Safety Is A Value

"We talk about what is important to us."
- Jacob Tetlow, APS

Regular safety meetings and striving for constant improvement are a sign that safety actually is important.  APS has regular safety meetings where we try to proactively create safer working conditions.  By sharing and talking about safety incidents we can learn from them before they happen to us.  "The wise man learns from others' mistakes."

APS is implementing a new safety program called Safety Foward, based on the ideas of Todd Conklin, a retired senior safety adviser from Los Alamos National Lab.  You can look up his talks on Youtube or look into his book “Pre Accident Investigations”.  He talks about the difference between resilient and fragile systems. A fragile system is liable to a single point of failure, for example, an operator-dependent system where the only safeguard against risk is the behavior of the employee.  Dr. Conklin says that such a system is basically "alligator wrestling" where you are telling the employee, "don't get bit!".

Some key ideas around moving Safety Forward
Create a resilient safety system: It's not IF an event occurs, but WHEN.
People are the solution: Employees doing the work are best suited to provide solutions to safety risks/hazards.
Focus on being a learning organization: Establish learning teams to collaborate and communicate learnings from an event or known risk.
Focus on leading indicators:  Focus on safety observations and serious injury or fatality (SIF) potential.

More notes

• Failure is the mother of improvement – viewing an accident as an opportunity to improve processes, procedures, and overall culture
• All accidents are not preventable and don’t ask “if” questions – ask “when” questions – sets up individuals to recover better for when an incident happens
• Design a system that knows it will fail
• Detection and correction are the two most powerful tools in safety – getting at the idea of recoverability
• Three main controls to number of accidents include Compliance (procedures, rules, regulations), Design (engineering controls for safety) and human performance (place where work meets the worker)
• The new view of safety looks at workers as the solution rather than the problem
• Safety leaders should be asking what workers need in order to be safe instead of leading safety from a top-down approach

Tactical and Executive Leadership

Notes from a presentation at APS by Jason Gardner, Echelon Front, fomer Navy Sea Air and Land SEAL.

Sometimes good to let people fail so they can improve.

There is often the assumption that if you told someone what to do then it will work, but may not hold true in stressful situations.

Develop culture where everyone is included and understands that their contribution is important.

1. Cover and Move
If teammate fails, we all fail.

2. Keep it Simple
Everyone needs to understand the goal.

3. Prioritize and Execute
Detach from details. Don't be a robot, but don't forget to see yourself from the outside.

4.  Decentralized Command
Everyone leads.  Leadership is not just a title but an attitude. 

Victory Mindset
-Default mode: aggressive.  See and do. Often the most important things to do are in the places we least want to look.
-Innovate and Adapt - aggressively
-Humility: check your ego
-Influence up and down chain of command: develop relationships
-Lead and follow
-Discipline equals freedom
-Extreme ownership: no blame, no excuses.

Australian Wildfires

Extremely large pyrocumulus clouds tower over bushfires in New South Wales and spread over the Pacific Ocean. Sentinel-2A image, December 31, 2019, processed by @andrewmiskelly.  Source.

A pyrocumulus cloud is produced by the intense heating of the air over a fire. This induces convection, which causes the air mass to rise to a point of stability, where condensation occurs. If the fire is large enough, the cloud may continue to grow, becoming a cumulonimbus flammagenitus which may produce lightning and start another fire.  Source.

"Fuels management cannot prevent fires but can change their behavior" but fuels management is limited by budgets and time to burn, especially in droughts." Source.

The BBC has a good overview:

"We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire. When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around."

"Even Australia’s fire-adapted forest ecosystems are struggling because they are facing increasingly frequent events. In Tasmania, over the past few years we have seen environments burning that historically see fires very rarely, perhaps every 1000 years. The increasing tempo, spatial scale, and frequency of fires could see ecosystems extinguished." Source.


