found to propose solutions.