More Info.
Australian Fire Center
Case Study / Educational Info

What We Need More Of, Is Science

No Heroes or Villains
Dodds has a nickname for us humans: Homo narrativus. Dodds, a professor at the University of Vermont, uses mathematics to study social networks. He has argued that people see the stories of heroes and villains, where there are really just networks and graphs. It’s our desire for narrative, he says, that makes us believe that something like fame is the result of merit or destiny and not a network model quirk. (From http://nautil.us/issue/47/Consciousness/to-fix-the-climate-tell-better-stories)

Scientific narratives, if they’re done right, are some of the most powerful of all. They teach us more than facts, mechanisms, and procedures. They convey a worldview of skeptical empiricism and indefinite revision, show us how to negotiate the boundary between our rational and emotional selves, teach us to suspend judgment and consider all the possibilities, and remind us that a belief in objective truth is a deep kind of optimism with massive dividends.

Kirk Johnson, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, puts it this way: “If you look at how the media treats scientific discoveries, they’ll go to the wonder. ... [They’ll say] ‘here’s this thing that’s been discovered,’ not the process of how we figured it out. And I think that understanding of how we know what we know is so critical ... If you don’t help people understand what those processes are, [if] you just say ‘here’s the answer,’ now they can go onto the web and dial up an alternate answer. I think we’re seeing an erosion of credibility of science to the public because of this huge flood of technology and information.”

This erosion is essential to understanding the modern climate debate. In the words of the philosopher Richard Rorty, “We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.”4 In the absence of social justification, the public ends up being called on to be the judge of accuracy of representation—in other words, of scientific content

Climate Change Belief Tree

An article in Nautilus magazine analogizes beliefs about climate change to branches on a tree.  I like that the tree diagram emphasizes the unity of thinking about climate change, even if we may be on different branches.  Also, I think it is OK for one person's beliefs to span different branches: belief about the future does not need to be certain but can be probabilistic and can change from one day to the next. 

Diagram and original article by Summer Praetorius.

The article concludes: "What if instead of feeling threatened by differences in opinion, we were to reconceptualize them in much the same way a tree will distribute a canopy to collect as much sunlight as possible—as a multi-pronged approach to getting the job done? In the same sense that both fast and slow processes contribute to Earth change, both steady progress and immediate local action will contribute to climate solutions. Let’s take stock of our pace and work together, thankful there is someone else to fill the space we can’t. After all, we are not lone trees, but a living, connected forest, and balance is essential for stability."

Top 2019 conservation news

Multiple stories of widespread wild animal population declines:

From 10 billion down to 7 billion birds.
The population of birds in North American has fallen by a third in 50 years. Science.

Statistic of the decade: amount of rainforest lost in Amazon.

"Insect apocalypse" in the New York Times Magazine garnered widespread attention. 
In the United States, scientists recently found the population of monarch butterflies fell by 90 percent in the last 20 years, a loss of 900 million individuals; the rusty-patched bumblebee, which once lived in 28 states, dropped by 87 percent over the same period.

the overall abundance of flying insects in German nature reserves had decreased by 75 percent over just 27 years. If you looked at midsummer population peaks, the drop was 82 percent.

It is estimated that, since 1970, Earth’s various populations of wild land animals have lost, on average, 60 percent of their members.

What we’re losing is not just the diversity part of biodiversity, but the bio part: life in sheer quantity....Finding reassurance in the survival of a few symbolic standard-bearers ignores the value of abundance, of a natural world that thrives on richness and complexity and interaction.

Scientists have begun to speak of functional extinction (as opposed to the more familiar kind, numerical extinction). Functionally extinct animals and plants are still present but no longer prevalent enough to affect how an ecosystem works. Some phrase this as the extinction not of a species but of all its former interactions with its environment — an extinction of seed dispersal and predation and pollination and all the other ecological functions an animal once had...

Other News  (Link)
Last female Yangzte Giant Softshell Turtle died
Last Sumatran Rhino in Malaysia died
Jaguar and Koala populations hit by wildfires in Brazil and Australia

Ethnography and Human Health Pioneers

I'm interested in people who have traveled the world, learning from the diversity of human adaptations and health responses.

Esther Gokhale

Weston A. Price

Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic

Logging to Save a Forest from Climate Change

A good article about logging in the forest where I did my graduate research in northern Michigan.  Researchers are using funding from a timber contract with Louisiana-Pacific to cut the aspen trees on part of the experimental forest.  They will study the soil and water impacts of cutting the trees, as well as looking at species composition changes.

In the article, a researcher is quoted as saying that it would be irresponsible not to cut the trees because of climate change.  "Aspen in the Great Lakes region are considered “climate change losers,” according to Nave, and are not expected to fare well as the region’s climate continues to warm in the coming decades."

"The high-emissions scenario projects an 11.2-degree Fahrenheit summer temperature increase in the assessment area by the end of the 21st century. At the same time, summer precipitation is projected to decline by 3.8 inches under that scenario. "

"It will take a decade or more to know which of the aspen-management treatments was most effective, Nave said. It is expected that future generations of Biological Station researchers and students will carry on with the work, he said."

Glyphosate Fear-Mongering

Despite recent court cases, glyphosate is not recognized as a carcinogen or toxin as these terms are normally understood in environmental toxicology.  Yes, there is some research linking glyphosate with increased cancer risk, but that is not the scientific consensus.

I don't think this blog post on glyphosate can be counted as scientifically accurate, even though it does cite scientific research. Websites that sell fear based on a few studies while ignoring the body of scientific literature are not reliable sources for decision-making. 

I am writing as a concerned science-lover. For me (and I could be wrong), I see glyphosate fear-mongering as no different from conspiracy theories about vaccine harms or global warming.  Yes, there are scientific papers showing that vaccines cause autism and that global warming is not happening, but any article that only cites those papers without weighing (or at least mentioning!) the current scientific consensus would be misleading at best.

Focusing on glyphosate seems especially misguided given the other chemicals used in agriculture and commonly found in our food supply (e.g. chlorpyrifos).  While glyphosate may be the popular boogeyman of the year, science-based reporting should at least acknowledge that it is probably the least toxic of any chemical pesticides currently being used. 

A better approach than just selling fear:  promote solutions, such as better testing of all chemicals in our food supply. 

Plant Interactions Versus Integrated Vegetation Management (IVM)

Questions:  does existing vegetation help or hurt the IVM goal of creating a self-sustaining, compatible plant community?  Do some compatible species tend to facilitate or inhibit the establishment and growth of incompatible species? And do these plant interactions vary systematically across ecosystems?

These questions fall into the domain of “Community Ecology”.  This looks like a good review paper but I don’t have access to it.  Ecology is notoriously unsystematic, so (without reading the review) I bet the answer is “Its complicated” and “It depends.”

Here are some papers I was able to access:

Paper: The role of plant interactions in the restoration of degraded ecosystems: a meta‐analysis across life‐forms and ecosystems

Link: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2745.2009.01573.x

Relevant Conclusions:  Inhibition predominates in herbaceous communities typical of early‐successional stages, whereas facilitation prevails in communities dominated by shrubs and trees.

My Comment: IVM that leaves shrubs (like in Sonoran desert) would probably not create inhibition for tree growth, whereas IVM that leaves grasses (like Ponderosa habitats) would be expected to inhibit tree growth.

Paper: Is the change of plant–plant interactions with abiotic stress predictable? A meta‐analysis of field results in arid environments

Link: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1365-2745.2005.01017.x

Relevant Conclusions:  Density data showed that the net effect of plant neighbours was positive at low abiotic stress and negative at high abiotic stress levels.  However, none of our meta‐analyses indicated that the magnitude of the net effect provided by plant neighbours, whether positive or negative, was higher under high abiotic stress conditions, and facilitation does not therefore appear to increase in importance with abiotic stress.

My Comment: Results are mixed, but in general deserts do not show more importance of “nurse plant” facilitation.